Is there a more efficient way of making pagination in Hibernate than executing select and count queries?

Question

Usually pagination queries look like this. Is there a better way instead of making two almost equal methods, one of which executing \"select *...\" and the other one \"count

Answer 1

I know this problem and have faced it before. For starters, the double query mechanism where it does the same SELECT conditions is indeed not optimal. But, it works, and before you go off and do some giant change, just realize it might not be worth it.

But, anyways:

1) If you are dealing with small data on the client side, use a result set implementation that lets you set the cursor to the end of the set, get its row offset, then reset the cursor to before first.

2) Redesign the query so that you get COUNT(*) as an extra column in the normal rows. Yes, it contains the same value for every row, but it only involves 1 extra column that is an integer. This is improper SQL to represent an aggregated value with non aggregated values, but it may work.

3) Redesign the query to use an estimated limit, similar to what was being mentioned. Use rows per page and some upper limit. E.g. just say something like "Showing 1 to 10 of 500 or more". When they browse to "Showing 25o to 260 of X", its a later query so you can just update the X estimate by making the upper bound relative to page * rows/page.