merge

SQLServerCentral Article

Getting started with the SQL MERGE statement

  • Article

This article is focused on beginners who have already started writing SQL queries and are now diving deep towards more data processing and complex queries in SQL. When we talk about data processing, an important concept that comes to our mind is performing ETL workloads to a data warehouse. ETL is a very complex topic […]

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2021-01-26

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SQLServerCentral Article

How To Avoid MERGE in SQL Server

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Introduction This article shows how to script a basic merge between two tables, without using MERGE. This can be handy when you're merging a pair of tables with hundreds of columns, since the script doesn't know anything about them. This technique introduces and populates some auditing columns (IS_DELETED, IS_INSERTED, IS_UPDATED, TRANSACTION_DATE) for each record, and runs fast. […]

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2023-02-20 (first published: )

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Question of the Day

The Decoded Value

In SQL Server 2025, what is returned from this code:

DECLARE @message VARCHAR(50) = 'Hello SQL Server 2025!';
DECLARE @encoded VARCHAR(MAX);

SET @encoded = BASE64_ENCODE(CAST(@message AS VARBINARY(1000)));
SELECT BASE64_DECODE(@encoded) 

See possible answers