Steve,

It is mentioned at

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic793765-145-1.aspx

It uses CTE with delete. Very neat.

create table t(a varchar(1))

insert into t values('b')

insert into t values('a')

insert into t values('b')

insert into t values('a')

with

dup as

(

select a,row_number() over(partition by a order by a) rn

from t

)

delete from dup where rn>1

In Oracle this would be pretty straight forward via the use of the pseudo rowid column that all tables have.

This references a physical (and thus unique) address of each row.

At this link

http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/159785/Physical-location-of-a-row-in-SQL-Server

there is an interesting discussion of undocumented %%physloc%% and %%lockres%% columns starting with SS2008R2.