I don't know if Oracle changed recently, but the last few times I used it, it was incredibly annoying having to put everything in a subquery to get a LIMIT-type operation to work AFTER the sort, so that you could use their ROWNUM. For example, to get the first 50 rows of a SELECT result. Their ROWNUM worked BEFORE the ORDER BY, so to get the 1st 50 rows, you had to put the query in a subselect, and say SELECT ... where ROWNUM <= 50.
I love OFFSET ... LIMIT in PostgreSQL! I do a lot of web applications, and it is incredibly handy to page output with. Susan ---------------------------------------------------- Tiered Data Protection Made Simple http://www.overlandstorage.com/ ----------------------------------------------------