I have a huge merge command that does a hash join, 50 window sort steps and an associated FTS. With even a degree of 2 on the involved tables, it spawns 20 PQ slaves and never completes. With noparallel the query completes in 3-4 minutes. Can someone please verify...If the FTS spawns a number of slaves based on the degree, does each sort operation also get that number of slaves, is that correct? parallel_max_servers = 20 and thus why only 20 are used I belive, but I think the job would actualy want about a 100 slaves. Hmmm, thanks -- .. David -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l