Re: A nice PL*SQL Problem..

I know this is not what you asked, but I thought I would give you a little insight anyway. When you do a sub-select, it does a full table scan instead of using the indexes. I would suggest using Exists and Not Exists in your select statement. It forces the use of indexes. I did an Explain Plan of the sub-select statements that went across database links and it did some merge joins, sort joins, unique sorts, and full table accesses. There were about 7 steps in all. When I did the Exists and Not Exists it was down to 3 statements.

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John Jones	
Oracle Consultant
jmj22026_at_us1j69.glaxo.com