Question

I have a trigger in a table with a good number of columns (perhaps around 100) and quite a lot of updates (for some definition of “a lot of”).
If any of some fields have changed, the trigger inserts some data in another table.

For obvious reasons, I want this trigger to run as fast as possible. What’s the best method to do the comparison?
For now I have those:

IF NOT EXISTS (SELECT * FROM Inserted i, Deleted d WHERE 
    i.Fld1 = d.Fld1 AND i.Fld2 = d.Fld2 AND
    i.Fld3 = d.Fld3 AND i.Fld4 = d.Fld4 AND
    i.Fld5 = d.Fld5 AND i.Fld6 = d.Fld6 AND
    i.Fld7 = d.Fld7)     
    THEN ...

---

IF ((SELECT Fld1 FROM Inserted) <> (SELECT Fld1 FROM Deleted) OR
    (SELECT Fld2 FROM Inserted) <> (SELECT Fld2 FROM Deleted) OR
    (SELECT Fld3 FROM Inserted) <> (SELECT Fld3 FROM Deleted) OR
    (SELECT Fld4 FROM Inserted) <> (SELECT Fld4 FROM Deleted) OR
    (SELECT Fld5 FROM Inserted) <> (SELECT Fld5 FROM Deleted) OR
    (SELECT Fld6 FROM Inserted) <> (SELECT Fld6 FROM Deleted) OR
    (SELECT Fld7 FROM Inserted) <> (SELECT Fld7 FROM Deleted))
THEN...

I would usually prefer the first method, as it’s more compact and seems more idiomatic. However, when speed is an issue, how should I do it?

Answer 1

The second version is completely broken for multi-row UPDATES, so for that reason alone, I’d do a variant of the first:

INSERT INTO ANotherTable (Column1, COlumn2, /* Etc */)
SELECT i.Column1,d.Column1, /* Other COlumns */
FROM
    inserted i
        inner join
    deleted d
        on
            i.Fld1 = d.Fld1 and /* For each column in PK */
            i.Fld2 <> d.Fld2 /* For each non-PK column */

Assuming the PK is stable and unchanging