Well well, after I posted my request for help, I thought to search the mailing list archive, and lo! and behold! there was a discussion in December 2003 of the exact same problem, with the "resolution" that it is a design limitation, it may have been put on some request list, and it looks like I need to go back to individually defined tables or find some other workaround ... So unless someone has developed a patch for this for 7.4.2, I will now continue with my irregularly scheduled poking around and learning ... Thanks to everybody for PostgreSQL anyway :-) -- ... _._. ._ ._. . _._. ._. ___ .__ ._. . .__. ._ .. ._. Felix Finch: scarecrow repairman & rocket surgeon / felix@crowfix.com GPG = E987 4493 C860 246C 3B1E 6477 7838 76E9 182E 8151 ITAR license #4933 I've found a solution to Fermat's Last Theorem but I see I've run out of room o ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 7: don't forget to increase your free space map settings