Yes you are correct. I am looking at why we really need partitioning. The tables(like 4) were designed this way, but I don't believe with current volumn we actaully have are benefiting from this option. Our largest table holds 11 millions rows. If we expect to grow that is great, but Oracle reccomends to start partition a table when the table reaches 2g or more in size. Is that what everyone else has as a rule of thumb. Thanks Niall Litchfield <niall.litchfield@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: Just an aside really Laura, to me partitioning and parallelism (tend to) go hand in hand, it sounds like an interesting system to me that only requires 2 cpus but also has sufficient volumes of data to make splitting them worth while? -- Niall Litchfield Oracle DBA http://www.orawin.info --------------------------------- Cheap Talk? Check out Yahoo! Messenger's low PC-to-Phone call rates.