About parent vs child latches. There is no fundamental low level difference between parent and child latches, they are all small regions of memory modified with atomic test-and-set style opcodes.
You see parent (and solitary) latches from x$ksllt where kslltcnm = 0 and child latches have Kslltcnm > 0 (their child number is stored there).
V$LATCH_PARENT shows all latches with kslltcnm 0, V$LATCH_CHILDREN shows all latches with cnm > 0. V$LATCH just summarizes & groups all statistics up using the latch number, it doesn't care about parent vs child latches.
It's up to Oracle, how it uses the child and parent latches, normally when child latches are used, parent latches don't get used much (or at all), since all resources to be protected have been spread between child latches already.
今天看到書中講LATCH的時候提到了兩個視圖V$LATCH_CHILDREN和V$LATCH_PARENT ,不太清楚兩者的區別,去百度了一下,還沒百度到,GOOGLE了才找到一篇相關的文章。
看了上面的講解,我個人理解就是二者其實沒什麼區別,完全取決於ORACLE如何使用。