Firebird OFFSET/FETCH pagination and JDBC driver handling of large offsets

Goal: Retrieve a consistent page of data from a large Firebird table using the OFFSET/FETCH clause through a JDBC connection, while maintaining deterministic order and acceptable response time.

Constraints: The OFFSET/FETCH syntax requires an explicit ORDER BY to guarantee stable pagination; without it the server may return rows in an undefined order, making pages non‑deterministic. Large offset values force the engine to scan and discard preceding rows, which can degrade performance. The JDBC driver must implement Firebird 3.0+ SQL grammar to parse OFFSET/FETCH correctly, especially when the offset and fetch values are supplied as parameter markers.

Uncertainty: It is unclear whether the driver treats parameter‑bound offset/fetch values as literal values in the SQL statement, whether it adds any client‑side buffering that could alter the semantics of OFFSET/FETCH, and how the combination of OFFSET/FETCH with ORDER BY behaves when the underlying data changes between fetches.

Specific questions:

• Does the Firebird JDBC driver accept offset and fetch values as JDBC parameters (e.g., ?, :name) in a prepared statement without throwing a syntax error?
• When ORDER BY is omitted, does the driver or server guarantee any particular row order across executions, or is the result set truly undefined?
• What is the performance impact of using a large OFFSET value (e.g., >100 000) through JDBC, and does the driver fetch the entire result set before applying the offset?