bliako, Most excellent reference!

I am an "old school hardware guy", dating back to the dark ages where 64K bytes of iron core memory was a lot! My current machine is 64 bits with 16 GB of semiconductor memory. Memory usage is something to be aware of, but I don't worry about it often, but "seldom does not mean never".

I suppose that the unwary could get into a "memory thrashing" situation with a huge allocation of virtual memory. With my experience so far, if the result set is so humongous that it won't fit into physical memory, then there may be a problem with the SQL query itself! That is something to be considered also!