Oracle Minus Operator

 

I find the MINUS operator very handy and use it a lot to compare tables and find out missing things.

For example suppose you want to compare Table1 with Table2.

If the two tables have the same layouts (same column names and data content), you can simply do this

SELECT * FROM <Table 1>
MINUS
SELECT * FROM <Table 2>

This query will compare each record in Table 1 to a record in table 2.
The result returned will be records in table 1 that are not in table 2.