Which describes a drawback of offset-based pagination?

Which describes a drawback of offset-based pagination?

• A. It uses a cursor for position
• B. It is always the fastest for large datasets
• C. It requires constant time per page
• D. It can degrade performance with large offsets

Answer: (D)

Offset-based pagination works by telling the database to skip the first N rows and then return the next page of results. The bigger N is, the more work the database has to do to reach that page, because it must locate and discard a large number of rows before producing any results. This can mean scanning or reading many rows from disk, even if you only fetch a small page, which slows down the response time on large datasets or when the data isn’t accessed via an efficient index. So, as the offset grows, performance tends to degrade. In contrast, cursor-based pagination uses a marker from the last retrieved item to fetch the next page, avoiding the need to skip a large portion of the dataset and often keeping fetch times more stable. Keeping that in mind, the described drawback of offset-based pagination is its tendency to slow down as offsets become large.

Offset-based pagination works by telling the database to skip the first N rows and then return the next page of results. The bigger N is, the more work the database has to do to reach that page, because it must locate and discard a large number of rows before producing any results. This can mean scanning or reading many rows from disk, even if you only fetch a small page, which slows down the response time on large datasets or when the data isn’t accessed via an efficient index. So, as the offset grows, performance tends to degrade.

In contrast, cursor-based pagination uses a marker from the last retrieved item to fetch the next page, avoiding the need to skip a large portion of the dataset and often keeping fetch times more stable. Keeping that in mind, the described drawback of offset-based pagination is its tendency to slow down as offsets become large.