Here is one I ran into some time ago. There is only on indexed column, myid, on the table. For your amusement, note them temp spc usage: DELETE FROM myname WHERE myID NOT IN (SELECT DISTINCT myID FROM myname WHERE runTIME > :1) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | Id | Operation | Name | Rows | Bytes |TempSpc| Cost (%CPU)| Time | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | 0 | DELETE STATEMENT | | | | | 8812K(100)| | PLAN_TABLE_OUTPUT ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | 1 | DELETE | MYNAME | | | | | | | 2 | HASH JOIN RIGHT ANTI| | 556M| 18G| 2160M| 8812K (1)| 29:22:29 | | 3 | TABLE ACCESS FULL | MYNAME | 66M| 1398M| | 3537K (1)| 11:47:33 | | 4 | TABLE ACCESS FULL | MYNAME | 1332M| 17G| | 3517K (1)| 11:43:36 | They were running this many times per hour and complaining I needed to add space to the temp tablespace. -- Andrew W. Kerber 'If at first you dont succeed, dont take up skydiving.' -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l