Enhancements to the OUTPUT clause in SQL Server 2008

We had covered the OUTPUT and the OUTPUT INTO clauses in SQL Server 2005 before in this post. Prior to SQL Server 2008, as you can see from the examples from that post, one could not filter out the records that are returned using the OUTPUT/OUTPUT INTO clauses i.e. one can choose only the different columns that one wants in those clauses but cannot choose which rows one wants to return. As a result, one has to dump all of that data into a table and then apply a filter criteria (WHERE clause) at that table in order to sub-select the records that one wants to get.

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