On Tue, Jan 17, 2006 at 08:56:00PM +0100, Alessandro Baretta wrote: > I understand most of these issues, and expected this kind of reply. Please, > allow me to insist that we reason on this problem and try to find a > solution. My reason for doing so is that the future software industry is > likely to see more and more web applications retrieving data from virtually > endless databases, and in such contexts, it is sensible to ask the final > client--the web client--to store the "cursor state", because web > interaction is intrinsically asynchronous, and you cannot count on users > logging out when they're done, releasing resources allocated to them. Think > of Google. What is wrong with LIMIT and OFFSET? I assume your results are ordered in some manner. Especially with web users, who become bored if the page doesn't flicker in a way that appeals to them, how could one have any expectation that the cursor would ever be useful at all? As a 'general' solution, I think optimizing the case where the same query is executed multiple times, with only the LIMIT and OFFSET parameters changing, would be a better bang for the buck. I'm thinking along the lines of materialized views, for queries executed more than a dozen times in a short length of time... :-) In the mean time, I successfully use LIMIT and OFFSET without such an optimization, and things have been fine for me. Cheers, mark -- mark@xxxxxxxxx / markm@xxxxxx / markm@xxxxxxxxxx __________________________ . . _ ._ . . .__ . . ._. .__ . . . .__ | Neighbourhood Coder |\/| |_| |_| |/ |_ |\/| | |_ | |/ |_ | | | | | | \ | \ |__ . | | .|. |__ |__ | \ |__ | Ottawa, Ontario, Canada One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them... http://mark.mielke.cc/