CELKO (12/6/2016)
Using proprietary dialect constructs like CROSS APPLY and TOP make optimization difficult and portability impossible.
Joe you make me laugh. You know that we have two options, either portable code or fast code. You can't have both. Your continued preaching about portability is seriously one of most tired and absurd arguments. Businesses don't just decide to switch to a new DBMS as frequently as you seem to think. In my experience that has happened exactly 0 times.
How would you propose we get the TOP row? We could use a query to get that one on its own but all the DBMS have their own version of TOP, LIMIT etc.
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Understanding and Using APPLY (Part 1) - http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/APPLY/69953/
Understanding and Using APPLY (Part 2) - http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/APPLY/69954/