SELECT TOP 1* FROM TicketActivity

SELECT MIN(TicketId) FROM TicketActivity

The above 2 queries are different.

But you can also run the min query as below :

select top 1 ticketid from TicketActivity order by ticketid

Check the sub-tree cost of bot the queries and see which one is more beneficial.Most probably the cost would be same but i am confident that in any case the query with orderby clause would not be using Stream Aggregates and should be a better choice .

HTH