Why You Shouldn’t Use OFFSET and LIMIT For Your Pagination

Programming@programming.dev – -2 points – 10 months ago

If you are wondering why lemmy is moving away from offset pagination since 0.19, here is a nice article about it

You are viewing a single comment

Paywall.

This seems to be the same article.

I have my doubts about the technique, but it could be useful in certain controlled situations.

Lemmy just implemented it for 0.19 and it makes a big difference on heavier queries like Scaled homepage.

It also has the advantage of your pagination not getting screwy if new content has been added between page 2 and 3 queries.

I was going to recommend looking at https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/paginate-search-results.html#scroll-search-results - but it looks like that method is now not advised- but if you read up above it it looks like there’s a search_after/PIT method described which sounds similar to the article.

This is all to say - I don’t think this is a one-off concept - it’s been around for a bit.

I have my doubts about the technique, but it could be useful in certain controlled situations

This is completely uncontroversial advice and has been for 30 years. What are your doubts exactly?

I’d go further: if you see a query that uses “offset” on a non-trivial production DB something is very, very wrong.

Of course, the trick is that you need to make sure you have indexes for all sort orders you need to display, but that’s obvious.

Thanks! Agreed, it's a very limited usecase.

Sorry, I updated the link