>I included some example code in my first message, but I guess it's been snipped by now. Anyway, if you do a select while DELETED, EXACT, and ANSI are all set to off (and you don't include NOFILTER), the deleted flag will stay set on deleted records. Whether or not this is something that can be counted on as staying that way is a separate and equally important issue.

Sergey explained why it happens. In your case the where expression is completely optimizable and instead of creating a real cursor you were getting a filtered result.

So, you should assume to never get deleted() status back and if you do, it means, you forgot to put NOFILTER <g>