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  • They may block off Howard Street—but Oracle OpenWorld is a two-way street.

    - by Oracle Accelerate for Midsize Companies
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 by Jim Lein, Sr. Director, Oracle Accelerate for Midsize Companies “Engineered to Inform and Inspire”—that’s the theme of Oracle OpenWorld 2012. In early October, tens of thousands of attendees will descend on the streets of San Francisco because they share one thing in common: the desire to learn more about Oracle. You might think that’s the way we, Oracle employees, look at this event—as just another opportunity for attendees to learn about what we do. But it’s really a two way street. Every year I’m amazed by how informed and inspired I am by our customers and their companies. Midsize companies buy Oracle to grow. As part of the Oracle Accelerate for Midsize Companies team I get to talk with our partners and business leaders at growing companies almost every day, usually via phone. Oracle OpenWorld presents the perfect opportunity to meet some of them in person, in an informal setting, and in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. The stories our customers tell me about their businesses provide vivid examples of how they have overcome the challenges of managing increasingly complex global operations and growing during uncertain economic conditions. It’s no secret that my favorite session at Oracle OpenWorld (besides Larry Ellison’s keynotes and the Customer Appreciation Event, of course) is the Oracle Accelerate Customer Panel. This year we’re featuring executives from three companies who deployed Oracle ERP rapidly to support their company’s growth: Chris Powell, VP and Corporate Controller of Beats by Dr. Dre, a California based designer and manufacturer of premium headphones (sorry, no free samples), Iñaki Zuazo, CIO of Industrias Juno, a building materials provider based in Spain, Kamran Moosa, Project Coordinator for Spartan Engineering, a provider of engineering and construction support services for an LPG storage project in Texas, and That’s a pretty diverse lineup and it will be interesting to hear the perspectives of both IT and financial project stakeholders. The session, “Oracle Accelerate Customer Case Studies: Rapid Deployment of Oracle Applications”, is at 3:30 pm on Wednesday, October 3, in the Concert room at the Palace Hotel. Oracle loves our hometown of San Francisco and it’s a great place to host Oracle OpenWorld. It’s now San Francisco’s largest conference and the city closes off Howard Street to better accommodate the attendees. Some Bay Area commuters may be inconvenienced for a few days by this closure but the conference brings about $100 million into the local economy. Now that’s a two-way street. More Oracle Accelerate at Oracle OpenWorld “Faster, Better, Cheaper Application Deployment with Oracle Business Accelerators”, Monday, October 1st, 10:45 a.m., Moscone West Room 3016 “Oracle Accelerate and Oracle Business Accelerators for Midsize Companies”, (partners only), Wednesday, October 3, 10:15 a.m., Marriott – Golden Gate B Visit the Oracle Accelerate and Oracle Business Accelerator Kiosk in the Moscone West Exhibit Grounds Download the Focus On Oracle Accelerate for Midsize Companies Focus document /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";}

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  • Interviews Gone Bad.....Now What Do I Do?

    - by david.talamelli
    We have all done it at some stage of our working careers - you know those times when you leave an interview and then you think to yourself "why didn't I ask that question" or "I can't believe I said that" or "how could I have forgotten to say that". It happens to everyone but how you handle things moving forwards could be critical in helping you land that dream job. There is nothing better than seeing that dream job with the dream company that you are looking to work for advertised (or in some cases getting called by the Recruiter to let you know about that job). The role may seem perfect and it could be just what you are looking for and it is with the right company as well. You have sent in your resume and have subsequently had one, two or maybe three interviews for the role. After each step of the process you get a little bit more excited about the role as you start to think about your work day in your new role/company. Then it happens, you get it: you get The Phone Call to inform you that you have not been successful in securing the position that you have invested so much time and effort into. It can be disappointing to hear this news but what you do next is important in potentially keeping that door open for future opportunities with that company. How you handle yourself in this situation is important: if any of you remember the Choose Your Own Adventure Books do you: Tell the Recruiter (maybe get aggressive) they are wrong in their assessment and that you are the right candidate for the role Switch off and say ok thanks and hang up without engaging in any further dialogue Thank the company for their time and enquire if there may be any other opportunities in the future to explore If you chose the first option - the company in question may consider whether or not to look at you for other opportunities. How you handle yourself in the recruitment process could be an indication of how you would deal with clients/colleagues in your role and the impression that you leave a potential employer may be what sticks in their mind when they think of you (eg: isn't that the person who couldn't handle it when we told him he wasn't right for our role). The second option potentially produces a similar outcome. If you rush to get off the phone, the company may come back to you to talk about other roles when they come up, but you also leave open the potential thought with the company you were only interested in that role and therefore not interested in any other opportunities. Why take the risk of the company thinking that and potentially not getting back to you in the future. By picking the third option, you actively engage with the company and keep the dialogue open for future discussions. Ok, so you didn't get the role you interviewed for - you don't know who else the company may have been interviewing - maybe they found someone who was a better fit, or maybe there were too many boxes you didn't tick to step straight into that specific role. Take a deep breath and keep the company engaged. You are fresh in their mind - take advantage of that fact and let them know that while you respect their decision, that you are still interested in the company and would like to be kept in mind for future roles. Ask if it is ok to keep in touch and when they would like to keep in touch, as long as you are interested let them know you are still interested. You do need to balance that though if you come across as too keen or start stalking people - it could equally damage your brand. Companies normally have more than one open role. New roles are created all the time, circumstances change and hiring people is not a static business, it changes course from everyone's best laid initial plans. If you didn't get that initial role you wanted, keep the door open with that company so that when those new roles do come up or when circumstances do change you have already laid the ground to step into those new positions.

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  • Dude, what’s up with POP Forums vNext?

    - by Jeff
    Yeah, it has been awhile. I posted v9.2 back in January, about five months ago. That’s a real change from the release pace I had there for awhile. Let me explain what’s going on. First off, in the interim, I re-launched CoasterBuzz, which required a lot of my attention for about two of those months. That’s a good thing though, because that site is just about the best test bed I could ask for. The other thing is that I committed to make the next version use ASP.NET MVC 4, which is now at the RC stage. I didn’t think much about when they’d hit their RTW point, but RC is good enough for me. To that end, there is enough change in the next version that I recently decided to make it a major version upgrade, and finish up the loose ends and science projects to make it whole. Here’s what’s in store… Mobile views: I sat on this or a long time. Originally, I was going to use jQuery Mobile, and waited and waited for a new release, but in the end, decided against using it. Sometimes buttons would unexplainably not work, I felt like I was fighting it at times, and the CSS just felt too heavy. I rolled my own mobile sugar at a fraction of the size, and I think you’ll find it easy to modify. And it’s Metro-y, of course! Re-do of background services: A number of things run in the background, and I did quite a bit of “reimagining” of that code. It’s the weirdness of running services in a Web site context, because so many folks can’t run a bona fide service on their host’s box. The biggest change here is that these service no longer start up by default. You’ll need to call a new method from global.asax called PopForumsActivation.StartServices(). This is also a precursor to running the app in a Web farm (new data layer and caching is the second part of that). I learned about this the hard way when I had three apps using the forum library code but only one was actually the forum. The services were all running three times as often with race conditions and hits on the same data. That was particularly bad for e-mail. CSS clean up: It’s still not ideal, but it’s getting better. That’s one of those things that comes with integrating to a real site… you discover all of the dumb things you did. The mobile CSS is particularly easier to live with. Bug fixes: There are a whole lot of them. Most were minor, but it’s feeling pretty solid now. So that’s where I am. I’m going to call it v10.0, and I’m going to really put forth some effort toward finishing the mobile experience and getting through the remaining bugs. The roadmap beyond that will likely not be feature oriented, but rather work on some other things, like making it run in Azure, perhaps using SQL CE, a better install experience, etc. As usual, I’ll post the latest here. Stay tuned!

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  • iPad Impressions

    - by Aaron Lazenby
    So, I spent some quality time with my new iPad on Saturday. Here are things I like/don't like: -- Don't like that it has to sync with iTunes before you use it: I was traveling and left my laptop at home thinking I'd use this iPad thing instead. But the first thing it asked me to do is connect it to a laptop. Ugh. Had to borrow my mother-in-law's MacBook Pro just to get the iPad rolling. -- Like that magazines and newspapers are forever changed: And I think for the better...it's why I bought this thing in the first place. I spent significant time with The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine and Popular Science on the iPad. Sliding stories around, jumping from section to section, enlarging images = all excellent experiences. Actually prefer iPad magazine to print, which will require a major shift in editorial strategy, summed up by Popular Science's Mark Jannot in his editor's note "What defines a magazine? Curated expertise--not paper." -- Don't like the screwy human factors: I actually enjoy the virtual keyboard (although I think I'm in the minority), but you have to hunch over to look down at what you're typing. Bad technology ergonomics have already jacked my body in various ways. The iPad just introduced a new one.-- Like the multitouch: In fact, it's awesome. Hands down. Probably will have the most lasting impact on the personal computing industry as a whole.   -- Don't like that it's heavy: If you plan to read in bed, you'd better double up on the creatine and curls. Holding this thing up on your own gets pretty uncomfortable. -- Like the Netfilx app: I wanted to watch "The Big Lebowski," so I did. That is all. -- Don't like that people feel 3G is necessary: For $30 a month? Please. I'm already accustomed to limiting my laptop internet use to readily available free wi-fi. Why do I expect anything different with the iPad? Most anyplace I have time to sit and read/use a computer (cafe, airport, you house, library, etc.) has free wi-fi. I can live without web surfing in your car. That's what the iPhone is for. -- Don't like that not everyone was ready in day one: I'm looking at you Facebook. No iPad app for launch? Lame. iPhone apps scaled-up to work on the iPad look grainy and cheap. Not a quality befitting this beautiful $700 piece of glass.Verdict: I'm bringing it to COLLABORATE 08 and seeing if I can go the whole week using only the iPad. If I can trade this thing for my laptop, I know it's a winner. For now, I'm enjoying Popular Science.

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  • Building a Mafia&hellip;TechFest Style

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

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  • What’s the use of code reuse?

    - by Tony Davis
    All great developers write reusable code, don’t they? Well, maybe, but as with all statements regarding what “great” developers do or don’t do, it’s probably an over-simplification. A novice programmer, in particular, will encounter in the literature a general assumption of the importance of code reusability. They spend time worrying about DRY (don’t repeat yourself), moving logic into specific “helper” modules that they can then reuse, agonizing about the minutiae of the class structure, inheritance and interface design that will promote easy reuse. Unfortunately, writing code specifically for reuse often leads to complicated object hierarchies and inheritance models that are anything but reusable. If, instead, one strives to write simple code units that are highly maintainable and perform a single function, in a concise, isolated fashion then the potential for reuse simply “drops out” as a natural by-product. Programmers, of course, care about these principles, about encapsulation and clean interfaces that don’t expose inner workings and allow easy pluggability. This is great when it helps with the maintenance and development of code but how often, in practice, do we actually reuse our code? Most DBAs and database developers are familiar with the practical reasons for the limited opportunities to reuse database code and its potential downsides. However, surely elsewhere in our code base, reuse happens often. After all, we can all name examples, such as date/time handling modules, which if we write with enough care we can plug in to many places. I spoke to a developer just yesterday who looked me in the eye and told me that in 30+ years as a developer (a successful one, I’d add), he’d never once reused his own code. As I sat blinking in disbelief, he explained that, of course, he always thought he would reuse it. He’d often agonized over its design, certain that he was creating code of great significance that he and other generations would reuse, with grateful tears misting their eyes. In fact, it never happened. He had in his head, most of the algorithms he needed and would simply write the code from scratch each time, refining the algorithms and tailoring the code to meet the specific requirements. It was, he said, simply quicker to do that than dig out the old code, check it, correct the mistakes, and adapt it. Is this a common experience, or just a strange anomaly? Viewed in a certain light, building code with a focus on reusability seems to hark to a past age where people built cars and music systems with the idea that someone else could and would replace and reuse the parts. Technology advances so rapidly that the next time you need the “same” code, it’s likely a new technique, or a whole new language, has emerged in the meantime, better equipped to tackle the task. Maybe we should be less fearful of the idea that we could write code well suited to the system requirements, but with little regard for reuse potential, and then rewrite a better version from scratch the next time.

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  • Kanban Tools Review

    - by GeekAgilistMercenary
    The first two sessions on Sunday were Collaboration and why it is so hard and the following, which was a perfect following session was on Kanban.  While in that second session two online Saas Style Tools were mentioned; AgileZen and Leankit.  I decided right then and there that I would throw together some first impressions and setup some sample projects.  I did this by setting up an account and creating the projects. Agile Zen Account Creation Setting up the initial account required an e-mail verification, which is understandable.  Within a few seconds it was mailed out and I was logged in. Setting Up the Kanban Board The initial setup of the board was pretty easy.  I maybe clicked around an extra few times, but overall everything I needed to use the tool was immediately available.  The representation of everything was very similar to what one expects in a real Kanban Board too.  This is a HUGE plus, especially if a team is smart and places this tool in a centrally viewable area to allow for visibility. Each of the board items is just like a post it, being blue, grey, green, pink, or one of another few colors.  Dragging them onto each swim lane on the board was flawless, making changes through the work super easy and intuitive. The other thing I really liked about AgileZen is that the Kanban Board had the swim lanes setup immediately.  One can change them, but when you know you immediately need a Ready Lane, Working Lane, and a Complete Lane it is nice to just have them right in front of you in the interface.  In addition, the Backlog is simply a little tab on the left hand side.  This is perfect for the Backlog Queue.  Out of the way, with the focus on the primary items. Once  I got the items onto the board I was easily able to get back to the actual work at hand versus playing around with the tool.  The fact that it was so easy to use, fast and easy UX, and overall a great layout put me back to work on things I needed to do versus sitting a playing with the tool.  That, in the end is the key to using these tools. LeanKit Kanban Account Creation Setting up the account got me straight into the online tool.  This I thought was pretty cool. Setting Up the Kanban Board Setting up the Kanban Board within Leankit was a bit of trouble.  There were multiple UX issues in regard to process and intuitiveness.  The Leankit basically forces one to design the whole board first, making no assumptions about how the board should look.  The swim lanes in my humble opinion should be setup immediately without any manipulation with the most common lanes;  ready, working, and complete. The other UX hiccup that I had a problem with is that as soon as I managed to get the swim lanes into place, I wanted to remove the redundant Backlog Lane.  The Backlog Lane, or Backlog Bucket should be somewhere that I accidentally added as a lane.  Then on top of that I screwed up and added an item inside the lane, which then prevented me from deleting the lane.  I had to go back out of the lane manipulation, remove the item, and then remove the excess lane.  Summary Leankit wasn't a bad interface, it just wasn't as good as AgileZen.  The AgileZen interface was just better UX design overall.  AgileZen also presents a much better user interface graphical design all together.  It is much closer to what the Kanban Board would look like if it were a physical Kanban Board.  Since one of the HUGE reasons for Kanban is to increase visibility, the fact the design is similar to what a real Kanban Board is actually a pretty big deal. This is an image (click for larger) that shows the two Kanban Boards side by side.  The one on the left is AgileZen and the right is Leankit. Original Entry

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  • When to implement: Together with or after the source product?

    - by Jeremy Oosthuizen
    Somebody recently relayed a prospect's question to me: How hard would it be to implement OUBI after the source product (CC&B, WAM or NMS) has already been implemented? Fact is that MOST non-OUBI Data Warehouse / Business Intelligence implementations take place after the source application(s) are in place and hopefully stable. If an organization decides that they need better reporting and management information, then the logical path (see The Data Warehouse Institute's Data Warehouse Maturity Model) is to a Data Warehouse -- no matter when their last applications were implemented. If there is a pre-built Data Warehouse for their specific application, or even for the desired business process in their industry, they're in luck. Else they have to design and build from scratch, using a toolset. The implementation of a toolset is unlike the implementation of OUBI which, like OBI Apps, contain pre-built ETL routines and user content. Much has been written before about the advantages of that. So, because OUBI is designed specifically for Oracle Utilities transactional products, we often implement them in parallel -- with OUBI lagging a little behind by necessity, like Reporting. Customers know from the start they're going to need the solution, and therefore purchase the products at the same time. My biggest argument FOR a parallel installation/implementation of OUBI with the source product is two-fold: - There could be things (which is the technical term for data elements) that customers figure out they need when implementing OUBI, which are often easier added to the source product's implementation project, than to add later; - OUBI's ETL often points out errors (severe or not) with converted data, which are easier to fix during the source product's implementation project, or it may even be impossible to fix afterwards. The Conversion routines sometimes miss these errors, because the source system can live with the not-quite-perfect converted data. If the data can't be properly extracted, i.e. the proper Dimensions linked to the Facts, then it can't get into OUBI. That means it can't be analyzed effectively along with the rest of the organization's data. Then there is also the throw-away-work argument, which may be significant. The operational / transactional system cannot go live without reports on Day 1. A lot of those reports would be taken care of by the implementation of OUBI. If OUBI is implemented after go-live, those reports STILL have to be built during the source product's implementation project, but they become throw-away after the OUBI implementation. I have sometimes been told that it is better to implement OUBI after the source product, because it cuts down on scope and risk for the source product's implementation project. All I can say to that, is bah humbug. No, seriously, given the arguments above, planning has to include the OUBI implementation and it has to be managed properly -- just like any other implementation. If so, it should not add any risk and it should be included in the scope from the start. The answer to the prospect's question is therefore that it is not that much more difficult; after all, most DW/BI implemenations are done like that. They just have to consider the points above.

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  • The Evolution Of C#

    - by Paulo Morgado
    The first release of C# (C# 1.0) was all about building a new language for managed code that appealed, mostly, to C++ and Java programmers. The second release (C# 2.0) was mostly about adding what wasn’t time to built into the 1.0 release. The main feature for this release was Generics. The third release (C# 3.0) was all about reducing the impedance mismatch between general purpose programming languages and databases. To achieve this goal, several functional programming features were added to the language and LINQ was born. Going forward, new trends are showing up in the industry and modern programming languages need to be more: Declarative With imperative languages, although having the eye on the what, programs need to focus on the how. This leads to over specification of the solution to the problem in hand, making next to impossible to the execution engine to be smart about the execution of the program and optimize it to run it more efficiently (given the hardware available, for example). Declarative languages, on the other hand, focus only on the what and leave the how to the execution engine. LINQ made C# more declarative by using higher level constructs like orderby and group by that give the execution engine a much better chance of optimizing the execution (by parallelizing it, for example). Concurrent Concurrency is hard and needs to be thought about and it’s very hard to shoehorn it into a programming language. Parallel.For (from the parallel extensions) looks like a parallel for because enough expressiveness has been built into C# 3.0 to allow this without having to commit to specific language syntax. Dynamic There was been lots of debate on which ones are the better programming languages: static or dynamic. The fact is that both have good qualities and users of both types of languages want to have it all. All these trends require a paradigm switch. C# is, in many ways, already a multi-paradigm language. It’s still very object oriented (class oriented as some might say) but it can be argued that C# 3.0 has become a functional programming language because it has all the cornerstones of what a functional programming language needs. Moving forward, will have even more. Besides the influence of these trends, there was a decision of co-evolution of the C# and Visual Basic programming languages. Since its inception, there was been some effort to position C# and Visual Basic against each other and to try to explain what should be done with each language or what kind of programmers use one or the other. Each language should be chosen based on the past experience and familiarity of the developer/team/project/company and not by particular features. In the past, every time a feature was added to one language, the users of the other wanted that feature too. Going forward, when a feature is added to one language, the other will work hard to add the same feature. This doesn’t mean that XML literals will be added to C# (because almost the same can be achieved with LINQ To XML), but Visual Basic will have auto-implemented properties. Most of these features require or are built on top of features of the .NET Framework and, the focus for C# 4.0 was on dynamic programming. Not just dynamic types but being able to talk with anything that isn’t a .NET class. Also introduced in C# 4.0 is co-variance and contra-variance for generic interfaces and delegates. Stay tuned for more on the new C# 4.0 features.

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  • Using the StopWatch class to calculate the execution time of a block of code

    - by vik20000in
      Many of the times while doing the performance tuning of some, class, webpage, component, control etc. we first measure the current time taken in the execution of that code. This helps in understanding the location in code which is actually causing the performance issue and also help in measuring the amount of improvement by making the changes. This measurement is very important as it helps us understand the problem in code, Helps us to write better code next time (as we have already learnt what kind of improvement can be made with different code) . Normally developers create 2 objects of the DateTime class. The exact time is collected before and after the code where the performance needs to be measured.  Next the difference between the two objects is used to know about the time spent in the code that is measured. Below is an example of the sample code.             DateTime dt1, dt2;             dt1 = DateTime.Now;             for (int i = 0; i < 1000000; i++)             {                 string str = "string";             }             dt2 = DateTime.Now;             TimeSpan ts = dt2.Subtract(dt1);             Console.WriteLine("Time Spent : " + ts.TotalMilliseconds.ToString());   The above code works great. But the dot net framework also provides for another way to capture the time spent on the code without doing much effort (creating 2 datetime object, timespan object etc..). We can use the inbuilt StopWatch class to get the exact time spent. Below is an example of the same work with the help of the StopWatch class.             Stopwatch sw = Stopwatch.StartNew();             for (int i = 0; i < 1000000; i++)             {                 string str = "string";             }             sw.Stop();             Console.WriteLine("Time Spent : " +sw.Elapsed.TotalMilliseconds.ToString());   [Note the StopWatch class resides in the System.Diagnostics namespace] If you use the StopWatch class the time taken for measuring the performance is much better, with very little effort. Vikram

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  • Is there a low carbon future for the retail industry?

    - by user801960
    Recently Oracle published a report in conjunction with The Future Laboratory and a global panel of experts to highlight the issue of energy use in modern industry and the serious need to reduce carbon emissions radically by 2050.  Emissions must be cut by 80-95% below the levels in 1990 – but what can the retail industry do to keep up with this? There are three key aspects to the retail industry where carbon emissions can be cut:  manufacturing, transport and IT.  Manufacturing Naturally, manufacturing is going to be a big area where businesses across all industries will be forced to make considerable savings in carbon emissions as well as other forms of pollution.  Many retailers of all sizes will use third party factories and will have little control over specific environmental impacts from the factory, but retailers can reduce environmental impact at the factories by managing orders more efficiently – better planning for stock requirements means economies of scale both in terms of finance and the environment. The John Lewis Partnership has made detailed commitments to reducing manufacturing and packaging waste on both its own-brand products and products it sources from third party suppliers. It aims to divert 95 percent of its operational waste from landfill by 2013, which is a huge logistics challenge.  The John Lewis Partnership’s website provides a large amount of information on its responsibilities towards the environment. Transport Similarly to manufacturing, tightening up on logistical planning for stock distribution will make savings on carbon emissions from haulage.  More accurate supply and demand analysis will mean less stock re-allocation after initial distribution, and better warehouse management will mean more efficient stock distribution.  UK grocery retailer Morrisons has introduced double-decked trailers to its haulage fleet and adjusted distribution logistics accordingly to reduce the number of kilometers travelled by the fleet.  Morrisons measures route planning efficiency in terms of cases moved per kilometre and has, over the last two years, increased the number of cases per kilometre by 12.7%.  See Morrisons Corporate Responsibility report for more information. IT IT infrastructure is often initially overlooked by businesses when considering environmental efficiency.  Datacentres and web servers often need to run 24/7 to handle both consumer orders and internal logistics, and this both requires a lot of energy and puts out a lot of heat.  Many businesses are lowering environmental impact by reducing IT system fragmentation in their offices, while an increasing number of businesses are outsourcing their datacenters to cloud-based services.  Using centralised datacenters reduces the power usage at smaller offices, while using cloud based services means the datacenters can be based in a more environmentally friendly location.  For example, Facebook is opening a massive datacentre in Sweden – close to the Arctic Circle – to reduce the need for artificial cooling methods.  In addition, moving to a cloud-based solution makes IT services more easily scaleable, reducing redundant IT systems that would still use energy.  In store, the UK’s Carbon Trust reports that on average, lighting accounts for 25% of a retailer’s electricity costs, and for grocery retailers, up to 50% of their electricity bill comes from refrigeration units.  On a smaller scale, retailers can invest in greener technologies in store and in their offices.  The report concludes that widely shared objectives of energy security, reduced emissions and continued economic growth are dependent on the development of a smart grid capable of delivering energy efficiency and demand response, as well as integrating renewable and variable sources of energy. The report is available to download from http://emeapressoffice.oracle.com/imagelibrary/detail.aspx?MediaDetailsID=1766I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on the report.   

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  • Know Your Audience, And/Or Your Customer

    - by steve.diamond
    Yesterday I gave an internal presentation to about 20 Oracle employees on "messaging," not messaging technology, but embarking on the process of building messages. One of the elements I covered was the importance of really knowing and understanding your audience. As a humorous reference I included two side-by-side photos of Oakland A's fans and Oakland Raiders fans. The Oakland A's fans looked like happy-go-lucky drunk types. The Oakland Raiders fans looked like angry extras from a low budget horror flick. I then asked my presentation attendees what these two groups had in common. Here's what I heard. --They're human (at least I THINK they're human). --They're from Oakland. --They're sports fans. After that, it was anyone's guess. A few days earlier we were putting the finishing touches on a sales presentation for one of our product lines. We had included an upfront "lead in" addressing how the economy is improving, yet that doesn't mean sales executives will have any more resources to add to their teams, invest in technology, etc. This "lead in" included miscellaneous news article headlines and statistics validating the slowly improving economy. When we subjected this presentation to internal review two days ago, this upfront section in particular was scrutinized. "Is the economy really getting better? I (exclamation point) don't think it's really getting better. Haven't you seen the headlines coming out of Greece and Europe?" Then the question TO ME became, "Who will actually be in the audience that sees and hears this presentation? Will s/he be someone like me? Or will s/he be someone like the critic who didn't like our lead-in?" We took the safe route and removed that lead in. After all, why start a "pitch" with a component that is arguably subjective? What if many of our audience members are individuals at organizations still facing a strong headwind? For reasons I won't go into here, it was the right decision to make. The moral of the story: Make sure you really know your audience. Harness the wisdom of the information your organization's CRM systems collect to get that fully informed "customer view." Conduct formal research. Conduct INFORMAL research. Ask lots of questions. Study industries and scenarios that have nothing to do with yours to see "how they do it." Stop strangers in coffee shops and on the street...seriously. Last week I caught up with an old friend from high school who recently retired from a 25 year career with the USMC. He said, "I can learn something from every single person I come into contact with." What a great way of approaching the world. Then, think about and write down what YOU like and dislike as a customer. But also remember that when it comes to your company's products, you are most likely NOT the customer, so don't go overboard in superimposing your own world view. Approaching the study of customers this way adds rhyme, reason and CONTEXT to lengthy blog posts like this one. Know your audience.

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  • AutoFit in PowerPoint: Turn it OFF

    - by Daniel Moth
    Once a feature has shipped, it is very hard to eliminate it from the next release. If I was in charge of the PowerPoint product, I would not hesitate for a second to remove the dreadful AutoFit feature. Fortunately, AutoFit can be turned off on a slide-by-slide basis and, even better, globally: go to the PowerPoint "Options" and under "Proofing" find the "AutoCorrect Options…" button which brings up the dialog where you need to uncheck the last two checkboxes (see the screenshot to the right). AutoFit is the ability for the user to keep hitting the Enter key as they type more and more text into a slide and it magically still fits, by shrinking the space between the lines and then the text font size. It is the root of all slide evil. It encourages people to think of a slide as a Word document (which may be your goal, if you are presenting to execs in Microsoft, but that is a different story). AutoFit is the reason you fall asleep in presentations. AutoFit causes too much text to appear on a slide which by extension causes the following: When the slide appears, the text is so small so it is not readable by everyone in the audience. They dismiss the presenter as someone who does not care for them and then they stop paying attention. If the text is readable, but it is too much (hence the AutoFit feature kicked in when the slide was authored), the audience is busy reading the slide and not paying attention to the presenter. Humans can either listen well or read well at the same time, so when they are done reading they now feel that they missed whatever the speaker was saying. So they "switch off" for the rest of the slide until the next slide kicks in, which is the natural point for them to pick up paying attention again. Every slide ends up with different sized text. The less visual consistency between slides, the more your presentation feels unprofessional. You can do better than dismiss the (subconscious) negative effect a deck with inconsistent slides has on an audience. In contrast, the absence of AutoFit Leads to consistency among all slides in a deck with regards to amount of text and size of said text. Ensures the text is readable by everyone in the audience (presuming the PowerPoint template is designed for the room where the presentation is delivered). Encourages the presenter to create slides with the minimum necessary text to help the audience understand the basic structure, flow, and key points of the presentation. The "meat" of the presentation is delivered verbally by the presenter themselves, which is why they are in the room in the first place. Following on from the previous point, the audience can at a quick glance consume the text on the slide when it appears and then concentrate entirely on the presenter and what they have to say. You could argue that everything above has nothing to do with the AutoFit feature and all to do with the advice to keep slide content short. You would be right, but the on-by-default AutoFit feature is the one that stops most people from seeing and embracing that truth. In other words, the slides are the tool that aids the presenter in delivering their message, instead of the presenter being the tool that advances the slides which hold the message. To get there, embrace terse slides: the first step is to turn off this horrible feature (that was probably introduced due to the misuse of this tool within Microsoft). The next steps are described on my next post. Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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  • Release Management as Orchestra

    - by ericajanine
    I read an excellent, concise article (http://www.buildmeister.com/articles/software_release_management_best_practices) on the basics of release management practices. In the article, it states "Release Management is often likened to the conductor of an orchestra, with the individual changes to be implemented the various instruments within it." I played in music ensembles for years, so this is especially close to my heart as example. I learned most of my discipline from hours and hours of practice at the hand of a very skilled conductor and leader. I also learned that the true magic in symphonic performance is one where everyone involved is focused on one sound, one goal. In turn, that solid focus creates a sound and experience bigger than just mechanics alone accomplish. In symphony, a conductor's true purpose is to make you, a performer, better so the overall sound and end product is better. The big picture (the performance of the composition) is the end-game, and all musicians in the orchestra know without question their part makes up an important but incomplete piece of that performance. A good conductor works with each section (e.g. group) to ensure their individual pieces are solid. Let's restate: The conductor leads and is responsible for ensuring those pieces are solid. While the performers themselves are doing the work, the conductor is the final authority on when the pieces are ready or not. If not, the conductor initiates the efforts to get them ready or makes the decision to scrap their parts altogether for the sake of an overall performance. Let it sink in, because it's clear--It is not the performer's call if they play their part as agreed, it's the conductor's final call to allow it. In comparison, if a software release manager is a conductor, the only way for that manager to be effective is to drive the overarching process and execution of individual pieces of a software development lifecycle. It does not mean the release manager performs each and every piece, it means the release manager has oversight and influence because the end-game is a successful software enhancin a useable environment. It means the release manager, not the developer or development manager, has the final call if something goes into a software release. Of course, this is not a process of autocracy or dictation of absolute rule, it's cooperative effort. But the release manager must have the final authority to make a decision if something is ready to be added to the bigger piece, the overall symphony of software changes being considered for package and release. It also goes without saying a release manager, like a conductor, must have full autonomy and isolation from other software groups. A conductor is the one on the podium waving a little stick at the each section and cueing them for their parts, not yelling from the back of the room while also playing a tuba and taking direction from the horn section. I have personally seen where release managers are relegated to being considered little more than coordinators, red-tapers to "satisfy" the demands of an audit group without being bothered to actually respect all that a release manager gives a group willing to employ them fully. In this dysfunctional scenario, development managers, project managers, business users, and other stakeholders have been given nearly full clearance to demand and push their agendas forward, causing a tail-wagging-the-dog scenario where an inherent conflict will ensue. Depending on the strength, determination for peace, and willingness to overlook a built-in expectation that is wrong, the release manager here must face the crafted conflict head-on and diffuse it as quickly as possible. Then, the release manager must clearly make a case why a change cannot be released without negative impact to all parties involved. If a political agenda is solely driving a software release, there IS no symphony, there is no "software lifecycle". It's just out-of-tune noise. More importantly, there is no real conductor. Sometimes, just wanting to make a beautiful sound is not enough. If you are a release manager, are you freed up enough to move, to conduct the sections of software creation to ensure a solid release performance is possible? If not, it's time to take stock in what your role actually is and see if that is what you truly want to achieve in your position. If you are, then you can successfully build your career and that of the people in your groups to create truly beautiful software (music) together.

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  • SQL SERVER – Guest Post – Glenn Berry – Wait Type – Day 26 of 28

    - by pinaldave
    Glenn Berry works as a Database Architect at NewsGator Technologies in Denver, CO. He is a SQL Server MVP, and has a whole collection of Microsoft certifications, including MCITP, MCDBA, MCSE, MCSD, MCAD, and MCTS. He is also an Adjunct Faculty member at University College – University of Denver, where he has been teaching since 2000. He is one wonderful blogger and often blogs at here. I am big fan of the Dynamic Management Views (DMV) scripts of Glenn. His script are extremely popular and the reality is that he has inspired me to start this series with his famous DMV which I have mentioned in very first  wait stats blog post (I had forgot to request his permission to re-use the script but when asked later on his whole hearty approved it). Here is is his excellent blog post on this subject of wait stats: Analyzing cumulative wait stats in SQL Server 2005 and above has become a popular and effective technique for diagnosing performance issues and further focusing your troubleshooting and diagnostic  efforts.  Rather than just guessing about what resource(s) that SQL Server is waiting on, you can actually find out by running a relatively simple DMV query. Once you know what resources that SQL Server is spending the most time waiting on, you can run more specific queries that focus on that resource to get a better idea what is causing the problem. I do want to throw out a few caveats about using wait stats as a diagnostic tool. First, they are most useful when your SQL Server instance is experiencing performance problems. If your instance is running well, with no indication of any resource pressure from other sources, then you should not worry that much about what the top wait types are. SQL Server will always be waiting on some resource, but many wait types are quite benign, and can be safely ignored. In spite of this, I quite often see experienced DBAs obsessing over the top wait type, even when their SQL Server instance is running extremely well. Second, I often see DBAs jump to the wrong conclusion based on seeing a particular well-known wait type. A good example is CXPACKET waits. People typically jump to the conclusion that high CXPACKET waits means that they should immediately change their instance-level MADOP setting to 1. This is not always the best solution. You need to consider your workload type, and look carefully for any important “missing” indexes that might be causing the query optimizer to use a parallel plan to compensate for the missing index. In this case, correcting the index problem is usually a better solution than changing MAXDOP, since you are curing the disease rather than just treating the symptom. Finally, you should get in the habit of clearing out your cumulative wait stats with the  DBCC SQLPERF(‘sys.dm_os_wait_stats’, CLEAR); command. This is especially important if you have made an configuration or index changes, or if your workload has changed recently. Otherwise, your cumulative wait stats will be polluted with the old stats from weeks or months ago (since the last time SQL Server was started or the stats were cleared).  If you make a change to your SQL Server instance, or add an index, you should clear out your wait stats, and then wait a while to see what your new top wait stats are. At any rate, enjoy Pinal Dave’s series on Wait Stats. This blog post has been written by Glenn Berry (Twitter | Blog) Read all the post in the Wait Types and Queue series. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, Readers Contribution, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Wait Stats, SQL Wait Types, T SQL, Technology

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  • July, the 31 Days of SQL Server DMO’s – Day 19 (sys.dm_exec_query_stats)

    - by Tamarick Hill
    The sys.dm_exec_query_stats DMV is one of the most useful DMV’s out there when it comes to performance tuning. If you have been keeping up with this blog series this month, you know that I started out on Day 1 reviewing many of the DMV’s within the ‘exec’ namespace. I’m not sure how I missed this one considering how valuable it is, but hey, they say it’s better late than never right?? On Day 7 and Day 8 we reviewed the sys.dm_exec_procedure_stats and sys.dm_exec_trigger_stats respectively. This sys.dm_exec_query_stats DMV is very similar to these two. As a matter of fact, this DMV will return all of the information you saw in the other two DMV’s, but in addition to that, you can see stats for all queries that have cached execution plans on your server. You can even see stats for statements that are ran Ad-Hoc as long as they are still cached in the buffer pool. To better illustrate this DMV, let have a quick look at it: SELECT * FROM sys.dm_exec_query_stats As you can see, there is a lot of information returned from this DMV. I wont go into detail about each and every one of these columns, but I will touch on a few of them briefly. The first column is the ‘sql_handle’, which if you remember from Day 4 of our blog series, I explained how you can use this column to extract the actual SQL text that was executed. The next columns statement_start_offset and statement_end_offset provide you a way of extracting the exact SQL statement that was executed as part of a batch. The plan_handle column is used to extract the Execution plan that was used, which we talked about during Day 5 of this blog series. Later in the result set, you have columns to identify how many times a particular statement was executed, how much CPU time it used, how many reads/writes it performed, the duration, how many rows were returned, etc. These columns provide you with a solid avenue to begin your performance optimization. The last column I will touch on is the query_plan_hash column. A lot of times when you have Dynamic SQL running on your server, you have similar statements with different parameter values being passed in. Many times these types of statements will get similar execution plans and then a Binary hash value can be generated based on these similar plans. This query plan hash can be used to find the cost of all queries that have similar execution plans and then you can tune based on that plan to improve the performance of all of the individual queries. This is a very powerful way of identifying and tuning Ad-hoc statements that run on your server. As I stated earlier, this sys.dm_exec_query_stats DMV is a very powerful and recommended DMV for performance tuning. You are able to quickly identify statements that are running on your server and analyze their impact on system resources. Using this DMV to track down the biggest performance killers on your server will allow you to make the biggest gains once you focus your tuning efforts on those top offenders. For more information about this DMV, please see the below Books Online link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms189741.aspx Follow me on Twitter @PrimeTimeDBA

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  • Tips to Make Your Website Cell Phone Friendly

    - by Aditi
    Working on a new website design? or Redesigning your website? There is a lot more to consider now a days not just user experience, clean code, CSS etc. one of the important attribute one must not miss, which is making them mobile friendly! With the growing use of handhelds & unlimited data plans, people browse on their cellphones! and All come in different sizes! it is tough to make a website that would look great not just on a high resolution widescreen monitor/LCD, but also should look equally impressive on the low resolutions of cellphones. We are today going to discuss about such factors that can help you make a website Cellphone Friendly. Fluid Width Layouts As we start discussing about this, Most people speak of the Fluid Width Layouts as vital step in moving your website to be mobile friendly. Fluid width allows the width of your website stretch or shrink depending on the browser size. However, having a layout which flows with the width of the screen’s resolution is certainly convenient, more often than not the website was originally laid out for a desktop in mind. Compressing a fluid layout to 320 pixels can do some serious damage to layout, Thus some people strongly believe it is far better to have a mobile style sheet and lay out the content specifically for that screen and have more control on the display. The best thing to do is to detect the type of platform that is connected to your website and disabling or changing some tools and effects to make it look better if not perfect. Keep Your Web Pages Short length One must avoid long pages on their website, a lot of scroll makes it very non user friendly for people, especially on mobile devices this is a huge draw back because of the longer load time it takes to download the webpage. Everyone likes crisp & concise content such pages are easier to load & browse. This makes your website accessible across all platforms. Also try to keep shorter urls, if they have to type..save them from that much work especially if someone is using a cellphone with no QWERTY keyboard it can be tough. Usable Navigation & Search Unlike Desktops, your website’s Navigation won’t super work on a cellphone. Keep in mind the user experience for cellphone users as you design your Navigation. Try to keep your content centered as they do have difficulty in reading the webpage. I always look upto Google and their pages as available on mobile as a great example. Keeping a functional & very visible search bar helps mobile users navigate by searching. Understanding Clean Website Code : Evolved for Mobile Clean code is important when you consider the diversity out there for handheld devices. Some cell phones may only understand WAP. More capable phones may understand WAP2, which allows rendering websites with XHTML and CSS. Most mobiles won’t display tables, floats, frames, JavaScript, and dynamic menus. Most cellphone will not support cookies. Devices at the high end of the mobile market such as BlackBerry, Palm, or the upcoming iPhone are highly capable and support nearly as much as a standard computer..but masses still do not have such phones. You can use specific emulators to test your website on mobile devices. Make sure your color combinations provide good contrast between foreground and background colors, particularly for devices with fewer color options.

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  • AutoFit in PowerPoint: Turn it OFF

    - by Daniel Moth
    Once a feature has shipped, it is very hard to eliminate it from the next release. If I was in charge of the PowerPoint product, I would not hesitate for a second to remove the dreadful AutoFit feature. Fortunately, AutoFit can be turned off on a slide-by-slide basis and, even better, globally: go to the PowerPoint "Options" and under "Proofing" find the "AutoCorrect Options…" button which brings up the dialog where you need to uncheck the last two checkboxes (see the screenshot to the right). AutoFit is the ability for the user to keep hitting the Enter key as they type more and more text into a slide and it magically still fits, by shrinking the space between the lines and then the text font size. It is the root of all slide evil. It encourages people to think of a slide as a Word document (which may be your goal, if you are presenting to execs in Microsoft, but that is a different story). AutoFit is the reason you fall asleep in presentations. AutoFit causes too much text to appear on a slide which by extension causes the following: When the slide appears, the text is so small so it is not readable by everyone in the audience. They dismiss the presenter as someone who does not care for them and then they stop paying attention. If the text is readable, but it is too much (hence the AutoFit feature kicked in when the slide was authored), the audience is busy reading the slide and not paying attention to the presenter. Humans can either listen well or read well at the same time, so when they are done reading they now feel that they missed whatever the speaker was saying. So they "switch off" for the rest of the slide until the next slide kicks in, which is the natural point for them to pick up paying attention again. Every slide ends up with different sized text. The less visual consistency between slides, the more your presentation feels unprofessional. You can do better than dismiss the (subconscious) negative effect a deck with inconsistent slides has on an audience. In contrast, the absence of AutoFit Leads to consistency among all slides in a deck with regards to amount of text and size of said text. Ensures the text is readable by everyone in the audience (presuming the PowerPoint template is designed for the room where the presentation is delivered). Encourages the presenter to create slides with the minimum necessary text to help the audience understand the basic structure, flow, and key points of the presentation. The "meat" of the presentation is delivered verbally by the presenter themselves, which is why they are in the room in the first place. Following on from the previous point, the audience can at a quick glance consume the text on the slide when it appears and then concentrate entirely on the presenter and what they have to say. You could argue that everything above has nothing to do with the AutoFit feature and all to do with the advice to keep slide content short. You would be right, but the on-by-default AutoFit feature is the one that stops most people from seeing and embracing that truth. In other words, the slides are the tool that aids the presenter in delivering their message, instead of the presenter being the tool that advances the slides which hold the message. To get there, embrace terse slides: the first step is to turn off this horrible feature (that was probably introduced due to the misuse of this tool within Microsoft). The next steps are described on my next post. Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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  • Fast Data: Go Big. Go Fast.

    - by Dain C. Hansen
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 For those of you who may have missed it, today’s second full day of Oracle OpenWorld 2012 started with a rumpus. Joe Tucci, from EMC outlined the human face of big data with real examples of how big data is transforming our world. And no not the usual tried-and-true weblog examples, but real stories about taxi cab drivers in Singapore using big data to better optimize their routes as well as folks just trying to get a better hair cut. Next we heard from Thomas Kurian who talked at length about the important platform characteristics of Oracle’s Cloud and more specifically Oracle’s expanded Cloud Services portfolio. Especially interesting to our integration customers are the messaging support for Oracle’s Cloud applications. What this means is that now Oracle’s Cloud applications have a lightweight integration fabric that on-premise applications can communicate to it via REST-APIs using Oracle SOA Suite. It’s an important element to our strategy at Oracle that supports this idea that whether your requirements are for private or public, Oracle has a solution in the Cloud for all of your applications and we give you more deployment choice than any vendor. If this wasn’t enough to get the juices flowing, later that morning we heard from Hasan Rizvi who outlined in his Fusion Middleware session the four most important enterprise imperatives: Social, Mobile, Cloud, and a brand new one: Fast Data. Today, Rizvi made an important step in the definition of this term to explain that he believes it’s a convergence of four essential technology elements: Event Processing for event filtering, business rules – with Oracle Event Processing Data Transformation and Loading - with Oracle Data Integrator Real-time replication and integration – with Oracle GoldenGate Analytics and data discovery – with Oracle Business Intelligence Each of these four elements can be considered (and architect-ed) together on a single integrated platform that can help customers integrate any type of data (structured, semi-structured) leveraging new styles of big data technologies (MapReduce, HDFS, Hive, NoSQL) to process more volume and variety of data at a faster velocity with greater results.  Fast data processing (and especially real-time) has always been our credo at Oracle with each one of these products in Fusion Middleware. For example, Oracle GoldenGate continues to be made even faster with the recent 11g R2 Release of Oracle GoldenGate which gives us some even greater optimization to Oracle Database with Integrated Capture, as well as some new heterogeneity capabilities. With Oracle Data Integrator with Big Data Connectors, we’re seeing much improved performance by running MapReduce transformations natively on Hadoop systems. And with Oracle Event Processing we’re seeing some remarkable performance with customers like NTT Docomo. Check out their upcoming session at Oracle OpenWorld on Wednesday to hear more how this customer is using Event processing and Big Data together. If you missed any of these sessions and keynotes, not to worry. There's on-demand versions available on the Oracle OpenWorld website. You can also checkout our upcoming webcast where we will outline some of these new breakthroughs in Data Integration technologies for Big Data, Cloud, and Real-time in more details. /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";}

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  • Unreal Tournament 3 vs UDK: What Should I Choose?

    - by Matt Christian
    Many people in the mod community were very excited to see the release of the Unreal Developer Kit (UDK) a few months ago.  Along with generating excitement into a very dedicated community, it also introduced many new modders into a flourishing area of indie-development.  However, since UDK is free, most beginners jump right into UDK, which is OK though you might just benefit more from purchasing a shelf-copy of Unreal Tournament 3. UDK UDK is a free full version of UnrealEd (the editor environment used to create games like Gears of War 1/2, Bioshock 1/2, and of course Unreal Tournament 3).  The editor gives you all the features of the editor from the shelf-copy of the game plus some refinements in many of the tools.  (One of the first things you'll find about UnrealEd is that it's a collection of tools grouped into the same editor so it really isn't a single 'tool') Interestingly enough, Epic is allowing you to sell any game made in UDK with a few catches.  First off, you must purchase a liscense for your game (which, I THINK is aproximately $99 starting).  Secondly, you must pay 25% of all profits for the first $5,000 of your game revenue to them (about $1250).  Finally, you cannot use any of the 'media' provided in UDK for your game.  UDK provides sample meshes, textures, materials, sounds, and other sample pieces of media pulled (mostly) from Unreal Tournament 3. The final point here will really determine whether you should use UDK.  There is a very small amount of media provided in UDK for someone to go in and begin creating levels without first developing your own meshes, textures, and other media.  Sure, you can slap together a few unique levels, though you will end up finding yourself restriced to the same items over and over and over.  This is absolutely how professional game development is; you are 'given' (typically liscensed or built in-house) an engine/editor and you begin creating all the content for the game and placing it.  UDK is aimed toward those who really want to build their game content from scratch with a currently existing engine.  It is not suited for someone who would like to simply build levels and quick mods without learning external 3D programs and image editing software. Unreal Tournament 3 Unless you have a serious grudge against FPS's, Epic, or your computer sucks, there really is no reason not to own this game for PC.  You can pick it up on Steam or Amazon for around $20 brand new.  Not only are you provided with a full single-player and multiplayer game, but you are given the entire UnrealEd 3.0 including all of the content used to build UT3.  If you want to start building levels and mods quickly for UT3, you should absolutely pick up a shelf-copy. However, as off-the-shelf UT3 is a few years old now, the tools have not been updated for quite a while.  Compared to UDK, the menus are more difficult to navigate through and take more time getting used to.  Since UDK is updated almost every month, there are new inclusions to the editor that may not be in UT3 (including the future addition of 3D!).  I haven't worked enough with shelf UT3 to see if there are more features in UDK or if they both feature the same stuff in different forms, however you should remember that the Unreal Engine 3.0 has undergone numerous upgrades between it's launch and Gears of War 2 (in fact, Epic had a conference to show off what changed just between the Gears of Wars games). Since UT3 has much more core content, someone who wants to focus on level editing or modding the core UT3 game may find their needs better suited with an off-the-shelf copy of UT3.  If that level designer has a team that is generating custom assets, they may be better off with UDK. The choice is now yours...

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  • Review: A Quick Look at Reflector

    - by James Michael Hare
    I, like many, was disappointed when I heard that Reflector 7 was not free, and perhaps that’s why I waited so long to try it and just kept using my version 6 (which continues to be free).  But though I resisted for so long, I longed for the better features that were being developed, and began to wonder if I should upgrade.  Thus, I began to look into the features being offered in Reflector 7.5 to see what was new. Multiple Editions Reflector 7.5 comes in three flavors, each building on the features of the previous version: Standard – Contains just the Standalone application ($70) VS – Same as Standard but adds Reflector Object Browser for Visual Studio ($130) VSPro – Same as VS but adds ability to set breakpoints and step into decompiled code ($190) So let’s examine each of these features. The Standalone Application (Standard, VS, VSPro editions) Popping open Reflector 7.5 and looking at the GUI, we see much of the same familiar features, with a few new ones as well: Most notably, the disassembler window now has a tabbed window with navigation buttons.  This makes it much easier to back out of a deep-dive into many layers of decompiled code back to a previous point. Also, there is now an analyzer which can be used to determine dependencies for a given method, property, type, etc. For example, if we select System.Net.Sockets.TcpClient and hit the Analyze button, we’d see a window with the following nodes we could expand: This gives us the ability to see what a given type uses, what uses it, who exposes it, and who instantiates it. Now obviously, for low-level types (like DateTime) this list would be enormous, but this can give a lot of information on how a given type is connected to the larger code ecosystem. One of the other things I like about using Reflector 7.5 is that it does a much better job of displaying iterator blocks than Reflector 6 did. For example, if you were to take a look at the Enumerable.Cast() extension method in System.Linq, and dive into the CastIterator in Reflector 6, you’d see this: But now, in Reflector 7.5, we see the iterator logic much more clearly: This is a big improvement in the quality of their code disassembler and for me was one of the main reasons I decided to take the plunge and get version 7.5. The Reflector Object Browser (VS, VSPro editions) If you have the .NET Reflector VS or VSPro editions, you’ll find you have in Visual Studio a Reflector Object Browser window available where you can select and decompile any assembly right in Visual Studio. For example, if you want to take a peek at how System.Collections.Generic.List<T> works, you can either select List<T> in the Reflector Object Browser, or even simpler just select a usage of it in your code and CTRL + Click to dive in. – And it takes you right to a source window with the decompiled source: Setting Breakpoints and Stepping Into Decompiled Code (VSPro) If you have the VSPro edition, in addition to all the things said above, you also get the additional ability to set breakpoints in this decompiled code and step through it as if it were your own code: This can be a handy feature when you need to see why your code’s use of a BCL or other third-party library isn’t working as you expect. Summary Yes, Reflector is no longer free, and yes, that’s a bit of a bummer. But it always was and still is a very fine tool. If you still have Reflector 6, you aren’t forced to upgrade any longer, but getting the nicer disassembler (especially for iterator blocks) and the handy VS integration is worth at least considering upgrading for.  So I leave it up to you, these are some of the features of Reflector 7.5, what’s your thoughts? Technorati Tags: .NET,Reflector

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  • 10 Best Programming Podcast 2010 Edition

    - by mbcrump
    This list is in no particular order. Just the 10 best programming podcast that I have found so far. Stack Overflow Podcast -  Jeff Atwood (of codinghorror.com) and Joel Spolsky (of joelonsoftware.com) discuss the development of their new programming community, StackOverflow.com. [This Podcast hasn’t been updated in a while, but its always great to hear more from Jeff Atwood] Hanselminutes - Hanselminutes is a weekly audio talk show with noted web developer and technologist Scott Hanselman and hosted by Carl Franklin. Scott discusses utilities and tools, gives practical how-to advice, and discusses ASP.NET or Windows issues and workarounds. [This Podcast has recently started talking about random topics like diabetes, plane travel and geek relationship tips.  I am not sure if Scott is trying to move to a more mainstream audience or not] Herding Code - A weekly discussion featuring K. Scott Allen (odetocode.com), Kevin Dente, Scott Koon (lazycoder.com), and Jon Galloway. [Great all all-around podcast that I would recommend to all] Deep Fried Bytes - Deep Fried Bytes is an audio talk show with a Southern flavor hosted by technologists and developers Keith Elder and Chris Woodruff. The show discusses a wide range of topics including application development, operating systems and technology in general. Anything is fair game if it plugs into the wall or takes a battery. [This is one that just keeps getting better] Dot Net Rocks - .NET Rocks! is an Internet Audio Talk Show for Microsoft .NET Developers. [One of the first and usually very high quality content] Connected Show - Connected Show Podcast! A podcast covering new Microsoft technology for the developer community. The show is hosted by Dmitry Lyalin and Peter Laudati. [This and Polymorphic are one of my favorite podcast – Dmitry is a great host and would recommend this to all] Polymorphic Podcast - Object oriented development, architecture and best practices in .NET [Craig is a ASP.NET MVP and a great presenter. His podcast is great and it could only be better if he recorded it more often] ASP.NET Podcast - Wallace B. (Wally) McClure presents interviews and short technical talks on .NET Technologies. [Has great information on ASP.NET of course as well as iPhone Dev] Ruby on Rails Podcast - News and interviews about the Ruby language and the Rails website framework. [Even though I am not a Ruby programmer, I’ve found this podcast very interesting] Software Engineering Radio - Software Engineering Radio is a podcast targeted at the professional software developer. The goal is to be a lasting educational resource, not a newscast. Every ten days, a new episode is published that covers all topics software engineering. Episodes are either tutorials on a specific topic, or an interview with a well-known character from the software engineering world. All SE Radio episodes are original content ? we do not record conferences or talks given in other venues. Each episode comprises two speakers to ensure a lively listening experience. SE Radio is an independent and non-commercial organization. [Another excellent podcast – I would recommend any programmer add this to his/her drive home] If I have missed something, please feel free to email me and it might make the 2011 list. =)

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  • A View from the Top – Jan Ackerman (VP APAC Recruiting)

    - by user769227
    This week, Headhunt Magazine in Singapore, took the opportunity to publish an interview with Jan Ackerman who is Vice President for Recruitment for Asia Pacific here at Oracle. The link to the online interview can be found here. Below is the interview in full that was published in Headhunt Magazine.  A View from the Top – Jan Ackerman Written by HeadHunt on August 16, 2012 · Leave a Comment By Susheela Menon Jan Ackerman is the Vice President for Recruiting in Asia Pacific and Japan at Oracle. Which particular personal trait do you attribute your professional success to? Perseverance has been the most important trait that has attributed to my professional success. Endurance and perseverance combined to win in the end has always been a great credo. I find that this trait carries through in my professional as well as my personal life. I enjoy sport fishing and find that perseverance with a great deal of patience in this hobby is critical to the overall enjoyment and success in this sporting activity. In the same way, this doggedness – steadfastness with persistence – and tenacity toward an unyielding course of action has served me well in reaching goals and thus greater success. What’s the biggest challenge you have faced in your career so far? I have to constantly keep pace with ever changing technology in my career. The industry changes rapidly and requires me to stay on top of the latest trends and advancements. Outside of work, I like to develop software as a hobby and in order to ensure that what I am developing will meet what the business needs, I have to continually innovate and stay current on the latest trends in the industry to deliver a solution that will delight the end- user. Best career advice you have ever received. Always be forthright and honest with your customers and peers; mixed with a “Can Do” attitude, a great and fulfilling career can be yours to have and hold. What makes Oracle a great place to be in? The freedom to innovate and pave new avenues of success is one of the greatest things about working here at Oracle. We are always looking to grow and improve our business for our customers and we are always adapting to present and future industry demands. This means we are always looking to change, to perform better and to do things differently. All these create a culture and spirit of innovation and success. What motivates you to be in the HR sector? I really like working with and helping people. HR is all about “the people” in the organisation, and staying focused every day on making things better for the Oracle team gives me a great deal of happiness. Describe your leadership style. I am very direct and goal- oriented. I provide ideas and guidance and then give the team all the freedom they need to reach a successful outcome. I can also be a very “roll up your sleeves” kind of manager when the task needs a bit of a push. What’s the biggest business challenge you see in your industry right now? The ability to keep pace with all the convergence in the industry and to continue to stay focused on delivering top talent to serve Oracle’s customers well. Our unique Recruiting Model has served us well in meeting these needs. We are well-placed in this goal and look forward to maintain Oracle’s leadership role in the industry.

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  • How do I deal with a third party application that has embedded hints that result in a sub-optimal execution plan in my environment?

    - by Maria Colgan
    I have gotten many variations on this question recently as folks begin to upgrade to Oracle Database 11g and there have been several posts on this blog and on others describing how to use SQL Plan Management (SPM) so that a non-hinted SQL statement can use a plan generated with hints. But what if the hint is supplied in the third party application and is causing performance regressions on your system? You can actually use a very similar technique to the ones shown before but this time capture the un-hinted plan and have the hinted SQL statement use that plan instead. Below is an example that demonstrates the necessary steps. 1. We will begin by running the hinted statement 2. After examining the execution plan we can see it is suboptimal because of a bad join order. 3. In order to use SPM to correct the problem we must create a SQL plan baseline for the statement. In order to create a baseline we will need the SQL_ID for the hinted statement. Easy place to get it is in V$SQL. 4. A SQL plan baseline can be created using a SQL_ID and DBMS_SPM.LOAD_PLANS_FROM_CURSOR_CACHE. This will capture the existing plan for this SQL_ID from the shared pool and store in the SQL plan baseline. 5. We can check the SQL plan baseline got created successfully by querying DBA_SQL_PLAN_BASELINES. 6. When you manually create a SQL plan baseline the first plan added is automatically accepted and enabled. We know that the hinted plan is poorly performing plan so we will disable it using DBMS_SPM.ALTER_SQL_PLAN_BASELINE. Disabling the plan tells the optimizer that this plan not a good plan, however since there is no alternative plan at this point the optimizer will still continue to use this plan until we provide a better one. 7. Now let's run the statement without the hint. 8. Looking at the execution plan we can see that the join order is different. The plan without the hint also has a lower cost (3X lower), which indicates it should perform better. 9. In order to map the un-hinted plan to the hinted SQL statement we need to add the plan to the SQL plan baseline for the hinted statement. We can do this using DBMS_SPM.LOAD_PLANS_FROM_CURSOR_CACHE but we will need the SQL_ID and  PLAN_HASH_VALUE for the non-hinted statement, which we can find in V$SQL. 10. Now we can add the non-hinted plan to the SQL plan baseline of the hinted SQL statement using DBMS_SPM.LOAD_PLANS_FROM_CURSOR_CACHE. This time we need to pass a few more arguments. We will use the SQL_ID and PLAN_HASH_VALUE of the non-hinted statement but the SQL_HANDLE of the hinted statement. 11. The SQL plan baseline for our statement now has two plans. But only the newly added plan (SQL_PLAN_gbpcg3f67pc788a6d8911) is enabled and accepted. This tells the Optimizer that this is the plan it should use for this statement. We can confirm that the correct plan (non-hinted) will be selected for the statement from now on by re-executing the hinted statement and checking its execution plan.

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  • How can we improve overall Programmer Education & Training?

    - by crosenblum
    Last week, I was just viewing this amazing interview by Kevin Rose of Phillip Rosedale, of Second Life. And they had an amazing discussion about how to find, hire and identify good programmer's, and how hard it is to find good ones. Which has lead me to really think about the way we programmer's learn, are taught. For a majority of us, myself included, we are self-taught. Which is great about being a programmer, anyone can learn and develop skills. But this also means, that there is no real standards of what a good programmer is/are, and what kind of environment's encourage the growth of programming skills. This isn't so much a question, but just a desire in me, to see how we can change the culture of programming, and the manager's of programming, so that education and self-improvement is encouraged. There are a lot of avenue's for continued education, youtube videos, books, conferences, but because of the experiental nature of what we do, it isn't always clear what's important to learn and to master. Let's look at the The Joel 12 Steps. The Joel Test Do you use source control? Can you make a build in one step? Do you make daily builds? Do you have a bug database? Do you fix bugs before writing new code? Do you have an up-to-date schedule? Do you have a spec? Do programmers have quiet working conditions? Do you use the best tools money can buy? Do you have testers? Do new candidates write code during their interview? Do you do hallway usability testing? I think all of these have important value, but because of something I call the Experiential Gap, if a programmer or manager has never experienced any of the negative consequences for not having done items on the list, they will never see the need to do any of them. The Experiental Gap, is my basic theory, that each of us has different jobs and different experiences. So for some of us, that have always worked with dozens of programmer's, source control is a must have. But for people who have always been the only programmer, they can not imagine the need for source control. And it's because of this major flaw in how we learn, that we evaluate people by what best practices they do or not do, and the reason for either can start a flame war. We always evaluate people in our field by what they do, and think "Oh if this guy/gal isn't doing xyz best practice, he/she can't be a good programmer, so let's not waste time or energy talking to them." This is exactly why we have so many programming flame wars, that it becomes, because of the Experiental Gap, we can't imagine people not having made the decisions that we have had to made. So this has lead me to think, that we totally need to rethink how we train, educate and manage programmer's. For example, what percentage of you have had encouragement by your manager's to go to conferences, and even have them pay for it? For me, and a lot of people, this is extremely rare, a lot of us would love to go to conferences, to learn more, but the money ain't there to do that. So the point of this question is really to spark a lot of how can we train, learn and manage better? How can we create a new culture of learning that doesn't insult people for not having the same job experiences. Yes we all have jobs and work to do, but our ability to do our jobs well, depends on our desire, interest and support in improving our mastery of our skills. Right now, I see our culture being rather disorganized, we support the elite, but those tons of us that want to get better, just don't have enough support to learn and improve ourselves. I mean, do we as an industry, want to be perceived as just replaceable cogs? Thank you...

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