Hi! Whats wrong with stored procedures? You should be able to put your script in an package... /Bjoern ----- Original Message ----- From: Johan Muller To: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx ; Oracle L (E-mail) Sent: Friday, September 01, 2006 10:08 PM Subject: Can we do this: Populate a variable inside a trigger? CREATE OR REPLACE TRIGGER features_tbl_au AFTER UPDATE ON features_tbl REFERENCING NEW AS NEW OLD AS OLD FOR EACH ROW DECLARE v_file VARCHAR2(1024); BEGIN IF (:NEW.enabled = 1 AND :OLD.enabled = 0) THEN v_file := '/vobs/NMS/nms/sql/nms_security/' || :NEW.name; @@v_file; END IF; EXCEPTION WHEN DUP_VAL_ON_INDEX THEN NULL; -- script has already been run so just ignore this type of error WHEN OTHERS THEN RAISE; END; / SP2-0310: unable to open file "v_file.sql" Is there a way to execute the script - the trigger will not pass the v_file variable to complete : NEW.name variable.