This chapter is not your typical operating system chapter. Most people reading this book already have a pretty good understanding of how to install, upgrade, and administer Oracle on a host operating system. You know the typical commands to find files-do some awk'ing and grep'ing-and how to perform standard administration tasks. But I will go beyond issuing commands and understanding syntax.

Here, I focus on how to quickly determine the operating system's bottleneck using standard, freely available tools and how to ensure what you're seeing in Oracle matches what you're seeing from an operating system perspective. I will show you how to hook this altogether using the OraPub 3-circle analysis method (introduced in Chapter 1). I want you to be able to stand in front of your operating system administration team and confidently explain to them where the operating system bottleneck resides, how you discovered it, how Oracle is involved, and what can be done to resolve the problem from three different perspectives.

There are a lot of Oracle DBAs in the world, and there are a lot of operating system administrators as well. But few people really know Oracle well, can quickly determine the operating system bottleneck, and can relate them together to build a convincing solution case. What I'm trying to convince you is that understanding the operating system from an Oracle performance firefighter's perspective is a very good thing for your career!