Cursor-Based Pagination Outperforms SQL Offset for Large-Scale Datasets

Standard SQL offset pagination becomes a serious performance bottleneck as databases scale to millions of rows, with deep page queries potentially spiking CPU usage to 100%. The core issue is that offset queries scan all preceding rows before returning results, giving them O(N) linear complexity. Cursor-based pagination solves this by using a unique identifier from the previous page to tell the database exactly where to begin, enabling constant O(1) query time regardless of page depth. Because the cursor leverages an indexed field for a direct pointer lookup, performance stays consistent whether loading page 2 or page 50,000. For engineers building read-heavy or large-scale systems, switching to cursor-based pagination is considered a straightforward way to reduce disk I/O and improve scalability.