Selecting a range from a table is easy in MYSQL. Say you want to bring back results that you are paginating. Bringing back thousands of results is inefficient and needless.

MS SQL there isn’t a simple way of doing this. The best way I have found, or my colleague Daniel has found, is to wrap a select statement inside another statement.

Above is our full statement returning all our results. First, we need to add a row number which will allow us to know the result's position.

Select a Range in MS SQL

Just a quick SQL tip that I have been using recently, and is aimed mainly at MS SQL, but I cant see any reason why this wouldn’t work on MY SQL, except for the fact the MY SQL has easier Backup facilities.

The background for this is that I was making changes to a table, but wanted a backup of the latest version. Microsoft makes it ridiculously complicated to back up individual tables and restore them, and I didn’t have time to read manuals or try out third-party software.

The script below simply takes the entire table selected and copies it under a new name, giving you both tables to compare and rename/restore with ease.

I have since used this script several times and seems an easy way of making sure you don’t ruin a perfectly good table!

Quick SQL Copy Table

I recently had a problem while creating a list of players for a project. I needed to list them in a certain order based on their position.

I knew there were only 4 possible positions, but wanted them returned in the order of GK, DEF, MID and STK.

I managed to find two ways of doing this which I will demonstrate below.

The first way was to use an Order by. The script below orders the table first by my Custom order, and then by the ID Number field.

Category: SQL.

Select a Range in MS SQL

Quick SQL Copy Table

SQL Custom Order