June 18th - Oracle Office Suite 400 45 O'Connor

Registration 8:45am

Presentation 9:00am - 4:00pm with morning and afternoon breaks, and one hour for lunch.  Lunch is not provided.

Biography - Cary Millsap

Cary Millsap has been an Oracle performance specialist since 1989. He worked for Oracle from 1989 to 1999, where he grew from a Senior Consultant to a Regional Vice President in charge of the Oracle System Performance Group and the global service line organization responsible for creating technical services throughout the world. In 1999, he left Oracle to become an entrepreneur. In the time since, he has founded two companies. His current business, Method R Corporation (http://method-r.com), creates software, training courses, and consulting services for performance-oriented developers and database administrators around the world. In Method R, Mr. Millsap serves as president, software designer and developer, teacher, and consultant.

He is recognized by Oracle Corporation as an Oracle ACE Director. His technical papers are quoted in many Oracle books, in Wikipedia, in blogs all over the world, and in dozens of conference presentations each month. He has presented at hundreds of public and private events around the world, and he is published in Communications of the ACM. He wrote the book “Optimizing Oracle Performance” (O’Reilly 2003), for which he and co-author Jeff Holt were named Oracle Magazine’s 2004 Authors of the Year. 

 

Thinking Clearly about Performance, by Cary Millsap

When I wrote Optimizing Oracle Performance with Jeff Holt back in 2003, my goal was to define a reliable, teachable method for fixing software performance problems. After a few months of contentment after finishing the project, I began to notice a trend in how people were responding to it. Many of the questions coming in had started to repeat themselves: “Sure, fixing problems is important, but how can I prevent them?” “The book was fun, but of course I didn’t read the whole chapter on queuing theory; is that stuff really important, anyway?” “Where does capacity planning fit in?” ...And, sadly, I continued to see people make the same mistakes that we had tried to warn people about in the book.

One day, in response to a sequence of questions to which I had responded hundreds of times (at least it seemed), I sat down to write the simplest summary I could of everything I thought people needed to know about software performance. My goal was to ‘connect’ all the topics in the software performance domain that people needed to understand.

I began with why we should approach performance scientifically in the first place. I defined what performance was, how to measure it, and how to say what you want. I showed how performance problem diagnosis works and how tools like the sequence diagram and the profile help you accomplish your goals. I described how efficiency and speed are different things, how load affects performance, and how capacity planning fits into the whole performance equation. Finally, I wanted to show how instrumentation and logging are vital to creating and running software that meets tough performance constraints.

To my surprise, the paper just flowed out in a coherent document that really wasn’t too long or too difficult to read.

I’ve been thrilled with where the project has taken me. The paper has been downloaded nearly 15,000 times from our method-r.com web site. It has won numerous awards at user groups at which I’ve spoken, and the article was published in ACM Queue and Communications of the ACM. It is absolutely my favorite material I’ve ever presented. I think that’s because it touches upon almost everything I’ve ever done as a professional. A remarkable thing about the presentation graphics is that I have presented the same material in time slots ranging from just one hour to a full day. In Ottawa, I’m looking forward to giving the full-day version.