For years, I’ve done consulting around helping organizations tune their database platforms, both from within the database and underneath, to help boost performance and availability. Some database design or code is capable of being tuned, since the organization owns it, but they might lack the time or ability to tune beyond a lab environment. Other times, third-party software vendors ship some pretty troubling code that eats an extraordinary amount of CPU time or storage demand on the database servers. Throwing hardware at the problem only pushes the pain further out into the future but doesn’t solve the problem.
We’ve made some significant improvements lately with our ability to work with ISVs to help them tune their code so that their customers benefit. Their willingness to help shows me that some software vendors do listen and care about their customer complaints. Given the gains we’ve made for some large ISVs, I’d love to hear your thoughts on specific applications and vendors that ship sub-optimal code. We want to use the list to approach these vendors directly to see if we can convince them to let us help tune their code, and in turn, make their software perform better and get happier customers. If you have a moment, please fill out the SurveyMonkey survey here and let me know your top offenders that you’d like to see corrected! I really appreciate your feedback!