Improving CGI/ODBC/Oracle8 Performance

My Question:
What can I do to reduce the connection/query execution time of a CGI application connecting to Oracle8 via ODBC under Windows NT?

The Situation:
We're in the process of evaluating using Oracle8 as the DBMS for a CGI-based intranet application running under IIS/Windows NT. We will use ODBC to connect from the application (written in VC++) to Oracle8. In the past we have used Microsoft SQL Server for most of the intranet applications we've built and performance has been quite good--even on lower-end hardware, connection+query execution+disconnect time has typically been in the 100-500 millisecond range. Using similar hardware and Oracle8, we're experiencing much longer times (in the neighborhood of 3-8 seconds) for similar queries. It appears that the vast majority of that time is spent in making the connection from the application to Oracle8--once connected, the queries seem to execute very quickly.

Any info, pointers, etc. are sincerely appreciated.

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Sean Black
zoot_at_mcs.net