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  • Guide to MySQL & NoSQL, Webinar Q&A

    - by Mat Keep
    0 0 1 959 5469 Homework 45 12 6416 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-ansi-language:EN-US;} Yesterday we ran a webinar discussing the demands of next generation web services and how blending the best of relational and NoSQL technologies enables developers and architects to deliver the agility, performance and availability needed to be successful. Attendees posted a number of great questions to the MySQL developers, serving to provide additional insights into areas like auto-sharding and cross-shard JOINs, replication, performance, client libraries, etc. So I thought it would be useful to post those below, for the benefit of those unable to attend the webinar. Before getting to the Q&A, there are a couple of other resources that maybe useful to those looking at NoSQL capabilities within MySQL: - On-Demand webinar (coming soon!) - Slides used during the webinar - Guide to MySQL and NoSQL whitepaper  - MySQL Cluster demo, including NoSQL interfaces, auto-sharing, high availability, etc.  So here is the Q&A from the event  Q. Where does MySQL Cluster fit in to the CAP theorem? A. MySQL Cluster is flexible. A single Cluster will prefer consistency over availability in the presence of network partitions. A pair of Clusters can be configured to prefer availability over consistency. A full explanation can be found on the MySQL Cluster & CAP Theorem blog post.  Q. Can you configure the number of replicas? (the slide used a replication factor of 1) Yes. A cluster is configured by an .ini file. The option NoOfReplicas sets the number of originals and replicas: 1 = no data redundancy, 2 = one copy etc. Usually there's no benefit in setting it >2. Q. Interestingly most (if not all) of the NoSQL databases recommend having 3 copies of data (the replication factor).    Yes, with configurable quorum based Reads and writes. MySQL Cluster does not need a quorum of replicas online to provide service. Systems that require a quorum need > 2 replicas to be able to tolerate a single failure. Additionally, many NoSQL systems take liberal inspiration from the original GFS paper which described a 3 replica configuration. MySQL Cluster avoids the need for a quorum by using a lightweight arbitrator. You can configure more than 2 replicas, but this is a tradeoff between incrementally improved availability, and linearly increased cost. Q. Can you have cross node group JOINS? Wouldn't that run into the risk of flooding the network? MySQL Cluster 7.2 supports cross nodegroup joins. A full cross-join can require a large amount of data transfer, which may bottleneck on network bandwidth. However, for more selective joins, typically seen with OLTP and light analytic applications, cross node-group joins give a great performance boost and network bandwidth saving over having the MySQL Server perform the join. Q. Are the details of the benchmark available anywhere? According to my calculations it results in approx. 350k ops/sec per processor which is the largest number I've seen lately The details are linked from Mikael Ronstrom's blog The benchmark uses a benchmarking tool we call flexAsynch which runs parallel asynchronous transactions. It involved 100 byte reads, of 25 columns each. Regarding the per-processor ops/s, MySQL Cluster is particularly efficient in terms of throughput/node. It uses lock-free minimal copy message passing internally, and maximizes ID cache reuse. Note also that these are in-memory tables, there is no need to read anything from disk. Q. Is access control (like table) planned to be supported for NoSQL access mode? Currently we have not seen much need for full SQL-like access control (which has always been overkill for web apps and telco apps). So we have no plans, though especially with memcached it is certainly possible to turn-on connection-level access control. But specifically table level controls are not planned. Q. How is the performance of memcached APi with MySQL against memcached+MySQL or any other Object Cache like Ecache with MySQL DB? With the memcache API we generally see a memcached response in less than 1 ms. and a small cluster with one memcached server can handle tens of thousands of operations per second. Q. Can .NET can access MemcachedAPI? Yes, just use a .Net memcache client such as the enyim or BeIT memcache libraries. Q. Is the row level locking applicable when you update a column through memcached API? An update that comes through memcached uses a row lock and then releases it immediately. Memcached operations like "INCREMENT" are actually pushed down to the data nodes. In most cases the locks are not even held long enough for a network round trip. Q. Has anyone published an example using something like PHP? I am assuming that you just use the PHP memcached extension to hook into the memcached API. Is that correct? Not that I'm aware of but absolutely you can use it with php or any of the other drivers Q. For beginner we need more examples. Take a look here for a fully worked example Q. Can I access MySQL using Cobol (Open Cobol) or C and if so where can I find the coding libraries etc? A. There is a cobol implementation that works well with MySQL, but I do not think it is Open Cobol. Also there is a MySQL C client library that is a standard part of every mysql distribution Q. Is there a place to go to find help when testing and/implementing the NoSQL access? If using Cluster then you can use the [email protected] alias or post on the MySQL Cluster forum Q. Are there any white papers on this?  Yes - there is more detail in the MySQL Guide to NoSQL whitepaper If you have further questions, please don’t hesitate to use the comments below!

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  • Interrupted Upgrade from 11.10 to 12.04

    - by Tamil
    My upgrade using alternative iso from 11.10 to 12.04 got interrupted and I had to hard restart my machine. Now I feel that everything is recovered except my already installed packages like vim. How do I backup my home folder for fresh installation of ubuntu? Following are the errors I'm facing I couldn't mark any package for re-installation in synaptic or remove and install too. output of sudo apt-get install vim Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Package vim is not available, but is referred to by another package. This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or is only available from another source E: Package 'vim' has no installation candidate If I try installing it from synaptic I get apache2.2-common: Package apache2.2-common has no available version, but exists in the database. This typically means that the package was mentioned in a dependency and never uploaded, has been obsoleted or is not available with the contents of sources.list my sources.list file # added by the release upgrader # deb cdrom:[Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS _Precise Pangolin_ - Release amd64 (20120822.4)]/ precise main restricted # added by the release upgrader # # deb cdrom:[Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS _Precise Pangolin_ - Release amd64 (20120822.4)]/ precise main restricted # deb cdrom:[Ubuntu 11.04 _Natty Narwhal_ - Release amd64 (20110427.1)]/ natty main restricted # See http://help.ubuntu.com/community/UpgradeNotes for how to upgrade to # newer versions of the distribution. deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise main restricted deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise main restricted ## Major bug fix updates produced after the final release of the ## distribution. deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-updates main restricted deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-updates main restricted ## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu ## team. Also, please note that software in universe WILL NOT receive any ## review or updates from the Ubuntu security team. deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise universe deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise universe deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-updates universe deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-updates universe ## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu ## team, and may not be under a free licence. Please satisfy yourself as to ## your rights to use the software. Also, please note that software in ## multiverse WILL NOT receive any review or updates from the Ubuntu ## security team. deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise multiverse deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise multiverse deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-updates multiverse deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-updates multiverse ## Uncomment the following two lines to add software from the 'backports' ## repository. ## N.B. software from this repository may not have been tested as ## extensively as that contained in the main release, although it includes ## newer versions of some applications which may provide useful features. ## Also, please note that software in backports WILL NOT receive any review ## or updates from the Ubuntu security team. # deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ natty-backports main restricted universe multiverse # deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ natty-backports main restricted universe multiverse deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-security main restricted deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-security main restricted deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-security universe deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-security universe deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-security multiverse deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-security multiverse ## Uncomment the following two lines to add software from Canonical's ## 'partner' repository. ## This software is not part of Ubuntu, but is offered by Canonical and the ## respective vendors as a service to Ubuntu users. deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu precise partner # deb-src http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu natty partner ## This software is not part of Ubuntu, but is offered by third-party ## developers who want to ship their latest software. deb http://extras.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise main deb-src http://extras.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise main # deb http://tamil.3758_gmail.com:[email protected]/free unstable main # disabled on upgrade to oneiric # deb http://debian.datastax.com/natty oneiric main # disabled on upgrade to oneiric sudo apt-get update Err http://archive.ubuntu.com precise InRelease Err http://archive.canonical.com precise InRelease Err http://archive.ubuntu.com precise-updates InRelease Err http://archive.ubuntu.com precise-security InRelease Err http://extras.ubuntu.com precise InRelease Err http://archive.canonical.com precise Release.gpg Unable to connect to 172.16.140.249:3142: Err http://archive.ubuntu.com precise Release.gpg Unable to connect to 172.16.140.249:3142: Err http://archive.ubuntu.com precise-updates Release.gpg Unable to connect to 172.16.140.249:3142: Err http://extras.ubuntu.com precise Release.gpg Unable to connect to 172.16.140.249:3142: Err http://archive.ubuntu.com precise-security Release.gpg Unable to connect to 172.16.140.249:3142: W: Failed to fetch http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/precise/InRelease

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  • How to install chrome autosave extension?

    - by Oguz Can Sertel
    I would like to install chrome autosave plugin on ubuntu. when I try to install it with these steps https://github.com/NV/chrome-devtools-autosave-server , I got some errors... there was not installed node and npm out of box on ubuntu 12.10. So I installed npm and node with these commands. sudo apt-get install npm sudo apt-get install node and I tried to install autosave here is the output: sudo npm install -g autosave npm http GET https://registry.npmjs.org/autosave npm http 304 https://registry.npmjs.org/autosave npm http GET https://registry.npmjs.org/commander npm http 304 https://registry.npmjs.org/commander /usr/local/bin/autosave -> /usr/local/lib/node_modules/autosave/bin/autosave > [email protected] install /usr/local/lib/node_modules/autosave > node ./scripts/install.js npm ERR! error installing [email protected] npm WARN This failure might be due to the use of legacy binary "node" npm WARN For further explanations, please read npm WARN /usr/share/doc/nodejs/README.Debian npm WARN npm ERR! [email protected] install: `node ./scripts/install.js` npm ERR! `sh "-c" "node ./scripts/install.js"` failed with 1 npm ERR! npm ERR! Failed at the [email protected] install script. npm ERR! This is most likely a problem with the autosave package, npm ERR! not with npm itself. npm ERR! Tell the author that this fails on your system: npm ERR! node ./scripts/install.js npm ERR! You can get their info via: npm ERR! npm owner ls autosave npm ERR! There is likely additional logging output above. npm ERR! npm ERR! System Linux 3.5.0-17-generic npm ERR! command "/usr/bin/nodejs" "/usr/bin/npm" "install" "-g" "autosave" npm ERR! cwd /home/naczu npm ERR! node -v v0.6.19 npm ERR! npm -v 1.1.4 npm ERR! code ELIFECYCLE npm ERR! message [email protected] install: `node ./scripts/install.js` npm ERR! message `sh "-c" "node ./scripts/install.js"` failed with 1 npm ERR! errno {} npm ERR! npm ERR! Additional logging details can be found in: npm ERR! /home/naczu/npm-debug.log npm not ok and here is README.debian nodejs for Debian ================= packaged modules ---------------- The global search path for modules is /usr/lib/nodejs Future packages of node modules will use that directory, so it should be used wisely. user modules ------------ Node looks for modules in ./node_modules directory first; please read node#modules documentation carefully for more information. Node does not look for modules in /usr/local/lib/node_modules, where npm put them. Please read npm-link(1) of npm package, to understand how to properly use npm-installed modules in a project. Note that require.paths is not supported in future node versions. See also node(1) for more information about NODE_PATH. nodejs command -------------- The upstream name for the Node.js interpreter command is "node". In Debian the interpreter command has been changed to "nodejs". This was done to prevent a namespace collision: other commands use the same name in their upstreams, such as ax25-node from the "node" package. Scripts calling Node.js as a shell command must be changed to instead use the "nodejs" command.

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  • SSIS - Connect to Oracle on a 64-bit machine (Updated for SSIS 2008 R2)

    - by jorg
    We recently had a few customers where a connection to Oracle on a 64 bit machine was necessary. A quick search on the internet showed that this could be a big problem. I found all kind of blog and forum posts of developers complaining about this. A lot of developers will recognize the following error message: Test connection failed because of an error in initializing provider. Oracle client and networking components were not found. These components are supplied by Oracle Corporation and are part of the Oracle Version 7.3.3 or later client software installation. Provider is unable to function until these components are installed. After a lot of searching, trying and debugging I think I found the right way to do it! Problems Because BIDS is a 32 bit application, as well on 32 as on 64 bit machines, it cannot see the 64 bit driver for Oracle. Because of this, connecting to Oracle from BIDS on a 64 bit machine will never work when you install the 64 bit Oracle client. Another problem is the "Microsoft Provider for Oracle", this driver only exists in a 32 bit version and Microsoft has no plans to create a 64 bit one in the near future. The last problem I know of is in the Oracle client itself, it seems that a connection will never work with the instant client, so always use the full client. There are also a lot of problems with the 10G client, one of it is the fact that this driver can't handle the "(x86)" in the path of SQL Server. So using the 10G client is no option! Solution Download the Oracle 11G full client. Install the 32 AND the 64 bit version of the 11G full client (Installation Type: Administrator) and reboot the server afterwards. The 32 bit version is needed for development from BIDS with is 32 bit, the 64 bit version is needed for production with the SQLAgent, which is 64 bit. Configure the Oracle clients (both 32 and 64 bits) by editing  the files tnsnames.ora and sqlnet.ora. Try to do this with an Oracle DBA or, even better, let him/her do this. Use the "Oracle provider for OLE DB" from SSIS, don't use the "Microsoft Provider for Oracle" because a 64 bit version of it does not exist. Schedule your packages with the SQLAgent. Background information Visual Studio (BI Dev Studio)is a 32bit application. SQL Server Management Studio is a 32bit application. dtexecui.exe is a 32bit application. dtexec.exe has both 32bit and 64bit versions. There are x64 and x86 versions of the Oracle provider available. SQLAgent is a 64bit process. My advice to BI consultants is to get an Oracle DBA or professional for the installation and configuration of the 2 full clients (32 and 64 bit). Tell the DBA to download the biggest client available, this way you are sure that they pick the right one ;-) Testing if the clients have been installed and configured in the right way can be done with Windows ODBC Data Source Administrator: Start... Programs... Administrative tools... Data Sources (ODBC) ADITIONAL STEPS FOR SSIS 2008 R2 It seems that, unfortunately, some additional steps are necessary for SQL Server 2008 R2 installations: 1. Open REGEDIT (Start… Run… REGEDIT) on the server and search for the following entry (for the 32 bits driver): HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\MSDTC\MTxOCI Make sure the following values are entered: 2. Next, search for (for the 64 bits driver): HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\MSDTC\MTxOCI Make sure the same values as above are entered. 3. Reboot your server.

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  • Developing a Cost Model for Cloud Applications

    - by BuckWoody
    Note - please pay attention to the date of this post. As much as I attempt to make the information below accurate, the nature of distributed computing means that components, units and pricing will change over time. The definitive costs for Microsoft Windows Azure and SQL Azure are located here, and are more accurate than anything you will see in this post: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/offers/  When writing software that is run on a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering like Windows Azure / SQL Azure, one of the questions you must answer is how much the system will cost. I will not discuss the comparisons between on-premise costs (which are nigh impossible to calculate accurately) versus cloud costs, but instead focus on creating a general model for estimating costs for a given application. You should be aware that there are (at this writing) two billing mechanisms for Windows and SQL Azure: “Pay-as-you-go” or consumption, and “Subscription” or commitment. Conceptually, you can consider the former a pay-as-you-go cell phone plan, where you pay by the unit used (at a slightly higher rate) and the latter as a standard cell phone plan where you commit to a contract and thus pay lower rates. In this post I’ll stick with the pay-as-you-go mechanism for simplicity, which should be the maximum cost you would pay. From there you may be able to get a lower cost if you use the other mechanism. In any case, the model you create should hold. Developing a good cost model is essential. As a developer or architect, you’ll most certainly be asked how much something will cost, and you need to have a reliable way to estimate that. Businesses and Organizations have been used to paying for servers, software licenses, and other infrastructure as an up-front cost, and power, people to the systems and so on as an ongoing (and sometimes not factored) cost. When presented with a new paradigm like distributed computing, they may not understand the true cost/value proposition, and that’s where the architect and developer can guide the conversation to make a choice based on features of the application versus the true costs. The two big buckets of use-types for these applications are customer-based and steady-state. In the customer-based use type, each successful use of the program results in a sale or income for your organization. Perhaps you’ve written an application that provides the spot-price of foo, and your customer pays for the use of that application. In that case, once you’ve estimated your cost for a successful traversal of the application, you can build that into the price you charge the user. It’s a standard restaurant model, where the price of the meal is determined by the cost of making it, plus any profit you can make. In the second use-type, the application will be used by a more-or-less constant number of processes or users and no direct revenue is attached to the system. A typical example is a customer-tracking system used by the employees within your company. In this case, the cost model is often created “in reverse” - meaning that you pilot the application, monitor the use (and costs) and that cost is held steady. This is where the comparison with an on-premise system becomes necessary, even though it is more difficult to estimate those on-premise true costs. For instance, do you know exactly how much cost the air conditioning is because you have a team of system administrators? This may sound trivial, but that, along with the insurance for the building, the wiring, and every other part of the system is in fact a cost to the business. There are three primary methods that I’ve been successful with in estimating the cost. None are perfect, all are demand-driven. The general process is to lay out a matrix of: components units cost per unit and then multiply that times the usage of the system, based on which components you use in the program. That sounds a bit simplistic, but using those metrics in a calculation becomes more detailed. In all of the methods that follow, you need to know your application. The components for a PaaS include computing instances, storage, transactions, bandwidth and in the case of SQL Azure, database size. In most cases, architects start with the first model and progress through the other methods to gain accuracy. Simple Estimation The simplest way to calculate costs is to architect the application (even UML or on-paper, no coding involved) and then estimate which of the components you’ll use, and how much of each will be used. Microsoft provides two tools to do this - one is a simple slider-application located here: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/pricing-calculator/  The other is a tool you download to create an “Return on Investment” (ROI) spreadsheet, which has the advantage of leading you through various questions to estimate what you plan to use, located here: https://roianalyst.alinean.com/msft/AutoLogin.do?d=176318219048082115  You can also just create a spreadsheet yourself with a structure like this: Program Element Azure Component Unit of Measure Cost Per Unit Estimated Use of Component Total Cost Per Component Cumulative Cost               Of course, the consideration with this model is that it is difficult to predict a system that is not running or hasn’t even been developed. Which brings us to the next model type. Measure and Project A more accurate model is to actually write the code for the application, using the Software Development Kit (SDK) which can run entirely disconnected from Azure. The code should be instrumented to estimate the use of the application components, logging to a local file on the development system. A series of unit and integration tests should be run, which will create load on the test system. You can use standard development concepts to track this usage, and even use Windows Performance Monitor counters. The best place to start with this method is to use the Windows Azure Diagnostics subsystem in your code, which you can read more about here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sumitm/archive/2009/11/18/introducing-windows-azure-diagnostics.aspx This set of API’s greatly simplifies tracking the application, and in fact you can use this information for more than just a cost model. After you have the tracking logs, you can plug the numbers into ay of the tools above, which should give a representative cost or in some cases a unit cost. The consideration with this model is that the SDK fabric is not a one-to-one comparison with performance on the actual Windows Azure fabric. Those differences are usually smaller, but they do need to be considered. Also, you may not be able to accurately predict the load on the system, which might lead to an architectural change, which changes the model. This leads us to the next, most accurate method for a cost model. Sample and Estimate Using standard statistical and other predictive math, once the application is deployed you will get a bill each month from Microsoft for your Azure usage. The bill is quite detailed, and you can export the data from it to do analysis, and using methods like regression and so on project out into the future what the costs will be. I normally advise that the architect also extrapolate a unit cost from those metrics as well. This is the information that should be reported back to the executives that pay the bills: the past cost, future projected costs, and unit cost “per click” or “per transaction”, as your case warrants. The challenge here is in the model itself - statistical methods are not foolproof, and the larger the sample (in this case I recommend the entire population, not a smaller sample) is key. References and Tools Articles: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/patrick_butler_monterde/archive/2010/02/10/windows-azure-billing-overview.aspx http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/gg213848.aspx http://blog.codingoutloud.com/2011/06/05/azure-faq-how-much-will-it-cost-me-to-run-my-application-on-windows-azure/ http://blogs.msdn.com/b/johnalioto/archive/2010/08/25/10054193.aspx http://geekswithblogs.net/iupdateable/archive/2010/02/08/qampa-how-can-i-calculate-the-tco-and-roi-when.aspx   Other Tools: http://cloud-assessment.com/ http://communities.quest.com/community/cloud_tools

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  • Source-control 'wet-work'?

    - by Phil Factor
    When a design or creative work is flawed beyond remedy, it is often best to destroy it and start again. The other day, I lost the code to a long and intricate SQL batch I was working on. I’d thought it was impossible, but it happened. With all the technology around that is designed to prevent this occurring, this sort of accident has become a rare event.  If it weren’t for a deranged laptop, and my distraction, the code wouldn’t have been lost this time.  As always, I sighed, had a soothing cup of tea, and typed it all in again.  The new code I hastily tapped in  was much better: I’d held in my head the essence of how the code should work rather than the details: I now knew for certain  the start point, the end, and how it should be achieved. Instantly the detritus of half-baked thoughts fell away and I was able to write logical code that performed better.  Because I could work so quickly, I was able to hold the details of all the columns and variables in my head, and the dynamics of the flow of data. It was, in fact, easier and quicker to start from scratch rather than tidy up and refactor the existing code with its inevitable fumbling and half-baked ideas. What a shame that technology is now so good that developers rarely experience the cleansing shock of losing one’s code and having to rewrite it from scratch.  If you’ve never accidentally lost  your code, then it is worth doing it deliberately once for the experience. Creative people have, until Technology mistakenly prevented it, torn up their drafts or sketches, threw them in the bin, and started again from scratch.  Leonardo’s obsessive reworking of the Mona Lisa was renowned because it was so unusual:  Most artists have been utterly ruthless in destroying work that didn’t quite make it. Authors are particularly keen on writing afresh, and the results are generally positive. Lawrence of Arabia actually lost the entire 250,000 word manuscript of ‘The Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ by accidentally leaving it on a train at Reading station, before rewriting a much better version.  Now, any writer or artist is seduced by technology into altering or refining their work rather than casting it dramatically in the bin or setting a light to it on a bonfire, and rewriting it from the blank page.  It is easy to pick away at a flawed work, but the real creative process is far more brutal. Once, many years ago whilst running a software house that supplied commercial software to local businesses, I’d been supervising an accounting system for a farming cooperative. No packaged system met their needs, and it was all hand-cut code.  For us, it represented a breakthrough as it was for a government organisation, and success would guarantee more contracts. As you’ve probably guessed, the code got mangled in a disk crash just a week before the deadline for delivery, and the many backups all proved to be entirely corrupted by a faulty tape drive.  There were some fragments left on individual machines, but they were all of different versions.  The developers were in despair.  Strangely, I managed to re-write the bulk of a three-month project in a manic and caffeine-soaked weekend.  Sure, that elegant universally-applicable input-form routine was‘nt quite so elegant, but it didn’t really need to be as we knew what forms it needed to support.  Yes, the code lacked architectural elegance and reusability. By dawn on Monday, the application passed its integration tests. The developers rose to the occasion after I’d collapsed, and tidied up what I’d done, though they were reproachful that some of the style and elegance had gone out of the application. By the delivery date, we were able to install it. It was a smaller, faster application than the beta they’d seen and the user-interface had a new, rather Spartan, appearance that we swore was done to conform to the latest in user-interface guidelines. (we switched to Helvetica font to look more ‘Bauhaus’ ). The client was so delighted that he forgave the new bugs that had crept in. I still have the disk that crashed, up in the attic. In IT, we have had mixed experiences from complete re-writes. Lotus 123 never really recovered from a complete rewrite from assembler into C, Borland made the mistake with Arago and Quattro Pro  and Netscape’s complete rewrite of their Navigator 4 browser was a white-knuckle ride. In all cases, the decision to rewrite was a result of extreme circumstances where no other course of action seemed possible.   The rewrite didn’t come out of the blue. I prefer to remember the rewrite of Minix by young Linus Torvalds, or the rewrite of Bitkeeper by a slightly older Linus.  The rewrite of CP/M didn’t do too badly either, did it? Come to think of it, the guy who decided to rewrite the windowing system of the Xerox Star never regretted the decision. I’ll agree that one should often resist calls for a rewrite. One of the worst habits of the more inexperienced programmer is to denigrate whatever code he or she inherits, and then call loudly for a complete rewrite. They are buoyed up by the mistaken belief that they can do better. This, however, is a different psychological phenomenon, more related to the idea of some motorcyclists that they are operating on infinite lives, or the occasional squaddies that if they charge the machine-guns determinedly enough all will be well. Grim experience brings out the humility in any experienced programmer.  I’m referring to quite different circumstances here. Where a team knows the requirements perfectly, are of one mind on methodology and coding standards, and they already have a solution, then what is wrong with considering  a complete rewrite? Rewrites are so painful in the early stages, until that point where one realises the payoff, that even I quail at the thought. One needs a natural disaster to push one over the edge. The trouble is that source-control systems, and disaster recovery systems, are just too good nowadays.   If I were to lose this draft of this very blog post, I know I’d rewrite it much better. However, if you read this, you’ll know I didn’t have the nerve to delete it and start again.  There was a time that one prayed that unreliable hardware would deliver you from an unmaintainable mess of a codebase, but now technology has made us almost entirely immune to such a merciful act of God. An old friend of mine with long experience in the software industry has long had the idea of the ‘source-control wet-work’,  where one hires a malicious hacker in some wild eastern country to hack into one’s own  source control system to destroy all trace of the source to an application. Alas, backup systems are just too good to make this any more than a pipedream. Somehow, it would be difficult to promote the idea. As an alternative, could one construct a source control system that, on doing all the code-quality metrics, would systematically destroy all trace of source code that failed the quality test? Alas, I can’t see many managers buying into the idea. In reading the full story of the near-loss of Toy Story 2, it set me thinking. It turned out that the lucky restoration of the code wasn’t the happy ending one first imagined it to be, because they eventually came to the conclusion that the plot was fundamentally flawed and it all had to be rewritten anyway.  Was this an early  case of the ‘source-control wet-job’?’ It is very hard nowadays to do a rapid U-turn in a development project because we are far too prone to cling to our existing source-code.

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  • PASS: Election Changes for 2011

    - by Bill Graziano
    Last year after the election, the PASS Board created an Election Review Committee.  This group was charged with reviewing our election procedures and making suggestions to improve the process.  You can read about the formation of the group and review some of the intermediate work on the site – especially in the forums. I was one of the members of the group along with Joe Webb (Chair), Lori Edwards, Brian Kelley, Wendy Pastrick, Andy Warren and Allen White.  This group worked from October to April on our election process.  Along the way we: Interviewed interested parties including former NomCom members, Board candidates and anyone else that came forward. Held a session at the Summit to allow interested parties to discuss the issues Had numerous conference calls and worked through the various topics I can’t thank these people enough for the work they did.  They invested a tremendous number of hours thinking, talking and writing about our elections.  I’m proud to say I was a member of this group and thoroughly enjoyed working with everyone (even if I did finally get tired of all the calls.) The ERC delivered their recommendations to the PASS Board prior to our May Board meeting.  We reviewed those and made a few modifications.  I took their recommendations and rewrote them as procedures while incorporating those changes.  Their original recommendations as well as our final document are posted at the ERC documents page.  Please take a second and read them BEFORE we start the elections.  If you have any questions please post them in the forums on the ERC site. (My final document includes a change log at the end that I decided to leave in.  If you want to know which areas to pay special attention to that’s a good start.) Many of those recommendations were already posted in the forums or in the blogs of individual ERC members.  Hopefully nothing in the ERC document is too surprising. In this post I’m going to walk through some of the key changes and talk about what I remember from both ERC and Board discussions.  I’ll pay a little extra attention to things the Board changed from the ERC.  I’d also encourage any of the Board or ERC members to blog their thoughts on this. The Nominating Committee will continue to exist.  Personally, I was curious to see what the non-Board ERC members would think about the NomCom.  There was broad agreement that a group to vet candidates had value to the organization. The NomCom will be composed of five members.  Two will be Board members and three will be from the membership at large.  The only requirement for the three community members is that you’ve volunteered in some way (and volunteering is defined very broadly).  We expect potential at-large NomCom members to participate in a forum on the PASS site to answer questions from the other PASS members. We’re going to hold an election to determine the three community members.  It will be closer to voting for Summit sessions than voting for Board members.  That means there won’t be multiple dedicated emails.  If you’re at all paying attention it will be easy to participate.  Personally I wanted it easy for those that cared to participate but not overwhelm those that didn’t care.  I think this strikes a good balance. There’s also a clause that in order to be considered a winner in this NomCom election, you must receive 10 votes.  This is something I suggested.  I have no idea how popular the NomCom election is going to be.  I just wanted a fallback that if no one participated and some random person got in with one or two votes.  Any open slots will be filled by the NomCom chair (usually the PASS Immediate Past President).  My assumption is that they would probably take the next highest vote getters unless they were throwing flames in the forums or clearly unqualified.  As a final check, the Board still approves the final NomCom. The NomCom is going to rank candidates instead of rating them.  This has interesting implications.  This was championed by another ERC member and I’m hoping they write something about it.  This will really force the NomCom to make decisions between candidates.  You can’t just rate everyone a 3 and be done with it.  It may also make candidates appear further apart than they actually are.  I’m looking forward talking with the NomCom after this election and getting their feedback on this. The PASS Board added an option to remove a candidate with a unanimous vote of the NomCom.  This was primarily put in place to handle people that lied on their application or had a criminal background or some other unusual situation and we figured it out. We list an explicit goal of three candidate per open slot. We also wanted an easy way to find the NomCom candidate rankings from the ballot.  Hopefully this will satisfy those that want a broad candidate pool and those that want the NomCom to identify the most qualified candidates. The primary spokesperson for the NomCom is the committee chair.  After the issues around the election last year we didn’t have a good communication plan in place.  We should have and that was a failure on the part of the Board.  If there is criticism of the election this year I hope that falls squarely on the Board.  The community members of the NomCom shouldn’t be fielding complaints over the election process.  That said, the NomCom is ranking candidates and we are forcing them to rank some lower than others.  I’m sure you’ll each find someone that you think should have been ranked differently.  I also want to highlight one other change to the process that we started last year and isn’t included in these documents.  I think the candidate forums on the PASS site were tremendously helpful last year in helping people to find out more about candidates.  That gives our members a way to ask hard questions of the candidates and publicly see their answers. This year we have two important groups to fill.  The first is the NomCom.  We need three people from our membership to step up and fill this role.  It won’t be easy.  You will have to make subjective rankings of your fellow community members.  Your actions will be important in deciding who the future leaders of PASS will be.  There’s a 50/50 chance that one of the people you interview will be the President of PASS someday.  This is not a responsibility to be taken lightly. The second is the slate of candidates.  If you’ve ever thought about running for the Board this is the year.  We’ve never had nine candidates on the ballot before.  Your chance of making it through the NomCom are higher than in any previous year.  Unfortunately the more of you that run, the more of you that will lose in the election.  And hopefully that competition will mean more community involvement and better Board members for PASS. Is this the end of changes to the election process?  It isn’t.  Every year that I’ve been on the Board the election process has changed.  Some years there have been small changes and some years there have been large changes.  After this election we’ll look at how the process worked and decide what steps to take – just like we do every year.

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  • Build-time dependency resolving coming to Entity Framework. Now, how about those BI tools too?

    - by jamiet
    Three months ago I wrote a blog post entitled Some thoughts on Visual Studio database references and how they should be used for SQL Server BI where I shared some thoughts on a feature available to database developers in Visual Studio 2010 that I would love to see added to SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), Analysis Services (SSAS) and Reporting Services (SSRS). In there I said: Over the past few weeks I have been making heavy use of the Database tools in Visual Studio 2010 and one of the features that has most impressed me has been database references.   Database references allow you to have stored procedures in your database project that refer to objects (tables, views, stored procedures etc…) that exist in other database projects and hence when you build your database project it is able to resolve those references.   It occurred to me that similar functionality would be incredibly useful for SQL Server Integration Services(SSIS), Analysis Services (SSAS) & Reporting Services (SSRS) projects. After all reports, packages and data source views are rife with references to database objects – why shouldn’t we be able to have design-time dependency checking in our BI projects the same way that database and .Net developers do? In that blog post I shared links to three Connect submissions where I requested this feature be added to SSIS, SSAS & SSRS. In addition I also submitted a request that the feature be extended to .Net projects so that any reference to a database object in a .Net assembly can be resolved at build time. That Connect submission is at [Entity FX] Use database references to constrain the EDM and overnight it received this comment from Microsoft: We have been working on this feature for a while and and will be available soon This is really good news - it improves the Microsoft developer ecosystem by ensuring invalid references to database references get caught at build time (ideally as part of a Continuous integration build) rather than run time. [Hopefully it might nip this code-first nonsense in the bud too (Ooo...way to incite flame comments :) ) ]. If you want to see this feature in action then check out a video from Teched Europe last month entitled SQL Server Developer Tools Code-named "Juneau" where it is demo'd by Lance Delano and Tim Laverty.   The point of this blog post though is not just to draw attention to this forthcoming feature for .Net developers, it is to ask you to petition Microsoft to get this feature added to SSIS/SSAS/SSRS too. After all, we already know (from the video above) that the feature is coming to this new code-name Juneau development environment plus we also know that Juneau will be the development environment for SSIS/SSAS/SSRS as well - is it really much of a stretch to expect the BI tools to have access to this great feature too? I don't think so and if you agree with me then I urge you to vote and add a comment to the Connection submissions that are requesting this feature. They are at: [SSAS] Declare Object Dependancies [SSRS] Declare Object Dependancies [SSIS] Declare Object Dependancies (Update, Apparently someone at Microsoft has deemed it necassary to set this to private and I am not able to change it back even though I submitted it. You can still vote on the other two though.) Let's close that SQL Developer Gap!   @Jamiet    

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  • 10 Steps to access Oracle stored procedures from Crystal Reports

    Requirements to access Oracle stored procedures from CR The following requirements must be met in order for CR to access an Oracle stored procedure: 1. You must create a package that defines the REF CURSOR. This REF CURSOR must be strongly bound to a static pre-defined structure (see Strongly Bound REF CURSORs vs Weakly Bound REF CURSORs). This package must be created separately and before the creation of the stored procedure. NOTE Crystal Reports 9 native connections will support Oracle stored procedures created within packages as well as Oracle stored procedures referencing weakly bound REF CURSORs. Crystal Reports 8.5 native connections will support Oracle stored procedures referencing weakly bound REF CURSORs. 2. The procedure must have a parameter that is a REF CURSOR type. This is because CR uses this parameter to access and define the result set that the stored procedure returns. 3. The REF CURSOR parameter must be defined as IN OUT (read/write mode). After the procedure has opened and assigned a query to the REF CURSOR, CR will perform a FETCH call for every row from the query's result. This is why the parameter must be defined as IN OUT. 4. Parameters can only be input (IN) parameters. CR is not designed to work with OUT parameters. 5. The REF CURSOR variable must be opened and assigned its query within the procedure. 6. The stored procedure can only return one record set. The structure of this record set must not change, based on parameters. 7. The stored procedure cannot call another stored procedure. 8. If using an ODBC driver, it must be the CR Oracle ODBC driver (installed by CR). Other Oracle ODBC drivers (installed by Microsoft or Oracle) may not function correctly. 9. If you are using the CR ODBC driver, you must ensure that in the ODBC Driver Configuration setup, under the Advanced Tab, the option 'Procedure Return Results' is checked ON. 10. If you are using the native Oracle driver and using hard-coded date selection within the procedure, the date selection must use either a string representation format of 'YYYY-DD-MM' (i.e. WHERE DATEFIELD = '1999-01-01') or the TO_DATE function with the same format specified (i.e. WHERE DATEFIELD = TO_DATE ('1999-01-01','YYYY-MM-DD'). For more information, refer to kbase article C2008023. 11. Most importantly, this stored procedure must execute successfully in Oracle's SQL*Plus utility. If all of these conditions are met, you must next ensure you are using the appropriate database driver. Please refer to the sections in this white paper for a list of acceptable database drivers. span.fullpost {display:none;}

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  • Why We Should Learn to Stop Worrying and Love Millennials

    - by HCM-Oracle
    By Christine Mellon Much is said and written about the new generations of employees entering our workforce, as though they are a strange specimen, a mysterious life form to be “figured out,” accommodated and engaged – at a safe distance, of course.  At its worst, this talk takes a critical and disapproving tone, with baby boomer employees adamantly refusing to validate this new breed of worker, let alone determine how to help them succeed and achieve their potential.   The irony of our baby-boomer resentments and suspicions is that they belie the fact that we created the very vision that younger employees are striving to achieve.  From our frustrations with empty careers that did not fulfill us, from our opposition to “the man,” from our sharp memories of our parents’ toiling for 30 years just for the right to retire, from the simple desire not to live our lives in a state of invisibility, came the seeds of hope for something better. One characteristic of Millennial workers that grew from these seeds is the desire to experience as much as possible.  They are the “Experiential Employee”, with a passion for growing in diverse ways and expanding personal and professional horizons.  Rather than rooting themselves in a single company for a career, or even in a single career path, these employees are committed to building a broad portfolio of experiences and capabilities that will enable them to make a difference and to leave a mark of significance in the world.  How much richer is the organization that nurtures and leverages this inclination?  Our curmudgeonly ways must be surrendered and our focus redirected toward building the next generation of talent ecosystems, if we are to optimize what future generations have to offer.   Accelerating Professional Development In spite of our Boomer grumblings about Millennials’ “unrealistic” expectations, the truth is that we have a well-matched set of circumstances.  We have executives-in-waiting who want to learn quickly and a concurrent, urgent need to ramp up their development time, based on anticipated high levels of retirement in the next 10+ years.  Since we need to rapidly skill up these heirs to the corporate kingdom, isn’t it a fortunate coincidence that they are hungry to learn, develop and move fluidly throughout our organizations??  So our challenge now is to efficiently operationalize the wisdom we have acquired about effective learning and development.   We have already evolved from classroom-based models to diverse instructional methods.  The next step is to find the best approaches to help younger employees learn quickly and apply new learnings in an impactful way.   Creating temporary or even permanent functional partnerships among Millennial employees is one way to maximize outcomes.  This might take the form of 2 or more employees owning aspects of what once fell under a single role.  While one might argue this would mean duplication of resources, it could be a short term cost while employees come up to speed.  And the potential benefits would be numerous:  leveraging and validating the inherent sense of community of new generations, creating cross-functional skills with broad applicability, yielding additional perspectives and approaches to traditional work outcomes, and accelerating the performance curve for incumbents through Cooperative Learning (Johnson, D. and Johnson R., 1989, 1999).  This well-researched teaching strategy, where students support each other in the absorption and application of new information, has been shown to deliver faster, more efficient learning, and greater retention. Alternately, perhaps short term contracts with exiting retirees, or former retirees, to help facilitate the development of following generations may have merit.  Again, a short term cost, certainly.  However, the gains realized in shortening the learning curve, and strengthening engagement are substantial and lasting. Ultimately, there needs to be creative thinking applied for each organization on how to accelerate the capabilities of our future leaders in unique ways that mesh with current culture. The manner in which performance is evaluated must finally shift as well.  Employees will need to be assessed on how well they have developed key skills and capabilities vs. end-to-end mastery of functional positions they have no interest in keeping for an entire career. As we become more comfortable in placing greater and greater weight on competencies vs. tasks, we will realize increased organizational agility via this new generation of workers, which will be further enhanced by their natural flexibility and appetite for change. Revisiting Succession  For many years, organizations have failed to deliver desired succession planning outcomes.  According to CEB’s 2013 research, only 28% of current leaders were pre-identified in a succession plan. These disappointing results, along with the entrance of the experiential, Millennial employee into the workforce, may just provide the needed impetus for HR to reinvent succession processes.   We have recognized that the best professional development efforts are not always linear, and the time has come to fully adopt this philosophy in regard to succession as well.  Paths to specific organizational roles will not look the same for newer generations who seek out unique learning opportunities, without consideration of a singular career destination.  Rather than charting particular jobs as precursors for key positions, the experiences and skills behind what makes an incumbent successful must become essential in succession mapping.  And the multitude of ways in which those experiences and skills may be acquired must be factored into the process, along with the individual employee’s level of learning agility. While this may seem daunting, it is necessary and long overdue.  We have talked about the criticality of competency-based succession, however, we have not lived up to our own rhetoric.  Many Boomers have experienced the same frustration in our careers; knowing we are capable of shining in a particular role, but being denied the opportunity due to how our career history lined up, on paper, with documented job requirements.  These requirements usually emphasized past jobs/titles and specific tasks, versus capabilities, drive and willingness (let alone determination) to learn new things.  How satisfying would it be for us to leave a legacy where such narrow thinking no longer applies and potential is amplified? Realizing Diversity Another bloom from the seeds we Boomers have tried to plant over the past decades is a completely evolved view of diversity.  Millennial employees assume a diverse workforce, and are startled by anything less.  Their social tolerance, nurtured by wide and diverse networks, is unprecedented.  College graduates expect a similar landscape in the “real world” to what they experienced throughout their lives.  They appreciate and seek out divergent points of view and experiences without needing any persuasion.  The face of our U.S. workforce will likely see dramatic change as Millennials apply their fresh take on hiring and building strong teams, with an inherent sense of inclusion.  This wonderful aspect of the Millennial wave should be celebrated and strongly encouraged, as it is the fulfillment of our own aspirations. Future Perfect The Experiential Employee is operating more as a free agent than a long term player, and their commitment will essentially last as long as meaningful organizational culture and personal/professional opportunities keep their interest.  As Boomers, we have laid the foundation for this new, spirited employment attitude, and we should take pride in knowing that.  Generations to come will challenge organizations to excel in how they identify, manage and nurture talent. Let’s support and revel in the future that we’ve helped invent, rather than lament what we think has been lost.  After all, the future is always connected to the past.  And as so eloquently phrased by Antoine Lavoisier, French nobleman, chemist and politico:  “Nothing is Lost, Nothing is Created, and Everything is Transformed.” Christine has over 25 years of diverse HR experience.  She has held HR consulting and corporate roles, including CHRO positions for Echostar in Denver, a 6,000+ employee global engineering firm, and Aepona, a startup software firm, successfully acquired by Intel. Christine is a resource to Oracle clients, to assist in Human Capital Management strategy development and implementation, compensation practices, talent development initiatives, employee engagement, global HR management, and integrated HR systems and processes that support the full employee lifecycle. 

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  • Quaternion Camera Orbiting around a Sphere

    - by jessejuicer
    Background: I'm trying to create a game where the camera is always rotating around a single sphere. I'm using the DirectX D3DX math functions in C++ on Windows. The Problem: I cannot get both the camera position and orientation both working properly at the same time. Either one works but not both together. Here's the code for my quaternion camera that revolves around a sphere, always looking at the centerpoint of the sphere, ... as far as I understand it (but which isn't working properly): (I'm only going to present rotation around the X axis here, to simplify this post) Whenever the UP key is pressed or held down, the camera should rotate around the X axis, while looking at the centerpoint of the sphere (which is at 0,0,0 in the world). So, I build a quaternion that represents a small angle of rotation around the x axis like this (where 'deltaAngle' is a small enough number for a slow rotation): D3DXVECTOR3 rotAxis; D3DXQUATERNION tempQuat; tempQuat.x = 0.0f; tempQuat.y = 0.0f; tempQuat.z = 0.0f; tempQuat.w = 1.0f; rotAxis.x = 1.0f; rotAxis.y = 0.0f; rotAxis.z = 0.0f; D3DXQuaternionRotationAxis(&tempQuat, &rotAxis, deltaAngle); ...and I accumulate the result into the camera's current orientation quat, like this: D3DXQuaternionMultiply(&cameraOrientationQuat, &cameraOrientationQuat, &tempQuat); ...which all works fine. Now I need to build a view matrix to pass to DirectX SetTransform function. So I build a rotation matrix from the camera orientation quat as follows: D3DXMATRIXA16 rotationMatrix; D3DXMatrixIdentity(&rotationMatrix); D3DXMatrixRotationQuaternion(&rotationMatrix, &cameraOrientationQuat); ...Now (as seen below) if I just transpose that rotationMatrix and plug it into the 3x3 section of the view matrix, then negate the camera's position and plug it into the translation section of the view matrix, the rotation magically works. Perfectly. (even when I add in rotations for all three axes). There's no gimbal lock, just a smooth rotation all around in any direction. BUT- this works even though I never change the camera's position. At all. Which sorta blows my mind. I even display the camera position and can watch it stay constant at it's starting point (0.0, 0.0, -4000.0). It never moves, but the rotation around the sphere is perfect. I don't understand that. For proper view rotation, the camera position should be revolving around the sphere. Here's the rest of building the view matrix (I'll talk about the commented code below). Note that the camera starts out at (0.0, 0.0, -4000.0) and m_camDistToTarget is 4000.0: /* D3DXVECTOR3 vec1; D3DXVECTOR4 vec2; vec1.x = 0.0f; vec1.y = 0.0f; vec1.z = -1.0f; D3DXVec3Transform(&vec2, &vec1, &rotationMatrix); g_cameraActor->pos.x = vec2.x * g_cameraActor->m_camDistToTarget; g_cameraActor->pos.y = vec2.y * g_cameraActor->m_camDistToTarget; g_cameraActor->pos.z = vec2.z * g_cameraActor->m_camDistToTarget; */ D3DXMatrixTranspose(&g_viewMatrix, &rotationMatrix); g_viewMatrix._41 = -g_cameraActor->pos.x; g_viewMatrix._42 = -g_cameraActor->pos.y; g_viewMatrix._43 = -g_cameraActor->pos.z; g_viewMatrix._44 = 1.0f; g_direct3DDevice9->SetTransform( D3DTS_VIEW, &g_viewMatrix ); ...(The world matrix is always an identity, and the perspective projection works fine). ...So, without the commented code being compiled, the rotation works fine. But to be proper, for obvious reasons, the camera position should be rotating around the sphere, which it currently is not. That's what the commented code is supposed to do. And when I add in that chunk of code to do that, and look at all the data as I hold the keys down (using UP, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT to rotate different directions) all the values look correct! The camera position is rotating around the sphere just fine, and I can watch that happen visually too. The problem is that the camera orientation does not lookat the center of the sphere. It always looks straight forward down the z axis (toward positive z) as it revolves around the sphere. Yet the values of both the rotation matrix and the view matrix seem to be behaving correctly. (The view matrix orientation is the same as the rotation matrix, just transposed). For instance if I just hold down the key to spin around the x axis, I can watch the values of the three axes represented in the view matrix (x, y, and z axes)... view x-axis stays at (1.0, 0.0, 0.0), and view y-axis and z-axis both spin around the x axis just fine. All the numbers are changing as they should be... well, almost. As far as I can tell, the position of the view matrix is spinning around the sphere one direction (like clockwise), and the orientation (the axes in the view matrix) are spinning the opposite direction (like counter-clockwise). Which I guess explains why the orientation appears to stay straight ahead. I know the position is correct. It revolves properly. It's the orientation that's wrong. Can anyone see what am I doing wrong? Am I using these functions incorrectly? Or is my algorithm flawed? As usual I've been combing my code for simple mistakes for many hours. I'm willing to post the actual code, and a video of the behavior, but that will take much more effort. Thought I'd ask this way first.

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  • Emtel Knowledge Series - Q2/2014

    From Cyber Island to Smart Mauritius Cyber Island? Smart Mauritius? - What is Emtel talking about? "With the majority of the population living in urban environments today, the concept of "Smart Cities" has become an urgent necessity. "Smart Cities" refer to an urban transformation which, by using latest ICT technologies makes cities more efficient. Many Governments are setting out ambitious plans to build the cities of the future based on massive connectivity, high bandwidth communications, intelligent sensors and analysis of huge volumes of data. Various researches have shown four key enablers for smart city success - Government leadership, suitable technology infrastructure, solid public-private partnerships and engaged citizens. It is around these enabling factors that telecoms companies can play a vital role in assisting governments to deliver on the smart city vision." The Emtel Knowledge Series goes in compliance with Emtel's 25th anniversary celebrations throughout the year and the master of ceremony, Kim Andersen, mentioned that there will be more upcoming events on a quarterly base. As a representative of the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community (MSCC) there was absolutely no hesitation to join in again. Following my visit to the first Emtel Knowledge Series workshop back in February this year, it was great to have another opportunity to meet and exchange with technology experts. But quite frankly what is it with those buzz words... As far as I remember and how it was mentioned "Cyber Island" is an old initiative from around 2005/2006 which has been refreshed in 2010. It implies the empowerment of Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) as an essential factor of growth by the government here in Mauritius. Actually, the first promotional period of Cyber Island brought me here but that's another story. The venue and its own problems Like last time the event was organised and held at the Conference Hall at Cyber Tower I in Ebene. As I've been working there for some years, I know about the frustrating situation of finding a proper parking. So, does Smart Island include better solutions for the search of parking spaces? Maybe, let's see whether I will be able to answer that question at the end of the article. Anyway, after circling around the tower almost two times, I finally got a decent space to put the car, without risking to get a ticket or damage actually. International speakers and their experience Once again, Emtel did a great job to get international expertise onto the stage to share their experience and vision on this kind of embarkment. Personally, I really appreciated the fact they were speakers of global reach and could provide own-experience knowledge. Johan Gott spoke about the fundamental change that the Swedish government ignited in order to move their society and workers' environment away from heavy industry towards a knowledge-based approach. Additionally, we spoke about the effort and transformation of New York City into a greener and more efficient Smart City. Given modern technology he also advised that any kind of available Big Data should be opened to the general public - this openness would provide a playground for anyone to garner new ideas and most probably solid solutions of which no one else thought about before. Emtel Knowledge Series on moving from Cyber Island to Smart Mauritus Later during the afternoon that exact statement regarding openness to and transparency of government-owned Big Data has been emphasised again by the Danish speaker Kim Andersen and his former colleague Mika Jantunen from Finland. Mika continued to underline the important role of the government to provide a solid foundation for a knowledge-based society and mentioned that Finnish citizens have a constitutional right to broadband connectivity. Next to free higher (tertiary) education Finland already produced a good number of innovations, among them are: First country to grant voting rights to women Free higher education Constitutional right to broadband connectivity Nokia Linux Angry Birds Sauna and others...  General access to internet via broadband and/or mobile connectivity is surely a key factor towards Smart Cities, or better said Smart Mauritius given the area dimensions and size of population. CTO Paul Valette gave the audience a brief overview of the essential role that Emtel will have to move Mauritius forward towards a knowledge-based and innovation-driven environment for its citizen. What I have seen looks really promising and with recently published information that Mauritians have 127% of mobile capacity - meaning more than 1 mobile, smartphone or tablet per person - it will be crucial to have the right infrastructure for these connected devices. How would it be possible to achieve a knowledge-based society? YouTube to the rescue!Seriously, gaining more knowledge will require to have fast access to educational course material as explained by Dr Kaviraj Sukon, General Director of the Open University of Mauritius. According to him a good number of high-profile universities in the world have opened their course libraries to the general public, among them EDX, Coursera and Open University. Nowadays, you're actually able and enabled to learn for and earn a BSc or even MSc certification on your own pace - no need to attend classed on campus. It was really impressive to see the number of available hours - more than enough for a life-long learning experience! {loadposition content_adsense} Networking in the name of MSCC As briefly mentioned above I was about to combine two approaches for this workshop. Of course, getting latest information and updates on Emtel services available, especially for my business here on the west coast of the island, but also to meet and greet new people for the MSCC. And I think it was very positive on both sides. Let me quickly describe some of the key aspects that happened during the day: Met with Arnaud Meslier and Kellie, both Microsoft to swap latest information on IT events. Hereby, I got an invite to Microsoft Windows Phone 8.1 Dev Camp. Got in touch with Arvin Lockee, Emtel to check our options to meet with the data team, and seizing the opportunity to have a visiting tour at the Emtel Data Centre. Had a great chat with Avinash Meetoo, Knowledge 7, Kim Andersen and Mika Jantunen about the situation of teaching and learning in general and specifically in the private sector here in Mauritius. Additionally, a number of various other interesting chats... Once again, I'm catching up on a couple of business cards in order to provide more background information about the MSCC, and to create a better awareness of MSCC within the local IT businesses. There is more to come soon!  Resume of the day The number of attendees during this event has been doubled or even tripled this time. The whole organisation has been improved massively and the combination of presentation and summarizing panel discussions was better than during the previous workshop back in February. Overall, once again a well-organised workshop and I'm already looking forward to join the next workshop in Q3. Update End of July we finally managed to visit the Emtel Data Centre in Arsenal. It was an interesting opportunity for some of our MSCC members.

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  • SQL Server Table Polling by Multiple Subscribers

    - by Daniel Hester
    Background Designing Stored Procedures that are safe for multiple subscribers (to call simultaneously) can be challenging.  For example let’s say that you want multiple worker processes to poll a shared work queue that’s encapsulated as a SQL Table. This is a common scenario and through experience you’ll find that you want to use Table Hints to prevent unwanted locking when performing simultaneous queries on the same table. There are three table hints to consider: NOLOCK, READPAST and UPDLOCK. Both NOLOCK and READPAST table hints allow you to SELECT from a table without placing a LOCK on that table. However, SELECTs with the READPAST hint will ignore any records that are locked due to being updated/inserted (or otherwise “dirty”), whereas a SELECT with NOLOCK ignores all locks including dirty reads. For the initial update of the flag (that marks the record as available for subscription) I don’t use the NOLOCK Table Hint because I want to be sensitive to the “active” records in the table and I want to exclude them.  I use an Update Lock (UPDLOCK) in conjunction with a WHERE clause that uses a sub-select with a READPAST Table Hint in order to explicitly lock the records I’m updating (UPDLOCK) but not place a lock on the table when selecting the records that I’m going to update (READPAST). UPDATES should be allowed to lock the rows affected because we’re probably changing a flag on a record so that it is not included in a SELECT from another subscriber. On the UPDATE statement we should explicitly use the UPDLOCK to guard against lock escalation. A SELECT to check for the next record(s) to process can result in a shared read lock being held by more than one subscriber polling the shared work queue (SQL table). It is expected that more than one worker process (or server) might try to process the same new record(s) at the same time. When each process then tries to obtain the update lock, none of them can because another process has a shared read lock in place. Thus without the UPDLOCK hint the result would be a lock escalation deadlock; however with the UPDLOCK hint this condition is mitigated against. Note that using the READPAST table hint requires that you also set the ISOLATION LEVEL of the transaction to be READ COMMITTED (rather than the default of SERIALIZABLE). Guidance In the Stored Procedure that returns records to the multiple subscribers: Perform the UPDATE first. Change the flag that makes the record available to subscribers.  Additionally, you may want to update a LastUpdated datetime field in order to be able to check for records that “got stuck” in an intermediate state or for other auditing purposes. In the UPDATE statement use the (UPDLOCK) Table Hint on the UPDATE statement to prevent lock escalation. In the UPDATE statement also use a WHERE Clause that uses a sub-select with a (READPAST) Table Hint to select the records that you’re going to update. In the UPDATE statement use the OUTPUT clause in conjunction with a Temporary Table to isolate the record(s) that you’ve just updated and intend to return to the subscriber. This is the fastest way to update the record(s) and to get the records’ identifiers within the same operation. Finally do a set-based SELECT on the main Table (using the Temporary Table to identify the records in the set) with either a READPAST or NOLOCK table hint.  Use NOLOCK if there are other processes (besides the multiple subscribers) that might be changing the data that you want to return to the multiple subscribers; or use READPAST if you're sure there are no other processes (besides the multiple subscribers) that might be updating column data in the table for other purposes (e.g. changes to a person’s last name).  NOLOCK is generally the better fit in this part of the scenario. See the following as an example: CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[usp_NewCustomersSelect] AS BEGIN -- OVERRIDE THE DEFAULT ISOLATION LEVEL SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL READ COMMITTED -- SET NOCOUNT ON SET NOCOUNT ON -- DECLARE TEMP TABLE -- Note that this example uses CustomerId as an identifier; -- you could just use the Identity column Id if that’s all you need. DECLARE @CustomersTempTable TABLE ( CustomerId NVARCHAR(255) ) -- PERFORM UPDATE FIRST -- [Customers] is the name of the table -- [Id] is the Identity Column on the table -- [CustomerId] is the business document key used to identify the -- record globally, i.e. in other systems or across SQL tables -- [Status] is INT or BIT field (if the status is a binary state) -- [LastUpdated] is a datetime field used to record the time of the -- last update UPDATE [Customers] WITH (UPDLOCK) SET [Status] = 1, [LastUpdated] = GETDATE() OUTPUT [INSERTED].[CustomerId] INTO @CustomersTempTable WHERE ([Id] = (SELECT TOP 100 [Id] FROM [Customers] WITH (READPAST) WHERE ([Status] = 0) ORDER BY [Id] ASC)) -- PERFORM SELECT FROM ENTITY TABLE SELECT [C].[CustomerId], [C].[FirstName], [C].[LastName], [C].[Address1], [C].[Address2], [C].[City], [C].[State], [C].[Zip], [C].[ShippingMethod], [C].[Id] FROM [Customers] AS [C] WITH (NOLOCK), @CustomersTempTable AS [TEMP] WHERE ([C].[CustomerId] = [TEMP].[CustomerId]) END In a system that has been designed to have multiple status values for records that need to be processed in the Work Queue it is necessary to have a “Watch Dog” process by which “stale” records in intermediate states (such as “In Progress”) are detected, i.e. a [Status] of 0 = New or Unprocessed; a [Status] of 1 = In Progress; a [Status] of 2 = Processed; etc.. Thus, if you have a business rule that states that the application should only process new records if all of the old records have been processed successfully (or marked as an error), then it will be necessary to build a monitoring process to detect stalled or stale records in the Work Queue, hence the use of the LastUpdated column in the example above. The Status field along with the LastUpdated field can be used as the criteria to detect stalled / stale records. It is possible to put this watchdog logic into the stored procedure above, but I would recommend making it a separate monitoring function. In writing the stored procedure that checks for stale records I would recommend using the same kind of lock semantics as suggested above. The example below looks for records that have been in the “In Progress” state ([Status] = 1) for greater than 60 seconds: CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[usp_NewCustomersWatchDog] AS BEGIN -- TO OVERRIDE THE DEFAULT ISOLATION LEVEL SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL READ COMMITTED -- SET NOCOUNT ON SET NOCOUNT ON DECLARE @MaxWait int; SET @MaxWait = 60 IF EXISTS (SELECT 1 FROM [dbo].[Customers] WITH (READPAST) WHERE ([Status] = 1) AND (DATEDIFF(s, [LastUpdated], GETDATE()) > @MaxWait)) BEGIN SELECT 1 AS [IsWatchDogError] END ELSE BEGIN SELECT 0 AS [IsWatchDogError] END END Downloads The zip file below contains two SQL scripts: one to create a sample database with the above stored procedures and one to populate the sample database with 10,000 sample records.  I am very grateful to Red-Gate software for their excellent SQL Data Generator tool which enabled me to create these sample records in no time at all. References http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms187373.aspx http://www.techrepublic.com/article/using-nolock-and-readpast-table-hints-in-sql-server/6185492 http://geekswithblogs.net/gwiele/archive/2004/11/25/15974.aspx http://grounding.co.za/blogs/romiko/archive/2009/03/09/biztalk-sql-receive-location-deadlocks-dirty-reads-and-isolation-levels.aspx

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  • Oracle Announces Release of PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 Feature Pack 2

    - by Jay Zuckert
    Big things sometimes come in small packages.  Today Oracle announced the availability of PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 Feature Pack 2 which delivers a new HR self service user experience that fundamentally changes the way managers and employees interact with the HCM system.  Earlier this year we reviewed a number of new concept designs with our Customer Advisory Boards.  With the accelerated feature pack development cycle we have adopted, these innovations are  now available to all 9.1 customers without the need for an upgrade.   There are no new products that need to be licensed for the capabilities below. For more details on Feature Pack 2, please see the Oracle press release. Included in Feature Pack 2 is a new search-based menu-free navigation that allows managers to search for employees by name and take actions directly from the secure search results.  For example, a manager can now simply type in part of an employee’s first or last name and receive meaningful results from documents related to performance, compensation, learning, recruiting, career planning and more.   Delivered actions can be initiated directly from these search results and the actions are securely tied to HCM security and user role.  The feature pack also includes new pages that will enable managers to be more productive by aggregating key employee data into a single page.  The new Manager Dashboard and Talent Summary provide a consolidated view of data related to a manager’s team and individual team members, respectively.   The Manager Dashboard displays information relevant to their direct reports including team learning, objective alignment, alerts, and pending approvals requiring their attention.  The Talent Summary provides managers with an aggregated view of talent management-related data for an individual employee including performance history, salary history, succession options, total rewards, and competencies.   The information displayed in both the Manager Dashboard and Talent Summary is configurable by system administrators and can be personalized by each of your managers. Other Feature Pack 2 enhancements allow organizations to administer Matrix or Dotted-Line Relationship Management, which addresses the challenge of tracking and maintaining project-based organizations that cut across the enterprise and geographic regions.  From within the Company Directory and Org Viewer organization charts, managers now have access to manager self-service transactions from related actions.  More than 70 manager and employee self-service transactions have been tied into the related action framework accessible from Org Viewer, Manager Dashboard, Talent Summary and Secure Enterprise Search (SES) results.  In addition to making it easier to access manager self-service transactions, the feature pack delivers streamlined transaction pages making everyday tasks such as promoting an employee faster and more efficient. With the delivery of PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 Feature Pack 2, Oracle continues to deliver on its commitment to our PeopleSoft customers.  With this feature pack, HCM 9.1 customers will be able to deploy the newest functionality quickly, without a major release upgrade, and realize added value from their existing PeopleSoft investment.    For customers newly deploying 9.1, a new download with all of Feature Pack 2  will be available early next year.   This will aslo include recertified upgrade paths from 8.8, 8.9 and 9.0, for customers in the upgrade process.

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  • 10 Steps to access Oracle stored procedures from Crystal Reports

    Requirements to access Oracle stored procedures from CR The following requirements must be met in order for CR to access an Oracle stored procedure: 1. You must create a package that defines the REF CURSOR. This REF CURSOR must be strongly bound to a static pre-defined structure (see Strongly Bound REF CURSORs vs Weakly Bound REF CURSORs). This package must be created separately and before the creation of the stored procedure. NOTE Crystal Reports 9 native connections will support Oracle stored procedures created within packages as well as Oracle stored procedures referencing weakly bound REF CURSORs. Crystal Reports 8.5 native connections will support Oracle stored procedures referencing weakly bound REF CURSORs. 2. The procedure must have a parameter that is a REF CURSOR type. This is because CR uses this parameter to access and define the result set that the stored procedure returns. 3. The REF CURSOR parameter must be defined as IN OUT (read/write mode). After the procedure has opened and assigned a query to the REF CURSOR, CR will perform a FETCH call for every row from the query's result. This is why the parameter must be defined as IN OUT. 4. Parameters can only be input (IN) parameters. CR is not designed to work with OUT parameters. 5. The REF CURSOR variable must be opened and assigned its query within the procedure. 6. The stored procedure can only return one record set. The structure of this record set must not change, based on parameters. 7. The stored procedure cannot call another stored procedure. 8. If using an ODBC driver, it must be the CR Oracle ODBC driver (installed by CR). Other Oracle ODBC drivers (installed by Microsoft or Oracle) may not function correctly. 9. If you are using the CR ODBC driver, you must ensure that in the ODBC Driver Configuration setup, under the Advanced Tab, the option 'Procedure Return Results' is checked ON. 10. If you are using the native Oracle driver and using hard-coded date selection within the procedure, the date selection must use either a string representation format of 'YYYY-DD-MM' (i.e. WHERE DATEFIELD = '1999-01-01') or the TO_DATE function with the same format specified (i.e. WHERE DATEFIELD = TO_DATE ('1999-01-01','YYYY-MM-DD'). For more information, refer to kbase article C2008023. 11. Most importantly, this stored procedure must execute successfully in Oracle's SQL*Plus utility. If all of these conditions are met, you must next ensure you are using the appropriate database driver. Please refer to the sections in this white paper for a list of acceptable database drivers. span.fullpost {display:none;}

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  • Protecting Consolidated Data on Engineered Systems

    - by Steve Enevold
    In this time of reduced budgets and cost cutting measures in Federal, State and Local governments, the requirement to provide services continues to grow. Many agencies are looking at consolidating their infrastructure to reduce cost and meet budget goals. Oracle's engineered systems are ideal platforms for accomplishing these goals. These systems provide unparalleled performance that is ideal for running applications and databases that traditionally run on separate dedicated environments. However, putting multiple critical applications and databases in a single architecture makes security more critical. You are putting a concentrated set of sensitive data on a single system, making it a more tempting target.  The environments were previously separated by iron so now you need to provide assurance that one group, department, or application's information is not visible to other personnel or applications resident in the Exadata system. Administration of the environments requires formal separation of duties so an administrator of one application environment cannot view or negatively impact others. Also, these systems need to be in protected environments just like other critical production servers. They should be in a data center protected by physical controls, network firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention, etc Exadata also provides unique security benefits, including a reducing attack surface by minimizing packages and services to only those required. In addition to reducing the possible system areas someone may attempt to infiltrate, Exadata has the following features: 1.    Infiniband, which functions as a secure private backplane 2.    IPTables  to perform stateful packet inspection for all nodes               Cellwall implements firewall services on each cell using IPTables 3.    Hardware accelerated encryption for data at rest on storage cells Oracle is uniquely positioned to provide the security necessary for implementing Exadata because security has been a core focus since the company's beginning. In addition to the security capabilities inherent in Exadata, Oracle security products are all certified to run in an Exadata environment. Database Vault Oracle Database Vault helps organizations increase the security of existing applications and address regulatory mandates that call for separation-of-duties, least privilege and other preventive controls to ensure data integrity and data privacy. Oracle Database Vault proactively protects application data stored in the Oracle database from being accessed by privileged database users. A unique feature of Database Vault is the ability to segregate administrative tasks including when a command can be executed, or that the DBA can manage the health of the database and objects, but may not see the data Advanced Security  helps organizations comply with privacy and regulatory mandates by transparently encrypting all application data or specific sensitive columns, such as credit cards, social security numbers, or personally identifiable information (PII). By encrypting data at rest and whenever it leaves the database over the network or via backups, Oracle Advanced Security provides the most cost-effective solution for comprehensive data protection. Label Security  is a powerful and easy-to-use tool for classifying data and mediating access to data based on its classification. Designed to meet public-sector requirements for multi-level security and mandatory access control, Oracle Label Security provides a flexible framework that both government and commercial entities worldwide can use to manage access to data on a "need to know" basis in order to protect data privacy and achieve regulatory compliance  Data Masking reduces the threat of someone in the development org taking data that has been copied from production to the development environment for testing, upgrades, etc by irreversibly replacing the original sensitive data with fictitious data so that production data can be shared safely with IT developers or offshore business partners  Audit Vault and Database Firewall Oracle Audit Vault and Database Firewall serves as a critical detective and preventive control across multiple operating systems and database platforms to protect against the abuse of legitimate access to databases responsible for almost all data breaches and cyber attacks.  Consolidation, cost-savings, and performance can now be achieved without sacrificing security. The combination of built in protection and Oracle’s industry-leading data protection solutions make Exadata an ideal platform for Federal, State, and local governments and agencies.

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  • Source-control 'wet-work'?

    - by Phil Factor
    When a design or creative work is flawed beyond remedy, it is often best to destroy it and start again. The other day, I lost the code to a long and intricate SQL batch I was working on. I’d thought it was impossible, but it happened. With all the technology around that is designed to prevent this occurring, this sort of accident has become a rare event.  If it weren’t for a deranged laptop, and my distraction, the code wouldn’t have been lost this time.  As always, I sighed, had a soothing cup of tea, and typed it all in again.  The new code I hastily tapped in  was much better: I’d held in my head the essence of how the code should work rather than the details: I now knew for certain  the start point, the end, and how it should be achieved. Instantly the detritus of half-baked thoughts fell away and I was able to write logical code that performed better.  Because I could work so quickly, I was able to hold the details of all the columns and variables in my head, and the dynamics of the flow of data. It was, in fact, easier and quicker to start from scratch rather than tidy up and refactor the existing code with its inevitable fumbling and half-baked ideas. What a shame that technology is now so good that developers rarely experience the cleansing shock of losing one’s code and having to rewrite it from scratch.  If you’ve never accidentally lost  your code, then it is worth doing it deliberately once for the experience. Creative people have, until Technology mistakenly prevented it, torn up their drafts or sketches, threw them in the bin, and started again from scratch.  Leonardo’s obsessive reworking of the Mona Lisa was renowned because it was so unusual:  Most artists have been utterly ruthless in destroying work that didn’t quite make it. Authors are particularly keen on writing afresh, and the results are generally positive. Lawrence of Arabia actually lost the entire 250,000 word manuscript of ‘The Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ by accidentally leaving it on a train at Reading station, before rewriting a much better version.  Now, any writer or artist is seduced by technology into altering or refining their work rather than casting it dramatically in the bin or setting a light to it on a bonfire, and rewriting it from the blank page.  It is easy to pick away at a flawed work, but the real creative process is far more brutal. Once, many years ago whilst running a software house that supplied commercial software to local businesses, I’d been supervising an accounting system for a farming cooperative. No packaged system met their needs, and it was all hand-cut code.  For us, it represented a breakthrough as it was for a government organisation, and success would guarantee more contracts. As you’ve probably guessed, the code got mangled in a disk crash just a week before the deadline for delivery, and the many backups all proved to be entirely corrupted by a faulty tape drive.  There were some fragments left on individual machines, but they were all of different versions.  The developers were in despair.  Strangely, I managed to re-write the bulk of a three-month project in a manic and caffeine-soaked weekend.  Sure, that elegant universally-applicable input-form routine was‘nt quite so elegant, but it didn’t really need to be as we knew what forms it needed to support.  Yes, the code lacked architectural elegance and reusability. By dawn on Monday, the application passed its integration tests. The developers rose to the occasion after I’d collapsed, and tidied up what I’d done, though they were reproachful that some of the style and elegance had gone out of the application. By the delivery date, we were able to install it. It was a smaller, faster application than the beta they’d seen and the user-interface had a new, rather Spartan, appearance that we swore was done to conform to the latest in user-interface guidelines. (we switched to Helvetica font to look more ‘Bauhaus’ ). The client was so delighted that he forgave the new bugs that had crept in. I still have the disk that crashed, up in the attic. In IT, we have had mixed experiences from complete re-writes. Lotus 123 never really recovered from a complete rewrite from assembler into C, Borland made the mistake with Arago and Quattro Pro  and Netscape’s complete rewrite of their Navigator 4 browser was a white-knuckle ride. In all cases, the decision to rewrite was a result of extreme circumstances where no other course of action seemed possible.   The rewrite didn’t come out of the blue. I prefer to remember the rewrite of Minix by young Linus Torvalds, or the rewrite of Bitkeeper by a slightly older Linus.  The rewrite of CP/M didn’t do too badly either, did it? Come to think of it, the guy who decided to rewrite the windowing system of the Xerox Star never regretted the decision. I’ll agree that one should often resist calls for a rewrite. One of the worst habits of the more inexperienced programmer is to denigrate whatever code he or she inherits, and then call loudly for a complete rewrite. They are buoyed up by the mistaken belief that they can do better. This, however, is a different psychological phenomenon, more related to the idea of some motorcyclists that they are operating on infinite lives, or the occasional squaddies that if they charge the machine-guns determinedly enough all will be well. Grim experience brings out the humility in any experienced programmer.  I’m referring to quite different circumstances here. Where a team knows the requirements perfectly, are of one mind on methodology and coding standards, and they already have a solution, then what is wrong with considering  a complete rewrite? Rewrites are so painful in the early stages, until that point where one realises the payoff, that even I quail at the thought. One needs a natural disaster to push one over the edge. The trouble is that source-control systems, and disaster recovery systems, are just too good nowadays.   If I were to lose this draft of this very blog post, I know I’d rewrite it much better. However, if you read this, you’ll know I didn’t have the nerve to delete it and start again.  There was a time that one prayed that unreliable hardware would deliver you from an unmaintainable mess of a codebase, but now technology has made us almost entirely immune to such a merciful act of God. An old friend of mine with long experience in the software industry has long had the idea of the ‘source-control wet-work’,  where one hires a malicious hacker in some wild eastern country to hack into one’s own  source control system to destroy all trace of the source to an application. Alas, backup systems are just too good to make this any more than a pipedream. Somehow, it would be difficult to promote the idea. As an alternative, could one construct a source control system that, on doing all the code-quality metrics, would systematically destroy all trace of source code that failed the quality test? Alas, I can’t see many managers buying into the idea. In reading the full story of the near-loss of Toy Story 2, it set me thinking. It turned out that the lucky restoration of the code wasn’t the happy ending one first imagined it to be, because they eventually came to the conclusion that the plot was fundamentally flawed and it all had to be rewritten anyway.  Was this an early  case of the ‘source-control wet-job’?’ It is very hard nowadays to do a rapid U-turn in a development project because we are far too prone to cling to our existing source-code.

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  • Data-driven animation states

    - by user8363
    I'm trying to handle animations in a 2D game engine hobby project, without hard-coding them. Hard coding animation states seems like a common but very strange phenomenon, to me. A little background: I'm working with an entity system where components are bags of data and subsystems act upon them. I chose to use a polling system to update animation states. With animation states I mean: "walking_left", "running_left", "walking_right", "shooting", ... My idea to handle animations was to design it as a data driven model. Data could be stored in an xml file, a rdbms, ... And could be loaded at the start of a game / level/ ... This way you can easily edit animations and transitions without having to go change the code everywhere in your game. As an example I made an xml draft of the data definitions I had in mind. One very important piece of data would simply be the description of an animation. An animation would have a unique id (a descriptive name). It would hold a reference id to an image (the sprite sheet it uses, because different animations may use different sprite sheets). The frames per second to run the animation on. The "replay" here defines if an animation should be run once or infinitely. Then I defined a list of rectangles as frames. <animation id='WIZARD_WALK_LEFT'> <image id='WIZARD_WALKING' /> <fps>50</fps> <replay>true</replay> <frames> <rectangle> <x>0</x> <y>0</y> <width>45</width> <height>45</height> </rectangle> <rectangle> <x>45</x> <y>0</y> <width>45</width> <height>45</height> </rectangle> </frames> </animation> Animation data would be loaded and held in an animation resource pool and referenced by game entities that are using it. It would be treated as a resource like an image, a sound, a texture, ... The second piece of data to define would be a state machine to handle animation states and transitions. This defines each state a game entity can be in, which states it can transition to and what triggers that state change. This state machine would differ from entity to entity. Because a bird might have states "walking" and "flying" while a human would only have the state "walking". However it could be shared by different entities because multiple humans will probably have the same states (especially when you define some common NPCs like monsters, etc). Additionally an orc might have the same states as a human. Just to demonstrate that this state definition might be shared but only by a select group of game entities. <state id='IDLE'> <event trigger='LEFT_DOWN' goto='MOVING_LEFT' /> <event trigger='RIGHT_DOWN' goto='MOVING_RIGHT' /> </state> <state id='MOVING_LEFT'> <event trigger='LEFT_UP' goto='IDLE' /> <event trigger='RIGHT_DOWN' goto='MOVING_RIGHT' /> </state> <state id='MOVING_RIGHT'> <event trigger='RIGHT_UP' goto='IDLE' /> <event trigger='LEFT_DOWN' goto='MOVING_LEFT' /> </state> These states can be handled by a polling system. Each game tick it grabs the current state of a game entity and checks all triggers. If a condition is met it changes the entity's state to the "goto" state. The last part I was struggling with was how to bind animation data and animation states to an entity. The most logical approach seemed to me to add a pointer to the state machine data an entity uses and to define for each state in that machine what animation it uses. Here is an xml example how I would define the animation behavior and graphical representation of some common entities in a game, by addressing animation state and animation data id. Note that both "wizard" and "orc" have the same animation states but a different animation. Also, a different animation could mean a different sprite sheet, or even a different sequence of animations (an animation could be longer or shorter). <entity name="wizard"> <state id="IDLE" animation="WIZARD_IDLE" /> <state id="MOVING_LEFT" animation="WIZARD_WALK_LEFT" /> </entity> <entity name="orc"> <state id="IDLE" animation="ORC_IDLE" /> <state id="MOVING_LEFT" animation="ORC_WALK_LEFT" /> </entity> When the entity is being created it would add a list of states with state machine data and an animation data reference. In the future I would use the entity system to build whole entities by defining components in a similar xml format. -- This is what I have come up with after some research. However I had some trouble getting my head around it, so I was hoping op some feedback. Is there something here what doesn't make sense, or is there a better way to handle these things? I grasped the idea of iterating through frames but I'm having trouble to take it a step further and this is my attempt to do that.

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  • Incomplete upgrade 12.04 to 12.10

    - by David
    Everything was running smoothly. Everything had been downloaded from Internet, packages had been installed and a prompt asked for some obsolete programs/files to be removed or kept. After that the computer crashed and and to manually force a shutdown. I turned it on again and surprise I was on 12.10! Still the upgrade was not finished! How can I properly finish that upgrade? Here's the output I got in the command line after following posted instructions: i astrill - Astrill VPN client software i dayjournal - Simple, minimal, digital journal. i gambas2-gb-form - A gambas native form component i gambas2-gb-gtk - The Gambas gtk component i gambas2-gb-gtk-ext - The Gambas extended gtk GUI component i gambas2-gb-gui - The graphical toolkit selector component i gambas2-gb-qt - The Gambas Qt GUI component i gambas2-gb-settings - Gambas utilities class i A gambas2-runtime - The Gambas runtime i google-chrome-stable - The web browser from Google i google-talkplugin - Google Talk Plugin i indicator-keylock - Indicator for Lock Keys i indicator-ubuntuone - Indicator for Ubuntu One synchronization s i A language-pack-kde-zh-hans - KDE translation updates for language Simpl i language-pack-kde-zh-hans-base - KDE translations for language Simplified C i libapt-inst1.4 - deb package format runtime library idA libattica0.3 - a Qt library that implements the Open Coll idA libbabl-0.0-0 - Dynamic, any to any, pixel format conversi idA libboost-filesystem1.46.1 - filesystem operations (portable paths, ite idA libboost-program-options1.46.1 - program options library for C++ idA libboost-python1.46.1 - Boost.Python Library idA libboost-regex1.46.1 - regular expression library for C++ i libboost-serialization1.46.1 - serialization library for C++ idA libboost-signals1.46.1 - managed signals and slots library for C++ idA libboost-system1.46.1 - Operating system (e.g. diagnostics support idA libboost-thread1.46.1 - portable C++ multi-threading i libcamel-1.2-29 - Evolution MIME message handling library i libcmis-0.2-0 - CMIS protocol client library i libcupsdriver1 - Common UNIX Printing System(tm) - Driver l i libdconf0 - simple configuration storage system - runt i libdvdcss2 - Simple foundation for reading DVDs - runti i libebackend-1.2-1 - Utility library for evolution data servers i libecal-1.2-10 - Client library for evolution calendars i libedata-cal-1.2-13 - Backend library for evolution calendars i libedataserver-1.2-15 - Utility library for evolution data servers i libexiv2-11 - EXIF/IPTC metadata manipulation library i libgdu-gtk0 - GTK+ standard dialog library for libgdu i libgdu0 - GObject based Disk Utility Library idA libgegl-0.0-0 - Generic Graphics Library idA libglew1.5 - The OpenGL Extension Wrangler - runtime en i libglew1.6 - OpenGL Extension Wrangler - runtime enviro i libglewmx1.6 - OpenGL Extension Wrangler - runtime enviro i libgnome-bluetooth8 - GNOME Bluetooth tools - support library i libgnomekbd7 - GNOME library to manage keyboard configura idA libgsoap1 - Runtime libraries for gSOAP i libgweather-3-0 - GWeather shared library i libimobiledevice2 - Library for communicating with the iPhone i libkdcraw20 - RAW picture decoding library i libkexiv2-10 - Qt like interface for the libexiv2 library i libkipi8 - library for apps that want to use kipi-plu i libkpathsea5 - TeX Live: path search library for TeX (run i libmagickcore4 - low-level image manipulation library i libmagickwand4 - image manipulation library i libmarblewidget13 - Marble globe widget library idA libmusicbrainz4-3 - Library to access the MusicBrainz.org data i libnepomukdatamanagement4 - Basic Nepomuk data manipulation interface i libnux-2.0-0 - Visual rendering toolkit for real-time app i libnux-2.0-common - Visual rendering toolkit for real-time app i libpoppler19 - PDF rendering library i libqt3-mt - Qt GUI Library (Threaded runtime version), i librhythmbox-core5 - support library for the rhythmbox music pl i libusbmuxd1 - USB multiplexor daemon for iPhone and iPod i libutouch-evemu1 - KernelInput Event Device Emulation Library i libutouch-frame1 - Touch Frame Library i libutouch-geis1 - Gesture engine interface support i libutouch-grail1 - Gesture Recognition And Instantiation Libr idA libx264-120 - x264 video coding library i libyajl1 - Yet Another JSON Library i linux-headers-3.2.0-29 - Header files related to Linux kernel versi i linux-headers-3.2.0-29-generic - Linux kernel headers for version 3.2.0 on i linux-image-3.2.0-29-generic - Linux kernel image for version 3.2.0 on 64 i mplayerthumbs - video thumbnail generator using mplayer i myunity - Unity configurator i A openoffice.org-calc - office productivity suite -- spreadsheet i A openoffice.org-writer - office productivity suite -- word processo i python-brlapi - Python bindings for BrlAPI i python-louis - Python bindings for liblouis i rts-bpp-dkms - rts-bpp driver in DKMS format. i system76-driver - Universal driver for System76 computers. i systemconfigurator - Unified Configuration API for Linux Instal i systemimager-client - Utilities for creating an image and upgrad i systemimager-common - Utilities and libraries common to both the i systemimager-initrd-template-am - SystemImager initrd template for amd64 cli i touchpad-indicator - An indicator for the touchpad i ubuntu-tweak - Ubuntu Tweak i A unity-lens-utilities - Unity Utilities lens i A unity-scope-calculator - Calculator engine i unity-scope-cities - Cities engine i unity-scope-rottentomatoes - Unity Scope Rottentomatoes

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  • Notes from a short presentation on NodeJs

    - by Aligned
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Aligned/archive/2014/05/30/notes-from-a-short-presentation-on-nodejs.aspxI volunteered myself to give a short 30 minute presentation at a work lunch and learn on NodeJs. With my limited experience I see using Node as a great tool for build process improvement, scaffolding with yeoman, and running tests with Karma. I haven’t looked into using as a full server or development stack. I guess I’m too stuck on IIS and Visual Studio :-). Here are my notes, that aren’t very well formatted, but I wanted to share it anyways. What is it? "Node.js is a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices." Why should you be interested? another popular tool that can help you get the job done you can use the command prompt! can be run at build or release time to automate tasks What are some uses? https://www.npmjs.org/ - NuGet for Node packages http://bower.io/ - NuGet for UI JavaScript libraries (jQuery, Bootstrap, Angular, etc) http://yeoman.io/ "Our workflow is comprised of three tools for improving your productivity and satisfaction when building a web app: yo (the scaffolding tool), grunt (the build tool) and bower (for package management)." -> yeoman asks which components you want alternative - http://joakimbeng.eu01.aws.af.cm/slush-replacing-yeoman-with-gulp/ https://www.npmjs.org/package/generator-cg-angular - phantom js, less, // git is needed for bower http://git-scm.com/ run installer in Windows before you can use bower // select Run Git from the Windows Command Prompt in the installer // requires a reboot http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20069297/bower-git-not-in-the-path-error npm install -g git npm install -g yo npm install -g generator-cg-angular mkdir myapp cd myapp yo cg-angular npm install -g bower npm install -g grunt-cli yo bower grunt serve grunt test grunt build // there are many generators (generator-angular) is another one // I like the Nuget HotTowel-Angular from John Papa myself // needed IIS Node for Express -> prompt from WebMatrix Karma bat to startup Karma - see below image compression - https://www.npmjs.org/search?q=optimize+images, https://github.com/heldr/node-smushit - do it from the command line LESS compiling js and css combine and minification at build with Gulp for requireJS apps quick lightweight HTTP server - "Express" Build pipeline with Grunt or Gulp http://www.johnpapa.net/gulp-and-grunt-at-anglebrackets/ Gulp is the newer and improved over Grunt. Supposed to be easier to use, but Grunt is more established. https://github.com/johnpapa/ng-demos/tree/master/grunt-gulp https://github.com/assetgraph/assetgraph-builder Does a lot of the minimizing, combining, image optimization etc using Node. Looks interesting.... http://nodejs.org http://nodeschool.io/ http://sub.watchmecode.net/getting-started-with-nodejs-installing-and-writing-your-first-code/ https://stormpath.com/blog/build-a-killer-node-dot-js-client-for-your-rest-plus-json-api/ https://codio.com/ http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ItsJustASoftwareIssueEdgejsBringsNodeAndNETTogetherOnThreePlatforms.aspx run unit tests - Karma in msBuild karma-start.bat @echo off cd %~dp0\.. REM 604800 is to make sure we only update once every 7 days call npm install --cache-min 604800 -g grunt-cli call npm install --cache-min 604800 call npm install --cache-min 604800 -g karma-cli karma start UnitTests\karma.conf.js REM karma start UnitTests\karma.conf.js --single-run REM see karma-start.bat and karam.config.js REM jsHint comes from Nuget

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  • vmware player xorg driver broke after ubuntu 12.04 LTS automatic system update on 06/07/2014

    - by user291828
    I am running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS as a virtual machine on a Windows 7 host using vmware player 6.0.2. On Sat. 06/07/2014, Ubuntu performed an automatic system update as it does regularly, however after reboot, the display driver seems to be broken which causes the screen to split into many identical panels. This pretty much rendered the VM unusable. Below is the log entry for that update from /var/log/apt/history.log It appears that at least one of these updates have caused this problem. The exact same problem has been reported on the vmware forum as well, see https://communities.vmware.com/message/2388776#2388776 So far I have not been able so find a solution. Content in /var/log/apt/history.log Start-Date: 2014-06-07 15:04:46 Commandline: aptdaemon role='role-commit-packages' sender=':1.65' Install: linux-headers-3.2.0-64:amd64 (3.2.0-64.97), linux-image-3.2.0-64-generic:amd64 (3.2.0-64.97), linux-headers-3.2.0-64-generic:amd64 (3.2.0-64.97) Upgrade: iproute:amd64 (20111117-1ubuntu2.1, 20111117-1ubuntu2.3), libknewstuff3-4:amd64 (4.8.5-0ubuntu0.2, 4.8.5-0ubuntu0.3), libkdeclarative5:amd64 (4.8.5-0ubuntu0.2, 4.8.5-0ubuntu0.3), libnepomukquery4a:amd64 (4.8.5-0ubuntu0.2, 4.8.5-0ubuntu0.3), libgnutls-openssl27:amd64 (2.12.14-5ubuntu3.7, 2.12.14-5ubuntu3.8), libthreadweaver4:amd64 (4.8.5-0ubuntu0.2, 4.8.5-0ubuntu0.3), libkdecore5:amd64 (4.8.5-0ubuntu0.2, 4.8.5-0ubuntu0.3), libnepomukutils4:amd64 (4.8.5-0ubuntu0.2, 4.8.5-0ubuntu0.3), libktexteditor4:amd64 (4.8.5-0ubuntu0.2, 4.8.5-0ubuntu0.3), linux-generic:amd64 (3.2.0.63.75, 3.2.0.64.76), libkmediaplayer4:amd64 (4.8.5-0ubuntu0.2, 4.8.5-0ubuntu0.3), libkrosscore4:amd64 (4.8.5-0ubuntu0.2, 4.8.5-0ubuntu0.3), libgnutls26:amd64 (2.12.14-5ubuntu3.7, 2.12.14-5ubuntu3.8), libgnutls26:i386 (2.12.14-5ubuntu3.7, 2.12.14-5ubuntu3.8), libsolid4:amd64 (4.8.5-0ubuntu0.2, 4.8.5-0ubuntu0.3), libnepomuk4:amd64 (4.8.5-0ubuntu0.2, 4.8.5-0ubuntu0.3), libkdnssd4:amd64 (4.8.5-0ubuntu0.2, 4.8.5-0ubuntu0.3), libkparts4:amd64 (4.8.5-0ubuntu0.2, 4.8.5-0ubuntu0.3), kdoctools:amd64 (4.8.5-0ubuntu0.2, 4.8.5-0ubuntu0.3), libssl-dev:amd64 (1.0.1-4ubuntu5.13, 1.0.1-4ubuntu5.14), libssl-doc:amd64 (1.0.1-4ubuntu5.13, 1.0.1-4ubuntu5.14), libkidletime4:amd64 (4.8.5-0ubuntu0.2, 4.8.5-0ubuntu0.3), linux-headers-generic:amd64 (3.2.0.63.75, 3.2.0.64.76), linux-image-generic:amd64 (3.2.0.63.75, 3.2.0.64.76), libkcmutils4:amd64 (4.8.5-0ubuntu0.2, 4.8.5-0ubuntu0.3), libkfile4:amd64 (4.8.5-0ubuntu0.2, 4.8.5-0ubuntu0.3), libkpty4:amd64 (4.8.5-0ubuntu0.2, 4.8.5-0ubuntu0.3), libkntlm4:amd64 (4.8.5-0ubuntu0.2, 4.8.5-0ubuntu0.3), libplasma3:amd64 (4.8.5-0ubuntu0.2, 4.8.5-0ubuntu0.3), libkemoticons4:amd64 (4.8.5-0ubuntu0.2, 4.8.5-0ubuntu0.3), kdelibs-bin:amd64 (4.8.5-0ubuntu0.2, 4.8.5-0ubuntu0.3), libkdewebkit5:amd64 (4.8.5-0ubuntu0.2, 4.8.5-0ubuntu0.3), libkjsembed4:amd64 (4.8.5-0ubuntu0.2, 4.8.5-0ubuntu0.3), libkio5:amd64 (4.8.5-0ubuntu0.2, 4.8.5-0ubuntu0.3), libkjsapi4:amd64 (4.8.5-0ubuntu0.2, 4.8.5-0ubuntu0.3), openssl:amd64 (1.0.1-4ubuntu5.13, 1.0.1-4ubuntu5.14), kdelibs5-data:amd64 (4.8.5-0ubuntu0.2, 4.8.5-0ubuntu0.3), linux-libc-dev:amd64 (3.2.0-63.95, 3.2.0-64.97), libkde3support4:amd64 (4.8.5-0ubuntu0.2, 4.8.5-0ubuntu0.3), libknotifyconfig4:amd64 (4.8.5-0ubuntu0.2, 4.8.5-0ubuntu0.3), kdelibs5-plugins:amd64 (4.8.5-0ubuntu0.2, 4.8.5-0ubuntu0.3), libkhtml5:amd64 (4.8.5-0ubuntu0.2, 4.8.5-0ubuntu0.3), libkdeui5:amd64 (4.8.5-0ubuntu0.2, 4.8.5-0ubuntu0.3), libkdesu5:amd64 (4.8.5-0ubuntu0.2, 4.8.5-0ubuntu0.3), libssl1.0.0:amd64 (1.0.1-4ubuntu5.13, 1.0.1-4ubuntu5.14), libssl1.0.0:i386 (1.0.1-4ubuntu5.13, 1.0.1-4ubuntu5.14) End-Date: 2014-06-07 15:09:08

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  • How to resize / enlarge / grow a non-LVM ext4 partition

    - by Mischa
    I have already searched the forums, but couldnt find a good suitable answer: I have an Ubuntu Server 10.04 as KVM Host and a guest system, that also runs 10.04. The host system uses LVM and there are three logical volumes, which are provided to the guest as virtual block devices - one for /, one for /home and one for swap. The guest had been partitioned without LVM. I have already enlarged the logical volume in the host system - the guest successfully sees the bigger virtual disk. However, this virtual disk contains one "good old" partition, which still has the old small size. The output of fdisk -l is me@produktion:/$ LC_ALL=en_US sudo fdisk -l Disk /dev/vda: 32.2 GB, 32212254720 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 3916 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x000c8ce7 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/vda1 * 1 3917 31455232 83 Linux Disk /dev/vdb: 2147 MB, 2147483648 bytes 244 heads, 47 sectors/track, 365 cylinders Units = cylinders of 11468 * 512 = 5871616 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x000f2bf7 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/vdb1 1 366 2095104 82 Linux swap / Solaris Partition 1 has different physical/logical beginnings (non-Linux?): phys=(0, 32, 33) logical=(0, 43, 28) Partition 1 has different physical/logical endings: phys=(260, 243, 47) logical=(365, 136, 44) Disk /dev/vdc: 225.5 GB, 225485783040 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 27413 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00027f25 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/vdc1 1 9138 73398272 83 Linux The output of parted print all is Model: Virtio Block Device (virtblk) Disk /dev/vda: 32.2GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: msdos Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 1 1049kB 32.2GB 32.2GB primary ext4 boot Model: Virtio Block Device (virtblk) Disk /dev/vdb: 2147MB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: msdos Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 1 1049kB 2146MB 2145MB primary linux-swap(v1) Model: Virtio Block Device (virtblk) Disk /dev/vdc: 225GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: msdos Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 1 1049kB 75.2GB 75.2GB primary ext4 What I want to achieve is to simply grow or resize the partition /dev/vdc1 so that it uses the whole space provided by the virtual block device /dev/vdc. The problem is, that when I try to do that with parted, it complains: (parted) select /dev/vdc Using /dev/vdc (parted) print Model: Virtio Block Device (virtblk) Disk /dev/vdc: 225GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: msdos Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 1 1049kB 75.2GB 75.2GB primary ext4 (parted) resize 1 WARNING: you are attempting to use parted to operate on (resize) a file system. parted's file system manipulation code is not as robust as what you'll find in dedicated, file-system-specific packages like e2fsprogs. We recommend you use parted only to manipulate partition tables, whenever possible. Support for performing most operations on most types of file systems will be removed in an upcoming release. Start? [1049kB]? End? [75.2GB]? 224GB Error: File system has an incompatible feature enabled. Compatible features are has_journal, dir_index, filetype, sparse_super and large_file. Use tune2fs or debugfs to remove features. So what can I do? This is a headless production system. What is a safe way to grow this partition? I CAN unmount it, though - so this is not the problem.

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  • Master-slave vs. peer-to-peer archictecture: benefits and problems

    - by Ashok_Ora
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE Almost two decades ago, I was a member of a database development team that introduced adaptive locking. Locking, the most popular concurrency control technique in database systems, is pessimistic. Locking ensures that two or more conflicting operations on the same data item don’t “trample” on each other’s toes, resulting in data corruption. In a nutshell, here’s the issue we were trying to address. In everyday life, traffic lights serve the same purpose. They ensure that traffic flows smoothly and when everyone follows the rules, there are no accidents at intersections. As I mentioned earlier, the problem with typical locking protocols is that they are pessimistic. Regardless of whether there is another conflicting operation in the system or not, you have to hold a lock! Acquiring and releasing locks can be quite expensive, depending on how many objects the transaction touches. Every transaction has to pay this penalty. To use the earlier traffic light analogy, if you have ever waited at a red light in the middle of nowhere with no one on the road, wondering why you need to wait when there’s clearly no danger of a collision, you know what I mean. The adaptive locking scheme that we invented was able to minimize the number of locks that a transaction held, by detecting whether there were one or more transactions that needed conflicting eyou could get by without holding any lock at all. In many “well-behaved” workloads, there are few conflicts, so this optimization is a huge win. If, on the other hand, there are many concurrent, conflicting requests, the algorithm gracefully degrades to the “normal” behavior with minimal cost. We were able to reduce the number of lock requests per TPC-B transaction from 178 requests down to 2! Wow! This is a dramatic improvement in concurrency as well as transaction latency. The lesson from this exercise was that if you can identify the common scenario and optimize for that case so that only the uncommon scenarios are more expensive, you can make dramatic improvements in performance without sacrificing correctness. So how does this relate to the architecture and design of some of the modern NoSQL systems? NoSQL systems can be broadly classified as master-slave sharded, or peer-to-peer sharded systems. NoSQL systems with a peer-to-peer architecture have an interesting way of handling changes. Whenever an item is changed, the client (or an intermediary) propagates the changes synchronously or asynchronously to multiple copies (for availability) of the data. Since the change can be propagated asynchronously, during some interval in time, it will be the case that some copies have received the update, and others haven’t. What happens if someone tries to read the item during this interval? The client in a peer-to-peer system will fetch the same item from multiple copies and compare them to each other. If they’re all the same, then every copy that was queried has the same (and up-to-date) value of the data item, so all’s good. If not, then the system provides a mechanism to reconcile the discrepancy and to update stale copies. So what’s the problem with this? There are two major issues: First, IT’S HORRIBLY PESSIMISTIC because, in the common case, it is unlikely that the same data item will be updated and read from different locations at around the same time! For every read operation, you have to read from multiple copies. That’s a pretty expensive, especially if the data are stored in multiple geographically separate locations and network latencies are high. Second, if the copies are not all the same, the application has to reconcile the differences and propagate the correct value to the out-dated copies. This means that the application program has to handle discrepancies in the different versions of the data item and resolve the issue (which can further add to cost and operation latency). Resolving discrepancies is only one part of the problem. What if the same data item was updated independently on two different nodes (copies)? In that case, due to the asynchronous nature of change propagation, you might land up with different versions of the data item in different copies. In this case, the application program also has to resolve conflicts and then propagate the correct value to the copies that are out-dated or have incorrect versions. This can get really complicated. My hunch is that there are many peer-to-peer-based applications that don’t handle this correctly, and worse, don’t even know it. Imagine have 100s of millions of records in your database – how can you tell whether a particular data item is incorrect or out of date? And what price are you willing to pay for ensuring that the data can be trusted? Multiple network messages per read request? Discrepancy and conflict resolution logic in the application, and potentially, additional messages? All this overhead, when all you were trying to do was to read a data item. Wouldn’t it be simpler to avoid this problem in the first place? Master-slave architectures like the Oracle NoSQL Database handles this very elegantly. A change to a data item is always sent to the master copy. Consequently, the master copy always has the most current and authoritative version of the data item. The master is also responsible for propagating the change to the other copies (for availability and read scalability). Client drivers are aware of master copies and replicas, and client drivers are also aware of the “currency” of a replica. In other words, each NoSQL Database client knows how stale a replica is. This vastly simplifies the job of the application developer. If the application needs the most current version of the data item, the client driver will automatically route the request to the master copy. If the application is willing to tolerate some staleness of data (e.g. a version that is no more than 1 second out of date), the client can easily determine which replica (or set of replicas) can satisfy the request, and route the request to the most efficient copy. This results in a dramatic simplification in application logic and also minimizes network requests (the driver will only send the request to exactl the right replica, not many). So, back to my original point. A well designed and well architected system minimizes or eliminates unnecessary overhead and avoids pessimistic algorithms wherever possible in order to deliver a highly efficient and high performance system. If you’ve every programmed an Oracle NoSQL Database application, you’ll know the difference! /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}

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  • "Can't create table" when having to many partitions

    - by Chris
    I am currently having a problem I dont understand. Wherever I look it says mySQL (5.5) / InnoDB doesnt have a table limit. I wanted to test the InnoDB compression and was about to create an empty copy of an existing table and ran into the following problem. this one works: CREATE TABLE `hsc` ( LOTS OF STUFF ) ENGINE=InnoDB CHARSET=utf8 PARTITION BY RANGE (pid) SUBPARTITION BY HASH (cons) SUBPARTITIONS 2 (PARTITION hsc_p0 VALUES LESS THAN (10000) , PARTITION hsc_p1 VALUES LESS THAN (20000) , PARTITION hsc_p2 VALUES LESS THAN (30000) , PARTITION hsc_p3 VALUES LESS THAN (40000) , PARTITION hsc_p4 VALUES LESS THAN (50000) , PARTITION hsc_p40 VALUES LESS THAN (4000000) ); this one doesn't: CREATE TABLE `hsc` ( LOTS OF STUFF ) ENGINE=InnoDB CHARSET=utf8 PARTITION BY RANGE (pid) SUBPARTITION BY HASH (cons) SUBPARTITIONS 2 (PARTITION hsc_p0 VALUES LESS THAN (10000) , PARTITION hsc_p1 VALUES LESS THAN (20000) , PARTITION hsc_p2 VALUES LESS THAN (30000) , PARTITION hsc_p3 VALUES LESS THAN (40000) , PARTITION hsc_p4 VALUES LESS THAN (50000) , PARTITION hsc_p5 VALUES LESS THAN (75000) , PARTITION hsc_p6 VALUES LESS THAN (100000) , PARTITION hsc_p7 VALUES LESS THAN (125000) , PARTITION hsc_p8 VALUES LESS THAN (150000) , PARTITION hsc_p9 VALUES LESS THAN (175000) , PARTITION hsc_p40 VALUES LESS THAN (4000000) ); ERROR 1005 (HY000): Can't create table 'hsc' (errno: 1) Its reproducable by removing the number of partitions and adding them again. it does not have to do anything with the name of the table as i tried various names. there is also enough empty space on the HDD. /dev/simfs 230G 26G 192G 12% /var/lib/mysql.mnt There should be no limit on the partitions http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/partitioning-limitations.html Maximum number of partitions. The maximum possible number of partitions for a given table (that does not use the NDB storage engine) is 1024. This number includes subpartitions. i have increased both open_files show variables where variable_name LIKE '%open_files%'; +-------------------+-------+ | Variable_name | Value | +-------------------+-------+ | innodb_open_files | 512 | | open_files_limit | 1536 | +-------------------+-------+ No change. Any clues where should I start looking? UPDATE: the whole thing is running in an openvz environment. i saw in users_beancounters that the numflock was a problem, so i increased it. but the problem still persists. maybe this helps: ulimit -a core file size (blocks, -c) 0 data seg size (kbytes, -d) unlimited scheduling priority (-e) 0 file size (blocks, -f) unlimited pending signals (-i) 515011 max locked memory (kbytes, -l) 64 max memory size (kbytes, -m) unlimited open files (-n) 1024 pipe size (512 bytes, -p) 8 POSIX message queues (bytes, -q) 819200 real-time priority (-r) 0 stack size (kbytes, -s) 10240 cpu time (seconds, -t) unlimited max user processes (-u) 515011 virtual memory (kbytes, -v) unlimited file locks (-x) unlimited cat /proc/user_beancounters Version: 2.5 uid resource held maxheld barrier limit failcnt 200: kmemsize 9309653 13357056 14372700 14790164 0 lockedpages 0 1008 2048 2048 0 privvmpages 675424 686528 1048576 1572864 0 shmpages 33 673 21504 21504 0 dummy 0 0 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775807 0 numproc 49 90 240 240 0 physpages 243761 246945 0 9223372036854775807 0 vmguarpages 0 0 1048576 1048576 0 oomguarpages 81672 83305 1048576 1048576 0 numtcpsock 6 8 360 360 0 numflock 175 188 512 512 8 numpty 1 9 16 16 0 numsiginfo 0 48 256 256 0 tcpsndbuf 104640 263912 1720320 2703360 0 tcprcvbuf 98304 131072 1720320 2703360 0 othersockbuf 32368 89304 1126080 2097152 0 dgramrcvbuf 0 2312 262144 262144 0 numothersock 19 28 360 360 0 dcachesize 2285052 3624426 3409920 3624960 0 numfile 616 870 9312 9312 0 dummy 0 0 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775807 0 dummy 0 0 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775807 0 dummy 0 0 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775807 0 numiptent 24 24 128 128 0

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  • Fun with Python

    - by dotneteer
    I am taking a class on Coursera recently. My formal education is in physics. Although I have been working as a developer for over 18 years and have learnt a lot of programming on the job, I still would like to gain some systematic knowledge in computer science. Coursera courses taught by Standard professors provided me a wonderful chance. The three languages recommended for assignments are Java, C and Python. I am fluent in Java and have done some projects using C++/MFC/ATL in the past, but I would like to try something different this time. I first started with pure C. Soon I discover that I have to write a lot of code outside the question that I try to solve because the very limited C standard library. For example, to read a list of values from a file, I have to read characters by characters until I hit a delimiter. If I need a list that can grow, I have to create a data structure myself, something that I have taking for granted in .Net or Java. Out of frustration, I switched to Python. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Python is very easy to learn. The tutorial on the official Python site has the exactly the right pace for me, someone with experience in another programming. After a couple of hours on the tutorial and a few more minutes of toying with IDEL, I was in business. I like the “battery supplied” philosophy that gives everything that I need out of box. For someone from C# or Java background, curly braces are replaced by colon(:) and tab spaces. Although I tend to miss colon from time to time, I found that the idea of tab space is actually very nice once I get use to them. I also like to feature of multiple assignment and multiple return parameters. When I need to return a by-product, I just add it to the list of returns. When would use Python? I would use Python if I need to computer anything quick. The language is very easy to use. Python has a good collection of libraries (packages). The REPL of the interpreter allows me test ideas quickly before committing them into script. Lots of computer science work have been ported from Lisp to Python. Some universities are even teaching SICP in Python. When wouldn’t I use Python? I mostly would not use it in a managed environment, such as Ironpython or Jython. Both .Net and Java already have a rich library so one has to make a choice which library to use. If we use the managed runtime library, the code will tie to the particular runtime and thus not portable. If we use the Python library, then we will face the relatively long start-up time. For this reason, I would not recommend to use Ironpython for WP7 development. The only situation that I see merit with managed Python is in a server application where I can preload Python so that the start-up time is not a concern. Using Python as a managed glue language is an over-kill most of the time. A managed Scheme could be a better glue language as it is small enough to start-up very fast.

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