One of the more advanced tricks I like to exploit are analytic Top-N queries. Although I am using them for quite a while, I recently discovered a “limitation” that I was not aware of. Actually—to be honest—it’s not a limitation; it is a missing optimization in a rarely used feature that can easily worked around. I must admit that I ask for quite a lot in that case.

The article starts with a general introduction into Top-N queries, applies that technique to analytic queries and explains the case where I miss an optimization. But is is really worth all that efforts? The article concludes with my answer to that question.