* Understand the general latch and mutex algorithms. This is what this chapter is all about. If you don't understand the fundamentals of serialization, your solutions are pretty much guesses-you honestly don't know if they will help improve performance.

* Detect significant latch and mutex contention. Every production Oracle system contains latch and mutex contention. If this were not the case, Oracle would be out of business, and nonconcurrency control products would be used instead. The issue is not whether contention exists; it's whether contention is a performance problem. As you'll see, Oracle's wait interface tells us if there is enough serialization to prompt us to act.

* Determine the problematic latch or mutex. With rare exception, the best solutions are latch- and mutex-specific, which means they are not general, but target a specific latch or mutex. Knowing the contention exists is not enough for a pinpoint diagnosis. You need to determine specifically which latch is the problem. Again, Oracle's wait interface provides us with this information.