Hi Folks below is a seltion of queries all doing very similar things I have run all on Oracle 7 and 8i and all work fine. but only number 2 works in MySQL. So does this suggest that MySQL is not fully compliant with Ansi SQL? The problem seems to lie in the fact that the embedded select does not not like multiple values as params. Though it will work if you hard code in values. but what the hell is the use of hard coding stuff, everything nowadays is param driven. 1. select count(*) from user_results where res_id in (select res_id from user where depart_id = 10) 2.select count(*) from user_results x,user y where x.res_id = y.res_id and y.depart_id = 10; 3.select count(*) from user_results y where y.res_id = (select x.res_id from user where x.depart_id = 10 and x.user_id = y.user_id); Any Ideas would be appreciated. Darragh