SQL/DB Tuning Question(Order by)?

I have this query that that joins about 5 tables. Without sorting the results with Order by. It returns in about 3 seconds. When I add a simple order by clause the query takes about 40 seconds. My first thought was that it was sorting using Disk. But autotrace indicated that all of the sorting was taking place in memory. I even bumped up SORT_AREA_SIZE to 5 meg just in case. I also noticed that one of the CPU's on the box(it has 6 CPU's) had a server process that was taking up a 100% of the CPU time. The result set is only about 200 rows. Any Ideas on whats going on? Is there any way to spread this sorting activity over multiple CPU's? None of the documentation of tuning sorting seems to cover this situation. Is there any way to speed up sorting other that making sure that it happens in memory? Running 8.1.7 on HU-UX 11.

TIA Received on Fri Mar 16 2001 - 02:03:22 CST