Data paging in SQL Server CE (Compact Edition)

Question

I am writing a wpf destop application, and would like to use SQL Server CE as a backend. I'm trying to come up with a good way to do efficient data paging. In SQL Server Express, I can do something like this:

Select ID, FirstName, LastName
From (SELECT  ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY ID)
 AS Row, ID, FirstName, LastName
 From TestTable                             
) 
WHERE  Row > 1 AND Row <= 10

Is there anything comparable in SQL Server CE? I'm not completely sure what is and is not supported. I want to only return 10 rows at a time from the database, and not have to pull back all the data and then filter it down to display to the user, since that is much slower. Thanks.

Answer 1

Honestly, probably the fastest thing to do is use an SqlCeDataReader and call .Read() 10 times. Then when the user moves to the next page, you're already pointing at the 11th result, and can read 10 more. If you need to go backwards, you can either cache your results or switch to an SqlCeResultSet which supports seeking.

Also, SqlCeDataReader/Result is, from experience, the absolute fastest way to interact with the database on the desktop. It can be literally 100 times faster than using DataSets/DataAdapters.

Answer 2

I'm also currently working on a WPF application which uses SQL Server CE as the persistence mechanism. We have several (40+) tables and some of them are pretty big (50k records, at least that's big for my standards).

My advice about data paging directly in SQL CE is this: avoid it if you can! I have used the approach described by Bob King, and at least for me it resulted in Very Ugly code, a real maintenance nightmare.

Unless you'll need to page over tens of thousands of records, I believe the best approach is to load them all using SqlCeDataReader into a collection of custom classes and then page over the collection in memory. I found this approach to be more responsive than re-executing the SQL query every time, even with caching. What happened is that in my case the queries were fairly complex, and SqlCeDataReader performance was good enough so that the performance hit was almost imperceptible. No need to point that, after the first batch load, every page change happens almost instantaneously because everything is kept in memory.

The general opinion of my users were that it's ok to wait a little longer for the first results to appear, if that's going to lead to faster paging afterwards. And using LINQ, paging is as easy as calling Skip and Take methods. I have implemented this logic inside a Pager<T> class, making it very DRY and nice.

Answer 3

There are a few ways, but the most simplistic way would be like the following:

Assuming

1. Page Size = 10
2. Page = 2

Then

1. First TOP = PageSize (10)
2. Second TOP = PageSize * Page (20)

SELECT
 [Page].[ID],
 [Page].[FirstName],
 [Page].[LastName]
FROM
(
SELECT TOP (10)
 [FirstRows].[ID],
 [FirstRows].[FirstName],
 [FirstRows].[LastName]
FROM
 (
 SELECT TOP (20)
  [TestTable].[ID],
  [TestTable].[FirstName],
  [TestTable].[LastName]
 FROM
  [TestTable]
 ORDER BY
  [TestTable].[ID] ASC
 ) AS [FirstRows]
ORDER BY 
 [FirstRows].[ID] DESC
) AS [Page]
ORDER BY
  [Page].[ID] ASC