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Performance Comparison: Comparing Column Differences

Shane O’Neill has a column difference showdown:

The original post for this topic garnered the attention of a commenter who pointed out that the same result could be gathered using a couple of UNION ALLs and those lovely set-based EXCEPT and INTERSECT keywords.

I personally think that both options work and whatever you feel comfortable with, use that.

It did play on my mind though of what the performance differences would be…what would the difference in STATISTICS IO, TIME be? What would the difference in Execution Plans be? Would there even be any difference between the two or are they the same thing? How come it’s always the things I tell myself not to forget that I end up forgetting?

This may not be the most important thing to test, but it does show you a technique.