Thank you Justin for your response. As far as I know, OPS is not required to gather statistics in parallel. The gather_schema specifications were recommended by a 3rd party software vendor. I'm testing gathering histograms for only indexed columns. However, because of the number of tables involved it is taking hours :-(. From: Justin Cave (DDBC) <jcave_at_ddbcinc.com> Date: Sun, 14 Mar 2004 16:48:01 -0700 Do you need to have Oracle Parallel Server for parallel operations to work in 8.1.7? I seem to recall having no problems with parallel statistics gathering in 8.1.7, but I had OPS installed. Do you really need to gather histograms on every column? That seems a bit excessive and probably is a substantial portion of your running time. Justin Cave Distributed Database Consulting, Inc. http://www.ddbcinc.com/askDDBC <http://www.ddbcinc.com/askDDBC> Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - More reliable, more storage, less spam