Dear list, I've got a question about hierarchical queries, especially sys_connect_by_path(): sys_connect_by_path requires a seperator that does not exist in the returned values, otherwise it spawns an ORA-30004 (or an ORA-30003 if an empty string is specified, which would do for my case). Is there any way to avoid that? I want to use the query on a statspack sql table (stats$sqltext), so no matter what I choose, sooner or later it will be part of the data. :) What I did try, is to get the full SQL text from stats$sqltext in one line, without whitespaces. It works very well, but only until my query becomes part of the SQL history. :P As I'm typing that, I become aware that I can exclude this query from this query, but it would be generally interesting if I somehow can be fully independent from a fixed seperator string (or a seperator in general), since hierarchivcal queries are useful otherwise, too, and it's always a risk to rely on a fixed expression? My code (the skeleton "stolen" from hali's blog): ====================================================== with data as ( select sql_id, SQL_TEXT, row_number() over (partition by SQL_ID order by PIECE) rn, count(*) over (partition by SQL_ID) cnt from stats$sqltext ) -- TRANSLATE replaces '_' with '_', and '$$$' with nothing, -- since no replacement char is specified :) select SQL_ID, translate(sys_connect_by_path(SQL_TEXT,'$$$'), '_$$$', '_') SQL_TEXT from data where rn = cnt start with rn = 1 connect by prior SQL_ID = SQL_ID and prior rn = rn-1 order by SQL_ID ; ====================================================== Thanks in advance Martin -- Usn's IT Blog for Linux, Oracle, Asterisk http://www.usn-it.de -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l