Very interesting but I'm not quite sure I understand the correlation between maxthr and the cost calculation from your results below. Did the point at which the DOP/cost ratio flattened out change with different values of maxthr? In other words, if you doubled maxthr to 16000, did the cost continue to decrease until you got to parallel=8? Thanks, Brandon -----Original Message----- From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Alberto Dell'Era the cost doesn't change beyond a certain degree of parallelism, since IMHO after that point (parallel=4 in this case) the CBO assumes that the disks are running at 100% utilization (aka Max Throughput) and so adding new parallel servers won't decrease the response time (aka cost). -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l