help on managing large recordsets on multiple web pages

[snowy]

Hi,
I am new out here was looking for a suggestion on how to deal with task I am consulting. Let me straightaway start with telling you what the requirement is.

I have a web application which would have a functionality something simmilar to say managing helpdesk tickets. So I have priorities and open dates for each ticket. (Just an example taht will help to understand the scenario better)

The search option sends a query to the Oracle database to retrieve a set of records (this is expected to be large say 1000 or more records atleast). Now the web application has to display all the records in order of priorities and dates.

The recordset fetched now needs to be displayed in several pages as 1 page would display say some 20-30 records.

Now My Question is what is the best way to do this. Please look at the below points to be considered.
1. The data set is expected to be large and also the number of users can be high so managing large data sets can be a problem at front end.
2. Can the use of temporary tables that store the records for a particular search in the required format be a good solution or this would be a non practical solution.
3. There were thoughts of sending a Query to the backend at every page number click which will order the entire record set and keep only the required set of records based on the page number. but I feel this is not the right approach as it would mean querying the backend multiple times and sorting it too many times thus reducing the performance and also doing the same fetch again and again.

Please suggest me for some good options that will be feasible. I think forums and mail servers would be using something simmilar ...

Thanks in advance