Hi Howard,

I agree with your comments about the reason for deleting the 'nth' row in no particular order, but I can't for the life of me understand what the extract above is getting at. A query like the following is guaranteed to delete the row identified as #4 (peculiar though the logic is):

DELETE E

FROM (

SELECT rn = ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY (SELECT 0))

FROM dbo.Example

) AS E

WHERE E.rn = 4

;

Naturally, we would normally use a deterministic order by with the row number window function to identify the row or rows to delete.

Paul