Question

I am having difficulty writing a Stored Procedure that will query a list of students with their associative marks.

Retrieving a List of Students – trivial Retrieving the top five marks per student – trivial…SELECT TOP (5) * WHERE StudentID = X

Combining these two, I am a bit confused.

I would like the Stored Procedure to return two tables:

• First table that lists students by a criteria
• Second table: a list of grades (5 each per student in the First Table)

Second table is when it is tricky. I can get all the marks per student in First Table but not sure how I can limit it to top 5.

Answer 1

If you’re using SQL 2005 or greater, this should work. If not, there are other slightly messier ways to do it.

WITH Student_Grades AS (     SELECT         S.student_id,         G.grade,         RANK() OVER (PARTITION BY S.student_id, ORDER BY G.exam_date DESC) AS grade_rank     FROM         Students S     LEFT OUTER JOIN Grades G ON         G.student_id = S.student_id ) SELECT     student_id,     grade FROM     Student_Grades WHERE     grade_rank <= 5