Applies to: SQL Server Azure SQL Database Azure SQL Managed Instance Azure Synapse Analytics Analytics Platform System (PDW) SQL analytics endpoint in Microsoft Fabric Warehouse in Microsoft Fabric
Determines the partitioning and ordering of a rowset before the associated window function is applied. That is, the OVER clause defines a window or user-specified set of rows within a query result set. A window function then computes a value for each row in the window. You can use the OVER clause with functions to compute aggregated values such as moving averages, cumulative aggregates, running totals, or a top N per group results.
If PARTITION BY is not specified, the function treats all rows of the query result set as a single partition.Function will be applied on all rows in the partition if you don't specify ORDER BY clause.
Specifies the column by which the rowset is partitioned. value_expression can only refer to columns made available by the FROM clause. value_expression cannot refer to expressions or aliases in the select list. value_expression can be a column expression, scalar subquery, scalar function, or user-defined variable.
order_by_expression
Specifies a column or expression on which to sort. order_by_expression can only refer to columns made available by the FROM clause. An integer cannot be specified to represent a column name or alias.
COLLATE collation_name
Specifies that the ORDER BY operation should be performed according to the collation specified in collation_name. collation_name can be either a Windows collation name or a SQL collation name. For more information, see Collation and Unicode Support. COLLATE is applicable only for columns of type char, varchar, nchar, and nvarchar.
ASC DESC
Specifies that the values in the specified column should be sorted in ascending or descending order. ASC is the default sort order. Null values are treated as the lowest possible values.
Further limits the rows within the partition by specifying start and end points within the partition. This is done by specifying a range of rows with respect to the current row either by logical association or physical association. Physical association is achieved by using the ROWS clause.
The ROWS clause limits the rows within a partition by specifying a fixed number of rows preceding or following the current row. Alternatively, the RANGE clause logically limits the rows within a partition by specifying a range of values with respect to the value in the current row. Preceding and following rows are defined based on the ordering in the ORDER BY clause. The window frame "RANGE ... CURRENT ROW ..." includes all rows that have the same values in the ORDER BY expression as the current row. For example, ROWS BETWEEN 2 PRECEDING AND CURRENT ROW means that the window of rows that the function operates on is three rows in size, starting with 2 rows preceding until and including the current row.
ROWS or RANGE requires that the ORDER BY clause be specified. If ORDER BY contains multiple order expressions, CURRENT ROW FOR RANGE considers all columns in the ORDER BY list when determining the current row.
Used with either ROWS or RANGE to specify the lower (starting) and upper (ending) boundary points of the window. defines the boundary starting point and defines the boundary end point. The upper bound cannot be smaller than the lower bound.
Specifies that the window ends at the last row of the partition. UNBOUNDED FOLLOWING can only be specified as a window end point. For example RANGE BETWEEN CURRENT ROW AND UNBOUNDED FOLLOWING defines a window that starts with the current row and ends with the last row of the partition.
FOLLOWING
Specified with to indicate the number of rows or values to follow the current row. When FOLLOWING is specified as the window starting point, the ending point must be FOLLOWING. For example, ROWS BETWEEN 2 FOLLOWING AND 10 FOLLOWING defines a window that starts with the second row that follows the current row and ends with the tenth row that follows the current row. This specification is not allowed for RANGE.
If ROWS/RANGE is specified and is used for (short syntax) then this specification is used for the window frame boundary starting point and CURRENT ROW is used for the boundary ending point. For example "ROWS 5 PRECEDING" is equal to "ROWS BETWEEN 5 PRECEDING AND CURRENT ROW".
If ORDER BY is not specified entire partition is used for a window frame. This applies only to functions that do not require ORDER BY clause. If ROWS/RANGE is not specified but ORDER BY is specified, RANGE UNBOUNDED PRECEDING AND CURRENT ROW is used as default for window frame. This applies only to functions that have can accept optional ROWS/RANGE specification. For example, ranking functions cannot accept ROWS/RANGE, therefore this window frame is not applied even though ORDER BY is present and ROWS/RANGE is not.
The following example shows using the OVER clause with ROW_NUMBER function to display a row number for each row within a partition. The ORDER BY clause specified in the OVER clause orders the rows in each partition by the column SalesYTD. The ORDER BY clause in the SELECT statement determines the order in which the entire query result set is returned.
The following example uses the OVER clause with aggregate functions over all rows returned by the query. In this example, using the OVER clause is more efficient than using subqueries to derive the aggregate values.
The following example uses the AVG and SUM functions with the OVER clause to provide a moving average and cumulative total of yearly sales for each territory in the Sales.SalesPerson table. The data is partitioned by TerritoryID and logically ordered by SalesYTD. This means that the AVG function is computed for each territory based on the sales year. Notice that for TerritoryID 1, there are two rows for sales year 2005 representing the two sales people with sales that year. The average sales for these two rows is computed and then the third row representing sales for the year 2006 is included in the computation.
In this example, the OVER clause does not include PARTITION BY. This means that the function will be applied to all rows returned by the query. The ORDER BY clause specified in the OVER clause determines the logical order to which the AVG function is applied. The query returns a moving average of sales by year for all sales territories specified in the WHERE clause. The ORDER BY clause specified in the SELECT statement determines the order in which the rows of the query are displayed.
The following example shows using the OVER clause with an aggregate function in a calculated value. Notice that the aggregates are calculated by SalesOrderNumber and the percentage of the total sales order is calculated for each line of each SalesOrderNumber.
It has come to seem to me recently that this present moment must be to language something like what the Industrial Revolution was to textiles. A writer who works on the old system of production can spend days crafting a sentence, putting what feels like a worthy idea into language, only to find, once finished, that the internet has already produced countless sentences that are more or less just like it, even if these lack the same artisanal origin story that we imagine gives writing its soul. There is, it seems to me, no more place for writers and thinkers in our future than, since the nineteenth century, there has been for weavers.
This predicament is not confined to politics, and in fact engulfs all domains of human social existence. But it perhaps crystallizes most refractively in the case of politics, so we may as well start there.
The transformation of planes and cars from individual things into vectors of data in a vastly larger system has obvious advantages, safety foremost among them. An airplane is now protected by countless layers of abstraction, by its own sort of invisible bubble wrap, a technology descended from the first insurance policies placed on ships in the golden age of commerce.
This wrapping makes it possible for rational people (I am not one of them) to worry not about singular cataclysms, but rather about systematic problems that generally result in mere inconveniences, such as multi-plane backups on the runway. It is not surprising, in a historical moment in which such structural breakdowns are easily perceived as injustices, as occasions to ask to speak with a proverbial manager, that in more straightforwardly political matters people should spend more time worrying about structural violence than about violence: more time worrying about microaggressions or the emotional strain of having to listen to someone whose opinion does not entirely conform to their own, than about violence properly speaking, the blows that come down on individual heads like waves striking individual ships or individual birds getting stuck in individual jet engines on take-off.
And yet for me to try to insert myself into the metrics-driven system would be a performative contradiction, since the book itself is an extended philippic against this system. And so what I do? I play along, as best I can, until I start to feel ashamed of myself. I contradict myself.
My own book may be crap, but I am certain, when such an imbalance in profitability as the one I have just described emerges, between photojournalism and selfies, that it is all over. This is not a critical judgment. I am not saying that the photos of Pol Pot are good and the selfies are bad. I am saying that the one reveals a subject and the other reveals an algorithm, and that when everything in our society is driven and sustained in existence by the latter, it is all over.
As we enter our new technological serfdom, and along with liberal democracy we lose the individual human subject that has been built up slowly over the centuries as a locus of real value, we will be repeatedly made to know, by the iron rule of the metrics, that our creative choices and inclinations change nothing. Creative work will likely take on, for many, a mystical character, where it is carried out not from any belief in its power to influence the world as it is at present, as it may remain for the next millennia, but as a simple act of faith, as something that must be done, to misquote Tertullian, because it is absurd.