Paul, The developer believes that numbers are just characters, same as letters, ergo they are treated the same way in the database. I know that the values are stored with different types, but beyond that, I don't know what issues could bite me. I have seen code for other columns defined as CHAR or VARCHAR2 that use <, >, and <> to pull the desired rows. Would this be relevant to the discussion as well? Sandy
The developer doesn't want to translate? What, he thinks 0 and 1 are letters?