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Comment by willvarfar | Hacker News Reader

Well, funnily enough MySQL are now owned by Oracle and I've wasted a couple of days trying to get some sane semblance of `LIMIT` working for me on Oracle... so don't hold your breath, Oracle have an even longer history of damning their customers...

I've been keeping a list of MySQL gotchas, but steering clear of the MySQL take on the SQL standard itself: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/25080396258/oh-my...

I still contemplate MySQL for new projects, because better the enemy you know and all that... OMG, I'm mad! Postgres rah rah rah!

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Oracle does seems to make limit queries much harder than they need to be. I wrote an article about limit and paging queries in oracle ages ago that may interest you, but you probably have it all figured out now.

http://betteratoracle.com/posts/18-limiting-query-results-to...

This actually made me think of: Oracle's "UTF8" vs "AL32UTF8" which I consider to be a gotcha, even though it is reasonable in terms of the evolution of the standard, a modern land mine perhaps.

The lack of limit sucks, but the thing that annoys me most regularly is that Oracle refuses to make the 0 length string / null behavior configurable to allow for ANSI compliance ( MySQL null handling is worse IMO, makes me insane.... )

Oracle historically has poor support. Here's an old example with an ADO bug, they never fixed it even though the support ticket was open for almost 2 years!

http://randomtechnicalstuff.blogspot.com.au/2009/11/nasty-or...

and unfortunately, they are the only ones who can offer support or implement a patch for their software!

With postgres and mysql you can find many companies competing to offer great service, and who can contribute their fixes and improvements directly should they so choose. The stronger the output of these communities and the organizations that support them, the more pressure for even the companies like Oracle to improve ( or perish :))

You should be able to do LIMIT in Oracle using http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/issue-archive/2006/06-sep/... . If you want a standards-compliant way to do it, you can use the ROW_NUMBER() window function. This might not be as fast, but will work on virtually every DB except MySQL...

Yes I'm deep beyond correctness and now want to make it fast...

Oracle is like COBOL; the only techies who like it are those whose job security depends upon it ;)

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