Based on Alex great work I created a logic which ckecks at every incremental backup if a datafile has changed mor than x% - in this case it is doung a full backup of this datafile instead of an incremental. Even it's based on x$ tables only it works fine. I recently checked all the X$KR tables in all versions I had available (up to 11.2.0.1). I did not find any changes. So the good information here seems: Oracle considers it quite stable, there was no need to change anything. But unfortunately noone at oracle ever decided to create v$ views and make this officially available. Well, recently I even found a funny feature: http://berxblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/oracle-joke.html over all: thumbs up for BCT! Martin On Wed, Nov 3, 2010 at 13:39, Ron Chennells <ron.chennells@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Good write up on it at > > http://www.pythian.com/documents/Pythian-oracle-block-change.pdf > > > Ron -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l