Intersect/Except/Join Comparison Question

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Intersect/Except/Join Comparison Question

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DB_Newbie2007

Posted Wednesday, May 26, 2010 10:04 AM

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Last Login: Wednesday, May 15, 2013 10:47 AM
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OK, maybe I am missing something here. I was reviewing an forum discussion about ignoring duplicates,
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic856838-392-2.aspx. One of the posts appeared to be interesting, so I thought I would try some speed/IO tests comparing the various insert methods. However, I appear to be having problems with comparing the EXCEPT to the LEFT OUTER JOIN and the results I get back.

Here is the modified version of the post from the forum:

---- 0: Create some tables, data in tables
-- New Transactions
CREATE TABLE #Transactions
(
TranId BIGINT PRIMARY KEY,
TranDate DATETIME,
TranCode VARCHAR(4),
Amount MONEY
);

-- Existing Transactions
CREATE TABLE #VendorExport
(
TranId BIGINT PRIMARY KEY,
TranDate DATETIME,
TranCode VARCHAR(4),
Amount MONEY
);

-- Generate one million existing transactions (takes about three seconds)
WITH Data (rn)
AS (
SELECT TOP (1000000)
ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY C1.object_id, C1.column_id)
FROM master.sys.columns C1,
master.sys.columns C2,
master.sys.columns C3
)
INSERT #VendorExport(TranID, TranDate, TranCode, Amount)
SELECT rn,
DATEADD(HOUR, Data.rn, '19950101'),
CASE rn % 2 WHEN 0 THEN 'room' WHEN 1 THEN 'tax' ELSE NULL END,
RAND(CHECKSUM(NEWID())) * 25 + 1
FROM Data;

-- Generate new data, with some overlaps
-- (The original generate script used TOP (10000) )
WITH Data (rn)
AS (
SELECT TOP (1000)
ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY (SELECT NULL))
FROM master.sys.columns C1,
master.sys.columns C2
)
INSERT #Transactions (TranId, TranDate, TranCode, Amount)
SELECT rn * 100,
DATEADD(HOUR, Data.rn, '19950101'),
CASE rn % 2 WHEN 0 THEN 'room' WHEN 1 THEN 'tax' ELSE NULL END,
rn % 25
FROM Data;
-- Generate new data, with some overlaps
--- (Added this, since the original script did not appear to generate "new" data?)
WITH Data (rn)
AS (
SELECT TOP (1000)
ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY (SELECT NULL))
FROM master.sys.columns C1,
master.sys.columns C2
)
INSERT #Transactions (TranId, TranDate, TranCode, Amount)
SELECT rn * 10002,
DATEADD(HOUR, Data.rn, '19950101'),
CASE rn % 2 WHEN 0 THEN 'room' WHEN 1 THEN 'tax' ELSE NULL END,
rn % 25
FROM Data;

---- 1: Select results using EXCEPT
SELECT TranID, TranDate, TranCode, Amount
FROM #Transactions
EXCEPT
SELECT TranID, TranDate, TranCode, Amount
FROM #VendorExport;
---- 2: Select results using LEFT OUTER JOIN
SELECT T.TranID, T.TranDate, T.TranCode, T.Amount
FROM #Transactions T
LEFT OUTER JOIN #VendorExport V
ON T.TranID = V.TranID
WHERE V.TranID IS NULL
---- 3: Select results using INNER JOIN
SELECT T.TranID, T.TranDate, T.TranCode, T.Amount
FROM #Transactions T
INNER JOIN #VendorExport V
ON T.TranID = V.TranID
---- 4: Select results using INTERSECT
SELECT TranID, TranDate, TranCode, Amount
FROM #Transactions
INTERSECT
SELECT TranID, TranDate, TranCode, Amount
FROM #VendorExport;

---- Tidy up
DROP TABLE
#Transactions,
#VendorExport;

Step 1 (EXCEPT) generates 2000 records;
Step 2 (LEFT OUTER JOIN) generates 901 records;
Step 3 (INNER JOIN) generates 1099 records;
Step 4 (INTERSECT) has 0 records.

The questions:
a) Why the 1099 records in Step 3 are the same as the first 1099 records in Step 1?
b) Why does the INNER JOIN return 1099 records but the INTERSECT returns 0 records?

Argue your limitations and sure enough they will be yours (Richard Bach, Illusions)

Post #928420

DB_Newbie2007

Posted Wednesday, May 26, 2010 10:08 AM

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Group: General Forum Members
Last Login: Wednesday, May 15, 2013 10:47 AM
Points: 179, Visits: 1,086

Just to make sure I understood the Intersect/Except operators, I tried a variation of the examples from BOL. I put debug(s) around it all just to run various tests without having to re-generate the TEMP tables all the time:

DECLARE @DEBUG INT;
SET @DEBUG = 1;

IF (@DEBUG = 0)
BEGIN
CREATE TABLE #TableA (col1 int);
CREATE TABLE #TableB (col1 int);
CREATE TABLE #TableC (col1 int);

INSERT INTO #TableA
SELECT NULL UNION
SELECT 1 UNION
SELECT 2 UNION
SELECT 2 UNION
SELECT 2 UNION
SELECT 2 UNION
SELECT 3 UNION
SELECT 4 UNION
SELECT 4;
INSERT INTO #TableA VALUES (NULL);
INSERT INTO #TableA VALUES (NULL);

INSERT INTO #TableB
SELECT NULL UNION
SELECT 1 UNION
SELECT 3 UNION
SELECT 4 UNION
SELECT 4;

INSERT INTO #Tablec
SELECT 2 UNION
SELECT 2 UNION
SELECT 2 UNION
SELECT 4 UNION
SELECT 4;

SELECT * from #TableA;
SELECT * FROM #TableB;
SELECT * FROM #TableC;
END;

IF (@Debug = 1)
BEGIN
SELECT col1
FROM #TableA
EXCEPT
SELECT col1 FROM #TableB;

SELECT A.Col1
FROM #TableA A
LEFT OUTER JOIN #TableB B
ON A.Col1 = B.Col1
WHERE B.Col1 IS NULL;

SELECT *
FROM #TableA
INTERSECT
SELECT * FROM #TableB;

SELECT A.Col1
FROM #TableA A
INNER JOIN #TableB B
ON A.Col1 = B.Col1
END

IF (@DEBUG = 10)
DROP TABLE #TableA, #TableB, #TableC;

All of the results here are as expected. But that still leaves the questions as to why the first tests had differences..... Sad

Argue your limitations and sure enough they will be yours (Richard Bach, Illusions)

Post #928426

kramaswamy

Posted Friday, May 28, 2010 2:56 PM

Right there with Babe

Group: General Forum Members
Last Login: Friday, May 17, 2013 1:53 PM
Points: 785, Visits: 1,534

The reason your results are not corresponding to what you would have expected them to be, is that you're not understanding the operations correctly.

EXCEPT and INTERSECT compare the *entire* data set.

EXCEPT returns all the rows which exist in Table 1 but do NOT exist in table 2 - for *ALL* columns.

Take the following information as example data for what I'm going to describe below:

SELECT * FROM #Transactions WHERE tranID = 100

TranId	TranDate	TranCode	Amount
100	1995-01-01 01:00:00.000	tax	1.00

-----------------

SELECT * FROM #VendorExport WHERE tranID = 100

TranId	TranDate	TranCode	Amount
100	1995-01-05 04:00:00.000	room	3.5587

When doing the EXCEPT query, the row would be returned. This is because although they have the same TranID, they are different in their TranDate, TranCode, and Amount fields.

When doing the LEFT OUTER JOIN query, the row would not be returned. This is because the LEFT OUTER JOIN query is looking to match on TranID alone, and since both tables share the TranID in question, the "WHERE v.TranID IS NULL" part of the query would cause it to be excluded.

When doing the INNER JOIN query, the row would be returned. This is because the INNER JOIN is joining only when the TranID matches. The reason why you are seeing the "same" information as the records from Query 1, is because you are looking only at the columns from #Transactions. If you were to show the columns from #VendorExport, then you would see the different results brought back by the JOIN.

Finally, when doing the INTERSECT query, the row would not be returned. The reason why the INNER JOIN query returns 1099 rows while the INTERSECT query returns 0 rows, is because of the way INTERSECT (and EXCEPT, for that matter) works. INTERSECT returns the opposite result set of EXCEPT. It returns for you all the rows which are *exactly* the same between the two tables (while EXCEPT returns the rows which are *not* exactly the same).

Post #929930

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