Pagination & Sorting

JPA paginates with setFirstResult(offset) and setMaxResults(limit); Spring Data wraps this with Pageable, returning Page<T> (data + count query) or Slice<T> (data only, no count).

Offset pagination re-scans everything you skip and degrades linearly with depth, while keyset pagination seeks directly to the last seen key and delivers constant-time pages regardless of depth.

setFirstResult and setMaxResults are the raw JPA pagination knobs, while Spring Data's Pageable wraps page number, size, and sort into one object, returning Page (with total count) or Slice (without count) for efficient retrieval.