FETCH FIRST

Description

The FETCH FIRST clause is used to limit the number of rows returned by a query. This is similar to the LIMIT clause in other SQL databases like MySQL. It allows to retrieve only a specific number of rows from the result set, which can be useful for pagination or for getting the top N records.

Syntax

SELECT ...
FROM ...
ORDER BY ...
FETCH FIRST N ROWS ONLY;

• N: The number of rows to fetch.

Example

To get the first 5 rows from the employees table ordered by hire_date, you can use:

SELECT
    employee_id,
    first_name,
    last_name,
    hire_date
FROM
    employees
ORDER BY
    hire_date
FETCH FIRST 5 ROWS ONLY;