Sorry - I'm guilty of posting the below inquiry before searching the archives. I just searched them and found that Tanel Poder has already answered this question: //www.freelists.org/archives/oracle-l/12-2005/msg00588.html It appears that one of the 20+ tables was analyzed last night (by the gather_stats_job) and that invalidated the plans. Apparently this is typical behaviour for the plan to be aged out when invalidated even though the cursor is kept. I'll try locking the stats on these tables and see if that keeps the plan from being aged out. Regards, Brandon ________________________________ From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Allen, Brandon The problem is that the execution plan still seems to get aged out of the pool - if I query v$sql_plan for these hash_values, I get no rows, and when I run the queries again, they still take a long time to parse. This is my first experience with keeping objects in the shared pool so I don't know if this is the normal behaviour. Has anyone else seen the same? Privileged/Confidential Information may be contained in this message or attachments hereto. Please advise immediately if you or your employer do not consent to Internet email for messages of this kind. Opinions, conclusions and other information in this message that do not relate to the official business of this company shall be understood as neither given nor endorsed by it.