In my question Insert Update stored proc on SQL Server I explained an efficient way of doing an insert/update - perhaps THE most efficient. It's nothing amazing but it's a small algorithm that I came up with in a mini-Eureka moment. Although I had "invented" it by myself and secretly hoped that I was the first to do so I knew that it had probably been around for years but after posting on a couple of lists and not getting confirmation I had never found anything definitive written up about it.

So my questions: What software algorithm did you come up with that you thought that you'd invented? Or better yet, did you invent one?