Paginating over multiple partitions

Returning to our original user_status_updates table, we might in certain situations, for an administrative interface, for instance, display all of the status updates in the system. In this case, we will certainly want the ability to paginate, as the total collection of status updates will get very large.

As in our previous example, let's use a page size of three. The query for the first page is simple enough:

SELECT * FROM "user_status_updates"
LIMIT 3;

As expected, we'll get back bob's first three status updates:

For the second page, things get a bit more complicated. We know that the last row we retrieved was from bob's partition, but we're not sure if there are any more status updates for bob. In case there are, we will ask for the next page of bob's partition:

SELECT * FROM "user_status_updates"
WHERE "username" = 'bob'
  AND id > 3f9e9350-e8f7-11e3-9211-5f98e903bf02;

In this query, we ask for any status updates in bob's partition that have an id that...