And if you want to go very deep, there's another paper that explains the algorithms in a very, very detailed way: "SQL Memory Management in Oracle9i" by Dageville et others: http://www.cs.ust.hk/vldb2002/VLDB2002-proceedings/papers/S29P03.pdf On 8/8/07, amar kumar padhi <amar.padhi@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Hi, > Jonathan has a good article at > http://www.jlcomp.demon.co.uk/untested.html that may give some good > insight into how memory plays with different PGA settings. I believe > this would show up on the execution plan cost. -- Alberto Dell'Era "the more you know, the faster you go" -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l