Kevin >My point is that the engine does not have FP underpinnings for scalability. >You know, those things that happen, uh, like millions of times per second >like spinlocks, dba hashing, chain walks, etc. I agree with you that for the engine it isn't a problem. The only time it's possible to have millions of floating points operations per second is while a nice SUM(amount_sold) on the large fact table is running. Cheers, Chris -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l