SQL Development question

We are developing a new application to replace an old Cobol app.

We are looking at displaying results of a search, and I wanted to know how to handle returning the first 10-15 rows and then giving the user a Next/Previous choice. I see this done all of the time in Web applications and the like, but I don't know what mechanism they use.

The ideas we've had so far are:
1- Pull back all of the data but only display small chunks

(which seems like a waste of processing)
2- Pass the first/last result of the current list into the

   Previous/Next queries

(which is complicated, since the unique result is
         6 columns across two tables)
3- Develop some kind of cursor that stays open

(but we still get all of the data, right?)

I used TOAD a lot and they have a data browser that seems to do this, but I am at a loss as to how.

Thanks in advance for any ideas/suggestions/samples.

Steve Monaghan
Worldcom
Long Island, NY, USA Received on Tue Jul 25 2000 - 10:34:44 CDT