In search of help with Performance Monitoring

I am searching for help in monitoring our database. We have been running several extract programs w/out problems over the past 6 months. Within the last month the times jumped from 10 minutes to close to 2 hours. As a band-aid we run a quick analyze twice a day on the main tables in the query and the programs take 10 minutes.

I am not DBA (application developer) but I don't believe that this should be the case. The tables change less than 1% on a daily basis. Granted 2 of the tables are big (17 Million rows) I don't understand what could be causing this.

Using DBA studio I can see that it reaches the last blocks and then just takes forever to complete. Our DBAs needless to say have been absolutely worthless on this issue as w/ most of our issues.

Are there queries I can run or things I can check using TOAD to see where the bottlenecks might be?
The database is 8i and the programs run in CHOOSE mode. Received on Mon Dec 06 2004 - 12:28:02 CST