How do I write LINQ's .Skip(1000).Take(100) in pure SQL?

SQL Server 2012 and above have added this syntax:

SELECT *FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader ORDER BY OrderDateOFFSET (@Skip) ROWS FETCH NEXT (@Take) ROWS ONLY

In SQL Server 2005 and above you can use ROW_NUMBER function. eg.

USE AdventureWorks;GOWITH OrderedOrders AS(    SELECT SalesOrderID, OrderDate,    ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY OrderDate) AS 'RowNumber'    FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader ) SELECT * FROM OrderedOrders WHERE RowNumber BETWEEN 51 AND 60; --BETWEEN is inclusive

LINQ to SQL does this by using a ROW_NUMBER windowing function:

  SELECT a,b,c FROM    (SELECT a,b,c, ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY ...) as row_number    FROM Table) t0   WHERE to.row_number BETWEEN 1000 and 1100;

This works, but the need to manufacture the row_number from the ORDER BY may result in your query being sorted on the server side and cause performance problems. Even when an index can satisfy the ORDER BY requirement, the query still has to count 1000 rows before startting to return results. All too often developers forget this and just throw a pagination control over a 5 mil rows table and wonder why the first page is returned so much faster than the last one...

None the less, using ROW_NUMBER() is probably the best balance between ease of use and good performance, provided you make sure you avoid the sort (the ORDER BY condition can be satisified by an index).