I'm designing some VB based ASP.NET 2.0, and I am trying to make more use of the various ASP tags that visual studio provides, rather than hand writing everything in the code-behind. I want to pass in an outside variable from the Session to identify who the user is for the query. <asp:sqldatasource id="DataStores" runat="server" connectionstring="<%$ ConnectionStrings:MY_CONNECTION %>" providername="<%$ ConnectionStrings:MY_CONNECTION.ProviderName %>" selectcommand="SELECT THING1, THING2 FROM DATA_TABLE WHERE (THING2 IN (SELECT THING2 FROM RELATED_DATA_TABLE WHERE (USERNAME = @user)))" onselecting="Data_Stores_Selecting"> <SelectParameters> <asp:parameter name="user" defaultvalue ="" /> </SelectParameters> </asp:sqldatasource> And on my code behind I have: Protected Sub Data_Stores_Selecting(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.Web.UI.WebControls.SqlDataSourceSelectingEventArgs) Handles Data_Stores.Selecting e.Command.Parameters("user").Value = Session("userid") End Sub Oracle squaks at me with ORA-01036, illegal variable name. Am I declaring the variable wrong in the query? I thought external variables share the same name with a @ prefixed. from what I understand, this should be placing the value I want into the query when it executes the select. EDIT: Okay, thanks for the advice so far, first error was corrected, I need to use : and not @ for the variable declaration in the query. Now it generates an ORA-01745 invalid host/bind variable name. EDIT AGAIN: Okay, looks like user was a reserved word. It works now! Thanks for other points of view on this one. I hadn't thought of that approach.