You should be able to do LIMIT in Oracle using http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/issue-archive/2006/06-sep/... . If you want a standards-compliant way to do it, you can use the ROW_NUMBER() window function. This might not be as fast, but will work on virtually every DB except MySQL...
Oracle is like COBOL; the only techies who like it are those whose job security depends upon it ;)