Niall >Ah yes, indeed I have just such an example in my recent blog on oic >and oica (it was oica that had a similar effect for us) :) The >original question though was after an example of improved performance >rather than changed plans Mhmm... I don't understand... if the execution plan doesn't change, how = to get better performance? Ok, one possibility, for a query with a large number of predicates, it's = to tweak the order in which they are executed. But this has nothing to do with OIC. The idea behind OIC is simply to = adjust the cost of nested loops and therefore to say to the CBO that is = has to use more/less nested loops. (since the default is 0, the original = idea is to favor them) Chris -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l