>Interesting group of threads Sergey. I looked at several and found that I would have recommended an ORDER BY before the GROUP BY in order to specify which records are shown in the results. I've never had any problem as long as I used ORDER BY - have I been missing something?

Yes, you were lucky. The fields that aren't included in GROUP BY clause are returned from the last physical record in the group. The ORDER BY clause doesn't have any effect on this because sorting's performed on the resulting recordset after it has been processed by HAVING clause and before it's written to the destination cursor/table/array/e.t.c.

>I don't want to get too far off thread here - it's fine with me to move to SQL syntax as long as it's complete enough to do what we need - and as far as I can see MS needs to add the SQL Statements WITH ROLLUP and WITH CUBE to do that.

VFP SQL language is limited compare to SQL Server and I agree with you that it should be expanded and improved. However I'm not sure that WITH ROLLUP and WITH CUBE would be on the top of my list.