Re: Ultimate Question: Oracle, MSSQL, Others vs MYSQL LIMIT Statement

Tony Wright wrote on Tuesday 01 October 2002 04:28:

> As for exposing the physical layout of the data, well, I guess to do
> paging, there would always be a need to order the data to ensure it
> was returned in a consistent fashion. I personally don't see a problem
> with this, as my strategy handles this well enough for our
> circumstances.

The whole idea behind SQL is that you, as the user do not have to worry/care/know about the physical layout of the data. SQL is designed in such a way that you describe _what_ you want, and the DBMS has to worry about how to give you the results.

Also, I don't quite follow you what you mean with "consistent fashion". Do you mean the order of the rows in a table? If yes, then remember that a table contains a _set_ of rows, and sets are not sorted per definition. If you want to have a certain order of the rows when you retrieve them using a cursor, then you have to use the ORDER BY clause. Again, this is based on the underlying concept of SQL of separating external (views), internal (tables), and physical schema (tablespaces, containers, ...) of the data.

-- 
Knut Stolze
DB2 Spatial Extender
IBM Germany / University of Jena