Hmmm... Guys thanks for your feedback. Much appreciated. I have received such feedback in the past and I have identified that simple checks put in the right place with this logic just makes it foolproof. The old note I gave link to is an elementary form of how to use the concept, and not the complete design. I have used this in quite a few heavy load designs and never found any issues, some are running for years now. Places where I could not implement this is where the application_info call is already in use. For instance, oracle apps already uses it to register session information (had to resort to using a generic lock holding table for such designs). I do agree that locking is also a good option, but this did result in some serious bottlenecks on different client runtime. And yes, I haven't tried this on RAC. This will come up for me soon, so will keep this list posted. thanks! Amar Www.amar-Padhi.com -original message- Subject: RE: Grabbing sequence values blocks in consecutive order: Need a guaranteed method. -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l