If you follow this process and complete your document, you will be able to stand in front of management and your colleagues and confidently explain the situation and your recommendations.

If formally documenting your work is not your style, you can still follow this process on a piece of scratch paper. During my firefighting training courses, I don't have students create a document. Instead, on a piece of paper, they outline each key section and methodically perform their analysis. Within 30 minutes, the students can complete a full 3-circle analysis and be ready to discuss each circle's unique situation, how they relate, and possible solutions!

There are two distinct methods to diagnose Oracle contention. The traditional approach is based on performance ratios, such as the block buffer cache hit ratio. The current approach is based on Oracle's instrumented9 kernel code. The instrumented analysis approach is commonly called wait-event analysis. As you'll come to understand, wait-event analysis is far superior because it is both fast and accurate. Plus it is a key input when performing an Oracle response-time analysis. This book exploits Oracle's instrumentation. Here, I'll give you some insight into the wait-event analysis method. How to perform a thorough wait-event analysis is described Chapters 2 and 5.