Question:

In big query I am running a query on exported tables from GA.

I can not seem to get big query to limit the results. Here is a sample query, quite basic.

SELECT * FROM [1111111.ga_sessions_20140318] LIMIT 20000

The result set returns but with 7 million+ rows! I have tried this several different ways, ie. out to a table, just return result set, use cache results, don't use cached results, etc. No matter which table I try to query it always returns the entire table.

This is basically the same as the sample query big query gives when clicking on the query table button except I changed the limit value from 1000 to 20000.

Anyone have any insight?

As noted by the comment on the original question:

<blockquote>

"Is it possible that the number of rows shown at the bottom of the result set returned in big query is my 20000 main object records plus all the nested records?"

</blockquote>

The answer is yes: BigQuery will apply the limit to the number of rows in the response, but if there are nested records involved, those will be flattened in the output.