Question

If use the select statement:

select top (18) * from pippo;

And I use the delete statement:

delete top (18) from pippo;

I would like to know if the 18 selected and deleted rows are the same.
Any help?

EDIT after having accepted the answer:

I have found the following solution here: Delete the 'first' record from a table in SQL Server, without a WHERE condition

WITH  q AS
        (
        SELECT TOP 18 *
        FROM    pippo
        ORDER BY FIELD1 ASC /* You may want to add ORDER BY here */
        )
DELETE
FROM    q

With this solution I sort all the “pippo” table by FIELD1, and then I delete the first 18 rows.

Answer 1

Without an order by clause, there is no guaranteed ordering so no, they are not guaranteed to be the same.