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• Smart Help with UPK

  - by [email protected]

  A short lesson on how awesome Smart Help is. In Oracle UPK speak, there are targeted and non-targeted applications. Targeted applications are Oracle EBS, PeopleSoft, Siebel, JD Edwards, SAP and a few others. Non-targeted applications are either custom built or other third party off the shelf applications. For most targeted applications you'll see better object recognition (during recording) and also Help Integration for that application. Help integration means that someone technical modifies the help link in your application to call up the UPK content that has been created. If you have seen this presented before, this is usually where the term context sensitive help is mentioned and the Do It mode shows off. The fact that UPK builds context sensitive help for its targeted applications automatically is awesome enough, but there is a whole new world out there and it's called "custom and\or third party apps." For the purposes of Smart Help and this discussion, I'm talking about the browser based applications. How does UPK support these apps? It used to be that you had to have your vendor try to modify the Help link to point to UPK or if your company had control over the applications configuration menus, then you get someone on your team to modify this for you. But as you start to use UPK for more than one, two or three applications, the administration of this starts to become daunting. Multiple administrators, multiple player packages, multiple call points, multiple break points, help doesn't always work the same way for every application (picture the black white infomercial with an IT person trying to configure a bunch of wires or something funny like that). Introducing Smart Help! (in color of course, new IT person, probably wearing a blue shirt and smiling). Smart help eliminates the need to configure multiple browser help integration points, and adds a icon to the users browser itself. You're using your browser to read this now correct? Look up at the icons on your browser, you have the home link icon, print icon, maybe an RSS feed icon. Smart Help is icon that gets added to the users browser just like the others. When you click it, it first recognizes which application you're in and then finds the UPK created material for you and returns the best possible match, for (hold on to your seat now) both targeted and non-targeted applications (browser based applications). But wait, there's more. It does this automatically! You don't have to do anything! All you have to do is record content, UPK and Smart Help do the rest! This technology is not new. There are customers out there today that use this for as many as six applications! The real hero here is SMART MATCH. Smart match is the technology that's used to determine which application you're in and where you are when you click on Smart Help. We'll save that for a one-on-one conversation. Like most other awesome features of UPK, it ships with the product. All you have to do is turn it on. To learn more about Smart Help, Smart Match, Targeted and Non-Targeted applications, contact your UPK Sales Consultant or me directly at [email protected]

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• ASP.NET Web API - Screencast series with downloadable sample code - Part 1

  - by Jon Galloway

  There's a lot of great ASP.NET Web API content on the ASP.NET website at http://asp.net/web-api. I mentioned my screencast series in original announcement post, but we've since added the sample code so I thought it was worth pointing the series out specifically. This is an introductory screencast series that walks through from File / New Project to some more advanced scenarios like Custom Validation and Authorization. The screencast videos are all short (3-5 minutes) and the sample code for the series is both available for download and browsable online. I did the screencasts, but the samples were written by the ASP.NET Web API team. So - let's watch them together! Grab some popcorn and pay attention, because these are short. After each video, I'll talk about what I thought was important. I'm embedding the videos using HTML5 (MP4) with Silverlight fallback, but if something goes wrong or your browser / device / whatever doesn't support them, I'll include the link to where the videos are more professionally hosted on the ASP.NET site. Note also if you're following along with the samples that, since Part 1 just looks at the File / New Project step, the screencast part numbers are one ahead of the sample part numbers - so screencast 4 matches with sample code demo 3. Note: I started this as one long post for all 6 parts, but as it grew over 2000 words I figured it'd be better to break it up. Part 1: Your First Web API [Video and code on the ASP.NET site] This screencast starts with an overview of why you'd want to use ASP.NET Web API: Reach more clients (thinking beyond the browser to mobile clients, other applications, etc.) Scale (who doesn't love the cloud?!) Embrace HTTP (a focus on HTTP both on client and server really simplifies and focuses service interactions) Next, I start a new ASP.NET Web API application and show some of the basics of the ApiController. We don't write any new code in this first step, just look at the example controller that's created by File / New Project. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Net.Http; using System.Web.Http; namespace NewProject_Mvc4BetaWebApi.Controllers { public class ValuesController : ApiController { // GET /api/values public IEnumerable<string> Get() { return new string[] { "value1", "value2" }; } // GET /api/values/5 public string Get(int id) { return "value"; } // POST /api/values public void Post(string value) { } // PUT /api/values/5 public void Put(int id, string value) { } // DELETE /api/values/5 public void Delete(int id) { } } } Finally, we walk through testing the output of this API controller using browser tools. There are several ways you can test API output, including Fiddler (as described by Scott Hanselman in this post) and built-in developer tools available in all modern browsers. For simplicity I used Internet Explorer 9 F12 developer tools, but you're of course welcome to use whatever you'd like. A few important things to note: This class derives from an ApiController base class, not the standard ASP.NET MVC Controller base class. They're similar in places where API's and HTML returning controller uses are similar, and different where API and HTML use differ. A good example of where those things are different is in the routing conventions. In an HTTP controller, there's no need for an "action" to be specified, since the HTTP verbs are the actions. We don't need to do anything to map verbs to actions; when a request comes in to /api/values/5 with the DELETE HTTP verb, it'll automatically be handled by the Delete method in an ApiController. The comments above the API methods show sample URL's and HTTP verbs, so we can test out the first two GET methods by browsing to the site in IE9, hitting F12 to bring up the tools, and entering /api/values in the URL: That sample action returns a list of values. To get just one value back, we'd browse to /values/5: That's it for Part 1. In Part 2 we'll look at getting data (beyond hardcoded strings) and start building out a sample application.

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• Data Quality and Master Data Management Resources

  - by Dejan Sarka

  Many companies or organizations do regular data cleansing. When you cleanse the data, the data quality goes up to some higher level. The data quality level is determined by the amount of work invested in the cleansing. As time passes, the data quality deteriorates, and you need to repeat the cleansing process. If you spend an equal amount of effort as you did with the previous cleansing, you can expect the same level of data quality as you had after the previous cleansing. And then the data quality deteriorates over time again, and the cleansing process starts over and over again. The idea of Data Quality Services is to mitigate the cleansing process. While the amount of time you need to spend on cleansing decreases, you will achieve higher and higher levels of data quality. While cleansing, you learn what types of errors to expect, discover error patterns, find domains of correct values, etc. You don’t throw away this knowledge. You store it and use it to find and correct the same issues automatically during your next cleansing process. The following figure shows this graphically. The idea of master data management, which you can perform with Master Data Services (MDS), is to prevent data quality from deteriorating. Once you reach a particular quality level, the MDS application—together with the defined policies, people, and master data management processes—allow you to maintain this level permanently. This idea is shown in the following picture. OK, now you know what DQS and MDS are about. You can imagine the importance on maintaining the data quality. Here are some resources that help you preparing and executing the data quality (DQ) and master data management (MDM) activities. Books Dejan Sarka and Davide Mauri: Data Quality and Master Data Management with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 – a general introduction to MDM, MDS, and data profiling. Matching explained in depth. Dejan Sarka, Matija Lah and Grega Jerkic: MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-463): Building Data Warehouses with Microsoft SQL Server 2012 – I wrote quite a few chapters about DQ and MDM, and introduced also SQL Server 2012 DQS. Thomas Redman: Data Quality: The Field Guide – you should start with this book. Thomas Redman is the father of DQ and MDM. Tyler Graham: Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Master Data Services – MDS in depth from a product team mate. Arkady Maydanchik: Data Quality Assessment – data profiling in depth. Tamraparni Dasu, Theodore Johnson: Exploratory Data Mining and Data Cleaning – advanced data profiling with data mining. Forthcoming presentations I am presenting a DQS and MDM seminar at PASS SQL Rally Amsterdam 2013: Wednesday, November 6th, 2013: Enterprise Information Management with SQL Server 2012 – a good kick start to your first DQ and / or MDM project. Courses Data Quality and Master Data Management with SQL Server 2012 – I wrote a 2-day course for SolidQ. If you are interested in this course, which I could also deliver in a shorter seminar way, you can contact your closes SolidQ subsidiary, or, of course, me directly on addresses [email protected] or [email protected]. This course could also complement the existing courseware portfolio of training providers, which are welcome to contact me as well. Start improving the quality of your data now!

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• Call Webservices&hellip;Maybe!?

  - by MOSSLover

  So I have been doing preliminary work for my iOS talk for a while, but did not get into the meat of the project until recently.  One day I envision my talk uploading pictures from a camera on an iPhone or iPad into SharePoint and telling people how I did it.  As you know with my Silverlight talk and any new technology, building new talks with new technologies always ends up with some pain points that you must jump over just to grab data.  So step 1 always starts out with how do we even access a webservice using the new technology. I started out watching every single SPC video available on oAuth and Rest Webservices in SharePoint 2013.  I also sent an email to Eric Shupps about some REST and 2013 examples.  The videos further confused me, because all the videos were on SharePoint hosted apps (provider and autohosted).  I did not want to create a SharePoint hosted app, but instead a mobile app outside of the SharePoint context altogether.  Nick Swan sent me his code and it was great for a starting point on how the JSON calls would look like on iOS, but I was still missing a piece.  Nick does a great job on showing how to use the REST/JSON calls in a non-MS tech, however his presentation uses the SharePoint context and can grab the SPAppToken.  At this point I had to ask the question how do you grab the SAML token outside of SharePoint 2013 in iOS using Objective-C?  After reading all the MSDN documentation, some documentation on Restkit and Objective-C/oAuth calls, and some SharePoint 2013 blog post my head was swimming.  I was dreaming about REST and iOS in SharePoint 2013.  SAML tokens were taunting me.  I was nowhere near understanding 2013. I started talking to my friend, Pedro Jimenez, who is also playing with Objective-C and went to SPC.  He found me a couple good MSDN posts with REST/JSON calls that basically showed the accessToken was all I needed (at this point I was still thinking iOS needed to be a provider hosted app which is wrong).  So then again I had to ask the SAML token question…How do you get a SAML token outside of SharePoint without the TokenHelper class? So then I started talking to people and thinking why do I need to completely avoid TokenHelper…The solution in concept is basically create a webservice in Azure wrapped into a Provider Hosted App in SharePoint.  Wictor Wilen created a helper webservice in the following blog post: http://www.wictorwilen.se/Post/How-to-do-active-authentication-to-Office-365-and-SharePoint-Online.aspx. So now I have to basically stand up the webservice, the SharePoint app wrapper, and then use Restkit to call the first webservice to grab the token and then the second webservice to pass in the token and grab some SharePoint data.  What this means is that you can no longer just pass credentials into SharePoint webservices and get data back.  You have to pass in a SAML token with every single webservice call to SharePoint.  The theory is that this token is associated with the permissions the app can handle (read, write, whatever).  It seems like a ton of pain and a lot of work, but this is step 1 in my crusade to pull some piece of data into iOS from SharePoint and show people how to do it themselves.  In the upcoming months hopefully I can get halfway to my end goal. Technorati Tags: SharePoint 2013,REST,oAuth,Objective-C,iOS

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• Oracle WebCenter - Well Connected

  - by Brian Dirking

  800x600 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} An good post from Dan Elam on the state of the ECM industry (http://www.aiim.org/community/blogs/community/ECM-Vendors-go-to-War) . For those of you who don’t know Dan, he is one of the major forces in the content management industry. He founded eVisory and IMERGE Consulting, he is an AIIM Fellow and a former US Technical Expert to the International Standards Organization (ISO), and has been a driving force behind EmTag, AIIM’s Emerging Technologies Group. His post is interesting – it starts out talking about our Moveoff Documentum campaign, but then it becomes a much deeper insight into the ECM industry. Dan points out that Oracle has been making quiet strides in the ECM industry. In fact, analysts share this view Oracle, pointing out Oracle is growing greater than 20% annually while many of the big vendors are shrinking. And as Dan points out, this cements Oracle as one of the big five in the ECM space – the same week that Autonomy was removed from the Gartner Magic Quadrant for ECM. One of the key things points out is that Oracle WebCenter is well connected. WebCenter has out-of-the-box connections to key enterprise applications such as E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, Siebel and JD Edwards. Those out-of-the-box integrations make it easy for organizations to drive content right into the places where it is needed, in the midst of business processes. At the same time, WebCenter provides composite interface capabilities to bring together two or more of these enterprise applications onto the same screen. Combine that with the capabilities of Oracle Social Network, you start to see how Oracle is providing a full platform for user engagement. But beyond those connections, WebCenter can also connect to other content management systems. It can index and search those systems from a single point of search, bringing back results in a single combined hitlist. WebCenter can also extend records management capabilities into Documentum, SharePoint, and email archiving systems. From a single console, records managers can define a series, set a retention schedule, and place holds – without having to go to each system to make these updates. Dan points out that there are some new competitive dynamics – to be sure. And it is interesting when a system can interact with another system, enforce dispositions and holds, and enable users to search and retrieve content. Oracle WebCenter is providing the infrastructure to build on, and the interfaces to drive user engagement. It’s an interesting time.

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• New security options in UCM Patch Set 3

  - by kyle.hatlestad

  While the Patch Set 3 (PS3) release was mostly focused on bug fixes and such, some new features sneaked in there. One of those new features is to the security options. In 10gR3 and prior versions, UCM had a component called Collaboration Manager which allowed for project folders to be created and groups of users assigned as members to collaborate on documents. With this component came access control lists (ACL) for content and folders. Users could assign specific security rights on each and every document and folder within a project. And it was even possible to enable these ACL's without having the Collaboration Manager component enabled (see technote# 603148.1). When 11g came out, Collaboration Manager was no longer available. But the configuration settings to turn on ACLs were still there. Well, in PS3 they're implemented slightly differently. And there is a new component available which adds an additional dimension to define security on the object, Roles. So now instead of selecting individual users or groups of users (defined as an Alias in User Admin), you can select a particular role. And if a user has that role, they are granted that level of access. This can allow for a much more flexible and manageable security model instead of trying to manage with just user and group access as people come and go in the organization. The way that it is enabled is still through configuration entries. First log in as an administrator and go to Administration -> Admin Server. On the Component Manager page, click the 'advanced component manager' link in the description paragraph at the top. In the list of Disabled Components, enable the RoleEntityACL component. Then click the General Configuration link on the left. In the Additional Configuration Variables text area, enter the new configuration values: UseEntitySecurity=true SpecialAuthGroups=<comma separated list of Security Groups to honor ACLs> The SpecialAuthGroups should be a list of Security Groups that honor the ACL fields. If an ACL is applied to a content item with a Security Group outside this list, it will be ignored. Save the settings and restart the instance. Upon restart, three new metadata fields will be created: xClbraUserList, xClbraAliasList, xClbraRoleList. If you are using OracleTextSearch as the search indexer, be sure to run a Fast Rebuild on the collection. On the Check In, Search, and Update pages, values are added by simply typing in the value and getting a type-ahead list of possible values. Select the value, click Add and then set the level of access (Read, Write, Delete, or Admin). If all of the fields are blank, then it simply falls back to just Security Group and Account access. For Users and Groups, these values are automatically picked up from the corresponding database tables. In the case of Roles, this is an explicitly defined list of choices that are made available. These values must match the role that is being defined from WebLogic Server or you LDAP/AD repository. To add these values, go to Administration -> Admin Applets -> Configuration Manager. On the Views tab, edit the values for the ExternalRolesView. By default, 'guest' and 'authenticated' are added. Once added to through the view, they will be available to select from for the Roles Access List. As for how they are stored in the metadata fields, each entry starts with it's identifier: ampersand (&) symbol for users, "at" (@) symbol for groups, and colon (:) for roles. Following that is the entity name. And at the end is the level of access in paranthesis. e.g. (RWDA). And each entry is separated by a comma. So if you were populating values through batch loader or an external source, the values would be defined this way. Detailed information on Access Control Lists can be found in the Oracle Fusion Middleware System Administrator's Guide for Oracle Content Server.

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• Tuxedo 11gR1 Client Server Affinity

  - by todd.little

  One of the major new features in Oracle Tuxedo 11gR1 is the ability to define an affinity between clients and servers. In previous releases of Tuxedo, the only way to ensure that multiple requests from a client went to the same server was to establish a conversation with tpconnect() and then use tpsend() and tprecv(). Although this works it has some drawbacks. First for single-threaded servers, the server is tied up for the entire duration of the conversation and cannot service other clients, an obvious scalability issue. I believe the more significant drawback is that the application programmer has to switch from the simple request/response model provided by tpcall() to the half duplex tpsend() and tprecv() calls used with conversations. Switching between the two typically requires a fair amount of redesign and recoding. The Client Server Affinity feature in Tuxedo 11gR1 allows by way of configuration an application to define affinities that can exist between clients and servers. This is done in the *SERVICES section of the UBBCONFIG file. Using new parameters for services defined in the *SERVICES section, customers can determine when an affinity session is created or deleted, the scope of the affinity, and whether requests can be routed outside the affinity scope. The AFFINITYSCOPE parameter can be MACHINE, GROUP, or SERVER, meaning that while the affinity session is in place, all requests from the client will be routed to the same MACHINE, GROUP, or SERVER. The creation and deletion of affinity is defined by the SESSIONROLE parameter and a service can be defined as either BEGIN, END, or NONE, where BEGIN starts an affinity session, END deletes the affinity session, and NONE does not impact the affinity session. Finally customers can define how strictly they want the affinity scope adhered to using the AFFINITYSTRICT parameter. If set to MANDATORY, all requests made during an affinity session will be routed to a server in the affinity scope. Thus if the affinity scope is SERVER, all subsequent tpcall() requests will be sent to the same server the affinity scope was established with. If the server doesn't offer that service, even though other servers do offer the service, the call will fail with TPNOENT. Setting AFFINITYSTRICT to PRECEDENT tells Tuxedo to try and route the request to a server in the affinity scope, but if that's not possible, then Tuxedo can try to route the request to servers out of scope. All of this begs the question, why? Why have this feature? There many uses for this capability, but the most common is when there is state that is maintained in a server, group of servers, or in a machine and subsequent requests from a client must be routed to where that state is maintained. This might be something as simple as a database cursor maintained by a server on behalf of a client. Alternatively it might be that the server has a connection to an external system and subsequent requests need to go back to the server that has that connection. A more sophisticated case is where a group of servers maintains some sort of cache in shared memory and subsequent requests need to be routed to where the cache is maintained. Although this last case might be able to be handled by data dependent routing, using client server affinity allows the cache to be partitioned dynamically instead of statically.

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• A Letter for Your CEO About Social Marketing’s Future

  - by Mike Stiles

  We’ll leave it to you to decide if or how to sneak this in front of them. Dear Chief: This social marketing thing looks serious. It’s gone beyond having a Facebook page and putting our info and a few promotions on it. It’s seriously disrupting how we’ve always done marketing. And its implications reach well beyond marketing. My concern is that we stay positioned ahead of these changes and are prepared to embrace, adapt and capitalize on these new capabilities as opposed to spending valuable time and money trying to shoehorn social into “the way we’ve always done things.” I’m also concerned about what happens if our competition executes on this before we do. The days of being able to impose our ad messaging on the masses to great effect are numbered. The public now has the tech tools and ability to filter out things that are irrelevant to them. And frankly, spending ad dollars to reach unlikely prospects isn’t the most efficient path for us either. Today, our customers have to genuinely love what we do. That starts with a renewed, customer-centric focus on the quality and usability of our product. If their experience with it is bad, they now have very connected, loud voices that will testify against us. We can’t afford that. Next, their customer service experience, before and after the sale, has to be a pleasant surprise. That requires truly knowing our customers and listening to them. Lip service won’t cut it. We have to get and use as much data on the customer as possible, interact with them wherever they want to interact with us, and commit to impressing them. If we do, they’ll get out there and advertise for us. Since peer-to-peer recommendation is the most effective marketing, that’s money in the bank. Social marketing is about forming relationships, same as how individuals use social. We want them to know us, trust us, and get real value from knowing us. That requires honesty and transparency that before now might have been uncomfortable. I propose that if we clearly make everything we do about our customers’ wants and needs, we’ll have nothing to hide. It will solidify customer loyalty, retention, and thus, revenue. These things can’t happen without certain tools and structural changes in the organization. There are social cloud platforms that integrate social management into all of the necessary areas: CRM, customer service, sales, marketing automation, content marketing, ecommerce, etc. This is will give us a real-time, complete view of the customer so their every interaction with us is attentive, personalized, accurate, relevant, and satisfying. Without it, we’re just a collage of disjointed systems, each gathering data that informs only its own departmental silo. The customer is voluntarily giving us everything we need to know about them to win them over, but we have to start listening and putting the pieces together. There’s still time. Brands are coming to terms with this transition to the socially enabled enterprise, but so far they aren’t moving very fast. Like us, they’re dealing with long-entrenched technologies and processes. CMO’s and CIO’s have to form new partnerships. Content operations have to be initiated and properly staffed and funded. Various departments must be able to utilize interconnected big data. What will separate the winners from the losers? Well chief, that’s why I’m writing you. It’s in your hands. These initiatives won’t get the kind of priority and seriousness that inspire actual deadlines & action unless they come from your desk. You have to be the champion of customer centricity. You have to be our change agent. You have to be our innovator. Otherwise, it’s going to be business as usual, and that puts us in a very vulnerable place. Sincerely, Your Team @mikestilesPhoto: Gary Scott, stock.xchng

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• Running ODI 11gR1 Standalone Agent as a Windows Service

  - by fx.nicolas

  ODI 11gR1 introduces the capability to use OPMN to start and protect agent processes as services. Setting up the OPMN agent is covered in the following post and extensively in the ODI Installation Guide. Unfortunately, OPMN is not installed along with ODI, and ODI 10g users who are really at ease with the old Java Wrapper are a little bit puzzled by OPMN, and ask: "How can I simply set up the agent as a service?". Well... although the Tanuki Service Wrapper is no longer available for free, and the agentservice.bat script lost, you can switch to another service wrapper for the same result. For example, Yet Another Java Service Wrapper (YAJSW) is a good candidate. To configure a standalone agent with YAJSW: download YAJSW Uncompress the zip to a folder (called %YAJSW% in this example) Configure, start and test your standalone agent. Make sure that this agent is loaded with all the required libraries and drivers, as the service will not load dynamically the drivers added subsequently in the /drivers directory. Retrieve the PID of the agent process: Open Task Manager. Select View Select Columns Select the PID (Process Identifier) column, then click OK In the list of processes, find the java.exe process corresponding to your agent, and note its PID. Open a command line prompt in %YAJSW%/bat and run: genConfig.bat <your_pid> This command generates a wrapper configuration file for the agent. This file is called %YAJSW%/conf/wrapper.conf. Stop your agent. Edit the wrapper.conf file and modify the configuration of your service. For example, modify the display name and description of the service as shown in the example below. Important: Make sure to escape the commas in the ODI encoded passwords with a backslash! In the example below, the ODI_SUPERVISOR_ENCODED_PASS contained a comma character which had to be prefixed with a backslash. # Title to use when running as a console wrapper.console.title=\"AGENT\" #******************************************************************** # Wrapper Windows Service and Posix Daemon Properties #******************************************************************** # Name of the service wrapper.ntservice.name=AGENT_113 # Display name of the service wrapper.ntservice.displayname=ODI Agent # Description of the service wrapper.ntservice.description=Oracle Data Integrator Agent 11gR3 (11.1.1.3.0) ... # Escape the comma in the password with a backslash. wrapper.app.parameter.7 = -ODI_SUPERVISOR_ENCODED_PASS=fJya.vR5kvNcu9TtV\,jVZEt Execute your wrapped agent as console by calling in the command line prompt: runConsole.bat Check that your agent is running, and test it again.This command starts the agent with the configuration but does not install it yet as a service. To Install the agent as service call installService.bat From that point, you can view, start and stop the agent via the windows services. Et voilà ! Two final notes: - To modify the agent configuration, you must uninstall/reinstall the service. For this purpose, run the uninstallService.bat to uninstall it and play again the process above. - To be able to uninstall the agent service, you should keep a backup of the wrapper.conf file. This is particularly important when starting several services with the wrapper.

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• How to make software development decisions based on facts

  - by Laila

  We love to hear stories about the many and varied ways our customers use the tools that we develop, but in our earnest search for stories and feedback, we'd rather forgotten that some of our keenest users are fellow RedGaters, in the same building. It was almost by chance that we discovered how the SQL Source Control team were using SmartAssembly. As it happens, there is a separate account (here on Simple-Talk) of how SmartAssembly was used to support the Early Access program; by providing answers to specific questions about how the SQL Source Control product was used. But what really got us all grinning was how valuable the SQL Source Control team found the reports that SmartAssembly was quickly and painlessly providing. So gather round, my friends, and I'll tell you the Tale Of The Framework Upgrade . <strange mirage effect to denote a flashback. A subtle background string of music starts playing in minor key> Kevin and his team were undecided. They weren't sure whether they could move their software product from .NET 2 to .NET 3.5 , let alone to .NET 4. You see, they were faced with having to guess what version of .NET was already installed on the average user's machine, which I'm sure you'll agree is no easy task. Upgrading their code to .NET 3.5 might put a barrier to people trying the tool, which was the last thing Kevin wanted: "what if our users have to download X, Y, and Z before being able to open the application?" he asked. That fear of users having to do half an hour of downloads (.followed by at least ten minutes of installation. followed by a five minute restart) meant that Kevin's team couldn't take advantage of WCF (Windows Communication Foundation). This made them sad, because WCF would have allowed them to write their code in a much simpler way, and in hours instead of days (as was the case with .NET 2). Oh sure, they had a gut feeling that this probably wasn't the case, 3.5 had been out for so many years, but they weren't sure. <background music switches to major key> SmartAssembly Feature Usage Reporting gave Kevin and his team exactly what they needed: hard data on their users' systems, both hardware and software. I was there, I saw it happen, and that's not the sort of thing a woman quickly forgets. I'll always remember his last words (before he went to lunch): "You get lots of free information by just checking a box in SmartAssembly" is what he said. For example, they could see how many CPU cores their customers were using, and found out that they should be making use of parallelism to take advantage of available cores. But crucially, (and this is the moral of my tale, dear reader), Kevin saw that 99% of SQL Source Control's users were on .NET 3.5 or above.   So he knew that they could make the switch and that is was safe to do so. With this reassurance, they could use WCF to not only make development easier, but to also give them a really nice way to do inter-process communication between the Source Control and the SQL Compare products. To have done that on .NET 2.0 was certainly possible <knowing chuckle>, but Microsoft have made it a lot easier with WCF. <strange mirage effect to denote end of flashback> So you see, with Feature Usage Reporting, they finally got the hard evidence they needed to safely make the switch to .NET 3.5, knowing it would not inconvenience their users. And that, my friends, is just the sort of thing we like to hear.

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• Building a Mafia&hellip;TechFest Style

  - by David Hoerster

  It’s been a few months since I last blogged (not that I blog much to begin with), but things have been busy.  We all have a lot going on in our lives, but I’ve had one item that has taken up a surprising amount of time – Pittsburgh TechFest 2012.  After the event, I went through some minutes of the first meetings for TechFest, and I started to think about how it all came together.  I think what inspired me the most about TechFest was how people from various technical communities were able to come together and build and promote a common event.  As a result, I wanted to blog about this to show that people from different communities can work together to build something that benefits all communities.  (Hopefully I've got all my facts straight.)  TechFest started as an idea Eric Kepes and myself had when we were planning our next Pittsburgh Code Camp, probably in the summer of 2011.  Our Spring 2011 Code Camp was a little different because we had a great infusion of some folks from the Pittsburgh Agile group (especially with a few speakers from LeanDog).  The line-up was great, but we felt our audience wasn’t as broad as it should have been.  We thought it would be great to somehow attract other user groups around town and have a big, polyglot conference. We started contacting leaders from Pittsburgh’s various user groups.  Eric and I split up the ones that we knew about, and we just started making contacts.  Most of the people we started contacting never heard of us, nor we them.  But we all had one thing in common – we ran user groups who’s primary goal is educating our members to make them better at what they do. Amazingly, and I say this because I wasn’t sure what to expect, we started getting some interest from the various leaders.  One leader, Greg Akins, is, in my opinion, Pittsburgh’s poster boy for the polyglot programmer.  He’s helped us in the past with .NET Code Camps, is a Java developer (and leader in Pittsburgh’s Java User Group), works with Ruby and I’m sure a handful of other languages.  He helped make some e-introductions to other user group leaders, and the whole thing just started to snowball. Once we realized we had enough interest with the user group leaders, we decided to not have a Fall Code Camp and instead focus on this new entity. Flash-forward to October of 2011.  I set up a meeting, with the help of Jeremy Jarrell (Pittsburgh Agile leader) to hold a meeting with the leaders of many of Pittsburgh technical user groups.  We had representatives from 12 technical user groups (Python, JavaScript, Clojure, Ruby, PittAgile, jQuery, PHP, Perl, SQL, .NET, Java and PowerShell) – 14 people.  We likened it to a scene from a Godfather movie where the heads of all the families come together to make some deal.  As a result, the name “TechFest Mafia” was born and kind of stuck. Over the next 7 months or so, we had our starts and stops.  There were moments where I thought this event would not happen either because we wouldn’t have the right mix of topics (was I off there!), or enough people register (OK, I was wrong there, too!) or find an appropriate venue (hmm…wrong there, too) or find enough sponsors to help support the event (wow…not doing so well).  Overall, everything fell into place with a lot of hard work from Eric, Jen, Greg, Jeremy, Sean, Nicholas, Gina and probably a few others that I’m forgetting.  We also had a bit of luck, too.  But in the end, the passion that we had to put together an event that was really about making ourselves better at what we do really paid off. I’ve never been more excited about a project coming together than I have been with Pittsburgh TechFest 2012.  From the moment the first person arrived at the event to the final minutes of my closing remarks (where I almost lost my voice – I ended up being diagnosed with bronchitis the next day!), it was an awesome event.  I’m glad to have been part of bringing something like this to Pittsburgh…and I’m looking forward to Pittsburgh TechFest 2013.  See you there!

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• Who should ‘own’ the Enterprise Architecture?

  - by Michael Glas

  I recently had a discussion around who should own an organization’s Enterprise Architecture. It was spawned by an article titled “Busting CIO Myths” in CIO magazine1 where the author interviewed Jeanne Ross, director of MIT's Center for Information Systems Research and co-author of books on enterprise architecture, governance and IT value.In the article Jeanne states that companies need to acknowledge that "architecture says everything about how the company is going to function, operate, and grow; the only person who can own that is the CEO". "If the CEO doesn't accept that role, there really can be no architecture."The first question that came up when talking about ownership was whether you are talking about a person, role, or organization (there are pros and cons to each, but in general, I like to assign accountability to as few people as possible). After much thought and discussion, I came to the conclusion that we were answering the wrong question. Instead of talking about ownership we were talking about responsibility and accountability, and the answer varies depending on the particular role of the organization’s Enterprise Architecture and the activities of the enterprise architect(s).Instead of looking at just who owns the architecture, think about what the person/role/organization should do. This is one possible scenario (thanks to Bob Covington): The CEO should own the Enterprise Strategy which guides the business architecture. The Business units should own the business processes and information which guide the business, application and information architectures. The CIO should own the technology, IT Governance and the management of the application and information architectures/implementations. The EA Governance Team owns the EA process.  If EA is done well, the governance team consists of both IT and the business. While there are many more roles and responsibilities than listed here, it starts to provide a clearer understanding of ‘ownership’. Now back to Jeanne’s statement that the CEO should own the architecture. If you agree with the statement about what the architecture is (and I do agree), then ultimately the CEO does need to own it. However, what we ended up with was not really ownership, but more statements around roles and responsibilities tied to aspects of the enterprise architecture. You can debate the semantics of ownership vs. responsibility and accountability, but in the end the important thing is to come to a clearer understanding that is easily communicated (and hopefully measured) around the question “Who owns the Enterprise Architecture”.The next logical step . . . create a RACI matrix that details the findings . . . but that is a step that each organization needs to do on their own as it will vary based on current EA maturity, company culture, and a variety of other factors. Who ‘owns’ the Enterprise Architecture in your organization? 1 CIO Magazine Article (Busting CIO Myths): http://www.cio.com/article/704943/Busting_CIO_Myths Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• Google, typography, and cognitive fluency for persuasion

  - by Roger Hart

  Cognitive fluency is - roughly - how easy it is to think about something. Mere Exposure (or familiarity) effects are basically about reacting more favourably to things you see a lot. Which is part of why marketers in generic spaces like insipid mass-market lager will spend quite so much money on getting their logo daubed about the place; or that guy at the bus stop starts to look like a dating prospect after a month or two. Recent thinking suggests that exposure effects likely spin off cognitive fluency. We react favourably to things that are easier to think about. I had to give tech support to an older relative recently, and suggested they Google the problem. They were confused. They could not, apparently, Google the problem, because part of it was that their Google toolbar had mysteriously vanished. Once I'd finished trying not to laugh, I started thinking about typography. This is going somewhere, I promise. Google is a ubiquitous brand. Heck, it's a verb, and their recent, jaw-droppingly well constructed Paris advert is more or less about that ubiquity. It trades on Google's integration into any information-seeking behaviour. But, as my tech support encounter suggests, people settle into comfortable patterns of thinking about things. They build schemas, and altering them can take work. Maybe the ubiquity even works to cement that. Alongside their online effort, Google is running billboard campaigns to advertise Chrome, a free product in a crowded space. They are running these ads in some kind of kooky Calibri / Comic Sans hybrid. Now, at first it seems odd that one of the world's more ubiquitous brands needs to run a big print campaign in public places - surely they have all the fluency they need? Well, not so much. Chrome, after all, is not the same as their core product, so there's some basic awareness work to do, and maybe a whole new batch of exposure effect to try and grab. But why the typeface? It's heavily foregrounded, and the ads are extremely textual. Plus, don't we all know that jovial, off-beat fonts look unprofessional, or something? There's a whole bunch of people who want (often rightly) to ban Comic Sans I wonder, though. Are Google trying to subtly disrupt cognitive fluency? There's an interesting paper (pdf) about - among other things - the effects of typography on they way people answer survey questions. Participants given the slightly harder to read question gave more abstract answers. The paper references other work suggesting that generally speaking, less-fluent question framing elicits more considered answers. The Chrome ad typeface is less fluent for print. Reactions may therefore be more considered, abstract, and disruptive. Is that, in fact, what Google need? They have brand ubiquity, but they want here to change accustomed behaviour, to get people to think about changing their browser. Is this actually a very elegant piece of persuasive information design? If you think about their "what is a browser?" vox pop research video, there's certainly a perceptual barrier they're going to have to tackle somehow.

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• Plymouth and GRUB do not show at all

  - by WarriorIng64

  I am using Ubuntu 11.04 64-bit as my only OS on my desktop computer, which used to only run Ubuntu 10.04 LTS until I had the time to upgrade it with a fresh install. It uses integrated NVIDIA graphics (listed as a GeForce 6150SE nForce 430 by the NVIDIA X Server Settings utility) with the current proprietary driver as provided by the Additional Drivers utility, and has a VGA connection to a 1680x1050 Acer monitor. I used to get the (ugly-looking version of) Plymouth graphical boot screen while under 10.04. It didn't look that great, but I was fine with it. Now, it doesn't show on 11.04 at all during boot (I just get an error message in a moving gray box from the monitor saying "Input Not Supported"), and only rarely it will show on shutdown, all garbled up. I could not get GRUB to show during boot while holding down Shift, either (same error message), but pressing Enter while it should be up starts the system normally. A picture of the error message I was getting: Once fully booted, the system still shows the login screen and desktop just fine. Any information on how to troubleshoot this would be appreciated. If there's any hardware-specific stuff I forgot to include here, let me know the relevant commands to run in a comment below. Things that I've tried: Running plymouth in a framebuffer: no effect Booting with nomodeset as my grub boot: option no effect Booting with nomodeset and plymouth in a framebuffer: no effect other than Plymouth showing during shutdown only Following the Softpedia instructions for fixing Plymouth's resolution: Problem mostly solved, except logo does not show in Plymouth during boot, and both grub and Plymouth are slightly off-center #4 above, but with nomodeset removed as a grub boot option: same effect as #4 #5 above, but with vt.handoff=7 added as a grub boot option: same effect as #4 I have added the current contents of /etc/default/grub as requested in the comments: # If you change this file, run 'update-grub' afterwards to update # /boot/grub/grub.cfg. # For full documentation of the options in this file, see: # info -f grub -n 'Simple configuration' GRUB_DEFAULT=0 GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0 GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT_QUIET=true GRUB_TIMEOUT=10 GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=`lsb_release -i -s 2> /dev/null || echo Debian` GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash video=uvesafb:mode_option=1280x1024-24,mtrr=3,scroll=ywrap" GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="" # Uncomment to enable BadRAM filtering, modify to suit your needs # This works with Linux (no patch required) and with any kernel that obtains # the memory map information from GRUB (GNU Mach, kernel of FreeBSD ...) #GRUB_BADRAM="0x01234567,0xfefefefe,0x89abcdef,0xefefefef" # Uncomment to disable graphical terminal (grub-pc only) #GRUB_TERMINAL=console # The resolution used on graphical terminal # note that you can use only modes which your graphic card supports via VBE # you can see them in real GRUB with the command `vbeinfo' GRUB_GFXMODE=1280x1024 # Uncomment if you don't want GRUB to pass "root=UUID=xxx" parameter to Linux #GRUB_DISABLE_LINUX_UUID=true # Uncomment to disable generation of recovery mode menu entries #GRUB_DISABLE_RECOVERY="true" # Uncomment to get a beep at grub start #GRUB_INIT_TUNE="480 440 1" CURRENT STATUS: I forgot to uncomment one line as per "things that I've tried" #4, so I took care of that. I can now see GRUB during startup when I hold Shift and a normal-looking Plymouth during shutdown...but Plymouth during boot is now just a solid purple screen. In each case, it's displayed a little off-center to the left, with a thin black bar running down the right side of the monitor. The error pictured above no longer shows. I'd say this problem is about 2/3 solved now. UPDATE: After Natty started freezing up on me, I decided to dual-boot with Oneiric, which unfortunately shows the same problems. Rather than trying all these workarounds though, I decided to do what I should have done from the start and file a pair of bug reports. LAST UPDATE: Bug 850908 has been confirmed as a legitimate nouveaufb bug. I have overwritten my 11.04 partition with 12.04 LTS, and I can confirm at this time that the issue is present there, as well. I will now flag this question to be closed, yet I hope it was helpful for anyone who experienced similar issues; if you are still having the same problem as me, please go there and mark yourself as affected. Thanks!

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• MVC 2 jQuery Client-side Validation

  - by nmarun

  Well, I watched Phil Haack’s show What's New in Microsoft ASP.NET MVC 2 and was impressed about the client-side validation (starts at 17:45) that MVC 2 offers. I tried creating the same, but Phil does not show what .js files need to be included and also I was not able to find the source code for the application that he used. In order to find out the required JavaScript file references, I added all of the files in my application to the page and ran it. Of course it worked, but this is definitely not an optimum solution. By removing one at a time and testing the app, I’ve short-listed the following ones: 1: <script src="../../Scripts/jquery-1.4.1.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script 2: <script src="../../Scripts/MicrosoftAjax.js" type="text/javascript"></script> 3: <script src="../../Scripts/MicrosoftMvcValidation.js" type="text/javascript"></script> Now, a little about the feature itself. Say, I’m working with a Book application so my model will look something like: 1: public class Book 2: { 3: [HiddenInput(DisplayValue = false)] 4: public int BookId { get; set; } 5:  6: [DisplayName("Book Title")] 7: [Required(ErrorMessage = "Book title is required")] 8: [StringLength(20, ErrorMessage = "Must be under 20 characters")] 9: public string Title { get; set; } 10:  11: [Required(ErrorMessage = "Author is required")] 12: [StringLength(40, ErrorMessage = "Must be under 40 characters")] 13: public string Author { get; set; } 14:  15: public decimal Price { get; set; } 16: 17: [DisplayName("ISBN")] 18: [StringLength(13, ErrorMessage = "Must be 13 characters")] 19: public string Isbn { get; set; } 20: } This ensures that the data passed will be validated upon post. But what would happen if you add the line (along with the above mentioned .js files): 1: <% Html.EnableClientValidation(); %> Now, this acts as ‘on-the-fly’ or ‘real-time’ validation. Now, when the user types 20 characters for the Title, the error shows up right on the 21st character. Beautiful… and you do not have to create the JavaScript function(s) for this. They’re auto-magically created for you. (Doing a ‘View Source’ on the browser page shows you the JavaScript logic that goes on behind the scenes). I bumped into another post that shows how .net 4 allows us to create custom validation attributes: Dynamic Range validation in MVC 2. This will help us attach virtually any business logic to the model itself. Please see the source code I’ve worked with.

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• Silverlight Cream for March 31, 2010 -- #826

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Andrea Boschin, Radenko Zec, Andrej Tozon, Bobby Diaz, Brad Abrams, Wolf Schmidt, Colin Eberhardt, Anand Iyer, Matthias Shapiro, Jaime Rodriguez, Bill Reiss, and Lee. Shoutouts: Cigdem has a post up about here MIX10 Interviewing experiences: MIX10 SilverlightShow Interviews Ian T. Lackey has his material up from his talk Silverlight SEO at the St. Louis .Net Users Group Not Silverlight but definitely WP7 cool, Michael Klucher reports that there are New Windows Phone Samples on Creators Club Online Tim Heuer posted a survey: What tools are the minimum to get started in Silverlight? From SilverlightCream.com: A RoleManager to apply roles declaratively to user interface Andrea Boschin also has a new post at SilverlightShow discussing the use of a RoleManager in WCF RIA Services to apply user roles to elements of the UI... good stuff, Andrea. Virtualization in Silverlight 4 RC Radenko Zec has a post out at SilverlightShow where he explains UI and Data Virtualization then gives some examples of their use in Silverlight 4RC, and some issues as well. MS Word Mail Merge with Silverlight 4 COM Automation Andrej Tozon has a post up at SilverlightShow that I missed in the rush of MIX10. He's doing MailMerge with COM automation and Silverlight 4... actually prett cool stuff and all the source! KISS and Tell - MVVM and the ViewModelLocator Bobby Diaz is blogging about a very popular subject right now: ViewModelLocator. He's not showing production code, but it's a thought... check it out. Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Validating Data I'm running behind, but Brad Abrams' next post in his series is about validating data in the business application. He also discusses setting up shared code validation. A One-stop Shopping XAML Namespace for Silverlight Client SDK Controls Wolf Schmidt at the Silverlight SDK has a post up highlighting the SL4 XAML namespace prefix. He starts with SL3 then demonstrates the feature's use in SL4. Binding a Silverlight 3 DataGrid to dynamic data via IDictionary (Updated) Colin Eberhardt has an update to his previous article of the same title. This one is a bug fix on an upgrade to SL3 and also an expansion of the previous post. Demo Apps from MIX10 on Windows Phone 7 Anand Iyer posted links to all the WP7 demos used at MIX10 and at least in the case of FourSquare, the source is on CodePlex. XAML Files for Location Visualizations in Silverlight and WPF Matthias Shapiro has graciously provided XAML for us for Silverlight and WPF for a bunch of different US maps... too cool, now we don't have to be asking 'where did you get that map?'... thanks Matthias! Theming in Windows Phone Jaime Rodriguez has a post up that deep-dives theming in general and demonstrates using it on WP7... end-user configurations and developer stuff. Space Rocks game step 7: Moving the ship It appears that in the heat of battle (blogging) I said Bill Reiss' Space Rocks game he's building is for WP7... obviously it's not, but it's a game folks... :) THis is Episode 7 and he's moving the ship now. SL4(RC) RichTextBox and Access Violation Lee has some code that looks like it should work for a RichTextBox in SL4RC, and it's throwing an error... see if you have a solution for him... or is it a bug? Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Creating and using VM Groups in VirtualBox

  - by Fat Bloke

  With VirtualBox 4.2 we introduced the Groups feature which allows you to organize and manage your guest virtual machines collectively, rather than individually. Groups are quite a powerful concept and there are a few nice features you may not have discovered yet, so here's a bit more information about groups, and how they can be used.... Creating a group Groups are just ad hoc collections of virtual machines and there are several ways of creating a group: In the VirtualBox Manager GUI: Drag one VM onto another to create a group of those 2 VMs. You can then drag and drop more VMs into that group; Select multiple VMs (using Ctrl or Shift and click) then  select the menu: Machine...Group; or   press Cmd+U (Mac), or Ctrl+U(Windows); or right-click the multiple selection and choose Group, like this: From the command line: Group membership is an attribute of the vm so you can modify the vm to belong in a group. For example, to put the vm "Ubuntu" into the group "TestGroup" run this command: VBoxManage modifyvm "Ubuntu" --groups "/TestGroup" Deleting a Group Groups can be deleted by removing a group attribute from all the VMs that constitute that group. To do this via the command-line the syntax is: VBoxManage modifyvm "Ubuntu" --groups "" In the VirtualBox Manager, this is more easily done by right-clicking on a group header and selecting "Ungroup", like this: Multiple Groups Now that we understand that Groups are just attributes of VMs, it can be seen that VMs can exist in multiple groups, for example, doing this: VBoxManage modifyvm "Ubuntu" --groups "/TestGroup","/ProjectX","/ProjectY" Results in: Or via the VirtualBox Manager, you can drag VMs while pressing the Alt key (Mac) or Ctrl (other platforms). Nested Groups Just like you can drag VMs around in the VirtualBox Manager, you can also drag whole groups around. And dropping a group within a group creates a nested group. Via the command-line, nested groups are specified using a path-like syntax, like this: VBoxManage modifyvm "Ubuntu" --groups "/TestGroup/Linux" ...which creates a sub-group and puts the VM in it. Navigating Groups In the VirtualBox Manager, Groups can be collapsed and expanded by clicking on the carat to the left in the Group Header. But you can also Enter and Leave groups too, either by using the right-arrow/left-arrow keys, or by clicking on the carat on the right hand side of the Group Header, like this: . ..leading to a view of just the Group contents. You can Leave or return to the parent in the same way. Don't worry if you are imprecise with your clicking, you can use a double click on the entire right half of the Group Header to Enter a group, and the left half to Leave a group. Double-clicking on the left half when you're at the top will roll-up or collapse the group.   Group Operations The real power of Groups is not simply in arranging them prettily in the Manager. Rather it is about performing collective operations on them, once you have grouped them appropriately. For example, let's say that you are working on a project (Project X) where you have a solution stack of: Database VM, Middleware/App VM, and  a couple of client VMs which you use to test your app. With VM Groups you can start the whole stack with one operation. Select the Group Header, and choose Start: The full list of operations that may be performed on Groups are: Start Starts from any state (boot or resume) Start VMs in headless mode (hold Shift while starting) Pause Reset Close Save state Send Shutdown signal Poweroff Discard saved state Show in filesystem Sort Conclusion Hopefully we've shown that the introduction of VM Groups not only makes Oracle VM VirtualBox pretty, but pretty powerful too.  - FB 

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• A quick look at: sys.dm_os_buffer_descriptors

  - by Jonathan Allen

  SQL Server places data into cache as it reads it from disk so as to speed up future queries. This dmv lets you see how much data is cached at any given time and knowing how this changes over time can help you ensure your servers run smoothly and are adequately resourced to run your systems. This dmv gives the number of cached pages in the buffer pool along with the database id that they relate to: USE [tempdb] GO SELECT COUNT(*) AS cached_pages_count , CASE database_id WHEN 32767 THEN 'ResourceDb' ELSE DB_NAME(database_id) END AS Database_name FROM sys.dm_os_buffer_descriptors GROUP BY DB_NAME(database_id) , database_id ORDER BY cached_pages_count DESC; This gives you results which are quite useful, but if you add a new column with the code: …to convert the pages value to show a MB value then they become more relevant and meaningful. To see how your server reacts to queries, start up SSMS and connect to a test server and database – mine is called AdventureWorks2008. Make sure you start from a know position by running: -- Only run this on a test server otherwise your production server's-- performance may drop off a cliff and your phone will start ringing. DBCC DROPCLEANBUFFERS GO Now we can run a query that would normally turn a DBA’s hair white: USE [AdventureWorks2008] go SELECT * FROM [Sales].[SalesOrderDetail] AS sod INNER JOIN [Sales].[SalesOrderHeader] AS soh ON [sod].[SalesOrderID] = [soh].[SalesOrderID] …and then check our cache situation: A nice low figure – not! Almost 2000 pages of data in cache equating to approximately 15MB. Luckily these tables are quite narrow; if this had been on a table with more columns then this could be even more dramatic. So, let’s make our query more efficient. After resetting the cache with the DROPCLEANBUFFERS and FREEPROCCACHE code above, we’ll only select the columns we want and implement a WHERE predicate to limit the rows to a specific customer. SELECT [sod].[OrderQty] , [sod].[ProductID] , [soh].[OrderDate] , [soh].[CustomerID] FROM [Sales].[SalesOrderDetail] AS sod INNER JOIN [Sales].[SalesOrderHeader] AS soh ON [sod].[SalesOrderID] = [soh].[SalesOrderID] WHERE [soh].[CustomerID] = 29722 …and check our effect cache: Now that is more sympathetic to our server and the other systems sharing its resources. I can hear you asking: “What has this got to do with logging, Jonathan?” Well, a smart DBA will keep an eye on this metric on their servers so they know how their hardware is coping and be ready to investigate anomalies so that no ‘disruptive’ code starts to unsettle things. Capturing this information over a period of time can lead you to build a picture of how a database relies on the cache and how it interacts with other databases. This might allow you to decide on appropriate schedules for over night jobs or otherwise balance the work of your server. You could schedule this job to run with a SQL Agent job and store the data in your DBA’s database by creating a table with: IF OBJECT_ID('CachedPages') IS NOT NULL DROP TABLE CachedPages CREATE TABLE CachedPages ( cached_pages_count INT , MB INT , Database_Name VARCHAR(256) , CollectedOn DATETIME DEFAULT GETDATE() ) …and then filling it with: INSERT INTO [dbo].[CachedPages] ( [cached_pages_count] , [MB] , [Database_Name] ) SELECT COUNT(*) AS cached_pages_count , ( COUNT(*) * 8.0 ) / 1024 AS MB , CASE database_id WHEN 32767 THEN 'ResourceDb' ELSE DB_NAME(database_id) END AS Database_name FROM sys.dm_os_buffer_descriptors GROUP BY database_id After this has been left logging your system metrics for a while you can easily see how your databases use the cache over time and may see some spikes that warrant your attention. This sort of logging can be applied to all sorts of server statistics so that you can gather information that will give you baseline data on how your servers are performing. This means that when you get a problem you can see what statistics are out of their normal range and target you efforts to resolve the issue more rapidly.

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• Silverlight Cream for February 02, 2011 -- #1039

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Tony Champion, Gill Cleeren, Alex van Beek, Michael James, Ollie Riches, Peter Kuhn, Mike Ormond, WindowsPhoneGeek(-2-), Daniel N. Egan, Loek Van Den Ouweland, and Paul Thurott. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Using the AutoCompleteBox" Peter Kuhn WP7: "Windows Phone Image Button" Loek Van Den Ouweland Training: "New WP7 Virtual Labs" Daniel N. Egan Shoutouts: SilverlightShow has their top 5 most popular news articles up: SilverlightShow for Jan 24-30, 2011 Rudi Grobler posted answers he gives to questions about Silverlight - Where do I start? Brian Noyes starts a series of Webinars at SilverlightShow this morning at 10am PDT: Free Silverlight Show Webinar: Querying and Updating Data From Silverlight Clients with WCF RIA Services Join your fellow geeks at Gangplank in Chandler Arizona this Saturday as Scott Cate and AZGroups brings you Azure Boot Camp – Feb 5th 2011 From SilverlightCream.com: Deploying Silverlight with WCF Services Tony Champion takes a step out of his norm (Pivot) and has a post up about deploying WCF Services with your SL app, and how to take the pain out of that without pulling out your hair. Getting ready for Microsoft Silverlight Exam 70-506 (Part 3) Gill Cleeren's part 3 of getting ready for the Silverlight Exam is up at SilverlightShow... with links to the first two parts. There's so much good information linked off these... thanks Gill and 'The Show'! A guide through WCF RIA Services attributes Alex van Beek has a post up you will probably want to bookmark unless you're not using WCF RIA... do you know all the attributes by heart? ... how about an excellent explanation of 10 of them? Using DeferredLoadListBox in a Pivot Control Michael James discusses using the DeferredLoadListBox, and then also using it with the Pivot control... but not without some pain points which he defines and gives the workaround for. WP7: Know your data Ollie Riches' latest is about Data and WP7 ... specifically 'knowing' what data you're needing/using to avoid the 90MB memory limit... He gives a set of steps to follow to measure your data model to avoid getting in trouble. Using the AutoCompleteBox Peter Kuhn takes a great look at the AutoCompleteBox... the basics, and then well beyond with custom data, item templates, custom filters, asynchronous filtering, and a behavior for MVVM async filtering. OData and Windows Phone 7 Part 2 Mike Ormond has part 2 of his OData/WP7 post up... lashing up the images to go along with the code this time out... nice looking app. WP7 RoundToggleButton and RoundButton in depth WindowsPhoneGeek is checking out the RoundToggleButton and RoundButton controls from the Coding4fun Toolkit in detail... of course where to get them, and then the setup, demo project included. All about Dependency Properties in Silverlight for WP7 WindowsPhoneGeek's latest post is a good dependency-property discussion related to WP7 development, but if you're just learning, it's a good place to learn about the subject. New WP7 Virtual Labs Daniel N. Egan posted links to 6 new WP7 Virtual Labs released on 1/25. Windows Phone Image Button Loek Van Den Ouweland has a style up on his blog that gives you an imageButton for your WP7 apps, and a sweet little video showing how it's done in Expression Blend too. Yet another free Windows Phone book for developers Paul Thurott found a link to another Free eBook for WP7 development. This one is by Puja Pramudya and is an English translation of the original, and is an introductory text, but hey... it's free... give it a look! Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Playing HTML5 Video with fall back for IE8/IE7 and earlier versions of other browsers using Silverlight

  - by Harish Ranganathan

  One of the popular HTML5 tags is the video tag.  The ability to play videos without depending on a plugin is something that excites web developers to a great extent and no wonder you end up seeing video demos in all HTML5 conferences. Now, coming to HTML5 Video, the tag itself is simply <video id=”ID” src=”FILENAME.mp4/ogv/webm” > in the simplest form.  This also means that the video needs to be H.256 encoded MP4 format or some of the other formats as mentioned above.  For a detailed specification on this, check this Wikipedia article HTML5 video is supported by all the modern browsers such as IE9 (currently in RC stage), Mozilla Firefox 4 and Chrome latest versions.  Here below is a simple example of a HTML5 video tag and the screen shot of how it looks like in IE9 RC <!DOCTYPE html> <head></head> <body> <h1>This is a sample of an HTML5 Video</h1> <video src="video.mp4" id="myvideo">Your browser doesn’t support this currently</video> </body> </html> You can add attributes to the video tag such as “autoplay” which will automatically start playing the video.  Also, you can specify “poster” to display an initial picture before the video starts playing etc., but I am not going into those for now. This would play well in the modern browsers as mentioned above.  However, if the end users are viewing this page from an earlier version of browsers such as IE8/IE7 or IE6, this video wouldn’t play.  Whatever text that is specified between the video tags, would just show up. Note: for demo purposes, I went to the IE9 developer toolbar and chose IE8 as Browser Mode to exhibit this legacy behaviour.  However, in the interest of serving the larger community of users who visit the site, we would like to have a fall back mechanism for playing videos on older version of browsers. Now, Silverlight is supported in IE6/7 & 8 and other browsers too.  If we can have the same video encoded for Silverlight, we can put the fall-back code, as follows:- <video src="videos/video.mp4" id="myvideo">     <object height="252" type="application/x-silverlight-2" width="448">         <param name="source" value="resources/player.xap">         <param name="initParams" value="deferredLoad=true, duration=0, m=http://localhost/DemoSite/videos/video.mp4, autostart=false, autohide=true, showembed=true, postid=0" />         <param name="background" value="#00FFFFFF" />     </object> </video>   Note, this sample uses a Silverlight XAP file with the same video and uses the object tag to embed it instead of the HTML5 video tag. So, when I now run this sample and switch to IE8 (using the IE9 Developer toolbar’s Browser Mode), I get and when clicking on the “Play” icon, Note, there are multiple ways to play videos in Silverlight and this is one of the ways.  For a complete list of Silverlight samples, visit http://www.silverlight.net/learn/  Also, we can use Flash to play video in the fall-back mechanism as well. Thus, we can create a fall-back mechanism for playing HTML5 videos for the older browsers and hence ensure that the end users get to experience the same. Cheers !!!

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• Ubuntu 11.04 and 10.04 hang with black screen while installing from USB disk

  - by Bill

  I've been trying to install Ubuntu 11.04 from a USB flash stick and each time I try to boot from the USB key one of two things happen: A) The screen that asks you what you would like to do (e.g. run Ubuntu from the USB key or install it) shows up and the countdown to the default option starts to count down but as soon as I either touch the keyboard (sometimes I press enter or the arrow keys to select an option) or the countdown gets to zero the screen just locks up and nothing happens no matter how long I wait. B) When I boot from the USB key the screen will flicker for a second and then go black with a flashing white underscore at the top left corner of the screen. Again it doesn't matter how long I wait, nothing happens and pressing keys doesn't do a thing. The very first time I tried to install it I got a terminal-like screen that said something about a directory called 'casper' having an error of some sort. I have tried installing from USB using both 11.04 and 10.10. I'm about to try 10.04. I have read tons of forum posts about this but so far I haven't seen anything in the solutions that apply to me. My intention is to dual boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu. I must keep Windows as I am required to use Visual Studio for one of my college courses. Right now I'm using Wubi but I really want a full install. I can't use LVPM because it doesn't work with the version of Wubi I used. So now I'm thinking my best bet is to try to get a clean install working. I'd also convert Wubi to a full install too but there's no solution as far as I've read. So could someone tell me a reason why this is happening or if there's something I can do to get around the problem? I'm using a Gateway LT2802u netbook with and Intel Atom N455 processor, 1GB RAM, Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3150 graphics card, and a 250GB HDD. I don't have anything on my current Wubi install that I can't replace so keep in mind when answering that I don't care if I lose my current settings and files from Wubi. Thanks everyone! UPDATE I just answered my own question so in case anyone else is having this same problem using similar hardware, do the following: When I first tried installing 11.04 I used the recommended universal installer tool to create the USB live/installation disk. That caused the original problem. Note that I had already downloaded the 11.04 ISO and did not use the included downloader from the USB creator. After that failed I used the same USB creator but had it download 10.10 for me. It also failed with the same issue. I repeated this process with unetbootin as well for both versions. Finally, I downloaded the Ubuntu 10.04 ISO and used the recommended USB creator once again. There was an error while creating the USB live install so I reformatted the USB key as FAT32 and tried again. It created the USB key. I then booted from the USB flash drive and selected "Install Ubuntu" (exact wording was different). It worked! It took me through the process that you see shown in pictures on the Ubuntu website. I let it create the appropriate partitions for me and it simply worked. I did get a few errors while the system tried to restart after it installed. It hung on a terminal-like screen but I pressed ENTER and it restarted. I booted into Windows 7, it checked the disks as it sensed that I messed with a partition, then it booted into Windows normally. Now I'm going to uninstall Wubi and update my new full install of Ubuntu! I'm excited to get the benefits of a full install now. So in the end, hopefully someone can learn from what I did.

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• Big Data – Operational Databases Supporting Big Data – Key-Value Pair Databases and Document Databases – Day 13 of 21

  - by Pinal Dave

  In yesterday’s blog post we learned the importance of the Relational Database and NoSQL database in the Big Data Story. In this article we will understand the role of Key-Value Pair Databases and Document Databases Supporting Big Data Story. Now we will see a few of the examples of the operational databases. Relational Databases (Yesterday’s post) NoSQL Databases (Yesterday’s post) Key-Value Pair Databases (This post) Document Databases (This post) Columnar Databases (Tomorrow’s post) Graph Databases (Tomorrow’s post) Spatial Databases (Tomorrow’s post) Key Value Pair Databases Key Value Pair Databases are also known as KVP databases. A key is a field name and attribute, an identifier. The content of that field is its value, the data that is being identified and stored. They have a very simple implementation of NoSQL database concepts. They do not have schema hence they are very flexible as well as scalable. The disadvantages of Key Value Pair (KVP) database are that they do not follow ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) properties. Additionally, it will require data architects to plan for data placement, replication as well as high availability. In KVP databases the data is stored as strings. Here is a simple example of how Key Value Database will look like: Key Value Name Pinal Dave Color Blue Twitter @pinaldave Name Nupur Dave Movie The Hero As the number of users grow in Key Value Pair databases it starts getting difficult to manage the entire database. As there is no specific schema or rules associated with the database, there are chances that database grows exponentially as well. It is very crucial to select the right Key Value Pair Database which offers an additional set of tools to manage the data and provides finer control over various business aspects of the same. Riak Rick is one of the most popular Key Value Database. It is known for its scalability and performance in high volume and velocity database. Additionally, it implements a mechanism for collection key and values which further helps to build manageable system. We will further discuss Riak in future blog posts. Key Value Databases are a good choice for social media, communities, caching layers for connecting other databases. In simpler words, whenever we required flexibility of the data storage keeping scalability in mind – KVP databases are good options to consider. Document Database There are two different kinds of document databases. 1) Full document Content (web pages, word docs etc) and 2) Storing Document Components for storage. The second types of the document database we are talking about over here. They use Javascript Object Notation (JSON) and Binary JSON for the structure of the documents. JSON is very easy to understand language and it is very easy to write for applications. There are two major structures of JSON used for Document Database – 1) Name Value Pairs and 2) Ordered List. MongoDB and CouchDB are two of the most popular Open Source NonRelational Document Database. MongoDB MongoDB databases are called collections. Each collection is build of documents and each document is composed of fields. MongoDB collections can be indexed for optimal performance. MongoDB ecosystem is highly available, supports query services as well as MapReduce. It is often used in high volume content management system. CouchDB CouchDB databases are composed of documents which consists fields and attachments (known as description). It supports ACID properties. The main attraction points of CouchDB are that it will continue to operate even though network connectivity is sketchy. Due to this nature CouchDB prefers local data storage. Document Database is a good choice of the database when users have to generate dynamic reports from elements which are changing very frequently. A good example of document usages is in real time analytics in social networking or content management system. Tomorrow In tomorrow’s blog post we will discuss about various other Operational Databases supporting Big Data. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• Access Music from Amie Street in Boxee

  - by Mysticgeek

  One of our favorite sites for discovering new music is Amie Street. Today we take a look at the Amie Street app for Boxee that allows you to access your favorite tunes from the Boxee interface. Amie Street is a cool site that allows you to discover a lot of cool music from independent artists. What makes Amie Street unique is that most of the music starts out free, then the price goes up incrementally as its popularity grows. The Amie Street App for Boxee let’s you access music and playlists you’ve created on the site, with more features are on the way. For this example we’re using the mouse and keyboard, but of course you can also get to each section using your remote if you have one. Or you can turn your iPod touch into a Boxee remote too. Amie Street in Boxee To access the Amie Street app, launch Boxee and click on Apps from the main menu. Under the Search Sidebar type in Amie Street and select it from the results field.   Then you can add it to the My Apps section…and double-click on the icon. Click on Start to begin using it. You’ll be be presented with a Welcome screen where you can sign into your account. If you don’t have an account yet, there is also an option to go to the Amie Street site and create one. Enter in your account credentials… Now you’ll be able to access your Library, Playlists, Search for new tunes, and check out your Recommended bands and artists. Hover the pointer over an album to get a bit more info about it such as the music genre. You’ll be able to play the songs from the playlists you created on the Amie Street site. You can browse through the history of the music you’ve played as well. Not all the features of this app seem to work as you’d expect them to, and some of the features are not yet available like the Browse feature.   Conclusion At the time of this writing we weren’t able to purchase music or get additional information about the artists. As development continues on Boxee and this app, you can expect more of a full user experience and the ability to purchase music. Even though some of the features are a bit buggy or not available, if you’re a Boxee user and a fan of Amie Street, this is cool app to add to your collection. Download Boxee for Windows, Mac, and Ubuntu Learn more about Amie Street on Boxee Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Amie Street Downloader Makes Purchasing Music EasierFind Free or Cheap Indie Music at Amie StreetIntegrate Boxee with Media Center in Windows 7Using Pandora in BoxeeGetting Started with Boxee TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips HippoRemote Pro 2.2 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Watch World Cup Online On These Sites Speed Up Windows With ReadyBoost Awesome World Cup Soccer Calendar Nice Websites To Watch TV Shows Online 24 Million Sites Windows Media Player Glass Icons (icons we like)

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• Required Parameters [SSIS Denali]

  - by jamiet

  SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) in its 2005 and 2008 incarnations expects you to set a property values within your package at runtime using Configurations. SSIS developers tend to have rather a lot of issues with SSIS configurations; in this blog post I am going to highlight one of those problems and how it has been alleviated in SQL Server code-named Denali.   A configuration is a property path/value pair that exists outside of a package, typically within SQL Server or in a collection of one or more configurations in a file called a .dtsConfig file. Within the package one defines a pointer to a configuration that says to the package “When you execute, go and get a configuration value from this location” and if all goes well the package will fetch that configuration value as it starts to execute and you will see something like the following in your output log: Information: 0x40016041 at Package: The package is attempting to configure from the XML file "C:\Configs\MyConfig.dtsConfig". Unfortunately things DON’T always go well, perhaps the .dtsConfig file is unreachable or the name of the SQL Sever holding the configuration value has been defined incorrectly – any one of a number of things can go wrong. In this circumstance you might see something like the following in your log output instead: Warning: 0x80012014 at Package: The configuration file "C:\Configs\MyConfig.dtsConfig" cannot be found. Check the directory and file name. The problem that I want to draw attention to here though is that your package will ignore the fact it can’t find the configuration and executes anyway. This is really really bad because the package will not be doing what it is supposed to do and worse, if you have not isolated your environments you might not even know about it. Can you imagine a package executing for months and all the while inserting data into the wrong server? Sounds ridiculous but I have absolutely seen this happen and the root cause was that no-one picked up on configuration warnings like the one above. Happily in SSIS code-named Denali this problem has gone away as configurations have been replaced with parameters. Each parameter has a property called ‘Required’: Any parameter with Required=True must have a value passed to it when the package executes. Any attempt to execute the package will result in an error. Here we see that error when attempting to execute using the SSMS UI: and similarly when executing using T-SQL: Error is: Msg 27184, Level 16, State 1, Procedure prepare_execution, Line 112 In order to execute this package, you need to specify values for the required parameters.   As you can see, SSIS code-named Denali has mechanisms built-in to prevent the problem I described at the top of this blog post. Specifying a Parameter required means that any packages in that project cannot execute until a value for the parameter has been supplied. This is a very good thing. I am loathe to make recommendations so early in the development cycle but right now I’m thinking that all Project Parameters should have Required=True, certainly any that are used to define external locations should be anyway. @Jamiet

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• SQL SERVER – Performance Tuning Resolution

  - by pinaldave

  This blog post is written in response to T-SQL Tuesday hosted by MidnightDBAs. Taking resolutions is such an interesting subject. I think just like records, these are broken way more often. I find this is the funniest thing as we all take resolutions every year but not every year, we can manage to keep them. Well, does it mean we should not take resolutions? In fact I support resolutions. Every year, I take a resolution that I will strive reduce my body weight and I usually manage to keep eating healthy till the end of January. When February begins, I begin to loose focus from my goal and as March starts, the “As usual” eating habits begin. Looking at the positive side, what would happen if every year I do not eat healthy in January, I think that might cause terrible consequences to my health in the long run. So keeping resolutions is a good practise and following them to the extent one can is commendable. Let us come back to the world of SQL Server. What is my resolution for year 2011 for SQL Server? There are many, I am going to list three of very important resolutions that I have taken this new year over here. To understand SQL Server Performance Tuning at a deeper Level I think I am already half way through. I have been being very much busy during any given month doing hands-on performance tuning for at least 12 days on an average. That means, I am doing this activity for almost doing 2 weeks a month. I believe that I have a good understanding of the subject. Note that the word that I have used is “good,” and not “best.” There are often cases when I am stumped, and I have no clue of what to do next. Then, I usually go for my “trial and error” method - whichever method works, I make sure to keep a note on my blog. My goal is that I should never ever go for the trial and error method again to achieve the same solution. I should know the solution right away when I see the problem. I do understand that Performance Tuning can be a strange animal at times and one cannot guess the right step every time. However, aiming a high goal never hurts and I am going to learn more and more in this focused area. Going further from Basic BI understanding I do fairly decent with BI concepts. I know the nbasics of SSIS, SSRS, SSAS, PowerPivot and SharePoint (and few other things MDS, StreamInsight, etc). However, I still consider myself as a beginner. I do not have hands-on experience like many other BI Gurus around. I think I want to take my learning further in this direction. I do not want to be a BI expert as the first step but the goal is to move ahead from basic level towards an advanced level. I am going to start presenting in User Group Sessions and other places on this subject. When I have to prepare new subject for presentations, I think I force myself to learn more. I am committed to learn a bit more in this direction. Learning new features SQL Server 2011 Denali This is new thing from “Microsoft” for all the SQL Geeks. I am eagerly waiting for final product later this year and I am planning to learn it well. I think if I follow my above two goals, I think this goal will be automatically covered. I am eager and excited for this new offering from Microsoft. I guess, these are my resolutions; may be next year about the same time, I must revisit this post and see how much successful I am in following my goal. On a lighter note, I am particularly fan of following cartoon strip (Courtesy: Calvin and Hobbes). I think when we cannot resolve our resolutions, we tend to act like Calvin. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: About Me, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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