As Oracle systems become increasingly complex, the time attributed to the Oracle database server is becoming less significant. Said another way, Oracle's time contribution toward what a user experiences is decreasing. While that may sound fine, this also means Oracle's time contribution is becoming more and more insignificant. This makes our job more difficult and our impact less significant, because our optimization efforts will have less and less effect on the total user experience. (This is also not great for job security!)

First, let's be crystal clear about what end-to-end response time means. It is what the end user personally experiences. If the end user held a stopwatch and timed, for example, a query, that is end-to-end response time. It's not what Oracle's performance views can possibly show us. It's not what our ORTA shows us (sorry to disappoint you). It's not what an Oracle wait-event analysis shows us. It's not what the network team shows us. And it's not exactly what the bot on the user's PC tells us. It is only what the user experiences. Whenever you hear people mention end-to-end response time, be sure you understand their definition, because it may not be the same as your definition.

An Oracle process time contribution increase does increase end-to-end response time, but understanding the details is becoming more and more complicated. Here are just of few of the time consumers between the database and the end user: cloud computing, security checks, application servers, web servers, web services, and load-balancing algorithms.