OK, I see that for each database user connecting through the same DAD the v$process shows the same OS PID. OCI docs explain more how it is done at API level (things changed from the last time I used OCI :-) ) Anyway, re-authentication seems to be fast enough also it inevitably adds some overhead of course. How critical this overhead becomes depends on how loaded the system is. One larger issue which remains is the fact that only Oracle 10gR2 fixed one nasty 32K users issue(ORA-600) and one 9i version even was not capable of exporting more than 32K database users. This only means that database users is hardly a common choice for large applications. Fyrirvari/Disclaimer http://www.landsbanki.is/disclaimer -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l