SQL Select 'n' records without a Table

Question

Is there a way of selecting a specific number of rows without creating a table. e.g. if i use the following:

SELECT 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
         


        

Answer 1

You can use a recursive CTE to generate an arbitrary sequence of numbers in T-SQL like so:

DECLARE @start INT = 1;
DECLARE @end INT = 10;

WITH numbers AS (
    SELECT @start AS number
    UNION ALL
    SELECT number + 1 
    FROM  numbers
    WHERE number < @end
)
SELECT *
FROM numbers
OPTION (MAXRECURSION 0);