Sams Teach Yourself MySQL

Limiting the Number of Rows Returned

If you are expecting a query to still return more rows that you want, even with the filtering from a WHERE clause applied, you can add a LIMIT clause to specify the maximum number of records to be returned.

Using a LIMIT Clause

The following example retrieves all the rows from the customer_contacts table, but the LIMIT clause restricts the number of rows returned to three:

mysql> SELECT first_name, last_name
    -> FROM customer_contacts
    -> ORDER BY last_name
    -> LIMIT 3;
+------------+-----------+
| first_name | last_name |
+------------+-----------+
| Benjamin   | Britten   |
| Marie      | Curie     |
| Charles    | Darwin    |
+------------+-----------+
3 rows in set (0.00 sec)

Limiting Sorted Records

The sorting specified ...