Hi all, I'm having some trouble with the insert function and would appreciate anyones woords of wisdom... What I'm trying to do in a nutshell: 1. populate a 'working' table from a file (this is fine) 2. run sanity checks on the data (this is fine) 3. merge 'working' table into the 'main' table. (AARRGGGHHHH - not fine) eg. raw datafile: ------------------------------- 1996-12-12 12:12:12|bill 1997-03-02 23:12:45|ted ..etc... ------------------------------- sql statements: (table log has already been created with same parameters as 'logtmp') ------------------------------------------------------------- create table logtmp (outdate timestamp,luser char(8)); copy logtmp from '/tmp/file' using delimiters '|'; \echo various syntax checking to make sure data is good \echo \echo Update main table with new data \set fieldnames 'outdate,luser' insert into log (:fieldnames) select :fieldnames from logtmp; ------------------------------------------------------------- Everything works OK except for the last line... I know the variable 'fieldnames' works though on 'select :fieldnames from logtmp' When I actually use this in the production environment, the main table will have _one_ extra field as a serial sequence (this is why I used the fieldnames variable, otherwise I have about 20 fields), I thought this was my problem at first, but when I simplified the data right down, it still fails. Any thoughts?? Thanks in Advance. -- Dale Walker [EMAIL PROTECTED]