[swagasaurus-rex]

Cursor based pagination was mentioned. It has another useful feature: If items have been added between when a user loads the page and hits the next button, index based pagination will give you some already viewed items from the previous page.

Cursor based pagination (using the ID of the last object on the previous page) will give you a new list of items that haven't been viewed. This is helpful for infinite scrolling.

The downside to cursor based pagination is that it's hard to build a jump to page N button.

[echelon]

You should make your cursors opaque so as to never reveal the size of your database.

You can do some other cool stuff if they're opaque - encode additional state within the cursor itself: search parameters, warm cache / routing topology, etc.

[rockwotj]

Came here to say these same things exactly. Best write up I know on this subject: https://use-the-index-luke.com/sql/partial-results/fetch-nex...