Can I paginate a query in Sql Server without using ROW_NUM () OVER (ORDER BY xxxxx)?
If you're writing your own data access layer, and you want to apply ROW_NUMBER() only knowing the query's output field names (rather than it's internals)...
SELECT *FROM( SELECT ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY field1, field2, field3) AS row_id, * FROM ( <your-query> ) AS unordered_data) AS ordered_dataWHERE row_id BETWEEN x AND y