2008/9/30 Milan Babuskov <milanb@...>:

> Daniel Albuschat wrote:
>> - None I have seen so far give an indication of how many datasets
>> exist in the result set (i.e. by sizing the scroll-bar appropriately).
>
> I'd rather use the word 'records' because 'dataset' means the same thing
> as 'result set'.
>
>> Even database-managers that should be very sophisticated in this task,
>> often fail in this regard.
>
> This is because 'select count()' is slow in most cases. There is no way
> to know about row number efficiently.

Yes, exactly. It's physically impossible. That's why most people
either think "Ok, so the user has to wait for [incredibly long
timespan], I can do nothing about it" or "Well, it'll take too long.
The user will not know how many records there are".
My solution, however, is to let the user go on with his work with the
program while it is fetching all available records in the background.
Without the application-developer doing anything fancy for this.

--
eat(this); // delicious suicide