reconciliation – sqlsunday.com

Comparing nullable columns

Do you ever compare the values of a lot of columns in two tables? Sure you do. Like, for instance, in a cross update, when you need to figure out which rows you should actually update. But it gets worse if the columns are nullable. The fact that any value could potentially be NULL vastly complicates the comparison and might wreak havoc not only on your code but also on your query performance.

But there’s hope.

Basic reconciliation skills

You will often encounter situations where you have to reconcile two sets of data – are they the same, and if not, what differences are there? This can be because you re-wrote a piece of code and you want to verify that it still does the same job, or it can be a straight-forward comparison of two data sources. In this article, we’ll look through some useful methods and functions to compare data in SQL Server.