subquery returning no rows in WHERE clause

Is there any way in Oracle8 to have a not-equals comparison against a subquery return rows when the subquery returns no rows?

Take the following query:

SELECT TextCol FROM Table1
WHERE IDCol <> (SELECT ID FROM IDTable
WHERE IDValue = '...')

When there is no matching record in the IDTable this returns no rows, as the subquery returns no
rows. Logically, however, this is incorrect - everything is not equal to nothing! Is there any
way (without an embedded PL/SQL function) to have this return the logically correct rows?

   Thanks
   -Tom Received on Thu Jun 03 1999 - 09:18:26 CDT