@@ROWCOUNT and SELECT statements - I want to understand this

Running Small Business Server 2003 premium (SQL Server 2000).

My question :

When I want to loop through  records I have been creating temp tables with a record ID field in them and writing the data to the temp table.  Then I usually execute a SELECT stmt to determine the beginning recordID and the ending record ID.

I was wondering:  



1.)      After performing a SELECT, does @@ROWCOUNT contain the number of records returned by the SELECT statement?

2.)      Lets say I execute a SELECT statement having a clause like:
                 ORDER BY  field1 DESC

            Does the @@ROWCOUNT number the records in the order they are sorted?



The SQL Server online help is unhelpful on this topic.

Thanks for your help.
Start Free Trial