Thought I’d visit an old friend the other day and lo and behold the old friend still doesn’t work. I’m talking about BINARY_CHECKSUM(). I thought that I would try it while looking at differences between tables using TSQL (without some third-party tool). I’ve been “using” this function since SQL Server 7 and thought by now someone would have fixed it…the damn thing still doesn’t work! Unreal! Is there a reason that we even have this in SQL Server? I have no idea why the Microsoft engineers would continue leaving this thing in our toolset when it clearly returns bad information. <head shaking, slouched in my chair. Fail!>.
A word to you – don’t try this for checking differences in rows, tables, or whatever. I geeked with it for a couple of hours the other day while doing table diffs in TSQL and time and again I proved that it returns bad info.
Oh, and this prompted me, by the way, to do a little series on the various ways to find differences in tables using TSQL. I’ve got some cool methods to share, and you’ll be surprised at which method is fastest.
Lee
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