The following query will emulate a

SELECT emp_id,lname,fname FROM employee LIMIT 20,10

That says, give me 10 records starting at record 21. So what will be returned are rows 21-30. This is used heavily in web-based apps so you can do recordset paging. 

Here is what you can do in MS SQL to emulate it (this runs on the PUBS db):

select * from (
 select top 10 emp_id,lname,fname from (
    select top 30 emp_id,lname,fname
    from employee
   order by lname asc
 ) as newtbl order by lname desc
) as newtbl2 order by lname asc


The main thing to remember is to deal with all your ORDER BY clauses and also to use the inner TOP as the sum of what you are looking for. In this example - 30 since you start at 20 and want 10 rows (20+10=30).

Hope this helps you as it has helped me improve performance greatly on my web-based apps since I no longer have to transfer loads of data across the wire to get just the 10 results I display on a page.

Don't even think about using the internal ADO paging stuff if you have a lot of records to deal with, it will kill your performance as it must pull the entire recordset down to the local machine before it can do its work. Why bring down 20,000 records if you only want to display 10?

Enjoy!