Looking at both my simple and convoluted mappings, I'm not seeing NVL() functions except where I wrote them in the GUI, so either this is some version-specific muddiness, or there's an ETL developer who gets paid per line of code. For reference, I'm on 11.1 on Windows 2008 x64. HTH, T. J. -----Original Message----- From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Niall Litchfield Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2011 5:39 AM To: ORACLE-L Subject: owb and NVL I'm looking at an OWB generated statement (and so my head is exploding) which is full of subqueries like the following. SELECT NVL(T1.KEY_VALUE, NULL)... I sure am puzzled as to why the tool would generate this and not SELECT T1.KEY_VALUE... other than to further muddy the waters. -- Niall Litchfield Oracle DBA http://www.orawin.info -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l