Posted by Serge Rielau on 12/23/06 23:17

Joe,

How do you answer the question:
Give me all employees of the 5 best paid managers?
This query is very easy to write with a nested TOP/ORDER BY.

SELECT * FROM EMP
WHERE MGRID IN (SELECT TOP 5 EMPID FROM MGR
ORDER BY SALARY DESC)

It gets really nasty without. Matter of fact I can't think of a way
without cheating (e.g. using ROW_NUMBER() to sneak in the ORDER BY
through the back door).

Are you saying SQL shouldn't be able to answer such queries without
escaping into the application? I doubt that's what Codd had in mind...

Cheers
Serge
--
Serge Rielau
DB2 Solutions Development
IBM Toronto Lab

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