Thanks for the response mark. Yes i was testing with just accountId initially but the ultimate goal is to sort the results by customer and customer's accounts sorted by another actID. I don't think sort order of null values should be an issue. On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 11:59 AM, Mark W. Farnham <mwf@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > you've changed the order by since the original posting. which order by do > you actually want? a.actID versus c.name, a.actID > > How do you want null values to sort for the sort order you actually want? > -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l