On Sep 14, 2004, at 10:03 PM, Mark Richard wrote: > I can't help but wonder if waiting for a > parallel query is still the quickest way to get things done? Would > killing > the parallel query effectively move the waits to another category > without > achieving any real gain? Mark, what you say makes sense except that I've read that parallel query was very buggy in 8.1.7.4. My own experience bears this out. A previous version of this application on a different server, but with the same version of Oracle, had parallel_automatic_tuning turned on. Performance was awful. I found a reference somewhere, I can't recall where anymore, claiming that parallel processing on this version was likely to hurt performance so we turned it off and things improved dramatically. I'm sure this is a per-application thing, but that has been my experience. it probably does not apply to more modern versions of Oracle. janine -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l