Posted by Erland Sommarskog on 12/19/06 08:20

Russ Rose (russrose@hotmail.com) writes:
> "Erland Sommarskog" <esquel@sommarskog.se> wrote in message
>> Logically the TOP 100 PERCENT and the ORDER BY means nothing at all.
>
> Would it mean nothing at all if requesting 10%?

Yes.

SELECT TOP 10 PERCENT EmployeeID, Salary
FROM Employees
ORDER BY Salary DESC

means "Give the tenth of the employees with the highest salary".

However if you would put this in a view and say:

SELECT EmployeeID, Salary FROM myview

There is no guarantee that the employees would be listed in salary order.
Any SELECT statement without ORDER BY tells SQL Server that it's free to
to returns the rows in any order it feels like.


--
Erland Sommarskog, SQL Server MVP, esquel@sommarskog.se

Books Online for SQL Server 2005 at
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/2005/downloads/books.mspx
Books Online for SQL Server 2000 at
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/prodinfo/previousversions/books.mspx

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