SQL server 2008: Selecting over a million records

Selecting over a million records, what would be the best approach with performance. I am going to make up a table we can work later. But i want to get some information first. What are all the resources I need as for as CPU etc..........? Lets start there.

It depends on what you need to do. The best performance would be a class that provides only forward-only access to a single table in any order (not sorted).

Is C# the right language to handle this with performance, I am doing some research I am hearing that, a native language like c , c++ will be much faster, whats your opinion Sam? I am still learning.

C# provides good or excellent performance for most things and I assume C# is good for whatever you are doing. If the people saying that C++ is significantly faster are people that are experienced with C++ but not C# then of course you must be skeptical of what they say.

From they were saying that c sharp has to run though and interpreter which will take time, but since c, c++ is a native language it skips that interpreter process, I need to find out what that means.

Anyone saying that C# is interpreted does not understand how .Net works. It is not that simple.

You can introduce custom paging using stored procedures also for selecting records.

can you point me to a tutorial using custom paging, i never really use the term custom paging, what is custom paging?

Ok now that we have that clear lets make an example, say for instance we have one table and we may have to one join to pull in related data possible, I am going to make a table call Contacts. We are going to say there are a million contacts in this table. I am just a making up table representing what I am really doing, but using a contact table to communicate from. I cant go to much in detail. So we have this Contact table and also Education table below. An a customer wants to view all records  or export all records to common format file like excel, csv, etc......

What would be the best architecture or should say how would design this effectively. My first take is to set up the stored procedures in SQL Server 2008 Mngt Studio etc.. I want to do this as team, this will pushing my learning when it comes to performance. First time working with a million records. This is my next learning curve

Contact Table
ID	Fname	Lname	City	State	ZipCode	Address	PhoneNo
Education Table
ID	School	Major	Classification	fk_ContactId

I cannot say very much that can help. I assume that you will need an index for the fk_ContactId field of the Education Table. Obviously the primary key for each table will be the ID filed for each of them. So when you do a join of the two tables using the fk_ContactId field then an index will likely help very much.

Can you send me to a good tutorial on creating indexes.