When you have a huge JSON database, adding a value event listener doesn’t make sense. It will return the huge JSON and parsing it would be time consuming. In such cases we can use pagination and fetch part of data and display or process it. Kind of like lazy loading or like fetching old chats when user clicks on show older chat. In this case Query can used.

Let’s take the our old example in previous sections. The user base contains 3 users, if it grows to say 3 hundred thousand user and you want to fetch the user list in batches of 50:

// class level
final int limit = 50;
int start = 0;

// event level
Query userListQuery = userDBRef.orderByChild("email").limitToFirst(limit)
        .startAt(start)
userListQuery.addValueEventListener(new ValueEventListener() {
    @Override
        public void onDataChange(DataSnapshot dataSnapshot) {
        // Do something
        start += (limit+1);
    }

    @Override
    public void onCancelled(DatabaseError databaseError) {
        // Do something about the error
    });

Here value or child events can be added and listened to. Call query again to fetch next 50. Make sure to add the orderByChild() method, this will not work without that. Firebase needs to know the order by which you are paginating.