I have some complex stored procedures that may return many thousands of rows, and take a long time to complete.
Is there any way to find out how many rows are going to be returned before the query executes and fetches the data?
This is with Visual Studio 2005, a Winforms application and SQL Server 2005.
A solution to your problem might be to re-write the stored procedure so that it limits the result set to some number, like:
in SQL Server, or
in Oracle. Or implement a paging solution so that the result set of each call is acceptably small.