Correct. I have a PR ready which integrates the sort, search and pagination with the server-side module. Currently, there is a Server Side module that pulls data from the server (https://gridjs.io/docs/examples/server).

Quick tip: for the client-side, large dataset case, if you want to get fancy it's possible to create a worker thread and perform the sort there, which makes it somewhat faster but more importantly stops it from freezing up the tab while it operates. We did this to great success at my last company when we needed to sort ~200,000 items client-side. The UI thread remained perfectly responsive during the operation and we were able to present the user with a loading spinner while it worked.

when you say "server-side" do you mean this is typescript that runs on the server? thus requiring a node-based server?

Not necessarily, any HTTP interface that can return JSON (e.g. Python Flask, PHP, etc)