What is the purpose of the offset in MySQL?

In MySQL, OFFSET is used to specify the offset of the query results. It is commonly used in conjunction with LIMIT to restrict the number of records returned and the starting position.

The OFFSET syntax is as follows:
SELECT column_name
FROM table_name
LIMIT number_of_rows OFFSET offset_value;

The number_of_rows specifies the number of records to return, while the offset_value specifies the offset from the beginning of the query result.

For example, suppose there is a table named users containing 100 records. If we want to return 5 records starting from the 10th record, we can use the following query statement:

Retrieve the first 5 records from the “users” table, starting from the 10th record.

This will return records 10 through 14.

The purpose of OFFSET is to allow us to skip a specified number of records in the result set so that we can start returning data from a specific position. This is very useful for pagination queries, as it allows us to return a certain number of records in each query to improve performance and optimize the user experience.