Microsoft® SQL Server® 2012 Bible

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Part II: Building Databases and Working with Data

FIGURE 6-4

Within Management Studio’s Query Designer, you can defi ne the sort order and sort type in the col-

umn pane. The TOP() predicate is set for the Query Designer inside the query’s Properties page.

Although there is not a limit on the number of columns that you can specify in the

ORDER BY clause of the select statement, an internal operation exists that indirectly

enforces a limit. During a sort operation, a worktable see Chapter 44, “Interpreting Query

Execution Plans” is created. This worktable has a maximum row size of 8060 bytes. As a

result, this limits the total size of the columns specifi ed in an ORDER BY clause.

Specifying the ORDER BY Using Column Names

The best way to sort the result set is to completely spell out the ORDER BY columns:

USE AdventureWorks;

SELECT FirstName, LastName

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