Hmmmm. That seems like a good idea. I don't usually use placeholders and the prepare/execute approach unless I am looking for performance gains on a repeated operation, but in this case it might prevent Oracle from treating the ampersand as a variable reference since it would be already inside a bind variable. I'll try it ... and post an update. It will take me a little while to set it up ... the actual insert is in a SUPER class, but I build the statement lower in the inheritance chain. Thanks.