MS SQL Server Interview Question:

How To Return the Top 5 Rows from a SELECT Query in MS SQL Server?

Submitted by: Administrator

If you want the query to return only the first 5 rows, you can use the "TOP 5" clause. The TOP clause takes one parameter to indicate how many top rows to return. The following statements returns the first 5 rows and 3 rows from the ggl_links:

SELECT TOP 5 id, url, counts, tag FROM ggl_links
ORDER BY counts DESC
GO
<pre>
id url counts tag
102 www.globalguideline.com 972 DBA
105 www.google.com 960 DBA
107 www.yahoo.com 828 SQA
103 www.mysql.com 728 SQA
106 www.php.net 439 DEV
</pre>
SELECT TOP 3 id, url, counts, tag FROM ggl_links
ORDER BY counts DESC
GO
<pre>
id url counts tag
102 www.globalguideline.com 972 DBA
105 www.google.com 960 DBA
107 www.yahoo.com 828 SQA
</pre>
Submitted by: Administrator