D'Hooge, The answer to your question is largely "yes", except I'd word it as "exec call includes all work (after parse call constructs the cursor) to construct the result set for the cursor". Rows cannot be retrieved (fetched) at the start of a GROUP BY operation or an ORDER BY operation for example, they can only be retrieved after those operations complete. If there is a HAVING clause then there is additional filtering to perform before the fetch phase can begin, etc. Whether that sorting or hashing occurs in private process memory (PGA) or in temporary segments is only a matter of elapsed time, but the EXEC phase won't complete until any such operations (as well as recursive operations in their entirety, as Cary pointed out) complete. Hope this helps... -Tim -----Original Message----- From: D'Hooge Freek [mailto:Freek.DHooge@xxxxxxxxx] Sent: Wednesday, November 4, 2009 07:07 AM To: mwf@xxxxxxxx, ''Daniel Fink'', tim@xxxxxxxxx, Brandon.Allen@xxxxxxxxxxx Cc: 'Oracle-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxx' Subject: RE: what could cause a high elap value for the exec system call (for a select statement)? Mark, Am I correct to say that, for a select statement, the exec call includes all the work (except parsing) that needs to be done to construct the cursor and that the fetch call includes all the work that needs to be done to retrieve rows from that cursor? Regards, Freek D'Hooge Uptime Oracle Database Administrator email: freek.dhooge@xxxxxxxxx tel +32(0)3 451 23 82 http://www.uptime.be disclaimer: www.uptime.be/disclaimer -----Original Message----- From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Mark W. Farnham Sent: woensdag 4 november 2009 14:47 To: D'Hooge Freek; 'Daniel Fink'; tim@xxxxxxxxx; Brandon.Allen@xxxxxxxxxxx Cc: 'Oracle-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxx' Subject: RE: what could cause a high elap value for the exec system call (for a select statement)? I'm pretty sure Tim meant that in the context a whole heck of a lotta work must occur before you know what the first row to return is. Another example is if you have a union (non-all) and the source datasets of the parts of the union don't have a provable joint subkey, then you have to do full projection of all the columns in the parts of the queries and sort the resultset for duplicate rejection before you return anything. Something like that with 1000 columns in the select list would be a really bad joke to play on a computer system. Please do correct me if I got that wrong, Tim. mwf