Under the collaboration umbrella between the Oracle Academy program and university teachers, at the end of the last year we were invited by Iuliana Botha, Associate Professor at Faculty of Economic Cybernetics, Statistics and Informatics, Coordinator of the Databases for Business Support Master’s Program, The Bucharest University of Economic Studies, to host a technical workshop on database for graduate students.
Our colleague Valentin Robu, Manager, CSS Tech Delivery, had the pleasure of delivering a technical session lecture to these students on the subject, “Oracle Database Performance Tuning: How to Monitor and Troubleshoot.”
The session focused on practical approaches to identifying and resolving performance bottlenecks in Oracle environments. They explored, in a demo live session, key monitoring tools and techniques such as Oracle Database performance views (AWR, ASH, dynamic performance views, and OSWatcher), execution plan analysis, wait events interpretation, and systematic troubleshooting strategies.
Beyond theory, the emphasis was on developing a structured mindset: how to think when performance degrades, how to separate symptoms from root causes, and how to make data-driven tuning decisions.
“It was a great opportunity to engage with curious minds and share real-world insights from production environments. I hope the session sparked further interest in database internals and performance engineering,” said Valentin.
Iuliana Botha said, “For our students, the topic of database performance metrics analysis was particularly relevant. Valentin’s live demonstrations were worth a thousand words, as the effects could be observed in real time, and the scenarios could be adjusted to address the students’ questions, allowing them to find clear and efficient answers. Moreover, as always, Valentin captivated the audience with his remarkable oratorical skills. I am very grateful for his time and dedication.”
Maria-Lavinia Tudor, a first year graduate student in the program, said, “Day by day, we run into various problems when working with databases, and the biggest one appears in the debugging phase. I always wondered why I had long execution times, even though under normal conditions the code used to run much faster. During an Oracle workshop, presented in a captivating way by Mr. Valentin Robu, I found out that long execution times can also be caused by the intensive use of the computer’s resources.”
“The database tuning workshop was extremely valuable to me because I learned how to identify the root causes of performance degradation, both in waiting processes and in CPU overload situations, along with analyzing database performance metrics, which gave me a clearer understanding of practical troubleshooting,” said Vanesa-Denisa Lungu, another first year graduate student.
We thank Valentin for his continued involvement as a volunteer for Oracle Academy. and thank all participants for their feedback on this event.
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