Thank you for a great article, Dave. I never really thought of using any of these commands as I normally would place data into temp tables to run JOIN queries that produce similar results, and I never fully understood their use until seeing it graphically in your article. I can now do a:

SELECT no_match_id FROM [production].[dbo].[ytd_table]

EXCEPT

SELECT no_match_id FROM [production].[dbo].[current_month_table]

To get a list of ID's in my main table that are no longer in the new month's data I load. There's more complexity to it than what I wrote here, but the EXCEPT command will achieve the same results for my table updates than the lengthy queries I'm using now.

And I'm sure I can find many other uses for utilizing both INTERSECT and EXCEPT to replace and simplify my current methodologies in which I use JOINs to match on as many as 60+ columns.

Thanks again for a great article!