>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,

That is not true, your where is evaluating the field for .T. and NULL is NOT .T. it is NULL so those records are removed from the result because they don't meet your where clause even though they were part of the left outer join.