I got the question right, assuming that the submitter was unaware of the fact that there is no guarantee for this behaviour. I was then surprised to see in the explanation that he is in fact aware of this, and still marked Ann as the correct answer. I don't get this - basically, the explanation says that the correct answer is "undetermined", but that answer is not given.
A weak question.
ronmoses (12/21/2010)
For educational purposes, I would genuinely appreciate it if one of the folks who take issue with the "most of the time" factor could illustrate a scenario in which that script returns different results.Thanks!
Ron
Read this blog post I wrote a few years ago.
For this specific scenario, without any changes to the code, the data, etc, I don't think we can make this script return different results. But Microsoft can. Since they didn't document or otherwise guarantee this behaviour, future versions of SQL Server, or even service packs and hotfixes, may change this behaviour. Remember what happened to all those views that abused the pre-SQL2005 "TOP 100 PERCENT ... ORDER BY" behaviour? And what about GROUP BY without ORDER BY in SQL 6.5 and older?