I believe its deprecated. Used to be used with OPS (version 7 & 8) on IBM SP2. If you want to "light it up" with PQ, just use "alter table parallel" which will set it to DEFAULT which is cpu_count * parallel_threads_per_cpu, which would default to 2 * # of CPUs. That is usually more than enough to saturate the IO channels. On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 9:03 AM, Rich Jesse <rjoralist@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Hey all, > > I'm looking to implement parallelism for our largest tables in 10.1.0.5.0 on > AIX in order to more fully utilize our SAN. While continuing testing with > various parameters, I've been seeing that there is an INSTANCES qualifier of > the PARALLEL clause in the ALTER TABLE statement. > > >From experiment, it appears to affect whether or not parallelism is used for > certain queries (I think there was just a thread here about that, but > regarding the DEGREE qualifier). The kicker is that I can't find any > documentation on INSTANCES. > > Docs on tahiti.oracle.com do not mention it in the 10.1, 10.2, or even the > 11.1 version for the ALTER TABLE command, and a search for "parallel > instances" is nearly futile with the number of unrelated hits on > "instance[s]". > > Anyone have any pointers on this? Thanks! > Rich -- Regards, Greg Rahn http://structureddata.org -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l