> I have used this in quite a few heavy load designs and never found any > issues, some are running for years now. You're playing a roulette. Proper sterilization is done using hardware atomic instructions (like test&set) which guarantees that no two process will be able to mess it (on which, in turn, Oracle serialization mechanisms are relying upon). -- Alex Fatkulin, http://afatkulin.blogspot.com http://www.linkedin.com/in/alexfatkulin -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l