I've just taken over the duties of reporting on a rather sloppy inventory system with missing chunks of data here and there. This missing data has brought a loop hole to my queries.....

I have two tables:
Workstat Table
WS_NUM
NAME
TYPE

Items Table
WS_NUM
ASSET
PUR_PRICE
WARRANTY
KIND

The two tables are inner joined @ WS_NUM and I need to query 'WS_NUM', 'NAME', 'TYPE', 'ASSET', 'PUR_PRICE', 'WARRANTY', & 'KIND' It is a one to many relationship with Workstat being 1 and Items being many. I need to see all of this data only for Items of 'Kind' = Computer. Here's where the problem occurs: some entries in 'Workstat' do not have corresponding entries in Items of 'Kind' = Computer, so how do I only display the 'WS_NUM' and 'NAME' for these special cases as opposed to what my query does now - not display any entry that does not have an associated Item of 'KIND' = computer. Any help would be extremely helpful. Thanks

Use an outer join:

SELECT w.ws_num, ..., i.kind
FROM workstat w
LEFT OUTER JOIN items i
ON w.ws_num = i.ws_num;

I was working on a same kind of problem today. In my case an outer join did not work, because we have a db in ORACLE 8 .
Our dba gave me the following statement for ORACLE 8 that is equal to an outer join (I translate it to you case);

SELECT w.ws_num, ..., i.kind
FROM workstat w, items i
WHERE w.ws_num = i.ws_num (+);

Problem Solved! In order to show the information in the 1st table given that data is missing from the right table, you must do a LEFT JOIN. However, you cannot do a left join if you are selecting based on criteria in the 2nd table. I ended up performing a nested SELECT statement and setting an alias for a subquery

SELECT table1.contents alias.contents
FROM table1
(SELECT table2.contents
FROM table2 LEFT JOIN
WHERE table2.contents = 'criteria') alias
ON table1.valuetojoin = alias.valuetojoin
WHERE table1 criteria

maybe it'll help you as well