Josh Sharp - web application development.

Now, if you're an open-source developer, you probably break into a sweat whenever working with Microsoft products is mentioned. Apache will always beat IIS and MySQL (or PostgreSQL) will reign supreme over SQL Server, despite those naysayers who worship at the temple of Steve Ballmer (I hear they chant "developers, developers, developers" and dance in religious ecstasy). And so it is with me. I knew that SQL Server had all those extras like stored procedures, user-defined functions and views — which MySQL didn't until recently — but I preferred the non-evil side of the force.

Turns out MySQL offers some little extras after all. Little things like the LIMIT clause, which allows you to define a range of results to be returned. This function is absolutely invaluable in paging data, but... in versions of SQL Server older than 2005, there's just nothing similar. The closest is the TOP clause, which returns the first X amount of rows, but does not allow you to specify a starting index.

What follows is a journey of strength and courage, of overcoming adversity, of sticking with SQL Server even when all seems hopeless. This is the story of attempting to page data returned from SQL Server 2000.

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