This is actually wrong. The end result is the same but it does not in any way have the same effect.
"in any way"? I'd say in the primary way it has the same effect: all rows are removed from the table.
Thus the end result is the same as I said but the in practice effect is quite different from a visibility, maintenance and programmability perspective.
But to say "it does not in any way have the same effect" explicitly excludes that any effect of the two things might be the same. In actual fact, in the simple case (no triggers) the effect is the same.
FWIW, the difference between "in practice effect" and "end result" is pretty esoteric, frankly - I'm not really sure what you're driving at there. The "end result" would surely include the behaviour of any triggers that might be fired.
TRUNCATE is NOT DELETE.
I don't think anyone is suggesting that it is.
Except Tim Smith who started this thread.
I don't believe he suggested that at all: he made an assumption that his DELETE triggers would fire on TRUNCATE, and when it was pointed out that he was mistaken he posted half a sentence from the documentation that supported his view, ignoring the second half of that sentence that makes it clear that the behaviour of the two commands is different, and ignoring the explicit statement on the very same page of the documentation viz:
"
TRUNCATE will not fire any ON DELETE triggers that might exist for the tables
