> How can the server know the rownum of all the result set in advance? Does

it

> fetch all the result set on a temporal space? If this is the trick, how is
> this different than having middleware?

It would have to select the whole query as usual, and then (in the case of
LIMIT (30, 10)) it would discard rows 0..29 and > 41 before returning a
cursor.

It differs from middleware because you don't have to send the whole result
set (which could be a few MB in size) to the middleware (which may be on
another machine) just to get 10 records. Surely that makes sense ?

Pete