Performance problem hard to solve

Hi all,

first of all, thanks to anyone on this NG for your support and replies to my past and future posts.

Now, the problem:

I work with Oracle 10g XE, Java 1.4.2 on Win XP (but the problem is the same with a Unix machine and Oracle 10g).

I need to perform some InsertOrUpdate statements and we thought to the following solution:

try to insert, catch the SQL exception if the row already exists then perform the update statement.

This solution presents excessive performance problem. Moreover, with the current application design and architecture, this solution seems the one applicable.

With some profiling tools, we've noticed that the bottleneck is on DB. Java code takes the 10% of overall execution timing...It seems the 90% is for the violation on DB, when I try to insert a row that already exists, and the consequent SQLException.

With a java profiler tool we can't monitor the DB performance.

Anyone can suggest any (free or community edition) performance monitoring tools for Oracle 10g XE?

And...anyone can suggest a better solution than "Try to insert, catch the exception if the row already exists then update"?

Thanks in advance!

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H0le