Re: LIMIT Question

["Gurjeet Singh" <singh.gurjeet@xxxxxxxxx>]

In my opinion (without looking at the code), if you have a grouping-function or ORDER BY or GROUP BY clause, then yes, the whole query has to be executed to show the first row of the result-set. But if the query doesn't have any of these clauses, then the DB has the ability to send back the first row from the result as soon as it processes it (i.e after WHERE clause processing), and stop the query execution there.

Best regards,

On Fri, Feb 29, 2008 at 5:02 AM, Scott Marlowe <scott.marlowe@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 3:20 PM, Terry Lee Tucker <terry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> When one uses LIMIT, as in LIMIT 1, is the entire query executed on the server
>  side, but only one record returned?
>
>  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>   PostgreSQL 7.4.19 on i686-redhat-linux-gnu, compiled by GCC gcc (GCC) 3.4.6
>  20060404 (Red Hat 3.4.6-9)

Sometimes yes, sometimes no.  Depends on how complex the query is and
whether or not pgsql's query planner can see a shortcut or not.  It's
more likely that a later version will have the optimizations needed to
do that than an older version like 7.4 I'd think.  But I'd ask someone
more expert on the planner like Tom to be sure.

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