I had a batch program chew up 16 gb of PGA and run for extended time doing updates to ( my only ) table that has a text index on it ( customer last name ) ... used for "soundex" lookups. Apparently Oracle has had a fix identified and available from August 2012 that ( somehow ) they have not seen as important enough to include in last several rounds of database PSU's. Wow ... thanks so much Oracle support! Looks like the bug / 4030 will only hit things that do large numbers of changes ( inserts also ? dunno ) to text index column ... but still ... not happy here. Problem Key ORA-4030 [404008] [druhopen:hash] [druhopen:hash table] Testing of the fix one-off looks ok so far and again ... found a while back ( p14367567_112030_Linux-x86-64.zip ). The following are the bugs fixed by this patch: 14367567: EXCESSIVE PGA MEMORY GROWTH LEADING TO HIGH SWAPPING AND PERFORMANCE IMPACTS -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l