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The panel is gated behind the pro-limits feature flag. Enforcement of any stored override is always active — only writing the limits requires the flag. Contact Lightdash to enable it for your organization, or self-hosters can set LIGHTDASH_ENABLE_FEATURE_FLAGS=pro-limits.
The Export limits panel lets organization admins raise or lower the two values that bound how much data a query can return and how large a CSV or Excel export can be. Without an override, every organization inherits the instance defaults set by LIGHTDASH_QUERY_MAX_LIMIT and LIGHTDASH_CSV_CELLS_LIMIT. Use this panel when a specific team needs to run wider or longer queries than the rest of the instance — for example, a single org on shared Cloud infrastructure that needs to export an 8M-cell CSV while keeping other orgs at the default.

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What you can configure

Both fields accept a positive integer. Leave a field empty to inherit the instance default. The CSV/Excel cells value is capped server-side at the higher of LIGHTDASH_CSV_MAX_LIMIT (default 5,000,000) and the current LIGHTDASH_CSV_CELLS_LIMIT. The query rows value cannot exceed LIGHTDASH_QUERY_MAX_LIMIT. The panel shows the active ceiling next to each input. The two limits are independent — raising the query-row limit does not change CSV export size, and vice versa. An All results export is bounded by the cell limit alone: it returns up to the cell limit divided by the number of columns (dimensions, metrics, and table calculations). With the default of 100,000 cells, a 10-column export holds up to 10,000 rows. To allow a larger export, set the cell limit to the number of rows you need multiplied by the number of columns.

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Google Sheets dashboard exports

Exporting a dashboard to Google Sheets is bounded separately, because Google caps a single spreadsheet at 10 million cells across all of its tabs. These limits are fixed and are not configurable from this panel: A tab trimmed by either limit is still created and still contains data — it’s marked Truncated in the export’s summary tab, along with the number of rows that were written. The export as a whole still succeeds.

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Set per-organization limits

  1. Go to Settings → Organization → Limits, which opens Query and export limits.
  2. Enter a value for Maximum query rows, Maximum CSV/Excel cells, or both.
  3. Click Save.
To revert to the instance default, clear the field and save. Changes take effect immediately for new queries and exports. Existing scheduled deliveries pick up the new limit on their next run.

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How limits are enforced

A Google Sheets Sync never applies the Maximum CSV/Excel cells override — raising it has no effect on a Sync’s ceiling. Because Maximum query rows can’t exceed LIGHTDASH_QUERY_MAX_LIMIT, an org admin on shared Cloud infrastructure can’t self-serve a higher ceiling for Syncs from this panel; that’s only possible on a dedicated or self-hosted instance, by changing the instance default itself. This doesn’t apply to the one-off export a dashboard to Google Sheets, which is bounded by its own fixed cell and row limits, not by either org setting.