If you are sure you want to execute in parallel and want to avoid setting the DOP for a table or modifying the queries involved, you can force parallelism with the following statement:
ALTER SESSION FORCE PARALLEL QUERY;
All subsequent queries are executed in parallel provided no restrictions are violated. You can also force DML and DDL statements. This clause overrides any parallel clause specified in subsequent statements in the session, but is overridden by a parallel hint.
In typical OLTP environments, for example, the tables are not set parallel, but nightly batch scripts may want to collect data from these tables in parallel. By setting the DOP in the session, the user avoids altering each table in parallel and then altering it back to serial when finished.