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  • NGINX + PHP-FPM - Strange issue when trying to display images via php-gd / readfile - Connection wont terminate

    - by anonymous-one
    Ok, to get the details out of the way: The php script can be anything as simple as: <? header('Content-Type: image/jpeg'); readfile('/local/image.jpg'); ?> When I try to execute this via nginx + php-fpm what happens is the image shows up in the browser, here is what happens: IE - The page stays blank for a long period of time, and eventually the image is shown. Chrome - The image shows, but the loading spinner spins and spins for a long period of time. Eventually the debugger will show the image in red as in error, but the image shows up fine. Everything else on the server works great. Its pushing out about 100mbit steady serving static content. So this is definatly a php-fpm related issue. I THINK this may have something to do with the chunked encoding being sent back wrong? Also, I threw in a pause before the image was read, and got the pid of the fpm process, and it looks as tho its terminatly correctly (from strace): shutdown(3, 1 /* send */) = 0 recvfrom(3, "\1\5\0\1\0\0\0\0", 8, 0, NULL, NULL) = 8 recvfrom(3, "", 8, 0, NULL, NULL) = 0 close(3) = 0 The above was dumped long before ie/chrome decided to give up (even tho the image was shown) loading the image. Displaying HTML / text content is fine. Big bodies etc all load nice and fast and terminate right away (as they should). Doing something like: THIS IS THE IMAGE ---BINARY DUMP OF IMAGE--- Works fine too. Any ideas?

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  • Allocating More Than 4 GB Of Memory

    - by TPatti
    I am facing an issue with memory allocation. I have: Host OS: Microsoft Windows XP - Professional x64 Edition - Version 2003 - Service Pack 2. Host Physical Memory: 8 GB Guest OS: Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS release 4 (Nahant Update 5). I am not sure if it is 32 or 64 bits. The lsb_release -a command says that argument LSB Version: core-3.0-ia32, so I guess that would be 32 bits... VMware Player Version: 2.5.2 build-156735 I would like that VMware Player could allocate more that 4 GB, but when I go to the setting, it only lists 4 GB. If I choose the "About" option, it actually says that I have 8 GB installed in the host machine. This VMware image created by someone else and provided to me, apparently done with VMware Workstation 5. Why can't I allocate 8 GB? Where is the problem? In the WMware Player Version, Guest OS or Host OS? How can I solve this? I understand that for this version of player there isn't one version for 32 and another for 64 bits.

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  • What is a good replacement for StumbleUpon's Share feature?

    - by Mofoo
    I've been using Firefox + StumbleUpon's Share feature with my friends for years now. It is a perfect way of sharing links directly with your friends. You first need to be Following each other and then on the SU toolbar, you can "Share" with your list of friends. You can even include a personal message. The friend will receive a notification with # of pending shares in their toolbar (bold & red). They click the stumble button and it will navigate to the site plus show a yellow bar with your message. I literally use it daily. But then Chrome came along and beat the tar out of Firefox (and other browsers) in terms of usability and performance. But it doesn't (and never will according to Google) allow toolbars. StumbleUpon's solution in Chrome is a fake toolbar (html) that gets injected into the page you're viewing. It's buggy and performance is low. Overall it's not an acceptable solution. I'm looking for a replacement with something that is just as easy to send/receive links. I was thinking of Twitter DM's and using a bookmarklet, but I wanted to survey the collective for other options Thanks in advance for your input!

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  • Is it possible to ack nagios alerts from the terminal on a remote workstation?

    - by cat pants
    I have nagios alerts set up to come through jabber with an http link to ack. Is is possible there is a script I can run from a terminal on a remote workstation that takes the hostname as a parameter and acks the alert? ./ack hostname The benefit, while seemingly mundane, is threefold. First, take http load off nagios. Secondly, nagios http pages can take up to 10-20 seconds to load, so I want to save time there. Thirdly, avoiding slower use of mouse + web interface + firefox/other annoyingly slow browser. Ideally, I would like a script bound to a keyboard shortcut that simply acks the most recent alert. Finally, I want to take the inputs from a joystick, buttons and whatnot, and connect one to a big red button bound to the script so I can just ack the most recent nagios alert by hitting the button lol. (It would be rad too if the button had a screen on the enclosure that showed the text of the alert getting acked lol) Make fun of me all you want, but this is actually something that would be useful to me. If I can save five seconds per alert, and I get 200 alerts per day I need to ack, that's saving me 15 minutes a day. And isn't the whole point of the sysadmin to automate what can be automated? Thanks!

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  • Changing the name of a binary packaged application and its evoking command

    - by jerkstore
    I have taken the source code of a large project, App A, and made many modifications to it to produce my version, App B. Both App A and App B compile cleanly on Debian and Red Hat and now I would like to build binary packages for both platforms. The last modification I need to make is ensuring App B can be installed alongside App A without any interference. I should be able to evoke both application-a and application-b in the terminal and have both be listed as separate software in whatever desktop environment is present. The projects have a debian/ folder (containing rules, control, etc.) and an rpm/ folder containing a SPEC file. Currently, building and installing the .rpm and .deb packages works except that App B is recognized as App A and therefore does not meet the aforementioned requirements. ldd shows the programs have the same exact dependencies and I am not able to pursue static linking of libraries. What modifications do I need to make to my project to achieve the desired outcome? Please be specific as I do not have much experience with the packaging process.

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  • What are the ways to build a failover cluster?

    - by light
    I have a task where I need to build a failover cluster in two cases: first with servers on Red Hat Enterprise 5.1 and second with SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 SP1. Both cases have SAN. I know there are many ways to build failover cluster, but I can’t find out more, so I need next: The ways to build it? I know only virtualization. Any good book or resource to broad my mind? I’ll be glad to hear any suggestion. Thanks! EDIT #1: failover of servers with bussiness application on it. EDIT #2: will be great to hear summary about solutions with SLES servers? EDIT #3: So if I understand correctly, in my cases the main ways are to use internal solutions or virtualization. So now I have additional questions: Does manufacturer of blades provide some solution? For example HP or IBM. (Without virtualization) Do I need additional server to control "heartbeat" between main and redundant servers? (Virtualization) For example I have several physical servers with VMs. Do I need additional server to control availability of VMs and to move VMs to another physical server in the case their physical server failure? Sorry for my poor English. EDIT #4: Failover of VM or OS on physical server. In both cases will be used SAN , it's not specified, but I think with file system image on it. I started to think that my question is stupid and I need to remake it.

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  • Help with Backup Scheme for B.E 12.5

    - by Jemartin
    I'm in process of implementing a new backup scheme. I would say that I'm kind of new to it. So here my question. I'm currently using Backup Exec 12.5 on Windows Server 2008 w/Hyper-V, and IBM Adic Scalar 24. I currently backup our mail server, SQL DB, Board Server Linux Red Hat, Ftp, etc. To a Near-line which is local on our SAN I have the daily's go there as well as full. I would like to start weekly full to tape on a Saturday it takes about 2-3 days to complete the entire full to tape due to backing up from our Co-Lo as well. I have read up on the Father/son rotation but here's my issue with that I dont use tapes everyday only on the weekly full to tape will I be using them. So if there is 4 weeks in a month would I rotate in this order ( Month June WK1 =7tapes , June WK2=7 tapes, June WK3=7tapes June Wk4=7tapes with WK4 being the last tape for the month of June I would use that as a Month tape. For the month of July Wk1= June's WK1 tapes, July WK2= June's WK2 tapes July WK4 = Junes Wk4 tape for a month or would I use a set of new tapes for the last week in July. All tapes are being taking off site as well.

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  • Windows XP to remote server 2008 R2 shares - awful response times

    - by nick3216
    I have a network infrastructure of Windows XP clients (a mix of XP and 64-bit XP), that are accessing a network share on a Windows 2008 R2 server. Whenever users type the address of a folder into the address bar of Windows Explorer it's as snappy at determining the contents of the current folder and presenting them to you in the address bar as if you're working on a local drive. But if you open one of the subfolders users get the animated red torch and 'Searching for items...' dialog, typically for 45 seconds. Similarly when using the open folder dialog to try and select a subfolder on this share it takes, on average, 45 seconds for the dialog to expand each node and show the subfolders of each node. Also, while the Explorer instance accsesing the network share is running slowly users notice that the performance of all other Explorer windows suffers. So while Explorer is searching for files on the network share they can't switch to another task and navigate around their local drive using Explorer because it's now as slow as a dead dog at accessing anything. Are there any settings we can change which will improve the performance accessing network shares?

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  • I&rsquo;m sorry RPGs, it&rsquo;s not you, it&rsquo;s me: The birth of my game idea

    - by George Clingerman
    One of the things I’ve had to give up in order to have some development time at night is gaming. It’s something I refused to admit for years but I’ve just had to face the facts. I’m no longer a gamer. I just don’t have hours and hours of free time to pour into gaming and when I do have hours and hours of free time I want to pour them into game development. That doesn’t mean I don’t game at all! I play games pretty much every day. It just means I’ve moved more into the casual game realm. It’s all I have time for when juggling priorities in my life. That means that games like Gears of War 2 sit shrink wrapped on my shelf and although I popped Dragon Age into my Xbox 360 one time, I barely made it through the opening sequence and haven’t had time to sit down and play again. Instead I’m playing short games like Jamestown, Atom Zombie Smasher, Fortix or if I have time to jump in and play a few rounds maybe some Monday Night Combat or Team Fortress 2. These are games I can instantly get into and play for just a short period of time and then walk away. Breath of Death VII saved my life: Back in the day (way, way back in the day) I used to be a pretty big RPG fan. Not big by a lot of RPG gamers' standards (most of the RPGs RPG fans about I’ve never heard of) but I used to LOVE to play them on the NES, SNES and Genesis and considered that my genre. Final Fantasy, Shining in the Darkness, Bard’s Tale, Faxanadu, Shadowrun, Ultima, Dragon Warrior, Chrono Trigger, Phantasy Star, Shining Force and well the list could go on but those are the ones I remember off the top of my head. I loved playing RPGs and they were my games of choice. After my first son was born (this was just about 12 years ago), I tried to continue playing RPGs and purchased games like Baldur’s Gate I & II, Neverwinter Nights, Fable, then a few of the Final Fantasy’s then Kingdom Hearts. I kept buying these games and then only playing for about fifteen minutes and never getting back to them. I still loved RPGs but they just no longer fit into my life (I still haven’t accepted that since I still purchased Dragon Age II for some reason and convinced myself I’d find the time). Adding three more sons to the mix (that’s 4 total) didn’t help much to finding more RPG time (except for Breath of Death VII and other XBLIG RPG titles, thanks guys!) All work and no RPG: A few months ago as I was sitting thinking about the lack of RPGs in my life and talking to my wife about why I wish RPGs were different and easier for a dad like me to get into. She seemed like she was listening, so I started listing all the things that made them impossible for me to play. Here’s a short list I came up with. They take 15 billion hours to complete I have a few minutes at a time I can grab to play them if I want to have time to code. At that rate it would take me 9 trillion years to beat just one RPG. There’s such long spans of times between when I can play them I forget what I was even doing so I have to spend most of the playtime I have just figuring that out and then my play time is over. Repeat. I’ll never finish one and since it takes so long to get to the fun part in an RPG, I’m never having fun. RPGs aren’t fun if you don’t have hours to play them at a time. As you can see based on my science and math, RPGs aren’t fun for me any more. From there my brain started toying around with ideas of RPGs that would work for me. They would have to be a short RPG, you know one you could beat in a single play session. A dad sized play session. I started thinking, wouldn’t it be awesome if there was a fifteen minute RPG? That got me laughing and I took that as a good sign that it sounded fun and so I thought about it a little more. I immediately discarded the idea of doing a real RPG. I’m sure a short RPG like that could be done but it wasn’t the vibe that I had in my head. No this was going to be something that just had the core essence of an RPG. In reality what I’d be making would be more of an arcade style game. One with high scores and lots of crazy action on the screen. And that’s when it hit me. It would be a speed run RPG. That’s the basics of the game I’m working on.   The Elevator Pitch: It’s a 2D top down RPG themed arcade game focused on speed. It sounds like an RPG, smells like an RPG but it’s merely emulating an RPG. The game is focused on fun and mayhem in RPG form with players leveling up in seconds instead of hours and rushing to finish quests as quickly as possible because they’ve only got fifteen minutes before EVIL overtakes the world. If the player takes longer than fifteen minutes, it’s game over man. One to four player co-operative play to really see just how fast players can level up and beat the game. Gamers will compete on leaderboards for bragging rights for fastest 1, 2, 3, and 4 player speed runs, lowest leveled characters to beat the game, highest leveled characters to beat the game and so on. Times will be tracked for everything from how long a player sat distributing stats, equipping items, talking to NPCs to running around the level. These stats will be shown at the end of each quest/level so the players can work on improving their speed run for that part of the game next time around. It’s the perfect RPG for those of us who only have fifteen minutes of game time! Where I’m at: I’m still at the prototyping stage attempting to but all the basic framework pieces in place that will at minimum give me one level to rush through. I’ve been working on this prototype for about a month now though so I’m going to have to step it up a bit or I’m not going to get finished in time (remember I’ve only got 85 days left!) Lots of the game code is in place (although pretty sloppy) but I still can’t play through that first quest/level just yet. That’s my goal to finish up by the end of next Sunday (3/25/2012). You can all hold me to that and cheer me on or heckle me throughout the week. Either way that should help me stay a bit more motivated and focused. In my head this feels like it’s going to be a fun game so I’m looking forward to seeing how it actually plays!

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  • Too Many Kittens To Juggle At Once

    - by Bil Simser
    Ahh, the Internet. That crazy, mixed up place where one tweet turns into a conversation between dozens of people and spawns a blogpost. This is the direct result of such an event this morning. It started innocently enough, with this: Then followed up by a blog post by Joel here. In the post, Joel introduces us to the term Business Solutions Architect with mad skillz like InfoPath, Access Services, Excel Services, building Workflows, and SSRS report creation, all while meeting the business needs of users in a SharePoint environment. I somewhat disagreed with Joel that this really wasn’t a new role (at least IMHO) and that a good Architect or BA should really be doing this job. As Joel pointed out when you’re building a SharePoint team this kind of role is often overlooked. Engineers might be able to build workflows but is the right workflow for the right problem? Michael Pisarek wrote about a SharePoint Business Architect a few months ago and it’s a pretty solid assessment. Again, I argue you really shouldn’t be looking for roles that don’t exist and I don’t suggest anyone create roles to hire people to fill them. That’s basically creating a solution looking for problems. Michael’s article does have some great points if you’re lost in the quagmire of SharePoint duties though (and I especially like John Ross’ quote “The coolest shit is worthless if it doesn’t meet business needs”). SharePoinTony summed it up nicely with “SharePoint Solutions knowledge is both lacking and underrated in most environments. Roles help”. Having someone on the team who can dance between a business user and a coder can be difficult. Remember the idea of telling something to someone and them passing it on to the next person. By the time the story comes round the circle it’s a shadow of it’s former self with little resemblance to the original tale. This is very much business requirements as they’re told by the user to a business analyst, written down on paper, read by an architect, tuned into a solution plan, and implemented by a developer. Transformations between what was said, what was heard, what was written down, and what was developed can be distant cousins. Not everyone has the skill of communication and even less have negotiation skills to suit the SharePoint platform. Negotiation is important because not everything can be (or should be) done in SharePoint. Sometimes it’s just not appropriate to build it on the SharePoint platform but someone needs to know enough about the platform and what limitations it might have, then communicate that (and/or negotiate) with a customer or user so it’s not about “You can’t have this” to “Let’s try it this way”. Visualize the possible instead of denying the impossible. So what is the right SharePoint team? My cromag brain came with a fairly simpleton answer (and I’m sure people will just say this is a cop-out). The perfect SharePoint team is just enough people to do the job that know the technology and business problem they’re solving. Bridge the gap between business need and technology platform and you have an architect. Communicate the needs of the business effectively so the entire team understands it and you have a business analyst. Can you get this with full time workers? Maybe but don’t expect miracles out of the gate. Also don’t take a consultant’s word as gospel. Some consultants just don’t have the diversity of the SharePoint platform to be worth their value so be careful. You really need someone who knows enough about SharePoint to be able to validate a consultants knowledge level. This is basically try for any consultant, not just a SharePoint one. Specialization is good and needed. A good, well-balanced SharePoint team is one of people that can solve problems with work with the technology, not against it. Having a top developer is great, but don’t rely on them to solve world hunger if they can’t communicate very well with users. An expert business analyst might be great at gathering requirements so the entire team can understand them, but if it means building 100% custom solutions because they don’t fit inside the SharePoint boundaries isn’t of much value. Just repeat. There is no silver bullet. There is no silver bullet. There is no silver bullet. A few people pointed out Nick Inglis’ article Excluding The Information Professional In SharePoint. It’s a good read too and hits home that maybe some developers and IT pros need some extra help in the information space. If you’re in an organization that needs labels on people, come up with something everyone understands and go with it. If that’s Business Solutions Architect, SharePoint Advisor, or Guy Who Knows A Lot About Portals, make it work for you. We all wish that one person could master all that is SharePoint but we also know that doesn’t scale very well and you quickly get into the hit-by-a-bus syndrome (with the organization coming to a full crawl when the guy or girl goes on vacation, gets sick, or pops out a baby). There are too many gaps in SharePoint knowledge to have any one person know it all and too many kittens to juggle all at once. We like to consider ourselves experts in our field, but trying to tackle too many roles at once and we end up being mediocre jack of all trades, master of none. Don't fall into this pit. It's a deep, dark hole you don't want to try to claw your way out of. Trust me. Been there. Done that. Got the t-shirt. In the end I don’t disagree with Joel. SharePoint is a beast and not something that should be taken on by newbies. If you just read “Teach Yourself SharePoint in 24 Hours” and want to go build your corporate intranet or the next killer business solution with all your new found knowledge plan to pony up consultant dollars a few months later when everything goes to Hell in a handbasket and falls over. I’m not saying don’t build solutions in SharePoint. I’m just saying that building effective ones takes skill like any craft and not something you can just cobble together with a little bit of cursory knowledge. Thanks to *everyone* who participated in this tweet rush. It was fun and educational.

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  • Visiting the Emtel Data Centre

    Back in February at the first event of the Emtel Knowledge Series (EKS) I spoke to various people at Emtel about their data centre here on the island. I was trying to see whether it would be possible to arrange a meeting over there for a selected group of our community members. Well, let's say it like this... My first approach wasn't that promising and far from successful but during the following months there were more and more occasions to get in touch with the "right" contact persons at Emtel to make it happen... Setting up an appointment and pre-requisites The major improvement came during a Boot Camp for Windows Phone 8.1 App development organised by Microsoft Indian Ocean Islands in cooperation with Emtel at the Emtel World, Ebene. Apart from learning bits and pieces regarding Universal Apps I took the opportunity to get in touch with Arvin Lockee, Sales Executive - Data, during our lunch break. And this really kicked off the whole procedure. Prior to get access to the Emtel data centre it is requested that you provide full name and National ID of anyone going to visit. Also, it should be noted that there was only a limited amount of seats available. Anyways, packed with this information I posted through the usual social media channels. Responses came in very quickly and based on First-come, first-serve (FCFS) principle I noted down the details and forwarded them to Emtel in order to fix a date and time for the visit. In preparation on our side, all attendees exchanged contact details and we organised transport options to go to the data centre in Arsenal. The day before and on the day of our meeting, Arvin send me a reminder to check whether everything is still confirmed and ready to go... Of course, it was! Arriving at the Emtel Data Centre As I'm coming from Flic En Flac towards the North, we agreed that I'm going to pick up a couple of young fellows near the old post office in Port Louis. All went well, except that Sean eventually might be living in another time zone compared to the rest of us. Anyway, after some extended stop we were complete and arrived just in time in Arsenal to meet and greet with Ish and Veer. Again, Emtel is taking access procedures to their data centre very serious and the gate stayed close until all our IDs had been noted and compared to the list of registered attendees. Despite having a good laugh at the mixture of old and new ID cards it was a straight-forward processing. The ward was very helpful and guided us to the waiting area at the entrance section of the building. Shortly after we were welcomed by Kamlesh Bokhoree, the Data Centre Officer. He gave us brief introduction into the rules and regulations during our visit, like no photography allowed, not touching the buttons, and following his instructions through the whole visit. Of course! Inside the data centre Next, he explained us the multi-factor authentication system using a combination of bio-metric data, like finger print reader, and "classic" pin panel. The Emtel data centre provides multiple services and next to co-location for your own hardware they also offer storage options for your backup and archive data in their massive, fire-resistant vault. Very impressive to get to know about the considerations that have been done in choosing the right location and how to set up the whole premises. It should also be noted that there is 24/7 CCTV surveillance inside and outside the buildings. Strengths of the Emtel TIER 3 Data Centre, Mauritius Finally, we were guided into the first server room. And wow, the whole setup is cleverly planned and outlined in the architecture. From the false floor and ceilings in order to provide optimum air flow, over to the separation of cold and hot aisles between the full-size server racks, and of course the monitored air conditions in order to analyse and watch changes in temperature, smoke detection and other parameters. And not surprisingly everything has been implemented in two independent circuits. There is a standardised classification for the construction and operation of data centres world-wide, and the Emtel's one has been designed to be a TIER 4 building but due to the lack of an alternative power supplier on the island it is officially registered as a TIER 3 compliant data centre. Maybe in the long run there might be a second supplier of energy next to CEB... time will tell. Luckily, the data centre is integrated into the National Fibre Optic Gigabit Ring and Emtel already connects internationally through diverse undersea cable routes like SAFE & LION/LION2 out of Mauritius and through several other providers for onwards connectivity. The data centre is part of the National Fibre Optic Gigabit Ring and has redundant internet connectivity onwards. Meanwhile, Arvin managed to join our little group of geeks and he supported Kamlesh in answering our technical questions regarding the capacities and general operation of the data centre. Visiting the NOC and its dedicated team of IT professionals was surely one of the visual highlights. Seeing their wall of screens to monitor any kind of activities on the data lines, the managed servers and the activity in and around the building was great. Even though I'm using a multi-head setup since years I cannot keep it up with that setup... ;-) But I got a couple of ideas on how to improve my work spaces here at the office. Clear advantages of hosting your e-commerce and mobile backends locally After the completely isolated NOC area we continued our Q&A session with Kamlesh and Arvin in the second server room which is dedictated to shared environments. On first thought it should be well-noted that there is lots of space for full-sized racks and therefore co-location of your own hardware. Actually, given the feedback that there will be upcoming changes in prices the facilities at the Emtel data centre are getting more and more competitive and interesting for local companies, especially small and medium enterprises. After seeing this world-class infrastructure available on the island, I'm already considering of moving one of my root servers abroad to be co-located here on the island. This would provide an improved user experience in terms of site performance and latency. This would be a good improvement, especially for upcoming e-commerce solutions for two of my local clients. Later on, we actually started the conversation of additional services that could be a catalyst for the local market in order to attract more small and medium companies to take the data centre into their evaluations regarding online activities. Until today Emtel does not provide virtualised server environments but there might be ongoing plans in the future to cover this field as well. Emtel is a mobile operator and internet connectivity provider in the first place, entering a market of managed and virtualised server infrastructures including capacities in terms of cloud storage and computing are rather new and there is a continuous learning curve at Emtel, too. You cannot just jump into a new market and see how it works out... And I appreciate Emtel's approach towards a solid fundament and then building new services on top of that. Emtel as a future one-stop-shop service provider for all your internet and telecommunications needs. Emtel's promotional video about their TIER 3 data centre in Arsenal, Mauritius More details are thoroughly described in Emtel's brochure of their data centre. Check out their PDF document here. Thanks for this opportunity Visiting and walking through the Emtel data centre for more than 2 hours was a great experience. As representative of the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community (MSCC) I would like to thank anyone at Emtel involved in the process of making it happen, and especially to Arvin Lockee and Kamlesh Bokhoree for their time and patience in explaining the infrastructure and answering all the endless questions from our members. Thank You!

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  • SQL University: Database testing and refactoring tools and examples

    - by Mladen Prajdic
    This is a post for a great idea called SQL University started by Jorge Segarra also famously known as SqlChicken on Twitter. It’s a collection of blog posts on different database related topics contributed by several smart people all over the world. So this week is mine and we’ll be talking about database testing and refactoring. In 3 posts we’ll cover: SQLU part 1 - What and why of database testing SQLU part 2 - What and why of database refactoring SQLU part 3 - Database testing and refactoring tools and examples This is the third and last part of the series and in it we’ll take a look at tools we can test and refactor with plus some an example of the both. Tools of the trade First a few thoughts about how to go about testing a database. I'm firmily against any testing tools that go into the database itself or need an extra database. Unit tests for the database and applications using the database should all be in one place using the same technology. By using database specific frameworks we fragment our tests into many places and increase test system complexity. Let’s take a look at some testing tools. 1. NUnit, xUnit, MbUnit All three are .Net testing frameworks meant to unit test .Net application. But we can test databases with them just fine. I use NUnit because I’ve always used it for work and personal projects. One day this might change. So the thing to remember is to be flexible if something better comes along. All three are quite similar and you should be able to switch between them without much problem. 2. TSQLUnit As much as this framework is helpful for the non-C# savvy folks I don’t like it for the reason I stated above. It lives in the database and thus fragments the testing infrastructure. Also it appears that it’s not being actively developed anymore. 3. DbFit I haven’t had the pleasure of trying this tool just yet but it’s on my to-do list. From what I’ve read and heard Gojko Adzic (@gojkoadzic on Twitter) has done a remarkable job with it. 4. Redgate SQL Refactor and Apex SQL Refactor Neither of these refactoring tools are free, however if you have hardcore refactoring planned they are worth while looking into. I’ve only used the Red Gate’s Refactor and was quite impressed with it. 5. Reverting the database state I’ve talked before about ways to revert a database to pre-test state after unit testing. This still holds and I haven’t changed my mind. Also make sure to read the comments as they are quite informative. I especially like the idea of setting up and tearing down the schema for each test group with NHibernate. Testing and refactoring example We’ll take a look at the simple schema and data test for a view and refactoring the SELECT * in that view. We’ll use a single table PhoneNumbers with ID and Phone columns. Then we’ll refactor the Phone column into 3 columns Prefix, Number and Suffix. Lastly we’ll remove the original Phone column. Then we’ll check how the view behaves with tests in NUnit. The comments in code explain the problem so be sure to read them. I’m assuming you know NUnit and C#. T-SQL Code C# test code USE tempdbGOCREATE TABLE PhoneNumbers( ID INT IDENTITY(1,1), Phone VARCHAR(20))GOINSERT INTO PhoneNumbers(Phone)SELECT '111 222333 444' UNION ALLSELECT '555 666777 888'GO-- notice we don't have WITH SCHEMABINDINGCREATE VIEW vPhoneNumbersAS SELECT * FROM PhoneNumbersGO-- Let's take a look at what the view returns -- If we add a new columns and rows both tests will failSELECT *FROM vPhoneNumbers GO -- DoesViewReturnCorrectColumns test will SUCCEED -- DoesViewReturnCorrectData test will SUCCEED -- refactor to split Phone column into 3 partsALTER TABLE PhoneNumbers ADD Prefix VARCHAR(3)ALTER TABLE PhoneNumbers ADD Number VARCHAR(6)ALTER TABLE PhoneNumbers ADD Suffix VARCHAR(3)GO-- update the new columnsUPDATE PhoneNumbers SET Prefix = LEFT(Phone, 3), Number = SUBSTRING(Phone, 5, 6), Suffix = RIGHT(Phone, 3)GO-- remove the old columnALTER TABLE PhoneNumbers DROP COLUMN PhoneGO-- This returns unexpected results!-- it returns 2 columns ID and Phone even though -- we don't have a Phone column anymore.-- Notice that the data is from the Prefix column-- This is a danger of SELECT *SELECT *FROM vPhoneNumbers -- DoesViewReturnCorrectColumns test will SUCCEED -- DoesViewReturnCorrectData test will FAIL -- for a fix we have to call sp_refreshview -- to refresh the view definitionEXEC sp_refreshview 'vPhoneNumbers'-- after the refresh the view returns 4 columns-- this breaks the input/output behavior of the database-- which refactoring MUST NOT doSELECT *FROM vPhoneNumbers -- DoesViewReturnCorrectColumns test will FAIL -- DoesViewReturnCorrectData test will FAIL -- to fix the input/output behavior change problem -- we have to concat the 3 columns into one named PhoneALTER VIEW vPhoneNumbersASSELECT ID, Prefix + ' ' + Number + ' ' + Suffix AS PhoneFROM PhoneNumbersGO-- now it works as expectedSELECT *FROM vPhoneNumbers -- DoesViewReturnCorrectColumns test will SUCCEED -- DoesViewReturnCorrectData test will SUCCEED -- clean upDROP VIEW vPhoneNumbersDROP TABLE PhoneNumbers [Test]public void DoesViewReturnCoorectColumns(){ // conn is a valid SqlConnection to the server's tempdb // note the SET FMTONLY ON with which we return only schema and no data using (SqlCommand cmd = new SqlCommand("SET FMTONLY ON; SELECT * FROM vPhoneNumbers", conn)) { DataTable dt = new DataTable(); dt.Load(cmd.ExecuteReader(CommandBehavior.CloseConnection)); // test returned schema: number of columns, column names and data types Assert.AreEqual(dt.Columns.Count, 2); Assert.AreEqual(dt.Columns[0].Caption, "ID"); Assert.AreEqual(dt.Columns[0].DataType, typeof(int)); Assert.AreEqual(dt.Columns[1].Caption, "Phone"); Assert.AreEqual(dt.Columns[1].DataType, typeof(string)); }} [Test]public void DoesViewReturnCorrectData(){ // conn is a valid SqlConnection to the server's tempdb using (SqlCommand cmd = new SqlCommand("SELECT * FROM vPhoneNumbers", conn)) { DataTable dt = new DataTable(); dt.Load(cmd.ExecuteReader(CommandBehavior.CloseConnection)); // test returned data: number of rows and their values Assert.AreEqual(dt.Rows.Count, 2); Assert.AreEqual(dt.Rows[0]["ID"], 1); Assert.AreEqual(dt.Rows[0]["Phone"], "111 222333 444"); Assert.AreEqual(dt.Rows[1]["ID"], 2); Assert.AreEqual(dt.Rows[1]["Phone"], "555 666777 888"); }}   With this simple example we’ve seen how a very simple schema can cause a lot of problems in the whole application/database system if it doesn’t have tests. Imagine what would happen if some outside process would depend on that view. It would get wrong data and propagate it silently throughout the system. And that is not good. So have tests at least for the crucial parts of your systems. And with that we conclude the Database Testing and Refactoring week at SQL University. Hope you learned something new and enjoy the learning weeks to come. Have fun!

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  • .NET to iOS: From WinForms to the iPad

    - by RobertChipperfield
    One of the great things about working at Red Gate is getting to play with new technology - and right now, that means mobile. A few weeks ago, we decided that a little research into the tablet computing arena was due, and purely from a numbers point of view, that suggested the iPad as a good target device. A quick trip to iPhoneDevCon in San Diego later, and Marine and I came back full of ideas, and with some concept of how iOS development was meant to work. Here's how we went from there to the release of Stacks & Heaps, our geeky take on the classic "Snakes & Ladders" game. Step 1: Buy a Mac I've played with many operating systems in my time: from the original BBC Model B, through DOS, Windows, Linux, and others, but I'd so far managed to avoid buying fruit-flavoured computer hardware! If you want to develop for the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch, that's the first thing that needs to change. If you've not used OS X before, the first thing you'll realise is that everything is different! In the interests of avoiding a flame war in the comments section, I'll only go so far as to say that a lot of my Windows-flavoured muscle memory no longer worked. If you're in the UK, you'll also realise your keyboard is lacking a # key, and that " and @ are the other way around from normal. The wonderful Ukelele keyboard layout editor restores some sanity here, as long as you don't look at the keyboard when you're typing. I couldn't give up the PC entirely, but a handy application called Synergy comes to the rescue - it lets you share a single keyboard and mouse between multiple machines. There's a few limitations: Alt-Tab always seems to go to the Mac, and Windows 7's UAC dialogs require the local mouse for security reasons, but it gets you a long way at least. Step 2: Register as an Apple Developer You can register as an Apple Developer free of charge, and that lets you download XCode and the iOS SDK. You also get the iPhone / iPad emulator, which is handy, since you'll need to be a paid member before you can deploy your apps to a real device. You can either enroll as an individual, or as a company. They both cost the same ($99/year), but there's a few differences between them. If you register as a company, you can add multiple developers to your team (all for the same $99 - not $99 per developer), and you get to use your company name in the App Store. However, you'll need to send off significantly more documentation to Apple, and I suspect the process takes rather longer than for an individual, where they just need to verify some credit card details. Here's a tip: if you're registering as a company, do so as early as possible. The approval process can take a while to complete, so get the application in in plenty of time. Step 3: Learn to love the square brackets! Objective-C is the language of the iPad. C and C++ are also supported, and if you're doing some serious game development, you'll probably spend most of your time in C++ talking OpenGL, but for forms-based apps, you'll be interacting with a lot of the Objective-C SDK. Like shifting from Ctrl-C to Cmd-C, it feels a little odd at first, with the familiar string.format(.) turning into: NSString *myString = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"Hello world, it's %@", [NSDate date]]; Thankfully XCode's auto-complete is normally passable, if not up to Visual Studio's standards, which coupled with a huge amount of content on Stack Overflow means you'll soon get to grips with the API. You'll need to get used to some terminology changes, though; here's an incomplete approximation: Coming from a .NET background, there's some luxuries you no longer have developing Objective C in XCode: Generics! Remember back in .NET 1.1, when all collections were just objects? Yup, we're back there now. ReSharper. Or, more generally, very much refactoring support. The not-many-keystrokes to rename a class, its file, and al references to it in Visual Studio turns into a much more painful experience in XCode. Garbage collection. This is actually rather less of an issue than you might expect: if you follow the rules, the reference counting provided by Objective C gets you a long way without too much pain. Circular references are their usual problematic self, though. Decent exception handling. You do have exceptions, but they're nowhere near as widely used. Generally, if something goes wrong, you get nil (see translation table above) back. Which brings me on to. Calling a method on a nil object isn't a failure - it just returns nil itself! There's many arguments for and against this, but personally I fall into the "stuff should fail as quickly and explicitly as possible" camp. Less specifically, I found that there's more chance of code failing at runtime rather than getting caught at compile-time: using the @selector(.) syntax to pass a method signature isn't (can't be) checked at compile-time, so the first you know about a typo is a crash when you try and call it. The solution to this is of course lots of great testing, both automated and manual, but I still find comfort in provably correct type safety being enforced in addition to testing. Step 4: Submit to the App Store Assuming you want to distribute to more than a handful of devices, you're going to need to submit your app to the Apple App Store. There's a few gotchas in terms of getting builds signed with the right certificates, and you'll be bouncing around between XCode and iTunes Connect a fair bit, but eventually you get everything checked off the to-do list, and are ready to upload your first binary! With some amount of anticipation, I pressed the Upload button in XCode, ready to release our creation into the world, but was instead greeted by an error informing me my XML file was malformed. Uh. A little Googling later, and it turned out that a simple rename from "Stacks&Heaps.app" to "StacksAndHeaps.app" worked around an XML escaping bug, and we were good to go. The next step is to wait for approval (or otherwise). After a couple of weeks of intensive development, this part is agonising. Did we make it? The Apple jury is still out at the moment, but our fingers are firmly crossed! In the meantime, you can see some screenshots and leave us your email address if you'd like us to get in touch when it does go live at the MobileFoo website. Step 5: Profit! Actually, that wasn't the idea here: Stacks & Heaps is free; there's no adverts, and we're not going to sell all your data either. So why did we do it? We wanted to get an idea of what it's like to move from coding for a desktop environment, to something completely different. We don't know whether in a year's time, the iPad will still be the dominant force, or whether Android will have smoothed out some bugs, tweaked the performance, and polished the UI, but I think it's a fairly sure bet that the tablet form factor is here to stay. We want to meet people who are using it, start chatting to them, and find out about some of the pain they're feeling. What better way to do that than do it ourselves, and get to write a cool game in the process?

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  • Anatomy of a .NET Assembly - Custom attribute encoding

    - by Simon Cooper
    In my previous post, I covered how field, method, and other types of signatures are encoded in a .NET assembly. Custom attribute signatures differ quite a bit from these, which consequently affects attribute specifications in C#. Custom attribute specifications In C#, you can apply a custom attribute to a type or type member, specifying a constructor as well as the values of fields or properties on the attribute type: public class ExampleAttribute : Attribute { public ExampleAttribute(int ctorArg1, string ctorArg2) { ... } public Type ExampleType { get; set; } } [Example(5, "6", ExampleType = typeof(string))] public class C { ... } How does this specification actually get encoded and stored in an assembly? Specification blob values Custom attribute specification signatures use the same building blocks as other types of signatures; the ELEMENT_TYPE structure. However, they significantly differ from other types of signatures, in that the actual parameter values need to be stored along with type information. There are two types of specification arguments in a signature blob; fixed args and named args. Fixed args are the arguments to the attribute type constructor, named arguments are specified after the constructor arguments to provide a value to a field or property on the constructed attribute type (PropertyName = propValue) Values in an attribute blob are limited to one of the basic types (one of the number types, character, or boolean), a reference to a type, an enum (which, in .NET, has to use one of the integer types as a base representation), or arrays of any of those. Enums and the basic types are easy to store in a blob - you simply store the binary representation. Strings are stored starting with a compressed integer indicating the length of the string, followed by the UTF8 characters. Array values start with an integer indicating the number of elements in the array, then the item values concatentated together. Rather than using a coded token, Type values are stored using a string representing the type name and fully qualified assembly name (for example, MyNs.MyType, MyAssembly, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=0123456789abcdef). If the type is in the current assembly or mscorlib then just the type name can be used. This is probably done to prevent direct references between assemblies solely because of attribute specification arguments; assemblies can be loaded in the reflection-only context and attribute arguments still processed, without loading the entire assembly. Fixed and named arguments Each entry in the CustomAttribute metadata table contains a reference to the object the attribute is applied to, the attribute constructor, and the specification blob. The number and type of arguments to the constructor (the fixed args) can be worked out by the method signature referenced by the attribute constructor, and so the fixed args can simply be concatenated together in the blob without any extra type information. Named args are different. These specify the value to assign to a field or property once the attribute type has been constructed. In the CLR, fields and properties can be overloaded just on their type; different fields and properties can have the same name. Therefore, to uniquely identify a field or property you need: Whether it's a field or property (indicated using byte values 0x53 and 0x54, respectively) The field or property type The field or property name After the fixed arg values is a 2-byte number specifying the number of named args in the blob. Each named argument has the above information concatenated together, mostly using the basic ELEMENT_TYPE values, in the same way as a method or field signature. A Type argument is represented using the byte 0x50, and an enum argument is represented using the byte 0x55 followed by a string specifying the name and assembly of the enum type. The named argument property information is followed by the argument value, using the same encoding as fixed args. Boxed objects This would be all very well, were it not for object and object[]. Arguments and properties of type object allow a value of any allowed argument type to be specified. As a result, more information needs to be specified in the blob to interpret the argument bytes as the correct type. So, the argument value is simple prepended with the type of the value by specifying the ELEMENT_TYPE or name of the enum the value represents. For named arguments, a field or property of type object is represented using the byte 0x51, with the actual type specified in the argument value. Some examples... All property signatures start with the 2-byte value 0x0001. Similar to my previous post in the series, names in capitals correspond to a particular byte value in the ELEMENT_TYPE structure. For strings, I'll simply give the string value, rather than the length and UTF8 encoding in the actual blob. I'll be using the following enum and attribute types to demonstrate specification encodings: class AttrAttribute : Attribute { public AttrAttribute() {} public AttrAttribute(Type[] tArray) {} public AttrAttribute(object o) {} public AttrAttribute(MyEnum e) {} public AttrAttribute(ushort x, int y) {} public AttrAttribute(string str, Type type1, Type type2) {} public int Prop1 { get; set; } public object Prop2 { get; set; } public object[] ObjectArray; } enum MyEnum : int { Val1 = 1, Val2 = 2 } Now, some examples: Here, the the specification binds to the (ushort, int) attribute constructor, with fixed args only. The specification blob starts off with a prolog, followed by the two constructor arguments, then the number of named arguments (zero): [Attr(42, 84)] 0x0001 0x002a 0x00000054 0x0000 An example of string and type encoding: [Attr("MyString", typeof(Array), typeof(System.Windows.Forms.Form))] 0x0001 "MyString" "System.Array" "System.Windows.Forms.Form, System.Windows.Forms, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089" 0x0000 As you can see, the full assembly specification of a type is only needed if the type isn't in the current assembly or mscorlib. Note, however, that the C# compiler currently chooses to fully-qualify mscorlib types anyway. An object argument (this binds to the object attribute constructor), and two named arguments (a null string is represented by 0xff and the empty string by 0x00) [Attr((ushort)40, Prop1 = 12, Prop2 = "")] 0x0001 U2 0x0028 0x0002 0x54 I4 "Prop1" 0x0000000c 0x54 0x51 "Prop2" STRING 0x00 Right, more complicated now. A type array as a fixed argument: [Attr(new[] { typeof(string), typeof(object) })] 0x0001 0x00000002 // the number of elements "System.String" "System.Object" 0x0000 An enum value, which is simply represented using the underlying value. The CLR works out that it's an enum using information in the attribute constructor signature: [Attr(MyEnum.Val1)] 0x0001 0x00000001 0x0000 And finally, a null array, and an object array as a named argument: [Attr((Type[])null, ObjectArray = new object[] { (byte)2, typeof(decimal), null, MyEnum.Val2 })] 0x0001 0xffffffff 0x0001 0x53 SZARRAY 0x51 "ObjectArray" 0x00000004 U1 0x02 0x50 "System.Decimal" STRING 0xff 0x55 "MyEnum" 0x00000002 As you'll notice, a null object is encoded as a null string value, and a null array is represented using a length of -1 (0xffffffff). How does this affect C#? So, we can now explain why the limits on attribute arguments are so strict in C#. Attribute specification blobs are limited to basic numbers, enums, types, and arrays. As you can see, this is because the raw CLR encoding can only accommodate those types. Special byte patterns have to be used to indicate object, string, Type, or enum values in named arguments; you can't specify an arbitary object type, as there isn't a generalised way of encoding the resulting value in the specification blob. In particular, decimal values can't be encoded, as it isn't a 'built-in' CLR type that has a native representation (you'll notice that decimal constants in C# programs are compiled as several integer arguments to DecimalConstantAttribute). Jagged arrays also aren't natively supported, although you can get around it by using an array as a value to an object argument: [Attr(new object[] { new object[] { new Type[] { typeof(string) } }, 42 })] Finally... Phew! That was a bit longer than I thought it would be. Custom attribute encodings are complicated! Hopefully this series has been an informative look at what exactly goes on inside a .NET assembly. In the next blog posts, I'll be carrying on with the 'Inside Red Gate' series.

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  • Oracle Tutor: Top 10 to Implement Sustainable Policies and Procedures

    - by emily.chorba(at)oracle.com
    Overview Your organization (executives, managers, and employees) understands the value of having written business process documents (process maps, procedures, instructions, reference documents, and form abstracts). Policies and procedures should be documented because they help to reduce the range of individual decisions and encourage management by exception: the manager only needs to give special attention to unusual problems, not covered by a specific policy or procedure. As more and more procedures are written to cover recurring situations, managers will begin to make decisions which will be consistent from one functional area to the next.Companies should take a project management approach when implementing an environment for a sustainable documentation program and do the following:1. Identify an Executive Champion2. Put together a winning team3. Assign ownership4. Centralize publishing5. Establish the Document Maintenance Process Up Front6. Document critical activities only7. Document actual practice8. Minimize documentation9. Support continuous improvement10. Keep it simple 1. Identify an Executive ChampionAppoint a top down driver. Select one key individual to be a mentor for the procedure planning team. The individual should be a senior manager, such as your company president, CIO, CFO, the vice-president of quality, manufacturing, or engineering. Written policies and procedures can be important supportive aids when known to express the thinking for the chief executive officer and / or the president and to have his or her full support. 2. Put Together a Winning TeamChoose a strong Project Management Leader and staff the procedure planning team with management members from cross functional groups. Make sure team members have the responsibility - and the authority - to make things happen.The winning team should consist of the Documentation Project Manager, Document Owners (one for each functional area), a Document Controller, and Document Specialists (as needed). The Tutor Implementation Guide has complete job descriptions for these roles. 3. Assign Ownership It is virtually impossible to keep process documentation simple and meaningful if employees who are far removed from the activity itself create it. It is impossible to keep documentation up-to-date when responsibility for the document is not clearly understood.Key to the Tutor methodology, therefore, is the concept of ownership. Each document has a single owner, who is responsible for ensuring that the document is necessary and that it reflects actual practice. The owner must be a person who is knowledgeable about the activity and who has the authority to build consensus among the persons who participate in the activity as well as the authority to define or change the way an activity is performed. The owner must be an advocate of the performers and negotiate, not dictate practices.In the Tutor environment, a document's owner is the only person with the authority to approve an update to that document. 4. Centralize Publishing Although it is tempting (especially in a networked environment and with document management software solutions) to decentralize the control of all documents -- with each owner updating and distributing his own -- Tutor promotes centralized publishing by assigning the Document Administrator (gate keeper) to manage the updates and distribution of the procedures library. 5. Establish a Document Maintenance Process Up Front (and stick to it) Everyone in your organization should know they are invited to suggest changes to procedures and should understand exactly what steps to take to do so. Tutor provides a set of procedures to help your company set up a healthy document control system. There are many document management products available to automate some of the document change and maintenance steps. Depending on the size of your organization, a simple document management system can reduce the effort it takes to track and distribute document changes and updates. Whether your company decides to store the written policies and procedures on a file server or in a database, the essential tasks for maintaining documents are the same, though some tasks are automated. 6. Document Critical Activities Only The best way to keep your documentation simple is to reduce the number of process documents to a bare minimum and to include in those documents only as much detail as is absolutely necessary. The first step to reducing process documentation is to document only those activities that are deemed critical. Not all activities require documentation. In fact, some critical activities cannot and should not be standardized. Others may be sufficiently documented with an instruction or a checklist and may not require a procedure. A document should only be created when it enhances the performance of the employee performing the activity. If it does not help the employee, then there is no reason to maintain the document. Activities that represent little risk (such as project status), activities that cannot be defined in terms of specific tasks (such as product research), and activities that can be performed in a variety of ways (such as advertising) often do not require documentation. Sometimes, an activity will evolve to the point where documentation is necessary. For example, an activity performed by single employee may be straightforward and uncomplicated -- that is, until the activity is performed by multiple employees. Sometimes, it is the interaction between co-workers that necessitates documentation; sometimes, it is the complexity or the diversity of the activity.7. Document Actual Practices The only reason to maintain process documentation is to enhance the performance of the employee performing the activity. And documentation can only enhance performance if it reflects reality -- that is, current best practice. Documentation that reflects an unattainable ideal or outdated practices will end up on the shelf, unused and forgotten.Documenting actual practice means (1) auditing the activity to understand how the work is really performed, (2) identifying best practices with employees who are involved in the activity, (3) building consensus so that everyone agrees on a common method, and (4) recording that consensus.8. Minimize Documentation One way to keep it simple is to document at the highest level possible. That is, include in your documents only as much detail as is absolutely necessary.When writing a document, you should ask yourself, What is the purpose of this document? That is, what problem will it solve?By focusing on this question, you can target the critical information.• What questions are the end users likely to have?• What level of detail is required?• Is any of this information extraneous to the document's purpose? Short, concise documents are user friendly and they are easier to keep up to date. 9. Support Continuous Improvement Employees who perform an activity are often in the best position to identify improvements to the process. In other words, continuous improvement is a natural byproduct of the work itself -- but only if the improvements are communicated to all employees who are involved in the process, and only if there is consensus among those employees.Traditionally, process documentation has been used to dictate performance, to limit employees' actions. In the Tutor environment, process documents are used to communicate improvements identified by employees. How does this work? The Tutor methodology requires a process document to reflect actual practice, so the owner of a document must routinely audit its content -- does the document match what the employees are doing? If it doesn't, the owner has the responsibility to evaluate the process, to build consensus among the employees, to identify "best practices," and to communicate these improvements via a document update. Continuous improvement can also be an outgrowth of corrective action -- but only if the solutions to problems are communicated effectively. The goal should be to solve a problem once and only once, which means not only identifying the solution, but ensuring that the solution becomes part of the process. The Tutor system provides the method through which improvements and solutions are documented and communicated to all affected employees in a cost-effective, timely manner; it ensures that improvements are not lost or confined to a single employee. 10. Keep it Simple Process documents don't have to be complex and unfriendly. In fact, the simpler the format and organization, the more likely the documents will be used. And the simpler the method of maintenance, the more likely the documents will be kept up-to-date. Keep it simply by:• Minimizing skills and training required• Following the established Tutor document format and layout• Avoiding technology just for technology's sake No other rule has as major an impact on the success of your internal documentation as -- keep it simple. Learn More For more information about Tutor, visit Oracle.Com or the Tutor Blog. Post your questions at the Tutor Forum.   Emily Chorba Principle Product Manager Oracle Tutor & BPM 

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  • Learnings from trying to write better software: Loud errors from the very start

    - by theo.spears
    Microsoft made a very small number of backwards incompatible changes between .NET 1.1 and 2.0, because they wanted to make it as easy and safe as possible to port applications to the new runtime. (Here’s a list.) However, one thing they did change was what happens when a background thread fails with an unhanded exception - in .NET 1.1 nothing happened, the thread terminated, and the application continued oblivious. Try the same trick in .NET 2.0 and the entire application, including all threads, will rudely terminate. There are three reasons for this. Firstly if a background thread has crashed, it may have left the entire application in an inconsistent state, in a way that will affect other threads. It’s better to terminate the entire application than continue and have the application perform actions based on a broken state, for example take customer orders, or write corrupt files to disk.  Secondly, during software development, it is far better for errors to be loud and obtrusive. Even if you have unit tests and integration tests (and you should), a key part of ensuring software works properly is to actually try using it, both through systematic testing and through the casual use all software gets by its developers during use. Subtle errors are easy to miss if you are not actually doing real work using the application, loud errors are obvious. Thirdly, and most importantly, even if catching and swallowing exceptions indiscriminately doesn't cause any problems in your application, the presence of unexpected exceptions shows you do not fully understand the behavior of your code. The currently released version of your application may be absolutely correct. However, because your mental model of the behavior is wrong, any future change you make to the program could and probably will introduce critical errors.  This applies to more than just exceptions causing threads to exit, any unexpected state should make the application blow up in an un-ignorable way. The worst thing you can do is silently swallow errors and continue. And let's be clear, writing to a log file does not count as blowing up in an un-ignorable way.  This is all simple as long as the call stack only contains your code, but when your functions start to be called by third party or .NET framework code, it's surprisingly easy for exceptions to start vanishing. Let's look at two examples.   1. Windows forms drag drop events  Usually if you throw an exception from a winforms event handler it will bring up the "application has crashed" dialog with abort and continue options. This is a good default behavior - the error is big and loud, but it is possible for the user to ignore the error and hopefully save their data, if somehow this bug makes it past testing. However drag and drop are different - throw an exception from one of these and it will just be silently swallowed with no explanation.  By the way, it's not just drag and drop events. Timer events do it too.  You can research how exceptions are treated in different handlers and code appropriately, but the safest and most user friendly approach is to always catch exceptions in your event handlers and show your own error message. I'll talk about one good approach to handling these exceptions at the end of this post.   2. SSMS integration for SQL Tab Magic  A while back wrote an SSMS add-in called SQL Tab Magic (learn more about the process here). It works by listening to certain SSMS events and remembering what documents are opened and closed. I deployed it internally and it was used for a few months by a number of people without problems, so I was reasonably confident in its quality. Before releasing I made a few cleanups, including introducing error reporting. Bam. A few days later I was looking at over 1,000 error reports in my inbox. In turns out I wasn't handling table designers properly. The exceptions were there, but again SSMS was helpfully swallowing them all for me, so I was blissfully unaware. Had I made my errors loud from the start, I would have noticed these issues long before and fixed them.   Handling exceptions  Now you are systematically catching exceptions throughout your application, you need to do something with them. I've tried 3 options: log them, alert the user, and automatically send them home.  There are a few good options for logging in .NET. The most widespread is Apache log4net, which provides a very capable and configurable logging framework. There is also NLog which has a compatible interface, with a greater emphasis on fluent rather than XML configuration.  Alerting the user serves two purposes. Firstly it means they understand their action has failed to they don't just assume it worked (Silent file copy failure is a problem if you then delete the originals) or that they should keep waiting for a background task to complete. Secondly, it means the users can report the bug to your support team, and then you can fix it. This means the message you show the user should contain the information you need as a developer to identify and fix it. And the user will probably just send you a screenshot of the dialog, so it shouldn't be hidden by scroll bars.  This leads us to the third option, automatically sending error reports home. By automatic I mean with minimal effort on the part of the user, rather than doing it silently behind their backs. The advantage of this is you can send back far more detailed and precise information than you can expect a user to include in an email, and by making it easier to report errors, you make it more likely users will do so.  We do this using a great tool called SmartAssembly (full disclosure: this is a product made by Red Gate). It captures complete stack traces including the values of all local variables and then allows the user to send all this information back with a single click. We also capture log files to help understand what lead up to the error. We then use the free SmartAssembly Sync for Jira to dedupe these reports and raise them as bugs in our bug tracking system.  The combined effect of loud errors during development and then automatic error reporting once software is deployed allows us to find and fix more bugs, correct misunderstandings on how our software works, and overall is a key piece in delivering higher quality software. However it is no substitute for having motivated cunning testers in the building - and we're looking to hire more of those too.   If you found this post interesting you should follow me on twitter.  

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  • SQL Server Table Polling by Multiple Subscribers

    - by Daniel Hester
    Background Designing Stored Procedures that are safe for multiple subscribers (to call simultaneously) can be challenging.  For example let’s say that you want multiple worker processes to poll a shared work queue that’s encapsulated as a SQL Table. This is a common scenario and through experience you’ll find that you want to use Table Hints to prevent unwanted locking when performing simultaneous queries on the same table. There are three table hints to consider: NOLOCK, READPAST and UPDLOCK. Both NOLOCK and READPAST table hints allow you to SELECT from a table without placing a LOCK on that table. However, SELECTs with the READPAST hint will ignore any records that are locked due to being updated/inserted (or otherwise “dirty”), whereas a SELECT with NOLOCK ignores all locks including dirty reads. For the initial update of the flag (that marks the record as available for subscription) I don’t use the NOLOCK Table Hint because I want to be sensitive to the “active” records in the table and I want to exclude them.  I use an Update Lock (UPDLOCK) in conjunction with a WHERE clause that uses a sub-select with a READPAST Table Hint in order to explicitly lock the records I’m updating (UPDLOCK) but not place a lock on the table when selecting the records that I’m going to update (READPAST). UPDATES should be allowed to lock the rows affected because we’re probably changing a flag on a record so that it is not included in a SELECT from another subscriber. On the UPDATE statement we should explicitly use the UPDLOCK to guard against lock escalation. A SELECT to check for the next record(s) to process can result in a shared read lock being held by more than one subscriber polling the shared work queue (SQL table). It is expected that more than one worker process (or server) might try to process the same new record(s) at the same time. When each process then tries to obtain the update lock, none of them can because another process has a shared read lock in place. Thus without the UPDLOCK hint the result would be a lock escalation deadlock; however with the UPDLOCK hint this condition is mitigated against. Note that using the READPAST table hint requires that you also set the ISOLATION LEVEL of the transaction to be READ COMMITTED (rather than the default of SERIALIZABLE). Guidance In the Stored Procedure that returns records to the multiple subscribers: Perform the UPDATE first. Change the flag that makes the record available to subscribers.  Additionally, you may want to update a LastUpdated datetime field in order to be able to check for records that “got stuck” in an intermediate state or for other auditing purposes. In the UPDATE statement use the (UPDLOCK) Table Hint on the UPDATE statement to prevent lock escalation. In the UPDATE statement also use a WHERE Clause that uses a sub-select with a (READPAST) Table Hint to select the records that you’re going to update. In the UPDATE statement use the OUTPUT clause in conjunction with a Temporary Table to isolate the record(s) that you’ve just updated and intend to return to the subscriber. This is the fastest way to update the record(s) and to get the records’ identifiers within the same operation. Finally do a set-based SELECT on the main Table (using the Temporary Table to identify the records in the set) with either a READPAST or NOLOCK table hint.  Use NOLOCK if there are other processes (besides the multiple subscribers) that might be changing the data that you want to return to the multiple subscribers; or use READPAST if you're sure there are no other processes (besides the multiple subscribers) that might be updating column data in the table for other purposes (e.g. changes to a person’s last name).  NOLOCK is generally the better fit in this part of the scenario. See the following as an example: CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[usp_NewCustomersSelect] AS BEGIN -- OVERRIDE THE DEFAULT ISOLATION LEVEL SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL READ COMMITTED -- SET NOCOUNT ON SET NOCOUNT ON -- DECLARE TEMP TABLE -- Note that this example uses CustomerId as an identifier; -- you could just use the Identity column Id if that’s all you need. DECLARE @CustomersTempTable TABLE ( CustomerId NVARCHAR(255) ) -- PERFORM UPDATE FIRST -- [Customers] is the name of the table -- [Id] is the Identity Column on the table -- [CustomerId] is the business document key used to identify the -- record globally, i.e. in other systems or across SQL tables -- [Status] is INT or BIT field (if the status is a binary state) -- [LastUpdated] is a datetime field used to record the time of the -- last update UPDATE [Customers] WITH (UPDLOCK) SET [Status] = 1, [LastUpdated] = GETDATE() OUTPUT [INSERTED].[CustomerId] INTO @CustomersTempTable WHERE ([Id] = (SELECT TOP 100 [Id] FROM [Customers] WITH (READPAST) WHERE ([Status] = 0) ORDER BY [Id] ASC)) -- PERFORM SELECT FROM ENTITY TABLE SELECT [C].[CustomerId], [C].[FirstName], [C].[LastName], [C].[Address1], [C].[Address2], [C].[City], [C].[State], [C].[Zip], [C].[ShippingMethod], [C].[Id] FROM [Customers] AS [C] WITH (NOLOCK), @CustomersTempTable AS [TEMP] WHERE ([C].[CustomerId] = [TEMP].[CustomerId]) END In a system that has been designed to have multiple status values for records that need to be processed in the Work Queue it is necessary to have a “Watch Dog” process by which “stale” records in intermediate states (such as “In Progress”) are detected, i.e. a [Status] of 0 = New or Unprocessed; a [Status] of 1 = In Progress; a [Status] of 2 = Processed; etc.. Thus, if you have a business rule that states that the application should only process new records if all of the old records have been processed successfully (or marked as an error), then it will be necessary to build a monitoring process to detect stalled or stale records in the Work Queue, hence the use of the LastUpdated column in the example above. The Status field along with the LastUpdated field can be used as the criteria to detect stalled / stale records. It is possible to put this watchdog logic into the stored procedure above, but I would recommend making it a separate monitoring function. In writing the stored procedure that checks for stale records I would recommend using the same kind of lock semantics as suggested above. The example below looks for records that have been in the “In Progress” state ([Status] = 1) for greater than 60 seconds: CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[usp_NewCustomersWatchDog] AS BEGIN -- TO OVERRIDE THE DEFAULT ISOLATION LEVEL SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL READ COMMITTED -- SET NOCOUNT ON SET NOCOUNT ON DECLARE @MaxWait int; SET @MaxWait = 60 IF EXISTS (SELECT 1 FROM [dbo].[Customers] WITH (READPAST) WHERE ([Status] = 1) AND (DATEDIFF(s, [LastUpdated], GETDATE()) > @MaxWait)) BEGIN SELECT 1 AS [IsWatchDogError] END ELSE BEGIN SELECT 0 AS [IsWatchDogError] END END Downloads The zip file below contains two SQL scripts: one to create a sample database with the above stored procedures and one to populate the sample database with 10,000 sample records.  I am very grateful to Red-Gate software for their excellent SQL Data Generator tool which enabled me to create these sample records in no time at all. References http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms187373.aspx http://www.techrepublic.com/article/using-nolock-and-readpast-table-hints-in-sql-server/6185492 http://geekswithblogs.net/gwiele/archive/2004/11/25/15974.aspx http://grounding.co.za/blogs/romiko/archive/2009/03/09/biztalk-sql-receive-location-deadlocks-dirty-reads-and-isolation-levels.aspx

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  • Developing Schema Compare for Oracle (Part 1)

    - by Simon Cooper
    SQL Compare is one of Red Gate's most successful SQL Server tools; it allows developers and DBAs to compare and synchronize the contents of their databases. Although similar tools exist for Oracle, they are quite noticeably lacking in the usability and stability that SQL Compare is known for in the SQL Server world. We could see a real need for a usable schema comparison tools for Oracle, and so the Schema Compare for Oracle project was born. Over the next few weeks, as we come up to release of v1, I'll be doing a series of posts on the development of Schema Compare for Oracle. For the first post, I thought I would start with the main pitfalls that we stumbled across when developing the product, especially from a SQL Server background. 1. Schemas and Databases The most obvious difference is that the concept of a 'database' is quite different between Oracle and SQL Server. On SQL Server, one server instance has multiple databases, each with separate schemas. There is typically little communication between separate databases, and most databases are no more than about 1000-2000 objects. This means SQL Compare can register an entire database in a reasonable amount of time, and cross-database dependencies probably won't be an issue. It is a quite different scene under Oracle, however. The terms 'database' and 'instance' are used interchangeably, (although technically 'database' refers to the datafiles on disk, and 'instance' the running Oracle process that reads & writes to the database), and a database is a single conceptual entity. This immediately presents problems, as it is infeasible to register an entire database as we do in SQL Compare; in my Oracle install, using the standard recommended options, there are 63975 system objects. If we tried to register all those, not only would it take hours, but the client would probably run out of memory before we finished. As a result, we had to allow people to specify what schemas they wanted to register. This decision had quite a few knock-on effects for the design, which I will cover in a future post. 2. Connecting to Oracle The next obvious difference is in actually connecting to Oracle – in SQL Server, you can specify a server and database, and off you go. On Oracle things are slightly more complicated. SIDs, Service Names, and TNS A database (the files on disk) must have a unique identifier for the databases on the system, called the SID. It also has a global database name, which consists of a name (which doesn't have to match the SID) and a domain. Alternatively, you can identify a database using a service name, which normally has a 1-to-1 relationship with instances, but may not if, for example, using RAC (Real Application Clusters) for redundancy and failover. You specify the computer and instance you want to connect to using TNS (Transparent Network Substrate). The user-visible parts are a config file (tnsnames.ora) on the client machine that specifies how to connect to an instance. For example, the entry for one of my test instances is: SC_11GDB1 = (DESCRIPTION = (ADDRESS_LIST = (ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = simonctest)(PORT = 1521)) ) (CONNECT_DATA = (SID = 11gR1db1) ) ) This gives the hostname, port, and SID of the instance I want to connect to, and associates it with a name (SC_11GDB1). The tnsnames syntax also allows you to specify failover, multiple descriptions and address lists, and client load balancing. You can then specify this TNS identifier as the data source in a connection string. Although using ODP.NET (the .NET dlls provided by Oracle) was fine for internal prototype builds, once we released the EAP we discovered that this simply wasn't an acceptable solution for installs on other people's machines. Due to .NET assembly strong naming, users had to have installed on their machines the exact same version of the ODP.NET dlls as we had on our build server. We couldn't ship the ODP.NET dlls with our installer as the Oracle license agreement prohibited this, and we didn't want to force users to install another Oracle client just so they can run our program. To be able to list the TNS entries in the connection dialog, we also had to locate and parse the tnsnames.ora file, which was complicated by users with several Oracle client installs and intricate TNS entries. After much swearing at our computers, we eventually decided to use a third party Oracle connection library from Devart that we could ship with our program; this could use whatever client version was installed, parse the TNS entries for us, and also had the nice feature of being able to connect to an Oracle server without having any client installed at all. Unfortunately, their current license agreement prevents us from shipping an Oracle SDK, but that's a bridge we'll cross when we get to it. 3. Running synchronization scripts The most important difference is that in Oracle, DDL is non-transactional; you cannot rollback DDL statements like you can on SQL Server. Although we considered various solutions to this, including using the flashback archive or recycle bin, or generating an undo script, no reliable method of completely undoing a half-executed sync script has yet been found; so in this case we simply have to trust that the DBA or developer will check and verify the script before running it. However, before we got to that stage, we had to get the scripts to run in the first place... To run a synchronization script from SQL Compare we essentially pass the script over to the SqlCommand.ExecuteNonQuery method. However, when we tried to do the same for an OracleConnection we got a very strange error – 'ORA-00911: invalid character', even when running the most basic CREATE TABLE command. After much hair-pulling and Googling, we discovered that Oracle has got some very strange behaviour with semicolons at the end of statements. To understand what's going on, we need to take a quick foray into SQL and PL/SQL. PL/SQL is not T-SQL In SQL Server, T-SQL is the language used to interface with the database. It has DDL, DML, control flow, and many other nice features (like Turing-completeness) that you can mix and match in the same script. In Oracle, DDL SQL and PL/SQL are two completely separate languages, with different syntax, different datatypes and different execution engines within the instance. Oracle SQL is much more like 'pure' ANSI SQL, with no state, no control flow, and only the basic DML commands. PL/SQL is the Turing-complete language, but can only do DML and DCL (i.e. BEGIN TRANSATION commands). Any DDL or SQL commands that aren't recognised by the PL/SQL engine have to be passed back to the SQL engine via an EXECUTE IMMEDIATE command. In PL/SQL, a semicolons is a valid token used to delimit the end of a statement. In SQL, a semicolon is not a valid token (even though the Oracle documentation gives them at the end of the syntax diagrams) . When you execute the command CREATE TABLE table1 (COL1 NUMBER); in SQL*Plus the semicolon on the end is a command to SQL*Plus to execute the preceding statement on the server; it strips off the semicolon before passing it on. SQL Developer does a similar thing. When executing a PL/SQL block, however, the syntax is like so: BEGIN INSERT INTO table1 VALUES (1); INSERT INTO table1 VALUES (2); END; / In this case, the semicolon is accepted by the PL/SQL engine as a statement delimiter, and instead the / is the command to SQL*Plus to execute the current block. This explains the ORA-00911 error we got when trying to run the CREATE TABLE command – the server is complaining about the semicolon on the end. This also means that there is no SQL syntax to execute more than one DDL command in the same OracleCommand. Therefore, we would have to do a round-trip to the server for every command we want to execute. Obviously, this would cause lots of network traffic and be very slow on slow or congested networks. Our first attempt at a solution was to wrap every SQL statement (without semicolon) inside an EXECUTE IMMEDIATE command in a PL/SQL block and pass that to the server to execute. One downside of this solution is that we get no feedback as to how the script execution is going; we're currently evaluating better solutions to this thorny issue. Next up: Dependencies; how we solved the problem of being unable to register the entire database, and the knock-on effects to the whole product.

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  • Real tortoises keep it slow and steady. How about the backups?

    - by Maria Zakourdaev
      … Four tortoises were playing in the backyard when they decided they needed hibiscus flower snacks. They pooled their money and sent the smallest tortoise out to fetch the snacks. Two days passed and there was no sign of the tortoise. "You know, she is taking a lot of time", said one of the tortoises. A little voice from just out side the fence said, "If you are going to talk that way about me I won't go." Is it too much to request from the quite expensive 3rd party backup tool to be a way faster than the SQL server native backup? Or at least save a respectable amount of storage by producing a really smaller backup files?  By saying “really smaller”, I mean at least getting a file in half size. After Googling the internet in an attempt to understand what other “sql people” are using for database backups, I see that most people are using one of three tools which are the main players in SQL backup area:  LiteSpeed by Quest SQL Backup by Red Gate SQL Safe by Idera The feedbacks about those tools are truly emotional and happy. However, while reading the forums and blogs I have wondered, is it possible that many are accustomed to using the above tools since SQL 2000 and 2005.  This can easily be understood due to the fact that a 300GB database backup for instance, using regular a SQL 2005 backup statement would have run for about 3 hours and have produced ~150GB file (depending on the content, of course).  Then you take a 3rd party tool which performs the same backup in 30 minutes resulting in a 30GB file leaving you speechless, you run to management persuading them to buy it due to the fact that it is definitely worth the price. In addition to the increased speed and disk space savings you would also get backup file encryption and virtual restore -  features that are still missing from the SQL server. But in case you, as well as me, don’t need these additional features and only want a tool that performs a full backup MUCH faster AND produces a far smaller backup file (like the gain you observed back in SQL 2005 days) you will be quite disappointed. SQL Server backup compression feature has totally changed the market picture. Medium size database. Take a look at the table below, check out how my SQL server 2008 R2 compares to other tools when backing up a 300GB database. It appears that when talking about the backup speed, SQL 2008 R2 compresses and performs backup in similar overall times as all three other tools. 3rd party tools maximum compression level takes twice longer. Backup file gain is not that impressive, except the highest compression levels but the price that you pay is very high cpu load and much longer time. Only SQL Safe by Idera was quite fast with it’s maximum compression level but most of the run time have used 95% cpu on the server. Note that I have used two types of destination storage, SATA 11 disks and FC 53 disks and, obviously, on faster storage have got my backup ready in half time. Looking at the above results, should we spend money, bother with another layer of complexity and software middle-man for the medium sized databases? I’m definitely not going to do so.  Very large database As a next phase of this benchmark, I have moved to a 6 terabyte database which was actually my main backup target. Note, how multiple files usage enables the SQL Server backup operation to use parallel I/O and remarkably increases it’s speed, especially when the backup device is heavily striped. SQL Server supports a maximum of 64 backup devices for a single backup operation but the most speed is gained when using one file per CPU, in the case above 8 files for a 2 Quad CPU server. The impact of additional files is minimal.  However, SQLsafe doesn’t show any speed improvement between 4 files and 8 files. Of course, with such huge databases every half percent of the compression transforms into the noticeable numbers. Saving almost 470GB of space may turn the backup tool into quite valuable purchase. Still, the backup speed and high CPU are the variables that should be taken into the consideration. As for us, the backup speed is more critical than the storage and we cannot allow a production server to sustain 95% cpu for such a long time. Bottomline, 3rd party backup tool developers, we are waiting for some breakthrough release. There are a few unanswered questions, like the restore speed comparison between different tools and the impact of multiple backup files on restore operation. Stay tuned for the next benchmarks.    Benchmark server: SQL Server 2008 R2 sp1 2 Quad CPU Database location: NetApp FC 15K Aggregate 53 discs Backup statements: No matter how good that UI is, we need to run the backup tasks from inside of SQL Server Agent to make sure they are covered by our monitoring systems. I have used extended stored procedures (command line execution also is an option, I haven’t noticed any impact on the backup performance). SQL backup LiteSpeed SQL Backup SQL safe backup database <DBNAME> to disk= '\\<networkpath>\par1.bak' , disk= '\\<networkpath>\par2.bak', disk= '\\<networkpath>\par3.bak' with format, compression EXECUTE master.dbo.xp_backup_database @database = N'<DBName>', @backupname= N'<DBName> full backup', @desc = N'Test', @compressionlevel=8, @filename= N'\\<networkpath>\par1.bak', @filename= N'\\<networkpath>\par2.bak', @filename= N'\\<networkpath>\par3.bak', @init = 1 EXECUTE master.dbo.sqlbackup '-SQL "BACKUP DATABASE <DBNAME> TO DISK= ''\\<networkpath>\par1.sqb'', DISK= ''\\<networkpath>\par2.sqb'', DISK= ''\\<networkpath>\par3.sqb'' WITH DISKRETRYINTERVAL = 30, DISKRETRYCOUNT = 10, COMPRESSION = 4, INIT"' EXECUTE master.dbo.xp_ss_backup @database = 'UCMSDB', @filename = '\\<networkpath>\par1.bak', @backuptype = 'Full', @compressionlevel = 4, @backupfile = '\\<networkpath>\par2.bak', @backupfile = '\\<networkpath>\par3.bak' If you still insist on using 3rd party tools for the backups in your production environment with maximum compression level, you will definitely need to consider limiting cpu usage which will increase the backup operation time even more: RedGate : use THREADPRIORITY option ( values 0 – 6 ) LiteSpeed : use  @throttle ( percentage, like 70%) SQL safe :  the only thing I have found was @Threads option.   Yours, Maria

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  • BI Applications overview

    - by sv744
    Welcome to Oracle BI applications blog! This blog will talk about various features, general roadmap, description of functionality and implementation steps related to Oracle BI applications. In the first post we start with an overview of the BI apps and will delve deeper into some of the topics below in the upcoming weeks and months. If there are other topics you would like us to talk about, pl feel free to provide feedback on that. The Oracle BI applications are a set of pre-built applications that enable pervasive BI by providing role-based insight for each functional area, including sales, service, marketing, contact center, finance, supplier/supply chain, HR/workforce, and executive management. For example, Sales Analytics includes role-based applications for sales executives, sales management, as well as front-line sales reps, each of whom have different needs. The applications integrate and transform data from a range of enterprise sources—including Siebel, Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP, and others—into actionable intelligence for each business function and user role. This blog  starts with the key benefits and characteristics of Oracle BI applications. In a series of subsequent blogs, each of these points will be explained in detail. Why BI apps? Demonstrate the value of BI to a business user, show reports / dashboards / model that can answer their business questions as part of the sales cycle. Demonstrate technical feasibility of BI project and significantly lower risk and improve success Build Vs Buy benefit Don’t have to start with a blank sheet of paper. Help consolidate disparate systems Data integration in M&A situations Insulate BI consumers from changes in the OLTP Present OLTP data and highlight issues of poor data / missing data – and improve data quality and accuracy Prebuilt Integrations BI apps support prebuilt integrations against leading ERP sources: Fusion Applications, E- Business Suite, Peoplesoft, JD Edwards, Siebel, SAP Co-developed with inputs from functional experts in BI and Applications teams. Out of the box dimensional model to source model mappings Multi source and Multi Instance support Rich Data Model    BI apps have a very rich dimensionsal data model built over 10 years that incorporates best practises from BI modeling perspective as well as reflect the source system complexities  Thanks for reading a long post, and be on the lookout for future posts.  We will look forward to your valuable feedback on these topics as well as suggestions on what other topics would you like us to cover. I Conformed dimensional model across all business subject areas allows cross functional reporting, e.g. customer / supplier 360 Over 360 fact tables across 7 product areas CRM – 145, SCM – 47, Financials – 28, Procurement – 20, HCM – 27, Projects – 18, Campus Solutions – 21, PLM - 56 Supported by 300 physical dimensions Support for extensive calendars; Gregorian, enterprise and ledger based Conformed data model and metrics for real time vs warehouse based reporting  Multi-tenant enabled Extensive BI related transformations BI apps ETL and data integration support various transformations required for dimensional models and reporting requirements. All these have been distilled into common patterns and abstracted logic which can be readily reused across different modules Slowly Changing Dimension support Hierarchy flattening support Row / Column Hybrid Hierarchy Flattening As Is vs. As Was hierarchy support Currency Conversion :-  Support for 3 corporate, CRM, ledger and transaction currencies UOM conversion Internationalization / Localization Dynamic Data translations Code standardization (Domains) Historical Snapshots Cycle and process lifecycle computations Balance Facts Equalization of GL accounting chartfields/segments Standardized values for categorizing GL accounts Reconciliation between GL and subledgers to track accounted/transferred/posted transactions to GL Materialization of data only available through costly and complex APIs e.g. Fusion Payroll, EBS / Fusion Accruals Complex event Interpretation of source data – E.g. o    What constitutes a transfer o    Deriving supervisors via position hierarchy o    Deriving primary assignment in PSFT o    Categorizing and transposition to measures of Payroll Balances to specific metrics to support side by side comparison of measures of for example Fixed Salary, Variable Salary, Tax, Bonus, Overtime Payments. o    Counting of Events – E.g. converting events to fact counters so that for example the number of hires can easily be added up and compared alongside the total transfers and terminations. Multi pass processing of multiple sources e.g. headcount, salary, promotion, performance to allow side to side comparison. Adding value to data to aid analysis through banding, additional domain classifications and groupings to allow higher level analytical reporting and data discovery Calculation of complex measures examples: o    COGs, DSO, DPO, Inventory turns  etc o    Transfers within a Hierarchy or out of / into a hierarchy relative to view point in hierarchy. Configurability and Extensibility support  BI apps offer support for extensibility for various entities as automated extensibility or part of extension methodology Key Flex fields and Descriptive Flex support  Extensible attribute support (JDE)  Conformed Domains ETL Architecture BI apps offer a modular adapter architecture which allows support of multiple product lines into a single conformed model Multi Source Multi Technology Orchestration – creates load plan taking into account task dependencies and customers deployment to generate a plan based on a customers of multiple complex etl tasks Plan optimization allowing parallel ETL tasks Oracle: Bit map indexes and partition management High availability support    Follow the sun support. TCO BI apps support several utilities / capabilities that help with overall total cost of ownership and ensure a rapid implementation Improved cost of ownership – lower cost to deploy On-going support for new versions of the source application Task based setups flows Data Lineage Functional setup performed in Web UI by Functional person Configuration Test to Production support Security BI apps support both data and object security enabling implementations to quickly configure the application as per the reporting security needs Fine grain object security at report / dashboard and presentation catalog level Data Security integration with source systems  Extensible to support external data security rules Extensive Set of KPIs Over 7000 base and derived metrics across all modules Time series calculations (YoY, % growth etc) Common Currency and UOM reporting Cross subject area KPIs (analyzing HR vs GL data, drill from GL to AP/AR, etc) Prebuilt reports and dashboards 3000+ prebuilt reports supporting a large number of industries Hundreds of role based dashboards Dynamic currency conversion at dashboard level Highly tuned Performance The BI apps have been tuned over the years for both a very performant ETL and dashboard performance. The applications use best practises and advanced database features to enable the best possible performance. Optimized data model for BI and analytic queries Prebuilt aggregates& the ability for customers to create their own aggregates easily on warehouse facts allows for scalable end user performance Incremental extracts and loads Incremental Aggregate build Automatic table index and statistics management Parallel ETL loads Source system deletes handling Low latency extract with Golden Gate Micro ETL support Bitmap Indexes Partitioning support Modularized deployment, start small and add other subject areas seamlessly Source Specfic Staging and Real Time Schema Support for source specific operational reporting schema for EBS, PSFT, Siebel and JDE Application Integrations The BI apps also allow for integration with source systems as well as other applications that provide value add through BI and enable BI consumption during operational decision making Embedded dashboards for Fusion, EBS and Siebel applications Action Link support Marketing Segmentation Sales Predictor Dashboard Territory Management External Integrations The BI apps data integration choices include support for loading extenral data External data enrichment choices : UNSPSC, Item class etc. Extensible Spend Classification Broad Deployment Choices Exalytics support Databases :  Oracle, Exadata, Teradata, DB2, MSSQL ETL tool of choice : ODI (coming), Informatica Extensible and Customizable Extensible architecture and Methodology to add custom and external content Upgradable across releases

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  • Complex event system for DungeonKeeper like game

    - by paul424
    I am working on opensource GPL3 game. http://opendungeons.sourceforge.net/ , new coders would be welcome. Now there's design question regarding Event System: We want to improve the game logic, that is program a new event system. I will just repost what's settled up already on http://forum.freegamedev.net/viewtopic.php?f=45&t=3033. From the discussion came the idea of the Publisher / Subscriber pattern + "domains": My current idea is to use the subscirbers / publishers model. Its similar to Observable pattern, but instead one subscribes to Events types, not Object's Events. For each Event would like to have both static and dynamic type. Static that is its's type would be resolved by belonging to the proper inherited class from Event. That is from Event we would have EventTile, EventCreature, EvenMapLoader, EventGameMap etc. From that there are of course subtypes like EventCreature would be EventKobold, EventKnight, EventTentacle etc. The listeners would collect the event from publishers, and send them subcribers , each of them would be a global singleton. The Listeners type hierachy would exactly mirror the type hierarchy of Events. In each constructor of Event type, the created instance would notify the proper listeners. That is when calling EventKnight the proper ctor would notify the Listeners : EventListener, CreatureLisener and KnightListener. The default action for an listner would be to notify all subscribers, but there would be some exceptions , like EventAttack would notify AttackListener which would dispatch event by the dynamic part ( that is the Creature pointer or hash). Any comments ? #include <vector> class Subscriber; class SubscriberAttack; class Event{ private: int foo; int bar; protected: // static std::vector<Publisher*> publishersList; static std::vector<Subscriber*> subscribersList; static std::vector<Event*> eventQueue; public: Event(){ eventQueue.push_back(this); } static int subscribe(Subscriber* ss); static int unsubscribe(Subscriber* ss); //static int reg_publisher(Publisher* pp); //static int unreg_publisher(Publisher* pp); }; // class Publisher{ // }; class Subscriber{ public: int (*newEvent) (Event* ee); Subscriber( ){ Event::subscribe(this); } Subscriber( int (*fp) (Event* ee) ):newEvent(fp){ Subscriber(); } ~Subscriber(){ Event::unsubscribe(this); } }; class EventAttack: Event{ private: int foo; int bar; protected: // static std::vector<Publisher*> publishersList; static std::vector<SubscriberAttack*> subscribersList; static std::vector<EventAttack*> eventQueue; public: EventAttack(){ eventQueue.push_back(this); } static int subscribe(SubscriberAttack* ss); static int unsubscribe(SubscriberAttack* ss); //static int reg_publisher(Publisher* pp); //static int unreg_publisher(Publisher* pp); }; class AttackSubscriber :Subscriber{ public: int (*newEvent) (EventAttack* ee); AttackSubscriber( ){ EventAttack::subscribe(this); } AttackSubscriber( int (*fp) (EventAttack* ee) ):newEventAttack(fp){ AttackSubscriber(); } ~AttackSubscriber(){ EventAttack::unsubscribe(this); } }; From that point, others wanted the Subject-Observer pattern, that is one would subscribe to all event types produced by particular object. That way it came out to add the domain system : Huh, to meet the ability to listen to particular game's object events, I though of introducing entity domains . Domains are trees, which nodes are labeled by unique names for each level. ( like the www addresses ). Each Entity wanting to participate in our event system ( that is be able to publish / produce events ) should at least now its domain name. That would end up in Player1/Room/Treasury/#24 or Player1/Creature/Kobold/#3 producing events. The subscriber picks some part of a tree. For example by specifiing subtree with the root in one of the nodes like Player1/Room/* ,would subscribe us to all Players1's room's event, and Player1/Creature/Kobold/#3 would subscribe to Players' third kobold's event. Does such event system make sense to you ? I have many implementation details to ask as well, but first let's start some general discussion. Note1: Notice that in the case of a fight between two creatues fight , the creature being attacked would have to throw an event, becuase it is HE/SHE/IT who have its domain address. So that would be BeingAttackedEvent() etc. I will edit that post if some other reflections on this would come out. Note2: the existing class hierarchy might be used to get the domains addresses being build in constructor . In a ctor you would just add + ."className" to domain address. If you are in a class'es hierarchy leaf constructor one might use nextID , hash or any other charactteristic, just to make the addresses distinguishable . Note3:subscribing to all entity's Events would require knowledge of all possible events produced by this entity . This could be done in one function call, but information on E produced would have to be handled for every Entity. SmartNote4 : Finding proper subscribers in a tree would be easy. One would start in particular Leaf for example Player1/Creature/Kobold/#3 and go up one parent a time , notifiying each Subscriber in a Node ie. : Player1/Creature/Kobold/* , Player1/Creature/* , Player1/* etc, , up to a root that is /* .<<<< Note5: The Event system was needed to have some way of incorporating Angelscript code into application. So the Event dispatcher was to be a gate to A-script functions. But it came out to this one.

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  • Reusing XSL template to be invoked with different relative XPaths

    - by meomaxy
    Here is my contrived example that illustrates what I am attempting to accomplish. I have an input XML file that I wish to flatten for further processing. Input file: <BICYCLES> <BICYCLE> <COLOR>BLUE</COLOR> <WHEELS> <WHEEL> <WHEEL_TYPE>FRONT</WHEEL_TYPE> <FLAT>NO</FLAT> <REFLECTORS> <REFLECTOR> <REFLECTOR_NUM>1</REFLECTOR_NUM> <COLOR>RED</COLOR> <SHAPE>SQUARE</SHAPE> </REFLECTOR> <REFLECTOR> <REFLECTOR_NUM>2</REFLECTOR_NUM> <COLOR>WHITE</COLOR> <SHAPE>ROUND</SHAPE> </REFLECTOR> </REFLECTORS> </WHEEL> <WHEEL> <WHEEL_TYPE>REAR</WHEEL_TYPE> <FLAT>NO</FLAT> </WHEEL> </WHEELS> </BICYCLE> </BICYCLES> The input is a list of <BICYCLE> nodes. Each <BICYCLE> has a <COLOR> and optionally has <WHEELS>. <WHEELS> is a list of <WHEEL> nodes, each of which has a few attributes, and optionally has <REFLECTORS>. <REFLECTORS> is a list of <REFLECTOR> nodes, each of which has a few attributes. The goal is to flatten this XML. This is the XSL I'm using: <xsl:stylesheet version="2.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format" xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:fn="http://www.w3.org/2005/xpath-functions"> <xsl:output method="xml" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes" omit-xml-declaration="yes" xml:space="preserve"/> <xsl:template match="/"> <BICYCLES> <xsl:apply-templates/> </BICYCLES> </xsl:template> <xsl:template match="BICYCLE"> <xsl:choose> <xsl:when test="WHEELS"> <xsl:apply-templates select="WHEELS"/> </xsl:when> <xsl:otherwise> <BICYCLE> <COLOR><xsl:value-of select="COLOR"/></COLOR> <WHEEL_TYPE/> <FLAT/> <REFLECTOR_NUM/> <COLOR/> <SHAPE/> </BICYCLE> </xsl:otherwise> </xsl:choose> </xsl:template> <xsl:template match="WHEELS"> <xsl:apply-templates select="WHEEL"/> </xsl:template> <xsl:template match="WHEEL"> <xsl:choose> <xsl:when test="REFLECTORS"> <xsl:apply-templates select="REFLECTORS"/> </xsl:when> <xsl:otherwise> <BICYCLE> <COLOR><xsl:value-of select="../../COLOR"/></COLOR> <WHEEL_TYPE><xsl:value-of select="WHEEL_TYPE"/></WHEEL_TYPE> <FLAT><xsl:value-of select="FLAT"/></FLAT> <REFLECTOR_NUM/> <COLOR/> <SHAPE/> </BICYCLE> </xsl:otherwise> </xsl:choose> </xsl:template> <xsl:template match="REFLECTORS"> <xsl:apply-templates select="REFLECTOR"/> </xsl:template> <xsl:template match="REFLECTOR"> <BICYCLE> <COLOR><xsl:value-of select="../../../../COLOR"/></COLOR> <WHEEL_TYPE><xsl:value-of select="../../WHEEL_TYPE"/></WHEEL_TYPE> <FLAT><xsl:value-of select="../../FLAT"/></FLAT> <REFLECTOR_NUM><xsl:value-of select="REFLECTOR_NUM"/></REFLECTOR_NUM> <COLOR><xsl:value-of select="COLOR"/></COLOR> <SHAPE><xsl:value-of select="SHAPE"/></SHAPE> </BICYCLE> </xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet> The output is: <BICYCLES xmlns:fn="http://www.w3.org/2005/xpath-functions" xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format" xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"> <BICYCLE> <COLOR>BLUE</COLOR> <WHEEL_TYPE>FRONT</WHEEL_TYPE> <FLAT>NO</FLAT> <REFLECTOR_NUM>1</REFLECTOR_NUM> <COLOR>RED</COLOR> <SHAPE>SQUARE</SHAPE> </BICYCLE> <BICYCLE> <COLOR>BLUE</COLOR> <WHEEL_TYPE>FRONT</WHEEL_TYPE> <FLAT>NO</FLAT> <REFLECTOR_NUM>2</REFLECTOR_NUM> <COLOR>WHITE</COLOR> <SHAPE>ROUND</SHAPE> </BICYCLE> <BICYCLE> <COLOR>BLUE</COLOR> <WHEEL_TYPE>REAR</WHEEL_TYPE> <FLAT>NO</FLAT> <REFLECTOR_NUM/> <COLOR/> <SHAPE/> </BICYCLE> </BICYCLES> What I don't like about this is that I'm outputting the color attribute in several forms: <COLOR><xsl:value-of select="../../../../COLOR"/></COLOR> <COLOR><xsl:value-of select="../../COLOR"/></COLOR> <COLOR><xsl:value-of select="COLOR"/></COLOR> <COLOR/> It seems like there ought to be a way to make a named template and invoke it from the various places where it is needed and pass some parameter that represents the path back to the <BICYCLE> node to which it refers. Is there a way to clean this up, say with a named template for bicycle fields, for wheel fields and for reflector fields? In the real world example this is based on, there are many more attributes to a "bicycle" than just color, and I want to make this XSL easy to change to include or exclude fields without having to change the XSL in multiple places.

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  • CSS layout problem on Firefox with filling space between end of left column and footer

    - by Jean
    Basically, the left column is supposed to extend to the footer with the continuous red color. However, in Firefox on pages with lots of text, the column does not extend to the footer and leaves a large white gap--see site: http://library.luhs.org/JHSII/about.html I've tried readjusting the heights, creating the sticky footer, and other things I've read about on this site. So I admit that I'm stumped, and what's really odd is that the layout seems to work in IE as there is no white space! I didn't create the site, but I recently inherited it and trying to work through the mess Any help is much appreciated, here's the CSS #html,body{ margin:0; padding:0; border:0; height:100%; } #body{ background:#ffffff; min-width:965px; text-align:center; width: 600px; font: Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; } #.style7{ clear:both; height:1px; overflow:hidden; line-height:1%; font-size:0px; margin-bottom:-1px; } #fullheightcontainer{ margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto; text-align:left; position:relative; width:965px; height:100%; } #wrapper{ min-height:100%; height:100%; background:#660000; background-color: #660000; background-repeat: repeat; } #wrapp\65 r{ height:auto; } # html wrapper{ height:100%; } #outer{ z-index:1; position:relative; margin-left:150px; width:815px; background:#FFFFFF; height:100%; background-color: #FFFFFF; } #left{ width:151px; float:left; display:inline; position:relative; margin-left:-150px; } padding: 20px; border: 0; margin: 0 0 0 240px *>html #left{width:150px;} #container-left{ width:150px; color: #CCCCCC; } * html #left{margin-right:-3px;} #center{ width:800px; float:right; display:inline; margin-left:-1px; } #clearheadercenter{ height:125px; overflow:hidden; } #clearfootercenter{ height:50px; overflow:hidden; } #footer{ z-index:1; position:relative; clear: both; width:965px; height:50px; overflow:hidden; margin-top:-50px; background-color: #660000; } #subfooter1{ background:#FFFFCC; text-align:left; margin-left:150px; height:50px; } #header{ z-index:1; position:absolute; top:0px; width:815px; margin-left:150px; height:100px; overflow:hidden; background-color: #660000; } #subheader1{ background:#FFFFCC; text-align:center; height:70px; } #gfx_bg_middle{ top:0px; position:absolute; height:100%; overflow:hidden; width:815px; margin-left:150px; background:#FFFFFF; } # html #gfx_bg_middle{ display:none; } #floatingnav { margin: 5px 10px 5px 5px; padding: 0px 5px 5px; float: right; font: .75em/1.35em Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; height: 600px; width: 300px; } #floatingnav a { color: #630; } #floatingnav ul { margin-top: -5; } #.floatright { float: right; margin: 0 0 10px 10px; border: 1px solid #666; padding: 2px; } #outer{ word-wrap:break-word; } #table.s1 { border-width: medium; border-spacing: 2px; border-style: none; border-color: rgb(85, 0, 0); border-collapse: collapse; background-color: white; } #table.s1 th { border-width: medium; padding: 2px; border-style: groove; border-color: red; background-color: white; -moz-border-radius: 0px 0px 0px 0px; } #table.s1 td { border-width: medium; padding: 2px; border-style: groove; border-color: #660000; background-color: #FFFFFF; -moz-border-radius: 0px 0px 0px 0px; } #a:link { color: #000066; } #a:visited { color: #000066; } #p.sample { font-family: serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: medium; line-height: 100%; word-spacing: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-decoration: none; text-transform: none; text-align: left; text-indent: 0ex; }

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  • scrolling lags in emacs 23.2 with GTK

    - by mefiX
    Hey there, I am using emacs 23.2 with the GTK toolkit. I built emacs from source using the following configure-params: ./configure --prefix=/usr --without-makeinfo --without-sound Which builds emacs with the following configuration: Where should the build process find the source code? /home/****/incoming/emacs-23.2 What operating system and machine description files should Emacs use? `s/gnu-linux.h' and `m/intel386.h' What compiler should emacs be built with? gcc -g -O2 -Wdeclaration-after-statement -Wno-pointer-sign Should Emacs use the GNU version of malloc? yes (Using Doug Lea's new malloc from the GNU C Library.) Should Emacs use a relocating allocator for buffers? yes Should Emacs use mmap(2) for buffer allocation? no What window system should Emacs use? x11 What toolkit should Emacs use? GTK Where do we find X Windows header files? Standard dirs Where do we find X Windows libraries? Standard dirs Does Emacs use -lXaw3d? no Does Emacs use -lXpm? yes Does Emacs use -ljpeg? yes Does Emacs use -ltiff? yes Does Emacs use a gif library? yes -lgif Does Emacs use -lpng? yes Does Emacs use -lrsvg-2? no Does Emacs use -lgpm? yes Does Emacs use -ldbus? yes Does Emacs use -lgconf? no Does Emacs use -lfreetype? yes Does Emacs use -lm17n-flt? no Does Emacs use -lotf? yes Does Emacs use -lxft? yes Does Emacs use toolkit scroll bars? yes When I'm scrolling within files of a common size (about 1000 lines) holding the up/down-keys, emacs almost hangs and produces about 50% CPU-load. I use the following plugins: ido linum tabbar auto-complete-config Starting emacs with -q fixes the problem, but then I don't have any plugins. I can't figure out, which part of my .emacs is responsible for this behaviour. Here's an excerpt of my .emacs-file: (require 'ido) (ido-mode 1) (require 'linum) (global-linum-mode 1) (require 'tabbar) (tabbar-mode 1) (tabbar-local-mode 0) (tabbar-mwheel-mode 0) (setq tabbar-buffer-groups-function (lambda () (list "All"))) (global-set-key [M-left] 'tabbar-backward) (global-set-key [M-right] 'tabbar-forward) ;; hide the toolbar (gtk etc.) (tool-bar-mode -1) ;; Mouse scrolling enhancements (setq mouse-wheel-progressive-speed nil) (setq mouse-wheel-scroll-amount '(5 ((shift) . 5) ((control) . nil))) ;; Smart-HOME (defun smart-beginning-of-line () "Forces the cursor to jump to the first none whitespace char of the current line when pressing HOME" (interactive) (let ((oldpos (point))) (back-to-indentation) (and (= oldpos (point)) (beginning-of-line)))) (put 'smart-beginning-of-line 'CUA 'move) (global-set-key [home] 'smart-beginning-of-line) (custom-set-variables ;; custom-set-variables was added by Custom. ;; If you edit it by hand, you could mess it up, so be careful. ;; Your init file should contain only one such instance. ;; If there is more than one, they won't work right. '(column-number-mode t) '(cua-mode t nil (cua-base)) '(custom-buffer-indent 4) '(delete-selection-mode nil) '(display-time-24hr-format t) '(display-time-day-and-date 1) '(display-time-mode t) '(global-font-lock-mode t nil (font-lock)) '(inhibit-startup-buffer-menu t) '(inhibit-startup-screen t) '(pc-select-meta-moves-sexps t) '(pc-select-selection-keys-only t) '(pc-selection-mode t nil (pc-select)) '(scroll-bar-mode (quote right)) '(show-paren-mode t) '(standard-indent 4) '(uniquify-buffer-name-style (quote forward) nil (uniquify))) (setq-default tab-width 4) (setq-default indent-tabs-mode t) (setq c-basic-offset 4) ;; Highlighting of the current line (global-hl-line-mode 1) (set-face-background 'hl-line "#E8F2FE") (defalias 'yes-or-no-p 'y-or-n-p) (display-time) (set-language-environment "Latin-1") ;; Change cursor color according to mode (setq djcb-read-only-color "gray") ;; valid values are t, nil, box, hollow, bar, (bar . WIDTH), hbar, ;; (hbar. HEIGHT); see the docs for set-cursor-type (setq djcb-read-only-cursor-type 'hbar) (setq djcb-overwrite-color "red") (setq djcb-overwrite-cursor-type 'box) (setq djcb-normal-color "black") (setq djcb-normal-cursor-type 'bar) (defun djcb-set-cursor-according-to-mode () "change cursor color and type according to some minor modes." (cond (buffer-read-only (set-cursor-color djcb-read-only-color) (setq cursor-type djcb-read-only-cursor-type)) (overwrite-mode (set-cursor-color djcb-overwrite-color) (setq cursor-type djcb-overwrite-cursor-type)) (t (set-cursor-color djcb-normal-color) (setq cursor-type djcb-normal-cursor-type)))) (add-hook 'post-command-hook 'djcb-set-cursor-according-to-mode) (define-key global-map '[C-right] 'forward-sexp) (define-key global-map '[C-left] 'backward-sexp) (define-key global-map '[s-left] 'windmove-left) (define-key global-map '[s-right] 'windmove-right) (define-key global-map '[s-up] 'windmove-up) (define-key global-map '[s-down] 'windmove-down) (define-key global-map '[S-down-mouse-1] 'mouse-stay-and-copy) (define-key global-map '[C-M-S-down-mouse-1] 'mouse-stay-and-swap) (define-key global-map '[S-mouse-2] 'mouse-yank-and-kill) (define-key global-map '[C-S-down-mouse-1] 'mouse-stay-and-kill) (define-key global-map "\C-a" 'mark-whole-buffer) (custom-set-faces ;; custom-set-faces was added by Custom. ;; If you edit it by hand, you could mess it up, so be careful. ;; Your init file should contain only one such instance. ;; If there is more than one, they won't work right. '(default ((t (:inherit nil :stipple nil :background "#f7f9fa" :foreground "#191919" :inverse-video nil :box nil :strike-through nil :overline nil :underline nil :slant normal :weight normal :height 98 :width normal :foundry "unknown" :family "DejaVu Sans Mono")))) '(font-lock-builtin-face ((((class color) (min-colors 88) (background light)) (:foreground "#642880" :weight bold)))) '(font-lock-comment-face ((((class color) (min-colors 88) (background light)) (:foreground "#3f7f5f")))) '(font-lock-constant-face ((((class color) (min-colors 88) (background light)) (:weight bold)))) '(font-lock-doc-face ((t (:inherit font-lock-string-face :foreground "#3f7f5f")))) '(font-lock-function-name-face ((((class color) (min-colors 88) (background light)) (:foreground "Black" :weight bold)))) '(font-lock-keyword-face ((((class color) (min-colors 88) (background light)) (:foreground "#7f0055" :weight bold)))) '(font-lock-preprocessor-face ((t (:inherit font-lock-builtin-face :foreground "#7f0055" :weight bold)))) '(font-lock-string-face ((((class color) (min-colors 88) (background light)) (:foreground "#0000c0")))) '(font-lock-type-face ((((class color) (min-colors 88) (background light)) (:foreground "#7f0055" :weight bold)))) '(font-lock-variable-name-face ((((class color) (min-colors 88) (background light)) (:foreground "Black")))) '(minibuffer-prompt ((t (:foreground "medium blue")))) '(mode-line ((t (:background "#222222" :foreground "White")))) '(tabbar-button ((t (:inherit tabbar-default :foreground "dark red")))) '(tabbar-button-highlight ((t (:inherit tabbar-default :background "white" :box (:line-width 2 :color "white"))))) '(tabbar-default ((t (:background "gray90" :foreground "gray50" :box (:line-width 3 :color "gray90") :height 100)))) '(tabbar-highlight ((t (:underline t)))) '(tabbar-selected ((t (:inherit tabbar-default :foreground "blue" :weight bold)))) '(tabbar-separator ((t nil))) '(tabbar-unselected ((t (:inherit tabbar-default))))) Any suggestions? Kind regards, mefiX

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  • Create Downloadable CSV File from PHP Script

    - by Aphex22
    How would I create a formatted version of the following PHP script as a downloadable CSV file from the code below (1.0) At the moment the fputcsv function is currently dumping the unparsed PHP/HTML code into a CSV file. This is incorrect. The downloaded CSV file should contain the columns and rows generated from the code at (1.0) as shown in the image link below. I've tried using the following code at the top of the PHP file: // output headers so that the file is downloaded rather than displayed header('Content-Type: text/csv; charset=utf-8'); header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=amazon.csv'); // create a file pointer connected to the output stream $output = fopen('php://output', 'w'); $mysql_hostname = ""; $mysql_user = ""; $mysql_password = ""; $mysql_database = ""; $bd = mysql_connect($mysql_hostname, $mysql_user, $mysql_password) or die("Could not connect database"); mysql_select_db($mysql_database, $bd) or die("Could not select database"); $sql = "select * from product WHERE on_amazon = 'on' AND active = 'on'"; $result = mysql_query($sql) or die ( mysql_error() ); // loop over the rows, outputting them while ($sql_result = mysql_fetch_assoc($sql)) fputcsv($output, $sql_result); 1.0 The start of the code outputs the column headings for the CSV file: // set headers echo " item_sku, external_product_id, external_product_id_type, item_name, brand_name, manufacturer, product_description, feed_product_type, update_delete, part_number, model, standard_price, list_price, currency, quantity, product_tax_code, product_site_launch_date, merchant_release_date, restock_date ... <br>"; And then follows PHP script for the column values // load all stock while ($line = mysql_fetch_assoc($result) ) { ?> <?php $size_suffix = array ("",'_chain','_con_b','_con_c'); $arrayLength = count ($size_suffix); for($y=0;$y<$arrayLength;$y++) { //Possible size array to loop through when checking quantity $con_size = array (36,365,37,375,38,385,39,395,40,405,41,415,42,425,43,435,44,445,45,455,46,465,47,475,48,485); $arrlength=count($con_size); for($x=0;$x<$arrlength;$x++) { // check if size is available if($line['quantity_c_size_'.$con_size[$x].$size_suffix[$y]] > 0 ) { ?> <!-- item sku --> <?=$line['product_id']?>, <!-- external product id --> <?=$line['code_size_'.$con_size[$x].'']?>, <? // external product id type $barcode = $line['code_size_'.$con_size[$x]]; $trim_barcode = trim($barcode); $count = strlen($trim_barcode); if ($count == 12) { echo "UPC"; } if ($count == 13) { echo "EAN"; } elseif ($count < 12) { echo " "; } ?>, <!-- item name --> <?=$line['title']?>, <? // brand_name $brand = $line['jys_brand']; echo ucfirst($brand); ?>, <? // manufacturer $brand = $line['jys_brand']; echo ucfirst($brand); ?>, <!-- product description --> <?=preg_replace('/[^\da-z]/i', ' ', $line['amazon_desc']) ?>, <!-- feed product type --> Shoes, , , , <!-- standard price --> <?=$line['price']?>, , <!-- currency --> GBP, <!-- quantity --> <?=$line['quantity_size_'.$con_size[$x].$size_suffix[$y]]?>, , <!-- product site launch date --> <?=$line['added_y']?>-<?=$line['added_m']?>-<?=$line['added_d']?>, <!-- merchat release date --> <?=$line['added_y']?>-<?=$line['added_m']?>-<?=$line['added_d']?>, , , , , <!-- item package quantity --> 1, , , , , <!-- fulfillment latency --> 2, <!-- max aggregate ship quantity --> 1, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , <!-- main image url, url1, url2, url3 --> http://www.getashoe.co.uk/full/<?=$line['product_id']?>_1.jpg, http://www.getashoe.co.uk/full/<?=$line['product_id']?>_2.jpg, http://www.getashoe.co.uk/full/<?=$line['product_id']?>_3.jpg, http://www.getashoe.co.uk/full/<?=$line['product_id']?>_4.jpg, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , <!-- heel height --> <?=$line['heel']?>, , , , , , , , , , , <!-- colour name --> <?=$line['colour']?>, <!-- colour map --> <? $colour = preg_replace('/[()]/i', ' ', $line['colour']); if (preg_match( '/[\/].*/i', $colour)) { echo 'Multicolour'; } if (preg_match( '/off.*/i', $colour)) { echo 'Off-White'; } elseif( preg_match( '/white.*/i', $colour)) { echo 'White'; } elseif( preg_match( '/moro.*/i', $colour)) { echo 'Brown'; } elseif( preg_match( '/morado.*/i', $colour)) { echo 'Purple'; } elseif( preg_match( '/cream.*/i', $colour)) { echo 'Off-White'; } elseif( preg_match( '/pewter.*/i', $colour)) { echo 'Silver'; } elseif( preg_match( '/yellow.*/i', $colour)) { echo 'Yellow'; } elseif( preg_match( '/camel.*/i', $colour)) { echo 'Beige'; } elseif( preg_match( '/navy.*/i', $colour)) { echo 'Blue'; } elseif( preg_match( '/tan.*/i', $colour)) { echo 'Brown'; } elseif( preg_match( '/rainbow.*/i', $colour)) { echo 'Multicolour'; } elseif( preg_match( '/orange.*/i', $colour)) { echo 'Orange'; } elseif( preg_match( '/leopard.*/i', $colour)) { echo 'Multicolour'; } elseif( preg_match( '/red.*/i', $colour)) { echo 'Red'; } elseif( preg_match( '/pink.*/i', $colour)) { echo 'Pink'; } elseif( preg_match( '/purple.*/i', $colour)) { echo 'Purple'; } elseif( preg_match( '/blue.*/i', $colour)) { echo 'Blue'; } elseif( preg_match( '/green.*/i', $colour)) { echo 'Green'; } elseif( preg_match( '/brown.*/i', $colour)) { echo 'Brown'; } elseif( preg_match( '/grey.*/i', $colour)) { echo 'Grey'; } elseif( preg_match( '/black.*/i', $colour)) { echo 'Black'; } elseif( preg_match( '/gold.*/i', $colour)) { echo 'Gold'; } elseif( preg_match( '/silver.*/i', $colour)) { echo 'Silver'; } elseif( preg_match( '/multi.*/i', $colour)) { echo 'Multicolour'; } elseif( preg_match( '/beige.*/i', $colour)) { echo 'Beige'; } elseif( preg_match( '/nude.*/i', $colour)) { echo 'Beige'; } ?>, <!-- size name --> <? echo $con_size[$x];?>, <!-- size map --> <? if ($con_size[$x] == 36) { echo "3 UK"; } elseif ($con_size[$x] == 37 ) { echo "4 UK"; } elseif ($con_size[$x] == 38) { echo "5 UK"; } elseif ($con_size[$x] == 39 ) { echo "6 UK"; } elseif ($con_size[$x] == 40 ) { echo "7 UK"; } elseif ($con_size[$x] == 41) { echo "8 UK"; } elseif ($con_size[$x] == 42) { echo "9 UK"; } elseif ($con_size[$x] == 43) { echo "10 UK"; } elseif ($con_size[$x] == 44 ) { echo "11 UK"; } elseif ($con_size[$x] == 45 ) { echo "12 UK"; } elseif ($con_size[$x] == 46 ) { echo "13 UK"; } elseif ($con_size[$x] == 47 ) { echo "14 UK"; } elseif ($con_size[$x] == 48 ) { echo "15 UK"; } elseif ($con_size[$x] == 365) { echo "3.5 UK"; } elseif ($con_size[$x] == 375 ) { echo "4.5 UK"; } elseif ($con_size[$x] == 385) { echo "5.5 UK"; } elseif ($con_size[$x] == 395 ) { echo "6.5 UK"; } elseif ($con_size[$x] == 405 ) { echo "7.5 UK"; } elseif ($con_size[$x] == 415) { echo "8.5 UK"; } elseif ($con_size[$x] == 425) { echo "9.5 UK"; } elseif ($con_size[$x] == 435) { echo "10.5 UK"; } elseif ($con_size[$x] == 445 ) { echo "11.5 UK"; } elseif ($con_size[$x] == 455 ) { echo "12.5 UK"; } elseif ($con_size[$x] == 465 ) { echo "13.5 UK"; } elseif ($con_size[$x] == 475 ) { echo "14.5 UK"; } elseif ($con_size[$x] == 485 ) { echo "15.5 UK"; } ?>, <br> <? // finish checking if size is available } } } ?> I've included an image of how the CSV file should appear. https://i.imgur.com/ZU3IFer.png Any help would be great.

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