The original title is: "Stop Using Offset for Pagination: Switching to Cursor-Based Filtering for Massive Datasets"

Short summary

Standard SQL offset pagination degrades to O(N) complexity as datasets grow, causing severe performance penalties on deep pages. Cursor-based pagination solves this by using an indexed unique identifier as a starting point, achieving O(1) query time regardless of page depth. The article provides implementation guidance for swapping offset queries with deterministic, index-driven cursors in read-heavy enterprise systems.

• •Offset pagination causes linear scan O(N) slowdown on large datasets
• •Cursor-based pagination uses indexed lookups for constant O(1) query time
• •Frontend passes next_cursor as query parameter for subsequent page requests

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