benw@packard.UUCP (B Weber) (08/03/87)
I'm a relative newcomer to Informix, so bear with me... I'm using ESQL to manage my database. My question is: Is there any way to do a select so that Informix just searches for a specified number of data items? For instance, suppose we have 100000 records in a table...maybe 8000 are of the kind we are interested in. However, the user wants a report that just lists 5 of them (any five). Right now we are using a cursor to do a select (of the 8000 records), and then doing 5 fetches to get five items for the report. Obviously, it is a tremendous waste of time to search the whole table, only to actually use a tiny number of the data items returned. So, is there any way to get something equivalent to "Select 5 items from ... where...."? Thanks, Ben Weber AT&T Technologies Liberty Corner, NJ ficit|packard!benw