Yea we examined it here as a group as we are facing the same kind of stuff and found exactly the same thing. It does what MSSQL called a Cartesian join, and ran no faster other then removing the outer join logic.
Using a regular join statement and only inner joins was the same speed and I think little less confusing when you have several joins as our system does. We may have to look at re-engineering our system as the original design has dozens of table whith a field set like ID, Value to hold stuff like apprehension type, jobtitle etc. So we hold a main record with dozens of id's (and joins when reporting). Joel Fradkin ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 8: explain analyze is your friend
