I am too new to this environment to know what to call what I want to do. Breifly, I want to do an insert where the values for three of the attributes are combined via a function and make up the value for the fourth attribute. The function may be a simple as a concatenation, or I may want to do other things to manipulate the strings that are entered. I think what I want is a function that I can call when I do the insert like this insert into mytable (col1, col2, col3) values ('somestring', 'another string' ) but have the insert fix col3 to be whatever it the function computes it to be. does this make any sense? -- David Bear College of Public Programs/ASU 411 N Central, Phoenix, AZ 85004 ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 4: Have you searched our list archives? http://archives.postgresql.org