🔗 Strategic pagination patterns for .NET APIs

When you design APIs that return large datasets, pagination is not optional. Without it, you risk overwhelming your database, your network, and your consumers. Pagination is the art of breaking data into manageable chunks, and like most things in software architecture, there is no single best way to do it. Each strategy has trade-offs that affect performance, consistency, and developer experience.

In this post, I will walk you through six common pagination strategies: Offset-based, Cursor-based, Keyset-based, Page-based, Time-based, and Hybrid approaches. For each, I will explain how it works, show you C# examples, and highlight the advantages and disadvantages. Along the way, I will use diagrams and analogies to make the concepts stick.