All, I'm looking for a way to measure the elapsed time (in milliseconds) of executing a bunch of functions within a PL/SQL package. I've written a "timer" function that records this by using SYSTIMESTAMP, however is causes the sessions to spend a significant amount of time waiting on "cache buffers chains". Coding "w_date := SYSTIMESTAMP;" will result in a recursive "SELECT SYSTIMESTAMP FROM DUAL", and this is the sql being executed by sessions waiting on this latch (from v$session_wait and v$sqlarea). Does anyone have suggestions for ways that I can improve this? I have 50 concurrent sessions (batch jobs) running this, and each will call the "timer" function about 60 times per second. Originally I used V$TIMER, however the HSECS from this was not granular enough. Thanks, Scott Hutchinson Interact Analysis Ltd ::This message sent using the free Web Mail service from http://TheName.co.uk -- http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l