Hey Niall, >> No more than 20,000 blocks (likely 156mb) there's a hard limit. :( Do you > actually *need* a controlfile autobackup every 15 minutes though? Perhaps not. But archivelog backups must be done every 15 minutes or LOG_ARCHIVE_DEST_1 will fill up during our regular data refreshes. And since I'm not using an RMAN catalog, autobackup is on. I believe that trying to manage when a controlfile backup is really needed and isn't would be worse than the overhead I'm seeing now. Thanks! Rich -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l