Search Results

Search found 6407 results on 257 pages for 'reorder columns'.

Page 207/257 | < Previous Page | 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214  | Next Page >

• Indentify Codecs & Technical Information About Video Files

  - by DigitalGeekery

  Have you ever wanted to play an audio or video file but didn’t have the proper codec installed? Today we’ll show how to determine codecs, along with a host of other technical details about your media files with MediaInfo. Installation Download and install MediaInfo. You can find the download link at the bottom of the page. Note: When installing MediaInfo there is a recommended software bundle which you can opt out of by selecting Do not install option. Each recommended software choice may be different, like in this example it offers Spyware Terminator. The cool thing though is they use Open Candy which opts you out of the install. Just double check to make sure you’re not installing extra crapware. Using MediaInfo The first time you run MediaInfo it will display the Preferences window. There are various option such as language, output format, and whether or not you want MediaInfo to check for new versions. Click OK. Select a file or folder to analyze by clicking on the File or Folder icons on the left of the application window or by selecting File > Open from the menu. You can also drag and drop a file directly onto the application. MediaInfo will display details of your media file. In Basic view, you’ll see basic information. Notice in the example below the video and audio codecs, along with file size, running time of the media file, and even the application used to create the video file (Writing application).    You can switch to some of the other views by selecting View from the Menu and choosing form the dropdown list.   Sheet View will present the information a bit more clearly. You can see in the example below that the video and audio codec are listing in clearly identified columns. (AVC is often more commonly referred to H.264.)   Tree View is perhaps the most detailed. You can see from the example below the codec used for this AVI file is XviD.   Scrolling down even further you’ll see additional information like video and audio bit rates, frame rate, aspect ratio, and more.   In Basic View (and also in Sheet view) you can click to find a player for your file. In this instance with an MP4 file, it took me to the download page for Quicktime. This is by no means the only media player for this file, but if you are stuck for how to play a media file, this will forward you to a solution that works. You can do the same thing with Video codec. Click Go to the web site of this video codec to find a download.   MediaInfo is a simple but powerful tool that can be used to discover the details of a media file, or just to find a compatible codec. It works with most any video file type and is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Some Mac and Linux versions, however, are currently command line only. Download MediaInfo Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips How to Convert Videos to 3GP for Mobile PhonesFix for VLC Skipping and Lagging Playing High-Def Video FilesUsing VLC Player Under VistaUse Your Mac Mini as a Media Server Part 2How to Play .OGM Video Files in Windows Vista 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 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 2010 World Cup Schedule Boot Snooze – Reboot and then Standby or Hibernate Customize Everything Related to Dates, Times, Currency and Measurement in Windows 7 Google Earth replacement Icon (Icons we like) Build Great Charts in Excel with Chart Advisor tinysong gives a shortened URL for you to post on Twitter (or anywhere)

  Read the article

• How the number of indexes built on a table can impact performances?

  - by Davide Mauri

  We all know that putting too many indexes (I’m talking of non-clustered index only, of course) on table may produce performance problems due to the overhead that each index bring to all insert/update/delete operations on that table. But how much? I mean, we all agree – I think – that, generally speaking, having many indexes on a table is “bad”. But how bad it can be? How much the performance will degrade? And on a concurrent system how much this situation can also hurts SELECT performances? If SQL Server take more time to update a row on a table due to the amount of indexes it also has to update, this also means that locks will be held for more time, slowing down the perceived performance of all queries involved. I was quite curious to measure this, also because when teaching it’s by far more impressive and effective to show to attended a chart with the measured impact, so that they can really “feel” what it means! To do the tests, I’ve create a script that creates a table (that has a clustered index on the primary key which is an identity column) , loads 1000 rows into the table (inserting 1000 row using only one insert, instead of issuing 1000 insert of one row, in order to minimize the overhead needed to handle the transaction, that would have otherwise ), and measures the time taken to do it. The process is then repeated 16 times, each time adding a new index on the table, using columns from table in a round-robin fashion. Test are done against different row sizes, so that it’s possible to check if performance changes depending on row size. The result are interesting, although expected. This is the chart showing how much time it takes to insert 1000 on a table that has from 0 to 16 non-clustered indexes. Each test has been run 20 times in order to have an average value. The value has been cleaned from outliers value due to unpredictable performance fluctuations due to machine activity. The test shows that in a  table with a row size of 80 bytes, 1000 rows can be inserted in 9,05 msec if no indexes are present on the table, and the value grows up to 88 (!!!) msec when you have 16 indexes on it This means a impact on performance of 975%. That’s *huge*! Now, what happens if we have a bigger row size? Say that we have a table with a row size of 1520 byte. Here’s the data, from 0 to 16 indexes on that table: In this case we need near 22 msec to insert 1000 in a table with no indexes, but we need more that 500msec if the table has 16 active indexes! Now we’re talking of a 2410% impact on performance! Now we can have a tangible idea of what’s the impact of having (too?) many indexes on a table and also how the size of a row also impact performances. That’s why the golden rule of OLTP databases “few indexes, but good” is so true! (And in fact last week I saw a database with tables with 1700bytes row size and 23 (!!!) indexes on them!) This also means that a too heavy denormalization is really not a good idea (we’re always talking about OLTP systems, keep it in mind), since the performance get worse with the increase of the row size. So, be careful out there, and keep in mind the “equilibrium” is the key world of a database professional: equilibrium between read and write performance, between normalization and denormalization, between to few and too may indexes. PS Tests are done on a VMWare Workstation 7 VM with 2 CPU and 4 GB of Memory. Host machine is a Dell Precsioni M6500 with i7 Extreme X920 Quad-Core HT 2.0Ghz and 16Gb of RAM. Database is stored on a SSD Intel X-25E Drive, Simple Recovery Model, running on SQL Server 2008 R2. If you also want to to tests on your own, you can download the test script here: Open TestIndexPerformance.sql

  Read the article

• Protecting Consolidated Data on Engineered Systems

  - by Steve Enevold

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

  Read the article

• Columnstore Case Study #1: MSIT SONAR Aggregations

  - by aspiringgeek

  Preamble This is the first in a series of posts documenting big wins encountered using columnstore indexes in SQL Server 2012 & 2014.  Many of these can be found in this deck along with details such as internals, best practices, caveats, etc.  The purpose of sharing the case studies in this context is to provide an easy-to-consume quick-reference alternative. Why Columnstore? If we’re looking for a subset of columns from one or a few rows, given the right indexes, SQL Server can do a superlative job of providing an answer. If we’re asking a question which by design needs to hit lots of rows—DW, reporting, aggregations, grouping, scans, etc., SQL Server has never had a good mechanism—until columnstore. Columnstore indexes were introduced in SQL Server 2012. However, they're still largely unknown. Some adoption blockers existed; yet columnstore was nonetheless a game changer for many apps.  In SQL Server 2014, potential blockers have been largely removed & they're going to profoundly change the way we interact with our data.  The purpose of this series is to share the performance benefits of columnstore & documenting columnstore is a compelling reason to upgrade to SQL Server 2014. App: MSIT SONAR Aggregations At MSIT, performance & configuration data is captured by SCOM. We archive much of the data in a partitioned data warehouse table in SQL Server 2012 for reporting via an application called SONAR.  By definition, this is a primary use case for columnstore—report queries requiring aggregation over large numbers of rows.  New data is refreshed each night by an automated table partitioning mechanism—a best practices scenario for columnstore. The Win Compared to performance using classic indexing which resulted in the expected query plan selection including partition elimination vs. SQL Server 2012 nonclustered columnstore, query performance increased significantly.  Logical reads were reduced by over a factor of 50; both CPU & duration improved by factors of 20 or more.  Other than creating the columnstore index, no special modifications or tweaks to the app or databases schema were necessary to achieve the performance improvements.  Existing nonclustered indexes were rendered superfluous & were deleted, thus mitigating maintenance challenges such as defragging as well as conserving disk capacity. Details The table provides the raw data & summarizes the performance deltas. Logical Reads (8K pages) CPU (ms) Durn (ms) Columnstore 160,323 20,360 9,786 Conventional Table & Indexes 9,053,423 549,608 193,903 ? x56 x27 x20 The charts provide additional perspective of this data.  "Conventional vs. Columnstore Metrics" document the raw data.  Note on this linear display the magnitude of the conventional index performance vs. columnstore.  The “Metrics (?)” chart expresses these values as a ratio. Summary For DW, reports, & other BI workloads, columnstore often provides significant performance enhancements relative to conventional indexing.  I have documented here, the first in a series of reports on columnstore implementations, results from an initial implementation at MSIT in which logical reads were reduced by over a factor of 50; both CPU & duration improved by factors of 20 or more.  Subsequent features in this series document performance enhancements that are even more significant. 

  Read the article

• SQL Script to Assign All Items to ALL Sites with Dynamics GP

  - by Ryan McBee

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 false false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} When setting up new items within Microsoft Dynamics GP, you will often run into the error message below which reads “This site is not assigned to the selected item.  Do you want to assign this site?”  The fix is quite simple given that you simply click the Add button below which opens up the Item Quantities Maintenance window which you will hit the save button and proceed with the entry of your Sales Order or Purchase Order.   If you have a lot of new items into GP and have just one Site ID setup, the best approach to assigning your items to a particular site is by going to the Site Maintenance Window which is located in Cards>>Inventory>>Site.  Once you are in the window below, you can click the Assign button to assign Items to the Site selected.     However, if you have you a lot of Sites and Items created, this can be quite a cumbersome and time consuming process.  For that, I have created the following SQL Script below that Assigns all Items to all Site ID’s within Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010.    declare @item varchar(100)       , @loc varchar(100)       , @ItemExist int         DECLARE TablePositionCursor CURSOR FOR         SELECT itemnmbr from IV00101 i         OPEN TablePositionCursor       FETCH NEXT FROM TablePositionCursor INTO @item       WHILE (@@fetch_status <> -1)             BEGIN                         DECLARE TablePositionCursor2 CURSOR FOR                         select locncode from IV40700                   OPEN TablePositionCursor2                   FETCH NEXT FROM TablePositionCursor2 INTO  @loc                   WHILE (@@fetch_status <> -1)                         BEGIN                           SELECT @ItemExist = isnull(count(*), 0) FROM IV00102 where ITEMNMBR = @item and LOCNCODE = @loc                                                 if @ItemExist  = 0                               BEGIN                                      insert into iv00102 values(                                     @item                                     ,@loc                                     ,''                                     ,2                                     ,''                                     ,0                                     ,0                                     ,0                                     ,0                                     ,'01/01/1900'                                     ,''                                     ,'01/01/1900'                                     ,0                                     ,0                                     ,0                                     ,0                                     ,0                                     ,0                                     ,0                                     ,0                                     ,0                                     ,0                                     ,0                                     ,0                                     ,'01/01/1900'                                     ,'01/01/1900'                                     ,'01/01/1900'                                     ,'01/01/1900'                                     ,0                                     ,''                                     ,''                                     ,''                                     ,1                                     ,0                                     ,0                                     ,1                                     ,0                                     ,0                                     ,1                                     ,2                                     ,0                                     ,0                                     ,0                                     ,0                                     ,0                                     ,0                                     ,0                                     ,1                                     ,0                                     ,0                                     ,0                                     ,3                                     ,0                                     ,0                                     ,0                                     ,''                                     ,''                                     ,''                                     ,''                                     ,''                                     ,''                                     ,''                                     ,''                                     ,1                                     ,1                                     ,''                                     ,1                                     ,1                                     ,0                                     ,1                                     ,1                                     ,1                                     ,0                                     ,0                                     ,0                                     ,0                                     ,0                                       )                         END                               FETCH NEXT FROM TablePositionCursor2 INTO @loc                         END                   DEALLOCATE TablePositionCursor2                     FETCH NEXT FROM TablePositionCursor INTO  @item             END       DEALLOCATE TablePositionCursor     The script below works just for GP 2010 since the columns in the IV00102 have changed from version to version.  If you need it for prior versions, please email me and I will send it to you.   Disclaimer: I tested this on limited data, if you find an issue or have a suggestion for improvement, please let me know and I will post the update here for everyone.  This blog is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

  Read the article

• Why I Love the Social Management Platform I Use

  - by Mike Stiles

  Not long ago, I asked the product heads for the various components of the Oracle Social Cloud’s SRM to say what they thought was coolest about their component. And while they did a fine job, it was recently pointed out to me that no one around here uses the platform in a real-world setting more than I do, as I not only blog and podcast my brains out, I also run Oracle Social’s own social properties. Of course I’m pro-Oracle Social’s product. Duh. But if you can get around immediately writing this off as a puff piece, there are real reasons beyond my employment that the Oracle SRM works for me as a community manager. If it didn’t, I could have simply written about something else, like how people love smartphones or something genius like that. Post Grid I like seeing what I want to see. I’m difficult that way. Post grid lets me see all posts for all channels, with custom columns showing me how posts are doing. I can filter the grid by social channel, published, scheduled, draft, suggested, etc. Then there’s a pullout side panel that shows me post details, including engagement analytics. From the pullout, I can preview the post, do a quick edit, a full edit, or (my favorite) copy a post so I can edit it and schedule it for other times so I don’t have to repeat from scratch. I’m not lazy, just time conscious. The Post Creation Environment Given our post volume, I need this to be as easy as it can be. I can highlight which streams I want the post to go out on, edit for the individual streams, maintain a media library that’s easy to upload to and attach from, tag posts, insert links that auto-shorten to an orac.le shortlink, schedule with a nice calendar visual, geo-target, drop photos inline into Twitter, and review each post. Watching My Channels The Engage component of the Oracle SRM brings in and drops into a grid the activity that’s happening on all my channels. I keep this open round-the-clock. Again, I get to see only what I want; social network, stream, unread messages, engagement by how I labeled them, and date range. I can bring up a post with a click, reply, label it, retweet it, assign it, delete it, archive it, etc. So don’t bother trying to be a troll on my channels. Analytics Social publishing and engaging 24/7 would be pretty unrewarding if I couldn’t see how our audience was responding. Frankly, I get more analytics than I know what to do with (I’m a content creator, not a data analyst). But I do know what numbers I care about, and they’re available by channel, date range, and campaigns. I’m seeing fan count, sources and demographics. I’m seeing engagement, what kinds of posts are getting engagement, and top engagers. I’m seeing my reach, both organic and paid. I’m seeing how individual posts performed in terms of engagement and virality, and posting time/date insight. Have I covered all the value propositions? I’ve covered pathetically few of them. It would be impossible in blog length to give shout-outs to the vast number of features and functionalities. From organizing teams and managing permissions with Workflow to the powerful ability to monitor topics (and your competition) across the web in Listen, it’s a major, and increasingly necessary, weapon in your social marketing arsenal. The life of a Community Manager is not for everybody. So if the Oracle SRM can actually make a Community Manager’s life easier, what’s not to love? I invite you to take a look at and participate in our Oracle Social Cloud social channels! Facebook Twitter YouTube Google Plus LinkedIn Daily Podcast on iHeartRadio @mikestiles @oraclesocial Photo: freeimages.com

  Read the article

• How Do You Actually Model Data?

  Since the 1970’s Developers, Analysts and DBAs have been able to represent concepts and relations in the form of data through the use of generic symbols.  But what is data modeling?  The first time I actually heard this term I could not understand why anyone would want to display a computer on a fashion show runway. Hey, what do you expect? At that time I was a freshman in community college, and obviously this was a long time ago.  I have since had the chance to learn what data modeling truly is through using it. Data modeling is a process of breaking down information and/or requirements in to common categories called objects. Once objects start being defined then relationships start to form based on dependencies found amongst other existing objects.  Currently, there are several tools on the market that help data designer actually map out objects and their relationships through the use of symbols and lines.  These diagrams allow for designs to be review from several perspectives so that designers can ensure that they have the optimal data design for their project and that the design is flexible enough to allow for potential changes and/or extension in the future. Additionally these basic models can always be further refined to show different levels of details depending on the target audience through the use of three different types of models. Conceptual Data Model(CDM)Conceptual Data Models include all key entities and relationships giving a viewer a high level understanding of attributes. Conceptual data model are created by gathering and analyzing information from various sources pertaining to a project during the typical planning phase of a project. Logical Data Model (LDM)Logical Data Models are conceptual data models that have been expanded to include implementation details pertaining to the data that it will store. Additionally, this model typically represents an origination’s business requirements and business rules by defining various attribute data types and relationships regarding each entity. This additional information can be directly translated to the Physical Data Model which reduces the actual time need to implement it. Physical Data Model(PDMs)Physical Data Model are transformed Logical Data Models that include the necessary tables, columns, relationships, database properties for the creation of a database. This model also allows for considerations regarding performance, indexing and denormalization that are applied through database rules, data integrity. Further expanding on why we actually use models in modern application/database development can be seen in the benefits that data modeling provides for data modelers and projects themselves, Benefits of Data Modeling according to Applied Information Science Abstraction that allows data designers remove concepts and ideas form hard facts in the form of data. This gives the data designers the ability to express general concepts and/or ideas in a generic form through the use of symbols to represent data items and the relationships between the items. Transparency through the use of data models allows complex ideas to be translated in to simple symbols so that the concept can be understood by all viewpoints and limits the amount of confusion and misunderstanding. Effectiveness in regards to tuning a model for acceptable performance while maintaining affordable operational costs. In addition it allows systems to be built on a solid foundation in terms of data. I shudder at the thought of a world without data modeling, think about it? Data is everywhere in our lives. Data modeling allows for optimizing a design for performance and the reduction of duplication. If one was to design a database without data modeling then I would think that the first things to get impacted would be database performance due to poorly designed database and there would be greater chances of unnecessary data duplication that would also play in to the excessive query times because unneeded records would need to be processed. You could say that a data designer designing a database is like a box of chocolates. You will never know what kind of database you will get until after it is built.

  Read the article

• Design pattern for logging changes in parent/child objects saved to database

  - by andrew

  I’ve got a 2 database tables in parent/child relationship as one-many. I’ve got three classes representing the data in these two tables: Parent Class { Public int ID {get; set;} .. other properties } Child Class { Public int ID {get;set;} Public int ParentID {get; set;} .. other properties } TogetherClass { Public Parent Parent; Public List<Child> ChildList; } Lastly I’ve got a client and server application – I’m in control of both ends so can make changes to both programs as I need to. Client makes a request for ParentID and receives a Together Class for the matching parent, and all of the child records. The client app may make changes to the children – add new children, remove or modify existing ones. Client app then sends the Together Class back to the server app. Server app needs to update the parent and child records in the database. In addition I would like to be able to log the changes – I’m doing this by having 2 separate tables one for Parent, one for child; each containing the same columns as the original plus date time modified, by whom and a list of the changes. I’m unsure as to the best approach to detect the changes in records – new records, records to be deleted, records with no fields changed, records with some fields changed. I figure I need to read the parent & children records and compare those to the ones in the Together Class. Strategy A: If Together class’s child record has an ID of say 0, that indicates a new record; insert. Any deleted child records are no longer in the Together Class; see if any of the comparison child records are not found in the Together class and delete if not found (Compare using ID). Check each child record for changes and if changed log. Strategy B: Make a new Updated TogetherClass UpdatedClass { Public Parent Parent {get; set} Public List<Child> ListNewChild {get;set;} Public List<Child> DeletedChild {get;set;} Public List<Child> ExistingChild {get;set;} // used for no changes and modified rows } And then process as per the list. The reason why I’m asking for ideas is that both of these solutions don’t seem optimal to me and I suspect this problem has been solved already – some kind of design pattern ? I am aware of one potential problem in this general approach – that where Client App A requests a record; App B requests same record; A then saves changes; B then saves changes which may overwrite changes A made. This is a separate locking issue which I’ll raise a separate question for if I’ve got trouble implementing. The actual implementation is c#, SQL Server and WCF between client and server - sharing a library containing the class implementations. Apologies if this is a duplicate post – I tried searching various terms without finding a match though.

  Read the article

• PowerShell: Read Excel to Create Inserts

  - by BuckWoody

  I’m writing a series of articles on how to migrate “departmental” data into SQL Server. I also hold workshops on the entire process – from discovering that the data exists to the modeling process and then how to design the Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) process. Finally I write about (and teach) a few methods on actually moving the data. One of those options is to use PowerShell. There are a lot of ways even with that choice, but the one I show is to read two columns from the spreadsheet and output statements that would insert the data using a stored procedure. Of course, you could re-write this as INSERT statements, out to a text file for bcp, or even use a database connection in the script to move the data directly from Excel into SQL Server. This snippet won’t run on your system, of course – it assumes a Microsoft Office Excel 2007 spreadsheet located at c:\temp called VendorList.xlsx. It looks for a tab in that spreadsheet called Vendors. The statement that does the writing just uses one column: Vendor Code. Here’s the breakdown of what I’m doing: In the first block, I connect to Microsoft Office Excel. That connection string is specific to Excel 2007, so if you need a different version you’ll need to look that up. In the second block I set up a selection from the entire spreadsheet based on that tab. Note that if you’re only after certain data you shouldn’t get the whole spreadsheet – that’s just good practice. In the next block I create the text I want, inserting the Vendor Code field as I go. Finally I close the connection. Enjoy! $ExcelConnection= New-Object -com "ADODB.Connection" $ExcelFile="c:\temp\VendorList.xlsx" $ExcelConnection.Open("Provider=Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0;` Data Source=$ExcelFile;Extended Properties=Excel 12.0;") $strQuery="Select * from [Vendors$]" $ExcelRecordSet=$ExcelConnection.Execute($strQuery) do { Write-Host "EXEC sp_InsertVendors '" $ExcelRecordSet.Fields.Item("Vendor Code").Value "'" $ExcelRecordSet.MoveNext()} Until ($ExcelRecordSet.EOF) $ExcelConnection.Close() Script Disclaimer, for people who need to be told this sort of thing: Never trust any script, including those that you find here, until you understand exactly what it does and how it will act on your systems. Always check the script on a test system or Virtual Machine, not a production system. All scripts on this site are performed by a professional stunt driver on a closed course. Your mileage may vary. Void where prohibited. Offer good for a limited time only. Keep out of reach of small children. Do not operate heavy machinery while using this script. If you experience blurry vision, indigestion or diarrhea during the operation of this script, see a physician immediately. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

  Read the article

• Accounts in Work Items after migration to TFS 2010 and to new domain

  - by Clara Oscura

  Lately I’ve been doing some tests on migrating our TFS 2008 installation to TFS 2010, coupled with a machine and domain change. One particular topic that was tricky is user accounts. We installed first a new machine with TFS 2010 and then migrated the projects in the old server. The work items were migrated with the projects. Great, but if I try to edit one of the old work items I cannot save it anymore because some fields contain old user names (ex. OLDDOMAIN\user) which are not known in the new domain (it should be NEWDOMAIN\user). The errors look like this: When I correct the ‘Assigned To’ field value, I get another error regarding another field: Before TFS 2010, we had TFSUsers power tool. It allow you to map an old user name to a new user name. This is not available anymore because WI fields with user accounts are now synchronized with AD display names changes (explained here). The correct way to go about this in TFS 2010 is to use TFSConfig Identities before adding the new domain accounts into the TFS groups (documented here). So, too late for us. I’ve found a (tedious) workaround to change those old account in work items in order to allow people to keep working with them. 1. Install TFS 2010 power tools 2. Export WIT from your project (VS | Tools | Process Editor | Work Item Types). Save the definition, for example: Original_MyProject_Task.xml 3. Copy the xml (NoReadOnly_MyProject_Task.xml) and edit it. From the field definition of ‘Activated By’, ‘Closed By’ and ‘Resolved By’, remove the following:        <WHENNOTCHANGED field="System.State">           <READONLY />         </WHENNOTCHANGED> 4. Import WIT in VS. Choose the new file (NoReadOnly_MyProject_Task.xml) and import it in MyProject 5. Open all tasks in Excel (flat list). Display the following columns: Asssigned To Activated By Closed By Resolved By Change the user accounts to the new ones (I usually sort each column alphabetically to make it easier). 6. Publish. If you get a conflict on a field, tough luck. You will have to manually choose “Local version” for each work item. I told you it was a tedious process. 7. Import original WIT (Original_MyProject_Task.xml) in MyProject. We only changed the WI definition so that we could change some fields. The original definition should be put back. And what about these other fields? Created By Authorized As These fields are not editable by definition (VS | Tools | Process Editor | Work Item Fields Explorer), even if they are not marked as read-only in the WIT. You can leave the old values. It doesn’t seem to matter to TFS. The other four fields are editable by definition, so only the WIT readonly rule prevents us from changing them. Technorati Tags: TFS,Team Foundation Server 2010,Work Item,Domain change

  Read the article

• How to display Sharepoint Data in a Windows Forms Application

  - by Michael M. Bangoy

  In this post I'm going to demonstrate how to retrieve Sharepoint data and display it on a Windows Forms Application. 1. Open Visual Studio 2010 and create a new Project. 2. In the project template select Windows Forms Application. 3. In order to communicate with Sharepoint from a Windows Forms Application we need to add the 2 Sharepoint Client DLL located in c:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\ISAPI. 4. Select the Microsoft.Sharepoint.Client.dll and Microsoft.Sharepoint.Client.Runtime.dll. (Your solution should look like the one below) 5. Open the Form1 in design view and from the Toolbox menu Add a Button, TextBox, Label and DataGridView on the form. 6. Next double click on the Load Button, this will open the code view of the form. Add Using statement to reference the Sharepoint Client Library then create two method for the Load Site Title and LoadList. See below:   using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.ComponentModel; using System.Data; using System.Drawing; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using System.Security; using System.Windows.Forms; using SP = Microsoft.SharePoint.Client;   namespace ClientObjectModel {     public partial class Form1 : Form     {         // url of the Sharepoint site         const string _context = "theurlofthesharepointsite";         public Form1()         {             InitializeComponent();         }         private void Form1_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)         {                    }         private void getsitetitle()         {             SP.ClientContext context = new SP.ClientContext(_context);             SP.Web _site = context.Web;             context.Load(_site);             context.ExecuteQuery();             txttitle.Text = _site.Title;             context.Dispose();         }                 private void loadlist()         {             using (SP.ClientContext _clientcontext = new SP.ClientContext(_context))             {                 SP.Web _web = _clientcontext.Web;                 SP.ListCollection _lists = _clientcontext.Web.Lists;                 _clientcontext.Load(_lists);                 _clientcontext.ExecuteQuery();                 DataTable dt = new DataTable();                 DataColumn column;                 DataRow row;                 column = new DataColumn();                 column.DataType = Type.GetType("System.String");                 column.ColumnName = "List Title";                 dt.Columns.Add(column);                 foreach (SP.List listitem in _lists)                 {                     row = dt.NewRow();                     row["List Title"] = listitem.Title;                     dt.Rows.Add(row);                 }                 dataGridView1.DataSource = dt;             }                   }       private void cmdload_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)         {             getsitetitle();             loadlist();          }     } } 7. That’s it. Hit F5 to run the application then click the Load Button. Your screen should like the one below. Hope this helps.

  Read the article

• Oracle GoldenGate Active-Active Part 1

  - by Nick_W

  My name is Nick Wagner, and I'm a recent addition to the Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) product management team.  I've spent the last 15+ years working on database replication products, and I've spent the last 10 years working on the Oracle GoldenGate product.  So most of my posting will probably be focused on OGG.  One question that comes up all the time is around active-active replication with Oracle GoldenGate.  How do I know if my application is a good fit for active-active replication with GoldenGate?   To answer that, it really comes down to how you plan on handling conflict resolution.  I will delve into topology and deployment in a later blog, but here is a simple architecture: The two most common resolution routines are host based resolution and timestamp based resolution. Host based resolution is used less often, but works with the fewest application changes.  Think of it like this: any transactions from SystemA always take precedence over any transactions from SystemB.  If there is a conflict on SystemB, then the record from SystemA will overwrite it.  If there is a conflict on SystemA, then it will be ignored.  It is quite a bit less restrictive, and in most cases, as long as all the tables have primary keys, host based resolution will work just fine.  Timestamp based resolution, on the other hand, is a little trickier. In this case, you can decide which record is overwritten based on timestamps. For example, does the older record get overwritten with the newer record?  Or vice-versa?  This method not only requires primary keys on every table, but it also requires every table to have a timestamp/date column that is updated each time a record is inserted or updated on the table.  Most homegrown applications can always be customized to include these requirements, but it's a little more difficult with 3rd party applications, and might even be impossible for large ERP type applications.  If your database has these features - whether it’s primary keys for host based resolution, or primary keys and timestamp columns for timestamp based resolution - then your application could be a great candidate for active-active replication.  But table structure is not the only requirement.  The other consideration applies when there is a conflict; i.e., do I need to perform any notification or track down the user that had their data overwritten?  In most cases, I don't think it's necessary, but if it is required, OGG can always create an exceptions table that contains all of the overwritten transactions so that people can be notified. It's a bit of extra work to implement this type of option, but if the business requires it, then it can be done. Unless someone is constantly monitoring this exception table or has an automated process in dealing with exceptions, there will be a delay in getting a response back to the end user. Ideally, when setting up active-active resolution we can include some simple procedural steps or configuration options that can reduce, or in some cases eliminate the potential for conflicts.  This makes the whole implementation that much easier and foolproof.  And I'll cover these in my next blog. 

  Read the article

• Where should you put constants and why?

  - by Tim Meyer

  In our mostly large applications, we usually have a only few locations for constants: One class for GUI and internal contstants (Tab Page titles, Group Box titles, calculation factors, enumerations) One class for database tables and columns (this part is generated code) plus readable names for them (manually assigned) One class for application messages (logging, message boxes etc) The constants are usually separated into different structs in those classes. In our C++ applications, the constants are only defined in the .h file and the values are assigned in the .cpp file. One of the advantages is that all strings etc are in one central place and everybody knows where to find them when something must be changed. This is especially something project managers seem to like as people come and go and this way everybody can change such trivial things without having to dig into the application's structure. Also, you can easily change the title of similar Group Boxes / Tab Pages etc at once. Another aspect is that you can just print that class and give it to a non-programmer who can check if the captions are intuitive, and if messages to the user are too detailed or too confusing etc. However, I see certain disadvantages: Every single class is tightly coupled to the constants classes Adding/Removing/Renaming/Moving a constant requires recompilation of at least 90% of the application (Note: Changing the value doesn't, at least for C++). In one of our C++ projects with 1500 classes, this means around 7 minutes of compilation time (using precompiled headers; without them it's around 50 minutes) plus around 10 minutes of linking against certain static libraries. Building a speed optimized release through the Visual Studio Compiler takes up to 3 hours. I don't know if the huge amount of class relations is the source but it might as well be. You get driven into temporarily hard-coding strings straight into code because you want to test something very quickly and don't want to wait 15 minutes just for that test (and probably every subsequent one). Everybody knows what happens to the "I will fix that later"-thoughts. Reusing a class in another project isn't always that easy (mainly due to other tight couplings, but the constants handling doesn't make it easier.) Where would you store constants like that? Also what arguments would you bring in order to convince your project manager that there are better concepts which also comply with the advantages listed above? Feel free to give a C++-specific or independent answer. PS: I know this question is kind of subjective but I honestly don't know of any better place than this site for this kind of question. Update on this project I have news on the compile time thing: Following Caleb's and gbjbaanb's posts, I split my constants file into several other files when I had time. I also eventually split my project into several libraries which was now possible much easier. Compiling this in release mode showed that the auto-generated file which contains the database definitions (table, column names and more - more than 8000 symbols) and builds up certain hashes caused the huge compile times in release mode. Deactivating MSVC's optimizer for the library which contains the DB constants now allowed us to reduce the total compile time of your Project (several applications) in release mode from up to 8 hours to less than one hour! We have yet to find out why MSVC has such a hard time optimizing these files, but for now this change relieves a lot of pressure as we no longer have to rely on nightly builds only. That fact - and other benefits, such as less tight coupling, better reuseability etc - also showed that spending time splitting up the "constants" wasn't such a bad idea after all ;-)

  Read the article

• BizTalk 2009 - The Community ODBC Adapter: Schema Generation

  - by Stuart Brierley

  Having previously detailed the installation of the Community ODBC Adapter for BizTalk 2009, the next thing I will be looking at is the generation of schemas using this ODBC adapter. Within your BizTalk 2009 project, right click the project and select Add Generated Items.  In the resultant window choose Add Adapter Metadata and click Add to open the Add Adapter Wizard. Check that the BizTalk Server and Database names are correct, select the ODBC adapter and click next. You must now set the connection string. To start with choose set, then new DSN (data source name). You now need to define the Data Source you will be connecting to.  On the User DSN tab select Add add then driver you want to use. In this case I am going to use the MySQL ODBC Driver.  A User DSN will only be visible on the current machine with you as a user. * Although I initially set up a User DSN and this was fine for creating schemas with, I later realised that you actually need a system DSN as the BizTalk host service needs this to be able connect to the database on a receive or send port. You will then be asked to Set up the MySQL ODBC Data Source.  In my case this is a local database making use of named pipes, so I had to make sure that I ticked the "Force use of named pipes" check box and removed the "# The Pipe the MySQL Server will use socket=mysql" line from the mysql.ini; with this is place the connection would fail as there is no apparent way to specify the pipe name in the ODBC driver configuration. This will then update the User DSN tab with the new Data Source.  Make sure that you select it and press OK. Select it again in the Choose Data Source window and press OK.  On the ODBC transport window select next. You will now be presented with the Schema Information window, where you must supply the namespace, type and root element names for your schema. Next choose the type of statement that you will be using to create your schema - in this case I am using a stored procedure. *I later discovered that this option is fine for MySQL stored procedures without input parameters, but failed for MySQL stored procedures with input parameters.  (I will be posting on the way to handle input parameters soon) Next you will need to specify the name of the stored procedure.  In this case I have a simple stored procedure to return all the data held by my TestTable in MySQL. Select * from TestTable; The table itself has three columns: Name, Sex and Married. Selecting finish should now hopefully create your schemas based on the input and output from your stored procedure. In my case I have:   An empty schema for the request; after all I have no parameters for the stored procedure.  A response schema comprised of a Table Record with Name, Sex and Married children. Next I will be looking at the use of the ODBC adpater with: Receive ports Send ports

  Read the article

• BizTalk&ndash;Mapping repeating EDI segments using a Table Looping functoid

  - by Bill Osuch

  BizTalk’s HIPAA X12 schemas have several repeating date/time segments in them, where the XML winds up looking something like this: <DTM_StatementDate> <DTM01_DateTimeQualifier>232</DTM01_DateTimeQualifier> <DTM02_ClaimDate>20120301</DTM02_ClaimDate> </DTM_StatementDate> <DTM_StatementDate> <DTM01_DateTimeQualifier>233</DTM01_DateTimeQualifier> <DTM02_ClaimDate>20120302</DTM02_ClaimDate> </DTM_StatementDate> The corresponding EDI segments would look like this: DTM*232*20120301~ DTM*233*20120302~ The DateTimeQualifier element indicates whether it’s the start date or end date – 232 for start, 233 for end. So in this example (an X12 835) we’re saying the statement starts on 3/1/2012 and ends on 3/2/2012. When you’re mapping from some other data format, many times your start and end dates will be within the same node, like this: <StatementDates> <Begin>20120301</Begin> <End>20120302</End> </StatementDates> So how do you map from that and create two repeating segments in your destination map? You could connect both the <Begin> and <End> nodes to a looping functoid, and connect its output to <DTM_StatementDate>, then connect both <Begin> and <End> to <DTM_StatementDate> … this would give you two repeating segments, each with the correct date, but how to add the correct qualifier? The answer is the Table Looping Functoid! To test this, let’s create a simplified schema that just contains the date fields we’re mapping. First, create your input schema: And your output schema: Now create a map that uses these two schemas, and drag a Table Looping functoid onto it. The first input parameter configures the scope (or how many times the records will loop), so drag a link from the StatementDates node over to the functoid. Yes, StatementDates only appears once, so this would make it seem like it would only loop once, but you’ll see in just a minute. The second parameter in the functoid is the number of columns in the output table. We want to fill two fields, so just set this to 2. Now drag the Begin and End nodes over to the functoid. Finally, we want to add the constant values for DateTimeQualifier, so add a value of 232 and another of 233. When all your inputs are configured, it should look like this: Now we’ll configure the output table. Click on the Table Looping Grid, and configure it to look like this: Microsoft’s description of this functoid says “The Table Looping functoid repeats with the looping record it is connected to. Within each iteration, it loops once per row in the table looping grid, producing multiple output loops.” So here we will loop (# of <StatementDates> nodes) * (Rows in the table), or 2 times. Drag two Table Extractor functoids onto the map; these are what are going to pull the data we want out of the table. The first input to each of these will be the output of the TableLooping functoid, and the second input will be the row number to pull from. So the functoid connected to <DTM01_DateTimeQualifier> will look like this: Connect these two functoids to the two nodes we want to populate, and connect another output from the Table Looping functoid to the <DTM_StatementDate> record. You should have a map that looks something like this: Create some sample xml, use it as the TestMap Input Instance, and you should get a result like the XML at the top of this post. Technorati Tags: BizTalk, EDI, Mapping

  Read the article

• How to retrieve Sharepoint data from a Windows Forms Application.

  - by Michael M. Bangoy

  In this demo I'm going to demonstrate how to retrieve Sharepoint data and display it on a Windows Forms Application. 1. Open Visual Studio 2010 and create a new Project. 2. In the project template select Windows Forms Application. 3. In order to communicate with Sharepoint from a Windows Forms Application we need to add the 2 Sharepoint Client DLL located in c:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\ISAPI. 4. Select the Microsoft.Sharepoint.Client.dll and Microsoft.Sharepoint.Client.Runtime.dll. That's it we're ready to write our codes. Note: In this example I've added to controls on the form, the controls are Button, TextBox, Label and DataGridView. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.ComponentModel; using System.Data; using System.Data.Objects; using System.Drawing; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using System.Security; using System.Windows.Forms; using SP = Microsoft.SharePoint.Client; namespace ClientObjectModel { public partial class Form1 : Form { // declare string url of the Sharepoint site string _context = "theurlofyoursharepointsite"; public Form1() { InitializeComponent(); } private void Form1_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { } private void getsitetitle() {    SP.ClientContext context = new SP.ClientContext(_context);    SP.Web _site = context.Web;    context.Load(_site);    context.ExecuteQuery();    txttitle.Text = _site.Title;    context.Dispose(); } private void loadlist() { using (SP.ClientContext _clientcontext = new SP.ClientContext(_context)) {    SP.Web _web = _clientcontext.Web;    SP.ListCollection _lists = _clientcontext.Web.Lists;    _clientcontext.Load(_lists);    _clientcontext.ExecuteQuery();    DataTable dt = new DataTable();    DataColumn column;    DataRow row;    column = new DataColumn();    column.DataType = Type.GetType("System.String");    column.ColumnName = "List Title";    dt.Columns.Add(column);    foreach (SP.List listitem in _lists)    {       row = dt.NewRow();       row["List Title"] = listitem.Title;       dt.Rows.Add(row);    }       dataGridView1.DataSource = dt;    } private void cmdload_Click(object sender, EventArgs e) { getsitetitle(); loadlist(); } } That's it. Running the application and clicking the Load Button will retrieve the Title of the Sharepoint site and display it on the TextBox and also it will retrieve ALL of the Sharepoint List on that site and populate the DataGridView with the List Title. Hope this helps. Thank you.

  Read the article

• Columnstore Case Study #1: MSIT SONAR Aggregations

  - by aspiringgeek

  Preamble This is the first in a series of posts documenting big wins encountered using columnstore indexes in SQL Server 2012 & 2014.  Many of these can be found in this deck along with details such as internals, best practices, caveats, etc.  The purpose of sharing the case studies in this context is to provide an easy-to-consume quick-reference alternative. Why Columnstore? If we’re looking for a subset of columns from one or a few rows, given the right indexes, SQL Server can do a superlative job of providing an answer. If we’re asking a question which by design needs to hit lots of rows—DW, reporting, aggregations, grouping, scans, etc., SQL Server has never had a good mechanism—until columnstore. Columnstore indexes were introduced in SQL Server 2012. However, they're still largely unknown. Some adoption blockers existed; yet columnstore was nonetheless a game changer for many apps.  In SQL Server 2014, potential blockers have been largely removed & they're going to profoundly change the way we interact with our data.  The purpose of this series is to share the performance benefits of columnstore & documenting columnstore is a compelling reason to upgrade to SQL Server 2014. App: MSIT SONAR Aggregations At MSIT, performance & configuration data is captured by SCOM. We archive much of the data in a partitioned data warehouse table in SQL Server 2012 for reporting via an application called SONAR.  By definition, this is a primary use case for columnstore—report queries requiring aggregation over large numbers of rows.  New data is refreshed each night by an automated table partitioning mechanism—a best practices scenario for columnstore. The Win Compared to performance using classic indexing which resulted in the expected query plan selection including partition elimination vs. SQL Server 2012 nonclustered columnstore, query performance increased significantly.  Logical reads were reduced by over a factor of 50; both CPU & duration improved by factors of 20 or more.  Other than creating the columnstore index, no special modifications or tweaks to the app or databases schema were necessary to achieve the performance improvements.  Existing nonclustered indexes were rendered superfluous & were deleted, thus mitigating maintenance challenges such as defragging as well as conserving disk capacity. Details The table provides the raw data & summarizes the performance deltas. Logical Reads (8K pages) CPU (ms) Durn (ms) Columnstore 160,323 20,360 9,786 Conventional Table & Indexes 9,053,423 549,608 193,903 ? x56 x27 x20 The charts provide additional perspective of this data.  "Conventional vs. Columnstore Metrics" document the raw data.  Note on this linear display the magnitude of the conventional index performance vs. columnstore.  The “Metrics (?)” chart expresses these values as a ratio. Summary For DW, reports, & other BI workloads, columnstore often provides significant performance enhancements relative to conventional indexing.  I have documented here, the first in a series of reports on columnstore implementations, results from an initial implementation at MSIT in which logical reads were reduced by over a factor of 50; both CPU & duration improved by factors of 20 or more.  Subsequent features in this series document performance enhancements that are even more significant. 

  Read the article

• When row estimation goes wrong

  - by Dave Ballantyne

  Whilst working at a client site, I hit upon one of those issues that you are not sure if that this is something entirely new or a bug or a gap in your knowledge. The client had a large query that needed optimizing.  The query itself looked pretty good, no udfs, UNION ALL were used rather than UNION, most of the predicates were sargable other than one or two minor ones.  There were a few extra joins that could be eradicated and having fixed up the query I then started to dive into the plan. I could see all manor of spills in the hash joins and the sort operations,  these are caused when SQL Server has not reserved enough memory and has to write to tempdb.  A VERY expensive operation that is generally avoidable.  These, however, are a symptom of a bad row estimation somewhere else, and when that bad estimation is combined with other estimation errors, chaos can ensue. Working my way back down the plan, I found the cause, and the more I thought about it the more i came convinced that the optimizer could be making a much more intelligent choice. First step is to reproduce and I was able to simplify the query down a single join between two tables, Product and ProductStatus,  from a business point of view, quite fundamental, find the status of particular products to show if ‘active’ ,’inactive’ or whatever. The query itself couldn’t be any simpler The estimated plan looked like this: Ignore the “!” warning which is a missing index, but notice that Products has 27,984 rows and the join outputs 14,000. The actual plan shows how bad that estimation of 14,000 is : So every row in Products has a corresponding row in ProductStatus.  This is unsurprising, in fact it is guaranteed,  there is a trusted FK relationship between the two columns.  There is no way that the actual output of the join can be different from the input. The optimizer is already partly aware of the foreign key meta data, and that can be seen in the simplifiction stage. If we drop the Description column from the query: the join to ProductStatus is optimized out. It serves no purpose to the query, there is no data required from the table and the optimizer knows that the FK will guarantee that a matching row will exist so it has been removed. Surely the same should be applied to the row estimations in the initial example, right ?  If you think so, please upvote this connect item. So what are our options in fixing this error ? Simply changing the join to a left join will cause the optimizer to think that we could allow the rows not to exist. or a subselect would also work However, this is a client site, Im not able to change each and every query where this join takes place but there is a more global switch that will fix this error,  TraceFlag 2301. This is described as, perhaps loosely, “Enable advanced decision support optimizations”. We can test this on the original query in isolation by using the “QueryTraceOn” option and lo and behold our estimated plan now has the ‘correct’ estimation. Many thanks goes to Paul White (b|t) for his help and keeping me sane through this

  Read the article

• Teminal non-responsive on load, can't enter anything until CTRL+C

  - by Silver Light

  Hello! I have an issue with terminal in Ubuntu 10.04. When I launch it, it hangs, like this: I cannot do anything until I press CTRL+C: I cannot remember when this started. What can be wrong? Looks like teminal is loading or processing something each time it loads. How can I diagnose and solve this problem? EDIT: Here are the conents of ~/.bashrc: # ~/.bashrc: executed by bash(1) for non-login shells. # see /usr/share/doc/bash/examples/startup-files (in the package bash-doc) # for examples # If not running interactively, don't do anything [ -z "$PS1" ] && return # don't put duplicate lines in the history. See bash(1) for more options # ... or force ignoredups and ignorespace HISTCONTROL=ignoredups:ignorespace # append to the history file, don't overwrite it shopt -s histappend # for setting history length see HISTSIZE and HISTFILESIZE in bash(1) HISTSIZE=1000 HISTFILESIZE=2000 # check the window size after each command and, if necessary, # update the values of LINES and COLUMNS. shopt -s checkwinsize # make less more friendly for non-text input files, see lesspipe(1) [ -x /usr/bin/lesspipe ] && eval "$(SHELL=/bin/sh lesspipe)" # set variable identifying the chroot you work in (used in the prompt below) if [ -z "$debian_chroot" ] && [ -r /etc/debian_chroot ]; then debian_chroot=$(cat /etc/debian_chroot) fi # set a fancy prompt (non-color, unless we know we "want" color) case "$TERM" in xterm-color) color_prompt=yes;; esac # uncomment for a colored prompt, if the terminal has the capability; turned # off by default to not distract the user: the focus in a terminal window # should be on the output of commands, not on the prompt #force_color_prompt=yes if [ -n "$force_color_prompt" ]; then if [ -x /usr/bin/tput ] && tput setaf 1 >&/dev/null; then # We have color support; assume it's compliant with Ecma-48 # (ISO/IEC-6429). (Lack of such support is extremely rare, and such # a case would tend to support setf rather than setaf.) color_prompt=yes else color_prompt= fi fi if [ "$color_prompt" = yes ]; then PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\[\033[01;32m\]\u@\h\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;34m\]\w\[\033[00m\]\$ ' else PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h:\w\$ ' fi unset color_prompt force_color_prompt # If this is an xterm set the title to user@host:dir case "$TERM" in xterm*|rxvt*) PS1="\[\e]0;${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h: \w\a\]$PS1" ;; *) ;; esac # enable color support of ls and also add handy aliases if [ -x /usr/bin/dircolors ]; then test -r ~/.dircolors && eval "$(dircolors -b ~/.dircolors)" || eval "$(dircolors -b)" alias ls='ls --color=auto' #alias dir='dir --color=auto' #alias vdir='vdir --color=auto' alias grep='grep --color=auto' alias fgrep='fgrep --color=auto' alias egrep='egrep --color=auto' fi # some more ls aliases alias ll='ls -alF' alias la='ls -A' alias l='ls -CF' # Add an "alert" alias for long running commands. Use like so: # sleep 10; alert alias alert='notify-send --urgency=low -i "$([ $? = 0 ] && echo terminal || echo error)" "$(history|tail -n1|sed -e '\''s/^\s*[0-9]\+\s*//;s/[;&|]\s*alert$//'\'')"' # Alias definitions. # You may want to put all your additions into a separate file like # ~/.bash_aliases, instead of adding them here directly. # See /usr/share/doc/bash-doc/examples in the bash-doc package. if [ -f ~/.bash_aliases ]; then . ~/.bash_aliases fi # enable programmable completion features (you don't need to enable # this, if it's already enabled in /etc/bash.bashrc and /etc/profile # sources /etc/bash.bashrc). if [ -f /etc/bash_completion ] && ! shopt -oq posix; then . /etc/bash_completion fi # Source .profile if [ -f ~/.profile ]; then . ~/.profile fi Setting -x at the beginning showed me that it tries to repeat this without stopping: +++++++++++++++++++ '[' 'complete -f -X '\''!*.@(pdf|PDF)'\'' acroread gpdf xpdf' '!=' 'complete -f -X '\''!*.@(pdf|PDF)'\'' acroread gpdf xpdf' ']' +++++++++++++++++++ line='complete -f -X '\''!*.@(pdf|PDF)'\'' acroread gpdf xpdf' +++++++++++++++++++ line='complete -f -X '\''!*.@(pdf|PDF)'\'' acroread gpdf xpdf' +++++++++++++++++++ line=' acroread gpdf xpdf' +++++++++++++++++++ list=("${list[@]}" $line) +++++++++++++++++++ read line

  Read the article

• Caching factory design

  - by max

  I have a factory class XFactory that creates objects of class X. Instances of X are very large, so the main purpose of the factory is to cache them, as transparently to the client code as possible. Objects of class X are immutable, so the following code seems reasonable: # module xfactory.py import x class XFactory: _registry = {} def get_x(self, arg1, arg2, use_cache = True): if use_cache: hash_id = hash((arg1, arg2)) if hash_id in _registry: return _registry[hash_id] obj = x.X(arg1, arg2) _registry[hash_id] = obj return obj # module x.py class X: # ... Is it a good pattern? (I know it's not the actual Factory Pattern.) Is there anything I should change? Now, I find that sometimes I want to cache X objects to disk. I'll use pickle for that purpose, and store as values in the _registry the filenames of the pickled objects instead of references to the objects. Of course, _registry itself would have to be stored persistently (perhaps in a pickle file of its own, in a text file, in a database, or simply by giving pickle files the filenames that contain hash_id). Except now the validity of the cached object depends not only on the parameters passed to get_x(), but also on the version of the code that created these objects. Strictly speaking, even a memory-cached object could become invalid if someone modifies x.py or any of its dependencies, and reloads it while the program is running. So far I ignored this danger since it seems unlikely for my application. But I certainly cannot ignore it when my objects are cached to persistent storage. What can I do? I suppose I could make the hash_id more robust by calculating hash of a tuple that contains arguments arg1 and arg2, as well as the filename and last modified date for x.py and every module and data file that it (recursively) depends on. To help delete cache files that won't ever be useful again, I'd add to the _registry the unhashed representation of the modified dates for each record. But even this solution isn't 100% safe since theoretically someone might load a module dynamically, and I wouldn't know about it from statically analyzing the source code. If I go all out and assume every file in the project is a dependency, the mechanism will still break if some module grabs data from an external website, etc.). In addition, the frequency of changes in x.py and its dependencies is quite high, leading to heavy cache invalidation. Thus, I figured I might as well give up some safety, and only invalidate the cache only when there is an obvious mismatch. This means that class X would have a class-level cache validation identifier that should be changed whenever the developer believes a change happened that should invalidate the cache. (With multiple developers, a separate invalidation identifier is required for each.) This identifier is hashed along with arg1 and arg2 and becomes part of the hash keys stored in _registry. Since developers may forget to update the validation identifier or not realize that they invalidated existing cache, it would seem better to add another validation mechanism: class X can have a method that returns all the known "traits" of X. For instance, if X is a table, I might add the names of all the columns. The hash calculation will include the traits as well. I can write this code, but I am afraid that I'm missing something important; and I'm also wondering if perhaps there's a framework or package that can do all of this stuff already. Ideally, I'd like to combine in-memory and disk-based caching.

  Read the article

• Documentation and Test Assertions in Databases

  - by Phil Factor

  When I first worked with Sybase/SQL Server, we thought our databases were impressively large but they were, by today’s standards, pathetically small. We had one script to build the whole database. Every script I ever read was richly annotated; it was more like reading a document. Every table had a comment block, and every line would be commented too. At the end of each routine (e.g. procedure) was a quick integration test, or series of test assertions, to check that nothing in the build was broken. We simply ran the build script, stored in the Version Control System, and it pulled everything together in a logical sequence that not only created the database objects but pulled in the static data. This worked fine at the scale we had. The advantage was that one could, by reading the source code, reach a rapid understanding of how the database worked and how one could interface with it. The problem was that it was a system that meant that only one developer at the time could work on the database. It was very easy for a developer to execute accidentally the entire build script rather than the selected section on which he or she was working, thereby cleansing the database of everyone else’s work-in-progress and data. It soon became the fashion to work at the object level, so that programmers could check out individual views, tables, functions, constraints and rules and work on them independently. It was then that I noticed the trend to generate the source for the VCS retrospectively from the development server. Tables were worst affected. You can, of course, add or delete a table’s columns and constraints retrospectively, which means that the existing source no longer represents the current object. If, after your development work, you generate the source from the live table, then you get no block or line comments, and the source script is sprinkled with silly square-brackets and other confetti, thereby rendering it visually indigestible. Routines, too, were affected. In our system, every routine had a directly attached string of unit-tests. A retro-generated routine has no unit-tests or test assertions. Yes, one can still commit our test code to the VCS but it’s a separate module and teams end up running the whole suite of tests for every individual change, rather than just the tests for that routine, which doesn’t scale for database testing. With Extended properties, one can get the best of both worlds, and even use them to put blame, praise or annotations into your VCS. It requires a lot of work, though, particularly the script to generate the table. The problem is that there are no conventional names beyond ‘MS_Description’ for the special use of extended properties. This makes it difficult to do splendid things such ensuring the integrity of the build by running a suite of tests that are actually stored in extended properties within the database and therefore the VCS. We have lost the readability of database source code over the years, and largely jettisoned the use of test assertions as part of the database build. This is not unexpected in view of the increasing complexity of the structure of databases and number of programmers working on them. There must, surely, be a way of getting them back, but I sometimes wonder if I’m one of very few who miss them.

  Read the article

• NHibernate Pitfalls: Custom Types and Detecting Changes

  - by Ricardo Peres

  This is part of a series of posts about NHibernate Pitfalls. See the entire collection here. NHibernate supports the declaration of properties of user-defined types, that is, not entities, collections or primitive types. These are used for mapping a database columns, of any type, into a different type, which may not even be an entity; think, for example, of a custom user type that converts a BLOB column into an Image. User types must implement interface NHibernate.UserTypes.IUserType. This interface specifies an Equals method that is used for comparing two instances of the user type. If this method returns false, the entity is marked as dirty, and, when the session is flushed, will trigger an UPDATE. So, in your custom user type, you must implement this carefully so that it is not mistakenly considered changed. For example, you can cache the original column value inside of it, and compare it with the one in the other instance. Let’s see an example implementation of a custom user type that converts a Byte[] from a BLOB column into an Image: 1: [Serializable] 2: public sealed class ImageUserType : IUserType 3: { 4: private Byte[] data = null; 5: 6: public ImageUserType() 7: { 8: this.ImageFormat = ImageFormat.Png; 9: } 10: 11: public ImageFormat ImageFormat 12: { 13: get; 14: set; 15: } 16: 17: public Boolean IsMutable 18: { 19: get 20: { 21: return (true); 22: } 23: } 24: 25: public Object Assemble(Object cached, Object owner) 26: { 27: return (cached); 28: } 29: 30: public Object DeepCopy(Object value) 31: { 32: return (value); 33: } 34: 35: public Object Disassemble(Object value) 36: { 37: return (value); 38: } 39: 40: public new Boolean Equals(Object x, Object y) 41: { 42: return (Object.Equals(x, y)); 43: } 44: 45: public Int32 GetHashCode(Object x) 46: { 47: return ((x != null) ? x.GetHashCode() : 0); 48: } 49: 50: public override Int32 GetHashCode() 51: { 52: return ((this.data != null) ? this.data.GetHashCode() : 0); 53: } 54: 55: public override Boolean Equals(Object obj) 56: { 57: ImageUserType other = obj as ImageUserType; 58: 59: if (other == null) 60: { 61: return (false); 62: } 63: 64: if (Object.ReferenceEquals(this, other) == true) 65: { 66: return (true); 67: } 68: 69: return (this.data.SequenceEqual(other.data)); 70: } 71: 72: public Object NullSafeGet(IDataReader rs, String[] names, Object owner) 73: { 74: Int32 index = rs.GetOrdinal(names[0]); 75: Byte[] data = rs.GetValue(index) as Byte[]; 76: 77: this.data = data as Byte[]; 78: 79: if (data == null) 80: { 81: return (null); 82: } 83: 84: using (MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream(this.data ?? new Byte[0])) 85: { 86: return (Image.FromStream(stream)); 87: } 88: } 89: 90: public void NullSafeSet(IDbCommand cmd, Object value, Int32 index) 91: { 92: if (value != null) 93: { 94: Image data = value as Image; 95: 96: using (MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream()) 97: { 98: data.Save(stream, this.ImageFormat); 99: value = stream.ToArray(); 100: } 101: } 102: 103: (cmd.Parameters[index] as DbParameter).Value = value ?? DBNull.Value; 104: } 105: 106: public Object Replace(Object original, Object target, Object owner) 107: { 108: return (original); 109: } 110: 111: public Type ReturnedType 112: { 113: get 114: { 115: return (typeof(Image)); 116: } 117: } 118: 119: public SqlType[] SqlTypes 120: { 121: get 122: { 123: return (new SqlType[] { new SqlType(DbType.Binary) }); 124: } 125: } 126: } In this case, we need to cache the original Byte[] data because it’s not easy to compare two Image instances, unless, of course, they are the same.

  Read the article

• Teminal hands on load, can't enter anything until CTRL+C

  - by Silver Light

  Hello! I have an issue with terminal in Ubuntu 10.04. When I launch it, it hangs, like this: I cannot do anything until I press CTRL+C: I cannot remember when this started. What can be wrong? Looks like teminal is loading or processing something each time it loads. How can I diagnose and solve this problem? EDIT: Here are the conents of ~/.bashrc: # ~/.bashrc: executed by bash(1) for non-login shells. # see /usr/share/doc/bash/examples/startup-files (in the package bash-doc) # for examples # If not running interactively, don't do anything [ -z "$PS1" ] && return # don't put duplicate lines in the history. See bash(1) for more options # ... or force ignoredups and ignorespace HISTCONTROL=ignoredups:ignorespace # append to the history file, don't overwrite it shopt -s histappend # for setting history length see HISTSIZE and HISTFILESIZE in bash(1) HISTSIZE=1000 HISTFILESIZE=2000 # check the window size after each command and, if necessary, # update the values of LINES and COLUMNS. shopt -s checkwinsize # make less more friendly for non-text input files, see lesspipe(1) [ -x /usr/bin/lesspipe ] && eval "$(SHELL=/bin/sh lesspipe)" # set variable identifying the chroot you work in (used in the prompt below) if [ -z "$debian_chroot" ] && [ -r /etc/debian_chroot ]; then debian_chroot=$(cat /etc/debian_chroot) fi # set a fancy prompt (non-color, unless we know we "want" color) case "$TERM" in xterm-color) color_prompt=yes;; esac # uncomment for a colored prompt, if the terminal has the capability; turned # off by default to not distract the user: the focus in a terminal window # should be on the output of commands, not on the prompt #force_color_prompt=yes if [ -n "$force_color_prompt" ]; then if [ -x /usr/bin/tput ] && tput setaf 1 >&/dev/null; then # We have color support; assume it's compliant with Ecma-48 # (ISO/IEC-6429). (Lack of such support is extremely rare, and such # a case would tend to support setf rather than setaf.) color_prompt=yes else color_prompt= fi fi if [ "$color_prompt" = yes ]; then PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\[\033[01;32m\]\u@\h\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;34m\]\w\[\033[00m\]\$ ' else PS1='${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h:\w\$ ' fi unset color_prompt force_color_prompt # If this is an xterm set the title to user@host:dir case "$TERM" in xterm*|rxvt*) PS1="\[\e]0;${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h: \w\a\]$PS1" ;; *) ;; esac # enable color support of ls and also add handy aliases if [ -x /usr/bin/dircolors ]; then test -r ~/.dircolors && eval "$(dircolors -b ~/.dircolors)" || eval "$(dircolors -b)" alias ls='ls --color=auto' #alias dir='dir --color=auto' #alias vdir='vdir --color=auto' alias grep='grep --color=auto' alias fgrep='fgrep --color=auto' alias egrep='egrep --color=auto' fi # some more ls aliases alias ll='ls -alF' alias la='ls -A' alias l='ls -CF' # Add an "alert" alias for long running commands. Use like so: # sleep 10; alert alias alert='notify-send --urgency=low -i "$([ $? = 0 ] && echo terminal || echo error)" "$(history|tail -n1|sed -e '\''s/^\s*[0-9]\+\s*//;s/[;&|]\s*alert$//'\'')"' # Alias definitions. # You may want to put all your additions into a separate file like # ~/.bash_aliases, instead of adding them here directly. # See /usr/share/doc/bash-doc/examples in the bash-doc package. if [ -f ~/.bash_aliases ]; then . ~/.bash_aliases fi # enable programmable completion features (you don't need to enable # this, if it's already enabled in /etc/bash.bashrc and /etc/profile # sources /etc/bash.bashrc). if [ -f /etc/bash_completion ] && ! shopt -oq posix; then . /etc/bash_completion fi # Source .profile if [ -f ~/.profile ]; then . ~/.profile fi Setting -x at the beginning showed me that it tries to repeat this without stopping: +++++++++++++++++++ '[' 'complete -f -X '\''!*.@(pdf|PDF)'\'' acroread gpdf xpdf' '!=' 'complete -f -X '\''!*.@(pdf|PDF)'\'' acroread gpdf xpdf' ']' +++++++++++++++++++ line='complete -f -X '\''!*.@(pdf|PDF)'\'' acroread gpdf xpdf' +++++++++++++++++++ line='complete -f -X '\''!*.@(pdf|PDF)'\'' acroread gpdf xpdf' +++++++++++++++++++ line=' acroread gpdf xpdf' +++++++++++++++++++ list=("${list[@]}" $line) +++++++++++++++++++ read line

  Read the article

• Can you/should you develop components for ASP.NET MVC?

  - by Vilx-

  Following from the previous question I've started to wonder - is it possible to implement "Components" in ASP.NET MVC (latest version)? And should you? Let's clarify what I mean with a "component". With that I mean a "control" (aka "widget"), similar to those that ASP.NET webforms is built upon. A gridview might be a good example. In webforms I can place on my form a datasource component (one line of code), a gridview component (another line of code) and bind them together (specify an attribute on the gridview). In the codebehind file I fill the datasource with data (a few lines of DB-querying code), and I'm all set. At this point the gridview is a fully functional standalone component. I can open the form, and I'll see all the data. I can sort it by clicking on the column headers; it is split into several pages; I can drag the column headers around and rearrange columns; I can turn on "grouping" mode; etc. And I don't need to write another line of code for any of it. The gridview, as a component, already has all the code tucked away in its classes and assemblies. I just place it on the form, initialize it, and it Just Works. At some times (like sorting or navigation to a different page) it will also perform ajax callbacks to the server, but those too will be handled internally, with my code having no knowledge at all about it. And then there are also events that I can attach if I want to get notified when something happens. In MVC I cannot see a way of doing this cleanly. Sure, there are the partial views, but those only handle half of the problem - they render the initial HTML. Some more can be achieved with client-side Javascript (like column re-arranging), but when the grid needs to do an ajax callback (say, to fetch the next page of data), my code will have to get involved and process that request. At best I guess I can provide some helper methods to process it, but I'll have to write the code that calls them, and also provide a controller method with signature matching the arguments of that callback. I guess that I could make some hacks with global events or special routes or something, but that just seems... hackish. Unelegant. Perhaps this is not the MVC way? Although I've completed one project in it, I'm still far from being an MVC expert. But then what is? In the intranet application that we're building there are dozens upon dozens of such grids. Naturally I want them all to have a unified look & behavior, and I don't want to repeat the same code all over the place. So what's the "MVC" approach to this problem?

  Read the article

• Selenium &ndash; Use Data Driven tests to run in multiple browsers and sizes

  - by Aligned

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Aligned/archive/2013/11/04/selenium-ndash-use-data-driven-tests-to-run-in-multiple.aspxSelenium uses WebDriver (or is it the same? I’m still learning how it is connected) to run Automated UI tests in many different browsers. For example, you can run the same test in Chrome and Firefox and in a smaller sized Chrome browser. The permutations can grow quickly. One way to get them to run in MStest is to create  a test method for each test (ie ChromeDeleteItem_Small, ChromeDeleteItem_Large, FFDeleteItem_Small, FFDeleteItem_Large) that each call  the same base method, passing in the browser and size you’d like. This approach was causing a lot of duplicate code, so I decided to use the data driven approach, common to Coded UI or Unit test methods. 1. Create a class with a test method. 2. Create a csv with two columns: BrowserType, BrowserSize 3. Add rows for each permutation: Chrome, Large | Chrome, Small | Firefox, Large | Firefox, Small | IE, Large | IE, Small | *** 4. Add the csv to the Visual Studio Project. 5. Set the Copy to output directory to Copy always 6. Add the attribute: [DataSource("Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.DataSource.CSV", "|DataDirectory|\\TestMatrix.csv", "TestMatrix#csv", DataAccessMethod.Sequential), DeploymentItem("TestMatrix.csv")] 7. Run the test in the test explorer Example:[CodedUITest] public class AllTasksTests : TasksTestBase { [TestMethod] [TestCategory("Tasks")] [DataSource("Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.DataSource.CSV", "|DataDirectory|\\TestMatrix.csv", "TestMatrix#csv", DataAccessMethod.Sequential), DeploymentItem("TestMatrix.csv")] public void CreateTask() { this.PrepForDataDrivenTest(); base.CreateTaskTest("New Task"); } } protected void PrepForDataDrivenTest() { var browserType = this.ParseBrowserType(Context.DataRow["BrowserType"].ToString()); var browserSize = this.ParseBrowserSize(Context.DataRow["BrowserSize"].ToString()); this.BrowserType = browserType; this.BrowserSize = browserSize; Trace.WriteLine("browser: " + browserType.ToString()); Trace.WriteLine("browser size: " + browserSize.ToString()); } /// <summary> /// Get the enum value from the string /// </summary> /// <param name="browserType">Chrome, Firefox, or IE</param> /// <returns>The browser type.</returns> private BrowserType ParseBrowserType(string browserType) { return (UITestFramework.BrowserType)Enum.Parse(typeof(UITestFramework.BrowserType), browserType, true); } /// <summary> /// Get the browser size enum value from the string /// </summary> /// <param name="browserSize">Small, Medium, Large</param> /// <returns>the browser size</returns> private BrowserSizeEnum ParseBrowserSize(string browserSize) { return (BrowserSizeEnum)Enum.Parse(typeof(BrowserSizeEnum), browserSize, true); }/// <summary> /// Change the browser to the size based on the enum. /// </summary> /// <param name="browserSize">The BrowserSizeEnum value to resize the window to.</param> private void ResizeBrowser(BrowserSizeEnum browserSize) { switch (browserSize) { case BrowserSizeEnum.Large: this.driver.Manage().Window.Maximize(); break; case BrowserSizeEnum.Medium: this.driver.Manage().Window.Size = new Size(800, this.driver.Manage().Window.Size.Height); break; case BrowserSizeEnum.Small: this.driver.Manage().Window.Size = new Size(500, this.driver.Manage().Window.Size.Height); break; default: break; } }/// <summary> /// Browser sizes for automation testing /// </summary> public enum BrowserSizeEnum { /// <summary> /// Large size, Maximized to the desktop /// </summary> Large, /// <summary> /// Similar to tablets /// </summary> Medium, /// <summary> /// Phone sizes... 610px and smaller /// </summary> Small } Hope it helps!

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214  | Next Page >