it's not so much a question of what I was doing or how to do it, although I just spent 30 seconds trying to figure out if I could have used joins and it made made my ears bleed a little. What I wanted to know is why an update fails where a select suceeds, when in effect they are doing the same thing... ooh I have just noted I've got set enginebehaviour 70 in there, might just test it again with it set to 90.

>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.