Including the rownum in the inline views (or whatever we're calling them this week) is the standard trick to force what you seem to want. -----Original Message----- <snip> When that didn't work and I made sure the table, index, and column stats were correct, I tried various hints for join order and join method. When that didn't work, I decided to smack Oracle in the face with the answer like this: SELECT ... FROM (SELECT ... FROM A, B WHERE ...) AB, (SELECT ... FROM C, D WHERE ...) CD WHERE ... <snip> -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l