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• Windows Phone Developer Spotlight: Nikolai Joukov

  - by Lori Lalonde

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/lorilalonde/archive/2014/06/04/windows-phone-developer-spotlight-nikolai-joukov.aspxAs part of an ongoing series, I plan to include a spotlight post on people within the community that are stars in their field and area of expertise. For my first spotlight post, I interviewed Nikolai Joukov, who is a regular attendee at my local area .NET User Group (CTTDNUG), and has also participated in many of the Mobile and Cloud workshops we have hosted over the past few years. Nikolai stood out immediately, because of his passion for developing mobile apps, his interest in continuous learning, and his drive to publish quality apps that people will find useful and entertaining. Background: Nikolai immigrated to Canada in 1995, and has been working in IT since 1997. He moved on to become an independent contractor in 2005, and has worked at various large scale organizations over the course of his career, including BMO, Enbridge, Economical Insurance, Equitable Life, Manulife and Sun Life. Nikolai is an accomplished Windows Phone and Windows Store publisher, with 11 published Windows Phone apps, and 8 published Windows Store apps. He has almost 6000 downloads and favourable reviews. Q & A with Nikolai How many years have you been developing Windows Phone apps? 2 years When did you develop your very first Windows Phone app, and what was it about? Actually, the very first app I wrote was for the Microsoft “Smart Phone” back in 2004. This phone was given to me by Microsoft during the Developers Days Conference in Toronto. It was some kind of experimental model named Smart Phone, but you had to use VB 3 to develop the applications. Needless to say, this was not very successful at that time. My app was a Stock Trades Calculator. Very primitive, but it was working for me. The phone was heavy and the battery barely lasted 4 hours. Microsoft stopped supporting it few months later and the phone stopped working shortly after, but I still have it as a souvenir. For Windows Phone, my first app was “Trip Packing Assistant”. This is a simple trip packing check list that allows you to list items by category, set required quantity of items, and mark off the item in the list when it is packed. I designed it for me and my wife Galina, since we love to travel and this program helps manage our list for us. How did you get started in Windows Phone development? I have to say thanks to our .NET User Group for introducing me to Windows Phone development. I was intrigued and decided to give it a try. In October 2012 during a 2 day training event that ObjectSharp hosted in London, I met Bruce Johnson. On his advice, I registered for Developer Movement, and it is was a good push to actually complete the apps that I started. You have a great series of travel guide apps both for Windows Phone and Windows Store. Tell us about how you came up with the idea to develop those apps and what process you went through to put it all together. Like I said earlier, my wife and I love to travel. Before I created Trip Packing Assistant, every time we were planning to travel somewhere new, Galina would spend 3-4 weeks doing research. She would create a Word document with all of the information. We didn’t want to have to carry our laptop with us all the time, so we printed out the Word document she created, and would take it with us. After we returned from the trip, we would bring back tons of pictures and materials. Then our friends started to ask us about our materials before they planned their trips to the same places we had visited. So I decided to give it a try and started making apps for Windows Phone and for Windows 8. I hope these applications will help people who are planning to travel. So, all of the pictures used in the travel apps you created were actually taken by you during these amazing trips? Yes Do you have another Windows Store/Windows Phone project in development right now? If so, can you give us a hint at what it will be about? I want to stay with travel apps for now. But this time I will try to write an app for us (Galina and I). Usually we go on the trip, then I write the apps after we have all this beautiful pictures in our hands. We are planning a trip to Rome. This app will not have the pictures, but I want to add a map with points of interest and all information that can be useful for us. Then we will go on our trip and test it on location. As well I am planning to work on my existing apps to make them better. What learning resources would you recommend for other developers that want to get started in Window Store and Windows Phone development? I would start with dev.windowsphone.com to get all tools and samples, also links to training materials. I like MVA (Microsoft Virtual Academy). Their videos are really useful and it is free. Pluralsight is good too but it is not free and I do not have a subscription anymore. Our .NET User Group meetings give good insights too. I went to all meetings and full day training events. When you start to develop your app, you need to do research for specific questions that arise during development. The Developer Portal and Nokia Developer are good resources too. Wrap Up Thanks Nikolai for participating in my first Spotlight blog post! Shown below is Nikolai’s publisher page in the Windows Phone Store and his publisher page in the Windows Store. Simply click on it to be taken to there to check out his portfolio of apps. Be sure to download his apps and try them out! They are all free! Nikolai’s Windows Phone apps   Nikolai’s Windows Store Apps

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• Master Data

  - by david.butler(at)oracle.com

  Let's take a deeper look at what we mean when we talk about 'Master' data. In its most general sense, master data is data that exists in more than one operational application. These are the applications that automate business processes. These applications require significant amounts of data to function correctly.  This includes data about the objects that are involved in transactions, as well as the transaction data itself.  For example, when a customer buys a product, the transaction is managed by a sales application.  The objects of the transaction are the Customer and the Product.  The transactional data is the time, place, price, discount, payment methods, etc. used at the point of sale. Many thousands of transactional data attributes are needed within the application. These important data elements are local to the applications and have no bearing on other applications. Harmonization and synchronization across applications is not necessary. The Customer and Product objects of the transaction also have a large number of attributes. Customer for example, includes hierarchies, hierarchical and matrixed relationships, contacts, classifications, preferences, accounts, identifiers, profiles, and addresses galore for 'ship to', 'mail to'; 'service at'; etc. Dozens of attributes exist for individuals, hundreds for organizations, and thousands for products. This data has meaning beyond any particular application. It exists in many applications and drives the vital cross application enterprise business processes. These are the processes that define and differentiate the organization. At every decision point, information about the objects of the process determines the direction of the process flow. This is the nature of the data that exists in more than one application, and this is why we call it 'master data'. Let me elaborate. Parties Oracle has developed a party schema to model all participants in your daily business operations. It models people, organizations, groups, customers, contacts, employees, and suppliers. It models their accounts, locations, classifications, and preferences.  And most importantly, it models the vast array of hierarchical and matrixed relationships that exist between all the participants in your real world operations.  The model logically separates people and organizations from their relationships and accounts.  This separation creates flexibility unmatched in the industry and accounts for the fact that the Oracle schema for Customers, Suppliers, and Accounts is a true superset of the wide variety of commercial and homegrown customer models in existence. Sites Sites are places where business is conducted. They can be addresses, clusters such as retail malls, locations within a cluster, floors within a building, places where meters are located, rooms on floors, etc.  Fully understanding all attributes of a site is key to many business processes. Attributes such as 'noise abatement policy' at a point of delivery, or the size of an oven in a business kitchen drive day-to-day activities such as delivery schedules or food promotions. Typically this kind of data is siloed in departments and scattered across applications and spreadsheets.  This leads to conflicting information and poor operational efficiencies. Oracle's Global Single Schema can hold all site attributes in one place and enables a single version of authoritative site information across the enterprise. Products and Services The Oracle Global Single Schema also includes a number of entities that define the products and services a company creates and offers for sale. Key entities include Items organized into Catalogs and Price Lists. The Catalog structures provide for the ability to capture different views of a product such as engineering, manufacturing, and service which are based on a unified product model. As a result, designers, manufacturing engineers, purchasers and partners can work simultaneously on a common product definition. The Catalog schema allows for unlimited attributes, combines them into meaningful groups, and maps them to catalog categories to track these different types of information. The model also maps an unlimited number of functional structures for each item. For example, multiple Bills of Material (BOMs) can be constructed representing requirements BOM, features BOM, and packaging BOM for an item. The Catalog model also supports hierarchical information about each item and all standard Global Data Synchronization attributes. Business Processes Utilizing Linked Data Entities Each business entity codified into a centralized master data environment significantly improves the efficiency of the automated business processes that use the consolidated data.  When all the key business entities used by an organization's process are so consolidated, the advantages are multiplied.  The primary reason for business process breakdowns (i.e. data errors across application boundaries) is eliminated. All processes are positively impacted and business process automation is itself automated.  I like to use the "Call to Resolution" business process as an example to help illustrate this important point. It involves call center applications, service applications, RMA applications, transportation applications, inventory applications, etc. Customer, Site, Product and Supplier master data must all be correct and consistent across these applications.  What's more, the data relationships between customer and product, and product and suppliers must be right. This is the minimum quality needed to insure the business process flows without error. But that is not the end of the story. Critical master data attributes such as customer loyalty, profitability, credit worthiness, and propensity to buy can optimize the call center point of contact component of the process. Critical product information such as alternative parts or equivalent products can optimize the resolution selected by the process. A comprehensive understanding of the 'service at' location can help insure multiple trips are avoided in the process. Full supplier information on reliability, delivery delays, and potential alternates can prevent supplier exceptions and play a significant role in optimizing the process.  In other words, these master data attributes enable the optimization of the "Call to Resolution" enterprise business process. Master data supports and guides business process flows. Thus the phrase 'Master Data' is indeed appropriate. MDM is the software that houses, manages, and governs the master data that resides in all applications and controls the enterprise business processes. A complete master data solution takes a data model that holds fully attributed master data entities and their inter-relationships. Oracle has this model. Oracle, with its deep understanding of application data is the logical choice for managing all your master data within the enterprise whether or not your organization actually runs any Oracle Applications.

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• Evaluating Solutions to Manage Product Compliance? Don't Wait Much Longer

  - by Kerrie Foy

  Depending on severity, product compliance issues can cause all sorts of problems from run-away budgets to business closures. But effective policies and safeguards can create a strong foundation for innovation, productivity, market penetration and competitive advantage. If you’ve been putting off a systematic approach to product compliance, it is time to reconsider that decision, or indecision. Why now?  No matter what industry, companies face a litany of worldwide and regional regulations that require proof of product compliance and environmental friendliness for market access.  For example, Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) is a regulation that restricts the use of six dangerous materials used in the manufacture of electronic and electrical equipment.  ROHS was originally adopted by the European Union in 2003 for implementation in 2006, and it has evolved over time through various regional versions for North America, China, Japan, Korea, Norway and Turkey.  In addition, the RoHS directive allowed for material exemptions used in Medical Devices, but that exemption ends in 2014.   Additional regulations worth watching are the Battery Directive, Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE), and Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) directives.  Additional evolving regulations are coming from governing bodies like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Corporate sustainability initiatives are also gaining urgency and influencing product design. In a survey of 405 corporations in the Global 500 by Carbon Disclosure Project, co-written by PwC (CDP Global 500 Climate Change Report 2012 entitled Business Resilience in an Uncertain, Resource-Constrained World), 48% of the respondents indicated they saw potential to create new products and business services as a response to climate change. Just 21% reported a dedicated budget for the research. However, the report goes on to explain that those few companies are winning over new customers and driving additional profits by exploiting their abilities to adapt to environmental needs. The article cites Dell as an example – Dell has invested in research to develop new products designed to reduce its customers’ emissions by more than 10 million metric tons of CO2e per year. This reduction in emissions should save Dell’s customers over $1billion per year as a result! Over time we expect to see many additional companies prove that eco-design provides marketplace benefits through differentiation and direct customer value. How do you meet compliance requirements and also successfully invest in eco-friendly designs? No doubt companies struggle to answer this question. After all, the journey to get there may involve transforming business models, go-to-market strategies, supply networks, quality assurance policies and compliance processes per the rapidly evolving global and regional directives. There may be limited executive focus on the initiative, inability to quantify noncompliance, or not enough resources to justify investment. To make things even more difficult to address, compliance responsibility can be a passionate topic within an organization, making the prospect of change on an enterprise scale problematic and time-consuming. Without a single source of truth for product data and without proper processes in place, ensuring product compliance burgeons into a crushing task that is cost-prohibitive and overwhelming to an organization. With all the overhead, certain markets or demographics become simply inaccessible. Therefore, the risk to consumer goodwill and satisfaction, revenue, business continuity, and market potential is too great not to solve the compliance challenge. Companies are beginning to adapt and even thrive in today’s highly regulated and transparent environment by implementing systematic approaches to product compliance that are more than functional bandages but revenue-generating engines. Consider partnering with Oracle to help you address your compliance needs. Many of the world’s most innovative leaders and pioneers are leveraging Oracle’s Agile Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) portfolio of enterprise applications to manage the product value chain, centralize product data, automate processes, and launch more eco-friendly products to market faster.   Particularly, the Agile Product Governance & Compliance (PG&C) solution provides out-of-the-box functionality to integrate actionable regulatory information into the enterprise product record from the ideation to the disposal/recycling phase. Agile PG&C makes it possible to efficiently manage compliance per corporate green initiatives as well as regional and global directives. Options are critical, but so is ease-of-use. Anyone who’s grappled with compliance policy knows legal interpretation plays a major role in determining how an organization responds to regulation. Agile PG&C gives you the freedom to configure product compliance per your needs, while maintaining rigorous control over the product record in an easy-to-use interface that facilitates adoption efforts. It allows you to assign regulations as specifications for a part or BOM roll-up. Each specification has a threshold value that alerts you to a non-compliance issue if the threshold value is exceeded. Set however many regulations as specifications you need to make sure a product can be sold in your target countries. Another option is to implement like one of our leading consumer electronics customers and define your own “catch-all” specification to ensure compliance in all markets. You can give your suppliers secure access to enter their component data or integrate a third party’s data. With Agile PG&C you are able to design compliance earlier into your products to reduce cost and improve quality downstream when stakes are higher. Agile PG&C is a comprehensive solution that makes product compliance more reliable and efficient. Throughout product lifecycles, use the solution to support full material disclosures, efficiently manage declarations with your suppliers, feed compliance data into a corrective action if a product must be changed, and swiftly satisfy audits by showing all due diligence tracked in one solution. Given the compounding regulation and consumer focus on urgent environmental issues, now is the time to act. Implementing an enterprise, systematic approach to product compliance is a competitive investment. From the start, Agile Product Governance & Compliance enables companies to confidently design for compliance and sustainability, reduce the cost of compliance, minimize the risk of business interruption, deliver responsible products, and inspire new innovation.  Don’t wait any longer! To find out more about Agile Product Governance & Compliance download the data sheet, contact your sales representative, or call Oracle at 1-800-633-0738. Many thanks to Shane Goodwin, Senior Manager, Oracle Agile PLM Product Management, for contributions to this article. 

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• Consuming the Amazon S3 service from a Win8 Metro Application

  - by cibrax

  As many of the existing Http APIs for Cloud Services, AWS also provides a set of different platform SDKs for hiding many of complexities present in the APIs. While there is a platform SDK for .NET, which is open source and available in C#, that SDK does not work in Win8 Metro Applications for the changes introduced in WinRT. WinRT offers a complete different set of APIs for doing I/O operations such as doing http calls or using cryptography for signing or encrypting data, two aspects that are absolutely necessary for consuming AWS. All the I/O APIs available as part of WinRT are asynchronous, and uses the TPL model for .NET applications (HTML and JavaScript Metro applications use a model based in promises, which is similar concept).  In the case of S3, the http Authorization header is used for two purposes, authenticating clients and make sure the messages were not altered while they were in transit. For doing that, it uses a signature or hash of the message content and some of the headers using a symmetric key (That's just one of the available mechanisms). Windows Azure for example also uses the same mechanism in many of its APIs. There are three challenges that any developer working for first time in Metro will have to face to consume S3, the new WinRT APIs, the asynchronous nature of them and the complexity introduced for generating the Authorization header. Having said that, I decided to write this post with some of the gotchas I found myself trying to consume this Amazon service. 1. Generating the signature for the Authorization header All the cryptography APIs in WinRT are available under Windows.Security.Cryptography namespace. Many of operations available in these APIs uses the concept of buffers (IBuffer) for representing a chunk of binary data. As you will see in the example below, these buffers are mainly generated with the use of static methods in a WinRT class CryptographicBuffer available as part of the namespace previously mentioned. private string DeriveAuthToken(string resource, string httpMethod, string timestamp) { var stringToSign = string.Format("{0}\n" + "\n" + "\n" + "\n" + "x-amz-date:{1}\n" + "/{2}/", httpMethod, timestamp, resource); var algorithm = MacAlgorithmProvider.OpenAlgorithm("HMAC_SHA1"); var keyMaterial = CryptographicBuffer.CreateFromByteArray(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(this.secret)); var hmacKey = algorithm.CreateKey(keyMaterial); var signature = CryptographicEngine.Sign( hmacKey, CryptographicBuffer.CreateFromByteArray(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(stringToSign)) ); return CryptographicBuffer.EncodeToBase64String(signature); } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } The algorithm that determines the information or content you need to use for generating the signature is very well described as part of the AWS documentation. In this case, this method is generating a signature required for creating a new bucket. A HmacSha1 hash is computed using a secret or symetric key provided by AWS in the management console. 2. Sending an Http Request to the S3 service WinRT also ships with the System.Net.Http.HttpClient that was first introduced some months ago with ASP.NET Web API. This client provides a rich interface on top the traditional WebHttpRequest class, and also solves some of limitations found in this last one. There are a few things that don't work with a raw WebHttpRequest such as setting the Host header, which is something absolutely required for consuming S3. Also, HttpClient is more friendly for doing unit tests, as it receives a HttpMessageHandler as part of the constructor that can fake to emulate a real http call. This is how the code for consuming the service with HttpClient looks like, public async Task<S3Response> CreateBucket(string name, string region = null, params string[] acl) { var timestamp = string.Format("{0:r}", DateTime.UtcNow); var auth = DeriveAuthToken(name, "PUT", timestamp); var request = new HttpRequestMessage(HttpMethod.Put, "http://s3.amazonaws.com/"); request.Headers.Host = string.Format("{0}.s3.amazonaws.com", name); request.Headers.TryAddWithoutValidation("Authorization", "AWS " + this.key + ":" + auth); request.Headers.Add("x-amz-date", timestamp); var client = new HttpClient(); var response = await client.SendAsync(request); return new S3Response { Succeed = response.StatusCode == HttpStatusCode.OK, Message = (response.Content != null) ? await response.Content.ReadAsStringAsync() : null }; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } You will notice a few additional things in this code. By default, HttpClient validates the values for some well-know headers, and Authorization is one of them. It won't allow you to set a value with ":" on it, which is something that S3 expects. However, that's not a problem at all, as you can skip the validation by using the TryAddWithoutValidation method. Also, the code is heavily relying on the new async and await keywords to transform all the asynchronous calls into synchronous ones. In case you would want to unit test this code and faking the call to the real S3 service, you should have to modify it to inject a custom HttpMessageHandler into the HttpClient. The following implementation illustrates this concept, In case you would want to unit test this code and faking the call to the real S3 service, you should have to modify it to inject a custom HttpMessageHandler into the HttpClient. The following implementation illustrates this concept, public class FakeHttpMessageHandler : HttpMessageHandler { HttpResponseMessage response; public FakeHttpMessageHandler(HttpResponseMessage response) { this.response = response; } protected override Task<HttpResponseMessage> SendAsync(HttpRequestMessage request, System.Threading.CancellationToken cancellationToken) { var tcs = new TaskCompletionSource<HttpResponseMessage>(); tcs.SetResult(response); return tcs.Task; } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } You can use this handler for injecting any response while you are unit testing the code.

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• Consuming the Amazon S3 service from a Win8 Metro Application

  - by cibrax

  As many of the existing Http APIs for Cloud Services, AWS also provides a set of different platform SDKs for hiding many of complexities present in the APIs. While there is a platform SDK for .NET, which is open source and available in C#, that SDK does not work in Win8 Metro Applications for the changes introduced in WinRT. WinRT offers a complete different set of APIs for doing I/O operations such as doing http calls or using cryptography for signing or encrypting data, two aspects that are absolutely necessary for consuming AWS. All the I/O APIs available as part of WinRT are asynchronous, and uses the TPL model for .NET applications (HTML and JavaScript Metro applications use a model based in promises, which is similar concept).  In the case of S3, the http Authorization header is used for two purposes, authenticating clients and make sure the messages were not altered while they were in transit. For doing that, it uses a signature or hash of the message content and some of the headers using a symmetric key (That's just one of the available mechanisms). Windows Azure for example also uses the same mechanism in many of its APIs. There are three challenges that any developer working for first time in Metro will have to face to consume S3, the new WinRT APIs, the asynchronous nature of them and the complexity introduced for generating the Authorization header. Having said that, I decided to write this post with some of the gotchas I found myself trying to consume this Amazon service. 1. Generating the signature for the Authorization header All the cryptography APIs in WinRT are available under Windows.Security.Cryptography namespace. Many of operations available in these APIs uses the concept of buffers (IBuffer) for representing a chunk of binary data. As you will see in the example below, these buffers are mainly generated with the use of static methods in a WinRT class CryptographicBuffer available as part of the namespace previously mentioned. private string DeriveAuthToken(string resource, string httpMethod, string timestamp) { var stringToSign = string.Format("{0}\n" + "\n" + "\n" + "\n" + "x-amz-date:{1}\n" + "/{2}/", httpMethod, timestamp, resource); var algorithm = MacAlgorithmProvider.OpenAlgorithm("HMAC_SHA1"); var keyMaterial = CryptographicBuffer.CreateFromByteArray(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(this.secret)); var hmacKey = algorithm.CreateKey(keyMaterial); var signature = CryptographicEngine.Sign( hmacKey, CryptographicBuffer.CreateFromByteArray(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(stringToSign)) ); return CryptographicBuffer.EncodeToBase64String(signature); } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } The algorithm that determines the information or content you need to use for generating the signature is very well described as part of the AWS documentation. In this case, this method is generating a signature required for creating a new bucket. A HmacSha1 hash is computed using a secret or symetric key provided by AWS in the management console. 2. Sending an Http Request to the S3 service WinRT also ships with the System.Net.Http.HttpClient that was first introduced some months ago with ASP.NET Web API. This client provides a rich interface on top the traditional WebHttpRequest class, and also solves some of limitations found in this last one. There are a few things that don't work with a raw WebHttpRequest such as setting the Host header, which is something absolutely required for consuming S3. Also, HttpClient is more friendly for doing unit tests, as it receives a HttpMessageHandler as part of the constructor that can fake to emulate a real http call. This is how the code for consuming the service with HttpClient looks like, public async Task<S3Response> CreateBucket(string name, string region = null, params string[] acl) { var timestamp = string.Format("{0:r}", DateTime.UtcNow); var auth = DeriveAuthToken(name, "PUT", timestamp); var request = new HttpRequestMessage(HttpMethod.Put, "http://s3.amazonaws.com/"); request.Headers.Host = string.Format("{0}.s3.amazonaws.com", name); request.Headers.TryAddWithoutValidation("Authorization", "AWS " + this.key + ":" + auth); request.Headers.Add("x-amz-date", timestamp); var client = new HttpClient(); var response = await client.SendAsync(request); return new S3Response { Succeed = response.StatusCode == HttpStatusCode.OK, Message = (response.Content != null) ? await response.Content.ReadAsStringAsync() : null }; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } You will notice a few additional things in this code. By default, HttpClient validates the values for some well-know headers, and Authorization is one of them. It won't allow you to set a value with ":" on it, which is something that S3 expects. However, that's not a problem at all, as you can skip the validation by using the TryAddWithoutValidation method. Also, the code is heavily relying on the new async and await keywords to transform all the asynchronous calls into synchronous ones. In case you would want to unit test this code and faking the call to the real S3 service, you should have to modify it to inject a custom HttpMessageHandler into the HttpClient. The following implementation illustrates this concept, In case you would want to unit test this code and faking the call to the real S3 service, you should have to modify it to inject a custom HttpMessageHandler into the HttpClient. The following implementation illustrates this concept, public class FakeHttpMessageHandler : HttpMessageHandler { HttpResponseMessage response; public FakeHttpMessageHandler(HttpResponseMessage response) { this.response = response; } protected override Task<HttpResponseMessage> SendAsync(HttpRequestMessage request, System.Threading.CancellationToken cancellationToken) { var tcs = new TaskCompletionSource<HttpResponseMessage>(); tcs.SetResult(response); return tcs.Task; } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } You can use this handler for injecting any response while you are unit testing the code.

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• BRE (Business Rules Engine) Data Services is out...!!!

  - by Vishal

  A few months ago we at Tellago had open sourced the BizTalk Data Services. We were meanwhile working on other artifacts which comes along with BizTalk Server like the “Business Rules Engine”.  We are happy to announce the first version of BRE Data Services. BRE Data Services is a same concept which we covered through BTS Data Services, providing a RESTFul OData – based API to interact with the Business Rules Engine via HTTP using ATOM Publishing Protocol or JSON as the encoding mechanism.   In the first version release, we mainly focused on the browsing, querying and searching BRE artifacts via a RESTFul interface. Also along with that we provide the functionality to execute Business Rules by inserting the Facts for policies via the IUpdatable implementation of WCF Data Services.   The BRE Data Services API provides a lightweight interface for managing Business Rules Engine artifacts such as Policies, Rules, Vocabularies, Conditions, Actions, Facts etc. The following are some examples which details some of the available features in the current version of the API.   Basic Querying: Querying BRE Policies http://localhost/BREDataServices/BREMananagementService.svc/Policies Querying BRE Rules http://localhost/BREDataServices/BREMananagementService.svc/Rules Querying BRE Vocabularies http://localhost/BREDataServices/BREMananagementService.svc/Vocabularies   Navigation: The BRE Data Services API also leverages WCF Data Services to enable navigation across related different BRE objects. Querying a specific Policy http://localhost/BREDataServices/BREMananagementService.svc/Policies(‘PolicyName’) Querying a specific Rule http://localhost/BREDataServices/BREMananagementService.svc/Rules(‘RuleName’) Querying all Rules under a Policy http://localhost/BREDataServices/BREMananagementService.svc/Policies('PolicyName')/Rules Querying all Facts under a Policy http://localhost/BREDataServices/BREMananagementService.svc/Policies('PolicyName')/Facts Querying all Actions for a specific Rule http://localhost/BREDataServices/BREMananagementService.svc/Rules('RuleName')/Actions Querying all Conditions for a specific Rule http://localhost/BREDataServices/BREMananagementService.svc/Rules('RuleName')/Actions Querying a specific Vocabulary: http://localhost/BREDataServices/BREMananagementService.svc/Vocabularies('VocabName')   Implementation: With the BRE Data Services, we also provide the functionality of executing a particular policy via HTTP. There are couple of ways you can do that though the API.   Ø First is though Service Operations feature of WCF Data Services in which you can execute the Facts by passing them in the URL itself. This is a very simple implementations of the executing the policies due to the limitations & restrictions (only primitive types of input parameters which can be passed) currently of the Service Operations of the WCF Data Services. Below is a code sample.                Below is a traced Request/Response message.                                 Ø Second is through the IUpdatable Interface of WCF Data Services. In this method, you can first query the rule which you want to execute and then inserts Facts for that particular Rules and finally when you perform the SaveChanges() call for the IUpdatable Interface API, it executes the policy with the facts which you inserted at runtime. Below is a sample of client side code. Due to the limitations of current version of WCF Data Services where there is no way you can return back the updates happening on the service side back to the client via the SaveChanges() method. Here we are executing the rule passing a serialized XML as Facts and there is no changes made to any data where we can query back to fetch the changes. This is overcome though the first way to executing the policies which is by executing it as a Service Operation call.     This actually generates a AtomPub message shown as below:   POST /Tellago.BRE.REST.ServiceHost/BREMananagementService.svc/$batch HTTP/1.1 User-Agent: Microsoft ADO.NET Data Services DataServiceVersion: 1.0;NetFx MaxDataServiceVersion: 2.0;NetFx Accept: application/atom+xml,application/xml Accept-Charset: UTF-8 Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary=batch_6b9a5ced-5ecb-4585-940a-9d5e704c28c7 Host: localhost:8080 Content-Length: 1481 Expect: 100-continue   --batch_6b9a5ced-5ecb-4585-940a-9d5e704c28c7 Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary=changeset_184a8c59-a714-4ba9-bb3d-889a88fe24bf   --changeset_184a8c59-a714-4ba9-bb3d-889a88fe24bf Content-Type: application/http Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary   MERGE http://localhost:8080/Tellago.BRE.REST.ServiceHost/BREMananagementService.svc/Facts('TestPolicy') HTTP/1.1 Content-ID: 4 Content-Type: application/atom+xml;type=entry Content-Length: 927   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes"?> <entry xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices" xmlns:m="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices/metadata" font-size: x-small"http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">   <category scheme="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices/scheme" term="Tellago.BRE.REST.Resources.Fact" />   <title />   <author>     <name />   </author>   <updated>2011-01-31T20:09:15.0023982Z</updated>   <id>http://localhost:8080/Tellago.BRE.REST.ServiceHost/BREMananagementService.svc/Facts('TestPolicy')</id>   <content type="application/xml">     <m:properties>       <d:FactInstance>&lt;ns0:LoanStatus xmlns:ns0="http://tellago.com"&gt;&lt;Age&gt;10&lt;/Age&gt;&lt;Status&gt;true&lt;/Status&gt;&lt;/ns0:LoanStatus&gt;</d:FactInstance>       <d:FactType>TestSchema</d:FactType>       <d:ID>TestPolicy</d:ID>     </m:properties>   </content> </entry> --changeset_184a8c59-a714-4ba9-bb3d-889a88fe24bf-- --batch_6b9a5ced-5ecb-4585-940a-9d5e704c28c7—     Installation: The installation of the BRE Data Services is pretty straight forward. ·         Create a new IIS website say BREDataServices. ·         Download the SourceCode from TellagoCodeplex and copy the content from Tellago.BRE.REST.ServiceHost to the physical location of the above created website.     ·         The appPool account running the website should have admin access to the BizTalkRuleEngineDb database. ·         TheRight click the BREManagementService.svc in the IIS ContentView for the website and wala..     Conclusion: The BRE Data Services API is an experiment intended to bring the capabilities of RESTful/OData based services to the Traditional BTS/BRE Solutions. The future releases will target on technologies like BAM, ESB Toolkit. This version has been tested with various version of BizTalk Server and we have uploaded the source code to our Tellago's DevLabs workspace at Codeplex. I hope you guys enjoy this release. Keep an eye on our new releases @ Tellago Codeplex. We are working on various other Biztalk Artifacts like BAM, ESB Toolkit.     Till than happy BizzRuling…!!!     Thanks,   Vishal Mody

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• Oracle Identity Manager Role Management With API

  - by mustafakaya

  As an administrator, you use roles to create and manage the records of a collection of users to whom you want to permit access to common functionality, such as access rights, roles, or permissions. Roles can be independent of an organization, span multiple organizations, or contain users from a single organization. Using roles, you can: View the menu items that the users can access through Oracle Identity Manager Administration Web interface. Assign users to roles. Assign a role to a parent role Designate status to the users so that they can specify defined responses for process tasks. Modify permissions on data objects. Designate role administrators to perform actions on roles, such as enabling members of another role to assign users to the current role, revoke members from current role and so on. Designate provisioning policies for a role. These policies determine if a resource object is to be provisioned to or requested for a member of the role. Assign or remove membership rules to or from the role. These rules determine which users can be assigned/removed as direct membership to/from the role.  In this post, i will share some examples for role management with Oracle Identity Management API.  You can do role operations you can use Thor.API.Operations.tcGroupOperationsIntf interface. tcGroupOperationsIntf service =  getClient().getService(tcGroupOperationsIntf.class);     Assign an user to role :    public void assignRoleByUsrKey(String roleName, String usrKey) throws Exception {         Map<String, String> filter = new HashMap<String, String>();         filter.put("Groups.Role Name", roleName);         tcResultSet role = service.findGroups(filter);         String groupKey = role.getStringValue("Groups.Key");         service.addMemberUser(Long.parseLong(groupKey), Long.parseLong(usrKey));     }  Revoke an user from role:     public void revokeRoleByUsrKey(String roleName, String usrKey) throws Exception {         Map<String, String> filter = new HashMap<String, String>();         filter.put("Groups.Role Name", roleName);         tcResultSet role = service.findGroups(filter);         String groupKey = role.getStringValue("Groups.Key");         service.removeMemberUser(Long.parseLong(groupKey), Long.parseLong(usrKey));     } Get all members of a role :      public List<User> getRoleMembers(String roleName) throws Exception {         List<User> userList = new ArrayList<User>();         Map<String, String> filter = new HashMap<String, String>();         filter.put("Groups.Role Name", roleName);         tcResultSet role = service.findGroups(filter);       String groupKey = role.getStringValue("Groups.Key");         tcResultSet members = service.getAllMemberUsers(Long.parseLong(groupKey));         for (int i = 0; i < members.getRowCount(); i++) {                 members.goToRow(i);                 long userKey = members.getLongValue("Users.Key");                 User member = oimUserManager.findUserByUserKey(String.valueOf(userKey));                 userList.add(member);         }        return userList;     } About me: Mustafa Kaya is a Senior Consultant in Oracle Fusion Middleware Team, living in Istanbul. Before coming to Oracle, he worked in teams developing web applications and backend services at a telco company. He is a Java technology enthusiast, software engineer and addicted to learn new technologies,develop new ideas. Follow Mustafa on Twitter,Connect on LinkedIn, and visit his site for Oracle Fusion Middleware related tips.

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• The Sensemaking Spectrum for Business Analytics: Translating from Data to Business Through Analysis

  - by Joe Lamantia

  One of the most compelling outcomes of our strategic research efforts over the past several years is a growing vocabulary that articulates our cumulative understanding of the deep structure of the domains of discovery and business analytics. Modes are one example of the deep structure we’ve found.  After looking at discovery activities across a very wide range of industries, question types, business needs, and problem solving approaches, we've identified distinct and recurring kinds of sensemaking activity, independent of context.  We label these activities Modes: Explore, compare, and comprehend are three of the nine recognizable modes.  Modes describe *how* people go about realizing insights.  (Read more about the programmatic research and formal academic grounding and discussion of the modes here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235971352_A_Taxonomy_of_Enterprise_Search_and_Discovery) By analogy to languages, modes are the 'verbs' of discovery activity.  When applied to the practical questions of product strategy and development, the modes of discovery allow one to identify what kinds of analytical activity a product, platform, or solution needs to support across a spread of usage scenarios, and then make concrete and well-informed decisions about every aspect of the solution, from high-level capabilities, to which specific types of information visualizations better enable these scenarios for the types of data users will analyze. The modes are a powerful generative tool for product making, but if you've spent time with young children, or had a really bad hangover (or both at the same time...), you understand the difficult of communicating using only verbs.  So I'm happy to share that we've found traction on another facet of the deep structure of discovery and business analytics.  Continuing the language analogy, we've identified some of the ‘nouns’ in the language of discovery: specifically, the consistently recurring aspects of a business that people are looking for insight into.  We call these discovery Subjects, since they identify *what* people focus on during discovery efforts, rather than *how* they go about discovery as with the Modes. Defining the collection of Subjects people repeatedly focus on allows us to understand and articulate sense making needs and activity in more specific, consistent, and complete fashion.  In combination with the Modes, we can use Subjects to concretely identify and define scenarios that describe people’s analytical needs and goals.  For example, a scenario such as ‘Explore [a Mode] the attrition rates [a Measure, one type of Subject] of our largest customers [Entities, another type of Subject] clearly captures the nature of the activity — exploration of trends vs. deep analysis of underlying factors — and the central focus — attrition rates for customers above a certain set of size criteria — from which follow many of the specifics needed to address this scenario in terms of data, analytical tools, and methods. We can also use Subjects to translate effectively between the different perspectives that shape discovery efforts, reducing ambiguity and increasing impact on both sides the perspective divide.  For example, from the language of business, which often motivates analytical work by asking questions in business terms, to the perspective of analysis.  The question posed to a Data Scientist or analyst may be something like “Why are sales of our new kinds of potato chips to our largest customers fluctuating unexpectedly this year?” or “Where can innovate, by expanding our product portfolio to meet unmet needs?”.  Analysts translate questions and beliefs like these into one or more empirical discovery efforts that more formally and granularly indicate the plan, methods, tools, and desired outcomes of analysis.  From the perspective of analysis this second question might become, “Which customer needs of type ‘A', identified and measured in terms of ‘B’, that are not directly or indirectly addressed by any of our current products, offer 'X' potential for ‘Y' positive return on the investment ‘Z' required to launch a new offering, in time frame ‘W’?  And how do these compare to each other?”.  Translation also happens from the perspective of analysis to the perspective of data; in terms of availability, quality, completeness, format, volume, etc. By implication, we are proposing that most working organizations — small and large, for profit and non-profit, domestic and international, and in the majority of industries — can be described for analytical purposes using this collection of Subjects.  This is a bold claim, but simplified articulation of complexity is one of the primary goals of sensemaking frameworks such as this one.  (And, yes, this is in fact a framework for making sense of sensemaking as a category of activity - but we’re not considering the recursive aspects of this exercise at the moment.) Compellingly, we can place the collection of subjects on a single continuum — we call it the Sensemaking Spectrum — that simply and coherently illustrates some of the most important relationships between the different types of Subjects, and also illuminates several of the fundamental dynamics shaping business analytics as a domain.  As a corollary, the Sensemaking Spectrum also suggests innovation opportunities for products and services related to business analytics. The first illustration below shows Subjects arrayed along the Sensemaking Spectrum; the second illustration presents examples of each kind of Subject.  Subjects appear in colors ranging from blue to reddish-orange, reflecting their place along the Spectrum, which indicates whether a Subject addresses more the viewpoint of systems and data (Data centric and blue), or people (User centric and orange).  This axis is shown explicitly above the Spectrum.  Annotations suggest how Subjects align with the three significant perspectives of Data, Analysis, and Business that shape business analytics activity.  This rendering makes explicit the translation and bridging function of Analysts as a role, and analysis as an activity. Subjects are best understood as fuzzy categories [http://georgelakoff.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/hedges-a-study-in-meaning-criteria-and-the-logic-of-fuzzy-concepts-journal-of-philosophical-logic-2-lakoff-19731.pdf], rather than tightly defined buckets.  For each Subject, we suggest some of the most common examples: Entities may be physical things such as named products, or locations (a building, or a city); they could be Concepts, such as satisfaction; or they could be Relationships between entities, such as the variety of possible connections that define linkage in social networks.  Likewise, Events may indicate a time and place in the dictionary sense; or they may be Transactions involving named entities; or take the form of Signals, such as ‘some Measure had some value at some time’ - what many enterprises understand as alerts.   The central story of the Spectrum is that though consumers of analytical insights (represented here by the Business perspective) need to work in terms of Subjects that are directly meaningful to their perspective — such as Themes, Plans, and Goals — the working realities of data (condition, structure, availability, completeness, cost) and the changing nature of most discovery efforts make direct engagement with source data in this fashion impossible.  Accordingly, business analytics as a domain is structured around the fundamental assumption that sense making depends on analytical transformation of data.  Analytical activity incrementally synthesizes more complex and larger scope Subjects from data in its starting condition, accumulating insight (and value) by moving through a progression of stages in which increasingly meaningful Subjects are iteratively synthesized from the data, and recombined with other Subjects.  The end goal of  ‘laddering’ successive transformations is to enable sense making from the business perspective, rather than the analytical perspective.Synthesis through laddering is typically accomplished by specialized Analysts using dedicated tools and methods. Beginning with some motivating question such as seeking opportunities to increase the efficiency (a Theme) of fulfillment processes to reach some level of profitability by the end of the year (Plan), Analysts will iteratively wrangle and transform source data Records, Values and Attributes into recognizable Entities, such as Products, that can be combined with Measures or other data into the Events (shipment of orders) that indicate the workings of the business.  More complex Subjects (to the right of the Spectrum) are composed of or make reference to less complex Subjects: a business Process such as Fulfillment will include Activities such as confirming, packing, and then shipping orders.  These Activities occur within or are conducted by organizational units such as teams of staff or partner firms (Networks), composed of Entities which are structured via Relationships, such as supplier and buyer.  The fulfillment process will involve other types of Entities, such as the products or services the business provides.  The success of the fulfillment process overall may be judged according to a sophisticated operating efficiency Model, which includes tiered Measures of business activity and health for the transactions and activities included.  All of this may be interpreted through an understanding of the operational domain of the businesses supply chain (a Domain).   We'll discuss the Spectrum in more depth in succeeding posts.

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

  - by Argenis

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

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

  - by Argenis

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

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• Clouds Everywhere But not a Drop of Rain – Part 3

  - by sxkumar

  I was sharing with you how a broad-based transformation such as cloud will increase agility and efficiency of an organization if process re-engineering is part of the plan.  I have also stressed on the key enterprise requirements such as “broad and deep solutions, “running your mission critical applications” and “automated and integrated set of capabilities”. Let me walk you through some key cloud attributes such as “elasticity” and “self-service” and what they mean for an enterprise class cloud. I will also talk about how we at Oracle have taken a very enterprise centric view to developing cloud solutions and how our products have been specifically engineered to address enterprise cloud needs. Cloud Elasticity and Enterprise Applications Requirements Easy and quick scalability for a short-period of time is the signature of cloud based solutions. It is this elasticity that allows you to dynamically redistribute your resources according to business priorities, helps increase your overall resource utilization, and reduces operational costs by allowing you to get the most out of your existing investment. Most public clouds are offering a instant provisioning mechanism of compute power (CPU, RAM, Disk), customer pay for the instance-hours(and bandwidth) they use, adding computing resources at peak times and removing them when they are no longer needed. This type of “just-in-time” serving of compute resources is well known for mid-tiers “state less” servers such as web application servers and web servers that just need another machine to start and run on it but what does it really mean for an enterprise application and its underlying data? Most enterprise applications are not as quite as “state less” and justifiably so. As such, how do you take advantage of cloud elasticity and make it relevant for your enterprise apps? This is where Cloud meets Grid Computing. At Oracle, we have invested enormous amount of time, energy and resources in creating enterprise grid solutions. All our technology products offer built-in elasticity via clustering and dynamic scaling. With products like Real Application Clusters (RAC), Automatic Storage Management, WebLogic Clustering, and Coherence In-Memory Grid, we allow all your enterprise applications to benefit from Cloud elasticity –both vertically and horizontally - without requiring any application changes. A number of technology vendors take a rather simplistic route of starting up additional or removing unneeded VM as the "Cloud Scale-Out" solution. While this may work for stateless mid-tier servers where load balancers can handle the addition and remove of instances transparently but following a similar approach for the database tier - often called as "database sharding" - requires significant application modification and typically does not work with off the shelf packaged applications. Technologies like Oracle Database Real Application Clusters, Automatic Storage Management, etc. on the other hand bring the benefits of incremental scalability and on-demand elasticity to ANY application by providing a simplified abstraction layers where the application does not need deal with data spread over multiple database instances. Rather they just talk to a single database and the database software takes care of aggregating resources across multiple hardware components. It is the technologies like these that truly make a cloud solution relevant for enterprises.  For customers who are looking for a next generation hardware consolidation platform, our engineered systems (e.g. Exadata, Exalogic) not only provide incredible amount of performance and capacity, they also reduce the data center complexity and simplify operations. Assemble, Deploy and Manage Enterprise Applications for Cloud Products like Oracle Virtual assembly builder (OVAB) resolve the complex problem of bringing the cloud speed to complex multi-tier applications. With assemblies, you can not only provision all components of a multi-tier application and wire them together by push of a button, other aspects of application lifecycle, such as real-time application testing, scale-up/scale-down, performance and availability monitoring, etc., are also automated using Oracle Enterprise Manager.  An essential criteria for an enterprise cloud to succeed is the ability to ensure business service levels especially when business users have either full visibility on the usage cost with a “show back” or a “charge back”. With Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c, we have created the most comprehensive cloud management solution in the industry that is capable of managing business service levels “applications-to-disk” in a enterprise private cloud – all from a single console. It is the only cloud management platform in the industry that allows you to deliver infrastructure, platform and application cloud services out of the box. Moreover, it offers integrated and complete lifecycle management of the cloud - including planning and set up, service delivery, operations management, metering and chargeback, etc .  Sounds unbelievable? Well, just watch this space for more details on how Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c is the nerve center of Oracle Cloud! Our cloud solution portfolio is also the broadest and most deep in the industry  - covering public, private, hybrid, Infrastructure, platform and applications clouds. It is no coincidence therefore that the Oracle Cloud today offers the most comprehensive set of public cloud services in the industry.  And to a large part, this has been made possible thanks to our years on investment in creating cloud enabling technologies.  Summary  But the intent of this blog post isn't to dwell on how great our solutions are (these are just some examples to illustrate how we at Oracle have approached this problem space). Rather it is to help you ask the right questions before you embark on your cloud journey.  So to summarize, here are the key takeaways.       It is critical that you are clear on why you are building the cloud. Successful organizations keep business benefits as the first and foremost cloud objective. On the other hand, those who approach this purely as a technology project are more likely to fail. Think about where you want to be in 3-5 years before you get started. Your long terms objectives should determine what your first step ought to be. As obvious as it may seem, more people than not make the first move without knowing where they are headed.  Don’t make the mistake of equating cloud to virtualization and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). Spinning a VM on-demand will give some short term relief to your IT staff but is unlikely to solve your larger business problems. As such, even if IaaS is your first step towards a more comprehensive cloud, plan the roadmap around those higher level services before you begin. And ask your vendors on how they are going to be your partners in this journey. Capabilities like self-service access and chargeback/showback are absolutely critical if you really expect your cloud to be transformational. Your business won't see the full benefits of the cloud until it empowers them with same kind of control and transparency that they are used to while using a public cloud service.  Evaluate the benefits of integration, as opposed to blindly following the best-of-breed strategy. Integration is a huge challenge and more so in a cloud environment. There are enormous costs associated with stitching a solution out of disparate components and even more in maintaining it. Hope you found these ideas helpful. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and experiences.

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• Entity Framework 6: Alpha2 Now Available

  - by ScottGu

  The Entity Framework team recently announced the 2nd alpha release of EF6.   The alpha 2 package is available for download from NuGet. Since this is a pre-release package make sure to select “Include Prereleases” in the NuGet package manager, or execute the following from the package manager console to install it: PM> Install-Package EntityFramework -Pre This week’s alpha release includes a bunch of great improvements in the following areas: Async language support is now available for queries and updates when running on .NET 4.5. Custom conventions now provide the ability to override the default conventions that Code First uses for mapping types, properties, etc. to your database. Multi-tenant migrations allow the same database to be used by multiple contexts with full Code First Migrations support for independently evolving the model backing each context. Using Enumerable.Contains in a LINQ query is now handled much more efficiently by EF and the SQL Server provider resulting greatly improved performance. All features of EF6 (except async) are available on both .NET 4 and .NET 4.5. This includes support for enums and spatial types and the performance improvements that were previously only available when using .NET 4.5. Start-up time for many large models has been dramatically improved thanks to improved view generation performance. Below are some additional details about a few of the improvements above: Async Support .NET 4.5 introduced the Task-Based Asynchronous Pattern that uses the async and await keywords to help make writing asynchronous code easier. EF 6 now supports this pattern. This is great for ASP.NET applications as database calls made through EF can now be processed asynchronously – avoiding any blocking of worker threads. This can increase scalability on the server by allowing more requests to be processed while waiting for the database to respond. The following code shows an MVC controller that is querying a database for a list of location entities:     public class HomeController : Controller     {         LocationContext db = new LocationContext();           public async Task<ActionResult> Index()         {             var locations = await db.Locations.ToListAsync();               return View(locations);         }     } Notice above the call to the new ToListAsync method with the await keyword. When the web server reaches this code it initiates the database request, but rather than blocking while waiting for the results to come back, the thread that is processing the request returns to the thread pool, allowing ASP.NET to process another incoming request with the same thread. In other words, a thread is only consumed when there is actual processing work to do, allowing the web server to handle more concurrent requests with the same resources. A more detailed walkthrough covering async in EF is available with additional information and examples. Also a walkthrough is available showing how to use async in an ASP.NET MVC application. Custom Conventions When working with EF Code First, the default behavior is to map .NET classes to tables using a set of conventions baked into EF. For example, Code First will detect properties that end with “ID” and configure them automatically as primary keys. However, sometimes you cannot or do not want to follow those conventions and would rather provide your own. For example, maybe your primary key properties all end in “Key” instead of “Id”. Custom conventions allow the default conventions to be overridden or new conventions to be added so that Code First can map by convention using whatever rules make sense for your project. The following code demonstrates using custom conventions to set the precision of all decimals to 5. As with other Code First configuration, this code is placed in the OnModelCreating method which is overridden on your derived DbContext class:         protected override void OnModelCreating(DbModelBuilder modelBuilder)         {             modelBuilder.Properties<decimal>()                 .Configure(x => x.HasPrecision(5));           } But what if there are a couple of places where a decimal property should have a different precision? Just as with all the existing Code First conventions, this new convention can be overridden for a particular property simply by explicitly configuring that property using either the fluent API or a data annotation. A more detailed description of custom code first conventions is available here. Community Involvement I blogged a while ago about EF being released under an open source license.  Since then a number of community members have made contributions and these are included in EF6 alpha 2. Two examples of community contributions are: AlirezaHaghshenas contributed a change that increases the startup performance of EF for larger models by improving the performance of view generation. The change means that it is less often necessary to use of pre-generated views. UnaiZorrilla contributed the first community feature to EF: the ability to load all Code First configuration classes in an assembly with a single method call like the following: protected override void OnModelCreating(DbModelBuilder modelBuilder) {        modelBuilder.Configurations            .AddFromAssembly(typeof(LocationContext).Assembly); } This code will find and load all the classes that inherit from EntityTypeConfiguration<T> or ComplexTypeConfiguration<T> in the assembly where LocationContext is defined. This reduces the amount of coupling between the context and Code First configuration classes, and is also a very convenient shortcut for large models. Other upcoming features coming in EF 6 Lots of information about the development of EF6 can be found on the EF CodePlex site, including a roadmap showing the other features that are planned for EF6. One of of the nice upcoming features is connection resiliency, which will automate the process of retying database operations on transient failures common in cloud environments and with databases such as the Windows Azure SQL Database. Another often requested feature that will be included in EF6 is the ability to map stored procedures to query and update operations on entities when using Code First. Summary EF6 is the first open source release of Entity Framework being developed in CodePlex. The alpha 2 preview release of EF6 is now available on NuGet, and contains some really great features for you to try. The EF team are always looking for feedback from developers - especially on the new features such as custom Code First conventions and async support. To provide feedback you can post a comment on the EF6 alpha 2 announcement post, start a discussion or file a bug on the CodePlex site. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• NSOperationQueue bug with dependencies

  - by Daniel

  I am using NSOperation and NSOperationQueue for performing a sequence of operations, all dependent on each other (2 on 1, 3 on 2, etc...). I set the dependency after I create the operations. I am encountering problems when the queue completes: the program crashes in the _release part of the code, apparently when the NSOperations are getting released. Note that they all get released at the end by the queue, because it is only after the very last one which depends on the second last one, which depends on etc... that they can be released. If I remove any dependency, the code runs fine. If I change waitUntilFinished: to NO, it crashes, if it is YES, it does not. I have isolated the problem to the following code which does not use any of my custom classes. NSOperation by default is a class that does absolutely nothing. Yet, this still crashes when all operations have completed. Therefore, it appears I am not using NSOperationQueue properly but can't see what is wrong. I am running on 10.9 and I have noticed that in general Maverick 10.9 is much more sensitive to these issues than 10.8. I call this method from the main Thread with a Menu item: - (void) testOperations:(id)object { NSOperationQueue* queue = [ [ NSOperationQueue alloc ] init ]; NSMutableArray* array = [ NSMutableArray array ]; for ( int i = 0; i < 10000; i++) [ array addObject: [[[ NSOperation alloc ] init ] autorelease ] ]; for ( int i = 1; i < [ array count ]; i++) [[ array objectAtIndex:i ] addDependency:[array objectAtIndex:i-1]]; // remove this and no crash [ queue addOperations: array waitUntilFinished:NO ]; // Change to YES, no crash [ queue autorelease ]; // or release, it does not make a difference, in fact leaking the memory makes no difference: the code crashes when the queue is removing the NSOperations } This will crash every single time with: bool objc::DenseMapBase , objc_object*, unsigned long, objc::DenseMapInfo, true: (EXC_BAD_ACCESS) The full stack is: #0 0x9104d81b in objc::DenseMapBase<objc::DenseMap<objc_object*, unsigned long, true, objc::DenseMapInfo<objc_object*> >, objc_object*, unsigned long, objc::DenseMapInfo<objc_object*>, true>::find(objc_object* const&) () #1 0x910384e3 in _objc_rootReleaseWasZero () #2 0x9104d5d9 in -[NSObject release] () #3 0x99e41224 in CFRelease () #4 0x99e56277 in -[__NSArrayM dealloc] () #5 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #6 0x97f62b22 in -[__NSOperationInternal dealloc] () #7 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #8 0x97f62ac8 in -[NSOperation dealloc] () #9 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10 0x99e41224 in CFRelease () #11 0x99e56277 in -[__NSArrayM dealloc] () #12 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #13 0x97f62b22 in -[__NSOperationInternal dealloc] () #14 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #15 0x97f62ac8 in -[NSOperation dealloc] () #16 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #17 0x99e41224 in CFRelease () #18 0x99e56277 in -[__NSArrayM dealloc] () #19 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #20 0x97f62b22 in -[__NSOperationInternal dealloc] () #21 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #22 0x97f62ac8 in -[NSOperation dealloc] () #23 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #24 0x99e41224 in CFRelease () #25 0x99e56277 in -[__NSArrayM dealloc] () #26 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #27 0x97f62b22 in -[__NSOperationInternal dealloc] () #28 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #29 0x97f62ac8 in -[NSOperation dealloc] () #30 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #31 0x99e41224 in CFRelease () #32 0x99e56277 in -[__NSArrayM dealloc] () #33 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #34 0x97f62b22 in -[__NSOperationInternal dealloc] () #35 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #36 0x97f62ac8 in -[NSOperation dealloc] () #37 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #38 0x99e41224 in CFRelease () #39 0x99e56277 in -[__NSArrayM dealloc] () #40 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #41 0x97f62b22 in -[__NSOperationInternal dealloc] () #42 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #43 0x97f62ac8 in -[NSOperation dealloc] () #44 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #45 0x99e41224 in CFRelease () #46 0x99e56277 in -[__NSArrayM dealloc] () #47 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #48 0x97f62b22 in -[__NSOperationInternal dealloc] () #49 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #50 0x97f62ac8 in -[NSOperation dealloc] () #10722 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10723 0x97f62b22 in -[__NSOperationInternal dealloc] () #10724 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10725 0x97f62ac8 in -[NSOperation dealloc] () #10726 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10727 0x99e41224 in CFRelease () #10728 0x99e56277 in -[__NSArrayM dealloc] () #10729 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10730 0x97f62b22 in -[__NSOperationInternal dealloc] () #10731 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10732 0x97f62ac8 in -[NSOperation dealloc] () #10733 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10734 0x99e41224 in CFRelease () #10735 0x99e56277 in -[__NSArrayM dealloc] () #10736 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10737 0x97f62b22 in -[__NSOperationInternal dealloc] () #10738 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10739 0x97f62ac8 in -[NSOperation dealloc] () #10740 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10741 0x99e41224 in CFRelease () #10742 0x99e56277 in -[__NSArrayM dealloc] () #10743 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10744 0x97f62b22 in -[__NSOperationInternal dealloc] () #10745 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10746 0x97f62ac8 in -[NSOperation dealloc] () #10747 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10748 0x99e41224 in CFRelease () #10749 0x99e56277 in -[__NSArrayM dealloc] () #10750 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10751 0x97f62b22 in -[__NSOperationInternal dealloc] () #10752 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10753 0x97f62ac8 in -[NSOperation dealloc] () #10754 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10755 0x99e41224 in CFRelease () #10756 0x99e56277 in -[__NSArrayM dealloc] () #10757 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10758 0x97f62b22 in -[__NSOperationInternal dealloc] () #10759 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10760 0x97f62ac8 in -[NSOperation dealloc] () #10761 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10762 0x99e41224 in CFRelease () #10763 0x99e56277 in -[__NSArrayM dealloc] () #10764 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10765 0x97f62b22 in -[__NSOperationInternal dealloc] () #10766 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10767 0x97f62ac8 in -[NSOperation dealloc] () #10768 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10769 0x99e41224 in CFRelease () #10770 0x99e56277 in -[__NSArrayM dealloc] () #10771 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10772 0x97f62b22 in -[__NSOperationInternal dealloc] () #10773 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10774 0x97f62ac8 in -[NSOperation dealloc] () #10775 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10776 0x99e41224 in CFRelease () #10777 0x99e56277 in -[__NSArrayM dealloc] () #10778 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10779 0x97f62b22 in -[__NSOperationInternal dealloc] () #10780 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10781 0x97f62ac8 in -[NSOperation dealloc] () #10782 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10783 0x99e41224 in CFRelease () #10784 0x99e56277 in -[__NSArrayM dealloc] () #10785 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10786 0x97f62b22 in -[__NSOperationInternal dealloc] () #10787 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10788 0x97f62ac8 in -[NSOperation dealloc] () #10789 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10790 0x99e41224 in CFRelease () #10791 0x99e56277 in -[__NSArrayM dealloc] () #10792 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10793 0x97f62b22 in -[__NSOperationInternal dealloc] () #10794 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10795 0x97f62ac8 in -[NSOperation dealloc] () #10796 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10797 0x99e41224 in CFRelease () #10798 0x99e56277 in -[__NSArrayM dealloc] () #10799 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10800 0x97f62b22 in -[__NSOperationInternal dealloc] () #10801 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10802 0x97f62ac8 in -[NSOperation dealloc] () #10803 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10804 0x99e41224 in CFRelease () #10805 0x99e56277 in -[__NSArrayM dealloc] () #10806 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10807 0x97f62b22 in -[__NSOperationInternal dealloc] () #10808 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10809 0x97f62ac8 in -[NSOperation dealloc] () #10810 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10811 0x99e41224 in CFRelease () #10812 0x99e56277 in -[__NSArrayM dealloc] () #10813 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10814 0x97f62b22 in -[__NSOperationInternal dealloc] () #10815 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10816 0x97f62ac8 in -[NSOperation dealloc] () #10817 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10818 0x99e41224 in CFRelease () #10819 0x99e56277 in -[__NSArrayM dealloc] () #10820 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10821 0x97f62b22 in -[__NSOperationInternal dealloc] () #10822 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10823 0x97f62ac8 in -[NSOperation dealloc] () #10824 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10825 0x99e41224 in CFRelease () #10826 0x99e56277 in -[__NSArrayM dealloc] () #10827 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10828 0x97f62b22 in -[__NSOperationInternal dealloc] () #10829 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10830 0x97f62ac8 in -[NSOperation dealloc] () #10831 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10832 0x99e41224 in CFRelease () #10833 0x99e56277 in -[__NSArrayM dealloc] () #10834 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10835 0x97f62b22 in -[__NSOperationInternal dealloc] () #10836 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10837 0x97f62ac8 in -[NSOperation dealloc] () #10838 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10839 0x99e41224 in CFRelease () #10840 0x99e56277 in -[__NSArrayM dealloc] () #10841 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10842 0x97f62b22 in -[__NSOperationInternal dealloc] () #10843 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10844 0x97f62ac8 in -[NSOperation dealloc] () #10845 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10846 0x99e41224 in CFRelease () #10847 0x99e56277 in -[__NSArrayM dealloc] () #10848 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10849 0x97f62b22 in -[__NSOperationInternal dealloc] () #10850 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10851 0x97f62ac8 in -[NSOperation dealloc] () #10852 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10853 0x99e41224 in CFRelease () #10854 0x99e56277 in -[__NSArrayM dealloc] () #10855 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10856 0x97f62b22 in -[__NSOperationInternal dealloc] () #10857 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10858 0x97f62ac8 in -[NSOperation dealloc] () #10859 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10860 0x99e41224 in CFRelease () #10861 0x99e56277 in -[__NSArrayM dealloc] () #10862 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10863 0x97f62b22 in -[__NSOperationInternal dealloc] () #10864 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10865 0x97f62ac8 in -[NSOperation dealloc] () #10866 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10867 0x99e41224 in CFRelease () #10868 0x99e56277 in -[__NSArrayM dealloc] () #10869 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10870 0x97f62b22 in -[__NSOperationInternal dealloc] () #10871 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10872 0x97f62ac8 in -[NSOperation dealloc] () #10873 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10874 0x99e41224 in CFRelease () #10875 0x99e56277 in -[__NSArrayM dealloc] () #10876 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10877 0x97f62b22 in -[__NSOperationInternal dealloc] () #10878 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10879 0x97f62ac8 in -[NSOperation dealloc] () #10880 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10881 0x99e41224 in CFRelease () #10882 0x99e56277 in -[__NSArrayM dealloc] () #10883 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10884 0x97f62b22 in -[__NSOperationInternal dealloc] () #10885 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10886 0x97f62ac8 in -[NSOperation dealloc] () #10887 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10888 0x99e41224 in CFRelease () #10889 0x99e56277 in -[__NSArrayM dealloc] () #10890 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10891 0x97f62b22 in -[__NSOperationInternal dealloc] () #10892 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10893 0x97f62ac8 in -[NSOperation dealloc] () #10894 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10895 0x99e41224 in CFRelease () #10896 0x99e56277 in -[__NSArrayM dealloc] () #10897 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10898 0x97f62b22 in -[__NSOperationInternal dealloc] () #10899 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10900 0x97f62ac8 in -[NSOperation dealloc] () #10901 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10902 0x99e41224 in CFRelease () #10903 0x99e56277 in -[__NSArrayM dealloc] () #10904 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10905 0x97f62b22 in -[__NSOperationInternal dealloc] () #10906 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10907 0x97f62ac8 in -[NSOperation dealloc] () #10908 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10909 0x99e41224 in CFRelease () #10910 0x99e56277 in -[__NSArrayM dealloc] () #10911 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10912 0x97f62b22 in -[__NSOperationInternal dealloc] () #10913 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10914 0x97f62ac8 in -[NSOperation dealloc] () #10915 0x9104d5ef in -[NSObject release] () #10916 0x97f49cca in __NSOQSchedule_f () #10917 0x9c1c9e21 in _dispatch_async_redirect_invoke () #10918 0x9c1c53a6 in _dispatch_client_callout () #10919 0x9c1c7467 in _dispatch_root_queue_drain () #10920 0x9c1c8732 in _dispatch_worker_thread2 () #10921 0x960c2dab in _pthread_wqthread () The full crash context is (bold for crash line): libobjc.A.dylib`objc::DenseMapBase<objc::DenseMap<objc_object*, unsigned long, true, objc::DenseMapInfo<objc_object*> >, objc_object*, unsigned long, objc::DenseMapInfo<objc_object*>, true>::find(objc_object* const&): 0x9104d800: pushl %ebp 0x9104d801: movl %esp, %ebp 0x9104d803: pushl %esi 0x9104d804: subl $20, %esp 0x9104d807: leal -8(%ebp), %eax 0x9104d80a: movl %eax, 8(%esp) 0x9104d80e: movl 16(%ebp), %eax 0x9104d811: movl %eax, 4(%esp) 0x9104d815: movl 12(%ebp), %esi 0x9104d818: movl %esi, (%esp) **0x9104d81b: calll 0x9104d9b6 ; bool objc::DenseMapBase<objc::DenseMap<objc_object*, unsigned long, true, objc::DenseMapInfo<objc_object*> >, objc_object*, unsigned long, objc::DenseMapInfo<objc_object*>, true>::LookupBucketFor<objc_object*>(objc_object* const&, std::__1::pair<objc_object*, unsigned long> const*&) const** 0x9104d820: movl 12(%esi), %ecx 0x9104d823: shll $3, %ecx 0x9104d826: addl (%esi), %ecx 0x9104d828: movl 8(%ebp), %edx 0x9104d82b: testb %al, %al 0x9104d82d: je 0x9104d836 ; objc::DenseMapBase<objc::DenseMap<objc_object*, unsigned long, true, objc::DenseMapInfo<objc_object*> >, objc_object*, unsigned long, objc::DenseMapInfo<objc_object*>, true>::find(objc_object* const&) + 54 0x9104d82f: movl -8(%ebp), %eax 0x9104d832: movl %eax, (%edx) 0x9104d834: jmp 0x9104d838 ; objc::DenseMapBase<objc::DenseMap<objc_object*, unsigned long, true, objc::DenseMapInfo<objc_object*> >, objc_object*, unsigned long, objc::DenseMapInfo<objc_object*>, true>::find(objc_object* const&) + 56 0x9104d836: movl %ecx, (%edx) 0x9104d838: movl %ecx, 4(%edx) 0x9104d83b: addl $20, %esp 0x9104d83e: popl %esi 0x9104d83f: popl %ebp 0x9104d840: ret $4 0x9104d843: nop I tried using a pre-created queue, this makes no difference. Apparently, with dependencies, this code is a problem with XCode 5.0, 32-bit. Edit: In fact, I can isolate the problem much further. An empty Cocoa Application project in XCOde 5.0 on 10.9 with ARC on and a single method will crash. If it does not on your computer, increase 4269 to anything bigger: - (void)applicationDidFinishLaunching:(NSNotification *)aNotification { NSOperationQueue* aQueue = [[ NSOperationQueue alloc ] init ]; NSMutableArray* array = [ NSMutableArray array ]; for ( int i = 0; i < 4269; i++) [ array addObject: [ [NSOperation alloc ] init ]]; for ( int i = 1; i < [ array count ]; i++) [[ array objectAtIndex:i ] addDependency:[array objectAtIndex:i-1]]; [ aQueue addOperations: array waitUntilFinished:NO ]; }

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• Tor : Stuck at Connecting to Relay Directory

  - by Ghassan

  i have never ever worked with tor before. the company where i work allows us to have access to any site we wish. nonetheless as of the the beginning of this month, they installed a proxy server to filter which sites can be accessed and which ones cant. the filter isnt only on URLS, but IPS as well, even hexa IPS wont work. so after some research, i decided to use tor, the first day i installed it, everything went smooth and i was accessing any website i wish. just 2day, everything stopped. i try 2 start vidalia, it gets stuck at Connecting to Relay Directory. i work on windows 7 platform. Please help me out! thanks in advance.

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• SonicPoint AP Clients Not Able To Connect With DHCP

  - by Mike Keller

  This is my first time setting up anything like this so please be gentle. I'm a web developer who fell into setting up a few SonicWall NSA 4200's... I've tried doing as much research on this through Google and ServerFault but haven't been able to hunt down an answer as to what I'm doing wrong. We've got two virtual access points set up here, one that is intended for employees (tied to X2) and the other for guests (tied to X2:V1). We are not using the DHCP server on the NSA 4200, but one already on the network. When a client connects to the employee SSID they are able to obtain a IP from the network's DHCP server. However when attempting to connect to the guest SSID the client does a search for a DHCP server but can't find one. Any clues, resources, answers would be appreciated.

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• Problems with SQL Server 2008 - "The client was unable to reuse a session with SPID 62, which had ..

  - by GrZeCh

  Hello, I'm having problems with my SQL Server 2008 installation (10.0.2531.0 - SP1 installed). It works as a database server for small hosting environment (about 500 sites). I'm getting errors like this: The client was unable to reuse a session with SPID 62, which had been reset for connection pooling. The failure ID is 29. This error may have been caused by an earlier operation failing. Check the error logs for failed operations immediately before this error message. in Windows event log and when I run this: SELECT * FROM sys.dm_os_performance_counters WHERE object_name = 'SQLServer:General Statistics' I see that one of counters looks a little odd: Logins/sec 429 Connection Reset/sec 163459 Logouts/sec 399 User Connections 30 Logical Connections 33 any ideas how to check what is causing this problem?

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• SPF Failure sending sms message to sms.mycricket.com

  - by CodeGurl

  I built an asp.net application that sends text messages to our employees using carrier-provided email to SMS gateways. The people on Cricket (sms.mycricket.com) are the only ones that are bouncing with a return message like this: Unknown address error SPF FAILURE/Sender has no SPF records: SEE RFC 4408 - FROM check failed: Received: from unknown (HELO servername.domainname.com) ([ipaddress]) by .... with ESMTP/TLS/DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA; 14 Nov 2012 06:22:56 -0600 From my research it looks like we may need to setup something in DNS for the Sender Policy Framework. I'm not in the networking group so I don't know much about this. How can this be done? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework

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• Apache+Tomcat VS Stand Alone Tomcat or GlassFish

  - by TonyZ

  Hi, I am setting up a Debian server to serve Java web applications. I have done quite a bit of research for several weeks now. Tomcat's web site says it is better to use stand alone Tomcat for speed if you are not clustering. However, I have seen many people suggest that using Apache + Tomcat gives you better security and protection against attacks. Please assume that the process will be running on port 80 as an unprivileged user. I would assume that if you are running a firewall in front the server, Tomcat should be fine. If, however, you just want to run an exposed webserver using Linux firewall, what is the best option? Or maybe someone can recommend another open source web server. I am trying to keep the solution as light as possible as these webapps will be running in containers. All opinions welcome and valued. Thanks, Tony Z

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• Getting a VMnet0 error in VMWare workstation after updating host computer from Windows 8 to 8.1

  - by Andrew

  Yesterday, I updated my computer from Windows 8 to 8.1. I have VMWare Workstation 10 running Windows XP on this computer and prior to the update I had no issues connecting to my network. However, since updating, I haven't been able to connect to any network and I'm getting the following error: "The network bridge on device VMnet0 is not running. The firtual machine will not be able to communicate with the host or with other machines on your network. Failed to connect virtual device Ethernet0" I've checked all of my settings which currently have my network adapter set for a bridged connection and under device status "connected" is checked. Not really sure where to go from here, but after doing some research I have seen that others users have reported getting this error when updating the OS (any OS, not windows 8 specifically) of the host computer. Thanks in advance to anyone who can help.

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• Add Service Reference is generating Message Contracts

  - by JohnIdol

  OK, this has been haunting me for a while, can't find much on Google and I am starting to lose hope so I am reverting to the SO community. When I import a given service using "Add service Reference" on Visual Studio 2008 (SP1) all the Request/Response messages are being unnecessarily wrapped into Message Contracts (named as -- "operationName" + "Request"/"Response" + "1" at the end). The code generator says: // CODEGEN: Generating message contract since the operation XXX is neither RPC nor document wrapped. The guys who are generating the wsdl from a Java service say they are specifying DOCUMENT-LITERAL/WRAPPED. Any help/pointer/clue would be highly appreciated. Update: this is a sample of my wsdl for one of the operations that look suspicious. Note the mismatch on the message element attribute for the request, compared to the response. <!- imports namespaces and defines elements --> <wsdl:types> <xsd:schema targetNamespace="http://WHATEVER/" xmlns:xsd_1="http://WHATEVER_1/" xmlns:xsd_2="http://WHATEVER_2/"> <xsd:import namespace="http://WHATEVER_1/" schemaLocation="WHATEVER_1.xsd"/> <xsd:import namespace="http://WHATEVER_2/" schemaLocation="WHATEVER_2.xsd"/> <xsd:element name="myOperationResponse" type="xsd_1:MyOperationResponse"/> <xsd:element name="myOperation" type="xsd_1:MyOperationRequest"/> </xsd:schema> </wsdl:types> <!- declares messages - NOTE the mismatch on the request element attribute compared to response --> <wsdl:message name="myOperationRequest"> <wsdl:part element="tns:myOperation" name="request"/> </wsdl:message> <wsdl:message name="myOperationResponse"> <wsdl:part element="tns:myOperationResponse" name="response"/> </wsdl:message> <!- operations --> <wsdl:portType name="MyService"> <wsdl:operation name="myOperation"> <wsdl:input message="tns:myOperationRequest"/> <wsdl:output message="tns:myOperationResponse"/> <wsdl:fault message="tns:myOperationFault" name="myOperationFault"/> <wsdl:fault message="tns:myOperationFault1" name="myOperationFault1"/> </wsdl:operation> </wsdl:portType> Update 2: I pulled all the types that I had in my imported namespace (they were in a separate xsd) into the wsdl, as I suspected the import could be triggering the message contract generation. To my surprise it was not the case and having all the types defined in the wsdl did not change anything. I then (out of desperation) started constructing wsdls from scratch and playing with the maxOccurs attributes of element attributes contained in a sequence attribute I was able to reproduce the undesired message contract generation behavior. Here's a sample of an element: <xsd:element name="myElement"> <xsd:complexType> <xsd:sequence> <xsd:element minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="1" name="arg1" type="xsd:string"/> </xsd:sequence> </xsd:complexType> </xsd:element> Playing with maxOccurs on elements that are used as messages (all requests and responses basically) the following happens: maxOccurs = "1" does not trigger the wrapping macOcccurs 1 triggers the wrapping maxOccurs = "unbounded" triggers the wrapping I was not able to reproduce this on my production wsdl yet because the nesting of the types goes very deep, and it's gonna take me time to inspect it thoroughly. In the meanwhile I am hoping it might ring a bell - any help highly appreciated.

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• Apache 301 redirect

  - by mcondiff

  I have inherited a server with a couple of domains on it. The website was reworked within the last two years and I am trying to oblige a request by staff to get a redirect to work properly (if it can given the default structure). So right now on the server I have a redirect that takes every 301 and dumps it onto the front page of the website. RedirectMatch /(.) http://www.example.com This has worked well for most of the old URL's coming in from various websites containing the old liking structure. However, now a staff member wants a single URL which is somewhat widely used to be redirected to it's proper place. Redirect /new/research/Exp_Rese_Disc/Asia/example.shtml http://example.com/asia/ Is this possible without killing the all encompassing 301 redirect? To have a general RedirectMatch /(.) redirect as well as a singular redirect? As of right now it is not seeming to let me. Any ideas, thoughts or examples are much appreciated.

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• What's the most efficient way to reclaim disk space after deleting lots of data from a database on Sybase ASE 15?

  - by Ernie Longmire

  As I understand it, based on some research but zero real-world experience with Sybase ASE, the only way to reclaim disk space once it's been allocated to a database is to export that database, create a new DB with the same schema, and reload all the exported data to the new database. Is this correct, or is there some other method? Then: assuming the above is correct and a full export-recreate-reload is required, what's the most efficient way to do that? Are there tools that will automate all or part of that process? I'm being told we would have to write separate bcp export and import commands for each and every object in the database, which if true sounds easily scriptable by someone who knows Sybase ASE well enough. (I don't.) This seems to me like a really basic housekeeping task, and it feels like I'm missing something obvious.

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• Windows Cannot Boot - 0xc0000225

  - by B__

  I've had Windows 7 installed for months on my Thinkpad T60 laptop and today out of the blue when I tried to boot, it started the Windows loading screen and immediately I got this error: Status: 0xc0000225 Info: The boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible. Through some research, I see people get this problem when a repartitioning goes wrong or there's a problem with their dual boot. I'm not dual booting my machine and I haven't messed with my partitions since I installed the OS. This error is truly out of the blue. I've run memory diagnostics from a Windows boot disc and hard drive diagnostics from my BIOS and neither found a problem. I don't have any backups to restore from so I'm hoping to find a fix for this. Anyone seen this kind of thing before? Thanks

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• How to install a Canon iRunner 210s

  - by Ssvarc

  A client has a Canon iRunner210S and is complaining about slow print speeds. I've searched for a install manual online but came up empty. A call to Canon technical referred me to their dealer network for service, as as informing me that there isn't a manual available on their website. Anyone know how to install these and/or have a link to a manual? The current setup has the printers on a LAN Manager printer port instead of on straight IP ports. Is this normal for this printer? And what exactly are Lan Manager ports (based on my research, they appear to be a way to authenticate a connection)?

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• Looking for a manual/how-to for installing a Canon iRunner 210s network printer

  - by Ssvarc

  A client has a Canon iRunner210S and is complaining about slow print speeds. I've searched for a install manual online but came up empty. A call to Canon technical referred me to their dealer network for service, as as informing me that there isn't a manual available on their website. Anyone know how to install these and/or have a link to a manual? The current setup has the printers on a LAN Manager printer port instead of on straight IP ports. Is this normal for this printer? And what exactly are Lan Manager ports (based on my research, they appear to be a way to authenticate a connection)?

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