Symptoms
Assume that you have a query that use some ranking functions, such as the ROW_NUMBER() function. When you run the query against a table in Microsoft SQL Server 2008, you may receive an incorrect result when a parallel execution plan is used for the query. Note This issue has been fixed in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 (SP1) and later versions.
Resolution
The issue was first fixed in the following cumulative update of SQL Server.
Cumulative Update 14 for SQL Server 2008 SP3 /en-us/help/2893410
Each new cumulative update for SQL Server contains all the hotfixes and all the security fixes that were included with the previous cumulative update. Check out the latest cumulative updates for SQL Server:
Status
Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed in the "Applies to" section.
References
For more information about the hotfix for the similar issues, click the following article numbers to view the articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
970198 FIX: You receive an incorrect result when you run a query that uses the row_number function in SQL Server 2008 or in SQL Server 2008 R2
2433265 FIX: You may receive an incorrect result when you run a query that uses the ROW_NUMBER function together with a left outer join in SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2
2589980 FIX: Incorrect results or constraint violation when you run a SELECT or DML statement that uses the row_number function and a parallel execution plan in SQL Server 2008
