Maybe I am the last person to the know but Doc ID: 1169017.1 is the announcement that cursor_sharing = similar is now deprecated in 11g! And the write up is very good. And it is great that they also included in the references the Optimizer Team's blog about it too. So yes, thank you Oracle Support! I really do appreciate this! This will now be one more battle I don't need to fight! Warm regards, Carol Dacko University of Michigan