Hello,

Both the article and the comment by Lutz Albers were enlightening.

When I ran into this problem, I would solve it like this:

SELECT *

FROM a

LEFT OUTER JOIN

  (SELECT * FROM b WHERE b.id <> 8) AS bx

ON a.id = bx.id

The above code clearly specifies (to me, anyway!) that excluding the value 8 should be applied to table b first, before the outer join is performed.

Thanks for the additional insight into this problem.