FAQ: Queries - Limit

Frequently Asked Questions SQL FAQ
1

Community%20FAQs%20on%20Codecademy%20Exercises
Community%20FAQs%20on%20Codecademy%20Exercises1000×208 141 KB

This community-built FAQ covers the “Limit” exercise from the lesson “Queries”.

Paths and Courses
This exercise can be found in the following Codecademy content:

Web Development
Data Science

Learn SQL

FAQs on the exercise Limit

Join the Discussion. Help a fellow learner on their journey.

Ask or answer a question about this exercise by clicking reply (reply) below!

Agree with a comment or answer? Like (like) to up-vote the contribution!

Need broader help or resources? Head here.

Looking for motivation to keep learning? Join our wider discussions.

Learn more about how to use this guide.

Found a bug? Report it!

Have a question about your account or billing? Reach out to our customer support team!

None of the above? Find out where to ask other questions here!

2

For LIMIT, it doesn’t seem that this command correctly returns data when there is a tie for the final position. For example, for the data set, if you use:

SELECT *
FROM movies
ORDER BY imdb_rating DESC
LIMIT 5;

You return 5 movies as asked, but if you use a large limit you will see that Star Wars and Intersteller are both ranted 8.7 on IMDb. There must be another parameter that breaks the tie-- seems to be id #. How could you change tie-breaking secondary parameters or change the code to return more rows of data in the case of a tie for the final spot to show all movies that tied for this last spot?

1 Like
3

SQL Server appears to have a selector to do what you want: SELECT TOP 12 WITH TIES * according to this, but I can’t make it work in the CA version. I’m not sure what the underlying SQL version is that we are dealing with here.

2 Likes
4

What happens if the limit command conflicts with the tying value of order by command.

For Eg.
In the given table ‘movies’ there were 3 values with ‘imdb_rating = 8.8’ instead of 2 as given in the example.
and the limit remained same i.e
LIMIT 3
So, what will be the criteria of selection in this case?
Or will it display all 3 values with ‘imdb_rating = 8.8’ making it a total of 4 values, including the one with ‘imdb_rating = 9.0’.

1 Like
5

why is the order of the the query so important, while they will return the same results ?

1 Like
6

Why did we not but imdb_rating as ‘imdb_rating’ even though this is a string?
how do we determine when to put them within single inverted commoas

8

There’s actually more than 2 values with rating of 8.8, you can see by increasing the limit to 4.
If limit is set to 3 it will only display the quantity of values requested, but I don’t know what are the tie-breaker parameters that SQL use in this case. As someone said before it appears to be the ‘id’ number.

9

I think they only need to be wrapped with single quotes like ‘imdb_rating’ when it is a value text string. In this case imdb_rating it’s not a value but a column name.

10

it would be nice to know from somebody more experienced why SELECT TOP n with TIES * does not work with codecademy´s SQL version. can anybody help us out? much apreciated

12

Perhaps if there is a tie one can use an IF statement. Though I am new to SQL, not sure if SQL allows for IF statements. I would you can do and if tie sort by how much they gross or something.