Sorry if I'm being dense, but how is including rownum going affect the execution plan? Example? -----Original Message----- From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Mark W. Farnham Sent: Friday, October 01, 2004 10:37 AM To: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: RE: Join order and intermediate results Including the rownum in the inline views (or whatever we're calling them this week) is the standard trick to force what you seem to want. -----Original Message----- <snip> When that didn't work and I made sure the table, index, and column stats were correct, I tried various hints for join order and join method. When that didn't work, I decided to smack Oracle in the face with the answer like this: SELECT ... FROM (SELECT ... FROM A, B WHERE ...) AB, (SELECT ... FROM C, D WHERE ...) CD WHERE ... <snip> -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l