>Conform or comfort, that is the question. The "thou shalt not have memos in a grouped query" added a few whites to my beard while I was working with SLQ Server 2000 - that's actually a ridiculous limitation, given that it works just fine in VFP 7. And also the mandatory "either in an aggregate function or in a group by list" requirement for all fields involved... the same.
>
>So that's not stone age, that's the standard written by people who never tried it in VFP. Probably it works faster that way - and requires more of our time.
>
>Conforming to standards is fine, to a point. At that point, Set ... 70 would be my choice.

Dragan,

Conforming to standards is "byproduct" of changes made in VFP8. The main reason for those changes in VFP8 was that those queries (DISTINCT with memo and GROUP BY with fields not included in the GROUP BY) returned incorrect results in previous version of VFP. That explains why it wasn't implemented in any other DB.