Stop Trying to Emulate SQL OFFSET Pagination with Your In-House DB Framework!

I’m pretty sure you’ve gotten it wrong in numerous ways, so far. And you probably won’t get it right any time soon. So why waste your precious time on SQL tweaking, when you could be implementing business logic?

Let me explain…

It hasn’t been until the recent SQL:2008 standard that what MySQL users know as LIMIT .. OFFSET was standardised into the following simple statement:


SELECT * 
FROM BOOK 
OFFSET 2 ROWS 
FETCH NEXT 1 ROWS ONLY

Yes. So many keywords.

SQL is indeed a very verbose language. Personally, we really like the conciseness of MySQL’s / PostgreSQL’s LIMIT .. OFFSET clause, which is why we chose that for the jOOQ DSL API In SQL:


SELECT * FROM BOOK LIMIT 1 OFFSET 2

In jOOQ:


select().from(BOOK).limit(1).offset(2);

Now, when you’re a SQL framework vendor, or when you’re rolling your own, in-house SQL abstraction, you might think about standardising this neat little clause. Here’s a couple of flavours from databases that natively support offset pagination:


-- MySQL, H2, HSQLDB, Postgres, and SQLite
SELECT * FROM BOOK LIMIT 1 OFFSET 2

-- CUBRID supports a MySQL variant of the 
-- LIMIT .. OFFSET clause
SELECT * FROM BOOK LIMIT 2, 1

-- Derby, SQL Server 2012, Oracle 12, SQL:2008
SELECT * FROM BOOK 
OFFSET 2 ROWS FETCH NEXT 1 ROWS ONLY

-- Ingres. Eek, almost the standard. Almost!
SELECT * FROM BOOK 
OFFSET 2 FETCH FIRST 1 ROWS ONLY

-- Firebird
SELECT * FROM BOOK ROWS 2 TO 3

-- Sybase SQL Anywhere
SELECT TOP 1 ROWS START AT 3 * FROM BOOK

-- DB2 (without OFFSET)
SELECT * FROM BOOK FETCH FIRST 1 ROWS ONLY

-- Sybase ASE, SQL Server 2008 (without OFFSET)
SELECT TOP 1 * FROM BOOK

So far, so good. These can all be handled. Some databases put offsets before limits, others put limits before offsets, and the T-SQL family puts the whole TOP clause before the SELECT list. This is easy to emulate. Now what about:

Oracle 11g and less
SQL Server 2008 and less
DB2 with OFFSET

(note that you can enable various alternative syntaxes in DB2) When you google for this, you will find millions of ways to emulate OFFSET .. FETCH in those older databases. The optimal solutions always involve:

Using doubly-nested derived tables with ROWNUM filtering in Oracle
Using single-nested derived tabels with ROW_NUMBER() filtering in SQL Server and DB2

So you’re emulating it.

Do you think you will get it right?

;-) Let us go through a couple of issues that you may not have thought about. First off, Oracle. Oracle obviously wanted to create a maximum vendor-lockin, which is only exceeded by Apple’s recent introduction of Swift. This is why ROWNUM solutions perform best, even better than SQL:2003 standard window function based solutions. Don’t believe it? Read this very interesting article on Oracle offset pagination performance. So, the optimal solution in Oracle is:


-- PostgreSQL syntax:
SELECT ID, TITLE 
FROM BOOK 
LIMIT 1 OFFSET 2

-- Oracle equivalent:
SELECT *
FROM (
  SELECT b.*, ROWNUM rn
  FROM (
    SELECT ID, TITLE
    FROM BOOK
  ) b
  WHERE ROWNUM <= 3 -- (1 + 2)
)
WHERE rn > 2

So that’s really the equivalent?

Of course not. You’re selecting an additional column, the rn column. You might just not care in most cases, but what if you wanted to make a limited subquery to be used with an IN predicate?


-- PostgreSQL syntax:
SELECT *
FROM BOOK
WHERE AUTHOR_ID IN (
  SELECT ID
  FROM AUTHOR
  LIMIT 1 OFFSET 2
)

-- Oracle equivalent:
SELECT *
FROM BOOK
WHERE AUTHOR_ID IN (
  SELECT * -- Ouch. These are two columns!
  FROM (
    SELECT b.*, ROWNUM rn
    FROM (
      SELECT ID
      FROM AUTHOR
    ) b
    WHERE ROWNUM <= 3
  )
  WHERE rn > 2
)

So, as you can see, you’ll have to do some more sophisticated SQL transformation. If you’re manually emulating LIMIT .. OFFSET, then you might just patch the ID column into the subquery:


SELECT *
FROM BOOK
WHERE AUTHOR_ID IN (
  SELECT ID -- better
  FROM (
    SELECT b.ID, ROWNUM rn -- better
    FROM (
      SELECT ID
      FROM AUTHOR
    ) b
    WHERE ROWNUM <= 3
  )
  WHERE rn > 2
)

So, that’s more like it, right? But since you’re not writing this manually every time, you’re about to start creating your own nifty in-house SQL framework covering the 2-3 use cases that you’ve encountered so far, right? You can do it. So you’ll regex-search-replace column names automagically to produce the above.

So now, it is correct?

Of course not! Because you can have ambiguous column names in top-level SELECTs, but not in nested selects. What if you want to do this:


-- PostgreSQL syntax:
-- Perfectly valid repetition of two ID columns
SELECT BOOK.ID, AUTHOR.ID
FROM BOOK
JOIN AUTHOR
ON BOOK.AUTHOR_ID = AUTHOR.ID
LIMIT 1 OFFSET 2

-- Oracle equivalent:
SELECT *
FROM (
  SELECT b.*, ROWNUM rn
  FROM (
    -- Ouch! ORA-00918: column ambiguously defined
    SELECT BOOK.ID, AUTHOR.ID
    FROM BOOK
    JOIN AUTHOR
    ON BOOK.AUTHOR_ID = AUTHOR.ID
  ) b
  WHERE ROWNUM <= 3
)
WHERE rn > 2

Nope. And the trick of manually patching ID columns from the previous example doesn’t work, because you have multiple ID instances. And renaming the columns to random values is nasty, because the user of your home-grown in-house database framework wants to receive well-defined column names. I.e. ID and… ID. So, the solution is to rename the columns twice. Once in each derived table:


-- Oracle equivalent:
-- Rename synthetic column names back to original
SELECT c1 ID, c2 ID
FROM (
  SELECT b.c1, b.c2, ROWNUM rn
  FROM (
    -- synthetic column names here
    SELECT BOOK.ID c1, AUTHOR.ID c2
    FROM BOOK
    JOIN AUTHOR
    ON BOOK.AUTHOR_ID = AUTHOR.ID
  ) b
  WHERE ROWNUM <= 3
)
WHERE rn > 2

But now, we’re done?

Of course not! What if you doubly nest such a query? Will you think about doubly renaming ID columns to synthetic names, and back? … ;-) Let’s leave it here and talk about something entirely different:

Does the same thing work for SQL Server 2008?

Of course not! In SQL Server 2008, the most popular approach is to use window functions. Namely, ROW_NUMBER(). So, let’s consider:


-- PostgreSQL syntax:
SELECT ID, TITLE 
FROM BOOK 
LIMIT 1 OFFSET 2

-- SQL Server equivalent:
SELECT b.*
FROM (
  SELECT ID, TITLE, 
    ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY ID) rn
  FROM BOOK
) b
WHERE rn > 2 AND rn <= 3

So that’s it, right?

Of course not! ;-) OK, we’ve already had this issue. We should not select *, because that would generate too many columns in the case that we’re using this as a subquery for an IN predicate. So let’s consider the correct solution with synthetic column names:


-- SQL Server equivalent:
SELECT b.c1 ID, b.c2 TITLE
FROM (
  SELECT ID c1, TITLE c2,
    ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY ID) rn
  FROM BOOK
) b
WHERE rn > 2 AND rn <= 3

But now we got it, right?

Make an educated guess: Nope!

What happens, if you add an ORDER BY clause to the original query?


-- PostgreSQL syntax:
SELECT ID, TITLE 
FROM BOOK 
ORDER BY SOME_COLUMN
LIMIT 1 OFFSET 2

-- Naive SQL Server equivalent:
SELECT b.c1 ID, b.c2 TITLE
FROM (
  SELECT ID c1, TITLE c2,
    ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY ID) rn
  FROM BOOK
  ORDER BY SOME_COLUMN
) b
WHERE rn > 2 AND rn <= 3

Now, that doesn’t work in SQL Server. Subqueries are not allowed to have an ORDER BY clause, unless they also have a TOP clause (or an OFFSET .. FETCH clause in SQL Server 2012). OK, we can probably tweak this using TOP 100 PERCENT to make SQL Server happy.


-- Better SQL Server equivalent:
SELECT b.c1 ID, b.c2 TITLE
FROM (
  SELECT TOP 100 PERCENT
    ID c1, TITLE c2,
    ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY ID) rn
  FROM BOOK
  ORDER BY SOME_COLUMN
) b
WHERE rn > 2 AND rn <= 3

Now, that’s correct SQL according to SQL Server, although you do not have a guarantee that the ordering of the derived table will survive after query execution. It may well be that the ordering is changed again by some influence. If you wanted to order by SOME_COLUMN in the outer query, you’d have to again transform the SQL statement to add another synthetic column:


-- Better SQL Server equivalent:
SELECT b.c1 ID, b.c2 TITLE
FROM (
  SELECT TOP 100 PERCENT
    ID c1, TITLE c2,
    SOME_COLUMN c99,
    ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY ID) rn
  FROM BOOK
) b
WHERE rn > 2 AND rn <= 3
ORDER BY b.c99

That does start getting a bit nasty. And let’s guess whether:

This is the correct solution!

Of course not! What if the original query had DISTINCT in it?


-- PostgreSQL syntax:
SELECT DISTINCT AUTHOR_ID
FROM BOOK 
LIMIT 1 OFFSET 2

-- Naive SQL Server equivalent:
SELECT b.c1 AUTHOR_ID
FROM (
  SELECT DISTINCT AUTHOR_ID c1,
    ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY AUTHOR_ID) rn
  FROM BOOK
) b
WHERE rn > 2 AND rn <= 3

Now, what happens if an author has written several books? Yes, the DISTINCT keyword should remove such duplicates, and effectively, the PostgreSQL query will correctly remove duplicates first, and then apply LIMIT and OFFSET. However, the ROW_NUMBER() predicate always generates distinct row numbers before DISTINCT can remove them again. In other words, DISTINCT has no effect. Luckily, we can tweak this SQL again, using this neat little trick:


-- Better SQL Server equivalent:
SELECT b.c1 AUTHOR_ID
FROM (
  SELECT DISTINCT AUTHOR_ID c1,
    DENSE_RANK() OVER (ORDER BY AUTHOR_ID) rn
  FROM BOOK
) b
WHERE rn > 2 AND rn <= 3

Read more about this trick here: SQL Trick: row_number() is to SELECT what dense_rank() is to SELECT DISTINCT. Watch out that the ORDER BY clause must contain all columns from the SELECT field list. Obviously, this will limit the acceptable columns in the SELECT DISTINCT field list to columns that are allowed in a window function’s ORDER BY clause (e.g. no other window functions). We could of course try to fix that as well using common table expressions, or we consider

Yet another issue??

Yes, of course! Do you even know what the column(s) in the window function’s ORDER BY clause should be? Have you just picked any column, at random? What if that column doesn’t have an index on it, will your window function still perform? The answer is easy when your original SELECT statement also has an ORDER BY clause, then you should probably take that one (plus all the columns from the SELECT DISTINCT clause if applicable). But what if you don’t have any ORDER BY clause? Yet another trick! Use a “constant” variable:


-- Better SQL Server equivalent:
SELECT b.c1 AUTHOR_ID
FROM (
  SELECT AUTHOR_ID c1,
    ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY @@version) rn
  FROM BOOK
) b
WHERE rn > 2 AND rn <= 3

Yes, you need to use a variable, because constants are not allowed in those ORDER BY clauses, in SQL Server. Painful, I know. Read more about this @@version trick here.

Are we done yet!?!?

Probably not ;-) But we have probably covered around 99% of the common and edge cases. We can sleep nicely, now. Note that all of these SQL transformations are implemented in jOOQ. jOOQ is the only SQL abstraction framework that takes SQL seriously (with all its warts and caveats), standardising over all of this madness. As mentioned in the beginning, with jOOQ, you just write:


// Don't worry about general emulation
select().from(BOOK).limit(1).offset(2);

// Don't worry about duplicate column names
// in subselects
select(BOOK.ID, AUTHOR.ID)
.from(BOOK)
.join(AUTHOR)
.on(BOOK.AUTHOR_ID.eq(AUTHOR.ID))
.limit(1).offset(2);

// Don't worry about invalid IN predicates
select()
.from(BOOK)
.where(BOOK.AUTHOR_ID).in(
    select(AUTHOR.ID)
    .from(AUTHOR)
    .limit(1).offset(2)
);

// Don't worry about the ROW_NUMBER() vs.
// DENSE_RANK() distinction
selectDistinct(AUTHOR_ID)
    .from(BOOK).limit(1).offset(2);

With jOOQ, you can just write your Oracle SQL or Transact SQL as if it were as awesome as PostgreSQL! … without jumping the SQL ship entirely, and moving on to JPA.

Keyset paging

Now, of course, if you have been reading our blog, or our partner blog SQL Performance Explained, you should know by now that OFFSET pagination is often a bad choice in the first place. You should know that keyset pagination almost always outperforms OFFSET pagination. Read about how jOOQ natively supports keyset pagination using the SEEK clause, here.