(resend with clean formatting) I guess I was more asking about from within the database when using ASM with RAW devices. (Maybe ASM doesn't matter really) I guess I'm looking for tidbits about 10g on RAW devices (which in this case are managed by ASM) - any database parameters that would improve lun access that I should investigate? One thing I'm seeing on a couple of the queries is that they spill over to the temp sorting area instead of in memory sorting and PGA is 5 GB. I disabled automatic workarea for the SESSION logins via trigger and setup some parameters for these individual sessions and that has improved things greatly. I was trying to determine if I could squeeze some more throughput out between the database and the IO layer (specifically, how the database is sending/receiving IOs to the storage and which optimizer parameters affect some of that). I've found several that have helped and I guess part of me was wondering what else could be tweaked for these reporting sessions. Here's what I have tweaked so far (schema level logon trigger): alter session set workarea_size_policy=manual; alter session set sort_area_size73741824; alter session set hash_area_size73741824; alter session set "_complex_view_merging"úLSE; --- found on Metalink for a different perf problem & still testing alter session set "_sort_multiblock_read_count"%6; --- set for workarea_size_policy manual alter session set "_hash_multiblock_io_count"%6; --- set for workarea_size_policy manual alter session set "_unnest_subquery"úLSE; --- found on Metalink for a different perf problem & still testing alter session set "_optimizer_use_histograms"úlse; --- Current statistics gathering strategy needs work alter session set "_optimizer_squ_bottomup"úlse; --- Metalink Note: 1118446.1 alter session set "_optimizer_sortmerge_join_enabled"úlse; ---Metalink Note: 444609.1 alter session set "_optimizer_join_sel_sanity_check" = true; --- alter session set "_always_semi_join" = off; alter session set "_optimizer_max_permutations"?000; --- alter session set "_OPTIMIZER_COST_BASED_TRANSFORMATION"=EXHAUSTIVE; ---Metalink Note: 567354.1 -- testing alter session set "_newsort_enabled"úlse; --Metalink Bug 6817844.8 -- testing, zero effect observed Chris -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l