Knowing your limitations: Using LIMIT

So far, all of our queries have returned the full result set of rows matching the WHERE clause. But sometimes you only want a subset of the results. Let’s use the LIMIT keyword to get the top 15 contributors by contribution.

First we order the results by amount (in descending order), and then we limit the results to only the first 15 rows:

SELECT * FROM CONTRIBUTORS ORDER BY amount DESC LIMIT 15;

top_15_contributors

And if there aren’t enough matching rows to reach the specified limit, the limit is simply ignored:

SELECT * FROM contributors WHERE amount > 2100 LIMIT 15;