Fortunately, there is a very simple solution. Sure, you should profile the session, as this is valuable and helps identify where the performance issue resides. But also profile the entire Oracle system and include an operating system analysis. Essentially, in addition to profiling the session, perform an OraPub 3-circle analysis and make sure you also perform a system-level ORTA. This will enable you to understand the relationship that exists between the profiled session and the rest of the computing environment. It will also allow you to better understand the impact, both from a session and system-wide perspective, of any changes you may decide to make.

So simply widening our analysis breadth brings our analysis back in order and actually strengthens it. And that's a good place to be.

This section focuses on collecting performance statistics (not optimizer statistics) in modern Oracle architectures. The difficulty associated with this type of data collection is the result of the end users being increasingly separated technically and possibly physically from where their requests are processed. This separation causes significant technical challenges when profiling a single end user's activity. To understand the challenges and truly appreciate the solution, we need to first look at the dramatic changes in Oracle system architectures.