In the preceding formula, I purposely included the conversion factors. Notice that all the time units cancel out, leaving us with a raw numeric without any reference to time. I could have carried the CPU core's metric to the final value of 94%, since 94% of the CPU core capacity was utilized, but since we normally don't represent utilization like this, it could cause some confusion.

It is important to understand this calculation is not the operating system CPU utilization, which can be gathered using an operating system command such as vmstat. What we calculated with this utilization formula is Oracle's CPU consumption related to the database server CPU capacity. This is commonly called the Oracle CPU utilization.

Besides gathering operating system CPU utilization using standard operating system commands such as vmstat and sar, starting with Oracle Database 10g, both operating system CPU consumption and CPU capacity details are available through the v$osstat view. We still need the sample interval, which is 149.97 minutes, as shown in Figure 9-2.