Offset Pagination Step by Step (with Sharding)

Why pagination exists Imagine a workers table with 1,000,000 rows. A request like GET /workers that returns all of them would: send a huge JSON payload over the wire crash the browser trying to render it hammer the database The fix is simple: send a small slice at a time. That slice is called a page . That is all pagination is. We will build the rest from this idea. Cute mental model Think of a deck of 100 cards. You cannot hand someone the whole deck and ask them to find one card fast. Instead