Web services

Hi, All.

is there any way to use paging on webservices for course lists? I am dealing with institution that has over 45k courses in Moodle, and while every single course detail pulls out just fine through REST call, first attempt to get ids of courses is taking literally forever (10+ minutes).  They might be using bad db, or suboptimal settings - i have no control over how they set their stuff up, but I do need to  basically consume list of courses and course sections somehow.

Is there something that can get out just ids (even that would be fine)? Or something that is 21st century and can do paging (aka limit/offset pairs) ?  

I tried to rack head on source code of moodle, searched around - not sure what i am missing