Retrieve only 50 words

I am creating an RSS feed and I need to limit what is shown in the <description> tag to about 50 words. What is the best way to do this when pulling data from a column?

select date, testimony from testimonies where ???

Thanks!

i wouldn’t bother trying to do this with sql, not unless the text that you want the 50 words of is many, many thousands of bytes long

just pull the row you want and extract the 50 words when you build the feed data