Re: Paged Query

Hermann Matthes wrote:
> I want to implement a "paged Query" feature, where the user can enter
in
> a dialog, how much rows he want to see. After displaying the first
page
> of rows, he can can push a button to display the next/previous page.
> On database level I could user "limit" to implement this feature. My
> problem now is, that the user is not permitted to view all rows. For
> every row a permission check is performed and if permission is
granted,
> the row is added to the list of rows sent to the client.
> If for example the user has entered a page size of 50 and I use "limit
> 50" to only fetch 50 records, what should I do if he is only permitted
> to see 20 of these 50 records? There may be more records he can view.
> But if I don't use "limit", what happens if the query would return
> 5,000,000 rows? Would my result set contain 5,000,000 rows or would
the
> performance of the database go down?

Selecting all 5000000 rows would consume a lot of memory wherever
they are cached. Also, it might lead to bad response times (with
an appropriate LIMIT clause, the server can choose a plan that
returns the first few rows quickly).

I assume that there is some kind of ORDER BY involved, so that
the order of rows displayed is not random.

I have two ideas:
- Try to integrate the permission check in the query.
It might be more efficient, and you could just use LIMIT
and OFFSET like you intended.
- Select some more rows than you want to display on one page,
perform the permission checks. Stop when you reach the end
or have enough rows. Remember the sort key of the last row
processed.
When the next page is to be displayed, use the remembered
sort key value to SELECT the next rows.

Yours,
Laurenz Albe