Oracle - Enabling Parallelism

If your database server is running on multiple processor system. You can make all your processors conspire to run a query. You might want to do this when the query is known to take a long time and there is no way it would return in sane time. At the same time, be careful to run this on production systems as it may hamper performance of the database.

select /*+ parallel(x 4) */ count(1)
from huge_table
where huge_table.x = 'somevalue'