artful, Appears you are curious as what the name of the column that contains the incremented value is...not what the value of the last insert was from the previous insert.

Sounds like you are looking for a description of the table itself. Since you mention describe, I am thinking you are talking about Oracle. (although as you can see from the forthcoming example, via oracle you would(should) use the sequenced column in the insert..so maybe I assume wrong) Anyway, here is an oracle way...

a typcial sequence that is tied to a column during an insert:

create sequence seq_name
   start with 1
   increment by 1
   maxvalue 999999
   nocycle
   cache 20;
create public synonym seq_name for owner.seq_name;
grant select on seq_name to joe_user;
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With above created, you now do the insert like so:

insert into table 
    (seq_col, cola, colb, colc)
  values 
    (seq_name.NEXTVAL, 'data','moredata','otherdata')
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Now I guess it's quite possible that the technique currently being used does not list the columns prior to the values...ala

insert into table 
  values 
    (seq_name.NEXTVAL, 'data','moredata','otherdata')
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...therefore you are not seeing the column name...if this is the case, modify the sql to use all the columns (you'll probably need the describe at this point...but just once, since you now have the column name in the sql). Note that doing an insert "by position" (without naming the columns prior to values) can get you into trouble if the table is ever altered without warning (that never happens, eh? :-))

anyway hope I was at least close on this one...

good luck