Discovering Ranking Functions
Kathi Kellenberger, Clayton Groom · Apress eBooks · 2015
The four ranking functions were introduced to T-SQL by Microsoft in 2005. Three of the functions, ROW_NUMBER , RANK , and DENSE_RANK , assign a sequential number to each row in a query's results. The fourth ranking function, NTILE , divides the rows by assigning a bucket number to the each row in the results. The group of low ranking rows get an NTILE value of 1 while the highest ranking group of rows are assigned the top number. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.