I think the original post was in reaction to Oracle's statement that it couldn't spread the F.P. operations across multiple CPU's. My guess is that the overhead to move operations to other CPUs would outweigh the benefit, but that is just a simple guess. ...in that case there are no other FPUs to send "it" to, and most importantly there is no "it" to send ( other than BINARY_FLOAT/ BINARY_DOUBLE which I contend still have nothing to do with scalability). -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l