This article is part of Greg Larsen’s continuing series on Learning T-SQL. To see all 8 items in the series, click here.
The basic MERGE statement
The MERGE statement was introduced with SQL Server 2008. It provides a single statement to perform UPDATE, INSERT and/or DELETE operations against a target table. The syntax for the basic MERGE statement that will be discussed, in this article, can be found in Figure 1:
MERGE [ INTO ] <target_table> USING <table_source> [ [ AS ] table_alias ] ON <merge_search_condition> [ WHEN MATCHED [ AND <clause_search_condition> ] THEN <merge_matched> ] [ …n ] [