ANSI/ISO plans for LIMIT standardization

limitssql-standard

Are there currently plans to standardize one best way of limiting the number of results returned by a query?

The stack overflow question at Is there an ANSI SQL alternative to the MYSQL LIMIT keyword? lists the various ways to handle this behavior in different languages:

DB2 -- select * from table fetch first 10 rows only 
Informix -- select first 10 * from table 
Microsoft SQL Server and Access -- select top 10 * from table 
MySQL and PostgreSQL -- select * from table limit 10 
Oracle -- select * from (select * from table) where rownum <= 10

I don't play in DBs that often so I'm speaking from ignorance here, but it seems like this is a pretty important functionality – at least important enough that I scratch my head when I see it has been left up to vendors.

Best Answer

The latest draft SQL standard that I could find on the internet (dated 21/12/2011) has the following available for use in a query expression:

<result offset clause> ::=
    OFFSET <offset row count> { ROW | ROWS }

<fetch first clause> ::=
    FETCH { FIRST | NEXT } [ <fetch first quantity> ] { ROW | ROWS } { ONLY | WITH TIES }
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