My apologies to all who have been kind enough to answer my questions.

I should have pointed out that I was aware that there were syntax
errors, and that I would need to fix them. Your answers have been
helpful in reminding me how variables and IF statements should be structured.

What i am more interested in, however, is how to solve the following problem :

"I need to get a field value dependant on the maximum of another field value.

For example in the following case, I want the BATCH NUMBER value for
the maximum RECORDNO value."

If I try "SELECT MAX(RECORDNO), BATCHNO FROM BATCH then I have to use
the GROUP BY clause. The problem with that is that I get a result set
with multiple rows.

What I would like is a singleton result set, which for the maximum
RECORDNO will give me the corresponding BATCHNO.

Any ideas?

Thanks, and apologies once again

Tim