In my previous post “Denali Paging – is it win.win ?” I demonstrated the use of using the Paging functionality within Denali.  On reflection,  I think i may of been a little unfair and should of continued always planned to continue my investigations to the next step.

In Pauls article, he uses a combination of ctes to first scan the ordered keys which is then filtered using TOP and rownumber and then uses those keys to seek the data.  So what happens if we replace the scanning portion of the code with the denali paging functionality.

Heres the original procedure,  we are going to replace the functionality of the Keys and SelectedKeys ctes :

CREATE  PROCEDURE dbo.FetchPageKeySeek
        @PageSize   BIGINT,
        @PageNumber BIGINT
AS
BEGIN
        -- Key-Seek algorithm
        WITH    Keys
        AS      (
                -- Step 1 : Number the rows from the non-clustered index
                -- Maximum number of rows = @PageNumber * @PageSize
                SELECT  TOP (@PageNumber * @PageSize)
                        rn = ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY P1.post_id ASC),
                        P1.post_id
                FROM    dbo.Post P1
                ORDER   BY
                        P1.post_id ASC
                ),
                SelectedKeys
        AS      (
                -- Step 2 : Get the primary keys for the rows on the page we want
                -- Maximum number of rows from this stage = @PageSize
                SELECT  TOP (@PageSize)
                        SK.rn,
                        SK.post_id
                FROM    Keys SK
                WHERE   SK.rn > ((@PageNumber - 1) * @PageSize)
                ORDER   BY
                        SK.post_id ASC
                )
        SELECT  -- Step 3 : Retrieve the off-index data
                -- We will only have @PageSize rows by this stage
                SK.rn,
                P2.post_id,
                P2.thread_id,
                P2.member_id,
                P2.create_dt,
                P2.title,
                P2.body
        FROM    SelectedKeys SK
        JOIN    dbo.Post P2
                ON  P2.post_id = SK.post_id
        ORDER   BY
                SK.post_id ASC;
END;

and here is the replacement procedure using paging:

CREATE  PROCEDURE dbo.FetchOffsetPageKeySeek
        @PageSize   BIGINT,
        @PageNumber BIGINT
AS
BEGIN
        -- Key-Seek algorithm
        WITH    SelectedKeys
        AS      (
                SELECT  post_id
                FROM    dbo.Post P1
                ORDER   BY post_id ASC
                OFFSET  @PageSize * (@PageNumber-1) ROWS
                FETCH NEXT @PageSize ROWS ONLY
                )
        SELECT  P2.post_id,
                P2.thread_id,
                P2.member_id,
                P2.create_dt,
                P2.title,
                P2.body
        FROM    SelectedKeys SK
        JOIN    dbo.Post P2
                ON  P2.post_id = SK.post_id
        ORDER   BY
                SK.post_id ASC;
END;


Notice how all i have done is replace the functionality with the Keys and SelectedKeys CTEs with the paging functionality.

So , what is the comparative performance now ?.

Exactly the same amount of IO and memory usage , but its now pretty obvious that in terms of CPU and overall duration we are onto a winner.