Well, if you need to support arbitrary sorting and filtering with your pagination, you'll be looking at table scans no matter what you do, so limit and offset d

Well, if you need to support arbitrary sorting and filtering with your pagination, you'll be looking at table scans no matter what you do, so limit and offset don't really add much extra cost. You can arrange for indexes on the most commonly used columns, so that e.g. initial default page load is fast, while leaving the user hanging for up to a second or two on the more unusual queries. It turns out that when people have better filtering and sorting tools, they spent a lot less time digging for page 10,001.