Can you give a high level overview of the entire process? Are you replacing the entire table each time? It doesn't sound very orthodox at all.
Also, the minus operation isn't necessarily a problem if you can get an efficient fast full index scan on the columns of interest in both tables, but if you end up full-scanning multiple times then yes you have a definite issue.
Nope...we do not have any MVs or summary tables. Though I would wish we had some summary tables. The largest table I have is the daily journal Tx table which has 230 columns of which 164 are descriptions, which are 99% the same. The other-thing the design guys have thrown on us is after everyday's ETL is complete, we have to do a row count between source and target which is fair enough and then to do "minus" compare on all the 164 descriptive columns between source and target which is unfair on the database don't u think ?
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