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• SQLAuthority News – Top 5 Latest Microsoft Certifications of 2013 – Guest Post

  - by Pinal Dave

  With the IT job market getting more and more competent by the day, certifications are a must for anyone who wishes to get a strong foothold in the industry. Microsoft community comes up with regular updates and enhancements in its existing products to keep up with the rapidly evolving requirements of the ICT industry. We bring you a list of five latest Microsoft certifications that you must consider acquiring this year. MCSE: SharePoint Learn all about Windows Server 2012 and Microsoft SharePoint 2013, which brings an advanced set of features to the fore in this latest version. It introduces new capabilities for business intelligence, social media, branding, search, identity management, mobile device among other features. Enjoy a great user experience with sharing and collaboration in community forum, within a pixel-perfect SharePoint website. Data connectivity and business intelligence tools allow users to process and access data, analyze reports, share and collaborate with each other more conveniently. Microsoft Specialist: Microsoft Project 2013 The only project management system that works seamlessly with other applications and cloud solutions of Microsoft, MS Project 2013 offers more than what meets the eye.  It provides for easier management and monitoring of projects so that users can ensure timely delivery while improving the productivity significantly. So keep all your projects on track and collaborate with your team like never before with this enhanced release! This one’s a must for all project managers. MCSE Messaging Another one of Microsoft gems is its messaging environment which has also launched the latest release Microsoft Exchange Server 2013. Messaging administrators can take up this training and validate their expertise in Unified Messaging, Exchange Online, PowerShell and Virtualization strategies, through MCSE Messaging certification in Exchange Server. If you wish to enhance productivity and data security of your organization while being flexible and extremely efficient, this is the right certification for you. MCSE Communication An enterprise can function optimally on the strength of its information flow and communication systems. With Lync Server 2013, you can introduce a whole new world of unified communications which consists of audio/video conferencing, dial-in, Persistent Chat, instant chat, and EDGE services in your organization. Utilize IT to serve and support business objectives by mastering this UC technology with this latest MCSE Communication course on using Microsoft Lync Server 2013. MCSE: SQL Server 2012 BI Platform The decision making process is largely influenced by underlying enterprise information used by the management for business intelligence. Therefore, a robust business intelligence platform that anchors enterprise IT and transform it to operational efficiencies is the need of the hour. SQL Server 2012 BI Platform certification helps professionals implement, manage and maintain a BI database infrastructure effectively. IT professionals with BI skills are highly sought after these days. MCSD: Windows Store Apps A Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer certification in Windows Store Apps validates your potential in designing interactive apps. Learn The Essentials of Developing Windows Store Apps using HTML5 and JavaScript and establish yourself as an ace developer capable of creating fast and fluid Metro style apps for Windows 8 that are accessible on a variety of devices. You can also go ahead and Learn Essentials of Developing Windows Store Apps using C# mode if you’re already familiar and working with C# programming language. Hence the developers are free to choose their own favorite development stream which opens doors for them to get ready for the latest and exciting application development platform called Windows store apps. Software developers with these skills are in great demand in the industry today. In order to continue being competitive in your respective fields, it is imperative that IT personnel update their knowledge on a regular basis. Certifications are a means to achieve this goal. Not considered to be an optional pre-requisite anymore, major IT certifications such as these are now essential to stay afloat in a cut-throat industry where technologies change on a daily basis. This blog is written by Aruneet Anand of Koenig Solutions. Koenig Solutions does training for all of the above courses. For more information, visit the website. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Microsoft Certifications

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• The new Auto Scaling Service in Windows Azure

  - by shiju

  One of the key features of the Cloud is the on-demand scalability, which lets the cloud application developers to scale up or scale down the number of compute resources hosted on the Cloud. Auto Scaling provides the capability to dynamically scale up and scale down your compute resources based on user-defined policies, Key Performance Indicators (KPI), health status checks, and schedules, without any manual intervention. Auto Scaling is an important feature to consider when designing and architecting cloud based solutions, which can unleash the real power of Cloud to the apps for providing truly on-demand scalability and can also guard the organizational budget for cloud based application deployment. In the past, you have had to leverage the the Microsoft Enterprise Library Autoscaling Application Block (WASABi) or a services like  MetricsHub for implementing Automatic Scaling for your cloud apps hosted on the Windows Azure. The WASABi required to host your auto scaling block in a Windows Azure Worker Role for effectively implementing the auto scaling behaviour to your Windows Azure apps. The newly announced Auto Scaling service in Windows Azure lets you add automatic scaling capability to your Windows Azure Compute Services such as Cloud Services, Web Sites and Virtual Machine. Unlike WASABi hosted on a Worker Role, you don’t need to host any monitoring service for using the new Auto Scaling service and the Auto Scaling service will be available to individual Windows Azure Compute Services as part of the Scaling. Configure Auto Scaling for a Windows Azure Cloud Service Currently the Auto Scaling service supports Cloud Services, Web Sites and Virtual Machine. In this demo, I will be used a Cloud Services app with a Web Role and a Worker Role. To enable the Auto Scaling, select t your Windows Azure app in the Windows Azure management portal, and choose “SCLALE” tab. The Scale tab will show the all information regards with Auto Scaling. The below image shows that we have currently disabled the AutoScale service. To enable Auto Scaling, you need to choose either CPU or QUEUE. The QUEUE option is not available for Web Sites. The image below demonstrates how to configure Auto Scaling for a Web Role based on the utilization of CPU. We have configured the web role app for running with 1 to 5 Virtual Machine instances based on the CPU utilization with a range of 50 to 80%. If the aggregate utilization is becoming above above 80%, it will scale up instances and it will scale down instances when utilization is becoming below 50%. The image below demonstrates how to configure Auto Scaling for a Worker Role app based on the messages added into the Windows Azure storage Queue. We configured the worker role app for running with 1 to 3 Virtual Machine instances based on the Queue messages added into the Windows Azure storage Queue. Here we have specified the number of messages target per machine is 2000. The image below shows the summary of the Auto Scaling for the Cloud Service after configuring auto scaling service. Summary Auto Scaling is an extremely important behaviour of the Cloud applications for providing on-demand scalability without any manual intervention. Windows Azure provides greater support for enabling Auto Scaling for the apps deployed on the Windows Azure cloud platform. The new Auto Scaling service in Windows Azure lets you add automatic scaling capability to your Windows Azure Compute Services such as Cloud Services, Web Sites and Virtual Machine. In the new Auto Scaling service, you don’t have to host any monitor service like you have had in WASABi block. The Auto Scaling service is an excellent alternative to the manually hosting WASABi block in a Worker Role app.

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• OOW 2013 Summary for Fusion Middleware Architects & Administrators by Simon Haslam

  - by JuergenKress

  OOW 2013 Summary for Fusion Middleware Architects & Administrators by Simon Haslam This September during Oracle OpenWorld 2013 the weather in San Francisco, as you see can from the photo, was exceptionally sunny. The dramatic final few days of the Americas Cup sailing competition, being held every day in the bay, coincided with the conference and meant that there was almost a holiday feel to the whole event. Here's my annual round-up of what I think was most interesting at OpenWorld 2013 for Fusion Middleware architects and administrators; I hope you find it useful and if you think I've missed something please add a comment! WebLogic and Cloud Application Foundation (CAF) The big WebLogic release of the year has already happened a few months ago with 12.1.2 so I won't duplicate that here. Will Lyons discussed the WebLogic and Coherence roadmap which essentially is that 12.1.3 will probably be released to coincide with SOA 12c next year and that 12.1.4, the next feature-rich WebLogic release, is more likely to be in 2015. This latter release will probably include full Java EE 7 support, have enhancements for multi-tenancy and further auto-scaling features to support increased density (i.e. more WebLogic usage for the same amount of hardware). There's a new Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder (OVAB) out already and an Oracle Traffic Director (OTD) 12c release round the corner too. Also of relevance to administrators is that Oracle has increased the support lifetime for Fusion Middleware 11g (e.g. WebLogic 10.3.6) so that Premier Support will now run to the end of 2018 and Extended Support until 2021 - this should remove any Oracle-driven pressure to upgrade at least. Java Mission Control Java Mission Control (JMC) is the HotSpot Java 7 version of JRockit 6 Mission Control, a very nice performance monitoring tool from Oracle's BEA acquisition. Flight Recorder is a feature built into the JVM which records diagnostic events into, typically, a circular buffer which can then be used for historical analysis, particularly in the case of a JVM crash or hang. It's been available separately for WebLogic only for perhaps a year now but, more significantly, it now includes JVM events and was bundled in with JDK7 Update 40 a few weeks ago. I attended a couple of interesting Java One sessions on JMC/Flight Recorder and have to say it's looking really good - it has all the previous JRMC features except for memory leak detector, plus some enhancements around operative sets and ECID filtering I think. Marcus also showed how you could add your own events into flight recorder by building your own event class - they are then available for graphing alongside all the other events in JMC. This uses a currently an unsupported/undocumented API, but it's also the same one that WebLogic uses for WLDF events so I imagine it is stable. I'm not sure quite whether this would be useful to custom applications, as opposed to infrastructure services or ISV packaged applications, but it was a very nice demonstration. I've been testing JMC / FR enabling on several environments recently and my confidence is growing - it feels robust and I think could very soon be part of my standard builds. Read the full article here. WebLogic Partner Community For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Technorati Tags: OOW,Simon Haslam,Oracle OpenWorld,WebLogic,WebLogic Community,Oracle,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• Replication - between pools in the same system

  - by Steve Tunstall

  OK, I fully understand that's it's been a LONG time since I've blogged with any tips or tricks on the ZFSSA, and I'm way behind. Hey, I just wrote TWO BLOGS ON THE SAME DAY!!! Make sure you keep scrolling down to see the next one too, or you may have missed it. To celebrate, for the one or two of you out there who are still reading this, I got something for you. The first TWO people who make any comment below, with your real name and email so I can contact you, will get some cool Oracle SWAG that I have to give away. Don't get excited, it's not an iPad, but it pretty good stuff. Only the first two, so if you already see two below, then settle down. Now, let's talk about Replication and Migration.  I have talked before about Shadow Migration here: https://blogs.oracle.com/7000tips/entry/shadow_migrationShadow Migration lets one take a NFS or CIFS share in one pool on a system and migrate that data over to another pool in the same system. That's handy, but right now it's only for file systems like NFS and CIFS. It will not work for LUNs. LUN shadow migration is a roadmap item, however. So.... What if you have a ZFSSA cluster with multiple pools, and you have a LUN in one pool but later you decide it's best if it was in the other pool? No problem. Replication to the rescue. What's that? Replication is only for replicating data between two different systems? Who told you that? We've been able to replicate to the same system now for a few code updates back. These instructions below will also work just fine if you're setting up replication between two different systems. After replication is complete, you can easily break replication, change the new LUN into a primary LUN and then delete the source LUN. Bam. Step 1- setup a target system. In our case, the target system is ourself, but you still have to set it up like it's far away. Go to Configuration-->Services-->Remote Replication. Click the plus sign and setup the target, which is the ZFSSA you're on now. Step 2. Now you can go to the LUN you want to replicate. Take note which Pool and Project you're in. In my case, I have a LUN in Pool2 called LUNp2 that I wish to replicate to Pool1.  Step 3. In my case, I made a Project called "Luns" and it has LUNp2 inside of it. I am going to replicate the Project, which will automatically replicate all of the LUNs and/or Filesystems inside of it.  Now, you can also replicate from the Share level instead of the Project. That will only replicate the share, and not all the other shares of a project. If someone tells you that if you replicate a share, it always replicates all the other shares also in that Project, don't listen to them.Note below how I can choose not only the Target (which is myself), but I can also choose which Pool to replicate it to. So I choose Pool1.  Step 4. I did not choose a schedule or pick the "Continuous" button, which means my replication will be manual only. I can now push the Manual Replicate button on my Actions list and you will see it start. You will see both a barber pole animation and also an update in the status bar on the top of the screen that a replication event has begun. This also goes into the event log.  Step 5. The status bar will also log an event when it's done. Step 6. If you go back to Configuration-->Services-->Remote Replication, you will see your event. Step 7. Done. To see your new replica, go to the other Pool (Pool1 for me), and click the "Replica" area below the words "Filesystems | LUNs" Here, you will see any replicas that have come in from any of your sources. It's a simple matter from here to break the replication, which will change this to a "Local" LUN, and then delete the original LUN back in Pool2. Ok, that's all for now, but I promise to give out more tricks sometime in November !!! There's very exciting stuff coming down the pipe for the ZFSSA. Both new hardware and new software features that I'm just drooling over. That's all I can say, but contact your local sales SC to get a NDA roadmap talk if you want to hear more.   Happy Halloween,Steve 

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• PHP Web Services - Nice try

  Thanks to the membership in the O'Reilly User Group Programme the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community (short: MSCC) recently received a welcome package with several book titles. Among them is the latest publication of Lorna Jane Mitchell - 'PHP Web Services: APIs for the Modern Web'. Following is the book review I put on Amazon: Nice try! Initially, I was astonished that a small book like 'PHP Web Services' would be able to cover all the interesting topics about APIs and Web Services, independently whether they are written in PHP or not. And unfortunately, the title isn't able to stand up to the readers (or at least my) expectations. Maybe as a light defense, there is no usual paragraph about the intended audience of that book, but still I have to admit that the first half (chapters 1 to 8) are well written and Lorna has her points on the various technologies. Also, the code samples in PHP are clean and easy to understand. With chapter 'Debugging Web Services' the book started to change my mind about the clarity of advice and the instructions on designing and developing good APIs. Eventually, this might be related to the fact that I'm used to other tools since years, like Telerik Fiddler as HTTP proxy in order to trace and inspect any kind of request/response handling. Including localhost monitoring, SSL certification acceptance, and the ability to debug mobile devices, especially iOS-based ones. Compared to Charles, Fiddler is available for free. What really got me off the hook is the following statement in chapter 10 about Service Type Decisions: "For users who have larger systems using technology stacks such as Java, C++, or .NET, it may be easier for them to integrate with a SOAP service." WHAT? A couple of pages earlier the author recommends to stay away from 'old-fashioned' API styles like SOAP (if possible). And on top of that I wonder why there are tons of documentation towards development of RESTful Web Services based on WebAPI. The ASP.NET stack clearly moves away from SOAP to JSON and REST since years! Honestly, as a software developer on the .NET stack this leaves a mixed feeling after all. As for the remaining chapters I simply consider them as 'blah blah' without any real value and lots of theoretical advice. Related to the chapter 13 about 'Documentation', I just had the 'pleasure' to write a C#-based client against a Java-based SOAP Web Service. Personally, I take the WSDL as the master reference in the first place and Visual Studio generates all the stub types involved in the communication. During the implementation and testing I came across a 'java.lang.NullPointerException' in various methods and for various method parameters. The WSDL and the generated types were declared as Nullable, so nothing to worry about, or? Well, I logged in a support ticket, and guess what was the response to that scenario? "The service definition in the WSDL is wrong, please refer to the documentation in order to use the methods and parameters correctly" - No comment! Lorna's title is a quick read and in some areas she has good advice on designing and implementing Web Services and APIs. But roughly 100 pages aren't enough to cover a vast topic like that. After all, nice try and I'm looking forward to an improved second edition. Honestly, I never thought that I would come across a poor review. In general, it's a good book but it clearly has a lack of depth, the PHP code samples are incomplete (closing tags missing), and there are too many assumptions and theoretical statements.

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• Silverlight Cream for January 04, 2011 -- #1022

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Dennis Doomen, Doug Holland, Kunal Chowdhury, Sacha Barber, Paul Sheriff, Mike Snow(-2-), Peter Kuhn(-2-), and Mike Ormond. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Silverlight: Fixing the BookShelf Sample" Peter Kuhn WP7: "Searching the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace Programmatically" Doug Holland Prism/Cinch: "PRISM 4 Custom Transitioning Region" Sacha Barber Shoutouts: Sacha Barber the author of Cinch asks for some advice from users: Cinch V2 : Question For The Reader Michael Crump introduces us to SnippetManager as a way to organize your Silverlight snippets... I'm thinking any snippet: A better way to organize your Silverlight Code Snippets. Andy Beaulieu announced an update of Physics Helper 4.2 using Farseer 3.2 ... check out the breaking changes though! Dennis Doomen blogged about a new release of his Fluent Assertions: A new year with a new release of Fluent Assertions, with a blog post about it below From SilverlightCream.com: Verifying PropertyChanged events in Silverlight using Fluent Assertions Dennis Doomen release his latest Fluent Assertions for .NET and Silverlight and wrote up a big post about the new event monitoring syntax. Searching the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace Programmatically Doug Holland has a post up on MSDN blogs talking about searching the WP7 Marketplace programmatically... ya know you should be able to do it... here's how. Beginners Guide to Visual Studio LightSwitch (Part - 5) Kunal Chowdhury has Part 5 of a tutorial series on Lightswitch up at SilverlightShow... working with custom validation this time, and for the first time in this series so far actually writes some code! PRISM 4 Custom Transitioning Region Sacha Barber took time to look at Prism4/MEF and Cinch2 and found things to be fine then wrote a custom PRISM region adaptor that uses a TransitionalElement from the Microsoft Transitionals project... code available, blog post to come. Get Application Title from Windows Phone Paul Sheriff has a cool chunk of code up... getting the Application's title programmatically... and other attributes as well, if you were wondering why you might wanna do that. Detecting Users Win7 Mobile Theme Color Mike Snow has a couple as well... first up is how to detect your user's theme... obviously useful if you wanna match it. Selecting an Item in a ComboBox after Adding Items Second for Mike Snow is a general Silverlight issue... setting the selected item on a ComboBox after filling it... if you haven't stumbled across this yet, you will... A Simplified Grid Markup Reloaded Peter Kuhn has a pair of posts up since last time... this first is an extension of Colin Eberhardt's simplified Grid markup system, but it's only useful if you don't plan on using Blend... can we get a show of hands? :) Silverlight: Fixing the BookShelf Sample Next Peter Kuhn has some changes to the Bookshelf code, but more importantly has some excelling tips about shader effects, Effects on Visual Elements and how to make best use of all the above. Displaying HTML Content in Windows Phone 7 Mike Ormond has a WP7 post up describing problems a customer had early on displaying rich text and an attempt to use the WebBrowser control to pull it off and the problems that caused... check out the resultant code, and read the comments as well. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Tuesday at OpenWorld: Identity Management

  - by Tanu Sood

  At Oracle OpenWorld? From keynotes, general sessions to product deep dives and executive events, this Tuesday is full of informational, educational and networking opportunities for you. Here’s a quick run-down of what’s happening today: Tuesday, October 2, 2012 KEYNOTE: The Oracle Cloud: Oracle’s Cloud Platform and Applications Strategy 8:00 a.m. – 9:45 a.m., Moscone North, Hall D Leading customers will join Oracle Executive Vice President Thomas Kurian to discuss how Oracle’s innovative cloud solutions are transforming how they manage their business, excite and retain their employees, and deliver great customer experiences through Oracle Cloud. GENERAL SESSION: Oracle Fusion Middleware Strategies Driving Business Innovation 10:15 a.m. – 11:15 a.m., Moscone North - Hall D Join Hasan Rizvi, Executive Vice President of Product in this strategy and roadmap session to hear how developers leverage new innovations in their applications and customers achieve their business innovation goals with Oracle Fusion Middleware. CON9437: Mobile Access Management 10:15 a.m. – 11:15 a.m., Moscone West 3022 The session will feature Identity Management evangelists from companies like Intuit, NetApp and Toyota to discuss how to extend your existing identity management infrastructure and policies to securely and seamlessly enable mobile user access. CON9162: Oracle Fusion Middleware: Meet This Year's Most Impressive Customer Projects 11:45 a.m. – 12:45 a.m., Moscone West, 3001 Hear from the winners of the 2012 Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Awards and see which customers are taking home a trophy for the 2012 Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Award.  Read more about the Innovation Awards here. CON9491: Enhancing the End-User Experience with Oracle Identity Governance applications 11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Join experts from Visa and Oracle as they explore how Oracle Identity Governance solutions deliver complete identity administration and governance solutions with support for emerging requirements like cloud identities and mobile devices. CON9447: Enabling Access for Hundreds of Millions of Users 1:15 p.m. – 2:15 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Dealing with scale problems? Looking to address identity management requirements with million or so users in mind? Then take note of Cisco’s implementation. Join this session to hear first-hand how Cisco tackled identity management and scaled their implementation to bolster security and enforce compliance. CON9465: Next Generation Directory – Oracle Unified Directory 5:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Get the 360 degrees perspective from a solution provider, implementation services partner and the customer in this session to learn how the latest Oracle Unified Directory solutions can help you build a directory infrastructure that is optimized to support cloud, mobile and social networking and yet deliver on scale and performance. EVENTS: Executive Edge @ OpenWorld: Chief Security Officer (CSO) Summit 10:00 a.m. – 3:00 p.m. If you are attending the Executive Edge at Open World, be sure to check out the sessions at the Chief Security Officer Summit. Former Sr. Counsel for the National Security Agency, Joel Brenner, will be speaking about his new book "America the Vulnerable". In addition, PWC will present a panel discussion on "Crisis Management to Business Advantage: Security Leadership". See below for the complete agenda. PRODUCT DEMOS: And don’t forget to see Oracle identity Management solutions in action at Oracle OpenWorld DEMOgrounds. DEMOS LOCATION EXHIBITION HALL HOURS Access Management: Complete and Scalable Access Management Moscone South, Right - S-218 Monday, October 1 9:30 a.m.–6:00 p.m. 9:30 a.m.–10:45 a.m. (Dedicated Hours) Tuesday, October 2 9:45 a.m.–6:00 p.m. 2:15 p.m.–2:45 p.m. (Dedicated Hours) Wednesday, October 3 9:45 a.m.–4:00 p.m. 2:15 p.m.–3:30 p.m. (Dedicated Hours) Access Management: Federating and Leveraging Social Identities Moscone South, Right - S-220 Access Management: Mobile Access Management Moscone South, Right - S-219 Access Management: Real-Time Authorizations Moscone South, Right - S-217 Access Management: Secure SOA and Web Services Security Moscone South, Right - S-223 Identity Governance: Modern Administration and Tooling Moscone South, Right - S-210 Identity Management Monitoring with Oracle Enterprise Manager Moscone South, Right - S-212 Oracle Directory Services Plus: Performant, Cloud-Ready Moscone South, Right - S-222 Oracle Identity Management: Closed-Loop Access Certification Moscone South, Right - S-221 For a complete listing, keep the Focus on Identity Management document handy. And don’t forget to converse with us while at OpenWorld @oracleidm. We look forward to hearing from you.

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• Measuring ASP.NET and SharePoint output cache

  - by DigiMortal

  During ASP.NET output caching week in my local blog I wrote about how to measure ASP.NET output cache. As my posting was based on real work and real-life results then I thought that this posting is maybe interesting to you too. So here you can read what I did, how I did and what was the result. Introduction Caching is not effective without measuring it. As MVP Henn Sarv said in one of his sessions then you will get what you measure. And right he is. Lately I measured caching on local Microsoft community portal to make sure that our caching strategy is good enough in environment where this system lives. In this posting I will show you how to start measuring the cache of your web applications. Although the application measured is built on SharePoint Server publishing infrastructure, all those counters have same meaning as similar counters under pure ASP.NET applications. Measured counters I used Performance Monitor and the following performance counters (their names are similar on ASP.NET and SharePoint WCMS): Total number of objects added – how much objects were added to output cache. Total object discards – how much objects were deleted from output cache. Cache hit count – how many times requests were served by cache. Cache hit ratio – percent of requests served from cache. The first three counters are cumulative while last one is coefficient. You can use also other counters to measure the full effect of caching (memory, processor, disk I/O, network load etc before and after caching). Measuring process The measuring I describe here started from freshly restarted web server. I measured application during 12 hours that covered also time ranges when users are most active. The time range does not include late evening hours and night because there is nothing to measure during these hours. During measuring we performed no maintenance or administrative tasks on server. All tasks performed were related to usual daily content management and content monitoring. Also we had no advertisement campaigns or other promotions running at same time. The results You can see the results on following graphic.   Total number of objects added   Total object discards   Cache hit count   Cache hit ratio You can see that adds and discards are growing in same tempo. It is good because cache expires and not so popular items are not kept in memory. If there are more popular content then the these lines may have bigger distance between them. Cache hit count grows faster and this shows that more and more content is served from cache. In current case it shows that cache is filled optimally and we can do even better if we tune caches more. The site contains also pages that are discarded when some subsite changes (page was added/modified/deleted) and one modification may affect about four or five pages. This may also decrease cache hit count because during day the site gets about 5-10 new pages. Cache hit ratio is currently extremely good. The suggested minimum is about 85% but after some tuning and measuring I achieved 98.7% as a result. This is due to the fact that new pages are most often requested and after new pages are added the older ones are requested only sometimes. So they get discarded from cache and only some of these will return sometimes back to cache. Although this may also indicate the need for additional SEO work the result is very well in technical means. Conclusion Measuring ASP.NET output cache is not complex thing to do and you can start by measuring performance of cache as a start. Later you can move on and measure caching effect to other counters such as disk I/O, network, processors etc. What you have to achieve is optimal cache that is not full of items asked only couple of times per day (you can avoid this by not using too long cache durations). After some tuning you should be able to boost cache hit ratio up to at least 85%.

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• SQLAuthority News – Amazon Gift Card Raffle for Beta Tester Feedback for NuoDB

  - by pinaldave

  As regular readers know I’ve been spending some time working with the NuoDB beta software. They contacted me last week and asked if I would give you a chance to try their new web-based console for their scalable, SQL-compliant database. They have just put out their final beta release, Beta 9.  It contains a preview of a new web-based “NuoConsole” that will replace and extend the functionality of their current desktop version.  I haven’t spent any time with the new console yet but a really quick look tells me it should make it easier to do deeper monitoring than the older one. It also looks like they have added query-level reporting through the console. I will try to play with it soon. NuoDB is doing a last, big push to get some more feedback from developers before they release their 1.0 product sometime in the next several weeks. Since the console is new, they are especially interested in some quick feedback on it before general availability. For SQLAuthority readers only, NuoDB will raffle off three $50 Amazon gift cards in exchange for your feedback on the NuoConsole preview. Here’s how to Enter Download NuoDBeta 9 here You must build a domain before you can start the console. Launch the Web Console. Windows Code: start java -jar jarnuodbwebconsole.jar Mac, Linux, Solaris, Unix Code: java -jar jar/nuodbwebconsole.jar Access the Web Console: Code: http://localhost:8080 When you have tried it out, go to a short (8 question) survey to enter the raffle Click here for the survey You must complete the survey before midnight EDT on October 17, 2012. Here’s what else they are saying about this last beta before general availability: Beta 9 now supports the Zend PHP framework so that PHP developers can directly integrate web applications with NuoDB. Multi-threaded HDFS support – NuoDB Storage Managers can now be configured to persist data to the high performance Hadoop distributed file system (HDFS). Beta 9 optimizes for multi-thread I/O streams at maximum performance. This enhancement allows users to make Hadoop their core storage with no extra effort which is a pretty cool idea. Improved Performance –On a single transaction node, Beta 9 offers performance comparable with MySQL and MariaDB. As additional nodes are added, NuoDB performance improves significantly at near linear scale. Query & Explain Plan Logging – Beta 9 introduces SQL explain plans for your queries. Qualify queries with the word “EXPLAIN” and NuoDB will respond with the details of the execution plan allowing performance optimization to SQL. Through the NuoConsole, you can now kill hung or long running queries. Java App Server Support – Beta 9 now supports leading Web JEE app servers including JBoss, Tomcat, and ColdFusion. They’ve also reported: Improved PHP/PDO drivers Support for Drupal Faster Ruby on Rails driver The Hibernate Dialect supports version 4.1 And good news for my readers: numerous SQL enhancements They will share the results of the web console feedback with me.  I’ll let you know how it goes. Also the winner of their last contest was Jaime Martínez Lafargue!  Do leave a comment here once you complete the survey.  Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: SQL Authority Tagged: NuoDB

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• Converting Creole to HTML, PDF, DOCX, ..

  - by Marko Apfel

  Challenge We documented a project on Github with the Wiki there. For most articles we used Creole as markup language. Now we have to deliver a lot of the content to our client in an usual format like PDF or DOCX. So we need a automatism to extract all relevant content, merge it together and convert the stuff to a new format. Problem One of the most popular toolsets to convert between several formats is Pandoc. But unfortunally Pandoc does not support Creole (see the converting matrix). Approach So we need an intermediate step: Converting from Creole to a supported Pandoc format. Creolo/c is a Creole to Html converter and does exactly what we need. After converting our Creole content to Html we could use Pandoc for all the subsequent tasks. Solution Getting the Creole stuff First at all we need the Creole content on our locale machines. This is easy. Because the Github Wiki themselves is a Git repository we could clone it to our machine. In the working copy we see now all the files and the suffix gives us the hint for the markup language. Converting and Merging Creole content to Html Because we would like all content from several Creole files in one HTML file, we have to convert and merge all the input files to one output file. Creole/c has an option (-b) to generate only the Html-stuff below a Html <Body>-tag. And this is hook for us to start. We have to create manually the additional preluding Html-tags (<html>, <head>, ..), then we merge all needed Creole content to our output file and last we add the closing tags. This could be done straightforward with a little bit old DOS magic: REM === Generate the intro tags === ECHO ^<html^> > %TMP%\output.html ECHO ^<head^> >> %TMP%\output.html ECHO ^<meta name="generator" content="creole/c"^> >> %TMP%\output.html ECHO ^</head^> >> %TMP%\output.html ECHO ^<body^> >> %TMP%\output.html REM === Mix in all interesting Creole stuff with creole/c === .\Creole-C\bin\creole.exe -b .\..\datamodel+overview.creole >> %TMP%\output.html .\Creole-C\bin\creole.exe -b .\..\datamodel+domain+CvdCaptureMode.creole >> %TMP%\output.html .\Creole-C\bin\creole.exe -b .\..\datamodel+domain+CvdDamageReducingActivity.creole >> %TMP%\output.html .\Creole-C\bin\creole.exe -b .\..\datamodel+lookup+IncidentDamageCodes.creole >> %TMP%\output.html .\Creole-C\bin\creole.exe -b .\..\datamodel+table+Attachments.creole >> %TMP%\output.html .\Creole-C\bin\creole.exe -b .\..\datamodel+table+TrafficLights.creole >> %TMP%\output.html REM === Generate the outro tags === ECHO ^</body^> >> %TMP%\output.html ECHO ^</html^> >> %TMP%\output.html REM === Convert the Html file to Docx with Pandoc === .\Pandoc\bin\pandoc.exe -o .\Database-Schema.docx %TMP%\output.html Some explanation for this The first ECHO call creates the file. Therefore the beginning <html> tag is send via > to a temporary working file. All following calls add content to the existing file via >>. The tag-characters < and > must be escaped. This is done by the caret sign (^). We use a file in the default temporary folder (%TMP%) to avoid writing in our current folders. (better for continuous integration) Both toolsets (Creole/c and Pandoc) are copied to a versioned tools folder in the Wiki. This is committable and no problem after pushing – Github does not do anything with it. In this folder is also the batch (Export-Docx.bat) for all the steps. Pandoc recognizes the conversion by the suffixes of the file names. So it is enough to specify only the input and output files.

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• Using the RSSBus Salesforce Excel Add-In From Excel Macros (VBA)

  - by dataintegration

  The RSSBus Salesforce Excel Add-In makes it easy to retrieve and update data from Salesforce from within Microsoft Excel. In addition to the built-in wizards that make data manipulation possible without code, the full functionality of the RSSBus Excel Add-Ins is available programmatically with Excel Macros (VBA) and Excel Functions. This article shows how to write an Excel macro that can be used to perform bulk inserts into Salesforce. Although this article uses the Salesforce Excel Add-In as an example, the same process can be applied to any of the Excel Add-Ins available on our website. Step 1: Download and install the RSSBus Excel Add-In available on our website. Step 2: Open Excel and create place holder cells for the connection details that are needed from the macro. In this article, a spreadsheet will be created for batch inserts, and these cells will store the connection details, and will be used to report the job Id, the batch Id, and the batch status. Step 3: Switch to the Developer tab in Excel. Add a new button on the spreadsheet, and create a new macro associated with it. This macro will contain the code needed to insert a batch of rows into Salesforce. Step 4: Add a reference to the Excel Add-In by selecting Tools --> References --> RSSBus Excel Add-In. The macro functions of the Excel Add-In will be available once the reference has been added. The following code shows how to call a Stored Procedure. In this example, a job is created to insert Leads by calling the CreateJob stored procedure. CreateJob returns a jobId that can be used to upload a large number of Leads in one transaction. Note the use of cells B1, B2, B3, and B4 that were created in Step 2 to read the connection settings from the Excel SpreadSheet and to write out the status of the procedure. methodName = "CreateJob" module.SetProviderName ("Salesforce") nameArray = Array("ObjectName", "Action", "ConcurrencyMode") valueArray = Array("Lead", "insert", "Serial") user = Range("B1").value pass = Range("B2").value atoken = Range("B3").value If (Not user = "" And Not pass = "" And Not atoken = "") Then module.SetConnectionString ("User=" + user + ";Password=" + pass + ";Access Token=" + atoken + ";") If module.CallSP(methodName, nameArray, valueArray) Then Dim ColumnCount As Integer ColumnCount = module.GetColumnCount Dim idIndex As Integer For Count = 0 To ColumnCount - 1 Dim colName As String colName = module.GetColumnName(Count) If module.GetColumnName(Count) = "id" Then idIndex = Count End If Next While (Not module.EOF) Range("B4").value = module.GetValue(idIndex) module.MoveNext Wend Else MsgBox "The CreateJob query failed." End If Exit Sub Else MsgBox "Please specify the connection details." Exit Sub End If Error: MsgBox "ERROR: " & Err.Description Step 5: Add the code to your macro. If you use the code above, you can check the results at Salesforce.com. They can be seen at Administration Setup -> Monitoring -> Bulk Data Load Jobs. Download the attached sample file for a more complete demo. Distributing an Excel File With Macros An Excel file with macros is saved using the .xlms extension. The code for the macro remains in the Excel file, and you can distribute your Excel file to any machine where the RSSBus Salesforce Excel Add-In is already installed. Macro Sample File Please download the fully functional sample excel file that includes the code referenced here. You will also need the RSSBus Excel Add-In to make the connection. You can download a free trial here. Note: You may get an error message stating: "Can't find project or library." in Excel 2007, since this example is made using Excel 2010. To resolve this, navigate to Tools -> References and uncheck the "MISSING: RSSBus Excel Add-In", then scroll down and check the "RSSBus Excel Add-In" listed below it.

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• Database – Beginning with Cloud Database As A Service

  - by Pinal Dave

  I love my weekend projects. Everybody does different activities in their weekend – like traveling, reading or just nothing. Every weekend I try to do something creative and different in the database world. The goal is I learn something new and if I enjoy my learning experience I share with the world. This weekend, I decided to explore Cloud Database As A Service – Morpheus. In my career I have managed many databases in the cloud and I have good experience in managing them. I should highlight that today’s applications use multiple databases from SQL for transactions and analytics, NoSQL for documents, In-Memory for caching to Indexing for search.  Provisioning and deploying these databases often require extensive expertise and time.  Often these databases are also not deployed on the same infrastructure and can create unnecessary latency between the application layer and the databases.  Not to mention the different quality of service based on the infrastructure and the service provider where they are deployed. Moreover, there are additional problems that I have experienced with traditional database setup when hosted in the cloud: Database provisioning & orchestration Slow speed due to hardware issues Poor Monitoring Tools High network latency Now if you have a great software and expert network engineer, you can continuously work on above problems and overcome them. However, not every organization have the luxury to have top notch experts in the field. Now above issues are related to infrastructure, but there are a few more problems which are related to software/application as well. Here are the top three things which can be problems if you do not have application expert: Replication and Clustering Simple provisioning of the hard drive space Automatic Sharding Well, Morpheus looks like a product build by experts who have faced similar situation in the past. The product pretty much addresses all the pain points of developers and database administrators. What is different about Morpheus is that it offers a variety of databases from MySQL, MongoDB, ElasticSearch to Reddis as a service.  Thus users can pick and chose any combination of these databases.  All of them can be provisioned in a matter of minutes with a simple and intuitive point and click user interface.  The Morpheus cloud is built on Solid State Drives (SSD) and is designed for high-speed database transactions.  In addition it offers a direct link to Amazon Web Services to minimize latency between the application layer and the databases. Here are the few steps on how one can get started with Morpheus. Follow along with me.  First go to http://www.gomorpheus.com and register for a new and free account. Step 1: Signup It is very simple to signup for Morpheus. Step 2: Select your database   I use MySQL for my daily routine, so I have selected MySQL. Upon clicking on the big red button to add Instance, it prompted a dialogue of creating a new instance.   Step 3: Create User Now we just have to create a user in our portal which we will use to connect to a database hosted at Morpheus. Click on your database instance and it will bring you to User Screen. Over here you will notice once again a big red button to create a new user. I created a user with my first name.   Step 4: Configure your MySQL client I used MySQL workbench and connected to MySQL instance, which I had created with an IP address and user.   That’s it! You are connecting to MySQL instance. Now you can create your objects just like you would create on your local box. You will have all the features of the Morpheus when you are working with your database. Dashboard While working with Morpheus, I was most impressed with its dashboard. In future blog posts, I will write more about this feature.  Also with Morpheus you use the same process for provisioning and connecting with other databases: MongoDB, ElasticSearch and Reddis. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: MySQL, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• Why is my RAID /dev/md1 showing up as /dev/md126? Is mdadm.conf being ignored?

  - by mmorris

  I created a RAID with: sudo mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md1 --level=mirror --raid-devices=2 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 sudo mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md2 --level=mirror --raid-devices=2 /dev/sdb2 /dev/sdc2 sudo mdadm --detail --scan returns: ARRAY /dev/md1 metadata=1.2 name=ion:1 UUID=aa1f85b0:a2391657:cfd38029:772c560e ARRAY /dev/md2 metadata=1.2 name=ion:2 UUID=528e5385:e61eaa4c:1db2dba7:44b556fb Which I appended it to /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf, see below: # mdadm.conf # # Please refer to mdadm.conf(5) for information about this file. # # by default (built-in), scan all partitions (/proc/partitions) and all # containers for MD superblocks. alternatively, specify devices to scan, using # wildcards if desired. #DEVICE partitions containers # auto-create devices with Debian standard permissions CREATE owner=root group=disk mode=0660 auto=yes # automatically tag new arrays as belonging to the local system HOMEHOST <system> # instruct the monitoring daemon where to send mail alerts MAILADDR root # definitions of existing MD arrays # This file was auto-generated on Mon, 29 Oct 2012 16:06:12 -0500 # by mkconf $Id$ ARRAY /dev/md1 metadata=1.2 name=ion:1 UUID=aa1f85b0:a2391657:cfd38029:772c560e ARRAY /dev/md2 metadata=1.2 name=ion:2 UUID=528e5385:e61eaa4c:1db2dba7:44b556fb cat /proc/mdstat returns: Personalities : [raid1] [linear] [multipath] [raid0] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] [raid10] md2 : active raid1 sdb2[0] sdc2[1] 208629632 blocks super 1.2 [2/2] [UU] md1 : active raid1 sdb1[0] sdc1[1] 767868736 blocks super 1.2 [2/2] [UU] unused devices: <none> ls -la /dev | grep md returns: brw-rw---- 1 root disk 9, 1 Oct 30 11:06 md1 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 9, 2 Oct 30 11:06 md2 So I think all is good and I reboot. After the reboot, /dev/md1 is now /dev/md126 and /dev/md2 is now /dev/md127????? sudo mdadm --detail --scan returns: ARRAY /dev/md/ion:1 metadata=1.2 name=ion:1 UUID=aa1f85b0:a2391657:cfd38029:772c560e ARRAY /dev/md/ion:2 metadata=1.2 name=ion:2 UUID=528e5385:e61eaa4c:1db2dba7:44b556fb cat /proc/mdstat returns: Personalities : [raid1] [linear] [multipath] [raid0] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] [raid10] md126 : active raid1 sdc2[1] sdb2[0] 208629632 blocks super 1.2 [2/2] [UU] md127 : active (auto-read-only) raid1 sdb1[0] sdc1[1] 767868736 blocks super 1.2 [2/2] [UU] unused devices: <none> ls -la /dev | grep md returns: drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 80 Oct 30 11:18 md brw-rw---- 1 root disk 9, 126 Oct 30 11:18 md126 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 9, 127 Oct 30 11:18 md127 All is not lost, I: sudo mdadm --stop /dev/md126 sudo mdadm --stop /dev/md127 sudo mdadm --assemble --verbose /dev/md1 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 sudo mdadm --assemble --verbose /dev/md2 /dev/sdb2 /dev/sdc2 and verify everything: sudo mdadm --detail --scan returns: ARRAY /dev/md1 metadata=1.2 name=ion:1 UUID=aa1f85b0:a2391657:cfd38029:772c560e ARRAY /dev/md2 metadata=1.2 name=ion:2 UUID=528e5385:e61eaa4c:1db2dba7:44b556fb cat /proc/mdstat returns: Personalities : [raid1] [linear] [multipath] [raid0] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] [raid10] md2 : active raid1 sdb2[0] sdc2[1] 208629632 blocks super 1.2 [2/2] [UU] md1 : active raid1 sdb1[0] sdc1[1] 767868736 blocks super 1.2 [2/2] [UU] unused devices: <none> ls -la /dev | grep md returns: brw-rw---- 1 root disk 9, 1 Oct 30 11:26 md1 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 9, 2 Oct 30 11:26 md2 So once again, I think all is good and I reboot. Again, after the reboot, /dev/md1 is /dev/md126 and /dev/md2 is /dev/md127????? sudo mdadm --detail --scan returns: ARRAY /dev/md/ion:1 metadata=1.2 name=ion:1 UUID=aa1f85b0:a2391657:cfd38029:772c560e ARRAY /dev/md/ion:2 metadata=1.2 name=ion:2 UUID=528e5385:e61eaa4c:1db2dba7:44b556fb cat /proc/mdstat returns: Personalities : [raid1] [linear] [multipath] [raid0] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] [raid10] md126 : active raid1 sdc2[1] sdb2[0] 208629632 blocks super 1.2 [2/2] [UU] md127 : active (auto-read-only) raid1 sdb1[0] sdc1[1] 767868736 blocks super 1.2 [2/2] [UU] unused devices: <none> ls -la /dev | grep md returns: drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 80 Oct 30 11:42 md brw-rw---- 1 root disk 9, 126 Oct 30 11:42 md126 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 9, 127 Oct 30 11:42 md127 What am I missing here?

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• links for 2010-12-08

  - by Bob Rhubart

  What's a data architect? A comic dialog by one who knows: Oracle ACE Director Lewis Cunningham. Webcast: Oracle Business Intelligence Forum - December 15, 2010 at 9:00 am PT "The Oracle Business Intelligence Online Forum is a half-day virtual event that offers you a unique opportunity to see, in one place, the full portfolio of Oracle’s Business Intelligence (BI) offerings, and to learn what sets Oracle apart from the rest. Hear Oracle executives and industry analyst, Howard Dresner, present the current state of Business Intelligence, along with a series of customers who will share their case studies of putting analytics in action." Oracle Rolls Out Private Cloud Architecture And World-Record Transaction Performance | Forrester Blogs "Exadata has been dealt with extensively in other venues, both inside Forrester and externally, and appears to deliver the goods for I&O groups who require efficient consolidation and maximum performance from an Oracle database environment." -- Richard Fichera, Forrester Seven ways to get things started: Java EE Startup Classes with GlassFish and WebLogic "This is a blog about a topic that I realy don't like. But it comes across my ways over and over again and it's no doubt that you need it from time to time. Enough reasons for me to collect some information about it and publish it for your reference. I am talking about Startup-/Shutdown classes with Java EE applications or servers." -- Oracle ACE Director Markus "@myfear" Eisele." Monitoring Undelivered Messages in BPEL in SOA 10g (Antony Reynolds' Blog) "I am currently working with a client that wants to know how many undelivered messages they have, and if it reaches a certain threshold then they wants to alert the operator. To do this they plan on using the Enterprise Manager alert functions, but first they needs to know how many undelivered instances are out there." SOA author Antony Reynolds VirtualBox Appliances for Developers "Developers can simply download a few files, assemble them with a script , and then import and run the resulting pre-built VM in VirtualBox. This makes starting with these technologies even easier. Each appliance contains some Hands-On-Labs to start learning." -- Peter Paul van de Beek Oracle UCM 11g Remote Intradoc Client (RIDC) Integration with Oracle ADF 11g "It's great we have out of the box WebCenter ADF task flows for document management in UCM. However, for complete business scenario implementations, usually it's not enough and we need to manage Content Repository programmatically. This can be achieved through Remote Intradoc Client (RIDC) API. It's quite hard to find any practical information about this API, but I managed to get code for UCM folder creation/removal and folder information." -- Oracle ACE Director Andrejus Baranovskis Interview with Java Champion Matjaz B. Juric on Cloud Computing, SOA, and Java EE 6 "Matjaz Juric of Slovenia, head of the Cloud Computing and SOA Competence Centre at the University of Maribor, and professor at the University of Ljubljana, shares insights about cloud computing, SOA and Java EE 6." White Paper: Oracle Complex Event Processing High Availability "This whitepaper describes the high availability (HA) solutions available in Oracle CEP 11g Release 1 Patch Set 2 and  presents the results of a benchmark study demonstrating the performance of the Oracle CEP HA solutions."

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• Why SQL Developer Rocks for the Advanced User Too

  - by thatjeffsmith

  While SQL Developer may be ‘perfect for Oracle beginners,’ that doesn’t preclude advanced and intermediate users from getting their fair share of toys! I’ve been working with Oracle since the 7.3.4 days, and I think it’s pretty safe to say that the WAY an ‘old timer’ uses a tool like SQL Developer is radically different than the ‘beginner.’ If you’ve been reluctant to use SQL Developer because it’s a GUI, give me a few minutes to try to convince you it’s worth a second (or third) look. 1. Help when you want it, and only when you want it One of the biggest gripes any user has with a piece of software is when said software can’t get out of it’s own way. When you’re typing in a word processor, sometimes you can do without the grammar and spelling checks, the offer to auto-complete your words, and all of the additional mark-up. This drives folks to programs like Notepad++ and vi. You can disable the code insight feature so you can type unmolested by SQL Developer’s attempt to auto-complete your object names. Now, if you happen to come across a long or hard to spell object name, you can still invoke the feature on demand using Ctrl+Spacebar Code Editor – Completion Insight – Enable Completion Auto-Popup (Keyword being Auto) 2. Automatic File Tracking SQL*Minus is nice. Vi is cool. Notepad++ has a lot of features I like. But not too many editors offer automatic logging of changes to your files without having to setup a source control system. I was doing some work on my login.sql. I’m not doing anything crazy, but seeing what I had done in previous iterations was helpful. Now imagine how nice it would be to have this available for your l,000+ line scripts! Track your scripts as they change, no setup required! 3. Extend the Functionality Know SQL and XML? Wish SQL Developer did JUST a little bit more? Build your own extensions. You can have custom context menus and object pages in just a few minutes. This is an example of lazy developers writing code that write code. 4. Get Your Money’s Worth You’ve licensed Enterprise Edition. You got your Diagnostic and Tuning packs. Now start using them! Not everyone has access to Enterprise Manager, especially developers. But that doesn’t mean they don’t need help with troubleshooting and optimizing poorly performing SQL statements. ASH, AWR, Real-Time SQL Monitoring and the SQL Tuning Advisor are built into the Reports and Worksheet. Yes you could make the package calls, but that’s a whole lot of typing, and I’d rather just get to the results. 5. Profile, Debug, & Unit Testing PLSQL An Interactive Development Environment (IDE) built by the same folks that own the programming language (Hello – Oracle PLSQL!) should be complete. It should ‘hug’ the developer and empower them to churn out programs that work, run fast, and are easy to maintain. Write it, test it, debug it, and tune it. When you’re running your programs and you just want to see the data that’s returned, that shouldn’t require any special settings or workaround to make it happen either. Magic! And a whole lot more… I could go on and talk about the support for things like DataPump, RMAN, and DBMS_SCHEDULER, but you’re experts and you’re plenty busy. If you think SQL Developer is falling short somewhere, I want you to let us know about it.

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• NoSQL Java API for MySQL Cluster: Questions & Answers

  - by Mat Keep

  The MySQL Cluster engineering team recently ran a live webinar, available now on-demand demonstrating the ClusterJ and ClusterJPA NoSQL APIs for MySQL Cluster, and how these can be used in building real-time, high scale Java-based services that require continuous availability. Attendees asked a number of great questions during the webinar, and I thought it would be useful to share those here, so others are also able to learn more about the Java NoSQL APIs. First, a little bit about why we developed these APIs and why they are interesting to Java developers. ClusterJ and Cluster JPA ClusterJ is a Java interface to MySQL Cluster that provides either a static or dynamic domain object model, similar to the data model used by JDO, JPA, and Hibernate. A simple API gives users extremely high performance for common operations: insert, delete, update, and query. ClusterJPA works with ClusterJ to extend functionality, including - Persistent classes - Relationships - Joins in queries - Lazy loading - Table and index creation from object model By eliminating data transformations via SQL, users get lower data access latency and higher throughput. In addition, Java developers have a more natural programming method to directly manage their data, with a complete, feature-rich solution for Object/Relational Mapping. As a result, the development of Java applications is simplified with faster development cycles resulting in accelerated time to market for new services. MySQL Cluster offers multiple NoSQL APIs alongside Java: - Memcached for a persistent, high performance, write-scalable Key/Value store, - HTTP/REST via an Apache module - C++ via the NDB API for the lowest absolute latency. Developers can use SQL as well as NoSQL APIs for access to the same data set via multiple query patterns – from simple Primary Key lookups or inserts to complex cross-shard JOINs using Adaptive Query Localization Marrying NoSQL and SQL access to an ACID-compliant database offers developers a number of benefits. MySQL Cluster’s distributed, shared-nothing architecture with auto-sharding and real time performance makes it a great fit for workloads requiring high volume OLTP. Users also get the added flexibility of being able to run real-time analytics across the same OLTP data set for real-time business insight. OK – hopefully you now have a better idea of why ClusterJ and JPA are available. Now, for the Q&A. Q & A Q. Why would I use Connector/J vs. ClusterJ? A. Partly it's a question of whether you prefer to work with SQL (Connector/J) or objects (ClusterJ). Performance of ClusterJ will be better as there is no need to pass through the MySQL Server. A ClusterJ operation can only act on a single table (e.g. no joins) - ClusterJPA extends that capability Q. Can I mix different APIs (ie ClusterJ, Connector/J) in our application for different query types? A. Yes. You can mix and match all of the API types, SQL, JDBC, ODBC, ClusterJ, Memcached, REST, C++. They all access the exact same data in the data nodes. Update through one API and new data is instantly visible to all of the others. Q. How many TCP connections would a SessionFactory instance create for a cluster of 8 data nodes? A. SessionFactory has a connection to the mgmd (management node) but otherwise is just a vehicle to create Sessions. Without using connection pooling, a SessionFactory will have one connection open with each data node. Using optional connection pooling allows multiple connections from the SessionFactory to increase throughput. Q. Can you give details of how Cluster J optimizes sharding to enhance performance of distributed query processing? A. Each data node in a cluster runs a Transaction Coordinator (TC), which begins and ends the transaction, but also serves as a resource to operate on the result rows. While an API node (such as a ClusterJ process) can send queries to any TC/data node, there are performance gains if the TC is where most of the result data is stored. ClusterJ computes the shard (partition) key to choose the data node where the row resides as the TC. Q. What happens if we perform two primary key lookups within the same transaction? Are they sent to the data node in one transaction? A. ClusterJ will send identical PK lookups to the same data node. Q. How is distributed query processing handled by MySQL Cluster ? A. If the data is split between data nodes then all of the information will be transparently combined and passed back to the application. The session will connect to a data node - typically by hashing the primary key - which then interacts with its neighboring nodes to collect the data needed to fulfil the query. Q. Can I use Foreign Keys with MySQL Cluster A. Support for Foreign Keys is included in the MySQL Cluster 7.3 Early Access release Summary The NoSQL Java APIs are packaged with MySQL Cluster, available for download here so feel free to take them for a spin today! Key Resources MySQL Cluster on-line demo  MySQL ClusterJ and JPA On-demand webinar  MySQL ClusterJ and JPA documentation MySQL ClusterJ and JPA whitepaper and tutorial

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• Oracle Cloud Hiring Event at Oracle in Redwood on November 9th

  - by user769227

  Wow, 24 hours to go until Cloud Hire 2012 at Oracle! Friday is going to be a great day for many looking to make a life and career changing move. In case you haven’t heard, Oracle is hosting Cloud Hire 2012 this Friday, November 9, at the Oracle Conference Center on our World Wide Headquarters campus in Redwood Shores. This is a one-of-a-kind event to be sure and we are still registering online! We are aggressively expanding our Cloud Development and Product Management organizations to meet to ever-growing demand for Oracle Cloud. And, from this event alone, we are hoping to hire 25+ Developers, Inbound and Outbound Product Managers, Technical Leaders and QA Engineers across several Oracle Cloud groups, including: · Data and Insight Services: Big Data as a Service/Business Directory · Cloud Infrastructure · Application Marketplace · Cloud Portal · Product Management and Marketing: Outbound/Inbound · Testing/Quality Assurance · Cloud Social Platform: Analytics, Media, Big Data, Text Analytics, High Performance Search, · Cloud Social Platform - Social Relationship Management: Mobile Development/Social Network Integrations Why attend this event? Just Google Larry Ellison’s 2012 OpenWorld keynote address and you will learn why! Oracle Cloud is growing every day and we are scaling, adding new products and revolutionizing and improving all areas of the Oracle Cloud. There is no company that can come close to the comprehensive product lineup, services, capabilities and global reach and delivery of Oracle’s Cloud. This why it is a great time to work for Oracle: where consistent, stable financial growth rules and high impact technological advances are occurring every day. If you are serious about managing an upward, expansive path in your career, while staying on the leading edge and making big career impacts, you should join Oracle. Whether you want to design and develop or manage Social, Infrastructure or Applications in the Cloud, you can do it all at Oracle. Whether you’re a Technical Leader, Developer, Architect or Product Manager/Strategist, we are hiring now! Come check us out on Friday, November 9 in-person and see why Oracle Cloud is the place to take your career! RSVP here: and Learn more about the hiring teams in attendance here. Here are just some of the big things happening on Friday, November 9: · 830-3pm: Registration/Refreshments, Oracle Conference Center, 350 Oracle Parkway, Redwood Shores, CA (free parking) · 9am – 3pm: Ongoing Hiring Team Discussions and Product Demos include: Social Marketing, Social Engagement, Social Monitoring, Insight / View, KPI Bundles, Business Directory, Virtualization, Messaging, Provisioning, Cloud Portal · 10:30am – Speaker: Gopalan Arun, Vice President, Oracle Cloud Development Bio: Arun has been with Oracle for 18 years+. He is a testament to the stability and career growth that you can achieve working for Oracle. Arun began as a Developer and ascended through several product organizations into key leadership roles. Over his 18 years at Oracle, he has built and shipped many Database and Middleware products. Arun is one of the founding members of the Oracle Cloud and currently leads the development of many of the core infrastructure and developer-facing services of the Oracle Cloud. Topic: Oracle Cloud for the Developer · 1pm – Speaker: Naresh Revanuru, Lead Architect, Oracle Cloud Bio: Naresh is currently leading Java, Storage and Compute services for Oracle Cloud. Naresh also helps drive decisions for broad based Cloud topics that affect multiple services. http://www.linkedin.com/in/nareshrevanuru Topic: Oracle Cloud Architectural Overview and Challenges to Solve · 1pm-3pm: Ongoing Hiring Team Discussions and Product Demos

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• Big Data – Basics of Big Data Analytics – Day 18 of 21

  - by Pinal Dave

  In yesterday’s blog post we learned the importance of the various components in Big Data Story. In this article we will understand what are the various analytics tasks we try to achieve with the Big Data and the list of the important tools in Big Data Story. When you have plenty of the data around you what is the first thing which comes to your mind? “What do all these data means?” Exactly – the same thought comes to my mind as well. I always wanted to know what all the data means and what meaningful information I can receive out of it. Most of the Big Data projects are built to retrieve various intelligence all this data contains within it. Let us take example of Facebook. When I look at my friends list of Facebook, I always want to ask many questions such as - On which date my maximum friends have a birthday? What is the most favorite film of my most of the friends so I can talk about it and engage them? What is the most liked placed to travel my friends? Which is the most disliked cousin for my friends in India and USA so when they travel, I do not take them there. There are many more questions I can think of. This illustrates that how important it is to have analysis of Big Data. Here are few of the kind of analysis listed which you can use with Big Data. Slicing and Dicing: This means breaking down your data into smaller set and understanding them one set at a time. This also helps to present various information in a variety of different user digestible ways. For example if you have data related to movies, you can use different slide and dice data in various formats like actors, movie length etc. Real Time Monitoring: This is very crucial in social media when there are any events happening and you wanted to measure the impact at the time when the event is happening. For example, if you are using twitter when there is a football match, you can watch what fans are talking about football match on twitter when the event is happening. Anomaly Predication and Modeling: If the business is running normal it is alright but if there are signs of trouble, everyone wants to know them early on the hand. Big Data analysis of various patterns can be very much helpful to predict future. Though it may not be always accurate but certain hints and signals can be very helpful. For example, lots of data can help conclude that if there is lots of rain it can increase the sell of umbrella. Text and Unstructured Data Analysis: unstructured data are now getting norm in the new world and they are a big part of the Big Data revolution. It is very important that we Extract, Transform and Load the unstructured data and make meaningful data out of it. For example, analysis of lots of images, one can predict that people like to use certain colors in certain months in their cloths. Big Data Analytics Solutions There are many different Big Data Analystics Solutions out in the market. It is impossible to list all of them so I will list a few of them over here. Tableau – This has to be one of the most popular visualization tools out in the big data market. SAS – A high performance analytics and infrastructure company IBM and Oracle – They have a range of tools for Big Data Analysis Tomorrow In tomorrow’s blog post we will discuss about very important components of the Big Data Ecosystem – Data Scientist. 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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• Top 10 Linked Blogs of 2010

  - by Bill Graziano

  Each week I send out a SQL Server newsletter and include links to interesting blog posts.  I’ve linked to over 500 blog posts so far in 2010.  Late last year I started storing those links in a database so I could do a little reporting.  I tend to link to posts related to the OLTP engine.  I also try to link to the individual blogger in the group blogs.  Unfortunately that wasn’t possible for the SQLCAT and CSS blogs.  I also have a real weakness for posts related to PASS. These are the top 10 blogs that I linked to during the year ordered by the number of posts I linked to. Paul Randal – Paul writes extensively on the internals of the relational engine.  Lots of great posts around transactions, transaction log, disaster recovery, corruption, indexes and DBCC.  I also linked to many of his SQL Server myths posts. Glenn Berry – Glenn writes very interesting posts on how hardware affects SQL Server.  I especially like his posts on the various CPU platforms.  These aren’t necessarily topics that I’m searching for but I really enjoy reading them. The SQLCAT Team – This Microsoft team focuses on the largest and most interesting SQL Server installations.  The regularly publish white papers and best practices. SQL Server CSS Team – These are the top engineers from the Microsoft Customer Service and Support group.  These are the folks you finally talk to after your case has been escalated about 20 times.  They write about the interesting problems they find. Brent Ozar – The posts I linked to mostly focused on the relational engine: CPU, NUMA, SSD drives, performance monitoring, etc.  But Brent writes about a real variety of topics including blogging, social networking, speaking, the MCM, SQL Azure and anything else that seems to strike his fancy.  His posts are always well written and though provoking. Jeremiah Peschka – A number of Jeremiah’s posts weren’t about SQL Server.  He’s very active in the “NoSQL” area and I linked to a number of those posts.  I think it’s important for people to know what other technologies are out there. Brad McGehee – Brad writes about being a DBA including maintenance plans, DBA checklists, compression and audit. Thomas LaRock – I linked to a variety of posts from PBM to networking to 24 Hours of PASS to TDE.  Just a real variety of topics.  Tom always writes with an interesting style usually mixing in a movie theme and/or bacon. Aaron Bertrand – Many of my links this year were Denali features.  He also had a great series on bad habits to kick. Michael J. Swart – This last one surprised me.  There are some well known SQL Server bloggers below Michael on this list.  I linked to posts on indexes, hierarchies, transactions and I/O performance and a variety of other engine related posts.  All are interesting and well thought out.  Many of his non-SQL posts are also very good.  He seems to have an interest in puzzles and other brain teasers.  Michael, I won’t be surprised again!

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• Oracle OpenWorld Update: Oracle GoldenGate for High Availability

  - by Doug Reid

  0 false 18 pt 18 pt 0 0 false false false /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} One of our primary themes this year for the Oracle OpenWorld Sessions featuring Oracle GoldenGate is High Availability. This is a pretty wide theme, but the focus will be on ways of maximizing uptime for critical systems during planned and unplanned events. We have a number of very informative sessions dedicated to exploring this theme in detail; from deep product implementation strategies up to lessons learned by our customers when using Oracle GoldenGate to meet strict SLAs. We kick this track off with our Customer Panel on Zero Downtime Operations on Monday, which I overviewed in my last posting. This is followed by Comcast, who will be hosting a sessions at 1:45PM in Moscone West 3014. Their session will discuss using Oracle GoldenGate to reduce downtime during a database upgrade. Here’s an overview: CON8571 - Oracle Database Upgrade with Oracle GoldenGate: Best Practices from Comcast Does your business demand high availability? In this session, Comcast, among the largest telecom firms in the world, shares tips on how to achieve zero downtime while upgrading to Oracle Database 11g Release 2, using a combination of Oracle technologies: Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC), Oracle Database’s Grid Infrastructure and Oracle Recovery Manager (Oracle RMAN) features, Oracle GoldenGate, and Oracle Active Data Guard. This successful upgrade took place on a mission-critical system that handles more than 60 million business requests and service calls a day. You’ll also hear how Comcast leverages Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services, including an Oracle Solution Support Center, to maximize performance and availability of its Oracle technologies. On Tuesday, Joydip Kundu (Director of Software Development) will be presenting “Oracle GoldenGate and Oracle Data Guard: Working Together Seamlessly” at 10:15AM in Moscone South 3005. This session focuses on how both modes of Oracle GoldenGate extract (Classic and Integrated Capture) can be used with Oracle Data Guard for disaster recovery purposes or to offload extract processing. That afternoon at 1:15PM Comcast takes the stage again to discuss firsthand lessons learned implementing Oracle GoldenGate in a heterogeneous, highly available environment. Here’s a rundown of their session: CON8750 - High-Volume OLTP with Oracle GoldenGate: Best Practices from Comcast Does your business demand high availability in a mission-critical environment? In this session, Comcast, one of the largest telecom firms, shares best practices for leveraging Oracle GoldenGate to replicate high-volume online transaction processing data from Tandem NSK SQL/MX to Teradata. Hear critical success factors from Comcast for overall platform and component architectures as well as configuration and tuning techniques. Learn how it met the challenges of replication in a complex heterogeneous environment. You’ll also hear how Comcast leverages Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services, including an Oracle Solution Support Center, to provide mission-critical support for maximized performance and availability of its Oracle environment. The final session on the high availability track will be hosted by Patricia Mcelroy (Distinguished Product Manager) and Stephan Haisly (Principle Member of Technical Staff). Their session (CON8401 - Tuning and Troubleshooting Oracle GoldenGate on Oracle Database) covers techniques for performance tuning and troubleshooting of Oracle GoldenGate on Oracle Database. Using various types of workloads (OLTP, batch, Oracle’s PeopleSoft Enterprise), the presentation steps through the process of monitoring and troubleshooting the configuration to maximize performance and replication throughput within and between Oracle clouds. Join us at our sessions or stop by our demo pods in Moscone south and meet the product management and development teams.

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• Becoming A Great Developer

  - by Lee Brandt

  Image via Wikipedia I’ve been doing the whole programming thing for awhile and reading and watching some of the best in the business. I have come to notice that the really great developers do a few things that (I think) makes them great. Now don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that I am one of these few. I still struggle with doing some of the things that makes one great at development. Coincidently, many of these things also make you a better person period. Believe That Guidance Is Better Than Answers This is one I have no problem with. I prefer guidance any time I am learning from another developer. Answers may get you going, but guidance will leave you stranded. At some point, you will come across a problem that can only be solved by thinking for yourself and this is where that guidance will really come in handy. You can use that guidance and extrapolate whatever technology to salve that problem (if it’s the right tool for solving that problem). The problem is, lots of developers simply want someone to tell them, “Do this, then this, then set that, and write this.” Favor thinking and learn the guidance of doing X and don’t ask someone to show you how to do X, if that makes sense. Read, Read and Read If you don’t like reading, you’re probably NOT going to make it into the Great Developer group. Great developers read books, they read magazines and they read code. Open source playgrounds like SourceForge, CodePlex and GitHub, have made it extremely easy to download code from developers you admire and see how they do stuff. Chances are, if you read their blog too, they’ll even explain WHY they did what they did (see “Guidance” above). MSDN and Code Magazine have not only code samples, but explanations of how to use certain technologies and sometimes even when NOT to use that same technology. Books are also out on just about every topic. I still favor the less technology centric books. For instance, I generally don’t buy books like, “Getting Started with Jiminy Jappets”. I look for titles like, “How To Write More Effective Code” (again, see guidance). The Addison-Wesley Signature Series is a great example of these types of books. They teach technology-agnostic concepts. Head First Design Patterns is another great guidance book. It teaches the "Gang Of Four" Design Patterns in a very easy-to-understand, picture-heavy way (I LIKE pictures). Hang Your Balls Out There Even though the advice came from a 3rd-shift Kinko’s attendant, doesn’t mean it’s not sound advice. Write some code and put it out for others to read, criticize and castigate you for. Understand that there are some real jerks out there who are absolute geniuses. Don’t be afraid to get some great advice wrapped in some really nasty language. Try to take what’s good about it and leave what’s not. I have a tough time with this myself. I don’t really have any code out there that is available for review (other than my demo code). It takes some guts to do, but in the end, there is no substitute for getting a community of developers to critique your code and give you ways to improve. Get Involved Speaking of community, the local and online user groups and discussion forums are a great place to hear about technologies and techniques you might never come across otherwise. Mostly because you might not know to look. But, once you sit down with a bunch of other developers and start discussing what you’re interested in, you may open up a whole new perspective on it. Don’t just go to the UG meetings and watch the presentations either, get out there and talk, socialize. I realize geeks weren’t meant to necessarily be social creatures, but if you’re amongst other geeks, it’s much easier. I’ve learned more in the last 3-4 years that I have been involved in the community that I did in my previous 8 years of coding without it. Socializing works, even if socialism doesn’t. Continuous Improvement Lean proponents might call this “Kaizen”, but I call it progress. We all know, especially in the technology realm, if you’re not moving ahead, you’re falling behind. It may seem like drinking from a fire hose, but step back and pick out the technologies that speak to you. The ones that may you’re little heart go pitter-patter. Concentrate on those. If you’re still overloaded, pick the best of the best. Just know that if you’re not looking at the code you wrote last week or at least last year with some embarrassment, you’re probably stagnating. That’s about all I can say about that, cause I am all out of clichés to throw at it. :0) Write Code Great painters paint, great writers write, and great developers write code. The most sure-fire way to improve your coding ability is to continue writing code. Don’t just write code that your work throws on you, pick that technology you love or are curious to know more about and walk through some blog demo examples. Take the language you use everyday and try to get it to do something crazy. Who knows, you might create the next Google search algorithm! All in all, being a great developer is about finding yourself in all this code. If it is just a job to you, you will probably never be one of the “Great Developers”, but you’re probably okay with that. If, on the other hand, you do aspire to greatness, get out there and GET it. No one’s going hand it to you.

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• Create Advanced Panoramas with Microsoft Image Composite Editor

  - by Matthew Guay

  Do you enjoy making panoramas with your pictures, but want more features than tools like Live Photo Gallery offer?  Here’s how you can create amazing panoramas for free with the Microsoft Image Composite Editor. Yesterday we took a look at creating panoramic photos in Windows Live Photo Gallery. Today we take a look at a free tool from Microsoft that will give you more advanced features to create your own masterpiece. Getting Started Download Microsoft Image Composite Editor from Microsoft Research (link below), and install as normal.  Note that there are separate version for 32 & 64-bit editions of Windows, so make sure to download the correct one for your computer. Once it’s installed, you can proceed to create awesome panoramas and extremely large image combinations with it.  Microsoft Image Composite Editor integrates with Live Photo Gallery, so you can create more advanced panoramic pictures directly.  Select the pictures you want to combine, click Extras in the menu bar, and select Create Image Composite. You can also create a photo stitch directly from Explorer.  Select the pictures you want to combine, right-click, and select Stitch Images… Or, simply launch the Image Composite Editor itself and drag your pictures into its editor.  Either way you start a image composition, the program will automatically analyze and combine your images.  This application is optimized for multiple cores, and we found it much faster than other panorama tools such as Live Photo Gallery. Within seconds, you’ll see your panorama in the top preview pane. From the bottom of the window, you can choose a different camera motion which will change how the program stitches the pictures together.  You can also quickly crop the picture to the size you want, or use Automatic Crop to have the program select the maximum area with a continuous picture.   Here’s how our panorama looked when we switched the Camera Motion to Planar Motion 2. But, the real tweaking comes in when you adjust the panorama’s projection and orientation.  Click the box button at the top to change these settings. The panorama is now overlaid with a grid, and you can drag the corners and edges of the panorama to change its shape. Or, from the Projection button at the top, you can choose different projection modes. Here we’ve chosen Cylinder (Vertical), which entirely removed the warp on the walls in the image.  You can pan around the image, and get the part you find most important in the center.  Click the Apply button on the top when you’re finished making changes, or click Revert if you want to switch to the default view settings. Once you’ve finished your masterpiece, you can export it easily to common photo formats from the Export panel on the bottom.  You can choose to scale the image or set it to a maximum width and height as well.  Click Export to disk to save the photo to your computer, or select Publish to Photosynth to post your panorama online. Alternately, from the File menu you can choose to save the panorama as .spj file.  This preserves all of your settings in the Image Composite Editor so you can edit it more in the future if you wish.   Conclusion Whether you’re trying to capture the inside of a building or a tall tree, the extra tools in Microsoft Image Composite Editor let you make nicer panoramas than you ever thought possible.  We found the final results surprisingly accurate to the real buildings and objects, especially after tweaking the projection modes.  This tool can be both fun and useful, so give it a try and let us know what you’ve found it useful for. Works with 32 & 64-bit versions of XP, Vista, and Windows 7 Link Download Microsoft Image Composite Editor Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Change or Set the Greasemonkey Script Editor in FirefoxNew Vista Syntax for Opening Control Panel Items from the Command-lineTune Your ClearType Font Settings in Windows VistaChange the Default Editor From Nano on Ubuntu LinuxMake MSE Create a Restore Point Before Cleaning Malware 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 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 Get a free copy of WinUtilities Pro 2010 World Cup Schedule Boot Snooze – Reboot and then Standby or Hibernate Customize Everything Related to Dates, Times, Currency and Measurement in Windows 7 Google Earth replacement Icon (Icons we like) Build Great Charts in Excel with Chart Advisor

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• Stumbling Through: Making a case for the K2 Case Management Framework

  I have recently attended a three-day training session on K2s Case Management Framework (CMF), a free framework built on top of K2s blackpearl workflow product, and I have come away with several different impressions for some of the different aspects of the framework.  Before we get into the details, what is the Case Management Framework?  It is essentially a suite of tools that, when used together, solve many common workflow scenarios.  The tool has been developed over time by K2 consultants that have realized they tend to solve the same problems over and over for various clients, so they attempted to package all of those common solutions into one framework.  Most of these common problems involve workflow process that arent necessarily direct and would tend to be difficult to model.  Such solutions could be achieved in blackpearl alone, but the workflows would be complex and difficult to follow and maintain over time.  CMF attempts to simplify such scenarios not so much by black-boxing the workflow processes, but by providing different points of entry to the processes allowing them to be simpler, moving the complexity to a middle layer.  It is not a solution in and of itself, development is still required to tie the pieces together. CMF is under continuous development, both a plus and a minus in that bugs are fixed quickly and features added regularly, but it may be difficult to know which versions are the most stable.  CMF is not an officially supported K2 product, which means you will not get technical support but you will get access to the source code. The example given of a business process that would fit well into CMF is that of a file cabinet, where each folder in said file cabinet is a case that contains all of the data associated with one complaint/customer/incident/etc. and various users can access that case at any time and take one of a set of pre-determined actions on it.  When I was given that example, my first thought was that any workflow I have ever developed in the past could be made to fit this model there must be more than just this model to help decide if CMF is the right solution.  As the training went on, we learned that one of the key features of CMF is SharePoint integration as each case gets a SharePoint site created for it, and there are a number of excellent web parts that can be used to design a portal for users to get at all the information on their cases.  While CMF does not require SharePoint, without it you will be missing out on a huge portion of functionality that CMF offers.  My opinion is that without SharePoint integration, you may as well write your workflows and other components the old fashioned way. When I heard that each case gets its own SharePoint site created for it, warning bells immediately went off in my head as I felt that depending on the data load, a CMF enabled solution could quickly overwhelm SharePoint with thousands of sites so we have yet another deciding factor for CMF:  Just how many cases will your solution be creating?  While it is not necessary to use the site-per-case model, it is one of the more useful parts of the framework.  Without it, you are losing a big chunk of what CMF has to offer. When it comes to developing on top of the Case Management Framework, it becomes a matter of configuring what makes up a case, what can be done to a case, where each action on a case should take the user, and then typing up actions to case statuses.  This last step is one that I immediately warmed up to, as just about every workflow Ive designed in the past needed some sort of mapping table to set the status of a work item based on the action being taken definitely one of those common solutions that it is good to see rolled up into a re-useable entity (and it gets a nice configuration UI to boot!).  This concept is a little different than traditional workflow design, in that you dont have to think of an end-to-end process around passing a case along a path, rather, you must envision the case as central object with workflow threads branching off of it and doing their own thing with the case data.  Certainly there can be certain workflow threads that get rather complex, but the idea is that they RELATE to the case, they dont BECOME the case (though it is still possible with action->status mappings to prevent certain actions in certain cases, so it isnt always a wide-open free for all of actions on a case). I realize that this description of the Case Management Framework merely scratches the surface on what the product actually can do, and I dont think Ive conclusively defined for what sort of business scenario you can make a case for Case Management Framework.  What I do hope to have accomplished with this post is to raise awareness of CMF there is a (free!) product out there that could potentially simplify a tangled workflow process and give (for free!) a very useful set of SharePoint web parts and a nice set of (free!) reports.  The best way to see if it will truly fit your needs is to give it a try did I mention it is FREE?  Er, ok, so it is free, but only obtainable at this time for K2 partnersDid you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Using Live Data in Database Development Work

  - by Phil Factor

  Guest Editorial for Simple-Talk Newsletter... in which Phil Factor reacts with some exasperation when coming across a report that a majority of companies were still using financial and personal data for both developing and testing database applications. If you routinely test your development work using real production data that contains personal or financial information, you are probably being irresponsible, and at worst, risking a heavy financial penalty for your company. Surprisingly, over 80% of financial companies still do this. Plenty of data breaches and fraud have happened from the use of real data for testing, and a data breach is a nightmare for any organisation that suffers one. The cost of each data breach averages out at around $7.2 million in the US in notification, escalation, credit monitoring, fines, litigation, legal costs, and lost business due to customer churn, £1.9 million in the UK. 70% of data breaches are done from within the organisation. Real data can be exploited in a number of ways for malicious or criminal purposes. It isn't just the obvious use of items such as name and address, date of birth, social security number, and credit card and bank account numbers: Data can be exploited in many subtle ways, so there are excellent reasons to ensure that a high priority is given to the detection and prevention of any data breaches. You'll never successfully guess all the ways that real data can be exploited maliciously, or the ease with which it can be accessed. It would be silly to argue that developers never need access to a copy of the database containing live data. Developers sometimes need to track a bug that can only be replicated on the data from the live database. However, it has to be done in a very restrictive harness. The law makes no distinction between development and production databases when a data breach occurs, so the data has to be held with all appropriate security measures in place. In Europe, the use of personal data for testing requires the explicit consent of the people whose data is being held. There are federal standards such as GLBA, PCI DSS and HIPAA, and most US States have privacy legislation. The task of ensuring compliance and tight security in such circumstances is an expensive and time-consuming overhead. The developer is likely to suffer investigation if a data breach occurs, even if the company manages to stay in business. Ironically, the use of copies of live data isn't usually the most effective way to develop or test your data. Data is usually time-specific and isn't usually current by the time it is used for testing, Existing data doesn't help much for new functionality, and every time the data is refreshed from production, any test data is likely to be overwritten. Also, it is not always going to test all the 'edge' conditions that are likely to flush out bugs. You still have the task of simulating the dynamics of actual usage of the database, and here you have no alternative to creating 'spoofed' data. Because of the complexities of relational data, It used to be that there was no realistic alternative to developing and testing with live data. However, this is no longer the case. Real data can be obfuscated, or it can be created entirely from scratch. The latter process used to be impractical, now that there are plenty of third-party tools to choose from. The process of obfuscation isn't risk free. The process must access the live data, and the success of the obfuscation process has to be carefully monitored. Database data security isn't an exciting topic to you or I, but to a hacker it can be an all-consuming obsession, especially if there is financial or political gain involved. This is not the sort of adversary one would wish for and it is far better to accept, and work with, security restrictions that exist for using live data in database development work, especially when the tools exist to create large realistic database test data that can be better for several aspects of testing.

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• Java 6 Certified with Forms and Reports 10g for EBS 12

  - by John Abraham

  Java 6 is now certified with Oracle Application Server 10g Forms and Reports with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 (12.0.6, 12.1.1 and higher). What? Wasn't this already certified? No, but a little background might be useful in understanding why this is a new announcement. We previously certified the use of Java 6 with E-Business Suite Release 12 -- with the sole exception of Oracle Application Server 10g components in the E-Business Suite technology stack. Oracle Application Server 10g originally included Java 1.4.2 as part of its distribution.  E-Business Suite 12 uses, amongst other things, the Oracle Forms and Reports 10g components running on Java 1.4. Java 1.4 in the Oracle Application Server 10g ORACLE_HOME is used exclusively by AS 10g Forms and Reports' for Java functionality.  This version of Java is separate from the Java distribution used by other parts of EBS such as Oracle Containers for Java (OC4J). What's new about this certification? You can now upgrade the older Java 1.4 libraries used by Oracle Forms & Reports 10g to Java 6. This allows you to upgrade the Java releases within the Oracle Application Server 10g ORACLE_HOME to the the same level as the rest of your E-Business Suite technology stack components. Why upgrade? This becomes particularly important for customers as individual vendors' support lifecycle for Java 1.4 reaches End of Life: Oracle's Sun JDK Release 1.4.2's End of Extended Support: February 2013 (Sustaining Support indefinitely after) IBM SDK and JRE 1.4.2's End of Service: September 2013 HP-UX Java 1.4.2's End-of-Life : May 2012 Along with Oracle Forms, Java lies at the heart of the Oracle E-Business Suite.  Small improvements in Java can have significant effects on the performance and stability of the E-Business Suite.  As a notable side-benefit, later versions of Java have improved built-in and third-party tools for JVM performance monitoring and tuning.Our standing recommendation is that you always stay current with the latest available Java update provided by your operating system vendor.  Don't forget to upgrade Forms & Reports to 10.1.2.3 E-Business Suite 12 originally shipped with Oracle Application Server 10g Forms & Reports 10.1.2.0.2.  That version is no longer eligible for Error Correction Support. New Forms and Reports 10g patches are now being released with Forms and Reports 10.1.2.3 as the prerequisite. Forms and Reports 10.1.2.3 was certified for EBS 12 environments in November 2008. If you haven't upgraded your EBS 12 environment to Forms & Reports 10.1.2.3, this is a good opportunity to do so. References Using Latest Update of Java 6.0 with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 (My Oracle Support Document 455492.1) Overview of Using Java with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 (My Oracle Support Document 418664.1) Oracle Lifetime Support Policy (Oracle Fusion Middleware) IBM Developer Kit Lifecycle Dates HP-UX Java - End of Life Policy & Release Naming Terminology Related Articles OracleAS 10g Forms and Reports 10.1.2.3 Certified With EBS R12 Java 6 Certified with E-Business Suite Release 12

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