At 06:20 PM 29/05/2006, you wrote:
I had written:

> > I wouldn't bother with SELECT FIRST for anything. It's a waste of
> > space -- one of those things that (IMNSHO) people insist they need
> > because they don't know any better.

Michael E. wrote

>We run a site where we have about 200 visitors per minute. Most of these
>users do a few clicks to scroll around and then leave. If the
>transactions would stay active for 2 hours, the DB server would need to
>sustain 200*120=24000 concurrent connections/transactions! Currently it
>runs pretty smoothly with a pool of 30 connections that get reused,
>paginating the results is achieved via FIRST/SKIP. Is this not a valid
>usage?

Assuming you're using it directly (not in a selectable SP) and you're
happy with its performance and it gives you what you want, it's
"valid usage". According to my recollection, it was this kind of
usage scenario - "stateless scrolling" - that made it an acceptable
feature to add, with the reservation that it should be applied to
small catchments of candidate rows.

But if one were using it on a catchment of several hundred thousands
of rows inside a selectable stored procedure to achieve the same
front-end purpose for a stateful client/server application, it's no
way "valid usage". It's a waste of time, resources and bandwidth.

./heLen