LIMIT / TOP / FETCH FIRST

These cap how many rows come back, which matters once a table has thousands (or millions) of rows and you only need a preview.

Source data — Pattern 1: Basic Data Retrieval

All queries run against the shared employees table (see schema.sql).

LIMIT / TOP / FETCH FIRST — source table 1

What it does

These cap how many rows come back, which matters once a table has thousands (or millions) of rows and you only need a preview. Every major database does this slightly differently — one of the few places dialect really matters for something this basic.

Problem

Display the first 5 employees.

-- MySQL / PostgreSQL / SQLite
SELECT *
FROM employees
LIMIT 5;

-- SQL Server
SELECT TOP 5 *
FROM employees;

-- Oracle
SELECT *
FROM employees
FETCH FIRST 5 ROWS ONLY;

Result

LIMIT / TOP / FETCH FIRST — result 1

SQL · Pattern 1 — Basic Data Retrieval