Here is a Codeigniter build that has had the Paul Zepernick Datatables library added to it, in order to make available a ready made application that shows how to use it.By default the library does not give any help for creating your own links or buttons on the rows, so I have patched it so that custom HTML can be added into each row, with the row id then being applied to any placeholders that are added. There is a sample database included in the resources directory with 100,000 rows, that you can import and use to test the performance. You can download the code at

https://github.com/macpczone/codeigniter-datatables-example/archive/master.tar.gz

A larger database is also available for download below which contains 10,000,000 rows, so that you can test with a more substantial amount of records.

Here finally is also a link to a database dump that has 100,000,000 records, so that you can see if your database tuning skills are up to the task:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B5OhdvjzzVvecGxPQ1h3aTJUc3c