> >Retrieving only part of result set is also important,
> >especially with internet applications.
>
> Could you explain this, please?

- Search results on web servers are usually presented 10 or 20 "rows" at a time,
rest of the result set is just thrown away. This is the reason why
lot of people demand TOP or LIMIT functionality.


- Take internet search engine as an example.
-It can be used by less experienced people, that are not accustomed
with particular database.
(If you use some database frequently, you will learn how to best
formulate queries to get desired result.)

-It can contain highly unpredictable data,
so even experienced user is never sure whether the query
will return 1 or 100000 rows.

If you get toooo large result set, you will probably not read it all,
but instead you will refine the query. In this case
it was just wasting user's time to do a sort on these data.


Ivan
prenosil@...