>You're not wrong. MAX() should return the largest value. If there's a group by including the field, then it'll be the largest value for that group. If not, then it'll be the largest field value regardless. AFAIK, there's no SQL statement that, under these circumstances, is guaranteed to return the value of the last physical record.

The behavior of VFP (and FP 2.x before it) has always been to return the field value from the last physical record in the group when a field is not include in the GROUP BY clause and has no aggregate function applied. As we all know, that's not necessarily either the minimum or maximum value for that particular field.

Tamar