Interpretation of Statspack reports

Hello all,

I'm new into reading statspack reports, and i would like to hear your opinion on some findings i find odd.
It's a 1hour snapreport from an oracle 9 on a 2CPU windowsmachine with one thirth-party application and a handful of users. Dataloading is about 1Gb per day.
There are a couple of weird choices made with the application design, e.g. every table has it's own tablespace, so there are more than 900 tablespaces with over 1800 datafiles. There are only a few users, the database is configured as shared server. etc!

Anyway:

Top 5 Timed Events

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~                                        % Total
Event                                 Waits    Time (s)       Ela Time


--------------------------------       ------------ -----------

--------

CPU time                                            1,448     66.73
db file sequential read           39,817         268    12.36
log file sync                       388,735         196     9.03
log file parallel write             433,236         183     8.45
control file sequential read       9,500          27     1.25

Q1:
This application primarily loads data , although i suspect in a suboptimal way. I would have
expected that I/O would be the main timed event, not the CPU. Does this confirm that the procedure that processes and loads the data is suboptimal?

Q2:

Event                               Waits       Timeouts
log file parallel write           433,236    431,408

The number of timeout almost equals the waits - what does this mean? If it means anything...

Q3: What book / article do you advice to learn the fine art of reportreading? Most of the things i found are rather basic - how to create a report, add statspack jobs, etc.

TIA,
H. Received on Wed Aug 22 2007 - 06:27:37 CDT