I'm looking into ways of improving the overall speed of our server (same as usual, want it running quicker by yesterday!).

One option were not utilising is the Parallel Query option (the degree of all tables is 1).
I've never used this before, but I know were licensed for it (in fact it's included as standard in 8i EE now I think).

Can anyone give any hints, pitfuls on how to implement this? (The option is listed in v$option). Is it just a case of changing the degree of tables? (do they need rebuilding for this). Would I be looking at a fair performance gain in going for this?

Our application is a Hybrid batch processing - lots of loading, followed by processing on the data into the main tables.
Configuration is: 36 CPU, Oracle 7.3.4 - may be decreasing CPU's down to 20 at some point in the future (don't know if that will have an impact on any settings).

Thanks,
Terry