Hi Christo >Where did you get the number of slots available and needed from? > >"In the second case we need about 116 slots but only 17 are available" My apologies, there's an error here... What I meant is "166 times the available memory for the slots". >Which trace told you that ? I cant seem to find tehse numbers >(especially 116) in the trace outputs you gave. My understanding/guess is that the CBO compares the "result set size" ("bytes" in execution plan) with "memory for slots". In the first case 400000 is smaller than 983040 --> therefore low cost. In the second case 80400000 is much greater than 696320 (about 116 times) --> therefore "high" cost. HTH Chris -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l