My company recently had an assessment performed on our Oracle DB, and quite a few recommendations were passed back to us. As someone who knows very, very little about Oracle, I'm trying to assess whether or not these statements are as dire as they sound. (We do have an Oracle DBA, and it's not me ). Obviously, with a single DBA, this isn't a huge system, but I'm not sure what metrics to give here for reference.

It seems that there has not been a regular performance analysis of database automated workload repository and diagnostics monitor. No daily checklist of monitoring and management activities. Mostly reactive care, rather than proactive.

Tests done during this assessment showed that there was a pattern of virtual memory being exhausted. This was not discovered prior to the assessment.

The File System IO was not set to direct IO in the initialization parameter file.

Installed release is 10gR2, which means we are 7 releases behind, and have missed over 25 Critical Patch Updates.

So - are these signs of a distracted/overburdened DBA? Does this sound like a normal system? Any thoughts you guys may have would be greatly appreciated.