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• SQLAuthority News – Storing Data and Files in Cloud – Dropbox – Personal Technology Tip

  - by pinaldave

  I thought long and hard about doing a Personal Technology Tips series for this blog.  I have so many tips I’d like to share.  I am on my computer almost all day, every day, so I have a treasure trove of interesting tidbits I like to share if given the chance.  The only thing holding me back – which tip to share first?  The first tip obviously has the weight of seeming like the most important.  But this would mean choosing amongst my favorite tricks and shortcuts.  This is a hard task. Source: Dropbox.com My Dropbox I have finally decided, though, and have determined that the first Personal Technology Tip may not be the most secret or even trickier to master – in fact, it is probably the easiest.  My today’s Personal Technology Tip is Dropbox. I hope that all of you are nodding along in recognition right now.  If you do not use Dropbox, or have not even heard of it before, get on the internet and find their site.  You won’t be disappointed.  A quick recap for those in the dark: Dropbox is an online storage site with a lot of additional syncing and cloud-computing capabilities.  Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s explore some of my favorite options in Dropbox. Collaborate with All The first thing I love about Dropbox is the ability it gives you to collaborate with others.  You can share files easily with other Dropbox users, and they can alter them, share them with you, all while keeping track of different versions in on easy place.  I’d like to see anyone try to accomplish that key idea – “easily” – using e-mail versions and multiple computers.  It’s even difficult to accomplish using a shared network. Afraid that this kind of ease looks too good to be true?  Afraid that maybe there isn’t enough storage space, or the user interface is confusing?  Think again.  There is plenty of space – you can get 2 GB with just a free account, and upgrades are inexpensive and go up to 100 GB of storage.  And the user interface is so easy that anyone can learn to use it. What I use Dropbox for I love Dropbox because I give a lot of presentations and often they are far from home.  I can keep my presentations on Dropbox and have easy access to them anywhere, without needing to have my whole computer with me.  This is just one small way that you can use Dropbox. You can sync your entire hard drive, or hard drives if you have multiple computers (home, work, office, shared), and you can set Dropbox to automatically sync files on a certain timeline, or whenever Dropbox notices that they’ve been changed. Why I love Dropbox Dropbox has plenty of storage, but 2 GB still has a hard time competing with the average desktop’s storage space.  So what if you want to sync most of your files, but only the ones you use the most and share between work and home, and not all your files (especially large files like pictures and videos)?  You can use selective sync to choose which files to sync. Above all, my favorite feature is LanSync.  Dropbox will search your Local Area Network (LAN) for new files and sync them to Dropbox, as well as downloading the new version to all the shared files across the network.  That means that if move around on different computers at work or at home, you will have the same version of the file every time.  Or, other users on the LAN will have access to the new version, which makes collaboration extremely easy. Ref: rzfeeser.com Dropbox has so many other features that I feel like I could create a Personal Technology Tips series devoted entirely to Dropbox.  I’m going to create a bullet list here to make things shorter, but I strongly encourage you to look further into these into options if it sounds like something you would use. Theft Recover Home Security File Hosting and Sharing Portable Dropbox Sync your iCal calendar Password Storage What is your favorite tool and why? I could go on and on, but I will end here.  In summary – I strongly encourage everyone to investigate Dropbox to see if it’s something they would find useful.  If you use Dropbox and know of a great feature I failed to mention, please share it with me, I’d love to hear how everyone uses this program. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Personal Technology

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• 11gR2 11.2.0.3 Database Certified with E-Business Suie

  - by Elke Phelps (Oracle Development)

  The 11gR2 11.2.0.2 Database was certified with E-Business Suite (EBS) 11i and EBS 12 almost one year ago today.  I’m pleased to announce that 11.2.0.3, the second patchset for the 11gR2 Database is now certified. Be sure to review the interoperability notes for R11i and R12 for the most up-to-date requirements for deployment. This certification announcement is important as you plan upgrades to the technology stack for your environment. For additional upgrade direction, please refer to the recently published EBS upgrade recommendations article. Database support implications may also be reviewed in the database patching and support article. Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i Prerequisites 11.5.10.2 + ATG PF.H RUP 6 and higher Certified Platforms Linux x86 (Oracle Linux 4, 5) Linux x86 (RHEL 4, 5) Linux x86 (SLES 10) Linux x86-64 (Oracle Linux 4, 5) -- Database-tier only Linux x86-64 (RHEL 4, 5) -- Database-tier only Linux x86-64 (SLES 10--Database-tier only) Oracle Solaris on SPARC (64-bit) (10) Oracle Solaris on x86-64 (64-bit) (10) -- Database-tier only Pending Platform Certifications Microsoft Windows Server (32-bit) Microsoft Windows Server (64-bit) HP-UX PA-RISC (64-bit) HP-UX Itanium IBM: Linux on System z  IBM AIX on Power Systems Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 Prerequisites Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.0.4 or later; or,Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1.1 or later Certified Platforms Linux x86 (Oracle Linux 4, 5) Linux x86 (RHEL 4, 5) Linux x86 (SLES 10) Linux x86-64 (Oracle Linux 4, 5) Linux x86-64 (RHEL 4, 5) Linux x86-64 (SLES 10) Oracle Solaris on SPARC (64-bit) (10) Oracle Solaris on x86-64 (64-bit) (10)  -- Database-tier only Pending Platform Certifications Microsoft Windows Server (32-bit) Microsoft Windows Server (64-bit) HP-UX PA-RISC (64-bit) IBM: Linux on System z IBM AIX on Power Systems HP-UX Itanium Database Feature and Option CertificationsThe following 11gR2 11.2.0.2 database options and features are supported for use: Advanced Compression Active Data Guard Advanced Security Option (ASO) / Advanced Networking Option (ANO) Database Vault  Database Partitioning Data Guard Redo Apply with Physical Standby Databases Native PL/SQL compilation Oracle Label Security (OLS) Real Application Clusters (RAC) Real Application Testing SecureFiles Virtual Private Database (VPD) Certification of the following database options and features is still underway: Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) Column Encryption 11gR2 version 11.2.0.3 Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) Tablespace Encryption 11gR2 version 11.2.0.3 About the pending certifications Oracle's Revenue Recognition rules prohibit us from discussing certification and release dates, but you're welcome to monitor or subscribe to this blog for updates, which I'll post as soon as soon as they're available.     EBS 11i References Interoperability Notes - Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i with Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2.0) (Note 881505.1) Using Oracle 11g Release 2 Real Application Clusters with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i (Note 823586.1) Encrypting Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i Network Traffic using Advanced Security Option and Advanced Networking Option (Note 391248.1) Using Transparent Data Encryption with Oracle E-Business Release 11i (Note 403294.1) Integrating Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i with Oracle Database Vault 11gR2 (Note 1091086.1) Using Oracle E-Business Suite with a Split Configuration Database Tier on Oracle 11gR2 Version 11.2.0.1.0 (Note 946413.1) Export/Import Process for Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i Database Instances Using Oracle Database 11g Release 1 or 2 (Note 557738.1) Database Initialization Parameters for Oracle Applications Release 11i (Note 216205.1) EBS 12 References Interoperability Notes - Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 with Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2.0) (Note 1058763.1) Database Initialization Parameters for Oracle Applications Release 12 (Note 396009.1) Using Oracle 11g Release 2 Real Application Clusters with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 (Note 823587.1) Using Transparent Data Encryption with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 (Note 732764.1) Integrating Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 with Oracle Database Vault 11gR2 (Note 1091083.1) Export/Import Process for Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 Database Instances Using Oracle Database 11g Release 1 or 11g Release 2 (Note 741818.1) Enabling SSL in Oracle Applications Release 12 (Note 376700.1) Related Articles 11gR2 Database Certified with E-Business Suite 11i 11gR2 Database Certified with E-Business Suite 12 11gR2 11.2.0.2 Database Certified with E-Business Suite 12 Can E-Business Users Apply Database Patch Set Updates? On Apps Tier Patching and Support: A Primer for E-Business Suite Users On Database Patching and Support:  A Primer for E-Business Suite Users Quarterly E-Business Suite Upgrade Recommendations;  October 2011 Edition The preceding is intended to outline our general product direction.  It is intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract.   It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decision.  The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle's products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.

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• Gene Hunt Says:

  - by BizTalk Visionary

  "She's as nervous as a very small nun at a penguin shoot"   "He's got fingers in more pies than a leper on a cookery course" "You so much as belch out of line and I'll have your scrotum on a barbed wire plate" "Let's go play slappyface" "your surrounded by armed barstewards" “Right, get out and find this murdering scum right now!” [pause] “Scratch that, we start 9am sharp tomorrow, it's beer-o-clock.” "So then Cartwright, you're such a good Detective.... Go and Detect me a packet of Garibaldies" "You're not the one who is going to have to knit himself a new arsehole after 25 years of aggressive male love in prison" “A dream for me is Diana Dors and a bottle of chip fat." “A dream for me is Diana Dors and a bottle of chip fat." “They reckon you've got concussion - but personally, I couldn't give a tart's furry cup if half your brains are falling out. Don't ever waltz into my kingdom playing king of the jungle.” “You great... soft... sissy... girlie... nancy... french... bender... Man-United supporting POOF!!” “Drugs eh? What's the point. They make you forget, make you talk funny, make you see things that aren't there. My old grandma got all of that for free when she had a stroke.” “He's Dead! It's quite serious!” “Fanny in the flat...Nice Work” “SoopaDoopa” “Tits in a Jumper!” “Drop your weapons! You are surrounded by armed bastards!” “It's 1973, almost dinnertime. I'm 'avin 'oops!” “Trust the Gene Genie!” “I wanna hump Britt Ekland...What're we gonna do...!” “Was that 'E' and you don't know the rest?! or you going 'Eeee, I Dunno'” “Good Girl! Prostate probe and no jelly. “ “Give over, it's nothing like Spain!” “I'll come over your houses and stamp on all your toys!” “The Wizard will sort it out. It's cos of the wonderful things he does” “Cartwright can jump up and down on his knackers!” “It's not a windup love, he really thinks like this!” “Women! You can't say two words to them” “I was thinking, maybe, a Berni Inn!” “If I wanted a bollocking for drinking too much...!” “Shhhh...hear that...that's the sound of this case being closed! “Chicken!? In a basket!?” “Seems a large quantity of cocaine...” “You probably thought he kept his cock in his keks!” “The tail-end of Rays demotion speech!” “Stephen Warren is gay!?” “You're a smart boy, use your initiative!” “Don't be such a Jessie!” “I find the idea of a bird brushing her teeth...!” “Never been tempted to the Magic talcum powder?” “Make sure she's got nice tits!” “You're more likely to find an ostrich with a plum up it's arse!” “Drink this lot under the table and have a pint on the way home!” “Never be a female Prime Minister!” “Pub? Pub! pub!.....Pub!” “Thou shalt not suck off rent boys!” “The number for the special clinic is on the notice board!” “If me uncle had tits, would he be me auntie!” “Got your vicars in a twist!” “We Done?!” “Your mates got balls...If they were any bigger he'd need a wheelbarrow!” “The Ending - from 'I want to go home' to the end music.”

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• Not so long ago in a city not so far away by Carlos Martin

  - by Maria Sandu

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 This is the story of how the EMEA Presales Center turned an Oracle intern into a trusted technology advisor for both Oracle’s Sales and customers. It was the summer of 2011 when I was finishing my Computer Engineering studies as well as my internship at Oracle when I was offered what could possibly be THE dream job for any young European Computer Engineer. Apart from that, it also seemed like the role was particularly tailored to me as I could leverage almost everything I learned at University and during the internship. And all of it in one of the best cities to live in, not only from my home country but arguably from Europe: Malaga! A day at EPC As part of the EPC Technology pillar, and later on completely focused on WebCenter, there was no way to describe a normal day on the job as each day had something unique. Some days I was researching documentation in order to elaborate accurate answers for a customer’s question within a Request for Information or Proposal (RFI/RFP), other days I was doing heavy programming in order to bring a Proof of Concept (PoC) for a customer to life and last not but least, some days I presented to the customer via webconference the demo I built for them the past weeks. So as you can see, the role has research, development and presentation, could you ask for more? Well, don’t worry because there IS more! Internationality As the organization’s name suggests, EMEA Presales Center, it is the Center of Presales within Europe, Middle East and Africa so I got the chance to work with great professionals from all this regions, expanding my network and learning things from one country to apply them to others. In addition to that, the teams based in the Malaga office are comprised of many young professionals hailing mainly from Western and Central European countries (although there are a couple of exceptions!) with very different backgrounds and personalities which guaranteed many laughs and stories during lunch or coffee breaks (or even while working on projects!). Furthermore, having EPC offices in Bucharest and Bangalore and thanks to today’s tele-presence technologies, I was working every day with people from India or Romania as if they were sitting right next to me and the bonding with them got stronger day by day. Career development Apart from the research and self-study I’ve earlier mentioned, one of the EPC’s Key Performance Indicators (KPI) is that 15% of your time is spent on training so you get lots and lots of trainings in order to develop both your technical product knowledge and your presentation, negotiation and other soft skills. Sometimes the training is via webcast, sometimes the trainer comes to the office and sometimes, the best times, you get to travel abroad in order to attend a training, which also helps you to further develop your network by meeting face to face with many people you only know from some email or instant messaging interaction. And as the months go by, your skills improving at a very fast pace, your relevance increasing with each new project you successfully deliver, it’s only a matter of time (and a bit of self-promoting!) that you get the attention of the manager of a more senior team and are offered the opportunity to take a new step in your professional career. For me it took 2 years to move to my current position, Technology Sales Consultant at the Oracle Direct organization. During those 2 years I had built a good relationship with the Oracle Direct Spanish sales and sales managers, who are also based in the Malaga office. I supported their former Sales Consultant in a couple of presentations and demos and were very happy with my overall performance and attitude so even before the position got eventually vacant, I got a heads-up from then in advance that their current Sales Consultant was going to move to a different position. To me it felt like a natural step, same as when I joined EPC, I had at least a 50% of the “homework” already done but wanted to experience that extra 50% to add new product and soft skills to my arsenal. The rest is history, I’ve been in the role for more than half a year as I’m writing this, achieved already some important wins, gained a lot of trust and confidence in front of customers and broadened my view of Oracle’s Fusion Middleware portfolio. I look back at the 2 years I spent in EPC and think: “boy, I’d recommend that experience to absolutely anyone with the slightest interest in IT, there are so many different things you can do as there are different kind of roles you can end up taking thanks to the experience gained at EPC” /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• An MCM exam, Rob? Really?

  - by Rob Farley

  I took the SQL 2008 MCM Knowledge exam while in Seattle for the PASS Summit ten days ago. I wasn’t planning to do it, but I got persuaded to try. I was meaning to write this post to explain myself before the result came out, but it seems I didn’t get typing quickly enough. Those of you who know me will know I’m a big fan of certification, to a point. I’ve been involved with Microsoft Learning to help create exams. I’ve kept my certifications current since I first took an exam back in 1998, sitting many in beta, across quite a variety of topics. I’ve probably become quite good at them – I know I’ve definitely passed some that I really should’ve failed. I’ve also written that I don’t think exams are worth studying for. (That’s probably not entirely true, but it depends on your motivation. If you’re doing learning, I would encourage you to focus on what you need to know to do your job better. That will help you pass an exam – but the two skills are very different. I can coach someone on how to pass an exam, but that’s a different kind of teaching when compared to coaching someone about how to do a job. For example, the real world includes a lot of “it depends”, where you develop a feel for what the influencing factors might be. In an exam, its better to be able to know some of the “Don’t use this technology if XYZ is true” concepts better.) As for the Microsoft Certified Master certification… I’m not opposed to the idea of having the MCM (or in the future, MCSM) cert. But the barrier to entry feels quite high for me. When it was first introduced, the nearest testing centres to me were in Kuala Lumpur and Manila. Now there’s one in Perth, but that’s still a big effort. I know there are options in the US – such as one about an hour’s drive away from downtown Seattle, but it all just seems too hard. Plus, these exams are more expensive, and all up – I wasn’t sure I wanted to try them, particularly with the fact that I don’t like to study. I used to study for exams. It would drive my wife crazy. I’d have some exam scheduled for some time in the future (like the time I had two booked for two consecutive days at TechEd Australia 2005), and I’d make sure I was ready. Every waking moment would be spent pouring over exam material, and it wasn’t healthy. I got shaken out of that, though, when I ended up taking four exams in those two days in 2005 and passed them all. I also worked out that if I had a Second Shot available, then failing wasn’t a bad thing at all. Even without Second Shot, I’m much more okay about failing. But even just trying an MCM exam is a big effort. I wouldn’t want to fail one of them. Plus there’s the illusion to maintain. People have told me for a long time that I should just take the MCM exams – that I’d pass no problem. I’ve never been so sure. It was almost becoming a pride-point. Perhaps I should fail just to demonstrate that I can fail these things. Anyway – boB Taylor (@sqlboBT) persuaded me to try the SQL 2008 MCM Knowledge exam at the PASS Summit. They set up a testing centre in one of the room there, so it wasn’t out of my way at all. I had to squeeze it in between other commitments, and I certainly didn’t have time to even see what was on the syllabus, let alone study. In fact, I was so exhausted from the week that I fell asleep at least once (just for a moment though) during the actual exam. Perhaps the questions need more jokes, I’m not sure. I knew if I failed, then I might disappoint some people, but that I wouldn’t’ve spent a great deal of effort in trying to pass. On the other hand, if I did pass I’d then be under pressure to investigate the MCM Lab exam, which can be taken remotely (therefore, a much smaller amount of effort to make happen). In some ways, passing could end up just putting a bunch more pressure on me. Oh, and I did.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, August 16, 2014

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, August 16, 2014Popular ReleasesTEBookConverter: 1.5: Added: Turkish and French translations Added: A few interface changes Removed: SkinDynamulet: Dynamulet v0.1: DynamoDB Transaction Server v0.1Console parallel nunit tests runner: ConsoleUnitTestsRunner 1.03: bugfixingFluentx: Fluentx v1.5.3: Added few more extension methods.fastBinaryJSON: v1.4.2: v1.4.2 - bug fix circular referencesfastJSON: v2.1.2: 2.1.2 - bug fix circular referencesJPush.NET: JPush Server SDK 1.2.1 (For JPush V3): Assembly: 1.2.1.24728 JPush REST API Version: v3 JPush Documentation Reference .NET framework: v4.0 or above. Sample: class: JPushClientV3 2014 Augest 15th.SEToolbox: SEToolbox 01.043.008 Release 1: Changed ship/station names to use new DisplayName instead of Beacon/Antenna. Fixed issue with updated SE binaries 01.043.018 using new Voxel Material definitions.Google .Net API: Drive.Sample: Google .NET Client API – Drive.SampleInstructions for the Google .NET Client API – Drive.Sample</h2> http://code.google.com/p/google-api-dotnet-client/source/browse/?repo=samples#hg%2FDrive.SampleBrowse Source, or main file http://code.google.com/p/google-api-dotnet-client/source/browse/Drive.Sample/Program.cs?repo=samplesProgram.cs <h3>1. Checkout Instructions</h3> <p><b>Prerequisites:</b> Install Visual Studio, and <a href="http://mercurial.selenic.com/">Mercurial</a>.</p> ...FineUI - jQuery / ExtJS based ASP.NET Controls: FineUI v4.1.1: -??Form??????????????（???-5929）。 -?TemplateField??ExpandOnDoubleClick、ExpandOnEnter、ExpandToSelectRow????（LZOM-5932）。 -BodyPadding???????，??“5”“5 10”，???????????“5px”“5px 10px”。 -??TriggerBox?EnableEdit=false????，??????????????（Jango_Jing-5450）。 -???????????DataKeyNames???????????（yygy-6002）。 -????????????????????????（Gnid-6018）。 -??PageManager???AutoSizePanelID????，??????????????????（yygy-6008）。 -?FState???????????????，????????????????（????-5925）。 -??????OnClientClick???return?????????（FineU...DNN CMS Platform: 07.03.02: Major Highlights Fixed backwards compatibility issue with 3rd party control panels Fixed issue in the drag and drop functionality of the File Uploader in IE 11 and Safari Fixed issue where users were able to create pages with the same name Fixed issue that affected older versions of DNN that do not include the maxAllowedContentLength during upgrade Fixed issue that stopped some skins from being upgraded to newer versions Fixed issue that randomly showed an unexpected error during us...WordMat: WordMat for Mac: WordMat for Mac has a few limitations compared to the Windows version - Graph is not supported (Gnuplot, GeoGebra and Excel works) - Units are not supported yet (Coming up) The Mac version is yet as tested as the windows version.HP OneView PowerShell Library: HP OneView PowerShell Library 1.10.1193: [NOTE]: The installer has been updated, only to allow the user to display What's New at the completion of the install. The contents are the same as the original installer. Branch to HP OneView 1.10 Release. NOTE: This library version does not support older appliance versions. Fixed New-HPOVProfile to check for Firmware and BIOS management for supported platforms. Would erroneously error when neither -firmware or -bios were passed. Fixed Remove-HPOV* cmdlets which did not handle -forc...MFCMAPI: August 2014 Release: Build: 15.0.0.1042 Full release notes at SGriffin's blog. If you just want to run the MFCMAPI or MrMAPI, get the executables. If you want to debug them, get the symbol files and the source. The 64 bit builds will only work on a machine with Outlook 2010/2013 64 bit installed. All other machines should use the 32 bit builds, regardless of the operating system. Facebook BadgeEWSEditor: EwsEditor 1.10 Release: • Export and import of items as a full fidelity steam works - without proxy classes! - I used raw EWS POSTs. • Turned off word wrap for EWS request field in EWS POST windows. • Several windows with scrolling texts boxes were limiting content to 32k - I removed this restriction. • Split server timezone info off to separate menu item from the timezone info windows so that the timezone info window could be used without logging into a mailbox. • Lots of updates to the TimeZone window. • UserAgen...Python Tools for Visual Studio: 2.1 RC: Release notes for PTVS 2.1 RC We’re pleased to announce the release candidate for Python Tools for Visual Studio 2.1. Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS) is an open-source plug-in for Visual Studio which supports programming with the Python language. PTVS supports a broad range of features including CPython/IronPython, editing, IntelliSense, interactive debugging, profiling, Microsoft Azure, IPython, and cross-platform debugging support. PTVS 2.1 RC is available for: Visual Studio Expre...Sense/Net ECM - Enterprise CMS: SenseNet 6.3.1 Community Edition: Sense/Net 6.3.1 Community EditionSense/Net 6.3.1 is an important step toward a more modular infrastructure, robustness and maintainability. With this release we finally introduce a packaging and a task management framework, and the Image Editor that will surely make the job of content editors more fun. Please review the changes and new features since Sense/Net 6.3 and give a feedback on our forum! Main new featuresSnAdmin (packaging framework) Task Management Image Editor OData REST A...Touchmote: Touchmote 1.0 beta 13: Changes Less GPU usage Works together with other Xbox 360 controls Bug fixesModern UI for WPF: Modern UI 1.0.6: The ModernUI assembly including a demo app demonstrating the various features of Modern UI for WPF. BREAKING CHANGE LinkGroup.GroupName renamed to GroupKey NEW FEATURES Improved rendering on high DPI screens, including support for per-monitor DPI awareness available in Windows 8.1 (see also Per-monitor DPI awareness) New ModernProgressRing control with 8 builtin styles New LinkCommands.NavigateLink routed command New Visual Studio project templates 'Modern UI WPF App' and 'Modern UI W...ClosedXML - The easy way to OpenXML: ClosedXML 0.74.0: Multiple thread safe improvements including AdjustToContents XLHelper XLColor_Static IntergerExtensions.ToStringLookup Exception now thrown when saving a workbook with no sheets, instead of creating a corrupt workbook Fix for hyperlinks with non-ASCII Characters Added basic workbook protection Fix for error thrown, when a spreadsheet contained comments and images Fix to Trim function Fix Invalid operation Exception thrown when the formula functions MAX, MIN, and AVG referenc...New Projects2113110030: name: pham van long code: 2113110030 subject: oop2113110033: Name: Nguyen Hoang Minh Class: CCQ1311LA Object: OOP2113110284: name: Vuong Thành Ðô id:2113110284 class: CCQ1311LA2113110286_OOP_kiemtra: Mon:OOP Tên: Lê Th? Ng?c Huy?nCRM Queue Monitor: A small tool to monitor queues in Microsoft dynamics CRM 2011 and following versions. It displays the number of items in the queues and the latest item.Dice Bag: A D20 Role Playing Game Dice Bag - A selection of dice for use in the D20 RPG System that can be rolled to any quantity with an applied modifier.DM.Dual-coloredBall: DM.Dual-coloredBallFB Account Data Miner by Bipul Raman: A software which can be use to extract basic metadata of a Facebook profile without logging in to Facebook.huynhtanphat-2113170373: Mon: OPP Name: Huynh Tan Phatkieuquanghuy_OOP: Suject: OOP Name: kieuquanghuy Class: CCQ1311LAMySale: A simple home point-of-sale application, designed for garage sales, and lemonade stalls alike.nguyennhubaongan_OOP: MON: OOP NAME: NGUY?N-NHU-B?O-NGÂNOPP-2113110288: Mon: OOP Ten: Bui Dinh Hoai Nam Pequeño RAE: Una aplicación Windows para utilizar los Web services del Diccionario de la Real Academia Española en línea.phungthiphuonglien_OOP: MONHOC: OOP NAME: PHUNG THI PHUONG LIEN MSSV: 2113110287sharpFlipWall: This is a simple executive toy for Unity that leverages Kinect v2 and Shaders to generate a wall of blocks that move based on player informaitonTranThanhDanh-2113110282: Mon: OPP Name: Tran Thanh DanhWsSequence: Run a number of WS in a sequence?????: ??????????: ???????????: gdsg?????: ???????????: fds??????: gdr??????: gfdg?????: ???????????: ???????????: ???????????: ggerger?????: htryhrt??????: trjty?????: ???????????: sdf?????: ?????QQ：2281595668，?????，????，????。??????????????????????。???????????，????????，????????????????????????????。???????，??????????????。????????????,????????，?????????????: ????????????: ertyer?????: ???????????: gsdrfgds??????: fds?????: ??????????: vcdfxgdsf??????: fdgher??????: fdsf?????: ??????????: ??????????: ???????????: hiuhui?????: ??????????: ??????????: ???????????: fdsfs?????: ??????????: ??????????: ??????????: ??????????: ??????????: ??????????: ??????????: ???????????: ???????????: ??????????: ??????????: fgsdf??????: vdsfd?????: ?????QQ：2281595668，?????，????，????。??????????1998?????????。????????????，???????????????，?????????????，???????????，?2003?????????????，????????????????????????????????: ???????????: ???????????: hfdg?????: ???????????: gfdgfd??????: fdsfd?????: fdsf??????: fghdt?????: ??????????: ??????????: ??????????: gfdgfd????????: gfjhtf??????: ????????????: vdcf??????: fvgdfg??????: ???????????: ??????????: ???????????: jvbhvhv?????: ??????????: ???????????: ???????????: ??????????: ???????????: ????????????: ????????????: ???????????: ???????????: ????????????: fdsfds?????: ???????????: ???????????: ??????????: ?????QQ：2281595668，?????，????，????。???????????????????，??????????????，????，?????????????????????，??????。 　　??，??????????????????????。????????，????????????，??????????: ??????????: ??????????: ??????????: ?????QQ：2281595668，?????，????，????。??????????????，??????、????、?????????????????????????，???????????? ??。???????????，??????????，???????????，????2000?，??????????，?????: ???????????: ????????????: ???????????: ???????????: ytryrt??????: ???????????: ???????????: ???????????: ??????????: ???????????: gdfgfd?????: ???????????: gfd??????: ???????????: ???????????: fdsf??????: ????????????: ????????????: gfdtgdr?????: ???????????: fdsfd?????: ??????????: ???????????: ????????????: ????????????: ???????????: ???????????: terwtq?????: ??????????: gdfg??????: ????????????: gfdg?????: ??????????: ??????????: ?????QQ：2281595668，?????，????，????。?????????????，????????????????、??????、???????、???????、?????、???、??????。 ??????????????，???????????，??????，???????，?????????????????: gdfsg?????: fdsf??????: hdfhdf?????: ???????????: ????????????: fgherh?????: ??????????: ?????QQ：2281595668，?????，????，????。?????????，????????????????????，???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????、?????????、??????、????????、?????????????: ???????????: ???????????: ???????????: ????????????: fgdstf??????: ???????????: gfdgfd??????: fdsfd??????: ????????????: ???????????: ???????????: fdsfd?????: ???????????: gfdgfdg?????: ??????????: ?????QQ：2281595668，?????，????，????。????????????????，???????，???QQ;??2008?8??????????????????，????????，?????????，?????????????，?????????????????. ?????????，??????????: ??????????: ???????????: ????????????: fgnhgf??????: gredg?????: ??????????: ??????????: ?????QQ：2281595668，?????，????，????。?????????????，???????????????????、?????????????。?????????????????，?????????????，????????????，?????，????????????????，?????，?????????: ????????????: ???????????: ???????????: ????????????: ???????????: gdfgedf??????: fdsf??????: ?????????????: ?????????????: fdsf??????: ???????????: ?????QQ：2281595668，?????，????，????。??????????????，?????????????????????，???????????????????????!?????????????????????????????????????????????、?????????、??????、??????: fdsf?????: ???????????: fdsf??????: fdsf?????: ???????????: vuv?????: ???????????: grfgfd?????: ??????????: ??????????: ??????????: ??????????: fdsf??????: ghrd?????: ????????????: ?????????????: sgdfg?????: ???????????: grfgdf?????: ???????????: hftghj?????: ???????????: ??????????????: gdfgfd?????: ???????????: fdsf?????: ???????????: fdsf??????: htgrfh?????: ??????????: ??????????: fds??????: sdfds??????: hgfh?????: ??????????: ?????QQ：2281595668，?????，????，????。??????????????，??????、????、?????????????????????????，???????????? ??。???????????，??????????，???????????，????2000?，??????????，??????: ????????????: ???????????: fdsfds????????????: fdsf?????: ??????????: ???????????: gfdgfd?????: ??????????: ??????????: ??????????: ?????QQ：2281595668，?????，????，????。??????????????，?????????????????????，???????????????????????!?????????????????????????????????????????????、?????????、??????、??????: ?????QQ：2281595668，?????，????，????。????????2002?，????????，???????????????，??，?????????。????98?????????????，?????????????，?????????????????，???????，????，?????????????: ??????????: ???????????: ????????????: fd??????: fds?????: ?????QQ：2281595668，?????，????，????。??????????、??、?????????,???????????,?????????????!???????、??、?????、???.????、???、???、???、???、???、?????、?????、???????、????。?????????: ??????????: fdsfds???????: fdsfdsf?????: ???????????: ???????????: ??????????: ???????????: ????????????: fdsf?????: ???????????: ????????????: gdfsgds?????: gttrey??????: cxzc???????: ?????????????: ???????????: ???????????: gdfgfd?????: ??????????: ???????????: ????????????: ????????????: ????????????: gfdgdf?????: ???????????: ytu?????: ???????????: yytry???????: ghmkuygk??????: ????????????: ????????????: ????????????: ???????????: ???????????: ????????????: vuhgvu??????: ??????QQ：2281595668，?????，????，????。?????????，????????????????????，????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????、?????????、??????、????????、???????????: ???????????: hfgh??????: hgfh?????: ?????QQ：2281595668，?????，????，????。??????????????，???????????。??????????????。??、??、????????????。????：????，??????!??????????????，?????，???，???，??，???，???，???，?????????: ????????????: ttgers??????: iui

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• International Radio Operators Alphabet in F# &amp; Silverlight &ndash; Part 1

  - by MarkPearl

  So I have been delving into F# more and more and thought the best way to learn the language is to write something useful. I have been meaning to get some more Silverlight knowledge (up to now I have mainly been doing WPF) so I came up with a really simple project that I can actually use at work. Simply put – I often get support calls from clients wanting new activation codes. One of our main app’s was written in VB6 and had its own “security” where it would require about a 45 character sequence for it to be activated. The catch being that each time you reopen the program it would require a different character sequence, which meant that when we activate clients systems we have to do it live! This involves us either referring them to a website, or reading the characters to them over the phone and since nobody in the office knows the IROA off by heart we would come up with some interesting words to represent characters… 9 times out of 10 the client would type in the wrong character and we would have to start all over again… with this app I am hoping to reduce the errors of reading characters over the phone by treating it like a ham radio. My “Silverlight” application will allow for the user to input a series of characters and the system will then generate the equivalent IROA words… very basic stuff e.g. Character Input – abc Words Generated – Alpha Bravo Charlie After listening to Anders Hejlsberg on Dot Net Rocks Show 541 he mentioned that he felt many applications could make use of F# but in an almost silo basis – meaning that you would write modules that leant themselves to Functional Programming in F# and then incorporate it into a solution where the front end may be in C# or where you would have some other sort of glue. I buy into this kind of approach, so in this project I will use F# to do my very intensive “Business Logic” and will use Silverlight/C# to do the front end. F# Business Layer I am no expert at this, so I am sure to get some feedback on way I could improve my algorithm. My approach was really simple. I would need a function that would convert a single character to a string – i.e. ‘A’ –> “Alpha” and then I would need a function that would take a string of characters, convert them into a sequence of characters, and then apply my converter to return a sequence of words… make sense? Lets start with the CharToString function let CharToString (element:char) = match element.ToString().ToLower() with | "1" -> "1" | "5" -> "5" | "9" -> "9" | "2" -> "2" | "6" -> "6" | "0" -> "0" | "3" -> "3" | "7" -> "7" | "4" -> "4" | "8" -> "8" | "a" -> "Alpha" | "b" -> "Bravo" | "c" -> "Charlie" | "d" -> "Delta" | "e" -> "Echo" | "f" -> "Foxtrot" | "g" -> "Golf" | "h" -> "Hotel" | "i" -> "India" | "j" -> "Juliet" | "k" -> "Kilo" | "l" -> "Lima" | "m" -> "Mike" | "n" -> "November" | "o" -> "Oscar" | "p" -> "Papa" | "q" -> "Quebec" | "r" -> "Romeo" | "s" -> "Sierra" | "t" -> "Tango" | "u" -> "Uniform" | "v" -> "Victor" | "w" -> "Whiskey" | "x" -> "XRay" | "y" -> "Yankee" | "z" -> "Zulu" | element -> "Unknown" Quite simple, an element is passed in, this element is them converted to a lowercase single character string and then matched up with the equivalent word. If by some chance a character is not recognized, “Unknown” will be returned… I know need a function that can take a string and can parse each character of the string and generate a new sequence with the converted words… let ConvertCharsToStrings (s:string) = s |> Seq.toArray |> Seq.map(fun elem -> CharToString(elem)) Here… the Seq.toArray converts the string to a sequence of characters. I then searched for some way to parse through every element in the sequence. Originally I tried Seq.iter, but I think my understanding of what iter does was incorrect. Eventually I found Seq.map, which applies a function to every element in a sequence and then creates a new collection with the adjusted processed element. It turned out to be exactly what I needed… To test that everything worked I created one more function that parsed through every element in a sequence and printed it. AT this point I realized the the Seq.iter would be ideal for this… So my testing code is below… let PrintStrings items = items |> Seq.iter(fun x -> Console.Write(x.ToString() + " ")) let newSeq = ConvertCharsToStrings("acdefg123") PrintStrings newSeq Console.ReadLine()   Pretty basic stuff I guess… I hope my approach was right? In Part 2 I will look into doing a simple Silverlight Frontend, referencing the projects together and deploying….

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• Login failed for user 'sa' because the account is currently locked out. The system administrator can

  - by cabhilash

  Login failed for user 'sa' because the account is currently locked out. The system administrator can unlock it. (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 18486) SQL server has local password policies. If policy is enabled which locks down the account after X number of failed attempts then the account is automatically locked down.This error with 'sa' account is very common. sa is default administartor login available with SQL server. So there are chances that an ousider has tried to bruteforce your system. (This can cause even if a legitimate tries to access the account with wrong password.Sometimes a user would have changed the password without informing others. So the other users would try to lo) You can unlock the account with the following options (use another admin account or connect via windows authentication) Alter account & unlock ALTER LOGIN sa WITH PASSWORD='password' UNLOCK Use another account Almost everyone is aware of the sa account. This can be the potential security risk. Even if you provide strong password hackers can lock the account by providing the wrong password. ( You can provide extra security by installing firewall or changing the default port but these measures are not always practical). As a best practice you can disable the sa account and use another account with same privileges.ALTER LOGIN sa DISABLE You can edit the lock-ot options using gpedit.msc( in command prompt type gpedit.msc and press enter). Navigate to Account Lokout policy as shown in the figure The Following options are available Account lockout threshold This security setting determines the number of failed logon attempts that causes a user account to be locked out. A locked-out account cannot be used until it is reset by an administrator or until the lockout duration for the account has expired. You can set a value between 0 and 999 failed logon attempts. If you set the value to 0, the account will never be locked out. Failed password attempts against workstations or member servers that have been locked using either CTRL+ALT+DELETE or password-protected screen savers count as failed logon attempts. Account lockout duration This security setting determines the number of minutes a locked-out account remains locked out before automatically becoming unlocked. The available range is from 0 minutes through 99,999 minutes. If you set the account lockout duration to 0, the account will be locked out until an administrator explicitly unlocks it. If an account lockout threshold is defined, the account lockout duration must be greater than or equal to the reset time. Default: None, because this policy setting only has meaning when an Account lockout threshold is specified. Reset account lockout counter after This security setting determines the number of minutes that must elapse after a failed logon attempt before the failed logon attempt counter is reset to 0 bad logon attempts. The available range is 1 minute to 99,999 minutes. If an account lockout threshold is defined, this reset time must be less than or equal to the Account lockout duration. Default: None, because this policy setting only has meaning when an Account lockout threshold is specified.When creating SQL user you can set CHECK_POLICY=on which will enforce the windows password policy on the account. The following policies will be applied Define the Enforce password history policy setting so that several previous passwords are remembered. With this policy setting, users cannot use the same password when their password expires.  Define the Maximum password age policy setting so that passwords expire as often as necessary for your environment, typically, every 30 to 90 days. With this policy setting, if an attacker cracks a password, the attacker only has access to the network until the password expires.  Define the Minimum password age policy setting so that passwords cannot be changed until they are more than a certain number of days old. This policy setting works in combination with the Enforce password historypolicy setting. If a minimum password age is defined, users cannot repeatedly change their passwords to get around the Enforce password history policy setting and then use their original password. Users must wait the specified number of days to change their passwords.  Define a Minimum password length policy setting so that passwords must consist of at least a specified number of characters. Long passwords--seven or more characters--are usually stronger than short ones. With this policy setting, users cannot use blank passwords, and they have to create passwords that are a certain number of characters long.  Enable the Password must meet complexity requirements policy setting. This policy setting checks all new passwords to ensure that they meet basic strong password requirements.  Password must meet the following complexity requirement, when they are changed or created: Not contain the user's entire Account Name or entire Full Name. The Account Name and Full Name are parsed for delimiters: commas, periods, dashes or hyphens, underscores, spaces, pound signs, and tabs. If any of these delimiters are found, the Account Name or Full Name are split and all sections are verified not to be included in the password. There is no check for any character or any three characters in succession. Contain characters from three of the following five categories:  English uppercase characters (A through Z) English lowercase characters (a through z) Base 10 digits (0 through 9) Non-alphabetic characters (for example, !, $, #, %) A catch-all category of any Unicode character that does not fall under the previous four categories. This fifth category can be regionally specific.

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• HTML5 and Visual Studio 2010

  - by Harish Ranganathan

  All of us work with Visual Studio (or the free Visual Web Developer Express Edition) for developing web applications targeting ASP.NET / ASP.NET MVC or Silverlight etc.,  Over the years, Visual Studio has grown to a great extent.  From being a simple limited functionality tool in VS.NET 2002 to the multi-faceted, MEF driven Visual Studio 2010, it has come a long way.  And as much as Visual Studio supports rapid web development by generating HTML mark up, it also added intellisense for some of the HTML specifications that one has otherwise monotonously type every time.  Ex.- In Visual Studio 2010, one can just type the angular bracket “<” and then the first keyword “h” or “x” for html or xhtml respectively and then press tab twice and it would render the entire markup required for XHTML or HTML 1.0/1.1 strict/transitional and the fully qualified W3C URL. The same holds good for specifying HTML type declaration.  Now, the difference between HTML and XHTML has been discussed in detail already, though, if you are interested to know, you can read it from http://www.w3schools.com/xhtml/xhtml_html.asp But, the industry trend or the buzz around is HTML5.  With browsers like IE9 Beta, Google Chrome, Firefox 4 etc., supporting HTML5 standards big time, everyone wants to start developing HTML5 based websites. VS developers (like me) often get the question around when would VS start supporting HTML5.  VS 2010 was released last year and HTML5 is still specifications under development.  Clearly, with the timelines we started developing Visual Studio (way back in 2008), HTML5 specs were almost non-existent.  Even today, the HTML5 body recommends not to fully depend on the entire mark up set as they are still under development specs and might change in the future. However, with Visual Studio 2010 SP1 beta, there is quite a bit of support for HTML5 based web development.  In fact, one of my colleagues pointed out that SP1 beta’s major enhancement is its ability to support HTML5 tags and even add server mode to them. Lets look at the existing validation schema available in Visual Studio (Tools – Options – Validation) This is before installing Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta.  Clearly, the validation options are restricted to HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.1 transitional and below. Also, lets consider using some of the new HTML5 input type elements.  (I found out this, just today from my friend, also an, ASP.NET team member) <input type=”email”> is one of the new input type elements according to the HTML5 specification.  Now, this works well if you type it as is  in Visual Studio and the page renders without any issue (since the default behaviour is, if there is an “undefined” type specified to input tag, it would fall back on the default mode, which is text. The moment you add <input type=”email” runat=”server” >, you get an error Naturally you don’t get intellisense support as well for these new tags.  Once you install Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 Beta from here (it takes a while so you need to be patient for the installation to complete), you will start getting additional Validation templates for HTML5, as below:- Once you set this, you can start using HTML5 elements in your web page without getting errors/warnings.  Look at the screen shot below, for the new “video” tag which is showing up in intellisense (video is a part of the new HTML5 specifications)     note that, you still need to hook up the <!DOCTYPE html /> on the top manually as it doesn’t change automatically  (from the default XHTML 1.0 strict) when you create a new page. Also, the new input type tags in HTML5 are also supported One, can also use the <asp:TextBox type=”email” which would in turn generate the <input type=”email”> markup when the page is rendered.  In fact, as of SP1 beta, this is the only way to put the new input type tags with the runat=”server” attribute (otherwise you will get the parser error mentioned above.  This issue would be fixed by the final release of SP1 beta) Going further, there may be more support for having server tags for some of the common HTML5 elements, but this is work in progress currently. So, other than not having runat=”server” support for the new HTML5  input tags, you can pretty much build and target HTML5 websites with Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta, today.  For those who are running Visual Studio 2008, you also have the “HTML5 intellisense for Visual Studio 2010 and 2008” available for download, from http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/d771cbc8-d60a-40b0-a1d8-f19fc393127d/ Note that, if you are running Visual Studio 2010, the recommended approach is to install the SP1 beta which would be the way forward for HTML5 support in Visual Studio. Of course, you need to test these on a browser supporting HTML5 such as IE9 Beta or Chrome or FireFox 4.  You can download IE9 Beta from here You can also follow the Visual Web Developer Team Blog for more updates on the stuff they are building. Cheers !!!

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• Meet our 2009 Oracle Graduates in South Africa

  - by anca.rosu

  Focusing on the broader Oracle community, Oracle South Africa initiated its first skills development programme in May 1988. Since its inception the programme has developed and improved and every year more graduates are taken on board. The Oracle Graduate Programme is made up of specific learning paths designed around customer, partner and Oracle specifications and is structured to meet the urgent skills requirements in the Oracle “economy”. The training programmes have a specific duration and incorporate both theoretical and practical application of Oracle product sets. It is aimed at creating: Meaningful employment for graduates; Learning opportunities for individuals within the organization so that career growth opportunities are exploited to the fullest; Capacity building for small enterprises which is aligned to Oracle’s Enterprise Development Programme Meet our five graduates who joined us in December 2008 and have spent over a year with us! Let’s get their initial feedback on the graduate programme and on their assignment to Jordan. Lector   On the Oracle Graduate Programme: “The Oracle Graduate Programme is an experience of a life time. I would not trade it for anything. It’s challenging and rewarding. I am proud and happy to be in an organization like Oracle” On the assignment in Jordan: "Friendly, welcoming people, world class instructors always willing to go the extra mile. What more can you ask for?"   Lungile On the Oracle Graduate Programme: “I joined Oracle as part of the graduate intake for pre-sales in order to develop my skills and knowledge. Working at Oracle has been an overwhelmingly positive experience as it has encouraged me to progress with my personal development. I am hugely grateful. It has been a great challenge and an awesome opportunity.” On the assignment to Jordan: “Going to Jordan was a great opportunity and the experience of a lifetime. The people were very welcoming and friendly. The culture was totally different from ours - the food, the clothes and the weather. It was an amazingly different experience to work from Sunday to Thursday with Friday and Saturday as the weekend.” Thabo On the Oracle Graduate Programme: “Life is an infinite learning path. I truly value growth. I believe for one to grow, one needs to be challenged to your full potential. The Oracle Graduate Programme offers real growth – and so much more.” On the assignment to Jordan: “I was amazed by the cultural differences. I now understood that to be part of the global community, I must embrace our similarities and understand our differences.”   Albeauty On the Oracle Graduate Programme: “Responsibility, dedication, focus and taking initiative … these are the key points I learned from Oracle. It is such an honour to finally be part of the Oracle family. The graduate programme itself was a great experience as I managed to learn how Oracle operates – it has been the highlight of my year. I believe that my hard work will assist in the growth of the company.” On the Jordan assignment: “A memory worth embracing. Going to Jordan was a great opportunity as I learned a lot with respect to integration between different cultures and getting to adapt to all things different. I, along with almost every other graduate, discovered that Oracle is far more than a database company. Now I know there is far more to the ‘Big Red’ name.” Emmanuel On the Oracle Graduate Programme: “The programme gave me invaluable exposure to the ICT sector and also provided an opportunity to travel, network and exchange ideas with others. The formal training helped me to improve my presentation skills and gave me a better understanding of business etiquette and communication.” On the assignment to Jordan: “It was my first trip abroad. It was a great chance to get to know each other. I had the opportunity to share ideas, share personal stuff as a team. We met experts who gave us superb training in Oracle Technologies. It was great.”   If you have any questions related to this article feel free to contact  [email protected].  You can find our job opportunities via http://campus.oracle.com.   Technorati Tags: Oracle community,South Africa,Graduate Programme,Jordan,Technologies

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• SQL SERVER – Replace a Column Name in Multiple Stored Procedure all together

  - by pinaldave

  I receive a lot of emails every day. I try to answer each and every email and comments on Facebook and Twitter. I prefer communication on social media as this gives opportunities to others to read the questions and participate along with me. There is always some question which everyone likes to read and remember. Here is one of the questions which I received in email. I believe the same question will be there any many developers who are beginning with SQL Server. I decided to blog about it so everyone can read it and participate. “I am beginner in SQL Server. I have a very interesting situation and need your help. I am beginner to SQL Server and that is why I do not have access to the production server and I work entirely on the development server. The project I am working on is also in the infant stage as well. In product I had to create a multiple tables and every table had few columns. Later on I have written Stored Procedures using those tables. During a code review my manager has requested to change one of the column which I have used in the table. As per him the naming convention was not accurate. Now changing the columname in the table is not a big issue. I figured out that I can do it very quickly either using T-SQL script or SQL Server Management Studio. The real problem is that I have used this column in nearly 50+ stored procedure. This looks like a very mechanical task. I believe I can go and change it in nearly 50+ stored procedure but is there a better solution I can use. Someone suggested that I should just go ahead and find the text in system table and update it there. Is that safe solution? If not, what is your solution. In simple words, How to replace a column name in multiple stored procedure efficiently and quickly? Please help me here with keeping my experience and non-production server in mind.” Well, I found this question very interesting. Honestly I would have preferred if this question was asked on my social media handles (Facebook and Twitter) as I am very active there and quite often before I reach there other experts have already answered this question. Anyway I am now answering the same question on the blog so all of us can participate here and come up with an appropriate answer. Here is my answer - “My Friend, I do not advice to touch system table. Please do not go that route. It can be dangerous and not appropriate. The issue which you faced today is what I used to face in early career as well I still face it often. There are two sets of argument I have observed – there are people who see no value in the name of the object and name objects like obj1, obj2 etc. There are sets of people who carefully chose the name of the object where object name is self-explanatory and almost tells a story. I am not here to take any side in this blog post – so let me go to a quick solution for your problem. Note: Following should not be directly practiced on Production Server. It should be properly tested on development server and once it is validated they should be pushed to your production server with your existing deployment practice. The answer is here assuming you have regular stored procedures and you are working on the Development NON Production Server. Go to Server Note >> Databases >> DatabaseName >> Programmability >> Stored Procedure Now make sure that Object Explorer Details are open (if not open it by clicking F7). You will see the list of all the stored procedures there. Now you will see a list of all the stored procedures on the right side list. Select either all of them or the one which you believe are relevant to your query. Now… Right click on the stored procedures >> SELECT DROP and CREATE to >> Now select New Query Editor Window or Clipboard. Paste the complete script to a new window if you have selected Clipboard option. Now press Control+H which will bring up the Find and Replace Screen. In this screen insert the column to be replaced in the “Find What”box and new column name into “Replace With” box. Now execute the whole script. As we have selected DROP and CREATE to, it will created drop the old procedure and create the new one. Another method would do all the same procedure but instead of DROP and CREATE manually replace the CREATE word with ALTER world. There is a small advantage in doing this is that if due to any reason the error comes up which prevents the new stored procedure to be created you will have your old stored procedure in the system as it is. “ Well, this was my answer to the question which I have received. Do you see any other workaround or solution? Reference : Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Server Management Studio, SQL Stored Procedure, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Stored proc running 30% slower through Java versus running directly on database

  - by James B

  Hi All, I'm using Java 1.6, JTDS 1.2.2 (also just tried 1.2.4 to no avail) and SQL Server 2005 to create a CallableStatement to run a stored procedure (with no parameters). I am seeing the Java wrapper running the same stored procedure 30% slower than using SQL Server Management Studio. I've run the MS SQL profiler and there is little difference in I/O between the two processes, so I don't think it's related to query plan caching. The stored proc takes no arguments and returns no data. It uses a server-side cursor to calculate the values that are needed to populate a table. I can't see how the calling a stored proc from Java should add a 30% overhead, surely it's just a pipe to the database that SQL is sent down and then the database executes it....Could the database be giving the Java app a different query plan?? I've posted to both the MSDN forums, and the sourceforge JTDS forums (topic: "stored proc slower in JTDS than direct in DB") I was wondering if anyone has any suggestions as to why this might be happening? Thanks in advance, -James (N.B. Fear not, I will collate any answers I get in other forums together here once I find the solution) Java code snippet: sLogger.info("Preparing call..."); stmt = mCon.prepareCall("SP_WB200_POPULATE_TABLE_limited_rows"); sLogger.info("Call prepared. Executing procedure..."); stmt.executeQuery(); sLogger.info("Procedure complete."); I have run sql profiler, and found the following: Java app : CPU: 466,514 Reads: 142,478,387 Writes: 284,078 Duration: 983,796 SSMS : CPU: 466,973 Reads: 142,440,401 Writes: 280,244 Duration: 769,851 (Both with DBCC DROPCLEANBUFFERS run prior to profiling, and both produce the correct number of rows) So my conclusion is that they both execute the same reads and writes, it's just that the way they are doing it is different, what do you guys think? It turns out that the query plans are significantly different for the different clients (the Java client is updating an index during an insert that isn't in the faster SQL client, also, the way it is executing joins is different (nested loops Vs. gather streams, nested loops Vs index scans, argh!)). Quite why this is, I don't know yet (I'll re-post when I do get to the bottom of it) Epilogue I couldn't get this to work properly. I tried homogenising the connection properties (arithabort, ansi_nulls etc) between the Java and Mgmt studio clients. It ended up the two different clients had very similar query/execution plans (but still with different actual plan_ids). I posted a summary of what I found to the MSDN SQL Server forums as I found differing performance not just between a JDBC client and management studio, but also between Microsoft's own command line client, SQLCMD, I also checked some more radical things like network traffic too, or wrapping the stored proc inside another stored proc, just for grins. I have a feeling the problem lies somewhere in the way the cursor was being executed, and it was somehow giving rise to the Java process being suspended, but why a different client should give rise to this different locking/waiting behaviour when nothing else is running and the same execution plan is in operation is a little beyond my skills (I'm no DBA!). As a result, I have decided that 4 days is enough of anyone's time to waste on something like this, so I will grudgingly code around it (if I'm honest, the stored procedure needed re-coding to be more incremental instead of re-calculating all data each week anyway), and chalk this one down to experience. I'll leave the question open, big thanks to everyone who put their hat in the ring, it was all useful, and if anyone comes up with anything further, I'd love to hear some more options...and if anyone finds this post as a result of seeing this behaviour in their own environments, then hopefully there's some pointers here that you can try yourself, and hope fully see further than we did. I'm ready for my weekend now! -James

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• SQL Saturday 43 in Redmond

  - by AjarnMark

  I attended my first SQLSaturday a couple of days ago, SQLSaturday #43 in Redmond (at Microsoft).  I got there really early, primarily because I forgot how fast I can get there from my home when nobody else is on the road.  On a weekday in rush hour traffic, that would have taken two hours to get there.  I gave myself 90 minutes, and actually got there in about 45.  Crazy! I made the mistake of going to the main Microsoft campus, but that’s not where the event was being held.  Instead it was in a big Microsoft conference center on the other side of the highway.  Fortunately, I had the address with me and quickly realized my mistake.  When I got back on track, I noticed that there were bright yellow signs out on the street corner that looked like they said they were for SOL Saturday, which actually was appropriate since it was the sunniest day around here in a long time. Since I was there so early, the registration was just getting setup, so I found Greg Larsen who was coordinating things and offered to help.  He put me to work with a group of people organizing the pre-printed raffle tickets and stuffing swag bags. I had never been to a SQLSaturday before this one, so I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect even though I have read about a few on some blogs.  It makes sense that each one will be a little bit different since they are almost completely volunteer driven, and the whole concept is still in its early stages.  I have been to the PASS Summit for the last several years, and was hoping for a smaller version of that.  Now, it’s not really fair to compare one free day of training run entirely by volunteers with a multi-day, $1,000+ event put on under the direction of a professional event management company.  But there are some parallels. At this SQLSaturday, there was no opening general session, just coffee and pastries in the common area / expo hallway and straight into the first group of sessions.  I don’t know if that was because there was no single room large enough to hold everyone, or for other reasons.  This worked out okay, but the organization guy in me would have preferred to have even a 15 minute welcome message from the organizers with a little overview of the day.  Even something as simple as, “Thanks to persons X, Y, and Z for helping put this together…Sessions will start in 20 minutes and are all in rooms down this hallway…the bathrooms are on the other side of the conference center…lunch today is pizza and we would like to thank sponsor Q for providing it.”  It doesn’t need to be much, certainly not a full-blown Keynote like at the PASS Summit, but something to use as a rallying point to pull everyone together and get the day off to an official start would be nice.  Again, there may have been logistical reasons why that was not feasible here.  I’m just putting out my thoughts for other SQLSaturday coordinators to consider. The event overall was great.  I believe that there were over 300 in attendance, and everything seemed to run smoothly.  At least from an attendee’s point of view where there was plenty of muffins in the morning and pizza in the afternoon, with plenty of pop to drink.  And hey, if you’ve got the food and drink covered, a lot of other stuff could go wrong and people will be very forgiving.  But as I said, everything appeared to run pretty smoothly, at least until Buck Woody showed up in his Oracle shirt.  Other than that, the volunteers did a great job! I was a little surprised by how few people in my own backyard that I know.  It makes sense if you really think about it, given how many companies must be using SQL Server around here.  I guess I just got spoiled coming into the PASS Summit with a few contacts that I already knew would be there.  Perhaps I have been spending too much time with too few people at the Summits and I need to step out and meet more folks.  Of course, it also is different since the Summit is the big national event and a number of the folks I know are spread out across the country, so the Summit is the only time we’re all in the same place at the same time.  I did make a few new contacts at SQLSaturday, and bumped into a couple of people that I knew (and a couple others that I only knew from Twitter, and didn’t even realize that they were here in the area). Other than the sheer entertainment value of Buck Woody’s session, the one that was probably the greatest value for me was a quick introduction to PowerShell.  I have not done anything with it yet, but I think it will be a good tool to use to implement my plans for automated database recovery testing.  I saw just enough at the session to take away some of the intimidation factor, and I am getting ready to jump in and see what I can put together in the next few weeks.  And that right there made the investment worthwhile.  So I encourage you, if you have the opportunity to go to a SQLSaturday event near you, go for it!

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• Installing SharePoint 2010 and PowerPivot for SharePoint on Windows 7

  - by smisner

  Many people like me want (or need) to do their business intelligence development work on a laptop. As someone who frequently speaks at various events or teaches classes on all subjects related to the Microsoft business intelligence stack, I need a way to run multiple server products on my laptop with reasonable performance. Once upon a time, that requirement meant only that I had to load the current version of SQL Server and the client tools of choice. In today's post, I'll review my latest experience with trying to make the newly released Microsoft BI products work with a Windows 7 operating system. The entrance of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 into the BI stack complicated matters and I started using Virtual Server to establish a "suitable" environment. As part of the team that delivered a lot of education as part of the Yukon pre-launch activities (that would be SQL Server 2005 for the uninitiated), I was working with four - yes, four - virtual servers. That was a pretty brutal workload for a 2GB laptop, which worked if I was very, very careful. It could also be a finicky and unreliable configuration as I learned to my dismay at one TechEd session several years ago when I had to reboot a very carefully cached set of servers just minutes before my session started. Although it worked, it came back to life very, very slowly much to the displeasure of the audience. They couldn't possibly have been less pleased than me. At that moment, I resolved to get the beefiest environment I could afford and consolidate to a single virtual server. Enter the 4GB 64-bit laptop to preserve my sanity and my livelihood. Likewise, for SQL Server 2008, I managed to keep everything within a single virtual server and I could function reasonably well with this approach. Now we have SQL Server 2008 R2 plus Office SharePoint Server 2010. That means a 64-bit operating system. Period. That means no more Virtual Server. That means I must use Hyper-V or another alternative. I've heard alternatives exist, but my few dabbles in this area did not yield positive results. It might have been just me having issues rather than any failure of those technologies to adequately support the requirements. My first run at working with the new BI stack configuration was to set up a 64-bit 4GB laptop with a dual-boot to run Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V. However, I was generally not happy with running Windows Server 2008 R2 on my laptop. For one, I couldn't put it into sleep mode, which is helpful if I want to prepare for a presentation beforehand and then walk to the podium without the need to hold my laptop in its open state along the way (my strategy at the TechEd session long, long ago). Secondly, it was finicky with projectors. I had issues from time to time and while I always eventually got it to work, I didn't appreciate those nerve-wracking moments wondering whether this would be the time that it wouldn't work. Somewhere along the way, I learned that it was possible to load SharePoint 2010 in a Windows 7 which piqued my interest. I had just acquired a new laptop running Windows 7 64-bit, and thought surely running the BI stack natively on my laptop must be better than running Hyper-V. (I have not tried booting to Hyper-V VHD yet, but that's on my list of things to try so the jury of one is still out on this approach.) Recently, I had to build up a server with the RTM versions of SQL Server 2008 R2 and Sharepoint Server 2010 and decided to follow suit on my Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit laptop. The process is slightly different, but I'm happy to report that it IS possible, although I had some fits and starts along the way. DISCLAIMER: These products are NOT intended to be run in production mode on the Windows 7 operating system. The configuration described in this post is strictly for development or learning purposes and not supported by Microsoft. If you have trouble, you will NOT get help from them. I might be able to help, but I provide no guarantees of my ability or availablity to help. I won't provide the step-by-step instructions in this post as there are other resources that provide these details, but I will provide an overview of my approach, point you to the relevant resources, describe some of the problems I encountered, and explain how I addressed those problems to achieve my desired goal. Because my goal was not simply to set up SharePoint Server 2010 on my laptop, but specifically PowerPivot for SharePoint, I started out by referring to the installation instructions at the PowerPiovt-Info site, but mainly to confirm that I was performing steps in the proper sequence. I didn't perform the steps in Part 1 because those steps are applicable only to a server operating system which I am not running on my laptop. Then, the instructions in Part 2, won't work exactly as written for the same reason. Instead, I followed the instructions on MSDN, Setting Up the Development Environment for SharePoint 2010 on Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008. In general, I found the following differences in installation steps from the steps at PowerPivot-Info: You must copy the SharePoint installation media to the local drive so that you can edit the config.xml to allow installation on a Windows client. You also have to manually install the prerequisites. The instructions provides links to each item that you must manually install and provides a command-line instruction to execute which enables required Windows features. I will digress for a moment to save you some grief in the sequence of steps to perform. I discovered later that a missing step in the MSDN instructions is to install the November CTP Reporting Services add-in for SharePoint. When I went to test my SharePoint site (I believe I tested after I had a successful PowerPivot installation), I ran into the following error: Could not load file or assembly 'RSSharePointSoapProxy, Version=10.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=89845dcd8080cc91' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified. I was rather surprised that Reporting Services was required. Then I found an article by Alan le Marquand, Working Together: SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services Integration in SharePoint 2010,that instructed readers to install the November add-in. My first reaction was, "Really?!?" But I confirmed it in another TechNet article on hardware and software requirements for SharePoint Server 2010. It doesn't refer explicitly to the November CTP but following the link took me there. (Interestingly, I retested today and there's no longer any reference to the November CTP. Here's the link to download the latest and greatest Reporting Services Add-in for SharePoint Technologies 2010.) You don't need to download the add-in anymore if you're doing a regular server-based installation of SharePoint because it installs as part of the prerequisites automatically. When it was time to start the installation of SharePoint, I deviated from the MSDN instructions and from the PowerPivot-Info instructions: On the Choose the installation you want page of the installation wizard, I chose Server Farm. On the Server Type page, I chose Complete. At the end of the installation, I did not run the configuration wizard. Returning to the PowerPivot-Info instructions, I tried to follow the instructions in Part 3 which describe installing SQL Server 2008 R2 with the PowerPivot option. These instructions tell you to choose the New Server option on the Setup Role page where you add PowerPivot for SharePoint. However, I ran into problems with this approach and got installation errors at the end. It wasn't until much later as I was investigating an error that I encountered Dave Wickert's post that installing PowerPivot for SharePoint on Windows 7 is unsupported. Uh oh. But he did want to hear about it if anyone succeeded, so I decided to take the plunge. Perseverance paid off, and I can happily inform Dave that it does work so far. I haven't tested absolutely everything with PowerPivot for SharePoint but have successfully deployed a workbook and viewed the PowerPivot Management Dashboard. I have not yet tested the data refresh feature, but I have installed. Continue reading to see how I accomplished my objective. I unintalled SQL Server 2008 R2 and started again. I had different problems which I don't recollect now. However, I uninstalled again and approached installation from a different angle and my next attempt succeeded. The downside of this approach is that you must do all of the things yourself that are done automatically when you install PowerPivot as a new server. Here are the steps that I followed: Install SQL Server 2008 R2 to get a database engine instance installed. Run the SharePoint configuration wizard to set up the SharePoint databases. In Central Administration, create a Web application using classic mode authentication as per a TechNet article on PowerPivot Authentication and Authorization. Then I followed the steps I found at How to: Install PowerPivot for SharePoint on an Existing SharePoint Server. Especially important to note - you must launch setup by using Run as administrator. I did not have to manually deploy the PowerPivot solution as the instructions specify, but it's good to know about this step because it tells you where to look in Central Administration to confirm a successful deployment. I did spot some incorrect steps in the instructions (at the time of this writing) in How To: Configure Stored Credentials for PowerPivot Data Refresh. Specifically, in the section entitled Step 1: Create a target application and set the credentials, both steps 10 and 12 are incorrect. They tell you to provide an actual Windows user name and password on the page where you are simply defining the prompts for your application in the Secure Store Service. To add the Windows user name and password that you want to associate with the application - after you have successfully created the target application - you select the target application and then click Set credentials in the ribbon. Lastly, I followed the instructions at How to: Install Office Data Connectivity Components on a PowerPivot server. However, I have yet to test this in my current environment. I did have several stops and starts throughout this process and edited those out to spare you from reading non-essential information. I believe the explanation I have provided here accurately reflect the steps I followed to produce a working configuration. If you follow these steps and get a different result, please let me know so that together we can work through the issue and correct these instructions. I'm sure there are many other folks in the Microsoft BI community that will appreciate the ability to set up the BI stack in a Windows 7 environment for development or learning purposes. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• SPARC M7 Chip - 32 cores - Mind Blowing performance

  - by Angelo-Oracle

  The M7 Chip Oracle just announced its Next Generation Processor at the HotChips HC26 conference. As the Tech Lead in our Systems Division's Partner group, I had a front row seat to the extraordinary price performance advantage of Oracle current T5 and M6 based systems. Partner after partner tested  these systems and were impressed with it performance. Just read some of the quotes to see what our partner has been saying about our hardware. We just announced our next generation processor, the M7. This has 32 cores (up from 16-cores in T5 and 12-cores in M6). With 20 nm technology  this is our most advanced processor. The processor has more cores than anything else in the industry today. After the Sun acquisition Oracle has released 5 processors in 4 years and this is the 6th.  The S4 core  The M7 is built using the foundation of the S4 core. This is the next generation core technology. Like its predecessor, the S4 has 8 dynamic threads. It increases the frequency while maintaining the Pipeline depth. Each core has its own fine grain power estimator that keeps the core within its power envelop in 250 nano-sec granularity. Each core also includes Software in Silicon features for Application Acceleration Support. Each core includes features to improve Application Data Integrity, with almost no performance loss. The core also allows using part of the Virtual Address to store meta-data.  User-Level Synchronization Instructions are also part of the S4 core. Each core has 16 KB Instruction and 16 KB Data L1 cache. The Core Clusters  The cores on the M7 chip are organized in sets of 4-core clusters. The core clusters share  L2 cache.  All four cores in the complex share 256 KB of 4 way set associative L2 Instruction Cache, with over 1/2 TB/s of throughput. Two cores share 256 KB of 8 way set associative L2 Data Cache, with over 1/2 TB/s of throughput. With this innovative Core Cluster architecture, the M7 doubles core execution bandwidth. to maximize per-thread performance.  The Chip  Each  M7 chip has 8 sets of these core-clusters. The chip has 64 MB on-chip L3 cache. This L3 caches is shared among all the cores and is partitioned into 8 x 8 MB chunks. Each chunk is  8-way set associative cache. The aggregate bandwidth for the L3 cache on the chip is over 1.6TB/s. Each chip has 4 DDR4 memory controllers and can support upto 16 DDR4 DIMMs, allowing for 2 TB of RAM/chip. The chip also includes 4 internal links of PCIe Gen3 I/O controllers.  Each chip has 7 coherence links, allowing for 8 of these chips to be connected together gluelessly. Also 32 of these chips can be connected in an SMP configuration. A potential system with 32 chips will have 1024 cores and 8192 threads and 64 TB of RAM.  Software in Silicon The M7 chip has many built in Application Accelerators in Silicon. These features will be exposed to our Software partners using the SPARC Accelerator Program.  The M7  has built-in logic to decompress data at the speed of memory access. This means that applications can directly work on compressed data in memory increasing the data access rates. The VA Masking feature allows the use of part of the virtual address to store meta-data.  Realtime Application Data Integrity The Realtime Application Data Integrity feature helps applications safeguard against invalid, stale memory reference and buffer overflows. The first 4-bits if the Pointer can be used to store a version number and this version number is also maintained in the memory & cache lines. When a pointer accesses memory the hardware checks to make sure the two versions match. A SEGV signal is raised when there is a mismatch. This feature can be used by the Database, applications and the OS.  M7 Database In-Memory Query Accelerator The M7 chip also includes a In-Silicon Query Engines.  These accelerate tasks that work on In-Memory Columnar Vectors. Oracle In-Memory options stores data in Column Format. The M7 Query Engine can speed up In-Memory Format Conversion, Value and Range Comparisons and Set Membership lookups. This engine can work on Compressed data - this means not only are we accelerating the query performance but also increasing the memory bandwidth for queries.  SPARC Accelerated Program  At the Hotchips conference we also introduced the SPARC Accelerated Program to provide our partners and third part developers access to all the goodness of the M7's SPARC Application Acceleration features. Please get in touch with us if you are interested in knowing more about this program. 

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• Forcing an External Activation with Service Broker

  - by Davide Mauri

  In these last days I’ve been working quite a lot with Service Broker, a technology I’m really happy to work with, since it can give a lot of satisfaction. The scale-out solution one can easily build is simply astonishing. I’m helping a company to build a very scalable and – yet almost inexpensive – invoicing system that has to be able to scale out using commodity hardware. To offload the work from the main server to satellite “compute nodes” (yes, I’ve borrowed this term from PDW) we’re using Service Broker and the External Activator application available in the SQL Server Feature Pack. For those who are not used to work with SSB, the External Activation is a feature that allows you to intercept the arrival of a message in a queue right from your application code. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms171617.aspx (Look for “Event-Based Activation”) In order to make life even more easier, Microsoft released the External Activation application that saves you even from writing even this code. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sql_service_broker/archive/tags/external+activator/ The External Activator application can be configured to execute your own application so that each time a message – an invoice in my case – arrives in the target queue, the invoking application is executed and the invoice is calculated. The very nice feature of External Activator is that it can automatically execute as many configured application in order to process as many messages as your system can handle.  This also a lot of create a scale-out solution, leaving to the developer only a fraction of the problems that usually came with asynchronous programming. Developers are also shielded from Service Broker since everything can be encapsulated in Stored Procedures, so that – for them – developing such scale-out asynchronous solution is not much more complex than just executing a bunch of Stored Procedures. Now, if everything works correctly, you don’t have to bother of anything else. You put messages in the queue and your application, invoked by the External Activator, process them. But what happen if for some reason your application fails to process the messages. For examples, it crashes? The message is safe in the queue so you just need to process it again. But your application is invoked by the External Activator application, so now the question is, how do you wake up that app? Service Broker will engage the activation process only if certain conditions are met: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms171601.aspx But how we can invoke the activation process manually, without having to wait for another message to arrive (the arrival of a new message is a condition that can fire the activation process)? The “trick” is to do manually with the activation process does: sending a system message to a queue in charge of handling External Activation messages: declare @conversationHandle uniqueidentifier; declare @n xml = N' <EVENT_INSTANCE>   <EventType>QUEUE_ACTIVATION</EventType>   <PostTime>' + CONVERT(CHAR(24),GETDATE(),126) + '</PostTime>   <SPID>' + CAST(@@SPID AS VARCHAR(9)) + '</SPID>   <ServerName>[your_server_name]</ServerName>   <LoginName>[your_login_name]</LoginName>   <UserName>[your_user_name]</UserName>   <DatabaseName>[your_database_name]</DatabaseName>   <SchemaName>[your_queue_schema_name]</SchemaName>   <ObjectName>[your_queue_name]</ObjectName>   <ObjectType>QUEUE</ObjectType> </EVENT_INSTANCE>' begin dialog conversation     @conversationHandle from service        [<your_initiator_service_name>] to service          '<your_event_notification_service>' on contract         [http://schemas.microsoft.com/SQL/Notifications/PostEventNotification] with     encryption = off,     lifetime = 6000 ; send on conversation     @conversationHandle message type     [http://schemas.microsoft.com/SQL/Notifications/EventNotification] (@n) ;     end conversation @conversationHandle; That’s it! Put the code in a Stored Procedure and you can add to your application a button that says “Force Queue Processing” (or something similar) in order to start the activation process whenever you need it (which should not occur too frequently but it may happen). PS I know that the “fire-and-forget” (ending the conversation without waiting for an answer) technique is not a best practice, but in this case I don’t see how it can hurts so I decided to stay very close to the KISS principle []

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• Talend Enterprise Data Integration overperforms on Oracle SPARC T4

  - by Amir Javanshir

  The SPARC T microprocessor, released in 2005 by Sun Microsystems, and now continued at Oracle, has a good track record in parallel execution and multi-threaded performance. However it was less suited for pure single-threaded workloads. The new SPARC T4 processor is now filling that gap by offering a 5x better single-thread performance over previous generations. Following our long-term relationship with Talend, a fast growing ISV positioned by Gartner in the “Visionaries” quadrant of the “Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools”, we decided to test some of their integration components with the T4 chip, more precisely on a T4-1 system, in order to verify first hand if this new processor stands up to its promises. Several tests were performed, mainly focused on: Single-thread performance of the new SPARC T4 processor compared to an older SPARC T2+ processor Overall throughput of the SPARC T4-1 server using multiple threads The tests consisted in reading large amounts of data --ten's of gigabytes--, processing and writing them back to a file or an Oracle 11gR2 database table. They are CPU, memory and IO bound tests. Given the main focus of this project --CPU performance--, bottlenecks were removed as much as possible on the memory and IO sub-systems. When possible, the data to process was put into the ZFS filesystem cache, for instance. Also, two external storage devices were directly attached to the servers under test, each one divided in two ZFS pools for read and write operations. Multi-thread: Testing throughput on the Oracle T4-1 The tests were performed with different number of simultaneous threads (1, 2, 4, 8, 12, 16, 32, 48 and 64) and using different storage devices: Flash, Fibre Channel storage, two stripped internal disks and one single internal disk. All storage devices used ZFS as filesystem and volume management. Each thread read a dedicated 1GB-large file containing 12.5M lines with the following structure: customerID;FirstName;LastName;StreetAddress;City;State;Zip;Cust_Status;Since_DT;Status_DT 1;Ronald;Reagan;South Highway;Santa Fe;Montana;98756;A;04-06-2006;09-08-2008 2;Theodore;Roosevelt;Timberlane Drive;Columbus;Louisiana;75677;A;10-05-2009;27-05-2008 3;Andrew;Madison;S Rustle St;Santa Fe;Arkansas;75677;A;29-04-2005;09-02-2008 4;Dwight;Adams;South Roosevelt Drive;Baton Rouge;Vermont;75677;A;15-02-2004;26-01-2007 […] The following graphs present the results of our tests: Unsurprisingly up to 16 threads, all files fit in the ZFS cache a.k.a L2ARC : once the cache is hot there is no performance difference depending on the underlying storage. From 16 threads upwards however, it is clear that IO becomes a bottleneck, having a good IO subsystem is thus key. Single-disk performance collapses whereas the Sun F5100 and ST6180 arrays allow the T4-1 to scale quite seamlessly. From 32 to 64 threads, the performance is almost constant with just a slow decline. For the database load tests, only the best IO configuration --using external storage devices-- were used, hosting the Oracle table spaces and redo log files. Using the Sun Storage F5100 array allows the T4-1 server to scale up to 48 parallel JVM processes before saturating the CPU. The final result is a staggering 646K lines per second insertion in an Oracle table using 48 parallel threads. Single-thread: Testing the single thread performance Seven different tests were performed on both servers. Given the fact that only one thread, thus one file was read, no IO bottleneck was involved, all data being served from the ZFS cache. Read File ? Filter ? Write File: Read file, filter data, write the filtered data in a new file. The filter is set on the “Status” column: only lines with status set to “A” are selected. This limits each output file to about 500 MB. Read File ? Load Database Table: Read file, insert into a single Oracle table. Average: Read file, compute the average of a numeric column, write the result in a new file. Division & Square Root: Read file, perform a division and square root on a numeric column, write the result data in a new file. Oracle DB Dump: Dump the content of an Oracle table (12.5M rows) into a CSV file. Transform: Read file, transform, write the result data in a new file. The transformations applied are: set the address column to upper case and add an extra column at the end, which is the concatenation of two columns. Sort: Read file, sort a numeric and alpha numeric column, write the result data in a new file. The following table and graph present the final results of the tests: Throughput unit is thousand lines per second processed (K lines/second). Improvement is the % of improvement between the T5140 and T4-1. Test T4-1 (Time s.) T5140 (Time s.) Improvement T4-1 (Throughput) T5140 (Throughput) Read/Filter/Write 125 806 645% 100 16 Read/Load Database 195 1111 570% 64 11 Average 96 557 580% 130 22 Division & Square Root 161 1054 655% 78 12 Oracle DB Dump 164 945 576% 76 13 Transform 159 1124 707% 79 11 Sort 251 1336 532% 50 9 The improvement of single-thread performance is quite dramatic: depending on the tests, the T4 is between 5.4 to 7 times faster than the T2+. It seems clear that the SPARC T4 processor has gone a long way filling the gap in single-thread performance, without sacrifying the multi-threaded capability as it still shows a very impressive scaling on heavy-duty multi-threaded jobs. Finally, as always at Oracle ISV Engineering, we are happy to help our ISV partners test their own applications on our platforms, so don't hesitate to contact us and let's see what the SPARC T4-based systems can do for your application! "As describe in this benchmark, Talend Enterprise Data Integration has overperformed on T4. I was generally happy to see that the T4 gave scaling opportunities for many scenarios like complex aggregations. Row by row insertion in Oracle DB is faster with more than 650,000 rows per seconds without using any bulk Oracle capabilities !" Cedric Carbone, Talend CTO.

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• Joins in single-table queries

  - by Rob Farley

  Tables are only metadata. They don’t store data. I’ve written something about this before, but I want to take a viewpoint of this idea around the topic of joins, especially since it’s the topic for T-SQL Tuesday this month. Hosted this time by Sebastian Meine (@sqlity), who has a whole series on joins this month. Good for him – it’s a great topic. In that last post I discussed the fact that we write queries against tables, but that the engine turns it into a plan against indexes. My point wasn’t simply that a table is actually just a Clustered Index (or heap, which I consider just a special type of index), but that data access always happens against indexes – never tables – and we should be thinking about the indexes (specifically the non-clustered ones) when we write our queries. I described the scenario of looking up phone numbers, and how it never really occurs to us that there is a master list of phone numbers, because we think in terms of the useful non-clustered indexes that the phone companies provide us, but anyway – that’s not the point of this post. So a table is metadata. It stores information about the names of columns and their data types. Nullability, default values, constraints, triggers – these are all things that define the table, but the data isn’t stored in the table. The data that a table describes is stored in a heap or clustered index, but it goes further than this. All the useful data is going to live in non-clustered indexes. Remember this. It’s important. Stop thinking about tables, and start thinking about indexes. So let’s think about tables as indexes. This applies even in a world created by someone else, who doesn’t have the best indexes in mind for you. I’m sure you don’t need me to explain Covering Index bit – the fact that if you don’t have sufficient columns “included” in your index, your query plan will either have to do a Lookup, or else it’ll give up using your index and use one that does have everything it needs (even if that means scanning it). If you haven’t seen that before, drop me a line and I’ll run through it with you. Or go and read a post I did a long while ago about the maths involved in that decision. So – what I’m going to tell you is that a Lookup is a join. When I run SELECT CustomerID FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader WHERE SalesPersonID = 285; against the AdventureWorks2012 get the following plan: I’m sure you can see the join. Don’t look in the query, it’s not there. But you should be able to see the join in the plan. It’s an Inner Join, implemented by a Nested Loop. It’s pulling data in from the Index Seek, and joining that to the results of a Key Lookup. It clearly is – the QO wouldn’t call it that if it wasn’t really one. It behaves exactly like any other Nested Loop (Inner Join) operator, pulling rows from one side and putting a request in from the other. You wouldn’t have a problem accepting it as a join if the query were slightly different, such as SELECT sod.OrderQty FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader AS soh JOIN Sales.SalesOrderDetail as sod on sod.SalesOrderID = soh.SalesOrderID WHERE soh.SalesPersonID = 285; Amazingly similar, of course. This one is an explicit join, the first example was just as much a join, even thought you didn’t actually ask for one. You need to consider this when you’re thinking about your queries. But it gets more interesting. Consider this query: SELECT SalesOrderID FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader WHERE SalesPersonID = 276 AND CustomerID = 29522; It doesn’t look like there’s a join here either, but look at the plan. That’s not some Lookup in action – that’s a proper Merge Join. The Query Optimizer has worked out that it can get the data it needs by looking in two separate indexes and then doing a Merge Join on the data that it gets. Both indexes used are ordered by the column that’s indexed (one on SalesPersonID, one on CustomerID), and then by the CIX key SalesOrderID. Just like when you seek in the phone book to Farley, the Farleys you have are ordered by FirstName, these seek operations return the data ordered by the next field. This order is SalesOrderID, even though you didn’t explicitly put that column in the index definition. The result is two datasets that are ordered by SalesOrderID, making them very mergeable. Another example is the simple query SELECT CustomerID FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader WHERE SalesPersonID = 276; This one prefers a Hash Match to a standard lookup even! This isn’t just ordinary index intersection, this is something else again! Just like before, we could imagine it better with two whole tables, but we shouldn’t try to distinguish between joining two tables and joining two indexes. The Query Optimizer can see (using basic maths) that it’s worth doing these particular operations using these two less-than-ideal indexes (because of course, the best indexese would be on both columns – a composite such as (SalesPersonID, CustomerID – and it would have the SalesOrderID column as part of it as the CIX key still). You need to think like this too. Not in terms of excusing single-column indexes like the ones in AdventureWorks2012, but in terms of having a picture about how you’d like your queries to run. If you start to think about what data you need, where it’s coming from, and how it’s going to be used, then you will almost certainly write better queries. …and yes, this would include when you’re dealing with regular joins across multiples, not just against joins within single table queries.

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• client problems - misaligned expectations & not following SDLC protocols

  - by louism

  hi guys, im having some serious problems with a client on a project - i could use some advice please the short version i have been working with this client now for almost 6 months without any problems (a classified website project in the range of 500 hours) over the last few days things have drastically deteriorated to the point where ive had to place the project on-hold whilst i work-out what to do (this has pissed the client off even more) to be simplistic, the root cause of the issue is this: the client doesnt read the specs i make for him, i code the feature, he than wants to change things, i tell him its not to the agreed spec and that that change will have to be postponed and possibly charged for, he gets upset and rants saying 'hes paid for the feature' and im not keeping to the agreement (<- misalignment of expectations) i think the root cause of the root cause is my clients failure to take my SDLC protocols seriously. i have a bug tracking system in place which he practically refuses to use (he still emails me bugs), he doesnt seem to care to much for the protocols i use for dealing with scope creep and change control the whole situation came to a head recently where he 'cracked it' (an aussie term for being fed-up). the more terms like 'postponed for post-launch implementation', 'costed feature addition', and 'not to agreed spec' i kept using, the worse it got finally, he began to bully me - basically insisting i shut-up and do the work im being paid for. i wrote a long-winded email explaining how wrong he was on all these different points, and explaining what all the SDLC protocols do to protect the success of the project. than i deleted that email and wrote a new one in the new email, i suggested as a solution i write up a list of grievances we both had. we than review the list and compromise on different points: he gets some things he wants, i get some things i want. sometimes youve got to give ground to get ground his response to this suggestion was flat-out refusal, and a restatement that i should just get on with the work ive been paid to do so there you have the very subjective short version. if you have the time and inclination, the long version may be a little less bias as it has the email communiques between me and my client the long version (with background) the long version works by me showing you the email communiques which lead to the situation coming to a head. so here it is, judge for yourself where the trouble started... 1. client asked me why something was missing from a feature i just uploaded, my response was to show him what was in the spec: it basically said the item he was looking for was never going to be included 2. [clients response...] Memo Louis, We are following your own title fields and keeping a consistent layout. Why the big fuss about not adding "Part". It simply replaces "model" and is consistent with your current title fields. 3. [my response...] hi [client], the 'part' field appeared to me as a redundancy / mistake. i requested clarification but never received any in a timely manner (about 2 weeks ago) the specification for this feature also indicated it wasnt going to be included: RE: "Why the big fuss about not adding "Part" " it may not appear so, but it would actually be a lot of work for me to now add a 'Part' field it could take me up to 15-20 minutes to properly explain why its such a big undertaking to do this, but i would prefer to use that time instead to work on completing your v1.1 features as a simplistic explanation - it connects to the change in paradigm from a 'generic classified ad' model to a 'specific attributes for specific categories' model basically, i am saying it is a big fuss, but i understand that it doesnt look that way - after all, it is just one ity-bitty field :) if you require a fuller explanation, please let me know and i will commit the time needed to write that out also, if you recall when we first started on the project, i said that with the effort/time required for features, you would likely not know off the top of your head. you may think something is really complex, but in reality its quite simple, you might think something is easy - but it could actually be a massive trauma to code (which is the case here with the 'Part' field). if you also recalled, i said the best course of action is to just ask, and i would let you know on a case-by-case basis 4. [email from me to client...] hi [client], the online catalogue page is now up live (see my email from a few days ago for information on how it works) note: the window of opportunity for input/revisions on what data the catalogue stores has now closed (as i have put the code up live now) RE: the UI/layout of the online catalogue page you may still do visual/ui tweaks to the page at the moment (this window for input/revisions will close in a couple of days time) 5. [email from client to me...] *(note: i had put up the feature & asked the client to review it, never heard back from them for a few days)* Memo Louis, Here you go again. CLOSED without a word of input from the customer. I don't think so. I will reply tomorrow regarding the content and functionality we require from this feature. 5. [from me to client...] hi [client]: RE: from my understanding, you are saying that the mini-sale yard control would change itself based on the fact someone was viewing for parts & accessories <- is that correct? this change is outside the scope of the v1.1 mini-spec and therefore will need to wait 'til post launch for costing/implementation 6. [email from client to me...] Memo Louis, Following your v1.1 mini-spec and all your time paid in full for the work selected. We need to make the situation clear. There will be no further items held for post-launch. Do not expect us to pay for any further items other than those we have agreed upon. You have undertaken to complete the Parts and accessories feature as follows. Obviously, as part of this process the "mini search" will be effected, and will require "adaption to make sense". 7. [email from me to client...] hi [client], RE: "There will be no further items held for post-launch. Do not expect us to pay for any further items other than those we have agreed upon." a few points to consider: 1) the specification for the 'parts & accessories' feature was as follows: (i.e. [what] "...we have agreed upon.") 2) you have received the 'parts & accessories' feature free of charge (you have paid $0 for it). ive spent two days coding that feature as a gesture of good will i would request that you please consider these two facts carefully and sincerely 8. [email from client to me...] Memo Louis, I don't see how you are giving us anything for free. From your original fee proposal you have deleted more than 30 hours of included features. Your title "shelved features". Further you have charged us twice by adding back into the site, at an addition cost, some of those "shelved features" features. See v1.1 mini-spec. Did include in your original fee proposal a change request budget but then charge without discussion items included in v1.1 mini-spec. Included a further Features test plan for a regression test, a fee of 10 hours that would not have been required if the "shelved features" were not left out of the agreed fee proposal. I have made every attempt to satisfy your your uneven business sense by offering you everything your heart desired, in the v1.1 mini-spec, to be left once again with your attitude of "its too hard, lets leave it for post launch". I am no longer accepting anything less than what we have contracted you to do. That is clearly defined in v1.1 mini-spec, and you are paid in advance for delivering those items as an acceptable function. a few notes about the above email... i had to cull features from the original spec because it didnt fit into the budget. i explained this to the client at the start of the project (he wanted more features than he had budget hours to do them all) nothing has been charged for twice, i didnt charge the client for culled features. im charging him to now do those culled features the draft version of the project schedule included a change request budget of 10 hours, but i had to remove that to meet the budget (the client may not have been aware of this to be fair to them) what the client refers to as my attitude of 'too hard/leave it for post-launch', i called a change request protocol and a method for keeping scope creep under control 9. [email from me to client...] hi [client], RE: "...all your grievances..." i had originally written out a long email response; it was fantastic, it had all these great points of how 'you were wrong' and 'i was right', you would of loved it (and by 'loved it', i mean it would of just infuriated you more) so, i decided to deleted it start over, for two reasons: 1) a long email is being disrespectful of your time (youre a busy businessman with things to do) 2) whos wrong or right gets us no closer to fixing the problems we are experiencing what i propose is this... i prepare a bullet point list of your grievances and my grievances (yes, im unhappy too about how things are going - and it has little to do with money) i submit this list to you for you to add to as necessary we then both take a good hard look at this list, and we decide which areas we are willing to give ground on as an example, the list may look something like this: "louis, you keep taking away features you said you would do" [your grievance 2] [your grievance 3] [your grievance ...] "[client], i feel you dont properly read the specs i prepare for you..." [my grievance 2] [my grievance 3] [my grievance ...] if you are willing to give this a try, let me know will it work? who knows. but if it doesnt, we can always go back to arguing some more :) obviously, this will only work if you are willing to give it a genuine try, and you can accept that you may have to 'give some ground to get some ground' what do you think? 10. [email from client to me ...] Memo Louis, Instead of wasting your time listing grievances, I would prefer you complete the items in v1.1 mini-spec, to a satisfactory conclusion. We almost had the website ready for launch until you brought the v1.1 mini-spec into the frame. Obviously I expected you could complete the v1.1 mini-spec in a two-week time frame as you indicated and give the site a more profession presentation. Most of the problems have been caused by you not following our instructions, but deciding to do what you feel like at the time. And then arguing with us how the missing information is not necessary. For instance "Parts and Accessories". Why on earth would you leave out the parts heading, when it ties-in with the fields you have already developed. It replaces "model" and is just as important in the context of information that appears in the "Details" panel. We are at a stage where the the v1.1 mini-spec needs to be completed without further time wasting and the site is complete (subject to all features working). We are on standby at this end to do just that. Let me know when you are back, working on the site and we will process and complete each v1.1 mini-spec, item by item, until the job is complete. 11. [last email from me to client...] hi [client], based on this reply, and your demonstrated unwillingness to compromise/give any ground on issues at hand, i have decided to place your project on-hold for the moment i will be considering further options on how to over-come our challenges over the next few days i will contact you by monday 17/may to discuss any new options i have come up with, and if i believe it is appropriate to restart work on your project at that point or not told you it was long... what do you think?

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• SQLAuthority News – #TechEdIn – TechEd India 2012 Memories and Photos

  - by pinaldave

  TechEd India 2012 was held in Bangalore last March 21 to 23, 2012. Just like every year, this event is bigger, grander and inspiring. Pinal Dave at TechEd India 2012 Family Event Every single year, TechEd is a special affair for my entire family.  Four months before the start of TechEd, I usually start to build the mental image of the event. I start to think  about various things. For the most part, what excites me most is presenting a session and meeting friends. Seriously, I start thinking about presenting my session 4 months earlier than the event!  I work on my presentation day and night. I want to make sure that what I present is accurate and that I have experienced it firsthand. My wife and my daughter also contribute to my efforts. For us, TechEd is a family event, and the two of them feel equally responsible as well. They give up their family time so I can bring out the best content for the Community. Pinal, Shaivi and Nupur at TechEd India 2012 Guinea Pigs (My Experiment Victims) I do not rehearse my session, ever. However, I test my demo almost every single day till the last moment that I have to present it already. I sometimes go over the demo more than 2-3 times a day even though the event is more than a month away. I have two “guinea pigs”: 1) Nupur Dave and 2) Vinod Kumar. When I am at home, I present my demos to my wife Nupur. At times I feel that people often backup their demo, but in my case, I have backup demo presenters. In the office during lunch time, I present the demos to Vinod. I am sure he can walk my demos easily with eyes closed. Pinal and Vinod at TechEd India 2012 My Sessions I’ve been determined to present my sessions in a real and practical manner. I prefer to present the subject that I myself would be eager to attend to and sit through if I were an audience. Just keeping that principle in mind, I have created two sessions this year. SQL Server Misconception and Resolution Pinal and Vinod at TechEd India 2012 We believe all kinds of stuff – that the earth is flat, or that the forbidden fruit is apple, or that the big bang theory explains the origin of the universe, and so many other things. Just like these, we have plenty of misconceptions in SQL Server as well. I have had this dream of co-presenting a session with Vinod Kumar for the past 3 years. I have been asking him every year if we could present a session together, but we never got it to work out, until this year came. Fortunately, we got a chance to stand on the same stage and present a single subject.  I believe that Vinod Kumar and I have an excellent synergy when we are working together. We know each other’s strengths and weakness. We know when the other person will speak and when he will keep quiet. The reason behind this synergy is that we have worked on 2 Video Learning Courses (SQL Server Indexes and SQL Server Questions and Answers) and authored 1 book (SQL Server Questions and Answers) together. Crowd Outside Session Hall This session was inspired from the “Laurel and Hardy” show so we performed a role-playing of those famous characters. We had an excellent time at the stage and, for sure, the audience had a wonderful time, too. We had an extremely large audience for this session and had a great time interacting with them. Speed Up! – Parallel Processes and Unparalleled Performance Pinal Dave at TechEd India 2012 I wanted to approach this session at level 400 and I was very determined to do so. The biggest challenge I had was that this was a total of 60 minutes of session and the audience profile was very generic. I had to present at level 100 as well at 400. I worked hard to tune up these demos. I wanted to make sure that my messages would land perfectly to the minds of the attendees, and when they walk out of the session, they could use the knowledge I shared on their servers. After the session, I felt an extreme satisfaction as I received lots of positive feedback at the event. At one point, so many people rushed towards me that I was a bit scared that the stage might break and someone would get injured. Fortunately, nothing like that happened and I was able to shake hands with everybody. Pinal Dave at TechEd India 2012 Crowd rushing to Pinal at TechEd India 2012 Networking This is one of the primary reasons many of us visit the annual TechEd event. I had a fantastic time meeting SQL Server enthusiasts. Well, it was a terrific time meeting old friends, user group members, MVPs and SQL Enthusiasts. I have taken many photographs with lots of people, but I have received a very few back. If you are reading this blog and have a photo of us at the event, would you please send it to me so I could keep it in my memory lane? SQL Track Speaker: Jacob and Pinal at TechEd India 2012 SQL Community: Pinal, Tejas, Nakul, Jacob, Balmukund, Manas, Sudeepta, Sahal at TechEd India 2012 Star Speakers: Amit and Balmukund at TechEd India 2012 TechED Rockstars: Nakul, Tejas and Pinal at TechEd India 2012 I guess TechEd is a mix of family affair and culture for me! Hamara TechEd (Our TechEd) Please tell me which photo you like the most! Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Author Visit, SQLAuthority News, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology Tagged: TechEd, TechEdIn

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• Token based Authentication for WCF HTTP/REST Services: Authentication

  - by Your DisplayName here!

  This post shows some of the implementation techniques for adding token and claims based security to HTTP/REST services written with WCF. For the theoretical background, see my previous post. Disclaimer The framework I am using/building here is not the only possible approach to tackle the problem. Based on customer feedback and requirements the code has gone through several iterations to a point where we think it is ready to handle most of the situations. Goals and requirements The framework should be able to handle typical scenarios like username/password based authentication, as well as token based authentication The framework should allow adding new supported token types Should work with WCF web programming model either self-host or IIS hosted Service code can rely on an IClaimsPrincipal on Thread.CurrentPrincipal that describes the client using claims-based identity Implementation overview In WCF the main extensibility point for this kind of security work is the ServiceAuthorizationManager. It gets invoked early enough in the pipeline, has access to the HTTP protocol details of the incoming request and can set Thread.CurrentPrincipal. The job of the SAM is simple: Check the Authorization header of the incoming HTTP request Check if a “registered” token (more on that later) is present If yes, validate the token using a security token handler, create the claims principal (including claims transformation) and set Thread.CurrentPrincipal If no, set an anonymous principal on Thread.CurrentPrincipal. By default, anonymous principals are denied access – so the request ends here with a 401 (more on that later). To wire up the custom authorization manager you need a custom service host – which in turn needs a custom service host factory. The full object model looks like this: Token handling A nice piece of existing WIF infrastructure are security token handlers. Their job is to serialize a received security token into a CLR representation, validate the token and turn the token into claims. The way this works with WS-Security based services is that WIF passes the name/namespace of the incoming token to WIF’s security token handler collection. This in turn finds out which token handler can deal with the token and returns the right instances. For HTTP based services we can do something very similar. The scheme on the Authorization header gives the service a hint how to deal with an incoming token. So the only missing link is a way to associate a token handler (or multiple token handlers) with a scheme and we are (almost) done. WIF already includes token handler for a variety of tokens like username/password or SAML 1.1/2.0. The accompanying sample has a implementation for a Simple Web Token (SWT) token handler, and as soon as JSON Web Token are ready, simply adding a corresponding token handler will add support for this token type, too. All supported schemes/token types are organized in a WebSecurityTokenHandlerCollectionManager and passed into the host factory/host/authorization manager. Adding support for basic authentication against a membership provider would e.g. look like this (in global.asax): var manager = new WebSecurityTokenHandlerCollectionManager(); manager.AddBasicAuthenticationHandler((username, password) => Membership.ValidateUser(username, password));   Adding support for Simple Web Tokens with a scheme of Bearer (the current OAuth2 scheme) requires passing in a issuer, audience and signature verification key: manager.AddSimpleWebTokenHandler(     "Bearer",     "http://identityserver.thinktecture.com/trust/initial",     "https://roadie/webservicesecurity/rest/",     "WFD7i8XRHsrUPEdwSisdHoHy08W3lM16Bk6SCT8ht6A="); In some situations, SAML token may be used as well. The following configures SAML support for a token coming from ADFS2: var registry = new ConfigurationBasedIssuerNameRegistry(); registry.AddTrustedIssuer( "d1 c5 b1 25 97 d0 36 94 65 1c e2 64 fe 48 06 01 35 f7 bd db", "ADFS"); var adfsConfig = new SecurityTokenHandlerConfiguration(); adfsConfig.AudienceRestriction.AllowedAudienceUris.Add( new Uri("https://roadie/webservicesecurity/rest/")); adfsConfig.IssuerNameRegistry = registry; adfsConfig.CertificateValidator = X509CertificateValidator.None; // token decryption (read from config) adfsConfig.ServiceTokenResolver = IdentityModelConfiguration.ServiceConfiguration.CreateAggregateTokenResolver();             manager.AddSaml11SecurityTokenHandler("SAML", adfsConfig);   Transformation The custom authorization manager will also try to invoke a configured claims authentication manager. This means that the standard WIF claims transformation logic can be used here as well. And even better, can be also shared with e.g. a “surrounding” web application. Error handling A WCF error handler takes care of turning “access denied” faults into 401 status codes and a message inspector adds the registered authentication schemes to the outgoing WWW-Authenticate header when a 401 occurs. The next post will conclude with authorization as well as the source code download.   (Wanna learn more about federation, WIF, claims, tokens etc.? Click here.)

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• Puppet: Making Windows Awesome Since 2011

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/robz/archive/2014/08/07/puppet-making-windows-awesome-since-2011.aspxPuppet was one of the first configuration management (CM) tools to support Windows, way back in 2011. It has the heaviest investment on Windows infrastructure with 1/3 of the platform client development staff being Windows folks.  It appears that Microsoft believed an end state configuration tool like Puppet was the way forward, so much so that they cloned Puppet’s DSL (domain-specific language) in many ways and are calling it PowerShell DSC. Puppet Labs is pushing the envelope on Windows. Here are several things to note: Puppet x64 Ruby support for Windows coming in v3.7.0. An awesome ACL module (with order, SIDs and very granular control of permissions it is best of any CM). A wealth of modules that work with Windows on the Forge (and more on GitHub). Documentation solely for Windows folks - https://docs.puppetlabs.com/windows. Some of the common learning points with Puppet on Windows user are noted in this recent blog post. Microsoft OpenTech supports Puppet. Azure has the ability to deploy a Puppet Master (http://puppetlabs.com/solutions/microsoft). At Microsoft //Build 2014 in the Day 2 Keynote Puppet Labs CEO Luke Kanies co-presented with Mark Russonivich (http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2014/KEY02  fast forward to 19:30)! Puppet has a Visual Studio Plugin! It can be overwhelming learning a new tool like Puppet at first, but Puppet Labs has some resources to help you on that path. Take a look at the Learning VM, which has a quest-based learning tool. For real-time questions, feel free to drop onto #puppet on freenode.net (yes, some folks still use IRC) with questions, and #puppet-dev with thoughts/feedback on the language itself. You can subscribe to puppet-users / puppet-dev mailing lists. There is also ask.puppetlabs.com for questions and Server Fault if you want to go to a Stack Exchange site. There are books written on learning Puppet. There are even Puppet User Groups (PUGs) and other community resources! Puppet does take some time to learn, but with anything you need to learn, you need to weigh the benefits versus the ramp up time. I learned NHibernate once, it had a very high ramp time back then but was the only game on the street. Puppet’s ramp up time is considerably less than that. The advantage is that you are learning a DSL, and it can apply to multiple platforms (Linux, Windows, OS X, etc.) with the same Puppet resource constructs. As you learn Puppet you may wonder why it has a DSL instead of just leveraging the language of Ruby (or maybe this is one of those things that keeps you up wondering at night). I like the DSL over a small layer on top of Ruby. It allows the Puppet language to be portable and go more places. It makes you think about the end state of what you want to achieve in a declarative sense instead of in an imperative sense. You may also find that right now Puppet doesn’t run manifests (scripts) in order of the way resources are specified. This is the number one learning point for most folks. As a long time consternation of some folks about Puppet, manifest ordering was not possible in the past. In fact it might be why some other CMs exist! As of 3.3.0, Puppet can do manifest ordering, and it will be the default in Puppet 4. http://puppetlabs.com/blog/introducing-manifest-ordered-resources You may have caught earlier that I mentioned PowerShell DSC. But what about DSC? Shouldn’t that be what Windows users want to choose? Other CMs are integrating with DSC, will Puppet follow suit and integrate with DSC? The biggest concern that I have with DSC is it’s lack of visibility in fine-grained reporting of changes (which Puppet has). The other is that it is a very young Microsoft product (pre version 3, you know what they say :) ). I tried getting it working in December and ran into some issues. I’m hoping that newer releases are there that actually work, it does have some promising capabilities, it just doesn’t quite come up to the standard of something that should be used in production. In contrast Puppet is almost a ten year old language with an active community! It’s very stable, and when trusting your business to configuration management, you want something that has been around awhile and has been proven. Give DSC another couple of releases and you might see more folks integrating with it. That said there may be a future with DSC integration. Portability and fine-grained reporting of configuration changes are reasons to take a closer look at Puppet on Windows. Yes, Puppet on Windows is here to stay and it’s continually getting better folks.

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• Remote Debug Windows Azure Cloud Service

  - by Shaun

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/shaunxu/archive/2013/11/02/remote-debug-windows-azure-cloud-service.aspxOn the 22nd of October Microsoft Announced the new Windows Azure SDK 2.2. It introduced a lot of cool features but one of it shocked most, which is the remote debug support for Windows Azure Cloud Service (a.k.a. WACS).   Live Debug is Nightmare for Cloud Application When we are developing against public cloud, debug might be the most difficult task, especially after the application had been deployed. In order to minimize the debug effort, Microsoft provided local emulator for cloud service and storage once the Windows Azure platform was announced. By using local emulator developers could be able run their application on local machine with almost the same behavior as running on Windows Azure, and that could be debug easily and quickly. But when we deployed our application to Azure, we have to use log, diagnostic monitor to debug, which is very low efficient. Visual Studio 2012 introduced a new feature named "anonymous remote debug" which allows any workstation under any user could be able to attach the remote process. This is less secure comparing the authenticated remote debug but much easier and simpler to use. Now in Windows Azure SDK 2.2, we could be able to attach our application from our local machine to Windows Azure, and it's very easy.   How to Use Remote Debugger First, let's create a new Windows Azure Cloud Project in Visual Studio and selected ASP.NET Web Role. Then create an ASP.NET WebForm application. Then right click on the cloud project and select "publish". In the publish dialog we need to make sure the application will be built in debug mode, since .NET assembly cannot be debugged in release mode. I enabled Remote Desktop as I will log into the virtual machine later in this post. It's NOT necessary for remote debug. And selected "advanced settings" tab, make sure we checked "Enable Remote Debugger for all roles". In WACS, a cloud service could be able to have one or more roles and each role could be able to have one or more instances. The remote debugger will be enabled for all roles and all instances if we checked. Currently there's no way for us to specify which role(s) and which instance(s) to enable. Finally click "publish" button. In the windows azure activity window in Visual Studio we can find some information about remote debugger. To attache remote process would be easy. Open the "server explorer" window in Visual Studio and expand "cloud services" node, find the cloud service, role and instance we had just published and wanted to debug, right click on the instance and select "attach debugger". Then after a while (it's based on how fast our Internet connect to Windows Azure Data Center) the Visual Studio will be switched to debug mode. Let's add a breakpoint in the default web page's form load function and refresh the page in browser to see what's happen. We can see that the our application was stopped at the breakpoint. The call stack, watch features are all available to use. Now let's hit F5 to continue the step, then back to the browser we will find the page was rendered successfully.   What Under the Hood Remote debugger is a WACS plugin. When we checked the "enable remote debugger" in the publish dialog, Visual Studio will add two cloud configuration settings in the CSCFG file. Since they were appended when deployment, we cannot find in our project's CSCFG file. But if we opened the publish package we could find as below. At the same time, Visual Studio will generate a certificate and included into the package for remote debugger. If we went to the azure management portal we will find there will a certificate under our application which was created, uploaded by remote debugger plugin. Since I enabled Remote Desktop there will be two certificates in the screenshot below. The other one is for remote debugger. When our application was deployed, windows azure system will open related ports for remote debugger. As below you can see there are two new ports opened on my application. Finally, in our WACS virtual machine, windows azure system will copy the remote debug component based on which version of Visual Studio we are using and start. Our application then can be debugged remotely through the visual studio remote debugger. Below is the task manager on the virtual machine of my WACS application.   Summary In this post I demonstrated one of the feature introduced in Windows Azure SDK 2.2, which is Remote Debugger. It allows us to attach our application from local machine to windows azure virtual machine once it had been deployed. Remote debugger is powerful and easy to use, but it brings more security risk. And since it's only available for debug build this means the performance will be worse than release build. Hence we should only use this feature for staging test and bug fix (publish our beta version to azure staging slot), rather than for production.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• Bring Office 2003 Menus Back to 2010 with UBitMenu

  - by Matthew Guay

  Are you having trouble getting used to the Ribbon interface in Office 2010?  Here’s how you can roll back the clock a bit and bring back the familiar menus and toolbars from 2003. The Office 2007 Ribbon was both praised and criticized.  While many users felt they were more productive with the new interface, others felt frustrated searching for commands they had memorized in older versions of Office.  Now, with Office 2010, the ribbon interface has been brought to every app in the Office suite, and is integrated into many newer programs from Microsoft. If you’re moving from Office 2003, using UBitMenu allows you to add the old familiar menus back along with the new Ribbon interface for an easier learning curve. Also, with the customizability of Office 2010, we can strip away the extra Ribbon tabs to make it more like 2003. Get the 2003 Menus and Toolbars Back in Office 2010 Download UBitMenu (link below), and install as normal.  Make sure all of your Office programs are closed during the installation.  This handy utility is very small, and installed amazingly quick. Open Word, Excel, or PowerPoint and there’s now a new Menu tab beside Home in the Ribbon.  Now you can access all of your favorite old Office commands in the familiar menus, and access many of the newer Office features such as SmartArt.   Here’s a close-up of the toolbar.  Notice that the layout is very similar to that of Word 2003. You can access all of the new Transitions in PowerPoint 2010 from the menu bar.   The menu in Excel even included support for the new PivotTable and PivotCharts Wizard. One problem we noticed was that the toolbars were condensed to a drop-down menu if the Office window was less than 870px wide.  This may be a frustration to users with low-resolution displays, and you might want to use the Office Apps maximized. Get Rid of the Ribbon Now that you’ve got the old menus back, you can get rid of the extra ribbon tabs if you’d like.  Office 2010 lets you customize your ribbon and remove tabs, so let’s get rid of all the other tabs except for our new Menu tab.  In our example we’re using Word, but you can do it in Excel or PowerPoint the same way. Click the File tab and select Options. Alternately, in the Menu tab, select Tools and then Word Options. Select Customize Ribbon on the left sidebar, then uncheck the boxes beside all the ribbon tabs you want to hide on the right.  Click Ok when you’re finished. While you’re at it, you can change the default color scheme as well. Note: The color change will automatically change the color scheme in all of the Office apps, so you’ll only need to do that once. Now the ribbon only has 2 tabs…the File tab for the new Backstage View, and the UBitMenu tab we just installed.  It almost has the appearance Word 2003, but with the new features of Word 2010!  You’ll need to repeat these steps in Excel and PowerPoint if you want to customize their ribbon the same.   Conclusion If you’ve been having a hard time getting used to Office 2010, UBitMenu is a great way to get familiar with the new interface, or simply stay productive with your old tricks.  We do wish it supported the other Office applications like OneNote and Outlook. That doesn’t make it a deal breaker though, it can make the learning curve easier in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. UBitMenu is free for personal use, and available at a very reasonable price for businesses. If you’re using Office 2007 and not a fan of the Ribbon, UBitMenu works for it as well. Download UBitMenu Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips How To Bring Back the Old Menus in Office 2007Upgrade Office 2003 to 2010 on XP or Run them Side by SideHow to Find Office 2003 Commands in Office 2010Make Word 2007 Always Save in Word 2003 FormatMake Excel 2007 Always Save in Excel 2003 Format 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 HippoRemote Pro 2.2 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Speed Up Windows With ReadyBoost Awesome World Cup Soccer Calendar Nice Websites To Watch TV Shows Online 24 Million Sites Windows Media Player Glass Icons (icons we like) How to Forecast Weather, without Gadgets

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• Camera Projection back Into 3D world, offset error

  - by Anthony

  I'm using XNA to simulate a robot in a 3D world and then do image analysis on what the camera sees. I have my camera looking down in front of the direction that the robot is going, and I have the robot detecting white pixels. I'm trying to take the white pixels that it finds and project them back into the 3D world so that I can see if it is actually detecting the correct pixels. I almost have it working, but there is an offset between where the white is in in the World and were I put my orange triangles (which represent what the robot things is white). /// <summary> /// Takes a bool map of and makes vertex positions based on the map. /// </summary> /// <param name="c"> The bool map</param> private void ProjectBoolMapOnGroundAnthony2(bool[,] c) { float triangleSize = 0.04f; // Point of interest in World W cordinate system. Vector3 pointOfInterest_W = Vector3.Zero; // Point of interest in Robot Cordinate system R Vector3 pointOfInterest_R = Vector3.Zero; // alpha is the angle from the robot camera to where it is looking in the center. //double alpha = Math.Atan(1.8f / 1); /// Matrix representation of the view determined by the position, target, and updirection. Matrix View = ((SimulationMain)Game).mainRobot.robotCameraView.View; /// Matrix representation of the view determined by the angle of the field of view (Pi/4), aspectRatio, nearest plane visible (1), and farthest plane visible (1200) Matrix Projection = ((SimulationMain)Game).mainRobot.robotCameraView.Projection; /// Matrix representing how the real world cordinates differ from that of the rendering by the camera. Matrix World = ((SimulationMain)Game).mainRobot.robotCameraView.World; Plane groundPlan = new Plane(Vector3.UnitZ, 0.0f); for (int x = 0; x < this.screenWidth; x++) { for (int y = 0; y < this.screenHeight; ) { if (c[x, y] == true && this.count1D < 62000) { int j = 1; Vector3 nearPlanePoint = Game.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Unproject(new Vector3(x, y, 0), Projection, View, World); Vector3 farPlanePoint = Game.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Unproject(new Vector3(x, y, 1), Projection, View, World); //Vector3 pointOfInterest_W = Vector3.in Ray ray = new Ray(nearPlanePoint, farPlanePoint); pointOfInterest_W = ray.Position + ray.Direction * (float) ray.Intersects(groundPlan); this.vertexArray2[this.count1D + 0].Position.X = pointOfInterest_W.X - triangleSize; this.vertexArray2[this.count1D + 0].Position.Y = pointOfInterest_W.Y - triangleSize * j; this.vertexArray2[this.count1D + 0].Position.Z = pointOfInterest_W.Z; this.vertexArray2[this.count1D + 0].Color = Color.DarkOrange; // Put another vertex a the position but +1 in the X direction triangleSize //this.vertexArray2[this.count1D + 1].Position.X = pointOnGroud.X + 3; //this.vertexArray2[this.count1D + 1].Position.Y = pointOnGroud.Y + j; this.vertexArray2[this.count1D + 1].Position.X = pointOfInterest_W.X; this.vertexArray2[this.count1D + 1].Position.Y = pointOfInterest_W.Y + triangleSize * j; this.vertexArray2[this.count1D + 1].Position.Z = pointOfInterest_W.Z; this.vertexArray2[this.count1D + 1].Color = Color.Red; // Put another vertex a the position but +1 in the X direction //this.vertexArray2[this.count1D + 0].Position.X = pointOnGroud.X; //this.vertexArray2[this.count1D + 0].Position.Y = pointOnGroud.Y + 3 + j; this.vertexArray2[this.count1D + 2].Position.X = pointOfInterest_W.X + triangleSize; this.vertexArray2[this.count1D + 2].Position.Y = pointOfInterest_W.Y - triangleSize * j; this.vertexArray2[this.count1D + 2].Position.Z = pointOfInterest_W.Z; this.vertexArray2[this.count1D + 2].Color = Color.Orange; this.count1D += 3; y += j; } else { y++; } } } } The world is a grass texture with lines on it. The world plane is normal at (0,0,1). Any ideas on why there is an offset? Any Ideas? Thanks for the help, Anthony G.

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