> (Sounds like, if the db really is frozen I'm not going to get anything > regardless. sigh . . .) If this (db hangs) happens regularly then it's better to have one idle dedicated connection from sqlplus to be able to run smth like "oradebug dump systemstate 10" when database is freezing. Or you can attach to this process, call ksudss() and run in sqlplus 'select 1 from dual' (just to awake process from sleep). No matter that select will not return anything -- call to ksudss() should be succesfull in such case. -- Egor http://www.oracledba.ru/orasrp/ Free Oracle Session Resource Profiler -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l