That's what it does, but if I'm not mistaken (at least in my experience with MariaDB) it'll also return immediately once it ran up to the limit and not try to process further rows. If you have an expensive subquery in the SELECT (...) AS `column_name`, it won't run that for every row before returning the first 10 (when using LIMIT 10) unless you ORDERed BY that column_name. Other components like the WHERE clause might also require that it reads every row before finding the ten matches. So mostly yes but not necessarily