how to select first N rows from a table in T-SQL?

Question

Is there any way to select, for example, first 10 rows of a table in T-SQL (working MSSQL)?
I think I saw something in Oracle defined as rownum meta variable, used in a

Answer 1

select top(@count) * from users

If @count is a constant, you can drop the parentheses:

select top 42 * from users

(the latter works on SQL Server 2000 too, while the former requires at least 2005)