You may say I'm ambitious, you may say I'm even foolish, but I'm going to do some database research work using PostgreSQL. And I've never used it before. Since I'm going to be working on optimization ideas, I'll have to get into the guts pretty quickly. For starters, though, I want to read the binary forms of stored procedures that are in PG_PROC.PROBIN. For that I need to use (I guess) a binary cursor. I don't see any examples lying about. Therefore, it's not instantly clear to me how to access fields from a binary cursor. I'm also not clear on how I find the internal structure of an arbitrary type, like 'bytea' (which is what the PROBIN is). Anybody with help, or with pointers to help, is welcome to share them. I expect to do a lot of RTFM, but I've run out of FM's I haven't already R-ed. ++ kevin -- Kevin O'Gorman (805) 650-6274 mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Permanent e-mail forwarder: mailto:Kevin.O'[EMAIL PROTECTED] At school: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~kogorman/index.html Web: http://trixie.kosman.via.ayuda.com/~kevin/index.html