>Nadya,
>
>I don't think merely changing your index expression will solve your problem. Your REPLACE statement will need to be modified in a similar manner. Even then, I'm not sure if it will be optimized.

Right, the REPLACE statement should be changed as well. Why do you think, it would not be Rushmore optimizable? Do you remember, NVL in index expression does automatically turn expression to be non-optimizable?
>
>>
>>This basically confirms my thoughts. I'm thinking about using this index expression instead:
>>

>>upper(ccode+town+street+ ;
>>  nvl(str(StNum,4), space(4))+nvl(StNumExt, space(4))+nvl(Unit, space(6)))