No, SQL top doesn’t look at the status of a database the way the TOP command in bash does. It looks at the top number of records returned in a query, so a bit more like head. This makes SELECT TOP useful with larger tables where this will be millions of records getting loaded into memory during a query.
In this article, we’ll use the same “Customers” table from our first articles to test out TOP:
ID Site Contact Address City Zip Country
1 Krypted Charles Edge my house Minneapolis 55418 US
2 Apple Tim Cook spaceship Cupertino 95014 US
3 Microsoft Satya Nadella campus Redmond 98053 US
4 Facebook Mark Zuckerberg foodhall Menlo Park 94025 US
5 JAMF Dean Hager Grain Exchange Minneapolis 55418 US
The following SELECT TOP statement shows the top 20% of the records from “Customers”:
SELECT TOP 20 PERCENT * FROM Customers;
Or just SELECT TOP the first three records:
SELECT TOP 3 * FROM Customers;
krypted February 23rd, 2016
Posted In: SQL
Tags: Apple, MAC, MySQL, show records, sql top