You're looking for the LIMIT clause in SQL. Now, because relational databases never guarentee that their results are returned in any order, you have to combine it with a ORDER BY clause so the results are sorted.

Another note is that you should avoid the use of SELECT *. It's slow, and here again, relational databses don't guarentee the columns will be in order (I wish more databases would pseduo-randomize the column order just to discourage this practice). You should instead specify the columns you want explicitly, e.g., SELECT Date, Description, Article WHERE . . ..

Finally, use placeholders. They're not too hard to work with, they're more secure, and they help statement caching. I have yet to see a good reason not to use them whenever possible. The nodes linked to should have some good examples of using them.