Pagination In Oracle Using ROWNUM And Limiting Result Set

ROWNUM is a magic column in Oracle Database that gets many people into trouble. When you learn what it is and how it works, however, it can be very useful. I use it for two main things:

• To perform top- N processing. This is similar to using the LIMIT clause, available in some other databases.
• To paginate through a query, typically in a stateless environment such as the Web. We can use this.

How ROWNUM Works?

ROWNUM is a pseudocolumn (not a real column) that is available in a query. ROWNUM will be assigned the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, … N , where N is the number of rows in the set ROWNUM is used with.A ROWNUM value is not assigned permanently to a row (this is a common misconception). A row in a table does not have a number; you cannot ask for row 5 from a table—there is no such thing.

Also confusing to many people is when a ROWNUM value is actually assigned. A ROWNUM value is assigned to a row after it passes the predicate phase of the query but before the query does any sorting or aggregation. Also, a ROWNUM value is incremented only after it is assigned, which is why the following query will never return a row:

SELECT *   FROM t  WHERE ROWNUM > 1;

Because ROWNUM > 1 is not true for the first row, ROWNUM does not advance to 2. Hence, no ROWNUM value ever gets to be greater than 1. Consider a query with this structure:

SELECT ..., ROWNUM      FROM T    WHERE <WHERE CLAUSE>    GROUP BY    HAVING <HAVING CLAUSE>    ORDER BY ;

Think of it as being processed in this order:

1. The FROM/WHERE clause goes first. 
2. ROWNUM is assigned and incremented to each output row from the FROM/WHERE clause. 
3. SELECT is applied. 
4. GROUP BY is applied. 
5. HAVING is applied. 
6. ORDER BY is applied.

That is why a query in the following form is almost certainly an error:

SELECT *    FROM emp    WHERE ROWNUM <= 5    ORDER BY sal DESC;

The intention was most likely to get the five highest-paid people—a top- N query. What the query will return is five random records (the first five the query happens to hit), sorted by salary. The procedural pseudocode for this query is as follows:

ROWNUM = 1 FOR x in (SELECT * FROM emp) LOOP     exit when NOT(ROWNUM <= 5)     OUTPUT record to temp     ROWNUM = ROWNUM+1 end loop SORT TEMP

It gets the first five records and then sorts them. A query with WHERE ROWNUM = 5 or WHERE ROWNUM > 5 doesn’t make sense. This is because a ROWNUM value is assigned to a row during the predicate evaluation and gets incremented only after a row passes the WHERE clause.

Here is the correct version of this query:

SELECT *   FROM (SELECT *             FROM emp         ORDER BY sal DESC)  WHERE ROWNUM <= 5;

This version will sort EMP by salary descending and then return the first five records it encounters (the top-five records). As you’ll see in the top- N discussion coming up shortly, Oracle Database doesn’t really sort the entire result set—it is smarter than that—but conceptually that is what takes place.

For pagination, if you want the 5 -10 records of the employee order by hiredate asc then go for this. Ahmed Hazzaf

SELECT outer.*   FROM (SELECT ROWNUM rn, inner.*           FROM (  SELECT e.*                     FROM employee e                 ORDER BY hiredate) inner) outer  WHERE outer.rn >= 5 AND outer.rn <= 10