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 permanent grins established eye contact, pointed his finger at me, and said, “Are you in First?”
Wai... Wha...?
I said, “No, platinum.” My first instinct was to explain that I had a right to occupy the space in which I was standing. It bothers me that this was my first instinct.
He dropped his pointing finger, and his eyes went no longer interested in me. The big grin diminished slightly.
Soon another guy walked up. Same story: the I’m-your-buddy-because-I’m-pointing-my-finger-at-you thing, and then, “First Class?” This time the answer was yes. “ALRIGHT! WHAT ROW ARE YOU IN?” Row two. “AGH,” like he’d been shot in the shoulder. He holstered his pointer finger, the cheery grin became vaguely menacing, and he resumed his stalking.
One guy who got the “First Class?” question just stared back. So, big-grin guy asked him again, “Are you in First Class?” No answer. Big-grin guy leaned in a little bit and looked him square in the eye. Still no answer. So he leaned back out, laughed uncomfortably, and said half under his breath, “Really?...”
I pieced it together watching this big, loud guy explain to his traveling companions so everybody could hear him, he just wanted to sit in Row 1 with his wife, but he had a seat in Row 2. And of course it will be so much easier to take care of it now than to wait and take care of it when everybody gets on the plane.
Of course.
This is the kind of guy who sells things to people. He has probably sold a lot of things to a lot of people. That’s probably why he and his wife have First Class tickets.
I’ll tell you, though, I had to battle against hoping he’d hit his head and fall down on the jet bridge (I battled coz it’s not nice to hope stuff like that). I would never have said something to him; I didn’t want to be Other Jackass to his Jackass. (Although people might have clapped if I had.)
So there’s this surge of emotions, none of them good, going on in my brain over stupid guy in the airport. Sales reps...
This is why Method R Corporation never had sales reps.
But that’s like saying I’ve seen bad aircraft engines before and so now in my airline, I never use aircraft engines. Alrighty then. In that case, I hope you like gliders. And, hey: gliders are fine if that makes you happy. But a glider can’t get me home from Florida. Or even take off by itself.
I wish I sold more Method R software. But never at the expense of being like the guy at the airport. It seems I’d rather perish than be that guy. This raises an interesting question: is my attitude on this topic just a luxury for me that cheats my family and my employees out of the financial rewards they really deserve? Or do I need to become that guy?
I think the answer is not A or B; it’s C.
There are also good sales people, people who sell a lot of things to a lot of people, who are nothing like the guy at the airport. People like Paul Kenny and the honorable, decent, considerate people I work with now at Accenture Enkitec Group who sell through serving others. There were good people selling software at Hotsos, too, but the circumstances of my departure in 2008 prevented me from working with them. (Yes, I do realize: my circumstances would not have prevented me from working with them if I had been more like the guy at the airport.)
This need for duality—needing both the person who makes the creations and the person who connects those creations to people who will pay for them—is probably the most essential of the founder’s dilemmas. These two people usually have to be two different people. And both need to be Good.
In both senses of the word.
Showing posts with label Karen Morton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Karen Morton. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 29, 2015
My Friend Karen
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 faster on her very first day, then they wouldn’t have to pay. She was a Give First person, even in her business. That is really hard to do. After she told me this story, I asked the obvious question. She smiled her big smile and told me that her clients had always paid her—cheerfully.
It was an honor when Karen joined my company just a little while later. She was the best teammate ever, and she delighted every customer she ever met. The times I got to work with Karen were bright spots in my life, during many of the most difficult years of my career. For me, she was a continual source of knowledge, inspiration, and courage.
This next part is for Karen’s family and friends outside of work. You know that she was smart, and you know she was successful. What you may not realize is how successful she was. Your girl was famous all over the world. She was literally one of the top experts on Earth at making computing systems run faster. She used her brilliant gift for explaining things through stories to become one of the most interesting and fun presenters in the Oracle world to go watch, and her attendance numbers proved it. Thousands of people all over the world know the name, the voice, and the face of your friend, your daughter, your sister, your spouse, your mom.
Everyone loved Karen’s stories. She and I told stories and talked about stories, it seems like, all the time we were together. Stories about how Oracle works, stories about helping people, stories about her college basketball career, stories about our kids and their sports, ...
My favorite stories of all—and my family’s too—were the stories about her younger brother Ted. These stories always started out with some middle-of-the-night phone call that Karen would describe in her most somber voice, with the Tennessee accent turned on full-bore: “Kar’n: This is your brother, Theodore LeROY.” Ted was Karen’s brother Teddy Lee when he wasn’t in trouble, so of course he was always Theodore LeROY in her stories. Every story Karen told was funny and kind.
We all wanted to have more time with Karen than we got, but she touched and warmed the lives of literally thousands of people. Karen Morton used her half-century here on Earth with us as well as anyone I’ve ever met. She did it right.
God bless you, Karen. I love you.
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 faster on her very first day, then they wouldn’t have to pay. She was a Give First person, even in her business. That is really hard to do. After she told me this story, I asked the obvious question. She smiled her big smile and told me that her clients had always paid her—cheerfully.
It was an honor when Karen joined my company just a little while later. She was the best teammate ever, and she delighted every customer she ever met. The times I got to work with Karen were bright spots in my life, during many of the most difficult years of my career. For me, she was a continual source of knowledge, inspiration, and courage.
This next part is for Karen’s family and friends outside of work. You know that she was smart, and you know she was successful. What you may not realize is how successful she was. Your girl was famous all over the world. She was literally one of the top experts on Earth at making computing systems run faster. She used her brilliant gift for explaining things through stories to become one of the most interesting and fun presenters in the Oracle world to go watch, and her attendance numbers proved it. Thousands of people all over the world know the name, the voice, and the face of your friend, your daughter, your sister, your spouse, your mom.
Everyone loved Karen’s stories. She and I told stories and talked about stories, it seems like, all the time we were together. Stories about how Oracle works, stories about helping people, stories about her college basketball career, stories about our kids and their sports, ...
My favorite stories of all—and my family’s too—were the stories about her younger brother Ted. These stories always started out with some middle-of-the-night phone call that Karen would describe in her most somber voice, with the Tennessee accent turned on full-bore: “Kar’n: This is your brother, Theodore LeROY.” Ted was Karen’s brother Teddy Lee when he wasn’t in trouble, so of course he was always Theodore LeROY in her stories. Every story Karen told was funny and kind.
We all wanted to have more time with Karen than we got, but she touched and warmed the lives of literally thousands of people. Karen Morton used her half-century here on Earth with us as well as anyone I’ve ever met. She did it right.
God bless you, Karen. I love you.
Friday, February 13, 2009
Oracle Optimizer Statistics
Accidentally messing up table statistics is probably the single most common cause for poor SQL query performance that I've ever seen. At Karen Morton's blog, you'll find a link to the best paper on the subject that I've ever seen.
Karen is going to present this topic at the Hotsos Symposium here in Dallas in just a few weeks. I'll hope to see you there. This one's big: Chris Date.
Karen is going to present this topic at the Hotsos Symposium here in Dallas in just a few weeks. I'll hope to see you there. This one's big: Chris Date.
Thursday, November 6, 2008
C. J. Date at Symposium 2009
I'm excited to announce that we have just arranged for Chris Date to speak at the upcoming Hotsos Symposium (hosted by our friends at Hotsos, 9–12 March 2009 near DFW Airport). Karen Morton just closed the deal with Chris a few minutes ago: he will deliver a keynote and then two one-hour technical sessions.Here is a chance to meet one of the men who invented the whole field in which so many of us earn our livings today. This as an incredible opportunity.
I'll hope to see you there.
Monday, July 7, 2008
Performance as a Service
I've mentioned already that, for the second time in ten years, I'm starting a business. It's a lot easier nowadays than it was back in 1999. I know; it's supposed to be easier the second time you do something, but what I mean is different from that. It's just a lot easier to start a business now than it used to be.
Take email for example. I remember the trauma of having to buy and build a server, install Linux on it, find a location for it, install Sendmail, figure out how to manage that, eventually hire someone to manage it, buy email client software for everyone (in our case, Microsoft Outlook), eventually decide that we wanted to use Microsoft Exchange instead of Sendmail, and then keep on top of hardware and software maintenance for everything we had bought, all in an environment where prices and technology and requirements were continuously variable. It took nearly a whole full-time person just to figure out which options we should be thinking about.
Jeff Holt did most of this work for us in my first start-up almost ten years ago. Now, when you think of how many people in the world there are who can set up email, and compare that to how few people in the world there are who can do what Jeff can do with an Oracle database, you realize that the opportunity cost of having Jeff fiddle with email is ludicrously high. But in 1999, the only other option I knew about was to spend a bunch of cash to hire a separate person to do it instead of Jeff.
Today, you pay $50 to Google for a whole year's worth of Gmail service for each employee you have, and that's it. Ok, there's a half hour or so of configuration work you have to do to get your own domain name in your email addresses. But for way less than one month's rent, you've got email for your company for a whole year that works every time, all the time, from anywhere. All you need is a browser to access it, and even that is free these days.
I can tell you the same kind of story for web hosting, bug tracking, backup and recovery, HR and payroll, accounting, even for sales. The common thread here is that there are a lot of things you have to do as a business that have nothing whatsoever to do with what your business really does, which is that content that your people are really passionate about providing to the market. Today, it's economically efficient to let specialty firms do things for you that ten years ago, you wouldn't have considered letting someone else do.
...Which brings me to what we do. My company, Method R Corporation, does performance for a living. Specifically, Oracle software performance. We know how to make just about any Oracle-based software go faster, and we can do it quicker than you probably think. And we can teach people how to do it just like we do. We even sell the tools we use, which make it a lot easier to do what we do. It works. Read the testimonials at our Profiler page for some evidence of what I mean.
So here's a really important question for our company: Why would a telco or a manufacturer or a transportation company or a financial services company—or even a computer software manufacturer—want to learn as much about Oracle performance as the people in Method R have invested into learning? The answer is that a lot of companies just don't.
I love the field of software performance. I love it; it's my life's work. But most people don't. There are a lot of business owners and even software developers out there who just don't love thinking about software performance. I get that. Hey, I happen not to love thinking about software security. I know it's necessary, and I want it; I just don't want to have to think about it. I think most people regard software performance the same way: want it, need it even, don't want to think about it.
What if software performance were something, like Gmail, that just worked, and the only time you had to think about it was when you wrote a little check to make sure you could continue not having to think about it? I think there's a real business model there.
So here's what we're doing.
The people here at Method R have created a software package that we call our SLA Manager. "SLA" stands for "Service Level Agreement." It is software that tracks the response times (the durations that your end-users care about) of the business tasks that you mark as the most important things you want to watch. For example, if your application's "Book Order" function is something that's important to you, we can measure all 10,436 of your "Book Order" button clicks that happened yesterday. Our SLA Manager could tell you how long every single one of those clicks took. We can report information like, "Only 92.7% of those clicks were fulfilled in 3 seconds or less (not 99% like you wanted)." Of course, we can see trends in the data (that is, we can see your performance problems before your users can), and so on.
So, our value proposition is this: We'll install some data collection software at your site. We'll instrument some of the business tasks that you want to make sure never have performance problems. We'll show you exactly what we're doing so there's no need to fear whether we're messing anything up for you. For example, we'll show you how to turn all our stuff off with the flick of a switch in case you ever get into a debate with one of your software vendors over the impact our measurements might have upon your system.
We'll periodically transfer data from your site to ours, where we'll look at your performance data. We'll charge a small fee for that. The people looking at your data will be Cary Millsap, Jeff Holt, Karen Morton, ...people like that.
Another part of our service will be regularly scheduled knowledge transfer sessions, where the same people I've mentioned already will be available to you. Whether the events are public or private, remote or on-site, ...that will depend on the level of service you want to purchase. We'll tailor these sessions to your needs. We'll be in tune with those needs because of the data we'll be collecting.
If this business model sounds attractive to you, then I hope you'll drop us a note at info at method-r dot com. If it doesn't sound attractive, then we're eager to know how we could make the idea more appealing.
Take email for example. I remember the trauma of having to buy and build a server, install Linux on it, find a location for it, install Sendmail, figure out how to manage that, eventually hire someone to manage it, buy email client software for everyone (in our case, Microsoft Outlook), eventually decide that we wanted to use Microsoft Exchange instead of Sendmail, and then keep on top of hardware and software maintenance for everything we had bought, all in an environment where prices and technology and requirements were continuously variable. It took nearly a whole full-time person just to figure out which options we should be thinking about.
Jeff Holt did most of this work for us in my first start-up almost ten years ago. Now, when you think of how many people in the world there are who can set up email, and compare that to how few people in the world there are who can do what Jeff can do with an Oracle database, you realize that the opportunity cost of having Jeff fiddle with email is ludicrously high. But in 1999, the only other option I knew about was to spend a bunch of cash to hire a separate person to do it instead of Jeff.
Today, you pay $50 to Google for a whole year's worth of Gmail service for each employee you have, and that's it. Ok, there's a half hour or so of configuration work you have to do to get your own domain name in your email addresses. But for way less than one month's rent, you've got email for your company for a whole year that works every time, all the time, from anywhere. All you need is a browser to access it, and even that is free these days.
I can tell you the same kind of story for web hosting, bug tracking, backup and recovery, HR and payroll, accounting, even for sales. The common thread here is that there are a lot of things you have to do as a business that have nothing whatsoever to do with what your business really does, which is that content that your people are really passionate about providing to the market. Today, it's economically efficient to let specialty firms do things for you that ten years ago, you wouldn't have considered letting someone else do.
...Which brings me to what we do. My company, Method R Corporation, does performance for a living. Specifically, Oracle software performance. We know how to make just about any Oracle-based software go faster, and we can do it quicker than you probably think. And we can teach people how to do it just like we do. We even sell the tools we use, which make it a lot easier to do what we do. It works. Read the testimonials at our Profiler page for some evidence of what I mean.
So here's a really important question for our company: Why would a telco or a manufacturer or a transportation company or a financial services company—or even a computer software manufacturer—want to learn as much about Oracle performance as the people in Method R have invested into learning? The answer is that a lot of companies just don't.
I love the field of software performance. I love it; it's my life's work. But most people don't. There are a lot of business owners and even software developers out there who just don't love thinking about software performance. I get that. Hey, I happen not to love thinking about software security. I know it's necessary, and I want it; I just don't want to have to think about it. I think most people regard software performance the same way: want it, need it even, don't want to think about it.
What if software performance were something, like Gmail, that just worked, and the only time you had to think about it was when you wrote a little check to make sure you could continue not having to think about it? I think there's a real business model there.
So here's what we're doing.
The people here at Method R have created a software package that we call our SLA Manager. "SLA" stands for "Service Level Agreement." It is software that tracks the response times (the durations that your end-users care about) of the business tasks that you mark as the most important things you want to watch. For example, if your application's "Book Order" function is something that's important to you, we can measure all 10,436 of your "Book Order" button clicks that happened yesterday. Our SLA Manager could tell you how long every single one of those clicks took. We can report information like, "Only 92.7% of those clicks were fulfilled in 3 seconds or less (not 99% like you wanted)." Of course, we can see trends in the data (that is, we can see your performance problems before your users can), and so on.
So, our value proposition is this: We'll install some data collection software at your site. We'll instrument some of the business tasks that you want to make sure never have performance problems. We'll show you exactly what we're doing so there's no need to fear whether we're messing anything up for you. For example, we'll show you how to turn all our stuff off with the flick of a switch in case you ever get into a debate with one of your software vendors over the impact our measurements might have upon your system.
We'll periodically transfer data from your site to ours, where we'll look at your performance data. We'll charge a small fee for that. The people looking at your data will be Cary Millsap, Jeff Holt, Karen Morton, ...people like that.
Remember: we're not looking at your actual transactions; all we're going to see is how many you do and how long they take.We'll report regularly to you on what we see, and we'll make recommendations when we see opportunities for improvement. How much or how little help you want will be your decision. If you ever do want us to help you fix a performance problem with one of the tasks that we've helped you instrument, we'll be able to provide quick answers because we have the tools that work with the instrumentation we installed.
Another part of our service will be regularly scheduled knowledge transfer sessions, where the same people I've mentioned already will be available to you. Whether the events are public or private, remote or on-site, ...that will depend on the level of service you want to purchase. We'll tailor these sessions to your needs. We'll be in tune with those needs because of the data we'll be collecting.
If this business model sounds attractive to you, then I hope you'll drop us a note at info at method-r dot com. If it doesn't sound attractive, then we're eager to know how we could make the idea more appealing.
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Karen Morton
Today I’ve added Karen Morton’s blog to my Blog list. I met her a few years back at a course I helped teach in Tennessee. She generously describes that the course changed her life, and she has since changed mine.Recently, Karen helped me found Method R Corporation. She’s our director of education and consulting. Many of you have met Karen already in a classroom.
Karen is an excellent teacher (that means more than “excellent instructor”), and she’s just one of those rare people who, when she says she’ll do something, it’s as good as a COMMIT. She is also one of the best SQL optimizers I know, on top of being a pioneer and first-rate practitioner of the techniques Jeff and I talk about in Optimizing Oracle Performance.
She has already taught me many things, and I’m eager to watch what she will have to say online.
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