I have a process which is taking up way more memory than I'd expected. The process runs a PL/SQL that does some nested loop joins on a PL/SQL table. The background process is using > 200Mb of private memory and this number goes up if we tweak the WHERE clause in the join to return more data. I did a heapdump of the process and the trace file looks like this (lots of stuff trimmed): I presume that "session heap" is the UGA for this process' session. Basically it goes on like this for several pages with sz anywhere between 16k and 1Mb. How can I interpret this? I presume the memory is to do with cursor information. This is a sort but the sort area size is only 10Mb and cannot account for all the private memory in use. I'm just trying to decide if this is a reasonable amount of memory to be using (i.e. explain what it is using it for) and just put up with it, or if something has gone wrong. I'm on 8.1.5 on Linux 2.2 (I know, I know...) Thanks for any insight!