As said above, this is an old 'caveat' with the legacy outer join syntax compared to ANSI joining, that has been around since day one ANSI joins was available.

The primary difference lies in how the query is resolved.

The legacy syntax has only one WHERE clause to put both join criteria and filtering criteria, where with ANSI syntax, you have a distinct section in the ON clause for the actual join, and the filtering goes into the WHERE clause.

This difference makes such questions as 'what rows exists in table A but not in table B' simply impossible to write correctly with the old legacy *= syntax, since what we really ask for in these cases are nulls that are a result of the join itself.

There are many reasons to switch habits from legacy join syntax to ANSI style, these kinds of queries is one of them.

/Kenneth