How to update and order by using ms sql

Question

Ideally I want to do this:

UPDATE TOP (10) messages SET status=10 WHERE status=0 ORDER BY priority DESC;

In English: I want to get the top 10 available (status=0) messages from the DB and lock them (status=10). A message with a higher priority should be gotten first.

unfortunately MS SQL doesn't allow an order by clause in the update.

Anyway how to circumvent this?

Answer 1

You can do a subquery where you first get the IDs of the top 10 ordered by priority and then update the ones that are on that sub query:

UPDATE  messages 
SET status=10 
WHERE ID in (SELECT TOP (10) Id 
             FROM Table 
             WHERE status=0 
             ORDER BY priority DESC);