Select unmatched data from two columns

  • SQL Kiwi (11/26/2012)


    That's the one I wrote first (though I used COALESCE, as it happens). The optimizer's expansion of the full join to left join concat anti-semi join eventually led me to the one that uses UNION, INTERSECT and EXCEPT. I like that combination of operators; it's the set-theoretic idea of difference being the union minus the intersection.

    Perfect! Very rightly said.

    It is very easy to understand those joins when we compare and contrast with set-theory concepts 🙂

    ~ Lokesh Vij


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  • Interesting qotd.

  • So many words for a Monday morning question; I ended up reading it 4 or 5 times before answering. :hehe:

    Thank you very much, it was a good one.



    Everything is awesome!

  • The oddity that I find interesting about this question is the fact that the UNION automatically sorts the results. In my head I'm thinking the results would be 4,7,2,8 and 2,8,4,7 from the two correct options.

    ***I now see that using the UNION ALL would not do the sorting to look for duplicates and would have given me the results that I expected.

    Aigle de Guerre!

  • Great question. Gave me something to think about.

  • Meow Now (11/26/2012)


    The oddity that I find interesting about this question is the fact that the UNION automatically sorts the results. In my head I'm thinking the results would be 4,7,2,8 and 2,8,4,7 from the two correct options.

    ***I now see that using the UNION ALL would not do the sorting to look for duplicates and would have given me the results that I expected.

    It depends on the physical implementation of the UNION / UNION ALL by the query optimizer. Depending on your SQL Server version, you will / might see different results with e.g. OPTION (HASH UNION) or OPTION (MERGE UNION). As always, ORDER BY is required for output ordering guarantees 🙂

  • A headscratcher... but a nice one. Thanks!

  • Took a bit to think over since there were so many lines of code, but a good question anyways. Thanks!

  • Nice One, +1

  • Hmm. Selected 1 and 3 and was told wrong.

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