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  • Is Oracle Policy Automation a Fit for My Agency? I'll bet it is.

    - by jeffrey.waterman
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Recently, I stumbled upon a new(-ish) whitepaper now posted on the Oracle Technology Network around Oracle Policy Automation (OPA). This paper is certain to become a must read for any customer interested in rules automation. What is OPA?  If you are not sitting in your favorite Greek restaurant waiting for that order of Saganaki to appear, OPA is Oracle’s solution for automated streamlining, standardizing, and the maintenance of policy. It is a specialized rules platform that simplifies the automation of rules and policies, putting the analysis in the hands of the analysts, not the IT organization. In other words, OPA allows the organization to be more efficient by eliminating (or at a minimum, reducing the engagement of) the middle man from the process. The whitepaper I mention above is titled, “Is Oracle Policy Automation a Good Fit for My Business?”. This short document walks the reader through use cases and advice for the reader to consider when deciding if OPA is right for their agency. The paper outlines many different scenarios, different uses of OPA in production today and, where OPA may not be a good fit. Many of the use case examples revolve around end user questionnaires or analyst research. What is often overlooked is OPA’s ability to act as a rules engine behind the scenes. That is, take inputs from one source (e.g., personnel data), process that data in OPA and send the output (e.g., pay data with benefits deductions) to a second source. The rules have been automated, no necessary human intervention to perform analysis. A few of my customers have used the embedded OPA solution to improve transaction processing and reduce the time spent analyzing exceptions. I suggest any reader whose organization is reliant on or deals with high complexity, volume or volatility in rules that are based on documentation – or which need to be documented – take a look at Oracle Policy Automation. You can find the white paper on Oracle Technology Network. You can find the white paper in the Oracle Policy Automation of the OTN. You can find more information around OPA on oracle.com. Finally, you can send me a question any time at [email protected] Thank you for reading. If you have any topics around Oracle Applications in the Federal or Public Sector industries you would like to see addressed in this blog, please leave suggestions in the comments section and I will do my best to address in a future post.

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  • Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c Update 1 is available now

    - by Anand Akela
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Following the announcement of Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c on April 4th, we are happy to announce the release of Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c update 1. This is a bundled patch release for Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center.  Here are the key features of the Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c update 1 : Oracle VM SPARC Server Pool HA Policy  Automatically Upgrade from Ops Center 11g update 3 and Ops Center 12c  Oracle Linux 5.8 and 6.x Support  Oracle VM SPARC IaaS (Virtual Datacenters) WANBoot Improvements with OBP Handling Enhancements SPARC SuperCluster Support Stability fixes This new release contains significant enhancements in the update provisioning, bare metal OS provisioning, shared storage management, cloud/virtual datacenter, and networking management sections of the product.  With this update, customers can achieve better handling of ASR faults, add networks and storage to virtual guests more easily, understand IPMP and VLAN configurations better, get a more robust LDAP integration, get  virtualization aware firmware patching, and observe improved product performance across the board.  Customers can now accelerate Oracle VM SPARC and T4 deployments into production . Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 11g and Ops Center 12c customers will now notice the availability of new product update under the Administration tab within the  Browser User Interface (BUI) .  Upgrade process is explained in detail within the Ops Center Administration Guide under “Chapter 10: Upgrading”.  Please be sure to read over that chapter and the Release Notes before upgrading.  During the week of July 9th,  the full download of the product will be available from the Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center download website.  Based on the customer feedback, we have changed the updates to include the entire product. Customers no longer need to install Ops Center 12c and then upgrade to the update 1 release.  The can simply install Ops Center 12c update 1 directly.  Here are some of the resources that can help you learn more about the Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center and the new update 1. Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center OTN site Bi-Monthly Product Demos Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center Forum Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center MOS Community Watch the recording of Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c launch webcast by clicking the following banner. Stay Connected: Twitter |  Face book |  You Tube |  Linked in |  Newsletter

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  • Barcodes and Bugs

    - by Tim Dexter
    A great mail from Mike at Browning last week. He has been through the ringer getting his BIP barcoding sorted out but he's now out of the woods. Here's the final result. By way of explanation, an excerpt from Mike's email:   This is an example of the GS1_128 carton shipping labels we are now producing with BIP in our web application for our vendors who drop ship products to our dealers. It produces 4 labels per printed page, in PDF format, on peel & stick label paper. Each label has a unique carton number, and a unique carton serial number in the SSCC-18 barcode. This example is for Cabelas (each customer has slightly different GS1-128 label format requirements – custom template for each - a pain!). I am using custom java encoders I wrote for the UPC and SSCC-18 barcodes, and a standard encoder (code128b) for the ShipTo zip barcode. Is there any way yet to get around that SUPER ANNOYING bug when opening the rtf template in MS Word, and it replaces my xsl code text in the barcode fields with gibberish??? Every time I open it I have to re-enter all the xsl code. Not only to be able to read & edit it, but also to get it to work in BIP (BIP doesn’t like the gibberish if I upload the template that has it). Mike's last point, regarding the annoying bug in the template builder, is one that I have experienced occasionally. The development team have looked at it and found it to be an issue with MSWord and not a plugin problem. That's all well and good but how can you get around it? Well, you can take advantage of the font mapping that BIP offers to get the barcodes into the PDF output. As many of you know, getting a barcode font to appear in the PDF output, you need employ the use of the xdo.cfg file in the template builder config directory.You would normally have an entry such as this:         <font family="Code 128" style="normal" weight="normal">        <truetype path="C:\windows\fonts\128R00.TTF" />       </font>to map a barcode font to get it to render in the PDF output when testing from the template builder plugin.   Mike's issue is only present when the formfield is highlighted with a barcode font. The other fields in the template are OK. What you can do to get around the issue is to bend the config entry to get around having to use the barcode font in the template at all. Changing the entry to something like:         <font family="Calibri" style="normal" weight="normal">        <truetype path="C:\windows\fonts\128R00.TTF" />       </font>   Note that we are mapping the Calibri; a humanly readable and non 'erroring' font in the template, to the code 128 barcode font. Where you used to highlight the field with the barcode in MSWord, you now use the Calibri font instead. At run time, BIP will go look for the Calibri font mapping and will drop in the Code128 font. Of course, Calibri is an example; you need to pick a font that you are not going to use any where else in the layout.

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  • Managing Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud with Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center

    - by Anand Akela
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c now comes out-of-the-box  with the latest release of Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud 2.0.1 software. It allows Customer to manage and monitor all components inside the Exalogic rack, including provisioning and management of physical and virtualized server. Ops Center will allow Customers to easily get started with creating and managing Private Clouds using the Exalogic components. Here is a snaphot of the Assets view showing the managable components of a Quarter Rack with 8 Compute Nodes: Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} A colleague has recently posted an interesting series of "Exalogic 2.0.1 Tea Break Snippets" which will guide you through the initial steps to get started with setting up your Exalogic environment: Exalogic 2.0.1 Tea Break Snippets - Creating Cloud Users https://blogs.oracle.com/ATeamExalogic/entry/exalogic_2_0_1_tea1 Exalogic 2.0.1 Tea Break Snippets - Creating Networks https://blogs.oracle.com/ATeamExalogic/entry/exalogic_2_0_1_tea2 Exalogic 2.0.1 Tea Break Snippets - Allocating Static IP Addresses https://blogs.oracle.com/ATeamExalogic/entry/exalogic_2_0_1_tea3 Exalogic 2.0.1 Tea Break Snippets - Creating Accounts https://blogs.oracle.com/ATeamExalogic/entry/exalogic_2_0_1_tea4 Exalogic 2.0.1 Tea Break Snippets - Importing Public Server Template https://blogs.oracle.com/ATeamExalogic/entry/exalogic_2_0_1_tea5 Have fun reading these very useful postings ! Dr. Jürgen Fleischer , Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center Engineering Stay Connected: Twitter |  Face book |  You Tube |  Linked in |  Newsletter

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  • Windows Azure Recipe: Consumer Portal

    - by Clint Edmonson
    Nearly every company on the internet has a web presence. Many are merely using theirs for informational purposes. More sophisticated portals allow customers to register their contact information and provide some level of interaction or customer support. But as our understanding of how consumers use the web increases, the more progressive companies are taking advantage of social web and rich media delivery to connect at a deeper level with the consumers of their goods and services. Drivers Cost reduction Scalability Global distribution Time to market Solution Here’s a sketch of how a Windows Azure Consumer Portal might be built out: Ingredients Web Role – this will host the core of the solution. Each web role is a virtual machine hosting an application written in ASP.NET (or optionally php, or node.js). The number of web roles can be scaled up or down as needed to handle peak and non-peak traffic loads. Database – every modern web application needs to store data. SQL Azure databases look and act exactly like their on-premise siblings but are fault tolerant and have data redundancy built in. Access Control (optional) – if identity needs to be tracked within the solution, the access control service combined with the Windows Identity Foundation framework provides out-of-the-box support for several social media platforms including Windows LiveID, Google, Yahoo!, Facebook. It also has a provider model to allow integration with other platforms as well. Caching (optional) – for sites with high traffic with lots of read-only data and lists, the distributed in-memory caching service can be used to cache and serve up static data at higher scale and speed than direct database requests. It can also be used to manage user session state. Blob Storage (optional) – for sites that serve up unstructured data such as documents, video, audio, device drivers, and more. The data is highly available and stored redundantly across data centers. Each entry in blob storage is provided with it’s own unique URL for direct access by the browser. Content Delivery Network (CDN) (optional) – for sites that service users around the globe, the CDN is an extension to blob storage that, when enabled, will automatically cache frequently accessed blobs and static site content at edge data centers around the world. The data can be delivered statically or streamed in the case of rich media content. Training Labs These links point to online Windows Azure training labs where you can learn more about the individual ingredients described above. (Note: The entire Windows Azure Training Kit can also be downloaded for offline use.) Windows Azure (16 labs) Windows Azure is an internet-scale cloud computing and services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services which can be used individually or together. It gives developers the choice to build web applications; applications running on connected devices, PCs, or servers; or hybrid solutions offering the best of both worlds. New or enhanced applications can be built using existing skills with the Visual Studio development environment and the .NET Framework. With its standards-based and interoperable approach, the services platform supports multiple internet protocols, including HTTP, REST, SOAP, and plain XML SQL Azure (7 labs) Microsoft SQL Azure delivers on the Microsoft Data Platform vision of extending the SQL Server capabilities to the cloud as web-based services, enabling you to store structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Windows Azure Services (9 labs) As applications collaborate across organizational boundaries, ensuring secure transactions across disparate security domains is crucial but difficult to implement. Windows Azure Services provides hosted authentication and access control using powerful, secure, standards-based infrastructure. See my Windows Azure Resource Guide for more guidance on how to get started, including links web portals, training kits, samples, and blogs related to Windows Azure.

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  • PASS: Bylaw Change 2013

    - by Bill Graziano
    PASS launched a Global Growth Initiative in the Summer of 2011 with the appointment of three international Board advisors.  Since then we’ve thought and talked extensively about how we make PASS more relevant to our members outside the US and Canada.  We’ve collected much of that discussion in our Global Growth site.  You can find vision documents, plans, governance proposals, feedback sites, and transcripts of Twitter chats and town hall meetings.  We also address these plans at the Board Q&A during the 2012 Summit. One of the biggest changes coming out of this process is around how we elect Board members.  And that requires a change to the bylaws.  We published the proposed bylaw changes as a red-lined document so you can clearly see the changes.  Our goal in these bylaw changes was to address the changes required by the global growth initiatives, conduct a legal review of the document and address other minor issues in the document.  There are numerous small wording changes throughout the document.  For example, we replaced every reference of “The Corporation” with the word “PASS” so it now reads “PASS is organized…”. Board Composition The biggest change in these bylaw changes is how the Board is composed and elected.  This discussion starts in section VI.2.  This section now says that some elected directors will come from geographic regions.  I think this is the best way to make sure we give all of our members a voice in the leadership of the organization.  The key parts of this section are: The remaining Directors (i.e. the non-Officer Directors and non-Vendor Appointed Directors) shall be elected by the voting membership (“Elected Directors”). Elected Directors shall include representatives of defined PASS regions (“Regions”) as set forth below (“Regional Directors”) and at minimum one (1) additional Director-at-Large whose selection is not limited by region. Regional Directors shall include, but are not limited to, two (2) seats for the Region covering Canada and the United States of America. Additional Regions for the purpose of electing additional Regional Directors and additional Director-at-Large seats for the purpose of expanding the Board shall be defined by a majority vote of the current Board of Directors and must be established prior to the public call for nominations in the general election. Previously defined Regions and seats approved by the Board of Directors shall remain in effect and can only be modified by a 2/3 majority vote by the then current Board of Directors. Currently PASS has six At-Large Directors elected by the members.  These changes allow for a Regional Director position that is elected by the members but must come from a particular region.  It also stipulates that there must always be at least one Director-at-Large who can come from any region. We also understand that PASS is currently a very US-centric organization.  Our Summit is held in America, roughly half our chapters are in the US and Canada and most of the Board members over the last ten years have come from America.  We wanted to reflect that by making sure that our US and Canadian volunteers would continue to play a significant role by ensuring that two Regional seats are reserved specifically for Canada and the US. Other than that, the bylaws don’t create any specific regional seats.  These rules allow us to create Regional Director seats but don’t require it.  We haven’t fully discussed what the criteria will be in order for a region to have a seat designated for it or how many regions there will be.  In our discussions we’ve broadly discussed regions for United States and Canada Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) Australia, New Zealand and Asia (also known as Asia Pacific or APAC) Mexico, South America, and Central America (LATAM) As you can see, our thinking is that there will be a few large regions.  I’ve also considered a non-North America region that we can gradually split into the regions above as our membership grows in those areas.  The regions will be defined by a policy document that will be published prior to the elections. I’m hoping that over the next year we can begin to publish more of what we do as Board-approved policy documents. While the bylaws only require a single non-region specific At-large Director, I would expect we would always have two.  That way we can have one in each election.  I think it’s important that we always have one seat open that anyone who is eligible to run for the Board can contest.  The Board is required to have any regions defined prior to the start of the election process. Board Elections – Regional Seats We spent a lot of time discussing how the elections would work for these Regional Director seats.  Ultimately we decided that the simplest solution is that every PASS member should vote for every open seat.  Section VIII.3 reads: Candidates who are eligible (i.e. eligible to serve in such capacity subject to the criteria set forth herein or adopted by the Board of Directors) shall be designated to fill open Board seats in the following order of priority on the basis of total votes received: (i) full term Regional Director seats, (ii) full term Director-at-Large seats, (iii) not full term (vacated) Regional Director seats, (iv) not full term (vacated) Director-at-Large seats. For the purposes of clarity, because of eligibility requirements, it is contemplated that the candidates designated to the open Board seats may not receive more votes than certain other candidates who are not selected to the Board. We debated whether to have multiple ballots or one single ballot.  Multiple ballot elections get complicated quickly.  Let’s say we have a ballot for US/Canada and one for Region 2.  After that we’d need a mechanism to merge those two together and come up with the winner of the at-large seat or have another election for the at-large position.  We think the best way to do this is a single ballot and putting the highest vote getters into the most restrictive seats.  Let’s look at an example: There are seats open for Region 1, Region 2 and at-large.  The election results are as follows: Candidate A (eligible for Region 1) – 550 votes Candidate B (eligible for Region 1) – 525 votes Candidate C (eligible for Region 1) – 475 votes Candidate D (eligible for Region 2) – 125 votes Candidate E (eligible for Region 2) – 75 votes In this case, Candidate A is the winner for Region 1 and is assigned that seat.  Candidate D is the winner for Region 2 and is assigned that seat.  The at-large seat is filled by the high remaining vote getter which is Candidate B. The key point to understand is that we may have a situation where a person with a lower vote total is elected to a regional seat and a person with a higher vote total is excluded.  This will be true whether we had multiple ballots or a single ballot.  Board Elections – Vacant Seats The other change to the election process is for vacant Board seats.  The actual changes are sprinkled throughout the document. Previously we didn’t have a mechanism that allowed for an election of a Board seat that we knew would be vacant in the future.  The most common case is when a Board members moves to an Officer role in the middle of their term.  One of the key changes is to allow the number of votes members have to match the number of open seats.  This allows each voter to express their preference on all open seats.  This only applies when we know about the opening prior to the call for nominations.  This all means that if there’s a seat will be open at the start of the next Board term, and we know about it prior to the call for nominations, we can include that seat in the elections.  Ultimately, the aim is to have PASS members decide who sits on the Board in as many situations as possible. We discussed the option of changing the bylaws to just take next highest vote-getter in all other cases.  I think that’s wrong for the following reasons: All voters aren’t able to express an opinion on all candidates.  If there are five people running for three seats, you can only vote for three.  You have no way to express your preference between #4 and #5. Different candidates may have different information about the number of seats available.  A person may learn that a Board member plans to resign at the end of the year prior to that information being made public. They may understand that the top four vote getters will end up on the Board while the rest of the members believe there are only three openings.  This may affect someone’s decision to run.  I don’t think this creates a transparent, fair election. Board members may use their knowledge of the election results to decide whether to remain on the Board or not.  Admittedly this one is unlikely but I don’t want to create a situation where this accusation can be leveled. I think the majority of vacancies in the future will be handled through elections.  The bylaw section quoted above also indicates that partial term vacancies will be filled after the full term seats are filled. Removing Directors Section VI.7 on removing directors has always had a clause that allowed members to remove an elected director.  We also had a clause that allowed appointed directors to be removed.  We added a clause that allows the Board to remove for cause any director with a 2/3 majority vote.  The updated text reads: Any Director may be removed for cause by a 2/3 majority vote of the Board of Directors whenever in its judgment the best interests of PASS would be served thereby. Notwithstanding the foregoing, the authority of any Director to act as in an official capacity as a Director or Officer of PASS may be suspended by the Board of Directors for cause. Cause for suspension or removal of a Director shall include but not be limited to failure to meet any Board-approved performance expectations or the presence of a reason for suspension or dismissal as listed in Addendum B of these Bylaws. The first paragraph is updated and the second and third are unchanged (except cleaning up language).  If you scroll down and look at Addendum B of these bylaws you find the following: Cause for suspension or dismissal of a member of the Board of Directors may include: Inability to attend Board meetings on a regular basis. Inability or unwillingness to act in a capacity designated by the Board of Directors. Failure to fulfill the responsibilities of the office. Inability to represent the Region elected to represent Failure to act in a manner consistent with PASS's Bylaws and/or policies. Misrepresentation of responsibility and/or authority. Misrepresentation of PASS. Unresolved conflict of interests with Board responsibilities. Breach of confidentiality. The bold line about your inability to represent your region is what we added to the bylaws in this revision.  We also added a clause to section VII.3 allowing the Board to remove an officer.  That clause is much less restrictive.  It doesn’t require cause and only requires a simple majority. The Board of Directors may remove any Officer whenever in their judgment the best interests of PASS shall be served by such removal. Other There are numerous other small changes throughout the document. Proxy voting.  The laws around how members and Board members proxy votes are specific in Illinois law.  PASS is an Illinois corporation and is subject to Illinois laws.  We changed section IV.5 to come into compliance with those laws.  Specifically this says you can only vote through a proxy if you have a written proxy through your authorized attorney.  English language proficiency.  As we increase our global footprint we come across more members that aren’t native English speakers.  The business of PASS is conducted in English and it’s important that our Board members speak English.  If we get big enough to afford translators, we may be able to relax this but right now we need English language skills for effective Board members. Committees.  The language around committees in section IX is old and dated.  Our lawyers advised us to clean it up.  This section specifically applies to any committees that the Board may form outside of portfolios.  We removed the term limits, quorum and vacancies clause.  We don’t currently have any committees that this would apply to.  The Nominating Committee is covered elsewhere in the bylaws. Electronic Votes.  The change allows the Board to vote via email but the results must be unanimous.  This is to conform with Illinois state law. Immediate Past President.  There was no mechanism to fill the IPP role if an outgoing President chose not to participate.  We changed section VII.8 to allow the Board to invite any previous President to fill the role by majority vote. Nominations Committee.  We’ve opened the language to allow for the transparent election of the Nominations Committee as outlined by the 2011 Election Review Committee. Revocation of Charters. The language surrounding the revocation of charters for local groups was flagged by the lawyers. We have allowed for the local user group to make all necessary payment before considering returning of items to PASS if required. Bylaw notification. We’ve spent countless meetings working on these bylaws with the intent to not open them again any time in the near future. Should the bylaws be opened again, we have included a clause ensuring that the PASS membership is involved. I’m proud that the Board has remained committed to transparency and accountability to members. This clause will require that same level of commitment in the future even when all the current Board members have rolled off. I think that covers everything.  I’d encourage you to look through the red-line document and see the changes.  It’s helpful to look at the language that’s being removed and the language that’s being added.  I’m happy to answer any questions here or you can email them to [email protected].

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  • Webcast Q&A: Hitachi Data Systems Improves Global Web Experiences with Oracle WebCenter

    - by kellsey.ruppel
    Last Thursday we had the third webcast in our WebCenter in Action webcast series, "Hitachi Data Systems Improves Global Web Experiences with Oracle WebCenter", where customer Sean Mattson from HDS and Rob Vandenberg from Oracle Partner Lingotek shared how Oracle WebCenter is powering Hitachi Data System’s externally facing website and providing a seamless experience for their customers. In case you missed it, here's a recap of the Q&A.   Sean Mattson, Hitachi Data Systems  Q: Did you run into any issues in the deployment of the platform?A: There were some challenges, we were one of the first enterprise ‘on premise’ installations for Lingotek and our WebCenter platform also has a lot of custom features.  There were a lot of iterations and back and forth working with Lingotek at first.  We both helped each other, learned a lot and in the end managed to resolve all issues and roll out a very compelling solution for HDS. Q: What has been the biggest benefit your end users have seen?A: Being able to manage and govern the content lifecycle globally and centrally and at the same time enabling the field to update, review and publish the incremental content changes without a lot of touchpoints has helped us streamline and simplify the entire publishing process. Q: Was there any resistance internally when implementing the solution? If so, how did you overcome that?A: I wouldn't say resistance as much as skepticism that we could actually deploy an automated and self publishing solution.  Even if a solution is great, adoption of a new process can be a challenge and we are still pursuing our adoption targets.  One of the most important aspects is to include lots of training and support materials and offer as much helpdesk type support as needed to get the field self sufficient and confident in the capabilities of the system.  Rob Vandenberg, Lingotek  Q: Are there any limitations regarding supported languages such as support for French Canadian and Indian languages?A: Lingotek supports all language pairs. Including right to left languages and double byte languages such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean Q: Is the Lingotek solution integrated with the new 11g release of WebCenter Sites? A: Yes! In fact, Lingotek is the first OVI partner for Oracle WebCenter Sites  Q: Can translation memories help to improve the accuracy of machine translation?A: One of the greatest long term strategic benefits of using Lingotek is the accumulation of translation memories, or past human translations. These TMs can be used to "train" statistical machine translation engines to have higher and higher quality. This virtuous cycle is ongoing and will consistently improve both machine and human translations.  Q: We have existing translation memories from previous work with our translation service provider. Can they be easily imported in to the Lingotek solution for re-use? Q: Yes, Lingotek is standards compliant. We support TM import in both the TMX and XLIFF formats. Q: If we use Lingotek as a service to do our professional translation and also use the Lingotek software solution, do we get the translation memories to give us a means of just translating future adds and changes ourselves? A: Yes, all the data is yours, always. Lingotek can provide both the integrated translation software as well as the professional translation services. All the content and translation memories are yours. Q: Can you give us an example of where community translation has proved to be successful?A: The key word here is community. If you have a community that cares about you, your content, and the rest of the community, then community translation can work for you. We've seen effective use cases in Product User Groups content, Support Communities, and other types of User Generated content, like wikis and blogs.   If you missed the webcast, be sure to catch the replay to see a live demonstration of WebCenter in action!   Hitachi Data Systems Improves Global Web Experiences with Oracle WebCenter from Oracle WebCenter

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  • Iterative and Incremental Principle Series 4: Iteration Planning – (a.k.a What should I do today?)

    - by llowitz
    Welcome back to the fourth of a five part series on applying the Iteration and Incremental principle.  During the last segment, we discussed how the Implementation Plan includes the number of the iterations for a project, but not the specifics about what will occur during each iteration.  Today, we will explore Iteration Planning and discuss how and when to plan your iterations. As mentioned yesterday, OUM prescribes initially planning your project approach at a high level by creating an Implementation Plan.  As the project moves through the lifecycle, the plan is progressively refined.  Specifically, the details of each iteration is planned prior to the iteration start. The Iteration Plan starts by identifying the iteration goal.  An example of an iteration goal during the OUM Elaboration Phase may be to complete the RD.140.2 Create Requirements Specification for a specific set of requirements.  Another project may determine that their iteration goal is to focus on a smaller set of requirements, but to complete both the RD.140.2 Create Requirements Specification and the AN.100.1 Prepare Analysis Specification.  In an OUM project, the Iteration Plan needs to identify both the iteration goal – how far along the implementation lifecycle you plan to be, and the scope of work for the iteration.  Since each iteration typically ranges from 2 weeks to 6 weeks, it is important to identify a scope of work that is achievable, yet challenging, given the iteration goal and timeframe.  OUM provides specific guidelines and techniques to help prioritize the scope of work based on criteria such as risk, complexity, customer priority and dependency.  In OUM, this prioritization helps focus early iterations on the high risk, architecturally significant items helping to mitigate overall project risk.  Central to the prioritization is the MoSCoW (Must Have, Should Have, Could Have, and Won’t Have) list.   The result of the MoSCoW prioritization is an Iteration Group.  This is a scope of work to be worked on as a group during one or more iterations.  As I mentioned during yesterday’s blog, it is pointless to plan my daily exercise in advance since several factors, including the weather, influence what exercise I perform each day.  Therefore, every morning I perform Iteration Planning.   My “Iteration Plan” includes the type of exercise for the day (run, bike, elliptical), whether I will exercise outside or at the gym, and how many interval sets I plan to complete.    I use several factors to prioritize the type of exercise that I perform each day.  Since running outside is my highest priority, I try to complete it early in the week to minimize the risk of not meeting my overall goal of doing it twice each week.  Regardless of the specific exercise I select, I follow the guidelines in my Implementation Plan by applying the 6-minute interval sets.  Just as in OUM, the iteration goal should be in context of the overall Implementation Plan, and the iteration goal should move the project closer to achieving the phase milestone goals. Having an Implementation Plan details the strategy of what I plan to do and keeps me on track, while the Iteration Plan affords me the flexibility to juggle what I do each day based on external influences thus maximizing my overall success. Tomorrow I’ll conclude the series on applying the Iterative and Incremental approach by discussing how to manage the iteration duration and highlighting some benefits of applying this principle.

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  • Best Practices - Core allocation

    - by jsavit
    This post is one of a series of "best practices" notes for Oracle VM Server for SPARC (also called Logical Domains) Introduction SPARC T-series servers currently have up to 4 CPU sockets, each of which has up to 8 or (on SPARC T3) 16 CPU cores, while each CPU core has 8 threads, for a maximum of 512 dispatchable CPUs. The defining feature of Oracle VM Server for SPARC is that each domain is assigned CPU threads or cores for its exclusive use. This avoids the overhead of software-based time-slicing and emulation (or binary rewriting) of system state-changing privileged instructions used in traditional hypervisors. To create a domain, administrators specify either the number of CPU threads or cores that the domain will own, as well as its memory and I/O resources. When CPU resources are assigned at the individual thread level, the logical domains constraint manager attempts to assign threads from the same cores to a domain, and avoid "split core" situations where the same CPU core is used by multiple domains. Sometimes this is unavoidable, especially when domains are allocated and deallocated CPUs in small increments. Why split cores can matter Split core allocations can silenty reduce performance because multiple domains with different address spaces and memory contents are sharing the core's Level 1 cache (L1$). This is called false cache sharing since even identical memory addresses from different domains must point to different locations in RAM. The effect of this is increased contention for the cache, and higher memory latency for each domain using that core. The degree of performance impact can be widely variable. For applications with very small memory working sets, and with I/O bound or low-CPU utilization workloads, it may not matter at all: all machines wait for work at the same speed. If the domains have substantial workloads, or are critical to performance then this can have an important impact: This blog entry was inspired by a customer issue in which one CPU core was split among 3 domains, one of which was the control and service domain. The reported problem was increased I/O latency in guest domains, but the root cause might be higher latency servicing the I/O requests due to the control domain being slowed down. What to do about it Split core situations are easily avoided. In most cases the logical domain constraint manager will avoid it without any administrative action, but it can be entirely prevented by doing one of the several actions: Assign virtual CPUs in multiples of 8 - the number of threads per core. For example: ldm set-vcpu 8 mydomain or ldm add-vcpu 24 mydomain. Each domain will then be allocated on a core boundary. Use the whole core constraint when assigning CPU resources. This allocates CPUs in increments of entire cores instead of virtual CPU threads. The equivalent of the above commands would be ldm set-core 1 mydomain or ldm add-core 3 mydomain. Older syntax does the same thing by adding the -c flag to the add-vcpu, rm-vcpu and set-vcpu commands, but the new syntax is recommended. When whole core allocation is used an attempt to add cores to a domain fails if there aren't enough completely empty cores to satisfy the request. See https://blogs.oracle.com/sharakan/entry/oracle_vm_server_for_sparc4 for an excellent article on this topic by Eric Sharakan. Don't obsess: - if the workloads have minimal CPU requirements and don't need anywhere near a full CPU core, then don't worry about it. If you have low utilization workloads being consolidated from older machines onto a current T-series, then there's no need to worry about this or to assign an entire core to domains that will never use that much capacity. In any case, make sure the most important domains have their own CPU cores, in particular the control domain and any I/O or service domain, and of course any important guests. Summary Split core CPU allocation to domains can potentially have an impact on performance, but the logical domains manager tends to prevent this situation, and it can be completely and simply avoided by allocating virtual CPUs on core boundaries.

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  • Oracle at HR Tech: What a Difference a Year Makes

    - by Natalia Rachelson
    Last week, I had the privilege of attending the famous HR Technology Conference (HR Tech) in my new hometown of Chicago. This annual event, which draws the who of who in the world of HR technology, was by far the biggest.  It wasn't just the highest level of attendance that was mind blowing, but also the amazing quality of attendees. Kudos go to the organizers, especially Bill Kutik for pulling together such a phenomenal conference. Conference highlights included Naomi Bloom's (http://infullbloom.us) Masters Panel and Mark Hurd's General Session on the last day of the conference. Naomi managed to do the seemingly impossible -- get all of the industry heavyweights and fierce competitors to travel to Chicago for her panel. Here are the executives she hosted: Our own Steve Miranda Sanjay Poonen, President Global Solutions, SAP Stan Swete, CTO, Workday Mike Capone, VP for Product Development and CIO, ADP John Wookey, EVP, Social Applications, Salesforce.com Adam Rogers, CTO, Ultimate Software       I bet you think "WOW" when you look at these names. Just this panel by itself would have been enough of a draw for any tech conference, so Naomi and Bill really scored. TechTarget published a great review of the conference here.  And here are a few highlights from Steve. "Steve Miranda, EVP Apps Dev Oracle, said delivering software in the cloud helps vendors shape their products to customer needs more efficiently. "As vendors, we're able to improve the software faster," he said. "We can see in real time what customers are using and not using." Miranda underscored Oracle's commitment to socializing its HCM platform,and named recruiting as an area where social has had a significant impact. "We want to make social a part of the fabric, not a separate piece," he said. "Already, if you're doing recruiting without social, it probably doesn't make any sense."" Having Mark Hurd at the conference was another real treat and everyone took notice.  The Business of HR publication covered Mark's participation at HR Tech and the full article is available here. Here is what Business of HR had to say: "In truth, the story of Oracle today is a story similar to many of the current and potential customers they faced at the conference this week. Their business is changing and growing. They've dealt with acquisitions of their own and their competitors continue to nip at their heels. They are dealing with growth (and yes, they are hiring in case you're interested). They have concerns about talent as well. If Oracle feels as strongly about their products as they seem to be, they will be getting their co-president in front of a lot more groups of current and potential customers like they did at the HR Technology Conference this year. And here's hoping this is one executive who won't stop talking about the importance of talent just because he isn't at the HR tech conference anymore." Natalia RachelsonSenior Director, Oracle Applications

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  • Comparing Isis, Google, and Paypal

    - by David Dorf
    Back in 2010 I was sure NFC would make great strides, but here we are two years later and NFC doesn't seem to be sticking. The obvious reason being the chicken-and-egg problem.  Retailers don't want to install the terminals until the phones support NFC, and vice-versa. So consumers continue to sit on the sidelines waiting for either side to blink and make the necessary investment.  In the meantime, EMV is looking for a way to sneak into the US with the help of the card brands. There are currently three major solutions that are battling in the marketplace.  All three know that replacing mag-stripe alone is not sufficient to move consumers.  Long-term it's the offers and loyalty programs combined with tendering that make NFC attractive. NFC solutions cross lots of barriers, so a strong partner system is required.  The solutions need to include the carriers, card brands, banks, handset manufacturers, POS terminals, and most of all lots of merchants.  Lots of coordination is necessary to make the solution seamless to the consumer. Google Wallet Google's problem has always been that only the Nexus phone has an NFC chip that supports their wallet.  There are a couple of additional phones out there now, but adoption is still slow.  They acquired Zavers a while back to incorporate digital coupons, but the the bulk of their users continue to be non-NFC.  They have taken an open approach by not specifying particular payment brands.  Google is piloting in San Francisco and New York, supporting both MasterCard PayPass and stored value. I suppose the other card brands may eventually follow.  There's no cost for consumers or merchants -- Google will make money via targeted ads. Isis Not long after Google announced its wallet, AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile announced a joint venture called Isis.  They are in the unique position of owning the SIM in the phones they issue.  At first it seemed Isis was a vehicle for the carriers to compete with the existing card brands, but Isis later switched to a generic wallet that supports the major card brands.  Isis reportedly charges issuers a $5 fee per customer per year.  Isis will pilot this summer in Salt Lake City and Austin. PayPal PayPal, the clear winner in the online payment space beyond traditional credit cards, is trying to move into physical stores.  After negotiations with Google to provide a wallet broke off, PayPal decided to avoid NFC altogether, at least for now, and focus on payments without any physical card or phone.  By avoiding NFC, consumers don't need an NFC-enabled phone and merchants don't need a new reader.  Consumers must enter their phone number and PIN in the merchant's existing device, or they can enter their PIN in the PayPal inStore app running on their phone, then show the merchant a unique barcode which authorizes payment. Paypal is free for consumers and charges a fee for merchants.  Its not clear, at least to me, how PayPal handles fraudulent transactions and whether the consumer is protected. The wildcard is, of course, Apple.  Their mobile technologies set the standard, so incorporating NFC chips would certainly accelerate adoption of many payment solutions.  Their announcement today of the iOS Passbook is a step in the right direction, but stops short of handling payments. For those retailers that have invested in modern terminals, it seems the best strategy is to support all the emerging solutions and let the consumers choose the winner.

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  • What is the difference between Workcenters, Dashboards, and the Interaction Hub?

    - by Matthew Haavisto
    Oracle Open World has just concluded.  Over the course of the conference, we presented several sessions covering different aspects of the PeopleSoft user experience, including Workcenters, Dashboards, and the PeopleSoft Interaction Hub (formerly known as the PeopleSoft Applications Portal).  Although we've produced collateral on these features and covered them in sessions, it became apparent at the conference that customers still have many questions about the these products, including how they are licensed, how they are installed, what their various purposes are, and how they can be used together synergistically. Let's Start with Licensing and Installation As you may know, we've extended the restricted use license (RUL) for the Interaction Hub.  This grants customers with PeopleTools 8.52 licenses the right to install the Interaction Hub for free for use as specified in the Tools license notes.  Note that this means customers receive a restricted use license for the Interaction Hub that doesn't cost them an additional license fee, but it is a separate product, not part of PeopleTools or PeopleSoft applications, and is a separate installation.  This means customers must provide the infrastructure to install and run the Hub, just like any other application.  The benefits of using the Hub to unify your PeopleSoft user experience can be great.  PeopleSoft applications have not yet delivered instances of the Hub with their products, though they may in the future. Workcenters and Dashboards, on the other hand, are frameworks provided by PeopleTools.  No other license is required, and no additional installation of a separate product is needed (apart from PeopleTools and PeopleSoft applications).  PeopleSoft applications are delivering instances of the workcenters and dashboards with their products.  Some are available now, and more are coming in future releases.  These delivered workcenter and dashboard instances require no additional licenses, and no additional installations beyond Tools and the applications that provide them.  In addition, the workcenter and dashboard frameworks provided by PeopleTools can be used by customers to build their own workcenters and dashboards, and it's quite easy and simple to do so. What are Their Differences?  What Purposes do they Serve? Workcenters, Dashboards and the Interaction Hub appear somewhat similar.  They all contain pagelets, and have some visual characteristics in common.  However, their strengths and purposes are very different, and they were designed to provide different benefits to your PeopleSoft ecosystem. Workcenters and Dashboards have the following characteristics: Designed for specific roles Focus on the daily tasks of those roles Help to streamline the work performed most often Personal view of my work world Makes navigation and search easier and quicker, particularly for transactions and decision support Reports and data needed for day-to-day work Personalizable, but minimal Delivered by PS Apps, but can be altered by customer for their requirements Customers can create their own Workcenters can be used for guided processes  The Interaction Hub is designed to aggregate content from multiple applications, and is is used to unify the user experience of those applications.  It offers a rich, web site-based user experience, and is often used to provide access to infrequently performed activities like benefits enrollment, payroll inquiries, life event changes, onboarding, and so on. Full-featured and robust Centrally administered Pushed to large audience Broad info like Company News Infrequent activities like benefits, not day-to-day tasks Self-service, access to employer info Central launch point for other activities and can navigate to workcenters and dashboards Deployed by customers or consultants, instances not delivered by PeopleSoft (at this time) Content management Unified PS application navigation Although these products are quite different and serve different purposes in your PeopleSoft environment, they can be used together to provide a richer, more efficient and engaging user experience for your all your user communities.

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  • October 2013 FMW Proactive Patches Released

    - by mustafakaya
    The following Fusion Middleware (FMW) Proactive  patches were released on October 15, 2013. Bundle Patches : Bundle patches are collections of controlled, well tested critical bug fixes for a specific product  which may include security contents and occasionally minor enhancements. These are cumulative in nature meaning the latest bundle patch in a particular series includes the contents of the previous bundle patches released.  A suite bundle patch is an aggregation of multiple product  bundle patches that are part of a product suite. Oracle Identity Management Suite Bundle Patch 11.1.1.5.5 consisting of Oracle Identity Manager (OIM) 11.1.1.5.9 bundle patch Oracle Access Manager (OAM) 11.1.1.5.6 bundle patch. Oracle Adaptive Access Manager (OAAM) 11.1.1.5.2 bundle patch. Oracle Entitlement Server (OES) 11.1.1.5.4 bundle patch. Oracle Identity Management Suite Bundle Patch 11.1.2.0.4 consisting of Oracle Access Manager (OAM) 11.1.2.0.4 bundle patch. Oracle Adaptive Access Manager (OAAM) 11.1.2.0.2 bundle patch. Oracle Entitlement Server (OES) 11.1.2.0.2 bundle patch. Oracle Identity Analytics (OIA ) 11.1.1.5.6  bundle patch. Oracle GlassFish Server (OGFS) 2.1.1.22, 3.0.1.8 and 3.1.2.7 bundle patches. Oracle iPlanet Web Server (OiWS) 7.0.18 bundle patch Oracle SOA Suite (SOA) 11.1.1.7.1 bundle patch Oracle WebCenter Portal (WCP) 11.1.1.8.1 bundle patch Sun Role Manager (SRM) 4.1.7 and 5.0.3.2 bundle patches. Patch Set Updates (PSU) Patch Set Updates (PSU)  are collections of well controlled, well tested critical bug fixes for a specific product  that have been proven in customer environments. PSUs  may include security contents but no  enhancements are included. These are cumulative in nature meaning the latest PSU  in a particular series includes the contents of the previous PSUs  released.  Oracle Exalogic 2.0.3.0.4 Physical Linux x86-64 and 2.0.4.0.4 Physical Solaris x86-64 PSUs. Oracle WebLogic Server 10.3.6.0.6 and 12.1.1.0.6 PSUs. Critical Patch Update (CPU) : The Critical Patch Update program is Oracle's quarterly release of security fixes. The following additional patches were released as part of Oracle's Critical Patch Update program: Oracle JDeveloper 11.1.2.3.0, 11.1.2.4.0 and 12.1.2.0.0 Oracle Outside In Technology 8.4.0 and  8.4.1 Oracle Portal 11.1.1.6.0 Oracle Security Service  11.1.1.6.0, 11.1.1.7.0 and 12.1.2.0.0 Oracle WebCache 11.1.1.6.0 and 11.1.1.7.0 Oracle WebCenter Content 10.1.3.5.1, 11.1.1.6.0, 11.1.1.7.0 and 11.1.1.8.0 Oracle WebServices 10.1.3.5.0 and 11.1.1.6.0 For more information; Master Notes on Fusion Middleware Proactive Patching. PSU and CPU October 2013  Availability Document Critical Patch Update Advisory -  October 2013 

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  • It’s official – Red Gate is a great place to work!

    - by red@work
    At a glittering award ceremony last week, we found out that we’re officially the 14th best small company to work for in the whole of the UK! This is no mean feat, considering that about 1,000 companies enter the Sunday Times Top 100 best companies awards each year. Most of these are in the small companies category too. It's the fourth year in a row for us to be in the Top 100 list and we're tickled pink because the results are based on employee opinion. We’re particularly proud to be the best small company in Cambridge (in the whole of East Anglia, in fact) and the best small software development company in the entire UK. So how does it all work? Well, 90% of us took the time to answer over 70 questions on categories such as management, benefits, wellbeing, leadership, giving something back and what we think of Red Gate as a whole. It makes you think about every part of day to day working life and how you feel about it. Do you slightly or strongly agree or disagree that your manager motivates your to do your best every day, or that you have confidence in Red Gate's leaders, or that you’re not spending too much time working? It's great to see that we had one of the best scores in the country for the question "Do you think your company takes advantage of you?" We got particularly high scores for management, wellbeing and for giving something back too. A few of us got dressed up and headed to London for the awards; very excited about where we’d place but slightly nervous about having to get up on stage. There was a last minute hic up with a bow tie but the Managing Editor of the Sunday Times kindly stepped in to offer his assistance just before we had our official photo taken. We were nominated for two Special Recognition Awards. Despite not bringing them home this year, we're very proud to be nominated as there are only three nominations in each category. First we were up for the Training and Development award. Best Companies loved that we get together at lunchtimes to teach each other photography, cookery and French, as well as our book clubs and techie talks. And of course they liked our opportunities to go on training courses and to jet off to international conferences. Our other nomination was for the Wellbeing award. Best Companies loved our free food (and let’s face it, so do we). Porridge or bacon sandwiches for breakfast, a three course hot dinner, and free fruit and cereals all day long. If all that has an affect on the waistline then there are plenty of sporty activities for us all to get involved in, such as yoga, running or squash. Or if that’s not your thing then a relaxing massage helps us all to unwind every few months or so. The awards were hosted by news presenter Kate Silverton. She gave us a special mention during the ceremony for having great customer engagement as well as employee engagement, after we told her about Rodney Landrum (a Friend of Red Gate) tattooing our logo on his arm. We showed off our customised dinner jacket (thanks to Dom from Usability) with a flashing Red Gate logo on the back and she seemed suitability impressed. Back in the office the next day, we popped open the champagne and raised a glass to our success. Neil, our joint CEO, talked about how pleased he was with the award because it's based on the opinions of the people that count – us. You can read more about the Sunday Times awards here. By the way, we're still growing and are still hiring. If you’d like to keep up with our latest vacancies then why not follow us on Twitter at twitter.com/redgatecareers. Right now we're busy hiring in development, test, sales, product management, web development, and project management. Here's a link to our current job opportunities page – we'd love to hear from great people who are looking for a great place to work! After all, we're only great because of the people who work here. Post by: Alice Chapman

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  • ArchBeat Link-o-Rama Top 10 for October 7-13, 2012

    - by Bob Rhubart
    The Top 10 items shared via the OTN ArchBeat Facebook page for the week of October 7-13, 2012. OOW12: Oracle Business Process Management/Oracle ADF Integration Best Practices | Andrejus Baranovskis The Oracle OpenWorld presentations keep coming! Oracle ACE Director Andrejus Baranovskis shares the slides from "Oracle Business Process Management/Oracle ADF Integration Best Practices," co-presented with Danilo Schmiedel from Opitz Consulting. Oracle's Analytics, Engineered Systems, and Big Data Strategy | Mark Rittman Part 1 of 3 in Oracle ACE Director Mark Rittman's series on Oracle Exalytics, Oracle R Enterprise and Endeca. Adaptive ADF/WebCenter template for the iPad | Maiko Rocha Oracle Fusion Middleware A-Team member Maiko Rocha responds to a a customer request for information about how to create an adaptive iPad template for their WebCenter Portal application, "a specific template to streamline their workflow on the iPad." Following the Thread in OSB | Antony Reynolds Antony Reynolds recently led an Oracle Service Bus POC in which his team needed to get high throughput from an OSB pipeline. "Imagine our surprise when, on stressing the system, we saw it lock up, with large numbers of blocked threads." He shares the details of the problem and the solution in this extensive technical post. WebCenter Sites Gadget Development Concepts Quickstart | John Brunswick What are Gadgets? "At their most basic level they can be thought of as lightweight portlets that run largely on the client side of an architecture," says John Brunswick. "Gadgets provide a cross-platform container to run reusable UI modules that generally expose dynamic information to an end user, allowing for some level of end user customization." Oracle Fusion Middleware Security: OAM and OIM 11g Academies Looking for technical how-to content covering Oracle Access Manager and Oracle Identity Manager? The people behind the Oracle Middleware Security blog have indexed relevant blog posts into what they call Academies. "These indexes contain the articles we've written that we believe provide long lasting guidance on OAM and OIM. Posts covered in these series include articles on key aspects of OAM and OIM 11g, best practice architectural guidance, integrations, and customizations." Fusion Applications Technical Tips | Naveen Nahata "Setting memory parameters for Admin and Managed servers of various domains in Fusion Applications can be, let us say, a little daunting," says Oracle Fusion Middleware A-Team member Naveen Nahata. "While all this may look complicated and intimidating, it is actually relatively simple once you understand how it all works." Updated Agenda for OTN Architect Day Los Angeles (Oct 25) In less than two weeks Oracle Architect Day rolls into Los Angeles, with a full slate of sessions devoted to cloud computing, engineered systems, and SOA. Follow the link for the updated event agenda. ORCLville: OOW 2012 - A Not So Brief Recap Oracle ACE Director Floyd Teter, an Applications & Apps Technology specialists, shares his personal, frank, and and extensive recap or Oracle OpenWorld 2012. SOA Suite create partition in Enterprise Manager | Peter Paul van de Beek "In Oracle SOA Suite 10g, or more specific BPEL 10g, one could group functionality in domains," says Peter Paul van de Beek. "This feature has been away in the early versions of SOA Suite 11g. They have returned in more recent version and can be used for all SCA composites (instead of BPEL only). Nowadays these 10g domains are called partitions." Thought for the Day "I strive for an architecture from which nothing can be taken away." — Helmut Jahn Source: BrainyQuote.com

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  • Customers Discuss: Real-World Operational Reporting with Oracle GoldenGate

    - by Irem Radzik
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} As businesses leverage business intelligence and analytics for day-to-day decision making, operational reporting solutions become more and more common. While some companies can use their production OLTP system for running operational reports, for many it is too much overhead and performance impact for transaction processing systems.  Oracle GoldenGate’s real-time data integration capabilities enable companies to create a real-time replica of their OLTP systems, dedicated for operational reporting. This instance can be optimized for the reports needed as well such as containing only the tables needed from the source. Oracle GoldenGate has certified solutions for many Oracle applications such as EBusiness Suite, Peoplesoft, JD Edwards, to offload operational reporting to another reporting server that has real-time data feeding from the production system. At Oracle OpenWorld we will be hearing from a panel of Oracle GoldenGate customers how they deployed GoldenGate for operational reporting. Comcast, Turk Telekom, and Raymond James will be sharing their experiences and the benefits achieved when implementing GoldenGate’s solution. If you have performance degradation in your production systems due to reporting or ad-hoc queries, and you will be at OpenWorld, don’t miss this informative session: Real-World Operational Reporting with Oracle GoldenGate: Customer Panel-- Tuesday Oct 2nd 11:45am Mascone West 3005. For other data integration sessions at OpenWorld, please check our Focus-On document.  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} If you cannot attend OpenWorld, please check out related white paper “Using Oracle GoldenGate to Achieve Operational Reporting for Oracle Applications” to learn more.

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  • Friday Tips #6, Part 1

    - by Chris Kawalek
    We have a two parter this week, with this post focusing on desktop virtualization and the next one on server virtualization. Question: Why would I use the Oracle Secure Global Desktop Secure Gateway? Answer by Rick Butland, Principal Sales Consultant, Oracle Desktop Virtualization: Well, for the benefit of those who might not be familiar with client connections in Oracle Secure Global Desktop (SGD), let me back up and briefly explain. An SGD client connects to an SGD server using two distinct protocols, which, by default, require two distinct TCP ports. The first is the HTTP protocol, used by the web browser to connect to the SGD webserver on TCP port 80, or if secure connections are enabled (SSL/TLS), then TCP port 443, commonly identified as the "HTTPS" port, that is, "SSL encrypted HTTP." The second protocol from the client to the server is the Adaptive Internet Protocol, or AIP, which is used for displaying applications, transferring drive mapping data, print jobs, and so on. By default, AIP uses the TCP port 3104, or port 5307 when SSL is enabled. When SGD clients need to access SGD over a firewall, the ports that AIP requires are typically "closed"; and most administrators are reluctant, to put it mildly, to change their firewall configurations to allow AIP traffic on 3144/5307.   To avoid this problem, SGD introduced "Firewall Forwarding", a technique where, in effect, both http and AIP traffic are "multiplexed" onto a single "well-known" TCP port, that is port 443, the https port.  This is also known as single-port firewall traversal.  This technique takes advantage of the fact that, as a "well-known service", port 443 is usually "open",   allowing (encrypted) traffic to pass. At the target SGD server, the two protocols are de-multiplexed and routed appropriately. The Secure Gateway was developed in response to requirements from customers for SGD to support multi-stage DMZ's, and to avoid exposing SGD servers and the information they contain directly to connections from the Internet. The Secure Gateway acts as a reverse-proxy in the first-tier of the DMZ, accepting, authenticating, and terminating incoming client connections, and then re-encrypting the connections, and proxying them, routing them on to SGD servers, deeper in the network. The client no longer needs to know the name/IP address of the SGD servers in their network, they connect to the gateway, only. The gateway takes care of those internal network details.     The Secure Gateway supports the same "single-port firewall" capability as does "Firewall Forwarding", but offers the additional advantage of load-balancing incoming client connections amongst SGD array members, which could be cumbersome without a forward-deployed secure gateway. Load-balancing weights and policies can be monitored and tuned using the "Balancer Manager" application, and Apache mod_proxy_balancer directives.   Going forward, our architects recommend the use of the Secure Gateway over "Firewall Forwarding" for single-port firewall traversal, due to its architectural advantages, its greater flexibility and enhanced features.  Finally, it should be noted that the Secure Gateway is not separately priced; any licensed SGD customer may use the Secure Gateway component at no additional cost.   For more information, see the "Secure Gateway Administrator's Guide".

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  • Social Search: Looking for Love

    - by Mike Stiles
    For marketers and enterprise executives who have placed a higher priority on and allocated bigger budgets to search over social, it might be time to notice yet another shift that’s well underway. Social is search. Search marketing was always more of an internal slam-dunk than other digital initiatives. Even a C-suite that understood little about the new technology world knew it’s a good thing when people are able to find you. Google was the new Yellow Pages. Only with Google, you could get your listing first without naming yourself “AAAA Plumbing.” There were wizards out there who could give your business prominence in front of people who were specifically looking for what you offered. Other search giants like Bing also came along to offer such ideal matchmaking possibilities. But what if the consumer isn’t using a search engine to find what they’re looking for? And what if the search engines started altering their algorithms so that search placement manipulation was more difficult? Both of those things have started to happen. Experian Hitwise’s numbers show that visits to the major search engines in the UK dropped 100 million through August. Search engines are far from dead, or even challenged. But more and more, the public is discovering the sites and brands they need through advice they get via social, not search. You’ll find the worlds of social and search increasingly co-mingling as well. Search behemoths Google and Bing are including Facebook and Google+ into their engines. Meanwhile, Facebook and Twitter have done some integration of global web search into their platforms. So what makes social such a worthwhile search entity for brands? First and foremost, the consumer has demonstrated a behavior of acting on recommendations from social connections. A cry in the wilderness like, “Anybody know any good catering companies?” will usually yield a link (and an endorsement) from a friend such as “Yeah, check out Just-Cheese-Balls Catering.” There’s no such human-driven force/influence behind the big search engines. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and others call it “Friend Mining.” It is, in essence, searching for answers from friends’ experiences as opposed to faceless code. And Facebook has all of those friends’ experiences already stored as data. eMarketer says search in an $18 billion business, and investors are really into it. So no shock Facebook’s ready to leverage their social graph into relevant search. What do you do about all this as a brand? For one thing, it’s going to lead to some interesting paid marketing opportunities around the corner, including Sponsored Stories bought against certain queries, inserting deals into search results, capitalizing on social search results on mobile, etc. Apart from that, it might be time to stop mentally separating social and search in your strategic planning and budgeting. Courting your fans on social will cumulatively add up to more valuable, personally endorsed recommendations for your company when a consumer conducts a search on social. Fail to foster those relationships, fail to engage, fail to provide knock-em-dead customer service, fail to wow them with your actual products and services…and you’ll wind up with the visibility you deserve in social search results.

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  • Stumbling Through: Visual Studio 2010 (Part I)

    Ive spent the better part of the last two years doing nothing but K2 workflow development, which until very recently could only be done in Visual Studio 2005 so I am a bit behind the times. I seem to have skipped over using Visual Studio 2008 entirely, and I am now ready to stumble through all that Ive missed. Not that I will abandon my K2 ramblings, but I need to get back to some of the other technologies I am passionate about but havent had the option of working with them on a day-to-day basis as I have with K2 blackpearl. Specifically, I am going to be focusing my efforts on what is new in the Entity Framework and WPF in Visual Studio 2010, though you have to keep in mind that since I have skipped VS 2008, I may be giving VS 2010 credit for things that really have been around for a while (hey, if I havent seen it, it is new to me!). I have the following simple goals in mind for this exercise: Entity Framework Model an inherited class Entity Framework Model a lookup entity WPF Bind a list of entities WPF - on selection of an entity in the bound list, display values of the selected entity WPF For the lookup field, provide a dropdown of potential values to lookup All of these goals must be accomplished using as little code as possible, relying on the features we get out of the box in Visual Studio 2010. This isnt going to be rocket science here, Im not even looking to get or save this data from/to a data source, but I gotta start somewhere and hopefully it will grow into something more interesting. For this exercise, I am going to try to model some fictional data about football players and personnel (maybe turning this into some sort of NFL simulation game if I lose my job and can play with this all day), so Ill start with a Person class that has a name property, and extend that with a Player class to include a Position lookup property. The idea is that a Person can be a Player, Coach or whatever other personnel type may be associated with a football team but well only flesh out the Player aspect of a person for this. So to get started, I fired up Visual Studio 2010 and created a new WPF Application: To this project, I added a new ADO.NET Entity Data Model named PlayerModel (for now, not sure what will be an appropriate name so this may be revisited): I chose for it to be an empty model, as I dont have a database designed for this yet: Using the toolbox, I dragged out an entity for each of the items we identified earlier: Person, Player and Position, and gave them some simple properties (note that I kept the default Id property for each of them): Now to figure out how to link these things together the way I want to first, lets try to tell it that Player extends Person. I see that Inheritance is one of the items in the toolbox, but I cant seem to drag it out anywhere onto the canvas. However, when I right-click an element, I get the option to Add Inheritance to it, which gives us exactly what we want: Ok, now that we have that, how do we tell it that each player has a position? Well, despite association being in the toolbox, I have learned that you cant just drag and drop those elements so I right click Player and select Add -> Association to get the following dialog: I see the option here to Add foreign key properties to my entities Ive read somewhere this this is a new and highly-sought after feature so Ill see what it does. Selecting it includes a PositionId on the Player element for me, which seems pretty database-centric and I would like to see if I can live without it for now given that we also got the Position property out of this association. Ill bring it back into the fold if it ends up being useful later. Here is what we end up with now: Trying to compile this resulted in an error stating that the Player entity cannot have an Id, because the Person element it extends already has a property named Id. Makes sense, so I remove it and compile again. Success, but with a warning but success is a good thing so Ill pretend I didnt see that warning for now. It probably has to do with the fact that my Player entity is now pretty useless as it doesnt have any non-navigation properties. So things seem to match what we are going for, great now what the heck do we do with this? Lets switch gears and see what we get for free dealing with this model from the UI. Lets open up the MainWindow.xaml and see if we can connect to our entities as a data source. Hey, whats this? Have you read my mind, Visual Studio? Our entities are already listed in the Data Sources panel: I do notice, however, that our Player entity is missing. Is this due to that compilation warning? Ill add a bogus property to our player entity just to see if that is the case no, still no love. The warning reads: Error 2062: No mapping specified for instances of the EntitySet and AssociationSet in the EntityContainer PlayerModelContainer. Well if everything worked without any issues, then I wouldnt be stumbling through at all, so lets get to the bottom of this. My good friend google indicates that the warning is due to the model not being tied up to a database. Hmmm, so why dont Players show up in my data sources? A little bit of drill-down shows that they are, in fact, exposed under Positions: Well now that isnt quite what I want. While you could get to players through a position, it shouldnt be that way exclusively. Oh well, I can ignore that for now lets drag Players out onto the canvas after selecting List from the dropdown: Hey, what the heck? I wanted a list not a listview. Get rid of that list view that was just dropped, drop in a listbox and then drop the Players entity into it. That will bind it for us. Of course, there isnt any data to show, which brings us to the really hacky part of all this and that is to stuff some test data into our view source without actually getting it from any data source. To do this through code, we need to grab a reference to the positionsPlayersViewSource resource that was created for us when we dragged out our Players entity. We then set the source of that reference equal to a populated list of Players.  Well add a couple of players that way as well as a few positions via the positionsViewSource resource, and Ill ensure that each player has a position specified.  Ultimately, the code looks like this: System.Windows.Data.CollectionViewSource positionViewSource = ((System.Windows.Data.CollectionViewSource)(this.FindResource("positionsViewSource")));             List<Position> positions = new List<Position>();             Position newPosition = new Position();             newPosition.Id = 0;             newPosition.Name = "WR";             positions.Add(newPosition);             newPosition = new Position();             newPosition.Id = 1;             newPosition.Name = "RB";             positions.Add(newPosition);             newPosition = new Position();             newPosition.Id = 2;             newPosition.Name = "QB";             positions.Add(newPosition);             positionViewSource.Source = positions;             System.Windows.Data.CollectionViewSource playerViewSource = ((System.Windows.Data.CollectionViewSource)(this.FindResource("positionsPlayersViewSource")));             List<Player> players = new List<Player>();             Player newPlayer = new Player();             newPlayer.Id = 0;             newPlayer.Name = "Test Dude";             newPlayer.Position = positions[0];             players.Add(newPlayer);             newPlayer = new Player();             newPlayer.Id = 1;             newPlayer.Name = "Test Dude II";             newPlayer.Position = positions[1];             players.Add(newPlayer);             newPlayer = new Player();             newPlayer.Id = 2;             newPlayer.Name = "Test Dude III";             newPlayer.Position = positions[2];             players.Add(newPlayer);             playerViewSource.Source = players; Now that our views are being loaded with data, we can go about tying things together visually. Drop a text box (to show the selected players name) and a combo box (to show the selected players position). Drag the Positions entity from the data sources panel to the combo box to wire it up to the positions view source. Click the text box that was dragged, and find its Text property in the properties pane. There is a little glyph next to it that displays Advanced Properties when hovered over click this and then select Apply Data Binding. In the dialog that appears, we can select the current players name as the value to bind to: Similarly, we can wire up the combo boxs SelectedItem value to the current players position: When the application is executed and we navigate through the various players, we automatically get their name and position bound to the appropriate fields: All of this was accomplished with no code save for loading the test data, and I might add, it was pretty intuitive to do so via the drag and drop of entities straight from the data sources panel. So maybe all of this was old hat to you, but I was very impressed with this experience and I look forward to stumbling through the caveats of doing more complex data modeling and binding in this fashion. Next up, I suppose, will be figuring out how to get the entities to get real data from a data source instead of stuffing it with test data as well as trying to figure out why Players ended up being under Positions in the data sources panel.Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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  • Cloud hosted CI for .NET projects

    - by Scott Dorman
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/sdorman/archive/2014/06/02/cloud-hosted-ci-for-.net-projects.aspxContinuous integration (CI) is important. If you don’t have it set up…you should. There are a lot of different options available for hosting your own CI server, but they all require you to maintain your own infrastructure. If you’re a business, that generally isn’t a problem. However, if you have some open source projects hosted, for example on GitHub, there haven’t really been any options. That has changed with the latest release of AppVeyor, which bills itself as “Continuous integration for busy developers.” What’s different about AppVeyor is that it’s a hosted solution. Why is that important? By being a hosted solution, it means that I don’t have to maintain my own infrastructure for a build server. How does that help if you’re hosting an open source project? AppVeyor has a really competitive pricing plan. For an unlimited amount of public repositories, it’s free. That gives you a cloud hosted CI system for all of your GitHub projects for the cost of some time to set them up, which actually isn’t hard to do at all. I have several open source projects (hosted at https://github.com/scottdorman), so I signed up using my GitHub credentials. AppVeyor fully supported my two-factor authentication with GitHub, so I never once had to enter my password for GitHub into AppVeyor. Once it was done, I authorized GitHub and it instantly found all of the repositories I have (both the ones I created and the ones I cloned from elsewhere). You can even add “build badges” to your markdown files in GitHub, so anyone who visits your project can see the status of the lasted build. Out of the box, you can simply select a repository, add the build project, click New Build and wait for the build to complete. You now have a complete CI server running for your project. The best part of this, besides the fact that it “just worked” with almost zero configuration is that you can configure it through a web-based interface which is very streamlined, clean and easy to use or you can use a appveyor.yml file. This means that you can define your CI build process (including any scripts that might need to be run, etc.) in a standard file format (the YAML format) and store it in your repository. The benefits to that are huge. The file becomes a versioned artifact in your source control system, so it can be branched, merged, and is completely transparent to anyone working on the project. By the way, AppVeyor isn’t limited to just GitHub. It currently supports GitHub, BitBucket, Visual Studio Online, and Kiln. I did have a few issues getting one of my projects to build, but the same day I posted the problem to the support forum a fix was deployed, and I had a functioning CI build about 5 minutes after that. Since then, I’ve provided some additional feature requests and had a few other questions, all of which have seen responses within a 24-hour period. I have to say that it’s easily been one of the best customer support experiences I’ve seen in a long time. AppVeyor is still young, so it doesn’t yet have full feature parity with some of the older (more established) CI systems available,  but it’s getting better all the time and I have no doubt that it will quickly catch up to those other CI systems and then pass them. The bottom line, if you’re looking for a good cloud-hosted CI system for your .NET-based projects, look at AppVeyor.

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  • Reducing Deadlocks - not a DBA issue ?

    - by steveh99999
     As a DBA, I'm involved on an almost daily basis troubleshooting 'SQL Server' performance issues. Often, this troubleshooting soon veers away from a 'its a SQL Server issue' to instead become a wider application/database design/coding issue.One common perception with SQL Server is that deadlocking is an application design issue - and is fixed by recoding...  I see this reinforced by MCP-type questions/scenarios where the answer to prevent deadlocking is simply to change the order in code in which tables are accessed....Whilst this is correct, I do think this has led to a situation where many 'operational' or 'production support' DBAs, when faced with a deadlock, are happy to throw the issue over to developers without analysing the issue further....A couple of 'war stories' on deadlocks which I think are interesting :- Case One , I had an issue recently on a third-party application that I support on SQL 2008.  This particular third-party application has an unusual support agreement where the customer is allowed to change the index design on the third-party provided database.  However, we are not allowed to alter application code or modify table structure..This third-party application is also known to encounter occasional deadlocks – indeed, I have documentation from the vendor that up to 50 deadlocks per day is not unusual !So, as a DBA I have to support an application which in my opinion has too many deadlocks - but, I cannot influence the design of the tables or stored procedures for the application. This should be the classic - blame the third-party developers scenario, and hope this issue gets addressed in a future application release - ie we could wait years for this to be resolved and implemented in our production environment...But, as DBAs  can change the index layout, is there anything I could do still to reduce the deadlocks in the application ?I initially used SQL traceflag 1222 to write deadlock detection output to the SQL Errorlog – using this I was able to identify one table heavily involved in the deadlocks.When I examined the table definition, I was surprised to see it was a heap – ie no clustered index existed on the table.Using SQL profiler to see locking behaviour and plan for the query involved in the deadlock, I was able to confirm a table scan was being performed.By creating an appropriate clustered index - it was possible to produce a more efficient plan and locking behaviour.So, less locks, held for less time = less possibility of deadlocks. I'm still unhappy about the overall number of deadlocks on this system - but that's something to be discussed further with the vendor.Case Two,  a system which hadn't changed for months suddenly started seeing deadlocks on a regular basis. I love the 'nothing's changed' scenario, as it gives me the opportunity to appear wise and say 'nothings changed on this system, except the data'.. This particular deadlock occurred on a table which had been growing rapidly. By using DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS - the DBA team were able to see that the deadlocks seemed to be occurring shortly after auto-update stats had regenerated the table statistics using it's default sampling behaviour.As a quick fix, we were able to schedule a nightly UPDATE STATISTICS WITH FULLSCAN on the table involved in the deadlock - thus, greatly reducing the potential for stats to be updated via auto_update_stats, consequently reducing the potential for a bad plan to be generated based on an unrepresentative sample of the data. This reduced the possibility of a deadlock occurring.  Not a perfect solution by any means, but quick, easy to implement, and needed no application code changes. This fix gave us some 'breathing space'  to properly fix the code during the next scheduled application release.   The moral of this post - don't dismiss deadlocks as issues that can only be fixed by developers...

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  • Why do I need two Instances in Windows Azure?

    - by BuckWoody
    Windows Azure as a Platform as a Service (PaaS) means that there are various components you can use in it to solve a problem: Compute “Roles” - Computers running an OS and optionally IIS - you can have more than one "Instance" of a given Role Storage - Blobs, Tables and Queues for Storage Other Services - Things like the Service Bus, Azure Connection Services, SQL Azure and Caching It’s important to understand that some of these services are Stateless and others maintain State. Stateless means (at least in this case) that a system might disappear from one physical location and appear elsewhere. You can think of this as a cashier at the front of a store. If you’re in line, a cashier might take his break, and another person might replace him. As long as the order proceeds, you as the customer aren’t really affected except for the few seconds it takes to change them out. The cashier function in this example is stateless. The Compute Role Instances in Windows Azure are Stateless. To upgrade hardware, because of a fault or many other reasons, a Compute Role's Instance might stop on one physical server, and another will pick it up. This is done through the controlling fabric that Windows Azure uses to manage the systems. It’s important to note that storage in Azure does maintain State. Your data will not simply disappear - it is maintained - in fact, it’s maintained three times in a single datacenter and all those copies are replicated to another for safety. Going back to our example, storage is similar to the cash register itself. Even though a cashier leaves, the record of your payment is maintained. So if a Compute Role Instance can disappear and re-appear, the things running on that first Instance would stop working. If you wrote your code in a Stateless way, then another Role Instance simply re-starts that transaction and keeps working, just like the other cashier in the example. But if you only have one Instance of a Role, then when the Role Instance is re-started, or when you need to upgrade your own code, you can face downtime, since there’s only one. That means you should deploy at least two of each Role Instance not only for scale to handle load, but so that the first “cashier” has someone to replace them when they disappear. It’s not just a good idea - to gain the Service Level Agreement (SLA) for our uptime in Azure it’s a requirement. We point this out right in the Management Portal when you deploy the application: (Click to enlarge) When you deploy a Role Instance you can also set the “Upgrade Domain”. Placing Roles on separate Upgrade Domains means that you have a continuous service whenever you upgrade (more on upgrades in another post) - the process looks like this for two Roles. This example covers the scenario for upgrade, so you have four roles total - One Web and one Worker running the "older" code, and one of each running the new code. In all those Roles you want at least two instances, and this example shows that you're covered for High Availability and upgrade paths: The take-away is this - always plan for forward-facing Roles to have at least two copies. For Worker Roles that do background processing, there are ways to architect around this number, but it does affect the SLA if you have only one.

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  • Feynman's inbox

    - by user12607414
    Here is Richard Feynman writing on the ease of criticizing theories, and the difficulty of forming them: The problem is not just to say something might be wrong, but to replace it by something — and that is not so easy. As soon as any really definite idea is substituted it becomes almost immediately apparent that it does not work. The second difficulty is that there is an infinite number of possibilities of these simple types. It is something like this. You are sitting working very hard, you have worked for a long time trying to open a safe. Then some Joe comes along who knows nothing about what you are doing, except that you are trying to open the safe. He says ‘Why don’t you try the combination 10:20:30?’ Because you are busy, you have tried a lot of things, maybe you have already tried 10:20:30. Maybe you know already that the middle number is 32 not 20. Maybe you know as a matter of fact that it is a five digit combination… So please do not send me any letters trying to tell me how the thing is going to work. I read them — I always read them to make sure that I have not already thought of what is suggested — but it takes too long to answer them, because they are usually in the class ‘try 10:20:30’. (“Seeking New Laws”, page 161 in The Character of Physical Law.) As a sometime designer (and longtime critic) of widely used computer systems, I have seen similar difficulties appear when anyone undertakes to publicly design a piece of software that may be used by many thousands of customers. (I have been on both sides of the fence, of course.) The design possibilities are endless, but the deep design problems are usually hidden beneath a mass of superfluous detail. The sheer numbers can be daunting. Even if only one customer out of a thousand feels a need to express a passionately held idea, it can take a long time to read all the mail. And it is a fact of life that many of those strong suggestions are only weakly supported by reason or evidence. Opinions are plentiful, but substantive research is time-consuming, and hence rare. A related phenomenon commonly seen with software is bike-shedding, where interlocutors focus on surface details like naming and syntax… or (come to think of it) like lock combinations. On the other hand, software is easier than quantum physics, and the population of people able to make substantial suggestions about software systems is several orders of magnitude bigger than Feynman’s circle of colleagues. My own work would be poorer without contributions — sometimes unsolicited, sometimes passionately urged on me — from the open source community. If a Nobel prize winner thought it was worthwhile to read his mail on the faint chance of learning a good idea, I am certainly not going to throw mine away. (In case anyone is still reading this, and is wondering what provoked a meditation on the quality of one’s inbox contents, I’ll simply point out that the volume has been very high, for many months, on the Lambda-Dev mailing list, where the next version of the Java language is being discussed. Bravo to those of my colleagues who are surfing that wave.) I started this note thinking there was an odd parallel between the life of the physicist and that of a software designer. On second thought, I’ll bet that is the story for anybody who works in public on something requiring special training. (And that would be pretty much anything worth doing.) In any case, Feynman saw it clearly and said it well.

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  • Where Twitter Stands Heading Into 2013

    - by Mike Stiles
    As Twitter continued throughout 2012 to be a stage on which global politics and culture played itself out, the company itself underwent some adjustments that give us a good indication of what users and brands can expect from the platform in 2013. The power of the network did anything but fade. Celebrities continued to use it to connect one-on-one. Even the Pope signed on this year. It continued to fuel revolutions. It played an exponentially large factor in this US Presidential election. And around the world, the freedom to speak was challenged as users were fired, sued, sometimes even jailed for their tweets. Expect more of the same in 2013, as Twitter has entrenched itself, for individuals, causes and brands, as the fastest, easiest, most efficient way to message the masses so some measure of impact can come from it. It’s changed everything, and it’s not finished. These fun facts reveal the position of strength with which Twitter enters 2013: It now generates a billion tweets every 2.5 days It has 500 million+ users The average Twitter user has tweeted 307 times 32% of everyone using the Internet uses Twitter It’s expected to bring in $540 million in ad revenue by 2014 11 new accounts are created every second High-level Executive Summary: people love it, people use it, and they’re going to keep loving and using it. Whether or not outside developers love it is a different matter. 2012 marked a shift from welcoming the third party support that played at least some role in Twitter being so warmly embraced, to discouraging anything that replicates what Twitter can do itself…or plans to do itself. It’s not the open playground it once was. Now Twitter must spend 2013 proving it can innovate in-house and keep us just as entranced. Likewise, Twitter is distancing itself from Facebook. Images from the #1 platform’s Instagram don’t work on Twitter anymore, and Twitter’s rolling out their own photo filter product. Where the two have lived in a “plenty of room for everybody” symbiosis up to now, 2013 could see the giants ramping up a full-on rivalry. Twitter is exhibiting a deliberate strategy. Updates have centered on more visually appealing search results, and making finding and sharing content easier. Deals have been cut with some media entities so their content stands out. CEO Dick Costolo has said tweets aren’t the attraction, they’re what leads you to content. Twitter aims to be a key distributor of media and info. Add the addition of former News Corp. President Peter Chernin to the board, and their hashtag landing page experience for events, and their media behemoth ambitions get pretty clear. There are challenges ahead and Costolo has also laid those out; entry into China, figuring out how to have Twitter deliver both comprehensive and relevant, targeted experiences, and the visualization of big data. What does this mean for corporations? They can expect a more media-rich evolution and growing emphases on imagery. They can expect more opportunities to create great media content and leverage Twitter for its distribution. And they can expect new ways to surface in searches. Are brands diving in? 56% of customer tweets to companies get completely and totally ignored. Ugh. A study Twitter recently conducted with Compete shows people who see tweets from retailers are more likely to buy a product. And, the more retailer tweets they see, the more likely they are to purchase on the retail site. As more of those tweets point to engaging media content from the brand, the results should get even better. Twitter appears ready for 2013. Enterprise brands have some work to do. @mikestilesPhoto Stuart Miles, freedigitalphotos.net

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  • The Best Data Integration for Exadata Comes from Oracle

    - by maria costanzo
    Oracle Data Integrator and Oracle GoldenGate offer unique and optimized data integration solutions for Oracle Exadata. For example, customers that choose to feed their data warehouse or reporting database with near real-time throughout the day, can do so without decreasing  performance or availability of source and target systems. And if you ask why real-time, the short answer is: in today’s fast-paced, always-on world, business decisions need to use more relevant, timely data to be able to act fast and seize opportunities. A longer response to "why real-time" question can be found in a related blog post. If we look at the solution architecture, as shown on the diagram below,  Oracle Data Integrator and Oracle GoldenGate are both uniquely designed to take full advantage of the power of the database and to eliminate unnecessary middle-tier components. Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) is the best bulk data loading solution for Exadata. ODI is the only ETL platform that can leverage the full power of Exadata, integrate directly on the Exadata machine without any additional hardware, and by far provides the simplest setup and fastest overall performance on an Exadata system. We regularly see customers achieving a 5-10 times boost when they move their ETL to ODI on Exadata. For  some companies the performance gain is even much higher. For example a large insurance company did a proof of concept comparing ODI vs a traditional ETL tool (one of the market leaders) on Exadata. The same process that was taking 5hrs and 11 minutes to complete using the competing ETL product took 7 minutes and 20 seconds with ODI. Oracle Data Integrator was 42 times faster than the conventional ETL when running on Exadata.This shows that Oracle's own data integration offering helps you to gain the most out of your Exadata investment with a truly optimized solution. GoldenGate is the best solution for streaming data from heterogeneous sources into Exadata in real time. Oracle GoldenGate can also be used together with Data Integrator for hybrid use cases that also demand non-invasive capture, high-speed real time replication. Oracle GoldenGate enables real-time data feeds from heterogeneous sources non-invasively, and delivers to the staging area on the target Exadata system. ODI runs directly on Exadata to use the database engine power to perform in-database transformations. Enterprise Data Quality is integrated with Oracle Data integrator and enables ODI to load trusted data into the data warehouse tables. Only Oracle can offer all these technical benefits wrapped into a single intelligence data warehouse solution that runs on Exadata. Compared to traditional ETL with add-on CDC this solution offers: §  Non-invasive data capture from heterogeneous sources and avoids any performance impact on source §  No mid-tier; set based transformations use database power §  Mini-batches throughout the day –or- bulk processing nightly which means maximum availability for the DW §  Integrated solution with Enterprise Data Quality enables leveraging trusted data in the data warehouse In addition to Starwood Hotels and Resorts, Morrison Supermarkets, United Kingdom’s fourth-largest food retailer, has seen the power of this solution for their new BI platform and shared their story with us. Morrisons needed to analyze data across a large number of manufacturing, warehousing, retail, and financial applications with the goal to achieve single view into operations for improved customer service. The retailer deployed Oracle GoldenGate and Oracle Data Integrator to bring new data into Oracle Exadata in near real-time and replicate the data into reporting structures within the data warehouse—extending visibility into operations. Using Oracle's data integration offering for Exadata, Morrisons produced financial reports in seconds, rather than minutes, and improved staff productivity and agility. You can read more about Morrison’s success story here and hear from Starwood here. From an Irem Radzik article.

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