Oracle Performance without OEM

I had a situation where a client facing process was processing 36 rows per hour. They needed to process 3.1 million rows in the next 8 hours. We could not stop the process. We could not modify the code. I ran an AWR report, figured out the problem, and made a couple of tweaks to the database. Boom, the process took off and processed 1.3 million rows per hour and finished in the next few hours. There is nothing I like doing better than making slow things go fast.

My question and challenge to all the DBAs out there. Can you do this without OEM? Do you know how to generate an AWR report, and analyze it, and figure out what needs to be tweaked in the database without OEM?

As a rule I don't use OEM for performance issues. What if OEM is down and you have to solve a production problem? Do you know the views to look at? Do you know what to query and what to look for?

Performance issues happen in production sometimes. As DBAs we need to know how to diagnose and fix them without the fancy tools, because sometimes the fancy tools aren't available. I would challenge all the DBAs out there that rely on OEM to take the time to learn what's really going on under the hood.

I love to make slow things go fast. I'd love to be able to read AWR reports all day and make slow things go faster.