Thanks for the time and effort to produce this informative article.

One small thing I noticed is that this solution requires an assumption that a "missing" row in either destination or source implies a 0. Because of the way you are using ISNULL(), a particular ID that exists with a value of 0 on one side and does not exist at all on the other side will never be identified as a difference.

This is probably fine in many cases (e.g. daily sales data), but it might be conceivable to create a circumstance where it would matter. For example, if we are comparing a normalized (to z scores) data set, 0 would have a very different meaning and not be a logical default assumption.

Admittedly, my example is a poor and far fetched one. But I think this assumption is worth pointing out for those who may use this snippet of code.

Geoff