You can always issue a alter system flush shared_pool which will force re-compliles (at the cost of performance), but the official Oracle line is to either use literals (which is what we don't want) or to force the use of an index with the /*+ INDEX(<analyzed index>) */ hint. Mind you, the official Oracle line is to use DBMS_STATS rather than analyze, but I've never managed to get it to compile stats on a large table in a reasonable amount of time (and I've never been able let it run long enough to complile stats with the "cascade" option - batch windows are such a constraint), where I count "reasonable time" as the time it takes "analyze" to complete the same operation, so when it comes to taking the Oracle line...the track record isn't terribly good.