> I don't buy the space saving thing (there might be dictionary performance I'm with Niall here. Deferred segment creation is a feature that brings very little benefit (negligible space saving in ratio, not in absolute amount), with unexpected side effects. I was about to set deferred_segment_creation to false on all our 11g databases because some of our traditional export dumps are found missing tables due to this feature. Then I found Original Export Raises EXP-11 Table Does Not Exist or Table is Ignored [ID 960216.1] and realize it's only a problem in 11.2.0.1, and most of our databases are or will soon be 11.2.0.3, so I didn't bother. In the meantime, we changed those exp jobs to expdp to avoid this problem in 11.2.0.1, and keep in mind not to use exp ad-hoc. I didn't know this was still a problem in case of transportable tablespace export, in version higher than 11.2.0.1(?). Yong Huang -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l