How to select bottom most rows?

Question

I can do SELECT TOP (200) ... but why not BOTTOM (200)?

Well not to get into philosophy what I mean is, how can I do the equivalent of TOP (200) but in reverse (from the bottom, like you'd expect BOTTOM to do...)?

Answer 1

It is unnecessary. You can use an ORDER BY and just change the sort to DESC to get the same effect.

Answer 2

All you need to do is reverse your ORDER BY. Add or remove DESC to it.

Answer 3

SELECT
    columns
FROM
(
     SELECT TOP 200
          columns
     FROM
          My_Table
     ORDER BY
          a_column DESC
) SQ
ORDER BY
     a_column ASC

Answer 4

The problem with ordering the other way is that it often does not make good use of indices. It is also not very extendable if you ever need to select a number of rows that are not at the start or the end. An alternative way is as follows.

DECLARE @NumberOfRows int;
SET @NumberOfRows = (SELECT COUNT(*) FROM TheTable);

SELECT col1, col2,...
FROM (
    SELECT col1, col2,..., ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY col1) AS intRow
    FROM TheTable
) AS T
WHERE intRow > @NumberOfRows - 20;