Cursor Pagination Step by Step

Short summary

Cursor pagination fixes offset pagination's problems: slow deep pages and data drift from concurrent inserts. Instead of skipping N rows with OFFSET, use a cursor—typically the last row's ID—to fetch records from that point forward. Implementation: ask for limit+1 rows, skip the cursor row itself, encode as opaque base64 for API stability.

• •Cursor pagination avoids slow deep pagination and data drift from concurrent inserts that plague offset-based approaches
• •Use the last row's ID as a cursor; query WHERE id > cursor to continue from where you left off without reprocessing data
• •Ask for limit+1 rows to detect more data; encode cursors as opaque base64 strings for API stability and database abstraction

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