I'm trying to implement a cursor-based paginating list based off of data from a Postgres database.
As an example, say I have a table with the following columns:
id | firstname | lastname
I want to paginate this data, which would be pretty simple if I only ever wanted to sort it by the id, but in my case, I want the option to sort by last name, and there's guaranteed to be multiple people with the same last name.
If I have a select statement like follows:
SELECT * FROM people
ORDER BY lastname ASC;
In the case, I could make my encoded cursor contain information about the lastname
so I could pick up where I left off, but since there will be multiple users with the same last name, this will be buggy. Is there a way in SQL to only get the results after a certain id in an ordered list where it is not the column by which the results are sorted?
Example results from the select statement:
1 | John | Doe
4 | John | Price
2 | Joe | White
6 | Jim | White
3 | Sam | White
5 | Sally | Young
If I wanted a page size of 3, I couldn't add WHERE lastname <= :lastname
as I'd have duplicate data on the list since it would return ids 2, 6, and 3 during that call. In my case, it'd be helpful if I could add to my query something similar to AFTER id = 6
where it could skip everything until it finds that id
in the ordered list.