Here’s an interesting feature to that may greatly simplifie a few queries. TOP n WITH TIES works pretty much like TOP, except it orders the top records “densely” to include tied values.
Tag: windowed function
An introduction to windowed functions
Windowed functions are a powerful feature of T-SQL, allowing you to perform advanced aggregates. They provide a very efficient way of doing this as soon as you just get the hang of the OVER() clause.