Consulting

Make Method R part of your team

System slowdowns are pressuring your business. Your users are suffering, but your dials are all green. Smart people disagree about what your evidence means.

Performance should be a feature, not a struggle.

I’m Cary Millsap, founder of Method R. I am a consultant. I have helped people optimize Oracle performance since 1989. I am currently accepting new clients. Let’s talk about what you’re up to.

Expertise

Here are some of the subject areas where I can help:

• Oracle-based software and system performance
• Measurement, testing, and diagnostic strategy
• Applying AI to communication and software development
• Instrumenting your application for improved observability
• UX design
• Development methods, tooling, and automation
• Proof-based technical decision-making
• Writing and communicating

War stories

My teams and I invented the methods and tools collectively known as Method R to fight battles like these:

• Global convenience retailer — A slow application search function ran 120+ seconds for months, jeopardizing a multi-million dollar project. Three global consulting firms worked for over three months with no relief. In three days, Method R had the function running in less than a second, which saved the project.
• Mission-critical airport operations software vendor — An airport had been suffering about 10 random application timeouts per hour, each requiring airport staff to assist affected passengers. Method R helped persuade the airport to trace its entire Oracle database for an hour. The trace revealed unexpected causes for timeouts. Those findings helped the airport reduce passenger-care costs.
• Major financial-services company — The SLA stipulated that the company’s nightly batch work finish by 8:00 AM, but the nightly batch was taking longer and longer, violating the SLA. Method R traced the entire batch job and identified precisely where the growing time waste had been occurring. This relieved our client of having to pay cash refunds.
• Global safety-science company — An online create-invoice feature’s performance degraded from 40 seconds for invoices generated early in the month to 300+ seconds for invoices generated late in the month. Method R created a model in Excel that allowed the client to predict why and when the degradation would occur. After optimizing one SQL statement, invoice generation time improved to less than a second.

War stories are fun to tell, but the battling is no way to live. Performance doesn’t have to be a fight. When we work together earlier in your software life cycle, I can help you prevent the battles before they ever break out.

Why Method R?

I have solved difficult technology problems since 1989. I teach as I work, so a relationship with Method R makes two things better: both your systems and your people. I also bring specialized Oracle tools that my long-time collaborator Jeff Holt and I created because we repeatedly needed capabilities that ordinary tools did not provide.

Ways to work together

There are a few ways we can work together, including:

• Focused projects — Concentrated work on a specific problem, decision, or initiative.
• Ongoing advisory relationships — Some time each month helping your team and your systems get better. We might learn how to trace, build tools for your particular environment, automate your testing, study and apply ideas from Faster, or work over time to learn why and how to communicate more effectively.

Sound useful? People tend to enjoy it. Let’s talk if you’re interested. No obligation.