LIMIT

Stack Serverless

The LIMIT processing command enables you to limit the number of rows that are returned.

Syntax

LIMIT max_number_of_rows

Parameters

max_number_of_rows

The maximum number of rows to return.

Description

The LIMIT processing command enables you to limit the number of rows that are returned.

For instance,

FROM index | WHERE field = "value"

is equivalent to:

FROM index | WHERE field = "value" | LIMIT 1000

Queries do not return more than 10,000 rows, regardless of the LIMIT command’s value. This is a configurable upper limit.

To overcome this limitation:

• Reduce the result set size by modifying the query to only return relevant data. Use WHERE to select a smaller subset of the data.
• Shift any post-query processing to the query itself. You can use the ES|QL STATS command to aggregate data in the query.

The upper limit only applies to the number of rows that are output by the query, not to the number of documents it processes: the query runs on the full data set.

Consider the following two queries:

FROM index | WHERE field0 == "value" | LIMIT 20000

and

FROM index | STATS AVG(field1) BY field2 | LIMIT 20000

In both cases, the filtering by field0 in the first query or the grouping by field2 in the second is applied over all the documents present in the index, irrespective of their number or indexes size. However, both queries will return at most 10,000 rows, even if there were more rows available to return.

The default and maximum limits can be changed using these dynamic cluster settings:

• esql.query.result_truncation_default_size
• esql.query.result_truncation_max_size

However, doing so involves trade-offs. A larger result-set involves a higher memory pressure and increased processing times; the internode traffic within and across clusters can also increase.

These limitations are similar to those enforced by the search API for pagination.

Example

FROM employees
| SORT emp_no ASC
| LIMIT 5