Hi Fred,

> Suppose one is looking for a list of screenings which fulfill several
> criteria including screening time between 7pm and midnight, and there
> are 100 screenings that fullfill the criteria, including 60 that
> begin between 7pm and 10:30. The initial screen will show 20 of the
> 100 according to the orderby clauses. Suppose the last item on the
> first page is an 11 pm screening of the first movie on the list. The
> second query will exclude all screening of all the rest of the movies
> that begin before 11 pm.

You are assuming a qry on more than one screening; that's a little
far-fetched, don't you think?

> Yes, please read all the posts in this and a related thread. ROWNUM
> is the index within a result set, not in a table. One of its uses
> with Oracle is for selecting subsets of the result set.

If Oracle can do it on the, presumably, server side, it should be
equally easy on the client's side, or, assuming that you can integerate
interbase with php, on the client side.

> No problem at all for some tasks. If you read the messages from Paulo
> to which Ann was responding you will see that for some types of
> application you will need an infinite number of arrays with different
> sorting orders as indexes to the structure you are proposing, in
> other words, the programmer will have to write a mini relational
> database.

I fail to see how you would ever need an infinate number of anything for
a task which oracle performs on the server side.

>
> You may not need or want an ISP to run your database, neither do I.
> Others do.
>