Simon, Thanks for the reply. Interesting thought but sub select refers to outer select....hmmm trying to redo i came up with: select r.ritm, t.task, t.ud from t t left outer join r r on t.ritm = r.ritm limit 1 order by date(t.ud) desc; which gives an error becuase of limit 1 clause so executing without limit clause: select r.ritm, t.task, t.ud from t t left outer join r r on t.ritm = r.ritm order by date(t.ud) desc; which then I get: r1|t3|2021-01-03 r1|t2|2021-01-02 r1|t1|2021-01-01 r2|t4|2021-01-01 which is wrong for two things. One is I only want the first row of t where it matches r on ritm and two I would like to see r3 from r and nulls for fields joining on t. Is there another way to just test the subselect? Thanks, Jeff