Wow, wow, wow. I am old enough nowadays to have the belief I have seen it all (at least, in theory) but this suggestion/answer by Mr. Lewis was truly eye-popping. The developer I have been working with had the same reaction (but he's much younger so that's to be expected :) ). Taking Jonathan's suggestion practically verbatim and making a few other minor tweaks like breaking one delete statement into 2 separate ones, the run time for this little program went from over 12 hours (and not even finishing) to about 2.5 minutes. The buffer gets that were over a billion for this particular delete dropped to 2.8 million. SSS3@idm3> @AdditionalInterestMigration.pls PL/SQL procedure successfully completed. Elapsed: 00:02:27.58 SSS3@idm3> It's been said many times over the years but I will say it again: This list is quite possibly the single best place on the internet to receive timely, accurate, and valuable information about this little beast we call Oracle. I have posted the explain plan for the revised statement below. Note the overall cost dropped from 1096 to 13 (!) with Jonathan's insight. I just may have to take my "Oracle Core - Essential Internals for DBAs and Developers" book next time JL visits Colorado in order to have it signed. I thought my groupie days were over, but perhaps not. :) Thanks again for the advice. -joe SQL stmt DELETE FROM BLDGASSIGNEDADDINT WHERE ID_ADDITIONALINTEREST in ( SELECT pk FROM ADDINTEREST WHERE ID_INSURED = :1 UNION ALL SELECT pk FROM ADDINTEREST WHERE lnnvl(ID_INSURED = :2) AND ID_POLICY in ( SELECT q.pk FROM quote q WHERE q.COMMONINSURED_ID = :3 AND q.ENDINFO_ID is null ) AND id_policy != :4 ) Explain plan DELETE STATEMENT Optimizer=ALL_ROWS (Cost=13 Cardinality=6 Bytes=144) DELETE OF BLDGASSIGNEDADDINT NESTED LOOPS (Cost=13 Cardinality=6 Bytes=144) VIEW OF VW_NSO_1 (VIEW) (Cost=10 Cardinality=3 Bytes=39) SORT (UNIQUE) (Cost=10 Cardinality=3 Bytes=62) UNION-ALL TABLE ACCESS (BY INDEX ROWID) OF ADDINTEREST (TABLE) (Cost=2 Cardinality=1 Bytes=8) INDEX (RANGE SCAN) OF ADDINTERESTINSURED (INDEX) (Cost=1 Cardinality=1) NESTED LOOPS NESTED LOOPS (Cost=8 Cardinality=2 Bytes=54) TABLE ACCESS (BY INDEX ROWID) OF QUOTE (TABLE) (Cost=5 Cardinality=2 Bytes=28) INDEX (RANGE SCAN) OF QUOTE_COMN_INSRD_ID_IDX (INDEX) (Cost=3 Cardinality=2) INDEX (RANGE SCAN) OF ADDINTERESTPOLICY (INDEX) (Cost=1 Cardinality=2) TABLE ACCESS (BY INDEX ROWID) OF ADDINTEREST (TABLE) (Cost=2 Cardinality=1 Bytes=13) INDEX (RANGE SCAN) OF BLDGASSIGNEDADDINT_BYADDINT (INDEX) (Cost=1 Cardinality=2 Bytes=22) From: Jonathan Lewis [mailto:jonathan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] Sent: Monday, May 12, 2014 2:00 PM To: Sweetser, Joe; Jeffrey Beckstrom Cc: ORACLE-L Subject: RE: SQL help Looks like an example of "subquery with OR" that forces a filter operation and stops the optimiser from doing an unnest. See: http://jonathanlewis.wordpress.com/2007/02/26/subquery-with-or I think you'll probably have to rewrite the query to look something like: delete from BLDGASSIGNEDADDINT where ID_ADDITIONALINTEREST in (select pk from ADDINTEREST where ID_INSURED = :3 union all select pk from ADDINTEREST where lnnvl(ID_INSURED = :3) and ID_POLICY in (select q.pk from quote q where q.COMMONINSURED_ID = :1 and q.ENDINFO_ID is null) and id_policy != :2 ); I think you'll also need an index on BLDGASSIGNEDADDINT(ID_ADDITIONALINTEREST) since that's how you're trying to identify the rows for deletion. Regards Jonathan Lewis http://jonathanlewis.wordpress.com @jloracle ________________________________ From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx<mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> [oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] on behalf of Sweetser, Joe [JSweetser@xxxxxxxx] Sent: 12 May 2014 20:39 To: Jeffrey Beckstrom Cc: ORACLE-L Subject: RE: SQL help Forgot the index definitions.... There are indexes on: addinterest.pk, addinterest.id_insured, addinterest.id_policy and bldgassignedaddint.id_additionalinterest -joe From: Jeffrey Beckstrom [mailto:JBECKSTROM@xxxxxxxxx] Sent: Monday, May 12, 2014 1:07 PM To: Sweetser, Joe Subject: Re: SQL help Where's the index on id_policy for addinterest? >>> "Sweetser, Joe" <JSweetser@xxxxxxxx<mailto:JSweetser@xxxxxxxx>> 5/12/14 >>> 3:01 PM >>> All, Without going into too much detail as to why (at this point), I have the following statement: delete from BLDGASSIGNEDADDINT where ID_ADDITIONALINTEREST in (select pk from ADDINTEREST where (ID_POLICY in (select q.pk from quote q where q.COMMONINSURED_ID = :1 and q.ENDINFO_ID is null) and id_policy != :2) or ID_INSURED = :3); That yields an explain plan of this: DELETE STATEMENT Optimizer=ALL_ROWS (Cost=1096 Cardinality=2316 Bytes=150540) DELETE OF BLDGASSIGNEDADDINT FILTER HASH JOIN (Cost=1096 Cardinality=185659 Bytes=12067835) TABLE ACCESS (FULL) OF ADDINTEREST (TABLE) (Cost=435 Cardinality=88384 Bytes=3446976) TABLE ACCESS (FULL) OF BLDGASSIGNEDADDINT (TABLE) (Cost=110 Cardinality=185657 Bytes=4827082) TABLE ACCESS (BY INDEX ROWID) OF QUOTE (TABLE) (Cost=3 Cardinality=1 Bytes=39) INDEX (UNIQUE SCAN) OF SYS_C005688632 (INDEX (UNIQUE)) (Cost=2 Cardinality=1) That gets executed many times in a loop and is doing a boatload of logical IO's and no physical IO's. By boatload I mean over 100 million buffer gets each hour. I am trying to figure out a way to avoid the full table scans. Below are the table creation statements for bldgassignaddint and addinterest tables minus extraneous columns CREATE TABLE "BLDGASSIGNEDADDINT" ( "ID_BUILDING" NUMBER(10), "ID_ADDITIONALINTEREST" NUMBER(10), CONSTRAINT "FK17A3EAC98DDD8F2C" FOREIGN KEY ("ID_ADDITIONALINTEREST") REFERENCES "ADDINTEREST" ("PK") VALIDATE , CONSTRAINT "FK17A3EAC9C50C5C52" FOREIGN KEY ("ID_BUILDING") REFERENCES "BUILDING" ("PK") VALIDATE , PRIMARY KEY ("ID_BUILDING", "ID_ADDITIONALINTEREST") VALIDATE; CREATE TABLE "ADDINTEREST" ( "PK" NUMBER(10), "ID_INSURED" NUMBER(10), "ID_POLICY" NUMBER(10), CONSTRAINT "FK4B56FACB277D71C9" FOREIGN KEY ("ID_INSURED") REFERENCES "INSURED" ("PK") VALIDATE , CONSTRAINT "FK4B56FACBE57638AB" FOREIGN KEY ("ID_POLICY") REFERENCES "QUOTE" ("PK") VALIDATE , PRIMARY KEY ("PK") VALIDATE ); Any suggestions? I am having no luck at all trying to incorporate EXISTS instead of IN. Thanks, -joe Confidentiality Note: This message contains information that may be confidential and/or privileged. If you are not the intended recipient, you should not use, copy, disclose, distribute or take any action based on this message. If you have received this message in error, please advise the sender immediately by reply email and delete this message. Although ICAT Managers, LLC, Underwriters at Lloyd's, Syndicate 4242, scans e-mail and attachments for viruses, it does not guarantee that either are virus-free and accepts no liability for any damage sustained as a result of viruses. Thank you. -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l .