I may have missed any comment you made about version - but if you're running 11.2 then it looks as if you need to check what the dbms_parallel_execute package could do for you: http://jonathanlewis.wordpress.com/2013/09/09/parallel-execution-2/ Regards Jonathan Lewis http://jonathanlewis.wordpress.com @jloracle ________________________________ From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] on behalf of Charlotte Hammond [dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] Sent: 17 July 2014 21:36 To: ORACLE-L Subject: RE: Big Update on Busy Table Everyone - thanks for your suggestions! No, unfortunately I can't get any downtime on this table. It's very busy 24x7 - running the update as a single statement would take well over an hour and lock many rows. The update is about 400 million rows of a 2 billion row table. <UrlBlockedError.aspx>