Simon Willison’s Weblog

Use The Index, Luke! Paging Through Results (via) The best explanation of keyset pagination I’ve seen. Keyset pagination is where instead of using OFFSET/LIMIT to return the next page of results you instead track the last seen value in the column you sort by and then return the next X results that follow it. This allows you to paginate to arbitrarily deep offsets within a table, whereas OFFSET/LIMIT requires first iterating across all preceding rows and tends to stop working well after the first few thousand results.