Category: Misc Languages

Lukas Eder discusses common pagination issues:

If your data source is a SQL database, you might have implemented pagination by using LIMIT .. OFFSET, or OFFSET .. FETCH or some ROWNUM / ROW_NUMBER() filtering (see the jOOQ manual for some syntax comparisons across RDBMS). OFFSET is the right tool to jump to page 317, but remember, no one really wants to jump to that page, and besides, OFFSET just skips a fixed number of rows. If there are new rows in the system between the time page number 316 is displayed to a user and when the user skips to page number 317, the rows will shift, because the offsets will shift. No one wants that either, when they click on “next”.

Instead, you should be using what we refer to as “keyset pagination” (as opposed to “offset pagination”).

He also has a good explanation of the seek method.

I will throw in one jab at Oracle (because hey, it’s been a while since I’ve lobbed a bomb at Oracle on this blog):  it’d really suck to have a system where I legally wasn’t allowed to distribute relevant performance comparison benchmarks.  Fortunately, I tend to work on better data stacks.

Kevin Jacobs solves a simple problem using Scala in a few ways and explains functional programming concepts along the way:

Why is this code better than the functional approach? Note that it saves an enormous amount of time since this approach does not need to scan through all the integers! It are simply a few calculations (at which a computer is good at). All the code (the naive approach and the better approach) can be found on GitHub.

Having a solid understanding of mathematics and logic can help you come up with superior algorithms, but make sure you comment them in detail so that the next dev (who might not understand the underpinnings of your code) doesn’t replace it with a brute-force method because it’s “easier.”