Wayne Lawton you are a star thats exactly what I wanted. I had posted the same problem on sqlteam.com & sql-server-performance.com and it...

no that didnt work either.

What i mean by mismatches is that:

I want to find all activities which are not associated to a store

Given each release consists of a group...

thats what Joe Celko had posted earlier, but doesnt work. it only works if I specify a single store which is obviously tedeous.

Sorry, I didnt include all the table for Activity. Yes there is a release column in the activity table.

In that case what is the difference between a full outer-join and...

The problem there is that the Store_activity doesnt have a release column. This is a very confusing problem which I really do not know what...