I couldn't see this covered in the Zsql user's guide. select myfield from foo works as expected. As the current ODBC driver I am using has a bug which truncates varchar fields, it was suggested I cast it to char while retrieving the field. But select cast(my_varchar_field as char(140)) from foo gives an error with the following traceback... Zope Error Zope has encountered an error while publishing this resource. ValueError Sorry, a Zope error occurred. Traceback (innermost last): File D:\zope2\lib\python\ZPublisher\Publish.py, line 214, in publish_module File D:\zope2\lib\python\ZPublisher\Publish.py, line 179, in publish File D:\zope2\lib\python\Zope\__init__.py, line 202, in zpublisher_exception_hook (Object: sqlTest) File D:\zope2\lib\python\ZPublisher\Publish.py, line 165, in publish File D:\zope2\lib\python\ZPublisher\mapply.py, line 160, in mapply (Object: manage_test) File D:\zope2\lib\python\ZPublisher\Publish.py, line 102, in call_object (Object: manage_test) File d:\zope2\lib\python\Shared\DC\ZRDB\DA.py, line 319, in manage_test (Object: sqlTest) File d:\zope2\lib\python\Shared\DC\ZRDB\DA.py, line 300, in manage_test (Object: sqlTest) File d:\zope2\lib\python\Shared\DC\ZRDB\DA.py, line 415, in __call__ (Object: sqlTest) File D:\zope2\lib\python\Shared\DC\ZRDB\RDB.py, line 151, in __init__ ValueError: Empty column name, Using 2.1.6 with the ODBC DA. ------- Regards, Graham Chiu gchiu<at>compkarori.co.nz http://www.compkarori.com/dynamo - The Homebuilt Dynamo http://www.compkarori.com/dbase - The dBase bulletin