Hi Brandon > I can't prevent Baan from sending these hints, it's > hardcoded into their database driver I won't comment about your problem with outlines. As you know and noticed they are simply not always reliable. (It's not a coincidence that Oracle is deprecating them...) If I where you I would add a SQL profile to change optimizer mode. Here an example (notice the switch between first_rows_10 and all_rows): SQL> select /*+ first_rows(10) */ * from sh.customers order by cust_id; ---------------------------------------------------- | Id | Operation | Name | ---------------------------------------------------- | 0 | SELECT STATEMENT | | | 1 | TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID| CUSTOMERS | | 2 | INDEX FULL SCAN | CUSTOMERS_PK | ---------------------------------------------------- SQL> begin 2 dbms_sqltune.import_sql_profile( 3 name => 'test', 4 category => 'DEFAULT', 5 sql_text => 'select /*+ first_rows(10) */ * from sh.customers order by cust_id', 6 profile => sqlprof_attr('ALL_ROWS','IGNORE_OPTIM_EMBEDDED_HINTS') 7 ); 8 end; 9 / SQL> select /*+ first_rows(10) */ * from sh.customers order by cust_id; ---------------------------------------- | Id | Operation | Name | ---------------------------------------- | 0 | SELECT STATEMENT | | | 1 | SORT ORDER BY | | | 2 | TABLE ACCESS FULL| CUSTOMERS | ---------------------------------------- HTH Chris -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l