note screamingeagle well, i'm only being half-serious here :0) <Br> if you're using Oracle as a back-end : <code> select to_char(sysdate,'YYYY-MM-DD HH:MI:SS') from dual; </code> if you're using SQL Server , then it's even shorter : <Code> select getdate() </code> can't get shorter than that, can u ? ;-) <br> (I wouldnt recommend firing an sql query just to get the timestamp, though) 189968 189968