Another advantage of this way might be if you often use default values for some of the columns in the table - this version won't fall over if you only pass it the arguments relevant to the non-default values - i.e. you can give it as many or as few args as you want, so long as you have good default values defined in the db.

I must say, I wish I could have voted for Ovid's node more than once - it helped me a lot.

§ George Sherston