As I mentioned, application software vendors anxious to avoid being blamed for poor performance stepped in to help identify a user's activity. Additionally, other companies introduced tools to help profile a user's activity in this messy environment. From an IT management perspective, it's complicated, many people are involved, and it's expensive. This boils down to increased risk, and that's a word no IT manager wants to hear. I believe this has motivated Oracle to take some leadership and work on providing at least a partial solution. This partial solution is indeed a big step, and it is called DBMS_MONITOR.

Figure 5-18. Many factors-such as cost, maintenance, security, the end users' experience and location, and computing system capacity-helped push Oracle to embrace a web-based architecture. This is a highly simplified drawing highlighting the key Oracle architectural components: browser, Oracle client process, Oracle server process, and the Oracle SGA.

Conceptually, all database activity flows through DBMS_MONITOR, and if any activity meets certain specific criteria, the activity is captured. So instead of focusing on a specific user (which you can do), you focus on defining the criteria of interest. Oracle introduced DBMS_MONITOR in Oracle Database 10g, and unlike other diagnostic features, it does not require an additional license.