Basics of TOP Operator
The TOP keyword in SQL Server is a non-ANSI standard expression to limit query results to some set of pre-specified rows. As an argument, it takes 0 to positive Bigint (9223372036854775807) and anything beyond or less gives an error message. TOP without an order by clause, in production, seems buggy because it can produce results in any order depending on the current schema and execution plan. You can also specify a percent with TOP expression which returns only the expression percent of rows from the result set. Float expressions used in TOP percent are rounded up to the next integer value.
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