Retrieving only a fixed number of rows in MySQL
SELECT * FROM `your_table` LIMIT 0, 5000
This will display the first 5000 results from the database.
SELECT * FROM `your_table` LIMIT 1001, 5000
This will show records from 1001 to 6000 (counting from 0).
MySQL is smart in that if you specify a LIMIT 5000
in your query, and it is possible to produce that result without generating the whole result set first, then it will not build the whole result.
For instance, the following query:
SELECT * FROM table ORDER BY column LIMIT 5000
This query will need to scan the whole table
unless there is an index on column
, in which case it does the smart thing and uses the index to find the rows with the smallest column
.