In most cases, however, everyone must get involved to solve the problem. This means DBAs focused on Oracle and balancing the workload; DBAs, vendors, and developers working on the SQL; and IO administrators somehow increasing IO capacity. Eventually, nearly every Oracle system outgrows its IO subsystem, and additional capacity must be added. But proving this is not our initial objective. We are problem-solvers, not salespeople!

As a DBA, I routinely check on three network-related areas: latency, collisions, and dropped packets. If there is a network issue, it is nearly always a latency issue. But in your career, you will undoubtedly encounter a collision issue and perhaps even a dropped packets problem.

If you suspect there is a latency issue, my first recommendation is to gets many, many samples. Network people can be extremely gruff. And if you crawled around on your hands and knees all day stringing cable, or spent hours staring at network graphs, you would probably be the same way.