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• 24 hours to pass until 24 Hours of PASS

  - by Rob Farley

  There’s a bunch of stuff going on at the moment in the SQL world, so if you’ve missed this particular piece of news, let me tell you a bit about it. Twice a year, the SQL community puts on its biggest virtual event – 24 Hours of PASS. And the next one is tomorrow – March 21st, 2012. Twenty-four sessions, back-to-back, featuring a selection of some of the best presenters in the SQL world, speakers from all over the world, coming together in an online collaboration that so far has well over thirty thousand registrations across the presentations. Some people are signed up for all 24 sessions, some only one. Traditionally, LiveMeeting has been used as the platform for this event, but this year we’re going with a new platform – IBTalk. It promises big, and we’re hoping it won’t let us down. LiveMeeting has been great, and we thank Microsoft for providing it as a platform for the past few years. However, as the event has grown, we’ve found that a new idea is necessary. Last year a search was done for a new platform, and IBTalk ticked the right boxes. The feedback from the presenters and moderators so far has been overwhelmingly positive, and we’re hoping that this is going to really enhance the user experience. One of my favourite features of the platform is the language side. It provides a pretty good translation service. Users who join a session will see a flag on the left of the screen. If they click it, they can change the language to one of 15 on offer. Picking this changes all the labels on everything. It even translates the text in the Q&A window. What this means is that someone from Brazil can ask their question in Portuguese, and the presenter will see it in English. Then if the answer is typed in English, the questioner will be able to see the answer, also in Portuguese. Or they can switch to English to see it as the answerer typed it. I know there’s always the risk of bad translations going on, but I’ve heard good things about this translation service. But there’s more – IBTalk are providing staff to type up closed captioning live during the event. So if English isn’t your first language, don’t worry! Picking your language will also let you see subtitles in your chosen language. I’m hoping that this event is the start of PASS being able to reach people from all corners of the world. Wouldn’t it be great to find that this event is successful, and that the next 24HOP (later in the year, our Summit Preview event) has just as many non-English speakers tuning in as English speakers? If you haven’t been planning which sessions you’re going to attend, you really should get over to sqlpass.org/24hours and have a look through what’s on offer. There’s some amazing material from some of the industry’s brightest, covering a wide range of topics, from classic SQL areas to the brand new SQL 2012 features. There really should be something for every SQL professional. Check the time zones though – if you’re in the US you might be on Summer time, and an hour closer to GMT than normal. Massive thanks must go to Microsoft, SQL Sentry and Idera for sponsoring this event. Without sponsors we wouldn’t be able to put any of this on. These companies are helping 24HOP continue to grow into an event for the whole world. See you tomorrow! @rob_farley | #24hop | #sqlpass

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• 24 hours to pass until 24 Hours of PASS

  - by Rob Farley

  There’s a bunch of stuff going on at the moment in the SQL world, so if you’ve missed this particular piece of news, let me tell you a bit about it. Twice a year, the SQL community puts on its biggest virtual event – 24 Hours of PASS. And the next one is tomorrow – March 21st, 2012. Twenty-four sessions, back-to-back, featuring a selection of some of the best presenters in the SQL world, speakers from all over the world, coming together in an online collaboration that so far has well over thirty thousand registrations across the presentations. Some people are signed up for all 24 sessions, some only one. Traditionally, LiveMeeting has been used as the platform for this event, but this year we’re going with a new platform – IBTalk. It promises big, and we’re hoping it won’t let us down. LiveMeeting has been great, and we thank Microsoft for providing it as a platform for the past few years. However, as the event has grown, we’ve found that a new idea is necessary. Last year a search was done for a new platform, and IBTalk ticked the right boxes. The feedback from the presenters and moderators so far has been overwhelmingly positive, and we’re hoping that this is going to really enhance the user experience. One of my favourite features of the platform is the language side. It provides a pretty good translation service. Users who join a session will see a flag on the left of the screen. If they click it, they can change the language to one of 15 on offer. Picking this changes all the labels on everything. It even translates the text in the Q&A window. What this means is that someone from Brazil can ask their question in Portuguese, and the presenter will see it in English. Then if the answer is typed in English, the questioner will be able to see the answer, also in Portuguese. Or they can switch to English to see it as the answerer typed it. I know there’s always the risk of bad translations going on, but I’ve heard good things about this translation service. But there’s more – IBTalk are providing staff to type up closed captioning live during the event. So if English isn’t your first language, don’t worry! Picking your language will also let you see subtitles in your chosen language. I’m hoping that this event is the start of PASS being able to reach people from all corners of the world. Wouldn’t it be great to find that this event is successful, and that the next 24HOP (later in the year, our Summit Preview event) has just as many non-English speakers tuning in as English speakers? If you haven’t been planning which sessions you’re going to attend, you really should get over to sqlpass.org/24hours and have a look through what’s on offer. There’s some amazing material from some of the industry’s brightest, covering a wide range of topics, from classic SQL areas to the brand new SQL 2012 features. There really should be something for every SQL professional. Check the time zones though – if you’re in the US you might be on Summer time, and an hour closer to GMT than normal. Massive thanks must go to Microsoft, SQL Sentry and Idera for sponsoring this event. Without sponsors we wouldn’t be able to put any of this on. These companies are helping 24HOP continue to grow into an event for the whole world. See you tomorrow! @rob_farley | #24hop | #sqlpass

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• SQL SERVER – Quiz and Video – Introduction to Hierarchical Query using a Recursive CTE

  - by pinaldave

  This blog post is inspired from SQL Queries Joes 2 Pros: SQL Query Techniques For Microsoft SQL Server 2008 – SQL Exam Prep Series 70-433 – Volume 2.[Amazon] | [Flipkart] | [Kindle] | [IndiaPlaza] This is follow up blog post of my earlier blog post on the same subject - SQL SERVER – Introduction to Hierarchical Query using a Recursive CTE – A Primer. In the article we discussed various basics terminology of the CTE. The article further covers following important concepts of common table expression. What is a Common Table Expression (CTE) Building a Recursive CTE Identify the Anchor and Recursive Query Add the Anchor and Recursive query to a CTE Add an expression to track hierarchical level Add a self-referencing INNER JOIN statement Above six are the most important concepts related to CTE and SQL Server.  There are many more things one has to learn but without beginners fundamentals one can’t learn the advanced  concepts. Let us have small quiz and check how many of you get the fundamentals right. Quiz 1) You have an employee table with the following data. EmpID FirstName LastName MgrID 1 David Kennson 11 2 Eric Bender 11 3 Lisa Kendall 4 4 David Lonning 11 5 John Marshbank 4 6 James Newton 3 7 Sally Smith NULL You need to write a recursive CTE that shows the EmpID, FirstName, LastName, MgrID, and employee level. The CEO should be listed at Level 1. All people who work for the CEO will be listed at Level 2. All of the people who work for those people will be listed at Level 3. Which CTE code will achieve this result? WITH EmpList AS (SELECT Boss.EmpID, Boss.FName, Boss.LName, Boss.MgrID, 1 AS Lvl FROM Employee AS Boss WHERE Boss.MgrID IS NULL UNION ALL SELECT E.EmpID, E.FirstName, E.LastName, E.MgrID, EmpList.Lvl + 1 FROM Employee AS E INNER JOIN EmpList ON E.MgrID = EmpList.EmpID) SELECT * FROM EmpList WITH EmpListAS (SELECT EmpID, FirstName, LastName, MgrID, 1 as Lvl FROM Employee WHERE MgrID IS NULL UNION ALL SELECT EmpID, FirstName, LastName, MgrID, 2 as Lvl ) SELECT * FROM BossList WITH EmpList AS (SELECT EmpID, FirstName, LastName, MgrID, 1 as Lvl FROM Employee WHERE MgrID is NOT NULL UNION SELECT EmpID, FirstName, LastName, MgrID, BossList.Lvl + 1 FROM Employee INNER JOIN EmpList BossList ON Employee.MgrID = BossList.EmpID) SELECT * FROM EmpList 2) You have a table named Employee. The EmployeeID of each employee’s manager is in the ManagerID column. You need to write a recursive query that produces a list of employees and their manager. The query must also include the employee’s level in the hierarchy. You write the following code segment: WITH EmployeeList (EmployeeID, FullName, ManagerName, Level) AS ( –PICK ANSWER CODE HERE ) SELECT EmployeeID, FullName, ” AS [ManagerID], 1 AS [Level] FROM Employee WHERE ManagerID IS NULL UNION ALL SELECT emp.EmployeeID, emp.FullName mgr.FullName, 1 + 1 AS [Level] FROM Employee emp JOIN Employee mgr ON emp.ManagerID = mgr.EmployeeId SELECT EmployeeID, FullName, ” AS [ManagerID], 1 AS [Level] FROM Employee WHERE ManagerID IS NULL UNION ALL SELECT emp.EmployeeID, emp.FullName, mgr.FullName, mgr.Level + 1 FROM EmployeeList mgr JOIN Employee emp ON emp.ManagerID = mgr.EmployeeId Now make sure that you write down all the answers on the piece of paper. Watch following video and read earlier article over here. If you want to change the answer you still have chance. Solution 1) 1 2) 2 Now compare let us check the answers and compare your answers to following answers. I am very confident you will get them correct. Available at USA: Amazon India: Flipkart | IndiaPlaza Volume: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Please leave your feedback in the comment area for the quiz and video. Did you know all the answers of the quiz? Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Joes 2 Pros, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• 2D Rendering with OpenGL ES 2.0 on Android (matrices not working)

  - by TranquilMarmot

  So I'm trying to render two moving quads, each at different locations. My shaders are as simple as possible (vertices are only transformed by the modelview-projection matrix, there's only one color). Whenever I try and render something, I only end up with slivers of color! I've only done work with 3D rendering in OpenGL before so I'm having issues with 2D stuff. Here's my basic rendering loop, simplified a bit (I'm using the Matrix manipulation methods provided by android.opengl.Matrix and program is a custom class I created that just calls GLES20.glUniformMatrix4fv()): Matrix.orthoM(projection, 0, 0, windowWidth, 0, windowHeight, -1, 1); program.setUniformMatrix4f("Projection", projection); At this point, I render the quads (this is repeated for each quad): Matrix.setIdentityM(modelview, 0); Matrix.translateM(modelview, 0, quadX, quadY, 0); program.setUniformMatrix4f("ModelView", modelview); quad.render(); // calls glDrawArrays and all I see is a sliver of the color each quad is! I'm at my wits end here, I've tried everything I can think of and I'm at the point where I'm screaming at my computer and tossing phones across the room. Anybody got any pointers? Am I using ortho wrong? I'm 100% sure I'm rendering everything at a Z value of 0. I tried using frustumM instead of orthoM, which made it so that I could see the quads but they would get totally skewed whenever they got moved, which makes sense if I correctly understand the way frustum works (it's more for 3D rendering, anyway). If it makes any difference, I defined my viewport with GLES20.glViewport(0, 0, windowWidth, windowHeight); Where windowWidth and windowHeight are the same values that are pased to orthoM It might be worth noting that the android.opengl.Matrix methods take in an offset as the second parameter so that multiple matrices can be shoved into one array, so that'w what the first 0 is for For reference, here's my vertex shader code: uniform mat4 ModelView; uniform mat4 Projection; attribute vec4 vPosition; void main() { mat4 mvp = Projection * ModelView; gl_Position = vPosition * mvp; } I tried swapping Projection * ModelView with ModelView * Projection but now I just get some really funky looking shapes... EDIT Okay, I finally figured it out! (Note: Since I'm new here (longtime lurker!) I can't answer my own question for a few hours, so as soon as I can I'll move this into an actual answer to the question) I changed Matrix.orthoM(projection, 0, 0, windowWidth, 0, windowHeight, -1, 1); to float ratio = windowWwidth / windowHeight; Matrix.orthoM(projection, 0, 0, ratio, 0, 1, -1, 1); I then had to scale my projection matrix to make it a lot smaller with Matrix.scaleM(projection, 0, 0.05f, 0.05f, 1.0f);. I then added an offset to the modelview translations to simulate a camera so that I could center on my action (so Matrix.translateM(modelview, 0, quadX, quadY, 0); was changed to Matrix.translateM(modelview, 0, quadX + camX, quadY + camY, 0);) Thanks for the help, all!

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• December 3 is Stephanie Choyer Day

  - by rickramsey

  I don't answer Stephanie Choyer's email just so I can enjoy her French accent when she calls. "Reek! Reek! Why do joo not answer my eemails?" Without the French, life on Earth would be so much poorer. No, they don't bring to the party any motorcycles that grow chest on your hair, and the Citroen is such a frightening study in Automobile design that I don't dare climb inside one. But they have French architecture. French sidewalks. French villages. The French Alps. Grenoble. French cheese. French wine. And that glorious French accent. If I were French, I'd spend all my time enjoying being French. Which makes the work that Stephanie does day in and day with our hard-edged technologies and stubborn technologists so admirable. Oracle Solaris 11 Resources for Sysadmins and Developers The page in the link above represents the work of many people, but it was Steph who rounded them up. And it wasn't easy. I know, because I ran and hid from her on many, many occasions. But she was tireless. "Reek. Reek. Why have you not published Glynn's article? Pleeeease, you must!" Remember when tech companies gave you a simple choice? You could either read the 27,000 pages of documentation or a double-sided data sheet. Which will it be, pal? Then they started writing white papers. 74 pages of excellent prose did a beautiful job of explaining why the technology was fantastic, but never told you how to use it. Well, have you taken a look at these? How-To Technical Articles for System Admins and Developers Now you can get wicked excited about a cool technique described in a 74-page white paper, and find a technical article that shows you exactly how to use it. The wicked smart marketing folks on the Oracle Solaris team wrote them, but it was Steph who bribed them with a Cabernet or beat them over the head with a baguette until all that work was finished and posted on OTN. There are songs about French wine, but not about French vintners. There are songs about French cities, but not about French bricklayers. About French sidewalks, but not about the French policemen who keep them safe. As far as I know, there are no songs about OTN, but if there were, they would probably neglect to mention Steph. Which is why today, Dec 3rd, we celebrate Stephanie Choyer Day. We dedicate this day to our relentless, hardworking, tireless, patient and friendly French colleague with the delightful accent. If I knew how to speak French, I'd say "Thanks for all you do" in French. But I don't speak French. And I don't trust online translations. I'd probably wind up saying "My left foot yearns for curdled milk." So here it is in plain old English: Thank you, Stephanie. psssst! about that documentation and those white papers ... In case you haven't noticed, the Oracle Solaris doc team has done some pretty cool things with the Solaris docs. And those white papers are interesting reading, well worth setting aside some time. Because with Solaris, as you know, it's not just about getting by with a rudimentary grasp of the basics. It's about the amazing stuff savvy sysadmins and developers can do when they really understand it. Find them here: White Papers Documentation And don't forget training! - Rick Website Newsletter Facebook Twitter

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• Design suggestions needed to create a MathBuilder framework

  - by Darf Zon

  Let explain what I'm trying to create. I'm creating a framework, the idea is to provide base classes to generate a math problem. Why do I need this framework? Because at first time, I realized when I create a new math problem I always do the same steps. Configuration settings such range numbers. For example if I'm developing multiplications, in beginner level only generate the first number between 2-5 or in advanced level, the first number will be between 6- 9, for example. Generate problem method. All the time I need to invoke a method like this to generate the problem. This one receives the configuration settings and generate the number according to them. And generate the object with the respective data. Validate the problem. Sometimes the problem generated is not valid. For example, supposed I'm creating fractions in most simplified, if I receive 2/4, the program should detect that this is not valid and must generate another like this one, 1/4. Load the view. All of them, have a custom view (please watch below the images). All of the problems must know how to CHECK if the user result is correct. All of this problems has answers. Some of them just require one answer, anothers may require more than one, so I guess a way to maintain flexibility to the developer has all the answers he wanna used. At the beginning I started using PRISM. Generate modules for each math problem was the idea and load it in the main system. I guess are the most important things of this idea. Let me showing some problems which I create in a WPF standalone program. Here I have a math problem about areas. When I generate the problem a set to the view the object and it draw it. In beginner level, I set in the configuration settings that just load square types. But in advance level, can load triangles and squares randomly. In this another, generate a binary problem like addition, subtraction, multiplication or division. Above just generate a single problem. The idea of this is to show a test o quiz, I mean get a worksheet (this I call as a collection of problems) where the user can answer it. I hope gets the idea with my ugly drawing. How to load this math problems? As I said above, I started using PRISM, and each module contains a math problem kind. This is a snapshot of my first demo. Below show the modules loaded, and center the respective configurations or levels. Until momment, I have no idea to start creating this software. I just know that I need a question | problem class, response class, user class. But I get lost about what properties should have to contain in it. Please give a little hand of this framework. I put much effort on this question, so if any isn't clear, let me know to clarify it.

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• 9 Ways Facebook Monetization Could Change Your Marketing

  - by Mike Stiles

  Think Facebook monetization isn’t a head game? Imagine creating something so functional, fun and addictive you literally amass about 1/7th of the planet’s population as an audience. You have 1 billion users that use it at least once a month. But analysts and marketers look at what you’ve done and say, “eh…not good enough.” What if you had a TV show that garnered 1/7 of Earth’s population as an audience? How much would a spot cost? And how fast would marketers write that check, even without the targeting and engagement analytics Facebook offers? Having already changed the marketing landscape forever, if you’re Facebook’s creator, you’d have to be scratching your head and asking, “Wow, what more does a product need to do?” Facebook’s been busy answering that very question with products and betas that will likely directly affect your brand’s strategy. Item 1: Users can send physical gifts to friends through Facebook based on suggestions from user data. A giant step toward the potential power of social commerce. Item 2: Users can pay $7 to promote posts for higher visibility. Individual users, not just marketers, are being leveraged as a revenue stream. Not impressive enough? There’s also the potential Craigslist killer Facebook Marketplace. Item 3: Mobile ads. 600 million+ access Facebook on smartphones. According to the company, half of the $1 million a day generated by Sponsored Stories as of late June was coming from mobile. Ads in News Feeds seen on mobile had click-through rates 23x higher than on desktop News Feeds or the right side panel. Item 4: App developers can buy install ads that show up in mobile News Feeds so reliance on discovery in app stores is reduced. Item 5: Want your posts seen by people who never liked your Page? A test began in August where you could appear in non-fans’ News Feeds on both web and mobile. Item 6: How about an ability to use Facebook data to buy ads outside of Facebook? A mobile ad network is being tested to get your targeted messages on non-Facebook apps and sites surfaced on devices. Item 7: Facebook Collections, Facebook’s answer to Pinterest. Users can gather images of desired products and click through to the retailer to buy. Keep focusing on your imagery. Item 8: Facebook Offers, Facebook’s answer to the Groupons and Living Socials of the world. You can send deals to your fans’ News Feeds. Item 9: Facebook Exchange lets you track what fans do on Facebook and across the entire Web. Could lead to a Facebook ad network leveraging Facebook users and data but not limiting exposure to the Facebook platform. Marketers are seeing increasing value in Facebook (and Twitter for that matter).  But as social grows and adjusts, will marketing budgets aimed in that direction grow and adjust accordingly, and within a reasonable time frame? @mikestilesPhoto Christie Merrill/stock.xchng

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• Starting to create a MathBuilder framework, help to start creating the design

  - by Darf Zon

  Let explain what I'm trying to create. I'm creating a framework, the idea is to provide base classes to generate a math problem. Why do I need this framework? Because at first time, I realized when I create a new math problem I always do the same steps. Configuration settings such range numbers. For example if I'm developing multiplications, in beginner level only generate the first number between 2-5 or in advanced level, the first number will be between 6- 9, for example. Generate problem method. All the time I need to invoke a method like this to generate the problem. This one receives the configuration settings and generate the number according to them. And generate the object with the respective data. Validate the problem. Sometimes the problem generated is not valid. For example, supposed I'm creating fractions in most simplified, if I receive 2/4, the program should detect that this is not valid and must generate another like this one, 1/4. Load the view. All of them, have a custom view (please watch below the images). All of the problems must know how to CHECK if the user result is correct. All of this problems has answers. Some of them just require one answer, anothers may require more than one, so I guess a way to maintain flexibility to the developer has all the answers he wanna used. At the beginning I started using PRISM. Generate modules for each math problem was the idea and load it in the main system. I guess are the most important things of this idea. Let me showing some problems which I create in a WPF standalone program. Here I have a math problem about areas. When I generate the problem a set to the view the object and it draw it. In beginner level, I set in the configuration settings that just load square types. But in advance level, can load triangles and squares randomly. In this another, generate a binary problem like addition, subtraction, multiplication or division. Above just generate a single problem. The idea of this is to show a test o quiz, I mean get a worksheet (this I call as a collection of problems) where the user can answer it. I hope gets the idea with my ugly drawing. How to load this math problems? As I said above, I started using PRISM, and each module contains a math problem kind. This is a snapshot of my first demo. Below show the modules loaded, and center the respective configurations or levels. Until momment, I have no idea to start creating this software. I just know that I need a question | problem class, response class, user class. But I get lost about what properties should have to contain in it. Please give a little hand of this framework. I put much effort on this question, so if any isn't clear, let me know to clarify it.

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• Big Data – Basics of Big Data Architecture – Day 4 of 21

  - by Pinal Dave

  In yesterday’s blog post we understood how Big Data evolution happened. Today we will understand basics of the Big Data Architecture. Big Data Cycle Just like every other database related applications, bit data project have its development cycle. Though three Vs (link) for sure plays an important role in deciding the architecture of the Big Data projects. Just like every other project Big Data project also goes to similar phases of the data capturing, transforming, integrating, analyzing and building actionable reporting on the top of  the data. While the process looks almost same but due to the nature of the data the architecture is often totally different. Here are few of the question which everyone should ask before going ahead with Big Data architecture. Questions to Ask How big is your total database? What is your requirement of the reporting in terms of time – real time, semi real time or at frequent interval? How important is the data availability and what is the plan for disaster recovery? What are the plans for network and physical security of the data? What platform will be the driving force behind data and what are different service level agreements for the infrastructure? This are just basic questions but based on your application and business need you should come up with the custom list of the question to ask. As I mentioned earlier this question may look quite simple but the answer will not be simple. When we are talking about Big Data implementation there are many other important aspects which we have to consider when we decide to go for the architecture. Building Blocks of Big Data Architecture It is absolutely impossible to discuss and nail down the most optimal architecture for any Big Data Solution in a single blog post, however, we can discuss the basic building blocks of big data architecture. Here is the image which I have built to explain how the building blocks of the Big Data architecture works. Above image gives good overview of how in Big Data Architecture various components are associated with each other. In Big Data various different data sources are part of the architecture hence extract, transform and integration are one of the most essential layers of the architecture. Most of the data is stored in relational as well as non relational data marts and data warehousing solutions. As per the business need various data are processed as well converted to proper reports and visualizations for end users. Just like software the hardware is almost the most important part of the Big Data Architecture. In the big data architecture hardware infrastructure is extremely important and failure over instances as well as redundant physical infrastructure is usually implemented. NoSQL in Data Management NoSQL is a very famous buzz word and it really means Not Relational SQL or Not Only SQL. This is because in Big Data Architecture the data is in any format. It can be unstructured, relational or in any other format or from any other data source. To bring all the data together relational technology is not enough, hence new tools, architecture and other algorithms are invented which takes care of all the kind of data. This is collectively called NoSQL. Tomorrow Next four days we will answer the Buzz Words – Hadoop. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• Multidimensional Thinking–24 Hours of Pass: Celebrating Women in Technology

  - by smisner

  It’s Day 1 of #24HOP and it’s been great to participate in this event with so many women from all over the world in one long training-fest. The SQL community has been abuzz on Twitter with running commentary which is fun to watch while listening to the current speaker. If you missed the fun today because you’re busy with all that work you’ve got to do – don’t despair. All sessions are recorded and will be available soon. Keep an eye on the 24 Hours of Pass page for details. And the fun’s not over today. Rather than run 24 hours consecutively, #24HOP is now broken down into 12-hours over two days, so check out the schedule to see if there’s a session that interests you and fits your schedule. I’m pleased to announce that my business colleague Erika Bakse ( Blog | Twitter) will be presenting on Day 2 – her debut presentation for a PASS event. (And I’m also pleased to say she’s my daughter!) Multidimensional Thinking: The Presentation My contribution to this lineup of terrific speakers was Multidimensional Thinking. Here’s the abstract: “Whether you’re developing Analysis Services cubes or creating PowerPivot workbooks, you need to get into a multidimensional frame of mind to produce a model that best enables users to answer their business questions on their own. Many database professionals struggle initially with multidimensional models because the data modeling process is much different than the one they use to produce traditional, third normal form databases. In this session, I’ll introduce you to the terminology of multidimensional modeling and step through the process of translating business requirements into a viable model.” If you watched the presentation and want a copy of the slides, you can download a copy here. And you’re welcome to download the slides even if you didn’t watch the presentation, but they’ll make more sense if you did! Kimball All the Way There’s only so much I can cover in the time allotted, but I hope that I succeeded in my attempt to build a foundation that prepares you for starting out in business intelligence. One of my favorite resources that will get into much more detail about all kinds of scenarios (well beyond the basics!) is The Data Warehouse Toolkit (Second Edition) by Ralph Kimball. Anything from Kimball or the Kimball Group is worth reading. Kimball material might take reading and re-reading a few times before it makes sense. From my own experience, I found that I actually had to just build my first data warehouse using dimensional modeling on faith that I was going the right direction because it just didn’t click with me initially. I’ve had years of practice since then and I can say it does get easier with practice. The most important thing, in my opinion, is that you simply must prototype a lot and solicit user feedback, because ultimately the model needs to make sense to them. They will definitely make sure you get it right! Schema Generation One question came up after the presentation about whether we use SQL Server Management Studio or Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) to build the tables for the dimensional model. My answer? It really doesn’t matter how you create the tables. Use whatever method that you’re comfortable with. But just so happens that it IS possible to set up your design in BIDS as part of an Analysis Services project and to have BIDS generate the relational schema for you. I did a Webcast last year called Building a Data Mart with Integration Services that demonstrated how to do this. Yes, the subject was Integration Services, but as part of that presentation, I showed how to leverage Analysis Services to build the tables, and then I showed how to use Integration Services to load those tables. I blogged about this presentation in September 2010 and included downloads of the project that I used. In the blog post, I explained that I missed a step in the demonstration. Oops. Just as an FYI, there were two more Webcasts to finish the story begun with the data – Accelerating Answers with Analysis Services and Delivering Information with Reporting Services. If you want to just cut to the chase and learn how to use Analysis Services to build the tables, you can see the Using the Schema Generation Wizard topic in Books Online.

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• Partner outreach on the Oracle Fusion Applications user experience begins

  - by mvaughan

  by Misha Vaughan, Architect, Applications User Experience I have been asked the question repeatedly since about December of last year: “What is the Applications User Experience group doing about partner outreach?”  My answer, at the time, was: “We are thinking about it.”  My colleagues and I were really thinking about the content or tools that the Applications UX group should be developing. What would be valuable to our partners? What will actually help grow their applications business, and fits within the applications user experience charter?In the video above, you’ll hear Jeremy Ashley, vice president of the Applications User Experience team, talk about two fundamental initiatives that our group is working on now that speaks straight to partners.  Special thanks to Joel Borellis, Kelley Greenly, and Steve Hoodmaker for helping to make this video happen so flawlessly. Steve was responsible for pulling together a day of Oracle Fusion Applications-oriented content, including David Bowin, Director, Fusion Applications Strategy, on some of the basic benefits of Oracle Fusion Applications.  Joel Borellis, Group Vice President, Partner Enablement, and David Bowin in the Oracle Studios.Nigel King, Vice President Applications Functional Architecture, was also on the list, talking about co-existence opportunities with Oracle Fusion Applications.Me and Nigel King, just before his interview with Joel. Fusion Applications User Experience 101: Basic education  Oracle has invested an enormous amount of intellectual and developmental effort in the Oracle Fusion Applications user experience. Find out more about that at the Oracle Partner Network Fusion Learning Center (Oracle ID required). What you’ll learn will help you uncover how, exactly, Oracle made Fusion General Ledger “sexy,” and that’s a direct quote from Oracle Ace Director Debra Lilley, of Fujitsu. In addition, select Applications User Experience staff members, as well as our own Fusion User Experience Advocates,  can provide a briefing to our partners on Oracle’s investment in the Oracle Fusion Applications user experience. Looking forward: Taking the best of the Fusion Applications UX to your customersBeyond a basic orientation to one of the key differentiators for Oracle Fusion Applications, we are also working on partner-oriented training.A question we are often getting right now is: “How do I help customers build applications that look like Fusion?” We also hear: “How do I help customers build applications that take advantage of the next-generation design work done in Fusion?”Our answer to this is training and a tool – our user experience design patterns – these are a set of user experience best-practices. Design patterns are re-usable, usability-tested, user experience components that make creating Fusion Applications-like experiences straightforward.  It means partners can leverage Oracle’s investment, but also gain an advantage by not wasting time solving a problem we’ve already solved. Their developers can focus on helping customers tackle the harder development challenges. Ultan O’Broin, an Apps UX team member,  and I are working with Kevin Li and Chris Venezia of the Oracle Platform Technology Services team, as well as Grant Ronald in Oracle ADF, to bring you some of the best “how-to” UX training, customized for your local area. Our first workshop will be in EMEA. Stay tuned for an assessment and feedback from the event.

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• SQL SERVER – Puzzle to Win Print Book – Functions FIRST_VALUE and LAST_VALUE with OVER clause and ORDER BY

  - by pinaldave

  Some time an interesting feature and smart audience makes total difference at places. From last two days, I have been writing on SQL Server 2012 feature FIRST_VALUE and LAST_VALUE. Please read following post before I continue today as this question is based on the same. Introduction to FIRST_VALUE and LAST_VALUE Introduction to FIRST_VALUE and LAST_VALUE with OVER clause As a comment of the second post I received excellent question from Nilesh Molankar. He asks what will happen if we change few things in the T-SQL. I really like this question as this kind of questions will make us sharp and help us perform in critical situation in need. We recently publish SQL Server Interview Questions book. I promise that in future version of this book, we will for sure include this question. Instead of repeating his question, I am going to ask something very similar to his question. Let us first run following query (read yesterday’s blog post for more detail): USE AdventureWorks GO SELECT s.SalesOrderID,s.SalesOrderDetailID,s.OrderQty, FIRST_VALUE(SalesOrderDetailID) OVER (PARTITION BY SalesOrderID ORDER BY SalesOrderDetailID ROWS BETWEEN UNBOUNDED PRECEDING AND UNBOUNDED FOLLOWING) FstValue, LAST_VALUE(SalesOrderDetailID) OVER (PARTITION BY SalesOrderID ORDER BY SalesOrderDetailID ROWS BETWEEN UNBOUNDED PRECEDING AND UNBOUNDED FOLLOWING) LstValue FROM Sales.SalesOrderDetail s WHERE SalesOrderID IN (43670, 43669, 43667, 43663) ORDER BY s.SalesOrderID,s.SalesOrderDetailID,s.OrderQty GO Here is the resultset of the above query. Now let us change the ORDER BY clause of OVER clause in above query and see what is the new result. USE AdventureWorks GO SELECT s.SalesOrderID,s.SalesOrderDetailID,s.OrderQty, FIRST_VALUE(SalesOrderDetailID) OVER (PARTITION BY SalesOrderID ORDER BY OrderQty ROWS BETWEEN UNBOUNDED PRECEDING AND UNBOUNDED FOLLOWING) FstValue, LAST_VALUE(SalesOrderDetailID) OVER (PARTITION BY SalesOrderID ORDER BY OrderQty ROWS BETWEEN UNBOUNDED PRECEDING AND UNBOUNDED FOLLOWING) LstValue FROM Sales.SalesOrderDetail s WHERE SalesOrderID IN (43670, 43669, 43667, 43663) ORDER BY s.SalesOrderID,s.SalesOrderDetailID,s.OrderQty GO Now let us see the result and ready for interesting question: Puzzle You can see that row number 2, 3, 4, and 5 has same SalesOrderID = 43667. The FIRST_VALUE is 78 and LAST_VALUE is 77. Now if these function was working on maximum and minimum value they should have given answer as 77 and 80 respectively instead of 78 and 77. Also the value of FIRST_VALUE is greater than LAST_VALUE 77. Why? Explain in detail. Hint Let me give you a simple hint. Just for simplicity I have changed the order of columns selected in the SELECT and ORDER BY (at the end). This will not change resultset but just order of the columns as well order of the rows. However, the data remains the same. USE AdventureWorks GO SELECT s.OrderQty,s.SalesOrderID,s.SalesOrderDetailID, FIRST_VALUE(SalesOrderDetailID) OVER (PARTITION BY SalesOrderID ORDER BY OrderQty ROWS BETWEEN UNBOUNDED PRECEDING AND UNBOUNDED FOLLOWING) FstValue, LAST_VALUE(SalesOrderDetailID) OVER (PARTITION BY SalesOrderID ORDER BY OrderQty ROWS BETWEEN UNBOUNDED PRECEDING AND UNBOUNDED FOLLOWING) LstValue FROM Sales.SalesOrderDetail s WHERE SalesOrderID IN (43670, 43669, 43667, 43663) ORDER BY s.OrderQty,s.SalesOrderID,s.SalesOrderDetailID GO Above query returns following result: Now I am very sure all of you have figured out the solution. Here is the second hint – pay attention to row 2, 3, 4, and 10. Hint2 T-SQL Enhancements: FIRST_VALUE() and LAST_VALUE() MSDN: FIRST_VALUE and LAST_VALUE Rules Leave a comment with your detailed answer by Nov 15′s blog post. Open world-wide (where Amazon ships books) If you blog about puzzle’s solution and if you win, you win additional surprise gift as well. Prizes Print copy of my new book SQL Server Interview Questions Amazon|Flipkart If you already have this book, you can opt for any of my other books SQL Wait Stats [Amazon|Flipkart|Kindle] and SQL Programming [Amazon|Flipkart|Kindle]. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Function, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Taking Your Business Scorecard Golfing

  - by tobyehatch

  Our workplace world is definitely changing. Not only are we taking work home, but we are working during odd hours in some very strange places.  I had the pleasure of interviewing Jacques Vigeant, Product Strategy Manager for Oracle Business Intelligence and Enterprise Performance Management, on a Podcast, and he enlightened me about how our mobile devices and business scorecards are enabling us to be more accountable and keep a watchful eye on business – even while on the golf course.Business scorecards have been around for many years - so I asked Jacques if he felt they had changed significantly due to technology. His answer was, “Yes, and no.”  Jacques agreed that scorecard enthusiasts are still passionate about executing the company strategy and monitoring Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), but scorecards and Business Intelligence (BI) as a whole have changed.  He explained that five to six years ago, people did BI work at the office and, for the most part, disconnected from their computer and workplace when they went home – with the exception of checking email and making a phone call or two. But now, that is no longer the case. People are virtually always connected with work and, more importantly, expect their BI and scorecards to be ‘always on,’ regardless of whether they are at their desk or somewhere else.Basically, the BI paradigm has changed from a 'pull' model, where employees are at their desks querying or pulling information from the system, to a 'push' model where employees expect their BI and scorecard systems to reach out (or push information) to them when there is something of note to learn or something on which they need to take action. I found this very interesting. However mobile devices do have their limitations with respect to screen sizes – does it really make sense to look at your strategy/scorecard on tiny devices? What kind of scorecard activities can you really expect to be able to do? Jacques’ answer was very logical. “When you think of a scorecard, it is really comprised of an organization of KPIs that are aligned with the strategic objectives of your company. KPIs are the heart of how you will execute your strategy. So, if you decompose that a little more, each KPI is well defined with the thresholds that you should keep an eye on and who is responsible for them. When we talk about scorecarding on a phone, we aren’t talking about surfing the strategy and exploring the strategy map like we do on the desktop. In a scorecarding context, we use the phone more as an alerting mechanism or simple monitoring device for your KPIs.”Jacques gave a great example of an inventory manager who took part of an afternoon off to go golfing before winter finally hit, and while on the front nine holes, his phone vibrated. His scorecard was alerting him that the inventory levels for one of the products was below some threshold that he had set.  From his phone, he had set up three options within Oracle Scorecard and Strategy Management (OSSM) for this type of situation:  1. Contact the warehouse manager directly by phone and work it out (standard phone function)  2. Tap/hold the KPI and add an annotation to the KPI in OSSM using the dictation capabilities of the phone and deal with it more fully when he gets back to the office  3. Tap/hold the KPI and invoke a business process from OSSM to transfer product from another warehouse with higher stock levels to the one that needs it  Being on a phone should still give you options to quickly deal with situations as needed, but mobile phones are not designed for nor should try to replicate the full desktop experience. We covered other interesting subjects in the interview, including how Oracle is keeping pace with mobile innovation and new devices such as Google Glasses, Galaxy Gear, Pebble Watches and more, and how Oracle is handling mobile security– which is great news for our mobile workforce. To listen to the entire Podcast, click here.To learn more about Oracle Scorecard and Strategy Management, click here.

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• New JavaScript Editor

  - by Petr

  I did not write a blog post here for a few weeks. I think the last my post was  about releasing NetBeans 7.1 in the beginning of January. The reason is not that I would change the job:), but that I have concentrated on new JavaScript support/editor. The new JavaScript editor is written basically from scratch. The answer for the question "Why from beginning again, why do you just improve the old one?" is not easy and the decision has more aspects. One of the main reasons is that the old support was written 4 years ago and the architecture is limited. Also during the time, the APIs were changed and it was very hard to keep the editor up to date. Also there is a license issue etc. In short, it is time to rewrite the old JS editor.  We build up strong community about the PHP support in NetBeans and because many PHP developers also write JavaScript code I would like to ask you for a help. There is a continual PHP build with the new JavaScript support. You can download the result of the builds here. It's a zip file. You can unzip the file anywhere, where you want. I recommend to run the build with the new userdir, to avoid damaging your current userdir. It shouldn't happened, but just to be sure:). You can achieve this through the switch --userdir. So start the unzipped file from command line from the folder, where you unzipped it, can be done with this command on unix: bin/netbeans.sh --userdir /path/to/new/userdir and on windows: bin\netbeans.exe --userdir D:\path\to\new\userdir For the developers who use continual php build already, it's well known. There is also full IDE build with the new JavaScript support for people, who need more than only PHP support.  Because the builds with the new JavaScript editor is created from a branch, there are not nightly builds available. They will be, when we merge the branch to the trunk, but so far we have to work only with the mentioned continual build. We will merge our branch after branching NetBeans 7.2 from trunk. This is also answer for the question, what release of NetBeans will contain the new JS support. It should be the release after NetBeans 7.2. I'm asking you whether you could play with the builds or better, could work in the builds with new JavaScript support and tell us every issue that you run in. It can be everything what doesn't fit you, something doesn't work as you expected, something is slow, you want change the behaviour of a feature etc. Your input / comments are very important for us and it will help us to achieve the new JavaScript support that you need.  The best way how to communicate issues is through our Bugzilla, because it is simple to track them. Sure you can write comment here:), but still I prefer Bugzilla for any issue. You can click here (you should be already log in Bugzilla), a form for the new JavaScript issue is opened, with pre-filled component Editor and NO72 keyword. I will write about the single features later, but now I will mentioned a few features that should work in better way than in the old support.  Syntactic and semantic colouring Navigator Mark Occurrences and GoTo Declaration  Code Completion Code Completion is invoked through keyboard shortcut CTRL+SPACE. The first invocation offers items that are found through a source model. Almost all editor features are based on the model, that is build from source code. There is a lot of work on the model yet, but it should offer better results. When the pop up window with code completion items is open and you press CTRL+SPACE again, then the code completion offers all elements that are in the project. In the pictures all elements that starts with letter 't'. Formatter with many options and more :) A few features are not still implemented that are supported in the old JavaScript support (for example jQuery support), but we are adding this features ASAP.

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• How can I thoroughly evaluate a prospective employer?

  - by glenviewjeff

  We hear much about code smells, test smells, and even project smells, but I have heard no discussion about employer "smells" outside of the Joel Test. After much frustration working for employers with a bouquet of unpleasant corporate-culture odors, I believe it's time for me to actively seek a more mature development environment. I've started assembling a list of questions to help vet employers by identifying issues during a job interview, and am looking for additional ideas. I suppose this list could easily be modified by an employer to vet an employee as well, but please answer from the interviewee's perspective. I think it would be important to ask many of these questions of multiple people to find out if consistent answers are given. For the most part, I tried to put the questions in each section in the order they could be asked. An undesired answer to an early question will often make follow-ups moot. Values What constitutes "well-written" software? What attributes does a good developer have? Same question for manager. Process Do you have a development process? How rigorously do you follow it? How do you decide how much process to apply to each project? Describe a typical project lifecycle. Ask the following if they don't come up otherwise: Waterfall/iterative: How much time is spent in upfront requirements gathering? upfront design? Testing Who develops tests (developers or separate test engineers?) When are they developed? When are the tests executed? How long do they take to execute? What makes a good test? How do you know you've tested enough? What percentage of code is tested? Review What is the review process like? What percentage of code is reviewed? Design? How frequently can I expect to participate as code/design reviewer/reviewee? What are the criteria applied to review and where do the criteria come from? Improvement What new tools and techniques have you evaluated or deployed in the past year? What training courses have your employees been given in the past year? What will I be doing for the first six months in your company (hinting at what kind of organized mentorship/training has been thought through, if any) What changes to your development process have been made in the past year? How do you improve and learn from your mistakes as an organization? What was your organizations biggest mistake in the past year, and how was it addressed? What feedback have you given to management lately? Was it implemented? If not, why? How does your company use "best practices?" How do you seek them out from the outside or within, and how do you share them with each other? Ethics Tell me about an ethical problem you or your employees experienced recently and how was it resolved? Do you use open-source software? What open-source contributions have you made? Follow-Ups I liked what @jim-leonardo said on this Stack Overflow question: Really a thing to ask yourself: "Does this person seem like they are trying to recruit me and make me interested?" I think this is one of the most important bits. If they seem to be taking the attitude that the only one being interviewed is you, then they probably will treat you poorly. Good interviewers understand they have to sell the position as much as the candidate needs to sell themselves. @SethP added: Glassdoor.com is a good web site for researching potential employers. It contains information about how specific companies conduct interviews...

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• SQL SERVER – Select the Most Optimal Backup Methods for Server

  - by pinaldave

  Backup and Restore are very interesting concepts and one should be very much with the concept if you are dealing with production database. One never knows when a natural disaster or user error will surface and the first thing everybody wants is to get back on point in time when things were all fine. Well, in this article I have attempted to answer a few of the common questions related to Backup methodology. How to Select a SQL Server Backup Type In order to select a proper SQL Server backup type, a SQL Server administrator needs to understand the difference between the major backup types clearly. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, let me offer it to you below. Select a Recovery Model First The very first question that you should ask yourself is: Can I afford to lose at least a little (15 min, 1 hour, 1 day) worth of data? Resist the temptation to save it all as it comes with the overhead – majority of businesses outside finances can actually afford to lose a bit of data. If your answer is YES, I can afford to lose some data – select a SIMPLE (default) recovery model in the properties of your database, otherwise you need to select a FULL recovery model. The additional advantage of the Full recovery model is that it allows you to restore the data to a specific point in time vs to only last backup time in the Simple recovery model, but it exceeds the scope of this article Backups in SIMPLE Recovery Model In SIMPLE recovery model you can select to do just Full backups or Full + Differential. Full Backup This is the simplest type of backup that contains all information needed to restore the database and should be your first choice. It is often sufficient for small databases, but note that it makes a big impact on the performance of your database Full + Differential Backup After Full, Differential backup picks up all of the changes since the last Full backup. This means if you made Full, Diff, Diff backup – the last Diff backup contains all of the changes and you don’t need the previous Differential backup. Differential backup is obviously smaller and carries less performance overhead Backups in FULL Recovery Model In FULL recovery model you can select Full + Transaction Log or Full + Differential + Transaction Log backup. You have to create Transaction Log backup, because at that time the log is being truncated. Otherwise your Transaction Log will grow uncontrollably. Full + Transaction Log Backup You would always need to perform a Full backup first. Then a series of Transaction log backup. Note that (in contrast to Differential) you need ALL transactions to log since the last Full of Diff backup to properly restore. Transaction log backups have the smallest performance overhead and can be performed often. Full + Differential + Transaction Log Backup If you want to ease the performance overhead on your server, you can replace some of the Full backup in the previous scenario with Differential. You restore scenario would start from Full, then the Last Differential, then all of the remaining transactions log backups Typical backup Scenarios You may say “Well, it is all nice – give me the examples now”. As you may already know, my favorite SQL backup software is SQLBackupAndFTP. If you go to Advanced Backup Schedule form in this program and click “Load a typical backup plan…” link, it will give you these scenarios that I think are quite common – see the image below. The Simplest Way to Schedule SQL Backups I hate to repeat myself, but backup scheduling in SQL agent leaves a lot to be desired. I do not know the simple way to schedule your SQL server backups than in SQLBackupAndFTP – see the image below. The whole backup scheduling with compression, encryption and upload to a Network Folder / HDD / NAS Drive / FTP / Dropbox / Google Drive / Amazon S3 takes just a few minutes – see my previous post for the review. Final Words This post offered an explanation for major backup types only. For more complicated scenarios or to research other options as usually go to MSDN. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Backup and Restore, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Normalisation and 'Anima notitia copia' (Soul of the Database)

  - by Phil Factor

  (A Guest Editorial for Simple-Talk) The other day, I was staring  at the sys.syslanguages  table in SQL Server with slightly-raised eyebrows . I’d just been reading Chris Date’s  interesting book ‘SQL and Relational Theory’. He’d made the point that you’re not necessarily doing relational database operations by using a SQL Database product.  The same general point was recently made by Dino Esposito about ASP.NET MVC.  The use of ASP.NET MVC doesn’t guarantee you a good application design: It merely makes it possible to test it. The way I’d describe the sentiment in both cases is ‘you can hit someone over the head with a frying-pan but you can’t call it cooking’. SQL enables you to create relational databases. However,  even if it smells bad, it is no crime to do hideously un-relational things with a SQL Database just so long as it’s necessary and you can tell the difference; not only that but also only if you’re aware of the risks and implications. Naturally, I’ve never knowingly created a database that Codd would have frowned at, but around the edges are interfaces and data feeds I’ve written  that have caused hissy fits amongst the Normalisation fundamentalists. Part of the problem for those who agonise about such things  is the misinterpretation of Atomicity.  An atomic value is one for which, in the strange virtual universe you are creating in your database, you don’t have any interest in any of its component parts.  If you aren’t interested in the electrons, neutrinos,  muons,  or  taus, then  an atom is ..er.. atomic. In the same way, if you are passed a JSON string or XML, and required to store it in a database, then all you need to do is to ask yourself, in your role as Anima notitia copia (Soul of the database) ‘have I any interest in the contents of this item of information?’.  If the answer is ‘No!’, or ‘nequequam! Then it is an atomic value, however complex it may be.  After all, you would never have the urge to store the pixels of images individually, under the misguided idea that these are the atomic values would you?  I would, of course,  ask the ‘Anima notitia copia’ rather than the application developers, since there may be more than one application, and the applications developers may be designing the application in the absence of full domain knowledge, (‘or by the seat of the pants’ as the technical term used to be). If, on the other hand, the answer is ‘sure, and we want to index the XML column’, then we may be in for some heavy XML-shredding sessions to get to store the ‘atomic’ values and ensure future harmony as the application develops. I went back to looking at the sys.syslanguages table. It has a months column with the months in a delimited list January,February,March,April,May,June,July,August,September,October,November,December This is an ordered list. Wicked? I seem to remember that this value, like shortmonths and days, is treated as a ‘thing’. It is merely passed off to an external  C++ routine in order to format a date in a particular language, and never accessed directly within the database. As far as the database is concerned, it is an atomic value.  There is more to normalisation than meets the eye.

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• What Counts For A DBA: ESP

  - by Louis Davidson

  Now I don’t want to get religious here, and I’m not going to, but what I’m going to describe in this ‘What Counts for a DBA’ installment sometimes feels like magic. Often  I will spend hours thinking about the solution to a design issue or coding problem, working diligently to try to come up with a solution and then finally just give up with the feeling that I’m not even qualified to be a data entry clerk, much less a data architect.  At this point I often take a walk (or sometimes a nap), and then it hits me. I realize that I have the answer just sitting in my brain, ready to implement.  This phenomenon is not limited to walks either; it can happen almost any time after I stop my obsession about a problem. I call this phenomena ESP (or Extra-Sensory Programming.)  Another term for this could be ‘sleeping on it’, and while the idiom tends to mean to let time pass to actively think about a problem, sleeping on a problem also lets you relax and let your brain do the work. I first noticed this back in my college days when I would play video games for hours on end. We would get stuck deep in some dungeon unable to find a way out, playing for days on end until we were beaten down tired. Once we gave up and walked away, the solution would usually be there waiting for one of us before we came back to play the next day.  Sometimes it would be in the form of a dream, and sometimes it would just be that the problem was now easy to solve when we started to play again.  While it worked great for video games, it never occurred when I studied English Literature for hours on end, or even when I worked for the same sort of frustrating hours attempting to solve a homework problem in Calculus.  I believe that the difference was that I was passionate about the video game, and certainly far less so about homework where people used the word “thou” instead of “you” or x to represent a number. This phenomenon occurs somewhat more often in my current work as a professional data programmer, because I am very passionate about SQL and love those aspects of my career choice.  Every day that I get to draw a new data model to solve a customer issue, or write a complex SELECT statement to ferret out the answer to a complex data question, is a great day. I hope it is the same for any reader of this blog.  But, unfortunately, while the day on a whole is great, a heck of a lot of noise is generated in work life. There are the typical project deadlines, along with the requisite project manager sitting on your shoulders shouting slogans to try to make you to go faster: Add in office politics, and the occasional family issues that permeate the mind, and you lose the ability to think deeply about any problem, not to mention occasionally forgetting your own name.  These office realities coupled with a difficult SQL problem staring at you from your widescreen monitor will slowly suck the life force out of your body, making it seem impossible to solve the problem This is when the walk starts; or a nap. Maybe you hide from the madness under your desk like George Costanza hides from Steinbrenner on Seinfeld.  Forget about the problem. Free your mind from the insanity of the problem and your surroundings. Then let your training and education deep in your brain take over and see if it will passively do the rest for you. If you don’t end up with a solution, the worst case scenario is that you have a bit of exercise or rest, and you won’t have heard the phrase “better is the enemy of good enough” even once…which certainly will do your brain some good. Once you stop expecting whipping your brain for information, inspiration may just strike and instead of a humdrum solution you find a solution you hadn’t even considered, almost magically. So, my beloved manager, next time you have an urgent deadline and you come across me taking a nap, creep away quietly because I’m working, doing some extra-sensory programming.

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• SQL SERVER – Puzzle #1 – Querying Pattern Ranges and Wild Cards

  - by Pinal Dave

  Note: Read at the end of the blog post how you can get five Joes 2 Pros Book #1 and a surprise gift. I have been blogging for almost 7 years and every other day I receive questions about Querying Pattern Ranges. The most common way to solve the problem is to use Wild Cards. However, not everyone knows how to use wild card properly. SQL Queries 2012 Joes 2 Pros Volume 1 – The SQL Queries 2012 Hands-On Tutorial for Beginners Book On Amazon | Book On Flipkart Learn SQL Server get all the five parts combo kit Kit on Amazon | Kit on Flipkart Many people know wildcards are great for finding patterns in character data. There are also some special sequences with wildcards that can give you even more power. This series from SQL Queries 2012 Joes 2 Pros® Volume 1 will show you some of these cool tricks. All supporting files are available with a free download from the www.Joes2Pros.com web site. This example is from the SQL 2012 series Volume 1 in the file SQLQueries2012Vol1Chapter2.2Setup.sql. If you need help setting up then look in the “Free Videos” section on Joes2Pros under “Getting Started” called “How to install your labs” Querying Pattern Ranges The % wildcard character represents any number of characters of any length. Let’s find all first names that end in the letter ‘A’. By using the percentage ‘%’ sign with the letter ‘A’, we achieve this goal using the code sample below: SELECT * FROM Employee WHERE FirstName LIKE '%A' To find all FirstName values beginning with the letters ‘A’ or ‘B’ we can use two predicates in our WHERE clause, by separating them with the OR statement. Finding names beginning with an ‘A’ or ‘B’ is easy and this works fine until we want a larger range of letters as in the example below for ‘A’ thru ‘K’: SELECT * FROM Employee WHERE FirstName LIKE 'A%' OR FirstName LIKE 'B%' OR FirstName LIKE 'C%' OR FirstName LIKE 'D%' OR FirstName LIKE 'E%' OR FirstName LIKE 'F%' OR FirstName LIKE 'G%' OR FirstName LIKE 'H%' OR FirstName LIKE 'I%' OR FirstName LIKE 'J%' OR FirstName LIKE 'K%' The previous query does find FirstName values beginning with the letters ‘A’ thru ‘K’. However, when a query requires a large range of letters, the LIKE operator has an even better option. Since the first letter of the FirstName field can be ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’, ‘D’, ‘E’, ‘F’, ‘G’, ‘H’, ‘I’, ‘J’ or ‘K’, simply list all these choices inside a set of square brackets followed by the ‘%’ wildcard, as in the example below: SELECT * FROM Employee WHERE FirstName LIKE '[ABCDEFGHIJK]%' A more elegant example of this technique recognizes that all these letters are in a continuous range, so we really only need to list the first and last letter of the range inside the square brackets, followed by the ‘%’ wildcard allowing for any number of characters after the first letter in the range. Note: A predicate that uses a range will not work with the ‘=’ operator (equals sign). It will neither raise an error, nor produce a result set. --Bad query (will not error or return any records) SELECT * FROM Employee WHERE FirstName = '[A-K]%' Question: You want to find all first names that start with the letters A-M in your Customer table and end with the letter Z. Which SQL code would you use? a. SELECT * FROM Customer WHERE FirstName LIKE 'm%z' b. SELECT * FROM Customer WHERE FirstName LIKE 'a-m%z' c. SELECT * FROM Customer WHERE FirstName LIKE 'a-m%z' d. SELECT * FROM Customer WHERE FirstName LIKE '[a-m]%z' e. SELECT * FROM Customer WHERE FirstName LIKE '[a-m]z%' f. SELECT * FROM Customer WHERE FirstName LIKE '[a-m]%z' g. SELECT * FROM Customer WHERE FirstName LIKE '[a-m]z%' Contest Leave a valid answer before June 18, 2013 in the comment section. 5 winners will be selected from all the valid answers and will receive Joes 2 Pros Book #1. 1 Lucky person will get a surprise gift from Joes 2 Pros. The contest is open for all the countries where Amazon ships the book (USA, UK, Canada, India and many others). Special Note: Read all the options before you provide valid answer as there is a small trick hidden in answers. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Joes 2 Pros, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Puzzle, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• SQL SERVER – #TechEdIn – Presenting Tomorrow on Speed Up! – Parallel Processes and Unparalleled Performance at TechEd India 2012

  - by pinaldave

  Performance tuning is always a very hot topic when it is about SQL Server. SQL Server Performance Tuning is a very challenging subject that requires expertise in Database Administration and Database Development. I always have enjoyed talking about SQL Server Performance tuning subject. However, in India, it’s actually the very first time someone is presenting on this interesting subject, so this time I had the biggest challenge to present this session. Frequently enough, we get these two kind of questions: How to turn off parallelism as it is reducing performance? How to turn on parallelism as I want more performance? The reality is that not everyone knows what exactly is needed by their system. In this session, I have attempted to answer this very question. I’ve decided to provide a balanced view but stay away from theory, which leads us to say “It depends”. The session will have a clear message about this towards its end. Deck Details Slides: 45+ Demos: 7+ Bonus Quiz: 5 Images: 10+ Session delivery time: 52 Mins + 8 Mins of Q & A I have presented this session a couple of times to my friends and so far have received good feedback. Oftentimes, when people hear that I am going to present 45 slides, they all say it is too much to cover. However, when I am done with the session the usual reaction is that I truly gave justice to those slides. Action Item Here are a few of the action items for all of those who are going to attend this session: If you want to attend the session, just come early. There’s a good chance that you may not get a seat because right before me, there is a session from SQL Guru Vinod Kumar. He performs a powerful delivery of million concepts in just a little time. Quiz. I will be asking few questions during the session as well as before the session starts. If you get the correct answer, I will give unique learning material for you. You may not want to miss this learning opportunity at any cosst. Session Details Title: Speed Up! – Parallel Processes and Unparalleled Performance (Add to Calendar) Abstract: “More CPU, More Performance” – A  very common understanding is that usage of multiple CPUs can improve the performance of the query. To get a maximum performance out of any query, one has to master various aspects of the parallel processes. In this deep-dive session, we will explore this complex subject with a very simple interactive demo. Attendees will walk away with proper understanding of CX_PACKET wait types, MAXDOP, parallelism threshold and various other concepts. Date and Time: March 23, 2012, 12:15 to 13:15 Location: Hotel Lalit Ashok - Kumara Krupa High Grounds, Bengaluru – 560001, Karnataka, India. Add to Calendar Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Interview Questions and Answers, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology

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• Insurers Pushed to Transform Their Business

  - by Calvin Glenn

  Everyone in the P&C industry has heard it “We can’t do it.” “Nobody wants to do it.” “We can’t afford to do it.”  Unfortunately, what they’re referencing are the reasons many insurers are still trying to maintain their business processing on legacy policy administration systems, attempting to bide time until there is no other recourse but to give in, bite the bullet, and take on the monumental task of replacing an entire policy administration system (PAS). Just the thought of that project sends IT, Business Users and Management reeling. However, is that fear real?  It is a bit daunting when one realizes that a complete policy administration system replacement will touch most every function an insurer manages, from quoting and rating, to underwriting, distribution, and even customer service. With that, everyone has heard at least one horror story around a transformation initiative that has far exceeded budget and the promised implementation / go-live timeline.    But, does it have to be that hard?  Surely, in the age where a person can voice-activate their DVR to record a TV program from a cell phone, there has to be someone somewhere who’s figured out how to simplify this process. To be able to help insurers, of all sizes, transform and grow their business while also delivering on their overall objectives of providing speed to market, straight-through-processing for applications, quoting, underwriting, and simplified product development. Maybe we’re looking too hard and the answer is simple and straight-forward. Why replace the entire machine when all it really needs is a new part…a single enterprise rating system? This core, modular piece of the policy administration system is the foundation of product development and rate management that enables insurers to provide the right product at the right price to the right customer through the best channels at any given moment in time. The real benefit of a single enterprise rating system is the ability to deliver enhanced business capabilities, such as improved product management, streamlined underwriting, and speed to market. With these benefits, carriers have accomplished a portion of their overall transformation goal. Furthermore, lessons learned from the rating project can be applied to the bigger, down-the-road PAS project to support the successful completion of the overall transformation endeavor. At the recent Oracle OpenWorld Conference in San Francisco, information was shared with attendees about a recent “go-live” project from an Oracle Insurance Tier 1 insurer who did what is proposed above…replaced just the rating portion of their legacy policy administration system with Oracle Insurance Insbridge Rating and Underwriting.  This change provided the insurer greater flexibility to set rates that better reflect risk while enabling the company to support its market segment strategy. Using the Oracle Insurance Insbridge enterprise rating solution, the insurer was able to reduce processing time for agents and underwriters, gained the ability to support proprietary rating models and improved pricing accuracy.      There is mounting pressure on P&C insurers to produce growth and show net profitability in the midst of modest overall industry growth, large weather-related losses and intensifying competition for market share.  Insurers are also being asked to improve customer service, offer a differentiated value proposition and simplify insurance processes.  While the demands are many there is an easy answer…invest in and update the most mission critical application in your arsenal, the single enterprise rating system. Download the Podcast to listen to “Stand-Alone Rating Engine - Leading Force Behind Core Transformation Projects in the P&C Market,” a podcast originally recorded in October 2013. Related Resources: White Paper: Stand-Alone Rating Engine: Leading Force Behind Core Transformation Projects in the P&C Market Webcast On Demand: Stand-Alone Rating Engine and Core Transformation for P&C Insurers Don’t forget to keep up with us year-round: Facebook: www.facebook.com/oracleinsurance Twitter: www.twitter.com/oracleinsurance YouTube: www.youtube.com/oracleinsurance

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• IE9 and the Mystery of the Broken Video Tag

  - by David Wesst

  I was very excited when Microsoft released the Internet Explorer 9 Release Candidate. As far as I was concerned, this was another nail in the coffin for IE6 and step in the right direction for us .NET web developers as our base camp was finally starting to support the latest and greatest future-web standards. Unfortunately, my celebration was short lived as I soon hit a snag while loading up an HTML5 site I was building in Visual Studio 2010. The Mystery After updating Internet Explorer, I ran my HTML5 site that had the oh-so-lovely HTML5 video tag showing a video. Even though this worked in IE9 Beta, it appeared that IE9 RC could not load the same file. I figured that it was the video codec. Maybe IE9 RC no longer supported the video codec I used to encode my video. Here's the code I used: <video width="854" height="480" id="myOtherVideo" autoplay="" controls=""> <source src="/DemoSite1/Media/big_buck_bunny.mp4"/> <div> <p>Your browser does not support HTML5 Video.</p> </div> </video> As you can see from the code, I had the "fail-safe" code inside the video tag. The idea there being that if the video tag, or the video files themselves, are not supported by the browser my video should fail gracefully. What was even more strange was the fact that it worked in all the other HTML5 browsers that supported video. The Investigation Whoa! DJ stop the music. How can any of that make sense? Would the IE team really take such huge strides forward only to forget to include a feature that was already in the beta? I don't think so. I did plenty of searching on the web and asking around on the web, but could not seem to find anyone else having the same problem. Eventually I came across this post talking about declaring the MIME type in the .htaccess file. That got me thinking: does my web server support the video MIME type? I was using VS2010, so how do I know what kind of MIME types are supported by default? Still, my page hosted in Cassini (the web development server in VS2010) works on the other browsers. Why wouldn't it work with IE9 RC? To answer that, it was time to open up the upgraded toolbox known as the Developer's Tools in IE9 and use the new Network Tab. The Conclusion If you take a closer look at the results displayed from the Network tab, you can see that IE9 RC has interpreted the video file as text/html rather than video/mp4. To make this work, I decided to use IIS to debug my HTML5 web application by setting the web project's properties. Then, I added the MIME types that I want to support (i.e. video/mp4, video/ogg, video/webm). Et voila! The Mystery of the Broken Video Tag is solved. After Thoughts After solving the mystery, I still had the question about why my site worked in Chrome, Safari, and Firefox 3.6. After asking around, the best answer that I received was from my colleague Tyler Doerksen. He said that IE9 likely depends on the server telling it what kind of file it is downloading rather than trying to read the metadata about the data it is trying to download before doing anything. I have no facts to back this up, but it makes sense to me. In a browser war where milliseconds can make your browser fall back a few places in the race for supremacy, maybe the IE team opted to depend on the server knowing what kind of content it is serving up. Makes sense to me. In any case, that is just an educated guess. If you have any comments, feel free to post on them below. This post also appears at http://david.wes.st

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• SQL SERVER – Monitoring SQL Server Database Transaction Log Space Growth – DBCC SQLPERF(logspace) – Puzzle for You

  - by pinaldave

  First of all – if you are going to say this is very old subject, I agree this is very (very) old subject. I believe in earlier time we used to have this only option to monitor Log Space. As new version of SQL Server released we all equipped with DMV, Performance Counters, Extended Events and much more new enhancements. However, during all this year, I have always used DBCC SQLPERF(logspace) to get the details of the logs. It may be because when I started my career I remember this command and it did what I wanted all the time. Recently I have received interesting question and I thought, I should request your help. However, before I request your help, let us see traditional usage of DBCC SQLPERF(logspace). Every time I have to get the details of the log I ran following script. Additionally, I liked to store the details of the when the log file snapshot was taken as well so I can go back and know the status log file growth. This gives me a fair estimation when the log file was growing. CREATE TABLE dbo.logSpaceUsage ( id INT IDENTITY (1,1), logDate DATETIME DEFAULT GETDATE(), databaseName SYSNAME, logSize DECIMAL(18,5), logSpaceUsed DECIMAL(18,5), [status] INT ) GO INSERT INTO dbo.logSpaceUsage (databaseName, logSize, logSpaceUsed, [status]) EXEC ('DBCC SQLPERF(logspace)') GO SELECT * FROM dbo.logSpaceUsage GO I used to record the details of log file growth every hour of the day and then we used to plot charts using reporting services (and excel in much earlier times). Well, if you look at the script above it is very simple script. Now here is the puzzle for you. Puzzle 1: Write a script based on a table which gives you the time period when there was highest growth based on the data stored in the table. Puzzle 2: Write a script based on a table which gives you the amount of the log file growth from the beginning of the table to the latest recording of the data. You may have to run above script at some interval to get the various data samples of the log file to answer above puzzles. To make things simple, I am giving you sample script with expected answers listed below for both of the puzzle. Here is the sample query for puzzle: -- This is sample query for puzzle CREATE TABLE dbo.logSpaceUsage ( id INT IDENTITY (1,1), logDate DATETIME DEFAULT GETDATE(), databaseName SYSNAME, logSize DECIMAL(18,5), logSpaceUsed DECIMAL(18,5), [status] INT ) GO INSERT INTO dbo.logSpaceUsage (databaseName, logDate, logSize, logSpaceUsed, [status]) SELECT 'SampleDB1', '2012-07-01 7:00:00.000', 5, 10, 0 UNION ALL SELECT 'SampleDB1', '2012-07-01 9:00:00.000', 16, 10, 0 UNION ALL SELECT 'SampleDB1', '2012-07-01 11:00:00.000', 9, 10, 0 UNION ALL SELECT 'SampleDB1', '2012-07-01 14:00:00.000', 18, 10, 0 UNION ALL SELECT 'SampleDB3', '2012-06-01 7:00:00.000', 5, 10, 0 UNION ALL SELECT 'SampleDB3', '2012-06-04 7:00:00.000', 15, 10, 0 UNION ALL SELECT 'SampleDB3', '2012-06-09 7:00:00.000', 25, 10, 0 GO Expected Result of Puzzle 1 You will notice that there are two entries for database SampleDB3 as there were two instances of the log file grows with the same value. Expected Result of Puzzle 2 Well, please a comment with valid answer and I will post valid answers with due credit next week. Not to mention that winners will get a surprise gift from me. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: DBCC

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• Can't boot in Ubuntu after windows upgrade

  - by VanceAnce

  After my lastest update for Ubuntu and Windows XP, I got a Grub error on booting the next day. ls lists the following (without () ): sd0 sd1, msdos sd2 sd5 sd6 When I tried to get into one with (sd0,xy)/ it doesn't detect system or unknown file system error. I tried to boot to a live session with a Knoppix live CD and found out that all data exists. I also tried to recover with TestDisk and it finds all systems. Here is the test disk result: Start End Size in sectors 1 * HPFS - NTFS 0 1 1 7079 254 63 113740137 2 E extended LBA 7080 0 1 12161 254 63 81642330 5 L HPFS - NTFS 7080 1 1 10266 254 63 51199092 [Schule] X extended 12031 30 1 12161 254 63 2102625 6 L Linux Swap 12031 31 33 12161 254 63 2102530 I've 1 winxp-home, 1x Ubuntu (ext3+swap) and 1 winxp prof and then I wrote on mbr with TestDisk but I always get the same errors with Grub. What should I do? I need both XP and Ubuntu. Help me please. more infos in answers below - sry for thos confusing style but im working on diff live system and browsers and have to reboot always the boot info script output is also down below maybe an advanced user can correct my fail posting - after i can solve my issuse i will register here thanx and pls help me with those weired issues ! as i still cant just comment my own answer or those on top i again has to put it here as a sepperate answer..... (or even edit - maybe an browser failur using the live cds ... cause this posti can edit) here the bootinfo script output - but the result is the same as with TestDisk ... but it looks worse - cause it also doesnt detect my old ubuntu ... but there wasnt a eares process or overwrite process visibile ending the last working session output: Boot Info Script 0.61 [1 April 2012] ============================= Boot Info Summary: =============================== = Syslinux MBR (4.04 and higher) is installed in the MBR of /dev/sda. sda1: __________________________________________ File system: ntfs Boot sector type: Windows XP: NTFS Boot sector info: No errors found in the Boot Parameter Block. Operating System: Windows XP Boot files: /boot.ini /ntldr /NTDETECT.COM sda2: __________________________________________ File system: Extended Partition Boot sector type: - Boot sector info: sda5: __________________________________________ File system: ntfs Boot sector type: Windows XP: NTFS Boot sector info: According to the info in the boot sector, sda5 starts at sector 63. Operating System: Windows XP Boot files: sda6: __________________________________________ File system: swap Boot sector type: - Boot sector info: ============================ Drive/Partition Info: ============================= Drive: sda _______________________________________ Disk /dev/sda: 100.0 GB, 100030242816 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 12161 cylinders, total 195371568 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Partition Boot Start Sector End Sector # of Sectors Id System /dev/sda1 * 63 113,740,199 113,740,137 7 NTFS / exFAT / HPFS /dev/sda2 113,740,200 195,382,529 81,642,330 f W95 Extended (LBA) /dev/sda5 113,740,263 164,939,354 51,199,092 7 NTFS / exFAT / HPFS /dev/sda6 193,280,000 195,382,529 2,102,530 82 Linux swap / Solaris /dev/sda2 ends after the last sector of /dev/sda /dev/sda6 ends after the last sector of /dev/sda "blkid" output: ____________________________________ Device UUID TYPE LABEL /dev/loop0 squashfs /dev/sda1 6596D86768011128 ntfs /dev/sda5 1300D3B7744EC141 ntfs Schule /dev/sda6 5b95f2a1-4145-43a5-ac51-41d7dd32b213 swap ================================ Mount points: ================================= Device Mount_Point Type Options /dev/loop0 /rofs squashfs (ro,noatime) /dev/sr0 /cdrom iso9660 (ro,noatime) ================================ sda1/boot.ini: ================================ [boot loader] timeout=30 default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS [operating systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptOut multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect [spybotsd] timeout.old=30 the last part shows that i now use the windows boot loader so that i can acces at least one OS but shouldnt i also get acces to my ubuntu partitions with live-linux-cds ? or do i have to boot with grub to get to those files only ??

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• Are Chief Digital Officers the Result of CMO/CIO Refusal to Change?

  - by Mike Stiles

  Apparently CDO no longer just stands for “Collateralized Debt Obligations.”  It stands for Chief Digital Officer. And they’re the ones who are supposed to answer the bat signal CEO’s are throwing into the sky, swoop in and POW! drive the transition of the enterprise to integrated digital systems. So imagine being a CMO or a CIO at such an enterprise and realizing it’s been determined that you are not the answer that’s needed. In fact, IntelligentHQ author Ashley Friedlein points out the very rise of the CDO is an admission of C-Suite failure to become savvy enough, quickly enough in modern technology. Is that fair? Despite the repeated drumbeat that CMO’s and CIO’s must enter a new era of cooperation and collaboration to enact the social-enabled enterprise, the verdict seems to be that if it’s happening at all, it’s not happening fast enough. Therefore, someone else is needed with the authority to make things happen. So who is this relatively new beast? Gartner VP David Willis says, “The Chief Digital Officer plays in the place where the enterprise meets the customer, where the revenue is generated, and the mission accomplished.” In other words, where the rubber meets the road. They aren’t just another “C” heading up a unit. They’re the CEO’s personal SWAT team, able to call the shots necessary across all units to affect what has become job one…customer experience. And what are the CMO’s and CIO’s doing while this is going on? Playing corporate games. Accenture reports 38% of CMOs say IT deliberately keeps them out of the loop, with 35% saying marketing’s needs aren’t a very high priority. 31% of CIOs say marketers don’t understand tech and regularly go around them for solutions. Fun! Meanwhile the CEO feels the need to bring in a parental figure to pull it all together. Gartner thinks 25% of all orgs will have a CDO by 2015 as CMO’s and particularly CIO’s (Peter Hinssen points out many CDO’s are coming “from anywhere but IT”) let the opportunity to be the agent of change their company needs slip away. Perhaps most interestingly, these CDO’s seem to be entering the picture already on the fast track. One consultancy counted 7 instances of a CDO moving into the CEO role, which, as this Wired article points out, is pretty astounding since nobody ever heard of the job a few years ago. And vendors are quickly figuring out that this is the person they need to be talking to inside the brand. The position isn’t without its critics. Forrester’s Martin Gill says the reaction from executives at some traditional companies to someone being brought in to be in charge of digital might be to wash their own hands of responsibility for all things digital – a risky maneuver given the pervasiveness of digital in business. They might not even be called Chief Digital Officers. They might be the Chief Customer Officer, Chief Experience Officer, etc. You can call them Twinkletoes if you want to, but essentially anyone who has the mandate direct from the CEO to enact modern technology changes not currently being championed by the CMO or CIO can be regarded as “boss.” @mikestiles @oraclesocialPhoto: freedigitalphotos.net

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