And one last thought on this: Buried deep in note Slow Performance Exhibited by Oracle ODBC Against 10.2 Oracle Database [ID 373129.1] there is a section that describes the rule hint in ALL_TAB_COLUMNS and says to manually resolve this problem by recreating this view as SYS on the 10.2.0.2.0 database without the rule hint. Seems to be bug 5304167, and if I can read the history on it, it seems to be fixed in 11.1. I don't have an 11.1 or higher instance to test against - be curious if anyone can verify this. In the meanwhile, for anyone else that has slow queries against any of the following views ALL_TAB_COLUMNS ALL_TAB_STATS_HISTORY WM_COMPRESS_BATCH_SIZES You may be hitting this same bug. Thanks, all stephan From: Uzzell, Stephan Sent: Thursday, 02 December, 2010 11:49 To: 'Taylor, Chris David'; 'knecht.stefan@xxxxxxxxx' Cc: 'oracle-l-freelists' Subject: RE: tuning queries against sys views? Stefan, Chris, Awesome, thanks! There is indeed a RULE hint in ALL_TAB_COLUMNS. I created a new version of that view without the hint (in its own schema) and it works great! Thanks to everyone who helped out... you guys rock. stephan