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N008-M1 Tier 1 · Foundations · medium ecommerce · Brightlane

Return the ID, name, and email for the 10 customers on that page

Part of LIMIT and OFFSET in SQL

The problem

Brightlane's internal customer directory displays 10 accounts per page, sorted alphabetically by customer name. The front-end is rendering page 2.

Write a query to return the ID, name, and email for the 10 customers on that page.

Assumptions:

  • The customers table contains every customer Brightlane has on file.
  • Page 1 is rows 1–10, page 2 is rows 11–20, page 3 is rows 21–30, and so on.
  • To land on page 2, skip the first 10 rows with OFFSET 10, then take the next 10 with LIMIT 10.

Output:

  • One row per customer on page 2, with columns id, name, and email, sorted by name ascending.
Schema · ecommerce 5 tables
categories
id integer
name text
parent_id? integer
products
id integer
name text
category_id integer
price numeric
stock_qty integer
attributes? jsonb
order_items
id integer
order_id integer
product_id integer
quantity integer
unit_price numeric
customers
id integer
name text
email text
city? text
country text
created_at timestamptz
is_active boolean
orders
id integer
customer_id integer
ordered_at timestamptz
status text
total_amount numeric
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Solution query
SELECT
  id,
  name,
  email
FROM
  customers
ORDER BY
  name
LIMIT
  10
OFFSET
  10

The shape

OFFSET 10 skips past the first page, LIMIT 10 returns the next ten rows, and the alphabetical sort is what makes "page 2" mean something stable between page loads.

Clause by clause

  • SELECT id, name, email picks the three columns the directory row displays.
  • FROM customers reads the full customer file. The pagination window is carved out later in the pipeline.
  • ORDER BY name sorts alphabetically — the same key the directory uses to define what "page 2" means. Ascending is the default.
  • LIMIT 10 OFFSET 10 is the pagination pair. OFFSET 10 discards the first ten rows (page 1), and LIMIT 10 returns the next ten. David Lee at row 11 lands as the first row of page 2.

Why this and not LIMIT 20

LIMIT 20 would return the first twenty customers — page 1 and page 2 stacked together. The front-end needs page 2 by itself, which is what OFFSET exists for. LIMIT caps the back, OFFSET trims the front, and together they carve out a window in the middle of the sorted result.

The formula behind the offset is OFFSET = (page - 1) * page_size. For a page size of 10, page 2 needs OFFSET 10, page 3 needs OFFSET 20, and so on. The same query shape works for any page by recomputing the offset.

The trap

Drop the ORDER BY and the pagination quietly breaks. Without a sort, PostgreSQL is free to return rows in whatever order is convenient, and "the first ten rows" can shift between runs. A customer on page 2 yesterday might land on page 3 today — or get missed entirely — even though no underlying data changed. OFFSET only means "page 2" when paired with a sort key that defines what page 1 was.

You practiced pairing OFFSET with LIMIT to pull a single page out of a sorted result. The recurring shape: OFFSET skips past prior pages, LIMIT caps the current page — together they implement the everyday "page N of M" pattern.

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