Thread: Cursors or Offset, Limit?

Hi,

I am mucking around trying to build a gui'sh "table editor" for
Postgresql.

I am currently using a "held" cursor to move around the table, Since the
"cursor" does not show table modification I am thinking about using the
"limit" and "offset" attributes to select the rows to display.

What are some of the tradeoffs between using a cursor and using the
limit/offset method of selecting rows to display?

Thanks,

Jerry

On Tue, Nov 15, 2005 at 01:44:32PM -0500, Jerry LeVan wrote:
>
> What are some of the tradeoffs between using a cursor and using the
> limit/offset method of selecting rows to display?

OFFSET actually has to scan all the preceding rows every time (plus
to get it consistently, you need to do an ORDER BY), so it's fast at
first but possibly painfully slow in the last rows (especially on a
large table).

A

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