Okay, makes since.

>Well, I've had the occasion when some other program provides a cursor with the basic data I needed but I had to add some fields to get the whole job done.
>Sure, I could have copied (COPY or SELECT) the cursor to a structure like I needed (that's what I do do now) but my choice at the time had been to ALTER TABLE and that's how I learned of this problem.
>
>
>>Why would you want to alter the stucture of the cursor? You should have built it correctly in the first place, since it is a cursor. You probable want to alter the data in the cursor.
>>>
>>>Uless your code will ALTER TABLE on the cursor, in which case the 10 character field name limit does come into play.