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LIMIT and aliasing make MySQL queries more flexible, and this beginner lesson shows exactly how both work in practice. You’ll learn how LIMIT controls the number of rows returned, how it can be paired with ORDER BY to find the top three oldest employees, and how the optional offset lets you start partway through a result set.

The lesson also covers aliasing, showing how to rename columns with AS so your output is easier to read and your HAVING clause can reference a clearer name like average_age instead of repeating the full aggregate expression. Using a simple GROUP BY example, the video demonstrates how aliases clean up queries and make SQL easier to work with.

If you’re learning SQL for data analytics, this is a practical walkthrough of MySQL LIMIT, ORDER BY, GROUP BY, HAVING, and column aliases. It’s a useful guide for beginner SQL practice, query writing, and understanding how to make results more readable and more powerful.

Great for anyone searching for MySQL beginner tutorial, SQL LIMIT and aliasing, ORDER BY with LIMIT, SQL column aliases, GROUP BY HAVING examples, and MySQL lessons for data analysts.

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Transcript
00:00Hello everybody, in this lesson we're going to be taking a look at limit and aliasing.
00:05Limit is just going to specify how many rows you want in your output.
00:08If we take this table for example, if we come right here and we say limit, let's do three.
00:14If we run this, it's only going to take the top three that we have.
00:19Let's go ahead and run this.
00:20As you can see we have employee one, three and four, Leslie, Tom and April.
00:25Now this seems super straightforward, really, really easy, but it can be combined with
00:29order by to actually be really powerful.
00:32For example, let's say we wanted to take the three oldest employees.
00:37All we'd have to do is come right under here and we say order by,
00:41and we'll order by the age in descending order.
00:45So we're going to order on age descending, and then it's going to take the top three.
00:49So if we run this, and very quickly we have the top three oldest people in this table.
00:55Now there is one additional parameter that we can use in limit,
00:58and all we have to do to access it is have a comma here.
01:02Now what this is going to do, and I'll put a one here.
01:05What this is going to do is it's now going to say we're going to start at position three,
01:09and then we're going to go one row after it.
01:13Now I actually want to take one of these people.
01:15So let's start at position two and select the next one after it, which should be Leslie Knope.
01:21So we're going to start at position two, and we're going to select the one right after it.
01:25So we're going to start at position two, and then one means we're taking the next one row.
01:30Let's go ahead and run this.
01:32And as you can see, we've got Leslie Knope in our output.
01:35Now let's come right down here.
01:37We are going to now look at aliasing.
01:42Now aliasing is just a way to change the name of the column for the most part.
01:48And it can also be used in joins, but we're going to take a look at joins,
01:52or aliasing joins in the intermediate series.
01:55In a previous lesson, we looked at a group by that looked like this.
01:58We selected gender, and we said from, I believe it was employee underscore demographics.
02:06Let me say group by gender.
02:09And we also had the average, and I think it was age.
02:14There we go.
02:15And we'll add our semicolon.
02:17Let's go ahead and run this.
02:18In our output, we have gender as our gender column, the same as the column name.
02:22But then average age is average age.
02:26And so if we want to actually do something like a having,
02:29where we say having the average age, let's say greater than 40, like we had it,
02:37we have to actually use this aggregate function in our having clause.
02:41And we don't want to always have to do that.
02:43We can actually change the name of this column and subsequently use it throughout our query
02:47with that aliased name.
02:49So I'm going to say as, and that's the keyword to actually change it.
02:53We'll say as, and we'll do average underscore age.
02:57So now we've changed this name to average underscore age, and we can come down here to
03:02having and say having the average age greater than 40.
03:07And when we run this, it works perfectly.
03:09And you'll notice that the name of the column was actually changed.
03:12Now, this as isn't actually 100% needed.
03:16It's kind of implied.
03:17Even if we get rid of it, it's implied there's like this as in there somewhere.
03:22But we don't have to have it.
03:24If we took it out and ran it like this, it would still work exactly the same.
03:28So that is how we can use limit and aliasing in SQL.
03:32And congratulations, this is the end of the beginner series in MySQL.
03:36In the intermediate series, we're going to take a look at things like joins,
03:40unions, unions, case statements, subqueries, and window functions.
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