My company is actually going through the transition to cursor/keyset pagination. As a SaaS company starts having to support larger customers, they will likely h

My company is actually going through the transition to cursor/keyset pagination. As a SaaS company starts having to support larger customers, they will likely have to go through this exercise. The reason is because most pagination is usually implemented with LIMIT/OFFSET in a SQL query. Using OFFSET becomes very expensive for pagination queries because the query has gotta do a full scan till it reaches the desired offset. Imagine a table with a 1 million rows, and you return pages in 100 item chunks. To get page 500, using the OFFSET method, you would have to scan through 100*499 records before you even get to the first record you care about. This can lead to all sorts of cascading problems because slow queries can cause back pressure build up from other queries queuing up. So in order to scale, services push the complexity out to the client. Conceivably, you can cache the indices on the client side, and abstract a page-number based paginator on top of it. Here's an article talking through the issue: https://www.moesif.com/blog/technical/api-design/REST-API-Design-Filtering-Sorting-and-Pagination/# https://www.moesif.com/blog/technical/api-design/REST-API-De...