My point is that everyone gets involved in reducing serialization and maximizing parallelization. It's not only a technical issue, but can also be a business issue.

However, there are times when all the time, money, creative thinking, and technical prowess come to a grinding serialization slowdown. In the Oracle world, this can occur when accessing memory. When a process wants to access Oracle memory structures, Oracle must ensure complete serialization control. It may be able to parallelize if multiple processes want to look at a memory structure, but it still must have full control. Memory serialization control is what latching and mutexes are all about, and why this chapter is so important to Oracle performance firefighting.

Detecting and resolving Oracle latch and mutex contention is straightforward. However, I do not mean to imply that it's simple. As you'll see, you not only must understand how Oracle uses latching and mutexes, but also the underlying memory structures. And this means you must learn about Oracle internals. I've distilled this process to eight key steps: