Assume your table has 1000 rows. You specify Top 10 With Ties ordered descending by a quantity field. If the Top 10 quantities are unique, you'll get 10 values. However, if the 10th value has duplicates, you'll also get all the duplicates regardless of the number of duplicates. That may result in 11 or more rows.
Usually the result set will contain fewer than 1000 rows from the table. However, if the table contains only 10 unique values, all 1000 rows will be returned when With Ties is specified. If you don't specify With Ties then only 10 rows will be returned regardless of the number of unique values or duplicates.
I hope this clarifies the point of using the TOP statement. Terry L. Broadbent
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