I just saw this on asktom.oracle.com the other day. I can't remember how I found it because I only noticed it while reading through a thread. The tread also pointed to a metalink document where it's discussed and the workaround is given. I'm pretty sure it's a call to dbms_metadata and the call is something like "PRETTY" or "NICE", some kind of formatting input. Aha, I just went through my history and found it. Check out http://asktom.oracle.com/pls/asktom/f?p=100:11:0::::P11_QUESTION_ID:30802454 515375