I found this side-by-side a concise little primer. http://www.oracle-base.com/articles/9i/ANSIISOSQLSupport.php And Mr. King's presentations have been quite good in past RMOUG Training Days events. I haven't seen this one personally, though: http://www.kingtraining.com/downloads/Oracle9iJoin_paper.pdf - bill c. -----Original Message----- From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Mladen Gogala Sent: Tuesday, January 18, 2005 12:45 PM To: 'Oracle-L (E-mail)' Subject: ANSI Joins My developers are starting to use ANSI joins in vain hope that they will make their apps portable across databases. I have a positive attitude toward ANSI joins: I hate those verbose extensions that make SQL statements lengthy and unreadable. What is the opinion of other people about ANSI joins? What is the @#$%! allure of those things? Where did they learn it from? Is there any readable document that explains ANSI joins for dummies? -- Mladen Gogala Oracle DBA Ext. 121 -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l