Glossary

Keyset pagination

Keyset pagination pages through rows using a column cursor (e.g. last id seen) instead of OFFSET, staying fast and consistent on large tables.

Keyset pagination (also called cursor or seek pagination) walks through a large result set by remembering the last row seen — for example 'give me the next 1,000 rows after id 50,000' — rather than using OFFSET, which forces the database to count and skip all preceding rows and can drift if data changes mid-scan. It's how BeQuery copies multi-million-row tables reliably: each batch resumes exactly where the last left off, immune to the row-shifting bugs OFFSET-based copies suffer.

How syncing works

Related terms