> They do so at their peril with respect to continuation of such behavior in future or other as-yet-untested releases. Thanks for your input Larry - I totally get that relying on undocumented behaviour is not a good strategy! The thrust of my argument now is that the current behaviour **should** be fixed **and** documented. If a programmer wants the values in the VALUES clause to have a different order, all they have to do is use a different order - so that, for example, ROW_NUMBER() will work as expected (or at least as **I** expect! :-) Thanks again! CV!