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• The Interaction between Three-Tier Client/Server Model and Three-Tier Application Architecture Model

  The three-tier client/server model is a network architectural approach currently used in modern networking. This approach divides a network in to three distinct components. Three-Tier Client/Server Model Components Client Component Server Component Database Component The Client Component of the network typically represents any device on the network. A basic example of this would be computer or another network/web enabled devices that are connected to a network. Network clients request resources on the network, and are usually equipped with a user interface for the presentation of the data returned from the Server Component. This process is done through the use of various software clients, and example of this can be seen through the use of a web browser client. The web browser request information from the Server Component located on the network and then renders the results for the user to process. The Server Components of the network return data based on specific client request back to the requesting client.  Server Components also inherit the attributes of a Client Component in that they are a device on the network and that they can also request information from other Server Components. However what differentiates a Client Component from a Server Component is that a Server Component response to requests from devices on the network. An example of a Server Component can be seen in a web server. A web server listens for new requests and then interprets the request, processes the web pages, and then returns the processed data back to the web browser client so that it may render the data for the user to interpret. The Database Component of the network returns unprocessed data from databases or other resources. This component also inherits attributes from the Server Component in that it is a device on a network, it can request information from other server components and database components, and it also listens for new requests so that it can return data when needed. The three-tier client/server model is very similar to the three-tier application architecture model, and in fact the layers can be mapped to one another. Three-Tier Application Architecture Model Presentation Layer/Logic Business Layer/Logic Data Layer/Logic The Presentation Layer including its underlying logic is very similar to the Client Component of the three-tiered model. The Presentation Layer focuses on interpreting the data returned by the Business Layer as well as presents the data back to the user.  Both the Presentation Layer and the Client Component focus primarily on the user and their experience. This allows for segments of the Business Layer to be distributable and interchangeable because the Presentation Layer is not directly integrated in with Business Layer. The Presentation Layer does not care where the data comes from as long as it is in the proper format. This allows for the Presentation Layer and Business Layer to be stored on one or more different servers so that it can provide a higher availability to clients requesting data. A good example of this is a web site that uses load balancing. When a web site decides to take on the task of load balancing they must obtain a network device that sits in front of a one or machines in order to distribute the request across multiple servers. When a user comes in through the load balanced device they are redirected to a specific server based on a few factors. Common Load Balancing Factors Current Server Availability Current Server Response Time Current Server Priority The Business Layer and corresponding logic are business rules applied to data prior to it being sent to the Presentation Layer. These rules are used to manipulate the data coming from the Data Access Layer, in addition to validating any data prior to being stored in the Data Access Layer. A good example of this would be when a user is trying to create multiple accounts under one email address. The Business Layer logic can prevent duplicate accounts by enforcing a unique email for every new account before the data is even stored in the Data Access Layer. The Server Component can be directly tied to this layer in that the server typically stores and process the Business Layer before it is returned to the end-user via the Presentation Layer. In addition the Server Component can also run automated process through the Business Layer on the data in the Data Access Layer so that additional business analysis can be derived from the data that has been already collected. The Data Layer and its logic are responsible for storing information so that it can be easily retrieved. Typical in most modern applications data is stored in a database management system however data can also be in the form of files stored on a file server. In addition a database can take on one of several forms. Common Database Formats XML File Pipe Delimited File Tab Delimited File Comma Delimited File (CSV) Plain Text File Microsoft Access Microsoft SQL Server MySql Oracle Sybase The Database component of the Networking model can be directly tied to the Data Layer because this is where the Data Layer obtains the data to return back the Business Layer. The Database Component basically allows for a place on the network to store data for future use. This enables applications to save data when they can and then quickly recall the saved data as needed so that the application does not have to worry about storing the data in memory. This prevents overhead that could be created when an application must retain all data in memory. As you can see the Three-Tier Client/Server Networking Model and the Three-Tiered Application Architecture Model rely very heavily on one another to function especially if different aspects of an application are distributed across an entire network. The use of various servers and database servers are wonderful when an application has a need to distribute work across the network. Network Components and Application Layers Interaction Database components will store all data needed for the Data Access Layer to manipulate and return to the Business Layer Server Component executes the Business Layer that manipulates data so that it can be returned to the Presentation Layer Client Component hosts the Presentation Layer that  interprets the data and present it to the user

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• Comments on Comments

  - by Joe Mayo

  I almost tweeted a reply to Capar Kleijne's question about comments on Twitter, but realized that my opinion exceeded 140 characters. The following is based upon my experience with extremes and approaches that I find useful in code comments. There are a couple extremes that I've seen and reasons why people go the distance in each approach. The most common extreme is no comments in the code at all.  A few bad reasons why this happens is because a developer is in a hurry, sloppy, or is interested in job preservation. The unfortunate result is that the code is difficult to understand and hard to maintain. The drawbacks to no comments in code are a primary reason why teachers drill the need for commenting code into our heads.  This viewpoint assumes the lack of comments are bad because the code is bad, but there is another reason for not commenting that is gaining more popularity. I've heard/and read that code should be self documenting. Following this thought pattern, if code is well written with meaningful names, there should not be a reason for comments.  An addendum to this argument is that comments are often neglected and get out-of-date, but the code is what is kept up-to-date. Presumably, if code contained very good naming, it would be easy to maintain.  This is a noble perspective and I like the practice of meaningful naming of identifiers. However, I think it's also an extreme approach that doesn't cover important cases.  i.e. If an identifier is named badly (subjective differences in opinion) or not changed appropriately during maintenance, then the badly named identifier is no more useful than a stale comment. These were the two no-comment extremes, so let's look at the too many comments extreme. On a regular basis, I'll see cases where the code is over-commented; not nearly as often as the no-comment scenarios, but still prevalent.  These are examples of where every single line in the code is commented.  These comments make the code harder to read because they get in the way of the algorithm.  In most cases, the comments parrot what each line of code does.  If a developer understands the language, then most statements are immediately intuitive.  i.e. what use is it to say that I'm assigning foo to bar when it's clear what the code is doing. I think that over-commenting code is a waste of time that slows down initial development and maintenance.  Understandably, the developer's intentions are admirable because they've had it beaten into their heads that they must comment. However, I think it's an extreme and prefer a more moderate approach. I don't think the extremes do justice to code because each can make maintenance harder.  No comments on bad code is obviously a problem, but the other two extremes are subtle and require qualification to address properly. The problem I see with the code-as-documentation approach is that it doesn't lift the developer out of the algorithm to identify dependencies, intentions, and hacks. Any developer can read code and follow an algorithm, but they still need to know where it fits into the big picture of the application. Because of indirections with language features like interfaces, delegates, and virtual members, code can become complex.  Occasionally, it's useful to point out a nuance or reason why a piece of code is there. i.e. If you've building an app that communicates via HTTP, you'll have certain headers to include for the endpoint, and it could be useful to point out why the code for setting those header values is there and how they affect the application. An argument against this could be that you should extract that code into a separate method with a meaningful name to describe the scenario.  My problem with such an approach would be that your code base becomes even more difficult to navigate and work with because you have all of this extra code just to make the code more meaningful. My opinion is that a simple and well-stated comment stating the reasons and intention for the code is more natural and convenient to the initial developer and maintainer.  I just don't agree with the approach of going out of the way to avoid making a comment.  I'm also concerned that some developers would take this approach as an excuse to not comment their bad code. Another area where I like comments is on documentation comments.  Java has it and so does C# and VB.  It's convenient because we can build automated tools that extract these comments.  These extracted comments are often much better than no documentation at all.  The "go read the code" answer always doesn't fulfill the need for a quick summary of an API. To summarize, I think that the extremes of no comments and too many comments are less than desirable approaches. I prefer documentation comments to explain each class and member (API level) and code comments as necessary to supplement well-written code. Joe

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• Programmatically use a server as the Build Server for multiple Project Collections

  Important: With this post you create an unsupported scenario by Microsoft. It will break your support for this server with Microsoft. So handle with care. I am the administrator an a TFS environment with a lot of Project Collections. In the supported configuration of Microsoft 2010 you need one Build Controller per Project Collection, and it is not supported to have multiple Build Controllers installed. Jim Lamb created a post how you can modify your system to change this behaviour. But since I have so many Project Collections, I automated this with the API of TFS. When you install a new build server via the UI, you do the following steps Register the build service (with this you hook the windows server into the build server environment) Add a new build controller Add a new build agent So in pseudo code, the code would look like foreach (projectCollection in GetAllProjectCollections) {       CreateNewWindowsService();       RegisterService();       AddNewController();       AddNewAgent(); } The following code fragements show you the most important parts of the method implementations. Attached is the full project. CreateNewWindowsService We create a new windows service with the SC command via the Diagnostics.Process class:             var pi = new ProcessStartInfo("sc.exe")                         {                             Arguments =                                 string.Format(                                     "create \"{0}\" start= auto binpath= \"C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010\\Tools\\TfsBuildServiceHost.exe              /NamedInstance:{0}\" DisplayName= \"Visual Studio Team Foundation Build Service Host ({1})\"",                                     serviceHostName, tpcName)                         };            Process.Start(pi);             pi.Arguments = string.Format("failure {0} reset= 86400 actions= restart/60000", serviceHostName);            Process.Start(pi); RegisterService The trick in this method is that we set the NamedInstance static property. This property is Internal, so we need to set it through reflection. To get information on these you need nice Microsoft friends and the .Net reflector .             // Indicate which build service host instance we are using            typeof(BuildServiceHostUtilities).Assembly.GetType("Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Config.BuildServiceHostProcess").InvokeMember("NamedInstance",              System.Reflection.BindingFlags.NonPublic | System.Reflection.BindingFlags.SetProperty | System.Reflection.BindingFlags.Static, null, null, new object[] { serviceName });             // Create the build service host            serviceHost = buildServer.CreateBuildServiceHost(serviceName, endPoint);            serviceHost.Save();             // Register the build service host            BuildServiceHostUtilities.Register(serviceHost, user, password); AddNewController and AddNewAgent Once you have the BuildServerHost, the rest is pretty straightforward. There are methods on the BuildServerHost to modify the controllers and the agents                 controller = serviceHost.CreateBuildController(controllerName);                 agent = controller.ServiceHost.CreateBuildAgent(agentName, buildDirectory, controller);                controller.AddBuildAgent(agent); You have now seen the highlights of the application. If you need it and want to have sample information when you work in this area, download the app TFS2010_RegisterBuildServerToTPCs

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• Oracle Enterprise Data Quality: Ever Integration-ready

  - by Mala Narasimharajan

  It is closing in on a year now since Oracle’s acquisition of Datanomic, and the addition of Oracle Enterprise Data Quality (EDQ) to the Oracle software family. The big move has caused some big shifts in emphasis and some very encouraging excitement from the field.  To give an illustration, combined with a shameless promotion of how EDQ can help to give quick insights into your data, I did a quick Phrase Profile of the subject field of emails to the Global EDQ mailing list since it was set up last September. The results revealed a very clear theme:   Integration, Integration, Integration! As well as the important Siebel and Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) integrations, we have been asked about integration with a huge variety of Oracle applications, including EBS, Peoplesoft, CRM on Demand, Fusion, DRM, Endeca, RightNow, and more - and we have not stood still! While it would not have been possible to develop specific pre-integrations with all of the above within a year, we have developed a package of feature-rich out-of-the-box web services and batch processes that can be plugged into any application or middleware technology with ease. And with Siebel, they work out of the box. Oracle Enterprise Data Quality version 9.0.4 includes the Customer Data Services (CDS) pack – a ready set of standard processes with standard interfaces, to provide integrated: Address verification and cleansing  Individual matching Organization matching The services can are suitable for either Batch or Real-Time processing, and are enabled for international data, with simple configuration options driving the set of locale-specific dictionaries that are used. For example, large dictionaries are provided to support international name transcription and variant matching, including highly specialized handling for Arabic, Japanese, Chinese and Korean data. In total across all locales, CDS includes well over a million dictionary entries.   Excerpt from EDQ’s CDS Individual Name Standardization Dictionary CDS has been developed to replace the OEM of Informatica Identity Resolution (IIR) for attached Data Quality on the Oracle price list, but does this in a way that creates a ‘best of both worlds’ situation for customers, who can harness not only the out-of-the-box functionality of pre-packaged matching and standardization services, but also the flexibility of OEDQ if they want to customize the interfaces or the process logic, without having to learn more than one product. From a competitive point of view, we believe this stands us in good stead against our key competitors, including Informatica, who have separate ‘Identity Resolution’ and general DQ products, and IBM, who provide limited out-of-the-box capabilities (with a steep learning curve) in both their QualityStage data quality and Initiate matching products. Here is a brief guide to the main services provided in the pack: Address Verification and Standardization EDQ’s CDS Address Cleaning Process The Address Verification and Standardization service uses EDQ Address Verification (an OEM of Loqate software) to verify and clean addresses in either real-time or batch. The Address Verification processor is wrapped in an EDQ process – this adds significant capabilities over calling the underlying Address Verification API directly, specifically: Country-specific thresholds to determine when to accept the verification result (and therefore to change the input address) based on the confidence level of the API Optimization of address verification by pre-standardizing data where required Formatting of output addresses into the input address fields normally used by applications Adding descriptions of the address verification and geocoding return codes The process can then be used to provide real-time and batch address cleansing in any application; such as a simple web page calling address cleaning and geocoding as part of a check on individual data.     Duplicate Prevention Unlike Informatica Identity Resolution (IIR), EDQ uses stateless services for duplicate prevention to avoid issues caused by complex replication and synchronization of large volume customer data. When a record is added or updated in an application, the EDQ Cluster Key Generation service is called, and returns a number of key values. These are used to select other records (‘candidates’) that may match in the application data (which has been pre-seeded with keys using the same service). The ‘driving record’ (the new or updated record) is then presented along with all selected candidates to the EDQ Matching Service, which decides which of the candidates are a good match with the driving record, and scores them according to the strength of match. In this model, complex multi-locale EDQ techniques can be used to generate the keys and ensure that the right balance between performance and matching effectiveness is maintained, while ensuring that the application retains control of data integrity and transactional commits. The process is explained below: EDQ Duplicate Prevention Architecture Note that where the integration is with a hub, there may be an additional call to the Cluster Key Generation service if the master record has changed due to merges with other records (and therefore needs to have new key values generated before commit). Batch Matching In order to allow customers to use different match rules in batch to real-time, separate matching templates are provided for batch matching. For example, some customers want to minimize intervention in key user flows (such as adding new customers) in front end applications, but to conduct a more exhaustive match on a regular basis in the back office. The batch matching jobs are also used when migrating data between systems, and in this case normally a more precise (and automated) type of matching is required, in order to minimize the review work performed by Data Stewards.  In batch matching, data is captured into EDQ using its standard interfaces, and records are standardized, clustered and matched in an EDQ job before matches are written out. As with all EDQ jobs, batch matching may be called from Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) if required. When working with Siebel CRM (or master data in Siebel UCM), Siebel’s Data Quality Manager is used to instigate batch jobs, and a shared staging database is used to write records for matching and to consume match results. The CDS batch matching processes automatically adjust to Siebel’s ‘Full Match’ (match all records against each other) and ‘Incremental Match’ (match a subset of records against all of their selected candidates) modes. The Future The Customer Data Services Pack is an important part of the Oracle strategy for EDQ, offering a clear path to making Data Quality Assurance an integral part of enterprise applications, and providing a strong value proposition for adopting EDQ. We are planning various additions and improvements, including: An out-of-the-box Data Quality Dashboard Even more comprehensive international data handling Address search (suggesting multiple results) Integrated address matching The EDQ Customer Data Services Pack is part of the Enterprise Data Quality Media Pack, available for download at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/oedq/downloads/index.html.

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• The Winds of Change are a Blowin&rsquo;

  - by Ajarn Mark Caldwell

  For six years I have been an avid and outspoken fan and paying customer of SourceGear products…from Vault to Dragnet to Fortress and on to Vault Professional, but that is all changing now.  Not the fan part, but the paying customer part.  I’m still a huge fan.  I think that SourceGear does a great job with their product and support has been fantastic when needed (which is not very often).  I think that Eric Sink has done a fine job building a quality company and products, and I appreciate his contributions to the tech community through this blogging and books.  I still think their products are high quality and do a fantastic job of what they do.  But there’s the rub…what they do is no longer enough for me. As I have rebuilt our development team over the last couple of years, and we have begun to investigate Scrum and Kanban, I realize that I need more visibility into the progress of the team.  I need better project management tools, and this is where Vault Professional lags behind several other tools.  Granted, in the latest release (Vault 6.0) they added a nice time tracking feature, but I want more.  (Note, I did contact SourceGear about my quest for more, but apparently, the rest of their customer base has not been clamoring for this and so they have not built it.  Granted, I wasn’t clamoring for it either until just recently, but unfortunately for SourceGear, I want it now and don’t want to wait for them to build it into their system.) Ironically, it was SourceGear themselves who started to turn me on to the possibilities of other tools.  They built a limited integration with Axosoft OnTime which I read about several times on their support site (I used to regularly read and occasionally comment on their Support Forum).  I decided to check out OnTime and was very impressed with the tool for work item tracking and project management (not to mention their great Scrum Master in 10 Minutes video).  I fell in love with the capabilities of OnTime.  Unfortunately, the integration with Vault for source control management was, as I mentioned, limited.  I could have forfeited the integration between work items and source code, but there is too much benefit to linking check-ins to work items for me to give that up.  So then I did what was previously unthinkable for me, I considered switching not just the work tracking tool, but also the source code management tool.  This was really stepping outside my comfort zone because source code is Gold, and not to be trifled with.  When you find a good weapon to protect your gold, stick with it. I looked at Git and Tortoise SVN, but the integration methods for those was pretty rough compared to what I was used to.  The recommended tool from Axosoft’s point of view appeared to be RocketSVN, but I really wasn’t sure I wanted to go the “flavor of Subversion” route.  Then I started thinking about that other tool I liked back when I first chose to go with Vault, but couldn’t afford:  Team Foundation Server.  And what do you know…Microsoft has not only radically improved it over that version from back in 2006, but they also came to their senses about how it should be licensed, and it is much more affordable now.  So I started looking into the latest capabilities in the 2012 version, and I fell in love all over again. I really went deep on checking out the tools.  I watched numerous webcasts from Microsoft partners, went to a beta preview on Microsoft’s campus, and watched a lot of Channel 9 videos on the new ALM features (oooh…shiny).  Frankly, I was very impressed with the capabilities of the newest version, and figured this was probably our direction.  As an interesting twist of fate, one of my employees crossed paths with an ALM Consultant from Northwest Cadence, a local Microsoft Partner, and one of the companies that produced several of the webcasts that I had been watching.  So I gave Bryon a call and started grilling him to see if he really knew anything or was just another guy who couldn’t find a job so he called himself a consultant.  It turns out Bryon actually knows a lot, especially in an area that was becoming a frustration point for us: Branching strategies and automated builds (that’s probably a whole separate blog entry).  As we talked, Bryon suggested we look into doing a DTDPS (Developer Tools Deployment Planning Services) session with his company.  This is a service that can be paid for by Microsoft Enterprise Agreement planning services credits or SA training benefits, and, again, coincidentally, we had several that were just about to expire, so I put them to good use. The DTDPS sessions were great; and Bryon, Rick, and the rest of the folks at Northwest Cadence have been a pleasure to work with.  We have just purchased a new server for our TFS rollout and are planning the steps and options right now.  This is still a big project ahead of us to not only install and configure TFS, but also to load all of our source code (many different systems, not just one program) and transition to the new way of life with TFS, but I am convinced that it is the right move for my team at this point in time.  We need the new capabilities that are in alignment with Scrum and Kanban methodologies in order to more efficiently manage all the different projects that we have going on at one time. I would still wholeheartedly endorse SourceGear’s products and Axosoft’s OnTime for those whose needs are met by those tools, but for me and my team, I think that TFS is the right fit, and I am looking forward to the change.

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• Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC Review

  - by Ben Griswold

  A few years back I started dallying with test-driven development, but I never fully committed to the practice. This wasn’t because I didn’t believe in the value of TDD; it was more a matter of not completely understanding how to incorporate “test first” into my everyday development. Back in my web forms days, I could point fingers at the framework for my ignorance and laziness. After all, web forms weren’t exactly designed for testability so who could blame me for not embracing TDD in those conditions, right? But when I switched to ASP.NET MVC and quickly found myself fresh out of excuses and it became instantly clear that it was time to get my head around red-green-refactor once and for all or I would regretfully miss out on one of the biggest selling points the new framework had to offer. I have previously written about how I learned ASP.NET MVC. It was primarily hands on learning but I did read a couple of ASP.NET MVC books along the way. The books I read dedicated a chapter or two to TDD and they certainly addressed the benefits of TDD and how MVC was designed with testability in mind, but TDD was merely an afterthought compared to, well, teaching one how to code the model, view and controller. This approach made some sense, and I learned a bunch about MVC from those books, but when it came to TDD the books were just a teaser and an opportunity missed.  But then I got lucky – Jonathan McCracken contacted me and asked if I’d review his book, Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC, and it was just what I needed to get over the TDD hump. As the title suggests, Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC takes a different approach to learning MVC as it focuses on testing right from the very start. McCracken wastes no time and swiftly familiarizes us with the framework by building out a trivial Quote-O-Matic application and then dedicates the better part of his book to testing first – first by explaining TDD and then coding a full-featured Getting Organized application inspired by David Allen’s popular book, Getting Things Done. If you are a learn-by-example kind of coder (like me), you will instantly appreciate and enjoy McCracken’s style – its fast-moving, pragmatic and focused on only the most relevant information required to get you going with ASP.NET MVC and TDD. The book continues with the test-first theme but McCracken moves away from the sample application and incorporates other practical skills like persisting models with NHibernate, leveraging Inversion of Control with the IControllerFactory and building a RESTful web service. What I most appreciated about this section was McCracken’s use of and praise for open source libraries like Rhino Mocks, SQLite and StructureMap (to name just a few) and productivity tools like ReSharper, Web Platform Installer and ASP.NET SQL Server Setup Wizard.  McCracken’s emphasis on real world, pragmatic development was clearly demonstrated in every tool choice, straight-forward code block and developer tip. Whether one is already familiar with the tools/tips or not, McCracken’s thought process is easily understood and appreciated. The final section of the book walks the reader through security and deployment – everything from error handling and logging with ELMAH, to ASP.NET Health Monitoring, to using MSBuild with automated builds, to the deployment  of ASP.NET MVC to various web environments. These chapters, like those prior, offer enough information and explanation to simply help you get the job done.  Do I believe Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC will turn you into an expert MVC developer overnight?  Well, no.  I don’t think any book can make that claim.  If that were possible, I think book list prices would skyrocket!  That said, Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC provides a solid foundation and a unique (and dare I say necessary) approach to learning ASP.NET MVC.  Along the way McCracken shares loads of very practical software development tips and references numerous tools and libraries. The bottom line is it’s a great ASP.NET MVC primer – if you’re new to ASP.NET MVC it’s just what you need to get started.  Do I believe Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC will give you everything you need to start employing TDD in your everyday development?  Well, I used to think that learning TDD required a lot of practice and, if you’re lucky enough, the guidance of a mentor or coach.  I used to think that one couldn’t learn TDD from a book alone. Well, I’m still no pro, but I’m testing first now and Jonathan McCracken and his book, Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC, played a big part in making this happen.  If you are an MVC developer and a TDD newb, Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC is just the book for you.

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• SQLAuthority News – Why VoIP Service Providers Should Think About NuoDB’s Geo Distribution

  - by Pinal Dave

  You can always tell when someone’s showing off their cool, cutting edge comms technology. They tend to raise their voice a lot. Back in the day they’d announce their gadget leadership to the rest of the herd by shouting into their cellphone. Usually the message was no more urgent than “Hi, I’m on my cellphone!” Now the same types will loudly name-drop a different technology to the rest of the airport lounge. “I’m leveraging the wifi,” a fellow passenger bellowed, the other day, as we filtered through the departure gate. Nobody needed to know that, but the subtext was “look at me everybody”. You can tell the really advanced mobile user – they tend to whisper. Their handset has a microphone (how cool is that!) and they know how to use it. Sometimes these shouty public broadcasters aren’t even connected anyway because the database for their Voice over IP (VoIP) platform can’t cope. This will happen if they are using a traditional SQL model to try and cope with a phone network which has far flung offices and hundreds of mobile employees. That, like shouting into your phone, is just wrong on so many levels. What VoIP needs now is a single, logical database across multiple servers in different geographies. It needs to be updated in real-time and automatically scaled out during times of peak demand. A VoIP system should scale up to handle increased traffic, but just as importantly is must then go back down in the off peak hours. Try this with a MySQL database. It can’t scale easily enough, so it will keep your developers busy. They’ll have spent many hours trying to knit the different databases together. Traditional relational databases can possibly achieve this, at a price. Mind you, you could extend baked bean cans and string to every point on the network and that would be no less elegant. That’s not really following engineering principles though is it? Having said that, most telcos and VoIP systems use a separate, independent solution for each office location, which they link together – loosely.  The more office locations, the more complex and expensive the solution becomes and so the more you spend on maintenance. Ideally, you’d have a fluid system that can automatically shift its shape as the need arises. That’s the point of software isn’t it – it adapts. Otherwise, we might as well return to the old days. A MySQL system isn’t exactly baked bean cans attached by string, but it’s closer in spirit to the old many teethed mechanical beast that was employed in the first type of automated switchboard. NuoBD’s NewSQL is designed to be a single database that works across multiple servers, which can scale easily, and scale on demand. That’s one system that gives high connectivity but no latency, complexity or maintenance issues. MySQL works in some circumstances, but a period of growth isn’t one of them. So as a company moves forward, the MySQL database can’t keep pace. Data storage and data replication errors creep in. Soon the diaspora of offices becomes a problem. Your telephone system isn’t just distributed, it is literally all over the place. Though voice calls are often a software function, some of the old habits of telephony remain. When you call an engineer out, some of them will listen to what you’re asking for and announce that it cannot be done. This is what happens if you ask, say, database engineers familiar with Oracle or Microsoft to fulfill your wish for a low maintenance system built on a single, fluid, scalable database. No can do, they’d say. In fact, I heard one shouting something similar into his VoIP handset at the airport. “I can’t get on the network, Mac. I’m on MySQL.” You can download NuoDB from here. “NuoDB provides the ability to replicate data globally in real-time, which is not available with any other product offering,” states Weeks.  “That alone is remarkable and it works. I’ve seen it. I’ve used it.  I’ve tested it. The ability to deploy NuoDB removes a tremendous burden from our support and engineering teams.” Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: NuoDB

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• Agile Testing Days 2012 – Day 1 – The birth of the #unicorn…

  - by Chris George

  Still riding the high from the tutorial day, I arrived at the conference venue eager to get cracking with the days talks. The opening Keynote was “Disciplined Agile Delivery: The Foundation for Scaling Agile” presented by Scott Ambler. The general ideas behind the methodology such as not re-inventing the wheel, and being goal driven, not prescriptive in how you work certainly struck chords with how we are trying to work in my team. Scott made some interesting observations about how scrum is quite prescriptive and is this really agile? I agreed with quite a few of his points on how what works for one team may not work for another. How a team works should be driven by context and reflection, not process and prescription. However was somewhat dubious about some of the statistics he rolled out towards the end. However, out of this keynote was born something that was to transcend this one presentation. During the talk, Scott mentioned on more than one occasion “In the real world”, and at one point made reference to people living in the land of unicorns and rainbows. The challenge was then laid down on twitter for all speakers to include a unicorn in their presentations… and for the most part this happened! It became an identity for this years conference, and I’m sure something that any attendee will always associate with Agile Testing Days 2012! Following this keynote, I attended “Going agile with Automated GUI Testing – Some personal insights” by Jan Zdunek from codecentric on the vendor track. My speciality is test automation, and in particular GUI testing, so this drew me to this talk more than the others. Thankfully, it was made clear from the very start that this was not peddling any particular product (even though it was on the vendor track), and Jan faithfully stuck to that. Most of the content was not new to me, but it was really comforting to hear someone else with very similar experiences to my own. In particular, things like how GUI testing is hard and is not a silver bullet; how record & replay is NOT a good thing to do (which drew a somewhat inflammatory tweet from an automation company when I tweeted that!). Something that I have started hearing around the place, and has certainly been murmuring at work is to push more of the automation coding onto the developers. After all they are the coding experts. I agree with this to a degree, but I personally enjoy coding and find it very rewarding doing so, therefore I’d be reluctant to give it up. I think there are some better alternatives such as pairing with a developer. Lastly, Jan mentioned, almost in passing, that we should consider virtualisation for gui testing for covering configuration combinations. On my project we’ve been running our win32/.NET GUI tests in cloud virtualisation for a couple of years now… I really should write about that! After lunch the second keynote of the day was by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory,”Myths about Agile Testing, De-Bunked”. It started off well… with the two ladies donning Medusa style head bands whilst they disbanding several myths about agile testing! I got the impression that it was perhaps not as slick as they would have liked, but then Janet was suffering with a very sore throat so kept losing her voice. Nevertheless, the presentation was captivating, and they debunked several myths such as : “Testing is dead”, “Testers must write code”, “Agile teams always deliver faster”. I didn’t take many notes for this because it was being recorded, but unfortunately the recordings have not been posted yet so I’ll write more about this when they are. The TestLab was held during a somewhat free for all time during most of the afternoon. It looked intriguing and proved to be one of the surprising experiences of the conference for me. Run by James Lyndsay and Bart Knaack, it consisted of a number of ‘stations’ that offered different testing problems. I opted for testing a mathematical drawing app call Geogebra, the task being to pair up and exploratory test it. After an allotted time, we discussed issues we’d found and decided if we wanted to continue ‘playing’ to which we all agreed! It was fun! The last track talk of the day was “Developers Exploratory Testing – Raising the bar” by Sigge Birgisson. One of the teams at Red Gate have tried Dev or Team exploratory testing a couple of times, and I was really interested to go to the presentation that prompted that. I was not disappointed! Sigge gave a first class presentation, and not only explained what DET was all about, but also how to go about implementing it. Little tips like calling it a ‘workshop’ rather than ‘testing’ I can really see working! Monday evening saw the presentation of the award for the Most Influential Agile Testing Professional Person go to a much deserved Lisa Crispin. The evening was great, with acrobatics, magic and music. My Takeaway Triple from Day 1:  Some of the cool stuff that was suggested in the GUI Testing talk, we are already doing. I should write about that! Testing is not dead! Perhaps testing will become more of a skill than a specific role, but it is certainly not dead. Team/Developer exploratory testing… seems like a no-brainer assuming you have a team who is willing.  Day 2 – Coming soon…

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• A Rose by Any Other Name..

  - by Geoff N. Hiten

  It is always a good start when you can steal a title line from one of the best writers in the English language.  Let’s hope I can make the rest of this post live up to the opening.  One recurring problem with SQL server is moving databases to new servers.  Client applications use a variety of ways to resolve SQL Server names, some of which are not changed easily <cough SharePoint /cough>.  If you happen to be using default instances on both the source and target SQL Server, then the solution is pretty simple.  You create (or bug the network admin until she creates) two DNS “A” records. One points the old name to the new IP address.  The other creates a new alias for the old server, since the original system name is now redirected.  Note this will redirect ALL traffic from the old server to the new server, including RDP and file share connection attempts.    Figure 1 – Microsoft DNS MMC Snap-In   Figure 2 – DNS New Host Dialog Box Both records are necessary so you can still access the old server via an alternate name. Server Role IP Address Name Alias Source 10.97.230.60 SQL01 SQL01_Old Target 10.97.230.80 SQL02 SQL01 Table 1 – Alias List If you or somebody set up connections via IP address, you deserve to have to go to each app and fix it by hand.  That is the only way to fix that particular foul-up. If have to deal with Named Instances either as a source or a target, then it gets more complicated.  The standard fix is to use the SQL Server Configuration Manager (or one of its earlier incarnations) to create a SQL client alias to redirect the connection.  This can be a pain installing and configuring the app on multiple client servers.  The good news is that SQL Server Configuration Manager AND all of its earlier versions simply write a few registry keys.  Extracting the keys into a .reg file makes centralized automated deployment a snap. If the client is a 32-bit system, you have to extract the native key.  If it is a 64-bit, you have to extract the native key and the WoW (32 bit on 64 bit host) key. First, pick a development system to create the actual registry key.  If you do this repeatedly, you can simply edit an existing registry file.  Create the entry using the SQL Configuration Manager.  You must use a 64-bit system to create the WoW key.  The following example redirects from a named instance “SQL01\SQLUtiluty” to a default instance on “SQL02”.   Figure 3 – SQL Server Configuration Manager - Native Figure 3 shows the native key listing. Figure 4 – SQL Server Configuration Manager – WoW If you think you don’t need the WoW key because your app is 64 it, think again.  SQL Server Management Server is a 32-bit app, as are most SQL test utilities.  Always create both keys for 64-bit target systems. Now that the keys exist, we can extract them into a .reg file. Fire up REGEDIT and browse to the following location:  HKLM\Software\Microsoft\MSSQLServer\Client\ConnectTo.  You can also search the registry for the string value of one of the server names (old or new). Right click on the “ConnectTo” label and choose “Export”.  Save with an appropriate name and location.  The resulting file should look something like this: Figure 5 – SQL01_Alias.reg Repeat the process with the location: HKLM\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\MSSQLServer\Client\ConnectTo Note that if you have multiple alias entries, ALL of the entries will be exported.  In that case, you can edit the file and remove the extra aliases. You can edit the files together into a single file.  Just leave a blank line between new keys like this: Figure 6 – SQL01_Alias_All.reg Of course if you have an automatic way to deploy, it makes sense to have an automatic way to Un-deploy.  To delete a registry key, simply edit the .reg file and replace the target with a “-“ sign like so. Figure 7 – SQL01_Alias_UNDO.reg Now we have the ability to move any database to any server without having to install or change any applications on any client server.  The whole process should be transparent to the applications, which makes planning and coordinating database moves a far simpler task.

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• How can a code editor effectively hint at code nesting level - without using indentation?

  - by pgfearo

  I've written an XML text editor that provides 2 view options for the same XML text, one indented (virtually), the other left-justified. The motivation for the left-justified view is to help users 'see' the whitespace characters they're using for indentation of plain-text or XPath code without interference from indentation that is an automated side-effect of the XML context. I want to provide visual clues (in the non-editable part of the editor) for the left-justified mode that will help the user, but without getting too elaborate. I tried just using connecting lines, but that seemed too busy. The best I've come up with so far is shown in a mocked up screenshot of the editor below, but I'm seeking better/simpler alternatives (that don't require too much code). [Edit] Taking the heatmap idea (from: @jimp) I get this and 3 alternatives - labelled a, b and c: The following section describes the accepted answer as a proposal, bringing together ideas from a number of other answers and comments. As this question is now community wiki, please feel free to update this. NestView The name for this idea which provides a visual method to improve the readability of nested code without using indentation. Contour Lines The name for the differently shaded lines within the NestView The image above shows the NestView used to help visualise an XML snippet. Though XML is used for this illustration, any other code syntax that uses nesting could have been used for this illustration. An Overview: The contour lines are shaded (as in a heatmap) to convey nesting level The contour lines are angled to show when a nesting level is being either opened or closed. A contour line links the start of a nesting level to the corresponding end. The combined width of contour lines give a visual impression of nesting level, in addition to the heatmap. The width of the NestView may be manually resizable, but should not change as the code changes. Contour lines can either be compressed or truncated to keep acheive this. Blank lines are sometimes used code to break up text into more digestable chunks. Such lines could trigger special behaviour in the NestView. For example the heatmap could be reset or a background color contour line used, or both. One or more contour lines associated with the currently selected code can be highlighted. The contour line associated with the selected code level would be emphasized the most, but other contour lines could also 'light up' in addition to help highlight the containing nested group Different behaviors (such as code folding or code selection) can be associated with clicking/double-clicking on a Contour Line. Different parts of a contour line (leading, middle or trailing edge) may have different dynamic behaviors associated. Tooltips can be shown on a mouse hover event over a contour line The NestView is updated continously as the code is edited. Where nesting is not well-balanced assumptions can be made where the nesting level should end, but the associated temporary contour lines must be highlighted in some way as a warning. Drag and drop behaviors of Contour Lines can be supported. Behaviour may vary according to the part of the contour line being dragged. Features commonly found in the left margin such as line numbering and colour highlighting for errors and change state could overlay the NestView. Additional Functionality The proposal addresses a range of additional issues - many are outside the scope of the original question, but a useful side-effect. Visually linking the start and end of a nested region The contour lines connect the start and end of each nested level Highlighting the context of the currently selected line As code is selected, the associated nest-level in the NestView can be highlighted Differentiating between code regions at the same nesting level In the case of XML different hues could be used for different namespaces. Programming languages (such as c#) support named regions that could be used in a similar way. Dividing areas within a nesting area into different visual blocks Extra lines are often inserted into code to aid readability. Such empty lines could be used to reset the saturation level of the NestView's contour lines. Multi-Column Code View Code without indentation makes the use of a multi-column view more effective because word-wrap or horizontal scrolling is less likely to be required. In this view, once code has reach the bottom of one column, it flows into the next one: Usage beyond merely providing a visual aid As proposed in the overview, the NestView could provide a range of editing and selection features which would be broadly in line with what is expected from a TreeView control. The key difference is that a typical TreeView node has 2 parts: an expander and the node icon. A NestView contour line can have as many as 3 parts: an opener (sloping), a connector (vertical) and a close (sloping). On Indentation The NestView presented alongside non-indented code complements, but is unlikely to replace, the conventional indented code view. It's likely that any solutions adopting a NestView, will provide a method to switch seamlessly between indented and non-indented code views without affecting any of the code text itself - including whitespace characters. One technique for the indented view would be 'Virtual Formatting' - where a dynamic left-margin is used in lieu of tab or space characters. The same nesting-level data used to dynamically render the NestView could also used for the more conventional-looking indented view. Printing Indentation will be important for the readability of printed code. Here, the absence of tab/space characters and a dynamic left-margin means that the text can wrap at the right-margin and still maintain the integrity of the indented view. Line numbers can be used as visual markers that indicate where code is word-wrapped and also the exact position of indentation: Screen Real-Estate: Flat Vs Indented Addressing the question of whether the NestView uses up valuable screen real-estate: Contour lines work well with a width the same as the code editor's character width. A NestView width of 12 character widths can therefore accommodate 12 levels of nesting before contour lines are truncated/compressed. If an indented view uses 3 character-widths for each nesting level then space is saved until nesting reaches 4 levels of nesting, after this nesting level the flat view has a space-saving advantage that increases with each nesting level. Note: A minimum indentation of 4 character widths is often recommended for code, however XML often manages with less. Also, Virtual Formatting permits less indentation to be used because there's no risk of alignment issues A comparison of the 2 views is shown below: Based on the above, its probably fair to conclude that view style choice will be based on factors other than screen real-estate. The one exception is where screen space is at a premium, for example on a Netbook/Tablet or when multiple code windows are open. In these cases, the resizable NestView would seem to be a clear winner. Use Cases Examples of real-world examples where NestView may be a useful option: Where screen real-estate is at a premium a. On devices such as tablets, notepads and smartphones b. When showing code on websites c. When multiple code windows need to be visible on the desktop simultaneously Where consistent whitespace indentation of text within code is a priority For reviewing deeply nested code. For example where sub-languages (e.g. Linq in C# or XPath in XSLT) might cause high levels of nesting. Accessibility Resizing and color options must be provided to aid those with visual impairments, and also to suit environmental conditions and personal preferences: Compatability of edited code with other systems A solution incorporating a NestView option should ideally be capable of stripping leading tab and space characters (identified as only having a formatting role) from imported code. Then, once stripped, the code could be rendered neatly in both the left-justified and indented views without change. For many users relying on systems such as merging and diff tools that are not whitespace-aware this will be a major concern (if not a complete show-stopper). Other Works: Visualisation of Overlapping Markup Published research by Wendell Piez, dated from 2004, addresses the issue of the visualisation of overlapping markup, specifically LMNL. This includes SVG graphics with significant similarities to the NestView proposal, as such, they are acknowledged here. The visual differences are clear in the images (below), the key functional distinction is that NestView is intended only for well-nested XML or code, whereas Wendell Piez's graphics are designed to represent overlapped nesting. The graphics above were reproduced - with kind permission - from http://www.piez.org Sources: Towards Hermenutic Markup Half-steps toward LMNL

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• Upgrading to Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Release 2: Top Tips One Must Know

  - by AnkurGupta

  Recently Oracle announced incremental release of Enterprise Manager 12c called Enterprise Manager 12c Release 2 (EM12c R2) which includes several new exciting features (Press announcement). Right before the official release, we upgraded an internal production site from EM 12c R1 to EM 12c R2 and had an extremely pleasant experience. Let me share few key takeaways as well as few tips from this upgrade exercise. I - Why Should You Upgrade To Enterprise Manager 12c Release 2 While an upgrade is usually recommended primarily to take benefit of the latest features (which is valid for this upgrade as well), I found several other compelling reasons purely from deployment perspective. Standardize your EM deployment:  Enterprise Manager comprises of several different components (OMS, agents, plug-ins, etc) and it might be possible that these are at varied patch levels in your environment. For instance, in case of an environment containing Bundle Patch 1 (customer announcement), there is a good chance that you may not have all the components up-to-date. There are two possible reasons. Bundle Patch 1 involved patching different components (OMS, agents, plug-ins) with multiple one-off patches which may not have been applied to all components yet. Bundle Patch 1 for different platforms were not released together. Which means you may not have got the chance to patch all the components on different platforms. Note: BP1 patches are not mandatory to upgrade to EM12c R2 release EM 12c R2 provides an excellent opportunity to standardize your Cloud Control environment (OMS, repository and agents) and plug-ins to latest versions in single shot. All platform releases are made available simultaneously: For the very first time in the history of EM release, all the platforms were released on day one itself, which means you do not need to wait for platform specific binaries for EM OMS or Agent to perform install or upgrades in a heterogeneous environment. Highly refined and automated process – Upgrade process is by far the smoothest and the cleanest as compared to previous releases of Enterprise manager. Following are the ones that stand out. Automatic Plug-in management – Plug-in upgrade along with new plug-in deployment is supported in upgrade installer wizard which means bulk of the updates to OMS and repository can be done in the same workflow. Saves time and minimizes user inputs. Plug-in Upgrade or Migrate Auto Update: While doing the OMS and repository upgrade, you can use Auto Update screen in Oracle Universal Installer to check for any updates/patches. That will help you to avoid the know issues and will make sure that your upgrade is successful. Allows mass upgrade of EM Agents – A new dedicated menu has been added in the EM console for agent upgrade. Agent upgrade workflow is extremely simple that requires agent name as the only input. ADM / JVMD Manager/Agent upgrade – complete process is supported via UI screens. EM12c R2 Upgrade Guide is much simpler to follow as compared to those for earlier releases. This is attributed to the simpler upgrade process. Robust and Performing Platform: EM12c R2 release not only includes several new features, but also provides a more stable platform which incorporates several fixes and enhancements in the Enterprise Manager framework. II - Few Tips To Remember In my last post (blog link) I shared few tips and tricks from my experience applying the Bundle Patch. Recently I upgraded the same site to EM 12c R2 and found few points that you must take note of, while planning this upgrade. The tips below are also applicable to EM 12c R1 environments that do not have Bundle Patch 1 patches applied. Verify the monitored application certification – Specific targets like E-Business Suite have not yet been certified as managed target in EM 12c R2. Therefore make sure to recheck the Enterprise Manager certification Matrix on My Oracle Support before planning the upgrade. Plan downtime – Because EM 12c R2 is an incremental release of EM 12c, for EM 12c R1 to EM 12c R2 upgrade supports only 1-system upgrade approach, which mean there will be downtime. OMS name change after upgrade – In case of multi OMS environments, additional OMS is renamed after upgrade, which has few implications when you upgrade JVMD and ADP agents on OMS. This is well documented in upgrade guide but make sure you read through all the notes. Upgrading BI Publisher– EM12c R2 is certified with BI Publisher 11.1.1.6.0 only. Therefore in case you are using EM 12c R1 which is integrated with BI Publisher 11.1.1.5.0, you must upgrade the BI Publisher to 11.1.1.6.0. Follow the steps from Advanced Installation and Configuration Guide here. Perform Post upgrade Tasks – Make sure to perform post upgrade steps mentioned in documentation here. These include critical changes that must be done right after upgrade to get the right configuration. For instance Database plug-in should be upgraded to Revision 3 (12.1.0.2.0 [u120804]). Delete old OMS Home – EM12c R1 to EM12c R2 is an out of place upgrade, which means it creates a new oracle home for OMS, plug-ins, etc. Therefore please ensure that You have sufficient extra space for new OMS before starting the upgrade process. You clean up the old OMS home after the upgrade process. Steps are available here. DO NOT remove the agent home on OMS host, because agent is upgraded in-place. If you have standby OMS setup then do look into the steps to upgrade the standby OMS from the upgrade guide before going ahead. Read the right documentation – Make sure to follow the Upgrade guide which provides the most comprehensive information on EM12c R2 upgrade process. Additionally you can refer other resources to get familiar with upgrade concepts. Recorded webcast - Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Release 2 Installation and Upgrade Overview Presentation - Understanding Enterprise Manager 12.1.0.2 Upgrade We are very excited about this latest release and will look forward to hear back any feedback from your upgrade experience!

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• Increase samba space on open suse 12.1

  - by Kapil Sharma

  I know linux basics but not an expert. IT guy left the job here and there is some time before new hire. So sorry if question is very basic. We have local testing server based on Open SUSE 12.1, which also act as shared drive between dev/mgmt team here and using Samba for that. Now we are running out of space on samba, even though server's 2*1TB harddisk is nearly 90% free. My question is, what is limiting Samba and how can I increase its limit? We need around at least 500 GB as shared drive but currently its just 25 GB. I don't need step by step answer, just a link to any helpful article would be sufficient. Probably I'm putting wrong keywords in google so not getting any helpful link. EDIT: Output of commands in the first comment. All commands were run as root user df -h (getting error with df -ht) Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on rootfs 30G 5.1G 23G 19% / devtmpfs 2.0G 36K 2.0G 1% /dev tmpfs 2.0G 1.1M 2.0G 1% /dev/shm tmpfs 2.0G 676K 2.0G 1% /run /dev/sda2 30G 5.1G 23G 19% / tmpfs 2.0G 0 2.0G 0% /sys/fs/cgroup tmpfs 2.0G 676K 2.0G 1% /var/run tmpfs 2.0G 0 2.0G 0% /media tmpfs 2.0G 676K 2.0G 1% /var/lock /dev/sda3 36G 31G 3.3G 91% /home fdisk -l /dev/[hmsv]d* Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders, total 156301488 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x2d4a2d49 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 2048 16771071 8384512 82 Linux swap / Solaris /dev/sda2 * 16771072 79681535 31455232 83 Linux /dev/sda3 79681536 156301311 38309888 83 Linux Disk /dev/sda1: 8585 MB, 8585740288 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1043 cylinders, total 16769024 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00000000 Disk /dev/sda1 doesn't contain a valid partition table Disk /dev/sda2: 32.2 GB, 32210157568 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 3915 cylinders, total 62910464 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00000000 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System Disk /dev/sda3: 39.2 GB, 39229325312 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4769 cylinders, total 76619776 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00000000 Disk /dev/sda3 doesn't contain a valid partition table vgs No volume groups found lvs No volume groups found output of vi /etc/samba/smb.conf # smb.conf is the main Samba configuration file. You find a full commented # version at /usr/share/doc/packages/samba/examples/smb.conf.SUSE if the # samba-doc package is installed. # Date: 2011-11-02 [global] workgroup = WORKGROUP passdb backend = tdbsam printing = cups printcap name = cups printcap cache time = 750 cups options = raw map to guest = Bad User include = /etc/samba/dhcp.conf logon path = \\%L\profiles\.msprofile logon home = \\%L\%U\.9xprofile logon drive = P: usershare allow guests = Yes [homes] comment = Home Directories valid users = %S, %D%w%S browseable = No read only = No inherit acls = Yes [profiles] comment = Network Profiles Service path = %H read only = No store dos attributes = Yes create mask = 0600 directory mask = 0700 [users] comment = All users path = /home read only = No inherit acls = Yes veto files = /aquota.user/groups/shares/ [groups] comment = All groups path = /home/groups read only = No inherit acls = Yes [printers] comment = All Printers path = /var/tmp printable = Yes create mask = 0600 browseable = No [print$] comment = Printer Drivers path = /var/lib/samba/drivers write list = @ntadmin root force group = ntadmin create mask = 0664 directory mask = 0775 [allusers] comment = All Users path = /home/shares/allusers valid users = @users force group = users create mask = 0660 directory mask = 0771 writable = yes

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• Migrating SQL Server Databases – The DBA’s Checklist (Part 2)

  - by Sadequl Hussain

  Continuing from Part 1  , our Migration Checklist continues: Step 5: Update statistics It is always a good idea to update the statistics of the database that you have just installed or migrated. To do this, run the following command against the target database: sp_updatestats The sp_updatestats system stored procedure runs the UPDATE STATISTICS command against every user and system table in the database.  However, a word of caution: running the sp_updatestats against a database with a compatibility level below 90 (SQL Server 2005) will reset the automatic UPDATE STATISTICS settings for every index and statistics of every table in the database. You may therefore want to change the compatibility mode before you run the command. Another thing you should remember to do is to ensure the new database has its AUTO_CREATE_STATISTICS and AUTO_UPDATE_STATISTICS properties set to ON. You can do so using the ALTER DATABASE command or from the SSMS. Step 6: Set database options You may have to change the state of a database after it has been restored. If the database was changed to single-user or read-only mode before backup, the restored copy will also retain these settings. This may not be an issue when you are manually restoring from Enterprise Manager or the Management Studio since you can change the properties. However, this is something to be mindful of if the restore process is invoked by an automated job or script and the database needs to be written to immediately after restore. You may want to check the database’s status programmatically in such cases. Another important option you may want to set for the newly restored / attached database is PAGE_VERIFY. This option specifies how you want SQL Server to ensure the physical integrity of the data. It is a new option from SQL Server 2005 and can have three values: CHECKSUM (default for SQL Server 2005 and latter databases), TORN_PAGE_DETECTION (default when restoring a pre-SQL Server 2005 database) or NONE. Torn page detection was itself an option for SQL Server 2000 databases. From SQL Server 2005, when PAGE_VERIFY is set to CHECKSUM, the database engine calculates the checksum for a page’s contents and writes it to the page header before storing it in disk. When the page is read from the disk, the checksum is computed again and compared with the checksum stored in the header.  Torn page detection works much like the same way in that it stores a bit in the page header for every 512 byte sector. When data is read from the page, the torn page bits stored in the header is compared with the respective sector contents. When PAGE_VERIFY is set to NONE, SQL Server does not perform any checking, even if torn page data or checksums are present in the page header.  This may not be something you would want to set unless there is a very specific reason.  Microsoft suggests using the CHECKSUM page verify option as this offers more protection. Step 7: Map database users to logins A common database migration issue is related to user access. Windows and SQL Server native logins that existed in the source instance and had access to the database may not be present in the destination. Even if the logins exist in the destination, the mapping between the user accounts and the logins will not be automatic. You can use a special system stored procedure called sp_change_users_login to address these situations. The procedure needs to be run against the newly attached or restored database and can accept four parameters. Depending on what you want to do, you may be using less than four though. The first parameter, @Action, can take three values. When you specify @Action = ‘Report’, the system will provide you with a list of database users which are not mapped to any login. If you want to map a database user to an existing SQL Server login, the value for @Action will be ‘Update_One’. In this case, you will only need to provide the database user name and the login it will map to. So if your newly restored database has a user account called “bob” and there is already a SQL Server login with the same name and you want to map the user to the login, you will execute a query like the following: sp_change_users_login         @Action = ‘Update_One’,         @UserNamePattern = ‘bob’,         @LoginName = ‘bob’ If the login does not exist, you can instruct SQL Server to create the login with the same name. In this case you will need to provide a password for the login and the value of the @Action parameter will be ‘Auto_Fix’. If the login already exists, it will be automatically mapped to the user account. Unfortunately sp_change_users_login system stored procedure cannot be used to map database users to trusted logins (Windows accounts) in SQL Server. You will need to follow a manual process to re-map the database user accounts.  Continues…

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• Generate Strongly Typed Observable Events for the Reactive Extensions for .NET (Rx)

  - by Bobby Diaz

  I must have tried reading through the various explanations and introductions to the new Reactive Extensions for .NET before the concepts finally started sinking in.  The article that gave me the ah-ha moment was over on SilverlightShow.net and titled Using Reactive Extensions in Silverlight.  The author did a good job comparing the "normal" way of handling events vs. the new "reactive" methods. Admittedly, I still have more to learn about the Rx Framework, but I wanted to put together a sample project so I could start playing with the new Observable and IObservable<T> constructs.  I decided to throw together a whiteboard application in Silverlight based on the Drawing with Rx example on the aforementioned article.  At the very least, I figured I would learn a thing or two about a new technology, but my real goal is to create a fun application that I can share with the kids since they love drawing and coloring so much! Here is the code sample that I borrowed from the article: var mouseMoveEvent = Observable.FromEvent<MouseEventArgs>(this, "MouseMove"); var mouseLeftButtonDown = Observable.FromEvent<MouseButtonEventArgs>(this, "MouseLeftButtonDown"); var mouseLeftButtonUp = Observable.FromEvent<MouseButtonEventArgs>(this, "MouseLeftButtonUp");       var draggingEvents = from pos in mouseMoveEvent                              .SkipUntil(mouseLeftButtonDown)                              .TakeUntil(mouseLeftButtonUp)                              .Let(mm => mm.Zip(mm.Skip(1), (prev, cur) =>                                  new                                  {                                      X2 = cur.EventArgs.GetPosition(this).X,                                      X1 = prev.EventArgs.GetPosition(this).X,                                      Y2 = cur.EventArgs.GetPosition(this).Y,                                      Y1 = prev.EventArgs.GetPosition(this).Y                                  })).Repeat()                          select pos;       draggingEvents.Subscribe(p =>     {         Line line = new Line();         line.Stroke = new SolidColorBrush(Colors.Black);         line.StrokeEndLineCap = PenLineCap.Round;         line.StrokeLineJoin = PenLineJoin.Round;         line.StrokeThickness = 5;         line.X1 = p.X1;         line.Y1 = p.Y1;         line.X2 = p.X2;         line.Y2 = p.Y2;         this.LayoutRoot.Children.Add(line);     }); One thing that was nagging at the back of my mind was having to deal with the event names as strings, as well as the verbose syntax for the Observable.FromEvent<TEventArgs>() method.  I came up with a couple of static/helper classes to resolve both issues and also created a T4 template to auto-generate these helpers for any .NET type.  Take the following code from the above example: var mouseMoveEvent = Observable.FromEvent<MouseEventArgs>(this, "MouseMove"); var mouseLeftButtonDown = Observable.FromEvent<MouseButtonEventArgs>(this, "MouseLeftButtonDown"); var mouseLeftButtonUp = Observable.FromEvent<MouseButtonEventArgs>(this, "MouseLeftButtonUp"); Turns into this with the new static Events class: var mouseMoveEvent = Events.Mouse.Move.On(this); var mouseLeftButtonDown = Events.Mouse.LeftButtonDown.On(this); var mouseLeftButtonUp = Events.Mouse.LeftButtonUp.On(this); Or better yet, just remove the variable declarations altogether:     var draggingEvents = from pos in Events.Mouse.Move.On(this)                              .SkipUntil(Events.Mouse.LeftButtonDown.On(this))                              .TakeUntil(Events.Mouse.LeftButtonUp.On(this))                              .Let(mm => mm.Zip(mm.Skip(1), (prev, cur) =>                                  new                                  {                                      X2 = cur.EventArgs.GetPosition(this).X,                                      X1 = prev.EventArgs.GetPosition(this).X,                                      Y2 = cur.EventArgs.GetPosition(this).Y,                                      Y1 = prev.EventArgs.GetPosition(this).Y                                  })).Repeat()                          select pos; The Move, LeftButtonDown and LeftButtonUp members of the Events.Mouse class are readonly instances of the ObservableEvent<TTarget, TEventArgs> class that provide type-safe access to the events via the On() method.  Here is the code for the class: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq;   namespace System.Linq {     /// <summary>     /// Represents an event that can be managed via the <see cref="Observable"/> API.     /// </summary>     /// <typeparam name="TTarget">The type of the target.</typeparam>     /// <typeparam name="TEventArgs">The type of the event args.</typeparam>     public class ObservableEvent<TTarget, TEventArgs> where TEventArgs : EventArgs     {         /// <summary>         /// Initializes a new instance of the <see cref="ObservableEvent"/> class.         /// </summary>         /// <param name="eventName">Name of the event.</param>         protected ObservableEvent(String eventName)         {             EventName = eventName;         }           /// <summary>         /// Registers the specified event name.         /// </summary>         /// <param name="eventName">Name of the event.</param>         /// <returns></returns>         public static ObservableEvent<TTarget, TEventArgs> Register(String eventName)         {             return new ObservableEvent<TTarget, TEventArgs>(eventName);         }           /// <summary>         /// Creates an enumerable sequence of event values for the specified target.         /// </summary>         /// <param name="target">The target.</param>         /// <returns></returns>         public IObservable<IEvent<TEventArgs>> On(TTarget target)         {             return Observable.FromEvent<TEventArgs>(target, EventName);         }           /// <summary>         /// Gets or sets the name of the event.         /// </summary>         /// <value>The name of the event.</value>         public string EventName { get; private set; }     } } And this is how it's used:     /// <summary>     /// Categorizes <see cref="ObservableEvents"/> by class and/or functionality.     /// </summary>     public static partial class Events     {         /// <summary>         /// Implements a set of predefined <see cref="ObservableEvent"/>s         /// for the <see cref="System.Windows.System.Windows.UIElement"/> class         /// that represent mouse related events.         /// </summary>         public static partial class Mouse         {             /// <summary>Represents the MouseMove event.</summary>             public static readonly ObservableEvent<UIElement, MouseEventArgs> Move =                 ObservableEvent<UIElement, MouseEventArgs>.Register("MouseMove");               // additional members omitted...         }     } The source code contains a static Events class with prefedined members for various categories (Key, Mouse, etc.).  There is also an Events.tt template that you can customize to generate additional event categories for any .NET type.  All you should have to do is add the name of your class to the types collection near the top of the template:     types = new Dictionary<String, Type>()     {         //{ "Microsoft.Maps.MapControl.Map, Microsoft.Maps.MapControl", null }         { "System.Windows.FrameworkElement, System.Windows", null },         { "Whiteboard.MainPage, Whiteboard", null }     }; The template is also a bit rough at this point, but at least it generates code that *should* compile.  Please let me know if you run into any issues with it.  Some people have reported errors when trying to use T4 templates within a Silverlight project, but I was able to get it to work with a little black magic...  You can download the source code for this project or play around with the live demo.  Just be warned that it is at a very early stage so don't expect to find much today.  I plan on adding alot more options like pen colors and sizes, saving, printing, etc. as time permits.  HINT: hold down the ESC key to erase! Enjoy! Additional Resources Using Reactive Extensions in Silverlight DevLabs: Reactive Extensions for .NET (Rx) Rx Framework Part III - LINQ to Events - Generating GetEventName() Wrapper Methods using T4

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• PASS Summit 2010 Recap

  - by AjarnMark

  Last week I attended my eighth PASS Summit in nine years, and every year it is a fantastic event!  I was fortunate my first year to have a contact (Bill Graziano (blog | Twitter) from SQLTeam) that I was expecting to meet, and who got me started on a good track of making new contacts.  Each year I have made a few more, and renewed friendships from years past.  Many of the attendees agree that the pure networking opportunities are one of the best benefits of attending the Summit.  And there’s a lot of great technical stuff, too, some of the things that stick out for me this year include… Pre-Con Monday: PowerShell with Allen White (blog | Twitter).  This was the first time that I attended a pre-con.  For those not familiar with the concept, the regular sessions for the conference are 75-90 minutes long.  For an extra fee, you can attend a full-day session on a single topic during a pre- or post-conference training day.  I had been meaning for several months to dive in and learn PowerShell, but just never seemed to find (or make) the time for it, so when I saw this was one of the all-day sessions, and I was planning to be there on Monday anyway, I decided to go for it.  And it was well worth it!  I definitely came out of there with a good foundation to build my own PowerShell scripts, plus several sample scripts that he showed which already cover the first four or five things I was planning to do with PowerShell anyway.  This looks like the right tool for me to build an automated version of our software deployment process, which right now contains many repeated steps.  Thanks Allen! Service Broker with Denny Cherry (blog | Twitter).  I remembered reading Denny’s blog post on Using Service Broker instead of Replication, and ever since then I have been thinking about using this to populate a new reporting-focused Data Repository that we will be building in the near future.  When I saw he was doing this session, I thought it would be great to get more information and be able to ask the author questions.  When I brought this idea back to my boss, he really liked it, as we had previously been discussing doing nightly data loads, with an option to manually trigger a mid-day load if up-to-the-minute data was needed for something.  If we go the Service Broker route, we can keep the Repository current in near real-time.  Hooray! DBA Mythbusters with Paul Randal (blog | Twitter).  Even though I read every one of the posts in Paul’s blog series of the same name, I had to go see the legend in person.  It was great, and I still learned something new! How to Conduct Effective Meetings with Joe Webb (blog | Twitter).  I always like to sit in on a session that Joe does.  I met Joe several years ago when both he and Bill Graziano were on the PASS Board of Directors together, and we have kept in touch.  Joe is very well-spoken and has great experience with both SQL Server and business.  And we could certainly use some pointers at my work (probably yours, too) on making our meetings more effective and to run on-time.  Of course, now that I’m the Chapter Leader for the Professional Development virtual chapter, I also had to sit in on this ProfDev session and recruit Joe to do a presentation or two for the chapter next year. Query Optimization with David DeWitt.  Anyone who has seen Dr. David DeWitt present the 3rd keynote at a PASS Summit over the last three years knows what a great time it is to sit and listen to him make some really complicated and advanced topic easy to understand (although it still makes your head hurt).  It still amazes me that the simple two-table join query from pubs that he used in his example can possibly have 22 million possible physical query plans.  Ouch! Exhibit Hall:  This year I spent more serious time in the exhibit hall than any year past.  I have talked my boss into making a significant (for us) investment in monitoring tools next year, and this was a great opportunity to talk with all the big-hitters.  Readers of mine may recall that I fell in love with the SQL Sentry Power Suite several months ago and wrote a blog entry about it just from the trial version.  Well as things turned out, short-term budget priorities shifted, and we weren’t able to make the purchase then.  I have it in the budget for next year, but since I was going to the Summit, my boss wanted me to look at the other options to see if this was really the one that we wanted.  I spent a couple of hours talking with representatives from Red-Gate, Idera, Confio, and Quest about their offerings, and giving them each the same 3 scenarios that I wanted to be able to accomplish based on the questions and issues that arise in our company.  It was interesting to discover the different approaches or “world view” that each vendor takes to the subject of performance monitoring and troubleshooting.  I may write a separate article that goes into this in more depth, but the product that best aligned with our point of view, and met the current needs we have is still the SQL Sentry Power Suite.  I’m not saying that the others are bad or wrong or anything like that, just that the way they tackled the issue did not align as well with our particular needs as does SQL Sentry’s product.  And that was something I learned too, when you go shopping for these products, you really need to know what you want to get from them.  It’s best if you have a few example scenarios from work that you can use to test out how well each tool fits your particular needs. Overall, another GREAT event.  I can’t wait to get the DVDs so I can sit in on a bunch of other sessions that I couldn’t get to because I was in one of the ones above.  And I can hardly wait until next year!

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• Simple-Talk development: a quick history lesson

  - by Michael Williamson

  Up until a few months ago, Simple-Talk ran on a pure .NET stack, with IIS as the web server and SQL Server as the database. Unfortunately, the platform for the site hadn’t quite gotten the love and attention it deserved. On the one hand, in the words of our esteemed editor Tony “I’d consider the current platform to be a “success”; it cost $10K, has lasted for 6 years, was finished, end to end in 6 months, and although we moan about it has got us quite a long way.” On the other hand, it was becoming increasingly clear that it needed some serious work. Among other issues, we had authors that wouldn’t blog because our current blogging platform, Community Server, was too painful for them to use. Forgetting about Simple-Talk for a moment, if you ask somebody what blogging platform they’d choose, the odds are they’d say WordPress. Regardless of its technical merits, it’s probably the most popular blogging platform, and it certainly seemed easier to use than Community Server. The issue was that WordPress is normally hosted on a Linux stack running PHP, Apache and MySQL — quite a difference from our Microsoft technology stack. We certainly didn’t want to rewrite the entire site — we just wanted a better blogging platform, with the rest of the existing, legacy site left as is. At a very high level, Simple-Talk’s technical design was originally very straightforward: when your browser sends an HTTP request to Simple-Talk, IIS (the web server) takes the request, does some work, and sends back a response. In order to keep the legacy site running, except with WordPress running the blogs, a different design is called for. We now use nginx as a reverse-proxy, which can then delegate requests to the appropriate application: So, when your browser sends a request to Simple-Talk, nginx takes that request and checks which part of the site you’re trying to access. Most of the time, it just passes the request along to IIS, which can then respond in much the same way it always has. However, if your request is for the blogs, then nginx delegates the request to WordPress. Unfortunately, as simple as that diagram looks, it hides an awful lot of complexity. In particular, the legacy site running on IIS was made up of four .NET applications. I’ve already mentioned one of these applications, Community Server, which handled the old blogs as well as managing membership and the forums. We have a couple of other applications to manage both our newsletters and our articles, and our own custom application to do some of the rendering on the site, such as the front page and the articles. When I say that it was made up of four .NET applications, this might conjure up an image in your mind of how they fit together: You might imagine four .NET applications, each with their own database, communicating over well-defined APIs. Sadly, reality was a little disappointing: We had four .NET applications that all ran on the same database. Worse still, there were many queries that happily joined across tables from multiple applications, meaning that each application was heavily dependent on the exact data schema that each other application used. Add to this that many of the queries were at least dozens of lines long, and practically identical to other queries except in a few key spots, and we can see that attempting to replace one component of the system would be more than a little tricky. However, the problems with the old system do give us a good place to start thinking about desirable qualities from any changes to the platform. Specifically: Maintainability — the tight coupling between each .NET application made it difficult to update any one application without also having to make changes elsewhere Replaceability — the tight coupling also meant that replacing one component wouldn’t be straightforward, especially if it wasn’t on a similar Microsoft stack. We’d like to be able to replace different parts without having to modify the existing codebase extensively Reusability — we’d like to be able to combine the different pieces of the system in different ways for different sites Repeatable deployments — rather than having to deploy the site manually with a long list of instructions, we should be able to deploy the entire site with a single command, allowing you to create a new instance of the site easily whether on production, staging servers, test servers or your own local machine Testability — if we can deploy the site with a single command, and each part of the site is no longer dependent on the specifics of how every other part of the site works, we can begin to run automated tests against the site, and against individual parts, both to prevent regressions and to do a little test-driven development In the next part, I’ll describe the high-level architecture we now have that hopefully brings us a little closer to these five traits.

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• I want to change DPI with Imagemagick without changing the actual byte-size of the image data

  - by user1694803

  I feel so horribly sorry that I have to ask this question here, but after hours of researching how to do an actually very simple task I'm still failing... In Gimp there is a very simple way to do what I want. I only have the German dialog installed but I'll try to translate it. I'm talking about going to "Picture-PrintingSize" and then adjusting the Values "X-Resolution" and "Y-Resolution" which are known to me as so called DPI values. You can also choose the format which by default is "Pixel/Inch". (In German the dialog is "Bild-Druckgröße" and there "X-Auflösung" and "Y-Auflösung") Ok, the values there are often "72" by default. When I change them to e.g. "300" this has the effect that the image stays the same on the computer, but if I print it, it will be smaller if you look at it, but all the details are still there, just smaller - it has a higher resolution on the printed paper (but smaller size... which is fine for me). I am often doing that when I am working with LaTeX, or to be exact with the command "pdflatex" on a recent Ubuntu-Machine. When I'm doing the above process with Gimp manually everything works just fine. The images will appear smaller in the resulting PDF but with high printing quality. What I am trying to do is to automate the process of going into Gimp and adjusting the DPI values. Since Imagemagick is known to be superb and I used it for many other tasks I tried to achieve my goal with this tool. But it does just not do what I want. After trying a lot of things I think this actually is be the command that should be my friend: convert input.png -density 300 output.png This should set the DPI to 300, as I can read everywhere in the web. It seems to work. When I check the file it stays the same. file input.png output.png input.png: PNG image data, 611 x 453, 8-bit grayscale, non-interlaced output.png: PNG image data, 611 x 453, 8-bit grayscale, non-interlaced When I use this command, it seems like it did what I wanted: identify -verbose output.png | grep 300 Resolution: 300x300 PNG:pHYs : x_res=300, y_res=300, units=0 (Funny enough, the same output comes for input.png which confuses me... so this might be the wrong parameters to watch?) But when I now render my TeX with "pdflatex" the image is still big and blurry. Also when I open the image with Gimp again the DPI values are set to "72" instead of "300". So there actually was no effect at all. Now what is the problem here. Am I getting something completely wrong? I can't be that wrong since everything works just fine with Gimp... Thanks for any help in this. I am also open to other automated solutions which are easily done on a Linux system...

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• OTN Architect Day Headed to Reston, VA - May 16

  - by Bob Rhubart

  In 2011 OTN Architect Day made stops in Chicago, Denver, Phoenix, Redwood Shores, and Toronto. The 2012 series begins with OTN Architect Day in Reston, VA on Wednesday May 16. Registration is now open for this free event, but don't get caught napping -- seating is limited, and the event is just 5 weeks away. The information below reflects the most recent updates to the event agenda, including the addition of Oracle ACE Director Kai Yu as the guest keynote speaker. Kai is Senior System Engineer / Architect at Dell, Inc., and has been very busy of late as a speaker at various industry and Oracle User Group events. I'm very happy Kai has agreed to make the trek from his hometown in Austin, TX to share his insight at the Architect Day event in Reston.  If you're in the area, put this one on your calendar. You won't be sorry.   Venue Sheraton Reston Hotel 11810 Sunrise Valley Drive Reston, VA 20191 Event Agenda 8:30 am - 9:00 am Registration and Continental Breakfast 9:00 am - 9:15 am Welcome and Opening Comments 9:15 am - 10:00 am Engineered Systems: Oracle's Vision for the Future | Ralf Dossman Oracle's Exadata and Exalogic are impressive products in their own right. But working in combination they deliver unparalleled transaction processing performance with up to a 30x increase over existing legacy systems, with the lowest cost of ownership over a 3 or 5 year basis than any other hardware. In this session you'll learn how to leverage Oracle's Engineered Systems within your enterprise to deliver record-breaking performance at the lowest TCO. 10:00 am - 10:30 am High Availability Infrastructure for Cloud Computing | Kai Yu Infrastructure high availability is extremely critical to Cloud Computing. In a Cloud system that hosts a large number of databases and applications with different SLAs, any unplanned outage can be devastating, and even a small planned downtime may be unacceptable. This presentation will discuss various technology solutions and the related best practices that system architects should consider in cloud infrastructure design to ensure high availability. 10:30 am - 10:45 am Break 10:45 am - 11:30 am Breakout Sessions: (pick one) Innovations in Grid Computing with Oracle Coherence | Bjorn Boe Learn how Coherence can increase the availability, scalability and performance of your existing applications with its advanced low-latency data-grid technologies. Also hear some interesting industry-specific use cases that customers had implemented and how Oracle is integrating Coherence into its Enterprise Java stack. Cloud Computing - Making IT Simple | Scott Mattoon The road to Cloud Computing is not without a few bumps. This session will help to smooth out your journey by tackling some of the potential complications. We'll examine whether standardization is a prerequisite for the Cloud. We'll look at why refactoring isn't just for application code. We'll check out deployable entities and their simplification via higher levels of abstraction. And we'll close out the session with a look at engineered systems and modular clouds. 11:30 pm - 12:15 pm Breakout Sessions: (pick one) Oracle Enterprise Manager | Joe Diemer Oracle Enterprise Manager (EM) provides complete lifecycle management for the cloud - from automated cloud setup to self-service delivery to cloud operations. In this session you'll learn how to take control of your cloud infrastructure with EM features including Consolidation Planning and Self-Service provisioning with Metering and Chargeback. Come hear how Oracle is expanding its management capabilities into the cloud! Rationalization and Defense in Depth - Two Steps Closer to the Clouds | Dave Chappelle Security represents one of the biggest concerns about cloud computing. In this session we'll get past the FUD with a real-world look at some key issues. We'll discuss the infrastructure necessary to support rationalization and security services, explore architecture for defense -in-depth, and deal frankly with the good, the bad, and the ugly in Cloud security. 12:15 pm - 1:15 pm Lunch 1:40 pm - 2:00 pm Panel Discussion - Q&A 2:00 pm - 2:45 pm Breakout Sessions: (pick one) 21st Century SOA | Peter Belknap Service Oriented Architecture has evolved from concept to reality in the last decade. The right methodology coupled with mature SOA technologies has helped customers demonstrate success in both innovation and ROI. In this session you will learn how Oracle SOA Suite's orchestration, virtualization, and governance capabilities provide the infrastructure to run mission critical business and system applications. And we'll take a special look at the convergence of SOA & BPM using Oracle's Unified technology stack. Track B: Oracle Cloud Reference Architecture | Anbu Krishnaswamy Cloud initiatives are beginning to dominate enterprise IT roadmaps. Successful adoption of Cloud and the subsequent governance challenges warrant a Cloud reference architecture that is applied consistently across the enterprise. This presentation gives an overview of Oracle's Cloud Reference Architecture, which is part of the Cloud Enterprise Technology Strategy (ETS). Concepts covered include common management layer capabilities, service models, resource pools, and use cases. 2:45 pm - 3:00 pm Break 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm Roundtable Discussions 4:00 pm - 4:15 pm Closing Comments & Readouts from Roundtable 4:15 pm - 5:00 pm Cocktail Reception / Networking Session schedule and content subject to change.

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• How to restore your production database without needing additional storage

  - by David Atkinson

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

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• How to restore your production database without needing additional storage

  - by David Atkinson

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

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• Solaris 11 pkg fix is my new friend

  - by user12611829

  While putting together some examples of the Solaris 11 Automated Installer (AI), I managed to really mess up my system, to the point where AI was completely unusable. This was my fault as a combination of unfortunate incidents left some remnants that were causing problems, so I tried to clean things up. Unsuccessfully. Perhaps that was a bad idea (OK, it was a terrible idea), but this is Solaris 11 and there are a few more tricks in the sysadmin toolbox. Here's what I did. # rm -rf /install/* # rm -rf /var/ai # installadm create-service -n solaris11-x86 --imagepath /install/solaris11-x86 \ -s [email protected] Warning: Service svc:/network/dns/multicast:default is not online. Installation services will not be advertised via multicast DNS. Creating service from: [email protected] DOWNLOAD PKGS FILES XFER (MB) SPEED Completed 1/1 130/130 264.4/264.4 0B/s PHASE ITEMS Installing new actions 284/284 Updating package state database Done Updating image state Done Creating fast lookup database Done Reading search index Done Updating search index 1/1 Creating i386 service: solaris11-x86 Image path: /install/solaris11-x86 So far so good. Then comes an oops..... setup-service[168]: cd: /var/ai//service/.conf-templ: [No such file or directory] ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ This is where you generally say a few things to yourself, and then promise to quit deleting configuration files and directories when you don't know what you are doing. Then you recall that the new Solaris 11 packaging system has some ability to correct common mistakes (like the one I just made). Let's give it a try. # pkg fix installadm Verifying: pkg://solaris/install/installadm ERROR dir: var/ai Group: 'root (0)' should be 'sys (3)' dir: var/ai/ai-webserver Missing: directory does not exist dir: var/ai/ai-webserver/compatibility-configuration Missing: directory does not exist dir: var/ai/ai-webserver/conf.d Missing: directory does not exist dir: var/ai/image-server Group: 'root (0)' should be 'sys (3)' dir: var/ai/image-server/cgi-bin Missing: directory does not exist dir: var/ai/image-server/images Group: 'root (0)' should be 'sys (3)' dir: var/ai/image-server/logs Missing: directory does not exist dir: var/ai/profile Missing: directory does not exist dir: var/ai/service Group: 'root (0)' should be 'sys (3)' dir: var/ai/service/.conf-templ Missing: directory does not exist dir: var/ai/service/.conf-templ/AI_data Missing: directory does not exist dir: var/ai/service/.conf-templ/AI_files Missing: directory does not exist file: var/ai/ai-webserver/ai-httpd-templ.conf Missing: regular file does not exist file: var/ai/service/.conf-templ/AI.db Missing: regular file does not exist file: var/ai/image-server/cgi-bin/cgi_get_manifest.py Missing: regular file does not exist Created ZFS snapshot: 2012-12-11-21:09:53 Repairing: pkg://solaris/install/installadm Creating Plan (Evaluating mediators): | DOWNLOAD PKGS FILES XFER (MB) SPEED Completed 1/1 3/3 0.0/0.0 0B/s PHASE ITEMS Updating modified actions 16/16 Updating image state Done Creating fast lookup database Done In just a few moments, IPS found the missing files and incorrect ownerships/permissions. Instead of reinstalling the system, or falling back to an earlier Live Upgrade boot environment, I was able to create my AI services and now all is well. # installadm create-service -n solaris11-x86 --imagepath /install/solaris11-x86 \ -s [email protected] Warning: Service svc:/network/dns/multicast:default is not online. Installation services will not be advertised via multicast DNS. Creating service from: [email protected] DOWNLOAD PKGS FILES XFER (MB) SPEED Completed 1/1 130/130 264.4/264.4 0B/s PHASE ITEMS Installing new actions 284/284 Updating package state database Done Updating image state Done Creating fast lookup database Done Reading search index Done Updating search index 1/1 Creating i386 service: solaris11-x86 Image path: /install/solaris11-x86 Refreshing install services Warning: mDNS registry of service solaris11-x86 could not be verified. Creating default-i386 alias Setting the default PXE bootfile(s) in the local DHCP configuration to: bios clients (arch 00:00): default-i386/boot/grub/pxegrub Refreshing install services Warning: mDNS registry of service default-i386 could not be verified. # installadm create-service -n solaris11u1-x86 --imagepath /install/solaris11u1-x86 \ -s [email protected] Warning: Service svc:/network/dns/multicast:default is not online. Installation services will not be advertised via multicast DNS. Creating service from: [email protected] DOWNLOAD PKGS FILES XFER (MB) SPEED Completed 1/1 514/514 292.3/292.3 0B/s PHASE ITEMS Installing new actions 661/661 Updating package state database Done Updating image state Done Creating fast lookup database Done Reading search index Done Updating search index 1/1 Creating i386 service: solaris11u1-x86 Image path: /install/solaris11u1-x86 Refreshing install services Warning: mDNS registry of service solaris11u1-x86 could not be verified. # installadm list Service Name Alias Of Status Arch Image Path ------------ -------- ------ ---- ---------- default-i386 solaris11-x86 on i386 /install/solaris11-x86 solaris11-x86 - on i386 /install/solaris11-x86 solaris11u1-x86 - on i386 /install/solaris11u1-x86 This is way way better than pkgchk -f in Solaris 10. I'm really beginning to like this new IPS packaging system.

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• xrandr shows two displays (LVDS1), but how can I use VGA1 only?

  - by Tom Fishman

  We're running Ubuntu 11 on this hardware: Foxconn R20-D2 Intel Atom D510 Intel NM10 Intel GMA 3150 Barebone There is no integrated display (it is a barebone box). I connected an external VGA to it. However xrandr shows two displays: Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1024 x 768, maximum 4096 x 4096 LVDS1 connected 1024x768+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 0mm x 0mm 1024x768 60.0*+ 800x600 60.3 56.2 640x480 59.9 VGA1 connected 1024x768+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 519mm x 324mm 1920x1200 60.0 + 1600x1200 60.0 1680x1050 60.0 1280x1024 76.0 75.0 72.0 60.0 1440x900 75.0 59.9 1152x864 75.0 1024x768 75.1 70.1 60.0* 832x624 74.6 800x600 72.2 75.0 60.3 640x480 72.8 75.0 66.7 60.0 720x400 70.1 But I don't have two displays. How can I get rid of LVDS1 and use only VGA1? The direct result is that I'm seeing a 1024x768 resolution on my VGA display, because the OS is using "mirror" mode which uses the lower resolution of the two. Turning off the mirror is not a solution. I want to fix it. Related logs: ... [ 20.019] (II) intel(0): Creating default Display subsection in Screen section "Default Screen Section" for depth/fbbpp 24/32 [ 20.019] (==) intel(0): Depth 24, (--) framebuffer bpp 32 [ 20.019] (==) intel(0): RGB weight 888 [ 20.019] (==) intel(0): Default visual is TrueColor [ 20.019] (II) intel(0): Integrated Graphics Chipset: Intel(R) Pineview G [ 20.019] (--) intel(0): Chipset: "Pineview G" [ 20.019] (**) intel(0): Relaxed fencing enabled [ 20.019] (**) intel(0): Wait on SwapBuffers? enabled [ 20.019] (**) intel(0): Triple buffering? enabled [ 20.019] (**) intel(0): Framebuffer tiled [ 20.019] (**) intel(0): Pixmaps tiled [ 20.020] (**) intel(0): 3D buffers tiled [ 20.020] (**) intel(0): SwapBuffers wait enabled [ 20.020] (==) intel(0): video overlay key set to 0x101fe [ 20.020] (II) intel(0): Output LVDS1 has no monitor section [ 20.020] (II) intel(0): found backlight control interface /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight [ 20.080] (II) intel(0): Output VGA1 has no monitor section [ 20.080] (II) intel(0): EDID for output LVDS1 [ 20.081] (II) intel(0): Not using default mode "320x240" (doublescan mode not supported) [ 20.081] (II) intel(0): Not using default mode "400x300" (doublescan mode not supported) [ 20.081] (II) intel(0): Not using default mode "400x300" (doublescan mode not supported) [ 20.081] (II) intel(0): Not using default mode "512x384" (doublescan mode not supported) ... [ 20.082] (II) intel(0): Not using default mode "960x600" (doublescan mode not supported) [ 20.082] (II) intel(0): Printing probed modes for output LVDS1 [ 20.082] (II) intel(0): Modeline "1024x768"x60.0 65.00 1024 1048 1184 1344 768 771 777 806 -hsync -vsync (48.4 kHz) [ 20.082] (II) intel(0): Modeline "800x600"x60.3 40.00 800 840 968 1056 600 601 605 628 +hsync +vsync (37.9 kHz) [ 20.082] (II) intel(0): Modeline "800x600"x56.2 36.00 800 824 896 1024 600 601 603 625 +hsync +vsync (35.2 kHz) [ 20.082] (II) intel(0): Modeline "640x480"x59.9 25.18 640 656 752 800 480 490 492 525 -hsync -vsync (31.5 kHz) [ 20.149] (II) intel(0): EDID for output VGA1 [ 20.149] (II) intel(0): Manufacturer: BNQ Model: 771b Serial#: 6595 [ 20.149] (II) intel(0): Year: 2008 Week: 16 [ 20.149] (II) intel(0): EDID Version: 1.3 [ 20.149] (II) intel(0): Analog Display Input, Input Voltage Level: 0.700/0.700 V ... [ 20.152] (II) intel(0): Modeline "640x480"x60.0 25.20 640 656 752 800 480 490 492 525 -hsync -vsync (31.5 kHz) [ 20.152] (II) intel(0): Modeline "720x400"x70.1 28.32 720 738 846 900 400 412 414 449 -hsync +vsync (31.5 kHz) [ 20.152] (II) intel(0): Output LVDS1 connected [ 20.152] (II) intel(0): Output VGA1 connected [ 20.152] (II) intel(0): Using exact sizes for initial modes [ 20.152] (II) intel(0): Output LVDS1 using initial mode 1024x768 [ 20.152] (II) intel(0): Output VGA1 using initial mode 1024x768 [ 20.152] (II) intel(0): Using default gamma of (1.0, 1.0, 1.0) unless otherwise stated. ...

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• Segfault when iterating over a map<string, string> and drawing its contents using SDL_TTF

  - by Michael Stahre

  I'm not entirely sure this question belongs on gamedev.stackexchange, but I'm technically working on a game and working with SDL, so it might not be entirely offtopic. I've written a class called DebugText. The point of the class is to have a nice way of printing values of variables to the game screen. The idea is to call SetDebugText() with the variables in question every time they change or, as is currently the case, every time the game's Update() is called. The issue is that when iterating over the map that contains my variables and their latest updated values, I get segfaults. See the comments in DrawDebugText() below, it specifies where the error happens. I've tried splitting the calls to it-first and it-second into separate lines and found that the problem doesn't always happen when calling it-first. It alters between it-first and it-second. I can't find a pattern. It doesn't fail on every call to DrawDebugText() either. It might fail on the third time DrawDebugText() is called, or it might fail on the fourth. Class header: #ifndef CLIENT_DEBUGTEXT_H #define CLIENT_DEBUGTEXT_H #include <Map> #include <Math.h> #include <sstream> #include <SDL.h> #include <SDL_ttf.h> #include "vector2.h" using std::string; using std::stringstream; using std::map; using std::pair; using game::Vector2; namespace game { class DebugText { private: TTF_Font* debug_text_font; map<string, string>* debug_text_list; public: void SetDebugText(string var, bool value); void SetDebugText(string var, float value); void SetDebugText(string var, int value); void SetDebugText(string var, Vector2 value); void SetDebugText(string var, string value); int DrawDebugText(SDL_Surface*, SDL_Rect*); void InitDebugText(); void Clear(); }; } #endif Class source file: #include "debugtext.h" namespace game { // Copypasta function for handling the toString conversion template <class T> inline string to_string (const T& t) { stringstream ss (stringstream::in | stringstream::out); ss << t; return ss.str(); } // Initializes SDL_TTF and sets its font void DebugText::InitDebugText() { if(TTF_WasInit()) TTF_Quit(); TTF_Init(); debug_text_font = TTF_OpenFont("LiberationSans-Regular.ttf", 16); TTF_SetFontStyle(debug_text_font, TTF_STYLE_NORMAL); } // Iterates over the current debug_text_list and draws every element on the screen. // After drawing with SDL you need to get a rect specifying the area on the screen that was changed and tell SDL that this part of the screen needs to be updated. this is done in the game's Draw() function // This function sets rects_to_update to the new list of rects provided by all of the surfaces and returns the number of rects in the list. These two parameters are used in Draw() when calling on SDL_UpdateRects(), which takes an SDL_Rect* and a list length int DebugText::DrawDebugText(SDL_Surface* screen, SDL_Rect* rects_to_update) { if(debug_text_list == NULL) return 0; if(!TTF_WasInit()) InitDebugText(); rects_to_update = NULL; // Specifying the font color SDL_Color font_color = {0xff, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00}; // r, g, b, unused int row_count = 0; string line; // The iterator variable map<string, string>::iterator it; // Gets the iterator and iterates over it for(it = debug_text_list->begin(); it != debug_text_list->end(); it++) { // Takes the first value (the name of the variable) and the second value (the value of the parameter in string form) //---------THIS LINE GIVES ME SEGFAULTS----- line = it->first + ": " + it->second; //------------------------------------------ // Creates a surface with the text on it that in turn can be rendered to the screen itself later SDL_Surface* debug_surface = TTF_RenderText_Solid(debug_text_font, line.c_str(), font_color); if(debug_surface == NULL) { // A standard check for errors fprintf(stderr, "Error: %s", TTF_GetError()); return NULL; } else { // If SDL_TTF did its job right, then we now set a destination rect row_count++; SDL_Rect dstrect = {5, 5, 0, 0}; // x, y, w, h dstrect.x = 20; dstrect.y = 20*row_count; // Draws the surface with the text on it to the screen int res = SDL_BlitSurface(debug_surface,NULL,screen,&dstrect); if(res != 0) { //Just an error check fprintf(stderr, "Error: %s", SDL_GetError()); return NULL; } // Creates a new rect to specify the area that needs to be updated with SDL_Rect* new_rect_to_update = (SDL_Rect*) malloc(sizeof(SDL_Rect)); new_rect_to_update->h = debug_surface->h; new_rect_to_update->w = debug_surface->w; new_rect_to_update->x = dstrect.x; new_rect_to_update->y = dstrect.y; // Just freeing the surface since it isn't necessary anymore SDL_FreeSurface(debug_surface); // Creates a new list of rects with room for the new rect SDL_Rect* newtemp = (SDL_Rect*) malloc(row_count*sizeof(SDL_Rect)); // Copies the data from the old list of rects to the new one memcpy(newtemp, rects_to_update, (row_count-1)*sizeof(SDL_Rect)); // Adds the new rect to the new list newtemp[row_count-1] = *new_rect_to_update; // Frees the memory used by the old list free(rects_to_update); // And finally redirects the pointer to the old list to the new list rects_to_update = newtemp; newtemp = NULL; } } // When the entire map has been iterated over, return the number of lines that were drawn, ie. the number of rects in the returned rect list return row_count; } // The SetDebugText used by all the SetDebugText overloads // Takes two strings, inserts them into the map as a pair void DebugText::SetDebugText(string var, string value) { if (debug_text_list == NULL) { debug_text_list = new map<string, string>(); } debug_text_list->erase(var); debug_text_list->insert(pair<string, string>(var, value)); } // Writes the bool to a string and calls SetDebugText(string, string) void DebugText::SetDebugText(string var, bool value) { string result; if (value) result = "True"; else result = "False"; SetDebugText(var, result); } // Does the same thing, but uses to_string() to convert the float void DebugText::SetDebugText(string var, float value) { SetDebugText(var, to_string(value)); } // Same as above, but int void DebugText::SetDebugText(string var, int value) { SetDebugText(var, to_string(value)); } // Vector2 is a struct of my own making. It contains the two float vars x and y void DebugText::SetDebugText(string var, Vector2 value) { SetDebugText(var + ".x", to_string(value.x)); SetDebugText(var + ".y", to_string(value.y)); } // Empties the list. I don't actually use this in my code. Shame on me for writing something I don't use. void DebugText::Clear() { if(debug_text_list != NULL) debug_text_list->clear(); } }

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• Selling Visual Studio ALM

  - by Tarun Arora

  Introduction As a consultant I have been selling Application Lifecycle Management services using Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server. I’ve been contacted various times by friends working in organization telling me that ALM processes in their company were benchmarked when dinosaurs walked the earth. Most of these individuals already know the great features Microsoft ALM tools offer and are keen to start a conversation with the CIO but don’t exactly know where to start. It is very important how you engage in your first conversation, if you start the conversation with ‘There is this great tooling from Microsoft which offers amazing features to boost developer productivity, … ‘ from experience I can tell you the reply from your CIO would be ‘I already know! Our existing landscape has a combination of bleeding edge open source and cutting edge licensed tools which already cover these features quite well, more over Microsoft products have a high licensing cost associated to them.’ You will always find it harder to sell by feature, the trick is to highlight the gap in the existing processes & tools and then highlight the impact of these gaps to the overall development processes, by now you would have captured enough attention to show off how the ALM tooling offered by Microsoft not only fills those gaps but offers great value adds to take their development practices to the next level. Rangers ALM Assessment Guide Image 1 – Welcome! First look at the Rangers ALM assessment guide Most organization already have some processes in place to cover aspects of ALM. How do you go about proving that there isn’t enough cover in place? This is where Visual Studio ALM Rangers ALM Assessment guide can help. The ALM assessment guide is really a tool that helps you gather information about Development practices and processes within a customer's environment. Several questionnaires are used to identify the current state of individual development lifecycle areas and decide on a desired state for those processes. It also presents guidance and roll-up summaries to help with recommendations moving forward. The ALM Rangers assessment guide can be downloaded from here. Image 2 – ALM Assessment guide divided into different functions of SDLC The assessment guide is divided into different functions of Software Development Lifecycle (listed below), this gives you the ability to access how mature the company is in different areas of SDLC. Architecture & Design Requirement Engineering & UX Development Software Configuration Management Governance Deployment & Operations Testing & Quality Assurance Project Planning & Management Each section has a set of questions, fill in the assessment by selecting “Never/Sometimes/Always” from the Answer column in the question sheets.  Each answer has weightage to the overall score. Each question has a link next to it, clicking the link takes you to the Reference sheet which gives you more details about the question along with a reason for “why you need to ask this question?”, “other ways to phrase the question” and “what to expect as an answer from the customer”. The trick is to engage the customer in a discussion. You need to probe a lot, listen to the customer and have a discussion with several team members, preferably without management to ensure that you receive candid feedback. This reminds me of a funny incident when during an ALM review a customer told me that they have a sophisticated semi-automated application deployment process, further discussions revealed that deployment actually involved 72 manual configuration steps per production node. Such observations can be recorded in the Issue Brainstorming worksheet for further consideration later. It is also worth mentioning the different levels of ALM maturity to the customer. By default the desired state of ALM maturity is set to Standard, it is possible to set a desired state by area, you should strive for Advanced or Dynamic, it always helps by explaining the classification and advantages. Image 3 – ALM levels by description The ALM assessment guide helps you arrive at a quantitative measure of the company’s ALM maturity. The resultant graph plotted on a spider’s web shows you the company’s current state of ALM maturity and the desired state of ALM maturity. Further since the results are classified by area you can immediately spot the areas where the customer needs immediate help. Image 4 – The spiders web! The red cross icons are areas shouting out for immediate attention, the yellow exclamation icons are areas that need improvement. These icons are calculated on the difference between the Current State of ALM maturity VS the Desired state of ALM maturity. Image 5 – Results by area Conclusion To conclude the Rangers ALM assessment guide gives you the ability to, Measure the customer’s current ALM maturity level Understand the ALM maturity level the customer desires to achieve Capture a healthy list of issues the customer wants to brainstorm further Now What’s next…? Download and get started with the Rangers ALM Assessment Guide. If you have successfully captured the above listed three pieces of information you are in a great state to make recommendations on the identified areas highlighting the benefits that Visual Studio ALM tools would offer. In the next post I will be covering how to take the ALM assessment results as the base to actually convert your recommendation into a sell.  Remember to subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TarunArora. I would love to hear your feedback! If you have any recommendations on things that I should consider or any questions or feedback, feel free to leave a comment. *** A special thanks goes out to fellow ranges Willy, Ethem and Philip for reviewing the blog post and providing valuable feedback. ***

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• SQL Saturday 43 in Redmond

  - by AjarnMark

  I attended my first SQLSaturday a couple of days ago, SQLSaturday #43 in Redmond (at Microsoft).  I got there really early, primarily because I forgot how fast I can get there from my home when nobody else is on the road.  On a weekday in rush hour traffic, that would have taken two hours to get there.  I gave myself 90 minutes, and actually got there in about 45.  Crazy! I made the mistake of going to the main Microsoft campus, but that’s not where the event was being held.  Instead it was in a big Microsoft conference center on the other side of the highway.  Fortunately, I had the address with me and quickly realized my mistake.  When I got back on track, I noticed that there were bright yellow signs out on the street corner that looked like they said they were for SOL Saturday, which actually was appropriate since it was the sunniest day around here in a long time. Since I was there so early, the registration was just getting setup, so I found Greg Larsen who was coordinating things and offered to help.  He put me to work with a group of people organizing the pre-printed raffle tickets and stuffing swag bags. I had never been to a SQLSaturday before this one, so I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect even though I have read about a few on some blogs.  It makes sense that each one will be a little bit different since they are almost completely volunteer driven, and the whole concept is still in its early stages.  I have been to the PASS Summit for the last several years, and was hoping for a smaller version of that.  Now, it’s not really fair to compare one free day of training run entirely by volunteers with a multi-day, $1,000+ event put on under the direction of a professional event management company.  But there are some parallels. At this SQLSaturday, there was no opening general session, just coffee and pastries in the common area / expo hallway and straight into the first group of sessions.  I don’t know if that was because there was no single room large enough to hold everyone, or for other reasons.  This worked out okay, but the organization guy in me would have preferred to have even a 15 minute welcome message from the organizers with a little overview of the day.  Even something as simple as, “Thanks to persons X, Y, and Z for helping put this together…Sessions will start in 20 minutes and are all in rooms down this hallway…the bathrooms are on the other side of the conference center…lunch today is pizza and we would like to thank sponsor Q for providing it.”  It doesn’t need to be much, certainly not a full-blown Keynote like at the PASS Summit, but something to use as a rallying point to pull everyone together and get the day off to an official start would be nice.  Again, there may have been logistical reasons why that was not feasible here.  I’m just putting out my thoughts for other SQLSaturday coordinators to consider. The event overall was great.  I believe that there were over 300 in attendance, and everything seemed to run smoothly.  At least from an attendee’s point of view where there was plenty of muffins in the morning and pizza in the afternoon, with plenty of pop to drink.  And hey, if you’ve got the food and drink covered, a lot of other stuff could go wrong and people will be very forgiving.  But as I said, everything appeared to run pretty smoothly, at least until Buck Woody showed up in his Oracle shirt.  Other than that, the volunteers did a great job! I was a little surprised by how few people in my own backyard that I know.  It makes sense if you really think about it, given how many companies must be using SQL Server around here.  I guess I just got spoiled coming into the PASS Summit with a few contacts that I already knew would be there.  Perhaps I have been spending too much time with too few people at the Summits and I need to step out and meet more folks.  Of course, it also is different since the Summit is the big national event and a number of the folks I know are spread out across the country, so the Summit is the only time we’re all in the same place at the same time.  I did make a few new contacts at SQLSaturday, and bumped into a couple of people that I knew (and a couple others that I only knew from Twitter, and didn’t even realize that they were here in the area). Other than the sheer entertainment value of Buck Woody’s session, the one that was probably the greatest value for me was a quick introduction to PowerShell.  I have not done anything with it yet, but I think it will be a good tool to use to implement my plans for automated database recovery testing.  I saw just enough at the session to take away some of the intimidation factor, and I am getting ready to jump in and see what I can put together in the next few weeks.  And that right there made the investment worthwhile.  So I encourage you, if you have the opportunity to go to a SQLSaturday event near you, go for it!

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