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• IPgallery banks on Solaris SPARC

  - by Frederic Pariente

  IPgallery is a global supplier of converged legacy and Next Generation Networks (NGN) products and solutions, including: core network components and cloud-based Value Added Services (VAS) for voice, video and data sessions. IPgallery enables network operators and service providers to offer advanced converged voice, chat, video/content services and rich unified social communications in a combined legacy (fixed/mobile), Over-the-Top (OTT) and Social Community (SC) environments for home and business customers. Technically speaking, this offer is a scalable and robust telco solution enabling operators to offer new services while controlling operating expenses (OPEX). In its solutions, IPgallery leverages the following Oracle components: Oracle Solaris, Netra T4 and SPARC T4 in order to provide a competitive and scalable solution without the price tag often associated with high-end systems. Oracle Solaris Binary Application Guarantee A unique feature of Oracle Solaris is the guaranteed binary compatibility between releases of the Solaris OS. That means, if a binary application runs on Solaris 2.6 or later, it will run on the latest release of Oracle Solaris.  IPgallery developed their application on Solaris 9 and Solaris 10 then runs it on Solaris 11, without any code modification or rebuild. The Solaris Binary Application Guarantee helps IPgallery protect their long-term investment in the development, training and maintenance of their applications. Oracle Solaris Image Packaging System (IPS) IPS is a new repository-based package management system that comes with Oracle Solaris 11. It provides a framework for complete software life-cycle management such as installation, upgrade and removal of software packages. IPgallery leverages this new packaging system in order to speed up and simplify software installation for the R&D and production environments. Notably, they use IPS to deliver Solaris Studio 12.3 packages as part of the rapid installation process of R&D environments, and during the production software deployment phase, they ensure software package integrity using the built-in verification feature. Solaris IPS thus improves IPgallery's time-to-market with a faster, more reliable software installation and deployment in production environments. Extreme Network Performance IPgallery saw a huge improvement in application performance both in CPU and I/O, when running on SPARC T4 architecture in compared to UltraSPARC T2 servers.  The same application (with the same activation environment) running on T2 consumes 40%-50% CPU, while it consumes only 10% of the CPU on T4. The testing environment comprised of: Softswitch (Call management), TappS (Telecom Application Server) and Billing Server running on same machine and initiating various services in capacity of 1000 CAPS (Call Attempts Per Second). In addition, tests showed a huge improvement in the performance of the TCP/IP stack, which reduces network layer processing and in the end Call Attempts latency. Finally, there is a huge improvement within the file system and disk I/O operations; they ran all tests with maximum logging capability and it didn't influence any benchmark values. "Due to the huge improvements in performance and capacity using the T4-1 architecture, IPgallery has engineered the solution with less hardware.  This means instead of deploying the solution on six T2-based machines, we will deploy on 2 redundant machines while utilizing Oracle Solaris Zones and Oracle VM for higher availability and virtualization" Shimon Lichter, VP R&D, IPgallery In conclusion, using the unique combination of Oracle Solaris and SPARC technologies, IPgallery is able to offer solutions with much lower TCO, while providing a higher level of service capacity, scalability and resiliency. This low-OPEX solution enables the operator, the end-customer, to deliver a high quality service while maintaining high profitability.

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• Strange Happenings

  - by MOSSLover

  There are weeks we go about our life thinking nothing is going to change nothing will happen.  Then there are other weeks a billion things happen at once.  Friday started off very weird for me.  I flew into Atlanta and I met some cool people for another SharePoint event.  I had some good conversations.  Saturday then hit me and my virtual machine bombed in my presentation after the auto updater ran.  I was writing code on the board and describing everything in notepad.  I would say as presentations go it was the best and the worst presentation all wrapped into one.  The next day I was in Baltimore and I hung out with my aunt which was relatively uneventful and great.  Then Monday hit and half my presentations failed or succeeded and my screen freezes so I start describing the code.  I was on top of my game until Monday night.  On top of the world.  I'm exhausted I get into Raleigh and one of the craziest stories of my life happens.  So my boss has been renting cars through Priceline this week I got a different company than the other weeks. The company gives me a Ford Focus and I plug in the coordinates on my IPhone where I want go.  I head out and then I get to the destination hotel (or I thought I did). I go inside it's the wrong hotel the other one is a few miles away.  I walk outside hop into the car and it sounds like a gunshot.  Nothing is starting...Am I doing something wrong?  No I'm not the car is completely dead in the water.  I call the rental car facility and they tell me to call roadside they are closing for the night.  Roadside says they can't give me a new car but they can get me a jump then I have to take it up with the facility.  They send me a tow truck to give me a jump the guy can't jump the car.  He tells me this vehicle was towed about an hour ago.  He shows me a copy of a slip from when he towed it.  We also notice the rental car company left one of there price scanning guns in the vehicle.  I call up roadside and now they are interested in getting me a car because I need to be onsite tomorrow.  They get the manager of the facility on the phone he apologizes profusely and he says he'll be there in 10 minutes.  About 30 minutes pass and him plus another dude show up with a Ford Escape leather interior.  At this point I hand him the gun tell him someone left it in the vehicle and that I'm not so happy with them.  I ask them to comp my rental they can't due to Priceline, however if I call him again this week he can get me a voucher.  It's about 2 am and I'm ready to get to the hotel I don't make it in the next morning until 10 am.  I would say this was a crazy week all forms of technology are trying to tell me something.  What I have no idea, but we'll see the outcome soon.  I feel so weird tons of change is about to happen.  I don't know if it's good or bad.  I think this week is some form of omen.

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• My Tech Ed North America Preview - Certification Edition

  - by Chris Gardner

  In my previous TechEd North America Preview, I addressed all the content I wanted to see at the show. This time, we shall turn our attention to the certifications I might try to pick up. If you have never been to TechEd North America before, one of the greatest things about the event is an on-site certification center. If you have a couple hours to spare, you can walk up to a test. The first test on my agenda is 70-5231. I took this update test once, but did not do well on the MVC portion2. A few practice tests later, and I think I'm ready to fake that section. After that, I need to complete my road to being a master. The good folks here at work have been having a real love / hate relationship with the idea of me become an MCM in SQL Server3. Of course, before I do that, I need to finally take the SQL Administration tests. Thus, we shall add 70-4324 and 70-4505 to the list. Speaking of MCM, TechEd North America will have a special on test 88-9706. This test is normally $500, and you have to find a place to take it7. However, there is a special 50% off rate for people who take it on location. With those kind of prices, I may just take it as a form of study guide. As a final push, I may take some Windows Phone exams. I mentioned in my previous post that I may attend the 70-5998 Exam Cram session. Unfortunately, I will be staffing the Hands-On-Lab at that time. As we know, this has never stopped me from taking a test. This may lead to fits of 70-5069, but after we've come this far... That should complete my list. Do I really think I'll find time to take 6 tests at TechEd North America? Probably not. I have done it at TechEd North America before, but that was before I was TechEd North America staff. I also had a co-worker pass 9 in one year, but he basically did nothing but travel to Orlando in 2007 to take tests. And what's the point of attending a HUGE conference if you don't network? Of course, networking will have to wait for Friday's post... 1 Upgrade: Transition Your MCPD .NET Framework 3.5 Web Developer Skills to MCPD .NET Framework 4 Web Developer 2Because I never have used, nor do I really think I ever will use, MVC... 3By that, I mean they love the idea, and they hate the price 4Microsoft SQL Server 2008, Implementation and Maintenance 5PRO: Designing, Optimizing and Maintaining a Database Administrative Solution Using Microsoft SQL Server 2008 6SQL Server 2008 Microsoft Certified Master: Knowledge Exam 7Which isn't nearly as expensive as the Lab Exam, nor as difficult to find a location. However, it is not offered at every testing facility. 8PRO: Designing and Developing Windows Phone Applications 9TS: Silverlight 4, Development

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• Windows Phone 7 Review &ndash; Part 1: LG Quantum

  - by Nikita Polyakov

  As many of my fellow geeks, I ran out and got a retail windows Phone 7 on the first day. Just had to have it :) I’ve had the developer prototypes in my hands for previous 3 months on and off, so I finally wanted to have one I call my own. I’ve rushed the Launch   I’ve checked out both AT&T and T-Mobile offerings on day 1 and decided on a Samsung Focus. Great screen, super light and thin. If you don’t believe me that this phone can compete with the best of the non-Phone 7 offerings - get it in your hand to compare for yourself. I have to say that even though the on-screen keyboard on Windows Phone 7 is one of the best, the amount of text I write on my phone and my expectation of how long that takes for a short reply are very high. Also the phone being so slick and sexy did not feel solid or confident in my hand or pocket. As the dust settled   Arrives the LG Quantum – now on AT&T and worldwide. First impression of the softer plastic, the back battery cover is solid metal - the entire phone feels solid and indestructible! Phone fits just right in my hand, it’s almost too good. It does not feel like it will crack in your jeans. I feel safe holding it and don’t feel like if I or someone were to bump into me walking it’d fly out of my hand. I’ve dropped and had thrown the Focus a few times on accident as it’s weight is negligible. I won’t even dream of lying the first day adjusting to a 3.5’ LCD screen from the Samsung’s blistering bright and poppy AMOLED 4’ was hard. But the colors and sharpness are still very good. I find it almost easier on the eyes actually for day to day use.  I had a chance to lay the phone down in the line with the prototypes and final versions of other phones that had LCD screens – LG makes HTC looks like a budget LCD compared to a high end LCD in the home theatre department. I am consistently complemented by friends that have the HD7 or Surround on how much better my screen looks. The screen just looks like the most color correct phone out of the line up. Even next to Samsung it makes it look oversaturated, but can’t match the true blacks compensating with true white.   Day to Day Usability   What I also noticed that is a huge difference is how much I am not accidently hitting the soft keys at the bottom. I real pain on Focus since holding it in am average size hand already would accidently touch the controls at the bottom. QWERTY keyboard on this phone is great. It’s like the mission for LG is “make it solid!”. Keyboard has a very durable feel.   LG’s has a secret wild card though is the DLNA support. If you seen an ad for it, you should. Imagine this – playing a song from your phone straight to your network connected A/V receiver. Done. Pictures to TV. Done. Video. Done. DLNA works with components that advertise to as well as Windows 7, XBOX 360 and other consoles.  I will write an extensive review of that experience in near future. LG Exclusive apps – from panorama photo taker to voice to text translator and even look-n-type app that works like a backup inverse camera, there is quite a bit there that won’t be found on the other phones. I’ll review those in more detail in another segment. Conclusion So for a quick comparison: If you want a phone that is super thin, light and is core reference of a Windows Phone 7 – Samsung Focus it is. If you want a great phone with solid secure feel, real keyboard, media features - the hands down winner is LG Quantum.   You can pick up the LG Quantum at AT&T in US and worldwide as LG Optimus 7Q.   Final thought: I have not had SmartPhone that I felt was a reliable trusty primary communication device since Samsung BlackJack II, this time the LG got the crown.   [ Disclosure: Phone was provided to me free of charge. That has been the case for all of my phones for years, nothing new - I get them all. ]

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• Nest reinvents smoke detectors. Introduces smart and talking smoke detector that keeps quite when you wave

  - by Gopinath

  Nest, the leading smart thermostat maker has introduced a smart home device today- Nest Protect, a smart, talking smoke & carbon monoxide detector that can quite when you wave your hand. Less annoyances and more intelligence Smoke detectors are around for hundreds of years and playing a major role in providing safety from fire accidents at home. But the technology of these devices is stale and there is no major innovation for the past several years. With the introduction of Nest Protect, the landscape of smoke detectors is all set to change just like how Nest thermostat redefined the industry two years ago. Nest Protect is internet enabled and equipped with motion- and smoke-detection sensors so that when it starts beeping you can silence it by waving hand instead of doing circus feats to turn off the alarm. Everyone who cooks in a home equipped with smoke detector would know how annoying it is to turn off sensitive smoke detectors that goes off control quite often. Apart from addressing the annoyances of regular smoke detector, Nest Protect has talking capabilities. It can alert users with clear & actionable instructions when it detects a danger. Instead of harsh beeps it actually speak to you so you know what is happening. It will tell you what smoke it has detected and in which room it is detected. Multiple Nest Protects installed in a home can communicate with each other. Lets say that there is a smoke in bed room, the Nest Protect installed in bed room shares this information to all Nest Protects installed in the home and your kitchen device can alert you that there is a smoke in bed room. There is an App for that The internet enabled Nest Protect has an app to view its status and various alerts. When the Protect is running on low battery it alerts you to replace them soon. If there is a smoke at home and you are away, you will get message alerts. The app works on all major smartphones as well as tablets. Auto shuts down gas furnaces/heaters on smoke Apart from forming a network with other Nest Protect devices installed at home, they can also communicate with Nest Thermostat if it is installed. When carbon monoxide is detected it can shut off your gas furnace automatically. Also with the help of motion detectors it improves Nest Thermostat’s auto-away functionality. It looks elegant and costs a lot more than a regular smoke detector Just like Nest Thermostat, Nest Protect is elegant and adorable. You just fall in love with it the moment you see it. It’s another master piece from the designer of Apple’s iPod. All is good with the Nest Protect, except the price!! It costs whooping $129, which is almost 4 times more expensive than the best selling conventional thermostats available at $30. A single bed room apartment would require at least 3 detectors and it costs around $390 to install Nest Protects compared to 90$ required for conventional smoke detectors. Though Nest Thermostat is an expensive one compared to conventional thermostats, it offered great savings through its intelligent auto-away feature. Users were able to able to see returns on their investments. If Nest Protect also can provide good return on investment the it will be very successful.

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• Problem with ebay AddItem API call [migrated]

  - by user1323572

  I am totally new to any sort of API application. Right now I am creating a listing application to list items on E-bay India site. API version being used is 767, sandbox url is https://api.sandbox.ebay.com/wsapi. I have sandbox account for ebay(buyer/seller) and developer account. I am getting error saying: 1) Sales Tax / VAT was dropped from the listing as per new sales tax / VAT policy. The items will be listed successfully, you may revise the listing to specify all inclusive price. 2) You have either not registered or are having problem with your payment method registration. ItemType type = new ItemType(); type.PaymentMethods = new BuyerPaymentMethodCodeTypeCollection(); type.PaymentMethods.Add(BuyerPaymentMethodCodeType.PaisaPayAccepted); Also do I have to specify taxation for each state? For VAT and shipping details here's my snippet: private ShippingDetailsType getShippingDetails() { // Shipping details. ShippingDetailsType sd = new ShippingDetailsType(); SalesTaxType salesTax = new SalesTaxType(); ReadSettings rs = new ReadSettings(); rs.GetSettings(); salesTax.SalesTaxPercent = 12f; salesTax.SalesTaxState = "MH"; SalesTaxType s = new SalesTaxType(); salesTax.ShippingIncludedInTax = true; salesTax.ShippingIncludedInTaxSpecified = true; sd.ApplyShippingDiscount = true; AmountType at = new AmountType(); at.Value = 2.8; at.currencyID = CurrencyCodeType.INR; sd.InsuranceFee = at; sd.InsuranceOption = InsuranceOptionCodeType.NotOffered; sd.PaymentInstructions = "These are my instructions."; VATDetailsType vd = new VATDetailsType(); vd.BusinessSeller = false; vd.BusinessSellerSpecified = false; vd.RestrictedToBusiness = false; vd.RestrictedToBusinessSpecified = false; vd.VATID = "VATSNO1234567890"; vd.VATPercent = 12f; vd.VATPercentSpecified = true; vd.VATSite = "None"; sd.ShippingType = ShippingTypeCodeType.Flat; // ShippingServiceOptionsType st1 = new ShippingServiceOptionsType(); sd.SalesTax = salesTax; st1.ShippingService = ShippingServiceCodeType.IN_Express.ToString(); at = new AmountType(); at.Value = 50; at.currencyID = CurrencyCodeType.INR; st1.ShippingServiceAdditionalCost = at; at = new AmountType(); at.Value = 50; at.currencyID = CurrencyCodeType.INR; st1.ShippingServiceCost = at; st1.ShippingServicePriority = 1; at = new AmountType(); at.Value = 1.0; at.currencyID = CurrencyCodeType.INR; st1.ShippingInsuranceCost = at; sd.ShippingServiceOptions = new ShippingServiceOptionsTypeCollection(new ShippingServiceOptionsType[] { st1 }); return sd; } Thank you for you efforts.

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama Top 10 for September 9-15, 2012

  - by Bob Rhubart

  The Top 10 most-viewed items shared on the OTN ArchBeat Facebook page for the week of September 9-15, 2017. 15 Lessons from 15 Years as a Software Architect | Ingo Rammer In this presentation from the GOTO Conference in Copenhagen, Ingo Rammer shares 15 tips regarding people, complexity and technology that he learned doing software architecture for 15 years. Attend OTN Architect Day – by Architects, for Architects – October 25 You won't need 3D glasses to take in these live presentations (8 sessions, two tracks) on Cloud computing, SOA, and engineered systems. And the ticket price is: Zero. Nothing. Absolutely free. Register now for Oracle Technology Network Architect Day in Los Angeles. Thursday October 25, 2012, 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. Sofitel Los Angeles , 8555 Beverly Boulevard , Los Angeles, CA 90048. Cloud API and service designers, stop thinking small | Cloud Computing - InfoWorld "The focus must shift away from fine-grained APIs that provide some type of primitive service, such as pushing data to a block of storage or perhaps making a request to a cloud-rooted database," says InfoWorld's David Linthicum. "To go beyond primitives, you must understand how these services should be used in a much larger architectural context. In other words, you need to understand how businesses will employ these services to form real workplace solutions—inside and outside the enterprise." Adding a runtime picker to a taskflow parameter in WebCenter | Yannick Ongena Oracle ACE Yannick Ongena shows how to create an Oracle WebCenter popup to allow users to "select items or do more complex things." Oracle IAM 11g R2 docs are now available "One of the great things about the new doc set is the inclusion of ePub files," says Fusion Middleware A-Team blogger Chris Johnson. "This means that if you have an iPad you can load up the doc library onto that and read the docs on the couch." Setting up a local Yum Server using the Exalogic ZFS Storage Appliance | Donald A concise technical post from the man named Donald. What's New in Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.2? | The Fat Bloke Sings "One of the trends we've seen is that as the average host platform becomes more powerful, our users are consistently running more and more vm's," says The Fat Bloke. "Some of our users have large libraries of vm's of various vintages, whilst others have groups of vm's that are run together as an assembly of the various tiers in a multi-tiered software solution, for example, a database tier, middleware tier, and front-ends." The new VirtualBox release, a year in the making, addresses the needs of these users, he explains. Configuring Oracle Business Intelligence 11g MDS XML Source Control Management with Git Version Control | Christian Screen Oracle ACE Christian Screen developed this tutorial for those interested in learning how to configure the Oracle Business Intelligence 11g (11.1.1.6) metadata repository for development using the new MDS XML source control management functionality. Identity and Access Management at Oracle Open World 2012 | Brian Eidelman Fusion Middleware A-Team blogger Brian Eideleman highlights three Oracle Openworld sessions that will put Identity and Access Management in the spotlight, and shares a link to the "Focus On: Identity Management" document, a comprehensive listing of Openworld activities also dealing with IM. Starting and stopping WebLogic automatically using Upstart | Chris Johnson "In Ubuntu, RedHat and Oracle Linux there's a new flavor of init called Upstart that all the kids are using," says Oracle Fusion Middleware A-Team member Chris Johnson. "It's the new hotness when it comes to making programs into daemons and wiring them to start and stop at appropriate times." Thought for the Day "The purpose of software engineering is to control complexity, not to create it." — Pamela Zave Source: SoftwareQuotes.com

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• My search what the Cloud will mean for my Work, part 2

  - by Kay Sellenrode

  My experience with the cloud and why work will change and not disappear. Until now I have multiple experiences with the cloud, for the most good. i have worked on multiple cloud solutions in the past but let me describe them as 0.x versions. For me the 1st real serious cloud experience was a bit more than 1 year ago, when our company switched from an in house server to Microsoft BPOS as a complete replacement. Since we are a small consultancy firm and don’t have that much else to do than consulting, our IT requirements are quite simple. We need Mail and Storage space for our documents. With the in house server we had multiple outages during a year, mostly by lack of administering. Being consultants in the field and hardly having time to maintain a server, BPOS was and still is for us the right solution. Since the migration we have less outages and a much more robust solution. Have we run into issues with BPOS for our own environment? No not that I’m aware of. Based on this experience I made a stance about deploy ability of BPOS and cloud solutions, they are suitable for MKB (Dutch for Medium and Small Businesses). Most Small businesses don’t have the amount of work to hire a full time it admin. Hiring a service provider to maintain their own server might be even more costly than hiring an admin. So seeing the capabilities of BPOS and the needs of most businesses I see it as a great solution that gives the business a complete Server replacement solution for a fixed price per user. resulting in a clear budget for IT spending, something most small businesses were looking for, for a long time. So right now I’m deploying BPOS with a customer, and I run into some of the Cloud 1.0 issues. In my opinion BPOS is a good working Cloud version 1.0 solution. What do I mean with 1.0? Well 1.0 is mostly a tested solution (unlike 0.x versions) but still have quite some limitations caused by too few market experience. in my opnion this is also the reason why we don’t see that much BPOS customers yet and why I think Office 365 will make a huge difference. What I have seen of 365 shows me it is a Cloud 2.0 version, meaning it has all needed features and is much more flexible to the customer. This is also why I see changes happen in my work field, changes and not unemployment due to Cloud solutions. Cloud 1.0 solutions gave me the idea that if every customer would adopt them I would be out of work. But in reality Cloud 1.0 solutions are here just to set the market needs. The Cloud 2.0 and higher versions will give the customer much more flexibility, but also require the need for a consultant. Where the 1.0 versions are simple to setup and maintain, the 2.0 solution needs more thought upfront and afterwards. ie. BPOS in its 1.0 version brings you a very simplified Exchange 2007 solution, Suitable for some customers. Looking at Office 365 you receive almost a full blown Exchange 2010 solution. I expect this to be even more customizable in the next version. In my search for the changes to my work I try to regulary write a post with my thought around the Cloud and the impact on my work as a consultant. I'm also planning to present around this topic, so if anyone is interested to see me present around this topic, you're more than welcome to contact me.

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• Community Branching

  - by Dane Morgridge

  As some may have noticed, I have taken a liking to Ruby (and Rails in particular) quite a bit recently. This last weekend I spoke at the NYC Code Camp on a comparison of ASP.NET and Rails as well as an intro to Entity Framework talk.  I am speaking at RubyNation in April and have submitted to other ruby conferences around the area and I am also doing a Rails and MongoDB talk at the Philly Code Camp in April. Before you start to think this is my "I'm leaving .NET post", which it isn't so I need to clarify. I am not, nor do I intend to any time in the near future plan on abandoning .NET.  I am simply branching out into another community based on a development technology that I very much enjoy.  If you look at my twitter bio, you will see that I am into Entity Framework, Ruby on Rails, C++ and ASP.NET MVC, and not necessarily in that order.  I know you're probably thinking to your self that I am crazy, which is probably true on several levels (especially the C++ part). I was actually crazy enough at the NYC Code Camp to show up wearing a Linux t-shirt, presenting with my MacBook Pro on Entity Framework, ASP.NET MVC and Rails. (I did get pelted in the head with candy by Rachel Appel for it though) At all of the code camps I am submitting to this year, i will be submitting sessions on likely all four topics, and some sessions will be a combination of 2 or more.  For example, my "ASP.NET MVC: A Gateway To Rails?" talk touches ASP.NET MVC, Entity Framework Code First and Rails. Simply put (and I talk about this in my MVC & Rails talk) is that learning and using Rails has made me a better ASP.NET MVC developer. Just one example of this is helper methods.  When I started working with ASP.NET MVC, I didn't really want to use helpers and preferred to just use standard html tags, especially where links were concerned.  It was just me being stubborn and not really seeing all of the benefit of the helpers.  To my defense, coming from WebForms, I wanted to be as bare metal as possible and it seemed at first like a lot of the helpers were an unnecessary abstraction. I took my first look at Rails back in v1 and didn't spend very much time with it so I dismissed it and went on my merry ASP.NET WebForms way.  Then I picked up ASP.NET MVC and grasped the MVC pattern itself much better. After this, I took another look at Rails and everything made sense.  I decided then to learn Rails. (I think it is important for developers to learn new languages and platforms regularly so it was a natural progression for me) I wanted to learn it the right way, so when I dug into code, everyone used helpers everywhere for pretty much everything possible. I took some time to dig in and found out how helpful they were and subsequently realized how awesome they were in ASP.NET MVC also and started using them. In short, I love Rails (and Ruby in general).  I also love ASP.NET MVC and Entity Framework and yes I still love C++.  I have varying degrees of love for them individually at any given moment and it is likely to shift based on the current project I am working on.  I know you're thinking it so before you ask the question. "Which do I use when?", I'm going to give the standard developer answer of: It depends.  There are a lot of factors that I am not going to even go into that would go into a decision.  The most basic question I would ask though is,  does this project depend on .NET?  If it does, then I'd say that ASP.NET MVC is probably going to be the more logical choice and I am going to leave it at that.  I am working on projects right now in both technologies and I don't see that changing anytime soon (one project even uses both). With all that being said, you'll find me at code camps, conferences and user groups presenting on .NET, Ruby or both, writing about .NET and Ruby and I will likely be blogging on both in the future.  I know of others that have successfully branched out to other communities and with any luck I'll be successful at it too. On a (sorta) side note, I read a post by Justin Etheredge the other day that pretty much sums up my feelings about Ruby as a language.  I highly recommend checking it out: What Is So Great About Ruby?

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• Polite busy-waiting with WRPAUSE on SPARC

  - by Dave

  Unbounded busy-waiting is an poor idea for user-space code, so we typically use spin-then-block strategies when, say, waiting for a lock to be released or some other event. If we're going to spin, even briefly, then we'd prefer to do so in a manner that minimizes performance degradation for other sibling logical processors ("strands") that share compute resources. We want to spin politely and refrain from impeding the progress and performance of other threads — ostensibly doing useful work and making progress — that run on the same core. On a SPARC T4, for instance, 8 strands will share a core, and that core has its own L1 cache and 2 pipelines. On x86 we have the PAUSE instruction, which, naively, can be thought of as a hardware "yield" operator which temporarily surrenders compute resources to threads on sibling strands. Of course this helps avoid intra-core performance interference. On the SPARC T2 our preferred busy-waiting idiom was "RD %CCR,%G0" which is a high-latency no-nop. The T4 provides a dedicated and extremely useful WRPAUSE instruction. The processor architecture manuals are the authoritative source, but briefly, WRPAUSE writes a cycle count into the the PAUSE register, which is ASR27. Barring interrupts, the processor then delays for the requested period. There's no need for the operating system to save the PAUSE register over context switches as it always resets to 0 on traps. Digressing briefly, if you use unbounded spinning then ultimately the kernel will preempt and deschedule your thread if there are other ready threads than are starving. But by using a spin-then-block strategy we can allow other ready threads to run without resorting to involuntary time-slicing, which operates on a long-ish time scale. Generally, that makes your application more responsive. In addition, by blocking voluntarily we give the operating system far more latitude regarding power management. Finally, I should note that while we have OS-level facilities like sched_yield() at our disposal, yielding almost never does what you'd want or naively expect. Returning to WRPAUSE, it's natural to ask how well it works. To help answer that question I wrote a very simple C/pthreads benchmark that launches 8 concurrent threads and binds those threads to processors 0..7. The processors are numbered geographically on the T4, so those threads will all be running on just one core. Unlike the SPARC T2, where logical CPUs 0,1,2 and 3 were assigned to the first pipeline, and CPUs 4,5,6 and 7 were assigned to the 2nd, there's no fixed mapping between CPUs and pipelines in the T4. And in some circumstances when the other 7 logical processors are idling quietly, it's possible for the remaining logical processor to leverage both pipelines. Some number T of the threads will iterate in a tight loop advancing a simple Marsaglia xor-shift pseudo-random number generator. T is a command-line argument. The main thread loops, reporting the aggregate number of PRNG steps performed collectively by those T threads in the last 10 second measurement interval. The other threads (there are 8-T of these) run in a loop busy-waiting concurrently with the T threads. We vary T between 1 and 8 threads, and report on various busy-waiting idioms. The values in the table are the aggregate number of PRNG steps completed by the set of T threads. The unit is millions of iterations per 10 seconds. For the "PRNG step" busy-waiting mode, the busy-waiting threads execute exactly the same code as the T worker threads. We can easily compute the average rate of progress for individual worker threads by dividing the aggregate score by the number of worker threads T. I should note that the PRNG steps are extremely cycle-heavy and access almost no memory, so arguably this microbenchmark is not as representative of "normal" code as it could be. And for the purposes of comparison I included a row in the table that reflects a waiting policy where the waiting threads call poll(NULL,0,1000) and block in the kernel. Obviously this isn't busy-waiting, but the data is interesting for reference. _table { border:2px black dotted; margin: auto; width: auto; } _tr { border: 2px red dashed; } _td { border: 1px green solid; } _table { border:2px black dotted; margin: auto; width: auto; } _tr { border: 2px red dashed; } td { background-color : #E0E0E0 ; text-align : right ; } th { text-align : left ; } td { background-color : #E0E0E0 ; text-align : right ; } th { text-align : left ; } Aggregate progress T = #worker threads Wait Mechanism for 8-T threadsT=1T=2T=3T=4T=5T=6T=7T=8 Park thread in poll() 32653347334833483348334833483348 no-op 415 831 124316482060249729303349 RD %ccr,%g0 "pause" 14262429269228623013316232553349 PRNG step 412 829 124616702092251029303348 WRPause(8000) 32443361333133483349334833483348 WRPause(4000) 32153308331533223347334833473348 WRPause(1000) 30853199322432513310334833483348 WRPause(500) 29173070315032223270330933483348 WRPause(250) 26942864294930773205338833483348 WRPause(100) 21552469262227902911321433303348

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• June is going to be a busy month!

  - by Monica Kumar

  Who says things slow down in summer? Well, maybe for school kids, but certainly not for Oracle's Virtualization team! June is turning out to be one of the busiest months for us. We are going to be participating in a number of industry events. If you happen to be at any of these, please stop by the Oracle booth and our session/s. Let's go through a run down of these events. 1. 13th Annual Call Center Week June 4-8 Ceasar's Palace, Las Vegas  Event website You're now wondering...why are we at this call center show. It's really simple, Oracle's Desktop Virtualization solutions offer the best way for call center to reliably and securely access enterprise apps using a variety of endpoint devices such as an iPad or a Sun Ray Client. Provisioning new employees becomes a breeze. We'll be jointly showcasing our solution with Oracle's CRM team. Come check us out.  2. Gartner Infrastructure & Management, Florida June 5-7 Orlando, FL  Event website Oracle is a Premier sponsor of the Gartner IOM Summit this June 5 – 7, 2012 in Orlando, FL.  Attendees will have the opportunity to meet with Oracle experts in a variety of sessions, including demonstrations during the showcase receptions. 3. Cloud Expo East Check out our website for details of our participation. Stop by at booth 511 to talk to our Cloud, Virtualization and Big Data experts. In addition, we're delivering a number of sessions at Cloud Expo. The one I want to highlight is the following: Session: Borderless Applications in the Cloud with Oracle VM and Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder Abstract: As virtualization adoption progresses beyond server consolidation, this is also transforming how enterprise applications are deployed and managed in an agile environment. The traditional method of business-critical application deployment where administrators have to contend with an array of unrelated tools, custom scripts to deploy and manage applications, OS and VM instances into a fast changing cloud computing environment can no longer scale effectively to achieve response time and desired efficiency. Oracle VM and Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder allow applications, associated components, deployment metadata, management policies and best practices to be encapsulated into ready-to-run VMs for rapid, repeatable deployment and ease of management. Join us in this Cloud Expo session to see how Oracle VM and Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder allow you to deploy complex multi-tier applications in minutes and enables you to easily onboard existing applications to cloud environments.  Get your free Cloud Expo pass now!  We're offering complimentary VIP Gold Passes. Go to https://www.blueskyz.com/v3/Login.aspx?ClientID=19&EventID=56&sg=177, click “Continue” if you are a New User or log-in if you have already created an account. Once there, you can view the Agenda or Register for Cloud Expo. To register - fill out the basic business card questions and then enter oracleVIPgold in the Priority Code field to change the price from $2,000 to $0. 4. CiscoLive 2012  June 10-14 San Diego, CA Event website Our Oracle VM and Oracle Linux experts will talk about joint collaboration with Cisco on UCS. We'll also highlight customer use cases. 5. Gartner Infrastructure & Operations Management Summit, EMEA Dates: June 11-12 Frankfurt, Germany Event website Meet experts from our Virtualization and Linux team in EMEA. Stop by our booth and find out what's new in Oracle VM Server for x86 and Oracle Linux. June is going to be busy.

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• how to assign javascript variable value to the google analytics script? [migrated]

  - by Vinoth Prakash

  I have assigned two values in the two hidden variables at server Side and accessed those values at client side using script. I have written the google analytics code. I have set two custom variable. I need to pass two values which is stored in the javascript variables to the "value" of custom variable. I have assigned the varibales but values not displaying. please telll what error i made in the script. My aspx code <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" > <head runat="server"> <title></title> </head> <body> <form id="form1" runat="server"> <div> <br /> Total Pirce&nbsp; &nbsp;: <asp:Label ID="Label1" runat="server" Text="10"></asp:Label><br /> &nbsp;Ship Price&nbsp; &nbsp; : <asp:Label ID="Label2" runat="server" Text="5"></asp:Label> <br /> ------------------<br /> Grand Total : <asp:Label ID="Label3" runat="server" Text="15"></asp:Label><br /> ------------------</div> <asp:HiddenField ID="HiddenField1" runat="server" /> <asp:HiddenField ID="HiddenField2" runat="server" /> </form> <script type="text/javascript"> var serverhid1 = document.getElementById('HiddenField1').value; var serverhid2 = document.getElementById('HiddenField2').value; alert(serverhid1) alert(serverhid2) var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-35156990-1']); //Set Custom Variable _gaq.push(['_setCustomVar', 1, 'TotalPirce', serverhid1 , 3]); _gaq.push(['_setCustomVar', 2, 'Shipping','yes', 3]); _gaq.push(['_setCustomVar', 3, 'GrandTotal',check(), 3]); _gaq.push(['_setDomainName', 'none']); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); (function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })(); </script> </body> </html> cs Code protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { HiddenField1.Value = Label1.Text; HiddenField2.Value = Label2.Text; }

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• Indexed view deadlocking

  - by Dave Ballantyne

  Deadlocks can be a really tricky thing to track down the root cause of.  There are lots of articles on the subject of tracking down deadlocks, but seldom do I find that in a production system that the cause is as straightforward.  That being said,  deadlocks are always caused by process A needs a resource that process B has locked and process B has a resource that process A needs.  There may be a longer chain of processes involved, but that is the basic premise. Here is one such (much simplified) scenario that was at first non-obvious to its cause: The system has two tables,  Products and Stock.  The Products table holds the description and prices of a product whilst Stock records the current stock level. USE tempdb GO CREATE TABLE Product ( ProductID INTEGER IDENTITY PRIMARY KEY, ProductName VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL, Price MONEY NOT NULL ) GO CREATE TABLE Stock ( ProductId INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, StockLevel INTEGER NOT NULL ) GO INSERT INTO Product SELECT TOP(1000) CAST(NEWID() AS VARCHAR(255)), ABS(CAST(CAST(NEWID() AS VARBINARY(255)) AS INTEGER))%100 FROM sys.columns a CROSS JOIN sys.columns b GO INSERT INTO Stock SELECT ProductID,ABS(CAST(CAST(NEWID() AS VARBINARY(255)) AS INTEGER))%100 FROM Product There is a single stored procedure of GetStock: Create Procedure GetStock as SELECT Product.ProductID,Product.ProductName FROM dbo.Product join dbo.Stock on Stock.ProductId = Product.ProductID where Stock.StockLevel <> 0 Analysis of the system showed that this procedure was causing a performance overhead and as reads of this data was many times more than writes,  an indexed view was created to lower the overhead. CREATE VIEW vwActiveStock With schemabinding AS SELECT Product.ProductID,Product.ProductName FROM dbo.Product join dbo.Stock on Stock.ProductId = Product.ProductID where Stock.StockLevel <> 0 go CREATE UNIQUE CLUSTERED INDEX PKvwActiveStock on vwActiveStock(ProductID) This worked perfectly, performance was improved, the team name was cheered to the rafters and beers all round.  Then, after a while, something else happened… The system updating the data changed,  The update pattern of both the Stock update and the Product update used to be: BEGIN TRAN UPDATE... COMMIT BEGIN TRAN UPDATE... COMMIT BEGIN TRAN UPDATE... COMMIT It changed to: BEGIN TRAN UPDATE... UPDATE... UPDATE... COMMIT Nothing that would raise an eyebrow in even the closest of code reviews.  But after this change we saw deadlocks occuring. You can reproduce this by opening two sessions. In session 1 begin transaction Update Product set ProductName ='Test' where ProductID = 998 Then in session 2 begin transaction Update Stock set Stocklevel = 5 where ProductID = 999 Update Stock set Stocklevel = 5 where ProductID = 998 Hop back to session 1 and.. Update Product set ProductName ='Test' where ProductID = 999 Looking at the deadlock graphs we could see the contention was between two processes, one updating stock and the other updating product, but we knew that all the processes do to the tables is update them.  Period.  There are separate processes that handle the update of stock and product and never the twain shall meet, no reason why one should be requiring data from the other.  Then it struck us,  AH the indexed view. Naturally, when you make an update to any table involved in a indexed view, the view has to be updated.  When this happens, the data in all the tables have to be read, so that explains our deadlocks.  The data from stock is read when you update product and vice-versa. The fix, once you understand the problem fully, is pretty simple, the apps did not guarantee the order in which data was updated.  Luckily it was a relatively simple fix to order the updates and deadlocks went away.  Note, that there is still a *slight* risk of a deadlock occurring, if both a stock update and product update occur at *exactly* the same time.

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• SQLAuthority News – Speaking at Southeast Asia SharePoint Conference 2013 – Singapore

  - by pinaldave

  Two years ago I spoke at Southeast Asia SharePoint Conference 2011, Singapore and I had a fantastic time to present to the Singapore audience. The session was very well received and lots of interest was generated. The event is back again this year and with much bigger scale. I will be presenting on SQL Server and Sharepoint subject at the conference. Session Details: Title: Performance in 60 Seconds – Database Tricks Every SharePoint Developer & Admin MUST Know Abstract: SharePoint Developers and System Administrators often come across situations where they face a slow server response, even though their hardware specifications are above  par. This session is for all the SharePoint Developers who want their server to perform at blazing fast speed but want to invest very little time to make it happen. We will go over various database tricks which require absolutely no time to master and require practically no SQL coding at all. After attending this session, Developers will only need 60 seconds to improve performance of their database server in their SharePoint implementation. Date and Time: January 18, 20013 - 3:15 PM-4:15 PM Location: Max Atria is located at Singapore Expo, 1 Expo Drive, Singapore Tel 65 6403 2160 This session will cover lots of interesting tips and tricks about SQL Server and SharePoint co-exists together. I promise that every attendee will walk out with a trick which they can walk out of session and directly apply to their production server to improve its performance. The event is going to be again fantastic event – if you are in Singapore – you must not miss this event. If you are planning vacation – this is the right time to take days off and travel to Singapore for vacation. The event features over 30 sessions to choose from, focus on three areas of business gain: Exploring Information, Improving Productivity and Making it Work. This event has an excellent line up of international speakers (speakers traveling from the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Sri Lanka and India). Register early to reserve a spot at your choice of more than 30 classes taught by Microsoft Certified Masters, MVPs, and other top SharePoint experts! Here I have attempted to answer a few of the questions which every SharePoint professional half: Which sessions suit my skill level? Click here. What sessions are right for me? Click here. Which sessions are of my interests? Click here. Which sessions are on when? Click here. If you register by next Friday, 14, December – you can save $126 on the regular price of the conference. Prizes, Giveaways and … I love conference goodies – I collect them as a souvenir . This event is known for its generous prizes. The first 100 people to register on the day will get a SPECIAL gift at the event. Additionally there are exhibitor booth give away too. Here is the page listing all the prizes and giveaways. Do leave a comment or send me email if you are going to the event, we can sit together and have a coffee. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology

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• Best Method For Evaluating Existing Software or New Software

  How many of us have been faced with having to decide on an off-the-self or a custom built component, application, or solution to integrate in to an existing system or to be the core foundation of a new system? What is the best method for evaluating existing software or new software still in the design phase? One of the industry preferred methodologies to use is the Active Reviews for Intermediate Designs (ARID) evaluation process.  ARID is a hybrid mixture of the Active Design Review (ADR) methodology and the Architectural Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM). So what is ARID? ARD’s main goal is to ensure quality, detailed designs in software. One way in which it does this is by empowering reviewers by assigning generic open ended survey questions. This approach attempts to remove the possibility for allowing the standard answers such as “Yes” or “No”. The ADR process ignores the “Yes”/”No” questions due to the fact that they can be leading based on how the question is asked. Additionally these questions tend to receive less thought in comparison to more open ended questions. Common Active Design Review Questions What possible exceptions can occur in this component, application, or solution? How should exceptions be handled in this component, application, or solution? Where should exceptions be handled in this component, application, or solution? How should the component, application, or solution flow based on the design? What is the maximum execution time for every component, application, or solution? What environments can this component, application, or solution? What data dependencies does this component, application, or solution have? What kind of data does this component, application, or solution require? Ok, now I know what ARID is, how can I apply? Let’s imagine that your organization is going to purchase an off-the-shelf (OTS) solution for its customer-relationship management software. What process would we use to ensure that the correct purchase is made? If we use ARID, then we will have a series of 9 steps broken up by 2 phases in order to ensure that the correct OTS solution is purchases. Phase 1 Identify the Reviewers Prepare the Design Briefing Prepare the Seed Scenarios Prepare the Materials When identifying reviewers for a design it is preferred that they be pulled from a candidate pool comprised of developers that are going to implement the design. The believe is that developers actually implementing the design will have more a vested interest in ensuring that the design is correct prior to the start of code. Design debriefing consist of a summary of the design, examples of the design solving real world examples put in to use and should be no longer than two hours typically. The primary goal of this briefing is to adequately summarize the design so that the review members could actually implement the design. In the example of purchasing an OTS product I would attempt to review my briefing prior to its distribution with the review facilitator to ensure that nothing was excluded that should have not been. This practice will also allow me to test the length of the briefing to ensure that can be delivered in an appropriate about of time. Seed Scenarios are designed to illustrate conceptualized scenarios when applied with a set of sample data. These scenarios can then be used by the reviewers in the actual evaluation of the software, All materials needed for the evaluation should be prepared ahead of time so that they can be reviewed prior to and during the meeting. Materials Included: Presentation Seed Scenarios Review Agenda Phase 2 Present ARID Present Design Brainstorm and prioritize scenarios Apply scenarios Summarize Prior to the start of any ARID review meeting the Facilitator should define the remaining steps of ARID so that all the participants know exactly what they are doing prior to the start of the review process. Once the ARID rules have been laid out, then the lead designer presents an overview of the design which typically takes about two hours. During this time no questions about the design or rational are allowed to be asked by the review panel as a standard, but they are written down for use latter in the process. After the presentation the list of compiled questions is then summarized and sent back to the lead designer as areas that need to be addressed further. In the example of purchasing an OTS product issues could arise regarding security, the implementation needed or even if this is this the correct product to solve the needed solution. After the Design presentation a brainstorming and prioritize scenarios process begins by reducing the seed scenarios down to just the highest priority scenarios.  These will then be used to test the design for suitability. Once the selected scenarios have been defined the reviewers apply the examples provided in the presentation to the scenarios. The intended output of this process is to provide code or pseudo code that makes use of the examples provided while solving the selected seed scenarios. As a standard rule, the designers of the systems are not allowed to help the review board unless they all become stuck. When this occurs it is documented and along with the reason why the designer needed to help the review panel back on track. Once all of the scenarios have been completed the review facilitator reviews with the group issues that arise during the process. Then the reviewers will be polled as to efficacy of the review experience. References: Clements, Paul., Kazman, Rick., Klien, Mark. (2002). Evaluating Software Architectures: Methods and Case Studies Indianapolis, IN: Addison-Wesley

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• Insurers Pushed to Transform Their Business

  - by Calvin Glenn

  Everyone in the P&C industry has heard it “We can’t do it.” “Nobody wants to do it.” “We can’t afford to do it.”  Unfortunately, what they’re referencing are the reasons many insurers are still trying to maintain their business processing on legacy policy administration systems, attempting to bide time until there is no other recourse but to give in, bite the bullet, and take on the monumental task of replacing an entire policy administration system (PAS). Just the thought of that project sends IT, Business Users and Management reeling. However, is that fear real?  It is a bit daunting when one realizes that a complete policy administration system replacement will touch most every function an insurer manages, from quoting and rating, to underwriting, distribution, and even customer service. With that, everyone has heard at least one horror story around a transformation initiative that has far exceeded budget and the promised implementation / go-live timeline.    But, does it have to be that hard?  Surely, in the age where a person can voice-activate their DVR to record a TV program from a cell phone, there has to be someone somewhere who’s figured out how to simplify this process. To be able to help insurers, of all sizes, transform and grow their business while also delivering on their overall objectives of providing speed to market, straight-through-processing for applications, quoting, underwriting, and simplified product development. Maybe we’re looking too hard and the answer is simple and straight-forward. Why replace the entire machine when all it really needs is a new part…a single enterprise rating system? This core, modular piece of the policy administration system is the foundation of product development and rate management that enables insurers to provide the right product at the right price to the right customer through the best channels at any given moment in time. The real benefit of a single enterprise rating system is the ability to deliver enhanced business capabilities, such as improved product management, streamlined underwriting, and speed to market. With these benefits, carriers have accomplished a portion of their overall transformation goal. Furthermore, lessons learned from the rating project can be applied to the bigger, down-the-road PAS project to support the successful completion of the overall transformation endeavor. At the recent Oracle OpenWorld Conference in San Francisco, information was shared with attendees about a recent “go-live” project from an Oracle Insurance Tier 1 insurer who did what is proposed above…replaced just the rating portion of their legacy policy administration system with Oracle Insurance Insbridge Rating and Underwriting.  This change provided the insurer greater flexibility to set rates that better reflect risk while enabling the company to support its market segment strategy. Using the Oracle Insurance Insbridge enterprise rating solution, the insurer was able to reduce processing time for agents and underwriters, gained the ability to support proprietary rating models and improved pricing accuracy.      There is mounting pressure on P&C insurers to produce growth and show net profitability in the midst of modest overall industry growth, large weather-related losses and intensifying competition for market share.  Insurers are also being asked to improve customer service, offer a differentiated value proposition and simplify insurance processes.  While the demands are many there is an easy answer…invest in and update the most mission critical application in your arsenal, the single enterprise rating system. Download the Podcast to listen to “Stand-Alone Rating Engine - Leading Force Behind Core Transformation Projects in the P&C Market,” a podcast originally recorded in October 2013. Related Resources: White Paper: Stand-Alone Rating Engine: Leading Force Behind Core Transformation Projects in the P&C Market Webcast On Demand: Stand-Alone Rating Engine and Core Transformation for P&C Insurers Don’t forget to keep up with us year-round: Facebook: www.facebook.com/oracleinsurance Twitter: www.twitter.com/oracleinsurance YouTube: www.youtube.com/oracleinsurance

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• Hyper-V Live Migration across Sites!

  - by Ryan Roussel

  One of the great sessions I sat in on at Tech Ed this week was stretching a Windows 2008 R2 Hyper-V  Failover Cluster across sites.  With this ability, you could actually implement a Hyper-V cluster where you could migrate or even Live Migrate VMs across sites.   With this area’s propensity for Hurricanes, this will be a very popular topic for me over the next few months. While this technology is possible today, it’s also very complicated and can be very expensive to implement.    First your WAN connection has to support the ability to trunk your VLAN across both sites in order to Live Migrate.  This means you can’t use a Layer 3 routed connection like MPLS.  It has to be a Metro Ethernet connection or "Dark Fiber”.  Dark Fiber is unused Fiber already in the ground that can be leased from  various providers. Both of these connections would allow you to trunk layer 2 across your WAN.  Cisco does have the ability to trunk layer 2 across a routed connection by muxing the traffic but this is only available in their Nexus product line which has a very steep price tag.   If you are stuck with MPLS or the like and Nexus switching is not a realistic possibility, you will have to implement a multi-subnet cluster in which case Live Migration won’t be possible.  However you can still failover VMs to the remote site with some planning and manual intervention.  The consideration here is that the VMs will be on a different subnet once migrated, so you will have to change the IP addressing of your VMs.  This also has ramifications with DNS and Name resolution to control your down time.  DHCP with Reservations for your VMs is the preferred method to achieve the IP changes as this will automate that part of the process.   Secondly, you will have to have  a mechanism to replicate your storage across both sites.  Many SAN vendors natively support hardware based synchronous and asynchronous replication.  Some even support cluster shared volumes which were introduced in 2008 R2.   If your SANs do not support this natively, there are alternative file based replication products either software based like Double Take or hardware appliance like EMC.  Be sure to check with your vendor on the support of Disk majority if you’re replicating your quorum disk between SANs.   The last consideration is the ability to maintain quorum for your cluster.  If your replication provider does not support Disk Majority through replication, you will have to explore Node Majority with File Share Witness.  This will affect your design as a 3 node cluster with 1 node at the remote site and FSW at the production site would not have the ability to maintain quorum if the production site was lost. MS best practice for this would be to implement an even node cluster with 2 nodes at  each site and the FSW at a third site.   And there you have it.  While some considerations and research goes into implementing this solution, even a multi-subnet solution would be invaluable to organizations in the implementations of “warm” DR sites.

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• Additional new material WebLogic Community

  - by JuergenKress

  Virtual Developer Conference On Demand - Register Updated Book: WebLogic 12c: Distinctive Recipes - Architecture, Development, Administration by Oracle ACE Director Frank Munz - Blog | YouTube Webcast: Migrating from GlassFish to WebLogic - Replay Reliance Commercial Finance Accelerates Time-to-Market, Improves IT Staff Productivity by 70% - Blog | Oracle Magazine Retrieving WebLogic Server Name and Port in ADF Application by Andrejus Baranovskis, Oracle Ace Director - Blog Using Oracle WebLogic 12c with NetBeans IDEOracle ACE Director Markus Eisele walks you through installing and configuring all the necessary components, and helps you get started with a simple Hello World project. Read the article. Video: Oracle A-Team ADF Mobile Persistence SampleThis video by Oracle Fusion Middleware A-Team architect Steven Davelaar demonstrates how to use the ADF Mobile Persistence Sample JDeveloper extension to generate a fully functional ADF Mobile application that reads and writes data using an ADF BC SOAP web service. Watch the video. Java ME 8 ReleaseDownload Java ME today! This release is an implementation of the Java ME 8 standards JSR 360 (CLDC 8) and JSR 361 (MEEP 8), and includes support of alignment with Java SE 8 language features and APIs, an enhanced services-enabled application platform, the ability to "right-size" the platform to address a wide range of target devices, and more. Learn more Download Java ME SDK 8It includes application development support for Oracle Java ME Embedded 8 platforms and includes plugins for NetBeans 8. See the Java ME 8 Developer Tools Documentation to learn JavaOne 2014 Early Bird RateRegister early to save $400 off the onsite price. With the release of Java 8 this year, we have exciting new sessions and an interactive demo space! NetBeans IDE 8.0 Patch UpdateThe NetBeans Team has released a patch for NetBeans IDE 8.0. Download it today to get fixes that enhance stability and performance. Java 8 Questions ForumFor any questions about this new release, please join the conversation on the Java 8 Questions Forum. Java ME 8: Getting Started with Samples and Demo CodeLearn in few steps how to get started with Java ME 8! The New Java SE 8 FeaturesJava SE 8 introduces enhancements such as lambda expressions that enable you to write more concise yet readable code, better utilize multicore systems, and detect more errors at compile time. See What's New in JDK 8 and the new Java SE 8 documentation portal. Pay Less for Java-Related Books!Save 20% on all new Oracle Press books related to Java. Download the free preview sampler for the Java 8 book written by Herbert Schildt, Maurice Naftain, Henrik Ebbers and J.F. DiMarzio. New book: EJB 3 in Action, Second Edition WebLogic 12c Does WebSockets Getting Started by C2B2 Video: Building Robots with Java Embedded Video: Nighthacking TV Watch presentations by Stephen Chin and community members about Java SE, Java Embedded, Java EE, Hadoop, Robots and more. Migrating the Spring Pet Clinic to Java EE 7 Trip report : Jozi JUG Java Day in Johannesburg How to Build GlassFish 4 from Source 4,000 posts later : The Aquarium WebLogic Partner Community For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Technorati Tags: WebLogic,WebLogic Community,Oracle,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• Session Report - Modern Software Development Anti-Patterns

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  In this standing-room-only session, building upon his 2011 JavaOne Rock Star “Diabolical Developer” session, Martijn Verburg, this time along with Ben Evans, identified and explored common “anti-patterns” – ways of doing things that keep developers from doing their best work. They emphasized the importance of social interaction and team communication, along with identifying certain psychological pitfalls that lead developers astray. Their emphasis was less on technical coding errors and more how to function well and to keep one’s focus on what really matters. They are the authors of the highly regarded The Well-Grounded Java Developer and are both movers and shakers in the London JUG community and on the Java Community Process. The large room was packed as they gave a fast-moving, witty presentation with lots of laughs and personal anecdotes. Below are a few of the anti-patterns they discussed.Anti-Pattern One: Conference-Driven DeliveryThe theme here is the belief that “Real pros hack code and write their slides minutes before their talks.” Their response to this anti-pattern is an expression popular in the military – PPPPPP, which stands for, “Proper preparation prevents piss-poor performance.”“Communication is very important – probably more important than the code you write,” claimed Verburg. “The more you speak in front of large groups of people the easier it gets, but it’s always important to do dry runs, to present to smaller groups. And important to be members of user groups where you can give presentations. It’s a great place to practice speaking skills; to gain new skills; get new contacts, to network.”They encouraged attendees to record themselves and listen to themselves giving a presentation. They advised them to start with a spouse or friends if need be. Learning to communicate to a group, they argued, is essential to being a successful developer. The emphasis here is that software development is a team activity and good, clear, accessible communication is essential to the functioning of software teams. Anti-Pattern Two: Mortgage-Driven Development The main theme here was that, in a period of worldwide recession and economic stagnation, people are concerned about keeping their jobs. So there is a tendency for developers to treat knowledge as power and not share what they know about their systems with their colleagues, so when it comes time to fix a problem in production, they will be the only one who knows how to fix it – and will have made themselves an indispensable cog in a machine so you cannot be fired. So developers avoid documentation at all costs, or if documentation is required, put it on a USB chip and lock it in a lock box. As in the first anti-pattern, the idea here is that communicating well with your colleagues is essential and documentation is a key part of this. Social interactions are essential. Both Verburg and Evans insisted that increasingly, year by year, successful software development is more about communication than the technical aspects of the craft. Developers who understand this are the ones who will have the most success. Anti-Pattern Three: Distracted by Shiny – Always Use the Latest Technology to Stay AheadThe temptation here is to pick out some obscure framework, try a bit of Scala, HTML5, and Clojure, and always use the latest technology and upgrade to the latest point release of everything. Don’t worry if something works poorly because you are ahead of the curve. Verburg and Evans insisted that there need to be sound reasons for everything a developer does. Developers should not bring in something simply because for some reason they just feel like it or because it’s new. They recommended a site run by a developer named Matt Raible with excellent comparison spread sheets regarding Web frameworks and other apps. They praised it as a useful tool to help developers in their decision-making processes. They pointed out that good developers sometimes make bad choices out of boredom, to add shiny things to their CV, out of frustration with existing processes, or just from a lack of understanding. They pointed out that some code may stay in a business system for 15 or 20 years, but not all code is created equal and some may change after 3 or 6 months. Developers need to know where the code they are contributing fits in. What is its likely lifespan? Anti-Pattern Four: Design-Driven Design The anti-pattern: If you want to impress your colleagues and bosses, use design patents left, right, and center – MVC, Session Facades, SOA, etc. Or the UML modeling suite from IBM, back in the day… Generate super fast code. And the more jargon you can talk when in the vicinity of the manager the better.Verburg shared a true story about a time when he was interviewing a guy for a job and asked him what his previous work was. The interviewee said that he essentially took patterns and uses an approved book of Enterprise Architecture Patterns and applied them. Verburg was dumbstruck that someone could have a job in which they took patterns from a book and applied them. He pointed out that the idea that design is a separate activity is simply wrong. He repeated a saying that he uses, “You should pay your junior developers for the lines of code they write and the things they add; you should pay your senior developers for what they take away.”He explained that by encouraging people to take things away, the code base gets simpler and reflects the actual business use cases developers are trying to solve, as opposed to the framework that is being imposed. He told another true story about a project to decommission a very long system. 98% of the code was decommissioned and people got a nice bonus. But the 2% remained on the mainframe so the 98% reduction in code resulted in zero reduction in costs, because the entire mainframe was needed to run the 2% that was left. There is an incentive to get rid of source code and subsystems when they are no longer needed. The session continued with several more anti-patterns that were equally insightful.

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• The Power to Control Power

  - by speakjava

  I'm currently working on a number of projects using embedded Java on the Raspberry Pi and Beagle Board.  These are nice and small, so don't take up much room on my desk as you can see in this picture. As you can also see I have power and network connections emerging from under my desk.  One of the (admittedly very minor) drawbacks of these systems is that they have no on/off switch.  Instead you insert or remove the power connector (USB for the RasPi, a barrel connector for the Beagle).  For the Beagle Board this can potentially be an issue; with the micro-SD card located right next to the connector it has been known for people to eject the card when trying to power off the board, which can be quite serious for the hardware. The alternative is obviously to leave the boards plugged in and then disconnect the power from the outlet.  Simple enough, but a picture of underneath my desk shows that this is not the ideal situation either. This made me think that it would be great if I could have some way of controlling a mains voltage outlet using a remote switch or, even better, from software via a USB connector.  A search revealed not much that fit my requirements, and anything that was close seemed very expensive.  Obviously the only way to solve this was to build my own.Here's my solution.  I decided my system would support both control mechanisms (remote physical switch and USB computer control) and be modular in its design for optimum flexibility.  I did a bit of searching and found a company in Hong Kong that were offering solid state relays for 99p plus shipping (£2.99, but still made the total price very reasonable).  These would handle up to 380V AC on the output side so more than capable of coping with the UK 240V supply.  The other great thing was that being solid state, the input would work with a range of 3-32V and required a very low current of 7.5mA at 12V.  For the USB control an Arduino board seemed the obvious low-cost and simple choice.  Given the current requirments of the relay, the Arduino would not require the additional power supply and could be powered just from the USB.Having secured the relays I popped down to Homebase for a couple of 13A sockets, RS for a box and an Arduino and Maplin for a toggle switch.  The circuit is pretty straightforward, as shown in the diagram (only one output is shown to make it as simple as possible).  Originally I used a 2 pole toggle switch to select the remote switch or USB control by switching the negative connections of the low voltage side.  Unfortunately, the resistance between the digital pins of the Arduino board was not high enough, so when using one of the remote switches it would turn on both of the outlets.  I changed to a 4 pole switch and isolated both positive and negative connections. IMPORTANT NOTE: If you want to follow my design, please be aware that it requires working with mains voltages.  If you are at all concerned with your ability to do this please consult a qualified electrician to help you.It was a tight fit, especially getting the Arduino in, but in the end it all worked.  The completed box is shown in the photos. The remote switch was pretty simple just requiring the squeezing of two rocker switches and a 9V battery into the small RS supplied box.  I repurposed a standard stereo cable with phono plugs to connect the switch box to the mains outlets.  I chopped off one set of plugs and wired it to the rocker switches.  The photo shows the RasPi and the Beagle board now controllable from the switch box on the desk. I've tested the Arduino side of things and this works fine.  Next I need to write some software to provide an interface for control of the outlets.  I'm thinking a JavaFX GUI would be in keeping with the total overkill style of this project.

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama Top 10 for October 21-27, 2012

  - by Bob Rhubart

  The Top 10 most popular items shared on the OTN ArchBeat Facebook Page for the week of October 21-27, 2012. OTN Architect Day: Los Angeles This is your brain on IT architecture. Stuff your cranium with architecture by attending Oracle Technology Network Architect Day in Los Angeles, October 25, 2012, at the Sofitel Los Angeles, 8555 Beverly Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90048. Technical sessions, panel Q&A, and peer roundtables—plus a free lunch. [NOTE: The event was last week, of course. Big thanks to the session presenters and especially to those Angelinos who came out for the event.] WebLogic Server 11gR1 Interactive Quick Reference"The WebLogic Server 11gR1 Administration interactive quick reference," explains Juergen Kress, "is a multimedia tool for various terms and concepts used in WebLogic Server architecture. This tool is available for administrators for online or offline use. This is built as a multimedia web page which provides descriptions of WebLogic Server Architectural components, and references to relevant documentation. This tool offers valuable reference information for any complex concept or product in an intuitive and useful manner." Podcast: Are You Future Proof? The latest OTN ArchBeat Podcast series features Oracle ACE Directors Ron Batra, Basheer Khan, and Ronald van Luttikhuizen, three practicing architects in an open discussion about how changes in enterprise IT are raising the bar for success for software architects and developers. Play Oracle Vanquisher Here's a little respite from whatever it is you normally spend your time on. Oracle Vanquisher is an online diversion that makes a game of data center optimization. According to the description: "Armed with a cool Oracle vacuum pack suit and a strategic IT roadmap, you will thwart threats and optimize your data center to increase your company’s stock price and boost your company’s position." Mainly you avoid electric shock and killer birds. The current high score belongs to someone identified as 'TEN." My score? Never mind. Advanced Oracle SOA Suite OOW 2012 PresentationsThe Oracle SOA Product Management team has compiled a complete list of all twelve of their Oracle SOA Suite presentations from Oracle OpenWorld 2012, with links to the slide decks. OAM and OIM 11g Academies Looking for technical how-to content covering Oracle Access Manager and Oracle Identity Manager? The people behind the Oracle Middleware Security blog have indexed relevant blog posts into what they call "Academies." "These indexes contain the articles we’ve written that we believe provide long lasting guidance on OAM and OIM. Posts covered in these series include articles on key aspects of OAM and OIM 11g, best practice architectural guidance, integrations, and customizations." Oracle’s Analytics, Engineered Systems, and Big Data Strategy | Mark Rittman Part 1 of 3 in Oracle ACE Director Mark Rittman's series on Oracle Exalytics, Oracle R Enterprise and Endeca. Oracle ACE Directors Nordic Tour 2012 : Venues and BI Presentations | Mark RittmanOracle ACE Director Mark Rittman shares information on the Oracle ACE Director Tour, as the community leaders make their way through the land of the midnight sun, with events in Copenhagen, Stockholm, Oslo and Helsinki. Following the Thread in OSB | Antony Reynolds Antony Reynolds recently led an Oracle Service Bus POC in which his team needed to get high throughput from an OSB pipeline. "Imagine our surprise when, on stressing the system, we saw it lock up, with large numbers of blocked threads." He shares the details of the problem and the solution in this extensive technical post. OW12: Oracle Business Process Management/Oracle ADF Integration Best Practices | Andrejus Baranovskis The Oracle OpenWorld presentations keep coming! Oracle ACE Director Andrejus Baranovskis shares the slides from "Oracle Business Process Management/Oracle ADF Integration Best Practices," co-presented with Danilo Schmiedel from Opitz Consulting. Thought for the Day "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." — Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879 – April 18, 1955) Source: Quotes For Software Engineers

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• Communication between state machines with hidden transitions

  - by slartibartfast

  The question emerged for me in embedded programming but I think it can be applied to quite a number of general networking situations e.g. when a communication partner fails. Assume we have an application logic (a program) running on a computer and a gadget connected to that computer via e.g. a serial interface like RS232. The gadget has a red/green/blue LED and a button which disables the LED. The LEDs color can be driven by software commands over the serial interface and the state (red/green/blue/off) is read back and causes a reaction in the application logic. Asynchronous behaviour of the application logic with regard to the LED color down to a certain delay (depending on the execution cycle of the application) is tolerated. What we essentially have is a resource (the LED) which can not be reserved and handled atomically by software because the (organic) user can at any time press the button to interfere/break the software attempt to switch the LED color. Stripping this example from its physical outfit I dare to say that we have two communicating state machines A (application logic) and G (gadget) where G executes state changes unbeknownst to A (and also the other way round, but this is not significant in our example) and only A can be modified at a reasonable price. A needs to see the reaction and state of G in one piece of information which may be (slightly) outdated but not inconsistent with respect to the short time window when this information was generated on the side of G. What I am looking for is a concise method to handle such a situation in embedded software (i.e. no layer/framework like CORBA etc. available). A programming technique which is able to map the complete behaviour of both participants on classical interfaces of a classical programming language (C in this case). To complicate matters (or rather, to generalize), a simple high frequency communication cycle of A to G and back (IOW: A is rapidly polling G) is out of focus because of technical restrictions (delay of serial com, A not always active, etc.). What I currently see as a general solution is: the application logic A as one thread of execution an adapter object (proxy) PG (presenting G inside the computer), together with the serial driver as another thread a communication object between the two (A and PG) which is transactionally safe to exchange The two execution contexts (threads) on the computer may be multi-core or just interrupt driven or tasks in an RTOS. The com object contains the following data: suspected state (written by A): effectively a member of the power set of states in G (in our case: red, green, blue, off, red_or_green, red_or_blue, red_or_off...etc.) command data (written by A): test_if_off, switch_to_red, switch_to_green, switch_to_blue operation status (written by PG): operation_pending, success, wrong_state, link_broken new state (written by PG): red, green, blue, off The idea of the com object is that A writes whichever (set of) state it thinks G is in, together with a command. (Example: suspected state="red_or_green", command: "switch_to_blue") Notice that the commands issued by A will not work if the user has switched off the LED and A needs to know this. PG will pick up such a com object and try to send the command to G, receive its answer (or a timeout) and set the operation status and new state accordingly. A will take back the oject once it is no longer at operation_pending and can react to the outcome. The com object could be separated of course (into two objects, one for each direction) but I think it is convenient in nearly all instances to have the command close to the result. I would like to have major flaws pointed out or hear an entirely different view on such a situation.

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• Impressions of Pivotal Tracker

  Pivotal Tracker is a free, online agile project management system. Ive been using it recently to better communicate to customers about the current state of our project. In Pivotal Tracker, the unit of work is a story and stories are arranged into iterations or delivery cycles. Stories can be any level of granularity you want, but the idea is to use stories to communicate clearly to customers, so you dont want to write a novel. You especially dont want to write a list of detailed programming tasks. A good story for a point of sale system might be: Allow managers to override the price of an item while ringing up a customer. A less useful story: Script out the process of adding a manager flag to the user table and stage that script into the deploy directory. Stories are estimated using a point scale, by default 1, 2 or 3. Iterations are then automatically laid out by combining enough tasks to fill the point total for that period of time. You have to start with a guess on how many points your team can do in an iteration, then adjust with real data as you complete iterations. This is basic agile methodology, but where Pivotal Tracker adds value is that it automatically and graphically lays out iterations for you on your project site. This makes communication and planning easy. Compiling release notes is no longer painful as it has been clear from the outset what work is going on. While I much prefer Pivotal Trackers customer facing interface over what we used previously (TFS), I see a couple of gaps. First, I have not able to make much headway with the reporting tools. Despite my complaints about TFS, it can produce some nice reports. Second, its not clear where if at all, Id keep track of purely internal tasks. Im talking about server maintenance, cleaning up source control, checking back on some code which you never quite felt right about. Theres no purpose in cluttering up an iteration backlog with these items, but if you dont track them, you lose them. Im not sure what a good answer for that is. One gap I thought Id see, which I dont, is more granular dev tasks. If Im implementing a story, Ill write out the steps and track my progress, but really, those steps arent useful to anybody but me. The only time Ive found that level of detail really useful is when my tasks are defined at too high a level anyway or when Im working with someone who needs more coaching and might not be able to finish a story in time without some scaffolding to get them going. You can learn more about Pivotal Tracker at: http://www.pivotaltracker.com/learnmore.   --- Relevant Links --- A good intro to stories: http://www.agilemodeling.com/artifacts/userStory.htmDid you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• await, WhenAll, WaitAll, oh my!!

  - by cibrax

  If you are dealing with asynchronous work in .NET, you might know that the Task class has become the main driver for wrapping asynchronous calls. Although this class was officially introduced in .NET 4.0, the programming model for consuming tasks was much more simplified in C# 5.0 in .NET 4.5 with the addition of the new async/await keywords. In a nutshell, you can use these keywords to make asynchronous calls as if they were sequential, and avoiding in that way any fork or callback in the code. The compiler takes care of the rest. I was yesterday writing some code for making multiple asynchronous calls to backend services in parallel. The code looked as follow, var allResults = new List<Result>(); foreach(var provider in providers) { var results = await provider.GetResults(); allResults.AddRange(results); } return allResults; You see, I was using the await keyword to make multiple calls in parallel. Something I did not consider was the overhead this code implied after being compiled. I started an interesting discussion with some smart folks in twitter. One of them, Tugberk Ugurlu, had the brilliant idea of actually write some code to make a performance comparison with another approach using Task.WhenAll. There are two additional methods you can use to wait for the results of multiple calls in parallel, WhenAll and WaitAll. WhenAll creates a new task and waits for results in that new task, so it does not block the calling thread. WaitAll, on the other hand, blocks the calling thread. This is the code Tugberk initially wrote, and I modified afterwards to also show the results of WaitAll. class Program { private static Func<Stopwatch, Task>[] funcs = new Func<Stopwatch, Task>[] { async (watch) => { watch.Start(); await Task.Delay(1000); Console.WriteLine("1000 one has been completed."); }, async (watch) => { await Task.Delay(1500); Console.WriteLine("1500 one has been completed."); }, async (watch) => { await Task.Delay(2000); Console.WriteLine("2000 one has been completed."); watch.Stop(); Console.WriteLine(watch.ElapsedMilliseconds + "ms has been elapsed."); } }; static void Main(string[] args) { Console.WriteLine("Await in loop work starts..."); DoWorkAsync().ContinueWith(task => { Console.WriteLine("Parallel work starts..."); DoWorkInParallelAsync().ContinueWith(t => { Console.WriteLine("WaitAll work starts..."); WaitForAll(); }); }); Console.ReadLine(); } static async Task DoWorkAsync() { Stopwatch watch = new Stopwatch(); foreach (var func in funcs) { await func(watch); } } static async Task DoWorkInParallelAsync() { Stopwatch watch = new Stopwatch(); await Task.WhenAll(funcs[0](watch), funcs[1](watch), funcs[2](watch)); } static void WaitForAll() { Stopwatch watch = new Stopwatch(); Task.WaitAll(funcs[0](watch), funcs[1](watch), funcs[2](watch)); } } After running this code, the results were very concluding. Await in loop work starts... 1000 one has been completed. 1500 one has been completed. 2000 one has been completed. 4532ms has been elapsed. Parallel work starts... 1000 one has been completed. 1500 one has been completed. 2000 one has been completed. 2007ms has been elapsed. WaitAll work starts... 1000 one has been completed. 1500 one has been completed. 2000 one has been completed. 2009ms has been elapsed. The await keyword in a loop does not really make the calls in parallel.

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• Developing Schema Compare for Oracle (Part 5): Query Snapshots

  - by Simon Cooper

  If you've emailed us about a bug you've encountered with the EAP or beta versions of Schema Compare for Oracle, we probably asked you to send us a query snapshot of your databases. Here, I explain what a query snapshot is, and how it helps us fix your bug. Problem 1: Debugging users' bug reports When we started the Schema Compare project, we knew we were going to get problems with users' databases - configurations we hadn't considered, features that weren't installed, unicode issues, wierd dependencies... With SQL Compare, users are generally happy to send us a database backup that we can restore using a single RESTORE DATABASE command on our test servers and immediately reproduce the problem. Oracle, on the other hand, would be a lot more tricky. As Oracle generally has a 1-to-1 mapping between instances and databases, any databases users sent would have to be restored to their own instance. Furthermore, the number of steps required to get a properly working database, and the size of most oracle databases, made it infeasible to ask every customer who came across a bug during our beta program to send us their databases. We also knew that there would be lots of issues with data security that would make it hard to get backups. So we needed an easier way to be able to debug customers issues and sort out what strange schema data Oracle was returning. Problem 2: Test execution time Another issue we knew we would have to solve was the execution time of the tests we would produce for the Schema Compare engine. Our initial prototype showed that querying the data dictionary for schema information was going to be slow (at least 15 seconds per database), and this is generally proportional to the size of the database. If you're running thousands of tests on the same databases, each one registering separate schemas, not only would the tests would take hours and hours to run, but the test servers would be hammered senseless. The solution To solve these, we needed to be able to populate the schema of a database without actually connecting to it. Well, the IDataReader interface is the primary way we read data from an Oracle server. The data dictionary queries we use return their data in terms of simple strings and numbers, which we then process and reconstruct into an object model, and the results of these queries are identical for identical schemas. So, we can record the raw results of the queries once, and then replay these results to construct the same object model as many times as required without needing to actually connect to the original database. This is what query snapshots do. They are binary files containing the raw unprocessed data we get back from the oracle server for all the queries we run on the data dictionary to get schema information. The core of the query snapshot generation takes the results of the IDataReader we get from running queries on Oracle, and passes the row data to a BinaryWriter that writes it straight to a file. The query snapshot can then be replayed to create the same object model; when the results of a specific query is needed by the population code, we can simply read the binary data stored in the file on disk and present it through an IDataReader wrapper. This is far faster than querying the server over the network, and allows us to run tests in a reasonable time. They also allow us to easily debug a customers problem; using a simple snapshot generation program, users can generate a query snapshot that could be sent along with a bug report that we can immediately replay on our machines to let us debug the issue, rather than having to obtain database backups and restore databases to test systems. There are also far fewer problems with data security; query snapshots only contain schema information, which is generally less sensitive than table data. Query snapshots implementation However, actually implementing such a feature did have a couple of 'gotchas' to it. My second blog post detailed the development of the dependencies algorithm we use to ensure we get all the dependencies in the database, and that algorithm uses data from both databases to find all the needed objects - what database you're comparing to affects what objects get populated from both databases. We get information on these additional objects using an appropriate WHERE clause on all the population queries. So, in order to accurately replay the results of querying the live database, the query snapshot needs to be a snapshot of a comparison of two databases, not just populating a single database. Furthermore, although the code population queries (eg querying all_tab_cols to get column information) can simply be passed straight from the IDataReader to the BinaryWriter, we need to hook into and run the live dependencies algorithm while we're creating the snapshot to ensure we get the same WHERE clauses, and the same query results, as if we were populating straight from a live system. We also need to store the results of the dependencies queries themselves, as the resulting dependency graph is stored within the OracleDatabase object that is produced, and is later used to help order actions in synchronization scripts. This is significantly helped by the dependencies algorithm being a deterministic algorithm - given the same input, it will always return the same output. Therefore, when we're replaying a query snapshot, and processing dependency information, we simply have to return the results of the queries in the order we got them from the live database, rather than trying to calculate the contents of all_dependencies on the fly. Query snapshots are a significant feature in Schema Compare that really helps us to debug problems with the tool, as well as making our testers happier. Although not really user-visible, they are very useful to the development team to help us fix bugs in the product much faster than we otherwise would be able to.

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