Well, maybe I should have made the reply a lot longer & included the timings. But for the sake of brevity: without the hint 1.25:30 with the hist 0.09:10 seconds, every time. -----Original Message----- From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] Sent: Monday, May 01, 2006 2:28 PM To: _oracle_L_list Subject: RE: quote a few reasons to downgrade a database release >>>01060412210634 17-APR-06 >>> 26.978 121 COGLINE 100 >>> >>>Obviously the rule hint does still work. How does that prove the rule hint worked? This is a new 10gR2 hint that I just tested: $ sqlplus rw/rw SQL*Plus: Release 10.2.0.1.0 - Production on Mon May 1 13:31:15 2006 Copyright (c) 1982, 2005, Oracle. All rights reserved. Connected to: Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition Release 10.2.0.1.0 - 64bit Production With the Partitioning, Real Application Clusters, OLAP and Data Mining options SQL> select /*+ bogus_hint */ count(*) from product ; COUNT(*) ---------- 1215903 SQL> -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l