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• ArchBeat Facebook Friday: Top 10 Shared Links - May 30- June 5, 2014

  - by OTN ArchBeat

  The list below is comprised of the Top 10 most popular articles, blog posts, videos, and other content shared over the last seven days with the more than 5,100 people fans of the OTN ArchBeat Facebook Page. What is REST? | Maarten Smeets "Most Middleware developers will encounter RESTful services," says Oracle SOA / BPM / Java integration specialist Maarten Smeets. "It is good to understand what they are, what they should be and how they work." His extensive post will help you achieve that understanding. Integrating with Fusion Applications using SOAP web services and REST APIs | Arvind Srinivasamoorth This article, part one of Arvind Srinivasamoorth's two-part series on Integrating with Fusion Applications using SOAP web services and REST APIs, shows you how to identify the Fusion Applications SOAP web service to be invoked. Oracle Technology Network | Architect Community Have you visited the OTN Solution Architect homepage lately? I've just updated it with information about the big OTN Virtual Tech Summit on July 9, plus the latest OTN tech articles, and a fresh list of community videos and podcasts. Check it out! Starting and Stopping a Java EE Environment when using Oracle WebLogic | Rene van Wijk Oracle ACE Director and Oracle Fusion Middleware specialist Rene van Wijk explores ways to simplify the life-cycle management of a Java EE environment through the use of scripts developed with WebLogic Scripting Tool and Linux Bash. Application Composer Series: Where and When to use Groovy | Richard Bingham Richard Bingham describes his post as "more of a reference than an article." The post is comprised of a table that highlights where you can add your own custom logic via Groovy code and when you might use the various features. Kscope 2014: HFM Metadata Diagnostics | Eric Erikson Oracle Certified Hyperion Financial Management Specialist Eric Erikson will present three sessions at ODTUG Kscope 2014, June 22-26 in Seattle. Why should you care? Watch the video. Tuning Asynchronous Web Services in Fusion Applications | Jian Liang This article, the fourth in solution architect Jian Liang's five-part series on Fusion Applications and asynchronous Web Services, shows you how to conduct performance tuning of the asynchronous web services in relation to Fusion Applications. IDM FA Integration Flows | Thiago Leoncio Fusion Applications uses the Oracle Identity Management for its identity store and policy store by default. This article by solution architect Thiago Leoncio explains how user and role flows work from different points of view, using key IDM products for each flow in detail. GoldenGate and Oracle Data Integrator - A Perfect Match in 12c... Part 1: Getting Started | Michael Rainey Michael Rainey has already written extensively about about integration between Oracle Data Integrator and GoldenGate -- but he's not done. "With the release of the 12c versions of ODI and GoldenGate last October, and a soon-to-be-updated reference architecture, it’s time to write a few posts on the subject again, " he says. Here's the first of those posts. Video: Kscope 2014 Preview: Tim Tow on Essbase Java API and ODTUG Community Oracle ACE Director and ODTUG board member Tim Tow talks about his Kscope 2014 sessions focused on the Essbase Java API in this short video interview.

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• Welcome 2011

  - by PSteele

  About this time last year, I wrote a blog post about how January of 2010 was almost over and I hadn’t done a single blog post.  Ugh…  History repeats itself. 2010 in Review If I look back at 2010, it was a great year in terms of technology and development: Visited Redmond to attend the MVP Summit in February.  Had a great time with the MS product teams and got to connect with some really smart people. Continued my work on Visual Studio Magazine’s “C# Corner” column.  About mid-year, the column changed from an every-other-month print column to an every-other-month print column along with bi-monthly web-only articles.  Needless to say, this kept me even busier and away from my blog. Participated in another GiveCamp!  Thanks to the wonderful leadership of Michael Eaton and all of his minions, GiveCamp 2010 was another great success.  Planning for GiveCamp 2011 will be starting soon… I switched to DVCS full time.  After years of being a loyal SVN user, I got bit by the DVCS bug.  I played around with both Mercurial and Git and finally settled on Mercurial.  It’s seamless integration with Windows Explorer along with it’s wealth of plugins made me fall in love.  I can’t imagine going back and using a centralized version control system. Continued to work with the awesome group of talent at SRT Solutions.  Very proud that SRT won it’s third consecutive FastTrack award! Jumped off the BlackBerry train and enjoying the smooth ride of Android.  It was time to replace the old BlackBerry Storm so I did some research and settled on the Motorola DroidX.  I couldn’t be happier.  Android is a slick OS and the DroidX is a sweet piece of hardware.  Been dabbling in some Android development with both Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA (I like IntelliJ IDEA a lot better!).   2011 Plans On January 1st I was pleasantly surprised to get an email from the Microsoft MVP program letting me know that I had received the MVP award again for my community work in 2010.  I’m honored and humbled to be recognized by Microsoft as well as my peers! I’ll continue to do some Android development.  I’m currently working on a simple app to get me feet wet.  It may even makes it’s way into the Android Market. I’ve got a project that could really benefit from WPF so I’ll be diving into WPF this year.  I’ve played around with WPF a bit in the past – simple demos and learning exercises – but this will give me a chance to build an entire application in WPF.  I’m looking forward to the increased freedom that a WPF UI should give me. I plan on blogging a lot more in 2011! Technorati Tags: Android,MVP,Mercurial,WPF,SRT,GiveCamp

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for October 14-20, 2012

  - by Bob Rhubart

  The Top 10 items shared on the OTN ArchBeat Facebook page for the week of October 14-21, 2012. Panel: On the Impact of Software | InfoQ Les Hatton (Oakwood Computing Associates), Clive King (Oracle), Paul Good (Shell), Mike Andrews (Microsoft) and Michiel van Genuchten (moderator) discuss the impact of software engineering on our lives in this panel discussion recorded at the Computer Society Software Experts Summit 2012. ResCare Solves Content Lifecycle Challenges with Oracle WebCenter Learn how ResCare solves content lifecycle challenges with Oracle WebCenter. Speakers: Joe Lichtefeld, VP of Application Services & PMO, ResCare Wayne Boerger, Product Manager, TEAM Informatics Doug Thompson, EVP Global Development, TEAM Informatics Date: Tuesday, October 30, 2012 Time: 10:00 a.m. PT / 1:00 p.m. ET WebLogic Server 11gR1 Interactive Quick Reference "The WebLogic Server 11gR1 Administration interactive quick reference," explains Juergen Kress, "is a multimedia tool for various terms and concepts used in WebLogic Server architecture. This tool is available for administrators for online or offline use. This is built as a multimedia web page which provides descriptions of WebLogic Server Architectural components, and references to relevant documentation. This tool offers valuable reference information for any complex concept or product in an intuitive and useful manner." Oracle ACE Directors Nordic Tour 2012 : Venues and BI Presentations | Mark Rittman Oracle ACE Director Mark Rittman shares information on the Oracle ACE Director Tour, as the community leaders make their way through the land of the midnight sun, with events in Copenhagen, Stockholm, Oslo and Helsinki. Mobile Apps for EBS | Capgemini Oracle Blog Capgemini solution architect Satish Iyer breifly describes how Oracle ADF and Oracle SOA Suite can be used to fill the gap in mobile applications for Oracle EBS. Introducing the New Face of Fusion Applications | Misha Vaughan Oracle ACE Directors Debra Lilly and Floyd Teter have already blogged about the the new face of Oracle Fusion Applications. Now Applications User Experience Architect Misha Vaughan shares a brief overview of how the Oracle Applications User Experience (UX) team developed the new look. BPM 11g - Dynamic Task Assignment with Multi-level Organization Units | Mark Foster "I've seen several requirements to have a more granular level of task assignment in BPM 11g based on some value in the data passed to the process," says Fusion Middleware A-Team architect Mark Foster. "Parametric Roles is normally the first port of call to try to satisfy this requirement, but in this blog we will show how a lot of use-cases can be satisfied by the easier to implement and flexible Organization Unit." OTN Architect Day Los Angeles - Oct 25 Oracle Technology Network Architect Day in Los Angeles happens in one week. Register now to make sure you don't miss out on a rich schedule of expert technical sessions and peer interaction covering the use of Oracle technologies in cloud computing, SOA, and more. Even better: it's all free. When: October 25, 2012, 8:30am - 5:00pm. Where: Sofitel Los Angeles, 8555 Beverly Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90048. Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.2.2 released | Oracle's Virtualization Blog The Fat Bloke weighs in with a short post with information on where you can find information and the download for the latest VirtualBox release. Advanced Oracle SOA Suite #OOW 2012 SOA Presentations The Oracle SOA Product Management team has compiled a complete list of all twelve of their Oracle SOA Suite presentations from Oracle OpenWorld 2012, with links to the slide decks. Thought for the Day "Software: do you write it like a book, grow it like a plant, accrete it like a pearl, or construct it like a building?" — Jeff Atwood Source: softwarequotes.com

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• What You Can Learn from the NFL Referee Lockout

  - by Christina McKeon

  American football is a lot like religion. The fans are devoted followers that take brand loyalty to a whole new level. These fans that worship their teams each week showed that they are powerful customers whose voice has an impact. Yesterday, these fans proved that their opinion could force the hand of a large and powerful institution. With a three-month NFL referee lockout that seemed like it was nowhere close to resolution, the Green Bay Packers and the Seattle Seahawks competed last Monday night. For those of you that might have been out of the news cycle the past few days, Green Bay lost the game due to a controversial call that many experts and analysts agree should have resulted in Green Bay winning the game. Outrage ensued. The NFL had pulled replacement referees from the high school ranks, and these replacements did not have the knowledge and experience to handle high intensity NFL games. Fans protested about their customer experience. Their anger-filled rants were heard in social media, in the headlines of newspapers, on radio, and on national TV. Suddenly, the NFL was moved to reach an agreement with the referees. That agreement was reached late in the night on Wednesday with many believing that the referees had the upper hand forcing the owners into submission. Some might argue that the referees benefited, not the fans. Since the fans wanted qualified and competent referees, I would say the fans did benefit. The referees are scheduled to return to the field this Sunday, so the fans got what they wanted. What can you learn from this negative customer experience? Customers are in control. NFL owners thought they were controlling this situation with the upper hand over referees. The owners figured out they weren’t in control when their fans reacted negatively. Customers can make or break you more now than ever before, which is why it is more important to connect with them, engage them in a personal manner, and create rewarding relationships. Protect your brand. Whether knowingly or unknowingly, the NFL put their brand and each team’s brand at risk with replacement referees. Think about each business decision you make, and how it may impact your brand at different points in time. A decision that results in a gain today could result in a larger loss down the road. Customer experience matters. The NFL likely foresaw declining revenues in ticket sales, merchandising, advertising, and other areas if the lockout continued. While fans primarily spoke with their minds in the days following the Green Bay debacle, their wallets would be the next things to speak. Customer experience directly affects your success and is one of the few areas where you can differentiate your business. What would you do if your brand got such negative attention? Would you be prepared to navigate such stormy waters? Would you be able to prevent such a fiasco? If you don’t have a good answer to these questions, consider joining us October 3-5, 2012 at the Oracle Customer Experience Summit in San Francisco. You’ll have the opportunity to learn even more about customer experience from industry experts such as best-selling author Seth Godin, Paul Hagen and Kerry Bodine from Forrester Research, Inc., George Kembel from the Stanford d.School, Bruce Temkin of The Temkin Group, and Gene Alvarez from Gartner Inc.. There will also be plenty of your peers and customer experience experts available for networking and discussions.

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• How views are changing in future versions of SQL

  - by Rob Farley

  April is here, and this weekend, SQL v11.0 (previous known as Denali, now known as SQL Server 2012) reaches general availability. And so I thought I’d share some news about what’s coming next. I didn’t hear this at the MVP Summit earlier this year (where there was lots of NDA information given, but I didn’t go), so I think I’m free to share it. I’ve written before about CTEs being query-scoped views. Well, the actual story goes a bit further, and will continue to develop in future versions. A CTE is a like a “temporary temporary view”, scoped to a single query. Due to globally-scoped temporary objects using a two-hashes naming style, and session-scoped (or ‘local’) temporary objects a one-hash naming style, this query-scoped temporary object uses a cunning zero-hash naming style. We see this implied in Books Online in the CREATE TABLE page, but as we know, temporary views are not yet supported in the SQL Server. However, in a breakaway from ANSI-SQL, Microsoft is moving towards consistency with their naming. We know that a CTE is a “common table expression” – this is proving to be a more strategic than you may have appreciated. Within the Microsoft product group, the term “Table Expression” is far more widely used than just CTEs. Anything that can be used in a FROM clause is referred to as a Table Expression, so long as it doesn’t actually store data (which would make it a Table, rather than a Table Expression). You can see this is not just restricted to the product group by doing an internet search for how the term is used without ‘common’. In the past, Books Online has referred to a view as a “virtual table” (but notice that there is no SQL 2012 version of this page). However, it was generally decided that “virtual table” was a poor name because it wasn’t completely accurate, and it’s typically accepted that virtualisation and SQL is frowned upon. That page I linked to says “or stored query”, which is slightly better, but when the SQL 2012 version of that page is actually published, the line will be changed to read: “A view is a stored table expression (STE)”. This change will be the first of many. During the SQL 2012 R2 release, the keyword VIEW will become deprecated (this will be SQL v11 SP1.5). Three versions later, in SQL 14.5, you will need to be in compatibility mode 140 to allow “CREATE VIEW” to work. Also consistent with Microsoft’s deprecation policy, the execution of any query that refers to an object created as a view (rather than the new “CREATE STE”), will cause a Deprecation Event to fire. This will all be in preparation for the introduction of Single-Column Table Expressions (to be introduced in SQL 17.3 SP6) which will finally shut up those people waiting for a decent implementation of Inline Scalar Functions. And of course, CTEs are “Common” because the Table Expression definition needs to be repeated over and over throughout a stored procedure. ...or so I think I heard at some point. Oh, and congratulations to all the new MVPs on this April 1st. @rob_farley

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• SQL Server Optimizer Malfunction?

  - by Tony Davis

  There was a sharp intake of breath from the audience when Adam Machanic declared the SQL Server optimizer to be essentially "stuck in 1997". It was during his fascinating "Query Tuning Mastery: Manhandling Parallelism" session at the recent PASS SQL Summit. Paraphrasing somewhat, Adam (blog | @AdamMachanic) offered a convincing argument that the optimizer often delivers flawed plans based on assumptions that are no longer valid with today’s hardware. In 1997, when Microsoft engineers re-designed the database engine for SQL Server 7.0, SQL Server got its initial implementation of a cost-based optimizer. Up to SQL Server 2000, the developer often had to deploy a steady stream of hints in SQL statements to combat the occasionally wilful plan choices made by the optimizer. However, with each successive release, the optimizer has evolved and improved in its decision-making. It is still prone to the occasional stumble when we tackle difficult problems, join large numbers of tables, perform complex aggregations, and so on, but for most of us, most of the time, the optimizer purrs along efficiently in the background. Adam, however, challenged further any assumption that the current optimizer is competent at providing the most efficient plans for our more complex analytical queries, and in particular of offering up correctly parallelized plans. He painted a picture of a present where complex analytical queries have become ever more prevalent; where disk IO is ever faster so that reads from disk come into buffer cache faster than ever; where the improving RAM-to-data ratio means that we have a better chance of finding our data in cache. Most importantly, we have more CPUs at our disposal than ever before. To get these queries to perform, we not only need to have the right indexes, but also to be able to split the data up into subsets and spread its processing evenly across all these available CPUs. Improvements such as support for ColumnStore indexes are taking things in the right direction, but, unfortunately, deficiencies in the current Optimizer mean that SQL Server is yet to be able to exploit properly all those extra CPUs. Adam’s contention was that the current optimizer uses essentially the same costing model for many of its core operations as it did back in the days of SQL Server 7, based on assumptions that are no longer valid. One example he gave was a "slow disk" bias that may have been valid back in 1997 but certainly is not on modern disk systems. Essentially, the optimizer assesses the relative cost of serial versus parallel plans based on the assumption that there is no IO cost benefit from parallelization, only CPU. It assumes that a single request will saturate the IO channel, and so a query would not run any faster if we parallelized IO because the disk system simply wouldn’t be able to handle the extra pressure. As such, the optimizer often decides that a serial plan is lower cost, often in cases where a parallel plan would improve performance dramatically. It was challenging and thought provoking stuff, as were his techniques for driving parallelism through query logic based on subsets of rows that define the "grain" of the query. I highly recommend you catch the session if you missed it. I’m interested to hear though, when and how often people feel the force of the optimizer’s shortcomings. Barring mistakes, such as stale statistics, how often do you feel the Optimizer fails to find the plan you think it should, and what are the most common causes? Is it fighting to induce it toward parallelism? Combating unexpected plans, arising from table partitioning? Something altogether more prosaic? Cheers, Tony.

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• Oracle Spatial and Graph – A year in review

  - by Mandy Ho

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} What a great year for Oracle Spatial! Or shall I now say, Oracle Spatial and Graph, with our official name change this summer. There were so many exciting events and updates we had this year, and this blog will review and link to some of the events you may have missed over the year. We kicked off 2012 with our webinar: Situational Analysis at OnStar with Oracle Spatial and Graph. We collaborated with OnStar’s Emergency Strategy and Outreach expert, Jeff Joyner ,on how Onstar uses Google Earth Visualization, NAVTEQ data and Oracle Database to deliver fast, accurate emergency services to its customers. In the next webinar in our 2012 series, Oracle partner TARGUSinfo showcased how to build a robust, scalable and secure customer relationship management systems – with built-in mapping and spatial analysis, and deployed in the cloud. This is a very cool system using all Oracle technologies including Oracle Database and Fusion Middleware MapViewer. Attendees learned how to gather market insight, score prospects and customers and perform location analysis. The replay is available here. Our final webinar of the year focused on using Oracle Business Intelligence tools, along with Oracle Spatial and Graph to perform location-aware predictive analysis. Watch the webcast here: In June, we joined up with the Location Intelligence conference in Washington, DC, and had a very successful 2012 Oracle Spatial User Conference. Customers and partners from the US, as well as from EMEA and Asia, flew in to share experiences and ideas, and get technical updates from Oracle experts. Users were excited to hear about spatial-Exadata performance, and advances in MapViewer and BI. Peter Doolan of Oracle Public Sector kicked off the event with a great keynote, and US Census, NOAA, and Ordnance Survey Great Britain were just a few of the presenters. Presentation archive here. We recognized some of the most exceptional partners and customers for their contributions to advancing mainstream solutions using geospatial technologies. Planning for 2013’s conference has already started. Please contribute your papers for consideration here. http://www.locationintelligence.net/ We also launched a new Oracle PartnerNetwork Spatial Specialization – to enable partners to get validated in the marketplace for their expertise in taking solutions to market. Individuals can also get individual certifications. Learn more here. Oracle Open World was not to disappoint, with news regarding our next Oracle Spatial and Graph release, as well as the announcement of our new Oracle Spatial and Graph SIG board! Join the SIG today. One more exciting event as we look to 2013. Spatial and location technologies have a dedicated track at the January BIWA SIG Summit – on January 9-10 in Redwood Shores, CA. View the agenda and register here: www.biwasummit.org. We thank you for all your support during the year of 2012 and look towards an even more exciting 2013! Wishing you and your family a prosperous New Year and Happy Holidays!

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• Call For Papers Tips and Tricks

  - by speakjava

  This year's JavaOne session review has just been completed and by now everyone who submitted papers should know whether they were successful or not.  I had the pleasure again this year of leading the review of the 'JavaFX and Rich User Experiences' track.  I thought it would be useful to write up a few comments to help people in future when submitting session proposals, not just for JavaOne, but for any of the many developer conferences that run around the world throughout the year.  This also draws on conversations I recently had with various Java User Group leaders at the Oracle User Group summit in Riga.  Many of these leaders run some of the biggest and most successful Java conferences in Europe. Try to think of a title which will sound interesting.  For example, "Experiences of performance tuning embedded Java for an ARM architecture based single board computer" probably isn't going to get as much attention as "Do you like coffee with your dessert? Java on the Raspberry Pi".  When thinking of the subject and title for your talk try to steer clear of sessions that might be too generic (and so get lost in a group of similar sessions).  Introductory talks are great when the audience is new to a subject, but beware of providing sessions that are too basic when the technology has been around for a while and there are lots of tutorials already available on the web. JavaOne, like many other conferences has a number of fields that need to be filled in when submitting a paper.  Many of these are selected from pull-down lists (like which track the session is applicable to).  Check these lists carefully.  A number of sessions we had needed to be shuffled between tracks when it was thought that the one selected was not appropriate.  We didn't count this against any sessions, but it's always a good idea to try and get the right one from the start, just in case. JavaOne, again like many other conferences, has two fields that describe the session being submitted: abstract and summary.  These are the most critical to a successful submission.  The two fields have different names and that is significant; a frequent mistake people make is to write an abstract for a session and then duplicate it for the summary.  The abstract (at least in the case of JavaOne) is what gets printed in the show guide and is typically what will be used by attendees when deciding what sessions to attend.  This is where you need to sell your session, not just to the reviewers, but also the people who you want in your audience.  Submitting a one line abstract (unless it's a really good one line) is not usually enough to decide whether this is worth investing an hour of conference time.  The abstract typically has a limit of a few hundred characters.  Try to use as many of them as possible to get as much information about your session across.  The summary should be different from the abstract (and don't leave it blank as some people do).  This field is where you can give the reviewers more detail about things like the structure of the talk, possible demonstrations and so on.  As a reviewer I look to this section to help me decide whether the hard-sell of the title and abstract will actually be reflected in the final content.  Try to make this comprehensive, but don't make it excessively long.  When you have to review possibly hundreds of sessions a certain level of conciseness can make life easier for reviewers and help the cause of your session. If you've not made many submissions for talks in the past, or if this is your first, try to give reviewers places to find background on you as a presenter.  Having an active blog and Twitter handle can also help reviewers if they're not sure what your level of expertise is.  Many call-for-papers have places for you to include this type of information.  It's always good to have new and original presenters and presentations for conferences.  Hopefully these tips will help you be successful when you answer the next call-for-papers.

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• Brazil is Hot for Social Media

  - by Mike Stiles

  Today’s guest blog is from Oracle SVP Product Development Reggie Bradford, fresh off a visit to Sao Paulo, Brazil where he spoke at the Dachis Social Business Summit and spent some time getting a personal taste for the astonishing growth of social in Brazil, both in terms of usage and engagement. I knew it was big, but I now have an all-new appreciation for why the Wall Street Journal branded Brazil the “social media capital of the universe.” Brazil has the world’s 5th largest economy, an expanding middle class, an active younger demo market, a connected & outgoing culture, and an ongoing embrace of the social media platforms. According to comScore's 2012 Brazil Digital Future in Focus report, 97% are using social media, and that’s not even taking mobile-only users into account. There were 65 million Facebook users in 2012, spending an average 535 minutes there, up 208%. It’s one of Twitter’s fastest growing markets and the 2nd biggest market for YouTube. Instagram usage has grown over 300% since last year. That by itself is exciting, but look at the opportunity for social marketing brands. 74% of Brazilian social users follow brands on Facebook, and 59% have praised a company on either Twitter or Facebook. A 2011 Oh! Panel study found 81% of social networkers there used social to research new products and 75% went there looking for discounts. B2C eCommerce sales in Brazil is projected to hit $26.9 billion by 2015. I bet I’m not the only one who sees great things ahead, and I was fortunate enough give a keynote ABRADI, an association of leading digital agencies in Brazil with 53 execs from 35 agencies attending. I was also afforded the opportunity to give my impressions of what’s going on in Brazil to Jornal Propoganda & Marketing, one of the most popular publications in Latin America for marketers. I conveyed that especially in an environment like Brazil, where social users are so willing to connect and engage brands, marketers need to back away from the heavy-handed, one-way messaging of old school advertising and move toward genuine relationships and trust-building. To aide in this, organizational and operation changes must be embraced inside the enterprise. We've talked often about the new, tighter partnership forming between the CIO and CMO. If this partnership is not encouraged, fostered and resourced, the increasing amount of time consumers spend on mobile and digital, and the efficiencies and integrations offered by cloud-based software cannot be exploited. These are the kinds of changes that can yield social data that, when combined with enterprise data, helps you come to know your social audiences intimately and predict their needs. Consumers are always connected and need your brand to be accessible at any time, be it for information or customer service. And, of course, all of this is happening quite publicly. The holistic, socially-enable enterprise connects social to customer service systems and all other customer touch points, facilitating the kind of immediate, real-time, gratifying response customers are coming to expect. Social users in Brazil are highly active and clearly willing to meet us as brands more than halfway. Empowering yourself with a social management technology platform will have you set up to maximize this booming social market…from listening & monitoring to engagement to analytics to workflow & automation to globalization & language support. Brands, it’s time to be as social as the great people of Brazil are. Obrigado! @reggiebradfordPhoto: Gualberto107, freedigitalphotos.net

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• Finalists for Community Manager of the Year Announced

  - by Mike Stiles

  For as long as brand social has been around, there’s still an amazing disparity from company to company on the role of Community Manager. At some brands, they are the lead social innovators. At others, the task has been relegated to interns who are at the company temporarily. Some have total autonomy and trust. Others must get chain-of-command permission each time they engage. So what does a premiere “worth their weight in gold” Community Manager look like? More than anyone else in the building, they have the most intimate knowledge of who the customer is. They live on the front lines and are the first to detect problems and opportunities. They are sincere, raving fans of the brand themselves and are trusted advocates for the others. They’re fun to be around. They aren’t salespeople. Give me one Community Manager who’s been at the job 6 months over 5 focus groups any day. Because not unlike in speed dating, they must immediately learn how to make a positive, lasting impression on fans so they’ll want to return and keep the relationship going. They’re informers and entertainers, with a true belief in the value of the brand’s proposition. Internally, they live at the mercy of the resources allocated toward social. Many, whose managers don’t understand the time involved in properly curating a community, are tasked with 2 or 3 too many of them. 63% of CM’s will spend over 30 hours a week on one community. They come to intuitively know the value of the relationships they’re building, even if they can’t always be shown in a bar graph to the C-suite. Many must communicate how the customer feels to executives that simply don’t seem to want to hear it. Some can get the answers fans want quickly, others are frustrated in their ability to respond within an impressive timeframe. In short, in a corporate world coping with sweeping technological changes, amidst business school doublespeak, pie charts, decks, strat sessions and data points, the role of the Community Manager is the most…human. They are the true emotional connection to the real life customer. Which is why we sought to find a way to recognize and honor who they are, what they do, and how well they have defined the position as social grows and integrates into the larger organization. Meet our 3 finalists for Community Manager of the Year. Jeff Esposito with VistaprintJeff manages and heads up content strategy for all social networks and blogs. He also crafts company-wide policies surrounding the social space. Vistaprint won the NEDMA Gold Award for Twitter Strategy in 2010 and 2011, and a Bronze in 2011 for Social Media Strategy. Prior to Vistaprint, Jeff was Media Relations Manager with the Long Island Ducks. He graduated from Seton Hall University with a BA in English and a minor in Classical Studies. Stacey Acevero with Vocus In addition to social management, Stacey blogs at Vocus on influential marketing and social media, and blogs at PRWeb on public relations and SEO. She’s been named one of the #Nifty50 Women in Tech on Twitter 2 years in a row, as well as included in the 15 up-and-coming PR pros to watch in 2012. Carly Severn with the San Francisco BalletCarly drives engagement, widens the fanbase and generates digital content for America’s oldest professional ballet company. Managed properties include Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube and G+. Prior to joining the SF Ballet, Carly was Marketing & Press Coordinator at The Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, where she graduated with a degree in English. We invite you to join us at the first annual Oracle Social Media Summit November 14 and 15 at the Wynn in Las Vegas where our finalists will be featured. Over 300 top brand marketers, agency executives, and social leaders & innovators will be exploring how social is transforming business. Space is limited and the information valuable, so get more info and get registered as soon as possible at the event site.

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• Zero to Cloud : One stop shop for resources to accelerate your transformation to enterprise private cloud

  - by Anand Akela

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} During the Oracle Open World 2012 last week, Oracle introduced "Zero to Cloud" resource center to help you accelerate your transformation journey to enterprise private cloud. To help organizations deploy fully operational, enterprise-grade private cloud environment in as little as half a day, Oracle has brought key content together into this single, user-friendly resource center. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} The resource center is launched just as the Oracle Cloud Builder Summit series moves into full swing. Designed for executives, cloud architects, and IT operations professionals, the day-long event series will eventually reach nearly 100 cities around the globe. During this event, an interactive "Zero to Cloud" session will showcase the transformational journey of a fictitious enterprise to the private cloud using the latest solutions from Oracle—including, Oracle Database, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle VM and Oracle Enterprise Manager, as well as Oracle’s full range of engineered systems. The online "Zero to Cloud" resource center includes best practices from Oracle experts and early adopter customers as well as interviews with Oracle development executives responsibly for Oracle’s private cloud solutions and roadmap. It also includes a new self-assessment quiz that can help determine readiness for a successful private cloud deployment. Once you've determined organizational readiness, explore early adopter tips, demos, guides, exclusive white papers and more at the "Zero to Cloud" resource center.

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• ?????????????Fusion Middleware??????????? ?4?

  - by rika.tokumichi

  ??????????OTN????????? ??OTN???????Fusion Middleware???????????????????????????????????????????????? ?OTN????????????????????????????? 2010?3??????????????????? ???????????? Oracle Direct Seminar?????????? ???! ????? ?????????????? OTN???????????????????! ???Fusion Middleware????????????DB?????????????????????????????? ???????????????????? ···?????????????????5???? ????????????????????????????????????? ????????Oracle WebLogic Server? ???????????????! ???? ?Oracle Direct Seminar??????????? ????????? ?????????????????????????????? Oracle Direct Seminar??????????????????? ?????????????????????????????????????? -------------------------------------------- ????????????????????????????Oracle Direct Seminar(????)? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????? ??????????????????????????????????????????? ????????????????/?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ?????????????(????)? ?????????????????????????????? ??????????????????????????????????? ?????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????!?DB?Upgrade???????? ?????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????? ??????????????????????????????????????????????????? Oralce Database????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ?????????????(????)? ????????????????????? ?????????????????????????????????????????????? ?????????(??????????)? ??????????????????????(??????????)? ????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ??????????????????????·??????????????????? ??????????????????????????????? ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ??????????????????????????????????????????OTN???????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????? -------------------------------------------- ????????????????????????????????????????! ???????????????! ?????????????????????????????! >Oracle Direct Seminar?????????? >?????????!????????????OTN???? ????????! ?????????????????????????????????? ????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????OTN??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ?????????????????????????? ?Developers Summit????????????????????2?????????·????????? ???? ?????????????????? ???? ??(?????????? ????????????????????)?? ?????? ??(Fusion Middleware?????? Fusion Middleware???????? ??????????????) ??? ????????????????????????????^^ >???????????????????1(?????? ???) >???????????????????2(???????) ???4???????????????????????????????????????????????? ?Oracle VM?Oracle WebLogic Server????????? ??????????????????????????????????!! ???????????? ????????????2????????????????????? ?????????????????? ???OTN?????????????????????????????? ????????????????!! ???????????????????????! >????????Oracle Customer Successes? ?????4??????????50??(???)?????????????????? ?????????????????(by Applications)?????????(by Technology)???(by Industry)???????(by Services)?????????? ??????????????????????????????? ????????!????????????????????! ?????????????????????Fusion Middleware??????????? ?4??????????? ??????????????????????! Fusion Middleware???????????! ?INFORMATION INDEPTH NEWSLETTERS Fusion Middleware Edition???????! ??1?OTN???????Fusion Middleware???????????????? ???????????????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????!! ?????????? Oracle/OTN????????????????????????????????????????????????? ????????????????????????????????????? INFORMATION INDEPTH NEWSLETTERS Fusion Middleware Edition??????????????????????? >???????????????????????? ??????????????????????Oracle's Dev2DBA Newsletter?????????????^^ >?Oracle's Dev2DBA Newsletter?????????????????????????????????

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• Netcat file transfer problem

  - by thepurplepixel

  I have two custom scripts I just wrote to facilitate transferring files between my VPS and my home server. They are both written in bash (short & sweet): To send: #!/bin/bash SENDFILE=$1 PORT=$2 HOST='<my house>' HOSTIP=`host $HOST | grep "has address" | cut --delimiter=" " -f 4` echo Transferring file \"$SENDFILE\" to $HOST \($HOSTIP\). tar -c "$SENDFILE" | pv -c -N tar -i 0.5 | lzma -z -c -6 | pv -c -N lzma -i 0.5 | nc -q 1 $HOSTIP $PORT echo Done. To receive: #!/bin/bash SERVER='<myserver>' SERVERIP=`host $SERVER | grep "has address" | cut --delimiter=" " -f 4` PORT=$1 echo Receiving file from $SERVER \($SERVERIP\) on port $PORT. nc -l $PORT | pv -c -N netcat -i 0.5 | lzma -d -c | pv -c -N lzma -i 0.5 | tar -xf - echo Done. The problem is that, for a very quick second, I see something flash along the lines of "Connection Refused" (before pv overwrites it), and no file is ever transferred. The port is forwarded through my router, and nmap confirms it: ~$ sudo nmap -sU -PN -p55515 -v <my house> Starting Nmap 5.00 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2010-04-21 18:10 EDT NSE: Loaded 0 scripts for scanning. Initiating Parallel DNS resolution of 1 host. at 18:10 Completed Parallel DNS resolution of 1 host. at 18:10, 0.00s elapsed Initiating UDP Scan at 18:10 Scanning 74.13.25.94 [1 port] Completed UDP Scan at 18:10, 2.02s elapsed (1 total ports) Host 74.13.25.94 is up. Interesting ports on 74.13.25.94: PORT STATE SERVICE 55515/udp open|filtered unknown Read data files from: /usr/share/nmap Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 2.08 seconds Raw packets sent: 2 (56B) | Rcvd: 5 (260B) Also, running netcat normally doesn't work either: squircle@summit:~$ netcat <my house> 55515 <my house> [<my IP>] 55515 (?) : Connection refused Both boxes are Ubuntu Karmic (9.10). The receiver has no firewall, and outbound traffic on that port is allowed on the sender. I have no idea what to troubleshoot next. Any ideas? P.S.: Feel free to move this to SO/SF if you feel it would fit better there.

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• Oracle OpenWorld Preview: Real World Perspectives from Oracle WebCenter Customers

  - by Christie Flanagan

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} If you frequent the Oracle WebCenter blog you’ve probably read a lot about the customer experience revolution over the last few months.  An important aspect of the customer experience revolution is the increasing role that peers play in influencing how others perceive a product, brand or solution, simply by sharing their own, real-world experiences.  Think about it, who do you trust more -- marketers and sales people pitching polished messages or peers with similar roles and similar challenges to the ones you face in your business every day? With this spirit in mind, this polished marketer personally invites you to hear directly from Oracle WebCenter customers about their real-life experiences during our customer panel sessions at Oracle OpenWorld next week.  If you’re currently using WebCenter, thinking about it, or just want to find out more about best practices in social business, next-generation portals, enterprise content management or web experience management, be sure to attend these sessions: CON8899 - Becoming a Social Business: Stories from the Front Lines of Change Wednesday, Oct 3, 11:45 AM - 12:45 PM - Moscone West - 3000Priscilla Hancock - Vice President/CIO, University of Louisville Kellie Christensen - Director of Information Technology, Banner EngineeringWhat does it really mean to be a social business? How can you change your organization to embrace social approaches? What pitfalls do you need to avoid? In this lively panel discussion, customer and industry thought leaders in social business explore these topics and more as they share their stories of the good, the bad, and the ugly that can happen when embracing social methods and technologies to improve business success. Using moderated questions and open Q&A from the audience, the panel discusses vital topics such as the critical factors for success, the major issues to avoid, how to gain senior executive support for social efforts, how to handle undesired behavior, and how to measure business impact. This session will take a thought-provoking look at becoming a social business from the inside. CON8900 - Building Next-Generation Portals: An Interactive Customer Panel DiscussionWednesday, Oct 3, 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM - Moscone West - 3000Roberts Wayne - Director, IT, Canadian Partnership Against CancerMike Beattie - VP Application Development, Aramark Uniform ServicesJohn Chen - Utilities Services Manager 6, Los Angeles Department of Water & PowerJörg Modlmayr - Head of Product Managment, Siemens AGSocial and collaborative technologies have changed how people interact, learn, and collaborate, and providing a modern, social Web presence is imperative to remain competitive in today’s market. Can your business benefit from a more collaborative and interactive portal environment for employees, customers, and partners? Attend this session to hear from Oracle WebCenter Portal customers as they share their strategies and best practices for providing users with a modern experience that adapts to their needs and includes personalized access to content in context. The panel also addresses how customers have benefited from creating next-generation portals by migrating from older portal technologies to Oracle WebCenter Portal. CON8898 - Land Mines, Potholes, and Dirt Roads: Navigating the Way to ECM NirvanaThursday, Oct 4, 12:45 PM - 1:45 PM - Moscone West - 3001Stephen Madsen - Senior Management Consultant, Alberta Agriculture and Rural DevelopmentHimanshu Parikh - Sr. Director, Enterprise Architecture & Middleware, Ross Stores, Inc.Ten years ago, people were predicting that by this time in history, we’d be some kind of utopian paperless society. As we all know, we're not there yet, but are we getting closer? What is keeping companies from driving down the road to enterprise content management bliss? Most people understand that using ECM as a central platform enables organizations to expedite document-centric processes, but most business processes in organizations are still heavily paper-based. Many of these processes could be automated and improved with an ECM platform infrastructure. In this panel discussion, you’ll hear from Oracle WebCenter customers that have already solved some of these challenges as they share their strategies for success and roads to avoid along your journey. CON8897 - Using Web Experience Management to Drive Online Marketing SuccessThursday, Oct 4, 2:15 PM - 3:15 PM - Moscone West - 3001Blane Nelson - Chief Architect, Ancestry.comMike Remedios - CIO, ArbonneCaitlin Scanlon - Product Manager, Monster WorldwideEvery year, the online channel becomes more imperative for driving organizational top-line revenue, but for many companies, mastering how to best market their products and services in a fast-evolving online world with high customer expectations for personalized experiences can be a complex proposition. Come to this panel discussion, and hear directly from customers on how they are succeeding today by using Web experience management to drive marketing success, using capabilities such as targeting and optimization, user-generated content, mobile site publishing, and site visitor personalization to deliver engaging online experiences. Your Handy Guide to WebCenter at Oracle OpenWorld Want a quick and easy guide to all the keynotes, demos, hands-on labs and WebCenter sessions you definitely don't want to miss at Oracle OpenWorld? Download this handy guide, Focus on WebCenter. More helpful links: * Oracle OpenWorld* Oracle Customer Experience Summit @ OpenWorld* Oracle OpenWorld on Facebook * Oracle OpenWorld on Twitter* Oracle OpenWorld on LinkedIn* Oracle OpenWorld Blog

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• Information Indepth Newsletter - Linux Edition

  - by Paulo Folgado

  INFORMATION INDEPTH NEWSLETTERLinux Edition February 2011 Stay Connected:  NEWS Now Available: Oracle Linux 6 Get the latest release of Oracle Linux 6, which includes Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel.Download Oracle Linux 6 Read More Customers Succeed by Using Oracle Exadata with Oracle Linux Watch IT executives from Bank of America, Linkshare, and Johns Hopkins as they talk about the business challenges they faced and why they chose to use Oracle Linux along with Oracle Exadata as the solution. Watch Now Video Interview: Oracle Senior Vice President Wim Coekaerts Watch Wim Coekaerts, senior vice president, Linux and Virtualization Engineering, as he talks about use cases for Oracle VM Templates as well as the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel for Linux.Watch Now Hot Off the Press: Migrate Your IBM AIX Environment to Oracle Linux This new white paper provides recommendations for planning and implementing the migration of applications from an IBM Power System running AIX to Oracle's Sun Fire X4800 Server with Intel Xeon 7560 Processor running Oracle Linux 5.5.Read More  Back to Top BLOGOSPHERE Just Launched: The Oracle Linux Blog Follow our new Oracle Linux blog  to hear the latest updates, product news, upcoming events, and all the latest happenings, directly from the Linux team at Oracle. Back to Top TECH DIVE NEW: Linux/Oracle Solaris CommandComparo Site from Oracle Technology NetworkThis site gives equivalent command syntax in Oracle Solaris 10 and Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 for common administrative tasks--focusing particularly on tasks that have tricky syntax or that you frequently need to double check. It acts as a quick reference for administrators who operate in these two OS environments. Free Download: Oracle Linux Release 5.6Did you know that by using Oracle Linux 5.5 or 5.6 along with the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel, you can get all the benefits of Linux mainline kernel 2.6.32 and more, right now, without the need to reinstall or migrate to a new operating system such as RHEL6?Read Release NotesDownload Oracle Linux 5.6 LSB 4.0 Certification Completed for Oracle Linux 5.5Oracle Linux 5.5 with Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel successfully completed the LSB 4.0 certification.  Back to Top WEBCASTS Boost Your Linux Performance with Oracle's Enhancements in Infiniband and RDSRegister to hear Director of Kernel Engineering Chris Mason cover scalability and performance improvements in Linux environment. Get the Facts Oracle's Unbreakable Enterprise KernelSVP Wim Coekaerts and Senior Director Monica Kumar cover the facts about and benefits of using Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel.  View Other Webcasts on Demand   Back to Top EVENTS Collaborate 2011April 10-14 Orlando, Florida Cloud Summit Events, WorldwideVarious dates (check the city for date/time of event) Datacenter Efficiency Events WorldwideThese events include Linux and Oracle VM sessions.Various dates (check the city for date/time of event) Virtualization Events in North America Find an Oracle Event  Back to Top EDUCATION Get Oracle Linux Certified from Oracle University Oracle University offers courses in both Oracle Linux and the administration of Oracle Database on Linux.  Back to Top CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT Pella Corporation Improves IT Performance and Efficiency with Oracle Linux and Oracle VM To improve IT performance and efficiency and lower operational costs, Pella Corporation, has standardized on Oracle VM and Oracle Linux. Read More Disney Store Deploys POS in 330 Stores and 7 Countries on Oracle Linux Disney Store is running 1,500 registers worldwide on a broad Oracle technology software stack including Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Fusion Middleware, and Oracle Linux. Read More Back to Top PARTNER SPOTLIGHT Emulex and Oracle Announce Data Integrity Features The Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel provides data integrity checking between Oracle Database applications and Emulex 8Gb/s LightPulse Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapters. Read More Dell Inc. Dell Inc. tested and validated configurations support Oracle Linux. Back to Top STAY IN TOUCH Follow @ORCL_Linux on Twitter for the latest penguin tweets Bookmark Oracle.com/Linux Read the Oracle Linux blog Back to Top  Oracle Information InDepth newsletters bring targeted news, articles, customer stories, and special offers to business people who want to find out how to streamline enterprise information management, measure results, improve business processes, and communicate a single truth to their constituents. Please send questions or comments to [email protected]. For answers to questions about subscribing, unsubscribing, and managing your Oracle e-mail communications preferences, please see the Oracle E-Mail Communications page. Copyright © 2011, Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. This document is provided for information purposes only, and the contents hereof are subject to change without notice. This document is not warranted to be error-free, nor is it subject to any other warranties or conditions, whether expressed orally or implied in law, including implied warranties and conditions of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. We specifically disclaim any liability with respect to this document, and no contractual obligations are formed either directly or indirectly by this document. This document may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, for any purpose, without our prior written permission. 

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• Visualising data a different way with Pivot collections

  - by Rob Farley

  Roger’s been doing a great job extending PivotViewer recently, and you can find the list of LobsterPot pivots at http://pivot.lobsterpot.com.au Many months back, the TED Talk that Gary Flake did about Pivot caught my imagination, and I did some research into it. At the time, most of what we did with Pivot was geared towards what we could do for clients, including making Pivot collections based on students at a school, and using it to browse PDF invoices by their various properties. We had actual commercial work based on Pivot collections back then, and it was all kinds of fun. Later, we made some collections for events that were happening, and even got featured in the TechEd Australia keynote. But I’m getting ahead of myself... let me explain the concept. A Pivot collection is an XML file (with .cxml extension) which lists Items, each linking to an image that’s stored in a Deep Zoom format (this means that it contains tiles like Bing Maps, so that the browser can request only the ones of interest according to the zoom level). This collection can be shown in a Silverlight application that uses the PivotViewer control, or in the Pivot Browser that’s available from getpivot.com. Filtering and sorting the items according to their facets (attributes, such as size, age, category, etc), the PivotViewer rearranges the way that these are shown in a very dynamic way. To quote Gary Flake, this lets us “see patterns which are otherwise hidden”. This browsing mechanism is very suited to a number of different methods, because it’s just that – browsing. It’s not searching, it’s more akin to window-shopping than doing an internet search. When we decided to put something together for the conferences such as TechEd Australia 2010 and the PASS Summit 2010, we did some screen-scraping to provide a different view of data that was already available online. Nick Hodge and Michael Kordahi from Microsoft liked the idea a lot, and after a bit of tweaking, we produced one that Michael used in the TechEd Australia keynote to show the variety of talks on offer. It’s interesting to see a pattern in this data: The Office track has the most sessions, but if the Interactive Sessions and Instructor-Led Labs are removed, it drops down to only the sixth most popular track, with Cloud Computing taking over. This is something which just isn’t obvious when you look an ordinary search tool. You get a much better feel for the data when moving around it like this. The more observant amongst you will have noticed some difference in the collection that Michael is demonstrating in the picture above with the screenshots I’ve shown. That’s because it’s been extended some more. At the SQLBits conference in the UK this year, I had some interesting discussions with the guys from Xpert360, particularly Phil Carter, who I’d met in 2009 at an earlier SQLBits conference. They had got around to producing a Pivot collection based on the SQLBits data, which we had been planning to do but ran out of time. We discussed some of ways that Pivot could be used, including the ways that my old friend Howard Dierking had extended it for the MSDN Magazine. I’m not suggesting I influenced Xpert360 at all, but they certainly inspired us with some of their posts on the matter So with LobsterPot guys David Gardiner and Roger Noble both having dabbled in Pivot collections (and Dave doing some for clients), I set Roger to work on extending it some more. He’s used various events and so on to be able to make an environment that allows us to do quick deployment of new collections, as well as showing the data in a grid view which behaves as if it were simply a third view of the data (the other two being the array of images and the ‘histogram’ view). I see PivotViewer as being a significant step in data visualisation – so much so that I feature it when I deliver talks on Spatial Data Visualisation methods. Any time when there is information that can be conveyed through an image, you have to ask yourself how best to show that image, and whether that image is the focal point. For Spatial data, the image is most often a map, and the map becomes the central mode for navigation. I show Pivot with postcode areas, since I can browse the postcodes based on their data, and many of the images are recognisable (to locals of South Australia). Naturally, the images could link through to the map itself, and so on, but generally people think of Spatial data in terms of navigating a map, which doesn’t always gel with the information you’re trying to extract. Roger’s even looking into ways to hook PivotViewer into the Bing Maps API, in a similar way to the Deep Earth project, displaying different levels of map detail according to how ‘zoomed in’ the images are. Some of the work that Dave did with one of the schools was generating the Deep Zoom tiles “on the fly”, based on images stored in a database, and Roger has produced a collection which uses images from flickr, that lets you move from one search term to another. Pulling the images down from flickr.com isn’t particularly ideal from a performance aspect, and flickr doesn’t store images in a small-enough format to really lend itself to this use, but you might agree that it’s an interesting concept which compares nicely to using Maps. I’m looking forward to future versions of the PivotViewer control, and hope they provide many more events that can be used, and even more hooks into it. Naturally, LobsterPot could help provide your business with a PivotViewer experience, but you can probably do a lot of it yourself too. There’s a thorough guide at getpivot.com, which is how we got into it. For some examples of what we’ve done, have a look at http://pivot.lobsterpot.com.au. I’d like to see PivotViewer really catch on a data visualisation tool.

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• Data Mining Resources

  - by Dejan Sarka

  There are many different types of analyses, each one with its own pros and cons. Relational reports have a predefined structure, and end users cannot change it. They are simple to use for end users. Reports can use real-time data and snapshots of data to show the state of a report at specific points in time. One of the drawbacks is that report authoring is limited to IT pros and advanced users. Any kind of dynamic restructuring is very limited. If real-time data is used for a report, the report has a negative impact on the performance of the source system. Processing of the reports might be slow because the data comes from relational database management systems, which are not optimized for reporting only. If you create a semantic model of your data, your end users can create ad-hoc report structures. However, the development is more complex because a developer is needed to create these semantic models. For OLAP, you typically use specialized database management systems. You get lightning speed of analyses. End users can use rich and thin clients to interactively change the structure of the report. Typically, they do it graphically. However, the development of an OLAP system is many times quite complex. It involves the preparation and maintenance of an enterprise data warehouse and OLAP cubes. In order to exploit the possibility of real-time restructuring of reports, the users must be both active and educated. The data is usually stale, as it is loaded into data warehouses and OLAP cubes with a scheduled process. With data mining, a structure is not selected in advance; it searches for the structure. As a result, data mining can give you the most valuable results because you can discover patterns you did not expect. A data mining model structure is limited only by the attributes that you use to train the model. One of the drawbacks is that a lot of knowledge is needed for a successful data mining project. End users have to understand the results. Subject matter experts and IT professionals need to understand business problem thoroughly. The development might be sometimes even more complex than the development of OLAP cubes. Each type of analysis has its own place in an enterprise system. SQL Server has tools for all kinds of analyses. However, data mining is the most advanced way of analyzing the data; this is the “I” in BI. In order to get the most out of it, you need to learn quite a lot. In this blog post, I am gathering together resources for learning, including forthcoming events. Books Multiple authors: SQL Server MVP Deep Dives – I wrote an introductory data mining chapter there. Erik Veerman, Teo Lachev and Dejan Sarka: MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-448): Microsoft SQL Server 2008 - Business Intelligence Development and Maintenance – you can find a good overview of a complete BI solution, including data mining, in this book. Jamie MacLennan, ZhaoHui Tang, and Bogdan Crivat: Data Mining with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 – can’t miss this book if you want to mine your data with SQL Server tools. Michael Berry, Gordon Linoff: Mastering Data Mining: The Art and Science of Customer Relationship Management – data mining from both, business and technical perspective. Dorian Pyle: Data Preparation for Data Mining – an in-depth book about data preparation. Thomas and Ronald Wonnacott: Introductory Statistics – if you thought that you could get away without statistics, then you are not serious about data mining. Jiawei Han and Micheline Kamber: Data Mining Concepts and Techniques – in-depth explanation of the most popular data mining algorithms. Michael Berry and Gordon Linoff: Data Mining Techniques – another book that explains data mining algorithms, more fro a business perspective. Paolo Guidici: Applied Data Mining – very mathematical book, only if you enjoy statistics and mathematics in general. Forthcoming presentations I am presenting two data mining related sessions during the PASS Summit in Charlotte, NC: Wednesday, October 16th, 2013 - Fraud Detection: Notes from the Field – I am showing how to use data mining for a specific business problem. The presentation is based on real-life projects. Friday, October 18th: Excel 2013 Advanced Analytics – I am focusing on Excel Data Mining Add-ins, and how to use them together with Power Pivot and other add-ins. This is the most you can get out of Excel. Sinergija 2013, Belgrade, Serbia Tuesday, October 22nd: Excel 2013 Analytics to the Max – another presentation focusing on the most advanced analytics you can get in Excel. SQL Rally Amsterdam, Netherlands Thursday, November 7th: Advanced Analytics in Excel 2013 – and again I am presenting about data mining in Excel. Why three different titles for the same presentation? I don’t know, I guess I forgot the name I proposed every time right after I sent the proposal. Courses Data Mining with SQL Server 2012 – I wrote a 3-day course for SolidQ. If you are interested in this course, which I could also deliver in a shorter seminar way, you can contact your closes SolidQ subsidiary, or, of course, me directly on addresses [email protected] or [email protected]. This course could also complement the existing courseware portfolio of training providers, which are welcome to contact me as well. OK, now you know: no more excuses, start learning data mining, get the most out of your data

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• Backpacks and Booth Paint: TechEd 2012

  - by The Un-T Guy

  Arriving in the parking lot of the Orange County Convention Center, I immediately knew I was in the right place. As far as the eye could see, the acres of asphalt were awash in backpacks, quirky (to be kind) outfits, and bad haircuts. This was the place. This was Microsoft Mecca v2012 for geeks and nerds, the Central Florida event of the year, a gathering of high tech professionals whose skills I both greatly respect and, frankly, fear a little. I was wholly and completely out of element, a dork in a vast sea of geek jumbo. It like was wearing dockers and a golf shirt walking into a RenFaire, but one with really crappy costumes and no turkey legs...save those attached to some of the attendees. Of course the corporate whores...errrr, vendors were in place, ready to parlay the convention's fre-nerd-ic energy into millions of dollars by convincing the big-brained and under-sexed in the crowd (i.e., virtually all of them...present company excluded, of course) that their product or service was the only thing standing between them and professional success, industry fame, and clear skin. "With KramTech 2012," they seemed to scream, "you will be THE ROCK STAR of your company's IT department!" As car shows and tattoo parlors learned long ago, Tech companies seem to believe that the best way to attract the attention of this crowd is through the hint of the promise of sex. They recruit and deploy an army of "sales reps" whose primary qualifications appear to be long hair, short skirts, high heels, and a vagina. Unlike their distant cousins in the car and body art industries, however, this sub-species of booth paint (semi-gloss decoration that adds nothing to the substance of the product) seems torn between committing to being all-out sex objects and recognition that they are in the presence of intelligent, discerning people. People who are smart enough to know exactly what these vendors are doing. Also unlike their distant car show and tattoo shop cousins, these young women (what…are there no gay tech professionals who could use some eye candy?) seem to realize that while IT remains a male-dominated field, there are ever-increasing numbers of intelligent, capable, strong professional women – women who’ve battled to make it in this field through hard work and work performance rather than a hard body and performing after work. This is not to say that all of the young female sales reps are there only because of their physical attributes. Many are competent, intelligent, and driven -- not to mention attractive. They're working hard on the front lines of delivering the next generation of technology. The distinction is pretty clear, however, between these young professionals and the booth paint. The former enthusiastically deliver credible information about the products they’re hawking. The latter are positioned in the aisles, uncomfortably avoiding eye contact as they struggle to operate the badge readers. Surprisingly, not all of the women in attendance seemed to object to the objectification of their younger sisters. One IT professional woman who came of age in the industry (mostly in IT marketing) said, “I have no problem with it. I was a ‘booth babe’ for years and it doesn’t bother me at all.” Others, however, weren’t quite so gracious. One woman I spoke with, an IT manager from Cheyenne, Wyoming, said it was demeaning and frankly, as more and more women grow into IT management positions, not a great marketing idea. “Using these young women is, to me, no different than vendors giving out t-shirts to attract attention. It’s sad because it’s still hard for a woman to be respected in the IT field and this just perpetuates the outdated notion that IT is a male-dominated field.” She went on to say that decisions by vendors to employ these young women in this “inappropriate way” could impact her purchasing decisions. “I might be swayed toward a vendor who has women on staff who are intelligent and dynamic rather than the vendors who use the ‘decoration’ girls.” So in many ways, the IT industry is no different than most other industries as it struggles to maximize performance by finding and developing talent – all of the talent, not just the 50% with a penis. Women in IT, like their brethren, struggle to find their niche in the field, to grow professionally, and reach for the brass ring, struggling to overcome obstacles as they climb the mountain of professional success in a never-ending cycle of economic uncertainty. But as (generally) well-educated and highly-trained professionals, they are probably better positioned than those in many other industries. Beside, they’ve got one other advantage over their non-IT counterparts as they attempt their ascent to the summit: They’ve already got the backpacks.

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• Using SQL Source Control with Fortress or Vault &ndash; Part 1

  - by AjarnMark

  I am fanatical when it comes to managing the source code for my company.  Everything that we build (in source form) gets put into our source control management system.  And I’m not just talking about the UI and middle-tier code written in C# and ASP.NET, but also the back-end database stuff, which at times has been a pain.  We even script out our Scheduled Jobs and keep a copy of those under source control. The UI and middle-tier stuff has long been easy to manage as we mostly use Visual Studio which has integration with source control systems built in.  But the SQL code has been a little harder to deal with.  I have been doing this for many years, well before Microsoft came up with Data Dude, so I had already established a methodology that, while not as smooth as VS, nonetheless let me keep things well controlled, and allowed doing my database development in my tool of choice, Query Analyzer in days gone by, and now SQL Server Management Studio.  It just makes sense to me that if I’m going to do database development, let’s use the database tool set.  (Although, I have to admit I was pretty impressed with the demo of Juneau that Don Box did at the PASS Summit this year.)  So as I was saying, I had developed a methodology that worked well for us (and I’ll probably outline in a future post) but it could use some improvement. When Solutions and Projects were first introduced in SQL Management Studio, I thought we were finally going to get our same experience that we have in Visual Studio.  Well, let’s say I was underwhelmed by Version 1 in SQL 2005, and apparently so were enough other people that by the time SQL 2008 came out, Microsoft decided that Solutions and Projects would be deprecated and completely removed from a future version.  So much for that idea. Then I came across SQL Source Control from Red-Gate.  I have used several tools from Red-Gate in the past, including my favorites SQL Compare, SQL Prompt, and SQL Refactor.  SQL Prompt is worth its weight in gold, and the others are great, too.  Earlier this year, we upgraded from our earlier product bundles to the new Developer Bundle, and in the process added SQL Source Control to our collection.  I thought this might really be the golden ticket I was looking for.  But my hopes were quickly dashed when I discovered that it only integrated with Microsoft Team Foundation Server and Subversion as the source code repositories.  We have been using SourceGear’s Vault and Fortress products for years, and I wholeheartedly endorse them.  So I was out of luck for the time being, although there were a number of people voting for Vault/Fortress support on their feedback forum (as did I) so I had hope that maybe next year I could look at it again. But just a couple of weeks ago, I was pleasantly surprised to receive notice in my email that Red-Gate had an Early Access version of SQL Source Control that worked with Vault and Fortress, so I quickly downloaded it and have been putting it through its paces.  So far, I really like what I see, and I have been quite impressed with Red-Gate’s responsiveness when I have contacted them with any issues or concerns that I have had.  I have had several communications with Gyorgy Pocsi at Red-Gate and he has been immensely helpful and responsive. I must say that development with SQL Source Control is very different from what I have been used to.  This post is getting long enough, so I’ll save some of the details for a separate write-up, but the short story is that in my regular mode, it’s all about the script files.  Script files are King and you dare not make a change to the database other than by way of a script file, or you are in deep trouble.  With SQL Source Control, you make your changes to your development database however you like.  I still prefer writing most of my changes in T-SQL, but you can also use any of the GUI functionality of SSMS to make your changes, and SQL Source Control “manages” the script for you.  Basically, when you first link your database to source control, the tool generates scripts for every primary object (tables and their indexes are together in one script, not broken out into separate scripts like DB Projects do) and those scripts are checked into your source control.  So, if you needed to, you could still do a GET from your source control repository and build the database from scratch.  But for the day-to-day work, SQL Source Control uses the same technique as SQL Compare to determine what changes have been made to your development database and how to represent those in your repository scripts.  I think that once I retrain myself to just work in the database and quit worrying about having to find and open the right script file, that this will actually make us more efficient. And for deployment purposes, SQL Source Control integrates with the full SQL Compare utility to produce a synchronization script (or do a live sync).  This is similar in concept to Microsoft’s DACPAC, if you’re familiar with that. If you are not currently keeping your database development efforts under source control, definitely examine this tool.  If you already have a methodology that is working for you, then I still think this is worth a review and comparison to your current approach.  You may find it more efficient.  But remember that the version which integrates with Vault/Fortress is still in pre-release mode, so treat it with a little caution.  I have found it to be fairly stable, but there was one bug that I found which had inconvenient side-effects and could have really been frustrating if I had been running this on my normal active development machine.  However, I can verify that that bug has been fixed in a more recent build version (did I mention Red-Gate’s responsiveness?).

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• A new SQL, a new Analysis Services, a new Workshop! #ssas #sql2012

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  One week ago Microsoft SQL Server 2012 finally debuted with a virtual launch event and you can find many intro sessions there (20 minutes each). There is a lot of new content available if you want to learn more about SQL 2012 and in this blog post I’d like to provide a few link to sessions, documents, bits and courses that are available now or very soon. First of all, the release of Analysis Services 2012 has finally released PowerPivot 2012 (many of us called it PowerPivot v2 before this official name) and also the new Data Mining Add-in for Microsoft Office 2010, now available also for Excel 64bit! And, of course, don’t miss the Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Feature Pack, there are a lot of upgrades for both DBAs and developers. I just discovered there is a new LocalDB version of SQL Express that can run in user mode without any setup. Is this the end of SQL CE? But now, back to Analysis Services: if you want some tutorial on Tabular, the Microsoft Virtual Academy has a whole track dedicated to Analysis Services 2012 but you will probably be interested also in the one about Reporting Services 2012. If you think that virtual is good but it’s not enough, there are plenty of conferences in the coming months – these are just those where I and Alberto will deliver some SSAS Tabular presentations: SQLBits X, London, March 29-31, 2012: if you are in London or want a good reason to go, this is the most important SQL Server event in Europe this year, no doubts about it. And not only because of the high number of attendees, but also because there is an impressive number of speakers (excluding me, of course) coming from all over the world. This is an event second only to PASS Summit in Seattle so there are no good reasons to not attend it. Microsoft SQL Server & Business Intelligence Conference 2012, Milan, March 28-29, 2012: this is an Italian conference so the language might be a barrier, but many of us also speak English and the food is good! Just a few seats still available. TechEd North America, Orlando, June 11-14, 2012: you know, this is a big event and it contains everything – if you want to spend a whole day learning the SSAS Tabular model with me and Alberto, don’t miss our pre-conference day “Using BISM Tabular in Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2012” (be careful, it is on June 10, a nice study-Sunday!). TechEd Europe, Amsterdam, June 26-29, 2012: the European version of TechEd provides almost the same content and you don’t have to go overseas. We also run the same pre-conference day “Using BISM Tabular in Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2012” (in this case, it is on June 25, that’s a regular Monday). I and Alberto will also speak at some user group meeting around Europe during… well, we’re going to travel a lot in the next months. In fact, if you want to get a complete training on SSAS Tabular, you should spend two days with us in one of our SSAS Tabular Workshop! We prepared a 2-day seminar, a very intense one, that start from the simple tabular modeling and cover architecture, DAX, query, advanced modeling, security, deployment, optimization, monitoring, relationships with PowerPivot and Multidimensional… Really, there are a lot of stuffs here! We announced the first dates in Europe and also an online edition optimized for America’s time zone: Apr 16-17, 2012 – Amsterdam, Netherlands Apr 26-27, 2012 – Copenhagen, Denmark May 7-8, 2012 – Online for America’s time zone May 14-15, 2012 – Brussels, Belgium May 21-22, 2012 – Oslo, Norway May 24-25, 2012 – Stockholm, Sweden May 28-29, 2012 – London, United Kingdom May 31-Jun 1, 2012 – Milan, Italy (Italian language) Also Chris Webb will join us in this workshop and in every date you can find who is the speaker on the web site. The course is based on our upcoming book, almost 600 pages (!) about SSAS Tabular, an incredible effort that will be available very soon in a preview (rough cuts from O’Reilly) and will be on the shelf in May. I will provide a link to order it as soon as we have one! And if you think that this is not enough… you’re right! Do you know what is the only thing you can do to optimize your Tabular model? Optimize your DAX code. Learning DAX is easy, mastering DAX requires some knowledge… and our DAX Advanced Workshop will provide exactly the required content. Public classes will be available later this year, by now we just deliver it on demand.

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• A new SQL, a new Analysis Services, a new Workshop! #ssas #sql2012

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  One week ago Microsoft SQL Server 2012 finally debuted with a virtual launch event and you can find many intro sessions there (20 minutes each). There is a lot of new content available if you want to learn more about SQL 2012 and in this blog post I’d like to provide a few link to sessions, documents, bits and courses that are available now or very soon. First of all, the release of Analysis Services 2012 has finally released PowerPivot 2012 (many of us called it PowerPivot v2 before this official name) and also the new Data Mining Add-in for Microsoft Office 2010, now available also for Excel 64bit! And, of course, don’t miss the Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Feature Pack, there are a lot of upgrades for both DBAs and developers. I just discovered there is a new LocalDB version of SQL Express that can run in user mode without any setup. Is this the end of SQL CE? But now, back to Analysis Services: if you want some tutorial on Tabular, the Microsoft Virtual Academy has a whole track dedicated to Analysis Services 2012 but you will probably be interested also in the one about Reporting Services 2012. If you think that virtual is good but it’s not enough, there are plenty of conferences in the coming months – these are just those where I and Alberto will deliver some SSAS Tabular presentations: SQLBits X, London, March 29-31, 2012: if you are in London or want a good reason to go, this is the most important SQL Server event in Europe this year, no doubts about it. And not only because of the high number of attendees, but also because there is an impressive number of speakers (excluding me, of course) coming from all over the world. This is an event second only to PASS Summit in Seattle so there are no good reasons to not attend it. Microsoft SQL Server & Business Intelligence Conference 2012, Milan, March 28-29, 2012: this is an Italian conference so the language might be a barrier, but many of us also speak English and the food is good! Just a few seats still available. TechEd North America, Orlando, June 11-14, 2012: you know, this is a big event and it contains everything – if you want to spend a whole day learning the SSAS Tabular model with me and Alberto, don’t miss our pre-conference day “Using BISM Tabular in Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2012” (be careful, it is on June 10, a nice study-Sunday!). TechEd Europe, Amsterdam, June 26-29, 2012: the European version of TechEd provides almost the same content and you don’t have to go overseas. We also run the same pre-conference day “Using BISM Tabular in Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2012” (in this case, it is on June 25, that’s a regular Monday). I and Alberto will also speak at some user group meeting around Europe during… well, we’re going to travel a lot in the next months. In fact, if you want to get a complete training on SSAS Tabular, you should spend two days with us in one of our SSAS Tabular Workshop! We prepared a 2-day seminar, a very intense one, that start from the simple tabular modeling and cover architecture, DAX, query, advanced modeling, security, deployment, optimization, monitoring, relationships with PowerPivot and Multidimensional… Really, there are a lot of stuffs here! We announced the first dates in Europe and also an online edition optimized for America’s time zone: Apr 16-17, 2012 – Amsterdam, Netherlands Apr 26-27, 2012 – Copenhagen, Denmark May 7-8, 2012 – Online for America’s time zone May 14-15, 2012 – Brussels, Belgium May 21-22, 2012 – Oslo, Norway May 24-25, 2012 – Stockholm, Sweden May 28-29, 2012 – London, United Kingdom May 31-Jun 1, 2012 – Milan, Italy (Italian language) Also Chris Webb will join us in this workshop and in every date you can find who is the speaker on the web site. The course is based on our upcoming book, almost 600 pages (!) about SSAS Tabular, an incredible effort that will be available very soon in a preview (rough cuts from O’Reilly) and will be on the shelf in May. I will provide a link to order it as soon as we have one! And if you think that this is not enough… you’re right! Do you know what is the only thing you can do to optimize your Tabular model? Optimize your DAX code. Learning DAX is easy, mastering DAX requires some knowledge… and our DAX Advanced Workshop will provide exactly the required content. Public classes will be available later this year, by now we just deliver it on demand.

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• High Jinks, Hi Jacks, Exceptional DBA Awards and PASS

  - by Rodney

  The countdown to PASS has counted down.  The day after tomorrow I will board a plane, like many others, on my way for the 4th year in a row to SQL PASS Summit.  The anticipation has been excruciating but luckily I have this little thing called a day job as a DBA that has kept me busy and not thinking too much about the event. Well that is not exactly true since my beautiful wife works for PASS so we get to talk about SQL from the time we wake up until late in the evening. I would not have it any other way and I feel very fortunate to be a part of this great event and to have been chosen as the Exceptional DBA Award judge also for the 4th year in a row.  This year, I will have been again tasked with presenting the award to the winner, Mr. Jeff Moden and it will be a true honor to meet him in person as I have read many of his articles on SSC and have attended his session at PASS previously.  The speech is all ready but one item remains, which will be a surprise to all who attend the party on Tuesday night in Seattle (see links below).  Let's face it, Exceptional DBAs everywhere work very hard protecting our data stores, tuning queries, mentoring, saving money, installing clusters, etc and once in a while there is time to be exceptionally non-professional and have a bit of fun. Once incident that happened this year that falls under the High Jinks category was when my network admin asked if I could Telnet into a SQL instance and see if I could make the connection through the firewall that he had just configured. I was able to establish a connection on port 1433 and it occurred to me that it would be very interesting if I could actually run T-SQL queries via a Telnet session much like you might do with an SMTP server. With that thought, I proceeded to demonstrate this could be possible by convincing my senior DBA Shawn McGehee that I was able to do so. At first he did not believe me. It shook his world view.  It was inconceivable.  What I had done, behind the scenes, of course, was to copy and rename SQLCMD.exe to Telnet.exe and used it to connect and run a simple, "Select * from sys.databases" on the SQL instance. I think if it had been anyone other than Shawn I could have extended this ruse indefinitely but he caught on within 30 seconds. It was a fun thirty seconds though. On the High Jacks side of the house, which is really merged to be SQL HACKS, I finally, after several years of struggling with how to connect to an untrusted domain like in a DMZ with a windows account in SSMS, I stumbled upon a solution that does away with the requirement to use SQL Authentication.  While "Runas" is a great command to use to run an application with a higher privileged account, I had not previously been able to figure out how to connect to the remote domain with SSMS and "Runsas". It never connected and caused a login failure every time for the remote windows domain account. Then I ran across an option for "Runas",   "/netonly".  This option postpones the login until a connection is made and only then passes the remote login you supply when you first launch SSMS with the "Runas" command. So a typical shortcut would look like: "C:\Windows\System32\runas.exe /netonly /user:remotedomain.com\rodlandrum "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Tools\Binn\VSShell\Common7\IDE\Ssms.exe" You will want to make sure the passwords are synced between the two domains, your local domain and the remote domain, otherwise you may have account lockout issues, but I have found in weeks of testing this is a stable solution. Now it is time to get ready to head for Seattle. Please, if you see me (@SQLBeat) or my wife (@Karlakay22) please run up and high five me (wait..High Jinks.High Jacks.High Fives.Need to change the title) or give me a big bear hug if you are strong enough to lift me off the ground. And if you do actually do that, I will think you are awesome and will not embarrass you by crying out for help or complaining of a broken back or sciatic nerve damage. And now the links to others who have all of the details. First, for the MVP Deep Dives 2, of which, like John, I was lucky enough to be able to participate in this year. http://www.simple-talk.com/community/blogs/johnm/archive/2011/09/29/103577.aspx And the details of the SSC party where the Exceptional DBA of 2011, Jeff Moden, will be awarded. http://www.simple-talk.com/community/blogs/rebecca_amos/archive/2011/10/05/103661.aspx   Cheers! Rodney

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• Making your ASP.NET/HTML Websites Indic aware &ndash; accepting Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Hindi and ot

  - by Harish Ranganathan

  Its been a month since I wrote my last post.  Much of work has been happening around planning for Tech Ed India, the upcoming Virtual TechDays this week as well as our Developer content at the Great Indian Developer Summit 2010.  Its going to be one exciting period starting this week and I am glad I would be able to meet a lot of folks who have written to me personally that they would like to catch up at Tech Ed India. For now, I had a chance to meet the Microsoft India Development Centre team that worked on the Microsoft Indic Language Input Tool (erstwhile Akshara). The team updated me that they have also released the scripts  so that the Indic input feature can be encapsulated into your own websites.  For example, if you are having a web page where you collect user information, you can pretty much make your site indic aware i.e. accept inputs in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Hindi etc.,  All you would need to include would be a bunch of scripts onto your web pages and you are ready to make it, like I said, “indic aware” I have built a sample web page that accepts First Name, Last Name, Address and an additional field.  When it comes to accepting indic, sometimes, you may want to avoid the indic input in certain fields and accept it in English.  You can specify the MicrosoftILITWebAttach="false" attribute to the Text Boxes and Text Areas (TextMode=”Multiline” in ASP.NET) so that the particular field automatically switches over to English input.  Similarly, the moment you specify that the TextMode=”Password” to make it as a password field, it automatically ignores all indic recognition and shows the masked dots for the words entered. Note that, this is, when we are going for the Opt-out mode, where we are specifying that by default all the input controls would need indic awareness and we would specify for those controls where it is not required.  The other mode is Opt-in mode where you would need to add a different property to the script definition i.e. attachMode=”optin” .  When we do this, we need to explicitly add the MicrosoftILITWebAttach="true" attribute for every control where we need indic input. I have created a sample web page which accepts First Name, Last Name, Address and an additional input field to demonstrate the “Opt-out”.   You can copy paste this into any of your web pages to check it <form id="form1" runat="server">     <!-- Microsoft Indic Language Input Tool embed code --> <input type="hidden" id="MicrosoftILITWebEmbedInfo" attachMode="optout" value="" /> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ilit.microsoft.com/bookmarklet/script/Tamil.js" defer="defer"></script>     <div>     <h2>         Welcome to the Registration Page     </h2>     <p>         First Name: <asp:TextBox runat="server" ID="txtFirstName" />         <br />         <br />         Last Name: <asp:TextBox runat="server" ID="txtLastName" />         <br />         <br />         Password:         <asp:TextBox runat="server" ID="txtPassword" TextMode="Password" />         <br />         <br />         Address: <asp:TextBox runat="server" ID="txtAddress" TextMode="MultiLine" Height="100" Width="200" />         <br />         <br />         English Text: <asp:TextBox ID="txtEnglishText" runat="server" MicrosoftILITWebAttach="false" />     </p>     <p>         <!-- Microsoft Indic Language Input Tool attribution image link --> <a style="text-decoration: none" href="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=184205&clcid=0x409"><img style="border: 0px" alt="Transliteration by Microsoft" src="http://ilit.microsoft.com/bookmarklet/images/attribution.png"></a>     </p>     </div>     </form> If you note the code snippet above, I have included the scripts in the top with the attachMode set to “optout” and for the last TextBox, I have mentioned the MicrosoftILITWebAttach="false” attribute to make it accept English input.   Additionally, you also need to add the “Microsoft Indic Language Input Tool attribution image” to your web page as a courtesy to the team that developed this feature.  It would basically add a image saying “Transliteration by Microsoft” similar to a Copy Right image.  You can see the screen shot below where I have typed it in Tamil.  In that you will notice that the password field behaves as expected and the last field accepts English Text.  You can also notice the icon that comes in the first textbox that indicates that, the field is going to accept indic text.   This sample is using Tamil, but you can pretty much do it for Hindi, Telugu, Kannada, Marathi, Bengali etc.,   The website for getting the Indic script and other instructions is http://specials.msn.co.in/ilit/WebEmbed.aspx?language=Tamil You can replace the querystring value “Tamil” to other languages as mentioned above to get the respective script. This also works for plain HTML based websites and doesn’t necessarily need you to use ASP.NET to achieve the functionality. Note that, this form is not completely localized.  This is transliterated.  You can add label controls for FirstName, LastName indication etc., and use the Visual Studio tools to localize and get those values from resource files.  In the resource files, you can enter the text in different languages to make this a truly localized page.  If you just want to download the Indic Tool Desktop version (that can be used for typing in Word, Excel, pretty much any input area), you can download it from http://specials.msn.co.in/ilit/  In the same page, there is also a web version where you can type and get text then and there if you dont want to install the desktop version. So, go ahead, download / use them in your websites and enjoy the power of Indic. Cheers !!!

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• Columnstore Case Study #2: Columnstore faster than SSAS Cube at DevCon Security

  - by aspiringgeek

  Preamble This is the second in a series of posts documenting big wins encountered using columnstore indexes in SQL Server 2012 & 2014.  Many of these can be found in my big deck along with details such as internals, best practices, caveats, etc.  The purpose of sharing the case studies in this context is to provide an easy-to-consume quick-reference alternative. See also Columnstore Case Study #1: MSIT SONAR Aggregations Why Columnstore? As stated previously, If we’re looking for a subset of columns from one or a few rows, given the right indexes, SQL Server can do a superlative job of providing an answer. If we’re asking a question which by design needs to hit lots of rows—DW, reporting, aggregations, grouping, scans, etc., SQL Server has never had a good mechanism—until columnstore. Columnstore indexes were introduced in SQL Server 2012. However, they're still largely unknown. Some adoption blockers existed; yet columnstore was nonetheless a game changer for many apps.  In SQL Server 2014, potential blockers have been largely removed & they're going to profoundly change the way we interact with our data.  The purpose of this series is to share the performance benefits of columnstore & documenting columnstore is a compelling reason to upgrade to SQL Server 2014. The Customer DevCon Security provides home & business security services & has been in business for 135 years. I met DevCon personnel while speaking to the Utah County SQL User Group on 20 February 2012. (Thanks to TJ Belt (b|@tjaybelt) & Ben Miller (b|@DBADuck) for the invitation which serendipitously coincided with the height of ski season.) The App: DevCon Security Reporting: Optimized & Ad Hoc Queries DevCon users interrogate a SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services cube via SSRS. In addition, the SQL Server 2012 relational back end is the target of ad hoc queries; this DW back end is refreshed nightly during a brief maintenance window via conventional table partition switching. SSRS, SSAS, & MDX Conventional relational structures were unable to provide adequate performance for user interaction for the SSRS reports. An SSAS solution was implemented requiring personnel to ramp up technically, including learning enough MDX to satisfy requirements. Ad Hoc Queries Even though the fact table is relatively small—only 22 million rows & 33GB—the table was a typical DW table in terms of its width: 137 columns, any of which could be the target of ad hoc interrogation. As is common in DW reporting scenarios such as this, it is often nearly to optimize for such queries using conventional indexing. DevCon DBAs & developers attended PASS 2012 & were introduced to the marvels of columnstore in a session presented by Klaus Aschenbrenner (b|@Aschenbrenner) The Details Classic vs. columnstore before-&-after metrics are impressive. Scenario Conventional Structures Columnstore ? SSRS via SSAS 10 - 12 seconds 1 second >10x Ad Hoc 5-7 minutes (300 - 420 seconds) 1 - 2 seconds >100x Here are two charts characterizing this data graphically.  The first is a linear representation of Report Duration (in seconds) for Conventional Structures vs. Columnstore Indexes.  As is so often the case when we chart such significant deltas, the linear scale doesn’t expose some the dramatically improved values corresponding to the columnstore metrics.  Just to make it fair here’s the same data represented logarithmically; yet even here the values corresponding to 1 –2 seconds aren’t visible.  The Wins Performance: Even prior to columnstore implementation, at 10 - 12 seconds canned report performance against the SSAS cube was tolerable. Yet the 1 second performance afterward is clearly better. As significant as that is, imagine the user experience re: ad hoc interrogation. The difference between several minutes vs. one or two seconds is a game changer, literally changing the way users interact with their data—no mental context switching, no wondering when the results will appear, no preoccupation with the spinning mind-numbing hurry-up-&-wait indicators.  As we’ve commonly found elsewhere, columnstore indexes here provided performance improvements of one, two, or more orders of magnitude. Simplified Infrastructure: Because in this case a nonclustered columnstore index on a conventional DW table was faster than an Analysis Services cube, the entire SSAS infrastructure was rendered superfluous & was retired. PASS Rocks: Once again, the value of attending PASS is proven out. The trip to Charlotte combined with eager & enquiring minds let directly to this success story. Find out more about the next PASS Summit here, hosted this year in Seattle on November 4 - 7, 2014. DevCon BI Team Lead Nathan Allan provided this unsolicited feedback: “What we found was pretty awesome. It has been a game changer for us in terms of the flexibility we can offer people that would like to get to the data in different ways.” Summary For DW, reports, & other BI workloads, columnstore often provides significant performance enhancements relative to conventional indexing.  I have documented here, the second in a series of reports on columnstore implementations, results from DevCon Security, a live customer production app for which performance increased by factors of from 10x to 100x for all report queries, including canned queries as well as reducing time for results for ad hoc queries from 5 - 7 minutes to 1 - 2 seconds. As a result of columnstore performance, the customer retired their SSAS infrastructure. I invite you to consider leveraging columnstore in your own environment. Let me know if you have any questions.

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• The Customer Experience Imperative: A Game Changer for Brands

  - by Jeri Kelley

  By Anthony Lye, SVP, Cloud Applications Strategy, Oracle We know that customer experience has emerged as a primary differentiator for businesses today.  I’ve talked a lot about the new age of the empowered consumer. At Oracle we’ve spent a lot of time developing technologies and practices that our customers can implement to greatly improve their customer experience strategies. Of course I’m biased, but I think that we have created a portfolio of the best solutions on the planet to help organizations deal with the challenges of providing great customer experiences. We’ve done this because we started to witness some trends over the last few years. As the average person began to utilize social and mobile technologies more frequently and products commoditized, customer experience truly remained the only sustainable differentiator for businesses.In fact, we have seen that customer experience is often driving the success or the failure of a product or a brand. And as end customers have become more vocal about their experiences with companies on social and mobile channels, they now have the power to decide which brands will win and which brands will lose. To address this customer experience imperative, I believe that business today must do three things really well:Connect with your customers. You have to connect with customers whenever, wherever and however they want. Organizations must provide a great experience on their existing channels— the call center, the brick and mortar store, the field sales organizations, the websites and social properties. Businesses must also be great at managing and delivering journeys on these channels, while quickly adapting to embrace the new channels that emerge. You have to understand mobile. You have to understand social. You have to understand kiosks. These are all new routes to market, new channels where your customers may or may not show up. You have to interact with them where they are. You have to present information in a way that's meaningful to them. As well as providing what we would call a multichannel experience. We have to recognize that customers may start their experience on one channel, but end it on a different channel. It’s important that an organization’s technology solutions enable, not just a multichannel strategy, but a strategy that can power new channels and create customer journeys that cross these channels.Get to know your customers. Next, companies need to get to know the customer as intimately as the customer will allow. Today most customer interactions are anonymous, but it’s important for brands to know which customers drive value. Customers want to provide feedback. They want to share their opinions, but they want to know that those opinions are being heard and acted upon. For this to occur, we need to know much more about the customer and then reward them for their loyalty and for their advocacy.Enable connections. The last thing is to enable people to connect or transact with your brand. We've got to make it really, really simple for customers to do business with us. We can't make them repeat the steps; we can't make them tell us their identity for the fifth time as they move between organizations. These silos can no longer sustain or deliver a good customer experience. It's extremely important that companies be where customers want them to be—that we create profitable journeys for us and for them.Organizations have to make sure that there is a single source of truth that defines the customer. We have to make sure that the technology applications that we rely on understand not just the dimensions of multichannel, but of cross-channel too. We have to enable social at the very core of the overall architecture. We have to use historical analytics, real-time decisioning as well as predictive analytics to help personalize and drive an experience. And these are all technologies that IT needs, that IT is familiar with, but needs to enable for the line of business that in turn can enable for the end customer.  This means that we've got to make our solutions available to the customers in the cloud.In this new age of the empowered consumer, businesses have to focus on delivery mechanisms that reduce the overall TCO, while driving a rapid rate of innovation and a more rapid rate of deployment. At the Oracle Customer Experience Summit @ OpenWorld, I’ll discuss these issues and more. I hope that you can join us for what promises to be an unforgettable experience.

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