ADQL evolution: OFFSET?

[Mark Taylor]

On Tue, 12 Jan 2016, Markus Demleitner wrote:

> In terms of whether OFFSET makes sense without ORDER BY: I think
> that's really a moot point since ADQL has allowed TOP without ORDER BY
> since the beginning, which is exactly as questionable.  So, I'd claim

I don't think that's really true.  TOP is just if you want a result
but you don't want it too big.  Non-ORDERed OFFSET would on the other
hand presumably be used to provide pagination.  The problem there is
that you might get different orderings for different queries, so
end up with duplicate or missing records.

--
Mark Taylor   Astronomical Programmer   Physics, Bristol University, UK
m.b.taylor at bris.ac.uk +44-117-9288776  http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/