I needed to track changes when updating a table, but I wasn’t really sure what would be the most perf-friendly method. Luckily I stumbled on a great post about T-SQL MERGE. The post described almost to a “T” what I needed to do: some records would stay the same, some would drop off, and others would change.

MERGE is pretty slick. I was able to easily take the 3 queries I had in place for insert, update and delete (well, soft delete anyway) and basically cut/paste them right into the merge command. It is nice that the syntax matches up so well and makes sense (unlike things like ROW_NUMBER() – yuck). It was really a nice, concise way to get exactly what I needed, and it performs very well.