It appears that what you really need is a job scheduler, one with dependencies built in. I'm sure someone will suggest 10g DBMS_SCHEDULER, but from my limited perusal of the docs, it does not appear to be up to that kind of task. Jared On 6/28/05, Deepak Sharma <sharmakdeep_oracle@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > We are on 9.2.0.6 <http://9.2.0.6> . > > As you said, the package is actively being used when > the DDL happens. > > Right now I am manually co-ordinating with the > application group so that I drop the partition(s) when > the application is not running. After dropping I > inform the group to run their application. This is a > pain, as the table has about 180 daily partitions, and > I need to do this every day. > >