How to update and order by using ms sql

Toad picture Toad · Mar 17, 2009 · Viewed 99k times · Source

Ideally I want to do this:

UPDATE TOP (10) messages SET status=10 WHERE status=0 ORDER BY priority DESC;

In English: I want to get the top 10 available (status=0) messages from the DB and lock them (status=10). A message with a higher priority should be gotten first.

unfortunately MS SQL doesn't allow an order by clause in the update.

Anyway how to circumvent this?

Answer

Quassnoi picture Quassnoi · Mar 17, 2009
WITH    q AS
        (
        SELECT  TOP 10 *
        FROM    messages
        WHERE   status = 0
        ORDER BY
                priority DESC
        )
UPDATE  q
SET     status = 10