You could use Powell's recommendation or something like below. You create a view by joining your original table with selects on v$globalcontext across local and remote instance. You can then create public synonym on view. In the v$globalcontext query itself, you can set the context if it wasn't already set with query like below. select decode(nvl(sum(length(value)), 1), 1, dbms_session.set_context(....)) from v$globalcontext where namespace=? and attribute=?; Keep in mind that contexts are global across all RAC nodes, i.e. context set in one instance is visible in v$globalcontext on all other RAC node (you don't have to query gv$globalcontext). Thanks, Sai http://sai-oracle.blogspot.com -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l