You want to distribute the deletes over many connections/transactions to reduce your freelists from becoming inbalanced. If you do not seperate the deletes one of your freelist's will become huge with old blocks and the others will be using mostly new blocks. So, you might want to create a PL/SQL procedure that uses automatous transactions or use a few SQL*Plus sessions using SQL, but spread out the load. If you are not using freelists then I am wasting my time.