Second question first. How did Oracle process the query correctly? I haven't a clue. It's optimizer must work in a different way, logically, than SQL Servers. As to the first quest,...

Hmmm... Interesting.

A couple of problems though. I wanted to get a list of values that exist in one table and not the other. I also tried running it with the...

Amen on the aliasing brother.

We've been reviewing some code from developers that not only didn't use aliasing, but used table names instead. Unfortunately they didn't even do that consistently so...

That's how I "solved" the problem when it was first presented to me. I couldn't read it in a way that made sense with the old syntax so I rewrote...

Doggone it. I was looking through Itzik's stuff for answer. I guess I didn't dig deep enough. Thanks for posting that.

Itzik's one of the minor dieties around my shop ever...

Setting AlwaysUseDefaultCodePath="TRUE" will cause this error to go away.

Yeah, I knew that. Just included it as information. BTW, it only occurred using the MS driver, not with any of the...

Thanks. That makes more sense than any other explanation I've been able to come up with.

It simply returns the anticipated results, which is only those rows that don't match. Precisely how... you need to ask someone that understands Oracle. I think Scott Coleman's answers have been...

A lot of it, unfortunately not all of it, comes from Oracle people. But even Oracle is starting down the path of eliminating the old style syntax. If you go...

Because of the left join, you would get values that are null, despite the fact that there were no null values in the table. It's not dissimilar to the query...

Couldn't agree more. I personally haven't written queries using the old syntax for something like 10 years. I had just assumed during all that time, that those people, either...

Sorry about that. This article wrote itself since I just copied & pasted the code. Usually I'd write the code for an article seperately. Again, sorry for the confusion.

It is absolutely the driver. The 8i & 9i drivers both had odd behavior, but after getting the 10g OLEDB driver installed, all of it went away. The data type...

Thanks for the response. We've just started looking into the driver to see if that could help. I've been running 8i. I think some of the developers were running 9i...

After I chased the guy down and hopefully retreived the pocket book, I'd try to educate the dope.

One thought that hadn't occurred to me previously, what happens when some other...