The spotlight is on Cary Millsap, Distinguished Product Manager, Oracle, United States.

Slow systems are frustrating. They waste time and money. But making consistently great decisions about performance can be easy, if you understand what’s going on. That’s the essence of Cary Millsap’s book How to Make Things Faster and also one of the messages he delivers as an Oracle Academy Ambassador.

Millsap, based in Southlake, Texas, has the remarkable credentials of having devised a repeatable, teachable method of optimizing performance for any Oracle-based system. In the ‘90s he created the Optimal Flexible Architecture (OFA) standard, used in every Oracle Database installation worldwide. He also built and trained a team of 85 elite performance specialists. Before leaving Oracle in 1999 to raise a family and start a business, he was flying to 30-plus sites per year, helping Oracle customers to get better performance from their systems.

Twenty-five years later, Millsap is back at Oracle—as a Distinguished Product Manager, complete with an Oracle Academy Ambassador hat, as befits someone who has educated thousands of information technology professionals through his commitment to writing, teaching, and speaking at public events.

Millsap’s educational background is extensive. His bachelor’s degree was a double major in Math and Computer Science from East Central University in Oklahoma. He has a master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, and an MBA from Southern Methodist University. In his own words, “I am a mathematician and computer scientist who wanted the MBA so that I could understand how to relate to business leaders.”

Oracle Academy: What does your role of Distinguished Product Manager at Oracle entail?

Cary Millsap: I am currently focused on the use of AI to improve productivity. One of my ongoing assignments has been to help my colleagues to create collateral that’s more enjoyable both to write and to read.

Lately, I’ve been engineering ChatGPT-style prompts to help people write both better and faster. With AI I can reach more people than was feasible in person. It’s about optimization of writing and editing—an area where I’ve had a whole lot of practice over the past three decades, and it has been a great way to connect with other leaders within the company.

Oracle Academy: And as Oracle Academy Ambassador you also coach people to do things better and faster?

Cary Millsap: Correct. I like to tell optimization stories. There are lots to choose from. I catch students’ imaginations by showing them how to mix a wide variety of skills—like diagnosing, testing, explaining, proving, proposing, empathizing, or estimating—to solve a meaningful problem that an important company is willing to pay good money to fix. I recently spent a little more than an hour on a Zoom call transmitting that message to a Database Management course at the University of Colorado.

Oracle Academy: Almost a lesson in consulting…

Cary Millsap: It’s exactly a lesson in consulting. In a session with Gannon University in Pennsylvania, I talked about how consulting requires the ability to write, speak in public, convince people, navigate internal politics, and then fix things. Those are so-called soft skills that you have to have if you’re going to be successful at helping people solve problems.

In my talks, I like to illustrate a performance problem or two and show how much fun it is to see the puzzle pieces fit together, to understand how something that seemed impossible—“How can this be happening so badly?”—is solved by finding that little something that nobody noticed.

Oracle Academy: What feedback do you get?

Cary Millsap: In my experience, students almost always want to know more about the kinds of careers they might be able to have. I’ve gone through this with my own kids, and I can certainly remember back when I was graduating, I wanted to know how I could find a job—ideally, doing something I could actually enjoy.

I can remember thinking that my biggest problem was simply not knowing what kinds of career options were available to someone with my educational background. I didn’t know what I wanted to be, but I knew some of the things that I wanted to do: wear a suit, ride airplanes, and help lots of people.

It’s important for students to realize is that it’s really common for people not to have as much fun as they had hoped in the first year of their career. I’ve seen it over and over, and it certainly happened to me. It’s easy to see why, if you think about it: It’s hard to love something that you’re not very good at. And who can possibly master something meaningful in just a year?

But! If you buckle down and get good at something important—especially if it’s difficult—then you can make yourself indispensable. And that’s what you want. When I was in school, I never envisioned myself to be a writer or a public speaker. But I worked hard at it—just as hard as I did on my favorite subjects—and today it turns out that writing and public speaking are the skills that distinguish me from my “competition.”

Being an Oracle Academy Ambassador is not just giving pep talks. I tell students about my work in using AI to improve productivity—inside Oracle and in the whole world. Students want to know how AI affects the job market. A lot of people want to know, “Why would they hire me when they’ve got ChatGPT?’’ My answer is that it’s more valuable to treat AI as a partner rather than as a tool. ChatGPT won’t take away your job, it’s the guy who uses ChatGPT as a partner that will take away your job.

It boils down to understanding the tools and processes that make a business work. It’s why Oracle has been a leader for so long, because Larry Ellison understands, and the people who work for him understand, what’s going on many, many, many levels further down.

Oracle Academy: Coming back to Oracle Academy, how do you see the impact of the free technology resources provided to students?

Cary Millsap: During the Database 23ai launch, Oracle’s Executive Vice President of Mission-Critical Database Technologies talked about the importance of getting Oracle into college kids’ hands. I agree 100%. When graduates make their way out into the world, I want them promoting what they have learned in school from Oracle Academy, want them to say: “Of course, we must use Oracle APEX on the Autonomous Oracle Database for that.” I want that type of response to be automatic, part of their education DNA, their default mindset.

The miracle of Oracle Academy is that it provides curriculum, tests, exercises, test environments—all of which are super powerful for faculty and students alike. The benefits start at the top. The president of the university wants the school’s graduates to land the best jobs; it’s a competitive advantage for the institution. Teachers want to keep their skills updated, which makes them more valuable to their students, their school, and their potential future employers. Naturally, students benefit from teachers who know about the real world. And of course, the students themselves benefit from marketable experience.

Everybody in the chain benefits from a first-rate curriculum from the world’s greatest database vendor. Oracle Academy is the one-stop shop that kicks all of it into motion.

Oracle Academy: A nice shop! What ambassador activities are in your pipeline right now?

Cary Millsap: It’s quite a new assignment but I’m available when needed. Recently I visited ECU (my undergrad school in Oklahoma), whose president graduated in the same class that I did. He sponsors a nice program where a big busload of business and computer science students visit companies in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. I got to address them and have dinner with them after the event, highlighting the optimization story and how they could end up with good jobs in the types of businesses they visited—which is the whole reason they were on the bus!

I always welcome invitations. If a college professor reading this article thinks my profile is right for the guest speaker he or she has in mind, we can book a Zoom, or I’ll even pack my overnight bag if it makes sense…

Oracle Academy: Mobile Ambassador! And what are your interests outside of the Oracle universe?

Cary Millsap: Dominantly my children. I’ve loved watching a lot of baseball games and volleyball matches over the past few decades. We’re down to our final three years of collegiate volleyball, which leaves me with the most hobby time I’ve ever had.

All my hobbies are about creating things. I love making computer software, furniture, tools... all sorts of stuff. When my wife and I moved into our present house in 1997, we didn’t much care for the kitchen table options we found in the stores, so we decided I’d take up woodworking and build something of our own. I read a ton of books, bought quite a bit of equipment, and indeed built our kitchen table, bookcases, shelves, and various things I’d rather build than buy.

Lately, I’ve rekindled a model airplane hobby that I started as a kid. I’ve gotten pretty serious with it, earning gold medals for my work at lots of contests all the way up to the USA national level. It’s beyond “model airplanes” now. Now, they’re “museum-quality aviation replicas.”

Thank you, Cary Millsap, for volunteering to be an Oracle Academy Ambassador.