Is there an alternative to TOP in MySQL?

Question

I want to know the alternative of the TOP keyword as in MySQL. I have read about TOP in SQL Server.

Is there any alternative to this in MySQL, or any other method i

Answer 1

You can use the LIMIT keyword (See the documentation of the SELECT instruction) -- it goes at the end of the query :

select *
from your_table
where ...
limit 10

to get the top 10 lines

Or even :

select *
from your_table
where ...
limit 5, 10

To get 10 lines, startig from the 6th (i.e. getting lines 6 to 15).

Answer 2

mysql equivalent of top and you can find further more about LIMIT in MySql Doc

Answer 3

yes, there is the limit clause.

Example:

    SELECT * FROM `your_table` LIMIT 0, 10 

This will display the first 10 results from the database.

Answer 4

Ordering and limiting the results:

SELECT field1, field2
FROM myTable
ORDER BY field1 ASC
LIMIT 10

Answer 5

I know this question has been answered by I'd like to add some Performance consideration. The TOP operator in MySQL is not translated with LIMIT.

Suppose you want to get the last 10 persons inserted in the db:

SELECT name, id
FROM persons
ORDER BY id DESC
LIMIT 10

However this could became extremely slow when using thousands of rows.

A much faster solution would be retrieve the current number X of rows:

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM persons

and use that number to query for the last 10:

SELECT name, id
    FROM persons
    LIMIT x-10,10

So limit will skip the first X-10 rows and return the next 10. This was 100 times faster for me than sorting the column, but this is just my experience.