COALESCE() is ANSI standard, One major difference with ISNULL is how it deals with implicit conversions. COALESCE will, like any other T-SQL operation, use the rules of data type precedence to find the data type of its result – but ISNULL will always retu

Recently in MSDN forums, OP wanted to get all results from the first table (called it r) LEFT JOINed with the other table (m) and INNER JOINed with another table (called s). In my mind it was a tricky question and I solved it by a separate CTE first doing