>I am trying to return a value from an Oracle stored function. I know how to work with the stored procedures but I do not know the syntax and steps to deal with functions. I simply want to return a value to determine if a certain record in a table exists. I have been doing this via stored procedures but I would rather do this through a function. Can anyone lead me in the right direction?

If your ADO provider does not offer that kind of thing (and I doubt that it does), you can't do it. The best thing is to have a stored procedures that call your funtions and return a value.