OUTER JOIN result is missing rows, no WHERE clause (Workaround found)

Question

Update at the bottom.

I am trying to do a self outer join that, for each record, returns it and all other records occuring later than it, or NULL if it itself is t

Answer 1

You are not missing anything. If this happens, it's a bug.

The engine used by MS-Access has several bugs. I've seen similar, inavlid behaviour in joins that had "complex" ON conditions. See another SO question where Access gives buggy results: Why does my left join in Access have fewer rows than the left table?

You can try the query with identical data in SQL-Server, Oracle, Postgres, even MySQL and you will get the correct, expected results.

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As a workaround, you can try rewriting the query with a UNION, but one can never be sure about the correctness:

SELECT A.[CR#], A.REGIS_STATUSDATE, B.REGIS_STATUSDATE
FROM CR_ADMIN_REGIS_STATUS A 
  INNER JOIN CR_ADMIN_REGIS_STATUS B
    ON  A.[CR#]=B.[CR#] 
    AND A.REGIS_STATUSDATE < B.REGIS_STATUSDATE

UNION ALL

SELECT A.[CR#], A.REGIS_STATUSDATE, NULL
FROM CR_ADMIN_REGIS_STATUS A 
WHERE NOT EXISTS
      ( SELECT *
        FROM CR_ADMIN_REGIS_STATUS B
        WHERE A.[CR#]=B.[CR#] 
          AND A.REGIS_STATUSDATE < B.REGIS_STATUSDATE
      ) ;