My advice: if your sysadmins like to keep you in the dark, "borrow" the manuals and educate yourself. A DBA's job is made enormously more difficult is he/she is not *permitted* to know the details of the "hardware" and operating system the database is running on. I can *imagine* a situation where somebody approaches me and tells me something like: "I want you to manage my database. But you're not allowed to know the operating system, the number of CPUs, the amount of memory, or the physical structure of the storage layer; DBA's don't need to know these things, they are matters fo Sysadmins only." ...and that is somehow different than Oracle's position on the topic ? -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l