In the last episode (Apr 27), Martijn Tonies said:
> It seems that there is no direct support to limit 'select' to only the
> first N rows in a table. Could you let me know what the best way
> select
> rows from the first N rows in a table is?
LIMIT usually works fine ;-)
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/select.html
That may noy be what Peng is looking for, though. LIMIT filters the
output
resultset, not the input table. Since in the logical SQL world, tables
are
unsorted collections of rows, it doesn't make sense to limit on them
directly. You can do this, however:
SELECT * FROM
(
SELECT * FROM products ORDER BY DATE LIMIT 10
) AS t
WHERE color='red'
This will fetch the 10 oldest products in the table and then return only
the
red ones. Compare to
SELECT * FROM products WHERE color='red' ORDER BY DATE LIMIT 10
which will return the 10 oldest red products, even if they are the 10
newest
records in the table.
I fully agree on the differences, and yes, you're very right about unsorted
collections
of rows.
Basically, you're selecting from an intermediate limited resultset set here
via a
derived table.
Not sure what the original posted wanted though.
With regards,
Martijn Tonies
Upscene Productions
http://www.upscene.com
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