Jared, It is the oracle 9i database reference release 9.2 document. I checked the 10gR2 documentation and the same statement is made there as well. Thanks. Bill Wagman Univ. of California at Davis IET Campus Data Center wjwagman@xxxxxxxxxxx (530) 754-6208 ________________________________ From: Jared Still [mailto:jkstill@xxxxxxxxx] Sent: Thursday, December 21, 2006 4:49 PM To: William Wagman Cc: Thomas.Mercadante@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx; oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: Why isn't Oracle Using My Index n 12/21/06, William Wagman <wjwagman@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: Greetings, Thanks to Riyajh Shamsudeen for pointing out to me that NLS_SORT is in part the culprit. In our database NLS_SORT = GENERIC_BASELETTER. According to the Oracle documentation this forces a full table scan. I set nls_sort=binary and the query used the indexes. I still don't fully understand what is going on and need to do some further reading. I also need to turn on cpu_costing and see if that will resolve the problem if nls_sort is left at it's current setting. Thanks to all who responded, I truly appreciate the help. Very interesting. Can you perhaps point out just which documentation you found this in? -- Jared Still Certifiable Oracle DBA and Part Time Perl Evangelist