Karen Morton is the Director of Education of Method R Corporation. For over 20 years, Karen has worked in information technology starting out as a mainframe programmer and then growing and changing with the times to do development, DBA, and data architect work. She has been using Oracle since the early 90s and began teaching others how to use Oracle over a decade ago. She has authored several Oracle training coursebooks, including leading the development of the Hotsos/Method R SQL Optimization curriculum.

What Karen Morton Can Do for You

You can bring Karen Morton's passion and years of experience to your site, where she can help you in any of the following areas:

• Solving Oracle system performance problems.
• Implementing processes to prevent more performance problems from occurring.
• Learning how the Oracle kernel performance instrumentation works, and how to use that instrumentation both for diagnosing and preventing performance problems.
• Learning the whys and hows of good software performance instrumentation that should occur during software development lifecycle.
• Discovering and correcting inefficient SQL.
• Learning how the Oracle optimizer works, and how to use that knowledge to write and maintain better SQL.
• Implementing or learning how to use Method R performance management software
• Designing specific Method R software enhancements to suit your needs.

Career Summary

Karen worked in the government sector (Tennessee Valley Authority) and public sector (Aluminum Company of America - Alcoa) early in her career from 1986-1994. It was while at Alcoa, she starting working with Oracle. She began teaching and doing small projects "on the side" in 1992 and in 1994 started her own independent consultancy focused on Oracle development and administration with an emphasis on performance optimization. Besides a love for the work and the challenge of being an independent, the catalyst for making the leap was working on a project for the Ben Hogan Tour (now known as the Nationwide Tour) which was a development tour for golf professionals attempting to qualify for the PGA (Professional Golf Association) Tour. As a volunteer, she created a program to automatically create and manage the scheduling of the hundreds of volunteers needed to staff the event. The success of this project led to many new opportunities that gave her the confidence to head out on her own.

For the next 10 years, she worked as an independent consultant and educator. In early 2000, she heard Cary Millsap deliver a presentation entitled "Why a 99%+ Database Buffer Cache Hit Ratio is Not Ok". The presentation inspired her to take a course taught by Cary in Boston called the Hotsos Clinic (this course has evolved into Method R's current Oracle Performance Management using Response Time Profiling course). What she learned in that three day course changed the way she handled her consulting practice. With the confidence inspired by learning the Method R approach to performance optimization and grasping how to use Oracle trace data and the wait interface to quickly and efficiently get to the root cause of Oracle performance problems, she began offering her clients a 4 hour guarantee. The guarantee stated that if she couldn't help the client successfully diagnose the root cause of a performance issue (that may have plagued them for days, weeks or even months) within 4 hours using Method R and by collecting a properly scoped trace data file of the problem application, she would not charge them for the work. The good news is she always got paid!

It was during that time that Karen partnered often with Cary's company at that time, Hotsos, in seeking advice and assistance for some of the more complex customer problems she came across. In late 2003, Karen was approached by Hotsos and asked to consider coming on board to join the Hotsos team to head up their education division. She said yes.

For the next four years, Karen led Hotsos Education to significant growth each year, including hiring some of the best instructors available to help teach the growing performance optimization curriculum. During that time, Karen not only served as Director of Education Services, but also did consulting field work and many remote SQL optimization support projects.

Even though Karen often spends time in the field consulting, doing research, presenting to conferences and user groups, authoring courses and more, her passion is teaching. Over the years, she's taught hundreds of individuals in many topic areas, and finds nothing more rewarding than "seeing the light come on" and knowing she played a part in helping that person find the on/off switch!