There are many Oracle DBAs, and there are many operating system administrators, but there are not nearly enough people who can effectively operate in both arenas. My hope is this chapter has given you the tools, strategies, and courage to begin operating in this realm.

1 CPU cores are sometimes called servers because each core serves transactions. This can be very confusing to DBAs without a predictive analysis background. DBAs typically consider each box, node, or database server to be a server. In the predictive analysis arena, it is common to speak of anything that serves transactions as a server. It could be a CPU, a CPU core, a physical IO device, an IO volume, or the server at a restaurant. If it can serve, than it's a server. However, in this book, I will try not to use the word server to avoid confusion

2 Confusing to Oracle DBAs, the Linux sar facility is contained in the sysstat package. On Linux, this package is not automatically installed, but obviously can be very helpful for our purposes.