MySQL SELECT LIMIT statement.

MySQL statement SELECT LIMIT is used to extract records from one or more tables into MySQL and limit the number of records to be returned based on the limit value.

Syntax of SELECT LIMIT in MySQL

SELECT expressions
FROM tables
[WHERE conditions]
[ORDER BY expression [ ASC | DESC ]].
LIMIT row_count;

Parameters and arguments of the statement

• expressions – columns or calculations that you want to get.
• tables – the tables from which you want to get the records. There must be at least one table listed in the FROM sentence.
• WHERE conditions are optional. The conditions that must be met for the selected records.
• ORDER BY expression – optional. It is used in the SELECT LIMIT instruction so that you can organize the results of the records you want to return.
• LIMIT row_count – specifies a limited number of rows in the resulting set to be returned based on row_count. For example, LIMIT 10 will return the first 10 rows that meet the SELECT criteria. In this case, the sort order is meaningful, so be sure to use the ORDER BY operator accordingly.

Example of how to use LIMIT

Let’s see how to use the SELECT statement with LIMIT in MySQL.
For example:

SELECT contact_id, first_name, last_name
FROM contacts
WHERE website = 'bestsite.net'
ORDER BY contact_id DESC
LIMIT 5;

This MySQL example SELECT LIMIT will select the first 5 entries from the contacts table, where website = ‘bestsite.net’.

The five most excellent contact id values are returned by SELECT LIMIT because the results are sorted by contact id in descending order.

SELECT LIMIT in MySQL will not return any additional entries in the contact table where website = “bestsite.net” if there are any other entries.

May change the sort order to read as follows if we want to choose the five lowest contact id values rather than the highest:

SELECT contact_id, last_name, first_name
FROM contacts
WHERE website = 'TechOnTheNet.com'
ORDER BY contact_id ASC
LIMIT 5;

The results will now be sorted by contact_id in ascending order. So this SELECT LIMIT operator will return the first five minor contact_id entries with website = ‘bestsite.net.’ This query will not return any other records.

SELECT with LIMIT in SQL

About Enteros

Enteros offers a patented database performance management SaaS platform. It proactively identifies root causes of complex business-impacting database scalability and performance issues across a growing number of clouds, RDBMS, NoSQL, and machine learning database platforms.