Efficient Pagination: Moving Beyond OFFSET for Scalable Data Retrieval Many applications rely on pagination to display large datasets, from product catalogs to social media feeds. While the OFFSET and LIMIT clauses are commonly taught for this purpose, they often become a significant performance bottleneck as data volumes grow. This article explores the inherent issues with OFFSET -based pagination and presents a more robust, scalable alternative: cursor-based pagination. The Hidden Costs of Deep Pagination Consider a scenario where an automated scraper systematically requests pages from a large product catalog API. As the scraper delves deeper into the dataset, perhaps reaching page=80000 on a table containing 20 million records, the database begins to struggle. A single query for this deep page, intended to retrieve 50 items, might force the database to scan and discard millions of preceding rows before identifying the target subset.…