I'd like to get row numbers for my output without having to use ROW_NUMBER () OVER (PARTITION BY.). Is this possible, and can you provide an example? To add a row number column in front of each row, add a column with the ROW_NUMBER function, in this case named Row. You must move the ORDER BY clause up to the OVER clause. You have to use ORDER BY clause along with ROW_NUMBER () to generate row numbers. In this article, I will show you a simple trick to generate row number without using ORDER BY clause. SQL Server's ROW_NUMBER () function is a flexible tool that allows you to provide each row in a result set a unique row number. It is equally effective when used without the PARTITION BY clause, even though it is frequently used in conjunction with it for grouping and ranking within partitions. The row_number () window function is defined in ISO/IEC 9075-2:2023 as part of optional feature T611, “Elementary OLAP operations”. Using row_number () without order by is part of optional feature T612. Window functions such as ROW_NUMBER () require an OVER clause (and that clause must have an ORDER BY clause). To fix this issue, add an OVER clause when calling the ROW_NUMBER () function. Is there any way to use ROW_NUMBER () in SQL without using OVER, because I want to use sorting. I have a Grid with multiple sortable columns with configurable rows. In my scenario order by is variable that's why I am not able to put order by using ROWNUM. SQL Datasets don't have an implicit ordering, they're explicitly unordered. For ROW_NUMBER () to do anything useful you have to tell it how to calculate the order of your set from the data itself; thus, the ORDER BY clause. So, this begs the question; WHY do you want to do this? The Sequence Project iterator then does the actual row number calculation, based on the output of the Segment iterator's output. But the following query, using that logic, shouldn't have to include a Segment, because there's no partition expression. I just wanted to number each row without partitioning and in the order the server produced them (which in this case was deterministic as it was from an XML source).