Notes from Release It! Book
Unbounded Result Sets / Unbounded Capacity In any API or protocol, the caller should always indicate how much of a response it is prepared to accept. TCP does this in the "window" header field. Search engine APIs allow the caller to specify how many results to return and what the starting offset should be. Limit results coming out from the database. SELECT TOP 15 colspec FROM tablespec SELECT colspec FROM tablespec WHERE rownum <=15 SELECT colspec FROM tablespec LIMIT 15