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• Service Broker, not ETL

  - by jamiet

  I have been very quiet on this blog of late and one reason for that is I have been very busy on a client project that I would like to talk about a little here. The client that I have been working for has a website that runs on a distributed architecture utilising a messaging infrastructure for communication between different endpoints. My brief was to build a system that could consume these messages and produce analytical information in near-real-time. More specifically I basically had to deliver a data warehouse however it was the real-time aspect of the project that really intrigued me. This real-time requirement meant that using an Extract transformation, Load (ETL) tool was out of the question and so I had no choice but to write T-SQL code (i.e. stored-procedures) to process the incoming messages and load the data into the data warehouse. This concerned me though – I had no way to control the rate at which data would arrive into the system yet we were going to have end-users querying the system at the same time that those messages were arriving; the potential for contention in such a scenario was pretty high and and was something I wanted to minimise as much as possible. Moreover I did not want the processing of data inside the data warehouse to have any impact on the customer-facing website. As you have probably guessed from the title of this blog post this is where Service Broker stepped in! For those that have not heard of it Service Broker is a queuing technology that has been built into SQL Server since SQL Server 2005. It provides a number of features however the one that was of interest to me was the fact that it facilitates asynchronous data processing which, in layman’s terms, means the ability to process some data without requiring the system that supplied the data having to wait for the response. That was a crucial feature because on this project the customer-facing website (in effect an OLTP system) would be calling one of our stored procedures with each message – we did not want to cause the OLTP system to wait on us every time we processed one of those messages. This asynchronous nature also helps to alleviate the contention problem because the asynchronous processing activity is handled just like any other task in the database engine and hence can wait on another task (such as an end-user query). Service Broker it was then! The stored procedure called by the OLTP system would simply put the message onto a queue and we would use a feature called activation to pick each message off the queue in turn and process it into the warehouse. At the time of writing the system is not yet up to full capacity but so far everything seems to be working OK (touch wood) and crucially our users are seeing data in near-real-time. By near-real-time I am talking about latencies of a few minutes at most and to someone like me who is used to building systems that have overnight latencies that is a huge step forward! So then, am I advocating that you all go out and dump your ETL tools? Of course not, no! What this project has taught me though is that in certain scenarios there may be better ways to implement a data warehouse system then the traditional “load data in overnight” approach that we are all used to. Moreover I have really enjoyed getting to grips with a new technology and even if you don’t want to use Service Broker you might want to consider asynchronous messaging architectures for your BI/data warehousing solutions in the future. This has been a very high level overview of my use of Service Broker and I have deliberately left out much of the minutiae of what has been a very challenging implementation. Nonetheless I hope I have caused you to reflect upon your own approaches to BI and question whether other approaches may be more tenable. All comments and questions gratefully received! Lastly, if you have never used Service Broker before and want to kick the tyres I have provided below a very simple “Service Broker Hello World” script that will create all of the objects required to facilitate Service Broker communications and then send the message “Hello World” from one place to anther! This doesn’t represent a “proper” implementation per se because it doesn’t close down down conversation objects (which you should always do in a real-world scenario) but its enough to demonstrate the capabilities! @Jamiet ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /*This is a basic Service Broker Hello World app. Have fun! -Jamie */ USE MASTER GO CREATE DATABASE SBTest GO --Turn Service Broker on! ALTER DATABASE SBTest SET ENABLE_BROKER GO USE SBTest GO -- 1) we need to create a message type. Note that our message type is -- very simple and allowed any type of content CREATE MESSAGE TYPE HelloMessage VALIDATION = NONE GO -- 2) Once the message type has been created, we need to create a contract -- that specifies who can send what types of messages CREATE CONTRACT HelloContract (HelloMessage SENT BY INITIATOR) GO --We can query the metadata of the objects we just created SELECT * FROM   sys.service_message_types WHERE name = 'HelloMessage'; SELECT * FROM   sys.service_contracts WHERE name = 'HelloContract'; SELECT * FROM   sys.service_contract_message_usages WHERE  service_contract_id IN (SELECT service_contract_id FROM sys.service_contracts WHERE name = 'HelloContract') AND        message_type_id IN (SELECT message_type_id FROM sys.service_message_types WHERE name = 'HelloMessage'); -- 3) The communication is between two endpoints. Thus, we need two queues to -- hold messages CREATE QUEUE SenderQueue CREATE QUEUE ReceiverQueue GO --more querying metatda SELECT * FROM sys.service_queues WHERE name IN ('SenderQueue','ReceiverQueue'); --we can also select from the queues as if they were tables SELECT * FROM SenderQueue   SELECT * FROM ReceiverQueue   -- 4) Create the required services and bind them to be above created queues CREATE SERVICE Sender   ON QUEUE SenderQueue CREATE SERVICE Receiver   ON QUEUE ReceiverQueue (HelloContract) GO --more querying metadata SELECT * FROM sys.services WHERE name IN ('Receiver','Sender'); -- 5) At this point, we can begin the conversation between the two services by -- sending messages DECLARE @conversationHandle UNIQUEIDENTIFIER DECLARE @message NVARCHAR(100) BEGIN   BEGIN TRANSACTION;   BEGIN DIALOG @conversationHandle         FROM SERVICE Sender         TO SERVICE 'Receiver'         ON CONTRACT HelloContract WITH ENCRYPTION=OFF   -- Send a message on the conversation   SET @message = N'Hello, World';   SEND  ON CONVERSATION @conversationHandle         MESSAGE TYPE HelloMessage (@message)   COMMIT TRANSACTION END GO --check contents of queues SELECT * FROM SenderQueue   SELECT * FROM ReceiverQueue   GO -- Receive a message from the queue RECEIVE CONVERT(NVARCHAR(MAX), message_body) AS MESSAGE FROM ReceiverQueue GO --If no messages were received and/or you can't see anything on the queues you may wish to check the following for clues: SELECT * FROM sys.transmission_queue -- Cleanup DROP SERVICE Sender DROP SERVICE Receiver DROP QUEUE SenderQueue DROP QUEUE ReceiverQueue DROP CONTRACT HelloContract DROP MESSAGE TYPE HelloMessage GO USE MASTER GO DROP DATABASE SBTest GO

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• SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #034

  - by Pinal Dave

  Here is the list of selected articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2007 UDF – User Defined Function to Strip HTML – Parse HTML – No Regular Expression The UDF used in the blog does fantastic task – it scans entire HTML text and removes all the HTML tags. It keeps only valid text data without HTML task. This is one of the quite commonly requested tasks many developers have to face everyday. De-fragmentation of Database at Operating System to Improve Performance Operating system skips MDF file while defragging the entire filesystem of the operating system. It is absolutely fine and there is no impact of the same on performance. Read the entire blog post for my conversation with our network engineers. Delay Function – WAITFOR clause – Delay Execution of Commands How do you delay execution of the commands in SQL Server – ofcourse by using WAITFOR keyword. In this blog post, I explain the same with the help of T-SQL script. Find Length of Text Field To measure the length of TEXT fields the function is DATALENGTH(textfield). Len will not work for text field. As of SQL Server 2005, developers should migrate all the text fields to VARCHAR(MAX) as that is the way forward. Retrieve Current Date Time in SQL Server CURRENT_TIMESTAMP, GETDATE(), {fn NOW()} There are three ways to retrieve the current datetime in SQL SERVER. CURRENT_TIMESTAMP, GETDATE(), {fn NOW()} Explanation and Comparison of NULLIF and ISNULL An interesting observation is NULLIF returns null if it comparison is successful, whereas ISNULL returns not null if its comparison is successful. In one way they are opposite to each other. Here is my question to you - How to create infinite loop using NULLIF and ISNULL? If this is even possible? 2008 Introduction to SERVERPROPERTY and example SERVERPROPERTY is a very interesting system function. It returns many of the system values. I use it very frequently to get different server values like Server Collation, Server Name etc. SQL Server Start Time We can use DMV to find out what is the start time of SQL Server in 2008 and later version. In this blog you can see how you can do the same. Find Current Identity of Table Many times we need to know what is the current identity of the column. I have found one of my developers using aggregated function MAX () to find the current identity. However, I prefer following DBCC command to figure out current identity. Create Check Constraint on Column Some time we just need to create a simple constraint over the table but I have noticed that developers do many different things to make table column follow rules than just creating constraint. I suggest constraint is a very useful concept and every SQL Developer should pay good attention to this subject. 2009 List Schema Name and Table Name for Database This is one of the blog post where I straight forward display script. One of the kind of blog posts, which I still love to read and write. Clustered Index on Separate Drive From Table Location A table devoid of primary key index is called heap, and here data is not arranged in a particular order, which gives rise to issues that adversely affect performance. Data must be stored in some kind of order. If we put clustered index on it then the order will be forced by that index and the data will be stored in that particular order. Understanding Table Hints with Examples Hints are options and strong suggestions specified for enforcement by the SQL Server query processor on DML statements. The hints override any execution plan the query optimizer might select for a query. 2010 Data Pages in Buffer Pool – Data Stored in Memory Cache One of my earlier year article, which I still read it many times and point developers to read it again. It is clear from the Resultset that when more than one index is used, datapages related to both or all of the indexes are stored in Memory Cache separately. TRANSACTION, DML and Schema Locks Can you create a situation where you can see Schema Lock? Well, this is a very simple question, however during the interview I notice over 50 candidates failed to come up with the scenario. In this blog post, I have demonstrated the situation where we can see the schema lock in database. 2011 Solution – Puzzle – Statistics are not updated but are Created Once In this example I have created following situation: Create Table Insert 1000 Records Check the Statistics Now insert 10 times more 10,000 indexes Check the Statistics – it will be NOT updated Auto Update Statistics and Auto Create Statistics for database is TRUE Now I have requested two things in the example 1) Why this is happening? 2) How to fix this issue? Selecting Domain from Email Address This is a straight to script blog post where I explain how to select only domain name from entire email address. Solution – Generating Zero Without using Any Numbers in T-SQL How to get zero digit without using any digit? This is indeed a very interesting question and the answer is even interesting. Try to come up with answer in next 10 minutes and if you can’t come up with the answer the blog post read this post for solution. 2012 Simple Explanation and Puzzle with SOUNDEX Function and DIFFERENCE Function In simple words - SOUNDEX converts an alphanumeric string to a four-character code to find similar-sounding words or names. DIFFERENCE function returns an integer value. The  integer returned is the number of characters in the SOUNDEX values that are the same. Read Only Files and SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) I have come across a very interesting feature in SSMS related to “Read Only” files. I believe it is a little unknown feature as well so decided to write a blog about the same. Identifying Column Data Type of uniqueidentifier without Querying System Tables How do I know if any table has a uniqueidentifier column and what is its value without using any DMV or System Catalogues? Only information you know is the table name and you are allowed to return any kind of error if the table does not have uniqueidentifier column. Read the blog post to find the answer. Solution – User Not Able to See Any User Created Object in Tables – Security and Permissions Issue Interesting question – “When I try to connect to SQL Server, it lets me connect just fine as well let me open and explore the database. I noticed that I do not see any user created instances but when my colleague attempts to connect to the server, he is able to explore the database as well see all the user created tables and other objects. Can you help me fix it?” Importing CSV File Into Database – SQL in Sixty Seconds #018 – Video Here is interesting small 60 second video on how to import CSV file into Database. ColumnStore Index – Batch Mode vs Row Mode Here is the logic behind when Columnstore Index uses Batch Mode and when it uses Row Mode. A batch typically represents about 1000 rows of data. Batch mode processing also uses algorithms that are optimized for the multicore CPUs and increased memory throughput. Follow up – Usage of $rowguid and $IDENTITY This is an excellent follow up blog post of my earlier blog post where I explain where to use $rowguid and $identity.  If you do not know the difference between them, this is a blog with a script example. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Getting your bearings and defining the project objective

  - by johndoucette

  I wrote this two years ago and thought it was worth posting… Some may think this is a daunting task and some may even say “what a waste of time” and want to open MS Project and start typing out tasks because someone asked for an estimate and a task list. Hell, maybe you even use Excel and pump out a spreadsheet with some real scientific formula for guessing how long it will take to code a bunch of classes. However, this short exercise will provide the basis for the entire project, whether small or large and be a great friend when communicating to anyone on your team or even your client. I call this the Project Brief. If you find yourself going beyond a single page, then you must decompose the sections and summarize your findings so there is a complete and clear picture of the project you are working on in a relatively short statement. Here is a great quote from the PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge) relative to what a project is;   A project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service or result. With this in mind, the project brief should encompass the entirety (objective) of the endeavor in its explanation and what it will take (goals) to create the product, service or result (deliverables). Normally the process of identifying the project objective is done during the first stage of a project called the Project Kickoff, but you can perform this very important step anytime to help you get a bearing. There are many more parts to helping a project stay on course, but this is usually the foundation where it can be grounded on. Through a series of 3 exercises, you should be able to come up with the objective, goals and deliverables on your project. Follow these steps, and in no time (about &frac12; hour), you will have the foundation of your project plan. (See examples below) Exercise 1 – Objectives Begin with the end in mind. Think about your project in business terms with a couple things to help you understand the objective; Reference the business benefit in terms of cost, speed and / or quality, Provide a higher level of what the outcome will look like (future sense) It should be non-measurable, that’s what the goals are all about The output should be a single paragraph with three sentences and take 10 minutes to write. *Typically, agreement must be reached on the objectives of the project before you would proceed to the next steps of the project. Exercise 2 – Goals A project goal is a statement that answers questions about who, what, why, where and when. A good project goal statement; Answers the five “W” questions for the project Is measurable in each of its parts Is published and agreed on by all the owners This helps the Project Manager receive confirmation on defining the project target. Using the established project objective done in the first exercise, think about the things it will take to get the job done. Think about tangible activities which are the top level tasks in a typical Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). The overall goal statement plus all the deliverables (next exercise) can be seen as the project team’s contract with the project owners. Write 3 - 5 goals in about 10 minutes. You should not write the words “Who, what, why, where and when, but merely be able to answer the questions when you read a goal. Exercise 3 – Deliverables Every project creates some type of output and these outputs are called deliverables. There are two classes of deliverables; Internal – produced for project team members to meet their goals External – produced for project owners to meet their expectations The list you enter here provides a checklist for the team’s delivery and/or is a statement of all the expectations of the project owners. Here are some typical project deliverables; Product and product documentation End product/system Requirements/feature documents Installation guides Demo/prototype System design documents User guides/help files Plans Project plan Training plan Conversion/installation/delivery plan Test plans Documentation plan Communication plan Reports and general documentation Progress reports System acceptance tests Outstanding bug list Procedures Risk and issue logs Project history Deliverables should go with each of the goals. Have 3-5 deliverables for each goal. When you are done, you will have established a great foundation for the clarity of your project. This exercise can take some time, but with practice, you should be able to whip this one out in 10 minutes as well, especially if you are intimate with an ongoing project. Samples  Objective [Client] is implementing a series of MOSS sites to support external public (Internet), internal employee (Intranet) and an external secure (password protected Internet) applications. This project will focus on the public-facing web site and will provide [Client] with architectural recommendations based on the current design being done by their design partner [Partner] and the internal Content Team. In addition, it will provide [Client] with a development plan and confidence they need to deploy a world class public Internet website. Goals 1.  [Consultant] will provide technical guidance and set project team expectations for the implementation of the MOSS Internet site based on provided features/functions within three weeks. 2.  [Consultant] will understand phase 2 secure password-protected Internet site design and provide recommendations.   Deliverables 1.1  Public Internet (unsecure) Architectural Recommendation Plan 1.2  Physical Site construction Work Breakdown Structure and plan (Time, cost and resources needed) 2.1  Two Factor authentication recommendation document   Objective [Client] is currently using an application developed by [Consultant] many years ago called "XXX". This application, although functional, does not meet their new updated business requirements and contains a few defects which [Client] has developed work-around processes. [Client] would like to have a "new and improved" system to support their membership management needs by expanding membership and subscription capabilities, provide accounting integration with internal (GL) and external (VeriSign) systems, and implement hooks to the current CRM solution. This effort will take place through a series of phases, beginning with envisioning. Goals 1. Through discussions with users, [Consultant] will discover current issues/bugs which need to be resolved which must meet the current functionality requirements within three weeks. 2. [Consultant] will gather requirements from the users about what is "needed" vs. "what they have" for enhancements and provide a high level document supporting their needs. 3. [Consultant] will meet with the team members through a series of meetings and help define the overall project plan to deliver a new and improved solution. Deliverables 1.1 Prioritized list of Current application issues/bugs that need to be resolved 1.2 Provide a resolution plan on the issues/bugs identified in the current application 1.3 Risk Assessment Document 2.1 Deliver a Requirements Document showing high-level [Client] needs for the new XXX application. · New feature functionality not in the application today · Existing functionality that will remain in the new functionality 2.2 Reporting Requirements Document 3.1 A Project Plan showing the deliverables and cost for the next (second) phase of this project. 3.2 A Statement of Work for the next (second) phase of this project. 3.3 An Estimate of any work that would need to follow the second phase.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, August 22, 2014

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, August 22, 2014Popular ReleasesQuickMon: Version 3.22: This release add two important changes. 1. Config variables at the monitor pack level (global to entire monitor pack for all Collectors) 2. The QuickMon (Windows) service now automatically reloads monitor packs that have been changed since it was started. This means you don't have to restart the service for changes to take effect.SSIS ReportGeneratorTask: ReportGenerator Task 1.8: New version of the SSIS Report Generator Task that supports SQL Server 2008, 2012 and 2014. In addition to minor bug fixes Multi-Value Parameters and Execution Information were integrated. The complete variable and parameter assignment is now a string and can be set dynamically.Corefig for Windows Server 2012 Core and Hyper-V Server 2012: Corefig 1.1.2 ISO: FixesUpdated Hyper-V scripts to use version 2 of the WMI tree. Updated the Hyper-V check for saved VM to look for the proper identifier. Fixed text issues with the licensing tab (thanks to briangw for rooting this problem out). EnhancementsNew (and improved) version number in Corefig.psd1.Outlook 2013 Backup Add-In: Outlook Backup Add-In 1.3: Changelog for new version: Added button in config-window to reset the last backup-time (this will trigger the backup after closing outlook) Minimum interval set to 0 (backup at each closing of outlook) Catch exception when data store entry is corrupt Added two parameters (prefix and suffix) to automatically rename the backup file Updated VSTO-Runtime to 10.0.50325 Upgraded project to Visual Studio 2013 Added optional command to run after backup (e.g. pack backup files, ...) Add...babelua: 1.6.7.0: V1.6.7.0 - 2014.8.21New feature: add a file search window ( ctrl+1 or ALT+L ), like The file search in VC Assistant; Stability improvement: performance improvement when BabeLua load/unload; performance improvement when debugger load lua files;File Explorer for WPF: FileExplorer3_20August2014: Please see Aug14 Update.Open NFe: RDI Open NFe 3.0 (alpha): Atualização para o layout 3.10 da NFe.ODBC Connect: v1.0: ODBC Connect executables for both 32bit and 64bit ODBC data sourcesMSSQL Deployment Tool: Microsoft SQL Deploy Tool v1.3.1: MicrosoftSqlDeployTool: v1.3.1.38348 What's changed? Update namespace and assembly name. Bug fixing.SharePoint 2013 Search Query Tool: SharePoint 2013 Search Query Tool v2.1: Layout improvements Bug fixes Stores auth method and user name Moved experimental settings to Advanced boxCtrlAltStudio Viewer: CtrlAltStudio Viewer 1.2.2.41183 Alpha: This alpha of the CtrlAltStudio Viewer provides some preliminary Oculus Rift DK2 support. For more details, see the release notes linked to below. Release notes: http://ctrlaltstudio.com/viewer/release-notes/1-2-2-41183-alpha Support info: http://ctrlaltstudio.com/viewer/support Privacy policy: http://ctrlaltstudio.com/viewer/privacy Disclaimer: This software is not provided or supported by Linden Lab, the makers of Second Life.HDD Guardian: HDD Guardian 0.6.1: New: package now include smartctl 6.3; Removed: standard notification e-mail. Now you have to set your mail server to send e-mail alerts; Bugfix: USB detection error; custom e-mail server settings issue; bottom panel displays a wrong ATA error count.VG-Ripper & PG-Ripper: VG-Ripper 2.9.62: changes NEW: Added Support for 'MadImage.org' links NEW: Added Support for 'ImgSpot.org' links NEW: Added Support for 'ImgClick.net' links NEW: Added Support for 'Imaaage.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'Image-Bugs.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'Pictomania.org' links NEW: Added Support for 'ImgDap.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'FileSpit.com' links FIXED: 'ImgSee.me' linksMagick.NET: Magick.NET 7.0.0.0001: Magick.NET linked with ImageMagick 7-Beta.CMake Tools for Visual Studio: CMake Tools for Visual Studio 1.2: This release adds the following new features and bug fixes from CMake Tools for Visual Studio 1.1: Added support for CMake 3.0. Added support for word completion. Added IntelliSense support for the CMAKEHOSTSYSTEM_INFORMATION command. Fixed syntax highlighting for tokens beginning with escape sequences. Fixed issue uninstalling CMake Tools for Visual Studio after Visual Studio has been uninstalled.GW2 Personal Assistant Overlay: GW2 Personal Assistant Overlay 1.1: Overview1.1 is the second 'stable' release of the GW2 Personal Assistant Overlay. This version includes just a couple of very minor features and some minor bug fixes. For details regarding installation, setup, and general use, see Documentation. Note: If you were using a previous version, you will probably want to copy over the following user settings files: GW2PAO.DungeonSettings.xml GW2PAO.EventSettings.xml GW2PAO.WvWSettings.xml GW2PAO.ZoneCompletionSettings.xml New FeaturesAdded new "No...Fluentx: Fluentx v1.5.3: Added few more extension methods.fastJSON: v2.1.2: 2.1.2 - bug fix circular referencesJPush.NET: JPush Server SDK 1.2.1 (For JPush V3): Assembly: 1.2.1.24728 JPush REST API Version: v3 JPush Documentation Reference .NET framework: v4.0 or above. Sample: class: JPushClientV3 2014 Augest 15th.SEToolbox: SEToolbox 01.043.008 Release 1: Changed ship/station names to use new DisplayName instead of Beacon/Antenna. Fixed issue with updated SE binaries 01.043.018 using new Voxel Material definitions.New Projects1thManage: GDT for erevery oneCreateProjectOnCodePlex: This is the first project for CoderCamps.HEAD FIRST C# LAB 1 : A DAY AT THE RACES: This has been provided for educational purposes and general discussion to improve coding practices associated with the resources detailed within Head First C#.Introduce Audit logging to your EF application using Repository & Unit of Work: Introduce Auditing in your application that uses Entity Framework by utilizing the Repository and Unit of Work design patterns.License Registration (C++): Allow to create demo version, activate or not a module.MS Word SharepointWiki Plugin: Scope of the Plugin is to enable a Post to a Sharepoint Wiki from within MS Word with Formatted Text and Images.Send My Zip: This app will help you to send the files were zipped then send the email about password information. This project is currently in setup mode and only availablewinhttp: this is a project for http/https download.Wix Builder: WixBuilder focusses on easily generating a WiX script from a project ouput, compile and link it into msi installer using the WiX Toolset.XiamiSig: ????????。

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• Developing Mobile Applications: Web, Native, or Hybrid?

  - by Michelle Kimihira

  Authors: Joe Huang, Senior Principal Product Manager, Oracle Mobile Application Development Framework  and Carlos Chang, Senior Principal Product Director The proliferation of mobile devices and platforms represents a game-changing technology shift on a number of levels. Companies must decide not only the best strategic use of mobile platforms, but also how to most efficiently implement them. Inevitably, this conversation devolves to the developers, who face the task of developing and supporting mobile applications—not a simple task in light of the number of devices and platforms. Essentially, developers can choose from the following three different application approaches, each with its own set of pros and cons. Native Applications: This refers to apps built for and installed on a specific platform, such as iOS or Android, using a platform-specific software development kit (SDK).  For example, apps for Apple’s iPhone and iPad are designed to run specifically on iOS and are written in Xcode/Objective-C. Android has its own variation of Java, Windows uses C#, and so on.  Native apps written for one platform cannot be deployed on another. Native apps offer fast performance and access to native-device services but require additional resources to develop and maintain each platform, which can be expensive and time consuming. Mobile Web Applications: Unlike native apps, mobile web apps are not installed on the device; rather, they are accessed via a Web browser.  These are server-side applications that render HTML, typically adjusting the design depending on the type of device making the request.  There are no program coding constraints for writing server-side apps—they can be written in Java, C, PHP, etc., it doesn’t matter.  Instead, the server detects what type of mobile browser is pinging the server and adjusts accordingly. For example, it can deliver fully JavaScript and CSS-enabled content to smartphone browsers, while downgrading gracefully to basic HTML for feature phone browsers. Mobile apps work across platforms, but are limited to what you can do through a browser and require Internet connectivity. For certain types of applications, these constraints may not be an issue. Oracle supports mobile web applications via ADF Faces (for tablets) and ADF Mobile browser (Trinidad) for smartphone and feature phones. Hybrid Applications: As the name implies, hybrid apps combine technologies from native and mobile Web apps to gain the benefits each. For example, these apps are installed on a device, like their pure native app counterparts, while the user interface (UI) is based on HTML5.  This UI runs locally within the native container, which usually leverages the device’s browser engine.  The advantage of using HTML5 is a consistent, cross-platform UI that works well on most devices.  Combining this with the native container, which is installed on-device, provides mobile users with access to local device services, such as camera, GPS, and local device storage.  Native apps may offer greater flexibility in integrating with device native services.  However, since hybrid applications already provide device integrations that typical enterprise applications need, this is typically less of an issue.  The new Oracle ADF Mobile release is an HTML5 and Java hybrid framework that targets mobile app development to iOS and Android from one code base. So, Which is the Best Approach? The short answer is – the best choice depends on the type of application you are developing.  For instance, animation-intensive apps such as games would favor native apps, while hybrid applications may be better suited for enterprise mobile apps because they provide multi-platform support. Just for starters, the following issues must be considered when choosing a development path. Application Complexity: How complex is the application? A quick app that accesses a database or Web service for some data to display?  You can keep it simple, and a mobile Web app may suffice. However, for a mobile/field worker type of applications that supports mission critical functionality, hybrid or native applications are typically needed. Richness of User Interactivity: What type of user experience is required for the application?  Mobile browser-based app that’s optimized for mobile UI may suffice for quick lookup or productivity type of applications.  However, hybrid/native application would typically be required to deliver highly interactive user experiences needed for field-worker type of applications.  For example, interactive BI charts/graphs, maps, voice/email integration, etc.  In the most extreme case like gaming applications, native applications may be necessary to deliver the highly animated and graphically intensive user experience. Performance: What type of performance is required by the application functionality?  For instance, for real-time look up of data over the network, mobile app performance depends on network latency and server infrastructure capabilities.  If consistent performance is required, data would typically need to be cached, which is supported on hybrid or native applications only. Connectivity and Availability: What sort of connectivity will your application require? Does the app require Web access all the time in order to always retrieve the latest data from the server? Or do the requirements dictate offline support? While native and hybrid apps can be built to operate offline, Web mobile apps require Web connectivity. Multi-platform Requirements: The terms “consumerization of IT” and BYOD (bring your own device) effectively mean that the line between the consumer and the enterprise devices have become blurred. Employees are bringing their personal mobile devices to work and are often expecting that they work in the corporate network and access back-office applications.  Even if companies restrict access to the big dogs: (iPad, iPhone, Android phones and tablets, possibly Windows Phone and tablets), trying to support each platform natively will require increasing resources and domain expertise with each new language/platform. And let’s not forget the maintenance costs, involved in upgrading new versions of each platform.   Where multi-platform support is needed, Web mobile or hybrid apps probably have the advantage. Going native, and trying to support multiple operating systems may be cost prohibitive with existing resources and developer skills. Device-Services Access:  If your app needs to access local device services, such as the camera, contacts app, accelerometer, etc., then your choices are limited to native or hybrid applications.   Fragmentation: Apple controls Apple iOS and the only concern is what version iOS is running on any given device.   Not so Android, which is open source. There are many, many versions and variants of Android running on different devices, which can be a nightmare for app developers trying to support different devices running different flavors of Android.  (Is it an Amazon Kindle Fire? a Samsung Galaxy?  A Barnes & Noble Nook?) This is a nightmare scenario for native apps—on the other hand, a mobile Web or hybrid app, when properly designed, can shield you from these complexities because they are based on common frameworks.  Resources: How many developers can you dedicate to building and supporting mobile application development?  What are their existing skills sets?  If you’re considering native application development due to the complexity of the application under development, factor the costs of becoming proficient on a each platform’s OS and programming language. Add another platform, and that’s another language, another SDK. On the other side of the equation, Web mobile or hybrid applications are simpler to make, and readily support more platforms, but there may be performance trade-offs. Conclusion This only scratches the surface. However, I hope to have suggested some food for thought in choosing your mobile development strategy.  Do your due diligence, search the Web, read up on mobile, talk to peers, attend events. The development team at Oracle is working hard on mobile technologies to help customers extend enterprise applications to mobile faster and effectively.  To learn more on what Oracle has to offer, check out the Oracle ADF Mobile (hybrid) and ADF Faces/ADF Mobile browser (Web Mobile) solutions from Oracle.   Additional Information Blog: ADF Blog Product Information on OTN: ADF Mobile Product Information on Oracle.com: Oracle Fusion Middleware Follow us on Twitter and Facebook Subscribe to our regular Fusion Middleware Newsletter

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• Mscorlib mocking minus the attribute

  - by mehfuzh

  Mocking .net framework members (a.k.a. mscorlib) is always a daunting task. It’s the breed of static and final methods and full of surprises. Technically intercepting mscorlib members is completely different from other class libraries. This is the reason it is dealt differently. Generally, I prefer writing a wrapper around an mscorlib member (Ex. File.Delete(“abc.txt”)) and expose it via interface but that is not always an easy task if you already have years old codebase. While mocking mscorlib members first thing that comes to people’s mind is DateTime.Now. If you Google through, you will find tons of example dealing with just that. May be it’s the most important class that we can’t ignore and I will create an example using JustMock Q2 with the same. In Q2 2012, we just get rid of the MockClassAtrribute for mocking mscorlib members. JustMock is already attribute free for mocking class libraries. We radically think that vendor specific attributes only makes your code smelly and therefore decided the same for mscorlib. Now, I want to fake DateTime.Now for the following class: public class NestedDateTime { public DateTime GetDateTime() { return DateTime.Now; } } It is the simplest one that can be. The first thing here is that I tell JustMock “hey we have a DateTime.Now in NestedDateTime class that we want to mock”. To do so, during the test initialization I write this: .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Mock.Replace(() => DateTime.Now).In<NestedDateTime>(x => x.GetDateTime());.csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } I can also define it for all the members in the class, but that’s just a waste of extra watts. Mock.Replace(() => DateTime.Now).In<NestedDateTime>(); Now question, why should I bother doing it? The answer is that I am not using attribute and with this approach, I can mock any framework members not just File, FileInfo or DateTime. Here to note that we already mock beyond the three but when nested around a complex class, JustMock was not intercepting it correctly. Therefore, we decided to get rid of the attribute altogether fixing the issue. Finally, I write my test as usual. [TestMethod] public void ShouldAssertMockingDateTimeFromNestedClass() { var expected = new DateTime(2000, 1, 1); Mock.Arrange(() => DateTime.Now).Returns(expected); Assert.Equal(new NestedDateTime().GetDateTime(), expected); } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } That’s it, we are good. Now let me do the same for a random one, let’s say I want mock a member from DriveInfo: Mock.Replace<DriveInfo[]>(() => DriveInfo.GetDrives()).In<MsCorlibFixture>(x => x.ShouldReturnExpectedDriveWhenMocked()); Moving forward, I write my test: [TestMethod] public void ShouldReturnExpectedDriveWhenMocked() { Mock.Arrange(() => DriveInfo.GetDrives()).MustBeCalled(); DriveInfo.GetDrives(); Mock.Assert(()=> DriveInfo.GetDrives()); } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Here is one convention; you have to replace the mscorlib member before executing the target method that contains it. Here the call to DriveInfo is within the MsCorlibFixture therefore it should be defined during test initialization or before executing the test method. Hope this gives you the idea.

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• Why people don't patch and upgrade?!?

  - by Mike Dietrich

  Discussing the topic "Why Upgrade" or "Why not Upgrade" is not always fun. Actually the arguments repeat from customer to customer. Typically we hear things such as: A PSU or Patch Set introduces new bugs A new PSU or Patch Set introduces new features which lead to risk and require application verification  Patching means risk Patching changes the execution plans Patching requires too much testing Patching is too much work for our DBAs Patching costs a lot of money and doesn't pay out And to be very honest sometimes it's hard for me to stay calm in such discussions. Let's discuss some of these points a bit more in detail. A PSU or Patch Set introduces new bugsWell, yes, that is true as no software containing more than some lines of code is bug free. This applies to Oracle's code as well as too any application or operating system code. But first of all, does that mean you never patch your OS because the patch may introduce new flaws? And second, what is the point of saying "it introduces new bugs"? Does that mean you will never get rid of the mean issues we know about and we fixed already? Scroll down from MOS Note:161818.1 to the patch release you are on, no matter if it's 10.2.0.4 or 11.2.0.3 and check for the Known Issues And Alerts.Will you take responsibility to know about all these issues and refuse to upgrade to 11.2.0.4? I won't. A new PSU or Patch Set introduces new featuresOk, we can discuss that. Offering new functionality within a database patch set is a dubious thing. It has advantages such as in 11.2.0.4 where we backported Database Redaction to. But this is something you will only use once you have an Advanced Security license. I interpret that statement I've heard quite often from customers in a different way: People don't want to get surprises such as new behaviour. This certainly gives everybody a hard time. And we've had many examples in the past (SESSION_CACHED_CURSROS in 10.2.0.4,  _DATAFILE_WRITE_ERRORS_CRASH_INSTANCE in 11.2.0.2 and others) where those things weren't documented, not even in the README. Thanks to many friends out there I learned about those as well. So new behaviour is the topic people consider as risky - not really new features. And just to point this out: A PSU never brings in new features or new behaviour by definition! Patching means riskDoes it really mean risk? Yes, there were issues in the past (and sometimes in the present as well) where a patch didn't get installed correctly. But personally I consider it way more risky to not patch. Keep that in mind: The day Oracle publishes an PSU (or CPU) containing security fixes all the great security experts out there go public with their findings as well. So from that day on even my grandma can find out about those issues and try to attack somebody. Now a lot of people say: "My database does not face the internet." And I will answer: "The enemy is sitting already behind your firewalls. And knows potentially about these things." My statement: Not patching introduces way more risk to your environment than patching. Seriously! Patching changes the execution plansDo they really? I agree - there's a very small risk for this happening with Patch Sets. But not with PSUs or CPUs as they contain no optimizer fixes changing behaviour (but they may contain fixes curing wrong-query-result-bugs). But what's the point of a changing execution plan? In Oracle Database 11g it is so simple to be prepared. SQL Plan Management is a free EE feature - so once that occurs you'll put the plan into the Plan Baseline. Basta! Yes, you wouldn't like to get such surprises? Than please use the SQL Performance Analyzer (SPA) from Real Application Testing and you'll detect that easily upfront in minutes. And not to forget this, a plan change can also be very positive!Yes, there's a little risk with a database patchset - and we have many possibilites to detect this before patching. Patching requires too much testingWell, does it really? I have seen in the past 12 years how people test. There are very different efforts and approaches on this. I have seen people spending a hell of money on licenses or on project team staffing. And I have seen people sailing blindly without any tests just going the John-Wayne-approach.Proper tools will allow you to test easily without too much efforts. See the paragraph above. We have used Real Application Testing in so many customer projects reducing the amount of work spend on testing by over 50%. But apart from that at some point you will have to stop testing. If you don't you'll get lost and you'll burn money. There's no 100% guaranty. You will have to deal with a little risk as reaching the final 5% of certainty will cost you the same as it did cost to reach 95%. And doing this will lead to abnormal long product cycles that you'll run behind forever. And this will cost even more money. Patching is too much work for our DBAsPatching is a lot of work. I agree. And it's no fun work. It's boring, annoying. You don't learn much from that. That's why you should try to automate this task. Use the Database's Lifecycle Management Pack. And don't cry about the fact that it costs money. Yes it does. But it will ease the process and you'll save a lot of costs as you don't waste your valuable time with patching. Or use Oracle Database 12c Oracle Multitenant and patch either by unplug/plug or patch an entire container database with all PDBs with one patch in one task. We have customer reference cases proofing it saved them 75% of time, effort and cost since they've used Lifecycle Management Pack. So why don't you use it? Patching costs a lot of money and doesn't pay outWell, see my statements in the paragraph above. And it pays out as flying with a database with 100 known critical flaws in it which are already fixed by Oracle (such as in the Oct 2013 PSU for Oracle Database 12c) will cost ways more in case of failure or even data loss. Bet with me? Let me finally ask you some questions. What cell phone are you using and which OS does it run? Do you have an iPhone 5 and did you upgrade already to iOS 7.0.3? I've just encountered on mine that the alarm (which I rely on when traveling) has gotten now a dependency on the physical switch "sound on/off". If it is switched to "off" physically the alarm rings "silently". What a wonderful example of a behaviour change coming in with a patch set. Will this push you to stay with iOS5 or iOS6? No, because those have security flaws which won't be fixed anymore. What browser are you surfing with? Do you use Mozilla 3.6? Well, congratulations to all the hackers. It will be easy for them to attack you and harm your system. I'd guess you have the auto updater on.  Same for Google Chrome, Safari, IE. Right? -Mike The T.htmtableborders, .htmtableborders td, .htmtableborders th {border : 1px dashed lightgrey ! important;} html, body { border: 0px; } body { background-color: #ffffff; } img, hr { cursor: default }

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• Translating Your Customizations

  - by Richard Bingham

  This blog post explains the basics of translating the customizations you can make to Fusion Applications products, with the inclusion of information for both composer-based customizations and the generic design-time customizations done via JDeveloper. Introduction Like most Oracle Applications, Fusion Applications installs on-premise with a US-English base language that is, in Release 7, supported by the option to add up to a total of 22 additional language packs (In Oracle Cloud production environments languages are pre-installed already). As such many organizations offer their users the option of working with their local language, and logically that should also apply for any customizations as well. Composer-based UI Customizations Customizations made in Page Composer take into consideration the session LOCALE, as set in the user preferences screen, during all customization work, and stores the customization in the MDS repository accordingly. As such the actual new or changed values used will only apply for the same language under which the customization was made, and text for any other languages requires a separate upload. See the Resource Bundles section below, which incidentally also applies to custom UI changes done in JDeveloper. You may have noticed this when you select the “Select Text Resource” menu option when editing the text on a page. Using this ensures that the resource bundles are used, whereas if you define a static value in Expression Builder it will never be available for translation. Notice in the screenshot below the “What’s New” custom value I have already defined using the ‘Select Text Resource’ feature is internally using the adfBundle groovy function to pull the custom value for my key (RT_S_1) from the ComposerOverrideBundle. Figure 1 – Page Composer showing the override bundle being used. Business Objects Customizing the Business Objects available in the Applications Composer tool for the CRM products, such as adding additional fields, also operates using the session language. Translating these additional values for these fields into other installed languages requires loading additional resource bundles, again as described below. Reports and Analytics Most customizations to Reports and BI Analytics are just essentially reorganizations and visualizations of existing number and text data from the system, and as such will use the appropriate values based on the users session language. Where a translated value or string exists for that session language, it will be used without the need for additional work. Extending through the addition of brand new reports and analytics requires another method of loading the translated strings, as part of what is known as ‘Localizing’ the BI Catalog and Metadata. This time it is via an export/import of XML data through the BI Administrators console, and is described in the OBIEE Admin Guide. Fusion Applications reports based on BI Publisher are already defined in template-per-locale, and in addition provide an extra process for getting the data for translation and reloading. This again uses the standard resource bundle format. Loading a custom report is illustrated in this video from our YouTube channel which shows the screen for both setting the template local and running an export for translation. Fusion Applications Menus Whilst the seeded Navigator and Global Menu values are fully translated when the additional language is installed, if they are customized then the change or new menu item will apply universally, not currently per language. This is set to change in a future release with the new UI Text Editor feature described below. More on Resource Bundles As mentioned above, to provide translations for most of your customizations you need to add values to a resource bundle. This is an industry open standard (OASIS) format XML file with the extension .xliff, and store translated values for the strings used by ADF at run-time. The general process is that these values are exported from the MDS repository, manually edited, and then imported back in again.This needs to be done by an administrator, via either WLST commands or through Enterprise Manager as per the screenshot below. This is detailed out in the Fusion Applications Extensibility Guide. For SaaS environments the Cloud Operations team can assist. Figure 2 – Enterprise Manager’s MDS export used getting resource bundles for manual translation and re-imported on the same screen. All customized strings are stored in an override bundle (xliff file) for each locale, suffixed with the language initials, with English ones being saved to the default. As such each language bundle can be easily identified and updated. Similarly if you used JDeveloper to create your own applications as extensions to Fusion Applications you would use the native support for resource bundles, and add them into the faces-config.xml file for inclusion in your application. An example is this ADF customization video from our YouTube channel. JDeveloper also supports automatic synchronization between your underlying resource bundles and any translatable strings you add – very handy. For more information see chapters on “Using Automatic Resource Bundle Integration in JDeveloper” and “Manually Defining Resource Bundles and Locales” in the Oracle Fusion Middleware Web User Interface Developer’s Guide for Oracle Application Development Framework. FND Messages and Look-ups FND Messages, as defined here, are not used for UI labels (they are known as ‘strings’), but are the responses back to users as a result of an action, such as from a page submit. Each ‘message’ is defined and stored in the related database table (FND_MESSAGES_B), with another (FND_MESSAGES_TL) holding any language-specific values. These come seeded with the additional language installs, however if you customize the messages via the “Manage Messages” task in Functional Setup Manager, or add new ones, then currently (in Release 7) you’ll need to repeat it for each language. Figure 3 – An FND Message defined in an English user session. Similarly Look-ups are stored in a translation table (FND_LOOKUP_VALUES_TL) where appropriate, and can be customized by setting the users session language and making the change  in the Setup and Maintenance task entitled “Manage [Standard|Common] Look-ups”. Online Help Yes, in fact all the seeded help is applied as part of each language pack install as part of the post-install provisioning process. If you are editing or adding custom online help then the Create Help screen provides a drop-down of which language your help customization will apply to. This is shown in the video below from our YouTube channel, and obviously you’ll need to it for each language in use. What is Coming for Translations? Currently planned for Release 8 is something called the User Interface (UI) Text Editor. This tool will allow the editing of all the text shown on the pages and forms of Fusion Application. This will provide a search based on a particular term or word, say “Worker”, and will allow it to be adjusted, say to “Employee”, which then updates all the Resource Bundles that contain it. In the case of multi-language environments, it will use the users session language (locale) to know which Resource Bundles to apply the change to. This capability will also support customization sandboxes, to help ensure changes can be tested and approved.  It is also interesting to note that the design currently allows any page-specific customizations done using Page Composer or Application Composer to over-write the global changes done via the UI Text Editor, allowing for special context-sensitive values to still be used. Further Reading and Resources The following short list provides the mains resources for digging into more detail on translation support for both Composer and JDeveloper customization projects. There is a dedicated chapter entitled “Translating Custom Text” in the Fusion Applications Extensibility Guide. This has good examples and steps for many tasks, especially administering resource bundles. Using localization formatting (numbers, dates etc) for design-time changes is well documented in the Fusion Applications Developer Guide. For more guidelines on general design-time globalization, see either the ‘Internationalizing and Localizing Pages’ chapter in the Oracle Fusion Middleware Web User Interface Developer’s Guide for Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle Fusion Applications Edition) or the general Oracle Database Globalization Support Guide. The Oracle Architecture ‘A-Team’ provided a recent post on customizing the user session timeout popup, using design-time changes to resource bundles. It has detailed step-by-step examples which can be a useful illustration.

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• How I Work: Staying Productive Whilst Traveling

  - by BuckWoody

  I travel a lot. Not like some folks that are gone every week, mind you, although in the last month I’ve been to: Cambridge, UK; Anchorage, AK; San Jose, CA; Copenhagen, DK, Boston, MA; and I’m currently en-route to Anaheim, CA.  While this many places in a month is a bit unusual for me, I would say I travel frequently. I’ve travelled most of my 28+ years in IT, and at one time was a consultant traveling weekly.   With that much time away from my primary work location, I have to find ways to stay productive. Some might say “just rest – take a nap!” – but I’m not able to do that. For one thing, I’m a very light sleeper and I’ve never slept on a plane - even a 30+ hour trip to New Zealand in Business Class - so that just isn’t option. I also am not always in the plane, of course. There’s the hotel, the taxi/bus/train, the airport and then all that over again when I arrive. Since my regular jobs have many demands, I have to get work done.   Note: No, I’m not always focused on work. I need downtime just like everyone else. Sometimes I just think, watch a movie or listen to tunes – and I give myself permission to do that anytime – sometimes the whole trip. I have too fewheartbeats left in life to only focus on work – it’s just not that important, and neither am I. Some of these tasks are letters to friends and family, or other personal things. What I’m talking about here is a plan, not some task list I have to follow. When I get to the location I’m traveling to, I always build in as much time as I can to ensure I enjoy those sights and the people I’m with. I would find traveling to be a waste if not for that.   The Unrealistic Expectation As I would evaluate the trip I was taking – say a 6-8 hour flight – I would expect to get 10-12 hours of work done. After all, there’s the time at the airport, the taxi and so on, and then of course the time in the air with all of the room, power, internet and everything else I needed to get my work done. I would pile up tasks at home, pack my bags, and head happily to the magical land of the TSA.   Right. On return from the trip, I had accomplished little, had more e-mails and other work that had piled up, and I was tired, hungry, and unorganized. This had to change. So, I decided to do three things: Segment my work Set realistic expectations Plan accordingly  Segmenting By Available Resources The first task was to decide what kind of work I could do in each location – if any. I found that I was dependent on a few things to get work done, such as power, the Internet, and a place to sit down. Before I fly, I take some time at home to get all of the work I’d like to accomplish while away segmented into these areas, and print that out on paper, which goes in my suit-coat pocket along with a mechanical pencil. I print my tickets, and I’m all set for the adventure ahead. Then I simply do each kind of work whenever I’m in that situation. No power There are certain times when I don’t have power available. But not only that, I might not even be able to use most of my electronics. So I now schedule as many phone calls as I can for the taxi/bus/train ride and the airports as I can. I have a paper notebook (Moleskine, of course) and a pencil and I print out any notes or numbers I need prior to the trip. Once I’m airborne or at the airport, I work on my laptop. I check and respond to e-mails, create slides, write code, do architecture, whatever I can.  If I can’t use any electronics, or once the power runs out, I schedule time for reading. I can read at the airport or anywhere, actually, even in-flight or any other transport. I “read with a pencil”, meaning I take a lot of notes, which I liketo put in OneNote, but since in most cases I don’t have power, I use the Moleskine to do that. Speaking of which, sometimes as I’m thinking I come up with new topics, ideas, blog posts, or things to teach in my classes. Once again I take out the notebook and write it down. All of these notes get a check-mark when I get back to the office and transfer the writing to OneNote. I’ve tried those “smart pens” and so on to automate this, but it just never works out. Pencil and paper are just fine. As I mentioned, sometime I just need to think. I’ll do nothing, and let my mind wander, thinking of nothing in particular, or some math problem or science question I’m interested in. My only issue with this is that I communicate tothink, and I don’t want to drive people crazy by being that guy that won’t shut up, so I think in a different way. Power, but no Internet or Phone If I have power but no Internet or phone, I focus on the laptop and the tablet as before, and I also recharge my other gadgets. Power, Internet, Phone and a Place to Work At first I thought that when I arrived at the hotel or event I could get the same amount of work done that I do at the office. Not so. There’s simply too many distractions, things you need, or other issues that allow this. Of course, Ican work on any device, read, think, write or whatever, but I am simply not as productive as I am in my home office. So I plan for about 25-50% as much work getting done in this environment as I think I could really do. I’ve done some measurements, and this holds out to be true almost every time. The key is that I re-set my expectations (and my co-worker’s expectations as well) that this is the case. I use the Out-Of-Office notices to let people know that I’m just not going to be 100% at this time – it’s hard for everyone, but it’s more honest and realistic, and I’d rather they know that – and that I realize that – than to let them think I’m totally available. Because I’m not – I’m traveling. I don’t tend to put too much detail, because after all I don’t necessarily want to let people know when I’m not home :) but I do think it’s important to let people that depend on my know that I’ll get back with them later. I hope this helps you think through your own methodology of staying productive when you travel. Or perhaps you just go offline, and don’t worry about any of this – good for you! That’s completely valid as well.   (Oh, and yes, I wrote this at 35K feet, on Alaska Airlines on a trip. :)  Practice what you preach, Buck.)

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• Cancelling Route Navigation in AngularJS Controllers

  - by dwahlin

  If you’re new to AngularJS check out my AngularJS in 60-ish Minutes video tutorial or download the free eBook. Also check out The AngularJS Magazine for up-to-date information on using AngularJS to build Single Page Applications (SPAs). Routing provides a nice way to associate views with controllers in AngularJS using a minimal amount of code. While a user is normally able to navigate directly to a specific route, there may be times when a user triggers a route change before they’ve finalized an important action such as saving data. In these types of situations you may want to cancel the route navigation and ask the user if they’d like to finish what they were doing so that their data isn’t lost. In this post I’ll talk about a technique that can be used to accomplish this type of routing task.   The $locationChangeStart Event When route navigation occurs in an AngularJS application a few events are raised. One is named $locationChangeStart and the other is named $routeChangeStart (there are other events as well). At the current time (version 1.2) the $routeChangeStart doesn’t provide a way to cancel route navigation, however, the $locationChangeStart event can be used to cancel navigation. If you dig into the AngularJS core script you’ll find the following code that shows how the $locationChangeStart event is raised as the $browser object’s onUrlChange() function is invoked:   $browser.onUrlChange(function (newUrl) { if ($location.absUrl() != newUrl) { if ($rootScope.$broadcast('$locationChangeStart', newUrl, $location.absUrl()).defaultPrevented) { $browser.url($location.absUrl()); return; } $rootScope.$evalAsync(function () { var oldUrl = $location.absUrl(); $location.$$parse(newUrl); afterLocationChange(oldUrl); }); if (!$rootScope.$$phase) $rootScope.$digest(); } }); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } The key part of the code is the call to $broadcast. This call broadcasts the $locationChangeStart event to all child scopes so that they can be notified before a location change is made. To handle the $locationChangeStart event you can use the $rootScope.on() function. For this example I’ve added a call to $on() into a function that is called immediately after the controller is invoked:   function init() { //initialize data here.. //Make sure they're warned if they made a change but didn't save it //Call to $on returns a "deregistration" function that can be called to //remove the listener (see routeChange() for an example of using it) onRouteChangeOff = $rootScope.$on('$locationChangeStart', routeChange); } This code listens for the $locationChangeStart event and calls routeChange() when it occurs. The value returned from calling $on is a “deregistration” function that can be called to detach from the event. In this case the deregistration function is named onRouteChangeOff (it’s accessible throughout the controller). You’ll see how the onRouteChangeOff function is used in just a moment.   Cancelling Route Navigation The routeChange() callback triggered by the $locationChangeStart event displays a modal dialog similar to the following to prompt the user:     Here’s the code for routeChange(): function routeChange(event, newUrl) { //Navigate to newUrl if the form isn't dirty if (!$scope.editForm.$dirty) return; var modalOptions = { closeButtonText: 'Cancel', actionButtonText: 'Ignore Changes', headerText: 'Unsaved Changes', bodyText: 'You have unsaved changes. Leave the page?' }; modalService.showModal({}, modalOptions).then(function (result) { if (result === 'ok') { onRouteChangeOff(); //Stop listening for location changes $location.path(newUrl); //Go to page they're interested in } }); //prevent navigation by default since we'll handle it //once the user selects a dialog option event.preventDefault(); return; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Looking at the parameters of routeChange() you can see that it accepts an event object and the new route that the user is trying to navigate to. The event object is used to prevent navigation since we need to prompt the user before leaving the current view. Notice the call to event.preventDefault() at the end of the function. The modal dialog is shown by calling modalService.showModal() (see my previous post for more information about the custom modalService that acts as a wrapper around Angular UI Bootstrap’s $modal service). If the user selects “Ignore Changes” then their changes will be discarded and the application will navigate to the route they intended to go to originally. This is done by first detaching from the $locationChangeStart event by calling onRouteChangeOff() (recall that this is the function returned from the call to $on()) so that we don’t get stuck in a never ending cycle where the dialog continues to display when they click the “Ignore Changes” button. A call is then made to $location.path(newUrl) to handle navigating to the target view. If the user cancels the operation they’ll stay on the current view. Conclusion The key to canceling routes is understanding how to work with the $locationChangeStart event and cancelling it so that route navigation doesn’t occur. I’m hoping that in the future the same type of task can be done using the $routeChangeStart event but for now this code gets the job done. You can see this code in action in the Customer Manager application available on Github (specifically the customerEdit view). Learn more about the application here.

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• Webcast Q&A: Qualcomm Provides a Seamless Experience for Customers with Oracle WebCenter

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  Last Thursday we had the second webcast in our WebCenter in Action webcast series, "Qualcomm Provides a Seamless Experience for Customers with Oracle WebCenter, where customer Michael Chander from Qualcomm and Vince Casarez & Gourav Goyal from Oracle Partner Keste shared how Oracle WebCenter is powering Qualcomm’s externally facing website and providing a seamless experience for their customers. In case you missed it, here's a recap of the Q&A.   Mike Chandler, Qualcomm Q: Did you run into any issues when integrating all of the different applications together?A: Definitely, our main challenges were in the area of user provisioning and security propagation, all the standard stuff you might expect when hooking up SSO for authentication and authorization. In addition, we spent several iterations getting the UI’s in sync. While everyone was given the same digital material to build too, each team interpreted and implemented it their own way. Initially as a user navigated, if you were looking for it, you could slight variations in color or font or width , stuff like that. So we had to pull all the developers responsible for the UI together and get pixel level agreement on a lot of things so we could ensure seamless transitions across applications. Q: What has been the biggest benefit your end users have seen?A: Wow, there have been several. An SSO enabled environment was huge a win for our users. The portal application that this replaced had not really been invested in by the business. With this project, we had full business participation and backing, and it really showed in some key areas like the shopping experience. For example, while ordering in the previous site, the items did not have any pictures or really usable descriptions. A tremendous amount of work was done to try and make the site more intuitive and user friendly. Site performance has also drastically improved thanks to new hardware, improved database design, and of course the fact that ADF has made great strides in runtime performance. Q: Was there any resistance internally when implementing the solution? If so, how did you overcome that?A: Within a large company, I’m sure there is always going to be competition for large projects, as there was here. Once we got through the technical analysis and settled on the technology choices, it was actually no resistance to implementing the solution. This project was fully driven by the business with the aim of long term growth. I can confidently say that the fact that this project was given the utmost importance by both the business and IT really help put down any resistance that you would typically see while implementing a new solution. Q: Given the performance, what do you estimate to be the top end capacity of the system? A:I think our top end capacity is really only limited by our hardware. I’m comfortable saying we could grow 10x on our current hardware, both in terms of transactions and users. We can easily spin up new JVM instances if needed. We already use less JVM’s than we had planned. In addition, ADF is doing a very good job with his connection pooling and application module pooling, so we see a very good ratio of users connected to the systems vs db connections, without impacting performace. Q: What's the overview or summary of feedback from the users interacting with the site?A: Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive from both the business and our customers. They’re very happy with the new SSO environment , the new LAF, and the performance of the site. Of course, it’s not all roses. No matter what, there are always going to be people that don’t like the layout or the color scheme, etc. By and large though, customers are happy and the business is happy. Q: Can you describe the impressions about the site before and after the project within Qualcomm?A: Before the project, the site worked and people were using it, but most people were not happy with it. It was slow and tended to be a bit tempermental, for example a user would perform a transaction and the system would throw and unexpected error. The user could back up and retry the steps and things would work fine, so why didn’t work the first time?. From a UI perspective, we’d hear comments like it looked like it was built by a high school student.  Vince Casarez & Gourav Goyal, Keste Q: Did you run into any obstacles when implementing the solution?A: It's interesting some people call them "obstacles" on this project we just called them "dependencies".  There were both technical and business related dependencies that we had to work out. Mike points out the SSO dependencies and the coordination and synchronization between the teams to have a seamless login experience and a seamless end user experience.  There was also a set of dependencies on the User Acceptance testing to make sure that everyone understood the use cases for how the system would be used.  With a branching into a new market and trying to match a simple user experience as many consumer sites have today, there was always a tendency for the team members to provide their suggestions on how things could be simpler.  But with all the work up front on the user design and getting the business driving this set of experiences, this minimized the downstream suggestions that tend to distract a team.  In this case, all the work up front allowed us to enumerate the "dependencies" and keep the distractions to a minimum. Q: Was there a lot of custom work that needed to be done for this particular solution?A: The focus for this particular solution was really on the custom processes. The interesting thing is that with the data flows and the integration with applications, there are some pre-built integrations, but realistically for the process flow, we had to build those. The framework and tooling we used made things easier so we didn’t have to implement core functionality, like transitioning from screen to screen or from flow to flow. The design feature of Task Flows really helped speed the development and keep the component infrastructure in line with the dynamic processes.  Task flows and other elements like Skins are core to the infrastructure or technology stack of Oracle. This then allowed the team to center the project focus around the business flows and use cases to meet the core requirements and keep the project on time. Q: What do you think were the keys to success for rolling out WebCenter?A:  The 5 main keys to success were: 1) Sponsorship from the whole organization around this project from senior executive agreement, business owners driving functionality, and IT development alignment; 2) Upfront design planning and use case definition to clearly define the project scope and requirements; 3) Focussed development and project management aligned with the top level goals and drivers; 4) User acceptance and usability testing along the way to identify potential issues and direct resolution of the issues;  and 5) Constant prioritization of the issues for development to fix by the business.  It also helps to have great team chemistry and really smart people working on the project. If you missed the webcast, be sure to catch the replay to see a live demonstration of WebCenter in action!  Qualcomm Provides a Seamless Experience for Customers with Oracle WebCenter from Oracle WebCenter

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• Effectiveness and Efficiency

  - by Daniel Moth

  In the professional environment, i.e. at work, I am always seeking personal growth and to be challenged. The result is that my assignments, my work list, my tasks, my goals, my commitments, my [insert whatever word resonates with you] keep growing (in scope and desired impact). Which in turn means I have to keep finding new ways to deliver more value, while not falling into the trap of working more hours. To do that I continuously evaluate both my effectiveness and my efficiency. EFFECTIVENESS The first thing I check is my effectiveness: Am I doing the right things? Am I focusing too much on unimportant things? Am I spending more time doing stuff that is important to my team/org/division/business/company, or am I spending it on stuff that is important to me and that I enjoy doing? Am I valuing activities that maybe I have outgrown and should be delegated to others who are at a stage I have surpassed (in Microsoft speak: is the work I am doing level appropriate or am I still operating at the previous level)? Notice how the answers to those questions change over time and due to certain events, so I have to remind myself to revisit them frequently. Events that force me to re-examine them are: change of role, change of team/org/etc, change of direction of team/org/etc, re-org, new hires on the team that take on some of the work I did, personal promotion, change of manager... and if none of those events has occurred since the last annual review, I ask myself those at each annual review anyway. If you think you are not being effective at work, make a list of the stuff that you do and start tracking where your time goes. In parallel, have a discussion with your manager about where they think your time should go. Ultimately your time is finite and hence it is your most precious investment, don't waste it. If your management doesn't value as highly what you spend your time on, then either convince your management, or stop spending your time on it, or find different management: Lead, Follow, or get out of the way! That's my view on effectiveness. You have to fix that before moving to being efficient, or you may end up being very efficient at stuff that nobody wants you to be doing in the first place. For example, you may be spending your time writing blog posts and becoming better and faster at it all the time. If your manager thinks that is not even part of your job description, you are wasting your time to satisfy your inner desires. Nobody can help you with your effectiveness other than your management chain and your management peers - they are the judges of it. EFFICIENCY The second thing I check is my efficiency: Am I doing things right? For me, doing things right means that I deliver the same quality of work faster [than what I used to, and than my peers, and than expected of me]. The result is that I can achieve more [than what I used to, and than my peers, and than expected of me]. Notice how the efficiency goal is a more portable one. If, by whatever criteria, you think you are the best at [insert your own skill here], this can change at two events: because you have new colleagues (who are potentially better than your older ones), and it can change with a change of manager (who has potentially higher expectations). That's about it. Once you are efficient at something, you carry that with you... All you need to really be doing here is, when taking on new kinds of work that you haven't done before, try a few approaches and devise a system so that you can become efficient at this new activity too... Just keep "collecting" stuff that you are efficient at. If you think you are not being efficient at something, break it down: What are the steps you take to complete that task? How long do you spend on each step? Talk to others about what steps they take, to see if you can optimize some steps away or trade them for better steps, or just learn how to complete a step faster. Have a system for every task you take so that you can have repeatable success. That's my view on efficiency. You have to fix it so that you can free up time to do more. When you plan a route from A to B - all else being equal - you try to get there as fast as possible so why would you not want to do that with your everyday work? For example, imagine you are inefficient at processing email: You spend more time than necessary dealing with email, and you still end up with dropped email threads and with slower response times than others. How can you improve? Talk to someone that you think is good at this, understand their system (e.g. here is my email processing system) and come up with one that works for you. Parting Thoughts Are you considered, by your colleagues and manager, an effective and efficient person at your workplace? If you are, what would you change if you were asked by your management to do the job of two people? Seriously, think about that! Your immediate reaction may be "that is not possible", but it actually is. You just have to re-assess what things that were previously important will now stop being important, by discussing them with your management and reaching agreement on relative priorities. For example, stuff that was previously on your plate may now have to be delegated or dropped. Where you thought you were efficient, maybe now you have to find an even faster path to completion, perhaps keeping in mind that Perfect is the Enemy of “Good Enough”. My personal experience (from both observing others and from my own reflection) is that when folks are struggling to keep up at work it is because of two reasons: They are investing energy in stuff that they enjoy doing which the business regards as having a lower priority than a lot of other things on their plate. They are completing tasks to a level of higher quality than what is required (due to personal pride) missing the big picture which almost always mandates completing three tasks at good enough quality than knocking only one of them out of the park while the other two come in late or not at all. There is a lot of content on the web, so I strongly encourage you to use your favorite search engine to read other views on effectiveness and efficiency (Bing, Google). Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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• BI Applications overview

  - by sv744

  Welcome to Oracle BI applications blog! This blog will talk about various features, general roadmap, description of functionality and implementation steps related to Oracle BI applications. In the first post we start with an overview of the BI apps and will delve deeper into some of the topics below in the upcoming weeks and months. If there are other topics you would like us to talk about, pl feel free to provide feedback on that. The Oracle BI applications are a set of pre-built applications that enable pervasive BI by providing role-based insight for each functional area, including sales, service, marketing, contact center, finance, supplier/supply chain, HR/workforce, and executive management. For example, Sales Analytics includes role-based applications for sales executives, sales management, as well as front-line sales reps, each of whom have different needs. The applications integrate and transform data from a range of enterprise sources—including Siebel, Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP, and others—into actionable intelligence for each business function and user role. This blog  starts with the key benefits and characteristics of Oracle BI applications. In a series of subsequent blogs, each of these points will be explained in detail. Why BI apps? Demonstrate the value of BI to a business user, show reports / dashboards / model that can answer their business questions as part of the sales cycle. Demonstrate technical feasibility of BI project and significantly lower risk and improve success Build Vs Buy benefit Don’t have to start with a blank sheet of paper. Help consolidate disparate systems Data integration in M&A situations Insulate BI consumers from changes in the OLTP Present OLTP data and highlight issues of poor data / missing data – and improve data quality and accuracy Prebuilt Integrations BI apps support prebuilt integrations against leading ERP sources: Fusion Applications, E- Business Suite, Peoplesoft, JD Edwards, Siebel, SAP Co-developed with inputs from functional experts in BI and Applications teams. Out of the box dimensional model to source model mappings Multi source and Multi Instance support Rich Data Model    BI apps have a very rich dimensionsal data model built over 10 years that incorporates best practises from BI modeling perspective as well as reflect the source system complexities  Thanks for reading a long post, and be on the lookout for future posts.  We will look forward to your valuable feedback on these topics as well as suggestions on what other topics would you like us to cover. I Conformed dimensional model across all business subject areas allows cross functional reporting, e.g. customer / supplier 360 Over 360 fact tables across 7 product areas CRM – 145, SCM – 47, Financials – 28, Procurement – 20, HCM – 27, Projects – 18, Campus Solutions – 21, PLM - 56 Supported by 300 physical dimensions Support for extensive calendars; Gregorian, enterprise and ledger based Conformed data model and metrics for real time vs warehouse based reporting  Multi-tenant enabled Extensive BI related transformations BI apps ETL and data integration support various transformations required for dimensional models and reporting requirements. All these have been distilled into common patterns and abstracted logic which can be readily reused across different modules Slowly Changing Dimension support Hierarchy flattening support Row / Column Hybrid Hierarchy Flattening As Is vs. As Was hierarchy support Currency Conversion :-  Support for 3 corporate, CRM, ledger and transaction currencies UOM conversion Internationalization / Localization Dynamic Data translations Code standardization (Domains) Historical Snapshots Cycle and process lifecycle computations Balance Facts Equalization of GL accounting chartfields/segments Standardized values for categorizing GL accounts Reconciliation between GL and subledgers to track accounted/transferred/posted transactions to GL Materialization of data only available through costly and complex APIs e.g. Fusion Payroll, EBS / Fusion Accruals Complex event Interpretation of source data – E.g. o    What constitutes a transfer o    Deriving supervisors via position hierarchy o    Deriving primary assignment in PSFT o    Categorizing and transposition to measures of Payroll Balances to specific metrics to support side by side comparison of measures of for example Fixed Salary, Variable Salary, Tax, Bonus, Overtime Payments. o    Counting of Events – E.g. converting events to fact counters so that for example the number of hires can easily be added up and compared alongside the total transfers and terminations. Multi pass processing of multiple sources e.g. headcount, salary, promotion, performance to allow side to side comparison. Adding value to data to aid analysis through banding, additional domain classifications and groupings to allow higher level analytical reporting and data discovery Calculation of complex measures examples: o    COGs, DSO, DPO, Inventory turns  etc o    Transfers within a Hierarchy or out of / into a hierarchy relative to view point in hierarchy. Configurability and Extensibility support  BI apps offer support for extensibility for various entities as automated extensibility or part of extension methodology Key Flex fields and Descriptive Flex support  Extensible attribute support (JDE)  Conformed Domains ETL Architecture BI apps offer a modular adapter architecture which allows support of multiple product lines into a single conformed model Multi Source Multi Technology Orchestration – creates load plan taking into account task dependencies and customers deployment to generate a plan based on a customers of multiple complex etl tasks Plan optimization allowing parallel ETL tasks Oracle: Bit map indexes and partition management High availability support    Follow the sun support. TCO BI apps support several utilities / capabilities that help with overall total cost of ownership and ensure a rapid implementation Improved cost of ownership – lower cost to deploy On-going support for new versions of the source application Task based setups flows Data Lineage Functional setup performed in Web UI by Functional person Configuration Test to Production support Security BI apps support both data and object security enabling implementations to quickly configure the application as per the reporting security needs Fine grain object security at report / dashboard and presentation catalog level Data Security integration with source systems  Extensible to support external data security rules Extensive Set of KPIs Over 7000 base and derived metrics across all modules Time series calculations (YoY, % growth etc) Common Currency and UOM reporting Cross subject area KPIs (analyzing HR vs GL data, drill from GL to AP/AR, etc) Prebuilt reports and dashboards 3000+ prebuilt reports supporting a large number of industries Hundreds of role based dashboards Dynamic currency conversion at dashboard level Highly tuned Performance The BI apps have been tuned over the years for both a very performant ETL and dashboard performance. The applications use best practises and advanced database features to enable the best possible performance. Optimized data model for BI and analytic queries Prebuilt aggregates& the ability for customers to create their own aggregates easily on warehouse facts allows for scalable end user performance Incremental extracts and loads Incremental Aggregate build Automatic table index and statistics management Parallel ETL loads Source system deletes handling Low latency extract with Golden Gate Micro ETL support Bitmap Indexes Partitioning support Modularized deployment, start small and add other subject areas seamlessly Source Specfic Staging and Real Time Schema Support for source specific operational reporting schema for EBS, PSFT, Siebel and JDE Application Integrations The BI apps also allow for integration with source systems as well as other applications that provide value add through BI and enable BI consumption during operational decision making Embedded dashboards for Fusion, EBS and Siebel applications Action Link support Marketing Segmentation Sales Predictor Dashboard Territory Management External Integrations The BI apps data integration choices include support for loading extenral data External data enrichment choices : UNSPSC, Item class etc. Extensible Spend Classification Broad Deployment Choices Exalytics support Databases :  Oracle, Exadata, Teradata, DB2, MSSQL ETL tool of choice : ODI (coming), Informatica Extensible and Customizable Extensible architecture and Methodology to add custom and external content Upgradable across releases

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• Testing Workflows &ndash; Test-First

  - by Timothy Klenke

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/TimothyK/archive/2014/05/30/testing-workflows-ndash-test-first.aspxThis is the second of two posts on some common strategies for approaching the job of writing tests.  The previous post covered test-after workflows where as this will focus on test-first.  Each workflow presented is a method of attack for adding tests to a project.  The more tools in your tool belt the better.  So here is a partial list of some test-first methodologies. Ping Pong Ping Pong is a methodology commonly used in pair programing.  One developer will write a new failing test.  Then they hand the keyboard to their partner.  The partner writes the production code to get the test passing.  The partner then writes the next test before passing the keyboard back to the original developer. The reasoning behind this testing methodology is to facilitate pair programming.  That is to say that this testing methodology shares all the benefits of pair programming, including ensuring multiple team members are familiar with the code base (i.e. low bus number). Test Blazer Test Blazing, in some respects, is also a pairing strategy.  The developers don’t work side by side on the same task at the same time.  Instead one developer is dedicated to writing tests at their own desk.  They write failing test after failing test, never touching the production code.  With these tests they are defining the specification for the system.  The developer most familiar with the specifications would be assigned this task. The next day or later in the same day another developer fetches the latest test suite.  Their job is to write the production code to get those tests passing.  Once all the tests pass they fetch from source control the latest version of the test project to get the newer tests. This methodology has some of the benefits of pair programming, namely lowering the bus number.  This can be good way adding an extra developer to a project without slowing it down too much.  The production coder isn’t slowed down writing tests.  The tests are in another project from the production code, so there shouldn’t be any merge conflicts despite two developers working on the same solution. This methodology is also a good test for the tests.  Can another developer figure out what system should do just by reading the tests?  This question will be answered as the production coder works there way through the test blazer’s tests. Test Driven Development (TDD) TDD is a highly disciplined practice that calls for a new test and an new production code to be written every few minutes.  There are strict rules for when you should be writing test or production code.  You start by writing a failing (red) test, then write the simplest production code possible to get the code working (green), then you clean up the code (refactor).  This is known as the red-green-refactor cycle. The goal of TDD isn’t the creation of a suite of tests, however that is an advantageous side effect.  The real goal of TDD is to follow a practice that yields a better design.  The practice is meant to push the design toward small, decoupled, modularized components.  This is generally considered a better design that large, highly coupled ball of mud. TDD accomplishes this through the refactoring cycle.  Refactoring is only possible to do safely when tests are in place.  In order to use TDD developers must be trained in how to look for and repair code smells in the system.  Through repairing these sections of smelly code (i.e. a refactoring) the design of the system emerges. For further information on TDD, I highly recommend the series “Is TDD Dead?”.  It discusses its pros and cons and when it is best used. Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) Whereas TDD focuses on small unit tests that concentrate on a small piece of the system, Acceptance Tests focuses on the larger integrated environment.  Acceptance Tests usually correspond to user stories, which come directly from the customer. The unit tests focus on the inputs and outputs of smaller parts of the system, which are too low level to be of interest to the customer. ATDD generally uses the same tools as TDD.  However, ATDD uses fewer mocks and test doubles than TDD. ATDD often complements TDD; they aren’t competing methods.  A full test suite will usually consist of a large number of unit (created via TDD) tests and a smaller number of acceptance tests. Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) BDD is more about audience than workflow.  BDD pushes the testing realm out towards the client.  Developers, managers and the client all work together to define the tests. Typically different tooling is used for BDD than acceptance and unit testing.  This is done because the audience is not just developers.  Tools using the Gherkin family of languages allow for test scenarios to be described in an English format.  Other tools such as MSpec or FitNesse also strive for highly readable behaviour driven test suites. Because these tests are public facing (viewable by people outside the development team), the terminology usually changes.  You can’t get away with the same technobabble you can with unit tests written in a programming language that only developers understand.  For starters, they usually aren’t called tests.  Usually they’re called “examples”, “behaviours”, “scenarios”, or “specifications”. This may seem like a very subtle difference, but I’ve seen this small terminology change have a huge impact on the acceptance of the process.  Many people have a bias that testing is something that comes at the end of a project.  When you say we need to define the tests at the start of the project many people will immediately give that a lower priority on the project schedule.  But if you say we need to define the specification or behaviour of the system before we can start, you’ll get more cooperation.   Keep these test-first and test-after workflows in your tool belt.  With them you’ll be able to find new opportunities to apply them.

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• Benefits of Behavior Driven Development

  - by Aligned

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Aligned/archive/2013/07/26/benefits-of-behavior-driven-development.aspxContinuing my previous article on BDD, I wanted to point out some benefits of BDD and since BDD is an extension of Test Driven Development (TDD), you get those as well. I’ll add another article on some possible downsides of this approach. There are many articles about the benefits of TDD and they apply to BDD. I’ve pointed out some here and copied some of the main points for each article, but there are many more including the book The Art of Unit Testing by Roy Osherove. http://geekswithblogs.net/leesblog/archive/2008/04/30/the-benefits-of-test-driven-development.aspx (Lee Brandt) Stability Accountability Design Ability Separated Concerns Progress Indicator http://tddftw.com/benefits-of-tdd/ Help maintainers understand the intention behind the code Bring validation and proper data handling concerns to the forefront. Writing the tests first is fun. Better APIs come from writing testable code. TDD will make you a better developer. http://www.slideshare.net/dhelper/benefit-from-unit-testing-in-the-real-world (from Typemock). Take a look at the slides, especially the extra time required for TDD (slide 10) and the next one of the bugs avoided using TDD (slide 11). Less bugs (slide 11) about testing and development (13) Increase confidence in code (14) Fearlessly change your code (14) Document Requirements (14) also see http://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2013/06/01/roc-rocks.aspx Discover usability issues early (14) All these points and articles are great and there are many more. The following are my additions to the benefits of BDD from using it in real projects for my company. July 2013 on MSDN - Behavior-Driven Design with SpecFlow Scott Allen did a very informative TDD and MVC module, but to me he is doing BDDCompile and Execute Requirements in Microsoft .NET ~ Video from TechEd 2012 Communication I was working through a complicated task that the decision tree kept growing. After writing out the Given, When, Then of the scenario, I was able tell QA what I had worked through for their initial test cases. They were able to add from there. It is also useful to use this language with other developers, managers, or clients to help make informed decisions on if it meets the requirements or if it can simplified to save time (money). Thinking through solutions, before starting to code This was the biggest benefit to me. I like to jump into coding to figure out the problem. Many times I don't understand my path well enough and have to do some parts over. A past supervisor told me several times during reviews that I need to get better at seeing "the forest for the trees". When I sit down and write out the behavior that I need to implement, I force myself to think things out further and catch scenarios before they get to QA. A co-worker that is new to BDD and we’ve been using it in our new project for the last 6 months, said “It really clarifies things”. It took him awhile to understand it all, but now he’s seeing the value of this approach (yes there are some downsides, but that is a different issue). Developers’ Confidence This is huge for me. With tests in place, my confidence grows that I won’t break code that I’m not directly changing. In the past, I’ve worked on projects with out tests and we would frequently find regression bugs (or worse the users would find them). That isn’t fun. We don’t catch all problems with the tests, but when QA catches one, I can write a test to make sure it doesn’t happen again. It’s also good for Releasing code, telling your manager that it’s good to go. As time goes on and the code gets older, how confident are you that checking in code won’t break something somewhere else? Merging code - pre release confidence If you’re merging code a lot, it’s nice to have the tests to help ensure you didn’t merge incorrectly. Interrupted work I had a task that I started and planned out, then was interrupted for a month because of different priorities. When I started it up again, and un-shelved my changes, I had the BDD specs and it helped me remember what I had figured out and what was left to do. It would have much more difficult without the specs and tests. Testing and verifying complicated scenarios Sometimes in the UI there are scenarios that get tricky, because there are a lot of steps involved (click here to open the dialog, enter the information, make sure it’s valid, when I click cancel it should do {x}, when I click ok it should close and do {y}, then do this, etc….). With BDD I can avoid some of the mouse clicking define the scenarios and have them re-run quickly, without using a mouse. UI testing is still needed, but this helps a bunch. The same can be true for tricky server logic. Documentation of Assumptions and Specifications The BDD spec tests (Jasmine or SpecFlow or other tool) also work as documentation and show what the original developer was trying to accomplish. It’s not a different Word document, so developers will keep this up to date, instead of letting it become obsolete. What happens if you leave the project (consulting, new job, etc) with no specs or at the least good comments in the code? Sometimes I think of a new scenario, so I add a failing spec and continue in the same stream of thought (don’t forget it because it was on a piece of paper or in a notepad). Then later I can come back and handle it and have it documented. Jasmine tests and JavaScript –> help deal with the non-typed system I like JavaScript, but I also dislike working with JavaScript. I miss C# telling me if a property doesn’t actually exist at build time. I like the idea of TypeScript and hope to use it more in the future. I also use KnockoutJs, which has observables that need to be called with ending (), since the observable is a function. It’s hard to remember when to use () or not and the Jasmine specs/tests help ensure the correct usage.   This should give you an idea of the benefits that I see in using the BDD approach. I’m sure there are more. It talks a lot of practice, investment and experimentation to figure out how to approach this and to get comfortable with it. I agree with Scott Allen in the video I linked above “Remember that TDD can take some practice. So if you're not doing test-driven design right now? You can start and practice and get better. And you'll reach a point where you'll never want to get back.”

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• Restoring databases to a set drive and directory

  - by okeofs

   Restoring databases to a set drive and directory Introduction Often people say that necessity is the mother of invention. In this case I was faced with the dilemma of having to restore several databases, with multiple ‘ndf’ files, and having to restore them with different physical file names, drives and directories on servers other than the servers from which they originated. As most of us would do, I went to Google to see if I could find some code to achieve this task and found some interesting snippets on Pinal Dave’s website. Naturally, I had to take it further than the code snippet, HOWEVER it was a great place to start. Creating a temp table to hold database file details First off, I created a temp table which would hold the details of the individual data files within the database. Although there are a plethora of fields (within the temp table below), I utilize LogicalName only within this example. The temporary table structure may be seen below:   create table #tmp ( LogicalName nvarchar(128)  ,PhysicalName nvarchar(260)  ,Type char(1)  ,FileGroupName nvarchar(128)  ,Size numeric(20,0)  ,MaxSize numeric(20,0), Fileid tinyint, CreateLSN numeric(25,0), DropLSN numeric(25, 0), UniqueID uniqueidentifier, ReadOnlyLSN numeric(25,0), ReadWriteLSN numeric(25,0), BackupSizeInBytes bigint, SourceBlocSize int, FileGroupId int, LogGroupGUID uniqueidentifier, DifferentialBaseLSN numeric(25,0), DifferentialBaseGUID uniqueidentifier, IsReadOnly bit, IsPresent bit,  TDEThumbPrint varchar(50) )    We now declare and populate a variable(@path), setting the variable to the path to our SOURCE database backup. declare @path varchar(50) set @path = 'P:\DATA\MYDATABASE.bak'   From this point, we insert the file details of our database into the temp table. Note that we do so by utilizing a restore statement HOWEVER doing so in ‘filelistonly’ mode.   insert #tmp EXEC ('restore filelistonly from disk = ''' + @path + '''')   At this point, I depart from what I gleaned from Pinal Dave.   I now instantiate a few more local variables. The use of each variable will be evident within the cursor (which follows):   Declare @RestoreString as Varchar(max) Declare @NRestoreString as NVarchar(max) Declare @LogicalName  as varchar(75) Declare @counter as int Declare @rows as int set @counter = 1 select @rows = COUNT(*) from #tmp  -- Count the number of records in the temp                                    -- table   Declaring and populating the cursor At this point I do realize that many people are cringing about the use of a cursor. Being an Oracle professional as well, I have learnt that there is a time and place for cursors. I would remind the reader that the data that will be read into the cursor is from a local temp table and as such, any locking of the records (within the temp table) is not really an issue.   DECLARE MY_CURSOR Cursor  FOR  Select LogicalName  From #tmp   Parsing the logical names from within the cursor. A small caveat that works in our favour,  is that the first logical name (of our database) is the logical name of the primary data file (.mdf). Other files, except for the very last logical name, belong to secondary data files. The last logical name is that of our database log file.   I now open my cursor and populate the variable @RestoreString Open My_Cursor  set @RestoreString =  'RESTORE DATABASE [MYDATABASE] FROM DISK = N''P:\DATA\ MYDATABASE.bak''' + ' with  '   We now fetch the first record from the temp table.   Fetch NEXT FROM MY_Cursor INTO @LogicalName   While there are STILL records left within the cursor, we dynamically build our restore string. Note that we are using concatenation to create ‘one big restore executable string’.   Note also that the target physical file name is hardwired, as is the target directory.   While (@@FETCH_STATUS <> -1) BEGIN IF (@@FETCH_STATUS <> -2) -- As long as there are no rows missing select @RestoreString = case  when @counter = 1 then -- This is the mdf file    @RestoreString + 'move  N''' + @LogicalName + '''' + ' TO N’’X:\DATA1\'+ @LogicalName + '.mdf' + '''' + ', '   -- OK, if it passes through here we are dealing with an .ndf file -- Note that Counter must be greater than 1 and less than the number of rows.   when @counter > 1 and @counter < @rows then -- These are the ndf file(s)    @RestoreString + 'move  N''' + @LogicalName + '''' + ' TO N’’X:\DATA1\'+ @LogicalName + '.ndf' + '''' + ', '   -- OK, if it passes through here we are dealing with the log file When @LogicalName like '%log%' then    @RestoreString + 'move  N''' + @LogicalName + '''' + ' TO N’’X:\DATA1\'+ @LogicalName + '.ldf' +'''' end --Increment the counter   set @counter = @counter + 1 FETCH NEXT FROM MY_CURSOR INTO @LogicalName END   At this point we have populated the varchar(max) variable @RestoreString with a concatenation of all the necessary file names. What we now need to do is to run the sp_executesql stored procedure, to effect the restore.   First, we must place our ‘concatenated string’ into an nvarchar based variable. Obviously this will only work as long as the length of @RestoreString is less than varchar(max) / 2.   set @NRestoreString = @RestoreString EXEC sp_executesql @NRestoreString   Upon completion of this step, the database should be restored to the server. I now close and deallocate the cursor, and to be clean, I would also drop my temp table.   CLOSE MY_CURSOR DEALLOCATE MY_CURSOR GO   Conclusion Restoration of databases on different servers with different physical names and on different drives are a fact of life. Through the use of a few variables and a simple cursor, we may achieve an efficient and effective way to achieve this task.

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• Entity Framework 6: Alpha2 Now Available

  - by ScottGu

  The Entity Framework team recently announced the 2nd alpha release of EF6.   The alpha 2 package is available for download from NuGet. Since this is a pre-release package make sure to select “Include Prereleases” in the NuGet package manager, or execute the following from the package manager console to install it: PM> Install-Package EntityFramework -Pre This week’s alpha release includes a bunch of great improvements in the following areas: Async language support is now available for queries and updates when running on .NET 4.5. Custom conventions now provide the ability to override the default conventions that Code First uses for mapping types, properties, etc. to your database. Multi-tenant migrations allow the same database to be used by multiple contexts with full Code First Migrations support for independently evolving the model backing each context. Using Enumerable.Contains in a LINQ query is now handled much more efficiently by EF and the SQL Server provider resulting greatly improved performance. All features of EF6 (except async) are available on both .NET 4 and .NET 4.5. This includes support for enums and spatial types and the performance improvements that were previously only available when using .NET 4.5. Start-up time for many large models has been dramatically improved thanks to improved view generation performance. Below are some additional details about a few of the improvements above: Async Support .NET 4.5 introduced the Task-Based Asynchronous Pattern that uses the async and await keywords to help make writing asynchronous code easier. EF 6 now supports this pattern. This is great for ASP.NET applications as database calls made through EF can now be processed asynchronously – avoiding any blocking of worker threads. This can increase scalability on the server by allowing more requests to be processed while waiting for the database to respond. The following code shows an MVC controller that is querying a database for a list of location entities:     public class HomeController : Controller     {         LocationContext db = new LocationContext();           public async Task<ActionResult> Index()         {             var locations = await db.Locations.ToListAsync();               return View(locations);         }     } Notice above the call to the new ToListAsync method with the await keyword. When the web server reaches this code it initiates the database request, but rather than blocking while waiting for the results to come back, the thread that is processing the request returns to the thread pool, allowing ASP.NET to process another incoming request with the same thread. In other words, a thread is only consumed when there is actual processing work to do, allowing the web server to handle more concurrent requests with the same resources. A more detailed walkthrough covering async in EF is available with additional information and examples. Also a walkthrough is available showing how to use async in an ASP.NET MVC application. Custom Conventions When working with EF Code First, the default behavior is to map .NET classes to tables using a set of conventions baked into EF. For example, Code First will detect properties that end with “ID” and configure them automatically as primary keys. However, sometimes you cannot or do not want to follow those conventions and would rather provide your own. For example, maybe your primary key properties all end in “Key” instead of “Id”. Custom conventions allow the default conventions to be overridden or new conventions to be added so that Code First can map by convention using whatever rules make sense for your project. The following code demonstrates using custom conventions to set the precision of all decimals to 5. As with other Code First configuration, this code is placed in the OnModelCreating method which is overridden on your derived DbContext class:         protected override void OnModelCreating(DbModelBuilder modelBuilder)         {             modelBuilder.Properties<decimal>()                 .Configure(x => x.HasPrecision(5));           } But what if there are a couple of places where a decimal property should have a different precision? Just as with all the existing Code First conventions, this new convention can be overridden for a particular property simply by explicitly configuring that property using either the fluent API or a data annotation. A more detailed description of custom code first conventions is available here. Community Involvement I blogged a while ago about EF being released under an open source license.  Since then a number of community members have made contributions and these are included in EF6 alpha 2. Two examples of community contributions are: AlirezaHaghshenas contributed a change that increases the startup performance of EF for larger models by improving the performance of view generation. The change means that it is less often necessary to use of pre-generated views. UnaiZorrilla contributed the first community feature to EF: the ability to load all Code First configuration classes in an assembly with a single method call like the following: protected override void OnModelCreating(DbModelBuilder modelBuilder) {        modelBuilder.Configurations            .AddFromAssembly(typeof(LocationContext).Assembly); } This code will find and load all the classes that inherit from EntityTypeConfiguration<T> or ComplexTypeConfiguration<T> in the assembly where LocationContext is defined. This reduces the amount of coupling between the context and Code First configuration classes, and is also a very convenient shortcut for large models. Other upcoming features coming in EF 6 Lots of information about the development of EF6 can be found on the EF CodePlex site, including a roadmap showing the other features that are planned for EF6. One of of the nice upcoming features is connection resiliency, which will automate the process of retying database operations on transient failures common in cloud environments and with databases such as the Windows Azure SQL Database. Another often requested feature that will be included in EF6 is the ability to map stored procedures to query and update operations on entities when using Code First. Summary EF6 is the first open source release of Entity Framework being developed in CodePlex. The alpha 2 preview release of EF6 is now available on NuGet, and contains some really great features for you to try. The EF team are always looking for feedback from developers - especially on the new features such as custom Code First conventions and async support. To provide feedback you can post a comment on the EF6 alpha 2 announcement post, start a discussion or file a bug on the CodePlex site. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• DHCP settings out of range Internet shuts off after a few minutes

  - by user263115

  I recently upgraded from windows eight to windows 8.1 I do not know if this has anything to do with anything I have a 64 bit OS. My Internet goes off by itself every 5 minutes even though my wireless icon at the lower right of the screen still shows connected I had an error message in the last event in it said that might DHCP settings were out of range. I get my internet at my house through a wireless portable hotspot through my smart phone. But i haven't ever had any problems before and i only have this problem on this network. If i turn airplane mode on and reset my network card, the internet will come back to life but soon die. i don't experience this problem while on a different network or if i'm on WiFi. This s really annoying please help Windows IP Configuration Host Name . . . . . . . . . . . . : NastyMcnastyJr Primary Dns Suffix . . . . . . . : Node Type . . . . . . . . . . . . : Hybrid IP Routing Enabled. . . . . . . . : No WINS Proxy Enabled. . . . . . . . : No Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection: Media State . . . . . . . . . . . : Media disconnected Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : Description . . . . . . . . . . . : TeamViewer VPN Adapter Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : 00-FF-5D-13-26-21 DHCP Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : Yes Autoconfiguration Enabled . . . . : Yes Wireless LAN adapter Local Area Connection* 11: Media State . . . . . . . . . . . : Media disconnected Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : Description . . . . . . . . . . . : Microsoft Wi-Fi Direct Virtual Adapter Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : F6-B7-E2-50-09-38 DHCP Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : Yes Autoconfiguration Enabled . . . . : Yes Wireless LAN adapter SAMMY McNASTY: Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : Description . . . . . . . . . . . : Broadcom 802.11n Network Adapter Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : F4-B7-E2-50-09-38 DHCP Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : Yes Autoconfiguration Enabled . . . . : Yes Link-local IPv6 Address . . . . . : fe80::3107:66bc:cf1f:c776%4(Preferred) IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.43.3(Preferred) Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0 Lease Obtained. . . . . . . . . . : Friday, November 1, 2013 9:50:20 PM Lease Expires . . . . . . . . . . : Saturday, November 2, 2013 12:56:46 AM Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.43.1 DHCP Server . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.43.1 DHCPv6 IAID . . . . . . . . . . . : 83146722 DHCPv6 Client DUID. . . . . . . . : 00-01-00-01-19-F1-98-B4-20-89-84-84-61-BB DNS Servers . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.43.1 NetBIOS over Tcpip. . . . . . . . : Enabled Ethernet adapter Ethernet: Media State . . . . . . . . . . . : Media disconnected Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : Description . . . . . . . . . . . : Broadcom NetLink (TM) Gigabit Ethernet Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : 20-89-84-84-61-BB DHCP Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : Yes Autoconfiguration Enabled . . . . : Yes Log Name: System Source: Microsoft-Windows-UserPnp Date: 10/26/2013 7:52:23 PM Event ID: 20003 Task Category: (7005) Level: Information Keywords: User: SYSTEM Computer: NastyMcnastyJr Description: Driver Management has concluded the process to add Service vwifibus for Device Instance ID PCI\VEN_14E4&DEV_4727&SUBSYS_E042105B&REV_01\4&3265ADAB&0&00E1 with the following status: 0. Event Xml: 20003 0 4 7005 0 0x8000000000000000 5118 System NastyMcnastyJr vwifibus \SystemRoot\system32\DRIVERS\vwifibus.sys PCI\VEN_14E4&DEV_4727&SUBSYS_E042105B&REV_01\4&3265ADAB&0&00E1 false true 0 Log Name: System Source: Microsoft-Windows-UserPnp Date: 10/19/2013 3:29:12 PM Event ID: 20001 Task Category: (7005) Level: Information Keywords: User: SYSTEM Computer: NastyMcnastyJr Description: Driver Management concluded the process to install driver netbc64.inf_amd64_0df63b5297d0f820\netbc64.inf for Device Instance ID PCI\VEN_14E4&DEV_4727&SUBSYS_E042105B&REV_01\4&3265ADAB&0&00E1 with the following status: 0x0. Event Xml: 20001 0 4 7005 0 0x8000000000000000 2015 System NastyMcnastyJr netbc64.inf_amd64_0df63b5297d0f820\netbc64.inf 6.30.223.102 Microsoft PCI\VEN_14E4&DEV_4727&SUBSYS_E042105B&REV_01\4&3265ADAB&0&00E1 {4D36E972-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318} false false false 0x0 Broadcom 802.11n Network Adapter Log Name: System Source: Microsoft-Windows-DNS-Client Date: 11/2/2013 12:24:59 AM Event ID: 1014 Task Category: (1014) Level: Warning Keywords: (268435456) User: NETWORK SERVICE Computer: NastyMcnastyJr Description: Name resolution for the name www.google.com timed out after none of the configured DNS servers responded. Event Xml: 1014 0 3 1014 0 0x4000000010000000 34771 System NastyMcnastyJr www.google.com 128 02000000C0A82B01000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

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• IPsec tunnel to Android device not created even though there is an IKE SA

  - by Quentin Swain

  I'm trying to configure a VPN tunnel between an Android device running 4.1 and a Fedora 17 Linux box running strongSwan 5.0. The device reports that it is connected and strongSwan statusall returns that there is an IKE SA, but doesn't display a tunnel. I used the instructions for iOS in the wiki to generate certificates and configure strongSwan. Since Android uses a modified version of racoon this should work and since the connection is partly established I think I am on the right track. I don't see any errors about not being able to create the tunnel. This is the configuration for the strongSwan connection conn android2 keyexchange=ikev1 authby=xauthrsasig xauth=server left=96.244.142.28 leftsubnet=0.0.0.0/0 leftfirewall=yes leftcert=serverCert.pem right=%any rightsubnet=10.0.0.0/24 rightsourceip=10.0.0.2 rightcert=clientCert.pem ike=aes256-sha1-modp1024 auto=add This is the output of strongswan statusall Status of IKE charon daemon (strongSwan 5.0.0, Linux 3.3.4-5.fc17.x86_64, x86_64): uptime: 20 minutes, since Oct 31 10:27:31 2012 malloc: sbrk 270336, mmap 0, used 198144, free 72192 worker threads: 8 of 16 idle, 7/1/0/0 working, job queue: 0/0/0/0, scheduled: 7 loaded plugins: charon aes des sha1 sha2 md5 random nonce x509 revocation constraints pubkey pkcs1 pkcs8 pgp dnskey pem openssl fips-prf gmp xcbc cmac hmac attr kernel-netlink resolve socket-default stroke updown xauth-generic Virtual IP pools (size/online/offline): android-hybrid: 1/0/0 android2: 1/1/0 Listening IP addresses: 96.244.142.28 Connections: android-hybrid: %any...%any IKEv1 android-hybrid: local: [C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=vpn.strongswan.org] uses public key authentication android-hybrid: cert: "C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=vpn.strongswan.org" android-hybrid: remote: [%any] uses XAuth authentication: any android-hybrid: child: dynamic === dynamic TUNNEL android2: 96.244.142.28...%any IKEv1 android2: local: [C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=vpn.strongswan.org] uses public key authentication android2: cert: "C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=vpn.strongswan.org" android2: remote: [C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=client] uses public key authentication android2: cert: "C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=client" android2: remote: [%any] uses XAuth authentication: any android2: child: 0.0.0.0/0 === 10.0.0.0/24 TUNNEL Security Associations (1 up, 0 connecting): android2[3]: ESTABLISHED 10 seconds ago, 96.244.142.28[C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=vpn.strongswan.org]...208.54.35.241[C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=client] android2[3]: Remote XAuth identity: android android2[3]: IKEv1 SPIs: 4151e371ad46b20d_i 59a56390d74792d2_r*, public key reauthentication in 56 minutes android2[3]: IKE proposal: AES_CBC_256/HMAC_SHA1_96/PRF_HMAC_SHA1/MODP_1024 The output of ip -s xfrm policy src ::/0 dst ::/0 uid 0 socket in action allow index 3851 priority 0 ptype main share any flag (0x00000000) lifetime config: limit: soft 0(bytes), hard 0(bytes) limit: soft 0(packets), hard 0(packets) expire add: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) expire use: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) lifetime current: 0(bytes), 0(packets) add 2012-10-31 13:29:08 use - src ::/0 dst ::/0 uid 0 socket out action allow index 3844 priority 0 ptype main share any flag (0x00000000) lifetime config: limit: soft 0(bytes), hard 0(bytes) limit: soft 0(packets), hard 0(packets) expire add: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) expire use: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) lifetime current: 0(bytes), 0(packets) add 2012-10-31 13:29:08 use - src ::/0 dst ::/0 uid 0 socket in action allow index 3835 priority 0 ptype main share any flag (0x00000000) lifetime config: limit: soft 0(bytes), hard 0(bytes) limit: soft 0(packets), hard 0(packets) expire add: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) expire use: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) lifetime current: 0(bytes), 0(packets) add 2012-10-31 13:29:08 use - src ::/0 dst ::/0 uid 0 socket out action allow index 3828 priority 0 ptype main share any flag (0x00000000) lifetime config: limit: soft 0(bytes), hard 0(bytes) limit: soft 0(packets), hard 0(packets) expire add: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) expire use: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) lifetime current: 0(bytes), 0(packets) add 2012-10-31 13:29:08 use - src 0.0.0.0/0 dst 0.0.0.0/0 uid 0 socket in action allow index 3819 priority 0 ptype main share any flag (0x00000000) lifetime config: limit: soft 0(bytes), hard 0(bytes) limit: soft 0(packets), hard 0(packets) expire add: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) expire use: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) lifetime current: 0(bytes), 0(packets) add 2012-10-31 13:29:08 use 2012-10-31 13:29:39 src 0.0.0.0/0 dst 0.0.0.0/0 uid 0 socket out action allow index 3812 priority 0 ptype main share any flag (0x00000000) lifetime config: limit: soft 0(bytes), hard 0(bytes) limit: soft 0(packets), hard 0(packets) expire add: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) expire use: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) lifetime current: 0(bytes), 0(packets) add 2012-10-31 13:29:08 use 2012-10-31 13:29:22 src 0.0.0.0/0 dst 0.0.0.0/0 uid 0 socket in action allow index 3803 priority 0 ptype main share any flag (0x00000000) lifetime config: limit: soft 0(bytes), hard 0(bytes) limit: soft 0(packets), hard 0(packets) expire add: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) expire use: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) lifetime current: 0(bytes), 0(packets) add 2012-10-31 13:29:08 use 2012-10-31 13:29:20 src 0.0.0.0/0 dst 0.0.0.0/0 uid 0 socket out action allow index 3796 priority 0 ptype main share any flag (0x00000000) lifetime config: limit: soft 0(bytes), hard 0(bytes) limit: soft 0(packets), hard 0(packets) expire add: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) expire use: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) lifetime current: 0(bytes), 0(packets) add 2012-10-31 13:29:08 use 2012-10-31 13:29:20 So a xfrm policy isn't being created for the connection, even though there is an SA between device and strongswan. Executing ip -s xfrm policy on the android device results in the following output: src 0.0.0.0/0 dst 10.0.0.2/32 uid 0 dir in action allow index 40 priority 2147483648 share any flag (0x00000000) lifetime config: limit: soft (INF)(bytes), hard (INF)(bytes) limit: soft (INF)(packets), hard (INF)(packets) expire add: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) expire use: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) lifetime current: 0(bytes), 0(packets) add 2012-10-31 13:42:08 use - tmpl src 96.244.142.28 dst 25.239.33.30 proto esp spi 0x00000000(0) reqid 0(0x00000000) mode tunnel level required share any enc-mask 00000000 auth-mask 00000000 comp-mask 00000000 src 10.0.0.2/32 dst 0.0.0.0/0 uid 0 dir out action allow index 33 priority 2147483648 share any flag (0x00000000) lifetime config: limit: soft (INF)(bytes), hard (INF)(bytes) limit: soft (INF)(packets), hard (INF)(packets) expire add: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) expire use: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) lifetime current: 0(bytes), 0(packets) add 2012-10-31 13:42:08 use - tmpl src 25.239.33.30 dst 96.244.142.28 proto esp spi 0x00000000(0) reqid 0(0x00000000) mode tunnel level required share any enc-mask 00000000 auth-mask 00000000 comp-mask 00000000 src 0.0.0.0/0 dst 0.0.0.0/0 uid 0 dir 4 action allow index 28 priority 0 share any flag (0x00000000) lifetime config: limit: soft (INF)(bytes), hard (INF)(bytes) limit: soft (INF)(packets), hard (INF)(packets) expire add: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) expire use: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) lifetime current: 0(bytes), 0(packets) add 2012-10-31 13:42:04 use 2012-10-31 13:42:08 src 0.0.0.0/0 dst 0.0.0.0/0 uid 0 dir 3 action allow index 19 priority 0 share any flag (0x00000000) lifetime config: limit: soft (INF)(bytes), hard (INF)(bytes) limit: soft (INF)(packets), hard (INF)(packets) expire add: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) expire use: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) lifetime current: 0(bytes), 0(packets) add 2012-10-31 13:42:04 use 2012-10-31 13:42:08 src 0.0.0.0/0 dst 0.0.0.0/0 uid 0 dir 4 action allow index 12 priority 0 share any flag (0x00000000) lifetime config: limit: soft (INF)(bytes), hard (INF)(bytes) limit: soft (INF)(packets), hard (INF)(packets) expire add: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) expire use: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) lifetime current: 0(bytes), 0(packets) add 2012-10-31 13:42:04 use 2012-10-31 13:42:06 src 0.0.0.0/0 dst 0.0.0.0/0 uid 0 dir 3 action allow index 3 priority 0 share any flag (0x00000000) lifetime config: limit: soft (INF)(bytes), hard (INF)(bytes) limit: soft (INF)(packets), hard (INF)(packets) expire add: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) expire use: soft 0(sec), hard 0(sec) lifetime current: 0(bytes), 0(packets) add 2012-10-31 13:42:04 use 2012-10-31 13:42:07 Logs from charon: 00[DMN] Starting IKE charon daemon (strongSwan 5.0.0, Linux 3.3.4-5.fc17.x86_64, x86_64) 00[KNL] listening on interfaces: 00[KNL] em1 00[KNL] 96.244.142.28 00[KNL] fe80::224:e8ff:fed2:18b2 00[CFG] loading ca certificates from '/etc/strongswan/ipsec.d/cacerts' 00[CFG] loaded ca certificate "C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=strongSwan CA" from '/etc/strongswan/ipsec.d/cacerts/caCert.pem' 00[CFG] loading aa certificates from '/etc/strongswan/ipsec.d/aacerts' 00[CFG] loading ocsp signer certificates from '/etc/strongswan/ipsec.d/ocspcerts' 00[CFG] loading attribute certificates from '/etc/strongswan/ipsec.d/acerts' 00[CFG] loading crls from '/etc/strongswan/ipsec.d/crls' 00[CFG] loading secrets from '/etc/strongswan/ipsec.secrets' 00[CFG] loaded RSA private key from '/etc/strongswan/ipsec.d/private/clientKey.pem' 00[CFG] loaded IKE secret for %any 00[CFG] loaded EAP secret for android 00[CFG] loaded EAP secret for android 00[DMN] loaded plugins: charon aes des sha1 sha2 md5 random nonce x509 revocation constraints pubkey pkcs1 pkcs8 pgp dnskey pem openssl fips-prf gmp xcbc cmac hmac attr kernel-netlink resolve socket-default stroke updown xauth-generic 08[NET] waiting for data on sockets 16[LIB] created thread 16 [15338] 16[JOB] started worker thread 16 11[CFG] received stroke: add connection 'android-hybrid' 11[CFG] conn android-hybrid 11[CFG] left=%any 11[CFG] leftsubnet=(null) 11[CFG] leftsourceip=(null) 11[CFG] leftauth=pubkey 11[CFG] leftauth2=(null) 11[CFG] leftid=(null) 11[CFG] leftid2=(null) 11[CFG] leftrsakey=(null) 11[CFG] leftcert=serverCert.pem 11[CFG] leftcert2=(null) 11[CFG] leftca=(null) 11[CFG] leftca2=(null) 11[CFG] leftgroups=(null) 11[CFG] leftupdown=ipsec _updown iptables 11[CFG] right=%any 11[CFG] rightsubnet=(null) 11[CFG] rightsourceip=96.244.142.3 11[CFG] rightauth=xauth 11[CFG] rightauth2=(null) 11[CFG] rightid=%any 11[CFG] rightid2=(null) 11[CFG] rightrsakey=(null) 11[CFG] rightcert=(null) 11[CFG] rightcert2=(null) 11[CFG] rightca=(null) 11[CFG] rightca2=(null) 11[CFG] rightgroups=(null) 11[CFG] rightupdown=(null) 11[CFG] eap_identity=(null) 11[CFG] aaa_identity=(null) 11[CFG] xauth_identity=(null) 11[CFG] ike=aes256-sha1-modp1024 11[CFG] esp=aes128-sha1-modp2048,3des-sha1-modp1536 11[CFG] dpddelay=30 11[CFG] dpdtimeout=150 11[CFG] dpdaction=0 11[CFG] closeaction=0 11[CFG] mediation=no 11[CFG] mediated_by=(null) 11[CFG] me_peerid=(null) 11[CFG] keyexchange=ikev1 11[KNL] getting interface name for %any 11[KNL] %any is not a local address 11[KNL] getting interface name for %any 11[KNL] %any is not a local address 11[CFG] left nor right host is our side, assuming left=local 11[CFG] loaded certificate "C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=vpn.strongswan.org" from 'serverCert.pem' 11[CFG] id '%any' not confirmed by certificate, defaulting to 'C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=vpn.strongswan.org' 11[CFG] added configuration 'android-hybrid' 11[CFG] adding virtual IP address pool 'android-hybrid': 96.244.142.3/32 13[CFG] received stroke: add connection 'android2' 13[CFG] conn android2 13[CFG] left=96.244.142.28 13[CFG] leftsubnet=0.0.0.0/0 13[CFG] leftsourceip=(null) 13[CFG] leftauth=pubkey 13[CFG] leftauth2=(null) 13[CFG] leftid=(null) 13[CFG] leftid2=(null) 13[CFG] leftrsakey=(null) 13[CFG] leftcert=serverCert.pem 13[CFG] leftcert2=(null) 13[CFG] leftca=(null) 13[CFG] leftca2=(null) 13[CFG] leftgroups=(null) 13[CFG] leftupdown=ipsec _updown iptables 13[CFG] right=%any 13[CFG] rightsubnet=10.0.0.0/24 13[CFG] rightsourceip=10.0.0.2 13[CFG] rightauth=pubkey 13[CFG] rightauth2=xauth 13[CFG] rightid=(null) 13[CFG] rightid2=(null) 13[CFG] rightrsakey=(null) 13[CFG] rightcert=clientCert.pem 13[CFG] rightcert2=(null) 13[CFG] rightca=(null) 13[CFG] rightca2=(null) 13[CFG] rightgroups=(null) 13[CFG] rightupdown=(null) 13[CFG] eap_identity=(null) 13[CFG] aaa_identity=(null) 13[CFG] xauth_identity=(null) 13[CFG] ike=aes256-sha1-modp1024 13[CFG] esp=aes128-sha1-modp2048,3des-sha1-modp1536 13[CFG] dpddelay=30 13[CFG] dpdtimeout=150 13[CFG] dpdaction=0 13[CFG] closeaction=0 13[CFG] mediation=no 13[CFG] mediated_by=(null) 13[CFG] me_peerid=(null) 13[CFG] keyexchange=ikev0 13[KNL] getting interface name for %any 13[KNL] %any is not a local address 13[KNL] getting interface name for 96.244.142.28 13[KNL] 96.244.142.28 is on interface em1 13[CFG] loaded certificate "C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=vpn.strongswan.org" from 'serverCert.pem' 13[CFG] id '96.244.142.28' not confirmed by certificate, defaulting to 'C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=vpn.strongswan.org' 13[CFG] loaded certificate "C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=client" from 'clientCert.pem' 13[CFG] id '%any' not confirmed by certificate, defaulting to 'C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=client' 13[CFG] added configuration 'android2' 13[CFG] adding virtual IP address pool 'android2': 10.0.0.2/32 08[NET] received packet: from 208.54.35.241[32235] to 96.244.142.28[500] 15[CFG] looking for an ike config for 96.244.142.28...208.54.35.241 15[CFG] candidate: %any...%any, prio 2 15[CFG] candidate: 96.244.142.28...%any, prio 5 15[CFG] found matching ike config: 96.244.142.28...%any with prio 5 01[JOB] next event in 29s 999ms, waiting 15[IKE] received NAT-T (RFC 3947) vendor ID 15[IKE] received draft-ietf-ipsec-nat-t-ike-02 vendor ID 15[IKE] received draft-ietf-ipsec-nat-t-ike-02\n vendor ID 15[IKE] received draft-ietf-ipsec-nat-t-ike-00 vendor ID 15[IKE] received XAuth vendor ID 15[IKE] received Cisco Unity vendor ID 15[IKE] received DPD vendor ID 15[IKE] 208.54.35.241 is initiating a Main Mode IKE_SA 15[IKE] IKE_SA (unnamed)[1] state change: CREATED => CONNECTING 15[CFG] selecting proposal: 15[CFG] proposal matches 15[CFG] received proposals: IKE:AES_CBC_256/HMAC_SHA1_96/PRF_HMAC_SHA1/MODP_1024, IKE:AES_CBC_256/HMAC_MD5_96/PRF_HMAC_MD5/MODP_1024, IKE:AES_CBC_128/HMAC_SHA1_96/PRF_HMAC_SHA1/MODP_1024, IKE:AES_CBC_128/HMAC_MD5_96/PRF_HMAC_MD5/MODP_1024, IKE:3DES_CBC/HMAC_SHA1_96/PRF_HMAC_SHA1/MODP_1024, IKE:3DES_CBC/HMAC_MD5_96/PRF_HMAC_MD5/MODP_1024, IKE:DES_CBC/HMAC_SHA1_96/PRF_HMAC_SHA1/MODP_1024, IKE:DES_CBC/HMAC_MD5_96/PRF_HMAC_MD5/MODP_1024 15[CFG] configured proposals: IKE:AES_CBC_256/HMAC_SHA1_96/PRF_HMAC_SHA1/MODP_1024, IKE:AES_CBC_128/AES_CBC_192/AES_CBC_256/3DES_CBC/CAMELLIA_CBC_128/CAMELLIA_CBC_192/CAMELLIA_CBC_256/HMAC_MD5_96/HMAC_SHA1_96/HMAC_SHA2_256_128/HMAC_SHA2_384_192/HMAC_SHA2_512_256/AES_XCBC_96/AES_CMAC_96/PRF_HMAC_MD5/PRF_HMAC_SHA1/PRF_HMAC_SHA2_256/PRF_HMAC_SHA2_384/PRF_HMAC_SHA2_512/PRF_AES128_XCBC/PRF_AES128_CMAC/MODP_2048/MODP_2048_224/MODP_2048_256/MODP_1536/MODP_4096/MODP_8192/MODP_1024/MODP_1024_160 15[CFG] selected proposal: IKE:AES_CBC_256/HMAC_SHA1_96/PRF_HMAC_SHA1/MODP_1024 15[NET] sending packet: from 96.244.142.28[500] to 208.54.35.241[32235] 04[NET] sending packet: from 96.244.142.28[500] to 208.54.35.241[32235] 15[MGR] checkin IKE_SA (unnamed)[1] 15[MGR] check-in of IKE_SA successful. 08[NET] received packet: from 208.54.35.241[32235] to 96.244.142.28[500] 08[NET] waiting for data on sockets 07[MGR] checkout IKE_SA by message 07[MGR] IKE_SA (unnamed)[1] successfully checked out 07[NET] received packet: from 208.54.35.241[32235] to 96.244.142.28[500] 07[LIB] size of DH secret exponent: 1023 bits 07[IKE] remote host is behind NAT 07[IKE] sending cert request for "C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=strongSwan CA" 07[ENC] generating NAT_D_V1 payload finished 07[NET] sending packet: from 96.244.142.28[500] to 208.54.35.241[32235] 07[MGR] checkin IKE_SA (unnamed)[1] 07[MGR] check-in of IKE_SA successful. 04[NET] sending packet: from 96.244.142.28[500] to 208.54.35.241[32235] 08[NET] received packet: from 208.54.35.241[35595] to 96.244.142.28[4500] 10[IKE] ignoring certificate request without data 10[IKE] received end entity cert "C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=client" 10[CFG] looking for XAuthInitRSA peer configs matching 96.244.142.28...208.54.35.241[C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=client] 10[CFG] candidate "android-hybrid", match: 1/1/2/2 (me/other/ike/version) 10[CFG] candidate "android2", match: 1/20/5/1 (me/other/ike/version) 10[CFG] selected peer config "android2" 10[CFG] certificate "C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=client" key: 2048 bit RSA 10[CFG] using trusted ca certificate "C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=strongSwan CA" 10[CFG] checking certificate status of "C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=client" 10[CFG] ocsp check skipped, no ocsp found 10[CFG] certificate status is not available 10[CFG] certificate "C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=strongSwan CA" key: 2048 bit RSA 10[CFG] reached self-signed root ca with a path length of 0 10[CFG] using trusted certificate "C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=client" 10[IKE] authentication of 'C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=client' with RSA successful 10[ENC] added payload of type ID_V1 to message 10[ENC] added payload of type SIGNATURE_V1 to message 10[IKE] authentication of 'C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=vpn.strongswan.org' (myself) successful 10[IKE] queueing XAUTH task 10[IKE] sending end entity cert "C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=vpn.strongswan.org" 10[NET] sending packet: from 96.244.142.28[4500] to 208.54.35.241[35595] 04[NET] sending packet: from 96.244.142.28[4500] to 208.54.35.241[35595] 10[IKE] activating new tasks 10[IKE] activating XAUTH task 10[NET] sending packet: from 96.244.142.28[4500] to 208.54.35.241[35595] 04[NET] sending packet: from 96.244.142.28[4500] to 208.54.35.241[35595] 01[JOB] next event in 3s 999ms, waiting 10[MGR] checkin IKE_SA android2[1] 10[MGR] check-in of IKE_SA successful. 08[NET] received packet: from 208.54.35.241[35595] to 96.244.142.28[4500] 08[NET] waiting for data on sockets 12[MGR] checkout IKE_SA by message 12[MGR] IKE_SA android2[1] successfully checked out 12[NET] received packet: from 208.54.35.241[35595] to 96.244.142.28[4500] 12[MGR] checkin IKE_SA android2[1] 12[MGR] check-in of IKE_SA successful. 08[NET] received packet: from 208.54.35.241[35595] to 96.244.142.28[4500] 16[MGR] checkout IKE_SA by message 16[MGR] IKE_SA android2[1] successfully checked out 16[NET] received packet: from 208.54.35.241[35595] to 96.244.142.28[4500] 08[NET] waiting for data on sockets 16[IKE] XAuth authentication of 'android' successful 16[IKE] reinitiating already active tasks 16[IKE] XAUTH task 16[NET] sending packet: from 96.244.142.28[4500] to 208.54.35.241[35595] 04[NET] sending packet: from 96.244.142.28[4500] to 208.54.35.241[35595] 16[MGR] checkin IKE_SA android2[1] 01[JOB] next event in 3s 907ms, waiting 16[MGR] check-in of IKE_SA successful. 08[NET] received packet: from 208.54.35.241[35595] to 96.244.142.28[4500] 09[MGR] checkout IKE_SA by message 09[MGR] IKE_SA android2[1] successfully checked out 09[NET] received packet: from 208.54.35.241[35595] to 96.244.142.28[4500] .8rS 09[IKE] IKE_SA android2[1] established between 96.244.142.28[C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=vpn.strongswan.org]...208.54.35.241[C=CH, O=strongSwan, CN=client] 09[IKE] IKE_SA android2[1] state change: CONNECTING => ESTABLISHED 09[IKE] scheduling reauthentication in 3409s 09[IKE] maximum IKE_SA lifetime 3589s 09[IKE] activating new tasks 09[IKE] nothing to initiate 09[MGR] checkin IKE_SA android2[1] 09[MGR] check-in of IKE_SA successful. 09[MGR] checkout IKE_SA 09[MGR] IKE_SA android2[1] successfully checked out 09[MGR] checkin IKE_SA android2[1] 09[MGR] check-in of IKE_SA successful. 01[JOB] next event in 3s 854ms, waiting 08[NET] waiting for data on sockets 08[NET] received packet: from 208.54.35.241[35595] to 96.244.142.28[4500] 14[MGR] checkout IKE_SA by message 14[MGR] IKE_SA android2[1] successfully checked out 14[NET] received packet: from 208.54.35.241[35595] to 96.244.142.28[4500] 14[IKE] processing INTERNAL_IP4_ADDRESS attribute 14[IKE] processing INTERNAL_IP4_NETMASK attribute 14[IKE] processing INTERNAL_IP4_DNS attribute 14[IKE] processing INTERNAL_IP4_NBNS attribute 14[IKE] processing UNITY_BANNER attribute 14[IKE] processing UNITY_DEF_DOMAIN attribute 14[IKE] processing UNITY_SPLITDNS_NAME attribute 14[IKE] processing UNITY_SPLIT_INCLUDE attribute 14[IKE] processing UNITY_LOCAL_LAN attribute 14[IKE] processing APPLICATION_VERSION attribute 14[IKE] peer requested virtual IP %any 14[CFG] assigning new lease to 'android' 14[IKE] assigning virtual IP 10.0.0.2 to peer 'android' 14[NET] sending packet: from 96.244.142.28[4500] to 208.54.35.241[35595] 14[MGR] checkin IKE_SA android2[1] 14[MGR] check-in of IKE_SA successful. 04[NET] sending packet: from 96.244.142.28[4500] to 208.54.35.241[35595] 08[NET] waiting for data on sockets 01[JOB] got event, queuing job for execution 01[JOB] next event in 91ms, waiting 13[MGR] checkout IKE_SA 13[MGR] IKE_SA android2[1] successfully checked out 13[MGR] checkin IKE_SA android2[1] 13[MGR] check-in of IKE_SA successful. 01[JOB] got event, queuing job for execution 01[JOB] next event in 24s 136ms, waiting 15[MGR] checkout IKE_SA 15[MGR] IKE_SA android2[1] successfully checked out 15[MGR] checkin IKE_SA android2[1] 15[MGR] check-in of IKE_SA successful.

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• Install Quartz.Net as a windows service and Test installation

  - by Tarun Arora

  In this blog post I’ll be covering, 01: Where to download Quartz.net from 02: How to install Quartz.net as a Windows service 03: Test the Quartz.net Installation If you are new to Quartz.net I would recommend reading the blog post on a brief introduction to Quartz.net. 01 – Where to download Quartz.net? http://sourceforge.net/projects/quartznet/files/quartznet/       Currently version  Quartz.Net 2.0.1 is the recommended download version. 02 – How to install Quartz.net as a Windows service         Go to the download location and unzip the Quartz.net package Navigate to the folder Quartz.Net \ Server \ bin – This is where you will find different .net version installers of the quartz.net packages. For example in the screen shot above, you can see the Quartz.net .net 3.5 and .net 4 packages. Open up the Quartz.net .net 4.0 folder, this folder contains the files you need to install Quartz.net as a windows service Copy the contents of the folder Downloads\Quartz.NET-2.0.1\server\bin\4.0 to the folder %program files%\Quartz.net   5. Open up a new CMD as an administrator and run the below command to install Quartz.net as a windows service /> Quartz.Server.exe install 6. How do I know that Quartz.Net service has installed as a Windows service? Go to run prompt and type ‘services.msc’ you should now see all the windows services installed on your machine. Navigate down to look for Quartz.Net. The service installs itself as an automatic startup Type and log on as ‘Local System’. You can easily change this to your prefer account that you would like to run the service as. If you wanted to name the Quartz service something else then that’s also possible… Can I change the default display name of the quartz.net windows service? Yes, you can! Navigate to C:\Program Files (x86)\Quartz.Net\ and open up the config file ‘quartz.config’ - You can change the instance name - You can change the default thread count of 10 - The port that the service listens to (by default this is port 555) A blog post on more configuration details can be found here. 03 – Test Quartz.Net windows service installation So, I have installed Quartz.Net as a windows service, how do I test whether my installation has been successful. Open up cmd as an administrator and run the below command, C:\Program Files (x86)\Quartz.Net> Quartz.Server.exe –i Since by default the Quartz.net windows service writes INFO level diagnostics (this can be changed from Quartz.Server.exe.config) you should see the service information show up on the console. For instance in the example above I can see that the service is running in a NON CLUSTERED mode, its currently not started and is currently in standby mode with 0 number of jobs executed so far… This was second in the series of posts on enterprise scheduling using Quartz.net, in the next post I’ll be covering how to run your first scheduled task using Quartz.net windows service. Thank you for taking the time out and reading this blog post. If you enjoyed the post, remember to subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TarunArora. Stay tuned!

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• AIX Grid Control 10.2.0.5 Communication and Monitoring Issue since 31-DEC-2010

  - by jayatheertha.rao(at)oracle.com

  Detailed symptoms for Oracle Management Server (OMS) 10.2.0.5 on AIX Oracle Management Service 10.2.0.5 instances on AIX 5L remain active and functional, but the OMS instances fail to communicate with the Grid Control Management Agents.An SSLPeerUnverified exception will be reported in the file $ORACLE_HOME/sysman/log/emoms.trc when OMS attempts to connect with an Agent:Javax.net.ssl.SSLPeerUnverifiedException: peer not authenticatedat com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.SSLSessionImpl.getPeerCertificateChain(DashoA12275)at oracle.sysman.emSDK.emd.comm.EMDClient.authenticateHTTPConnection(EMDClient.java:2002)at oracle.sysman.emSDK.emd.comm.EMDClient.getConnection(EMDClient.java:1877)at oracle.sysman.emSDK.emd.comm.EMDClient.getConnection(EMDClient.java:1810)at oracle.sysman.emSDK.emd.comm.EMDClient.verifyHttpConnection(EMDClient.java:2540)at oracle.sysman.emSDK.emd.comm.EMDClient.getResponseForRequest(EMDClient.java:2323)at oracle.sysman.emSDK.emd.comm.EMDClient.getUploadManagerStatus(EMDClient.java:4853)at oracle.sysman.eml.admin.rep.emdConfig.EmdConfigTargetsData.getEmdUploadData(EmdConfigTargetsData.java:1640)at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)This error may be reported when:- Accessing the Agent home page in Grid Control- Setting preferred credentials for a target monitored by the Agent- Managing metrics for a target monitored by the Agent The jobs scheduled to be run by Agents can become non-responsiveThe OMS log file $ORACLE_HOME/sysman/log/emoms.trc can show:2010-12-31 00:06:58,204 [JobWorker 430:Thread-34] DEBUG emSDK.comm getStreamResponse.4015 - oracle.sysman.emSDK.emd.comm.CommException: java.io.IOException: javax.net.ssl.SSLPeerUnverifiedException: peer not authenticatedoracle.sysman.emSDK.emd.comm.CommException: java.io.IOException: javax.net.ssl.SSLPeerUnverifiedException: peer not authenticatedat oracle.sysman.emSDK.emd.comm.EMDClient.getStreamResponse_(EMDClient.java:4088)at oracle.sysman.emSDK.emd.comm.EMDClient.getStreamResponse(EMDClient.java:4009)at oracle.sysman.emSDK.emd.comm.EMDClient.remoteOperation(EMDClient.java:3404)at oracle.sysman.emdrep.jobs.CommandManager.requestRemoteCommand(CommandManager.java:765)at oracle.sysman.emdrep.jobs.commands.RemoteOp.executeCommand(RemoteOp.java:434)at oracle.sysman.emdrep.jobs.commands.RemoteOp.executeCommand(RemoteOp.java:491)at oracle.sysman.emdrep.jobs.BaseJobWorker.runStep(BaseJobWorker.java:614)at oracle.sysman.emdrep.jobs.BaseJobWorker.doOneOperation(BaseJobWorker.java:738)at oracle.sysman.emdrep.jobs.JobWorker.doOneOperation(JobWorker.java:306)at oracle.sysman.emdrep.jobs.JobWorker.run(JobWorker.java:288)at oracle.sysman.util.threadPoolManager.WorkerThread.run(Worker.java:261) Detailed symptoms for Grid Control Management Agent 10.2.0.5 on AIX Beginning 31-DEC-2010 00:00:00, 10.2.0.5 Management Agents running on the AIX 5L operating system will fail to monitor Oracle Application Server targets. As a result, the Availability Status for the Oracle Application Server targets will be in the "Metric Error" state. NOTE: The 10.2.0.5.0 Agents would experience these errors regardless of the version/platform of the OMS.The following metric error is seen in the console for the Oracle Application Server targets monitored by a Grid Control Management Agent 10.2.0.5 installed on AIX and experiencing a Root Certificate Authority issue:Message oracle.sysman.emSDK.emd.fetchlet.FetchletException: oracle.sysman.emSDK.emd.fetchlet.FetchletException: oracle.sysman.emSDK.emd.fetchlet.FetchletException: oracle.sysman.emSDK.emd.comm.CommException: java.io.IOException: javax.net.ssl.SSLPeerUnverifiedException: peer not authenticated The Grid Control Management Agent log file $ORACLE_HOME/sysman/log/emagentfetchlet.log (or $ORACLE_HOME/hostname/sysman/log/emagentfetchlet.log for a clustered Agent) includes the following errors:2010-12-31 00:01:03,626 [nmefmgr_getJNIFetchlet] ERROR ias.ResponseMetric getResponseMetric.154 - Unable tocompute application server statusoracle.sysman.emSDK.emd.fetchlet.FetchletException: oracle.sysman.emSDK.emd.comm.CommException: java.io.IOException: javax.net.ssl.SSLPeerUnverifiedException: peer not authenticatedat oracle.sysman.ias.ias.ResponseMetric.getResponseMetric(ResponseMetric.java:108)at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:79)at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:43)at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:618)at oracle.sysman.emd.fetchlets.JavaWrapperFetchlet.getMetric(JavaWrapperFetchlet.java:217)at oracle.sysman.emd.fetchlets.FetchletWrapper.getMetric(FetchletWrapper.java:382) Beginning 31-DEC-2010, 10.2.0.5 Management Agents on the AIX 5L platform will fail to secure or re-secure with Oracle Management Service (OMS). This failure will cause installation of 10.2.0.5 Agents on the AIX 5L platform to fail.NOTE: The 10.2.0.5.0 Agents would experience these errors regardless of the version/platform of the OMS.The "emctl secure agent" command will fail with the following error, which will be written to the $ORACLE_HOME/sysman/log/secure.log file (or $ORACLE_HOME/hostname/sysman/log/secure.log for a clustered Agent) :2011-01-03 21:06:11,941 [main] ERROR agent.SecureAgentCmd main.207 - Failedto secure the Agent:javax.net.ssl.SSLPeerUnverifiedException: peer not authenticatedatcom.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.SSLSessionImpl.getPeerCertificateChain(DashoA6275)atoracle.sysman.emctl.secure.agent.SecureAgentCmd.checkUpload(SecureAgentCmd.java:478)atoracle.sysman.emctl.secure.agent.SecureAgentCmd.secureAgent(SecureAgentCmd.java:249)atoracle.sysman.emctl.secure.agent.SecureAgentCmd.main(SecureAgentCmd.java:200)  For solution, refer to AIX Grid Control 10.2.0.5 SSL Communication and Monitoring Issue since 31-DEC-2010 (Doc ID 1275070.1)

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• Raspberry Pi entrance signed backed by Umbraco - Part 1

  - by Chris Houston

  Being experts on all things Umbraco, we jumped at the chance to help our client, QV Offices, with their pressing signage predicament. They needed to display a sign in the entrance to their building and approached us for our advice. Of course it had to be electronic: displaying multiple names of their serviced office clients, meeting room bookings and on-the-pulse promotions. But with a winding Victorian staircase and minimal storage space how could the monitor be run, updated and managed? That’s where we came in…Raspberry PiUmbraco CMSAutomatic updatesAutomated monitor of the signPower saving when the screen is not in useMounting the screenThe screen that has been used is a standard LED low energy Full HD screen and has been mounted on the wall using it's VESA mounting points, as the wall is a stud wall we were able to add an access panel behind the screen to feed through the mains, HDMI and sensor cables.The Raspberry Pi is then tucked away out of sight in the main electrical cupboard which just happens to be next to the sign, we had an electrician add a power point inside this cupboard to allow us to power the screen and the Raspberry Pi.Designing the interface and editing the contentAlthough a room sign was the initial requirement from QV Offices, their medium term goal has always been to add online meeting booking to their website and hence we suggested adding information about the current and next day's meetings to the sign that would be pulled directly from their online booking system.We produced the design and built the web page to fit exactly on a 1920 x 1080 screen (Full HD in Portrait)As you would expect all the information can be edited via an Umbraco CMS, they are able to add floors, rooms, clients and virtual clients as well as add meeting bookings to their meeting diary.How we configured the Raspberry PiAfter receiving a new Raspberry Pi we downloaded the latest release of Raspbian operating system and followed the official guide which shows how to copy the OS onto an SD card from a Mac, we then followed the majority of steps on this useful guide: 10 Things to Do After Buying a Raspberry Pi.Installing ChromiumWe chose to use the Chromium web browser which for those who do not know is the open sourced version of Google Chrome. You can install this from the terminal with the following command:sudo apt-get install chromium-browserInstalling UnclutterWe found this little application which automatically hides the mouse pointer, it is used in the script below and is installed using the following command:sudo apt-get install unclutterAuto start Chromium and disabling the screen saver, power saving and mouseWhen the Raspberry Pi has been installed it will not have a keyboard or mouse and hence if their was a power cut we needed it to always boot and re-loaded Chromium with the correct URL.Our preferred command line text editor is Nano and I have assumed you know how to use this editor or will be able to work it out pretty quickly.So using the following command:sudo nano /etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE/autostartWe then changed the autostart file content to:@lxpanel --profile LXDE@pcmanfm --desktop --profile LXDE@xscreensaver -no-splash@xset s off@xset -dpms@xset s noblank@chromium --kiosk --incognito http://www.qvoffices.com/someURL@unclutter -idle 0The first few commands turn off the screen saver and power saving, we then open Cromium in Kiosk Mode (full screen with no menu etc) and pass in the URL to use (I have changed the URL in this example) We found a useful blog post with the Cromium command line switches.Finally we also open an application called Unclutter which auto hides the mouse after 0 seconds, so you will never see a mouse on the sign.We also had to edit the following file:sudo nano /etc/lightdm/lightdm.confAnd added the following line under the [SeatDefault] section:xserver-command=X -s 0 dpmsRefreshing the screenWe decided to try and add a scheduled task that would trigger Chromium to reload the page, at some point in the future we might well change this to using Javascript to update the content, but for now this works fine.First we installed the XDOTool which enables you to script Keyboard commands:sudo apt-get install xdotoolWe used the Refreshing Chromium Browser by Shell Script post as a reference and created the following shell script (which we called refreshing.sh):export DISPLAY=":0"WID=$(xdotool search --onlyvisible --class chromium|head -1)xdotool windowactivate ${WID}xdotool key ctrl+F5This selects the correct display and then sends a CTRL + F5 to refresh Chromium.You will need to give this file execute permissions:chmod a=rwx refreshing.shNow we have the script file setup we just need to schedule it to call this script periodically which is done by using Crontab, to edit this you use the following command:crontab -eAnd we added the following:*/5 * * * * DISPLAY=":.0" /home/pi/scripts/refreshing.sh >/home/pi/cronlog.log 2>&1This calls our script every 5 minutes to refresh the display and it logs any errors to the cronlog.log file.SummaryQV Offices now have a richer and more manageable booking system than they did before we started, and a great new sign to boot.How could we make sure that the sign was running smoothly downstairs in a busy office centre? A second post will follow outlining exactly how Vizioz enabled QV Offices to monitor their sign simply and remotely, from the comfort of their desks.

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• I’m a Phoenix… and I’m miffed

  - by Stan Spotts

  For personal reasons, almost 30 years ago I left school to enter the workforce. I decided late 2008 to go back to school and finish my degree. After the expected loss of credits for a transfer, from Temple University to University of Phoenix, I'm now about 75% done. The experience has been interesting. Classes are time compressed, only 5 weeks each. Because I have a family and a full time job, I'm taking one at a time. Even so, I've written more papers in these classes than I ever wrote at Temple. My own papers are one thing, but the team papers give me heartburn since I can't completely control what goes into them. Not a big deal except that they make up 30% of our grade. In any case, most of the class facilitators have been great. I had great ones for Accounting, Finance, and frankly most others. I've had a few (4, maybe) cases where I was less than 2 points from an A, and asked the facilitator if I could get any of my work reviewed to see if I could get those extra points. I figured it was worth a shot, and there were no extenuating circumstances to help make my case. I think that only one facilitator decided after a review of one paper that my interpretation was good, just not what he expected, and gave me another point, which gave me an A. So while none are pushovers, they've all been open to discussion, which is as much as I should expect. Overall, good experience. That is, until my last class. On the second week, the day I was due to hand in my personal assignment for the week, I was in an accident. An SUV creamed my little Ford Focus, and totaled it (estimated repair over $11K). I was pretty banged up, especially my left shoulder. I was scheduled for rotator cuff surgery for two weeks later, and getting hit against the door really made it worse. After dealing with the police, the EMT, the tow truck, and the Percocet and Flexeril for the pain, I crashed for the night and didn't get to upload my paper until the next day. The instructor took 30% off for it being late, even after I supplied photos of the car, my arm (huge bruises), and offered to supply the police report number. I figured I'd be okay since that's 2.7 points, and I could lose up to 5 before jeopardizing an A grade. Well, that wasn't the case as we lost more points than I expected on our team paper in Week 5. I ended up with a 94.3. Yes, 7/10 of a point from an A. Of course I asked the instructor to review the issue with the accident and give me just the 0.7 points I needed for the A. That got me a short response of "I have received your emails and review your work over the last five weeks. Your current grade will stand. If you would like to dispute your grade then please feel free to contact your academic advisor. I wish you much success in your professional and academic career." Brrrr….! So I asked my academic advisor to file a dispute. If it wasn't that a pretty bad car accident was the cause, I wouldn't have. Without the grade reduction, I would have had a 97 for the class, so I'll argue that I was performing at the A level throughout the class. Why her purported "review" of my work didn't then warrant such a minor adjustment, I don't know. An A- drops my GPA, and this ticked me off. Now I have to wait and see what the school says about the grade dispute.

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• Framework 4 Features: Support for Timed Jobs

  - by Anthony Shorten

  One of the new features of the Oracle Utilities Application Framework V4 is the ability for the batch framework to support Timed Batch. Traditionally batch is associated with set processing in the background in a fixed time frame. For example, billing customers. Over the last few versions their has been functionality required by the products required a more monitoring style batch process. The monitor is a batch process that looks for specific business events based upon record status or other pieces of data. For example, the framework contains a fact monitor (F1-FCTRN) that can be configured to look for specific status's or other conditions. The batch process then uses the instructions on the object to determine what to do. To support monitor style processing, you need to run the process regularly a number of times a day (for example, every ten minutes). Traditional batch could support this but it was not as optimal as expected (if you are a site using the old Workflow subsystem, you understand what I mean). The Batch framework was extended to add additional facilities to support times (and continuous batch which is another new feature for another blog entry). The new facilities include: The batch control now defines the job as Timed or Not Timed. Non-Timed batch are traditional batch jobs. The timer interval (the interval between executions) can be specified The timer can be made active or inactive. Only active timers are executed. Setting the Timer Active to inactive will stop the job at the next time interval. Setting the Timer Active to Active will start the execution of the timed job. You can specify the credentials, language to view the messages and an email address to send the a summary of the execution to. The email address is optional and requires an email server to be specified in the relevant feature configuration. You can specify the thread limits and commit intervals to be sued for the multiple executions. Once a timer job is defined it will be executed automatically by the Business Application Server process if the DEFAULT threadpool is active. This threadpool can be started using the online batch daemon (for non-production) or externally using the threadpoolworker utility. At that time any batch process with the Timer Active set to Active and Batch Control Type of Timed will begin executing. As Timed jobs are executed automatically then they do not appear in any external schedule or are managed by an external scheduler (except via the DEFAULT threadpool itself of course). Now, if the job has no work to do as the timer interval is being reached then that instance of the job is stopped and the next instance started at the timer interval. If there is still work to complete when the interval interval is reached, the instance will continue processing till the work is complete, then the instance will be stopped and the next instance scheduled for the next timer interval. One of the key ways of optimizing this processing is to set the timer interval correctly for the expected workload. This is an interesting new feature of the batch framework and we anticipate it will come in handy for specific business situations with the monitor processes.

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• Oracle BI and XS Energy Drinks – Don’t Miss the Amway Presentation!

  - by Michelle Kimihira

  By Maria Forney Amway is a global leader in the direct sales industry with $10.9B in annual sales in more than 100 countries and territories. The company has implemented a global BI framework that provides accurate, consistent, and timely insights to support global, regional and local analytical research, business planning, performance measurement and assessment. Oracle BI EE is used by 1500 employees across Amway sales, marketing, finance, and supply chain business units as well as Amway affiliates in Europe, Russia, South Africa, Japan, Australia, Latin America, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Indonesia. Last week, I spoke with Lead Data Analyst with Amway Global Sales, Dan Arganbright, and IT Manager with Amway BI Competency Center, Mike Olson, about their upcoming presentation at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco. Scheduled during a prime speaking slot on Monday, October 1 at 12:15pm in Moscone West, 2007, Dan and Mike will discuss their experience building Amway’s Distributor Consulting solution, powered by Oracle BI EE. You can find more information here. As background, Amway offers people an opportunity to own their own businesses and consumers exclusive products in health and wellness, beauty and home care.  The Amway internal Sales organization is charged with consulting leadership-level Distributors to help them with data insights and ultimately grow their business. Until recently, this was a resource-intense process of gathering and formatting data. In some markets, it took over 40 hours to collect the data and produce the analysis needed for one consultation session. Amway began its global BI journey in 2006 and since then the company has migrated from having multiple technology providers and integration points to an integrated strategic vendor approach. Today, the company has standardized on Oracle technology for BI.  Amway has achieved cost savings through the retirement of redundant technology platforms. In addition, Mike’s organization has led the charge to align disparate BI organizations into a BI Competency Center.  The following diagram highlights the simplicity of the standardized architecture of Amway today. Dubbed Distributor Consulting, Amway has developed a BI solution using the Oracle technology stack to help Distributor leaders grow their businesses. The Distributor Consulting solution provides over 40 metrics for Sales staff to provide data-driven insights on the Distributors and organizations they support.  Using Oracle BI EE, Exadata, and Oracle Data Integrator, Amway provides customized and personalized business intelligence, and the Oracle BI EE dashboards were developed by the Amway Sales organization, which demonstrates business empowerment of the technology. Amway is also leveraging the power of BI to drive business growth in all of its markets.  A new set of Distributor Segmentation metrics are enabling a better understanding of distributor behaviors. A Global Scorecard that Amway developed provides key metrics at a market and global level for executive-level discussions. Product Analysis teams can now highlight repeat purchase rates, product penetration and the success of CRM campaigns. In the words of Dan and Mike, the addition of Exadata 11 months ago has been “a game changer.”  Amway has been able to dramatically reduce complexity, improve performance and increase business productivity and cost savings. For example, the number of indexes on the global data warehouse was reduced from more than 1,000 to less than 20.  Pulling data for the highest level distributors or the largest markets in the company now can be done in minutes instead of hours.  As a result, IT has shifted from performance tuning and keeping the system operational to higher-value business-focused activities. •       “The distributors that have been introduced to the BI reports have found them extremely helpful. Because they have never had this kind of information before, when they were presented with the reports, they wanted to take action immediately!”  -     Sales Development Manager in Latin America Without giving away more, the Amway case study presentation will be one of the unique customer sessions at OpenWorld this year. Speakers Dan Arganbright and Mike Olson have planned an interactive and entertaining session on Monday October 1 at 12:15pm in Moscone West, 2007. I’ll see you there!

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