Explain plan question

I'm using utlxplp to look at the plans for several nearly identical queries. The only differences in the queries are that they each run the same query off of separate tables with identical designs (same columns, constraints etc). One query runs in 20 minutes and the other is taking well over 2 hours (20 minutes is fast considering I HAVE to aggregate 30 million rows). I'm trying to figure out if the problem is with the query/plan or with resource contention. So, I ran an explain plan then found that the only difference in the plans is in the TQ column. Oracle documentation says that this only represents the object_node column of the plan_table and that it describes the order in which output from operations is consumed. What does that mean?

In particular the fast query returns 3,00 for TQ and the slow one returns 7,00. Does this have anything to do with the speed of the query?

Thanks,
Peter Received on Wed May 10 2000 - 00:00:00 CDT