I was going by what Oracle things final result set record count is, if you look at the execution plan its 378M for analytical query versus 18M for the other query. In reality it may not return every single record in the table, but the those 2 queries are not the same and they don't produce the same output. Add distinct clause to the outer section of analytical query and check the execution plan. Thanks, Sai http://sai-oracle.blogspot.com