How To Write Top N In Mysql Examples . Second, list all parameters of the stored function inside the parentheses followed by the function name. This article will show you a simple query example in mysql 5.7 (along with an example using the rank() function in mysql 8.0) that will return the top 3 orders per month out of an orders table. MySQL Best Practices OTN LAD Tour from www.slideshare.net For example, top (10) in the select query will return the top 10 records from the full result set. To get the 2 largest cities for each country, you can use the following query in mysql: The following discussion describes how to write statements that use ctes.