Thanks for your assistance. Its certainly educational.

I can see how creating an updateable view would work with small tables but I eventually want my app to add - say - 10,000 records to a table which may already have several million in it. Unless I'm missing something, that approach wouldn't work. You refer, however, to SQL Server's bulk operations and I've come across other references to that but I can't find an actual working example that would help me formulate a working command for that. If you can point me to a relevant link which has such an example, I would be grateful.

By the bye, I've just tried

SQLPREPARE(gnhandle,"insert into vizkeys (realkey,kcurrent,date_used,kprevious,knext,date_up,crypt_key,mess_hash,ownerkey) values (m.realkey,m.kcurrent,m.date_used,'','',m.date_up,'','',m.ownerkey)",'real')

and got this error message:

"The name 'realkey' is not permitted in this context. Only constants, expressions,or variables allowed here. Column names are not permitted."

which makes no sense to me whatever, as Column names would seem to be an obvious requirement when we're inserting records!!