Ahhhh..The light goes on! That would certainly explain the error messages I get!

Okay, I'm thinking I can defiintely get oracle to provide the timestamp for the time the record was actually inserted into the Oracle table: that will meet the user needs. But, the other datetime field was the time the record was originally entered into the system.: the SQL server table I am working from is created from a select on another table.

Do you know if there a way to convert that datetime value into another datatype (varchar?) in the sql server select statement I use to populate my table? Then I would need to just go from varchar (for example) to the Oracle timestamp field. Or, to reverse that logic, can I go from datetime to say varchar2 in Oracle (and then have a trigger that fires a block of PL/SQL code to cast the value as a timestamp after it arrives)?

Just trying to play some games with the DBMS's to get them to do what we need. I'll give the above a try, but if you already have experience with it and know I'm fighting a losing battle let me know!

Thanks, Scott!!!