I am using select top 5 from(select * from tbl2) tbl, will it get all records from tbl2 and then it will it get only specific records i.e 5? or do it only get 5 records from internal memory. suppose we have 1000 records in tbl2.
For future reference, SQL actually has a huge amount of amazing documentation/resources online. For instance: This google search.
As to your question, it will pull the top five results matching your criteria, so it depends. It'll go through, and find the first five results matching your criteria. If those are the last results it goes through, it'll still have to do the comparisons and filtering on all rows, the only difference will be that it will have to send less rows to your computer.
For example, let's say we have a table my_table with two columns: Customer_ID (which is unique) and First_Purchase_Date (which is a date value between 2015-01-01 and 2017-07-26). If we simply do SELECT TOP 5 * FROM my_table then it will go through and pull the first five rows it finds, without looking at the rest of the rows. On the other hand, if we do SELECT TOP 5 * FROM my_table WHERE First_Purchase_Date = '2017-05-17' then it will have to go through all the rows until it can find five rows with a First_Purchase_Date of 2017-05-17. If First_Purchase_Date is indexed, this should not be very expensive, as it'll more or less know where to look. If it's not, then it depends on your how SQL has decided to structure your table, and if it has created any useful statistics. Worst case, it could not have any statistics and the desired rows could be the last five in the database, in which case it will have to complete the comparison on all the rows in the database.
By the way, this is a somewhat poor idea, as the columns returned will not necessarily stay consistent over time. It may be a good idea to throw in an ORDER BY clause, to ensure you get the same records every time.
The SELECT TOP clause is used to specify the number of records to return.
It limits the rows returned in a query result set to a specified number of rows or percentage of rows. When TOP is used in conjunction with the ORDER BY clause, the result set is limited to the first N number of ordered rows; otherwise, it returns the first N number of rows in an undefined order.
SELECT TOP number|percent column_name(s)
FROM table_name
WHERE condition;
Related
I am bit new to SQL, I want to write query with TOP clause and order by clause.
So, for returning all the records I write below query
select PatientName,PlanDate as Date,* from OPLMLA21..Exams order
by PlanDate desc
And I need top few elements from same query, so I modified the query to
select top(5) PatientName,PlanDate as Date,* from OPLMLA21..Exams
order by PlanDate desc
In my understanding it will give the top 5 results from the previous query, but I see ambiguity there. I have attached the screen shot of query results .
May be my understanding is wrong, I read a lot but not able to understand this please help me out.
I stated this in a comment, however, to repeat that:
TOP (5) doesn't give the "top results" of the prior query though, no. It gives the top (first) rows from the dataset defined in the query it in is. If there are multiple rows that have the same "rank", then the row(s) returned for that rank are arbitrary. So, for example, for your query if you have 100 rows all with the same value for PlanDate, what 5 rows you get are completely arbitrary and could be different (including the order they are in) every time you run said query.
What I mean by arbitrary is that, effectively, SQL Server is free to choose whatever rows, of those applicable, are returned. Sometimes this might be the same everytime you run the query, but this by luck more than anything. As your database gets larger, you have more users querying the data, you involve joins, things like locks, indexes, parrallelism, etc all will effect the "order" that SQL Server is processing said data, and will effect an ambigious TOP clause.
Take the example data below:
ID | SomeDate
---|---------
1 |2020-01-01
2 |2020-01-01
3 |2020-01-01
4 |2020-01-01
5 |2020-01-01
6 |2020-01-02
Now, what would you expect if I ran a TOP (2) against that table with an ORDER BY clause of SomeDate DESC. Well, certainly, you'd expect the "last" row (with an ID of 6) to be returned, but what about the next row? The other 5 rows all have the same value for SomeDate. Perhaps, because your under the impression that data in a table is pre-sorted, you might expect the row with a value of 5 for ID. What if I told you that there was a CLUSTERED INDEX on ID ASC; that might well end up meaning that the row with a value of 1 is returned. What if there is also an index on SomeDate DESC?
What if the table was 10,000 of rows in size, and you also have a JOIN to another table, which also has a CLUSTERED INDEX, and some user is performing a query with some specific row locking on in while you run your query? What would you expect then?
Without your ORDER BY being specific enough to ensure that each row has a distinct ordering position, SQL Server will return other rows in an arbitrary order and when mixed with a TOP means the "top" rows will also be arbitrary.
Side note: I note in your image (of what appears to be SSMS), your "dates" are in the format yyyyMMdd. This strongly implies that you are storing a date value as a varchar or int type. This is a design flaw and needs to be fixed. There are 6 date and time data types, and 5 of them are far superior to using a string and numerical data type to storing the data.
I have a table with approximately 100 million rows (TABLE_A), I need to select 6 millons different rows each query, once the entire table is selected, the process ends. TABLE_A does not have index or primary key, and ORDER BY is very expensive in terms of time, also I don't need any order here, just different rows. I have tried to order using ROWID, according to this,
They are the fastest way to access a single row.
This query works but takes about 5 minutes (I would like to avoid this order by)
SELECT * FROM TABLE_A ORDER BY ROWID
OFFSET 6000000 ROWS FETCH NEXT 6000000 ROWS ONLY;
This query works faster but has no sense since ROWNUM, according to this
returns a number indicating the order in which Oracle selects the row
from a table
SELECT * FROM TABLE_A ORDER BY ROWNUM asc
OFFSET 6000000 ROWS FETCH NEXT 6000000 ROWS ONLY;
As expected, same query returns different results each time.
This query seems to be conceptually better.
SELECT * FROM TABLE_A WHERE ROWID >= 6000000 AND ROWID <12000000;
But it can't be done in this way, ROWID (UROWID Datatype) has values like AAAZIUAHWAAC6XcAAI
So, Is there a way to select different rows avoiding order? and just call the rows using some kind of internal ID, maybe a direction in the storage or maybe a default order. The whole approach was likely wrong, so I'm open to radical changes.
I've also tried somethig like this
SELECT * FROM TABLE_A
WHERE dbms_rowid.rowid_block_number(rowid)
BETWEEN 2049 AND 261281;
it's surprisingly fast but unfortunately a row could have more than one block number.
Based on your last comment, some things to look at:
DBMS_PARALLEL_EXECUTE
If you are going through 100 million rows, the best place to process them is on the database itself. If your processing is done with PL/SQL, then dbms_parallel_execute can manage most of the parallelisation for you, and carve up the rows.
ROWID ranges
Even if you don't process the rows on the database, you can use DBMS_PARALLEL_EXECUTE to produce the rowid ranges for you. Then use those start-end pairs as inputs to whatever app you are using to do the processing
simple MOD
Each instance of your app gets an ID from 0 to 'n-1' and each issues a query
select *
from (
select rownum r, m.* from my_table
)
where mod(r,"n") = :x
where x is that app's ID. If you already have a numeric sequence column of some sort that is reasonably distributed, you can substitute that in for the rownum
I have a query as following:
SELECT Brand,Id,Model FROM product
Which takes time in order of seconds as Product table has more than 1 million records.
But the query executes within no time. (less than even one second))
select count(*) as numberOfRows from (SELECT Brand,Id,Model FROM product) result
Why is that?
When you execute a Query, the Time taken will vary depending on the Number of Columns and Rows and their datatypes.
In a table where you have 10 Columns, The Performance will be different if you select all columns (*) for all records and Just 1 or Two Columns for All records.
Because The Amount of data loaded is less in the Second case, it will execute faster.
Just like that, When you say Count(*) the result is Just a single Cell whereas in your first Select, you are selecting Millions of rows for those 3 columns, So the amount of Data is high.
That's why you are getting the Count(*) result faster. You don't need to give * inside the count, Instead Just use Count(1) for even more better performance.
I have seen a few posts detailing fast ways to "estimate" the number of rows in a given SQL table without using COUNT(*). However, none of them seem to really solve the problem if you need to estimate the number of rows which satisfy a given criteria. I am trying to get a way of estimating the number of rows which satisfy a given criteria, but the information for these criteria is scattered around two or three tables. Of course a SELECT COUNT(*) with the NOLOCK hint and a few joins will do, and I can afford under- or over-estimating the total records. The probem is that this kind of query will be running every 5-10 minutes or so, and since I don't need the actual number-only an estimate-I would like to trade-off accuracy for speed.
The solution, if any, may be "SQL Server"-specific. In fact, it must be compatible with SQL Server 2005. Any hints?
There is no easy way to do this. You can get an estimate for the total number of rows in a table, e.g. from system catalog views.
But there's no way to do this for a given set of criteria in a WHERE clause - either you would have to keep counts for each set of criteria and the values, or you'd have to use black magic to find that out. The only place that SQL Server keeps something that would go into that direction is the statistics it keeps on the indices. Those will have certain information about what kind of values occur how frequently in an index - but I quite honestly don't have any idea if (and how) you could leverage the information in the statistics in your own queries......
If you really must know the number of rows matching a certain criteria, you need to do a count of some sort - either a SELECT COUNT(*) FROM dbo.YourTable WHERE (yourcriteria) or something else.
Something else could be something like this:
wrap your SELECT statement into a CTE (Common Table Expression)
define a ROW_NUMBER() in that CTE ordering your data by some column (or set of columns)
add a second ROW_NUMBER() to that CTE that orders your data by the same column (or columns) - but in the opposite direction (DESC vs. ASC)
Something like this:
;WITH YourDataCTE AS
(
SELECT (list of columns you need),
ROW_NUMBER() OVER(ORDER BY <your column>) AS 'RowNum',
ROW_NUMBER() OVER(ORDER BY <your column> DESC) AS 'RowNum2'
FROM
dbo.YourTable
WHERE
<your conditions here>
)
SELECT *
FROM YourDataCTE
Doing this, you would get the following effect:
your first row in your result set will contain your usual data columns
the first ROW_NUMBER() will contain the value 1
the second ROW_NUMBER() will contain the total number of row that match that criteria set
It's surprisingly good at dealing with small to mid-size result sets - I haven't tried yet how it'll hold up with really large result sets - but it might be something to investigate and see if it works.
Possible solutions:
If the count number is big in comparison to the total number of rows in the table, then adding indexes that cover where condition will help and the query will be very fast.
If the result number is close to the total number of rows in the table, indexes will not help much. You could implement a trigger that would maintain a 'conditional count table'. So whenever row matching condition added you would increment the value in the table, and when row is deleted you would decrement the value. So you will query this small 'summary count table'.
I am planning to create a mysql 5 (myISAM) table that will contain x thousand rows of data. Each row will have a count field, & the rows with the 20 highest count values will be retrieved quite a lot, probably on a one-for-one ratio to every row update. The x thousand rows not in this 20 will not typically be retrieved.
What are the choices wrt choosing an efficient method of querying for the 20 top count values. Data does not have to be realtime live but it helps!
Add an index to the count field, then just a normal query:
SELECT * FROM myTable ORDER BY countField DESC LIMIT 20;
Create an index on the count field. Done.
Every five minutes, empty out and then copy the top 20 to a separate table. To get the top 20, just consult that table. Done!
(Or, you could spend the next few hours tweaking your query and parameters and indices and making it all "just right".)