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• Cloud Computing = Elasticity * Availability

  - by Herve Roggero

  What is cloud computing? Is hosting the same thing as cloud computing? Are you running a cloud if you already use virtual machines? What is the difference between Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and a cloud provider? And the list goes on… these questions keep coming up and all try to fundamentally explain what “cloud” means relative to other concepts. At the risk of over simplification, answering these questions becomes simpler once you understand the primary foundations of cloud computing: Elasticity and Availability.   Elasticity The basic value proposition of cloud computing is to pay as you go, and to pay for what you use. This implies that an application can expand and contract on demand, across all its tiers (presentation layer, services, database, security…).  This also implies that application components can grow independently from each other. So if you need more storage for your database, you should be able to grow that tier without affecting, reconfiguring or changing the other tiers. Basically, cloud applications behave like a sponge; when you add water to a sponge, it grows in size; in the application world, the more customers you add, the more it grows. Pure IaaS providers will provide certain benefits, specifically in terms of operating costs, but an IaaS provider will not help you in making your applications elastic; neither will Virtual Machines. The smallest elasticity unit of an IaaS provider and a Virtual Machine environment is a server (physical or virtual). While adding servers in a datacenter helps in achieving scale, it is hardly enough. The application has yet to use this hardware.  If the process of adding computing resources is not transparent to the application, the application is not elastic.   As you can see from the above description, designing for the cloud is not about more servers; it is about designing an application for elasticity regardless of the underlying server farm.   Availability The fact of the matter is that making applications highly available is hard. It requires highly specialized tools and trained staff. On top of it, it's expensive. Many companies are required to run multiple data centers due to high availability requirements. In some organizations, some data centers are simply on standby, waiting to be used in a case of a failover. Other organizations are able to achieve a certain level of success with active/active data centers, in which all available data centers serve incoming user requests. While achieving high availability for services is relatively simple, establishing a highly available database farm is far more complex. In fact it is so complex that many companies establish yearly tests to validate failover procedures.   To a certain degree certain IaaS provides can assist with complex disaster recovery planning and setting up data centers that can achieve successful failover. However the burden is still on the corporation to manage and maintain such an environment, including regular hardware and software upgrades. Cloud computing on the other hand removes most of the disaster recovery requirements by hiding many of the underlying complexities.   Cloud Providers A cloud provider is an infrastructure provider offering additional tools to achieve application elasticity and availability that are not usually available on-premise. For example Microsoft Azure provides a simple configuration screen that makes it possible to run 1 or 100 web sites by clicking a button or two on a screen (simplifying provisioning), and soon SQL Azure will offer Data Federation to allow database sharding (which allows you to scale the database tier seamlessly and automatically). Other cloud providers offer certain features that are not available on-premise as well, such as the Amazon SC3 (Simple Storage Service) which gives you virtually unlimited storage capabilities for simple data stores, which is somewhat equivalent to the Microsoft Azure Table offering (offering a server-independent data storage model). Unlike IaaS providers, cloud providers give you the necessary tools to adopt elasticity as part of your application architecture.    Some cloud providers offer built-in high availability that get you out of the business of configuring clustered solutions, or running multiple data centers. Some cloud providers will give you more control (which puts some of that burden back on the customers' shoulder) and others will tend to make high availability totally transparent. For example, SQL Azure provides high availability automatically which would be very difficult to achieve (and very costly) on premise.   Keep in mind that each cloud provider has its strengths and weaknesses; some are better at achieving transparent scalability and server independence than others.    Not for Everyone Note however that it is up to you to leverage the elasticity capabilities of a cloud provider, as discussed previously; if you build a website that does not need to scale, for which elasticity is not important, then you can use a traditional host provider unless you also need high availability. Leveraging the technologies of cloud providers can be difficult and can become a journey for companies that build their solutions in a scale up fashion. Cloud computing promises to address cost containment and scalability of applications with built-in high availability. If your application does not need to scale or you do not need high availability, then cloud computing may not be for you. In fact, you may pay a premium to run your applications with cloud providers due to the underlying technologies built specifically for scalability and availability requirements. And as such, the cloud is not for everyone.   Consistent Customer Experience, Predictable Cost With all its complexities, buzz and foggy definition, cloud computing boils down to a simple objective: consistent customer experience at a predictable cost.  The objective of a cloud solution is to provide the same user experience to your last customer than the first, while keeping your operating costs directly proportional to the number of customers you have. Making your applications elastic and highly available across all its tiers, with as much automation as possible, achieves the first objective of a consistent customer experience. And the ability to expand and contract the infrastructure footprint of your application dynamically achieves the cost containment objectives.     Herve Roggero is a SQL Azure MVP and co-author of Pro SQL Azure (APress).  He is the co-founder of Blue Syntax Consulting (www.bluesyntax.net), a company focusing on cloud computing technologies helping customers understand and adopt cloud computing technologies. For more information contact herve at hroggero @ bluesyntax.net .

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• NVIDIA x server - "sudo nvidia config" does not generate a working 'xorg.config'

  - by Mike

  I am over 18 hours deep on this challenge. I got to this point and am stuck. very stuck. Maybe you can figure it out? Ubuntu Version 12.04 LTS with all the updates installed. Problem: The default settings in "etc/X11/xorg.conf" that are generated by the "nvidia-xconfig" tool, do not allow the NVIDIA x server to connect to the driver in my "System Settings Additional Driver window". (that's how I understand it. Lots of information below). Symptoms of Problem "System Settings Additional Driver" window has drivers, but the nvidia x server cannot connect/utilize any of the 4 drivers. the drivers are activated, but not in use. When I go to "System Tools Administration NVIDIA x server settings" I get an error that basically tells me to create a default file to initialize the NVIDIA X server (screen shot below). This is the messages the terminal gives after running a "sudo nvidia-xconfig" command for the first time. It seems that the generated file by the tool i just ran is generating a bad/unusable file: If I run the "sudo nvidia-xconfig" command again, I wont get an error the second time. However when I reboot, the default file that is generated (etc/X11/xorg.conf) simply puts the screen resolution at 800 x 600 (or something big like that). When I try to go to NVIDIA x server settings I am greeted with the same screen as the screen shot as in symptom 2 (no option to change the resolution). If I try to go to "system settings display" there are no other resolutions to choose from. At this point I must delete the newly minted "xorg.conf" and reinstate the original in its place. Here are the contents of the "xorg.conf" that is generated first (the one missing required information): # nvidia-xconfig: X configuration file generated by nvidia-xconfig # nvidia-xconfig: version 304.88 (buildmeister@swio-display-x86-rhel47-06) Wed Mar 27 15:32:58 PDT 2013 Section "ServerLayout" Identifier "Layout0" Screen 0 "Screen0" InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard" InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer" EndSection Section "Files" EndSection Section "InputDevice" # generated from default Identifier "Mouse0" Driver "mouse" Option "Protocol" "auto" Option "Device" "/dev/psaux" Option "Emulate3Buttons" "no" Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5" EndSection Section "InputDevice" # generated from default Identifier "Keyboard0" Driver "kbd" EndSection Section "Monitor" Identifier "Monitor0" VendorName "Unknown" ModelName "Unknown" HorizSync 28.0 - 33.0 VertRefresh 43.0 - 72.0 Option "DPMS" EndSection Section "Device" Identifier "Device0" Driver "nvidia" VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation" EndSection Section "Screen" Identifier "Screen0" Device "Device0" Monitor "Monitor0" DefaultDepth 24 SubSection "Display" Depth 24 EndSubSection EndSection Hardware: I ran the "lspci|grep VGA". There results are: 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 2nd Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 09) 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GF108 [Quadro 1000M] (rev a1) More Hardware info: Ram: 16GB CPU: Intel Core i7-2720QM @2.2GHz * 8 Other: 64 bit. This is a triple boot computer and not a VM. Attempts With Not Success on My End: 1) Tried to append the "xorg.conf" with what I perceive is missing information and obviously it didn't fly. 2) All the other stuff I tried got me to this point. 3) See if this link is helpful to you (I barely get it, but i get enough knowing that a smarter person might find this useful): http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/lucid/man1/nvidia-xconfig.1.html 4) I am completely new to Linux (40 hours over past week), but not to programming. However I am very serious about changing over to Linux. When you respond (I hope someone responds...) please respond in a way that a person new to Linux can understand. 5) By the way, the reason I am in this mess is because I MUST have a second monitor running from my laptop, and "System Settings Display" doesn't recognize my second display. I know it is possible to make the second display work in my system, because when I boot from the install CD, I perform work on the native laptop monitor, but the second monitor shows a purple screen with Ubuntu in the middle, so I know the VGA port is sending a signal out. If this is too much for you to tackle please suggest an alternative method to get a second display. I don't want to go to windows but I cannot have a single display. I am really fudged here. I hope some smart person can help. Thanks in advance. Mike. **********************EDIT #1********************** More Details About Graphics Card I was asked "which brand of nvidia-card do you have exactly?" Here is what I did to provide more info (maybe relevant, maybe not, but here is everything): 1) Took my Lenovo W520 right apart to see if there is an identifier on the actual card. However I realized that if I get deep enough to take a look, the laptop "won't like it". so I put it back together. Figuring out the card this way is not an option for me right now. 2) (My computer is triple boot) I logged into Win7 and ran 'dxdiag' command. here is the screen shot: 3) I tried to look on the lenovo website for more details... but no luck. I took a look at my receipts and here is info form receipt: System Unit: W520 NVIDIA Quadro 1000M 2GB 4) In win7 I went to the NVIDIA website and used the option to have my card 'scanned' by a Java applet to determine the latest update for my card. I tried the same with Ubuntu but I can't get the applet to run. Here is the recommended driver from from the NVIDIA Applet for my card for Win7 (I hope this shines some light on the specifics of the card): Quadro/NVS/Tesla/GRID Desktop Driver Release R319 Version: 320.00 WHQL Release Date: 3.5.2013 5) Also I went on the NVIDIA driver search and looked through every possible combination of product type + product series + product to find all the combinations that yield a 1000M card. My card is: Product Type: Quadro Product Series: Quadro Series (Notebooks) Product: 1000M ***********************EDIT #2******************* Additional Symptoms Another question that generated more symptoms I previously didn't mention was: "After generating xorg.conf by nvidia-xconfig, go to additional drivers, do you see nvidia-304?" 1) I took a screen shot of the "additional drivers" right after generating xorg.conf by nvidia-xconfig. Here it is: 2) Then I did a reboot. Now Ubuntu is 600 x 800 resolution. When I logged in after the computer came up I got an error (which I always get after generating xorg.conf by nvidia-xconfig and rebooting) 3) To finally answer the question - No. There is no "NVIDIA-304" driver. Screen shot of additional drivers after generating xorg.conf by nvidia-xconfig and rebooting : At this point I revert to the original xorg.conf and delete the xorg.conf generated by Nvidia.

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• The Application Architecture Domain

  - by Michael Glas

  I have been spending a lot of time thinking about Application Architecture in the context of EA. More specifically, as an Enterprise Architect, what do I need to consider when looking at/defining/designing the Application Architecture Domain?There are several definitions of Application Architecture. TOGAF says “The objective here [in Application Architecture] is to define the major kinds of application system necessary to process the data and support the business”. FEA says the Application Architecture “Defines the applications needed to manage the data and support the business functions”.I agree with these definitions. They reflect what the Application Architecture domain does. However, they need to be decomposed to be practical.I find it useful to define a set of views into the Application Architecture domain. These views reflect what an EA needs to consider when working with/in the Applications Architecture domain. These viewpoints are, at a high level:Capability View: This view reflects how applications alignment with business capabilities. It is a super set of the following views when viewed in aggregate. By looking at the Application Architecture domain in terms of the business capabilities it supports, you get a good perspective on how those applications are directly supporting the business.Technology View: The technology view reflects the underlying technology that makes up the applications. Based on the number of rationalization activities I have seen (more specifically application rationalization), the phrase “complexity equals cost” drives the importance of the technology view, especially when attempting to reduce that complexity through standardization type activities. Some of the technology components to be considered are: Software: The application itself as well as the software the application relies on to function (web servers, application servers). Infrastructure: The underlying hardware and network components required by the application and supporting application software. Development: How the application is created and maintained. This encompasses development components that are part of the application itself (i.e. customizable functions), as well as bolt on development through web services, API’s, etc. The maintenance process itself also falls under this view. Integration: The interfaces that the application provides for integration as well as the integrations to other applications and data sources the application requires to function. Type: Reflects the kind of application (mash-up, 3 tiered, etc). (Note: functional type [CRM, HCM, etc.] are reflected under the capability view). Organization View: Organizations are comprised of people and those people use applications to do their jobs. Trying to define the application architecture domain without taking the organization that will use/fund/change it into consideration is like trying to design a car without thinking about who will drive it (i.e. you may end up building a formula 1 car for a family of 5 that is really looking for a minivan). This view reflects the people aspect of the application. It includes: Ownership: Who ‘owns’ the application? This will usually reflect primary funding and utilization but not always. Funding: Who funds both the acquisition/creation as well as the on-going maintenance (funding to create/change/operate)? Change: Who can/does request changes to the application and what process to the follow? Utilization: Who uses the application, how often do they use it, and how do they use it? Support: Which organization is responsible for the on-going support of the application? Information View: Whether or not you subscribe to the view that “information drives the enterprise”, it is a fact that information is critical. The management, creation, and organization of that information are primary functions of enterprise applications. This view reflects how the applications are tied to information (or at a higher level – how the Application Architecture domain relates to the Information Architecture domain). It includes: Access: The application is the mechanism by which end users access information. This could be through a primary application (i.e. CRM application), or through an information access type application (a BI application as an example). Creation: Applications create data in order to provide information to end-users. (I.e. an application creates an order to be used by an end-user as part of the fulfillment process). Consumption: Describes the data required by applications to function (i.e. a product id is required by a purchasing application to create an order. Application Service View: Organizations today are striving to be more agile. As an EA, I need to provide an architecture that supports this agility. One of the primary ways to achieve the required agility in the application architecture domain is through the use of ‘services’ (think SOA, web services, etc.). Whether it is through building applications from the ground up utilizing services, service enabling an existing application, or buying applications that are already ‘service enabled’, compartmentalizing application functions for re-use helps enable flexibility in the use of those applications in support of the required business agility. The applications service view consists of: Services: Here, I refer to the generic definition of a service “a set of related software functionalities that can be reused for different purposes, together with the policies that should control its usage”. Functions: The activities within an application that are not available / applicable for re-use. This view is helpful when identifying duplication functions between applications that are not service enabled. Delivery Model View: It is hard to talk about EA today without hearing the terms ‘cloud’ or shared services.  Organizations are looking at the ways their applications are delivered for several reasons, to reduce cost (both CAPEX and OPEX), to improve agility (time to market as an example), etc.  From an EA perspective, where/how an application is deployed has impacts on the overall enterprise architecture. From integration concerns to SLA requirements to security and compliance issues, the Enterprise Architect needs to factor in how applications are delivered when designing the Enterprise Architecture. This view reflects how applications are delivered to end-users. The delivery model view consists of different types of delivery mechanisms/deployment options for applications: Traditional: Reflects non-cloud type delivery options. The most prevalent consists of an application running on dedicated hardware (usually specific to an environment) for a single consumer. Private Cloud: The application runs on infrastructure provisioned for exclusive use by a single organization comprising multiple consumers. Public Cloud: The application runs on infrastructure provisioned for open use by the general public. Hybrid: The application is deployed on two or more distinct cloud infrastructures (private, community, or public) that remain unique entities, but are bound together by standardized or proprietary technology that enables data and application portability. While by no means comprehensive, I find that applying these views to the application domain gives a good understanding of what an EA needs to consider when effecting changes to the Application Architecture domain.Finally, the application architecture domain is one of several architecture domains that an EA must consider when developing an overall Enterprise Architecture. The Oracle Enterprise Architecture Framework defines four Primary domains: Business Architecture, Application Architecture, Information Architecture, and Technology Architecture. Each domain links to the others either directly or indirectly at some point. Oracle links them at a high level as follows:Business Capabilities and/or Business Processes (Business Architecture), links to the Applications that enable the capability/process (Applications Architecture – COTS, Custom), links to the Information Assets managed/maintained by the Applications (Information Architecture), links to the technology infrastructure upon which all this runs (Technology Architecture - integration, security, BI/DW, DB infrastructure, deployment model). There are however, times when the EA needs to narrow focus to a particular domain for some period of time. These views help me to do just that.

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• Premature-Optimization and Performance Anxiety

  - by James Michael Hare

  While writing my post analyzing the new .NET 4 ConcurrentDictionary class (here), I fell into one of the classic blunders that I myself always love to warn about.  After analyzing the differences of time between a Dictionary with locking versus the new ConcurrentDictionary class, I noted that the ConcurrentDictionary was faster with read-heavy multi-threaded operations.  Then, I made the classic blunder of thinking that because the original Dictionary with locking was faster for those write-heavy uses, it was the best choice for those types of tasks.  In short, I fell into the premature-optimization anti-pattern. Basically, the premature-optimization anti-pattern is when a developer is coding very early for a perceived (whether rightly-or-wrongly) performance gain and sacrificing good design and maintainability in the process.  At best, the performance gains are usually negligible and at worst, can either negatively impact performance, or can degrade maintainability so much that time to market suffers or the code becomes very fragile due to the complexity. Keep in mind the distinction above.  I'm not talking about valid performance decisions.  There are decisions one should make when designing and writing an application that are valid performance decisions.  Examples of this are knowing the best data structures for a given situation (Dictionary versus List, for example) and choosing performance algorithms (linear search vs. binary search).  But these in my mind are macro optimizations.  The error is not in deciding to use a better data structure or algorithm, the anti-pattern as stated above is when you attempt to over-optimize early on in such a way that it sacrifices maintainability. In my case, I was actually considering trading the safety and maintainability gains of the ConcurrentDictionary (no locking required) for a slight performance gain by using the Dictionary with locking.  This would have been a mistake as I would be trading maintainability (ConcurrentDictionary requires no locking which helps readability) and safety (ConcurrentDictionary is safe for iteration even while being modified and you don't risk the developer locking incorrectly) -- and I fell for it even when I knew to watch out for it.  I think in my case, and it may be true for others as well, a large part of it was due to the time I was trained as a developer.  I began college in in the 90s when C and C++ was king and hardware speed and memory were still relatively priceless commodities and not to be squandered.  In those days, using a long instead of a short could waste precious resources, and as such, we were taught to try to minimize space and favor performance.  This is why in many cases such early code-bases were very hard to maintain.  I don't know how many times I heard back then to avoid too many function calls because of the overhead -- and in fact just last year I heard a new hire in the company where I work declare that she didn't want to refactor a long method because of function call overhead.  Now back then, that may have been a valid concern, but with today's modern hardware even if you're calling a trivial method in an extremely tight loop (which chances are the JIT compiler would optimize anyway) the results of removing method calls to speed up performance are negligible for the great majority of applications.  Now, obviously, there are those coding applications where speed is absolutely king (for example drivers, computer games, operating systems) where such sacrifices may be made.  But I would strongly advice against such optimization because of it's cost.  Many folks that are performing an optimization think it's always a win-win.  That they're simply adding speed to the application, what could possibly be wrong with that?  What they don't realize is the cost of their choice.  For every piece of straight-forward code that you obfuscate with performance enhancements, you risk the introduction of bugs in the long term technical debt of the application.  It will become so fragile over time that maintenance will become a nightmare.  I've seen such applications in places I have worked.  There are times I've seen applications where the designer was so obsessed with performance that they even designed their own memory management system for their application to try to squeeze out every ounce of performance.  Unfortunately, the application stability often suffers as a result and it is very difficult for anyone other than the original designer to maintain. I've even seen this recently where I heard a C++ developer bemoaning that in VS2010 the iterators are about twice as slow as they used to be because Microsoft added range checking (probably as part of the 0x standard implementation).  To me this was almost a joke.  Twice as slow sounds bad, but it almost never as bad as you think -- especially if you're gaining safety.  The only time twice is really that much slower is when once was too slow to begin with.  Think about it.  2 minutes is slow as a response time because 1 minute is slow.  But if an iterator takes 1 microsecond to move one position and a new, safer iterator takes 2 microseconds, this is trivial!  The only way you'd ever really notice this would be in iterating a collection just for the sake of iterating (i.e. no other operations).  To my mind, the added safety makes the extra time worth it. Always favor safety and maintainability when you can.  I know it can be a hard habit to break, especially if you started out your career early or in a language such as C where they are very performance conscious.  But in reality, these type of micro-optimizations only end up hurting you in the long run. Remember the two laws of optimization.  I'm not sure where I first heard these, but they are so true: For beginners: Do not optimize. For experts: Do not optimize yet. This is so true.  If you're a beginner, resist the urge to optimize at all costs.  And if you are an expert, delay that decision.  As long as you have chosen the right data structures and algorithms for your task, your performance will probably be more than sufficient.  Chances are it will be network, database, or disk hits that will be your slow-down, not your code.  As they say, 98% of your code's bottleneck is in 2% of your code so premature-optimization may add maintenance and safety debt that won't have any measurable impact.  Instead, code for maintainability and safety, and then, and only then, when you find a true bottleneck, then you should go back and optimize further.

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• Cost Comparison Hard Disk Drive to Solid State Drive on Price per Gigabyte - dispelling a myth!

  - by tonyrogerson

  It is often said that Hard Disk Drive storage is significantly cheaper per GiByte than Solid State Devices – this is wholly inaccurate within the database space. People need to look at the cost of the complete solution and not just a single component part in isolation to what is really required to meet the business requirement. Buying a single Hitachi Ultrastar 600GB 3.5” SAS 15Krpm hard disk drive will cost approximately £239.60 (http://scan.co.uk, 22nd March 2012) compared to an OCZ 600GB Z-Drive R4 CM84 PCIe costing £2,316.54 (http://scan.co.uk, 22nd March 2012); I’ve not included FusionIO ioDrive because there is no public pricing available for it – something I never understand and personally when companies do this I immediately think what are they hiding, luckily in FusionIO’s case the product is proven though is expensive compared to OCZ enterprise offerings. On the face of it the single 15Krpm hard disk has a price per GB of £0.39, the SSD £3.86; this is what you will see in the press and this is what sales people will use in comparing the two technologies – do not be fooled by this bullshit people! What is the requirement? The requirement is the database will have a static size of 400GB kept static through archiving so growth and trim will balance the database size, the client requires resilience, there will be several hundred call centre staff querying the database where queries will read a small amount of data but there will be no hot spot in the data so the randomness will come across the entire 400GB of the database, estimates predict that the IOps required will be approximately 4,000IOps at peak times, because it’s a call centre system the IO latency is important and must remain below 5ms per IO. The balance between read and write is 70% read, 30% write. The requirement is now defined and we have three of the most important pieces of the puzzle – space required, estimated IOps and maximum latency per IO. Something to consider with regard SQL Server; write activity requires synchronous IO to the storage media specifically the transaction log; that means the write thread will wait until the IO is completed and hardened off until the thread can continue execution, the requirement has stated that 30% of the system activity will be write so we can expect a high amount of synchronous activity. The hardware solution needs to be defined; two possible solutions: hard disk or solid state based; the real question now is how many hard disks are required to achieve the IO throughput, the latency and resilience, ditto for the solid state. Hard Drive solution On a test on an HP DL380, P410i controller using IOMeter against a single 15Krpm 146GB SAS drive, the throughput given on a transfer size of 8KiB against a 40GiB file on a freshly formatted disk where the partition is the only partition on the disk thus the 40GiB file is on the outer edge of the drive so more sectors can be read before head movement is required: For 100% sequential IO at a queue depth of 16 with 8 worker threads 43,537 IOps at an average latency of 2.93ms (340 MiB/s), for 100% random IO at the same queue depth and worker threads 3,733 IOps at an average latency of 34.06ms (34 MiB/s). The same test was done on the same disk but the test file was 130GiB: For 100% sequential IO at a queue depth of 16 with 8 worker threads 43,537 IOps at an average latency of 2.93ms (340 MiB/s), for 100% random IO at the same queue depth and worker threads 528 IOps at an average latency of 217.49ms (4 MiB/s). From the result it is clear random performance gets worse as the disk fills up – I’m currently writing an article on short stroking which will cover this in detail. Given the work load is random in nature looking at the random performance of the single drive when only 40 GiB of the 146 GB is used gives near the IOps required but the latency is way out. Luckily I have tested 6 x 15Krpm 146GB SAS 15Krpm drives in a RAID 0 using the same test methodology, for the same test above on a 130 GiB for each drive added the performance boost is near linear, for each drive added throughput goes up by 5 MiB/sec, IOps by 700 IOps and latency reducing nearly 50% per drive added (172 ms, 94 ms, 65 ms, 47 ms, 37 ms, 30 ms). This is because the same 130GiB is spread out more as you add drives 130 / 1, 130 / 2, 130 / 3 etc. so implicit short stroking is occurring because there is less file on each drive so less head movement required. The best latency is still 30 ms but we have the IOps required now, but that’s on a 130GiB file and not the 400GiB we need. Some reality check here: a) the drive randomness is more likely to be 50/50 and not a full 100% but the above has highlighted the effect randomness has on the drive and the more a drive fills with data the worse the effect. For argument sake let us assume that for the given workload we need 8 disks to do the job, for resilience reasons we will need 16 because we need to RAID 1+0 them in order to get the throughput and the resilience, RAID 5 would degrade performance. Cost for hard drives: 16 x £239.60 = £3,833.60 For the hard drives we will need disk controllers and a separate external disk array because the likelihood is that the server itself won’t take the drives, a quick spec off DELL for a PowerVault MD1220 which gives the dual pathing with 16 disks 146GB 15Krpm 2.5” disks is priced at £7,438.00, note its probably more once we had two controller cards to sit in the server in, racking etc. Minimum cost taking the DELL quote as an example is therefore: {Cost of Hardware} / {Storage Required} £7,438.60 / 400 = £18.595 per GB £18.59 per GiB is a far cry from the £0.39 we had been told by the salesman and the myth. Yes, the storage array is composed of 16 x 146 disks in RAID 10 (therefore 8 usable) giving an effective usable storage availability of 1168GB but the actual storage requirement is only 400 and the extra disks have had to be purchased to get the  IOps up. Solid State Drive solution A single card significantly exceeds the IOps and latency required, for resilience two will be required. ( £2,316.54 * 2 ) / 400 = £11.58 per GB With the SSD solution only two PCIe sockets are required, no external disk units, no additional controllers, no redundant controllers etc. Conclusion I hope by showing you an example that the myth that hard disk drives are cheaper per GiB than Solid State has now been dispelled - £11.58 per GB for SSD compared to £18.59 for Hard Disk. I’ve not even touched on the running costs, compare the costs of running 18 hard disks, that’s a lot of heat and power compared to two PCIe cards!Just a quick note: I've left a fair amount of information out due to this being a blog! If in doubt, email me :)I'll also deal with the myth that SSD's wear out at a later date as well - that's just way over done still, yes, 5 years ago, but now - no.

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• Building an Infrastructure Cloud with Oracle VM for x86 + Enterprise Manager 12c

  - by Richard Rotter

  Cloud Computing? Everyone is talking about Cloud these days. Everyone is explaining how the cloud will help you to bring your service up and running very fast, secure and with little effort. You can find these kinds of presentations at almost every event around the globe. But what is really behind all this stuff? Is it really so simple? And the answer is: Yes it is! With the Oracle SW Stack it is! In this post, I will try to bring this down to earth, demonstrating how easy it could be to build a cloud infrastructure with Oracle's solution for cloud computing.But let me cover some basics first: How fast can you build a cloud?How elastic is your cloud so you can provide new services on demand? How much effort does it take to monitor and operate your Cloud Infrastructure in order to meet your SLAs?How easy is it to chargeback for your services provided? These are the critical success factors of Cloud Computing. And Oracle has an answer to all those questions. By using Oracle VM for X86 in combination with Enterprise Manager 12c you can build and control your cloud environment very fast and easy. What are the fundamental building blocks for your cloud? Oracle Cloud Building Blocks #1 Hardware Surprise, surprise. Even the cloud needs to run somewhere, hence you will need hardware. This HW normally consists of servers, storage and networking. But Oracles goes beyond that. There are Optimized Solutions available for your cloud infrastructure. This is a cookbook to build your HW cloud platform. For example, building your cloud infrastructure with blades and our network infrastructure will reduce complexity in your datacenter (Blades with switch network modules, splitter cables to reduce the amount of cables, TOR (Top Of the Rack) switches which are building the interface to your infrastructure environment. Reducing complexity even in the cabling will help you to manage your environment more efficient and with less risk. Of course, our engineered systems fit into the cloud perfectly too. Although they are considered as a PaaS themselves, having the database SW (for Exadata) and the application development environment (for Exalogic) already deployed on them, in general they are ideal systems to enable you building your own cloud and PaaS infrastructure. #2 Virtualization The next missing link in the cloud setup is virtualization. For me personally, it's one of the most hidden "secret", that oracle can provide you with a complete virtualization stack in terms of a hypervisor on both architectures: X86 and Sparc CPUs. There is Oracle VM for X86 and Oracle VM for Sparc available at no additional  license costs if your are running this virtualization stack on top of Oracle HW (and with Oracle Premier Support for HW). This completes the virtualization portfolio together with Solaris Zones introduced already with Solaris 10 a few years ago. Let me explain how Oracle VM for X86 works: Oracle VM for x86 consists of two main parts: - The Oracle VM Server: Oracle VM Server is installed on bare metal and it is the hypervisor which is able to run virtual machines. It has a very small footprint. The ISO-Image of Oracle VM Server is only 200MB large. It is very small but efficient. You can install a OVM-Server in less than 5 mins by booting the Server with the ISO-Image assigned and providing the necessary configuration parameters (like installing an Linux distribution). After the installation, the OVM-Server is ready to use. That's all. - The Oracle VM-Manager: OVM-Manager is the central management tool where you can control your OVM-Servers. OVM-Manager provides the graphical user interface, which is an Application Development Framework (ADF) application, with a familiar web-browser based interface, to manage Oracle VM Servers, virtual machines, and resources. The Oracle VM Manager has the following capabilities: Create virtual machines Create server pools Power on and off virtual machines Manage networks and storage Import virtual machines, ISO files, and templates Manage high availability of Oracle VM Servers, server pools, and virtual machines Perform live migration of virtual machines I want to highlight one of the goodies which you can use if you are running Oracle VM for X86: Preconfigured, downloadable Virtual Machine Templates form edelivery With these templates, you can download completely preconfigured Virtual Machines in your environment, boot them up, configure them at first time boot and use it. There are templates for almost all Oracle SW and Applications (like Fusion Middleware, Database, Siebel, etc.) available. #3) Cloud Management The management of your cloud infrastructure is key. This is a day-to-day job. Acquiring HW, installing a virtualization layer on top of it is done just at the beginning and if you want to expand your infrastructure. But managing your cloud, keeping it up and running, deploying new services, changing your chargeback model, etc, these are the daily jobs. These jobs must be simple, secure and easy to manage. The Enterprise Manager 12c Cloud provides this functionality from one management cockpit. Enterprise Manager 12c uses Oracle VM Manager to control OVM Serverpools. Once you registered your OVM-Managers in Enterprise Manager, then you are able to setup your cloud infrastructure and manage everything from Enterprise Manager. What you need to do in EM12c is: ">Register your OVM Manager in Enterprise ManagerAfter Registering your OVM Manager, all the functionality of Oracle VM for X86 is also available in Enterprise Manager. Enterprise Manager works as a "Manger" of the Manager. You can register as many OVM-Managers you want and control your complete virtualization environment Create Roles and Users for your Self Service Portal in Enterprise ManagerWith this step you allow users to logon on the Enterprise Manager Self Service Portal. Users can request Virtual Machines in this portal. Setup the Cloud InfrastructureSetup the Quotas for your self service users. How many VMs can they request? How much of your resources ( cpu, memory, storage, network, etc. etc.)? Which SW components (templates, assemblys) can your self service users request? In this step, you basically set up the complete cloud infrastructure. Setup ChargebackOnce your cloud is set up, you need to configure your chargeback mechanism. The Enterprise Manager collects the resources metrics, which are used in a very deep level. Almost all collected Metrics could be used in the chargeback module. You can define chargeback plans based on configurations (charge for the amount of cpu, memory, storage is assigned to a machine, or for a specific OS which is installed) or chargeback on resource consumption (% of cpu used, storage used, etc). Or you can also define a combination of configuration and consumption chargeback plans. The chargeback module is very flexible. Here is a overview of the workflow how to handle infrastructure cloud in EM: Summary As you can see, setting up an Infrastructure Cloud Service with Oracle VM for X86 and Enterprise Manager 12c is really simple. I personally configured a complete cloud environment with three X86 servers and a small JBOD san box in less than 3 hours. There is no magic in it, it is all straightforward. Of course, you have to have some experience with Oracle VM and Enterprise Manager. Experience in setting up Linux environments helps as well. I plan to publish a technical cookbook in the next few weeks. I hope you found this post useful and will see you again here on our blog. Any hints, comments are welcome!

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• Lenovo V570 CPU fan running constantly, CPU core 1 running over 90%!

  - by Rabbit2190

  I have seen that a lot of people are having this same issue. I am running a Lenovo V570 i5 4 core, 6 gigs of ram, and am running 11.10 Onieric Ocelot. On my system monitor graph it shows CPU at 20%, when I open the monitor it shows core #1 at around 90%, the other cores fluctuate at or below 5-12% if even. Now this seems like a really terrible balance of power between the cores, especially with so much stress on one core only, when these things are designed to work with 4 cores and not at such high temps. My current readings say 64 degrees Celsius, this does not seem normal for any cpu, and I am seriously considering, working on my windows7 partition until I see a real solution to this issue or upgrading to 12.04 right away when it comes out... I have seen countless things saying it has something to do with the Kernel, the kernel on mine is the same as when I upgraded, I really do not like messing with it, as when I had 11.04, I did tinker with it due to the freeze issues I was having, and that just made worse issues. I like this version 11.10 and would like to keep it for a while, but without the fear that my core is going to fry! So any help would be much appreciated! I did try changing a couple things in ACPI, and restarting this did not help, and here I am. I tried one thing prior to that that was listed under a different computer brand, but it would not do a make on the file. I really need help with this, I rely on this computer for a lot of things, and love this OS! Please help so I do not need to resort to my Microsoft partition! PLEASE! Here is the fwts cpufrequ- output: rabbit@rabbit-Lenovo-V570:~$ sudo fwts cpufreq - 00001 fwts Results generated by fwts: Version V0.23.25 (Thu Oct 6 15 00002 fwts :12:31 BST 2011). 00003 fwts 00004 fwts Some of this work - Copyright (c) 1999 - 2010, Intel Corp. 00005 fwts All rights reserved. 00006 fwts Some of this work - Copyright (c) 2010 - 2011, Canonical. 00007 fwts 00008 fwts This test run on 02/04/12 at 17:23:22 on host Linux 00009 fwts rabbit-Lenovo-V570 3.0.0-17-generic-pae #30-Ubuntu SMP Thu 00010 fwts Mar 8 17:53:35 UTC 2012 i686. 00011 fwts 00012 fwts Running tests: cpufreq. 00014 cpufreq CPU frequency scaling tests (takes ~1-2 mins). 00015 cpufreq --------------------------------------------------------- 00016 cpufreq Test 1 of 1: CPU P-State Checks. 00017 cpufreq For each processor in the system, this test steps through 00018 cpufreq the various frequency states (P-states) that the BIOS 00019 cpufreq advertises for the processor. For each processor/frequency 00020 cpufreq combination, a quick performance value is measured. The 00021 cpufreq test then validates that: 00022 cpufreq 1) Each processor has the same number of frequency states 00023 cpufreq 2) Higher advertised frequencies have a higher performance 00024 cpufreq 3) No duplicate frequency values are reported by the BIOS 00025 cpufreq 4) Is BIOS wrongly doing Sw_All P-state coordination across cores 00026 cpufreq 5) Is BIOS wrongly doing Sw_Any P-state coordination across cores 00027 cpufreq Frequency | Speed 00028 cpufreq -----------+--------- 00029 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 100.0 % 00030 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 83.7 % 00031 cpufreq 2.05 Ghz | 69.2 % 00032 cpufreq 1.85 Ghz | 62.5 % 00033 cpufreq 1.65 Ghz | 55.2 % 00034 cpufreq 1400 Mhz | 48.6 % 00035 cpufreq 1200 Mhz | 41.8 % 00036 cpufreq 1000 Mhz | 34.5 % 00037 cpufreq 800 Mhz | 27.6 % 00038 cpufreq 9 CPU frequency steps supported 00039 cpufreq Frequency | Speed 00040 cpufreq -----------+--------- 00041 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 97.7 % 00042 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 83.7 % 00043 cpufreq 2.05 Ghz | 69.6 % 00044 cpufreq 1.85 Ghz | 63.3 % 00045 cpufreq 1.65 Ghz | 55.7 % 00046 cpufreq 1400 Mhz | 48.7 % 00047 cpufreq 1200 Mhz | 41.7 % 00048 cpufreq 1000 Mhz | 34.5 % 00049 cpufreq 800 Mhz | 27.5 % 00050 cpufreq Frequency | Speed 00051 cpufreq -----------+--------- 00052 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 97.7 % 00053 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 84.4 % 00054 cpufreq 2.05 Ghz | 69.6 % 00055 cpufreq 1.85 Ghz | 62.6 % 00056 cpufreq 1.65 Ghz | 55.9 % 00057 cpufreq 1400 Mhz | 48.7 % 00058 cpufreq 1200 Mhz | 41.7 % 00059 cpufreq 1000 Mhz | 34.7 % 00060 cpufreq 800 Mhz | 27.8 % 00061 cpufreq Frequency | Speed 00062 cpufreq -----------+--------- 00063 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 100.0 % 00064 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 82.6 % 00065 cpufreq 2.05 Ghz | 67.8 % 00066 cpufreq 1.85 Ghz | 61.4 % 00067 cpufreq 1.65 Ghz | 54.9 % 00068 cpufreq 1400 Mhz | 48.3 % 00069 cpufreq 1200 Mhz | 41.1 % 00070 cpufreq 1000 Mhz | 34.3 % 00071 cpufreq 800 Mhz | 27.4 % 00072 cpufreq Frequency | Speed 00073 cpufreq -----------+--------- 00074 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 96.2 % 00075 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 82.5 % 00076 cpufreq 2.05 Ghz | 69.3 % 00077 cpufreq 1.85 Ghz | 62.7 % 00078 cpufreq 1.65 Ghz | 55.0 % 00079 cpufreq 1400 Mhz | 47.4 % 00080 cpufreq 1200 Mhz | 41.1 % 00081 cpufreq 1000 Mhz | 34.0 % 00082 cpufreq 800 Mhz | 27.2 % 00083 cpufreq Frequency | Speed 00084 cpufreq -----------+--------- 00085 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 96.5 % 00086 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 83.6 % 00087 cpufreq 2.05 Ghz | 68.1 % 00088 cpufreq 1.85 Ghz | 61.7 % 00089 cpufreq 1.65 Ghz | 54.9 % 00090 cpufreq 1400 Mhz | 48.0 % 00091 cpufreq 1200 Mhz | 41.1 % 00092 cpufreq 1000 Mhz | 34.2 % 00093 cpufreq 800 Mhz | 27.8 % 00094 cpufreq Frequency | Speed 00095 cpufreq -----------+--------- 00096 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 96.4 % 00097 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 82.6 % 00098 cpufreq 2.05 Ghz | 68.8 % 00099 cpufreq 1.85 Ghz | 60.5 % 00100 cpufreq 1.65 Ghz | 52.4 % 00101 cpufreq 1400 Mhz | 48.8 % 00102 cpufreq 1200 Mhz | 41.1 % 00103 cpufreq 1000 Mhz | 34.2 % 00104 cpufreq 800 Mhz | 26.4 % 00105 cpufreq Frequency | Speed 00106 cpufreq -----------+--------- 00107 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 95.3 % 00108 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 82.5 % 00109 cpufreq 2.05 Ghz | 65.5 % 00110 cpufreq 1.85 Ghz | 62.8 % 00111 cpufreq 1.65 Ghz | 54.8 % 00112 cpufreq 1400 Mhz | 48.0 % 00113 cpufreq 1200 Mhz | 41.2 % 00114 cpufreq 1000 Mhz | 34.2 % 00115 cpufreq 800 Mhz | 27.3 % 00116 cpufreq Frequency | Speed 00117 cpufreq -----------+--------- 00118 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 96.3 % 00119 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 83.4 % 00120 cpufreq 2.05 Ghz | 68.3 % 00121 cpufreq 1.85 Ghz | 61.9 % 00122 cpufreq 1.65 Ghz | 54.9 % 00123 cpufreq 1400 Mhz | 48.0 % 00124 cpufreq 1200 Mhz | 41.1 % 00125 cpufreq 1000 Mhz | 34.2 % 00126 cpufreq 800 Mhz | 27.3 % 00127 cpufreq Frequency | Speed 00128 cpufreq -----------+--------- 00129 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 100.0 % 00130 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 77.9 % 00131 cpufreq 2.05 Ghz | 64.6 % 00132 cpufreq 1.85 Ghz | 54.0 % 00133 cpufreq 1.65 Ghz | 51.7 % 00134 cpufreq 1400 Mhz | 45.2 % 00135 cpufreq 1200 Mhz | 39.0 % 00136 cpufreq 1000 Mhz | 33.1 % 00137 cpufreq 800 Mhz | 25.5 % 00138 cpufreq Frequency | Speed 00139 cpufreq -----------+--------- 00140 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 93.4 % 00141 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 75.7 % 00142 cpufreq 2.05 Ghz | 64.5 % 00143 cpufreq 1.85 Ghz | 59.1 % 00144 cpufreq 1.65 Ghz | 51.4 % 00145 cpufreq 1400 Mhz | 45.9 % 00146 cpufreq 1200 Mhz | 39.3 % 00147 cpufreq 1000 Mhz | 32.7 % 00148 cpufreq 800 Mhz | 25.8 % 00149 cpufreq Frequency | Speed 00150 cpufreq -----------+--------- 00151 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 92.1 % 00152 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 78.1 % 00153 cpufreq 2.05 Ghz | 65.7 % 00154 cpufreq 1.85 Ghz | 58.6 % 00155 cpufreq 1.65 Ghz | 52.5 % 00156 cpufreq 1400 Mhz | 45.7 % 00157 cpufreq 1200 Mhz | 39.3 % 00158 cpufreq 1000 Mhz | 32.7 % 00159 cpufreq 800 Mhz | 24.3 % 00160 cpufreq Frequency | Speed 00161 cpufreq -----------+--------- 00162 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 88.9 % 00163 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 79.8 % 00164 cpufreq 2.05 Ghz | 58.4 % 00165 cpufreq 1.85 Ghz | 52.6 % 00166 cpufreq 1.65 Ghz | 46.9 % 00167 cpufreq 1400 Mhz | 41.0 % 00168 cpufreq 1200 Mhz | 35.1 % 00169 cpufreq 1000 Mhz | 29.1 % 00170 cpufreq 800 Mhz | 22.9 % 00171 cpufreq Frequency | Speed 00172 cpufreq -----------+--------- 00173 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 92.8 % 00174 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 80.1 % 00175 cpufreq 2.05 Ghz | 66.2 % 00176 cpufreq 1.85 Ghz | 59.5 % 00177 cpufreq 1.65 Ghz | 52.9 % 00178 cpufreq 1400 Mhz | 46.2 % 00179 cpufreq 1200 Mhz | 39.5 % 00180 cpufreq 1000 Mhz | 32.9 % 00181 cpufreq 800 Mhz | 26.3 % 00182 cpufreq Frequency | Speed 00183 cpufreq -----------+--------- 00184 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 92.9 % 00185 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 79.5 % 00186 cpufreq 2.05 Ghz | 66.2 % 00187 cpufreq 1.85 Ghz | 59.6 % 00188 cpufreq 1.65 Ghz | 52.9 % 00189 cpufreq 1400 Mhz | 46.7 % 00190 cpufreq 1200 Mhz | 39.6 % 00191 cpufreq 1000 Mhz | 32.9 % 00192 cpufreq 800 Mhz | 26.3 % 00193 cpufreq FAILED [MEDIUM] CPUFreqCPUsSetToSW_ANY: Test 1, Processors 00194 cpufreq are set to SW_ANY. 00195 cpufreq FAILED [MEDIUM] CPUFreqSW_ANY: Test 1, Firmware not 00196 cpufreq implementing hardware coordination cleanly. Firmware using 00197 cpufreq SW_ANY instead?. 00198 cpufreq 00199 cpufreq ========================================================= 00200 cpufreq 0 passed, 2 failed, 0 warnings, 0 aborted, 0 skipped, 0 00201 cpufreq info only. 00202 cpufreq ========================================================= 00204 summary 00205 summary 0 passed, 2 failed, 0 warnings, 0 aborted, 0 skipped, 0 00206 summary info only. 00207 summary 00208 summary Test Failure Summary 00209 summary ==================== 00210 summary 00211 summary Critical failures: NONE 00212 summary 00213 summary High failures: NONE 00214 summary 00215 summary Medium failures: 2 00216 summary cpufreq test, at 1 log line: 193 00217 summary "Processors are set to SW_ANY." 00218 summary cpufreq test, at 1 log line: 195 00219 summary "Firmware not implementing hardware coordination cleanly. Firmware using SW_ANY instead?." 00220 summary 00221 summary Low failures: NONE 00222 summary 00223 summary Other failures: NONE 00224 summary 00225 summary Test |Pass |Fail |Abort|Warn |Skip |Info | 00226 summary ---------------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+ 00227 summary cpufreq | | 2| | | | | 00228 summary ---------------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+ 00229 summary Total: | 0| 2| 0| 0| 0| 0| 00230 summary ---------------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+ rabbit@rabbit-Lenovo-V570:~$

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• Orchestrating the Virtual Enterprise

  - by John Murphy

  During the American Industrial Revolution, the Ford Motor Company did it all. It turned raw materials into a showroom full of Model Ts. It owned a steel mill, a glass factory, and an automobile assembly line. The company was both self-sufficient and innovative and went on to become one of the largest and most profitable companies in the world. Nowadays, it's unusual for any business to follow this vertical integration model because its much harder to be best in class across such a wide a range of capabilities and services. Instead, businesses focus on their core competencies and outsource other business functions to specialized suppliers. They exchange vertical integration for collaboration. When done well, all parties benefit from this arrangement and the collaboration leads to the creation of an agile, lean and successful "virtual enterprise." Case in point: For Sun hardware, Oracle outsources most of its manufacturing and all of its logistics to third parties. These are vital activities, but ones where Oracle doesn't have a core competency, so we shift them to business partners who do. Within our enterprise, we always retain the core functions of product development, support, and most of the sales function, because that's what constitutes our core value to our customers. This is a perfect example of a virtual enterprise.  What are the implications of this? It means that we must exchange direct internal control for indirect external collaboration. This fundamentally changes the relative importance of different business processes, the boundaries of security and information sharing, and the relationship of the supply chain systems to the ERP. The challenge is that the systems required to support this virtual paradigm are still mired in "island enterprise" thinking. But help is at hand. Developments such as the Web, social networks, collaboration, and rules-based orchestration offer great potential to fundamentally re-architect supply chain systems to better support the virtual enterprise.  Supply Chain Management Systems in a Virtual Enterprise Historically enterprise software was constructed to automate the ERP - and then the supply chain systems extended the ERP. They were joined at the hip. In virtual enterprises, the supply chain system needs to be ERP agnostic, sitting above each of the ERPs that are distributed across the virtual enterprise - most of which are operating in other businesses. This is vital so that the supply chain system can manage the flow of material and the related information through the multiple enterprises. It has to have strong collaboration tools. It needs to be highly flexible. Users need to be able to see information that's coming from multiple sources and be able to react and respond to events across those sources.  Oracle Fusion Distributed Order Orchestration (DOO) is a perfect example of a supply chain system designed to operate in this virtual way. DOO embraces the idea that a company's fulfillment challenge is a distributed, multi-enterprise problem. It enables users to manage the process and the trading partners in a uniform way and deliver a consistent user experience while operating over a heterogeneous, virtual enterprise. This is a fundamental shift at the core of managing supply chains. It forces virtual enterprises to think architecturally about how best to construct their supply chain systems.  Case in point, almost everyone has ordered from Amazon.com at one time or another. Our orders are as likely to be fulfilled by third parties as they are by Amazon itself. To deliver the order promptly and efficiently, Amazon has to send it to the right fulfillment location and know the availability in that location. It needs to be able to track status of the fulfillment and deal with exceptions. As a virtual enterprise, Amazon's operations, using thousands of trading partners, requires a very different approach to fulfillment than the traditional 'take an order and ship it from your own warehouse' model. Amazon had no choice but to develop a complex, expensive and custom solution to tackle this problem as there used to be no product solution available. Now, other companies who want to follow similar models have a better off-the-shelf choice -- Oracle Distributed Order Orchestration (DOO).  Consider how another of our customers is using our distributed orchestration solution. This major airplane manufacturer has a highly complex business and interacts regularly with the U.S. Government and major airlines. It sits in the middle of an intricate supply chain and needed to improve visibility across its many different entities. Oracle Fusion DOO gives the company an orchestration mechanism so it could improve quality, speed, flexibility, and consistency without requiring an organ transplant of these highly complex legacy systems. Many retailers face the challenge of dealing with brick and mortar, Web, and reseller channels. They all need to be knitted together into a virtual enterprise experience that is consistent for their customers. When a large U.K. grocer with a strong brick and mortar retail operation added an online business, they turned to Oracle Fusion DOO to bring these entities together. Disturbing the Peace with Acquisitions Quite often a company's ERP system is disrupted when it acquires a new company. An acquisition can inject a new set of processes and systems -- or even introduce an entirely new business like Sun's hardware did at Oracle. This challenge has been a driver for some of our DOO customers. A large power management company is using Oracle Fusion DOO to provide the flexibility to rapidly integrate additional products and services into its central fulfillment operation. The Flip Side of Fulfillment Meanwhile, we haven't ignored similar challenges on the supply side of the equation. Specifically, how to manage complex supply in a flexible way when there are multiple trading parties involved? How to manage the supply to suppliers? How to manage critical components that need to merge in a tier two or tier three supply chain? By investing in supply orchestration solutions for the virtual enterprise, we plan to give users better visibility into their network of suppliers to help them drive down costs. We also think this technology and full orchestration process can be applied to the financial side of organizations. An example is transactions that flow through complex internal structures to minimize tax exposure. We can help companies manage those transactions effectively by thinking about the internal organization as a virtual enterprise and bringing the same solution set to this internal challenge.  The Clear Front Runner No other company is investing in solving the virtual enterprise supply chain issues like Oracle is. Oracle is in a unique position to become the gold standard in this market space. We have the infrastructure of Oracle technology. We already have an Oracle Fusion DOO application which embraces the best of what's required in this area. And we're absolutely committed to extending our Fusion solution to other use cases and delivering even more business value.

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• To SYNC or not to SYNC – Part 3

  - by AshishRay

  I can't believe it has been almost a year since my last blog post. I know, that's an absolute no-no in the blogosphere. And I know that "I have been busy" is not a good excuse. So - without trying to come up with an excuse - let me state this - my apologies for taking such a long time to write the next Part. Without further ado, here goes. This is Part 3 of a multi-part blog article where we are discussing various aspects of setting up Data Guard synchronous redo transport (SYNC). In Part 1 of this article, I debunked the myth that Data Guard SYNC is similar to a two-phase commit operation. In Part 2, I discussed the various ways that network latency may or may not impact a Data Guard SYNC configuration. In this article, I will talk in details regarding why Data Guard SYNC is a good thing. I will also talk about distance implications for setting up such a configuration. So, Why Good? Why is Data Guard SYNC a good thing? Because, at the end of the day, this gives you the assurance of zero data loss - it doesn’t matter what outage may befall your primary system. Befall! Boy, that sounds theatrical. But seriously - think about this - it minimizes your data risks. That’s a big deal. Whether you have an outage due to bad disks, faulty hardware components, hardware / software bugs, physical data corruptions, power failures, lightning that takes out significant part of your data center, fire that melts your assets, water leakage from the cooling system, human errors such as accidental deletion of online redo log files - it doesn’t matter - you can have that “Om - peace” look on your face and then you can failover to the standby system, without losing a single bit of data in your Oracle database. You will be a hero, as shown in this not so imaginary conversation: IT Manager: Well, what’s the status? You: John is doing the trace analysis on the storage array. IT Manager: So? How long is that gonna take? You: Well, he is stuck, waiting for a response from <insert your not-so-favorite storage vendor here>. IT Manager: So, no root cause yet? You: I told you, he is stuck. We have escalated with their Support, but you know how long these things take. IT Manager: Darn it - the site is down! You: Not really … IT Manager: What do you mean? You: John is stuck, but Sreeni has already done a failover to the Data Guard standby. IT Manager: Whoa, whoa - wait! Failover means we lost some data, why did you do this without letting the Business group know? You: We didn’t lose any data. Remember, we had set up Data Guard with SYNC? So now, any problems on the production – we just failover. No data loss, and we are up and running in minutes. The Business guys don’t need to know. IT Manager: Wow! Are we great or what!! You: I guess … Ok, so you get it - SYNC is good. But as my dear friend Larry Carpenter says, “TANSTAAFL”, or "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch". Yes, of course - investing in Data Guard SYNC means that you have to invest in a low-latency network, you have to monitor your applications and database especially in peak load conditions, and you cannot under-provision your standby systems. But all these are good and necessary things, if you are supporting mission-critical apps that are supposed to be running 24x7. The peace of mind that this investment will give you is priceless, especially if you are serious about HA. How Far Can We Go? Someone may say at this point - well, I can’t use Data Guard SYNC over my coast-to-coast deployment. Most likely - true. So how far can you go? Well, we have customers who have deployed Data Guard SYNC over 300+ miles! Does this mean that you can also deploy over similar distances? Duh - no! I am going to say something here that most IT managers don’t like to hear - “It depends!” It depends on your application design, application response time / throughput requirements, network topology, etc. However, because of the optimal way we do SYNC, customers have been able to stretch Data Guard SYNC deployments over longer distances compared to traditional, storage-centric ways of doing this. The MAA Database 10.2 best practices paper Data Guard Redo Transport & Network Configuration, and Oracle Database 11.2 High Availability Best Practices Manual talk about some of these SYNC-related metrics. For example, a test deployment of Data Guard SYNC over 330 miles with 10ms latency showed an impact less than 5% for a busy OLTP application. Even if you can’t deploy Data Guard SYNC over your WAN distance, or if you already have an ASYNC standby located 1000-s of miles away, here’s another nifty way to boost your HA. Have a local standby, configured SYNC. How local is “local”? Again - it depends. One customer runs a local SYNC standby across the campus. Another customer runs it across 15 miles in another data center. Both of these customers are running Data Guard SYNC as their HA standard. If a localized outage affects their primary system, no problem! They have all the data available on the standby, to which they can failover. Very fast. In seconds. Wait - did I say “seconds”? Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. But you have to wait till the next blog article to find out more. I assure you tho’ that this time you won’t have to wait for another year for this.

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• Clouds Everywhere But not a Drop of Rain – Part 3

  - by sxkumar

  I was sharing with you how a broad-based transformation such as cloud will increase agility and efficiency of an organization if process re-engineering is part of the plan.  I have also stressed on the key enterprise requirements such as “broad and deep solutions, “running your mission critical applications” and “automated and integrated set of capabilities”. Let me walk you through some key cloud attributes such as “elasticity” and “self-service” and what they mean for an enterprise class cloud. I will also talk about how we at Oracle have taken a very enterprise centric view to developing cloud solutions and how our products have been specifically engineered to address enterprise cloud needs. Cloud Elasticity and Enterprise Applications Requirements Easy and quick scalability for a short-period of time is the signature of cloud based solutions. It is this elasticity that allows you to dynamically redistribute your resources according to business priorities, helps increase your overall resource utilization, and reduces operational costs by allowing you to get the most out of your existing investment. Most public clouds are offering a instant provisioning mechanism of compute power (CPU, RAM, Disk), customer pay for the instance-hours(and bandwidth) they use, adding computing resources at peak times and removing them when they are no longer needed. This type of “just-in-time” serving of compute resources is well known for mid-tiers “state less” servers such as web application servers and web servers that just need another machine to start and run on it but what does it really mean for an enterprise application and its underlying data? Most enterprise applications are not as quite as “state less” and justifiably so. As such, how do you take advantage of cloud elasticity and make it relevant for your enterprise apps? This is where Cloud meets Grid Computing. At Oracle, we have invested enormous amount of time, energy and resources in creating enterprise grid solutions. All our technology products offer built-in elasticity via clustering and dynamic scaling. With products like Real Application Clusters (RAC), Automatic Storage Management, WebLogic Clustering, and Coherence In-Memory Grid, we allow all your enterprise applications to benefit from Cloud elasticity –both vertically and horizontally - without requiring any application changes. A number of technology vendors take a rather simplistic route of starting up additional or removing unneeded VM as the "Cloud Scale-Out" solution. While this may work for stateless mid-tier servers where load balancers can handle the addition and remove of instances transparently but following a similar approach for the database tier - often called as "database sharding" - requires significant application modification and typically does not work with off the shelf packaged applications. Technologies like Oracle Database Real Application Clusters, Automatic Storage Management, etc. on the other hand bring the benefits of incremental scalability and on-demand elasticity to ANY application by providing a simplified abstraction layers where the application does not need deal with data spread over multiple database instances. Rather they just talk to a single database and the database software takes care of aggregating resources across multiple hardware components. It is the technologies like these that truly make a cloud solution relevant for enterprises.  For customers who are looking for a next generation hardware consolidation platform, our engineered systems (e.g. Exadata, Exalogic) not only provide incredible amount of performance and capacity, they also reduce the data center complexity and simplify operations. Assemble, Deploy and Manage Enterprise Applications for Cloud Products like Oracle Virtual assembly builder (OVAB) resolve the complex problem of bringing the cloud speed to complex multi-tier applications. With assemblies, you can not only provision all components of a multi-tier application and wire them together by push of a button, other aspects of application lifecycle, such as real-time application testing, scale-up/scale-down, performance and availability monitoring, etc., are also automated using Oracle Enterprise Manager.  An essential criteria for an enterprise cloud to succeed is the ability to ensure business service levels especially when business users have either full visibility on the usage cost with a “show back” or a “charge back”. With Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c, we have created the most comprehensive cloud management solution in the industry that is capable of managing business service levels “applications-to-disk” in a enterprise private cloud – all from a single console. It is the only cloud management platform in the industry that allows you to deliver infrastructure, platform and application cloud services out of the box. Moreover, it offers integrated and complete lifecycle management of the cloud - including planning and set up, service delivery, operations management, metering and chargeback, etc .  Sounds unbelievable? Well, just watch this space for more details on how Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c is the nerve center of Oracle Cloud! Our cloud solution portfolio is also the broadest and most deep in the industry  - covering public, private, hybrid, Infrastructure, platform and applications clouds. It is no coincidence therefore that the Oracle Cloud today offers the most comprehensive set of public cloud services in the industry.  And to a large part, this has been made possible thanks to our years on investment in creating cloud enabling technologies.  Summary  But the intent of this blog post isn't to dwell on how great our solutions are (these are just some examples to illustrate how we at Oracle have approached this problem space). Rather it is to help you ask the right questions before you embark on your cloud journey.  So to summarize, here are the key takeaways.       It is critical that you are clear on why you are building the cloud. Successful organizations keep business benefits as the first and foremost cloud objective. On the other hand, those who approach this purely as a technology project are more likely to fail. Think about where you want to be in 3-5 years before you get started. Your long terms objectives should determine what your first step ought to be. As obvious as it may seem, more people than not make the first move without knowing where they are headed.  Don’t make the mistake of equating cloud to virtualization and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). Spinning a VM on-demand will give some short term relief to your IT staff but is unlikely to solve your larger business problems. As such, even if IaaS is your first step towards a more comprehensive cloud, plan the roadmap around those higher level services before you begin. And ask your vendors on how they are going to be your partners in this journey. Capabilities like self-service access and chargeback/showback are absolutely critical if you really expect your cloud to be transformational. Your business won't see the full benefits of the cloud until it empowers them with same kind of control and transparency that they are used to while using a public cloud service.  Evaluate the benefits of integration, as opposed to blindly following the best-of-breed strategy. Integration is a huge challenge and more so in a cloud environment. There are enormous costs associated with stitching a solution out of disparate components and even more in maintaining it. Hope you found these ideas helpful. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and experiences.

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• PSTN Trunk TDM400P Install on Asterisk / Trixbox

  - by Jona

  Hey All, I'm trying to get a TDM400P card with FXO module to connect to our PSTN line. The card is correctly detected by Linux: [trixbox1.localdomain asterisk]# lspci 00:09.0 Communication controller: Tiger Jet Network Inc. Tiger3XX Modem/ISDN interface I've run setup-pstn which produces the following output trixbox1.localdomain ~]# setup-pstn -------------------------------------------------------------- Detecting PSTN cards and USB PSTN Devices -------------------------------------------------------------- Hardware present! STOPPING ASTERISK Asterisk Stopped STOPPING FOP SERVER FOP Server Stopped Unloading DAHDI hardware modules: done Loading DAHDI hardware modules: wct4xxp: [ OK ] wcte12xp: [ OK ] wct1xxp: [ OK ] wcte11xp: [ OK ] wctdm24xxp: [ OK ] opvxa1200: [ OK ] wcfxo: [ OK ] wctdm: [ OK ] wcb4xxp: [ OK ] wctc4xxp: [ OK ] xpp_usb: [ OK ] Running dahdi_cfg: [ OK ] SETTING FILE PERMISSIONS Permissions OK STARTING ASTERISK Asterisk Started STARTING FOP SERVER FOP Server Started Chan Extension Context Language MOH Interpret Blocked State pseudo default en default In Service 1 from-pstn en default In Service dahdi_scan returns: dahdi_scan [1] active=yes alarms=OK description=Wildcard TDM400P REV I Board 5 name=WCTDM/4 manufacturer=Digium devicetype=Wildcard TDM400P REV I location=PCI Bus 00 Slot 10 basechan=1 totchans=4 irq=209 type=analog port=1,FXO port=2,none port=3,none port=4,none And asterisk can see the channel: > trixbox1*CLI> dahdi show channel 1 > Channel: 1LI> File Descriptor: 14 > Span: 11*CLI> Extension: I> Dialing: > noI> Context: from-pstn Caller ID: I> > Calling TON: 0 Caller ID name: > Mailbox: none Destroy: 0LI> InAlarm: > 1LI> Signalling Type: FXS Kewlstart > Radio: 0*CLI> Owner: <None> Real: > <None>> Callwait: <None> Threeway: > <None> Confno: -1LI> Propagated > Conference: -1 Real in conference: 0 > DSP: no1*CLI> Busy Detection: no TDD: > no1*CLI> Relax DTMF: no > Dialing/CallwaitCAS: 0/0 Default law: > ulaw Fax Handled: no Pulse phone: no > DND: no1*CLI> Echo Cancellation: > trixbox1128 taps trixbox1(unless TDM > bridged) currently OFF Actual > Confinfo: Num/0, Mode/0x0000 Actual > Confmute: No > Hookstate (FXS only): Onhook A cat of /etc/asterisk/dahdi.conf shows: [trixbox1.localdomain ~]# cat /etc/asterisk/dahdi-channels.conf ; Autogenerated by /usr/sbin/dahdi_genconf on Tue May 25 17:45:13 2010 ; If you edit this file and execute /usr/sbin/dahdi_genconf again, ; your manual changes will be LOST. ; Dahdi Channels Configurations (chan_dahdi.conf) ; ; This is not intended to be a complete chan_dahdi.conf. Rather, it is intended ; to be #include-d by /etc/chan_dahdi.conf that will include the global settings ; ; Span 1: WCTDM/4 "Wildcard TDM400P REV I Board 5" (MASTER) ;;; line="1 WCTDM/4/0 FXSKS (SWEC: MG2)" signalling=fxs_ks callerid=asreceived group=0 context=from-pstn channel => 1 callerid= group= context=default I have configured a "ZAP Trunk (DAHDI compatibility Mode)" with the ZAP identifier 1 and an outbound route, but when ever I try to make an external call via it I get the "All Circuits are busy now, please try your call again later message". I have one outbound route which uses the dial pattern 9|. and the Trunk Zap/1 and one Zap Trunk which uses Zap Identifier (trunk name): 1 and has no Dial Rules. The FXO module is directly connected to our phone line from BT via a BT-RJ11 cable. When running tail -f /var/log/asterisk/full and placing a call I get the following output: [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2723] logger.c: == Using SIP RTP TOS bits 184 [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2723] logger.c: == Using SIP RTP CoS mark 5 [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2723] logger.c: == Using SIP VRTP TOS bits 136 [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2723] logger.c: == Using SIP VRTP CoS mark 6 [May 26 11:10:52] WARNING[2661] pbx.c: FONALITY: This thread has already held the conlock, skip locking [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [901483890915@from-internal:1] Macro("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "user-callerid,SKIPTTL,") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-user-callerid:1] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "AMPUSER=801") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-user-callerid:2] GotoIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "0?report") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-user-callerid:3] ExecIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "1?Set(REALCALLERIDNUM=801)") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-user-callerid:4] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "AMPUSER=801") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-user-callerid:5] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "AMPUSERCIDNAME=Jona") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-user-callerid:6] GotoIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "0?report") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-user-callerid:7] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "AMPUSERCID=801") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-user-callerid:8] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "CALLERID(all)="Jona" <801>") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-user-callerid:9] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "REALCALLERIDNUM=801") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-user-callerid:10] ExecIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "0?Set(CHANNEL(language)=)") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-user-callerid:11] GotoIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "1?continue") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Goto (macro-user-callerid,s,20) [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-user-callerid:20] NoOp("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "Using CallerID "Jona" <801>") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [901483890915@from-internal:2] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "_NODEST=") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [901483890915@from-internal:3] Macro("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "record-enable,801,OUT,") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-record-enable:1] GotoIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "1?check") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Goto (macro-record-enable,s,4) [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-record-enable:4] AGI("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "recordingcheck,20100526-111052,1274868652.1") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Launched AGI Script /var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin/recordingcheck [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: recordingcheck,20100526-111052,1274868652.1: Outbound recording not enabled [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- <SIP/801-b7ce8c28>AGI Script recordingcheck completed, returning 0 [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-record-enable:5] MacroExit("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [901483890915@from-internal:4] Macro("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "dialout-trunk,1,01483890915,") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:1] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "DIAL_TRUNK=1") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:2] GosubIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "0?sub-pincheck,s,1") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:3] GotoIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "0?disabletrunk,1") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:4] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "DIAL_NUMBER=01483890915") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:5] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "DIAL_TRUNK_OPTIONS=tr") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:6] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "OUTBOUND_GROUP=OUT_1") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:7] GotoIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "1?nomax") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Goto (macro-dialout-trunk,s,9) [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:9] GotoIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "0?skipoutcid") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:10] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "DIAL_TRUNK_OPTIONS=") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:11] Macro("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "outbound-callerid,1") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-outbound-callerid:1] ExecIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "0?Set(CALLERPRES()=)") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-outbound-callerid:2] ExecIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "0?Set(REALCALLERIDNUM=801)") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-outbound-callerid:3] GotoIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "1?normcid") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Goto (macro-outbound-callerid,s,6) [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-outbound-callerid:6] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "USEROUTCID=") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-outbound-callerid:7] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "EMERGENCYCID=") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-outbound-callerid:8] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "TRUNKOUTCID=") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-outbound-callerid:9] GotoIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "1?trunkcid") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Goto (macro-outbound-callerid,s,12) [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-outbound-callerid:12] ExecIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "0?Set(CALLERID(all)=)") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-outbound-callerid:13] ExecIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "0?Set(CALLERID(all)=)") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-outbound-callerid:14] ExecIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "0?Set(CALLERPRES()=prohib_passed_screen)") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:12] ExecIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "0?AGI(fixlocalprefix)") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:13] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "OUTNUM=01483890915") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:14] Set("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "custom=DAHDI/1") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:15] ExecIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "0?Set(DIAL_TRUNK_OPTIONS=M(setmusic^))") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:16] Macro("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "dialout-trunk-predial-hook,") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk-predial-hook:1] MacroExit("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:17] GotoIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "0?bypass,1") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:18] GotoIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "0?customtrunk") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:19] Dial("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "DAHDI/1/01483890915,300,") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] WARNING[2858] app_dial.c: Unable to create channel of type 'DAHDI' (cause 0 - Unknown) [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: == Everyone is busy/congested at this time (1:0/0/1) [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-dialout-trunk:20] Goto("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "s-CHANUNAVAIL,1") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Goto (macro-dialout-trunk,s-CHANUNAVAIL,1) [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s-CHANUNAVAIL@macro-dialout-trunk:1] GotoIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "1?noreport") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Goto (macro-dialout-trunk,s-CHANUNAVAIL,3) [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s-CHANUNAVAIL@macro-dialout-trunk:3] NoOp("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "TRUNK Dial failed due to CHANUNAVAIL (hangupcause: 0) - failing through to other trunks") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [901483890915@from-internal:5] Macro("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "outisbusy,") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-outisbusy:1] Playback("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "all-circuits-busy-now,noanswer") in new stack [May 26 11:10:52] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- <SIP/801-b7ce8c28> Playing 'all-circuits-busy-now.ulaw' (language 'en') [May 26 11:10:54] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-outisbusy:2] Playback("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "pls-try-call-later,noanswer") in new stack [May 26 11:10:54] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- <SIP/801-b7ce8c28> Playing 'pls-try-call-later.ulaw' (language 'en') [May 26 11:10:54] WARNING[2661] pbx.c: FONALITY: This thread has already held the conlock, skip locking [May 26 11:10:54] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: == Spawn extension (macro-outisbusy, s, 2) exited non-zero on 'SIP/801-b7ce8c28' in macro 'outisbusy' [May 26 11:10:54] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: == Spawn extension (from-internal, 901483890915, 5) exited non-zero on 'SIP/801-b7ce8c28' [May 26 11:10:54] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [h@from-internal:1] Macro("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "hangupcall") in new stack [May 26 11:10:54] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-hangupcall:1] ResetCDR("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "vw") in new stack [May 26 11:10:54] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-hangupcall:2] NoCDR("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "") in new stack [May 26 11:10:54] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-hangupcall:3] GotoIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "1?skiprg") in new stack [May 26 11:10:54] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Goto (macro-hangupcall,s,6) [May 26 11:10:55] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-hangupcall:6] GotoIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "1?skipblkvm") in new stack [May 26 11:10:55] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Goto (macro-hangupcall,s,9) [May 26 11:10:55] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-hangupcall:9] GotoIf("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "1?theend") in new stack [May 26 11:10:55] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Goto (macro-hangupcall,s,11) [May 26 11:10:55] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: -- Executing [s@macro-hangupcall:11] Hangup("SIP/801-b7ce8c28", "") in new stack [May 26 11:10:55] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: == Spawn extension (macro-hangupcall, s, 11) exited non-zero on 'SIP/801-b7ce8c28' in macro 'hangupcall' [May 26 11:10:55] VERBOSE[2858] logger.c: == Spawn extension (from-internal, h, 1) exited non-zero on 'SIP/801-b7ce8c28' I'm guessing I've missed a configuration step somewhere but no idea where, any help greatly appreciated.

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• X:\ is not accessible. Insufficient system resources exist to complete the requested service. Help [

  - by Katherine

  I keeping getting the error message from above on multiple computers that I administer. I wasn't sure if I should be posting this on SuperUser or ServerFault so my apologizes if it should go there... Basically, I have at least 5 computers of varying ages (some fresh out of the box!) throwing the above error. X:\ is one of our network drives that is mapped for users. Most of the time if you shut down the biggest application it will fix the problem, but it's becoming an increasing issue, and I can't keep running around fixing it manually. I have tried to do some research, but most of it just states the obvious without supplying a permanent fix. The machines are all running Win XP SP3, with at least 2gb of ram. Sorry for the delay in getting back to people... a lot of good questions. To respond back to people... It is a windows 2003 server that houses the file share. We have about 175 users, however i cannot state how many are actually accessing the information at a single moment. Considering that this is our largest file share, I would say that probably at least 100+. The files we work with are large, but not that big considering that we do a lot of graphical and video work. ~50mb. That being said, this is error occurs simply when trying to gain access to the server itself, not actual files. When I say close a program, I mean that it can be any program. It doesn't matter which program. It varies from machine to machine, and from day to day. Some days it is Firefox, some days it is Outlook, some days it is Excel. There doesn't seem to be a common bond behind which application could be causing the problem. Thank you for the articles, and the recommendation on paging files. I will have to look into that. None of our computers are set to hibernate, so I am going to rule that out.

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• mongodb : Can create new thread on FreeBSD?

  - by user197739

  We experienced some strange thing in our mongodb gridfs platform. The platform actually is a bi Xeon E5 (bi quad core) with 128GB of memory, running on freebsd 9 with a zfs pool dedicated for mongodb. [root@mongofile1 ~]# uname -sr FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE our /boot/loader.conf vfs.zfs.arc_min="2048M" vfs.zfs.arc_max="7680M" vm.kmem_size_max="16G" vm.kmem_size="12G" vfs.zfs.prefetch_disable="1" kern.ipc.nmbclusters="32768" /etc/sysctl.conf net.inet.tcp.msl=15000 net.inet.tcp.keepidle=300000 kern.ipc.nmbclusters=32768 kern.ipc.maxsockbuf=2097152 kern.ipc.somaxconn=8192 kern.maxfiles=65536 kern.maxfilesperproc=32768 net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0 net.inet.tcp.sendspace=65535 net.inet.udp.recvspace=65535 net.inet.udp.maxdgram=57344 net.local.stream.recvspace=65535 net.local.stream.sendspace=65535 we follow the recommendation for the ulimit : [root@mongofile1 ~]# su - mongodb $ ulimit -a cpu time (seconds, -t) unlimited file size (512-blocks, -f) unlimited data seg size (kbytes, -d) 33554432 stack size (kbytes, -s) 524288 core file size (512-blocks, -c) unlimited max memory size (kbytes, -m) unlimited locked memory (kbytes, -l) unlimited max user processes (-u) 5547 open files (-n) 32768 virtual mem size (kbytes, -v) unlimited swap limit (kbytes, -w) unlimited sbsize (bytes, -b) unlimited pseudo-terminals (-p) unlimited This server have a twin (same config exactly) for ReplSet in other data center and we have a virtualized arbiter. Some time, almost 3 days, the process of mongodb exit. The problem begin with: Fri Nov 8 11:27:31.741 [conn774697] end connection 192.168.10.162:47963 (23 connections now open) Fri Nov 8 11:27:31.770 [initandlisten] can't create new thread, closing connection Fri Nov 8 11:27:31.771 [rsHealthPoll] replSet member mongofile2:27017 is now in state DOWN Fri Nov 8 11:27:31.774 [initandlisten] connection accepted from 192.168.10.162:47968 #774702 (20 connections now open) Fri Nov 8 11:27:31.774 [initandlisten] connection accepted from 192.168.10.161:28522 #774703 (21 connections now open) Fri Nov 8 11:27:31.774 [initandlisten] connection accepted from 192.168.10.164:15406 #774704 (22 connections now open) Fri Nov 8 11:27:31.774 [initandlisten] connection accepted from 192.168.10.163:25750 #774705 (23 connections now open) Fri Nov 8 11:27:31.810 [initandlisten] connection accepted from 192.168.10.182:20779 #774706 (24 connections now open) Fri Nov 8 11:27:31.855 [initandlisten] connection accepted from 192.168.10.161:28524 #774707 (25 connections now open) Fri Nov 8 11:27:31.869 [initandlisten] connection accepted from 192.168.10.182:20786 #774708 (26 connections now open) and after many "can create new thread" [root@mongofile1 /usr/mongodb]# tail -n 15000 mongod.log.old |grep "create new thread"|wc 5020 55220 421680 and finish by a magnificent Fri Nov 8 11:30:22.333 [rsMgr] replSet warning caught unexpected exception in electSelf() pure virtual method called Fri Nov 8 11:30:22.333 Got signal: 6 (Abort trap: 6). Fri Nov 8 11:30:22.337 Backtrace: 0x599efc 0x8035cb516 0x599efc <_ZN5mongo10abruptQuitEi+988> at /usr/local/bin/mongod 0x8035cb516 <_pthread_sigmask+918> at /lib/libthr.so.3 Extract of mongodb from top 78126 mongodb 77 20 0 1253G 1449M sbwait 0 0:20 0.00% mongod If I restart the process when it crash, the problem is fixed for almost 3 days. Has anyone seen this before, or know of a fix?

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• Server to server replication and CPU and 32k\ corrupt doc

  - by nick wall

  Summary: if database contains a doc with 32K issue or corrupt, on server to server replication it causes marked increase in CPU in nserver.exe task, which effectively causes our server(s) to slow right down. We have a 5 server cluster (1 "hub" and 4 HTTP servers accessed via reverse proxy and SSO for load balancing and redundancy). All are physically located next to each other on network, they don't have dedicated network\ ports for cluster or replication. I realise IBM recommendation is dedicated port for cluster. Cluster queues are in tolerance and under heavy application user load, i.e. the maximum number of documents are being created, edited, deleted, the replication times between servers are negligible. Normally, all is well. Of the servers in the cluster, 1 is considered the "hub", and imitates a PUSH-PULL replication with it's cluster mates every 60mins, so that the replication load is taken by the hub and not cluster mates. The problem we have: every now and then we get a slow replication time from the hub to a cluster mate, sometimes up to 30mins. This maxes out the nserver.exe task on the "cluster mate" which causes it to respond to http requests very slowly. In the past, we have found that if a corrupt document is in the DB, it can have this affect, but on those occasions, the server log will show the corrupt doc noteId, we run fixup, all well. But we are not now seeing any record of corrupt docs. What we have noticed is if a doc with the 32K issue is present, the same thing can happen. Our only solution in that case is to run a : fixup mydb.nsf -V, which shows it is purging a 32K doc. Luckily we run a reverse proxy, so we can shut HTTP servers down without users noticing, but users do notice when a server has the problem! Has anyone else seen this occur? I have set up DDM event handlers for many of the replication events. I have set the replication time out limit to 5 mins (the max we usually see under full user load is 0.1min), to prevent it rep'ing for 30mins as before. This ia a temporary work around. Does anyone know of a DDM event to trap the 32K issue? we could at least then send alert. Regarding 32K issue: this prob needs another thread, but we are finding this relatively hard to find the source of the issue as the 32K event is fairly rare. Our app is fairly complex, interacting with various other external web services, with 2 way data transfer. But if we do encounter a 32K doc, we can't look at field properties, so we can't work out which field has issue which would give us a clue as to which process is culprit. As above, we run a fixup -V. Any help\ comments on this would be gratefully received.

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• SQLAuthority News – A Successful Community TechDays at Ahmedabad – December 11, 2010

  - by pinaldave

  We recently had one of the best community events in Ahmedabad. We were fortunate that we had SQL Experts from around the world to have presented at this event. This gathering was very special because besides Jacob Sebastian and myself, we had two other speakers traveling all the way from Florida (Rushabh Mehta) and Bangalore (Vinod Kumar).There were a total of nearly 170 attendees and the event was blast. Here are the details of the event. Pinal Dave Presenting at Community Tech Days On the day of the event, it seemed to be the coldest day in Ahmedabad but I was glad to see hundreds of people waiting for the doors to be opened some hours before. We started the day with hot coffee and cookies. Yes, food first; and it was right after my keynote. I could clearly see that the coffee did some magic right away; the hall was almost full after the coffee break. Jacob Sebastian Presenting at Community Tech Days Jacob Sebastian, an SQL Server MVP and a close friend of mine, had an unusual job of surprising everybody with an innovative topic accompanied with lots of question-and-answer portions. That’s definitely one thing to love Jacob, that is, the novelty of the subject. His presentation was entitled “Best Database Practices for the .Net”; it really created magic on the crowd. Pinal Dave Presenting at Community Tech Days Next to Jacob Sebastian, I presented “Best Database Practices for the SharePoint”. It was really fun to present Database with the perspective of the database itself. The main highlight of my presentation was when I talked about how one can speed up the database performance by 40% for SharePoint in just 40 seconds. It was fun because the most important thing was to convince people to use the recommendation as soon as they walk out of the session. It was really amusing and the response of the participants was remarkable. Pinal Dave Presenting at Community Tech Days My session was followed by the most-awaited session of the day: that of Rushabh Mehta. He is an international BI expert who traveled all the way from Florida to present “Self Service BI” session. This session was funny and truly interesting. In fact, no one knew BI could be this much entertaining and fascinating. Rushabh has an appealing style of presenting the session; he instantly got very much interaction from the audience. Rushabh Mehta Presenting at Community Tech Days We had a networking lunch break in-between, when we talked about many various topics. It is always interesting to get in touch with the Community and feel a part of it. I had a wonderful time during the break. Vinod Kumar Presenting at Community Tech Days After lunch was apparently the most difficult session for the presenter as during this time, many people started to fall sleep and get dizzy. This spot was requested by Microsoft SQL Server Evangelist Vinod Kumar himself. During our discussion he suggested that if he gets this slot he would make sure people are up and more interactive than during the morning session. Just like always, this session was one of the best sessions ever. Vinod is true to his word as he presented the subject of “Time Management for Developer”. This session was the biggest hit in the event because the subject was instilled in the mind of every participant. Vinod Kumar Presenting at Community Tech Days Vinod’s session was followed by his own small session. Due to “insistent public demand”, he presented an interesting subject, “Tricks and Tips of SQL Server“. In 20 minutes he has done another awesome job and all attendees wanted more of the tricks. Just as usual he promised to do that next time for us. Vinod’s session was succeeded by Prabhjot Singh Bakshi’s session. He presented an appealing Silverlight concept. Just the same, he did a great job and people cheered him. Prabhjot Presenting at Community Tech Days We had a special invited speaker, Dhananjay Kumar, traveling all the way from Pune. He always supports our cause to help the Community in empowering participants. He presented the topic about Win7 Mobile and SharePoint integration. This was something many did not even expect to be possible. Kudos to Dhananjay for doing a great job. Dhananjay Kumar Presenting at Community Tech Days All in all, this event was one of the best in the Community Tech Days series in Ahmedabad. We were fortunate that legends from the all over the world were present here to present to the Community. I’d say never underestimate the power of the Community and its influence over the direction of the technology. Vinod Kumar Presenting trophy to Pinal Dave Vinod Kumar Presenting trophy to Pinal Dave This event was a very special gathering to me personally because of your support to the vibrant Community. The following awards were won for last year’s performance: Ahmedabad SQL Server User Group (President: Jacob Sebastian; Leader: Pinal Dave) – Best Tier 2 User Group Best Development Community Individual Contributor – Pinal Dave Speakers I was very glad to receive the award for our entire Community. Attendees at Community Tech Days I want to say thanks to Rushabh Mehta, Vinod Kumar and Dhananjay Kumar for visiting the city and presenting various technology topics in Community Tech Days. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: MVP, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Author Visit, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology

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• My Interview with Microsoft

  - by Victor Hurdugaci

  This post is for those who want to apply or have already applied (but not finished the interview) for a Microsoft Job. The recruitment process is quite similar for everyone and consists of a few steps. Application E-Mail Interview Phone Interview On Site Interview I will tell you my story and how I went through the four phases. 1. Application My blog's title (Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit) means "Nothing Comes Out of Nothing". You can't get a job at Microsoft by not doing anything - this is true for anything else. The first step you need to complete is the application process. For this, many options are available. You can... ... apply online on Microsoft's Careers website as I did ... send your CV to different e-mail addresses (there are some dedicated e-mails for different positions) ... apply through some 3rd party organization (job shop, campus recruitment, job agency, etc) On MS Careers you just have to post your CV and choose the job you want. That's all! No recommendation letter, no cover letter, no nothing. Of course, not every CV passes the selection process. Here are some tips for improving your resume (worked for me): Don't write it just before applying! Write a draft version, wait a few days and then review it. This way you will find a lot of mistakes and stupid things you wrote initially. If you review it immediately after writing, your mind will not be criticism oriented and will just ignore mistakes. Repeat the write-wait-review process as many times as necessary, until you find that the review revealed no mistakes. After you did the final review and the CV is bullet-proof, ask others to review it. They will definitely find inconsistencies and mistakes and this will make you feel stupid. This is good because will open your eyes will make you go into an 'I want to improve' mode. You'll try to correct everything. After you come up with a modified version go again through steps 1 and 2. Repeat this as many times as necessary. [Special thanks to Lucian Sasu, Nadia Comanici, Andrei Ciobanu, Monica Balan and Lavinia Tanase for reviewing my CV!] Make it short and give only relevant facts. Initially, I come up with a 5 pages CV because I wrote every single technology with which I worked. There were a lot irrelevant things, I wrote Windows Workflow Foundation just because I played with it for a few days. I added extensive descriptions for every project, made a personal details section (name, birth date, address, etc) of 1/2 page. Others suggested to cut everything that was not necessary. You don't need to give extensive descriptions, just add a few words. For example, I wrote "VS Image Visualizer - Visual Studio 2008 debug visualizer for images" and added a link to the project's page - you submit formatted andcan embed links. Add something that makes it different. I don't know if this makes a difference, but I added some lines to separate items just like in the picture below. Definitely Microsoft gets thousands of CVs per day. You need something special. Don't lie! Tell exactly what you did and what is the proficiency level of your skills. For example, don't write "Advanced" for UML if you don't know the difference between composition and aggregation. Be realistic and don't under/over estimate yourself. Use the spell chick. Make sure everything is written in correct English and there are no grammar/spelling mistakes. Noddy likes a WC with grammar mi takes. You mght fail just because of that. Once you completed your CV, choose the job that suits best your needs, apply and wait... The waiting is a problem because all these big companies like Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, Apple, etc. will contact you only if they find something interesting in your application. If you're not suitable, then no rejection is sent. I applied for an Intern Software Development Engineer position at Microsoft Redmond. I cannot apply for a full time position because I want to finish the master program on time, in the next summer - an internship is just what I need. 2. E-Mail Interview January 20, 2010. Two months since I submitted the CV. I wasn't hoping anymore that MS will contact me, when I got an e-mail titled: "Victor Hurdugaci ES DK" from Holly Peterson saying: Read more >>

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• Adopting DBVCS

  - by Wes McClure

  Identify early adopters Pick a small project with a small(ish) team.  This can be a legacy application or a green-field application. Strive to find a team of early adopters that will be eager to try something new. Get the team on board! Research Research the tool(s) that you want to use.  Some tools provide all of the features you would need while some only provide a slice of the pie.  DBVCS requires the ability to manage a set of change scripts that update a database from one version to the next.  Ideally a tool can track database versions and automatically apply updates.  The change script generation process can be manual, but having diff tools available to automatically generate it can really reduce the overhead to adoption.  Finally, an automated tool to generate a script file per database object is an added bonus as your version control system can quickly identify what was changed in a commit (add/del/modify), just like with code changes. Don’t settle on just one tool, identify several.  Then work with the team to evaluate the tools.  Have the team do some tests of the following scenarios with each tool: Baseline an existing database: can the migration tool work with legacy databases?  Caution: most migration platforms do not support baselines or have poor support, especially the fad of fluent APIs. Add/drop tables Add/drop procedures/functions/views Alter tables (rename columns, add columns, remove columns) Massage data – migrations sometimes involve changing data types that cannot be implicitly casted and require you to decide how the data is explicitly cast to the new type.  This is a requirement for a migrations platform.  Think about a case where you might want to combine fields, or move a field from one table to another, you wouldn’t want to lose the data. Run the tool via the command line.  If you cannot automate the tool in Continuous Integration what is the point? Create a copy of a database on demand. Backup/restore databases locally. Let the team give feedback and decide together, what tool they would like to try out. My recommendation at this point would be to include TSqlMigrations and RoundHouse as SQL based migration platforms.  In general I would recommend staying away from the fluent platforms as they often lack baseline capabilities and add overhead to learn a new API when SQL is already a very well known DSL.  Code migrations often get messy with procedures/views/functions as these have to be created with SQL and aren’t cross platform anyways.  IMO stick to SQL based migrations. Reconciling Production If your project is a legacy application, you will need to reconcile the current state of production with your development databases.  Find changes in production and bring them down to development, even if they are old and need to be removed.  Once complete, produce a baseline of either dev or prod as they are now in sync.  Commit this to your VCS of choice. Add whatever schema changes tracking mechanism your tool requires to your development database.  This often requires adding a table to track the schema version of that database.  Your tool should support doing this for you.  You can add this table to production when you do your next release. Script out any changes currently in dev.  Remove production artifacts that you brought down during reconciliation.  Add change scripts for any outstanding changes in dev since the last production release.  Commit these to your repository.   Say No to Shared Dev DBs Simply put, you wouldn’t dream of sharing a code checkout, why would you share a development database?  If you have a shared dev database, back it up, distribute the backups and take the shared version offline (including the dev db server once all projects are using DB VCS).  Doing DB VCS with a shared database is bound to cause problems as people won’t be able to easily script out their own changes from those that others are working on.   First prod release Copy prod to your beta/testing environment.  Add the schema changes table (or mechanism) and do a test run of your changes.  If successful you can schedule this to be run on production.   Evaluation After your first release, evaluate the pain points of the process.  Try to find tools or modifications to existing tools to help fix them.  Don’t leave stones unturned, iteratively evolve your tools and practices to make the process as seamless as possible.  This is why I suggest open source alternatives.  Nothing is set in stone, a good example was adding transactional support to TSqlMigrations.  We ran into situations where an update would break a database, so I added a feature to do transactional updates and rollback on errors!  Another good example is generating change scripts.  We have been manually making these for months now.  I found an open source project called Open DB Diff and integrated this with TSqlMigrations.  These were things we just accepted at the time when we began adopting our tool set.  Once we became comfortable with the base functionality, it was time to start automating more of the process.  Just like anything else with development, never be afraid to try to find tools to make your job easier!   Enjoy -Wes

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• To ORM or Not to ORM. That is the question&hellip;

  - by Patrick Liekhus

  UPDATE:  Thanks for the feedback and comments.  I have adjusted my table below with your recommendations.  I had missed a point or two. I wanted to do a series on creating an entire project using the EDMX XAF code generation and the SpecFlow BDD Easy Test tools discussed in my earlier posts, but I thought it would be appropriate to start with a simple comparison and reasoning on why I choose to use these tools. Let’s start by defining the term ORM, or Object-Relational Mapping.  According to Wikipedia it is defined as the following: Object-relational mapping (ORM, O/RM, and O/R mapping) in computer software is a programming technique for converting data between incompatible type systems in object-oriented programming languages. This creates, in effect, a "virtual object database" that can be used from within the programming language. Why should you care?  Basically it allows you to map your business objects in code to their persistence layer behind them. And better yet, why would you want to do this?  Let me outline it in the following points: Development speed.  No more need to map repetitive tasks query results to object members.  Once the map is created the code is rendered for you. Persistence portability.  The ORM knows how to map SQL specific syntax for the persistence engine you choose.  It does not matter if it is SQL Server, Oracle and another database of your choosing. Standard/Boilerplate code is simplified.  The basic CRUD operations are consistent and case use database metadata for basic operations. So how does this help?  Well, let’s compare some of the ORM tools that I have used and/or researched.  I have been interested in ORM for some time now.  My ORM of choice for a long time was NHibernate and I still believe it has a strong case in some business situations.  However, you have to take business considerations into account and the law of diminishing returns.  Because of these two factors, my recent activity and experience has been around DevExpress eXpress Persistence Objects (XPO).  The primary reason for this is because they have the DevExpress eXpress Application Framework (XAF) that sits on top of XPO.  With this added value, the data model can be created (either database first of code first) and the Web and Windows client can be created from these maps.  While out of the box they provide some simple list and detail screens, you can verify easily extend and modify these to your liking.  DevExpress has done a tremendous job of providing enough framework while also staying out of the way when you need to extend it.  This sounds worse than it really is.  What I mean by this is that if you choose to follow DevExpress coding style and recommendations, the hooks and extension points provided allow you to do some pretty heavy lifting while also not worrying about the basics. I have put together a list of the top features that I have used to compare the limited list of ORM’s that I have exposure with.  Again, the biggest selling point in my opinion is that XPO is just a solid as any of the other ORM’s but with the added layer of XAF they become unstoppable.  And then couple that with the EDMX modeling tools and code generation, it becomes a no brainer. Designer Features Entity Framework NHibernate Fluent w/ Nhibernate Telerik OpenAccess DevExpress XPO DevExpress XPO/XAF plus Liekhus Tools Uses XML to map relationships - Yes - - -   Visual class designer interface Yes - - - - Yes Management integrated w/ Visual Studio Yes - - Yes - Yes Supports schema first approach Yes - - Yes - Yes Supports model first approach Yes - - Yes Yes Yes Supports code first approach Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Attribute driven coding style Yes - Yes - Yes Yes                 I have a very small team and limited resources with a lot of responsibilities.  In order to keep up with our customers, we must rely on tools like these.  We use the EDMX tool so that we can create a visual representation of the applications with our customers.  Second, we rely on the code generation so that we can focus on the business problems at hand and not whether a field is mapped correctly.  This keeps us from requiring as many junior level developers on our team.  I have also worked on multiple teams where they believed in writing their own “framework”.  In my experiences and opinion this is not the route to take unless you have a team dedicated to supporting just the framework.  Each time that I have worked on custom frameworks, the framework eventually becomes old, out dated and full of “performance” enhancements specific to one or two requirements.  With an ORM, there are a lot smarter people than me working on the bigger issue of persistence and performance.  Again, my recommendation would be to use an available framework and get to working on your business domain problems.  If your coding is not making money for you, why are you working on it?  Do you really need to be writing query to object member code again and again? Thanks

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• Upgrading VSIX extensions from VS2012 to VS2013

  - by Tarun Arora [Microsoft MVP]

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/TarunArora/archive/2013/06/27/upgrading-vsix-extensions-from-vs2012-to-vs2013.aspx  As consumers of your Visual Studio extensions start to move over to VS 2013, you will have to upgrade the Visual Studio extensions you build for Visual Studio 2012 to Visual Studio 2013 and republish to the Visual Studio extension gallery. Failing which, it will not be possible for your consumers to install and use your extensions on Visual Studio 2013.   Objective In this blog post, I’ll show you how simple it is to upgrade your Visual Studio 2012 extension to Visual Studio 2013. There aren’t any reported breaking changes between VS 2012 SDK and VS 2013 SDK, the upgrade usually involves, rebuilding the extension against VS 2013 SDK and updating the vsix manifest file.              Walkthrough Download the Visual Studio 2013 SDK - You will need to download the Visual Studio 2013 SDK in order to open up the Visual Studio extension project in Visual Studio 2013. The SDK can be downloaded from here. Install the SDK before you proceed.                2. Once the VS 2013 SDK has been installed, open up your package project. For the purposes of this blog post, I’ll open up the Avanade Extension – Software Inventory in Visual Studio 2013. You will notice that Visual Studio doesn’t load the project but let’s you know that the project needs to be Migrated.                  3. Right click the project and choose the option ‘Reload Project’ from the Context Menu.                  4. Choosing the Reload Project option brings up an upgrade window, telling you that the upgrade is a one way only upgrade i.e. the project will be changed to work with Visual Studio 2013 and you will not be able to open the project up in Visual Studio 2012. My recommendation would be to create a Visual Studio 2013 branch and upgrading the project in that branch only, so if you need to go back to Visual Studio 2012 project at some point, you have a handy reference in a separate branch.             5. Upon clicking Ok, the project is updated. See below, the following changes are made at the time of upgrade,           - The runtime version is updated in the Resources.Designer.cs file                      - The Minimum version of Visual Studio in the package project file is changed from 11.0 to 12.0                    6. Reference VS 2013 dll’s rather than VS 2012 dll’s. So reference Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.dll and Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Controls.dll from C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE\ReferenceAssemblies\v2.0 and C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE\ReferenceAssemblies\v4.5. If you have any other API references, then change the references to point to VS 2013 instead of VS 2012.                          7. Rebuild your solution to ensure there are no breaking changes. Success!                8. Update VSIX Manifest file (the file source.extnsion.vsixmanifest contains the meta data for your VSIX).          - Update the Install Targets from 11.0 to 12.0. This basically enforces that the extension can be installed on Visual Studio 2013 version of Visual Studio.                         - Update the Dependencies from Visual Studio MPF 11.0 to Visual Studio MPF 12.0              9. Rebuild the solution and open up the bin folder for the Package project and look for the file *.vsix file [Microsoft Visual Studio Extension].         - This is basically the installer for your extension.                 - Double click the installer to launch the installer wizard. Viola! You can see the package installation wizard opens up and gives you the option to install the extension for Visual Studio 2013.                    - Click Install to Continue                    - Note – If you run into the exception “23/06/2013 10:42:18 - Install Error : Microsoft.VisualStudio.ExtensionManager.InstallByMsiException: The InstalledByMSI element in extension Avanade Extensions cannot be 'true' when installing an extension through the Extensions and Updates Installer.  The element can only be 'true' when an MSI lays down the extension manifest file.” Ensure you have the option “This VSIX is installed by Windows Installer” unchecked in the Install Targets tab.        10. Verifying that the extension has installed correctly.           - Open Extension Manager and verify that the installed extension shows up in the extension manager “list of installed VSIX”.                      11. First Look at the updated Extension                         - The links have now been moved to the context menu, so to see the navigation links, you’ll have to right click on the icon and select the option from the context menu.                                        Note – The Avanade Extension being used in the demo has been developed by Utkarsh and Tarun. The Software Inventory Extension for Visual Studio 2012…  allows you to see the list of Software installed on the hosted build server right from with in Visual Studio,  the extension also allows you to export this list to excel. More details on how this has been implemented can be found here.   I hope you found this useful. In case you have any questions or feedback, feel free to reach out on Visual Studio extensibility MSDN forums or via Microsoft Visual Studio feedback forum. Thank you for taking the time out and reading this blog post. If you enjoyed the post, remember to subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TarunArora. Stay tuned!

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• Geocaching - World wide treasure hunt

  I'm not quite sure how I came across this topic but actually I find it absolutely interesting, challenging and most of all a great fun for the family and friends. The interesting part is for sure that you can follow other peoples treasures and their preferred locations where a cache might be hidden. Of course, it wont be easy to find a cache after all. Sometimes there are even 'mystery caches' which have either riddles, further instructions or little brain games for you in order to find the actual cache - that's the challenge. And last but not least, those caches are hidden outdoor. A great experience to explore nature either on your own, or your family especially with children, or as a treasure hunting pack with a couple of friends. What is geocaching? It's a high-tech outdoor treasure hunting game that's a great way to explore the world with friends, family or on your own. Participants use GPS-enabled devices to locate hidden containers called geocaches. There are over one million geocaches hidden around the world today, waiting for you to find them. Visit Geocaching.com to search for geocaches near you.(Source: Referral Email of geocaching.com) Checkout the Geocaching 101 for further details and information. They also provide a video channel on YouTube. Which equipment do I need? Any GPS-enabled device is sufficient to go onto the hunt. I'm going to start our geocaching experience equipped with my Samsung Galaxy Tab. Additionally, I installed a geocaching.com client called c:geo that hopefully assists me soon. Combined with a map app like Google Maps and a nice Compass app you should be fully equipped and ready to go. I guess, that even a car navigation system is perfect for that task. Later on, with more experience and demand for technology (or precision) it might be interesting to opt-in for a pure GPS device, like a Garmin or any other brand on the market. {loadposition content_adsense} What is a geocache and what does it contain? In its simplest form, a cache always contains a logbook or logsheet for you to log your find. Larger caches may contain a logbook and any number of items. These items turn the adventure into a true treasure hunt. You never know what the cache owner or visitors to the cache may have left for you to enjoy. Remember, if you take something, leave something of equal or greater value in return. It is recommended that items in a cache be individually packaged in a clear, zipped plastic bag to protect them from the elements. Finding your first geocache Well, first you have to have interest to pick up the challenge. Then you have to check out the Geocache directory on geocaching.com. They have recommendations for beginner's caches but you are free to choose any. Actually, we have a Mystery Cache very close to our base, and I guess that we are going for that one on our first trip. Anyway, there is a very informative guide on the website which should answer all your questions about starting your new outdoor adventure. For sure, it's going to be rewarding. Team up with friends and family Especially as a beginner there might be misunderstandings in handling the GPS coordinates, the compass, or the map, and even finding the container at the documented position isn't easy in the first place. Luckily, there are logbook reports online from other hunters, and most of the time there are even 'spoiler' images available. But also bear in mind, that a geocache might have been removed or is lost due to unconscious people or whatever other reasons. Don't be disappointed in case that you can't find anything... There be nothing anymore. A general recommendation in this case would be to replace the missing container with a new one, and give feedback to the original owner about the state of that particular location. After all, it's about fun and active participation in a world-wide community. Geocaches in Mauritius? Yes, there are currently about 45 geocaches spread all over the island, and even a single in Rodriguez - that's gonna be a tough one. Hopefully, we will get increasing numbers as Geocaching.com allows, no better, even encourages you to hide new containers at your locations of choice. I think this is going to be real fun for us during the upcoming weeks and months. Especially, when we are travelling to other countries and transfer so-called trackable items between geocaches. On my first impression, Geocaching.com seems to be very mature, open and community-oriented. There are literally hundreds of thousands geocache 'hunters' all over the world. And usually finding a container remote from your home is very rewarding. I'll keep you updated in these matters during the next months to come...

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• Recover that Photo, Picture or File You Deleted Accidentally

  - by The Geek

  Have you ever accidentally deleted a photo on your camera, computer, USB drive, or anywhere else? What you might not know is that you can usually restore those pictures—even from your camera’s memory stick. Windows tries to prevent you from making a big mistake by providing the Recycle Bin, where deleted files hang around for a while—but unfortunately it doesn’t work for external USB drives, USB flash drives, memory sticks, or mapped drives. The great news is that this technique also works if you accidentally deleted the photo… from the camera itself. That’s what happened to me, and prompted writing this article. Restore that File or Photo using Recuva The first piece of software that you’ll want to try is called Recuva, and it’s extremely easy to use—just make sure when you are installing it, that you don’t accidentally install that stupid Yahoo! toolbar that nobody wants. Now that you’ve installed the software, and avoided an awful toolbar installation, launch the Recuva wizard and let’s start through the process of recovering those pictures you shouldn’t have deleted. The first step on the wizard page will let you tell Recuva to only search for a specific type of file, which can save a lot of time while searching, and make it easier to find what you are looking for. Next you’ll need to specify where the file was, which will obviously be up to wherever you deleted it from. Since I deleted mine from my camera’s SD card, that’s where I’m looking for it. The next page will ask you whether you want to do a Deep Scan. My recommendation is to not select this for the first scan, because usually the quick scan can find it. You can always go back and run a deep scan a second time. And now, you’ll see all of the pictures deleted from your drive, memory stick, SD card, or wherever you searched. Looks like what happened in Vegas didn’t stay in Vegas after all… If there are a really large number of results, and you know exactly when the file was created or modified, you can switch to the advanced view, where you can sort by the last modified time. This can help speed up the process quite a bit, so you don’t have to look through quite as many files. At this point, you can right-click on any filename, and choose to Recover it, and then save the files elsewhere on your drive. Awesome! Restore that File or Photo using DiskDigger If you don’t have any luck with Recuva, you can always try out DiskDigger, another excellent piece of software. I’ve tested both of these applications very thoroughly, and found that neither of them will always find the same files, so it’s best to have both of them in your toolkit. Note that DiskDigger doesn’t require installation, making it a really great tool to throw on your PC repair Flash drive. Start off by choosing the drive you want to recover from…   Now you can choose whether to do a deep scan, or a really deep scan. Just like with Recuva, you’ll probably want to select the first one first. I’ve also had much better luck with the regular scan, rather than the “dig deeper” one. If you do choose the “dig deeper” one, you’ll be able to select exactly which types of files you are looking for, though again, you should use the regular scan first. Once you’ve come up with the results, you can click on the items on the left-hand side, and see a preview on the right.  You can select one or more files, and choose to restore them. It’s pretty simple! Download DiskDigger from dmitrybrant.com Download Recuva from piriform.com Good luck recovering your deleted files! And keep in mind, DiskDigger is a totally free donationware software from a single, helpful guy… so if his software helps you recover a photo you never thought you’d see again, you might want to think about throwing him a dollar or two. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Stupid Geek Tricks: Undo an Accidental Move or Delete With a Keyboard ShortcutRestore Accidentally Deleted Files with RecuvaCustomize Your Welcome Picture Choices in Windows VistaAutomatically Resize Picture Attachments in Outlook 2007Resize Your Photos with Easy Thumbnails 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 Icelandic Volcano Webcams Open Multiple Links At One Go NachoFoto Searches Images in Real-time Office 2010 Product Guides Google Maps Place marks – Pizza, Guns or Strip Clubs Monitor Applications With Kiwi

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• Selling Visual Studio ALM

  - by Tarun Arora

  Introduction As a consultant I have been selling Application Lifecycle Management services using Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server. I’ve been contacted various times by friends working in organization telling me that ALM processes in their company were benchmarked when dinosaurs walked the earth. Most of these individuals already know the great features Microsoft ALM tools offer and are keen to start a conversation with the CIO but don’t exactly know where to start. It is very important how you engage in your first conversation, if you start the conversation with ‘There is this great tooling from Microsoft which offers amazing features to boost developer productivity, … ‘ from experience I can tell you the reply from your CIO would be ‘I already know! Our existing landscape has a combination of bleeding edge open source and cutting edge licensed tools which already cover these features quite well, more over Microsoft products have a high licensing cost associated to them.’ You will always find it harder to sell by feature, the trick is to highlight the gap in the existing processes & tools and then highlight the impact of these gaps to the overall development processes, by now you would have captured enough attention to show off how the ALM tooling offered by Microsoft not only fills those gaps but offers great value adds to take their development practices to the next level. Rangers ALM Assessment Guide Image 1 – Welcome! First look at the Rangers ALM assessment guide Most organization already have some processes in place to cover aspects of ALM. How do you go about proving that there isn’t enough cover in place? This is where Visual Studio ALM Rangers ALM Assessment guide can help. The ALM assessment guide is really a tool that helps you gather information about Development practices and processes within a customer's environment. Several questionnaires are used to identify the current state of individual development lifecycle areas and decide on a desired state for those processes. It also presents guidance and roll-up summaries to help with recommendations moving forward. The ALM Rangers assessment guide can be downloaded from here. Image 2 – ALM Assessment guide divided into different functions of SDLC The assessment guide is divided into different functions of Software Development Lifecycle (listed below), this gives you the ability to access how mature the company is in different areas of SDLC. Architecture & Design Requirement Engineering & UX Development Software Configuration Management Governance Deployment & Operations Testing & Quality Assurance Project Planning & Management Each section has a set of questions, fill in the assessment by selecting “Never/Sometimes/Always” from the Answer column in the question sheets.  Each answer has weightage to the overall score. Each question has a link next to it, clicking the link takes you to the Reference sheet which gives you more details about the question along with a reason for “why you need to ask this question?”, “other ways to phrase the question” and “what to expect as an answer from the customer”. The trick is to engage the customer in a discussion. You need to probe a lot, listen to the customer and have a discussion with several team members, preferably without management to ensure that you receive candid feedback. This reminds me of a funny incident when during an ALM review a customer told me that they have a sophisticated semi-automated application deployment process, further discussions revealed that deployment actually involved 72 manual configuration steps per production node. Such observations can be recorded in the Issue Brainstorming worksheet for further consideration later. It is also worth mentioning the different levels of ALM maturity to the customer. By default the desired state of ALM maturity is set to Standard, it is possible to set a desired state by area, you should strive for Advanced or Dynamic, it always helps by explaining the classification and advantages. Image 3 – ALM levels by description The ALM assessment guide helps you arrive at a quantitative measure of the company’s ALM maturity. The resultant graph plotted on a spider’s web shows you the company’s current state of ALM maturity and the desired state of ALM maturity. Further since the results are classified by area you can immediately spot the areas where the customer needs immediate help. Image 4 – The spiders web! The red cross icons are areas shouting out for immediate attention, the yellow exclamation icons are areas that need improvement. These icons are calculated on the difference between the Current State of ALM maturity VS the Desired state of ALM maturity. Image 5 – Results by area Conclusion To conclude the Rangers ALM assessment guide gives you the ability to, Measure the customer’s current ALM maturity level Understand the ALM maturity level the customer desires to achieve Capture a healthy list of issues the customer wants to brainstorm further Now What’s next…? Download and get started with the Rangers ALM Assessment Guide. If you have successfully captured the above listed three pieces of information you are in a great state to make recommendations on the identified areas highlighting the benefits that Visual Studio ALM tools would offer. In the next post I will be covering how to take the ALM assessment results as the base to actually convert your recommendation into a sell.  Remember to subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TarunArora. I would love to hear your feedback! If you have any recommendations on things that I should consider or any questions or feedback, feel free to leave a comment. *** A special thanks goes out to fellow ranges Willy, Ethem and Philip for reviewing the blog post and providing valuable feedback. ***

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• Vacations on Rodrigues 2014

  And now something completely different compared to the usual technical or community related articles here on this blog. Yes, this time I'm writing some lines on my (and my family's) activities during our long weekend stay on Rodrigues. So, please bear with me, it's eventually a bit more personal... Grab a soda, some popcorn and a cosy place to continue to read. var googleAlbumLink = "https://plus.google.com/photos/117698191428446859536/albums/6047895311458281985"; //optional----------------------- var mySlideWidth = 580; var mySlideHeight = 340; var mySlideDelay = 7000; //delay in milliseconds Special promotions during school holidays Originally, our children started to ask more frequently about going on the plane again. Obviously, after their aunty from Germany was around during May, they were really eager to travel again. So, we decided that it might be a great opportunity to book some vacations during their school holidays. And just in time the local hotels and hotel groups started to advertise their special promotions for citizens and residents. After collecting multiple brochures over several days, we got attracted by various hotel packages on Rodrigues - most interestingly the expenses for the stay and flight ticket were less compared to other resorts here on the main island. As we have been to Rodrigues already back in 2008, we followed up on this idea and got in touch with a couple travel agencies. Well, I have to report that you should be really careful about the promotions from some of them. We had a very negative experience with Shamal Travel Agency in Quatre Bornes regarding their adverts and the actual price levels and age definition for children. Please, stay away from them if you are interested in transparent cost and services. Anyway, after some arrangements with two other close families we managed to confirm our stay at the Cotton Bay Hotel in Rodrigues. Given the fact that we already stayed there, and the hotel has been renovated recently, and it is under new management all looked very promising and relaxed for our vacation. Counting the days... As we already booked in July our children were counting down the days. And it got more interesting as soon as they were on school holidays finally. Well, the day arrived and waking them up at 2:30 hrs wasn't a problem after all. Quite the opposite it was fascinating for us parents to watch them waiting for the transport and later on during the airport transfer. Despite the early hours both didn't fall asleep and it was all so exciting. We are taking the plane! Well organised by the Cotton Bay Hotel Honestly, it was a breeze and a smooth ride during our stay at the hotel. From the airport transfer, the cleanliness of our bungalow, the organisation of our day trips, and the SPA - all very well and enjoyable. The children had great fun, and although it was a bit too windy to plunge into the pool they had a lot of fun with other activities on the beach and at the Kid's Club. Oh, and we had our private petting zoo with cows, sheep and goats just close to the terrace. Some of us went to check out the SPA facilities and I have to admit that the services regarding Hammam and Sauna are better than at some other hotels in Mauritius. I don't know after how many months or years I was once again enjoying a very hot sauna. Little draw-back but nothing to worry about... There is no cold water or at least ice cubes to cool down the body, but hey there was a nice breeze coming over the hills. Some day trips to mention Based on a friend's recommendation we walked to a "restaurant" called Chez Solange & Robert. Hahaha, restaurant is widely stretched in this case, as we enjoyed a great BBQ with fresh lobster, whole fish, and pieces of chicken breast in an open cottage. Just some wooden structure covered with dried palm leaves on the roof - island feeling pure! The other day we went to the Giant Tortoise & Cave Reserve Francois Leguat to observe the giant Aldabra turtles and to visit the Grande Caverne. The biggest limestone cave on the island. Compared to our last visit this was a novelty after checking out the Caverne Partate. The formations of stalactites and stalagmites are very impressive and imaginative. Our guide had lots of funny terms and despite the low light conditions the kids had a great time wandering around on the narrow wooden paths and stairs. And last but not least, we decided to check out the Tyrodrig zip lines... Everyone was allowed to join the trip through the air, and our little ones stayed close to our field guides. But finally went on their own on the very last traversal. Puuuh, it was astounishing to glide over the valley, and for sure something to repeat next time. Impressions of our vacation on Rodrigues 2014   Next stay has been discussed already Oh yes, Rodrigues baby! We are going to come again! Tentative dates have been discussed already and now it's up to us to earn enough our next holiday on that wonderful remote piece of paradise. Eventually, a little bit longer than this time. We'll see...

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• PeopleSoft at Alliance 2012 Executive Forum

  - by John Webb

  Guest Posting From Rebekah Jackson This week I jointed over 4,800 Higher Ed and Public Sector customers and partners in Nashville at our annual Alliance conference.   I got lost easily in the hallways of the sprawling Gaylord Opryland Hotel. I carried the resort map with me, and I would still stand for several minutes at a very confusing junction, studying the map and the signage on the walls. Hallways led off in many directions, some with elevators going down here and stairs going up there. When I took a wrong turn I would instantly feel stuck, lose my bearings, and occasionally even have to send out a call for help.    It strikes me that the theme for the Executive Forum this year outlines a less tangible but equally disorienting set of challenges that our higher education customer’s CIOs are facing: Making Decisions at the Intersection of Business Value, Strategic Investment, and Enterprise Technology. The forces acting upon higher education institutions today are not neat, straight-forward decision points, where one can glance to the right, glance to the left, and then quickly choose the best course of action. The operational, technological, and strategic factors that must be considered are complex, interrelated, messy…and the stakes are high. Michael Horn, co-author of “Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns”, set the tone for the day. He introduced the model of disruptive innovation, which grew out of the research he and his colleagues have done on ‘Why Successful Organizations Fail’. Highly simplified, the pattern he shared is that things start out decentralized, take a leap to extreme centralization, and then experience progressive decentralization. Using computers as an example, we started with a slide rule, then developed the computer which centralized in the form of mainframes, and gradually decentralized to mini-computers, desktop computers, laptops, and now mobile devices. According to Michael, you have more computing power in your cell phone than existed on the planet 60 years ago, or was on the first rocket that went to the moon. Applying this pattern to Higher Education means the introduction of expensive and prestigious private universities, followed by the advent of state schools, then by community colleges, and now online education. Michael shared statistics that indicate 50% of students will be taking at least one on line course by 2014…and by some measures, that’s already the case today. The implication is that technology moves from being the backbone of the campus, the IT department’s domain, and pushes into the academic core of the institution. Innovative programs are underway at many schools like Bellevue and BYU Idaho, joined by startups and disruptive new players like the Khan Academy.   This presents both threat and opportunity for higher education institutions, and means that IT decisions cannot afford to be disconnected from the institution’s strategic plan. Subsequent sessions explored this theme.    Theo Bosnak, from Attain, discussed the model they use for assessing the complete picture of an institution’s financial health. Compounding the issue are the dramatic trends occurring in technology and the vendors that provide it. Ovum analyst Nicole Engelbert, shared her insights next and suggested that incremental changes are no longer an option, instead fundamental changes are affecting the landscape of enterprise technology in higher ed.    Nicole closed with her recommendation that institutions focus on the trends in higher education with an eye towards the strategic requirements and business value first. Technology then is the enabler.   The last presentation of the day was from Tom Fisher, Sr. Vice President of Cloud Services at Oracle. Tom runs the delivery arm of the Cloud Services group, and shared his thoughts candidly about his experiences with cloud deployments as well as key issues around managing costs and security in cloud deployments. Okay, we’ve covered a lot of ground at this point, from financials planning, business strategy, and cloud computing, with the possibility that half of the institutions in the US might not be around in their current form 10 years from now. Did I forget to mention that was raised in the morning session? Seems a little hard to believe, and yet Michael Horn made a compelling point. Apparently 100 years ago, 8 of the top 10 education institutions in the world were German. Today, the leading German school is ranked somewhere in the 40’s or 50’s. What will the landscape be 100 years from now? Will there be an institution from China, India, or Brazil in the top 10? As Nicole suggested, maybe US parents will be sending their children to schools overseas much sooner, faced with the ever-increasing costs of a US based education. Will corporations begin to view skill-based certification from an online provider as a viable alternative to a 4 year degree from an accredited institution, fundamentally altering the education industry as we know it?

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• Take Advantage of Oracle's Ongoing Assurance Effort!

  - by eric.maurice

  Hi, this is Eric Maurice again! A few years ago, I posted a blog entry, which discussed the psychology of patching. The point of this blog entry was that a natural tendency existed for systems and database administrators to be reluctant to apply patches, even security patches, because of the fear of "breaking" the system. Unfortunately, this belief in the principle "if it ain't broke, don't fix it!" creates significant risks for organizations. Running systems without applying the proper security patches can greatly compromise the security posture of the organization because the security controls available in the affected system may be compromised as a result of the existence of the unfixed vulnerabilities. As a result, Oracle continues to strongly recommend that customers apply all security fixes as soon as possible. Most recently, I have had a number of conversations with customers who questioned the need to upgrade their highly stable but otherwise unsupported Oracle systems. These customers wanted to know more about the kind of security risks they were exposed to, by running obsolete versions of Oracle software. As per Oracle Support Policies, Critical Patch Updates are produced for currently supported products. In other words, Critical Patch Updates are not created by Oracle for product versions that are no longer covered under the Premier Support or Extended Support phases of the Lifetime Support Policy. One statement used in each Critical Patch Update Advisory is particularly important: "We recommend that customers upgrade to a supported version of Oracle products in order to obtain patches. Unsupported products, releases and versions are not tested for the presence of vulnerabilities addressed by this Critical Patch Update. However, it is likely that earlier versions of affected releases are also affected by these vulnerabilities." The purpose of this warning is to inform Oracle customers that a number of the vulnerabilities fixed in each Critical Patch Update may affect older versions of a specific product line. In other words, each Critical Patch Update provides a number of fixes for currently supported versions of a given product line (this information is listed for each bug in the Risk Matrices of the Critical Patch Update Advisory), but the unsupported versions in the same product line, while they may be affected by the vulnerabilities, will not receive the fixes, and are therefore vulnerable to attacks. The risk assumed by organizations wishing to remain on unsupported versions is amplified by the behavior of malicious hackers, who typically will attempt to, and sometimes succeed in, reverse-engineering the content of vendors' security fixes. As a result, it is not uncommon for exploits to be published soon after Oracle discloses vulnerabilities with the release of a Critical Patch Update or Security Alert. Let's consider now the nature of the vulnerabilities that may exist in obsolete versions of Oracle software. A number of severe vulnerabilities have been fixed by Oracle over the years. While Oracle does not test unsupported products, releases and versions for the presence of vulnerabilities addressed by each Critical Patch Update, it should be assumed that a number of the vulnerabilities fixed with the Critical Patch Update program do exist in unsupported versions (regardless of the product considered). The most severe vulnerabilities fixed in past Critical Patch Updates may result in full compromise of the targeted systems, down to the OS level, by remote and unauthenticated users (these vulnerabilities receive a CVSS Base Score of 10.0) or almost as critically, may result in the compromise of the affected systems (without compromising the underlying OS) by a remote and unauthenticated users (these vulnerabilities receive a CVSS Base Score of 7.5). Such vulnerabilities may result in complete takeover of the targeted machine (for the CVSS 10.0), or may result in allowing the attacker the ability to create a denial of service against the affected system or even hijacking or stealing all the data hosted by the compromised system (for the CVSS 7.5). The bottom line is that organizations should assume the worst case: that the most critical vulnerabilities are present in their unsupported version; therefore, it is Oracle's recommendation that all organizations move to supported systems and apply security patches in a timely fashion. Organizations that currently run supported versions but may be late in their security patch release level can quickly catch up because most Critical Patch Updates are cumulative. With a few exceptions noted in Oracle's Critical Patch Update Advisory, the application of the most recent Critical Patch Update will bring these products to current security patch level and provide the organization with the best possible security posture for their patch level. Furthermore, organizations are encouraged to upgrade to most recent versions as this will greatly improve their security posture. At Oracle, our security fixing policies state that security fixes are produced for the main code line first, and as a result, our products benefit from the mistakes made in previous version(s). Our ongoing assurance effort ensures that we work diligently to fix the vulnerabilities we find, and aim at constantly improving the security posture our products provide by default. Patch sets include numerous in-depth fixes in addition to those delivered through the Critical Patch Update and, in certain instances, important security fixes require major architectural changes that can only be included in new product releases (and cannot be backported through the Critical Patch Update program). For More Information: • Mary Ann Davidson is giving a webcast interview on Oracle Software Security Assurance on February 24th. The registration link for attending this webcast is located at http://event.on24.com/r.htm?e=280304&s=1&k=6A7152F62313CA09F77EBCEEA9B6294F&partnerref=EricMblog • A blog entry discussing Oracle's practices for ensuring the quality of Critical patch Updates can be found at http://blogs.oracle.com/security/2009/07/ensuring_critical_patch_update_quality.html • The blog entry "To patch or not to patch" is located at http://blogs.oracle.com/security/2008/01/to_patch_or_not_to_patch.html • Oracle's Support Policies are located at http://www.oracle.com/us/support/policies/index.html • The Critical Patch Update & Security Alert page is located at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/security/alerts-086861.html

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