Efficient way of getting @@rowcount from a query using row_number

Question

I have an expensive query using the row_number over() functionality in SQL Server 2005. I return only a sub list of those records as the query is paginated. However, I wou

Answer 1

If count(*) is slow you really need to address that issue first by carefully examining your indexes and making sure your statistics are up to date.

In my experience, there is nothing better than doing two separate queries, one to get the data page, and one to get the total count. Using a temporary table in order to get total counts is a losing strategy as your number of rows increases. E.g., the cost of inserting 10,000,000 million rows into a temp table simply to count them is obviously going to be excessive.