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

I have run into the same issue and one reason I have needed to preserve the order is when I try to use ROLLUP to get a weighted average based on the raw data and not an average of what is in that column. For instance, say I want to see the average of profit based on number of units sold by four store locations? I can do this very easily by creating the equation Profit / #Units = Avg. Now I include a ROLLUP in my GROUP BY so that I can also see the average across all locations. Now I think to myself, "This is good info but I want to see it in order of Best Average to Worse and keep the Overall at the bottom (or top) of the list)." The ROLLUP will fail you in this so you take a different approach.

Why not create row numbers based on the sequence (order) you need to preserve?

    SELECT OrderBy = ROW_NUMBER() OVER(PARTITION BY 'field you want to count' ORDER BY 'field(s) you want to use ORDER BY')
    , VibeFGEvents.*  
    FROM VibeFGEvents
    LEFT OUTER JOIN VibeFGEventsStudyStart
    ON 
        CHARINDEX(REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(logName, 'MyVibe ', ''), ' new laptop', ''), ' old laptop', ''), excelFilename) > 0
        AND VibeFGEventsStudyStart.MIN_TitleInstID <= VibeFGEvents.TitleInstID
        AND VibeFGEventsStudyStart.MIN_WinInstId <= VibeFGEvents.WndInstID
    WHERE VibeFGEventsStudyStart.excelFilename IS NOT NULL

Now you can use the OrderBy field from your table to set the order of values. I removed the ORDER BY statement from the query above since it does not affect how the data is loaded to the table.