padders - you are correct on the /*+ APPEND */ hint.

I am still in the design phase of this conversion so have not actually run the queries to see how long they will take. Just wanted to put it out and see if there are better methods to do this kind of conversion.

My tables (40 in count) are medium sized. (500,000 to 10 million rows). The xref table will have ~ 400,000 records.

And I plan to alter the new tables for "nologging" during the conversion. Rename the old tables to _bak after conversion and put new tables in its place and enable refrential integrity.