Roberto/Christian, >>Forgive my ignorance, but my impression was (is) that the entire = >purpose of >>a connection pool is to reuse and not close the connections. Forgive my ignorance too, but I *think* there is a JDBC setting that controls whether the cursor requires a 'describe' of the objects involved in order to see if there are any DDL mismatches. Would this not stress the shared pool and cause parsing for internal recursive SQL? I would suggest turning on trace across the whole database for just a few minutes while this occurs and look at all the trace files for lines with "dep=1" (or "dep=2"!) Cheers, John Kanagaraj <>< DB Soft Inc Phone: 408-970-7002 (W) Listen to great, commercial-free christian music 24x7x365 at http://www.klove.com ** The opinions and facts contained in this message are entirely mine and do not reflect those of my employer or customers ** -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l