Preserving ORDER BY in SELECT INTO

Question

I have a T-SQL query that takes data from one table and copies it into a new table but only rows meeting a certain condition:

SELECT VibeFGEvents.* 
INTO Vib         


        

Answer 1

The reason why one would desire this (a specific order) is because you cannot define the order in a subquery, so, the idea is that, if you create a table variable, THEN make a query from that table variable, you would think you would retain the order(say, to concatenate rows that must be in order- say for XML or json), but you can't. So, what do you do? The answer is to force SQL to order it by using TOP in your select (just pick a number high enough to cover all your rows).