Thanks again for your input Helen (and Sandeep)
The field is NOT NULL, but these are good points anyway I hadn't
thought of.

Just had a thorough scour, and realised I was feeding the input
paramters incorrectly (there are four input params, only showed one
for simplicity)
I checked this very thing at least 3 times, and missed it each time,
d'uh! (very annoying for me, and a nuisance to you)

Very very very sleepy, seeing double and need sleep.
Sorry for wasting your time, but at least I learnt a few new things
through this.

Rgds,
-Ryan

> Sandeep, it crossed my mind that the proc should test for NULL as

well as

> 'N', if it doesn't have a Not Null constraint, since I think Ryan

really

> wants his procedure to perform some processing on a record which

has 'Y'

> and to exit otherwise. But I can't see where the presence of null

would

> cause the proc to see a 'Y' as a 'N'.
>
> Another thing to do (anyway) should be to initialise the

variable...

>
> heLen