Thanks, Mark, for the good information. I had forgotten about the conversion aspect of transportable. No way I can do it on the source side--can't add more disk--questionable on the target side at this point in time. We have been running more tests on the larger tables and have found that direct-path insert in parallel will significantly cut load time. We will continue to test various scenarios over the next 3 weeks. There also is some discussion of moving the largest table a month at a time--fortunately, it now has a static date--moving the most current months first. Thanks everyone for all your suggestions. Sandy