> BTW: You have to use the cost based optimizer (new syntax with rule > based optimizer yields really bad performance). And our DBA really > don't like statistics... :( This is kind of off topic on this list, but there are ways to force Oracle to use specific plans by carefully hinting it. And the bad news for your DBA: I think Oracle wants to deprecate the rule based optimizer completely in the future (I'm not the one who cares about Oracle here, so I won't know this for sure, but I overheard some Oracle DBA head-banging here). So better get used to the statistics... Cheers, Csaba.