ROW_NUMBER() OVER Not Fast Enough With Large Result Set, any good solution?

Question

I use ROW_NUMBER() to do paging with my website content and when you hit the last page it timeout because the SQL Server takes too long to complete the search.

There

Answer 1

The base logic of this method relies on the SET ROWCOUNT expression to both skip the unwanted rows and fetch the desired ones:

DECLARE @Sort /* the type of the sorting column */
SET ROWCOUNT @StartRow
SELECT @Sort = SortColumn FROM Table ORDER BY SortColumn
SET ROWCOUNT @PageSize
SELECT ... FROM Table WHERE SortColumn >= @Sort ORDER BY SortColumn

The issue is well covered in this CodeProject article, including scalability graphs.

TOP is supported on SQL Server 2000, but only static values. Eg no "TOP (@Var)", only "TOP 200"