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• How to Easily Put a Windows PC into Kiosk Mode With Assigned Access

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Windows 8.1′s Assigned Access feature allows you to easily lock a Windows PC to a single application, such as a web browser. This feature makes it easy for anyone to configure Windows 8.1 devices as point-of-sale or other kiosk systems. In the past, setting up a Windows PC in kiosk mode involved much more work, requiring the use of third-party software, group policy, or Linux distributions designed around kiosk mode. Assigned Access is available on Windows 8.1 RT, Windows 8.1 Professional, and Windows 8.1 Enterprise. The standard edition of Windows 8.1 doesn’t support Assigned Access. Create a User Account for Assigned Access Rather than turn your entire computer into a locked-down kiosk system, Assigned Access allows you to create a separate user account that can only launch a single app — such as a web browser. To set this up, you must be logged into Windows as a user with administrator permissions. First, open the PC settings app — swipe in from the right or press Windows Key + C to open the charms bar, tap Settings, and tap Change PC settings. In the PC settings app, select Accounts and select Other accounts. Use the Add an account button to create a new Windows account. Select  the “Sign in without a Microsoft account” option and select Local account to create a local user account. You could also create a Microsoft account, but you may not want to do this if you just want a locked-down account with only browser access. If you need to install apps from the Windows Store to use in Assigned Access mode, you’ll have to set up a Microsoft account instead of a local account. A local account will still allow you access to the preinstalled apps, such as Internet Explorer. You may want to create a user account with a blank password. This would make it simple for anyone to access kiosk mode, even if the system becomes locked or needs to be rebooted. The account will be created as a standard user account with limited permissions. Leave it as a standard user account — don’t make it an administrator account. Set Up Assigned Access Once you’ve created an account, you’ll first need to sign into it. If you don’t, you’ll see a “This account has no apps” message when trying to enable Assigned Access. Go back to the welcome screen, log in to the new account you created, and allow Windows to go through the first-time account setup process. If you want to use a non-default app in kiosk mode, install it while logged in as that user account. Once you’re done, log out of the other account, log back in as your administrator account, and go back to the Other accounts screen. Click the Set up an account for assigned access option to continue. Select the user account you created and select the app you want to limit the account to. For a web-based kiosk, this can be a web browser such as the Modern version of Internet Explorer. Businesses can also create their own Modern apps and set them to run in kiosk mode in this way. Note that Microsoft’s documentation says “web browsers are not good choices for assigned access” because they require more permissions than average Modern (or “Windows Store”) apps. However, if you want to provide a kiosk for web-browsing, using Assigned Access is a much better option than using Guest Mode and offering up a full Windows desktop. When you’re done, restart your PC and log in as the Assigned Access account. Windows will automatically open the app you chose and won’t allow a user to leave that app. Standard Windows 8 features like the charms bar, app switcher, and Start screen won’t appear. Pressing the Windows key once will do nothing. To sign out of Assigned Access mode, press the Windows key five times — quickly — while signed in. You’ll be sent back to the standard login screen. The account will actually still be logged in and the app will remain running — this method just “locks” the screen and allows another user to log in. Automatically Log Into Assigned Access Whenever your Windows device boots, you can log into the Assigned Access account and turn it into a kiosk system. While this isn’t ideal for all kiosk systems, you may want the device to automatically launch the specific app when it boots without requiring any login process. To do so, you’ll just need to have Windows automatically log into the Assigned Access account when it boots. This option is hidden and not available in the standard Control Panel. You’ll need to use the hidden netplwiz Control Panel tool to set up automatic login on boot. If you didn’t create a password for the user account, leave the Password field empty while configuring this. Security Considerations If you’re using this feature to turn a Windows 8.1 system into a kiosk and leaving it open to the public, remember to consider security. Anyone could come up to the system, press the Windows key five times, and try to log into your standard administrator user account. Ensure the administrator user account has a strong password so people won’t be able to get past the kiosk system’s limitations and tamper with the system. Even Windows 8′s detractors have to admit that it’s an ideal system for a touch-screen kiosk device, running either a browser or another specific application. Assigned Access finally makes this easy to set up on Windows systems in the real world — no IT experience, third-party software, or Linux distributions necessary.     

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• Using Node.js as an accelerator for WCF REST services

  - by Elton Stoneman

  Node.js is a server-side JavaScript platform "for easily building fast, scalable network applications". It's built on Google's V8 JavaScript engine and uses an (almost) entirely async event-driven processing model, running in a single thread. If you're new to Node and your reaction is "why would I want to run JavaScript on the server side?", this is the headline answer: in 150 lines of JavaScript you can build a Node.js app which works as an accelerator for WCF REST services*. It can double your messages-per-second throughput, halve your CPU workload and use one-fifth of the memory footprint, compared to the WCF services direct.   Well, it can if: 1) your WCF services are first-class HTTP citizens, honouring client cache ETag headers in request and response; 2) your services do a reasonable amount of work to build a response; 3) your data is read more often than it's written. In one of my projects I have a set of REST services in WCF which deal with data that only gets updated weekly, but which can be read hundreds of times an hour. The services issue ETags and will return a 304 if the client sends a request with the current ETag, which means in the most common scenario the client uses its local cached copy. But when the weekly update happens, then all the client caches are invalidated and they all need the same new data. Then the service will get hundreds of requests with old ETags, and they go through the full service stack to build the same response for each, taking up threads and processing time. Part of that processing means going off to a database on a separate cloud, which introduces more latency and downtime potential.   We can use ASP.NET output caching with WCF to solve the repeated processing problem, but the server will still be thread-bound on incoming requests, and to get the current ETags reliably needs a database call per request. The accelerator solves that by running as a proxy - all client calls come into the proxy, and the proxy routes calls to the underlying REST service. We could use Node as a straight passthrough proxy and expect some benefit, as the server would be less thread-bound, but we would still have one WCF and one database call per proxy call. But add some smart caching logic to the proxy, and share ETags between Node and WCF (so the proxy doesn't even need to call the servcie to get the current ETag), and the underlying service will only be invoked when data has changed, and then only once - all subsequent client requests will be served from the proxy cache.   I've built this as a sample up on GitHub: NodeWcfAccelerator on sixeyed.codegallery. Here's how the architecture looks:     The code is very simple. The Node proxy runs on port 8010 and all client requests target the proxy. If the client request has an ETag header then the proxy looks up the ETag in the tag cache to see if it is current - the sample uses memcached to share ETags between .NET and Node. If the ETag from the client matches the current server tag, the proxy sends a 304 response with an empty body to the client, telling it to use its own cached version of the data. If the ETag from the client is stale, the proxy looks for a local cached version of the response, checking for a file named after the current ETag. If that file exists, its contents are returned to the client as the body in a 200 response, which includes the current ETag in the header. If the proxy does not have a local cached file for the service response, it calls the service, and writes the WCF response to the local cache file, and to the body of a 200 response for the client. So the WCF service is only troubled if both client and proxy have stale (or no) caches.   The only (vaguely) clever bit in the sample is using the ETag cache, so the proxy can serve cached requests without any communication with the underlying service, which it does completely generically, so the proxy has no notion of what it is serving or what the services it proxies are doing. The relative path from the URL is used as the lookup key, so there's no shared key-generation logic between .NET and Node, and when WCF stores a tag it also stores the "read" URL against the ETag so it can be used for a reverse lookup, e.g:   Key Value /WcfSampleService/PersonService.svc/rest/fetch/3 "28cd4796-76b8-451b-adfd-75cb50a50fa6" "28cd4796-76b8-451b-adfd-75cb50a50fa6" /WcfSampleService/PersonService.svc/rest/fetch/3    In Node we read the cache using the incoming URL path as the key and we know that "28cd4796-76b8-451b-adfd-75cb50a50fa6" is the current ETag; we look for a local cached response in /caches/28cd4796-76b8-451b-adfd-75cb50a50fa6.body (and the corresponding .header file which contains the original service response headers, so the proxy response is exactly the same as the underlying service). When the data is updated, we need to invalidate the ETag cache – which is why we need the reverse lookup in the cache. In the WCF update service, we don't need to know the URL of the related read service - we fetch the entity from the database, do a reverse lookup on the tag cache using the old ETag to get the read URL, update the new ETag against the URL, store the new reverse lookup and delete the old one.   Running Apache Bench against the two endpoints gives the headline performance comparison. Making 1000 requests with concurrency of 100, and not sending any ETag headers in the requests, with the Node proxy I get 102 requests handled per second, average response time of 975 milliseconds with 90% of responses served within 850 milliseconds; going direct to WCF with the same parameters, I get 53 requests handled per second, mean response time of 1853 milliseconds, with 90% of response served within 3260 milliseconds. Informally monitoring server usage during the tests, Node maxed at 20% CPU and 20Mb memory; IIS maxed at 60% CPU and 100Mb memory.   Note that the sample WCF service does a database read and sleeps for 250 milliseconds to simulate a moderate processing load, so this is *not* a baseline Node-vs-WCF comparison, but for similar scenarios where the  service call is expensive but applicable to numerous clients for a long timespan, the performance boost from the accelerator is considerable.     * - actually, the accelerator will work nicely for any HTTP request, where the URL (path + querystring) uniquely identifies a resource. In the sample, there is an assumption that the ETag is a GUID wrapped in double-quotes (e.g. "28cd4796-76b8-451b-adfd-75cb50a50fa6") – which is the default for WCF services. I use that assumption to name the cache files uniquely, but it is a trivial change to adapt to other ETag formats.

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• Master Details and collectionViewSource in separate views cannot make it work.

  - by devnet247

  Hi all, I really cannot seem to make/understand how it works with separate views It all works fine if a bundle all together in a single window. I have a list of Countries-Cities-etc... When you select a country it should load it's cities. Works So I bind 3 listboxes successfully using collection sources and no codebehind more or less (just code to set the datacontext and selectionChanged). you can download the project here http://cid-9db5ae91a2948485.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/PublicFolder/2MasterDetails.zip <Window.Resources> <CollectionViewSource Source="{Binding}" x:Key="cvsCountryList"/> <CollectionViewSource Source="{Binding Source={StaticResource cvsCountryList},Path=Cities}" x:Key="cvsCityList"/> <CollectionViewSource Source="{Binding Source={StaticResource cvsCityList},Path=Hotels}" x:Key="cvsHotelList"/> </Window.Resources> <Grid> <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <ColumnDefinition/> <ColumnDefinition/> <ColumnDefinition/> </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition Height="Auto"/> <RowDefinition/> </Grid.RowDefinitions> <TextBlock Grid.Column="0" Grid.Row="0" Text="Countries"/> <TextBlock Grid.Column="1" Grid.Row="0" Text="Cities"/> <TextBlock Grid.Column="2" Grid.Row="0" Text="Hotels"/> <ListBox Grid.Column="0" Grid.Row="1" Name="lstCountries" IsSynchronizedWithCurrentItem="True" ItemsSource="{Binding Source={StaticResource cvsCountryList}}" DisplayMemberPath="Name" SelectionChanged="OnSelectionChanged"/> <ListBox Grid.Column="1" Grid.Row="1" Name="lstCities" IsSynchronizedWithCurrentItem="True" ItemsSource="{Binding Source={StaticResource cvsCityList}}" DisplayMemberPath="Name" SelectionChanged="OnSelectionChanged"/> <ListBox Grid.Column="2" Grid.Row="1" Name="lstHotels" ItemsSource="{Binding Source={StaticResource cvsHotelList}}" DisplayMemberPath="Name" SelectionChanged="OnSelectionChanged"/> </Grid> Does not work I am trying to implement the same using a view for each eg(LeftSideMasterControl -RightSideDetailsControls) However I cannot seem to make them bind. Can you help? I would be very grateful so that I can understand how you communicate between userControls You can download the project here. http://cid-9db5ae91a2948485.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/PublicFolder/2MasterDetails.zip I have as follows LeftSideMasterControl.xaml <Grid> <ListBox Name="lstCountries" SelectionChanged="OnSelectionChanged" DisplayMemberPath="Name" ItemsSource="{Binding Countries}"/> </Grid> RightViewDetailsControl.xaml MainView.xaml <CollectionViewSource Source="{Binding}" x:Key="cvsCountryList"/> <CollectionViewSource Source="{Binding Source={StaticResource cvsCountryList},Path=Cities}" x:Key="cvsCityList"/> </UserControl.Resources> <Grid> <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <ColumnDefinition/> <ColumnDefinition Width="3*"/> </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <Views:LeftViewMasterControl x:Name="leftSide" Margin="5" Content="{Binding Source=}"/> <GridSplitter Grid.Column="0" Grid.Row="0" Background="LightGray"/> <Views:RightViewDetailsControl Grid.Column="1" x:Name="RightSide" Margin="5"/> </Grid> ViewModels public class CountryListVM : ViewModelBase { public CountryListVM() { Countries = new ObservableCollection<CountryVM>(); } public ObservableCollection<CountryVM> Countries { get; set; } private RelayCommand _loadCountriesCommand; public ICommand LoadCountriesCommand { get { return _loadCountriesCommand ?? (_loadCountriesCommand = new RelayCommand(x => LoadCountries(), x => CanLoadCountries)); } } private static bool CanLoadCountries { get { return true; } } private void LoadCountries() { var countryList = Repository.GetCountries(); foreach (var country in countryList) { Countries.Add(new CountryVM { Name = country.Name }); } } } public class CountryVM : ViewModelBase { private string _name; public string Name { get { return _name; } set { _name = value; OnPropertyChanged("Name"); } } } public class CityListVM : ViewModelBase { private CountryVM _selectedCountry; public CityListVM(CountryVM country) { SelectedCountry = country; Cities = new ObservableCollection<CityVM>(); } public ObservableCollection<CityVM> Cities { get; set; } public CountryVM SelectedCountry { get { return _selectedCountry; } set { _selectedCountry = value; OnPropertyChanged("SelectedCountry"); } } private RelayCommand _loadCitiesCommand; public ICommand LoadCitiesCommand { get { return _loadCitiesCommand ?? (_loadCitiesCommand = new RelayCommand(x => LoadCities(), x => CanLoadCities)); } } private static bool CanLoadCities { get { return true; } } private void LoadCities() { var cities = Repository.GetCities(SelectedCountry.Name); foreach (var city in cities) { Cities.Add(new CityVM() { Name = city.Name }); } } } public class CityVM : ViewModelBase { private string _name; public string Name { get { return _name; } set { _name = value; OnPropertyChanged("Name"); } } } Models ========= public class Country { public Country() { Cities = new ObservableCollection<City>(); } public string Name { get; set; } public ObservableCollection<City> Cities { get; set; } } public class City { public City() { Hotels = new ObservableCollection<Hotel>(); } public string Name { get; set; } public ObservableCollection<Hotel> Hotels { get; set; } } public class Hotel { public string Name { get; set; } }

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• Oracle's Global Single Schema

  - by david.butler(at)oracle.com

  Maximizing business process efficiencies in a heterogeneous environment is very difficult. The difficulty stems from the fact that the various applications across the Information Technology (IT) landscape employ different integration standards, different message passing strategies, and different workflow engines. Vendors such as Oracle and others are delivering tools to help IT organizations manage the complexities introduced by these differences. But the one remaining intractable problem impacting efficient operations is the fact that these applications have different definitions for the same business data. Business data is your business information codified for computer programs to use. A good data model will represent the way your organization does business. The computer applications your organization deploys to improve operational efficiency are built to operate on the business data organized into this schema.  If the schema does not represent how you do business, the applications on that schema cannot provide the features you need to achieve the desired efficiencies. Business processes span these applications. Data problems break these processes rendering them far less efficient than they need to be to achieve organization goals. Thus, the expected return on the investment in these applications is never realized. The success of all business processes depends on the availability of accurate master data.  Clearly, the solution to this problem is to consolidate all the master data an organization uses to run its business. Then clean it up, augment it, govern it, and connect it back to the applications that need it. Until now, this obvious solution has been difficult to achieve because no one had defined a data model sufficiently broad, deep and flexible enough to support transaction processing on all key business entities and serve as a master superset to all other operational data models deployed in heterogeneous IT environments. Today, the situation has changed. Oracle has created an operational data model (aka schema) that can support accurate and consistent master data across heterogeneous IT systems. This is foundational for providing a way to consolidate and integrate master data without having to replace investments in existing applications. This Global Single Schema (GSS) represents a revolutionary breakthrough that allows for true master data consolidation. Oracle has deep knowledge of applications dating back to the early 1990s.  It developed applications in the areas of Supply Chain Management (SCM), Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Human Capital Management (HCM), Financials and Manufacturing. In addition, Oracle applications were delivered for key industries such as Communications, Financial Services, Retail, Public Sector, High Tech Manufacturing (HTM) and more. Expertise in all these areas drove requirements for GSS. The following figure illustrates Oracle's unique position that enabled the creation of the Global Single Schema. GSS Requirements Gathering GSS defines all the key business entities and attributes including Customers, Contacts, Suppliers, Accounts, Products, Services, Materials, Employees, Installed Base, Sites, Assets, and Inventory to name just a few. In addition, Oracle delivers GSS pre-integrated with a wide variety of operational applications.  Business Process Automation EBusiness is about maximizing operational efficiency. At the highest level, these 'operations' span all that you do as an organization.  The following figure illustrates some of these high-level business processes. Enterprise Business Processes Supplies are procured. Assets are maintained. Materials are stored. Inventory is accumulated. Products and Services are engineered, produced and sold. Customers are serviced. And across this entire spectrum, Employees do the procuring, supporting, engineering, producing, selling and servicing. Not shown, but not to be overlooked, are the accounting and the financial processes associated with all this procuring, manufacturing, and selling activity. Supporting all these applications is the master data. When this data is fragmented and inconsistent, the business processes fail and inefficiencies multiply. But imagine having all the data under these operational business processes in one place. ·            The same accurate and timely customer data will be provided to all your operational applications from the call center to the point of sale. ·            The same accurate and timely supplier data will be provided to all your operational applications from supply chain planning to procurement. ·            The same accurate and timely product information will be available to all your operational applications from demand chain planning to marketing. You would have a single version of the truth about your assets, financial information, customers, suppliers, employees, products and services to support your business automation processes as they flow across your business applications. All company and partner personnel will access the same exact data entity across all your channels and across all your lines of business. Oracle's Global Single Schema enables this vision of a single version of the truth across the heterogeneous operational applications supporting the entire enterprise. Global Single Schema Oracle's Global Single Schema organizes hundreds of thousands of attributes into 165 major schema objects supporting over 180 business application modules. It is designed for international operations, and extensibility.  The schema is delivered with a full set of public Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and an Integration Repository with modern Service Oriented Architecture interfaces to make data available as a services (DaaS) to business processes and enable operations in heterogeneous IT environments. ·         Key tables can be extended with unlimited numbers of additional attributes and attribute groups for maximum flexibility.  o    This enables model extensions that reflect business entities unique to your organization's operations. ·         The schema is multi-organization enabled so data manipulation can be controlled along organizational boundaries. ·         It uses variable byte Unicode to support over 31 languages. ·         The schema encodes flexible date and flexible address formats for easy localizations. No matter how complex your business is, Oracle's Global Single Schema can hold your business objects and support your global operations. Oracle's Global Single Schema identifies and defines the business objects an enterprise needs within the context of its business operations. The interrelationships between the business objects are also contained within the GSS data model. Their presence expresses fundamental business rules for the interaction between business entities. The following figure illustrates some of these connections.   Interconnected Business Entities Interconnecte business processes require interconnected business data. No other MDM vendor has this capability. Everyone else has either one entity they can master or separate disconnected models for various business entities. Higher level integrations are made available, but that is a weak architectural alternative to data level integration in this critically important aspect of Master Data Management.    

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• Building dynamic OLAP data marts on-the-fly

  - by DrJohn

  At the forthcoming SQLBits conference, I will be presenting a session on how to dynamically build an OLAP data mart on-the-fly. This blog entry is intended to clarify exactly what I mean by an OLAP data mart, why you may need to build them on-the-fly and finally outline the steps needed to build them dynamically. In subsequent blog entries, I will present exactly how to implement some of the techniques involved. What is an OLAP data mart? In data warehousing parlance, a data mart is a subset of the overall corporate data provided to business users to meet specific business needs. Of course, the term does not specify the technology involved, so I coined the term "OLAP data mart" to identify a subset of data which is delivered in the form of an OLAP cube which may be accompanied by the relational database upon which it was built. To clarify, the relational database is specifically create and loaded with the subset of data and then the OLAP cube is built and processed to make the data available to the end-users via standard OLAP client tools. Why build OLAP data marts? Market research companies sell data to their clients to make money. To gain competitive advantage, market research providers like to "add value" to their data by providing systems that enhance analytics, thereby allowing clients to make best use of the data. As such, OLAP cubes have become a standard way of delivering added value to clients. They can be built on-the-fly to hold specific data sets and meet particular needs and then hosted on a secure intranet site for remote access, or shipped to clients' own infrastructure for hosting. Even better, they support a wide range of different tools for analytical purposes, including the ever popular Microsoft Excel. Extension Attributes: The Challenge One of the key challenges in building multiple OLAP data marts based on the same 'template' is handling extension attributes. These are attributes that meet the client's specific reporting needs, but do not form part of the standard template. Now clearly, these extension attributes have to come into the system via additional files and ultimately be added to relational tables so they can end up in the OLAP cube. However, processing these files and filling dynamically altered tables with SSIS is a challenge as SSIS packages tend to break as soon as the database schema changes. There are two approaches to this: (1) dynamically build an SSIS package in memory to match the new database schema using C#, or (2) have the extension attributes provided as name/value pairs so the file's schema does not change and can easily be loaded using SSIS. The problem with the first approach is the complexity of writing an awful lot of complex C# code. The problem of the second approach is that name/value pairs are useless to an OLAP cube; so they have to be pivoted back into a proper relational table somewhere in the data load process WITHOUT breaking SSIS. How this can be done will be part of future blog entry. What is involved in building an OLAP data mart? There are a great many steps involved in building OLAP data marts on-the-fly. The key point is that all the steps must be automated to allow for the production of multiple OLAP data marts per day (i.e. many thousands, each with its own specific data set and attributes). Now most of these steps have a great deal in common with standard data warehouse practices. The key difference is that the databases are all built to order. The only permanent database is the metadata database (shown in orange) which holds all the metadata needed to build everything else (i.e. client orders, configuration information, connection strings, client specific requirements and attributes etc.). The staging database (shown in red) has a short life: it is built, populated and then ripped down as soon as the OLAP Data Mart has been populated. In the diagram below, the OLAP data mart comprises the two blue components: the Data Mart which is a relational database and the OLAP Cube which is an OLAP database implemented using Microsoft Analysis Services (SSAS). The client may receive just the OLAP cube or both components together depending on their reporting requirements.  So, in broad terms the steps required to fulfil a client order are as follows: Step 1: Prepare metadata Create a set of database names unique to the client's order Modify all package connection strings to be used by SSIS to point to new databases and file locations. Step 2: Create relational databases Create the staging and data mart relational databases using dynamic SQL and set the database recovery mode to SIMPLE as we do not need the overhead of logging anything Execute SQL scripts to build all database objects (tables, views, functions and stored procedures) in the two databases Step 3: Load staging database Use SSIS to load all data files into the staging database in a parallel operation Load extension files containing name/value pairs. These will provide client-specific attributes in the OLAP cube. Step 4: Load data mart relational database Load the data from staging into the data mart relational database, again in parallel where possible Allocate surrogate keys and use SSIS to perform surrogate key lookup during the load of fact tables Step 5: Load extension tables & attributes Pivot the extension attributes from their native name/value pairs into proper relational tables Add the extension attributes to the views used by OLAP cube Step 6: Deploy & Process OLAP cube Deploy the OLAP database directly to the server using a C# script task in SSIS Modify the connection string used by the OLAP cube to point to the data mart relational database Modify the cube structure to add the extension attributes to both the data source view and the relevant dimensions Remove any standard attributes that not required Process the OLAP cube Step 7: Backup and drop databases Drop staging database as it is no longer required Backup data mart relational and OLAP database and ship these to the client's infrastructure Drop data mart relational and OLAP database from the build server Mark order complete Start processing the next order, ad infinitum. So my future blog posts and my forthcoming session at the SQLBits conference will all focus on some of the more interesting aspects of building OLAP data marts on-the-fly such as handling the load of extension attributes and how to dynamically alter the structure of an OLAP cube using C#.

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• Oracle Database 12 c New Partition Maintenance Features by Gwen Lazenby

  - by hamsun

  One of my favourite new features in Oracle Database 12c is the ability to perform partition maintenance operations on multiple partitions. This means we can now add, drop, truncate and merge multiple partitions in one operation, and can split a single partition into more than two partitions also in just one command. This would certainly have made my life slightly easier had it been available when I administered a data warehouse at Oracle 9i. To demonstrate this new functionality and syntax, I am going to create two tables, ORDERS and ORDERS_ITEMS which have a parent-child relationship. ORDERS is to be partitioned using range partitioning on the ORDER_DATE column, and ORDER_ITEMS is going to partitioned using reference partitioning and its foreign key relationship with the ORDERS table. This form of partitioning was a new feature in 11g and means that any partition maintenance operations performed on the ORDERS table will also take place on the ORDER_ITEMS table as well. First create the ORDERS table - SQL CREATE TABLE orders ( order_id NUMBER(12), order_date TIMESTAMP, order_mode VARCHAR2(8), customer_id NUMBER(6), order_status NUMBER(2), order_total NUMBER(8,2), sales_rep_id NUMBER(6), promotion_id NUMBER(6), CONSTRAINT orders_pk PRIMARY KEY(order_id) ) PARTITION BY RANGE(order_date) (PARTITION Q1_2007 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('01-APR-2007','DD-MON-YYYY')), PARTITION Q2_2007 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('01-JUL-2007','DD-MON-YYYY')), PARTITION Q3_2007 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('01-OCT-2007','DD-MON-YYYY')), PARTITION Q4_2007 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('01-JAN-2008','DD-MON-YYYY')) ); Table created. Now the ORDER_ITEMS table SQL CREATE TABLE order_items ( order_id NUMBER(12) NOT NULL, line_item_id NUMBER(3) NOT NULL, product_id NUMBER(6) NOT NULL, unit_price NUMBER(8,2), quantity NUMBER(8), CONSTRAINT order_items_fk FOREIGN KEY(order_id) REFERENCES orders(order_id) on delete cascade) PARTITION BY REFERENCE(order_items_fk) tablespace example; Table created. Now look at DBA_TAB_PARTITIONS to get details of what partitions we have in the two tables – SQL select table_name,partition_name, partition_position position, high_value from dba_tab_partitions where table_owner='SH' and table_name like 'ORDER_%' order by partition_position, table_name; TABLE_NAME PARTITION_NAME POSITION HIGH_VALUE -------------- --------------- -------- ------------------------- ORDERS Q1_2007 1 TIMESTAMP' 2007-04-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q1_2007 1 ORDERS Q2_2007 2 TIMESTAMP' 2007-07-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q2_2007 2 ORDERS Q3_2007 3 TIMESTAMP' 2007-10-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q3_2007 3 ORDERS Q4_2007 4 TIMESTAMP' 2008-01-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q4_2007 4 Just as an aside it is also now possible in 12c to use interval partitioning on reference partitioned tables. In 11g it was not possible to combine these two new partitioning features. For our first example of the new 12cfunctionality, let us add all the partitions necessary for 2008 to the tables using one command. Notice that the partition specification part of the add command is identical in format to the partition specification part of the create command as shown above - SQL alter table orders add PARTITION Q1_2008 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('01-APR-2008','DD-MON-YYYY')), PARTITION Q2_2008 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('01-JUL-2008','DD-MON-YYYY')), PARTITION Q3_2008 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('01-OCT-2008','DD-MON-YYYY')), PARTITION Q4_2008 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('01-JAN-2009','DD-MON-YYYY')); Table altered. Now look at DBA_TAB_PARTITIONS and we can see that the 4 new partitions have been added to both tables – SQL select table_name,partition_name, partition_position position, high_value from dba_tab_partitions where table_owner='SH' and table_name like 'ORDER_%' order by partition_position, table_name; TABLE_NAME PARTITION_NAME POSITION HIGH_VALUE -------------- --------------- -------- ------------------------- ORDERS Q1_2007 1 TIMESTAMP' 2007-04-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q1_2007 1 ORDERS Q2_2007 2 TIMESTAMP' 2007-07-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q2_2007 2 ORDERS Q3_2007 3 TIMESTAMP' 2007-10-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q3_2007 3 ORDERS Q4_2007 4 TIMESTAMP' 2008-01-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q4_2007 4 ORDERS Q1_2008 5 TIMESTAMP' 2008-04-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q1_2008 5 ORDERS Q2_2008 6 TIMESTAMP' 2008-07-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEM Q2_2008 6 ORDERS Q3_2008 7 TIMESTAMP' 2008-10-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q3_2008 7 ORDERS Q4_2008 8 TIMESTAMP' 2009-01-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q4_2008 8 Next, we can drop or truncate multiple partitions by giving a comma separated list in the alter table command. Note the use of the plural ‘partitions’ in the command as opposed to the singular ‘partition’ prior to 12c– SQL alter table orders drop partitions Q3_2008,Q2_2008,Q1_2008; Table altered. Now look at DBA_TAB_PARTITIONS and we can see that the 3 partitions have been dropped in both the two tables – TABLE_NAME PARTITION_NAME POSITION HIGH_VALUE -------------- --------------- -------- ------------------------- ORDERS Q1_2007 1 TIMESTAMP' 2007-04-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q1_2007 1 ORDERS Q2_2007 2 TIMESTAMP' 2007-07-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q2_2007 2 ORDERS Q3_2007 3 TIMESTAMP' 2007-10-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q3_2007 3 ORDERS Q4_2007 4 TIMESTAMP' 2008-01-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q4_2007 4 ORDERS Q4_2008 5 TIMESTAMP' 2009-01-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q4_2008 5 Now let us merge all the 2007 partitions together to form one single partition – SQL alter table orders merge partitions Q1_2005, Q2_2005, Q3_2005, Q4_2005 into partition Y_2007; Table altered. TABLE_NAME PARTITION_NAME POSITION HIGH_VALUE -------------- --------------- -------- ------------------------- ORDERS Y_2007 1 TIMESTAMP' 2008-01-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Y_2007 1 ORDERS Q4_2008 2 TIMESTAMP' 2009-01-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q4_2008 2 Splitting partitions is a slightly more involved. In the case of range partitioning one of the new partitions must have no high value defined, and in list partitioning one of the new partitions must have no list of values defined. I call these partitions the ‘everything else’ partitions, and will contain any rows contained in the original partition that are not contained in the any of the other new partitions. For example, let us split the Y_2007 partition back into 4 quarterly partitions – SQL alter table orders split partition Y_2007 into (PARTITION Q1_2007 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('01-APR-2007','DD-MON-YYYY')), PARTITION Q2_2007 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('01-JUL-2007','DD-MON-YYYY')), PARTITION Q3_2007 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('01-OCT-2007','DD-MON-YYYY')), PARTITION Q4_2007); Now look at DBA_TAB_PARTITIONS to get details of the new partitions – TABLE_NAME PARTITION_NAME POSITION HIGH_VALUE -------------- --------------- -------- ------------------------- ORDERS Q1_2007 1 TIMESTAMP' 2007-04-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q1_2007 1 ORDERS Q2_2007 2 TIMESTAMP' 2007-07-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q2_2007 2 ORDERS Q3_2007 3 TIMESTAMP' 2007-10-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q3_2007 3 ORDERS Q4_2007 4 TIMESTAMP' 2008-01-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q4_2007 4 ORDERS Q4_2008 5 TIMESTAMP' 2009-01-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q4_2008 5 Partition Q4_2007 has a high value equal to the high value of the original Y_2007 partition, and so has inherited its upper boundary from the partition that was split. As for a list partitioning example let look at the following another table, SALES_PAR_LIST, which has 2 partitions, Americas and Europe and a partitioning key of country_name. SQL select table_name,partition_name, high_value from dba_tab_partitions where table_owner='SH' and table_name = 'SALES_PAR_LIST'; TABLE_NAME PARTITION_NAME HIGH_VALUE -------------- --------------- ----------------------------- SALES_PAR_LIST AMERICAS 'Argentina', 'Canada', 'Peru', 'USA', 'Honduras', 'Brazil', 'Nicaragua' SALES_PAR_LIST EUROPE 'France', 'Spain', 'Ireland', 'Germany', 'Belgium', 'Portugal', 'Denmark' Now split the Americas partition into 3 partitions – SQL alter table sales_par_list split partition americas into (partition south_america values ('Argentina','Peru','Brazil'), partition north_america values('Canada','USA'), partition central_america); Table altered. Note that no list of values was given for the ‘Central America’ partition. However it should have inherited any values in the original ‘Americas’ partition that were not assigned to either the ‘North America’ or ‘South America’ partitions. We can confirm this by looking at the DBA_TAB_PARTITIONS view. SQL select table_name,partition_name, high_value from dba_tab_partitions where table_owner='SH' and table_name = 'SALES_PAR_LIST'; TABLE_NAME PARTITION_NAME HIGH_VALUE --------------- --------------- -------------------------------- SALES_PAR_LIST SOUTH_AMERICA 'Argentina', 'Peru', 'Brazil' SALES_PAR_LIST NORTH_AMERICA 'Canada', 'USA' SALES_PAR_LIST CENTRAL_AMERICA 'Honduras', 'Nicaragua' SALES_PAR_LIST EUROPE 'France', 'Spain', 'Ireland', 'Germany', 'Belgium', 'Portugal', 'Denmark' In conclusion, I hope that DBA’s whose work involves maintaining partitions will find the operations a bit more straight forward to carry out once they have upgraded to Oracle Database 12c. Gwen Lazenby is a Principal Training Consultant at Oracle. She is part of Oracle University's Core Technology delivery team based in the UK, teaching Database Administration and Linux courses. Her specialist topics include using Oracle Partitioning and Parallelism in Data Warehouse environments, as well as Oracle Spatial and RMAN.

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• XSL unique values per node per position

  - by Nathan Colin

  this get ever more complicated :) now i face another issue in last question we managed to take unique values from only one parent node now with: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> <roots> <root> <name>first</name> <item> <something>A</something> <something>A</something> </item> <item> <something>B</something> <something>A</something> </item> <item> <something>C</something> <something>P</something> </item> <item> <something>A</something> <something>L</something> </item> <item> <something>A</something> <something>A</something> </item> <item> <something>B</something> <something>A</something> </item> <item> <something>D</something> <something>A</something> </item> </root> <root> <name>second</name> <item> <something>E</something> <something>A</something> </item> <item> <something>B</something> <something>A</something> </item> <item> <something>F</something> <something>A</something> </item> <item> <something>A</something> <something>A</something> </item> <item> <something>A</something> <something>A</something> </item> <item> <something>B</something> <something>H</something> </item> <item> <something>D</something> <something>G</something> </item> </root> </roots> now i need to get the unique values depending only from one node before but just from the elements on the second position <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"> <xsl:output indent="yes" method="text"/> <xsl:key name="item-by-value" match="something" use="concat(normalize-space(.), ' ', generate-id(./ancestor::root))"/> <xsl:key name="rootkey" match="root" use="name"/> <xsl:template match="/"> <xsl:for-each select="key('rootkey','first')"> <xsl:for-each select="item/something[1]"> <xsl:sort /> <xsl:if test="generate-id() = generate-id(key('item-by-value', concat(normalize-space(.), ' ', generate-id(./ancestor::root))))"> <xsl:value-of select="."/> </xsl:if> </xsl:for-each> <xsl:text>_________</xsl:text> <xsl:for-each select="item/something[2]"> <xsl:sort /> <xsl:if test="generate-id() = generate-id(key('item-by-value', concat(normalize-space(.), ' ', generate-id(./ancestor::root))))"> <xsl:value-of select="."/> </xsl:if> </xsl:for-each> </xsl:for-each> </xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet> with this XSL i get ABCD__LP where the result i need is ABCD__ALP any ideas?

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• Oracle Identity Manager Role Management With API

  - by mustafakaya

  As an administrator, you use roles to create and manage the records of a collection of users to whom you want to permit access to common functionality, such as access rights, roles, or permissions. Roles can be independent of an organization, span multiple organizations, or contain users from a single organization. Using roles, you can: View the menu items that the users can access through Oracle Identity Manager Administration Web interface. Assign users to roles. Assign a role to a parent role Designate status to the users so that they can specify defined responses for process tasks. Modify permissions on data objects. Designate role administrators to perform actions on roles, such as enabling members of another role to assign users to the current role, revoke members from current role and so on. Designate provisioning policies for a role. These policies determine if a resource object is to be provisioned to or requested for a member of the role. Assign or remove membership rules to or from the role. These rules determine which users can be assigned/removed as direct membership to/from the role.  In this post, i will share some examples for role management with Oracle Identity Management API.  You can do role operations you can use Thor.API.Operations.tcGroupOperationsIntf interface. tcGroupOperationsIntf service =  getClient().getService(tcGroupOperationsIntf.class);     Assign an user to role :    public void assignRoleByUsrKey(String roleName, String usrKey) throws Exception {         Map<String, String> filter = new HashMap<String, String>();         filter.put("Groups.Role Name", roleName);         tcResultSet role = service.findGroups(filter);         String groupKey = role.getStringValue("Groups.Key");         service.addMemberUser(Long.parseLong(groupKey), Long.parseLong(usrKey));     }  Revoke an user from role:     public void revokeRoleByUsrKey(String roleName, String usrKey) throws Exception {         Map<String, String> filter = new HashMap<String, String>();         filter.put("Groups.Role Name", roleName);         tcResultSet role = service.findGroups(filter);         String groupKey = role.getStringValue("Groups.Key");         service.removeMemberUser(Long.parseLong(groupKey), Long.parseLong(usrKey));     } Get all members of a role :      public List<User> getRoleMembers(String roleName) throws Exception {         List<User> userList = new ArrayList<User>();         Map<String, String> filter = new HashMap<String, String>();         filter.put("Groups.Role Name", roleName);         tcResultSet role = service.findGroups(filter);       String groupKey = role.getStringValue("Groups.Key");         tcResultSet members = service.getAllMemberUsers(Long.parseLong(groupKey));         for (int i = 0; i < members.getRowCount(); i++) {                 members.goToRow(i);                 long userKey = members.getLongValue("Users.Key");                 User member = oimUserManager.findUserByUserKey(String.valueOf(userKey));                 userList.add(member);         }        return userList;     } About me: Mustafa Kaya is a Senior Consultant in Oracle Fusion Middleware Team, living in Istanbul. Before coming to Oracle, he worked in teams developing web applications and backend services at a telco company. He is a Java technology enthusiast, software engineer and addicted to learn new technologies,develop new ideas. Follow Mustafa on Twitter,Connect on LinkedIn, and visit his site for Oracle Fusion Middleware related tips.

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• Top 10 Browser Productivity Tips

  - by Renso

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/renso/archive/2013/10/14/top-10-browser-productivity-tips.aspxYou don’t have to be a geek to be a productive browser user. The tips below have been selected by actions users take most of the time to navigate a web-site but use long-standing keyboard or mouse actions to get them done, when there are keyboard short-cuts you can use instead. Since you hands are already on the keyboard it is almost always faster to sue a keyboard shortcut to get something done that you usually used the mouse for. For example right-clicking on something to copy it and then doing to same for pasting something is very time consuming, keyboard shortcuts have been created that simplify the task. All it takes are a few memory brain cells to remember them. Here are the tips, in no particular order:   Tip 1 Hold down the spacebar on your keyboard to page to the end of your web page rather than using your mouse. This is really a slow way of doing it. If you want to page one page at a time, hit the spacebar once, and again to page again. But if you want to page all the way to the end of the web page simply hit Ctrl+End (that is hold down the Ctrl key and hit the End button on your keyboard). To get to the top of your web page, simply hit Ctrl + Home to go all the way to the top of your web page. Tip 2 Where are my downloads? Some folks run downloads again-and-again because they do not know where the last one went and they do not see the popup, or browser note on their web page in the footer, etc. Simply hit Ctrl+J. Works in most browsers. Tip 3 Selecting a US state from a drop down box. Don’t use the mouse, takes just way too long to scroll. When you tab to the drop down box or click on it with your mouse, simply hit the first character of the state and it will be selected. For Texas for example hit the letter “T” twice on your keyboard to get to it. The same concept can be applied to any drop down box that is alphabetical or numerically sorted. Tip 4 Fixing spelling errors. All modern-day browsers support this now. You see the red wavy lines underscoring a word, yes it is a spelling error. How do you fix it? Don’t overtype it or try and fix it manually, fist right-click on it and a list of suggestions comes up. If it does not show up, like my name “Renso” and you know how to spell your name as in this example, look further down the list of options (the little window popup that appears when you right click) and you should see an option to “Add to Dictionary”. Be warned, when you add it, it only adds it to the browser you’re using’s dictionary. If you use Google Chrome, Firefox and IE, each one will have their own list. Tip 5 So you have trouble seeing the text on the screen. Or you are looking at a photo, for example in Facebook. You want to zoom in to read better or zoom into a photo a bit more. Hit Ctrl++ (hold down Ctrl key and hit the plus key – actually it’s the equal key but it is easier to remember that it is plus for bigger). Hit the minus to zoom out. Now you can’t remember what the original size was since you were so excited to hit it 20 times, or was that 21… Simply hit Ctrl+0 (that is zero) and it will reset it to the default. Tip 6 So you closed a couple of tabs in your browser. Suddenly you remember something you wanted to double-check something on one of the tabs, you cannot remember the URL ad the tab is gone forever, or is it? Simply hit Ctrl+Shift+t and it will bring back your tabs one by one each time you click the T. This has also been a great way for me to quickly close some tabs because I don’t want my boss to see I’m shopping and then hitting Ctrl+Shift+t to quickly get it back and complete my check-put and purchase. Or, for parents, when you walk into your daughter’s room and you see she quickly clicks and closes a window/tab in here browser. Not to worry my little darling, daddy will Ctrl+Shift+t and see what boys on Facebook you were talking too… Tip 7 The web browser is frozen on your PC/Laptop/Whatever, in this example it may be your Internet Explorer browser. I don’t mention Firefox or Chrome here because it probably never happens in their world. You cannot close it, it won’t respond to anything you have done s far except for the next step you are about to take, which is throw your two-day old coffee on your keyboard. This happens especially on sites that want to force you to complete a purchase order. Hit Ctrl+Alt+Del on your keyboard on any version of windows, select TASK MANAGER. In the  First Tab, which is the Process Tab, look for the item in question. In this example you should see Internet Explorer. Right-click it and select “End Task”. It will force the thread out of memory and terminate that process. You can of course do this with any program running under your account. Tip 8 This is a personal favorite of mine. To select words in the paragraph without using the mouse. You don’t want to select one character at a time like when you use the Ctrl+arrows as it can be very slow if you want to select a lot of text. You also want to select whole words. Simply use the Ctrl+Shift_arrow (right or left depending which direction you want to go. Tip 9 I was a bit reluctant to add this one, but being in the professional services industry still come across many-a-folk that simply can’t copy-and-paste them-all text or images that reside on them screens, y’all. Ctrl+c to copy and Ctrl+v to paste it. Works a lot faster than using the mouse. You may be asking: “Well why in the devil did they not use Ctrl+p for paste…. because that is for printing. This is of course not limited to the browser world, it applies to almost any piece of software running on PC or Mac. Go try it on an image on your browser, right-click it and select copy. Open a word document and Ctrl+v to paste the image in there. Please consider copyright laws. Tip 10 Getting rid of annoying ads. Now this only works when you load a web page, meaning when you get back to the same page later you will have to do this again and you will need to learn a tool to do it, WELL WORTH IT. For example, I use GrooveShark to listen to music but I don’t like the ads they show. Install a tool like Firebug for Firefox or use the Ctrl+Shift+I on Chrome to bring up the developer toolbar. Shows at the bottom of the page. With Firefox, once you have installed Firebug as an add-on, a yellow bug should appear on the top right-hand-side of your browser, click on it to display the developer toolbar. You will need to learn how to use it, but once you know how to select an item/section on the window (usually just right-click the add you don’t want to see and select “Inspect Element”, the developer toolbar will appear (if not already there)) and then simply hit delete and it will remove the add from the screen. If you don’t know HTML you may need to play with it a bit, but once you understand how it works can open up a whole new world for you on how web pages actually work. If you can think of any others that have saved you a ton of time please let me know so I can add them to a top 99 list.

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• Session caching problem

  - by Levani

  I have a strange problem with php sessions. I use them for authorization on my site. I store two variables - currently logged in user's id and username in session. When I log in with one username, than log out and log in again with another username the previous user's id is returned using the session variable instead of the current user. The most strange thing is that this happens only when it comes to insert some data into database. When I directly echo this variable the correct id is displayed, but when I insert new record into database this variable sends incorrect id. Here is the php code I use for sending data into database: <?php session_start(); //connect database require_once 'dbc.php'; $authorID = $_SESSION['user_id']; if ( $authorID != 0 ) { $content = htmlentities($_POST["answ_content"],ENT_COMPAT,'UTF-8'); $dro = date('Y-m-d H:i:s'); $qID = $_POST["question_ID"]; $author = 'avtori'; $sql="INSERT INTO comments (comment_ID, comment_post_ID, comment_author, comment_date, comment_content, user_id) VALUES (NULL, '$qID', '$author', '$dro', '$content', '$authorID')"; $result = mysql_query($sql); } else { echo 'error'; } ?> Can anyone please help? Here is the logout function: function logout() { global $db; session_start(); if(isset($_SESSION['user_id']) || isset($_COOKIE['user_id'])) { mysql_query("update `users` set `ckey`= '', `ctime`= '' where `id`='$_SESSION[user_id]' OR `id` = '$_COOKIE[user_id]'") or die(mysql_error()); } /************ Delete the sessions****************/ unset($_SESSION['user_id']); unset($_SESSION['user_name']); unset($_SESSION['user_level']); unset($_SESSION['HTTP_USER_AGENT']); session_unset(); session_destroy(); /* Delete the cookies*******************/ setcookie("user_id", '', time()-60*60*24*COOKIE_TIME_OUT, "/"); setcookie("user_name", '', time()-60*60*24*COOKIE_TIME_OUT, "/"); setcookie("user_key", '', time()-60*60*24*COOKIE_TIME_OUT, "/"); header("Location: index.php"); } Here is the authentication script: include 'dbc.php'; $err = array(); foreach($_GET as $key => $value) { $get[$key] = filter($value); //get variables are filtered. } if ($_POST['doLogin']=='Login') { foreach($_POST as $key => $value) { $data[$key] = filter($value); // post variables are filtered } $user_email = $data['usr_email']; $pass = $data['pwd']; if (strpos($user_email,'@') === false) { $user_cond = "user_name='$user_email'"; } else { $user_cond = "user_email='$user_email'"; } $result = mysql_query("SELECT `id`,`pwd`,`full_name`,`approved`,`user_level` FROM users WHERE $user_cond AND `banned` = '0' ") or die (mysql_error()); $num = mysql_num_rows($result); // Match row found with more than 1 results - the user is authenticated. if ( $num > 0 ) { list($id,$pwd,$full_name,$approved,$user_level) = mysql_fetch_row($result); if(!$approved) { //$msg = urlencode("Account not activated. Please check your email for activation code"); $err[] = "Account not activated. Please check your email for activation code"; //header("Location: login.php?msg=$msg"); //exit(); } //check against salt if ($pwd === PwdHash($pass,substr($pwd,0,9))) { // this sets session and logs user in session_start(); session_regenerate_id (true); //prevent against session fixation attacks. // this sets variables in the session $_SESSION['user_id']= $id; $_SESSION['user_name'] = $full_name; $_SESSION['user_level'] = $user_level; $_SESSION['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] = md5($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']); //update the timestamp and key for cookie $stamp = time(); $ckey = GenKey(); mysql_query("update users set `ctime`='$stamp', `ckey` = '$ckey' where id='$id'") or die(mysql_error()); //set a cookie if(isset($_POST['remember'])){ setcookie("user_id", $_SESSION['user_id'], time()+60*60*24*COOKIE_TIME_OUT, "/"); setcookie("user_key", sha1($ckey), time()+60*60*24*COOKIE_TIME_OUT, "/"); setcookie("user_name",$_SESSION['user_name'], time()+60*60*24*COOKIE_TIME_OUT, "/"); } if(empty($err)){ header("Location: myaccount.php"); } } else { //$msg = urlencode("Invalid Login. Please try again with correct user email and password. "); $err[] = "Invalid Login. Please try again with correct user email and password."; //header("Location: login.php?msg=$msg"); } } else { $err[] = "Error - Invalid login. No such user exists"; } }

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• Can Google Employees See My Saved Google Chrome Passwords?

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Storing your passwords in your web browser seems like a great time saver, but are the passwords secure and inaccessible to others (even employees of the browser company) when squirreled away? Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. The Question SuperUser reader MMA is curious if Google employees have (or could have) access to the passwords he stores in Google Chrome: I understand that we are really tempted to save our passwords in Google Chrome. The likely benefit is two fold, You don’t need to (memorize and) input those long and cryptic passwords. These are available wherever you are once you log in to your Google account. The last point sparked my doubt. Since the password is available anywhere, the storage must in some central location, and this should be at Google. Now, my simple question is, can a Google employee see my passwords? Searching over the Internet revealed several articles/messages. Do you save passwords in Chrome? Maybe you should reconsider: Talks about your passwords being stolen by someone who has access to your computer account. Nothing mentioned about the central storage security and vulnerability. There is even a response from Chrome browser security tech lead about the first issue. Chrome’s insane password security strategy: Mostly along the same line. You can steal password from somebody if you have access to the computer account. How to Steal Passwords Saved in Google Chrome in 5 Simple Steps: Teaches you how to actually perform the act mentioned in the previous two when you have access to somebody else’s account. There are many more (including this one at this site), mostly along the same line, points, counter-points, huge debates. I refrain from mentioning them here, simply carry a search if you want to find them. Coming back to my original query, can a Google employee see my password? Since I can view the password using a simple button, definitely they can be unhashed (decrypted) even if encrypted. This is very different from the passwords saved in Unix-like OS’s where the saved password can never be seen in plain text. They use a one-way encryption algorithm to encrypt your passwords. This encrypted password is then stored in the passwd or shadow file. When you attempt to login, the password you type in is encrypted again and compared with the entry in the file that stores your passwords. If they match, it must be the same password, and you are allowed access. Thus, a superuser can change my password, can block my account, but he can never see my password. So are his concerns well founded or will a little insight dispel his worry? The Answer SuperUser contributor Zeel helps put his mind at ease: Short answer: No* Passwords stored on your local machine can be decrypted by Chrome, as long as your OS user account is logged in. And then you can view those in plain text. At first this seems horrible, but how did you think auto-fill worked? When that password field gets filled in, Chrome must insert the real password into the HTML form element – or else the page wouldn’t work right, and you could not submit the form. And if the connection to the website is not over HTTPS, the plain text is then sent over the internet. In other words, if chrome can’t get the plain text passwords, then they are totally useless. A one way hash is no good, because we need to use them. Now the passwords are in fact encrypted, the only way to get them back to plain text is to have the decryption key. That key is your Google password, or a secondary key you can set up. When you sign into Chrome and sync the Google servers will transmit the encrypted passwords, settings, bookmarks, auto-fill, etc, to your local machine. Here Chrome will decrypt the information and be able to use it. On Google’s end all that info is stored in its encrpyted state, and they do not have the key to decrypt it. Your account password is checked against a hash to log in to Google, and even if you let chrome remember it, that encrypted version is hidden in the same bundle as the other passwords, impossible to access. So an employee could probably grab a dump of the encrypted data, but it wouldn’t do them any good, since they would have no way to use it.* So no, Google employees can not** access your passwords, since they are encrypted on their servers. * However, do not forget that any system that can be accessed by an authorized user can be accessed by an unauthorized user. Some systems are easier to break than other, but none are fail-proof. . . That being said, I think I will trust Google and the millions they spend on security systems, over any other password storage solution. And heck, I’m a wimpy nerd, it would be easier to beat the passwords out of me than break Google’s encryption. ** I am also assuming that there isn’t a person who just happens to work for Google gaining access to your local machine. In that case you are screwed, but employment at Google isn’t actually a factor any more. Moral: Hit Win + L before leaving machine. While we agree with zeel that it’s a pretty safe bet (as long as your computer is not compromised) that your passwords are in fact safe while stored in Chrome, we prefer to encrypt all our logins and passwords in a LastPass vault. Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.     

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• Augmenting your Social Efforts via Data as a Service (DaaS)

  - by Mike Stiles

  The following is the 3rd in a series of posts on the value of leveraging social data across your enterprise by Oracle VP Product Development Don Springer and Oracle Cloud Data and Insight Service Sr. Director Product Management Niraj Deo. In this post, we will discuss the approach and value of integrating additional “public” data via a cloud-based Data-as-as-Service platform (or DaaS) to augment your Socially Enabled Big Data Analytics and CX Management. Let’s assume you have a functional Social-CRM platform in place. You are now successfully and continuously listening and learning from your customers and key constituents in Social Media, you are identifying relevant posts and following up with direct engagement where warranted (both 1:1, 1:community, 1:all), and you are starting to integrate signals for communication into your appropriate Customer Experience (CX) Management systems as well as insights for analysis in your business intelligence application. What is the next step? Augmenting Social Data with other Public Data for More Advanced Analytics When we say advanced analytics, we are talking about understanding causality and correlation from a wide variety, volume and velocity of data to Key Performance Indicators (KPI) to achieve and optimize business value. And in some cases, to predict future performance to make appropriate course corrections and change the outcome to your advantage while you can. The data to acquire, process and analyze this is very nuanced: It can vary across structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data It can span across content, profile, and communities of profiles data It is increasingly public, curated and user generated The key is not just getting the data, but making it value-added data and using it to help discover the insights to connect to and improve your KPIs. As we spend time working with our larger customers on advanced analytics, we have seen a need arise for more business applications to have the ability to ingest and use “quality” curated, social, transactional reference data and corresponding insights. The challenge for the enterprise has been getting this data inline into an easily accessible system and providing the contextual integration of the underlying data enriched with insights to be exported into the enterprise’s business applications. The following diagram shows the requirements for this next generation data and insights service or (DaaS): Some quick points on these requirements: Public Data, which in this context is about Common Business Entities, such as - Customers, Suppliers, Partners, Competitors (all are organizations) Contacts, Consumers, Employees (all are people) Products, Brands This data can be broadly categorized incrementally as - Base Utility data (address, industry classification) Public Master Reference data (trade style, hierarchy) Social/Web data (News, Feeds, Graph) Transactional Data generated by enterprise process, workflows etc. This Data has traits of high-volume, variety, velocity etc., and the technology needed to efficiently integrate this data for your needs includes - Change management of Public Reference Data across all categories Applied Big Data to extract statics as well as real-time insights Knowledge Diagnostics and Data Mining As you consider how to deploy this solution, many of our customers will be using an online “cloud” service that provides quality data and insights uniformly to all their necessary applications. In addition, they are requesting a service that is: Agile and Easy to Use: Applications integrated with the service can obtain data on-demand, quickly and simply Cost-effective: Pre-integrated into applications so customers don’t have to Has High Data Quality: Single point access to reference data for data quality and linkages to transactional, curated and social data Supports Data Governance: Becomes more manageable and cost-effective since control of data privacy and compliance can be enforced in a centralized place Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) Just as the cloud has transformed and now offers a better path for how an enterprise manages its IT from their infrastructure, platform, and software (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS), the next step is data (DaaS). Over the last 3 years, we have seen the market begin to offer a cloud-based data service and gain initial traction. On one side of the DaaS continuum, we see an “appliance” type of service that provides a single, reliable source of accurate business data plus social information about accounts, leads, contacts, etc. On the other side of the continuum we see more of an online market “exchange” approach where ISVs and Data Publishers can publish and sell premium datasets within the exchange, with the exchange providing a rich set of web interfaces to improve the ease of data integration. Why the difference? It depends on the provider’s philosophy on how fast the rate of commoditization of certain data types will occur. How do you decide the best approach? Our perspective, as shown in the diagram below, is that the enterprise should develop an elastic schema to support multi-domain applicability. This allows the enterprise to take the most flexible approach to harness the speed and breadth of public data to achieve value. The key tenet of the proposed approach is that an enterprise carefully federates common utility, master reference data end points, mobility considerations and content processing, so that they are pervasively available. One way you may already be familiar with this approach is in how you do Address Verification treatments for accounts, contacts etc. If you design and revise this service in such a way that it is also easily available to social analytic needs, you could extend this to launch geo-location based social use cases (marketing, sales etc.). Our fundamental belief is that value-added data achieved through enrichment with specialized algorithms, as well as applying business “know-how” to weight-factor KPIs based on innovative combinations across an ever-increasing variety, volume and velocity of data, will be where real value is achieved. Essentially, Data-as-a-Service becomes a single entry point for the ever-increasing richness and volume of public data, with enrichment and combined capabilities to extract and integrate the right data from the right sources with the right factoring at the right time for faster decision-making and action within your core business applications. As more data becomes available (and in many cases commoditized), this value-added data processing approach will provide you with ongoing competitive advantage. Let’s look at a quick example of creating a master reference relationship that could be used as an input for a variety of your already existing business applications. In phase 1, a simple master relationship is achieved between a company (e.g. General Motors) and a variety of car brands’ social insights. The reference data allows for easy sort, export and integration into a set of CRM use cases for analytics, sales and marketing CRM. In phase 2, as you create more data relationships (e.g. competitors, contacts, other brands) to have broader and deeper references (social profiles, social meta-data) for more use cases across CRM, HCM, SRM, etc. This is just the tip of the iceberg, as the amount of master reference relationships is constrained only by your imagination and the availability of quality curated data you have to work with. DaaS is just now emerging onto the marketplace as the next step in cloud transformation. For some of you, this may be the first you have heard about it. Let us know if you have questions, or perspectives. In the meantime, we will continue to share insights as we can.Photo: Erik Araujo, stock.xchng

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• I Clobbered a Leopard with a Window Last Night

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  I’ve had my 15” Mac Book Pro for a little over a year now, and its hands-down the best laptop I’ve ever owned…hardware wise. And I tried, I really really tried, to like OSX. I even bought Parallels so I could run Windows 7 and all my development tools while still trying to live in an OSX world. But in the end, I missed Windows too much. There were just too many shortcomings with OSX that kept me from being productive. For one thing, Office for Mac is *not* Office for Windows. The applications are written by different teams, and Excel on the Mac is just different enough to be painful. The VM experience was adequate, but my MBP would heat up like crazy when running it and the experience trying to get Windows apps to interact with an OSX file system was awkward. And I found I was in the VM more than I thought I’d be. iMovie is not as easy to use for doing simple movie editing as Windows Movie Maker. There’s no free blog editing software for OSX that’s on par with Windows Live Writer. And really, all I was using OSX for was Twitter (which I can use a Windows client for) and web browsing (also something Windows can provide obviously). So I had to ask myself – why am I forcing myself to use an operating system I don’t like, on a laptop that can support Windows 7? And so I paved my MBP and am happily running Windows 7 on it…and its fantastic! All the good stuff with the hardware is still there with the goodness of Win 7. Happy happy. I did run into some snags doing this though, and that’s really what this blog post is about – things to be aware of if you want to install Win 7 directly on your MBP metal. First, Ensure You Have Your Original Mac Install Disk This was a warning my buddy Dylan, who’s been running Win 7 on his MBP for a while now, gave me early on. The reason you need that original disk is that the hardware drivers you need are all located there. Apparently you can’t easily download them, so make sure you have them ahead of time. Second, Forget BootCamp The only reason you need BootCamp is if you still want the option to boot into OSX. If you don’t, then you don’t need BootCamp. In fact, you don’t even need BootCamp to install Win 7. What you *will* need though is a DVD with Win 7 burnt on it. Apple doesn’t support bootable USB drives. Well, actually they do for Mac Book Airs which don’t come with optical drives…but to get it working you’ll need to edit a system file of BootCamp so your make of MBP is included in an XML document, and even then you *still* are using BootCamp meaning you’ll be making an OSX partition. So don’t worry about BootCamp, just burn a Windows 7 disc, put it into the DVD drive, and restart your MBP. Third, Know The Secret Commands So after putting in the Windows 7 DVD and restarting your MBP, you’ll want to hold down the ‘C’ key during boot up. This tells the MBP that it should boot from the DVD drive instead of the hard drive. Interestingly, it appears you don’t have to do this if its the Mac OSX install disc (more on that in a second), but regardless – hold down C and Windows will start the install process. Next up is the partition process. You’ll notice that there’s a partition called ETI or something like that. This has to do with the drive format that Apple uses and how they partition their system drives. What I did – I blew it away! At first I didn’t, but I was told I couldn’t install Windows on the remaining space due to the different drive format. Blowing away the ETI partition (and all other partitions) allowed me to continue the Windows install. *REMEMBER –  No warranty is provided or implied, just telling you what I did and how I got it to work. Ok, so now Windows is installed and I’m rebooting. Everything looks good, but I need drivers! So I put in the OSX install DVD and run the BootCamp assistant which installs all the Windows drivers I need. Fantastic! Oh, I need to restart – no problem. OH NO, PROBLEM! I left the OSX install DVD in the drive and now the MBP wants to boot from the drive and install OSX! I’m not holding down the C key, what the heck?! Ok, well there must be a way to eject this disk…hmm…no physical button on the side…the eject button doesn’t seem to work on the keyboard…no little pin hole to insert something to force the disc out…well what the…?! It turns out, if you want to eject a disc at boot up, you need (and I kid you not) to plug a mouse into the laptop and hold down the right-click button while its booting. This ejected the disc for me. Seriously. Finally, Things You Should Be Aware Of Once you have Windows up and running there’s a few things you need to be aware of, mainly new keyboard shortcuts. For instance, on the Mac keyboard there is no Home, End, PageUp or PageDown. There’s also no obvious way to do something like select large amounts of text (like you would by holding Shift-Home at the end of a line of text for instance). So here’s some shortcuts you need to know: Home – fn + left arrow End – fn + right arrow Select a line of text as you would with the Home key – Shift + fn + left arrow Select a line of text as you would with the End key – Shift + fn + right arrow Page Up – fn + up arrow Page Down – fn + down arrow Also, you’ll notice that the awesome Mac track pad doesn’t respond to taps as clicks. No fear, this is just a setting that needs to be altered in the BootCamp control panel (that controls the Mac Hardware-specific settings within Windows, you can access it easily from the system tray icon) One other thing, battery life seems a bit lower than with OSX, but then again I’m also doing more than Twitter or web browsing on this thing now. Conclusion My laptop runs awesome now that I have Windows 7 on there. It’s obviously up to individual taste, but for me I just didn’t see benefits to living in an OSX world when everything I needed lived in Windows. And also, I finally am back to an operating system that doesn’t require me to eject a USB drive before physically removing it! It’s 2012 folks, how has this not been fixed?! D

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• Let your Signature Experience drive IT-decision making

  - by Tania Le Voi

  Today’s CIO job description:  ‘’Align IT infrastructure and solutions with business goals and objectives ; AND while doing so reduce costs; BUT ALSO, be innovative, ensure the architectures are adaptable and agile as we need to act today on the changes that we may request tomorrow.”   Sound like an unachievable request? The fact is, reality dictates that CIO’s are put under this type of pressure to deliver more with less. In a past career phase I spent a few years as an IT Relationship Manager for a large Insurance company. This is a role that we see all too infrequently in many of our customers, and it’s a shame.  The purpose of this role was to build a bridge, a relationship between IT and the business. Key to achieving that goal was to ensure the same language was being spoken and more importantly that objectives were commonly understood - hence service and projects were delivered to time, to budget and actually solved the business problems. In reality IT and the business are already married, but the relationship is most often defined as ‘supplier’ of IT rather than a ‘trusted partner’. To deliver business value they need to understand how to work together effectively to attain this next level of partnership. The Business cannot compete if they do not get a new product to market ahead of the competition, or for example act in a timely manner to address a new industry problem such as a legislative change. An even better example is when the Application or Service fails and the Business takes a hit by bad publicity, being trending topics on social media and losing direct revenue from online channels. For this reason alone Business and IT need the alignment of their priorities and deliverables now more than ever! Take a look at Forrester’s recent study that found ‘many IT respondents considering themselves to be trusted partners of the business but their efforts are impaired by the inadequacy of tools and organizations’.  IT Meet the Business; Business Meet IT So what is going on? We talk about aligning the business with IT but the reality is it’s difficult to do. Like any relationship each side has different goals and needs and language can be a barrier; business vs. technology jargon! What if we could translate the needs of both sides into actionable information, backed by data both sides understand, presented in a meaningful way?  Well now we can with the Business-Driven Application Management capabilities in Oracle Enterprise Manager 12cR2! Enterprise Manager’s Business-Driven Application Management capabilities provide the information that IT needs to understand the impact of its decisions on business criteria.  No longer does IT need to be focused solely on speeds and feeds, performance and throughput – now IT can understand IT’s impact on business KPIs like inventory turns, order-to-cash cycle, pipeline-to-forecast, and similar.  Similarly, now the line of business can understand which IT services are most critical for the KPIs they care about. There are a good deal of resources on Oracle Technology Network that describe the functionality of these products, so I won’t’ rehash them here.  What I want to talk about is what you do with these products. What’s next after we meet? Where do you start? Step 1:  Identify the Signature Experience. This is THE business process (or set of processes) that is core to the business, the one that drives the economic engine, the process that a customer recognises the company brand for, reputation, the customer experience, the process that a CEO would state as his number one priority. The crème de la crème of your business! Once you have nailed this it gets easy as Enterprise Manager 12c makes it easy. Step 2:  Map the Signature Experience to underlying IT.  Taking the signature experience, map out the touch points of the components that play a part in ensuring this business transaction is successful end to end, think of it like mapping out a critical path; the applications, middleware, databases and hardware. Use the wealth of Enterprise Manager features such as Systems, Services, Business Application Targets and Business Transaction Management (BTM) to assist you. Adding Real User Experience Insight (RUEI) into the mix will make the end to end customer satisfaction story transparent. Work with the business and define meaningful key performance indicators (KPI’s) and thresholds to enable you to report and action upon. Step 3:  Observe the data over time.  You now have meaningful insight into every step enabling your signature experience and you understand the implication of that experience on your underlying IT.  Watch if for a few months, see what happens and reconvene with your business stakeholders and set clear and measurable targets which can re-define service levels.  Step 4:  Change the information about which you and the business communicate.  It’s amazing what happens when you and the business speak the same language.  You’ll be able to make more informed business and IT decisions. From here IT can identify where/how budget is spent whether on the level of support, performance, capacity, HA, DR, certification etc. IT SLA’s no longer need be focused on metrics such as %availability but structured around business process requirements. The power of this way of thinking doesn’t end here. IT staff get to see and understand how their own role contributes to the business making them accountable for the business service. Take a step further and appraise your staff on the business competencies that are linked to the service availability. For the business, the language barrier is removed by producing targeted reports on the signature experience core to the business and therefore key to the CEO. Chargeback or show back becomes easier to justify as the ‘cost of day per outage’ can be more easily calculated; the business will be able to translate the cost to the business to the cost/value of the underlying IT that supports it. Used this way, Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c is a key enabler to a harmonious relationship between the end customer the business and IT to deliver ultimate service and satisfaction. Just engage with the business upfront, make the signature experience visible and let Enterprise Manager 12c do the rest. In the next blog entry we will cover some of the Enterprise Manager features mentioned to enable you to implement this new way of working.  

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• How to access a row from af:table out of context

  - by Vijay Mohan

  Scenario : Lets say you have an adf table in a jsff and it is included as af:region inside other page(parent page).Now your requirement is to access some specific rows from the table and do some operations. Now, since you are aceessing the table outside the context in which it is present, so first you will have to setup the context and then you can use the visitCallback mechanism to do the opeartions on table. Here is the sample code: ================= final RichTable table = this.getRichTable();         FacesContext facesContext = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance();         VisitContext visitContext =   RequestContext.getCurrentInstance().createVisitContext(facesContext,null, EnumSet.of(VisitHint.SKIP_TRANSIENT,VisitHint.SKIP_UNRENDERED), null);         //Annonymous call         UIXComponent.visitTree(visitContext,facesContext.getViewRoot(),new VisitCallback(){             public VisitResult visit(VisitContext context, UIComponent target)               {                   if (table != target)                   {                     return VisitResult.ACCEPT;                   }                   else if(table == target)                   {                       //Here goes the Actual Logic                       Iterator selection = table.getSelectedRowKeys().iterator();                       while (selection.hasNext()) {                           Object key = selection.next();                           //store the original key                           Object origKey = table.getRowKey();                           try {                               table.setRowKey(key);                               Object o = table.getRowData();                               JUCtrlHierNodeBinding rowData = (JUCtrlHierNodeBinding)o;                               Row row = rowData.getRow();                               System.out.println(row.getAttribute(0));                           }                           catch(Exception ex){                               ex.printStackTrace();                           }                           finally {                               //restore original key                               table.setRowKey(origKey);                           }                       }                   }                   return VisitResult.COMPLETE;               }         }); 

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• SSIS - Range lookups

  - by Repieter

    When developing an ETL solution in SSIS we sometimes need to do range lookups in SSIS. Several solutions for this can be found on the internet, but now we have built another solution which I would like to share, since it's pretty easy to implement and the performance is fast.   You can download the sample package to see how it works. Make sure you have the AdventureWorks2008R2 and AdventureWorksDW2008R2 databases installed. (Apologies for the layout of this blog, I don't do this too often :))   To give a little bit more information about the example, this is basically what is does: we load a facttable and do an SCD type 2 lookup operation of the Product dimension. This is done with a script component.   First we query the Data warehouse to create the lookup dataset. The query that is used for that is:   SELECT     [ProductKey]     ,[ProductAlternateKey]     ,[StartDate]     ,ISNULL([EndDate], '9999-01-01') AS EndDate FROM [DimProduct]     The output of this query is stored in a DataTable:     string lookupQuery = @"                         SELECT                             [ProductKey]                             ,[ProductAlternateKey]                             ,[StartDate]                             ,ISNULL([EndDate], '9999-01-01') AS EndDate                         FROM [DimProduct]";           OleDbCommand oleDbCommand = new OleDbCommand(lookupQuery, _oleDbConnection);         OleDbDataAdapter adapter = new OleDbDataAdapter(oleDbCommand);           _dataTable = new DataTable();         adapter.Fill(_dataTable);     Now that the dimension data is stored in the DataTable we use the following method to do the actual lookup:   public int RangeLookup(string businessKey, DateTime lookupDate)     {         // set default return value (Unknown)         int result = -1;           DataRow[] filteredRows;         filteredRows = _dataTable.Select(string.Format("ProductAlternateKey = '{0}'", businessKey));           for (int i = 0; i < filteredRows.Length; i++)         {             // check if the lookupdate is found between the startdate and enddate of any of the records             if (lookupDate >= (DateTime)filteredRows[i][2] && lookupDate < (DateTime)filteredRows[i][3])             {                 result = (filteredRows[i][0] == null) ? -1 : (int)filteredRows[i][0];                 break;             }         }           filteredRows = null;           return result;     }       This method is executed for every row that passes the script component. This is implemented in the ProcessInputRow method   public override void Input0_ProcessInputRow(Input0Buffer Row)     {         // Perform the lookup operation on the current row and put the value in the Surrogate Key Attribute         Row.ProductKey = RangeLookup(Row.ProductNumber, Row.OrderDate);     }   Now what actually happens?!   1. Every record passes the business key and the orderdate to the RangeLookup method. 2. The DataTable is then filtered on the business key of the current record. The output is stored in a DataRow [] object. 3. We loop over the DataRow[] object to see where the orderdate meets the following expression: (lookupDate >= (DateTime)filteredRows[i][2] && lookupDate < (DateTime)filteredRows[i][3]) 4. When the expression returns true (so where the data is between the Startdate and the EndDate), the surrogate key of the dimension record is returned   We have done some testing with this solution and it works great for us. Hope others can use this example to do their range lookups.

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• lwjgl isKeyDown canceling out other keys

  - by AKrush95

  While trying to create a simple game where a square is manipulated via the keyboard keys, I have come across a small, rather irritating problem. I would like it to work so that when the opposite directional key is pressed, the character will stop; the character may move the other two directions while stopped in this situation. This works perfectly with LEFT and RIGHT held down; the player may move UP or DOWN. If UP and DOWN are held down, however, the player will not move, nor will Java recognize that the LEFT or RIGHT keys were pressed. import java.util.ArrayList; import java.util.Random; import org.lwjgl.*; import org.lwjgl.input.Keyboard; import org.lwjgl.opengl.*; import static org.lwjgl.opengl.GL11.*; public class Main { private Man p; private ArrayList<Integer> keysDown, keysUp; public Main() { try { Display.setDisplayMode(new DisplayMode(640, 480)); Display.setTitle("LWJGLHelloWorld"); Display.create(); } catch (LWJGLException e) { e.printStackTrace(); } p = new Man(0, 0); keysDown = new ArrayList<>(); keysUp = new ArrayList<>(); glMatrixMode(GL_PROJECTION); glLoadIdentity(); glOrtho(0, 640, 480, 0, 1, -1); glMatrixMode(GL_MODELVIEW); while (!Display.isCloseRequested()) { glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT); checkKeys(); p.draw(); Display.update(); Display.sync(60); } Display.destroy(); } public void checkKeys() { ArrayList<Integer> keys = new ArrayList<>(); keys.add(Keyboard.KEY_A); keys.add(Keyboard.KEY_D); keys.add(Keyboard.KEY_W); keys.add(Keyboard.KEY_S); for (int key : keys) { if (Keyboard.isKeyDown(key)) keysDown.add(key); else keysUp.add(key); } keysDown.removeAll(keysUp); keysUp = new ArrayList<>(); int speed = 4; int dx = 0; int dy = 0; if (keysDown.contains(keys.get(2))) { System.out.println("keyUP"); dy -= speed; } if (keysDown.contains(keys.get(3))) { System.out.println("keyDOWN"); dy += speed; } if (keysDown.contains(keys.get(0))) { System.out.println("keyLEFT"); dx -= speed; } if (keysDown.contains(keys.get(1))) { System.out.println("keyRIGHT"); dx += speed; } //if (keysDown.contains(keys.get(0)) && keysDown.contains(keys.get(1))) dx = 0; //if (keysDown.contains(keys.get(2)) && keysDown.contains(keys.get(3))) dy = 0; p.update(dx, dy); } public static void main(String[] args) { new Main(); } class Man { public int x, y, w, h; public float cR, cG, cB; public Man(int x, int y) { this.x = x; this.y = y; w = 50; h = 50; Random rand = new Random(); cR = rand.nextFloat(); cG = rand.nextFloat(); cB = rand.nextFloat(); } public void draw() { glColor3f(cR, cG, cB); glRecti(x, y, x+w, y+h); } public void update(int dx, int dy) { x += dx; y += dy; } } } That is the code that I am working with. In addition, I am unsure how to compile an executable jar that is using the lwjgl library in addition to slick-util.

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• In a SQL XDL File, how do I read the waitresource attribute on process nodes which are deadlocking?

  - by skimania

  On SQL Server 2005, I'm getting a deadlock when updating two different keys in the same table. note from below that these two waitresources have the same beginning part, but different ending parts. waitresource="KEY: 6:72057594090487808 (d900ed5a6cc6)" and waitresource="KEY: 6:72057594090487808 (d900fb5261bb)" These two keys are locking, and I need to figure out why. The question: If the values in parenthesis are different, why are the first half of the key's the same? <deadlock-list> <deadlock victim="processffffffff8f5863e8"> <process-list> <process id="processaf02f8" taskpriority="0" logused="0" waitresource="KEY: 6:72057594090487808 (d900fb5261bb)" waittime="2281" ownerId="1370264705" transactionname="user_transaction" lasttranstarted="2010-06-17T00:35:25.483" XDES="0x69453a70" lockMode="U" schedulerid="3" kpid="7624" status="suspended" spid="339" sbid="0" ecid="0" priority="0" transcount="2" lastbatchstarted="2010-06-17T00:35:25.483" lastbatchcompleted="2010-06-17T00:35:25.483" clientapp=".Net SqlClient Data Provider" hostname="RISKBBG_VM" hostpid="5848" loginname="RiskOpt" isolationlevel="read committed (2)" xactid="1370264705" currentdb="6" lockTimeout="4294967295" clientoption1="671088672" clientoption2="128056"> <executionStack> <frame procname="MKP_RISKDB.dbo.MarketDataCurrentRtUpload" line="14" stmtstart="840" stmtend="1220" sqlhandle="0x03000600005f9d24c8878f00849d00000100000000000000"> UPDATE c WITH (ROWLOCK) SET LastUpdate = t.LastUpdate, Value = t.Value, Source = t.Source FROM MarketDataCurrent c INNER JOIN #TEMPTABLE2 t ON c.MDID = t.mdid; -- Insert new MDID </frame> <frame procname="adhoc" line="1" sqlhandle="0x010006004a58132228bf8d73000000000000000000000000"> MarketDataCurrentBlbgRtUpload </frame> </executionStack> <inputbuf> MarketDataCurrentBlbgRtUpload </inputbuf> </process> <process id="processffffffff8f5863e8" taskpriority="0" logused="0" waitresource="KEY: 6:72057594090487808 (d900ed5a6cc6)" waittime="2281" ownerId="1370264646" transactionname="user_transaction" lasttranstarted="2010-06-17T00:35:25.450" XDES="0x1cb72be8" lockMode="U" schedulerid="5" kpid="1880" status="suspended" spid="287" sbid="0" ecid="0" priority="0" transcount="2" lastbatchstarted="2010-06-17T00:35:25.450" lastbatchcompleted="2010-06-17T00:35:25.450" clientapp=".Net SqlClient Data Provider" hostname="RISKAPPS_VM" hostpid="1424" loginname="RiskOpt" isolationlevel="read committed (2)" xactid="1370264646" currentdb="6" lockTimeout="4294967295" clientoption1="671088672" clientoption2="128056"> <executionStack> <frame procname="MKP_RISKDB.dbo.MarketDataCurrent_BulkUpload" line="28" stmtstart="1062" stmtend="1720" sqlhandle="0x03000600a28e5e4ef4fd8e00849d00000100000000000000"> UPDATE c WITH (ROWLOCK) SET LastUpdate = getdate(), Value = t.Value, Source = @source FROM MarketDataCurrent c INNER JOIN #MDTUP t ON c.MDID = t.mdid WHERE c.lastUpdate &lt; @updateTime and c.mdid not in (select mdid from MarketData where BloombergTicker is not null and PriceSource like &apos;Live.%&apos;) and c.value &lt;&gt; t.value </frame> <frame procname="adhoc" line="1" stmtstart="88" sqlhandle="0x01000600c1653d0598706ca7000000000000000000000000"> exec MarketDataCurrent_BulkUpload @clearBefore, @source </frame> <frame procname="unknown" line="1" sqlhandle="0x000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000"> unknown </frame> </executionStack> <inputbuf> (@clearBefore datetime,@source nvarchar(10))exec MarketDataCurrent_BulkUpload @clearBefore, @source </inputbuf> </process> </process-list> <resource-list> <keylock hobtid="72057594090487808" dbid="6" objectname="MKP_RISKDB.dbo.MarketDataCurrent" indexname="PK_MarketDataCurrent" id="lock64ac7940" mode="U" associatedObjectId="72057594090487808"> <owner-list> <owner id="processffffffff8f5863e8" mode="U"/> </owner-list> <waiter-list> <waiter id="processaf02f8" mode="U" requestType="wait"/> </waiter-list> </keylock> <keylock hobtid="72057594090487808" dbid="6" objectname="MKP_RISKDB.dbo.MarketDataCurrent" indexname="PK_MarketDataCurrent" id="lockffffffffb8d2dd40" mode="U" associatedObjectId="72057594090487808"> <owner-list> <owner id="processaf02f8" mode="U"/> </owner-list> <waiter-list> <waiter id="processffffffff8f5863e8" mode="U" requestType="wait"/> </waiter-list> </keylock> </resource-list> </deadlock> </deadlock-list>

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• OpenGL, draw two polygons in the same time (by mouse clicks)

  - by YoungSalafi

  im trying to draw 2 polygons at the same time depending on user input from the opengl screen... so i made 2 arrays which each one of them will carry the vertices of each polygon ... i think my logic is right but the program still prints only polygon and delete the old polygon if you draw a polygon again . and its acting weird too please check the code yourself here it is : P.S dont mind the delete function right now.. i know it missing something. #include <windows.h> #include <gl/gl.h> #include <gl/glut.h> void Draw(); void Set_Transformations(); void Initialize(int argc, char *argv[]); void OnKeyPress(unsigned char key, int x, int y); void DeleteVer(); void MouseClick(int bin, int state , int x , int y); void GetOGLPos(int x, int y,float* arrY,float* arrX); void DrawPolygon(float* arrX,float* arrY); float xPos[20]; float yPos[20]; float xPos2[20]; float yPos2[20]; float fx = 0,fy = 0; float size = 10; int count = 0; bool done = false; bool flag = true; void Initialize(int argc, char *argv[]) { glutInit(&argc, argv); glutInitDisplayMode(GLUT_RGBA); glutInitWindowPosition(100, 100); glutInitWindowSize(600, 600); glutCreateWindow("OpenGL Lab1"); Set_Transformations(); glutDisplayFunc(Draw); glutMouseFunc(MouseClick); glutKeyboardFunc(OnKeyPress); glutMainLoop(); } void Set_Transformations() { glClearColor(1, 1, 1, 1); glMatrixMode(GL_PROJECTION); glLoadIdentity(); gluOrtho2D(-200, 200, -200, 200); } void OnKeyPress(unsigned char key, int x, int y) { if (key == 27) exit(0); switch(key) { case 13: //enter key it will draw done = true; glutPostRedisplay(); flag=!flag; // this flag to switch to the other array that the vertices will be stored in, in order to draw the second polygon break; } } void MouseClick(int button, int state , int x , int y) { switch (button) { case GLUT_RIGHT_BUTTON: if (state == GLUT_DOWN) { if (count>0) { DeleteVer(); //dont mind this right now } } break; case GLUT_LEFT_BUTTON: if (state == GLUT_DOWN) { if(count<20) { if(flag =true){ // drawing first polygon GetOGLPos(x, y,xPos,yPos);} if (flag=false) //drawing second polygon after Enter is pressed GetOGLPos(x, y,xPos2,yPos2); } } break; } } void GetOGLPos(int x, int y,float* arrY,float* arrX) //getting the vertices from the user { GLint viewport[4]; GLdouble modelview[16]; GLdouble projection[16]; GLfloat winX, winY, winZ; GLdouble posX, posY, posZ; glGetDoublev( GL_MODELVIEW_MATRIX, modelview ); glGetDoublev( GL_PROJECTION_MATRIX, projection ); glGetIntegerv( GL_VIEWPORT, viewport ); winX = (float)x; winY = (float)viewport[3] - (float)y; glReadPixels( x, int(winY), 1, 1, GL_DEPTH_COMPONENT, GL_FLOAT, &winZ ); gluUnProject( winX, winY, winZ, modelview, projection, viewport, &posX, &posY, &posZ); arrX[count] = posX; arrY[count] = posY; count++; glPointSize( 6.0 ); glBegin(GL_POINTS); glVertex2f(posX,posY); glEnd(); glFlush(); } void DeleteVer(){ //dont mind this glColor3f ( 1, 1, 1); glBegin(GL_POINTS); glVertex2f(xPos[count-1],yPos[count-1]); glEnd(); glFlush(); xPos[count] = NULL; yPos[count] = NULL; count--; glColor3f ( 0, 0, 0); } void DrawPolygon(float* arrX,float* arrY) { int n=0; glColor3f ( 0, 0, 0); glBegin(GL_POLYGON); while(n<count) { glVertex2f(arrX[n],arrY[n]); n++; } count=0; glEnd(); glFlush(); } void Draw() //main drawing func { glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT); glColor3f(0, 0, 0); if(done) { DrawPolygon(xPos,yPos); DrawPolygon(xPos2,yPos2); } glFlush(); } int main(int argc, char *argv[]) { Initialize(argc, argv); return 0; }

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• SQL SERVER – Update Statistics are Sampled By Default

  - by pinaldave

  After reading my earlier post SQL SERVER – Create Primary Key with Specific Name when Creating Table on Statistics, I have received another question by a blog reader. The question is as follows: Question: Are the statistics sampled by default? Answer: Yes. The sampling rate can be specified by the user and it can be anywhere between a very low value to 100%. Let us do a small experiment to verify if the auto update on statistics is left on. Also, let’s examine a very large table that is created and statistics by default- whether the statistics are sampled or not. USE [AdventureWorks] GO -- Create Table CREATE TABLE [dbo].[StatsTest]( [ID] [int] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL, [FirstName] [varchar](100) NULL, [LastName] [varchar](100) NULL, [City] [varchar](100) NULL, CONSTRAINT [PK_StatsTest] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED ([ID] ASC) ) ON [PRIMARY] GO -- Insert 1 Million Rows INSERT INTO [dbo].[StatsTest] (FirstName,LastName,City) SELECT TOP 1000000 'Bob', CASE WHEN ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name)%2 = 1 THEN 'Smith' ELSE 'Brown' END, CASE WHEN ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name)%10 = 1 THEN 'New York' WHEN ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name)%10 = 5 THEN 'San Marino' WHEN ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name)%10 = 3 THEN 'Los Angeles' ELSE 'Houston' END FROM sys.all_objects a CROSS JOIN sys.all_objects b GO -- Update the statistics UPDATE STATISTICS [dbo].[StatsTest] GO -- Shows the statistics DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS ("StatsTest"PK_StatsTest) GO -- Clean up DROP TABLE [dbo].[StatsTest] GO Now let us observe the result of the DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS. The result shows that Resultset is for sure sampling for a large dataset. The percentage of sampling is based on data distribution as well as the kind of data in the table. Before dropping the table, let us check first the size of the table. The size of the table is 35 MB. Now, let us run the above code with lesser number of the rows. USE [AdventureWorks] GO -- Create Table CREATE TABLE [dbo].[StatsTest]( [ID] [int] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL, [FirstName] [varchar](100) NULL, [LastName] [varchar](100) NULL, [City] [varchar](100) NULL, CONSTRAINT [PK_StatsTest] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED ([ID] ASC) ) ON [PRIMARY] GO -- Insert 1 Hundred Thousand Rows INSERT INTO [dbo].[StatsTest] (FirstName,LastName,City) SELECT TOP 100000 'Bob', CASE WHEN ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name)%2 = 1 THEN 'Smith' ELSE 'Brown' END, CASE WHEN ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name)%10 = 1 THEN 'New York' WHEN ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name)%10 = 5 THEN 'San Marino' WHEN ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY a.name)%10 = 3 THEN 'Los Angeles' ELSE 'Houston' END FROM sys.all_objects a CROSS JOIN sys.all_objects b GO -- Update the statistics UPDATE STATISTICS [dbo].[StatsTest] GO -- Shows the statistics DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS ("StatsTest"PK_StatsTest) GO -- Clean up DROP TABLE [dbo].[StatsTest] GO You can see that Rows Sampled is just the same as Rows of the table. In this case, the sample rate is 100%. Before dropping the table, let us also check the size of the table. The size of the table is less than 4 MB. Let us compare the Result set just for a valid reference. Test 1: Total Rows: 1000000, Rows Sampled: 255420, Size of the Table: 35.516 MB Test 2: Total Rows: 100000, Rows Sampled: 100000, Size of the Table: 3.555 MB The reason behind the sample in the Test1 is that the data space is larger than 8 MB, and therefore it uses more than 1024 data pages. If the data space is smaller than 8 MB and uses less than 1024 data pages, then the sampling does not happen. Sampling aids in reducing excessive data scan; however, sometimes it reduces the accuracy of the data as well. Please note that this is just a sample test and there is no way it can be claimed as a benchmark test. The result can be dissimilar on different machines. There are lots of other information can be included when talking about this subject. I will write detail post covering all the subject very soon. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Index, SQL Optimization, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: SQL Statistics

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• SQL SERVER – History of SQL Server Database Encryption

  - by pinaldave

  I recently met Michael Coles and Rodeney Landrum the author of one of the kind book Expert SQL Server 2008 Encryption at SQLPASS in Seattle. During the conversation we ended up how Microsoft is evolving encryption technology. The same discussion lead to talking about history of encryption tools in SQL Server. Michale pointed me to page 18 of his book of encryption. He explicitly give me permission to re-produce relevant part of history from his book. Encryption in SQL Server 2000 Built-in cryptographic encryption functionality was nonexistent in SQL Server 2000 and prior versions. In order to get server-side encryption in SQL Server you had to resort to purchasing or creating your own SQL Server XPs. Creating your own cryptographic XPs could be a daunting task owing to the fact that XPs had to be compiled as native DLLs (using a language like C or C++) and the XP application programming interface (API) was poorly documented. In addition there were always concerns around creating wellbehaved XPs that “played nicely” with the SQL Server process. Encryption in SQL Server 2005 Prior to the release of SQL Server 2005 there was a flurry of regulatory activity in response to accounting scandals and attacks on repositories of confidential consumer data. Much of this regulation centered onthe need for protecting and controlling access to sensitive financial and consumer information. With the release of SQL Server 2005 Microsoft responded to the increasing demand for built-in encryption byproviding the necessary tools to encrypt data at the column level. This functionality prominently featured the following: Support for column-level encryption of data using symmetric keys or passphrases. Built-in access to a variety of symmetric and asymmetric encryption algorithms, including AES, DES, Triple DES, RC2, RC4, and RSA. Capability to create and manage symmetric keys. Key creation and management. Ability to generate asymmetric keys and self-signed certificates, or to install external asymmetric keys and certificates. Implementation of hierarchical model for encryption key management, similar to the ANSI X9.17 standard model. SQL functions to generate one-way hash codes and digital signatures, including SHA-1 and MD5 hashes. Additional SQL functions to encrypt and decrypt data. Extensions to the SQL language to support creation, use, and administration of encryption keys and certificates. SQL CLR extensions that provide access to .NET-based encryption functionality. Encryption in SQL Server 2008 Encryption demands have increased over the past few years. For instance, there has been a demand for the ability to store encryption keys “off-the-box,” physically separate from the database and the data it contains. Also there is a recognized requirement for legacy databases and applications to take advantage of encryption without changing the existing code base. To address these needs SQL Server 2008 adds the following features to its encryption arsenal: Transparent Data Encryption (TDE): Allows you to encrypt an entire database, including log files and the tempdb database, in such a way that it is transparent to client applications. Extensible Key Management (EKM): Allows you to store and manage your encryption keys on an external device known as a hardware security module (HSM). Cryptographic random number generation functionality. Additional cryptography-related catalog views and dynamic management views. SQL language extensions to support the new encryption functionality. The encryption book covers all the tools in its various chapter in one simple story. If you are interested how encryption evolved and reached to the stage where it is today, this book is must for everyone. You can read my earlier review of the book over here. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Book Review, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Encryption, SQL Server Encryption, SQLPASS

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• Where does ASP.NET Web API Fit?

  - by Rick Strahl

  With the pending release of ASP.NET MVC 4 and the new ASP.NET Web API, there has been a lot of discussion of where the new Web API technology fits in the ASP.NET Web stack. There are a lot of choices to build HTTP based applications available now on the stack - we've come a long way from when WebForms and Http Handlers/Modules where the only real options. Today we have WebForms, MVC, ASP.NET Web Pages, ASP.NET AJAX, WCF REST and now Web API as well as the core ASP.NET runtime to choose to build HTTP content with. Web API definitely squarely addresses the 'API' aspect - building consumable services - rather than HTML content, but even to that end there are a lot of choices you have today. So where does Web API fit, and when doesn't it? But before we get into that discussion, let's talk about what a Web API is and why we should care. What's a Web API? HTTP 'APIs' (Microsoft's new terminology for a service I guess)  are becoming increasingly more important with the rise of the many devices in use today. Most mobile devices like phones and tablets run Apps that are using data retrieved from the Web over HTTP. Desktop applications are also moving in this direction with more and more online content and synching moving into even traditional desktop applications. The pending Windows 8 release promises an app like platform for both the desktop and other devices, that also emphasizes consuming data from the Cloud. Likewise many Web browser hosted applications these days are relying on rich client functionality to create and manipulate the browser user interface, using AJAX rather than server generated HTML data to load up the user interface with data. These mobile or rich Web applications use their HTTP connection to return data rather than HTML markup in the form of JSON or XML typically. But an API can also serve other kinds of data, like images or other binary files, or even text data and HTML (although that's less common). A Web API is what feeds rich applications with data. ASP.NET Web API aims to service this particular segment of Web development by providing easy semantics to route and handle incoming requests and an easy to use platform to serve HTTP data in just about any content format you choose to create and serve from the server. But .NET already has various HTTP Platforms The .NET stack already includes a number of technologies that provide the ability to create HTTP service back ends, and it has done so since the very beginnings of the .NET platform. From raw HTTP Handlers and Modules in the core ASP.NET runtime, to high level platforms like ASP.NET MVC, Web Forms, ASP.NET AJAX and the WCF REST engine (which technically is not ASP.NET, but can integrate with it), you've always been able to handle just about any kind of HTTP request and response with ASP.NET. The beauty of the raw ASP.NET platform is that it provides you everything you need to build just about any type of HTTP application you can dream up from low level APIs/custom engines to high level HTML generation engine. ASP.NET as a core platform clearly has stood the test of time 10+ years later and all other frameworks like Web API are built on top of this ASP.NET core. However, although it's possible to create Web APIs / Services using any of the existing out of box .NET technologies, none of them have been a really nice fit for building arbitrary HTTP based APIs. Sure, you can use an HttpHandler to create just about anything, but you have to build a lot of plumbing to build something more complex like a comprehensive API that serves a variety of requests, handles multiple output formats and can easily pass data up to the server in a variety of ways. Likewise you can use ASP.NET MVC to handle routing and creating content in various formats fairly easily, but it doesn't provide a great way to automatically negotiate content types and serve various content formats directly (it's possible to do with some plumbing code of your own but not built in). Prior to Web API, Microsoft's main push for HTTP services has been WCF REST, which was always an awkward technology that had a severe personality conflict, not being clear on whether it wanted to be part of WCF or purely a separate technology. In the end it didn't do either WCF compatibility or WCF agnostic pure HTTP operation very well, which made for a very developer-unfriendly environment. Personally I didn't like any of the implementations at the time, so much so that I ended up building my own HTTP service engine (as part of the West Wind Web Toolkit), as have a few other third party tools that provided much better integration and ease of use. With the release of Web API for the first time I feel that I can finally use the tools in the box and not have to worry about creating and maintaining my own toolkit as Web API addresses just about all the features I implemented on my own and much more. ASP.NET Web API provides a better HTTP Experience ASP.NET Web API differentiates itself from the previous Microsoft in-box HTTP service solutions in that it was built from the ground up around the HTTP protocol and its messaging semantics. Unlike WCF REST or ASP.NET AJAX with ASMX, it’s a brand new platform rather than bolted on technology that is supposed to work in the context of an existing framework. The strength of the new ASP.NET Web API is that it combines the best features of the platforms that came before it, to provide a comprehensive and very usable HTTP platform. Because it's based on ASP.NET and borrows a lot of concepts from ASP.NET MVC, Web API should be immediately familiar and comfortable to most ASP.NET developers. Here are some of the features that Web API provides that I like: Strong Support for URL Routing to produce clean URLs using familiar MVC style routing semantics Content Negotiation based on Accept headers for request and response serialization Support for a host of supported output formats including JSON, XML, ATOM Strong default support for REST semantics but they are optional Easily extensible Formatter support to add new input/output types Deep support for more advanced HTTP features via HttpResponseMessage and HttpRequestMessage classes and strongly typed Enums to describe many HTTP operations Convention based design that drives you into doing the right thing for HTTP Services Very extensible, based on MVC like extensibility model of Formatters and Filters Self-hostable in non-Web applications  Testable using testing concepts similar to MVC Web API is meant to handle any kind of HTTP input and produce output and status codes using the full spectrum of HTTP functionality available in a straight forward and flexible manner. Looking at the list above you can see that a lot of functionality is very similar to ASP.NET MVC, so many ASP.NET developers should feel quite comfortable with the concepts of Web API. The Routing and core infrastructure of Web API are very similar to how MVC works providing many of the benefits of MVC, but with focus on HTTP access and manipulation in Controller methods rather than HTML generation in MVC. There’s much improved support for content negotiation based on HTTP Accept headers with the framework capable of detecting automatically what content the client is sending and requesting and serving the appropriate data format in return. This seems like such a little and obvious thing, but it's really important. Today's service backends often are used by multiple clients/applications and being able to choose the right data format for what fits best for the client is very important. While previous solutions were able to accomplish this using a variety of mixed features of WCF and ASP.NET, Web API combines all this functionality into a single robust server side HTTP framework that intrinsically understands the HTTP semantics and subtly drives you in the right direction for most operations. And when you need to customize or do something that is not built in, there are lots of hooks and overrides for most behaviors, and even many low level hook points that allow you to plug in custom functionality with relatively little effort. No Brainers for Web API There are a few scenarios that are a slam dunk for Web API. If your primary focus of an application or even a part of an application is some sort of API then Web API makes great sense. HTTP ServicesIf you're building a comprehensive HTTP API that is to be consumed over the Web, Web API is a perfect fit. You can isolate the logic in Web API and build your application as a service breaking out the logic into controllers as needed. Because the primary interface is the service there's no confusion of what should go where (MVC or API). Perfect fit. Primary AJAX BackendsIf you're building rich client Web applications that are relying heavily on AJAX callbacks to serve its data, Web API is also a slam dunk. Again because much if not most of the business logic will probably end up in your Web API service logic, there's no confusion over where logic should go and there's no duplication. In Single Page Applications (SPA), typically there's very little HTML based logic served other than bringing up a shell UI and then filling the data from the server with AJAX which means the business logic required for data retrieval and data acceptance and validation too lives in the Web API. Perfect fit. Generic HTTP EndpointsAnother good fit are generic HTTP endpoints that to serve data or handle 'utility' type functionality in typical Web applications. If you need to implement an image server, or an upload handler in the past I'd implement that as an HTTP handler. With Web API you now have a well defined place where you can implement these types of generic 'services' in a location that can easily add endpoints (via Controller methods) or separated out as more full featured APIs. Granted this could be done with MVC as well, but Web API seems a clearer and more well defined place to store generic application services. This is one thing I used to do a lot of in my own libraries and Web API addresses this nicely. Great fit. Mixed HTML and AJAX Applications: Not a clear Choice  For all the commonality that Web API and MVC share they are fundamentally different platforms that are independent of each other. A lot of people have asked when does it make sense to use MVC vs. Web API when you're dealing with typical Web application that creates HTML and also uses AJAX functionality for rich functionality. While it's easy to say that all 'service'/AJAX logic should go into a Web API and all HTML related generation into MVC, that can often result in a lot of code duplication. Also MVC supports JSON and XML result data fairly easily as well so there's some confusion where that 'trigger point' is of when you should switch to Web API vs. just implementing functionality as part of MVC controllers. Ultimately there's a tradeoff between isolation of functionality and duplication. A good rule of thumb I think works is that if a large chunk of the application's functionality serves data Web API is a good choice, but if you have a couple of small AJAX requests to serve data to a grid or autocomplete box it'd be overkill to separate out that logic into a separate Web API controller. Web API does add overhead to your application (it's yet another framework that sits on top of core ASP.NET) so it should be worth it .Keep in mind that MVC can generate HTML and JSON/XML and just about any other content easily and that functionality is not going away, so just because you Web API is there it doesn't mean you have to use it. Web API is not a full replacement for MVC obviously either since there's not the same level of support to feed HTML from Web API controllers (although you can host a RazorEngine easily enough if you really want to go that route) so if you're HTML is part of your API or application in general MVC is still a better choice either alone or in combination with Web API. I suspect (and hope) that in the future Web API's functionality will merge even closer with MVC so that you might even be able to mix functionality of both into single Controllers so that you don't have to make any trade offs, but at the moment that's not the case. Some Issues To think about Web API is similar to MVC but not the Same Although Web API looks a lot like MVC it's not the same and some common functionality of MVC behaves differently in Web API. For example, the way single POST variables are handled is different than MVC and doesn't lend itself particularly well to some AJAX scenarios with POST data. Code Duplication I already touched on this in the Mixed HTML and Web API section, but if you build an MVC application that also exposes a Web API it's quite likely that you end up duplicating a bunch of code and - potentially - infrastructure. You may have to create authentication logic both for an HTML application and for the Web API which might need something different altogether. More often than not though the same logic is used, and there's no easy way to share. If you implement an MVC ActionFilter and you want that same functionality in your Web API you'll end up creating the filter twice. AJAX Data or AJAX HTML On a recent post's comments, David made some really good points regarding the commonality of MVC and Web API's and its place. One comment that caught my eye was a little more generic, regarding data services vs. HTML services. David says: I see a lot of merit in the combination of Knockout.js, client side templates and view models, calling Web API for a responsive UI, but sometimes late at night that still leaves me wondering why I would no longer be using some of the nice tooling and features that have evolved in MVC ;-) You know what - I can totally relate to that. On the last Web based mobile app I worked on, we decided to serve HTML partials to the client via AJAX for many (but not all!) things, rather than sending down raw data to inject into the DOM on the client via templating or direct manipulation. While there are definitely more bytes on the wire, with this, the overhead ended up being actually fairly small if you keep the 'data' requests small and atomic. Performance was often made up by the lack of client side rendering of HTML. Server rendered HTML for AJAX templating gives so much better infrastructure support without having to screw around with 20 mismatched client libraries. Especially with MVC and partials it's pretty easy to break out your HTML logic into very small, atomic chunks, so it's actually easy to create small rendering islands that can be used via composition on the server, or via AJAX calls to small, tight partials that return HTML to the client. Although this is often frowned upon as to 'heavy', it worked really well in terms of developer effort as well as providing surprisingly good performance on devices. There's still plenty of jQuery and AJAX logic happening on the client but it's more manageable in small doses rather than trying to do the entire UI composition with JavaScript and/or 'not-quite-there-yet' template engines that are very difficult to debug. This is not an issue directly related to Web API of course, but something to think about especially for AJAX or SPA style applications. Summary Web API is a great new addition to the ASP.NET platform and it addresses a serious need for consolidation of a lot of half-baked HTTP service API technologies that came before it. Web API feels 'right', and hits the right combination of usability and flexibility at least for me and it's a good fit for true API scenarios. However, just because a new platform is available it doesn't meant that other tools or tech that came before it should be discarded or even upgraded to the new platform. There's nothing wrong with continuing to use MVC controller methods to handle API tasks if that's what your app is running now - there's very little to be gained by upgrading to Web API just because. But going forward Web API clearly is the way to go, when building HTTP data interfaces and it's good to see that Microsoft got this one right - it was sorely needed! Resources ASP.NET Web API AspConf Ask the Experts Session (first 5 minutes) © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Web Api   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• SQLAuthority News – Wireless Router Security and Attached Devices – Complex Password

  - by pinaldave

  In the last four days (April 21-24), I have received calls from friends who told me that they have got strange emails from me. To my surprise, I did not send them any emails. I was not worried until my wife complained that she was not able to find one of the very important folders containing our daughter’s photo that is located in our shared drive. This was alarming in my par, so I started a search around my computer’s folders. Again, please note that I am by no means a security expert. I checked my entire computer with virus and spyware, and strangely, there I found nothing. I tried to think what can cause this happening. I suddenly realized that there was a power outage in my area for about two hours during the days I have mentioned. Back then, my wireless router needed to be reset, and so I did. I had set up my WPA-PSK [TKIP] + WPA2-PSK [AES] very well. My key was very simple ( ‘SQLAuthority1′), and I never thought of changing it. (It is now replaced with a very complex one). While checking the Attached Devices, I found out that there was another very strange computer name and IP attached to my network. And so as soon as I found out that there is strange device attached to my computer, I shutdown my local network. Afterwards, I reconfigured my wireless router with a more complex security key. Since I created the complex password, I noticed that the user is no more connecting to my machine. Subsequently, I figured out that I can also set up Access Control List. I added my networked computer to that list as well. When I tried to connect from an external laptop which was not in the list but with a valid security key, I was not able to access the network, neither able to connect to it. I wasn’t also able to connect using a remote desktop, so I think it was good. If you have received any nasty emails from me (from my gmail account) during the afore-mentioned days, I want to apologize. I am already paying for my negligence of not putting a complex password; by way of losing the important photos of my daughter. I have already checked with my client, whose password I saved in SSMS, so there was no issue at all. In fact, I have decided to never leave any saved password of production server in my SSMS. Here is the tip SQL SERVER – Clear Drop Down List of Recent Connection From SQL Server Management Studio to clean them. I think after doing all this, I am feeling safe right now. However, I believe that safety is an illusion of many times. I need your help and advice if there is anymore I can do to stop unauthorized access. I am seeking advice and help through your comments. Reference : Pinal Dave (http://www.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Security, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology

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• Something for the weekend - Whats the most complex query?

  - by simonsabin

  Whenever I teach about SQL Server performance tuning I try can get across the message that there is no such thing as a table. Does that sound odd, well it isn't, trust me. Rather than tables you need to consider structures. You have 1. Heaps 2. Indexes (b-trees) Some people split indexes in two, clustered and non-clustered, this I feel confuses the situation as people associate clustered indexes with sorting, but don't associate non clustered indexes with sorting, this is wrong. Clustered and non-clustered indexes are the same b-tree structure(and even more so with SQL 2005) with the leaf pages sorted in a linked list according to the keys of the index.. The difference is that non clustered indexes include in their structure either, the clustered key(s), or the row identifier for the row in the table (see http://sqlblog.com/blogs/kalen_delaney/archive/2008/03/16/nonclustered-index-keys.aspx for more details). Beyond that they are the same, they have key columns which are stored on the root and intermediary pages, and included columns which are on the leaf level. The reason this is important is that this is how the optimiser sees the world, this means it can use any of these structures to resolve your query. Even if your query only accesses one table, the optimiser can access multiple structures to get your results. One commonly sees this with a non-clustered index scan and then a key lookup (clustered index seek), but importantly it's not restricted to just using one non-clustered index and the clustered index or heap, and that's the challenge for the weekend. So the challenge for the weekend is to produce the most complex single table query. For those clever bods amongst you that are thinking, great I will just use lots of xquery functions, sorry these are the rules. 1. You have to use a table from AdventureWorks (2005 or 2008) 2. You can add whatever indexes you like, but you must document these 3. You cannot use XQuery, Spatial, HierarchyId, Full Text or any open rowset function. 4. You can only reference your table once, i..e a FROM clause with ONE table and no JOINs 5. No Sub queries. The aim of this is to show how the optimiser can use multiple structures to build the results of a query and to also highlight why the optimiser is doing that. How many structures can you get the optimiser to use? As an example create these two indexes on AdventureWorks2008 create index IX_Person_Person on Person.Person (lastName, FirstName,NameStyle,PersonType) create index IX_Person_Person on Person.Person(BusinessentityId,ModifiedDate)with drop_existing    select lastName, ModifiedDate   from Person.Person  where LastName = 'Smith' You will see that the optimiser has decided to not access the underlying clustered index of the table but to use two indexes above to resolve the query. This highlights how the optimiser considers all storage structures, clustered indexes, non clustered indexes and heaps when trying to resolve a query. So are you up to the challenge for the weekend to produce the most complex single table query? The prize is a pdf version of a popular SQL Server book, or a physical book if you live in the UK.  

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• New Communications Industry Data Model with "Factory Installed" Predictive Analytics using Oracle Da

  - by charlie.berger

  Oracle Introduces Oracle Communications Data Model to Provide Actionable Insight for Communications Service Providers   We've integrated pre-installed analytical methodologies with the new Oracle Communications Data Model to deliver automated, simple, yet powerful predictive analytics solutions for customers.  Churn, sentiment analysis, identifying customer segments - all things that can be anticipated and hence, preconcieved and implemented inside an applications.  Read on for more information! TM Forum Management World, Nice, France - 18 May 2010 News Facts To help communications service providers (CSPs) manage and analyze rapidly growing data volumes cost effectively, Oracle today introduced the Oracle Communications Data Model. With the Oracle Communications Data Model, CSPs can achieve rapid time to value by quickly implementing a standards-based enterprise data warehouse that features communications industry-specific reporting, analytics and data mining. The combination of the Oracle Communications Data Model, Oracle Exadata and the Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) Foundation represents the most comprehensive data warehouse and BI solution for the communications industry. Also announced today, Hong Kong Broadband Network enhanced their data warehouse system, going live on Oracle Communications Data Model in three months. The leading provider increased its subscriber base by 37 percent in six months and reduced customer churn to less than one percent. Product Details Oracle Communications Data Model provides industry-specific schema and embedded analytics that address key areas such as customer management, marketing segmentation, product development and network health. CSPs can efficiently capture and monitor critical data and transform it into actionable information to support development and delivery of next-generation services using: More than 1,300 industry-specific measurements and key performance indicators (KPIs) such as network reliability statistics, provisioning metrics and customer churn propensity. Embedded OLAP cubes for extremely fast dimensional analysis of business information. Embedded data mining models for sophisticated trending and predictive analysis. Support for multiple lines of business, such as cable, mobile, wireline and Internet, which can be easily extended to support future requirements. With Oracle Communications Data Model, CSPs can jump start the implementation of a communications data warehouse in line with communications-industry standards including the TM Forum Information Framework (SID), formerly known as the Shared Information Model. Oracle Communications Data Model is optimized for any Oracle Database 11g platform, including Oracle Exadata, which can improve call data record query performance by 10x or more. Supporting Quotes "Oracle Communications Data Model covers a wide range of business areas that are relevant to modern communications service providers and is a comprehensive solution - with its data model and pre-packaged templates including BI dashboards, KPIs, OLAP cubes and mining models. It helps us save a great deal of time in building and implementing a customized data warehouse and enables us to leverage the advanced analytics quickly and more effectively," said Yasuki Hayashi, executive manager, NTT Comware Corporation. "Data volumes will only continue to grow as communications service providers expand next-generation networks, deploy new services and adopt new business models. They will increasingly need efficient, reliable data warehouses to capture key insights on data such as customer value, network value and churn probability. With the Oracle Communications Data Model, Oracle has demonstrated its commitment to meeting these needs by delivering data warehouse tools designed to fill communications industry-specific needs," said Elisabeth Rainge, program director, Network Software, IDC. "The TM Forum Conformance Mark provides reassurance to customers seeking standards-based, and therefore, cost-effective and flexible solutions. TM Forum is extremely pleased to work with Oracle to certify its Oracle Communications Data Model solution. Upon successful completion, this certification will represent the broadest and most complete implementation of the TM Forum Information Framework to date, with more than 130 aggregate business entities," said Keith Willetts, chairman and chief executive officer, TM Forum. Supporting Resources Oracle Communications Oracle Communications Data Model Data Sheet Oracle Communications Data Model Podcast Oracle Data Warehousing Oracle Communications on YouTube Oracle Communications on Delicious Oracle Communications on Facebook Oracle Communications on Twitter Oracle Communications on LinkedIn Oracle Database on Twitter The Data Warehouse Insider Blog

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