@kellyleahy said:yup... that's what I meant. I was just commenting on the "exists in most databases" comment. LIMIT, per se, does not exist in Oracle, though Oracle provides a way that this can be done through ROWNUM (with the appropriate caveats applied, as you so carefully noted in your post).You're right, it seems. Been a while since I used Oracle, and Sybase has a totally different way of doing things. Postgres has LIMIT ... OFFSET, I'm not sure what MySQL, DB2, Ingres or Informix have.anyway, I apologise for the confusion.Simon