SQL LIMIT

Caps how many rows come back — almost always paired with ORDER BY to mean something specific.

What & Why

LIMIT n returns at most n rows. On its own it just truncates whatever order the rows happened to arrive in — paired with ORDER BY first, it becomes "top N."

See How It Works

BUSINESS QUESTION

The two highest-spend campaigns.

id	name	channel	spend	start_date	end_date	status	target_segment
1	Spring Launch	google_ads	55000.00	2024-01-15	2024-03-31	active	smb
2	Retention Webinar	email	45000.00	2024-02-10	2024-04-15	active	enterprise
3	Finance Retargeting	linkedin	50000.00	2024-03-12	2024-05-31	active	enterprise
4	Enterprise Search	google_ads	60000.00	2024-04-01	2024-06-30	active	enterprise

Sort first, then cut off at 2Step 1 of 2

ORDER BY spend DESC LIMIT 2

-- ORDER BY spend DESC (no LIMIT yet)

position	name	channel	spend
1	Enterprise Search	google_ads	60,000
2	Spring Launch	google_ads	55,000
3	Finance Retargeting	linkedin	50,000
4	Retention Webinar	email	45,000

The campaigns are sorted by spend, highest first.

EXAMPLE QUERY

SELECT name, spend FROM marketing.campaigns
ORDER BY spend DESC
LIMIT 2;

Now You Try

Practice this concept

Product wants the 5 lowest-rated feedback records for a quick quality review.

Available schema

product

Prefix tables with product.table_name.

user_idratingcreated_at

product.feedback

Column	Type
id	integer
user_id	integer
feature_id	integer
rating	integer
nps_score	integer
comment	text
created_at	timestamp with time zone
moderation_bucket	text

query.sql

Beginner business practice