How to Make Things Faster

Chapter 64. Richard

Richard (his real name) was the enterprise architect for a global convenience store chain, based in Irving, Texas. His company was having performance problems with a number of features in a new Oracle application they were rolling out. One feature in particular—a function called Material Specification Search—had become emblematic of the entire implementation. The company had purchased one of the most extraordinary computers on the planet, yet it would take nearly two minutes for a test kitchen chef to identify what kinds of cheeses were available for a new recipe.

By the time I met Richard on the phone in 2017, he had exhausted every avenue offered by the three international hardware, software, and consulting vendors with offices on site. He was eager to see what we might be able to do with our look at it approach. The night before our visit, I remember lying in bed thinking…my colleague Jeff Holt and I are going to be the first people in the world to learn why this search-for-cheese function is so slow.

Richard himself hosted the meeting the next morning. He was an ideal client:

• He had sufficient authority to provide access to anyone we needed: an application user who could reproduce the problem for us, a DBA to do the tracing and file fetching, and others as required.

• He had the authority to make decisions on behalf of his company.

• He was interested in how we worked, so he stayed right there with us, which kept our feedback loops short.

• He was a gracious ...