teejayuu - 9:10 am on Sep 1, 2010 (gmt 0)

Thanks all for the input. The work I am doing is at a different site and as it's development it's stored locally and I can't access it. I'll try these tomorrow on my return, but thanks anyway.

rocknbil

Second, I have never done "table as [placeholder]," I think those only apply to selected fields.

I really can't comment on this as I'm not heavily into MySQL or PHP. I am trying to modify an Open Source application (HESK) to suit a need we have and this query is lifted from that app (it also uses `backticks` but I've taken those out).

Thinking back to dawn of time (my college days - 1990 and a typing error) I seem to remember using "table as [placeholder]," if you were trying to join the same table to itself (can't remember why we were doing that) although things have probably changed since then (before the Internet). Anyway big thanks for your help - I'll be able to try tomorrow.

Cheers
Tony