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• Best way to auto-restore db on an houlry basis

  - by aron

  Hello, I have a demo site where anyone can login and test a management interface. Every hour I would like to flush all the data in the SQL 2008 Database and restore it from the original. Rae Gate sql has some awesome tools for this, however they are beyond my budget right now. Could I simply make a backup copy of the database's data file, then have a c# console app that deletes it and copies over the original. Then I can have a windows schedule task to run the .exe every hour. It's simple and free... would this work? I'm using SQL Server 2008 R2 Web edition I understand that red gate is technically better because I can set it to analyze the db and only update the records that were altered, and the approach I have above is like a "sledge hammer".

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• how do i see if a big JSON object contains a value?

  - by Haroldo

  I'm using PHP to json encode a massive multi-dimensional array of events, so i get something like this: var ents = {"7":{"event_id":"7","nn":"The Whisky Drifters","nn_url":"the-whisky-drifters","venue":"The Grain Barge","date_num":"2010-06-11","date_txt":"Friday 11th June","gig_club":"1","sd":"A New Acoustic String Band...","ven_id":"44","art":0},"15":{"event_id":"15","nn":"Bass Kitchen","nn_url":"bass-kitchen","venue":"Timbuk2","date_num":"2010-06-11","date_txt":"Friday 11th June","gig_club":"2","sd":"Hexadecimal \/ DJ Derek \/ Id","ven_id":"21","art":1}, the first dimension is the id, see var ents = {"7":{ So its possible to get the ids without examining the nested objects... What's the fastest, most efficent way to check if my JSON contains an id?

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• Ruby (on Rails) && PHP - two great things that work great together???

  - by pedalpete

  I've done very little work with Ruby, and have an app I've written in PHP. I would like to add some functionality which is available in open sourced Ruby code. I could either try to translate the Ruby to PHP, or try mixing the two. Though I think the mixing part would be somewhat silly. I believe my options are to either mix ruby with php, or translate the ruby code into php. Anybody have any suggestions on this, or other ideas? I am not really interested in converting my entire app into Ruby just so I can get this feature (I saw Derek Sivers post about that which convinced me. http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/09/7%5Freasons%5Fi%5Fswitched%5Fback%5Fto%5Fp%5F1.html)

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• Best way to auto-restore a database every hour

  - by aron

  I have a demo site where anyone can login and test a management interface. Every hour I would like to flush all the data in the SQL 2008 Database and restore it from the original. Red Gate Software has some awesome tools for this, however they are beyond my budget right now. Could I simply make a backup copy of the database's data file, then have a c# console app that deletes it and copies over the original. Then I can have a windows schedule task to run the .exe every hour. It's simple and free... would this work? I'm using SQL Server 2008 R2 Web edition I understand that Red Gate Software is technically better because I can set it to analyze the db and only update the records that were altered, and the approach I have above is like a "sledge hammer".

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• Chicago SQL Saturday

  - by Johnm

  This past Saturday, April 17, 2010, I journeyed North to the great city of Chicago for some SQL Server fun, learning and fellowship. The Chicago edition of this grassroots phenomenon was the 31st scheduled SQL Saturday since the program's birth in late 2007. The Chicago SQL Saturday consisted of four tracks with eight sessions each and was a very energetic and fast paced day for the 300+/- SQL Server enthusiasts in attendance. The speaker line up included national notables such as Kevin Kline, Brent Ozar, and Brad McGehee. My hometown of Indianapolis was well represented in the speaker line up with Arie Jones, Aaron King and Derek Comingore. The day began with a very humorous keynote by Kevin Kline and Brent Ozar who emphasized the importance of community events such as SQL Saturday and the monthly user group meetings. They also brilliantly included the impact that getting involved in the SQL community through social media can have on your professional career. My approach to the day was to try to experience as much of the event as I could, so there were very few sessions that I attended for their full duration. I leaped from session to session like a bumble bee, gleaning bits of nectar from each session. Amid these leaps I took the opportunity to briefly chat with some of the in-the-queue speakers as well as other attendees that wondered the hallways. I especially enjoyed a great discussion with Devin Knight about his plans regarding the upcoming Jacksonville SQL Saturday as well as an interesting SQL interpretation of the Iron Chef, which I think would catch on like wild-fire. There were two sessions that stood out as exceptional. So much so that I could not pull myself away: Kevin Kline presented on "SQL Server Internals and Architecture". This session could have been classified as one that is intended for the beginner. Kevin even personally warned me of such as I entered the room. I am a believer in revisiting the basics regardless of the level of your mastery, so I entered into this session in that spirit. It was a very clear and precise presentation. Masterfully illustrated and demonstrated. Brad McGehee presented on "How and When to Use Indexed Views". This was a topic that I was recently exploring and was considering to for use in an integration project. Brad effectively communicated the complexity of this feature and what is involved to gain their full benefit. It was clear at the conclusion of this session that it was not the right feature for my specific needs. Overall, the event was a great success. The use of volunteers, from an attendee's perspective was masterful. The only recommendation that I would have for the next Chicago SQL Saturday would be to include more time in between sessions to permit some level of networking among the attendees, one-on-one questions for speakers and visits to the sponsor booths. Congratulations to Wendy Pastrick, Ted Krueger, and Aaron Lowe for their efforts and a very successful SQL Saturday!

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• Silverlight Cream for May 04, 2010 -- #855

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: John Papa, Adam Kinney, Mike Taulty, Kirupa, Gunnar Peipman, Mike Snow(-2-, -3-), Jesse Liberty, and Lee. Shoutout: Jeff Wilcox announced Silverlight Unit Test Framework: New version in the April 2010 Silverlight Toolkit From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight TV 23: MVP Q&A with WWW (Wildermuth, Wahlin and Ward) John Papa has Silverlight 23 up which is a panel discussion between Shawn Wildermuth, Dan Wahlin, Ward Bell and John... wow... what a crew! Design-time Resources in Expression Blend 4 RC Adam Kinney reports on the new feature of Expresseion Blend RC to load resources at design time. Adam also has a project available to demonstrate the concepts he's explaining. Silverlight and WCF RIA Services (1 - Overview) Mike Taulty is starting a series on WCF RIA Services. This first one is an overview and looks to be a good series as expected. Introduction to Sample Data - Page 1 Kirupa has a great 5-part post up about sample data in Expression Blend. Windows Phone 7 development: Using WebBrowser control Gunnar Peipman posted about using the web browser control in WP7 to display RSS data. Good stuff, and all the code too. Silverlight Tip of the Day #10 – Converting Client IP to Geographical Location Mike Snow's Tip #10 is about taking an IP address and getting a geographical location from it. Combine this with his Tip #9 that retrieves the IP address. Silverlight Tip of the Day #11 – Deploying Silverlight Applications with WCF web services. Mike Snow's Tip #11 is much bigger than most ... it's almost an end-to-end solution for creating and deploying a WCF service, including resolving problems. Silverlight Tip of the Day #12 – Getting an Images Source File Name Mike Snow also has tip #12 up, and it's a quick one on getting the original source file name for an image you've loaded. Screen Scraping – When All You Have Is A Hammer… Jesse Liberty posted his solution to a self-imposed problem and ended up writing a 'mini tutorial on using Silverlight for creating desk-top utilities' ... all with source. RIA services and combobox lookups Lee has a post up about RIA Services and setting up comboboxes for lookups. Lots of source in the post and full project download. Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Oracle Leader in Transportation Management

  - by John Murphy

  Oracle Named a Leader in the Transportation Management Systems Market by Leading Analyst Firm Redwood Shores, Calif. – October 15, 2012 News Facts Gartner, Inc. has placed Oracle Transportation Management in the Leaders Quadrant of its 2012 report, “Magic Quadrant for Transportation Management Systems (TMS).” (1) Gartner Magic Quadrants position vendors within a particular market segment based on their completeness of vision and ability to execute on that vision. According to the report, “Multiple subcomponents make up a comprehensive TMS across planning (for example, load consolidation, routing, mode selection and carrier selection) and execution (for example, tendering loads to carriers, shipment track and trace, and freight audit and payment).” Built on modern, flexible, Internet based architecture, Oracle Transportation Management is a global transportation and logistics operations system that allows companies to minimize cost, optimize service levels, support sustainability initiatives, and create flexible business process automation within their transportation and logistics networks. With a share of 26% of worldwide software revenue for 2011, Oracle is also number one in TMS vendor share according to Gartner’s report, “Market Trends: A Golden Opportunity in the Transportation Management System Market, 2012 – 2016.” (2) Supporting Quote “Shippers and logistics service providers face increasingly complex challenges as they try to reduce costs, secure capacity and improve overall freight efficiency,” said Derek Gittoes, vice president, logistics product strategy, Oracle. “We believe our high standing in both Gartner reports is a reflection of Oracle’s commitment to addressing these challenges by delivering the industry’s broadest and deepest transportation management platform. With a flexible and modern platform, we are able to support customers with both basic transportation needs, as well as those with highly complex logistics requirements.” Supporting Resources Magic Quadrant for Transportation Management Systems Market Trends: A Golden Opportunity in the Transportation Management System Market, 2012 – 2016 Oracle Transportation Management (1) Gartner, Inc., “Magic Quadrant for Transportation Management Systems,” by C. Dwight Klappich, August 23, 2012 (2) Gartner, Inc., “Market Trends: A Golden Opportunity in the Transportation Management System Market, 2012 – 2016,” by Chad Eschinger and C. Dwight Klappich, September 24, 2012. About Oracle Applications Over 65,000 customers worldwide rely on Oracle's complete, open and integrated enterprise applications to achieve superior results. Oracle provides a secure path for customers to benefit from the latest technology advances that improve the customer software experience and drive better business performance. Oracle Applications Unlimited is Oracle's commitment to customer choice through continuous investment and innovation in current applications offerings. Oracle's next-generation Fusion Applications build upon that commitment, and are designed to work with and evolve Oracle's Applications Unlimited offerings. Oracle's lifetime support policy helps ensure customers will continue to have a choice in upgrade paths, based on their enterprise needs. For more information on the latest Oracle Applications releases go towww.oracle.com/applications About Oracle Oracle engineers hardware and software to work together in the cloud and in your data center. For more information about Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL), visit www.oracle.com. Trademarks Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. ###   Karen [email protected] Simon JonesBlanc & [email protected]

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• Common SOA Problems by C2B2

  - by JuergenKress

  SOA stands for Service Oriented Architecture and has only really come together as a concrete approach in the last 15 years or so, although the concepts involved have been around for longer. Oracle SOA Suite is based around the Service Component Architecture (SCA) devised by the Open SOA collaboration of companies including Oracle and IBM. SCA, as used in SOA suite, is designed as a way to crystallise the concepts of SOA into a standard which ensures that SOA principles like the separation of application and business logic are maintained. Orchestration or Integration? A common thing to see with many people who are beginning to either build a new SOA based infrastructure, or move an old system to be service oriented, is confusion in the purpose of SOA technologies like BPEL and enterprise service buses. For a lot of problems, orchestration tools like BPEL or integration tools like an ESB will both do the job and achieve the right objectives; however it’s important to remember that, although a hammer can be used to drive a screw into wood, that doesn’t mean it’s the best way to do it. Service Integration is the act of connecting components together at a low level, which usually results in a single external endpoint for you to expose to your customers or other teams within your organisation – a simple product ordering system, for example, might integrate a stock checking service and a payment processing service. Process Orchestration, however, is generally a higher level approach whereby the (often externally exposed) service endpoints are brought together to track an end-to-end business process. This might include the earlier example of a product ordering service and couple it with a business rules service and human task to handle edge-cases. A good (but not exhaustive) rule-of-thumb is that integrations performed by an ESB will usually be real-time, whereas process orchestration in a SOA composite might comprise processes which take a certain amount of time to complete, or have to wait pending manual intervention. BPEL vs BPMN For some, with pre-existing SOA or business process projects, this decision is effectively already made. For those embarking on new projects it’s certainly an important consideration for those using Oracle SOA software since, due to the components included in SOA Suite and BPM Suite, the choice of which to buy is determined by what they offer. Oracle SOA suite has no BPMN engine, whereas BPM suite has both a BPMN and a BPEL engine. SOA suite has the ESB component “Mediator”, whereas BPM suite has none. Decisions must be made, therefore, on whether just one or both process modelling languages are to be used. The wrong decision could be costly further down the line. Design for performance: Read the complete article here. SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki Technorati Tags: C2B2,SOA best practice,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• Common SOA Problems by C2B2

  - by JuergenKress

  SOA stands for Service Oriented Architecture and has only really come together as a concrete approach in the last 15 years or so, although the concepts involved have been around for longer. Oracle SOA Suite is based around the Service Component Architecture (SCA) devised by the Open SOA collaboration of companies including Oracle and IBM. SCA, as used in SOA suite, is designed as a way to crystallise the concepts of SOA into a standard which ensures that SOA principles like the separation of application and business logic are maintained. Orchestration or Integration? A common thing to see with many people who are beginning to either build a new SOA based infrastructure, or move an old system to be service oriented, is confusion in the purpose of SOA technologies like BPEL and enterprise service buses. For a lot of problems, orchestration tools like BPEL or integration tools like an ESB will both do the job and achieve the right objectives; however it’s important to remember that, although a hammer can be used to drive a screw into wood, that doesn’t mean it’s the best way to do it. Service Integration is the act of connecting components together at a low level, which usually results in a single external endpoint for you to expose to your customers or other teams within your organisation – a simple product ordering system, for example, might integrate a stock checking service and a payment processing service. Process Orchestration, however, is generally a higher level approach whereby the (often externally exposed) service endpoints are brought together to track an end-to-end business process. This might include the earlier example of a product ordering service and couple it with a business rules service and human task to handle edge-cases. A good (but not exhaustive) rule-of-thumb is that integrations performed by an ESB will usually be real-time, whereas process orchestration in a SOA composite might comprise processes which take a certain amount of time to complete, or have to wait pending manual intervention. BPEL vs BPMN For some, with pre-existing SOA or business process projects, this decision is effectively already made. For those embarking on new projects it’s certainly an important consideration for those using Oracle SOA software since, due to the components included in SOA Suite and BPM Suite, the choice of which to buy is determined by what they offer. Oracle SOA suite has no BPMN engine, whereas BPM suite has both a BPMN and a BPEL engine. SOA suite has the ESB component “Mediator”, whereas BPM suite has none. Decisions must be made, therefore, on whether just one or both process modelling languages are to be used. The wrong decision could be costly further down the line. Design for performance: Read the complete article here. SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki Technorati Tags: C2B2,SOA best practice,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• vCenter 5.1 SSO Configuration option not available in Web Client?

  - by goober

  Problem I just finished separately installing vCenter Server 5.1. I installed the components separately but on the same machine using a local SQL 2008 R2 DB (not SQL express). Everything appears to be working correctly with the exception of SSO. It doesn't find the AD server. This is to be expected (see below) but I don't know how to fix it. Potential Leads / Steps taken During the install of SSO, I was logged on as a local administrator (waiting on central IT dept to create a service account). As a result, I received a message saying that SSO wouldn't be able to automatically locate the AD. (fair eonugh) After I read up on it a little bit, I believed I could go into the SSO Configuration option in the Web client, like so: However, what I actually see is: I also notice that the "SSO Users and Groups" entry is not there. Betting that has something to do with it as well. Question How can I get the "Configure" Option to show up for SSO? Overall goal: How can I manually enter the AD server in this scenario while logged in as a local administrator? References VMWare vCenter 5.1 Installation: Part 9 (Optional SSO Configuration) [Derek Seaman's Blog] (used the image of correct configuration menu)

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• OS X, Chrome, and Spaces annoyance

  - by David Hollman

  Here's my problem: I use Google Chrome as my web browser on MacOS X Snow Leopard. I am a keyboard shortcut addict, and I use QuickSilver to create keyboard shortcuts for anything I can. One of the most common things that I do is to open a new web browser window. But I use Spaces frequently to partition my tasks that I am currently working on, and when I open a web browser or web page with a QuickSilver trigger, spaces switches to the last space that I used Chrome on and opens a new tab, which often distracts me for hours because it brings me to a different space and thus a different task. I can fix this by right-clicking on the Google Chrome icon and clicking the "New Window" option, which opens a new window on the current space. I have tried to compose an AppleScript to do something like this, with no success. It has become a serious problem. Back when I used Firefox, I solved the problem by changing a preference item that says "Always open pop-up links in a new window" or something like that, which was kind of a sledge hammer approach, but it worked. I can always go back to Firefox, but I thought I'd ask my question here first. Anyone with any ideas?

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• VirtualBox management interface unreliability

  - by Arlen Cuss

  I'm using VirtualBox 3.2.8_OSE with 20 VMs running, and everything's going fine. I find that if I hammer the VBoxManage interface, all sorts of interesting things happen, usually necessitating either a restart of the VM in question, or of all VMs. For instance, if I use VBoxManage guestcontrol execute to run processes, after a few hours of using it maybe once or twice a minute on any given VM, it'll mysteriously start reporting VERR_NOT_IMPLEMENTED and refusing to do anything—sometimes trying to restart /usr/sbin/VBoxService on the VM itself will get it back in working order, but often it won't, and in the meantime, no data can be collected using VBoxManage. Such data includes the VM's IP, so if I hadn't recorded it earlier, I'm usually in trouble and have no option but to portscan the network for it, or kill the VM's process on the host manually and restart it. This one I haven't narrowed down yet, but it seems that even using VBoxManage guestproperty get (to retrieve a machine's IP) frequently and rapidly is enough to cause all VMs' management interfaces to die. The processes are still running fine, but VBoxManage reports them all as "powered off". In the meantime, another process somewhere in the system seems to have decided that their being powered off means they need to be powered on again, and suddenly I have 2x the number of VBoxHeadless processes running than I used to. Has anyone else seen behaviour like this? Is there any workaround? This is a serious impediment to my work, as I've had to resort to a lot of (hacky) caching of data and rate-limiting how often I call VBoxManage, just in case I accidentally bring 20 VMs to their knees.

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• Computer making strange sound when turned on, ever since power outage

  - by Dot NET

  Recently we experienced a power outage, and the PC was off. However, once the power came back, I switched on the PC and heard a strange noise - almost as if the hard disk or fans were struggling to work. I can't really describe the sound, but it's a laboured, loud sound almost like a jack-hammer. This has been persisting ever since the power outage, however the noise stops after around 10 minutes or so, and doesn't start again until the computer is turned off and on again. At first I thought it had something to do with the HDD, but all my files are intact, chkdsk did not report any issues and performance is 100% unchanged, even in games (so the gfx card is fine, and so is the HDD most likely). My PC setup basically has around 3 cooling fans, but I'm not sure if it's one of these either as the noise actually stops after 10 minutes or so, and if I leave the PC on for 4 hours (for example) the noise never starts again. It's there solely when turning on the PC. I haven't got a UPS, and it's important to note that the computer was not on when the power went out - it was merely plugged in. I then promptly unplugged the PC once the power was out, and only plugged it in again when the power came back. Could it be the power supply? Unfortunately I can't open my tower as I would void the warranty. Are there any tests which I could carry out without voiding the warranty?

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• How can I get multiple video cards to work on linux?

  - by user17943

  I installed fedora 12. I have 2 ATI cards that I used to use on windows to run 4 monitors. A recurring problem has been to get them detected in linux. Only my secondary card is picked up linux. When I manage the displays it detects the 2 monitors connected that card. What are the specific steps I should take to get the second card detected? Supposedly there is a tool system-config-xfree. I don't have it, yum can't find it. Also I heard it has something to do with editing some xorg.conf file or something to that effect. I have absolutely no idea how to find the "bus id" of my card, or lookup the horizontal refresh rates, etc.. I would probably have no problem following the documentation & editing the file if I knew a good way to find these values. Someone also suggested installing linux twice and saving the xorg.conf it generates each time (with different card each time) and then merging the two by hand. That is like killing a fly with a hammer though, when I do this again and again in the future It'd be nice to not have to take twice as long. Thanks

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• Query Logging in Analysis Services

  - by MikeD

  On a project I work on, we capture the queries that get executed on our Analysis Services instance (SQL Server 2008 R2) and use the table for helping us to build aggregations and also we aggregate the query log daily into a data warehouse of operational data so we can track usage of our Analysis databases by users over time. We've learned a couple of helpful things about this logging that I'd like to share here.First off, the query log table automatically gets cleaned out by SSAS under a few conditions - schema changes to the analysis database and even regular data and aggregation processing can delete rows in the table. We like to keep these logs longer than that, so we have a trigger on the table that copies all rows into another table with the same structure:Here is our trigger code:CREATE TRIGGER [dbo].[SaveQueryLog] on [dbo].[OlapQueryLog] AFTER INSERT AS       INSERT INTO dbo.[OlapQueryLog_History] (MSOLAP_Database, MSOLAP_ObjectPath, MSOLAP_User, Dataset, StartTime, Duration)      SELECT MSOLAP_Database, MSOLAP_ObjectPath, MSOLAP_User, Dataset, StartTime, Duration FROM inserted Second, the query logging process is "best effort" - if SSAS cannot connect to the database listed in the QueryLogConnectionString in the Analysis Server properties, it just stops logging - it doesn't generate any errors to the client at all, which is a good thing. Once it stops logging, it doesn't retry later - an hour, a day, a week, or even a month later, so long as the service doesn't restart.That has burned us a couple of times, when we have made changes to the service account that is used for SSAS, and that account doesn't have access to the database we want to log to. The last time this happened, we noticed a while later that no logging was taking place, and I determined that the service account didn't have sufficient permissions, so I made the necessary changes to give that service account access to the logging database. I first tried just the db_datawriter role and that wasn't enough, so I granted the service account membership in the db_owner role. Yes, that's a much bigger set of permissions, but I didn't want to search out the specific permissions at the time. Once I determined that the service account had the appropriate permissions, I wanted to get query logging restarted from SSAS, and I wondered how to do that? Having just used a larger hammer than necessary with the db_owner role membership, I considered just restarting SSAS to get it logging again. However, this was a production server, and it was in the middle of business hours, and there were active users connecting to that SSAS instance, so I thought better of it.As I considered the options, I remembered that the first time I set up query logging, by putting in a valid connection string to the QueryLogConnectionString server property, logging started immediately after I saved the properties. I wondered if I could make some other change to the connection string so that the query logging would start again without restarting the service. I went into the connection string dialog, went to the All page, and looked at the properties I could change that wouldn't affect the actual connection. Aha! The Application Name property would do just nicely - I set it to "SSAS Query Logging" (it was previously blank) and saved the changes to the server properties. And the query logging started up right away. If I need to get this running again in the future, I could just make a small change in the Application Name property again, save it, and even change it back again if I wanted to.The other nice side effect of setting the Application Name property is that now I can see (and possibly filter for or filter out) the SQL activity in that database that is related to the query logging process in Profiler:  To sum up:The SSAS Query Logging process will automatically delete rows from the QueryLog table, so if you want to keep them longer, put a trigger on the table to copy the rows to another tableThe SSAS service account requires more than db_datawriter role membership (and probably less than db_owner) in the database specified in the QueryLogConnectionString server property to successfully insert log rows to the QueryLog  table.Query logging will stop quietly whenever it encounters an error. Make a change to the QueryLogConnectionString server property (such as the Application Name attribute) to get query logging to restart and you won't have to restart the service.

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• Simple task framework - building software from reusable pieces

  - by RuslanD

  I'm writing a web service with several APIs, and they will be sharing some of the implementation code. In order not to copy-paste, I would like to ideally implement each API call as a series of tasks, which are executed in a sequence determined by the business logic. One obvious question is whether that's the best strategy for code reuse, or whether I can look at it in a different way. But assuming I want to go with tasks, several issues arise: What's a good task interface to use? How do I pass data computed in one task to another task in the sequence that might need it? In the past, I've worked with task interfaces like: interface Task<T, U> { U execute(T input); } Then I also had sort of a "task context" object which had getters and setters for any kind of data my tasks needed to produce or consume, and it gets passed to all tasks. I'm aware that this suffers from a host of problems. So I wanted to figure out a better way to implement it this time around. My current idea is to have a TaskContext object which is a type-safe heterogeneous container (as described in Effective Java). Each task can ask for an item from this container (task input), or add an item to the container (task output). That way, tasks don't need to know about each other directly, and I don't have to write a class with dozens of methods for each data item. There are, however, several drawbacks: Each item in this TaskContext container should be a complex type that wraps around the actual item data. If task A uses a String for some purpose, and task B uses a String for something entirely different, then just storing a mapping between String.class and some object doesn't work for both tasks. The other reason is that I can't use that kind of container for generic collections directly, so they need to be wrapped in another object. This means that, based on how many tasks I define, I would need to also define a number of classes for the task items that may be consumed or produced, which may lead to code bloat and duplication. For instance, if a task takes some Long value as input and produces another Long value as output, I would have to have two classes that simply wrap around a Long, which IMO can spiral out of control pretty quickly as the codebase evolves. I briefly looked at workflow engine libraries, but they kind of seem like a heavy hammer for this particular nail. How would you go about writing a simple task framework with the following requirements: Tasks should be as self-contained as possible, so they can be composed in different ways to create different workflows. That being said, some tasks may perform expensive computations that are prerequisites for other tasks. We want to have a way of storing the results of intermediate computations done by tasks so that other tasks can use those results for free. The task framework should be light, i.e. growing the code doesn't involve introducing many new types just to plug into the framework.

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• Script to UPDATE STATISTICS with time window

  - by Bill Graziano

  I recently spent some time troubleshooting odd query plans and came to the conclusion that we needed better statistics.  We’ve been running sp_updatestats but apparently it wasn’t sampling enough of the table to get us what we needed.  I have a pretty limited window at night where I can hammer the disks while this runs.  The script below just calls UPDATE STATITICS on all tables that “need” updating.  It defines need as any table whose statistics are older than the number of days you specify (30 by default).  It also has a throttle so it breaks out of the loop after a set amount of time (60 minutes).  That means it won’t start processing a new table after this time but it might take longer than this to finish what it’s doing.  It always processes the oldest statistics first so it will eventually get to all of them.  It defaults to sample 25% of the table.  I’m not sure that’s a good default but it works for now.  I’ve tested this in SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008.  I liked the way Michelle parameterized her re-index script and I took the same approach. CREATE PROCEDURE dbo.UpdateStatistics ( @timeLimit smallint = 60 ,@debug bit = 0 ,@executeSQL bit = 1 ,@samplePercent tinyint = 25 ,@printSQL bit = 1 ,@minDays tinyint = 30 )AS/******************************************************************* Copyright Bill Graziano 2010*******************************************************************/SET NOCOUNT ON;PRINT '[ ' + CAST(GETDATE() AS VARCHAR(100)) + ' ] ' + 'Launching...'IF OBJECT_ID('tempdb..#status') IS NOT NULL DROP TABLE #status;CREATE TABLE #status( databaseID INT , databaseName NVARCHAR(128) , objectID INT , page_count INT , schemaName NVARCHAR(128) Null , objectName NVARCHAR(128) Null , lastUpdateDate DATETIME , scanDate DATETIME CONSTRAINT PK_status_tmp PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED(databaseID, objectID));DECLARE @SQL NVARCHAR(MAX);DECLARE @dbName nvarchar(128);DECLARE @databaseID INT;DECLARE @objectID INT;DECLARE @schemaName NVARCHAR(128);DECLARE @objectName NVARCHAR(128);DECLARE @lastUpdateDate DATETIME;DECLARE @startTime DATETIME;SELECT @startTime = GETDATE();DECLARE cDB CURSORREAD_ONLYFOR select [name] from master.sys.databases where database_id > 4OPEN cDBFETCH NEXT FROM cDB INTO @dbNameWHILE (@@fetch_status <> -1)BEGIN IF (@@fetch_status <> -2) BEGIN SELECT @SQL = ' use ' + QUOTENAME(@dbName) + ' select DB_ID() as databaseID , DB_NAME() as databaseName ,t.object_id ,sum(used_page_count) as page_count ,s.[name] as schemaName ,t.[name] AS objectName , COALESCE(d.stats_date, ''1900-01-01'') , GETDATE() as scanDate from sys.dm_db_partition_stats ps join sys.tables t on t.object_id = ps.object_id join sys.schemas s on s.schema_id = t.schema_id join ( SELECT object_id, MIN(stats_date) as stats_date FROM ( select object_id, stats_date(object_id, stats_id) as stats_date from sys.stats) as d GROUP BY object_id ) as d ON d.object_id = t.object_id where ps.row_count > 0 group by s.[name], t.[name], t.object_id, COALESCE(d.stats_date, ''1900-01-01'') ' SET ANSI_WARNINGS OFF; Insert #status EXEC ( @SQL); SET ANSI_WARNINGS ON; END FETCH NEXT FROM cDB INTO @dbNameENDCLOSE cDBDEALLOCATE cDBDECLARE cStats CURSORREAD_ONLYFOR SELECT databaseID , databaseName , objectID , schemaName , objectName , lastUpdateDate FROM #status WHERE DATEDIFF(dd, lastUpdateDate, GETDATE()) >= @minDays ORDER BY lastUpdateDate ASC, page_count desc, [objectName] ASC OPEN cStatsFETCH NEXT FROM cStats INTO @databaseID, @dbName, @objectID, @schemaName, @objectName, @lastUpdateDateWHILE (@@fetch_status <> -1)BEGIN IF (@@fetch_status <> -2) BEGIN IF DATEDIFF(mi, @startTime, GETDATE()) > @timeLimit BEGIN PRINT '[ ' + CAST(GETDATE() AS VARCHAR(100)) + ' ] ' + '*** Time Limit Reached ***'; GOTO __DONE; END SELECT @SQL = 'UPDATE STATISTICS ' + QUOTENAME(@dBName) + '.' + QUOTENAME(@schemaName) + '.' + QUOTENAME(@ObjectName) + ' WITH SAMPLE ' + CAST(@samplePercent AS NVARCHAR(100)) + ' PERCENT;'; IF @printSQL = 1 PRINT '[ ' + CAST(GETDATE() AS VARCHAR(100)) + ' ] ' + @SQL + ' (Last Updated: ' + CAST(@lastUpdateDate AS VARCHAR(100)) + ')' IF @executeSQL = 1 BEGIN EXEC (@SQL); END END FETCH NEXT FROM cStats INTO @databaseID, @dbName, @objectID, @schemaName, @objectName, @lastUpdateDateEND__DONE:CLOSE cStatsDEALLOCATE cStatsPRINT '[ ' + CAST(GETDATE() AS VARCHAR(100)) + ' ] ' + 'Completed.'GO

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• Hell and Diplomacy: Notes on Software Integration

  - by ericajanine

  Well, I'm getting cabin fever and short-timer's ADD all at the same time. I haven't been anywhere outside of my greater city area in FOREVER and I'm only days away from my vacation. I have brainlock because the last few days have been non-stop diffusing amazingly hostile conversations. I think I'll write about that. So then, I "do" software. At the end of the day, software is pretty straightforward. Software is that thing we love and try to make do things not currently in play, in existence. If a process around getting software to do something is broken (like most actually are), then we should acknowledge it and move on. We are professional. We are helpful beyond the normal call of duty. We live and breathe making the lives better for those apps being active in the world. But above all--the shocker: We are SERVICE. In a service frame of mind, all perspectives shift to what is best overall for system stabilization vs. what must be in production to meet business objectives. It doesn't matter how much you like or dislike the creator of said software. It doesn't matter what time you went to bed last night or if your mate appreciates your Death March attitude. Getting a product in and when is an age-old dilemma in a software environment where more than, say, 3 people are involved. We know this. Taking a servant's perspective eliminates the drama surrounding what a group of half-baked developers forgot to tell each other in the 11th hour about their trampling changes before check-in. We, my counterparts in society, get paid to deal with that drama. I get paid to diffuse that drama and make everything integrate as smoothly as possible. At the end of the day, attacking someone over a minor detail not only makes things worse, it's against the whole point of our real existence. Being in support or software integration means you are to keep your eyes on the end game. That end game? It's making a solution work for all stakeholders, not just you or your immediate superior. Development and technology groups exist because business groups need them to exist and solve their issues. The end game? Doing what is best for those business groups ultimately. Period. Note: That does not mean you let your business users solely dictate when and if something gets changed in an environment you ultimately own. That's just crazy. Software and its environments are legitimately owned by those who manage it directly, no matter how important a business group believes it is to the existence of mankind. So, you both negotiate the terms of changing that environment and only do so upon that negotiation. Diplomacy is in order. So, to finish my thoughts: If you have no ability to keep your mouth shut in a situation where a business or development group truly need your help to make something work even beyond a deadline, find another profession. Beating up someone verbally because they screw up means a service attitude is not at the forefront of your motivation for doing what is ultimately their work and their product. Software, especially integration, requires a strong will and a soft touch to keep it on track. Not a hammer covered in broken glass.

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• Experimenting with other search engines

  - by Bill Graziano

  I’ve been a Google user so long I can hardly remember what I used before it.  Alta Vista maybe?  Or Yahoo.  I’ve tried Bing off and on but it never really stuck.  I probably care more about search engines than your average user because of their impact on SQLTeam.com.  Lately I’ve been trying two other search engines and actually switched to one of them. I’ve played with Blekko a little in the past.  They have some interesting ways to “slice up” your results.  For example, searching on “SQL Server /blogs /date” should just search all the recently updated blogs.  Those two extra words on the search are slashtags.  The full list of slashtags runs from /forums to just see forums to /twitter to /nikon to /reviews and on and on and on.  I laughed when I saw they had slashtags for both liberal and conservative.  I’d hate to find any search results that don’t match my existing worldview :)  You can also create your own slashtags.  I created a mini-search engine for the SQL Server blogs that I read.  You can search it for “backup” at http://blekko.com/ws/backup+/billgraziano/sql-sites.  I uploaded my OPML and it limited the search to just those sites.  It seems like the site is focusing more on curating results and less on algorithms.  This is an interesting site for those power searchers.  There are some great ways to curate results using slashtags.  For 99% of my searches (type words, click on one of the first few links) slashtags are overkill.  They do have some good information on page and site ranking though so I’ll probably send some time looking through that. Blekko recently got my attention again when they said they were banning “content farms” - and that includes eHow and experts-exchange.  I always feel used when I click on a link to EE and find myself scrolling all the way to the bottom to see if I can find the answer.  Sometimes it’s there but sometimes it tells me I need to pay first.  I’ve longed for a way to always exclude certain sites.  Blekko might be taking a hammer to a problem that needs a scalpel but it’s an interesting choice.  (And some of the comments in the TechCrunch link are interesting if you’re a search nerd.) DuckDuckGo is an odd name for a search engine.  Their big hook is that they don’t have search history.  If you wade through your Google account you can probably find the page where it stores your search history.  It was pretty enlightening to find mine.  It was easy to disable but that got me started looking at other search engines.  DDG (or DukGo) just feels like Google used to in the old days.  The results are good enough and the site is fast. Searches will return a snippet from WikiPedia or other site (like StackOverflow) at the top.  I think the idea is to answer the question without needing to visit the site.  I’m not sure that’s a good thing for SQLTeam.com. The only thing I really miss is image search.  You can add a “!i” at the end of any search and it will search the images on Bing.  Bing doesn’t have a great image search but it works for most of what I need.  They call these exclamation marks “!bangs” and they are kinda, sorta like slashtags.  I’ve been using DuckDuckGo now for a few weeks and I’m pretty happy with it.  I use Chrome for my browser and it was an easy switch to make.  It’s still a little surprising seeing my search results come up in a different format.  I’m starting to get used to it though.

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• Approach for packing 2D shapes while minimizing total enclosing area

  - by Dennis

  Not sure on my tags for this question, but in short .... I need to solve a problem of packing industrial parts into crates while minimizing total containing area. These parts are motors, or pumps, or custom-made components, and they have quite unusual shapes. For some, it may be possible to assume that a part === rectangular cuboid, but some are not so simple, i.e. they assume a shape more of that of a hammer or letter T. With those, (assuming 2D shape), by alternating direction of top & bottom, one can pack more objects into the same space, than if all tops were in the same direction. Crude example below with letter "T"-shaped parts: ***** xxxxx ***** x ***** *** ooo * x vs * x vs * x vs * x o * x * xxxxx * x * x o xxxxx xxx Right now we are solving the problem by something like this: using CAD software, make actual models of how things fit in crate boxes make estimates of actual crate dimensions & write them into Excel file (1) is crazy amount of work and as the result we have just a limited amount of possible entries in (2), the Excel file. The good things is that programming this is relatively easy. Given a combination of products to go into crates, we do a lookup, and if entry exists in the Excel (or Database), we bring it out. If it doesn't, we say "sorry, no data!". I don't necessarily want to go full force on making up some crazy algorithm that given geometrical part description can align, rotate, and figure out best part packing into a crate, given its shape, but maybe I do.. Question Well, here is my question: assuming that I can represent my parts as 2D (to be determined how), and that some parts look like letter T, and some parts look like rectangles, which algorithm can I use to give me a good estimate on the dimensions of the encompassing area, while ensuring that the parts are packed in a minimal possible area, to minimize crating/shipping costs? Are there approximation algorithms? Seeing how this can get complex, is there an existing library I could use? My thought / Approach My naive approach would be to define a way to describe position of parts, and place the first part, compute total enclosing area & dimensions. Then place 2nd part in 0 degree orientation, repeat, place it at 180 degree orientation, repeat (for my case I don't think 90 degree rotations will be meaningful due to long lengths of parts). Proceed using brute force "tacking on" other parts to the enclosing area until all parts are processed. I may have to shift some parts a tad (see 3rd pictorial example above with letters T). This adds a layer of 2D complexity rather than 1D. I am not sure how to approach this. One idea I have is genetic algorithms, but I think those will take up too much processing power and time. I will need to look out for shape collisions, as well as adding extra padding space, since we are talking about real parts with irregularities rather than perfect imaginary blocks. I'm afraid this can get geometrically messy fairly fast, and I'd rather keep things simple, if I can. But what if the best (practical) solution is to pack things into different crate boxes rather than just one? This can get a bit more tricky. There is human element involved as well, i.e. like parts can go into same box and are thus a constraint to be considered. Some parts that are not the same are sometimes grouped together for shipping and can be considered as a common grouped item. Sometimes customers want things shipped their way, which adds human element to constraints. so there will have to be some customization.

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• How can I copy a SQL record which has related records in other tables to the same database?

  - by DerekVS

  Hi. I created a function in C# which allows me to copy a record and its related children to a new record and new related children in the same database. (This is for an application that allows the use of previous work as a template for new work.) Anyway, it works great... Here's a description of how it accomplishes the copy: It populates a two-column memory-based look-up table with the current primary key of each record. Next, as it individually creates each new copy record, it updates the look-up table with the Identity PK of the new record [retrieved from SCOPE_IDENTITY()]. Now, when it copies over any related children, it can look up the new parent PK to set the FK on the new record. In testing, it only took a minute to copy a relational structure on a local instance of SQL Server 2005 Express Edition. Unfortunately it is proving to be horribly slow in production! My users are dealing with 60,000+ records per parent record over the LAN to our SQL Server! While my copy function still works, each of those records represents an individual SQL UPDATE command and it loads the SQL Server at about 17% CPU from its normal 2% idle. I just finished testing a 50,000 record copy and it took almost 20 minutes! Is there a way to duplicate this functionality in SQL queries or stored procecures to make the SQL server do all of the copy work instead of blasting it over the LAN from each client? (We're running Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition.) Thanks! -Derek

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• Improving long-polling Ajax performance

  - by Bears will eat you

  I'm writing a webapp (Firefox-compatible only) which uses long polling (via jQuery's ajax abilities) to send more-or-less constant updates from the server to the client. I'm concerned about the effects of leaving this running for long periods of time, say, all day or overnight. The basic code skeleton is this: function processResults(xml) { // do stuff with the xml from the server } function fetch() { setTimeout(function () { $.ajax({ type: 'GET', url: 'foo/bar/baz', dataType: 'xml', success: function (xml) { processResults(xml); fetch(); }, error: function (xhr, type, exception) { if (xhr.status === 0) { console.log('XMLHttpRequest cancelled'); } else { console.debug(xhr); fetch(); } } }); }, 500); } (The half-second "sleep" is so that the client doesn't hammer the server if the updates are coming back to the client quickly - which they usually are.) After leaving this running overnight, it tends to make Firefox crawl. I'd been thinking that this could be partially caused by a large stack depth since I've basically written an infinitely recursive function. However, if I use Firebug and throw a breakpoint into fetch, it looks like this is not the case. The stack that Firebug shows me is only about 4 or 5 frames deep, even after an hour. One of the solutions I'm considering is changing my recursive function to an iterative one, but I can't figure out how I would insert the delay in between Ajax requests without spinning. I've looked at the JS 1.7 "yield" keyword but I can't quite wrap my head around it, to figure out if it's what I need here. Is the best solution just to do a hard refresh on the page periodically, say, once every hour? Is there a better/leaner long-polling design pattern that won't put a hurt on the browser even after running for 8 or 12 hours? Or should I just skip the long polling altogether and use a different "constant update" pattern since I usually know how frequently the server will have a response for me?

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• Anomalous results getting color components of some UIColors

  - by hkatz

  I'm trying to extract the rgb components of a UIColor in order to hand-build the pixels in a CGBitmapContext. The following sample code works fine for most of the UIColor constants but, confusingly, not all. To wit: CGColorRef color = [[UIColor yellowColor] CGColor]; const float* rgba = CGColorGetComponents(color); float r = rgba[0]; float g = rgba[1]; float b = rgba[2]; float a = rgba[3]; NSLog( @"r=%f g=%f b=%f a=%f", r, g, b, a); The results for [UIColor yellowColor] above are r=1.000000 g=1.000000 b=0.000000 a=1.000000, as expected. [UIColor redColor] gives r=1.000000 g=0.000000 b=0.000000 a=1.000000, again as expected. Similarly for blueColor and greenColor. However, the results for [UIColor blackColor] and [UIColor whiteColor] seem completely anomalous, and I don't know what I'm doing wrong (if indeed I am). To wit, [UIColor blackColor] gives r=0.000000 g=1.000000 b=0.000000 a=0.000000, which is a tranparent green, and [UIColor whiteColor] gives r=1.000000 g=1.000000 b=0.000000 a=0.000000, which is a transparent yellow. I'd appreciate it if somebody could either: (1) explain what I'm doing wrong (2) replicate my anomalous results and tell me it's not me, or (3) hit me over the head with a big hammer so it stops hurting so much. Howard

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• Silverlight databinding error

  - by Petezah

  I found an example online that explains how to perform databinding to a ListBox control using LINQ in WPF. The example works fine but when I replicate the same code in Silverlight it doesn't work. Is there a fundamental difference between Silverlight and WPF that I'm not aware of? Here is an Example of the XAML: <ListBox x:Name="listBox1"> <ListBox.ItemTemplate> <DataTemplate> <StackPanel> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Name}" FontSize="18"/> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Role}" /> </StackPanel> </DataTemplate> </ListBox.ItemTemplate> </ListBox> Here is an example of my code behind: private void UserControl_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { string[] names = new string[] { "Captain Avatar", "Derek Wildstar", "Queen Starsha" }; string[] roles = new string[] { "Hero", "Captain", "Queen of Iscandar" }; listBox1.ItemSource = from n in names from r in roles select new { Name = n, Role = r} }

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• Global.asax parser errors when deploying MVC 1 application to remote server.

  - by mannish

  So we're having some issues deploying an ASP.NET MVC app to a client site. Basically when we try to test the app from localhost, we get the dreaded Global.asax parser error indicating it could not load the application global. Research indicates there are basically 4 possible reasons for this exception we're seeing: The solution hasn't been built. This clearly isn't the case since we can deploy it here and it runs fine on any machine we deploy to AND we had to build and publish the darn thing to deploy it anyway. The Global.asax namespace inheritance does not match the application global code file. Again we double checked this and since it runs just fine here that can't be the issue. Miscellaneous non-descript IIS/VS.NET mischief. Basically something get's wonky in IIS or VS.NET and the web server won't behave correctly for this application. We've done cleans and rebuilds, we've deleted virtual dir and recreated, and performed all of the IIS munging that we've found elsewhere online. Various combinations of IIS bounces, server reboots, virtual dir/application recreation, etc. Code level permissions issue. We've verified full trust in machine/web config in the framework directory, we've set .NET trust to full in IIS, we've granted Everyone full control on the directories just to hit it with the security hammer, etc. etc. The pertinent detials: Windows Server 2008 x64 IIS 7, 32 bit compatible app pool (app was written on 32 bit OS compiled for any cpu) App pool identity set to NetworkService Microsoft ASP.NET MVC 1.0 XCopy deployment We deployed another read-only app just fine. The significant difference in this app is the use of NHibernate and Log4Net which require full trust. Additionally, the actual project name of the web project differs from the default namespace however the Inherits namespace in Global.asax and the Global.asax.cs files match so this shouldn't be an issue. Anybody have any bright ideas? We're officially down to just the dim ones.

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