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• Silverlight Cream for February 23, 2011 -- #1051

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Ian T. Lackey, Kevin Hoffman, Kunal Chowdhury, Jesse Liberty(-2-), Page Brooks, Deborah Kurata(-2-), and Paul Sheriff. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Building a Radar Control in Silverlight–Part 2" Page Brooks WP7: "Reactive Drag and Drop Part 2" Jesse Liberty Expression Blend: "Simple RadioButtonList and / or CheckBoxList in Silverlight Using a Behavior" Ian T. Lackey Shoutouts: Kunal Chowdhury delivered a full day session on Silverlight at the Microsoft Imagine Cup Championship event in Mumbai... you can Download Microsoft Imagine Cup Session PPT on Silverlight Dennis Doomen has appeared in my blog any number of times... he's looking for some assistance: Get me on stage on the Developer Days 2011 Steve Wortham posted An Interview with Jeff Wilcox From SilverlightCream.com: Simple RadioButtonList and / or CheckBoxList in Silverlight Using a Behavior Ian T. Lackey bemoans the lack of a RadioButtonList or CheckBoxList, and jumps into Blend to show us how to make one using a behavior... and the code is available too! WP7 for iPhone and Android Developers - Introduction to XAML and Silverlight Continuing his series at SilvelightShow for iPhone and Android devs, Kevin Hoffman has part 2 up getting into the UI with an intro to XAML and Silverlight. Day 1: Working with Telerik Silverlight RadControls Kunal Chowdhury kicked my tires that I had missed his Telerik control series... He's detailing his experience getting up to speed with the Silverlight RadControls. Day 1 is intro, what there is, installing, stuff like that. Part 2 continues: Day 2: Working with BusyIndicator of Telerik Silverlight RadControls, followed (so far) by part 3: Day 3: Working with Masked TextBox of Telerik Silverlight RadControls Reactive Drag and Drop Part 2 Jesse Liberty has his 7th part about Rx up ... and the 2nd part of Reactive Drag and Drop, and oh yeah... it's for WP7 as well! Yet Another Podcast #25–Glenn Block / WCF Next Jesse Liberty has Glenn Block on stage for his Yet Another Podcast number 25... talking WCF with Glenn. Building a Radar Control in Silverlight–Part 2 Page Brooks has part 2 of his 'radar' control for Silverlight up... I don't know where I'd use this, but it's darned cool... and the live demo is amazing. Silverlight Charting: Setting Colors Deborah Kurata is looking at the charting controls now, and how to set colors. She begins with a previous post on charts and adds color definitions to that post. Silverlight Charting: Setting the Tooltip Deborah Kurata next gets into formatting the tooltip you can get when the user hovers over a chart to make it make more sense to your user 'Content' is NOT 'Text' in XAML Paul Sheriff discusses the Content property of XAML controls and how it can be pretty much any other XAML you want it to be, then goes on to show some nice examples. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Azure, don't give me multiple VMs, give me one elastic VM

  - by FransBouma

  Yesterday, Microsoft revealed new major features for Windows Azure (see ScottGu's post). It all looks shiny and great, but after reading most of the material describing the new features, I still find the overall idea behind all of it flawed: why should I care on how much VMs my web app runs? Isn't that a problem to solve for the Windows Azure engineers / software? And what if I need the file system, why can't I simply get a virtual filesystem ? To illustrate my point, let's use a real example: a product website with a customer system/database and next to it a support site with accompanying database. Both are written in .NET, using ASP.NET and use a SQL Server database each. The product website offers files to download by customers, very simple. You have a couple of options to host these websites: Buy a server, place it in a rack at an ISP and run the sites on that server Use 'shared hosting' with an ISP, which means your sites' appdomains are running on the same machine, as well as the files stored, and the databases are hosted in the same server as the other shared databases. Hire a VM, install your OS of choice at an ISP, and host the sites on that VM, basically the same as the first option, except you don't have a physical server At some cloud-vendor, either host the sites 'shared' or in a VM. See above. With all of those options, scalability is a problem, even the cloud-based ones, though not due to the same reasons: The physical server solution has the obvious problem that if you need more power, you need to buy a bigger server or more servers which requires you to add replication and other overhead Shared hosting solutions are almost always capped on memory usage / traffic and database size: if your sites get too big, you have to move out of the shared hosting environment and start over with one of the other solutions The VM solution, be it a VM at an ISP or 'in the cloud' at e.g. Windows Azure or Amazon, in theory allows scaling out by simply instantiating more VMs, however that too introduces the same overhead problems as with the physical servers: suddenly more than 1 instance runs your sites. If a cloud vendor offers its services in the form of VMs, you won't gain much over having a VM at some ISP: the main problems you have to work around are still there: when you spin up more than one VM, your application must be completely stateless at any moment, including the DB sub system, because what's in memory in instance 1 might not be in memory in instance 2. This might sounds trivial but it's not. A lot of the websites out there started rather small: they were perfectly runnable on a single machine with normal memory and CPU power. After all, you don't need a big machine to run a website with even thousands of users a day. Moving these sites to a multi-VM environment will cause a problem: all the in-memory state they use, all the multi-page transitions they use while keeping state across the transition, they can't do that anymore like they did that on a single machine: state is something of the past, you have to store every byte of state in either a DB or in a viewstate or in a cookie somewhere so with the next request, all state information is available through the request, as nothing is kept in-memory. Our example uses a bunch of files in a file system. Using multiple VMs will require that these files move to a cloud storage system which is mounted in each VM so we don't have to store the files on each VM. This might require different file paths, but this change should be minor. What's perhaps less minor is the maintenance procedure in place on the new type of cloud storage used: instead of ftp-ing into a VM, you might have to update the files using different ways / tools. All in all this makes moving an existing website which was written for an environment that's based around a VM (namely .NET with its CLR) overly cumbersome and problematic: it forces you to refactor your website system to be able to be used 'in the cloud', which is caused by the limited way how e.g. Windows Azure offers its cloud services: in blocks of VMs. Offer a scalable, flexible VM which extends with my needs Instead, cloud vendors should offer simply one VM to me. On that VM I run the websites, store my DB and my files. As it's a virtual machine, how this machine is actually ran on physical hardware (e.g. partitioned), I don't care, as that's the problem for the cloud vendor to solve. If I need more resources, e.g. I have more traffic to my server, way more visitors per day, the VM stretches, like I bought a bigger box. This frees me from the problem which comes with multiple VMs: I don't have any refactoring to do at all: I can simply build my website as if it runs on my local hardware server, upload it to the VM offered by the cloud vendor, install it on the VM and I'm done. "But that might require changes to windows!" Yes, but Microsoft is Windows. Windows Azure is their service, they can make whatever change to what they offer to make it look like it's windows. Yet, they're stuck, like Amazon, in thinking in VMs, which forces developers to 'think ahead' and gamble whether they would need to migrate to a cloud with multiple VMs in the future or not. Which comes down to: gamble whether they should invest time in code / architecture which they might never need. (YAGNI anyone?) So the VM we're talking about, is that a low-level VM which runs a guest OS, or is that VM a different kind of VM? The flexible VM: .NET's CLR ? My example websites are ASP.NET based, which means they run inside a .NET appdomain, on the .NET CLR, which is a VM. The only physical OS resource the sites need is the file system, however this too is accessed through .NET. In short: all the websites see is what .NET allows the websites to see, the world as the websites know it is what .NET shows them and lets them access. How the .NET appdomain is run physically, that's the concern of .NET, not mine. This begs the question why Windows Azure doesn't offer virtual appdomains? Or better: .NET environments which look like one machine but could be physically multiple machines. In such an environment, no change has to be made to the websites to migrate them from a local machine or own server to the cloud to get proper scaling: the .NET VM will simply scale with the need: more memory needed, more CPU power needed, it stretches. What it offers to the application running inside the appdomain is simply increasing, but not fragmented: all resources are available to the application: this means that the problem of how to scale is back to where it should be: with the cloud vendor. "Yeah, great, but what about the databases?" The .NET application communicates with the database server through a .NET ADO.NET provider. Where the database is located is not a problem of the appdomain: the ADO.NET provider has to solve that. I.o.w.: we can host the databases in an environment which offers itself as a single resource and is accessible through one connection string without replication overhead on the outside, and use that environment inside the .NET VM as if it was a single DB. But what about memory replication and other problems? This environment isn't simple, at least not for the cloud vendor. But it is simple for the customer who wants to run his sites in that cloud: no work needed. No refactoring needed of existing code. Upload it, run it. Perhaps I'm dreaming and what I described above isn't possible. Yet, I think if cloud vendors don't move into that direction, what they're offering isn't interesting: it doesn't solve a problem at all, it simply offers a way to instantiate more VMs with the guest OS of choice at the cost of me needing to refactor my website code so it can run in the straight jacket form factor dictated by the cloud vendor. Let's not kid ourselves here: most of us developers will never build a website which needs a truck load of VMs to run it: almost all websites created by developers can run on just a few VMs at most. Yet, the most expensive change is right at the start: moving from one to two VMs. As soon as you have refactored your website code to run across multiple VMs, adding another one is just as easy as clicking a mouse button. But that first step, that's the problem here and as it's right there at the beginning of scaling the website, it's particularly strange that cloud vendors refuse to solve that problem and leave it to the developers to solve that. Which makes migrating 'to the cloud' particularly expensive.

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• Plan Operator Tuesday round-up

  - by Rob Farley

  Eighteen posts for T-SQL Tuesday #43 this month, discussing Plan Operators. I put them together and made the following clickable plan. It’s 1000px wide, so I hope you have a monitor wide enough. Let me explain this plan for you (people’s names are the links to the articles on their blogs – the same links as in the plan above). It was clearly a SELECT statement. Wayne Sheffield (@dbawayne) wrote about that, so we start with a SELECT physical operator, leveraging the logical operator Wayne Sheffield. The SELECT operator calls the Paul White operator, discussed by Jason Brimhall (@sqlrnnr) in his post. The Paul White operator is quite remarkable, and can consume three streams of data. Let’s look at those streams. The first pulls data from a Table Scan – Boris Hristov (@borishristov)’s post – using parallel threads (Bradley Ball – @sqlballs) that pull the data eagerly through a Table Spool (Oliver Asmus – @oliverasmus). A scalar operation is also performed on it, thanks to Jeffrey Verheul (@devjef)’s Compute Scalar operator. The second stream of data applies Evil (I figured that must mean a procedural TVF, but could’ve been anything), courtesy of Jason Strate (@stratesql). It performs this Evil on the merging of parallel streams (Steve Jones – @way0utwest), which suck data out of a Switch (Paul White – @sql_kiwi). This Switch operator is consuming data from up to four lookups, thanks to Kalen Delaney (@sqlqueen), Rick Krueger (@dataogre), Mickey Stuewe (@sqlmickey) and Kathi Kellenberger (@auntkathi). Unfortunately Kathi’s name is a bit long and has been truncated, just like in real plans. The last stream performs a join of two others via a Nested Loop (Matan Yungman – @matanyungman). One pulls data from a Spool (my post – @rob_farley) populated from a Table Scan (Jon Morisi). The other applies a catchall operator (the catchall is because Tamera Clark (@tameraclark) didn’t specify any particular operator, and a catchall is what gets shown when SSMS doesn’t know what to show. Surprisingly, it’s showing the yellow one, which is about cursors. Hopefully that’s not what Tamera planned, but anyway...) to the output from an Index Seek operator (Sebastian Meine – @sqlity). Lastly, I think everyone put in 110% effort, so that’s what all the operators cost. That didn’t leave anything for me, unfortunately, but that’s okay. Also, because he decided to use the Paul White operator, Jason Brimhall gets 0%, and his 110% was given to Paul’s Switch operator post. I hope you’ve enjoyed this T-SQL Tuesday, and have learned something extra about Plan Operators. Keep your eye out for next month’s one by watching the Twitter Hashtag #tsql2sday, and why not contribute a post to the party? Big thanks to Adam Machanic as usual for starting all this. @rob_farley

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• Silverlight Cream for June 28, 2011 -- #1112

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: WindowsPhoneGeek, John Papa, Mike Taulty, Erno de Weerd, Stephen Price, Chris Rouw, Peter Kuhn, Damian Schenkelman, Michael Washington, and Manas Patnaik. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Binding to View Model properties in Data Templates. The RootBinding Markup Extension" Damian Schenkelman WP7: "Storing Files in SQL Server using WCF RIA Services and Silverlight – Part 3" Chris Rouw LightSwitch: "Saving Files To File System With LightSwitch (Uploading Files)" Michael Washington Shoutouts: Steve Wortham announced a change to his XilverlightXAP.com site... they're now accepting XAML illustrations: Introducing XAML Illustrations, Increased Payouts to Contributors, and More Amid all the discussions that I've tried to avoid, Michael Washinton is Betting The House On LightSwitch From SilverlightCream.com: Dynamically updating a data bound LongListSelector in Windows Phone WindowsPhoneGeek's latest is on using the LongListSelector from the Toolkit and dynamically updating it with data... detailed guidelines and plenty of pictures and code as always. Silverlight TV 77: Exploring 3D with Aaron Oneal John Papa has Silverlight TV number 77 up and is chatting with Aaron Oneal, program manager of the Silverlight 3D efforts... too cool. Silverlight WebBrowser Control for Offline Apps (Part 2) Mike Taulty wrote this post in Silverlight 5 Beta, but says it should be fine in 4... a continuation of his HTML Content display using the WebBrowser control while offline Windows Phone 7: Databinding and the Pivot Control Erno de Weerd discusses the Pivot control in WP7 based on his attempts to use it in an app. Required Attribute on an Entity Stephen Price has a new post at XAML Source... first is this one on setting the required attribute and the troubles you can get into if it's not set correctly Storing Files in SQL Server using WCF RIA Services and Silverlight – Part 3 Chris Rouw has Part 3 of his series on Storing files in SQL Server using FILESTREAM Storage in SQL Server 2008 and Silverlight... this time he's viewing files stored in the FILESTREAM from the LOB app. Getting ready for the Windows Phone 7 Exam 70-599 (Part 4) Peter Kuhn has Part 4 of his series on getting ready for the WP7 exam up at SilverlightShow... the date is coming up soon... are you ready? Binding to View Model properties in Data Templates. The RootBinding Markup Extension Damian Schenkelman has a Silverlight 5 Beta post up... digging into the XAML Markup Extensions and popping out a RootBindingExtensionthat helps bind to a property in a view model from a DataTemplate. Saving Files To File System With LightSwitch (Uploading Files) Michael Washington has a cool tutorial up on his new LightSwitch Help Website... File Upload to a server file system using LightSwitch, plus a project to download... good stuff! Microsoft Media Platform (MMPPF): Player Framework for Silverlight Manas Patnaik's latest post is about the Media Player Project... some of the history of media with Silvelight and how to go about using the Media Player Project bits Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Some of my favourite Visual Studio 2012 things&ndash;Teams

  - by Aaron Kowall

  Getting the balance right for when and how many team projects to create has always been a bit of a balance.  On large initiatives, there are often teams who work toward a common system.  These teams often have quite a bit of autonomy, but need to roll up to some higher level initiative.  In TFS 2010, people were often tempted to create separate Team Projects for each of the sub-teams and then do some magic with reporting and cross-team queries to get the consolidated view.  My recommendation was always to use Areas as a means of separating work across the team, but that always resulted in a large number of queries that need to be maintained and just seemed confusing.  When doing anything you had to remember to filter the query or view by Area in order to get correct results. Along with the awesome web access portal that comes in TFS 2012 (which I will cover details of in another post) the product group has introduced the concept of Teams.  A team is a sub-group within a TFS 2012 Team Project which allows us to more easily divide work along team boundaries. Technically, a Team is defined by an Area Path and a TFS Group, both of which could be done in TFS 2012.  However, by allowing for creation of a ‘Team’ in TFS 2012, the web portal is able to do a bunch of ‘magic’ for us.  We can view the project site (backlog, taskboard, etc) for the the team, we can assign items to the team and we can view the burndown for the team.  Basically, all the stuff that we had to prepare manually we now get created and managed for us with a nice UI. When you create a Team Project in TFS 2012, a ‘Default’ team is created with the same name as the Team Project.  So, if you only have 1 team working on the project, you are set.  If you want to divide the work into additional teams, you can create teams by using the Team Web Client. Teams are created using the ‘Administer Server’ icon in the top right of the web site.   You can select the team site by using the team chooser: Once you have selected a team, the Product Backlog, TaskBoard, Burndown Charts, etc. are all filtered to that team. NOTE: You always have the ability to choose the ‘Default’ team to see items for the entire project. PS: It’s been a long while since I shared on this blog.  To help with that I’m in a blogging challenge with some other developer and agilist friends.  Please check out their blogs as well: Steve Rogalsky: http://winnipegagilist.blogspot.ca Dylan Smith: http://www.geekswithblogs.net/optikal Tyler Doerkson: http://blog.tylerdoerksen.com David Alpert: http://www.spinthemoose.com Dave White: http://www.agileramblings.com   Technorati Tags: TFS 2012,Agile,Team

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• Silverlight Cream for February 14, 2011 -- #1047

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Mohamed Mosallem, Tony Champion, Gill Cleeren, Laurent Bugnion, Deborah Kurata, Jesse Liberty(-2-), Tim Heuer, Mike Taulty, John Papa, Martin Krüger, and Jeremy Likness. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Binding to a ComboBox in Silverlight : A Gotcha" Tony Champion WP7: "An Ultra Light Windows Phone 7 MVVM Framework" Jeremy Likness Shoutouts: Steve Wortham has a post up discussing Silverlight 5, HTML5, and what the future may bring From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight 4.0 Tutorial (12 of N): Collecting Attendees Feedback using Windows Phone 7 Mohamed Mosallem is up to number 12 in his Silverlight tutorial series. He's continuing his RegistrationBooth app, but this time, he's building a WP7 app to give attendee feedback. Binding to a ComboBox in Silverlight : A Gotcha If you've tried to bind to a combobox in Silverlight, you've probably either accomplished this as I have (with help) by having it right once, and continuing, but Tony Champion takes the voodoo out of getting it all working. Getting ready for Microsoft Silverlight Exam 70-506 (Part 5) Gill Cleeren has Part 5 of his exam preparation post up on SilverlightShow. As with the others, he provides many external links to good information. Referencing a picture in another DLL in Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Laurent Bugnion explains the pitfalls and correct way to reference an image from a dll... good info for loading images such as icons for Silverlight in general and WP7 also. Silverlight MVVM Commanding II Deborah Kurata has a part 2 up on MVVM Commanding. The first part covered the built-in commanding for controls that inherit from ButtonBase... this post goes beyond that into other Silverlight controls. Reactive Drag and Drop Part 1 This Drag and Drop with Rx post by Jesse Liberty is the 4th in his Rx series. He begins with a video from the Rx team and applies reactive programming to mouse movements. Yet Another Podcast #24–Reactive Extensions On the heels of his previous post on Rx, in his latest 'Yet Another Podcast', Jesse Liberty chats with Matthew Podwysocki and Bart De Smet about Reactive Extensions. Silverlight 4 February 2011 Update Released Today Tim Heuer announced the release of the February 2011 Silverlight 4 release. Check out Tim's post for information about what's contained in this release. Blend Bits 25–Templating Part 3 In his 3rd Templating tutorial in BlendBits, Mike Taulty demonstrates the 'Make into Control' option rather than the other way around. Silverlight TV 61: Expert Chat on Deep Zoom, Touch, and Windows Phone John Papa interviews David Kelley in the latest Silverlight TV... David is discussing touch in Silverlight and for WP7 and his WP7 apps in the marketplace. Simple Hyperlinkbutton style Martin Krüger has a cool Hyperlink style available at the Expression Gallery. Interesting visual for entertaining your users. An Ultra Light Windows Phone 7 MVVM Framework Jeremy Likness takes his knowledge of MVVM (Jounce), and WP7 and takes a better look at what he'd really like to have for a WP7 framework. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Silverlight Cream for April 08, 2010 -- #834

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Michael Washington, Phil Middlemiss, Yochay Kiriaty, Giorgetti Alessandro, Mike Snow, John Papa, SilverLaw, smartyP, and Pete Brown. Shoutouts: Steve Wortham sent me a link to his RegEx tool that is written in Silverlight... definitely worth a look: Introducing Code Hinting for Regular Expressions Joshua Blake posted his MIX10 materials: MIX10 NUI session sample code From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight MVVM: An (Overly) Simplified Explanation Michael Washington has a tutorial up for getting your arms (and head) around MVVM and Silverlight, and Blend too. A Chrome and Glass Theme - Part 3 Phil Middlemiss has part 3 up of his tutorial series on building an awesome theme for Silverlight... he's styling the textbox and checkbox this time around, and improving the button too Automatic Rotation Support or Automatic Multi-Orientation Layout Support for Windows Phone Yochay Kiriaty is giving up some WP7 goodness with his post on Multi-Orientation Layout Support ... yeah I had to say it twice myself :) good links and all the code in addition to the good blog post Silverlight Navigation Framework: resolve the pages using an IoC container Giorgetti Alessandro has some pretty cool code up as a proof of concept of using an IoC container with the Navigation Framework of Silverlight 4. Silverlight Tip of the Day No. 109 – Attach to Process Debugging Mike Snow is back doing Tips of the Day... and number 109 is showing how to attach the debugger to a running Silverlight app. Silverlight TV 20: Community Driven Development with WCF RIA Services In his latest Silverlight TV episode, John Papa talks with Jeff Handley about RIA Services, and how feedback from the community helped shape the product. ChildWindowMouseScrollResizeBehavior - Silverlight 3 SilverLaw has a new Behavior up at the Expression Gallery that gives you resizing on a ChildWindow using the Mouse Wheel. Creating a Windows Phone 7 Metro Style Pivot Application [Part 3] smartyP has the 3rd and final episode for his WP7 Pivot up, and this one includes not only the source but a video tutorial. Layout Rounding Pete Brown talks about Layout Rounding and it has nothing to do with rounding corners... it has to do with rounding off where your objects get placed pixel-wise ... I've blogged about this seemingly-anti-aliasing more than once... Pete has the real answer Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Create Image Maps with GIMP

  - by SGWellens

  Having a clickable image in a web page is not a big deal. Having an image in a web page with clickable hotspots is a big deal. The powerful GIMP editor has a tool to make creating clickable hotspots much easier. GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. Its home page and download links are here: http://www.gimp.org/ (it is completely free). Beware: GIMP is an extraordinarily advanced and powerful image editor. If you wish to use it for general image editing tasks, you have a steep learning curve to climb. FYI: I used it to create the shadows you see on the images below. Fortunately, the tool to make Image Maps is separate from the main program. To start, open an image with GIMP or, drag and drop an image onto the GIMP main window. I'm using the image of a bar graph. Next, we have to find the Image Map tool and launch it (Filters->Web->Image Map…): Why is the Image Map tool under Filters and not Tools? I don't know. It's mystery—much like the Loch Ness Monster, the Bermuda Triangle, or why my socks keep disappearing when I do laundry. I swear I've got twenty single unmatched socks. But I digress… Here is what the Image Map tool looks like: If we click the blue 'I' button, we can add information to the Image Map: Now we'll use the rectangle tool to create some clickable hotspots. Select the Blue Rectangle tool, drag a rectangle, click when done and you'll get something like this: You can also make circle/oval and polygon areas. You can edit all the parameters of an image map area after drawing it. Rectangle settings (for fine tweaking): JavaScript functions (it's up to you to write them): Here is a setup with two rectangles and one polygon area: When you hit save a map file is generated that looks something like this: Paste the contents into a web page and you are almost there. I made some tweaks before it became usable: Replaced &apos; with apostrophes in the javascript functions. Changed the image path so it would find the image in my images directory Tweaked the href urls. Added Title="Some Text" to get tool tips. Cleaned out the comments. Result: The final markup (with JavaScript function): function ImageMapMouseHover(Msg) { $("#Label1").html(Msg); } It may seem like a lot of bother but, the tool does the heavy lifting: i.e. the coordinates. Getting the regions positioned and sized is easy using a visual tool…much better than doing it by hand. This, of course, isn't a full treatise on the tool but it should give you enough information to decide if it's helpful. I hope someone finds this useful Steve Wellens

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• SQLOS and Cloud Infrastructure sessions at PASS Summit 2012

  - by SQLOS Team

  The SQL Pass Summit 2012, the largest yet, is in full swing. Here's a summary of the sessions this week on cloud infrastructure and SQLOS topics. Some of these were today, and you can catch the recordings. One more session takes place on Friday covering SQL Server solution patterns in Windows Azure VMs... Also, catch Thursday's keynote with Quentin Clark which will feature a cool IaaS demo!   SQL Server in Windows Azure VM Sessions CLD-309-A SQLCAT: Best Practices and Lessons Learned on SQL Server in an Azure VM Steve Howard, Arvind Ranasaria - Wednesday 11/6 10:15 This session looked at some best practices to optimize Networking, Memory, Disk IO and high availability based on lessons learned during SQLCat work with customer deployments. Well worth catching the recording.   SQL Server in Azure VM patterns: Hybrid Disaster Recovery, data movement and BI Guy Bowerman, Peter Saddow, Michael Washam, Ross LoForte - Friday 11/9 9:45 Rm 613 [Note: In the guides this has an outdated title.] This session has a focus on SQL Server Azure VM solutions. Starting with the basics and then going deeper into: - New features in the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit 8.0 to help plan and size SQL VM migrations.- A Look at a Windows Azure VM SQL Server app making use of load balancing and SQL Server high availability features.- A BI case study running SQL BI components in Azure VMs and making use of Windows 8 tiles.- A training class in a VM case study.   SQLOS Sessions DBA-500-HD Inside SQLOS 2012 (half-day session) Bob Ward - Wednesday 11/6 1:30pm Bob Ward from CSS applies his wealth of experience to look at the internals of SQLOS and what's changed in the various SQL 2012 components, including memory, resource governor, scheduler.   DBA-403-M: SQLCAT: Memory Manager Changes in SQL Server 2012 Gus Apostol, Jerome Halmans - 1:30pm Covers the redesigned SQLOS memory manager in SQL Server 2012 including the new page allocator for any size pages (and all that implies), DMVs, demo's. Not sure why this was placed at the same time as the SQLOS half-day session, but since it's recorded it's available for catch-up.   - Guy   Originally posted at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlosteam/

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• IDC Analyst Report Touts Oracle–Accenture Strategic Initiative

  - by kristin.jellison

  Hi there, partners! Oracle Engineered Systems have been getting some love lately, and we want to share it with you! The market intelligence and advisory firm IDC recently released a report lauding Oracle and Accenture’s strategic initiative to route the performance and flexibility of Oracle Engineered Systems to clients. The report, "Oracle and Accenture Strategic Alliance Places Big Bet on Engineered Systems,” by Steve White, reflects a largely positive analysis of the relationship. White notes that the alliance is “one of the largest in the industry.” Under the relationship, Accenture has incorporated Oracle Engineered Systems—including Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, Oracle SuperCluster, and Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine—into its leading datacenter transformation consulting services. Together, the two companies have also created bespoke platforms, such as the Accenture Foundation Platform for Oracle, which helps clients accelerate deployments on Oracle Fusion Middleware, running Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and Oracle Exadata Database Machine. Oracle Engineered Systems deliver a single, engineered platform—including server to storage and networking. This makes it easier and cheaper for Accenture clients around the world to prepare their datacenters for managing, processing and analyzing the massive amounts of data they (rightly) anticipate seeing in the next decade. The new solutions can help reduce the effort and cost to migrate any vendor database to an Oracle Engineered Systems platform, which can lower the cost of ownership by up to 50 percent. For its part, Accenture has built a team of 300 consultants to implement and increase the flexibility and stability of client datacenters. This move further expands one of the fastest-growing full-service Oracle Enterprise solutions. Over 52,000 Accenture consultants are qualified to implement, upgrade and outsource the Oracle product suite. Accenture is a Diamond-level member of Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN). For Oracle Partners, this update should give you at least two things to walk away with. First, this initiative is showing signs of success. As Marty Cole, group chief executive for Accenture’s Technology growth platform, put it, “We are seeing an increasing number of clients recognizing the value of consolidating their databases and taking advantage of the cost and performance benefits delivered by these solutions.” The pipeline is there—and not just for Accenture. Use this example to show your clients that investments in Oracle Engineered Systems are on the rise. Second, recognize that Oracle Engineered Systems represent one of the biggest platforms for growth that Oracle has to offer partners. As part of the agreement, Accenture is able to provide: Platform Readiness Assessments Platform Implementation App Rationalization Database Rationalization Managed Services These are all enablement opportunities you can offer customers under Oracle’s partner programs —to continue building the value of their investments, and the value of your relationship with Oracle. Take a read through the IDC report. To learn more about the partnership, see this press release. Happy selling! The OPN Communications Team

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• Partner Blog Series: PwC Perspectives - "Is It Time for an Upgrade?"

  - by Tanu Sood

  Is your organization debating their next step with regard to Identity Management? While all the stakeholders are well aware that the one-size-fits-all doesn’t apply to identity management, just as true is the fact that no two identity management implementations are alike. Oracle’s recent release of Identity Governance Suite 11g Release 2 has innovative features such as a customizable user interface, shopping cart style request catalog and more. However, only a close look at the use cases can help you determine if and when an upgrade to the latest R2 release makes sense for your organization. This post will describe a few of the situations that PwC has helped our clients work through. “Should I be considering an upgrade?” If your organization has an existing identity management implementation, the questions below are a good start to assessing your current solution to see if you need to begin planning for an upgrade: Does the current solution scale and meet your projected identity management needs? Does the current solution have a customer-friendly user interface? Are you completely meeting your compliance objectives? Are you still using spreadsheets? Does the current solution have the features you need? Is your total cost of ownership in line with well-performing similar sized companies in your industry? Can your organization support your existing Identity solution? Is your current product based solution well positioned to support your organization's tactical and strategic direction? Existing Oracle IDM Customers: Several existing Oracle clients are looking to move to R2 in 2013. If your organization is on Sun Identity Manager (SIM) or Oracle Identity Manager (OIM) and if your current assessment suggests that you need to upgrade, you should strongly consider OIM 11gR2. Oracle provides upgrade paths to Oracle Identity Manager 11gR2 from SIM 7.x / 8.x as well as Oracle Identity Manager 10g / 11gR1. The following are some of the considerations for migration: Check the end of product support (for Sun or legacy OIM) schedule There are several new features available in R2 (including common Helpdesk scenarios, profiling of disconnected applications, increased scalability, custom connectors, browser-based UI configurations, portability of configurations during future upgrades, etc) Cost of ownership (for SIM customers)\ Customizations that need to be maintained during the upgrade Time/Cost to migrate now vs. waiting for next version If you are already on an older version of Oracle Identity Manager and actively maintaining your support contract with Oracle, you might be eligible for a free upgrade to OIM 11gR2. Check with your Oracle sales rep for more details. Existing IDM infrastructure in place: In the past year and half, we have seen a surge in IDM upgrades from non-Oracle infrastructure to Oracle. If your organization is looking to improve the end-user experience related to identity management functions, the shopping cart style access request model and browser based personalization features may come in handy. Additionally, organizations that have a large number of applications that include ecommerce, LDAP stores, databases, UNIX systems, mainframes as well as a high frequency of user identity changes and access requests will value the high scalability of the OIM reconciliation and provisioning engine. Furthermore, we have seen our clients like OIM's out of the box (OOB) support for multiple authoritative sources. For organizations looking to integrate applications that do not have an exposed API, the Generic Technology Connector framework supported by OIM will be helpful in quickly generating custom connector using OOB wizard. Similarly, organizations in need of not only flexible on-boarding of disconnected applications but also strict access management to these applications using approval flows will find the flexible disconnected application profiling feature an extremely useful tool that provides a high degree of time savings. Organizations looking to develop custom connectors for home grown or industry specific applications will likewise find that the Identity Connector Framework support in OIM allows them to build and test a custom connector independently before integrating it with OIM. Lastly, most of our clients considering an upgrade to OIM 11gR2 have also expressed interest in the browser based configuration feature that allows an administrator to quickly customize the user interface without adding any custom code. Better yet, code customizations, if any, made to the product are portable across the future upgrades which, is viewed as a big time and money saver by most of our clients. Below are some upgrade methodologies we adopt based on client priorities and the scale of implementation. For illustration purposes, we have assumed that the client is currently on Oracle Waveset (formerly Sun Identity Manager).   Integrated Deployment: The integrated deployment is typically where a client wants to split the implementation to where their current IDM is continuing to handle the front end workflows and OIM takes over the back office operations incrementally. Once all the back office operations are moved completely to OIM, the front end workflows are migrated to OIM. Parallel Deployment: This deployment is typically done where there can be a distinct line drawn between which functionality the platforms are supporting. For example the current IDM implementation is handling the password reset functionality while OIM takes over the access provisioning and RBAC functions. Cutover Deployment: A cutover deployment is typically recommended where a client has smaller less complex implementations and it makes sense to leverage the migration tools to move them over immediately. What does this mean for YOU? There are many variables to consider when making upgrade decisions. For most customers, there is no ‘easy’ button. Organizations looking to upgrade or considering a new vendor should start by doing a mapping of their requirements with product features. The recommended approach is to take stock of both the short term and long term objectives, understand product features, future roadmap, maturity and level of commitment from the R&D and build the implementation plan accordingly. As we said, in the beginning, there is no one-size-fits-all with Identity Management. So, arm yourself with the knowledge, engage in industry discussions, bring in business stakeholders and start building your implementation roadmap. In the next post we will discuss the best practices on R2 implementations. We will be covering the Do's and Don't's and share our thoughts on making implementations successful. Meet the Writers: Dharma Padala is a Director in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has been implementing medium to large scale Identity Management solutions across multiple industries including utility, health care, entertainment, retail and financial sectors.   Dharma has 14 years of experience in delivering IT solutions out of which he has been implementing Identity Management solutions for the past 8 years. Scott MacDonald is a Director in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has consulted for several clients across multiple industries including financial services, health care, automotive and retail.   Scott has 10 years of experience in delivering Identity Management solutions. John Misczak is a member of the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has experience implementing multiple Identity and Access Management solutions, specializing in Oracle Identity Manager and Business Process Engineering Language (BPEL). Praveen Krishna is a Manager in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  Over the last decade Praveen has helped clients plan, architect and implement Oracle identity solutions across diverse industries.  His experience includes delivering security across diverse topics like network, infrastructure, application and data where he brings a holistic point of view to problem solving. Jenny (Xiao) Zhang is a member of the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  She has consulted across multiple industries including financial services, entertainment and retail. Jenny has three years of experience in delivering IT solutions out of which she has been implementing Identity Management solutions for the past one and a half years.

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• Issue 15: Oracle Exadata Marketing Campaigns

  - by rituchhibber

       PARTNER FOCUS Oracle ExadataMarketing Campaign Steve McNickleVP Europe, cVidya Steve McNickle is VP Europe for cVidya, an innovative provider of revenue intelligence solutions for telecom, media and entertainment service providers including AT&T, BT, Deutsche Telecom and Vodafone. The company's product portfolio helps operators and service providers maximise margins, improve customer experience and optimise ecosystem relationships through revenue assurance, fraud and security management, sales performance management, pricing analytics, and inter-carrier services. cVidya has partnered with Oracle for more than a decade. RESOURCES -- Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Oracle Exastack Program Oracle Exastack Optimized Oracle Exastack Labs and Enablement Resources Oracle Engineered Systems Oracle Communications cVidya SUBSCRIBE FEEDBACK PREVIOUS ISSUES Are you ready for Oracle OpenWorld this October? -- -- Please could you tell us a little about cVidya's partnering history with Oracle, and expand on your Oracle Exastack accreditations? "cVidya was established just over ten years ago and we've had a strong relationship with Oracle almost since the very beginning. Through our Revenue Intelligence work with some of the world's largest service providers we collect tremendous amounts of information, amounting to billions of records per day. We help our clients to collect, store and analyse that data to ensure that their end customers are getting the best levels of service, are billed correctly, and are happy that they are on the correct price plan. We have been an Oracle Gold level partner for seven years, and crucially just two months ago we were also accredited as Oracle Exastack Optimized for MoneyMap, our core Revenue Assurance solution. Very soon we also expect to be Oracle Exastack Optimized DRMap, our Data Retention solution." What unique capabilities and customer benefits does Oracle Exastack add to your applications? "Oracle Exastack enables us to deliver radical benefits to our customers. A typical mobile operator in the UK might handle between 500 million and two billion call data record details daily. Each transaction needs to be validated, billed correctly and fraud checked. Because of the enormous volumes involved, our clients demand scalable infrastructure that allows them to efficiently acquire, store and process all that data within controlled cost, space and environmental constraints. We have proved that the Oracle Exadata system can process data up to seven times faster and load it as much as 20 times faster than other standard best-of-breed server approaches. With the Oracle Exadata Database Machine they can reduce their datacentre equipment from say, the six or seven cabinets that they needed in the past, down to just one. This dramatic simplification delivers incredible value to the customer by cutting down enormously on all of their significant cost, space, energy, cooling and maintenance overheads." "The Oracle Exastack Program has given our clients the ability to switch their focus from reactive to proactive. Traditionally they may have spent 80 percent of their day processing, and just 20 percent enabling end customers to see advanced analytics, and avoiding issues before they occur. With our solutions and Oracle Exadata they can now switch that balance around entirely, resulting not only in reduced revenue leakage, but a far higher focus on proactive leakage prevention. How has the Oracle Exastack Program transformed your customer business? "We can already see the impact. Oracle solutions allow our delivery teams to achieve successful deployments, happy customers and self-satisfaction, and the power of Oracle's Exa solutions is easy to measure in terms of their transformational ability. We gained our first sale into a major European telco by demonstrating the major performance gains that would transform their business. Clients can measure the ease of organisational change, the early prevention of business issues, the reduction in manpower required to provide protection and coverage across all their products and services, plus of course end customer satisfaction. If customers know that that service is provided accurately and that their bills are calculated correctly, then over time this satisfaction can be attributed to revenue intelligence and the underlying systems which provide it. Combine this with the further integration we have with the other layers of the Oracle stack, including the telecommunications offerings such as NCC, OCDM and BRM, and the result is even greater customer value—not to mention the increased speed to market and the reduced project risk." What does the Oracle Exastack community bring to cVidya, both in terms of general benefits, and also tangible new opportunities and partnerships? "A great deal. We have participated in the Oracle Exastack community heavily over the past year, and have had lots of meetings with Oracle and our peers around the globe. It brings us into contact with like-minded, innovative partners, who like us are not happy to just stand still and want to take fresh technology to their customer base in order to gain enhanced value. We identified three new partnerships in each of two recent meetings, and hope these will open up new opportunities, not only in areas that exactly match where we operate today, but also in some new associative areas that will expand our reach into new business sectors. Notably, thanks to the Exastack community we were invited on stage at last year's Oracle OpenWorld conference. Appearing so publically with Oracle senior VP Judson Althoff elevated awareness and visibility of cVidya and has enabled us to participate in a number of other events with Oracle over the past eight months. We've been involved in speaking opportunities, forums and exhibitions, providing us with invaluable opportunities that we wouldn't otherwise have got close to." How has Exastack differentiated cVidya as an ISV, and helped you to evolve your business to the next level? "When we are selling to our core customer base of Tier 1 telecommunications providers, we know that they want more than just software. They want an enduring partnership that will last many years, they want innovation, and a forward thinking partner who knows how to guide them on where they need to be to meet market demand three, five or seven years down the line. Membership of respected global bodies, such as the Telemanagement Forum enables us to lead standard adherence in our area of business, giving us a lot of credibility, but Oracle is also involved in this forum with its own telecommunications portfolio, strengthening our position still further. When we approach CEOs, CTOs and CIOs at the very largest Tier 1 operators, not only can we easily show them that our technology is fantastic, we can also talk about our strong partnership with Oracle, and our joint embracing of today's standards and tomorrow's innovation." Where would you like cVidya to be in one year's time? "We want to get all of our relevant products Oracle Exastack Optimized. Our MoneyMap Revenue Assurance solution is already Exastack Optimised, our DRMAP Data Retention Solution should be Exastack Optimised within the next month, and our FraudView Fraud Management solution within the next two to three months. We'd then like to extend our Oracle accreditation out to include other members of the Oracle Engineered Systems family. We are moving into the 'Big Data' space, and so we're obviously very keen to work closely with Oracle to conduct pilots, map new technologies onto Oracle Big Data platforms, and embrace and measure the benefits of other Oracle systems, namely Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, the Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine and the Oracle SPARC SuperCluster. We would also like to examine how the Oracle Database Appliance might benefit our Tier 2 service provider customers. Finally, we'd also like to continue working with the Oracle Communications Global Business Unit (CGBU), furthering our integration with Oracle billing products so that we are able to quickly deploy fraud solutions into Oracle's Engineered System stack, give operational benefits to our clients that are pre-integrated, more cost-effective, and can be rapidly deployed rapidly and producing benefits in three months, not nine months." Chris Baker ,Senior Vice President, Oracle Worldwide ISV-OEM-Java Sales Chris Baker is the Global Head of ISV/OEM Sales responsible for working with ISV/OEM partners to maximise Oracle's business through those partners, whilst maximising those partners' business to their end users. Chris works with partners, customers, innovators, investors and employees to develop innovative business solutions using Oracle products, services and skills. Firstly, could you please explain Oracle's current strategy for ISV partners, globally and in EMEA? "Oracle customers use independent software vendor (ISV) applications to run their businesses. They use them to generate revenue and to fulfil obligations to their own customers. Our strategy is very straight-forward. We want all of our ISV partners and OEMs to concentrate on the things that they do the best – building applications to meet the unique industry and functional requirements of their customer. We want to ensure that we deliver a best in class application platform so the ISV is free to concentrate their effort on their application functionality and user experience We invest over four billion dollars in research and development every year, and we want our ISVs to benefit from all of that investment in operating systems, virtualisation, databases, middleware, engineered systems, and other hardware. By doing this, we help them to reduce their costs, gain more consistency and agility for quicker implementations, and also rapidly differentiate themselves from other application vendors. It's all about simplification because we believe that around 25 to 30 percent of the development costs incurred by many ISVs are caused by customising infrastructure and have nothing to do with their applications. Our strategy is to enable our ISV partners to standardise their application platform using engineered architecture, so they can write once to the Oracle stack and deploy seamlessly in the cloud, on-premise, or in hybrid deployments. It's really important that architecture is the same in order to keep cost and time overheads at a minimum, so we provide standardisation and an environment that enables our ISVs to concentrate on the core business that makes them the most money and brings them success." How do you believe this strategy is helping the ISVs to work hand-in-hand with Oracle to ensure that end customers get the industry-leading solutions that they need? "We work with our ISVs not just to help them be successful, but also to help them market themselves. We have something called the 'Oracle Exastack Ready Program', which enables ISVs to publicise themselves as 'Ready' to run the core software platforms that run on Oracle's engineered systems including Exadata and Exalogic. So, for example, they can become 'Database Ready' which means that they use the latest version of Oracle Database and therefore can run their application without modification on Exadata or the Oracle Database Appliance. Alternatively, they can become WebLogic Ready, Oracle Linux Ready and Oracle Solaris Ready which means they run on the latest release and therefore can run their application, with no new porting work, on Oracle Exalogic. Those 'Ready' logos are important in helping ISVs advertise to their customers that they are using the latest technologies which have been fully tested. We now also have Exadata Ready and Exalogic Ready programmes which allow ISVs to promote the certification of their applications on these platforms. This highlights these partners to Oracle customers as having solutions that run fluently on the Oracle Exadata Database Machine, the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud or one of our other engineered systems. This makes it easy for customers to identify solutions and provides ISVs with an avenue to connect with Oracle customers who are rapidly adopting engineered systems. We have also taken this programme to the next level in the shape of 'Oracle Exastack Optimized' for partners whose applications run best on the Oracle stack and have invested the time to fully optimise application performance. We ensure that Exastack Optimized partner status is promoted and supported by press releases, and we help our ISVs go to market and differentiate themselves through the use our technology and the standardisation it delivers. To date we have had several hundred organisations successfully work through our Exastack Optimized programme." How does Oracle's strategy of offering pre-integrated open platform software and hardware allow ISVs to bring their products to market more quickly? "One of the problems for many ISVs is that they have to think very carefully about the technology on which their solutions will be deployed, particularly in the cloud or hosted environments. They have to think hard about how they secure these environments, whether the concern is, for example, middleware, identity management, or securing personal data. If they don't use the technology that we build-in to our products to help them to fulfil these roles, they then have to build it themselves. This takes time, requires testing, and must be maintained. By taking advantage of our technology, partners will now know that they have a standard platform. They will know that they can confidently talk about implementation being the same every time they do it. Very large ISV applications could once take a year or two to be implemented at an on-premise environment. But it wasn't just the configuration of the application that took the time, it was actually the infrastructure - the different hardware configurations, operating systems and configurations of databases and middleware. Now we strongly believe that it's all about standardisation and repeatability. It's about making sure that our partners can do it once and are then able to roll it out many different times using standard componentry." What actions would you recommend for existing ISV partners that are looking to do more business with Oracle and its customer base, not only to maximise benefits, but also to maximise partner relationships? "My team, around the world and in the EMEA region, is available and ready to talk to any of our ISVs and to explore the possibilities together. We run programmes like 'Excite' and 'Insight' to help us to understand how we can help ISVs with architecture and widen their environments. But we also want to work with, and look at, new opportunities - for example, the Machine-to-Machine (M2M) market or 'The Internet of Things'. Over the next few years, many millions, indeed billions of devices will be collecting massive amounts of data and communicating it back to the central systems where ISVs will be running their applications. The only way that our partners will be able to provide a single vendor 'end-to-end' solution is to use Oracle integrated systems at the back end and Java on the 'smart' devices collecting the data – a complete solution from device to data centre. So there are huge opportunities to work closely with our ISVs, using Oracle's complete M2M platform, to provide the infrastructure that enables them to extract maximum value from the data collected. If any partners don't know where to start or who to contact, then they can contact me directly at [email protected] or indeed any of our teams across the EMEA region. We want to work with ISVs to help them to be as successful as they possibly can through simplification and speed to market, and we also want all of the top ISVs in the world based on Oracle." What opportunities are immediately opened to new ISV partners joining the OPN? "As you know OPN is very, very important. New members will discover a huge amount of content that instantly becomes accessible to them. They can access a wealth of no-cost training and enablement materials to build their expertise in Oracle technology. They can download Oracle software and use it for development projects. They can help themselves become more competent by becoming part of a true community and uncovering new opportunities by working with Oracle and their peers in the Oracle Partner Network. As well as publishing massive amounts of information on OPN, we also hold our global Oracle OpenWorld event, at which partners play a huge role. This takes place at the end of September and the beginning of October in San Francisco. Attending ISV partners have an unrivalled opportunity to contribute to elements such as the OpenWorld / OPN Exchange, at which they can talk to other partners and really begin thinking about how they can move their businesses on and play key roles in a very large ecosystem which revolves around technology and standardisation." Finally, are there any other messages that you would like to share with the Oracle ISV community? "The crucial message that I always like to reinforce is architecture, architecture and architecture! The key opportunities that ISVs have today revolve around standardising their architectures so that they can confidently think: “I will I be able to do exactly the same thing whenever a customer is looking to deploy on-premise, hosted or in the cloud”. The right architecture is critical to being competitive and to really start changing the game. We want to help our ISV partners to do just that; to establish standard architecture and to seize the opportunities it opens up for them. New market opportunities like M2M are enormous - just look at how many devices are all around you right now. We can help our partners to interface with these devices more effectively while thinking about their entire ecosystem, rather than just the piece that they have traditionally focused upon. With standardised architecture, we can help people dramatically improve their speed, reach, agility and delivery of enhanced customer satisfaction and value all the way from the Java side to their centralised systems. All Oracle ISV partners must take advantage of these opportunities, which is why Oracle will continue to invest in and support them." -- Gergely Strbik is Oracle Hardware and Software Product Manager for Avnet in Hungary. Avnet Technology Solutions is an OracleValue Added Distributor focused on the development of the existing Oracle channel. This includes the recruitment and enablement of Oracle partners as well as driving deeper adoption of Oracle's technology and application products within the IT channel. "The main business benefits of ODA for our customers and partners are scalability, flexibility, a great price point for the high performance delivered, and the easily configurable embedded Linux operating system. People welcome a lower point of entry and the ability to grow capacity on demand as their business expands." "Marketing and selling the ODA requires another way of thinking because it is an appliance. We have to transform the ways in which our partners and customers think from buying hardware and software independently to buying complete solutions. Successful early adopters and satisfied customer reactions will certainly help us to sell the ODA. We will have more experience with the product after the first deliveries and installations—end users need to see the power and benefits for themselves." "Our typical ODA customers will be those looking for complete solutions from a single reseller partner who is also able to manage the appliance. They will have enjoyed using Oracle Database but now want a new product that is able to unlock new levels of performance. A higher proportion of potential customers will come from our existing Oracle base, with around 30% from new business, but we intend to evangelise the ODA on the market to see how we can change this balance as all our customers adjust to the concept of 'Hardware and Software, Engineered to Work Together'. -- Back to the welcome page

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• Six Unusual Blogs I Like

  - by Bill Graziano

  I subscribe to and read over 100 SQL Server blogs every day.  I link to posts that I think are interesting.  I also read a fair number of non-SQL Server blogs.  Here are a few that I think are interesting. danah boyd. She is a researcher with Microsoft and writes about privacy, social media and teenagers.  I discovered her blog while looking for strategies to keep my personal and professional life separate.  (I haven’t found a good solution to that yet.)  Her stories of how teenagers use Facebook and other social media tools are fascinating. Clayton’s Web Snacks.  Steve Clayton works at Microsoft and has a variety of blogs out there.  This one focuses on … hmmm.  His latest posts are on graffiti, infographics, paper tweets, cartoons and slow motion videos.  It’s mostly visual and you never really know what you’ll get.  It’s always interesting though and I like what he posts.  It’s good creative stuff. Seth Godin.  Seth writes about Marketing.  I read him for motivation to get off my butt and get things done.  He’s a great motivator who encourages you to think big.  And do something! Ask the Pilot.  Patrick Smith is a commercial airline pilot writing about the airline industry.  He’s a great debunker of myths (no they don’t reduce oxygen in the cabin to keep you docile).  My favorite topics include the TSA, flying myths, airport reviews and flight delays. My old favorite flight blog used to be enplaned.  No one knew who wrote it.  It focused on the economics of the airline industry.  It was fascinating stuff.  One day it was gone.  The entire blog was deleted.  Someone tracked down some partial archives and put them online. The Agent’s Journal.  Jack Bechta is an NFL agent.  He writes about the business side of the NFL, the draft and free agency.  Lately he’s been writing about the potential lockout.  He has a distinct lack of hype which I find very refreshing.  xkcd.  I call this the comic for smart people.  A little math, some IT and internet privacy thrown in all make an unusual comic. Funny and intelligent.

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• Oracle 'In Touch' PartnerCast - July 1, 2014

  - by Cinzia Mascanzoni

  27 May 2014 'In Touch' Webcast for Oracle EMEA Partners Invitation Stay Connected Oracle Media Network   OPN on PartnerCast   Oracle 'In Touch' PartnerCast (July 1, 2014)Be prepared for a year of growth Register Now! Dear partner, We would like to invite you to join David Callaghan, Senior Vice President Oracle EMEA Alliances and Channels, and his studio guests for the next broadcast of the Oracle ‘In Touch’ PartnerCast on Tuesday 1st July 2014 from 10:30am UK / 11:30am CET. In this cast, David’s studio guests and his regional reporters will be looking at your priorities as EMEA partners and how best to grow with Oracle. We also look forward to the broadcast covering topics on the following: Highlights of FY14 Strategic themes for FY15 HCM, CRM and ERP Oracle on Oracle Exclusive for ‘In Touch’ David Callaghan questions Rich Geraffo, Senior Vice President, Global Alliances & Channels, on how the FY15 partner Global kick off relates to EMEA. Plus David provides your chance to hear from some of the newly appointed Worldwide A&C Leadership team as he discusses with Bruce Chumley VP Oracle Channel Distribution Sales & Troy Richardson VP Oracle Strategic Alliances; their core focus and strategy of growth and what they intend on bringing to the table in their new role. Register Now! With lots of studio guests joining David, why not get in touch on Twitter using the hashtag #OracleInTouch or by emailing [email protected] to get your questions featured in the cast! To find out more information and to watch previous episodes on-demand, please visit our webpage here. Best regards, Oracle EMEA Alliances & Channels Oracle 'In Touch' PartnerCast: be prepared for a year of growth July 01, 2014 10:30am UK / 11:30am CET Duration: 45 mins. Host David Callaghan Senior VP Oracle EMEA Alliances & Channels Studio Guests Alistair Hopkins VP Sales & Strategy, Technology Solutions, Oracle EMEA Alliances & Channels More to be announced shortly Features Contributors Rich Geraffo Senior Vice President, Oracle Worldwide Alliances & Channels Bruce Chumley Vice President Channel Distribution Sales, Oracle WW Alliances & Channels Steve Biondi VP Channel Distribution Sales, Oracle WW Alliances & Channels Regional Reporters Silvia Kaske VP Oracle A&C WCE North Will O'Brien VP Oracle A&C UK/IE Eric Fontaine VP Oracle A&C WCE South Janusz Naklicki VP Oracle A&C ECEMEA

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• The Birth of a Method - Where did OUM come from?

  - by user702549

  It seemed fitting to start this blog entry with the OUM vision statement. The vision for the Oracle® Unified Method (OUM) is to support the entire Enterprise IT lifecycle, including support for the successful implementation of every Oracle product.  Well, it’s that time of year again; we just finished testing and packaging OUM 5.6.  It will be released for general availability to qualifying customers and partners this month.  Because of this, I’ve been reflecting back on how the birth of Oracle’s Unified method - OUM came about. As the Release Director of OUM, I’ve been honored to package every method release.  No, maybe you’d say it’s not so special.  Of course, anyone can use packaging software to create an .exe file.  But to me, it is pretty special, because so many people work together to make each release come about.  The rich content that results is what makes OUM’s history worth talking about.   To me, professionally speaking, working on OUM, well it’s been “a labor of love”.  My youngest child was just 8 years old when OUM was born, and she’s now in High School!  Watching her grow and change has been fascinating, if you ask her, she’s grown up hearing about OUM.  My son would often walk into my home office and ask “How is OUM today, Mom?”  I am one of many people that take care of OUM, and have watched the method “mature” over these last 6 years.  Maybe that makes me a "Method Mom" (someone in one of my classes last year actually said this outloud) but there are so many others who collaborate and care about OUM Development. I’ve thought about writing this blog entry for a long time just to reflect on how far the Method has come. Each release, as I prepare the OUM Contributors list, I see how many people’s experience and ideas it has taken to create this wealth of knowledge, process and task guidance as well as templates and examples.  If you’re wondering how many people, just go into OUM select the resources button on the top of most pages of the method, and on that resources page click the ABOUT link. So now back to my nostalgic moment as I finished release 5.6 packaging.  I reflected back, on all the things that happened that cause OUM to become not just a dream but to actually come to fruition.  Here are some key conditions that make it possible for each release of the method: A vision to have one method instead of many methods, thereby focusing on deeper, richer content People within Oracle’s consulting Organization  willing to contribute to OUM providing Subject Matter Experts who are willing to write down and share what they know. Oracle’s continued acquisition of software companies, the need to assimilate high quality existing materials from these companies The need to bring together people from very different backgrounds and provide a common language to support Oracle Product implementations that often involve multiple product families What came first, and then what was the strategy? Initially OUM 4.0 was based on Oracle’s J2EE Custom Development Method (JCDM), it was a good “backbone”  (work breakdown structure) it was Unified Process based, and had good content around UML as well as custom software development.  But it needed to be extended in order to achieve the OUM Vision. What happened after that was to take in the “best of the best”, the legacy and acquired methods were scheduled for assimilation into OUM, one release after another.  We incrementally built OUM.  We didn’t want to lose any of the expertise that was reflected in AIM (Oracle’s legacy Application Implementation Method), Compass (People Soft’s Application implementation method) and so many more. When was OUM born? OUM 4.1 published April 30, 2006.  This release allowed Oracles Advanced Technology groups to begin the very first implementations of Fusion Middleware.  In the early days of the Method we would prepare several releases a year.  Our iterative release development cycle began and continues to be refined with each Method release.  Now we typically see one major release each year. The OUM release development cycle is not unlike many Oracle Implementation projects in that we need to gather requirements, prioritize, prepare the content, test package and then go production.  Typically we develop an OUM release MoSCoW (must have, should have, could have, and won’t have) right after the prior release goes out.   These are the high level requirements.  We break the timeframe into increments, frequent checkpoints that help us assess the content and progress is measured through frequent checkpoints.  We work as a team to prioritize what should be done in each increment. Yes, the team provides the estimates for what can be done within a particular increment.  We sometimes have Method Development workshops (physically or virtually) to accelerate content development on a particular subject area, that is where the best content results. As the written content nears the final stages, it goes through edit and evaluation through peer reviews, and then moves into the release staging environment.  Then content freeze and testing of the method pack take place.  This iterative cycle is run using the OUM artifacts that make sense “fit for purpose”, project plans, MoSCoW lists, Test plans are just a few of the OUM work products we use on a Method Release project. In 2007 OUM 4.3, 4.4 and 4.5 were published.  With the release of 4.5 our Custom BI Method (Data Warehouse Method FastTrack) was assimilated into OUM.  These early releases helped us align Oracle’s Unified method with other industry standards Then in 2008 we made significant changes to the OUM “Backbone” to support Applications Implementation projects with that went to the OUM 5.0 release.  Now things started to get really interesting.  Next we had some major developments in the Envision focus area in the area of Enterprise Architecture.  We acquired some really great content from the former BEA, Liquid Enterprise Method (LEM) along with some SMEs who were willing to work at bringing this content into OUM.  The Service Oriented Architecture content in OUM is extensive and can help support the successful implementation of Fusion Middleware, as well as Fusion Applications. Of course we’ve developed a wealth of OUM training materials that work also helps to improve the method content.  It is one thing to write “how to”, and quite another to be able to teach people how to use the materials to improve the success of their projects.  I’ve learned so much by teaching people how to use OUM. What's next? So here toward the end of 2012, what’s in store in OUM 5.6, well, I’m sure you won’t be surprised the answer is Cloud Computing.   More details to come in the next couple of weeks!  The best part of being involved in the development of OUM is to see how many people have “adopted” OUM over these six years, Clients, Partners, and Oracle Consultants.  The content just gets better with each release.   I’d love to hear your comments on how OUM has evolved, and ideas for new content you’d like to see in the upcoming releases.

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• Great Expectations - Fusion HCM Highlights at OOW

  - by Kathryn Perry

  A guest post by Lisa Conley, Principal Product Strategy Manager, Fusion HCM, Oracle Applications Development Oracle Open World is just around the corner! There's always so much to see and do and learn at the conference so I want to share some of the 'don't miss' Fusion HCM highlights with you. (Use this tool to search by session number to get a full description.) For starters, we have several customers who will be sharing their Fusion HCM implementation stories. We'll kick off these presentations with a customer panel at 12:15 on Monday in Moscone West 2005 (CON9420). You'll hear from Zillow, the Gerson Lehrman Group, UBS, and ConAgra about their experiences with our products. Oracle partners MarketSphere (CON8581) and eVerge (CON3800) have implemented Fusion HCM themselves and and will talk about how they'll use their experiences to help customers with their implementations (both are in Moscone West 2006). Beth Correa, CEO of Official Payroll Advisor, will highlight her favorite things about Oracle Fusion HCM Payroll on Tuesday at 11:45 in Moscone West 2006 (CON6691). And you'll get to hear from customers again when they speak with Steve Miranda in his Oracle Applications: Strategic Directions and Recommendations session on Tuesday at 1:15 in Moscone West 2002/2004 (CON11434). To bring it all together for you, we've listed all your Fusion HCM opportunities to learn and interact in this Focus On Document. I am really looking forward to the sessions on Human Capital Management in the Cloud. The Oracle Cloud combines the multiple product offerings into a single environment that leverages a common technology infrastructure enabling users to focus on their business - not the business of managing environments. On Tuesday at 10:15 in Moscone West 2002/2004, there is a General Session entitled the Future of Oracle HCM -- Strategy and Roadmap (GEN9505). This will touch on all product lines. Fusion HCM will be highlighted in Gretchen Alarcon's Oracle HCM: Overview, Strategy, Customer Experiences, and Roadmap session on Monday at 12:15 in Moscone West 2005 (CON9410). Also on Tuesday at 1:15 in Moscone West 2006, is a session focused on Talent Management and how you can try out these new products, co-existing with your current product set (CON9430). This is important in that you can test the waters before diving in. ConAgra will be sharing their experience in this session as well.  And of course, if you want to have a personal demonstration, please come by the Oracle DEMOgrounds in West Exhibition Hall Level 1 or the Oracle Cloud Services Lounge at Moscone West Level 3 where our Oracle HCM Cloud Services experts will be ready to answer your questions. I hope you have a wonderful week in San Francisco.Lisa ConleyPrincipal Product Strategy Manager, Fusion HCMApplications DevelopmentOracle Corporation

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• The Great Divorce

  - by BlackRabbitCoder

  I have a confession to make: I've been in an abusive relationship for more than 17 years now.  Yes, I am not ashamed to admit it, but I'm finally doing something about it. I met her in college, she was new and sexy and amazingly fast -- and I'd never met anything like her before.  Her style and her power captivated me and I couldn't wait to learn more about her.  I took a chance on her, and though I learned a lot from her -- and will always be grateful for my time with her -- I think it's time to move on. Her name was C++, and she so outshone my previous love, C, that any thoughts of going back evaporated in the heat of this new romance.  She promised me she'd be gentle and not hurt me the way C did.  She promised me she'd clean-up after herself better than C did.  She promised me she'd be less enigmatic and easier to keep happy than C was.  But I was deceived.  Oh sure, as far as truth goes, it wasn't a complete lie.  To some extent she was more fun, more powerful, safer, and easier to maintain.  But it just wasn't good enough -- or at least it's not good enough now. I loved C++, some part of me still does, it's my first-love of programming languages and I recognize its raw power, its blazing speed, and its improvements over its predecessor.  But with today's hardware, at speeds we could only dream to conceive of twenty years ago, that need for speed -- at the cost of all else -- has died, and that has left my feelings for C++ moribund. If I ever need to write an operating system or a device driver, then I might need that speed.  But 99% of the time I don't.  I'm a business-type programmer and chances are 90% of you are too, and even the ones who need speed at all costs may be surprised by how much you sacrifice for that.   That's not to say that I don't want my software to perform, and it's not to say that in the business world we don't care about speed or that our job is somehow less difficult or technical.  There's many times we write programs to handle millions of real-time updates or handle thousands of financial transactions or tracking trading algorithms where every second counts.  But if I choose to write my code in C++ purely for speed chances are I'll never notice the speed increase -- and equally true chances are it will be far more prone to crash and far less easy to maintain.  Nearly without fail, it's the macro-optimizations you need, not the micro-optimizations.  If I choose to write a O(n2) algorithm when I could have used a O(n) algorithm -- that can kill me.  If I choose to go to the database to load a piece of unchanging data every time instead of caching it on first load -- that too can kill me.  And if I cross the network multiple times for pieces of data instead of getting it all at once -- yes that can also kill me.  But choosing an overly powerful and dangerous mid-level language to squeeze out every last drop of performance will realistically not make stock orders process any faster, and more likely than not open up the system to more risk of crashes and resource leaks. And that's when my love for C++ began to die.  When I noticed that I didn't need that speed anymore.  That that speed was really kind of a lie.  Sure, I can be super efficient and pack bits in a byte instead of using separate boolean values.  Sure, I can use an unsigned char instead of an int.  But in the grand scheme of things it doesn't matter as much as you think it does.  The key is maintainability, and that's where C++ failed me.  I like to tell the other developers I work with that there's two levels of correctness in coding: Is it immediately correct? Will it stay correct? That is, you can hack together any piece of code and make it correct to satisfy a task at hand, but if a new developer can't come in tomorrow and make a fairly significant change to it without jeopardizing that correctness, it won't stay correct. Some people laugh at me when I say I now prefer maintainability over speed.  But that is exactly the point.  If you focus solely on speed you tend to produce code that is much harder to maintain over the long hall, and that's a load of technical debt most shops can't afford to carry and end up completely scrapping code before it's time.  When good code is written well for maintainability, though, it can be correct both now and in the future. And you know the best part is?  My new love is nearly as fast as C++, and in some cases even faster -- and better than that, I know C# will treat me right.  Her creators have poured hundreds of thousands of hours of time into making her the sexy beast she is today.  They made her easy to understand and not an enigmatic mess.  They made her consistent and not moody and amorphous.  And they made her perform as fast as I care to go by optimizing her both at compile time and a run-time. Her code is so elegant and easy on the eyes that I'm not worried where she will run to or what she'll pull behind my back.  She is powerful enough to handle all my tasks, fast enough to execute them with blazing speed, maintainable enough so that I can rely on even fairly new peers to modify my work, and rich enough to allow me to satisfy any need.  C# doesn't ask me to clean up her messes!  She cleans up after herself and she tries to make my life easier for me by taking on most of those optimization tasks C++ asked me to take upon myself.  Now, there are many of you who would say that I am the cause of my own grief, that it was my fault C++ didn't behave because I didn't pay enough attention to her.  That I alone caused the pain she inflicted on me.  And to some extent, you have a point.  But she was so high maintenance, requiring me to know every twist and turn of her vast and unrestrained power that any wrong term or bout of forgetfulness was met with painful reminders that she wasn't going to watch my back when I made a mistake.  But C#, she loves me when I'm good, and she loves me when I'm bad, and together we make beautiful code that is both fast and safe. So that's why I'm leaving C++ behind.  She says she's changing for me, but I have no interest in what C++0x may bring.  Oh, I'll still keep in touch, and maybe I'll see her now and again when she brings her problems to my door and asks for some attention -- for I always have a soft spot for her, you see.  But she's out of my house now.  I have three kids and a dog and a cat, and all require me to clean up after them, why should I have to clean up after my programming language as well?

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• Personal Technology – Laptop Screen Blank – No Post – No BIOS – No Boot

  - by Pinal Dave

  If your laptop Screen is Blank and there is no POST, BIOS or boot, you can follow the steps mentioned here and there are chances that it will work if there is no hardware failure inside. Step 1: Remove the power cord from the laptop Step 2: Remove the battery from the laptop Step 3: Hold power button (keep it pressed) for almost 60 seconds Step 4: Plug power back in laptop Step 5: Start computer and it should just start normally. Step 6: Now shut down Step 7: Insert the battery back in the laptop Step 8: Start laptop again and it should work Note 1: If your laptop does not work after inserting back the memory. Remove the memory and repeat above process. Do not insert the battery back as it is malfunctioning. Note 2: If your screen is faulty or have issues with your hardware (motherboard, screen or anything else) this method will not fix your computer. Those, who care about how I come up with this not SQL related blog post, here is the very funny true story. If you are a married man, you will know what I am going to describe next. May be you have faced the same situation or at least you feel and understand my situation. My wife’s computer suddenly stops working when she was searching for my daughter’s mathematics worksheets online. While the fatal accident happened with my wife’s computer (which was my loyal computer for over 4 years before she got it), I was working in my home office, fixing a high priority issue (live order’s database was corrupted) with one of the largest eCommerce websites.  While I was working on production server where I was fixing database corruption, my wife ran to my home office. Here is how the conversation went: Wife: This computer does not work. I: Restart it. Wife: It does not start. I: What did you do with it? Wife: Nothing, it just stopped working. I: Okey, I will look into it later, working on the very urgent issue. Wife: I was printing my daughter’s worksheet. I: Hm.. Okey. Wife: It was the mathematics worksheet, which you promised you will teach but you never get around to do it, so I am doing it myself. I: Thanks. I appreciate it. I am very busy with this issue as million dollar transaction are not happening as the database got corrupted and … Wife: So what … umm… You mean to say that you care about this customer more than your daughter. You know she got A+ in every other class but in mathematics she got only A. She missed that extra credit question. I: She is only 4, it is okay. Wife: She is 4.5 years old not 4. So you are not going to fix this computer which does not start at all. I think our daughter next time will even get lower grades as her dad is busy fixing something. I: Alright, I give up bring me that computer. Our daughter who was listening everything so far she finally decided to speak up. Daughter: Dad, it is a laptop not computer. I: Yes, sweety get that laptop here and your dad is going to fix the this small issue of million dollar issue later on. I decided to pay attention to my wife’s computer. She was right. No matter what I do, it will not boot up, it will not start, no BIOS, no POST screen. The computer starts for a second but nothing comes up on the screen. The light indicating hard drive comes up for a second and goes off. Nothing happens. I removed every single USB drive from the laptop but it still would not start. It was indeed no fun for me. Finally I remember my days when I was not married and used to study in University of Southern California, Los Angeles. I remembered that I used to have very old second (or maybe third or fourth) hand computer with me. In polite words, I had pre-owned computer and it used to face very similar issues again and again. I had small routine I used to follow to fix my old computer and I had decided to follow the same steps again with this computer. Step 1: Remove the power cord from the laptop Step 2: Remove the battery from the laptop Step 3: Hold power button (keep it pressed) for almost 60 seconds Step 4: Plug power back in laptop Step 5: Start computer and it should just start normally. Step 6: Now shut down Step 7: Insert the battery back in the laptop Step 8: Start laptop again and it should work Note 1: If your laptop does not work after inserting back the memory. Remove the memory and repeat above process. Do not insert the battery back as it is malfunctioning. Note 2: If your screen is faulty or have issues with your hardware (motherboard, screen or anything else) this method will not fix your computer. Once I followed above process, her computer worked. I was very delighted, that now I can go back to solving the problem where millions of transactions were waiting as I was fixing corrupted database and it the current state of the database was in emergency mode. Once I fixed the computer, I looked at my wife and asked. I: Well, now this laptop is back online, can I get guaranteed that she will get A+ in mathematics in this week’s quiz? Wife: Sure, I promise. I: Fantastic. After saying that I started to look at my database corruption and my wife interrupted me again. Wife: Btw, I forgot to tell you. Our daughter had got A in mathematics last week but she had another quiz today and she already have received A+ there. I kept my promise. I looked at her and she started to walk outside room, before I say anything my phone rang. DBA from eCommerce company had called me, as he was wondering why there is no activity from my side in last 10 minutes. DBA: Hey bud, are you still connected. I see um… no activity in last 10 minutes. I: Oh, well, I was just saving the world. I am back now. After two hours I had fixed the database corruption and everything was normal. I was outsmarted by my wife but honestly I still respect and love her the same as she is the one who spends countless hours with our daughter so she does not miss me and I can continue writing blogs and keep on doing technology evangelism. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Humor, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• A Bad Day at Work

  - by TehGrumpyCoder

  There's lots of ways of having a bad day at work... I suppose for many people, just being *at* work makes it a bad day, but I happen to be one of those people that found a way to do something I like for a living. I've always said "if you're not having fun, what's the point?" ... on the latest Zune podcast, they were interviewing someone from the WP7 team and he said they're mantra is "It's not done until it's fun" ... I like that too. But, even when you're doing what you like for a living, it can get tedious. There were times that I didn't look forward to going out and playing guitar on a Friday or Saturday night, and some nights I was looking at my watch just waiting for it to be over. Well, that was today... like Steve Martin in "The Jerk" ... the first hour was like a regular hour, but then the rest of the morning was like a day, and the afternoon has been like a week. I've got a list of stuff I need to get into my head, and it's tough when the highest technology you have during 9 hours of your day is .NET 2.0 and you can only run what IT installed. I get wrapped around the power take-off reading something and dearly want to write some code to try, but with the state of technology here, it's like trying to teach jazz chords to someone that showed up for their lesson with that stupid plastic guitar from Guitar Hero. I tried to watch a training video... downloaded it zipped so maybe it wouldn't be noticed like it might if I streamed it. Then nothing on this machine would play the video... dang! Well, if someone doesn't take me out on the drive tonight or back in tomorrow, maybe it'll be a better day... or maybe I'll d/l a bunch of training videos in a different format, or bring in a decent viewer, or download them to my Zune maybe... that would work. I suppose at age 61 there are worse things than feeling stifled... for instance, so far I've lived 2 years longer than my father... but at the same time, he's the one that pointed out that in my first letter home from Boot Camp "He's complaining, he's fine"... guess he had my number :) I think he'd appreciate "Teh Grumpy Coder"

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• Why wearing Jeans is considered unprofessional?

  - by Gopinath

  When I started my career 9 years ago I use to wear casual wear to office – Jeans & T-Shirts all the 5 days. The environment at workplace during those days encouraged me to be casual and many of my colleagues use to come in Jeans. We just started our career those days it was perfectly fine to be in casual. As I grow up in the ladder, I started feeling the discomfort of wearing Jeans at work. During clients visits, senior managers meetings and consultations I was an odd man in the crowd as the rest of them are in formals. In order to be one among the professionals I’m forced change my dressing style and start wearing formals. But  the question of “Why wearing jeans to workplace is considered as unprofessional?” use in linger in my mind till today. I got the answer to my question from a discussion thread on Quora When they were invented, jeans were associated with blue-collar work. They were meant to get muddy and gross and take lots of abuse without falling apart, even if you wore the same pair every day. The people who bought them were the ones whose lives required durable clothing. And another commenter says… A professional image is critical to cementing business relationships, and part of that is, for right or wrong, how you dress. Jeans are typically associated with "kicking back", relaxation, leisure, informality,  and even a slightly rebellious flavor. The style and condition of the jeans are a consideration, as we often wear jeans into advanced states of being worn down, with tearing, etc.. that we generally do not do with other clothing items. I agree with this theory even though it may be centuries old. If you want to look like a professional and treated like a professional it’s better to be dress up in formals. These days I make a point to be in formals at workplace. Not everyone is Steve Jobs to wear a Jean & Turtle Neck T-shirt  right? CC Image credit flickr/exey

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• Hardware and Software Working Together - What Does LJE say?

  - by Stephen Slade

   IDG News Service - Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said Oracle will continue to bet on selling high-end custom hardware for its software products, even amidst a growing trend toward roomfuls of cheap, generic servers. "You have to be in the hardware business and the software business, to get the best possible system," he said during a keynote speech at Oracle's OpenWorld conference in Tokyo. "We believe it's the right idea, we believe it's the next generation of computing, we believe all the pieces have to fit together." Ellison, as he has often done in the past, repeatedly referred to Apple as his "favorite example" of such tight integration. He was a close friend of Apple's co-founder Steve Jobs and previously served on Apple's board of directors.He said sales of Oracle's advanced servers were booming and generating around a billion dollars a year in revenue for the company, which has until recent years focused almost exclusively on its software offerings. With the explosion of popular online services and the increasing number of mobile devices that access them, demand is high for databases that can quickly respond to high numbers of relatively simple queries. While Oracle is pitching its expensive, finely-tuned machines to meet this requirement, Internet behemoths like Google, Facebook and Microsoft increasingly rely on armies of low-cost, easily replaceable servers. Ellison emphasized the high specifications of Oracle's servers, which come packed with multiple terabytes of RAM and flash-based storage for speed. Such machines are superior to large server farms, he said, because they require far less electricity and floor space, and are also cost competitive. When asked about whether purchasing such products would lock customers in to expensive hardware from Oracle, he promised that the company's software would always run on "multiple hardware sources."  Ellison, who spoke from Kyoto, Japan's ancient capital, was shown live online via webcast. The Oracle founder has a fondness for Japanese architecture and is staying in his large garden residence in the city Source: Ellison: Hardware-software integration key, Apple is best example. Oracle's founder and CEO reaffirmed his commitment to custom hardware for its software products  LINK to Computerworld article Apr 5, 2012 http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9225858/Ellison_Hardware_software_integration_key_Apple_is_best_example?source=CTWNLE_nlt_entsoft_2012-04-09&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+computerworld%2Fs%2Ffeed%2Ftopic%2F173+%28Computerworld+Databases+News%29#disqus_thread

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• Why I Love Microsoft Development

  - by Brian Lanham

  I've been writing software for a while and recently had an opportunity to broaden my horizons and start developing for iOS. We decided to leverage, as much as possible, our existing skills and use MonoTouch and MonoDevelop by Novell.    For those of you who do not know, Mono is a .NET port originally designed for Linux but adapted for other platforms as well. MonoTouch is a port specifically for building iOS applications using the .NET framework. MonoDroid is a port (in CTP-esque release) for Android.   A MISSING COMPONENT - VISUAL DESIGNER   MonoDevelop lacks one very significant component compared with other tools I am using: NO VISUAL DESIGNER. Instead of using an integrated visual designer, MonoDevelop shells to the Mac OS "Interface Builder".  Since MonoDevelop lets me have a "Visual Studio-esque" feel *and* I get to use C#, AND it's FREE, I am gladly willing to overlook this.  In fact, it's not even a question.  Free?  Sure, I'll take it with no Visual Designer.   In my experiences I've grown from UNIX and DOS to .NET development through many steps. Java/JSP/Servlets; Windows; Web; etc. I've been doing .NET for quite a few years and I guess I just got "comfortable" with the tools.   WHY AM I NOT GETTING IT?   Interface Builder (IB) is amazingly confusing for me. I had the opportunity to speak at the Northern VA Code Camp on 12/11/2010. My presentation was "Getting Started with iOS Development using MonoTouch and C#".    At the visual design part of the presentation, I asked one of the 3 or 4 Mac developers in the room about my confusion with the IB. I don't understand why the "Classes" list includes objects. I don't understand what "File's Owner" is. And, most importantly, WHAT THE HECK IS AN OUTLET AND WHY IS IT NECESSARY?!?!?"   His response to these question (especially Outlets): "They did it wrong."   I'm accustom to a visual designer that creates variables for graphical widgets for me. Not IB. Instead, I have to create "Outlets" manually. I still do not understand why and, the explanation from a seasoned Mac developer is that it's wrong. (He received nods of confirmation from the other Mac devs in the room.)   I LOVE MS DEV   I love development for Microsoft platforms using Microsoft development tools. I love Windows 7. I love Visual Studio 2010. I love SQL Server. Azure, Entity Framework, Active Directory, Office, WCF/WF/WPF, etc. are all designed with integration in mind. They are also all designed with developers in mind.   Steve Ballmer recently ranted "It's the developers!" That's why it is relatively quick to build apps using MS tools. Clearly, MS knows that while we usually enjoy building technology solutions, we are here to make money. And we need tools that accelerate our time to market without compromising the power and quality of our solutions.   So, yeah, I am sucking up I guess. But I love Microsoft Development. Thank you, Microsoft, for providing the plethora of great development tools.    P.S. (but please slow down a bit…I'm having trouble keeping up!)

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• Three Global Telecoms Soar With Siebel

  - by michael.seback

  Deutsche Telekom Group Selects Oracle's Siebel CRM to Underpin Next-Generation CRM Strategy The Deutsche Telekom Group (DTAG), one of the world's leading telecommunications companies, and a customer of Oracle since 2001, has invested in Oracle's Siebel CRM as the standard platform for its Next Generation CRM strategy; a move to lower the cost of managing its 120 million customers across its European businesses. Oracle's Siebel CRM is planned to be deployed in Germany and all of the company's European business within five years. "...Our Next-Generation strategy is a significant move to lower our operating costs and enhance customer service for all our European customers. Not only is Oracle underpinning this strategy, but is also shaping the way our company operates and sells to customers. We look forward to working with Oracle over the coming years as the technology is extended across Europe," said Dr. Steffen Roehn, CIO Deutsche Telekom AG... "The telecommunications industry is currently undergoing some major changes. As a result, companies like Deutsche Telekom are needing to be more intelligent about the way they use technology, particularly when it comes to customer service. Deutsche Telekom is a great example of how organisations can use CRM to not just improve services, but also drive more commercial opportunities through the ability to offer highly tailored offers, while the customer is engaged online or on the phone," said Steve Fearon, vice president CRM, EMEA Read more. Telecom Argentina S.A. Accelerates Time-to-Market for New Communications Products and Services Telecom Argentina S.A. offers basic telephone, urban landline, and national and international long-distance services...."With Oracle's Siebel CRM and Oracle Communication Billing and Revenue Management, we started a technological transformation that allows us to satisfy our critical business needs, such as improving customer service and quickly launching new phone and internet products and services." - Saba Gooley, Chief Information Officer, Wire Line and Internet Services, Telecom Argentina S.A.Read more. Türk Telekom Develops Benefits-Driven CRM Roadmap Türk Telekom Group provides integrated telecommunication services from public switched telephone network (PSTN) and global systems for mobile communications technology (GSM). to broadband internet...."Oracle Insight provided us with a structured deployment approach that makes sense for our business. It quantified the benefits of the CRM solution allowing us to engage with the relevant business owners; essential for a successful transformation program." - Paul Taylor, VP Commercial Transformation, Türk Telekom Read more.

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• NFS server generating "invalid extent" on EXT4 system disk?

  - by Stephen Winnall

  I have a server running Xen 4.1 with Oneiric in the dom0 and each of the 4 domUs. The system disks of the domUs are LVM2 volumes built on top of an mdadm RAID1. All the domU system disks are EXT4 and are created using snapshots of the same original template. 3 of them run perfectly, but one (called s-ub-02) keeps on being remounted read-only. A subsequent e2fsck results in a single "invalid extent" diagnosis: e2fsck 1.41.14 (22-Dec-2010) /dev/domu/s-ub-02-root contains a file system with errors, check forced. Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes Inode 525418 has an invalid extent (logical block 8959, invalid physical block 0, len 0) Clear<y>? yes Pass 2: Checking directory structure Pass 3: Checking directory connectivity Pass 4: Checking reference counts Pass 5: Checking group summary information /dev/domu/s-ub-02-root: 77757/655360 files (0.3% non-contiguous), 360592/2621440 blocks The console shows typically the following errors for the system disk (xvda2): [101980.903416] EXT4-fs error (device xvda2): ext4_ext_find_extent:732: inode #525418: comm apt-get: bad header/extent: invalid extent entries - magic f30a, entries 12, max 340(340), depth 0(0) [101980.903473] EXT4-fs (xvda2): Remounting filesystem read-only I have created new versions of the system disk. The same thing always happens. This, and the fact that the disk is ultimately on a RAID1, leads me to preclude a hardware disk error. The only obvious distinguishing feature of this domU is the presence of nfs-kernel-server, so I suspect that. Its exports file looks like this: /exports/users 192.168.0.0/255.255.248.0(rw,sync,no_subtree_check) /exports/media/music 192.168.0.0/255.255.248.0(rw,sync,no_subtree_check) /exports/media/pictures 192.168.0.0/255.255.248.0(rw,sync,no_subtree_check) /exports/opt 192.168.0.0/255.255.248.0(rw,sync,no_subtree_check) /exports/users and /exports/opt are LVM2 volumes from the same volume group as the system disk. /exports/media is an EXT2 volume. (There is an issue where clients see /exports/media/pictures as being a read-only volume, which I mention for completeness.) With the exception of the read-only problem, the NFS server appears to work correctly under light load for several hours before the "invalid extent" problem occurs. There are no helpful entries in /var/log. All of a sudden, no more files are written, so you can see when the disk was remounted read-only, but there is no indication of what the cause might be. Can anyone help me with this problem? Steve

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for 2012-09-19

  - by Bob Rhubart

  BPM Process Accelerator Packs – Update | Pat Shepherd Architect Pat Shepherd shares several resources relevant to the new Oracle Process Accelerators for Oracle Business Process Management. Oracle BI EE Management Pack Now Available for Oracle Enterprise Manager 12cR2 | Mark Rittman A handy and informative overview from Oracle ACE Director Mark Rittman. WebSockets on WebLogic Server | Steve Button "As there's no standard WebSocket Java API at this point, we've chosen to model the API on the Grizzly WebSocket API with some minor changes where necessary," says James "Buttso" Buttons. "Once the results of JSR-356 (Java API for WebSocket) becomes public, we'll look to implement and support that." Oracle Reference Architecture: Software Engineering This document from the IT Strategies from Oracle library focuses on integrated asset management and the need for efffective asset metadata management to insure that assets are properly tracked and reused in a manner that provides a holistic functional view of the enterprise. The tipping point for cloud management is nigh | Cloud Computing - InfoWorld "Businesses typically don't think too much about managing IT resources until they become too numerous and cumbersome to deal with on an ad hoc basis—a point many companies will soon hit in their adoption of cloud computing." — David Linthicum DevOps Basics: Track Down High CPU Thread with ps, top and the new JDK7 jcmd Tool | Frank Munz "The approach is very generic and works for WebLogic, Glassfish or any other Java application," say Frank Munz. "UNIX commands in the example are run on CentOS, so they will work without changes for Oracle Enterprise Linux or RedHat. Creating the thread dump at the end of the video is done with the jcmd tool from JDK7." Frank has captured the process in the posted video. OIM 11g R2 UI customization | Daniel Gralewski "OIM user interface customizations are easier now, and they survive patch applications--there is no need to reapply them after patching," says Fusion Middleware A-Team member Daniel Gralewski. "Adding new artifacts, new skins, and plugging code directly into the user interface components became an easier task." Daniel shows just how easy in this post. Thought for the Day "I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when looked at in the right way, did not become still more complicated." — Poul Anderson (November 25, 1926 – July 31, 2001) Source: SoftwareQuotes.com

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