How to return rows from left table not found in right table?

Question

I have two tables with similar column names and I need to return records from the left table which are not found in the right table? I have a primary key(column) which will

Answer 1

This page gives a decent breakdown of the different join types, as well as venn diagram visualizations to help... well... visualize the difference in the joins.

As the comments said this is a quite basic query from the sounds of it, so you should try to understand the differences between the joins and what they actually mean.

Check out http://blog.codinghorror.com/a-visual-explanation-of-sql-joins/

You're looking for a query such as:

DECLARE @table1 TABLE (test int)
DECLARE @table2 TABLE (test int)

INSERT INTO @table1
(
    test
)
SELECT 1
UNION ALL SELECT 2

INSERT INTO @table2
(
    test
)
SELECT 1
UNION ALL SELECT 3

-- Here's the important part
SELECT  a.*
FROM    @table1 a
LEFT    join @table2 b on a.test = b.test -- this will return all rows from a
WHERE   b.test IS null -- this then excludes that which exist in both a and b

-- Returned results:

2