The situation:

I have two tables. First table has 3,000 - 4,000 records [userID, firstname, lastname, dateJoined, etc...]. Second table has about 100 records [userID, status, date, etc ...]. The database is MySQL v4.0.27 and I'm talking to it with phpMyAdmin 2.6.4-pl2.

What I want to accomplish:

I want to return all records in the FirstTable where the userID does not exist as a userID in the SecondTable. This sounds simple to me but I just haven't been able to get it to work.

Any advice from the fine minds at dbforums.com would be greatly appreciated.

yes, a join will get you there

specifically, a LEFT OUTER JOIN where FirstTable is the left table and SecondTable is the right table, with a WHERE clause to check IS NULL in the right table's join condition

there's an example of this here -- http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/4.1/en/join.html