Yes. It's answering a slightly different question, but it's definitely less code.

More detail on the APPLY pattern:

http://sqlblog.com/blogs/rob_farley/archive/2011/04/12/the-power-of-t-sql-s-apply-operator.aspx

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/APPLY/69953/

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/APPLY/69954/

drew.allen (2/8/2012)

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Using EXCEPT should give you the same results, is probably more efficient,...

Mark-101232 (2/8/2012)

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The non-deterministic behaviour of UPDATE..FROM is well known and fully documented in BOL. There are other non-deterministic functions in SQL Server such as the ANSI compliant ROW_NUMBER - would...

John Mitchell-245523 (2/8/2012)

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I now try to avoid UPDATE...FROM unless there is no possibility of cardinality errors - and then I document it in case somebody else is tempted to follow...

http://sqlblog.com/blogs/aaron_bertrand/archive/2011/01/24/deprecate-update-from-not-if-i-can-help-it.aspx

He's referring to the possibility of non-deterministic updates:

DECLARE @T1 AS TABLE (col1 integer NULL, col2 integer NULL);

DECLARE @T2 AS TABLE (col1 integer NULL, col2 integer NULL);

INSERT @T1 VALUES (1, NULL);

INSERT...

The site editor already gave his reasons for not specifying a minimum version. At least you...

cengland0 (2/8/2012)

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You're right that the ideal...

INSERT dbo.temp2empdtls

(empno, empname, age)

VALUES

(14, 'Bob', 46);

Your code gives the wrong results.

There are a couple of choices, use pessimistic locking or the optimistic rowversion:

http://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/1501/optimistic-locking-in-sql-server-using-the-rowversion-data-type/

This 'ordered variable concatenation' trick was only supported in a few specific cases for backward compatibility....

Cool 😎 ...by the way there might be more efficient solutions, that's just the one that seemed natural...

That was already clear 😛

Steve said it well a few posts back...

Steve Jones - SSC Editor (2/2/2012)

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SQL 2005 is out of support,...

You didn't try it did you? 😉