Pagination, versioning and errors

What you take away

• OFFSET pagination makes the database walk and discard every skipped row, so deep pages get slow and shift under inserts.
• Cursor (keyset) pagination remembers where you stopped, so page 10,000 costs the same as page 1.
• Adding an optional field is not a breaking change; removing, renaming or redefining one is.
• One error envelope with a stable machine-readable code and a request id turns support tickets into lookups.

How the class is laid out

1. The problem
2. The simple version
3. Pagination
4. Versioning
5. Errors
6. Check your understanding