In my August 2009 blog post Exploring Composable DML I introduced a new feature in SQL Server 2008 called Composable DML and also outlined one of its limitations; namely that data from the OUTPUT cannot be aggregated prior to insertion. Composable DML does have some useful scenarios however and one of those is in capturing and storing values that ...

Just lately I’ve been using T-SQL’s MERGE statement (introduced in SQL Server 2008) and one thing that I needed to do was extract rowcounts for each DML operation (i.e. INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE) conducted by a MERGE. I was surprised to find that while @@ROWCOUNT is supported for MERGE, it only returns the total number of affected rows and there are ...