You aren't going to like this answer at first, but bear with me. There is another way. When you see the other way done well you may conclude, as I have, that it is the best trade-off given the technology you've chosen (the web). You want to use
pagination. That is, your user won't be able to see 10s of thousands of rows at once. They will have to page through them. That doesn't mean your user won't be able to sort and filter and rearrange the data as a whole; but after each action, they will only see the first page of the changed result. If you do this well, every user action will result in a near instantaneous change on screen. You'll need to make every link in the chain as fast as it can be. The key is going to be the database. The first thing you'll need to know is the fastest way to do pagination in the particular database you are using. You need to be able to do something like this: getCustomers(81,160) and get instant results. You'll need database connection pooling. You'll want to send the smallest possible payload over the wire. HTML, XML, and JSON are too verbose. Don't send the word "LastName:" with every row. This will double your payload. Include the column names only one time in the response. When the client gets the payload, slap html on it, and inject it into the DOM (replace a div: <div id="results"></div>). Let the user set their page size (40, 80, 160). If you play with this, you'll find that every device/browser/connection combination will eventually choke if you keep increasing page size (and have a large enough result set), but every device/browser/connection will enjoy beautiful responsiveness at 40 or 80 results per page. When you feel what this is like you wont want to go back to watching a spinner for 10 seconds and then watching your browser hang up every time you scroll. And your user who is using an iPhone 4 with some old version of Safari on a 3g connection really doesn't want to watch a spinner for 30 seconds, then see a blink of results, then see their browser crash. But that is exactly what will happen if you give them 10s of thousands of rows.