Beginning Oracle Database 11g Administration From Novice to Professional

358
CHAPTER 16 INSTANCE TUNING
“Then why are you searching here?”
“Because it is so much brighter here!”
The story is fictional, and the moral is that you must concentrate your efforts in the
appropriate place. You shouldn’t focus your effort wherever it is most convenient to do
so—in fact, the problem might not even be in the Oracle database at all.
Here is an example of a case where poor performance was reported but the database
was not the problem. The output shown in Listing 16-1 was produced by using the
procedure to trace a poorly performing batch process
and then using the utility to summarize the trace data. The session was traced for
about 40 minutes, and the data shows that the Oracle database spent only 140.08 seconds
in executing SQL queries. The bulk of the time—2138.67 seconds—was spent waiting for
further instructions from the program. This clearly showed that the database was not the
problem.
Listing 16-1. Sample Output of the Utility