Most consultants hand you a plan. I hand you a system that works.
Advice is easy to sell and easy to walk away from — I’d rather be judged on whether the thing runs.
For 25 years I’ve designed, built, migrated, and rescued database systems, Oracle-deep and multi-platform, and stayed on each one until it holds up under real load. You get a senior engineer doing the work, start to finish. Not a strategy deck, not a junior, not a hand-off. Me.
12 hrs → 3 hrs
Re-architected a serial migration pipeline into parallel streaming — processing windows cut 75% across 5 production datasets.
8 hrs → under 10 sec
Took an Oracle batch process from 8 hours per client to under 10 seconds.
Batch → hourly
Stood up a PostgreSQL (Aurora) data warehouse on AWS with incremental ETL, powering hourly dashboard refreshes.
You work directly with the engineer.
Salamander Systems is one senior engineer — me, John Wichorek — independent since 1998. No account managers, no bench of juniors, no layer between you and the person solving your problem. The person who scopes the work is the person who does it.
That model earns its keep. Clients don’t just call me for the one hard problem — they keep me on. My longest-standing client first brought me in two decades ago and has kept bringing me back ever since, and several of my engagements have run for years. You don’t get that from a rotating cast of contractors.
What I do
Deep in Oracle, fluent across PostgreSQL and the cloud (AWS and Azure). Five kinds of work, one standard: it has to hold up in production.
- Design & build — new database-backed systems, data models, and back-end/PL-SQL, built to run at load, not just to demo.
- Migrate & modernize — Oracle and database workloads to AWS or Azure, plus legacy and end-of-life transitions, with performance validated after cutover, not assumed.
- Tune & optimize — find the real bottleneck (AWR/ASH, execution plans, wait events) and fix it at the source, on the licenses you already own.
- Data warehouse & ETL — architecture, builds, and modernization; batch converted to incremental so dashboards refresh in hours, not overnight.
- Rescue — the production problem that’s outlasted the internal team and the outside vendor. The hard one.
When to bring me in
- An Oracle system is slow, fragile, or costly to run, and the workarounds have stopped working.
- A cloud migration is coming up — or one already underway has stalled.
- You need a data-driven system designed and built right the first time, not prototyped.
- A batch job, report, or pipeline can’t finish in the window it’s given.
- A problem’s been “on the list” for months and no one’s been able to close it.
Have a system that has to work? Let’s talk.
Tell me what’s slow, breaking, or coming up. I’ll give you a straight read on whether I can help and how I’d approach it — no obligation, no pitch.