The amount of data shown to a user needs to be restricted not only from a performance point of view, but also from a user productivity view point. Many users ask for wild card searches that return large amounts of data when what the user is looking for a single entity on which to operate. The manual sifting of data by means of next page is a painful experience, its like looking for a needle in a haystack.

The other is that we give users a lot of fields on which he can search. In order to achieve this we take recourse to writing a challenging dynamic SQL query. In real life the search is carried out 99.99 % of time on two or three fields, does it make sense to achieve flexibility we sacrifice so much performance.