gunslinger008

Thanks for the suggestion, but unfortunately it doesn\'t work. :/ When a project has more than one budget or extra cost the same thing happens as I described. And, without the LEFT JOINs, if a project has zero budgets or extra costs then both sums become null. I\'ve decided that what\'s needed is formal subqueries, so I\'ll just have go with separate queries until MySQL v4.1 is ready for production use. We migrated from Oracle a while ago, and while I can\'t test it, I believe Oracle does (left) outer joins in a subquery-like fashion. Cheers, Sean

I\'m using MySQL v4.0.13, and I have the following tables: PROJECTS, BUDGETS, EXTRA_COSTS. Each project can have multiple (or zero) budgets and multiple (or zero) extra costs. I\'m trying to get the budget and extra cost totals for a particular project using the following query: SELECT SUM(budget_tot) AS budget_total, SUM(extrac_tot) AS extracost_total FROM PROJECTS LEFT JOIN BUDGETS ON budget_proj_id = proj_id LEFT JOIN EXTRA_COSTS ON extrac_proj_id = proj_id WHERE proj_id = 143 The problem is when a project has a more than one budget or more than one extra cost each amount is multiplied by the number of rows in the other table. For example, if a project has five budgets and two extra costs, each budget amount would be included twice and each extra cost amount would be included five times. I realize what\'s happening here, but it\'s not what I expected (and obviously not what I\'d like to happen). I have worked out the following trick to get the right numbers, but it\'s a bit of a hack: SELECT ( SUM(budget_tot) / IF(COUNT(DISTINCT extrac_id)=0, 1, COUNT(DISTINCT extrac_id)) ) AS budget_total, ( SUM(extrac_tot) / IF(COUNT(DISTINCT budget_id)=0, 1, COUNT(DISTINCT budget_id)) ) AS extracost_total FROM PROJECTS LEFT JOIN BUDGETS ON budget_proj_id = proj_id LEFT JOIN EXTRA_COSTS ON extrac_proj_id = proj_id WHERE proj_id = 143 Does anyone know of a better way to do this without resorting to separate queries? It would be nice to have something like SUM(DISTINCT ...). Does anyone know if the LEFT JOIN behavior has changed in MySQL v4.1? Thanks, Sean