(Yes, I'm asking a lot of questions. Hopefully the answers to the more interesting ones can eventually make their way into documentation...) I want to do something like this pseudo_sql_method: select * from some_table where some_column = <!--#sqlvar other_sql_method type=int--> other_sql_method looks like this: select max(some_column) from another_table The point being that other_sql_method is guaranteed to return a single value. I want to take that single value and directly interpolate it into the text of pseudo_sql_method. What I'm really trying to do here is: select * from some_table where some_column = (select max(some_column) from another_table) but MySQL doesn't support nested selects (yet). I'm quite confident there's a way to do this -- I was reading about direct traversal -- but I can't quite grasp it. Daniel Drucker