Any veterans out there could provide the list of DBA ultimate tools. The idea is to have as much of DBA work done by vendor tools no matter how much it costs so That the dba's can reduce the in-house built tools. 10gR2 is doing some nice things to standardizing And simplifying the tools we use in some areas. We have => BCV's backups => OEM 10G R2 => HP service guard hardware failover Your suggestions ==> Areas can cover for a management tool: db security logon/user security Encryption Backups with Rman ( we have inhouse wrappers) General Database management Db management of very large sizes..ie Tables 1Terabyte in size +Others Brian -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l