Mike,

>No, my problem was not just with the names. Maybe I should have capitalized it or something when I said operations based on record number or position are contrary to the core principles of SQL. That whirring sound you hear is Dr. Codd spinning in his grave....

Whatever... I guess Codd would have sucked down the entire data table every time just so he could page it in code isntead of using a positional subselect with top n based on where and order by? Maybe purer, but not very efficient (or real-world). Or he could have used Fox tables with moving the record pointer and spin even more. :-)