Gary, Your first answer is correct. The prepared statement is stored with the space for the open variables to be filled in. If you need to be really tricky, you can put the statement in quotation marks, and variables with dollar sign will be filled in immediately (by Tcl), and those with colon will not be filled in until actually executed. Of course, unless you execute a statement a skazillion times, you won't see any difference in the timing. Tcl is slow, but not that slow. Disk access time dominates all. Gerry