Question

Its not really a subtraction I’m looking for. And I know its not a union or intersection… I have been given a long and complex stored procedure that returns a table of active and inactive documents. I have also been given a similar stored procedure that returns another table that contains only the active documents.

How could I get a table of inactive documents using these two store procedures?

We are using SQL Server 2005.

Answer 1

The set operation you are looking for is called MINUS, but in SQL Server the keyword is EXCEPT

  SELECT ... // all documents
  EXCEPT
  SELECT ... // active documents

I believe that the EXCEPT set operation became available in SQL Server 2005.