Hi All, When I start the instance, ALTER DATABASE OPEN command takes a very long time to complete. It takes approximately 20-25 mins. to complete. Is this normal? If not, how to investigate this? Is it because I have a large no. of datafiles (close to 500)? I'm aware that opening takes a long time after SHUTDOWN ABORT, but this happens even after the database is shutdown normally with SHUTDOWN IMMEDIATE. Alert log gives no clue whatsoever. Please let me know what might be wrong and how to debug this problem. Regards New DBA __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - 100MB free storage! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l