How to ORDER BY DESC and display the first 3 records in MySQL?

For this, you can use ORDER BY DESC with LIMIT. Let us first create a table −

mysql> create table DemoTable
(
   UserId int NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
   UserName varchar(100)
);
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.59 sec)

Insert some records in the table using insert command −

mysql> insert into DemoTable(UserName) values('Chris');
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.16 sec)
mysql> insert into DemoTable(UserName) values('Robert');
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.13 sec)
mysql> insert into DemoTable(UserName) values('Bob');
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.12 sec)
mysql> insert into DemoTable(UserName) values('David');
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.10 sec)
mysql> insert into DemoTable(UserName) values('Mike');
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.10 sec)

Display all records from the table using select statement −

mysql> select *from DemoTable;

This will produce the following output −

+--------+----------+
| UserId | UserName |
+--------+----------+
|      1 | Chris    |
|      2 | Robert   |
|      3 | Bob      |
|      4 | David    |
|      5 | Mike     |
+--------+----------+
5 rows in set (0.00 sec)

Following is the query to display first 3 records after applying for ORDER BY DESC on a MySQL column −

mysql> select *from DemoTable order by UserId DESC LIMIT 0,3;

This will produce the following output −

+--------+----------+
| UserId | UserName |
+--------+----------+
|      5 | Mike     |
|      4 | David    |
|      3 | Bob      |
+--------+----------+
3 rows in set (0.00 sec)