thanks for replying all

we know how to do it right, and how to filter the nulls, but we were wondering about when the 'where' conditions were run against the set. If it runs last in the statment, it could exclude records from the resultset even in left joins.
Obviously, fox doesn't do that. It seems the where clause is throwing away records from the tables before they are joined, but we thought afterwards.

regards,
derk

>Mark,
>
>The problem is the NULLs in the result set. You are not filtering them out with the where.
>
>... WHERE yy.Whatever ...
> HAVING NOT ISNULL(Whatever)