I have a related question. After I run a statement consuming the temporary tablespace a lot and commit the transaction, the tablespace is not cleaned soon. Then other sessions got an error something like "can't extend ...in ..." which means the temporary tablespace is not enough. Is there something wrong with the background process? Do I have to use a separate temporary tablespace or set the temporary tablespace autoextend (which I think is not safe and hard to control the datafile size)? --=20 Yao Yongping Learning Oracle, UNIX/Linux... Love Reading, Classical Music, Philosophy, Economics etc. Blog: http://blog.csdn.net/ -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l