Oracle processes eating CPU time

Hello - I need help!
We're running RDBMS verson 6.0.334, and SQL*Plus v. 3.0.10. Our database WAS pretty much fully normalized, with about 25,000 records in two major tables and a couple thousand more in ancillary tables. Things went well enough until we started to really bang up against the DB - doing updates through SQL*plus to 400 records at a time, for instance, based on a SQL script to calculate percentiles within a group; or selecting 500 records from a major table with 5 joins to smaller tables. The system slows down under these conditions unacceptably.

To get around some of this, we de-normalized one of the major tables to get rid of some joins, and that helped just a bit.

Sorry for the long-windedness, it gets better:

My question is this: why does the Novell Monitor report 99-100% CPU usage under the situations described above? We're on Novell 3.11, on an ARC 486 server with 32 megs of RAM. We've attempted to configure Novell and Oracle for best performance (with noticable differences), but it still takes 15 minutes to run a cursor through 500 records (the cursor in this case calculates a ranking for a group of people based on an average of three to four values in their records).

Is Novell Monitor lying to me? Seeing that CPU usage go up to 100% and stay there for a full working day leads me to believe that our pathetic hardware (we're storing all data, rollback segments, and indexes on one hard drive) is not the problem...

I realize this is vague; if someone can take the bait I'll provide more coherent details.

Thanks very much for any responses - jspaith_at_cris.com (.sig pending) Received on Fri Apr 01 1994 - 23:24:51 CEST