I tried setting: "_serial_direct_read"=TRUE and that does not do it. First execution = 30s, second execution = 1s on raw devices. Clearly the data is being cached _somewhere_ in the system in this scenario. Chris From: Sayan Malakshinov [mailto:xt.and.r@xxxxxxxxx] Sent: Monday, April 22, 2013 3:16 PM To: Taylor Christopher - Nashville Cc: ORACLE-L Subject: Re: Question - any parameter or hint to FORCE Physical Read (bypass buffer cache) You can do it, for example, with forcing direct path reads. -- Best regards, Sayan Malakshinov Senior performance tuning engineer PSBank http://orasql.org -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l