>I have wondered some time ago what would be the use of a full join, with a join condition. I can see the use of a Cartesian product (which is what your example is supposed to do), but with a join condition, what would anybody need a full join for?

I actually had a situation where I needed a full join. I was woking on year end reporting for our payroll product. I need to create XML that includes State info for each employee. The state section of the XML has tags for both State Income tax and Unemployment Insurance tax. The wage and tax amounts can be different. However, it is possible to pay SIT in one state but not have SUTA... So, for each state the employee working in, when I joined the SUTA records to the SIT records I need a return for each state that they had SIT/SUTA even if they only had one tax or the other, hence the FULL JOIN.

BOb