Software

Method R software tools help you do one thing really well: manage the performance of your Oracle-based software.

Workshop Software Package

Toolbox

Workbench

Workshop

Your Enterprise Deserves the Very Best

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Why are there so many alternatives to Oracle Enterprise Manager? Simply, Oracle continues to deliver the best core database in the industry, but falls short when it comes to delivering performance management tools. Monitoring apps are great for giving admins an overview of the daily “performance” of their systems. But when a system fails to meet performance targets, no amount of monitoring will help fix the problems. To really improve performance, you need to see performance the way the user experiences it, from the application code to the metal and back again. Oracle extended SQL trace files can give you that information, with detail that will floor you.

No other software comes close to the precision and trustworthiness of Method R software.

Alex Gorbachev · Chief Technical Officer · The Pythian Group

Profiling: the Language of, ...well, Real People

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Method R software tools do the dirty work for you of mining what you need to see from the tremendous amount of detail in your trace files. Cary Millsap and his Method R have revolutionized the way we solve performance problems. You can use the very same tools that the world’s best performance consultants use. Profiling of software instead of monitoring of systems has created a new language of performance management, a simple language in which you ask direct questions like, “How long did that program take?” “Why?” And “How will response time change if we do x?”

Transform your enterprise today by incorporating this language into your SOP, whether that be CMMI, ITIL, Six Sigma, or Seven Rho. This is inconceivable with traditional monitoring approaches. Whatever your current process, you will be amazed at the benefits to be gained from having a common language that ties application developers, DBAs, system administrators, users, and business leaders together in ways never before achieved.

Another benefit from the Profiler is that the word got out that we could show with certainty if the application and/or database were causing unacceptable response times. At first all of the finger pointing towards the database disappeared. I mean, total silence from the complain farm. It was too funny. We’re turning it around by communicating that we are here to help and that we had bought licenses for a few group leads. Some of them are starting to seek advice earlier in the projects, not only for performance analysis but architecture as well.

Tony Aponte · Database Administrator · Clearwater, Florida

Be the Leader that Transforms Your Enterprise

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Yes, you!

Let’s face it, standing out in the crowd exposes you to both risk and reward. The rewards of transforming your performance management processes include that corner office promotion, the satisfaction of really affecting the bottom line in a positive way, and the undying admiration of your colleagues. The biggest risk in bringing the Method R Workshop software package into your enterprise is the risk of becoming the guy at the party not complaining about how slow his software is at work. Be prepared for the scorn of those around you who aren’t yet using the right tools for the job.

With MR Tools and the Method R Profiler, I will be invincible! :D

Ian Woodbury-Kuvik · Sparkworx · California

What’s In the Package

Here’s what you get in the Method R Workshop software package:

Method R Trace: 1-person license, including maintenance
Method R Profiler: 1-person, 20-instance license, including maintenance
Method R Tools: 1-person license, including maintenance

The Fine Print

Here are the definitions of the Method R Software Licensing terms. Don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.

Per-Person License. A Software Per-Person License restricts the number of people who can run the Software. Each Software Per-Person License unit entitles one specific person to run the specified Software on any system, using any login id. With a Per-Person license, the distribution contains the licensed software for all the platforms we support.

Per-Userid License. A Software Per-Userid License restricts the number of Userids that a licensed person can use to run the Software. Each Per-Userid License unit entitles one specific person to run the specified Software within exactly one Userid. A Userid is defined to be a single login account on a single physical or virtual computer. A person can thus act in the capacity of multiple Userids. For example, one person using two different login accounts on each of three different physical or virtual computers would count as six (2 + 2 + 2 = 6) Userids. With a Per-Userid license, the distribution contains the licensed software for only one platform of the licensee’s choice.

Per-Instance License. A Software Per-Instance License restricts the number of Oracle Instances that a licensed person is permitted to analyze with the Software. Each Per-Instance License unit entitles one specific person to run the specified Software to analyze exactly one Instance. An Instance is defined as a single collection of Oracle background processes and memory buffers as defined in Oracle Corporation’s Database Concepts documentation. For example, a group of users using the Software to analyze a single-instance development system, and a single-instance test system, and a 3-node RAC system would count as five (1 + 1 + 3 = 5) Instances.

Maintenance License. An active Maintenance License entitles a licensee to download and install, at no additional fee, all new versions of the specified Software (for the licensed platforms) that are released within eleven (11) months from the date of purchase. To download and install a version released after this period requires an additional fee.

Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation.

Workbench Software Package

Toolbox

Workbench

Workshop

Sometimes, a Profiler is Just Not Enough

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Sometimes, even when you have the best Oracle profiling software in the world, you still find yourself opening up that trace file to have a look? Why? There are a number of reasons:

The time scope is wrong on your trace file. You’re trying to diagnose an 11-second business task execution, but your trace file contains 48 seconds’ worth of data, so you need to crop your trace file. But cropping a trace file is hard. It’s not something you do with a text editor. It’s something you can do by deleting lines with a text editor.
You need to drill down in a dimension that your Profiler doesn’t drill. For instance, maybe you need to see your read call durations grouped by I/O size.
Your trace data is scattered across more than one file. Maybe your system uses a connection pooling architecture. Maybe you’re just fighting a long-running PX operation.
You’re looking for the region of trace data lines when something took way longer than you expected, but which lines are the ones you’re looking for? And once you find them, how are you going to convert that 13-digit Oracle Database tim value to a wall clock time, so you can join your information back to your Oracle Database Active Session History data?

Method R Tools are basically an all-in-one ETL + BI solution for Oracle database trace data.

Alex Gorbachev · Chief Technical Officer · The Pythian Group

Power. More Power

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It’s hard to describe how good it feels to have to have utter domination over your performance data. Imagine knowing, with one command, which of your thousands of trace files has the best (well, worst) example of a latch contention problem in it. Imagine knowing with just one command: can you actually incur a library cache miss on an exec call? If you have just a little instrumentation in your application, you can answer questions that long-time managers of Oracle systems will find utterly amazing, like, which IP address is experiencing the worst “book order” response times?

Within half an hour, I presented to my colleague, the offending SQL statement. He needed almost 2 days to figure out the same, after long discussions with other team members, fiddling with report options in tkprof and the trace analyzers and trying to see it all in context; regarding the info presented in his reports.

Marco Gralike · Principal Database Consultant · AMIS

Be More Valuable within Your Organization

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Mastery awaits...

The best thing about understanding your trace data? Because trace data directly describes your end users’ response time experience, it’s the perfect data for understanding your users and your developers. When a user comes to you with, “My click took 23 seconds,” your response is, “Yes, I see that,” instead of, “I just don’t get it; my dials are all green...”

Because trace data describes response time in terms of database and operating system calls, it's the perfect data for discussing your problem with your DBAs and your system administrators; even your network and SAN admins. When your SAN administrator tells you, “But your average read latencies are awesome,” your response is, “But our users are spending more than 13 hours each day waiting for single-block reads that take longer than 250 µsec apiece.”

There were some unanticipated benefits from the Profiler. One is the gratification of actually helping a co-worker. She was so enthusiastic she even took the Intensive SQL Tuning class. We got her a Profiler license and she’s been busy reworking the VB app. I don’t know her very well since I’ve been in this job for a short time, but it felt so good to help someone who had been working on the same thing for so long that it had become a chore to come to work. She has more time now and is working on porting the app to Apex. Again, a little training on the method and the Profiler has gone a long way to improve her morale and productivity. You don’t see that in the marketing literature.

Tony Aponte · Database Administrator · Clearwater, Florida

What’s in the Package

When you buy the Method R Workbench, here’s what you get:

Method R Trace: 1-person license, including maintenance
Method R Profiler: 1-person, 2-instance license, including maintenance
Method R Tools: 1-person license, including maintenance

The Fine Print

Here are the definitions of the Method R Software Licensing terms. Don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.

Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation.

Toolbox Software Package

Toolbox

Workbench

Workshop

Performance Problems Can Come from Anywhere

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Do you know where software performance problems come from? They can come from anywhere:

They can come from badly written code, from SQL or PL/SQL or PHP or C# or Ruby;
They can come from too many index segments, or too few, or a bad decision about your data model or how your schema was implemented;
They can come from inadequate hardware capacity, or a bad RAID controller, or a mistake in how your SAN caches are configured;
They can come from a badly set parameter on your OS or database or application server or web server;
They can come from a user who mentally filters through 10,000 rows of results because she doesn’t know there's a one-click way to get the one row she really wants;

They can come from anywhere. It’s a big problem.

How Do You Find and Prevent Problems?

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There’s a rich Oracle history of trying to find performance problems in perhaps the most inefficient possible way: by looking everywhere they might come from. But because performance problems can come from anywhere, neither you nor your software can possibly monitor and make sense of data coming from everywhere your performance problems might be coming from. You can’t prevent problems this way either: you can’t possibly know everything there is about all the layers in a complex stack of hardware, software, and personnel, before you take an application live. Does an application developer really have to know everything there is to know about Oracle redo and undo and freelists and IOTs before he can write great code that uses an Oracle Database?

There’s a much better way.

I’m a firm believer in the Method R strategy for performance tuning as it has worked well for me countless times over the years.

Steve Montgomerie · Sr. Oracle/PeopleSoft DBA · Siemens Corporation

The Way Out: Profiling

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A profile is a report of exactly how your system spends your user’s time. It’s how you answer simple-sounding business questions like these:

That click takes 20 seconds now. It used to take .5. Why?
That report took 2 hours. Could it run in 10 minutes?

As simple as these questions sound, you can’t answer them with the tools you use today. That’s why managing performance is way more difficult for you than it needs to be.

Profiling is what DBAs and sysadmins do in production when a program takes longer than we want, or when we just wonder if it could go faster. Profiling is what developers with good code hygiene do before they hand their code to the next person in the software lifecycle, to make sure their code is as tight and fast as possible—to make sure they didn’t do anything inefficient that might be particularly embarrassing under load.

We’ve always had trace files, but most developers do not know how to read them. The Profiler makes things very easy and gives me the evidence I need to demonstrate the problem is in the code, not the database.

Dorrie Keyes · DBA Manager · Indianapolis, Indiana

We Get It: Profiling is Hard

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With the wrong tools, profiling is a nightmare. Profiling with Oracle Enterprise Manager or Oracle’s Active Session History data (if you’re lucky enough to have a license for it) is impossible. The data you need is in your Oracle trace data, but collecting trace data can be difficult. Even if you’ve cracked the collection problems, retrieving trace files can be a pain in the neck, especially for developers and analysts who don’t have login access to the system they’re trying to fix. And making sense of trace files without the right tools can make you go blind. Yet Oracle’s tkprof leaves so much to be desired...

Profiling Doesn’t Need to be Difficult

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Be incredible...

The Method R Toolbox pairs of our easiest-to-use trace data collection and retrieval tool and our easiest-to-use profiling tool. The result: you’ll finally find out where all those programs have been hiding your time. You’ll have the tools that many of our customers have used to systematically eliminate waste from their systems, to save enormous heartache and strife. And heat, and electricity, and cash. With our Toolbox, you’ll be able to explain Oracle application response times in a manner that database administrators, developers, users, and managers alike can relate to. Imagine: “Here’s where all of your time has been going...” The Method R Toolbox is performance management software that you need, whether you’re live right now or still building, whether you’re running custom software or software off-the-shelf.

When you combine MR Trace and the Profiler, we’ve been able to turn around fixes with almost no interruptions and have taken warehouse queries that used to never finish down to less than ten minutes.

Bernard Antonuk · Orion Data Management

What’s In the Package

Here’s what you get in the Method R Toolbox software package:

Method R Trace: 1-person license, including maintenance
Method R Profiler: 1-person, 2-instance license, including maintenance

The Fine Print

Here are the definitions of the Method R Software Licensing terms. Don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.

Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation.

Method R Profiler

The classic tool that started it all, the Method R Profiler is software that makes simple work of knowing exactly why your application consumes the response time it does. With minimal training, a Method R Profiler user can—in just minutes—identify the root cause of an Oracle-based application performance problem, propose sensible solutions to it, and predict the end-user response time impact of each proposed solution.

The Method R Profiler and Method R Tools are the best performance diagnostic tools I have ever used.

Andrew Zitelli / Thales-Raytheon Systems / Fullerton, California