Hi gurus, I'm basically trying to have global settings that can be overriden per object (let's say a forum as in the DDL below) ... let me explain, let's say I want to have 5 settings for all my forums, e.g. threads per page .. etc, I want those to work as global or default settings but at the same time I still want to be able to override some or all of the settings per forum.

The global (or default) settings are in the ForumSettingDefaults table, the overriden settings are in the ForumSettings table, how can we select the settings for all forums so that the resultset contains:
ForumID, SettingName, SettingValue (if the setting is overriden, ie. exists in the ForumSettings table, the value is taken from there otherwise we get the value from the ForumSettingDefaults table).

Here's the DDL for the tables and an example for the data follows:

create table Forums
(
ForumID int,
ForumName varchar(50),
-- other fields
);

create table ForumSettings
(
ForumID int,
SettingName varchar(50),
SettingValue varchar(50)
);

create table ForumSettingDefaults
(
SettingName varchar(50),
SettingValue varchar(50)
);

For example if I have this data in my tables:

-- Table Forums
ForumID | ForumName
1 | Forum1
2 | Forum2

-- Table ForumSettings
ForumID | SettingName | SettingValue
2 | Setting2 | 7

-- Table ForumSettingDefaults
SettingName | SettingValue
Setting1 | 1
Setting2 | 2
Setting3 | 3
Setting4 | 4
Setting5 | 5

I want to get this resultset:

ForumID | SettingName | SettingValue
1 | Setting1 | 1
1 | Setting2 | 2
1 | Setting3 | 3
1 | Setting4 | 4
1 | Setting5 | 5
2 | Setting1 | 1
2 | Setting2 | 7
2 | Setting3 | 3
2 | Setting4 | 4
2 | Setting5 | 5

* Notice the overriden value for Setting2 in fourm 2

Any suggestions are highly appreciated...

Never mind guys, I already solved the problem, here's the select statement:

SELECT
ForumID,
SettingName,
SettingValue
FROM
ForumSettings
UNION ALL
SELECT
Forums.ForumID,
ForumSettingDefaults.SettingName,
ForumSettingDefaults.SettingValue
FROM
Forums,
ForumSettingDefaults
WHERE
CONCAT(Forums.ForumID, ForumSettingDefaults.SettingName) NOT IN (SELECT CONCAT(ForumID, SettingName) FROM ForumSettings)

If you have any better solution, it would be very nice to post it here.

Thanks

better solution might be a LEFT OUTER JOIN

Thanks a lot, it works greatly!