>>>Seems fair for your purpose. But what if there were 10000 peoples with the same number of messages?!
>>
>>This is why I don't think it is correct. 50 is suppose to be the first 50 not the first 50 based on the number of messages.
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>We looked at using TOP for something similar and it didn't work. Checking the help file for SELECT SQL produces this gem:
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>You can specify from 1 to 32,767 rows. Rows with identical values for the columns specified in the ORDER BY clause are included in the query result. Therefore, if you specify 10 for nExpr, the query result can contain more than 10 rows if there are more than 10 rows with identical values for the columns specified in the ORDER BY clause.
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>We had to abondon the TOP method because of this.
>
That's why you choose a tiebreaker, if unique there is no problem except that some candidates for your list are truncated out.