Hi Rich As you know the optimizer don't optimize as well through dblinks, if you are thinking to do complex queries, I suggestion you to use a materialized view (in the source database) or a function table (in the source database), so you only get rows from there; there is the driving site hint, if I remember well, but this didn't helped too much in the past. Another problem is when some one change the password the dblnk in the other database uses. There is a secuiryt issue about a sys table where you can see the dblinks password. There are several options if you check the sql reference, I suggest you to make some test I really I'm not sure which will be better for you dblink setup.