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  • Mysql 100% CPU + Slow query

    - by felipeclopes
    I'm using the RDS database from amazon with a some very big tables, and yesterday I started to face 100% CPU utilisation on the server and a bunch of slow query logs that were not happening before. I tried to check the queries that were running and faced this result from the explain command +----+-------------+-------------------------------+--------+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+---------------------------------------+---------+-----------------------------------------------------------------+------+----------------------------------------------+ | id | select_type | table | type | possible_keys | key | key_len | ref | rows | Extra | +----+-------------+-------------------------------+--------+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+---------------------------------------+---------+-----------------------------------------------------------------+------+----------------------------------------------+ | 1 | SIMPLE | businesses | const | PRIMARY | PRIMARY | 4 | const | 1 | Using index; Using temporary; Using filesort | | 1 | SIMPLE | activities_businesses | ref | PRIMARY,index_activities_users_on_business_id,index_tweets_users_on_tweet_id_and_business_id | index_activities_users_on_business_id | 9 | const | 2252 | Using index condition; Using where | | 1 | SIMPLE | activities_b_taggings_975e9c4 | ref | taggings_idx | taggings_idx | 782 | const,myapp_production.activities_businesses.id,const | 1 | Using index condition; Using where | | 1 | SIMPLE | activities | eq_ref | PRIMARY,index_activities_on_created_at | PRIMARY | 8 | myapp_production.activities_businesses.activity_id | 1 | Using where | +----+-------------+-------------------------------+--------+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+---------------------------------------+---------+-----------------------------------------------------------------+------+----------------------------------------------+ Also checkin in the process list, I got something like this: +----+-----------------+-------------------------------------+----------------------------+---------+------+--------------+------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Id | User | Host | db | Command | Time | State | Info | +----+-----------------+-------------------------------------+----------------------------+---------+------+--------------+------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | 1 | my_app | my_ip:57152 | my_app_production | Sleep | 0 | | NULL | | 2 | my_app | my_ip:57153 | my_app_production | Sleep | 2 | | NULL | | 3 | rdsadmin | localhost:49441 | NULL | Sleep | 9 | | NULL | | 6 | my_app | my_other_ip:47802 | my_app_production | Sleep | 242 | | NULL | | 7 | my_app | my_other_ip:47807 | my_app_production | Query | 231 | Sending data | SELECT my_fields... | | 8 | my_app | my_other_ip:47809 | my_app_production | Query | 231 | Sending data | SELECT my_fields... | | 9 | my_app | my_other_ip:47810 | my_app_production | Query | 231 | Sending data | SELECT my_fields... | | 10 | my_app | my_other_ip:47811 | my_app_production | Query | 231 | Sending data | SELECT my_fields... | | 11 | my_app | my_other_ip:47813 | my_app_production | Query | 231 | Sending data | SELECT my_fields... | ... So based on the numbers, it looks like there is no reason to have a slow query, since the worst execution plan is the one that goes through 2k rows which is not much. Edit 1 Another information that might be useful is the slow query_log SET timestamp=1401457485; SELECT my_query... # User@Host: myapp[myapp] @ ip-10-195-55-233.ec2.internal [IP] Id: 435 # Query_time: 95.830497 Lock_time: 0.000178 Rows_sent: 0 Rows_examined: 1129387 Edit 2 After profiling, I got this result. The result have approximately 250 rows with two columns each. +----------------------+----------+ | state | duration | +----------------------+----------+ | Sending data | 272 | | removing tmp table | 0 | | optimizing | 0 | | Creating sort index | 0 | | init | 0 | | cleaning up | 0 | | executing | 0 | | checking permissions | 0 | | freeing items | 0 | | Creating tmp table | 0 | | query end | 0 | | statistics | 0 | | end | 0 | | System lock | 0 | | Opening tables | 0 | | logging slow query | 0 | | Sorting result | 0 | | starting | 0 | | closing tables | 0 | | preparing | 0 | +----------------------+----------+ Edit 3 Adding query as requested SELECT activities.share_count, activities.created_at FROM `activities_businesses` INNER JOIN `businesses` ON `businesses`.`id` = `activities_businesses`.`business_id` INNER JOIN `activities` ON `activities`.`id` = `activities_businesses`.`activity_id` JOIN taggings activities_b_taggings_975e9c4 ON activities_b_taggings_975e9c4.taggable_id = activities_businesses.id AND activities_b_taggings_975e9c4.taggable_type = 'ActivitiesBusiness' AND activities_b_taggings_975e9c4.tag_id = 104 AND activities_b_taggings_975e9c4.created_at >= '2014-04-30 13:36:44' WHERE ( businesses.id = 1 ) AND ( activities.created_at > '2014-04-30 13:36:44' ) AND ( activities.created_at < '2014-05-30 12:27:03' ) ORDER BY activities.created_at; Edit 4 There may be a chance that the indexes are not being applied due to difference in column type between the taggings and the activities_businesses, on the taggable_id column. mysql> SHOW COLUMNS FROM activities_businesses; +-------------+------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+ | Field | Type | Null | Key | Default | Extra | +-------------+------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+ | id | int(11) | NO | PRI | NULL | auto_increment | | activity_id | bigint(20) | YES | MUL | NULL | | | business_id | bigint(20) | YES | MUL | NULL | | +-------------+------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+ 3 rows in set (0.01 sec) mysql> SHOW COLUMNS FROM taggings; +---------------+--------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+ | Field | Type | Null | Key | Default | Extra | +---------------+--------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+ | id | int(11) | NO | PRI | NULL | auto_increment | | tag_id | int(11) | YES | MUL | NULL | | | taggable_id | bigint(20) | YES | | NULL | | | taggable_type | varchar(255) | YES | | NULL | | | tagger_id | int(11) | YES | | NULL | | | tagger_type | varchar(255) | YES | | NULL | | | context | varchar(128) | YES | | NULL | | | created_at | datetime | YES | | NULL | | +---------------+--------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+ So it is examining way more rows than it shows in the explain query, probably because some indexes are not being applied. Do you guys can help m with that?

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  • What does the `forall` keyword in Haskell/GHC do?

    - by JUST MY correct OPINION
    I've been banging my head on this one for (quite literally) years now. I'm beginning to kinda/sorta understand how the foreach keyword is used in so-called "existential types" like this: data ShowBox = forall s. Show s => SB s (This despite the confusingly-worded explanations of it in the fragments found all around the web.) This is only a subset, however, of how foreach is used and I simply cannot wrap my mind around its use in things like this: runST :: forall a. (forall s. ST s a) -> a Or explaining why these are different: foo :: (forall a. a -> a) -> (Char,Bool) bar :: forall a. ((a -> a) -> (Char, Bool)) Or the whole RankNTypes stuff that breaks my brain when "explained" in a way that makes me want to do that Samuel L. Jackson thing from Pulp Fiction. (Don't follow that link if you're easily offended by strong language.) The problem, really, is that I'm a dullard. I can't fathom the chicken scratchings (some call them "formulae") of the elite mathematicians that created this language seeing as my university years are over two decades behind me and I never actually had to put what I learnt into use in practice. I also tend to prefer clear, jargon-free English rather than the kinds of language which are normal in academic environments. Most of the explanations I attempt to read on this (the ones I can find through search engines) have these problems: They're incomplete. They explain one part of the use of this keyword (like "existential types") which makes me feel happy until I read code that uses it in a completely different way (like runST, foo and bar above). They're densely packed with assumptions that I've read the latest in whatever branch of discrete math, category theory or abstract algebra is popular this week. (If I never read the words "consult the paper whatever for details of implementation" again, it will be too soon.) They're written in ways that frequently turn even simple concepts into tortuously twisted and fractured grammar and semantics. (I suspect that the last two items are the biggest problem. I wouldn't know, though, since I'm too much a dullard to comprehend them.) It's been asked why Haskell never really caught on in industry. I suspect, in my own humble, unintelligent way, that my experience in figuring out one stupid little keyword -- a keyword that is increasingly ubiquitous in the libraries being written these days -- are also part of the answer to that question. It's hard for a language to catch on when even its individual keywords cause years-long quests to comprehend. Years-long quests which end in failure. So... On to the actual question. Can anybody completely explain the foreach keyword in clear, plain English (or, if it exists somewhere, point to such a clear explanation which I've missed) that doesn't assume I'm a mathematician steeped in the jargon?

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  • Custom string class (C++)

    - by Sanctus2099
    Hey guys. I'm trying to write my own C++ String class for educational and need purposes. The first thing is that I don't know that much about operators and that's why I want to learn them. I started writing my class but when I run it it blocks the program but does not do any crash. Take a look at the following code please before reading further: class CString { private: char* cstr; public: CString(); CString(char* str); CString(CString& str); ~CString(); operator char*(); operator const char*(); CString operator+(const CString& q)const; CString operator=(const CString& q); }; First of all I'm not so sure I declared everything right. I tried googleing about it but all the tutorials about overloading explain the basic ideea which is very simple but lack to explain how and when each thing is called. For instance in my = operator the program calls CString(CString& str); but I have no ideea why. I have also attached the cpp file below: CString::CString() { cstr=0; } CString::CString(char *str) { cstr=new char[strlen(str)]; strcpy(cstr,str); } CString::CString(CString& q) { if(this==&q) return; cstr = new char[strlen(q.cstr)+1]; strcpy(cstr,q.cstr); } CString::~CString() { if(cstr) delete[] cstr; } CString::operator char*() { return cstr; } CString::operator const char* () { return cstr; } CString CString::operator +(const CString &q) const { CString s; s.cstr = new char[strlen(cstr)+strlen(q.cstr)+1]; strcpy(s.cstr,cstr); strcat(s.cstr,q.cstr); return s; } CString CString::operator =(const CString &q) { if(this!=&q) { if(cstr) delete[] cstr; cstr = new char[strlen(q.cstr)+1]; strcpy(cstr,q.cstr); } return *this; } For testing I used a code just as simple as this CString a = CString("Hello") + CString(" World"); printf(a); I tried debugging it but at a point I get lost. First it calls the constructor 2 times for "hello" and for " world". Then it get's in the + operator which is fine. Then it calls the constructor for the empty string. After that it get's into "CString(CString& str)" and now I'm lost. Why is this happening? After this I noticed my string containing "Hello World" is in the destructor (a few times in a row). Again I'm very puzzeled. After converting again from char* to Cstring and back and forth it stops. It never get's into the = operator but neither does it go further. printf(a) is never reached. I use VisualStudio 2010 for this but it's basically just standard c++ code and thus I don't think it should make that much of a difference

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  • IE7 rendering bug: Heading before a floated list

    - by Tomalak
    Can somebody please explain this IE7 bug to me? It occurs in Standards and Quirks mode rendering, it does not occur in Firefox, Chrome or IE8 (though switching the rendering engine via IE8 developer tools will provoke it). Here's the HTML to reproduce the behavior: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"> <html> <head> <title>Test</title> <style type="text/css"> /* h1 { margin: 0px; } */ ul { padding: 0; margin: 0; list-style-type: none; } ul li { float: left; width: 140px; padding: 3px; } div { clear: left; padding: 3px; } div, li { background-color: OrangeRed; } /* ul { border: 1px solid blue; } */ </style> </head> <body> <h1>Heading 1</h1> <ul class="t"> <li>bla 1</li><li>bla 2</li><li>bla 3</li> </ul> <div>yada</div> </body> </html> This renders a floated <ul> above a <div> (supposed to be a tabbed user interface). There's an unexplained gap between the <div> and the <ul>. Now do one of the following: Uncomment the CSS rule for <h1>. The gap disappears and the list is rendered tight to the <div>, but also very close to the <h1>. Alternatively, uncomment the CSS rule for <ul>. Now a narrow blue border is rendered above the <ul>, but the gap disappears. My questions: How can the <h1> margin (I suppose any block level element with a defined margin will do) affect the space below the list? Can I prevent this from happening without having to set header margins to 0 or messing with the <ul> borders (setting border-width: 0; does not work BTW)? I suppose it is connected to the <ul> having no width because it has only floated children. Maybe someone with more insight into IE7 peculiarities than I have can explain what the rendering engine is doing here. Thanks!

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  • Why is SQLite3 using covering indices instead of the indices I created?

    - by Geoff
    I have an extremely large database (contacts has ~3 billion entries, people has ~280 million entries, and the other tables have a negligible number of entries). Most other queries I've run are really fast. However, I've encountered a more complicated query that's really slow. I'm wondering if there's any way to speed this up. First of all, here is my schema: CREATE TABLE activities (id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, name TEXT NOT NULL); CREATE TABLE contacts ( id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, person1_id INTEGER NOT NULL, person2_id INTEGER NOT NULL, duration REAL NOT NULL, -- hours activity_id INTEGER NOT NULL -- FOREIGN_KEY(person1_id) REFERENCES people(id), -- FOREIGN_KEY(person2_id) REFERENCES people(id) ); CREATE TABLE people ( id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, state_id INTEGER NOT NULL, county_id INTEGER NOT NULL, age INTEGER NOT NULL, gender TEXT NOT NULL, -- M or F income INTEGER NOT NULL -- FOREIGN_KEY(state_id) REFERENCES states(id) ); CREATE TABLE states ( id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, name TEXT NOT NULL, abbreviation TEXT NOT NULL ); CREATE INDEX activities_name_index on activities(name); CREATE INDEX contacts_activity_id_index on contacts(activity_id); CREATE INDEX contacts_duration_index on contacts(duration); CREATE INDEX contacts_person1_id_index on contacts(person1_id); CREATE INDEX contacts_person2_id_index on contacts(person2_id); CREATE INDEX people_age_index on people(age); CREATE INDEX people_county_id_index on people(county_id); CREATE INDEX people_gender_index on people(gender); CREATE INDEX people_income_index on people(income); CREATE INDEX people_state_id_index on people(state_id); CREATE INDEX states_abbreviation_index on states(abbreviation); CREATE INDEX states_name_index on states(name); Note that I've created an index on every column in the database. I don't care about the size of the database; speed is all I care about. Here's an example of a query that, as expected, runs almost instantly: SELECT count(*) FROM people, states WHERE people.state_id=states.id and states.abbreviation='IA'; Here's the troublesome query: SELECT * FROM contacts WHERE rowid IN (SELECT contacts.rowid FROM contacts, people, states WHERE contacts.person1_id=people.id AND people.state_id=states.id AND states.name='Kansas' INTERSECT SELECT contacts.rowid FROM contacts, people, states WHERE contacts.person2_id=people.id AND people.state_id=states.id AND states.name='Missouri'); Now, what I think would happen is that each subquery would use each relevant index I've created to speed this up. However, when I show the query plan, I see this: sqlite> EXPLAIN QUERY PLAN SELECT * FROM contacts WHERE rowid IN (SELECT contacts.rowid FROM contacts, people, states WHERE contacts.person1_id=people.id AND people.state_id=states.id AND states.name='Kansas' INTERSECT SELECT contacts.rowid FROM contacts, people, states WHERE contacts.person2_id=people.id AND people.state_id=states.id AND states.name='Missouri'); 0|0|0|SEARCH TABLE contacts USING INTEGER PRIMARY KEY (rowid=?) (~25 rows) 0|0|0|EXECUTE LIST SUBQUERY 1 2|0|2|SEARCH TABLE states USING COVERING INDEX states_name_index (name=?) (~1 rows) 2|1|1|SEARCH TABLE people USING COVERING INDEX people_state_id_index (state_id=?) (~5569556 rows) 2|2|0|SEARCH TABLE contacts USING COVERING INDEX contacts_person1_id_index (person1_id=?) (~12 rows) 3|0|2|SEARCH TABLE states USING COVERING INDEX states_name_index (name=?) (~1 rows) 3|1|1|SEARCH TABLE people USING COVERING INDEX people_state_id_index (state_id=?) (~5569556 rows) 3|2|0|SEARCH TABLE contacts USING COVERING INDEX contacts_person2_id_index (person2_id=?) (~12 rows) 1|0|0|COMPOUND SUBQUERIES 2 AND 3 USING TEMP B-TREE (INTERSECT) In fact, if I show the query plan for the first query I posted, I get this: sqlite> EXPLAIN QUERY PLAN SELECT count(*) FROM people, states WHERE people.state_id=states.id and states.abbreviation='IA'; 0|0|1|SEARCH TABLE states USING COVERING INDEX states_abbreviation_index (abbreviation=?) (~1 rows) 0|1|0|SEARCH TABLE people USING COVERING INDEX people_state_id_index (state_id=?) (~5569556 rows) Why is SQLite using covering indices instead of the indices I created? Shouldn't the search in the people table be able to happen in log(n) time given state_id which in turn is found in log(n) time?

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  • How to make MySQL utilize available system resources, or find "the real problem"?

    - by anonymous coward
    This is a MySQL 5.0.26 server, running on SuSE Enterprise 10. This may be a Serverfault question. The web user interface that uses these particular queries (below) is showing sometimes 30+, even up to 120+ seconds at the worst, to generate the pages involved. On development, when the queries are run alone, they take up to 20 seconds on the first run (with no query cache enabled) but anywhere from 2 to 7 seconds after that - I assume because the tables and indexes involved have been placed into ram. From what I can tell, the longest load times are caused by Read/Update Locking. These are MyISAM tables. So it looks like a long update comes in, followed by a couple 7 second queries, and they're just adding up. And I'm fine with that explanation. What I'm not fine with is that MySQL doesn't appear to be utilizing the hardware it's on, and while the bottleneck seems to be the database, I can't understand why. I would say "throw more hardware at it", but we did and it doesn't appear to have changed the situation. Viewing a 'top' during the slowest times never shows much cpu or memory utilization by mysqld, as if the server is having no trouble at all - but then, why are the queries taking so long? How can I make MySQL use the crap out of this hardware, or find out what I'm doing wrong? Extra Details: On the "Memory Health" tab in the MySQL Administrator (for Windows), the Key Buffer is less than 1/8th used - so all the indexes should be in RAM. I can provide a screen shot of any graphs that might help. So desperate to fix this issue. Suffice it to say, there is legacy code "generating" these queries, and they're pretty much stuck the way they are. I have tried every combination of Indexes on the tables involved, but any suggestions are welcome. Here's the current Create Table statement from development (the 'experimental' key I have added, seems to help a little, for the example query only): CREATE TABLE `registration_task` ( `id` varchar(36) NOT NULL default '', `date_entered` datetime NOT NULL default '0000-00-00 00:00:00', `date_modified` datetime NOT NULL default '0000-00-00 00:00:00', `assigned_user_id` varchar(36) default NULL, `modified_user_id` varchar(36) default NULL, `created_by` varchar(36) default NULL, `name` varchar(80) NOT NULL default '', `status` varchar(255) default NULL, `date_due` date default NULL, `time_due` time default NULL, `date_start` date default NULL, `time_start` time default NULL, `parent_id` varchar(36) NOT NULL default '', `priority` varchar(255) NOT NULL default '9', `description` text, `order_number` int(11) default '1', `task_number` int(11) default NULL, `depends_on_id` varchar(36) default NULL, `milestone_flag` varchar(255) default NULL, `estimated_effort` int(11) default NULL, `actual_effort` int(11) default NULL, `utilization` int(11) default '100', `percent_complete` int(11) default '0', `deleted` tinyint(1) NOT NULL default '0', `wf_task_id` varchar(36) default '0', `reg_field` varchar(8) default '', `date_offset` int(11) default '0', `date_source` varchar(10) default '', `date_completed` date default '0000-00-00', `completed_id` varchar(36) default NULL, `original_name` varchar(80) default NULL, PRIMARY KEY (`id`), KEY `idx_reg_task_p` (`deleted`,`parent_id`), KEY `By_Assignee` (`assigned_user_id`,`deleted`), KEY `status_assignee` (`status`,`deleted`), KEY `experimental` (`deleted`,`status`,`assigned_user_id`,`parent_id`,`date_due`) ) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 And one of the ridiculous queries in question: SELECT users.user_name assigned_user_name, registration.FIELD001 parent_name, registration_task.status status, registration_task.date_modified date_modified, registration_task.date_due date_due, registration.FIELD240 assigned_wf, if(LENGTH(registration_task.description)>0,1,0) has_description, registration_task.* FROM registration_task LEFT JOIN users ON registration_task.assigned_user_id=users.id LEFT JOIN registration ON registration_task.parent_id=registration.id where (registration_task.status != 'Completed' AND registration.FIELD001 LIKE '%' AND registration_task.name LIKE '%' AND registration.FIELD060 LIKE 'GN001472%') AND registration_task.deleted=0 ORDER BY date_due asc LIMIT 0,20; my.cnf - '[mysqld]' section. [mysqld] port = 3306 socket = /var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock skip-locking key_buffer = 384M max_allowed_packet = 100M table_cache = 2048 sort_buffer_size = 2M net_buffer_length = 100M read_buffer_size = 2M read_rnd_buffer_size = 160M myisam_sort_buffer_size = 128M query_cache_size = 16M query_cache_limit = 1M EXPLAIN above query, without additional index: +----+-------------+-------------------+--------+--------------------------------+----------------+---------+------------------------------------------------+---------+-----------------------------+ | id | select_type | table | type | possible_keys | key | key_len | ref | rows | Extra | +----+-------------+-------------------+--------+--------------------------------+----------------+---------+------------------------------------------------+---------+-----------------------------+ | 1 | SIMPLE | registration_task | ref | idx_reg_task_p,status_assignee | idx_reg_task_p | 1 | const | 1067354 | Using where; Using filesort | | 1 | SIMPLE | registration | eq_ref | PRIMARY,gbl | PRIMARY | 8 | sugarcrm401.registration_task.parent_id | 1 | Using where | | 1 | SIMPLE | users | ref | PRIMARY | PRIMARY | 38 | sugarcrm401.registration_task.assigned_user_id | 1 | | +----+-------------+-------------------+--------+--------------------------------+----------------+---------+------------------------------------------------+---------+-----------------------------+ EXPLAIN above query, with 'experimental' index: +----+-------------+-------------------+--------+-----------------------------------------------------------+------------------+---------+------------------------------------------------+--------+-----------------------------+ | id | select_type | table | type | possible_keys | key | key_len | ref | rows | Extra | +----+-------------+-------------------+--------+-----------------------------------------------------------+------------------+---------+------------------------------------------------+--------+-----------------------------+ | 1 | SIMPLE | registration_task | range | idx_reg_task_p,status_assignee,NewIndex1,tcg_experimental | tcg_experimental | 259 | NULL | 103345 | Using where; Using filesort | | 1 | SIMPLE | registration | eq_ref | PRIMARY,gbl | PRIMARY | 8 | sugarcrm401.registration_task.parent_id | 1 | Using where | | 1 | SIMPLE | users | ref | PRIMARY | PRIMARY | 38 | sugarcrm401.registration_task.assigned_user_id | 1 | | +----+-------------+-------------------+--------+-----------------------------------------------------------+------------------+---------+------------------------------------------------+--------+-----------------------------+

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  • Calculate the number of ways to roll a certain number

    - by helloworld
    I'm a high school Computer Science student, and today I was given a problem to: Program Description: There is a belief among dice players that in throwing three dice a ten is easier to get than a nine. Can you write a program that proves or disproves this belief? Have the computer compute all the possible ways three dice can be thrown: 1 + 1 + 1, 1 + 1 + 2, 1 + 1 + 3, etc. Add up each of these possibilities and see how many give nine as the result and how many give ten. If more give ten, then the belief is proven. I quickly worked out a brute force solution, as such int sum,tens,nines; tens=nines=0; for(int i=1;i<=6;i++){ for(int j=1;j<=6;j++){ for(int k=1;k<=6;k++){ sum=i+j+k; //Ternary operators are fun! tens+=((sum==10)?1:0); nines+=((sum==9)?1:0); } } } System.out.println("There are "+tens+" ways to roll a 10"); System.out.println("There are "+nines+" ways to roll a 9"); Which works just fine, and a brute force solution is what the teacher wanted us to do. However, it doesn't scale, and I am trying to find a way to make an algorithm that can calculate the number of ways to roll n dice to get a specific number. Therefore, I started generating the number of ways to get each sum with n dice. With 1 die, there is obviously 1 solution for each. I then calculated, through brute force, the combinations with 2 and 3 dice. These are for two: There are 1 ways to roll a 2 There are 2 ways to roll a 3 There are 3 ways to roll a 4 There are 4 ways to roll a 5 There are 5 ways to roll a 6 There are 6 ways to roll a 7 There are 5 ways to roll a 8 There are 4 ways to roll a 9 There are 3 ways to roll a 10 There are 2 ways to roll a 11 There are 1 ways to roll a 12 Which looks straightforward enough; it can be calculated with a simple linear absolute value function. But then things start getting trickier. With 3: There are 1 ways to roll a 3 There are 3 ways to roll a 4 There are 6 ways to roll a 5 There are 10 ways to roll a 6 There are 15 ways to roll a 7 There are 21 ways to roll a 8 There are 25 ways to roll a 9 There are 27 ways to roll a 10 There are 27 ways to roll a 11 There are 25 ways to roll a 12 There are 21 ways to roll a 13 There are 15 ways to roll a 14 There are 10 ways to roll a 15 There are 6 ways to roll a 16 There are 3 ways to roll a 17 There are 1 ways to roll a 18 So I look at that, and I think: Cool, Triangular numbers! However, then I notice those pesky 25s and 27s. So it's obviously not triangular numbers, but still some polynomial expansion, since it's symmetric. So I take to Google, and I come across this page that goes into some detail about how to do this with math. It is fairly easy(albeit long) to find this using repeated derivatives or expansion, but it would be much harder to program that for me. I didn't quite understand the second and third answers, since I have never encountered that notation or those concepts in my math studies before. Could someone please explain how I could write a program to do this, or explain the solutions given on that page, for my own understanding of combinatorics? EDIT: I'm looking for a mathematical way to solve this, that gives an exact theoretical number, not by simulating dice

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  • RFC822: email address validation with regular expressions

    - by every_answer_gets_a_point
    as you know, this is how we validate an email address: (?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*(?:(?:(?:[^()<>@,;:\\".\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t] )+|\Z|(?=[\["()<>@,;:\\".\[\]]))|"(?:[^\"\r\\]|\\.|(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t]))*"(?:(?: \r\n)?[ \t])*)(?:\.(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*(?:[^()<>@,;:\\".\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:( ?:\r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z|(?=[\["()<>@,;:\\".\[\]]))|"(?:[^\"\r\\]|\\.|(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t]))*"(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*))*@(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*(?:[^()<>@,;:\\".\[\] \000-\0 31]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z|(?=[\["()<>@,;:\\".\[\]]))|\[([^\[\]\r\\]|\\.)*\ ](?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*)(?:\.(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*(?:[^()<>@,;:\\".\[\] \000-\031]+ (?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z|(?=[\["()<>@,;:\\".\[\]]))|\[([^\[\]\r\\]|\\.)*\](?: (?:\r\n)?[ \t])*))*|(?:[^()<>@,;:\\".\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z |(?=[\["()<>@,;:\\".\[\]]))|"(?:[^\"\r\\]|\\.|(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t]))*"(?:(?:\r\n) ?[ \t])*)*\<(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*(?:@(?:[^()<>@,;:\\".\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?:\ r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z|(?=[\["()<>@,;:\\".\[\]]))|\[([^\[\]\r\\]|\\.)*\](?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*)(?:\.(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*(?:[^()<>@,;:\\".\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n) ?[ \t])+|\Z|(?=[\["()<>@,;:\\".\[\]]))|\[([^\[\]\r\\]|\\.)*\](?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t] )*))*(?:,@(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*(?:[^()<>@,;:\\".\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z|(?=[\["()<>@,;:\\".\[\]]))|\[([^\[\]\r\\]|\\.)*\](?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])* )(?:\.(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*(?:[^()<>@,;:\\".\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t] )+|\Z|(?=[\["()<>@,;:\\".\[\]]))|\[([^\[\]\r\\]|\\.)*\](?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*))*) *:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*)?(?:[^()<>@,;:\\".\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])+ |\Z|(?=[\["()<>@,;:\\".\[\]]))|"(?:[^\"\r\\]|\\.|(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t]))*"(?:(?:\r \n)?[ \t])*)(?:\.(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*(?:[^()<>@,;:\\".\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?: \r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z|(?=[\["()<>@,;:\\".\[\]]))|"(?:[^\"\r\\]|\\.|(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t ]))*"(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*))*@(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*(?:[^()<>@,;:\\".\[\] \000-\031 ]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z|(?=[\["()<>@,;:\\".\[\]]))|\[([^\[\]\r\\]|\\.)*\]( ?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*)(?:\.(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*(?:[^()<>@,;:\\".\[\] \000-\031]+(? :(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z|(?=[\["()<>@,;:\\".\[\]]))|\[([^\[\]\r\\]|\\.)*\](?:(? :\r\n)?[ \t])*))*\>(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*)|(?:[^()<>@,;:\\".\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(? :(?:\r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z|(?=[\["()<>@,;:\\".\[\]]))|"(?:[^\"\r\\]|\\.|(?:(?:\r\n)? [ \t]))*"(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*)*:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*(?:(?:(?:[^()<>@,;:\\".\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z|(?=[\["()<>@,;:\\".\[\]]))|"(?:[^\"\r\\]| \\.|(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t]))*"(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*)(?:\.(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*(?:[^()<> @,;:\\".\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z|(?=[\["()<>@,;:\\".\[\]]))|" (?:[^\"\r\\]|\\.|(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t]))*"(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*))*@(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t] )*(?:[^()<>@,;:\\".\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z|(?=[\["()<>@,;:\\ ".\[\]]))|\[([^\[\]\r\\]|\\.)*\](?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*)(?:\.(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*(? :[^()<>@,;:\\".\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z|(?=[\["()<>@,;:\\".\[ \]]))|\[([^\[\]\r\\]|\\.)*\](?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*))*|(?:[^()<>@,;:\\".\[\] \000- \031]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z|(?=[\["()<>@,;:\\".\[\]]))|"(?:[^\"\r\\]|\\.|( ?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t]))*"(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*)*\<(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*(?:@(?:[^()<>@,; :\\".\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z|(?=[\["()<>@,;:\\".\[\]]))|\[([ ^\[\]\r\\]|\\.)*\](?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*)(?:\.(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*(?:[^()<>@,;:\\" .\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z|(?=[\["()<>@,;:\\".\[\]]))|\[([^\[\ ]\r\\]|\\.)*\](?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*))*(?:,@(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*(?:[^()<>@,;:\\".\ [\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z|(?=[\["()<>@,;:\\".\[\]]))|\[([^\[\]\ r\\]|\\.)*\](?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*)(?:\.(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*(?:[^()<>@,;:\\".\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z|(?=[\["()<>@,;:\\".\[\]]))|\[([^\[\]\r\\] |\\.)*\](?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*))*)*:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*)?(?:[^()<>@,;:\\".\[\] \0 00-\031]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z|(?=[\["()<>@,;:\\".\[\]]))|"(?:[^\"\r\\]|\\ .|(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t]))*"(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*)(?:\.(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*(?:[^()<>@, ;:\\".\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z|(?=[\["()<>@,;:\\".\[\]]))|"(? :[^\"\r\\]|\\.|(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t]))*"(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*))*@(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])* (?:[^()<>@,;:\\".\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z|(?=[\["()<>@,;:\\". \[\]]))|\[([^\[\]\r\\]|\\.)*\](?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*)(?:\.(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*(?:[ ^()<>@,;:\\".\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z|(?=[\["()<>@,;:\\".\[\] ]))|\[([^\[\]\r\\]|\\.)*\](?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*))*\>(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*)(?:,\s*( ?:(?:[^()<>@,;:\\".\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z|(?=[\["()<>@,;:\\ ".\[\]]))|"(?:[^\"\r\\]|\\.|(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t]))*"(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*)(?:\.(?:( ?:\r\n)?[ \t])*(?:[^()<>@,;:\\".\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z|(?=[ \["()<>@,;:\\".\[\]]))|"(?:[^\"\r\\]|\\.|(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t]))*"(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t ])*))*@(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*(?:[^()<>@,;:\\".\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t ])+|\Z|(?=[\["()<>@,;:\\".\[\]]))|\[([^\[\]\r\\]|\\.)*\](?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*)(? :\.(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*(?:[^()<>@,;:\\".\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])+| \Z|(?=[\["()<>@,;:\\".\[\]]))|\[([^\[\]\r\\]|\\.)*\](?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*))*|(?: [^()<>@,;:\\".\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z|(?=[\["()<>@,;:\\".\[\ ]]))|"(?:[^\"\r\\]|\\.|(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t]))*"(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*)*\<(?:(?:\r\n) ?[ \t])*(?:@(?:[^()<>@,;:\\".\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z|(?=[\[" ()<>@,;:\\".\[\]]))|\[([^\[\]\r\\]|\\.)*\](?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*)(?:\.(?:(?:\r\n) ?[ \t])*(?:[^()<>@,;:\\".\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z|(?=[\["()<> @,;:\\".\[\]]))|\[([^\[\]\r\\]|\\.)*\](?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*))*(?:,@(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*(?:[^()<>@,;:\\".\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z|(?=[\["()<>@, ;:\\".\[\]]))|\[([^\[\]\r\\]|\\.)*\](?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*)(?:\.(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t] )*(?:[^()<>@,;:\\".\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z|(?=[\["()<>@,;:\\ ".\[\]]))|\[([^\[\]\r\\]|\\.)*\](?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*))*)*:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*)? (?:[^()<>@,;:\\".\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z|(?=[\["()<>@,;:\\". \[\]]))|"(?:[^\"\r\\]|\\.|(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t]))*"(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*)(?:\.(?:(?: \r\n)?[ \t])*(?:[^()<>@,;:\\".\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z|(?=[\[ "()<>@,;:\\".\[\]]))|"(?:[^\"\r\\]|\\.|(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t]))*"(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t]) *))*@(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*(?:[^()<>@,;:\\".\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t]) +|\Z|(?=[\["()<>@,;:\\".\[\]]))|\[([^\[\]\r\\]|\\.)*\](?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*)(?:\ .(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*(?:[^()<>@,;:\\".\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z |(?=[\["()<>@,;:\\".\[\]]))|\[([^\[\]\r\\]|\\.)*\](?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*))*\>(?:( ?:\r\n)?[ \t])*))*)?;\s*) can you please explain to me what is going on here? are we looking at a string and deciding whether it is an email address? can you at least explain the first line: (?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*(?:(?:(?:[^()<>@,;:\\".\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t]

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  • Which programming idiom to choose for this open source library?

    - by Walkman
    I have an interesting question about which programming idiom is easier to use for beginner developers writing concrete file parsing classes. I'm developing an open source library, which one of the main functionality is to parse plain text files and get structured information from them. All of the files contains the same kind of information, but can be in different formats like XML, plain text (each of them is structured differently), etc. There are a common set of information pieces which is the same in all (e.g. player names, table names, some id numbers) There are formats which are very similar to each other, so it's possible to define a common Base class for them to facilitate concrete format parser implementations. So I can clearly define base classes like SplittablePlainTextFormat, XMLFormat, SeparateSummaryFormat, etc. Each of them hints the kind of structure they aim to parse. All of the concrete classes should have the same information pieces, no matter what. To be useful at all, this library needs to define at least 30-40 of these parsers. A couple of them are more important than others (obviously the more popular formats). Now my question is, which is the best programming idiom to choose to facilitate the development of these concrete classes? Let me explain: I think imperative programming is easy to follow even for beginners, because the flow is fixed, the statements just come one after another. Right now, I have this: class SplittableBaseFormat: def parse(self): "Parses the body of the hand history, but first parse header if not yet parsed." if not self.header_parsed: self.parse_header() self._parse_table() self._parse_players() self._parse_button() self._parse_hero() self._parse_preflop() self._parse_street('flop') self._parse_street('turn') self._parse_street('river') self._parse_showdown() self._parse_pot() self._parse_board() self._parse_winners() self._parse_extra() self.parsed = True So the concrete parser need to define these methods in order in any way they want. Easy to follow, but takes longer to implement each individual concrete parser. So what about declarative? In this case Base classes (like SplittableFormat and XMLFormat) would do the heavy lifting based on regex and line/node number declarations in the concrete class, and concrete classes have no code at all, just line numbers and regexes, maybe other kind of rules. Like this: class SplittableFormat: def parse_table(): "Parses TABLE_REGEX and get information" # set attributes here def parse_players(): "parses PLAYER_REGEX and get information" # set attributes here class SpecificFormat1(SplittableFormat): TABLE_REGEX = re.compile('^(?P<table_name>.*) other info \d* etc') TABLE_LINE = 1 PLAYER_REGEX = re.compile('^Player \d: (?P<player_name>.*) has (.*) in chips.') PLAYER_LINE = 16 class SpecificFormat2(SplittableFormat): TABLE_REGEX = re.compile(r'^Tournament #(\d*) (?P<table_name>.*) other info2 \d* etc') TABLE_LINE = 2 PLAYER_REGEX = re.compile(r'^Seat \d: (?P<player_name>.*) has a stack of (\d*)') PLAYER_LINE = 14 So if I want to make it possible for non-developers to write these classes the way to go seems to be the declarative way, however, I'm almost certain I can't eliminate the declarations of regexes, which clearly needs (senior :D) programmers, so should I care about this at all? Do you think it matters to choose one over another or doesn't matter at all? Maybe if somebody wants to work on this project, they will, if not, no matter which idiom I choose. Can I "convert" non-programmers to help developing these? What are your observations? Other considerations: Imperative will allow any kind of work; there is a simple flow, which they can follow but inside that, they can do whatever they want. It would be harder to force a common interface with imperative because of this arbitrary implementations. Declarative will be much more rigid, which is a bad thing, because formats might change over time without any notice. Declarative will be harder for me to develop and takes longer time. Imperative is already ready to release. I hope a nice discussion will happen in this thread about programming idioms regarding which to use when, which is better for open source projects with different scenarios, which is better for wide range of developer skills. TL; DR: Parsing different file formats (plain text, XML) They contains same kind of information Target audience: non-developers, beginners Regex probably cannot be avoided 30-40 concrete parser classes needed Facilitate coding these concrete classes Which idiom is better?

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  • Performance and Optimization Isn’t Evil

    - by Reed
    Donald Knuth is a fairly amazing guy.  I consider him one of the most influential contributors to computer science of all time.  Unfortunately, most of the time I hear his name, I cringe.  This is because it’s typically somebody quoting a small portion of one of his famous statements on optimization: “premature optimization is the root of all evil.” I mention that this is only a portion of the entire quote, and, as such, I feel that Knuth is being quoted out of context.  Optimization is important.  It is a critical part of every software development effort, and should never be ignored.  A developer who ignores optimization is not a professional.  Every developer should understand optimization – know what to optimize, when to optimize it, and how to think about code in a way that is intelligent and productive from day one. I want to start by discussing my own, personal motivation here.  I recently wrote about a performance issue I ran across, and was slammed by multiple comments and emails that effectively boiled down to: “You’re an idiot.  Premature optimization is the root of all evil.  This doesn’t matter.”  It didn’t matter that I discovered this while measuring in a profiler, and that it was a portion of my code base that can take “many hours to complete.”  Even so, multiple people instantly jump to “it’s premature – it doesn’t matter.” This is a common thread I see.  For example, StackOverflow has many pages of posts with answers that boil down to (mis)quoting Knuth.  In fact, just about any question relating to a performance related issue gets this quote thrown at it immediately – whether it deserves it or not.  That being said, I did receive some positive comments and emails as well.  Many people want to understand how to optimize their code, approaches to take, tools and techniques they can use, and any other advice they can discover. First, lets get back to Knuth – I mentioned before that Knuth is being quoted out of context.  Lets start by looking at the entire quote from his 1974 paper Structured Programming with go to Statements: “We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%. A good programmer will not be lulled into complacency by such reasoning, he will be wise to look carefully at the critical code; but only after that code has been identified.” Ironically, if you read Knuth’s original paper, this statement was made in the middle of a discussion of how Knuth himself had changed how he approaches optimization.  It was never a statement saying “don’t optimize”, but rather, “optimizing intelligently provides huge advantages.”  His approach had three benefits: “a) it doesn’t take long” … “b) the payoff is real”, c) you can “be less efficient in the other parts of my programs, which therefore are more readable and more easily written and debugged.” Looking at Knuth’s premise here, and reading that section of his paper, really leads to a few observations: Optimization is important  “he will be wise to look carefully at the critical code” Normally, 3% of your code – three lines out of every 100 you write, are “critical code” and will require some optimization: “we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%” Optimization, if done well, should not be time consuming: “it doesn’t take long” Optimization, if done correctly, provides real benefits: “the payoff is real” None of this is new information.  People who care about optimization have been discussing this for years – for example, Rico Mariani’s Designing For Performance (a fantastic article) discusses many of the same issues very intelligently. That being said, many developers seem unable or unwilling to consider optimization.  Many others don’t seem to know where to start.  As such, I’m going to spend some time writing about optimization – what is it, how should we think about it, and what can we do to improve our own code.

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  • Logging connection strings

    If you some of the dynamic features of SSIS such as package configurations or property expressions then sometimes trying to work out were your connections are pointing can be a bit confusing. You will work out in the end but it can be useful to explicitly log this information so that when things go wrong you can just review the logs. You may wish to develop this idea further and encapsulate such logging into a custom task, but for now lets keep it simple and use the Script Task. The Script Task code below will raise an Information event showing the name and connection string for a connection. Imports System Imports Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Runtime Public Class ScriptMain Public Sub Main() Dim fireAgain As Boolean ' Get the connection string, we need to know the name of the connection Dim connectionName As String = "My OLE-DB Connection" Dim connectionString As String = Dts.Connections(connectionName).ConnectionString ' Format the message and log it via an information event Dim message As String = String.Format("Connection ""{0}"" has a connection string of ""{1}"".", _ connectionName, connectionString) Dts.Events.FireInformation(0, "Information", message, Nothing, 0, fireAgain) Dts.TaskResult = Dts.Results.Success End Sub End Class Building on that example it is probably more flexible to log all connections in a package as shown in the next example. Imports System Imports Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Runtime Public Class ScriptMain Public Sub Main() Dim fireAgain As Boolean ' Loop through all connections in the package For Each connection As ConnectionManager In Dts.Connections ' Get the connection string and log it via an information event Dim message As String = String.Format("Connection ""{0}"" has a connection string of ""{1}"".", _ connection.Name, connection.ConnectionString) Dts.Events.FireInformation(0, "Information", message, Nothing, 0, fireAgain) Next Dts.TaskResult = Dts.Results.Success End Sub End Class By using the Information event it makes it readily available in the designer, for example the Visual Studio Output window (Ctrl+Alt+O) or the package designer Execution Results tab, and also allows you to readily control the logging by choosing which events to log in the normal way. Now before somebody starts commenting that this is a security risk, I would like to highlight good practice for building connection managers. Firstly the Password property, or any other similar sensitive property is always defined as write-only, and secondly the connection string property only uses the public properties to assemble the connection string value when requested. In other words the connection string will never contain the password. I have seen a couple of cases where this is not true, but that was just bad development by third-parties, you won’t find anything like that in the box from Microsoft.   Whilst writing this code it made me wish that there was a custom log entry that you could just turn on that did this for you, but alas connection managers do not even seem to support custom events. It did however remind me of a very useful event that is often overlooked and fits rather well alongside connection string logging, the Execute SQL Task’s custom ExecuteSQLExecutingQuery event. To quote the help reference Custom Messages for Logging - Provides information about the execution phases of the SQL statement. Log entries are written when the task acquires connection to the database, when the task starts to prepare the SQL statement, and after the execution of the SQL statement is completed. The log entry for the prepare phase includes the SQL statement that the task uses. It is the last part that is so useful, how often have you used an expression to derive a SQL statement and you want to log that to make sure the correct SQL is being returned? You need to turn it one, by default no custom log events are captured, but I’ll refer you to a walkthrough on setting up the logging for ExecuteSQLExecutingQuery by Jamie.

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  • SQL SERVER – A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words – A Collection of Inspiring and Funny Posts by Vinod Kumar

    - by pinaldave
    One of the most popular quotes is: A picture is worth a thousand words. Working on this concept I started a series over my blog called the “Picture Post”. Rather than rambling over tons of material over text, we are trying to give you a capsule mode of the blog in a quick glance. Some of the picture posts already available over my blog are: Correlation of Ego and Work: Ego and Pride most of the times become a hindrance when we work inside a team. Take this cue, the first ever Picture post was published. Simple and easy to understand concept. Would want to say, Ego is the biggest enemy to humans. Read Original Post. Success (Perception Vs Reality): Personally, have always thought success is not something the talented achieve with the opportunity presented to them, but success is developed using the opportunity in hand now. In this fast paced world where success is pre-defined and convoluted by metrics it is hard to understand how complex it can sometimes be. So I took a stab at this concept in a simple way. Read Original Post. Doing Vs Saying: As Einstein would describe, Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Given the amount of information we get, it is difficult to keep track, learn and implement the same. If you were ever reminded of your college days, there will always be 5-6 people doing different things and we naturally try to emulate what they are doing. This could be from competitive exams GMAT, GRE, CAT, Higher-Ed, B-School hunting etc. Rather than saying you are going to do, it is best to do and then say!!! Read Original Picture Post. Your View Vs Management View: Being in the corporate world can be really demanding and we keep asking this question – “Why me?” when the performance appraisal process ends. In this post I just want to ask you one frank opinion – “Are you really self-critical in your assessments?”. If that is the case there shouldn’t be any heartburns or surprises. If you had just one thing to take back, well forget what others are getting but invest time in making yourself better because that is going to take you longer and further in your career. Read Picture Post. Blogging lifecycle for majority: I am happy and fortunate to be in this blog post because this picture post surely doesn’t apply to SQLAuthority where consistency and persistence have been the hallmark of the blog. For the majority others, who have a tendency to start a blog, get into slumber for a while and write saying they want to get back to blogging, the picture post was specifically done for them. Paradox of being someone else: It is always a dream that we want to become somebody and in this process of doing so, we become nobody. In this constant tussle of lost identity we forget to enjoy the moment that is in front of us. I just depicted this using a simple analogy of our constant struggle to get to the other side, just to realize we missed the wonderful moments. Grass is not greener on the other side, but grass is greener where we water the surface. Read Picture Post. And on the lighter side… Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: About Me, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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  • Pie Charts Just Don't Work When Comparing Data - Number 10 of Top 10 Reasons to Never Ever Use a Pie

    - by Tony Wolfram
    When comparing data, which is what a pie chart is for, people have a hard time judging the angles and areas of the multiple pie slices in order to calculate how much bigger one slice is than the others. Pie Charts Don't Work A slice of pie is good for serving up a portion of desert. It's not good for making a judgement about how big the slice is, what percentage of 100 it is, or how it compares to other slices. People have trouble comparing angles and areas to each other. Controlled studies show that people will overestimate the percentage that a pie slice area represents. This is because we have trouble calculating the area based on the space between the two angles that define the slice. This picture shows how a pie chart is useless in determing the largest value when you have to compare pie slices.   You can't compare angles and slice areas to each other. Human perception and cognition is poor when viewing angles and areas and trying to make a mental comparison. Pie charts overload the working memory, forcing the person to make complicated calculations, and at the same time make a decision based on those comparisons. What's the point of showing a pie chart when you want to compare data, except to say, "well, the slices are almost the same, but I'm not really sure which one is bigger, or by how much, or what order they are from largest to smallest. But the colors sure are pretty. Plus, I like round things. Oh,was I suppose to make some important business decision? Sorry." Bad Choices and Bad Decisions Interaction Designers, Graphic Artists, Report Builders, Software Developers, and Executives have all made the decision to use pie charts in their reports, software applications, and dashboards. It was a bad decision. It was a poor choice. There are always better options and choices, yet the designer still made the decision to use a pie chart. I'll expore why people make such poor choices in my upcoming blog entires. (Hint: It has more to do with emotions than with analytical thinking.) I've outlined my opinions and arguments about the evils of using pie charts in "Countdown of Top 10 Reasons to Never Ever Use a Pie Chart." Each of my next 10 blog entries will support these arguments with illustrations, examples, and references to studies. But my goal is not to continuously and endlessly rage against the evils of using pie charts. This blog is not about pie charts. This blog is about understanding why designers choose to use a pie chart. Why, when give better alternatives, and acknowledging the shortcomings of pie charts, do designers over and over again still freely choose to place a pie chart in a report? As an extra treat and parting shot, check out the nice pie chart that Wikipedia uses to illustrate the United States population by state.   Remember, somebody chose to use this pie chart, with all its glorious colors, and post it on Wikipedia for all the world to see. My next blog will give you a better alternative for displaying comparable data - the sorted bar chart.

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  • Amazon Product Advertising API SOAP Namespace Changes

    - by Rick Strahl
    About two months ago (twowards the end of February 2012 I think) Amazon decided to change the namespace of the Product Advertising API. The error that would come up was: <ItemSearchResponse > was not expected. If you've used the Amazon Product Advertising API you probably know that Amazon has made it a habit to break the services every few years or so and I guess last month was about the time for another one. Basically the service namespace of the document has been changed and responses from the service just failed outright even though the rest of the schema looks fine. Now I looked around for a while trying to find a recent update to the Product Advertising API - something semi-official looking but everything is dated around 2009. Really??? And it's not just .NET - the newest thing on the sample/APIs is dated early 2011 and a handful of 2010 samples. There are newer full APIs for the 'cloud' offerings, but the Product Advertising API apparently isn't part of that. After searching for quite a bit trying to trace this down myself and trying some of the newer samples (which also failed) I found an obscure forum post that describes the solution of getting past the namespace issue. FWIW, I've been using an old version of the Product Advertising API using the old Microsoft WSE3 services (pre-WCF), which provides some of the WS* security features required by the Amazon service. The fix for this code is to explicitly override the namespace declaration on each of the imported service method signatures. The old service namespace (at least on my build) was: http://webservices.amazon.com/AWSECommerceService/2009-03-31 and it should be changed to: http://webservices.amazon.com/AWSECommerceService/2011-08-01 Change it on the class header:[Microsoft.Web.Services3.Messaging.SoapService("http://webservices.amazon.com/AWSECommerceService/2011-08-01")] [System.Xml.Serialization.XmlIncludeAttribute(typeof(Property[]))] [System.Xml.Serialization.XmlIncludeAttribute(typeof(BrowseNode[]))] [System.Xml.Serialization.XmlIncludeAttribute(typeof(TransactionItem[]))] public partial class AWSECommerceService : Microsoft.Web.Services3.Messaging.SoapClient { and on all method signatures:[Microsoft.Web.Services3.Messaging.SoapMethodAttribute("http://soap.amazon.com/ItemSearch")] [return: System.Xml.Serialization.XmlElementAttribute("ItemSearchResponse", Namespace="http://webservices.amazon.com/AWSECommerceService/2011-08-01")] public ItemSearchResponse ItemSearch(ItemSearch ItemSearch1) { Microsoft.Web.Services3.SoapEnvelope results = base.SendRequestResponse("ItemSearch", ItemSearch1); return ((ItemSearchResponse)(results.GetBodyObject(typeof(ItemSearchResponse), this.SoapServiceAttribute.TargetNamespace))); } It's easy to do with a Search and Replace on the above strings. Amazon Services <rant> FWIW, I've not been impressed by Amazon's service offerings. While the services work well, their documentation and tool support is absolutely horrendous. I was recently working with a customer on an old AWS application and their old API had been completely removed with a new API that wasn't even a close match. One old API call resulted in requiring three different APIs to perform the same functionality. We had to re-write the entire piece from scratch essentially. The documentation was downright wrong, and incomplete and so scattered it was next to impossible to follow. The examples weren't examples at all - they're mockups of real service calls with fake data that didn't even provide everything that was required to make same service calls work. Additionally there appears to be just about no public support from Amazon, only peer support which is sparse at best - and getting a hold of somebody at Amazon, even for pay seems to be mythical task. It's a terrible business model they have going. I can't see why anybody would put themselves through this sort of customer and development experience. Sad really, but an experience we see more and more these days. Nobody puts in the time to document anything anymore, leaving it to devs to figure this stuff out over and over again… </rant>© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in CSharp  Web Services   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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  • Getting a 'base' Domain from a Domain

    - by Rick Strahl
    Here's a simple one: How do you reliably get the base domain from full domain name or URI? Specifically I've run into this scenario in a few recent applications when creating the Forms Auth Cookie in my ASP.NET applications where I explicitly need to force the domain name to the common base domain. So, www.west-wind.com, store.west-wind.com, west-wind.com, dev.west-wind.com all should return west-wind.com. Here's the code where I need to use this type of logic for issuing an AuthTicket explicitly:private void IssueAuthTicket(UserState userState, bool rememberMe) { FormsAuthenticationTicket ticket = new FormsAuthenticationTicket(1, userState.UserId, DateTime.Now, DateTime.Now.AddDays(10), rememberMe, userState.ToString()); string ticketString = FormsAuthentication.Encrypt(ticket); HttpCookie cookie = new HttpCookie(FormsAuthentication.FormsCookieName, ticketString); cookie.HttpOnly = true; if (rememberMe) cookie.Expires = DateTime.Now.AddDays(10); // write out a domain cookie cookie.Domain = Request.Url.GetBaseDomain(); HttpContext.Response.Cookies.Add(cookie); } Now unfortunately there's no Uri.GetBaseDomain() method unfortunately, as I was surprised to find out. So I ended up creating one:public static class NetworkUtils { /// <summary> /// Retrieves a base domain name from a full domain name. /// For example: www.west-wind.com produces west-wind.com /// </summary> /// <param name="domainName">Dns Domain name as a string</param> /// <returns></returns> public static string GetBaseDomain(string domainName) { var tokens = domainName.Split('.'); // only split 3 segments like www.west-wind.com if (tokens == null || tokens.Length != 3) return domainName; var tok = new List<string>(tokens); var remove = tokens.Length - 2; tok.RemoveRange(0, remove); return tok[0] + "." + tok[1]; ; } /// <summary> /// Returns the base domain from a domain name /// Example: http://www.west-wind.com returns west-wind.com /// </summary> /// <param name="uri"></param> /// <returns></returns> public static string GetBaseDomain(this Uri uri) { if (uri.HostNameType == UriHostNameType.Dns) return GetBaseDomain(uri.DnsSafeHost); return uri.Host; } } I've had a need for this so frequently it warranted a couple of helpers. The second Uri helper is an Extension method to the Uri class, which is what's used the in the first code sample. This is the preferred way to call this since the URI class can differentiate between Dns names and IP Addresses. If you use the first string based version there's a little more guessing going on if a URL is an IP Address. There are a couple of small twists in dealing with 'domain names'. When passing a string only there's a possibility to not actually pass domain name, but end up passing an IP address, so the code explicitly checks for three domain segments (can there be more than 3?). IP4 Addresses have 4 and IP6 have none so they'll fall through. Then there are things like localhost or a NetBios machine name which also come back on URL strings, but also shouldn't be handled. Anyway, small thing but maybe somebody else will find this useful.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in ASP.NET  Networking   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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  • How can I change mouse keymapping

    - by zuberuber
    I have Razer DeathAdder(left handed edition) and A4Tech wireless mouse. My problem is I don't know how to change wireless mouse keymapping(swaping left/right click). Can somebody guide me how to do such thing? List of my devices: ? Virtual core pointer id=2 [master pointer (3)] ? ? Virtual core XTEST pointer id=4 [slave pointer (2)] ? ? Logitech Unifying Device. Wireless PID:4004 id=8 [slave pointer (2)] ? ? Razer Razer DeathAdder id=11 [slave pointer (2)] ? ? A4TECH USB Device id=12 [slave pointer (2)] ? ? A4TECH USB Device id=13 [slave pointer (2)] ? Virtual core keyboard id=3 [master keyboard (2)] ? Virtual core XTEST keyboard id=5 [slave keyboard (3)] ? Power Button id=6 [slave keyboard (3)] ? Power Button id=7 [slave keyboard (3)] ? Logitech USB Keyboard id=9 [slave keyboard (3)] ? Logitech USB Keyboard id=10 [slave keyboard (3)] This is my Razer xinput: Device 'Razer Razer DeathAdder': Device Enabled (121): 1 Coordinate Transformation Matrix (123): 1.000000, 0.000000, 0.000000, 0.000000, 1.000000, 0.000000, 0.000000, 0.000000, 1.000000 Device Accel Profile (246): 0 Device Accel Constant Deceleration (247): 5.000000 Device Accel Adaptive Deceleration (248): 1.000000 Device Accel Velocity Scaling (249): 10.000000 Device Product ID (240): 5426, 22 Device Node (241): "/dev/input/event4" Evdev Axis Inversion (250): 0, 0 Evdev Axes Swap (252): 0 Axis Labels (253): "Rel X" (131), "Rel Y" (132), "Rel Vert Wheel" (274) Button Labels (254): "Button Left" (124), "Button Middle" (125), "Button Right" (126), "Button Wheel Up" (127), "Button Wheel Down" (128), "Button Horiz Wheel Left" (129), "Button Horiz Wheel Right" (130), "Button Side" (269), "Button Extra" (270), "Button Forward" (271), "Button Back" (272), "Button Task" (273), "Button Unknown" (243), "Button Unknown" (243), "Button Unknown" (243), "Button Unknown" (243) Evdev Middle Button Emulation (255): 0 Evdev Middle Button Timeout (256): 50 Evdev Third Button Emulation (257): 0 Evdev Third Button Emulation Timeout (258): 1000 Evdev Third Button Emulation Button (259): 3 Evdev Third Button Emulation Threshold (260): 20 Evdev Wheel Emulation (261): 0 Evdev Wheel Emulation Axes (262): 0, 0, 4, 5 Evdev Wheel Emulation Inertia (263): 10 Evdev Wheel Emulation Timeout (264): 200 Evdev Wheel Emulation Button (265): 4 Evdev Drag Lock Buttons (266): 0 And this is my wireless mouse xinput: Device 'A4TECH USB Device': Device Enabled (121): 1 Coordinate Transformation Matrix (123): 1.000000, 0.000000, 0.000000, 0.000000, 1.000000, 0.000000, 0.000000, 0.000000, 1.000000 Device Accel Profile (246): 0 Device Accel Constant Deceleration (247): 1.000000 Device Accel Adaptive Deceleration (248): 1.000000 Device Accel Velocity Scaling (249): 10.000000 Device Product ID (240): 2522, 1359 Device Node (241): "/dev/input/event16" Evdev Axis Inversion (250): 0, 0 Evdev Axes Swap (252): 0 Axis Labels (253): "Rel X" (131), "Rel Y" (132), "Rel Horiz Wheel" (245), "Rel Vert Wheel" (274) Button Labels (254): "Button Left" (124), "Button Middle" (125), "Button Right" (126), "Button Wheel Up" (127), "Button Wheel Down" (128), "Button Horiz Wheel Left" (129), "Button Horiz Wheel Right" (130), "Button Side" (269), "Button Extra" (270), "Button Forward" (271), "Button Back" (272), "Button Task" (273), "Button Unknown" (243), "Button Unknown" (243), "Button Unknown" (243), "Button Unknown" (243), "Button Unknown" (243), "Button Unknown" (243), "Button Unknown" (243), "Button Unknown" (243), "Button Unknown" (243), "Button Unknown" (243), "Button Unknown" (243), "Button Unknown" (243) Evdev Middle Button Emulation (255): 0 Evdev Middle Button Timeout (256): 50 Evdev Third Button Emulation (257): 0 Evdev Third Button Emulation Timeout (258): 1000 Evdev Third Button Emulation Button (259): 3 Evdev Third Button Emulation Threshold (260): 20 Evdev Wheel Emulation (261): 0 Evdev Wheel Emulation Axes (262): 0, 0, 4, 5 Evdev Wheel Emulation Inertia (263): 10 Evdev Wheel Emulation Timeout (264): 200 Evdev Wheel Emulation Button (265): 4 Evdev Drag Lock Buttons (266): 0

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  • Restricting Input in HTML Textboxes to Numeric Values

    - by Rick Strahl
    Ok, here’s a fairly basic one – how to force a textbox to accept only numeric input. Somebody asked me this today on a support call so I did a few quick lookups online and found the solutions listed rather unsatisfying. The main problem with most of the examples I could dig up was that they only include numeric values, but that provides a rather lame user experience. You need to still allow basic operational keys for a textbox – navigation keys, backspace and delete, tab/shift tab and the Enter key - to work or else the textbox will feel very different than a standard text box. Yes there are plug-ins that allow masked input easily enough but most are fixed width which is difficult to do with plain number input. So I took a few minutes to write a small reusable plug-in that handles this scenario. Imagine you have a couple of textboxes on a form like this: <div class="containercontent"> <div class="label">Enter a number:</div> <input type="text" name="txtNumber1" id="txtNumber1" value="" class="numberinput" /> <div class="label">Enter a number:</div> <input type="text" name="txtNumber2" id="txtNumber2" value="" class="numberinput" /> </div> and you want to restrict input to numbers. Here’s a small .forceNumeric() jQuery plug-in that does what I like to see in this case: [Updated thanks to Elijah Manor for a couple of small tweaks for additional keys to check for] <script type="text/javascript"> $(document).ready(function () { $(".numberinput").forceNumeric(); }); // forceNumeric() plug-in implementation jQuery.fn.forceNumeric = function () { return this.each(function () { $(this).keydown(function (e) { var key = e.which || e.keyCode; if (!e.shiftKey && !e.altKey && !e.ctrlKey && // numbers key >= 48 && key <= 57 || // Numeric keypad key >= 96 && key <= 105 || // comma, period and minus key == 190 || key == 188 || key == 109 || // Backspace and Tab and Enter key == 8 || key == 9 || key == 13 || // Home and End key == 35 || key == 36 || // left and right arrows key == 37 || key == 39 || // Del and Ins key == 46 || key == 45) return true; return false; }); }); } </script> With the plug-in in place in your page or an external .js file you can now simply use a selector to apply it: $(".numberinput").forceNumeric(); The plug-in basically goes through each selected element and hooks up a keydown() event handler. When a key is pressed the handler is fired and the keyCode of the event object is sent. Recall that jQuery normalizes the JavaScript Event object between browsers. The code basically white-lists a few key codes and rejects all others. It returns true to indicate the keypress is to go through or false to eat the keystroke and not process it which effectively removes it. Simple and low tech, and it works without too much change of typical text box behavior.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in JavaScript  jQuery  HTML  

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  • Multiplayer / Networking options for a 2D game with physics

    - by lahmas
    Summary: My 50% finished 2D sidescroller with Box2D as physics engine should have multiplayer support in the final version. However, the current code is just a singleplayer game. What should I do now? And more important, how should I implement multiplayer and combine it with singleplayer? Is it a bad idea to code the singleplayer mode separated from multiplayer mode (like Notch did it with Minecraft)? The performance in singleplayer should be as good as possible (Simulating physics with using a loopback server to implement singleplayer mode would be a problem there) Full background / questions: I'm working on a relatively large 2D game project in C++, with physics as a core element of it. (I use Box2D for that) The finished game should have full multiplayer support, however I made the mistake that I didn't plan the networking part properly and basically worked on a singleplayer game until now. I thought that multiplayer support could be added to the almost finished singleplayer game in a relatively easy and clear way, but apparently, from what I have read this is wrong. I even read that a multiplayer game should be programmed as one from the beginning, with the singleplayer mode actually just consisting of hosting an invisible local server and connecting to it via loopback. (I found out that most FPS game engines do it that way, an example would be Source) So here I am, with my half finished 2D sidescroller game, and I don't really know how to go on. Simply continueing to work on the singleplayer / client seems useless to me now, as I'd have to recode and refactor even more later. First, a general question to anybody who possibly found himself in a situation like this: How should I proceed? Then, the more specific one - I have been trying to find out how I can approach the networking part for my game: (Possible solutions:) Invisible / loopback server for singleplayer This would have the advantage that there basically is no difference between singleplayer and multiplayer mode. Not much additional code would be needed. A big disadvantage: Performance and other limitations in singleplayer. There would be two physics simulations running. One for the client and one for the loopback server. Even if you work around by providing a direct path for the data from the loopback server, through direct communcation by the threads for example, the singleplayer would be limited. This is a problem because people should be allowed to play around with masses of objects at once. Separated singleplayer / Multiplayer mode There would be no server involved in singleplayer mode. I'm not really sure how this would work. But at least I think that there would be a lot of additional work, because all of the singleplayer features would have to be re-implemented or glued to multiplayer mode. Multiplayer mode as a module for singleplayer This is merely a quick thought I had. Multiplayer could consist of a singleplayer game, with an additional networking module loaded and connected to a server, which sends and receives data and updates the singleplayer world. In the retrospective, I regret not having planned the multiplayer mode earlier. I'm really stuck at this point and I hope that somebody here is able to help me!

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  • Clustering for Mere Mortals (Pt2)

    - by Geoff N. Hiten
    Planning. I could stop there and let that be the entirety post #2 in this series.  Planning is the single most important element in building a cluster and the Laptop Demo Cluster is no exception.  One of the more awkward parts of actually creating a cluster is coordinating information between Windows Clustering and SQL Clustering.  The dialog boxes show up hours apart, but still have to have matching and consistent information. Excel seems to be a good tool for tracking these settings.  My workbook has four pages: Systems, Storage, Network, and Service Accounts.  The systems page looks like this:   Name Role Software Location East Physical Cluster Node 1 Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Laptop VM West Physical Cluster Node 2 Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Laptop VM North Physical Cluster Node 3 (Future Reserved) Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Laptop VM MicroCluster Cluster Management Interface N/A Laptop VM SQL01 High-Performance High-Security Instance SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition x64 SP1 Laptop VM SQL02 High-Performance Standard-Security Instance SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition x64 SP1 Laptop VM SQL03 Standard-Performance High-Security Instance SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition x64 SP1 Laptop VM Note that everything that has a computer name is listed here, whether physical or virtual. Storage looks like this: Storage Name Instance Purpose Volume Path Size (GB) LUN ID Speed Quorum MicroCluster Cluster Quorum Quorum Q: 2     SQL01Anchor SQL01 Instance Anchor SQL01Anchor L: 2     SQL02Anchor SQL02 Instance Anchor SQL02Anchor M: 2     SQL01Data1 SQL01 SQL Data SQL01Data1 L:\MountPoints\SQL01Data1 2     SQL02Data1 SQL02 SQL Data SQL02Data1 M:\MountPoints\SQL02Data1       Starting at the left is the name used in the storage array.  It is important to rename resources at each level, whether it is Storage, LUN, Volume, or disk folder.  Otherwise, troubleshooting things gets complex and difficult.  You want to be able to glance at a resource at any level and see where it comes from and what it is connected to. Networking is the same way:   System Network VLAN  IP Subnet Mask Gateway DNS1 DNS2 East Public Cluster1 10.97.230.x(DHCP) 255.255.255.0 10.97.230.1 10.97.230.1 10.97.230.1 East Heartbeat Cluster2   255.255.255.0       West Public Cluster1 10.97.230.x(DHCP) 255.255.255.0 10.97.230.1 10.97.230.1 10.97.230.1 West Heartbeat Cluster2   255.255.255.0       North Public Cluster1 10.97.230.x(DHCP) 255.255.255.0 10.97.230.1 10.97.230.1 10.97.230.1 North Heartbeat Cluster2   255.255.255.0       SQL01 Public Cluster1 10.97.230.x(DHCP) 255.255.255.0       SQL02 Public Cluster1 10.97.230.x(DHCP) 255.255.255.0       One hallmark of a poorly planned and implemented cluster is a bunch of "Local Network Connection #n" entries in the network settings page.  That lets me know that somebody didn't care about the long-term supportabaility of the cluster.  This can be critically important with Hyper-V Clusters and their high NIC counts.  Final page:   Instance Service Name Account Password Domain OU SQL01 SQL Server SVCSQL01 Baseline22 MicroAD Service Accounts SQL01 SQL Agent SVCSQL01 Baseline22 MicroAD Service Accounts SQL02 SQL Server SVC_SQL02 Baseline22 MicroAD Service Accounts SQL02 SQL Agent SVC_SQL02 Baseline22 MicroAD Service Accounts SQL03 (Future) SQL Server SVC_SQL03 Baseline22 MicroAD Service Accounts SQL03 (Future) SQL Agent SVC_SQL03 Baseline22 MicroAD Service Accounts             Installation Account           administrator            Yes.  I write down the account information.  I secure the file via NTFS, but I don't want to fumble around looking for passwords when it comes time to rebuild a node. Always fill out the workbook COMPLETELY before installing anything.  The whole point is to have everything you need at your fingertips before you begin.  The install experience is so much better and more productive with this information in place.

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  • Wipe, Delete, and Securely Destroy Your Hard Drive’s Data the Easy Way

    - by The Geek
    Giving a computer to somebody else? Maybe you’re putting it out on Craigslist to sell to a stranger—either way, you’ll want to make sure that your drive is completely wiped, scrubbed, and clean of any personal data. Here’s the easy way to do it. If you only have access to an Ubuntu Live CD or thumb drive, you can actually use that instead if you prefer, and we’ve got you covered with a full guide to securely wiping your PC’s hard drive. Otherwise, keep reading. Wipe the Drive with DBAN Darik’s Boot and Nuke CD is the easiest way to permanently and totally destroy every bit of personal information on that drive—nobody is going to recover a thing once this is done. The first thing you’ll need to do is download a copy of the ISO image, and then burn it to a blank CD with something really useful like Imgburn. Just choose Burn image to Disc at the start screen, select the little file icon, grab the downloaded ISO, and then go. If you need a little more help, we’ve got you covered with a beginner’s guide to burning an ISO image. Once you’re done, stick the disc into the drive, start the PC up, and then once you boot to the DBAN prompt you’ll see a menu. You can pretty much ignore everything on here, and just type… autonuke And there you are, your disk is now being securely wiped. Once it’s all done, you can remove the CD, and then either pack the PC up to sell, or re-install Windows on there if you feel like it. More Advanced Method If you’re really paranoid, want to run a different type of wipe, or just like fiddling with the options, you can choose F3 or hit Enter at the prompt to head to the advanced selection screen. Here you can choose exactly which drive to wipe, or hit the M key to change the method. You’ll be able to choose between a bunch of different wipe options. The Quick Erase is all you really need though.   So there you are, easy PC wiping in one package. What about you? Do you make sure to wipe your old PCs before giving them away? Personally I’ve always just yanked out the hard drives before I got rid of an old PC, but that’s just me. Download DBAN from dban.org Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Use an Ubuntu Live CD to Securely Wipe Your PC’s Hard DriveHow to Dispose of Old Computers ResponsiblyHow To Delete a VHD in Windows 7Speed up External USB Hard Drives in Windows VistaSpeed Up SATA Hard Drives in Windows Vista TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Follow Finder Finds You Twitter Users To Follow Combine MP3 Files Easily QuicklyCode Provides Cheatsheets & Other Programming Stuff Download Free MP3s from Amazon Awe inspiring, inter-galactic theme (Win 7) Case Study – How to Optimize Popular Wordpress Sites

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  • When to implement: Together with or after the source product?

    - by Jeremy Oosthuizen
    Somebody recently relayed a prospect's question to me: How hard would it be to implement OUBI after the source product (CC&B, WAM or NMS) has already been implemented? Fact is that MOST non-OUBI Data Warehouse / Business Intelligence implementations take place after the source application(s) are in place and hopefully stable. If an organization decides that they need better reporting and management information, then the logical path (see The Data Warehouse Institute's Data Warehouse Maturity Model) is to a Data Warehouse -- no matter when their last applications were implemented. If there is a pre-built Data Warehouse for their specific application, or even for the desired business process in their industry, they're in luck. Else they have to design and build from scratch, using a toolset. The implementation of a toolset is unlike the implementation of OUBI which, like OBI Apps, contain pre-built ETL routines and user content. Much has been written before about the advantages of that. So, because OUBI is designed specifically for Oracle Utilities transactional products, we often implement them in parallel -- with OUBI lagging a little behind by necessity, like Reporting. Customers know from the start they're going to need the solution, and therefore purchase the products at the same time. My biggest argument FOR a parallel installation/implementation of OUBI with the source product is two-fold: - There could be things (which is the technical term for data elements) that customers figure out they need when implementing OUBI, which are often easier added to the source product's implementation project, than to add later; - OUBI's ETL often points out errors (severe or not) with converted data, which are easier to fix during the source product's implementation project, or it may even be impossible to fix afterwards. The Conversion routines sometimes miss these errors, because the source system can live with the not-quite-perfect converted data. If the data can't be properly extracted, i.e. the proper Dimensions linked to the Facts, then it can't get into OUBI. That means it can't be analyzed effectively along with the rest of the organization's data. Then there is also the throw-away-work argument, which may be significant. The operational / transactional system cannot go live without reports on Day 1. A lot of those reports would be taken care of by the implementation of OUBI. If OUBI is implemented after go-live, those reports STILL have to be built during the source product's implementation project, but they become throw-away after the OUBI implementation. I have sometimes been told that it is better to implement OUBI after the source product, because it cuts down on scope and risk for the source product's implementation project. All I can say to that, is bah humbug. No, seriously, given the arguments above, planning has to include the OUBI implementation and it has to be managed properly -- just like any other implementation. If so, it should not add any risk and it should be included in the scope from the start. The answer to the prospect's question is therefore that it is not that much more difficult; after all, most DW/BI implemenations are done like that. They just have to consider the points above.

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  • Odd MVC 4 Beta Razor Designer Issue

    - by Rick Strahl
    This post is a small cry for help along with an explanation of a problem that is hard to describe on twitter or even a connect bug and written in hopes somebody has seen this before and any ideas on what might cause this. Lots of helpful people had comments on Twitter for me, but they all assumed that the code doesn't run, which is not the case - it's a designer issue. A few days ago I started getting some odd problems in my MVC 4 designer for an app I've been working on for the past 2 weeks. Basically the MVC 4 Razor designer keeps popping me errors, about the call signature to various Html Helper methods being incorrect. It also complains about the ViewBag object and not supporting dynamic requesting to load assemblies into the project. Here's what the designer errors look like: You can see the red error underlines under the ViewBag and an Html Helper I plopped in at the top to demonstrate the behavior. Basically any HtmlHelper I'm accessing is showing the same errors. Note that the code *runs just fine* - it's just the designer that is complaining with Errors. What's odd about this is that *I think* this started only a few days ago and nothing consequential that I can think of has happened to the project or overall installations. These errors aren't critical since the code runs but pretty annoying especially if you're building and have .csHtml files open in Visual Studio mixing these fake errors with real compiler errors. What I've checked Looking at the errors it indeed looks like certain references are missing. I can't make sense of the Html Helpers error, but certainly the ViewBag dynamic error looks like System.Core or Microsoft.CSharp assemblies are missing. Rest assured they are there and the code DOES run just fine at runtime. This is a designer issue only. I went ahead and checked the namespaces that MVC has access to in Razor which lives in the Views folder's web.config file: /Views/web.config For good measure I added <system.web.webPages.razor> <host factoryType="System.Web.Mvc.MvcWebRazorHostFactory, System.Web.Mvc, <split for layout> Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" /> <pages pageBaseType="System.Web.Mvc.WebViewPage"> <namespaces> <add namespace="System.Web.Mvc" /> <add namespace="System.Web.Mvc.Ajax" /> <add namespace="System.Web.Mvc.Html" /> <add namespace="System.Web.Routing" /> <add namespace="System.Linq" /> <add namespace="System.Linq.Expressions" /> <add namespace="ClassifiedsBusiness" /> <add namespace="ClassifiedsWeb"/> <add namespace="Westwind.Utilities" /> <add namespace="Westwind.Web" /> <add namespace="Westwind.Web.Mvc" /> </namespaces> </pages> </system.web.webPages.razor> For good measure I added System.Linq and System.Linq.Expression on which some of the Html.xxxxFor() methods rely, but no luck. So, has anybody seen this before? Any ideas on what might be causing these issues only at design time rather, when the final compiled code runs just fine?© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Razor  MVC   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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  • Ongoing confusion about ivars and properties in objective C

    - by Earl Grey
    After almost 8 months being in ios programming, I am again confused about the right approach. Maybe it is not the language but some OOP principle I am confused about. I don't know.. I was trying C# a few years back. There were fields (private variables, private data in an object), there were getters and setters (methods which exposed something to the world) ,and properties which was THE exposed thing. I liked the elegance of the solution, for example there could be a class that would have a property called DailyRevenue...a float...but there was no private variable called dailyRevenue, there was only a field - an array of single transaction revenues...and the getter for DailyRevenue property calculated the revenue transparently. If somehow the internals of daily revenue calculation would change, it would not affect somebody who consumed my DailyRevenue property in any way, since he would be shielded from getter implementation. I understood that sometimes there was , and sometimes there wasn't a 1-1 relationship between fields and properties. depending on the requirements. It seemed ok in my opinion. And that properties are THE way to acces the data in object. I know the difference betweeen private, protected, and public keyword. Now lets get to objectiveC. On what factor should I base my decision about making someting only an ivar or making it as a property? Is the mental model the same as I describe above? I know that ivars are "protected" by default, not "private" asi in c#..But thats ok I think, no big deal for my presnet level of understanding the whole ios development. The point is ivars are not accesible from outside (given i don't make them public..but i won't). The thing that clouds my clear understanding is that I can have IBOutlets from ivars. Why am I seeing internal object data in the UI? *Why is it ok?* On the other hand, if I make an IBOutlet from property, and I do not make it readonly, anybody can change it. Is this ok too? Let's say I have a ParseManager object. This object would use a built in Foundation framework class called NSXMLParser. Obviously my ParseManager will utilize this nsxmlparser's capabilities but will also do some additional work. Now my question is, who should initialize this NSXMLParser object and in which way should I make a reference to it from the ParseManager object, when there is a need to parse something. A) the ParseManager -1) in its default init method (possible here ivar - or - ivar+ppty) -2) with lazyloading in getter (required a ppty here) B) Some other object - who will pass a reference to NSXMLParser object to the ParseManager object. -1) in some custom initializer (initWithParser:(NSXMLPArser *) parser) when creating the ParseManager object.. A1 - the problem is, we create a parser and waste memory while it is not yet needed. However, we can be sure that all methods that are part ot ParserManager object, can use the ivar safely, since it exists. A2 - the problem is, the nsxmlparser is exposed to outside world, although it could be read only. Would we want a parser to be exposed in some scenario? B1 - this could maybe be useful when we would want to use more types of parsers..i dont know... I understand that architectural requirements and and language is not the same. But clearly the two are in relation. How to get out of that mess of my? Please bear with me, I wasn't able to come up with a single ultimate question. And secondly, it's better to not scare me with some superadvanced newspeak that talks about some crazy internals (what the compiler does) and edge cases.

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  • Would using a self-signed SSL certificate be appropriate in this scenario?

    - by Kevin Y
    Now I realize this topic has been discussed in a few questions before (specifically this one), but I'm still a little confused about the implications of using a self-signed certificate, and how I would be affected by doing so in this case. After reading various sources, I'm still a little confused about the exact details of using one. The biggest problem with a self-signed certificate, is a man-in-the-middle attack. Even if you are 100% sure that you are on the correct website and you completely trust the site (your email server for example), you could have someone intercept the connection and present you with their own self-signed certificate. You would think that you are using a secure connection with your email server but you are really using a secure connection to an attacker's email server. – SSL Shopper So somebody could switch out my self-signed certificate with their own, and I wouldn't be able to detect it? The way this site phrases it, it makes it sound worse to install a self-signed certificate than to leave your site without a certificate at all. Self-signed certificates cannot (by nature) be revoked, which may allow an attacker who has already gained access to monitor and inject data into a connection to spoof an identity if a private key has been compromised. CAs on the other hand have the ability to revoke a compromised certificate if alerted, which prevents its further use. - Wikipedia Does this mean that the only way someone could switch out their own certificate for mine is for them to find out the private key? I suppose this is more secure, but I'm still slightly confused about what exactly results from using a self-signed certificate. Is the only issue that obnoxious security warning that pops up in your browser when directed to the site, or is there more to it? Now in my case, I want to add the an SSL certificate to a minuscule Wordpress blog I run that I don't expect anyone else will read anytime soon; I mainly started it to get into the habit of blogging, and to learn more about the process of administrating a site (ex. what to do in situations like this one). Whenever I go to the login page and there's an HTTP:// instead of HTTPS://, I cringe a little. Submitting my password feels like I'm shouting my password out loud with hundreds of people listening. I don't plan on adding any other authors to the site, so I am the only person who would ever need to login. This isn't a site I'm trying to get page views from, or one that handles e-commerce or any sensitive info like that, simply my username and password to login with. One of the concerns (that I've gathered so far) of a self-signed certificate is that non-technical users might be scared by the security warning, but this would not be an issue in my case. TL;DR: If scaring visitors away isn't a concern (which it isn't in my case), is it acceptable to use a self-signed certificate for the purpose of encrypting my Wordpress blog's password, or are there added security issues I should be aware of? Essentially, I'm wondering whether adding a self-signed certificate will be safer than leaving my login page the way it is now, or if it adds the potential for more security breaches than leaving it sans-SSL.

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  • Thoughts on Thoughts on TDD

    Brian Harry wrote a post entitled Thoughts on TDD that I thought I was going to let lie, but I find that I need to write a response. I find myself in agreement with Brian on many points in the post, but I disagree with his conclusion. Not surprisingly, I agree with the things that he likes about TDD. Focusing on the usage rather than the implementation is really important, and this is important whether you use TDD or not. And YAGNI was a big theme in my Seven Deadly Sins of Programming series. Now, on to what he doesnt like. He says that he finds it inefficient to have tests that he has to change every time he refactors. Here is where we part company. If you are having to do a lot of test rewriting (say, more than a couple of minutes work to get back to green) *often* when you are refactoring your code, I submit that either you are testing things that you dont need to test (internal details rather than external implementation), your code perhaps isnt as decoupled as it could be, or maybe you need a visit to refactorers anonymous. I also like to refactor like crazy, but as we all know, the huge downside of refactoring is that we often break things. Important things. Subtle things. Which makes refactoring risky. *Unless* we have a set of tests that have great coverage. And TDD (or Example-based Design, which I prefer as a term) gives those to us. Now, I dont know what sort of coverage Brian gets with the unit tests that he writes, but I do know that for the majority of the developers Ive worked with and I count myself in that bucket the coverage of unit tests written afterwards is considerably inferior to the coverage of unit tests that come from TDD. For me, it all comes down to the answer to the following question: How do you ensure that your code works now and will continue to work in the future? Im willing to put up with a little efficiency on the front side to get that benefit later. Its not the writing of the code thats the expensive part, its everything else that comes after. I dont think that stepping through test cases in the debugger gets you what you want. You can verify what the current behavior is, sure, and do it fairly cheaply, but you dont help the guy in the future who doesnt know what conditions were important if he has to change your code. His second part that he doesnt like backing into an architecture (go read to see what he means). Ive certainly had to work with code that was like this before, and its a nightmare the code that nobody wants to touch. But thats not at all the kind of code that you get with TDD, because if youre doing it right youre doing the write a failing tests, make it pass, refactor approach. Now, you may miss some useful refactorings and generalizations for this, but if you do, you can refactor later because you have the tests that make it safe to do so, and your code tends to be easy to refactor because the same things that make code easy to write unit tests for make it easy to refactor. I also think Brian is missing an important point. We arent all as smart as he is. Im reminded a bit of the lesson of Intentional Programming, Charles Simonyis paradigm for making programming easier. I played around with Intentional Programming when it was young, and came to the conclusion that it was a pretty good thing if you were as smart as Simonyi is, but it was pretty much a disaster if you were an average developer. In this case, TDD gives you a way to work your way into a good, flexible, and functional architecture when you dont have somebody of Brians talents to help you out. And thats a good thing.Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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