First off, hints can be overridden by the Oracle optimizer. Just so you know.

If you want to track performance do this:
1. Before you run your SQL
ALTER SESSION SET SQL_TRACE TRUE;
run...

This is more complex than you might think. Here is an in-depth article on sending email:...

FWIW - Oracle is as good as it gets on sorting. If the fields being sorted are indexed, you get maximum speed.

We sort 200,000,000 records in 10-12 minutes - but that doesn't mean anything -...

SQL> col brackets format a7 trunc
SQL> select '[ ]' brackets,
my_field1
from mytable;

BRACKET MY_FIELD1
------- ---------------
[ ] JOHN SMITH

Your specifications are kinda fuzzy - I used PL/SQL to get what I thought you wanted - one weeks worth of data. The &1 thing is for interactive input.
If you saved this as "someday.sql" then usage...

Using Oracle and the SQL langauge are somewhat different things. Oracle has a lot of "features" like Oracle Forms and PL/SQL that are Oracle-specific.

Oracle comes with a learning "set" -- the...

That's good.
Do you have a valid tnsnames.ora and sqlnet.ora file? ie., please post them here.
They are in your Oracle home directory (like ORA92)

If you version of 9i is old they will be in...

Can you connect using sqlplus?