Avoid JDBC pagination for large results
Most databases support some way of paging ordered results through LIMIT .. OFFSET, TOP .. START AT, OFFSET .. FETCH clauses. In the absence of support for these clauses, there is still the possibility for
ROWNUM (Oracle) or
ROW_NUMBER() OVER() filtering (DB2, SQL Server 2008 and less), which is much faster than paging in memory. This is specifically true for large offsets!
The Cure:
Just use those clauses, or a tool (such as
jOOQ) that can simulate those clauses for you.
Source
SqlBestPractices 
