I am not sure I got the exact idea of what you're trying to do, but you can use INNER JOINs instead, e.g.

update tablea set field1 = '1 from Table1 t inner join (select ... ) sql1 on t1.f2 = sql2.f2 inner join ...

>Just a quick one, is Update-SQL really more limited on how complex the expression can be than Select-SQL or am I missing something?
>
>I have a table with 2 populated fields and I want to put a "1" in a 3rd field only when there are not 2 different values in field 1 matching a single value in field 2 or vice versa.
>
>this sort of thing:
>
>1 2 ok
>1 2 ok
>5 5 ok
>2 3 not ok
>3 3 not ok
>4 3 not ok
>4 4 not ok
>
>so step 1 I do:
>

select f1,f2 group by f1,f2 into cursor look_up

>
>then if I do following select, I get a result ok:
>

>SELECT id FROM mytable where;
> f1 in (SELECT f1 from look_up group by f1 having count(*) = 1) AND ;
> f2 in (select f2 from look_up group by f2 having count(*) = 1)
>

>
>so I'd expect to be able to do:
>

>update mytable set flag = "1" where;
> f1 in (SELECT f1 from look_up group by f1 having count(*) = 1) AND ;
> f2 in (select f2 from look_up group by f2 having count(*) = 1)
>

>
>but that gives a sql expression to complex error, I'd expect a simple update like that to work whereever the select works, even if I do the two group selects beforehand so that the two selects in the IN bits are simple it fails, so are the limits really different and if so where can I check out the differences?
>
>Either way it's not a big issue, I just have to do that example select into a cursor and then do:
>

>update mytable set flag = "1" where id in (select id from complexselect)
>

>
>Just curious as I wasted 10 mins looking inquizitivly at the two statements.