point clouds - Page 100

Webcast Tomorrow: Securing the Cloud for Public Sector

- by Darin Pendergraft

Securing the Cloud for Public Sector Click here, to register for the live webcast. Cloud computing offers government organizations tremendous potential to enhance public value by helping organizations increase operational efficiency and improve service delivery. However, as organizations pursue cloud adoption to achieve the anticipated benefits a common set of questions have surfaced. “Is the cloud secure? Are all clouds equal with respect to security and compliance? Is our data safe in the cloud?” Join us December 12th for a webcast as part of the “Secure Government Training Series” to get answers to your pressing cloud security questions and learn how to best secure your cloud environments. You will learn about a comprehensive set of security tools designed to protect every layer of an organization’s cloud architecture, from application to disk, while ensuring high levels of compliance, risk avoidance, and lower costs. Discover how to control and monitor access, secure sensitive data, and address regulatory compliance across cloud environments by: providing strong authentication, data encryption, and (privileged) user access control to ensure that information is only accessible to those who need it mitigating threats across your databases and applications protecting applications and information – no matter where it is – at rest, in use and in transit For more information, access the Secure Government Resource Center or to speak with an Oracle representative, please call1.800.ORACLE1. LIVE Webcast Securing the Cloud for Public Sector Date: Wednesday, December 12, 2012 Time: 2:00 p.m. ET Visit the Secure Government Resource CenterClick here for information on enterprise security solutions that help government safeguard information, resources and networks. ACCESS NOW Copyright © 2012, Oracle. All rights reserved. Contact Us | Legal Notices | Privacy Statement

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Delivering Oracle DBaaS: Journey to Enterprise Cloud with Oracle Database 12c

- by B R Clouse

The release of Oracle Database 12c is accompanied by extensive supporting collateral that details the new features and options of this major release. But with so much to read and investigate, where to start? If you don't have the time to pore through everything, then you may wish organize your reading in terms of the use case you're most interested in. If your interest is Database as a Service in private database clouds then may I suggest that you start here: Accelerate the Journey to Enterprise Cloud with Oracle Database 12c Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} This paper describes the phases of the journey to enterprise cloud, and enumerates the new features and options in Oracle Database 12c that support each phase. Oracle Multitenant figures prominently, but it's not the only cloud-enabling topic: Oracle Database Quality of Service Management, Application Continuity, Automatic Data Optimization, Global Data Services and Active Data Guard Far Sync all deliver key benefits for delivering database as a service. Further reading and research is suggested by the references included in the paper. Happy clouding!

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NUMA-aware placement of communication variables

- by Dave

For classic NUMA-aware programming I'm typically most concerned about simple cold, capacity and compulsory misses and whether we can satisfy the miss by locally connected memory or whether we have to pull the line from its home node over the coherent interconnect -- we'd like to minimize channel contention and conserve interconnect bandwidth. That is, for this style of programming we're quite aware of where memory is homed relative to the threads that will be accessing it. Ideally, a page is collocated on the node with the thread that's expected to most frequently access the page, as simple misses on the page can be satisfied without resorting to transferring the line over the interconnect. The default "first touch" NUMA page placement policy tends to work reasonable well in this regard. When a virtual page is first accessed, the operating system will attempt to provision and map that virtual page to a physical page allocated from the node where the accessing thread is running. It's worth noting that the node-level memory interleaving granularity is usually a multiple of the page size, so we can say that a given page P resides on some node N. That is, the memory underlying a page resides on just one node. But when thinking about accesses to heavily-written communication variables we normally consider what caches the lines underlying such variables might be resident in, and in what states. We want to minimize coherence misses and cache probe activity and interconnect traffic in general. I don't usually give much thought to the location of the home NUMA node underlying such highly shared variables. On a SPARC T5440, for instance, which consists of 4 T2+ processors connected by a central coherence hub, the home node and placement of heavily accessed communication variables has very little impact on performance. The variables are frequently accessed so likely in M-state in some cache, and the location of the home node is of little consequence because a requester can use cache-to-cache transfers to get the line. Or at least that's what I thought. Recently, though, I was exploring a simple shared memory point-to-point communication model where a client writes a request into a request mailbox and then busy-waits on a response variable. It's a simple example of delegation based on message passing. The server polls the request mailbox, and having fetched a new request value, performs some operation and then writes a reply value into the response variable. As noted above, on a T5440 performance is insensitive to the placement of the communication variables -- the request and response mailbox words. But on a Sun/Oracle X4800 I noticed that was not the case and that NUMA placement of the communication variables was actually quite important. For background an X4800 system consists of 8 Intel X7560 Xeons . Each package (socket) has 8 cores with 2 contexts per core, so the system is 8x8x2. Each package is also a NUMA node and has locally attached memory. Every package has 3 point-to-point QPI links for cache coherence, and the system is configured with a twisted ladder "mobius" topology. The cache coherence fabric is glueless -- there's not central arbiter or coherence hub. The maximum distance between any two nodes is just 2 hops over the QPI links. For any given node, 3 other nodes are 1 hop distant and the remaining 4 nodes are 2 hops distant. Using a single request (client) thread and a single response (server) thread, a benchmark harness explored all permutations of NUMA placement for the two threads and the two communication variables, measuring the average round-trip-time and throughput rate between the client and server. In this benchmark the server simply acts as a simple transponder, writing the request value plus 1 back into the reply field, so there's no particular computation phase and we're only measuring communication overheads. In addition to varying the placement of communication variables over pairs of nodes, we also explored variations where both variables were placed on one page (and thus on one node) -- either on the same cache line or different cache lines -- while varying the node where the variables reside along with the placement of the threads. The key observation was that if the client and server threads were on different nodes, then the best placement of variables was to have the request variable (written by the client and read by the server) reside on the same node as the client thread, and to place the response variable (written by the server and read by the client) on the same node as the server. That is, if you have a variable that's to be written by one thread and read by another, it should be homed with the writer thread. For our simple client-server model that means using split request and response communication variables with unidirectional message flow on a given page. This can yield up to twice the throughput of less favorable placement strategies. Our X4800 uses the QPI 1.0 protocol with source-based snooping. Briefly, when node A needs to probe a cache line it fires off snoop requests to all the nodes in the system. Those recipients then forward their response not to the original requester, but to the home node H of the cache line. H waits for and collects the responses, adjudicates and resolves conflicts and ensures memory-model ordering, and then sends a definitive reply back to the original requester A. If some node B needed to transfer the line to A, it will do so by cache-to-cache transfer and let H know about the disposition of the cache line. A needs to wait for the authoritative response from H. So if a thread on node A wants to write a value to be read by a thread on node B, the latency is dependent on the distances between A, B, and H. We observe the best performance when the written-to variable is co-homed with the writer A. That is, we want H and A to be the same node, as the writer doesn't need the home to respond over the QPI link, as the writer and the home reside on the very same node. With architecturally informed placement of communication variables we eliminate at least one QPI hop from the critical path. Newer Intel processors use the QPI 1.1 coherence protocol with home-based snooping. As noted above, under source-snooping a requester broadcasts snoop requests to all nodes. Those nodes send their response to the home node of the location, which provides memory ordering, reconciles conflicts, etc., and then posts a definitive reply to the requester. In home-based snooping the snoop probe goes directly to the home node and are not broadcast. The home node can consult snoop filters -- if present -- and send out requests to retrieve the line if necessary. The 3rd party owner of the line, if any, can respond either to the home or the original requester (or even to both) according to the protocol policies. There are myriad variations that have been implemented, and unfortunately vendor terminology doesn't always agree between vendors or with the academic taxonomy papers. The key is that home-snooping enables the use of a snoop filter to reduce interconnect traffic. And while home-snooping might have a longer critical path (latency) than source-based snooping, it also may require fewer messages and less overall bandwidth. It'll be interesting to reprise these experiments on a platform with home-based snooping. While collecting data I also noticed that there are placement concerns even in the seemingly trivial case when both threads and both variables reside on a single node. Internally, the cores on each X7560 package are connected by an internal ring. (Actually there are multiple contra-rotating rings). And the last-level on-chip cache (LLC) is partitioned in banks or slices, which with each slice being associated with a core on the ring topology. A hardware hash function associates each physical address with a specific home bank. Thus we face distance and topology concerns even for intra-package communications, although the latencies are not nearly the magnitude we see inter-package. I've not seen such communication distance artifacts on the T2+, where the cache banks are connected to the cores via a high-speed crossbar instead of a ring -- communication latencies seem more regular.

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ArchBeat Link-o-Rama Top 20 for June 10-16, 2012

- by Bob Rhubart

The top 20 most popular items shared via my social networks for the week of June 10-16, 2012. DevOps: Evolving to Handle Disruption | JP Morgenthal The Healthy Tension That Mobility Creates | Hernan Capdevila If you aren't among those finding bugs you might be among those complaining about them later | Markus Eisele ODTUG Kscope12 - June 24-28 - San Antonio, TX It's Alive! - The Oracle OpenWorld Content Catalog URGENT BULLETIN: Disable JRE Auto-Update for All E-Business Suite End-Users Aetna Dumps Its Siloed Enterprise Architecture for SOA | Stephanie Overby Condos and Clouds: Thinking about Cloud Computng by Looking at Condominiums | Pat Helland 5 minutes or less: Indexing Attributes in OID | Andre Correa Whole Lotta Virtualization Goin' On | Rick Ramsey The Road to a Cloud-Enabled, Infinitely Elastic Application Infrastructure | Andy Butler, Massimo Pezzini Migrating C/C++ embedded SQL code | Tom Laszewski Catching Up to Mobile Computing | Bob Rhubart Duke's Choice Award Nominations Close Friday! | Tori Wieldt Eclipse DemoCamp - June 2012 - Redwood Shores, CA BI Architecture Master Class for Partners - Oracle Architecture Unplugged ADF Tutorial Chapter 1: Introduction | Yannick Ongena OPN: Fusion Middleware Summer Camps in July in Lisbon and Munich Networking in VirtualBox | The Fat Bloke 2012 Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Awards - Win a FREE Pass to Oracle OpenWorld 2012 in San Francisco Thought for the Day "If the mind really is the finest computer, then there are a lot of people out there who need to be rebooted." — Tim Bryce Source: SoftwareQuotes.com

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ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for 101/10/2011

- by Bob Rhubart

All day, all architecture. Oracle Technology Network Architect Day - Phoenix, AZ - Dec 14. Free registration. Spend the day with your peers learning from Oracle experts in Cloud Computing, Engineered Systems, Oracle WebLogic, Oracle Coherence, Application-Driven Virtualization, and more. Registration is free, but seating is limited. Register now! Data Integration - Bad data is really the monster | Bikram Sinha "Bad data can cause huge operational failure and cost millions of dollars in terms of time and resources to clean up and validate data across multiple participating systems," says Bikram Sinha. Changing a navigation model on a page in WebCenter | Edwin Biemond Another illustrated how-to from Oracle ACE Edwin Biemond. Why do I need an Authenticator when I have an Identity Asserter? | Chris Johnson Chris Johnson responds to a user question. OOW: The Most Important Thing | Floyd Teter Oracle ACE Director Floyd Teter explains why he sees "the inclusion of Fusion Applications CRM and HCM in the Oracle Public Cloud" as the most important news to come out of Oracle OpenWorld 2011. Oracle Releases Oracle Solaris 11 | Gokhan Atil Atil offers an overview of some of the "key points" of the new Solaris 11 release. SOA Development Virtual Developer Day (On Demand) You won't get the hands-on experience available in the live event, but if you will learn learn how a SOA approach can be implemented, whether starting afresh with new services or reusing existing services. Webcast: Maximum Availability on Private Clouds - Nov 10 - 10am PT/ 1pm ET Featuring Margaret Hamburger (Director, Product Marketing, Oracle) and Joe Meeks (Director, Product Management, Oracle). Should Enterprise Architecture Teams Be More Focused on Innovation? | Richard Seroter Richard Seroter looks answers among opinions offered by Forrester analyst Brian Hopkins and Jude Umeh of CapGemini.

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Podcast Show Notes: Conversations in the Cloud

- by Bob Rhubart

The centerpiece of every OTN Architect Day event is a panel discussion the gathers all of the session speakers togehter to respond to questions from the audience. I generally try to record these discussions, usually by stiking my iPad on top of one of the PA speakers, with mixed results. Fortunately, the A/V tech at the venue for the Los Angeles event, held on October 25, 2012, had the necessary gear to get a good-quality recording of the panel discussion. So starting this week the OTN ArchBeat Podcast will feature a short series of highlights from those discussions. Listen to Part 1: Dude, What's My Role? Members of the Architect Day panel respond to an audience question about what happens to traditional IT roles in a cloud environment. Listen to Part 2: Migrating Mission-Critical Applications to the Cloud (Nov 21) The panel offers advice and examples in response to an audience question about dealing with mission-critical applications. Listen to Part 3: All Clouds Are Not Equal (Nov 28) The panel responds to a challenging question about cloud strategy with a discussion of enterprise-grade cloud services. Listen to Part 4: Cloud Security and Auditing (Dec 5) The last segment in the series is short discussion in response to an audience question about auditing and security in the cloud. The Panelists (Listed alphabetically) Ashok Aletty, Senior Director of Product Management, Oracle Cloud Application Foundation Dr. James Baty, Vice President, Oracle Global Enterprise Architecture Program Dave Chappelle, Enterprise Architect, Oracle Global Enterprise Architecture Program Jeff Davies, Senior Principal Product Manager, Oracle Corporation Anbu Krishnaswamy, Enterprise Architect, Oracle Global Enterprise Architecture Program Dhanraj Pondicherry, Sales Consulting Manager, Oracle Exadata Perren Walker, Senior Principal Product Manager, Oracle Enterprise Manager Coming Soon Upcoming programs will focus on DevOps and Continuous Integration, and on Oracle's Java Cloud and Developer Cloud services. Stay tuned: RSS

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Why people don't patch and upgrade?!?

- by Mike Dietrich

Discussing the topic "Why Upgrade" or "Why not Upgrade" is not always fun. Actually the arguments repeat from customer to customer. Typically we hear things such as: A PSU or Patch Set introduces new bugs A new PSU or Patch Set introduces new features which lead to risk and require application verification Patching means risk Patching changes the execution plans Patching requires too much testing Patching is too much work for our DBAs Patching costs a lot of money and doesn't pay out And to be very honest sometimes it's hard for me to stay calm in such discussions. Let's discuss some of these points a bit more in detail. A PSU or Patch Set introduces new bugsWell, yes, that is true as no software containing more than some lines of code is bug free. This applies to Oracle's code as well as too any application or operating system code. But first of all, does that mean you never patch your OS because the patch may introduce new flaws? And second, what is the point of saying "it introduces new bugs"? Does that mean you will never get rid of the mean issues we know about and we fixed already? Scroll down from MOS Note:161818.1 to the patch release you are on, no matter if it's 10.2.0.4 or 11.2.0.3 and check for the Known Issues And Alerts.Will you take responsibility to know about all these issues and refuse to upgrade to 11.2.0.4? I won't. A new PSU or Patch Set introduces new featuresOk, we can discuss that. Offering new functionality within a database patch set is a dubious thing. It has advantages such as in 11.2.0.4 where we backported Database Redaction to. But this is something you will only use once you have an Advanced Security license. I interpret that statement I've heard quite often from customers in a different way: People don't want to get surprises such as new behaviour. This certainly gives everybody a hard time. And we've had many examples in the past (SESSION_CACHED_CURSROS in 10.2.0.4, _DATAFILE_WRITE_ERRORS_CRASH_INSTANCE in 11.2.0.2 and others) where those things weren't documented, not even in the README. Thanks to many friends out there I learned about those as well. So new behaviour is the topic people consider as risky - not really new features. And just to point this out: A PSU never brings in new features or new behaviour by definition! Patching means riskDoes it really mean risk? Yes, there were issues in the past (and sometimes in the present as well) where a patch didn't get installed correctly. But personally I consider it way more risky to not patch. Keep that in mind: The day Oracle publishes an PSU (or CPU) containing security fixes all the great security experts out there go public with their findings as well. So from that day on even my grandma can find out about those issues and try to attack somebody. Now a lot of people say: "My database does not face the internet." And I will answer: "The enemy is sitting already behind your firewalls. And knows potentially about these things." My statement: Not patching introduces way more risk to your environment than patching. Seriously! Patching changes the execution plansDo they really? I agree - there's a very small risk for this happening with Patch Sets. But not with PSUs or CPUs as they contain no optimizer fixes changing behaviour (but they may contain fixes curing wrong-query-result-bugs). But what's the point of a changing execution plan? In Oracle Database 11g it is so simple to be prepared. SQL Plan Management is a free EE feature - so once that occurs you'll put the plan into the Plan Baseline. Basta! Yes, you wouldn't like to get such surprises? Than please use the SQL Performance Analyzer (SPA) from Real Application Testing and you'll detect that easily upfront in minutes. And not to forget this, a plan change can also be very positive!Yes, there's a little risk with a database patchset - and we have many possibilites to detect this before patching. Patching requires too much testingWell, does it really? I have seen in the past 12 years how people test. There are very different efforts and approaches on this. I have seen people spending a hell of money on licenses or on project team staffing. And I have seen people sailing blindly without any tests just going the John-Wayne-approach.Proper tools will allow you to test easily without too much efforts. See the paragraph above. We have used Real Application Testing in so many customer projects reducing the amount of work spend on testing by over 50%. But apart from that at some point you will have to stop testing. If you don't you'll get lost and you'll burn money. There's no 100% guaranty. You will have to deal with a little risk as reaching the final 5% of certainty will cost you the same as it did cost to reach 95%. And doing this will lead to abnormal long product cycles that you'll run behind forever. And this will cost even more money. Patching is too much work for our DBAsPatching is a lot of work. I agree. And it's no fun work. It's boring, annoying. You don't learn much from that. That's why you should try to automate this task. Use the Database's Lifecycle Management Pack. And don't cry about the fact that it costs money. Yes it does. But it will ease the process and you'll save a lot of costs as you don't waste your valuable time with patching. Or use Oracle Database 12c Oracle Multitenant and patch either by unplug/plug or patch an entire container database with all PDBs with one patch in one task. We have customer reference cases proofing it saved them 75% of time, effort and cost since they've used Lifecycle Management Pack. So why don't you use it? Patching costs a lot of money and doesn't pay outWell, see my statements in the paragraph above. And it pays out as flying with a database with 100 known critical flaws in it which are already fixed by Oracle (such as in the Oct 2013 PSU for Oracle Database 12c) will cost ways more in case of failure or even data loss. Bet with me? Let me finally ask you some questions. What cell phone are you using and which OS does it run? Do you have an iPhone 5 and did you upgrade already to iOS 7.0.3? I've just encountered on mine that the alarm (which I rely on when traveling) has gotten now a dependency on the physical switch "sound on/off". If it is switched to "off" physically the alarm rings "silently". What a wonderful example of a behaviour change coming in with a patch set. Will this push you to stay with iOS5 or iOS6? No, because those have security flaws which won't be fixed anymore. What browser are you surfing with? Do you use Mozilla 3.6? Well, congratulations to all the hackers. It will be easy for them to attack you and harm your system. I'd guess you have the auto updater on. Same for Google Chrome, Safari, IE. Right? -Mike The T.htmtableborders, .htmtableborders td, .htmtableborders th {border : 1px dashed lightgrey ! important;} html, body { border: 0px; } body { background-color: #ffffff; } img, hr { cursor: default }

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DBA Best Practices - A Blog Series: Episode 1 - Backups

- by Argenis

This blog post is part of the DBA Best Practices series, on which various topics of concern for daily database operations are discussed. Your feedback and comments are very much welcome, so please drop by the comments section and be sure to leave your thoughts on the subject. Morning Coffee When I was a DBA, the first thing I did when I sat down at my desk at work was checking that all backups had completed successfully. It really was more of a ritual, since I had a dual system in place to check for backup completion: 1) the scheduled agent jobs to back up the databases were set to alert the NOC in failure, and 2) I had a script run from a central server every so often to check for any backup failures. Why the redundancy, you might ask. Well, for one I was once bitten by the fact that database mail doesn't work 100% of the time. Potential causes for failure include issues on the SMTP box that relays your server email, firewall problems, DNS issues, etc. And so to be sure that my backups completed fine, I needed to rely on a mechanism other than having the servers do the taking - I needed to interrogate the servers and ask each one if an issue had occurred. This is why I had a script run every so often. Some of you might have monitoring tools in place like Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) or similar 3rd party products that would track all these things for you. But at that moment, we had no resort but to write our own Powershell scripts to do it. Now it goes without saying that if you don't have backups in place, you might as well find another career. Your most sacred job as a DBA is to protect the data from a disaster, and only properly safeguarded backups can offer you peace of mind here. "But, we have a cluster...we don't need backups" Sadly I've heard this line more than I would have liked to. You need to understand that a cluster is comprised of shared storage, and that is precisely your single point of failure. A cluster will protect you from an issue at the Operating System level, and also under an outage of any SQL-related service or dependent devices. But it will most definitely NOT protect you against corruption, nor will it protect you against somebody deleting data from a table - accidentally or otherwise. Backup, fine. How often do I take a backup? The answer to this is something you will hear frequently when working with databases: it depends. What does it depend on? For one, you need to understand how much data your business is willing to lose. This is what's called Recovery Point Objective, or RPO. If you don't know how much data your business is willing to lose, you need to have an honest and realistic conversation about data loss expectations with your customers, internal or external. From my experience, their first answer to the question "how much data loss can you withstand?" will be "zero". In that case, you will need to explain how zero data loss is very difficult and very costly to achieve, even in today's computing environments. Do you want to go ahead and take full backups of all your databases every hour, or even every day? Probably not, because of the impact that taking a full backup can have on a system. That's what differential and transaction log backups are for. Have I answered the question of how often to take a backup? No, and I did that on purpose. You need to think about how much time you have to recover from any event that requires you to restore your databases. This is what's called Recovery Time Objective. Again, if you go ask your customer how long of an outage they can withstand, at first you will get a completely unrealistic number - and that will be your starting point for discussing a solution that is cost effective. The point that I'm trying to get across is that you need to have a plan. This plan needs to be practiced, and tested. Like a football playbook, you need to rehearse the moves you'll perform when the time comes. How often is up to you, and the objective is that you feel better about yourself and the steps you need to follow when emergency strikes. A backup is nothing more than an untested restore Backups are files. Files are prone to corruption. Put those two together and realize how you feel about those backups sitting on that network drive. When was the last time you restored any of those? Restoring your backups on another box - that, by the way, doesn't have to match the specs of your production server - will give you two things: 1) peace of mind, because now you know that your backups are good and 2) a place to offload your consistency checks with DBCC CHECKDB or any of the other DBCC commands like CHECKTABLE or CHECKCATALOG. This is a great strategy for VLDBs that cannot withstand the additional load created by the consistency checks. If you choose to offload your consistency checks to another server though, be sure to run DBCC CHECKDB WITH PHYSICALONLY on the production server, and if you're using SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 CU4 and above, be sure to enable traceflags 2562 and/or 2549, which will speed up the PHYSICALONLY checks further - you can read more about this enhancement here. Back to the "How Often" question for a second. If you have the disk, and the network latency, and the system resources to do so, why not backup the transaction log often? As in, every 5 minutes, or even less than that? There's not much downside to doing it, as you will have to clear the log with a backup sooner than later, lest you risk running out space on your tlog, or even your drive. The one drawback to this approach is that you will have more files to deal with at restore time, and processing each file will add a bit of extra time to the entire process. But it might be worth that time knowing that you minimized the amount of data lost. Again, test your plan to make sure that it matches your particular needs. Where to back up to? Network share? Locally? SAN volume? This is another topic where everybody has a favorite choice. So, I'll stick to mentioning what I like to do and what I consider to be the best practice in this regard. I like to backup to a SAN volume, i.e., a drive that actually lives in the SAN, and can be easily attached to another server in a pinch, saving you valuable time - you wouldn't need to restore files on the network (slow) or pull out drives out a dead server (been there, done that, it’s also slow!). The key is to have a copy of those backup files made quickly, and, if at all possible, to a remote target on a different datacenter - or even the cloud. There are plenty of solutions out there that can help you put such a solution together. That right there is the first step towards a practical Disaster Recovery plan. But there's much more to DR, and that's material for a different blog post in this series.

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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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links for 2010-12-17

- by Bob Rhubart

Overview of Oracle Enterprise Manager Management Packs How does Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control do so much across so many different systems? Porus Homi Havewala has the answers. (tags: oracle otn grid soa entarch) How to overcome cloud computing hurdles - Computerworld What does it take to go from 'we should move to the cloud' to a successful cloud computing strategy? This excerpt from Silver Clouds, Dark Linings offers advice on crossing cloud chasms and developing a successful roadmap. (tags: ping.fm) Security in OBIEE 11g, Part 2 Guest blogger Pravin Janardanam continues the discussion about OBIEE 11g Authorization and other Security aspects. (tags: oracle otn security businessintelligence obiee) Oracle Fusion Middleware Security: A Quick Note about Oracle Access Manager 11g and WebLogic "OAM 11g integrates with WebLogic using the very same components used to integrate OAM 10.1.4.3. Under most circumstances, that means using the OAM Identity Asserter...which asserts the OAM_REMOTE_USER header as the user principal in the JAAS subject." - Brian Eidelman (tags: WebLogic oracle) Comparison Between Cluster Multicast Messaging and Unicast Messaging Mode Weblogic wonders!!! "When servers are in a cluster, these member servers communicate with each other by sending heartbeats and indicating that they are alive. For this communication between the servers, either unicast or multicast messaging is used." -- Divya Duryea (tags: weblogic oracle) Ron Batra: Cloud Computing Series: IV: Database.com, ExaData on Demand and connecting the dots Oracle ACE Direct Ron Batra offers his assessment of recent rumblings in the Cloud. (tags: oracle otn oracleace cloud database)

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DBA Best Practices - A Blog Series: Episode 1 - Backups

- by Argenis

This blog post is part of the DBA Best Practices series, on which various topics of concern for daily database operations are discussed. Your feedback and comments are very much welcome, so please drop by the comments section and be sure to leave your thoughts on the subject. Morning Coffee When I was a DBA, the first thing I did when I sat down at my desk at work was checking that all backups have completed successfully. It really was more of a ritual, since I had a dual system in place to check for backup completion: 1) the scheduled agent jobs to back up the databases were set to alert the NOC in failure, and 2) I had a script run from a central server every so often to check for any backup failures. Why the redundancy, you might ask. Well, for one I was once bitten by the fact that database mail doesn't work 100% of the time. Potential causes for failure include issues on the SMTP box that relays your server email, firewall problems, DNS issues, etc. And so to be sure that my backups completed fine, I needed to rely on a mechanism other than having the servers do the taking - I needed to interrogate the servers and ask each one if an issue had occurred. This is why I had a script run every so often. Some of you might have monitoring tools in place like Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) or similar 3rd party products that would track all these things for you. But at that moment, we had no resort but to write our own Powershell scripts to do it. Now it goes without saying that if you don't have backups in place, you might as well find another career. Your most sacred job as a DBA is to protect the data from a disaster, and only properly safeguarded backups can offer you peace of mind here. "But, we have a cluster...we don't need backups" Sadly I've heard this line more than I would have liked to. You need to understand that a cluster is comprised of shared storage, and that is precisely your single point of failure. A cluster will protect you from an issue at the Operating System level, and also under an outage of any SQL-related service or dependent devices. But it will most definitely NOT protect you against corruption, nor will it protect you against somebody deleting data from a table - accidentally or otherwise. Backup, fine. How often do I take a backup? The answer to this is something you will hear frequently when working with databases: it depends. What does it depend on? For one, you need to understand how much data your business is willing to lose. This is what's called Recovery Point Objective, or RPO. If you don't know how much data your business is willing to lose, you need to have an honest and realistic conversation about data loss expectations with your customers, internal or external. From my experience, their first answer to the question "how much data loss can you withstand?" will be "zero". In that case, you will need to explain how zero data loss is very difficult and very costly to achieve, even in today's computing environments. Do you want to go ahead and take full backups of all your databases every hour, or even every day? Probably not, because of the impact that taking a full backup can have on a system. That's what differential and transaction log backups are for. Have I answered the question of how often to take a backup? No, and I did that on purpose. You need to think about how much time you have to recover from any event that requires you to restore your databases. This is what's called Recovery Time Objective. Again, if you go ask your customer how long of an outage they can withstand, at first you will get a completely unrealistic number - and that will be your starting point for discussing a solution that is cost effective. The point that I'm trying to get across is that you need to have a plan. This plan needs to be practiced, and tested. Like a football playbook, you need to rehearse the moves you'll perform when the time comes. How often is up to you, and the objective is that you feel better about yourself and the steps you need to follow when emergency strikes. A backup is nothing more than an untested restore Backups are files. Files are prone to corruption. Put those two together and realize how you feel about those backups sitting on that network drive. When was the last time you restored any of those? Restoring your backups on another box - that, by the way, doesn't have to match the specs of your production server - will give you two things: 1) peace of mind, because now you know that your backups are good and 2) a place to offload your consistency checks with DBCC CHECKDB or any of the other DBCC commands like CHECKTABLE or CHECKCATALOG. This is a great strategy for VLDBs that cannot withstand the additional load created by the consistency checks. If you choose to offload your consistency checks to another server though, be sure to run DBCC CHECKDB WITH PHYSICALONLY on the production server, and if you're using SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 CU4 and above, be sure to enable traceflags 2562 and/or 2549, which will speed up the PHYSICALONLY checks further - you can read more about this enhancement here. Back to the "How Often" question for a second. If you have the disk, and the network latency, and the system resources to do so, why not backup the transaction log often? As in, every 5 minutes, or even less than that? There's not much downside to doing it, as you will have to clear the log with a backup sooner than later, lest you risk running out space on your tlog, or even your drive. The one drawback to this approach is that you will have more files to deal with at restore time, and processing each file will add a bit of extra time to the entire process. But it might be worth that time knowing that you minimized the amount of data lost. Again, test your plan to make sure that it matches your particular needs. Where to back up to? Network share? Locally? SAN volume? This is another topic where everybody has a favorite choice. So, I'll stick to mentioning what I like to do and what I consider to be the best practice in this regard. I like to backup to a SAN volume, i.e., a drive that actually lives in the SAN, and can be easily attached to another server in a pinch, saving you valuable time - you wouldn't need to restore files on the network (slow) or pull out drives out a dead server (been there, done that, it’s also slow!). The key is to have a copy of those backup files made quickly, and, if at all possible, to a remote target on a different datacenter - or even the cloud. There are plenty of solutions out there that can help you put such a solution together. That right there is the first step towards a practical Disaster Recovery plan. But there's much more to DR, and that's material for a different blog post in this series.

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How can I keep a graphics object centered (like a circle) when zooming in or out on it?

- by sonny5

using System; using System.Drawing; using System.Collections; using System.ComponentModel; using System.Windows.Forms; using System.Data; using System.Drawing.Drawing2D; using System.Drawing.Imaging; namespace testgrfx { public class Form1 : System.Windows.Forms.Form { float m_Scalef; float m_Scalefout; Rectangle m_r1; private System.Windows.Forms.Button button2; private System.Windows.Forms.Button button3; private System.ComponentModel.Container components = null; private void InitializeComponent() { m_Scalef = 1.0f; // for zooming purposes Console.WriteLine("opening m_Scalef= {0}",m_Scalef); m_Scalefout = 1.0f; Console.WriteLine("opening m_Scalefout= {0}",m_Scalefout); m_r1 = new Rectangle(50,50,100,100); this.AutoScrollMinSize = new Size(600,700); this.components = new System.ComponentModel.Container(); this.button2 = new System.Windows.Forms.Button(); this.button2.BackColor = System.Drawing.Color.LightGray; this.button2.Location = new System.Drawing.Point(120, 30); this.button2.Name = "button2"; this.button2.Size = new System.Drawing.Size(72, 24); this.button2.TabIndex = 1; this.button2.Text = "Zoom In"; this.button2.Click += new System.EventHandler(this.mnuZoomin_Click); this.Controls.Add(button2); this.button3 = new System.Windows.Forms.Button(); this.button3.BackColor = System.Drawing.Color.LightGray; this.button3.Location = new System.Drawing.Point(200, 30); this.button3.Name = "button3"; this.button3.Size = new System.Drawing.Size(72, 24); this.button3.TabIndex = 2; this.button3.Text = "Zoom Out"; this.button3.Click += new System.EventHandler(this.mnuZoomout_Click); this.Controls.Add(button3); //InitMyForm(); } public Form1() { InitializeComponent(); Text = " DrawLine"; BackColor = SystemColors.Window; // Gotta load these kind at start-up ... not with button assignments this.Paint+=new PaintEventHandler(this.Form1_Paint); } static void Main() { Application.Run(new Form1()); } /// Clean up any resources being used. protected override void Dispose( bool disposing ) { if( disposing ) { if (components != null) { components.Dispose(); } } base.Dispose( disposing ); } // autoscroll2.cs does work private void Form1_Paint(object sender, System.Windows.Forms.PaintEventArgs e) { Graphics dc = e.Graphics; dc.PageUnit = GraphicsUnit.Pixel; dc.PageScale = m_Scalef; Console.WriteLine("opening dc.PageScale= {0}",dc.PageScale); dc.TranslateTransform(this.AutoScrollPosition.X/m_Scalef, this.AutoScrollPosition.Y/m_Scalef); Pen pn = new Pen(Color.Blue,2); dc.DrawEllipse(pn,m_r1); Console.WriteLine("form_paint_dc.PageUnit= {0}",dc.PageUnit); Console.WriteLine("form_paint_dc.PageScale= {0}",dc.PageScale); //Console.Out.NewLine = "\r\n\r\n"; // makes all double spaces } private void mnuZoomin_Click(object sender, System.EventArgs e) { m_Scalef = m_Scalef * 2.0f; Console.WriteLine("in mnuZoomin_Click m_Scalef= {0}",m_Scalef); Invalidate(); // to trigger Paint of entire client area } // try: System.Drawing.Rectangle resolution = Screen.GetWorkingArea(someForm); private void Form1_MouseDown(object sender, System.Windows.Forms.MouseEventArgs e) { // Uses the mouse wheel to scroll Graphics dc = CreateGraphics(); dc.TranslateTransform(this.AutoScrollPosition.X/m_Scalef, this.AutoScrollPosition.Y/m_Scalef); Console.WriteLine("opening Form1_MouseDown dc.PageScale= {0}", dc.PageScale); Console.WriteLine("Y wheel= {0}", this.AutoScrollPosition.Y/m_Scalef); dc.PageUnit = GraphicsUnit.Pixel; dc.PageScale = m_Scalef; Console.WriteLine("frm1_moudwn_dc.PageScale= {0}",dc.PageScale); Point [] mousep = new Point[1]; Console.WriteLine("mousep= {0}", mousep); // make sure to adjust mouse pos.for scroll position Size scrollOffset = new Size(this.AutoScrollPosition); mousep[0] = new Point(e.X-scrollOffset.Width, e.Y-scrollOffset.Height); dc.TransformPoints(CoordinateSpace.Page, CoordinateSpace.Device,mousep); Pen pen = new Pen(Color.Green,1); dc.DrawRectangle(pen,m_r1); Console.WriteLine("m_r1= {0}", m_r1); Console.WriteLine("mousep[0].X= {0}", mousep[0].X); Console.WriteLine("mousep[0].Y= {0}", mousep[0].Y); if (m_r1.Contains(new Rectangle(mousep[0].X, mousep[0].Y,1,1))) MessageBox.Show("click inside rectangle"); } private void Form1_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e) { } private void mnuZoomout_Click(object sender, System.EventArgs e) { Console.WriteLine("first line--mnuZoomout_Click m_Scalef={0}",m_Scalef); if(m_Scalef > 9 ) { m_Scalef = m_Scalef / 2.0f; Console.WriteLine("in >9 mnuZoomout_Click m_Scalef= {0}",m_Scalef); Console.WriteLine("in >9 mnuZoomout_Click__m_Scalefout= {0}",m_Scalefout); } else { Console.WriteLine("<= 9_Zoom-out B-4 redefining={0}",m_Scalef); m_Scalef = m_Scalef * 0.5f; // make it same as previous Zoom In Console.WriteLine("<= 9_Zoom-out after m_Scalef= {0}",m_Scalef); } Invalidate(); } } // public class Form1 }

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SOA Cloud and Service Technology Symposium December 4-5th 2013 in Mexico

- by JuergenKress

Do you want to attend the SOA; Cloud and Service Technology Symposium December 4-5th 2013 in Mexico? Please feel free to use the promotional code “Q14CB324” for a 50% discount. Here are the Conference presentations from Partners and Oracle: "Cloud Service Brokers" Jürgen Kress, Oracle, Rolando Carrasco, S&P Solutions "Fast Data - Delivering High-Velocity and Volume Big Data Business Value in Real Time" Robin Smith, Oracle, Robert Greene, Oracle "Unlocking the Value of Big Data" Raul Goycoolea Seoane, Oracle "Modeling Business Process Architecture on BPMN 2.0 and Decomposing it to Service Inventory" Jorge Heredia, Itehl Consulting "BPM and Dynamic/Adaptive Case Management - Friends or Foes?" Manas Deb, Oracle "Building SOA and MDM Solutions to Enable Cloud Adoption" Luis Weir, HCL, John Dunn, HCL "Secure Applications in the Cloud: Security & Privacy Patterns and Mechanisms" Ricardo Puttini, University of Brasília, Anderson Nascimento, University of Brasília "SOA, Data Grids, Mobile and Clouds - Where Next for SOA?" Matt Brasier, C2B2 Consulting LTD "Achieving Greater Responsiveness with BPM" Andre Boaventura, Oracle Do you want to meet the Oracle team at the conference? Please send us a message on twitter @soacommunity. Do you want to network at the conference? Please use the #soacommunity. For details and registrations please visit the conference website. SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki Mix Forum Technorati Tags: SOA Symposium,Thmas Erl,Service Technolgy Symosium,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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Why do I get a nullpointerexception at line ds.getPort in class L1?

- by Fred

import java.awt.; import java.awt.event.; import javax.swing.; import java.io.; import java.net.; import java.util.; public class Draw extends JFrame { /* * Socket stuff */ static String host; static int port; static int localport; DatagramSocket ds; Socket socket; Draw d; Paper p = new Paper(ds); public Draw(int localport, String host, int port) { d = this; this.localport = localport; this.host = host; this.port = port; try { ds = new DatagramSocket(localport); InetAddress ia = InetAddress.getByName(host); System.out.println("Attempting to connect DatagramSocket. Local port " + localport + " , foreign host " + host + ", foreign port " + port + "..."); ds.connect(ia, port); System.out.println("Success, ds.localport: " + ds.getLocalPort() + ", ds.port: " + ds.getPort() + ", address: " + ds.getInetAddress()); Reciever r = new Reciever(ds); r.start(); } catch (Exception e) { e.printStackTrace(); } setDefaultCloseOperation(EXIT_ON_CLOSE); getContentPane().add(p, BorderLayout.CENTER); setSize(640, 480); setVisible(true); } public static void main(String[] args) { int x = 0; for (String s : args){ if (x==0){ localport = Integer.parseInt(s); x++; } else if (x==1){ host = s; x++; } else if (x==2){ port = Integer.parseInt(s); } } Draw d = new Draw(localport, host, port); } } class Paper extends JPanel { DatagramSocket ds; private HashSet hs = new HashSet(); public Paper(DatagramSocket ds) { this.ds=ds; setBackground(Color.white); addMouseListener(new L1(ds)); addMouseMotionListener(new L2()); } public void paintComponent(Graphics g) { super.paintComponent(g); g.setColor(Color.black); Iterator i = hs.iterator(); while(i.hasNext()) { Point p = (Point)i.next(); g.fillOval(p.x, p.y, 2, 2); } } private void addPoint(Point p) { hs.add(p); repaint(); } class L1 extends MouseAdapter { DatagramSocket ds; public L1(DatagramSocket ds){ this.ds=ds; } public void mousePressed(MouseEvent me) { addPoint(me.getPoint()); Point p = me.getPoint(); String message = Integer.toString(p.x) + " " + Integer.toString(p.y); System.out.println(message); try{ byte[] data = message.getBytes("UTF-8"); //InetAddress ia = InetAddress.getByName(ds.host); String convertedMessage = new String(data, "UTF-8"); System.out.println("The converted string is " + convertedMessage); DatagramPacket dp = new DatagramPacket(data, data.length); System.out.println(ds.getPort()); //System.out.println(message); //System.out.println(ds.toString()); //ds.send(dp); /*System.out.println("2Sending a packet containing data: " +data +" to " + ia + ":" + d.port + "...");*/ } catch (Exception e){ e.printStackTrace(); } } } class L2 extends MouseMotionAdapter { public void mouseDragged(MouseEvent me) { addPoint(me.getPoint()); Point p = me.getPoint(); String message = Integer.toString(p.x) + " " + Integer.toString(p.y); //System.out.println(message); } } } class Reciever extends Thread{ DatagramSocket ds; byte[] buffer; Reciever(DatagramSocket ds){ this.ds = ds; buffer = new byte[65507]; } public void run(){ try { DatagramPacket packet = new DatagramPacket(buffer, buffer.length); while(true){ try { ds.receive(packet); String s = new String(packet.getData()); System.out.println(s); } catch (Exception e) { e.printStackTrace(); } } } catch (Exception e) { e.printStackTrace(); } } }

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How to implement smooth flocking

- by Craig

I'm working on a simple survival game, avoid the big guy and chase the the small guys to stay alive for as long as possible. I have taken the chase and evade example from MSDN create and drawn 20 mice on the screen. I want the small guys to flock when they arent evading. They are doing this, but it isnt as smooth as I would like it to be. How do i make the movement smoother? Its very jittery.# Below is what I have going at the moment, flocking code is within the IF statement, when it isnt set to evading. Any help would be greatly appreciated! :) namespace ChaseAndEvade { class MouseSprite { public enum MouseAiState { // evading the cat Evading, // the mouse can't see the "cat", and it's wandering around. Wander } // how fast can the mouse move? public float MaxMouseSpeed = 4.5f; // and how fast can it turn? public float MouseTurnSpeed = 0.20f; // MouseEvadeDistance controls the distance at which the mouse will flee from // cat. If the mouse is further than "MouseEvadeDistance" pixels away, he will // consider himself safe. public float MouseEvadeDistance = 100.0f; // this constant is similar to TankHysteresis. The value is larger than the // tank's hysteresis value because the mouse is faster than the tank: with a // higher velocity, small fluctuations are much more visible. public float MouseHysteresis = 60.0f; public Texture2D mouseTexture; public Vector2 mouseTextureCenter; public Vector2 mousePosition; public MouseAiState mouseState = MouseAiState.Wander; public float mouseOrientation; public Vector2 mouseWanderDirection; int separationImpact = 4; int cohesionImpact = 6; int alignmentImpact = 2; int sensorDistance = 50; public void UpdateMouse(Vector2 position, MouseSprite [] mice, int numberMice, int index) { Vector2 catPosition = position; int enemies = numberMice; // first, calculate how far away the mouse is from the cat, and use that // information to decide how to behave. If they are too close, the mouse // will switch to "active" mode - fleeing. if they are far apart, the mouse // will switch to "idle" mode, where it roams around the screen. // we use a hysteresis constant in the decision making process, as described // in the accompanying doc file. float distanceFromCat = Vector2.Distance(mousePosition, catPosition); // the cat is a safe distance away, so the mouse should idle: if (distanceFromCat > MouseEvadeDistance + MouseHysteresis) { mouseState = MouseAiState.Wander; } // the cat is too close; the mouse should run: else if (distanceFromCat < MouseEvadeDistance - MouseHysteresis) { mouseState = MouseAiState.Evading; } // if neither of those if blocks hit, we are in the "hysteresis" range, // and the mouse will continue doing whatever it is doing now. // the mouse will move at a different speed depending on what state it // is in. when idle it won't move at full speed, but when actively evading // it will move as fast as it can. this variable is used to track which // speed the mouse should be moving. float currentMouseSpeed; // the second step of the Update is to change the mouse's orientation based // on its current state. if (mouseState == MouseAiState.Evading) { // If the mouse is "active," it is trying to evade the cat. The evasion // behavior is accomplished by using the TurnToFace function to turn // towards a point on a straight line facing away from the cat. In other // words, if the cat is point A, and the mouse is point B, the "seek // point" is C. // C // B // A Vector2 seekPosition = 2 * mousePosition - catPosition; // Use the TurnToFace function, which we introduced in the AI Series 1: // Aiming sample, to turn the mouse towards the seekPosition. Now when // the mouse moves forward, it'll be trying to move in a straight line // away from the cat. mouseOrientation = ChaseAndEvadeGame.TurnToFace(mousePosition, seekPosition, mouseOrientation, MouseTurnSpeed); // set currentMouseSpeed to MaxMouseSpeed - the mouse should run as fast // as it can. currentMouseSpeed = MaxMouseSpeed; } else { // if the mouse isn't trying to evade the cat, it should just meander // around the screen. we'll use the Wander function, which the mouse and // tank share, to accomplish this. mouseWanderDirection and // mouseOrientation are passed by ref so that the wander function can // modify them. for more information on ref parameters, see // http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/14akc2c7(VS.80).aspx ChaseAndEvadeGame.Wander(mousePosition, ref mouseWanderDirection, ref mouseOrientation, MouseTurnSpeed); // if the mouse is wandering, it should only move at 25% of its maximum // speed. currentMouseSpeed = .25f * MaxMouseSpeed; Vector2 separate = Vector2.Zero; Vector2 moveCloser = Vector2.Zero; Vector2 moveAligned = Vector2.Zero; // What the AI does when it sees other AIs for (int j = 0; j < enemies; j++) { if (index != j) { // Calculate a vector towards another AI Vector2 separation = mice[index].mousePosition - mice[j].mousePosition; // Only react if other AI is within a certain distance if ((separation.Length() < this.sensorDistance) & (separation.Length()> 0) ) { moveAligned += mice[j].mouseWanderDirection; float distance = Math.Abs(separation.Length()); if (distance == 0) distance = 1; moveCloser += mice[j].mousePosition; separation.Normalize(); separate += separation / distance; } } } if (moveAligned.LengthSquared() != 0) { moveAligned.Normalize(); } if (moveCloser.LengthSquared() != 0) { moveCloser.Normalize(); } moveCloser /= enemies; mice[index].mousePosition += (separate * separationImpact) + (moveCloser * cohesionImpact) + (moveAligned * alignmentImpact); } // The final step is to move the mouse forward based on its current // orientation. First, we construct a "heading" vector from the orientation // angle. To do this, we'll use Cosine and Sine to tell us the x and y // components of the heading vector. See the accompanying doc for more // information. Vector2 heading = new Vector2( (float)Math.Cos(mouseOrientation), (float)Math.Sin(mouseOrientation)); // by multiplying the heading and speed, we can get a velocity vector. the // velocity vector is then added to the mouse's current position, moving him // forward. mousePosition += heading * currentMouseSpeed; } } }

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Early Adopters of Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Report Agility and Productivity Benefits

- by Anand Akela

Earlier this month at the Oracle Open World 2012, we celebrated the first anniversary of Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c . Early adopters of Oracle Enterprise manager 12c have benefited from its federated self-service access to complete application stacks, automated provisioning, elastic scalability, metering, and charge-back capabilities. Crimson Consulting Group recently interviewed multiple early adopters of Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c and captured their finding in a white Paper "Real-World Benefits of Private Cloud: Early Adopters of Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Report Agility and Productivity Gains". Here is summary of the finding :- On October 25th at 10 AM pacific time, Kirk Bangstad from the Crimson Consulting group will join us in a live webcast and share what learnt from the early adopters of Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c. Don't miss this chance to hear how private clouds could impact your business and ask questions from our experts. Webcast: Real-World Benefits of Private Cloud Early Adopters of Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Report Agility and Productivity Benefits Date: Thursday, October 25, 2012 Time: 10:00 AM PDT | 1:00 PM EDT Register Today All attendees will receive the White Paper: Real-World Benefits of Private Cloud: Early Adopters of Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Report Agility and Productivity Gains. Stay Connected Twitter | Face book | You Tube | Linked in | Newsletter

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Change collision action

- by PatrickR

I have a collision detection and its working fine, the problem is, that whenever my "bird" is hitting a "cloud", the cloud dissapers and i get some points. The same happens for the "sol" which it should, but not with the clouds. How can this be changed ? ive tryed a lot, but can seem to figger it out. Collision Code - (void)update:(ccTime)dt { bird.position = ccpAdd(bird.position, skyVelocity); NSMutableArray *projectilesToDelete = [[NSMutableArray alloc] init]; for (CCSprite *bird in _projectiles) { bird.anchorPoint = ccp(0, 0); CGRect absoluteBox = CGRectMake(bird.position.x, bird.position.y, [bird boundingBox].size.width, [bird boundingBox].size.height); NSMutableArray *targetsToDelete = [[NSMutableArray alloc] init]; for (CCSprite *cloudSprite in _targets) { cloudSprite.anchorPoint = ccp(0, 0); CGRect absoluteBox = CGRectMake(cloudSprite.position.x, cloudSprite.position.y, [cloudSprite boundingBox].size.width, [cloudSprite boundingBox].size.height); if (CGRectIntersectsRect([bird boundingBox], [cloudSprite boundingBox])) { [targetsToDelete addObject:cloudSprite]; } } for (CCSprite *solSprite in _targets) { solSprite.anchorPoint = ccp(0, 0); CGRect absoluteBox = CGRectMake(solSprite.position.x, solSprite.position.y, [solSprite boundingBox].size.width, [solSprite boundingBox].size.height); if (CGRectIntersectsRect([bird boundingBox], [solSprite boundingBox])) { [targetsToDelete addObject:solSprite]; score += 50/2; [scoreLabel setString:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%d", score]]; } } // NÅR SKYEN BLIVER RAMT AF FUGLEN for (CCSprite *cloudSprite in targetsToDelete) { //[_targets removeObject:cloudSprite]; //[self removeChild:cloudSprite cleanup:YES]; } // NÅR SOLEN BLIVER RAMT AF FUGLEN for (CCSprite *solSprite in targetsToDelete) { [_targets removeObject:solSprite]; [self removeChild:solSprite cleanup:YES]; } if (targetsToDelete.count > 0) { [projectilesToDelete addObject:bird]; } [targetsToDelete release]; } // NÅR FUGLEN BLIVER RAMT AF ALT ANDET for (CCSprite *bird in projectilesToDelete) { //[_projectiles removeObject:bird]; //[self removeChild:bird cleanup:YES]; } [projectilesToDelete release]; }

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Solaris at LISA 2011

- by dminer

As is our custom, the Solaris team will be out in force at the USENIX LISA conference; this year it's in Boston so it's sort of a home game for me for a change. The big event we'll have is Tuesday, December 6, the Oracle Solaris 11 Summit Day. We'll be covering deployment, ZFS, Networking, Virtualization, Security, Clustering, and how Oracle apps run best on Solaris 11. We've done this the past couple of years and it's always a very full day.On Wednesday, December 7, we've got a couple of BOF sessions scheduled back-to-back. At 7:30 we'll have the ever-popular engineering panel, with all of us who are speaking at Tuesday's summit day there for a free-flowing discussion of all things Solaris. Following that, Bart & I are hosting a second BOF at 9:30 to talk more about deployment for clouds and traditional data centers.Also, on Wednesday and Thursday we'll have a booth at the exhibition where there'll be demos and just a general chance to talk with various Solaris staff from engineering and product management.The conference program looks great and I look forward to seeing you there!

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PASS Summit 2010 BI Workshop Feedbacks

- by Davide Mauri

As many other speakers already did, I’d like to share with the SQL Community the feedback of my PASS Summit 2010 Workshop. For those who were not there, my workshop was the “BI From A-Z” and the main objective of that workshop was to introduce people in the BI world not only from a technical point of view but insist a lot on the methodological and “engineered” approach. The will to put more engineering in the IT (and specially in the BI field) is something that has been growing stronger and stronger in me every day for of this last 5 years since is simply envy the fact that Airbus, Fincatieri, BMW (just to name a few) can create very complex machine “just” using putting people together and giving them some rules to follow (Of course this is an oversimplification but I think you get what I mean). The key point of engineering is that, after having defined the project blueprint, you have the possibility to give to a huge number of people, the rules to follow, the correct tools in order to implement the rules easily and semi-automatically and a way to measure the quality of the results. Could this be done in IT? Very big question, so my scope is now limited to BI. So that’s the main point of my workshop: and entry-level approach to BI (level was 200) in order to allow attendees to know the basics, to understand what tools they should use for which purpose and, above all, a set of rules and tools in order to make a BI solution scalable in terms of people working on it, while still maintaining a very good quality. All done not focusing only on the practice but explaining the theory behind to see how it can help *a lot* to build a correct solution despite the technology used to implement it. The idea is to reach a point where more then 70% of the work done to create a BI solution can be reused even if technologies changes. This is a very demanding challenge nowadays with the coming of Denali and its column-aligned storage and the shiny-new DAX language. As you may understand I was looking forward to get the feedback since you may have noticed that there’s a lot of “architectural” stuff in IT but really nothing on “engineering”. So how the session could be perceived by the attendees was really unknown to me. The feedback could also give a good indication if the need of more “engineering” is something I feel only by myself or if is something more broad. I’m very happy to be able to say that the overall score of 4.75 put my workshop in the TOP 20 session (on near 200 sessions)! Here’s the detailed evaluations: How would you rate the usefulness of the information presented in your day-to-day environment? 4.75 Answer: # of Responses 3 1 4 12 5 42 How would you rate the Speaker's presentation skills? 4.80 Answer: # of Responses 3 : 1 4 : 9 5 : 45 How would you rate the Speaker's knowledge of the subject? 4.95 Answer: # of Responses 4 : 3 5 : 52 How would you rate the accuracy of the session title, description and experience level to the actual session? 4.75 Answer: # of Responses 3 : 2 4 : 10 5 : 43 How would you rate the amount of time allocated to cover the topic/session? 4.44 Answer: # of Responses 3 : 7 4 : 17 5 : 31 How would you rate the quality of the presentation materials? 4.62 Answer: # of Responses 4 : 21 5 : 34 The comments where all very positive. Many of them asked for more time on the subject (or to shorten the very last topics). I’ll make treasure of these comments and will review the content accordingly. We’ll organize a two-day classes on this topic, where also more examples will be shown and some arguments will be explained more deeply. I’d just like to answer a comment that asks how much of what I shown is “universally applicable”. I can tell you that all of our BI project follow these rules and they’ve been applied to different markets (Insurance, Fashion, GDO) with different people and different teams and they allowed us to be “Adaptive” against the customer. The more the rules are well defined and the more there are tools that supports their implementations, the easier is to add new people to the project and to add or change solution features. Think of a car. How come that almost any mechanic can help you to fix a problem? Because they know what to expect. Because there a rules that allow them to identify the problem without having to discover each time how the car has been implemented build. And this is of course also true for car upgrades/improvements. Last but not least: thanks a lot to everyone for coming!

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Restoring databases to a set drive and directory

- by okeofs

Restoring databases to a set drive and directory Introduction Often people say that necessity is the mother of invention. In this case I was faced with the dilemma of having to restore several databases, with multiple ‘ndf’ files, and having to restore them with different physical file names, drives and directories on servers other than the servers from which they originated. As most of us would do, I went to Google to see if I could find some code to achieve this task and found some interesting snippets on Pinal Dave’s website. Naturally, I had to take it further than the code snippet, HOWEVER it was a great place to start. Creating a temp table to hold database file details First off, I created a temp table which would hold the details of the individual data files within the database. Although there are a plethora of fields (within the temp table below), I utilize LogicalName only within this example. The temporary table structure may be seen below: create table #tmp ( LogicalName nvarchar(128) ,PhysicalName nvarchar(260) ,Type char(1) ,FileGroupName nvarchar(128) ,Size numeric(20,0) ,MaxSize numeric(20,0), Fileid tinyint, CreateLSN numeric(25,0), DropLSN numeric(25, 0), UniqueID uniqueidentifier, ReadOnlyLSN numeric(25,0), ReadWriteLSN numeric(25,0), BackupSizeInBytes bigint, SourceBlocSize int, FileGroupId int, LogGroupGUID uniqueidentifier, DifferentialBaseLSN numeric(25,0), DifferentialBaseGUID uniqueidentifier, IsReadOnly bit, IsPresent bit, TDEThumbPrint varchar(50) ) We now declare and populate a variable(@path), setting the variable to the path to our SOURCE database backup. declare @path varchar(50) set @path = 'P:\DATA\MYDATABASE.bak' From this point, we insert the file details of our database into the temp table. Note that we do so by utilizing a restore statement HOWEVER doing so in ‘filelistonly’ mode. insert #tmp EXEC ('restore filelistonly from disk = ''' + @path + '''') At this point, I depart from what I gleaned from Pinal Dave. I now instantiate a few more local variables. The use of each variable will be evident within the cursor (which follows): Declare @RestoreString as Varchar(max) Declare @NRestoreString as NVarchar(max) Declare @LogicalName as varchar(75) Declare @counter as int Declare @rows as int set @counter = 1 select @rows = COUNT(*) from #tmp -- Count the number of records in the temp -- table Declaring and populating the cursor At this point I do realize that many people are cringing about the use of a cursor. Being an Oracle professional as well, I have learnt that there is a time and place for cursors. I would remind the reader that the data that will be read into the cursor is from a local temp table and as such, any locking of the records (within the temp table) is not really an issue. DECLARE MY_CURSOR Cursor FOR Select LogicalName From #tmp Parsing the logical names from within the cursor. A small caveat that works in our favour, is that the first logical name (of our database) is the logical name of the primary data file (.mdf). Other files, except for the very last logical name, belong to secondary data files. The last logical name is that of our database log file. I now open my cursor and populate the variable @RestoreString Open My_Cursor set @RestoreString = 'RESTORE DATABASE [MYDATABASE] FROM DISK = N''P:\DATA\ MYDATABASE.bak''' + ' with ' We now fetch the first record from the temp table. Fetch NEXT FROM MY_Cursor INTO @LogicalName While there are STILL records left within the cursor, we dynamically build our restore string. Note that we are using concatenation to create ‘one big restore executable string’. Note also that the target physical file name is hardwired, as is the target directory. While (@@FETCH_STATUS <> -1) BEGIN IF (@@FETCH_STATUS <> -2) -- As long as there are no rows missing select @RestoreString = case when @counter = 1 then -- This is the mdf file @RestoreString + 'move N''' + @LogicalName + '''' + ' TO N’’X:\DATA1\'+ @LogicalName + '.mdf' + '''' + ', ' -- OK, if it passes through here we are dealing with an .ndf file -- Note that Counter must be greater than 1 and less than the number of rows. when @counter > 1 and @counter < @rows then -- These are the ndf file(s) @RestoreString + 'move N''' + @LogicalName + '''' + ' TO N’’X:\DATA1\'+ @LogicalName + '.ndf' + '''' + ', ' -- OK, if it passes through here we are dealing with the log file When @LogicalName like '%log%' then @RestoreString + 'move N''' + @LogicalName + '''' + ' TO N’’X:\DATA1\'+ @LogicalName + '.ldf' +'''' end --Increment the counter set @counter = @counter + 1 FETCH NEXT FROM MY_CURSOR INTO @LogicalName END At this point we have populated the varchar(max) variable @RestoreString with a concatenation of all the necessary file names. What we now need to do is to run the sp_executesql stored procedure, to effect the restore. First, we must place our ‘concatenated string’ into an nvarchar based variable. Obviously this will only work as long as the length of @RestoreString is less than varchar(max) / 2. set @NRestoreString = @RestoreString EXEC sp_executesql @NRestoreString Upon completion of this step, the database should be restored to the server. I now close and deallocate the cursor, and to be clean, I would also drop my temp table. CLOSE MY_CURSOR DEALLOCATE MY_CURSOR GO Conclusion Restoration of databases on different servers with different physical names and on different drives are a fact of life. Through the use of a few variables and a simple cursor, we may achieve an efficient and effective way to achieve this task.

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Oracle Buys BigMachines - Adds Leading Configure, Price and Quote (CPQ) Cloud to the Oracle Cloud to Enable Smarter Selling

- by Richard Lefebvre

News Facts Oracle today announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire BigMachines, a leading cloud-based Configure, Price and Quote (CPQ) solution provider. BigMachines’ CPQ Cloud accelerates the conversion of sales opportunities into revenue by automating the sales order process with guided selling, dynamic pricing, and an easy-to-use workflow approval process, accessible anywhere, on any device. Companies that use sales automation technology often rely on manual, cumbersome and disconnected processes to convert opportunities into orders. This creates errors, adds costs, delays revenue, and degrades the customer experience. BigMachines’ CPQ cloud extends sales automation to include the creation of an optimal quote, which enables sales personnel to easily configure and price complex products, select the best options, promotions and deal terms, and include up sell and renewals, all using automated workflows. In combination with Oracle’s enterprise-grade cloud solutions, including Marketing, Sales, Social, Commerce and Service Clouds, Oracle and BigMachines will create an end-to-end smarter selling cloud solution so sales personnel are more productive, customers are more satisfied, and companies grow revenue faster. More information on this announcement can be found at http://www.oracle.com/bigmachines Supporting Quotes “The fundamental goals of smarter selling are to provide sales teams with the information, access, and insights they need to maximize revenue opportunities and execute on all phases of the sales cycle,” said Thomas Kurian, Executive Vice President, Oracle Development. “By adding BigMachines’ CPQ Cloud to the Oracle Cloud, companies will be able to drive more revenue and increase customer satisfaction with a seamlessly integrated process across marketing and sales, pricing and quoting, and fulfillment and service.” “BigMachines has developed leading CPQ solutions that serve companies of all sizes across multiple industries,” said David Bonnette, BigMachines’ CEO. “Together with Oracle, we expect to provide a complete cloud solution to manage sales processes and deliver exceptional customer experiences.” Supporting Resources About Oracle and BigMachines General Presentation Customer and Partner Letter FAQ

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Is There a Cloud Over OpenWorld?

- by Tony Berk

If you have been to OpenWorld in the past, you know it can be overwhelming or at least a bit "large." If this is your first time at OpenWorld, get ready! You are in for a big (or I should say HUGE) treat. The first thing you'll notice when you get to San Francisco is there are a lot of people, buses with "Oracle" posters, large exhibit halls filled with demos, games and tchotchkes from vendors with hot new solutions, and then there are the sessions. Yes, in fact there are over 2000 sessions. How can you possibly sort through 2000 sessions to find the best 20 or so for you? Which are the 1% for you? We will try to help with some insight over the next few weeks. I'm going start at the highest level. Up in the Clouds! Since I know many people are looking for an update on The Oracle Cloud. We will drill down into the cloud and other topics for CRM and Customer Experience sessions in the next set of posts. Below is a list of some of the Oracle executive keynotes during OpenWorld highlighting The Oracle Cloud and applications related topics (the full list is here). In these sessions you will get details on Oracle's strategy and how Oracle is changing the industry to help our customers be more efficient, effective and innovative. Sunday, September 30 6:00pm - 7:00pm Larry Ellison: Hardware and Software, Engineered to Work Together: Why it's a Different Approach Tuesday, October 2 8:45am - 9:45am Thomas Kurian: The Oracle Cloud: Oracle's Cloud Platform and Application's Strategy Tuesday, October 2 3:30pm - 4:30pm Larry Ellison: The Oracle Cloud: Where Social is Built in Thursday, October 4 9:45am - 10:45am Mark Hurd: See More, Act Faster: Oracle Business Analytics We encourage you to also join the keynotes on the Oracle Database and Cloud Infrastructure and the fascinating partner keynotes, as well. Check the full list on the OpenWorld site. Oh, if you haven't registered yet, what are you waiting for? OpenWorld Registration Details.

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New whitepaper: Evolution from the Traditional Data Center to Exalogic: An Operational Perspective

- by Javier Puerta

IT organizations are struggling with the need to balance the day-to-day concerns of data center management against the business level requirements to deliver long-term value. This balancing act has proven difficult and inefficient: systems and application management tools are resource intensive and traditional infrastructure management architectures have developed over time on a project by project basis. These traditional management systems consist of multiple tools that require administrators to waste time performing too many steps to handle routine administrative tasks. Operational efficiency and agility in your enterprise are directly linked to the capabilities provided by the management layer across the entire stack, from the application, middleware, operating system, compute, network and storage. Only when this end to end capability is provided will we experience the full benefit of a scalable, efficient, responsive and secure datacenter. Managing Exalogic is substantially less complex and error prone than managing traditional systems built from individually sourced, multi-vendor components because Exalogic is designed to be administered and maintained as a single, integrated system (Figure 1). It is at the forefront of the industry-wide shift away from costly and inferior one-off platforms toward private clouds and Engineered Systems. Read the full whitepaper "Evolution from the Traditional Data Center to Exalogic: An Operational Perspective". Full document is available for download at the Exadata Partner Community Collaborative Workspace (for community members only - if you get an error message, please register for the Community first).

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New Whitepaper: Evolution from the Traditional Data Center to Exalogic: An Operational Perspective

- by Javier Puerta

IT organizations are struggling with the need to balance the day-to-day concerns of data center management against the business level requirements to deliver long-term value. This balancing act has proven difficult and inefficient: systems and application management tools are resource intensive and traditional infrastructure management architectures have developed over time on a project by project basis. These traditional management systems consist of multiple tools that require administrators to waste time performing too many steps to handle routine administrative tasks. Operational efficiency and agility in your enterprise are directly linked to the capabilities provided by the management layer across the entire stack, from the application, middleware, operating system, compute, network and storage. Only when this end to end capability is provided will we experience the full benefit of a scalable, efficient, responsive and secure datacenter. Managing Exalogic is substantially less complex and error prone than managing traditional systems built from individually sourced, multi-vendor components because Exalogic is designed to be administered and maintained as a single, integrated system (Figure 1). It is at the forefront of the industry-wide shift away from costly and inferior one-off platforms toward private clouds and Engineered Systems. Read the full whitepaper "Evolution from the Traditional Data Center to Exalogic: An Operational Perspective". Full document is available for download at the Exadata Partner Community Collaborative Workspace (for community members only - if you get an error message, please register for the Community first).

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Call Webservices…Maybe!?

- by MOSSLover

So I have been doing preliminary work for my iOS talk for a while, but did not get into the meat of the project until recently. One day I envision my talk uploading pictures from a camera on an iPhone or iPad into SharePoint and telling people how I did it. As you know with my Silverlight talk and any new technology, building new talks with new technologies always ends up with some pain points that you must jump over just to grab data. So step 1 always starts out with how do we even access a webservice using the new technology. I started out watching every single SPC video available on oAuth and Rest Webservices in SharePoint 2013. I also sent an email to Eric Shupps about some REST and 2013 examples. The videos further confused me, because all the videos were on SharePoint hosted apps (provider and autohosted). I did not want to create a SharePoint hosted app, but instead a mobile app outside of the SharePoint context altogether. Nick Swan sent me his code and it was great for a starting point on how the JSON calls would look like on iOS, but I was still missing a piece. Nick does a great job on showing how to use the REST/JSON calls in a non-MS tech, however his presentation uses the SharePoint context and can grab the SPAppToken. At this point I had to ask the question how do you grab the SAML token outside of SharePoint 2013 in iOS using Objective-C? After reading all the MSDN documentation, some documentation on Restkit and Objective-C/oAuth calls, and some SharePoint 2013 blog post my head was swimming. I was dreaming about REST and iOS in SharePoint 2013. SAML tokens were taunting me. I was nowhere near understanding 2013. I started talking to my friend, Pedro Jimenez, who is also playing with Objective-C and went to SPC. He found me a couple good MSDN posts with REST/JSON calls that basically showed the accessToken was all I needed (at this point I was still thinking iOS needed to be a provider hosted app which is wrong). So then again I had to ask the SAML token question…How do you get a SAML token outside of SharePoint without the TokenHelper class? So then I started talking to people and thinking why do I need to completely avoid TokenHelper…The solution in concept is basically create a webservice in Azure wrapped into a Provider Hosted App in SharePoint. Wictor Wilen created a helper webservice in the following blog post: http://www.wictorwilen.se/Post/How-to-do-active-authentication-to-Office-365-and-SharePoint-Online.aspx. So now I have to basically stand up the webservice, the SharePoint app wrapper, and then use Restkit to call the first webservice to grab the token and then the second webservice to pass in the token and grab some SharePoint data. What this means is that you can no longer just pass credentials into SharePoint webservices and get data back. You have to pass in a SAML token with every single webservice call to SharePoint. The theory is that this token is associated with the permissions the app can handle (read, write, whatever). It seems like a ton of pain and a lot of work, but this is step 1 in my crusade to pull some piece of data into iOS from SharePoint and show people how to do it themselves. In the upcoming months hopefully I can get halfway to my end goal. Technorati Tags: SharePoint 2013,REST,oAuth,Objective-C,iOS

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