>Hi Naomi,
>
>Perhaps one last question: does it matter or is it best practice to give aliases to the tables that are used in the subquery - it seems to work either way. Or is it just to be clear and to shorten the table names to short aliases?
>
>I am trying to "think" of what the subquery is actually doing. This runs and gives the same result set but maybe there is a possible future problem:
>
>

>SELECT ;
>   Plaintiffs.Plaintiff_ID, Plaintiff_Files.File_ID ;
>   FROM Plaintiffs  JOIN Plaintiff_Files pf ;
>      ON Plaintiffs.Plaintiff_ID == pf.Plaintiff_ID ;
>    WHERE  pf.Date_Closed < ldCutOffDate AND ;
>        NOT EXISTS ( SELECT 1 FROM Plaintiff_Files f WHERE Date_Closed IS NULL and f.Plaintiff_ID == Plaintiff.Plaintiff_ID  ) ;
>   INTO CURSOR Results
>

>

Yes, this query is also correct - as you can see, there are multiple ways to get the same results. I always use aliases for subqueries and for multiple tables joining for every column as well. This is a good practice and also self-documenting and allows to avoid hard to find bugs in the code.