I found SQL Fundamentals to be an extraordinarily useful guide to learning both the Oracle and Access versions.

So, uh, why would having an empty Gifts.MemberID cause the query to return nothing? I assume that the date of the donorless gift was 1/14/08…

Close — it was 1/13/08. What was happening is that no set that included the donorless gift could be generated correctly. I have no idea why.

You don’t owe me anything, but I am trying to gather ideas and inspirations for a new logo for my company, DocRocket - if you want to sketch a cute and/or cool rocket ship, that would be great, because my graphic artist has a serious rocket ship drawing deficit. Something 50s-ish?

Well, drawing machinery really isn’t my strong suit, but I gave it a shot…

I wish I had a book to recommend on the subject, but I learned by doing.

You don’t owe me anything, but I am trying to gather ideas and inspirations for a new logo for my company, DocRocket - if you want to sketch a cute and/or cool rocket ship, that would be great, because my graphic artist has a serious rocket ship drawing deficit. Something 50s-ish?

And yes, it was a problem in one of the underlying data tables.

First of all, thank you Robert for providing the essential info that I had to add a semicolon at the end; that was the thing I couldn’t figure out about running a standalone. (I had figured out the info SamC gave myself).

I had already known that the data for gift dates wasn’t screwed up (that was one of the first things I checked, by opening the data table directly and scanning the date column). However, when I ran Petar’s query (thank you, Petar) and scanned the results, I noticed that there was one gift which didn’t have an associated member ID — which is wrong. All gifts should have member IDs, indicating who gave the gift. (In fact, it shouldn’t even be possible to enter a gift without associating it with a member ID).

So I went to the data table, deleted the gift with no associated member ID, and now everything’s working perfectly. :-)

Thank you all for your help.

To run as a standalone, just go into Access, query/new/design view; when the query pops up, change the view to SQL; and paste in the code Petar posted. (Robert beat me to it.)

Also, could you try putting in the date code. Type the date into Excel, then change the cell format to “number”; 8/1/2007 is 39295.

I, too, suspect some problem in the underlying data tables.

SELECT Gifts.MemberID FROM Gifts GROUP BY Gifts.MemberID HAVING MAX{Gifts.Date} >= #01/14/08#;

WHERE {{{Members.Zip}>”0″

If this were my problem, I would do exactly what Robert suggested, and would try to isolate the problem.

The first thing to do is to run this: (use whatever parenthesis your system requires)

SELECT Gifts.MemberID, MAX(Gifts.Date)
FROM Gifts
GROUP BY Gifts.MemberID
HAVING MAX(Gifts.Date) >= #01/01/07#

This should give you a list of everyone who has donated anything since the beginning of last year, and the dates of their last gift. Is there anything strange about the results? Does a date appear too often? Does it look as if someone purged records? Tell us what you get, and I’ll give you the next step.

An interesting result would be if you get all dates higher than 01/13/08. Then I would go look for a incomplete/malformed record with that date in the Gifts table, or for the reason of made-up gifts showing at that time.

Whatever. Run it and let us know.

SELECT Members.Zip, Members.[First name], Members.[Last name], Members.[Address 1], Members.[Address 2], Members.City, Members.State
FROM Members
WHERE (((Members.Zip)>”0″) AND ((Members.MemberID)=(SELECT Gifts.MemberID FROM Gifts GROUP BY Gifts.MemberID HAVING MAX(Gifts.Date) >= #08/01/07#)) AND ((Members.Deceased)<>Yes) AND ((Members.[No Mail])<>Yes) AND ((Members.Retirement)<>Yes) AND ((Members.[No Begging])<>Yes))
ORDER BY Members.Zip, Members.[Last name];

But that just returns a “at most one record can be returned by this subquery” error.

So at my workplace, a nonprofit historic site, we use Microsoft Access to keep track of donations and addresses.

That’s your problem right there.

Bwhahahahhahahahaha!

Sorry. I was feeling immature and had to get that out of my system somehow.

SELECT Gifts.MemberID FROM Gifts GROUP BY Gifts.MemberID HAVING MAX{Gifts.Date} >= #01/14/08#

as a standalone and see what your output is for various dates.

Your queries are fine, at least to my eyes. But you knew that, because they used to work. Something has kludged your data.