Is there a portable way to have “SELECT FIRST 10 * FROM T” semantic?

Question

I want to read data in blocks of say 10k records from a database.

I found Result limits on wikipedia and it seems obvious that this can\'t done with sql in a portabl

Answer 1

No. Thats why database abstraction layers like Hibernate contains SQL dialects where you choose the one to use with your database.

Answer 2

If you want a portable way, you need to move up an abstraction layer, as there's no portable SQL way(not one that databases actually implement anyways) - and use ORM mappers like e.g hibernate.

If you do need raw JDBC, you'll have to write specific SQL for eache specific database - which is often the case anyway as writing 100% portabl SQL is pretty hard in all but the trivial cases.

The last resort is to run the query without any restrictions and just iterate over the 10 first results you get back - though this doesn't leverage the database capabilities and would be quite bad if your query results in many rows.

Answer 3

Grab Hibernate or JPA. Both are familiar with various database dialects and will handle the nasty DB specifics under the hoods transparently.

In Hibernate you can paginate using Criteria#setFirstResult() and Criteria#setMaxResults(). E.g.

List users = session.createCriteria(User.class)
    .addOrder(Order.asc("id"))
    .setFirstResult(0) // Index of first row to be retrieved.
    .setMaxResults(10) // Amount of rows to be retrieved.
    .list();

In JPA you can do similar using Query#setFirstResult() and Query#setMaxResults().

List users = em.createQuery("SELECT u FROM User u ORDER BY u.id");
    .setFirstResult(0) // Index of first row to be retrieved.
    .setMaxResults(10) // Amount of rows to be retrieved.
    .getResultList();

Answer 4

There is an ANSI standard syntax from SQL:2008:

SELECT t.* 
  FROM TABLE t
 FETCH FIRST 10 ROWS ONLY

...but it's not supported on most databases at this time.

Answer 5

There is no portable way of doing that on plain SQL, because different SQL Engines use different syntaxes for that.

Use a Database Abstraction Layer, or DBAL.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_abstraction_layer

http://jonasbandi.net/wiki/index.php/ORM_Solutions_for_Java