title: SELECT Excerpt?
body: <p>Is it possible to <code>SELECT</code> only an excerpt of an (text based as <code>nvarchar</code>, <code>text</code>, ..) column?</p>
  
  <p>I'm especially asking for MySQL.</p>
  
  <p>If yes: How can I do this and would it be even worth it (respectively performance)?</p>
  
  <p>Why I'm asking this?<br>
  I'm building an overview about <em>items</em> which shall show only an excerpt of one field of one item. Since this text field could be up to 65535 characters I just want to get the first X characters to improve the query performance. </p>