Outer join / index loss - strange behaviour

Hi, Had a weird one today. I had a query with a lot of outer joins. It should (according to data) have returned one row but it didn't. I returned 4 rows, the real one with most of the values not null, and others with nulls in various fields. I couldn't find any explaination and the usual method of dropping bits off the query until it started to behave didn't find the smoking gun. Had a look at sqexplain.out and one of the indexes was not being used. I checked the index and it wasn't there so I re-created it and ran update statistics high. This solved the problem. Weird. I didn't think that the index effected the results of the query, only its access path. Could a corrupted index done this? TIA Steve --------------------------------------------------------- Steve Roach: Remove NOSPAM from address to reply: steve_roach@NOSPAMattglobal.net steve_roach@NOSPAMhotmail.com