Mark,

Yep, me too! Thanks for confirmation and for jogging my memory regarding the NVL function (I almost forgot about that jewel!). By the way, looking forward to seeing you at SouthWest Fox in October.

Thanks again Mark!!!

>Yep. My second and third fields were empty intead of null. When I made them null, I get the same results as you. This works:
>
>INDEX ON f1+NVL(f2,'')+NVL(f3,'') TAG f1
>
>>Could this have anything to do with the fact that two of the index fields could be NULL? That is, the join for two of the tables is a LEFT OUTER JOIN which means the records without a matching join will contain NULLs. That's the one thing I do notice when I test the supposed blank fields, they have NULLs in them.
>>
>>Which makes them sort ike:
>>
>>AAA NULL NULL
>>CCC NULL NULL
>>AAA AAA AAA
>>BBB AAA BBB
>>CCC CCC CCC
>>
>>Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm???????????????????????????????