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  • Considerations for a business looking to transition from PSTN to IP Telephony

    - by Bryce Thomas
    Full disclosure - This is related to a homework assignment question. I am not asking you to do my work for me, I am merely looking for some pointers and considerations to direct me in my further research. I have an assignment I'm working on where I've been given a scenario where a business wants to look into transitioning to using "Internet Telephone" as opposed to a traditional PSTN/PBX system and I need to write a report on it. I'm after some high level pointers from people, especially anyone that has been involved in a real life transition of this nature, on what some of the most important considerations are. These can be financial considerations, initial setup considerations, ongoing administrative considerations, quality of service considerations or anything else that is pertinent to performing such a transition.

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  • Practical considerations for HTML / CSS naming conventions (syntax)

    - by Jeroen
    Question: what are the practical considerations for the syntax in class and id values? Note that I'm not asking about the semantics, i.e. the actual words that are being used, as for example described in this blogpost. There are a lot of resources on that side of naming conventions already, in fact obscuring my search for practical information on the various syntactical bits: casing, use of interpunction (specifically the - dash), specific characters to use or avoid, etc. To sum up the reasons I'm asking this question: The naming restrictions on id and class don't naturally lead to any conventions The abundance of resources on the semantic side of naming conventions obscure searches on the syntactic considerations I couldn't find any authorative source on this There wasn't any question on SE Programmers yet on this topic :) Some of the conventions I've considered using: UpperCamelCase, mainly as a cross-over habit from server side coding lowerCamelCase, for consistency with JavaScript naming conventions css-style-classes, which is consistent with naming of css properties (but can be annoying when Ctrl+Shift+ArrowKey selection of text) with_under_scores, which I personally haven't seen used much alllowercase, simple to remember but can be hard to read for longer names UPPERCASEFTW, as a great way to annoy your fellow programmers (perhaps combined with option 4 for readability) And probably I've left out some important options or combinations as well. So: what considerations are there for naming conventions, and to which convention do they lead?

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  • Important Considerations When Implementing Oracle E-Business Tax in Release 12

    - by Robert Story
    Upcoming WebcastTitle: Important Considerations When Implementing Oracle E-Business Tax in Release 12Date: April 15, 2010 Time: 12:00 pm EDT Product Family: Receivables CommunitySummary This one-hour session is recommended for functional users who wish to understand the important considerations when they are implementing Oracle E-Business Tax in Release 12. Topics will include: Features of E-Business TaxUpgrade versus fresh implementationPartner Integrations Localizations A short, live demonstration (only if applicable) and question and answer period will be included. Click here to register for this session....... ....... ....... ....... ....... ....... .......The above webcast is a service of the E-Business Suite Communities in My Oracle Support.For more information on other webcasts, please reference the Oracle Advisor Webcast Schedule.Click here to visit the E-Business Communities in My Oracle Support Note that all links require access to My Oracle Support.

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  • Security considerations for a default install?

    - by cpedros
    So with an old burned install CD of Feisty Fawn I went through the process of completely formatting the Windows OS and installing Ubuntu on an old XP laptop. I then went through the online upgrade to 10.4 LTS, only installing the gnome desktop environment package in the process. My (admittedly very open) question is that in this state and online, what security considerations do I have to immediately make for the default install? I understand that a lot of this swings on my intended use of the server, but just sitting there online what risks is it exposed to (this obviously goes far beyond the realm of linux, but I am not sure how these risks are accommodated in the default install). For example, I believe there is a firewall installed with Ubuntu but by default it allows all traffic. Any other guidelines would be much appreciated. Thanks

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  • Security considerations for default install of Ubuntu

    - by cpedros
    So with an old burned install CD of Feisty Fawn I went through the process of completely formatting the Windows OS and installing Ubuntu on an old XP laptop. I then went through the online upgrade to 10.4 LTS, only installing the gnome desktop environment package in the process. My (admittedly very open) question is that in this state and online, what security considerations do I have to immediately make for the default install? I understand that a lot of this swings on my intended use of the server, but just sitting there online what risks is it exposed to (this obviously goes far beyond the realm of linux, but I am not sure how these risks are accommodated in the default install). For example, I believe there is a firewall installed with Ubuntu but by default it allows all traffic. Any other guidelines would be much appreciated. Thanks

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  • 2D animations frames vs 3D animation for small indie project: timing considerations

    - by mm24
    pretty lame question but was wondering.. I am developing a 2D game using Cocos2D for iOS. The art work till now is all 2D (is a shooter game) but some of the characters would benefit of complex animations (eg. 20 frames). I feel a bit stupid because I came across only now that there is the chance to do 3D to 2D frames exporting and then to use them in Cocos2D. The thing that put me off on 3D gaming at first was that it takes more than one person in a team to do so properly (Illustrator, 3D modeller, 3D animator and programmer). Now I feel a bit stupid because having a 3D model I could do and modify the poses whenever I wanted (I should ask to the 3D animator which I guess would be time expensive). Instead now is me and two illustrators (as I require many frames per character). Is my impression that it would have been much longer right or not? Are there any other project management considerations that can be done on this? Sorry if for some this might be trivial but is my first "indie game developer experience".

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  • Performance considerations for common SQL queries

    - by Jim Giercyk
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/NibblesAndBits/archive/2013/10/16/performance-considerations-for-common-sql-queries.aspxSQL offers many different methods to produce the same results.  There is a never-ending debate between SQL developers as to the “best way” or the “most efficient way” to render a result set.  Sometimes these disputes even come to blows….well, I am a lover, not a fighter, so I decided to collect some data that will prove which way is the best and most efficient.  For the queries below, I downloaded the test database from SQLSkills:  http://www.sqlskills.com/sql-server-resources/sql-server-demos/.  There isn’t a lot of data, but enough to prove my point: dbo.member has 10,000 records, and dbo.payment has 15,554.  Our result set contains 6,706 records. The following queries produce an identical result set; the result set contains aggregate payment information for each member who has made more than 1 payment from the dbo.payment table and the first and last name of the member from the dbo.member table.   /*************/ /* Sub Query  */ /*************/ SELECT  a.[Member Number] ,         m.lastname ,         m.firstname ,         a.[Number Of Payments] ,         a.[Average Payment] ,         a.[Total Paid] FROM    ( SELECT    member_no 'Member Number' ,                     AVG(payment_amt) 'Average Payment' ,                     SUM(payment_amt) 'Total Paid' ,                     COUNT(Payment_No) 'Number Of Payments'           FROM      dbo.payment           GROUP BY  member_no           HAVING    COUNT(Payment_No) > 1         ) a         JOIN dbo.member m ON a.[Member Number] = m.member_no         /***************/ /* Cross Apply  */ /***************/ SELECT  ca.[Member Number] ,         m.lastname ,         m.firstname ,         ca.[Number Of Payments] ,         ca.[Average Payment] ,         ca.[Total Paid] FROM    dbo.member m         CROSS APPLY ( SELECT    member_no 'Member Number' ,                                 AVG(payment_amt) 'Average Payment' ,                                 SUM(payment_amt) 'Total Paid' ,                                 COUNT(Payment_No) 'Number Of Payments'                       FROM      dbo.payment                       WHERE     member_no = m.member_no                       GROUP BY  member_no                       HAVING    COUNT(Payment_No) > 1                     ) ca /********/                    /* CTEs  */ /********/ ; WITH    Payments           AS ( SELECT   member_no 'Member Number' ,                         AVG(payment_amt) 'Average Payment' ,                         SUM(payment_amt) 'Total Paid' ,                         COUNT(Payment_No) 'Number Of Payments'                FROM     dbo.payment                GROUP BY member_no                HAVING   COUNT(Payment_No) > 1              ),         MemberInfo           AS ( SELECT   p.[Member Number] ,                         m.lastname ,                         m.firstname ,                         p.[Number Of Payments] ,                         p.[Average Payment] ,                         p.[Total Paid]                FROM     dbo.member m                         JOIN Payments p ON m.member_no = p.[Member Number]              )     SELECT  *     FROM    MemberInfo /************************/ /* SELECT with Grouping   */ /************************/ SELECT  p.member_no 'Member Number' ,         m.lastname ,         m.firstname ,         COUNT(Payment_No) 'Number Of Payments' ,         AVG(payment_amt) 'Average Payment' ,         SUM(payment_amt) 'Total Paid' FROM    dbo.payment p         JOIN dbo.member m ON m.member_no = p.member_no GROUP BY p.member_no ,         m.lastname ,         m.firstname HAVING  COUNT(Payment_No) > 1   We can see what is going on in SQL’s brain by looking at the execution plan.  The Execution Plan will demonstrate which steps and in what order SQL executes those steps, and what percentage of batch time each query takes.  SO….if I execute all 4 of these queries in a single batch, I will get an idea of the relative time SQL takes to execute them, and how it renders the Execution Plan.  We can settle this once and for all.  Here is what SQL did with these queries:   Not only did the queries take the same amount of time to execute, SQL generated the same Execution Plan for each of them.  Everybody is right…..I guess we can all finally go to lunch together!  But wait a second, I may not be a fighter, but I AM an instigator.     Let’s see how a table variable stacks up.  Here is the code I executed: /********************/ /*  Table Variable  */ /********************/ DECLARE @AggregateTable TABLE     (       member_no INT ,       AveragePayment MONEY ,       TotalPaid MONEY ,       NumberOfPayments MONEY     ) INSERT  @AggregateTable         SELECT  member_no 'Member Number' ,                 AVG(payment_amt) 'Average Payment' ,                 SUM(payment_amt) 'Total Paid' ,                 COUNT(Payment_No) 'Number Of Payments'         FROM    dbo.payment         GROUP BY member_no         HAVING  COUNT(Payment_No) > 1   SELECT  at.member_no 'Member Number' ,         m.lastname ,         m.firstname ,         at.NumberOfPayments 'Number Of Payments' ,         at.AveragePayment 'Average Payment' ,         at.TotalPaid 'Total Paid' FROM    @AggregateTable at         JOIN dbo.member m ON m.member_no = at.member_no In the interest of keeping things in groupings of 4, I removed the last query from the previous batch and added the table variable query.  Here’s what I got:     Since we first insert into the table variable, then we read from it, the Execution Plan renders 2 steps.  BUT, the combination of the 2 steps is only 22% of the batch.  It is actually faster than the other methods even though it is treated as 2 separate queries in the Execution Plan.  The argument I often hear against Table Variables is that SQL only estimates 1 row for the table size in the Execution Plan.  While this is true, the estimate does not come in to play until you read from the table variable.  In this case, the table variable had 6,706 rows, but it still outperformed the other queries.  People argue that table variables should only be used for hash or lookup tables.  The fact is, you have control of what you put IN to the variable, so as long as you keep it within reason, these results suggest that a table variable is a viable alternative to sub-queries. If anyone does volume testing on this theory, I would be interested in the results.  My suspicion is that there is a breaking point where efficiency goes down the tubes immediately, and it would be interesting to see where the threshold is. Coding SQL is a matter of style.  If you’ve been around since they introduced DB2, you were probably taught a little differently than a recent computer science graduate.  If you have a company standard, I strongly recommend you follow it.    If you do not have a standard, generally speaking, there is no right or wrong answer when talking about the efficiency of these types of queries, and certainly no hard-and-fast rule.  Volume and infrastructure will dictate a lot when it comes to performance, so your results may vary in your environment.  Download the database and try it!

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  • Some Early Considerations

    - by Chris Massey
    Following on from my previous post, I want to say "thank you" to everyone who has got in touch and got involved – you are pioneers! An update on where we are right now: paper prototypes v1 To be more specific, we’ve picked two of the ideas that seem to have more pros than cons, turned them into Balsamiq mockups, and are getting them fleshed out with realistic content. We’ll initially make these available to the aforementioned pioneers (thank you again), roll in the feedback, and then open up to get more data on what works and what doesn’t. If you’ve got any questions about this (or what we’re working on right now), feel free to ask me in the comments below. I’ve had a few people express an interest in the process we’re going through, and I’m more than happy to share details more frequently as we go along – not least because you, dear reader, will help us stay on target and create something Good. To start with, here’s a quick flashback to bring you all up to speed. A Brief Retrospective As you may already know, we’re creating a new publishing asset specifically focused on providing great content for web developers. We don’t yet know exactly what this thing will look like, or exactly how it will work, but we know we want to create something that is useful different. For my part, I’m seriously excited at the prospect of building a genuinely digital publishing system (as opposed to what most publishing is these days, which is print-style publishing which just happens to be on the web). The main challenge at this point is working out our build-measure-assess loop to speed up our experimental turn-around, and that’ll get better as we run more trials. Of course, there are a few things we’ve been pondering at this early conceptual stage: Do we publishing about heterogeneous technology stacks from day 1, or do we start with ASP.NET (which we’re familiar with) & branch out later? There are challenges with either approach. What publishing "modes" are already being well-handled? For example, the likes of Pluralsight, TekPub, and Treehouse have pretty much nailed video training (debate about price, if you like), and unless we think we can do it faster / better / cheaper (unlikely, for the record), we should leave them to it. Where should we base whatever we create? Should we create a completely new asset under a new name, graft something onto Simple-Talk (like the labs), or just build something directly into Simple-Talk? It sounds trivial, but it does have at least some impact on infrastructure and what how we manage the different types of content we (will) have. Are there any obvious problems or niches that we think could address really well, or should we just throw ideas out and see what readers respond to? What kind of users do we want to provide for? This actually deserves a little bit of unpacking… Why are you here? We currently divide readers into (broadly) the categories: Category 1: I know nothing about X, and I’d like to learn about it. Category 2: I know something about X, but I’d like to learn how to do something specific with it. Category 3: Ah man, I have a problem with X, and I need to fix it now. Now that I think about it, I might also include a 4th class of reader: Category 4: I’m looking for something interesting to engage my brain. These are clearly task-based categorizations, and depending on which task you’re performing when you arrive here, you’re going to need different types of content, or will have specific discovery needs. One of the questions that’s at the back of my mind whenever I consider a new idea is “How many of the categories will this satisfy?” As an example, typical video training is very well suited to categories 1, 2, and 4. StackOverflow is very well suited to category 3, and serves as a sign-posting system to the rest. Clearly it’s not necessary to satisfy every category need to be useful and popular, but being aware of what behavior readers might be exhibiting when they arrive will help us tune our ideas appropriately. < / Flashback > We don’t have clean answers to most of these considerations – they’re things we’re aware of, and each idea we look at is going to be best suited to a different mix of the options I’ve described. Our first experimental loop will be coming full circle in the next few days, so we should start to see how the different possibilities vary between ideas. Free to chime in with questions and suggestions about anything I’ve just brain-dumped, or at any stage as we go along. If you see anything that intrigued or enrages you, or just have an idea you’d like to share, I’d love to hear from you.

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  • Database Partitioning and Multiple Data Source Considerations

    - by Jeffrey McDaniel
    With the release of P6 Reporting Database 3.0 partitioning was added as a feature to help with performance and data management.  Careful investigation of requirements should be conducting prior to installation to help improve overall performance throughout the lifecycle of the data warehouse, preventing future maintenance that would result in data loss. Before installation try to determine how many data sources and partitions will be required along with the ranges.  In P6 Reporting Database 3.0 any adjustments outside of defaults must be made in the scripts and changes will require new ETL runs for each data source.  Considerations: 1. Standard Edition or Enterprise Edition of Oracle Database.   If you aren't using Oracle Enterprise Edition Database; the partitioning feature is not available. Multiple Data sources are only supported on Enterprise Edition of Oracle   Database. 2. Number of Data source Ids for partitioning during configuration.   This setting will specify how many partitions will be allocated for tables containing data source information.  This setting requires some evaluation prior to installation as       there are repercussions if you don't estimate correctly.   For example, if you configured the software for only 2 data sources and the partition setting was set to 2, however along came a 3rd data source.  The necessary steps to  accommodate this change are as follows: a) By default, 3 partitions are configured in the Reporting Database scripts. Edit the create_star_tables_part.sql script located in <installation directory>\star\scripts   and search for partition.  You’ll see P1, P2, P3.  Add additional partitions and sub-partitions for P4 and so on. These will appear in several areas.  (See P6 Reporting Database 3.0 Installation and Configuration guide for more information on this and how to adjust partition ranges). b) Run starETL -r.  This will recreate each table with the new partition key.  The effect of this step is that all tables data will be lost except for history related tables.   c) Run starETL for each of the 3 data sources (with the data source # (starETL.bat "-s2" -as defined in P6 Reporting Database 3.0 Installation and Configuration guide) The best strategy for this setting is to overestimate based on possible growth.  If during implementation it is deemed that there are atleast 2 data sources with possibility for growth, it is a better idea to set this setting to 4 or 5, allowing room for the future and preventing a ‘start over’ scenario. 3. The Number of Partitions and the Number of Months per Partitions are not specific to multi-data source.  These settings work in accordance to a sub partition of larger tables with regard to time related data.  These settings are dataset specific for optimization.  The number of months per partition is self explanatory, optimally the smaller the partition, the better query performance so if the dataset has an extremely large number of spread/history records, a lower number of months is optimal.  Working in accordance with this setting is the number of partitions, this will determine how many "buckets" will be created per the number of months setting.  For example, if you kept the default for # of partitions of 3, and select 2 months for each partitions you would end up with: -1st partition, 2 months -2nd partition, 2 months -3rd partition, all the remaining records Therefore with records to this setting, it is important to analyze your source db spread ranges and history settings when determining the proper number of months per partition and number of partitions to optimize performance.  Also be aware the DBA will need to monitor when these partition ranges will fill up and when additional partitions will need to be added.  If you get to the final range partition and there are no additional range partitions all data will be included into the last partition. 

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  • Timeout Considerations for Solicit Response

    - by Michael Stephenson
    Background One of the clients I work with had been experiencing some issues for a while surrounding web service timeouts.  It's been a little challenging to work through the problems due to limitations in the diagnostic information available from one of the applications, but I learned some interesting things while troubleshooting the problem which don't seem to have been discussed much in the community so I thought I'd share my findings. In the scenario we have BizTalk trying to make calls to a .net web service which was exposed as a WSE 2 endpoint.  In the process BizTalk will try to make a large number of concurrent web service calls to the application, and the backend application has more than enough infrastructure and capability to handle the load. We have configured the <ConnectionManagement> section of the BizTalk configuration file to support up to 100 concurrent connections from each of our 2 BizTalk send servers to the web servers of the application. The problem we were facing was that the BizTalk side was reporting a significant number of timeouts when calling the web service.   One of the biggest issues was the challenge of being able to correlate a message from BizTalk to the IIS log in the .net application and the custom logs in the application especially when there was a fairly large number of servers hosting the web services.  However the key moment came when we were able to identify a specific call which had taken 40 seconds to execute on the server (yes a long time I know but that's a different story!).  Anyway we were able to identify that this had timed out on the BizTalk side.  Based on the normal 2 minute timeout we knew something unexpected was going on. From here I decided to do some experimentation and I wanted to start outside of BizTalk because my hunch was this was not a BizTalk behaviour but something which was being highlighted by BizTalk because of our large load.     Server-side - Sample Web Service To begin with I created a sample web service.  Nothing special just a vanilla asmx web service hosted in IIS6 on Windows 2003 Standard Edition.  The web service is just a hello world style web service as shown in the below picture.  The only key feature is that the server side web method has a 30 second sleep in it and will trace out some information before and after the thread is set to sleep.      In the configuration for this web service there again is nothing special it's pretty much the most plain simple web service you could build. Client-Side To begin looking at what was happening with our example I created a number of different ways to consume the web service. SoapHttpClientProtocol Example I created a small application which would use a normal proxy generated to call the web service.  It would iterate around a loop and make calls using the begin/end methods so I can do this asynchronously.  I would do a loop of 20 calls with the ConnectionManager configuration section supporting only 5 concurrent connections to the server.     <connectionManagement> <remove address="*"/> <add address = "*" maxconnection = "12" /> <add address = "http://<ServerName>" maxconnection = "5" />                         </connectionManagement> </system.net>     The below picture shows an example of the service calling code, key points are: I have configured the timeout of 40 seconds for the proxy I am using the asynchronous methods on the proxy to call the web service         The Test I would run the client and execute 21 calls to the web service.   The Results  Below is the client side trace showing what's happening on the client. In the below diagram is the web service side trace showing what's happening on the server Some observations on the results are: All of the calls were successful from the clients perspective You could see the next call starting on the server as soon as the previous one had completed Calls took significantly longer than 40 seconds from the start of our call to the return. In fact call 20 took 2 minutes and 30 seconds from the perspective of my code to execute even though I had set the timeout to 40 seconds     WSE 2 Sample In the second example I used the exact same code to call the web service again with a single exception that I modified the web service proxy to derive from WebServiceClient protocol which is part of WSE 2 (using SP3).  The below picture shows the basic code and the key points are: I have configured the timeout of 40 seconds for the proxy I am using the asynchronous methods on the proxy to call the web service        The Test This test would execute 21 calls from the client to the web service.   The Results  The below trace is from the client side: The below trace is from the server side:   Some observations on the trace results for this scenario are: With call 4 if you look at the server side trace it did not start executing on the server for a number of seconds after the other 4 initial calls which were accepted by the server. I re-ran the test and this happened a couple of times and not on most others so at this point I'm just putting this down to something unexpected happening on the development machine and we will leave this observation out of scope of this article. You can see that the client side trace statement executed almost immediately in all cases All calls after the initial few calls would timeout On the client side the calls that did timeout; timed out in a longer duration than the 40 seconds we set as the timeout You can see that as calls were completing on the server the next calls were starting to come through The calls that timed out on the client did actually connect to the server and their server side execution completed successfully     Elaboration on the findings Based on the above observations I have drawn the below sequence diagram to illustrate conceptually what is happening.  Everything except the final web service object is on the client side of the call. In the diagram below I've put two notes on the Web Service Proxy to show the two different places where the different base classes seem to start their timeout counters. From the earlier samples we can work out that the timeout counter for the WSE web service proxy starts before the one for the SoapHttpClientProtocol proxy and the WSE one includes the time to get a connection from the pool; whereas the Soap proxy timeout just covers the method execution. One interesting observation is if we rerun the above sample and increase the number of calls from 21 to 100,000 then for the WSE sample we will see a similar pattern where everything after the first few calls will timeout on the client as soon as it makes a connection to the server whereas the soap proxy will happily plug away and process all of the calls without a single timeout. I have actually set the sample running overnight and this did happen. At this point you are probably thinking the same thoughts I was at the time about the differences in behaviour and which is right and why are they different? I'm not sure there is a definitive answer to this in the documentation, or at least not that I could find! I think you just have to consider that they are different and they could have different effects depending on your messaging solution. In lots of situations this is just not an issue as your concurrent requests doesn't get to the situation where you end up throttling the web service calls on the client side, however this is definitely more common with an integration broker such as BizTalk where you often have high throughput requirements.  Some of the considerations you should make Based on this behaviour you should be aware of the following: In a .net application if you are making lots of concurrent web service calls from an application in an asynchronous manner your user may thing they are experiencing poor performance but you think your web service is working well. The problem could be that the client will have a default of 2 connections to remote servers so you should bear this in mind When you are developing a BizTalk solution or a .net solution with the WSE 2 stack you may experience timeouts under load and throttling the number of connections using the max connections element in the configuration file will not help you For an application using WSE2 or SoapHttpClientProtocol an expired timeout will not throw an error until after a connection to the server has been made so you should consider this in your transaction and durability patterns     Our Work Around In the short term for our specific scenario we know that we can handle this by just increasing our timeout value.  There is only a specific small window when we get lots of concurrent traffic that causes this scenario so we should be able to increase the timeout to take into consideration the additional client side wait, and on the odd occasion where we do get a timeout the BizTalk send port retry will handle this. What was causing our original problem was that for that short window we were getting a lot of retries which significantly increased the load on our send servers and highlighted the issue.  Longer Term Solution As a longer term solution this really gives us more ammunition to argue a migration to WCF. The application we are calling has some factors which limit the protocols we can use but with WCF we would have more control on the various timeout options because in WCF you can configure specific parts of the timeout. Summary I've had this blog post on my to do list for ages but hopefully it will be useful to some people to just understand this behaviour and to possibly help you with some performance issues you may have. I do not believe there is too much in the way of documentation particularly around WSE2 and ASMX in this area so again another bit of ammunition for migrating to WCF. I'll try to do a follow up post with the sample for WCF to show how this changes things.

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  • Ghost Records, Backups, and Database Compression…With a Pinch of Security Considerations

    - by Argenis
      Today Jeffrey Langdon (@jlangdon) posed on #SQLHelp the following questions: So I set to answer his question, and I said to myself: “Hey, I haven’t blogged in a while, how about I blog about this particular topic?”. Thus, this post was born. (If you have never heard of Ghost Records and/or the Ghost Cleanup Task, go see this blog post by Paul Randal) 1) Do ghost records get copied over in a backup? If you guessed yes, you guessed right. The backup process in SQL Server takes all data as it is on disk – it doesn’t crack the pages open to selectively pick which slots have actual data and which ones do not. The whole page is backed up, regardless of its contents. Even if ghost cleanup has run and processed the ghost records, the slots are not overwritten immediately, but rather until another DML operation comes along and uses them. As a matter of fact, all of the allocated space for a database will be included in a full backup. So, this poses a bit of a security/compliance problem for some of you DBA folk: if you want to take a full backup of a database after you’ve purged sensitive data, you should rebuild all of your indexes (with FILLFACTOR set to 100%). But the empty space on your data file(s) might still contain sensitive data! A SHRINKFILE might help get rid of that (not so) empty space, but that might not be the end of your troubles. You might _STILL_ have (not so) empty space on your files! One approach that you can follow is to export all of the data on your database to another SQL Server instance that does NOT have Instant File Initialization enabled. This can be a tedious and time-consuming process, though. So you have to weigh in your options and see what makes sense for you. Snapshot Replication is another idea that comes to mind. 2) Does Compression get rid of ghost records (2008)? The answer to this is no. The Ghost Records/Ghost Cleanup Task mechanism is alive and well on compressed tables and indexes. You can prove this running a simple script: CREATE DATABASE GhostRecordsTest GO USE GhostRecordsTest GO CREATE TABLE myTable (myPrimaryKey int IDENTITY(1,1) PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED,                       myWideColumn varchar(1000) NOT NULL DEFAULT 'Default string value')                         ALTER TABLE myTable REBUILD PARTITION = ALL WITH (DATA_COMPRESSION = PAGE) GO INSERT INTO myTable DEFAULT VALUES GO 10 DELETE myTable WHERE myPrimaryKey % 2 = 0 DBCC TRACEON(2514) DBCC CHECKTABLE(myTable) TraceFlag 2514 will make DBCC CHECKTABLE give you an extra tidbit of information on its output. For the above script: “Ghost Record count = 5” Until next time,   -Argenis

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  • Ghost Records, Backups, and Database Compression…With a Pinch of Security Considerations

    - by Argenis
      Today Jeffrey Langdon (@jlangdon) posed on #SQLHelp the following questions: So I set to answer his question, and I said to myself: “Hey, I haven’t blogged in a while, how about I blog about this particular topic?”. Thus, this post was born. (If you have never heard of Ghost Records and/or the Ghost Cleanup Task, go see this blog post by Paul Randal) 1) Do ghost records get copied over in a backup? If you guessed yes, you guessed right. The backup process in SQL Server takes all data as it is on disk – it doesn’t crack the pages open to selectively pick which slots have actual data and which ones do not. The whole page is backed up, regardless of its contents. Even if ghost cleanup has run and processed the ghost records, the slots are not overwritten immediately, but rather until another DML operation comes along and uses them. As a matter of fact, all of the allocated space for a database will be included in a full backup. So, this poses a bit of a security/compliance problem for some of you DBA folk: if you want to take a full backup of a database after you’ve purged sensitive data, you should rebuild all of your indexes (with FILLFACTOR set to 100%). But the empty space on your data file(s) might still contain sensitive data! A SHRINKFILE might help get rid of that (not so) empty space, but that might not be the end of your troubles. You might _STILL_ have (not so) empty space on your files! One approach that you can follow is to export all of the data on your database to another SQL Server instance that does NOT have Instant File Initialization enabled. This can be a tedious and time-consuming process, though. So you have to weigh in your options and see what makes sense for you. Snapshot Replication is another idea that comes to mind. 2) Does Compression get rid of ghost records (2008)? The answer to this is no. The Ghost Records/Ghost Cleanup Task mechanism is alive and well on compressed tables and indexes. You can prove this running a simple script: CREATE DATABASE GhostRecordsTest GO USE GhostRecordsTest GO CREATE TABLE myTable (myPrimaryKey int IDENTITY(1,1) PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED,                       myWideColumn varchar(1000) NOT NULL DEFAULT 'Default string value')                         ALTER TABLE myTable REBUILD PARTITION = ALL WITH (DATA_COMPRESSION = PAGE) GO INSERT INTO myTable DEFAULT VALUES GO 10 DELETE myTable WHERE myPrimaryKey % 2 = 0 DBCC TRACEON(2514) DBCC CHECKTABLE(myTable) TraceFlag 2514 will make DBCC CHECKTABLE give you an extra tidbit of information on its output. For the above script: “Ghost Record count = 5” Until next time,   -Argenis

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  • Security considerations for my first eStore.

    - by RPK
    I have a website through which I am going to sell few products. It is hosted on a simple shared-hosting and does not have SSL. On the products page, each product has a Buy Now button created from my PayPal Merchant account. PayPal recommends to use it's Button Factory to create secure buttons and save it inside PayPal itself. I have followed the same advice and the code of any button is secure and does not disclose any information on either a product or it's price. When the user clicks on a Buy Now button, he/she is taken to PayPal site where a page is opened in SSL for the user to fill in the credit card and shipping details. After a successful transaction, the control is passed back to my site. I want to know whether there is still any chance when security could be compromised.

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  • Design considerations on JSON schema for scalars with a consistent attachment property

    - by casperOne
    I'm trying to create a JSON schema for the results of doing statistical analysis based on disparate pieces of data. The current schema I have looks something like this: { // Basic key information. video : "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uwfjpfK0jo", start : "00:00:00", end : null, // For results of analysis, to be populated: // *** This is where it gets interesting *** analysis : { game : { value: "Super Street Fighter 4: Arcade Edition Ver. 2012", confidence: 0.9725 } teams : [ { player : { value : "Desk", confidence: 0.95, } characters : [ { value : "Hakan", confidence: 0.80 } ] } ] } } The issue is the tuples that are used to store a value and the confidence related to that value (i.e. { value : "some value", confidence : 0.85 }), populated after the results of the analysis. This leads to a creep of this tuple for every value. Take a fully-fleshed out value from the characters array: { name : { value : "Hakan", confidence: 0.80 } ultra : { value: 1, confidence: 0.90 } } As the structures that represent the values become more and more detailed (and more analysis is done on them to try and determine the confidence behind that analysis), the nesting of the tuples adds great deal of noise to the overall structure, considering that the final result (when verified) will be: { name : "Hakan", ultra : 1 } (And recall that this is just a nested value) In .NET (in which I'll be using to work with this data), I'd have a little helper like this: public class UnknownValue<T> { T Value { get; set; } double? Confidence { get; set; } } Which I'd then use like so: public class Character { public UnknownValue<Character> Name { get; set; } } While the same as the JSON representation in code, it doesn't have the same creep because I don't have to redefine the tuple every time and property accessors hide the appearance of creep. Of course, this is an apples-to-oranges comparison, the above is code while the JSON is data. Is there a more formalized/cleaner/best practice way of containing the creep of these tuples in JSON, or is the approach above an accepted approach for the type of data I'm trying to store (and I'm just perceiving it the wrong way)? Note, this is being represented in JSON because this will ultimately go in a document database (something like RavenDB or elasticsearch). I'm not concerned about being able to serialize into the object above, because I can always use data transfer objects to facilitate getting data into/out of my underlying data store.

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  • Considerations Before Hiring Logo Design Services

    These days, hiring a logo design service is not easy. Just enter a keyword "logo design" in a search engine and you will see thousands of result pages full of online logo design services. Certainly, ... [Author: Gisselle Gloria - Web Design and Development - October 05, 2009]

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  • Considerations for accepting contributed code to an Open Source project

    - by Jason Holland
    I’m working on a "for fun" project in my spare time. I may end up making it Open Source and this makes me wonder what I need to think about if someone cares enough to contribute to it. Do I need to have some sort of legal mumbo jumbo about “if you give me yer code, it accepts the same license as the project, bla bla bla” (what is the norm here?) Is there a way to check contributed code to make sure it is not plagiarized or would that liability fall on the contributer? Are there any other gotchas, standard/common practices I should follow, recommendations, things I need to think about?

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  • Podcast Best Practices - Page Development & Monetization Considerations

    - by Christopher Ickes
    Our current podcast page has show notes and a link to download an mp3 of our podcast. We were advised to add an audio player to stream the file live from our website. The thought being this would improve time spent on our site and allow for greater advertising dollars. Is it better to have a page with show notes, an mp3 for download AND also stream the podcast live OR just stick to the show notes & mp3 download? Does anyone see any affect on advertising revenue, either way?

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  • Timeout Considerations for Solicit Response – Part 2

    - by Michael Stephenson
    To follow up a previous article about timeouts and how they can affect your application I have extended the sample we were using to include WCF. I will execute some test scenarios and discuss the results. The sample We begin by consuming exactly the same web service which is sitting on a remote server. This time I have created a .net 3.5 application which will consume the web service using the basichttp binding. To show you the configuration for the consumption of this web service please refer to the below diagram. You can see like before we also have the connectionManagement element in the configuration file. I have added a WCF service reference (also using the asynchronous proxy methods) and have the below code sample in the application which will asynchronously make the web service calls and handle the responses on a call back method invoked by a delegate. If you have read the previous article you will notice that the code is almost the same.   Sample 1 – WCF with Default Timeouts In this test I set about recreating the same scenario as previous where we would run the test but this time using WCF as the messaging component. For the first test I would use the default configuration settings which WCF had setup when we added a reference to the web service. The timeout values for this test are: closeTimeout="00:01:00" openTimeout="00:01:00" receiveTimeout="00:10:00" sendTimeout="00:01:00"   The Test We simulated 21 calls to the web service Test Results The client-side trace is as follows:   The server-side trace is as follows: Some observations on the results are as follows: The timeouts happened quicker than in the previous tests because some calls were timing out before they attempted to connect to the server The first few calls that timed out did actually connect to the server and did execute successfully on the server   Test 2 – Increase Open Connection Timeout & Send Timeout In this test I wanted to increase both the send and open timeout values to try and give everything a chance to go through. The timeout values for this test are: closeTimeout="00:01:00" openTimeout="00:10:00" receiveTimeout="00:10:00" sendTimeout="00:10:00"   The Test We simulated 21 calls to the web service   Test Results The client side trace for this test was   The server-side trace for this test was: Some observations on this test are: This test proved if the timeouts are high enough everything will just go through   Test 3 – Increase just the Send Timeout In this test we wanted to increase just the send timeout. The timeout values for this test are: closeTimeout="00:01:00" openTimeout="00:01:00" receiveTimeout="00:10:00" sendTimeout="00:10:00"   The Test We simulated 21 calls to the web service   Test Results The below is the client side trace The below is the server side trace Some observations on this test are: In this test from both the client and server perspective everything ran through fine The open connection timeout did not seem to have any effect   Test 4 – Increase Just the Open Connection Timeout In this test I wanted to validate the change to the open connection setting by increasing just this on its own. The timeout values for this test are: closeTimeout="00:01:00" openTimeout="00:10:00" receiveTimeout="00:10:00" sendTimeout="00:01:00"   The Test We simulated 21 calls to the web service Test Results The client side trace was The server side trace was Some observations on this test are: In this test you can see that the open connection which relates to opening the channel timeout increase was not the thing which stopped the calls timing out It's the send of data which is timing out On the server you can see that the successful few calls were fine but there were also a few calls which hit the server but timed out on the client You can see that not all calls hit the server which was one of the problems with the WSE and ASMX options   Test 5 – Smaller Increase in Send Timeout In this test I wanted to make a smaller increase to the send timeout than previous just to prove that it was the key setting which was controlling what was timing out. The timeout values for this test are: openTimeout="00:01:00" receiveTimeout="00:10:00" sendTimeout="00:02:30"   The Test We simulated 21 calls to the web service Test Results The client side trace was   The server side trace was Some observations on this test are: You can see that most of the calls got through fine On the client you can see that call 20 timed out but still hit the server and executed fine.   Summary At this point between the two articles we have quite a lot of scenarios showing the different way the timeout setting have played into our original performance issue, and now we can see how WCF could offer an improved way to handle the problem. To summarise the differences in the timeout properties for the three technology stacks: ASMX The timeout value only applies to the execution time of your request on the server. The timeout does not consider how long your code might be waiting client side to get a connection. WSE The timeout value includes both the time to obtain a connection and also the time to execute the request. A timeout will not be thrown as an error until an attempt to connect to the server is made. This means a 40 second timeout setting may not throw the error until 60 seconds when the connection to the server is made. If the connection to the server is made you should be aware that your message will be processed and you should design for this. WCF The WCF send timeout is the setting most equivalent to the settings we were looking at previously. Like WSE this setting the counter includes the time to get a connection as well as the time to execute on a server. Unlike WSE and ASMX an error will be thrown as soon as the send timeout from making your call from user code has elapsed regardless of whether we are waiting for a connection or have an open connection to the server. This may to a user appear to have better latency in getting an error response compared to WSE or ASMX.

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  • DDD Model Design and Repository Persistence Performance Considerations

    - by agarhy
    So I have been reading about DDD for some time and trying to figure out the best approach on several issues. I tend to agree that I should design my model in a persistent agnostic manner. And that repositories should load and persist my models in valid states. But are these approaches realistic practically? I mean its normal for a model to hold a reference to a collection of another type. Persisting that model should mean persist the entire collection. Fine. But do I really need to load the entire collection every time I load the model? Probably not. So I can have specialized repositories. Some that load maybe a subset of the object graph via DTOs and others that load the entire object graph. But when do I use which? If I have DTOs, what's stopping client code from directly calling them and completely bypassing the model? I can have mappers and factories to create my models from DTOs maybe? But depending on the design of my models that might not always work. Or it might not allow my models to be created in a valid state. What's the correct approach here?

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  • K-12 and Cloud considerations

    - by user736511
    Much like every other Public Sector organization, school districts in the US and Canada are under tremendous pressure to deliver consistent and modern services while operating with reduced budgets, IT personnel shortages, and staff attrition.  Electronic/remote learning and the need for immediate access to resources such as grades, calendars, curricula etc. are straining IT environments that were already burdened with meeting privacy requirements imposed by both regulators and parents/students.  One area viewed as a solution to at least some of the challenges is the use of "Cloud" in education.  Although the concept of "Cloud" is nothing new in education with many providers supplying educational material over the web, school districts defer previously-in-house-hosted services to established commercial vendors to accommodate document sharing, app hosting, and even e-mail.  Doing so, however, does not reduce an important risk, that of privacy.  As always, Cloud implementations are viewed in a skeptical manner because of the perceived reduction in sensitive data management and protection thereof, although with a careful approach and the right tooling, the benefits realized by Clouds can expand to security and privacy.   Oracle's comprehensive approach to data privacy and identity management ensures that the necessary tools are available to support regulations, operational efficiencies and strong security regardless of where the sensitive data is stored - on premise or a Cloud.  Common management tools, role-based access controls, access policy management and engineered systems provided by Oracle can be the foundational pieces on which school districts can build their Cloud implementations without having to worry about security itself. Their biggest challenge, and it is a positive one, is how to best take advantage of Oracle's DB Security and IDM functionality to reduce operational costs while enabling modern applications and data delivery to those who needs access to it. For more information please refer to http://www.oracle.com/us/products/middleware/identity-management/overview/index.html and http://www.oracle.com/us/products/database/security/overview/index.html.

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  • EPM 11.1.2.2.000 release - considerations

    - by THE
    (guest Article by Nancy) Please be aware with the upcoming release of EPM v11.1.2.2.000, it is highly recommended you first read the"ORACLE® ENTERPRISE PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM 11.1.2.2.000 Readme" prior to installing this release. We want to highlight the "Installation Information" section which includes the following late-breaking information: Business Rules Migration to Calculation Manager Oracle Hyperion Calculation Manager has replaced Oracle Hyperion Business Rules as the mechanism for designing and managing business rules, therefore, Business Rules is no longer released with EPM System Release 11.1.2.2. If you are applying 11.1.2.2 as a maintenance release, or upgrading to Release 11.1.2.2, and have been using Business Rules in an earlier release, you must migrate to Calculation Manager rules in Release 11.1.2.2. (See Oracle Enterprise Performance Management System Installation and Configuration Guide.) Planning User Interface Enhancements This release of Planning includes a large number of user interface enhancements, as described in Oracle Hyperion Planning New Features. To optimize performance with these new features, you must implement the following recommended configuration. Server: 64-bit, 16 GB physical RAM Client: Optimized for Internet Explorer 9 and Firefox 10 or higher Client-to-Server Connectivity: High-speed internet connection or VPN connection between client and server, client-to-server ping time < 150 milliseconds for best performance The new, improved Planning user interface requires efficient browsers to handle interactivity provided through Web 2.0 like functionality. In our testing, Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8, and Firefox 3.x are not sufficient to handle such interactivity, and the responsiveness in these versions of browsers is not as fast as the user interface in the previous releases of Planning. For this reason, we strongly recommend that you upgrade your browser to Internet Explorer 9 or Firefox 10 to get responsiveness similar to what you experienced in previous releases. In some instances, the response times in Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3.x could be acceptable. Hence, we suggest that you uptake the new user interface only after you conduct an end user response test and you are satisfied with the results of these tests for these versions of browsers. Please note that it is still possible to leverage the old user interface and features from Planning Release 11.1.2.1. (For more information, see “Using the Planning Release 11.1.2.1 User Interface and Features” in the Oracle Hyperion Planning Administrator's Guide.) IBM HTTP Server and IIS Default Ports Both IBM HTTP Server and IIS Web Server use 80 as their default port. If you are using WebSphere, you must change one of these defaults so that there is no port conflict. If you have further questions, please utilize the  Planning or Essbase MOS Community.

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