worker process - Page 164

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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Beginner Geek: Scan a Document or Picture in Windows 7

- by Mysticgeek

There may come a time when you want to digitize your priceless old pictures, or need to scan a receipts and documents for your company. Today we look at how to scan a picture or document in Windows 7. Scanning Your Document In this example we’re using an HP PSC 1500 All-In-One printer connected to a Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit system. Different scanners will vary, however the process is essentially the same. The scanning process has changed a bit since the XP days. To scan a document in Windows 7, place the document or picture in the scanner, click on Start, and go to Devices and Printers. When the Devices and Printers window opens, find your scanning device and double-click on it to get the manufacturers Printer Actions menu. For our HP PSC 1500 we have a few different options like printing, device setup, and scanner actions. Here we’ll click on the Scan a document or photo hyperlink. The New Scan window opens and from here you can adjust the quality of the scanned image and choose the output file type. Then click the Preview button to get an idea of what the image will look like. If you’re not happy with the preview, then you can go back and make any adjustments to the quality of the document or photo. Once everything looks good, click on the Scan button. The scanning process will start. The amount of time it takes will depend on your scanner type, and the quality of the settings you choose. The higher the quality…the more time it will take. You will have the option to tag the picture if you want to… Now you can view your scanned document or photo inside Windows Photo Viewer. If you’re happy with the look of the document, you can send it off in an email, put it on an network drive, FTP it… whatever you need to do with it. Another method is to place the document of photo you wish to scan in the scanner, open up Devices and Printers, then right-click on the scanning device and select Start Scan from the context menu. This should bypass the manufacturer screen and go directly into the New Scan window, where you can start the scan process. From the Context Menu you can also choose Scan Properties. This will allow you to test the scanner if you’re having problems with it and change some of its settings. Or you can choose Scan Profiles which allows you to use pre-selected settings, create your own, or set one as the default. Although scanning documents and photos isn’t a common occurrence as it was a few years ago, Windows 7 still includes the feature. When you need to scan a document or photo in Windows 7, this should get you started. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Easily Rotate Pictures In Word 2007Beginner Geek: Delete User Accounts in Windows 7Customize Your Welcome Picture Choices in Windows VistaSecure Computing: Detect and Eliminate Malware Using Windows DefenderMark Your Document As Final in Word 2007 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 VMware Workstation 7 Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Creating a Password Reset Disk in Windows Bypass Waiting Time On Customer Service Calls With Lucyphone MELTUP – "The Beginning Of US Currency Crisis And Hyperinflation" Enable or Disable the Task Manager Using TaskMgrED Explorer++ is a Worthy Windows Explorer Alternative Error Goblin Explains Windows Error Codes

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SQL – Quick Start with Admin Sections of NuoDB – Manage NuoDB Database

- by Pinal Dave

In the yesterday’s blog post we have seen that it is extremely easy to install the NuoDB database on your local machine. Now that the application is properly set up, let us explore NuoDB a bit more and get you familiar with the how it works and what the important areas of the NuoDB are that you should learn. As we have already installed NuoDB, now we will quickly start with two of the important areas in NuoDB: 1) Admin and 2) Explorer. In this blog post I will explore how the Admin Section of the NuoDB Console works. In the next blog post we will learn how the Explorer Section works. Let us go to the NuoDB Console by typing the following URL in your browser: http://localhost:8080/ It will bring you to the following screen: On this screen you can see a big Start QuickStart button. Click on the button and it will bring you to following screen. On this screen you will find very important information about Domain and Database Settings. It is our habit that we do not read what is written on the screen and keep on clicking on continue without reading. While we are familiar with most wizards, we can often miss the very important message on the screen. Please note the information of Domain Settings and Database Settings from the following screen before clicking on Create Database. Domain Settings User: quickstart Password: quickstart Database Settings User: dba Password: goalie Database: test Schema: HOCKEY Once you click on the Create Database button it will immediately start creating sample database. First, it will start a Storage Manager and right after that it will start a Transaction Engine. Once the engine is up, it will Create a Schema and Sample Data. On the success of the creating the sample database it will show the following screen. Now is the time where we can explore the NuoDB Admin or NuoDB Explorer. If you click on Admin, it will first show following login screen. Enter for the username “domain” and for the password “bird”. Alternatively you can enter “quickstart” twice for username and password. It works as too. Once you enter into the Admin Section, on the left side you can see information about NuoDB and Admin Console and on the right side you can see the domain overview area. From this Administrative section you can do any of the following tasks: Create a view of the entire domain Add and remove databases Start and stop NuoDB Transaction Engines and Storage Managers Monitor transaction across all the NuoDB databases On the right side of the Admin Section we can see various information about a particular NuoDB domain. You can quickly view various alerts, find out information about the number of host machines that are provisioned for the domain, and see the number of databases and processes that are running in the domain. If you click on the “1 host” link you will be able to see various processes, CPU usage and other information. In the Processes Section you can see that there are two different types of processes. The first process (where you can see the floppy drive icon) represents a running Storage Manager process and the second process a running Transaction Engine process. You can click on the links for the Storage Manager and Transaction Engine to see further statistical details right down to the last byte of the data. There are various charts available for analysis as well. I think the product is quite mature and the user can add different monitor charts to the Admin section. Additionally, the Admin section is the place where you can create and manage new databases. I hope today’s tutorial gives you enough confidence that you can try out NuoDB and checkout various administrative activities with the database. I am personally impressed with their dashboard related to various counters. For more information about how the NuoDB architecture works and what a Storage Manager or Transaction Engine does, check out this short video with NuoDB CTO Seth Proctor: In the next blog post, we will try out the Explorer section of NuoDB, which allows us to run SQL queries and write SQL code. Meanwhile, I strongly suggest you download and install NuoDB and get yourself familiar with the product. 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, Technology Tagged: NuoDB

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Oracle Database 11gR2 11.2.0.3 Certified with E-Business Suite on Windows

- by John Abraham

As a follow up to our original certification announcement, Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2.0.3) is now certified with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i and Release 12 on the following Microsoft Windows operating systems: Release 12.1 (12.1.1 and higher) Microsoft Windows Server (32-bit) (2003, 2008) Microsoft Windows x64 (64-bit) (20031, 20081, 2008 R22) Release 12.0 (12.0.4 and higher) Microsoft Windows Server (32-bit) (2003) Microsoft Windows x64 (64-bit) (2003, 2008)1 Release 11i (11.5.10.2 + ATG PF.H RUP 6 and higher) Microsoft Windows Server (32-bit) (2003, 20081) Microsoft Windows x64 (64-bit) (2003, 2008, 2008 R2)1 Notes 1: This OS is a 'database tier only' or 'split tier configuration' platform where the application tier must be on a fully certified E-Business Suite platform. 2: This OS is a 'database tier only' platform for Release 11i. For 12.1.1 or higher, it is also supported on the application tier via the migration process outlined in My Oracle Support Document 1188535.1. Pending Certification E-Business Suite 12.0 with 11.2.0.3 Split Tier Certification on Microsoft Windows x64 (64-bit) (2008 R2) is in progress and will be announced separately. This announcement for Oracle E-Business Suite 11i and R12 includes: Real Application Clusters (RAC) Oracle Database Vault Transparent Data Encryption (Column Encryption) TDE Tablespace Encryption Advanced Security Option (ASO)/Advanced Networking Option (ANO) Export/Import Process for Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i and Release 12 Database Instances Transportable Database and Transportable Tablespaces Data Migration Processes for Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i and Release 12 References MOS Document 881505.1 - Interoperability Notes - Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i with Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2.0) MOS Document 1058763.1 - Interoperability Notes - Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 with Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2.0) MOS Document 1091086.1 - Integrating Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i with Oracle Database Vault 11gR2 MOS Document 1091083.1 - Integrating Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 with Oracle Database Vault 11gR2 MOS Document 216205.1 - Database Initialization Parameters for Oracle E-Business Suite 11i MOS Document 396009.1 - Database Initialization Parameters for Oracle Applications Release 12 MOS Document 823586.1 - Using Oracle 11g Release 2 Real Application Clusters with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i MOS Document 823587.1 - Using Oracle 11g Release 2 Real Application Clusters with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 MOS Document 403294.1 - Using Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) Column Encryption with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i MOS Document 732764.1 - Using Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) Column Encryption with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 MOS Document 828223.1 - Using TDE Tablespace Encryption with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i MOS Document 828229.1 - Using TDE Tablespace Encryption with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 MOS Document 391248.1 - Encrypting Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i Network Traffic using Advanced Security Option and Advanced Networking Option MOS Document 732764.1 - Using Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) Column Encryption with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 MOS Document 557738.1 - Export/Import Process for Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i Database Instances Using Oracle Database 11g Release 1 or 11g Release 2 MOS Document 741818.1 - Export/Import Process for Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 Database Instances Using Oracle Database 11g Release 1 or 11g Release 2 MOS Document 1366265.1 - Using Transportable Tablespaces to Migrate Oracle Applications 11i Using Oracle Database 11g Release 2 MOS Document 1311487.1 - Using Transportable Tablespaces to Migrate Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 Using Oracle Database 11g Release 2 MOS Document 729309.1 - Using Transportable Database to Migrate Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i Using Oracle Database 10g Release 2 or 11g MOS Document 734763.1 - Using Transportable Database to Migrate Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 Using Oracle Database 10g Release 2 or 11g MOS Document 1188535.1 - Migrating Oracle E-Business Suite R12 to Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Please also review the platform-specific Oracle Database Installation Guides for operating system and other prerequisites. Related Articles Database 11.2.0.2 Certified with EBS R12 on IBM: Linux on System z EBS R12 Certified with Database 11gR2 on SLES 11 11gR2 11.2.0.3 Database Certified with E-Business Suite

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Oracle Database 11.2.0.4 Certified with EBS on Microsoft Windows Server

- by John Abraham

As a follow up to to a previous announcement, Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2.0.4) is now certified with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i and Release 12 on the following Microsoft Windows Server operating systems: Release 12.2 (12.2.3 and higher): Microsoft Windows x64 (64-bit) (2008 R2) Release 12.1 (12.1.1 and higher): Microsoft Windows Server (32-bit) (2003, 2008) Microsoft Windows x64 (64-bit) (20031, 20081, 2008 R22) Release 12.0 (12.0.4 and higher): Microsoft Windows Server (32-bit) (2003) Microsoft Windows x64 (64-bit) (2003, 2008, 2008 R2)1 Release 11i (11.5.10.2 + ATG PF.H RUP 6 and higher):: Microsoft Windows Server (32-bit) (2003, 20081) Microsoft Windows x64 (64-bit) (2003, 2008, 2008 R2)1 Notes: 1: This OS is a 'database tier only' or 'split tier configuration' platform where the application tier must be on a fully certified E-Business Suite platform. 2: This OS is a 'database tier only' platform for Release 11i. For 12.1.1 or higher, it is also supported on the application tier via the migration process outlined in My Oracle Support Document 1188535.1. This announcement for Oracle E-Business Suite 11i and R12 includes: Oracle Database 11gR2 version 11.2.0.4 Oracle Database 11gR2 version 11.2.0.4 Real Application Clusters (RAC) Oracle Database Vault 11gR2 version 11.2.0.4 Transparent Data Encryption (Column Encryption) using Oracle Database 11gR2 version 11.2.0.4 TDE Tablespace Encryption using Oracle Database 11gR2 version 11.2.0.4 Advanced Security Option (ASO)/Advanced Networking Option (ANO) with Oracle Database 11gR2 version 11.2.0.4 Export/Import Process for Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i and Release 12 Database Instances Transportable Database and Transportable Tablespaces Data Migration Processes for Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i and Release 12 Certification data in My Oracle Support (http://support.oracle.com) has been updated with this certification - please review the documents below for all requirements and additional details: Where can I find more information? MOS Document 881505.1 - Interoperability Notes - Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i with Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2.0) MOS Document 1058763.1 - Interoperability Notes - Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 with Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2.0) MOS Dcoument 1623879.1 - Interoperability Notes - Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2 with Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2.0) MOS Document 1091086.1 - Integrating Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i with Oracle Database Vault 11gR2 MOS Document 1091083.1 - Integrating Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 with Oracle Database Vault 11gR2 MOS Document 216205.1 - Database Initialization Parameters for Oracle E-Business Suite 11i MOS Document 396009.1 - Database Initialization Parameters for Oracle Applications Release 12 MOS Document 823586.1 - Using Oracle 11g Release 2 Real Application Clusters with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i MOS Document 823587.1 - Using Oracle 11g Release 2 Real Application Clusters with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 MOS Document 946413.1 - Using Oracle Applications with a Split Configuration Database Tier on Oracle Release 11g Release 2 MOS Document 403294.1 - Using Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) Column Encryption with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i MOS Document 732764.1 - Using Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) Column Encryption with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 MOS Document 828223.1 - Using TDE Tablespace Encryption with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i MOS Document 828229.1 - Using TDE Tablespace Encryption with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 MOS Document 391248.1 - Encrypting Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i Network Traffic using Advanced Security Option and Advanced Networking Option MOS Document 376700.1 - Enabling SSL in Oracle Application Release 12 MOS Document 732764.1 - Using Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) Column Encryption with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 MOS Document 557738.1 - Export/Import Process for Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i Database Instances Using Oracle Database 11g Release 1 or 11g Release 2 MOS Document 741818.1 - Export/Import Process for Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 Database Instances Using Oracle Database 11g Release 1 or 11g Release 2 MOS Document 1366265.1 - Using Transportable Tablespaces to Migrate Oracle Applications 11i Using Oracle Database 11g Release 2 MOS Document 1311487.1 - Using Transportable Tablespaces to Migrate Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 Using Oracle Database 11g Release 2 MOS Document 729309.1 - Using Transportable Database to Migrate Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i Using Oracle Database 10g Release 2 or 11g MOS Document 734763.1 - Using Transportable Database to Migrate Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 Using Oracle Database 10g Release 2 or 11g MOS Document 1188535.1 - Migrating Oracle E-Business Suite R12 to Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 MOS Dcoument 1349240.1 - Database Preparation Guidelines for an Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2 Upgrade MOS Document 1594274.1 - Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2: Consolidated List of Patches and Technology Bug Fixes Please also review the platform-specific Oracle Database Installation Guides for operating system and other prerequisites.

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Part 15: Fail a build based on the exit code of a console application

In the series the following parts have been published Part 1: Introduction Part 2: Add arguments and variables Part 3: Use more complex arguments Part 4: Create your own activity Part 5: Increase AssemblyVersion Part 6: Use custom type for an argument Part 7: How is the custom assembly found Part 8: Send information to the build log Part 9: Impersonate activities (run under other credentials) Part 10: Include Version Number in the Build Number Part 11: Speed up opening my build process template Part 12: How to debug my custom activities Part 13: Get control over the Build Output Part 14: Execute a PowerShell script Part 15: Fail a build based on the exit code of a console application When you have a Console Application or a batch file that has errors, the exitcode is set to another value then 0. You would expect that the build would see this and report an error. This is not true however. First we setup the scenario. Add a ConsoleApplication project to your solution you are building. In the Main function set the ExitCode to 1 class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { Console.WriteLine("This is an error in the script."); Environment.ExitCode = 1; } } Checkin the code. You can choose to include this Console Application in the build or you can decide to add the exe to source control Now modify the Build Process Template CustomTemplate.xaml Add an argument ErrornousScript Scroll down beneath the TryCatch activity called “Try Compile, Test, and Associate Changesets and Work Items” Add an Sequence activity to the template In the Sequence, add a ConvertWorkspaceItem and an InvokeProcess activity (see Part 14: Execute a PowerShell script for more detailed steps) In the FileName property of the InvokeProcess use the ErrornousScript so the ConsoleApplication will be called. Modify the build definition and make sure that the ErrornousScript is executing the exe that is setting the ExitCode to 1. You have now setup a build definition that will execute the errornous Console Application. When you run it, you will see that the build succeeds. This is not what you want! To solve this, you can make use of the Result property on the InvokeProcess activity. So lets change our Build Process Template. Add the new variables (scoped to the sequence where you run the Console Application) called ExitCode (type = Int32) and ErrorMessage Click on the InvokeProcess activity and change the Result property to ExitCode In the Handle Standard Output of the InvokeProcess add a Sequence activity In the Sequence activity, add an Assign primitive. Set the following properties: To = ErrorMessage Value = If(Not String.IsNullOrEmpty(ErrorMessage), Environment.NewLine + ErrorMessage, "") + stdOutput And add the default BuildMessage to the sequence that outputs the stdOutput Add beneath the InvokeProcess activity and If activity with the condition ExitCode <> 0 In the Then section add a Throw activity and set the Exception property to New Exception(ErrorMessage) The complete workflow looks now like When you now check in the Build Process Template and run the build, you get the following result And that is exactly what we want. You can download the full solution at BuildProcess.zip. It will include the sources of every part and will continue to evolve.

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Software Architecture verses Software Design

Recently, I was asked what the differences between software architecture and software design are. At a very superficial level both architecture and design seem to mean relatively the same thing. However, if we examine both of these terms further we will find that they are in fact very different due to the level of details they encompass. Software Architecture can be defined as the essence of an application because it deals with high level concepts that do not include any details as to how they will be implemented. To me this gives stakeholders a view of a system or application as if someone was viewing the earth from outer space. At this distance only very basic elements of the earth can be detected like land, weather and water. As the viewer comes closer to earth the details in this view start to become more defined. Details about the earth’s surface will start to actually take form as well as mane made structures will be detected. The process of transitioning a view from outer space to inside our earth’s atmosphere is similar to how an architectural concept is transformed to an architectural design. From this vantage point stakeholders can start to see buildings and other structures as if they were looking out of a small plane window. This distance is still high enough to see a large area of the earth’s surface while still being able to see some details about the surface. This viewing point is very similar to the actual design process of an application in that it takes the very high level architectural concept or concepts and applies concrete design details to form a software design that encompasses the actual implementation details in the form of responsibilities and functions. Examples of these details include: interfaces, components, data, and connections. In review, software architecture deals with high level concepts without regard to any implementation details. Software design on the other hand takes high level concepts and applies concrete details so that software can be implemented. As part of the transition between software architecture to the creation of software design an evaluation on the architecture is recommended. There are several benefits to including this step as part of the transition process. It allows for projects to ensure that they are on the correct path as to meeting the stakeholder’s requirement goals, identifies possible cost savings and can be used to find missing or nonspecific requirements that cause ambiguity in a design. In the book “Evaluating Software Architectures: Methods and Case Studies”, they define key benefits to adding an architectural review process to ensure that an architecture is ready to move on to the design phase. Benefits to evaluating software architecture: Gathers all stakeholders to communicate about the project Goals are clearly defined in regards to the creation or validation of specific requirements Goals are prioritized so that when conflicts occur decisions will be made based on goal priority Defines a clear expectation of the architecture so that all stakeholders have a keen understanding of the project Ensures high quality documentation of the architecture Enables discoveries of architectural reuse Increases the quality of architecture practices. I can remember a few projects that I worked on that could have really used an architectural review prior to being passed on to developers. This project was to create some new advertising space on the company’s website in order to sell space based on the location and some other criteria. I was one of the developer selected to lead this project and I was given a high level design concept and a long list of ever changing requirements due to the fact that sales department had no clear direction as to what exactly the project was going to do or how they were going to bill the clients once they actually agreed to purchase the Ad space. In my personal opinion IT should have pushed back to have the requirements further articulated instead of forcing programmers to code blindly attempting to build such an ambiguous project. Unfortunately, we had to suffer with this project for about 4 months when it should have only taken 1.5 to complete due to the constantly changing and unclear requirements. References Clements, P., Kazman, R., & Klein, M. (2002). Evaluating Software Architectures. Westford, Massachusetts: Courier Westford.

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i don't receive mail notification...Nagios Core 4

- by alessio

I have a problem with automatically mail notification in Nagios Core 4 installed on ubuntu 12 .04 lts server... i have tried to send mail with nagios user and root user with the command: echo "test" | mail -s "test mail" [email protected] and i received mail correctly... but i don't receive any automatically mail notification... i don't know how can i do to resolve this issue! :( these are my configuration files (commands.cfg, contacts.cfg, nagios.log, mail.log): commands.cfg (the path /usr/bin/mail is the right path): # 'notify-host-by-email' command definition define command{ command_name notify-host-by-email command_line /usr/bin/printf "%b" "***** Nagios *****\n\nNotification Type: $NOTIFICATIONTYPE$\nHost: $HOSTNAME$\nState: $HOSTSTATE$\nAddress: $HOSTADDRESS$\nInfo: $HOSTOUTPUT$\n\nDate/Time: $LONGDATETIME$\n" | /usr/bin/mail -s "** $NOTIFICATIONTYPE$ Host Alert: $HOSTNAME$ is $HOSTSTATE$ **" $CONTACTEMAIL$ } # 'notify-service-by-email' command definition define command{ command_name notify-service-by-email command_line /usr/bin/printf "%b" "***** Nagios *****\n\nNotification Type: $NOTIFICATIONTYPE$\n\nService: $SERVICEDESC$\nHost: $HOSTALIAS$\nAddress: $HOSTADDRESS$\nState: $SERVICESTATE$\n\nDate/Time: $LONGDATETIME$\n\nAdditional Info:\n\n$SERVICEOUTPUT$\n" | /usr/bin/mail -s "** $NOTIFICATIONTYPE$ Service Alert: $HOSTALIAS$/$SERVICEDESC$ is $SERVICESTATE$ **" $CONTACTEMAIL$ } # 'process-host-perfdata' command definition define command{ command_name process-host-perfdata command_line /usr/bin/printf "%b" "$LASTHOSTCHECK$\t$HOSTNAME$\t$HOSTSTATE$\t$HOSTATTEMPT$\t$HOSTSTATETYPE$\t$HOSTEXECUTIONTIME$\t$HOSTOUTPUT$\t$HOSTPERFDATA$\n" >> /usr/local/nagios/var/host-perfdata.out } # 'process-service-perfdata' command definition define command{ command_name process-service-perfdata command_line /usr/bin/printf "%b" "$LASTSERVICECHECK$\t$HOSTNAME$\t$SERVICEDESC$\t$SERVICESTATE$\t$SERVICEATTEMPT$\t$SERVICESTATETYPE$\t$SERVICEEXECUTIONTIME$\t$SERVICELATENCY$\t$SERVICEOUTPUT$\t$SERVICEPERFDATA$\n" >> /usr/local/nagios/var/service-perfdata.out } contacts.cfg: define contact{ contact_name supporto alias Supporto Clienti DEA service_notification_period 24x7 host_notification_period 24x7 service_notification_options w,u,c,r host_notification_options d,r service_notification_commands notify-service-by-email host_notification_commands notify-host-by-email email [email protected] } define contactgroup{ contactgroup_name admins alias Nagios Administrators members supporto } nagios.log: [1401871412] SERVICE ALERT: fileserver;Current Users;OK;SOFT;2;USERS OK - 1 users currently logged in [1401871953] SERVICE ALERT: backups;Nagios Status;WARNING;SOFT;1;NAGIOS WARNING: 36 processes, status log updated 541 seconds ago [1401872133] SERVICE ALERT: backups;Nagios Status;OK;SOFT;2;NAGIOS OK: 36 processes, status log updated 180 seconds ago [1401872321] SERVICE ALERT: posta;Swap Usage;CRITICAL;SOFT;1;CRITICAL - Plugin timed out after 10 seconds [1401872322] SERVICE ALERT: fileserver;Current Users;CRITICAL;SOFT;1;CRITICAL - Plugin timed out after 10 seconds [1401872420] SERVICE ALERT: archivio;Disk Space;CRITICAL;SOFT;1;CRITICAL - Plugin timed out after 10 seconds [1401872492] SERVICE ALERT: fileserver;Current Users;OK;SOFT;2;USERS OK - 1 users currently logged in [1401872492] SERVICE ALERT: posta;Swap Usage;OK;SOFT;2;SWAP OK: 100% free (1984 MB out of 1984 MB) [1401872590] SERVICE ALERT: archivio;Disk Space;OK;SOFT;2;DISK OK [1401872931] Auto-save of retention data completed successfully. [1401873333] SERVICE ALERT: backups;Nagios Status;WARNING;SOFT;1;NAGIOS WARNING: 36 processes, status log updated 402 seconds ago [1401873513] SERVICE ALERT: backups;Nagios Status;OK;SOFT;2;NAGIOS OK: 36 processes, status log updated 180 seconds ago mail.log (i think that the problem is here but i don't know how to resolve it): Jun 4 10:00:01 backups sm-msp-queue[6109]: My unqualified host name (backups) unknown; sleeping for retry Jun 4 10:01:01 backups sm-msp-queue[6109]: unable to qualify my own domain name (backups) -- using short name Jun 4 10:20:01 backups sm-msp-queue[7247]: My unqualified host name (backups) unknown; sleeping for retry Jun 4 10:21:01 backups sm-msp-queue[7247]: unable to qualify my own domain name (backups) -- using short name Jun 4 10:40:01 backups sm-msp-queue[8327]: My unqualified host name (backups) unknown; sleeping for retry Jun 4 10:41:01 backups sm-msp-queue[8327]: unable to qualify my own domain name (backups) -- using short name Jun 4 11:00:01 backups sm-msp-queue[9549]: My unqualified host name (backups) unknown; sleeping for retry Jun 4 11:01:01 backups sm-msp-queue[9549]: unable to qualify my own domain name (backups) -- using short name Jun 4 11:20:01 backups sm-msp-queue[10678]: My unqualified host name (backups) unknown; sleeping for retry Jun 4 11:21:01 backups sm-msp-queue[10678]: unable to qualify my own domain name (backups) -- using short name i'm at the last step and i want to finish this Nagios Core! :) Any help be appreciate!:) host definition (this host have the disk almost full and it is in hard state but non notification) : define host{ use generic-host ; Name of host template to use host_name posta alias Server Posta ESA address 10.10.2.102 parents xen1, xen2 icon_image redhat.png statusmap_image redhat.gd2 } service definition: define service{ use generic-service host_name xen1, maestro, xen2, posta, nas002, serv2, esasrvmi02, esaubuntumi service_description Disk Space check_command ssh_all_disks!10%!5% } Notification is allowed for the contact definition you gave, but is it also allowed at the the service level ? sorry but i don't understand this thing! :(

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Industry perspectives on managing content

- by aahluwalia

Earlier this week I was noodling over a topic for my first blog post. My intention for this blog is to bring a practitioner's perspective on ECM to the community; to share and collaborate on best practices and approaches that address today's business problems. Reviewing my past 14 years of experience with web technologies, I wondered what topic would serve as a good "conversation starter". During this time, I received a call from a friend who was seeking insights on how content management applies to specific industries. She approached me because she vaguely remembered that I had worked in the Health Insurance industry in the recent past. She wanted me to tell her about the specific business needs of this industry. She was in for quite a surprise as she found out that I had spent the better part of a decade managing content within the Health Insurance industry and I discovered a great topic for my first blog post! I offer some insights from Health Insurance and invite my fellow practitioners to share their insights from other industries. What does content management mean to these industries? What can solution providers be aware of when offering solutions to these industries? The United States health care system relies heavily on private health insurance, which is the primary source of coverage for approximately 58% Americans. In the late 19th century, "accident insurance" began to be available, which operated much like modern disability insurance. In the late 20th century, traditional disability insurance evolved into modern health insurance programs. The first thing a solution provider must be aware of about the Health Insurance industry is that it tends to be transaction intensive. They are the ones who manage and administer our health plans and process our claims when we visit our health care providers. It helps to keep in mind that they are in the business of delivering health insurance and not technology. You may find the mindset conservative in comparison to the IT industry, however, the Health Insurance industry has benefited and will continue to benefit from the efficiency that technology brings to traditionally paper-driven processes. We are all aware of the impact that Healthcare reform bill has had a significant impact on the Health Insurance industry. They are under a great deal of pressure to explore ways to reduce their administrative costs and increase operational efficiency. Overall, administrative costs of health insurance include the insurer's cost to administer the health plan, the costs borne by employers, health-care providers, governments and individual consumers. Inefficiencies plague health insurance, owing largely to the absence of standardized processes across the industry. To achieve this, industry leaders have come together to establish standards and invest in initiatives to help their healthcare provider partners transition to the next generation of healthcare technology. The move to online services and paperless explanation of benefits are some manifestations of technological advancements in health insurance. Several companies have adopted Toyota's LEAN methodology or Six Sigma principles to improve quality, reduce waste and excessive costs, thereby increasing the value of their plan offerings. A growing number of health insurance companies have transformed their business systems in the past decade alone and adopted some form of content management to reduce the costs involved in administering health plans. The key strategy has been to convert paper documents and forms into electronic formats, automate the content development process and securely distribute content to various audiences via diverse marketing channels, including web and mobile. Enterprise content management solutions can enable document capture of claim forms, manage digital assets, integrate with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Human Capital Management (HCM) solutions, build Business Process Management (BPM) processes, define retention and disposition instructions to comply with state and federal regulations and allow eBusiness and Marketing departments to develop and deliver web content to multiple websites, mobile devices and portals. Content can be shared securely within and outside the organization using Information Rights Management. At the end of the day, solution providers who can translate strategic goals into solutions that maximize process automation, increase ease of use and minimize IT overhead are likely to be successful in today's health insurance environment.

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ORA-4031 Troubleshooting

- by [email protected]

QUICKLINK: Note 396940.1 Troubleshooting and Diagnosing ORA-4031 Error Note 1087773.1 : ORA-4031 Diagnostics Tools [Video] Have you observed an ORA-04031 error reported in your alert log? An ORA-4031 error is raised when memory is unavailable for use or reuse in the System Global Area (SGA). The error message will indicate the memory pool getting errors and high level information about what kind of allocation failed and how much memory was unavailable. The challenge with ORA-4031 analysis is that the error and associated trace is for a "victim" of the problem. The failing code ran into the memory limitation, but in almost all cases it was not part of the root problem. Looking for the best way to diagnose? When an ORA-4031 error occurs, a trace file is raised and noted in the alert log if the process experiencing the error is a background process. User processes may experience errors without reports in the alert log or traces generated. The V$SHARED_POOL_RESERVED view will show reports of misses for memory over the life of the database. Diagnostics scripts are available in Note 430473.1 to help in analysis of the problem. There is also a training video on using and interpreting the script data Note 1087773.1. 11g DiagnosabilityStarting with Oracle Database 11g Release 1, the Diagnosability infrastructure was introduced which places traces and core files into a location controlled by the DIAGNOSTIC_DEST initialization parameter when an incident, such as an ORA-4031 occurs. For earlier versions, the trace file will be written to either USER_DUMP_DEST (if the error was caught in a user process) or BACKGROUND_DUMP_DEST (if the error was caught in a background process like PMON or SMON). The trace file contains vital information about what led to the error condition. Note 443529.1 11g Quick Steps to Package and Send Critical Error Diagnostic Information to Support[Video]Oracle Configuration Manager (OCM)Oracle Configuration Manager (OCM) works with My Oracle Support to enable proactive support capability that helps you organize, collect and manage your Oracle configurations.Oracle Configuration Manager Quick Start GuideNote 548815.1: My Oracle Support Configuration Management FAQ Note 250434.1: BULLETIN: Learn More About My Oracle Support Configuration Manager Common Causes/Solutions The ORA-4031 can occur for many different reasons. Some possible causes are: SGA components too small for workload Auto-tuning issues Fragmentation due to application design Bug/leaks in memory allocationsFor more on the 4031 and how this affects the SGA, see Note 396940.1 Troubleshooting and Diagnosing ORA-4031 Error Because of the multiple potential causes, it is important to gather enough diagnostics so that an appropriate solution can be identified. However, most commonly the cause is associated with configuration tuning. Ensuring that MEMORY_TARGET or SGA_TARGET are large enough to accommodate workload can get around many scenarios. The default trace associated with the error provides very high level information about the memory problem and the "victim" that ran into the issue. The data in the default trace is not going to point to the root cause of the problem. When migrating from 9i to 10g and higher, it is necessary to increase the size of the Shared Pool due to changes in the basic design of the shared memory area. Note 270935.1 Shared pool sizing in 10gNOTE: Diagnostics on the errors should be investigated as close to the time of the error(s) as possible. If you must restart a database, it is not feasible to diagnose the problem until the database has matured and/or started seeing the problems again. Note 801787.1 Common Cause for ORA-4031 in 10gR2, Excess "KGH: NO ACCESS" Memory Allocation ***For reference to the content in this blog, refer to Note.1088239.1 Master Note for Diagnosing ORA-4031

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Using Live Data in Database Development Work

- by Phil Factor

Guest Editorial for Simple-Talk Newsletter... in which Phil Factor reacts with some exasperation when coming across a report that a majority of companies were still using financial and personal data for both developing and testing database applications. If you routinely test your development work using real production data that contains personal or financial information, you are probably being irresponsible, and at worst, risking a heavy financial penalty for your company. Surprisingly, over 80% of financial companies still do this. Plenty of data breaches and fraud have happened from the use of real data for testing, and a data breach is a nightmare for any organisation that suffers one. The cost of each data breach averages out at around $7.2 million in the US in notification, escalation, credit monitoring, fines, litigation, legal costs, and lost business due to customer churn, £1.9 million in the UK. 70% of data breaches are done from within the organisation. Real data can be exploited in a number of ways for malicious or criminal purposes. It isn't just the obvious use of items such as name and address, date of birth, social security number, and credit card and bank account numbers: Data can be exploited in many subtle ways, so there are excellent reasons to ensure that a high priority is given to the detection and prevention of any data breaches. You'll never successfully guess all the ways that real data can be exploited maliciously, or the ease with which it can be accessed. It would be silly to argue that developers never need access to a copy of the database containing live data. Developers sometimes need to track a bug that can only be replicated on the data from the live database. However, it has to be done in a very restrictive harness. The law makes no distinction between development and production databases when a data breach occurs, so the data has to be held with all appropriate security measures in place. In Europe, the use of personal data for testing requires the explicit consent of the people whose data is being held. There are federal standards such as GLBA, PCI DSS and HIPAA, and most US States have privacy legislation. The task of ensuring compliance and tight security in such circumstances is an expensive and time-consuming overhead. The developer is likely to suffer investigation if a data breach occurs, even if the company manages to stay in business. Ironically, the use of copies of live data isn't usually the most effective way to develop or test your data. Data is usually time-specific and isn't usually current by the time it is used for testing, Existing data doesn't help much for new functionality, and every time the data is refreshed from production, any test data is likely to be overwritten. Also, it is not always going to test all the 'edge' conditions that are likely to flush out bugs. You still have the task of simulating the dynamics of actual usage of the database, and here you have no alternative to creating 'spoofed' data. Because of the complexities of relational data, It used to be that there was no realistic alternative to developing and testing with live data. However, this is no longer the case. Real data can be obfuscated, or it can be created entirely from scratch. The latter process used to be impractical, now that there are plenty of third-party tools to choose from. The process of obfuscation isn't risk free. The process must access the live data, and the success of the obfuscation process has to be carefully monitored. Database data security isn't an exciting topic to you or I, but to a hacker it can be an all-consuming obsession, especially if there is financial or political gain involved. This is not the sort of adversary one would wish for and it is far better to accept, and work with, security restrictions that exist for using live data in database development work, especially when the tools exist to create large realistic database test data that can be better for several aspects of testing.

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Automated Error Reporting = More Robust Software

- by Laila

I would like to tell you how to revolutionize your software development process </marketing hyperbole> On a more serious note, we (Red Gate's .NET Development team) recently rolled a new tool into our development process which has made our lives dramatically easier AND improved the quality of our software, and I (& one of our developers, Alex Davies) just wanted to take a quick moment to share the love. I work with a development team that takes pride in what they ship, so we take software testing rather seriously. For every development project we run, we allocate at least one software tester for every two developers, and we never ship software without first shipping early access releases and betas to get user feedback. And therein lies the challenge -encouraging users to provide consistent, useful feedback is a headache, but without that feedback, improving the software is. tricky. Until fairly recently, we used the standard (if long-winded) approach of receiving bug reports of variable quality via email or through our support forums. If that didn't give us enough information to reproduce the problem - which was most of the time - we had to enter into a time-consuming to-and-fro conversation with the end-user, to get scrape together the data we needed to work out where the problem lay. As I'm sure you're aware, this is painfully slow. To the delight of the team, we recently got to work with SmartAssembly, which lets us embed automated exception and error reporting into our software with very little pain, and we decided to do a little dogfooding. As a result, we've have made a really handy (if perhaps slightly obvious) discovery: As soon as we release a beta, or indeed any release of software, we now get tonnes of customer feedback through automated error reports. Making this process easier for our users has dramatically increased the amount (and quality) of feedback we get. From their point of view, they get an experience similar to Microsoft's error reporting, and process is essentially idiot-proof. From our side of things, we can now react much faster to the information we get, fixing the bugs and shipping a new-and-improved release, which our users rather appreciate. Smiles and hugs all round. Even more so because, as we're use SmartAssembly's Automated Error Reporting, we get to avoid having to spend weeks building an exception reporting mechanism. It takes just a few minutes to add reporting to a project, and we get a bunch of useful information back, like a stack trace and the values of all the local variables, which we can use to fix bugs. Happily, "Automated Error Reporting = More Robust Software" can actually be read two ways: we've found that we not only ship higher quality software, but we also release within a shorter time. We can ship stable software that our users are happy to upgrade to, and we then bask in the glory of lots of positive customer feedback. Once we'd starting working with SmartAssembly, we were curious to know how widespread error reporting was as a practice. Our product manager ran a survey in autumn last year, and found that 40% of software developers never really considered deploying error reporting. Considering how we've now got plenty of experience on the subject, one of our dev guys, Alex Davies, thought we should share what we've learnt, and he's kindly offered to host a webinar on delivering robust software with Automated Error Reporting. Drawing on our own in-house development experiences, he'll cover how to add error reporting to your program, how to actually use the error reports to fix bugs (don't snigger, not everyone's as bright as you), how to customize the error report dialog that your users see, and how to automatically get log files from your users' machine. The webinar will take place on Jan 25th (that's next week). It's free to attend, but you'll still need to register to hear Alex's dulcet tones.

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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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Does your analytic solution tell you what questions to ask?

- by Manan Goel

Analytic solutions exist to answer business questions. Conventional wisdom holds that if you can answer business questions quickly and accurately, you can take better business decisions and therefore achieve better business results and outperform the competition. Most business questions are well understood (read structured) so they are relatively easy to ask and answer. Questions like what were the revenues, cost of goods sold, margins, which regions and products outperformed/underperformed are relatively well understood and as a result most analytics solutions are well equipped to answer such questions. Things get really interesting when you are looking for answers but you don’t know what questions to ask in the first place? That’s like an explorer looking to make new discoveries by exploration. An example of this scenario is the Center of Disease Control (CDC) in United States trying to find the vaccine for the latest strand of the swine flu virus. The researchers at CDC may try hundreds of options before finally discovering the vaccine. The exploration process is inherently messy and complex. The process is fraught with false starts, one question or a hunch leading to another and the final result may look entirely different from what was envisioned in the beginning. Speed and flexibility is the key; speed so the hundreds of possible options can be explored quickly and flexibility because almost everything about the problem, solutions and the process is unknown. Come to think of it, most organizations operate in an increasingly unknown or uncertain environment. Business Leaders have to take decisions based on a largely unknown view of the future. And since the value proposition of analytic solutions is to help the business leaders take better business decisions, for best results, consider adding information exploration and discovery capabilities to your analytic solution. Such exploratory analysis capabilities will help the business leaders perform even better by empowering them to refine their hunches, ask better questions and take better decisions. That’s your analytic system not only answering the questions but also suggesting what questions to ask in the first place. Today, most leading analytic software vendors offer exploratory analysis products as part of their analytic solutions offerings. So, what characteristics should be top of mind while evaluating the various solutions? The answer is quite simply the same characteristics that are essential for exploration and analysis – speed & flexibility. Speed is required because the system inherently has to be agile to handle hundreds of different scenarios with large volumes of data across large user populations. Exploration happens at the speed of thought so make sure that you system is capable of operating at speed of thought. Flexibility is required because the exploration process from start to finish is full of unknowns; unknown questions, answers and hunches. So, make sure that the system is capable of managing and exploring all relevant data – structured or unstructured like databases, enterprise applications, tweets, social media updates, documents, texts, emails etc. and provides flexible Google like user interface to quickly explore all relevant data. Getting Started You can help business leaders become “Decision Masters” by augmenting your analytic solution with information discovery capabilities. For best results make sure that the solution you choose is enterprise class and allows advanced, yet intuitive, exploration and analysis of complex and varied data including structured, semi-structured and unstructured data. You can learn more about Oracle’s exploratory analysis solutions by clicking here.

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Crime Scene Investigation: SQL Server

- by Rodney Landrum

“The packages are running slower in Prod than they are in Dev” My week began with this simple declaration from one of our lead BI developers, quickly followed by an emailed spreadsheet demonstrating that, over 5 executions, an extensive ETL process was running average 630 seconds faster on Dev than on Prod. The situation needed some scientific investigation to determine why the same code, the same data, the same schema would yield consistently slower results on a more powerful server. Prod had yet to be officially christened with a “Go Live” date so I had the time, and having recently been binge watching CSI: New York, I also had the inclination. An inspection of the two systems, Prod and Dev, revealed the first surprise: although Prod was indeed a “bigger” system, with double the amount of RAM of Dev, the latter actually had twice as many processor cores. On neither system did I see much sign of resources being heavily taxed, while the ETL process was running. Without any real supporting evidence, I jumped to a conclusion that my years of performance tuning should have helped me avoid, and that was that the hardware differences explained the better performance on Dev. We spent time setting up a Test system, similarly scoped to Prod except with 4 times the cores, and ported everything across. The results of our careful benchmarks left us truly bemused; the ETL process on the new server was slower than on both other systems. We burned more time tweaking server configurations, monitoring IO and network latency, several times believing we’d uncovered the smoking gun, until the results of subsequent test runs pitched us back into confusion. Finally, I decided, enough was enough. Hadn’t I learned very early in my DBA career that almost all bottlenecks were caused by code and database design, not hardware? It was time to get back to basics. With over 100 SSIS packages and hundreds of queries, each handling specific tasks such as file loads, bulk inserts, transforms, logging, and so on, the task seemed formidable. And yet, after barely an hour spent with Profiler, Extended Events, and wait statistics DMVs, I had a lead in the shape of a query that joined three tables, containing millions of rows, returned 3279 results, but performed 239K logical reads. As soon as I looked at the execution plans for the query in Dev and Test I saw the culprit, an implicit conversion warning on a join predicate field that was numeric in one table and a varchar(50) in another! I turned this information over to the BI developers who quickly resolved the data type mismatches and found and fixed “several” others as well. After the schema changes the same query with the same databases ran in under 1 second on all systems and reduced the logical reads down to fewer than 300. The analysis also revealed that on Dev, the ETL task was pulling data across a LAN, whereas Prod and Test were connected across slower WAN, in large part explaining why the same process ran slower on the latter two systems. Loading the data locally on Prod delivered a further 20% gain in performance. As we progress through our DBA careers we learn valuable lessons. Sometimes, with a project deadline looming and pressure mounting, we choose to forget them. I was close to giving into the temptation to throw more hardware at the problem. I’m pleased at least that I resisted, though I still kick myself for not looking at the code on day one. It can seem a daunting prospect to return to the fundamentals of the code so close to roll out, but with the right tools, and surprisingly little time, you can collect the evidence that reveals the true problem. It is a lesson I trust I will remember for my next 20 years as a DBA, if I’m ever again tempted to bypass the evidence.

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Know Your Service Request Status

- by Get Proactive Customer Adoption Team

Untitled Document To monitor a Service Request or not to monitor a Service Request... That should never be the question Monitoring the Service Requests you create is an essential part of the process to resolve your issue when you work with a Support Engineer. If you monitor your Service Request, you know at all times where it is in the process, or to be more specific, you know at all times what action the Support Engineer has taken on your request and what the next step is. When you think about it, it is rather simple... Oracle Support is working the issue, Oracle Development is working the issue, or you are. When you check on the status, you may find that the Support Engineer has a question for you or the engineer is waiting for more information to resolve the issue. If you monitor the Service Request, and respond quickly, the process keeps moving, and you’ll get your answer more quickly. Monitoring a Service Request is easy. All you need to do is check the status codes that the Support Engineer or the system assigns to your Service Request. These status codes are not static. You will see that during the life of your Service request, it will go through a variety of status codes. The best advice I can offer you when you monitor your Service Request is to watch the codes. If the status is not changing, or if you are not getting responses back within the agreed timeframes, you should review the action plan the Support Engineer has outlined or talk about a new action plan. Here are the most common status codes: Work in Progress indicates that your Support Engineer is researching and working the issue. Development Working means that you have a code related issue and Oracle Support has submitted a bug to Development. Please pay a particular attention to the following statuses; they indicate that the Support Engineer is waiting for a response from you: Customer Working usually means that your Support Engineer needs you to collect additional information, needs you to try something or to apply a patch, or has more questions for you. Solution Offered indicates that the Support Engineer has identified the problem and has provided you with a solution. Auto-Close or Close Initiated are statuses you don’t want to see. Monitoring your Service Request helps prevent your issues from reaching these statuses. They usually indicate that the Support Engineer did not receive the requested information or action from you. This is important. If you fail to respond, the Support Engineer will attempt to contact you three times over a two-week period. If these attempts are unsuccessful, he or she will initiate the Auto-Close process. At the end of this additional two-week period, if you have not updated the Service Request, your Service Request is considered abandoned and the Support Engineer will assign a Customer Abandoned status. A Support Engineer doesn’t like to see this status, since he or she has been working to solve your issue, but we know our customers dislike it even more, since it means their issue is not moving forward. You can avoid delays in resolving your issue by monitoring your Service Request and acting quickly when you see the status change. Respond to the request from the engineer to answer questions, collect information, or to try the offered solution. Then the Support Engineer can continue working the issue and the Service Request keeps moving forward towards resolution. Keep in mind that if you take an extended period of time to respond to a request or to provide the information requested, the Support Engineer cannot take the next step. You may inadvertently send an implicit message about the problem’s urgency that may not match the Service Request priority, and your need for an answer. Help us help you. We want to get you the answer as quickly as possible so you can stay focused on your company’s objectives. Now, back to our initial question. To monitor Service Requests or not to monitor Service Requests? I think the answer is clear: yes, monitor your Service Request to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.

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Controlling soft errors and false alarms in SSIS

- by Jim Giercyk

If you are like me, you dread the 3AM wake-up call. I would say that the majority of the pages I get are false alarms. The alerts that require action often require me to open an SSIS package, see where the trouble is and try to identify the offending data. That can be very time-consuming and can take quite a chunk out of my beauty sleep. For those reasons, I have developed a simple error handling scenario for SSIS which allows me to rest a little easier. Let me first say, this is a high level discussion; getting into the nuts and bolts of creating each shape is outside the scope of this document, but if you have an average understanding of SSIS, you should have no problem following along. In the Data Flow above you can see that there is a caution triangle. For the purpose of this discussion I am creating a truncation error to demonstrate the process, so this is to be expected. The first thing we need to do is to redirect the error output. Double-clicking on the Query shape presents us with the properties window for the input. Simply set the columns that you want to redirect to Redirect Row in the dropdown box and hit Apply. Without going into a dissertation on error handling, I will just note that you can decide which errors you want to redirect on Error and on Truncation. Therefore, to override this process for a column or condition, simply do not redirect that column or condition. The next thing we want to do is to add some information about the error; specifically, the name of the package which encountered the error and which step in the package wrote the record to the error table. REMEMBER: If you redirect the error output, your package will not fail, so you will not know where the error record was created without some additional information. I added 3 columns to my error record; Severity, Package Name and Step Name. Severity is just a free-form column that you can use to note whether an error is fatal, whether the package is part of a test job and should be ignored, etc. Package Name and Step Name are system variables. In my package I have created a truncation situation, where the firstname column is 50 characters in the input, but only 4 characters in the output. Some records will pass without truncation, others will be sent to the error output. However, the package will not fail. We can see that of the 14 input rows, 8 were redirected to the error table. This information can be used by another step or another scheduled process or triggered to determine whether an error should be sent. It can also be used as a historical record of the errors that are encountered over time. There are other system variables that might make more sense in your infrastructure, so try different things. Date and time seem like something you would want in your output for example. In summary, we have redirected the error output from an input, added derived columns with information about the errors, and inserted the information and the offending data into an error table. The error table information can be used by another step or process to determine, based on the error information, what level alert must be sent. This will eliminate false alarms, and give you a head start when a genuine error occurs.

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Mastering snow and Java development at jDays in Gothenburg

- by JavaCecilia

Last weekend, I took the train from Stockholm to Gothenburg to attend and present at the new Java developer conference jDays. It was professionally arranged in the Swedish exhibition hall close to the amusement park Liseberg and we got a great deal out of the top-level presenters and hallway discussions. Understanding and Improving Your Java Process Our main purpose was to spread information on JVM and our monitoring tools for Java processes, so I held a crash course in the most important terms and concepts if you want to affect the performance of your Java process. From the beginning - the JVM specification to interpretation of heap usage graphs. For correct analysis, you also need to understand something about process memory - you need space for the Java heap (-Xms for initial size and -Xmx for max heap size), but the process memory also contain the thread stacks (to a size of -Xss), JVM internal data structures used for keeping track of Java objects on the heap, method compilation/optimization, native libraries, etc. If you get long pause times, make sure to monitor your application, see the allocation rate and frequency of pause times.My colleague Klara Ward then held a presentation on the Java Mission Control product, the profiling and diagnostics tools suite for HotSpot, coming soon. The room was packed and very appreciated, Klara demonstrated four different scenarios, e.g. how to diagnose and fix latencies due to lock contention for logging.My German colleague, OpenJDK ambassador Dalibor Topic travelled to Sweden to do the second keynote on "Make the Future Java". He let us in on the coming features and roadmaps of Java, now delivering major versions on a two-year schedule (Java 7 2011, Java 8 2013, etc). Also letting us in on where to download early versions of 8, to report problems early on. Software Development in teams Being a scout leader, I'm drilled in different team building and workshop techniques, creating strong groups - of course, I had to attend Henrik Berglund's session on building successful teams. He spoke about the importance of clear goals, autonomy and agreed processes. Thomas Sundberg ended the conference by doing live remote pair programming with Alex in Rumania and a concrete tips for people wanting to try it out (for local collaboration, remember to wash and change clothes). Memory Master Keynote The conference keynote was delivered by the Swedish memory master Mattias Ribbing, showing off by remembering the order of a deck of cards he'd seen once. He made it interactive by forcing the audience to learn a memory mastering technique of remembering ten ordered things by heart, asking us to shout out the order backwards and we made it! I desperately need this - bought the book, will get back on the subject. Continuous Delivery The most impressive presenter was Axel Fontaine on Continuous Delivery. Very well prepared slides with key images of his message and moved about the stage like a rock star. The topic is of course highly interesting, how to create an infrastructure enabling immediate feedback to developers and ability to release your product several times per day. Tomek Kaczanowski delivered a funny and useful presentation on good and bad tests, providing comic relief with poorly written tests and the useful rules of thumb how to rewrite them. To conclude, we had a great time and hope to see you at jDays next year :)

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ARTS Reference Model for Retail

- by Sanjeev Sharma

Consider a hypothetical scenario where you have been tasked to set up retail operations for a electronic goods or daily consumables or a luxury brand etc. It is very likely you will be faced with the following questions: What are the essential business capabilities that you must have in place? What are the essential business activities under-pinning each of the business capabilities, identified in Step 1? What are the set of steps that you need to perform to execute each of the business activities, identified in Step 2? Answers to the above will drive your investments in software and hardware to enable the core retail operations. More importantly, the choices you make in responding to the above questions will several implications in the short-run and in the long-run. In the short-term, you will incur the time and cost of defining your technology requirements, procuring the software/hardware components and getting them up and running. In the long-term, as you grow in operations organically or through M&A, partnerships and franchiser business models you will invariably need to make more technology investments to manage the greater complexity (scale and scope) of business operations. "As new software applications, such as time & attendance, labor scheduling, and POS transactions, just to mention a few, are introduced into the store environment, it takes a disproportionate amount of time and effort to integrate them with existing store applications. These integration projects can add up to 50 percent to the time needed to implement a new software application and contribute significantly to the cost of the overall project, particularly if a systems integrator is called in. This has been the reality that all retailers have had to live with over the last two decades. The effect of the environment has not only been to increase costs, but also to limit retailers' ability to implement change and the speed with which they can do so." (excerpt taken from here) Now, one would think a lot of retailers would have already gone through the pain of finding answers to these questions, so why re-invent the wheel? Precisely so, a major effort began almost 17 years ago in the retail industry to make it less expensive and less difficult to deploy new technology in stores and at the retail enterprise level. This effort is called the Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS). Without standards such as those defined by ARTS, you would very likely end up experiencing the following: Increased Time and Cost due to resource wastage arising from re-inventing the wheel i.e. re-creating vanilla processes from scratch, and incurring, otherwise avoidable, mistakes and errors by ignoring experience of others Sub-optimal Process Efficiency due to narrow, isolated view of processes thereby ignoring process inter-dependencies i.e. optimizing parts but not the whole, and resulting in lack of transparency and inter-departmental finger-pointing Embracing ARTS standards as a blue-print for establishing or managing or streamlining your retail operations can benefit you in the following ways: Improved Time-to-Market from parity with industry best-practice processes e.g. ARTS, thus avoiding “reinventing the wheel” for common retail processes and focusing more on customizing processes for differentiations, and lowering integration complexity and risk with a standardized vocabulary for exchange between internal and external i.e. partner systems Lower Operating Costs by embracing the ARTS enterprise-wide process reference model for developing and streamlining retail operations holistically instead of a narrow, silo-ed view, and procuring IT systems in compliance with ARTS thus avoiding IT budget marginalization While parity with industry standards such as ARTS business process model by itself does not create a differentiation, it does however provide a higher starting point for bridging the strategy-execution gap in setting up and improving retail operations.

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E-Business Suite : Role of CHUNK_SIZE in Oracle Payroll

- by Giri Mandalika

Different batch processes in Oracle Payroll flow have the ability to spawn multiple child processes (or threads) to complete the work in hand. The number of child processes to fork is controlled by the THREADS parameter in APPS.PAY_ACTION_PARAMETERS view. THREADS parameter The default value for THREADS parameter is 1, which is fine for a single-processor system but not optimal for the modern multi-core multi-processor systems. Setting the THREADS parameter to a value equal to or less than the total number of [virtual] processors available on the system may improve the performance of payroll processing. However on the down side, since multiple child processes operate against the same set of payroll tables in HR schema, database may experience undesired consequences such as buffer busy waits and index contention, which results in giving up some of the gains achieved by using multiple child processes/threads to process the work. Couple of other action parameters, CHUNK_SIZE and CHUNK_SHUFFLE, help alleviate the database contention. eg., Set a value for THREADS parameter as shown below. CONNECT APPS/APPS_PASSWORD UPDATE PAY_ACTION_PARAMETERS SET PARAMETER_VALUE = DESIRED_VALUE WHERE PARAMETER_NAME = 'THREADS'; COMMIT; (I am not aware of any maximum value for THREADS parameter) CHUNK_SIZE parameter The size of each commit unit for the batch process is controlled by the CHUNK_SIZE action parameter. In other words, chunking is the act of splitting the assignment actions into commit groups of desired size represented by the CHUNK_SIZE parameter. The default value is 20, and each thread processes one chunk at a time -- which means each child process inserts or processes 20 assignment actions at any time. When multiple threads are configured, each thread picks up a chunk to process, completes the assignment actions and then picks up another chunk. This is repeated until all the chunks are exhausted. It is possible to use different chunk sizes in different batch processes. During the initial phase of processing, CHUNK_SIZE number of assignment actions are inserted into relevant table(s). When multiple child processes are inserting data at the same time into the same set of tables, as explained earlier, database may experience contention. The default value of 20 is mostly optimal in such a case. Experiment with different values for the initial phase by +/-10 for CHUNK_SIZE parameter and observe the performance impact. A larger value may make sense during the main processing phase. Again experimentation is the key in finding the suitable value for your environment. Start with a large value such as 2000 for the chunk size, then increment or decrement the size by 500 at a time until an optimal value is found. eg., Set a value for CHUNK_SIZE parameter as shown below. CONNECT APPS/APPS_PASSWORD UPDATE PAY_ACTION_PARAMETERS SET PARAMETER_VALUE = DESIRED_VALUE WHERE PARAMETER_NAME = 'CHUNK_SIZE'; COMMIT; CHUNK_SIZE action parameter accepts a value that is as low as 1 or as high as 16000. CHUNK SHUFFLE parameter By default, chunks of assignment actions are processed sequentially by all threads - which may not be a good thing especially given that all child processes/threads performing similar actions against the same set of tables almost at the same time. By saying not a good thing, I mean to say that the default behavior leads to contention in the database (in data blocks, for example). It is possible to relieve some of that database contention by randomizing the processing order of chunks of assignment actions. This behavior is controlled by the CHUNK SHUFFLE action parameter. Chunk processing is not randomized unless explicitly configured. eg., Set chunk shuffling as shown below. CONNECT APPS/APPS_PASSWORD UPDATE PAY_ACTION_PARAMETERS SET PARAMETER_VALUE = 'Y' WHERE PARAMETER_NAME = 'CHUNK SHUFFLE'; COMMIT; Finally I recommend checking the following document out for additional details and additional pay action tunable parameters that may speed up the processing of Oracle Payroll. My Oracle Support Doc ID: 226987.1 Oracle 11i & R12 Human Resources (HRMS) & Benefits (BEN) Tuning & System Health Checks Also experiment with different combinations of parameters and values until the right set of action parameters and values are found for your deployment.

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Profiling Startup Of VS2012 – dotTrace Profiler

- by Alois Kraus

Jetbrains which is famous for the Resharper tool has also a profiler in its portfolio. I downloaded dotTrace 5.2 Professional (569€+VAT) to check how far I can profile the startup of VS2012. The most interesting startup option is “.NET Process”. With that you can profile the next started .NET process which is very useful if you want to profile an application which is not started by you. I did select Tracing as and Wall time to get similar options across all profilers. For some reason the attach option did not work with .NET 4.5 on my home machine. But I am sure that it did work with .NET 4.0 some time ago. Since we are profiling devenv.exe we can also select “Standalone Application” and start it from the profiler. The startup time of VS does increase about a factor 3 but that is ok. You get mainly three windows to work with. The first one shows the threads where you can drill down thread wise where most time is spent. I The next window is the call tree which does merge all threads together in a similar view. The last and most useful view in my opinion is the Plain List window which is nearly the same as the Method Grid in Ants Profiler. But this time we do get when I enable the Show system functions checkbox not a 150 but 19407 methods to choose from! I really tried with Ants Profiler to find something about out how VS does work but look how much we were missing! When I double click on a method I do get in the lower pane the called methods and their respective timings. This is something really useful and I can nicely drill down to the most important stuff. The measured time seems to be Wall Clock time which is a good thing to see where my time is really spent. You can also use Sampling as profiling method but this does give you much less information. Except for getting a first idea where to look first this profiling mode is not very useful to understand how you system does interact. The options have a good list of presets to hide by default many method and gray them out to concentrate on your code. It does not filter anything out if you enable Show system functions. By default methods from these assemblies are hidden or if the checkbox is checked grayed out. All in all JetBrains has made a nice profiler which does show great detail and it has nice drill down capabilities. The only thing is that I do not trust its measured timings. I did fall several times into the trap with this one to optimize at places which were already fast but the profiler did show high times in these methods. After measuring with Tracing I was certain that the measured times were greatly exaggerated. Especially when IO is involved it seems to have a hard time to subtract its own overhead. What I did miss most was the possibility to profile not only the next started process but to be able to select a process by name and perhaps a count to profile the next n processes of this name. Next: YourKit

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Ops Center 12c - Update - Provisioning Solaris on x86 Using a Card-Based NIC

- by scottdickson

Last week, I posted a blog describing how to use Ops Center to provision Solaris over the network via a NIC on a card rather than the built-in NIC. Really, that was all about how to install Solaris on a SPARC system. This week, we'll look at how to do the same thing for an x86-based server. Really, the overall process is exactly the same, at least for Solaris 11, with only minor updates. We will focus on Solaris 11 for this blog. Once I verify that the same approach works for Solaris 10, I will provide another update. Booting Solaris 11 on x86 Just as before, in order to configure the server for network boot across a card-based NIC, it is necessary to declare the asset to associate the additional MACs with the server. You likely will need to access the server console via the ILOM to figure out the MAC and to get a good idea of the network instance number. The simplest way to find both of these is to start a network boot using the desired NIC and see where it appears in the list of network interfaces and what MAC is used when it tries to boot. Go to the ILOM for the server. Reset the server and start the console. When the BIOS loads, select the boot menu, usually with Ctrl-P. This will give you a menu of devices to boot from, including all of the NICs. Select the NIC you want to boot from. Its position in the list is a good indication of what network number Solaris will give the device. In this case, we want to boot from the 5th interface (GB_4, net4). Pick it and start the boot processes. When it starts to boot, you will see the MAC address for the interface Once you have the network instance and the MAC, go through the same process of declaring the asset as in the SPARC case. This associates the additional network interface with the server.. Creating an OS Provisioning Plan The simplest way to do the boot via an alternate interface on an x86 system is to do a manual boot. Update the OS provisioning profile as in the SPARC case to reflect the fact that we are booting from a different interface. Update, in this case, the network boot device to be GB_4/net4, or the device corresponding to your network instance number. Configure the profile to support manual network boot by checking the box for manual boot in the OS Provisioning profile. Booting the System Once you have created a profile and plan to support booting from the additional NIC, we are ready to install the server. Again, from the ILOM, reset the system and start the console. When the BIOS loads, select boot from the Boot Menu as above. Select the network interface from the list as before and start the boot process. When the grub bootloader loads, the default boot image is the Solaris Text Installer. On the grub menu, select Automated Installer and Ops Center takes over from there. Lessons The key lesson from all of this is that Ops Center is a valuable tool for provisioning servers whether they are connected via built-in network interfaces or via high-speed NICs on cards. This is great news for modern datacenters using converged network infrastructures. The process works for both SPARC and x86 Solaris installations. And it's easy and repeatable.

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Faster Memory Allocation Using vmtasks

- by Steve Sistare

You may have noticed a new system process called "vmtasks" on Solaris 11 systems: % pgrep vmtasks 8 % prstat -p 8 PID USERNAME SIZE RSS STATE PRI NICE TIME CPU PROCESS/NLWP 8 root 0K 0K sleep 99 -20 9:10:59 0.0% vmtasks/32 What is vmtasks, and why should you care? In a nutshell, vmtasks accelerates creation, locking, and destruction of pages in shared memory segments. This is particularly helpful for locked memory, as creating a page of physical memory is much more expensive than creating a page of virtual memory. For example, an ISM segment (shmflag & SHM_SHARE_MMU) is locked in memory on the first shmat() call, and a DISM segment (shmflg & SHM_PAGEABLE) is locked using mlock() or memcntl(). Segment operations such as creation and locking are typically single threaded, performed by the thread making the system call. In many applications, the size of a shared memory segment is a large fraction of total physical memory, and the single-threaded initialization is a scalability bottleneck which increases application startup time. To break the bottleneck, we apply parallel processing, harnessing the power of the additional CPUs that are always present on modern platforms. For sufficiently large segments, as many of 16 threads of vmtasks are employed to assist an application thread during creation, locking, and destruction operations. The segment is implicitly divided at page boundaries, and each thread is given a chunk of pages to process. The per-page processing time can vary, so for dynamic load balancing, the number of chunks is greater than the number of threads, and threads grab chunks dynamically as they finish their work. Because the threads modify a single application address space in compressed time interval, contention on locks protecting VM data structures locks was a problem, and we had to re-scale a number of VM locks to get good parallel efficiency. The vmtasks process has 1 thread per CPU and may accelerate multiple segment operations simultaneously, but each operation gets at most 16 helper threads to avoid monopolizing CPU resources. We may reconsider this limit in the future. Acceleration using vmtasks is enabled out of the box, with no tuning required, and works for all Solaris platform architectures (SPARC sun4u, SPARC sun4v, x86). The following tables show the time to create + lock + destroy a large segment, normalized as milliseconds per gigabyte, before and after the introduction of vmtasks: ISM system ncpu before after speedup ------ ---- ------ ----- ------- x4600 32 1386 245 6X X7560 64 1016 153 7X M9000 512 1196 206 6X T5240 128 2506 234 11X T4-2 128 1197 107 11x DISM system ncpu before after speedup ------ ---- ------ ----- ------- x4600 32 1582 265 6X X7560 64 1116 158 7X M9000 512 1165 152 8X T5240 128 2796 198 14X (I am missing the data for T4 DISM, for no good reason; it works fine). The following table separates the creation and destruction times: ISM, T4-2 before after ------ ----- create 702 64 destroy 495 43 To put this in perspective, consider creating a 512 GB ISM segment on T4-2. Creating the segment would take 6 minutes with the old code, and only 33 seconds with the new. If this is your Oracle SGA, you save over 5 minutes when starting the database, and you also save when shutting it down prior to a restart. Those minutes go directly to your bottom line for service availability.

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Where are my date ranges in Analytics coming from?

- by Jeffrey McDaniel

In the P6 Reporting Database there are two main tables to consider when viewing time - W_DAY_D and W_Calendar_FS. W_DAY_D is populated internally during the ETL process and will provide a row for every day in the given time range. Each row will contain aspects of that day such as calendar year, month, week, quarter, etc. to allow it to be used in the time element when creating requests in Analytics to group data into these time granularities. W_Calendar_FS is used for calculations such as spreads, but is also based on the same set date range. The min and max day_dt (W_DAY_D) and daydate (W_Calendar_FS) will be related to the date range defined, which is a start date and a rolling interval plus a certain range. Generally start date plus 3 years. In P6 Reporting Database 2.0 this date range was defined in the Configuration utility. As of P6 Reporting Database 3.0, with the introduction of the Extended Schema this date range is set in the P6 web application. The Extended Schema uses this date range to calculate the data for near real time reporting in P6. This same date range is validated and used for the P6 Reporting Database. The rolling date range means if today is April 1, 2010 and the rolling interval is set to three years, the min date will be 1/1/2010 and the max date will be 4/1/2013. 1/1/2010 will be the min date because we always back fill to the beginning of the year. On April 2nd, the Extended schema services are run and the date range is adjusted there to move the max date forward to 4/2/2013. When the ETL process is run the Reporting Database will pick up this change and also adjust the max date on the W_DAY_D and W_Calendar_FS. There are scenarios where date ranges affecting areas like resource limit may not be adjusted until a change occurs to cause a recalculation, but based on general system usage these dates in these tables will progress forward with the rolling intervals. Choosing a large date range can have an effect on the ETL process for the P6 Reporting Database. The extract portion of the process will pull spread data over into the STAR. The date range defines how long activity and resource assignment spread data is spread out in these tables. If an activity lasts 5 days it will have 5 days of spread data. If a project lasts 5 years, and the date range is 3 years the spread data after that 3 year date range will be bucketed into the last day in the date range. For the overall project and even the activity level you will still see the correct total values. You just would not be able to see the daily spread 5 years from now. This is an important question when choosing your date range, do you really need to see spread data down to the day 5 years in the future? Generally this amount of granularity years in the future is not needed. Remember all those values 5, 10, 15, 20 years in the future are still available to report on they would be in more of a summary format on the activity or project. The data is always there, the level of granularity is the decision.

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Installed SQL Server 2008 and now TFS is broken.

- by johnnycakes

Hi, My W2K3 server was running TFS 2008 SP1, SQL Server 2005 Development edition. I installed SQL Server 2008 Standard. I installed it while leaving SQL Server 2005 alone. Upgrading was not possible due to the differences in editions of the SQL Servers. Now TFS is broken. On a client computer, if I go Team - Connect to Team Foundation Server, I get this error: Team Foundation services are not available from server myserver. Technical information (for administrator): TF30059: Fatal error while initializing web service. So I head on over to my event viewer on the server. Under Application, I see one warning and two errors. First, the warning: Source: SQLSERVERAGENT Event ID: 208 Description: SQL Server Scheduled Job 'TfsWorkItemTracking Process Identities Job' (0x21F395C1F444CA499A63EBF05D717749) - Status: Failed - Invoked on: 2010-04-26 13:30:00 - Message: The job failed. The Job was invoked by Schedule 9 (ProcessIdentitiesSchedule). The last step to run was step 1 (Process Identities). Then the first error: Source: TFS Services Event ID: 3017 Description: TF53010: The following error has occurred in a Team Foundation component or extension: Date (UTC): 4/26/2010 5:36:29 PM Machine: myserver Application Domain: /LM/W3SVC/799623628/Root/Services-2-129167769888923968 Assembly: Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Server, Version=9.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a; v2.0.50727 Process Details: Process Name: w3wp Process Id: 4008 Thread Id: 224 Account name: DOMAIN\TFSService Detailed Message: TF53013: A crash report is being prepared for Microsoft. The following information is included in that report: System Values OS Version Information=Microsoft Windows NT 5.2.3790 Service Pack 2 CLR Version Information=2.0.50727.3053 Machine Name=myserver Processor Count=1 Working Set=34897920 System Directory=C:\WINDOWS\system32 Process Values ExitCode=0 Interactive=False Has Shutdown Started=False Process Environment Variables Path = C:\WINDOWS\system32;C:\WINDOWS;C:\WINDOWS\System32\Wbem;C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\80\Tools\Binn\;C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Tools\binn\;C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\DTS\Binn\;C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Tools\Binn\VSShell\Common7\IDE\;C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies\;C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Tools\Binn\;C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\DTS\Binn\;C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Tools\Binn\VSShell\Common7\IDE\;C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies\;C:\WINDOWS\system32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0 PATHEXT = .COM;.EXE;.BAT;.CMD;.VBS;.VBE;.JS;.JSE;.WSF;.WSH;.PSC1 PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE = x86 SystemDrive = C: windir = C:\WINDOWS TMP = C:\WINDOWS\TEMP USERPROFILE = C:\Documents and Settings\Default User ProgramFiles = C:\Program Files FP_NO_HOST_CHECK = NO COMPUTERNAME = myserver APP_POOL_ID = Microsoft Team Foundation Server Application Pool NUMBER_OF_PROCESSORS = 1 PROCESSOR_IDENTIFIER = x86 Family 16 Model 5 Stepping 2, AuthenticAMD ClusterLog = C:\WINDOWS\Cluster\cluster.log SystemRoot = C:\WINDOWS ComSpec = C:\WINDOWS\system32\cmd.exe CommonProgramFiles = C:\Program Files\Common Files PROCESSOR_LEVEL = 16 PROCESSOR_REVISION = 0502 lib = C:\Program Files\SQLXML 4.0\bin\ ALLUSERSPROFILE = C:\Documents and Settings\All Users TEMP = C:\WINDOWS\TEMP OS = Windows_NT Request Details Url=http://myserver.domain.local:8080/Services/v1.0/Registration.asmx [method = POST] User Agent=Team Foundation (devenv.exe, 10.0.30128.1) Headers=Content-Length=390&Content-Type=text%2fxml%3b+charset%3dutf-8&Accept-Encoding=gzip%2cgzip%2cgzip&Accept-Language=en-US&Authorization=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%2f6h5U30CEXgoAEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACQAyAEgAVABUAFAALwB0AGkAdABhAG4ALgBoAHkAcABlAHIAaQBvAG4ALgBsAG8AYwBhAGwAAAAAAAAAAAA%3d&Expect=100-continue&Host=myserver.domain.local%3a8080&User-Agent=Team+Foundation+(devenv.exe%2c+10.0.30128.1)&X-TFS-Version=1.0.0.0&X-TFS-Session=b7e7fdec-e7ee-48fc-92e8-537d1cd87ea4&SOAPAction=%22http%3a%2f%2fschemas.microsoft.com%2fTeamFoundation%2f2005%2f06%2fServices%2fRegistration%2f03%2fGetRegistrationEntries%22 Path=/Services/v1.0/Registration.asmx Local Request=False User Host Address=10.0.5.78 User=DOMAIN\Johnny [auth = NTLM] Application Provided Information Team Foundation Application Information Event Log Source = TFS Services Configured Team Foundation Server = http://myserver:8080 License Type = WorkgroupLicense Server Culture = en-US Activity Logging Name = Integration Component Name = CS Initialized = No Requests Processed = 0 Exception: TypeInitializationException Message: The type initializer for 'Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Server.IntegrationResourceComponent' threw an exception. Stack Trace: at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Server.IntegrationResourceComponent.RegisterExceptions() at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Server.Global.Initialize() at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Server.TeamFoundationApplication.Init() Inner Exception Details Exception: ReflectionTypeLoadException Message: Unable to load one or more of the requested types. Retrieve the LoaderExceptions property for more information. Stack Trace: at System.Reflection.Module._GetTypesInternal(StackCrawlMark& stackMark) at System.Reflection.Assembly.GetTypes() at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Server.SqlResourceComponent.RegisterExceptions(Assembly assembly) at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Server.IntegrationResourceComponent.RegisterExceptions() at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Server.IntegrationResourceComponent..cctor() Application Domain Information Assembly Name=mscorlib, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089 Assembly CLR Version=v2.0.50727 Assembly Version=2.0.0.0 Assembly Location=C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\mscorlib.dll Assembly File Version: File: C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\mscorlib.dll InternalName: mscorlib.dll OriginalFilename: mscorlib.dll FileVersion: 2.0.50727.3053 (netfxsp.050727-3000) FileDescription: Microsoft Common Language Runtime Class Library Product: Microsoft® .NET Framework ProductVersion: 2.0.50727.3053 Debug: False Patched: False PreRelease: False PrivateBuild: False SpecialBuild: False Language: English (United States) Assembly Name=System.Web, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a Assembly CLR Version=v2.0.50727 Assembly Version=2.0.0.0 Assembly Location=C:\WINDOWS\assembly\GAC_32\System.Web\2.0.0.0__b03f5f7f11d50a3a\System.Web.dll Assembly File Version: File: C:\WINDOWS\assembly\GAC_32\System.Web\2.0.0.0__b03f5f7f11d50a3a\System.Web.dll InternalName: System.Web.dll OriginalFilename: System.Web.dll FileVersion: 2.0.50727.3053 (netfxsp.050727-3000) FileDescription: System.Web.dll Product: Microsoft® .NET Framework ProductVersion: 2.0.50727.3053 Debug: False Patched: False PreRelease: False PrivateBuild: False SpecialBuild: False Language: English (United States) Assembly Name=System, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089 Assembly CLR Version=v2.0.50727 Assembly Version=2.0.0.0 Assembly Location=C:\WINDOWS\assembly\GAC_MSIL\System\2.0.0.0__b77a5c561934e089\System.dll Assembly File Version: File: C:\WINDOWS\assembly\GAC_MSIL\System\2.0.0.0__b77a5c561934e089\System.dll InternalName: System.dll OriginalFilename: System.dll FileVersion: 2.0.50727.3053 (netfxsp.050727-3000) FileDescription: .NET Framework Product: Microsoft® .NET Framework ProductVersion: 2.0.50727.3053 Debug: False Patched: False PreRelease: False PrivateBuild: False SpecialBuild: False Language: English (United States) Assembly Name=System.Xml, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089 Assembly CLR Version=v2.0.50727 Assembly Version=2.0.0.0 Assembly Location=C:\WINDOWS\assembly\GAC_MSIL\System.Xml\2.0.0.0__b77a5c561934e089\System.Xml.dll Assembly File Version: File: C:\WINDOWS\assembly\GAC_MSIL\System.Xml\2.0.0.0__b77a5c561934e089\System.Xml.dll InternalName: System.Xml.dll OriginalFilename: System.Xml.dll FileVersion: 2.0.50727.3053 (netfxsp.050727-3000) FileDescription: .NET Framework Product: Microsoft® .NET Framework ProductVersion: 2.0.50727.3053 Debug: False Patched: False PreRelease: False PrivateBuild: False SpecialBuild: False Language: English (United States) Assembly Name=System.Configuration, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a Assembly CLR Version=v2.0.50727 Assembly Version=2.0.0.0 Assembly Location=C:\WINDOWS\assembly\GAC_MSIL\System.Configuration\2.0.0.0__b03f5f7f11d50a3a\System.Configuration.dll Assembly File Version: File: C:\WINDOWS\assembly\GAC_MSIL\System.Configuration\2.0.0.0__b03f5f7f11d50a3a\System.Configuration.dll InternalName: System.Configuration.dll OriginalFilename: System.Configuration.dll FileVersion: 2.0.50727.3053 (netfxsp.050727-3000) FileDescription: System.Configuration.dll Product: Microsoft® .NET Framework ProductVersion: 2.0.50727.3053 Debug: False Patched: False PreRelease: False PrivateBuild: False SpecialBuild: False Language: English (United States) Assembly Name=Microsoft.JScript, Version=8.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a Assembly CLR Version=v2.0.50727 Assembly Version=8.0.0.0 Assembly Location=C:\WINDOWS\assembly\GAC_MSIL\Microsoft.JScript\8.0.0.0__b03f5f7f11d50a3a\Microsoft.JScript.dll Assembly File Version: File: C:\WINDOWS\assembly\GAC_MSIL\Microsoft.JScript\8.0.0.0__b03f5f7f11d50a3a\Microsoft.JScript.dll InternalName: Microsoft.JScript.dll OriginalFilename: Microsoft.JScript.dll FileVersion: 8.0.50727.3053 FileDescription: Microsoft.JScript.dll Product: Microsoft (R) Visual Studio (R) 2005 ProductVersion: 8.0.50727.3053 Debug: False Patched: False PreRelease: False PrivateBuild: False SpecialBuild: False Language: Language Neutral Assembly Name=App_global.asax.4nq_g1xi, Version=0.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null Assembly CLR Version=v2.0.50727 Assembly Version=0.0.0.0 Assembly Location=C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files\services\87e24ff8\921625fe\App_global.asax.4nq_g1xi.dll Assembly File Version: File: C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files\services\87e24ff8\921625fe\App_global.asax.4nq_g1xi.dll InternalName: App_global.asax.4nq_g1xi.dll OriginalFilename: App_global.asax.4nq_g1xi.dll FileVersion: 0.0.0.0 FileDescription: Product: ProductVersion: 0.0.0.0 Debug: False Patched: False PreRelease: False PrivateBuild: False SpecialBuild: False Language: Language Neutral Assembly Name=Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Server, Version=9.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a Assembly CLR Version=v2.0.50727 Assembly Version=9.0.0.0 Assembly Location=C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files\services\87e24ff8\921625fe\assembly\dl3\9051eeb6\603ea9a2_d822c801\Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Server.DLL Assembly File Version: File: C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files\services\87e24ff8\921625fe\assembly\dl3\9051eeb6\603ea9a2_d822c801\Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Server.DLL InternalName: Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Server.dll OriginalFilename: Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Server.dll FileVersion: 9.0.21022.8 FileDescription: Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Server.dll Product: Microsoft (R) Visual Studio (R) 2008 ProductVersion: 9.0.21022.8 Debug: False Patched: False PreRelease: False PrivateBuild: False SpecialBuild: False Language: Language Neutral Assembly Name=Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Common, Version=9.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a Assembly CLR Version=v2.0.50727 Assembly Version=9.0.0.0 Assembly Location=C:\WINDOWS\assembly\GAC_32\Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Common\9.0.0.0__b03f5f7f11d50a3a\Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Common.dll Assembly File Version: File: C:\WINDOWS\assembly\GAC_32\Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Common\9.0.0.0__b03f5f7f11d50a3a\Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Common.dll InternalName: Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Common.dll OriginalFilename: Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Common.dll FileVersion: 9.0.30729.1 FileDescription: Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Common.dll Product: Microsoft (R) Visual Studio (R) 2008 ProductVersion: 9.0.30729.1 Debug: False Patched: False PreRelease: False PrivateBuild: False SpecialBuild: False Language: Language Neutral Assembly Name=Microsoft.TeamFoundation, Version=9.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a Assembly CLR Version=v2.0.50727 Assembly Version=9.0.0.0 Assembly Location=C:\WINDOWS\assembly\GAC_32\Microsoft.TeamFoundation\9.0.0.0__b03f5f7f11d50a3a\Microsoft.TeamFoundation.dll Assembly File Version: File: C:\WINDOWS\assembly\GAC_32\Microsoft.TeamFoundation\9.0.0.0__b03f5f7f11d50a3a\Microsoft.TeamFoundation.dll InternalName: Microsoft.TeamFoundation.dll OriginalFilename: Microsoft.TeamFoundation.dll FileVersion: 9.0.30729.1 FileDescription: Microsoft.TeamFoundation.dll Product: Microsoft (R) Visual Studio (R) 2008 ProductVersion: 9.0.30729.1 Debug: False Patched: False PreRelease: False PrivateBuild: False SpecialBuild: False Language: Language Neutral Assembly Name=System.Security, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a Assembly CLR Version=v2.0.50727 Assembly Version=2.0.0.0 Assembly Location=C:\WINDOWS\assembly\GAC_MSIL\System.Security\2.0.0.0__b03f5f7f11d50a3a\System.Security.dll Assembly File Version: File: C:\WINDOWS\assembly\GAC_MSIL\System.Security\2.0.0.0__b03f5f7f11d50a3a\System.Security.dll InternalName: System.Security.dll OriginalFilename: System.Security.dll FileVersion: 2.0.50727.3053 (netfxsp.050727-3000) FileDescription: System.Security.dll Product: Microsoft® .NET Framework ProductVersion: 2.0.50727.3053 Debug: False Patched: False PreRelease: False PrivateBuild: False SpecialBuild: False Language: English (United States) Assembly Name=System.Data, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089 Assembly CLR Version=v2.0.50727 Assembly Version=2.0.0.0 Assembly Location=C:\WINDOWS\assembly\GAC_32\System.Data\2.0.0.0__b77a5c561934e089\System.Data.dll Assembly File Version: File: C:\WINDOWS\assembly\GAC_32\System.Data\2.0.0.0__b77a5c561934e089\System.Data.dll InternalName: system.data.dll OriginalFilename: system.data.dll FileVersion: 2.0.50727.3053 (netfxsp.050727-3000) FileDescription: .NET Framework Product: Microsoft® .NET Framework ProductVersion: 2.0.50727.3053 Debug: False Patched: False PreRelease: False PrivateBuild: False SpecialBuild: False Language: English (United States) Assembly Name=Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Common.Library, Version=9.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a Assembly CLR Version=v2.0.50727 Assembly Version=9.0.0.0 Assembly Location=C:\WINDOWS\assembly\GAC_32\Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Common.Library\9.0.0.0__b03f5f7f11d50a3a\Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Common.Library.dll Assembly File Version: File: C:\WINDOWS\assembly\GAC_32\Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Common.Library\9.0.0.0__b03f5f7f11d50a3a\Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Common.Library.dll InternalName: Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Common.Library.dll OriginalFilename: Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Common.Library.dll FileVersion: 9.0.30729.1 FileDescription: Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Common.Library.dll Product: Microsoft (R) Visual Studio (R) 2008 ProductVersion: 9.0.30729.1 Debug: False Patched: False PreRelease: False PrivateBuild: False SpecialBuild: False Language: Language Neutral Assembly Name=System.Web.Mobile, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a Assembly CLR Version=v2.0.50727 Assembly Version=2.0.0.0 Assembly Location=C:\WINDOWS\assembly\GAC_MSIL\System.Web.Mobile\2.0.0.0__b03f5f7f11d50a3a\System.Web.Mobile.dll As And finally, the second error: Source: Team Foundation Error Reporting Event ID: 5000 Description: EventType teamfoundationue, P1 1.0.0.0, P2 tfs, P3 9.0.30729.1, P4 9.0.0.0, P5 general, P6 typeinitializationexcept, P7 4758b22a940fe6d9, P8 d15c14bb, P9 NIL, P10 NIL. Any ideas? Thanks.

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