Our production and qadatabases are same in structure and hardware. following query is taking approx 2 minutes to fetch about 4568878 where as am firing the same query on qa it is still running. no of indexs and columns are identical on the both the databases..where should i look for.. select m.sic_code sic_code from zips z, addresses a, memberships m, territorys t where m.MEM_SOURCE != 'MCCOY NOM' and m.mem_type = 'GOV' and ((m.CANCEL_TYPE IS NULL OR m.CANCEL_TYPE IN('REINSTATE','EXTENSION') OR m.CANCEL_TYPE LIKE 'PO%') OR SYSDATE - m.CANCEL_DT < 366) and m.mem_id = a.mem_id and a.addr_type ='BUS' and a.zip_code = z.zip_code and substr(lpad(to_char(abs(z.zip_code)),9,'0'),1,5) = t.zip_code and z.state=t.state and z.county=t.county_code thanks Unlimited freedom, unlimited storage. Get it now, on http://help.yahoo.com/l/in/yahoo/mail/yahoomail/tools/tools-08.html/