All,

OK, add the "EXCEPT" and "INTERSECT" clauses to my list. I was asked to compare a file used to load our master parts data from last week's file to this week's file. I started in the column by column method (yuck), then to using checksum values on the rows and then found the "EXCEPT" gem. Don't know about performance on larger tables, but for around 50,000 rows it works great.

Good article here is:

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic848796-2596-1.aspx

External Link:

https://www.simple-talk.com/sql/performance/the-except-and-intersect-operators-in-sql-server/

Anton