>Hi Vlad,
> You make an interesting observation about the # of queries apparently required with my SQL statement. I am not sure that the issue you mentioned applies to SQL however, as SQL is a non-procedural language. As I understand it, that means that the details of the implementation are determined at run time, and hidden from the developer. In general I would think that as long as the chosen SQL statement is one that was expected by the writers of the SQL implementation that the optimization process would find a sufficiently efficient way of processing the query, which would probably not match our logical model of how the query would be processed.
>
>P.S. Wasn't the initial question how to perform the query in one SQL statement?

I don't know how far the SELECT-SQL internal optimization will go. So, I prefer to use a version that doesn't need internal optimization. But you may be right and in this case it might be the same.

Vlad