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• Where is my app.config for SSIS?

  Sometimes when working with SSIS you need to add or change settings in the .NET application configuration file, which can be a bit confusing when you are building a SSIS package not an application. First of all lets review a couple of examples where you may need to do this. You are using referencing an assembly in a Script Task that uses Enterprise Library (aka EntLib), so you need to add the relevant configuration sections and settings, perhaps for the logging application block. You are using using Enterprise Library in a custom task or component, and again you need to add the relevant configuration sections and settings. You are using a web service with Microsoft Web Services Enhancements (WSE) 3.0 and hosting the proxy in SSIS, in an assembly used by your package, and need to add the configuration sections and settings. You need to change behaviours of the .NET framework which can be influenced by a configuration file, such as the System.Net.Mail default SMTP settings. Perhaps you wish to configure System.Net and the httpWebRequest header for parsing unsafe header (useUnsafeHeaderParsing), which will change the way the HTTP Connection manager behaves. You are consuming a WCF service and wish to specify the endpoint in configuration. There are no doubt plenty more examples but each of these requires us to identify the correct configuration file and and make the relevant changes. There are actually several configuration files, each used by a different execution host depending on how you are working with the SSIS package. The folders we need to look in will actually vary depending on the version of SQL Server as well as the processor architecture, but most are all what we can call the Binn folder. The SQL Server 2005 Binn folder is at C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\DTS\Binn\, compared to C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\DTS\Binn\ for SQL Server 2008. If you are on a 64-bit machine then you will see C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SQL Server\90\DTS\Binn\ for the 32-bit executables and C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\DTS\Binn\ for 64-bit, so be sure to check all relevant locations. Of course SQL Server 2008 may have a C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SQL Server\100\DTS\Binn\ on a 64-bit machine too. To recap, the version of SQL Server determines if you look in the 90 or 100 sub-folder under SQL Server in Program Files (C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\nn\) . If you are running a 64-bit operating system then you will have two instances program files, C:\Program Files (x86)\ for 32-bit and  C:\Program Files\ for 64-bit. You may wish to check both depending on what you are doing, but this is covered more under each section below. There are a total of five specific configuration files that you may need to change, each one is detailed below: DTExec.exe.config DTExec.exe is the standalone command line tool used for executing SSIS packages, and therefore it is an execution host with an app.config file. e.g. C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\DTS\Binn\DTExec.exe.config The file can be found in both the 32-bit and 64-bit Binn folders. DtsDebugHost.exe.config DtsDebugHost.exe is the execution host used by Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) / Visual Studio when executing a package from the designer in debug mode, which is the default behaviour. e.g. C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\DTS\Binn\DtsDebugHost.exe.config The file can be found in both the 32-bit and 64-bit Binn folders. This may surprise some people as Visual Studio is only 32-bit, but thankfully the debugger supports both. This can be set in the project properties, see the Run64BitRuntime property (true or false) in the Debugging pane of the Project Properties. dtshost.exe.config dtshost.exe is the execution host used by what I think of as the built-in features of SQL Server such as SQL Server Agent e.g. C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\DTS\Binn\dtshost.exe.config This file can be found in both the 32-bit and 64-bit Binn folders devenv.exe.config Something slightly different is devenv.exe which is Visual Studio. This configuration file may also need changing if you need a feature at design-time such as in a Task Editor or Connection Manager editor. Visual Studio 2005 for SQL Server 2005  - C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe.config Visual Studio 2008 for SQL Server 2008  - C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe.config Visual Studio is only available for 32-bit so on a 64-bit machine you will have to look in C:\Program Files (x86)\ only. DTExecUI.exe.config The DTExec UI tool can also have a configuration file and these cab be found under the Tools folders for SQL Sever as shown below. C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Tools\Binn\VSShell\Common7\IDE\DTExecUI.exe C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Tools\Binn\VSShell\Common7\IDE\DTExecUI.exe A configuration file may not exist, but if you can find the matching executable you know you are in the right place so can go ahead and add a new file yourself. In summary we have covered the assembly configuration files for all of the standard methods of building and running a SSIS package, but obviously if you are working programmatically you will need to make the relevant modifications to your program’s app.config as well.

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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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• The Challenge with HTML5 – In Pictures

  - by dwahlin

  I love working with Web technologies and am looking forward to the new functionality that HTML5 will ultimately bring to the table (some of which can be used today). Having been through the div versus layer battle back in the IE4 and Netscape 4 days I think we’re headed down that road again as a result of browsers implementing features differently. I’ve been spending a lot of time researching and playing around with HTML5 samples and features (mainly because we’re already seeing demand for training on HTML5) and there’s a lot of great stuff there that will truly revolutionize web applications as we know them. However, browsers just aren’t there yet and many people outside of the development world don’t really feel a need to upgrade their browser if it’s working reasonably well (Mom and Dad come to mind) so it’s going to be awhile. There’s a nice test site at http://www.HTML5Test.com that runs through different HTML5 features and scores how well they’re supported. They don’t test for everything and are very clear about that on the site: “The HTML5 test score is only an indication of how well your browser supports the upcoming HTML5 standard and related specifications. It does not try to test all of the new features offered by HTML5, nor does it try to test the functionality of each feature it does detect. Despite these shortcomings we hope that by quantifying the level of support users and web developers will get an idea of how hard the browser manufacturers work on improving their browsers and the web as a development platform. The score is calculated by testing for the many new features of HTML5. Each feature is worth one or more points. Apart from the main HTML5 specification and other specifications created the W3C HTML Working Group, this test also awards points for supporting related drafts and specifications. Some of these specifications were initially part of HTML5, but are now further developed by other W3C working groups. WebGL is also part of this test despite not being developed by the W3C, because it extends the HTML5 canvas element with a 3d context. The test also awards bonus points for supporting audio and video codecs and supporting SVG or MathML embedding in a plain HTML document. These test do not count towards the total score because HTML5 does not specify any required audio or video codec. Also SVG and MathML are not required by HTML5, the specification only specifies rules for how such content should be embedded inside a plain HTML file. Please be aware that the specifications that are being tested are still in development and could change before receiving an official status. In the future new tests will be added for the pieces of the specification that are currently still missing. The maximum number of points that can be scored is 300 at this moment, but this is a moving goalpost.” It looks like their tests haven’t been updated since June, but the numbers are pretty scary as a developer because it means I’m going to have to do a lot of browser sniffing before assuming a particular feature is available to use. Not that much different from what we do today as far as browser sniffing you say? I’d have to disagree since HTML5 takes it to a whole new level. In today’s world we have script libraries such as jQuery (my personal favorite), Prototype, script.aculo.us, YUI Library, MooTools, etc. that handle the heavy lifting for us. Until those libraries handle all of the key HTML5 features available it’s going to be a challenge. Certain features such as Canvas are supported fairly well across most of the major browsers while other features such as audio and video are hit or miss depending upon what codec you want to use. Run the tests yourself to see what passes and what fails for different browsers. You can also view the HTML5 Test Suite Conformance Results at http://test.w3.org/html/tests/reporting/report.htm (a work in progress). The table below lists the scores that the HTML5Test site returned for different browsers I have installed on my desktop PC and laptop. A specific list of tests run and features supported are given when you go to the site. Note that I went ahead and tested the IE9 beta and it didn’t do nearly as good as I expected it would, but it’s not officially out yet so I expect that number will change a lot. Am I opposed to HTML5 as a result of these tests? Of course not - I’m actually really excited about what it offers.  However, I’m trying to be realistic and feel it'll definitely add a new level of headache to the Web application development process having been through something like this many years ago. On the flipside, developers that are able to target a specific browser (typically Intranet apps) or master the cross-browser issues are going to release some pretty sweet applications. Check out http://html5gallery.com/ for a look at some of the more cutting-edge sites out there that use HTML5. Also check out the http://www.beautyoftheweb.com site that Microsoft put together to showcase IE9. Chrome 8 Safari 5 for Windows     Opera 10 Firefox 3.6     Internet Explorer 9 Beta (Note that it’s still beta) Internet Explorer 8

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• Can't build and run an android test project created using "ant create test-project" when tested proj

  - by Mike

  I have a module that builds an app called MyApp. I have another that builds some testcases for that app, called MyAppTests. They both build their own APKs, and they both work fine from within my IDE. I'd like to build them using ant so that I can take advantage of continuous integration. Building the app module works fine. I'm having difficulty getting the Test module to compile and run. Using Christopher's tip from a previous question, I used android create test-project -p MyAppTests -m ../MyApp -n MyAppTests to create the necessary build files to build and run my test project. This seems to work great (once I remove an unnecessary test case that it constructed for me and revert my AndroidManifest.xml to the one I was using before it got replaced by android create), but I have two problems. The first problem: The project doesn't compile because it's missing libraries. $ ant run-tests Buildfile: build.xml [setup] Project Target: Google APIs [setup] Vendor: Google Inc. [setup] Platform Version: 1.6 [setup] API level: 4 [setup] WARNING: No minSdkVersion value set. Application will install on all Android versions. -install-tested-project: [setup] Project Target: Google APIs [setup] Vendor: Google Inc. [setup] Platform Version: 1.6 [setup] API level: 4 [setup] WARNING: No minSdkVersion value set. Application will install on all Android versions. -compile-tested-if-test: -dirs: [echo] Creating output directories if needed... -resource-src: [echo] Generating R.java / Manifest.java from the resources... -aidl: [echo] Compiling aidl files into Java classes... compile: [javac] Compiling 1 source file to /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyApp/bin/classes -dex: [echo] Converting compiled files and external libraries into /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyApp/bin/classes.dex... [echo] -package-resources: [echo] Packaging resources [aaptexec] Creating full resource package... -package-debug-sign: [apkbuilder] Creating MyApp-debug-unaligned.apk and signing it with a debug key... [apkbuilder] Using keystore: /Users/mike/.android/debug.keystore debug: [echo] Running zip align on final apk... [echo] Debug Package: /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyApp/bin/MyApp-debug.apk install: [echo] Installing /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyApp/bin/MyApp-debug.apk onto default emulator or device... [exec] 1567 KB/s (288354 bytes in 0.179s) [exec] pkg: /data/local/tmp/MyApp-debug.apk [exec] Success -compile-tested-if-test: -dirs: [echo] Creating output directories if needed... [mkdir] Created dir: /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/gen [mkdir] Created dir: /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/bin [mkdir] Created dir: /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/bin/classes -resource-src: [echo] Generating R.java / Manifest.java from the resources... -aidl: [echo] Compiling aidl files into Java classes... compile: [javac] Compiling 5 source files to /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/bin/classes [javac] /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/src/com/myapp/test/GsonTest.java:4: package roboguice.test does not exist [javac] import roboguice.test.RoboUnitTestCase; [javac] ^ [javac] /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/src/com/myapp/test/GsonTest.java:8: package com.google.gson does not exist [javac] import com.google.gson.JsonElement; [javac] ^ [javac] /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/src/com/myapp/test/GsonTest.java:9: package com.google.gson does not exist [javac] import com.google.gson.JsonParser; [javac] ^ [javac] /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/src/com/myapp/test/GsonTest.java:11: cannot find symbol [javac] symbol: class RoboUnitTestCase [javac] public class GsonTest extends RoboUnitTestCase<MyApplication> { [javac] ^ [javac] /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/src/com/myapp/test/HttpTest.java:6: package roboguice.test does not exist [javac] import roboguice.test.RoboUnitTestCase; [javac] ^ [javac] /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/src/com/myapp/test/HttpTest.java:7: package roboguice.util does not exist [javac] import roboguice.util.RoboLooperThread; [javac] ^ [javac] /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/src/com/myapp/test/HttpTest.java:11: package com.google.gson does not exist [javac] import com.google.gson.JsonObject; [javac] ^ [javac] /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/src/com/myapp/test/HttpTest.java:15: cannot find symbol [javac] symbol: class RoboUnitTestCase [javac] public class HttpTest extends RoboUnitTestCase<MyApplication> { [javac] ^ [javac] /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/src/com/myapp/test/LinksTest.java:4: package roboguice.test does not exist [javac] import roboguice.test.RoboUnitTestCase; [javac] ^ [javac] /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/src/com/myapp/test/LinksTest.java:12: cannot find symbol [javac] symbol: class RoboUnitTestCase [javac] public class LinksTest extends RoboUnitTestCase<MyApplication> { [javac] ^ [javac] /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/src/com/myapp/test/SafeAsyncTest.java:4: package roboguice.test does not exist [javac] import roboguice.test.RoboUnitTestCase; [javac] ^ [javac] /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/src/com/myapp/test/SafeAsyncTest.java:5: package roboguice.util does not exist [javac] import roboguice.util.RoboAsyncTask; [javac] ^ [javac] /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/src/com/myapp/test/SafeAsyncTest.java:6: package roboguice.util does not exist [javac] import roboguice.util.RoboLooperThread; [javac] ^ [javac] /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/src/com/myapp/test/SafeAsyncTest.java:12: cannot find symbol [javac] symbol: class RoboUnitTestCase [javac] public class SafeAsyncTest extends RoboUnitTestCase<MyApplication> { [javac] ^ [javac] /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyApp/bin/classes/com/myapp/activity/Stories.class: warning: Cannot find annotation method 'value()' in type 'roboguice.inject.InjectResource': class file for roboguice.inject.InjectResource not found [javac] /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyApp/bin/classes/com/myapp/activity/Stories.class: warning: Cannot find annotation method 'value()' in type 'roboguice.inject.InjectResource' [javac] /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyApp/bin/classes/com/myapp/activity/Stories.class: warning: Cannot find annotation method 'value()' in type 'roboguice.inject.InjectView': class file for roboguice.inject.InjectView not found [javac] /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyApp/bin/classes/com/myapp/activity/Stories.class: warning: Cannot find annotation method 'value()' in type 'roboguice.inject.InjectView' [javac] /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyApp/bin/classes/com/myapp/activity/Stories.class: warning: Cannot find annotation method 'value()' in type 'roboguice.inject.InjectView' [javac] /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyApp/bin/classes/com/myapp/activity/Stories.class: warning: Cannot find annotation method 'value()' in type 'roboguice.inject.InjectView' [javac] /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/src/com/myapp/test/GsonTest.java:15: cannot find symbol [javac] symbol : class JsonParser [javac] location: class com.myapp.test.GsonTest [javac] final JsonParser parser = new JsonParser(); [javac] ^ [javac] /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/src/com/myapp/test/GsonTest.java:15: cannot find symbol [javac] symbol : class JsonParser [javac] location: class com.myapp.test.GsonTest [javac] final JsonParser parser = new JsonParser(); [javac] ^ [javac] /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/src/com/myapp/test/GsonTest.java:18: cannot find symbol [javac] symbol : class JsonElement [javac] location: class com.myapp.test.GsonTest [javac] final JsonElement e = parser.parse(s); [javac] ^ [javac] /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/src/com/myapp/test/GsonTest.java:20: cannot find symbol [javac] symbol : class JsonElement [javac] location: class com.myapp.test.GsonTest [javac] final JsonElement e2 = parser.parse(s2); [javac] ^ [javac] /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/src/com/myapp/test/HttpTest.java:19: cannot find symbol [javac] symbol : method getInstrumentation() [javac] location: class com.myapp.test.HttpTest [javac] assertEquals("MyApp", getInstrumentation().getTargetContext().getResources().getString(com.myapp.R.string.app_name)); [javac] ^ [javac] /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/src/com/myapp/test/HttpTest.java:62: cannot find symbol [javac] symbol : class RoboLooperThread [javac] location: class com.myapp.test.HttpTest [javac] new RoboLooperThread() { [javac] ^ [javac] /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/src/com/myapp/test/HttpTest.java:82: cannot find symbol [javac] symbol : method assertTrue(java.lang.String,boolean) [javac] location: class com.myapp.test.HttpTest [javac] assertTrue(result[0], result[0].contains("Search")); [javac] ^ [javac] /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/src/com/myapp/test/HttpTest.java:87: cannot find symbol [javac] symbol : class JsonObject [javac] location: class com.myapp.test.HttpTest [javac] final JsonObject[] result = {null}; [javac] ^ [javac] /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/src/com/myapp/test/HttpTest.java:90: cannot find symbol [javac] symbol : class RoboLooperThread [javac] location: class com.myapp.test.HttpTest [javac] new RoboLooperThread() { [javac] ^ [javac] /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/src/com/myapp/test/HttpTest.java:117: cannot find symbol [javac] symbol : class JsonObject [javac] location: class com.myapp.test.HttpTest [javac] final JsonObject[] result = {null}; [javac] ^ [javac] /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/src/com/myapp/test/HttpTest.java:120: cannot find symbol [javac] symbol : class RoboLooperThread [javac] location: class com.myapp.test.HttpTest [javac] new RoboLooperThread() { [javac] ^ [javac] /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/src/com/myapp/test/LinksTest.java:27: cannot find symbol [javac] symbol : method assertTrue(boolean) [javac] location: class com.myapp.test.LinksTest [javac] assertTrue(m.matches()); [javac] ^ [javac] /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/src/com/myapp/test/LinksTest.java:28: cannot find symbol [javac] symbol : method assertEquals(java.lang.String,java.lang.String) [javac] location: class com.myapp.test.LinksTest [javac] assertEquals( map.get(url), m.group(1) ); [javac] ^ [javac] /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/src/com/myapp/test/SafeAsyncTest.java:19: cannot find symbol [javac] symbol : method getInstrumentation() [javac] location: class com.myapp.test.SafeAsyncTest [javac] assertEquals("MyApp", getInstrumentation().getTargetContext().getString(com.myapp.R.string.app_name)); [javac] ^ [javac] /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/src/com/myapp/test/SafeAsyncTest.java:27: cannot find symbol [javac] symbol : class RoboLooperThread [javac] location: class com.myapp.test.SafeAsyncTest [javac] new RoboLooperThread() { [javac] ^ [javac] /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/src/com/myapp/test/SafeAsyncTest.java:65: cannot find symbol [javac] symbol : method assertEquals(com.myapp.test.SafeAsyncTest.State,com.myapp.test.SafeAsyncTest.State) [javac] location: class com.myapp.test.SafeAsyncTest [javac] assertEquals(State.TEST_SUCCESS,state[0]); [javac] ^ [javac] /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/src/com/myapp/test/SafeAsyncTest.java:74: cannot find symbol [javac] symbol : class RoboLooperThread [javac] location: class com.myapp.test.SafeAsyncTest [javac] new RoboLooperThread() { [javac] ^ [javac] /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/src/com/myapp/test/SafeAsyncTest.java:105: cannot find symbol [javac] symbol : method assertEquals(com.myapp.test.SafeAsyncTest.State,com.myapp.test.SafeAsyncTest.State) [javac] location: class com.myapp.test.SafeAsyncTest [javac] assertEquals(State.TEST_SUCCESS,state[0]); [javac] ^ [javac] /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/src/com/myapp/test/SafeAsyncTest.java:113: cannot find symbol [javac] symbol : class RoboLooperThread [javac] location: class com.myapp.test.SafeAsyncTest [javac] new RoboLooperThread() { [javac] ^ [javac] /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/src/com/myapp/test/SafeAsyncTest.java:144: cannot find symbol [javac] symbol : method assertEquals(com.myapp.test.SafeAsyncTest.State,com.myapp.test.SafeAsyncTest.State) [javac] location: class com.myapp.test.SafeAsyncTest [javac] assertEquals(State.TEST_SUCCESS,state[0]); [javac] ^ [javac] /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/src/com/myapp/test/SafeAsyncTest.java:154: cannot find symbol [javac] symbol : class RoboLooperThread [javac] location: class com.myapp.test.SafeAsyncTest [javac] new RoboLooperThread() { [javac] ^ [javac] /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/src/com/myapp/test/SafeAsyncTest.java:187: cannot find symbol [javac] symbol : method assertEquals(com.myapp.test.SafeAsyncTest.State,com.myapp.test.SafeAsyncTest.State) [javac] location: class com.myapp.test.SafeAsyncTest [javac] assertEquals(State.TEST_SUCCESS,state[0]); [javac] ^ [javac] /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/src/com/myapp/test/StoriesTest.java:11: cannot access roboguice.activity.GuiceListActivity [javac] class file for roboguice.activity.GuiceListActivity not found [javac] public class StoriesTest extends ActivityUnitTestCase<Stories> { [javac] ^ [javac] /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/src/com/myapp/test/StoriesTest.java:21: cannot access roboguice.application.GuiceApplication [javac] class file for roboguice.application.GuiceApplication not found [javac] setApplication( new MyApplication( getInstrumentation().getTargetContext() ) ); [javac] ^ [javac] /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/src/com/myapp/test/StoriesTest.java:22: incompatible types [javac] found : com.myapp.activity.Stories [javac] required: android.app.Activity [javac] final Activity activity = startActivity(intent, null, null); [javac] ^ [javac] 39 errors [javac] 6 warnings BUILD FAILED /opt/local/android-sdk-mac/platforms/android-1.6/templates/android_rules.xml:248: Compile failed; see the compiler error output for details. Total time: 24 seconds That's not a hard problem to solve. I'm not sure it's the right thing to do, but I copied the missing libraries (roboguice and gson) from the MyApp/libs directory to the MyAppTests/libs directory and everything seems to compile fine. But that leads to the second problem, which I'm currently stuck on. The tests compile fine but they won't run: $ cp ../MyApp/libs/gson-r538.jar libs/ $ cp ../MyApp/libs/roboguice-1.1-SNAPSHOT.jar libs/ 0 10:23 /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests $ ant run-testsBuildfile: build.xml [setup] Project Target: Google APIs [setup] Vendor: Google Inc. [setup] Platform Version: 1.6 [setup] API level: 4 [setup] WARNING: No minSdkVersion value set. Application will install on all Android versions. -install-tested-project: [setup] Project Target: Google APIs [setup] Vendor: Google Inc. [setup] Platform Version: 1.6 [setup] API level: 4 [setup] WARNING: No minSdkVersion value set. Application will install on all Android versions. -compile-tested-if-test: -dirs: [echo] Creating output directories if needed... -resource-src: [echo] Generating R.java / Manifest.java from the resources... -aidl: [echo] Compiling aidl files into Java classes... compile: [javac] Compiling 1 source file to /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyApp/bin/classes -dex: [echo] Converting compiled files and external libraries into /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyApp/bin/classes.dex... [echo] -package-resources: [echo] Packaging resources [aaptexec] Creating full resource package... -package-debug-sign: [apkbuilder] Creating MyApp-debug-unaligned.apk and signing it with a debug key... [apkbuilder] Using keystore: /Users/mike/.android/debug.keystore debug: [echo] Running zip align on final apk... [echo] Debug Package: /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyApp/bin/MyApp-debug.apk install: [echo] Installing /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyApp/bin/MyApp-debug.apk onto default emulator or device... [exec] 1396 KB/s (288354 bytes in 0.201s) [exec] pkg: /data/local/tmp/MyApp-debug.apk [exec] Success -compile-tested-if-test: -dirs: [echo] Creating output directories if needed... -resource-src: [echo] Generating R.java / Manifest.java from the resources... -aidl: [echo] Compiling aidl files into Java classes... compile: [javac] Compiling 5 source files to /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/bin/classes [javac] Note: /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/src/com/myapp/test/SafeAsyncTest.java uses unchecked or unsafe operations. [javac] Note: Recompile with -Xlint:unchecked for details. -dex: [echo] Converting compiled files and external libraries into /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/bin/classes.dex... [echo] -package-resources: [echo] Packaging resources [aaptexec] Creating full resource package... -package-debug-sign: [apkbuilder] Creating MyAppTests-debug-unaligned.apk and signing it with a debug key... [apkbuilder] Using keystore: /Users/mike/.android/debug.keystore debug: [echo] Running zip align on final apk... [echo] Debug Package: /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/bin/MyAppTests-debug.apk install: [echo] Installing /Users/mike/Projects/myapp/android/MyAppTests/bin/MyAppTests-debug.apk onto default emulator or device... [exec] 1227 KB/s (94595 bytes in 0.075s) [exec] pkg: /data/local/tmp/MyAppTests-debug.apk [exec] Success run-tests: [echo] Running tests ... [exec] [exec] android.test.suitebuilder.TestSuiteBuilder$FailedToCreateTests:INSTRUMENTATION_RESULT: shortMsg=Class ref in pre-verified class resolved to unexpected implementation [exec] INSTRUMENTATION_RESULT: longMsg=java.lang.IllegalAccessError: Class ref in pre-verified class resolved to unexpected implementation [exec] INSTRUMENTATION_CODE: 0 BUILD SUCCESSFUL Total time: 38 seconds Any idea what's causing the "Class ref in pre-verified class resolved to unexpected implementation" error?

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• XNA Notes 006

  - by George Clingerman

  If you used to think the XNA community was small and inactive, hopefully these XNA Notes are opening your eyes. And I honestly feel like I’m still only catching the tail end of everything that’s going on. It’s a large and active community and you can be so mired down in one part of it you miss all sorts of cool stuff another part is doing. XNA is many things to a lot of people and that makes for a lot of really awesome things going on. So here’s what I saw going on this last week! Time Critical XNA New: XNA Team - Peer Review now closes for XNA 3.1 games http://blogs.msdn.com/b/xna/archive/2011/02/08/peer-review-pipeline-closed-for-new-xna-gs-3-1-games-or-updates-on-app-hub.aspx http://twitter.com/XNACommunity/statuses/34649816529256448 The XNA Team posts about a meet up with Microsoft for Creator’s going to be at GDC, March 3rd at the Lobby Bar http://on.fb.me/fZungJ XNA Team: @mklucher is busying playing the the bubblegum on WP7 made by a member of the XNA team (although reportedly made in Silverlight? Crazy! ;) ) http://twitter.com/mklucher/statuses/34645662737895426 http://bubblegum.me Shawn Hargreaves posts multiple posts (is this a sign that something new is coming from the XNA team? Usually when Shawn has time to post, something has just wrapped up…) Random Shuffle http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnhar/archive/2011/02/09/random-shuffle.aspx Doing the right thing: resume, rewind or skip ahead http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnhar/archive/2011/02/10/doing-the-right-thing-resume-rewind-or-skip-ahead.aspx XNA Developers: Andrew Russel was on .NET Rocks recently talking with Carl and Richard about developing games for Xbox, iPhone and Android http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?ShowNum=635 Eric W. releases the Fishing Girl source code into the wild http://ericw.ca/blog/posts/fishing-girl-now-open-source/ http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/74642/454512.aspx#454512 BinaryTweedDeej reminds that XNA community that Indie City wants you involved http://twitter.com/BinaryTweedDeej/statuses/34596114028044288 http://www.indiecity.com Mike McLaughlin (@mikebmcl) releases his first two XNA articles on the TechNet wiki http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/xna-framework-overview.aspx http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/content-pipeline-overview.aspx John Watte plays around with the Content Pipeline and Music Visualization exploring just what can be done. http://www.enchantedage.com/xna-content-pipeline-fft-song-analysis http://www.enchantedage.com/fft-in-xna-content-pipeline-for-beat-detection-for-the-win Simon Stevens writes up his talk on Vector Collision Physics http://www.simonpstevens.com/News/VectorCollisionPhysics @domipheus puts together an XNA Task Manager http://www.flickr.com/photos/domipheus/5405603197/ MadNinjaSkillz releases his fork of Nick's Easy Storage component on CodePlex http://twitter.com/MadNinjaSkillz/statuses/34739039068229634 http://ezstorage.codeplex.com @ActiveNick was interviewed by Rob Cameron and discusses Windows Phone 7, Bing Maps and XNA http://twitter.com/ActiveNick/statuses/35348548526546944 http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/cc537546 Radiangames (Luke Schneider) posts about converting his games from XNA to Unity http://radiangames.com/?p=592 UberMonkey (@ElementCy) posts about a new project in the works, CubeTest a Minecraft style terrain http://www.ubergamermonkey.com/personal-projects/new-project-in-the-works/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Ubergamermonkey+%28UberGamerMonkey%29 Xbox LIVE Indie Games (XBLIG): VideoGamer Rob review Bonded Realities http://videogamerrob.wordpress.com/2011/02/05/xblig-review-bonded-realities/ XBLIG Round Up on Gamergeddon http://www.gamergeddon.com/2011/02/06/xbox-indie-game-round-up-february-6th/ Are gamers still rating Indie Games after the Xbox Dashboard update? http://www.gamemarx.com/news/2011/02/06/are-gamers-still-rating-indie-games-after-the-xbox-dashboard-update.aspx Joystiq - Xbox Live Indie Gems: Corrupted http://www.joystiq.com/2011/02/04/xbox-live-indie-gems-corrupted/ Raymond Matthews of DarkStarMatryx reviews (Almost) Total Mayhem and Aban Hawkins & the 1000 Spikes http://www.darkstarmatryx.com/?p=225 http://www.darkstarmatryx.com/?p=229 8 Bit Horse reviews Aban Hawkins & the 1000 spikes http://8bithorse.blogspot.com/2011/01/aban-hawkins-1000-spikes-xbl-indie.html 2010 wrap-up for FunInfused Games http://www.krissteele.net/blogdetails.aspx?id=245 NeoGaf roundup of January's XBLIGs http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=420528 Armless Ocotopus interviews Michael Ventnor creator of Bonded Realities http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/02/07/interview-michael-ventnor-of-red-crest-studios/ @recharge_media posts about the new city music for Woodvale in Sin Rising http://rechargemedia.com/2011/02/08/new-city-theme-woodvale/ @DrMisty posts some footage of YoYoYo in action http://www.mstargames.co.uk/mistryblogmain/54-yoyoyoblogs/184-video-update.html Xona Games - Decimation X3 on Reviews on the Run http://video.citytv.com/video/detail/782443063001.000000/reviews-on-the-run--february-8-2011/g4/ @benkane gives an early peek at his action RPG coming to XBLIG http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDF_PrvtwU8 Rock, Paper Shotgun talks to Zeboyd games about bringing Cthulhu Saves the World to PC http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/02/11/summoning-cthulhu-natter-with-zeboyd/ Xbox LIVE Indieverse interviews the creator of Bonded Realities http://xbl-indieverse.blogspot.com/2011/02/xbl-indieverse-interview-red-crest.html XNA Game Development: Dream-In-Code posts about an upcoming XNA Challenge/Coding contest http://www.dreamincode.net/forums/blog/1385/entry-3192-xna-challengecontest/ Sgt.Conker covers Fishing Girl and IndieFreaks Game Framework release http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/02/fishing-girl-did-not-sell-a-single-copy/ http://www.sgtconker.com/2011/02/indiefreaks-game-framework-v0-2-0-0/ @slyprid releases Transmute v0.40a with lots of new features and fixes http://twitter.com/slyprid/statuses/34125423067533312 http://twitter.com/slyprid/statuses/35326876243337216 http://forgottenstarstudios.com/ Jeff Brown writes an XNA 4.0 tutorial on Saving/Loading on the Xbox 360 http://www.robotfootgames.com/xna-tutorials/92-xna-tutorial-savingloading-on-xbox-360-40 XNA for Silverlight Developers: Part 3- Animation http://www.silverlightshow.net/items/XNA-for-Silverlight-developers-Part-3-Animation-transforms.aspx?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+xna-connection-twitter-specific-stream+%28XNA+Connection%27s+Twitter+specific+stream%29 The news from Nokia is definitely something XNA developers will want to keep their eye on http://blogs.forum.nokia.com/blog/nokia-developer-news/2011/02/11/letter-to-developers?sf1066337=1

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• Computer Networks UNISA - Chap 12 &ndash; Networking Security

  - by MarkPearl

  After reading this section you should be able to Identify security risks in LANs and WANs and design security policies that minimize risks Explain how physical security contributes to network security Discuss hardware and design based security techniques Understand methods of encryption such as SSL and IPSec, that can secure data in storage and in transit Describe how popular authentication protocols such as RADIUS< TACACS,Kerberos, PAP, CHAP, and MS-CHAP function Use network operating system techniques to provide basic security Understand wireless security protocols such as WEP, WPA and 802.11i Security Audits Before spending time and money on network security, examine your networks security risks – rate and prioritize risks. Different organizations have different levels of network security requirements. Security Risks Not all security breaches result from a manipulation of network technology – there are human factors that can play a role as well. The following categories are areas of considerations… Risks associated with People Risks associated with Transmission and Hardware Risks associated with Protocols and Software Risks associated with Internet Access An effective security policy A security policy identifies your security goals, risks, levels of authority, designated security coordinator and team members, responsibilities for each team member, and responsibilities for each employee. In addition it specifies how to address security breaches. It should not state exactly which hardware, software, architecture, or protocols will be used to ensure security, nor how hardware or software will be installed and configured. A security policy must address an organizations specific risks. to understand your risks, you should conduct a security audit that identifies vulnerabilities and rates both the severity of each threat and its likelihood of occurring. Security Policy Content Security policy content should… Policies for each category of security Explain to users what they can and cannot do and how these measures protect the networks security Should define what confidential means to the organization Response Policy A security policy should provide for a planned response in the event of a security breach. The response policy should identify the members of a response team, all of whom should clearly understand the the security policy, risks, and measures in place. Some of the roles concerned could include… Dispatcher – the person on call who first notices the breach Manager – the person who coordinates the resources necessary to solve the problem Technical Support Specialist – the person who focuses on solving the problem Public relations specialist – the person who acts as the official spokesperson for the organization Physical Security An important element in network security is restricting physical access to its components. There are various techniques for this including locking doors, security people at access points etc. You should identify the following… Which rooms contain critical systems or data and must be secured Through what means might intruders gain access to these rooms How and to what extent are authorized personnel granted access to these rooms Are authentication methods such as ID cards easy to forge etc. Security in Network Design The optimal way to prevent external security breaches from affecting you LAN is not to connect your LAN to the outside world at all. The next best protection is to restrict access at every point where your LAN connects to the rest of the world. Router Access List – can be used to filter or decline access to a portion of a network for certain devices. Intrusion Detection and Prevention While denying someone access to a section of the network is good, it is better to be able to detect when an attempt has been made and notify security personnel. This can be done using IDS (intrusion detection system) software. One drawback of IDS software is it can detect false positives – i.e. an authorized person who has forgotten his password attempts to logon. Firewalls A firewall is a specialized device, or a computer installed with specialized software, that selectively filters or blocks traffic between networks. A firewall typically involves a combination of hardware and software and may reside between two interconnected private networks. The simplest form of a firewall is a packet filtering firewall, which is a router that examines the header of every packet of data it receives to determine whether that type of packet is authorized to continue to its destination or not. Firewalls can block traffic in and out of a LAN. NOS (Network Operating System) Security Regardless of the operating system, generally every network administrator can implement basic security by restricting what users are authorized to do on a network. Some of the restrictions include things related to Logons – place, time of day, total time logged in, etc Passwords – length, characters used, etc Encryption Encryption is the use of an algorithm to scramble data into a format that can be read only by reversing the algorithm. The purpose of encryption is to keep information private. Many forms of encryption exist and new ways of cracking encryption are continually being invented. The following are some categories of encryption… Key Encryption PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) SSH (Secure Shell) SCP (Secure CoPy) SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol) IPSec (Internet Protocol Security) For a detailed explanation on each section refer to pages 596 to 604 of textbook Authentication Protocols Authentication protocols are the rules that computers follow to accomplish authentication. Several types exist and the following are some of the common authentication protocols… RADIUS and TACACS PAP (Password Authentication Protocol) CHAP and MS-CHAP EAP (Extensible Authentication Protocol) 802.1x (EAPoL) Kerberos Wireless Network Security Wireless transmissions are particularly susceptible to eavesdropping. The following are two wireless network security protocols WEP WPA

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• SQL SERVER – Spatial Database Queries – What About BLOB – T-SQL Tuesday #006

  - by pinaldave

  Michael Coles is one of the most interesting book authors I have ever met. He has a flair of writing complex stuff in a simple language. There are a very few people like that.  I really enjoyed reading his recent book, Expert SQL Server 2008 Encryption. I strongly suggest taking a look at it. This blog is written in response to T-SQL Tuesday #006: “What About BLOB? by Michael Coles. Spatial Database is my favorite subject. Since I did my TechEd India 2010 presentation, I have enjoyed this subject a lot. Before I continue this blog post, there are a few other blog posts, so I suggest you read them.  To help build the environment run the queries, I am going to present them in this single blog post. SQL SERVER – What is Spatial Database? – Developing with SQL Server Spatial and Deep Dive into Spatial Indexing This blog post explains the basics of Spatial Database and also provides a good introduction to Indexing concept. SQL SERVER – World Shapefile Download and Upload to Database – Spatial Database This blog post will enable you with how to load the shape file into database. SQL SERVER – Spatial Database Definition and Research Documents This blog post links to the white paper about Spatial Database written by Microsoft experts. SQL SERVER – Introduction to Spatial Coordinate Systems: Flat Maps for a Round Planet This blog post links to the white paper explaining coordinate system, as written by Microsoft experts. After reading the above listed blog posts, I am very confident that you are ready to run the following script. Once you create a database using the World Shapefile, as mentioned in the second link above,you can display the image of India just like the following. Please note that this is not an accurate political map. The boundary of this map has many errors and it is just a representation. You can run the following query to generate the map of India from the database spatial which you have created after following the instructions here. USE Spatial GO -- India Map SELECT [CountryName] ,[BorderAsGeometry] ,[Border] FROM [Spatial].[dbo].[Countries] WHERE Countryname = 'India' GO Now, let us find the longitude and latitude of the two major IT cities of India, Hyderabad and Bangalore. I find their values as the following: the values of longitude-latitude for Bangalore is 77.5833300000 13.0000000000; for Hyderabad, longitude-latitude is 78.4675900000 17.4531200000. Now, let us try to put these values on the India Map and see their location. -- Bangalore DECLARE @GeoLocation GEOGRAPHY SET @GeoLocation = GEOGRAPHY::STPointFromText('POINT(77.5833300000 13.0000000000)',4326).STBuffer(20000); -- Hyderabad DECLARE @GeoLocation1 GEOGRAPHY SET @GeoLocation1 = GEOGRAPHY::STPointFromText('POINT(78.4675900000 17.4531200000)',4326).STBuffer(20000); -- Bangalore and Hyderabad on Map of India SELECT name, [GeoLocation] FROM [IndiaGeoNames] I WHERE I.[GeoLocation].STDistance(@GeoLocation) <= 0 UNION ALL SELECT name, [GeoLocation] FROM [IndiaGeoNames] I WHERE I.[GeoLocation].STDistance(@GeoLocation1) <= 0 UNION ALL SELECT '',[Border] FROM [Spatial].[dbo].[Countries] WHERE Countryname = 'India' GO Now let us quickly draw a straight line between them. DECLARE @GeoLocation GEOGRAPHY SET @GeoLocation = GEOGRAPHY::STPointFromText('POINT(78.4675900000 17.4531200000)',4326).STBuffer(10000); DECLARE @GeoLocation1 GEOGRAPHY SET @GeoLocation1 = GEOGRAPHY::STPointFromText('POINT(77.5833300000 13.0000000000)',4326).STBuffer(10000); DECLARE @GeoLocation2 GEOGRAPHY SET @GeoLocation2 = GEOGRAPHY::STGeomFromText('LINESTRING(78.4675900000 17.4531200000, 77.5833300000 13.0000000000)',4326) SELECT name, [GeoLocation] FROM [IndiaGeoNames] I WHERE I.[GeoLocation].STDistance(@GeoLocation) <= 0 UNION ALL SELECT name, [GeoLocation] FROM [IndiaGeoNames] I1 WHERE I1.[GeoLocation].STDistance(@GeoLocation1) <= 0 UNION ALL SELECT '' name, @GeoLocation2 UNION ALL SELECT '',[Border] FROM [Spatial].[dbo].[Countries] WHERE Countryname = 'India' GO Let us use the distance function of the spatial database and find the straight line distance between this two cities. -- Distance Between Hyderabad and Bangalore DECLARE @GeoLocation GEOGRAPHY SET @GeoLocation = GEOGRAPHY::STPointFromText('POINT(78.4675900000 17.4531200000)',4326) DECLARE @GeoLocation1 GEOGRAPHY SET @GeoLocation1 = GEOGRAPHY::STPointFromText('POINT(77.5833300000 13.0000000000)',4326) SELECT @GeoLocation.STDistance(@GeoLocation1)/1000 'KM'; GO The result of above query is as displayed in following image. As per SQL Server, the distance between these two cities is 501 KM, but according to what I know, the distance between those two cities is around 562 KM by road. However, please note that roads are not straight and they have lots of turns, whereas this is a straight-line distance. What would be more accurate is the distance between these two cities by air travel. When we look at the air travel distance between Bangalore and Hyderabad, the total distance covered is 495 KM, which is very close to what SQL Server has estimated, which is 501 KM. Bravo! SQL Server has accurately provided the distance between two of the cities. SQL Server Spatial Database can be very useful simply because it is very easy to use, as demonstrated above. I appreciate your comments, so let me know what your thoughts and opinions about this are. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Spatial Database

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• Diagnose PC Hardware Problems with an Ubuntu Live CD

  - by Trevor Bekolay

  So your PC randomly shuts down or gives you the blue screen of death, but you can’t figure out what’s wrong. The problem could be bad memory or hardware related, and thankfully the Ubuntu Live CD has some tools to help you figure it out. Test your RAM with memtest86+ RAM problems are difficult to diagnose—they can range from annoying program crashes, or crippling reboot loops. Even if you’re not having problems, when you install new RAM it’s a good idea to thoroughly test it. The Ubuntu Live CD includes a tool called Memtest86+ that will do just that—test your computer’s RAM! Unlike many of the Live CD tools that we’ve looked at so far, Memtest86+ has to be run outside of a graphical Ubuntu session. Fortunately, it only takes a few keystrokes. Note: If you used UNetbootin to create an Ubuntu flash drive, then memtest86+ will not be available. We recommend using the Universal USB Installer from Pendrivelinux instead (persistence is possible with Universal USB Installer, but not mandatory). Boot up your computer with a Ubuntu Live CD or USB drive. You will be greeted with this screen: Use the down arrow key to select the Test memory option and hit Enter. Memtest86+ will immediately start testing your RAM. If you suspect that a certain part of memory is the problem, you can select certain portions of memory by pressing “c” and changing that option. You can also select specific tests to run. However, the default settings of Memtest86+ will exhaustively test your memory, so we recommend leaving the settings alone. Memtest86+ will run a variety of tests that can take some time to complete, so start it running before you go to bed to give it adequate time. Test your CPU with cpuburn Random shutdowns – especially when doing computationally intensive tasks – can be a sign of a faulty CPU, power supply, or cooling system. A utility called cpuburn can help you determine if one of these pieces of hardware is the problem. Note: cpuburn is designed to stress test your computer – it will run it fast and cause the CPU to heat up, which may exacerbate small problems that otherwise would be minor. It is a powerful diagnostic tool, but should be used with caution. Boot up your computer with a Ubuntu Live CD or USB drive, and choose to run Ubuntu from the CD or USB drive. When the desktop environment loads up, open the Synaptic Package Manager by clicking on the System menu in the top-left of the screen, then selecting Administration, and then Synaptic Package Manager. Cpuburn is in the universe repository. To enable the universe repository, click on Settings in the menu at the top, and then Repositories. Add a checkmark in the box labeled “Community-maintained Open Source software (universe)”. Click close. In the main Synaptic window, click the Reload button. After the package list has reloaded and the search index has been rebuilt, enter “cpuburn” in the Quick search text box. Click the checkbox in the left column, and select Mark for Installation. Click the Apply button near the top of the window. As cpuburn installs, it will caution you about the possible dangers of its use. Assuming you wish to take the risk (and if your computer is randomly restarting constantly, it’s probably worth it), open a terminal window by clicking on the Applications menu in the top-left of the screen and then selection Applications > Terminal. Cpuburn includes a number of tools to test different types of CPUs. If your CPU is more than six years old, see the full list; for modern AMD CPUs, use the terminal command burnK7 and for modern Intel processors, use the terminal command burnP6 Our processor is an Intel, so we ran burnP6. Once it started up, it immediately pushed the CPU up to 99.7% total usage, according to the Linux utility “top”. If your computer is having a CPU, power supply, or cooling problem, then your computer is likely to shutdown within ten or fifteen minutes. Because of the strain this program puts on your computer, we don’t recommend leaving it running overnight – if there’s a problem, it should crop up relatively quickly. Cpuburn’s tools, including burnP6, have no interface; once they start running, they will start driving your CPU until you stop them. To stop a program like burnP6, press Ctrl+C in the terminal window that is running the program. Conclusion The Ubuntu Live CD provides two great testing tools to diagnose a tricky computer problem, or to stress test a new computer. While they are advanced tools that should be used with caution, they’re extremely useful and easy enough that anyone can use them. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Reset Your Ubuntu Password Easily from the Live CDCreate a Persistent Bootable Ubuntu USB Flash DriveAdding extra Repositories on UbuntuHow to Share folders with your Ubuntu Virtual Machine (guest)Building a New Computer – Part 3: Setting it Up 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 Have Fun Editing Photo Editing with Citrify Outlook Connector Upgrade Error Gadfly is a cool Twitter/Silverlight app Enable DreamScene in Windows 7 Microsoft’s “How Do I ?” Videos Home Networks – How do they look like & the problems they cause

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• Searching for tasks with code – Executables and Event Handlers

  Searching packages or just enumerating through all tasks is not quite as straightforward as it may first appear, mainly because of the way you can nest tasks within other containers. You can see this illustrated in the sample package below where I have used several sequence containers and loops. To complicate this further all containers types, including packages and tasks, can have event handlers which can then support the full range of nested containers again. Towards the lower right, the task called SQL In FEL also has an event handler not shown, within which is another Execute SQL Task, so that makes a total of 6 Execute SQL Tasks 6 tasks spread across the package. In my previous post about such as adding a property expressionI kept it simple and just looked at tasks at the package level, but what if you wanted to find any or all tasks in a package? For this post I've written a console program that will search a package looking at all tasks no matter how deeply nested, and check to see if the name starts with "SQL". When it finds a matching task it writes out the hierarchy by name for that task, starting with the package and working down to the task itself. The output for our sample package is shown below, note it has found all 6 tasks, including the one on the OnPreExecute event of the SQL In FEL task TaskSearch v1.0.0.0 (1.0.0.0) Copyright (C) 2009 Konesans Ltd Processing File - C:\Projects\Alpha\Packages\MyPackage.dtsx MyPackage\FOR Counter Loop\SQL In Counter Loop MyPackage\SEQ For Each Loop Wrapper\FEL Simple Loop\SQL In FEL MyPackage\SEQ For Each Loop Wrapper\FEL Simple Loop\SQL In FEL\OnPreExecute\SQL On Pre Execute for FEL SQL Task MyPackage\SEQ Top Level\SEQ Nested Lvl 1\SEQ Nested Lvl 2\SQL In Nested Lvl 2 MyPackage\SEQ Top Level\SEQ Nested Lvl 1\SQL In Nested Lvl 1 #1 MyPackage\SEQ Top Level\SEQ Nested Lvl 1\SQL In Nested Lvl 1 #2 6 matching tasks found in package. The full project and code is available for download below, but first we can walk through the project to highlight the most important sections of code. This code has been abbreviated for this description, but is complete in the download. First of all we load the package, and then start by looking at the Executables for the package. // Load the package file Application application = new Application(); using (Package package = application.LoadPackage(filename, null)) { int matchCount = 0; // Look in the package's executables ProcessExecutables(package.Executables, ref matchCount); ... // // ... // Write out final count Console.WriteLine("{0} matching tasks found in package.", matchCount); } The ProcessExecutables method is a key method, as an executable could be described as the the highest level of a working functionality or container. There are several of types of executables, such as tasks, or sequence containers and loops. To know what to do next we need to work out what type of executable we are dealing with as the abbreviated version of method shows below. private static void ProcessExecutables(Executables executables, ref int matchCount) { foreach (Executable executable in executables) { TaskHost taskHost = executable as TaskHost; if (taskHost != null) { ProcessTaskHost(taskHost, ref matchCount); ProcessEventHandlers(taskHost.EventHandlers, ref matchCount); continue; } ... // // ... ForEachLoop forEachLoop = executable as ForEachLoop; if (forEachLoop != null) { ProcessExecutables(forEachLoop.Executables, ref matchCount); ProcessEventHandlers(forEachLoop.EventHandlers, ref matchCount); continue; } } } As you can see if the executable we find is a task we then call out to our ProcessTaskHost method. As with all of our executables a task can have event handlers which themselves contain more executables such as task and loops, so we also make a call out our ProcessEventHandlers method. The other types of executables such as loops can also have event handlers as well as executables. As shown with the example for the ForEachLoop we call the same ProcessExecutables and ProcessEventHandlers methods again to drill down into the hierarchy of objects that the package may contain. This code needs to explicitly check for each type of executable (TaskHost, Sequence, ForLoop and ForEachLoop) because whilst they all have an Executables property this is not from a common base class or interface. This example was just a simple find a task by its name, so ProcessTaskHost really just does that. We also get the hierarchy of objects so we can write out for information, obviously you can adapt this method to do something more interesting such as adding a property expression. private static void ProcessTaskHost(TaskHost taskHost, ref int matchCount) { if (taskHost == null) { return; } // Check if the task matches our match name if (taskHost.Name.StartsWith(TaskNameFilter, StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase)) { // Build up the full object hierarchy of the task // so we can write it out for information StringBuilder path = new StringBuilder(); DtsContainer container = taskHost; while (container != null) { path.Insert(0, container.Name); container = container.Parent; if (container != null) { path.Insert(0, "\\"); } } // Write the task path // e.g. Package\Container\Event\Task Console.WriteLine(path); Console.WriteLine(); // Increment match counter for info matchCount++; } } Just for completeness, the other processing method we covered above is for event handlers, but really that just calls back to the executables. This same method is called in our main package method, but it was omitted for brevity here. private static void ProcessEventHandlers(DtsEventHandlers eventHandlers, ref int matchCount) { foreach (DtsEventHandler eventHandler in eventHandlers) { ProcessExecutables(eventHandler.Executables, ref matchCount); } } As hopefully the code demonstrates, executables (Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Runtime.Executable) are the workers, but within them you can nest more executables (except for task tasks).Executables themselves can have event handlers which can in turn hold more executables. I have tried to illustrate this highlight the relationships in the following diagram. Download Sample code project TaskSearch.zip (11KB)

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• Compress Large Video Files with DivX / Xvid and AutoGK

  - by DigitalGeekery

  Have you ever recorded home video on a camcorder only to find the video size is enormous? What if you wanted to share a video clip on YouTube or another video sharing site, but the file size was bigger than the maximum upload size? Today we’ll look at a way to compress certain video files, such as MPEG and AVI, with Auto Gordian Knot (AutoGK). AutoGK is a free application that runs on Windows. It supports Mpeg1, Mpeg2, Transport Streams, Vobs, and virtually any codec used for an .AVI file. AutoGK will accept as input the following file types: MPG, MPEG, VOB, VRO, M2V, DAT, IFO, TS, TP, TRP, M2T, and AVI. Files are output as .AVI files and are converted using the DivX or XviD codecs. Installing and Using AutoGK Download and install AutoGK (link below) Open the AutoGK. You’ll need to navigate a few wizard screens, but you can just accept the defaults.   Choose your video file by clicking on the folder to the right of the Input file text box.   Browse for and select your video file and click “Open.”   For this example, we’ll be working with an .AVI file that’s 167MB in size.   The output file is copied into the same directory as the input file by default, but you can change this if you choose. If the input file is also .AVI, AutoGK will append an _agk to the output file so that the original is not overwritten. Next, you’ll see any audio tracks listed. You can unselect the check box if you’d like to remove the audio track. You can choose one of the Predefined size options… Or, select a Custom size in MB or Target Quality in percentage. For our example, we’ll be compressing our 167MB file to 35MB. Click on Advanced Settings. Here you can choose your codec, if you have a preference, as well as output resolution and output audio. If you’d like to use the DivX codec, you’ll need to download and install it separately. (See link below) Typically you’ll want to keep the defaults. Click “OK.” Now you’re ready to add your file conversion job to the Job queue. Click Add Job to add it to the queue. You can add multiple files conversions to the job queue and  convert them in one batch. Click Start to begin the conversion process. The process will begin. You’ll be able to see the progress in the Log window on the bottom left. When the conversion is complete you’ll see a “Job finished” and the total time in the log window.   Check your output file to see it’s compressed size. Test your video just to make sure the output quality is satisfactory.   Note:  Conversion times can vary greatly depending on the size of the file and your computer hardware. Files that are several GBs in size may take several hours to compress. AutoGK is no longer being actively developed but is still a wonderful DivX/XviD conversion tool. It can also be used to compress and convert non-copy protected DVDs. Downloads AutoGordianKnot DivX (optional) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Use Your Mac Mini as a Media Server Part 2Make Disk Cleanup Compress Older(or Newer) Files on XPMysticgeek Blog: Exclusive Look Inside Vreel – Including Interview With Vreel Founder!Friday Fun: Watch HD Video Content with MeevidConvert a DVD Movie Directly to AVI with FairUse Wizard 2.9 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 Penolo Lets You Share Sketches On Twitter Visit Woolyss.com for Old School Games, Music and Videos Add a Custom Title in IE using Spybot or Spyware Blaster When You Need to Hail a Taxi in NYC Live Map of Marine Traffic NoSquint Remembers Site Specific Zoom Levels (Firefox)

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• EBS Techstack Sessions at OAUG/Collaborate 2010

  - by Steven Chan

  We have a large contingent of E-Business Suite Applications Technology Group staff rolling out to the OAUG/Collaborate 2010 conference in Las Vegas new week.  Our Applications Technology Group staff will be appearing as guest speakers or full-speakers at the following E-Business Suite technology stack related sessions:Database Special Interest GroupSunday, April 18, 11:00 AM, Breakers FSIG Leaders:  Michael Brown, Colibri; Sandra Vucinic, Vlad GroupGuest Speaker:  Steven ChanCovering database upcoming and past desupport dates, and database support policies as they apply to E-Business Suite environments, general Q&A E-Business Suite Technology Stack Special Interest GroupSunday, April 18, 3:00 PM, Breakers FSIG Leaders:  Elke Phelps, Paul Jackson, HumanaGuest Speaker:  Steven ChanCovering the latest EBS technology stack certifications, roadmap, desupport noticesupgrade options for Discoverer, OID, SSO, Portal, general Q&A E-Business Suite Applications Technology Roadmap & VisionMonday, April 19, 8:00 AM, South Seas GOracle Speaker:  Uma PrabhalaLatest developments for SOA, AOL, OAF, Web ADI, SES, AMP, ACMP, security, and other technologies Oracle E-Business Suite Applications Strategy and General Manager UpdateMonday, April 19, 2:30 PM, Mandalay Bay Ballroom DOracle Speaker:  Cliff GodwinUpdate on the entire Oracle E-Business Suite product line. The session covers the value delivered by the current release of Oracle E-Business Suite applications, the momentum, and how Oracle E-Business Suite applications integrate into Oracle's overall applications strategy 10 Things You Can Do Today to Prepare for the Next Generation ApplicationsTuesday, April 20, 8:00 AM, South Seas FOracle Speaker:  Nadia Bendjedou"Common sense" and "practical" steps that can be taken today to increase the value of your Oracle Applications (E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, Siebel, and JDE) investments by using the latest Oracle solutions and technologiesReducing TCO using Oracle E-Business Suite Management PacksTuesday, April 20, 10:30 AM, South Seas EOracle Speaker:  Angelo RosadoLearn how you can reduce the Total Cost of Ownership by implementing Application Management Pack (AMP) and Application Change Management Pack (ACP) for E-Business Suite 11i, R12, R12.1. AMP is Oracle's next generation system manageability product offering that provides a centralized platform to manage and maintain EBS. ACP is Oracle's offering to monitor and manage E-Business Suite changes in the areas of E-Business Suite Customizations, Patches and Functional Setups. E-Business Suite Upgrade Special Interest GroupTuesday, April 20, 3:15 PM, South Seas ESIG Leaders:  John Stouffer; Sandra Vucinic, Vlad GroupGuest Speaker:  Steven ChanParticipating in general Q&A E-Business Suite Technology Essentials: Using the Latest Oracle Technologies with E-Business Suite Wednesday, April 21, 8:00 AM, South Seas HOracle Speaker:  Lisa ParekhOracle continues to build new functionality into the Oracle Database, Fusion Middleware, and Enterprise Manager. Come see how you can enhance the value of E-Business Suite for your users and lower your costs of ownership by utilizing the latest features of these Oracle technologies with E-Business Suite. Learn about the latest advanced E-Business Suite topologies and features, including new options for security, performance, third-party integration, SOA, virtualization, clouds, systems management, and much more How to Leverage the New E-Business Suite R12.1 Solutions Without Upgrading your 11.5.10 EnvironmentWednesday, April 21, 10:30 AMOracle Speaker:  Nadia Bendjedou, South Seas ELearn how you can use the latest E-Business Suite 12.1 standalone solutions without upgrading from your E-Business Suite 11.5.10 environment Web 2.0 User Experience and Oracle Fusion Middleware Integration with Oracle E-Business SuiteWednesday, April 21, 4:00 PM, South Seas FOracle Speaker:  Padmaprabodh AmbaleSee the next generation Oracle E-Business Suite OA framework improvements that will provide new rich interactions in components such as LOV, Tables and Attachments.  See  new components like the Rich Container that allows any Web 2.0 content like Flash or OBIEE to be embedded in OA Framework pages. Advanced Technology Deployment Architectures for E-Business Suite Wednesday, April 21, 2:15 PM, South Seas EOracle Speaker:  Steven ChanLearn how to take advantage of the latest version of Oracle Fusion Middleware with Oracle E-Business Suite. Learn how to utilize identity management systems and LDAP directories. In addition, come to this session for answers about advanced network deployments involving reverse proxy servers, load balancers, and DMZ's, and to see how you can take benefit from virtualization and new system management capabilities. Upgrading to Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1 - Best PracticesThursday, April 22, 11:00 AM, South Seas EOracle Speaker:  Lester Gutierrez, Udayan ParvateFundamental of upgrading to Release 12.1, which includes the technology stack components and differences, the upgrade path from various releases of Oracle E-Business Suite, upgrade steps, monitoring the upgrade, hints and tips for minimizing downtime and upgrade best practices for making the upgrade to Release 12.1 a success.  We look forward to seeing you there!

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• SharePoint Saturday Michigan 2010 Recap, Slides, and Photos

  - by Brian Jackett

  This past weekend I attended SharePoint Saturday Michigan (SPSMI) in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  For those unfamiliar, SharePoint Saturday is a community driven event where various speakers gather to present at a FREE conference on all topics related to SharePoint.  This made my third SharePoint Saturday attended and second I’ve spoken at.  I believe today it was announced that about 210 people total attended the event.  I was very happy with the turnout, especially the ratio of male to female attendees.  Typically with computer related conferences the ratio leans towards more males attending, but both Peter Serzo (one of conference organizers) and I both commented to each other that at the end of the day it appeared to be close to 40% women in the crowd.  So here’s my recap of the weekend. Arrival     Friday afternoon I drove up from Columbus, OH to Ann Arbor, MI and arrived around 4pm.  I was attempting to avoid the rush hour traffic and construction backups.  Turned out to be a good idea because other speakers coming up Friday got stuck on a highway which literally closed down in both directions due to a bad accident.  I was talking my friend Sean McDonough through the highway closing and this was the first time I had seen a solid black traffic line on Google Maps.  Most of us are familiar with Green, Yellow, and Red, but this line was black if that tells you how bad it got. Speaker “Dinner”     Fast forward a few hours and it was time for the speaker “dinner.”  I put “dinner” in quotes because with this night alone SPSMI set a new bar for nicest and most extravagant speaker appreciation events for SharePoint Saturday.  By tapping into some very influential contacts, the conference organizers were able to provide a truck limo (yep you heard right) with refreshments, access to an underground suite at the Palace of Auburn Hills, and courtside tickets to see the Detroit Pistons play that night.  Being a Michigan native I have to say that I was absolutely floored by this experience and very thankful to our conference organizers Peter, Sebastian, and Jesse along with Trillium Teamologies. Sessions     The actual conference started Saturday morning at 9am with the keynote by Rob Collie who is the Microsoft program manager for PowerPivot.  The day continued and I attended the following sessions: Mike Watson (@mikewat) – “SharePoint 2010 Fight Night: Devs vs. Admins” Karl Swedeberg (@kswedberg) – “A Walk on the Client Side with jQuery“ [my session] Brian Jackett (@briantjackett) - “Real World Deployment of SharePoint 2007 Solutions” Jeff Willinger (@jwillie) - “Social Computing and Collaboration Inside and Outside the 4 Walls” Paul Schaeflein (@paulschaeflein) – “PowerShell for the SharePoint Developer” My Presentation     I had a great time presenting my session on Deploying SharePoint 2007 Solutions, but it wasn’t without its fair share of technical issues.  As my session was right after lunch I came in to my room 10 mins early to set up my laptop, slides, and demos.  As a quick background note, a few months ago I got an upgraded laptop from my company Sogeti and have been dual booting it between XP (factory installed) and Windows Server 2008 R2 w/ Hyper-V.  As such I had prepared all of my demo virtual machines to run under Hyper-V.  About 3 minutes before my session was scheduled to start though it became apparent that I did not have the correct display drivers to connect Windows Server 2008 R2 to the projector…     As you can imagine this was a slight cause for concern as I was potentially going to be unable to give my presentation.  Luckily for me I usually prepare for such unforeseen issues and had my presentation and some spare VMs that would run on XP on my external hard drive.  Knowing this I rebooted my machine into XP and began my presentation without slides until about 5 mins into the session when everything was up and running on XP.  Despite this being the first time I gave this presentation I have to say it was one of my favorites I’ve given so far.  The audience was very engaged in the session and I received some great, positive feedback afterwards.  Thanks to all who attended my session, I appreciate it very much. Link to Presentation Files     For those of you who attended my session and would like my slides or demo PowerShell scripts they can be found on my SkyDrive at the link below.  Also, if you have a few minutes and wouldn’t mind rating my session I have this session posted on SpeakerRate.  As speakers we always appreciate any and all feedback attendees offer, so thank you if you are able to provide any. SkyDrive folder with session files Rate my SharePoint 2007 Solutions session   Picture Albums     For everyone else, here are my pictures from the weekend.  The first link is to my FaceBook album which will have tagging (recommend this one.)  The second is to my Live album if you care for higher resolution images. http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2154482&id=21905041&l=a3fb72ee8c View Full Album Conclusion     A big thank you goes out to all of the organizers, speakers, sponsors, and attendees of SPSMI.  As I’ve said so many times, without each and every one of you these events wouldn’t be possible.  I thoroughly enjoyed this trip back to my home state and presenting a new session.  For those interested in my upcoming schedule I will be giving two sessions on PowerShell at SharePoint Saturday Charlotte in April, helping plan Stir Trek: Iron Man Edition in May, and I’m submitting sessions to Day of .Net Ann Arbor in May as well.  Beyond that I haven’t planned out any travels.  Thanks for reading my recap.  Look forward to more technical posts now that I have a short break in conferences.         -Frog Out   links: Michigan image

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• Creating an ASP.NET report using Visual Studio 2010 - Part 2

  - by rajbk

  We continue building our report in this three part series. Creating an ASP.NET report using Visual Studio 2010 - Part 1 Creating an ASP.NET report using Visual Studio 2010 - Part 3 Creating the Client Report Definition file (RDLC) Add a folder called “RDLC”. This will hold our RDLC report.   Right click on the RDLC folder, select “Add new item..” and add an “RDLC” name of “Products”. We will use the “Report Wizard” to walk us through the steps of creating the RDLC.   In the next dialog, give the dataset a name called “ProductDataSet”. Change the data source to “NorthwindReports.DAL” and select “ProductRepository(GetProductsProjected)”. The fields that are returned from the method are shown on the right. Click next.   Drag and drop the ProductName, CategoryName, UnitPrice and Discontinued into the Values container. Note that you can create much more complex grouping using this UI. Click Next.   Most of the selections on this screen are grayed out because we did not choose a grouping in the previous screen. Click next. Choose a style for your report. Click next. The report graphic design surface is now visible. Right click on the report and add a page header and page footer. With the report design surface active, drag and drop a TextBox from the tool box to the page header. Drag one more textbox to the page header. We will use the text boxes to add some header text as shown in the next figure. You can change the font size and other properties of the textboxes using the formatting tool bar (marked in red). You can also resize the columns by moving your cursor in between columns and dragging. Adding Expressions Add two more text boxes to the page footer. We will use these to add the time the report was generated and page numbers. Right click on the first textbox in the page footer and select “Expression”. Add the following expression for the print date (note the = sign at the left of the expression in the dialog below) "© Northwind Traders " & Format(Now(),"MM/dd/yyyy hh:mm tt") Right click on the second text box and add the following for the page count.   Globals.PageNumber & " of " & Globals.TotalPages Formatting the page footer is complete.   We are now going to format the “Unit Price” column so it displays the number in currency format.  Right click on the [UnitPrice] column (not header) and select “Text Box Properties..” Under “Number”, select “Currency”. Hit OK. Adding a chart With the design surface active, go to the toolbox and drag and drop a chart control. You will need to move the product list table down first to make space for the chart contorl. The document can also be resized by dragging on the corner or at the page header/footer separator. In the next dialog, pick the first chart type. This can be changed later if needed. Click OK. The chart gets added to the design surface.   Click on the blue bars in the chart (not legend). This will bring up drop locations for dropping the fields. Drag and drop the UnitPrice and CategoryName into the top (y axis) and bottom (x axis) as shown below. This will give us the total unit prices for a given category. That is the best I could come up with as far as what report to render, sorry :-) Delete the legend area to get more screen estate. Resize the chart to your liking. Change the header, x axis and y axis text by double clicking on those areas. We made it this far. Let’s impress the client by adding a gradient to the bar graph :-) Right click on the blue bar and select “Series properties”. Under “Fill”, add a color and secondary color and select the Gradient style. We are done designing our report. In the next section you will see how to add the report to the report viewer control, bind to the data and make it refresh when the filter criteria are changed.   Creating an ASP.NET report using Visual Studio 2010 - Part 3

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• Oracle Enterprise Data Quality: Ever Integration-ready

  - by Mala Narasimharajan

  It is closing in on a year now since Oracle’s acquisition of Datanomic, and the addition of Oracle Enterprise Data Quality (EDQ) to the Oracle software family. The big move has caused some big shifts in emphasis and some very encouraging excitement from the field.  To give an illustration, combined with a shameless promotion of how EDQ can help to give quick insights into your data, I did a quick Phrase Profile of the subject field of emails to the Global EDQ mailing list since it was set up last September. The results revealed a very clear theme:   Integration, Integration, Integration! As well as the important Siebel and Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) integrations, we have been asked about integration with a huge variety of Oracle applications, including EBS, Peoplesoft, CRM on Demand, Fusion, DRM, Endeca, RightNow, and more - and we have not stood still! While it would not have been possible to develop specific pre-integrations with all of the above within a year, we have developed a package of feature-rich out-of-the-box web services and batch processes that can be plugged into any application or middleware technology with ease. And with Siebel, they work out of the box. Oracle Enterprise Data Quality version 9.0.4 includes the Customer Data Services (CDS) pack – a ready set of standard processes with standard interfaces, to provide integrated: Address verification and cleansing  Individual matching Organization matching The services can are suitable for either Batch or Real-Time processing, and are enabled for international data, with simple configuration options driving the set of locale-specific dictionaries that are used. For example, large dictionaries are provided to support international name transcription and variant matching, including highly specialized handling for Arabic, Japanese, Chinese and Korean data. In total across all locales, CDS includes well over a million dictionary entries.   Excerpt from EDQ’s CDS Individual Name Standardization Dictionary CDS has been developed to replace the OEM of Informatica Identity Resolution (IIR) for attached Data Quality on the Oracle price list, but does this in a way that creates a ‘best of both worlds’ situation for customers, who can harness not only the out-of-the-box functionality of pre-packaged matching and standardization services, but also the flexibility of OEDQ if they want to customize the interfaces or the process logic, without having to learn more than one product. From a competitive point of view, we believe this stands us in good stead against our key competitors, including Informatica, who have separate ‘Identity Resolution’ and general DQ products, and IBM, who provide limited out-of-the-box capabilities (with a steep learning curve) in both their QualityStage data quality and Initiate matching products. Here is a brief guide to the main services provided in the pack: Address Verification and Standardization EDQ’s CDS Address Cleaning Process The Address Verification and Standardization service uses EDQ Address Verification (an OEM of Loqate software) to verify and clean addresses in either real-time or batch. The Address Verification processor is wrapped in an EDQ process – this adds significant capabilities over calling the underlying Address Verification API directly, specifically: Country-specific thresholds to determine when to accept the verification result (and therefore to change the input address) based on the confidence level of the API Optimization of address verification by pre-standardizing data where required Formatting of output addresses into the input address fields normally used by applications Adding descriptions of the address verification and geocoding return codes The process can then be used to provide real-time and batch address cleansing in any application; such as a simple web page calling address cleaning and geocoding as part of a check on individual data.     Duplicate Prevention Unlike Informatica Identity Resolution (IIR), EDQ uses stateless services for duplicate prevention to avoid issues caused by complex replication and synchronization of large volume customer data. When a record is added or updated in an application, the EDQ Cluster Key Generation service is called, and returns a number of key values. These are used to select other records (‘candidates’) that may match in the application data (which has been pre-seeded with keys using the same service). The ‘driving record’ (the new or updated record) is then presented along with all selected candidates to the EDQ Matching Service, which decides which of the candidates are a good match with the driving record, and scores them according to the strength of match. In this model, complex multi-locale EDQ techniques can be used to generate the keys and ensure that the right balance between performance and matching effectiveness is maintained, while ensuring that the application retains control of data integrity and transactional commits. The process is explained below: EDQ Duplicate Prevention Architecture Note that where the integration is with a hub, there may be an additional call to the Cluster Key Generation service if the master record has changed due to merges with other records (and therefore needs to have new key values generated before commit). Batch Matching In order to allow customers to use different match rules in batch to real-time, separate matching templates are provided for batch matching. For example, some customers want to minimize intervention in key user flows (such as adding new customers) in front end applications, but to conduct a more exhaustive match on a regular basis in the back office. The batch matching jobs are also used when migrating data between systems, and in this case normally a more precise (and automated) type of matching is required, in order to minimize the review work performed by Data Stewards.  In batch matching, data is captured into EDQ using its standard interfaces, and records are standardized, clustered and matched in an EDQ job before matches are written out. As with all EDQ jobs, batch matching may be called from Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) if required. When working with Siebel CRM (or master data in Siebel UCM), Siebel’s Data Quality Manager is used to instigate batch jobs, and a shared staging database is used to write records for matching and to consume match results. The CDS batch matching processes automatically adjust to Siebel’s ‘Full Match’ (match all records against each other) and ‘Incremental Match’ (match a subset of records against all of their selected candidates) modes. The Future The Customer Data Services Pack is an important part of the Oracle strategy for EDQ, offering a clear path to making Data Quality Assurance an integral part of enterprise applications, and providing a strong value proposition for adopting EDQ. We are planning various additions and improvements, including: An out-of-the-box Data Quality Dashboard Even more comprehensive international data handling Address search (suggesting multiple results) Integrated address matching The EDQ Customer Data Services Pack is part of the Enterprise Data Quality Media Pack, available for download at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/oedq/downloads/index.html.

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• BizTalk host throttling &ndash; Singleton pattern and High database size

  - by S.E.R.

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/SERivas/archive/2013/06/30/biztalk-host-throttling-ndash-singleton-pattern-and-high-database-size.aspxI have worked for some days around the singleton pattern (for those unfamiliar with it, read this post by Victor Fehlberg) and have come across a few very interesting posts, among which one dealt with performance issues (here, also by Victor Fehlberg). Simply put: if you have an orchestration which implements the singleton pattern, then performances will continuously decrease as the orchestration receives and consumes messages, and that behavior is more obvious when the orchestration never ends (ie : it keeps looping and never terminates or completes). As I experienced the same kind of problem (actually I was alerted by SCOM, which told me that the host was being throttled because of High database size), I thought it would be a good idea to dig a little bit a see what happens deep inside BizTalk and thus understand the reasons for this behavior. NOTE: in this article, I will focus on this High database size throttling condition. I will try and work on the other conditions in some not too distant future… Test conditions The singleton orchestration For the purpose of this study, I have created the following orchestration, which is a very basic implementation of a singleton that piles up incoming messages, then does something else when a certain timeout has been reached without receiving another message: Throttling settings I have two distinct hosts : one that hosts the receive port (basic FILE port) : Ports_ReceiveHostone that hosts the orchestration : ProcessingHost In order to emphasize the throttling mechanism, I have modified the throttling settings for each of these hosts are as follows (all other parameters are set to the default value): [Throttling thresholds] Message count in database: 500 (default value : 50000) Evolution of performance counters when submitting messages Since we are investigating the High database size throttling condition, here are the performance counter that we should take a look at (all of them are in the BizTalk:Message Agent performance object): Database sizeHigh database sizeMessage delivery throttling stateMessage publishing throttling stateMessage delivery delay (ms)Message publishing delay (ms)Message delivery throttling state durationMessage publishing throttling state duration (If you are not used to Perfmon, I strongly recommend that you start using it right now: it is a wonderful tool that allows you to open the hood and see what is going on inside BizTalk – and other systems) Database size It is quite obvious that we will start by watching the database size and high database size counters, just to see when the first reaches the configured threshold (500) and when the second rings the alarm. NOTE : During this test I submitted 600 messages, one message at a time every 10ms to see the evolution of the counters we have previously selected. It might not show very well on this screenshot, but here is what happened: From 15:46:50 to 15:47:50, the database size for the Ports_ReceiveHost host (blue line) kept growing until it reached a maximum of 504.At 15:47:50, the high database size alert fires At first I was surprised by this result: why is it the database size of the receiving host that keeps growing since it is the processing host that piles up messages? Actually, it makes total sense. This counter measures the size of the database queue that is being filled by the host, not consumed. Therefore, the high database size alert is raised on the host that fills the queue: Ports_ReceiveHost. More information is available on the Public MPWiki page. Now, looking at the Message publishing throttling state for the receiving host (green line), we can see that a throttling condition has been reached at 15:47:50: We can also see that the Message publishing delay(ms) (blue line) has begun growing slowly from this point. All of this explains why performances keep decreasing when a singleton keeps processing new messages: the database size grows and when it has exceeded the Message count in database threshold, the host is throttled and the publishing delay keeps increasing. Digging further So, what happens to the database queue then? Is it flushed some day or does it keep growing and growing indefinitely? The real question being: will the host be throttled forever because of this singleton? To answer this question, I set the Message count in database threshold to 20 (this value is very low in order not to wait for too long, otherwise I certainly would have fallen asleep in front of my screen) and I submitted 30 messages. The test was started at 18:26. At 18:56 (ie : exactly 30min later) the throttling was stopped and the database size was divided by 2. 30 min later again, the database size had dropped to almost zero: I guess I’ll have to find some documentation and do some more testing before I sort this out! My guess is that some maintenance job is at work here, though I cannot tell which one Digging even further If we take a look at the Message delivery throttling state counter for the processing host, we can see that this host was also throttled during the submission of the 600 documents: The value for the counter was 1, meaning that Message delivery incoming rate for the host instance exceeds the Message delivery outgoing rate * the specified Rate overdrive factor (percent) value. We will see this another day… :) A last word Let’s end this article with a warning: DO NOT CHANGE THE THROTTLING SETTINGS LIGHTLY! The temptation can be great to just bypass throttling by setting very high values for each parameter (or zero in some cases, which simply disables throttling). Nevertheless, always keep in mind that this mechanism is here for a very good reason: prevent your BizTalk infrastructure from exploding!! So whatever you do with those settings, do a lot of testing and benchmarking!

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• Troubleshooting High-CPU Utilization for SQL Server

  - by Susantha Bathige

  The objective of this FAQ is to outline the basic steps in troubleshooting high CPU utilization on  a server hosting a SQL Server instance. The first and the most common step if you suspect high CPU utilization (or are alerted for it) is to login to the physical server and check the Windows Task Manager. The Performance tab will show the high utilization as shown below: Next, we need to determine which process is responsible for the high CPU consumption. The Processes tab of the Task Manager will show this information: Note that to see all processes you should select Show processes from all user. In this case, SQL Server (sqlserver.exe) is consuming 99% of the CPU (a normal benchmark for max CPU utilization is about 50-60%). Next we examine the scheduler data. Scheduler is a component of SQLOS which evenly distributes load amongst CPUs. The query below returns the important columns for CPU troubleshooting. Note – if your server is under severe stress and you are unable to login to SSMS, you can use another machine’s SSMS to login to the server through DAC – Dedicated Administrator Connection (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms189595.aspx for details on using DAC) SELECT scheduler_id ,cpu_id ,status ,runnable_tasks_count ,active_workers_count ,load_factor ,yield_count FROM sys.dm_os_schedulers WHERE scheduler_id See below for the BOL definitions for the above columns. scheduler_id – ID of the scheduler. All schedulers that are used to run regular queries have ID numbers less than 1048576. Those schedulers that have IDs greater than or equal to 1048576 are used internally by SQL Server, such as the dedicated administrator connection scheduler. cpu_id – ID of the CPU with which this scheduler is associated. status – Indicates the status of the scheduler. runnable_tasks_count – Number of workers, with tasks assigned to them that are waiting to be scheduled on the runnable queue. active_workers_count – Number of workers that are active. An active worker is never preemptive, must have an associated task, and is either running, runnable, or suspended. current_tasks_count - Number of current tasks that are associated with this scheduler. load_factor – Internal value that indicates the perceived load on this scheduler. yield_count – Internal value that is used to indicate progress on this scheduler.                                                                 Now to interpret the above data. There are four schedulers and each assigned to a different CPU. All the CPUs are ready to accept user queries as they all are ONLINE. There are 294 active tasks in the output as per the current_tasks_count column. This count indicates how many activities currently associated with the schedulers. When a  task is complete, this number is decremented. The 294 is quite a high figure and indicates all four schedulers are extremely busy. When a task is enqueued, the load_factor  value is incremented. This value is used to determine whether a new task should be put on this scheduler or another scheduler. The new task will be allocated to less loaded scheduler by SQLOS. The very high value of this column indicates all the schedulers have a high load. There are 268 runnable tasks which mean all these tasks are assigned a worker and waiting to be scheduled on the runnable queue.   The next step is  to identify which queries are demanding a lot of CPU time. The below query is useful for this purpose (note, in its current form,  it only shows the top 10 records). SELECT TOP 10 st.text  ,st.dbid  ,st.objectid  ,qs.total_worker_time  ,qs.last_worker_time  ,qp.query_plan FROM sys.dm_exec_query_stats qs CROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_sql_text(qs.sql_handle) st CROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_query_plan(qs.plan_handle) qp ORDER BY qs.total_worker_time DESC This query as total_worker_time as the measure of CPU load and is in descending order of the  total_worker_time to show the most expensive queries and their plans at the top:      Note the BOL definitions for the important columns: total_worker_time - Total amount of CPU time, in microseconds, that was consumed by executions of this plan since it was compiled. last_worker_time - CPU time, in microseconds, that was consumed the last time the plan was executed.   I re-ran the same query again after few seconds and was returned the below output. After few seconds the SP dbo.TestProc1 is shown in fourth place and once again the last_worker_time is the highest. This means the procedure TestProc1 consumes a CPU time continuously each time it executes.      In this case, the primary cause for high CPU utilization was a stored procedure. You can view the execution plan by clicking on query_plan column to investigate why this is causing a high CPU load. I have used SQL Server 2008 (SP1) to test all the queries used in this article.

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• Searching for tasks with code – Executables and Event Handlers

  Searching packages or just enumerating through all tasks is not quite as straightforward as it may first appear, mainly because of the way you can nest tasks within other containers. You can see this illustrated in the sample package below where I have used several sequence containers and loops. To complicate this further all containers types, including packages and tasks, can have event handlers which can then support the full range of nested containers again. Towards the lower right, the task called SQL In FEL also has an event handler not shown, within which is another Execute SQL Task, so that makes a total of 6 Execute SQL Tasks 6 tasks spread across the package. In my previous post about such as adding a property expressionI kept it simple and just looked at tasks at the package level, but what if you wanted to find any or all tasks in a package? For this post I've written a console program that will search a package looking at all tasks no matter how deeply nested, and check to see if the name starts with "SQL". When it finds a matching task it writes out the hierarchy by name for that task, starting with the package and working down to the task itself. The output for our sample package is shown below, note it has found all 6 tasks, including the one on the OnPreExecute event of the SQL In FEL task TaskSearch v1.0.0.0 (1.0.0.0) Copyright (C) 2009 Konesans Ltd Processing File - C:\Projects\Alpha\Packages\MyPackage.dtsx MyPackage\FOR Counter Loop\SQL In Counter Loop MyPackage\SEQ For Each Loop Wrapper\FEL Simple Loop\SQL In FEL MyPackage\SEQ For Each Loop Wrapper\FEL Simple Loop\SQL In FEL\OnPreExecute\SQL On Pre Execute for FEL SQL Task MyPackage\SEQ Top Level\SEQ Nested Lvl 1\SEQ Nested Lvl 2\SQL In Nested Lvl 2 MyPackage\SEQ Top Level\SEQ Nested Lvl 1\SQL In Nested Lvl 1 #1 MyPackage\SEQ Top Level\SEQ Nested Lvl 1\SQL In Nested Lvl 1 #2 6 matching tasks found in package. The full project and code is available for download below, but first we can walk through the project to highlight the most important sections of code. This code has been abbreviated for this description, but is complete in the download. First of all we load the package, and then start by looking at the Executables for the package. // Load the package file Application application = new Application(); using (Package package = application.LoadPackage(filename, null)) { int matchCount = 0; // Look in the package's executables ProcessExecutables(package.Executables, ref matchCount); ... // // ... // Write out final count Console.WriteLine("{0} matching tasks found in package.", matchCount); } The ProcessExecutables method is a key method, as an executable could be described as the the highest level of a working functionality or container. There are several of types of executables, such as tasks, or sequence containers and loops. To know what to do next we need to work out what type of executable we are dealing with as the abbreviated version of method shows below. private static void ProcessExecutables(Executables executables, ref int matchCount) { foreach (Executable executable in executables) { TaskHost taskHost = executable as TaskHost; if (taskHost != null) { ProcessTaskHost(taskHost, ref matchCount); ProcessEventHandlers(taskHost.EventHandlers, ref matchCount); continue; } ... // // ... ForEachLoop forEachLoop = executable as ForEachLoop; if (forEachLoop != null) { ProcessExecutables(forEachLoop.Executables, ref matchCount); ProcessEventHandlers(forEachLoop.EventHandlers, ref matchCount); continue; } } } As you can see if the executable we find is a task we then call out to our ProcessTaskHost method. As with all of our executables a task can have event handlers which themselves contain more executables such as task and loops, so we also make a call out our ProcessEventHandlers method. The other types of executables such as loops can also have event handlers as well as executables. As shown with the example for the ForEachLoop we call the same ProcessExecutables and ProcessEventHandlers methods again to drill down into the hierarchy of objects that the package may contain. This code needs to explicitly check for each type of executable (TaskHost, Sequence, ForLoop and ForEachLoop) because whilst they all have an Executables property this is not from a common base class or interface. This example was just a simple find a task by its name, so ProcessTaskHost really just does that. We also get the hierarchy of objects so we can write out for information, obviously you can adapt this method to do something more interesting such as adding a property expression. private static void ProcessTaskHost(TaskHost taskHost, ref int matchCount) { if (taskHost == null) { return; } // Check if the task matches our match name if (taskHost.Name.StartsWith(TaskNameFilter, StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase)) { // Build up the full object hierarchy of the task // so we can write it out for information StringBuilder path = new StringBuilder(); DtsContainer container = taskHost; while (container != null) { path.Insert(0, container.Name); container = container.Parent; if (container != null) { path.Insert(0, "\\"); } } // Write the task path // e.g. Package\Container\Event\Task Console.WriteLine(path); Console.WriteLine(); // Increment match counter for info matchCount++; } } Just for completeness, the other processing method we covered above is for event handlers, but really that just calls back to the executables. This same method is called in our main package method, but it was omitted for brevity here. private static void ProcessEventHandlers(DtsEventHandlers eventHandlers, ref int matchCount) { foreach (DtsEventHandler eventHandler in eventHandlers) { ProcessExecutables(eventHandler.Executables, ref matchCount); } } As hopefully the code demonstrates, executables (Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Runtime.Executable) are the workers, but within them you can nest more executables (except for task tasks).Executables themselves can have event handlers which can in turn hold more executables. I have tried to illustrate this highlight the relationships in the following diagram. Download Sample code project TaskSearch.zip (11KB)

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• SQL SERVER – Guest Post by Sandip Pani – SQL Server Statistics Name and Index Creation

  - by pinaldave

  Sometimes something very small or a common error which we observe in daily life teaches us new things. SQL Server Expert Sandip Pani (winner of Joes 2 Pros Contests) has come across similar experience. Sandip has written a guest post on an error he faced in his daily work. Sandip is working for QSI Healthcare as an Associate Technical Specialist and have more than 5 years of total experience. He blogs at SQLcommitted.com and contribute in various forums. His social media hands are LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Once I faced following error when I was working on performance tuning project and attempt to create an Index. Mug 1913, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 The operation failed because an index or statistics with name ‘Ix_Table1_1′ already exists on table ‘Table1′. The immediate reaction to the error was that I might have created that index earlier and when I researched it further I found the same as the index was indeed created two times. This totally makes sense. This can happen due to many reasons for example if the user is careless and executes the same code two times as well, when he attempts to create index without checking if there was index already on the object. However when I paid attention to the details of the error, I realize that error message also talks about statistics along with the index. I got curious if the same would happen if I attempt to create indexes with the same name as statistics already created. There are a few other questions also prompted in my mind. I decided to do a small demonstration of the subject and build following demonstration script. The goal of my experiment is to find out the relation between statistics and the index. Statistics is one of the important input parameter for the optimizer during query optimization process. If the query is nontrivial then only optimizer uses statistics to perform a cost based optimization to select a plan. For accuracy and further learning I suggest to read MSDN. Now let’s find out the relationship between index and statistics. We will do the experiment in two parts. i) Creating Index ii) Creating Statistics We will be using the following T-SQL script for our example. IF (OBJECT_ID('Table1') IS NOT NULL) DROP TABLE Table1 GO CREATE TABLE Table1 (Col1 INT NOT NULL, Col2 VARCHAR(20) NOT NULL) GO We will be using following two queries to check if there are any index or statistics on our sample table Table1. -- Details of Index SELECT OBJECT_NAME(OBJECT_ID) AS TableName, Name AS IndexName, type_desc FROM sys.indexes WHERE OBJECT_NAME(OBJECT_ID) = 'table1' GO -- Details of Statistics SELECT OBJECT_NAME(OBJECT_ID) TableName, Name AS StatisticsName FROM sys.stats WHERE OBJECT_NAME(OBJECT_ID) = 'table1' GO When I ran above two scripts on the table right after it was created it did not give us any result which was expected. Now let us begin our test. 1) Create an index on the table Create following index on the table. CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX Ix_Table1_1 ON Table1(Col1) GO Now let us use above two scripts and see their results. We can see that when we created index at the same time it created statistics also with the same name. Before continuing to next set of demo – drop the table using following script and re-create the table using a script provided at the beginning of the table. DROP TABLE table1 GO 2) Create a statistic on the table Create following statistics on the table. CREATE STATISTICS Ix_table1_1 ON Table1 (Col1) GO Now let us use above two scripts and see their results. We can see that when we created statistics Index is not created. The behavior of this experiment is different from the earlier experiment. Clean up the table setup using the following script: DROP TABLE table1 GO Above two experiments teach us very valuable lesson that when we create indexes, SQL Server generates the index and statistics (with the same name as the index name) together. Now due to the reason if we have already had statistics with the same name but not the index, it is quite possible that we will face the error to create the index even though there is no index with the same name. A Quick Check To validate that if we create statistics first and then index after that with the same name, it will throw an error let us run following script in SSMS. Make sure to drop the table and clean up our sample table at the end of the experiment. -- Create sample table CREATE TABLE TestTable (Col1 INT NOT NULL, Col2 VARCHAR(20) NOT NULL) GO -- Create Statistics CREATE STATISTICS IX_TestTable_1 ON TestTable (Col1) GO -- Create Index CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX IX_TestTable_1 ON TestTable(Col1) GO -- Check error /*Msg 1913, Level 16, State 1, Line 2 The operation failed because an index or statistics with name 'IX_TestTable_1' already exists on table 'TestTable'. */ -- Clean up DROP TABLE TestTable GO While creating index it will throw the following error as statistics with the same name is already created. In simple words – when we create index the name of the index should be different from any of the existing indexes and statistics. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Error Messages, SQL Index, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: SQL Statistics

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• Trying to keep up with Technology and Blogging

  - by Dave Campbell

  A little bit of everything... The heading above got changed a bunch during writing and I finally settled on that because this has become a 'stream of consciousness' post... or maybe a stream of UNconsciousness :) If you've noticed, my blogging has been a tad slow this fall. There's been a lot going on personally. But then again, I haven't skipped anybody either. Rather than go through ALL the blogs I have aggregated, and take a week to get to the bottom, at some point in the last year, I had moved the lists around so I now have "SilverlightMVPs", "Very Prolific", "WP7", and "Top Checks". This is a total of about 250 of the more prolific bloggers. Those 250 bloggers have kept me very busy up through about //BUILD. Sometimes it would take all week to go through just that list putting out 13 posts per blog per day... but not anymore. This weekend I made it all the way through the BIG list... close to 700 blogs, and if you read my blog, you know I had one medium day (Saturday), and yesterday was very short. Why is this? To be honest, I don't know... is everybody busy re-tooling, or churning waiting for direction? I have a short list of WinRT/Metro/W8 folks... maybe I need to be pointed to more of them... but my old favorites are not pumping out posts as they have in the past. I said before that I am attracted to Metro, and I've already got My first Metro app post out there, and were it not for working with the new site, I'd have had another out last weekend... so definitely look for more from me in that area. New Site? Did I say 'new site' ? oops... didn't mean to do that, but now that the cat is out of the bag, I may as well continue... While at //BUILD, I discussed a re-tooling of SilverlightCream with lots of folks... probably more than wanted to hear about it to be honest! ... it's needed a facelift, and there's stuff on there that never worked right, plus there's a lot of manual effort that goes into a blog post. In an effort to alleviate all the above, Michael Washington and I have been working on the next iteration of SilverlightCream. Not wanting to lose that branding or mess with any saved links, I decided to change from a somewhat funky name to something more professional. I also decided to put my blog on the site, and tie my main announcement twitter feed to the site as well. The way things sit today, there are 3 different names in those locations and it's gotta be confusing for folks just stumbling in. We're going to do a series of posts talking about the site and the new backend processing (hint: Michael Washington is responsible for it, so you can take a guess at the technology), but for now, we'd like some eyes on the front end of the site, and some submittals using it to see if it falls over somewhere that we haven't tried. So... I'm going to give it up... the new site is Windows Dev News. The Twitter feed is @WindowsDevNews, and the blog will be on the site as well at Windows Dev News Blog. I've got the RSS Feed on Feedburner too, so I think all the nuts and bolts are good to go. The submittal and search pages work, as does the blog page. You'll notice we used the MasterPage from SilverlightCream to get started. That will probably change, but it's just the visual... the content is the important part. Other missing things are the tracking and 'Skim' page that we will eventually have up and running. There are some formatting issues with the blog posts but if you hang in there with me, those will be taken care of. If you're a blogger, please submit through the site and let me know if you find any problems. If you're a reader, please add this feed and site. I'll be duplicating the effort for a while but at some point will stop that foolishness. We won't lose the data from SilverlightCream though, so keep using that as a search resource... I have hopes to pull that database over to WindowsDevNews, or link to it in some manner... that part isn't set in jello yet, but it will not be lost. So there it is... let me know what you think, send me your WinRT/Metro/W8 postings along with your Silverlight and WP7 posts... it's not that different, it's just more. Stay in the 'Light

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• It&rsquo;s A Team Sport: PASS Board Year 2, Q3

  - by Denise McInerney

  As I type this I’m on an airplane en route to my 12th PASS Summit. It’s been a very busy 3.5 months since my last post on my work as a Board member. Nearing the end of my 2-year term I am struck by how much has happened, and yet how fast the time has gone. But I’ll save the retrospective post for next time and today focus on what happened in Q3. In the last three months we made progress on several fronts, thanks to the contributions of many volunteers and HQ staff members. They deserve our appreciation for their dedication to delivering for the membership week after week. Virtual Chapters The Virtual Chapters continue to provide many PASS members with valuable free training. Between July and September of 2013 VCs hosted over 50 webinars with a total of 4300 attendees. This quarter also saw the launch of the Security & Global Russian VCs. Both are off to a strong start and I welcome these additions to the Virtual Chapter portfolio. At the beginning of 2012 we had 14 Virtual Chapters. Today we have 22. This growth has been exciting to see. It has also created a need to have more volunteers help manage the work of the VCs year-round. We have renewed focus on having Virtual Chapter Mentors work with the VC Leaders and other volunteers. I am grateful to volunteers Julie Koesmarno, Thomas LeBlanc and Marcus Bittencourt who join original VC Mentor Steve Simon on this team. Thank you for stepping up to help. Many improvements to the VC web sites have been rolling out over the past few weeks. Our marketing and IT teams have been busy working a new look-and-feel, features and a logo for each VC. They have given the VCs a fresh, professional look consistent with the rest of the PASS branding, and all VCs now have a logo that connects to PASS and the particular focus of the chapter. 24 Hours of PASS The Summit Preview edition  of 24HOP was held on July 31 and by all accounts was a success. Our first use of the GoToWebinar platform for this event went extremely well. Thanks to our speakers, moderators and sponsors for making this event possible. Special thanks to HQ staffers Vicki Van Damme and Jane Duffy for a smoothly run event. Coming up: the 24HOP Portuguese Edition will be held November 13-14, followed December 12-13 by the Spanish Edition. Thanks to the Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking community volunteers who are organizing these events. July Board Meeting The Board met July 18-19 in Kansas City. The first order of business was the election of the Executive Committee who will take office January 1. I was elected Vice President of Marketing and will join incoming President Thomas LaRock, incoming Executive Vice President of Finance Adam Jorgensen and Immediate Past President Bill Graziano on the Exec Co. I am honored that my fellow Board members elected me to this position and look forward to serving the organization in this role. Visit to PASS HQ In late September I traveled to Vancouver for my first visit to PASS HQ, where I joined Tom LaRock and Adam Jorgensen to make plans for 2014.  Our visit was just a few weeks before PASS Summit and coincided with the Board election, and the office was humming with activity. I saw first-hand the enthusiasm and dedication of everyone there. In each interaction I observed a focus on what is best for PASS and our members. Our partners at HQ are key to the organization’s success. This week at PASS Summit is a great opportunity for all of us to remember that, and say “thanks.” Next Up PASS Summit—of course! I’ll be around all week and look forward to connecting with many of our member over meals, at the Community Zone and between sessions. In the evenings you can find me at the Welcome Reception, Exhibitor’s Reception and Community Appreciation Party. And I will be at the Board Q&A session  Friday at 12:45 p.m. Transitions The newly elected Exec Co and Board members take office January 1, and the Virtual Chapter portfolio is transitioning to a new director. I’m thrilled that Jen Stirrup will be taking over. Jen has experience as a volunteer and co-leader of the Business Intelligence Virtual Chapter and was a key contributor to the BI VCs expansion to serving our members in the EMEA region. I’ll be working closely with Jen over the next couple of months to ensure a smooth transition.

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• Connection Pooling is Busted

  - by MightyZot

  A few weeks ago we started getting complaints about performance in an application that has performed very well for many years.  The application is a n-tier application that uses ADODB with the SQLOLEDB provider to talk to a SQL Server database.  Our object model is written in such a way that each public method validates security before performing requested actions, so there is a significant number of queries executed to get information about file cabinets, retrieve images, create workflows, etc.  (PaperWise is a document management and workflow system.)  A common factor for these customers is that they have remote offices connected via MPLS networks. Naturally, the first thing we looked at was the query performance in SQL Profiler.  All of the queries were executing within expected timeframes, most of them were so fast that the duration in SQL Profiler was zero.  After getting nowhere with SQL Profiler, the situation was escalated to me.  I decided to take a peek with Process Monitor.  Procmon revealed some “gaps” in the TCP/IP traffic.  There were notable delays between send and receive pairs.  The send and receive pairs themselves were quite snappy, but quite often there was a notable delay between a receive and the next send.  You might expect some delay because, presumably, the application is doing some thinking in-between the pairs.  But, comparing the procmon data at the remote locations with the procmon data for workstations on the local network showed that the remote workstations were significantly delayed.  Procmon also showed a high number of disconnects. Wireshark traces showed that connections to the database were taking between 75ms and 150ms.  Not only that, but connections to a file share containing images were taking 2 seconds!  So, I asked about a trust.  Sure enough there was a trust between two domains and the file share was on the second domain.  Joining a remote workstation to the domain hosting the share containing images alleviated the time delay in accessing the file share.  Removing the trust had no affect on the connections to the database. Microsoft Network Monitor includes filters that parse TDS packets.  TDS is the protocol that SQL Server uses to communicate.  There is a certificate exchange and some SSL that occurs during authentication.  All of this was evident in the network traffic.  After staring at the network traffic for a while, and examining packets, I decided to call it a night.  On the way home that night, something about the traffic kept nagging at me.  Then it dawned on me…at the beginning of the dance of packets between the client and the server all was well.  Connection pooling was working and I could see multiple queries getting executed on the same connection and ethereal port.  After a particular query, connecting to two different servers, I noticed that ADODB and SQLOLEDB started making repeated connections to the database on different ethereal ports.  SQL Server would execute a single query and respond on a port, then open a new port and execute the next query.  Connection pooling appeared to be broken. The next morning I wrote a test to confirm my hypothesis.  Turns out that the sequence causing the connection nastiness goes something like this: Make a connection to the database. Open a result set that returns enough records to require multiple roundtrips to the server. For each result, query for some other data in the database (this will open a new implicit connection.) Close the inner result set and repeat for every item in the original result set. Close the original connection. Provided that the first result set returns enough data to require multiple roundtrips to the server, ADODB and SQLOLEDB will start making new connections to the database for each query executed in the loop.  Originally, I thought this might be due to Microsoft’s denial of service (ddos) attack protection.  After turning those features off to no avail, I eventually thought to switch my queries to client-side cursors instead of server-side cursors.  Server-side cursors are the default, by the way.  Voila!  After switching to client-side cursors, the disconnects were gone and the above sequence yielded two connections as expected. While the real problem is the amount of time it takes to make connections over these MPLS networks (100ms on average), switching to client-side cursors made the problem go away.  Believe it or not, this is actually documented by Microsoft, and rather difficult to find.  (At least it was while we were trying to troubleshoot the problem!)  So, if you’re noticing performance issues on slower networks, or networks with slower switching, take a look at the traffic in a tool like Microsoft Network Monitor.  If you notice a high number of disconnects, and you’re using fire-hose or server-side cursors, then try switching to client-side cursors and you may see the problem go away. Most likely, Microsoft believes this to be appropriate behavior, because ADODB can’t guarantee that all of the data has been retrieved when you execute the inner queries.  I’m not convinced, though, because the problem remains even after replacing all of the implicit connections with explicit connections and closing those connections in-between each of the inner queries.  In that case, there doesn’t seem to be a reason why ADODB can’t use a single connection from the connection pool to make the additional queries, bringing the total number of connections to two.  Instead ADO appears to make an assumption about the state of the connection. I’ve reported the behavior to Microsoft and am awaiting to hear from the appropriate team, so that I can demonstrate the problem.  Maybe they can explain to us why this is appropriate behavior.  :)

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• Measuring Usability with Common Industry Format (CIF) Usability Tests

  - by Applications User Experience

  Sean Rice, Manager, Applications User Experience A User-centered Research and Design Process The Oracle Fusion Applications user experience was five years in the making. The development of this suite included an extensive and comprehensive user experience design process: ethnographic research, low-fidelity workflow prototyping, high fidelity user interface (UI) prototyping, iterative formative usability testing, development feedback and iteration, and sales and customer evaluation throughout the design cycle. However, this process does not stop when our products are released. We conduct summative usability testing using the ISO 25062 Common Industry Format (CIF) for usability test reports as an organizational framework. CIF tests allow us to measure the overall usability of our released products.  These studies provide benchmarks that allow for comparisons of a specific product release against previous versions of our product and against other products in the marketplace. What Is a CIF Usability Test? CIF refers to the internationally standardized method for reporting usability test findings used by the software industry. The CIF is based on a formal, lab-based test that is used to benchmark the usability of a product in terms of human performance and subjective data. The CIF was developed and is endorsed by more than 375 software customer and vendor organizations led by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), a US government entity. NIST sponsored the CIF through the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standards-making processes. Oracle played a key role in developing the CIF. The CIF report format and metrics are consistent with the ISO 9241-11 definition of usability: “The extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use.” Our goal in conducting CIF tests is to measure performance and satisfaction of a representative sample of users on a set of core tasks and to help predict how usable a product will be with the larger population of customers. Why Do We Perform CIF Testing? The overarching purpose of the CIF for usability test reports is to promote incorporation of usability as part of the procurement decision-making process for interactive products. CIF provides a common format for vendors to report the methods and results of usability tests to customer organizations, and enables customers to compare the usability of our software to that of other suppliers. CIF also enables us to compare our current software with previous versions of our software. CIF Testing for Fusion Applications Oracle Fusion Applications comprises more than 100 modules in seven different product families. These modules encompass more than 400 task flows and 400 user roles. Due to resource constraints, we cannot perform comprehensive CIF testing across the entire product suite. Therefore, we had to develop meaningful inclusion criteria and work with other stakeholders across the applications development organization to prioritize product areas for testing. Ultimately, we want to test the product areas for which customers might be most interested in seeing CIF data. We also want to build credibility with customers; we need to be able to make the case to current and prospective customers that the product areas tested are representative of the product suite as a whole. Our goal is to test the top use cases for each product. The primary activity in the scoping process was to work with the individual product teams to identify the key products and business process task flows in each product to test. We prioritized these products and flows through a series of negotiations among the user experience managers, product strategy, and product management directors for each of the primary product families within the Oracle Fusion Applications suite (Human Capital Management, Supply Chain Management, Customer Relationship Management, Financials, Projects, and Procurement). The end result of the scoping exercise was a list of 47 proposed CIF tests for the Fusion Applications product suite.  Figure 1. A participant completes tasks during a usability test in Oracle’s Usability Labs Fusion Supplier Portal CIF Test The first Fusion CIF test was completed on the Supplier Portal application in July of 2011.  Fusion Supplier Portal is part of an integrated suite of Procurement applications that helps supplier companies manage orders, schedules, shipments, invoices, negotiations and payments. The user roles targeted for the usability study were Supplier Account Receivables Specialists and Supplier Sales Representatives, including both experienced and inexperienced users across a wide demographic range.  The test specifically focused on the following functionality and features: Manage payments – view payments Manage invoices – view invoice status and create invoices Manage account information – create new contact, review bank account information Manage agreements – find and view agreement, upload agreement lines, confirm status of agreement lines upload Manage purchase orders (PO) – view history of PO, request change to PO, find orders Manage negotiations – respond to request for a quote, check the status of a negotiation response These product areas were selected to represent the most important subset of features and functionality of the flow, in terms of frequency and criticality of use by customers. A total of 20 users participated in the usability study. The results of the Supplier Portal evaluation were favorable and exceeded our expectations. Figure 2. Fusion Supplier Portal Next Studies We plan to conduct two Fusion CIF usability studies per product family over the next nine months. The next product to be tested will be Self-service Procurement. End users are currently being recruited to participate in this usability study, and the test sessions are scheduled to begin during the last week of November.

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• Building InstallShield based Installers using Team Build 2010

  - by jehan

  Last few weeks, I have been working on Application Packaging stuff using all the widely used tools like InstallShield, WISE, WiX and Visual Studio Installer. So, I thought it would be good to post about how to Build the Installers developed using these tools with Team Build 2010. This post will focus on how to build the InstallShield generated packages using Team Build 2010. For the release of VS2010, Microsoft has partnered with Flexera who are the makers of InstallShield to create InstallShield Limited Edition, especially for the customers of Visual Studio. First Microsoft planned to release WiX (Windows Installer Xml) with VS2010, but later Microsoft dropped  WiX from VS2010 due to reasons which are best known to them and partnered with InstallShield for Limited Edition. It disappointed lot of people because InstallShield Limited Edition provides only few features of InstallShield and it may not feasable to build complex installer packages using this and it also requires License, where as WiX is an open source with no license costs and it has proved efficient in building most complex packages. Only the last three features are available in InstallShield Limited Edition from the total features offered by InstallShield as shown in below list.                                                                                            Feature Limited Edition for Visual Studio 2010 Standalone Build System Maintain a clean build machine by using only the part of InstallShield that compiles the installations. InstallShield Best Practices Validation Suite Avoid common installation issues. Try and Die Functionality RCreate a fully functional trial version of your product. InstallShield Repackager Create Windows Installer setups from any legacy installation. Multilingual Support Present installation text in up to 35 languages. Microsoft App-V™ Support Deploy your applications as App-V virtual packages that run without conflict. Industry-Standard InstallScript Achieve maximum flexibility in your installations. Dialog Editor Modify the layout of existing end-user dialogs, create new custom dialogs, and more. Patch Creation Build updates and patches for your products. Setup Prerequisite Editor Easily control prerequisite restart behavior and source locations. String Editor View Control the localizable text strings displayed at run time with this spreadsheet-like table. Text File Changes View Configure search-and-replace actions for content in text files to be modified at run time. Virtual Machine Detection Block your installations from running on virtual machines. Unicode Support Improve multi-language installation development. Support for 64-Bit COM Extraction Extract COM data from a 64-bit COM server. Windows Installer Installation Chaining Add MSI packages to your main installation and chain them together. XML Support Save time by quickly testing XML configuration changes to installation projects. Billboard Support for Custom Branding Display Adobe Flash billboards and other graphic files during the install process. SaaS Support (IIS 7 and SSL Technologies) Easily deploy Windows-based Web applications. Project Assistant Jumpstart a project by using a simplified set of views. Support for Digital Signatures Save time by digitally signing all your files at build time. Easily Run Custom Actions Schedule a custom action to run at precisely the right moment in your installation. Installation Prerequisites Check for and install prerequisites before your installation is executed. To create a InstallShield project in Visual Studio and Build it using Team Build 2010, first you have to add the InstallShield Project template  to your Solution file. If you want to use InstallShield Limited edition you can add it from FileàNewà project àother Project Types àSetup and Deploymentà InstallShield LE and if you are using other versions of InstallShield, then you have to add it from  from FileàNewà project àInstallShield Projects. Here, I’m using  InstallShield 2011 Premier edition as I already have it Installed. I have created a simple package for TailSpin Application which has a Feature called Web, few components and a IIS Web Site for  TailSpin application.   Before started working on this, I thought I may need to build the package by calling invoke process activity in build process template or have to create a new custom activity. But, it got build without any changes to build process template. But, it was failing with below error message. C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\InstallShield\2011\InstallShield.targets (68): The "InstallShield.Tasks.InstallShield" task could not be loaded from the assembly C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\InstallShield\2010Limited\InstallShield.Tasks.dll. Could not load file or assembly 'file:///C:\Program Files(x86)\MSBuild\InstallShield\2011\InstallShield.Tasks.dll' or one of its dependencies. An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format. Confirm that the <UsingTask> declaration is correct, that the assembly and all its dependencies are available, and that the task contains a public class that implements Microsoft.Build.Framework.ITask. This error is due to 64-bit build machine which I’m using. This issue will be replicable if you are queuing a build on a 64-bit build machine. To avoid this you have to ensure that you configured the build definition for your InstallShield project to load the InstallShield.Tasks.dll file (which is a 32-bit file); otherwise, you will encounter this build error informing you that the InstallShield.Tasks.dll file could not be loaded. To select the 32-bit version of MSBuild, click the Process tab of your build definition in Team Explorer. Then, under the Advanced node, find the MSBuild Platform setting, and select x86. Note that if you are using a 32-bit build machine, you can select either Auto or x86 for the MSBuild Platform setting.  Once I did above changes, the build got successful.

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• Slow boot on Ubuntu 12.04

  - by Hailwood

  My Ubuntu is booting really slow (Windows is booting faster...). I am using Ubuntu a Dell Inspiron 1545 Pentium(R) Dual-Core CPU T4300 @ 2.10GHz, 4GB Ram, 500GB HDD running Ubuntu 12.04 with gnome-shell 3.4.1. After running dmesg the culprit seems to be this section, in particular the last three lines: [26.557659] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth0: link is not ready [26.565414] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth0: link is not ready [27.355355] Console: switching to colour frame buffer device 170x48 [27.362346] fb0: radeondrmfb frame buffer device [27.362347] drm: registered panic notifier [27.362357] [drm] Initialized radeon 2.12.0 20080528 for 0000:01:00.0 on minor 0 [27.617435] init: udev-fallback-graphics main process (1049) terminated with status 1 [30.064481] init: plymouth-stop pre-start process (1500) terminated with status 1 [51.708241] CE: hpet increased min_delta_ns to 20113 nsec [59.448029] eth2: no IPv6 routers present But I have no idea how to start debugging this. sudo lshw -C video $ sudo lshw -C video *-display description: VGA compatible controller product: RV710 [Mobility Radeon HD 4300 Series] vendor: Hynix Semiconductor (Hyundai Electronics) physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0 version: 00 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm pciexpress msi vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom configuration: driver=fglrx_pci latency=0 resources: irq:48 memory:e0000000-efffffff ioport:de00(size=256) memory:f6df0000-f6dfffff memory:f6d00000-f6d1ffff After loading the propriety driver my new dmesg log is below (starting from the first major time gap): [2.983741] EXT4-fs (sda6): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. Opts: (null) [25.094327] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth0: link is not ready [25.119737] udevd[520]: starting version 175 [25.167086] lp: driver loaded but no devices found [25.215341] fglrx: module license 'Proprietary. (C) 2002 - ATI Technologies, Starnberg, GERMANY' taints kernel. [25.215345] Disabling lock debugging due to kernel taint [25.231924] wmi: Mapper loaded [25.318414] lib80211: common routines for IEEE802.11 drivers [25.318418] lib80211_crypt: registered algorithm 'NULL' [25.331631] [fglrx] Maximum main memory to use for locked dma buffers: 3789 MBytes. [25.332095] [fglrx] vendor: 1002 device: 9552 count: 1 [25.334206] [fglrx] ioport: bar 1, base 0xde00, size: 0x100 [25.334229] pci 0000:01:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 16 [25.334235] pci 0000:01:00.0: setting latency timer to 64 [25.337109] [fglrx] Kernel PAT support is enabled [25.337140] [fglrx] module loaded - fglrx 8.96.4 [Mar 12 2012] with 1 minors [25.342803] Adding 4189180k swap on /dev/sda7. Priority:-1 extents:1 across:4189180k [25.364031] type=1400 audit(1338241723.027:2): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_load" name="/sbin/dhclient" pid=606 comm="apparmor_parser" [25.364491] type=1400 audit(1338241723.031:3): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_load" name="/usr/lib/NetworkManager/nm-dhcp-client.action" pid=606 comm="apparmor_parser" [25.364760] type=1400 audit(1338241723.031:4): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_load" name="/usr/lib/connman/scripts/dhclient-script" pid=606 comm="apparmor_parser" [25.394328] wl 0000:0c:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 17 (level, low) -> IRQ 17 [25.394343] wl 0000:0c:00.0: setting latency timer to 64 [25.415531] acpi device:36: registered as cooling_device2 [25.416688] input: Video Bus as /devices/LNXSYSTM:00/device:00/PNP0A03:00/device:34/LNXVIDEO:00/input/input6 [25.416795] ACPI: Video Device [VID] (multi-head: yes rom: no post: no) [25.416865] [Firmware Bug]: Duplicate ACPI video bus devices for the same VGA controller, please try module parameter "video.allow_duplicates=1"if the current driver doesn't work. [25.425133] lib80211_crypt: registered algorithm 'TKIP' [25.448058] snd_hda_intel 0000:00:1b.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 21 (level, low) -> IRQ 21 [25.448321] snd_hda_intel 0000:00:1b.0: irq 47 for MSI/MSI-X [25.448353] snd_hda_intel 0000:00:1b.0: setting latency timer to 64 [25.738867] eth1: Broadcom BCM4315 802.11 Hybrid Wireless Controller 5.100.82.38 [25.761213] input: HDA Intel Mic as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1b.0/sound/card0/input7 [25.761406] input: HDA Intel Headphone as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1b.0/sound/card0/input8 [25.783432] dcdbas dcdbas: Dell Systems Management Base Driver (version 5.6.0-3.2) [25.908318] EXT4-fs (sda6): re-mounted. Opts: errors=remount-ro [25.928155] input: Dell WMI hotkeys as /devices/virtual/input/input9 [25.960561] udevd[543]: renamed network interface eth1 to eth2 [26.285688] init: failsafe main process (835) killed by TERM signal [26.396426] input: PS/2 Mouse as /devices/platform/i8042/serio2/input/input10 [26.423108] input: AlpsPS/2 ALPS GlidePoint as /devices/platform/i8042/serio2/input/input11 [26.511297] Bluetooth: Core ver 2.16 [26.511383] NET: Registered protocol family 31 [26.511385] Bluetooth: HCI device and connection manager initialized [26.511388] Bluetooth: HCI socket layer initialized [26.511391] Bluetooth: L2CAP socket layer initialized [26.512079] Bluetooth: SCO socket layer initialized [26.530164] Bluetooth: BNEP (Ethernet Emulation) ver 1.3 [26.530168] Bluetooth: BNEP filters: protocol multicast [26.553893] type=1400 audit(1338241724.219:5): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_replace" name="/sbin/dhclient" pid=928 comm="apparmor_parser" [26.554860] Bluetooth: RFCOMM TTY layer initialized [26.554866] Bluetooth: RFCOMM socket layer initialized [26.554868] Bluetooth: RFCOMM ver 1.11 [26.557910] type=1400 audit(1338241724.223:6): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_load" name="/usr/lib/lightdm/lightdm/lightdm-guest-session-wrapper" pid=927 comm="apparmor_parser" [26.559166] type=1400 audit(1338241724.223:7): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_replace" name="/usr/lib/NetworkManager/nm-dhcp-client.action" pid=928 comm="apparmor_parser" [26.559574] type=1400 audit(1338241724.223:8): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_replace" name="/usr/lib/connman/scripts/dhclient-script" pid=928 comm="apparmor_parser" [26.575519] type=1400 audit(1338241724.239:9): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_load" name="/usr/lib/telepathy/mission-control-5" pid=931 comm="apparmor_parser" [26.581100] type=1400 audit(1338241724.247:10): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_load" name="/usr/lib/telepathy/telepathy-*" pid=931 comm="apparmor_parser" [26.582794] type=1400 audit(1338241724.247:11): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_load" name="/usr/bin/evince" pid=929 comm="apparmor_parser" [26.605672] ppdev: user-space parallel port driver [27.592475] sky2 0000:09:00.0: eth0: enabling interface [27.604329] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth0: link is not ready [27.606962] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): eth0: link is not ready [27.852509] vesafb: mode is 1024x768x32, linelength=4096, pages=0 [27.852513] vesafb: scrolling: redraw [27.852515] vesafb: Truecolor: size=0:8:8:8, shift=0:16:8:0 [27.852523] mtrr: type mismatch for e0000000,400000 old: write-back new: write-combining [27.852527] mtrr: type mismatch for e0000000,200000 old: write-back new: write-combining [27.852531] mtrr: type mismatch for e0000000,100000 old: write-back new: write-combining [27.852534] mtrr: type mismatch for e0000000,80000 old: write-back new: write-combining [27.852538] mtrr: type mismatch for e0000000,40000 old: write-back new: write-combining [27.852541] mtrr: type mismatch for e0000000,20000 old: write-back new: write-combining [27.852544] mtrr: type mismatch for e0000000,10000 old: write-back new: write-combining [27.852548] mtrr: type mismatch for e0000000,8000 old: write-back new: write-combining [27.852551] mtrr: type mismatch for e0000000,4000 old: write-back new: write-combining [27.852554] mtrr: type mismatch for e0000000,2000 old: write-back new: write-combining [27.852558] mtrr: type mismatch for e0000000,1000 old: write-back new: write-combining [27.853154] vesafb: framebuffer at 0xe0000000, mapped to 0xffffc90005580000, using 3072k, total 3072k [27.853405] Console: switching to colour frame buffer device 128x48 [27.853426] fb0: VESA VGA frame buffer device [28.539800] fglrx_pci 0000:01:00.0: irq 48 for MSI/MSI-X [28.540552] [fglrx] Firegl kernel thread PID: 1168 [28.540679] [fglrx] Firegl kernel thread PID: 1169 [28.540789] [fglrx] Firegl kernel thread PID: 1170 [28.540932] [fglrx] IRQ 48 Enabled [29.845620] [fglrx] Gart USWC size:1236 M. [29.845624] [fglrx] Gart cacheable size:489 M. [29.845629] [fglrx] Reserved FB block: Shared offset:0, size:1000000 [29.845632] [fglrx] Reserved FB block: Unshared offset:fc21000, size:3df000 [29.845635] [fglrx] Reserved FB block: Unshared offset:1fffb000, size:5000 [59.700023] eth2: no IPv6 routers present

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• RTS Voxel Engine using LWJGL - Textures glitching

  - by Dieter Hubau

  I'm currently working on an RTS game engine using voxels. I have implemented a basic chunk manager using an Octree of Octrees which contains my voxels (simple square blocks, as in Minecraft). I'm using a Voronoi-based terrain generation to get a simplistic yet relatively realistic heightmap. I have no problem showing a 256*256*256 grid of voxels with a decent framerate (250), because of frustum culling, face culling and only rendering visible blocks. For example, in a random voxel grid of 256*256*256 I generally only render 100k-120k faces, not counting frustum culling. Frustum culling is only called every 100ms, since calling it every frame seemed a bit overkill. Now I have reached the stage of texturing and I'm experiencing some problems: Some experienced people might already see the problem, but if we zoom in, you can see the glitches more clearly: All the seams between my blocks are glitching and kind of 'overlapping' or something. It's much more visible when you're moving around. I'm using a single, simple texture map to draw on my cubes, where each texture is 16*16 pixels big: I have added black edges around the textures to get a kind of cellshaded look, I think it's cool. The texture map has 256 textures of each 16*16 pixels, meaning the total size of my texture map is 256*256 pixels. The code to update the ChunkManager: public void update(ChunkManager chunkManager) { for (Octree<Cube> chunk : chunks) { if (chunk.getId() < 0) { // generate an id for the chunk to be able to call it later chunk.setId(glGenLists(1)); } glNewList(chunk.getId(), GL_COMPILE); glBegin(GL_QUADS); faces += renderChunk(chunk); glEnd(); glEndList(); } } Where my renderChunk method is: private int renderChunk(Octree<Cube> node) { // keep track of the number of visible faces in this chunk int faces = 0; if (!node.isEmpty()) { if (node.isLeaf()) { faces += renderItem(node); } List<Octree<Cube>> children = node.getChildren(); if (children != null && !children.isEmpty()) { for (Octree<Cube> child : children) { faces += renderChunk(child); } } return faces; } Where my renderItem method is the following: private int renderItem(Octree<Cube> node) { Cube cube = node.getItem(-1, -1, -1); int faces = 0; float x = node.getPosition().x; float y = node.getPosition().y; float z = node.getPosition().z; float size = cube.getSize(); Vector3f point1 = new Vector3f(-size + x, -size + y, size + z); Vector3f point2 = new Vector3f(-size + x, size + y, size + z); Vector3f point3 = new Vector3f(size + x, size + y, size + z); Vector3f point4 = new Vector3f(size + x, -size + y, size + z); Vector3f point5 = new Vector3f(-size + x, -size + y, -size + z); Vector3f point6 = new Vector3f(-size + x, size + y, -size + z); Vector3f point7 = new Vector3f(size + x, size + y, -size + z); Vector3f point8 = new Vector3f(size + x, -size + y, -size + z); TextureCoordinates tc = textureManager.getTextureCoordinates(cube.getCubeType()); // front face if (cube.isVisible(CubeSide.FRONT)) { faces++; glTexCoord2f(TEXTURE_U_COORDINATES[tc.u], TEXTURE_V_COORDINATES[tc.v]); glVertex3f(point1.x, point1.y, point1.z); glTexCoord2f(TEXTURE_U_COORDINATES[tc.u + 1], TEXTURE_V_COORDINATES[tc.v]); glVertex3f(point4.x, point4.y, point4.z); glTexCoord2f(TEXTURE_U_COORDINATES[tc.u + 1], TEXTURE_V_COORDINATES[tc.v + 1]); glVertex3f(point3.x, point3.y, point3.z); glTexCoord2f(TEXTURE_U_COORDINATES[tc.u], TEXTURE_V_COORDINATES[tc.v + 1]); glVertex3f(point2.x, point2.y, point2.z); } // back face if (cube.isVisible(CubeSide.BACK)) { faces++; glTexCoord2f(TEXTURE_U_COORDINATES[tc.u + 1], TEXTURE_V_COORDINATES[tc.v]); glVertex3f(point5.x, point5.y, point5.z); glTexCoord2f(TEXTURE_U_COORDINATES[tc.u + 1], TEXTURE_V_COORDINATES[tc.v + 1]); glVertex3f(point6.x, point6.y, point6.z); glTexCoord2f(TEXTURE_U_COORDINATES[tc.u], TEXTURE_V_COORDINATES[tc.v + 1]); glVertex3f(point7.x, point7.y, point7.z); glTexCoord2f(TEXTURE_U_COORDINATES[tc.u], TEXTURE_V_COORDINATES[tc.v]); glVertex3f(point8.x, point8.y, point8.z); } // left face if (cube.isVisible(CubeSide.SIDE_LEFT)) { faces++; glTexCoord2f(TEXTURE_U_COORDINATES[tc.u], TEXTURE_V_COORDINATES[tc.v]); glVertex3f(point5.x, point5.y, point5.z); glTexCoord2f(TEXTURE_U_COORDINATES[tc.u + 1], TEXTURE_V_COORDINATES[tc.v]); glVertex3f(point1.x, point1.y, point1.z); glTexCoord2f(TEXTURE_U_COORDINATES[tc.u + 1], TEXTURE_V_COORDINATES[tc.v + 1]); glVertex3f(point2.x, point2.y, point2.z); glTexCoord2f(TEXTURE_U_COORDINATES[tc.u], TEXTURE_V_COORDINATES[tc.v + 1]); glVertex3f(point6.x, point6.y, point6.z); } // ETC ETC return faces; } When all this is done, I simply render my lists every frame, like this: public void render(ChunkManager chunkManager) { glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, textureManager.getCubeTextureId()); // load all chunks from the tree List<Octree<Cube>> chunks = chunkManager.getTree().getAllItems(); for (Octree<Cube> chunk : chunks) { if (frustum.cubeInFrustum(chunk.getPosition(), chunk.getSize() / 2)) { glCallList(chunk.getId()); } } } I don't know if anyone is willing to go through all of this code or maybe you can spot the problem right away, but that is basically the problem, and I can't find a solution :-) Thanks for reading and any help is appreciated!

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