spark-instrumented-optimizer/docs/sql-ref-syntax-qry-select-limit.md

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global	LIMIT Clause	LIMIT Clause	Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file distributed with this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership. The ASF licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

Description

The LIMIT clause is used to constrain the number of rows returned by the SELECT statement. In general, this clause is used in conjunction with ORDER BY to ensure that the results are deterministic.

Syntax

LIMIT { ALL | integer_expression }

Parameters

• ALL

  If specified, the query returns all the rows. In other words, no limit is applied if this option is specified.

• integer_expression

  Specifies a foldable expression that returns an integer.

Examples

CREATE TABLE person (name STRING, age INT);
INSERT INTO person VALUES
    ('Zen Hui', 25),
    ('Anil B', 18),
    ('Shone S', 16),
    ('Mike A', 25),
    ('John A', 18),
    ('Jack N', 16);

-- Select the first two rows.
SELECT name, age FROM person ORDER BY name LIMIT 2;
+------+---+
|  name|age|
+------+---+
|Anil B| 18|
|Jack N| 16|
+------+---+

-- Specifying ALL option on LIMIT returns all the rows.
SELECT name, age FROM person ORDER BY name LIMIT ALL;
+-------+---+
|   name|age|
+-------+---+
| Anil B| 18|
| Jack N| 16|
| John A| 18|
| Mike A| 25|
|Shone S| 16|
|Zen Hui| 25|
+-------+---+

-- A function expression as an input to LIMIT.
SELECT name, age FROM person ORDER BY name LIMIT length('SPARK');
+-------+---+
|   name|age|
+-------+---+
| Anil B| 18|
| Jack N| 16|
| John A| 18|
| Mike A| 25|
|Shone S| 16|
+-------+---+

-- A non-foldable expression as an input to LIMIT is not allowed.
SELECT name, age FROM person ORDER BY name LIMIT length(name);
org.apache.spark.sql.AnalysisException: The limit expression must evaluate to a constant value ...

Related Statements

• SELECT Main
• WHERE Clause
• GROUP BY Clause
• HAVING Clause
• ORDER BY Clause
• SORT BY Clause
• CLUSTER BY Clause
• DISTRIBUTE BY Clause
• CASE Clause
• PIVOT Clause
• LATERAL VIEW Clause