I would recommend - that's adventurous, but... - have the PeopleSoft people or the person in charge of this "new" SQL to maybe consider other alternatives writing the query/report. I don't work on 10.2.0.3, but had some headaches with merge join cartesians on 9i . They work wery well in many cases, but some others not. I got rid of that ones 10076 event which activate costing for MJC (on 9i the CBO don't computed cost for MJC by default). Sorry I cannot be of help on 10.2.0.3 which is your case. regards. -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l