You might have noticed that I am routinely pointing out that there are issues, drastic issues, with any piece of code that issues a query without setting a limit to the number of results.

I got several replies saying that I am worrying too much about this issue. I don’t really understand that sort of thinking. Leaving aside the possibility of literally killing our application (as a result of Out of Memory Exception), unbounded result sets are dangerous. The main problem is that they aren’t just a theoretical problem, it is a problem that happens with regular intervals in production systems.

The real issue is that it is not just System Down issues, this might be the best scenario, actually. In most production deployment, you are actually paying for the amount of data that you are passing around. When you start dealing with unbounded result set, you are literally writing an open check and handing it to strangers.

I don’t know many people who can do something like this with equanimity.

It doesn’t take a lot to get to the point where this sort of thing really hurts. Moreover, there are truly very few cases where you actually need to have access to the entire result set. For the most part, when I see developers doing that, it is usually out of sheer laziness.