Hello List, I was little confused about the settings of pga_aggregate_target parameter. I was in a assumption that when we set this parameter to a certain value, the usage of pga wont go beond this value. I have set pga as 3gb to one of my business critical database. Recently, I have found that max pga allocation was 4+ Gb. My boss askmed me, why the hell it takes more than what we have defined. I explained him saying that oracle might taken it from the OS to finish the necessary request. His immediately counter question was, then what is the use of setting pga_aggregate_target parameter? When oracle allocates and de-allocated the memory (pga) as per requirements. Is it expected behaviour that oracle takes sometime more that the value defined for pga? If so, what is the benift of setting value for pga? Thanks for your time. -- Best Regards, Syed Jaffar Hussain OCP 8i & 9i DBA, Banque Saudi Fransi, Saudi Arabia ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Winners don't do different things. They do things differently." -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l