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• What is the difference between Workcenters, Dashboards, and the Interaction Hub?

  - by Matthew Haavisto

  Oracle Open World has just concluded.  Over the course of the conference, we presented several sessions covering different aspects of the PeopleSoft user experience, including Workcenters, Dashboards, and the PeopleSoft Interaction Hub (formerly known as the PeopleSoft Applications Portal).  Although we've produced collateral on these features and covered them in sessions, it became apparent at the conference that customers still have many questions about the these products, including how they are licensed, how they are installed, what their various purposes are, and how they can be used together synergistically. Let's Start with Licensing and Installation As you may know, we've extended the restricted use license (RUL) for the Interaction Hub.  This grants customers with PeopleTools 8.52 licenses the right to install the Interaction Hub for free for use as specified in the Tools license notes.  Note that this means customers receive a restricted use license for the Interaction Hub that doesn't cost them an additional license fee, but it is a separate product, not part of PeopleTools or PeopleSoft applications, and is a separate installation.  This means customers must provide the infrastructure to install and run the Hub, just like any other application.  The benefits of using the Hub to unify your PeopleSoft user experience can be great.  PeopleSoft applications have not yet delivered instances of the Hub with their products, though they may in the future. Workcenters and Dashboards, on the other hand, are frameworks provided by PeopleTools.  No other license is required, and no additional installation of a separate product is needed (apart from PeopleTools and PeopleSoft applications).  PeopleSoft applications are delivering instances of the workcenters and dashboards with their products.  Some are available now, and more are coming in future releases.  These delivered workcenter and dashboard instances require no additional licenses, and no additional installations beyond Tools and the applications that provide them.  In addition, the workcenter and dashboard frameworks provided by PeopleTools can be used by customers to build their own workcenters and dashboards, and it's quite easy and simple to do so. What are Their Differences?  What Purposes do they Serve? Workcenters, Dashboards and the Interaction Hub appear somewhat similar.  They all contain pagelets, and have some visual characteristics in common.  However, their strengths and purposes are very different, and they were designed to provide different benefits to your PeopleSoft ecosystem. Workcenters and Dashboards have the following characteristics: Designed for specific roles Focus on the daily tasks of those roles Help to streamline the work performed most often Personal view of my work world Makes navigation and search easier and quicker, particularly for transactions and decision support Reports and data needed for day-to-day work Personalizable, but minimal Delivered by PS Apps, but can be altered by customer for their requirements Customers can create their own Workcenters can be used for guided processes  The Interaction Hub is designed to aggregate content from multiple applications, and is is used to unify the user experience of those applications.  It offers a rich, web site-based user experience, and is often used to provide access to infrequently performed activities like benefits enrollment, payroll inquiries, life event changes, onboarding, and so on. Full-featured and robust Centrally administered Pushed to large audience Broad info like Company News Infrequent activities like benefits, not day-to-day tasks Self-service, access to employer info Central launch point for other activities and can navigate to workcenters and dashboards Deployed by customers or consultants, instances not delivered by PeopleSoft (at this time) Content management Unified PS application navigation Although these products are quite different and serve different purposes in your PeopleSoft environment, they can be used together to provide a richer, more efficient and engaging user experience for your all your user communities.

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• Managing Social Relationships for the Enterprise – Part 2

  - by Michael Snow

  12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Reggie Bradford, Senior Vice President, Oracle  On September 13, 2012, I sat down with Altimeter Analyst Jeremiah Owyang to talk about how enterprise businesses are approaching the management of both their social media strategies and internal structures. There’s no longer any question as to whether companies are adopting social full throttle. That’s exactly the way it should be, because it’s a top online behavior across all age groups. For your consumers, it’s an ingrained, normal form of communication. And beyond connecting with friends, social users are reaching out for information and service from brands. Jeremiah tells us 29% of Twitter followers follow a brand and 58% of Facebook users have “Liked” a brand. Even on the B2B side, people act on reviews and recommendations. Just as in the early 90’s we saw companies move from static to dynamic web sites, businesses of all sizes are moving from just establishing a social presence to determining effective and efficient ways to use it. I like to say we’re in the 2nd or 3rd inning of a 9-inning game. Corporate social started out as a Facebook page, it’s multiple channels servicing customers wherever they are. Social is also moving from merely moderating to analyzing so that the signal can be separated from the noise, so that impactful influencers can be separated from other users. Organizationally, social started with the marketers. Now we’re getting into social selling, commerce, service, HR, recruiting, and collaboration. That’s Oracle’s concept of enterprise social relationship management, a framework to extend social across the entire organization real-time in as holistic a way as possible. Social requires more corporate coordination than ever before. One of my favorite statistics is that the average corporation at enterprise has 178 social accounts, according to Altimeter. Not all of them active, not all of them necessary, but 178 of them. That kind of fragmentation creates risk, so the smarter companies will look for solutions (as opposed to tools) that can organize, scale and defragment, as well as quickly integrate other networks and technologies that will come along. Our conversation goes deep into the various corporate social structures we’re seeing, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of each. There are also a couple of great examples of how known brands used an integrated, holistic approach to achieve stated social goals. What’s especially exciting to me is the Oracle SRM framework for the enterprise provides companywide integration into one seamless system. This is not a dream. This is going to have substantial business impact in the next several years.

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• Improving Click and Drag with C++

  - by Josh

  I'm currently using SFML 2.0 to develop a game in C++. I have a game sprite class that has a click and drag method. The method works, but there is a slight problem. If the mouse moves too fast, the object the user selected can't keep up and is left behind in the spot where the mouse left its bounds. I will share the class definition and the given function implementation. Definition: class codePeg { protected: FloatRect bounds; CircleShape circle; int xPos, yPos, xDiff, yDiff, once; int xBase, yBase; Vector2i mousePos; Vector2f circlePos; public: void init(RenderWindow& Window); void draw(RenderWindow& Window); void drag(RenderWindow& Window); void setPegPosition(int x, int y); void setPegColor(Color pegColor); void mouseOver(RenderWindow& Window); friend int isPegSelected(void); }; Implementation of the "drag" function: void codePeg::drag(RenderWindow& Window) { mousePos = Mouse::getPosition(Window); circlePos = circle.getPosition(); if(Mouse::isButtonPressed(Mouse::Left)) { if(mousePos.x > xPos && mousePos.y > yPos && mousePos.x - bounds.width < xPos && mousePos.y - bounds.height < yPos) { if(once) { xDiff = mousePos.x - circlePos.x; yDiff = mousePos.y - circlePos.y; once = 0; } xPos = mousePos.x - xDiff; yPos = mousePos.y - yDiff; circle.setPosition(xPos, yPos); } } else { once = 1; xPos = xBase; yPos = yBase; xDiff = 0; yDiff = 0; circle.setPosition(xBase, yBase); } Window.draw(circle); } Like I said, the function works, but to me, the code is very ugly and I think it could be improved and could be more efficient. The only thing I can think of as to why the object cannot keep up with the mouse is that there are too many function calls and/or checks. The user does not really have to mouse the mouse "fast" for it to happen, I would say at an average pace the object is left behind. How can I improve the code so that the object remains with the mouse when it is selected? Any help improving this code or giving advice is greatly appreciated.

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• Why Is Hibernation Still Used?

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  With the increased prevalence of fast solid-state hard drives, why do we still have system hibernation? Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. The Question SuperUser reader Moses wants to know why he should use hibernate on a desktop machine: I’ve never quite understood the original purpose of the Hibernation power state in Windows. I understand how it works, what processes take place, and what happens when you boot back up from Hibernate, but I’ve never truly understood why it’s used. With today’s technology, most notably with SSDs, RAM and CPUs becoming faster and faster, a cold boot on a clean/efficient Windows installation can be pretty fast (for some people, mere seconds from pushing the power button). Standby is even faster, sometimes instantaneous. Even SATA drives from 5-6 years ago can accomplish these fast boot times. Hibernation seems pointless to me [on desktop computers] when modern technology is considered, but perhaps there are applications that I’m not considering. What was the original purpose behind hibernation, and why do people still use it? Quite a few people use hibernate, so what is Moses missing in the big picture? The Answer SuperUser contributor Vignesh4304 writes: Normally hibernate mode saves your computer’s memory, this includes for example open documents and running applications, to your hard disk and shuts down the computer, it uses zero power. Once the computer is powered back on, it will resume everything where you left off. You can use this mode if you won’t be using the laptop/desktop for an extended period of time, and you don’t want to close your documents. Simple Usage And Purpose: Save electric power and resuming of documents. In simple terms this comment serves nice e.g (i.e. you will sleep but your memories are still present). Why it’s used: Let me describe one sample scenario. Imagine your battery is low on power in your laptop, and you are working on important projects on your machine. You can switch to hibernate mode – it will result your documents being saved, and when you power on, the actual state of application gets restored. Its main usage is like an emergency shutdown with an auto-resume of your documents. MagicAndre1981 highlights the reason we use hibernate everyday: Because it saves the status of all running programs. I leave all my programs open and can resume working the next day very easily. Doing a real boot would require to start all programs again, load all the same files into those programs, get to the same place that I was at before, and put all my windows in exactly the same place. Hibernating saves a lot of work pulling these things back up again. It’s not unusual to find computers around the office here that have been hibernated day in and day out for months without an actual full system shutdown and restart. It’s enormously convenient to freeze your work space at the exact moment you stopped working and to turn right around and resume there the next morning. Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.     

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• Conflict Minerals - Design to Compliance

  - by C. Chadwick

  Dr. Christina  Schröder - Principal PLM Consultant, Enterprise PLM Solutions EMEA What does the Conflict Minerals regulation mean? Conflict Minerals has recently become a new buzz word in the manufacturing industry, particularly in electronics and medical devices. Known as the "Dodd-Frank Section 1502", this regulation requires SEC listed companies to declare the origin of certain minerals by 2014. The intention is to reduce the use of tantalum, tungsten, tin, and gold which originate from mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and adjoining countries that are controlled by violent armed militia abusing human rights. Manufacturers now request information from their suppliers to see if their raw materials are sourced from this region and which smelters are used to extract the metals from the minerals. A standardized questionnaire has been developed for this purpose (download and further information). Soon, even companies which are not directly affected by the Conflict Minerals legislation will have to collect and maintain this information since their customers will request the data from their suppliers. Furthermore, it is expected that the public opinion and consumer interests will force manufacturers to avoid the use of metals with questionable origin. Impact for existing products Several departments are involved in the process of collecting data and providing conflict minerals compliance information. For already marketed products, purchasing typically requests Conflict Minerals declarations from the suppliers. In order to address requests from customers, technical operations or product management are usually responsible for keeping track of all parts, raw materials and their suppliers so that the required information can be provided. For complex BOMs, it is very tedious to maintain complete, accurate, up-to-date, and traceable data. Any product change or new supplier can, in addition to all other implications, have an effect on the Conflict Minerals compliance status. Influence on product development  It makes sense to consider compliance early in the planning and design of new products. Companies should evaluate which metals are needed or contained in supplier parts and if these could originate from problematic sources. The answer influences the cost and risk analysis during the development. If it is known early on that a part could be non-compliant with respect to Conflict Minerals, alternatives can be evaluated and thus costly changes at a later stage can be avoided. Integrated compliance management  Ideally, compliance data for Conflict Minerals, but also for other regulations like REACH and RoHS, should be managed in an integrated supply chain system. The compliance status is directly visible across the entire BOM at any part level and for the finished product. If data is missing, a request to the supplier can be triggered right away without having to switch to another system. The entire process, from identification of the relevant parts, requesting information, handling responses, data entry, to compliance calculation is fully covered end-to-end while being transparent for all stakeholders. Agile PLM Product Governance and Compliance (PG&C) The PG&C module extends Agile PLM with exactly this integrated functionality. As with the entire Agile product suite, PG&C can be configured according to customer requirements: data fields, attributes, workflows, routing, notifications, and permissions, etc… can be quickly and easily tailored to a customer’s needs. Optionally, external databases can be interfaced to query commercially available sources of Conflict Minerals declarations which obviates the need for a separate supplier request in many cases. Suppliers can access the system directly for data entry through a special portal. The responses to the standard EICC-GeSI questionnaire can be imported by the supplier or internally. Manual data entry is also supported. A set of compliance-specific dashboards and reports complement the functionality Conclusion  The increasing number of product compliance regulations, for which Conflict Minerals is just one example, requires companies to implement an efficient data and process management in this area. Consumer awareness in this matter increases as well so that an integrated system from development to production also provides a competitive advantage. Follow this link to learn more about Agile's PG&C solution

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• Where Have All the Ugly Forms Gone? Users and ADF Took Care Of It

  - by ultan o'broin

  Sometimes I hear that our application demos are a bit too "cutsey" and that we never talk about with any user roles that have lots of data entry as a requirement. Some (no names) consider those old clunker forms, with the myriad rows of fields, to be super-productive for data clerks. We do have such roles covered in Oracle Fusion Applications for sure. But consider what is really the issue here: productivity. Check out how the Oracle Fusion Financials Applications User Experience team went about designing for productivity when receiving and entering invoice data, for example. See how Fusion Financials caters so well for input and control of data? Central to all this is knowing the users and how they work: what tasks do they need to perform, and when. Read more about Fusion Financials productivity in the white paper, Get It Done Fast, Get It Done Right: The Oracle Fusion Financials User Experience. Now and then, I see forms that weren't designed for end user activity at all. Instead, they were designed by developers or by the IT department around the database schema. Forms with literally dozens of fields on the same page, sometimes. Forms that give the impression there was only task involved, when there may have been several. At times, completing one of these huge forms accurately became so tedious that, under pressure, it made more sense for the user to complete it quickly as possible and then let somebody else check it for accuracy and fill in the gaps from data emailed along in spreadsheet form. Data accuracy is critical in our business. Not good. Not efficient. Not productive. So here are a few basics on forms design for data entry-type user roles. A great place for developers to start exploring what is possible with forms layout is the Rich Client User Experience (RCUX) guidance on Form Layout, using ADF components. User-Centered Forms Design Considerations The starting point--something you must always keep in mind with your own design--is design for the end user. Find a representative end user, and keep that user engaged throughout the design, deployment, and test process. Consider these points in user testing those forms: Are there automated or technical solutions to entering the data that avoid manual input in the first place? For example, imports, uploads, OCR, whatever. Some day we will be able to tell Siri to do it, but leave that for now. Design your form to reflect the task involved (i.e., the business process) and not the database schema. On the form, group like fields together, logically. Eliminate duplicate data entry or prepopulate from previous data entry. Allow users to complete fields in the order they wish (i.e., no interdependency). Allow for tabbing between fields (keyboard is faster than mouse), so know how the browser supports this (see that RCUX guideline). Allow for final validation at the page level not at field-level entry. Way better for heads-down users. For example, ADF messages allow you to see a list of all validation errors on a page on a final submit or navigation action and to easily navigate to the point of error. Better still, be error tolerant. Allow users to enter data in formats they comfortable with. Bind any relevant user preference setting to the input format allowed (for example, the locale date format). Explore what data entry conversion can do for you automatically too (see the ADF converter demos, convenience patterns can also be written). Only ask for data input when it's needed. Get rid of, or hide optional fields. Cut down on the number of mandatory fields, and mark them clearly (use a *). Clearly label the fields in plain language. I am sure you may have a few more tips on forms design for data entry users. Remember the user before finding the comments.

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• Reducing Deadlocks - not a DBA issue ?

  - by steveh99999

   As a DBA, I'm involved on an almost daily basis troubleshooting 'SQL Server' performance issues. Often, this troubleshooting soon veers away from a 'its a SQL Server issue' to instead become a wider application/database design/coding issue.One common perception with SQL Server is that deadlocking is an application design issue - and is fixed by recoding...  I see this reinforced by MCP-type questions/scenarios where the answer to prevent deadlocking is simply to change the order in code in which tables are accessed....Whilst this is correct, I do think this has led to a situation where many 'operational' or 'production support' DBAs, when faced with a deadlock, are happy to throw the issue over to developers without analysing the issue further....A couple of 'war stories' on deadlocks which I think are interesting :- Case One , I had an issue recently on a third-party application that I support on SQL 2008.  This particular third-party application has an unusual support agreement where the customer is allowed to change the index design on the third-party provided database.  However, we are not allowed to alter application code or modify table structure..This third-party application is also known to encounter occasional deadlocks – indeed, I have documentation from the vendor that up to 50 deadlocks per day is not unusual !So, as a DBA I have to support an application which in my opinion has too many deadlocks - but, I cannot influence the design of the tables or stored procedures for the application. This should be the classic - blame the third-party developers scenario, and hope this issue gets addressed in a future application release - ie we could wait years for this to be resolved and implemented in our production environment...But, as DBAs  can change the index layout, is there anything I could do still to reduce the deadlocks in the application ?I initially used SQL traceflag 1222 to write deadlock detection output to the SQL Errorlog – using this I was able to identify one table heavily involved in the deadlocks.When I examined the table definition, I was surprised to see it was a heap – ie no clustered index existed on the table.Using SQL profiler to see locking behaviour and plan for the query involved in the deadlock, I was able to confirm a table scan was being performed.By creating an appropriate clustered index - it was possible to produce a more efficient plan and locking behaviour.So, less locks, held for less time = less possibility of deadlocks. I'm still unhappy about the overall number of deadlocks on this system - but that's something to be discussed further with the vendor.Case Two,  a system which hadn't changed for months suddenly started seeing deadlocks on a regular basis. I love the 'nothing's changed' scenario, as it gives me the opportunity to appear wise and say 'nothings changed on this system, except the data'.. This particular deadlock occurred on a table which had been growing rapidly. By using DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS - the DBA team were able to see that the deadlocks seemed to be occurring shortly after auto-update stats had regenerated the table statistics using it's default sampling behaviour.As a quick fix, we were able to schedule a nightly UPDATE STATISTICS WITH FULLSCAN on the table involved in the deadlock - thus, greatly reducing the potential for stats to be updated via auto_update_stats, consequently reducing the potential for a bad plan to be generated based on an unrepresentative sample of the data. This reduced the possibility of a deadlock occurring.  Not a perfect solution by any means, but quick, easy to implement, and needed no application code changes. This fix gave us some 'breathing space'  to properly fix the code during the next scheduled application release.   The moral of this post - don't dismiss deadlocks as issues that can only be fixed by developers...

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• Efficiently separating Read/Compute/Write steps for concurrent processing of entities in Entity/Component systems

  - by TravisG

  Setup I have an entity-component architecture where Entities can have a set of attributes (which are pure data with no behavior) and there exist systems that run the entity logic which act on that data. Essentially, in somewhat pseudo-code: Entity { id; map<id_type, Attribute> attributes; } System { update(); vector<Entity> entities; } A system that just moves along all entities at a constant rate might be MovementSystem extends System { update() { for each entity in entities position = entity.attributes["position"]; position += vec3(1,1,1); } } Essentially, I'm trying to parallelise update() as efficiently as possible. This can be done by running entire systems in parallel, or by giving each update() of one system a couple of components so different threads can execute the update of the same system, but for a different subset of entities registered with that system. Problem In reality, these systems sometimes require that entities interact(/read/write data from/to) each other, sometimes within the same system (e.g. an AI system that reads state from other entities surrounding the current processed entity), but sometimes between different systems that depend on each other (i.e. a movement system that requires data from a system that processes user input). Now, when trying to parallelize the update phases of entity/component systems, the phases in which data (components/attributes) from Entities are read and used to compute something, and the phase where the modified data is written back to entities need to be separated in order to avoid data races. Otherwise the only way (not taking into account just "critical section"ing everything) to avoid them is to serialize parts of the update process that depend on other parts. This seems ugly. To me it would seem more elegant to be able to (ideally) have all processing running in parallel, where a system may read data from all entities as it wishes, but doesn't write modifications to that data back until some later point. The fact that this is even possible is based on the assumption that modification write-backs are usually very small in complexity, and don't require much performance, whereas computations are very expensive (relatively). So the overhead added by a delayed-write phase might be evened out by more efficient updating of entities (by having threads work more % of the time instead of waiting). A concrete example of this might be a system that updates physics. The system needs to both read and write a lot of data to and from entities. Optimally, there would be a system in place where all available threads update a subset of all entities registered with the physics system. In the case of the physics system this isn't trivially possible because of race conditions. So without a workaround, we would have to find other systems to run in parallel (which don't modify the same data as the physics system), other wise the remaining threads are waiting and wasting time. However, that has disadvantages Practically, the L3 cache is pretty much always better utilized when updating a large system with multiple threads, as opposed to multiple systems at once, which all act on different sets of data. Finding and assembling other systems to run in parallel can be extremely time consuming to design well enough to optimize performance. Sometimes, it might even not be possible at all because a system just depends on data that is touched by all other systems. Solution? In my thinking, a possible solution would be a system where reading/updating and writing of data is separated, so that in one expensive phase, systems only read data and compute what they need to compute, and then in a separate, performance-wise cheap, write phase, attributes of entities that needed to be modified are finally written back to the entities. The Question How might such a system be implemented to achieve optimal performance, as well as making programmer life easier? What are the implementation details of such a system and what might have to be changed in the existing EC-architecture to accommodate this solution?

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• Where Twitter Stands Heading Into 2013

  - by Mike Stiles

  As Twitter continued throughout 2012 to be a stage on which global politics and culture played itself out, the company itself underwent some adjustments that give us a good indication of what users and brands can expect from the platform in 2013. The power of the network did anything but fade. Celebrities continued to use it to connect one-on-one. Even the Pope signed on this year. It continued to fuel revolutions. It played an exponentially large factor in this US Presidential election. And around the world, the freedom to speak was challenged as users were fired, sued, sometimes even jailed for their tweets. Expect more of the same in 2013, as Twitter has entrenched itself, for individuals, causes and brands, as the fastest, easiest, most efficient way to message the masses so some measure of impact can come from it. It’s changed everything, and it’s not finished. These fun facts reveal the position of strength with which Twitter enters 2013: It now generates a billion tweets every 2.5 days It has 500 million+ users The average Twitter user has tweeted 307 times 32% of everyone using the Internet uses Twitter It’s expected to bring in $540 million in ad revenue by 2014 11 new accounts are created every second High-level Executive Summary: people love it, people use it, and they’re going to keep loving and using it. Whether or not outside developers love it is a different matter. 2012 marked a shift from welcoming the third party support that played at least some role in Twitter being so warmly embraced, to discouraging anything that replicates what Twitter can do itself…or plans to do itself. It’s not the open playground it once was. Now Twitter must spend 2013 proving it can innovate in-house and keep us just as entranced. Likewise, Twitter is distancing itself from Facebook. Images from the #1 platform’s Instagram don’t work on Twitter anymore, and Twitter’s rolling out their own photo filter product. Where the two have lived in a “plenty of room for everybody” symbiosis up to now, 2013 could see the giants ramping up a full-on rivalry. Twitter is exhibiting a deliberate strategy. Updates have centered on more visually appealing search results, and making finding and sharing content easier. Deals have been cut with some media entities so their content stands out. CEO Dick Costolo has said tweets aren’t the attraction, they’re what leads you to content. Twitter aims to be a key distributor of media and info. Add the addition of former News Corp. President Peter Chernin to the board, and their hashtag landing page experience for events, and their media behemoth ambitions get pretty clear. There are challenges ahead and Costolo has also laid those out; entry into China, figuring out how to have Twitter deliver both comprehensive and relevant, targeted experiences, and the visualization of big data. What does this mean for corporations? They can expect a more media-rich evolution and growing emphases on imagery. They can expect more opportunities to create great media content and leverage Twitter for its distribution. And they can expect new ways to surface in searches. Are brands diving in? 56% of customer tweets to companies get completely and totally ignored. Ugh. A study Twitter recently conducted with Compete shows people who see tweets from retailers are more likely to buy a product. And, the more retailer tweets they see, the more likely they are to purchase on the retail site. As more of those tweets point to engaging media content from the brand, the results should get even better. Twitter appears ready for 2013. Enterprise brands have some work to do. @mikestilesPhoto Stuart Miles, freedigitalphotos.net

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• SQL Server Optimizer Malfunction?

  - by Tony Davis

  There was a sharp intake of breath from the audience when Adam Machanic declared the SQL Server optimizer to be essentially "stuck in 1997". It was during his fascinating "Query Tuning Mastery: Manhandling Parallelism" session at the recent PASS SQL Summit. Paraphrasing somewhat, Adam (blog | @AdamMachanic) offered a convincing argument that the optimizer often delivers flawed plans based on assumptions that are no longer valid with today’s hardware. In 1997, when Microsoft engineers re-designed the database engine for SQL Server 7.0, SQL Server got its initial implementation of a cost-based optimizer. Up to SQL Server 2000, the developer often had to deploy a steady stream of hints in SQL statements to combat the occasionally wilful plan choices made by the optimizer. However, with each successive release, the optimizer has evolved and improved in its decision-making. It is still prone to the occasional stumble when we tackle difficult problems, join large numbers of tables, perform complex aggregations, and so on, but for most of us, most of the time, the optimizer purrs along efficiently in the background. Adam, however, challenged further any assumption that the current optimizer is competent at providing the most efficient plans for our more complex analytical queries, and in particular of offering up correctly parallelized plans. He painted a picture of a present where complex analytical queries have become ever more prevalent; where disk IO is ever faster so that reads from disk come into buffer cache faster than ever; where the improving RAM-to-data ratio means that we have a better chance of finding our data in cache. Most importantly, we have more CPUs at our disposal than ever before. To get these queries to perform, we not only need to have the right indexes, but also to be able to split the data up into subsets and spread its processing evenly across all these available CPUs. Improvements such as support for ColumnStore indexes are taking things in the right direction, but, unfortunately, deficiencies in the current Optimizer mean that SQL Server is yet to be able to exploit properly all those extra CPUs. Adam’s contention was that the current optimizer uses essentially the same costing model for many of its core operations as it did back in the days of SQL Server 7, based on assumptions that are no longer valid. One example he gave was a "slow disk" bias that may have been valid back in 1997 but certainly is not on modern disk systems. Essentially, the optimizer assesses the relative cost of serial versus parallel plans based on the assumption that there is no IO cost benefit from parallelization, only CPU. It assumes that a single request will saturate the IO channel, and so a query would not run any faster if we parallelized IO because the disk system simply wouldn’t be able to handle the extra pressure. As such, the optimizer often decides that a serial plan is lower cost, often in cases where a parallel plan would improve performance dramatically. It was challenging and thought provoking stuff, as were his techniques for driving parallelism through query logic based on subsets of rows that define the "grain" of the query. I highly recommend you catch the session if you missed it. I’m interested to hear though, when and how often people feel the force of the optimizer’s shortcomings. Barring mistakes, such as stale statistics, how often do you feel the Optimizer fails to find the plan you think it should, and what are the most common causes? Is it fighting to induce it toward parallelism? Combating unexpected plans, arising from table partitioning? Something altogether more prosaic? Cheers, Tony.

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• LUKOIL Overseas Holding Optimizes Oil Field Development Projects with Integrated Project Management

  - by Melissa Centurio Lopes

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} LUKOIL Overseas Group is a growing oil and gas company that is an integral part of the vertically integrated oil company OAO LUKOIL. It is engaged in the exploration, acquisition, integration, and efficient development of oil and gas fields outside the Russian Federation to promote transforming LUKOIL into a transnational energy company. In 2010, the company signed a 20-year development project for the giant, West Qurna 2 oil field in Iraq. Executing 10,000 to 15,000 project activities simultaneously on 14 major construction and drilling projects in Iraq for the West Qurna-2 project meant the company needed a clear picture, in real time, of dependencies between its capital construction, geologic exploration and sinking projects—required for its building infrastructure oil field development projects in Iraq. LUKOIL Overseas Holding deployed Oracle’s Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management to generate structured project management information and optimize planning, monitoring, and analysis of all engineering and commercial activities—such as tenders, and bulk procurement of materials and equipment—related to oil field development projects. A word from LUKOIL Overseas Holding Ltd. “Previously, we created project schedules on desktop computers and uploaded them to the project server to be merged into one big file for each project participant to access. This was not scalable, as we’ve grown and now run up to 15,000 activities in numerous projects and subprojects at any time. With Oracle’s Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management, we can now work concurrently on projects with many team members, enjoy absolute security, and issue new baselines for all projects and project participants once a week, with ease.” – Sergey Kotov, Head of IT and the Communication Office, LUKOIL Mid-East Ltd. Oracle Primavera Solutions: · Facilitated managing dependencies between projects by enabling the general scheduler to reschedule all projects and subprojects once a week, realigning 10,000 to 15,000 project activities that the company runs at any time · Replaced Microsoft Project and a paper-based system with a complete solution that provides structured project data · Enhanced data security by establishing project management security policies that enable only authorized project members to edit their project tasks, while enabling each project participant to view all project data that are relevant to that individual’s task · Enabled the company to monitor project progress in comparison to the projected plan, based on physical project assets to determine if each project is on track to conclude within its time and budget limitations To view the full list of solutions view here. “Oracle Gold Partner Parma Telecom was key to our successful Primavera deployment, implementing the software’s basic functionalities, such as project content, timeframes management, and cost management, in addition to performing its integration with our enterprise resource planning system and intranet portal within ten months and in accordance with budgets,” said Rafik Baynazarov, head of the master planning and control office, LUKOIL Mid-East Ltd. “ To read the full version of the customer success story, please view here.

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• Taking HRMS to the Cloud to Simplify Human Resources Management

  - by HCM-Oracle

  By Anke Mogannam With human capital management (HCM) a top-of-mind issue for executives in every industry, human resources (HR) organizations are poised to have their day in the sun—proving not just their administrative worth but their strategic value as well.  To make good on that promise, however, HR must modernize. Indeed, if HR is to act as an agent of change—providing the swift reallocation of employees  and the rapid absorption of employee data required for enterprises to shift course on a dime—it must first deal with the disruptive change at its own front door. And increasingly, that means choosing the right technology and human resources management system (HRMS) for managing the entire employee lifecycle. Unfortunately, for most organizations, this task has proved easier said than done. This is because while much has been written about advances in HRMS technology, until recently, most of those advances took the form of disparate on-premises solutions designed to serve very specific purposes. Although this may have resulted in key competencies in certain areas, it also meant that processes for core HR functions like payroll and benefits were being carried out in separate systems from those used for talent management, workforce optimization, training, and so on. With no integration—and no single system of record—processes were disconnected, ease of use was impeded, user experience was diminished, and vital data was left untapped.  Today, however, that scenario has begun to change, and end-to-end cloud-based HCM solutions have moved from wished-for innovations to real-life solutions. Why, then, have HR organizations been so slow in adopting them? The answer—it would seem—is, “It’s complicated.” So complicated, in fact, that 45 percent of the respondents to PwC’s “Annual HR Technology Survey” (for 2013) reported having no formal HR software roadmap, and 40 percent stated that they “did not know” whether their organizations would be increasing their use of cloud or software as a service (SaaS) for HR.  Clearly, HR organizations need help sorting through the morass of HR software options confronting them. But just as clearly, there’s an enormous opportunity awaiting those that do. The trick will come in charting a course that allows HR to leverage existing technology while investing in the cloud-based solutions that will deliver the end-to-end processes, easy-to-understand analytics, and superior adaptability required to simplify—and add value to—every aspect of employee management. The Opportunity therefore is to cut costs, drive Innovation, and increase engagement by moving to cloud-based HCM.  Then you will benefit from one Interface, leverage many access points, and  gain at-a-glance insight across your entire workforce. With many legacy on-premises HR systems not being efficient anymore and cloud-based, integrated systems that span the range of HR functions finally reaching maturity, the time is ripe for moving core HR to the cloud. Indeed, for the first time ever there are more HRMS replacement initiatives than HRMS upgrade initiatives under way, and the majority of them involve moving to the cloud per Cedar Crestone’s 2013-2014 HRMS survey. To learn how you can launch your own cloud HCM initiative and begin using HR to power the enterprise, visit Oracle HRMS in the Cloud and Oracle’s new customer 2 cloud program. Anke Mogannam brings more than 16 years of marketing and human capital management experience in the technology industries to her role at Oracle where she is part of the Human Capital Management applications marketing team. In that role, Anke drives content marketing, messaging, go-to-market activities, integrated marketing campaigns, and field enablement. Prior to joining Oracle, Anke held several roles in communications, marketing, HCM product strategy and product management at PeopleSoft, SAP, Workday and Saba. Follow her on Twitter @amogannam

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• OpenWorld: Our (Road) Maps are Looking Good!

  - by Tony Berk

  Wow, only one (or two) days down at Oracle OpenWorld! Are you on overload yet? I'm still trying to figure out how to be in 3 sessions at the same time... I guess everyone needs to prioritize! There was a lot to see in Monday's sessions, especially some great forward-looking roadmap sessions. In case you aren't here or you decided to go to other sessions, this is my quick summary of what I could capture from a couple of the roadmaps: In the Fusion CRM Strategy and Roadmap session, Anthony Lye provided an overview of the Fusion CRM strategy including the key design principles of 3 E's: Easy, Effective and Efficient. After an overview of how Oracle has deployed Fusion CRM internally to 25,000 users worldwide, Anthony discussed the features coming in the next release, the releases in the next 12 months and beyond. I can't detail too much since you haven't read Oracle's Safe Harbor statement, but check out Fusion Tap and look for new features and added functionality for sales prediction, marketing, social and integration with a number of the key Customer Experience products.  In the Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service Vision and Roadmap session, Chris Hamilton presented the focus areas for the RightNow product. As a result of the large increase in development resources after the acquisition, the RightNow CX team is planning a lot of enhancements to the functionality, infrastructure and integrations. As a key piece of the Oracle Customer Experience (CX) strategy, RightNow will be integrated with Oracle Social Network, Oracle Commerce (ATG and Endeca), Oracle Knowledge, Oracle Policy Automation and, of course, further integration with Fusion Sales and Marketing. Look forward to seeing more on the Virtual Assistant, Smart Interaction Hub and Mobility. In addition to the roadmaps, I was looking forward to hearing from Oracle CRM customers. So, I sat in on two great Siebel customer panels: The Maximizing User Adoption Rates for Siebel Sales and Siebel Partner Relationship Management panel consisted of speakers from CSL Behring, McKesson and Intuit. It was great to get an overview of implementations for both B2B and B2C companies. It was great hearing that all of these companies have more than 1,000 sales users (Intuit has 4,000) and how the 360 degree view of the customer in Siebel is helping these customers improve their customers' experience (CX). They are all great examples of centralized implementations which have standardized processes across the globe and across business units.  Waste Management, Farmers Insurance and the US Citizenship & Immigration Services presented in the Driving Great Customer Experiences with Siebel Service Applications session. Talk about serving large customer bases! Is it possible that Farmers with only 10 million households is the smallest of these 3? All of them provided great examples of how they are improving the customer experience (CX) including 60-70% improvements in efficiency or reducing the number of applications the customer service reps (CSRs) need to use from 10 to 1 (Waste Management) and context aware call transfers to avoid the caller explaining their issue 3 times (USCIS). So that's my wrap up of only 4 sessions from Monday. In between sessions, I stopped by the Oracle DEMOgrounds and CRM Pavilion to visit with a group of great partners and see the products and partner integrations in action. Don't miss a recap of Mark Hurd's Keynote. I can't believe there were another 40+ sessions covering CRM, Fusion, Cloud, etc. that I missed today! Anyone else see any great sessions?

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• Getting the number of fragments which passed the depth test

  - by Etan

  In "modern" environments, the "NV Occlusion Query" extension provides a method to get the number of fragments which passed the depth test. However, on the iPad / iPhone using OpenGL ES, the extension is not available. What is the most performant approach to implement a similar behaviour in the fragment shader? Some of my ideas: Render the object completely in white, then count all the colors together using a two-pass shader where first a vertical line is rendered and for each fragment the shader computes the sum over the whole row. Then, a single vertex is rendered whose fragment sums all the partial sums of the first pass. Doesn't seem to be very efficient. Render the object completely in white over a black background. Downsample recursively, abusing the hardware linear interpolation between textures until being at a reasonably small resolution. This leads to fragments which have a greyscale level depending on the number of white pixels where in their corresponding region. Is this even accurate enough? Use mipmaps and simply read the pixel on the 1x1 level. Again the question of accuracy and if it is even possible using non-power-of-two textures. The problem wit these approaches is, that the pipeline gets stalled which results in major performance issues. Therefore, I'm looking for a more performant way to accomplish my goal. Using the EXT_OCCLUSION_QUERY_BOOLEAN extension Apple introduced EXT_OCCLUSION_QUERY_BOOLEAN in iOS 5.0 for iPad 2. "4.1.6 Occlusion Queries Occlusion queries use query objects to track the number of fragments or samples that pass the depth test. An occlusion query can be started and finished by calling BeginQueryEXT and EndQueryEXT, respectively, with a target of ANY_SAMPLES_PASSED_EXT or ANY_SAMPLES_PASSED_CONSERVATIVE_EXT. When an occlusion query is started with the target ANY_SAMPLES_PASSED_EXT, the samples-boolean state maintained by the GL is set to FALSE. While that occlusion query is active, the samples-boolean state is set to TRUE if any fragment or sample passes the depth test. When the occlusion query finishes, the samples-boolean state of FALSE or TRUE is written to the corresponding query object as the query result value, and the query result for that object is marked as available. If the target of the query is ANY_SAMPLES_PASSED_CONSERVATIVE_EXT, an implementation may choose to use a less precise version of the test which can additionally set the samples-boolean state to TRUE in some other implementation dependent cases." The first sentence hints on a behavior which is exactly what I'm looking for: getting the number of pixels which passed the depth test in an asynchronous manner without much performance loss. However, the rest of the document describes only how to get boolean results. Is it possible to exploit this extension to get the pixel count? Does the hardware support it so that there may be hidden API to get access to the pixel count? Other extensions which could be exploitable would be debugging features like the number of times the fragment shader was invoked (PSInvocations in DirectX - not sure if something simila is available in OpenGL ES). However, this would also result in a pipeline stall.

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• Implementing Service Level Agreements in Enterprise Manager 12c for Oracle Packaged Applications

  - by Anand Akela

  Contributed by Eunjoo Lee, Product Manager, Oracle Enterprise Manager. Service Level Management, or SLM, is a key tool in the proactive management of any Oracle Packaged Application (e.g., E-Business Suite, Siebel, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards E1, Fusion Apps, etc.). The benefits of SLM are that administrators can utilize representative Application transactions, which are constantly and automatically running behind the scenes, to verify that all of the key application and technology components of an Application are available and performing to expectations. A single transaction can verify the availability and performance of the underlying Application Tech Stack in a much more efficient manner than by monitoring the same underlying targets individually. In this article, we’ll be demonstrating SLM using Siebel Applications, but the same tools and processes apply to any of the Package Applications mentioned above. In this demonstration, we will log into the Siebel Application, navigate to the Contacts View, update a contact phone record, and then log-out. This transaction exposes availability and performance metrics of multiple Siebel Servers, multiple Components and Component Groups, and the Siebel Database - in a single unified manner. We can then monitor and manage these transactions like any other target in EM 12c, including placing pro-active alerts on them if the transaction is either unavailable or is not performing to required levels. The first step in the SLM process is recording the Siebel transaction. The following screenwatch demonstrates how to record Siebel transaction using an EM tool called “OpenScript”. A completed recording is called a “Synthetic Transaction”. The second step in the SLM process is uploading the Synthetic Transaction into EM 12c, and creating Generic Service Tests. We can create a Generic Service Test to execute our synthetic transactions at regular intervals to evaluate the performance of various business flows. As these transactions are running periodically, it is possible to monitor the performance of the Siebel Application by evaluating the performance of the synthetic transactions. The process of creating a Generic Service Test is detailed in the next screenwatch. EM 12c provides a guided workflow for all of the key creation steps, including configuring the Service Test, uploading of the Synthetic Test, determining the frequency of the Service Test, establishing beacons, and selecting performance and usage metrics, just to name a few. The third and final step in the SLM process is the creation of Service Level Agreements (SLA). Service Level Agreements allow Administrators to utilize the previously created Service Tests to specify expected service levels for Application availability, performance, and usage. SLAs can be created for different time periods and for different Service Tests. This last screenwatch demonstrates the process of creating an SLA, as well as highlights the Dashboards and Reports that Administrators can use to monitor Service Test results. Hopefully, this article provides you with a good start point for creating Service Level Agreements for your E-Business Suite, Siebel, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards E1, or Fusion Applications. Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c, with the Application Management Suites, represents a quick and easy way to implement Service Level Management capabilities at customer sites. Stay Connected: Twitter |  Face book |  You Tube |  Linked in |  Google+ |  Newsletter

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• Investigating on xVelocity (VertiPaq) column size

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

    In January I published an article about how to optimize high cardinality columns in VertiPaq. In the meantime, VertiPaq has been rebranded to xVelocity: the official name is now “xVelocity in-memory analytics engine (VertiPaq)” but using xVelocity and VertiPaq when we talk about Analysis Services has the same meaning. In this post I’ll show how to investigate on columns size of an existing Tabular database so that you can find the most important columns to be optimized. A first approach can be looking in the DataDir of Analysis Services and look for the folder containing the database. Then, look for the biggest files in all subfolders and you will find the name of a file that contains the name of the most expensive column. However, this heuristic process is not very optimized. A better approach is using a DMV that provides the exact information. For example, by using the following query (open SSMS, open an MDX query on the database you are interested to and execute it) you will see all database objects sorted by used size in a descending way. SELECT * FROM $SYSTEM.DISCOVER_STORAGE_TABLE_COLUMN_SEGMENTS ORDER BY used_size DESC You can look at the first rows in order to understand what are the most expensive columns in your tabular model. The interesting data provided are: TABLE_ID: it is the name of the object – it can be also a dictionary or an index COLUMN_ID: it is the column name the object belongs to – you can also see ID_TO_POS and POS_TO_ID in case they refer to internal indexes RECORDS_COUNT: it is the number of rows in the column USED_SIZE: it is the used memory for the object By looking at the ration between USED_SIZE and RECORDS_COUNT you can understand what you can do in order to optimize your tabular model. Your options are: Remove the column. Yes, if it contains data you will never use in a query, simply remove the column from the tabular model Change granularity. If you are tracking time and you included milliseconds but seconds would be enough, round the data source column to the nearest second. If you have a floating point number but two decimals are good enough (i.e. the temperature), round the number to the nearest decimal is relevant to you. Split the column. Create two or more columns that have to be combined together in order to produce the original value. This technique is described in VertiPaq optimization article. Sort the table by that column. When you read the data source, you might consider sorting data by this column, so that the compression will be more efficient. However, this technique works better on columns that don’t have too many distinct values and you will probably move the problem to another column. Sorting data starting from the lower density columns (those with a few number of distinct values) and going to higher density columns (those with high cardinality) is the technique that provides the best compression ratio. After the optimization you should be able to reduce the used size and improve the count/size ration you measured before. If you are interested in a longer discussion about internal storage in VertiPaq and you want understand why this approach can save you space (and time), you can attend my 24 Hours of PASS session “VertiPaq Under the Hood” on March 21 at 08:00 GMT.

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• Top 5 Reasons to Invest in Enterprise 2.0 Technologies

  - by kellsey.ruppel(at)oracle.com

  In 2010, Oracle's portal, content management, and collaboration solutions evolved rapidly, supported by increasingly deep integrations across Oracle Fusion Middleware and the entire Oracle stack. In light of these developments, we asked Vince Casarez, vice president of Enterprise 2.0 product management, for his top five reasons to invest in Enterprise 2.0 (E2.0) technologies--including real-world examples of businesses already realizing the benefits of next-generation E2.0 technologies. 1. Provide a modern user experience As E2.0 technologies gain widespread adoption, customers and employees expect intuitive Web experiences that are both interactive and community-based. By partnering with Oracle, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Group is already making that happen. With 76,000 employees and operations in more than 100 countries, the company wanted a streamlined, personalized user experience with more relevant content in fewer clicks. Working with Oracle, they created a global support portal that supports personalization and integration with Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and Oracle E-Business Suite--and drives collaboration with tools such as wikis, blogs, and forums. Learn more about Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Group's Global Support Portal in this Webcast. 2. Improve productivity and collaboration As E2.0 technologies mature, Oracle anticipates companies moving beyond the idea of simply creating yet another Facebook-like destination for its employees, and instead shaping work environments around specific business tasks. After rapid growth--both organic and through acquisition--construction and infrastructure services leader Balfour Beatty found itself with multiple homegrown intranet sites with very minimal content-sharing capabilities. Today, thanks to Oracle WebCenter Suite, Oracle WebCenter Spaces, Oracle WebCenter Services, and Oracle Universal Content Management, Balfour Beatty is benefiting from collaborative workspaces, a central place to use and work with documents, and unified search across content. 3. Leverage business processes and applications Modern portals are now able to integrate users, content, and business processes in unprecedented ways. To take advantage of these new possibilities, leading dairy provider Land O'Lakes has implemented a fully integrated ERP solution together with Oracle's ECM platform. As a result, Land O'Lakes has been able to achieve better information management and compliance, increased adoption rates for enterprise tools, and increased business process efficiency thanks to more effective information sharing and collaboration. 4. Enhance customer and supplier relationships Companies have begun to move beyond the idea that E2.0 simply means enabling customer reviews or embedding chat functionality. They are taking E2.0 to the next level and providing interactive experiences for their customers. For example, to enhance customer and supplier relationships, Wind River, a global leader in device software optimization, successfully partnered with Oracle to: Integrate ERP and ECM content to provide customers the latest and most relevant support information for products they own Enable customers to personalize their support experience and receive updates regarding patches, application notes, and other relevant content Enable discussions, wikis, and blogs for more efficient collaboration 5. Increase business visibility and responsiveness By strategically embedding collaboration and communication tools into specific business contexts, companies significantly increase visibility into changing business conditions--and can respond much more agilely. Texas A&M University System--one of the largest systems of higher education in the U.S.--partnered with Oracle to create a unified repository that would enable the retrieval of research and grant data from disparate systems via an Enterprise 2.0 user interface. By enabling researchers to customize their own portals with easy-to-use tools, they have also been able to significantly reduce their reliance on the IT department. Learn how other Oracle customers are leveraging Enterprise 2.0 technologies.

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• Omni-directional light shadow mapping with cubemaps in WebGL

  - by Winged

  First of all I must say, that I have read a lot of posts describing an usage of cubemaps, but I'm still confused about how to use them. My goal is to achieve a simple omni-directional (point) light type shading in my WebGL application. I know that there is a lot more techniques (like using Two-Hemispheres or Camera Space Shadow Mapping) which are way more efficient, but for an educational purpose cubemaps are my primary goal. Till now, I have adapted a simple shadow mapping which works with spotlights (with one exception: I don't know how to cut off the glitchy part beyond the reach of a single shadow map texture): glitchy shadow mapping<<< So for now, this is how I understand the usage of cubemaps in shadow mapping: Setup a framebuffer (in case of cubemaps - 6 framebuffers; 6 instead of 1 because every usage of framebufferTexture2D slows down an execution which is nicely described here <<<) and a texture cubemap. Also in WebGL depth components are not well supported, so I need to render it to RGBA first. this.texture = gl.createTexture(); gl.bindTexture(gl.TEXTURE_CUBE_MAP, this.texture); gl.texParameteri(gl.TEXTURE_CUBE_MAP, gl.TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, gl.LINEAR); gl.texParameteri(gl.TEXTURE_CUBE_MAP, gl.TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, gl.LINEAR); for (var face = 0; face < 6; face++) gl.texImage2D(gl.TEXTURE_CUBE_MAP_POSITIVE_X + face, 0, gl.RGBA, this.size, this.size, 0, gl.RGBA, gl.UNSIGNED_BYTE, null); gl.bindTexture(gl.TEXTURE_CUBE_MAP, null); this.framebuffer = []; for (face = 0; face < 6; face++) { this.framebuffer[face] = gl.createFramebuffer(); gl.bindFramebuffer(gl.FRAMEBUFFER, this.framebuffer[face]); gl.framebufferTexture2D(gl.FRAMEBUFFER, gl.COLOR_ATTACHMENT0, gl.TEXTURE_CUBE_MAP_POSITIVE_X + face, this.texture, 0); gl.framebufferRenderbuffer(gl.FRAMEBUFFER, gl.DEPTH_ATTACHMENT, gl.RENDERBUFFER, this.depthbuffer); var e = gl.checkFramebufferStatus(gl.FRAMEBUFFER); // Check for errors if (e !== gl.FRAMEBUFFER_COMPLETE) throw "Cubemap framebuffer object is incomplete: " + e.toString(); } Setup the light and the camera (I'm not sure if should I store all of 6 view matrices and send them to shaders later, or is there a way to do it with just one view matrix). Render the scene 6 times from the light's position, each time in another direction (X, -X, Y, -Y, Z, -Z) for (var face = 0; face < 6; face++) { gl.bindFramebuffer(gl.FRAMEBUFFER, shadow.buffer.framebuffer[face]); gl.viewport(0, 0, shadow.buffer.size, shadow.buffer.size); gl.clear(gl.COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | gl.DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT); camera.lookAt( light.position.add( cubeMapDirections[face] ) ); scene.draw(shadow.program); } In a second pass, calculate the projection a a current vertex using light's projection and view matrix. Now I don't know If should I calculate 6 of them, because of 6 faces of a cubemap. ScaleMatrix pushes the projected vertex into the 0.0 - 1.0 region. vDepthPosition = ScaleMatrix * uPMatrixFromLight * uVMatrixFromLight * vWorldVertex; In a fragment shader calculate the distance between the current vertex and the light position and check if it's deeper then the depth information read from earlier rendered shadow map. I know how to do it with a 2D Texture, but I have no idea how should I use cubemap texture here. I have read that texture lookups into cubemaps are performed by a normal vector instead of a UV coordinate. What vector should I use? Just a normalized vector pointing to the current vertex? For now, my code for this part looks like this (not working yet): float shadow = 1.0; vec3 depth = vDepthPosition.xyz / vDepthPosition.w; depth.z = length(vWorldVertex.xyz - uLightPosition) * linearDepthConstant; float shadowDepth = unpack(textureCube(uDepthMapSampler, vWorldVertex.xyz)); if (depth.z > shadowDepth) shadow = 0.5; Could you give me some hints or examples (preferably in WebGL code) how I should build it?

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• Multithreading 2D gravity calculations

  - by Postman

  I'm building a space exploration game and I've currently started working on gravity ( In C# with XNA). The gravity still needs tweaking, but before I can do that, I need to address some performance issues with my physics calculations. This is using 100 objects, normally rendering 1000 of them with no physics calculations gets well over 300 FPS (which is my FPS cap), but any more than 10 or so objects brings the game (and the single thread it runs on) to its knees when doing physics calculations. I checked my thread usage and the first thread was killing itself from all the work, so I figured I just needed to do the physics calculation on another thread. However when I try to run the Gravity.cs class's Update method on another thread, even if Gravity's Update method has nothing in it, the game is still down to 2 FPS. Gravity.cs public void Update() { foreach (KeyValuePair<string, Entity> e in entityEngine.Entities) { Vector2 Force = new Vector2(); foreach (KeyValuePair<string, Entity> e2 in entityEngine.Entities) { if (e2.Key != e.Key) { float distance = Vector2.Distance(entityEngine.Entities[e.Key].Position, entityEngine.Entities[e2.Key].Position); if (distance > (entityEngine.Entities[e.Key].Texture.Width / 2 + entityEngine.Entities[e2.Key].Texture.Width / 2)) { double angle = Math.Atan2(entityEngine.Entities[e2.Key].Position.Y - entityEngine.Entities[e.Key].Position.Y, entityEngine.Entities[e2.Key].Position.X - entityEngine.Entities[e.Key].Position.X); float mult = 0.1f * (entityEngine.Entities[e.Key].Mass * entityEngine.Entities[e2.Key].Mass) / distance * distance; Vector2 VecForce = new Vector2((float)Math.Cos(angle), (float)Math.Sin(angle)); VecForce.Normalize(); Force = Vector2.Add(Force, VecForce * mult); } } } entityEngine.Entities[e.Key].Position += Force; } } Yeah, I know. It's a nested foreach loop, but I don't know how else to do the gravity calculation, and this seems to work, it's just so intensive that it needs its own thread. (Even if someone knows a super efficient way to do these calculations, I'd still like to know how I COULD do it on multiple threads instead) EntityEngine.cs (manages an instance of Gravity.cs) public class EntityEngine { public Dictionary<string, Entity> Entities = new Dictionary<string, Entity>(); public Gravity gravity; private Thread T; public EntityEngine() { gravity = new Gravity(this); } public void Update() { foreach (KeyValuePair<string, Entity> e in Entities) { Entities[e.Key].Update(); } T = new Thread(new ThreadStart(gravity.Update)); T.IsBackground = true; T.Start(); } } EntityEngine is created in Game1.cs, and its Update() method is called within Game1.cs. I need my physics calculation in Gravity.cs to run every time the game updates, in a separate thread so that the calculation doesn't slow the game down to horribly low (0-2) FPS. How would I go about making this threading work? (any suggestions for an improved Planetary Gravity system are welcome if anyone has them) I'm also not looking for a lesson in why I shouldn't use threading or the dangers of using it incorrectly, I'm looking for a straight answer on how to do it. I've already spent an hour googling this very question with little results that I understood or were helpful. I don't mean to come off rude, but it always seems hard as a programming noob to get a straight meaningful answer, I usually rather get an answer so complex I'd easily be able to solve my issue if I understood it, or someone saying why I shouldn't do what I want to do and offering no alternatives (that are helpful). Thank you for the help!

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• Investigating on xVelocity (VertiPaq) column size

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

    In January I published an article about how to optimize high cardinality columns in VertiPaq. In the meantime, VertiPaq has been rebranded to xVelocity: the official name is now “xVelocity in-memory analytics engine (VertiPaq)” but using xVelocity and VertiPaq when we talk about Analysis Services has the same meaning. In this post I’ll show how to investigate on columns size of an existing Tabular database so that you can find the most important columns to be optimized. A first approach can be looking in the DataDir of Analysis Services and look for the folder containing the database. Then, look for the biggest files in all subfolders and you will find the name of a file that contains the name of the most expensive column. However, this heuristic process is not very optimized. A better approach is using a DMV that provides the exact information. For example, by using the following query (open SSMS, open an MDX query on the database you are interested to and execute it) you will see all database objects sorted by used size in a descending way. SELECT * FROM $SYSTEM.DISCOVER_STORAGE_TABLE_COLUMN_SEGMENTS ORDER BY used_size DESC You can look at the first rows in order to understand what are the most expensive columns in your tabular model. The interesting data provided are: TABLE_ID: it is the name of the object – it can be also a dictionary or an index COLUMN_ID: it is the column name the object belongs to – you can also see ID_TO_POS and POS_TO_ID in case they refer to internal indexes RECORDS_COUNT: it is the number of rows in the column USED_SIZE: it is the used memory for the object By looking at the ration between USED_SIZE and RECORDS_COUNT you can understand what you can do in order to optimize your tabular model. Your options are: Remove the column. Yes, if it contains data you will never use in a query, simply remove the column from the tabular model Change granularity. If you are tracking time and you included milliseconds but seconds would be enough, round the data source column to the nearest second. If you have a floating point number but two decimals are good enough (i.e. the temperature), round the number to the nearest decimal is relevant to you. Split the column. Create two or more columns that have to be combined together in order to produce the original value. This technique is described in VertiPaq optimization article. Sort the table by that column. When you read the data source, you might consider sorting data by this column, so that the compression will be more efficient. However, this technique works better on columns that don’t have too many distinct values and you will probably move the problem to another column. Sorting data starting from the lower density columns (those with a few number of distinct values) and going to higher density columns (those with high cardinality) is the technique that provides the best compression ratio. After the optimization you should be able to reduce the used size and improve the count/size ration you measured before. If you are interested in a longer discussion about internal storage in VertiPaq and you want understand why this approach can save you space (and time), you can attend my 24 Hours of PASS session “VertiPaq Under the Hood” on March 21 at 08:00 GMT.

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• Proving What You are Worth

  - by Ted Henson

  Here is a challenge for everyone. Just about everyone has been asked to provide or calculate the Return on Investment (ROI), so I will assume everyone has a method they use. The problem with stopping once you have an ROI is that those in the C-Suite probably do not care about the ROI as much as Return on Equity (ROE). Shareholders are mostly concerned with their return on the money the invested. Warren Buffett looks at ROE when deciding whether to make a deal or not. This article will outline how you can add more meaning to your ROI and show how you can potentially enhance the ROE of the company.   First I want to start with a base definition I am using for ROI and ROE. Return on investment (ROI) and return on equity (ROE) are ways to measure management effectiveness, parts of a system of measures that also includes profit margins for profitability, price-to-earnings ratio for valuation, and various debt-to-equity ratios for financial strength. Without a set of evaluation metrics, a company's financial performance cannot be fully examined by investors. ROI and ROE calculate the rate of return on a specific investment and the equity capital respectively, assessing how efficient financial resources have been used. Typically, the best way to improve financial efficiency is to reduce production cost, so that will be the focus. Now that the challenge has been made and items have been defined, let’s go deeper. Most research about implementation stops short at system start-up and seldom addresses post-implementation issues. However, we know implementation is a continuous improvement effort, and continued efforts after system start-up will influence the ultimate success of a system.   Most UPK ROI’s I have seen only include the cost savings in developing the training material. Some will also include savings based on reduced Help Desk calls. Using just those values you get a good ROI. To get an ROE you need to go a little deeper. Typically, the best way to improve financial efficiency is to reduce production cost, which is the purpose of implementing/upgrading an enterprise application. Let’s assume the new system is up and running and all users have been properly trained and are comfortable using the system. You provide senior management with your ROI that justifies the original cost. What you want to do now is develop a good base value to a measure the current efficiency. Using usage tracking you can look for various patterns. For example, you may find that users that are accessing UPK assistance are processing a procedure, such as entering an order, 5 minutes faster than those that don’t.  You do some research and discover each minute saved in processing a claim saves the company one dollar. That translates to the company saving five dollars on every transaction. Assuming 100,000 transactions are performed a year, and all users improve their performance, the company will be saving $500,000 a year. That $500,000 can be re-invested, used to reduce debt or paid to the shareholders.   With continued refinement during the life cycle, you should be able to find ways to reduce cost. These are the type of numbers and productivity gains that senior management and shareholders want to see. Being able to quantify savings and increase productivity may also help when seeking a raise or promotion.

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• Bounding Box Collision Glitching Problem (Pygame)

  - by Ericson Willians

  So far the "Bounding Box" method is the only one that I know. It's efficient enough to deal with simple games. Nevertheless, the game I'm developing is not that simple anymore and for that reason, I've made a simplified example of the problem. (It's worth noticing that I don't have rotating sprites on my game or anything like that. After showing the code, I'll explain better). Here's the whole code: from pygame import * DONE = False screen = display.set_mode((1024,768)) class Thing(): def __init__(self,x,y,w,h,s,c): self.x = x self.y = y self.w = w self.h = h self.s = s self.sur = Surface((64,48)) draw.rect(self.sur,c,(self.x,self.y,w,h),1) self.sur.fill(c) def draw(self): screen.blit(self.sur,(self.x,self.y)) def move(self,x): if key.get_pressed()[K_w] or key.get_pressed()[K_UP]: if x == 1: self.y -= self.s else: self.y += self.s if key.get_pressed()[K_s] or key.get_pressed()[K_DOWN]: if x == 1: self.y += self.s else: self.y -= self.s if key.get_pressed()[K_a] or key.get_pressed()[K_LEFT]: if x == 1: self.x -= self.s else: self.x += self.s if key.get_pressed()[K_d] or key.get_pressed()[K_RIGHT]: if x == 1: self.x += self.s else: self.x -= self.s def warp(self): if self.y < -48: self.y = 768 if self.y > 768 + 48: self.y = 0 if self.x < -64: self.x = 1024 + 64 if self.x > 1024 + 64: self.x = -64 r1 = Thing(0,0,64,48,1,(0,255,0)) r2 = Thing(6*64,6*48,64,48,1,(255,0,0)) while not DONE: screen.fill((0,0,0)) r2.draw() r1.draw() # If not intersecting, then moves, else, it moves in the opposite direction. if not ((((r1.x + r1.w) > (r2.x - r1.s)) and (r1.x < ((r2.x + r2.w) + r1.s))) and (((r1.y + r1.h) > (r2.y - r1.s)) and (r1.y < ((r2.y + r2.h) + r1.s)))): r1.move(1) else: r1.move(0) r1.warp() if key.get_pressed()[K_ESCAPE]: DONE = True for ev in event.get(): if ev.type == QUIT: DONE = True display.update() quit() The problem: In my actual game, the grid is fixed and each tile has 64 by 48 pixels. I know how to deal with collision perfectly if I moved by that size. Nevertheless, obviously, the player moves really fast. In the example, the collision is detected pretty well (Just as I see in many examples throughout the internet). The problem is that if I put the player to move WHEN IS NOT intersecting, then, when it touches the obstacle, it does not move anymore. Giving that problem, I began switching the directions, but then, when it touches and I press the opposite key, it "glitches through". My actual game has many walls, and the player will touch them many times, and I can't afford letting the player go through them. The code-problem illustrated: When the player goes towards the wall (Fine). When the player goes towards the wall and press the opposite direction. (It glitches through). Here is the logic I've designed before implementing it: I don't know any other method, and I really just want to have walls fixed in a grid, but move by 1 or 2 or 3 pixels (Slowly) and have perfect collision without glitching-possibilities. What do you suggest?

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• Pinterest and the Rising Power of Imagery

  - by Mike Stiles

  If images keep you glued to a screen, you’re hardly alone. Countless social users are letting their eyes do the walking, waiting for that special photo to grab their attention. And perhaps more than any other social network, Pinterest has been giving those eyes plenty of room to walk. Pinterest came along in 2010. Its play was that users could simply create topic boards and pin pictures to the appropriate boards for sharing. Yes there are some words, captions mostly, but not many. The speed of its growth raised eyebrows. Traffic quadrupled in the last quarter of 2011, with 7.51 million unique visitors in December alone. It now gets 1.9 billion monthly page views. And it was sticky. In the US, the average time a user spends strolling through boards and photos on Pinterest is 15 minutes, 50 seconds. Proving the concept of browsing a catalogue is not dead, it became a top 5 referrer for several apparel retailers like Land’s End, Nordstrom, and Bergdorfs. Now a survey of online shoppers by BizRate Insights says that Pinterest is responsible for more purchases online than Facebook. Over 70% of its users are going there specifically to keep up with trends and get shopping ideas. And when they buy, the average order value is $179. Pinterest is also scoring better in terms of user engagement. 66% of pinners regularly follow and repin retailers, whereas 17% of Facebook fans turn to that platform for purchase ideas. (Facebook still wins when it comes to reach and driving traffic to 3rd-party sites by the way). Social posting best practices have consistently shown that posts with photos are rewarded with higher engagement levels. You may be downright Shakespearean in your writing, but what makes images in the digital world so much more powerful than prose? 1. They transcend language barriers. 2. They’re fun and addictive to look at. 3. They can be consumed in fractions of a second, important considering how fast users move through their social content (admit it, you do too). 4. They’re efficient gateways. A good picture might get them to the headline. A good headline might then get them to the written content. 5. The audience for them surpasses demographic limitations. 6. They can effectively communicate and trigger an emotion. 7. With mobile use soaring, photos are created on those devices and easily consumed and shared on them. Pinterest’s iPad app hit #1 in the Apple store in 1 day. Even as far back as 2009, over 2.5 billion devices with cameras were on the streets generating in just 1 year, 10% of the number of photos taken…ever. But let’s say you’re not a retailer. What if you’re a B2B whose products or services aren’t visual? Should you worry about your presence on Pinterest? As with all things, you need a keen awareness of who your audience is, where they reside online, and what they want to do there. If it doesn’t make sense to put a tent stake in Pinterest, fine. But ignore the power of pictures at your own peril. If not visually, how are you going to attention-grab social users scrolling down their News Feeds at top speed? You’re competing with every other cool image out there from countless content sources. Bore us and we’ll fly right past you.

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• Broken Views

  - by Ajarn Mark Caldwell

  “SELECT *” isn’t just hazardous to performance, it can actually return blatantly wrong information. There are a number of blog posts and articles out there that actively discourage the use of the SELECT * FROM …syntax.  The two most common explanations that I have seen are: Performance:  The SELECT * syntax will return every column in the table, but frequently you really only need a few of the columns, and so by using SELECT * your are retrieving large volumes of data that you don’t need, but the system has to process, marshal across tiers, and so on.  It would be much more efficient to only select the specific columns that you need. Future-proof:  If you are taking other shortcuts in your code, along with using SELECT *, you are setting yourself up for trouble down the road when enhancements are made to the system.  For example, if you use SELECT * to return results from a table into a DataTable in .NET, and then reference columns positionally (e.g. myDataRow[5]) you could end up with bad data if someone happens to add a column into position 3 and skewing all the remaining columns’ ordinal position.  Or if you use INSERT…SELECT * then you will likely run into errors when a new column is added to the source table in any position. And if you use SELECT * in the definition of a view, you will run into a variation of the future-proof problem mentioned above.  One of the guys on my team, Mike Byther, ran across this in a project we were doing, but fortunately he caught it while we were still in development.  I asked him to put together a test to prove that this was related to the use of SELECT * and not some other anomaly.  I’ll walk you through the test script so you can see for yourself what happens. We are going to create a table and two views that are based on that table, one of them uses SELECT * and the other explicitly lists the column names.  The script to create these objects is listed below. IF OBJECT_ID('testtab') IS NOT NULL DROP TABLE testtabgoIF OBJECT_ID('testtab_vw') IS NOT NULL DROP VIEW testtab_vwgo IF OBJECT_ID('testtab_vw_named') IS NOT NULL DROP VIEW testtab_vw_namedgo CREATE TABLE testtab (col1 NVARCHAR(5) null, col2 NVARCHAR(5) null)INSERT INTO testtab(col1, col2)VALUES ('A','B'), ('A','B')GOCREATE VIEW testtab_vw AS SELECT * FROM testtabGOCREATE VIEW testtab_vw_named AS SELECT col1, col2 FROM testtabgo Now, to prove that the two views currently return equivalent results, select from them. SELECT 'star', col1, col2 FROM testtab_vwSELECT 'named', col1, col2 FROM testtab_vw_named OK, so far, so good.  Now, what happens if someone makes a change to the definition of the underlying table, and that change results in a new column being inserted between the two existing columns?  (Side note, I normally prefer to append new columns to the end of the table definition, but some people like to keep their columns alphabetized, and for clarity for later people reviewing the schema, it may make sense to group certain columns together.  Whatever the reason, it sometimes happens, and you need to protect yourself and your code from the repercussions.) DROP TABLE testtabgoCREATE TABLE testtab (col1 NVARCHAR(5) null, col3 NVARCHAR(5) NULL, col2 NVARCHAR(5) null)INSERT INTO testtab(col1, col3, col2)VALUES ('A','C','B'), ('A','C','B')goSELECT 'star', col1, col2 FROM testtab_vwSELECT 'named', col1, col2 FROM testtab_vw_named I would have expected that the view using SELECT * in its definition would essentially pass-through the column name and still retrieve the correct data, but that is not what happens.  When you run our two select statements again, you see that the View that is based on SELECT * actually retrieves the data based on the ordinal position of the columns at the time that the view was created.  Sure, one work-around is to recreate the View, but you can’t really count on other developers to know the dependencies you have built-in, and they won’t necessarily recreate the view when they refactor the table. I am sure that there are reasons and justifications for why Views behave this way, but I find it particularly disturbing that you can have code asking for col2, but actually be receiving data from col3.  By the way, for the record, this entire scenario and accompanying test script apply to SQL Server 2008 R2 with Service Pack 1. So, let the developer beware…know what assumptions are in effect around your code, and keep on discouraging people from using SELECT * syntax in anything but the simplest of ad-hoc queries. And of course, let’s clean up after ourselves.  To eliminate the database objects created during this test, run the following commands. DROP TABLE testtabDROP VIEW testtab_vwDROP VIEW testtab_vw_named

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• Data Mining Email with Thunderbird

  - by user554629

  Oracle has many formal, searchable locations:  Service Requests, BugIDs, Technical Documents. These contain the results of an investigation for a customer crash situation;  they're created after the intense work of resolution is over, and typically contain the "root cause" of the failure ... but not the methods for identifying that cause. Email is still the standby for interacting with quickly formed groups of specialists, focusing on a particular incident.Customer BI, Network and System specialists;  Oracle Tech Support, Development, Consultants; OEM Database, OS technical support.   It is a chaotic, time-oriented set of configuration, call stacks, changes, techniques to discover and repair the failure. I needed to organize that information into something cohesive to prepare the blog entry on Teradata.  My corporate email client of choice is Thunderbird.   My original (flawed) search technique: R-Click on Inbox in Thunderbird left pane, and choose Search Messages Subject:  [ teradata ] Results: A new window titled "Search Messages"Single pane of selected messagesColumn headings:  Subject  From  Date  LocationNo preview window for messages There are 673 email entries in the result ( too many )  R-click icon just above the vertical scroll bar on the rightCheck [x] Tags Click on the Tags header to sort by "Important" View contents of message by double-clickingOpens in the Thunderbird Main Window in a new Tab Not what I was looking for, close the tab and try again. There has to be a better way.  ( and there is ) I need to be more productive, eliminating duplicate-chained messages, for example.   Even the Tag "Important" that was added during the investigation phase, is "not so much" for my current task. In the "Search Messages" window, click [ Save as Search Folder ] [ teradata ]  Appears as a new folder in my Inbox. Focus on that folder and the results appear with a list of messages like every other folder in the Inbox.Only the results of the search are shown A preview window is now available for each message Sort, Select message, Cursor Down ... navigates quickly through the messages. But wait, there's more ... Click Find ( Ctrl-F) Enter a search term for the message body, like.[ LIBPATH ] The search is "sticky" ... each message you cycle through wil focus ( and highlight) the LIBPATH search term. And still more .... Reset the Tag"Important" message.   Press "1" and the tag is removed Press "4" and a new Tag "ToDo" is applied After applying all of the tags, sort by Tag for a new message order Adjust the search criteria ... R-click on the [ teradata ] search folder, and choose Properties Add additional criteria to narrow the search Some of the information I'm looking for did not contain "teradata" in the subject line. + Body  [ contains ] [ Best Practices ] That's it.  Much more efficient search.   Thank you Thunderbird.

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