[wildmXranat]

Hold up ,- when I used a C or similar language for accessing a database and wanted to clamp down on memory usage to deterministically control how much I want to allocated, I would explicitly limit the number of rows in the query.

There never was an unbound "select all rows from some table" without a "fetch first N rows only" or "limit N"

If you knew that this design is rigid, why not leverage the query to actually do it ?

What am I missing ?

[JuniperMesos]

Because nothing forced them to and they didn't think of it. Maybe the people writing the code that did the query knew that the tables they were working with never had more than 60 rows and figured "that's small" so they didn't bother with a limit. Maybe the people who wrote the file size limit thought "60 rows isn't that much data" and made a very small file size limit and didn't coordinate with the first people.

Anyway regardless of which language you use to construct a SQL query, you're not obligated to put in a max rows

[wildmXranat]

I imagine there's numerous ways to protect against it and protection should've been added by whoever decided on this optimization. In data layer, create some kind of view which never returns more than 200 rows from base table(s). In code, use some kind of iterator. I'm not a Rust guy, just a C defensive practices type of dude, but maybe they just missed a biggie during a code review.