Offset Pagination Step by Step (with Sharding)

Short summary

Pagination solves the problem of retrieving large datasets by sending small slices to clients instead of the entire table. This tutorial explains the SQL offset/limit pattern, the mathematical formula for converting page numbers into database skip/take parameters, the HATEOAS pattern for constructing next-page links, and scaling pagination across horizontally sharded databases.

• •Offset pagination uses SQL LIMIT and OFFSET to slice large tables into manageable pages
• •Page numbers convert to database parameters via formula: skip = (page - 1) * page_size
• •Detect next page by peeking with a count query instead of returning total row count
• •Sharding splits tables across buckets; pagination walks sequentially through each shard

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