Okay, it seems that this forum software does not like the 'Less than' character. How odd. Well, anywhere that ROWNUM appears by itself and looks a little out of context, assume that 'LESS THAN Y' is appended to it.

Also, here is the rest of the one point that was cut off:

Use of the upper bound (ROWNUM LESS THAN Y) will reduce the amount of work that the query must perform. As soon as Y records are retrieved, the query can stop and exit. This can be a significant savings.

Hope this all makes sense,

- Chris