Hi, I've seen this happen before - the culprit was hibernate/JDBC passing in a value as a an NVARCHAR2 instead of a VARCHAR2 - I had to create a functional index (TO_NCHAR) as a workaround. Have a look in dba_hist_sql_bind_metadata & check what type Oracle thinks the bind variable is. Cheers, Phil On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 5:53 AM, GovindanK <gkatteri@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Linux RAC ,11.1.0.7 > Query runs fast with hard coding / SQL*Plus '&' ; But when run through the > application using bind variables , the plan is different and it goes for > MERGE CARTESIAN JOIN. Metalink , google , underscore parameters are not of > much help. Tried different bucket sizes with statistics ; Tried rewriting > the query; Marginal improvement ; If you hard code or with SQL*Plus '&' the > query runs in 1 second .. but with bind variable it takes anywhere from 3 > to 10 minutes depending on the input values. > > > > -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l