is it possible to query an oracle database to find out how hard it's working?

The only measure (that I've heard) of how hard an Oracle database is working is the current CPU load on the box.

For instance, a DBA would tell me: "spiffy, the Oracle server has two 0% idle CPUs! We need to kill some sessions or tune queries."

I assume they're getting the information by running 'top' or 'sar' from a shell on spiffy.

Is there an SQL query or PL/SQL code block that could be run to determine some measure of how busy a database server is? This would be quite useful to predetermine if some expensive queries would be possible before actually starting them. Received on Mon Feb 02 2004 - 16:33:53 CST