You could at least add the condition "and owner not in ('SYS', 'SYSTEM')" Or if you can narrow down the number of schemae involved to one or two, then "and owner in ('SCHEMA1', 'SCHEMA2')" -----Original Message----- Thomas Day Thanks. However, I'm not worried about table owner. Rarely, but possibly, a column could be foreign keyed to a column in a table in another schema. From: "Jacques Kilchoer" First, clean up your query - you have an unnecessary view in your from clause (cartesian join on dba_cons_columns in the outer query) and the joins are incomplete (don't you want to join on table owner?). select a.table_name, a.column_name from dba_tab_columns a, dba_tab_columns b where a.owner = '&owner' and b.owner = a.owner -- (?) I imagine you want this condition and a.column_name like '%' || b.column_name || '%' and a.column_name != b.column_name -- does the b column have to be in a different table than the a column? -- and b.table_name != a.table_name and not exists (select null from dba_cons_columns c where c.owner = b.owner and c.table_name = b.table_name and c.column_name = b.column_name) ; ---------------------------------------------------------------- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com ---------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe send email to: oracle-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx put 'unsubscribe' in the subject line. -- Archives are at //www.freelists.org/archives/oracle-l/ FAQ is at //www.freelists.org/help/fom-serve/cache/1.html -----------------------------------------------------------------