Figure 5-2. Most firefighting requires interval reporting. This figure shows an example of how simple it can be to capture and report interval data from v$sysstat or any similarly structured performance view.

Oracle does provide parsing and recursive CPU consumption information. However, the statistic parse time cpu contains all CPU parse time from server processes and background processes, and includes both recursive and nonrecursive SQL. To complicate classification efforts further, the recursive cpu usage statistic includes all recursive SQL CPU consumption, including parsing-related CPU consumption. This means we cannot simply subdivide total Oracle CPU consumption into three exclusive categories: parsing, recursive SQL, and everything else. The best we can do with the instance views is to gather Oracle process CPU consumption, all recursive CPU consumption, and all parsing-related CPU consumption.

This begs the question, "What exactly is recursive SQL?" Most DBAs consider recursive SQL to be any SQL that a DBA or application developer did not create. For example, a DBA may submit this statement: