I think I said in the article that ROW_NUMBER() and the other ranking functions are all good performing options over trying to code the same thing yourself a different way.
I do want to emphasize that what Luis and Chris said are equally important considerations. Indexing on the table may impact the performance you get out of ROW_NUMBER (improving it assuming your PARTITION/ORDER BY condition matches the CLUSTERED INDEX).
And like anything that is good, they could be misused to make them very, very bad.
Edit: Oh yes and Alan, thanks for the plug.
My thought question: Have you ever been told that your query runs too fast?
My advice:
INDEXing a poor-performing query is like putting sugar on cat food. Yeah, it probably tastes better but are you sure you want to eat it?
The path of least resistance can be a slippery slope. Take care that fixing your fixes of fixes doesn't snowball and end up costing you more than fixing the root cause would have in the first place.
Need to UNPIVOT? Why not CROSS APPLY VALUES instead?[/url]
Since random numbers are too important to be left to chance, let's generate some![/url]
Learn to understand recursive CTEs by example.[/url]
[url url=http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/St