Greetings David

>If I understand you correctly, you want to find any records in BALANCE that do not have matching TYPEs in PTYPES.

SELECT * FROM balance ;
>WHERE type NOT IN (SELECT type FROM ptypes)

Yes, that'll work but its not suitable for the particular operation I'm trying to deal with. The problem with that is I'm trying to create a generic form of the query and I want to be able to use the same format whether the user is asking for matching or non matching records. Francisco put me straight with the "left join". Now it works regardless.

Thanks

Harry