oracle 8.0.6 running aweful!!!!! need tuning advice!

hello people,
I have a strange situation at work ( somehow I get the feeling I should get used to these situations!).
The oracle server is running very slow. It's on an HP-UX 10.20 ( 900/800). It has 1G RAM, a SCSI disk array of several drives....don't recall how many but at least 6 disks....space isn't a problem! The processor is 120MHZ.....don't laugh!!!!!!! :)
That's what we have to work with!
I'm pretty sure no one has ever done any sort of performance tuning on this thing.....
They are also running Lawson on the oracle database as well....I think this adds to the complexity and trouble of tuning this thing! I've never heard of Lawson until I started working at this place.

    Anyway, I tried suggesting that the owner hire an oracle specialist (Dulcian.com) to tune this thing but he turned that down..........too expensive and wants to let this "partner" ( consultants ) do this. They are doing a great job of web developing and programming...but they never said they were Oracle specialists....even their website doesn't even mention Oracle. ( comvision.com ).

    So, until they get around to it I need to start taking some measurements of this thing and see just how bad it is and why? Kyle Hailey posted a monitor utility that he's developed as well as a link to Quest.com. What do oracle professionals have to say about quest software or Kyle's monitor software?

    I started doing some research at Oracle and found some basic documentation on performance tuning the version 8.0.6 database as well as a site called oracle.ittoolbox.com that has a lot of very good info.

    Basically, since I'm going through a crash course of database admininstration in real life! What or where are the best places to go so as to quickly learn the things I need to do in order to start analysing the performance of this database so I can have an idea of what is going on??......so if or when the changes start to be put into place by the "partner" ( consultants).....I'll have an idea of what the consequences will be. I'm the systems admin. of this place so if anything goes wrong........its my butt on the line! I'm very confident of my abilities with windows NT/98/2000 and linux. I'm starting to get good at unix...but still learning. The oracle database thing is totally new to me.........but from what I can see.........this is very sophisticated stuff and trouble-shooting it is hard because it interacts with so many different things (software and hardware). From what I'm quickly learning........... the way the database is setup and even the way the sql scripts are written will have a big effect on the performance of the database under a production environment.

forgive the long message but I'd really appreciate some accurate advice on what I should be reading or looking at to solve this problem!

Thank you,

Oskar Received on Sat Mar 24 2001 - 15:27:07 CST