Hi Gordon,

It's always tricky with VFP because of limited support for correlated quiries and subquieries in general. Try this

SELECT Str(id) + MAX(TTOC(effective_date, 1)) AS id_maxdt;
	FROM address_tbl ;
	INTO CURSOR crsAddr

SELECT Str(id) + MAX(TTOC(effective_date, 1)) AS id_maxdt ;
	FROM name_tbl ;
	INTO CURSOR crsName

SELECT id.*, NVL(nm.lname, ' ') lname ;
	FROM id_table id ;
		LEFT JOIN name_tbl nm 	ON id.id = nm.id ;
		LEFT JOIN address_tbl ad ON id.id = ad.id ;
	WHERE (nm.effective_date IS NULL ;
		OR Str(nm.id) + TTOC(nm.effective_date, 1) IN ;
			(SELECT id_maxdt FROM crsName)) ;
		AND (ad.effective_date IS NULL ;
			OR Str(ad.id) + TTOC(ad.effective_date,1) IN ;
				(SELECT id_maxdt FROM crsAddr)) 

>I tried your solution and got back an error "SQL expression is too complex." I even simplified the query down for testing purposes:
>
>SELECT a.*, b.nameinfo...
>FROM id a LEFT JOIN names b
>ON a.id = b.id
>WHERE (b.id IS NULL OR TTOC(b.effective_date, 1) =
>(SELECT MAX(TTOC(f.effective_date, 1)) FROM names f WHERE f.id = b.id))
>
>I am not sure what is too complex for VFP ;-) This is exactly what I was looking for but I don't know why it doesn't work.