Posted by Erland Sommarskog on 06/06/05 01:16

DA Morgan (damorgan@psoug.org) writes:
> As you can see: Identical.

For such a simple query, I would expect anything else. I did not try
the same on SQL Server, but I would expect identical plans there as well.

The problems with *= are not really with performance, but funny
restrictions, and unexpected results that are difficult to explain. And
there is no *=* for a full outer join.

> I can't speak for Oracle but I expect the ISO operators will be there
> for the rest of my professional life. Oracle has always been far more
> committed to backward compatibility than some other companies. Often to
> my dismay in that some of the antiquities encourage bad practices.

Microsoft has in my opinion a quite elegant take on this: you can run a
database in compatibility mode for an earlier version. This permits
MS to drop support or to make incompatible changes in order to improve
things, but still makes it possible for people to migrate.

I have seen few people lament that *= are going away from the mainstream.
In our system we had over 500 stored procedures with this syntax, and I
really welcome the change. (And thanks to that I outlawed the syntax in
our load tool, our numbers have now started to decrease.)

--
Erland Sommarskog, SQL Server MVP, esquel@sommarskog.se

Books Online for SQL Server SP3 at
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/techinfo/productdoc/2000/books.asp

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