In general, the UIData first property is not controlled by the component itself, it's expected that the application will control first and rows to implement functionality like pagination, range display, etc.

The component provides an integrated paginator that breaks this expectation somewhat. However, this paginator still just acts to give the client control over the first and rows properties, without app bindings. The component doesn't adjust these properties without obvious prompts from the client .

If disabling the paginator was to forcibly reset the state of first / rows / page, it would be a departure from the current expectation that the component doesn't make subtle internal adjustments to the state of these properties. An application that wishes to reduce the displayed data to only the current top row should be able to just disable pagination and set rows to 1.

Cases where removing pagination entirely is desired should disable pagination and call dataTable.resetPagination().

This is very serious and should be more prominent in the docs and showcase!!! With big bold faces and letters in red.
I've been using the remove pagination trick to cope for the removal of the "All" option in the # of rows to display, and since all our tables are pretty big (over 10k rows), I've never noticed that if you're navigating through it and then disable the pagination, it'll get stuck with whatever's left, and not the whole resultset. Good thing I was rummaging through the forum to see what got fixed for 3.2 and stumbled upon this. Please raise the awareness of other uses about this, I'm sure a lot of other people are oblivious of this issue.

I'll add a comment to the TLD of the pagination property clarifying that disabling it doesn't alter the current table position.