Question:
How do I find out the top-five best sale items? I want the maximum five items to be listed.
Answer:
In version 7, SQL Server has conveniently provided the TOP keyword. So, using the pubs database for an example, the following query will return the books with the top three sales:
use pubsgoselect top 3 title_id,sum(qty)from salesgroup by title_idorder by sum(qty) desc
Please note that the keyword TOP does not mean “highest” or “maximum”; it simply means the first n rows of the result set. That is why, in order to get the three books with the highest sales, I had to sort the result set in descending order. Had I allowed the default sort order of ascending, I would have received the three books with the lowest sales.
Another option with the TOP keyword is to use TOP N PERCENT. This limits the result set to the first n percentage of rows.