Some more info on the problem i posted earlier. According to Oracle it isn't possible using stored outlines. Now this raises some more questions. 1) Oracle development said that the decision wether or not to materialize a subquery (in a WITH clause) is made at parse time. Before outlines or even the statistics come into play. And that decision is influenced by a set of fixed rules. Anyone have *any* clue what does rules are ? 2) We've tried to alter the execution of the query using any methods a) Query rewrite and a materialized view won't work, because of the correlated subquery in the select clause b) dbms_advanced_rewrite doesn't support the WITH clause c) stored outlines or a sql profile can't be used due to the reasons mentioned in 1) d) creating a view instead of the table, and specifying the hint in the view definition doesn't appear to work either None of the above worked. Anyone have any other ideas ? thanks in advance Stefan