Thanks! That did it. The inner parens are necessary - without them the ORDER BY seems to be parsed as part of the second subquery and is therefore a syntax error.
Best, Andy ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Andrew J Perrin - http://www.unc.edu/~aperrin Assistant Professor of Sociology, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill [EMAIL PROTECTED] * andrew_perrin (at) unc.edu On Thu, 12 Sep 2002, Tom Lane wrote: > Andrew Perrin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > SELECT ... FROM participants > > WHERE typenr=1 AND <eligibility> > > UNION > > SELECT ... FROM participants > > WHERE typenr=2 LIMIT 172 > > ORDER BY zip; > > I think you need > > SELECT * FROM > ( > SELECT ... FROM participants > WHERE typenr=1 AND <eligibility> > UNION > (SELECT ... FROM participants > WHERE typenr=2 LIMIT 172) > ) ss > ORDER BY zip; > > Not sure if the inner set of parens is essential, but it might be. > The outer SELECT superstructure is definitely necessary to give a > place to hang the ORDER BY on. > > regards, tom lane > ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 1: subscribe and unsubscribe commands go to [EMAIL PROTECTED]