I had to do something simlar. I opted for a global non-partitioned index on the field users query. I get 1 hr of downtime per night to archive/drop the oldest partition and rebuild the index. I need to rebuild the index because it's global and therfore gets invalidated by the drop. Queries were too slow making the index local. But on another database all our indexes are local bitmap on the partitioned tables and the queries fly. So, moral of the story, you have to test. Mike -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l