Summary: Proposed solution, and question on efficiency of technique I don't know if this is what you are looking for, but I have a database where I needed a relatively complex view (which I can do thanks to the expanded view buffer in 7.0!, it didn't fit in 6.5.3), but I need to pass an "effective date" to the view that needed to be in a range (so I couldn't just use a column in one of the source tables) to get the results I want. My "solution" was to come up with an "effective dates" table with one column (primary keyed) that I can put the dates in. For example: create table effective_date (date date, primary key (date) ); create view complex_view as select blah, ..... , effective_date.date from tablea, tableb, tablec, effective_date where tablea.foo=tableb.foo .... and effective_date.date between tablec.start_date=tablec.end_date ; then, when I want to select rows from the view, I have to INSERT the date I want into the "effective_date" table (which is effectively my "parameter"), then I can select it from the view. i.e.: insert into effective_date values ('09/23/2000'); -- may "fail" if date is already in the table, but if it is, who cares? select * from complex_view where date='09/23/2000'; Now it would certainly be nicer if I could set some kind of global system variable to the date, then reference that system variable in the view, but I couldn't figure out any way to do it. If anyone in the know is screaming out loud at this technique, please point me in the right direction, I would love to be able to skip the "Insert into effective_date..." step. -paul Keith Wong wrote: > This is not really possible with postgresql at the moment. > Better off trying to work around, perhaps using a view. That way you have a > way to change the select > statement without actually modifying your client code. > > Keith. > > At 06:09 PM 22/09/2000 -0400, Nelson wrote: > >thank you jie Liang for your response, but my problems are: > >1. How to store a query in the database. > >2. How to give a parameter from outside of database, for example: > >select * from table1 where row1 = my_parameter_outside. > >Give me an example please. > > > >