If you're issuing SELECT statements to a database using Java Database Connectivity (JDBC), a huge number of records can be returned by the java.sql.ResultSet. However, sometimes you will want to limit the number of records returned. Java provides a simple mechanism for doing this: simply call the setMaxRows() method defined in the java.sql.Statement class and inherited by its subclasses. In this example, if more than 1000 records are contained in the table, then only the first 1000 returned by the query will be available through the ResultSet.
java.sql.Statement stmt = conn.createStatement();
String select = "SELECT * FROM MYTABLE";
java.sql.ResultSet rset = stmt.executeQuery(select);