I find that my best answer is, "I don't know, yet, but I will." I don't have the answer at my fingertips but I do know where in the documentation to look for them (and which mail list to ask if the documentation doesn't have the answer). I would guess that being seen as an Oracle expert consists of having made all the big mistakes somewhere else and not repeating them on this job. BTW - I just found out that if you have a Java app querrying your database and you have lazy Java programmers then you'd better use US7ASCII as your character set. -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l