There is a 10 year old function that I think Tom Kyte put on the web called remove_constraints that will turn literal values into a single @ sign. That is pretty slow because it has to loop through every character in every sql statement. So I re-wrote it with some regular expressions. I include a test case below. The down side to this and to Tom's Approach is that if you have a column with a digit in it, it turns that digit into an @ sign. This isn't a total killer, but I'd prefer to avoid it. I have over 1300 columns with digits in them. Anyone know how I could tinker with this to make it only look for digits on the right side of the where clause? I am not worried about literals in the select clause, but it would be nice if there is a way to do that also (though that would be much harder) create table test( mytest clob); insert into test values ('select 1 from mytable where x = '||chr(39)||'v'||chr(39)||' and y = '||chr(39)||'q'||chr(39)); insert into test values ('select 1 from mytable where x =1235 and y =987654 and z = 3'); insert into test values ('select 1 from mytabe where a = '||chr(39)||'xyz'||chr(39)); commit; -- sql is basically 2 parts. inner part gets changes anything between single quotes to an @(the translate turns the single quote to an @. I was having trouble passing single quotes to a regular expression so I just turned the quotes into an @. -- outer 2 regexp_replace change all numbers to a single @. First one turns all digits into @. This leaves 1 or more @. outer replace turns the multiple @ into a single @. select regexp_replace(regexp_replace(regexp_replace(translate(mytest,chr(39),'@'),'@[^@]+@','@'),'[[:digit:]]','@'),'(@){2,}','@') new from test / -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l