Not sure this is the case here, but I have seen in the past something very similar coming from a "peeked" bind variable the value of which was outside the bounds known by Oracle (low_value/high_value in dba_tab_columns - stored in hexa, utl_raw and the like may be useful for converting). HTH Stephane Faroult RoughSea Ltd <http://www.roughsea.com> Konagora <http://www.konagora.com> RoughSea Channel on Youtube <http://www.youtube.com/user/roughsealtd> LB wrote: > I've got a query that ran this morning that for some reason decided to > jump ship off its normal plan and use a different plan. This is a > very straightforward single table query. When the query runs normally > it uses the correct index and returns results very quickly. This > table and its 2 indexes (one PK and one non-unique) have their > respective statistics gathered nightly at 1AM. At 8AM this morning, > Oracle decided that using the PK index was the best choice and so it > gobbled up 22 seconds doing single block I/O. Now I understand that > gathering statistics can cause a SQL plan to change but that plan > change should remain effect all things being equal. -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l