Help In Paginating Query output

Question

Hi All,
I have a query which fetches 80000 records at one short. This fetching can be controlled by using the search criteria. But some times it needs to fetch all the records and populate on the screen. The query fetches and populates more than 50 columns and which takes more time.
What i want is to fetch all the records but display only 10 of them at a time and provide pagination option like 1,2,3.... So when the user clicks on page 3, he will get the records 21-20 and page 4 records 31-40 and so on. If he want to again view page 1 then he should get records 1-10.
How can i write a stored procedure to achive this and how to store the counters of this search?
What is the best way to do this (alternate processes using PL/SQL)?
Any explanations and solution to this will be of great help.
Regards
Swadhin

Answer 1

Swadhin,
One quick way I can think of is to have a sort order column in your
table. The PL/SQL stored procedure would just take the upper and lower
limits as parameters and query data. You just need to call
the same procedure, passing it the appropriate upper and lower limits (which
you would match against the sort order column). The limits would change
for each link on a page.
This approach would avoid dumping all the 80k records at one shot which is
unnecessary. You can also avoid caching data on a client buffer.
Just one way of doing it. There could be more efficient ways to achieve this.
Rgds.
Amogh