Has anyone seen execution plans change using virtual processors on AIX? How about VM/Linux or VM/Windows? For the purposes of the optimizer, I'd think they'd all react in a similar manner. We've got several partitions on an AIX system. If a specific instance has a certain allotment of processors (generally >=2) when a query kicks off, it runs differently than when the instance is basically idle (<= 1 processor allocated) and the query starts.