What does OFFSET do in pagination?

In pagination, OFFSET is used to skip a specified number of rows before starting to return the rows from a query. It allows you to control which subset of the result set you want to retrieve.

For example, if you have a query that returns a list of items and you want to display items starting from a specific point, you can use OFFSET to skip the initial rows.

Here's a simple example:

SELECT * FROM items ORDER BY id LIMIT 10 OFFSET 20;

In this query, it retrieves 10 rows starting from the 21st row (skipping the first 20 rows). This is useful for implementing pagination in applications where you want to display results in chunks.