Hugo,

I don't disagree with any of that really; as I said before, I think both answers are correct, I just happen to prefer one over the other. My preference is based on:

We are talking about the logical order of processing here, so it seems wrong to me to rely on current implementation details to argue the point. Yes, presentation ORDER BY and TOP ORDER BY will be the same as the product stands - but that seems to be a consequence of the current restrictions of the language, not a logical restriction.

Let us imagine that SQL Server supports the TOP OVER() construction in the next release -which logical description would you prefer then?

Fascinating stuff 🙂

Paul