Thank you for the explanations Jason. I compared the first and third methods and have about the same costs (51% and 49% respectively) by very different execution plans. ...

Sorry. I thought I was replying to Dwain's posted answer rather than making a general post. The first answer posted by Phil Parkin works with a tweak. ...

Thank you for the reply. Unfortunately this one does not work on the real data. Maybe it has to do with some additional information about the data that...

Thank you! That works really well.

Agreed

I did not understand what was meant by '(through queries)'. When I execute $PSVersionTable.PSVersion in Powershell I get the barely informative

Major Minor Build Revision

----- ...

I have three tables I sometimes need to sync (development, acceptance and production) and use the following sort of query to find all differences. This is not quite what...

I got an error. My default schema is not dbo. The tables get created in the default schema and then the first select is explicitly from dbo. ...

Agreed

Thanks for the explanation Hugo. At least I was trying to think the right way.

I have never heard of templates so I pulled found out how to access them and pulled up the first one for aggregates. Here is the part from the...

I also got 3, 5 or 6 distinct values depending on the database.

I had no idea what VCS meant. Closest I could find in a search was Veritas Cluster Server. Guessed wrong.

agreed

Same here