> Has anybody run into specific problems with > performance when using a lot of services Jon, I didn't measure. But I suppose if you have too many services, Oracle has to work harder to maintain all the service related performance views v$service% or the underlined tables, and service$. It reminds me of the old advice to not create too many tablespaces. But since all tablespaces are LMT now, the overhead is much smaller. (There's one thing common between ts$ and service$: "deleted" tablespaces/services stay in the table, although they can be reused if the same named tablespace/service is recreated.) Another concern is the limit of services, 100 as of 10.2.0.1 according to Jeremy Schneider's paper. We have more than 10 services in our database. We created a generic one that handles all small applications and dedicated ones each for each of the bigger apps. Yong Huang -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l