I have a relativelly fast machine for testing. It's a 4 cpu XEON 3.6 ghz with 1 mb of cache 16 gb of ram and a lot of fast storage. It's running RedHat linux 4 64 bit with 64 bit Oracle 10g and ASM. Throw your ideas if you would like to see something tested, it's sitting idle right now. I just finished setting it up, so i am running some very raw tests. For example, I created a 3.68 gb table with ~40m rows from dba_objects. Exact size is: 3'959'422'976 bytes 38'653'952 rows It's gething full scanned for 5.05 cpuseconds. (482008 logical reads, no physical). If anyone wants to see something let me know. There's 500 gb of storage available. -- Christo Kutrovsky Senior Database/System Administrator The Pythian Group -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l