How to select the nth row in a SQL database table?

Question

I\'m interested in learning some (ideally) database agnostic ways of selecting the nth row from a database table. It would also be interesting to see how this can b

Answer 1

Here's a generic version of a sproc I recently wrote for Oracle that allows for dynamic paging/sorting - HTH

-- p_LowerBound = first row # in the returned set; if second page of 10 rows,
--                this would be 11 (-1 for unbounded/not set)
-- p_UpperBound = last row # in the returned set; if second page of 10 rows,
--                this would be 20 (-1 for unbounded/not set)

OPEN o_Cursor FOR
SELECT * FROM (
SELECT
    Column1,
    Column2
    rownum AS rn
FROM
(
    SELECT
        tbl.Column1,
        tbl.column2
    FROM MyTable tbl
    WHERE
        tbl.Column1 = p_PKParam OR
        tbl.Column1 = -1
    ORDER BY
        DECODE(p_sortOrder, 'A', DECODE(p_sortColumn, 1, Column1, 'X'),'X'),
        DECODE(p_sortOrder, 'D', DECODE(p_sortColumn, 1, Column1, 'X'),'X') DESC,
        DECODE(p_sortOrder, 'A', DECODE(p_sortColumn, 2, Column2, sysdate),sysdate),
        DECODE(p_sortOrder, 'D', DECODE(p_sortColumn, 2, Column2, sysdate),sysdate) DESC
))
WHERE
    (rn >= p_lowerBound OR p_lowerBound = -1) AND
    (rn <= p_upperBound OR p_upperBound = -1);