After reading Jonathan Lewis's books, Tom Kyte's posts and Joze Senegacnik's presentations (and so many others out there who have contributed), one message (among others) has been beaten into my head; give the CBO all the facts, and the CBO will make the best choice. The corollary is that if you lie to the CBO, it may (or may not) come up with a sub-optimal plan. So with all the automated features and collections in 10g, could not the engine determine if it was being lied to by comparing the estimated costs & cardinality to the actual end values? With all this talk about "self-tuning", I would almost expect the database to come back and say "Hey, you fed me false information!". At the very least. The next step would be for the engine to go back and correct that false information. Maybe the database already does this and I am missing it somehow. If so, please correct me. charles schultz oracle dba aits - adsd university of illinois