Pagination in databases involves dividing results into pages and retrieving them as needed, with the OFFSET and LIMIT clauses commonly used for this purpose, although not always the most efficient. The text discusses optimizing pagination in Couchbase's N1QL, suggesting keyset pagination as a more efficient alternative to OFFSET pagination. By leveraging Couchbase's indexing capabilities, particularly with the travel-sample dataset, N1QL can optimize queries by pushing pagination parameters like OFFSET and LIMIT to the index scan, provided that the ORDER BY clause aligns with the index key order. The document also highlights the advantages of keyset pagination, which avoids scanning unnecessary records by using unique document keys (META().id in N1QL) to navigate pages, thereby reducing overhead and improving performance. Through various examples and optimizations, the text demonstrates how to achieve consistent query performance regardless of the OFFSET value, emphasizing the importance of aligning query predicates and index configurations for efficient pagination.