Oh I'm sorry. See, I forgot the '::oid' part would be interpreted as part of the variable name. Its not. One of the ways you type a variable is to append it following a double colon. So 12345::integer and 'this is a text field'::text are valid PostgreSQL constructs. I suggested you write "insert into patblob values ('Yo'," . $blobid . "::oid)" this. I just moved $blobid out of the string so its obvious which parts are SQL and which parts are perl.