All, thanks for your support and further insight into how derby works which you have been providing in your answers.
So if I understand correctly: (1) With the lack of a possibility to change the content of a transition variable in an After Insert trigger, (2) the lack of insert, update or delete in Before Insert triggers and (3) with the restriction of check constraints needing to be deterministic, it looks like (1) defining a default value on the colum (to ensure something is put there even if the user does not give a value on the insert itself) and (2) a SECOND after insert trigger which includes an Update statement seems to be the only option to implement an audit function if one wants to ensure that a column 'CreatedBy' on a table shows the login of the person who has inserted the row (regardless of what that person might or might not have included on the insert statement itself). (Note: a second after insert trigger, because the 'other' after insert trigger which executed a derby procedure is already needed to implement the audit function as such). I still need to implement this second after insert trigger to check details, but I would assume the update statement included will then itself fire the update trigger I defined for auditing changes on my table and I will then have audit records (1) showing the initially inserted value on the columns and (2) audit records showing the 'old' value fom the initial inserrt and records from after the update coming fom the second trigger - whereas I would have only had one entry in case I could have overwritten transition variable content in the first place with whatever would have been stored there prior to this being written back to the data base. Regards Thomas
