quote:
Antares, do you mean if I join a bunch of tables together that collectively exceed the row limit & try to sort them it wouldn't work?This doesn't seem right. Or do you mean only if I first combined rows (String Concatenation)?
If you create a join of tables with a column list that will create a resultset row width of greater than 8k and have a ORDER BY in it it will throw and error. But seems to only if the TempDB is used. What happens on some ordering functions is that a temp table is created to do the sorting and when this is done the temp table is subject to the 8k limit. I don't have a good example around to demonstrate on-hand.