I am not seeing that behavior in 5.2.5. Looking at the source code, in every LimitHandler (except for SQLServer2005LimitHandler) I see the following code in processSql():
Code:
if (LimitHelper.hasFirstRow( selection )) {
throw new UnsupportedOperationException( "query result offset is not supported" );
}
I am using both setMaxResults() and setFirstResult() and I see that exception every time.
Update - I tried using SQLServer2005LimitHandler and my queries are now working as they did with previous Hibernate versions. I was previously using the SQLServerDialect and its default LimitHandler seemed to support MaxResults and FirstResult. Now I will specifically set my (SQL) dialect to use SQLServer2005LimitHandler.