Techniques are described for executing an analytical query with a top-N clause. In an embodiment, a stream of tuples are received by each of the processing units from a data source identified in the query. The processing unit uses a portion of a received tuple to identify the partition that the tuple is assigned to. For each partition, the processing unit maintains a top-N data store that stores an N number of received tuples that match the criteria of top N tuples according to the query. The received tuple is compared to the N number of tuples to determine whether to store the received tuple and discard an already stored tuple, or to discard the received tuple. After all the tuples have been similarly processed by the processing units, all the top-N data stores for each partition are merged, yielding the top N number of tuples for each partition to return as a result of the query.