Pagination queries with ordering are really tricky in Oracle.
Oracle provides a ROWNUM pseudocolumn that returns a number indicating the order in which the database selects the row from a table or set of joined views.
ROWNUM is a pseudocolumn that gets many people into trouble. A ROWNUM value is not permanently assigned to a row (this is a common misunderstanding). It may be confusing when a ROWNUM value is actually assigned. A ROWNUM value is assigned to a row after it passes filter predicates of the query but before query aggregation or sorting.
What is more, a ROWNUM value is incremented only after it is assigned.
This is why the followin query returns no rows:
select * from (select * from some_table order by some_column) where ROWNUM <= 4 and ROWNUM > 1; The first row of the query result does not pass ROWNUM > 1 predicate, so ROWNUM does not increment to 2. For this reason, no ROWNUM value gets greater than 1, consequently, the query returns no rows.
Correctly defined query should look like this:
select *from (select *, ROWNUM rnum from (select * from skijump_results order by points) where ROWNUM <= 4)where rnum > 1; Find out more about pagination queries in my articles on Vertabelo blog: