Comments on: MERGE gives better OUTPUT options

By: Karl Ninh

Karl Ninh — Tue, 25 Oct 2016 19:57:01 +0000

Can you output to a file?

By: Ritesh Patel

Ritesh Patel — Wed, 05 Oct 2016 13:21:39 +0000

Hi Rob,
The audit table part of your query does not quiet work as expected. Although it is capturing the changes into #someaudittable it is still also performing the merge action on the #tmp table.
Is there any way to prevent the actual merge on #tmp and just getting the ‘proposed’ changes into #someaudittable?
Thanks,
Ritesh

By: Rob Farley

Rob Farley — Wed, 11 Mar 2015 01:01:33 +0000

Hi Pete – yes. 🙂

By: Peter Nightingale

Peter Nightingale — Tue, 10 Mar 2015 18:53:54 +0000

Correction, the IDENTITY column does appear in the INSERTED table, but not in the target table.
So v useful actually. (ahem)

By: Pete Nightingale

Pete Nightingale — Tue, 10 Mar 2015 18:48:13 +0000

Interesting but this method does not actually allow you to pickup the values applied with an IDENTITY column as they so not appear in the INSERTED table.
Suppose I had better write a loop then, good job I am covering a rare event.

By: Rob Farley

Rob Farley — Wed, 14 Jan 2015 11:36:07 +0000

Sorry Dipz, you don’t have access to that information in an INSERT statement.

By: Dipankar Saha

Dipankar Saha — Wed, 14 Jan 2015 11:09:19 +0000

Hi Rob,
I was working on a requirement where i need to access inserted.* values and values from the Select List in the output clause for an insert statement. I am working in 2005 so i cannot use merge statement which i know is the other way around but wanted to clear my doubt that its techinically not possible or i am missing something.
PFB, the code part.
INSERT INTO ExternalEmployeeNumber(ExternalEmployeeNumber,DateUsed)
SELECT dateadd(second, ROWVAL, DateVale)
FROM
( SELECT B.[FIRST NAME] FNAME, B.[LAST NAME] LNAME , B.EMAIL EMAIL , GETDATE() DateVale , ROW_NUMBER ( )
OVER (ORDER BY B.[FIRST NAME], B.[LAST NAME] , B.EMAIL) ROWVAL
FROM dbo.[EOP_REMs$] B where B.[last name] is not null and B.[first name] is not null and B.[email] is not null
and NOT EXISTS ( SELECT 1 FROM employee E WHERE B.[first name] = E.[firstname] AND B.[email] = E.[email] AND B.[last name] = E.[lastname] )
) X
OUTPUT INSERTED.ExternalEmployeeNumber , FNAME , LNAME , EMAIL
INTO #EmployeeNew([Employee#],[FirstName],[LastName],[Email]);
In the code part above, i am using Fname, Lname and Email other than the inserted column.
It is giving me an error , invalid reference of the Fname, Lname, Email column name ?
Can you help me out. As i said i implemented this using Merge and its working but i need to implement this in SQL 2005.
Thanks and Regards
Dipz

By: Sean Peffer

Sean Peffer — Fri, 03 Oct 2014 12:22:30 +0000

Thanks for this great explaantion of the OUTPUT/$ACTION – very useful.
I used the MERGE statement to update a SCD2 Dimension and it’s great that it can be done in a single step iso multiple steps and temp tables. I now require to capture the Audit info as well and this function helps with this requirement as well. Here’s an exmaple used inside a stored proc to return the audit info
DECLARE @Results TABLE(Action VARCHAR(20));
/…….Merge statements here…../
OUTPUT $action INTO @Results;
SELECT @Insert=[INSERT],
@Update=[UPDATE],
@Delete=[DELETE]
FROM (SELECT Action,
1 ROWS
FROM @Results) P
PIVOT (COUNT(ROWS)
FOR Action IN ([INSERT], [UPDATE], [DELETE])) AS pvt;

By: Rob Farley

Rob Farley — Fri, 26 Sep 2014 08:59:13 +0000

Thanks Mark – that’s an interesting idea. 🙂

By: Mark Kennedy

Mark Kennedy — Thu, 18 Sep 2014 12:59:35 +0000

You can access data other than the inserted/deleted in an output clause, but it has to be joined.
There’s examples on the OUTPUT clause MSDN page, example E is where I got the idea to try self join.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/ms177564(v=sql.105).aspx
but try this:
UPDATE #tmp
SET someval += 1
OUTPUT deleted.*, inserted.someval, t.id
FROM #tmp
INNER JOIN #tmp as t ON #tmp.id = t.id
I don’t know why exactly, but its probably something to do with not being able to use values on the table directly being changed, but joining to its self seems to work.
I did this on SQL server 2008R2
Saves having to delve into using merge statements if you just want to get other data in an OUTPUT from a simple update.