Search Results

Search found 47615 results on 1905 pages for 'make it useful keep it simple'.

Page 179/1905 | < Previous Page | 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186  | Next Page >

• Celko's SQL Stumper: Eggs in one Basket

  Joe Celko returns with another stumper to celebrate Easter. Unsurprisingly, this involves eggs. More surprising is the nature of the puzzle: This time, the puzzle is one of designing a database rather than a query. DDL as well as the DML.

  Read the article

• PASS Summit – looking back on my first time

  - by Fatherjack

    So I was lucky enough to get my first experience of PASS Summit this year and took some time beforehand to read some blogs and reference material to get an idea on what to do and how to get the best out of my visit. Having been to other conferences – technical and non-technical – I had a reasonable idea on the routine and what to expect in general. Here is a list of a few things that I have learned/remembered as the week has gone by. Wear comfortable shoes. This actually needs to be broadened to Take several pairs of comfortable shoes. You will be spending many many hours, for several days one after another. Having comfortable feet that can literally support you for the duration will make the week in general a whole lot better. Not only at the conference but getting to and from you could well be walking. In the evenings you will be walking around town and standing talking in various bars and clubs. Looking back, on some days I was on my feet for over 20 hours. Make friends. This is a given for the long term benefits it brings but there is also an immediate reward in being at a conference with a friend or two. Some events are bigger and more popular than others and some have the type of session that every single attendee will want to be in. This is great for those that get in but if you are in the bathroom or queuing for coffee and you miss out it sucks. Having a friend that can get in to a room and reserve you a seat is a great advantage to make sure you get the content that you want to see and still have the coffee that you need. Don’t go to every session you want to see This might sound counter intuitive and it relies on the sessions being recorded in some way to guarantee you don’t totally miss out. Both PASS Summit and SQL Bits sessions are recorded (summit is audio, SQLBits is video) and this means that if you get into a good conversation with someone over a coffee you don’t have to break it up to go to a session. Obviously there is a trade-off here and you need to decide on the tipping point for yourself but a conversation at a place like this could make a big difference to the next contract or employer you have or it might simply be great catching up with some friends you don’t see so often. Go to at least one session you don’t want to Again, this will seem to be contrary to normal logic but there is no reason why you shouldn’t learn about a part of SQL Server that isn’t part of your daily routine. Not only will you learn something new but you will also pick up on the feelings and attitudes of the people in the session. So, if you are a DBA, head off to a BI session and so on. You’ll hear BI speakers speaking to a BI audience and get to understand their point of view and reasoning for making the decisions they do. You will also appreciate the way that your decisions and instructions affect the way they have to work. This will help you a lot when you are on a project, working with multiple teams and make you all more productive. Socialise While you are at the conference venue, speak to people. Ask questions, be interested in whoever you are speaking to. You get chances to talk to new friends at breakfast, dinner and every break between sessions. The only people that might not talk to you would be speakers that are about to go and give a session, in most cases speakers like peace and quiet before going on stage. Other than that the people around you are just waiting for someone to talk to them so make the first move. There is a whole lot going on outside of the conference hours and you should make an effort to join in with some of this too. At karaoke evenings or just out for a quiet drink with a few of the people you meet at the conference. Either way, don’t be a recluse and hide in your room or be alone out in the town. Don’t talk to people Once again this sounds wrong but stay with me. I have spoken to a number of speakers since Summit 2013 finished and they have all mentioned the time it has taken them to move about the conference venue due to people stopping them for a chat or to ask a question. 45 minutes to walk from a session room to the speaker room in one case. Wow. While none of the speakers were upset about this sort of delay I think delegates should take the situation into account and possibly defer their question to an email or to a time when the person they want is clearly less in demand. Give them a chance to enjoy the conference in the same way that you are, they may actually want to go to a session or just have a rest after giving their session – talking for 75 minutes is hard work, taking an extra 45 minutes right after is unbelievable. I certainly hope that they get good feedback on their sessions and perhaps if you spoke to a speaker outside a session you can give them a mention in the ‘any other comments’ part of the feedback, just to convey your gratitude for them giving up their time and expertise for free. Say thank you I just mentioned giving the speakers a clear, visible ‘thank you’ in the feedback but there are plenty of people that help make any conference the success it is that would really appreciate hearing that their efforts are valued. People on the registration desk, volunteers giving schedule guidance and directions, people on the community zone are all volunteers giving their time to help you have the best experience possible. Send an email to PASS and convey your thoughts about the work that was done. Maybe you want to be a volunteer next time so you could enquire how you get into that position at the same time. This isn’t an exclusive list and you may agree or disagree with the points I have made, please add anything you think is good advice in the comments. I’d like to finish by saying a huge thank you to all the people involved in planning, facilitating and executing the PASS Summit 2013, it was an excellent event and I know many others think it was a totally worthwhile event to attend.

  Read the article

• Web.NET is Closing Fast

  - by Chris Massey

  The voting for sessions has now closed, and sadly only half of the potential sessions could make it through. On the plus side, the sessions that floated to the top look great and, with the votes in, Simone and Ugo have moved right along and created a draft agenda to whet our appetites. Take a look, and let them know what you think. I’d also strongly recommend that you get ready to grab your tickets when they become available next week (specifically, September 18th), as places are going to be snapped up fast. In case you need a reminder as to why Web.NET is worth your time: Complete focus on web development Awesome sessions All-night hackathon Free (although I urge you to make a donation to help Simone and Ugo create the best possible event) Put October 20th in your calendar, and start packing. I’ve already booked my flights, and am perusing the list of hotels while I eat my lunch. Bonus Material There will be a full day of RavenDB training on Monday the 22nd of October, run by Ayende himself, and attending Web.NET will get you a 30% discount on the cost of the session.

  Read the article

• A Bit Cloudy

  - by Chris Massey

  "Systems Administrators, I come in peace. You have nothing to fear from me" - Office 365 Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite recently absorbed a few other services and has been rebranded as Office 365, which is currently in private Beta and NDA-d up to the eyeballs. As Microsoft's (slightly delayed) answer to Google Apps Premier Edition, it shows a lot of promise; MS has technical expertise, market penetration, and financial capital all going for it. On the other hand, Google...(read more)

  Read the article

• Database IDs

  - by fatherjack

  Just a quick post, mainly to test out the new blog format but related to a question on the #sqlhelp hashtag. The question came from Justin Dearing (@zippy1981) as: So I take it database_id isn’t an ever incrementing value. #sqlhelp When a new database is created it is given the lowest available ID. This either is in a gap in IDs where a database has been dropped or the database ID is incremented by one from the highest current ID if there are no gaps to fill. To see this in action, connect to your sandbox server and try this: USE MASTER GO CREATE DATABASE cherry GO USE cherry GO SELECT DB_ID() GO CREATE DATABASE grape GO USE grape GO SELECT DB_ID() GO CREATE DATABASE melon GO USE melon GO SELECT DB_ID() GO USE MASTER GO DROP DATABASE grape GO CREATE DATABASE kiwi GO USE kiwi GO SELECT DB_ID() GO USE MASTER GO DROP DATABASE cherry DROP DATABASE melon DROP DATABASE kiwi You should get an incrementing series of database IDs as the databases are created until the last one where the new database gets allocated the ID that is missing because one was dropped.

  Read the article

• error with gtkmm 3 in ubuntu 12.04

  - by Grohiik

  i install libgtkmm-3.0-dev in ubuntu 12.04 and i try to learn and write program with c++ and gtkmm 3 i go to this link "http://developer.gnome.org/gtkmm-tutorial/unstable/sec-basics-simple-example.html.en" and try to compile simple example program : #include <gtkmm.h> int main(int argc, char *argv[]) { Glib::RefPtr<Gtk::Application> app = Gtk::Application::create(argc, argv, "org.gtkmm.examples.base"); Gtk::ApplicationWindow window; return app->run(window); } my file name is "basic.cc" and i open terminal and type following command to compile: g++ basic.cc -o basic `pkg-config gtkmm-3.0 --cflags --libs` compile completed without any error but when i try to run program with type ./basic in terminal i get following error : ~$ ./simple ./simple: symbol lookup error: ./simple: undefined symbol:_ZN3Gtk11Application6createERiRPPcRKN4Glib7ustringEN3Gio16ApplicationFlagsE ~$ how can i solve this problem ? i can cimpile any gtkmm 2.4 code with this command : " g++ basic.cc -o basic pkg-config gtkmm-3.0 --cflags --libs " and this command : " g++ basic.cc -o basic pkg-config gtkmm-2.4 --cflags --libs " thanks

  Read the article

• Managing Data Growth in SQL Server

  'Help, my database ate my disk drives!'. Many DBAs spend most of their time dealing with variations of the problem of database processes consuming too much disk space. This happens because of errors such as incorrect configurations for recovery models, data growth for large objects and queries that overtax TempDB resources. Rodney describes, with some feeling, the errors that can lead to this sort of crisis for the working DBA, and their solution.

  Read the article

• Glimpse: Open Source Web Development

  - by Elizabeth Ayer

  We’re delighted to announce that Red Gate will be backing Glimpse! For those of you who aren’t familiar with the project, Glimpse is an open source tool which does for the server what Firebug does for the client. It’s been in beta for the last year, and we’re very excited to give Glimpse the support and dedicated effort needed to take it to a v1 and beyond. Glimpse’s founders (Nik Molnar and Anthony van der Hoorn) have joined Red Gate, and they’re just as excited as we are about the opportunities that active development of Glimpse will bring. They will continue to write code, support the community and drive the project forward (as they’ve done since its inception). With full-time attention on growing Glimpse and its community, users and developers can expect the project to accelerate, with frequent releases of new functionality. Red Gate is excited about its first major involvement with open source. You may well be wondering, though, why Red Gate is doing this. Glimpse dovetails beautifully with Red Gate’s .NET tools, which makes Glimpse an ideal framework for plugging in advanced, paid-for functionality (like performance analysis) the way web developers want to see it. As a means to this end, we will contribute to the Glimpse open source project in order to broaden its adoption and delight web developers. Since bringing in .NET Reflector in 2008, we’ve learnt sharp lessons from the community about the right and wrong ways to engage with developers, not to mention the enduring value of free. Glimpse further shows what the .NET community can achieve through open source collaboration, and we’re looking forward to working with the Glimpse community to make something enduring and awesome. Nik and Anthony, themselves passionate advocates of community-driven software, will continue to control the Glimpse project, steering it to best meet the needs of its users and contributors. If you have any questions or queries about Glimpse, or Red Gate’s involvement in the project, please tweet with the #glimpse hashtag, contact us at Red Gate on [email protected], or post to the Glimpse Development Forum on Google Groups.

  Read the article

• Javascript replace

  - by Webby

  Hello struggling here guys.. Is it possible to string replace anything between the the first forward slashes with "" but keep the rest? e.g. var would be string "/anything-here-this-needs-to-be-replaced123/but-keep-this"; would end up like this string "/but-keep-this"; Hope that made sence

  Read the article

• Exploring In-memory OLTP Engine (Hekaton) in SQL Server 2014 CTP1

  The continuing drop in the price of memory has made fast in-memory OLTP increasingly viable. SQL Server 2014 allows you to migrate the most-used tables in an existing database to memory-optimised 'Hekaton' technology, but how you balance between disk tables and in-memory tables for optimum performance requires judgement and experiment. What is this technology, and how can you exploit it? Rob Garrison explains.

  Read the article

• Antenna Aligner part 1: In the beginning.

  - by Chris George

  Picture the scene, it's 9pm, I'm in my caravan (yes I know, I've heard all the jokes!) with my family and I'm trying to tune the tv by moving the aerial, retuning, moving the aerial again, retuning... 45 mins and much cursing later I succeed. Surely there must be an easier way than this? Aha, an app; there must be an app for that? So I search in the AppStore for such an app, but curiously drew a blank. Then the seeds of the idea started to grow. I can code, I work in a software house with lots of very clever people, surely I can make an app that points to the nearest digital tv transmitter! Not having looked into app development before, I investigated how one goes about making an iPhone app and was quickly greeted by a now familiar answer "Buy a mac!". That was not an option for many reasons, mostly wife related! My dreams were starting to fade until one of my colleagues pointed out that within Red Gate, the very company I work for, there was on-going development on a piece of software that would allow me to write an app using Visual Studio on a Windows machine, Nomad! Once I signed up for the beta program I got to work learning the Jquery mobile / Phonegap framework. Within a couple of hours I had written (in Visual Studio), built in the cloud (using Nomad) and published (via TestFlight) my first iPhone app onto my iPhone ! It didn't do much, but it was a step in the right direction. To be continued...

  Read the article

• PHP File Serving Script: Unreliable Downloads?

  - by JGB146

  This post started as a question on ServerFault ( http://serverfault.com/questions/131156/user-receiving-partial-downloads ) but I determined that our php script was the culprit. So I'm issuing an updated question here about what I believe is the actual issue. I am using a php script to verify permissions and then serve up a file for users of my website to download. Most of the time, this works, but recently one user has been seeing problems with larger downloads. He is only getting ~80% of downloads for files that are 100MB in size. Also, all downloads from this script fail to report a filesize. Further, tests revealed that the same user COULD reliably download each of the failed files if given a direct link (at which point the filesize is reported). Here's the relevant snippet of code that we are using to serve the file: header("Content-type:$contenttype"); $len = filesize($filename); header("Content-Length: $len"); header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=".$title.".".$ext); readfile($filename); Note that $contenttype, $filename, $title, and $ext are all set correctly before we get here. These have been triple-checked. None of them are the problem. Also, $len does provide the correct filesize. While researching this issue, I came across this post: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1334471/content-length-header-always-zero It seems that I am encountering the same issue. When I use the script, I get chunked encoding on the file and no size is set for content-length. I'm hypothesizing that something is going wrong on the large downloads, leading him to get a zero-length chunk before the end of the file. Here's what the headers look like for a direct request: http://www.grinderschool.com/videos/zfff5061b65ae00e8b21/KillsAids021.wmv GET /videos/zfff5061b65ae00e8b21/KillsAids021.wmv HTTP/1.1 Host: www.grinderschool.com User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100401 Firefox/3.6.3 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729) Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8 Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5 Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7 Keep-Alive: 115 Connection: keep-alive Referer: http://www.grinderschool.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=14&p=29468 Cookie: style_cookie=printonly; phpbb3_7c544_u=2; phpbb3_7c544_k=44b832912e5f887d; phpbb3_7c544_sid=e8852df42e08cc1b2250300c2897f78f; __utma=174624884.2719561324781918700.1251850714.1270986325.1270989003.575; __utmz=174624884.1264524375.411.12.utmcsr=google|utmccn=(organic)|utmcmd=organic|utmctr=low%20stakes%20poker%20videos; phpbb3_cmviy_k=; phpbb3_cmviy_u=2; phpbb3_cmviy_sid=d8df5c0943863004ca40ef9c392d371d; __utmb=174624884.4.10.1270989003; __utmc=174624884 Pragma: no-cache Cache-Control: no-cache HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Sun, 11 Apr 2010 12:57:41 GMT Server: Apache/2.2.14 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.14 OpenSSL/0.9.8l DAV/2 mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 Last-Modified: Sun, 04 Apr 2010 12:51:06 GMT Etag: "eb42d6-7d9b843-48368aa6dc280" Accept-Ranges: bytes Content-Length: 131708995 Keep-Alive: timeout=10, max=30 Connection: Keep-Alive Content-Type: video/x-ms-wmv And here's what they look like for the request answered by my script: http://www.grinderschool.com/download_video_test.php?t=KillsAids021&format=wmv GET /download_video_test.php?t=KillsAids021&format=wmv HTTP/1.1 Host: www.grinderschool.com User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100401 Firefox/3.6.3 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729) Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8 Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5 Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7 Keep-Alive: 115 Connection: keep-alive Cookie: style_cookie=printonly; phpbb3_7c544_u=2; phpbb3_7c544_k=44b832912e5f887d; phpbb3_7c544_sid=e8852df42e08cc1b2250300c2897f78f; __utma=174624884.2719561324781918700.1251850714.1270986325.1270989003.575; __utmz=174624884.1264524375.411.12.utmcsr=google|utmccn=(organic)|utmcmd=organic|utmctr=low%20stakes%20poker%20videos; phpbb3_cmviy_k=; phpbb3_cmviy_u=2; phpbb3_cmviy_sid=d8df5c0943863004ca40ef9c392d371d; __utmb=174624884.4.10.1270989003; __utmc=174624884 HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Sun, 11 Apr 2010 12:58:02 GMT Server: Apache/2.2.14 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.14 OpenSSL/0.9.8l DAV/2 mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.11 Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=KillsAids021.wmv Vary: Accept-Encoding Content-Encoding: gzip Keep-Alive: timeout=10, max=30 Connection: Keep-Alive Transfer-Encoding: chunked Content-Type: video/x-ms-wmv So the question is...what can I do to make downloads from the script work properly? Again, for 99% of users, it works as is (though I find it annoying now that no filesize is reported and thus that no time estimate can be computed about the download).

  Read the article

• Good DBAs Do Baselines

  - by Louis Davidson

  One morning, you wake up and feel funny. You can’t quite put your finger on it, but something isn’t quite right. What now? Unless you happen to be a hypochondriac, you likely drag yourself out of bed, get on with the day and gather more “evidence”. You check your symptoms over the next few days; do you feel the same, better, worse? If better, then great, it was some temporal issue, perhaps caused by an allergic reaction to some suspiciously spicy chicken. If the same or worse then you go to the doctor for some health advice, but armed with some data to share, and having ruled out certain possible causes that are fixed with a bit of rest and perhaps an antacid. Whether you realize it or not, in comparing how you feel one day to the next, you have taken baseline measurements. In much the same way, a DBA uses baselines to gauge the gauge health of their database servers. Of course, while SQL Server is very willing to share data regarding its health and activities, it has almost no idea of the difference between good and bad. Over time, experienced DBAs develop “mental” baselines with which they can gauge the health of their servers almost as easily as their own body. They accumulate knowledge of the daily, natural state of each part of their database system, and so know instinctively when one of their databases “feels funny”. Equally, they know when an “issue” is just a passing tremor. They see their SQL Server with all of its four CPU cores running close 100% and don’t panic anymore. Why? It’s 5PM and every day the same thing occurs when the end-of-day reports, which are very CPU intensive, are running. Equally, they know when they need to respond in earnest when it is the first time they have heard about an issue, even if it has been happening every day. Nevertheless, no DBA can retain mental baselines for every characteristic of their systems, so we need to collect physical baselines too. In my experience, surprisingly few DBAs do this very well. Part of the problem is that SQL Server provides a lot of instrumentation. If you look, you will find an almost overwhelming amount of data regarding user activity on your SQL Server instances, and use and abuse of the available CPU, I/O and memory. It seems like a huge task even to work out which data you need to collect, let alone start collecting it on a regular basis, managing its storage over time, and performing detailed comparative analysis. However, without baselines, though, it is very difficult to pinpoint what ails a server, just by looking at a single snapshot of the data, or to spot retrospectively what caused the problem by examining aggregated data for the server, collected over many months. It isn’t as hard as you think to get started. You’ve probably already established some troubleshooting queries of the type SELECT Value FROM SomeSystemTableOrView. Capturing a set of baseline values for such a query can be as easy as changing it as follows: INSERT into BaseLine.SomeSystemTable (value, captureTime) SELECT Value, SYSDATETIME() FROM SomeSystemTableOrView; Of course, there are monitoring tools that will collect and manage this baseline data for you, automatically, and allow you to perform comparison of metrics over different periods. However, to get yourself started and to prove to yourself (or perhaps the person who writes the checks for tools) the value of baselines, stick something similar to the above query into an agent job, running every hour or so, and you are on your way with no excuses! Then, the next time you investigate a slow server, and see x open transactions, y users logged in, and z rows added per hour in the Orders table, compare to your baselines and see immediately what, if anything, has changed!

  Read the article

• Antenna Aligner Part 3: Kaspersky

  - by Chris George

  Quick one today. Since starting this project, I've been encountering times where Nomad fails to build my app. It would then take repeated attempts at building to then see a build go through successfully. Rob, who works on Nomad at Red Gate, investigated this and it showed that certain parts of the message required to trigger the 'cloud build' were not getting through to the Nomad app, causing the HTTP connection to stall until timeout. After much scratching heads, it turns out that the Kaspersky Internet Security system I have installed on my laptop at home, was being very aggressive and was causing the problem. Perhaps it's trying to protect me from myself? Anyway, we came up with an interim solution why the Nomad guys investigate with Kaspersky by setting Visual Studio to be a trusted application with the Kaspersky settings and setting it to not scan network traffic. Hey presto! This worked and I have not had a single build problem since (other than losing internet connection, or that embarrassing moment when you blame everyone else then realise you've accidentally switched off your wireless on the laptop).

  Read the article

• AsyncBridge? Async on .NET 4.0 using VS11

  - by Alex.Davies

  I've just found something quite cool. It's a code snippet that lets you use the real VS 11 C#5 compiler to write code that uses the async and await keywords, but to target .NET 4.0. It was published by Daniel Grunwald (from SharpDevelop).That means I can stop using the Async CTP for VS2010, which is not at all supported anymore, and a pain to install if you have windows updates turned on. Obviously I couldn't ask all my users to install .NET 4.5 beta, but .NET Demon is a VS 2010 extension, so we already have .NET 4.0. At the time of writing, VS11 is in beta still, but hopefully it's stable enough for my team to use!I would have written the code myself, but I had the wrong impression that the C# 5 beta compiler only looked in mscorlib for the helper classes it needs to implement async methods. Turns out you can provide them yourself. You can get the code here: https://gist.github.com/1961087You just add it to your project, and the compiler will apparently pick it up and use it to implement async/await. I'm at my parents' place for Easter without access to a machine with VS 11 to try it out. Let me know whether you get it to work!This reminds me of LINQBridge, which let us use C# 3 LINQ, but only require .NET 2. We should stick up a webpage to explain, with a nice easy dll, put it in nuget, and call it AsyncBridge.If you were really enthusiastic, you could re-implement the skeleton of the Task Parallel Library against .NET 2 to use async/await without even requiring .NET 4. Our usage stats suggest that practically everyone that uses Red Gate tools already has .NET 4 installed though, so I don't think I'll go to the effort.

  Read the article

• SQL Server Optimizer Malfunction?

  - by Tony Davis

  There was a sharp intake of breath from the audience when Adam Machanic declared the SQL Server optimizer to be essentially "stuck in 1997". It was during his fascinating "Query Tuning Mastery: Manhandling Parallelism" session at the recent PASS SQL Summit. Paraphrasing somewhat, Adam (blog | @AdamMachanic) offered a convincing argument that the optimizer often delivers flawed plans based on assumptions that are no longer valid with today’s hardware. In 1997, when Microsoft engineers re-designed the database engine for SQL Server 7.0, SQL Server got its initial implementation of a cost-based optimizer. Up to SQL Server 2000, the developer often had to deploy a steady stream of hints in SQL statements to combat the occasionally wilful plan choices made by the optimizer. However, with each successive release, the optimizer has evolved and improved in its decision-making. It is still prone to the occasional stumble when we tackle difficult problems, join large numbers of tables, perform complex aggregations, and so on, but for most of us, most of the time, the optimizer purrs along efficiently in the background. Adam, however, challenged further any assumption that the current optimizer is competent at providing the most efficient plans for our more complex analytical queries, and in particular of offering up correctly parallelized plans. He painted a picture of a present where complex analytical queries have become ever more prevalent; where disk IO is ever faster so that reads from disk come into buffer cache faster than ever; where the improving RAM-to-data ratio means that we have a better chance of finding our data in cache. Most importantly, we have more CPUs at our disposal than ever before. To get these queries to perform, we not only need to have the right indexes, but also to be able to split the data up into subsets and spread its processing evenly across all these available CPUs. Improvements such as support for ColumnStore indexes are taking things in the right direction, but, unfortunately, deficiencies in the current Optimizer mean that SQL Server is yet to be able to exploit properly all those extra CPUs. Adam’s contention was that the current optimizer uses essentially the same costing model for many of its core operations as it did back in the days of SQL Server 7, based on assumptions that are no longer valid. One example he gave was a "slow disk" bias that may have been valid back in 1997 but certainly is not on modern disk systems. Essentially, the optimizer assesses the relative cost of serial versus parallel plans based on the assumption that there is no IO cost benefit from parallelization, only CPU. It assumes that a single request will saturate the IO channel, and so a query would not run any faster if we parallelized IO because the disk system simply wouldn’t be able to handle the extra pressure. As such, the optimizer often decides that a serial plan is lower cost, often in cases where a parallel plan would improve performance dramatically. It was challenging and thought provoking stuff, as were his techniques for driving parallelism through query logic based on subsets of rows that define the "grain" of the query. I highly recommend you catch the session if you missed it. I’m interested to hear though, when and how often people feel the force of the optimizer’s shortcomings. Barring mistakes, such as stale statistics, how often do you feel the Optimizer fails to find the plan you think it should, and what are the most common causes? Is it fighting to induce it toward parallelism? Combating unexpected plans, arising from table partitioning? Something altogether more prosaic? Cheers, Tony.

  Read the article

• Calling all developers building ASP.NET applications

  - by Laila Lotfi

  We know that developers building desktop apps have to contend with memory management issues, and we’d like to learn more about the memory challenges ASP.NET developers are facing. To be more specific, we’re carrying out some exploratory research leading into the next phase of development on ANTS Memory Profiler, and our development team would love to speak to developers building ASP.NET applications. You don’t need to have ever used ANTS profiler – this will be a more general conversation about: - your current site architecture, and how you manage the memory requirements of your applications on your back-end servers and web services. - how you currently diagnose memory leaks and where you do this (production server, or during testing phase, or if you normally manage to get them all during the local development). - what specific memory problems you’ve experienced – if any. Of course, we’ll compensate you for your time with a $50 Amazon voucher (or equivalent in other currencies), and our development team’s undying gratitude. If you’d like to participate, please just drop me a line on [email protected].

  Read the article

• Finding bugs is difficult, right?

  - by Laila

  Something I hear developers tell us all the time is that they take pride in being a developer.and that bugs are a dent in that pride. Someone once told me "I know I have found bugs years later, and it's the worst feeling in the world." So how can you avoid that sinking feeling when you find out a bug has been in production months before someone lets you know about it? Besides, let's face it: hearing about a bug often means a world of pain, because it can take hours to track down where the problem is and more hours (if not days) to fix it. And during that time, you're not working on something new, and that, my friends, is really frustrating! So to cheer you up, we've created a Bug Hunt game, where you battle against the clock to spot bugs. We've really enjoyed putting this together and hope you enjoy playing it too. Once you're done with the bug hunt, we explain how easy it can be to find and fix bugs in real life, using a neat mechanism that we call Automated Error Reporting. Play the game now.

  Read the article

• Security Issues When Creating Pages in SharePoint

  - by Damon

  I was speaking (or rather IM'ing) with Ben Collins a while back and he came across an interesting problem that I wanted to document for the sake of posterity.  If you have a SharePoint user who has permissions to create a page in a page library, but that user is having security issues trying to actually make a page, then it the security issue may be related to their access rights on the master page gallery.  Users who create pages must have at least restricted read access to the master page gallery for page creation to succeed. That is one of the joys of working in SharePoint. if something doesn't show up there is usually a good but obscure reason for it, but SharePoint certainly won't tell you outright why it is.  All I have to say is that I'm glad he ran into that issue and not me.

  Read the article

• In search of database delivery practitioners and enthusiasts

  - by Claire Brooking

  We know from speaking with many of you at tradeshows and user groups that database delivery is not a factory production line. During planning, evaluation, quality control, and disaster mitigation, the people having their say at each step means that successful database deployment is a carefully managed course of action. With so many factors involved at every stage, we would love to find a way for our software to help out, by simplifying processes, speeding them up or joining together the people and the steps that make it all happen. We’re hoping our new research group for database delivery (SQL Server and Oracle) will help us understand the views and experiences of those of you out there in the trenches managing database changes. As part of our new group, we’ll be running a variety of research sessions, including surveys and phone interviews, over coming months. If you have opinions to share on Continuous Integration or Continuous Delivery for databases, we’d love to hear from you. Your feedback really will count as the product teams at Red Gate build plans. For some of our more in-depth sessions, we’ll also be offering participants an Amazon voucher as a thank-you for your time. If you’re not yet practising automated database deployment processes, but are contemplating or planning it, please do consider joining our research group too. If you’d like to sign up to the group and find out more, please fill in a quick form online, and we’ll be in touch to let you know about new research opportunities you might be interested in. We look forward to hearing your stories!

  Read the article

• Building Enterprise Smartphone App &ndash; Part 4: Application Development Considerations

  - by Tim Murphy

  This is the final part in a series of posts based on a talk I gave recently at the Chicago Information Technology Architects Group.  Feel free to leave feedback. Application Development Considerations Now we get to the actual building of your solutions.  What are the skills and resources that will be needed in order to develop a smartphone application in the enterprise? Language Knowledge One of the first things you need to consider when you are deciding which platform language do you either have the most in house skill base or can you easily acquire.  If you already have developers who know Java or C# you may want to use either Android or Windows Phone.  You should also take into consideration the market availability of developers.  If your key developer leaves how easy is it to find a knowledgeable replacement? A second consideration when it comes to programming languages is the qualities exposed by the languages of a particular platform.  How well does that development language and its associated frameworks support things like security and access to the features of the smartphone hardware?  This will play into your overall cost of ownership if you have to create this infrastructure on your own. Manage Limited Resources Everything is limited on a smartphone: battery, memory, processing power, network bandwidth.  When developing your applications you will have to keep your footprint as small as possible in every way.  This means not running unnecessary processes in the background that will drain the battery or pulling more data over the airwaves than you have to.  You also want to keep your on device in as compact a format as possible. Mobile Design Patterns There are a number of design patterns that have either come to life because of smartphone development or have been adapted for this use.  The main pattern in the Windows Phone environment is the MVVM (Model-View-View-Model).  This is great for overall application structure and separation of concerns.  The fun part is trying to keep that separation as pure as possible.  Many of the other patterns may or may not have strict definitions, but some that you need to be concerned with are push notification, asynchronous communication and offline data storage. Real estate is limited on smartphones and even tablets. You are also limited in the type of controls that can be represented in the UI. This means rethinking how you modularize your application. Typing is also much harder to do so you want to reduce this as much as possible.  This leads to UI patterns.  While not what we would traditionally think of as design patterns the guidance each platform has for UI design is critical to the success of your application.  If user find the application difficult navigate they will not use it. Development Process Because of the differences in development tools required, test devices and certification and deployment processes your teams will need to learn new way of working together.  This will include the need to integrate service contracts of back-end systems with mobile applications.  You will also want to make sure that you present consistency across different access points to corporate data.  Your web site may have more functionality than your smartphone application, but it should have a consistent core set of functionality.  This all requires greater communication between sub-teams of your developers. Testing Process Testing of smartphone apps has a lot more to do with what happens when you lose connectivity or if the user navigates away from your application. There are a lot more opportunities for the user or the device to perform disruptive acts.  This should be your main testing concentration aside from the main business requirements.  You will need to do things like setting the phone to airplane mode and seeing what the application does in order to weed out any gaps in your handling communication interruptions. Need For Outside Experts Since this is a development area that is new to most companies the need for experts is a lot greater. Whether these are consultants, vendor representatives or just development community forums you will need to establish expert contacts. Nothing is more dangerous for your project timelines than a lack of knowledge.  Make sure you know who to call to avoid lengthy delays in your project because of knowledge gaps. Security Security has to be a major concern for enterprise applications. You aren't dealing with just someone's game standings. You are dealing with a companies intellectual property and competitive advantage. As such you need to start by limiting access to the application itself.  Once the user is in the app you need to ensure that the data is secure at all times.  This includes both local storage and across the wire.  This means if a platform doesn’t natively support encryption for these functions you will need to find alternatives to secure your data.  You also need to keep secret (encryption) keys obfuscated or locked away outside of the application. People can disassemble the code otherwise and break your encryption. Offline Capabilities As we discussed earlier one your biggest concerns is not having connectivity.  Because of this a good portion of your code may be dedicated to handling loss of connection and reconnection situations.  What do you do if you lose the network?  Back up all your transactions and store of any supporting data so that operations can continue off line. In order to support this you will need to determine the available flat file or local data base capabilities of the platform.  Any failed transactions will need to support a retry mechanism whether it is automatic or user initiated.  This also includes your services since they will need to be able to roll back partially completed transactions.  What ever you do, don’t ignore this area when you are designing your system. Deployment Each platform has different deployment capabilities. Some are more suited to enterprise situations than others. Apple's approach is probably the most mature at the moment. Prior to the current generation of smartphone platforms it would have been Windows CE. Windows Phone 7 has the limitation that the app has to be distributed through the same network as public facing applications. You mark them as private which means that they are only accessible by a direct URL. Unfortunately this does not make them undiscoverable (although it is very difficult). This will change with Windows Phone 8 where companies will be able to certify their own applications and distribute them.  Given this Windows Phone applications need to be more diligent with application access in order to keep them restricted to the company's employees. My understanding of the Android deployment schemes is that it is much less standardized then either iOS or Windows Phone. Someone would have to confirm or deny that for me though since I have not yet put the time into researching this platform further. Given my limited exposure to the iOS and Android platforms I have not been able to confirm this, but there are varying degrees of user involvement to install and keep applications updated. At one extreme the user just goes to a website to do the install and in other case they may need to download files and perform steps to install them. Future Bluetooth Today we use Bluetooth for keyboards, mice and headsets.  In the future it could be used to interrogate car computers or manufacturing systems or possibly retail machines by service techs.  This would open smartphones to greater use as a almost a Star Trek Tricorder.  You would get you all your data as well as being able to use it as a universal remote for just about any device or machine. Better corporation controlled deployment At least in the Windows Phone world the upcoming release of Windows Phone 8 will include a private certification and deployment option that is currently not available with Windows Phone 7 (Mango). We currently have to run the apps through the Marketplace certification process and use a targeted distribution method. Platform independent approaches HTML5 and JavaScript with Web Service has become a popular topic lately for not only creating flexible web site, but also creating cross platform mobile applications.  I’m not yet convinced that this lowest common denominator approach is viable in most cases, but it does have it’s place and seems to be growing.  Be sure to keep an eye on it. Summary From my perspective enterprise smartphone applications can offer a great competitive advantage to many companies.  They are not cheap to build and should be approached cautiously.  Understand the factors I have outlined in this series, do you due diligence and see if there is a portion of your business that can benefit from the mobile experience. del.icio.us Tags: Architecture,Smartphones,Windows Phone,iOS,Android

  Read the article

• AIR: sync gui with data-base?

  - by John Isaacks

  I am going to be building an AIR application that shows a list (about 1-25 rows of data) from a data-base. The data-base is on the web. I want the list to be as accurate as possible, meaning as soon as the data-base data changes, the list displayed in the app should update asap. I do not know of anyway that the air application could be notified when there is a change, I am thinking I am going to have to poll the data-base at certain intervals to keep an up to date list. So my question is, first is there any way to NOT have to keep checking the data-base? or if I do keep have to keep checking the data-base what is a reasonable interval to do that at? Thanks.

  Read the article

• Antenna Aligner part 2: Finding the right direction

  - by Chris George

  Last time I managed to get "my first app(tm)" built, published and running on my iPhone. This was really cool, a piece of my code running on my very own device. Ok, so I'm easily pleased! The next challenge was actually trying to determine what it was I wanted this app to do, and how to do it. Reverting back to good old paper and pen, I started sketching out designs for the app. I knew I wanted it to get a list of transmitters, then clicking on a transmitter would display a compass type view, with an arrow pointing the right way. I figured there would not be much point in continuing until I know I could do the graphical part of the project, i.e. the rotating compass, so armed with that reasoning (plus the fact I just wanted to get on and code!), I once again dived into visual studio. Using my friend (google) I found some example code for getting the compass data from the phone using the PhoneGap framework. // onSuccess: Get the current heading // function onSuccess(heading) {    alert('Heading: ' + heading); } navigator.compass.getCurrentHeading(onSuccess, onError); Using the ripple mobile emulator this showed that it was successfully getting the compass heading. But it didn't work when uploaded to my phone. It turns out that the examples I had been looking at were for PhoneGap 1.0, and Nomad uses PhoneGap 1.4.1. In 1.4.1, getCurrentHeading provides a compass object to onSuccess, not just a numeric value, so the code now looks like // onSuccess: Get the current magnetic heading // function onSuccess(heading) {    alert('Heading: ' + heading.magneticHeading); }; navigator.compass.getCurrentHeading(onSuccess, onError); So the lesson learnt from this... read the documentation for the version you are actually using! This does, however, lead to compatibility problems with ripple as it only supports 1.0 which is a real pain. I hope that the ripple system is updated sometime soon.

  Read the article

• Social Networking at Professional Events

  Dr. Masha Petrova compresses, into a small space, much good advice on networking with other professional people. She draws from her own experience as a technical expert to provide a detailed checklist of things you should and shouldn't do at conferences or tradeshows to be a successful 'networker'. As usual, she delivers sage advice with a dash of humour.

  Read the article

• Defining .NET Components with Namespaces

  A .NET software component is a compiled set of classes that provide a programmable interface that is used by consumer applications for a service. As a component is no more than a logical grouping of classes, what then is the best way to define the boundaries of a component within the .NET framework? How should the classes inter-operate? Patrick Smacchia, the lead developer of NDepend, discusses the issues and comes up with a solution.

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186  | Next Page >