Like many hosting providers, we grant full access to databases for site administrators, and we create a separate, rights-limited user for each database. This is a great idea until it's time to run update.php. It really should detect that I don't have DROP, ALTER, etc; but instead it just fails badly. What I've been doing is editing settings.php to replace the credentials in $db_url, running update.php, and then re-editing the file. I'm sure that most of our users are just leaving things as-is, which is bad for many reasons. It would be nice to have a place to enter some temporary credentials, stored in $_SESSION and disposed of when the user logs out. a) Is this in-progress someplace? b) Anybody have UI suggestions for this? It could just go into update.php, but may have use elsewhere. Allie Micka pajunas interactive, inc. http://www.pajunas.com scalable web hosting and open source strategies