Paul Benedict Yes, thats part of it. Like I said I foresee a generic solution and then simplified, special-use solutions.

But take the case of creation/modification timestamp. Often users want to have the db "current timestamp" function be used. There are 2 routes here:

1. We could call the function, get the value and then turn around and pass it back in to the db using a parameter
2. We could encode the function call into the SQL.

In the later case the "strategy" approach does not work as a general solution