Imagine a database with 10 million blog posts. If a user opens your website and you try to send all 10 million posts at once, the server would crash, the browser would freeze, and the user would give up and leave. Pagination solves this by breaking data into pages — small, manageable chunks.

Analogy: Think of a book. You don't read all 500 pages at once — you read one page at a time. Pagination works the same way.

Without Pagination: User Request --> Server sends ALL 10,000,000 records --> Browser crashes

With Pagination: User Request --> Server sends records 1-20 --> User scrolls --> Server sends records 21-40 --> ...

There are two major strategies for implementing pagination:

1. Offset-based pagination (traditional, simple)
2. Cursor-based pagination (modern, scalable)