fastapi-pagination | FastAPI pagination 📖

There is no right or wrong answer to such a question. A lot depends on the technology stack that you use, as well as the context that you have, considering also the future directions of both the software you wrote as well as the software you use (mongo).

Answering your questions:

1. It depends on the load you have to manage and the dev stack you use. Usually it is done at database level, since retrieving the first 110 and dropping the first 100 is quite dumb and resource consuming (the database will do it for you).

2. To me is seems pretty simple on how to do it via fastapi: just add to your get function the parameters limit: int = 10 and skip: int = 0 and use them in the filtering function of your database. Fastapi will check the data types for you, while you could check that limit is not negative or above, say, 100.

3. It says that there is no silver bullet and that since skip function of mongo does not perform well. Thus he believes that the second option is better, just for performances. If you have billions and billions of documents (e.g. amazon), well, it may be the case to use something different, though by the time your website has grown that much, I guess you'll have the money to pay an entire team of experts to sort things out and possibly develop your own database.

Concluding, the limit and skip approach is the most common one. It is usually done at the database level, in order to reduce the amount of work of the application and bandwidth.

Mongo is not very efficient in skipping and limiting results. If your database has, say a million of documents, then I don't think you'll even notice. You could even use a relational database for such a workload. You can always benchmark the options you have and choose the most appropriate one.

I don't know much about mongo, but I know that generally, indexes can help limiting and skipping records (docs in this case), but I'm not sure if it's the case for mongo as well.