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Language: Enterprise
Expertise: Advanced

Aug 25, 2000

When querying in Oracle, use ROWNUM pseudocolumn to limit the number of returned rows. Pseudocolumns behave like table columns but are not actually stored in tables. (Other pseudocolumns are RowId, Level, etc.).

In Sybase, the equivalent way to restrict returned rows in T-SQL is the following:

 Set Rowcount n

Where 'n' stands for number of rows returned by query

Consider following this example, which would restrict the resulting number of rows to 9:

 SELECT firstname
FROM   employee
WHERE  ROWNUM < 10 ;

Here are the results:

 FIRSTNAME
------------
John
Tim
Julie
Stacy
Rahul
Leena
Amy
Bill
Teri

However, one should be careful when using the Order By clause along with Rownum. When Order By is used with Rownum to restrict query results, it works only if Ordered By is the primary key of the table. For example, empid is the primary key in this employee table:

 SELECT firstname
FROM   employee
WHERE  ROWNUM < 5 
ORDER BY empid;

Here are the results:

 FIRSTNAME
------------
John
Julie
Stacy
Tim

Now consider the following query, ordered by a non-PK column. The order of its results would be unpredictable. It would depend on how the rows were inserted in table.

 SELECT firstname
FROM   employee
WHERE  ROWNUM< 5 
ORDER BY firstname;

Here are the results:

 FIRSTNAME
------------
Teri
Julie
Stacy
Bill