In all fairness, I can't really blame Oracle on this one. That's a fairly well documented issue, because Oracle places the hash value of each query into the sha

In all fairness, I can't really blame Oracle on this one. That's a fairly well documented issue, because Oracle places the hash value of each query into the shared SQL pool, and if CURSOR_SHARING is set to exact and you've stopped the query from aging out then Oracle will see it as a different query. That's not even really a CBO issue. But I hear your pain :-)