Pagination in SQL

Pagination is the task of dividing a data set into subsequent parts of the whole data set. For example, a search engine initially only shows the first 15 results for a search query. The user can then step through the rest of the results the by clicking a “Next” button.

Ideally this feature is also supported by the underlying database system. Otherwise, the application would have to load all matching data records from the database, just to filter out the major part of of them, because the user only wanted to see page 3 of 50. A pagination request has two components: a limit and an offset. If a page contains a maximum of 15 items and page 3 is requested, then the limit would be 15 and the offset would be 30 = (page-1) × limit.

PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB

The database systems PostgreSQL, MySQL and MariaDB have a straight forward syntax for pagination: LIMIT {number} OFFSET {number} . So a simple SQL query with pagination might look like this:

SELECT * FROM users ORDER BY name LIMIT 15 OFFSET 30;

Oracle DB

Oracle DB didn’t have a dedicated syntax for pagination before Oracle 12c, but it was still possible to achieve the same result with other means. With Oracle 12c a new syntax for pagination was introduced under the name “Row limiting clause”. First I’ll show the old method, then the new syntax.

The old method is based on ROWNUM . If you wanted to specify both an offset and a limit, you had to nest multiple queries:

SELECT *
FROM (SELECT *, rownum AS rnum
      FROM (SELECT *
            FROM users
            ORDER BY name)
      WHERE rownum < 45)
WHERE rnum >= 30;

The newer row limiting clause syntax is shorter and looks as follows:

SELECT * FROM users ORDER BY name
  OFFSET 30 ROWS FETCH NEXT 15 ROWS ONLY;

This syntax also allows the option to specify a percentage of rows instead of a fixed number of rows:

SELECT * FROM users ORDER BY name
  FETCH FIRST 20 PERCENT ROWS ONLY;

MS SQL Server

Microsoft’s SQL Server also supports the Oracle-like syntax with OFFSET and FETCH clauses and recommends the usage of this syntax for pagination.