Get a block of rows

Hi to all,

my problem is the following:
I have a table: "adresses" (ID, type, firstname, lastname). There's a primary key on ID and an index on (type, lastname).

I want to get all addresses "where type like 'customer' order by lastname"
But I need a possibility to select only a block of customer-addresses (e.g. 1..20, 21..40, 41..60, ...). In other words, I need a possibility to get row n..m from the table "addresses"
using the index (type, lastname).

I tried to use the "between" or the "Minus" operator. With small numbers of n it worked fine, but when the number grow bigger it took
to much time (because I have to execute this select-statement almost every second).
I think with the "between" and the "Minus" operator, Oracle always creates a new cursor with many results although I only need 20 rows.

Of course I need to have the possibility to jump backwards to a former block which I already the read before, so it's not just some fetch-statements in the cursor.

If you have any idea or suggestions, please let me know. Thanks in advance.
 Ralf Received on Mon Mar 10 2003 - 13:10:50 CET