Question: The normal `result()` method described in the documentation appears to load all records immediately. My application needs to load about 30,000 rows, and one at a time, submit them to a third-party search index API. Obviously loading everything into memory at once doesn't work well (errors out because of too much memory).

So my question is, how can I achieve the effect of the conventional MySQLi API method, in which you load one row at a time in a loop?

Answer: 
For those who want to save memory on large result-set:

Since **CodeIgniter 3.0.0**,
There is a `unbuffered_row` function,

> 
> All the methods above will load the whole result into memory (prefetching). Use unbuffered\_row() for processing large result sets.
> 
> 
> 

> 
> This method returns a single result row without prefetching the whole result in memory as row() does. If your query has more than one row, it returns the current row and moves the internal data pointer ahead.
> 
> 
> 

```
$query = $this->db->query("YOUR QUERY");

while ($row = $query->unbuffered_row())
{
    echo $row->title;
    echo $row->name;
    echo $row->body;
}

```

> 
> You can optionally pass ‘object’ (default) or ‘array’ in order to specify the returned value’s type:
> 
> 
> 

```
$query->unbuffered_row();               // object
$query->unbuffered_row('object');       // object
$query->unbuffered_row('array');        // associative array

```

Official Document: <https://www.codeigniter.com/userguide3/database/results.html#id2>
Well, the thing is that `result()` gives away the entire reply of the query. `row()` simply fetches the first case and dumps the rest. However the query can still fetched 30 000 rows regardles of which function you use.

One design that would fit your cause would be:

```
$offset = (int)@$_GET['offset'];

$query = $this-db->query("SELECT * FROM table LIMIT ?, 1", array($offset));
$row = $query->row();

if ($row) {

    /* Run api with values */

    redirect(current_url().'?offset'.($offset + 1));

}

```

This would take one row, send it to api, update the page and use the next row. It will alos prevent the page from having a timeout. However it would most likely take a while with 30 000 records and refreshes, so you may wanna adjust your `LIMIT ?, 1` to a higher number than `1` and go `result()` and `foreach()` multiple apis per pageload.