>Note that you obviously cannot update the row you are inserting in a before insert trigger since the row has not yet been inserted. Obviously. I started out thinking in much less verbose solutions (and fewer execution steps) for such trivial data transformations that could be implemented in a `BEFORE` trigger as simply as: `SELECT new.field := function(new.field)` (not sure where/if I've seen this) or `SELECT function(new.field) INTO new.field` (MySQL for @vars, not sure if it works in general for regular fields) But neither syntax is supported by SQLite3. Thanks again. Your suggestion appears to work.