How do you do a limit query in HQL?

Question

In Hibernate 3, is there a way to do the equivalent of the following MySQL limit in HQL?

select * from a_table order by a_table_column desc limit 0, 20;

I don't want to use setMaxResults if possible. This definitely was possible in the older version of Hibernate/HQL, but it seems to have disappeared.

Answer 1

Try:

 // SQL: SELECT * FROM table LIMIT start, maxRows;

Query q = session.createQuery("FROM table");

q.setFirstResult(start);

q.setMaxResults(maxRows);

Answer 2

You will have to use the setMaxResults() method because the LIMIT keyword is not directly supported by HQL itself to set a limit on the results of a query in HQL. 

Example Code 

Query query = session.createQuery("FROM EntityName e WHERE e.property = :value"); 

query.setParameter("value", someValue); 

query.setMaxResults(10); // Limits the result to 10 entries 

List<EntityName> results = query.list(); 

Explanation 

the code has been explained below 

setMaxResults(int maxResults): Sets the maximum number of rows to be retrieved. 

This limits the results without altering the syntax of the HQL query itself.