Keeping a session open on the server is more expensive when the user closes
their webbrowser or goes to another site. You end up waiting for sessions
to time-out and this is wasteful.

Stored procedures are no good because they are too specific. You very often
need to generate the query at runtime based on entries from a html <form>.

Missing a record because someone deleted one while you was reading the page
isn't a big deal.

Apart from all the complaining about the ROWNUMBER idea, I have not yet seen
a single plausable alternative. Does this mean there isn't one ?