Redundant row limiting in queries

Reports redundant row limiting clauses like FETCH and LIMIT in queries.

Example (PostgreSQL):

CREATE TABLE foo(a INT);

SELECT * FROM foo WHERE EXISTS(SELECT * FROM foo LIMIT 2);
SELECT * FROM foo WHERE EXISTS(SELECT * FROM foo FETCH FIRST 2 ROWS ONLY);

To fix the warning, you can add OFFSET to limiting clauses. If OFFSET is missing, then LIMIT is redundant because the usage of LIMIT does not influence the operation result of EXISTS. In case with OFFSET, we skip first N rows and this will influence the output.

SELECT * FROM foo WHERE EXISTS(SELECT * FROM foo OFFSET 1 ROW LIMIT 2);
SELECT * FROM foo WHERE EXISTS(SELECT * FROM foo OFFSET 1 ROW FETCH FIRST 2 ROWS ONLY);

Locating this inspection

By ID

Can be used to locate inspection in e.g. Qodana configuration files, where you can quickly enable or disable it, or adjust its settings.

SqlRedundantLimit

Via Settings dialog

Path to the inspection settings via IntelliJ Platform IDE Settings dialog, when you need to adjust inspection settings directly from your IDE.

Settings or Preferences | Editor | Inspections | SQL

Inspection ID: SqlRedundantLimitInspection

Suppressing Inspection

You can suppress this inspection by placing the following comment marker before the code fragment where you no longer want messages from this inspection to appear:

//noinspection SqlRedundantLimit

More detailed instructions as well as other ways and options that you have can be found in the product documentation:

Inspection Details
By default bundled with:	CLion 2026.1, DataGrip 2026.1, DataSpell 2026.1, GoLand 2026.1, IntelliJ IDEA 2026.1, JetBrains Rider 2025.3, PhpStorm 2026.1, PyCharm 2026.1, Qodana for .NET 2025.3, Qodana for Go 2026.1, Qodana for JS 2026.1, Qodana for JVM 2026.1, Qodana for PHP 2026.1, Qodana for Ruby 2026.1, RubyMine 2026.1, WebStorm 2026.1

Last modified: 31 March 2026