Hi David,

The article you refer me to, doesn't really explain why it's better to have seprate table for employes salaries. So I'l stick with my prevous assesment of that idea.

>Sergey,
>
>Hi. There is a website called www.dbdebunk.com where there is a lot of content from Fabian Pascal and Chris Date. This is where I got the example from. I would post the link to the article itself, but it use frames or something so the link always just shows as www.dbdebunk.com. Anyway, I pasted the entire article below, part of which gives the employees and salaries example. However, when I pasted it the diagrams in Figure's 1 2 and 3 didn't come over. If you search dbdebunk you can find it. I understand your point that an outer join just produces nulls anyway! Maybe the idea is to avoid nulls in a BASE TABLE, but that it is ok in a query result?