You clearly know what you're doing -- I make the assumption, at any rate, that anybody who uses SQL knows what he or she is doing -- my own experience with SQL was limited to mainframe (DB2) work, and it was extensive there, but I never bothered bringing it over to the PC, because I generally found Excel by itself did all I wanted.

If you are interested in seeing what I did in Excel, send me an e-mail (by reply, using that option instead of posting to the boards), and I'll send you a copy of the ages-old Excel sheet I created ... using an export from SIPro of seven years of financial every one of the S&P 500 companies ... and you may see why I opted for that route rather than SQL access to their database. I did the same with the Russell 2000, for small cap companies, a much larger export and resulting in a larger file, but the same notion ...

mathetes