If you need only a specified number of rows from a result set, use a LIMIT clause in the query, rather than fetching the whole result set and throwing away the extra data.

MySQL sometimes optimizes a query that has a LIMIT row_count clause and no HAVING clause:

If multiple rows have identical values in the ORDER BY columns, the server is free to return those rows in any order, and may do so differently depending on the overall execution plan. In other words, the sort order of those rows is nondeterministic with respect to the nonordered columns.

One factor that affects the execution plan is LIMIT, so an ORDER BY query with and without LIMIT may return rows in different orders. Consider this query, which is sorted by the category column but nondeterministic with respect to the id and rating columns:

mysql> SELECT * FROM ratings ORDER BY category;
+----+----------+--------+
| id | category | rating |
+----+----------+--------+
|  1 |        1 |    4.5 |
|  5 |        1 |    3.2 |
|  3 |        2 |    3.7 |
|  4 |        2 |    3.5 |
|  6 |        2 |    3.5 |
|  2 |        3 |    5.0 |
|  7 |        3 |    2.7 |
+----+----------+--------+

Including LIMIT may affect order of rows within each category value. For example, this is a valid query result:

mysql> SELECT * FROM ratings ORDER BY category LIMIT 5;
+----+----------+--------+
| id | category | rating |
+----+----------+--------+
|  1 |        1 |    4.5 |
|  5 |        1 |    3.2 |
|  4 |        2 |    3.5 |
|  3 |        2 |    3.7 |
|  6 |        2 |    3.5 |
+----+----------+--------+

In each case, the rows are sorted by the ORDER BY column, which is all that is required by the SQL standard.

If it is important to ensure the same row order with and without LIMIT, include additional columns in the ORDER BY clause to make the order deterministic. For example, if id values are unique, you can make rows for a given category value appear in id order by sorting like this:

mysql> SELECT * FROM ratings ORDER BY category, id;
+----+----------+--------+
| id | category | rating |
+----+----------+--------+
|  1 |        1 |    4.5 |
|  5 |        1 |    3.2 |
|  3 |        2 |    3.7 |
|  4 |        2 |    3.5 |
|  6 |        2 |    3.5 |
|  2 |        3 |    5.0 |
|  7 |        3 |    2.7 |
+----+----------+--------+

mysql> SELECT * FROM ratings ORDER BY category, id LIMIT 5;
+----+----------+--------+
| id | category | rating |
+----+----------+--------+
|  1 |        1 |    4.5 |
|  5 |        1 |    3.2 |
|  3 |        2 |    3.7 |
|  4 |        2 |    3.5 |
|  6 |        2 |    3.5 |
+----+----------+--------+

As of MySQL 5.6.2, the optimizer more efficiently handles queries (and subqueries) of the following form:

SELECT ... FROM single_table ... ORDER BY non_index_column [DESC] LIMIT [M,]N;

That type of query is common in web applications that display only a few rows from a larger result set. For example:

SELECT col1, ... FROM t1 ... ORDER BY name LIMIT 10;
SELECT col1, ... FROM t1 ... ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 15;

The sort buffer has a size of sort_buffer_size. If the sort elements for N rows are small enough to fit in the sort buffer (M+N rows if M was specified), the server can avoid using a merge file and perform the sort entirely in memory by treating the sort buffer as a priority queue:

Previously, the server performed this operation by using a merge file for the sort:

The cost of the table scan is the same for the queue and merge-file methods, so the optimizer chooses between methods based on other costs:

The optimizer considers the balance between these factors for particular values of N and the row size.