Abstract
SQL Server is designed to work best on sets of data. By definition, sets of data are unordered; it is not until the query’s ORDER BY clause that the final results of the query become ordered. Windowing functions allow your query to look at a subset of the rows being returned by your query before applying the function to just those rows. In doing so, the functions allow you to specify an order for your unordered subset of data so as to evaluate that data in a particular order. This is performed before the final result is ordered (and in addition to it). This allows for processes that previously required self-joins, the use of inefficient inequality operators, or non-set-based row-by-row (iterative) processing to use more efficient set-based processing.
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© 2015 Jason Brimhall, Jonathan Gennick, and Wayne Sheffield
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Brimhall, J., Gennick, J., Sheffield, W. (2015). Chapter 7: Windowing Functions. In: SQL Server T-SQL Recipes. Apress, Berkeley, CA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-0061-2_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-0061-2_7
Publisher Name: Apress, Berkeley, CA
Print ISBN: 978-1-4842-0062-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-4842-0061-2
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