What is the difference between UNION and UNION ALL?

Question

What is the difference between UNION and UNION ALL?

Answer 1

Just to add my two cents to the discussion here: one could understand the UNION operator as a pure, SET-oriented UNION - e.g. set A={2,4,6,8}, set B={1,2,3,4}, A UNION B = {1,2,3,4,6,8}

When dealing with sets, you would not want numbers 2 and 4 appearing twice, as an element either is or is not in a set.

In the world of SQL, though, you might want to see all the elements from the two sets together in one "bag" {2,4,6,8,1,2,3,4}. And for this purpose T-SQL offers the operator UNION ALL.