Architecture & Thinking

Apr 22, 2026 · Backend Development

Why Traditional Limit‑Offset Fails on Billion‑Row Tables and How to Fix It

This article dissects the performance collapse of classic LIMIT‑OFFSET pagination on tables with hundreds of millions of rows, explains the underlying execution steps, presents benchmark data, and walks through a progressive set of solutions—including index tuning, Seek pagination, Cursor pagination, and sharding—complete with Go code examples and practical trade‑offs.