Are there general guidelines one can use to improve the gateway performance?
The Gateways are not tunable. To troubleshoot gateway performance issues, turn on gateway tracing (HS_FDS_TRACE_LEVEL= debug). Observe the trace file for things like: the entire SQL statement in question is being sent across to the non-Oracle system or the entire table is being fetched Application users can then re-write their SQL such that most of the processing is done at non-Oracle systems and only the relevant data is fetched across the network. Post processing at Oracle is probably the most common cause of performance degradation.