What does TOP mean ?

[Walter Landry]

Markus Demleitner <msdemlei at ari.uni-heidelberg.de> wrote:
>> I thought that the difference between MAXREC and TOP is that MAXREC
>> requires an overflow indicator, while TOP would prohibit it.
> 
> Interesting thought -- is it intended to work this way? [it doesn't
> in DaCHS, and a quick search in the 1.1 specs didn't give me anything
> pointing in that direction]

It turns out that I am a bit confused.  I was thinking about TAP.  In
any case, Section 8.10.2 of SSAP only talks about MAXREC.

I would argue that TAP is even more explicit.  TOP in TAP only shows
up in ADQL, which means that if you only got 10 results from "TOP 10",
then there is no error.  Therefore, to keep TAP and SSAP from being
gratuitously different, I think these keywords should have identical
semantics.

However, in SSAP, TOP does have an undefined, implicit, perhaps table
specific rank.  That seems like a bad idea, but I guess that ship has
already sailed.

Cheers,
Walter Landry