Using the $adb object

[joebordes]

That is just the way it works, the record set is just to big, it could contain thousands of records, so you don't get them all, you have explicitly retrieve the row you want. Be that with a direct access (query_result) or by looping them all.

I really don't know if there is more documentation on this object, but reading about PDO should help, all the data base abstraction libraries I have seen take the same approach.