I'm sure you realized this, but my answer was intended as a joke. Mark J. Bobak's reply was much more valuable in helping you solve your problem. -----Original Message----- sol beach [mailto:sol.beach@xxxxxxxxx] 1,184,893 / 60 =~ 20,000 transactions per second. This is/was not "homework". This is/was based upon a directive from my Damagement. The query I posted, or ones very similar to it (different dates) have run times of 5 to 90+ seconds. I've run SQL_TRACE against them. Based upon the value in the QUERY column, there seems to me to be a direct linear correlation between that value & elasped time. My system seems to do approximately 12,000 "queries" per second. I'm wondering how this compares to what others see on their systems. -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l