For all its faults, this is one thing I like about Oracle. No matter how many levels of nested correlated subqueries or other convoluted junk I throw at it, it (almost) always untangles the query into a nicely optimized plan. Of course, this makes it less likely I'll spend time actually thinking about how the query could be cleaned up and streamlined. Which means if I tried to move over to MSSQL or MySQL my queries would probably take forever or fail completely. Ergo, I'll stick to Oracle... ?