Randolf, Thanks for the comments. I took the question to mean "the same query" - but even then the same query with tables refreshed with different amounts of data; the same query with virtually the same data but different stats; the "same" query on the same data but with different values used in literal predicates etc. could all (with a little bad luck on estimated cardinality) produce significantly different degrees of parallelism. I stopped thinking at the assumption that the input tables were always about the same size. Regards Jonathan Lewis http://jonathanlewis.wordpress.com/all-postings Author: Oracle Core (Apress 2011) http://www.apress.com/9781430239543 ----- Original Message ----- From: "Randolf Geist" <info@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> To: <oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Friday, August 01, 2014 1:43 PM Subject: Re: PARALLEL Hint in 11.2.0.3 | For DML the computation also includes as factor the data volume to | process, so in your case also the number of rows to be inserted | determined by the optimizer can influence the DOP computation. | -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l