According to the documentation:
To retrieve all rows from a certain offset up to the end of the result set, you can use some large number for the second parameter. This statement retrieves all rows from the 96th row to the last:
SELECT * FROM tbl LIMIT 95, 18446744073709551615;
This is the maximum rows a MyISAM table can hold, 2^64-1.
There is a limit of 2^32 (~4.295E+09) rows in a MyISAM table. If you build MySQL with the --with-big-tables option, the row limitation is increased to (2^32)^2 (1.844E+19) rows. See Section 2.16.2, “Typical configure Options”. Binary distributions for Unix and Linux are built with this option.
If you're looking to get the last x number of rows, the easiest thing to do is SORT DESC
and LIMIT to the first x rows. Granted, the SORT
will slow your query down. But if you're opposed to setting an arbitrarily large number as the second LIMIT
arg, then that's the way to do it.
The only solution I am aware of currently is to do as you say and give a ridiculously high number as the second argument to LIMIT. I do not believe there is any difference in performance to specifying a low number or a high number, mysql will simply stop returning rows at the end of the result set, or when it hits your limit.