David, I haven't had the opportunity to use 10g yet, but I like your opinion that overall this is a great feature, and wonder what the experience of others has been. One of the quickest way to shut down a production application is to have two screens before you, one for test, one for production. Enter the drop table command into the wrong screen. The second easiest is to have a script lying about which conveniently begins with DROP TABLE, followed by CREATE TABLE. Have that executed at the wrong time on the wrong system, and catastrophe ensues. I have usually exported the small static tables weekly just to be able to recover from this problem. But I can see this can be frustrating when working with large tables because an additional step is required in order to release the space. Dennis Williams