>>Not quite it. I want to pad with nothing. It seems that the other guy (working in powerbuilder and sybase's SQL anywhere) is kinda working with SET ANSI ON -- that is to say, "CERT " # "CERT" so I need to only write the first four characters... I think its an ODBC setting or something, at least I hope there is something like that.

>Can you not trim the field in the insert validation and put a NULL at the end??

So I would change my insert statement to something like:

insert into master_cred (system_name) values ("CERT"+.null.)

Would that work? Is there a way to do that for every field in the system automatically? I would rather not have to set it up for every field (there are a few hundred of them in the final insert statement.)