Well maybe the rushmore optimiser will not work if you include the parentheses, but the query should still work in every case.

>I'm not sure about using parentheses, I've been told by Microsoft support that they can affect how code works.
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>Some years ago, I had a problem with Foxpro 2.5 and an SQL select returning unexpected results, after several calls, one support engineer asked to see a copy of the code, which was in the form :
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>select ..... where (a=b) AND (c=d) AND (e=f)
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>he asked me why the parentheses were there - so I told him to aid readability - & in all seriousness he told me that they weren't necessary & if I removed them then the select would work correctly.
>
>(At that point, I was actually desperate enough to try & of course it didn't work. Since then I've been very dubious about the quality of MS tech support.)