Hi Brandon... Thank yoou for the reply. Rusmore level came to ---> None. How can I increase it ? I am executing the following statment on 2 different tables both have 290000 records.

SELECT itm_numb,itm_desc FROM A WHERE SUBSTR(itm_numb,1,3)='STI'

On table A which is indexed but it is 2K/record in size, it took 100 seconds to select 4000 records.
On table B which is only .5K/records in size, took only 14 seconds to select 4000 records.

Why is this ? How can I optimized the behaviour.

Raz