Oracle Database Discussions

Starting from scratch I am familiarizing myself with the tools a DBA can use to analyse the system. I know there are probably better solutions than looking at VMSTAT but it is a tool offered and one of the first that I would like to familiarise myself with. So I wrote a script after looking around and trying different things that takes a snapshot every five minutes of vmstat and insert's the data into a table. I know have the data and would like to start analysing it. I was told that the things to look out for are page ins and outs, swaps in and out as well as inactive and active pages. I can now see that during the day there are spikes in the memory being swapped into and out of the disk. Now that i can see the trends should how do I further my investigations as to what is causing these spikes. Also the numebr of processes waiting I read should never be more than the number of cpu's. Is there a way to check what processes were running at a specific time? Basically with the info now building up for later analyses what should I be looking out for in the data provided by VMSTAT?

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Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition Release 10.2.0.4.0 - 64bi
PL/SQL Release 10.2.0.4.0 - Production
CORE 10.2.0.4.0 Production
TNS for Linux: Version 10.2.0.4.0 - Production
NLSRTL Version 10.2.0.4.0 - Production