Method R

The Motive for a New Method

Unfortunately, most of the data presented by tools from Quest, BMC, Veritas, Oracle, and others use system-wide aggregation techniques that make it nearly impossible to diagnose many common application performance problems. However, most performance problems are very easy to diagnose rapidly and accurately using the approach that we call Method R:

  1. Select the top user actions for which the business needs improved performance.

  2. Collect properly scoped diagnostic data that will allow you to identify the causes of response time consumption for each selected user action while it is performing sub-optimally.

  3. Execute the candidate optimization activity that will have the greatest net payoff to the business. If even the best net-payoff activity produces insufficient net payoff, then suspend your performance improvement activities until something changes.

  4. Go to step 1.

Method R Distinctions

Method R scores much better than traditional Oracle performance improvement methods in several important dimensions:

Impact

Method R causes you to produce the highest possible impact because you are always focused on the goal that has meaning to the business: the response time of targeted user actions.

Efficiency

Method R provides excellent project efficiency because it keeps you focused on the top priorities for the business, and because it allows you to make fully informed decisions during every step of the project. Project efficiency is in fact this method's key design constraint.

Measurability

Method R uses end-user response time as its measurement criterion, not internal technical metrics that may or may not translate directly to end-user benefit.

Predictive capacity

Method R gives the unprecedented ability to predict the impact of a proposed tuning activity upon a targeted user action, without having to invest in expensive experimentation.

Reliability

Method R performs reliably in virtually every performance problem situation imaginable; a distinction of the method is its ability to pinpoint the root cause of any type of performance problem without having to resort to experience, intution, or luck.

Determinism

Method R eliminates diagnostic guesswork first by maintaining your focus on business priority, and second by providing a foolproof method for determining the true relationships between problem symptoms and their root causes.

Finiteness

Method R has a clearly stated termination condition. The method provides the distinctive capacity to prove when no further optimization effort is economically justifiable.

Practicality

Method R is a teachable method that has been used successfully by hundreds of analysts of widely varying experience levels to resolve Oracle performance problems quickly and permanently.