Are these two queries the same - GROUP BY vs. DISTINCT?

Question

These two queries seem to return the same results. Is that coincidental or are they really the same?

1.

SELECT t.ItemNumber,
  (SELECT TOP 1 ItemDes         


        

Answer 1

Same results but the second one seems to have a more expensive sort step to apply the DISTINCT on my quick test.

Both were beaten out of sight by ROW_NUMBER though...

with T as
(
SELECT ItemNumber, 
       ItemDescription,
       ROW_NUMBER() OVER ( PARTITION BY ItemNumber ORDER BY DateCreated DESC) AS RN
FROM Transactions
)
SELECT * FROM T
WHERE RN=1

edit ...which in turn was thumped by Joe's solution on my test setup.

Test Setup

CREATE TABLE Transactions
(
ItemNumber INT not null,
ItemDescription VARCHAR(50) not null,
DateCreated DATETIME not null
)

INSERT INTO Transactions
SELECT 
number, NEWID(),DATEADD(day, cast(rand(CAST(newid() as varbinary))*10000 
  as int),getdate()) 
FROM master.dbo.spt_values

ALTER TABLE dbo.Transactions ADD CONSTRAINT
    PK_Transactions PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED 
    (ItemNumber,DateCreated)