T-SQL paging done right

Proposed session for SQLBits 2026

TL; DR

Rather than overwhelming your client app with all of the data at once, you want to implement paging in your SQL database. But things have not gone well. Let’s take five and look at some common pitfalls, how the simple solution may not be the best, and how to think like a SQL performance tuner.

Session Details

Rather than overwhelming your client app with all of the data at once, you want to implement paging in your SQL database. So you watched the tutorial, you wrote the code, but now your database performance has tanked and users are complaining.

Let’s take five and look at some common pitfalls, how the simple solution may not be the best, and how to think like a SQL performance tuner.

We’ll cover indexing practices, FETCH and OFFSET, and basic performance concepts like ordering and blocking operators. I hope you’ll walk away with a couple of new ideas to help you fix most of the performance issues associated with paging.