Hello,

Lots of posts here about efficiency and COALESCE and ISNULL. The points are well taken, though that really wasn't the point of this little article.

The point was more meant to be the importance of understanding that there are almost always non-procedural ways to accomplish a query task, and that those solutions are generally more elegant in form.

I also personally think it is good for any query writer to know how to think purely mathematically, before using any syntax specially provided by the query language, such as COALESCE and ISNULL. I've seen way too many simply copy-and-paste these techniques without really understanding what was going on. Of course - if you have understanding, then by all means run with it!

As far as efficiency - in 14 years I've always found this technique to be acceptable in the realm of efficiency and (especially in the old days) was given weight over closing the potential security holes of dynamic SQL.

Of course, every scenario is different and I'm sure there are scenarios in which a different approach is preferable (there always are).

Again - I wanted to post something stressing an appreciation of fundamentalism over T-SQL in the learning process, I've always found you start with a mathematically elegant solution and can then generally increase its efficiency by taking advantage of whatever specialties the DBMS you are working in provides.

Thanks for the posts,

Tony