>>>If you enable 10046 trace while doing the scan, you should >>>see your server process occasionally waiting on SQL*Net >>>message to/from client events against the ASM instance, >>>while it's scanning through the table. These are the ASM >>>metadata fetches. >>> right. I was looking at some stats from one of our buddies over on the Oak Table and he showed the extant array values from all 4 instances on a 4 node cluster. Instance 4 had 10x more ASM extent array size than the largest of the other 3 instances. I'm sure we've all measured the failover impact of being cache-cold on over 1GB of extent array cache that has to be fetched over 1Gb right in the event of a RAC failover? What if that forces a shared pool extention? What if that causes other shrinkage? Hmmm... I started testing this very aspect yesterday so the questions are rhetorical :-) -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l