[slver]

> EDIT: Are you arguing about performance impact of scanning 500 rows vs 100 rows (though I don't understand your approach either, you're skipping - scanning - 400 rows as well)? The problem of paging is scanning whole dataset.

Cursor+offset doesn't scan the whole dataset, and saving subsets in temp tables doesn't improve on it (i.e. temp tables make things slower). But I'm not sure where we misunderstand each other.

1. You start at the cursor.

2. You offset at most 400 records from the cursor.

3. You read 100 records.

The first point means you don't scan the whole dataset. The second point means for the next 5 pages you offset max 400 records. The third point means you read nothing, except what you want to display immediately.