> 4) INDEXESI can certainly add an index but given the table sizes I am not
> sure if that is a factor. This by no means is a large dataset less than
> 350,000 rows in total and 3 columns. Also this was just a quick dump of
> data for comparison purpose. When I saw the poor performance on the
> COALESCE, I pointed the data load to SQL Server and ran the same query
> except with the TSQL specific ISNULL function.
350000 rows definitely is a lot of rows, although with 3 INT column it's
just about 13MB of data (including overhead). But indexes can be quite
handy when doing joins, as in this case.
Tomas