>>Side-stepping the issue is, at best, disingenuous.
>>
>>This is not a "constructed" scenario - it is a scenario I've faced on numerous occasions from different clients. It separates the desktop/LAN developers from web/distributed development.
>>
>>I invite you to poll developers on different SQL forums if you don't believe me.
>
>Bt it was contrived!
>
>I stopped reading when I got to '... therefore it must support paging... yet the user must know how many total...". Crap.

Actually not - I also met that scenario in real life, and actually had to take some part in the code which would automatically churn the alphabetic links, next/previous 50 page links etc.

It's the requirement that the web generating bit is separate from the data layer, which is fine and proper n-tier, that muddies the water here, because it doesn't say how separate. In a separate class, separate COM object in the same process or completely separate process, or even something marshalled back and forth via some sort of pool manager.

But that gets into the game after we have our SQL done, so it's actually like the physics problem when given to mathematicians: contains one unnecessary condition just to make it less simple.