Posted by Jochem Maas on 04/22/05 14:13

Richard Lynch wrote:
> On Thu, April 21, 2005 12:23 pm, Warren Vail said:
>
>>The only approach left that I could come up with is to transfer the
>>entire sequence set to your application, and count the rows, perhaps
>>only displaying the rows you want to show. This is obviously not very
>>efficient (in fact, with enough rows it may prove impossible because of
>>memory limitations), but it will produce what appears to be a paged
>>result.
>
>
> If this is the best answer your database software will let you come up
> with, it's time to switch databases :-)
>
> Fortunately, the databases that don't do "LIMIT" have this nifty thing

I was under the impression that LIMIT was mySQL specific (although its
quite likely that their use of the keyword and the ubiqitous nature of mySQL
that other vendors have also adopted it.

anyway, many other DBs do implement an alternative in the form of FIRST, SKIP
keywords which effectively does the same as the LIMIT clause. (AFAICR
FIRST/SKIP is part of the SQL std)

> called "CURSOR" which lets you kind of do the same thing.
>
> At least, all the databases I know of.
>
> Maybe something really stupid and broken like MS Access or something that
> doesn't even claim to do SQL like, errrr, FileMaker???
>
> Even there, I'll bet there's some better answer than pulling all the rows
> down just to display a tiny fraction of them.
>

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