Well that would be a big leap. However, I am not saying Oracle should keep the RULE hint because one customer has one query which will benefit from doing so. I am assuming there are hundreds of queries such as this that I will come across in my career and that can be multiplied of 1000's of DBA's elsewhere. Yes you can achieve the same results without the hint but that may require a lot of work and adding the hint does not. I apologize for not playing the part of the Oracle purist here but sometimes I just want to get the job done and the RULE hint has worked very nicely for me and others on this list numerous times in the past. What if Oracle decides to drop other hints for indexes, join types etc...? -----Original Message----- From: Niall Litchfield [mailto:niall.litchfield@xxxxxxxxx]=20 Sent: Friday, April 22, 2005 4:41 AM To: Post, Ethan Cc: Michael Fontana; oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: rm RULE based optimizer !=3D GOOD IDEA It seems a big leap to me from "adding the RULE hint helps my one query", to "we should keep the RBO", not least because you can achieve the same effect without the RULE hint. --=20 Niall Litchfield Oracle DBA http://www.niall.litchfield.dial.pipex.com -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l