PostgreSQL 13: LIMIT … WITH TIES

September 16, 2020/in 2ndQuadrant, Alvaro's PlanetPostgreSQL, PostgreSQL 13 /by

Álvaro Herrera
One of the new features in PostgreSQL 13 is the SQL-standard WITH TIES clause to
use with LIMIT — or, as the standard calls that, FETCH FIRST n ROWS. Thanks are due
to Surafel Temesgen as initial patch author; Tomas Vondra and yours truly for some
additional code fixes; and reviewers Andrew Gierth and Erik Rijkers. You can peruse
the commit message.

[ T ] Maggie Taylor - A Caucus-Race (Alice in Wonderland) (2007)

A caucus race. An illustration by Maggie Taylor.
Ties are very frequently when ranking things; for instance, in a caucus race you
could have many ties, and for sure you don’t want to deprive participants of their
prizes! What WITH TIES does is pretty simple: it adds any following row or rows to
your result set, if they rank equal to the last row returned per the LIMIT clause,
according to the ORDER BY claus