Brian has a interesting post about his discovery of the new EXCEPT set operator in SQL Server 2005.  When I read his post I was at first excited, but then disappointed.  You see, the EXCEPT set operator could potentially save us from updating or inserting a large number of records in the data imports that our system runs.  Unfortunatly, we currently support BOTH Oracle and SQL Server so this new and exciting SQL Server 2005 feature wouldn't help us with many of our clients (since they're primarily on Oracle).  However, after a little bit of Googling I came across the MINUS operator in Oracle, which appears to be the equivalent of the SQL Server 2005 EXCEPT operator.  I'll have to dig into things a little more to know if the EXCEPT and MINUS set operators are equivalent, as well as run some tests to see what kind of impact it could have on our data imports, but it looks promising.