LIMIT

The LIMIT statement allows slicing the result array using an offset and a count. It reduces the number of elements in the result to at most the specified number.

Syntax

Two general forms of LIMIT are:

LIMIT count
LIMIT offset, count

The first form allows specifying only the count value whereas the second form allows specifying both offset and count. The first form is identical using the second form with an offset value of 0.

Usage

FOR u IN users
  LIMIT 5
  RETURN u

Above query returns the first five documents of the users collection. It could also be written as LIMIT 0, 5 for the same result. Which documents it actually returns is rather arbitrary, because no explicit sorting order is specified however. Therefore, a limit should be usually accompanied by a SORT operation.

The offset value specifies how many elements from the result shall be skipped. It must be 0 or greater. The count value specifies how many elements should be at most included in the result.

FOR u IN users
  SORT u.firstName, u.lastName, u.id DESC
  LIMIT 2, 5
  RETURN u

In above example, the documents of users are sorted, the first two results get skipped and it returns the next five user documents.

Where a LIMIT is used in relation to other operations in a query has meaning. LIMIT operations before FILTERs in particular can change the result significantly, because the operations are executed in the order in which they are written in the query. See FILTER for a detailed example.

The LIMIT operation never applies to write operations (INSERT, UPDATE, REPLACE, REMOVE, UPSERT) but only their returned results. In the following example, five documents are created, regardless of the LIMIT 2. The LIMIT operation only constrains the number of documents returned by the query (via RETURN) to the first two:

FOR i IN 1..5
  INSERT { value: i } INTO coll
  LIMIT 2
  RETURN NEW