> is it so resource intensive that the system > will essentially lock (from the users viewpoint) Mike, Others had excellent answers. I want to point out the locks taken during the sync_index operation. My earlier test (in 10.2.0.1) shows that "All TM locks are in mode 3. So there shouldn't be conflict with DML." See http://yong321.freeshell.org/oranotes/TextIndex.txt If the index were ctxsys.ctxcat type, you wouldn't need to run sync_index. But ctxsys.context type does. Yong Huang -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l