ABSTRACT This article shows that adding a TOP clause to the SQL SELECT query may greatly increase its execution time. It also shows very effective solution to fix this problem. INTRODUCTION Lately I was conducting performance tests for a new project. I built sample database, filled it with data and began testing. The database schema is not important here. All you should know is that I had about 3M of records in main table [Articles] and about 11M of records in tables which I joined. I used this naive ......