In today's Sitecore Tip of the Day we will examine how to control the limit on the number of items in a query result set.

NOTE: The setting that controls the maximum number of items returned in a Sitecore Query also controls the maximum number of items in Lookup, Multilist and Valuelookup fields.

In your site's 'web.config' file, under the node /configuration/sitecore/settings you will find a <setting name="Query.MaxItems" ...> note. The value attribute of this node will determine the maximum number of items in a query result set. The default value of this node is 100, and setting the value of the node to 0 will effectively make the number of items unlimited. It should be noted that this can have a negative affect on system performance should a large query result be returned.

Note that this setting effects the Sitecore.Data.Database.SelectItems() and Sitecore.Data.Items.Item.Axes.SelectItems() query methods, as well as the other Sitecore.Data.Items.Item.Axes query methods. Ideally, these methods should not be used against a large data set. In their documentation, Sitecore suggests "using a search index or another solution where the system must frequently match items in a large branch," instead of using Sitecore Queries against large volumes of data.