If you are on 9i then you should try to gather system statistics. This = may change the join method from NL to HJ. Regards, Joze=20 -----Original Message----- From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx = [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Sami Seerangan Sent: Wednesday, October 20, 2004 9:49 PM To: Oracle Discussion List Subject: Why the optimizer is not choosing the best plan? Hi All, I have 4 tables join query(all tables statistics are upto date) that is working fine if it goes for HASH_JOIN. But without HINT it is always doing NL_JOIN and takes about 50 secs to execute. However using ORDERED hint it is going for HASH_JOIN and the response time got reduced to less than 5 secs, but we don't prefer to implement HINT based solution Why the optimizer is not choosing the best execution plan(In this case hash_join rather than NL_join)? --=20 Sami Seerangan Oracle DBA -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l