I have two tables and I need to remove rows from the first table if an exact copy of a row exists in the second table.
Does anyone have an example of how I would go about doing this in MSSQL server?
Well, at some point you're going to have to check all the columns - might as well get joining...
DELETE a
FROM a -- first table
INNER JOIN b -- second table
ON b.ID = a.ID
AND b.Name = a.Name
AND b.Foo = a.Foo
AND b.Bar = a.Bar
That should do it... there is also CHECKSUM(*)
, but this only helps - you'd still need to check the actual values to preclude hash-conflicts.