Select top 10 records for each category

Question

I want to return top 10 records from each section in one query. Can anyone help with how to do it? Section is one of the columns in the table.

Database is SQL Serve

Answer 1

I know this thread is a little bit old but I've just bumped into a similar problem (select the newest article from each category) and this is the solution I came up with :

WITH [TopCategoryArticles] AS (
    SELECT 
        [ArticleID],
        ROW_NUMBER() OVER (
            PARTITION BY [ArticleCategoryID]
            ORDER BY [ArticleDate] DESC
        ) AS [Order]
    FROM [dbo].[Articles]
)
SELECT [Articles].* 
FROM 
    [TopCategoryArticles] LEFT JOIN 
    [dbo].[Articles] ON
        [TopCategoryArticles].[ArticleID] = [Articles].[ArticleID]
WHERE [TopCategoryArticles].[Order] = 1

This is very similar to Darrel's solution but overcomes the RANK problem that might return more rows than intended.