just to confirm, the PS of Christian is *very* true; during parsing, statement transformation takes place *before* the optimizer (RBO or CBO) is invoked... kind regards, Lex. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Steve Adams Seminar http://www.naturaljoin.nl/events/seminars.html ------------------------------------------------------------------ -----Original Message----- PS: My guess is that the core of the RBO itself has not changed (except, = perhaps, to fix bugs). But, before a statement is send to it, some = transformation can be applied (like complex view merging). Therefore = another execution plan is generated because the RBO works on a different = statement and not because the RBO itself has changed. -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l