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• Identity R2 - Experts Podcast Series

  - by Tanu Sood

  To follow up on the Identity Management R2 launch, a series of podcasts were recorded with subject matter experts from customer organizations, our partners and Oracle’s PM team to discuss key trends, R2 capabilities, implementation best practices and more. Below is a roll-up of the podcast series that is available on Fusion Middleware radio. R2 Podcasts:   ·         Designing the Next-Generation Identity Platform Vadim Lander, Oracle Highlights: Common architecture model, integration, interoperability and the driving factors behind R2 innovation IT Departments are shifting their Identity Management strategy to be able to support mobile, cloud and social applications. Oracle has anticipated this shift and has built a product roadmap to take advantage of this focus. Join Vadim as he discusses the design strategy behind the latest 11gR2 release and talks about how IDM services have to evolve to meet this new challenge.   ·         BETA Customer Perspective on R2 Ravi Meduri, Kaiser Permanente Highlights: R2 scalability and high availability In this podcast Ravi discusses the new features in 11gR2 that he is most interested in, including High Availability options for Access Management, multi-datacenter architecture, and what it was like working with the Oracle product team during the BETA program.   ·         Partner Perspective on R2 Rex Thexton, PricewaterhouseCoopers Highlights: Usability Enhancements for Users and Administrators A lot of new usability features went into the 11gR2 release making this the most business friendly IDM release to date. In this podcast Rex Thexton, Managing Director from PwC, talks about some of the new UI changes for both end users and administrators, and also about the new connector creation framework.   Access Request Updates in R2 Marc Boroditsky, Oracle Highlights: Access request User Interface innovations A lot of changes have been made to the Access Request user interface in the latest version of Oracle Identity Manager 11gR2. A real focus has been put on making the request process more business user friendly, and a lot of new customization capability has been added for the IT administrators. Hear Marc discuss the updated UI, and explain how administrators will be able to customize OIM to meet their company's requirements   ·         Oracle Optimized System for Oracle Unified Directory (OOS4OUD) Nick Kloski, Oracle Highlights: New Optimized System configuration for Unified Directory One of the new features in 11gR2 is the availability of an Optimized System configuration for Oracle Unified Directory. Oracle engineers installed the OUD software onto off the shelf hardware and then created a performance tuned configuration. Join us as we talk to Nick Kloski, Infrastructure Solutions Manager, all about the testing process and the resulting performance metrics.   Privileged Account Management Mark Wilcox, Oracle Highlights: Oracle Privileged Account Manager key capabilities, use cases The new release of Oracle Identity Management 11g R2 includes the capability to manage privileged accounts. Privileged accounts, if compromised, create a risk for fraud in the enterprise and as a result controlling access to privileged accounts is critical. Hear what Mark Wilcox, Principal Product Manager of Oracle Privileged Account Manager has to say about the capabilities of the offering in this podcast.   ·         Browser-based User Interface (UI) Customization Clayton Donley, Oracle Highlights: Benefits of Durable UI Configuration framework Business users need user interfaces that are not only friendly but also easily customizable. However the downside of any customization project is the cost and complexity involved in developing, testing, deploying and managing custom code. In this podcast, we examine how a new capability in Oracle Identity Management around browser based UI customization can reduce costs and complexity of customization while simplifying self service integration with corporate portal strategies.   ·         Simplifying Mobile and Social Sign-On Dan Killmer, Oracle Highlights: Secure mobile sign-on and consumption of social identities with Oracle Access Management The proliferation of mobile devices has spurred a new trend where employees tend to bring their own mobile devices to work and access corporate applications the same way they would access from a desktop or laptop. In this podcast, we examine how Oracle's latest innovation in Identity Management around Mobile and Social Sign On can simplify security and access management challenges posed by the widespread adoption of mobile devices in the enterprise. ·         Enabling Your Business with IDM R2 Scott Bonnell, Oracle Highlights: Self service, mobile access, personalization Gone are the days when Identity Management was just about stopping unauthorized users in their tracks. Identity Management if done right, can also enable your business. Join Scott Bonnell as he discusses how the IDM 11gR2 release enables the enterprise by providing self service, personalization and mobile access to corporate resources.

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• How to restore your production database without needing additional storage

  - by David Atkinson

  Production databases can get very large. This in itself is to be expected, but when a copy of the database is needed the database must be restored, requiring additional and costly storage.  For example, if you want to give each developer a full copy of your production server, you'll need n times the storage cost for your n-developer team. The same is true for any test databases that are created during the course of your project lifecycle. If you've read my previous blog posts, you'll be aware that I've been focusing on the database continuous integration theme. In my CI setup I create a "production"-equivalent database directly from its source control representation, and use this to test my upgrade scripts. Despite this being a perfectly valid and practical thing to do as part of a CI setup, it's not the exact equivalent to running the upgrade script on a copy of the actual production database. So why shouldn't I instead simply restore the most recent production backup as part of my CI process? There are two reasons why this would be impractical. 1. My CI environment isn't an exact copy of my production environment. Indeed, this would be the case in a perfect world, and it is strongly recommended as a good practice if you follow Jez Humble and David Farley's "Continuous Delivery" teachings, but in practical terms this might not always be possible, especially where storage is concerned. It may just not be possible to restore a huge production database on the environment you've been allotted. 2. It's not just about the storage requirements, it's also the time it takes to do the restore. The whole point of continuous integration is that you are alerted as early as possible whether the build (yes, the database upgrade script counts!) is broken. If I have to run an hour-long restore each time I commit a change to source control I'm just not going to get the feedback quickly enough to react. So what's the solution? Red Gate has a technology, SQL Virtual Restore, that is able to restore a database without using up additional storage. Although this sounds too good to be true, the explanation is quite simple (although I'm sure the technical implementation details under the hood are quite complex!) Instead of restoring the backup in the conventional sense, SQL Virtual Restore will effectively mount the backup using its HyperBac technology. It creates a data and log file, .vmdf, and .vldf, that becomes the delta between the .bak file and the virtual database. This means that both read and write operations are permitted on a virtual database as from SQL Server's point of view it is no different from a conventional database. Instead of doubling the storage requirements upon a restore, there is no 'duplicate' storage requirements, other than the trivially small virtual log and data files (see illustration below). The benefit is magnified the more databases you mount to the same backup file. This technique could be used to provide a large development team a full development instance of a large production database. It is also incredibly easy to set up. Once SQL Virtual Restore is installed, you simply run a conventional RESTORE command to create the virtual database. This is what I have running as part of a nightly "release test" process triggered by my CI tool. RESTORE DATABASE WidgetProduction_virtual FROM DISK=N'C:\WidgetWF\ProdBackup\WidgetProduction.bak' WITH MOVE N'WidgetProduction' TO N'C:\WidgetWF\ProdBackup\WidgetProduction_WidgetProduction_Virtual.vmdf', MOVE N'WidgetProduction_log' TO N'C:\WidgetWF\ProdBackup\WidgetProduction_log_WidgetProduction_Virtual.vldf', NORECOVERY, STATS=1, REPLACE GO RESTORE DATABASE mydatabase WITH RECOVERY   Note the only change from what you would do normally is the naming of the .vmdf and .vldf files. SQL Virtual Restore intercepts this by monitoring the extension and applies its magic, ensuring the 'virtual' restore happens rather than the conventional storage-heavy restore. My automated release test then applies the upgrade scripts to the virtual production database and runs some validation tests, giving me confidence that were I to run this on production for real, all would go smoothly. For illustration, here is my 8Gb production database: And its corresponding backup file: Here are the .vldf and .vmdf files, which represent the only additional used storage for the new database following the virtual restore.   The beauty of this product is its simplicity. Once it is installed, the interaction with the backup and virtual database is exactly the same as before, as the clever stuff is being done at a lower level. SQL Virtual Restore can be downloaded as a fully functional 14-day trial. Technorati Tags: SQL Server

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• Vacations on Rodrigues 2014

  And now something completely different compared to the usual technical or community related articles here on this blog. Yes, this time I'm writing some lines on my (and my family's) activities during our long weekend stay on Rodrigues. So, please bear with me, it's eventually a bit more personal... Grab a soda, some popcorn and a cosy place to continue to read. var googleAlbumLink = "https://plus.google.com/photos/117698191428446859536/albums/6047895311458281985"; //optional----------------------- var mySlideWidth = 580; var mySlideHeight = 340; var mySlideDelay = 7000; //delay in milliseconds Special promotions during school holidays Originally, our children started to ask more frequently about going on the plane again. Obviously, after their aunty from Germany was around during May, they were really eager to travel again. So, we decided that it might be a great opportunity to book some vacations during their school holidays. And just in time the local hotels and hotel groups started to advertise their special promotions for citizens and residents. After collecting multiple brochures over several days, we got attracted by various hotel packages on Rodrigues - most interestingly the expenses for the stay and flight ticket were less compared to other resorts here on the main island. As we have been to Rodrigues already back in 2008, we followed up on this idea and got in touch with a couple travel agencies. Well, I have to report that you should be really careful about the promotions from some of them. We had a very negative experience with Shamal Travel Agency in Quatre Bornes regarding their adverts and the actual price levels and age definition for children. Please, stay away from them if you are interested in transparent cost and services. Anyway, after some arrangements with two other close families we managed to confirm our stay at the Cotton Bay Hotel in Rodrigues. Given the fact that we already stayed there, and the hotel has been renovated recently, and it is under new management all looked very promising and relaxed for our vacation. Counting the days... As we already booked in July our children were counting down the days. And it got more interesting as soon as they were on school holidays finally. Well, the day arrived and waking them up at 2:30 hrs wasn't a problem after all. Quite the opposite it was fascinating for us parents to watch them waiting for the transport and later on during the airport transfer. Despite the early hours both didn't fall asleep and it was all so exciting. We are taking the plane! Well organised by the Cotton Bay Hotel Honestly, it was a breeze and a smooth ride during our stay at the hotel. From the airport transfer, the cleanliness of our bungalow, the organisation of our day trips, and the SPA - all very well and enjoyable. The children had great fun, and although it was a bit too windy to plunge into the pool they had a lot of fun with other activities on the beach and at the Kid's Club. Oh, and we had our private petting zoo with cows, sheep and goats just close to the terrace. Some of us went to check out the SPA facilities and I have to admit that the services regarding Hammam and Sauna are better than at some other hotels in Mauritius. I don't know after how many months or years I was once again enjoying a very hot sauna. Little draw-back but nothing to worry about... There is no cold water or at least ice cubes to cool down the body, but hey there was a nice breeze coming over the hills. Some day trips to mention Based on a friend's recommendation we walked to a "restaurant" called Chez Solange & Robert. Hahaha, restaurant is widely stretched in this case, as we enjoyed a great BBQ with fresh lobster, whole fish, and pieces of chicken breast in an open cottage. Just some wooden structure covered with dried palm leaves on the roof - island feeling pure! The other day we went to the Giant Tortoise & Cave Reserve Francois Leguat to observe the giant Aldabra turtles and to visit the Grande Caverne. The biggest limestone cave on the island. Compared to our last visit this was a novelty after checking out the Caverne Partate. The formations of stalactites and stalagmites are very impressive and imaginative. Our guide had lots of funny terms and despite the low light conditions the kids had a great time wandering around on the narrow wooden paths and stairs. And last but not least, we decided to check out the Tyrodrig zip lines... Everyone was allowed to join the trip through the air, and our little ones stayed close to our field guides. But finally went on their own on the very last traversal. Puuuh, it was astounishing to glide over the valley, and for sure something to repeat next time. Impressions of our vacation on Rodrigues 2014   Next stay has been discussed already Oh yes, Rodrigues baby! We are going to come again! Tentative dates have been discussed already and now it's up to us to earn enough our next holiday on that wonderful remote piece of paradise. Eventually, a little bit longer than this time. We'll see...

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• Big Data – Buzz Words: What is Hadoop – Day 6 of 21

  - by Pinal Dave

  In yesterday’s blog post we learned what is NoSQL. In this article we will take a quick look at one of the four most important buzz words which goes around Big Data – Hadoop. What is Hadoop? Apache Hadoop is an open-source, free and Java based software framework offers a powerful distributed platform to store and manage Big Data. It is licensed under an Apache V2 license. It runs applications on large clusters of commodity hardware and it processes thousands of terabytes of data on thousands of the nodes. Hadoop is inspired from Google’s MapReduce and Google File System (GFS) papers. The major advantage of Hadoop framework is that it provides reliability and high availability. What are the core components of Hadoop? There are two major components of the Hadoop framework and both fo them does two of the important task for it. Hadoop MapReduce is the method to split a larger data problem into smaller chunk and distribute it to many different commodity servers. Each server have their own set of resources and they have processed them locally. Once the commodity server has processed the data they send it back collectively to main server. This is effectively a process where we process large data effectively and efficiently. (We will understand this in tomorrow’s blog post). Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) is a virtual file system. There is a big difference between any other file system and Hadoop. When we move a file on HDFS, it is automatically split into many small pieces. These small chunks of the file are replicated and stored on other servers (usually 3) for the fault tolerance or high availability. (We will understand this in the day after tomorrow’s blog post). Besides above two core components Hadoop project also contains following modules as well. Hadoop Common: Common utilities for the other Hadoop modules Hadoop Yarn: A framework for job scheduling and cluster resource management There are a few other projects (like Pig, Hive) related to above Hadoop as well which we will gradually explore in later blog posts. A Multi-node Hadoop Cluster Architecture Now let us quickly see the architecture of the a multi-node Hadoop cluster. A small Hadoop cluster includes a single master node and multiple worker or slave node. As discussed earlier, the entire cluster contains two layers. One of the layer of MapReduce Layer and another is of HDFC Layer. Each of these layer have its own relevant component. The master node consists of a JobTracker, TaskTracker, NameNode and DataNode. A slave or worker node consists of a DataNode and TaskTracker. It is also possible that slave node or worker node is only data or compute node. The matter of the fact that is the key feature of the Hadoop. In this introductory blog post we will stop here while describing the architecture of Hadoop. In a future blog post of this 31 day series we will explore various components of Hadoop Architecture in Detail. Why Use Hadoop? There are many advantages of using Hadoop. Let me quickly list them over here: Robust and Scalable – We can add new nodes as needed as well modify them. Affordable and Cost Effective – We do not need any special hardware for running Hadoop. We can just use commodity server. Adaptive and Flexible – Hadoop is built keeping in mind that it will handle structured and unstructured data. Highly Available and Fault Tolerant – When a node fails, the Hadoop framework automatically fails over to another node. Why Hadoop is named as Hadoop? In year 2005 Hadoop was created by Doug Cutting and Mike Cafarella while working at Yahoo. Doug Cutting named Hadoop after his son’s toy elephant. Tomorrow In tomorrow’s blog post we will discuss Buzz Word – MapReduce. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• The Unspoken - The Why of GC Ergonomics

  - by jonthecollector

  Do you use GC ergonomics, -XX:+UseAdaptiveSizePolicy, with the UseParallelGC collector? The jist of GC ergonomics for that collector is that it tries to grow or shrink the heap to meet a specified goal. The goals that you can choose are maximum pause time and/or throughput. Don't get too excited there. I'm speaking about UseParallelGC (the throughput collector) so there are definite limits to what pause goals can be achieved. When you say out loud "I don't care about pause times, give me the best throughput I can get" and then say to yourself "Well, maybe 10 seconds really is too long", then think about a pause time goal. By default there is no pause time goal and the throughput goal is high (98% of the time doing application work and 2% of the time doing GC work). You can get more details on this in my very first blog. GC ergonomics The UseG1GC has its own version of GC ergonomics, but I'll be talking only about the UseParallelGC version. If you use this option and wanted to know what it (GC ergonomics) was thinking, try -XX:AdaptiveSizePolicyOutputInterval=1 This will print out information every i-th GC (above i is 1) about what the GC ergonomics to trying to do. For example, UseAdaptiveSizePolicy actions to meet *** throughput goal *** GC overhead (%) Young generation: 16.10 (attempted to grow) Tenured generation: 4.67 (attempted to grow) Tenuring threshold: (attempted to decrease to balance GC costs) = 1 GC ergonomics tries to meet (in order) Pause time goal Throughput goal Minimum footprint The first line says that it's trying to meet the throughput goal. UseAdaptiveSizePolicy actions to meet *** throughput goal *** This run has the default pause time goal (i.e., no pause time goal) so it is trying to reach a 98% throughput. The lines Young generation: 16.10 (attempted to grow) Tenured generation: 4.67 (attempted to grow) say that we're currently spending about 16% of the time doing young GC's and about 5% of the time doing full GC's. These percentages are a decaying, weighted average (earlier contributions to the average are given less weight). The source code is available as part of the OpenJDK so you can take a look at it if you want the exact definition. GC ergonomics is trying to increase the throughput by growing the heap (so says the "attempted to grow"). The last line Tenuring threshold: (attempted to decrease to balance GC costs) = 1 says that the ergonomics is trying to balance the GC times between young GC's and full GC's by decreasing the tenuring threshold. During a young collection the younger objects are copied to the survivor spaces while the older objects are copied to the tenured generation. Younger and older are defined by the tenuring threshold. If the tenuring threshold hold is 4, an object that has survived fewer than 4 young collections (and has remained in the young generation by being copied to the part of the young generation called a survivor space) it is younger and copied again to a survivor space. If it has survived 4 or more young collections, it is older and gets copied to the tenured generation. A lower tenuring threshold moves objects more eagerly to the tenured generation and, conversely a higher tenuring threshold keeps copying objects between survivor spaces longer. The tenuring threshold varies dynamically with the UseParallelGC collector. That is different than our other collectors which have a static tenuring threshold. GC ergonomics tries to balance the amount of work done by the young GC's and the full GC's by varying the tenuring threshold. Want more work done in the young GC's? Keep objects longer in the survivor spaces by increasing the tenuring threshold. This is an example of the output when GC ergonomics is trying to achieve a pause time goal UseAdaptiveSizePolicy actions to meet *** pause time goal *** GC overhead (%) Young generation: 20.74 (no change) Tenured generation: 31.70 (attempted to shrink) The pause goal was set at 50 millisecs and the last GC was 0.415: [Full GC (Ergonomics) [PSYoungGen: 2048K-0K(26624K)] [ParOldGen: 26095K-9711K(28992K)] 28143K-9711K(55616K), [Metaspace: 1719K-1719K(2473K/6528K)], 0.0758940 secs] [Times: user=0.28 sys=0.00, real=0.08 secs] The full collection took about 76 millisecs so GC ergonomics wants to shrink the tenured generation to reduce that pause time. The previous young GC was 0.346: [GC (Allocation Failure) [PSYoungGen: 26624K-2048K(26624K)] 40547K-22223K(56768K), 0.0136501 secs] [Times: user=0.06 sys=0.00, real=0.02 secs] so the pause time there was about 14 millisecs so no changes are needed. If trying to meet a pause time goal, the generations are typically shrunk. With a pause time goal in play, watch the GC overhead numbers and you will usually see the cost of setting a pause time goal (i.e., throughput goes down). If the pause goal is too low, you won't achieve your pause time goal and you will spend all your time doing GC. GC ergonomics is meant to be simple because it is meant to be used by anyone. It was not meant to be mysterious and so this output was added. If you don't like what GC ergonomics is doing, you can turn it off with -XX:-UseAdaptiveSizePolicy, but be pre-warned that you have to manage the size of the generations explicitly. If UseAdaptiveSizePolicy is turned off, the heap does not grow. The size of the heap (and the generations) at the start of execution is always the size of the heap. I don't like that and tried to fix it once (with some help from an OpenJDK contributor) but it unfortunately never made it out the door. I still have hope though. Just a side note. With the default throughput goal of 98% the heap often grows to it's maximum value and stays there. Definitely reduce the throughput goal if footprint is important. Start with -XX:GCTimeRatio=4 for a more modest throughput goal (%20 of the time spent in GC). A higher value means a smaller amount of time in GC (as the throughput goal).

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• SQL SERVER – Number-Crunching with SQL Server – Exceed the Functionality of Excel

  - by Pinal Dave

  Imagine this. Your users have developed an Excel spreadsheet that extracts data from your SQL Server database, manipulates that data through the use of Excel formulas and, possibly, some VBA code which is then used to calculate P&L, hedging requirements or even risk numbers. Management comes to you and tells you that they need to get rid of the spreadsheet and that the results of the spreadsheet calculations need to be persisted on the database. SQL Server has a very small set of functions for analyzing data. Excel has hundreds of functions for analyzing data, with many of them focused on specific financial and statistical calculations. Is it even remotely possible that you can use SQL Server to replace the complex calculations being done in a spreadsheet? Westclintech has developed a library of functions that match or exceed the functionality of Excel’s functions and contains many functions that are not available in EXCEL. Their XLeratorDB library of functions contains over 700 functions that can be incorporated into T-SQL statements. XLeratorDB takes advantage of the SQL CLR architecture introduced in SQL Server 2005. SQL CLR permits managed code to be compiled into the database and run alongside built-in SQL Server functions like COUNT or SUM. The Westclintech developers have taken advantage of this architecture to bring robust analytical functions to the database. In our hypothetical spreadsheet, let’s assume that our users are using the YIELD function and that the data are extracted from a table in our database called BONDS. Here’s what the spreadsheet might look like. We go to column G and see that it contains the following formula. Obviously, SQL Server does not offer a native YIELD function. However, with XLeratorDB we can replicate this calculation in SQL Server with the following statement: SELECT *, wct.YIELD(CAST(GETDATE() AS date),Maturity,Rate,Price,100,Frequency,Basis) AS YIELD FROM BONDS This produces the following result. This illustrates one of the best features about XLeratorDB; it is so easy to use. Since I knew that the spreadsheet was using the YIELD function I could use the same function with the same calling structure to do the calculation in SQL Server. I didn’t need to know anything at all about the mechanics of calculating the yield on a bond. It was pretty close to cut and paste. In fact, that’s one way to construct the SQL. Just copy the function call from the cell in the spreadsheet and paste it into SMS and change the cell references to column names. I built the SQL for this query by starting with this. SELECT * ,YIELD(TODAY(),B2,C2,D2,100,E2,F2) FROM BONDS I then changed the cell references to column names. SELECT * --,YIELD(TODAY(),B2,C2,D2,100,E2,F2) ,YIELD(TODAY(),Maturity,Rate,Price,100,Frequency,Basis) FROM BONDS Finally, I replicated the TODAY() function using GETDATE() and added the schema name to the function name. SELECT * --,YIELD(TODAY(),B2,C2,D2,100,E2,F2) --,YIELD(TODAY(),Maturity,Rate,Price,100,Frequency,Basis) ,wct.YIELD(GETDATE(),Maturity,Rate,Price,100,Frequency,Basis) FROM BONDS Then I am able to execute the statement returning the results seen above. The XLeratorDB libraries are heavy on financial, statistical, and mathematical functions. Where there is an analog to an Excel function, the XLeratorDB function uses the same naming conventions and calling structure as the Excel function, but there are also hundreds of additional functions for SQL Server that are not found in Excel. You can find the functions by opening Object Explorer in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) and expanding the Programmability folder under the database where the functions have been installed. The  Functions folder expands to show 3 sub-folders: Table-valued Functions; Scalar-valued functions, Aggregate Functions, and System Functions. You can expand any of the first three folders to see the XLeratorDB functions. Since the wct.YIELD function is a scalar function, we will open the Scalar-valued Functions folder, scroll down to the wct.YIELD function and and click the plus sign (+) to display the input parameters. The functions are also Intellisense-enabled, with the input parameters displayed directly in the query tab. The Westclintech website contains documentation for all the functions including examples that can be copied directly into a query window and executed. There are also more one hundred articles on the site which go into more detail about how some of the functions work and demonstrate some of the extensive business processes that can be done in SQL Server using XLeratorDB functions and some T-SQL. XLeratorDB is organized into libraries: finance, statistics; math; strings; engineering; and financial options. There is also a windowing library for SQL Server 2005, 2008, and 2012 which provides functions for calculating things like running and moving averages (which were introduced in SQL Server 2012), FIFO inventory calculations, financial ratios and more, without having to use triangular joins. To get started you can download the XLeratorDB 15-day free trial from the Westclintech web site. It is a fully-functioning, unrestricted version of the software. If you need more than 15 days to evaluate the software, you can simply download another 15-day free trial. XLeratorDB is an easy and cost-effective way to start adding sophisticated data analysis to your SQL Server database without having to know anything more than T-SQL. Get XLeratorDB Today and Now! Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: Excel

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• Parner Webcast - Innovations in Products Program

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  We are pleased to invite you to join the Innovations in Products –webcast. Innovations in Products will present Oracle Applications' Product's new functions and features including sales positioning. The key objectives of these webcasts are to inspire System Integrator's implementation personnel to conduct successful after sales in their Customer projects. Innovations in Products will be presented on the 1st Monday of each quarter after the billable day (4:00 to 5:00 PM CET). The webcast is intended for System Integrator's Implementation Certified Specialists but Innovations in Products is open for other interested Oracle Applications system Integrator's personnel as well. At first, two Oracle representatives will discuss Oracle's contribution to Partners. Then you will see product breakout session followed by Q&A with Oracle Experts. Each session will last for maximum 1 hour. A Q&A document covering all questions and answers will be made available after the webcast. What are the Benefits for partners? Find out how Innovations in Products helps you to improve your after sales Discover new functions and features so you can enrich your Customers's solution Learn more about Oracle Applications products, especially sales positioning Hear crucial questions raised by colleague alike, learn from their interest Engage and present your questions to subject experts Be inspired of the richness of Oracle Application portfolio – for your and your customer’s benefit Note: Should you already be familiar with a specific Product, then choose another one. Doing so you would expand your knowledge of the overall Applications portfolio. Some presentations contain product demonstration, although these presentations are not intended to be extremely detailed technical presentations. Note: At the latter part of this email you have also 17 links into the recent Applications Products presentations and 6 links into the Public Sector Value Proposition presentations that were presented in Innovations in Industries -program. Product breakout sessions: Topics Speaker To Register Fusion Applications Technology and Extensibility: A next-generation platform that adapts to client needs. Matthew Johnson, Sr. Director, SCM Product Development, EMEA CLICK HERE Fusion Applications - Transforming your Back-Office Accounting Function: Changing how people work in back office functions to drive value add Liam Nolan, Director, ERP Product Development, EMEA CLICK HERE Fusion HCM & Talent Overview & Extensibility: A more in-depth look into a personalized HCM solution Synco Jonkeren, Vice-President HCM Product Development & Management, EMEA CLICK HERE Fusion HCM Compensation Planning: Compensate To Compete Rosie Warner, Director, HCM Sales Development CLICK HERE Enterprise PLM for the Product Value Chain: Oracle Enterprise PLM offers Industry specific solutions that cover the Product Value Chain Ulf Köster, Sales Development Leader Enterprise PLM, Oracle Western Europe CLICK HERE Oracle's Asset Management and Maintenance Solution: What you need to know to successfully implement Oracle Asset Management solutions within Oracle Installed Base Philip Carey, Asset Management and Maintenance Solution Specialist CLICK HERE For more details please visit Innovations in Products and other breakout sessions on OPN page. Delivery Format Innovations in Products –program is a series of FREE prerecorded Applications product presentations followed by Q&A. It will be delivered over the Web. Participants have the opportunity to submit questions during the web cast via chat and subject matter experts will provide verbal answers live. Innovations in Products consists of several parallel prerecorded product breakout sessions, each lasting for max. 1 hour. At first, two Oracle representatives will discuss Oracle’s contribution to Partners. Then you’ll see the product breakout sessions followed by Q&A with Oracle Experts. A Q&A document covering all questions and answers will be made available after the webcast. You can also see Innovations in Products afterwards as its content will be available online for the next 6-12 months. The next Innovations in Products web casts will be presented as follows: July 2nd 2012 October 1st 2012 January 14th 2013 April 8th 2013. Note: Depending on local network bandwidth please allow some seconds time the presentations to download. You might want to refresh your screen by pressing F5. Duration Maximum 1 hour For further information please contact me Markku Rouhiainen. Recent Innovations in Products presentations Applications Products presented on April the 2nd, 2012 Speaker To Register Fusion CRM: Effective, Efficient and Easy James Penfold , Senior Director, Applications Product Development and Product Management CLICK HERE Fusion HCM: Talent management overview performance, goals, talent review Jaime Losantos Viñolas, Director, HCM Sales Development CLICK HERE Distributed Order Management - Fusion SCM Solution Vikram K Singla, Business Development Director, Supply Chain Management Applications, UK CLICK HERE Oracle Transportation Management Dominic Regan, Senior Director Oracle Transportation Management EMEA CLICK HERE Oracle Value Chain Planning: Demantra Sales & Operation Planning and Demantra Demand Management Lionel Albert, Senior Director Value Chain Planning, EMEA CLICK HERE Oracle CX (Customer Experience) - formerly CEM: Powering Great Customer Experiences Maria Ramirez , CRM Presales Consultant, EPC CLICK HERE EPM 11.1.2.2 Overview Nicholas Cox , EMEA Sales Development Director - Enterprise Performance Management CLICK HERE Oracle Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management, 11.1.2.1 Daniela Lazar , Senior EPM Sales Consultant, EPC CLICK HERE January the 16th 2012 Speaker To Register CRM / ATG: Best-in-Class CRM & Commerce Maria Ramirez , Associate CRM Presales Consultant, EPC CLICK HERE CRM / Automate Business Rules for Maximum Efficiency with OPA (Oracle Policy Automation) Marco Nilo, Associate CRM Presales Consultant, EPC CLICK HERE CRM / InQuira Toby Baker, Principal Sales Consultant, CRM Product Specialist Team CLICK HERE EPM / Business Intelligence Foundation Suite – Sales and Product Updates Liviu Nitescu, Senior BI Sales Consultant, EPC CLICK HERE EPM / Hyperion Planning 11.1.2.1 - Sales & Product Updates Andreea Voinea, EPM Sales Consultant, EPC CLICK HERE ERP / JDE EnterpriseOne Fulfillment Management Overview Mirela Andreea Nasta , ERP Presales Consultant, EPC CLICK HERE ERP / Spotlights on iExpenses Elena Nita ,ERP Presales Consultant, EPC CLICK HERE MDM / Master Data Management Martin Boyd , Senior Director Product Strategy CLICK HERE Product break through session Fusion Applications Human Capital Management Rosie Warner , Director, HCM Sales Development CLICK HERE Recent Innovations in Industries Value Proposition presentations January the 16th 2012 Speaker To Register Process Modernisation Iemke Idsingh Public Sector Solutions Director CLICK HERE Shared Services Ann Smith Business Development Director, Shared Services CLICK HERE Strengthening Financial Discipline Whilst Delivering Cashable Savings Philippa Headley UK Sales Development Director Public Sector - EPM Solutions CLICK HERE Social Welfare Industry Solutions Christian Wernberg-Tougaard Industry Director - Social Welfare CLICK HERE Police Industry Solutions Jeff Penrose Solution Sales Director CLICK HERE Tax and Revenue Management Industry Solutions Andre van der Post Global Director - Tax Solutions and Strategy CLICK HERE  

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• Video games, content strategy, and failure - oh my.

  - by Roger Hart

  Last night was the CS London group's event Content Strategy, Manhattan Style. Yes, it's a terrible title, feeling like a self-conscious grasp for chic, sadly commensurate with the venue. Fortunately, this was not commensurate with the event itself, which was lively, relevant, and engaging. Although mostly if you're a consultant. This is a strong strain in current content strategy discourse, and I think we're going to see it remedied quite soon. Not least in Paris on Friday. A lot of the bloggers, speakers, and commentators in the sphere are consultants, or part of agencies and other consulting organisations. A lot of the talk is about how you sell content strategy to your clients. This is completely acceptable. Of course it is. And it's actually useful if that's something you regularly have to do. To an extent, it's even portable to those of us who have to sell content strategy within an organisation. We're still competing for credibility and resource. What we're doing less is living in the beginning of a project. This was touched on by Jeffrey MacIntyre (albeit in a your-clients kind of a way) who described "the day two problem". Companies, he suggested, build websites for launch day, and forget about the need for them to be ongoing entities. Consultants, agencies, or even internal folks on short projects will live through Day Two quite often: the trainwreck moment where somebody realises that even if the content is right (which it often isn't), and on time (which it often isn't), it'll be redundant, outdated, or inaccurate by the end of the week/month/fickle social media attention cycle. The thing about living through a lot of Day Two is that you see a lot of failure. Nothing succeeds like failure? Failure is good. When it's structured right, it's an awesome tool for learning - that's kind of how video games work. I'm chewing over a whole blog post about this, but basically in game-like learning, you try, fail, go round the loop again. Success eventually yields joy. It's a relatively well-known phenomenon. It works best when that failing step is acutely felt, but extremely inexpensive. Dying in Portal is highly frustrating and surprisingly characterful, but the save-points are well designed and the reload unintrusive. The barrier to re-entry into the loop is very low, as is the cost of your failure out in meatspace. So it's easy (and fun) to learn. Yeah, spot the difference with business failure. As an external content strategist, you get to rock up with a big old folder full of other companies' Day Two (and ongoing day two hundred) failures. You can't send the client round the learning loop - although you may well be there because they've been round it once - but you can show other people's round trip. It's not as compelling, but it's not bad. What about internal content strategists? We can still point to things that are wrong, and there are some very compelling tools at our disposal - content inventories, user testing, and analytics, for instance. But if we're picking up big organically sprawling legacy content, Day Two may well be a distant memory, and the felt experience of web content failure is unlikely to be immediate to many people in the organisation. What to do? My hunch here is that the first task is to create something immediate and felt, but that it probably needs to be a success. Something quickly doable and visible - a content problem solved with a measurable business result. Now, that's a tall order; but scrape of the "quickly" and it's the whole reason we're here. At Red Gate, I've started with the text book fear and passion introduction to content strategy. In fact, I just typo'd that as "contempt strategy", and it isn't a bad description. Yelling "look at this, our website is rubbish!" gets you the initial attention, but it doesn't make you many friends. And if you don't produce something pretty sharp-ish, it's easy to lose the momentum you built up for change. The first thing I've done - after the visual content inventory - is to delete a bunch of stuff. About 70% of the SQL Compare web content has gone, in fact. This is a really, really cheap operation. It's visible, and it's powerful. It's cheap because you don't have to create any new content. It's not free, however, because you do have to validate your deletions. This means analytics, actually reading that content, and talking to people whose business purposes that content has to serve. If nobody outside the company uses it, and nobody inside the company thinks they ought to, that's a no-brainer for the delete list. The payoff here is twofold. There's the nebulous hard-to-illustrate "bad content does user experience and brand damage" argument; and there's the "nobody has to spend time (money) maintaining this now" argument. One or both are easily felt, and the second at least should be measurable. But that's just one approach, and I'd be interested to hear from any other internal content strategy folks about how they get buy-in, maintain momentum, and generally get things done.

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• Windows Azure Recipe: Enterprise LOBs

  - by Clint Edmonson

  Enterprises are more and more dependent on their specialized internal Line of Business (LOB) applications than ever before. Naturally, the more software they leverage on-premises, the more infrastructure they need manage. It’s frequently the case that our customers simply can’t scale up their hardware purchases and operational staff as fast as internal demand for software requires. The result is that getting new or enhanced applications in the hands of business users becomes slower and more expensive every day. Being able to quickly deliver applications in a rapidly changing business environment while maintaining high standards of corporate security is a challenge that can be met right now by moving enterprise LOBs out into the cloud and leveraging Azure’s Access Control services. In fact, we’re seeing many of our customers (both large and small) see huge benefits from moving their web based business applications such as corporate help desks, expense tracking, travel portals, timesheets, and more to Windows Azure. Drivers Cost Reduction Time to market Security Solution Here’s a sketch of how many Windows Azure Enterprise LOBs are being architected and deployed: Ingredients Web Role – this will host the core of the application. Each web role is a virtual machine hosting an application written in ASP.NET (or optionally php, or node.js). The number of web roles can be scaled up or down as needed to handle peak and non-peak traffic loads. Many Java based applications are also being deployed to Windows Azure with a little more effort. Database – every modern web application needs to store data. SQL Azure databases look and act exactly like their on-premise siblings but are fault tolerant and have data redundancy built in. Access Control – this service is necessary to establish federated identity between the cloud hosted application and an enterprise’s corporate network. It works in conjunction with a secure token service (STS) that is hosted on-premises to establish the corporate user’s identity and credentials. The source code for an on-premises STS is provided in the Windows Azure training kit and merely needs to be customized for the corporate environment and published on a publicly accessible corporate web site. Once set up, corporate users see a near seamless single sign-on experience. Reporting – businesses live and die by their reports and SQL Azure Reporting, based on SQL Server Reporting 2008 R2, can serve up reports with tables, charts, maps, gauges, and more. These reports can be accessed from the Windows Azure Portal, through a web browser, or directly from applications. Service Bus (optional) – if deep integration with other applications and systems is needed, the service bus is the answer. It enables secure service layer communication between applications hosted behind firewalls in on-premises or partner datacenters and applications hosted inside Windows Azure. The Service Bus provides the ability to securely expose just the information and services that are necessary to create a simpler, more secure architecture than opening up a full blown VPN. Data Sync (optional) – in cases where the data stored in the cloud needs to be shared internally, establishing a secure one-way or two-way data-sync connection between the on-premises and off-premises databases is a perfect option. It can be very granular, allowing us to specify exactly what tables and columns to synchronize, setup filters to sync only a subset of rows, set the conflict resolution policy for two-way sync, and specify how frequently data should be synchronized Training Labs These links point to online Windows Azure training labs where you can learn more about the individual ingredients described above. (Note: The entire Windows Azure Training Kit can also be downloaded for offline use.) Windows Azure (16 labs) Windows Azure is an internet-scale cloud computing and services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services which can be used individually or together. It gives developers the choice to build web applications; applications running on connected devices, PCs, or servers; or hybrid solutions offering the best of both worlds. New or enhanced applications can be built using existing skills with the Visual Studio development environment and the .NET Framework. With its standards-based and interoperable approach, the services platform supports multiple internet protocols, including HTTP, REST, SOAP, and plain XML SQL Azure (7 labs) Microsoft SQL Azure delivers on the Microsoft Data Platform vision of extending the SQL Server capabilities to the cloud as web-based services, enabling you to store structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Windows Azure Services (9 labs) As applications collaborate across organizational boundaries, ensuring secure transactions across disparate security domains is crucial but difficult to implement. Windows Azure Services provides hosted authentication and access control using powerful, secure, standards-based infrastructure. See my Windows Azure Resource Guide for more guidance on how to get started, including links web portals, training kits, samples, and blogs related to Windows Azure.

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• ISACA Webcast follow up: Managing High Risk Access and Compliance with a Platform Approach to Privileged Account Management

  - by Darin Pendergraft

  Last week we presented how Oracle Privileged Account Manager (OPAM) could be used to manage high risk, privileged accounts.  If you missed the webcast, here is a link to the replay: ISACA replay archive (NOTE: you will need to use Internet Explorer to view the archive) For those of you that did join us on the call, you will know that I only had a little bit of time for Q&A, and was only able to answer a few of the questions that came in.  So I wanted to devote this blog to answering the outstanding questions.  Here they are. 1. Can OPAM track admin or DBA activity details during a password check-out session? Oracle Audit Vault is monitoring these activities which can be correlated to check-out events. 2. How would OPAM handle simultaneous requests? OPAM can be configured to allow for shared passwords.  By default sharing is turned off. 3. How long are the passwords valid?  Are the admins required to manually check them in? Password expiration can be configured and set in the password policy according to your corporate standards.  You can specify if you want forced check-in or not. 4. Can 2-factor authentication be used with OPAM? Yes - 2-factor integration with OPAM is provided by integration with Oracle Access Manager, and Oracle Adaptive Access Manager. 5. How do you control access to OPAM to ensure that OPAM admins don't override the functionality to access privileged accounts? OPAM provides separation of duties by using Admin Roles to manage access to targets and privileged accounts and to control which operations admins can perform. 6. How and where are the passwords stored in OPAM? OPAM uses Oracle Platform Security Services (OPSS) Credential Store Framework (CSF) to securely store passwords.  This is the same system used by Oracle Applications. 7. Does OPAM support hierarchical/level based privileges?  Is the log maintained for independent review/audit? Yes. OPAM uses the Fusion Middleware (FMW) Audit Framework to store all OPAM related events in a dedicated audit database.  8. Does OPAM support emergency access in the case where approvers are not available until later? Yes.  OPAM can be configured to release a password under a "break-glass" emergency scenario. 9. Does OPAM work with AIX? Yes supported UNIX version are listed in the "certified component section" of the UNIX connector guide at:http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E22999_01/doc.111/e17694/intro.htm#autoId0 10. Does OPAM integrate with Sun Identity Manager? Yes.  OPAM can be integrated with SIM using the REST  APIs.  OPAM has direct integration with Oracle Identity Manager 11gR2. 11. Is OPAM available today and what does it cost? Yes.  OPAM is available now.  Ask your Oracle Account Manager for pricing. 12. Can OPAM be used in SAP environments? Yes, supported SAP version are listed in the "certified component section" of the SAP  connector guide here: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E22999_01/doc.111/e25327/intro.htm#autoId0 13. How would this product integrate, if at all, with access to a particular field in the DB that need additional security such as SSN's? OPAM can work with DB Vault and DB Firewall to provide the fine grained access control for databases. 14. Is VM supported? As a deployment platform Oracle VM is supported. For further details about supported Virtualization Technologies see Oracle Fusion Middleware Supported System configurations here: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/ias/downloads/fusion-certification-100350.html 15. Where did this (OPAM) technology come from? OPAM was built by Oracle Engineering. 16. Are all Linux flavors supported?  How about BSD? BSD is not supported. For supported UNIX version see the "certified component section" of the UNIX connector guide http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E22999_01/doc.111/e17694/intro.htm#autoId0 17. What happens if users don't check passwords in at the end of a work task? In OPAM a time frame can be defined how long a password can be checked out. The security admin can force a check-in at any given time. 18. is MySQL supported? Yes, supported DB version are listed in the "certified component section" of the DB connector guide here: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E22999_01/doc.111/e28315/intro.htm#BABGJJHA 19. What happens when OPAM crashes and you need to use the password? OPAM can be configured for high availability, but if required, OPAM data can be backed up/recovered.  See the OPAM admin guide. 20. Is OPAM Standalone product or does it leverage other components from IDM? OPAM can be run stand-alone, but will also leverage other IDM components

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• .NET 4: &ldquo;Slim&rdquo;-style performance boost!

  - by Vitus

  RTM version of .NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010 is available, and now we can do some test with it. Parallel Extensions is one of the most valuable part of .NET 4.0. It’s a set of good tools for easily consuming multicore hardware power. And it also contains some “upgraded” sync primitives – Slim-version. For example, it include updated variant of widely known ManualResetEvent. For people, who don’t know about it: you can sync concurrency execution of some pieces of code with this sync primitive. Instance of ManualResetEvent can be in 2 states: signaled and non-signaled. Transition between it possible by Set() and Reset() methods call. Some shortly explanation: Thread 1 Thread 2 Time mre.Reset(); mre.WaitOne(); //code execution 0 //wating //code execution 1 //wating //code execution 2 //wating //code execution 3 //wating mre.Set(); 4 //code execution //… 5 Upgraded version of this primitive is ManualResetEventSlim. The idea in decreasing performance cost in case, when only 1 thread use it. Main concept in the “hybrid sync schema”, which can be done as following:   internal sealed class SimpleHybridLock : IDisposable { private Int32 m_waiters = 0; private AutoResetEvent m_waiterLock = new AutoResetEvent(false);   public void Enter() { if (Interlocked.Increment(ref m_waiters) == 1) return; m_waiterLock.WaitOne(); }   public void Leave() { if (Interlocked.Decrement(ref m_waiters) == 0) return; m_waiterLock.Set(); }   public void Dispose() { m_waiterLock.Dispose(); } } It’s a sample from Jeffry Richter’s book “CLR via C#”, 3rd edition. Primitive SimpleHybridLock have two public methods: Enter() and Leave(). You can put your concurrency-critical code between calls of these methods, and it would executed in only one thread at the moment. Code is really simple: first thread, called Enter(), increase counter. Second thread also increase counter, and suspend while m_waiterLock is not signaled. So, if we don’t have concurrent access to our lock, “heavy” methods WaitOne() and Set() will not called. It’s can give some performance bonus. ManualResetEvent use the similar idea. Of course, it have more “smart” technics inside, like a checking of recursive calls, and so on. I want to know a real difference between classic ManualResetEvent realization, and new –Slim. I wrote a simple “benchmark”: class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { ManualResetEventSlim mres = new ManualResetEventSlim(false); ManualResetEventSlim mres2 = new ManualResetEventSlim(false);   ManualResetEvent mre = new ManualResetEvent(false);   long total = 0; int COUNT = 50;   for (int i = 0; i < COUNT; i++) { mres2.Reset(); Stopwatch sw = Stopwatch.StartNew();   ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem((obj) => { //Method(mres, true); Method2(mre, true); mres2.Set(); }); //Method(mres, false); Method2(mre, false);   mres2.Wait(); sw.Stop();   Console.WriteLine("Pass {0}: {1} ms", i, sw.ElapsedMilliseconds); total += sw.ElapsedMilliseconds; }   Console.WriteLine(); Console.WriteLine("==============================="); Console.WriteLine("Done in average=" + total / (double)COUNT); Console.ReadLine(); }   private static void Method(ManualResetEventSlim mre, bool value) { for (int i = 0; i < 9000000; i++) { if (value) { mre.Set(); } else { mre.Reset(); } } }   private static void Method2(ManualResetEvent mre, bool value) { for (int i = 0; i < 9000000; i++) { if (value) { mre.Set(); } else { mre.Reset(); } } } } I use 2 concurrent thread (the main thread and one from thread pool) for setting and resetting ManualResetEvents, and try to run test COUNT times, and calculate average execution time. Here is the results (I get it on my dual core notebook with T7250 CPU and Windows 7 x64): ManualResetEvent ManualResetEventSlim Difference is obvious and serious – in 10 times! So, I think preferable way is using ManualResetEventSlim, because not always on calling Set() and Reset() will be called “heavy” methods for working with Windows kernel-mode objects. It’s a small and nice improvement! ;)

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• Trigger Happy

  - by Tim Dexter

  Its been a while, I know, we’ll say no more OK? I’ll just write …In the latest BIP 11.1.1.6 release and if I’m really honest; the release before this (we'll call it dot 5 for brevity.) The boys and gals in the engine room have been real busy enhancing BIP with some new functionality. Those of you that use the scheduling engine in OBIEE may already know and use the ‘conditional scheduling’ feature. This allows you to be more intelligent about what reports get run and sent to folks on a scheduled basis. You create a ‘trigger’ analysis (answer) that is executed at schedule time prior to the main report. When the schedule rolls around, the trigger is run, if it returns rows, then the main report is run and delivered. If there are no rows returned, then the main report is not run. Useful right? Your users are not bombarded with 20 reports in their inbox every week that they need to wade throu. They get a handful that they know they need to look at. If you ensure you use conditional formatting in the report then they can find the anomalous data in the reports very quickly and move on to the rest of their day more quickly. You could even think of OBIEE as a virtual team member, scouring the data on your behalf 24/7 and letting you know when its found an issue.BI Publisher, wanting the team t-shirt and the khaki pants, has followed suit. You can now set up ‘triggers’ for it to execute before it runs the main report. Just like its big brother, if the scheduled report trigger returns rows of data; it then executes the main report. Otherwise, the report is skipped until the next schedule time rolls around. Sound familiar?BIP differs a little, in that you only need to construct a query to act as the trigger rather than a complete report. Let assume we have a monthly wage by department report on a schedule. We only want to send the report to managers if their departmental wages reach and/or exceed a certain amount. The toughest part about this is coming up with the SQL to test the business rule you want to implement. For my example, its not that tough: select d.department_name, sum(e.salary) as wage_total from employees e, departments d where d.department_id = e.department_id group by d.department_name having sum(e.salary) > 230000 We're looking for departments where the wage cost is greater than 230,000 Dexter Dollars! With a bit of messing I found out you can parametrize the query. Users can then set a value at schedule time if they need to. To create the trigger is straightforward enough. You can create multiple triggers for users to select at schedule time. Notice I also used a parameter in the query, :wamount. Note the matching parameter in the tree on the left. You also dont need to return multiple columns, one is fine, the key is if there are rows returned. You can build the rest of your report as usual. At scheduling time the Schedule tab has a bit more on it. If your users want to set the trigger, they check the Use Trigger box. The page will then pop fields to pick the appropriate trigger they want to use, even a trigger on another data model if needed. Note it will also ask for the parameter value associated with the trigger. At this point you should note that the data model does not make a distinction between trigger and data model (extract) parameters. So users will see the parameters on the General and Schedule tabs. If per chance you do need to just have a trigger parameters. You can just hide them from the report using the Parameters popup in the report designer, just un-check the 'Show' box I have tested the opposite case where you do not want main report parameters seen in the trigger section. BIP handles that for you! Once the report hits its allotted schedule time, the trigger is executed. Based on the results the report will either run or be 'skipped.' Now, you have a smarter scheduler that will only deliver reports when folks need to see them and take action on the contents. More official info here for developers and here for users.

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• PASS Summit 2011 &ndash; Part III

  - by Tara Kizer

  Well we’re about a month past PASS Summit 2011, and yet I haven’t finished blogging my notes! Between work and home life, I haven’t been able to come up for air in a bit.  Now on to my notes… On Thursday of the PASS Summit 2011, I attended Klaus Aschenbrenner’s (blog|twitter) “Advanced SQL Server 2008 Troubleshooting”, Joe Webb’s (blog|twitter) “SQL Server Locking & Blocking Made Simple”, Kalen Delaney’s (blog|twitter) “What Happened? Exploring the Plan Cache”, and Paul Randal’s (blog|twitter) “More DBA Mythbusters”.  I think my head grew two times in size from the Thursday sessions.  Just WOW! I took a ton of notes in Klaus' session.  He took a deep dive into how to troubleshoot performance problems.  Here is how he goes about solving a performance problem: Start by checking the wait stats DMV System health Memory issues I/O issues I normally start with blocking and then hit the wait stats.  Here’s the wait stat query (Paul Randal’s) that I use when working on a performance problem.  He highlighted a few waits to be aware of such as WRITELOG (indicates IO subsystem problem), SOS_SCHEDULER_YIELD (indicates CPU problem), and PAGEIOLATCH_XX (indicates an IO subsystem problem or a buffer pool problem).  Regarding memory issues, Klaus recommended that as a bare minimum, one should set the “max server memory (MB)” in sp_configure to 2GB or 10% reserved for the OS (whichever comes first).  This is just a starting point though! Regarding I/O issues, Klaus talked about disk partition alignment, which can improve SQL I/O performance by up to 100%.  You should use 64kb for NTFS cluster, and it’s automatic in Windows 2008 R2. Joe’s locking and blocking presentation was a good session to really clear up the fog in my mind about locking.  One takeaway that I had no idea could be done was that you can set a timeout in T-SQL code view LOCK_TIMEOUT.  If you do this via the application, you should trap error 1222. Kalen’s session went into execution plans.  The minimum size of a plan is 24k.  This adds up fast especially if you have a lot of plans that don’t get reused much.  You can use sys.dm_exec_cached_plans to check how often a plan is being reused by checking the usecounts column.  She said that we can use DBCC FLUSHPROCINDB to clear out the stored procedure cache for a specific database.  I didn’t know we had this available, so this was great to hear.  This will be less intrusive when an emergency comes up where I’ve needed to run DBCC FREEPROCCACHE. Kalen said one should enable “optimize for ad hoc workloads” if you have an adhoc loc.  This stores only a 300-byte stub of the first plan, and if it gets run again, it’ll store the whole thing.  This helps with plan cache bloat.  I have a lot of systems that use prepared statements, and Kalen says we simulate those calls by using sp_executesql.  Cool! Paul did a series of posts last year to debunk various myths and misconceptions around SQL Server.  He continues to debunk things via “DBA Mythbusters”.  You can get a PDF of a bunch of these here.  One of the myths he went over is the number of tempdb data files that you should have.  Back in 2000, the recommendation was to have as many tempdb data files as there are CPU cores on your server.  This no longer holds true due to the numerous cores we have on our servers.  Paul says you should start out with 1/4 to 1/2 the number of cores and work your way up from there.  BUT!  Paul likes what Bob Ward (twitter) says on this topic: 8 or less cores –> set number of files equal to the number of cores Greater than 8 cores –> start with 8 files and increase in blocks of 4 One common myth out there is to set your MAXDOP to 1 for an OLTP workload with high CXPACKET waits.  Instead of that, dig deeper first.  Look for missing indexes, out-of-date statistics, increase the “cost threshold for parallelism” setting, and perhaps set MAXDOP at the query level.  Paul stressed that you should not plan a backup strategy but instead plan a restore strategy.  What are your recoverability requirements?  Once you know that, now plan out your backups. As Paul always does, he talked about DBCC CHECKDB.  He said how fabulous it is.  I didn’t want to interrupt the presentation, so after his session had ended, I asked Paul about the need to run DBCC CHECKDB on your mirror systems.  You could have data corruption occur at the mirror and not at the principal server.  If you aren’t checking for data corruption on your mirror systems, you could be failing over to a corrupt database in the case of a disaster or even a planned failover.  You can’t run DBCC CHECKDB against the mirrored database, but you can run it against a snapshot off the mirrored database.

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• Architect Day: Boston - Agenda Update

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Here's the latest information on the session schedule and content for Oracle Technology Network Architect Day in Boston, MA on September 12, 2012. Registration is open, but seating is limited. When: September 12, 2012 8:30am – 5:00pm Where: Boston Marriott Burlington One Burlington Mall Road Burlington, MA 01803 Register now Agenda Time Session Title Room 8:30 am - 9:00 am Registration and Continental Breakfast Salon E Foyer 9:00 am - 9:15 am Welcome and Opening Comments | Bob Rhubart Salon E 9:15 am - 10:00 am Engineered Systems: Oracle's Vision for the Future | Ralf Dossmann Oracle's Exadata and Exalogic are impressive products in their own right. But working in combination they deliver unparalleled transaction processing performance with up to a 30x increase over existing legacy systems, with the lowest cost of ownership over a 3 or 5 year basis than any other hardware. In this session you'll learn how to leverage Oracle's Engineered Systems within your enterprise to deliver record-breaking performance at the lowest TCO. Salon E 10:00 am - 10:30 am Securing Public and Private Clouds | Anton Nielsen Long before the term "Cloud Computing" existed, Oracle technologies supported and promoted the concept. Centralized data with remote users has been at the core of these technologies for decades. The public cloud, and extending private clouds to the internet, though, has added security challenges never imagined decades ago. This presentation will examine a real life security breach and introduce architecture, technologies and policies to secure public and private clouds.  Salon E 10:30 am - 10:45 am Break 10:45 am - 11:30 am Breakout Sessions (pick one) Cloud Computing - Making IT Simple | Scott Mattoon The road to Cloud Computing is not without a few bumps. This session will help to smooth out your journey by tackling some of the potential complications. We'll examine whether standardization is a prerequisite for the Cloud. We'll look at why refactoring isn't just for application code. We'll check out deployable entities and their simplification via higher levels of abstraction. And we'll close out the session with a look at engineered systems and modular clouds. Salon E Innovations in Grid Computing with Oracle Coherence | Rob Misek Learn how Coherence can increase the availability, scalability and performance of your existing applications with its advanced low-latency data-grid technologies. Also hear some interesting industry-specific use cases that customers had implemented and how Oracle is integrating Coherence into its Enterprise Java stack. Salon C 11:30 am - 12:15 pm Breakout Sessions (pick one) Enterprise Strategy for Cloud Security | Dave Chappelle Security is high on the list of concerns for many organizations as they evaluate their cloud computing options. This session will examine security in the context of the various forms of cloud computing. We'll consider technical and non-technical aspects of security, and discuss several strategies for cloud computing, from both the consumer and producer perspectives. Salon E Oracle Enterprise Manager | Avi Huber Much more than a DB management tool, Oracle Enterprise Manager provides management and monitoring coverage for the entire Oracle stack, and beyond. This session will concentrate on the middleware management functionality in OEM, starting with Real User Experience monitoring, through AppServer management, and into deep-dive Java diagnostics. We’ll discuss Business Driven Application Management (BDAM) and the benefits of top-down monitoring. Lastly, we’ll demonstrate how to trace a specific user experience problem, through a multitier SOA application, to its root cause, deep in the JVM. Salon C 12:15 pm - 1:15 pm Lunch Salon E Foyer 1:15 pm - 2:00 pm Panel Discussion - Q&A with session speakers Salon E 2:00 pm - 2:45 pm Breakout Sessions (pick one) Oracle Cloud Reference Architecture | Anbu Krishnaswamy Cloud initiatives are beginning to dominate enterprise IT roadmaps. Successful adoption of Cloud and the subsequent governance challenges warrant a Cloud reference architecture that is applied consistently across the enterprise. This presentation will answer the important questions: What exactly is a Cloud, why you need it, what changes it will bring to the enterprise, and what are the key capabilities of a Cloud infrastructure are - using Oracle's Cloud Reference Architecture, which is part of the IT Strategies from Oracle (ITSO) Cloud Enterprise Technology Strategy (ETS). Salon E 21st Century SOA | Peter Belknap Service Oriented Architecture has evolved from concept to reality in the last decade. The right methodology coupled with mature SOA technologies has helped customers demonstrate success in both innovation and ROI. In this session you will learn how Oracle SOA Suite's orchestration, virtualization, and governance capabilities provide the infrastructure to run mission critical business and system applications. And we'll take a special look at the convergence of SOA & BPM using Oracle's Unified technology stack. Salon C 2:45 pm - 3:00 pm Break 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm Roundtable Discussion Salon E 4:00 pm - 4:15 pm Closing Comments & Readouts from Roundtables Salon E 4:15 pm - 5:00 pm Networking / Reception Salon E Foyer Note: Session schedule and content subject to change.

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• Explaining Explain Plan Notes for Auto DOP

  - by jean-pierre.dijcks

  I've recently gotten some questions around "why do I not see a parallel plan" while Auto DOP is on (I think)...? It is probably worthwhile to quickly go over some of the ways to find out what Auto DOP was thinking. In general, there is no need to go tracing sessions and look under the hood. The thing to start with is to do an explain plan on your statement and to look at the parameter settings on the system. Parameter Settings to Look At First and foremost, make sure that parallel_degree_policy = AUTO. If you have that parameter set to LIMITED you will not have queuing and we will only do the auto magic if your objects are set to default parallel (so no degree specified). Next you want to look at the value of parallel_degree_limit. It is typically set to CPU, which in default settings equates to the Default DOP of the system. If you are testing Auto DOP itself and the impact it has on performance you may want to leave it at this CPU setting. If you are running concurrent statements you may want to give this some more thoughts. See here for more information. In general, do stick with either CPU or with a specific number. For now avoid the IO setting as I've seen some mixed results with that... In 11.2.0.2 you should also check that IO Calibrate has been run. Best to simply do a: SQL> select * from V$IO_CALIBRATION_STATUS; STATUS        CALIBRATION_TIME ------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------- READY         04-JAN-11 10.04.13.104 AM You should see that your IO Calibrate is READY and therefore Auto DOP is ready. In any case, if you did not run the IO Calibrate step you will get the following note in the explain plan: Note -----    - automatic DOP: skipped because of IO calibrate statistics are missing One more note on calibrate_io, if you do not have asynchronous IO enabled you will see:  ERROR at line 1: ORA-56708: Could not find any datafiles with asynchronous i/o capability ORA-06512: at "SYS.DBMS_RMIN", line 463 ORA-06512: at "SYS.DBMS_RESOURCE_MANAGER", line 1296 ORA-06512: at line 7 While this is changed in some fixes to the calibrate procedure, you should really consider switching asynchronous IO on for your data warehouse. Explain Plan Explanation To see the notes that are shown and explained here (and the above little snippet ) you can use a simple explain plan mechanism. There should  be no need to add +parallel etc. explain plan for <statement> SELECT PLAN_TABLE_OUTPUT FROM TABLE(DBMS_XPLAN.DISPLAY()); Auto DOP The note structure displaying why Auto DOP did not work (with the exception noted above on IO Calibrate) is like this: Automatic degree of parallelism is disabled: <reason> These are the reason codes: Parameter -  parallel_degree_policy = manual which will not allow Auto DOP to kick in  Hint - One of the following hints are used NOPARALLEL, PARALLEL(1), PARALLEL(MANUAL) Outline - A SQL outline of an older version (before 11.2) is used SQL property restriction - The statement type does not allow for parallel processing Rule-based mode - Instead of the Cost Based Optimizer the system is using the RBO Recursive SQL statement - The statement type does not allow for parallel processing pq disabled/pdml disabled/pddl disabled - For some reason (alter session?) parallelism is disabled Limited mode but no parallel objects referenced - your parallel_degree_policy = LIMITED and no objects in the statement are decorated with the default PARALLEL degree. In most cases all objects have a specific degree in which case Auto DOP will honor that degree. Parallel Degree Limited When Auto DOP does it works you may see the cap you imposed with parallel_degree_limit showing up in the note section of the explain plan: Note -----    - automatic DOP: Computed Degree of Parallelism is 16 because of degree limit This is an obvious indication that your are being capped for this statement. There is one quite interesting one that happens when you are being capped at DOP = 1. First of you get a serial plan and the note changes slightly in that it does not indicate it is being capped (we hope to update the note at some point in time to be more specific). It right now looks like this: Note -----    - automatic DOP: Computed Degree of Parallelism is 1 Dynamic Sampling With 11.2.0.2 you will start seeing another interesting change in parallel plans, and since we are talking about the note section here, I figured we throw this in for good measure. If we deem the parallel (!) statement complex enough, we will enact dynamic sampling on your query. This happens as long as you did not change the default for dynamic sampling on the system. The note looks like this: Note ----- - dynamic sampling used for this statement (level=5)

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• A little primer on using TFS with a small team

  - by johndoucette

  The scenario; A small team of 3 developers mostly in maintenance mode with traditional ASP.net, classic ASP, .Net integration services and utilities with the company’s third party packages, and a bunch of java-based Coldfusion web applications all under Visual Source Safe (VSS). They are about to embark on a huge SharePoint 2010 new construction project and wanted to use subversion instead VSS. TFS was a foreign word and smelled of “high cost” and of an “over complicated process”. Since they had no preconditions about the old TFS versions (‘05 & ‘08), it was fun explaining how simple it was to install a TFS server and get the ball rolling, with or without all the heavy stuff one sometimes associates with such a huge and powerful application management lifecycle product. So, how does a small team begin using TFS? 1. Start by using source control and migrate current VSS source trees into TFS. You can take the latest version or migrate the entire version history. It’s up to you on whether you want a clean start or need quick access to all the version notes and history of the bits. 2. Since most shops are mainly in maintenance mode with existing applications, begin using bug workitems for everything. When you receive an issue/bug from your current tracking system, manually enter the workitem in TFS right through Visual Studio. You can automate the integration to the current tracking system later or replace it entirely. Believe me, this thing is powerful and can handle even the largest of help desks. 3. With new construction, begin work with requirements and task workitems and follow the traditional sprint-based development lifecycle. Obviously, some minor training will be needed, but don’t fear, this is very intuitive and MSDN has a ton of lesson based labs and videos. 4. For the java developers, use the new Team Explorer Everywhere 2010 plugin (recently known as Teamprise). There is a seamless interface in Eclipse, but also a good command-line utility for other environments such as Dreamweaver. 5. Wait to fully integrate the whole workitem/project management/testing process until your team is familiar with the integrated workitems for bugs and code. After a while, you will see the team wanting more transparency into the work they are all doing and naturally, everyone will want workitems to help them organize the chaos! 6. Management will be limited in the value of the reports until you have a fully blown implementation of project planning, construction, build, deployment and testing. However, there are some basic “bug rate” reports and current backlog listings that can provide good information. Some notable explanations of TFS; Work Item Tracking and Project Management - A workitem represents the unit of work within the system which enables tracking of all activities produced by a user, whether it is a developer, business user, project manager or tester. The properties of a workitem such as linked changesets (checked-in code), who updated the data and when, the states and reasons for change, are all transitioned to a data warehouse within TFS for reporting purposes. A workitem can be defines as a "bug", "requirement", test case", or a "change request". They drive the work effort by the individual assigned to it and also provide a key role in defining what needs to be done. Workitems are the things the team needs to do to accomplish a goal. Test Case Management - Starting with a workitem known as a "test case", a tester (or developer) can now author and manage test cases within a formal test plan subsystem. Although TFS supports the test case workitem type, there is a new product known as the VS Test Professional 2010 which allows a tester to facilitate manual tests including fast forwarding steps in the process to arrive at the assertion point quickly. This repeatable process provides quick regression tests and can be conducted by the business user to ensure completeness during UAT. In addition, developers no longer can provide a response to a bug with the line "cannot reproduce". With every test run, attachments including the recorded session, captured environment configurations and settings, screen shots, intellitrace (debugging history), and in some cases if the lab manager is being used, a snapshot of the tested environment is available. Version Control - A modern system allowing shared check-in/check-out, excellent merge conflict resolution, Shelvesets (personal check-ins), branching/merging visualization, public workspaces, gated check-ins, security hierarchy capabilities, and changeset/workitem tracking. Knowing what was done with the code by any developer has become much easier to picture and resolve issues. Team Build - Automate the compilation process whether you need it to be whenever a developer checks-in code, periodically such as nightly builds for testers in the morning, or manual builds to be deployed into production. Each build can run through pre-determined tests, perform code analysis to see if the developer conforms to the team standards, and reject the build if either fails. Project Portal & Reporting - Provide management with a dashboard with insight into the project(s). "Where are we" in each step of the way including past iterations and the current burndown rate. Enabling this feature is easy as it seamlessly interfaces with existing SharePoint implementations.

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• Windows Azure Recipe: Software as a Service (SaaS)

  - by Clint Edmonson

  The cloud was tailor built for aspiring companies to create innovative internet based applications and solutions. Whether you’re a garage startup with very little capital or a Fortune 1000 company, the ability to quickly setup, deliver, and iterate on new products is key to capturing market and mind share. And if you can capture that share and go viral, having resiliency and infinite scale at your finger tips is great peace of mind. Drivers Cost avoidance Time to market Scalability Solution Here’s a sketch of how a basic Software as a Service solution might be built out: Ingredients Web Role – this hosts the core web application. Each web role will host an instance of the software and as the user base grows, additional roles can be spun up to meet demand. Access Control – this service is essential to managing user identity. It’s backed by a full blown implementation of Active Directory and allows the definition and management of users, groups, and roles. A pre-built ASP.NET membership provider is included in the training kit to leverage this capability but it’s also flexible enough to be combined with external Identity providers including Windows LiveID, Google, Yahoo!, and Facebook. The provider model provides extensibility to hook into other industry specific identity providers as well. Databases – nearly every modern SaaS application is backed by a relational database for its core operational data. If the solution is sold to organizations, there’s a good chance multi-tenancy will be needed. An emerging best practice for SaaS applications is to stand up separate SQL Azure database instances for each tenant’s proprietary data to ensure isolation from other tenants. Worker Role – this is the best place to handle autonomous background processing such as data aggregation, billing through external services, and other specialized tasks that can be performed asynchronously. Placing these tasks in a worker role frees the web roles to focus completely on user interaction and data input and provides finer grained control over the system’s scalability and throughput. Caching (optional) – as a web site traffic grows caching can be leveraged to keep frequently used read-only, user specific, and application resource data in a high-speed distributed in-memory for faster response times and ultimately higher scalability without spinning up more web and worker roles. It includes a token based security model that works alongside the Access Control service. Blobs (optional) – depending on the nature of the software, users may be creating or uploading large volumes of heterogeneous data such as documents or rich media. Blob storage provides a scalable, resilient way to store terabytes of user data. The storage facilities can also integrate with the Access Control service to ensure users’ data is delivered securely. Training & Examples These links point to online Windows Azure training labs and examples where you can learn more about the individual ingredients described above. (Note: The entire Windows Azure Training Kit can also be downloaded for offline use.) Windows Azure (16 labs) Windows Azure is an internet-scale cloud computing and services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services which can be used individually or together. It gives developers the choice to build web applications; applications running on connected devices, PCs, or servers; or hybrid solutions offering the best of both worlds. New or enhanced applications can be built using existing skills with the Visual Studio development environment and the .NET Framework. With its standards-based and interoperable approach, the services platform supports multiple internet protocols, including HTTP, REST, SOAP, and plain XML SQL Azure (7 labs) Microsoft SQL Azure delivers on the Microsoft Data Platform vision of extending the SQL Server capabilities to the cloud as web-based services, enabling you to store structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Windows Azure Services (9 labs) As applications collaborate across organizational boundaries, ensuring secure transactions across disparate security domains is crucial but difficult to implement. Windows Azure Services provides hosted authentication and access control using powerful, secure, standards-based infrastructure. Developing Applications for the Cloud, 2nd Edition (eBook) This book demonstrates how you can create from scratch a multi-tenant, Software as a Service (SaaS) application to run in the cloud using the latest versions of the Windows Azure Platform and tools. The book is intended for any architect, developer, or information technology (IT) professional who designs, builds, or operates applications and services that run on or interact with the cloud. Fabrikam Shipping (SaaS reference application) This is a full end to end sample scenario which demonstrates how to use the Windows Azure platform for exposing an application as a service. We developed this demo just as you would: we had an existing on-premises sample, Fabrikam Shipping, and we wanted to see what it would take to transform it in a full subscription based solution. The demo you find here is the result of that investigation See my Windows Azure Resource Guide for more guidance on how to get started, including more links web portals, training kits, samples, and blogs related to Windows Azure.

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• Manage Your Amazon S3 Account with CloudBerry Explorer

  - by Mysticgeek

  If you have an Amazon S3 account you’re using to backup your data, you might want an easy way to manage it. CloudBerry Explorer is a free app that runs on your desktop an provides an easy way to manage your S3 account. Installation and Setup Just download and install the application with the defaults. When the application launches you’ll be prompted to enter in your username and email to get a registration key. Or you can continue on by clicking Register later. Now you will want to set up your Amazon S3 account. Click on File \ Amazon S3 Accounts. Double-click on the New Account icon.   Next enter in your Amazon account Access and Secret keys, select SSL if you want, then click the Test Connection button. Provided everything was entered correctly, you’ll see the Connection Success screen, just close out of it. Browse and Manage files Once you have your account setup through the Explorer, you can start viewing and managing your files on S3. The left pane shows your S3 buckets and stored files, while the right side shows your local computer. This allows you to manage your files in your Amazon S3 buckets directly from your desktop! It’s very easy to use, and you can drag and drop files from your computer to the S3 account or vice versa. There is also the ability to transfer files between Amazon S3 accounts from within the explorer. Go into Tools and Content Types and you can control the file types by adding, removing, or editing them. If you end up messing something up along the lines, you can always select Reset to defaults and everything will be back to normal. There is a multiple tabbed view so you can easily keep track of your different accounts and local machine. It allows the ability to create new storage buckets directly in the Explorer. Or you can delete buckets as well… Different actions can be accessed from the toolbars or by right-clicking and selecting from the context menu. Here we see a cool option that lets you move your data inside Amazon S3. It is faster and doesn’t cost money by moving the files to your computer first, then to another account. However, if you want data moved to your local machine first, you have that option as well.   Not all features are available in the free version, and if it’s not, you’ll be prompted to purchase a license for the Pro version. We will have a comprehensive review of the Pro version in the near future.    If you ever need help with CloudBerry Explorer, go to Tools \ Diagnostics. It will run a quick diagnostics check and you can send the information to the CloudBerry team for assistance. Delete Files from Amazon S3 To delete a file from you Amazon S3 account, simply highlight the files or folder you want to get rid of then click Delete on the toolbar. You can also right-click the file and select Delete from the Context Menu. Click Yes to the confirmation dialog box… Then you can watch the progress as your files are deleted in the bottom section of the explorer. Conclusion CloudBerry Explorer free version has several neat features that will allow you easy and basic control over you Amazon S3 account. The free version may be enough for basic users, but power users will want to upgrade to the pro version, as it includes a lot more features. Using the free version allows you to get a feel for what CloudBerry Explorer has to offer, and is a good starting point. Keep in mind that Amazon S3 is introducing Reduced Redundancy Storage which will lower the price of data stored. The price drops from $0.15 per GB to only $0.10 per GB. If you’re a Windows Home Server user, check out our review of CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for WHS. Download CloudBerry Explorer Free for Amazon S3 Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home ServerReopen Closed Tabs in Internet ExplorerPreview and Purchase Ebooks with Kindle for PCTroubleshoot and Manage Addons in Internet Explorer 8Beginner Geek: Delete User Accounts in Windows 7 TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 VMware Workstation 7 Google TV The iPod Revolution Ultimate Boot CD can help when disaster strikes Windows Firewall with Advanced Security – How To Guides Sculptris 1.0, 3D Drawing app AceStock, a Tiny Desktop Quote Monitor

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• Death March

  - by Nick Harrison

  It is a horrible sight to watch a project fail. There are few things as bad. Watching a project fail regardless of the reason is almost like sitting in a room with a "Dementor" from Harry Potter. It will literally suck all of the life and joy out of the room. Nearly every project that I have seen fail has failed because of political challenges or management challenges. Sometimes there are technical challenges that bring a project to its knees, but usually projects fail for less technical reasons. Here a few observations about projects failing for political reasons. Both the client and the consultants have to be committed to seeing the project succeed. Put simply, you cannot solve a problem when the primary stake holders do not truly want it solved. This could come from a consultant being more interested in extended the engagement. It could come from a client being afraid of what will happen to them once the problem is solved. It could come from disenfranchised stake holders. Sometimes a project is beset on all sides. When you find yourself working on a project that has this kind of threat, do all that you can to constrain the disruptive influences of the bad apples. If their influence cannot be constrained, you truly have no choice but to move on to a new project. Tough choices have to be made to make a project successful. These choices will affect everyone involved in the project. These choices may involve users not getting a change request through that they want. Developers may not get to use the tools that they want. Everyone may have to put in more hours that they originally planned. Steps may be skipped. Compromises will be made, but if everyone stays committed to the end goal, you can still be successful. If individuals start feeling disgruntled or resentful of the compromises reached, the project can easily be derailed. When everyone is not working towards a common goal, it is like driving with one foot on the break and one foot on the accelerator. Not only will you not get to where you are planning, you will also damage the car and possibly the passengers as well.   It is important to always keep the end result in mind. Regardless of the development methodology being followed, the end goal is not comprehensive documentation. In all cases, it is working software. Comprehensive documentation is nice but useless if the software doesn't work.   You can never get so distracted by the next goal that you fail to meet the current goal. Most projects are ultimately marathons. This means that the pace must be sustainable. Regardless of the temptations, you cannot burn the team alive. Processes will fail. Technology will get outdated. Requirements will change, but your people will adapt and learn and grow. If everyone on the team from the most senior analyst to the most junior recruit trusts and respects each other, there is no challenge that they cannot overcome. When everyone involved faces challenges with the attitude "This is my project and I will not let it fail" "You are my teammate and I will not let you fail", you will in fact not fail. When you find a team that embraces this attitude, protect it at all cost. Edward Yourdon wrote a book called Death March. In it, he included a graph for categorizing Death March project types based on the Happiness of the Team and the Chances of Success.   Chances are we have all worked on Death March projects. We will all most likely work on more Death March projects in the future. To a certain extent, they seem to be inevitable, but they should never be suicide or ugly. Ideally, they can all be "Mission Impossible" where everyone works hard, has fun, and knows that there is good chance that they will succeed. If you are ever lucky enough to work on such a project, you will know that sense of pride that comes from the eventual success. You will recognize a profound bond with the team that you worked with. Chances are it will change your life or at least your outlook on life. If you have not already read this book, get a copy and study it closely. It will help you survive and make the most out of your next Death March project.

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• How to get paid and figure out if I want to keep this client [migrated]

  - by Heiner Fawkes

  I have a client who is not paying on time, but it looks like the specifics don't match similar questions on this SE site. I got a call from a client I did website work for years ago. I had not done this kind of work for many years and frankly I'm not sure I want to now, but nevertheless about a month ago I agreed to bring his website, SEO, social media, and overall marketing for his small business up to speed. Why? He has told me many times how I'm the most honest, most well-informed contractor he's had experience with. And I personally kind of like him too. So I started working on an hourly basis. I sent one very small invoice and got paid. Then we talked a whole lot about all sorts of feature he would like me to implement. I started that work, and sent a second invoice on the first of the month (one of my two stated billing days). I didn't get paid. On every invoice it states that I charge a whopping ten percent per week late. I sent many voicemails and emails asking to please let me know what's going on with payment, and didn't get replies. Then the 15th of the month rolled around (which I stated initially as one of my invoicing dates). Since I hadn't been paid for the last invoice, I simply didn't send him an invoice at that time but emailed him and said that I will combine it with the next scheduled invoice for this reason (probably a bad idea I realize). Eventually he sent a portion of the invoice payment. I emailed back to let him know that he's three weeks late and what the remaining balance is. Finally we got in touch via phone. He basically told me that he thought I hadn't done all of the work I said I did. He looked at the page source code and it didn't look complete to him. I explained why his perception would be different and what work I had done as specified. He accepted this and said that part of the reason he didn't pay in full is that he's been swamped with personal family stuff, and part of the reason is that he didn't think I did all the work. That struck me as pretty weird. He also expressed concern that he has no idea now how much all the changes he has asked for are going to cost. And once again, he told me how honest and high-quality my services are compared to others he has dealt with. He also said he would pay me more (but not all) of the now three weeks overdue invoice that day. I didn't receive any payment. Basically this is how the client relationship strikes me: He's not good at communication. He's very busy and English isn't his first language. He almost never replies to emails but phone calls are fine. He's asked me to avoid emails for communication and I've asked him to please use email. He might not have enough money to afford all the things he has asked for. But so far I have been working for an hourly fee (which is quite high). He also has started paying monthly for hosting and social media services from me. What seems very abnormal is for a client to be so overdue on payments and to actually withhold payment of an invoice without any communication because he didn't think the work was done. I told him that I will send dollar estimates of each module of remaining work so that we can decide which ones are the highest priority if he cannot afford them all. I also reiterated that in the future if he has doubts about the work or an inability to pay, he must contact me immediately to say so. I basically plan to state the following to him: I would like to work for him and help his business. I also have sympathy for his recent family difficulties. I am happy to figure out payment plans that would work better for him, but first I need to be paid in full for all outstanding invoices, especially given that I skipped one of them just to be nice. The most crucial thing I need is communication about any problems with my work or his ability to pay. Once again, he heeds to pay in full immediately before we negotiate anything else. Does the above seem like an appropriate communication? Is anything missing from it? Is anything I'm doing here really abnormal?

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• PASS: Board Q&amp;A at the Summit

  - by Bill Graziano

  The last two years we’ve put the Board in front of the members and taken questions.  We’re going to do that again this year.  It will be in Room 307/308 from 12:15 to 1:30 on Friday. Yes, this time overlaps with the Birds of a Feather Lunch and the start of afternoon sessions – but only partially.  You can attend the Q&A and still get to parts of both of those.  There just isn’t a great time to do this.  Every time overlaps with something. We can’t do it after the last session on Friday.  We can’t fit it between the last session and the evening events on Wednesday or Thursday.  We had some discussion around breakfast time but I didn’t think that was realistic.  This is the least bad time we could come up with. Last year we had 60-70 people attend.  These are the items that were specific things that I could work on: The first question was whether to increase transparency around individual votes of Board members.  We approved this at the Board meeting the following day.  The only caveat was that if the Board is given confidential information as a basis for their vote then we may not be able to disclose individual votes.  Putting a Director in a position where they can’t publicly defend the reason for their vote is a difficult situation.  Thanks Kendal! Can we have a Board member discretionary fund?  As background, I took a couple of people to lunch so we could have a quiet place to talk.  I bought lunch but wasn’t able to expense it back to PASS.  We just don’t have a budget item for things like this.  I think we should.  I would guess the entire Board would like it also.  It was in an earlier version of the budget but came out as part of a cost-cutting move to balance the budget.  I’d like to see it added back in but we’ll have to see. I know there were a comments about the elections.  At this point we had created the Election Review Committee.  I’ve already written at length about this process. Where does IT work go?  PASS started to publish our internal management reports starting in December 2010.  You can find them on our Governance page.  These aren’t filtered at all and include a variety of information about IT projects.  The most recent update had roughly a page of updates related to IT.  Lots of the work was related to Summit and the Orator tool that we use to manage speaker submissions. There were numerous requests that Tina Turner not be repeated.  Done.  I don’t think we’ll do anything quite like that again.  We had a request for a payment plan for Summit.  We looked into this briefly but didn’t take any action.  We didn’t think the effort was worth the small number of people that would use it.  If you disagree, submit this on our Summit Feedback site and get some votes. There were lots of suggestions around the first-timers events – especially from first timers.  You can find all our current activities related to first-timers at the First Timers page on the Summit web site.  Plus links to 34 (!) blog posts on suggestions for first-timers.  And a big THANK YOU to Confio and Red Gate for sponsoring this. I hope you get the chance to attend.  These events are very helpful to me as a Board member.  I like being able to look around the room as comments are being made and see the audience reaction.  It helps me gauge the interest in an idea. I’d also like to direct you to the Summit Feedback site.  You can submit and vote on ideas to make the Summit a better experience.  As of right now we have the suggestions from last year still up.  We may reset these prior to the Summit though.

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• Highlights from the Oracle Customer Experience Summit @ OpenWorld

  - by Kathryn Perry

  A guest post by David Vap, Group Vice President, Oracle Applications Product Development The Oracle Customer Experience Summit was the first-ever event covering the full breadth of Oracle's CX portfolio -- Marketing, Sales, Commerce, and Service. The purpose of the Summit was to articulate the customer experience imperative and to showcase the suite of Oracle products that can help our customers create the best possible customer experience. This topic has always been a very important one, but now that there are so many alternative companies to do business with and because people have such public ways to voice their displeasure, it's necessary for vendors to have multiple listening posts in place to gauge consumer sentiment. They need to know what is going on in real time and be able to react quickly to turn negative situations into positive ones. Those can then be shared in a social manner to enhance the brand and turn the customer into a repeat customer. The Summit was focused on Oracle's portfolio of products and entirely dedicated to customers who are committed to building great customer experiences within their businesses. Rather than DBAs, the attendees were business people looking to collaborate with other like-minded experts and find out how Oracle can help in terms of technology, best practices, and expertise. The event was at the Westin St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco as part of Oracle OpenWorld. We had eight hundred people attend, which was great for the first year. Next year, there's no doubt in my mind, we can raise that number to 5,000. Alignment and Logic Oracle's Customer Experience portfolio is made up of a combination of acquired and organic products owned by many people who are new to Oracle. We include homegrown Fusion CRM, as well as RightNow, Inquira, OPA, Vitrue, ATG, Endeca, and many others. The attendees knew of the acquisitions, so naturally they wanted to see how the products all fit together and hear the logic behind the portfolio. To tell them about our alignment, we needed to be aligned. To accomplish that, a cross functional team at Oracle agreed on the messaging so that every single Oracle presenter could cover the big picture before going deep into a product or topic. Talking about the full suite of products in one session produced overflow value for other products. And even though this internal coordination was a huge effort, everyone saw the value for our customers and for our long-term cooperation and success. Keynotes, Workshops, and Tents of Innovation We scored by having Seth Godin as our keynote speaker ? always provocative and popular. The opening keynote was a session orchestrated by Mark Hurd, Anthony Lye, and me. Mark set the stage by giving real-world examples of bad customer experiences, Anthony clearly articulated the business imperative for addressing these experiences, and I brought it all to life by taking the audience around the Customer Lifecycle and showing demos and videos, with partners included at each of the stops around the lifecycle. Brian Curran, a VP for RightNow Product Strategy, presented a session that was in high demand called The Economics of Customer Experience. People loved hearing how to build a business case and justify the cost of building a better customer experience. John Kembel, another VP for RightNow Product Strategy, held a workshop that customers raved about. It was based on the journey mapping methodology he created, which is a way to talk to customers about where they want to make improvements to their customers' experiences. He divided the audience into groups led by facilitators. Each person had the opportunity to engage with experts and peers and construct some real takeaways. From left to right: Brian Curran, John Kembel, Seth Godin, and George Kembel The conference hotel was across from Union Square so we used that space to set up Innovation Tents. During the day we served lunch in the tents and partners showed their different innovative ideas. It was very interesting to see all the technologies and advancements. It also gave people a place to mix and mingle and to think about the fringe of where we could all take these ideas. Product Portfolio Plus Thought Leadership Of course there is always room for improvement, but the feedback on the format of the conference was positive. Ninety percent of the sessions had either a partner or a customer teamed with an Oracle presenter. The presentations weren't dry, one-way information dumps, but more interactive. I just followed up with a CEO who attended the conference with his Head of Marketing. He told me that they are using John Kembel's journey mapping methodology across the organization to pull people together. This sort of thought leadership in these highly competitive areas gives Oracle permission to engage around the technology. We have to differentiate ourselves and it's harder to do on the product side because everyone looks the same on paper. But on thought leadership ? we can, and did, take some really big steps. David VapGroup Vice PresidentOracle Applications Product Development

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• Reference Data Management and Master Data: Are Relation ?

  - by Mala Narasimharajan

  Submitted By:  Rahul Kamath  Oracle Data Relationship Management (DRM) has always been extremely powerful as an Enterprise Master Data Management (MDM) solution that can help manage changes to master data in a way that influences enterprise structure, whether it be mastering chart of accounts to enable financial transformation, or revamping organization structures to drive business transformation and operational efficiencies, or restructuring sales territories to enable equitable distribution of leads to sales teams following the acquisition of new products, or adding additional cost centers to enable fine grain control over expenses. Increasingly, DRM is also being utilized by Oracle customers for reference data management, an emerging solution space that deserves some explanation. What is reference data? How does it relate to Master Data? Reference data is a close cousin of master data. While master data is challenged with problems of unique identification, may be more rapidly changing, requires consensus building across stakeholders and lends structure to business transactions, reference data is simpler, more slowly changing, but has semantic content that is used to categorize or group other information assets – including master data – and gives them contextual value. In fact, the creation of a new master data element may require new reference data to be created. For example, when a European company acquires a US business, chances are that they will now need to adapt their product line taxonomy to include a new category to describe the newly acquired US product line. Further, the cross-border transaction will also result in a revised geo hierarchy. The addition of new products represents changes to master data while changes to product categories and geo hierarchy are examples of reference data changes.1 The following table contains an illustrative list of examples of reference data by type. Reference data types may include types and codes, business taxonomies, complex relationships & cross-domain mappings or standards. Types & Codes Taxonomies Relationships / Mappings Standards Transaction Codes Industry Classification Categories and Codes, e.g., North America Industry Classification System (NAICS) Product / Segment; Product / Geo Calendars (e.g., Gregorian, Fiscal, Manufacturing, Retail, ISO8601) Lookup Tables (e.g., Gender, Marital Status, etc.) Product Categories City à State à Postal Codes Currency Codes (e.g., ISO) Status Codes Sales Territories (e.g., Geo, Industry Verticals, Named Accounts, Federal/State/Local/Defense) Customer / Market Segment; Business Unit / Channel Country Codes (e.g., ISO 3166, UN) Role Codes Market Segments Country Codes / Currency Codes / Financial Accounts Date/Time, Time Zones (e.g., ISO 8601) Domain Values Universal Standard Products and Services Classification (UNSPSC), eCl@ss International Classification of Diseases (ICD) e.g., ICD9 à IC10 mappings Tax Rates Why manage reference data? Reference data carries contextual value and meaning and therefore its use can drive business logic that helps execute a business process, create a desired application behavior or provide meaningful segmentation to analyze transaction data. Further, mapping reference data often requires human judgment. Sample Use Cases of Reference Data Management Healthcare: Diagnostic Codes The reference data challenges in the healthcare industry offer a case in point. Part of being HIPAA compliant requires medical practitioners to transition diagnosis codes from ICD-9 to ICD-10, a medical coding scheme used to classify diseases, signs and symptoms, causes, etc. The transition to ICD-10 has a significant impact on business processes, procedures, contracts, and IT systems. Since both code sets ICD-9 and ICD-10 offer diagnosis codes of very different levels of granularity, human judgment is required to map ICD-9 codes to ICD-10. The process requires collaboration and consensus building among stakeholders much in the same way as does master data management. Moreover, to build reports to understand utilization, frequency and quality of diagnoses, medical practitioners may need to “cross-walk” mappings -- either forward to ICD-10 or backwards to ICD-9 depending upon the reporting time horizon. Spend Management: Product, Service & Supplier Codes Similarly, as an enterprise looks to rationalize suppliers and leverage their spend, conforming supplier codes, as well as product and service codes requires supporting multiple classification schemes that may include industry standards (e.g., UNSPSC, eCl@ss) or enterprise taxonomies. Aberdeen Group estimates that 90% of companies rely on spreadsheets and manual reviews to aggregate, classify and analyze spend data, and that data management activities account for 12-15% of the sourcing cycle and consume 30-50% of a commodity manager’s time. Creating a common map across the extended enterprise to rationalize codes across procurement, accounts payable, general ledger, credit card, procurement card (P-card) as well as ACH and bank systems can cut sourcing costs, improve compliance, lower inventory stock, and free up talent to focus on value added tasks. Change Management: Point of Sales Transaction Codes and Product Codes In the specialty finance industry, enterprises are confronted with usury laws – governed at the state and local level – that regulate financial product innovation as it relates to consumer loans, check cashing and pawn lending. To comply, it is important to demonstrate that transactions booked at the point of sale are posted against valid product codes that were on offer at the time of booking the sale. Since new products are being released at a steady stream, it is important to ensure timely and accurate mapping of point-of-sale transaction codes with the appropriate product and GL codes to comply with the changing regulations. Multi-National Companies: Industry Classification Schemes As companies grow and expand across geographies, a typical challenge they encounter with reference data represents reconciling various versions of industry classification schemes in use across nations. While the United States, Mexico and Canada conform to the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) standard, European Union countries choose different variants of the NACE industry classification scheme. Multi-national companies must manage the individual national NACE schemes and reconcile the differences across countries. Enterprises must invest in a reference data change management application to address the challenge of distributing reference data changes to downstream applications and assess which applications were impacted by a given change. References 1 Master Data versus Reference Data, Malcolm Chisholm, April 1, 2006.

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• Organization &amp; Architecture UNISA Studies &ndash; Chap 5

  - by MarkPearl

  Learning Outcomes Describe the operation of a memory cell Explain the difference between DRAM and SRAM Discuss the different types of ROM Explain the concepts of a hard failure and a soft error respectively Describe SDRAM organization Semiconductor Main Memory The two traditional forms of RAM used in computers are DRAM and SRAM DRAM (Dynamic RAM) Divided into two technologies… Dynamic Static Dynamic RAM is made with cells that store data as charge on capacitors. The presence or absence of charge in a capacitor is interpreted as a binary 1 or 0. Because capacitors have natural tendency to discharge, dynamic RAM requires periodic charge refreshing to maintain data storage. The term dynamic refers to the tendency of the stored charge to leak away, even with power continuously applied. Although the DRAM cell is used to store a single bit (0 or 1), it is essentially an analogue device. The capacitor can store any charge value within a range, a threshold value determines whether the charge is interpreted as a 1 or 0. SRAM (Static RAM) SRAM is a digital device that uses the same logic elements used in the processor. In SRAM, binary values are stored using traditional flip flop logic configurations. SRAM will hold its data as along as power is supplied to it. Unlike DRAM, no refresh is required to retain data. SRAM vs. DRAM DRAM is simpler and smaller than SRAM. Thus it is more dense and less expensive than SRAM. The cost of the refreshing circuitry for DRAM needs to be considered, but if the machine requires a large amount of memory, DRAM turns out to be cheaper than SRAM. SRAMS are somewhat faster than DRAM, thus SRAM is generally used for cache memory and DRAM is used for main memory. Types of ROM Read Only Memory (ROM) contains a permanent pattern of data that cannot be changed. ROM is non volatile meaning no power source is required to maintain the bit values in memory. While it is possible to read a ROM, it is not possible to write new data into it. An important application of ROM is microprogramming, other applications include library subroutines for frequently wanted functions, System programs, Function tables. A ROM is created like any other integrated circuit chip, with the data actually wired into the chip as part of the fabrication process. To reduce costs of fabrication, we have PROMS. PROMS are… Written only once Non-volatile Written after fabrication Another variation of ROM is the read-mostly memory, which is useful for applications in which read operations are far more frequent than write operations, but for which non volatile storage is required. There are three common forms of read-mostly memory, namely… EPROM EEPROM Flash memory Error Correction Semiconductor memory is subject to errors, which can be classed into two categories… Hard failure – Permanent physical defect so that the memory cell or cells cannot reliably store data Soft failure – Random error that alters the contents of one or more memory cells without damaging the memory (common cause includes power supply issues, etc.) Most modern main memory systems include logic for both detecting and correcting errors. Error detection works as follows… When data is to be read into memory, a calculation is performed on the data to produce a code Both the code and the data are stored When the previously stored word is read out, the code is used to detect and possibly correct errors The error checking provides one of 3 possible results… No errors are detected – the fetched data bits are sent out An error is detected, and it is possible to correct the error. The data bits plus error correction bits are fed into a corrector, which produces a corrected set of bits to be sent out An error is detected, but it is not possible to correct it. This condition is reported Hamming Code See wiki for detailed explanation. We will probably need to know how to do a hemming code – refer to the textbook (pg. 188 – 189) Advanced DRAM organization One of the most critical system bottlenecks when using high-performance processors is the interface to main memory. This interface is the most important pathway in the entire computer system. The basic building block of main memory remains the DRAM chip. In recent years a number of enhancements to the basic DRAM architecture have been explored, and some of these are now on the market including… SDRAM (Synchronous DRAM) DDR-DRAM RDRAM SDRAM (Synchronous DRAM) SDRAM exchanges data with the processor synchronized to an external clock signal and running at the full speed of the processor/memory bus without imposing wait states. SDRAM employs a burst mode to eliminate the address setup time and row and column line precharge time after the first access In burst mode a series of data bits can be clocked out rapidly after the first bit has been accessed SDRAM has a multiple bank internal architecture that improves opportunities for on chip parallelism SDRAM performs best when it is transferring large blocks of data serially There is now an enhanced version of SDRAM known as double data rate SDRAM or DDR-SDRAM that overcomes the once-per-cycle limitation of SDRAM

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• Declarative Architectures in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

  - by BuckWoody

  I deal with computing architectures by first laying out requirements, and then laying in any constraints for it's success. Only then do I bring in computing elements to apply to the system. As an example, a requirement might be "world-side availability" and a constraint might be "with less than 80ms response time and full HA" or something similar. Then I can choose from the best fit of technologies which range from full-up on-premises computing to IaaS, PaaS or SaaS. I also deal in abstraction layers - on-premises systems are fully under your control, in IaaS the hardware is abstracted (but not the OS, scale, runtimes and so on), in PaaS the hardware and the OS is abstracted and you focus on code and data only, and in SaaS everything is abstracted - you merely purchase the function you want (like an e-mail server or some such) and simply use it. When you think about solutions this way, the architecture moves to the primary factor in your decision. It's problem-first architecting, and then laying in whatever technology or vendor best fixes the problem. To that end, most architects design a solution using a graphical tool (I use Visio) and then creating documents that  let the rest of the team (and business) know what is required. It's the template, or recipe, for the solution. This is extremely easy to do for SaaS - you merely point out what the needs are, research the vendor and present the findings (and bill) to the business. IT might not even be involved there. In PaaS it's not much more complicated - you use the same Application Lifecycle Management and design tools you always have for code, such as Visual Studio or some other process and toolset, and you can "stamp out" the application in multiple locations, update it and so on. IaaS is another story. Here you have multiple machines, operating systems, patches, virus scanning, run-times, scale-patterns and tools and much more that you have to deal with, since essentially it's just an in-house system being hosted by someone else. You can certainly automate builds of servers - we do this as technical professionals every day. From Windows to Linux, it's simple enough to create a "build script" that makes a system just like the one we made yesterday. What is more problematic is being able to tie those systems together in a coherent way (as a solution) and then stamp that out repeatedly, especially when you might want to deploy that solution on-premises, or in one cloud vendor or another. Lately I've been working with a company called RightScale that does exactly this. I'll point you to their site for more info, but the general idea is that you document out your intent for a set of servers, and it will deploy them to on-premises clouds, Windows Azure, and other cloud providers all from the same script. In other words, it doesn't contain the images or anything like that - it contains the scripts to build them on-premises or on a cloud vendor like Microsoft. Using a tool like this, you combine the steps of designing a system (all the way down to passwords and accounts if you wish) and then the document drives the distribution and implementation of that intent. As time goes on and more and more companies implement solutions on various providers (perhaps for HA and DR) then this becomes a compelling investigation. The RightScale information is here, if you want to investigate it further. Yes, there are other methods I've found, but most are tied to a single kind of cloud, and I'm not into vendor lock-in. Poppa Bear Level - Hands-on EvaluateRightScale at no cost.  Just bring your Windows Azurecredentials and follow the these tutorials: Sign Up for Windows Azure Add     Windows Azure to a RightScale Account Windows Azure Virtual Machines     3-tier Deployment Momma Bear Level - Just the Right level... ;0)  WindowsAzure Evaluation Guide - if you are new toWindows Azure Virtual Machines and new to RightScale, we recommend that youread the entire evaluation guide to gain a more complete understanding of theWindows Azure + RightScale solution.    WindowsAzure Support Page @ support.rightscale.com - FAQ's, tutorials,etc. for  Windows Azure Virtual Machines (Work in Progress) Baby Bear Level - Marketing WindowsAzure Page @ www.rightscale.com - find overview informationincluding solution briefs and presentation & demonstration videos   Scale     and Automate Applications on Windows Azure  Solution Brief     - how RightScale makes Windows Azure Virtual Machine even better SQL     Server on Windows Azure  Solution Brief   -       Run Highly Available SQL Server on Windows Azure Virtual Machines

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