There have been times recently when our production system has been painfully slow. The DBA Team took the lead to find out what was wrong. They could not isolate the problem. So they brought up the matter with Oracle Corporation.Oracle could find no defect with the database software. Their analysis resulted them in saying that there must be a defect in our source code. The only value add they provided was some queries which were taking a long time on average.
This was most disappointing. Any monkey with a tool can identify the worst performing queries in the system. Now this is not to say that a query might not be poor. However these SQL statements were doing updates using only a primary key in the WHERE clause.
Sooner or later this problem will come around to our team. I told our project manager that I expected we would need a dedicated Oracle performance engineer. We used to have such individuals assigned to our project. They have since been replaced by consultants who are competent, but not performance experts.
