Oracle Database 10g brought in a slew of tuning and performance related tools and indeed a new way of dealing with performance issues. Even though 10g has been around for a while, many DBAs haven’t really used many of the new features, mostly because they are not well known or understood. In this Expert session, we will look past the slick demos of the new tuning and performance related tools and go “under the hood”. Using this knowledge, we will bypass the GUI and look at the views and counters that matter and quickly understand what they are saying. Tools covered include AWR, ADDM, ASH, Metrics, Tuning Advisors and their related views. Much of information about Oracle Database 10g presented in this paper has been adapted from my book and I acknowledge that with gratitude to my publisher - SAMS (Pearson).