jcrawf02 (7/30/2008)
So, for someone who is using 2000 still, but looking forward to 2005, EXCEPT will let me intersect the two sets, and give me the results that are not overlapping, correct?
Well technically, no. What you describe is the Exclusive Union, or Disjoint Union (which is the Set equivalent of XOR in logic) which in SQL Server could be expressed as:
(A UNION B) EXCEPT (A INTERSECT B)
EXCEPT (which used to be called "MINUS" in some old implementations of SQL) is more like a subtraction operator. It returns only the (distinct) elements of the first set that are not in the second set. In logical operators, EXCEPT would be:
A AND (NOT B)
Of course that may be what you actually meant, but the details really matter when it comes to logic and set theory descriptions.
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