Hi everybody: I am seeing a degradation in SQL*Loader performance after making a seemingly benign changes to couple of tables - the tables were dropped and recreated with some columns being removed and other being added or moved around. After that the load that used to take about an 80 jumped to 140 min. I can't think of what could have caused it. The degree of parallelism on the tables did not changed. I am not sure what else could explain that. Any ideas? The database is 9.2.0.8. The SQL*Loader is running in direct mode thank you Gene Gurevich -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l