Can Skip/Take reliably paginate many‑to‑many queries?

Goal

The objective is to retrieve a specific page—say the 10th page of 1,000 records—from a very large table that participates in a many‑to‑many relationship. The query must avoid loading the entire dataset into memory, prevent duplicate root entities, and maintain acceptable performance on SQL Server 2019 using NHibernate 6.

Constraints & Uncertainty

• Pagination is performed via Skip() and Take() on an IQueryable.
• The mapping uses fetch="join" to eagerly load the related collection.
• There is a risk of duplicate root entities when the join expands the result set before pagination is applied.
• StatelessSession is considered to reduce cache overhead, but its interaction with Skip/Take is unclear.

Specific Questions

1. Does NHibernate correctly translate Skip() and Take() into SQL when a fetch join is present, ensuring that pagination occurs after the join?
2. What alternative strategies (e.g., projections, row_number() subqueries, or StatelessSession) provide reliable pagination without duplicate roots?
3. Is StatelessSession compatible with IQueryable extensions like Skip() and Take(), or does it require separate query construction?