Phew, what a thread! My experience this year has been that Oracle development are moving too fast for Oracle support and too many things just do not work. As an example the mutlicast requirement of the latest 11.2 release for RAC. People were blogging about this and OSS were clearly non the wiser as to what was going on. I guess it like lots of organisations at the moment, support is not seen as an area to invest in. Regards Pete -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l