Hi I am having trouble understanding what this parameter means. Just by its fancy title it says that if PARALLEL_DEGREE_POLICY is AUTO then instead of writing SELECT /* parallel (4 big_table) */ col1,col2 ......... from big_table i can simply do this SELECT col1,col2 ......... from big_table and oracle depending upon the size would decide what parallelism to use is my understanding correct -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l