please recommand some good way to do the paging.to retrieve a big list from database is vary slow. what's the best way to return only reqired subset of list for every page.I don't want to do this in database tier since I don't want to introduce column for identify the rows for page such as rownumber.
I know in Oracle there is rownum, but this is a vendor specified feature.
is there any other generic way to do this?
if I'm using HQL with hibernate, is there any way to handler it?

I was having s similar requirements for implemeting Paging, column based sorting etc in a struts application and I came across this - http://displaytag.sourceforge.net/

You may try this, its extremely easy to use and is a big help in providing pagination in JSP's.

Cheers,
Vijay

query=session.createQuery(hsql);
int start=(pageNog-1)*page_size;
int rowNum=page_size;
query.setFirstResult(start);
query.setMaxResults(rowNum);
offices = query.list()

Thank you.
I think using this way, the habernate still need to retrieve database for all result set and convert part of result set into list.
what I like is to reitrieve only part of result from database to save retrieveing time since we have very big result set

thank you