title: Is there a portable way to have "SELECT FIRST 10 * FROM T" semantic?
body: <p>I want to read data in blocks of say 10k records from a database.</p>
  
  <p>I found <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Select_%28SQL%29" rel="noreferrer">Result limits</a> on wikipedia and it seems obvious that this can't done with sql in a portable way.</p>
  
  <p>Another approach could be <a href="http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/2.5.1/api/org/springframework/jdbc/core/JdbcTemplate.html" rel="noreferrer">JdbcTemplate</a> which offers many methods for queries, but how could I decide that enough rows have been read. Through the callbacks like RowMapper and ResultSetExtractor it can't be indicated, that enough data has been read. </p>
  
  <p>EDIT: I was looking for a solution for JdbcTemplate 
  This <a href="http://forum.springsource.org/showthread.php?t=12205" rel="noreferrer">post</a> suggests to use <a href="http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/2.0.3/api/org/springframework/jdbc/core/JdbcTemplate.html#setMaxRows%28int%29" rel="noreferrer">setMaxRows</a> which I had overlooked.</p>