OFFSET vs. ROW_NUMBER()

Question

As we know, Postgresql\'s OFFSET requires that it scan through all the rows up until the point it gets to where you requested, which makes it kind of useless for pagination

Answer 1

Use a CURSOR for a large resultset, will be much faster. For small result sets the LIMIT OFFSET construction works fine, but it has it's limits.

ROW_NUMBER is a nice thing, but not for pagination. You end up with bad performance because of sequential scan's.