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  • SQL SERVER – Identify Numbers of Non Clustered Index on Tables for Entire Database

    - by pinaldave
    Here is the script which will give you numbers of non clustered indexes on any table in entire database. SELECT COUNT(i.TYPE) NoOfIndex, [schema_name] = s.name, table_name = o.name FROM sys.indexes i INNER JOIN sys.objects o ON i.[object_id] = o.[object_id] INNER JOIN sys.schemas s ON o.[schema_id] = s.[schema_id] WHERE o.TYPE IN ('U') AND i.TYPE = 2 GROUP BY s.name, o.name ORDER BY schema_name, table_name Here is the small story behind why this script was needed. I recently went to meet my friend in his office and he introduced me to his colleague in office as someone who is an expert in SQL Server Indexing. I politely said I am yet learning about Indexing and have a long way to go. My friend’s colleague right away said – he had a suggestion for me with related to Index. According to him he was looking for a script which will count all the non clustered on all the tables in the database and he was not able to find that on SQLAuthority.com. I was a bit surprised as I really do not remember all the details about what I have written so far. I quickly pull up my phone and tried to look for the script on my custom search engine and he was correct. I never wrote a script which will count all the non clustered indexes on tables in the whole database. Excessive indexing is not recommended in general. If you have too many indexes it will definitely negatively affect your performance. The above query will quickly give you details of numbers of indexes on tables on your entire database. You can quickly glance and use the numbers as reference. Please note that the number of the index is not a indication of bad indexes. There is a lot of wisdom I can write here but that is not the scope of this blog post. There are many different rules with Indexes and many different scenarios. For example – a table which is heap (no clustered index) is often not recommended on OLTP workload (here is the blog post to identify them), drop unused indexes with careful observation (here is the script for it), identify missing indexes and after careful testing add them (here is the script for it). Even though I have given few links here it is just the tip of the iceberg. If you follow only above four advices your ship may still sink. Those who wants to learn the subject in depth can watch the videos here after logging in. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Index, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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  • Oracle Tutor: Are Documented Policies and Procedures Necessary?

    - by emily.chorba(at)oracle.com
    People refer to policies and procedures with a variety of expressions including business process documentation, standard operating procedures (SOPs), department operating procedures (DOPs), work instructions, specifications, and so on. For our purpose here, policies and procedures mean a set of documents that describe an organization's policies (rules) for operation and the procedures (containing tasks performed by individuals) to fulfill the policies. When an organization documents policies and procedures properly, they can be the strategic link between an organization's vision and its daily operations. Policies and procedures are often necessary because of some external requirement, such as environmental compliance or other governmental regulations. One example of an external requirement would be the American Sarbanes-Oxley Act, requiring full openness in accounting practices. Here are a few other examples of business issues that necessitate writing policies and procedures: Operational needs -- policies and procedures ensure fundamental processes are performed in a consistent way that meets the organization's needs. Risk management -- policies and procedures are identified by the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission (COSO) as a control activity needed to manage risk. Continuous improvement -- Procedures can improve processes by building important internal communication practices. Compliance -- Well-defined and documented processes (i.e. procedures, training materials) along with records that demonstrate process capability can demonstrate an effective internal control system compliant with regulations and standards. In addition to helping with the above business issues, policies and procedures can support the basic needs of employees and management. Well documented and easy to access policies and procedures: allow employees to understand their roles and responsibilities within predefined limits and to stay on the accepted path indentified by the organization's management provide clarity to the reader when dealing with accountability issues or activities that are of critical importance allow management to guide operations without constant intervention allow managers to control events in advance and prevent employees from making costly mistakes Can you think of another way organizations can meet the above needs of management and their employees in place of documented Policies and Procedures? Probably not, but we would love your feedback on this question. And that my friends, is why documented policies and procedures are very necessary. Learn MoreFor more information about Tutor, visit Oracle.com or the Tutor Blog. Post your questions at the Tutor Forum. Emily ChorbaPrinciple Product Manager Oracle Tutor & BPM

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  • Evaluating Solutions to Manage Product Compliance? Don’t Wait Much Longer

    - by Evelyn Neumayr
    By Kerrie Foy, Director PLM Product Marketing, Oracle Depending on severity, product compliance issues can cause various problems from run-away budgets to business closures. But effective policies and safeguards can create a strong foundation for innovation, productivity, market penetration and competitive advantage. If you’ve been putting off a systematic approach to product compliance, it is time to reconsider that decision. Why now?  No matter what industry, companies face a litany of worldwide and regional regulations that require proof of product compliance and environmental friendliness for market access.  For example, Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS), a regulation that restricts the use of six dangerous materials used in the manufacture of electronic and electrical equipment, was originally adopted by the European Union in 2003 for implementation in 2006 and has evolved over time through various regional versions for North America, China, Japan, Korea, Norway and Turkey. In addition, the RoHS directive allowed for material exemptions used in Medical Devices, but that exemption ends in 2014. Additional regulations worth watching are the Battery Directive, Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE), and Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) directives. Additional regulations are expected from organizations such as the Food and Drug Administration in the US and similar organizations elsewhere. Meeting compliance requirements and also successfully investing in eco-friendly designs can be a major challenge. It may involve transforming business models, go-to-market strategies, supply networks, quality assurance policies and compliance processes.  Without a single source of truth for product data and without proper processes in place, ensuring product compliance burgeons into a crushing task that is cost-prohibitive and overwhelming.  However, the risk to consumer goodwill and satisfaction, revenue, business continuity, and market potential is too great not to solve the compliance challenge. Companies are beginning to adapt and thrive by implementing systematic approaches to product compliance that are more than functional bandages, they are revenue-generating engines. Consider working with Oracle to help you address your compliance needs. Many of the world’s most innovative leaders and pioneers are leveraging Oracle’s Agile Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) portfolio of enterprise applications to manage the product value chain, centralize product data, automate processes, and launch more eco-friendly products to market faster.   Particularly, the Agile Product Governance & Compliance (PG&C) solution provides out-of-the-box functionality to integrate actionable regulatory information into the enterprise product record from the ideation to the disposal/recycling phase.  Agile PG&C is a comprehensive solution that makes product compliance per corporate initiatives and regulations more reliable and efficient. Throughout product lifecycles, use the solution to support full material disclosures, gain rapid visibility into non-compliance issues, efficiently manage declarations with your suppliers, feed compliance data into a corrective action if a product must be changed, and swiftly satisfy audits by showing all due diligence tracked in one solution. Given the compounding regulation and consumer focus on urgent environmental issues, now is the time to act. Implementing an enterprise-wide systematic approach to product compliance is a competitive investment. From the start, Agile PG&C enables companies to confidently design for compliance and sustainability, reduce the cost of compliance, minimize the risk of business interruption, deliver responsible products, and inspire new innovation.  Don’t wait any longer! To find out more about Agile Product Governance & Compliance download the data sheet, contact your sales representative, or call Oracle at 1-800-633-0738.

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  • Using SQL Source Control and Vault Professional Part 4

    - by Ajarn Mark Caldwell
    Two weeks ago I upgraded our installation of Fortress to the latest version, which is now named Vault Professional.  This is the version of Vault (i.e. Vault Standard 5.1 / Vault Professional 5.1) that will be officially supported with Red-Gate SQL Source Control 2.1.  While the folks at Red-Gate did a fantastic job of working with me to get SQL Source Control to work with the older Fortress version, we weren’t going to just sit on that.  There are a couple of things that Vault Professional cleaned up for us, such as improved integration with Visual Studio 2010, so it was a win all around. Shortly after that upgrade, I received notice from Red-Gate that they had a new Early Access version of SQL Source Control available that included the ability to source control static data.  The idea here is that you probably have a few fairly static lookup tables in your system, and those data values are similar in concept to source code, and should be versioned in your source control management system also.  I agree with this, but please be wise…somebody out there is bound to try to use this feature as their disaster recovery for their entire database, and that is NOT the purpose.  First off, you should never have your PROD (or LIVE, whatever you call it) system attached to source control.  Source Control is for development, not for PROD systems.  Second, use the features that are intended for this purpose, such as BACKUP and RESTORE. Laying that tangent aside, it is great that now you can include these critical values in your repository and make them part of a deployment process.  As you would guess, SQL Source Control uses SQL Data Compare to create the data change scripts just like it uses SQL Compare to create the schema change scripts.  Once again, they did a very good job with the integration to their other products.  At this point we are really starting to see some good payback on our investment in the full SQL Developer Bundle.  Those products were worth the investment back when we only used them sporadically for troubleshooting and DBA analysis, but now with SQL Source Control, they are becoming everyday-use products for the development team. I like this software (SQL Source Control) so much that I am about to break my own rules and distribute it to my team to use even though it is still in beta.  This is the first time that I have approved the use of any beta software in a production scenario (actively building our next versions of internal software) but I predict that the usability and productivity gain of using SQL Source Control over manual scripting is worth the risk.  Of course, I have also put this beta software through its paces pretty well to be comfortable with it, and Red-Gate has proven their responsiveness to issues that came up in my early beta testing, and so I am willing to bet on their continued support.  Likewise, SourceGear, the maker of Vault Professional, has proven itself to me as well, and so the combination of SQL Source Control with Vault Professional is the new standard for my development team.

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  • Responding to Invites

    - by Daniel Moth
    Following up from my post about Sending Outlook Invites here is a shorter one on how to respond. Whatever your choice (ACCEPT, TENTATIVE, DECLINE), if the sender has not unchecked the "Request Response" option, then send your response. Always send your response. Even if you think the sender made a mistake in keeping it on, send your response. Seriously, not responding is plain rude. If you knew about the meeting, and you are happy investing your time in it, and the time and location work for you, and there is an implicit/explicit agenda, then ACCEPT and send it. If one or more of those things don't work for you then you have a few options. Send a DECLINE explaining why. Reply with email to ask for further details or for a change to be made. If you don’t receive a response to your email, send a DECLINE when you've waited enough. Send a TENTATIVE if you haven't made up your mind yet. Hint: if they really require you there, they'll respond asking "why tentative" and you have a discussion about it. When you deem appropriate, instead of the options above, you can also use the counter propose feature of Outlook but IMO that feature has questionable interaction model and UI (on both sender and recipient) so many people get confused by it. BTW, two of my outlook rules are relevant to invites. The first one auto-marks as read the ACCEPT responses if there is no comment in the body of the accept (I check later who has accepted and who hasn't via the "Tracking" button of the invite). I don’t have a rule for the DECLINE and TENTATIVE cause typically I follow up with folks that send those.   The second rule ensures that all Invites go to a specific folder. That is the first folder I see when I triage email. It is also the only folder which I have configured to show a count of all items inside it, rather than the unread count - when sending a response to an invite the item disappears from the folder and hence it is empty and not nagging me. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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  • Can you Trust Search?

    - by David Dorf
    An awful lot of referrals to e-commerce sites come from web searches. Retailers rely on search engine optimization (SEO) to correctly position their website so they can be found. Search on "blue jeans" and the results are determined by a semi-secret algorithm -- in my case Levi.com, Banana Republic, and ShopStyle show up. The NY Times recently uncovered a situation where JCPenney, via third-parties hired to help with SEO, was caught manipulating search results so they were erroneously higher in page rankings. No doubt this helped drive additional sales during this part Christmas. The article, The Dirty Little Secrets of Search, is well worth reading. My friend Ron Kleinman started an interesting discussion at the ARTS Linkedin forum. He posed the question: The ability of a single company to "punish" any retailer (by significantly impacting their on-line sales volume) who does not play by their rules ... is this a good thing or a bad thing? Clearly JCP was in the wrong and needed to be punished, but should that decision lie with Google alone? Don't get me wrong -- I'm certainly not advocating we create a Department of Search where bureaucrats think of ways to spend money, but Google wields an awful lot of power in this situation, and it makes me feel uncomfortable. Now Google is incorporating more social aspects into their search results. For example, when Google knows its me (i.e. I'm logged in when using Google) search results will be influenced by my Twitter network. In an effort to increase relevance, the blogs and re-tweeted articles from my network will be higher in the search results than they otherwise would be. So in the case of product searches, things discussed in my network will rise to the top. Continuing my blue jean example, if someone in my network had been discussing Macy's perhaps they would now be higher in the result set. soapbox: I already have lots of spammers posting bogus comments to this blog in an effort to create additional links to their sites and thus increase their search ranking. Should I expect a similar situation in Twitter and eventually Facebook? Now retailers need to expand their SEO efforts to incorporate social media as well, but do us all a favor and please don't cheat.

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  • Separating physics and game logic from UI code

    - by futlib
    I'm working on a simple block-based puzzle game. The game play consists pretty much of moving blocks around in the game area, so it's a trivial physics simulation. My implementation, however, is in my opinion far from ideal and I'm wondering if you can give me any pointers on how to do it better. I've split the code up into two areas: Game logic and UI, as I did with a lot of puzzle games: The game logic is responsible for the general rules of the game (e.g. the formal rule system in chess) The UI displays the game area and pieces (e.g. chess board and pieces) and is responsible for animations (e.g. animated movement of chess pieces) The game logic represents the game state as a logical grid, where each unit is one cell's width/height on the grid. So for a grid of width 6, you can move a block of width 2 four times until it collides with the boundary. The UI takes this grid, and draws it by converting logical sizes into pixel sizes (that is, multiplies it by a constant). However, since the game has hardly any game logic, my game logic layer [1] doesn't have much to do except collision detection. Here's how it works: Player starts to drag a piece UI asks game logic for the legal movement area of that piece and lets the player drag it within that area Player lets go of a piece UI snaps the piece to the grid (so that it is at a valid logical position) UI tells game logic the new logical position (via mutator methods, which I'd rather avoid) I'm not quite happy with that: I'm writing unit tests for my game logic layer, but not the UI, and it turned out all the tricky code is in the UI: Stopping the piece from colliding with others or the boundary and snapping it to the grid. I don't like the fact that the UI tells the game logic about the new state, I would rather have it call a movePieceLeft() method or something like that, as in my other games, but I didn't get far with that approach, because the game logic knows nothing about the dragging and snapping that's possible in the UI. I think the best thing to do would be to get rid of my game logic layer and implement a physics layer instead. I've got a few questions regarding that: Is such a physics layer common, or is it more typical to have the game logic layer do this? Would the snapping to grid and piece dragging code belong to the UI or the physics layer? Would such a physics layer typically work with pixel sizes or with some kind of logical unit, like my game logic layer? I've seen event-based collision detection in a game's code base once, that is, the player would just drag the piece, the UI would render that obediently and notify the physics system, and the physics system would call a onCollision() method on the piece once a collision is detected. What is more common? This approach or asking for the legal movement area first? [1] layer is probably not the right word for what I mean, but subsystem sounds overblown and class is misguiding, because each layer can consist of several classes.

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  • Unleash the Power of Cryptography on SPARC T4

    - by B.Koch
    by Rob Ludeman Oracle’s SPARC T4 systems are architected to deliver enhanced value for customer via the inclusion of many integrated features.  One of the best examples of this approach is demonstrated in the on-chip cryptographic support that delivers wire speed encryption capabilities without any impact to application performance.  The Evolution of SPARC Encryption SPARC T-Series systems have a long history of providing this capability, dating back to the release of the first T2000 systems that featured support for on-chip RSA encryption directly in the UltraSPARC T1 processor.  Successive generations have built on this approach by support for additional encryption ciphers that are tightly coupled with the Oracle Solaris 10 and Solaris 11 encryption framework.  While earlier versions of this technology were implemented using co-processors, the SPARC T4 was redesigned with new crypto instructions to eliminate some of the performance overhead associated with the former approach, resulting in much higher performance for encrypted workloads. The Superiority of the SPARC T4 Approach to Crypto As companies continue to engage in more and more e-commerce, the need to provide greater degrees of security for these transactions is more critical than ever before.  Traditional methods of securing data in transit by applications have a number of drawbacks that are addressed by the SPARC T4 cryptographic approach. 1. Performance degradation – cryptography is highly compute intensive and therefore, there is a significant cost when using other architectures without embedded crypto functionality.  This performance penalty impacts the entire system, slowing down performance of web servers (SSL), for example, and potentially bogging down the speed of other business applications.  The SPARC T4 processor enables customers to deliver high levels of security to internal and external customers while not incurring an impact to overall SLAs in their IT environment. 2. Added cost – one of the methods to avoid performance degradation is the addition of add-in cryptographic accelerator cards or external offload engines in other systems.  While these solutions provide a brute force mechanism to avoid the problem of slower system performance, it usually comes at an added cost.  Customers looking to encrypt datacenter traffic without the overhead and expenditure of extra hardware can rely on SPARC T4 systems to deliver the performance necessary without the need to purchase other hardware or add-on cards. 3. Higher complexity – the addition of cryptographic cards or leveraging load balancers to perform encryption tasks results in added complexity from a management standpoint.  With SPARC T4, encryption keys and the framework built into Solaris 10 and 11 means that administrators generally don’t need to spend extra cycles determining how to perform cryptographic functions.  In fact, many of the instructions are built-in and require no user intervention to be utilized.  For example, For OpenSSL on Solaris 11, SPARC T4 crypto is available directly with a new built-in OpenSSL 1.0 engine, called the "t4 engine."  For a deeper technical dive into the new instructions included in SPARC T4, consult Dan Anderson’s blog. Conclusion In summary, SPARC T4 systems offer customers much more value for applications than just increased performance. The integration of key virtualization technologies, embedded encryption, and a true Enterprise Operating System, Oracle Solaris, provides direct business benefits that supersedes the commodity approach to data center computing.   SPARC T4 removes the roadblocks to secure computing by offering integrated crypto accelerators that can save IT organizations in operating cost while delivering higher levels of performance and meeting objectives around compliance. For more on the SPARC T4 family of products, go to here.

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  • top tweets SOA Partner Community – June 2013

    - by JuergenKress
    Send your tweets @soacommunity #soacommunity and follow us at http://twitter.com/soacommunity Oracle SOA Learn how Business Rules are used in Oracle SOA Suite. New free self-study course - Oracle Univ. #soa #oraclesoa http://pub.vitrue.com/ll9B OPITZ CONSULTING ?Wie #BPM und #SOA zusammengehören? Watch 100-Seconds-Video-Lesson by @Rolfbaer - http://ow.ly/luSjK @soacommunity Andrejus Baranovskis ?Customized BPM 11g PS6 Workspace Application http://fb.me/2ukaSBXKs Mark Nelson ?Case Management Samples Released http://wp.me/pgVeO-Lv Mark Nelson Instance Patching Demo for BPM 11.1.1.7 http://wp.me/pgVeO-Lx Simone Geib Antony Reynolds: Target Verification #oraclesoa https://blogs.oracle.com/reynolds/ OPITZ CONSULTING ?"It's all about Integration - Developing with Oracle #Cloud Services" @t_winterberg files: http://ow.ly/ljtEY #cloudworld @soacommunity Arun Pareek ?Functional Testing Business Processes In Oracle BPM Suite 11g http://wp.me/pkPu1-pc via @arrunpareek SOA Proactive Want to get started with Human Workflow? Check out the introductory video on OTN, http://pub.vitrue.com/enIL C2B2 Consulting Free tech workshop,London 6th of Jun Diagnosing Performance & Scalability Problems in Oracle SOASuite http://www.c2b2.co.uk/oracle_fusion_middleware_performance_seminar … @soacommunity Oracle BPM Must have technologies for delivering effective #CX : #BPM #Social #Mobile > #OracleBPM Whitepaper http://pub.vitrue.com/6pF6 OracleBlogs ?Introduction to Web Forms -Basic Tutorial http://ow.ly/2wQLTE OTNArchBeat ?Complete State of SOA podcast now available w/ @soacommunity @hajonormann @gschmutz @t_winterberg #industrialsoa http://pub.vitrue.com/PZFw Ronald Luttikhuizen VENNSTER Blog | Article published - Fault Handling and Prevention - Part 2 | http://blog.vennster.nl/2013/05/article-published-fault-handling-and.html … Mark Nelson ?Getting to know Maven http://wp.me/pgVeO-Lk gschmutz ?Cool! Our 2nd article has just been published: "Fault Handling and Prevention for Services in Oracle Service Bus" http://pub.vitrue.com/jMOy David Shaffer Interesting SOA Development and Delivery post on A-Team Redstack site - http://bit.ly/18oqrAI . Would be great to get others to contribute! Mark Nelson BPM PS6 video showing process lifecycle in more detail (30min) http://wp.me/pgVeO-Ko SOA Proactive ?Webcast: 'Introduction and Troubleshooting of the SOA 11g Database Adapter', May 9th. Register now at http://pub.vitrue.com/8In7 Mark Nelson ?SOA Development and Delivery http://wp.me/pgVeO-Kd Oracle BPM Manoj Das, VP Product Mangement talks about new #OracleBPM release #BPM #processmanagement http://pub.vitrue.com/FV3R OTNArchBeat Podcast: The State of SOA w/ @soacommunity @hajonormann @gschmutz @t_winterberg #industrialsoa http://pub.vitrue.com/OK2M gschmutz New article series on Industrial SOA started on OTN and Service Technology Magazine: http://guidoschmutz.wordpress.com/2013/04/22/first-two-chapters-of-industrial-soa-articles-series-have-been-published-both-on-otn-and-service-technology-magazine/ … #industrialSOA Danilo Schmiedel ?Article series #industrialSOA published on OTN and Service Technology Magazine http://inside-bpm-and-soa.blogspot.de/2013/04/industrial-soa_22.html … @soacommunity @OC_WIRE SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki Mix Forum Technorati Tags: twitter,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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  • AI for a mixed Turn Based + Real Time battle system - Something "Gambit like" the right approach?

    - by Jason L.
    This is maybe a question that's been asked 100 times 1,000 different ways. I apologize for that :) I'm in the process of building the AI for a game I'm working on. The game is a turn based one, in the vein of Final Fantasy but also has a set of things that happen in real time (reactions). I've experimented with FSM, HFSMs, and Behavior Trees. None of them felt "right" to me and all felt either too limiting or too generic / big. The idea I'm toying with now is something like a "Rules engine" that could be likened to the Gambit system from Final Fantasy 12. I would have a set of predefined personalities. Each of these personalities would have a set of conditions it would check on each event (Turn start, time to react, etc). These conditions would be priority ordered, and the first one that returns true would be the action I take. These conditions can also point to a "choice" action, which is just an action that will make a choice based on some Utility function. Sort of a mix of FSM/HFSM and a Utility Function approach. So, a "gambit" with the personality of "Healer" may look something like this: (ON) Ally HP = 0% - Choose "Relife" spell (ON) Ally HP < 50% - Choose Heal spell (ON) Self HP < 65% - Choose Heal spell (ON) Ally Debuff - Choose Debuff Removal spell (ON) Ally Lost Buff - Choose Buff spell Likewise, a "gambit" with the personality of "Agressor" may look like this: (ON) Foe HP < 10% - Choose Attack skill (ON) Foe any - Choose target - Choose Attack skill (ON) Self Lost Buff - Choose Buff spell (ON) Foe HP = 0% - Taunt the player What I like about this approach is it makes sense in my head. It also would be extremely easy to build an "AI Editor" with an approach like this. What I'm worried about is.. would it be too limiting? Would it maybe get too complicated? Does anyone have any experience with AIs in Turn Based games that could maybe provide me some insight into this approach.. or suggest a different approach? Many thanks in advance!!!

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  • Should I be looking for an alternative to Zen Cart as my business grows?

    - by MarkS
    I created a business website for a family business which is growing. It's my family, and I'm a software developer, but I don't want to rebuild the wheels or be a shopping cart programmer. For this business, I need the web store to "just work", but... it gets complicated... There are two parts of this business website. One of them is driven by Wordpress and I use the awesome Thesis theme. This is modern, flexible, and saves me a lot of time from doing custom coding and styling. I couldn't be more pleased with this arrangement. The other part of the site is a Zen Cart store. It's administration and it's flexibility is frustrating and archaic Web 1.0. For the past few years, I keep hearing that the developers are working on a 2.0 version of Zen Cart, but they haven't communicated anything significant in the past few years other than to say, "When it's ready, we'll let you know." What I'm looking for in a cart, I would need to install 6-10 additional mods, and would need to do a lot of custom coding. I'm now willing to pay for a top-notch e-commerce solution for a small business that we can grow up into a larger business over time. Requirements: Extremely flexible shipping that let's us set up rules per product/category, tables of rates, calculated rates, max package weighs, etc. (flexibility like that available with CEON Advance Shipping Module for Zen Cart Coupons and gift certificates Manual order entry for phone orders Multi-channel support (We also sell on Amazon, eBay, use Google Base and we want to maintain one set of inventory and have it kept current) Decent SEO features Reviews and star-ratings on products Easy social networking features for sharing, following, liking, etc) Easy integration with AdWords and analytics tracking Modern and very usable product and store administration (Like I was saying, I'm spoiled by Wordpress and Thesis) At the end of the day, I don't care if it's a hosted solution or if I have to host it myself. I just want something that is going to stay up-to-date, regularly be maintained and improved, and if I have to update it, things like the one-click update present in Wordpress is something it has to have. Professional Webmasters, if you had to run a store / website, but you had to spend your time focusing on your sales and marketing efforts rather than diffing php files and copying and tweaking them to change even the slightest details of your site, what would you choose?

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  • Implementing features in an Entity System

    - by Bane
    After asking two questions on Entity Systems (1, 2), and reading some articles on them, I think that I understand them much better than before. But, I still have some uncertainties, and mainly they are about building a Particle Emitter, an Input system, and a Camera. I obviously still have some problems understanding Entity Systems, and they might apply to a whole other range of objects, but I chose these three because they are very different concepts and should cover a pretty big ground, and help me understand Entity Systems and how to handle problems like these myself, as they come along. I am building an engine in Javascript, and I've implemented most of the core features, which include: input handling, flexible animation system, particle emitter, math classes and functions, scene handling, a camera and a render, and a whole bunch of other things that engines usually support. Then, I read Byte56's answer that got me interested into making the engine into an Entity System one. It would still remain an HTML5 game engine with the basic Scene philosophy, but it should support dynamic creation of entities from components. These are some of the definitions from the previous questions, updated: An Entity is an identifier. It doesn't have any data, it's not an object, it's a simple id that represents an index in the Scene's list of all entities (which I actually plan to implement as a component matrix). A Component is a data holder, but with methods that can operate on that data. The best example is a Vector2D, or a "Position" component. It has data: x and y, but also some methods that make operating on the data a bit easier: add(), normalize(), and so on. A System is something that can operate on a set of entities that meet the certain requirements, usually they (the entities) need to have a specified (by the system itself) set of components to be operated upon. The system is the "logic" part, the "algorithm" part, all the functionality supplied by components is purely for easier data management. The problem that I have now is fitting my old engine concept into this new programming paradigm. Lets start with the simplest one, a Camera. The camera has a position property (Vector2D), a rotation property and some methods for centering it around a point. Each frame, it is fed to a renderer, along with a scene, and all the objects are translated according to it's position. Then the scene is rendered. How could I represent this kind of an object in an Entity System? Would the camera be an entity or simply a component? A combination (see my answer)? Another issues that is bothering me is implementing a Particle Emitter. For what exactly I mean by that, you can check out my video of it: http://youtu.be/BObargIMQsE. The problem I have with this is, again, what should be what. I'm pretty sure that particles themselves shouldn't be entities, as I want to support 10k+ of them, and creating that much entities would be a heavy blow on my performance, I believe. Or maybe not? Depends on the implementation, but anyone with experience: please, do answer. The last bit I wan't to talk about, which is also bugging me the most, is how input should be handled. In my current version of the engine, there is a class called Input. It's a handler that subscribes to browser's events, such as keypresses, and mouse position changes, and also it maintains an internal state. Then, the player class has a react() method, which accepts an input object as an argument. The advantage of this is that the input object could be serialized into JSON and then shared over the network, allowing for smooth multiplayer simulations. But how does this translate into an Entity System?

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  • Hey You! Stop Using the Apply Button and Just Click OK! [Geek Rants]

    - by The Geek
    As a computer geek, I often find myself helping people, and watching them change settings on their PC… and they almost always click the Apply button, and then the OK button. Why? Whenever you encounter a dialog box in Windows, there are the standard OK, Cancel, Apply buttons—but you don’t actually have to click the Apply button first. The OK button does the same thing, saves the settings, and then closes the dialog box… saving you an extra click. Don’t believe me? Try it out for yourself. Only the worst possible application won’t behave that way, and you probably don’t want to use that type of application to begin with. The only exception to this rule is a multiple tab dialog box, on a badly written application. Sometimes… your settings on one tab won’t stick unless you click Apply. Note that in this particular case, you can make changes in any one of the tabs, and they will carry through without having to click Apply, because this dialog window is well written. We’re just using the screenshot as an example of a multiple tab setting interface. So now that you know better, you can tell us… do you always use the Apply button first? Have you ever found an instance where it behaves differently? Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Got Awesome Skills? Why Not Write for How-To Geek?Customize Your Windows Vista Logon ScreenUse Outlook Rules to Prevent "Oh No!" After Sending EmailsGot Awesome Geek Skills? The How-To Geek is Looking for WritersQuick Firefox UI Tweaks TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Recycle ! Find That Elusive Icon with FindIcons Looking for Good Windows Media Player 12 Plug-ins? Find Out the Celebrity You Resemble With FaceDouble Whoa ! Use Printflush to Solve Printing Problems

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  • Amazon.com Cutting Off Colorado Affiliates

    - by Joe Mayo
    I received an email from Amazon.com today, essentially cutting off my affiliate status because I'm in Colorado. Colorado recently passed legislation that requires retailers to either collect sales tax for on-line transactions or engage in an onerous process that makes you wish you had collected sales tax.  After I Tweeted this, Mike Jones tweeted a link to the legislation.  Here's an excerpt from Amazon.com's email: "Dear Colorado-based Amazon Associate: We are writing from the Amazon Associates Program to inform you that the Colorado government recently enacted a law to impose sales tax regulations on online retailers. The regulations are burdensome and no other state has similar rules. The new regulations do not require online retailers to collect sales tax. Instead, they are clearly intended to increase the compliance burden to a point where online retailers will be induced to "voluntarily" collect Colorado sales tax -- a course we won't take. We and many others strongly opposed this legislation, known as HB 10-1193, but it was enacted anyway. Regrettably, as a result of the new law, we have decided to stop advertising through Associates based in Colorado. We plan to continue to sell to Colorado residents, however, and will advertise through other channels, including through Associates based in other states. There is a right way for Colorado to pursue its revenue goals, but this new law is a wrong way. As we repeatedly communicated to Colorado legislators, including those who sponsored and supported the new law, we are not opposed to collecting sales tax within a constitutionally-permissible system applied even-handedly. The US Supreme Court has defined what would be constitutional, and if Colorado would repeal the current law or follow the constitutional approach to collection, we would welcome the opportunity to reinstate Colorado-based Associates. You may express your views of Colorado's new law to members of the General Assembly and to Governor Ritter, who signed the bill. Your Associates account has been closed as of March 8, 2010, and we will no longer pay advertising fees for customers you refer to Amazon.com after that date. Please be assured that all qualifying advertising fees earned prior to March 8, 2010, will be processed and paid in accordance with our regular payment schedule. Based on your account closure date of March 8, any final payments will be paid by May 31, 2010. We have enjoyed working with you and other Colorado-based participants in the Amazon Associates Program, and wish you all the best in your future.   Best Regards,   The Amazon Associates Team"

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  • Adding Attributes to Generated Classes

    ASP.NET MVC 2 adds support for data annotations, implemented via attributes on your model classes.  Depending on your design, you may be using an OR/M tool like Entity Framework or LINQ-to-SQL to generate your entity classes, and you may further be using these entities directly as your Model.  This is fairly common, and alleviates the need to do mapping between POCO domain objects and such entities (though there are certainly pros and cons to using such entities directly). As an example, the current version of the NerdDinner application (available on CodePlex at nerddinner.codeplex.com) uses Entity Framework for its model.  Thus, there is a NerdDinner.edmx file in the project, and a generated NerdDinner.Models.Dinner class.  Fortunately, these generated classes are marked as partial, so you can extend their behavior via your own partial class in a separate file.  However, if for instance the generated Dinner class has a property Title of type string, you cant then add your own Title of type string for the purpose of adding data annotations to it, like this: public partial class Dinner { [Required] public string Title { get;set; } } This will result in a compilation error, because the generated Dinner class already contains a definition of Title.  How then can we add attributes to this generated code?  Do we need to go into the T4 template and add a special case that says if were generated a Dinner class and it has a Title property, add this attribute?  Ick. MetadataType to the Rescue The MetadataType attribute can be used to define a type which contains attributes (metadata) for a given class.  It is applied to the class you want to add metadata to (Dinner), and it refers to a totally separate class to which youre free to add whatever methods and properties you like.  Using this attribute, our partial Dinner class might look like this: [MetadataType(typeof(Dinner_Validation))] public partial class Dinner {}   public class Dinner_Validation { [Required] public string Title { get; set; } } In this case the Dinner_Validation class is public, but if you were concerned about muddying your API with such classes, it could instead have been created as a private class within Dinner.  Having the validation attributes specified in their own class (with no other responsibilities) complies with the Single Responsibility Principle and makes it easy for you to test that the validation rules you expect are in place via these annotations/attributes. Thanks to Julie Lerman for her help with this.  Right after she showed me how to do this, I realized it was also already being done in the project I was working on. Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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  • Best pathfinding for a 2D world made by CPU Perlin Noise, with random start- and destinationpoints?

    - by Mathias Lykkegaard Lorenzen
    I have a world made by Perlin Noise. It's created on the CPU for consistency between several devices (yes, I know it takes time - I have my techniques that make it fast enough). Now, in my game you play as a fighter-ship-thingy-blob or whatever it's going to be. What matters is that this "thing" that you play as, is placed in the middle of the screen, and moves along with the camera. The white stuff in my world are walls. The black stuff is freely movable. Now, as the player moves around he will constantly see "monsters" spawning around him in a circle (a circle that's larger than the screen though). These monsters move inwards and try to collide with the player. This is the part that's tricky. I want these monsters to constantly spawn, moving towards the player, but avoid walls entirely. I've added a screenshot below that kind of makes it easier to understand (excuse me for my bad drawing - I was using Paint for this). In the image above, the following rules apply. The red dot in the middle is the player itself. The light-green rectangle is the boundaries of the screen (in other words, what the player sees). These boundaries move with the player. The blue circle is the spawning circle. At the circumference of this circle, monsters will spawn constantly. This spawncircle moves with the player and the boundaries of the screen. Each monster spawned (shown as yellow triangles) wants to collide with the player. The pink lines shows the path that I want the monsters to move along (or something similar). What matters is that they reach the player without colliding with the walls. The map itself (the one that is Perlin Noise generated on the CPU) is saved in memory as two-dimensional bit-arrays. A 1 means a wall, and a 0 means an open walkable space. The current tile size is pretty small. I could easily make it a lot larger for increased performance. I've done some path algorithms before such as A*. I don't think that's entirely optimal here though.

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  • Achieving Zero Downtime Deployment

    - by MattW
    I am trying to achieve zero downtime deployments so I can deploy less during off hours and more during "slower" hours - or anytime, in theory. My current setup, somewhat simplified: Web Server A (.NET App) Web Server B (.NET App) Database Server (SQL Server) My current deployment process: "Stop" the sites on both Web Server A and B Upgrade the database schema for the version of the app being deployed Update Web Server A Update Web Server B Bring everything back online Current Problem This leads to a small amount of downtime each month - about 30 mins. I do this during off hours, so it isn't a huge problem - but it is something I'd like to get away from. Also - there is no way to really go 'back'. I don't generally make rollback DB scripts - only upgrade scripts. Leveraging The Load Balancer I'd love to be able to upgrade one Web Server at a time. Take Web Server A out of the load balancer, upgrade it, put it back online, then repeat for Web Server B. The problem is the database. Each version of my software will need to execute against a different version of the database - so I am sort of "stuck". Possible Solution A current solution I am considering is adopting the following rules: Never delete a database table. Never delete a database column. Never rename a database column. Never reorder a column. Every stored procedure must be versioned. Meaning - 'spFindAllThings' will become 'spFindAllThings_2' when it is edited. Then it becomes 'spFindAllThings_3' when edited again. Same rule applies to views. While, this seems a bit extreme - I think it solves the problem. Each version of the application will be hitting the DB in a non breaking way. The code expects certain results from the views/stored procedures - and this keeps that 'contract' valid. The problem is - it just seeps sloppy. I know I can clean up old stored procedures after the app is deployed for awhile, but it just feels dirty. Also - it depends on all of the developers following these rule, which will mostly happen, but I imagine someone will make a mistake. Finally - My Question Is this sloppy or hacky? Is anybody else doing it this way? How are other people solving this problem?

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  • Should I be put off a junior role that uses an online development test?

    - by Ninefingers
    I've applied for a junior development role, or rather been found by a recruiter looking for a developer. In order to get to a telephone interview stage I've been asked to sit one of those online coding assessments. This wasn't quite what I expected. I consider myself a fairly good developer for my age and experience, but I've no illusions about being Don Knuth or anything. The test was a series of incredibly obtuse questions asking about the results of various obscure evaluations. About 30 minutes in I was thinking to myself I hadn't intended to enter an obfuscated code contest/code golf exercise. After my last telephone interview I was asked to build something. I did. That seemed fair. Go away and work this out is more my in office experience of programming than "please evaluate this combination of lambdas, filters, maps, lists, tuples etc". So I'm a little put off, to be honest. I never claimed to know the language inside out or all the little corner cases. My questions, then: Should I be put off? Why? Why not? Are these kinds of tests what I should be expecting for junior roles? Should I learn stuff exam style? That seems to be the objective of these tests, for which you are timed and not supposed to use references or books? Normally, in the course of development I have a fairly good idea of basic types, rules, flow control and whatever. Occasionally I'll come up on something I need to use a regex for and have to go and remind myself of the exact piece of syntax I need if trying what I think should work doesn't. Or I'll come up against a module I've not used before and go and look it up. For example, if I wanted to write a server using sockets in C right now, I'd probably check the last piece of code I wrote doing that (and or the various books I have) and work from there. Chances are I probably couldn't do it exactly from scratch and from memory, although I can tell you you'd need a socket(), bind(), listen() and accept() call and you might also want select() depending on whether you intend to pthread_create or not. So I know what the calls are, but not their specific parameter list. What are your experiences if you are a recruiting manager? Are you after programmers who can quote you the API or do you not mind if your programmers have a few books on their desk and google function calls every so often?

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  • Creating metadata value relationships

    - by kyle.hatlestad
    I was recently asked an question about an interesting use case. They wanted content to be submitted into UCM with a particular ID in a custom metadata field. But they wanted that ID to be translated during submission into an employee name in another metadata field upon submission. My initial thought was that this could be done with a dependent choice list (DCL). One option list field driving the choices in another. But this didn't work in this case for a couple of reasons. First, the number of IDs could potentially be very large. So making that into a drop-down list would not be practical. The preference would be for that field to simply be a text field to type in the ID. Secondly, data could be submitted through different methods other then the web-based check-in form. And without an interface to select the DCL choices, the system needed a way to determine and populate the name field. So instead I went the approach of having the value of the ID field drive the value of the Name field using the derived field approach in my rule. In looking at it though, it was easy to simply copy the value of the ID field into the Name field...but to have it look up and translate the value proved to be the tricky part. So here is the approach I took... First I created my two metadata fields as standard text fields in the Configuration Manager applet. Next I create a table that stores the relationship between the IDs and Names. I then create a View into that table and set the column to the EmployeeID. I now create a new Application Field and set it as an option list using the View I created in the previous step. The reason I create it as an Application field is because I don't need to display the field or store a value in it. I simply need to make use of the option list in the next step... Finally, I create a Rule in which I select the Employee Name field and turn on the 'Is derived field' checkbox. I edit the derived value and add a new condition. Because the option list is a Application field and not an Information field, I can't use the Compute button. Instead, I insert this line directly in the Value field: @getFieldViewValue("EmployeeMapping",#active.xEmployeeID, "EmployeeName") The "EmployeeMapping" parameter designates that the value should be pulled from the EmployeeMapping Application field that I had created in the previous step. The #active.xEmployeeID field is the ID value that should be pulled from what the user entered. "EmployeeName" is the column name in the table which has the value which corresponds to the ID. The extracted name then becomes the value within our Employee Name field. That's it. You can then add additional Rules to make the Name field read-only/hidden on the check-in page and such.

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  • Guessing Excel Data Types

    - by AjarnMark
    Note to Self HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Jet\4.0\Engines\Excel: TypeGuessRows = 0 means scan everything. Note to Others About 10 years ago I stumbled across this bit of information just when I needed it and it saved my project.  Then for some reason, a few years later when it would have been nice, but not critical, for some reason I could not find it again anywhere.  Well, now I have stumbled across it again, and to preserve my future self from nightmares and sudden baldness due to pulling my hair out, I have decided to blog it in the hopes that I can find it again this way. Here’s the story…  When you query data from an Excel spreadsheet, such as with old-fashioned DTS packages in SQL 2000 (my first reference) or simply with an OLEDB Data Adapter from ASP.NET (recent task) and if you are using the Microsoft Jet 4.0 driver (newer ones may deal with this differently) then you can get funny results where the query reports back that a cell value is null even when you know it contains data. What happens is that Excel doesn’t really have data types.  While you can format information in cells to appear like certain data types (e.g. Date, Time, Decimal, Text, etc.) that is not really defining the cell as being of a certain type like we think of when working with databases.  But, presumably, to make things more convenient for the user (programmer) when you issue a query against Excel, the query processor tries to guess what type of data is contained in each column and returns it in an appropriate manner.  This is all well and good IF your data is consistent in every row and matches what the processor guessed.  And, for efficiency’s sake, when the query processor is trying to figure out each column’s data type, it does so by analyzing only the first 8 rows of data (default setting). Now here’s the problem, suppose that your spreadsheet contains information about clothing, and one of the columns is Size.  Now suppose that in the first 8 rows, all of your sizes look like 32, 34, 18, 10, and so on, using numbers, but then, somewhere after the 8th row, you have some rows with sizes like S, M, L, XL.  What happens is that by examining only the first 8 rows, the query processor inferred that the column contained numerical data, and then when it hits the non-numerical data in later rows, it comes back blank.  Major bummer, and a real pain to track down if you don’t know that Excel is doing this, because you study the spreadsheet and say, “the data is RIGHT THERE!  WHY doesn’t the query see it?!?!”  And the hair-pulling begins. So, what’s a developer to do?  One option is to go to the registry setting noted above and change the DWORD value of TypeGuessRows from the default of 8 to 0 (zero).  Setting this value to zero will force Jet to scan every row in the spreadsheet before making its determination as to what type of data the column contains.  And that means that in the example above, it would have treated the column as a string rather than as numeric, and presto! your query now returns all of the values that you know are in there. Of course, there is a caveat… if you are querying large spreadsheets, making Jet scan every row can be quite a performance hit.  You could enter a different number (more than 8) that you believe is a better sampling of rows to make the guess, but you still have the possibility that every row scanned looks alike, but that later rows are different, and that you might get blanks when there really is data there.  That’s the type of gamble, I really don’t like to take with my data. Anyone with a better approach, or with experience with more recent drivers that have a better way of handling data types, please chime in!

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  • Fast Data: Go Big. Go Fast.

    - by J Swaroop
    Cross-posting Dain Hansen's excellent recap of the Big Data/Fast Data announcement during OOW: For those of you who may have missed it, today’s second full day of Oracle OpenWorld 2012 started with a rumpus. Joe Tucci, from EMC outlined the human face of big data with real examples of how big data is transforming our world. And no not the usual tried-and-true weblog examples, but real stories about taxi cab drivers in Singapore using big data to better optimize their routes as well as folks just trying to get a better hair cut. Next we heard from Thomas Kurian who talked at length about the important platform characteristics of Oracle’s Cloud and more specifically Oracle’s expanded Cloud Services portfolio. Especially interesting to our integration customers are the messaging support for Oracle’s Cloud applications. What this means is that now Oracle’s Cloud applications have a lightweight integration fabric that on-premise applications can communicate to it via REST-APIs using Oracle SOA Suite. It’s an important element to our strategy at Oracle that supports this idea that whether your requirements are for private or public, Oracle has a solution in the Cloud for all of your applications and we give you more deployment choice than any vendor. If this wasn’t enough to get the juices flowing, later that morning we heard from Hasan Rizvi who outlined in his Fusion Middleware session the four most important enterprise imperatives: Social, Mobile, Cloud, and a brand new one: Fast Data. Today, Rizvi made an important step in the definition of this term to explain that he believes it’s a convergence of four essential technology elements: Event Processing for event filtering, business rules – with Oracle Event Processing Data Transformation and Loading - with Oracle Data Integrator Real-time replication and integration – with Oracle GoldenGate Analytics and data discovery – with Oracle Business Intelligence Each of these four elements can be considered (and architect-ed) together on a single integrated platform that can help customers integrate any type of data (structured, semi-structured) leveraging new styles of big data technologies (MapReduce, HDFS, Hive, NoSQL) to process more volume and variety of data at a faster velocity with greater results.  Fast data processing (and especially real-time) has always been our credo at Oracle with each one of these products in Fusion Middleware. For example, Oracle GoldenGate continues to be made even faster with the recent 11g R2 Release of Oracle GoldenGate which gives us some even greater optimization to Oracle Database with Integrated Capture, as well as some new heterogeneity capabilities. With Oracle Data Integrator with Big Data Connectors, we’re seeing much improved performance by running MapReduce transformations natively on Hadoop systems. And with Oracle Event Processing we’re seeing some remarkable performance with customers like NTT Docomo. Check out their upcoming session at Oracle OpenWorld on Wednesday to hear more how this customer is using Event processing and Big Data together. If you missed any of these sessions and keynotes, not to worry. There's on-demand versions available on the Oracle OpenWorld website. You can also checkout our upcoming webcast where we will outline some of these new breakthroughs in Data Integration technologies for Big Data, Cloud, and Real-time in more details.

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  • Oracle ERP Cloud Solution Defines Revenue Recognition Software Market

    - by Steve Dalton
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE Revenue is a fundamental yardstick of a company's performance, and one of the most important metrics for investors in the capital markets. So it’s no surprise that the accounting standard boards have devoted significant resources to this topic, with a key goal of ensuring that companies use a consistent method of recognizing revenue. Due to the myriad of revenue-generating transactions, and the divergent ways organizations recognize revenue today, the IFRS and FASB have been working for 12 years on a common set of accounting standards that apply to all industries in virtually all countries. Through their joint efforts on May 28, 2014 the FASB and IFRS released the IFRS 15 / ASU 2014-9 (Revenue from Contracts with Customers) converged accounting standard. This standard applies to revenue in all public companies, but heavily impacts organizations in any industry that might have complex sales contracts with multiple distinct deliverables (obligations). For example, an auto dealer who bundles free service with the sale of a car can only recognize the service revenue once the owner of the car brings it in for work. Similarly, high-tech companies that bundle software licenses, consulting, and support services on a sales contract will recognize bundled service revenue once the services are delivered. Now all companies need to review their revenue for hidden bundling and implicit obligations. Numerous time-consuming and judgmental activities must be performed to properly recognize revenue for complex sales contracts. To illustrate, after the contract is identified, organizations must identify and examine the distinct deliverables, determine the estimated selling price (ESP) for each deliverable, then allocate the total contract price to each deliverable based on the ESPs. In terms of accounting, organizations must determine whether the goods or services have been delivered or performed to the customer’s satisfaction, then either book revenue in the current period or record a liability for the obligation if revenue will be recognized in a future accounting period. Oracle Revenue Management Cloud was architected and developed so organizations can simplify and streamline revenue recognition. Among other capabilities, the solution uses business rules to efficiently identify and examine contracts, intelligently calculate and allocate deliverable prices based on prescribed inputs, and accurately recognize revenue for each deliverable based on customer satisfaction. "Oracle works very closely with our customers, the Big 4 accounting firms, and the accounting standard boards to deliver an adaptive, comprehensive, new generation revenue recognition solution,” said Rondy Ng, Senior Vice President, Applications Development. “With the recently announced IFRS 15 / ASU 2014-9, Oracle is ready to support customer adoption of the new standard with our Revenue Management Cloud,” said Rondy. Oracle Revenue Management Cloud, an integral part of Oracle Financials Cloud, helps organizations comply with accounting standards, provides them with confidence that reported revenue is materially accurate, and simplifies the accounting process for revenue recognition. Stay tuned to this blog for regular updates on Oracle Revenue Management Cloud. We also invite you to review our new oracle.com ERP pages @ oracle.com/erp. We will be updating these pages very soon with more information about Oracle Revenue Management Cloud.

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  • My Package Version Number Appears Greater Yet apt-get Doesn't Select It

    - by nutznboltz
    Backstory: It was determined that when using lxc container VMs the Nagios nrpe shutdown script when run on the host of the containers would kill the nrpe processes inside the containers. This was remediated by changing the script to use pidfiles instead of searching the process table for the nrpe process. Regrettably start-stop-daemon is a C program that resulted from translating a Perl script and it shows. There are far too many global varibles in start-stop-daemon.c and although there are some nice blocks of comments there are far to few comments that explain the intent behind variable names such as "schedule" (the string "schedule" appears in many contexts.) The manual page for start-stop-daemon strongly suggests that unless you use the "--retry" option the start-stop-daemon program may return before the process it sent a signal to actually calls exit() and terminates, however it doesn't actually state this in plain English. The obtuseness of start-stop-daemon is most likely the reason that the "fixed" version of the script includes a dubious comment indicating that sometimes the pid file has not been removed. I can easily see why someone would not understand that he left the --retry option missing. This bug also causes failures when the script is given the "restart" option; the nrpe daemon will shutdown but not start up again. Did I mention that since applying the update our nrpe servers started crashing over and over? Repairing this is why I am doing this work. I have been working on remediating the fix. You can see my current work in this PPA. Actual Question: The upstream version number of nagios-nrpe-server in lucid-updates is 2.12-4ubuntu1.10.04.1 My PPA uses this version number 2.12-4ubuntu1.10.04.1.1~ppa1~lucid1 I check the rules here and use this test program and I am lead to believe that the version number I use in my PPA is greater than the one in lucid-updates yet when I ran: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nutznboltz/nrpe-unbreak-lp-600941 sudo apt-get update sudo aptitiude dist-upgrade The replacement package was not installed. I was able to install it using sudo aptitude install nagios-nrpe-server=2.12-4ubuntu1.10.04.1.1~ppa1~lucid1 Can anyone explain this behavior? Why didn't my version number appear greater to "aptitude dist-upgrade"? Thanks $ cat /etc/apt/preferences Package: * Pin: release a=lucid-backports Pin-Priority: 400 Package: * Pin: release a=lucid-security Pin-Priority: 990 Package: * Pin: release a=lucid-updates Pin-Priority: 900 Package: * Pin: release a=lucid-proposed Pin-Priority: 400 $ ls /etc/apt/preferences.d/ $ Should not make any difference as a PPA cannot be in any of those pockets. I went ahead and bumped the version number in the PPA to 2.12-4ubuntu1.10.04.2~ppa1~lucid1. I'll see if that makes a difference. I do notice that lintian complains: W: nagios-nrpe-server: debian-revision-not-well-formed 2.12-4ubuntu1.10.04.2~ppa1~lucid1

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  • The importance of Unit Testing in BI

    - by Davide Mauri
    One of the main steps in the process we internally use to develop a BI solution is the implementation of Unit Test of you BI Data. As you may already know, I’ve create a simple (for now) tool that leverages NUnit to allow us to quickly create Unit Testing without having to resort to use Visual Studio Database Professional: http://queryunit.codeplex.com/ Once you have a tool like this one, you can start also to make sure that your BI solution (DWH and CUBE) is not only structurally sound (I mean, the cube or the report gets processed correctly), but you can also check that the logical integrity of your business rules is enforced. For example let’s say that the customer tell you that they will never create an invoice for a specific product-line in 2010 since that product-line is dismissed and will never be sold again. Ok we know that this in theory is true, but a lot of this business rule effectiveness depends on the fact the people does not do a mistake while inserting new orders/invoices and the ERP used implements a check for this business logic. Unfortunately these last two hypotesis are not always true, so you may find yourself really having some invoices for a product line that doesn’t exists anymore. Maybe this kind of situation in future will be solved using Master Data Management but, meanwhile, how you can give and idea of the data quality to your customers? How can you check that logical integrity of the analytical data you produce is exactly what you expect? Well, Unit Testing of a DWH or a CUBE can be a solution. Once you have defined your test suite, by writing SQL and MDX queries that checks that your data is what you expect to be, if you use NUnit (and QueryUnit does), you can then use a tool like NUnit2Report to create a nice HTML report that can be shipped via email to give information of data quality: In addition to that, since NUnit produces an XML file as a result, you can also import it into a SQL Server Database and then monitor the quality of data over time. I’ll be speaking about this approach (and more in general about how to “engineer” a BI solution) at the next European SQL PASS Adaptive BI Best Practices http://www.sqlpass.org/summit/eu2010/Agenda/ProgramSessions/AdaptiveBIBestPratices.aspx I’ll enjoy discussing with you all about this, so see you there! And remember: “if ain't tested it's broken!” (Sorry I don’t remember how said that in first place :-)) Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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  • Mexico leading in Business Transformation Strategies:

    - by [email protected]
    By John Burke Group Vice President Oracle Applications Business Unit     I recently completed a business tour in Mexico, and was surprised by both the economic vibrancy of the country and the thought leadership expressed by many of the customers I met.  An example of the economic vibrancy of the country: across the street from my hotel was the local Bentley dealership, Coach Store, Yves Saint Laurent and of course a Starbucks.  I only made it to Starbucks.  Both the Coach Store and YSL had a line of folks waiting to get in... As for thought leadership, there were several illustrations only on the first day. I had the opportunity to meet with a branch of the Mexican Federal Government. Their questions were not about clerical task automation, far from it! We discussed citizen on-line access to fees and services - for example looking up the duty on an international goods shipment, or tracking that my taxes have been received, or the status of my request for a certain service.  Eligibility, policies and status.  Having an integrated rules or policy automation system that would allow businesses and citizens to access accurate information and ensure the proper collection of fees and payment for 3rd party provided services.    Then in the afternoon, I met with the owner of a roofing company (note: most roofs in Mexico are flat and made of cement).  This CEO started discussing how he wanted to transform his business from a cement products company to a service company and market 5-10-15 year service contracts which would guarantee the structural integrity of the roof and of course that the roof would remain waterproof.  Although his products were guaranteed, they required an annual inspection and most home owners never schedule that inspection until it is too late and water damage has occurred.  These emergency calls reduce his margin and reduce customer satisfaction.  This lead to a discussion of business models in general and why long term differentiation can only come from service, not just for the music or news industries, but also for roofing companies!    I completely agreed with the transformational concepts described in both meetings and quickly understood why there is a Bentley dealership near my hotel.    

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