I wonder if this wrapper function idea may hurt, or help in some cases, w/r/t function based indexes? The wrapper is an interesting idea, and good for some tests. ;-) Regards, Mike On Wed, 3 Nov 2004 10:47:39 +0100, Stephane Faroult <sfaroult@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > I usually try to get rid of function calls, especially costly ones, in SQL > statements but when everything fails I try to use packaged variables, eg > -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l