Some suggested reading: http://oradoc.photo.net/ora81/DOC/server.815/a67842/toc.htm http://oradoc.photo.net/ora81/DOC/server.815/a68022/toc.htm The Oracle documentation is surprisingly well written and fairly easy to skim. -joseph * Embedded SQL is, without a doubt, terribly rigid and not particularly * pleasant or perlish. On the other hand, at one point (the point where I was * using Oracle regularly) I'd have killed, or at least given really nasty * paper cuts, for it as a way to wean folks off of C. (It's amazing how many * people write reports, including financial reports, in C. It's got to be one * of the *least* suitable languages for that sort of thing...)