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• Inside Red Gate - Exercises in Leanness

  - by simonc

  There's a new movement rumbling around Red Gate Towers - the Lean Startup. At its core is the idea that you don't have to be in a company with single-digit employees to be an entrepreneur; you simply have to (being blunt) not know what you should be doing. Specifically, you accept that you don't know everything you need to know in order to create a useful, successful & profitable product. This is something that Red Gate has had problems with in the past; we've created products that weren't aimed at the correct market, or didn't solve the problem the user had (although they solved the problem we thought the users had, or the problem the users thought they had). As a result, these products weren't as successful as they could have been. The ideas at the core of the Lean Startup help to combat this tendency to build large, well-engineered products that solve the wrong problem. You need to actually test your hypotheses about what the users and the market needs, rather than just running a project based on those untested assumptions. Furthermore, these tests need to be done as fast as possible (on the order of a week) so that, if necessary, you can change the direction of the project without wasting effort going down a dead end. Over time, as more tests are done and more hypotheses are confirmed or refuted, the project moves towards something that solves users' actual problems. However, re-aligning the development teams that operate within Red Gate along these lines does itself have some issues; we've got very good at doing large, monolithic releases, with a feature set decided well in advance. Currently it takes about 2 weeks to do install & release testing before a release; this is clearly not practicable for a team doing weekly, or even daily releases. There's also many infrastructure issues to be solved; in our source control, build system, release mechanism, support pages & documentation, licensing system, update system, and download pages. All these need modifications to allow the fast releases necessary for each experiment. Not only do we have to change our infrastructure, we have to change our mindset. Doing daily releases means each release won't get nearly as much testing as 'standard' releases. As a team, we have to be prepared that there will be releases that have bugs and issues with them; not only do we have to be prepared to change direction with every experiment we do, but we have to be ready to fix any bugs that are reported very quickly as well. The SmartAssembly team is spearheading this move towards leanness within the company, using Feature Usage Reporting (FUR). We think this is a cracking feature that will really help developers learn how people use their products, but we need to confirm this hypothesis. So, over the next few weeks, we'll be running a variety of experiments on SmartAssembly to either confirm or refute our hypotheses concerning how people use SmartAssembly and apply FUR to their own products. In the rest of this series, I'll be documenting how the experiments we perform get on, and our experiences with applying the Lean Startup model to a mature product like SmartAssembly. Cross posted from Simple Talk.

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• Changing the action of a hyperlink in a Silverlight RichTextArea

  - by Marc Schluper

  The title of this post could also have been "Move over Hyperlink, here comes Actionlink" or "Creating interactive text in Silverlight." But alas, there can be only one. Hyperlinks are very useful. However, they are also limited because their action is fixed: browse to a URL. This may have been adequate at the start of the Internet, but nowadays, in web applications, the one thing we do not want to happen is a complete change of context. In applications we typically like a hyperlink selection to initiate an action that updates a part of the screen. For instance, if my application has a map displayed with some text next to it, the map would react to a selection of a hyperlink in the text, e.g. by zooming in on a location and displaying additional locational information in a popup. In this way, the text becomes interactive text. It is quite common that one company creates and maintains websites for many client companies. To keep maintenance cost low, it is important that the content of these websites can be updated by the client companies themselves, without the need to involve a software engineer. To accommodate this scenario, we want the author of the interactive text to configure all hyperlinks (without writing any code). In a Silverlight RichTextArea, the default action of a Hyperlink is the same as a traditional hyperlink, but it can be changed: if the Command property has a value then upon a click event this command is called with the value of the CommandParameter as parameter. How can we let the author of the text specify a command for each hyperlink in the text, and how can we let an application react properly to a hyperlink selection event? We are talking about any command here. Obviously, the application would recognize only a specific set of commands, with well defined parameters, but the approach we take here is generic in the sense that it pertains to the RichTextArea and any command. So what do we require? We wish that: As a text author, I can configure the action of a hyperlink in a (rich) text without writing code; As a text author, I can persist the action of a hyperlink with the text; As a reader of persisted text, I can click a hyperlink and the configured action will happen; As an application developer, I can configure a control to use my application specific commands. In an excellent introduction to the RichTextArea, John Papa shows (among other things) how to persist a text created using this control. To meet our requirements, we can create a subclass of RichTextArea that uses John's code and allows plugging in two command specific components: one to prompt for a command definition, and one to execute the command. Since both of these plugins are application specific, our RichTextArea subclass should not assume anything about them except their interface. public interface IDefineCommand { void Prompt(string content, // the link content Action<string, object> callback); // the method called to convey the link definition } public interface IPerformCommand : ICommand {} The IDefineCommand plugin receives the content of the link (the text visible to the reader) and displays some kind of control that allows the author to define the link. When that's done, this (possibly changed) content string is conveyed back to the RichTextArea, together with an object that defines the command to execute when the link is clicked by the reader of the published text. The IPerformCommand plugin simply implements System.Windows.Input.ICommand. Let's use MEF to load the proper plugins. In the example solution there is a project that contains rudimentary implementations of these. The IDefineCommand plugin simply prompts for a command string (cf. a command line or query string), and the IPerformCommand plugin displays a MessageBox showing this command string. An actual application using this extended RichTextArea would have its own set of commands, each having their own parameters, and hence would provide more user friendly application specific plugins. Nonetheless, in any case a command can be persisted as a string and hence the two interfaces defined above suffice. For a Visual Studio 2010 solution, see my article on The Code Project.

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• WCF RIA Services DomainContext Abstraction Strategies–Say That 10 Times!

  - by dwahlin

  The DomainContext available with WCF RIA Services provides a lot of functionality that can help track object state and handle making calls from a Silverlight client to a DomainService. One of the questions I get quite often in our Silverlight training classes (and see often in various forums and other areas) is how the DomainContext can be abstracted out of ViewModel classes when using the MVVM pattern in Silverlight applications. It’s not something that’s super obvious at first especially if you don’t work with delegates a lot, but it can definitely be done. There are various techniques and strategies that can be used but I thought I’d share some of the core techniques I find useful. To start, let’s assume you have the following ViewModel class (this is from my Silverlight Firestarter talk available to watch online here if you’re interested in getting started with WCF RIA Services): public class AdminViewModel : ViewModelBase { BookClubContext _Context = new BookClubContext(); public AdminViewModel() { if (!DesignerProperties.IsInDesignTool) { LoadBooks(); } } private void LoadBooks() { _Context.Load(_Context.GetBooksQuery(), LoadBooksCallback, null); } private void LoadBooksCallback(LoadOperation<Book> books) { Books = new ObservableCollection<Book>(books.Entities); } } Notice that BookClubContext is being used directly in the ViewModel class. There’s nothing wrong with that of course, but if other ViewModel objects need to load books then code would be duplicated across classes. Plus, the ViewModel has direct knowledge of how to load data and I like to make it more loosely-coupled. To do this I create what I call a “Service Agent” class. This class is responsible for getting data from the DomainService and returning it to a ViewModel. It only knows how to get and return data but doesn’t know how data should be stored and isn’t used with data binding operations. An example of a simple ServiceAgent class is shown next. Notice that I’m using the Action<T> delegate to handle callbacks from the ServiceAgent to the ViewModel object. Because LoadBooks accepts an Action<ObservableCollection<Book>>, the callback method in the ViewModel must accept ObservableCollection<Book> as a parameter. The callback is initiated by calling the Invoke method exposed by Action<T>: public class ServiceAgent { BookClubContext _Context = new BookClubContext(); public void LoadBooks(Action<ObservableCollection<Book>> callback) { _Context.Load(_Context.GetBooksQuery(), LoadBooksCallback, callback); } public void LoadBooksCallback(LoadOperation<Book> lo) { //Check for errors of course...keeping this brief var books = new ObservableCollection<Book>(lo.Entities); var action = (Action<ObservableCollection<Book>>)lo.UserState; action.Invoke(books); } } This can be simplified by taking advantage of lambda expressions. Notice that in the following code I don’t have a separate callback method and don’t have to worry about passing any user state or casting any user state (the user state is the 3rd parameter in the _Context.Load method call shown above). public class ServiceAgent { BookClubContext _Context = new BookClubContext(); public void LoadBooks(Action<ObservableCollection<Book>> callback) { _Context.Load(_Context.GetBooksQuery(), (lo) => { var books = new ObservableCollection<Book>(lo.Entities); callback.Invoke(books); }, null); } } A ViewModel class can then call into the ServiceAgent to retrieve books yet never know anything about the DomainContext object or even know how data is loaded behind the scenes: public class AdminViewModel : ViewModelBase { ServiceAgent _ServiceAgent = new ServiceAgent(); public AdminViewModel() { if (!DesignerProperties.IsInDesignTool) { LoadBooks(); } } private void LoadBooks() { _ServiceAgent.LoadBooks(LoadBooksCallback); } private void LoadBooksCallback(ObservableCollection<Book> books) { Books = books } } You could also handle the LoadBooksCallback method using a lambda if you wanted to minimize code just like I did earlier with the LoadBooks method in the ServiceAgent class.  If you’re into Dependency Injection (DI), you could create an interface for the ServiceAgent type, reference it in the ViewModel and then inject in the object to use at runtime. There are certainly other techniques and strategies that can be used, but the code shown here provides an introductory look at the topic that should help get you started abstracting the DomainContext out of your ViewModel classes when using WCF RIA Services in Silverlight applications.

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• Silverlight Cream for March 23, 2010 -- #818

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this Issue: Max Paulousky, Jeremy Likness, Mark Tucker, Christian Schormann, Page Brooks, Brad Abrams(-2-), Jeff Wilcox, Unnir, Bea Stollnitz, John Papa and Adam Kinney, and Bill Reiss(-2-). Shoutouts: Ashish Shetty posted his material from his MIX10 presentation: Stepping outside the browser with Silverlight 4 Not Silverlight, but dang useful, Karl Shifflett posted a Visual Studio 2010 XAML Editor IntelliSense Presenter Extension Yavor Georgiev posted his MIX10 material: Two samples from today's MIX talk From SilverlightCream.com: GroupBox Sketching Control for WPF applications Using Blend Max Paulousky creates a GroupBox control for SketchFlow for WPF. He includes a link to an example of doing the same for Silverlight. Sequential Asynchronous Workflows in Silverlight using Coroutines Jeremy Likness' latest post begann with a post on the Silverlight.net forum and Rob Eisenburg's MVVM presentation from MIX10 resulting in the use of Wintellect's PowerThreading library (downloadable), and Coroutines. Windows Phone 7 UI Templates Mark Tucker has been putting a lot of thought into WP7 apps and produced 5 templates for building apps, downloadable in PowerPoint format. He's also looking to discuss this concept. Blend 4: About Path Layout, Part I Christian Schormann has a great tutorial up about Expression Blend 4 and path layout ... this is lots of great info, and it's only part 1! Custom Splash Screen for Windows Phone Page Brooks makes very quick work of showing how to add a splash screen to your WP7 app... very nice, Page! Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Exposing Data from Entity Framework Brad Abrams next post in the series is is on pulling your data from wherever it lives, and uses a DomainService to shape it for your Silverlight app. Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Consuming Data in the Silverlight Client Brad Abrams then discusses consuming that data in a Silverlight app. Not much code involvement at all.. great ROI :) Building Silverlight 3 and Silverlight 4 applications on a .NET 3.5 build machine Jeff Wilcox talks about building Silverlight 3 and Silverlight 4B both on a .NET 3.5 machine. He then adds in the Toolkit, and even WCF RIA Services. Expression Blend 4 - XAML generation tweaks Unnir demonstrates a few changes to Expression Blend 4 that produce more compact XAML. He's also asking for other examples you'd like to see tightened up. How can I sort a hierarchy? Bea Stollnitz posts plausible solutions to sorting data items at each level of a hierarchical UI, with descriptions of why they don't work, followed by the real deal... Silverlight and WPF. Silverlight Training Course (Silverlight 4) John Papa and Adam Kinney have posted a huge body of work to get us up-to-speed on Silverlight 4 -- a WhitePaper, hands-on labs, and an 8-unit course with 25 accompanying videos... geez... Silverlight game development on Windows Phone 7 Bill Reiss has a post up discussing game development on WP7 in general and then discusses his SilverSprite library, with a link to it. XNA or Silverlight for Windows Phone 7 game development? Bill Reiss next discusses the advantage of using Silverlight or XNA for your WP7 game development, and who better to discuss both? Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• Adding Fake Build Information in TFS 2010

  - by Jakob Ehn

  We have been using TFS 2010 build for distributing a build in parallel on several agents, but where the actual compilation is done by a bunch of external tools and compilers, e.g. no MSBuild involved. We are using the ParallelTemplate.xaml template that Jim Lamb blogged about previously, which distributes each configuration to a different agent. We developed custom activities for running these external compilers and collecting the information and errors by reading standard out/error and pushing it back to the build log. But since we aren’t using MSBuild we don’t the get nice configuration summary section on the build summary page that we are used to. We would like to show the result of each configuration with any errors/warnings as usual, together with a link to the log file. TFS 2010 API to the rescue! What we need to do is adding information to the InformationNode structure that is associated with every TFS build. The log that you normally see in the Log view is built up as a tree structure of IBuildInformationNode objects. This structure can we accessed by using the InformationNodeConverters class. This class also contain some helper methods for creating BuildProjectNode, which contain the information about each project that was build, for example which configuration, number of errors and warnings and link to the log file. Here is a code snippet that first creates a “fake” build from scratch and the add two BuildProjectNodes, one for Debug|x86 and one for Release|x86 with some release information:   TfsTeamProjectCollection collection = TfsTeamProjectCollectionFactory.GetTeamProjectCollection(new Uri("http://lt-jakob2010:8080/tfs")); IBuildServer buildServer = collection.GetService<IBuildServer>(); var buildDef = buildServer.GetBuildDefinition("TeamProject", "BuildDefinition"); //Create fake build with random build number var detail = buildDef.CreateManualBuild(new Random().Next().ToString()); // Create Debug|x86 project summary IBuildProjectNode buildProjectNode = detail.Information.AddBuildProjectNode(DateTime.Now, "Debug", "MySolution.sln", "x86", "$/project/MySolution.sln", DateTime.Now, "Default"); buildProjectNode.CompilationErrors = 1; buildProjectNode.CompilationWarnings = 1; buildProjectNode.Node.Children.AddBuildError("Compilation", "File1.cs", 12, 5, "", "Syntax error", DateTime.Now); buildProjectNode.Node.Children.AddBuildWarning("File2.cs", 3, 1, "", "Some warning", DateTime.Now, "Compilation"); buildProjectNode.Node.Children.AddExternalLink("Log File", new Uri(@"\\server\share\logfiledebug.txt")); buildProjectNode.Save(); // Create Releaes|x86 project summary buildProjectNode = detail.Information.AddBuildProjectNode(DateTime.Now, "Release", "MySolution.sln", "x86", "$/project/MySolution.sln", DateTime.Now, "Default"); buildProjectNode.CompilationErrors = 0; buildProjectNode.CompilationWarnings = 0; buildProjectNode.Node.Children.AddExternalLink("Log File", new Uri(@"\\server\share\logfilerelease.txt")); buildProjectNode.Save(); detail.Information.Save(); detail.FinalizeStatus(BuildStatus.Failed); When running this code, it will a create a build that looks like this: As you can see, it created two configurations with error and warning information and a link to a log file. Just like a regular MSBuild would have done. This is very useful when using TFS 2010 Build in heterogeneous environments. It would also be possible to do this when running compilations completely outside TFS build, but then push the results of the into TFS for easy access. You can push all information, including the compilation summary, drop location, test results etc using the API.

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

  - by The Geek

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

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• upgraded "Compiz' and "Unity", now no Unity 3D on screen

  - by user18432

  Today when I logged in to my Ubuntu 12.04, the update manager told me of some upgrades. Compiz and Unity were in those upgrades. After I installed the upgrades, I can no longer get the Unity panel on the left side of screen or the systray at the top of screen. I now have to run Ubuntu 12.04 with Unity 2D. My laptop is a HP Pavilion dv9000 with Nvidia GeForce Go 7600 video. I tried to run "unity --reset" but it says there are serious issues with compiz. I have cut & pasted the read out from the terminal below. [09:35:02] xxxxxxx@L01U1204:~$ unity --reset unity-panel-service: no process found Checking if settings need to be migrated ...no Checking if internal files need to be migrated ...no Backend : gconf Integration : true Profile : unity Adding plugins Initializing core options...done compiz (core) - Warn: failed to receive ConfigureNotify event on 0x2e00004 compiz (core) - Warn: failed to receive ConfigureNotify event on 0x580005a compiz (core) - Warn: failed to receive ConfigureNotify event on 0x3600006 compiz (core) - Warn: failed to receive ConfigureNotify event on 0x3200255 compiz (core) - Warn: failed to receive ConfigureNotify event on 0x1600002 compiz (core) - Warn: failed to receive ConfigureNotify event on 0x1400002 Initializing composite options...done Initializing opengl options...done Initializing decor options...done Initializing vpswitch options...done Initializing snap options...done Initializing mousepoll options...done Initializing resize options...done Initializing place options...done Initializing move options...done Initializing wall options...done Initializing grid options...done I/O warning : failed to load external entity "/home/brwright/.compiz/session/10afaca1703486b216133648409481824100000130110002" Initializing session options...done Initializing gnomecompat options...done Initializing animation options...done Initializing fade options...done Initializing unitymtgrabhandles options...done Initializing workarounds options...done Initializing scale options...done compiz (expo) - Warn: failed to bind image to texture Initializing expo options...done Initializing ezoom options...done compiz (core) - Error: Couldn't load plugin '/usr/lib/compiz/libunityshell.so' : /usr/lib/compiz/libunityshell.so: undefined symbol: _ZNK5unity4dash10Controller6windowEv compiz (core) - Error: Couldn't load plugin 'unityshell' compiz (core) - Warn: unhandled ConfigureNotify on 0x7000090! compiz (core) - Warn: this should never happen. you should probably file a bug about this. compiz (core) - Warn: unhandled ConfigureNotify on 0x7000093! compiz (core) - Warn: this should never happen. you should probably file a bug about this. compiz (core) - Warn: unhandled ConfigureNotify on 0x7000096! compiz (core) - Warn: this should never happen. you should probably file a bug about this. compiz (core) - Warn: unhandled ConfigureNotify on 0x7000099! compiz (core) - Warn: this should never happen. you should probably file a bug about this. compiz (core) - Warn: unhandled ConfigureNotify on 0x700009c! compiz (core) - Warn: this should never happen. you should probably file a bug about this. compiz (core) - Warn: unhandled ConfigureNotify on 0x700009f! compiz (core) - Warn: this should never happen. you should probably file a bug about this. Initializing annotate options...done Initializing blur options...done Initializing clone options...done Initializing colorfilter options...done Initializing commands options...done Initializing cube options...done Initializing imgjpeg options...done Initializing kdecompat options...done Initializing mag options...done Initializing neg options...done Initializing obs options...done Initializing opacify options...done Initializing put options...done Initializing resizeinfo options...done Initializing ring options...done Initializing rotate options...done Initializing scaleaddon options...done Initializing screenshot options...done Initializing shift options...done Initializing staticswitcher options...done Initializing switcher options...done Initializing thumbnail options...done Initializing unityshell options...done Initializing water options...done Initializing winrules options...done Initializing wobbly options...done Setting Update "main_menu_key" Setting Update "run_key" Starting gtk-window-decorator As you can see the terminal never comes back to the CI prompt. I must do a control C to get to the CI prompt, but then the OS is frozen. I have to reboot and run Unity 2D in able to do anything on my laptop. I hope I have explained this enough and provided some useful info. I am at a loss to understand what the problem is, or what exactly what is causing the problem. Is it Unity or Compiz? Can anyone help?

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• July, the 31 Days of SQL Server DMO’s – Day 23 (sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats)

  - by Tamarick Hill

  The sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats Dynamic Management View is used to return usage information about the various indexes on your SQL Server instance. Let’s have a look at this DMV against our AdventureWorks2012 database so we can examine the information returned. SELECT * FROM sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats WHERE database_id = db_id('AdventureWorks2012') The first three columns in the result set represent the database_id, object_id, and index_id of a given row. You can join these columns back to other system tables to extract the actual database, object, and index names. The next four columns are probably the most beneficial columns within this DMV. First, the user_seeks column represents the number of times that a user query caused a seek operation against a particular index. The user_scans column represents how many times a user query caused a scan operation on a particular index. The user_lookups column represents how many times an index was used to perform a lookup operation. The user_updates column refers to how many times an index had to be updated due to a write operation that effected a particular index. The last_user_seek, last_user_scan, last_user_lookup, and last_user_update columns provide you with DATETIME information about when the last user scan, seek, lookup, or update operation was performed. The remaining columns in the result set are the same as the ones we previously discussed, except instead of the various operations being generated from user requests, they are generated from system background requests. This is an extremely useful DMV and one of my favorites when it comes to Index Maintenance. As we all know, indexes are extremely beneficial with improving the performance of your read operations. But indexes do have a downside as well. Indexes slow down the performance of your write operations, and they also require additional resources for storage. For this reason, in my opinion, it is important to regularly analyze the indexes on your system to make sure the indexes you have are being used efficiently. My AdventureWorks2012 database is only used for demonstrating or testing things, so I dont have a lot of meaningful information here, but for a Production system, if you see an index that is never getting any seeks, scans, or lookups, but is constantly getting a ton of updates, it more than likely would be a good candidate for you to consider removing. You would not be getting much benefit from the index, but yet it is incurring a cost on your system due to it constantly having to be updated for your write operations, not to mention the additional storage it is consuming. You should regularly analyze your indexes to ensure you keep your database systems as efficient and lean as possible. One thing to note is that these DMV statistics are reset every time SQL Server is restarted. Therefore it would not be a wise idea to make decisions about removing indexes after a Server Reboot or a cluster roll. If you restart your SQL Server instances frequently, for example if you schedule weekly/monthly cluster rolls, then you may not capture indexes that are being used for weekly/monthly reports that run for business users. And if you remove them, you may have some upset people at your desk on Monday morning. If you would like to begin analyzing your indexes to possibly remove the ones that your system is not using, I would recommend building a process to load this DMV information into a table on scheduled basis, depending on how frequently you perform an operation that would reset these statistics, then you can analyze the data over a period of time to get a more accurate view of what indexes are really being used and which ones or not. For more information about this DMV, please see the below Books Online link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms188755.aspx Follow me on Twitter @PrimeTimeDBA

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• SQL SERVER – How to Compare the Schema of Two Databases with Schema Compare

  - by Pinal Dave

  Earlier I wrote about An Efficiency Tool to Compare and Synchronize SQL Server Databases and it was very much well received. Since the blog post I have received quite a many question that just like data how we can also compare schema and synchronize it. If you think about comparing the schema manually, it is almost impossible to do so. Table Schema has been just one of the concept but if you really want the all the schema of the database (triggers, views, stored procedure and everything else) it is just impossible task. If you are developer or database administrator who works in the production environment than you know that there are so many different occasions when we have to compare schema of the database. Before deploying any changes to the production server, I personally like to make note of the every single schema change and document it so in case of any issue , I can always go back and refer my documentation. As discussed earlier it is absolutely impossible to do this task without the help of third party tools. I personally use Devart Schema Compare for this task. This is an extremely easy tool. Let us see how it works. First I have two different databases – a) AdventureWorks2012 and b) AdventureWorks2012-V1. There are total three changes between these databases. Here is the list of the same. One of the table has additional column One of the table have new index One of the stored procedure is changed Now let see how dbForge Schema Compare works in this scenario. First open dbForge Schema Compare studio. Click on New Schema Comparison. It will bring you to following screen where we have to configure the database needed to configure. I have selected AdventureWorks2012 and AdventureWorks-V1 databases. In the next screen we can verify various options but for this demonstration we will keep it as it is. We will not change anything in schema mapping screen as in our case it is not required but generically if you are comparing across schema you may need this. This is the most important screen as on this screen we select which kind of object we want to compare. You can see the options which are available to select. The screen lets you select the objects from SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2012. Once you click on compare in previous screen it will bring you to this screen, which will essentially display the comparative difference between two of the databases which we had selected in earlier screen. As mentioned above there are three different changes in the database and the same has been listed over here. Two of the changes belongs to the tables and one changes belong to the procedure. Let us click each of them one by one to see what is the difference between them. In very first option we can see that there is an additional column in another database which did not exist earlier. In this example we can see that AdventureWorks2012 database have an additional index. Following example is very interesting as in this case, we have changed the definition of the stored procedure and the result pan contains the same. dbForget Schema Compare very effectively identify the changes in schema and lists them neatly to developers. Here is one more screen. This software not only compares the schema but also provides the options to update or drop them as per the choice. I think this is brilliant option. Well, I have been using schema compare for quite a while and have found it very useful. Here are few of the things which dbForge Schema Compare can do for developers and DBAs. Compare and synchronize SQL Server database schemas Compare schemas of live database and SQL Server backup Generate comparison reports in Excel and HTML formats Eliminate mistakes in schema changes propagation across environments Track production database changes and customizations Automate migration of schema changes using command line interface I suggest that you try out dbForge Schema Compare and let me know what you think of this product. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Utility, T SQL

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• permission denied: /etc/apt/sources.list

  - by Eli

  I'm trying to install java jre, i usually do it like this sudo echo 'deb http://www.duinsoft.nl/pkg debs all' >> /etc/apt/sources.list sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys 5CB26B26 sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install update-sun-jre exit but when i do sudo echo 'deb http://www.duinsoft.nl/pkg debs all' >> /etc/apt/sources.list i see permission denied: /etc/apt/sources.list When i do ls -l /etc/apt/sources.list i see -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3360 Aug 26 01:45 /etc/apt/sources.list When i do sudo mv /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.old sudo cat /etc/apt/sources.list.old | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list i see #deb cdrom:[Ubuntu 12.04 LTS _Precise Pangolin_ - Release amd64 (20120425)]/ dists/precise/main/binary-i386/ #deb cdrom:[Ubuntu 12.04 LTS _Precise Pangolin_ - Release amd64 (20120425)]/ dists/precise/restricted/binary-i386/ #deb cdrom:[Ubuntu 12.04 LTS _Precise Pangolin_ - Release amd64 (20120425)]/ precise main restricted # See http://help.ubuntu.com/community/UpgradeNotes for how to upgrade to # newer versions of the distribution. deb http://lb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise main restricted deb-src http://lb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise main restricted ## Major bug fix updates produced after the final release of the ## distribution. deb http://lb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates main restricted deb-src http://lb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates main restricted ## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu ## team. Also, please note that software in universe WILL NOT receive any ## review or updates from the Ubuntu security team. deb http://lb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise universe deb-src http://lb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise universe deb http://lb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates universe deb-src http://lb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates universe ## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu ## team, and may not be under a free licence. Please satisfy yourself as to ## your rights to use the software. Also, please note that software in ## multiverse WILL NOT receive any review or updates from the Ubuntu ## security team. deb http://lb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise multiverse deb-src http://lb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise multiverse deb http://lb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates multiverse deb-src http://lb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-updates multiverse ## N.B. software from this repository may not have been tested as ## extensively as that contained in the main release, although it includes ## newer versions of some applications which may provide useful features. ## Also, please note that software in backports WILL NOT receive any review ## or updates from the Ubuntu security team. deb http://lb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-backports main restricted universe multiverse deb-src http://lb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise-backports main restricted universe multiverse deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-security main restricted deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-security main restricted deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-security universe deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-security universe deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-security multiverse deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise-security multiverse ## Uncomment the following two lines to add software from Canonical's ## 'partner' repository. ## This software is not part of Ubuntu, but is offered by Canonical and the ## respective vendors as a service to Ubuntu users. # deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu precise partner # deb-src http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu precise partner ## This software is not part of Ubuntu, but is offered by third-party ## developers who want to ship their latest software. deb http://extras.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise main deb-src http://extras.ubuntu.com/ubuntu precise main and the issue is not solved, i still see that permission error, I'm on a 64 bit laptop

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• Share Files and Folders and Internet between Guest OS and the Host in Hyper-V

  - by Manesh Karunakaran

  For those who are familiar with the VirtualPC, vmWare and VirtualBox environments will be quite irritated to find out that there is no direct way to share files from the Host machine to the Virtualized guest environment. This is a good thing from a CIO perspective because there’s excellent isolation for the virtualized environments this way, but for the developer junkies like us, this is an irritant, especially for those who have nuked their Windows 7 OS and installed Windows Server 2008 R2 for all the the SharePoint friendliness that it offers. Here’s a quick 5 minutes howto on Enabling Shared Folders and Internet Access for the Hyper-V images, for those who are still struggling with this. Step 1: Add a Virtual Network Adapter to your Guest OS For this, shut down the guest machine, go to its settings and add a Virtual Network Adapter as given in the images below     Step 2: Enable Virtual Networking in Hyper-V   Setting this up is very easy. In the Hyper-V Manager, under Actions (right panel), click the Virtual Network Manager. In the Virtual Network Manager in the Create virtual network panel, select Internal and click the Add button.        At this point if you open Control Panel\Network and Internet\Network Connections you will be able to see the new Network Adapter, Now name it to something meaningful other than Network Adapter X. Now you can add this network to each of your virtual machines, but at this point, unless you assign an IP address in each connection, you won't be able to do much.   Step 3: Enable Internet Connection Sharing so that Guest OS’es also can connect to the internet. To enable ICS follow these steps: Click on the network icon in the tray of your host machine and select Network and Sharing Center. From there click Manage network connections. Select the network adapter that you use to access the Internet. Right click it and select Properties. In the properties dialog select the Sharing tab. On this tab check the box that says "Allow other network users..." and then set the Home networking connection to be the network adapter that was created above (now you see why I said to rename it to something useful). Now your virtual machines that have this network connection will automatically get an IP address and will be able to connect to the Internet (provided your internet connection is working). Because each adapter also gets an automatic address you can now share files and folders between your host and your virtual machines which is important since you can't just drag-and-drop files like you can with Virtual PC.   Step 4: Create a Shared Folder in the Host Machine and use it in the Guest machine. Right click on the folder that you want to Share and select ‘Share with\Specific People’ and specify who all can access the share. Open the Guest OS from Hyper V Navigate to Start > Run and type in the Address of the Share (Or Map a Drive to the Share) Bingo! The Share opens!! :)   Now you can share as many files and folders as you want between the host and the guest, and you also have internet access inside the Virtual machines. Hope that helps.   Technorati Tags: Shared folder,Hyper-V,Share Files,Share files and folders between guest and host,Hyper-V Networking,Share Internet Access in Hyper-V,Internet,Files,Shared folders in Hyper-V

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• Adobe Photoshop CS5 vs Photoshop CS5 extended

  - by Edward

  Adobe Photoshop has been an industry standard for most web designers & photographers worldwide. Photoshop CS5 has made photography editing much more refined and the composition process has become much easier than ever before.  To study the advantage of Photoshop CS5 extended over Photoshop CS5 we have written this comparison article, with both a Designer’s & Photographer’s perspective. Hopefully it shall help you in your buying/upgrade decision. Photoshop CS5 Photoshop CS5 has refining feature with powerful photography tools. It made editing process easy as fewer steps are involved to remove noise, add grain, create vignettes, correct lens distortions, sharpen, and create HDR images. It has quick image correction and color and tone control for professional purpose. Intelligent image editing and enhancement , extraordinary advanced compositing has made it a better tool than earlier versions for photographers. It allows users to accelerate workflow with fast performance on 64-bit Windows® and Mac hardware systems and smoother interactions due to more GPU-accelerated features. It also boasts of a state-of-the-art processing with Adobe Photoshop Camera Raw 6 and helps to maximize creative impact. It provides for tremendous precision and freedom. It allows user to easily select intricate image elements, such as hair and create realistic painting effects. It also allows to remove any image element and see the space fill in almost magically. It has easy access to core editing and streamlined work flow and flexible work ambience. It has creative tools and contents. Photoshop CS5 Extended Photoshop CS5 extended is quite innovative and has incorporated 3D elements to 2D artwork directly within digital imaging application, which enables user to do an easy on-ramp to 3D image creation. It also provides for 3D editing. It has intelligent image editing and enhancement. It offers advance composing and has extraordinary painting and drawing toolset. It provides for video and animation designing. It helps to work with specialized images for architecture, manufacturing, engineering, science, and medicine. Where CS5 extended scores over CS5 CS5 extended has many features, which were not included in CS5. These features make it score more over CS5. These features are: Technology for creating 3D extrusion 3D material library and picker Field depth for 3D 3D merging and scene composition improvements 3D workflow improvement Customization of 3D features Image based light source Shadow catcher for shadow creation Enhanced ray tracer Context sensitive widgets, which allows easy control of objects, lights and cameras. Overlays for materials and mesh boundaries Photoshop CS5 extended is far better than CS5 as it incorporates all the features of CS5 and have more advanced features. It allows 3D creation and editing and has other advanced tools to make it better. Redefining the Image-Editing Experience  : A Photographer’s point of View Photoshop CS5 delivers amazing features and creative options so even new users can perform advanced image manipulations and compositions. Breath taking image intelligence behind Content-Aware Fill magically removes any image detail or object, examines the surroundings and seamlessly fills in the space left behind. Lighting, tone and noise of the surrounding area can be matched. New Refine Edge makes nearly-impossible image selections possible. Masking was never easier, the toughest types of edges, such as hair and foliage seem easier to fix. To sum up following are few advantages of CS5 extended over previous versions 64-bit processing Content Aware Fill Refine Edge, “makes nearly-impossible image selections impossible” HDR Pro, including ghost artifact removal and HDR toning, which gives the look of HDR with a single exposure New brush options Improved image management with enhanced Adobe Bridge Lens corrections Improved black-and-white conversions Puppet Warp: Precisely reposition or warp any image element Adobe Camera Raw 6 Upgrade Buy Online Pricing and Availability Adobe Photoshop CS5 and CS5 Extended are available through Adobe Authorized Resellers & the Adobe Store. Estimated street price for Adobe Photoshop CS5 is US$699 and US$999 for Photoshop CS5 Extended. Upgrade pricing and volume licensing are also available. Related posts:10 Free Alternatives for Adobe Photoshop Software Web based Alternatives to Photoshop 15 Useful Adobe Illustrator Tutorials For Designers

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• Friday Fun: Spell Blazer

  - by Asian Angel

  Are you ready for some fun and adventure after a long week back at work? This week’s game combines jewel-matching style game play with an RPG story for an awesome mix of fun and fiction. Your goal is to help a young wizard reach the magic academy in Raven as the forces of darkness are building. Spell Blazer The object of the game is to help young Kaven reach the Lightcaster Academy in Raven alive, but he will encounter many dangers along the way. Are you ready to begin the quest? As soon as you click Start Game the intro will automatically begin. If this is your first time playing the game the intro provides a nice background story for the game and what is happening in the game environment. Once you are past the intro, you will see a map of the region with your starting point in the Farmlands, various towns and the roads connecting them, along with your final destination of Raven. Notice that some of the roads are different colors…those colors indicate the “danger levels” for each part of your journey (green = good, yellow = some danger, etc.). To begin your journey click on the Town of Goose with your mouse. You will encounter your first monster part of the way towards Goose. This first round takes you through the game play process step-by-step. Once you have clicked Okay you will see the details about the monster you have just encountered. It is very important that you do not click on Fight! or Flee! until viewing and noting the types of spells that the monster is resistant to or has a weakness against. Choose your spells wisely based on the information provided about the monster. Keep in mind that the healing spell can be very useful depending on the monster you meet and your current health status. Note: Spells shown in order here are Healing, Fireball, Icebolt, & Lightning. Ready to fight! The first battle will also explain how to fight…click Okay to get started. Once the main window is in full view there are details that you need to look at. Beneath each of the combatants you will see the three attacks that each brings to the battle and at the bottom you will see their respective health points. We got lucky and had an Icebolt attack that we could utilize on the first play! Note: You can exchange two squares without making a match in order to try and line up an attack. While it happened too quickly to capture in our screenshot, there will be cool lightning bolt effects shoot out from matched up squares to the opposite combatant. You will also see the amount of damage inflicted from a particular attack on top of the avatars. Victory! Once you have won a round of combat a window will appear showing the amount of gold coins left behind by the monster. When you reach a town you will have the opportunity to stop over and rest or directly continue on with your journey. On to Halgard after a good rest! Play Spell Blazer Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How To Boot 10 Different Live CDs From 1 USB Flash Drive The 20 Best How-To Geek Linux Articles of 2010 The 50 Best How-To Geek Windows Articles of 2010 The 20 Best How-To Geek Explainer Topics for 2010 How to Disable Caps Lock Key in Windows 7 or Vista How to Use the Avira Rescue CD to Clean Your Infected PC The Deep – Awesome Use of Metal Objects as Deep Sea Creatures [Video] Convert or View Documents Online Easily with Zoho, No Account Required Build a Floor Scrubbing Robot out of Computer Fans and a Frisbee Serene Blue Windows Wallpaper for Your Desktop 2011 International Space Station Calendar Available for Download (Free) Ultimate Elimination – Lego Black Ops [Video]

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• Unable to apt-get upgrade in ubuntu 11.10

  - by blackhole

  These are the errors shows by different client Update Manager: Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/aptdaemon/worker.py", line 968, in simulate trans.unauthenticated = self._simulate_helper(trans) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/aptdaemon/worker.py", line 1092, in _simulate_helper return depends, self._cache.required_download, \ File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/apt/cache.py", line 235, in required_download pm.get_archives(fetcher, self._list, self._records) SystemError: E:Method has died unexpectedly!, E:Sub-process returned an error code (100), E:Method /usr/lib/apt/methods/ did not start correctly Synaptic package Manager E: Method has died unexpectedly! E: Sub-process returned an error code (100) E: Method /usr/lib/apt/methods/ did not start correctly E: Unable to lock the download directory Command: sudo apt-get upgrade Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following packages will be upgraded: libfreetype6 libfreetype6-dev 2 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Failed to exec method /usr/lib/apt/methods/ E: Method has died unexpectedly! E: Sub-process returned an error code (100) E: Method /usr/lib/apt/methods/ did not start correctly Can anyone one tell me how to resolve these issues ? I have no volatile packages or anything so i am even posting the preview of my sources.list file. # deb cdrom:[Ubuntu 10.10 _Maverick Meerkat_ - Release i386 (20101007)]/ maverick main restricted # See http://help.ubuntu.com/community/UpgradeNotes for how to upgrade to # newer versions of the distribution. deb http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ oneiric main restricted ## Major bug fix updates produced after the final release of the ## distribution. deb http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ oneiric-updates main restricted ## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu ## team. Also, please note that software in universe WILL NOT receive any ## review or updates from the Ubuntu security team. deb http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ oneiric universe deb http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ oneiric-updates universe ## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu ## team, and may not be under a free licence. Please satisfy yourself as to ## your rights to use the software. Also, please note that software in ## multiverse WILL NOT receive any review or updates from the Ubuntu ## security team. deb http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ oneiric multiverse deb http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ oneiric-updates multiverse ## Uncomment the following two lines to add software from the 'backports' ## repository. ## N.B. software from this repository may not have been tested as ## extensively as that contained in the main release, although it includes ## newer versions of some applications which may provide useful features. ## Also, please note that software in backports WILL NOT receive any review ## or updates from the Ubuntu security team. # deb http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ maverick-backports main restricted universe multiverse # deb-src http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ maverick-backports main restricted universe multiverse ## Uncomment the following two lines to add software from Canonical's ## 'partner' repository. ## This software is not part of Ubuntu, but is offered by Canonical and the ## respective vendors as a service to Ubuntu users. deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu oneiric partner deb-src http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu oneiric partner ## This software is not part of Ubuntu, but is offered by third-party ## developers who want to ship their latest software. deb http://extras.ubuntu.com/ubuntu oneiric main deb-src http://extras.ubuntu.com/ubuntu oneiric main deb http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ oneiric-security main restricted deb http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ oneiric-security universe deb http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ oneiric-security multiverse # deb http://archive.canonical.com/ lucid partner Here is the preview of my sources.list file

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• SQL SERVER – Guest Post – Glenn Berry – Wait Type – Day 26 of 28

  - by pinaldave

  Glenn Berry works as a Database Architect at NewsGator Technologies in Denver, CO. He is a SQL Server MVP, and has a whole collection of Microsoft certifications, including MCITP, MCDBA, MCSE, MCSD, MCAD, and MCTS. He is also an Adjunct Faculty member at University College – University of Denver, where he has been teaching since 2000. He is one wonderful blogger and often blogs at here. I am big fan of the Dynamic Management Views (DMV) scripts of Glenn. His script are extremely popular and the reality is that he has inspired me to start this series with his famous DMV which I have mentioned in very first  wait stats blog post (I had forgot to request his permission to re-use the script but when asked later on his whole hearty approved it). Here is is his excellent blog post on this subject of wait stats: Analyzing cumulative wait stats in SQL Server 2005 and above has become a popular and effective technique for diagnosing performance issues and further focusing your troubleshooting and diagnostic  efforts.  Rather than just guessing about what resource(s) that SQL Server is waiting on, you can actually find out by running a relatively simple DMV query. Once you know what resources that SQL Server is spending the most time waiting on, you can run more specific queries that focus on that resource to get a better idea what is causing the problem. I do want to throw out a few caveats about using wait stats as a diagnostic tool. First, they are most useful when your SQL Server instance is experiencing performance problems. If your instance is running well, with no indication of any resource pressure from other sources, then you should not worry that much about what the top wait types are. SQL Server will always be waiting on some resource, but many wait types are quite benign, and can be safely ignored. In spite of this, I quite often see experienced DBAs obsessing over the top wait type, even when their SQL Server instance is running extremely well. Second, I often see DBAs jump to the wrong conclusion based on seeing a particular well-known wait type. A good example is CXPACKET waits. People typically jump to the conclusion that high CXPACKET waits means that they should immediately change their instance-level MADOP setting to 1. This is not always the best solution. You need to consider your workload type, and look carefully for any important “missing” indexes that might be causing the query optimizer to use a parallel plan to compensate for the missing index. In this case, correcting the index problem is usually a better solution than changing MAXDOP, since you are curing the disease rather than just treating the symptom. Finally, you should get in the habit of clearing out your cumulative wait stats with the  DBCC SQLPERF(‘sys.dm_os_wait_stats’, CLEAR); command. This is especially important if you have made an configuration or index changes, or if your workload has changed recently. Otherwise, your cumulative wait stats will be polluted with the old stats from weeks or months ago (since the last time SQL Server was started or the stats were cleared).  If you make a change to your SQL Server instance, or add an index, you should clear out your wait stats, and then wait a while to see what your new top wait stats are. At any rate, enjoy Pinal Dave’s series on Wait Stats. This blog post has been written by Glenn Berry (Twitter | Blog) Read all the post in the Wait Types and Queue series. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, Readers Contribution, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Wait Stats, SQL Wait Types, T SQL, Technology

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• SharePoint 2010 Sandboxed solution SPGridView

  - by Steve Clements

  If you didn’t know, you probably will soon, the SPGridView is not available in Sandboxed solutions. To be honest there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of information out there about the whys and what nots, basically its not part of the Sandbox SharePoint API. Of course the error message from SharePoint is about as useful as punch in the face… An unexpected error has been encountered in this Web Part.  Error: A Web Part or Web Form Control on this Page cannot be displayed or imported. You don't have Add and Customize Pages permissions required to perform this action …that’s if you have debug=true set, if not the classic “This webpart cannot be added” !! Love that one! but will a little digging you should find something like this… [TypeLoadException: Could not load  type Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.SPGridView from assembly 'Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=14.900.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c'.]   Depending on what you want to do with the SPGridView, this may not help at all.  But I’m looking to inherit the theme of the site and style it accordingly. After spending a bit of time with Chrome’s FireBug I was able to get the required CSS classes.  I created my own class inheriting from GridView (note the lack of a preceding SP!) and simply set the styles in there. Inherit from the standard GridView public class PSGridView : GridView   Set the styles in the contructor… public PSGridView() {     this.CellPadding = 2;     this.CellSpacing = 0;     this.GridLines = GridLines.None;     this.CssClass = "ms-listviewtable";     this.Attributes.Add("style", "border-bottom-style: none; border-right-style: none; width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; border-top-style: none; border-left-style: none;");       this.HeaderStyle.CssClass = "ms-viewheadertr";          this.RowStyle.CssClass = "ms-itmhover";     this.SelectedRowStyle.CssClass = "s4-itm-selected";     this.RowStyle.Height = new Unit(25); }   Then as you cant override the Columns property setter, a custom method to add the column and set the style… public PSGridView() {     this.CellPadding = 2;     this.CellSpacing = 0;     this.GridLines = GridLines.None;     this.CssClass = "ms-listviewtable";     this.Attributes.Add("style", "border-bottom-style: none; border-right-style: none; width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; border-top-style: none; border-left-style: none;");       this.HeaderStyle.CssClass = "ms-viewheadertr";          this.RowStyle.CssClass = "ms-itmhover";     this.SelectedRowStyle.CssClass = "s4-itm-selected";     this.RowStyle.Height = new Unit(25); }   And that should be enough to get the nicely styled SPGridView without the need for the SPGridView, but seriously….get the SPGridView in the SandBox!!!   Technorati Tags: Sharepoint 2010,SPGridView,Sandbox Solutions,Sandbox Technorati Tags: Sharepoint 2010,SPGridView,Sandbox Solutions,Sandbox

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• New January 2013 Release of the Ajax Control Toolkit

  - by Stephen.Walther

  I am super excited to announce the January 2013 release of the Ajax Control Toolkit! I have one word to describe this release and that word is “Charts” – we’ve added lots of great new chart controls to the Ajax Control Toolkit. You can download the new release directly from http://AjaxControlToolkit.CodePlex.com – or, just fire the following command from the Visual Studio Library Package Manager Console Window (NuGet): Install-Package AjaxControlToolkit You also can view the new chart controls by visiting the “live” Ajax Control Toolkit Sample Site. 5 New Ajax Control Toolkit Chart Controls The Ajax Control Toolkit contains five new chart controls: the AreaChart, BarChart, BubbleChart, LineChart, and PieChart controls. Here is a sample of each of the controls: AreaChart: BarChart: BubbleChart: LineChart: PieChart: We realize that people love to customize the appearance of their charts so all of the chart controls include properties such as color properties. The chart controls render the chart on the browser using SVG. The chart controls are compatible with any browser which supports SVG including Internet Explorer 9 and new and recent versions of Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Apple Safari. (If you attempt to display a chart on a browser which does not support SVG then you won’t get an error – you just won’t get anything). Updates to the HTML Sanitizer If you are using the HtmlEditorExtender on a public-facing website then it is really important that you enable the HTML Sanitizer to prevent Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks. The HtmlEditorExtender uses the HTML Sanitizer by default. The HTML Sanitizer strips out any suspicious content (like JavaScript code and CSS expressions) from the HTML submitted with the HtmlEditorExtender. We followed the recommendations of OWASP and ha.ckers.org to identify suspicious content. We updated the HTML Sanitizer with this release to protect against new types of XSS attacks. The HTML Sanitizer now has over 220 unit tests. The Ajax Control Toolkit team would like to thank Gil Cohen who helped us identify and block additional XSS attacks. Change in Ajax Control Toolkit Version Format We ran out of numbers. The Ajax Control Toolkit was first released way back in 2006. In previous releases, the version of the Ajax Control Toolkit followed the format: Release Year + Date. So, the previous release was 60919 where 6 represented the 6th release year and 0919 represent September 19. Unfortunately, the AssembyVersion attribute uses a UInt16 data type which has a maximum size of 65,534. The number 70123 is bigger than 65,534 so we had to change our version format with this release. Fortunately, the AssemblyVersion attribute actually accepts four UInt16 numbers so we used another one. This release of the Ajax Control Toolkit is officially version 7.0123. This new version format should work for another 65,000 years. And yes, I realize that 7.0123 is less than 60,919, but we ran out of numbers. Summary I hope that you find the chart controls included with this latest release of the Ajax Control Toolkit useful. Let me know if you use them in applications that you build. And, let me know if you run into any issues using the new chart controls. Next month, back to improving the File Upload control – more exciting stuff.

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• Oracle Big Data Software Downloads

  - by Mike.Hallett(at)Oracle-BI&EPM

  Companies have been making business decisions for decades based on transactional data stored in relational databases. Beyond that critical data, is a potential treasure trove of less structured data: weblogs, social media, email, sensors, and photographs that can be mined for useful information. Oracle offers a broad integrated portfolio of products to help you acquire and organize these diverse data sources and analyze them alongside your existing data to find new insights and capitalize on hidden relationships. Oracle Big Data Connectors Downloads here, includes: Oracle SQL Connector for Hadoop Distributed File System Release 2.1.0 Oracle Loader for Hadoop Release 2.1.0 Oracle Data Integrator Companion 11g Oracle R Connector for Hadoop v 2.1 Oracle Big Data Documentation The Oracle Big Data solution offers an integrated portfolio of products to help you organize and analyze your diverse data sources alongside your existing data to find new insights and capitalize on hidden relationships. Oracle Big Data, Release 2.2.0 - E41604_01 zip (27.4 MB) Integrated Software and Big Data Connectors User's Guide HTML PDF Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) Application Adapter for Hadoop Apache Hadoop is designed to handle and process data that is typically from data sources that are non-relational and data volumes that are beyond what is handled by relational databases. Typical processing in Hadoop includes data validation and transformations that are programmed as MapReduce jobs. Designing and implementing a MapReduce job usually requires expert programming knowledge. However, when you use Oracle Data Integrator with the Application Adapter for Hadoop, you do not need to write MapReduce jobs. Oracle Data Integrator uses Hive and the Hive Query Language (HiveQL), a SQL-like language for implementing MapReduce jobs. Employing familiar and easy-to-use tools and pre-configured knowledge modules (KMs), the application adapter provides the following capabilities: Loading data into Hadoop from the local file system and HDFS Performing validation and transformation of data within Hadoop Loading processed data from Hadoop to an Oracle database for further processing and generating reports Oracle Database Loader for Hadoop Oracle Loader for Hadoop is an efficient and high-performance loader for fast movement of data from a Hadoop cluster into a table in an Oracle database. It pre-partitions the data if necessary and transforms it into a database-ready format. Oracle Loader for Hadoop is a Java MapReduce application that balances the data across reducers to help maximize performance. Oracle R Connector for Hadoop Oracle R Connector for Hadoop is a collection of R packages that provide: Interfaces to work with Hive tables, the Apache Hadoop compute infrastructure, the local R environment, and Oracle database tables Predictive analytic techniques, written in R or Java as Hadoop MapReduce jobs, that can be applied to data in HDFS files You install and load this package as you would any other R package. Using simple R functions, you can perform tasks such as: Access and transform HDFS data using a Hive-enabled transparency layer Use the R language for writing mappers and reducers Copy data between R memory, the local file system, HDFS, Hive, and Oracle databases Schedule R programs to execute as Hadoop MapReduce jobs and return the results to any of those locations Oracle SQL Connector for Hadoop Distributed File System Using Oracle SQL Connector for HDFS, you can use an Oracle Database to access and analyze data residing in Hadoop in these formats: Data Pump files in HDFS Delimited text files in HDFS Hive tables For other file formats, such as JSON files, you can stage the input in Hive tables before using Oracle SQL Connector for HDFS. Oracle SQL Connector for HDFS uses external tables to provide Oracle Database with read access to Hive tables, and to delimited text files and Data Pump files in HDFS. Related Documentation Cloudera's Distribution Including Apache Hadoop Library HTML Oracle R Enterprise HTML Oracle NoSQL Database HTML Recent Blog Posts Big Data Appliance vs. DIY Price Comparison Big Data: Architecture Overview Big Data: Achieve the Impossible in Real-Time Big Data: Vertical Behavioral Analytics Big Data: In-Memory MapReduce Flume and Hive for Log Analytics Building Workflows in Oozie

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• July, the 31 Days of SQL Server DMO’s – Day 19 (sys.dm_exec_query_stats)

  - by Tamarick Hill

  The sys.dm_exec_query_stats DMV is one of the most useful DMV’s out there when it comes to performance tuning. If you have been keeping up with this blog series this month, you know that I started out on Day 1 reviewing many of the DMV’s within the ‘exec’ namespace. I’m not sure how I missed this one considering how valuable it is, but hey, they say it’s better late than never right?? On Day 7 and Day 8 we reviewed the sys.dm_exec_procedure_stats and sys.dm_exec_trigger_stats respectively. This sys.dm_exec_query_stats DMV is very similar to these two. As a matter of fact, this DMV will return all of the information you saw in the other two DMV’s, but in addition to that, you can see stats for all queries that have cached execution plans on your server. You can even see stats for statements that are ran Ad-Hoc as long as they are still cached in the buffer pool. To better illustrate this DMV, let have a quick look at it: SELECT * FROM sys.dm_exec_query_stats As you can see, there is a lot of information returned from this DMV. I wont go into detail about each and every one of these columns, but I will touch on a few of them briefly. The first column is the ‘sql_handle’, which if you remember from Day 4 of our blog series, I explained how you can use this column to extract the actual SQL text that was executed. The next columns statement_start_offset and statement_end_offset provide you a way of extracting the exact SQL statement that was executed as part of a batch. The plan_handle column is used to extract the Execution plan that was used, which we talked about during Day 5 of this blog series. Later in the result set, you have columns to identify how many times a particular statement was executed, how much CPU time it used, how many reads/writes it performed, the duration, how many rows were returned, etc. These columns provide you with a solid avenue to begin your performance optimization. The last column I will touch on is the query_plan_hash column. A lot of times when you have Dynamic SQL running on your server, you have similar statements with different parameter values being passed in. Many times these types of statements will get similar execution plans and then a Binary hash value can be generated based on these similar plans. This query plan hash can be used to find the cost of all queries that have similar execution plans and then you can tune based on that plan to improve the performance of all of the individual queries. This is a very powerful way of identifying and tuning Ad-hoc statements that run on your server. As I stated earlier, this sys.dm_exec_query_stats DMV is a very powerful and recommended DMV for performance tuning. You are able to quickly identify statements that are running on your server and analyze their impact on system resources. Using this DMV to track down the biggest performance killers on your server will allow you to make the biggest gains once you focus your tuning efforts on those top offenders. For more information about this DMV, please see the below Books Online link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms189741.aspx Follow me on Twitter @PrimeTimeDBA

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• Oracle Text query parser

  - by Roger Ford

  Oracle Text provides a rich query syntax which enables powerful text searches.However, this syntax isn't intended for use by inexperienced end-users.  If you provide a simple search box in your application, you probably want users to be able to type "Google-like" searches into the box, and have your application convert that into something that Oracle Text understands.For example if your user types "windows nt networking" then you probably want to convert this into something like"windows ACCUM nt ACCUM networking".  But beware - "NT" is a reserved word, and needs to be escaped.  So let's escape all words:"{windows} ACCUM {nt} ACCUM {networking}".  That's fine - until you start introducing wild cards. Then you must escape only non-wildcarded searches:"win% ACCUM {nt} ACCUM {networking}".  There are quite a few other "gotchas" that you might encounter along the way.Then there's the issue of scoring.  Given a query for "oracle text query syntax", it would be nice if we could score a full phrase match higher than a hit where all four words are present but not in a phrase.  And then perhaps lower than that would be a document where three of the four terms are present.  Progressive relaxation helps you with this, but you need to code the "progression" yourself in most cases.To help with this, I've developed a query parser which will take queries in Google-like syntax, and convert them into Oracle Text queries. It's designed to be as flexible as possible, and will generate either simple queries or progressive relaxation queries. The input string will typically just be a string of words, such as "oracle text query syntax" but the grammar does allow for more complex expressions:  word : score will be improved if word exists  +word : word must exist  -word : word CANNOT exist  "phrase words" : words treated as phrase (may be preceded by + or -)  field:(expression) : find expression (which allows +,- and phrase as above) within "field". So for example if I searched for   +"oracle text" query +syntax -ctxcatThen the results would have to contain the phrase "oracle text" and the word syntax. Any documents mentioning ctxcat would be excluded from the results. All the instructions are in the top of the file (see "Downloads" at the bottom of this blog entry).  Please download the file, read the instructions, then try it out by running "parser.pls" in either SQL*Plus or SQL Developer.I am also uploading a test file "test.sql". You can run this and/or modify it to run your own tests or run against your own text index. test.sql is designed to be run from SQL*Plus and may not produce useful output in SQL Developer (or it may, I haven't tried it).I'm putting the code up here for testing and comments. I don't consider it "production ready" at this point, but would welcome feedback.  I'm particularly interested in comments such as "The instructions are unclear - I couldn't figure out how to do XXX" "It didn't work in my environment" (please provide as many details as possible) "We can't use it in our application" (why not?) "It needs to support XXX feature" "It produced an invalid query output when I fed in XXXX" Downloads: parser.pls test.sql

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• How to Add a Note to an Email Message in Outlook 2013

  - by Lori Kaufman

  There may be times when you want to add a note to an email message you received. Maybe you need to remember something about the sender or the contents of the email. There are several ways to add a note to an email message. NOTE: You can also create a new task containing an email message you received. This is useful if you need to do something related to the email. The new task will contain all the contents (except attachments) from the email. One method of adding a note to an email message is to flag the message. To do this, right-click on the flag icon in the flag column for the message to which you want to add a note. Select Custom from the popup menu. On the Custom dialog box, you can select a ready-made note from the Flag to drop-down list. You can also type a custom note in the Flag to edit box. Select a Start date and a Due date and setup a reminder, if desired. Click OK. The flag displays above the body of the email message when you double-click on the message to open it in the Message window. You can also put the cursor in the subject line of the message and add text to it, as shown below. When you close the message window, a confirmation dialog box displays asking if you want to save your changes. To save the note you added to the subject line, click Yes. Your note displays as part of the subject line on the message in your list of email messages. You can also add a note to the body of an email message. To do this, you must enable editing of the message. Double-click the message to open the Message window. Click Actions in the Move section of the Message tab and select Edit Message from the drop-down menu. Click in the body of the message and type your note. When you close the Message window, a confirmation dialog box displays asking if you want to save your changes. Click Yes to save you note in the body of the email. You can see the note you added if it is visible as part of the first line of the body displayed in the list of email messages. Use the Notes section of Outlook to create a separate note you can attach to an email message. To do this, click the … button on the Navigation Bar and select Notes from the popup menu. Click New Note on the Home tab of the Notes window (or press Ctrl + N) to create a note. Enter the text for your note in the small note window that displays and click the X button to close the note, saving it. To attach the note to the email message, make sure the Mail section of Outlook is active. Double-click on the message onto which you want to attach the note. Leaving the Message window open, go back to the main Outlook window and select Notes from the Navigation Bar, as mentioned above. Drag the note you created to the message window. The note is added to the message as an attachment. When you close the Message window, a confirmation dialog box displays asking if you want to save your changes. To save the message with your note added as an attachment, click Yes. A paperclip icon is added to the message in the list of email messages, indicating there is an attachment in the message. When you add a note to an email message as an attachment using the Notes section of Outlook, you don’t have to keep the original note. The note is now saved with the message, and can be deleted from the Notes section.     

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• How to I do install DB2 ODBC?

  - by Justin

  I have been trying, with no success, to install a IBM DB2 ODBC driver so that my PHP server can connect to a database. I've tried installing the db2_connect and get all sorts of problems, I tried install I Access for Linux and the RPM did not install right nor did using alien breed any useful results. I've also tried the DB2 Runtime v8.1, no success. If I attempt to run the rpm it claims I need dependencies that I can't find in apt-get. Yum is also not very helpful as it appears I don't have any repositories installed or lists... Running the simple RPM gives me this result in terminal: # rpm -ivh iSeriesAccess-7.1.0-1.0.x86_64.rpm rpm: RPM should not be used directly install RPM packages, use Alien instead! rpm: However assuming you know what you are doing... error: Failed dependencies: /bin/ln is needed by iSeriesAccess-7.1.0-1.0.x86_64 /sbin/ldconfig is needed by iSeriesAccess-7.1.0-1.0.x86_64 /bin/rm is needed by iSeriesAccess-7.1.0-1.0.x86_64 /bin/sh is needed by iSeriesAccess-7.1.0-1.0.x86_64 libc.so.6()(64bit) is needed by iSeriesAccess-7.1.0-1.0.x86_64 libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.2.5)(64bit) is needed by iSeriesAccess-7.1.0-1.0.x86_64 libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.3)(64bit) is needed by iSeriesAccess-7.1.0-1.0.x86_64 libdl.so.2()(64bit) is needed by iSeriesAccess-7.1.0-1.0.x86_64 libdl.so.2(GLIBC_2.2.5)(64bit) is needed by iSeriesAccess-7.1.0-1.0.x86_64 libgcc_s.so.1()(64bit) is needed by iSeriesAccess-7.1.0-1.0.x86_64 libm.so.6()(64bit) is needed by iSeriesAccess-7.1.0-1.0.x86_64 libm.so.6(GLIBC_2.2.5)(64bit) is needed by iSeriesAccess-7.1.0-1.0.x86_64 libodbcinst.so.1()(64bit) is needed by iSeriesAccess-7.1.0-1.0.x86_64 libodbc.so.1()(64bit) is needed by iSeriesAccess-7.1.0-1.0.x86_64 libpthread.so.0()(64bit) is needed by iSeriesAccess-7.1.0-1.0.x86_64 libpthread.so.0(GLIBC_2.2.5)(64bit) is needed by iSeriesAccess-7.1.0-1.0.x86_64 libpthread.so.0(GLIBC_2.3.2)(64bit) is needed by iSeriesAccess-7.1.0-1.0.x86_64 librt.so.1()(64bit) is needed by iSeriesAccess-7.1.0-1.0.x86_64 librt.so.1(GLIBC_2.2.5)(64bit) is needed by iSeriesAccess-7.1.0-1.0.x86_64 libstdc++.so.6()(64bit) is needed by iSeriesAccess-7.1.0-1.0.x86_64 libstdc++.so.6(CXXABI_1.3)(64bit) is needed by iSeriesAccess-7.1.0-1.0.x86_64 libstdc++.so.6(GLIBCXX_3.4)(64bit) is needed by iSeriesAccess-7.1.0-1.0.x86_64 Using alien and running the dkpg gives me thes headaque: $ alien iSeriesAccess-7.1.0-1.0.x86_64.rpm --scripts # dpkg -i iseriesaccess_7.1.0-2_amd64.deb (Reading database ... 127664 files and directories currently installed.) Preparing to replace iseriesaccess 7.1.0-2 (using iseriesaccess_7.1.0-2_amd64.deb) ... Unpacking replacement iseriesaccess ... post uninstall processing for iSeriesAccess 1.0...upgrade /var/lib/dpkg/info/iseriesaccess.postrm: line 8: [: upgrade: integer expression expected Setting up iseriesaccess (7.1.0-2) ... post install processing for iSeriesAccess 1.0...configure iSeries Access ODBC Driver has been deleted (if it existed at all) because its usage count became zero odbcinst: Driver installed. Usage count increased to 1. Target directory is /etc odbcinst: Driver installed. Usage count increased to 3. Target directory is /etc Processing triggers for libc-bin ... ldconfig deferred processing now taking place So it seems the files installed right, well my odbc driver shows up but db2cli.ini is no where to be found. So several questions. Is there a better alternative to connect php to db2, say an ubuntu package I can just install? Can someone direct me to the steps that makes my ubuntu server works well with the RPM so I can build my db2 instance? Also remember I'm connection to an I Series remotely. I'm not using the DB2 Express C thing, even if I did try it to get the db2 php functions to work. And I don't have zend but I think I have every other package on the ubuntu repositories. Help, thank you!

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• SQLAuthority News – Book Signing Event – SQLPASS 2011 Event Log

  - by pinaldave

  I have been dreaming of writing book for really long time, and I finally got the chance – in fact, two chances!  I recently wrote two books: SQL Programming Joes 2 Pros: Programming and Development for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 [Amazon] | [Flipkart] | [Kindle] and SQL Wait Stats Joes 2 Pros: SQL Performance Tuning Techniques Using Wait Statistics, Types & Queues [Amazon] | [Flipkart] | [Kindle].  I had a lot of fun writing these two books, even though sometimes I had to sacrifice some family time and time for other personal development to write the books. The good side of writing book is that when the efforts put in writing books are recognize by books readers and kind organizations like expressor studio. Book Signing Event Book writing is a complex process.  Even after you spend months, maybe years, writing the material you still have to go through the editing and fact checking processes.  And, once the book is out there, there is no way to take back all the copies to change mistakes or add something you forgot.  Most of the time it is a one-way street. Book Signing Event Just like every author, I had a dream that after the books were written, they would be loved by people and gain acceptance by an audience. My first book, SQL Programming Joes 2 Pros: Programming and Development for Microsoft SQL Server 2008, is extremely popular because it helps lots of people learn various fundamental topics. My second book covers beginning to learn SQL Server Wait Stats, which is a relatively new subject. This book has had very good acceptance in the community. Book Signing Event Helping my community is my primary focus, so I was happy to see this year’s SQLPASS tag line: ‘This is a Community.‘ At the event, the expressor studio guys came up with a very novel idea. They had previously used my books and they had found them very useful. They got 100 copies of the book and decided to give it away to community folks. They invited me and my co-author Rick Morelan to hold a book signing event. We did a book signing on Thursday between 1 pm and 2 pm. Book Signing Event This event was one of the best events for me. This was my first book signing event outside of India. I reached the book signing location around 20 minutes before the scheduled time and what I saw was a big line for the book signing event. I felt very honored looking at the crowd and all the people around the event location. I felt very humbled when I saw some of my very close friends standing in the line to get my signature. It was really heartwarming to see so many enthusiasts waiting for more than an hour to get my signature. While standing in line I had the chance to have a conversation with every single person who showed up for the signature. I made sure that I repeated every single name and wrote it in every book with my signature. There is saying that if we write a name once we will remember it forever. I want to remember all of you who saw me at the book signing. Your comments were wonderful, your feedback was amazing and you were all very supportive. Book Signing Event I have made a note of every conversation I had with all of you when I was signing the books. Once again, I just want to express my thanks for coming to my book signing event. The whole experience was very humbling. On the top of it, I want to thank the expressor studio people who made it possible, who organized the whole signing event. I am so thankful to them for facilitating the whole experience, which is going to be hard to beat by any future experience. My books Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL PASS, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Author Visit, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology

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• Editor's Notebook - Social Aura: Insights from the Oracle Social Media Summit

  - by user462779

  Panelists talk social marketing at the Oracle Social Media Summit On November 14, I traveled to Las Vegas for the first-ever Oracle Social Media Summit. The two day event featured an impressive collection of social media luminaries including: David Kirkpatrick (founder and CEO of Techonomy Media and author of The Facebook Effect), John Yi (Head of Marketing Partnerships, Facebook), Matt Dickman (EVP of Social Business Innovation, Weber Shandwick), and Lyndsay Iorio (Social Media & Communications Manager, NBC Sports Group) among others. It was also a great opportunity to talk shop with some of our new Vitrue and Involver colleagues who have been returning great social media results even before their companies were acquired by Oracle. I was live tweeting the event from @OracleProfit which was great for those who wanted to follow along with the proceedings from the comfort of their office or blackjack table. But I've also found over the years that live tweeting an event is a handy way to take notes: I can sift back through my record of what people said or thoughts I had at the time and organize the Twitter messages into some kind of summary account of the proceedings. I've had nearly a month to reflect on the presentations and conversations at the event and a few key topics have emerged: David Kirkpatrick's comment during the opening presentation really set the stage for the conversations that followed. Especially if you are a marketer or publisher, the idea that you are in a one-way broadcast relationship with your audience is a thing of the past. "Rising above the noise" does not mean reaching for a megaphone, ALL CAPS, or exclamation marks. Hype will not motivate social media denizens to do anything but unfollow and tune you out. But knowing your audience, creating quality content and/or offers for them, treating them with respect, and making an authentic effort to please them: that's what I believe is now necessary. And Kirkpatrick's comment early in the day really made the point. Later in the day, our friends @Vitrue demonstrated this point by elaborating on a comment by Facebook's John Yi. If a social strategy is comprised of nothing more than cutting/pasting the same message into different social media properties, you're missing the opportunity to have an actual conversation. That's not shouting at your audience, but it does feel like an empty gesture. Walter Benjamin, perplexed by auraless Twitter messages Not to get too far afield, but 20th century cultural critic Walter Benjamin has a concept that is useful for understanding the dynamics of the empty social media gesture: Aura. In his work The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin struggled to understand the difference he percieved between the value of a hand-made art object (a painting, wood cutting, sculpture, etc.) and a photograph. For Benjamin, aura is similar to the "soul" of an artwork--the intangible essence that is created when an artist picks up a tool and puts creative energy and effort into a work. I'll defer to Wikipedia: "He argues that the "sphere of authenticity is outside the technical" so that the original artwork is independent of the copy, yet through the act of reproduction something is taken from the original by changing its context. He also introduces the idea of the "aura" of a work and its absence in a reproduction." So make sure you put aura into your social interactions. Don't just mechanically reproduce them. Keeping aura in your interactions requires the intervention of an actual human being. That's why @NoahHorton's comment about content curation struck me as incredibly important. Maybe it's just my own prejudice, being in the content curation business myself. And it's not to totally discount machine-aided content management systems, content recommendation engines, and other tech-driven tools for building an exceptional content experience. It's just that without that human interaction--that editor who reviews the analytics and responds to user feedback--interactions over social media feel a bit empty. It is SOCIAL media, right? (We'll leave the conversation about social machines for another day). At the end of the day, experimentation is key. Just like trying to find that right joke to tell at the beginning of your presentation or that good opening like at a cocktail party, social media messages and interactions can take some trial and error. Don't be afraid to try things, tinker with incomplete ideas, abandon things that don't work, and engage in the conversation. And make sure your heart is in it, otherwise your audience can tell. And finally:

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• The Oscar of Java Programming

  - by Tori Wieldt

  Why bother nominating a peer, yourself or your company for a Duke's Choice Award? I asked Duke's Choice Award winner Fabiane Nardon, whose team won in 2005 for the Healthcare Information System they created for the Brazilian government, what it was like winning the award and if it had any impact on her career. Here's what she told me: 1) What was it like to win a Duke's Choice Award? For me it was like winning an Oscar or a Grammy :-) I think that for a Java developer, a Duke's Choice Award is probably the highest award you can get, so it was really an honor. We had an amazing team working on that project and the team really deserved it. We were all very happy when we got that email with the announcement. That moment was one of the most important moments of my career. 2) What benefits have you gotten from being a "Duke's Choice Award Winner?" I think the most important benefit you get from winning a Duke is the fact that you become known by your peers. This opens many doors, since you are approached by more people, get invitations to speak in more conferences, you meet people with the same technical interests you have and so on. I certainly benefited a lot from it. We were lucky that in 2005, when we got our award, the winners were featured in the JavaOne keynote, with short documentaries produced about each one. So, we could be on the stage and talk a little about the project. We got lots of press at the time. We see  today's winners benefiting a lot from the press coverage. 3) How is the the Brazilian Healthcare Information System project doing today? Still running and getting new features every year. I'm not involved on the project anymore, but there are good people taking care of it. We opened the code since the beginning, so different cities could use and add features to it. There are many new developers working on that code base right now and I hope they can take the whole system to a new level. 4) What are you up to these days? I worked in the healthcare field for many years and a few years ago I decided that it was time to move on and take the experience I got designing large scale and mission critical systems to other fields. Since then I have been working with high access internet applications. I also co-founded ToolsCloud, a company that provides a development environment with open source tools in the cloud. We just launched ToolsCloud in USA, so other companies can get the same bundle of tools, hassle free, that several companies are successfully using in Brazil. Besides that, right now I'm personally working on the coolest project I ever worked on. It combines several technical challenges with a good dose of social impact. We should launch it in the second semester and I should keep it as a secret for now. Hopefully it will be useful to many people and disruptive enough to maybe get us a new Duke's Choice Award. Who knows? Read more about Fabiane in the "Heroes of Java" series by Markus Eisele. Her Twitter handle is @FabianeNardon. The Duke's Choice Awards celebrate extreme innovation in the world of Java technology. Nominate an individual, a group or company who show the best in Java innovation. Nominate via the easy online form at www.Java.net/dukeschoice. Nominations are open until June 15, 2012.

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