The trouble you're having there is that there is no standard syntax for ANSI 89 outer joins at all. All outer joins were RDBMS-specific syntax. Indeed, if I rem

The trouble you're having there is that there is no standard syntax for ANSI 89 outer joins at all. All outer joins were RDBMS-specific syntax. Indeed, if I remember right, left outer comma joins are *= for Oracle and =* for DB2 (or was it =+). MySQL has never supported any other syntax for outer joins, but it does support ANSI 89 (comma) inner joins. The ANSI 89 syntax for inner joins is pretty ubiquitous, as it can be a little easier to write code generators that way.