I've been coming to these forums long enough to know that Joe Celko was going to respond to this one. I recall Joe discussing the TOP clause in another forum long ago. Correct me if I'm wrong Joe, but TOP isn't to be trusted to pull the "first rows in a table" because tables don't store rows in any particular order. Is that what you were going for in your re-education reprimand? I've always felt it was a little misleading...it should have been called LIMIT or something like that because that's all it's really doing...limiting the result set.

IMHO.

Gabe