I have table that tracks the records being inserted into our database. Each record that gets inserted has a sequence number attached to it , usually 1 through 85000 for the day. I have a procedure that runs every hour that checks to make sure we are not missing any records by creating a cursor of the records in that table and then going through them to see if any sequence numbers are missing. Here is the problem. When we are not missing any transaction numbers it usually runs in 1 minute. If we are missing some transactions , say 500 of them it runs for an hour. I increased the sort_area_size for that session and it didn't do any good. Any ideas? How could I find out what the problem is?