Cool MERGE features you may not know about

The MERGE statement is a really powerful way to create what’s called “upserts”. In this article, I’ll take a more detailed look at how you can make the best use of MERGE and I’ll also show you some cool tricks I picked up along the way.

Using MERGE to insert, delete and update all-in-one

As of SQL Server 2008, there’s a new powerful consolidation statement in the DML toolbox: MERGE. Using MERGE, you can perform so-called “upserts”, i.e. one statement that performs an insert, delete and/or update in a single statement. And, more importantly, with just a single join.