Chris Harshman (11/6/2008)
Why did they have to make the answer really be a response to 2 separate questions? UNION ALL is not a workarround for a column defined as TEXT datatype. UNION vs. UNION ALL is a separate topic for a separate purpose.:unsure:
I think the point is that the text datatype is not comparable, and UNION has an implicit DISTINCT. So you can use UNION ALL to avoid the DISTINCT.
Conversely, if you want to have the column be comparable, then you should use varchar(max), and use UNION to eliminate duplicates. There was also the comment that going forward, best practice will be to use varchar(max) instead of text datatype.