Although the Merge Statement is very powerful and should be used whenever there is need, I do suggest that you do a lot of testing on it before you start using it. Also, you have to be really careful when using the merge statement about the identity column (you may be skipping ids or creating unrelated records in the target table). As a safety rule, the target table should not have an identity column as a foreign key inside the source table. See you in the next article with a new feature.