Pagination in SQL is a technique for retrieving a subset of rows from a table. Instead of fetching the entire table, you fetch only the rows you need for a particular page. This is vital for performance when dealing with large datasets. Imagine a website displaying user profiles. Fetching all users at once would be slow and inefficient. Pagination allows you to load only the profiles for the current page, improving the user experience and application performance. The core idea is to divide the data into pages and retrieve only the data for the current page. This is often achieved using a combination of `LIMIT` and `OFFSET` clauses, or by using row number functions. Pagination is a common practice in web applications to display data in a user-friendly way, preventing overwhelming the user with too much information at once. It's also a critical aspect of database optimization, as it reduces the amount of data that needs to be processed, leading to faster query execution times. Proper pagination strategies are essential for building scalable and performant applications.