Glossary term
What is Offset? Meaning for developers
In System Design
A message's position in a partition. Example: "I've processed up to offset 1,041.".
Learn it properly · System DesignLesson 36: Apache Kafka FundamentalsThirty services all need each other's data, and the data team wants to replay last week. How Kafka's simple idea — a partitioned, replicated, append-only log — became the backbone of event streaming: topics, keys, offsets, consumer groups, retention and compaction.In Practical Design Problems
Skip N rows with LIMIT/OFFSET. It is simple, but the database reads and throws away N rows, and results shift when data changes.
Learn it properly · Practical Design ProblemsLesson 3: Design Pagination: Offset vs Cursor (Keyset)Why a large OFFSET is slow, how keyset paging works with a stable sort and a tiebreaker, opaque cursors and GraphQL connections.