Abhaysk, Thanks for the suggestion. I like the way you have written the new query - unfortunately this one is running for more than 50 secs(and it is still running) with appr. 100% CPU usage throughout.

There are about 3004 corr.content_id and 49034 ci.locator. So when you do a cartesian join between these two, it is producing 14,72,98,136 rows to which we are applying the CASE equation.

Here is the explain plan for your query :
Code:
Operation	Object Name	Rows	Bytes	Cost	Object Node	In/Out	PStart	PStop

SELECT STATEMENT Optimizer Mode=CHOOSE		1  	 	39  	 	      	             	 
  SORT AGGREGATE		1  	205  	 	 	      	             	 
    NESTED LOOPS		4  	820  	39  	 	      	             	 
      MERGE JOIN CARTESIAN		1  	170  	35  	 	      	             	 
        NESTED LOOPS		3  	438  	29  	 	      	             	 
          NESTED LOOPS		3  	237  	23  	 	      	             	 
            NESTED LOOPS		1  	38  	20  	 	      	             	 
              NESTED LOOPS		3  	84  	14  	 	      	             	 
                TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID	CSI.CLG_ASSESSMENT_RESULT	3  	54  	11  	 	      	             	 
                  INDEX RANGE SCAN	CSI.IDX_ASMNTRES_COMPDATE	38  	 	3  	 	      	             	 
                TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID	CSI.CLG_ASSESSMENT_INSTANCE	1  	10  	1  	 	      	             	 
                  INDEX UNIQUE SCAN	CSI.PK_ASSESSMENT_INSTANCE	1  	 	 	 	      	             	 
              TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID	CSI.CLG_USER	1  	10  	2  	 	      	             	 
                INDEX UNIQUE SCAN	CSI.PK_USER	1  	 	1  	 	      	             	 
            TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID	CSI.CLG_ITEM_RESULT	13  	533  	3  	 	      	             	 
              INDEX RANGE SCAN	CSI.PK_ITEM_RESULT	13  	 	2  	 	      	             	 
          TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID	CSI.CLG_ITEM	1  	67  	2  	 	      	             	 
            INDEX UNIQUE SCAN	CSI.PK_ITEM	1  	 	1  	 	      	             	 
        BUFFER SORT		1  	24  	33  	 	      	             	 
          TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID	CSI.CB_STANDARD	1  	24  	2  	 	      	             	 
            INDEX RANGE SCAN	CSI.UK_CB_STANDARD_LOCATOR	1  	 	1  	 	      	             	 
      INDEX RANGE SCAN	CSI.IDX_CORR_MLO_CONTENT_ASSET	28  	980  	4
Yes you are right in assuming that index CSI.IDX_CORR_ASSET_CONTENT_MLO is on CLG_CORRELATION.asset_type_id.