I have a table with about 40k rows that I want to be able to display and sort. I'm using the server-side processing so the table loads (it doesn't load at all without this). However, now that I have this set-up, filtering no longer works as you can test on the example: http://45.55.182.44/results/. Is it possible to filter these columns? It looks like I can still filter based on URL parameters, so seems like it should be possible to do so: http://45.55.182.44/results2016/?wdt_column_filter[4]=M 

Bonus question; how do I include a string with spaces in the URL parameter to filter by? I tried replacing the space with '+' without success.

http://45.55.182.44/results2016/?wdt_column_filter[0]=Archie+Post+5+Miler

Ok - found the answer to this! I had to make a view of my query, as noted in the docs. 

> If your MySQL-query based wpDataTable doesn’t work correctly with server-side processing, probably this is happening because wpDataTables server has problems with parsing of the query and building new queries dynamically (happens rarely, but does sometimes). To avoid this please prepare a MySQL view (a stored query), which will return the data that you need, call it e.g. “view1” and then build a wpDataTabled based on a simple query like “SELECT * FROM view1”.

And once I've done this, filtering with URL parameters with a '+' for the space works!