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ArchBeat Link-o-Rama Top 10 - September 16-22, 2012

- by Bob Rhubart

The Top 10 most popular items shared on the OTN ArchBeat Facebook Page for the week of September 16-22, 2012. The Real Architects of LA: OTN Architect Day in Los Angeles - Oct 25No gossip. No drama. No hair pulling. Just a full day of technical sessions and peer interaction focused on using Oracle technologies in today's cloud and SOA architectures. The event is free, but seating is limited, so register now. Thursday October 25, 2012. 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. Sofitel Los Angeles, 8555 Beverly Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90048. OIM-OAM-OAAM integration using TAP – Request Flow you must understand!! | Atul KumarAtul Kumar's post addresses "key points and request flow that you must understand" when integrating three Oracle Identity Management product Oracle Identity Management, Oracle Access Management, and Oracle Adaptive Access Manager. Cloud, automation drive new growth in SOA governance market | ZDNet "SOA governance tools and processes learned over the past decade are now underpinning cloud projects as they scale across enterprises," reports Joe McKendrick. But there remains a lack of understanding about SOA Governance. DevOps Basics: Track Down High CPU Thread with ps, top and the new JDK7 jcmd Tool | Frank Munz "The approach is very generic and works for WebLogic, Glassfish or any other Java application," say Frank Munz. "UNIX commands in the example are run on CentOS, so they will work without changes for Oracle Enterprise Linux or RedHat. Creating the thread dump at the end of the video is done with the jcmd tool from JDK7." Frank has captured the process in the posted video. Oracle OpenWorld 2012 Hands-on Lab: "Leading Your Everyday Application Integration Projects with Enterprise SOA" Yet another session to squeeze into your already-jammed Oracle OpenWorld schedule. This hands-on lab focuses on how "Oracle Enterprise Repository, Oracle Application Integration Architecture (AIA) Foundation Pack, and Oracle SOA Suite work together to help you drive your enterprisewide integration projects." Loving VirtualBox 4.2… | The ORACLE-BASE Blog Is it wrong for a man to love a technology? Oracle ACE Director Tim Hall has several very good reasons for his feelings… ADF Create and CreateInsert Operations for ADF Table | Andrejus Baranovskis Oracle ACE Director Andrejus Baranovskis answers the question, "What operation is best to use to insert a new row into an ADF table, Create or CreateInsert?" Fault Handling Slides and Q&A | Ronald van Luttikhuizen Oracle ACE Director Ronald van Luttikhuizen shares the slides and a Q&A transcript from a presentation he and fellow ACE Director Guido Schmutz gave at the recent Oracle OpenWorld and JavaOne preview event organized by AMIS Technology. Why IT is a profession in 'flux' | ZDNet I usuallly don't post two items from the same person in one day, but this post from ZDNet blogger Joe McKendrick deals with some critical issues affecting those in IT. As McKendrick puts it: "IT professionals are under considerable pressure to deliver more value to the business, versus being good at coding and testing and deploying and integrating." Running RichFaces on WebLogic 12c | Markus Eisele "With all the JMS magic and the different provider checks in the showcase this has become some kind of a challenge to simply build and deploy it," says Oracle ACE Director Markus Eisele. His detailed post will help you to meet that challenge. Thought for the Day "Less is more." — Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (March 27, 1886 – August 17, 1969) Source: BrainyQuote.com

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Slow Ubuntu 10.04 after long time unused

- by Winston Ewert

I'm at spring break so I'm back at my parent's house. I've turned my computer on which has been off since January and its unusably slow. This was not the case when I last used the computer in January. It is running 10.04, Memory: 875.5 MB CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4400+ Available Disk Space: 330.8 GB I'm not seeing a large usage of either memory or Disk I/O. If I look at my list of processes there is only a very small amount of CPU usage. However, if I hover over the CPU usage graph that I've on the top bar, I sometimes get really high readings like 100%. It took a long time to boot, to open firefox, to open a link in firefox. As far as I can tell everything that the computer tries to do is just massively slow. Right now, I'm apt-get dist-upgrading to install any updates that I will have missed since last time this computer was on. Any ideas as to what is going on here? UPDATE: I thought to check dmesg and it has a lot of entries like this: [ 1870.142201] ata3.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x7 SErr 0x0 action 0x0 [ 1870.142206] ata3.00: irq_stat 0x40000008 [ 1870.142210] ata3.00: failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED [ 1870.142217] ata3.00: cmd 60/08:10:c0:4a:65/00:00:03:00:00/40 tag 2 ncq 4096 in [ 1870.142218] res 41/40:00:c5:4a:65/00:00:03:00:00/40 Emask 0x409 (media error) <F> [ 1870.142221] ata3.00: status: { DRDY ERR } [ 1870.142223] ata3.00: error: { UNC } [ 1870.143981] ata3.00: SB600 AHCI: limiting to 255 sectors per cmd [ 1870.146758] ata3.00: SB600 AHCI: limiting to 255 sectors per cmd [ 1870.146761] ata3.00: configured for UDMA/133 [ 1870.146777] ata3: EH complete [ 1872.092269] ata3.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x7 SErr 0x0 action 0x0 [ 1872.092274] ata3.00: irq_stat 0x40000008 [ 1872.092278] ata3.00: failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED [ 1872.092285] ata3.00: cmd 60/08:00:c0:4a:65/00:00:03:00:00/40 tag 0 ncq 4096 in [ 1872.092287] res 41/40:00:c5:4a:65/00:00:03:00:00/40 Emask 0x409 (media error) <F> [ 1872.092289] ata3.00: status: { DRDY ERR } [ 1872.092292] ata3.00: error: { UNC } [ 1872.094050] ata3.00: SB600 AHCI: limiting to 255 sectors per cmd [ 1872.096795] ata3.00: SB600 AHCI: limiting to 255 sectors per cmd [ 1872.096798] ata3.00: configured for UDMA/133 [ 1872.096814] ata3: EH complete [ 1874.042279] ata3.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x7 SErr 0x0 action 0x0 [ 1874.042285] ata3.00: irq_stat 0x40000008 [ 1874.042289] ata3.00: failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED [ 1874.042296] ata3.00: cmd 60/08:10:c0:4a:65/00:00:03:00:00/40 tag 2 ncq 4096 in [ 1874.042297] res 41/40:00:c5:4a:65/00:00:03:00:00/40 Emask 0x409 (media error) <F> [ 1874.042300] ata3.00: status: { DRDY ERR } [ 1874.042302] ata3.00: error: { UNC } [ 1874.044048] ata3.00: SB600 AHCI: limiting to 255 sectors per cmd [ 1874.046837] ata3.00: SB600 AHCI: limiting to 255 sectors per cmd [ 1874.046840] ata3.00: configured for UDMA/133 [ 1874.046861] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] Unhandled sense code [ 1874.046863] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE [ 1874.046867] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] Sense Key : Medium Error [current] [descriptor] [ 1874.046872] Descriptor sense data with sense descriptors (in hex): [ 1874.046874] 72 03 11 04 00 00 00 0c 00 0a 80 00 00 00 00 00 [ 1874.046883] 03 65 4a c5 [ 1874.046886] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] Add. Sense: Unrecovered read error - auto reallocate failed [ 1874.046892] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] CDB: Read(10): 28 00 03 65 4a c0 00 00 08 00 [ 1874.046900] end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 56969925 [ 1874.046920] ata3: EH complete I'm not certain, but that looks like my problem may be a failing hard drive. But the drive is less then a year old, it really shouldn't be failing now...

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My Dog, Cross-Channel Shopping, and Fusion SCM

- by Kathryn Perry

A guest post by Mark Carson, Director, Oracle Fusion Supply Chain Management I was walking my dog Max in an open space behind my house. As we tromped through the tall weeds I remembered it is tick season and that I should get Max some protection. While he sniffed merrily in the tick infested brush, I started shopping in the middle of an open field on my phone. I thought it would be convenient to pick up the tick medicine from a pet store on the way home. Searching the pet store website I saw that they had the medicine, but there was no information on whether the store had any in stock and there were no options for shipping it to the store for pickup. I could return it, but not pick it up which seamed kind of odd. I really didn't feel like making calls to the local stores to find out if they had it. Since the product is popular, I tried one of the large 'everything' stores. Browsing its website I could see that it could be shipped to me, shipped to the store for free, and that the store nearest to me had it in stock. Needless to say, this store became a better option. This experience is a small example of why retailers, distributors, and manufactures have placed a high priority on enabling 'cross-channel commerce.' Shoppers like you and me expect to be able to search, compare, buy and return products on-line and over the phone using a variety of devices including PDAs, tablets and in-store kiosks. The pet store lost my business because its web channel had limited information about its stores. I have spoken with many customers and prospects about cross-channel commerce. They all realize the business implications and urgency behind cross-channel commerce but recognize there are challenges to enable it. New and existing applications must be integrated together globally through a consistent cross-channel business process. Integration is required between applications that provide the initial shopping experience and delivery applications associated with warehouses, stores, and partners. The enablement must be accomplished in a flexible way to react to fast-changing product portfolios and new acquisitions, while at the same time minimizing costs through reuse of existing systems. Meanwhile, the business must continue to grow and decision makers need to balance new capability with peak seasons. The challenges above are not unique to retail. Any customer in any industry who has multiple points for capturing orders and multiple points for fulfilling orders will face these challenges. With this in mind, we had a unique opportunity in Fusion SCM to re-think how to build a set of modular and flexible applications in the order management space that would make these challenges easier to conquer. The results are Fusion Distributed Order Orchestration and Global Order Promising. These applications can help companies, such as the pet store, enable true cross-channel commerce. The apps provide highly adaptable and flexible business processes to automate order orchestration across multiple cross-channel systems. They also show a global view of supply across warehouses, stores, and partners for real-time availability and more accurate order promising. Additional capability includes a standards-based integration framework for seamless execution and the ability to reuse existing systems for faster and lower cost implementations. OK, that was a mouthful of features and benefits. As Max waited to cross the street (he can do basic math too), I wondered if he could relate. He does not care about leash laws, pick-up courtesy, where he can/can't walk, what time of day it is, or even ticks. He does not care about how all these things could make walking complicated. He just wants to walk. Similarly, customers just want to shop and companies just want to make it easier to sell and deliver. You can learn more about Distributed Order Orchestration and Global Order Promising in cross-channel here.

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Social Technology and the Potential for Organic Business Networks

- by Michael Snow

Guest Blog Post by: Michael Fauscette, IDCThere has been a lot of discussion around the topic of social business, or social enterprise, over the last few years. The concept of applying emerging technologies from the social Web, combined with changes in processes and culture, has the potential to provide benefits across the enterprise over a wide range of operations impacting employees, customers, partners and suppliers. Companies are using social tools to build out enterprise social networks that provide, among other things, a people-centric collaborative and knowledge sharing work environment which over time can breakdown organizational silos. On the outside of the business, social technology is adding new ways to support customers, market to prospects and customers, and even support the sales process. We’re also seeing new ways of connecting partners to the business that increases collaboration and innovation. All of the new "connectivity" is, I think, leading businesses to a business model built around the concept of the network or ecosystem instead of the old "stand-by-yourself" approach. So, if you think about businesses as networks in the context of all of the other technical and cultural change factors that we're seeing in the new information economy, you can start to see that there’s a lot of potential for co-innovation and collaboration that was very difficult to arrange before. This networked business model, or what I've started to call “organic business networks,” is the business model of the information economy.The word “organic” could be confusing, but when I use it in this context, I’m thinking it has similar traits to organic computing. Organic computing is a computing system that is self-optimizing, self-healing, self-configuring, and self-protecting. More broadly, organic models are generally patterns and methods found in living systems used as a metaphor for non-living systems.Applying an organic model, organic business networks are networks that represent the interconnectedness of the emerging information business environment. Organic business networks connect people, data/information, content, and IT systems in a flexible, self-optimizing, self-healing, self-configuring, and self-protecting system. People are the primary nodes of the network, but the other nodes — data, content, and applications/systems — are no less important.A business built around the organic business network business model would incorporate the characteristics of a social business, but go beyond the basics—i.e., use social business as the operational paradigm, but also use organic business networks as the mode of operating the business. The two concepts complement each other: social business is the “what,” and the organic business network is the “how.”An organic business network lets the business work go outside of traditional organizational boundaries and become the continuously adapting implementation of an optimized business strategy. Value creation can move to the optimal point in the network, depending on strategic influencers such as the economy, market dynamics, customer behavior, prospect behavior, partner behavior and needs, supply-chain dynamics, predictive business outcomes, etc.An organic business network driven company is the antithesis of a hierarchical, rigid, reactive, process-constrained, and siloed organization. Instead, the business can adapt to changing conditions, leverage assets effectively, and thrive in a hyper-connected, global competitive, information-driven environment.To hear more on this topic – I’ll be presenting in the next webcast of the Oracle Social Business Thought Leader Webcast Series - “Organic Business Networks: Doing Business in a Hyper-Connected World” this coming Thursday, June 21, 2012, 10:00 AM PDT – Register here

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"Why We Chose Fusion CRM" by Vikas Bhambri, Managing Partner, The Athene Group

- by Natalia Rachelson

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-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;} A guest post by Vikas Bhambri, Managing Partner, The Athene Group This year The Athene Group (www.theathenegroup.com) celebrated our tenth anniversary. The company has accomplished a lot in ten years overcoming a number of hurdles and challenges to have grown organically to a 150+ person global company with offices in the US, UK, and India and customers in the US, Canada, and Europe. Now more than ever with the current global landscape from an economic and competitive standpoint it was vital that we make some changes to remain successful for the next ten years. There were two key initiatives that we discussed internally that would enable us to successfully accomplish this – collaboration and the concept of “insight to action”. With our existing Oracle CRM On Demand platform we had components of this but not the full depth and breadth that we were looking for. When we started to discuss Fusion CRM we immediately saw several next generation tools that would embrace these two objectives. For a consulting and development organization the collaboration required between business development and consulting delivery is as important as the collaboration required during the projects between the project delivery and account management teams. The Activity Streams functionality in Fusion CRM immediately addressed the communication of key discussion topics and exchanges around our clients. Of course when we saw the Oracle Social Network (which is part of our Fusion CRM roadmap) we were blown away. The combination OSN and our CRM is going to make us more effective as we discuss and work cohesively on client engagements – ensuring mutual success for both Athene and our clients. When we looked at “insight to action” we saw that we had a great platform when folks were at their desks, unfortunately a lot of our business development and consulting folks are on the road. The Fusion Mobile Sales and Fusion Outlook Desktop provide information to our teams when they are on the go. So that they can provide real-time information and react to real-time information provided by their peers. We are in the early stages of our transformative experience with Fusion CRM but we believe the platform along with our people and processes are going to help us achieve our goals in the future.

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Get Your Enterprise Working With Oracle On Track Communication 1.0

- by Josh Lannin

The On Track Development team is very pleased to announce that today On Track is available for our customers to download and evaluate. To learn more about what On Track does start with our whitepaper and datasheet. If you are a developer, take a look at our documentation and samples posted to our OTN page. For this first blog post, I’ll be speaking to several notable points about our product. Graceful Escalation via Conversations: On Track addresses the “Collaboration Problem” through a single guiding principle – graceful escalation – within the construct of a Conversation. In On Track, collaboration is based on a context (called a “Conversation”) that gracefully escalates in form, structure, and content, as dictated by the particular needs of a given collaboration. Within that context, On Track provides a rich set of tools to choose from. These tools provide for communication, coordination, content management, organization, decision making, and analysis -- all essential aspects of collaboration, but not all of them are essential all of the time. Every collaborative interaction will evolve differently. Some will evolve to represent work spreading over the course of years and involving a large, distributed team, while others may involve few people and not evolve at all. Regardless, all collaborative contexts are built from the same parts, utilize the same concepts, and start the same way. The principle of graceful escalation is that you only use the tools and structure you need; so you only incur the complexity you need. Purposeful Collaboration: Through application integration, On Track Conversations bring enterprise application users the communication and collaboration capabilities required to complete business process. By association with specific processes or business objects conversations extend the possible interactions and broaden participation to internal or external non-application users and provide a sophisticated interaction experience, all the while enhancing the data set within the owning application. Purposeful collaboration not only needs to happen in the context of applications, it must support a full range of real-time and long-running interactions to provide the greatest value. Multi Client, Multi Modal: This On Track 1.0 product release includes the same day availability of multiple clients, including iPhone and iPad applications which are now available on the Apple Store, a fully capable and accessible Outlook Add-In, along with our browser web client. With each client we have sought to leverage the strengths of each unique device- our iPhone client supports picture and voice posts, the iPad is optimized for meeting room situations and document viewing, and our Outlook add-in allows you to take emails in context and bring them into On Track. In addition to supporting a diverse array of clients, On Track provides a unified multi modal experience support starting with basic messages moving through to integrated documents with live annotations, snapshots, application sharing, and voice. Next Generation Web Architecture: We believe On Track will help move the bar higher for what users can expect from all web applications, most notably ones that involve real-time activity. On Track is built from the ground up with an innovative, real-time architecture that leverages the extensive push capabilities of our server. Whether you are receiving a new message, viewing where crowds of people are collaborating, or doing live annotation on a document with a set of people, that information comes to you immediately without refreshes or moving back and forth between pages. We’ve leveraged this core architecture across the product experience and raised the user experience bar for this type of application. As well these capabilities are based on open standards and protocols, and are fully extensible by anyone- enabling sophisticated integrations to be created with a wide variety of both legacy and next-generation applications. Agile Product Development: As a product team we operate using continuous feedback and modified agile development methodologies. We have thousands of active internal Oracle users who have helped pilot our product for critical business functions, and the On Track product development team uses our product as our primary vehicle for all our collaboration. Additionally we been working with early access customers who are adopting our technology and providing us valuable feedback - which our process has rapidly realized in improvements to our software. On Track agility extends to our server as well, which is built to scale, and is very simple to install and configure. We are pleased to make this product announcement and encourage you to join us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter, as well as checking back here for the latest product information.

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Oracle MDM Maturity Model

- by David Butler

A few weeks ago, I discussed the results of a survey conducted by Oracle’s Insight team. The survey was based on the data management maturity model that the Oracle Insight team has developed over the years as they analyzed customer IT organizations to help them get more out of everything they already have. I thought you might like to learn more about the maturity model itself. It can help you figure out where you stand when it comes to getting your organizations data management act together. The model covers maturity levels around five key areas: Profiling data sources; Defining a data strategy; Defining a data consolidation plan; Data maintenance; and Data utilization. Profile data sources: Profiling data sources involves taking an inventory of all data sources from across your IT landscape. Then evaluate the quality of the data in each source system. This enables the scoping of what data to collect into an MDM hub and what rules are needed to insure data harmonization across systems. Define data strategy: A data strategy requires an understanding of the data usage. Given data usage, various data governance requirements need to be developed. This includes data controls and security rules as well as data structure and usage policies. Define data consolidation strategy: Consolidation requires defining your operational data model. How integration is to be accomplished. Cross referencing common data attributes from multiple systems is needed. Synchronization policies also need to be developed. Data maintenance: The desired standardization needs to be defined, including what constitutes a ‘match’ once the data has been standardized. Cleansing rules are a part of this methodology. Data quality monitoring requirements also need to be defined. Utilize the data: What data gets published, and who consumes the data must be determined. How to get the right data to the right place in the right format given its intended use must be understood. Validating the data and insuring security rules are in place and enforced are crucial aspects for full no-risk data utilization. For each of the above data management areas, a maturity level needs to be assessed. Where your organization wants to be should also be identified using the same maturity levels. This results in a sound gap analysis your organization can use to create action plans to achieve the ultimate goals. Marginal is the lowest level. It is characterized by manually maintaining trusted sources; lacking or inconsistent, silo’d structures with limited integration, and gaps in automation. Stable is the next leg up the MDM maturity staircase. It is characterized by tactical MDM implementations that are limited in scope and target a specific division. It includes limited data stewardship capabilities as well. Best Practice is a serious MDM maturity level characterized by process automation improvements. The scope is enterprise wide. It is a business solution that provides a single version of the truth, with closed-loop data quality capabilities. It is typically driven by an enterprise architecture group with both business and IT representation. Transformational is the highest MDM maturity level. At this level, MDM is quantitatively managed. It is integrated with Business Intelligence, SOA, and BPM. MDM is leveraged in business process orchestration. Take an inventory using this MDM Maturity Model and see where you are in your journey to full MDM maturity with all the business benefits that accrue to organizations who have mastered their data for the benefit of all operational applications, business processes, and analytical systems. To learn more, Trevor Naidoo and I have written the Oracle MDM Maturity Model whitepaper. It’s free, so go ahead and download it and use it as you see fit.

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Script to UPDATE STATISTICS with time window

- by Bill Graziano

I recently spent some time troubleshooting odd query plans and came to the conclusion that we needed better statistics. We’ve been running sp_updatestats but apparently it wasn’t sampling enough of the table to get us what we needed. I have a pretty limited window at night where I can hammer the disks while this runs. The script below just calls UPDATE STATITICS on all tables that “need” updating. It defines need as any table whose statistics are older than the number of days you specify (30 by default). It also has a throttle so it breaks out of the loop after a set amount of time (60 minutes). That means it won’t start processing a new table after this time but it might take longer than this to finish what it’s doing. It always processes the oldest statistics first so it will eventually get to all of them. It defaults to sample 25% of the table. I’m not sure that’s a good default but it works for now. I’ve tested this in SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008. I liked the way Michelle parameterized her re-index script and I took the same approach. CREATE PROCEDURE dbo.UpdateStatistics ( @timeLimit smallint = 60 ,@debug bit = 0 ,@executeSQL bit = 1 ,@samplePercent tinyint = 25 ,@printSQL bit = 1 ,@minDays tinyint = 30 )AS/******************************************************************* Copyright Bill Graziano 2010*******************************************************************/SET NOCOUNT ON;PRINT '[ ' + CAST(GETDATE() AS VARCHAR(100)) + ' ] ' + 'Launching...'IF OBJECT_ID('tempdb..#status') IS NOT NULL DROP TABLE #status;CREATE TABLE #status( databaseID INT , databaseName NVARCHAR(128) , objectID INT , page_count INT , schemaName NVARCHAR(128) Null , objectName NVARCHAR(128) Null , lastUpdateDate DATETIME , scanDate DATETIME CONSTRAINT PK_status_tmp PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED(databaseID, objectID));DECLARE @SQL NVARCHAR(MAX);DECLARE @dbName nvarchar(128);DECLARE @databaseID INT;DECLARE @objectID INT;DECLARE @schemaName NVARCHAR(128);DECLARE @objectName NVARCHAR(128);DECLARE @lastUpdateDate DATETIME;DECLARE @startTime DATETIME;SELECT @startTime = GETDATE();DECLARE cDB CURSORREAD_ONLYFOR select [name] from master.sys.databases where database_id > 4OPEN cDBFETCH NEXT FROM cDB INTO @dbNameWHILE (@@fetch_status <> -1)BEGIN IF (@@fetch_status <> -2) BEGIN SELECT @SQL = ' use ' + QUOTENAME(@dbName) + ' select DB_ID() as databaseID , DB_NAME() as databaseName ,t.object_id ,sum(used_page_count) as page_count ,s.[name] as schemaName ,t.[name] AS objectName , COALESCE(d.stats_date, ''1900-01-01'') , GETDATE() as scanDate from sys.dm_db_partition_stats ps join sys.tables t on t.object_id = ps.object_id join sys.schemas s on s.schema_id = t.schema_id join ( SELECT object_id, MIN(stats_date) as stats_date FROM ( select object_id, stats_date(object_id, stats_id) as stats_date from sys.stats) as d GROUP BY object_id ) as d ON d.object_id = t.object_id where ps.row_count > 0 group by s.[name], t.[name], t.object_id, COALESCE(d.stats_date, ''1900-01-01'') ' SET ANSI_WARNINGS OFF; Insert #status EXEC ( @SQL); SET ANSI_WARNINGS ON; END FETCH NEXT FROM cDB INTO @dbNameENDCLOSE cDBDEALLOCATE cDBDECLARE cStats CURSORREAD_ONLYFOR SELECT databaseID , databaseName , objectID , schemaName , objectName , lastUpdateDate FROM #status WHERE DATEDIFF(dd, lastUpdateDate, GETDATE()) >= @minDays ORDER BY lastUpdateDate ASC, page_count desc, [objectName] ASC OPEN cStatsFETCH NEXT FROM cStats INTO @databaseID, @dbName, @objectID, @schemaName, @objectName, @lastUpdateDateWHILE (@@fetch_status <> -1)BEGIN IF (@@fetch_status <> -2) BEGIN IF DATEDIFF(mi, @startTime, GETDATE()) > @timeLimit BEGIN PRINT '[ ' + CAST(GETDATE() AS VARCHAR(100)) + ' ] ' + '*** Time Limit Reached ***'; GOTO __DONE; END SELECT @SQL = 'UPDATE STATISTICS ' + QUOTENAME(@dBName) + '.' + QUOTENAME(@schemaName) + '.' + QUOTENAME(@ObjectName) + ' WITH SAMPLE ' + CAST(@samplePercent AS NVARCHAR(100)) + ' PERCENT;'; IF @printSQL = 1 PRINT '[ ' + CAST(GETDATE() AS VARCHAR(100)) + ' ] ' + @SQL + ' (Last Updated: ' + CAST(@lastUpdateDate AS VARCHAR(100)) + ')' IF @executeSQL = 1 BEGIN EXEC (@SQL); END END FETCH NEXT FROM cStats INTO @databaseID, @dbName, @objectID, @schemaName, @objectName, @lastUpdateDateEND__DONE:CLOSE cStatsDEALLOCATE cStatsPRINT '[ ' + CAST(GETDATE() AS VARCHAR(100)) + ' ] ' + 'Completed.'GO

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Sneak Peak: Social Developer Program at JavaOne

- by Mike Stiles

By guest blogger Roland Smart We're just days away from what is gunning to be the most exciting installment of OpenWorld to date, so how about an exciting sneak peak at the very first Social Developer Program? If your first thought is, "What's a social developer?" you're not alone. It’s an emerging term and one we think will gain prominence as social experiences become more prevalent in enterprise applications. For those who keep an eye on the ever-evolving Facebook platform, you'll recall that they recently rebranded their PDC (preferred developer consultant) group as the PMD (preferred marketing developer), signaling the importance of development resources inside the marketing organization to unlock the potential of social. The marketing developer they're referring to could be considered a social developer in a broader context. While it's true social has really blossomed in the marketing context and CMOs are winning more and more technical resources, social is starting to work its way more deeply into the enterprise with the help of developers that work outside marketing. Developers, like the rest of us, have fallen in "like" with social functionality and are starting to imagine how social can transform enterprise applications in the way it has consumer-facing experiences. The thesis of my presentation is that social developers will take many pages from the marketing playbook as they apply social inside the enterprise. To support this argument, lets walk through a range of enterprise applications and explore how consumer-facing social experiences might be interpreted in this context. Here's one example of how a social experience could be integrated into a sales enablement application. As a marketer, I spend a great deal of time collaborating with my sales colleagues, so I have good insight into their working process. While at Involver, we grew our sales team quickly, and it became evident some of our processes broke with scale. For example, we used to have weekly team meetings at which we'd discuss what was working and what wasn't from a messaging perspective. One aspect of these sessions focused on "objections" and "responses," where the salespeople would walk through common objections to purchasing and share appropriate responses. We tried to map each context to best answers and we'd capture these on a wiki page. As our team grew, however, participation at scale just wasn't tenable, and our wiki pages quickly lost their freshness. Imagine giving salespeople a place where they could submit common objections and responses for their colleagues to see, sort, comment on, and vote on. What you'd get is an up-to-date and relevant repository of information. And, if you supported an application like this with a social graph, it would be possible to make good recommendations to individual sales people about the objections they'd likely hear based on vertical, product, region or other graph data. Taking it even further, you could build in a badging/game element to reward those salespeople who participate the most. Both these examples are based on proven models at work inside consumer-facing applications. If you want to learn about how HR, Operations, Product Development and Customer Support can leverage social experiences, you’re welcome to join us at JavaOne or join our Social Developer Community to find some of the presentations after OpenWorld.

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RIF PRD: Presentation syntax issues

- by Charles Young

Over Christmas I got to play a bit with the W3C RIF PRD and came across a few issues which I thought I would record for posterity. Specifically, I was working on a grammar for the presentation syntax using a GLR grammar parser tool (I was using the current CTP of ‘M’ (MGrammer) and Intellipad – I do so hope the MS guys don’t kill off M and Intellipad now they have dropped the other parts of SQL Server Modelling). I realise that the presentation syntax is non-normative and that any issues with it do not therefore compromise the standard. However, presentation syntax is useful in its own right, and it would be great to iron out any issues in a future revision of the standard. The main issues are actually not to do with the grammar at all, but rather with the ‘running example’ in the RIF PRD recommendation. I started with the code provided in Example 9.1. There are several discrepancies when compared with the EBNF rules documented in the standard. Broadly the problems can be categorised as follows: · Parenthesis mismatch – the wrong number of parentheses are used in various places. For example, in GoldRule, the RHS of the rule (the ‘Then’) is nested in the LHS (‘the If’). In NewCustomerAndWidgetRule, the RHS is orphaned from the LHS. Together with additional incorrect parenthesis, this leads to orphanage of UnknownStatusRule from the entire Document. · Invalid use of parenthesis in ‘Forall’ constructs. Parenthesis should not be used to enclose formulae. Removal of the invalid parenthesis gave me a feeling of inconsistency when comparing formulae in Forall to formulae in If. The use of parenthesis is not actually inconsistent in these two context, but in an If construct it ‘feels’ as if you are enclosing formulae in parenthesis in a LISP-like fashion. In reality, the parenthesis is simply being used to group subordinate syntax elements. The fact that an If construct can contain only a single formula as an immediate child adds to this feeling of inconsistency. · Invalid representation of compact URIs (CURIEs) in the context of Frame productions. In several places the URIs are not qualified with a namespace prefix (‘ex1:’). This conflicts with the definition of CURIEs in the RIF Datatypes and Built-Ins 1.0 document. Here are the productions: CURIE ::= PNAME_LN | PNAME_NS PNAME_LN ::= PNAME_NS PN_LOCAL PNAME_NS ::= PN_PREFIX? ':' PN_LOCAL ::= ( PN_CHARS_U | [0-9] ) ((PN_CHARS|'.')* PN_CHARS)? PN_CHARS ::= PN_CHARS_U | '-' | [0-9] | #x00B7 | [#x0300-#x036F] | [#x203F-#x2040] PN_CHARS_U ::= PN_CHARS_BASE | '_' PN_CHARS_BASE ::= [A-Z] | [a-z] | [#x00C0-#x00D6] | [#x00D8-#x00F6] | [#x00F8-#x02FF] | [#x0370-#x037D] | [#x037F-#x1FFF] | [#x200C-#x200D] | [#x2070-#x218F] | [#x2C00-#x2FEF] | [#x3001-#xD7FF] | [#xF900-#xFDCF] | [#xFDF0-#xFFFD] | [#x10000-#xEFFFF] PN_PREFIX ::= PN_CHARS_BASE ((PN_CHARS|'.')* PN_CHARS)? The more I look at CURIEs, the more my head hurts! The RIF specification allows prefixes and colons without local names, which surprised me. However, the CURIE Syntax 1.0 working group note specifically states that this form is supported…and then promptly provides a syntactic definition that seems to preclude it! However, on (much) deeper inspection, it appears that ‘ex1:’ (for example) is allowed, but would really represent a ‘fragment’ of the ‘reference’, rather than a prefix! Ouch! This is so completely ambiguous that it surely calls into question the whole CURIE specification. In any case, RIF does not allow local names without a prefix. · Missing ‘External’ specifiers for built-in functions and predicates. The EBNF specification enforces this for terms within frames, but does not appear to enforce (what I believe is) the correct use of External on built-in predicates. In any case, the running example only specifies ‘External’ once on the predicate in UnknownStatusRule. External() is required in several other places. · The List used on the LHS of UnknownStatusRule is comma-delimited. This is not supported by the EBNF definition. Similarly, the argument list of pred:list-contains is illegally comma-delimited. · Unnecessary use of conjunction around a single formula in DiscountRule. This is strictly legal in the EBNF, but redundant. All the above issues concern the presentation syntax used in the running example. There are a few minor issues with the grammar itself. Note that Michael Kiefer stated in his paper “Rule Interchange Format: The Framework” that: “The presentation syntax of RIF … is an abstract syntax and, as such, it omits certain details that might be important for unambiguous parsing.” · The grammar cannot differentiate unambiguously between strategies and priorities on groups. A processor is forced to resolve this by detecting the use of IRIs and integers. This could easily be fixed in the grammar. · The grammar cannot unambiguously parse the ‘->’ operator in frames. Specifically, ‘-’ characters are allowed in PN_LOCAL names and hence a parser cannot determine if ‘status->’ is (‘status’ ‘->’) or (‘status-’ ‘>’). One way to fix this is to amend the PN_LOCAL production as follows: PN_LOCAL ::= ( PN_CHARS_U | [0-9] ) ((PN_CHARS|'.')* ((PN_CHARS)-('-')))? However, unilaterally changing the definition of this production, which is defined in the SPARQL Query Language for RDF specification, makes me uncomfortable. · I assume that the presentation syntax is case-sensitive. I couldn’t find this stated anywhere in the documentation, but function/predicate names do appear to be documented as being case-sensitive. · The EBNF does not specify whitespace handling. A couple of productions (RULE and ACTION_BLOCK) are crafted to enforce the use of whitespace. This is not necessary. It seems inconsistent with the rest of the specification and can cause parsing issues. In addition, the Const production exhibits whitespaces issues. The intention may have been to disallow the use of whitespace around ‘^^’, but any direct implementation of the EBNF will probably allow whitespace between ‘^^’ and the SYMSPACE. Of course, I am being a little nit-picking about all this. On the whole, the EBNF translated very smoothly and directly to ‘M’ (MGrammar) and proved to be fairly complete. I have encountered far worse issues when translating other EBNF specifications into usable grammars. I can’t imagine there would be any difficulty in implementing the same grammar in Antlr, COCO/R, gppg, XText, Bison, etc. A general observation, which repeats a point made above, is that the use of parenthesis in the presentation syntax can feel inconsistent and un-intuitive. It isn’t actually inconsistent, but I think the presentation syntax could be improved by adopting braces, rather than parenthesis, to delimit subordinate syntax elements in a similar way to so many programming languages. The familiarity of braces would communicate the structure of the syntax more clearly to people like me. If braces were adopted, parentheses could be retained around ‘var (frame | ‘new()’) constructs in action blocks. This use of parenthesis feels very LISP-like, and I think that this is my issue. It’s as if the presentation syntax represents the deformed love-child of LISP and C. In some places (specifically, action blocks), parenthesis is used in a LISP-like fashion. In other places it is used like braces in C. I find this quite confusing. Here is a corrected version of the running example (Example 9.1) in compliant presentation syntax: Document( Prefix( ex1 <http://example.com/2009/prd2> ) (* ex1:CheckoutRuleset *) Group rif:forwardChaining ( (* ex1:GoldRule *) Group 10 ( Forall ?customer such that And(?customer # ex1:Customer ?customer[ex1:status->"Silver"]) (Forall ?shoppingCart such that ?customer[ex1:shoppingCart->?shoppingCart] (If Exists ?value (And(?shoppingCart[ex1:value->?value] External(pred:numeric-greater-than-or-equal(?value 2000)))) Then Do(Modify(?customer[ex1:status->"Gold"]))))) (* ex1:DiscountRule *) Group ( Forall ?customer such that ?customer # ex1:Customer (If Or( ?customer[ex1:status->"Silver"] ?customer[ex1:status->"Gold"]) Then Do ((?s ?customer[ex1:shoppingCart-> ?s]) (?v ?s[ex1:value->?v]) Modify(?s [ex1:value->External(func:numeric-multiply (?v 0.95))])))) (* ex1:NewCustomerAndWidgetRule *) Group ( Forall ?customer such that And(?customer # ex1:Customer ?customer[ex1:status->"New"] ) (If Exists ?shoppingCart ?item (And(?customer[ex1:shoppingCart->?shoppingCart] ?shoppingCart[ex1:containsItem->?item] ?item # ex1:Widget ) ) Then Do( (?s ?customer[ex1:shoppingCart->?s]) (?val ?s[ex1:value->?val]) (?voucher ?customer[ex1:voucher->?voucher]) Retract(?customer[ex1:voucher->?voucher]) Retract(?voucher) Modify(?s[ex1:value->External(func:numeric-multiply(?val 0.90))])))) (* ex1:UnknownStatusRule *) Group ( Forall ?customer such that ?customer # ex1:Customer (If Not(Exists ?status (And(?customer[ex1:status->?status] External(pred:list-contains(List("New" "Bronze" "Silver" "Gold") ?status)) ))) Then Do( Execute(act:print(External(func:concat("New customer: " ?customer)))) Assert(?customer[ex1:status->"New"])))) ) ) I hope that helps someone out there :-)

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EPM 11.1.2.2 Architecture: Financial Performance Management Applications

- by Marc Schumacher

Financial Management can be accessed either by a browser based client or by SmartView. Starting from release 11.1.2.2, the Financial Management Windows client does not longer access the Financial Management Consolidation server. All tasks that require an on line connection (e.g. load and extract tasks) can only be done using the web interface. Any client connection initiated by a browser or SmartView is send to the Oracle HTTP server (OHS) first. Based on the path given (e.g. hfmadf, hfmofficeprovider) in the URL, OHS makes a decision to forward this request either to the new Financial Management web application based on the Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) or to the .NET based application serving SmartView retrievals running on Internet Information Server (IIS). Any requests send to the ADF web interface that need to be processed by the Financial Management application server are send to the IIS using HTTP protocol and will be forwarded further using DCOM to the Financial Management application server. SmartView requests, which are processes by IIS in first row, are forwarded to the Financial Management application server using DCOM as well. The Financial Management Application Server uses OLE DB database connections via native database clients to talk to the Financial Management database schema. Communication between the Financial Management DME Listener, which handles requests from EPMA, and the Financial Management application server is based on DCOM. Unlike most other components Essbase Analytics Link (EAL) does not have an end user interface. The only user interface is a plug-in for the Essbase Administration Services console, which is used for administration purposes only. End users interact with a Transparent or Replicated Partition that is created in Essbase and populated with data by EAL. The Analytics Link Server deployed on WebLogic communicates through HTTP protocol with the Analytics Link Financial Management Connector that is deployed in IIS on the Financial Management web server. Analytics Link Server interacts with the Data Synchronisation server using the EAL API. The Data Synchronization server acts as a target of a Transparent or Replicated Partition in Essbase and uses a native database client to connect to the Financial Management database. Analytics Link Server uses JDBC to connect to relational repository databases and Essbase JAPI to connect to Essbase. As most Oracle EPM System products, browser based clients and SmartView can be used to access Planning. The Java based Planning web application is deployed on WebLogic, which is configured behind an Oracle HTTP Server (OHS). Communication between Planning and the Planning RMI Registry Service is done using Java Remote Message Invocation (RMI). Planning uses JDBC to access relational repository databases and talks to Essbase using the CAPI. Be aware of the fact that beside the Planning System database a dedicated database schema is needed for each application that is set up within Planning. As Planning, Profitability and Cost Management (HPCM) has a pretty simple architecture. Beside the browser based clients and SmartView, a web service consumer can be used as a client too. All clients access the Java based web application deployed on WebLogic through Oracle HHTP Server (OHS). Communication between Profitability and Cost Management and EPMA Web Server is done using HTTP protocol. JDBC is used to access the relational repository databases as well as data sources. Essbase JAPI is utilized to talk to Essbase. For Strategic Finance, two clients exist, SmartView and a Windows client. While SmartView communicates through the web layer to the Strategic Finance Server, Strategic Finance Windows client makes a direct connection to the Strategic Finance Server using RPC calls. Connections from Strategic Finance Web as well as from Strategic Finance Web Services to the Strategic Finance Server are made using RPC calls too. The Strategic Finance Server uses its own file based data store. JDBC is used to connect to the EPM System Registry from web and application layer. Disclosure Management has three kinds of clients. While the browser based client and SmartView interact with the Disclosure Management web application directly through Oracle HTTP Server (OHS), Taxonomy Designer does not connect to the Disclosure Management server. Communication to relational repository databases is done via JDBC, to connect to Essbase the Essbase JAPI is utilized.

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Outlook 2013 keeps freezing, semi-consistently

- by AviD

I have an oddity of problem with my Outlook's stability. It seems to be freezing up, not at random intervals, but based on a seemingly strange combination of configurations. I have been trying many different combinations, I've even devolved to "Cargo-cult" debugging, since I have no clue what is causing this... Here is my set up - since I don't know for sure which settings are causing the lockup, I'll probably mention irrelevant things: (relatively) clean install of Windows 8 (on hyper-v, if that matters) Clean install of Outlook 2013, fully updated 3 accounts configured: Hotmail account configured with ActiveSync Gmail account Large-ish account (several GB) connected with IMAP Only a few folders are subscribed in IMAP Outlook is set to only display subscribed folders configured to keep messages permanently Google Apps account, connected with IMAP Small account connected with IMAP All folders IMAP subscribed Outlook is set to only display subscribed folders configured to keep messages permanently Several Send/Receive Groups configured, to try different configurations of enabling/disable/partial the different accounts - with different send times, from 60 minutes down to 5 minutes. The problem is that at certain points Outlook completely freezes up and I have to kill it. This is not consistent - there are some things that cause it immediately almost consistently, there are some times that it just happens by itself after some period of time (sometimes a few moments, sometimes a few hours; sometimes while using it, sometimes after I've been away from it for a few hours). I have searched all over, and there seem to be many with similar (apparently) problem, and found numerous "solutions" (some even more cargocultish than mine), but so far none of them worked. I've removed all the accounts, both all together and one at a time, and re-configured them - eventually it freezes up. I've tried uninstalling Outlook, cleaning it up completely - removing files, app settings, registry keys, etc - then reinstalling - eventually it freezes up. I've only enabled the Hotmail account, disabling (but not removing) the Google accounts - apparently this does not lock up. I've enabled the Hotmail and the Gmail accounts, leaving the Apps one disabled - it seems like it does not lock up. With all accounts enabled, it locks up almost immediately after doing a send/receive. With only the Apps account enabled, it seems to not lock up. With the Hotmail and the Apps accounts enabled (Gmail disabled), it seems like it locks up after a random amount of time. With Hotmail enabled, and Gmail and Apps both enabled but set to receive only custom folder downloading (not all subscribed folders) - sometimes it locks up right after a send/receive, sometimes it goes for hours without locking up, and sometimes it only locks up when I send an email. I've tried switching the ports for the Google accounts (SSL/465 vs TLS/587), though I have no idea if this should affect, but no real difference. In short, I honestly have no idea what is actually causing Outlook to lock up, I might be completely barking up the wrong tree. At this point I don't really know what else to try, I'm flipping switches at random here. I would like to have all 3 accounts enabled, ideally in several groups (e.g. pull down only important folders in a group with short interval, and all other folders in a longer interval) - obviously without freezing up at all. I've tried putting in all the important details, if there is anything else important to add please let me know. Another issue that occurred to me might also be connected - the Google accounts don't always synchronize properly, even after a send/receive or "update folder". At least not consistently... though I haven't been able to find a significant connection between this and that.

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The Presentation Isn't Over Until It's Over

- by Phil Factor

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

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Windows Azure SDK 1.3 addresses early adopter feedback

- by Eric Nelson

At the end of November 2010 we released a new version of the Windows Azure SDK which contains many new features driven by the great feedback of early adopters plus a shiny new portal. New Portal implemented in Silverlight: The new portal is implemented using Silverlight and replaces the (IMHO rather clunky) original HTML + JavaScript portal. It is 100% better although does still have a few bugs. Enjoy! P.S. You can if you wish still use the old portal: New runtime functionality: The following functionality is now generally available through the Windows Azure SDK and Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio and the new Windows Azure Management Portal: Elevated Privileges and Full IIS. You can now run a portion or all of your code in Web and Worker roles with elevated administrator privileges. The Web role now provides Full IIS functionality, which enables multiple IIS sites per Web role and the ability to install IIS modules. Remote Desktop functionality enables you to connect to a running instance of your application or service in order to monitor activity and troubleshoot common problems. Windows Server 2008 R2 Roles: Windows Azure now supports Windows Server 2008 R2 in its Web, worker and VM roles. This new support enables you to take advantage of the full range of Windows Server 2008 R2 features such as IIS 7.5, AppLocker, and enhanced command-line and automated management using PowerShell Version 2.0. New runtime functionality – in beta: Windows Azure Virtual Machine Role: Support for more types of new and existing Windows applications will soon be available with the introduction of the Virtual Machine (VM) role. You can move more existing applications to Windows Azure, reducing the need to make costly code or deployment changes. Extra Small Windows Azure Instance, which is priced at $0.05 per compute hour, provides developers with a cost-effective training and development environment. Developers can also use the Extra Small instance to prototype cloud solutions at a lower cost. Windows Azure Connect: (formerly Project Sydney), which enables a simple and easy-to-manage mechanism to set up IP-based network connectivity between on-premises and Windows Azure resources, is the first Windows Azure Virtual Network feature that we’re making available as a CTP. You can sign up for any of the betas via the Windows Azure Management Portal. Improved processes and simplified operations New portal! (see above) Access to new diagnostic information including the ability to click on a role to see role type, deployment time and last reboot time A new sign-up process that dramatically reduces the number of steps needed to sign up for Windows Azure. New scenario based Windows Azure Platform forums to help answer questions and share knowledge more efficiently. Multiple Service Administrators: Windows Azure now supports multiple Windows Live IDs to have administrator privileges on the same Windows Azure account. The objective is to make it easy for a team to work on the same Windows Azure account while using their individual Windows Live IDs. Related Links Please also let us know through Microsoft Platform Ready if and when you intend to build an application using the Windows Azure Platform. Or indeed if you already have (Well done). You will get access to some great benefits if you do (more on that in a future post). It also really helps us better understand the demand out there which directly impacts how we will plan the next six months of activities around the Windows Azure Platform. Visit Microsoft Platform Ready to tell us about your plans for your applications UK based? Interested in the Windows Azure Platform? Join http://ukazure.ning.com Get started with the Windows Azure Platform http://bit.ly/startazure

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ArchBeat Link-o-Rama Top 10 for December 9-15, 2012

- by Bob Rhubart

You click, we listen. The following list reflects the Top 10 most popular items posted on the OTN ArchBeat Facefbook page for the week of December 9-15, 2012. DevOps Basics II: What is Listening on Open Ports and Files – WebLogic Essentials | Dr. Frank Munz "Can you easily find out which WebLogic servers are listening to which port numbers and addresses?" asks Dr. Frank Munz. The good doctor has an answer—and a tech tip. Using OBIEE against Transactional Schemas Part 4: Complex Dimensions | Stewart Bryson "Another important entity for reporting in the Customer Tracking application is the Contact entity," says Stewart Bryson. "At first glance, it might seem that we should simply build another dimension called Dim – Contact, and use analyses to combine our Customer and Contact dimensions along with our Activity fact table to analyze Customer and Contact behavior." SOA 11g Technology Adapters – ECID Propagation | Greg Mally "Many SOA Suite 11g deployments include the use of the technology adapters for various activities including integration with FTP, database, and files to name a few," says Oracle Fusion Middleware A-Team member Greg Mally. "Although the integrations with these adapters are easy and feature rich, there can be some challenges from the operations perspective." Greg's post focuses on technical tips for dealing with one of these challenges. Podcast: DevOps and Continuous Integration In Part 1 of a 3-part program, panelists Tim Hall (Senior Director of product management for Oracle Enterprise Repository and Oracle’s Application Integration Architecture), Robert Wunderlich (Principal Product Manager for Oracle’s Application Integration Architecture Foundation Pack) and Peter Belknap (Director of product management for Oracle SOA Integration) discuss why DevOps matters and how it changes development methodologies and organizational structure. Good To Know - Conflicting View Objects and Shared Entity | Andrejus Baranovskis Oracle ACE Director Andrejus Baranovskis shares his thoughts -- and a sample application -- dealing with an "interesting ADF behavior" encountered over the weekend. Cloud Deployment Models | B. R. Clouse Looking out for the cloud newbies... "As the cloud paradigm grows in depth and breadth, more readers are approaching the topic for the first time, or from a new perspective," says B. R. Clouse. "This blog is a basic review of cloud deployment models, to help orient newcomers and neophytes." Service governance morphs into cloud API management | David Linthicum "When building and using clouds, the ability to manage APIs or services is the single most important item you can provide to ensure the success of the project," says David Linthicum. "But most organizations driving a cloud project for the first time have no experience handling a service-based architecture and don't see the need for API management until after deployment. By then, it's too late." Oracle Fusion Middleware Security: Password Policy in OAM 11g R2 | Rob Otto Rob Otto continues the Oracle Fusion Middleware A-Team "Oracle Access Manager Academy" series with a detailed look at OAM's ability to support "a subset of password management processes without the need to use Oracle Identity Manager and LDAP Sync." Understanding the JSF Lifecycle and ADF Optimized Lifecycle | Steven Davelaar Could you call that a surprise ending? Oracle WebCenter & ADF Architecture Team (A-Team) member learned a lot more than he expected while creating a UKOUG presentation entitled "What you need to know about JSF to be succesful with ADF." Expanding on requestaudit - Tracing who is doing what...and for how long | Kyle Hatlestad "One of the most helpful tracing sections in WebCenter Content (and one that is on by default) is the requestaudit tracing," says Oracle Fusion Middleware A-Team architect Kyle Hatlestad. Get up close and technical in his post. Thought for the Day "There is no code so big, twisted, or complex that maintenance can't make it worse." — Gerald Weinberg Source: SoftwareQuotes.com

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Orchestrating the Virtual Enterprise, Part I

- by Kathryn Perry

A guest post by Jon Chorley, Oracle's Chief Sustainability Officer & Vice President, SCM Product Strategy During the American Industrial Revolution, the Ford Motor Company did it all. It turned raw materials into a showroom full of Model Ts. It owned a steel mill, a glass factory, and an automobile assembly line. The company was both self-sufficient and innovative and went on to become one of the largest and most profitable companies in the world. Nowadays, it's unusual for any business to follow this vertical integration model because its much harder to be best in class across such a wide a range of capabilities and services. Instead, businesses focus on their core competencies and outsource other business functions to specialized suppliers. They exchange vertical integration for collaboration. When done well, all parties benefit from this arrangement and the collaboration leads to the creation of an agile, lean and successful "virtual enterprise." Case in point: For Sun hardware, Oracle outsources most of its manufacturing and all of its logistics to third parties. These are vital activities, but ones where Oracle doesn't have a core competency, so we shift them to business partners who do. Within our enterprise, we always retain the core functions of product development, support, and most of the sales function, because that's what constitutes our core value to our customers. This is a perfect example of a virtual enterprise. What are the implications of this? It means that we must exchange direct internal control for indirect external collaboration. This fundamentally changes the relative importance of different business processes, the boundaries of security and information sharing, and the relationship of the supply chain systems to the ERP. The challenge is that the systems required to support this virtual paradigm are still mired in "island enterprise" thinking. But help is at hand. Developments such as the Web, social networks, collaboration, and rules-based orchestration offer great potential to fundamentally re-architect supply chain systems to better support the virtual enterprise. Supply Chain Management Systems in a Virtual Enterprise Historically enterprise software was constructed to automate the ERP - and then the supply chain systems extended the ERP. They were joined at the hip. In virtual enterprises, the supply chain system needs to be ERP agnostic, sitting above each of the ERPs that are distributed across the virtual enterprise - most of which are operating in other businesses. This is vital so that the supply chain system can manage the flow of material and the related information through the multiple enterprises. It has to have strong collaboration tools. It needs to be highly flexible. Users need to be able to see information that's coming from multiple sources and be able to react and respond to events across those sources. Oracle Fusion Distributed Order Orchestration (DOO) is a perfect example of a supply chain system designed to operate in this virtual way. DOO embraces the idea that a company's fulfillment challenge is a distributed, multi-enterprise problem. It enables users to manage the process and the trading partners in a uniform way and deliver a consistent user experience while operating over a heterogeneous, virtual enterprise. This is a fundamental shift at the core of managing supply chains. It forces virtual enterprises to think architecturally about how best to construct their supply chain systems. In my next post, I will share examples of companies that have made that shift and talk more about the distributed orchestration process.

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Insurers Pushed to Transform Their Business

- by Calvin Glenn

Everyone in the P&C industry has heard it “We can’t do it.” “Nobody wants to do it.” “We can’t afford to do it.” Unfortunately, what they’re referencing are the reasons many insurers are still trying to maintain their business processing on legacy policy administration systems, attempting to bide time until there is no other recourse but to give in, bite the bullet, and take on the monumental task of replacing an entire policy administration system (PAS). Just the thought of that project sends IT, Business Users and Management reeling. However, is that fear real? It is a bit daunting when one realizes that a complete policy administration system replacement will touch most every function an insurer manages, from quoting and rating, to underwriting, distribution, and even customer service. With that, everyone has heard at least one horror story around a transformation initiative that has far exceeded budget and the promised implementation / go-live timeline. But, does it have to be that hard? Surely, in the age where a person can voice-activate their DVR to record a TV program from a cell phone, there has to be someone somewhere who’s figured out how to simplify this process. To be able to help insurers, of all sizes, transform and grow their business while also delivering on their overall objectives of providing speed to market, straight-through-processing for applications, quoting, underwriting, and simplified product development. Maybe we’re looking too hard and the answer is simple and straight-forward. Why replace the entire machine when all it really needs is a new part…a single enterprise rating system? This core, modular piece of the policy administration system is the foundation of product development and rate management that enables insurers to provide the right product at the right price to the right customer through the best channels at any given moment in time. The real benefit of a single enterprise rating system is the ability to deliver enhanced business capabilities, such as improved product management, streamlined underwriting, and speed to market. With these benefits, carriers have accomplished a portion of their overall transformation goal. Furthermore, lessons learned from the rating project can be applied to the bigger, down-the-road PAS project to support the successful completion of the overall transformation endeavor. At the recent Oracle OpenWorld Conference in San Francisco, information was shared with attendees about a recent “go-live” project from an Oracle Insurance Tier 1 insurer who did what is proposed above…replaced just the rating portion of their legacy policy administration system with Oracle Insurance Insbridge Rating and Underwriting. This change provided the insurer greater flexibility to set rates that better reflect risk while enabling the company to support its market segment strategy. Using the Oracle Insurance Insbridge enterprise rating solution, the insurer was able to reduce processing time for agents and underwriters, gained the ability to support proprietary rating models and improved pricing accuracy. There is mounting pressure on P&C insurers to produce growth and show net profitability in the midst of modest overall industry growth, large weather-related losses and intensifying competition for market share. Insurers are also being asked to improve customer service, offer a differentiated value proposition and simplify insurance processes. While the demands are many there is an easy answer…invest in and update the most mission critical application in your arsenal, the single enterprise rating system. Download the Podcast to listen to “Stand-Alone Rating Engine - Leading Force Behind Core Transformation Projects in the P&C Market,” a podcast originally recorded in October 2013. Related Resources: White Paper: Stand-Alone Rating Engine: Leading Force Behind Core Transformation Projects in the P&C Market Webcast On Demand: Stand-Alone Rating Engine and Core Transformation for P&C Insurers Don’t forget to keep up with us year-round: Facebook: www.facebook.com/oracleinsurance Twitter: www.twitter.com/oracleinsurance YouTube: www.youtube.com/oracleinsurance

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Centos 7. Freeradius fails to start on boot

- by Alex

I was messing around with FreeRADIUS and MySQL (MariaDB) and it seems FreeRADIUS service can't start properly on startup. But it starts fine using root user or in debug mode (radiusd -X) and works just fine! Debug mode shows no errors. systemctl command shows that radiusd.service has failed to start. /var/log/messages output: Aug 21 15:52:29 nexus-test systemd: Starting The Apache HTTP Server... Aug 21 15:52:29 nexus-test systemd: Starting MariaDB database server... Aug 21 15:52:29 nexus-test systemd: Starting FreeRADIUS high performance RADIUS server.... Aug 21 15:52:29 nexus-test systemd: Started OpenSSH server daemon. Aug 21 15:52:29 nexus-test mysqld_safe: 140821 15:52:29 mysqld_safe Logging to '/var/log/mariadb/mariadb.log'. Aug 21 15:52:29 nexus-test mysqld_safe: 140821 15:52:29 mysqld_safe Starting mysqld daemon with databases from /var/lib/mysql Aug 21 15:52:30 nexus-test systemd: Started Postfix Mail Transport Agent. Aug 21 15:52:30 nexus-test avahi-daemon[604]: Registering new address record for fe80::250:56ff:fe85:e4af on eth0.*. Aug 21 15:52:30 nexus-test systemd: radiusd.service: control process exited, code=exited status=1 Aug 21 15:52:30 nexus-test systemd: Failed to start FreeRADIUS high performance RADIUS server.. Aug 21 15:52:30 nexus-test systemd: Unit radiusd.service entered failed state. Aug 21 15:52:31 nexus-test kdumpctl: kexec: loaded kdump kernel Aug 21 15:52:31 nexus-test kdumpctl: Starting kdump: [OK] Aug 21 15:52:31 nexus-test systemd: Started Crash recovery kernel arming. Aug 21 15:52:31 nexus-test systemd: Started The Apache HTTP Server. Aug 21 15:52:31 nexus-test systemd: Started MariaDB database server. /var/log/radius/radius.log output: Thu Aug 21 15:24:16 2014 : Info: rlm_sql (sql): Driver rlm_sql_mysql (module rlm_sql_mysql) loaded and linked Thu Aug 21 15:24:16 2014 : Info: rlm_sql (sql): Attempting to connect to database "radius" Thu Aug 21 15:24:16 2014 : Info: rlm_sql (sql): Opening additional connection (0) Thu Aug 21 15:24:16 2014 : Error: rlm_sql_mysql: Couldn't connect socket to MySQL server radius@localhost:radius Thu Aug 21 15:24:16 2014 : Error: rlm_sql_mysql: Mysql error 'Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (2)' Thu Aug 21 15:24:16 2014 : Error: rlm_sql (sql): Opening connection failed (0) Thu Aug 21 15:24:16 2014 : Error: /etc/raddb/mods-enabled/sql[47]: Instantiation failed for module "sql" After seeing this I tried to replicate the problem, killed mariadb.service and started to run debug mode again. And it spits out the same problem as in the radius.log. I tried disabling iptables and firewalld and rebooting, but no luck: systemctl disable iptables systemctl disable firewalld So maybe the problem is in the process startup order or delay of some kind. Maybe FreeRADIUS's SQL module can't connect to not yet started MariaDB? If it, how can I fix this? In earlier versions of RHEL/CENTOS I know you easily see service start order in like rc.d or stuff, now IDK. I am new to this fancy "systemd", "systemctl", "firewalld" stuff Centos 7 introduced so sorry I'm a little bit confused. Also this new FreeRADIUS 3 structure... PS. MariaDB is enabled on startup, credentials in FR DB configuration are correct A little update: cat /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/radiusd.service output: [Unit] Description=FreeRADIUS high performance RADIUS server. After=syslog.target network.target [Service] Type=forking PIDFile=/var/run/radiusd/radiusd.pid ExecStartPre=-/bin/chown -R radiusd.radiusd /var/run/radiusd ExecStartPre=/usr/sbin/radiusd -C ExecStart=/usr/sbin/radiusd -d /etc/raddb ExecReload=/usr/sbin/radiusd -C ExecReload=/bin/kill -HUP $MAINPID [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target

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Updated SOA Documents now available in ITSO Reference Library

- by Bob Rhubart

Nine documents within the IT Strategies from Oracle (ITSO) reference library have recently been updated. (Access to the ITSO collection is free to registered Oracle.com members -- and that membership is free.) All nine documents fall within the Service Oriented Architecture section of the ITSO collection, and cover the following topics: SOA Practitioner Guides Creating an SOA Roadmap (PDF, 54 pages, published: February 2012) The secret to successful SOA is to build a roadmap that can be successfully executed. SOA offers an opportunity to adopt an iterative technique to deliver solutions incrementally. This document offers a structured, iterative methodology to help you stay focused on business results, mitigate technology and organizational risk, and deliver successful SOA projects. A Framework for SOA Governance (PDF, 58 pages, published: February 2012) Successful SOA requires a strong governance strategy that designs-in measurement, management, and enforcement procedures. Enterprise SOA adoption introduces new assets, processes, technologies, standards, roles, etc. which require application of appropriate governance policies and procedures. This document offers a framework for defining and building a proper SOA governance model. Determining ROI of SOA through Reuse (PDF, 28 pages, published: February 2012) SOA offers the opportunity to save millions of dollars annually through reuse. Sharing common services intuitively reduces workload, increases developer productivity, and decreases maintenance costs. This document provides an approach for estimating the reuse value of the various software assets contained in a typical portfolio. Identifying and Discovering Services (PDF, 64 pages, published: March 2012) What services should we build? How can we promote the reuse of existing services? A sound approach to answer these questions is a primary measure for the success of a SOA initiative. This document describes a pragmatic approach for collecting the necessary information for identifying proper services and facilitating service reuse. Software Engineering in an SOA Environment (PDF, 66 pages, published: March 2012) Traditional software delivery methods are too narrowly focused and need to be adjusted to enable SOA. This document describes an engineering approach for delivering projects within an SOA environment. It identifies the unique software engineering challenges faced by enterprises adopting SOA and provides a framework to remove the hurdles and improve the efficiency of the SOA initiative. SOA Reference Architectures SOA Foundation (PDF, 70 pages, published: February 2012) This document describes they key tenets for SOA design, development, and execution environments. Topics include: service definition, service layering, service types, the service model, composite applications, invocation patterns, and standards. SOA Infrastructure (PDF, 86 pages, published: February 2012) Properly architected, SOA provides a robust and manageable infrastructure that enables faster solution delivery. This document describes the role of infrastructure and its capabilities. Topics include: logical architecture, deployment views, and Oracle product mapping. SOA White Papers and Data Sheets Oracle's Approach to SOA (white paper) (PDF, 14 pages, published: February 2012) Oracle has developed a pragmatic, holistic approach, based on years of experience with numerous companies to help customers successfully adopt SOA and realize measureable business benefits. This executive datasheet and whitepaper describe Oracle's proven approach to SOA. Oracle's Approach to SOA (data sheet) (PDF, 3 pages, published: March 2012) SOA adoption is complex and success is far from assured. This is why Oracle has developed a pragmatic, holistic approach, based on years of experience with numerous companies, to help customers successfully adopt SOA and realize measurable business benefits. This data sheet provides an executive overview of Oracle's proven approach to SOA.

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Workflow versioning

- by Nitra

I believe I have a fundamental misunderstanding when it comes to workflow engines which I would appreciate if you could help me sort out. I'm not sure if my misunderstanding is specific to the workflow engine I'm using, or if it's a general misunderstanding. I happen to use Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF). TLDR-version WWF allows you to implement business processes in long-running workflows (think months or even years). When started, the workflows can't be changed. But what business process can't change at any time? And if a business process changes, wouldn't you want your software to reflect this change for already started 'instances' of the business process? What am I missing? Background In WWF you define a workflow by combining a set of activites. There are different types of activities - some of them are for flow control, such as the IfElseActivity and the WhileActivty while others allows you to perform actual tasks, such as the CodeActivity wich allows you to run .NET code and the InvokeWebServiceActivity which allows you to call web services. The activites are combined to a workflow using a visual designer. You pretty much drag-and-drop activities from a toolbox to a designer area and connect the activites to each other. The workflow and activities have input paramters, output parameters and variables. We have a single workflow which sometimes runs in a matter of a few days, but it may run for 5-6 months. WWF takes care of persisting the workflow state (what activity are we currently executing, what are the variable values and so on). So far I think WWF makes sense. Some people will prefer to implement a software representation of a business process using a visual designer over writing all of it in code. So what's the issue then? What I don't really get is the following: WWF is designed to take care of long-running workflows. But at the same time, WWF has no built-in functionality which allows you to modify the running workflows. So if you model a business process using a workflow and run that for 6 months, you better hope that the business process does not change. Because if it do, you'll have to have multiple versions of the workflow executing at the same time. This seems like a fundamental design mistake to me, but at the same time it seems more likely that I've misunderstood something. For us, this has had some real-world effects: We release new versions every month, but some workflows may run for a year. This means that we have several versions of the workflow running in parallell, in other words several versions of the business logics. This is the same as having many differnt versions of your code running in production in the same system at the same time, which becomes a bit hard to understand for users. (depending on on whether they clicked a 'Start' button 9 or 10 months ago, the software will behave differently) Our workflow refers to different types of entities and since WWF now has persisted and serialized these we can't really refactor the entities since then existing workflows can't be resumed (deserialization will fail We've received some suggestions on how to handle this When we create a new version of the workflow, cancel all running workflows and create new ones. But in our workflows there's a lot of manual work involved and if we start from scratch a lot of people has to re-do their work. Track what has been done in the workflow and when you create a new one skip activites which have already been executed. I feel that this alternative may work for simple workflows, but it becomes hairy to automatically figure out what activities to skip if there's major refactoring done to a workflow. When we create a new version of the workflow, upgrade old versions using the new WWF 4.5 functionality for upgrading workflows. But then we would have to skip using the visual designer and write code to inject activities in the right places in the workflow. According to MSDN, this upgrade functionality is only intended for minor bug fixes and not larger changes. What am I missing?

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Console Hangs when Attempting to Deploy Software Updates

- by JCardenas

When in the SCCM 2012 console under Software Updates, I click Deploy on a Software Update Group and the console hangs indefinitely. It just stops; I click away and back and Windows does not recognize that the console has stopped responding. I end up having to kill the console through Task Manager. I have left the console for hours and it never becomes responsive again. I have tried removing and reinstalling the SUP, without success. Server reboots do not help, either. The issue with the console occurs both on my desktop, and directly on the site server itself. Any ideas? I've checked server logs and found nothing that would be indicative of a problem. Update: I managed to find something from the SMSAdminUI.log file: [1, PID:820][10/12/2012 08:59:26] :Disposed ResultObject was passed to update delegate, ignoring but refresh operation may not complete correctly [14, PID:820][10/12/2012 13:53:57] :System.Management.ManagementException\r\nNot found \r\n at System.Management.ManagementException.ThrowWithExtendedInfo(ManagementStatus errorCode) at System.Management.ManagementObject.Initialize(Boolean getObject) at System.Management.ManagementBaseObject.get_wbemObject() at System.Management.PropertyData.RefreshPropertyInfo() at System.Management.PropertyDataCollection.get_Item(String propertyName) at System.Management.ManagementBaseObject.GetPropertyValue(String propertyName) at System.Management.ManagementBaseObject.get_Item(String propertyName) at Microsoft.ConfigurationManagement.ManagementProvider.WqlQueryEngine.WqlConnectionManager.GetInstance(String objectPath)\r\nManagementException details: instance of __ExtendedStatus { Operation = "GetObject"; ParameterInfo = "SMS_PackageToContent.ContentID=16794374,PackageID=\"CA100065\""; ProviderName = "WinMgmt"; }; \r\n [14, PID:820][10/12/2012 13:53:57] :(SMS_PackageToContent.ContentID=16794374,PackageID='CA100065') does not exist or its IsContentValid returns false. We will (re)download this content. [14, PID:820][10/12/2012 13:54:01] :Successfully validated or downloaded update fcadb0ea-90ce-4aad-bc95-192450f05211! [14, PID:820][10/12/2012 13:54:02] :System.Management.ManagementException\r\nNot found \r\n at System.Management.ManagementException.ThrowWithExtendedInfo(ManagementStatus errorCode) at System.Management.ManagementObject.Initialize(Boolean getObject) at System.Management.ManagementBaseObject.get_wbemObject() at System.Management.PropertyData.RefreshPropertyInfo() at System.Management.PropertyDataCollection.get_Item(String propertyName) at System.Management.ManagementBaseObject.GetPropertyValue(String propertyName) at System.Management.ManagementBaseObject.get_Item(String propertyName) at Microsoft.ConfigurationManagement.ManagementProvider.WqlQueryEngine.WqlConnectionManager.GetInstance(String objectPath)\r\nManagementException details: instance of __ExtendedStatus { Operation = "GetObject"; ParameterInfo = "SMS_PackageToContent.ContentID=16787459,PackageID=\"CA100065\""; ProviderName = "WinMgmt"; }; \r\n [14, PID:820][10/12/2012 13:54:02] :(SMS_PackageToContent.ContentID=16787459,PackageID='CA100065') does not exist or its IsContentValid returns false. We will (re)download this content. [14, PID:820][10/12/2012 13:54:03] :Successfully validated or downloaded update eec264ac-fbc7-4cc4-891b-7cc6ab5bfe0e! [14, PID:820][10/12/2012 13:54:03] :System.Management.ManagementException\r\nNot found \r\n at System.Management.ManagementException.ThrowWithExtendedInfo(ManagementStatus errorCode) at System.Management.ManagementObject.Initialize(Boolean getObject) at System.Management.ManagementBaseObject.get_wbemObject() at System.Management.PropertyData.RefreshPropertyInfo() at System.Management.PropertyDataCollection.get_Item(String propertyName) at System.Management.ManagementBaseObject.GetPropertyValue(String propertyName) at System.Management.ManagementBaseObject.get_Item(String propertyName) at Microsoft.ConfigurationManagement.ManagementProvider.WqlQueryEngine.WqlConnectionManager.GetInstance(String objectPath)\r\nManagementException details: instance of __ExtendedStatus { Operation = "GetObject"; ParameterInfo = "SMS_PackageToContent.ContentID=16784547,PackageID=\"CA100065\""; ProviderName = "WinMgmt"; }; \r\n [14, PID:820][10/12/2012 13:54:03] :(SMS_PackageToContent.ContentID=16784547,PackageID='CA100065') does not exist or its IsContentValid returns false. We will (re)download this content. [14, PID:820][10/12/2012 13:54:05] :Successfully validated or downloaded update 8d780338-eec1-4d31-b1cd-6187400c02f3! [14, PID:820][10/12/2012 13:54:05] :System.Management.ManagementException\r\nNot found \r\n at System.Management.ManagementException.ThrowWithExtendedInfo(ManagementStatus errorCode) at System.Management.ManagementObject.Initialize(Boolean getObject) at System.Management.ManagementBaseObject.get_wbemObject() at System.Management.PropertyData.RefreshPropertyInfo() at System.Management.PropertyDataCollection.get_Item(String propertyName) at System.Management.ManagementBaseObject.GetPropertyValue(String propertyName) at System.Management.ManagementBaseObject.get_Item(String propertyName) at Microsoft.ConfigurationManagement.ManagementProvider.WqlQueryEngine.WqlConnectionManager.GetInstance(String objectPath)\r\nManagementException details: instance of __ExtendedStatus { Operation = "GetObject"; ParameterInfo = "SMS_PackageToContent.ContentID=16787423,PackageID=\"CA100065\""; ProviderName = "WinMgmt"; }; \r\n [14, PID:820][10/12/2012 13:54:05] :(SMS_PackageToContent.ContentID=16787423,PackageID='CA100065') does not exist or its IsContentValid returns false. We will (re)download this content.

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Authenticating your windows domain users in the cloud

- by cibrax

Moving to the cloud can represent a big challenge for many organizations when it comes to reusing existing infrastructure. For applications that drive existing business processes in the organization, reusing IT assets like active directory represent good part of that challenge. For example, a new web mobile application that sales representatives can use for interacting with an existing CRM system in the organization. In the case of Windows Azure, the Access Control Service (ACS) already provides some integration with ADFS through WS-Federation. That means any organization can create a new trust relationship between the STS running in the ACS and the STS running in ADFS. As the following image illustrates, the ADFS running in the organization should be somehow exposed out of network boundaries to talk to the ACS. This is usually accomplish through an ADFS proxy running in a DMZ. This is the official story for authenticating existing domain users with the ACS. Getting an ADFS up and running in the organization, which talks to a proxy and also trust the ACS could represent a painful experience. It basically requires advance knowledge of ADSF and exhaustive testing to get everything right. However, if you want to get an infrastructure ready for authenticating your domain users in the cloud in a matter of minutes, you will probably want to take a look at the sample I wrote for talking to an existing Active Directory using a regular WCF service through the Service Bus Relay Binding. You can use the WCF ability for self hosting the authentication service within a any program running in the domain (a Windows service typically). The service will not require opening any port as it is opening an outbound connection to the cloud through the Relay Service. In addition, the service will be protected from being invoked by any unauthorized party with the ACS, which will act as a firewall between any client and the service. In that way, we can get a very safe solution up and running almost immediately. To make the solution even more convenient, I implemented an STS in the cloud that internally invokes the service running on premises for authenticating the users. Any existing web application in the cloud can just establish a trust relationship with this STS, and authenticate the users via WS-Federation passive profile with regular http calls, which makes this very attractive for web mobile for example. This is how the WCF service running on premises looks like, [ServiceBehavior(Namespace = "http://agilesight.com/active_directory/agent")] public class ProxyService : IAuthenticationService { IUserFinder userFinder; IUserAuthenticator userAuthenticator; public ProxyService() : this(new UserFinder(), new UserAuthenticator()) { } public ProxyService(IUserFinder userFinder, IUserAuthenticator userAuthenticator) { this.userFinder = userFinder; this.userAuthenticator = userAuthenticator; } public AuthenticationResponse Authenticate(AuthenticationRequest request) { if (userAuthenticator.Authenticate(request.Username, request.Password)) { return new AuthenticationResponse { Result = true, Attributes = this.userFinder.GetAttributes(request.Username) }; } return new AuthenticationResponse { Result = false }; } } Two external dependencies are used by this service for authenticating users (IUserAuthenticator) and for retrieving user attributes from the user’s directory (IUserFinder). The UserAuthenticator implementation is just a wrapper around the LogonUser Win Api. The UserFinder implementation relies on Directory Services in .NET for searching the user attributes in an existing directory service like Active Directory or the local user store. public UserAttribute[] GetAttributes(string username) { var attributes = new List<UserAttribute>(); var identity = UserPrincipal.FindByIdentity(new PrincipalContext(this.contextType, this.server, this.container), IdentityType.SamAccountName, username); if (identity != null) { var groups = identity.GetGroups(); foreach(var group in groups) { attributes.Add(new UserAttribute { Name = "Group", Value = group.Name }); } if(!string.IsNullOrEmpty(identity.DisplayName)) attributes.Add(new UserAttribute { Name = "DisplayName", Value = identity.DisplayName }); if(!string.IsNullOrEmpty(identity.EmailAddress)) attributes.Add(new UserAttribute { Name = "EmailAddress", Value = identity.EmailAddress }); } return attributes.ToArray(); } As you can see, the code is simple and uses all the existing infrastructure in Azure to simplify a problem that looks very complex at first glance with ADFS. All the source code for this sample is available to download (or change) in this GitHub repository, https://github.com/AgileSight/ActiveDirectoryForCloud

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Open source adventures with... wait for it... Microsoft

- by Jeff

Last week, Microsoft announced that it was going to open source the rest of the ASP.NET MVC Web stack. The core MVC framework has been open source for a long time now, but the other pieces around it are also now out in the wild. Not only that, but it's not what I call "big bang" open source, where you release the source with each version. No, they're actually committing in real time to a public repository. They're also taking contributions where it makes sense. If that weren't exciting enough, CodePlex, which used to be a part of the team I was on, has been re-org'd to a different part of the company where it is getting the love and attention (and apparently money) that it deserves. For a period of several months, I lobbied to get a PM gig with that product, but got nowhere. A year and a half later, I'm happy to see it finally treated right. In any case, I found a bug in Razor, the rendering engine, before the beta came out. I informally sent the bug info to some people, but it wasn't fixed for the beta. Now, with the project being developed in the open, I was able to submit the issue, and went back and forth with the developer who wrote the code (I met him once at a meet up in Bellevue, I think), and he committed a fix. I tried it a day later, and the bug was gone. There's a lot to learn from all of this. That open source software is surprisingly efficient and often of high quality is one part of it. For me the win is that it demonstrates how open and collaborative processes, as light as possible, lead to better software. In other words, even if this were a project being developed internally, at a bank or something, getting stakeholders involved early and giving people the ability to respond leads to awesomeness. While there is always a place for big thinking, experience has shown time and time again that trying to figure everything out up front takes too long, and rarely meets expectations. This is a lesson that probably half of Microsoft has yet to learn, including the team I was on before I split. It's the reason that team still hasn't shipped anything to general availability. But I've seen what an open and iterative development style can do for teams, at Microsoft and other places that I've worked. When you can have a conversation with people, and take ideas and turn them into code quickly, you're winning. So why don't people like winning? I think there are a lot of reasons, and they can generally be categorized into fear, skepticism and bad experiences. I can't give the Web stack teams enough credit. Not only did they dream big, but they changed a culture that often seems immovable and hopelessly stuck. This is a very public example of this culture change, but it's starting to happen at every scale in Microsoft. It's really interesting to see in a company that has been written off as dead the last decade.

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XenServer Converting HVM to Paravirtualised

- by Karl Kloppenborg

Recently I have been tasked with the daunting process of converting a setup of HVM enabled VMs (running on Citrix XenServer 5.6.0) into PV (paravirtualised) containers. The constraints of the project was that: The operating system must be functionally identical after the migration. minimal modification to the operating system (with exception of kernel / drive mapping) I also was allowed to change the bootloader(ie, grub) in what ever way I see fit. However, I have attempted this, I will firstly like to show you my steps I took. This at the moment is CentOS5.5 specific: Steps: yum install kernel-xen This installed: 2.6.18-194.32.1.el5xen edited: /boot/grub/menu.lst changed my specs to match: title CentOS (2.6.18-194.32.1.el5xen) root (hd0,0) kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-194.32.1.el5xen ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 console=xvc0 initrd /initrd-2.6.18-194.32.1.el5xen.img Then I changed my xenserver parameters to match: xe vm-param-set uuid=[vm uuid] PV-bootloader-args="--kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-194.32.1.el5xen --ramdisk /initrd-2.6.18-194.32.1.el5xen.img" xe vm-param-set uuid=[vm uuid] HVM-boot-policy="" xe vm-param-set uuid=[vm uuid] PV-bootloader=pygrub xe vbd-param-set uuid==[Virtual Block Device/VBD uuid] bootable=true Some things to note, I am running a VolGroup LVM ;) Anyways, after all these steps (which aren't much!) I boot the VM and it boots initial kernel just fine, however I am presented with this error: Boot Screen: device-mapper: dm-raid45: initialized v0.2594l Waiting for driver initialization. Scanning and configuring dmraid supported devices Scanning logical volumes Reading all physical volumes. This may take a while... Activating logical volumes Volume group "VolGroup00" not found Creating root device. Mounting root filesystem. mount: could not find filesystem '/dev/root' Setting up other filesystems. Setting up new root fs setuproot: moving /dev failed: No such file or directory no fstab.sys, mounting internal defaults setuproot: error mounting /proc: No such file or directory setuproot: error mounting /sys: No such file or directory Switching to new root and running init. unmounting old /dev unmounting old /proc unmounting old /sys switchroot: mount failed: No such file or directory Now my hints are that it cannot detect / because of the fact that when you change from HVM mode to PV it does something (not that obvious) When you make a SR (storage) on a HVM, you get it mounted to the guest os as /dev/hda. However in PV mode, this presents itself as /dev/xvda... Could this be the answer? and if so, how the heck to I implement it?? Update: So I have gotten a bit further in my quest, as it now detects the LVM's... To do this, I required to recompile the xen-kernel initrd image. Command: mkinitrd -v --builtin=xen_vbd --preload=xenblk initrd-2.6.18-194.32.1.el5xen.img 2.6.18-194.32.1.el5xen Now when I boot I get this: Boot Screen: Loading dm-raid45.ko module device-mapper: dm-raid45: initialized v0.2594l Scanning and configuring dmraid supported devices Scanning logical volumes Reading all physical volumes. This may take a while... Found volume group "VolGroup00" using metadata type lvm2 Activating logical volumes 3 logical volume(s) in volume group "VolGroup00" now active Creating root device. Mounting root filesystem. mount: error mounting /dev/root on /sysroot as ext3: Device or resource busy Setting up other filesystems. Setting up new root fs setuproot: moving /dev failed: No such file or directory no fstab.sys, mounting internal defaults setuproot: error mounting /proc: No such file or directory setuproot: error mounting /sys: No such file or directory Switching to new root and running init. unmounting old /dev unmounting old /proc unmounting old /sys switchroot: mount failed: No such file or directory Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!

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Nominations now open for the Oracle FMW Excellence Awards 2014

- by Greg Jensen

2014 Oracle Excellence Award NominationsWho Is the Innovative Leader for Identity Management? • Is your organization leveraging one of Oracle’s Identity and Access Management solutions in your production environment?• Are you a leading edge organization that has adopted a forward thinking approach to Identity and Access Management processes across the organization?• Are you ready to promote and highlight the success of your deployment to your peers? • Would you a chance to win FREE registration to Oracle OpenWorld 2014? Oracle is pleased to announce the call for nominations for the 2014 Oracle Excellence Awards: Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation. The Oracle Excellence Awards for Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation honor organizations using Oracle Fusion Middleware to deliver unique business value. This year, the awards will recognize customers across nine distinct categories, including Identity and Access Management. Oracle customers, who feel they are pioneers in their implementation of at least one of the Oracle Identity and Access Management offerings in a production environment or active deployment, should submit a nomination. If submitted by June 20th, 2014, you will have a chance to win a FREE registration to Oracle OpenWorld 2014 (September 28 - October 2) in San Francisco, CA. Top customers will be showcased at Oracle OpenWorld and featured in Oracle publications. The Identity and Access Management Nomination Form Additional benefits to nomineesNominating your organization opens additional opportunities to partner with Oracle such as:• Promotion of your Customer Success StoriesProvides a platform for you to share the success of your initiatives and programs to peer groups raising the overall visibility of your team and your organization as a leader in security• Social Media promotion (Video, Blog & Podcast)Reach the masses of Oracle’s customers through sharing of success stories, or customer created blog content that highlights the advanced thought leadership role in security with co-authored articles on Oracle Blog page that reaches close to 100,000 subscribers. There are numerous options to promote activities on Facebook, Twitter and co-branded activities using Video and Audio. • Live speaking opportunities to your peersAs a technology leader within your organization, you can represent your organization at Oracle sponsored events (online, in person or webcasts) to help share the success of your organizations efforts building out your team/organization brand and success. • Invitation to the IDM Architect ForumOracle is able to invite the right customers into the IDM Architect Forum which is an invite only group of customers that meet monthly to hear technology driven presentations from their own peers (not from Oracle) on today’s trends. If you want to hear privately what some of the most successful companies in every industry are doing about security, this is the forum to be in. All presentations are private and remain within the forum, and only members can see take advantage of the lessons gained from these meetings. To date, there are 125 members. There are many more advantages to partnering with Oracle, however, it can start with the simple nomination form for Identity and Access Management category of the 2014 Oracle Excellence Award Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt: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-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}

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