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i agree about the explain plan, and look at where you could stick an index, or two. remember you can have binary or even three way indexes, but these add complexity and size.

sql developer is free now. There are a few ways of importing data into oracle. you can recreate the tables, indexes triggers etc and then dump the sql data out of the database and then cat this data into sqlplus like cat data.sql | sqlplus scott@tiger however i have done this before from postgress, and know that a simple ampersand can screw everything up. so you probably want to do something like: cat data.sql | sed 's/&/&/g' > data2.sql You can also use a proprietry tool like toad to do the import. How much data are you looking at? there are tricks like dividing up your data in to sections and starting many sqlplus instances for each set of data