Some time ago I wrote about getting fast pagination. While fast, it had some problems which made it unusable for some. Specifically – you couldn't get page count, and easily jump to page number N.
I did some thinking on the subject, and I think I found a way to make it all work. Quite fast. And with not big overhead. Let me show you.
some time ago merlin moncure wrote about one of new features of postgresql 8.2 – row-wise comparison.
i also read about it, but at first didn't find anything very useful about it – after all it doesn't give you any new functionality. any kind “(a, b, c) > (…)" can be written with standard column-based operators. so it's basically just a syntactic-sugar.
that's true. but merlin pointed me to not-so-obvious benefit – basically it allows much better paging of results. how? let's see.