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  • Windows Azure: Import/Export Hard Drives, VM ACLs, Web Sockets, Remote Debugging, Continuous Delivery, New Relic, Billing Alerts and More

    - by ScottGu
    Two weeks ago we released a giant set of improvements to Windows Azure, as well as a significant update of the Windows Azure SDK. This morning we released another massive set of enhancements to Windows Azure.  Today’s new capabilities include: Storage: Import/Export Hard Disk Drives to your Storage Accounts HDInsight: General Availability of our Hadoop Service in the cloud Virtual Machines: New VM Gallery, ACL support for VIPs Web Sites: WebSocket and Remote Debugging Support Notification Hubs: Segmented customer push notification support with tag expressions TFS & GIT: Continuous Delivery Support for Web Sites + Cloud Services Developer Analytics: New Relic support for Web Sites + Mobile Services Service Bus: Support for partitioned queues and topics Billing: New Billing Alert Service that sends emails notifications when your bill hits a threshold you define All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note that some features are still in preview).  Below are more details about them. Storage: Import/Export Hard Disk Drives to Windows Azure I am excited to announce the preview of our new Windows Azure Import/Export Service! The Windows Azure Import/Export Service enables you to move large amounts of on-premises data into and out of your Windows Azure Storage accounts. It does this by enabling you to securely ship hard disk drives directly to our Windows Azure data centers. Once we receive the drives we’ll automatically transfer the data to or from your Windows Azure Storage account.  This enables you to import or export massive amounts of data more quickly and cost effectively (and not be constrained by available network bandwidth). Encrypted Transport Our Import/Export service provides built-in support for BitLocker disk encryption – which enables you to securely encrypt data on the hard drives before you send it, and not have to worry about it being compromised even if the disk is lost/stolen in transit (since the content on the transported hard drives is completely encrypted and you are the only one who has the key to it).  The drive preparation tool we are shipping today makes setting up bitlocker encryption on these hard drives easy. How to Import/Export your first Hard Drive of Data You can read our Getting Started Guide to learn more about how to begin using the import/export service.  You can create import and export jobs via the Windows Azure Management Portal as well as programmatically using our Server Management APIs. It is really easy to create a new import or export job using the Windows Azure Management Portal.  Simply navigate to a Windows Azure storage account, and then click the new Import/Export tab now available within it (note: if you don’t have this tab make sure to sign-up for the Import/Export preview): Then click the “Create Import Job” or “Create Export Job” commands at the bottom of it.  This will launch a wizard that easily walks you through the steps required: For more comprehensive information about Import/Export, refer to Windows Azure Storage team blog.  You can also send questions and comments to the [email protected] email address. We think you’ll find this new service makes it much easier to move data into and out of Windows Azure, and it will dramatically cut down the network bandwidth required when working on large data migration projects.  We hope you like it. HDInsight: 100% Compatible Hadoop Service in the Cloud Last week we announced the general availability release of Windows Azure HDInsight. HDInsight is a 100% compatible Hadoop service that allows you to easily provision and manage Hadoop clusters for big data processing in Windows Azure.  This release is now live in production, backed by an enterprise SLA, supported 24x7 by Microsoft Support, and is ready to use for production scenarios. HDInsight allows you to use Apache Hadoop tools, such as Pig and Hive, to process large amounts of data in Windows Azure Blob Storage. Because data is stored in Windows Azure Blob Storage, you can choose to dynamically create Hadoop clusters only when you need them, and then shut them down when they are no longer required (since you pay only for the time the Hadoop cluster instances are running this provides a super cost effective way to use them).  You can create Hadoop clusters using either the Windows Azure Management Portal (see below) or using our PowerShell and Cross Platform Command line tools: The import/export hard drive support that came out today is a perfect companion service to use with HDInsight – the combination allows you to easily ingest, process and optionally export a limitless amount of data.  We’ve also integrated HDInsight with our Business Intelligence tools, so users can leverage familiar tools like Excel in order to analyze the output of jobs.  You can find out more about how to get started with HDInsight here. Virtual Machines: VM Gallery Enhancements Today’s update of Windows Azure brings with it a new Virtual Machine gallery that you can use to create new VMs in the cloud.  You can launch the gallery by doing New->Compute->Virtual Machine->From Gallery within the Windows Azure Management Portal: The new Virtual Machine Gallery includes some nice enhancements that make it even easier to use: Search: You can now easily search and filter images using the search box in the top-right of the dialog.  For example, simply type “SQL” and we’ll filter to show those images in the gallery that contain that substring. Category Tree-view: Each month we add more built-in VM images to the gallery.  You can continue to browse these using the “All” view within the VM Gallery – or now quickly filter them using the category tree-view on the left-hand side of the dialog.  For example, by selecting “Oracle” in the tree-view you can now quickly filter to see the official Oracle supplied images. MSDN and Supported checkboxes: With today’s update we are also introducing filters that makes it easy to filter out types of images that you may not be interested in. The first checkbox is MSDN: using this filter you can exclude any image that is not part of the Windows Azure benefits for MSDN subscribers (which have highly discounted pricing - you can learn more about the MSDN pricing here). The second checkbox is Supported: this filter will exclude any image that contains prerelease software, so you can feel confident that the software you choose to deploy is fully supported by Windows Azure and our partners. Sort options: We sort gallery images by what we think customers are most interested in, but sometimes you might want to sort using different views. So we’re providing some additional sort options, like “Newest,” to customize the image list for what suits you best. Pricing information: We now provide additional pricing information about images and options on how to cost effectively run them directly within the VM Gallery. The above improvements make it even easier to use the VM Gallery and quickly create launch and run Virtual Machines in the cloud. Virtual Machines: ACL Support for VIPs A few months ago we exposed the ability to configure Access Control Lists (ACLs) for Virtual Machines using Windows PowerShell cmdlets and our Service Management API. With today’s release, you can now configure VM ACLs using the Windows Azure Management Portal as well. You can now do this by clicking the new Manage ACL command in the Endpoints tab of a virtual machine instance: This will enable you to configure an ordered list of permit and deny rules to scope the traffic that can access your VM’s network endpoints. For example, if you were on a virtual network, you could limit RDP access to a Windows Azure virtual machine to only a few computers attached to your enterprise. Or if you weren’t on a virtual network you could alternatively limit traffic from public IPs that can access your workloads: Here is the default behaviors for ACLs in Windows Azure: By default (i.e. no rules specified), all traffic is permitted. When using only Permit rules, all other traffic is denied. When using only Deny rules, all other traffic is permitted. When there is a combination of Permit and Deny rules, all other traffic is denied. Lastly, remember that configuring endpoints does not automatically configure them within the VM if it also has firewall rules enabled at the OS level.  So if you create an endpoint using the Windows Azure Management Portal, Windows PowerShell, or REST API, be sure to also configure your guest VM firewall appropriately as well. Web Sites: Web Sockets Support With today’s release you can now use Web Sockets with Windows Azure Web Sites.  This feature enables you to easily integrate real-time communication scenarios within your web based applications, and is available at no extra charge (it even works with the free tier).  Higher level programming libraries like SignalR and socket.io are also now supported with it. You can enable Web Sockets support on a web site by navigating to the Configure tab of a Web Site, and by toggling Web Sockets support to “on”: Once Web Sockets is enabled you can start to integrate some really cool scenarios into your web applications.  Check out the new SignalR documentation hub on www.asp.net to learn more about some of the awesome scenarios you can do with it. Web Sites: Remote Debugging Support The Windows Azure SDK 2.2 we released two weeks ago introduced remote debugging support for Windows Azure Cloud Services. With today’s Windows Azure release we are extending this remote debugging support to also work with Windows Azure Web Sites. With live, remote debugging support inside of Visual Studio, you are able to have more visibility than ever before into how your code is operating live in Windows Azure. It is now super easy to attach the debugger and quickly see what is going on with your application in the cloud. Remote Debugging of a Windows Azure Web Site using VS 2013 Enabling the remote debugging of a Windows Azure Web Site using VS 2013 is really easy.  Start by opening up your web application’s project within Visual Studio. Then navigate to the “Server Explorer” tab within Visual Studio, and click on the deployed web-site you want to debug that is running within Windows Azure using the Windows Azure->Web Sites node in the Server Explorer.  Then right-click and choose the “Attach Debugger” option on it: When you do this Visual Studio will remotely attach the debugger to the Web Site running within Windows Azure.  The debugger will then stop the web site’s execution when it hits any break points that you have set within your web application’s project inside Visual Studio.  For example, below I set a breakpoint on the “ViewBag.Message” assignment statement within the HomeController of the standard ASP.NET MVC project template.  When I hit refresh on the “About” page of the web site within the browser, the breakpoint was triggered and I am now able to debug the app remotely using Visual Studio: Note above how we can debug variables (including autos/watchlist/etc), as well as use the Immediate and Command Windows. In the debug session above I used the Immediate Window to explore some of the request object state, as well as to dynamically change the ViewBag.Message property.  When we click the the “Continue” button (or press F5) the app will continue execution and the Web Site will render the content back to the browser.  This makes it super easy to debug web apps remotely. Tips for Better Debugging To get the best experience while debugging, we recommend publishing your site using the Debug configuration within Visual Studio’s Web Publish dialog. This will ensure that debug symbol information is uploaded to the Web Site which will enable a richer debug experience within Visual Studio.  You can find this option on the Web Publish dialog on the Settings tab: When you ultimately deploy/run the application in production we recommend using the “Release” configuration setting – the release configuration is memory optimized and will provide the best production performance.  To learn more about diagnosing and debugging Windows Azure Web Sites read our new Troubleshooting Windows Azure Web Sites in Visual Studio guide. Notification Hubs: Segmented Push Notification support with tag expressions In August we announced the General Availability of Windows Azure Notification Hubs - a powerful Mobile Push Notifications service that makes it easy to send high volume push notifications with low latency from any mobile app back-end.  Notification hubs can be used with any mobile app back-end (including ones built using our Mobile Services capability) and can also be used with back-ends that run in the cloud as well as on-premises. Beginning with the initial release, Notification Hubs allowed developers to send personalized push notifications to both individual users as well as groups of users by interest, by associating their devices with tags representing the logical target of the notification. For example, by registering all devices of customers interested in a favorite MLB team with a corresponding tag, it is possible to broadcast one message to millions of Boston Red Sox fans and another message to millions of St. Louis Cardinals fans with a single API call respectively. New support for using tag expressions to enable advanced customer segmentation With today’s release we are adding support for even more advanced customer targeting.  You can now identify customers that you want to send push notifications to by defining rich tag expressions. With tag expressions, you can now not only broadcast notifications to Boston Red Sox fans, but take that segmenting a step farther and reach more granular segments. This opens up a variety of scenarios, for example: Offers based on multiple preferences—e.g. send a game day vegetarian special to users tagged as both a Boston Red Sox fan AND a vegetarian Push content to multiple segments in a single message—e.g. rain delay information only to users who are tagged as either a Boston Red Sox fan OR a St. Louis Cardinal fan Avoid presenting subsets of a segment with irrelevant content—e.g. season ticket availability reminder to users who are tagged as a Boston Red Sox fan but NOT also a season ticket holder To illustrate with code, consider a restaurant chain app that sends an offer related to a Red Sox vs Cardinals game for users in Boston. Devices can be tagged by your app with location tags (e.g. “Loc:Boston”) and interest tags (e.g. “Follows:RedSox”, “Follows:Cardinals”), and then a notification can be sent by your back-end to “(Follows:RedSox || Follows:Cardinals) && Loc:Boston” in order to deliver an offer to all devices in Boston that follow either the RedSox or the Cardinals. This can be done directly in your server backend send logic using the code below: var notification = new WindowsNotification(messagePayload); hub.SendNotificationAsync(notification, "(Follows:RedSox || Follows:Cardinals) && Loc:Boston"); In your expressions you can use all Boolean operators: AND (&&), OR (||), and NOT (!).  Some other cool use cases for tag expressions that are now supported include: Social: To “all my group except me” - group:id && !user:id Events: Touchdown event is sent to everybody following either team or any of the players involved in the action: Followteam:A || Followteam:B || followplayer:1 || followplayer:2 … Hours: Send notifications at specific times. E.g. Tag devices with time zone and when it is 12pm in Seattle send to: GMT8 && follows:thaifood Versions and platforms: Send a reminder to people still using your first version for Android - version:1.0 && platform:Android For help on getting started with Notification Hubs, visit the Notification Hub documentation center.  Then download the latest NuGet package (or use the Notification Hubs REST APIs directly) to start sending push notifications using tag expressions.  They are really powerful and enable a bunch of great new scenarios. TFS & GIT: Continuous Delivery Support for Web Sites + Cloud Services With today’s Windows Azure release we are making it really easy to enable continuous delivery support with Windows Azure and Team Foundation Services.  Team Foundation Services is a cloud based offering from Microsoft that provides integrated source control (with both TFS and Git support), build server, test execution, collaboration tools, and agile planning support.  It makes it really easy to setup a team project (complete with automated builds and test runners) in the cloud, and it has really rich integration with Visual Studio. With today’s Windows Azure release it is now really easy to enable continuous delivery support with both TFS and Git based repositories hosted using Team Foundation Services.  This enables a workflow where when code is checked in, built successfully on an automated build server, and all tests pass on it – I can automatically have the app deployed on Windows Azure with zero manual intervention or work required. The below screen-shots demonstrate how to quickly setup a continuous delivery workflow to Windows Azure with a Git-based ASP.NET MVC project hosted using Team Foundation Services. Enabling Continuous Delivery to Windows Azure with Team Foundation Services The project I’m going to enable continuous delivery with is a simple ASP.NET MVC project whose source code I’m hosting using Team Foundation Services.  I did this by creating a “SimpleContinuousDeploymentTest” repository there using Git – and then used the new built-in Git tooling support within Visual Studio 2013 to push the source code to it.  Below is a screen-shot of the Git repository hosted within Team Foundation Services: I can access the repository within Visual Studio 2013 and easily make commits with it (as well as branch, merge and do other tasks).  Using VS 2013 I can also setup automated builds to take place in the cloud using Team Foundation Services every time someone checks in code to the repository: The cool thing about this is that I don’t have to buy or rent my own build server – Team Foundation Services automatically maintains its own build server farm and can automatically queue up a build for me (for free) every time someone checks in code using the above settings.  This build server (and automated testing) support now works with both TFS and Git based source control repositories. Connecting a Team Foundation Services project to Windows Azure Once I have a source repository hosted in Team Foundation Services with Automated Builds and Testing set up, I can then go even further and set it up so that it will be automatically deployed to Windows Azure when a source code commit is made to the repository (assuming the Build + Tests pass).  Enabling this is now really easy.  To set this up with a Windows Azure Web Site simply use the New->Compute->Web Site->Custom Create command inside the Windows Azure Management Portal.  This will create a dialog like below.  I gave the web site a name and then made sure the “Publish from source control” checkbox was selected: When we click next we’ll be prompted for the location of the source repository.  We’ll select “Team Foundation Services”: Once we do this we’ll be prompted for our Team Foundation Services account that our source repository is hosted under (in this case my TFS account is “scottguthrie”): When we click the “Authorize Now” button we’ll be prompted to give Windows Azure permissions to connect to the Team Foundation Services account.  Once we do this we’ll be prompted to pick the source repository we want to connect to.  Starting with today’s Windows Azure release you can now connect to both TFS and Git based source repositories.  This new support allows me to connect to the “SimpleContinuousDeploymentTest” respository we created earlier: Clicking the finish button will then create the Web Site with the continuous delivery hooks setup with Team Foundation Services.  Now every time someone pushes source control to the repository in Team Foundation Services, it will kick off an automated build, run all of the unit tests in the solution , and if they pass the app will be automatically deployed to our Web Site in Windows Azure.  You can monitor the history and status of these automated deployments using the Deployments tab within the Web Site: This enables a really slick continuous delivery workflow, and enables you to build and deploy apps in a really nice way. Developer Analytics: New Relic support for Web Sites + Mobile Services With today’s Windows Azure release we are making it really easy to enable Developer Analytics and Monitoring support with both Windows Azure Web Site and Windows Azure Mobile Services.  We are partnering with New Relic, who provide a great dev analytics and app performance monitoring offering, to enable this - and we have updated the Windows Azure Management Portal to make it really easy to configure. Enabling New Relic with a Windows Azure Web Site Enabling New Relic support with a Windows Azure Web Site is now really easy.  Simply navigate to the Configure tab of a Web Site and scroll down to the “developer analytics” section that is now within it: Clicking the “add-on” button will display some additional UI.  If you don’t already have a New Relic subscription, you can click the “view windows azure store” button to obtain a subscription (note: New Relic has a perpetually free tier so you can enable it even without paying anything): Clicking the “view windows azure store” button will launch the integrated Windows Azure Store experience we have within the Windows Azure Management Portal.  You can use this to browse from a variety of great add-on services – including New Relic: Select “New Relic” within the dialog above, then click the next button, and you’ll be able to choose which type of New Relic subscription you wish to purchase.  For this demo we’ll simply select the “Free Standard Version” – which does not cost anything and can be used forever:  Once we’ve signed-up for our New Relic subscription and added it to our Windows Azure account, we can go back to the Web Site’s configuration tab and choose to use the New Relic add-on with our Windows Azure Web Site.  We can do this by simply selecting it from the “add-on” dropdown (it is automatically populated within it once we have a New Relic subscription in our account): Clicking the “Save” button will then cause the Windows Azure Management Portal to automatically populate all of the needed New Relic configuration settings to our Web Site: Deploying the New Relic Agent as part of a Web Site The final step to enable developer analytics using New Relic is to add the New Relic runtime agent to our web app.  We can do this within Visual Studio by right-clicking on our web project and selecting the “Manage NuGet Packages” context menu: This will bring up the NuGet package manager.  You can search for “New Relic” within it to find the New Relic agent.  Note that there is both a 32-bit and 64-bit edition of it – make sure to install the version that matches how your Web Site is running within Windows Azure (note: you can configure your Web Site to run in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode using the Web Site’s “Configuration” tab within the Windows Azure Management Portal): Once we install the NuGet package we are all set to go.  We’ll simply re-publish the web site again to Windows Azure and New Relic will now automatically start monitoring the application Monitoring a Web Site using New Relic Now that the application has developer analytics support with New Relic enabled, we can launch the New Relic monitoring portal to start monitoring the health of it.  We can do this by clicking on the “Add Ons” tab in the left-hand side of the Windows Azure Management Portal.  Then select the New Relic add-on we signed-up for within it.  The Windows Azure Management Portal will provide some default information about the add-on when we do this.  Clicking the “Manage” button in the tray at the bottom will launch a new browser tab and single-sign us into the New Relic monitoring portal associated with our account: When we do this a new browser tab will launch with the New Relic admin tool loaded within it: We can now see insights into how our app is performing – without having to have written a single line of monitoring code.  The New Relic service provides a ton of great built-in monitoring features allowing us to quickly see: Performance times (including browser rendering speed) for the overall site and individual pages.  You can optionally set alert thresholds to trigger if the speed does not meet a threshold you specify. Information about where in the world your customers are hitting the site from (and how performance varies by region) Details on the latency performance of external services your web apps are using (for example: SQL, Storage, Twitter, etc) Error information including call stack details for exceptions that have occurred at runtime SQL Server profiling information – including which queries executed against your database and what their performance was And a whole bunch more… The cool thing about New Relic is that you don’t need to write monitoring code within your application to get all of the above reports (plus a lot more).  The New Relic agent automatically enables the CLR profiler within applications and automatically captures the information necessary to identify these.  This makes it super easy to get started and immediately have a rich developer analytics view for your solutions with very little effort. If you haven’t tried New Relic out yet with Windows Azure I recommend you do so – I think you’ll find it helps you build even better cloud applications.  Following the above steps will help you get started and deliver you a really good application monitoring solution in only minutes. Service Bus: Support for partitioned queues and topics With today’s release, we are enabling support within Service Bus for partitioned queues and topics. Enabling partitioning enables you to achieve a higher message throughput and better availability from your queues and topics. Higher message throughput is achieved by implementing multiple message brokers for each partitioned queue and topic.  The  multiple messaging stores will also provide higher availability. You can create a partitioned queue or topic by simply checking the Enable Partitioning option in the custom create wizard for a Queue or Topic: Read this article to learn more about partitioned queues and topics and how to take advantage of them today. Billing: New Billing Alert Service Today’s Windows Azure update enables a new Billing Alert Service Preview that enables you to get proactive email notifications when your Windows Azure bill goes above a certain monetary threshold that you configure.  This makes it easier to manage your bill and avoid potential surprises at the end of the month. With the Billing Alert Service Preview, you can now create email alerts to monitor and manage your monetary credits or your current bill total.  To set up an alert first sign-up for the free Billing Alert Service Preview.  Then visit the account management page, click on a subscription you have setup, and then navigate to the new Alerts tab that is available: The alerts tab allows you to setup email alerts that will be sent automatically once a certain threshold is hit.  For example, by clicking the “add alert” button above I can setup a rule to send myself email anytime my Windows Azure bill goes above $100 for the month: The Billing Alert Service will evolve to support additional aspects of your bill as well as support multiple forms of alerts such as SMS.  Try out the new Billing Alert Service Preview today and give us feedback. Summary Today’s Windows Azure release enables a ton of great new scenarios, and makes building applications hosted in the cloud even easier. If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today.  Then visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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  • SQL Server service accounts and SPNs

    - by simonsabin
    Service Principal Names (SPNs) are a must for kerberos authentication which is a must when using sharepoint, reporting services and sql server where you access one server that then needs to access another resource, this is called the double hop. The reason this is a complex problem is that the second hop has to be done with impersonation/delegation. For this to work there needs to be a way for the security system to make sure that the service in the middle is allowed to impersonate you, after all you are not giving the service your password. To do this you need to be using kerberos. The following is my simple interpretation of how kerberos works. I find the Kerberos documentation rediculously complex so the following might be sligthly wrong but I think its close enough. Keberos works on a ticketing system, the prinicipal is that you get a security token from AD and then you can pass that to the service in the middle which can then use that token to impersonate you. For that to work AD has to be able to identify who is allowed to use the token, in this case the service account.But how do you as a client know what service account the service in the middle is configured with. The answer is SPNs. The SPN is the mapping between your logical connection to the service account. One type of SPN is for the DNS name for the server and the port. i.e. MySQL.mydomain.com and 1433. You can see how this maps to SQL Server on that server, but how does it map to the account. Well it can be done in two ways, either you can have a mapping defined in AD or AD can use a default mapping (this is something I didn't know about). To map the SPN in AD then you have to add the SPN to the user account, this is documented in the first link below either directly or using a tool called SetSPN. You might say that is complex, well it is and thats why SQL Server tries to do it for you, at start up it tries to connect to AD and set the SPN on the account it is running as, clearly that can only happen IF SQL is running as a domain account AND importantly it has permission to do so. By default a normal domain user account doesn't have the correct permission, and is why so many people have this problem. If the account is a domain admin then it will have permission, but non of us run SQL using domain admin accounts do we. You might also note that the SPN contains the port number (this isn't a requirement now in sql 2008 but I won't go into that), so if you set it manually and you are using dynamic ports (the default for a named instance) what do you do, well every time the port changes you need to change the SPN allocated to the account. Thats why its advised to let SQL Server register the SPN itself. You may also have thought, well what happens if I change my service account, won't that lead to two accounts with the same SPN. Possibly. Having two accounts with the same SPN is definitely a problem. Why? Well because if there are two accounts Kerberos can't identify the exact account that the service is running as, it could be either account, and so your security falls back to NTLM. SETSPN is useful for finding duplicate SPNs Reading this you will probably be thinking Oh my goodness this is really difficult. It is however I've found today in investigating something else that there is an easy option. Use Network Service as your service account. Network Service is a special account and is tied to the computer. It appears that Network Service has the update rights to AD to set an SPN mapping for the computer account. This then allows the SPN mapping to work. I believe this also works for the local system account. To get all the SPNs in your AD run the following, it could be a large file, so you might want to restrict it to a specific OU, or CN ldifde -d "DC=<domain>" -l servicePrincipalName -F spn.txt You will read in the links below that you need SQL to register the SPN this is done how to use Kerberos authenticaiton in SQL Server - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/319723 Using Kerberos with SQL Server - http://blogs.msdn.com/sql_protocols/archive/2005/10/12/479871.aspx Understanding Kerberos and NTLM authentication in SQL Server Connections - http://blogs.msdn.com/sql_protocols/archive/2006/12/02/understanding-kerberos-and-ntlm-authentication-in-sql-server-connections.aspx Summary The only reason I personally know to use a domain account is when you can't get kerberos to work and you want to do BULK INSERT or other network service that requires access to a a remote server. In this case you have to resort to using SQL authentication and the SQL Server uses its service account to access the remote service, and thus you need a domain account. You migth need this if using some forms of replication. I've always found Kerberos awkward to setup and so fallen back to this domain account approach. So in summary to get Kerberos to work try using the network service or local system accounts. For a great post from the Adam Saxton of the SQL Server support team go to http://blogs.msdn.com/psssql/archive/2010/03/09/what-spn-do-i-use-and-how-does-it-get-there.aspx 

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  • How to create a new Team Project Collection in TFS2010:

    - by jehan
    TFS 2010 has introduced the notion of Team Project Collection (TPC).  I have already discussed about TPC in my earlier post, you can check it out here. In this post, I will demonstrate how to create a new Team Project Collection in TFS2010. First, you have to open the TFS Administration Console (Start à All Programs à Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010 à Team Foundation Server Administration Console), expand the Application Tier node in TFS Administration Console and click on Team Project Collection. Here you will see the TPC’s which are already exist, I am having only one TPC named New Collection and I’m going to create a new TPC called Demo Collection. To create a new Team Project Collection, you need to click on Create Collection; it will open the Create New Team Project Collection window.     Under the Name tab, you have to enter the name of Collection which you want to give for your new TPC (I naming it as Demo Collection). You can also provide some description about your TPC in Description tab which is optional and click next. Here, you need to enter the name of SQL Server Instance where you want your new TPC data to reside. You have the option either to choose the creating a Database for this TPC or use the already existing empty database and then click next.   In next screen, you have to choose SharePoint configuration. Here you have the options to either configure SharePoint Site for TPC at default collections or you can specify the your existing SharePoint site and  you can also choose not  to configure the SharePoint for this collection, if you choose last option then you cannot configure the Share Point sites for the all the Team Projects under this Project Collection. You also have the flexibility to create a Share Point site for this TPC later on, then if you need you have to configure SharePoint site for the existing team projects manually.   In next screen, you will have the Reports configuration. Here you have the options to either configure the Reports for TPC at default path or you can specify the path for at existing Reports folder, you can also choose not to configure the Reports for this collection, if you choose last option then you cannot create  the Reports  for the all the Team Projects under this Project Collection. Here also you can enable reporting for this TPC later on. The next screen is related to Lab Management Configuration, Lab Management is the new feature in TFS2010 which enables the users to create and manage virtual test environments where you can deploy and test your application. There are no options available here as I don’t have the Lab Management configured for my Team Foundation Server. The next screen is Review Configuration window, which will show up all the configuration settings you have specified, so that you can review the configurations before creating the Team Project Collection. If you want to make any changes to the configurations then you can go back to the previous windows and can make the changes. After Reviewing the configuration settings, you can click on verify button. Which will verify that if you’re Team Project Collection is ready to be created or not, it will show up the errors and warning (if any) which can make your Team Project Collection fail. You can then choose to create the Team Project Collection if the verify option doesn’t throw any warnings and errors. If the verify option throws any errors, then it is strongly suggested that you have to first rectify the issues then only go for TPC creation especially in case of warnings as it is a common practice to overlook the warnings.   If you choose the create TPC option, then it will start the process of creating a Team Project Collection  and once its completed you can check the status of configuration different components  during Team Project Collection. You can see in below screen that all the components are configured successfully.   In next screen, you can find the location of log file created for this Team Project Creation, this log file is really important in case of Team Project creation failure because it will help you to find  the root cause for the failure. Now, you can see that the New Team Projection (Demo Collection) which was created is now available in Team Foundation Collection tab and its status is Online.   You can now try to connect to this Team Project Collection from Team Explorer. Choose the newly created Team Project Collection and click on connect.     This Team Project Collection is empty because no Team Projects are created yet. Now, you can create the new Team Projects and start working.

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  • A Gentle Introduction to NuGet

    - by Joe Mayo
    Not too long ago, Microsoft released, NuGet, an automated package manager for Visual Studio.  NuGet makes it easy to download and install assemblies, and their references, into a Visual Studio project.  These assemblies, which I loosely refer to as packages, are often open source, and include projects such as LINQ to Twitter. In this post, I'll explain how to get started in using NuGet with your projects to include: installng NuGet, installing/uninstalling LINQ to Twitter via console command, and installing/uninstalling LINQ to Twitter via graphical reference menu. Installing NuGet The first step you'll need to take is to install NuGet.  Visit the NuGet site, at http://nuget.org/, click on the Install NuGet button, and download the NuGet.Tools.vsix installation file, shown below. Each browser is different (i.e. FireFox, Chrome, IE, etc), so you might see options to run right away, save to a location, or access to the file through the browser's download manager.  Regardless of how you receive the NuGet installer, execute the downloaded NuGet.Tools.vsix to install Nuget into visual Studio. The NuGet Footprint When you open visual Studio, observe that there is a new menu option on the Tools menu, titled Library Package Manager; This is where you use NuGet.  There are two menu options, from the Library Package Manager Menu that you can use: Package Manager Console and Package Manager Settings.  I won't discuss Package Manager Settings in this post, except to give you a general idea that, as one of a set of capabilities, it manages the path to the NuGet server, which is already set for you. Another menu, added by the NuGet installer, is Add Library Package Reference, found by opening the context menu for either a Solution Explorer project or a project's References folder or via the Project menu.  I'll discuss how to use this later in the post. The following discussion is concerned with the other menu option, Package Manager Console, which allows you to manage NuGet packages. Gettng a NuGet Package Selecting Tools -> Library Package Manager -> Package Manager Console opens the Package Manager Console.  As you can see, below, the Package Manager Console is text-based and you'll need to type in commands to work with packages. In this post, I'll explain how to use the Package Manager Console to install LINQ to Twitter, but there are many more commands, explained in the NuGet Package Manager Console Commands documentation.  To install LINQ to Twitter, open your current project where you want LINQ to Twitter installed, and type the following at the PM> prompt: Install-Package linqtotwitter If all works well, you'll receive a confirmation message, similar to the following, after a brief pause: Successfully installed 'linqtotwitter 2.0.20'. Successfully added 'linqtotwitter 2.0.20' to NuGetInstall. Also, observe that a reference to the LinqToTwitter.dll assembly was added to your current project. Uninstalling a NuGet Package I won't be so bold as to assume that you would only want to use LINQ to Twitter because there are other Twitter libraries available; I recommend Twitterizer if you don't care for LINQ to Twitter.  So, you might want to use the following command at the PM> prompt to remove LINQ to Twitter from your project: Uninstall-Package linqtotwitter After a brief pause, you'll see a confirmation message similar to the following: Successfully removed 'linqtotwitter 2.0.20' from NuGetInstall. Also, observe that the LinqToTwitter.dll assembly no longer appears in your project references list. Sometimes using the Package Manager Console is required for more sophisticated scenarios.  However, LINQ to Twitter doesn't have any dependencies and is a very simple install, so you can use another method of installing graphically, which I'll show you next. Graphical Installations As explained earlier, clicking Add Library Package Reference, from the context menu for either a Solution Explorer project or a project's References folder or via the Project menu opens the Add Library Package Reference window. This window will allow you to add a reference a NuGet package in your project. To the left of the window are a few accordian folders to help you find packages that are either on-line or already installed.  Just like the previous section, I'll assume you are installing LINQ to Twitter for the first time, so you would select the Online folder and click All.  After waiting for package descriptions to download, you'll notice that there are too many to scroll through in a short period of time, over 900 as I write this.  Therefore, use the search box located at the top right corner of the window and type LINQ to Twitter as I've done in the previous figure. You'll see LINQ to Twitter appear in the list. Click the Install button on the LINQ to Twitter entry. If the installation was successful, you'll see a message box display and disappear quickly (or maybe not if your machine is very fast or you blink at that moment). Then you'll see a reference to the LinqToTwitter.dll assembly in your project's references list. Note: While running this demo, I ran into an issue where VS had created a file lock on an installation folder without releasing it, causing an error with "packagename already exists. Skipping..." and then an error describing that it couldn't write to a destination folder.  I resolved the problem by closing and reopening VS. If you open the Add a Library Package Reference window again, you'll see LINQ to Twitter listed in the Recent packages folder. Summary You can install NuGet via the on-line home page with a click of a button.  Nuget provides two ways to work with packages, via console or graphical window.  While the graphical window is easiest, the console window is more powerful. You can now quickly add project references to many available packages via the NuGet service. Joe

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  • Extending Database-as-a-Service to Provision Databases with Application Data

    - by Nilesh A
    Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Database as a Service (DBaaS) empowers Self Service/SSA Users to rapidly spawn databases on demand in cloud. The configuration and structure of provisioned databases depends on respective service template selected by Self Service user while requesting for database. In EM12c, the DBaaS Self Service/SSA Administrator has the option of hosting various service templates in service catalog and based on underlying DBCA templates.Many times provisioned databases require production scale data either for UAT, testing or development purpose and managing DBCA templates with data can be unwieldy. So, we need to populate the database using post deployment script option and without any additional work for the SSA Users. The SSA Administrator can automate this task in few easy steps. For details on how to setup DBaaS Self Service Portal refer to the DBaaS CookbookIn this article, I will list steps required to enable EM 12c DBaaS to provision databases with application data in two distinct ways using: 1) Data pump 2) Transportable tablespaces (TTS). The steps listed below are just examples of how to extend EM 12c DBaaS and you can even have your own method plugged in part of post deployment script option. Using Data Pump to populate databases These are the steps to be followed to implement extending DBaaS using Data Pump methodolgy: Production DBA should run data pump export on the production database and make the dump file available to all the servers participating in the database zone [sample shown in Fig.1] -- Full exportexpdp FULL=y DUMPFILE=data_pump_dir:dpfull1%U.dmp, data_pump_dir:dpfull2%U.dmp PARALLEL=4 LOGFILE=data_pump_dir:dpexpfull.log JOB_NAME=dpexpfull Figure-1:  Full export of database using data pump Create a post deployment SQL script [sample shown in Fig. 2] and this script can either be uploaded into the software library by SSA Administrator or made available on a shared location accessible from servers where databases are likely to be provisioned Normal 0 -- Full importdeclare    h1   NUMBER;begin-- Creating the directory object where source database dump is backed up.    execute immediate 'create directory DEST_LOC as''/scratch/nagrawal/OracleHomes/oradata/INITCHNG/datafile''';-- Running import    h1 := dbms_datapump.open (operation => 'IMPORT', job_mode => 'FULL', job_name => 'DB_IMPORT10');    dbms_datapump.set_parallel(handle => h1, degree => 1);    dbms_datapump.add_file(handle => h1, filename => 'IMP_GRIDDB_FULL.LOG', directory => 'DATA_PUMP_DIR', filetype => 3);    dbms_datapump.add_file(handle => h1, filename => 'EXP_GRIDDB_FULL_%U.DMP', directory => 'DEST_LOC', filetype => 1);    dbms_datapump.start_job(handle => h1);    dbms_datapump.detach(handle => h1);end;/ Figure-2: Importing using data pump pl/sql procedures Using DBCA, create a template for the production database – include all the init.ora parameters, tablespaces, datafiles & their sizes SSA Administrator should customize “Create Database Deployment Procedure” and provide DBCA template created in the previous step. In “Additional Configuration Options” step of Customize “Create Database Deployment Procedure” flow, provide the name of the SQL script in the Custom Script section and lock the input (shown in Fig. 3). Continue saving the deployment procedure. Figure-3: Using Custom script option for calling Import SQL Now, an SSA user can login to Self Service Portal and use the flow to provision a database that will also  populate the data using the post deployment step. Using Transportable tablespaces to populate databases Copy of all user/application tablespaces will enable this method of populating databases. These are the required steps to extend DBaaS using transportable tablespaces: Production DBA needs to create a backup of tablespaces. Datafiles may need conversion [such as from Big Endian to Little Endian or vice versa] based on the platform of production and destination where DBaaS created the test database. Here is sample backup script shows how to find out if any conversion is required, describes the steps required to convert datafiles and backup tablespace. SSA Administrator should copy the database (tablespaces) backup datafiles and export dumps to the backup location accessible from the hosts participating in the database zone(s). Create a post deployment SQL script and this script can either be uploaded into the software library by SSA Administrator or made available on a shared location accessible from servers where databases are likely to be provisioned. Here is sample post deployment SQL script using transportable tablespaces. Using DBCA, create a template for the production database – all the init.ora parameters should be included. NOTE: DO NOT choose to bring tablespace data into this template as they will be created SSA Administrator should customize “Create Database Deployment Procedure” and provide DBCA template created in the previous step. In the “Additional Configuration Options” step of the flow, provide the name of the SQL script in the Custom Script section and lock the input. Continue saving the deployment procedure. Now, an SSA user can login to Self Service Portal and use the flow to provision a database that will also populate the data using the post deployment step. More Information: Database-as-a-Service on Exadata Cloud Podcast on Database as a Service using Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Installation and Administration guide, Cloud Administration guide DBaaS Cookbook Screenwatch: Private Database Cloud: Set Up the Cloud Self-Service Portal Screenwatch: Private Database Cloud: Use the Cloud Self-Service Portal Stay Connected: Twitter |  Face book |  You Tube |  Linked in |  Newsletter

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  • A deadlock was detected while trying to lock variables in SSIS

    Error: 0xC001405C at SQL Log Status: A deadlock was detected while trying to lock variables "User::RowCount" for read/write access. A lock cannot be acquired after 16 attempts. The locks timed out. Have you ever considered variable locking when building your SSIS packages? I expect many people haven’t just because most of the time you never see an error like the one above. I’ll try and explain a few key concepts about variable locking and hopefully you never will see that error. First of all, what is all this variable locking all about? Put simply SSIS variables have to be locked before they can be accessed, and then of course unlocked once you have finished with them. This is baked into SSIS, presumably to reduce the risk of race conditions, but with that comes some additional overhead in that you need to be careful to avoid lock conflicts in some scenarios. The most obvious place you will come across any hint of locking (no pun intended) is the Script Task or Script Component with their ReadOnlyVariables and ReadWriteVariables properties. These two properties allow you to enter lists of variables to be used within the task, or to put it another way, these lists of variables to be locked, so that they are available within the task. During the task pre-execute phase the variables and locked, you then use them during the execute phase when you code is run, and then unlocked for you during the post-execute phase. So by entering the variable names in one of the two list, the locking is taken care of for you, and you just read and write to the Dts.Variables collection that is exposed in the task for the purpose. As you can see in the image above, the variable PackageInt is specified, which means when I write the code inside that task I don’t have to worry about locking at all, as shown below. public void Main() { // Set the variable value to something new Dts.Variables["PackageInt"].Value = 199; // Raise an event so we can play in the event handler bool fireAgain = true; Dts.Events.FireInformation(0, "Script Task Code", "This is the script task raising an event.", null, 0, ref fireAgain); Dts.TaskResult = (int)ScriptResults.Success; } As you can see as well as accessing the variable, hassle free, I also raise an event. Now consider a scenario where I have an event hander as well as shown below. Now what if my event handler uses tries to use the same variable as well? Well obviously for the point of this post, it fails with the error quoted previously. The reason why is clearly illustrated if you consider the following sequence of events. Package execution starts Script Task in Control Flow starts Script Task in Control Flow locks the PackageInt variable as specified in the ReadWriteVariables property Script Task in Control Flow executes script, and the On Information event is raised The On Information event handler starts Script Task in On Information event handler starts Script Task in On Information event handler attempts to lock the PackageInt variable (for either read or write it doesn’t matter), but will fail because the variable is already locked. The problem is caused by the event handler task trying to use a variable that is already locked by the task in Control Flow. Events are always raised synchronously, therefore the task in Control Flow that is raising the event will not regain control until the event handler has completed, so we really do have un-resolvable locking conflict, better known as a deadlock. In this scenario we can easily resolve the problem by managing the variable locking explicitly in code, so no need to specify anything for the ReadOnlyVariables and ReadWriteVariables properties. public void Main() { // Set the variable value to something new, with explicit lock control Variables lockedVariables = null; Dts.VariableDispenser.LockOneForWrite("PackageInt", ref lockedVariables); lockedVariables["PackageInt"].Value = 199; lockedVariables.Unlock(); // Raise an event so we can play in the event handler bool fireAgain = true; Dts.Events.FireInformation(0, "Script Task Code", "This is the script task raising an event.", null, 0, ref fireAgain); Dts.TaskResult = (int)ScriptResults.Success; } Now the package will execute successfully because the variable lock has already been released by the time the event is raised, so no conflict occurs. For those of you with a SQL Engine background this should all sound strangely familiar, and boils down to getting in and out as fast as you can to reduce the risk of lock contention, be that SQL pages or SSIS variables. Unfortunately we cannot always manage the locking ourselves. The Execute SQL Task is very often used in conjunction with variables, either to pass in parameter values or get results out. Either way the task will manage the locking for you, and will fail when it cannot lock the variables it requires. The scenario outlined above is clear cut deadlock scenario, both parties are waiting on each other, so it is un-resolvable. The mechanism used within SSIS isn’t actually that clever, and whilst the message says it is a deadlock, it really just means it tried a few times, and then gave up. The last part of the error message is actually the most accurate in terms of the failure, A lock cannot be acquired after 16 attempts. The locks timed out.  Now this may come across as a recommendation to always manage locking manually in the Script Task or Script Component yourself, but I think that would be an overreaction. It is more of a reminder to be aware that in high concurrency scenarios, especially when sharing variables across multiple objects, locking is important design consideration. Update – Make sure you don’t try and use explicit locking as well as leaving the variable names in the ReadOnlyVariables and ReadWriteVariables lock lists otherwise you’ll get the deadlock error, you cannot lock a variable twice!

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  • Synergy - easy share of keyboard and mouse between multiple computers

    Did you ever have the urge to share one set of keyboard and mouse between multiple machines? If so, please read on... Using multiple machines Honestly, as a software craftsman it is my daily business to run multiple machines - either physical or virtual - to be able to solve my customers' requirements. Recent hardware equipment allows this very easily. For laptops it's a no-brainer to attach a second or even a third screen in order to extend your native display. This works quite handy and in my case I used to attached two additional screens - one via HD15 connector, the other via HDMI. But... as it's a laptop and therefore a mobile unit there are slight restrictions. Detaching and re-attaching all cables when changing locations is one of them but hardware limitations, too. After all, it's a laptop and not a workstation. I guess, that anyone working in IT (or ICT) has more than one machine at their workplace or their home office and at least I find it quite annoying to have multiple sets of keyboard and mouse conquering my remaining space on my desk. Despite the ugly looks of all those cables and whatsoever 'chaos of distraction' I prefer a more clean solution and working environment. This allows me to actually focus on my work and tasks to do rather than to worry about choosing the right combination of keyboard/mouse. My current workplace is a patch work of various pieces of hardware (approx. 2-3 years): DIY desktop on Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit, Core2 Duo (E7400, 2.8GHz), 4GB RAM, 2x 250GB HDD, nVidia GPU 512MB Dell Inspiron 1525 on Windows 8 64-bit, 4GB RAM, 200GB HDD HP Compaq 6720s on Windows Vista 32-bit, Core2 Duo (T5670, 1.8GHz), 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD Mac mini on Mac OS X 10.7, Core i5 (2.3 GHz), 2GB RAM, 500GB HDD I know... Not the latest and greatest but a decent combination to work with. New system(s) is/are already on the shopping list but I live in the 'wrong' country to buy computer hardware. So, the next trip abroad will provide me with some new stuff. Using multiple operating systems The list of hardware above already names different operating systems, and actually I have only one preference: Linux. But still my job as a software craftsman for Visual FoxPro and .NET development requires other OSes, too. Not a big deal, it's just like this. Additionally to those physical machines, there are a bunch of virtual machines around. Most of them running either Windows XP or Windows 7. Since years I have the practice that each development for one customer is isolated into its own virtual machine and environment. This keeps it clean and version-safe. But as you can easily imagine with that setup there are a couple of constraints referring to keyboard and mouse. Usually, those systems require their own pieces of hardware attached. As stated, I don't like clutter on my desk's surface, so a cross-platform solution has to come in here. In the past, I tried it with various applications, hardware or network protocols like X11, RDP, NX, TeamViewer, RAdmin, KVM switch, etc. but the problem in this case is that they either allow you to remotely connect to the other system or exclusively 'bind' your peripherals to the active system. Not optimal after all. Synergy to the rescue Quote from their website: "Synergy lets you easily share your mouse and keyboard between multiple computers on your desk, and it's Free and Open Source. Just move your mouse off the edge of one computer's screen on to another. You can even share all of your clipboards. All you need is a network connection. Synergy is cross-platform (works on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux)." Yep, that's it! All I need for my setup here... Actually, I couldn't believe it myself that I didn't stumble over synergy earlier but 'Get over it' and there we go. And despite the fact that it is Open Source, no, it's also for free. Donations for the developers are very welcome and recently they introduced Synergy Premium. A possibility to buy so-called premium votes that can be used to put more weight / importance on specific issues or bugs that you would like the developers to look into. Installation and configuration Simply download the installation packages for your systems of choice, run the installer and enter some minor information about your network setup. I chose my desktop machine for the role of the Synergy server and configured my screen setup as follows: The screen setup allows you currently to build or connect up to 15 machines. The number of screens can be higher as those machine might have multiple screens physically attached. Synergy takes this into the overall calculations and simply works as expected. I tried it for fun with a second monitor each connected to both laptops to have a total number of 6 active screens. No flaws after all - stunning! All the other machines are configured as clients like so: Side note: The screenshot was taken on Windows 8 and pasted via clipboard into Gimp running on Ubuntu. Resume Synergy is now definitely in my box of tools for my daily work, and amongst the first pieces of software I install after the operating system. It just simplifies my life and cleans my desk. Never again without Synergy!Now, only waiting for an Android version to integrate my Galaxy Tab 10.1, too. ;-) Please, check out that superb product and enjoy sharing one keyboard, one mouse and one clipboard between your various machines and operating systems.

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  • Cloud Deployment Models

    - by B R Clouse
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE As the cloud paradigm grows in depth and breadth, more readers are approaching the topic for the first time, or from a new perspective.  This blog is a basic review of  cloud deployment models, to help orient newcomers and neophytes. Most cloud deployments today are either private or public. It is also possible to connect a private cloud and a public cloud to form a hybrid cloud. A private cloud is for the exclusive use of an organization. Enterprises, universities and government agencies throughout the world are using private clouds. Some have designed, built and now manage their private clouds. Others use a private cloud that was built by and is now managed by a provider, hosted either onsite or at the provider’s datacenter. Because private clouds are for exclusive use, they are usually the option chosen by organizations with concerns about data security and guaranteed performance. Public clouds are open to anyone with an Internet connection. Because they require no capital investment from their users, they are particularly attractive to companies with limited resources in less regulated environments and for temporary workloads such as development and test environments. Public clouds offer a range of products, from end-user software packages to more basic services such as databases or operating environments. Public clouds may also offer cloud services such as a disaster recovery for a private cloud, or the ability to “cloudburst” a temporary workload spike from a private cloud to a public cloud. These are examples of a hybrid cloud. These are most feasible when the private and public clouds are built with similar technologies. Usually people think of a public cloud in terms of a user role, e.g., “Which public cloud should I consider using?” But someone needs to own and manage that public cloud. The company who owns and operates a public cloud is known as a public cloud provider. Oracle Database Cloud Service, Amazon RDS, database.com and Savvis Symphony Database are examples of public cloud database services. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} When evaluating deployment models, be aware that you can use any or all of the available options. Some workloads may be best-suited for a private cloud, some for a public or hybrid cloud. And you might deploy multiple private clouds in your organization. If you are going to combine multiple clouds, then you want to make sure that each cloud is based on a consistent technology portfolio and architecture. This simplifies management and gives you the greatest flexibility in moving resources and workloads among your different clouds. Oracle’s portfolio of cloud products and services enables both deployment models. Oracle can manage either model. Universities, government agencies and companies in all types of business everywhere in the world are using clouds built with the Oracle portfolio. By employing a consistent portfolio, these customers are able to run all of their workloads – from test and development to the most mission-critical -- in a consistent manner: One Enterprise Cloud, powered by Oracle.   /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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  • Are there Negative Impact of opensource on commercial environment?

    - by Lostsoul
    I know this is not a good fit for Stack Overflow but wasn't sure if it was good for this site also so let me know if its not and I'll delete it. I love programming for fun but my role in my company is not technical. I have always loved the hacker culture and have been trying to drive that openness within my company from day one. My company has a very broad range of products and there are a few that are not strategic to us so I wanted to open source them (so we can focus on what makes us unique and open source the products that every firm has). Our industry does not open source(we would be the first firm to try this) and the feedback I'm getting from my management team is either 1) we'll destroy the industry or 2) all competitive commercial firms will unite against us and we'll be wiped out either way. I disagreed on both points because I think transparency will only grow our industry and our firm (think of McDonalds/KFC sharing their recipe openly, people may copy you, competitors may target you, but customers also may feel more comfortable buying your product. The value add, I believe, is in the delivery and experience not in hoarding the recipe). It's a big battle in my firm right now between the IT people who have seen the positive effects of sharing and the business people who think we'll be giving up everything (they prefer we sell parts we want to opensource, but in their defense this is standard when divesting something). Our industry is very secretive and I don't want to put anyone(even my competitors employees) out of a job yet I don't want to protect inefficient people by not being open with everyone. Yet I've seen so many amazing technologies created in interesting ways just by giving people freedom to take apart code and put it back together. I'm interested in hearing people's thoughts(doesn't have to be to my specific situation, I'm looking for the general lessons). Its a very stressful decision(but one I feel I must make) because if we go the open source route then there will be no going back. So what are your thoughts? Does open sourcing apply generally or is it only really applicable to software? Is it overall good for people in the industry and outside? I'm actually more interested in the negativeness effects(although positive are welcomed as well) Update: Long story short, although code is involved this is not so much about code as it is more about the idea of open sourcing. We are a mid sized quant hedge fund. We have some unique strategies but also have the standard long/short, arbitrage, global macro, etc.. funds. We are keeping the unique funds we have but the other stuff that everyone else has we are considering open sourcing (We have put in years of work & millions of dollars into. Our funds is pretty popular and our performance is either in first or second quartile so I suspect there will be interest but I don't know to what extent). The goal is not to get a community to work for us or anything, the goal is to let anyone who wants to tinker with it do so and create anything they want (it will not be part of our product line although I may unofficially allocate some our of staff's time to assist any community that grows). Although the code base is quite large, the value in this is the industry knowledge and approaches we have acquired (there are many books on artificial intelligence and quant trading but they are often years behind what's really going on as most firms forbid their staff from discussing what they are doing). We are also considering after we move our clients out to let the software still run and output the resulting portfolios for free as well so people can at least see the results(as long as we have avail. infrastructure). I think our main choices are, we can continue to fight for market share in a products that are becoming commoditized, we can shut the funds/products down(and keep the code but no one outside of our firm will ever learn from it) or we can open source it and let people do what they want. By open sourcing it, my idea is that the talent pool in the industry will grow because right now most of our hires have the same background (CFA, MBA, similar school, same experience,etc.. because we can't spend time training people so the industry 'standardizes' most people and thus the firms themselves start to look/act similar) but this may allow us to identify talent that has never been in the industry before (if we put a GPU license then as people learn from what we did, we can learn from what they do as well and maybe apply it to other areas of our firm). I see a lot of benefits but not many negatives while my peers at the company see the opposite.

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  • Use IIS Application Initialization for keeping ASP.NET Apps alive

    - by Rick Strahl
    I've been working quite a bit with Windows Services in the recent months, and well, it turns out that Windows Services are quite a bear to debug, deploy, update and maintain. The process of getting services set up,  debugged and updated is a major chore that has to be extensively documented and or automated specifically. On most projects when a service is built, people end up scrambling for the right 'process' to use for administration. Web app deployment and maintenance on the other hand are common and well understood today, as we are constantly dealing with Web apps. There's plenty of infrastructure and tooling built into Web Tools like Visual Studio to facilitate the process. By comparison Windows Services or anything self-hosted for that matter seems convoluted.In fact, in a recent blog post I mentioned that on a recent project I'd been using self-hosting for SignalR inside of a Windows service, because the application is in fact a 'service' that also needs to send out lots of messages via SignalR. But the reality is that it could just as well be an IIS application with a service component that runs in the background. Either way you look at it, it's either a Windows Service with a built in Web Server, or an IIS application running a Service application, neither of which follows the standard Service or Web App template.Personally I much prefer Web applications. Running inside of IIS I get all the benefits of the IIS platform including service lifetime management (crash and restart), controlled shutdowns, the whole security infrastructure including easy certificate support, hot-swapping of code and the the ability to publish directly to IIS from within Visual Studio with ease.Because of these benefits we set out to move from the self hosted service into an ASP.NET Web app instead.The Missing Link for ASP.NET as a Service: Auto-LoadingI've had moments in the past where I wanted to run a 'service like' application in ASP.NET because when you think about it, it's so much easier to control a Web application remotely. Services are locked into start/stop operations, but if you host inside of a Web app you can write your own ticket and control it from anywhere. In fact nearly 10 years ago I built a background scheduling application that ran inside of ASP.NET and it worked great and it's still running doing its job today.The tricky part for running an app as a service inside of IIS then and now, is how to get IIS and ASP.NET launched so your 'service' stays alive even after an Application Pool reset. 7 years ago I faked it by using a web monitor (my own West Wind Web Monitor app) I was running anyway to monitor my various web sites for uptime, and having the monitor ping my 'service' every 20 seconds to effectively keep ASP.NET alive or fire it back up after a reload. I used a simple scheduler class that also includes some logic for 'self-reloading'. Hacky for sure, but it worked reliably.Luckily today it's much easier and more integrated to get IIS to launch ASP.NET as soon as an Application Pool is started by using the Application Initialization Module. The Application Initialization Module basically allows you to turn on Preloading on the Application Pool and the Site/IIS App, which essentially fires a request through the IIS pipeline as soon as the Application Pool has been launched. This means that effectively your ASP.NET app becomes active immediately, Application_Start is fired making sure your app stays up and running at all times. All the other features like Application Pool recycling and auto-shutdown after idle time still work, but IIS will then always immediately re-launch the application.Getting started with Application InitializationAs of IIS 8 Application Initialization is part of the IIS feature set. For IIS 7 and 7.5 there's a separate download available via Web Platform Installer. Using IIS 8 Application Initialization is an optional install component in Windows or the Windows Server Role Manager: This is an optional component so make sure you explicitly select it.IIS Configuration for Application InitializationInitialization needs to be applied on the Application Pool as well as the IIS Application level. As of IIS 8 these settings can be made through the IIS Administration console.Start with the Application Pool:Here you need to set both the Start Automatically which is always set, and the StartMode which should be set to AlwaysRunning. Both have to be set - the Start Automatically flag is set true by default and controls the starting of the application pool itself while Always Running flag is required in order to launch the application. Without the latter flag set the site settings have no effect.Now on the Site/Application level you can specify whether the site should pre load: Set the Preload Enabled flag to true.At this point ASP.NET apps should auto-load. This is all that's needed to pre-load the site if all you want is to get your site launched automatically.If you want a little more control over the load process you can add a few more settings to your web.config file that allow you to show a static page while the App is starting up. This can be useful if startup is really slow, so rather than displaying blank screen while the user is fiddling their thumbs you can display a static HTML page instead: <system.webServer> <applicationInitialization remapManagedRequestsTo="Startup.htm" skipManagedModules="true"> <add initializationPage="ping.ashx" /> </applicationInitialization> </system.webServer>This allows you to specify a page to execute in a dry run. IIS basically fakes request and pushes it directly into the IIS pipeline without hitting the network. You specify a page and IIS will fake a request to that page in this case ping.ashx which just returns a simple OK string - ie. a fast pipeline request. This request is run immediately after Application Pool restart, and while this request is running and your app is warming up, IIS can display an alternate static page - Startup.htm above. So instead of showing users an empty loading page when clicking a link on your site you can optionally show some sort of static status page that says, "we'll be right back".  I'm not sure if that's such a brilliant idea since this can be pretty disruptive in some cases. Personally I think I prefer letting people wait, but at least get the response they were supposed to get back rather than a random page. But it's there if you need it.Note that the web.config stuff is optional. If you don't provide it IIS hits the default site link (/) and even if there's no matching request at the end of that request it'll still fire the request through the IIS pipeline. Ideally though you want to make sure that an ASP.NET endpoint is hit either with your default page, or by specify the initializationPage to ensure ASP.NET actually gets hit since it's possible for IIS fire unmanaged requests only for static pages (depending how your pipeline is configured).What about AppDomain Restarts?In addition to full Worker Process recycles at the IIS level, ASP.NET also has to deal with AppDomain shutdowns which can occur for a variety of reasons:Files are updated in the BIN folderWeb Deploy to your siteweb.config is changedHard application crashThese operations don't cause the worker process to restart, but they do cause ASP.NET to unload the current AppDomain and start up a new one. Because the features above only apply to Application Pool restarts, AppDomain restarts could also cause your 'ASP.NET service' to stop processing in the background.In order to keep the app running on AppDomain recycles, you can resort to a simple ping in the Application_End event:protected void Application_End() { var client = new WebClient(); var url = App.AdminConfiguration.MonitorHostUrl + "ping.aspx"; client.DownloadString(url); Trace.WriteLine("Application Shut Down Ping: " + url); }which fires any ASP.NET url to the current site at the very end of the pipeline shutdown which in turn ensures that the site immediately starts back up.Manual Configuration in ApplicationHost.configThe above UI corresponds to the following ApplicationHost.config settings. If you're using IIS 7, there's no UI for these flags so you'll have to manually edit them.When you install the Application Initialization component into IIS it should auto-configure the module into ApplicationHost.config. Unfortunately for me, with Mr. Murphy in his best form for me, the module registration did not occur and I had to manually add it.<globalModules> <add name="ApplicationInitializationModule" image="%windir%\System32\inetsrv\warmup.dll" /> </globalModules>Most likely you won't need ever need to add this, but if things are not working it's worth to check if the module is actually registered.Next you need to configure the ApplicationPool and the Web site. The following are the two relevant entries in ApplicationHost.config.<system.applicationHost> <applicationPools> <add name="West Wind West Wind Web Connection" autoStart="true" startMode="AlwaysRunning" managedRuntimeVersion="v4.0" managedPipelineMode="Integrated"> <processModel identityType="LocalSystem" setProfileEnvironment="true" /> </add> </applicationPools> <sites> <site name="Default Web Site" id="1"> <application path="/MPress.Workflow.WebQueueMessageManager" applicationPool="West Wind West Wind Web Connection" preloadEnabled="true"> <virtualDirectory path="/" physicalPath="C:\Clients\…" /> </application> </site> </sites> </system.applicationHost>On the Application Pool make sure to set the autoStart and startMode flags to true and AlwaysRunning respectively. On the site make sure to set the preloadEnabled flag to true.And that's all you should need. You can still set the web.config settings described above as well.ASP.NET as a Service?In the particular application I'm working on currently, we have a queue manager that runs as standalone service that polls a database queue and picks out jobs and processes them on several threads. The service can spin up any number of threads and keep these threads alive in the background while IIS is running doing its own thing. These threads are newly created threads, so they sit completely outside of the IIS thread pool. In order for this service to work all it needs is a long running reference that keeps it alive for the life time of the application.In this particular app there are two components that run in the background on their own threads: A scheduler that runs various scheduled tasks and handles things like picking up emails to send out outside of IIS's scope and the QueueManager. Here's what this looks like in global.asax:public class Global : System.Web.HttpApplication { private static ApplicationScheduler scheduler; private static ServiceLauncher launcher; protected void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e) { // Pings the service and ensures it stays alive scheduler = new ApplicationScheduler() { CheckFrequency = 600000 }; scheduler.Start(); launcher = new ServiceLauncher(); launcher.Start(); // register so shutdown is controlled HostingEnvironment.RegisterObject(launcher); }}By keeping these objects around as static instances that are set only once on startup, they survive the lifetime of the application. The code in these classes is essentially unchanged from the Windows Service code except that I could remove the various overrides required for the Windows Service interface (OnStart,OnStop,OnResume etc.). Otherwise the behavior and operation is very similar.In this application ASP.NET serves two purposes: It acts as the host for SignalR and provides the administration interface which allows remote management of the 'service'. I can start and stop the service remotely by shutting down the ApplicationScheduler very easily. I can also very easily feed stats from the queue out directly via a couple of Web requests or (as we do now) through the SignalR service.Registering a Background Object with ASP.NETNotice also the use of the HostingEnvironment.RegisterObject(). This function registers an object with ASP.NET to let it know that it's a background task that should be notified if the AppDomain shuts down. RegisterObject() requires an interface with a Stop() method that's fired and allows your code to respond to a shutdown request. Here's what the IRegisteredObject::Stop() method looks like on the launcher:public void Stop(bool immediate = false) { LogManager.Current.LogInfo("QueueManager Controller Stopped."); Controller.StopProcessing(); Controller.Dispose(); Thread.Sleep(1500); // give background threads some time HostingEnvironment.UnregisterObject(this); }Implementing IRegisterObject should help with reliability on AppDomain shutdowns. Thanks to Justin Van Patten for pointing this out to me on Twitter.RegisterObject() is not required but I would highly recommend implementing it on whatever object controls your background processing to all clean shutdowns when the AppDomain shuts down.Testing it outI'm still in the testing phase with this particular service to see if there are any side effects. But so far it doesn't look like it. With about 50 lines of code I was able to replace the Windows service startup to Web start up - everything else just worked as is. An honorable mention goes to SignalR 2.0's oWin hosting, because with the new oWin based hosting no code changes at all were required, merely a couple of configuration file settings and an assembly directive needed, to point at the SignalR startup class. Sweet!It also seems like SignalR is noticeably faster running inside of IIS compared to self-host. Startup feels faster because of the preload.Starting and Stopping the 'Service'Because the application is running as a Web Server, it's easy to have a Web interface for starting and stopping the services running inside of the service. For our queue manager the SignalR service and front monitoring app has a play and stop button for toggling the queue.If you want more administrative control and have it work more like a Windows Service you can also stop the application pool explicitly from the command line which would be equivalent to stopping and restarting a service.To start and stop from the command line you can use the IIS appCmd tool. To stop:> %windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd stop apppool /apppool.name:"Weblog"and to start> %windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd start apppool /apppool.name:"Weblog"Note that when you explicitly force the AppPool to stop running either in the UI (on the ApplicationPools page use Start/Stop) or via command line tools, the application pool will not auto-restart immediately. You have to manually start it back up.What's not to like?There are certainly a lot of benefits to running a background service in IIS, but… ASP.NET applications do have more overhead in terms of memory footprint and startup time is a little slower, but generally for server applications this is not a big deal. If the application is stable the service should fire up and stay running indefinitely. A lot of times this kind of service interface can simply be attached to an existing Web application, or if scalability requires be offloaded to its own Web server.Easier to work withBut the ultimate benefit here is that it's much easier to work with a Web app as opposed to a service. While developing I can simply turn off the auto-launch features and launch the service on demand through IIS simply by hitting a page on the site. If I want to shut down an IISRESET -stop will shut down the service easily enough. I can then attach a debugger anywhere I want and this works like any other ASP.NET application. Yes you end up on a background thread for debugging but Visual Studio handles that just fine and if you stay on a single thread this is no different than debugging any other code.SummaryUsing ASP.NET to run background service operations is probably not a super common scenario, but it probably should be something that is considered carefully when building services. Many applications have service like features and with the auto-start functionality of the Application Initialization module, it's easy to build this functionality into ASP.NET. Especially when combined with the notification features of SignalR it becomes very, very easy to create rich services that can also communicate their status easily to the outside world.Whether it's existing applications that need some background processing for scheduling related tasks, or whether you just create a separate site altogether just to host your service it's easy to do and you can leverage the same tool chain you're already using for other Web projects. If you have lots of service projects it's worth considering… give it some thought…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2013Posted in ASP.NET  SignalR  IIS   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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  • Oracle Data Integrator 11.1.1.5 Complex Files as Sources and Targets

    - by Alex Kotopoulis
    Overview ODI 11.1.1.5 adds the new Complex File technology for use with file sources and targets. The goal is to read or write file structures that are too complex to be parsed using the existing ODI File technology. This includes: Different record types in one list that use different parsing rules Hierarchical lists, for example customers with nested orders Parsing instructions in the file data, such as delimiter types, field lengths, type identifiers Complex headers such as multiple header lines or parseable information in header Skipping of lines  Conditional or choice fields Similar to the ODI File and XML File technologies, the complex file parsing is done through a JDBC driver that exposes the flat file as relational table structures. Complex files are mapped to one or more table structures, as opposed to the (simple) file technology, which always has a one-to-one relationship between file and table. The resulting set of tables follows the same concept as the ODI XML driver, table rows have additional PK-FK relationships to express hierarchy as well as order values to maintain the file order in the resulting table.   The parsing instruction format used for complex files is the nXSD (native XSD) format that is already in use with Oracle BPEL. This format extends the XML Schema standard by adding additional parsing instructions to each element. Using nXSD parsing technology, the native file is converted into an internal XML format. It is important to understand that the XML is streamed to improve performance; there is no size limitation of the native file based on memory size, the XML data is never fully materialized.  The internal XML is then converted to relational schema using the same mapping rules as the ODI XML driver. How to Create an nXSD file Complex file models depend on the nXSD schema for the given file. This nXSD file has to be created using a text editor or the Native Format Builder Wizard that is part of Oracle BPEL. BPEL is included in the ODI Suite, but not in standalone ODI Enterprise Edition. The nXSD format extends the standard XSD format through nxsd attributes. NXSD is a valid XML Schema, since the XSD standard allows extra attributes with their own namespaces. The following is a sample NXSD schema: <?xml version="1.0"?> <xsd:schema xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:nxsd="http://xmlns.oracle.com/pcbpel/nxsd" elementFormDefault="qualified" xmlns:tns="http://xmlns.oracle.com/pcbpel/demoSchema/csv" targetNamespace="http://xmlns.oracle.com/pcbpel/demoSchema/csv" attributeFormDefault="unqualified" nxsd:encoding="US-ASCII" nxsd:stream="chars" nxsd:version="NXSD"> <xsd:element name="Root">         <xsd:complexType><xsd:sequence>       <xsd:element name="Header">                 <xsd:complexType><xsd:sequence>                         <xsd:element name="Branch" type="xsd:string" nxsd:style="terminated" nxsd:terminatedBy=","/>                         <xsd:element name="ListDate" type="xsd:string" nxsd:style="terminated" nxsd:terminatedBy="${eol}"/>                         </xsd:sequence></xsd:complexType>                         </xsd:element>                 </xsd:sequence></xsd:complexType>         <xsd:element name="Customer" maxOccurs="unbounded">                 <xsd:complexType><xsd:sequence>                 <xsd:element name="Name" type="xsd:string" nxsd:style="terminated" nxsd:terminatedBy=","/>                         <xsd:element name="Street" type="xsd:string" nxsd:style="terminated" nxsd:terminatedBy="," />                         <xsd:element name="City" type="xsd:string" nxsd:style="terminated" nxsd:terminatedBy="${eol}" />                         </xsd:sequence></xsd:complexType>                         </xsd:element>                 </xsd:sequence></xsd:complexType> </xsd:element> </xsd:schema> The nXSD schema annotates elements to describe their position and delimiters within the flat text file. The schema above uses almost exclusively the nxsd:terminatedBy instruction to look for the next terminator chars. There are various constructs in nXSD to parse fixed length fields, look ahead in the document for string occurences, perform conditional logic, use variables to remember state, and many more. nXSD files can either be written manually using an XML Schema Editor or created using the Native Format Builder Wizard. Both Native Format Builder Wizard as well as the nXSD language are described in the Application Server Adapter Users Guide. The way to start the Native Format Builder in BPEL is to create a new File Adapter; in step 8 of the Adapter Configuration Wizard a new Schema for Native Format can be created:   The Native Format Builder guides through a number of steps to generate the nXSD based on a sample native file. If the format is complex, it is often a good idea to “approximate” it with a similar simple format and then add the complex components manually.  The resulting *.xsd file can be copied and used as the format for ODI, other BPEL constructs such as the file adapter definition are not relevant for ODI. Using this technique it is also possible to parse the same file format in SOA Suite and ODI, for example using SOA for small real-time messages, and ODI for large batches. This nXSD schema in this example describes a file with a header row containing data and 3 string fields per row delimited by commas, for example: Redwood City Downtown Branch, 06/01/2011 Ebeneezer Scrooge, Sandy Lane, Atherton Tiny Tim, Winton Terrace, Menlo Park The ODI Complex File JDBC driver exposes the file structure through a set of relational tables with PK-FK relationships. The tables for this example are: Table ROOT (1 row): ROOTPK Primary Key for root element SNPSFILENAME Name of the file SNPSFILEPATH Path of the file SNPSLOADDATE Date of load Table HEADER (1 row): ROOTFK Foreign Key to ROOT record ROWORDER Order of row in native document BRANCH Data BRANCHORDER Order of Branch within row LISTDATE Data LISTDATEORDER Order of ListDate within row Table ADDRESS (2 rows): ROOTFK Foreign Key to ROOT record ROWORDER Order of row in native document NAME Data NAMEORDER Oder of Name within row STREET Data STREETORDER Order of Street within row CITY Data CITYORDER Order of City within row Every table has PK and/or FK fields to reflect the document hierarchy through relationships. In this example this is trivial since the HEADER and all CUSTOMER records point back to the PK of ROOT. Deeper nested documents require this to identify parent elements. All tables also have a ROWORDER field to define the order of rows, as well as order fields for each column, in case the order of columns varies in the original document and needs to be maintained. If order is not relevant, these fields can be ignored. How to Create an Complex File Data Server in ODI After creating the nXSD file and a test data file, and storing it on the local file system accessible to ODI, you can go to the ODI Topology Navigator to create a Data Server and Physical Schema under the Complex File technology. This technology follows the conventions of other ODI technologies and is very similar to the XML technology. The parsing settings such as the source native file, the nXSD schema file, the root element, as well as the external database can be set in the JDBC URL: The use of an external database defined by dbprops is optional, but is strongly recommended for production use. Ideally, the staging database should be used for this. Also, when using a complex file exclusively for read purposes, it is recommended to use the ro=true property to ensure the file is not unnecessarily synchronized back from the database when the connection is closed. A data file is always required to be present  at the filename path during design-time. Without this file, operations like testing the connection, reading the model data, or reverse engineering the model will fail.  All properties of the Complex File JDBC Driver are documented in the Oracle Fusion Middleware Connectivity and Knowledge Modules Guide for Oracle Data Integrator in Appendix C: Oracle Data Integrator Driver for Complex Files Reference. David Allan has created a great viewlet Complex File Processing - 0 to 60 which shows the creation of a Complex File data server as well as a model based on this server. How to Create Models based on an Complex File Schema Once physical schema and logical schema have been created, the Complex File can be used to create a Model as if it were based on a database. When reverse-engineering the Model, data stores(tables) for each XSD element of complex type will be created. Use of complex files as sources is straightforward; when using them as targets it has to be made sure that all dependent tables have matching PK-FK pairs; the same applies to the XML driver as well. Debugging and Error Handling There are different ways to test an nXSD file. The Native Format Builder Wizard can be used even if the nXSD wasn’t created in it; it will show issues related to the schema and/or test data. In ODI, the nXSD  will be parsed and run against the existing test XML file when testing a connection in the Dataserver. If either the nXSD has an error or the data is non-compliant to the schema, an error will be displayed. Sample error message: Error while reading native data. [Line=1, Col=5] Not enough data available in the input, when trying to read data of length "19" for "element with name D1" from the specified position, using "style" as "fixedLength" and "length" as "". Ensure that there is enough data from the specified position in the input. Complex File FAQ Is the size of the native file limited by available memory? No, since the native data is streamed through the driver, only the available space in the staging database limits the size of the data. There are limits on individual field sizes, though; a single large object field needs to fit in memory. Should I always use the complex file driver instead of the file driver in ODI now? No, use the file technology for all simple file parsing tasks, for example any fixed-length or delimited files that just have one row format and can be mapped into a simple table. Because of its narrow assumptions the ODI file driver is easy to configure within ODI and can stream file data without writing it into a database. The complex file driver should be used whenever the use case cannot be handled through the file driver. Are we generating XML out of flat files before we write it into a database? We don’t materialize any XML as part of parsing a flat file, either in memory or on disk. The data produced by the XML parser is streamed in Java objects that just use XSD-derived nXSD schema as its type system. We use the nXSD schema because is the standard for describing complex flat file metadata in Oracle Fusion Middleware, and enables users to share schemas across products. Is the nXSD file interchangeable with SOA Suite? Yes, ODI can use the same nXSD files as SOA Suite, allowing mixed use cases with the same data format. Can I start the Native Format Builder from the ODI Studio? No, the Native Format Builder has to be started from a JDeveloper with BPEL instance. You can get BPEL as part of the SOA Suite bundle. Users without SOA Suite can manually develop nXSD files using XSD editors. When is the database data written back to the native file? Data is synchronized using the SYNCHRONIZE and CREATE FILE commands, and when the JDBC connection is closed. It is recommended to set the ro or read_only property to true when a file is exclusively used for reading so that no unnecessary write-backs occur. Is the nXSD metadata part of the ODI Master or Work Repository? No, the data server definition in the master repository only contains the JDBC URL with file paths; the nXSD files have to be accessible on the file systems where the JDBC driver is executed during production, either by copying or by using a network file system. Where can I find sample nXSD files? The Application Server Adapter Users Guide contains nXSD samples for various different use cases.

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  • Overview of SOA Diagnostics in 11.1.1.6

    - by ShawnBailey
    What tools are available for diagnosing SOA Suite issues? There are a variety of tools available to help you and Support diagnose SOA Suite issues in 11g but it can be confusing as to which tool is appropriate for a particular situation and what their relationships are. This blog post will introduce the various tools and attempt to clarify what each is for and how they are related. Let's first list the tools we'll be addressing: RDA: Remote Diagnostic Agent DFW: Diagnostic Framework Selective Tracing DMS: Dynamic Monitoring Service ODL: Oracle Diagnostic Logging ADR: Automatic Diagnostics Repository ADRCI: Automatic Diagnostics Repository Command Interpreter WLDF: WebLogic Diagnostic Framework This overview is not mean to be a comprehensive guide on using all of these tools, however, extensive reference materials are included that will provide many more details on their execution. Another point to note is that all of these tools are applicable for Fusion Middleware as a whole but specific products may or may not have implemented features to leverage them. A couple of the tools have a WebLogic Scripting Tool or 'WLST' interface. WLST is a command interface for executing pre-built functions and custom scripts against a domain. A detailed WLST tutorial is beyond the scope of this post but you can find general information here. There are more specific resources in the below sections. In this post when we refer to 'Enterprise Manager' or 'EM' we are referring to Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control. RDA (Remote Diagnostic Agent) RDA is a standalone tool that is used to collect both static configuration and dynamic runtime information from the SOA environment. RDA is generally run manually from the command line against a domain or single server. When opening a new Service Request, including an RDA collection can dramatically decrease the back and forth required to collect logs and configuration information for Support. After installing RDA you configure it to use the SOA Suite module as decribed in the referenced resources. The SOA module includes the Oracle WebLogic Server (WLS) module by default in order to include all of the relevant information for the environment. In addition to this basic configuration there is also an advanced mode where you can set the number of thread dumps for the collections, log files, Incidents, etc. When would you use it? When creating a Service Request or otherwise working with Oracle resources on an issue, capturing environment snapshots to baseline your configuration or to diagnose an issue on your own. How is it related to the other tools? RDA is related to DFW in that it collects the last 10 Incidents from the server by default. In a similar manner, RDA is related to ODL through its collection of the diagnostic logs and these may contain information from Selective Tracing sessions. Examples of what it currently collects: (for details please see the links in the Resources section) Diagnostic Logs (ODL) Diagnostic Framework Incidents (DFW) SOA MDS Deployment Descriptors SOA Repository Summary Statistics Thread Dumps Complete Domain Configuration RDA Resources: Webcast Recording: Using RDA with Oracle SOA Suite 11g Blog Post: Diagnose SOA Suite 11g Issues Using RDA Download RDA How to Collect Analysis Information Using RDA for Oracle SOA Suite 11g Products [ID 1350313.1] How to Collect Analysis Information Using RDA for Oracle SOA Suite and BPEL Process Manager 11g [ID 1352181.1] Getting Started With Remote Diagnostic Agent: Case Study - Oracle WebLogic Server (Video) [ID 1262157.1] top DFW (Diagnostic Framework) DFW provides the ability to collect specific information for a particular problem when that problem occurs. DFW is included with your SOA Suite installation and deployed to the domain. Let's define the components of DFW. Diagnostic Dumps: Specific diagnostic collections that are defined at either the 'system' or product level. Examples would be diagnostic logs or thread dumps. Incident: A collection of Diagnostic Dumps associated with a particular problem Log Conditions: An Oracle Diagnostic Logging event that DFW is configured to listen for. If the event is identified then an Incident will be created. WLDF Watch: The WebLogic Diagnostic Framework or 'WLDF' is not a component of DFW, however, it can be a source of DFW Incident creation through the use of a 'Watch'. WLDF Notification: A Notification is a component of WLDF and is the link between the Watch and DFW. You can configure multiple Notification types in WLDF and associate them with your Watches. 'FMWDFW-notification' is available to you out of the box to allow for DFW notification of Watch execution. Rule: Defines a WLDF Watch or Log Condition for which we want to associate a set of Diagnostic Dumps. When triggered the specified dumps will be collected and added to the Incident Rule Action: Defines the specific Diagnostic Dumps to collect for a particular rule ADR: Automatic Diagnostics Repository; Defined for every server in a domain. This is where Incidents are stored Now let's walk through a simple flow: Oracle Web Services error message OWS-04086 (SOAP Fault) is generated on managed server 1 DFW Log Condition for OWS-04086 evaluates to TRUE DFW creates a new Incident in the ADR for managed server 1 DFW executes the specified Diagnostic Dumps and adds the output to the Incident In this case we'll grab the diagnostic log and thread dump. We might also want to collect the WSDL binding information and SOA audit trail When would you use it? When you want to automatically collect Diagnostic Dumps at a particular time using a trigger or when you want to manually collect the information. In either case it can be readily uploaded to Oracle Support through the Service Request. How is it related to the other tools? DFW generates Incidents which are collections of Diagnostic Dumps. One of the system level Diagonstic Dumps collects the current server diagnostic log which is generated by ODL and can contain information from Selective Tracing sessions. Incidents are included in RDA collections by default and ADRCI is a tool that is used to package an Incident for upload to Oracle Support. In addition, both ODL and DMS can be used to trigger Incident creation through DFW. The conditions and rules for generating Incidents can become quite complicated and the below resources go into more detail. A simpler approach to leveraging at least the Diagnostic Dumps is through WLST (WebLogic Scripting Tool) where there are commands to do the following: Create an Incident Execute a single Diagnostic Dump Describe a Diagnostic Dump List the available Diagnostic Dumps The WLST option offers greater control in what is generated and when. It can be a great help when collecting information for Support. There are overlaps with RDA, however, DFW is geared towards collecting specific runtime information when an issue occurs while existing Incidents are collected by RDA. There are 3 WLDF Watches configured by default in a SOA Suite 11g domain: Stuck Threads, Unchecked Exception and Deadlock. These Watches are enabled by default and will generate Incidents in ADR. They are configured to reset automatically after 30 seconds so they have the potential to create multiple Incidents if these conditions are consistent. The Incidents generated by these Watches will only contain System level Diagnostic Dumps. These same System level Diagnostic Dumps will be included in any application scoped Incident as well. Starting in 11.1.1.6, SOA Suite is including its own set of application scoped Diagnostic Dumps that can be executed from WLST or through a WLDF Watch or Log Condition. These Diagnostic Dumps can be added to an Incident such as in the earlier example using the error code OWS-04086. soa.config: MDS configuration files and deployed-composites.xml soa.composite: All artifacts related to the deployed composite soa.wsdl: Summary of endpoints configured for the composite soa.edn: EDN configuration summary if applicable soa.db: Summary DB information for the SOA repository soa.env: Coherence cluster configuration summary soa.composite.trail: Partial audit trail information for the running composite The current release of RDA has the option to collect the soa.wsdl and soa.composite Diagnostic Dumps. More Diagnostic Dumps for SOA Suite products are planned for future releases along with enhancements to DFW itself. DFW Resources: Webcast Recording: SOA Diagnostics Sessions: Diagnostic Framework Diagnostic Framework Documentation DFW WLST Command Reference Documentation for SOA Diagnostic Dumps in 11.1.1.6 top Selective Tracing Selective Tracing is a facility available starting in version 11.1.1.4 that allows you to increase the logging level for specific loggers and for a specific context. What this means is that you have greater capability to collect needed diagnostic log information in a production environment with reduced overhead. For example, a Selective Tracing session can be executed that only increases the log level for one composite, only one logger, limited to one server in the cluster and for a preset period of time. In an environment where dozens of composites are deployed this can dramatically reduce the volume and overhead of the logging without sacrificing relevance. Selective Tracing can be administered either from Enterprise Manager or through WLST. WLST provides a bit more flexibility in terms of exactly where the tracing is run. When would you use it? When there is an issue in production or another environment that lends itself to filtering by an available context criteria and increasing the log level globally results in too much overhead or irrelevant information. The information is written to the server diagnostic log and is exportable from Enterprise Manager How is it related to the other tools? Selective Tracing output is written to the server diagnostic log. This log can be collected by a system level Diagnostic Dump using DFW or through a default RDA collection. Selective Tracing also heavily leverages ODL fields to determine what to trace and to tag information that is part of a particular tracing session. Available Context Criteria: Application Name Client Address Client Host Composite Name User Name Web Service Name Web Service Port Selective Tracing Resources: Webcast Recording: SOA Diagnostics Session: Using Selective Tracing to Diagnose SOA Suite Issues How to Use Selective Tracing for SOA [ID 1367174.1] Selective Tracing WLST Reference top DMS (Dynamic Monitoring Service) DMS exposes runtime information for monitoring. This information can be monitored in two ways: Through the DMS servlet As exposed MBeans The servlet is deployed by default and can be accessed through http://<host>:<port>/dms/Spy (use administrative credentials to access). The landing page of the servlet shows identical columns of what are known as Noun Types. If you select a Noun Type you will see a table in the right frame that shows the attributes (Sensors) for the Noun Type and the available instances. SOA Suite has several exposed Noun Types that are available for viewing through the Spy servlet. Screenshots of the Spy servlet are available in the Knowledge Base article How to Monitor Runtime SOA Performance With the Dynamic Monitoring Service (DMS). Every Noun instance in the runtime is exposed as an MBean instance. As such they are generally available through an MBean browser and available for monitoring through WLDF. You can configure a WLDF Watch to monitor a particular attribute and fire a notification when the threshold is exceeded. A WLDF Watch can use the out of the box DFW notification type to notify DFW to create an Incident. When would you use it? When you want to monitor a metric or set of metrics either manually or through an automated system. When you want to trigger a WLDF Watch based on a metric exposed through DMS. How is it related to the other tools? DMS metrics can be monitored with WLDF Watches which can in turn notify DFW to create an Incident. DMS Resources: How to Monitor Runtime SOA Performance With the Dynamic Monitoring Service (DMS) [ID 1368291.1] How to Reset a SOA 11g DMS Metric DMS Documentation top ODL (Oracle Diagnostic Logging) ODL is the primary facility for most Fusion Middleware applications to log what they are doing. Whenever you change a logging level through Enterprise Manager it is ultimately exposed through ODL and written to the server diagnostic log. A notable exception to this is WebLogic Server which uses its own log format / file. ODL logs entries in a consistent, structured way using predefined fields and name/value pairs. Here's an example of a SOA Suite entry: [2012-04-25T12:49:28.083-06:00] [AdminServer] [ERROR] [] [oracle.soa.bpel.engine] [tid: [ACTIVE].ExecuteThread: '1' for queue: 'weblogic.kernel.Default (self-tuning)'] [userId: ] [ecid: 0963fdde7e77631c:-31a6431d:136eaa46cda:-8000-00000000000000b4,0] [errid: 41] [WEBSERVICE_PORT.name: BPELProcess2_pt] [APP: soa-infra] [composite_name: TestProject2] [J2EE_MODULE.name: fabric] [WEBSERVICE.name: bpelprocess1_client_ep] [J2EE_APP.name: soa-infra] Error occured while handling a post operation[[ When would you use it? You'll use ODL almost every time you want to identify and diagnose a problem in the environment. The entries are written to the server diagnostic log. How is it related to the other tools? The server diagnostic logs are collected by DFW and RDA. Selective Tracing writes its information to the diagnostic log as well. Additionally, DFW log conditions are triggered by ODL log events. ODL Resources: ODL Documentation top ADR (Automatic Diagnostics Repository) ADR is not a tool in and of itself but is where DFW stores the Incidents it creates. Every server in the domain has an ADR location which can be found under <SERVER_HOME>/adr. This is referred to the as the ADR 'Base' location. ADR also has what are known as 'Home' locations. Example: You have a domain called 'myDomain' and an associated managed server called 'myServer'. Your admin server is called 'AdminServer'. Your domain home directory is called 'myDomain' and it contains a 'servers' directory. The 'servers' directory contains a directory for the managed server called 'myServer' and here is where you'll find the 'adr' directory which is the ADR 'Base' location for myServer. To get to the ADR 'Home' locations we drill through a few levels: diag/ofm/myDomain/ In an 11.1.1.6 SOA Suite domain you will see 2 directories here, 'myServer' and 'soa-infra'. These are the ADR 'Home' locations. 'myServer' is the 'system' ADR home and contains system level Incidents. 'soa-infra' is the name that SOA Suite used to register with DFW and this ADR home contains SOA Suite related Incidents Each ADR home location contains a series of directories, one of which is called 'incident'. This is where your Incidents are stored. When would you use it? It's a good idea to check on these locations from time to time to see whether a lot of Incidents are being generated. They can be cleaned out by deleting the Incident directories or through the ADRCI tool. If you know that an Incident is of particular interest for an issue you're working with Oracle you can simply zip it up and provide it. How does it relate to the other tools? ADR is obviously very important for DFW since it's where the Incidents are stored. Incidents contain Diagnostic Dumps that may relate to diagnostic logs (ODL) and DMS metrics. The most recent 10 Incident directories are collected by RDA by default and ADRCI relies on the ADR locations to help manage the contents. top ADRCI (Automatic Diagnostics Repository Command Interpreter) ADRCI is a command line tool for packaging and managing Incidents. When would you use it? When purging Incidents from an ADR Home location or when you want to package an Incident along with an offline RDA collection for upload to Oracle Support. How does it relate to the other tools? ADRCI contains a tool called the Incident Packaging System or IPS. This is used to package an Incident for upload to Oracle Support through a Service Request. Starting in 11.1.1.6 IPS will attempt to collect an offline RDA collection and include it with the Incident package. This will only work if Perl is available on the path, otherwise it will give a warning and package only the Incident files. ADRCI Resources: How to Use the Incident Packaging System (IPS) in SOA 11g [ID 1381259.1] ADRCI Documentation top WLDF (WebLogic Diagnostic Framework) WLDF is functionality available in WebLogic Server since version 9. Starting with FMw 11g a link has been added between WLDF and the pre-existing DFW, the WLDF Watch Notification. Let's take a closer look at the flow: There is a need to monitor the performance of your SOA Suite message processing A WLDF Watch is created in the WLS console that will trigger if the average message processing time exceeds 2 seconds. This metric is monitored through a DMS MBean instance. The out of the box DFW Notification (the Notification is called FMWDFW-notification) is added to the Watch. Under the covers this notification is of type JMX. The Watch is triggered when the threshold is exceeded and fires the Notification. DFW has a listener that picks up the Notification and evaluates it according to its rules, etc When it comes to automatic Incident creation, WLDF is a key component with capabilities that will grow over time. When would you use it? When you want to monitor the WLS server log or an MBean metric for some condition and fire a notification when the Watch is triggered. How does it relate to the other tools? WLDF is used to automatically trigger Incident creation through DFW using the DFW Notification. WLDF Resources: How to Monitor Runtime SOA Performance With the Dynamic Monitoring Service (DMS) [ID 1368291.1] How To Script the Creation of a SOA WLDF Watch in 11g [ID 1377986.1] WLDF Documentation top

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  • Android: Haptic feedback: onClick() event vs hapticFeedbackEnabled in the view

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    I was trying to get PJAX working with my PHP site, this is the code I am using for it: <script src="js/jquery.js"></script> <script src="js/jquery.pjax.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> $(function(){ // pjax $('ul a').pjax('section') }) </script> I am just using the code they used on the PJAX demo page, but replacing the container they used (#main) with the one for my site, which was the section tag. There are no errors on the console or on the page, but it doesn't work either! Before I was using $(function() { $('ul a').pjax('section') }); and $('document').ready(function(){ $('ul a').pjax('section') }); But when I don't use either of those and just use $('ul a').pjax('section') I see this error in the console: Uncaught no pjax container for section in jquery.pjax.js (line: 353) Could I get some help with this? Thanks

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    - by Redth
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  • Problems upgrading VB.Net 2008 project into VS2010

    - by Brett Rigby
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  • Returning a list from a function in Python

    - by Jasper
    Hi, I'm creating a game for my sister, and I want a function to return a list variable, so I can pass it to another variable. The relevant code is as follows: def startNewGame(): while 1: #Introduction: print print """Hello, You will now be guided through the setup process. There are 7 steps to this. You can cancel setup at any time by typing 'cancelSetup' Thankyou""" #Step 1 (Name): print print """Step 1 of 7: Type in a name for your PotatoHead: """ inputPHName = raw_input('|Enter Name:|') if inputPHName == 'cancelSetup': sys.exit() #Step 2 (Gender): print print """Step 2 of 7: Choose the gender of your PotatoHead: input either 'm' or 'f' """ inputPHGender = raw_input('|Enter Gender:|') if inputPHGender == 'cancelSetup': sys.exit() #Step 3 (Colour): print print """Step 3 of 7: Choose the colour your PotatoHead will be: Only Red, Blue, Green and Yellow are currently supported """ inputPHColour = raw_input('|Enter Colour:|') if inputPHColour == 'cancelSetup': sys.exit() #Step 4 (Favourite Thing): print print """Step 4 of 7: Type your PotatoHead's favourite thing: """ inputPHFavThing = raw_input('|Enter Favourite Thing:|') if inputPHFavThing == 'cancelSetup': sys.exit() # Step 5 (First Toy): print print """Step 5 of 7: Choose a first toy for your PotatoHead: """ inputPHFirstToy = raw_input('|Enter First Toy:|') if inputPHFirstToy == 'cancelSetup': sys.exit() #Step 6 (Check stats): while 1: print print """Step 6 of 7: Check the following details to make sure that they are correct: """ print print """Name:\t\t\t""" + inputPHName + """ Gender:\t\t\t""" + inputPHGender + """ Colour:\t\t\t""" + inputPHColour + """ Favourite Thing:\t""" + inputPHFavThing + """ First Toy:\t\t""" + inputPHFirstToy + """ """ print print "Enter 'y' or 'n'" inputMCheckStats = raw_input('|Is this information correct?|') if inputMCheckStats == 'cancelSetup': sys.exit() elif inputMCheckStats == 'y': break elif inputMCheckStats == 'n': print "Re-enter info: ..." print break else: "The value you entered was incorrect, please re-enter your choice" if inputMCheckStats == 'y': break #Step 7 (Define variables for the creation of the PotatoHead): MFCreatePH = [] print print """Step 7 of 7: Your PotatoHead will now be created... Creating variables... """ MFCreatePH = [inputPHName, inputPHGender, inputPHColour, inputPHFavThing, inputPHFirstToy] time.sleep(1) print "inputPHName" print time.sleep(1) print "inputPHFirstToy" print return MFCreatePH print "Your PotatoHead varibles have been successfully created!" Then it is passed to another function that was imported from another module from potatohead import * ... welcomeMessage() MCreatePH = startGame() myPotatoHead = PotatoHead(MCreatePH) the code for the PotatoHead object is in the potatohead.py module which was imported above, and is as follows: class PotatoHead: #Initialise the PotatoHead object: def __init__(self, data): self.data = data #Takes the data from the start new game function - see main.py #Defines the PotatoHead starting attributes: self.name = data[0] self.gender = data[1] self.colour = data[2] self.favouriteThing = data[3] self.firstToy = data[4] self.age = '0.0' self.education = [self.eduScience, self.eduEnglish, self.eduMaths] = '0.0', '0.0', '0.0' self.fitness = '0.0' self.happiness = '10.0' self.health = '10.0' self.hunger = '0.0' self.tiredness = 'Not in this version' self.toys = [] self.toys.append(self.firstToy) self.time = '0' #Sets data lists for saving, loading and general use: self.phData = (self.name, self.gender, self.colour, self.favouriteThing, self.firstToy) self.phAdvData = (self.name, self.gender, self.colour, self.favouriteThing, self.firstToy, self.age, self.education, self.fitness, self.happiness, self.health, self.hunger, self.tiredness, self.toys) However, when I run the program this error appears: Traceback (most recent call last): File "/Users/Jasper/Documents/Programming/Potato Head Game/Current/main.py", line 158, in <module> myPotatoHead = PotatoHead(MCreatePH) File "/Users/Jasper/Documents/Programming/Potato Head Game/Current/potatohead.py", line 15, in __init__ self.name = data[0] TypeError: 'NoneType' object is unsubscriptable What am i doing wrong? -----EDIT----- The program finishes as so: Step 7 of 7: Your PotatoHead will now be created... Creating variables... inputPHName inputPHFirstToy Then it goes to the Tracback -----EDIT2----- This is the EXACT code I'm running in its entirety: #+--------------------------------------+# #| main.py |# #| A main module for the Potato Head |# #| Game to pull the other modules |# #| together and control through user |# #| input |# #| Author: |# #| Date Created / Modified: |# #| 3/2/10 | 20/2/10 |# #+--------------------------------------+# Tested: No #Import the required modules: import time import random import sys from potatohead import * from toy import * #Start the Game: def welcomeMessage(): print "----- START NEW GAME -----------------------" print "==Print Welcome Message==" print "loading... \t loading... \t loading..." time.sleep(1) print "loading..." time.sleep(1) print "LOADED..." print; print; print; print """Hello, Welcome to the Potato Head Game. In this game you can create a Potato Head, and look after it, like a Virtual Pet. This game is constantly being updated and expanded. Please look out for updates. """ #Choose whether to start a new game or load a previously saved game: def startGame(): while 1: print "--------------------" print """ Choose an option: New_Game or Load_Game """ startGameInput = raw_input('>>> >') if startGameInput == 'New_Game': startNewGame() break elif startGameInput == 'Load_Game': print "This function is not yet supported" print "Try Again" print else: print "You must have mistyped the command: Type either 'New_Game' or 'Load_Game'" print #Set the new game up: def startNewGame(): while 1: #Introduction: print print """Hello, You will now be guided through the setup process. There are 7 steps to this. You can cancel setup at any time by typing 'cancelSetup' Thankyou""" #Step 1 (Name): print print """Step 1 of 7: Type in a name for your PotatoHead: """ inputPHName = raw_input('|Enter Name:|') if inputPHName == 'cancelSetup': sys.exit() #Step 2 (Gender): print print """Step 2 of 7: Choose the gender of your PotatoHead: input either 'm' or 'f' """ inputPHGender = raw_input('|Enter Gender:|') if inputPHGender == 'cancelSetup': sys.exit() #Step 3 (Colour): print print """Step 3 of 7: Choose the colour your PotatoHead will be: Only Red, Blue, Green and Yellow are currently supported """ inputPHColour = raw_input('|Enter Colour:|') if inputPHColour == 'cancelSetup': sys.exit() #Step 4 (Favourite Thing): print print """Step 4 of 7: Type your PotatoHead's favourite thing: """ inputPHFavThing = raw_input('|Enter Favourite Thing:|') if inputPHFavThing == 'cancelSetup': sys.exit() # Step 5 (First Toy): print print """Step 5 of 7: Choose a first toy for your PotatoHead: """ inputPHFirstToy = raw_input('|Enter First Toy:|') if inputPHFirstToy == 'cancelSetup': sys.exit() #Step 6 (Check stats): while 1: print print """Step 6 of 7: Check the following details to make sure that they are correct: """ print print """Name:\t\t\t""" + inputPHName + """ Gender:\t\t\t""" + inputPHGender + """ Colour:\t\t\t""" + inputPHColour + """ Favourite Thing:\t""" + inputPHFavThing + """ First Toy:\t\t""" + inputPHFirstToy + """ """ print print "Enter 'y' or 'n'" inputMCheckStats = raw_input('|Is this information correct?|') if inputMCheckStats == 'cancelSetup': sys.exit() elif inputMCheckStats == 'y': break elif inputMCheckStats == 'n': print "Re-enter info: ..." print break else: "The value you entered was incorrect, please re-enter your choice" if inputMCheckStats == 'y': break #Step 7 (Define variables for the creation of the PotatoHead): MFCreatePH = [] print print """Step 7 of 7: Your PotatoHead will now be created... Creating variables... """ MFCreatePH = [inputPHName, inputPHGender, inputPHColour, inputPHFavThing, inputPHFirstToy] time.sleep(1) print "inputPHName" print time.sleep(1) print "inputPHFirstToy" print return MFCreatePH print "Your PotatoHead varibles have been successfully created!" #Run Program: welcomeMessage() MCreatePH = startGame() myPotatoHead = PotatoHead(MCreatePH) The potatohead.py module is as follows: #+--------------------------------------+# #| potatohead.py |# #| A module for the Potato Head Game |# #| Author: |# #| Date Created / Modified: |# #| 24/1/10 | 24/1/10 |# #+--------------------------------------+# Tested: Yes (24/1/10) #Create the PotatoHead class: class PotatoHead: #Initialise the PotatoHead object: def __init__(self, data): self.data = data #Takes the data from the start new game function - see main.py #Defines the PotatoHead starting attributes: self.name = data[0] self.gender = data[1] self.colour = data[2] self.favouriteThing = data[3] self.firstToy = data[4] self.age = '0.0' self.education = [self.eduScience, self.eduEnglish, self.eduMaths] = '0.0', '0.0', '0.0' self.fitness = '0.0' self.happiness = '10.0' self.health = '10.0' self.hunger = '0.0' self.tiredness = 'Not in this version' self.toys = [] self.toys.append(self.firstToy) self.time = '0' #Sets data lists for saving, loading and general use: self.phData = (self.name, self.gender, self.colour, self.favouriteThing, self.firstToy) self.phAdvData = (self.name, self.gender, self.colour, self.favouriteThing, self.firstToy, self.age, self.education, self.fitness, self.happiness, self.health, self.hunger, self.tiredness, self.toys) #Define the phStats variable, enabling easy display of PotatoHead attributes: def phDefStats(self): self.phStats = """Your Potato Head's Stats are as follows: ---------------------------------------- Name: \t\t""" + self.name + """ Gender: \t\t""" + self.gender + """ Colour: \t\t""" + self.colour + """ Favourite Thing: \t""" + self.favouriteThing + """ First Toy: \t""" + self.firstToy + """ Age: \t\t""" + self.age + """ Education: \t""" + str(float(self.eduScience) + float(self.eduEnglish) + float(self.eduMaths)) + """ -> Science: \t""" + self.eduScience + """ -> English: \t""" + self.eduEnglish + """ -> Maths: \t""" + self.eduMaths + """ Fitness: \t""" + self.fitness + """ Happiness: \t""" + self.happiness + """ Health: \t""" + self.health + """ Hunger: \t""" + self.hunger + """ Tiredness: \t""" + self.tiredness + """ Toys: \t\t""" + str(self.toys) + """ Time: \t\t""" + self.time + """ """ #Change the PotatoHead's favourite thing: def phChangeFavouriteThing(self, newFavouriteThing): self.favouriteThing = newFavouriteThing phChangeFavouriteThingMsg = "Your Potato Head's favourite thing is " + self.favouriteThing + "." #"Feed" the Potato Head i.e. Reduce the 'self.hunger' attribute's value: def phFeed(self): if float(self.hunger) >=3.0: self.hunger = str(float(self.hunger) - 3.0) elif float(self.hunger) < 3.0: self.hunger = '0.0' self.time = str(int(self.time) + 1) #Pass time #"Exercise" the Potato Head if between the ages of 5 and 25: def phExercise(self): if float(self.age) < 5.1 or float(self.age) > 25.1: print "This Potato Head is either too young or too old for this activity!" else: if float(self.fitness) <= 8.0: self.fitness = str(float(self.fitness) + 2.0) elif float(self.fitness) > 8.0: self.fitness = '10.0' self.time = str(int(self.time) + 1) #Pass time #"Teach" the Potato Head: def phTeach(self, subject): if subject == 'Science': if float(self.eduScience) <= 9.0: self.eduScience = str(float(self.eduScience) + 1.0) elif float(self.eduScience) > 9.0 and float(self.eduScience) < 10.0: self.eduScience = '10.0' elif float(self.eduScience) == 10.0: print "Your Potato Head has gained the highest level of qualifications in this subject! It cannot learn any more!" elif subject == 'English': if float(self.eduEnglish) <= 9.0: self.eduEnglish = str(float(self.eduEnglish) + 1.0) elif float(self.eduEnglish) > 9.0 and float(self.eduEnglish) < 10.0: self.eduEnglish = '10.0' elif float(self.eduEnglish) == 10.0: print "Your Potato Head has gained the highest level of qualifications in this subject! It cannot learn any more!" elif subject == 'Maths': if float(self.eduMaths) <= 9.0: self.eduMaths = str(float(self.eduMaths) + 1.0) elif float(self.eduMaths) > 9.0 and float(self.eduMaths) < 10.0: self.eduMaths = '10.0' elif float(self.eduMaths) == 10.0: print "Your Potato Head has gained the highest level of qualifications in this subject! It cannot learn any more!" else: print "That subject is not an option..." print "Please choose either Science, English or Maths" self.time = str(int(self.time) + 1) #Pass time #Increase Health: def phGoToDoctor(self): self.health = '10.0' self.time = str(int(self.time) + 1) #Pass time #Sleep: Age, change stats: #(Time Passes) def phSleep(self): self.time = '0' #Resets time for next 'day' (can do more things next day) #Increase hunger: if float(self.hunger) <= 5.0: self.hunger = str(float(self.hunger) + 5.0) elif float(self.hunger) > 5.0: self.hunger = '10.0' #Lower Fitness: if float(self.fitness) >= 0.5: self.fitness = str(float(self.fitness) - 0.5) elif float(self.fitness) < 0.5: self.fitness = '0.0' #Lower Health: if float(self.health) >= 0.5: self.health = str(float(self.health) - 0.5) elif float(self.health) < 0.5: self.health = '0.0' #Lower Happiness: if float(self.happiness) >= 2.0: self.happiness = str(float(self.happiness) - 2.0) elif float(self.happiness) < 2.0: self.happiness = '0.0' #Increase the Potato Head's age: self.age = str(float(self.age) + 0.1) The game is still under development - There may be parts of modules that aren't complete, but I don't think they're causing the problem

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  • C# Audio - How to time stretch (different tempo, same pitch)

    - by heath
    I'm trying to make a winform app in C# (VS2008) that can load an mp3 (other formats would be nice, but mp3 at a minimum) and be able to adjust the playback speed (tempo) without affecting pitch. I really don't need any other audio effects. I tried using DirectShow but that doesn't seem to offer time stretch capabilities. I was able to incorporate irrklang but that does not seem to have the time stretch capability either. So now I've moved on to SoundTouch. That certainly has the capabilities but I'm very unclear on how to implement in C#. After a few days of this, about all I've accomplished is using DLLImport on the SoundTouch DLL and am able to successfully retrieve a version number. At this point, I'm not even sure if I can do what I'm trying to do with SoundTouch. Can anyone offer some guidance either on how to implement SoundTouch or a different library with the capabilities that I'm looking for? Thank you.

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  • How to detect changes to Address Book after ABPersonViewController presentation

    - by nkhorman
    I have two view controllers that allow changes to the Address Book. The first one lets you add or create an entry based on an ABRedordRef or edit an existing ABRecordRef, by presentation of either ABUnknownPersonViewController or ABPersonViewController. The second one is a standard ABPeoplePickerNavigationController that allows you to view/edit any of the contents of the Address Book. Both views are accessible easily accessible to the use via the main application UITabBarController. How can I determine that changes were made by either view controller, so that I can force data dependency changes to a third separate view controller. I thought that I saw a notification center message that I could subscribe to, but I can't seem to find it again... I don't care if the notification center is the method that should be used, or a delegate protocol or... whatever, I don't care, I just need to know how to detect the change or the need to re-sync with the Address Book. Can someone Please point me in the right direction. Thank you.

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  • Tracking Google Analytics events with server side request automation

    - by Esko
    I'm currently in the process of programming an utility which generates GA tracking pixel (utm.gif) URL:s based on given parameters. For those of you who are wondering why I'm doing this on the server side, I need to do this server side since the context which I'm going to start tracking simply doesn't support JavaScript and as such ga.js is completely useless to me. I have managed to get it working otherwise quite nicely but I've hit a snag: I can't track events or custom variables because I have no idea how exactly the utme parameter's value should be structured to form a valid event or var type hit. GA's own documentation on this parameter isn't exactly that great, either. I've tried everything from Googling without finding anything (which I find ironic) to reverse engineering ga.js, unfortunately it's minified and quite unreadable because of that. The "mobile" version of GA didn't help either since officially GA mobile doesn't support events nor vars. To summarize, what is the format of the utme parameter for page hit types event and custom variable?

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  • MathML or OMML to PNG w/ .NET?

    - by charliedigital
    Are there any libraries which take MathML (or, even more preferably, OMML) and outputs a .PNG file? I am putting together an export process for .docx files and, as a part of this process, I'd like to extract equations and render them as .PNG files. Word 2007 does this natively when you save a document for the web, but so far, I have not been able to find a way to do this programmatically (if anyone has an answer for that, it would be even better). So the next best thing is to take the OMML and use the Microsoft provided XSL stylesheets and transform them to MathML. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find any (working) rendering libraries for either MathML or OMML. If there aren't any pure .NET libraries for this, I'll settle for just about anything that I can call from a commandline to output a .PNG from either MathML or OMML.

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  • WCF via Windows Service - Authenticating Clients

    - by Sean
    I am a WCF / Security Newb. I have created a WCF service which is hosted via a windows service. The WCF service grabs data from a 3rd party data source that is secured via windows authentication. I need to either: Pass the client's privileges through the windows service, through the WCF service and into the 3rd party data source, or... Limit who can call the windows service / WCF service to members of a particular AD group. Any suggestions on how I can do either of these tasks?

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