Question: The normal `result()` method described in the documentation appears to load all records immediately. My application needs to load about 30,000 rows, and one at a time, submit them to a third-party search index API. Obviously loading everything into memory at once doesn't work well (errors out because of too much memory).

So my question is, how can I achieve the effect of the conventional MySQLi API method, in which you load one row at a time in a loop?

Answer: 
Well, the thing is that `result()` gives away the entire reply of the query. `row()` simply fetches the first case and dumps the rest. However the query can still fetched 30 000 rows regardles of which function you use.

One design that would fit your cause would be:

```
$offset = (int)@$_GET['offset'];

$query = $this-db->query("SELECT * FROM table LIMIT ?, 1", array($offset));
$row = $query->row();

if ($row) {

    /* Run api with values */

    redirect(current_url().'?offset'.($offset + 1));

}

```

This would take one row, send it to api, update the page and use the next row. It will alos prevent the page from having a timeout. However it would most likely take a while with 30 000 records and refreshes, so you may wanna adjust your `LIMIT ?, 1` to a higher number than `1` and go `result()` and `foreach()` multiple apis per pageload.
Well, there'se the **[row()](http://ellislab.com/codeigniter/user-guide/database/results.html)** method, which returns just one row as an object, or the **row\_array()** method, which does the same but returns an array (of course).

So you could do something like

```
$sql = "SELECT * FROM yourtable";
$resultSet = $this->db->query($sql);
$total = $resultSet->num_rows();

for($i=0;$i<$total;$i++) {
  $row = $resultSet->row_array($i);
}

```

This fetches in a loop each row from the whole result set.  

Which is about the same as fetching everyting and looping over the `$this->db->query($sql)->result()` method calls I believe. 

If you want a row at a time either you make 30.000 calls, or you select all the results and fetch them one at a time or you fetch all and walk over the array. I can't see any way out now.