>>>>I got a feeling this isn't possible, but I thought I'd ask just in case. I want to do something like this:
>>>>
>>>>SELECT trips
>>>>DELETE ALL FOR trips.client_num NOT IN (SELECT client_num FROM clients)
>>>>
>>>>Basically, there's a lot of orphaned trips in the table and I want to clear them out. Is there any way to do that short of scanning through the trips table and looking up each client_num?
>>>>
>>>>Thanks,
>>>>
>>>Hi Michelle,
>>>
>>>A couple of additions to what Ken and Ed told you. If the table is part of a DBC and the database isn't current you'll need to use the Datebase!Table type syntax.
>>>
>>>The other thing worth mentioning is that unlike the DELETE command, DELETE - SQL uses record locking to mark multiple records for deletion. This means that you'll take a performance hit, unless you open the table exclusively. If that's not possible, in addition to the other solution, you can use the following to improve performance.

>>>SELECT Clients.Client_Num;
>>>  FROM Clients;
>>>  ORDER BY Clients.Client_Num;
>>>  INTO ARRAY a_clients
>>>SELECT Trips
>>>DELETE ALL FOR ASCAN(a_clients, Trips.Client_Num) = 0

>>>hth,
>>
>>I was thinking of something like that, but I hadn't formed the idea into something substantial. I'm not too worried about performance. I only needed to do it once to clear out old data. Took about 20 seconds.
>>
>>Thanks,
>>
>Hi (again) Michelle,
>
>If you're using these tables in a DBC, you can use the Refrential Intgrety Builder to automatically cascade the deletes, if you're not already doing so. If they're free tables, you should write your own routine to handle this.
>
>hth,

They're free tables. It's data from the old version that I need to clean up. The new version takes care of that.

Thanks,

-Michelle