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• Fraud and Anomaly Detection using Oracle Data Mining YouTube-like Video

  - by chberger

  I've created and recorded another YouTube-like presentation and "live" demos of Oracle Advanced Analytics Option, this time focusing on Fraud and Anomaly Detection using Oracle Data Mining.  [Note:  It is a large MP4 file that will open and play in place.  The sound quality is weak so you may need to turn up the volume.] Data is your most valuable asset. It represents the entire history of your organization and its interactions with your customers.  Predictive analytics leverages data to discover patterns, relationships and to help you even make informed predictions.   Oracle Data Mining (ODM) automatically discovers relationships hidden in data.  Predictive models and insights discovered with ODM address business problems such as:  predicting customer behavior, detecting fraud, analyzing market baskets, profiling and loyalty.  Oracle Data Mining, part of the Oracle Advanced Analytics (OAA) Option to the Oracle Database EE, embeds 12 high performance data mining algorithms in the SQL kernel of the Oracle Database. This eliminates data movement, delivers scalability and maintains security.  But, how do you find these very important needles or possibly fraudulent transactions and huge haystacks of data? Oracle Data Mining’s 1 Class Support Vector Machine algorithm is specifically designed to identify rare or anomalous records.  Oracle Data Mining's 1-Class SVM anomaly detection algorithm trains on what it believes to be considered “normal” records, build a descriptive and predictive model which can then be used to flags records that, on a multi-dimensional basis, appear to not fit in--or be different.  Combined with clustering techniques to sort transactions into more homogeneous sub-populations for more focused anomaly detection analysis and Oracle Business Intelligence, Enterprise Applications and/or real-time environments to "deploy" fraud detection, Oracle Data Mining delivers a powerful advanced analytical platform for solving important problems.  With OAA/ODM you can find suspicious expense report submissions, flag non-compliant tax submissions, fight fraud in healthcare claims and save huge amounts of money in fraudulent claims  and abuse.   This presentation and several brief demos will show Oracle Data Mining's fraud and anomaly detection capabilities.  

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• In a multidisciplicary team, how much should each member's skills overlap?

  - by spade78

  I've been working in embedded software development for this small startup and our team is pretty small: about 3-4 people. We're responsible for all engineering which involves an RF device controlled by an embedded microcontroller that connects to a PC host which runs some sort of data collection and analysis software. I have come to develop these two guidelines when I work with my colleagues: Define a clear separation of responsibilities and make sure each person's contribution to the final product doesn't overlap. Don't assume your colleagues know everything about their responsibilities. I assume there is some sort of technology that I will need to be competent at to properly interface with the work of my colleagues. The first point is pretty easy for us. I do firmware, one guy does the RF, another does the PC software, and the last does the DSP work. Nothing overlaps in terms of two people's work being mixed into the final product. For that to happen, one guy has to hand off work to another guy who will vet it and integrate it himself. The second point is the heart of my question. I've learned the hard way not to trust the knowledge of my colleagues absolutley no matter how many years experience they claim to have. At least not until they've demonstrated it to me a couple of times. So given that whenever I develop a piece of firmware, if it interfaces with some technology that I don't know then I'll try to learn it and develop a piece of test code that helps me understand what they're doing. That way if my piece of the product comes into conflict with another piece then I have some knowledge about possible causes. For example, the PC guy has started implementing his GUI's in .NET WPF (C#) and using LibUSBdotNET for USB access. So I've been learning C# and the .NET USB library that he uses and I build a little console app to help me understand how that USB library works. Now all this takes extra time and energy but I feel it's justified as it gives me a foothold to confront integration problems. Also I like learning this new stuff so I don't mind. On the other hand I can see how this can turn into a time synch for work that won't make it into the final product and may never turn into a problem. So how much experience/skills overlap do you expect in your teammates relative to your own skills? Does this issue go away as the teams get bigger and more diverse?

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• Started wrong with a project. Should I start over?

  - by solidsnake

  I'm a beginner web developer (one year of experience). A couple of weeks after graduating, I got offered a job to build a web application for a company whose owner is not much of a tech guy. He recruited me to avoid theft of his idea, the high cost of development charged by a service company, and to have someone young he can trust onboard to maintain the project for the long run (I came to these conclusions by myself long after being hired). Cocky as I was back then, with a diploma in computer science, I accepted the offer thinking I can build anything. I was calling the shots. After some research I settled on PHP, and started with plain PHP, no objects, just ugly procedural code. Two months later, everything was getting messy, and it was hard to make any progress. The web application is huge. So I decided to check out an MVC framework that would make my life easier. That's where I stumbled upon the cool kid in the PHP community: Laravel. I loved it, it was easy to learn, and I started coding right away. My code looked cleaner, more organized. It looked very good. But again the web application was huge. The company was pressuring me to deliver the first version, which they wanted to deploy, obviously, and start seeking customers. Because Laravel was fun to work with, it made me remember why I chose this industry in the first place - something I forgot while stuck in the shitty education system. So I started working on small projects at night, reading about methodologies and best practice. I revisited OOP, moved on to object-oriented design and analysis, and read Uncle Bob's book Clean Code. This helped me realize that I really knew nothing. I did not know how to build software THE RIGHT WAY. But at this point it was too late, and now I'm almost done. My code is not clean at all, just spaghetti code, a real pain to fix a bug, all the logic is in the controllers, and there is little object oriented design. I'm having this persistent thought that I have to rewrite the whole project. However, I can't do it... They keep asking when is it going to be all done. I can not imagine this code deployed on a server. Plus I still know nothing about code efficiency and the web application's performance. On one hand, the company is waiting for the product and can not wait anymore. On the other hand I can't see myself going any further with the actual code. I could finish up, wrap it up and deploy, but god only knows what might happen when people start using it. What do you think I should do?

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• MS in Computer Science after BE in electronics

  - by Abhinav

  I am doing my 3rd year Bachelors in Electronics and Electrical Communication but from the first year I have been interested in Computer Science. But at that time it was just my hobby. But in second year when I joined robotics my love for computer science rose. I with my team came in top three in 2 National Competition (Technical fests of different IITs) where we used Image Processing, Hardware interfacing etc. But then I realised that Computer Science is not just about coding. I took many lectures from online free schools like Udacity, Coursera in subjects related to Artificial Intelligence, Building a Search Engine, Design and Analysis of Algorithm, Programming a Robotic Car, Programming Languages, Machine Learning, Software Engineering as a Service, WebApps Engineering, Compilers, Applied Crypotography etc. I also did some courses in Core and Advanced Java in my second year from training institute. I will also be taking course in Statistics, Databases, Discrete Mathematics from 25th June. Now I realized how vast is the field of Computer Science and how efficient you become on deciding algorithms and classifying problems into different subfields which have been thoroughly researched so you don't always do brute force thing or naive programming. Now this field has become kind of passion for me. Adding to the fact I am also doing my 6 months internship in software field in Texas Instruments where I am working on Automation and Algorithms. I also have some 5-6 good college level projects in Softwares and Robotics. I also like Electronics but only some fields like Operating System(this subject was there in Electronics also), Micro Processor, Digital, Computer Architecture, DSPs etc. I really want to pursue MS in some field of Computer Science. I am giving GRE in October/November. Till now I have good CG of around 9.4/10 and my 1 year in college is still left. Do I have any chance that some good University in US will consider me for MS in field related to computer science or Robotics. Also Can you suggest somethings that I can do during this 1 year to increase my chances for MS or should I apply for EECS(Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) and then I can shift more towards Computer Science as my major option. My main aim is to do Phd after Ms in CS if I am able to do that somehow. I know that I have to put much extra effort to understand things in MS than CS undergraduates but I will do that with my full dedication, also when I communicate with my college CS students or during my internship period I didn't feel that I am missing very much stuff that they know and was very comfortable during my internship with software employees.

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• Reporting on common code smells : A POC

  - by Dave Ballantyne

  Over the past few blog entries, I’ve been looking at parsing TSQL scripts in a variety of ways for a variety of tasks.  In my last entry ‘How to prevent ‘Select *’ : The elegant way’, I looked at parsing SQL to report upon uses of SELECT *.  The obvious question leading on from this is, “Great, what about other code smells ?”  Well, using the language service parser to do that was turning out to be a bit of a hard job,  sure I was getting tokens but no real context.  I wasn't even being told when an end of statement had been reached. One of the other parsing options available from Microsoft is exposed in the assembly ‘Microsoft.SqlServer.TransactSql.ScriptDom’,  this is ,I believe, installed with the client development tools with SQLServer.  It is much more feature rich than the original parser I had used and breaks a TSQL script into intuitive classes for analysis. So, what sort of smells can I now find using it ?  Well, for an opening gambit quite a nice little list. Use of NOLOCK Set of READ UNCOMMITTED Use of SELECT * Insert without column references Explicit datatype conversion on Sargs Cross server selects Non use of two-part naming convention Table and Query hint usage Changes in set options Use of single line comments Use of ordinal column positions in ORDER BY clause Now, lets not argue the point that “It depends” as smells on some of these, but as an academic exercise it is quite interesting.  The code is available from this link :https://www.dropbox.com/s/rfk32sou4fzl2cw/TSQLDomTest.zip  All the usual disclaimers apply to this code, I cannot be held responsible for anything ranging from mild annoyance through to universe destruction due to the use of this code or examples. The zip file contains a powershell script and my test cases.  The assembly used requires .Net 4 to run, which means that you will need powershell 3 ( though im running through PowerGUI and all works ok ) .  The code searches for all .sql files in the folder hierarchy for the workingpath,  you can override this if you want by simply changing the $Folder variable, and processes each in turn for the smells.  Feedback is not great at the moment, all it does is output to an xml file (Smells.xml) the offset position and a description of the smell found. Right now, I am interested in your feedback.  What do you think ?  Is this (or should it be) more than an academic exercise ?  Can tooling such as this be used as some form of code quality measure ?  Does it Work ? Do you have a case listed above which is not being reported ? Do you have a case that you would love to be reported ? Let me know , please mailto: [email protected]. Thanks

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• What algorithms can I use to detect if articles or posts are duplicates?

  - by michael

  I'm trying to detect if an article or forum post is a duplicate entry within the database. I've given this some thought, coming to the conclusion that someone who duplicate content will do so using one of the three (in descending difficult to detect): simple copy paste the whole text copy and paste parts of text merging it with their own copy an article from an external site and masquerade as their own Prepping Text For Analysis Basically any anomalies; the goal is to make the text as "pure" as possible. For more accurate results, the text is "standardized" by: Stripping duplicate white spaces and trimming leading and trailing. Newlines are standardized to \n. HTML tags are removed. Using a RegEx called Daring Fireball URLs are stripped. I use BB code in my application so that goes to. (ä)ccented and foreign (besides Enlgish) are converted to their non foreign form. I store information about each article in (1) statistics table and in (2) keywords table. (1) Statistics Table The following statistics are stored about the textual content (much like this post) text length letter count word count sentence count average words per sentence automated readability index gunning fog score For European languages Coleman-Liau and Automated Readability Index should be used as they do not use syllable counting, so should produce a reasonably accurate score. (2) Keywords Table The keywords are generated by excluding a huge list of stop words (common words), e.g., 'the', 'a', 'of', 'to', etc, etc. Sample Data text_length, 3963 letter_count, 3052 word_count, 684 sentence_count, 33 word_per_sentence, 21 gunning_fog, 11.5 auto_read_index, 9.9 keyword 1, killed keyword 2, officers keyword 3, police It should be noted that once an article gets updated all of the above statistics are regenerated and could be completely different values. How could I use the above information to detect if an article that's being published for the first time, is already existing within the database? I'm aware anything I'll design will not be perfect, the biggest risk being (1) Content that is not a duplicate will be flagged as duplicate (2) The system allows the duplicate content through. So the algorithm should generate a risk assessment number from 0 being no duplicate risk 5 being possible duplicate and 10 being duplicate. Anything above 5 then there's a good possibility that the content is duplicate. In this case the content could be flagged and linked to the article's that are possible duplicates and a human could decide whether to delete or allow. As I said before I'm storing keywords for the whole article, however I wonder if I could do the same on paragraph basis; this would also mean further separating my data in the DB but it would also make it easier for detecting (2) in my initial post. I'm thinking weighted average between the statistics, but in what order and what would be the consequences...

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• cloud programming for OpenStack in C / C++

  - by Basile Starynkevitch

  (Sorry for such a fuzzy question, I am very newbie to cloud programming) I am interested in designing (and developing) a (free software) program in C or C++ (probably, most of it being meta-programmed, i.e. part of the C code code being generated). I am still in the thinking / designing phase. And I might perhaps give up. For reference, I am the main architect and implementor of GCC MELT, a domain specific language to extend the GCC compiler (the MELT language is translated to C/C++ and is bootstrapped: the MELT to C/C++ translator being written in MELT). And I am dreaming of extending it with some cloud computing abilities. But I am a newbie in cloud computing. (I am only interested in free-software, GPLv3 friendly, based cloud computing, which probably means openstack). I believe that "compiling on the cloud with some enhanced GCC" could make sense (for super-optimizations or static analysis of e.g. an entire Linux distribution, or at least a massive GCC compiled free software like Qt, GCC itself, or the Linux kernel). I'm dreaming of a MELT specific monitoring program which would store, communicate, and and enhance GCC compilation (extended by MELT). So the picture would be that each GCC process (actually the cc1 or cc1plus started by the gcc driver, suitably extended by some MELT extension) would communicate with some monitor. That "monitoring/persisting" program would run "on the cloud" (and probably manage some information produced by GCC e.g. on NoSQL bases). So, how should some (yet to be written) C program (some Linux daemon) be designed to be cloud-friendly? So far, I understood that it should provide some Web service, probably thru a RESTful service, so should use an HTTP server library like onion. And that OpenStack is able to start (e.g. a dozen of) such services. But I don't have a clear picture of what OpenStack brings. So far, I noticed the ability to manage (and distribute) virtual machines (with some Python API). It is less clear how can it distribute some ELF executable, how can it start it, etc. Do you have any references or examples of C / C++ programming on the cloud? How should a "cloud-friendly" (actually, OpenStack friendly) C/C++ server application be designed?

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• Data Virtualization: Federated and Hybrid

  - by Krishnamoorthy

  Data becomes useful when it can be leveraged at the right time. Not only enterprises application stores operate on large volume, velocity and variety of data. Mobile and social computing are in the need of operating in foresaid data. Replicating and transferring large swaths of data is one challenge faced in the field of data integration. However, smaller chunks of data aggregated from a variety of sources presents and even more interesting challenge in the industry. Over the past few decades, technology trends focused on best user experience, operating systems, high performance computing, high performance web sites, analysis of warehouse data, service oriented architecture, social computing, cloud computing, and big data. Operating on the ‘dark data’ becomes mandatory in the future technology trend, although, no solution can make dark data useful data in a single day. Useful data can be quantified by the facts of contextual, personalized and on time delivery. In most cases, data from a single source may not be complete the picture. Data has to be combined and computed from various sources, where data may be captured as hybrid data, meaning the combination of structured and unstructured data. Since related data is often found across disparate sources, effectively integrating these sources determines how useful this data ultimately becomes. Technology trends in 2013 are expected to focus on big data and private cloud. Consumers are not merely interested in where data is located or how data is retrieved and computed. Consumers are interested in how quick and how the data can be leveraged. In many cases, data virtualization is the right solution, and is expected to play a foundational role for SOA, Cloud integration, and Big Data. The Oracle Data Integration portfolio includes a data virtualization product called ODSI (Oracle Data Service Integrator). Unlike other data virtualization solutions, ODSI can perform both read and write operations on federated/hybrid data (RDBMS, Webservices,  delimited file and XML). The ODSI Engine is built on XQuery, hence ODSI user can perform computations on data either using XQuery or SQL. Built in data and query caching features, which reduces latency in repetitive calls. Rightly positioning ODSI, can results in a highly scalable model, reducing spend on additional hardware infrastructure.

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• What kind of position matches my skills, experience and interests? [closed]

  - by Ryan

  I work in a large firm and my current job covers a variety of different duties. Due to several factors I am seriously considering finding a new job (hours, pay-cut, limited career growth). I have worked for the company nearly 4 years and almost 2 years ago I transitioned into more of a business analyst role (previously I was working in a client facing role for our audit group). In this role I have overseen all aspects of the development of a large scale re-platforming of our firm's key tool in analyzing investment portfolios. I gathered requirements, wrote specs, designed the UI and functionality, worked closely with developers (onshore and offshore) to see to it the implementation was correct, managed schedules and was the lead tester. This is a large scale system used by thousands of people around the world. I've also written Excel macros, reports in SQL, given trainings, written technical manuals, interfaced with senior managers and partners, etc. I've been on a couple interviews sporadically, most of which were for positions aimed at higher management consulting type positions, dealing with strategy, overall process management, project management, etc. What really interests me is the technical stuff and overseeing a project from beginning to end (although I would rather not have to do so many of the tasks on my own). I genuinely like a lot of what I do, but the company culture and attitude towards overworking people combined with my recent pay-cut (my overtime was cut due to a promotion to a higher level) has lead me to want to seek work elsewhere. The problem is - what type of work could I realistically do? I feel like traditional business analysis is too much business and not enough tech stuff, and I've really taken a shine lately to beefing up my programming abilities and creating small programs to automate things around work. I also feel that because my actual years of experience as a business analyst (figure 1.5 years realistically) puts me at a junior level doing a lot of grunt requirements gathering, when the work that I have been doing with my current company is more in line with what a Program Manager does (depending on your definition I guess). So in reality, when I'm job hunting I get a bit perplexed because I feel like the traditional BA stuff wouldn't really suit me, and even if it did it's usually something along the lines of 5-10 years experience for the type of work that is similar to what I've done (and I've also found most BA jobs to be contract only which at the moment I'm not too keen on). Program Manager is something that interests me, but again I feel like the experience is lacking because that's a much more senior position. Am I in some kind of career no-man's land? Any idea what would best suit me given my experience and abilities, as well as my interests? I plan to keep learning programming on the side, but don't expect to get a job being a straight programmer given my relative inexperience with programming.

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• Enterprise Manager 12c: New DSS Demos Available

  - by Javier Puerta

  Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Application Replay Demo Now Available! User Experience Monitoring with Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c and Real User Experience Insight 12R1 Now Available! Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c: Database Management Packs demo upgrade     Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Application Replay Demo Now Available! We are pleased to announce the availability of the Oracle Application Replay demo that showcases some of the key capabilities of performing realistic, production scale testing of your web and packaged Oracle applications. This demo specifically focuses on capturing production web traffic from an E-Business Suite application and replaying the captured workload on a test E-Business Suite application to assess the impact of an application infrastructure change on the workload. The target audiences are application developers, quality assurance teams, IT managers and production control staff that deal in day-to-day change management activities and trouble shooting of production environments. Demo Highlights: Enterprise Manager 12c workflows for capturing application workload Seamless integration of Application Replay with Real User Experience Insight for application workload capture Enterprise Manager 12c centralized workflows for replaying captured application workloads in a test environment Demonstrates how to minimize risk when deploying a complex EBusiness Suite application infrastructure change. Rich reporting capability for performance analysis and problem detection User Experience Monitoring with Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c and Real User Experience Insight 12R1 Now Available! We are pleased to announce the availability of the Oracle Real User Experience Insight demo that showcases some of the key capabilities of user experience monitoring. This demo specifically focuses on business reporting, integrated performance diagnostics, tracking of customer journey’s through RUEI’s userflow tracking capabilities and it’s Key Performance Indicators tracking and configuration. Demo Highlights: Application-centric dashboard Integration with Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c – JVMD, ADP and BTM Session diagnostics and user session replay Monitoring through “Key Performance Indicators” (KPI) --- create alerts/incidents FUSION Application centric dashboards & integrated BI Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c: Database Management Packs demo upgrade DSS is pleased to announce an upgrade to the Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c: Database Management Packs demo. While retaining the content from the initial release of the demo—Diagnostic and Tuning Packs, Test Data Management and Data Masking, and Real Application Testing—the demo now includes a new Data Masking for Real Application Testing scenario. Demo Features: Diagnostic and Tuning Packs SQL Performance Analyzer Database Replay Data Masking Masking Real Application Testing workloads Testing pending Optimizer statistics Test Data Management

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• Seven Accounting Changes for 2010

  - by Theresa Hickman

  I read a very interesting article called Seven Accounting Changes That Will Affect Your 2010 Annual Report from SmartPros that nicely summarized how 2010 annual financial statements will be impacted.  Here’s a Reader’s Digest version of the changes: 1.  Changes to revenue recognition if you sell bundled products with multiple deliverables: Old Rule: You needed to objectively establish the “fair value” of each bundled item. So if you sold a dishwasher plus installation and could not establish the fair value of the installation, you might have to delay recognizing revenue of the dishwasher days or weeks later until it was installed. New Rule (ASU 2009-13): “Objective” proof of each service or good is no longer required; you can simply estimate the selling price of the installation and warranty. So the dishwasher vendor can recognize the dishwasher revenue immediately at the point of sale without waiting a few weeks for the installation. Then they can recognize the estimated value of the installation after it is complete. 2.  Changes to revenue recognition for devices with embedded software: Old Rule: Hardware devices with embedded software, such as the iPhone, had to follow stringent software revrec rules. This forced Apple to recognize iPhone revenues over two years, the period of time that software updates were provided. New Rule (ASU 2009-14): Software revrec rules no longer apply to these devices with embedded software; these devices can now follow ASU 2009-13. This allows vendors, such as Apple, to recognize revenue sooner. 3.  Fair value disclosures: Companies (both public and private) now need to spend extra time gathering, summarizing, and disclosing information about items measured at fair value, such as significant transfers in and out of Level 1(quoted market price), Level 2 (valuation based on observable markets), and Level 3 (valuations based on internal information). 4.  Consolidation of variable interest entities (a.k.a special purpose entities): Consolidation rules for variable interest entities now require a qualitative, not quantitative, analysis to determine the primary beneficiary. Instead of simply looking at the percentage of voting interests, the primary beneficiary could have less than the majority interests as long as it has the power to direct the activities and absorb any losses.  5.  XBRL: Starting in June 2011, all U.S. public companies are required to file financial statements to the SEC using XBRL. Note: Oracle supports XBRL reporting. 6.  Non-GAAP financial disclosures: Companies that report non-GAAP measures of performance, such as EBITDA in SEC filings, have more flexibility.  The new interpretations can be found here: http://www.sec.gov/divisions/corpfin/guidance/nongaapinterp.htm.  7.  Loss contingencies disclosures: Companies should expect additional scrutiny of their loss disclosures, such as those from litigation losses, in their annual financial statements. The SEC wants more disclosures about loss contingencies sooner instead of after the cases are settled.

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• Data Model Dissonance

  - by Tony Davis

  So often at the start of the development of database applications, there is a premature rush to the keyboard. Unless, before we get there, we’ve mapped out and agreed the three data models, the Conceptual, the Logical and the Physical, then the inevitable refactoring will dog development work. It pays to get the data models sorted out up-front, however ‘agile’ you profess to be. The hardest model to get right, the most misunderstood, and the one most neglected by the various modeling tools, is the conceptual data model, and yet it is critical to all that follows. The conceptual model distils what the business understands about itself, and the way it operates. It represents the business rules that govern the required data, its constraints and its properties. The conceptual model uses the terminology of the business and defines the most important entities and their inter-relationships. Don’t assume that the organization’s understanding of these business rules is consistent or accurate. Too often, one department has a subtly different understanding of what an entity means and what it stores, from another. If our conceptual data model fails to resolve such inconsistencies, it will reduce data quality. If we don’t collect and measure the raw data in a consistent way across the whole business, how can we hope to perform meaningful aggregation? The conceptual data model has more to do with business than technology, and as such, developers often regard it as a worthy but rather arcane ceremony like saluting the flag or only eating fish on Friday. However, the consequences of getting it wrong have a direct and painful impact on many aspects of the project. If you adopt a silo-based (a.k.a. Domain driven) approach to development), you are still likely to suffer by starting with an incomplete knowledge of the domain. Even when you have surmounted these problems so that the data entities accurately reflect the business domain that the application represents, there are likely to be dire consequences from abandoning the goal of a shared, enterprise-wide understanding of the business. In reading this, you may recall experiences of the consequence of getting the conceptual data model wrong. I believe that Phil Factor, for example, witnessed the abandonment of a multi-million dollar banking project due to an inadequate conceptual analysis of how the bank defined a ‘customer’. We’d love to hear of any examples you know of development projects poleaxed by errors in the conceptual data model. Cheers, Tony

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• BIDS Helper 1.6 Beta Release (now with SQL 2012 support!)

  - by Darren Gosbell

  The beta for BIDS Helper 1.6 was just released. We have not updated the version notification just yet as we would like to get some feedback on people's experiences with the SQL 2012 version. So if you are using SQL 2012, go grab it and let us know how you go (you can post a comment on this blog post or on the BIDS Helper site itself). This is the first release that supports SQL 2012 and consequently also the first release that runs in Visual Studio 2010. A big thanks to Greg Galloway for doing the bulk of the work on this release. Please note that if you are doing an xcopy deploy that you will need to unblock the files you download or you will get a cryptic error message. This appears to be caused by a security update to either Visual Studio or the .Net framework – the xcopy deploy instructions have been updated to show you how to do this. Below are the notes from the release page. ====== This beta release is the first to support SQL Server 2012 (in addition to SQL Server 2005, 2008, and 2008 R2). Since it is marked as a beta release, we are looking for bug reports in the next few months as you use BIDS Helper on real projects. In addition to getting all existing BIDS Helper functionality working appropriately in SQL Server 2012 (SSDT), the following features are new... Analysis Services Tabular Smart Diff Tabular Actions Editor Tabular HideMemberIf Tabular Pre-Build Fixes and Updates The Unused Datasets feature for Reporting Services now accounts for new features in Reporting Services 2008 R2 like Lookups and new features in Reporting Services 2012. SSIS: emit an informational message when a variable has an expression defined and EvaluateAsExpression = False SSAS: roles reports points to wrong server SSIS - Variable Copy / Move broken in v1.5 "Unused DataSets Report" not showing up in Context menu on VS2005 if Solution Folders used SSAS Tabular: Create a UI for managing actions SSAS Tabular: Smart Diff improvements for new schema and Tabular models SSIS: Copy/Move Variable Erroring due to custom Control Flow item Icon SSIS Performance Visualization Index out of range fixing bugs in AggManager when aggregation design IDs don't match names The exe downloads are a self extracting installer, the zip downloads allow for an xcopy deploy. Make sure to note the updated xcopy deploy instructions for SQL Server 2012.

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• Oracle PeopleSoft PeopleTools 8.53 Release Value Proposition (RVP) published

  - by Greg Kelly

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} The Oracle PeopleSoft PeopleTools 8.53 Release Value Proposition (RVP) can be found at: https://supporthtml.oracle.com/epmos/faces/ui/km/DocumentDisplay.jspx?id=1473194.1 The PeopleSoft PeopleTools 8.53 release continues Oracle’s commitment to protect and extend the value of your PeopleSoft implementation, provide additional technology options and enhancements that reduce ongoing operating costs and provide the applications user a dramatically improved experience. Across the PeopleSoft product development organization we have defined three design principles: Simplicity, Productivity and Total Cost of Ownership. These development principles have directly influenced the PeopleTools product direction during the past few releases. The scope for the PeopleTools 8.53 release again builds additional functionality into the product as a result of direct customer input, industry analysis and internal feature design. New features, bug fixes and new certifications found in PeopleTools 8.53 combine to offer customers improved application user experience, page interaction, and cost-effectiveness. Key PeopleTools 8.53 features include: · PeopleSoft Styles and User Interaction Model · PeopleSoft Data Migration Workbench · PeopleSoft Update Manager · Secure by Default Initiative Be sure to check out the PeopleSoft Update Manager. Many other things are also happening in this time frame. · See the posting on the PeopleSoft Interaction Hub https://blogs.oracle.com/peopletools/entry/introducing_the_peoplesoft_interaction_hub · The application 9.2 RVPs will also be published over the next few months · If you haven't seen it, check out John Webb's posting on the PeopleSoft Information Portal https://blogs.oracle.com/peoplesoft/entry/peoplesoft_information_find_it_quickly

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• Arçelik A.S. Uses Advanced Analytics to Improve Product Development

  - by Sylvie MacKenzie, PMP

  "Oracle’s Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management’s advanced analytics gives us better insight into the product development process by helping us to identify potential roadblocks.” – Iffet Iyigun Meydanli, Innovation and System Development Manager, R&D Center, Arçelik A.S. Founded in 1955, Arçelik A.S. is now the leading household appliance manufacturer in Turkey, and the third-largest household appliance company in Europe. It operates 14 production facilities in five countries (Turkey, Romania, Russia, China, and South Africa), with international sales and marketing offices in 20 countries. Additionally, the company manages 10 brands (Arçelik, Beko, Grundig, Blomberg, Elektrabregenz, Arctic, Leisure, Flavel, Defy, and Altus). The company has a household presence in more than 100 countries, including China and the United States. Arçelik’s Beko brand is among the top-10 household appliance brands in world, as a market leader for refrigerators, freezers, and washing machines in the United Kingdom. Arçelik implemented Oracle’s Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management for improved management of its design and manufacturing projects. With the solution, Arelik has improved its research and development (R&D) with the ability to evaluate technology risks when planning its projects. Also, it is now more easy to make plans for several locations, monitor all resources, and plan for future projects.  Challenges Improve monitoring of R&D resources?including human resources and critical laboratory equipment?to optimize management of the company’s R&D project portfolio Establish a transparent project platform to enable better product and process planning, gain insight into product performance, and facilitate advanced analytics that support R&D and overall business decisions Identify potential roadblocks for better risk management Solutions Worked with Oracle Partner PRM to implement Oracle’s Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management to manage the entire household-appliance, R&D project portfolio lifecycle, enabling managers and project leaders to better track and monitor resources and deliverables in real time Improved risk analysis and evaluation abilities for R&D projects Supported long-term planning needs Used advanced reporting features to capture data needed for budgeting and other project details, including employee performance evaluations Improved monitoring abilities and insight into the overall performance of products postproduction Enabled flexible, fast, and customized reporting with the P6 dashboard on a centralized platform to meet custom reporting needs for project leaders and support on-time and on-budget deliverables Integrated with other corporate departments, such as accounts payable, to upload project invoice data into the Primavera solution and the company’s e-mail system, so that project leaders will be alerted about milestones and other project related information Partner“Oracle Partner PRM provided us with a quick, reliable, and solution-focused approach to its support,” said Iffet Iyigun Meydanli, innovation and system development manager, R&D Center, Arçelik A.S. “The company’s service covered the entire spectrum of our needs, including implementation, training, configuration, problem solving, and integration.”

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• Independent Research on 1500 Companies Reveals Challenges in Performance Visibility – Part 1

  - by ndwyouell

  At the end of May I was joined by Professor Andy Neely of Cambridge University on a webinar, with an audience of over 700, to discuss the results of this extensive study which covered 13 countries and nearly every commercial and industrial sector.  What stunned both of us was not so much the number listening but the 100 questions they asked in just 1 hour.  This certainly represents a record in my experience and for those that organized the webinar. So what was all the fuss about?  Well, to begin with this was a pretty big sample and it represented organizations with over $100m sales across the USA, Europe, Africa and the Middle East. It also delivered some pretty interesting results across a wide range of EPM subjects such as profitability, planning and reporting.  Let’s look at some of those findings. We kicked off with profitability, one of the key factors in driving performance, or that is what you would think, but in fact 82% of our respondents said they did not have complete visibility into the profitability of their organization. 91% of these went further to say that, not surprisingly, this lack of knowledge into the profitability has implications with over half citing 3 or more implications.  Implications cited included misallocated resources, revenue opportunities not maximized, erroneous decisions made and impaired financial performance.  Quite a list of implications, especially given the difficult economic circumstances many organizations are operating in at this time. So why is this?  Well other results in the study point to some of the potential reasons.  Firstly 59% of respondents that use spreadsheets use them for monitoring profitability and 93% of all managers responding to the study use spreadsheets to gather and analyze information.  This is an enormous proportion given the problems with using spreadsheets based performance management systems that have been widely talked about for many years.  For profitability analysis this is particularly important when you consider the typical requirement will be to allocate cost and revenue across 6+ dimensions based on many different allocation methods.  Not something that can be done easily in spreadsheets plus it gets to be a nightmare once you want to change allocations, run different scenarios and then change the basis of your planning and budgeting! It is no wonder so many organizations have challenges in performance visibility. My next blog will look at the fragmented nature of many organizations’ planning.  In the meantime if you want to read the complete report on the research go to: http://www.oracle.com/webapps/dialogue/ns/dlgwelcome.jsp?p_ext=Y&p_dlg_id=10077790&src=7038701&Act=29

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• ATG Live Webcast Dec. 6th: Minimizing EBS Maintenance Downtimes

  - by Bill Sawyer

  This webcast provides an overview of the plans and decisions you can make, and the actions you can take, that will help you minimize maintenance downtimes for your E-Business Suite instances. It is targeted to system administrators, DBAs, developers, and implementers. This session, led by Elke Phelps, Senior Principal Product Manager, and Santiago Bastidas, Principal Product Manager, will cover best practices, tools, utilities, and tasks to minimize your maintenance downtimes during the four key maintenance phases. Topics will include: Pre-Patching: Reviewing the list of patches and analyzing their impact Patching Trials: Testing the patch prior to actual production deployment Patch Deployment: Applying patching to your system Post Patching Analysis: Validating the patch application Date:                Thursday, December 6, 2012Time:               8:00 AM - 9:00 AM Pacific Standard TimePresenters:   Elke Phelps, Senior Principal Product Manager                         Santiago Bastidas, Principal Product Manager Webcast Registration Link (Preregistration is optional but encouraged) To hear the audio feed:    Domestic Participant Dial-In Number:           877-697-8128    International Participant Dial-In Number:      706-634-9568    Additional International Dial-In Numbers Link:    Dial-In Passcode:                                              103200To see the presentation:    The Direct Access Web Conference details are:    Website URL: https://ouweb.webex.com    Meeting Number:  595757500 If you miss the webcast, or you have missed any webcast, don't worry -- we'll post links to the recording as soon as it's available from Oracle University.  You can monitor this blog for pointers to the replay. And, you can find our archive of our past webcasts and training here. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to email Bill Sawyer (Senior Manager, Applications Technology Curriculum) at BilldotSawyer-AT-Oracle-DOT-com.

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• Facial Recognition for Retail

  - by David Dorf

  My son decided to do his science project on how the brain recognizes faces.  Faces are so complicated and important that the brain has a dedicated area for just that purpose.  During our research, we came across some emerging uses for facial recognition in the retail industry. If you believe the movies, recognizing faces as they walk by a camera is easy for computers but that's not the reality.  Huge investments are being made by the U.S. government in this area, with a focus on airport security.  Now, companies like Eye See are leveraging that research for marketing purposes.  They do things like track eyes while viewing newspaper ads to see which ads get more "eye time."  This can help marketers make better placement and color decisions. But what caught my eye (that was too easy) was their new mannequins that watch shoppers.  These mannequins, being tested at European retailers like Benetton, watch shoppers that walk by and identify their gender, race, and age.  This helps the retailer better understand the types of customers being attracted to the outfit on the mannequin.  Of course to be most accurate, the software has pictures of the employees so they can be filtered out.  Since the mannequins are closer to the shoppers and at eye-level, they are more accurate than traditional in-ceiling LP cameras. Marketing agency RedPepper is offering retailers the ability to recognize loyalty shoppers at their doors using Facedeal.  For customers that have opted into the program, when they enter the store their face is recognized and they are checked in.  Then, as a reward, they are sent an offer on their smartphone. It won't be long before retailers begin to listen to shoppers are they walk the aisles, then keywords can be collected and aggregated to give the retailer an idea of what people are saying about their stores and products.  Sentiment analysis based on what's said or even facial expressions can't be far off. Clearly retailers need to be cautions and respect customer privacy.  That's why these technologies are emerging slowly.  But since the next generation of shoppers are less concerned about privacy, I expect these technologies to appear sporadically in the next five years then go mainstream.  Time will tell.

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• WebCenter Content Web Search Performance: Do you really need that folder path info?

  - by Nicolas Montoya

  End-users want content at their fingertips at the speed of thought if possible. When running search operations in the WebCenter Conter Web Interface every second or fraction of a second improvement does matter. When doing some trace analysis on the systemdatabase tracing on a customer environment, we came across some SQL queries that were unnecessarily being triggered! These were related to determining the folder path for every entry part of the search result set. However, this folder path was not even being used as part of the displayed information in the user interface.Why was the folder path information being collected when it was not even displayed in the UI? We found that the configuration parameter 'FolderPathInSearchResults' was set to 'true' under Administration > Admin Server > General Configuration > Additional Configuration Variables as shown below:When executing a quicksearch by keyword we were getting 100 out of 2280 entries in the first page of the result set.When thera 'FolderPathInSearchResults' configuration parameter is set to 'true', the following queries appear in the systemdatabase tracing:100 executions for a query on the FolderFiles table for each of the documents displayed in the first page:>systemdatabase/6       12.13 11:17:48.188      IdcServer-199   1.45 ms. SELECT * FROM FolderFiles WHERE dDocName='SLC02VGVUSORAC140641' AND fLinkRank=0[Executed. Returned row(s): true]382 executions for a query of the folders tables - most of the documents that match the keyword criteria are at a folder depth level of three or four:>systemdatabase/6       12.13 11:17:48.114      IdcServer-199   2.57 ms. SELECT FolderFolders.*,FolderMetaDefaults.* FROM FolderFolders,FolderMetaDefaults WHERE FolderFolders.fFolderGUID=FolderMetaDefaults.fFolderGUID(+) AND((FolderFolders.fFolderGUID = '1EB8E527E19B09ED3FE82EE310AEA13A' ) )[Executed.Returned row(s): true]By setting this 'FolderPathInSearchResults' configuration parameter to 'false', the above queries were no longer reported in the Server Output System Audit Information.Now, let's consider a practical scenario:Search result set page = 100Average folder depth der document in the search result set: 5The number of folder path related queries will be: 100 + 5*500 = 600If each query takes slightly over 3 ms. You would have 2000 ms (2 seconds) spent in server time to get this information.The overall performance impact goes beyond seerver time execution, as this information needs to travel from the server to the browser. If the documents are further nested into the folder hierarchy, additional hundreds of queries may be executed. If folder path is not being displayed in the end-user interface profile, your system may be better of with the 'FolderPathInSearchResults' configuration parameter disabled.

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• PASS Summit for SQL Starters

  - by Davide Mauri

  I’ve received a buch of emails from PASS Summit “First Timers” that are also somehow new to SQL Server (for “somehow” I mean people with less than 6 month experience but with some basic knowledge of SQL Server engine) or are catching up from SQL Server 2000. The common question regards the session one should not miss to have a broad view of the entire SQL Server platform have some insight into some specific areas of SQL Server Given that I’m on (semi-)vacantion and that I have more free time (not true, I have to prepare slides & demos for several conferences, PASS Summit  - Building the Agile Data Warehouse with SQL Server 2012 - and PASS 24H - Agile Data Warehousing with SQL Server 2012 - among them…but let’s pretend it to be true), I’ve decided to make a post to answer to this common questions. Of course this is my personal point of view and given the fact that the number and quality of session that will be delivered at PASS Summit is so high that is very difficoult to make a choice, fell free to jump into the discussion and leave your feedback or – even better – answer with another post. I’m sure it will be very helpful to all the SQL Server beginners out there. I’ve imposed to myself to choose 6 session at maximum for each Track. Why 6? Because it’s the maximum number of session you can follow in one day, and given that all the session will be on the Summit DVD, they are the answer to the following question: “If I have one day to spend in training, which session I should watch?”. Of course a Summit is not like a Course so a lot of very basics concept of well-established technologies won’t be found here. Analysis Services, Integration Services, MDX are not part of the Summit this time (at least for the basic part of them). Enough with that, let’s start with the session list ideal to have a good Overview of all the SQL Server Platform: Geospatial Data Types in SQL Server 2012 Inside Unstructured Data: SQL Server 2012 FileTable and Semantic Search XQuery and XML in SQL Server: Common Problems and Best Practice Solutions Microsoft's Big Play for Big Data Dashboards: When to Choose Which MSBI Tool Microsoft BI End-User Tools 360° for what concern Database Development, I recommend the following sessions Understanding Transaction Isolation Levels What to Look for in Execution Plans Improve Query Performance by Fixing Bad Parameter Sniffing A Window into Your Data: Using SQL Window Functions Practical Uses and Optimization of New T-SQL Features in SQL Server 2012 Taking MERGE Beyond the Basics For Business Intelligence Information Delivery Analyzing SSAS Data with Excel Building Compelling Power View Reports Managed Self-Service BI PowerPivot 101  SharePoint for Business Intelligence The Best Microsoft BI Tools You've Never Heard Of and for Business Intelligence Architecture & Development BI Power Hour Building a Tabular Model Database Enterprise Information Management: Bringing Together SSIS, DQS, and MDS SSIS Design Patterns Storing Columnstore Indexes Hadoop and Its Ecosystem Components in Action Beside the listed sessions, First Timers should also take a look the the page PASS set up for them: http://www.sqlpass.org/summit/2012/Connect/FirstTimers.aspx See you at PASS Summit!

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• New RUP Patch for iSupplier Portal, Sourcing and Supplier Lifecycle Management (SLM)

  - by LuciaC

  Just released - the 12.1.3 Rollup (RUP) Patch 17525552:R12.PRC_PF.B for iSupplier Portal, Sourcing and Supplier Lifecycle Management (SLM). Who should apply this patch? Anyone that is on Release 12.1.3 and is using  iSupplier Portal, Sourcing or Supplier Lifecycle Management (SLM) functionality. The following areas have had major fixes: Prospective Supplier Guided Navigation: The train-navigation is introduced for prospective supplier registration so that prospective suppliers can see all steps needed to successfully register themselves. Supplier Registration Workflow Enhancement: With this release, provided the Approval Management Engine (AME) action required notifications for supplier approval, so that all workflow related features can be enabled. Vacation rules can be set, approvals can be forwarded and more information can be requested through the notification itself.  Additionally AME parallel Approval support for Supplier Registration approvals has been added. Reinstate Supplier Request: Allow buyer to reopen/reinstate the rejected supplier. Supplier is able to access their previously rejected registration again and make changes and resubmit request. Contact Address Association: The prospective supplier is allowed to associate addresses with contacts (including Primary) during the prospective supplier registration process. Primary Contact Enhancement: The prospective supplier can be registered without creating a user account for the primary contact. Mandatory Attributes: In the negotiation requirement creation page, the lookup meaning of 'Internal' has been changed to 'Internal Optional', and a new lookup value with meaning as 'Internal Required' has been added. The values available in the 'Type' dropdown now are Display Only, Internal Optional, Internal Required, Supplier Optional and Supplier Required.  So now during supplier evaluations, internal user response can be set as mandatory by using Internal Required type during requirement creation. Notifications to Supplier:  When the supplier saves and submits their supplier registration request, then a notification with a registration status page link will be sent for further access.  When the buyer approves, rejects or returns the request, the supplier will be notified in an email with the current status. There are also 10 major enhancements included in this RUP. For information about this RUP; including, the fixes and enhancements included, how to access and apply the patch, performing an impact analysis on your system, and testing recommendations, see Doc ID 1591198.1.  Don’t delay apply the patch today!

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• Oracle Linux Partner Pavilion Spotlight - Part II

  - by Ted Davis

  As we draw closer to the first day of Oracle OpenWorld, starting in less than a week, we continue to showcase some of our premier partners exhibiting in the Oracle Linux Partner Pavilion ( Booth #1033). We have Independent Hardware Vendors, Independent Software Vendors and Systems Integrators that show the breadth of support in the Oracle Linux and Oracle VM ecosystem. In today's post we highlight three additional Oracle Linux / Oracle VM Partners from the pavilion. Micro Focus delivers mainframe solutions software and software delivery tools with its Borland products. These tools are grouped under the following solutions: Analysis and testing tools for JDeveloper Micro Focus Enterprise Analyzer is key to the success of application overhaul and modernization strategies by ensuring that they are based on a solid knowledge foundation. It reveals the reality of enterprise application portfolios and the detailed constructs of business applications. COBOL for Oracle Database, Oracle Linux, and Tuxedo Micro Focus Visual COBOL delivers the next generation of COBOL development and deployment. Itbrings the productivity of the Eclipse IDE to COBOL, and provides the ability to deploy key business critical COBOL applications to Oracle Linux both natively and under a JVM. Migration and Modernization tooling for mainframes Enterprise application knowledge, development, test and workload re-hosting tools significantly improves the efficiency of business application delivery, enabling CIOs and IT leaders to modernize application portfolios and target platforms such as Oracle Linux. When it comes to Oracle Linux database environments, supporting high transaction rates with minimal response times is no longer just a goal. It’s a strategic imperative. The “data deluge” is impacting the ability of databases and other strategic applications to access data and provide real-time analytics and reporting. As such, customer demand for accelerated application performance is increasing. Visit LSI at the Oracle Linux Pavilion, #733, to find out how LSI Nytro Application Acceleration products are designed from the ground up for database acceleration. Our intelligent solid-state storage solutions help to eliminate I/O bottlenecks, increase throughput and enable Oracle customers achieve the highest levels of DB performance. Accelerate Your Exadata Success With Teleran. Teleran’s software solutions for Oracle Exadata and Oracle Database reduce the cost, time and effort of migrating and consolidating applications on Exadata. In addition Teleran delivers visibility and control solutions for BI/data warehouse performance and user management that ensure service levels and cost efficiency.Teleran will demonstrate these solutions at the Oracle Open World Linux Pavilion: Consolidation Accelerator - Reduces the cost, time and risk ofof migrating and consolidation applications on Exadata. Application Readiness – Identifies legacy application performance enhancements needed to take advantage of Exadata performance features Workload Accelerator – Identifies and clusters workloads for faster performance on Exadata Application Visibility and Control - Improves performance, user productivity, and alignment to business objectives while reducing support and resource costs. Thanks for reading today's Partner Spotlight. Three more partners will be highlighted tomorrow. If you missed our first Partner Spotlight check it out here.

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• Capture a Query Executed By An Application Or User Against a SQL Server Database in Less Than a Minute

  - by Compudicted

  At times a Database Administrator, or even a developer is required to wear a spy’s hat. This necessity oftentimes is dictated by a need to take a glimpse into a black-box application for reasons varying from a performance issue to an unauthorized access to data or resources, or as in my most recent case, a closed source custom application that was abandoned by a deserted contractor without source code. It may not be news or unknown to most IT people that SQL Server has always provided means of back-door access to everything connecting to its database. This indispensible tool is SQL Server Profiler. This “gem” is always quietly sitting in the Start – Programs – SQL Server <product version> – Performance Tools folder (yes, it is for performance analysis mostly, but not limited to) ready to help you! So, to the action, let’s start it up. Once ready click on the File – New Trace button, or using Ctrl-N with your keyboard. The standard connection dialog you have seen in SSMS comes up where you connect the standard way: One side note here, you will be able to connect only if your account belongs to the sysadmin or alter trace fixed server role. Upon a successful connection you must be able to see this initial dialog: At this stage I will give a hint: you will have a wide variety of predefined templates: But to shorten your time to results you would need to opt for using the TSQL_Grouped template. Now you need to set it up. In some cases, you will know the principal’s login name (account) that needs to be monitored in advance, and in some (like in mine), you will not. But it is VERY helpful to monitor just a particular account to minimize the amount of results returned. So if you know it you can already go to the Event Section tab, then click the Column Filters button which would bring a dialog below where you key in the account being monitored without any mask (or whildcard):  If you do not know the principal name then you will need to poke around and look around for things like a config file where (typically!) the connection string is fully exposed. That was the case in my situation, an application had an app.config (XML) file with the connection string in it not encrypted: This made my endeavor very easy. So after I entered the account to monitor I clicked on Run button and also started my black-box application. Voilà, in a under a minute of time I had the SQL statement captured:

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• Point line collision reaction

  - by user4523

  I am trying to program point line segment collision detection and reaction. I am doing this for fun and to learn. The point moves (it has a velocity, and can be controlled by the user), whilst the lines are strait and stationary. The lines are not axis aligned. Everything is in 2D. It is quite straight forward to work out if a collision has occurred. For each frame, the point moves from A to B. AB is a line, and if it crosses the line segment, a collision has occurred (or will occur) and I am able to work out the point of intersection (poi). The problem I am having is with the reaction. Ideally I would like the point to be prevented from moving across the line. In one frame, I can move the point back to the poi (or only alow it to move as far as the poi), and alter the velocity. The problem I am having with this approach (I think) is that, next frame the user may try to cross the line again. Although the point is on the poi, the point may not be exactly on the line. Since it is not axis aligned, I think there is always some subtle rounding issue (A float representation of a point on a line might be rounded to a point that is slightly on one side or the other). Because of this, next frame the path might not intersect the line (because it can start on the other side and move away from it) and the point is effectively allowed to cross the line. Firstly, does the analysis sound correct? Having accepted (maybe) that I cannot always exactly position the point on the line, I tried to move the point away from the line slightly (either along the normal to the line, or along the path vector). I then get a problem at edges. Attempting to fix one collision by moving the point away from the line (even slightly) can cause it to cross another line (one shape I am dealing with is a star, with sharp corners). This can mean that the solution to one collision inadvertently creates another collision, which is ignored. Again, does this sound correct? Anyway, whatever I try, I am having difficulty with edges, and the point is occasionally able to penetrate the polygons and cross lines, which is undesirable. Whilst I can find a lot of information about collision detection on the web (and on this site) I can find precious little information on collision reaction. Does any one know of any good point line collision reaction tutorials? Or is my approach too flawed/over complicated?

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• Getting started with object detection - Image segmentation algorithm

  - by Dev Kanchen

  Just getting started on a hobby object-detection project. My aim is to understand the underlying algorithms and to this end the overall accuracy of the results is (currently) more important than actual run-time. I'm starting with trying to find a good image segmentation algorithm that provide a good jump-off point for the object detection phase. The target images would be "real-world" scenes. I found two techniques which mirrored my thoughts on how to go about this: Graph-based Image Segmentation: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~dph/papers/seg-ijcv.pdf Contour and Texture Analysis for Image Segmentation: http://www.eng.utah.edu/~bresee/compvision/files/MalikBLS.pdf The first one was really intuitive to understand and seems simple enough to implement, while the second was closer to my initial thoughts on how to go about this (combine color/intensity and texture information to find regions). But it's an order of magnitude more complex (at least for me). My question is - are there any other algorithms I should be looking at that provide the kind of results that these two, specific papers have arrived at. Are there updated versions of these techniques already floating around. Like I mentioned earlier, the goal is relative accuracy of image segmentation (with an eventual aim to achieve a degree of accuracy of object detection) over runtime, with the algorithm being able to segment an image into "naturally" or perceptually important components, as these two algorithms do (each to varying extents). Thanks! P.S.1: I found these two papers after a couple of days of refining my search terms and learning new ones relevant to the exact kind of techniques I was looking for. :) I have just about reached the end of my personal Google creativity, which is why I am finally here! Thanks for the help. P.S.2: I couldn't find good tags for this question. If some relevant ones exist, @mods please add them. P.S.3: I do not know if this is a better fit for cstheory.stackexchange (or even cs.stackexchange). I looked but cstheory seems more appropriate for intricate algorithmic discussions than a broad question like this. Also, I couldn't find any relevant tags there either! But please do move if appropriate.

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