I use your example to try to replicate my case. It is a single table where I have information of contracts by supplier. In that table a material-supplier can have more than one entry (contracts past and current). I just want to pick the most recent date. In a sense this is similar to your example.

What puzzles me is that I created the first step like in your case (it worked); even I saved those instructions as a MSAccess query (I called it “Query4″). Here are the instructions:
SELECT
MAX(SourceListIntl.BDATU) AS ContractDate, SourceListIntl.MATNR, SourceListIntl.WERKS
FROM
SourceListIntl
GROUP BY
SourceListIntl.MATNR, SourceListIntl.WERKS;

Then I wrote the instructions as per your second SQL query, but MSAccess returns an error message (Syntax error in JOIN operation). Here is the code:

SELECT SourceListIntl.MATNR, SourceListIntl.WERKS, SourceListIntl.BDATU, SourceListIntl.LIFNR, SourceListIntl.EBELN
FROM
SourceListInt INNER JOIN (SELECT MAX(SourceListIntl.BDATU) AS ContractDate, SourceListIntl.MATNR, SourceListIntl.WERKS
FROM
SourceListIntl
GROUP BY SourceListIntl.MATNR, SourceListIntl.WERKS
) AS LastDate
ON (SourceListIntl.MATNR= LastDate.MATNR) AND (SourceListIntl.WERKS= LastDate.WERKS) AND (SourceListIntl.BDATU= LastDate.ContractDate);
This does not works

BUT If I substitute the SELECT MAX … instructions by Query4 it works !!! Like this:

SELECT SourceListIntl.MATNR, SourceListIntl.WERKS, SourceListIntl.BDATU, SourceListIntl.LIFNR, SourceListIntl.EBELN
FROM SourceListIntl INNER JOIN Query4 ON (SourceListIntl.WERKS=Query4.WERKS) AND (SourceListIntl.MATNR=Query4.MATNR) AND (SourceListIntl.BDATU=Query4.ContractDate)
GROUP BY SourceListIntl.MATNR, SourceListIntl.WERKS, SourceListIntl.BDATU, SourceListIntl.LIFNR, SourceListIntl.EBELN;

This last set of instructions works but I would like it to work like yours

Any comments will be appreciated

Thanks in advance

Robert