How do I go about selecting a number of records from an SQL database by using XSLT?

One option I have been using works according to this set up:

  <xsl:variable name = "newsItem" select="SQL:GetDataSet('DBname', 'select id, date, title, description, thumbnail, articletype from webcontent_news WHERE articletype = 2', 'newsItem')"/>
        <!-- PAGING SETTINGS -->
        <xsl:variable name="recordCount" select="'6'"/>
        <xsl:variable name="startRecord">
            <xsl:choose>
                <xsl:when test="umbraco.library:Request('newsItemStartRecord') != ''">
                    <xsl:value-of select="umbraco.library:Request('newsItemStartRecord')"/>
                </xsl:when>
                <xsl:otherwise>0</xsl:otherwise>
            </xsl:choose>
        </xsl:variable>
        <xsl:variable name="endRecord" select="$startRecord+$recordCount"/>
        <xsl:template match="/">
            <span id="article-wrapper" start="{$startRecord+1}">
                <xsl:for-each select="$newsItem//newsItem">
                    <xsl:sort select="date" order="descending" />
                    <xsl:if test="position() &gt;= $startRecord and position() &lt;= $endRecord">
                        <article class = "newsstory">
                            <a>
                              <xsl:attribute name = "href">/bcast/news/article.aspx?id=<xsl:value-of select = "id" />
                                </xsl:attribute>
                                <xsl:attribute name = "title">
                                    <xsl:value-of select = "title" />
                                </xsl:attribute>
                                <span class = "title">
                                   <xsl:value-of select = "title" />
                                </span>
                                <span class = "publish_info">By [insert author] | <xsl:value-of select = "date" /></span>
                            </a>
                        </article>
                        
                    </xsl:if>
                </xsl:for-each>
            </span><!-- article-wrapper -->
    </xsl:template>

This works for some senarios, but it requires an HTML tag to wrap the XSLT file so that start="$startRecord+$recordCount" can reside in it. However, this doesn't work when I want to call the url of a file into an audio player's src. 

Is there a way to access a SQL database with XSLT using "SELECT TOP 10 from DB_Table" ?

Thank-you,

Luke