Hello everyone I am running a query which looks like following (running in 10.2.0.4): select a.account_number, a.id, b.* from account a, tmp_account b where b.amount between a.lowest_amount and a.highest_amount account has 8000000 rows and tmp_account 150000, the execution plan shows merge sort join as expected, this query takes around 5 hours to run, is there anyway to improve this? Alex -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l