Hey Fabian: Thanks so much for your response. I really appreciate the help. I don't think I can use the idea of creating a table with a sequence column and later doctoring that column with an ALTER SEQUENCE statement because I use a COPY INTO command to populate the table with a text file. The table must have the same number of columns as the test file for the COPY INTO statement to work and the text file has no sequence column. Do you know of some other way to populate a table from a text file that might get around this? I tried to use an INSERT statement to populate a table that already had a sequence column, but that didn't work either. Here's what I did. sql->create table test (name varchar(10), seq serial); sql->create table test2 (name varchar(10)); sql->insert into test2 values ('a), ('b'), ('c'); [ 3 ] sql->insert into test (name) select (name) from test2; ERROR = !ERROR: INSERT INTO: PRIMARY KEY constraint 'test.test_seq_pkey' violated So if I use the COPY INTO statement to populate a table from my text file, I can't use the resulting table in an INSERT/SELECT statement to populate another table that has a sequence column. Is there some course of action you can think of to get a sequenced table from a text file? With 40million+ rows it sure can't be done by hand. Again, thanks for your help and also thanks for all your postings on this list. I've found them interesting and instructive. Best......George