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• SQL SERVER – Thinking about Deprecated, Discontinued Features and Breaking Changes while Upgrading to SQL Server 2012 – Guest Post by Nakul Vachhrajani

  - by pinaldave

  Nakul Vachhrajani is a Technical Specialist and systems development professional with iGATE having a total IT experience of more than 7 years. Nakul is an active blogger with BeyondRelational.com (150+ blogs), and can also be found on forums at SQLServerCentral and BeyondRelational.com. Nakul has also been a guest columnist for SQLAuthority.com and SQLServerCentral.com. Nakul presented a webcast on the “Underappreciated Features of Microsoft SQL Server” at the Microsoft Virtual Tech Days Exclusive Webcast series (May 02-06, 2011) on May 06, 2011. He is also the author of a research paper on Database upgrade methodologies, which was published in a CSI journal, published nationwide. In addition to his passion about SQL Server, Nakul also contributes to the academia out of personal interest. He visits various colleges and universities as an external faculty to judge project activities being carried out by the students. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are his own personal opinions and do not represent his employer’s view in anyway. Blog | LinkedIn | Twitter | Google+ Let us hear the thoughts of Nakul in first person - Those who have been following my blogs would be aware that I am recently running a series on the database engine features that have been deprecated in Microsoft SQL Server 2012. Based on the response that I have received, I was quite surprised to know that most of the audience found these to be breaking changes, when in fact, they were not! It was then that I decided to write a little piece on how to plan your database upgrade such that it works with the next version of Microsoft SQL Server. Please note that the recommendations made in this article are high-level markers and are intended to help you think over the specific steps that you would need to take to upgrade your database. Refer the documentation – Understand the terms Change is the only constant in this world. Therefore, whenever customer requirements, newer architectures and designs require software vendors to make a change to the keywords, functions, etc; they ensure that they provide their end users sufficient time to migrate over to the new standards before dropping off the old ones. Microsoft does that too with it’s Microsoft SQL Server product. Whenever a new SQL Server release is announced, it comes with a list of the following features: Breaking changes These are changes that would break your currently running applications, scripts or functionalities that are based on earlier version of Microsoft SQL Server These are mostly features whose behavior has been changed keeping in mind the newer architectures and designs Lesson: These are the changes that you need to be most worried about! Discontinued features These features are no longer available in the associated version of Microsoft SQL Server These features used to be “deprecated” in the prior release Lesson: Without these changes, your database would not be compliant/may not work with the version of Microsoft SQL Server under consideration Deprecated features These features are those that are still available in the current version of Microsoft SQL Server, but are scheduled for removal in a future version. These may be removed in either the next version or any other future version of Microsoft SQL Server The features listed for deprecation will compose the list of discontinued features in the next version of SQL Server Lesson: Plan to make necessary changes required to remove/replace usage of the deprecated features with the latest recommended replacements Once a feature appears on the list, it moves from bottom to the top, i.e. it is first marked as “Deprecated” and then “Discontinued”. We know of “Breaking change” comes later on in the product life cycle. What this means is that if you want to know what features would not work with SQL Server 2012 (and you are currently using SQL Server 2008 R2), you need to refer the list of breaking changes and discontinued features in SQL Server 2012. Use the tools! There are a lot of tools and technologies around us, but it is rarely that I find teams using these tools religiously and to the best of their potential. Below are the top two tools, from Microsoft, that I use every time I plan a database upgrade. The SQL Server Upgrade Advisor Ever since SQL Server 2005 was announced, Microsoft provides a small, very light-weight tool called the “SQL Server upgrade advisor”. The upgrade advisor analyzes installed components from earlier versions of SQL Server, and then generates a report that identifies issues to fix either before or after you upgrade. The analysis examines objects that can be accessed, such as scripts, stored procedures, triggers, and trace files. Upgrade Advisor cannot analyze desktop applications or encrypted stored procedures. Refer the links towards the end of the post to know how to get the Upgrade Advisor. The SQL Server Profiler Another great tool that you can use is the one most SQL Server developers & administrators use often – the SQL Server profiler. SQL Server Profiler provides functionality to monitor the “Deprecation” event, which contains: Deprecation announcement – equivalent to features to be deprecated in a future release of SQL Server Deprecation final support – equivalent to features to be deprecated in the next release of SQL Server You can learn more using the links towards the end of the post. A basic checklist There are a lot of finer points that need to be taken care of when upgrading your database. But, it would be worth-while to identify a few basic steps in order to make your database compliant with the next version of SQL Server: Monitor the current application workload (on a test bed) via the Profiler in order to identify usage of features marked as Deprecated If none appear, you are all set! (This almost never happens) Note down all the offending queries and feature usages Run analysis sessions using the SQL Server upgrade advisor on your database Based on the inputs from the analysis report and Profiler trace sessions, Incorporate solutions for the breaking changes first Next, incorporate solutions for the discontinued features Revisit and document the upgrade strategy for your deployment scenarios Revisit the fall-back, i.e. rollback strategies in case the upgrades fail Because some programming changes are dependent upon the SQL server version, this may need to be done in consultation with the development teams Before any other enhancements are incorporated by the development team, send out the database changes into QA QA strategy should involve a comparison between an environment running the old version of SQL Server against the new one Because minimal application changes have gone in (essential changes for SQL Server version compliance only), this would be possible As an ongoing activity, keep incorporating changes recommended as per the deprecated features list As a DBA, update your coding standards to ensure that the developers are using ANSI compliant code – this code will require a change only if the ANSI standard changes Remember this: Change management is a continuous process. Keep revisiting the product release notes and incorporate recommended changes to stay prepared for the next release of SQL Server. May the power of SQL Server be with you! Links Referenced in this post Breaking changes in SQL Server 2012: Link Discontinued features in SQL Server 2012: Link Get the upgrade advisor from the Microsoft Download Center at: Link Upgrade Advisor page on MSDN: Link Profiler: Review T-SQL code to identify objects no longer supported by Microsoft: Link Upgrading to SQL Server 2012 by Vinod Kumar: Link Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Upgrade

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• C#/.NET Little Wonders: Tuples and Tuple Factory Methods

  - by James Michael Hare

  Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can really help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain.  This week, we look at the System.Tuple class and the handy factory methods for creating a Tuple by inferring the types. What is a Tuple? The System.Tuple is a class that tends to inspire a reaction in one of two ways: love or hate.  Simply put, a Tuple is a data structure that holds a specific number of items of a specific type in a specific order.  That is, a Tuple<int, string, int> is a tuple that contains exactly three items: an int, followed by a string, followed by an int.  The sequence is important not only to distinguish between two members of the tuple with the same type, but also for comparisons between tuples.  Some people tend to love tuples because they give you a quick way to combine multiple values into one result.  This can be handy for returning more than one value from a method (without using out or ref parameters), or for creating a compound key to a Dictionary, or any other purpose you can think of.  They can be especially handy when passing a series of items into a call that only takes one object parameter, such as passing an argument to a thread's startup routine.  In these cases, you do not need to define a class, simply create a tuple containing the types you wish to return, and you are ready to go? On the other hand, there are some people who see tuples as a crutch in object-oriented design.  They may view the tuple as a very watered down class with very little inherent semantic meaning.  As an example, what if you saw this in a piece of code: 1: var x = new Tuple<int, int>(2, 5); What are the contents of this tuple?  If the tuple isn't named appropriately, and if the contents of each member are not self evident from the type this can be a confusing question.  The people who tend to be against tuples would rather you explicitly code a class to contain the values, such as: 1: public sealed class RetrySettings 2: { 3: public int TimeoutSeconds { get; set; } 4: public int MaxRetries { get; set; } 5: } Here, the meaning of each int in the class is much more clear, but it's a bit more work to create the class and can clutter a solution with extra classes. So, what's the correct way to go?  That's a tough call.  You will have people who will argue quite well for one or the other.  For me, I consider the Tuple to be a tool to make it easy to collect values together easily.  There are times when I just need to combine items for a key or a result, in which case the tuple is short lived and so the meaning isn't easily lost and I feel this is a good compromise.  If the scope of the collection of items, though, is more application-wide I tend to favor creating a full class. Finally, it should be noted that tuples are immutable.  That means they are assigned a value at construction, and that value cannot be changed.  Now, of course if the tuple contains an item of a reference type, this means that the reference is immutable and not the item referred to. Tuples from 1 to N Tuples come in all sizes, you can have as few as one element in your tuple, or as many as you like.  However, since C# generics can't have an infinite generic type parameter list, any items after 7 have to be collapsed into another tuple, as we'll show shortly. So when you declare your tuple from sizes 1 (a 1-tuple or singleton) to 7 (a 7-tuple or septuple), simply include the appropriate number of type arguments: 1: // a singleton tuple of integer 2: Tuple<int> x; 3:  4: // or more 5: Tuple<int, double> y; 6:  7: // up to seven 8: Tuple<int, double, char, double, int, string, uint> z; Anything eight and above, and we have to nest tuples inside of tuples.  The last element of the 8-tuple is the generic type parameter Rest, this is special in that the Tuple checks to make sure at runtime that the type is a Tuple.  This means that a simple 8-tuple must nest a singleton tuple (one of the good uses for a singleton tuple, by the way) for the Rest property. 1: // an 8-tuple 2: Tuple<int, int, int, int, int, double, char, Tuple<string>> t8; 3:  4: // an 9-tuple 5: Tuple<int, int, int, int, double, int, char, Tuple<string, DateTime>> t9; 6:  7: // a 16-tuple 8: Tuple<int, int, int, int, int, int, int, Tuple<int, int, int, int, int, int, int, Tuple<int,int>>> t14; Notice that on the 14-tuple we had to have a nested tuple in the nested tuple.  Since the tuple can only support up to seven items, and then a rest element, that means that if the nested tuple needs more than seven items you must nest in it as well.  Constructing tuples Constructing tuples is just as straightforward as declaring them.  That said, you have two distinct ways to do it.  The first is to construct the tuple explicitly yourself: 1: var t3 = new Tuple<int, string, double>(1, "Hello", 3.1415927); This creates a triple that has an int, string, and double and assigns the values 1, "Hello", and 3.1415927 respectively.  Make sure the order of the arguments supplied matches the order of the types!  Also notice that we can't half-assign a tuple or create a default tuple.  Tuples are immutable (you can't change the values once constructed), so thus you must provide all values at construction time. Another way to easily create tuples is to do it implicitly using the System.Tuple static class's Create() factory methods.  These methods (much like C++'s std::make_pair method) will infer the types from the method call so you don't have to type them in.  This can dramatically reduce the amount of typing required especially for complex tuples! 1: // this 4-tuple is typed Tuple<int, double, string, char> 2: var t4 = Tuple.Create(42, 3.1415927, "Love", 'X'); Notice how much easier it is to use the factory methods and infer the types?  This can cut down on typing quite a bit when constructing tuples.  The Create() factory method can construct from a 1-tuple (singleton) to an 8-tuple (octuple), which of course will be a octuple where the last item is a singleton as we described before in nested tuples. Accessing tuple members Accessing a tuple's members is simplicity itself… mostly.  The properties for accessing up to the first seven items are Item1, Item2, …, Item7.  If you have an octuple or beyond, the final property is Rest which will give you the nested tuple which you can then access in a similar matter.  Once again, keep in mind that these are read-only properties and cannot be changed. 1: // for septuples and below, use the Item properties 2: var t1 = Tuple.Create(42, 3.14); 3:  4: Console.WriteLine("First item is {0} and second is {1}", 5: t1.Item1, t1.Item2); 6:  7: // for octuples and above, use Rest to retrieve nested tuple 8: var t9 = new Tuple<int, int, int, int, int, int, int, 9: Tuple<int, int>>(1,2,3,4,5,6,7,Tuple.Create(8,9)); 10:  11: Console.WriteLine("The 8th item is {0}", t9.Rest.Item1); Tuples are IStructuralComparable and IStructuralEquatable Most of you know about IComparable and IEquatable, what you may not know is that there are two sister interfaces to these that were added in .NET 4.0 to help support tuples.  These IStructuralComparable and IStructuralEquatable make it easy to compare two tuples for equality and ordering.  This is invaluable for sorting, and makes it easy to use tuples as a compound-key to a dictionary (one of my favorite uses)! Why is this so important?  Remember when we said that some folks think tuples are too generic and you should define a custom class?  This is all well and good, but if you want to design a custom class that can automatically order itself based on its members and build a hash code for itself based on its members, it is no longer a trivial task!  Thankfully the tuple does this all for you through the explicit implementations of these interfaces. For equality, two tuples are equal if all elements are equal between the two tuples, that is if t1.Item1 == t2.Item1 and t1.Item2 == t2.Item2, and so on.  For ordering, it's a little more complex in that it compares the two tuples one at a time starting at Item1, and sees which one has a smaller Item1.  If one has a smaller Item1, it is the smaller tuple.  However if both Item1 are the same, it compares Item2 and so on. For example: 1: var t1 = Tuple.Create(1, 3.14, "Hi"); 2: var t2 = Tuple.Create(1, 3.14, "Hi"); 3: var t3 = Tuple.Create(2, 2.72, "Bye"); 4:  5: // true, t1 == t2 because all items are == 6: Console.WriteLine("t1 == t2 : " + t1.Equals(t2)); 7:  8: // false, t1 != t2 because at least one item different 9: Console.WriteLine("t2 == t2 : " + t2.Equals(t3)); The actual implementation of IComparable, IEquatable, IStructuralComparable, and IStructuralEquatable is explicit, so if you want to invoke the methods defined there you'll have to manually cast to the appropriate interface: 1: // true because t1.Item1 < t3.Item1, if had been same would check Item2 and so on 2: Console.WriteLine("t1 < t3 : " + (((IComparable)t1).CompareTo(t3) < 0)); So, as I mentioned, the fact that tuples are automatically equatable and comparable (provided the types you use define equality and comparability as needed) means that we can use tuples for compound keys in hashing and ordering containers like Dictionary and SortedList: 1: var tupleDict = new Dictionary<Tuple<int, double, string>, string>(); 2:  3: tupleDict.Add(t1, "First tuple"); 4: tupleDict.Add(t2, "Second tuple"); 5: tupleDict.Add(t3, "Third tuple"); Because IEquatable defines GetHashCode(), and Tuple's IStructuralEquatable implementation creates this hash code by combining the hash codes of the members, this makes using the tuple as a complex key quite easy!  For example, let's say you are creating account charts for a financial application, and you want to cache those charts in a Dictionary based on the account number and the number of days of chart data (for example, a 1 day chart, 1 week chart, etc): 1: // the account number (string) and number of days (int) are key to get cached chart 2: var chartCache = new Dictionary<Tuple<string, int>, IChart>(); Summary The System.Tuple, like any tool, is best used where it will achieve a greater benefit.  I wouldn't advise overusing them, on objects with a large scope or it can become difficult to maintain.  However, when used properly in a well defined scope they can make your code cleaner and easier to maintain by removing the need for extraneous POCOs and custom property hashing and ordering. They are especially useful in defining compound keys to IDictionary implementations and for returning multiple values from methods, or passing multiple values to a single object parameter. Tweet Technorati Tags: C#,.NET,Tuple,Little Wonders

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• New Big Data Appliance Security Features

  - by mgubar

  The Oracle Big Data Appliance (BDA) is an engineered system for big data processing.  It greatly simplifies the deployment of an optimized Hadoop Cluster – whether that cluster is used for batch or real-time processing.  The vast majority of BDA customers are integrating the appliance with their Oracle Databases and they have certain expectations – especially around security.  Oracle Database customers have benefited from a rich set of security features:  encryption, redaction, data masking, database firewall, label based access control – and much, much more.  They want similar capabilities with their Hadoop cluster.    Unfortunately, Hadoop wasn’t developed with security in mind.  By default, a Hadoop cluster is insecure – the antithesis of an Oracle Database.  Some critical security features have been implemented – but even those capabilities are arduous to setup and configure.  Oracle believes that a key element of an optimized appliance is that its data should be secure.  Therefore, by default the BDA delivers the “AAA of security”: authentication, authorization and auditing. Security Starts at Authentication A successful security strategy is predicated on strong authentication – for both users and software services.  Consider the default configuration for a newly installed Oracle Database; it’s been a long time since you had a legitimate chance at accessing the database using the credentials “system/manager” or “scott/tiger”.  The default Oracle Database policy is to lock accounts thereby restricting access; administrators must consciously grant access to users. Default Authentication in Hadoop By default, a Hadoop cluster fails the authentication test. For example, it is easy for a malicious user to masquerade as any other user on the system.  Consider the following scenario that illustrates how a user can access any data on a Hadoop cluster by masquerading as a more privileged user.  In our scenario, the Hadoop cluster contains sensitive salary information in the file /user/hrdata/salaries.txt.  When logged in as the hr user, you can see the following files.  Notice, we’re using the Hadoop command line utilities for accessing the data: $ hadoop fs -ls /user/hrdataFound 1 items-rw-r--r--   1 oracle supergroup         70 2013-10-31 10:38 /user/hrdata/salaries.txt$ hadoop fs -cat /user/hrdata/salaries.txtTom Brady,11000000Tom Hanks,5000000Bob Smith,250000Oprah,300000000 User DrEvil has access to the cluster – and can see that there is an interesting folder called “hrdata”.  $ hadoop fs -ls /user Found 1 items drwx------   - hr supergroup          0 2013-10-31 10:38 /user/hrdata However, DrEvil cannot view the contents of the folder due to lack of access privileges: $ hadoop fs -ls /user/hrdata ls: Permission denied: user=drevil, access=READ_EXECUTE, inode="/user/hrdata":oracle:supergroup:drwx------ Accessing this data will not be a problem for DrEvil. He knows that the hr user owns the data by looking at the folder’s ACLs. To overcome this challenge, he will simply masquerade as the hr user. On his local machine, he adds the hr user, assigns that user a password, and then accesses the data on the Hadoop cluster: $ sudo useradd hr $ sudo passwd $ su hr $ hadoop fs -cat /user/hrdata/salaries.txt Tom Brady,11000000 Tom Hanks,5000000 Bob Smith,250000 Oprah,300000000 Hadoop has not authenticated the user; it trusts that the identity that has been presented is indeed the hr user. Therefore, sensitive data has been easily compromised. Clearly, the default security policy is inappropriate and dangerous to many organizations storing critical data in HDFS. Big Data Appliance Provides Secure Authentication The BDA provides secure authentication to the Hadoop cluster by default – preventing the type of masquerading described above. It accomplishes this thru Kerberos integration. Figure 1: Kerberos Integration The Key Distribution Center (KDC) is a server that has two components: an authentication server and a ticket granting service. The authentication server validates the identity of the user and service. Once authenticated, a client must request a ticket from the ticket granting service – allowing it to access the BDA’s NameNode, JobTracker, etc. At installation, you simply point the BDA to an external KDC or automatically install a highly available KDC on the BDA itself. Kerberos will then provide strong authentication for not just the end user – but also for important Hadoop services running on the appliance. You can now guarantee that users are who they claim to be – and rogue services (like fake data nodes) are not added to the system. It is common for organizations to want to leverage existing LDAP servers for common user and group management. Kerberos integrates with LDAP servers – allowing the principals and encryption keys to be stored in the common repository. This simplifies the deployment and administration of the secure environment. Authorize Access to Sensitive Data Kerberos-based authentication ensures secure access to the system and the establishment of a trusted identity – a prerequisite for any authorization scheme. Once this identity is established, you need to authorize access to the data. HDFS will authorize access to files using ACLs with the authorization specification applied using classic Linux-style commands like chmod and chown (e.g. hadoop fs -chown oracle:oracle /user/hrdata changes the ownership of the /user/hrdata folder to oracle). Authorization is applied at the user or group level – utilizing group membership found in the Linux environment (i.e. /etc/group) or in the LDAP server. For SQL-based data stores – like Hive and Impala – finer grained access control is required. Access to databases, tables, columns, etc. must be controlled. And, you want to leverage roles to facilitate administration. Apache Sentry is a new project that delivers fine grained access control; both Cloudera and Oracle are the project’s founding members. Sentry satisfies the following three authorization requirements: Secure Authorization:  the ability to control access to data and/or privileges on data for authenticated users. Fine-Grained Authorization:  the ability to give users access to a subset of the data (e.g. column) in a database Role-Based Authorization:  the ability to create/apply template-based privileges based on functional roles. With Sentry, “all”, “select” or “insert” privileges are granted to an object. The descendants of that object automatically inherit that privilege. A collection of privileges across many objects may be aggregated into a role – and users/groups are then assigned that role. This leads to simplified administration of security across the system. Figure 2: Object Hierarchy – granting a privilege on the database object will be inherited by its tables and views. Sentry is currently used by both Hive and Impala – but it is a framework that other data sources can leverage when offering fine-grained authorization. For example, one can expect Sentry to deliver authorization capabilities to Cloudera Search in the near future. Audit Hadoop Cluster Activity Auditing is a critical component to a secure system and is oftentimes required for SOX, PCI and other regulations. The BDA integrates with Oracle Audit Vault and Database Firewall – tracking different types of activity taking place on the cluster: Figure 3: Monitored Hadoop services. At the lowest level, every operation that accesses data in HDFS is captured. The HDFS audit log identifies the user who accessed the file, the time that file was accessed, the type of access (read, write, delete, list, etc.) and whether or not that file access was successful. The other auditing features include: MapReduce:  correlate the MapReduce job that accessed the file Oozie:  describes who ran what as part of a workflow Hive:  captures changes were made to the Hive metadata The audit data is captured in the Audit Vault Server – which integrates audit activity from a variety of sources, adding databases (Oracle, DB2, SQL Server) and operating systems to activity from the BDA. Figure 4: Consolidated audit data across the enterprise.  Once the data is in the Audit Vault server, you can leverage a rich set of prebuilt and custom reports to monitor all the activity in the enterprise. In addition, alerts may be defined to trigger violations of audit policies. Conclusion Security cannot be considered an afterthought in big data deployments. Across most organizations, Hadoop is managing sensitive data that must be protected; it is not simply crunching publicly available information used for search applications. The BDA provides a strong security foundation – ensuring users are only allowed to view authorized data and that data access is audited in a consolidated framework.

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• SQL SERVER – SSIS Look Up Component – Cache Mode – Notes from the Field #028

  - by Pinal Dave

  [Notes from Pinal]: Lots of people think that SSIS is all about arranging various operations together in one logical flow. Well, the understanding is absolutely correct, but the implementation of the same is not as easy as it seems. Similarly most of the people think lookup component is just component which does look up for additional information and does not pay much attention to it. Due to the same reason they do not pay attention to the same and eventually get very bad performance. Linchpin People are database coaches and wellness experts for a data driven world. In this 28th episode of the Notes from the Fields series database expert Tim Mitchell (partner at Linchpin People) shares very interesting conversation related to how to write a good lookup component with Cache Mode. In SQL Server Integration Services, the lookup component is one of the most frequently used tools for data validation and completion.  The lookup component is provided as a means to virtually join one set of data to another to validate and/or retrieve missing values.  Properly configured, it is reliable and reasonably fast. Among the many settings available on the lookup component, one of the most critical is the cache mode.  This selection will determine whether and how the distinct lookup values are cached during package execution.  It is critical to know how cache modes affect the result of the lookup and the performance of the package, as choosing the wrong setting can lead to poorly performing packages, and in some cases, incorrect results. Full Cache The full cache mode setting is the default cache mode selection in the SSIS lookup transformation.  Like the name implies, full cache mode will cause the lookup transformation to retrieve and store in SSIS cache the entire set of data from the specified lookup location.  As a result, the data flow in which the lookup transformation resides will not start processing any data buffers until all of the rows from the lookup query have been cached in SSIS. The most commonly used cache mode is the full cache setting, and for good reason.  The full cache setting has the most practical applications, and should be considered the go-to cache setting when dealing with an untested set of data. With a moderately sized set of reference data, a lookup transformation using full cache mode usually performs well.  Full cache mode does not require multiple round trips to the database, since the entire reference result set is cached prior to data flow execution. There are a few potential gotchas to be aware of when using full cache mode.  First, you can see some performance issues – memory pressure in particular – when using full cache mode against large sets of reference data.  If the table you use for the lookup is very large (either deep or wide, or perhaps both), there’s going to be a performance cost associated with retrieving and caching all of that data.  Also, keep in mind that when doing a lookup on character data, full cache mode will always do a case-sensitive (and in some cases, space-sensitive) string comparison even if your database is set to a case-insensitive collation.  This is because the in-memory lookup uses a .NET string comparison (which is case- and space-sensitive) as opposed to a database string comparison (which may be case sensitive, depending on collation).  There’s a relatively easy workaround in which you can use the UPPER() or LOWER() function in the pipeline data and the reference data to ensure that case differences do not impact the success of your lookup operation.  Again, neither of these present a reason to avoid full cache mode, but should be used to determine whether full cache mode should be used in a given situation. Full cache mode is ideally useful when one or all of the following conditions exist: The size of the reference data set is small to moderately sized The size of the pipeline data set (the data you are comparing to the lookup table) is large, is unknown at design time, or is unpredictable Each distinct key value(s) in the pipeline data set is expected to be found multiple times in that set of data Partial Cache When using the partial cache setting, lookup values will still be cached, but only as each distinct value is encountered in the data flow.  Initially, each distinct value will be retrieved individually from the specified source, and then cached.  To be clear, this is a row-by-row lookup for each distinct key value(s). This is a less frequently used cache setting because it addresses a narrower set of scenarios.  Because each distinct key value(s) combination requires a relational round trip to the lookup source, performance can be an issue, especially with a large pipeline data set to be compared to the lookup data set.  If you have, for example, a million records from your pipeline data source, you have the potential for doing a million lookup queries against your lookup data source (depending on the number of distinct values in the key column(s)).  Therefore, one has to be keenly aware of the expected row count and value distribution of the pipeline data to safely use partial cache mode. Using partial cache mode is ideally suited for the conditions below: The size of the data in the pipeline (more specifically, the number of distinct key column) is relatively small The size of the lookup data is too large to effectively store in cache The lookup source is well indexed to allow for fast retrieval of row-by-row values No Cache As you might guess, selecting no cache mode will not add any values to the lookup cache in SSIS.  As a result, every single row in the pipeline data set will require a query against the lookup source.  Since no data is cached, it is possible to save a small amount of overhead in SSIS memory in cases where key values are not reused.  In the real world, I don’t see a lot of use of the no cache setting, but I can imagine some edge cases where it might be useful. As such, it’s critical to know your data before choosing this option.  Obviously, performance will be an issue with anything other than small sets of data, as the no cache setting requires row-by-row processing of all of the data in the pipeline. I would recommend considering the no cache mode only when all of the below conditions are true: The reference data set is too large to reasonably be loaded into SSIS memory The pipeline data set is small and is not expected to grow There are expected to be very few or no duplicates of the key values(s) in the pipeline data set (i.e., there would be no benefit from caching these values) Conclusion The cache mode, an often-overlooked setting on the SSIS lookup component, represents an important design decision in your SSIS data flow.  Choosing the right lookup cache mode directly impacts the fidelity of your results and the performance of package execution.  Know how this selection impacts your ETL loads, and you’ll end up with more reliable, faster packages. If you want me to take a look at your server and its settings, or if your server is facing any issue we can Fix Your SQL Server. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: Notes from the Field, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: SSIS

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• Guide to MySQL & NoSQL, Webinar Q&A

  - by Mat Keep

  0 0 1 959 5469 Homework 45 12 6416 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-ansi-language:EN-US;} Yesterday we ran a webinar discussing the demands of next generation web services and how blending the best of relational and NoSQL technologies enables developers and architects to deliver the agility, performance and availability needed to be successful. Attendees posted a number of great questions to the MySQL developers, serving to provide additional insights into areas like auto-sharding and cross-shard JOINs, replication, performance, client libraries, etc. So I thought it would be useful to post those below, for the benefit of those unable to attend the webinar. Before getting to the Q&A, there are a couple of other resources that maybe useful to those looking at NoSQL capabilities within MySQL: - On-Demand webinar (coming soon!) - Slides used during the webinar - Guide to MySQL and NoSQL whitepaper  - MySQL Cluster demo, including NoSQL interfaces, auto-sharing, high availability, etc.  So here is the Q&A from the event  Q. Where does MySQL Cluster fit in to the CAP theorem? A. MySQL Cluster is flexible. A single Cluster will prefer consistency over availability in the presence of network partitions. A pair of Clusters can be configured to prefer availability over consistency. A full explanation can be found on the MySQL Cluster & CAP Theorem blog post.  Q. Can you configure the number of replicas? (the slide used a replication factor of 1) Yes. A cluster is configured by an .ini file. The option NoOfReplicas sets the number of originals and replicas: 1 = no data redundancy, 2 = one copy etc. Usually there's no benefit in setting it >2. Q. Interestingly most (if not all) of the NoSQL databases recommend having 3 copies of data (the replication factor).    Yes, with configurable quorum based Reads and writes. MySQL Cluster does not need a quorum of replicas online to provide service. Systems that require a quorum need > 2 replicas to be able to tolerate a single failure. Additionally, many NoSQL systems take liberal inspiration from the original GFS paper which described a 3 replica configuration. MySQL Cluster avoids the need for a quorum by using a lightweight arbitrator. You can configure more than 2 replicas, but this is a tradeoff between incrementally improved availability, and linearly increased cost. Q. Can you have cross node group JOINS? Wouldn't that run into the risk of flooding the network? MySQL Cluster 7.2 supports cross nodegroup joins. A full cross-join can require a large amount of data transfer, which may bottleneck on network bandwidth. However, for more selective joins, typically seen with OLTP and light analytic applications, cross node-group joins give a great performance boost and network bandwidth saving over having the MySQL Server perform the join. Q. Are the details of the benchmark available anywhere? According to my calculations it results in approx. 350k ops/sec per processor which is the largest number I've seen lately The details are linked from Mikael Ronstrom's blog The benchmark uses a benchmarking tool we call flexAsynch which runs parallel asynchronous transactions. It involved 100 byte reads, of 25 columns each. Regarding the per-processor ops/s, MySQL Cluster is particularly efficient in terms of throughput/node. It uses lock-free minimal copy message passing internally, and maximizes ID cache reuse. Note also that these are in-memory tables, there is no need to read anything from disk. Q. Is access control (like table) planned to be supported for NoSQL access mode? Currently we have not seen much need for full SQL-like access control (which has always been overkill for web apps and telco apps). So we have no plans, though especially with memcached it is certainly possible to turn-on connection-level access control. But specifically table level controls are not planned. Q. How is the performance of memcached APi with MySQL against memcached+MySQL or any other Object Cache like Ecache with MySQL DB? With the memcache API we generally see a memcached response in less than 1 ms. and a small cluster with one memcached server can handle tens of thousands of operations per second. Q. Can .NET can access MemcachedAPI? Yes, just use a .Net memcache client such as the enyim or BeIT memcache libraries. Q. Is the row level locking applicable when you update a column through memcached API? An update that comes through memcached uses a row lock and then releases it immediately. Memcached operations like "INCREMENT" are actually pushed down to the data nodes. In most cases the locks are not even held long enough for a network round trip. Q. Has anyone published an example using something like PHP? I am assuming that you just use the PHP memcached extension to hook into the memcached API. Is that correct? Not that I'm aware of but absolutely you can use it with php or any of the other drivers Q. For beginner we need more examples. Take a look here for a fully worked example Q. Can I access MySQL using Cobol (Open Cobol) or C and if so where can I find the coding libraries etc? A. There is a cobol implementation that works well with MySQL, but I do not think it is Open Cobol. Also there is a MySQL C client library that is a standard part of every mysql distribution Q. Is there a place to go to find help when testing and/implementing the NoSQL access? If using Cluster then you can use the [email protected] alias or post on the MySQL Cluster forum Q. Are there any white papers on this?  Yes - there is more detail in the MySQL Guide to NoSQL whitepaper If you have further questions, please don’t hesitate to use the comments below!

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• New Enhancements for InnoDB Memcached

  - by Calvin Sun

  In MySQL 5.6, we continued our development on InnoDB Memcached and completed a few widely desirable features that make InnoDB Memcached a competitive feature in more scenario. Notablely, they are 1) Support multiple table mapping 2) Added background thread to auto-commit long running transactions 3) Enhancement in binlog performance  Let’s go over each of these features one by one. And in the last section, we will go over a couple of internally performed performance tests. Support multiple table mapping In our earlier release, all InnoDB Memcached operations are mapped to a single InnoDB table. In the real life, user might want to use this InnoDB Memcached features on different tables. Thus being able to support access to different table at run time, and having different mapping for different connections becomes a very desirable feature. And in this GA release, we allow user just be able to do both. We will discuss the key concepts and key steps in using this feature. 1) "mapping name" in the "get" and "set" command In order to allow InnoDB Memcached map to a new table, the user (DBA) would still require to "pre-register" table(s) in InnoDB Memcached “containers” table (there is security consideration for this requirement). If you would like to know about “containers” table, please refer to my earlier blogs in blogs.innodb.com. Once registered, the InnoDB Memcached will then be able to look for such table when they are referred. Each of such registered table will have a unique "registration name" (or mapping_name) corresponding to the “name” field in the “containers” table.. To access these tables, user will include such "registration name" in their get or set commands, in the form of "get @@new_mapping_name.key", prefix "@@" is required for signaling a mapped table change. The key and the "mapping name" are separated by a configurable delimiter, by default, it is ".". So the syntax is: get [@@mapping_name.]key_name set [@@mapping_name.]key_name  or  get @@mapping_name set @@mapping_name Here is an example: Let's set up three tables in the "containers" table: The first is a map to InnoDB table "test/demo_test" table with mapping name "setup_1" INSERT INTO containers VALUES ("setup_1", "test", "demo_test", "c1", "c2", "c3", "c4", "c5", "PRIMARY");  Similarly, we set up table mappings for table "test/new_demo" with name "setup_2" and that to table "mydatabase/my_demo" with name "setup_3": INSERT INTO containers VALUES ("setup_2", "test", "new_demo", "c1", "c2", "c3", "c4", "c5", "secondary_index_x"); INSERT INTO containers VALUES ("setup_3", "my_database", "my_demo", "c1", "c2", "c3", "c4", "c5", "idx"); To switch to table "my_database/my_demo", and get the value corresponding to “key_a”, user will do: get @@setup_3.key_a (this will also output the value that corresponding to key "key_a" or simply get @@setup_3 Once this is done, this connection will switch to "my_database/my_demo" table until another table mapping switch is requested. so it can continue issue regular command like: get key_b  set key_c 0 0 7 These DMLs will all be directed to "my_database/my_demo" table. And this also implies that different connections can have different bindings (to different table). 2) Delimiter: For the delimiter "." that separates the "mapping name" and key value, we also added a configure option in the "config_options" system table with name of "table_map_delimiter": INSERT INTO config_options VALUES("table_map_delimiter", "."); So if user wants to change to a different delimiter, they can change it in the config_option table. 3) Default mapping: Once we have multiple table mapping, there should be always a "default" map setting. For this, we decided if there exists a mapping name of "default", then this will be chosen as default mapping. Otherwise, the first row of the containers table will chosen as default setting. Please note, user tables can be repeated in the "containers" table (for example, user wants to access different columns of the table in different settings), as long as they are using different mapping/configure names in the first column, which is enforced by a unique index. 4) bind command In addition, we also extend the protocol and added a bind command, its usage is fairly straightforward. To switch to "setup_3" mapping above, you simply issue: bind setup_3 This will switch this connection's InnoDB table to "my_database/my_demo" In summary, with this feature, you now can direct access to difference tables with difference session. And even a single connection, you can query into difference tables. Background thread to auto-commit long running transactions This is a feature related to the “batch” concept we discussed in earlier blogs. This “batch” feature allows us batch the read and write operations, and commit them only after certain calls. The “batch” size is controlled by the configure parameter “daemon_memcached_w_batch_size” and “daemon_memcached_r_batch_size”. This could significantly boost performance. However, it also comes with some disadvantages, for example, you will not be able to view “uncommitted” operations from SQL end unless you set transaction isolation level to read_uncommitted, and in addition, this will held certain row locks for extend period of time that might reduce the concurrency. To deal with this, we introduce a background thread that “auto-commits” the transaction if they are idle for certain amount of time (default is 5 seconds). The background thread will wake up every second and loop through every “connections” opened by Memcached, and check for idle transactions. And if such transaction is idle longer than certain limit and not being used, it will commit such transactions. This limit is configurable by change “innodb_api_bk_commit_interval”. Its default value is 5 seconds, and minimum is 1 second, and maximum is 1073741824 seconds. With the help of such background thread, you will not need to worry about long running uncommitted transactions when set daemon_memcached_w_batch_size and daemon_memcached_r_batch_size to a large number. This also reduces the number of locks that could be held due to long running transactions, and thus further increase the concurrency. Enhancement in binlog performance As you might all know, binlog operation is not done by InnoDB storage engine, rather it is handled in the MySQL layer. In order to support binlog operation through InnoDB Memcached, we would have to artificially create some MySQL constructs in order to access binlog handler APIs. In previous lab release, for simplicity consideration, we open and destroy these MySQL constructs (such as THD) for each operations. This required us to set the “batch” size always to 1 when binlog is on, no matter what “daemon_memcached_w_batch_size” and “daemon_memcached_r_batch_size” are configured to. This put a big restriction on our capability to scale, and also there are quite a bit overhead in creating destroying such constructs that bogs the performance down. With this release, we made necessary change that would keep MySQL constructs as long as they are valid for a particular connection. So there will not be repeated and redundant open and close (table) calls. And now even with binlog option is enabled (with innodb_api_enable_binlog,), we still can batch the transactions with daemon_memcached_w_batch_size and daemon_memcached_r_batch_size, thus scale the write/read performance. Although there are still overheads that makes InnoDB Memcached cannot perform as fast as when binlog is turned off. It is much better off comparing to previous release. And we are continuing optimize the solution is this area to improve the performance as much as possible. Performance Study: Amerandra of our System QA team have conducted some performance studies on queries through our InnoDB Memcached connection and plain SQL end. And it shows some interesting results. The test is conducted on a “Linux 2.6.32-300.7.1.el6uek.x86_64 ix86 (64)” machine with 16 GB Memory, Intel Xeon 2.0 GHz CPU X86_64 2 CPUs- 4 Core Each, 2 RAID DISKS (1027 GB,733.9GB). Results are described in following tables: Table 1: Performance comparison on Set operations Connections 5.6.7-RC-Memcached-plugin ( TPS / Qps) with memcached-threads=8*** 5.6.7-RC* X faster Set (QPS) Set** 8 30,000 5,600 5.36 32 59,000 13,000 4.54 128 68,000 8,000 8.50 512 63,000 6.800 9.23 * mysql-5.6.7-rc-linux2.6-x86_64 ** The “set” operation when implemented in InnoDB Memcached involves a couple of DMLs: it first query the table to see whether the “key” exists, if it does not, the new key/value pair will be inserted. If it does exist, the “value” field of matching row (by key) will be updated. So when used in above query, it is a precompiled store procedure, and query will just execute such procedures. *** added “–daemon_memcached_option=-t8” (default is 4 threads) So we can see with this “set” query, InnoDB Memcached can run 4.5 to 9 time faster than MySQL server. Table 2: Performance comparison on Get operations Connections 5.6.7-RC-Memcached-plugin ( TPS / Qps) with memcached-threads=8 5.6.7-RC* X faster Get (QPS) Get 8 42,000 27,000 1.56 32 101,000 55.000 1.83 128 117,000 52,000 2.25 512 109,000 52,000 2.10 With the “get” query (or the select query), memcached performs 1.5 to 2 times faster than normal SQL. Summary: In summary, we added several much-desired features to InnoDB Memcached in this release, allowing user to operate on different tables with this Memcached interface. We also now provide a background commit thread to commit long running idle transactions, thus allow user to configure large batch write/read without worrying about large number of rows held or not being able to see (uncommit) data. We also greatly enhanced the performance when Binlog is enabled. We will continue making efforts in both performance enhancement and functionality areas to make InnoDB Memcached a good demo case for our InnoDB APIs. Jimmy Yang, September 29, 2012

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, September 02, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, September 02, 2012Popular ReleasesThisismyusername's codeplex page.: HTML5 Multitouch Example - Fruit Ninja in HTML5: This is an example of how you could create a game such as Fruit Ninja using HTML5's multitouch capabilities. This example isn't responsive enough, so I will be working on that, and it doesn't have great graphics, either. If I had my own webpage, I could store some graphics and upload the game there and it might look halfway decent, but here the fruits are just circles. I hope you enjoy reading the source code anyway.GmailDefaultMaker: GmailDefaultMaker 3.0.0.2: Add QQ Mail BugfixRuminate XNA 4.0 GUI: Release 1.1.1: Fixed bugs with Slider and TextBox. Added ComboBox.Confuser: Confuser build 76542: This is a build of changeset 76542.SharePoint Column & View Permission: SharePoint Column and View Permission v1.2: Version 1.2 of this project. If you will find any bugs please let me know at enti@zoznam.sk or post your findings in Issue TrackerMihmojsos OS: Mihmojsos OS 3 (Smart Rabbit): !Mihmojsos OS 3 Smart Rabbit Mihmojsos Smart Rabbit is now availableDotNetNuke Translator: 01.00.00 Beta: First release of the project.YNA: YNA 0.2 alpha: Wath's new since 0.1 alpha ? A lot of changes but there are the most interresting : StateManager is now better and faster Mouse events for all YnObjects (Sprites, Images, texts) A really big improvement for YnGroup Gamepad support And the news : Tiled Map support (need refactoring) Isometric tiled map support (need refactoring) Transition effect like "FadeIn" and "FadeOut" (YnTransition) Timers (YnTimer) Path management (YnPath, need more refactoring) Downloads All downloads...Audio Pitch & Shift: Audio Pitch And Shift 5.1.0.2: fixed several issues with streaming modeUrlPager: UrlPager 1.2: Fixed bug in which url parameters will lost after paging; ????????url???bug；Sofire Suite: Sofire v1.5.0.0: Sofire v1.5.0.0 ?? ???????? ?????： 1、?? 2、????EntLib.com????????: EntLib.com???????? v3.0: EntLib eCommerce Solution ???Microsoft .Net Framework?????????????????????。Coevery - Free CRM: Coevery 1.0.0.24: Add a sample database, and installation instructions.Math.NET Numerics: Math.NET Numerics v2.2.1: Major linear algebra rework since v2.1, now available on Codeplex as well (previous versions were only available via NuGet). Since v2.2.0: Student-T density more robust for very large degrees of freedom Sparse Kronecker product much more efficient (now leverages sparsity) Direct access to raw matrix storage implementations for advanced extensibility Now also separate package for signed core library with a strong name (we dropped strong names in v2.2.0) Also available as NuGet packages...Microsoft SQL Server Product Samples: Database: AdventureWorks Databases – 2012, 2008R2 and 2008: About this release This release consolidates AdventureWorks databases for SQL Server 2012, 2008R2 and 2008 versions to one page. Each zip file contains an mdf database file and ldf log file. This should make it easier to find and download AdventureWorks databases since all OLTP versions are on one page. There are no database schema changes. For each release of the product, there is a light-weight and full version of the AdventureWorks sample database. The light-weight version is denoted by ...Christoc's DotNetNuke Module Development Template: DotNetNuke Project Templates V1.1 for VS2012: This release is specifically for Visual Studio 2012 Support, distributed through the Visual Studio Extensions gallery at http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/ After you build in Release mode the installable packages (source/install) can be found in the INSTALL folder now, within your module's folder, not the packages folder anymore Check out the blog post for all of the details about this release. http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Resources/Blogs/EntryId/3471/New-Visual-Studio-2012-Projec...Home Access Plus+: v8.0: v8.0.0901.1830 RELEASE CHANGED TO BETA Any issues, please log them on http://www.edugeek.net/forums/home-access-plus/ This is full release, NO upgrade ZIP will be provided as most files require replacing. To upgrade from a previous version, delete everything but your AppData folder, extract all but the AppData folder and run your HAP+ install Documentation is supplied in the Web Zip The Quota Services require executing a script to register the service, this can be found in there install ...Phalanger - The PHP Language Compiler for the .NET Framework: 3.0.0.3406 (September 2012): New features: Extended ReflectionClass libxml error handling, constants DateTime::modify(), DateTime::getOffset() TreatWarningsAsErrors MSBuild option OnlyPrecompiledCode configuration option; allows to use only compiled code Fixes: ArgsAware exception fix accessing .NET properties bug fix ASP.NET session handler fix for OutOfProc mode DateTime methods (WordPress posting fix) Phalanger Tools for Visual Studio: Visual Studio 2010 & 2012 New debugger engine, PHP-like debugging ...MabiCommerce: MabiCommerce 1.0.1: What's NewSetup now creates shortcuts Fix spelling errors Minor enhancement to the Map window.ScintillaNET: ScintillaNET 2.5.2: This release has been built from the 2.5 branch. Version 2.5.2 is functionally identical to the 2.5.1 release but also includes the XML documentation comments file generated by Visual Studio. It is not 100% comprehensive but it will give you Visual Studio IntelliSense for a large part of the API. Just make sure the ScintillaNET.xml file is in the same folder as the ScintillaNET.dll reference you're using in your projects. (The XML file does not need to be distributed with your application)....New ProjectsATSV: this is a student project for making a new silverlight UI Bookmark Collector: This project is a best practice example of how to use content items in DotNetNuke. It allows you to quickly and easily manage a listing of external links.BPVotingmachine: BP Vote SystemClean My Space: Sort your files in a fun and fast! With Clean My Space you can!CutePlatform: CutePlatform is a platform game based around the PlanetCute graphics pack from Daniel cook, make him a visit in www.lostgardem.comDancTeX: This project is targeting the integration of LaTeX into VisusalStudio. Epi Info™ Companion for Android: A mobile companion to the Epi Info™ 7 desktop tool for epidemiologic data collection and analysis.Flucene: Object Document Mapper for Lucene.Netfluentserializer: FluentSerializer is a library for .NET usable to create serialize/deserialize data through its fluent interface. The methods it creates are compiled.hongjiapp: hongjiappidealthings educational comprehensive administration system: ?????????????????????????????????????????????.Java Accounting Library: The project aims at providing a Financial Accounting Java Library which may be integrated to any other Java Application independent of its Backend Database.mycnblogs: mycnblogsNETPack: Lightweight and flexible packer for .NETRandom Useful Code: This project is where I will store various useful classes I have built over time. Only the code will be provided, no Library or the like.Suleymaniye Tavimi: Namaz vakitleri hesaplama uygulamasidir. Istenilen yer için hesaplama yapar.

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• Constant game speed independent of variable FPS in OpenGL with GLUT?

  - by Nazgulled

  I've been reading Koen Witters detailed article about different game loop solutions but I'm having some problems implementing the last one with GLUT, which is the recommended one. After reading a couple of articles, tutorials and code from other people on how to achieve a constant game speed, I think that what I currently have implemented (I'll post the code below) is what Koen Witters called Game Speed dependent on Variable FPS, the second on his article. First, through my searching experience, there's a couple of people that probably have the knowledge to help out on this but don't know what GLUT is and I'm going to try and explain (feel free to correct me) the relevant functions for my problem of this OpenGL toolkit. Skip this section if you know what GLUT is and how to play with it. GLUT Toolkit: GLUT is an OpenGL toolkit and helps with common tasks in OpenGL. The glutDisplayFunc(renderScene) takes a pointer to a renderScene() function callback, which will be responsible for rendering everything. The renderScene() function will only be called once after the callback registration. The glutTimerFunc(TIMER_MILLISECONDS, processAnimationTimer, 0) takes the number of milliseconds to pass before calling the callback processAnimationTimer(). The last argument is just a value to pass to the timer callback. The processAnimationTimer() will not be called each TIMER_MILLISECONDS but just once. The glutPostRedisplay() function requests GLUT to render a new frame so we need call this every time we change something in the scene. The glutIdleFunc(renderScene) could be used to register a callback to renderScene() (this does not make glutDisplayFunc() irrelevant) but this function should be avoided because the idle callback is continuously called when events are not being received, increasing the CPU load. The glutGet(GLUT_ELAPSED_TIME) function returns the number of milliseconds since glutInit was called (or first call to glutGet(GLUT_ELAPSED_TIME)). That's the timer we have with GLUT. I know there are better alternatives for high resolution timers, but let's keep with this one for now. I think this is enough information on how GLUT renders frames so people that didn't know about it could also pitch in this question to try and help if they fell like it. Current Implementation: Now, I'm not sure I have correctly implemented the second solution proposed by Koen, Game Speed dependent on Variable FPS. The relevant code for that goes like this: #define TICKS_PER_SECOND 30 #define MOVEMENT_SPEED 2.0f const int TIMER_MILLISECONDS = 1000 / TICKS_PER_SECOND; int previousTime; int currentTime; int elapsedTime; void renderScene(void) { (...) // Setup the camera position and looking point SceneCamera.LookAt(); // Do all drawing below... (...) } void processAnimationTimer(int value) { // setups the timer to be called again glutTimerFunc(TIMER_MILLISECONDS, processAnimationTimer, 0); // Get the time when the previous frame was rendered previousTime = currentTime; // Get the current time (in milliseconds) and calculate the elapsed time currentTime = glutGet(GLUT_ELAPSED_TIME); elapsedTime = currentTime - previousTime; /* Multiply the camera direction vector by constant speed then by the elapsed time (in seconds) and then move the camera */ SceneCamera.Move(cameraDirection * MOVEMENT_SPEED * (elapsedTime / 1000.0f)); // Requests to render a new frame (this will call my renderScene() once) glutPostRedisplay(); } void main(int argc, char **argv) { glutInit(&argc, argv); (...) glutDisplayFunc(renderScene); (...) // Setup the timer to be called one first time glutTimerFunc(TIMER_MILLISECONDS, processAnimationTimer, 0); // Read the current time since glutInit was called currentTime = glutGet(GLUT_ELAPSED_TIME); glutMainLoop(); } This implementation doesn't fell right. It works in the sense that helps the game speed to be constant dependent on the FPS. So that moving from point A to point B takes the same time no matter the high/low framerate. However, I believe I'm limiting the game framerate with this approach. Each frame will only be rendered when the time callback is called, that means the framerate will be roughly around TICKS_PER_SECOND frames per second. This doesn't feel right, you shouldn't limit your powerful hardware, it's wrong. It's my understanding though, that I still need to calculate the elapsedTime. Just because I'm telling GLUT to call the timer callback every TIMER_MILLISECONDS, it doesn't mean it will always do that on time. I'm not sure how can I fix this and to be completely honest, I have no idea what is the game loop in GLUT, you know, the while( game_is_running ) loop in Koen's article. But it's my understanding that GLUT is event-driven and that game loop starts when I call glutMainLoop() (which never returns), yes? I thought I could register an idle callback with glutIdleFunc() and use that as replacement of glutTimerFunc(), only rendering when necessary (instead of all the time as usual) but when I tested this with an empty callback (like void gameLoop() {}) and it was basically doing nothing, only a black screen, the CPU spiked to 25% and remained there until I killed the game and it went back to normal. So I don't think that's the path to follow. Using glutTimerFunc() is definitely not a good approach to perform all movements/animations based on that, as I'm limiting my game to a constant FPS, not cool. Or maybe I'm using it wrong and my implementation is not right? How exactly can I have a constant game speed with variable FPS? More exactly, how do I correctly implement Koen's Constant Game Speed with Maximum FPS solution (the fourth one on his article) with GLUT? Maybe this is not possible at all with GLUT? If not, what are my alternatives? What is the best approach to this problem (constant game speed) with GLUT? I originally posted this question on Stack Overflow before being pointed out about this site. The following is a different approach I tried after creating the question in SO, so I'm posting it here too. Another Approach: I've been experimenting and here's what I was able to achieve now. Instead of calculating the elapsed time on a timed function (which limits my game's framerate) I'm now doing it in renderScene(). Whenever changes to the scene happen I call glutPostRedisplay() (ie: camera moving, some object animation, etc...) which will make a call to renderScene(). I can use the elapsed time in this function to move my camera for instance. My code has now turned into this: int previousTime; int currentTime; int elapsedTime; void renderScene(void) { (...) // Setup the camera position and looking point SceneCamera.LookAt(); // Do all drawing below... (...) } void renderScene(void) { (...) // Get the time when the previous frame was rendered previousTime = currentTime; // Get the current time (in milliseconds) and calculate the elapsed time currentTime = glutGet(GLUT_ELAPSED_TIME); elapsedTime = currentTime - previousTime; /* Multiply the camera direction vector by constant speed then by the elapsed time (in seconds) and then move the camera */ SceneCamera.Move(cameraDirection * MOVEMENT_SPEED * (elapsedTime / 1000.0f)); // Setup the camera position and looking point SceneCamera.LookAt(); // All drawing code goes inside this function drawCompleteScene(); glutSwapBuffers(); /* Redraw the frame ONLY if the user is moving the camera (similar code will be needed to redraw the frame for other events) */ if(!IsTupleEmpty(cameraDirection)) { glutPostRedisplay(); } } void main(int argc, char **argv) { glutInit(&argc, argv); (...) glutDisplayFunc(renderScene); (...) currentTime = glutGet(GLUT_ELAPSED_TIME); glutMainLoop(); } Conclusion, it's working, or so it seems. If I don't move the camera, the CPU usage is low, nothing is being rendered (for testing purposes I only have a grid extending for 4000.0f, while zFar is set to 1000.0f). When I start moving the camera the scene starts redrawing itself. If I keep pressing the move keys, the CPU usage will increase; this is normal behavior. It drops back when I stop moving. Unless I'm missing something, it seems like a good approach for now. I did find this interesting article on iDevGames and this implementation is probably affected by the problem described on that article. What's your thoughts on that? Please note that I'm just doing this for fun, I have no intentions of creating some game to distribute or something like that, not in the near future at least. If I did, I would probably go with something else besides GLUT. But since I'm using GLUT, and other than the problem described on iDevGames, do you think this latest implementation is sufficient for GLUT? The only real issue I can think of right now is that I'll need to keep calling glutPostRedisplay() every time the scene changes something and keep calling it until there's nothing new to redraw. A little complexity added to the code for a better cause, I think. What do you think?

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, March 28, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, March 28, 2012Popular Releasescallisto: callisto 2.0.22: Patched update contains new option to enable or disable file sharing.JSON Toolkit: JSON Toolkit 3.1: slight performance improvement (5% - 10%) new JsonException classSPSiteInstaller: SPSiteInstaller v1.3: Now you can upgrade your existing structure, just use ./remsolns ./addsolns ./createpages ./addwebparts as per your requirements, i.e. after adding more pages/webparts etc to the siteconfig.xml, you can now rerun the above as many times as you want, if a page already exists, it will be skipped, if a webpart is already on a page, it wont be added again.Picturethrill: Version 2.3.28.0: Straightforward image selection. New clean UI look. Super stable. Simplified user experience.Indent Guides for Visual Studio: Indent Guides v12 (beta 2): Note This beta is likely to be less stable than the previous one. If you have severe troubles using this version, please report them with as much detail as possible (especially other extensions/addins that you may have) and downgrade to the last stable release. Version History Changed since v12 (beta 1): new options dialog with Quick Set selections for behavior restructured settings storage (should be more reliable) asynchronous background document analysis glow effect now appears in p...SQL Monitor - managing sql server performance: SQL Monitor 4.2 alpha 16: 1. finally fixed problem with logic fault checking for temporary table name... I really mean finally ...ScintillaNET: ScintillaNET 2.5: A slew of bug-fixes with a few new features sprinkled in. This release also upgrades the SciLexer and SciLexer64 DLLs to version 3.0.4. The official stuff: Issue # Title 32402 32402 27137 27137 31548 31548 30179 30179 24932 24932 29701 29701 31238 31238 26875 26875 30052 30052 Mugen MVVM Toolkit: Mugen MVVM Toolkit ver 1.1: Added Design mode support.Multiwfn: Multiwfn 2.3.2: Multiwfn 2.3.2Harness: Harness 2.0.2: change to .NET Framework Client Profile bug fix the download dialog auto answer. bug fix setFocus command. add "SendKeys" command. remove "closeAll" command. minor bugs fixed.BugNET Issue Tracker: BugNET 0.9.161: Below is a list of fixes in this release. Bug BGN-2092 - Link in Email "visit your profile" not functional BGN-2083 - Manager of bugnet can not edit project when it is not public BGN-2080 - clicking on a link in the project summary causes error (0.9.152.0) BGN-2070 - Missing Functionality On Feed.aspx BGN-2069 - Calendar View does not work BGN-2068 - Time tracking totals not ok BGN-2067 - Issues List Page Size Bug: Index was out of range. Must be non-negative and less than the si...YAF.NET (aka Yet Another Forum.NET): v1.9.6.1 RTW: v1.9.6.1 FINAL is .NET v4.0 ONLY v1.9.6.1 has: Performance Improvements .NET v4.0 improvements Improved FaceBook Integration KNOWN ISSUES WITH THIS RELEASE: ON INSTALL PLEASE DON'T CHECK "Upgrade BBCode Extensions...". More complete change list and discussion here: http://forum.yetanotherforum.net/yaf_postst14201_v1-9-6-1-RTW-Dated--3-26-2012.aspxQuick Performance Monitor: Version 1.8.1: Added option to set main window to be 'Always On Top'. Use context (right-click) menu on graph to toggle.Asp.NET Url Router: v1.0: build for .net 2.0 and .net 4.0menu4web: menu4web 0.0.3: menu4web 0.0.3ArcGIS Editor for OpenStreetMap: ArcGIS Editor for OSM 2.0 Final: This release installs both the ArcGIS Editor for OSM Server Component and/or ArcGIS Editor for OSM Desktop components. The Desktop tools allow you to download data from the OpenStreetMap servers and store it locally in a geodatabase. You can then use the familiar editing environment of ArcGIS Desktop to create, modify, or delete data. Once you are done editing, you can post back the edit changes to OSM to make them available to all OSM users. The Server Component allows you to quickly create...Craig's Utility Library: Craig's Utility Library 3.1: This update adds about 60 new extension methods, a couple of new classes, and a number of fixes including: Additions Added DateSpan class Added GenericDelimited class Random additions Added static thread friendly version of Random.Next called ThreadSafeNext. AOP Manager additions Added Destroy function to AOPManager (clears out all data so system can be recreated. Really only useful for testing...) ORM additions Added PagedCommand and PageCount functions to ObjectBaseClass (same as M...DotSpatial: DotSpatial 1.1: This is a Minor Release. See the changes in the issue tracker. Minimal -- includes DotSpatial core and essential extensions Extended -- includes debugging symbols and additional extensions Just want to run the software? End user (non-programmer) version available branded as MapWindow Want to add your own feature? Develop a plugin, using the template and contribute to the extension feed (you can also write extensions that you distribute in other ways). Components are available as NuGet pa...Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework - a centralized code sample library: C++, .NET Coding Guideline: Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework Coding Guideline This document describes the coding style guideline for native C++ and .NET (C# and VB.NET) programming used by the Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework project team.WebDAV for WHS: Version 1.0.67: - Added: Check whether the Remote Web Access is turned on or not; - Added: Check for Add-In updates;New Projects.NET File Cache: FileCache is a concrete implementation of the .Net Framework 4's System.Runtime.Caching.ObjectCache that uses the local filesystem as the target location.ASP.NET MVC / Web API / Web Pages: This is the source code repository for open source ASP.NET products. The products include MVC, Web API and Web Pages with Razor.AudioManager in XNA: This project shows how to create an audio engine in xna. The audio engine support xna's simple audio libraries and XACT, The project is written using xna 4.0, c# programming language and the Visual Studio IDE.CLab: CLabDominorder: A multi-agent simulation of dominoes (the agents) that are placed in a random order on a board and then try to form some kind of ordering. (Used for evaluating the MASON framework) -all in java- Easy Eject: Easy Eject lets you eject USB drives quickly. Excel File Cleaner: This tool is designed to reduce the size and speed up Excel 2007/2010 workbooks. It will only work for the new XML File formats (XLSX and XLSM). It cleans the files by reducing the number of styles in use and the number of activated cells. See Microsoft KBs: KB213904 & KB244435.ForumMVC: the forum site use MVCFreshbooks.NET: C# Client Library to use the Freshbooks APIFrogger 3D: FROGGER 3D GAME: 3D remake of the classic Konami game: you have to help 5 frogs to reach their respective holes passing over a street full of cars and a river where you can only use trunks and waterlily to pass-by without drowning. Levels: the numbers of levels is potentially infinite, even if you will find levels over the 15th almost undoable... Note: Some third parties code & models have been used in the game, all rights reserved to respective owners... Project made for XNA exam of M...Gestione11: Management Software created with LightswitchIntel: The Dungeon of Doom: A text based RPG, mostly being done to learn C++. This summary will be expanded as the project is completed.ketabresan: ketabresan is an online book delivery projectKinect anti theft: Kinect anti theft application. It uses the capturemylog to save datas.Komon: enterprise framework targeting datadriven systemslocal.angle API: The local.angle API makes it easier for developers using .Net to integrate with the local.angle group of community websites.MessageTel: It`s a simple app for forward phone number You can download it from ZuneMarketplace for free. Just search "MessageTel"Modularity: Create modules for asp.net using a base class that helps you subscribe to application events easier than before and in a unit testable manner.MongoLP - A LinqPad Driver: A MongoDB LinqPad driver that uses the official C# driver from 10gen.MvcApplicationTeste: Projeto testeNokia Developer Days - Windows Phone: Nokia Developer Days - Windows PhoneOrchard Inline Editing: An implementation of inline editing for Orchard CMS, this version currently takes advantage of fluid infusion.Paulo FPU: Projeto exemplo.PES Championship Control: Projeto open-source que visa criar um aplicativo desktop/web para controle de um campeonato de pro-evolution soccer.projectforgit: projectforgitQuickbookWorkers: Hello!SharpUpdater: Auto-updater for Windows Desktop applicatons.SovoktvAPI: Library for Sovoktv REST APIStyleRepair: A tool that will automatically fix certain StyleCop warnings. Tool is based on StyleCopFixer with added functionality and will be hosted at http://stylerepair.codeplex.com This tool is still in development and more warnings will be added soon. Rules 1200-1207 are fixed using NArrange with optional regions. The tool allows for fixing multiple warnings at once, however, it is best at this point to fix groups of only the same warning number at once as warnings are not fixed in any pa...SWCustomRibbon: Create your custom Ribbon Tab, Groups and Buttons! So you can add your favourite links to the Ribbon menu quite easy.Theme Override Orchard module: This Orchard module adds configuration to the admin page that lets override the styling of the current theme (works with tenants too).txresearch: Research ProjectsUnity AutoRegisterExtension: This project is unity container extension that is attribute base register.Visual Localizer: Visual Localizer is an opensource plugin for Visual Studio 2008 and 2010. It makes localizing of completed C# projects much easier by providing such functions as automatic string-lookup, advanced work with ResX files etc.Vodigi Open Source Interactive Digital Signage: Vodigi is a free, open source, interactive digital signage software solution that offers all the features you need to promote and advertise your products and services. With Vodigi, you can have a virtual sales team dedicated to promoting and advertising your products and services... a team that knows your products and services inside and out, can provide detailed interactive information about your products and services, and is available any time... day or night... to help you succeed. ...WishProject: WishProject é um projeto voltado para estudos dos frameworks wicket, Spring e HibernateWP7PUBLISH: WP7PUBLISH is a framework for building content delivery system applications.WtCHJqueryPlugins: WtCHJqueryPluginsYouTube API Class & Server Control for ASP.NET 4.0: This project have option to use YouTube API easily into your asp.net application using the simple dll file. Also you can display YouTube Videos in your website using Server Control simply.

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• Agile Testing Days 2012 – Day 2 – Learn through disagreement

  - by Chris George

  I think I was in the right place! During Day 1 I kept on reading tweets about Lean Coffee that has happened earlier that morning. It intrigued me and I figured in for a penny in for a pound, and set my alarm for 6:45am. Following the award night the night before, it was _really_ hard getting up when it went off, but I did and after a very early breakfast, set off for the 10 min walk to the Dorint. With Lean Coffee due to start at 07:30, I arrived at the hotel and made my way to one of the hotel bars. I soon realised I was in the right place as although the bar was empty, there was a table with post-it’s and pens! This MUST be the place! The premise of Lean Coffee is to have several small timeboxed discussions. Everyone writes down what they would like to discuss on post-its that are then briefly explained and submitted to the pile. Once everyone is done, the group dot-votes on the topics. The topics are then sorted by the dot vote counts and the discussions begin. Each discussion had 8 mins to start with, which meant it prevented the discussions getting off topic too much. After the time elapsed, the group had a vote whether to extend the discussion by a further 4 mins or move on. Several discussion were had around training, soft skills etc. The conversations were really interesting and there were quite a few good ideas. Overall it was a very enjoyable experience, certainly worth the early start! Make Melly Happy Following Lean Coffee was real coffee, and much needed that was! The first keynote of the day was “Let’s help Melly (Changing Work into Life)”by Jurgen Appelo. Draw lines to track happiness This was a very interesting presentation, and set the day nicely. The theme to the keynote was projects are about the people, more-so than the actual tasks. So he started by showing a photo of an employee ‘Melly’ who looked happy enough. He then stated that she looked happy but actually hated her job. In fact 50% of Americans hate their jobs. He went on to say that the world over 50% of people hate Americans their jobs. Jurgen talked about many ways to reduce the feedback cycle, not only of the project, but of the people management. Ideas such as Happiness doors, happiness tracking (drawing lines on a wall indicating your happiness for that day), kudo boxes (to compliment a colleague for good work). All of these (and more) ideas stimulate conversation amongst the team, lead to early detection of issues and investigation of solutions. I’ve massively simplified Jurgen’s keynote and have certainly not done it justice, so I will post a link to the video once it’s available. Following more coffee, the next talk was “How releasing faster changes testing” by Alexander Schwartz. This is a topic very close to our hearts at the moment, so I was eager to find out any juicy morsels that could help us achieve more frequent releases, and Alex did not disappoint. He started off by confirming something that I have been a firm believer in for a number of years now; adding more people can do more harm than good when trying to release. This is for a number of reasons, but just adding new people to a team at such a critical time can be more of a drain on resources than they add. The alternative is to have the whole team have shared responsibility for faster delivery. So the whole team is responsible for quality and testing. Obviously you will have the test engineers on the project who have the specialist skills, but there is no reason that the entire team cannot do exploratory testing on the product. This links nicely with the Developer Exploratory testing presented by Sigge on Day 1, and certainly something that my team are really striving towards. Focus on cycle time, so what can be done to reduce the time between dev cycles, release cycles. What’s stops a release, what delays a release? all good solid questions that can be answered. Alex suggested that perhaps the product doesn’t need to be fully tested. Doing less testing will reduce the cycle time therefore get the release out faster. He suggested a risk-based approach to planning what testing needs to happen. Reducing testing could have an impact on revenue if it causes harm to customers, so test the ‘right stuff’! Determine a set of tests that are ‘face saving’ or ‘smoke’ tests. These tests cover the core functionality of the product and aim to prevent major embarrassment if these areas were to fail! Amongst many other very good points, Alex suggested that a good approach would be to release after every new feature is added. So do a bit of work -> release, do some more work -> release. By releasing small increments of work, the impact on the customer of bugs being introduced is reduced. Red Pill, Blue Pill The second keynote of the day was “Adaptation and improvisation – but your weakness is not your technique” by Markus Gartner and proved to be another very good presentation. It started off quoting lines from the Matrix which relate to adapting, improvising, realisation and mastery. It has alot of nerds in the room smiling! Markus went on to explain how through deliberate practice ( and a lot of it!) you can achieve mastery, but then you never stop learning. Through methods such as code retreats, testing dojos, workshops you can continually improve and learn. The code retreat idea was one that interested me. It involved pairing to write an automated test for, say, 45 mins, they deleting all the code, finding a different partner and writing the same test again! This is another keynote where the video will speak louder than anything I can write here! Markus did elaborate on something that Lisa and Janet had touched on yesterday whilst busting the myth that “Testers Must Code”. Whilst it is true that to be a tester, you don’t need to code, it is becoming more common that there is this crossover happening where more testers are coding and more programmers are testing. Markus made a special distinction between programmers and developers as testers develop tests code so this helped to make that clear. “Extending Continuous Integration and TDD with Continuous Testing” by Jason Ayers was my next talk after lunch. We already do CI and a bit of TDD on my project team so I was interested to see what this continuous testing thing was all about and whether it would actually work for us. At the start of the presentation I was of the opinion that it just would not work for us because our tests are too slow, and that would be the case for many people. Jason started off by setting the scene and saying that those doing TDD spend between 10-15% of their time waiting for tests to run. This can be reduced by testing less often, reducing the test time but this then increases the risk of introduced bugs not being spotted quickly. Therefore, in comes Continuous Testing (CT). CT systems run your unit tests whenever you save some code and runs them in the background so you can continue working. This is a really nice idea, but to do this, your tests must be fast, independent and reliable. The latter two should be the case anyway, and the first is ideal, but hard! Jason makes several suggestions to make tests fast. Firstly keep the scope of the test small, secondly spin off any expensive tests into a suite which is run, perhaps, overnight or outside of the CT system at any rate. So this started to change my mind, perhaps we could re-engineer our tests, and continuously run the quick ones to give an element of coverage. This talk was very interesting and I’ve already tried a couple of the tools mentioned on our product (Mighty Moose and NCrunch). Sadly due to the way our solution is built, it currently doesn’t work, but we will look at whether we can make this work because this has the potential to be a mini-game-changer for us. Using the wrong data Gojko’s Hierarchy of Quality The final keynote of the day was “Reinventing software quality” by Gojko Adzic. He opened the talk with the statement “We’ve got quality wrong because we are using the wrong data”! Gojko then went on to explain that we should judge a bug by whether the customer cares about it, not by whether we think it’s important. Why spend time fixing issues that the customer just wouldn’t care about and releasing months later because of this? Surely it’s better to release now and get customer feedback? This was another reference to the idea of how it’s better to build the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right. Get feedback early to make sure you’re making the right thing. Gojko then showed something which was very analogous to Maslow’s heirachy of needs. Successful – does it contribute to the business? Useful – does it do what the user wants Usable – does it do what it’s supposed to without breaking Performant/Secure – is it secure/is the performance acceptable Deployable Functionally ok – can it be deployed without breaking? He then explained that User Stories should focus on change. In other words they should focus on the users needs, not the users process. Describe what the change will be, how that change will happen then measure it! Networking and Beer Following the day’s closing keynote, there were drinks and nibble for the ‘Networking’ evening. This was a great opportunity to talk to people. I find approaching strangers very uncomfortable but once again, when in Rome! Pete Walen and I had a long conversation about only fixing issues that the customer cares about versus fixing issues that make you proud of your software! Without saying much, and asking the right questions, Pete made me re-evaluate my thoughts on the matter. Clever, very clever!  Oh and he ‘bought’ me a beer! My Takeaway Triple from Day 2: release small and release often to minimize issues creeping in and get faster feedback from ‘the real world’ Focus on issues that the customers care about, not what we think is important It’s okay to disagree with someone, even if they are well respected agile testing gurus, that’s how discussion and learning happens!  

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• Set Context User Principal for Customized Authentication in SignalR

  - by Shaun

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/shaunxu/archive/2014/05/27/set-context-user-principal-for-customized-authentication-in-signalr.aspxCurrently I'm working on a single page application project which is built on AngularJS and ASP.NET WebAPI. When I need to implement some features that needs real-time communication and push notifications from server side I decided to use SignalR. SignalR is a project currently developed by Microsoft to build web-based, read-time communication application. You can find it here. With a lot of introductions and guides it's not a difficult task to use SignalR with ASP.NET WebAPI and AngularJS. I followed this and this even though it's based on SignalR 1. But when I tried to implement the authentication for my SignalR I was struggled 2 days and finally I got a solution by myself. This might not be the best one but it actually solved all my problem.   In many articles it's said that you don't need to worry about the authentication of SignalR since it uses the web application authentication. For example if your web application utilizes form authentication, SignalR will use the user principal your web application authentication module resolved, check if the principal exist and authenticated. But in my solution my ASP.NET WebAPI, which is hosting SignalR as well, utilizes OAuth Bearer authentication. So when the SignalR connection was established the context user principal was empty. So I need to authentication and pass the principal by myself.   Firstly I need to create a class which delivered from "AuthorizeAttribute", that will takes the responsible for authenticate when SignalR connection established and any method was invoked. 1: public class QueryStringBearerAuthorizeAttribute : AuthorizeAttribute 2: { 3: public override bool AuthorizeHubConnection(HubDescriptor hubDescriptor, IRequest request) 4: { 5: } 6:  7: public override bool AuthorizeHubMethodInvocation(IHubIncomingInvokerContext hubIncomingInvokerContext, bool appliesToMethod) 8: { 9: } 10: } The method "AuthorizeHubConnection" will be invoked when any SignalR connection was established. And here I'm going to retrieve the Bearer token from query string, try to decrypt and recover the login user's claims. 1: public override bool AuthorizeHubConnection(HubDescriptor hubDescriptor, IRequest request) 2: { 3: var dataProtectionProvider = new DpapiDataProtectionProvider(); 4: var secureDataFormat = new TicketDataFormat(dataProtectionProvider.Create()); 5: // authenticate by using bearer token in query string 6: var token = request.QueryString.Get(WebApiConfig.AuthenticationType); 7: var ticket = secureDataFormat.Unprotect(token); 8: if (ticket != null && ticket.Identity != null && ticket.Identity.IsAuthenticated) 9: { 10: // set the authenticated user principal into environment so that it can be used in the future 11: request.Environment["server.User"] = new ClaimsPrincipal(ticket.Identity); 12: return true; 13: } 14: else 15: { 16: return false; 17: } 18: } In the code above I created "TicketDataFormat" instance, which must be same as the one I used to generate the Bearer token when user logged in. Then I retrieve the token from request query string and unprotect it. If I got a valid ticket with identity and it's authenticated this means it's a valid token. Then I pass the user principal into request's environment property which can be used in nearly future. Since my website was built in AngularJS so the SignalR client was in pure JavaScript, and it's not support to set customized HTTP headers in SignalR JavaScript client, I have to pass the Bearer token through request query string. This is not a restriction of SignalR, but a restriction of WebSocket. For security reason WebSocket doesn't allow client to set customized HTTP headers from browser. Next, I need to implement the authentication logic in method "AuthorizeHubMethodInvocation" which will be invoked when any SignalR method was invoked. 1: public override bool AuthorizeHubMethodInvocation(IHubIncomingInvokerContext hubIncomingInvokerContext, bool appliesToMethod) 2: { 3: var connectionId = hubIncomingInvokerContext.Hub.Context.ConnectionId; 4: // check the authenticated user principal from environment 5: var environment = hubIncomingInvokerContext.Hub.Context.Request.Environment; 6: var principal = environment["server.User"] as ClaimsPrincipal; 7: if (principal != null && principal.Identity != null && principal.Identity.IsAuthenticated) 8: { 9: // create a new HubCallerContext instance with the principal generated from token 10: // and replace the current context so that in hubs we can retrieve current user identity 11: hubIncomingInvokerContext.Hub.Context = new HubCallerContext(new ServerRequest(environment), connectionId); 12: return true; 13: } 14: else 15: { 16: return false; 17: } 18: } Since I had passed the user principal into request environment in previous method, I can simply check if it exists and valid. If so, what I need is to pass the principal into context so that SignalR hub can use. Since the "User" property is all read-only in "hubIncomingInvokerContext", I have to create a new "ServerRequest" instance with principal assigned, and set to "hubIncomingInvokerContext.Hub.Context". After that, we can retrieve the principal in my Hubs through "Context.User" as below. 1: public class DefaultHub : Hub 2: { 3: public object Initialize(string host, string service, JObject payload) 4: { 5: var connectionId = Context.ConnectionId; 6: ... ... 7: var domain = string.Empty; 8: var identity = Context.User.Identity as ClaimsIdentity; 9: if (identity != null) 10: { 11: var claim = identity.FindFirst("Domain"); 12: if (claim != null) 13: { 14: domain = claim.Value; 15: } 16: } 17: ... ... 18: } 19: } Finally I just need to add my "QueryStringBearerAuthorizeAttribute" into the SignalR pipeline. 1: app.Map("/signalr", map => 2: { 3: // Setup the CORS middleware to run before SignalR. 4: // By default this will allow all origins. You can 5: // configure the set of origins and/or http verbs by 6: // providing a cors options with a different policy. 7: map.UseCors(CorsOptions.AllowAll); 8: var hubConfiguration = new HubConfiguration 9: { 10: // You can enable JSONP by uncommenting line below. 11: // JSONP requests are insecure but some older browsers (and some 12: // versions of IE) require JSONP to work cross domain 13: // EnableJSONP = true 14: EnableJavaScriptProxies = false 15: }; 16: // Require authentication for all hubs 17: var authorizer = new QueryStringBearerAuthorizeAttribute(); 18: var module = new AuthorizeModule(authorizer, authorizer); 19: GlobalHost.HubPipeline.AddModule(module); 20: // Run the SignalR pipeline. We're not using MapSignalR 21: // since this branch already runs under the "/signalr" path. 22: map.RunSignalR(hubConfiguration); 23: }); On the client side should pass the Bearer token through query string before I started the connection as below. 1: self.connection = $.hubConnection(signalrEndpoint); 2: self.proxy = self.connection.createHubProxy(hubName); 3: self.proxy.on(notifyEventName, function (event, payload) { 4: options.handler(event, payload); 5: }); 6: // add the authentication token to query string 7: // we cannot use http headers since web socket protocol doesn't support 8: self.connection.qs = { Bearer: AuthService.getToken() }; 9: // connection to hub 10: self.connection.start(); Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• Inheritance Mapping Strategies with Entity Framework Code First CTP5: Part 2 – Table per Type (TPT)

  - by mortezam

  In the previous blog post you saw that there are three different approaches to representing an inheritance hierarchy and I explained Table per Hierarchy (TPH) as the default mapping strategy in EF Code First. We argued that the disadvantages of TPH may be too serious for our design since it results in denormalized schemas that can become a major burden in the long run. In today’s blog post we are going to learn about Table per Type (TPT) as another inheritance mapping strategy and we'll see that TPT doesn’t expose us to this problem. Table per Type (TPT)Table per Type is about representing inheritance relationships as relational foreign key associations. Every class/subclass that declares persistent properties—including abstract classes—has its own table. The table for subclasses contains columns only for each noninherited property (each property declared by the subclass itself) along with a primary key that is also a foreign key of the base class table. This approach is shown in the following figure: For example, if an instance of the CreditCard subclass is made persistent, the values of properties declared by the BillingDetail base class are persisted to a new row of the BillingDetails table. Only the values of properties declared by the subclass (i.e. CreditCard) are persisted to a new row of the CreditCards table. The two rows are linked together by their shared primary key value. Later, the subclass instance may be retrieved from the database by joining the subclass table with the base class table. TPT Advantages The primary advantage of this strategy is that the SQL schema is normalized. In addition, schema evolution is straightforward (modifying the base class or adding a new subclass is just a matter of modify/add one table). Integrity constraint definition are also straightforward (note how CardType in CreditCards table is now a non-nullable column). Another much more important advantage is the ability to handle polymorphic associations (a polymorphic association is an association to a base class, hence to all classes in the hierarchy with dynamic resolution of the concrete class at runtime). A polymorphic association to a particular subclass may be represented as a foreign key referencing the table of that particular subclass. Implement TPT in EF Code First We can create a TPT mapping simply by placing Table attribute on the subclasses to specify the mapped table name (Table attribute is a new data annotation and has been added to System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace in CTP5): public abstract class BillingDetail {     public int BillingDetailId { get; set; }     public string Owner { get; set; }     public string Number { get; set; } } [Table("BankAccounts")] public class BankAccount : BillingDetail {     public string BankName { get; set; }     public string Swift { get; set; } } [Table("CreditCards")] public class CreditCard : BillingDetail {     public int CardType { get; set; }     public string ExpiryMonth { get; set; }     public string ExpiryYear { get; set; } } public class InheritanceMappingContext : DbContext {     public DbSet<BillingDetail> BillingDetails { get; set; } } If you prefer fluent API, then you can create a TPT mapping by using ToTable() method: protected override void OnModelCreating(ModelBuilder modelBuilder) {     modelBuilder.Entity<BankAccount>().ToTable("BankAccounts");     modelBuilder.Entity<CreditCard>().ToTable("CreditCards"); } Generated SQL For QueriesLet’s take an example of a simple non-polymorphic query that returns a list of all the BankAccounts: var query = from b in context.BillingDetails.OfType<BankAccount>() select b; Executing this query (by invoking ToList() method) results in the following SQL statements being sent to the database (on the bottom, you can also see the result of executing the generated query in SQL Server Management Studio): Now, let’s take an example of a very simple polymorphic query that requests all the BillingDetails which includes both BankAccount and CreditCard types: projects some properties out of the base class BillingDetail, without querying for anything from any of the subclasses: var query = from b in context.BillingDetails             select new { b.BillingDetailId, b.Number, b.Owner }; -- var query = from b in context.BillingDetails select b; This LINQ query seems even more simple than the previous one but the resulting SQL query is not as simple as you might expect: -- As you can see, EF Code First relies on an INNER JOIN to detect the existence (or absence) of rows in the subclass tables CreditCards and BankAccounts so it can determine the concrete subclass for a particular row of the BillingDetails table. Also the SQL CASE statements that you see in the beginning of the query is just to ensure columns that are irrelevant for a particular row have NULL values in the returning flattened table. (e.g. BankName for a row that represents a CreditCard type) TPT ConsiderationsEven though this mapping strategy is deceptively simple, the experience shows that performance can be unacceptable for complex class hierarchies because queries always require a join across many tables. In addition, this mapping strategy is more difficult to implement by hand— even ad-hoc reporting is more complex. This is an important consideration if you plan to use handwritten SQL in your application (For ad hoc reporting, database views provide a way to offset the complexity of the TPT strategy. A view may be used to transform the table-per-type model into the much simpler table-per-hierarchy model.) SummaryIn this post we learned about Table per Type as the second inheritance mapping in our series. So far, the strategies we’ve discussed require extra consideration with regard to the SQL schema (e.g. in TPT, foreign keys are needed). This situation changes with the Table per Concrete Type (TPC) that we will discuss in the next post. References ADO.NET team blog Java Persistence with Hibernate book a { text-decoration: none; } a:visited { color: Blue; } .title { padding-bottom: 5px; font-family: Segoe UI; font-size: 11pt; font-weight: bold; padding-top: 15px; } .code, .typeName { font-family: consolas; } .typeName { color: #2b91af; } .padTop5 { padding-top: 5px; } .padTop10 { padding-top: 10px; } p.MsoNormal { margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 10.0pt; margin-left: 0in; line-height: 115%; font-size: 11.0pt; font-family: "Calibri" , "sans-serif"; }

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• EM12c Release 4: Database as a Service Enhancements

  - by Adeesh Fulay

  Oracle Enterprise Manager 12.1.0.4 (or simply put EM12c R4) is the latest update to the product. As previous versions, this release provides tons of enhancements and bug fixes, attributing to improved stability and quality. One of the areas that is most exciting and has seen tremendous growth in the last few years is that of Database as a Service. EM12c R4 provides a significant update to Database as a Service. The key themes are: Comprehensive Database Service Catalog (includes single instance, RAC, and Data Guard) Additional Storage Options for Snap Clone (includes support for Database feature CloneDB) Improved Rapid Start Kits Extensible Metering and Chargeback Miscellaneous Enhancements 1. Comprehensive Database Service Catalog Before we get deep into implementation of a service catalog, lets first understand what it is and what benefits it provides. Per ITIL, a service catalog is an exhaustive list of IT services that an organization provides or offers to its employees or customers. Service catalogs have been widely popular in the space of cloud computing, primarily as the medium to provide standardized and pre-approved service definitions. There is already some good collateral out there that talks about Oracle database service catalogs. The two whitepapers i recommend reading are: Service Catalogs: Defining Standardized Database Service High Availability Best Practices for Database Consolidation: The Foundation for Database as a Service [Oracle MAA] EM12c comes with an out-of-the-box service catalog and self service portal since release 1. For the customers, it provides the following benefits: Present a collection of standardized database service definitions, Define standardized pools of hardware and software for provisioning, Role based access to cater to different class of users, Automated procedures to provision the predefined database definitions, Setup chargeback plans based on service tiers and database configuration sizes, etc Starting Release 4, the scope of services offered via the service catalog has been expanded to include databases with varying levels of availability - Single Instance (SI) or Real Application Clusters (RAC) databases with multiple data guard based standby databases. Some salient points of the data guard integration: Standby pools can now be defined across different datacenters or within the same datacenter as the primary (this helps in modelling the concept of near and far DR sites) The standby databases can be single instance, RAC, or RAC One Node databases Multiple standby databases can be provisioned, where the maximum limit is determined by the version of database software The standby databases can be in either mount or read only (requires active data guard option) mode All database versions 10g to 12c supported (as certified with EM 12c) All 3 protection modes can be used - Maximum availability, performance, security Log apply can be set to sync or async along with the required apply lag The different service levels or service tiers are popularly represented using metals - Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze, and so on. The Oracle MAA whitepaper (referenced above) calls out the various service tiers as defined by Oracle's best practices, but customers can choose any logical combinations from the table below:  Primary  Standby [1 or more]  EM 12cR4  SI  -  SI  SI  RAC -  RAC SI  RAC RAC  RON -  RON RON where RON = RAC One Node is supported via custom post-scripts in the service template A sample service catalog would look like the image below. Here we have defined 4 service levels, which have been deployed across 2 data centers, and have 3 standardized sizes. Again, it is important to note that this is just an example to get the creative juices flowing. I imagine each customer would come up with their own catalog based on the application requirements, their RTO/RPO goals, and the product licenses they own. In the screenwatch titled 'Build Service Catalog using EM12c DBaaS', I walk through the complete steps required to setup this sample service catalog in EM12c. 2. Additional Storage Options for Snap Clone In my previous blog posts, i have described the snap clone feature in detail. Essentially, it provides a storage agnostic, self service, rapid, and space efficient approach to solving your data cloning problems. The net benefit is that you get incredible amounts of storage savings (on average 90%) all while cloning databases in a matter of minutes. Space and Time, two things enterprises would love to save on. This feature has been designed with the goal of providing data cloning capabilities while protecting your existing investments in server, storage, and software. With this in mind, we have pursued with the dual solution approach of Hardware and Software. In the hardware approach, we connect directly to your storage appliances and perform all low level actions required to rapidly clone your databases. While in the software approach, we use an intermediate software layer to talk to any storage vendor or any storage configuration to perform the same low level actions. Thus delivering the benefits of database thin cloning, without requiring you to drastically changing the infrastructure or IT's operating style. In release 4, we expand the scope of options supported by snap clone with the addition of database CloneDB. While CloneDB is not a new feature, it was first introduced in 11.2.0.2 patchset, it has over the years become more stable and mature. CloneDB leverages a combination of Direct NFS (or dNFS) feature of the database, RMAN image copies, sparse files, and copy-on-write technology to create thin clones of databases from existing backups in a matter of minutes. It essentially has all the traits that we want to present to our customers via the snap clone feature. For more information on cloneDB, i highly recommend reading the following sources: Blog by Tim Hall: Direct NFS (DNFS) CloneDB in Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Oracle OpenWorld Presentation by Cern: Efficient Database Cloning using Direct NFS and CloneDB The advantages of the new CloneDB integration with EM12c Snap Clone are: Space and time savings Ease of setup - no additional software is required other than the Oracle database binary Works on all platforms Reduce the dependence on storage administrators Cloning process fully orchestrated by EM12c, and delivered to developers/DBAs/QA Testers via the self service portal Uses dNFS to delivers better performance, availability, and scalability over kernel NFS Complete lifecycle of the clones managed by EM12c - performance, configuration, etc 3. Improved Rapid Start Kits DBaaS deployments tend to be complex and its setup requires a series of steps. These steps are typically performed across different users and different UIs. The Rapid Start Kit provides a single command solution to setup Database as a Service (DBaaS) and Pluggable Database as a Service (PDBaaS). One command creates all the Cloud artifacts like Roles, Administrators, Credentials, Database Profiles, PaaS Infrastructure Zone, Database Pools and Service Templates. Once the Rapid Start Kit has been successfully executed, requests can be made to provision databases and PDBs from the self service portal. Rapid start kit can create complex topologies involving multiple zones, pools and service templates. It also supports standby databases and use of RMAN image backups. The Rapid Start Kit in reality is a simple emcli script which takes a bunch of xml files as input and executes the complete automation in a matter of seconds. On a full rack Exadata, it took only 40 seconds to setup PDBaaS end-to-end. This kit works for both Oracle's engineered systems like Exadata, SuperCluster, etc and also on commodity hardware. One can draw parallel to the Exadata One Command script, which again takes a bunch of inputs from the administrators and then runs a simple script that configures everything from network to provisioning the DB software. Steps to use the kit: The kit can be found under the SSA plug-in directory on the OMS: EM_BASE/oracle/MW/plugins/oracle.sysman.ssa.oms.plugin_12.1.0.8.0/dbaas/setup It can be run from this default location or from any server which has emcli client installed For most scenarios, you would use the script dbaas/setup/database_cloud_setup.py For Exadata, special integration is provided to reduce the number of inputs even further. The script to use for this scenario would be dbaas/setup/exadata_cloud_setup.py The database_cloud_setup.py script takes two inputs: Cloud boundary xml: This file defines the cloud topology in terms of the zones and pools along with host names, oracle home locations or container database names that would be used as infrastructure for provisioning database services. This file is optional in case of Exadata, as the boundary is well know via the Exadata system target available in EM. Input xml: This file captures inputs for users, roles, profiles, service templates, etc. Essentially, all inputs required to define the DB services and other settings of the self service portal. Once all the xml files have been prepared, invoke the script as follows for PDBaaS: emcli @database_cloud_setup.py -pdbaas -cloud_boundary=/tmp/my_boundary.xml -cloud_input=/tmp/pdb_inputs.xml          The script will prompt for passwords a few times for key users like sysman, cloud admin, SSA admin, etc. Once complete, you can simply log into EM as the self service user and request for databases from the portal. More information available in the Rapid Start Kit chapter in Cloud Administration Guide.  4. Extensible Metering and Chargeback  Last but not the least, Metering and Chargeback in release 4 has been made extensible in all possible regards. The new extensibility features allow customer, partners, system integrators, etc to : Extend chargeback to any target type managed in EM Promote any metric in EM as a chargeback entity Extend list of charge items via metric or configuration extensions Model abstract entities like no. of backup requests, job executions, support requests, etc  A slew of emcli verbs have also been added that allows administrators to create, edit, delete, import/export charge plans, and assign cost centers all via the command line. More information available in the Chargeback API chapter in Cloud Administration Guide. 5. Miscellaneous Enhancements There are other miscellaneous, yet important, enhancements that are worth a mention. These mostly have been asked by customers like you. These are: Custom naming of DB Services Self service users can provide custom names for DB SID, DB service, schemas, and tablespaces Every custom name is validated for uniqueness in EM 'Create like' of Service Templates Now creating variants of a service template is only a click away. This would be vital when you publish service templates to represent different database sizes or service levels. Profile viewer View the details of a profile like datafile, control files, snapshot ids, export/import files, etc prior to its selection in the service template Cleanup automation - for failed and successful requests Single emcli command to cleanup all remnant artifacts of a failed request Cleanup can be performed on a per request bases or by the entire pool As an extension, you can also delete successful requests Improved delete user workflow Allows administrators to reassign cloud resources to another user or delete all of them Support for multiple tablespaces for schema as a service In addition to multiple schemas, user can also specify multiple tablespaces per request I hope this was a good introduction to the new Database as a Service enhancements in EM12c R4. I encourage you to explore many of these new and existing features and give us feedback. Good luck! References: Cloud Management Page on OTN Cloud Administration Guide [Documentation] -- Adeesh Fulay (@adeeshf)

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• The Presentation Isn't Over Until It's Over

  - by Phil Factor

  The senior corporate dignitaries settled into their seats looking important in a blue-suited sort of way. The lights dimmed as I strode out in front to give my presentation.  I had ten vital minutes to make my pitch.  I was about to dazzle the top management of a large software company who were considering the purchase of my software product. I would present them with a dazzling synthesis of diagrams, graphs, followed by  a live demonstration of my software projected from my laptop.  My preparation had been meticulous: It had to be: A year’s hard work was at stake, so I’d prepared it to perfection.  I stood up and took them all in, with a gaze of sublime confidence. Then the laptop expired. There are several possible alternative plans of action when this happens     A. Stare at the smoking laptop vacuously, flapping ones mouth slowly up and down     B. Stand frozen like a statue, locked in indecision between fright and flight.     C. Run out of the room, weeping     D. Pretend that this was all planned     E. Abandon the presentation in favour of a stilted and tedious dissertation about the software     F. Shake your fist at the sky, and curse the sense of humour of your preferred deity I started for a few seconds on plan B, normally referred to as the ‘Rabbit in the headlamps of the car’ technique. Suddenly, a little voice inside my head spoke. It spoke the famous inane words of Yogi Berra; ‘The game isn't over until it's over.’ ‘Too right’, I thought. What to do? I ran through the alternatives A-F inclusive in my mind but none appealed to me. I was completely unprepared for this. Nowadays, longevity has since taught me more than I wanted to know about the wacky sense of humour of fate, and I would have taken two laptops. I hadn’t, but decided to do the presentation anyway as planned. I started out ignoring the dead laptop, but pretending, instead that it was still working. The audience looked startled. They were expecting plan B to be succeeded by plan C, I suspect. They weren’t used to denial on this scale. After my introductory talk, which didn’t require any visuals, I came to the diagram that described the application I’d written.  I’d taken ages over it and it was hot stuff. Well, it would have been had it been projected onto the screen. It wasn’t. Before I describe what happened then, I must explain that I have thespian tendencies.  My  triumph as Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady at the local operatic society is now long forgotten, but I remember at the time of my finest performance, the moment that, glancing up over the vast audience of  moist-eyed faces at the during the poignant  scene between Eliza and Higgins at the end, I  realised that I had a talent that one day could possibly  be harnessed for commercial use I just talked about the diagram as if it was there, but throwing in some extra description. The audience nodded helpfully when I’d done enough. Emboldened, I began a sort of mime, well, more of a ballet, to represent each slide as I came to it. Heaven knows I’d done my preparation and, in my mind’s eye, I could see every detail, but I had to somehow project the reality of that vision to the audience, much the same way any actor playing Macbeth should do the ghost of Banquo.  My desperation gave me a manic energy. If you’ve ever demonstrated a windows application entirely by mime, gesture and florid description, you’ll understand the scale of the challenge, but then I had nothing to lose. With a brief sentence of description here and there, and arms flailing whilst outlining the size and shape of  graphs and diagrams, I used the many tricks of mime, gesture and body-language  learned from playing Captain Hook, or the Sheriff of Nottingham in pantomime. I set out determinedly on my desperate venture. There wasn’t time to do anything but focus on the challenge of the task: the world around me narrowed down to ten faces and my presentation: ten souls who had to be hypnotized into seeing a Windows application:  one that was slick, well organized and functional I don’t remember the details. Eight minutes of my life are gone completely. I was a thespian berserker.  I know however that I followed the basic plan of building the presentation in a carefully controlled crescendo until the dazzling finale where the results were displayed on-screen.  ‘And here you see the results, neatly formatted and grouped carefully to enhance the significance of the figures, together with running trend-graphs!’ I waved a mime to signify an animated  window-opening, and looked up, in my first pause, to gaze defiantly  at the audience.  It was a sight I’ll never forget. Ten pairs of eyes were gazing in rapt attention at the imaginary window, and several pairs of eyes were glancing at the imaginary graphs and figures.  I hadn’t had an audience like that since my starring role in  Beauty and the Beast.  At that moment, I realized that my desperate ploy might work. I sat down, slightly winded, when my ten minutes were up.  For the first and last time in my life, the audience of a  ‘PowerPoint’ presentation burst into spontaneous applause. ‘Any questions?’ ‘Yes,  Have you got an agent?’ Yes, in case you’re wondering, I got the deal. They bought the software product from me there and then. However, it was a life-changing experience for me and I have never ever again trusted technology as part of a presentation.  Even if things can’t go wrong, they’ll go wrong and they’ll kill the flow of what you’re presenting.  if you can’t do something without the techno-props, then you shouldn’t do it.  The greatest lesson of all is that great presentations require preparation and  ‘stage-presence’ rather than fancy graphics. They’re a great supporting aid, but they should never dominate to the point that you’re lost without them.

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• HTG Explains: Why Does Rebooting a Computer Fix So Many Problems?

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Ask a geek how to fix a problem you’ve having with your Windows computer and they’ll likely ask “Have you tried rebooting it?” This seems like a flippant response, but rebooting a computer can actually solve many problems. So what’s going on here? Why does resetting a device or restarting a program fix so many problems? And why don’t geeks try to identify and fix problems rather than use the blunt hammer of “reset it”? This Isn’t Just About Windows Bear in mind that this soltion isn’t just limited to Windows computers, but applies to all types of computing devices. You’ll find the advice “try resetting it” applied to wireless routers, iPads, Android phones, and more. This same advice even applies to software — is Firefox acting slow and consuming a lot of memory? Try closing it and reopening it! Some Problems Require a Restart To illustrate why rebooting can fix so many problems, let’s take a look at the ultimate software problem a Windows computer can face: Windows halts, showing a blue screen of death. The blue screen was caused by a low-level error, likely a problem with a hardware driver or a hardware malfunction. Windows reaches a state where it doesn’t know how to recover, so it halts, shows a blue-screen of death, gathers information about the problem, and automatically restarts the computer for you . This restart fixes the blue screen of death. Windows has gotten better at dealing with errors — for example, if your graphics driver crashes, Windows XP would have frozen. In Windows Vista and newer versions of Windows, the Windows desktop will lose its fancy graphical effects for a few moments before regaining them. Behind the scenes, Windows is restarting the malfunctioning graphics driver. But why doesn’t Windows simply fix the problem rather than restarting the driver or the computer itself?  Well, because it can’t — the code has encountered a problem and stopped working completely, so there’s no way for it to continue. By restarting, the code can start from square one and hopefully it won’t encounter the same problem again. Examples of Restarting Fixing Problems While certain problems require a complete restart because the operating system or a hardware driver has stopped working, not every problem does. Some problems may be fixable without a restart, though a restart may be the easiest option. Windows is Slow: Let’s say Windows is running very slowly. It’s possible that a misbehaving program is using 99% CPU and draining the computer’s resources. A geek could head to the task manager and look around, hoping to locate the misbehaving process an end it. If an average user encountered this same problem, they could simply reboot their computer to fix it rather than dig through their running processes. Firefox or Another Program is Using Too Much Memory: In the past, Firefox has been the poster child for memory leaks on average PCs. Over time, Firefox would often consume more and more memory, getting larger and larger and slowing down. Closing Firefox will cause it to relinquish all of its memory. When it starts again, it will start from a clean state without any leaked memory. This doesn’t just apply to Firefox, but applies to any software with memory leaks. Internet or Wi-Fi Network Problems: If you have a problem with your Wi-Fi or Internet connection, the software on your router or modem may have encountered a problem. Resetting the router — just by unplugging it from its power socket and then plugging it back in — is a common solution for connection problems. In all cases, a restart wipes away the current state of the software . Any code that’s stuck in a misbehaving state will be swept away, too. When you restart, the computer or device will bring the system up from scratch, restarting all the software from square one so it will work just as well as it was working before. “Soft Resets” vs. “Hard Resets” In the mobile device world, there are two types of “resets” you can perform. A “soft reset” is simply restarting a device normally — turning it off and then on again. A “hard reset” is resetting its software state back to its factory default state. When you think about it, both types of resets fix problems for a similar reason. For example, let’s say your Windows computer refuses to boot or becomes completely infected with malware. Simply restarting the computer won’t fix the problem, as the problem is with the files on the computer’s hard drive — it has corrupted files or malware that loads at startup on its hard drive. However, reinstalling Windows (performing a “Refresh or Reset your PC” operation in Windows 8 terms) will wipe away everything on the computer’s hard drive, restoring it to its formerly clean state. This is simpler than looking through the computer’s hard drive, trying to identify the exact reason for the problems or trying to ensure you’ve obliterated every last trace of malware. It’s much faster to simply start over from a known-good, clean state instead of trying to locate every possible problem and fix it. Ultimately, the answer is that “resetting a computer wipes away the current state of the software, including any problems that have developed, and allows it to start over from square one.” It’s easier and faster to start from a clean state than identify and fix any problems that may be occurring — in fact, in some cases, it may be impossible to fix problems without beginning from that clean state. Image Credit: Arria Belli on Flickr, DeclanTM on Flickr     

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• Free Document/Content Management System Using SharePoint 2010

  - by KunaalKapoor

  That’s right, it’s true. You can use the free version of SharePoint 2010 to meet your document and content management needs and even run your public facing website or an internal knowledge bank.  SharePoint Foundation 2010 is free. It may not have all the features that you get in the enterprise license but it still has enough to cater to your needs to build a document management system and replace age old file shares or folders. I’ve built a dozen content management sites for internal and public use exploiting SharePoint. There are hundreds of web content management systems out there (see CMS Matrix).  On one hand we have commercial platforms like SharePoint, SiteCore, and Ektron etc. which are the most frequently used and on the other hand there are free options like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and Plone etc. which are pretty common popular as well. But I would be very surprised if anyone was able to find a single CMS platform that is all things to all people. Infact not a lot of people consider SharePoint’s free version under the free CMS side but its high time organizations benefit from this. Through this blog post I wanted to present SharePoint Foundation as an option for running a FREE CMS platform. Even if you knew that there is a free version of SharePoint, what most people don’t realize is that SharePoint Foundation is a great option for running web sites of all kinds – not just team sites. It is a great option for many reasons, but in reality it is supported by Microsoft, and above all it is FREE (yay!), and it is extremely easy to get started.  From a functionality perspective – it’s hard to beat SharePoint. Even the free version, SharePoint Foundation, offers simple data connectivity (through BCS), cross browser support, accessibility, support for Office Web Apps, blogs, wikis, templates, document support, health analyzer, support for presence, and MUCH more.I often get asked: “Can I use SharePoint 2010 as a document management system?” The answer really depends on ·          What are your specific requirements? ·          What systems you currently have in place for managing documents. ·          And of course how much money you have J Benefits? Not many large organizations have benefited from SharePoint yet. For some it has been an IT project to see what they can achieve with it, for others it has been used as a collaborative platform or in many cases an extended intranet. SharePoint 2010 has changed the game slightly as the improvements that Microsoft have made have been noted by organizations, and we are seeing a lot of companies starting to build specific business applications using SharePoint as the basis, and nearly every business process will require documents at some stage. If you require a document management system and have SharePoint in place then it can be a relatively straight forward decision to use SharePoint, as long as you have reviewed the considerations just discussed. The collaborative nature of SharePoint 2010 is also a massive advantage, as specific departmental or project sites can be created quickly and easily that allow workers to interact in a variety of different ways using one source of information.  This also benefits an organization with regards to how they manage the knowledge that they have, as if all of their information is in one source then it is naturally easier to search and manage. Is SharePoint right for your organization? As just discussed, this can only be determined after defining your requirements and also planning a longer term strategy for how you will manage your documents and information. A key factor to look at is how the users would interact with the system and how much value would it get for your organization. The amount of data and documents that organizations are creating is increasing rapidly each year. Therefore the ability to archive this information, whilst keeping the ability to know what you have and where it is, is vital to any organizations management of their information life cycle. SharePoint is best used for the initial life of business documents where they need to be referenced and accessed after time. It is often beneficial to archive these to overcome for storage and performance issues. FREE CMS – SharePoint, Really? In order to show some of the completely of what comes with this free version of SharePoint 2010, I thought it would make sense to use Wikipedia (since every one trusts it as a credible source). Wikipedia shows that a web content management system typically has the following components: Document Management:   -       CMS software may provide a means of managing the life cycle of a document from initial creation time, through revisions, publication, archive, and document destruction. SharePoint is king when it comes to document management.  Version history, exclusive check-out, security, publication, workflow, and so much more.  Content Virtualization:   -       CMS software may provide a means of allowing each user to work within a virtual copy of the entire Web site, document set, and/or code base. This enables changes to multiple interdependent resources to be viewed and/or executed in-context prior to submission. Through the use of versioning, each content manager can preview, publish, and roll-back content of pages, wiki entries, blog posts, documents, or any other type of content stored in SharePoint.  The idea of each user having an entire copy of the website virtualized is a bit odd to me – not sure why anyone would need that for anything but the simplest of websites. Automated Templates:   -       Create standard output templates that can be automatically applied to new and existing content, allowing the appearance of all content to be changed from one central place. Through the use of Master Pages and Themes, SharePoint provides the ability to change the entire look and feel of site.  Of course, the older brother version of SharePoint – SharePoint Server 2010 – also introduces the concept of Page Layouts which allows page template level customization and even switching the layout of an individual page using different page templates.  I think many organizations really think they want this but rarely end up using this bit of functionality.  Easy Edits:   -       Once content is separated from the visual presentation of a site, it usually becomes much easier and quicker to edit and manipulate. Most WCMS software includes WYSIWYG editing tools allowing non-technical individuals to create and edit content. This is probably easier described with a screen cap of a vanilla SharePoint Foundation page in edit mode.  Notice the page editing toolbar, the multiple layout options…  It’s actually easier to use than Microsoft Word. Workflow management: -       Workflow is the process of creating cycles of sequential and parallel tasks that must be accomplished in the CMS. For example, a content creator can submit a story, but it is not published until the copy editor cleans it up and the editor-in-chief approves it. Workflow, it’s in there. In fact, the same workflow engine is running under SharePoint Foundation that is running under the other versions of SharePoint.  The primary difference is that with SharePoint Foundation – you need to configure the workflows yourself.   Web Standards: -       Active WCMS software usually receives regular updates that include new feature sets and keep the system up to current web standards. SharePoint is in the fourth major iteration under Microsoft with the 2010 release.  In addition to the innovation that Microsoft continuously adds, you have the entire global ecosystem available. Scalable Expansion:   -       Available in most modern WCMSs is the ability to expand a single implementation (one installation on one server) across multiple domains. SharePoint Foundation can run multiple sites using multiple URLs on a single server install.  Even more powerful, SharePoint Foundation is scalable and can be part of a multi-server farm to ensure that it will handle any amount of traffic that can be thrown at it. Delegation & Security:  -       Some CMS software allows for various user groups to have limited privileges over specific content on the website, spreading out the responsibility of content management. SharePoint Foundation provides very granular security capabilities. Read @ http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee537811.aspx Content Syndication:  -       CMS software often assists in content distribution by generating RSS and Atom data feeds to other systems. They may also e-mail users when updates are available as part of the workflow process. SharePoint Foundation nails it.  With RSS syndication and email alerts available out of the box, content syndication is already in the platform. Multilingual Support: -       Ability to display content in multiple languages. SharePoint Foundation 2010 supports more than 40 languages. Read More Read more @ http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd776256(v=office.12).aspxYou can download the free version from http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=5970

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• Oracle Linux Tips and Tricks: Using SSH

  - by Robert Chase

  Out of all of the utilities available to systems administrators ssh is probably the most useful of them all. Not only does it allow you to log into systems securely, but it can also be used to copy files, tunnel IP traffic and run remote commands on distant servers. It’s truly the Swiss army knife of systems administration. Secure Shell, also known as ssh, was developed in 1995 by Tau Ylonen after the University of Technology in Finland suffered a password sniffing attack. Back then it was common to use tools like rcp, rsh, ftp and telnet to connect to systems and move files across the network. The main problem with these tools is they provide no security and transmitted data in plain text including sensitive login credentials. SSH provides this security by encrypting all traffic transmitted over the wire to protect from password sniffing attacks. One of the more common use cases involving SSH is found when using scp. Secure Copy (scp) transmits data between hosts using SSH and allows you to easily copy all types of files. The syntax for the scp command is: scp /pathlocal/filenamelocal remoteuser@remotehost:/pathremote/filenameremote In the following simple example, I move a file named myfile from the system test1 to the system test2. I am prompted to provide valid user credentials for the remote host before the transfer will proceed.  If I were only using ftp, this information would be unencrypted as it went across the wire.  However, because scp uses SSH, my user credentials and the file and its contents are confidential and remain secure throughout the transfer.  [user1@test1 ~]# scp /home/user1/myfile user1@test2:/home/user1user1@test2's password: myfile                                    100%    0     0.0KB/s   00:00 You can also use ssh to send network traffic and utilize the encryption built into ssh to protect traffic over the wire. This is known as an ssh tunnel. In order to utilize this feature, the server that you intend to connect to (the remote system) must have TCP forwarding enabled within the sshd configuraton. To enable TCP forwarding on the remote system, make sure AllowTCPForwarding is set to yes and enabled in the /etc/ssh/sshd_conf file: AllowTcpForwarding yes Once you have this configured, you can connect to the server and setup a local port which you can direct traffic to that will go over the secure tunnel. The following command will setup a tunnel on port 8989 on your local system. You can then redirect a web browser to use this local port, allowing the traffic to go through the encrypted tunnel to the remote system. It is important to select a local port that is not being used by a service and is not restricted by firewall rules.  In the following example the -D specifies a local dynamic application level port forwarding and the -N specifies not to execute a remote command.   ssh –D 8989 [email protected] -N You can also forward specific ports on both the local and remote host. The following example will setup a port forward on port 8080 and forward it to port 80 on the remote machine. ssh -L 8080:farwebserver.com:80 [email protected] You can even run remote commands via ssh which is quite useful for scripting or remote system administration tasks. The following example shows how to  log in remotely and execute the command ls –la in the home directory of the machine. Because ssh encrypts the traffic, the login credentials and output of the command are completely protected while they travel over the wire. [rchase@test1 ~]$ ssh rchase@test2 'ls -la'rchase@test2's password: total 24drwx------  2 rchase rchase 4096 Sep  6 15:17 .drwxr-xr-x. 3 root   root   4096 Sep  6 15:16 ..-rw-------  1 rchase rchase   12 Sep  6 15:17 .bash_history-rw-r--r--  1 rchase rchase   18 Dec 20  2012 .bash_logout-rw-r--r--  1 rchase rchase  176 Dec 20  2012 .bash_profile-rw-r--r--  1 rchase rchase  124 Dec 20  2012 .bashrc You can execute any command contained in the quotations marks as long as you have permission with the user account that you are using to log in. This can be very powerful and useful for collecting information for reports, remote controlling systems and performing systems administration tasks using shell scripts. To make your shell scripts even more useful and to automate logins you can use ssh keys for running commands remotely and securely without the need to enter a password. You can accomplish this with key based authentication. The first step in setting up key based authentication is to generate a public key for the system that you wish to log in from. In the following example you are generating a ssh key on a test system. In case you are wondering, this key was generated on a test VM that was destroyed after this article. [rchase@test1 .ssh]$ ssh-keygen -t rsaGenerating public/private rsa key pair.Enter file in which to save the key (/home/rchase/.ssh/id_rsa): Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase): Enter same passphrase again: Your identification has been saved in /home/rchase/.ssh/id_rsa.Your public key has been saved in /home/rchase/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.The key fingerprint is:7a:8e:86:ef:59:70:ef:43:b7:ee:33:03:6e:6f:69:e8 rchase@test1The key's randomart image is:+--[ RSA 2048]----+|                 ||  . .            ||   o .           ||    . o o        ||   o o oS+       ||  +   o.= =      ||   o ..o.+ =     ||    . .+. =      ||     ...Eo       |+-----------------+ Now that you have the key generated on the local system you should to copy it to the target server into a temporary location. The user’s home directory is fine for this. [rchase@test1 .ssh]$ scp id_rsa.pub rchase@test2:/home/rchaserchase@test2's password: id_rsa.pub                  Now that the file has been copied to the server, you need to append it to the authorized_keys file. This should be appended to the end of the file in the event that there are other authorized keys on the system. [rchase@test2 ~]$ cat id_rsa.pub >> .ssh/authorized_keys Once the process is complete you are ready to login. Since you are using key based authentication you are not prompted for a password when logging into the system.   [rchase@test1 ~]$ ssh test2Last login: Fri Sep  6 17:42:02 2013 from test1 This makes it much easier to run remote commands. Here’s an example of the remote command from earlier. With no password it’s almost as if the command ran locally. [rchase@test1 ~]$ ssh test2 'ls -la'total 32drwx------  3 rchase rchase 4096 Sep  6 17:40 .drwxr-xr-x. 3 root   root   4096 Sep  6 15:16 ..-rw-------  1 rchase rchase   12 Sep  6 15:17 .bash_history-rw-r--r--  1 rchase rchase   18 Dec 20  2012 .bash_logout-rw-r--r--  1 rchase rchase  176 Dec 20  2012 .bash_profile-rw-r--r--  1 rchase rchase  124 Dec 20  2012 .bashrc As a security consideration it's important to note the permissions of .ssh and the authorized_keys file.  .ssh should be 700 and authorized_keys should be set to 600.  This prevents unauthorized access to ssh keys from other users on the system.   An even easier way to move keys back and forth is to use ssh-copy-id. Instead of copying the file and appending it manually to the authorized_keys file, ssh-copy-id does both steps at once for you.  Here’s an example of moving the same key using ssh-copy-id.The –i in the example is so that we can specify the path to the id file, which in this case is /home/rchase/.ssh/id_rsa.pub [rchase@test1]$ ssh-copy-id -i /home/rchase/.ssh/id_rsa.pub rchase@test2 One of the last tips that I will cover is the ssh config file. By using the ssh config file you can setup host aliases to make logins to hosts with odd ports or long hostnames much easier and simpler to remember. Here’s an example entry in our .ssh/config file. Host dev1 Hostname somereallylonghostname.somereallylongdomain.com Port 28372 User somereallylongusername12345678 Let’s compare the login process between the two. Which would you want to type and remember? ssh somereallylongusername12345678@ somereallylonghostname.somereallylongdomain.com –p 28372 ssh dev1 I hope you find these tips useful.  There are a number of tools used by system administrators to streamline processes and simplify workflows and whether you are new to Linux or a longtime user, I'm sure you will agree that SSH offers useful features that can be used every day.  Send me your comments and let us know the ways you  use SSH with Linux.  If you have other tools you would like to see covered in a similar post, send in your suggestions.

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• Of transactions and Mongo

  - by Nuri Halperin

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/nuri/archive/2014/05/20/of-transactions-and-mongo-again.aspxWhat's the first thing you hear about NoSQL databases? That they lose your data? That there's no transactions? No joins? No hope for "real" applications? Well, you *should* be wondering whether a certain of database is the right one for your job. But if you do so, you should be wondering that about "traditional" databases as well! In the spirit of exploration let's take a look at a common challenge: You are a bank. You have customers with accounts. Customer A wants to pay B. You want to allow that only if A can cover the amount being transferred. Let's looks at the problem without any context of any database engine in mind. What would you do? How would you ensure that the amount transfer is done "properly"? Would you prevent a "transaction" from taking place unless A can cover the amount? There are several options: Prevent any change to A's account while the transfer is taking place. That boils down to locking. Apply the change, and allow A's balance to go below zero. Charge person A some interest on the negative balance. Not friendly, but certainly a choice. Don't do either. Options 1 and 2 are difficult to attain in the NoSQL world. Mongo won't save you headaches here either. Option 3 looks a bit harsh. But here's where this can go: ledger. See, and account doesn't need to be represented by a single row in a table of all accounts with only the current balance on it. More often than not, accounting systems use ledgers. And entries in ledgers - as it turns out – don't actually get updated. Once a ledger entry is written, it is not removed or altered. A transaction is represented by an entry in the ledger stating and amount withdrawn from A's account and an entry in the ledger stating an addition of said amount to B's account. For sake of space-saving, that entry in the ledger can happen using one entry. Think {Timestamp, FromAccountId, ToAccountId, Amount}. The implication of the original question – "how do you enforce non-negative balance rule" then boils down to: Insert entry in ledger Run validation of recent entries Insert reverse entry to roll back transaction if validation failed. What is validation? Sum up the transactions that A's account has (all deposits and debits), and ensure the balance is positive. For sake of efficiency, one can roll up transactions and "close the book" on transactions with a pseudo entry stating balance as of midnight or something. This lets you avoid doing math on the fly on too many transactions. You simply run from the latest "approved balance" marker to date. But that's an optimization, and premature optimizations are the root of (some? most?) evil.. Back to some nagging questions though: "But mongo is only eventually consistent!" Well, yes, kind of. It's not actually true that Mongo has not transactions. It would be more descriptive to say that Mongo's transaction scope is a single document in a single collection. A write to a Mongo document happens completely or not at all. So although it is true that you can't update more than one documents "at the same time" under a "transaction" umbrella as an atomic update, it is NOT true that there' is no isolation. So a competition between two concurrent updates is completely coherent and the writes will be serialized. They will not scribble on the same document at the same time. In our case - in choosing a ledger approach - we're not even trying to "update" a document, we're simply adding a document to a collection. So there goes the "no transaction" issue. Now let's turn our attention to consistency. What you should know about mongo is that at any given moment, only on member of a replica set is writable. This means that the writable instance in a set of replicated instances always has "the truth". There could be a replication lag such that a reader going to one of the replicas still sees "old" state of a collection or document. But in our ledger case, things fall nicely into place: Run your validation against the writable instance. It is guaranteed to have a ledger either with (after) or without (before) the ledger entry got written. No funky states. Again, the ledger writing *adds* a document, so there's no inconsistent document state to be had either way. Next, we might worry about data loss. Here, mongo offers several write-concerns. Write-concern in Mongo is a mode that marshals how uptight you want the db engine to be about actually persisting a document write to disk before it reports to the application that it is "done". The most volatile, is to say you don't care. In that case, mongo would just accept your write command and say back "thanks" with no guarantee of persistence. If the server loses power at the wrong moment, it may have said "ok" but actually no written the data to disk. That's kind of bad. Don't do that with data you care about. It may be good for votes on a pole regarding how cute a furry animal is, but not so good for business. There are several other write-concerns varying from flushing the write to the disk of the writable instance, flushing to disk on several members of the replica set, a majority of the replica set or all of the members of a replica set. The former choice is the quickest, as no network coordination is required besides the main writable instance. The others impose extra network and time cost. Depending on your tolerance for latency and read-lag, you will face a choice of what works for you. It's really important to understand that no data loss occurs once a document is flushed to an instance. The record is on disk at that point. From that point on, backup strategies and disaster recovery are your worry, not loss of power to the writable machine. This scenario is not different from a relational database at that point. Where does this leave us? Oh, yes. Eventual consistency. By now, we ensured that the "source of truth" instance has the correct data, persisted and coherent. But because of lag, the app may have gone to the writable instance, performed the update and then gone to a replica and looked at the ledger there before the transaction replicated. Here are 2 options to deal with this. Similar to write concerns, mongo support read preferences. An app may choose to read only from the writable instance. This is not an awesome choice to make for every ready, because it just burdens the one instance, and doesn't make use of the other read-only servers. But this choice can be made on a query by query basis. So for the app that our person A is using, we can have person A issue the transfer command to B, and then if that same app is going to immediately as "are we there yet?" we'll query that same writable instance. But B and anyone else in the world can just chill and read from the read-only instance. They have no basis to expect that the ledger has just been written to. So as far as they know, the transaction hasn't happened until they see it appear later. We can further relax the demand by creating application UI that reacts to a write command with "thank you, we will post it shortly" instead of "thank you, we just did everything and here's the new balance". This is a very powerful thing. UI design for highly scalable systems can't insist that the all databases be locked just to paint an "all done" on screen. People understand. They were trained by many online businesses already that your placing of an order does not mean that your product is already outside your door waiting (yes, I know, large retailers are working on it... but were' not there yet). The second thing we can do, is add some artificial delay to a transaction's visibility on the ledger. The way that works is simply adding some logic such that the query against the ledger never nets a transaction for customers newer than say 15 minutes and who's validation flag is not set. This buys us time 2 ways: Replication can catch up to all instances by then, and validation rules can run and determine if this transaction should be "negated" with a compensating transaction. In case we do need to "roll back" the transaction, the backend system can place the timestamp of the compensating transaction at the exact same time or 1ms after the original one. Effectively, once A or B visits their ledger, both transactions would be visible and the overall balance "as of now" would reflect no change.  The 2 transactions (attempted/ reverted) would be visible , since we do actually account for the attempt. Hold on a second. There's a hole in the story: what if several transfers from A to some accounts are registered, and 2 independent validators attempt to compute the balance concurrently? Is there a chance that both would conclude non-sufficient-funds even though rolling back transaction 100 would free up enough for transaction 117 (some random later transaction)? Yes. there is that chance. But the integrity of the business rule is not compromised, since the prime rule is don't dispense money you don't have. To minimize or eliminate this scenario, we can also assign a single validation process per origin account. This may seem non-scalable, but it can easily be done as a "sharded" distribution. Say we have 11 validation threads (or processing nodes etc.). We divide the account number space such that each validator is exclusively responsible for a certain range of account numbers. Sounds cunningly similar to Mongo's sharding strategy, doesn't it? Each validator then works in isolation. More capacity needed? Chop the account space into more chunks. So where  are we now with the nagging questions? "No joins": Huh? What are those for? "No transactions": You mean no cross-collection and no cross-document transactions? Granted - but don't always need them either. "No hope for real applications": well... There are more issues and edge cases to slog through, I'm sure. But hopefully this gives you some ideas of how to solve common problems without distributed locking and relational databases. But then again, you can choose relational databases if they suit your problem.

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• Should I go along with my choice of web hosting company or still search?

  - by Devner

  Hi all, I have been searching for a good website hosting company that can offer me all the services that I need for hosting my PHP & MySQL based website. Now this is a community based website and users will be able to upload pictures, etc. The hosting company that I have in mind, currently lets me do everything... let me use mail(), supports CRON jobs, etc. Of course they are charging about $6/month. Now the only problem with this company is that they have a limit of 50,000 files that can exist within the hosting account at any time. This kind of contradicts their frontpage ad of "UNLIMITED SPACE" on their website. Apart from this, I know of no other reason why I should not go with this hosting company. But my issue is that 50,000 file limit is what I cannot live with, once the users increase in significant number and the files they upload, exceed 50,000 in number. Now since this is a dynamic website and also includes sensitive issues like payments, etc. I am not sure if I should go ahead with this company as I am just starting out and then later switch over to a better hosting company which does not limit me with 50,000 files. If I need to switch over once I host with this company, I will need to take backups of all the files located in my account (jpg, zip, etc.), then upload them to the new host. I am not aware of any tools that can help me in this process. Can you please mention if you know any? I can go ahead with the other companies right now, but their cost is double/triple of the current price and they all sport less features than my current choice. If I pay more, then they are ready to accommodate my higher demands. Unfortunately, the company that I am willing to go with now, does NOT have any other higher/better plans that I can switch to. So that's the really really bad part. So my question(s): Since I am starting out with my website and since the scope of users initially is going to be less/small, should I go ahead with the current choice and then once the demand increases, switch over to a better provider? If yes, how can I transfer my database, especially the jpg files, etc. to the new provider? I don't even know the tools required to backup and restore to another host. (I don't like this idea but still..) Should I go ahead and pay more right now and go with better providers (without knowing if the website is going to do really that well) just for saving myself the trouble of having to take a backup of the 50,000 files and upload to a new host from an old host and just start paying double/triple the price without even knowing if I would receive back the returns as I expected? Backup and Restore in such a bulky numbers is something that I have never done before and hence I am stuck here trying to decide what to do. The price per month is also a considerable factor in my decision. All these web hosting companies say one common thing: It is customers responsibility to backup and restore data and they are not liable for any loss. So no matter what hosting company that I would like to go with, they ask me to take backup via FTP so that I can restore them whenever I want (& it seems to be safer to have the files locally with me). Some are providing tools for backup and some are not and I am not sure how much their backup tools can be trusted considering the disclaimers they have. I have never backed-up and restored 50,000 files from one web host to another, so please, all you experienced people out there, leave your comments and let me know your suggestions so that I can decide. I have spent 2 days fighting with myself trying to decide what to do and finally concluded that this is a double-edged sword and I can't arrive at a satisfactory final decision without involving others suggestions. I believe that someone must be out there who may have had such troublesome decision to make. So all your suggestions to help me make my decision are appreciated. Thank you all.

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• How to use pthread_atfork() and pthread_once() to reinitialize mutexes in child processes

  - by Blair Zajac

  We have a C++ shared library that uses ZeroC's Ice library for RPC and unless we shut down Ice's runtime, we've observed child processes hanging on random mutexes. The Ice runtime starts threads, has many internal mutexes and keeps open file descriptors to servers. Additionally, we have a few of mutexes of our own to protect our internal state. Our shared library is used by hundreds of internal applications so we don't have control over when the process calls fork(), so we need a way to safely shutdown Ice and lock our mutexes while the process forks. Reading the POSIX standard on pthread_atfork() on handling mutexes and internal state: Alternatively, some libraries might have been able to supply just a child routine that reinitializes the mutexes in the library and all associated states to some known value (for example, what it was when the image was originally executed). This approach is not possible, though, because implementations are allowed to fail *_init() and *_destroy() calls for mutexes and locks if the mutex or lock is still locked. In this case, the child routine is not able to reinitialize the mutexes and locks. On Linux, the this test C program returns EPERM from pthread_mutex_unlock() in the child pthread_atfork() handler. Linux requires adding _NP to the PTHREAD_MUTEX_ERRORCHECK macro for it to compile. This program is linked from this good thread. Given that it's technically not safe or legal to unlock or destroy a mutex in the child, I'm thinking it's better to have pointers to mutexes and then have the child make new pthread_mutex_t on the heap and leave the parent's mutexes alone, thereby having a small memory leak. The only issue is how to reinitialize the state of the library and I'm thinking of reseting a pthread_once_t. Maybe because POSIX has an initializer for pthread_once_t that it can be reset to its initial state. #include <pthread.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <string.h> static pthread_once_t once_control = PTHREAD_ONCE_INIT; static pthread_mutex_t *mutex_ptr = 0; static void setup_new_mutex() { mutex_ptr = malloc(sizeof(*mutex_ptr)); pthread_mutex_init(mutex_ptr, 0); } static void prepare() { pthread_mutex_lock(mutex_ptr); } static void parent() { pthread_mutex_unlock(mutex_ptr); } static void child() { // Reset the once control. pthread_once_t once = PTHREAD_ONCE_INIT; memcpy(&once_control, &once, sizeof(once_control)); setup_new_mutex(); } static void init() { setup_new_mutex(); pthread_atfork(&prepare, &parent, &child); } int my_library_call(int arg) { pthread_once(&once_control, &init); pthread_mutex_lock(mutex_ptr); // Do something here that requires the lock. int result = 2*arg; pthread_mutex_unlock(mutex_ptr); return result; } In the above sample in the child() I only reset the pthread_once_t by making a copy of a fresh pthread_once_t initialized with PTHREAD_ONCE_INIT. A new pthread_mutex_t is only created when the library function is invoked in the child process. This is hacky but maybe the best way of dealing with this skirting the standards. If the pthread_once_t contains a mutex then the system must have a way of initializing it from its PTHREAD_ONCE_INIT state. If it contains a pointer to a mutex allocated on the heap than it'll be forced to allocate a new one and set the address in the pthread_once_t. I'm hoping it doesn't use the address of the pthread_once_t for anything special which would defeat this. Searching comp.programming.threads group for pthread_atfork() shows a lot of good discussion and how little the POSIX standards really provides to solve this problem. There's also the issue that one should only call async-signal-safe functions from pthread_atfork() handlers, and it appears the most important one is the child handler, where only a memcpy() is done. Does this work? Is there a better way of dealing with the requirements of our shared library?

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• About global.asax and the events there

  - by eski

  So what i'm trying to understand is the whole global.asax events. I doing a simple counter that records website visits. I am using MSSQL. Basicly i have two ints. totalNumberOfUsers - The total visist from begining. currentNumberOfUsers - Total of users viewing the site at the moment. So the way i understand global.asax events is that every time someone comes to the site "Session_Start" is fired once. So once per user. "Application_Start" is fired only once the first time someone comes to the site. Going with this i have my global.asax file here. <script runat="server"> string connectionstring = ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["ConnectionString1"].ConnectionString; void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e) { // Code that runs on application startup Application.Lock(); Application["currentNumberOfUsers"] = 0; Application.UnLock(); string sql = "Select c_hit from v_counter where (id=1)"; SqlConnection connect = new SqlConnection(connectionstring); SqlCommand cmd = new SqlCommand(sql, connect); cmd.Connection.Open(); cmd.ExecuteNonQuery(); SqlDataReader reader = cmd.ExecuteReader(); while (reader.Read()) { Application.Lock(); Application["totalNumberOfUsers"] = reader.GetInt32(0); Application.UnLock(); } reader.Close(); cmd.Connection.Close(); } void Application_End(object sender, EventArgs e) { // Code that runs on application shutdown } void Application_Error(object sender, EventArgs e) { // Code that runs when an unhandled error occurs } void Session_Start(object sender, EventArgs e) { // Code that runs when a new session is started Application.Lock(); Application["totalNumberOfUsers"] = (int)Application["totalNumberOfUsers"] + 1; Application["currentNumberOfUsers"] = (int)Application["currentNumberOfUsers"] + 1; Application.UnLock(); string sql = "UPDATE v_counter SET c_hit = @hit WHERE c_type = 'totalNumberOfUsers'"; SqlConnection connect = new SqlConnection(connectionstring); SqlCommand cmd = new SqlCommand(sql, connect); SqlParameter hit = new SqlParameter("@hit", SqlDbType.Int); hit.Value = Application["totalNumberOfUsers"]; cmd.Parameters.Add(hit); cmd.Connection.Open(); cmd.ExecuteNonQuery(); cmd.Connection.Close(); } void Session_End(object sender, EventArgs e) { // Code that runs when a session ends. // Note: The Session_End event is raised only when the sessionstate mode // is set to InProc in the Web.config file. If session mode is set to StateServer // or SQLServer, the event is not raised. Application.Lock(); Application["currentNumberOfUsers"] = (int)Application["currentNumberOfUsers"] - 1; Application.UnLock(); } </script> In the page_load i have this protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { l_current.Text = Application["currentNumberOfUsers"].ToString(); l_total.Text = Application["totalNumberOfUsers"].ToString(); } So if i understand this right, every time someone comes to the site both the currentNumberOfUsers and totalNumberOfUsers are incremented with 1. But when the session is over the currentNumberOfUsers is decremented with 1. If i go to the site with 3 types of browsers with the same computer i should have 3 in hits on both counters. Doing this again after hours i should have 3 in current and 6 in total, right ? The way its working right now is the current goes up to 2 and the total is incremented on every postback on IE and Chrome but not on firefox. And one last thing, is this the same thing ? Application["value"] = 0; value = Application["value"] //OR Application.Set("Value", 0); Value = Application.Get("Value");

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• How to handle recurring dates (dates only) in .NET?

  - by Wayne M

  I am trying to figure out a good way to handle recurring events in .NET, specifically for an ASP.NET MVC application. The idea is that a user can create an event and specify that the event can occur repeatedly after a specific interval (e.g. "every two weeks", "once a month" and so on). What would be the best way to tackle this? My brainstorming right now is to have two tables: Job and RecurringJob. Job is the "master" record and has the description of the job as well a key to what customer it's for, while RecurringJob links back to Job and has additional info on what the occurrence frequency is (e.g. 1 for "once a month") as well as the timespan (e.g. "Weekly", "Monthly"). The issue is how to determine and set the next occurrence of the job since this will have to be something that's done regularly. I've seen two trains of thought with this: This logic should either be stored in a database column and periodically updated, or calculated on the fly in the code. Any thoughts or suggestions on tackling this? Edit: this is for a subscription based web app I'm creating to let service businesses schedule their common recurring jobs easily and track their customers. So a typical use might be to create a "Cut lawn" job for Mr Smith that occurs every month The exact date isn't important - it's the ability for the customer to see that Mr Smith gets his lawn cut every month and followup with him about it. Let me rephrase the above to better convey my idea. A sample use case for the application might be as follows: User pulls up the customer record for John Smith and clicks the Add Job link. The user fills out the form to create a job with a name of "Cut lawn", a start date of 11/15/2009, and selects a checkbox indicating that this job continually occurs. The user is presented with a secondary screen asking for the job frequency. The user indicates (haven't decided how at this point - let's assume select lists) that the job occurs once a month. User clicks save. Now, when the user views the record for John Smith, they can see that he has a job, "Cut lawn", that occurs every month starting from 11/15/2009. On the main dashboard when it's one week prior to the assumed start date, the user sees the job displayed with an indicator such as "12/15/2009 - Cut lawn (John Smith)". A week before the due date someone from the company calls him up to schedule and he says he's going to be out of town until 1/1/2010, so he wants his appointment rescheduled for that date. Our user can change the date for the job to be 1/1/2010, and now the recurrence will start one month from that date (e.g. next time will be 2/1/2010). The idea behind this is that the app is targeting businesses like lawn care, plumbers, carpet cleaners and the like where the exact date isn't as important (because it can and will change as people are busy), the key thing is to give the business an indicator that Mr. Smith's monthly service is coming up, and someone should give him a call to determine when exactly it can be scheduled for. In effect give these businesses a way to track repeat business and know when it's time to followup with a customer.

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• Why does @PostConstruct callback fire every time even though bean is @ViewScoped? JSF

  - by Nitesh Panchal

  Hello, I am using datatable on page and using binding attribute to bind it to my backing bean. This is my code :- <?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8' ?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html" xmlns:p="http://primefaces.prime.com.tr/ui"> <h:head> <title>Facelet Title</title> </h:head> <h:body> <h:form prependId="false"> <h:dataTable var="item" value="#{testBean.stringCollection}" binding="#{testBean.dataTable}"> <h:column> <h:outputText value="#{item}"/> </h:column> <h:column> <h:commandButton value="Click" actionListener="#{testBean.action}"/> </h:column> </h:dataTable> </h:form> </h:body> </html> This is my bean :- package managedBeans; import java.io.Serializable; import java.util.ArrayList; import java.util.List; import javax.annotation.PostConstruct; import javax.faces.bean.ManagedBean; import javax.faces.bean.ViewScoped; import javax.faces.component.html.HtmlDataTable; @ManagedBean(name="testBean") @ViewScoped public class testBean implements Serializable { private List<String> stringCollection; public List<String> getStringCollection() { return stringCollection; } public void setStringCollection(List<String> stringCollection) { this.stringCollection = stringCollection; } private HtmlDataTable dataTable; public HtmlDataTable getDataTable() { return dataTable; } public void setDataTable(HtmlDataTable dataTable) { this.dataTable = dataTable; } @PostConstruct public void init(){ System.out.println("Post Construct fired!!"); stringCollection = new ArrayList<String>(); stringCollection.add("a"); stringCollection.add("b"); stringCollection.add("c"); } public void action(){ System.out.println("Clicked!!"); } } Please tell me why is the @PostConstruct firing each and every time i click on button? It should fire only once as long as i am on same page beacause my bean is @ViewScoped. Further, if i remove the binding attribute then everything works fine and @PostConstruct callback fires only once. Then why every time when i use binding attribute? I need binding attribute and want to perform initialisation tasks like fetching data from webservice, etc only once. What should i do? Where should i write my initialisation task?

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• Java code optimization leads to numerical inaccuracies and errors

  - by rano

  I'm trying to implement a version of the Fuzzy C-Means algorithm in Java and I'm trying to do some optimization by computing just once everything that can be computed just once. This is an iterative algorithm and regarding the updating of a matrix, the clusters x pixels membership matrix U, this is the update rule I want to optimize: where the x are the element of a matrix X (pixels x features) and v belongs to the matrix V (clusters x features). And m is a parameter that ranges from 1.1 to infinity. The distance used is the euclidean norm. If I had to implement this formula in a banal way I'd do: for(int i = 0; i < X.length; i++) { int count = 0; for(int j = 0; j < V.length; j++) { double num = D[i][j]; double sumTerms = 0; for(int k = 0; k < V.length; k++) { double thisDistance = D[i][k]; sumTerms += Math.pow(num / thisDistance, (1.0 / (m - 1.0))); } U[i][j] = (float) (1f / sumTerms); } } In this way some optimization is already done, I precomputed all the possible squared distances between X and V and stored them in a matrix D but that is not enough, since I'm cycling througn the elements of V two times resulting in two nested loops. Looking at the formula the numerator of the fraction is independent of the sum so I can compute numerator and denominator independently and the denominator can be computed just once for each pixel. So I came to a solution like this: int nClusters = V.length; double exp = (1.0 / (m - 1.0)); for(int i = 0; i < X.length; i++) { int count = 0; for(int j = 0; j < nClusters; j++) { double distance = D[i][j]; double denominator = D[i][nClusters]; double numerator = Math.pow(distance, exp); U[i][j] = (float) (1f / (numerator * denominator)); } } Where I precomputed the denominator into an additional column of the matrix D while I was computing the distances: for (int i = 0; i < X.length; i++) { for (int j = 0; j < V.length; j++) { double sum = 0; for (int k = 0; k < nDims; k++) { final double d = X[i][k] - V[j][k]; sum += d * d; } D[i][j] = sum; D[i][B.length] += Math.pow(1 / D[i][j], exp); } } By doing so I encounter numerical differences between the 'banal' computation and the second one that leads to different numerical value in U (not in the first iterates but soon enough). I guess that the problem is that exponentiate very small numbers to high values (the elements of U can range from 0.0 to 1.0 and exp , for m = 1.1, is 10) leads to ver y small values, whereas by dividing the numerator and the denominator and THEN exponentiating the result seems to be better numerically. The problem is it involves much more operations. Am I doing something wrong? Is there a possible solution to get both the code optimized and numerically stable? Any suggestion or criticism will be appreciated.

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• Rspec2, Rails3, Authlogic: Can't run specs

  - by Sam

  When I do rspec spec in my rails project, I get No examples were matched. Perhaps {:if=>#<Proc:0x0000010126e998@/Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/rspec-core-2.3.1/lib/rspec/core/configuration.rb:50 (lambda)>, :unless=>#<Proc:0x0000010126e970@/Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/rspec-core-2.3.1/lib/rspec/core/configuration.rb:51 (lambda)>} is excluding everything? Finished in 0.00004 seconds 0 examples, 0 failures Now, this seems like maybe if I wrote a spec it would work, but as soon as I write a spec (and I do include spec_helper) /Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/rspec-core-2.3.1/lib/rspec/core/backward_compatibility.rb:20:in `const_missing': uninitialized constant Authlogic (NameError) from /{myapp}/app/models/user_session.rb:1:in `<top (required)>' from /Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/railties-3.0.3/lib/rails/engine.rb:138:in `block (2 levels) in eager_load!' from /Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/railties-3.0.3/lib/rails/engine.rb:137:in `each' from /Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/railties-3.0.3/lib/rails/engine.rb:137:in `block in eager_load!' from /Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/railties-3.0.3/lib/rails/engine.rb:135:in `each' from /Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/railties-3.0.3/lib/rails/engine.rb:135:in `eager_load!' from /Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/railties-3.0.3/lib/rails/application.rb:108:in `eager_load!' from /Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/railties-3.0.3/lib/rails/application/finisher.rb:41:in `block in <module:Finisher>' from /Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/railties-3.0.3/lib/rails/initializable.rb:25:in `instance_exec' from /Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/railties-3.0.3/lib/rails/initializable.rb:25:in `run' from /Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/railties-3.0.3/lib/rails/initializable.rb:50:in `block in run_initializers' from /Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/railties-3.0.3/lib/rails/initializable.rb:49:in `each' from /Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/railties-3.0.3/lib/rails/initializable.rb:49:in `run_initializers' from /Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/railties-3.0.3/lib/rails/application.rb:134:in `initialize!' from /Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/railties-3.0.3/lib/rails/application.rb:77:in `method_missing' from /{myapp}/config/environment.rb:5:in `<top (required)>' from <internal:lib/rubygems/custom_require>:29:in `require' from <internal:lib/rubygems/custom_require>:29:in `require' from /{myapp}/spec/spec_helper.rb:3:in `<top (required)>' from <internal:lib/rubygems/custom_require>:29:in `require' from <internal:lib/rubygems/custom_require>:29:in `require' from /{myapp}/spec/controllers/pages_controller_spec.rb:1:in `<top (required)>' from /Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/rspec-core-2.3.1/lib/rspec/core/configuration.rb:388:in `load' from /Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/rspec-core-2.3.1/lib/rspec/core/configuration.rb:388:in `block in load_spec_files' from /Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/rspec-core-2.3.1/lib/rspec/core/configuration.rb:388:in `map' from /Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/rspec-core-2.3.1/lib/rspec/core/configuration.rb:388:in `load_spec_files' from /Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/rspec-core-2.3.1/lib/rspec/core/command_line.rb:18:in `run' from /Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/rspec-core-2.3.1/lib/rspec/core/runner.rb:55:in `run_in_process' from /Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/rspec-core-2.3.1/lib/rspec/core/runner.rb:46:in `run' from /Users/samliu/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@rails3/gems/rspec-core-2.3.1/lib/rspec/core/runner.rb:10:in `block in autorun' The important line here seems to be /core/backward_compatibility.rb:20:in `const_missing': uninitialized constant Authlogic (NameError) Now if this were rails 2.3.8, I'd simply put config.gem "authlogic" into the environment.rb, in the initialization code block. However, the rails 3 environment.rb looks way different (there is no config code block, so putting it in arbitrarily causes an error where config is not defined). So my questions are 1) Do I actually have to put the gem config anywhere? I looked at https://github.com/trevmex/authlogic_rails3_example/ and it seems he didn't put it anywhere. 2) Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong in terms of rspec? My gem list is *** LOCAL GEMS *** abstract (1.0.0) actionmailer (3.0.3, 3.0.1, 3.0.0, 3.0.0.rc2, 2.3.4) actionpack (3.0.3, 3.0.1, 3.0.0, 3.0.0.rc2, 2.3.4) activemodel (3.0.3, 3.0.1, 3.0.0, 3.0.0.rc2) activerecord (3.0.3, 3.0.1, 3.0.0, 3.0.0.rc2, 2.3.4) activeresource (3.0.3, 3.0.1, 3.0.0, 3.0.0.rc2, 2.3.4) activesupport (3.0.3, 3.0.1, 3.0.0, 3.0.0.rc2, 2.3.4) arel (2.0.6, 1.0.1) asdf (0.5.0) authlogic (2.1.6, 2.1.3) autotest (4.4.6, 4.4.1) autotest-fsevent (0.2.4) autotest-growl (0.2.9) autotest-rails (4.1.0) autotest-rails-pure (4.1.2) bluecloth (2.0.9) builder (2.1.2) bundler (1.0.7, 1.0.2) cgi_multipart_eof_fix (2.5.0) commonwatir (1.6.2) couchrest (0.33) cri (1.0.1) cucumber (0.4.4, 0.4.3, 0.3.11) daemons (1.1.0, 1.0.10) dependencies (0.0.7) diff-lcs (1.1.2) erubis (2.6.6) fastercsv (1.5.0) fastthread (1.0.7) firewatir (1.6.2) flay (1.4.0) flog (2.2.0) funfx (0.2.2) gem_plugin (0.2.3) gemsonrails (0.7.2) giraffesoft-resource_controller (0.6.5) haml (2.2.14) hoe (2.3.3) i18n (0.4.1) jscruggs-metric_fu (1.1.5) json_pure (1.1.9) kramdown (0.12.0) mail (2.2.13, 2.2.6.1) memcache-client (1.8.5) mime-types (1.16) mojombo-chronic (0.3.0) mongrel (1.1.5) monk (0.0.7) nanoc (3.1.5) nanoc3 (3.1.5) nokogiri (1.4.3.1, 1.4.0) open4 (0.9.6) polyglot (0.3.1, 0.2.9) rack (1.2.1, 1.0.1) rack-mount (0.6.13) rack-test (0.5.6) rails (3.0.0, 2.3.4) rails3-generators (0.17.0, 0.14.0) railties (3.0.3, 3.0.1, 3.0.0, 3.0.0.rc2) rake (0.8.7) relevance-rcov (0.9.2.1) rest-client (1.0.3) rspec (2.3.0, 2.0.0.rc, 1.2.9) rspec-core (2.3.1, 2.0.0.rc) rspec-expectations (2.3.0, 2.0.0.rc) rspec-mocks (2.3.0, 2.0.0.rc) rspec-rails (2.3.1, 2.0.0.rc, 1.2.9) ruby_parser (2.0.4) rubyforge (2.0.3) rubygems-update (1.3.6, 1.3.5) rvm (1.0.13) s4t-utils (1.0.4) safariwatir (0.3.7) sexp_processor (3.0.3) spork (0.7.3) sqlite3-ruby (1.3.1, 1.2.5) sys-uname (0.8.5) term-ansicolor (1.0.4) text-format (1.0.0) text-hyphen (1.0.0) thor (0.14.6, 0.14.3, 0.12.0) treetop (1.4.8, 1.4.2) tzinfo (0.3.23) user-choices (1.1.6) vlad (2.0.0) vlad-git (2.1.0) webrat (0.7.1, 0.6.0, 0.5.3) xml-simple (1.0.12) ZenTest (4.4.2) I am using ruby 1.9.2 and rails 3.0.3 installed using RVM on OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard. I just want to be able to run my specs like I used to. As a separate issue, autotest yields an error about an include for autotest/growl but I installed autotest-growl. Maybe this is a gem issue? I tried doing the same things and get the same error when it comes to using my ubuntu 10.04 server machine though. Gemfile source 'http://rubygems.org' gem 'rails', '3.0.3' # Bundle edge Rails instead: # gem 'rails', :git => 'git://github.com/rails/rails.git' gem 'sqlite3-ruby', :require => 'sqlite3' group :couch do gem 'couchrest' end group :user_auth do gem 'authlogic' gem "rails3-generators" gem 'facebooker' end group :markup do gem 'haml' gem 'sass' end group :testing do gem 'rspec-rails' gem 'rspec' gem 'webrat' gem 'cucumber' gem 'capybara' gem 'factory_girl' gem 'shoulda' gem 'autotest' end group :server do gem 'unicorn' end # Use unicorn as the web server # gem 'unicorn' # Deploy with Capistrano # gem 'capistrano' # To use debugger # gem 'ruby-debug' # Bundle the extra gems: # gem 'bj' # gem 'nokogiri' # gem 'sqlite3-ruby', :require => 'sqlite3' # gem 'aws-s3', :require => 'aws/s3' # Bundle gems for the local environment. Make sure to # put test-only gems in this group so their generators # and rake tasks are available in development mode: # group :development, :test do # gem 'webrat' # end Gemfile.lock GEM remote: http://rubygems.org/ specs: ZenTest (4.4.2) abstract (1.0.0) actionmailer (3.0.3) actionpack (= 3.0.3) mail (~> 2.2.9) actionpack (3.0.3) activemodel (= 3.0.3) activesupport (= 3.0.3) builder (~> 2.1.2) erubis (~> 2.6.6) i18n (~> 0.4) rack (~> 1.2.1) rack-mount (~> 0.6.13) rack-test (~> 0.5.6) tzinfo (~> 0.3.23) activemodel (3.0.3) activesupport (= 3.0.3) builder (~> 2.1.2) i18n (~> 0.4) activerecord (3.0.3) activemodel (= 3.0.3) activesupport (= 3.0.3) arel (~> 2.0.2) tzinfo (~> 0.3.23) activeresource (3.0.3) activemodel (= 3.0.3) activesupport (= 3.0.3) activesupport (3.0.3) arel (2.0.6) authlogic (2.1.6) activesupport autotest (4.4.6) ZenTest (>= 4.4.1) builder (2.1.2) capybara (0.4.0) celerity (>= 0.7.9) culerity (>= 0.2.4) mime-types (>= 1.16) nokogiri (>= 1.3.3) rack (>= 1.0.0) rack-test (>= 0.5.4) selenium-webdriver (>= 0.0.27) xpath (~> 0.1.2) celerity (0.8.6) childprocess (0.1.6) ffi (~> 0.6.3) couchrest (1.0.1) json (>= 1.4.6) mime-types (>= 1.15) rest-client (>= 1.5.1) cucumber (0.10.0) builder (>= 2.1.2) diff-lcs (~> 1.1.2) gherkin (~> 2.3.2) json (~> 1.4.6) term-ansicolor (~> 1.0.5) culerity (0.2.13) diff-lcs (1.1.2) erubis (2.6.6) abstract (>= 1.0.0) facebooker (1.0.75) json_pure (>= 1.0.0) factory_girl (1.3.2) ffi (0.6.3) rake (>= 0.8.7) gherkin (2.3.2) json (~> 1.4.6) term-ansicolor (~> 1.0.5) haml (3.0.25) i18n (0.5.0) json (1.4.6) json_pure (1.4.6) kgio (2.0.0) mail (2.2.13) activesupport (>= 2.3.6) i18n (>= 0.4.0) mime-types (~> 1.16) treetop (~> 1.4.8) mime-types (1.16) nokogiri (1.4.4) polyglot (0.3.1) rack (1.2.1) rack-mount (0.6.13) rack (>= 1.0.0) rack-test (0.5.6) rack (>= 1.0) rails (3.0.3) actionmailer (= 3.0.3) actionpack (= 3.0.3) activerecord (= 3.0.3) activeresource (= 3.0.3) activesupport (= 3.0.3) bundler (~> 1.0) railties (= 3.0.3) rails3-generators (0.17.0) railties (>= 3.0.0) railties (3.0.3) actionpack (= 3.0.3) activesupport (= 3.0.3) rake (>= 0.8.7) thor (~> 0.14.4) rake (0.8.7) rest-client (1.6.1) mime-types (>= 1.16) rspec (2.3.0) rspec-core (~> 2.3.0) rspec-expectations (~> 2.3.0) rspec-mocks (~> 2.3.0) rspec-core (2.3.1) rspec-expectations (2.3.0) diff-lcs (~> 1.1.2) rspec-mocks (2.3.0) rspec-rails (2.3.1) actionpack (~> 3.0) activesupport (~> 3.0) railties (~> 3.0) rspec (~> 2.3.0) rubyzip (0.9.4) sass (3.1.0.alpha.206) selenium-webdriver (0.1.2) childprocess (~> 0.1.5) ffi (~> 0.6.3) json_pure rubyzip shoulda (2.11.3) sqlite3-ruby (1.3.2) term-ansicolor (1.0.5) thor (0.14.6) treetop (1.4.9) polyglot (>= 0.3.1) tzinfo (0.3.23) unicorn (3.1.0) kgio (~> 2.0.0) rack webrat (0.7.2) nokogiri (>= 1.2.0) rack (>= 1.0) rack-test (>= 0.5.3) xpath (0.1.2) nokogiri (~> 1.3) PLATFORMS ruby DEPENDENCIES authlogic autotest capybara couchrest cucumber facebooker factory_girl haml rails (= 3.0.3) rails3-generators rspec rspec-rails sass shoulda sqlite3-ruby unicorn webrat

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