Limiting Results

Imagine we’re managing an online store with thousands of products, and we need to display only the top 10 best-selling products on the homepage. Fetching all the products and then manually filtering them can be inefficient and time-consuming. By focusing on just a subset of data, we can improve performance, make data easier to browse, and create a smoother user experience. This is where limiting results in SQL queries becomes important. By using SQL clauses like LIMIT and OFFSET, we can retrieve just the data we need without overloading the database or the user interface.

Let's dive into the concept of limiting the results in SQL queries. We will learn to:

• Use the LIMIT clause to restrict the number of rows returned by a query.

• Use the OFFSET clause to skip a specific number of rows.

• Combine LIMIT and OFFSET for paginating results in a user-friendly manner.

The LIMIT clause

When we retrieve data from a table, we may not always need to see all the rows at once. Sometimes, we want to focus on the first few results or just a small sample. The LIMIT clause helps us do exactly that. By setting a limit on the number of rows returned, we make the result set more manageable. This can improve query performance and make our queries more user-friendly, especially when dealing with large datasets.

To use LIMIT, we simply add the clause at the end of our SELECT statement followed by the number of rows we want to return. The syntax of using LIMIT is as follows: