ah, cheers!

think the 'Min' on the IssueNo may just do the trick.

not sure though how good it performs on big dataset...

thanks. you missed out the 'group by' so i included it as below:

Select p.ProjectNo, p.IssueNo, p.DateStarted

From Projects As p

Inner Join

(

Select ProjectNo, Min(DateStarted) As EarliestDate

From Projects

...