My web log for things I’m interested in, including design, software development, performance analysis, learning, and running a business.
My company, Method R Corporation , makes systems faster. And we make people who make systems faster, faster. We train people to become performance optimization heroes. Here is my story about why you should be interested in our training. %% Slow programs remind me of Christmas when I was a kid. In early December, my parents would put a present for me under our Christmas tree. It would be wrapped up…
This week, my team at Method R devoted some time to an enhancement request that required an interesting design decision. This post is about the analysis behind that decision. The enhancement request was for our flagship product called Method R Workbench . It's an application that people use to mine, manage, and manipulate Oracle trace files. One of its features, called mrskew , is a tool that…
It finally happened. Several years ago, I asked my friend Mauro Pagano to help me spread a new catchphrase. I had made up this little saying. It was weird enough that I knew, if I heard it in the wild somewhere, then it had to have come from me. It would be a fun little experiment. The only problem with this new catchphrase was the "catch" part. It was a perfectly good "phrase," but we were having…
I should be jubilant. But I'm not. I'm habitually non-jubilant. I don't know why. This weekend, I returned from the kind of a trip that I don't take very often: an all-by-msyself vacation. This year, I attended the IPMS/USA National Convention 2023 in sunny San Marcos, Texas. IPMS is the International Plastic Modelers' Society. The convention is three things: a contest, a meetup, and a vendor…
A lot of people get confused by the "%" symbol. I can understand why. Even https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percentage seems way more confusing than it should be. Well, maybe I can help. Here's a simplifying little idea that I learned by reading ISO 80000-1 : The percent symbol (%) is just a constant, just like π or e . Its value is 0.01 (or 1/100, if you prefer). Let me show it to you in a table.…
I create for a living. I make presentations and software and books ... Even my hobbies are creation hobbies. I make tools and furnishings and, these days, “museum quality aviation replicas.” Many of the things I’ve made have worked out really well, but one result I can count on: my version 1 of pretty much anything is rarely going to be a keeper. My good work is almost always a v2, or v3, or…
This weekend, I watched a wonderful TEDx video by Barbara Sher, called “Isolation Is the Dream-Killer, Not Your Attitude.” Please watch this video. It’s 21 minutes, 18 seconds long. It reminded me about what was so great about the Oak Table. That’s right: was . It’s not anymore. Here’s what it was. People I admired, trusted, and liked would gather at a home in Denmark owned by a man named Mogens…
My new book called Faster: How to Optimize a System is ready! You can buy the PDF now at method-r.com . The hardcover format should be available at Amazon sometime around mid-January. The hardcover format is available now at Amazon. The physical book will be about 250 pages long, in a normal 6 × 9-inch business book format. There are 109 chapters, each of which conveys either a story or a lesson.…
I haven’t blogged in, what, ...forever. A couple of years. I have been writing, though. Just not here. A lot , actually. Here’s some of the stuff I’ve done during my lapse here: 2020-01-28 – “Solving the unsolvable performance problem” (2 pages) 2020-02-14 – “Method R Workbench: the pesky, intermittent performance problem” (video 4:57) 2020-03-11 – “Preventing the post-production performance…
I didn’t ride in First Class a lot during my career, but I can remember one trip, I was sitting in seat 1B. Aisle seat, very front row. Right behind the lavatory bulkhead. The lady next to me in 1A was very nice, and we traded some stories. I can remember telling her during dinner, wow, just look at us. Sitting in an aluminum tube going 500 miles per hour, 40,000 feet off the ground. It’s 50º…
The fifth “word I do not use” is the Oracle technical term wait . The Oracle Wait Interface In 1991, Oracle Corporation released some of the most important software instrumentation of all time: the “wait” statistics that were implemented in Oracle 7.0. Here’s part of the story, in Juan Loaiza ’s words, as told in Nørgaard et. al (2004), Oracle Insights: Tales of the Oak Table . This stuff was…
The fourth “word I do not use” is expert . When I was a young boy, my dad would sometimes drive me to school. It was 17 miles of country roads and two-lane highways, so it gave us time to talk. At least once a year, and always on the first day of school, he would tell me, “Son, there are two answers to every test question. There’s the correct answer, and there’s the answer that the teacher…
The third “word I do not use” is best practice . The “best practice” serves a vital need in any industry. It is the answer to, “Please don’t make me learn about this; just tell me what to do .” The “best practice” is a fine idea in spirit, but here’s the thing: many practices labeled “best” don’t deserve the adjective. They’re often containers for bad advice. The most common problem with “best…
The second “word I do not use” is holistic . When people use the word “holistic” in my industry (Oracle), it means that they’re paying attention to not just an individual subcomponent of a system, but to a whole system, including (I hope) even the people it serves. But trying to differentiate technology services by saying “we take a holistic view of your system” is about like differentiating…
Today, I will begin a brief sequence of blog posts that I’ll call “Words I Don’t Use.” I hope you’ll have some fun with it, and maybe find a thought or two worth considering. The first word I’ll discuss is methodology . Yes. I made a shirt about it. Approximately 100% of the time in the [mostly non-scientific] Oracle world that I live in, when people say “methodology,” they’re using it in the form…
Quick, which database is the biggest space consumer on this system? Database Total Size Total Storage -------------------- --------------- --------------- SAD99PS 635.53 GB 1.24 TB ANGLL 9.15 TB 18.3 TB FRI_W1 2.14 TB 4.29 TB DEMO 6.62 TB 13.24 TB H111D16 7.81 TB 15.63 TB HAANT 1.1 TB 2.2 TB FSU 7.41 TB 14.81 TB BYNANK 2.69 TB 5.38 TB HDMI7 237.68 GB 476.12 GB SXXZPP 598.49 GB 1.17 TB TPAA 1.71 TB…
Among movements like Agile , Lean Startup , and Design Thinking these days, you hear the term fail fast . The principle of failing fast is vital to efficiency, but I’ve seen project managers and business partners be offended or even agitated by the term fail fast . I’ve seen it come out like, “Why the hell would I want to fail fast ?! I don’t want to fail at all .” The implication, of course:…
Within Accenture Enkitec Group, we have recently been discussing the Oracle db_block_checksum parameter and how difficult it is to get clients to set it to a safer setting. Clients are always concerned about the performance impact of features like this. Several years ago, I met a lot of people who had—in response to some expensive advice with which I strongly disagreed—turned off redo logging with…
Once upon a time, I told my friend Chet Justice why he should start using one space instead of two after a sentence-ending period. I’m glad I did. Here’s the story. When you type, you’re inputting data into a machine. I know you like feeling like you’re in charge, but really you’re not in charge of all the rules you have to follow while you’re inputting your data. Other people—like the designers…
I met Terry Bradshaw one time. It was about ten years ago, in front of a movie theater near where I live. When I was little, Terry Bradshaw was my enemy because, unforgivably to a young boy, he and his Pittsburgh Steelers kept beating my beloved Dallas Cowboys in Super Bowls. As I grew up, though, his personality on TV talk shows won me over, and I enjoy watching him to this day on Fox NFL Sunday…
The fundamental challenge of computer system performance is for your system to have enough power to handle the work you ask it to do. It sounds really simple, but helping people meet this challenge has been the point of my whole career. It has kept me busy for 26 years, and there’s no end in sight. Capacity and Workload Our challenge is the relationship between a computer’s capacity and its…
Today’s Messed-Up App of the Day is the “Crux CCH-01W rear-view camera for select 2007-up Jeep Wrangler models.” A rear-view camera is an especially good idea in the Jeep Wrangler, because it is very difficult to see behind the vehicle. The rear seat headrests, the wiper motor housing, the spare tire, and the center brake light all conspire to obstruct much of what little view the window had given…
I flew home yesterday from Karen’s memorial service in Jacksonville, on a connecting flight through Charlotte. When I landed in Charlotte, I walked with all my stuff from my JAX arrival gate (D7) to my DFW departure gate (B15). The walk was more stressful than usual because the airport was so crowded. The moment I set my stuff down at B15, a passenger with expensive clothes and one of those…
My friend Karen Morton passed away on July 23, 2015 after a four-month battle against cancer. You can hear her voice here . I met Karen Morton in February 2002. The day I met her, I knew she was awesome. She told me the story that, as a consultant, she had been doing something that was unheard-of. She guaranteed her clients that if she couldn’t make things on their systems go at least X much…
On January 5, I received an email called “Video” from my friend and former employee Guðmundur Jósepsson from Iceland. His friends call him Gummi (rhymes with “do me”). Gummi is the guy whose name is set in the ridiculous monospace font on page xxiv of Optimizing Oracle Performance , apparently because O’Reilly’s Linotype Birka font didn’t have the letter eth (ð) in it. Gummi once modestly teased…