Paul, I absolutely agree that the parentheses and indentation do make the query much easier to read and comprehend - but it doesn't change the fact that it's still a query that uses nested joins. The parentheses and indentation don't have any functional impact on the query; they merely make the evaluation order, as implied by the order of the JOIN and ON clauses, more explicit and more visible to mere humans. The few timies where I did choose to use nested joins in actual code, I have always used parentheses and indentation for easier reading. In fact, my first draft of this question did use exactly that. I just took it out before submitting the question, because I am mean.:Whistling:

You are obviously correct that there are more ways to rewrite the query. When I wrote the explanation, I meant to write "the only way to rewrite the query to a form that doesn't use nested joins" - but I somehow forgot to put in that last crucial part. I am sure that, if we all weigh in, we'll be able to find at least a hundred other ways to rewrite the query. 😉

I stiill stand by what I intended to write - that the only way to rewrite the query to a form that doesn't use nested joins involves reordering the table order and changing the left outer join to the far less cocmmon and harder to grasp right outer join form.

Thanks for your comments! 😉