Since the DBMS_SYSTEM package is undocumented I would be cautious about granting privileges to it. I have granted access to it in the past to a user/schema that needed it to write messages and timestamps to a trace file. The schema contained an instrumentation package for measuring PL/SQL tasks using extended tracing. But I only granted execute privileges to DBMS_SYSTEM in the development environment, not in testing or production. -- Jimmy Brock