I have never once seen anyone use these. The most glaring issue with them is that unlike a lot of other directives in SQL, these ones just don’t do a good job of telling you what they do, and their behavior is sort of weird.
Unlike EXISTS and NOT EXISTS, which state their case very plainly, as do UNION and UNION ALL, figuring these out is not the most straightforward thing. Especially since INTERSECT has operator precedence rules that many other directives do not.
I’ve used EXCEPT
to check if two datasets are equivalent for testing purposes: A EXCEPT B
should be zero rows, and B EXCEPT A
should be zero rows. It has built-in handling of any NULL
madness. Set intersections have their uses as well.