Improving OFFSET performance in PostgreSQL

Question

I have a table I\'m doing an ORDER BY on before a LIMIT and OFFSET in order to paginate.

Adding an index on the ORDER BY column makes a massive difference to performance

Answer 1

I don't know anything about "counted b-tree indexes", but one thing we've done in our application to help with this is break our queries into two, possibly using a sub-query. My apologies for wasting your time if you're already doing this.

SELECT *
FROM massive_table
WHERE id IN (
    SELECT id
    FROM massive_table
    WHERE ...
    LIMIT 50
    OFFSET 500000
);

The advantage here is that, while it still has to calculate the proper ordering of everything, it doesn't order the entire row--only the id column.