Firebird ROWS and FIRST/SKIP limits for server-side pagination

Designing server-side pagination for Firebird 2.5 and 3.0 using documented result set limiting. The goal is to retrieve consistent pages with minimal network transfer while keeping result sets deterministic across requests.

The documented capabilities include FIRST and SKIP clauses for row subsets and the ROWS clause as a combined offset-limit expression. Effectiveness is understood to depend on ORDER BY for deterministic sets, and performance concerns are associated with large SKIP offsets without suitable indexing on the sort column. Behavior on views and complex joins is noted as potentially varying with optimizer plan and engine version.

What is the required condition for deterministic pagination with FIRST/SKIP in Firebird 2.5 and 3.0? How does ROWS map to FIRST and SKIP internally? Is pagination behavior consistent across versions when applied to views or complex joins?