As Sushila said it may be obvious to some that it is sensible to move column names into variables of the same name prefixed by @ but I have seen yards of off-shore code which does not follow this convention. Also in the interest of laziness tables like Purchase_order_header (I wonder what that might be?) are called something like Purordhd. A good example of this is Sage, a leading UK accountancy package. It has table names like stockm uses tables as if they were flat files and does not have any constraints. There is also ignorance about the use of triggers, functions and transaction processing.