In Access97 SQL how do I return a range of rows?

Question

I have an Access97 database (unfortunately) and I am querying it over ODBC.

I want to construct a query that will return me J ordered rows starting at offset K. Rig

Answer 1

You can use TOP with Not In and a TOP subquery:

 SELECT TOP n ... ID Not In (SELECT TOP k ...) 

It will probably be faster than trying to number rows in Access

Answer 2

You're basically trying to mimic ROW_NUMBER() in Access. Unfortunately, Access is not a good engine for doing this kind of thing. It gets dog slow after a hundred or so records.

With that said, here's what you can do:

SELECT t1.ID, t1.SomeText, t1.SomeDate,
(
  SELECT COUNT(*) + 1
  FROM Table1 AS t2
  WHERE t1.SomeText > t2.SomeText
) as RowNumber
FROM Table1 t1
ORDER BY t1.SomeText

That will produce this resultset (in my particular table):

ID | SomeText             | SomeDate  | RowNumber
10 | 4NGJN                | 1/20/2010 | 1
11 | ABH                  | 1/20/2010 | 2
2  | asldkfj              | 1/20/2010 | 3
1  | asldkfjaslgh         | 1/20/2010 | 4
7  | ewoiuhdkjnlbkjbn     | 1/20/2010 | 5
4  | oihkjldhnlkmdfn,mn   | 1/20/2010 | 6
3  | oihoih               | 1/20/2010 | 7
5  | qwwern               | 1/20/2010 | 8
8  | SKN                  | 1/20/2010 | 9
9  | WEOIN                | 1/20/2010 | 10
6  | wetrhn               | 1/20/2010 | 11
12 | XDNKJ                | 1/20/2010 | 12

I would make a saved query in Access (a view in a SQL Server) and then write a query like this in your application:

SELECT ID, SomeText, SomeDate, RowNumber
FROM myView
WHERE RowNumber > 5
  AND RowNumber < 11

Of course, "5" & "11" you would pass in from your client app, and would be based on the particular page you're on. (It would probably be 50 and 100 or something for you).