From Linear Scan to Instant Lookup: Cursor Pagination's Database Revolution

Standard OFFSET-based pagination creates an O(N) performance penalty that degrades exponentially as data grows, forcing databases to scan and discard hundreds of thousands of rows for each deep-page request. Cursor pagination eliminates this bottleneck by using indexed lookups to achieve constant O(1) performance, whether accessing page 1 or page 1,000,000. For data-heavy B2B SaaS platforms, this architectural shift is crucial to maintaining predictable API response times and protecting database resources under scale.