It's the MEMORY_TARGET / Automatic Memory Management, which changes your PGA_AGGREGATE_TARGET regularly, resulting in some _smm_* parameter changes, which happen to be part of the optimizer environment, which cause new hard parses when some existing cursors are used again. The HASH_MATCH_FAILED shows up when you use cursor_sharing_similar with "unsafe" bind variables - like where clauses with bind variables on columns with histograms or bind variables in various range, like, between or <, > conditions. -- *Tanel Poder* Enkitec (The Exadata Experts) Training <http://blog.tanelpoder.com/seminar/> | Troubleshooting<http://blog.tanelpoder.com/> | Exadata<http://www.amazon.com/Expert-Oracle-Exadata-Apress/dp/1430233923> | Voicee App <http://voic.ee/> On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 7:54 PM, Johan Eriksson <valpis@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > (Oracle 11.2.0.2.0 on AIX) > Hi, > > I faced something today which I still haven't figured out. On couple of SQL > we get a lot of child cursors (cursor_sharing=similiar) and for those of > them that has HASH_MATCH_FAILED=Y in v$sql_shared_cursor I understand it is > due to that setting. > > -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l