This article will be looking into how to SELECT the first record of a MySQL table or a query. We will be going through a few examples to demonstrate the concept.
Let us get started by making the sample data to be used across the examples. Create a table named sales_team_emails, followed by inserting some rows into it.
#create table sales_team_emails CREATE TABLE sales_team_emails ( sales_person_id INT AUTO_INCREMENT, sales_person_name VARCHAR(255), sales_person_email VARCHAR(255), PRIMARY KEY (sales_person_id) ); #insert rows to sales_team_emails INSERT INTO sales_team_emails (sales_person_name,sales_person_email) VALUES("Aditi","[email protected]"), ("Furan T","[email protected]"), ("Veronica","[email protected]"), ("Atharv","[email protected]"), ("Erick","[email protected]"), ("Veronica","[email protected]"), ("Rasmus","[email protected]"), ("Aditi Sharma","[email protected]"), ("George","[email protected]"), ("Veronica","[email protected]"), ("Simon","[email protected]");
To view the snapshot of the table sales_team_emails, execute:
SELECT * FROM sales_team_emails;

Example1: Get the first record of the table sales_team_emails
We will be using the LIMIT clause. LIMIT clause is used when we want to restrict the result set to a certain number of rows. To get the first record of the table sales_team_emails, observe the below select statement.
SELECT * FROM sales_team_emails LIMIT 1;
Action Output Message:-
1 row(s) returned.
Frequently Asked:
Output:-

Similarly, we can also get the first record of any other query.
Example2: Get the first record of sale_person_id and sales_person_email from the table sales_team_emails where sales_person_name is Veronica.
SELECT sales_person_id, sales_person_email FROM sales_team_emails WHERE sales_person_name = 'Veronica' LIMIT 1;
Action Output Message:-
1 row(s) returned.
Output:-

If we run the query without the LIMIT clause, we will get more than one result.
SELECT sales_person_id, sales_person_email FROM sales_team_emails WHERE sales_person_name = 'Veronica';
Output:-

READ MORE
- MySQL Select last N rows
- MySQL select rows by range
- MySQL select TOP 10 rows
- MySQL select row with max value
We hope this article helped you with getting the first record of a table or a query in MySQL. Good Luck!!