Imagine a database containing one million users.

If the API retrieves every user in one request, it can consume significant memory, increase response time, and transfer unnecessarily large amounts of data.

Pagination divides a large result set into smaller portions.

For example:

GET /api/v1/users?page=1&limit=10

This request retrieves the first ten records.

The next request can retrieve the next ten records.

Pagination improves API usability and resource management.

Two common approaches are:

• Offset-based pagination.
• Cursor-based pagination.

We will implement offset-based pagination first because it is straightforward for beginner applications.