Thanks Sergey,

see my reply to Tore

>>
>>I've never heard of this before and have been relying on this for many years now. I have just done some testing and _TALLY appears to always return 0 if no records were selected, even if selecting into a cursor.
>>
>>Can you give me a scenario where _tally will get set to 1 when no records are selected?
>
>Run your select w/o GROUP BY and with WHERE condition that filters out all records..