OK, I give up - I can't find out how to do this. I thought I'd tracked it down in my copy of O'Reilly's 2MySQL and mSQL which says that you put NULL as the value for an autoincrementing, NOT NULL field in an INSERT statement: e.g. INSERT INTO records (record_id, name, etc.....) VALUES (NULL, 'Alan', etc.) which is wierd enough. But it doesn't work (not via PHP mysql_query() anyhow) - predictably, I get an error 1048 Column 'record_id' cannot be null. Help please! TIA Alan Hale -- PHP Database Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To contact the list administrators, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]