> On Tue, 2005-12-06 at 11:32 +0100, Tino Wildenhain wrote: > > You can have a row number in postgres easily too. For example if you > > just include a serial for the row number. > Not if the order of things is determined runtime and not at insert time... > > > Cursor would work too but you would need to have a persistent > connection. > I just tried it: a cursor is not faster (what does not surprise me at > all, as the amount of work looks the same to me) > > I guess there is no solution. > sure there is. This begs the question: 'why do you want to read exactly 283745 rows ahead of row 'x'?) :) If you are scrolling forwards in a set, just pull in, say, 100-1000 rows at a time, ordered, and grab the next 1000 based on the highest value read previously. You can do this on server side (cursor) or client side (parameterized query). There are advantages and disadvantages to each. If you are looping over this set and doing processing, a cursor would be ideal (try out pl/pgsql). Welcome to PostgreSQL! :) Merlin