Hi everybody: I am running oracle 10.2.0.1. Once a week we have a analyze process run to gather stats on all the tables in the schema via commands like this one exec dbms_stats.gather_table_stats( 'schema', 'table', null, 25, degree=>8, cascade=>true ); Some of the tables are partitioned and we have 6 or 7 historical partitions which are not being updated anymore so I thought I would save time by restricting this command to only last two partitions: exec dbms_stats.gather_table_stats( 'owner', 'table', 'part1', 25, degree=>8, cascade=>true ); exec dbms_stats.gather_table_stats( 'owner', 'table', 'part2', 25, degree=>8, cascade=>true ); The partitions are roughly the same size. The indices are globally partitioned. The first command (analyze the whole table) took 25 minutes. Last two command combined - 27 min. Considering that there are 5 more patitions in the table, the math does not add up. What am I missing? thank you Gene Gurevich -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l