a) what Oracle version? b) in case it is not 9i (not that unlikely given it's a COTS) are there by any chance statistics on the dictionary objects? Again not that unlikely if they gathered statistics with dbms_utility... or is optimizer_goal set to first_rows? c) Why wouldn't explain plan not work on dictionary objects? d) How can the application care / know in what tablespace the indexes are? btw, while I was writing this I was running your sql against one of my Peoplesoft databases and it found 26,151 rows in less time than I wrote this (I forgot to turn riming on). stephen booth wrote: > I'm running into a problem on one of our systems where a query on > dba-segments is running incredibly slow. > -- Regards Wolfgang Breitling Centrex Consulting Corporation www.centrexcc.com -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l