David Fowler understand the order of things:
This was an interesting question that I was asked yesterday and something that I’d never really thought of before. Can you delete the top x number of rows based on an ORDER BY?
Why would you want to do that? Well let’s just assume that we have a ‘people’ table and some strange bug in the application has cause the need to delete the top 10 oldest females for whatever reason (I know, it’s very contrived example and not the situation that my colleague was facing but it’ll do to illustrate the point).
Click through for one way which doesn’t work and two ways which do.