Hi Fabio,

I did not test speed here. I see what you're doing here though, trying to use rushmore to let the db engine to come to to the conclusion earlier that there is no match. It is somewhat a pitty that the DB engine is not able to determine that in the first place by using a constant like .F.

Walter,

>Hi Walter,
>the speed of this is ....
>a small improvement
>

>SELECT NVL(A.Item, b.Item), count(a.Item)+Count(b.Item) FROM Items A FULL JOIN Items2 B ;
>ON A.Item=b.Item AND .F. GROUP BY 1

>
>Fabio