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N008-E2 Tier 1 · Foundations · easy ecommerce · Brightlane

Return the ID, name, and price of the 3 cheapest products

Part of LIMIT and OFFSET in SQL

The problem

Brightlane's promotions team is featuring entry-level products in the weekly newsletter and wants the three lowest-priced items.

Write a query to return the ID, name, and price of the 3 cheapest products.

Assumptions:

  • The products table contains every product in Brightlane's catalogue.
  • When two products share the same price, the product with the lower id takes priority.

Output:

  • One row per product, with columns id, name, and price, sorted by price ascending (and id ascending for ties), capped at 3 rows.
Schema · ecommerce 5 tables
categories
id integer
name text
parent_id? integer
products
id integer
name text
category_id integer
price numeric
stock_qty integer
attributes? jsonb
order_items
id integer
order_id integer
product_id integer
quantity integer
unit_price numeric
customers
id integer
name text
email text
city? text
country text
created_at timestamptz
is_active boolean
orders
id integer
customer_id integer
ordered_at timestamptz
status text
total_amount numeric
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Solution query
SELECT
  id,
  name,
  price
FROM
  products
ORDER BY
  price
LIMIT
  3

The shape

Sorting price ascending puts the cheapest products at the top of the result, and LIMIT 3 cuts the output at the three rows the promotions team needs for the newsletter.

Clause by clause

  • SELECT id, name, price picks the three columns the newsletter slot displays.
  • FROM products reads every product in the catalogue. The bottom-three filter happens via sort plus cap, not via a WHERE clause.
  • ORDER BY price sorts ascending by default — smallest first. Picture Frame 8x10 and HDMI Cable 2m both sit at 12.99; the tie resolves with id 60 ahead of id 49, matching the prompt's note that lower id takes priority.
  • LIMIT 3 caps the output at three rows. PostgreSQL completes the sort, hands back the first three, and stops.

Why this and not ORDER BY price DESC LIMIT 3

DESC would put the most expensive products at the top. That's the right shape for a "top three" query — the wrong shape here. "Cheapest" means smallest price first, which is what ascending order produces. The cap is the same; what flips between top-N and bottom-N is the direction of the sort, not the LIMIT.

You practiced combining ORDER BY ASC with LIMIT to fetch the bottom-N rows. The recurring shape: sort ascending so the smallest values surface first, then cap with LIMIT — the mirror image of "top N" via DESC + LIMIT.

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