jquery Datatables - how to achieve Server side fetching and Client side sorting

Question

I am using the datatables plugin for processing our tables. We have this use case where we need to fetch the data (paginated)through an ajax call using bServerSide and sAjaxSou

Answer 1

I've got something nearly identical running, and the solution was pipelining all the way--nothing else magical and no need to combine other solutions. Set the pipeline volume high -- in my case I'm grabbing essentially 5 "groups" of results (pages * display results) both forward and backward -- and trust that Datatables will do the rest.

In one instance of my app, I'm dealing with 5 million+ records. Yes, it's a lot. I've done a ton of testing on the various elements of the system, including the queries, the database optimization, indexing, and UI pattern usage. All point to this system being the most efficient possible for the situation. For your case, I'd strongly reccomend some performance monitoring regardless of your UI decision to see what (if any) bottlenecks exist. In my 5 million+ record system, I'm looking at about 2-4 seconds of query time and +-5% load per page or sort, which is certainly manageable. I've got hundreds of users and quite a few other processes to deal with as well simultaneously, and we're seeing no noticeable lag since implementing multiple DataTables about 6 months ago.

From a UI standpoint, the weakness of sorting only the on-screen data is that it's not intuitive. When I've got access to thousands or millions of records on a grid and I sort or filter it, I expect to see the sort and filter of all the available records. It sounds silly, but remember that the science of UI design is all about creating patterns that are "familiar" to the user.