I have a feeling she was thinking of INLIST() when she used IN() that way. If the sequence of strings is short and constant, INLIST() would be easier. The help menu made me wonder if it is rushmore optimizable when INLIST() contains more than two parameters. My quick test confirms that it is.

If the sequence of strings was long or variable, using a subquery (with an actual SQL statement in it), as you suggest, would be better.

>You may build a cursor on fly with records 'BROO','FOXB' etc and then
>select town from towns where town IN (select town from mycursor)
>
>
>>Walter,
>>
>> Recently I found another problem with SQL. In my case the Error message was 'SQL command is too complex'. I did a simple query like:
>>select town from towns where town IN ('BROO','FOXB',etc.), 32 codes.
>>Is my understanding correct, what I can not use IN function in SQLs? What the limitation of it's usage?
>>
>>TIA
>>
>>>
>>>I've encountered the same problem. It's seems to be either a BUG or an inproriate error message for a VFP limitation. The only solution I could come up with is to split up the SQL statement into 2 others.
>>>
>>>Walter,
>>>
>>>>Received the error message 'too many subqueries'. It didn't seem right to me. (Partly because I understood a subquery to be something different.)
>>>>
>>>>I did a very simple query. All INNER JOINS on one primary table. There were approximately 11 INNER JOINS to that table. I am pretty confident about my SQL SELECT statement. Just to be sure I used the query interface (builder?) to do the same thing. It build essentially the same code and the same error occurred.
>>>>
>>>>(I was hoping to be lazy and avoid writing the darn statement but here it is in crude example form...)
>>>>
>>>>SELE tbl1.*, tbl2.xyz2, tbl3.xyz3, tbl4.xyz4, tbl5.xyz5;
>>>>FROM tbl1, ;
>>>>INNER JOIN tbl2 ON tbl1.key2 = tbl2.key2;
>>>>INNER JOIN tbl3 ON tbl1.key3 = tbl3.key3;
>>>>INNER JOIN tbl4 ON tbl1.key4 = tbl4.key4;
>>>>INNER JOIN tbl5 ON tbl1.key5 = tbl5.key5
>>>>
>>>>Of course I had more INNER JOINs but all were joined on the one primary table.
>>>>
>>>>Is this a limitation of VFP? Any other pointers?
>>>>
>>>>Thanks.