oracle huge hash_area_size I am wondering what is the maximum setting for hash_area_size parameter?
I'm trying to perform a huge join which ends up allocating 10Gb of temp space and completes in an hour.  10Gb is not that much by today's standards.  I have the RAM available in the system.  Should be possible to process that in memory.  Is there a way to tell oracle to do that?  When I try to set hash_area_size to 10Gb it complains because it seems to be limited to 32bit integers.

I've also tried 
alter session set "_smm_max_size" = 10000000; -- 8 zeros

because I read that it is in Kb, but it doesn't seem to make a difference.

UPDATE: 
11g Enterprise Edition Release 11.2.0.3.0 - 64bit
The query is a join of 3 wide tables of equal size by 4 columns.  Each column has about 10M rows. No indexes.  The plan is 2 HASH JOINs.  Hash joins are performed in TEMP space.
If you have the Partitioning Option then consider hash partitioning the two tables into 32, 64, or 128 etc partitions on the join key. Whether you use parallel or serial query, your memory consumption will be very much reduced.