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  • Duke's Choice Award Ceremony

    - by Tori Wieldt
    The 2012 Duke's Choice Awards winners and their creative, Java-based technologies and Java community contributions were honored after the Sunday night JavaOne keynotes. Sharat Chander, Group Director for Java Technology Outreach, presented the awards. "Having the community participate directly in both submission and selection truly shows how we are driving exposure of the innovation happening in the Java community," he said. Apache Software Foundation Hadoop Project The Apache Software Foundation’s Hadoop project, written in Java, provides a framework for distributed processing of big data sets across clusters of computers, ranging from a few servers to thousands of machines. This harnessing of large data pools allows organizations to better understand and improve their business. AgroSense Project Improving farming methods to feed a hungry world is the goal of AgroSense, an open source farm information management system built in Java and the NetBeans platform. AgroSense enables farmers, agribusinesses, suppliers and others to develop modular applications that will easily exchange information through a common underlying NetBeans framework. JDuchess Rather than focus on a specific geographic area like most Java User Groups (JUGs), JDuchess fosters the participation of women in the Java community worldwide. The group has more than 500 members in 60 countries, and provides a platform through which women can connect with each other and get involved in all aspects of the Java community. Jelastic, Inc. Moving existing Java applications to the cloud can be a daunting task, but startup Jelastic, Inc. offers the first all-Java platform-as-a-service (PaaS) that enables existing Java applications to be deployed in the cloud without code changes or lock-in. Liquid Robotics Robotics – Liquid Robotics is an ocean data services provider whose Wave Glider technology collects information from the world’s oceans for application in government, science and commercial applications. The organization features the “father of Java” James Gosling as its chief software architect. London Java Community The second user group receiving a Duke’s Choice Award this year, the London Java Community (LJC) and its users have been active in the OpenJDK, the Java Community Process (JCP) and other efforts within the global Java community. NATO The first-ever Community Choice Award goes to the MASE Integrated Console Environment (MICE) in use at NATO. Built in Java on the NetBeans platform, MICE provides a high-performance visualization environment for conducting air defense and battle-space operations. Parleys.com E-learning specialist Parleys.com, based in Brussels, Belgium, uses Java technologies to bring online classes and full IT conferences to desktops, laptops, tablets and mobile devices. Parleys.com has hosted more than 1,700 conferences—including Devoxx and JavaOne—for more than 800,000 unique visitors. Student Nokia Developer Group This year’s student winner, Ram Kashyap, is the founder and president of the Nokia Student Network, and was profiled in the “The New Java Developers” feature in the March/April 2012 issue of Java Magazine. Since then, Ram has maintained a hectic pace, graduating from the People’s Education Society Institute of Technology in Bangalore, India, while working on a Java mobile startup and training students on Java ME. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is on the front lines of crises around the world, from civil wars to natural disasters. To help facilitate its mission of humanitarian relief, the UNHCR has developed a light-client Java application on the NetBeans platform. The Level One registration tool enables the UNHCR to collect information on the number of refugees and their water, food, housing, health, and other needs in the field, and combines that with geocoding information from various sources. This enables the UNHCR to deliver the appropriate kind and amount of assistance where it is needed. You can read more about the winners in the current issue of Java Magazine.

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  • Visual Studio 2010 Best Practices

    - by Etienne Tremblay
    I’d like to thank Packt for providing me with a review version of Visual Studio 2010 Best Practices eBook. In fairness I also know the author Peter having seen him speak at DevTeach on many occasions.  I started by looking at the table of content to see what this book was about, knowing that “best practices” is a real misnomer I wanted to see what they were.  I really like the fact that he starts the book by really saying they are not really best practices but actually recommend practices.  As a Team Foundation Server user I found that chapter 2 was more for the open source crowd and I really skimmed it.  The portion on Branching was well documented, although I’m not a fan of the testing branch myself, but the rest was right on. The section on merge remote changes (bring the outside to you) paradigm is really important and was touched on. Chapter 3 has good solid practices on low level constructs like generics and exceptions. Chapter 4 dives into architectural practices like decoupling, distributed architecture and data based architecture.  DTOs and ORMs are touched on briefly as is NoSQL. Chapter 5 is about deployment and is really a great primer on all the “packaging” technologies like Visual Studio Setup and Deployment (depreciated in 2012), Click Once and WIX the major player outside of commercial solutions.  This is a nice section on how to move from VSSD to WIX this is going to be important in the coming years due to the fact that VS 2012 doesn’t support VSSD. In chapter 6 we dive into automated testing practices, including test coverage, mocking, TDD, SpecDD and Continuous Testing.  Peter covers all those concepts really nicely albeit succinctly. Being a book on recommended practices I find this is really good. I really enjoyed chapter 7 that gave me a lot of great tips to enhance my Visual Studio “experience”.  Tips on organizing projects where good.  Also even though I knew about configurations I like that he put that in there so you can move all your settings to another machine, a lot of people don’t know about that. Quick find and Resharper are also briefly covered.  He touches on macros (depreciated in 2012).  Finally he touches on Continuous Integration a very important concept in today’s ALM landscape. Chapter 8 is all about Parallelization, threads, Async, division of labor, reactive extensions.  All those concepts are touched on and again generalized approaches to those modern problems are giving.       Chapter 9 goes into distributed apps, the most used and accepted practice in the industry for .NET projects the chapter tackles concepts like Scalability, Messaging and Cloud (the flavor of the month of distributed apps, although I think this will stick ;-)).  He also looks a protocols TCP/UDP and how to debug distributed apps.  He touches on logging and health monitoring. Chapter 10 tackles recommended practices for web services starting with implementing WCF services, which goes into all sort of goodness like how to host in IIS or self-host.  How to manual test WCF services, also a section on authentication and authorization.  ASP.NET Web services are also touched on in that chapter All in all a good read, nice tips and accepted practices.  I like the conciseness of the subjects and Peter touches on a lot of things in this book and uses a lot of the current technologies flavors to explain the concepts.   Cheers, ET

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  • Tuning Red Gate: #1 of Many

    - by Grant Fritchey
    Everyone runs into performance issues at some point. Same thing goes for Red Gate software. Some of our internal systems were running into some serious bottlenecks. It just so happens that we have this nice little SQL Server monitoring tool. What if I were to, oh, I don't know, use the monitoring tool to identify the bottlenecks, figure out the causes and then apply a fix (where possible) and then start the whole thing all over again? Just a crazy thought. OK, I was asked to. This is my first time looking through these servers, so here's how I'd go about using SQL Monitor to get a quick health check, sort of like checking the vitals on a patient. First time opening up our internal SQL Monitor instance and I was greeted with this: Oh my. Maybe I need to get our internal guys to read my blog. Anyway, I know that there are two servers where most of the load is. I'll drill down on the first. I'm selecting the server, not the instance, by clicking on the server name. That opens up the Global Overview page for the server. The information here much more applicable to the "oh my gosh, I have a problem now" type of monitoring. But, looking at this, I am seeing something immediately. There are four(4) drives on the system. The C:\ has an average read time of 16.9ms, more than double the others. Is that a problem? Not sure, but it's something I'll look at. It's write time is higher too. I'll keep drilling down, first, to the unclosed alerts on the server. Now things get interesting. SQL Monitor has a number of different types of alerts, some related to error states, others to service status, and then some related to performance. Guess what I'm seeing a bunch of right here: Long running queries and long job durations. If you check the dates, they're all recent, within the last 24 hours. If they had just been old, uncleared alerts, I wouldn't be that concerned. But with all these, all performance related, and all in the last 24 hours, yeah, I'm concerned. At this point, I could just start responding to the Alerts. If I click on one of the the Long-running query alerts, I'll get all kinds of cool data that can help me determine why the query ran long. But, I'm not in a reactive mode here yet. I'm still gathering data, trying to understand how the server works. I have the information that we're generating a lot of performance alerts, let's sock that away for the moment. Instead, I'm going to back up and look at the Global Overview for the SQL Instance. It shows all the databases on the server and their status. Then it shows a number of basic metrics about the SQL Server instance, again for that "what's happening now" view or things. Then, down at the bottom, there is the Top 10 expensive queries list: This is great stuff. And no, not because I can see the top queries for the last 5 minutes, but because I can adjust that out 3 days. Now I can see where some serious pain is occurring over the last few days. Databases have been blocked out to protect the guilty. That's it for the moment. I have enough knowledge of what's going on in the system that I can start to try to figure out why the system is running slowly. But, I want to look a little more at some historical data, to understand better how this server is behaving. More next time.

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  • PASS Summit 2011 &ndash; Part II

    - by Tara Kizer
    I arrived in Seattle last Monday afternoon to attend PASS Summit 2011.  I had really wanted to attend Gail Shaw’s (blog|twitter) and Grant Fritchey’s (blog|twitter) pre-conference seminar “All About Execution Plans” on Monday, but that would have meant flying out on Sunday which I couldn’t do.  On Tuesday, I attended Allan Hirt’s (blog|twitter) pre-conference seminar entitled “A Deep Dive into AlwaysOn: Failover Clustering and Availability Groups”.  Allan is a great speaker, and his seminar was packed with demos and information about AlwaysOn in SQL Server 2012.  Unfortunately, I have lost my notes from this seminar and the presentation materials are only available on the pre-con DVD.  Hmpf! On Wednesday, I attended Gail Shaw’s “Bad Plan! Sit!”, Andrew Kelly’s (blog|twitter) “SQL 2008 Query Statistics”, Dan Jones’ (blog|twitter) “Improving your PowerShell Productivity”, and Brent Ozar’s (blog|twitter) “BLITZ! The SQL – More One Hour SQL Server Takeovers”.  In Gail’s session, she went over how to fix bad plans and bad query patterns.  Update your stale statistics! How to fix bad plans Use local variables – optimizer can’t sniff it, so it’ll optimize for “average” value Use RECOMPILE (at the query or stored procedure level) – CPU hit OPTIMIZE FOR hint – most common value you’ll pass How to fix bad query patterns Don’t use them – ha! Catch-all queries Use dynamic SQL OPTION (RECOMPILE) Multiple execution paths Split into multiple stored procedures OPTION (RECOMPILE) Modifying parameter values Use local variables Split into outer and inner procedure OPTION (RECOMPILE) She also went into “last resort” and “very last resort” options, but those are risky unless you know what you are doing.  For the average Joe, she wouldn’t recommend these.  Examples are query hints and plan guides. While I enjoyed Andrew’s session, I didn’t take any notes as it was familiar material.  Andrew is a great speaker though, and I’d highly recommend attending his sessions in the future. Next up was Dan’s PowerShell session.  I need to look into profiles, manifests, function modules, and function import scripts more as I just didn’t quite grasp these concepts.  I am attending a PowerShell training class at the end of November, so maybe that’ll help clear it up.  I really enjoyed the Excel integration demo.  It was very cool watching PowerShell build the spreadsheet in real-time.  I must look into this more!  On a side note, I am jealous of Dan’s hair.  Fabulous hair! Brent’s session showed us how to quickly gather information about a server that you will be taking over database administration duties for.  He wrote a script to do a fast health check and then later wrapped it into a stored procedure, sp_Blitz.  I can’t wait to use this at my work even on systems where I’ve been the primary DBA for years, maybe there’s something I’ve overlooked.  We are using EPM to help standardize our environment and uncover problems, but sp_Blitz will definitely still help us out.  He even provides a cloud-based update feature, sp_BlitzUpdate, for sp_Blitz so you don’t have to constantly update it when he makes a change.  I think I’ll utilize his update code for some other challenges that we face at my work.

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  • Certify October Updates

    - by Sadia2
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE We have added some release and platform certifications to MOS Certify. Applications: Oracle Demantra 12.2.2 Collaboration Technologies: Oracle On Track Communication 1.0.0.0.0 Database : Oracle Database 11.2.0.4.0, Oracle Database Client 11.2.0.4.0, 11.2.0.3.0, Oracle Clusterware 12.1.0.1.0, 11.2.0.4.0, Oracle Real Application Clusters 12.1.0.1.0, 11.2.0.4.0, Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database 11.2.2.5.0, Oracle Audit Vault and Database Firewall 12.1.1.0.0, Oracle Database Client 10.2.0.5, Oracle Secure Enterprise Search 11.2.2.2.0 E-Business Suite: Oracle E-Business Suite 12.2.2, 12.1.3, 12.1.2, 12.1.1, 12.0.4, 11.5.10.2, 11.5.9.2 Edge Applications: Oracle Transportation Management 6.3.2 Enterprise Manager: Enterprise Manager Base Platform – OMS 12.1.0.3.0 FSGBU Insurance Group: Oracle Health Insurance Back Office 10.13.2.0.0 Fusion Middleware: Oracle Application Development Framework 11.1.1.6.0, Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11.1.1.7.0, Oracle BI Answers 11.1.1.7.0, Oracle BI Composer 11.1.1.7.0, Oracle BI Presentation Services 11.1.1.7.0, Oracle BI Delivers 11.1.1.7.0, Oracle BI Interactive Dashboards 11.1.1.7.0, Oracle BI Scorecard and Strategy Management 11.1.1.7.0, Oracle BI Catalog Manager 11.1.1.7.0, Oracle BI Search 11.1.1.7.0, Oracle BIP Enterprise 11.1.1.7.0, Oracle BIP Scheduler 11.1.1.7.0, Oracle Real-Time Decision Center 11.1.1.7.0, Oracle Segmentation Server 11.1.1.7.0, Oracle JRE 1.7.0_45, 1.7.0_40, 1.7.0_25, 1.7.0_21, 1.7.0_17, 1.7.0_15, 1.7.0_13, 1.7.0_11, 1.7.0_10, 1.6.0_65, 1.6.0_26, Oracle JDK 1.7.0_45, 1.7.0_25, 1.7.0_17, 1.7.0_15, 1.7.0_13, 1.7.0_11, 1.6.0_65, 1.6.0_41, 1.6.0_26, Oracle Discoverer 11.1.1.7.0, 11.1.1.6.0, Discoverer Administrator 11.1.1.7.0, 11.1.1.6.0, Discoverer Desktop 11.1.1.7.0, 11.1.1.6.0, Oracle GoldenGate 12.1.2.0.0, Oracle GoldenGate Director 12.1.2.0.0, Java 1.7.0_10, Oracle Fusion Middleware 12.1.2.0.0, Oracle Data Integrator Agent 12.1.2.0.0, Oracle Data Integrator Studio 12.1.2.0.0, Oracle Data Integrator Console 12.1.2.0.0 JD Edwards EnterpriseOne: JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Enterprise Server 9.1.3.0, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne One View Reporting 9.1.3.0, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Mobile Applications 9.0.2.0, 9.0.0.0, 9.1.2.0, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne for iPad 1.0.0.0 Linux & Server Virtualization (x86): Oracle VM Server for x86 3.2.6.0.0, 3.2.4.0.0, 3.2.3.0.0, 3.2.2.0.0, 3.2.1.0.0 MySQL: MySQL Database Server 5.6, 5.5, MySQL Cluster 7.3, 7.2, 7.1 Oracle Fusion Applications : Oracle Fusion Applications 11.1.7.0.0, 11.1.6.0.0, 11.1.5.0.0, 11.1.4.0.0 PeopleSoft: PeopleSoft PeopleTools 8.53, 8.52, 8.51, 8.5 Primavera GBU: Primavera Project Portfolio Mgmt 6.2.1, Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management 8.3.0.0.0 Siebel Enterprise: Siebel Application Server 8.2.2.4.0, 8.2.2.3.0, 8.2.2.2.0, 8.1.1.11.0, 8.1.1.10.0, 8.1.1.9.0, Siebel Database Server 8.2.2.4.0, 8.1.1.11.0 Siebel Web Server Extension 8.1.1.10.0 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}

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  • Oracle is #1 in Life Sciences!

    - by Michael Snow
    Guest post today by: John Klinke, Senior Principal Product Manager, Oracle WebCenter Content 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Based on the announcement last week at EMC World about Documentum for Life Sciences, it looks like EMC is starting to have regrets about pulling out of the life sciences space over the last few years. Certainly their content management customers and partners in life sciences have noticed their retreat. Many of them are now talking to us about WebCenter Content since they’ve seen the writing on the wall regarding Documentum’s decline, including falling revenue, shrinking investment, departure of key executives, and EMC’s auditing of existing customers. While EMC has been neglecting the life sciences industry over the last few years, Oracle has been increasing its investment and commitment by providing best-of-breed solutions to enable pharmaceutical, medical device, biotech and CRO companies to improve productivity and drive innovation. As a result, according to IDC Health Insights, Oracle is #1 in life sciences. From research and development through clinical development and manufacturing to sales and marketing, Oracle provides the solutions that life sciences companies depend on to accelerate R&D, expedite clinical trials, and speed time to market. Specifically for Oracle WebCenter, our life sciences business is booming thanks to our comprehensive offerings led by Oracle WebCenter Content, our 21 CFR Part 11 compliant enterprise content management platform. Unlike Documentum, WebCenter Content is all about keeping the cost of ownership low - through simplicity, flexibility, and out-of-the-box integrations. WebCenter Content is a single, comprehensive ECM platform that can handle all your content management needs, from controlled documents to digital asset management, records management and document imaging and capture. And it is much more flexible, letting you do configuration changes instead of customizations to meet your business needs. It also saves you money by being pre-integrated with the rest of the Oracle Fusion Middleware technology stack and with leading enterprise applications like Siebel (including Siebel CTMS), Primavera, E-Business Suite, JD Edwards and PeopleSoft. So if you think EMC’s announcement last week was too little and too late, I’m happy to report that Oracle is here to help. Back in October, we announced our Move Off Documentum offer, which provides a 100% trade-in credit for your Documentum licenses when you purchase Oracle WebCenter, and the good news is, this offer is still available for a limited time. So stop maintaining Documentum and start innovating with Oracle WebCenter. For more details see www.oracle.com/moveoff/documentum.

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  • WebCenter Innovation Award Winners

    - by Michael Snow
    Of course, here on our WebCenter blog – we’d like to highlight and brag about our great WebCenter winners. The 2012 WebCenter Innovation Award Winners University of Louisville Location: Louisville, KY, USA Industry: Higher Education Fusion Middleware Products: WebCenter Portal, WebCenter Content, JDeveloper, WebLogic, Oracle BI, Oracle IdM University of Louisville is a state supported research university Statewide Informatics Network to improve public health The University of Louisville has implemented WebCenter as part of the LOUI (Louisville Informatics Institute) Initiative, a Statewide Informatics Network, which will improve public healthcare and lower cost through the use of novel technology and next generation analytics, decision support and innovative outcomes-based payment systems. ---------- News Limited Country/Region: Australia Industry: News/Media FMW Products: WebCenter Sites Single platform running websites for 50% of Australia's newspapers News Corp is running half of Australia's newspaper websites on this shared platform powered by Oracle WebCenter Sites and have overtaken their nearest competitors and are now leading in terms of monthly page impressions. At peak they have over 250 editors on the system publishing in real-time.Sites include: www.newsspace.com.au, www.news.com.au, www.theaustralian.com.au and many others ------ Life Technologies Corp. Country/Region: Carlsbad, CA, USAIndustry: Life SciencesFMW Products: WebCenter Portal, SOA Suite Life Technologies Corp. is a global biotechnology tools company dedicated to improving the human condition with innovative life science products. They were awarded an innovation award for their solution utilizing WebCenter Portal for remotely monitoring & repairing biotech instruments. They deployed WebCenter as a portal that accesses Life Technologies cloud based service monitoring system where all customer deployed instruments can be remotely monitored and proactively repaired.  The portal provides alerts from these cloud based monitoring services directly to the customer and to Life Technologies Field Engineers.  The Portal provides insight into the instruments and services customers purchased for the purpose of analyzing and anticipating future customer needs and creating targeted sales and service programs. ----- China Mobile Jiangsu China Mobile Jiangsu is one of the biggest subsidiaries of China Mobile. It has over 25,000 employees and 40 million mobile subscribers. Country/Region: Jiangsu, China Industry: Telecommunications FMW Products: WebCenter Portal, WebCenter Content, JDeveloper, SOA Suite, IdM They were awarded an Innovation Award for their new employee platform powered by WebCenter Portal is designed to serve their 25,000+ employees and help them drive collaboration & productivity. JSMCC (Chian Mobile Jiangsu) Employee Enterprise Portal and Collaboration Platform. It is one of the China Mobile’s most important IT innovation projects. The new platform is designed to serve for JSMCC’s 25000+ employees and to help them improve the working efficiency, changing their traditional working mode to social ways, encouraging employees on business collaboration and innovation. The solution is built on top of Oracle WebCenter Portal Framework and WebCenter Spaces while also leveraging Weblogic Server, UCM, OID, OAM, SES, IRM and Oracle Database 11g. By providing rich collaboration services, knowledge management services, sensitive document protection services, unified user identity management services, unified information search services and personalized information integration capabilities, the working efficiency of JSMCC employees has been greatly improved. Main Functionality : Information portal, office automation integration, personal space, group space, team collaboration with web2.0 services, unified search engine for multiple data sources, document management and protection. SSO for multiple platforms. -------- LADWP – Los Angeles Department for Water and Power Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) is the largest public utility company in United States with over 1.6 Million customers. LADWP provides water and power for millions of residential & commercial customers in Southern California. LADWP also bills most of these customers for sanitation services provided by another city department. Country/Region: US – Los Angeles, CA Industry: Public Utility FMW Products: WebCenter Portal, WebCenter Content, JDeveloper, SOA Suite, IdM The new infrastructure consists of: Oracle WebCenter Portal including mobile portal Oracle WebCenter Content for Content Management and Digital Asset Management (DAM) Oracle OAM (IDM, OVD, OAM) integrated with AD for enterprise identity management Oracle Siebel for CRM Oracle DB Oracle SOA Suite for integration of various subsystems and back end systems  The new portal's features include: Complete Graphical redesign based on best practices in UI Design for high usability Customer Self Service implemented through MyAccount (Bill Pay, Payment History, Bill History, Usage Analysis, Service Request Management) Financial Assistance Programs (CRM, WebCenter) Customer Rebate Programs (CRM, WebCenter) Turn On/Off/Transfer of services (Commercial & Residential) Outage Reporting eNotification (SMS, email) Multilingual (English & Spanish) – using WebCenter multi-language support Section 508 (ADA) Compliant Search – Using WebCenter SES (Secured Enterprise Search) Distributed Authorship in WebCenter Content Mobile Access (any Mobile Browser)

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  • Expanding the Partner Ecosystem with Third-Party Plug-ins

    - by Joe Diemer
    Oracle Enterprise Manager’s extensibility capabilities are designed to allow customers and partners to adapt Enterprise Manager for management of heterogeneous environments with Plug-ins and Connectors.  Third-party developers continue to take advantage of Oracle Enterprise Manager’s Extensibility Development Kit (EDK) to build plug-ins to Enterprise Manager 12c, such as F5’s BIG IP Plug-in and Entuity’s Eye of the Storm Network Management Plug-In.  Partners can also validate their plug-ins through the Oracle Validated Integration (OVI) program, which assures customers that the plug-in has been tested and is functionally and technically sound, is designed in a reliable and standardized manner, and operates and performs as documented.   Two very recent examples of partners which have beta versions of their plug-ins are Blue Medora's VMware vSphere plug-in and the NetApp Storage plug-in.  VMware vSphere Plug-in by Blue Medora Blue Medora, an Oracle Partner Network (OPN) “Gold” member, which just announced that it is now signing up customers to try a beta version of their new VMware vSphere plug-in for Enterprise Manager 12c.  According to Blue Medora, the vSphere plug-in monitors critical VMware metrics (CPU, Memory, Disk, Network, etc) at the Host, VM, Cluster and Resource Pool levels.  It has minimal performance impact via an “agentless” approach that requires no installation directly on VMware servers.  It has discovery capabilities for VMware Datacenters, ESX Hosts, Clusters, Virtual Machines, and Datastores.  It offers integration of native VMware Events into Enterprise Manager, and it provides over 300 VMware-related health, availability, performance, and configuration metrics.  It comes with more than 30 out-of-the-box pre-defined thresholds and can manage VMware via a series of jobs split between cluster, host and VM target types.The company reports that the Enterprise Manager 12c plug-in supports vSphere versions 4.0, 4.5 and 5.0.  Platforms supported include Linux 64-bit, Windows, AIX and Solaris SPARC and x86.  Information about the plug-in, including how to sign up for the beta, is available at their web site at http://bluemedora.com after selecting the "Products" tab. NetApp Storage Plug-in NetApp believes the combination of storage system monitoring with comprehensive management of Oracle systems with Enterprise Manager will help customers reduce the cost and complexity of managing applications that rely on NetApp storage and Oracle technologies.  So, NetApp built a plug-in and reports that it has comprehensive availability and performance information for NetApp storage systems.  Using the plug-in, Oracle Enterprise Manager customers with NetApp storage solutions can track the association between databases and storage components and thereby respond to faults and IO performance bottlenecks quickly. With the latest configuration management capabilities, one can also perform drift analysis to make sure all storage systems are configured as per established gold standards. The company is also now signing up beta customers, which can be done at the NetApp Communities site at https://communities.netapp.com/groups/netapp-storage-system-plug-in-for-oem12c-beta. Learn More about Enterprise Manager Extensibility More plug-ins from other partners are soon to come, which I'll be reporting on them here.  To learn more about Enterprise Manager and how customers and partners can build plug-ins using the EDK to manage a multi-vendor data center, go to http://oracle.com/enterprisemanager in the Heterogeneous Management solution area.  The site also lists the plug-ins available with information on how to obtain them.  More info about the Oracle Validated Integration program can be found at the OPN Enterprise Manager Knowledge Zone in the "Develop" tab.

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  • Why Ultra-Low Power Computing Will Change Everything

    - by Tori Wieldt
    The ARM TechCon keynote "Why Ultra-Low Power Computing Will Change Everything" was anything but low-powered. The speaker, Dr. Johnathan Koomey, knows his subject: he is a Consulting Professor at Stanford University, worked for more than two decades at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and has been a visiting professor at Stanford University, Yale University, and UC Berkeley's Energy and Resources Group. His current focus is creating a standard (computations per kilowatt hour) and measuring computer energy consumption over time. The trends are impressive: energy consumption has halved every 1.5 years for the last 60 years. Battery life has made roughly a 10x improvement each decade since 1960. It's these improvements that have made laptops and cell phones possible. What does the future hold? Dr. Koomey said that in the past, the race by chip manufacturers was to create the fastest computer, but the priorities have now changed. New computers are tiny, smart, connected and cheap. "You can't underestimate the importance of a shift in industry focus from raw performance to power efficiency for mobile devices," he said. There is also a confluence of trends in computing, communications, sensors, and controls. The challenge is how to reduce the power requirements for these tiny devices. Alternate sources of power that are being explored are light, heat, motion, and even blood sugar. The University of Michigan has produced a miniature sensor that harnesses solar energy and could last for years without needing to be replaced. Also, the University of Washington has created a sensor that scavenges power from existing radio and TV signals.Specific devices designed for a purpose are much more efficient than general purpose computers. With all these sensors, instead of big data, developers should focus on nano-data, personalized information that will adjust the lights in a room, a machine, a variable sign, etc.Dr. Koomey showed some examples:The Proteus Digital Health Feedback System, an ingestible sensor that transmits when a patient has taken their medicine and is powered by their stomach juices. (Gives "powered by you" a whole new meaning!) Streetline Parking Systems, that provide real-time data about available parking spaces. The information can be sent to your phone or update parking signs around the city to point to areas with available spaces. Less driving around looking for parking spaces!The BigBelly trash system that uses solar power, compacts trash, and sends a text message when it is full. This dramatically reduces the number of times a truck has to come to pick up trash, freeing up resources and slashing fuel costs. This is a classic example of the efficiency of moving "bits not atoms." But researchers are approaching the physical limits of sensors, Dr. Kommey explained. With the current rate of technology improvement, they'll reach the three-atom transistor by 2041. Once they hit that wall, it will force a revolution they way we do computing. But wait, researchers at Purdue University and the University of New South Wales are both working on a reliable one-atom transistors! Other researchers are working on "approximate computing" that will reduce computing requirements drastically. So it's unclear where the wall actually is. In the meantime, as Dr. Koomey promised, ultra-low power computing will change everything.

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  • Get to Know a Candidate (8 of 25): Rocky Anderson&ndash;Justice Party

    - by Brian Lanham
    DISCLAIMER: This is not a post about “Romney” or “Obama”. This is not a post for whom I am voting. Information sourced for Wikipedia. Ross Carl “Rocky” Anderson served two terms as the 33rd mayor of Salt Lake City, Utah, between 2000 and 2008.  He is the Executive Director of High Road for Human Rights.  Prior to serving as Mayor, he practiced law for 21 years in Salt Lake City, during which time he was listed in Best Lawyers in America, was rated A-V (highest rating) by Martindale-Hubbell, served as Chair of the Utah State Bar Litigation Section[4] and was Editor-in-Chief of, and a contributor to, Voir Dire legal journal. As mayor, Anderson rose to nationwide prominence as a champion of several national and international causes, including climate protection, immigration reform, restorative criminal justice, LGBT rights, and an end to the "war on drugs". Before and after the invasion by the U.S. of Iraq in 2003, Anderson was a leading opponent of the invasion and occupation of Iraq and related human rights abuses. Anderson was the only mayor of a major U.S. city who advocated for the impeachment of President George W. Bush, which he did in many venues throughout the United States. Anderson's work and advocacy led to local, national, and international recognition in numerous spheres, including being named by Business Week as one of the top twenty activists in the world on climate change,serving on the Newsweek Global Environmental Leadership Advisory Board, and being recognized by the Human Rights Campaign as one of the top ten straight advocates in the United States for LGBT equality. He has also received numerous awards for his work, including the EPA Climate Protection Award, the Sierra Club Distinguished Service Award, the Respect the Earth Planet Defender Award, the National Association of Hispanic Publications Presidential Award, The Drug Policy Alliance Richard J. Dennis Drugpeace Award, the Progressive Democrats of America Spine Award, the League of United Latin American Citizens Profile in Courage Award, the Bill of Rights Defense Committee Patriot Award, the Code Pink (Salt Lake City) Pink Star honor, the Morehouse University Gandhi, King, Ikeda Award, and the World Leadership Award for environmental programs. Formerly a member of the Democratic Party, Anderson expressed his disappointment with that Party in 2011, stating, “The Constitution has been eviscerated while Democrats have stood by with nary a whimper. It is a gutless, unprincipled party, bought and paid for by the same interests that buy and pay for the Republican Party." Anderson announced his intention to run for President in 2012 as a candidate for the newly-formed Justice Party. Although founded by Rocky Anderson of Utah, the Justice Party was first recognized by Mississippi and describes itself as advocating economic justice through measures such as green jobs and a right to organize, environment justice through enforcing employee safeguards in trade agreements, and social and civic justice through universal health care. In its first press release, the Utah Justice Party set forth its goals for justice in the economic, environmental, social and civic realms, along with a call to rid the corrupting influence of big money from government, to reverse the erosion of rights guaranteed by the Constitution, and to stop draining American resources to support illegal wars of aggression. Its press release says its grassroots supporters believe that now is the time for all to "shed their skeptical view that their voices don't matter", that "our 2-party system is a 'duopoly' controlled by the same corporate and military interests", and that the people must act to ensure "that our nation will achieve a brighter, sustainable future.” Anderson has ballot access in CO, CT, FL, ID, LA, MI, MN, MS, NJ, NM, OR, RI, TN, UT, VT, WA (152 electoral votes) and has write-in access in AL, AK, DE, GA, IL, IO, KS, MD, MO, NE, NH, NY, PA, TX Learn more about Rocky Anderson and Justice Party on Wikipedia.

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  • What information must never appear in logs?

    - by MainMa
    I'm about to write the company guidelines about what must never appear in logs (trace of an application). In fact, some developers try to include as many information as possible in trace, making it risky to store those logs, and extremely dangerous to submit them, especially when the customer doesn't know this information is stored, because she never cared about this and never read documentation and/or warning messages. For example, when dealing with files, some developers are tempted to trace the names of the files. For example before appending file name to a directory, if we trace everything on error, it will be easy to notice for example that the appended name is too long, and that the bug in the code was to forget to check for the length of the concatenated string. It is helpful, but this is sensitive data, and must never appear in logs. In the same way: Passwords, IP addresses and network information (MAC address, host name, etc.)¹, Database accesses, Direct input from user and stored business data must never appear in trace. So what other types of information must be banished from the logs? Are there any guidelines already written which I can use? ¹ Obviously, I'm not talking about things as IIS or Apache logs. What I'm talking about is the sort of information which is collected with the only intent to debug the application itself, not to trace the activity of untrusted entities. Edit: Thank you for your answers and your comments. Since my question is not too precise, I'll try to answer the questions asked in the comments: What I'm doing with the logs? The logs of the application may be stored in memory, which means either in plain on hard disk on localhost, in a database, again in plain, or in Windows Events. In every case, the concern is that those sources may not be safe enough. For example, when a customer runs an application and this application stores logs in plain text file in temp directory, anybody who has a physical access to the PC can read those logs. The logs of the application may also be sent through internet. For example, if a customer has an issue with an application, we can ask her to run this application in full-trace mode and to send us the log file. Also, some application may sent automatically the crash report to us (and even if there are warnings about sensitive data, in most cases customers don't read them). Am I talking about specific fields? No. I'm working on general business applications only, so the only sensitive data is business data. There is nothing related to health or other fields covered by specific regulations. But thank you to talk about that, I probably should take a look about those fields for some clues about what I can include in guidelines. Isn't it easier to encrypt the data? No. It would make every application much more difficult, especially if we want to use C# diagnostics and TraceSource. It would also require to manage authorizations, which is not the easiest think to do. Finally, if we are talking about the logs submitted to us from a customer, we must be able to read the logs, but without having access to sensitive data. So technically, it's easier to never include sensitive information in logs at all and to never care about how and where those logs are stored.

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  • 13 Lösungen für eine höhere Sicherheit in einer Oracle Datenbank (Best Practices)

    - by C.Muetzlitz
    Externe Einflüsse wie Gesetze fordern die IT auf, (unsere) Daten zu schützen. Doch wie prüft man die eingestellte Sicherheit einer Oracle Datenbank überhaupt? Ist die geforderte Sicherheit ausreichend umgesetzt und zwar im Idealfall entsprechend dem notwendigen Schutzbedarf? Wann haben Sie eigentlich die Sicherheit Ihrer Oracle Datenbank das letzte Mal überprüft? Und noch besser gefragt, kennen Sie die Bedrohungen und die davon abgeleiteten Risiken? Alles Fragen deren Antworten ein verantwortlicher Anwendungsbesitzer sofort parat haben sollte oder sehen Sie das anders? Wie kann man sich am besten vor Bedrohungen schützen? Die einzige richtige Antwort auf diese Frage ist, durch Informationen und daraus abgeleitetes Wissen. Nun umfassen Informationen und das darin versteckte Wissen wahrscheinlich sehr viele Quellen. D.h. es wird immer schwieriger sich das richtige Wissen anzueignen und dieses Wissen für den Schutz von Daten und Datenbanken anzuwenden.Betrachtet man die Oracle Datenbank, dann empfehle ich zwei wesentliche Bereiche, die man tun muss bzw. wissen sollte. Die Best Practices Lösungen kennen, die man implementieren sollte und teilweise muss, um gute Sicherheit zu garantieren.Ich nenne diesen Bereich „13 Lösungen für eine höhere Sicherheit in einer Oracle Datenbank (Best Practices)“ Wie sieht der wirkliche Sicherheitszustand einer Oracle Datenbank aus.Diesen Bereich nenne ich „Check Oracle DB Security“ In diesem Beitrag möchte ich Sie nun in die Grundlagen einer guten Oracle Datenbank Sicherheit einführen und Sie befähigen, den Sicherheitszustand Ihrer Datenbank selber bestimmen zu können. 13 Lösungen für eine höhere Sicherheit in einer Oracle Datenbank (Best Practices)“  Password-Management aktiveren:Seien Sie sich bewusst, dass schwache Passwords eine hohe Bedrohung bedeuten. Aktivieren Sie ein vernünftiges Password Management Kennen Sie den Funktionsumfang Ihrer aktuellen Datenbank Version, auch die Funktionen, die nicht mehr unterstützt werden.Der "New Feature und Upgrade Guide" sollte eine Pflichtlektüre werden. Implementieren Sie eine passende Mindestsicherheit.Oracle liefert hier viele Vorgaben. Haben Sie das Rollen- und Account Management im GriffHier geht es um eine kontrollierte Privilegien-Vergabe (Least Privileg), eine Zwecktrennung im Account Management und eine andauernde Überprüfung des Rollenmanagements und Zugriffskonzepts Sicheres Datenbank Link Konzept implementierenGerade im Bereich der Datenintegration werden wiederholt DB Links in der Datenbank konfiguriert. Diese Links eröffnen u.U. unkontrollierte Zugriffe auf entfernte Datenbanken. Tracken Sie den Zugriff und setzen Sie ein sicheres DB Link Konzept um. Oracle liefert hier die entsprechenden Vorgaben. Definieren Sie Schutz-Policies für Ihre Anwendungen.Hierunter fällt z.B. ein richtiges Anwendungs-Owner und Anwendungs-User Setup Implementieren Sie den notwendigen Datenschutz für wichtige DatenKennen Sie die Daten, die geschützt werden müssen und schützen Sie diese angemessen. Kontrollieren Sie den Ressourcenverbrauch in Ihrer Datenbank Implementieren Sie eine sinnvolle Zwecktrennung in der DatenbankAuch bei der Datenbank ist es sinnvoll eine Zwecktrennung zu implementieren. Schalten Sie eine sinnvolle und gesetzeskonforme Protokollierung ein.Gesetze erfordern das und Oracle gibt eine Mindestprotokollierung vor. Implementieren Sie Prozesse, die den guten Zustand der Datenbank erhalten Führen Sie regelmäßige Health- Checks durchOracle liefert z.B. mit dem Enterprise Manager eine vollständige Library. Definieren Sie ein funktionierendes Patch-ManagementKennen Sie die Critical Patch Updates und handeln Sie falls notwendig. Check Oracle DB Security oder wer den Sicherheitszustand nicht kennt, wird auch keine Maßnahmen ergreifen Den Sicherheitszustand einer Oracle Datenbank zu überprüfen, ist sehr wichtig. Hierfür kann man verschiedene Anwendungen nutzen, die im Markt erhältlich sind. Eine gute Entscheidung wäre z.B. den Oracle Enterprise Manager (Cloud Control) mit dem Lifecycle Management zu nutzen, der periodisch den Sicherheitszustand für Sie ermittelt. Eine manuelle Überprüfung ist auch möglich, erfordert aber tiefes Wissen. Doch auch trotz der hohen Wissensanforderung ist ein Verstehen, wie man eine Oracle Datenbank manuell auf Sicherheit überprüft, wichtig. Vertrauen Sie nicht mehr auf Vermutungen, sondern nehmen Sie die Sicherheit Ihrer Datenbank ernst und lernen Sie den realen Zustand Ihrer Datenbank kennen. Wissen über reale Zustände und Wissen über geeignete Konzepte schützen. Erst dann können Sie entscheiden, welche Maßnahmen tatsächlich notwendig sind. Weiterführende Informationen: Oracle Online Dokumentation für die Datenbank Verschiedene Artikel in der Knowledge Base vom Oracle Support Das neue Buch „Oracle Security in der Praxis. Vollständige Sicherheitsüberprüfung Ihrer Oracle Datenbank“.

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  • Protecting Consolidated Data on Engineered Systems

    - by Steve Enevold
    In this time of reduced budgets and cost cutting measures in Federal, State and Local governments, the requirement to provide services continues to grow. Many agencies are looking at consolidating their infrastructure to reduce cost and meet budget goals. Oracle's engineered systems are ideal platforms for accomplishing these goals. These systems provide unparalleled performance that is ideal for running applications and databases that traditionally run on separate dedicated environments. However, putting multiple critical applications and databases in a single architecture makes security more critical. You are putting a concentrated set of sensitive data on a single system, making it a more tempting target.  The environments were previously separated by iron so now you need to provide assurance that one group, department, or application's information is not visible to other personnel or applications resident in the Exadata system. Administration of the environments requires formal separation of duties so an administrator of one application environment cannot view or negatively impact others. Also, these systems need to be in protected environments just like other critical production servers. They should be in a data center protected by physical controls, network firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention, etc Exadata also provides unique security benefits, including a reducing attack surface by minimizing packages and services to only those required. In addition to reducing the possible system areas someone may attempt to infiltrate, Exadata has the following features: 1.    Infiniband, which functions as a secure private backplane 2.    IPTables  to perform stateful packet inspection for all nodes               Cellwall implements firewall services on each cell using IPTables 3.    Hardware accelerated encryption for data at rest on storage cells Oracle is uniquely positioned to provide the security necessary for implementing Exadata because security has been a core focus since the company's beginning. In addition to the security capabilities inherent in Exadata, Oracle security products are all certified to run in an Exadata environment. Database Vault Oracle Database Vault helps organizations increase the security of existing applications and address regulatory mandates that call for separation-of-duties, least privilege and other preventive controls to ensure data integrity and data privacy. Oracle Database Vault proactively protects application data stored in the Oracle database from being accessed by privileged database users. A unique feature of Database Vault is the ability to segregate administrative tasks including when a command can be executed, or that the DBA can manage the health of the database and objects, but may not see the data Advanced Security  helps organizations comply with privacy and regulatory mandates by transparently encrypting all application data or specific sensitive columns, such as credit cards, social security numbers, or personally identifiable information (PII). By encrypting data at rest and whenever it leaves the database over the network or via backups, Oracle Advanced Security provides the most cost-effective solution for comprehensive data protection. Label Security  is a powerful and easy-to-use tool for classifying data and mediating access to data based on its classification. Designed to meet public-sector requirements for multi-level security and mandatory access control, Oracle Label Security provides a flexible framework that both government and commercial entities worldwide can use to manage access to data on a "need to know" basis in order to protect data privacy and achieve regulatory compliance  Data Masking reduces the threat of someone in the development org taking data that has been copied from production to the development environment for testing, upgrades, etc by irreversibly replacing the original sensitive data with fictitious data so that production data can be shared safely with IT developers or offshore business partners  Audit Vault and Database Firewall Oracle Audit Vault and Database Firewall serves as a critical detective and preventive control across multiple operating systems and database platforms to protect against the abuse of legitimate access to databases responsible for almost all data breaches and cyber attacks.  Consolidation, cost-savings, and performance can now be achieved without sacrificing security. The combination of built in protection and Oracle’s industry-leading data protection solutions make Exadata an ideal platform for Federal, State, and local governments and agencies.

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  • Using Solaris zfs + iscsi targets with Oracle VM

    - by wim.coekaerts
    I was playing with my Oracle VM setup and needed some shared storage that was block based. I did not have a storage array available but I did have a solaris box, that I use for Oracle VDI, available. I set up a few iscsi targets on this solaris server and exported them to my 2 Oracle VM servers. Here's how I did this : (1) On the solaris side : # zpool list NAME SIZE USED AVAIL CAP HEALTH ALTROOT rpool 544G 129G 415G 23% ONLINE - I just have a simple zpool, called rpool, on this box. It has plenty of space available for my needs. So I will use rpool and I will create 5 50gb vols : zfs create -V 50G rpool/ovm1 zfs create -V 50G rpool/ovm2 zfs create -V 50G rpool/ovm3 zfs create -V 50G rpool/ovm4 zfs create -V 50G rpool/ovm5 I want to use these volumes for iscsi so I have to enable them as shared iscsi devices : zfs set shareiscsi=on rpool/ovm1 zfs set shareiscsi=on rpool/ovm2 zfs set shareiscsi=on rpool/ovm3 zfs set shareiscsi=on rpool/ovm4 zfs set shareiscsi=on rpool/ovm5 The command iscsitadm list target should list these devices so make sure they show up. # iscsitadm list target Target: rpool/ovm1 iSCSI Name: iqn.1986-03.com.sun:02:896c766c-0943-4da5-d47e-9575b5a0be36 Connections: 2 Target: rpool/ovm2 iSCSI Name: iqn.1986-03.com.sun:02:a3116b46-73e0-e8c2-e80c-9a4f71aff069 Connections: 2 Target: rpool/ovm3 iSCSI Name: iqn.1986-03.com.sun:02:a838c400-2730-c0d6-f2c2-ee186a0261c1 Connections: 2 Target: rpool/ovm4 iSCSI Name: iqn.1986-03.com.sun:02:2e046afb-d66d-4f3f-c5de-8115e0ddd931 Connections: 2 Target: rpool/ovm5 iSCSI Name: iqn.1986-03.com.sun:02:66109fbe-81ac-ef05-f85e-ab8c1f34cb43 Connections: 2 At this point I want to make sure that I have some access control on these devices. To make it easier, I will create an alias for my 2 servers and use the alias for the ACL. get the iqn from the 2 servers on my 2 ovm servers (wcoekaer-srv1, wcoekaer-srv2) get the content of /etc/iscsi/initiatorname.iscsi (for each server) InitiatorName=iqn.1986-03.com.sun:01:2a7526f0ffff On the solaris side create the aliases : iscsitadm create initiator -n iqn.1986-03.com.sun:01:2a7526f0ffff wcoekaer-srv1 iscsitadm create initiator -n iqn.1986-03.com.sun:01:e31b08110f1 wcoekaer-srv5 Add the ACL to the targets : iscsitadm modify target -l wcoekaer-srv1 rpool/ovm1 iscsitadm modify target -l wcoekaer-srv1 rpool/ovm2 iscsitadm modify target -l wcoekaer-srv1 rpool/ovm3 iscsitadm modify target -l wcoekaer-srv1 rpool/ovm4 iscsitadm modify target -l wcoekaer-srv1 rpool/ovm5 iscsitadm modify target -l wcoekaer-srv5 rpool/ovm1 iscsitadm modify target -l wcoekaer-srv5 rpool/ovm2 iscsitadm modify target -l wcoekaer-srv5 rpool/ovm3 iscsitadm modify target -l wcoekaer-srv5 rpool/ovm4 iscsitadm modify target -l wcoekaer-srv5 rpool/ovm5 (2) the Oracle VM side On each server just do 2 simple things : # iscsiadm -m discovery -t sendtargets -p ca-vdi1 where ca-vdi1 is my solaris server name # service iscsi restart When I do cat /proc/partitions on my servers I will see the devices show up # cat /proc/partitions major minor #blocks name 8 0 160836480 sda 8 1 104391 sda1 8 2 3148740 sda2 8 3 1052257 sda3 253 0 6377804 dm-0 253 1 6377804 dm-1 253 2 6377804 dm-2 8 16 52428800 sdb 8 32 52428800 sdc 8 48 52428800 sdd 8 80 52428800 sdf 8 64 52428800 sde These 5 new devices sd[b..f] are shared storage for Oracle VM and can be used to pass through to the VM's as phy: devices or put ocfs2 on it and use as shared filesystem storage for dom0 repositories. I am setting up an 11gR2 rac template (the cool stuff Saar did) so I am using my devices to create a 2 node RAC cluster with phy: devices.

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  • XNA Multiplayer Games and Networking

    - by JoshReuben
    ·        XNA communication must by default be lightweight – if you are syncing game state between players from the Game.Update method, you must minimize traffic. That game loop may be firing 60 times a second and player 5 needs to know if his tank has collided with any player 3 and the angle of that gun turret. There are no WCF ServiceContract / DataContract niceties here, but at the same time the XNA networking stack simplifies the details. The payload must be simplistic - just an ordered set of numbers that you would map to meaningful enum values upon deserialization.   Overview ·        XNA allows you to create and join multiplayer game sessions, to manage game state across clients, and to interact with the friends list ·        Dependency on Gamer Services - to receive notifications such as sign-in status changes and game invitations ·        two types of online multiplayer games: system link game sessions (LAN) and LIVE sessions (WAN). ·        Minimum dev requirements: 1 Xbox 360 console + Creators Club membership to test network code - run 1 instance of game on Xbox 360, and 1 on a Windows-based computer   Network Sessions ·        A network session is made up of players in a game + up to 8 arbitrary integer properties describing the session ·        create custom enums – (e.g. GameMode, SkillLevel) as keys in NetworkSessionProperties collection ·        Player state: lobby, in-play   Session Types ·        local session - for split-screen gaming - requires no network traffic. ·        system link session - connects multiple gaming machines over a local subnet. ·        Xbox LIVE multiplayer session - occurs on the Internet. Ranked or unranked   Session Updates ·        NetworkSession class Update method - must be called once per frame. ·        performs the following actions: o   Sends the network packets. o   Changes the session state. o   Raises the managed events for any significant state changes. o   Returns the incoming packet data. ·        synchronize the session à packet-received and state-change events à no threading issues   Session Config ·        Session host - gaming machine that creates the session. XNA handles host migration ·        NetworkSession properties: AllowJoinInProgress , AllowHostMigration ·        NetworkSession groups: AllGamers, LocalGamers, RemoteGamers   Subscribe to NetworkSession events ·        GamerJoined ·        GamerLeft ·        GameStarted ·        GameEnded – use to return to lobby ·        SessionEnded – use to return to title screen   Create a Session session = NetworkSession.Create(         NetworkSessionType.SystemLink,         maximumLocalPlayers,         maximumGamers,         privateGamerSlots,         sessionProperties );   Start a Session if (session.IsHost) {     if (session.IsEveryoneReady)     {        session.StartGame();        foreach (var gamer in SignedInGamer.SignedInGamers)        {             gamer.Presence.PresenceMode =                 GamerPresenceMode.InCombat;   Find a Network Session AvailableNetworkSessionCollection availableSessions = NetworkSession.Find(     NetworkSessionType.SystemLink,       maximumLocalPlayers,     networkSessionProperties); availableSessions.AllowJoinInProgress = true;   Join a Network Session NetworkSession session = NetworkSession.Join(     availableSessions[selectedSessionIndex]);   Sending Network Data var packetWriter = new PacketWriter(); foreach (LocalNetworkGamer gamer in session.LocalGamers) {     // Get the tank associated with this player.     Tank myTank = gamer.Tag as Tank;     // Write the data.     packetWriter.Write(myTank.Position);     packetWriter.Write(myTank.TankRotation);     packetWriter.Write(myTank.TurretRotation);     packetWriter.Write(myTank.IsFiring);     packetWriter.Write(myTank.Health);       // Send it to everyone.     gamer.SendData(packetWriter, SendDataOptions.None);     }   Receiving Network Data foreach (LocalNetworkGamer gamer in session.LocalGamers) {     // Keep reading while packets are available.     while (gamer.IsDataAvailable)     {         NetworkGamer sender;          // Read a single packet.         gamer.ReceiveData(packetReader, out sender);          if (!sender.IsLocal)         {             // Get the tank associated with this packet.             Tank remoteTank = sender.Tag as Tank;              // Read the data and apply it to the tank.             remoteTank.Position = packetReader.ReadVector2();             …   End a Session if (session.AllGamers.Count == 1)         {             session.EndGame();             session.Update();         }   Performance •        Aim to minimize payload, reliable in order messages •        Send Data Options: o   Unreliable, out of order -(SendDataOptions.None) o   Unreliable, in order (SendDataOptions.InOrder) o   Reliable, out of order (SendDataOptions.Reliable) o   Reliable, in order (SendDataOptions.ReliableInOrder) o   Chat data (SendDataOptions.Chat) •        Simulate: NetworkSession.SimulatedLatency , NetworkSession.SimulatedPacketLoss •        Voice support – NetworkGamer properties: HasVoice ,IsTalking , IsMutedByLocalUser

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  • Make your TSQL easier to read during a presentation

    - by Jonathan Allen
    SQL Server Management Studio 2012 has some neat settings that you can use to help your presentations at a SQL event better for the attendees if you are willing to spend a few minutes making some settings changes. Historically, I have been reluctant to make changes to my SSMS settings as it is such a tedious process and it’s not 100% clear that what you think you are changing is actually what gets changed. With SSMS 2012 this has become a lot easier and a lot less risky. In any session that involves TSQL there is a trade off between the speaker having all the code on screen and the attendees being able to read any of what is on screen. You (the speaker) might be able to read this when you are working on the code but plenty of your audience wont be able to make head or tail of it. SSMS 2012 has a zoom facility that can help: but don’t go nuts … Having the font too big means you will be scrolling a lot and the code will again be rendered unreadable. There is more though but you need to take a deep breath and open the Tools menu and delve into the SSMS options. In previous versions of SSMS this is a deep, dark and scary place where changing values can be obscure and sometimes catastrophic to the UI when you get back to the code editor. First things first, we set out as a good DBA and save our current (and presumably acceptable) SSMS configuration. From the import and Export Settings you can set up a file to hold all of the settings that you currently have. The wizard will open and ask you to pick an option. This time around choose to export settings. hit next and next again and then name your settings profile in the final step of the wizard and then click Finish. Once this is done then you can change whatever you like and always get back to this configuration in a couple of clicks. So what can you change to make for a good experience? Well there are plenty of things that can be altered but don’t go too mad and change too many things without taking a look at the results for every item on the list above you can change font, size, weight, colour, background colour etc. etc. but consider what you are trying to achieve and take it slowly. I have seen presenters with their settings set to have a yellow highlight and black font rather than the default pale blue background and slightly darker font so to achieve that select Text Editor and then select “Selected Text” in the Display Items listbox. As you change things the Sample area give you an idea of what effect you are going to have. Black and yellow is the colour combination with the highest contrast – that’s why bees and wasps# are that colour. What next? how about increasing the default font for your demo scripts? This means that any script you open and any new ones that you start will take on this font. No more zooming (or forgetting to) in the middle of sessions. now don’t forget to save this profile – follow the same steps as above but give the profile a different name, something like PresentationBigFontHighContrast might be appropriate. Once you are done making changes, export the settings once more and then go into the Import Export wizard and import settings from the first profile you created. Everything will be back to normal. Now making changes to suit your environment can be done very easily and with confidence. * – and warning tape and safety signs and so forth – Health and Safety officers simply copy nature!

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  • Certify September Updates

    - by Sadia2
    We have added some release and platform certifications to MOS Certify. Applications: Oracle Demantra 12.2.2, 7.3.1.5, 7.3.1.4, 7.3.0.2.0, 7.3.0.0.0 Collaboration Technologies: Oracle Beehive 2.0.1.8.0 Database: Oracle Database Client 12.1.0.1.0, Oracle Clusterware 11.2.0.4.0, Oracle Database 11.2.0.4.0, Oracle Real Application Clusters 11.2.0.4.0 E-Business Suite: Oracle E-Business Suite 12.2.2, 12.1.3, 12.1.2, 12.1.1, 12.0.6, 11.5.10.2 Edge Applications: Oracle AutoVue 20.2.2, 20.2.1, 20.2.0 Enterprise Manager: Enterprise Manager Base Platform - OMS 12.1.0.3.0, Oracle Real User Experience Insight 12.1.0.4.0, 12.1.0.3.0, 12.1.0.1, 11.1 FSGBU Insurance Group: Oracle Health Insurance Claims 2.13.3.0.0 Fusion Middleware: Oracle Business Intelligence Applications 11.1.1.7.1, 7.9.6.4.0, Oracle Discoverer 11.1.1.6.0, Discoverer Administrator 11.1.1.6.0, Discoverer Desktop 11.1.1.6.0, Oracle JDK 1.7.0_40, 1.7.0_25", Oracle JRE 1.7.0_40, 1.7.0_25, Oracle JRockit 6u45 R28.2.7+, Oracle WebCenter Sites 11.1.1.8.0, Oracle WebCenter Sites: Community-Gadgets 11.1.1.8.0, Oracle WebCenter Sites: CIP for File Systems and MS SharePoint 11.1.1.8.0, Oracle WebCenter Sites: CIP for EMC Documentum 11.1.1.8.0 JD Edwards EnterpriseOne: JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Business Services Server 9.1.3.0, 9.1.2.0, 9.1.0.0, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Mobile Applications 9.1.2.0 Oracle Fusion Applications: Oracle Fusion Applications 11.1.7.0.0 Primavera GBU: Primavera Unifier 9.13.0.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Siebel Enterprise: Siebel Application Server 8.2.2.4.0, 8.2.2.3.0, 8.2.2.2.0, 8.1.1.10.0, 8.1.1.9.0, Siebel Database Server 8.2.2.3.0, 8.1.1.10.0, 8.1.1.9.0, Siebel Remote Client 8.2.2.4.0, 8.2.2.3.0, 8.2.2.2.0, 8.1.1.11.0, 8.1.1.10.0, 8.1.1.9.0, Siebel Tools Client 8.2.2.4.0, 8.2.2.2.0, 8.1.1.11.0, 8.1.1.9.0, Siebel SSO Integration 8.2.2.4.0, 8.2.2.3.0, 8.2.2.2.0, 8.1.1.11.0, 8.1.1.10.0, 8.1.1.9.0

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  • E-Business Suite : Role of CHUNK_SIZE in Oracle Payroll

    - by Giri Mandalika
    Different batch processes in Oracle Payroll flow have the ability to spawn multiple child processes (or threads) to complete the work in hand. The number of child processes to fork is controlled by the THREADS parameter in APPS.PAY_ACTION_PARAMETERS view. THREADS parameter The default value for THREADS parameter is 1, which is fine for a single-processor system but not optimal for the modern multi-core multi-processor systems. Setting the THREADS parameter to a value equal to or less than the total number of [virtual] processors available on the system may improve the performance of payroll processing. However on the down side, since multiple child processes operate against the same set of payroll tables in HR schema, database may experience undesired consequences such as buffer busy waits and index contention, which results in giving up some of the gains achieved by using multiple child processes/threads to process the work. Couple of other action parameters, CHUNK_SIZE and CHUNK_SHUFFLE, help alleviate the database contention. eg., Set a value for THREADS parameter as shown below. CONNECT APPS/APPS_PASSWORD UPDATE PAY_ACTION_PARAMETERS SET PARAMETER_VALUE = DESIRED_VALUE WHERE PARAMETER_NAME = 'THREADS'; COMMIT; (I am not aware of any maximum value for THREADS parameter) CHUNK_SIZE parameter The size of each commit unit for the batch process is controlled by the CHUNK_SIZE action parameter. In other words, chunking is the act of splitting the assignment actions into commit groups of desired size represented by the CHUNK_SIZE parameter. The default value is 20, and each thread processes one chunk at a time -- which means each child process inserts or processes 20 assignment actions at any time. When multiple threads are configured, each thread picks up a chunk to process, completes the assignment actions and then picks up another chunk. This is repeated until all the chunks are exhausted. It is possible to use different chunk sizes in different batch processes. During the initial phase of processing, CHUNK_SIZE number of assignment actions are inserted into relevant table(s). When multiple child processes are inserting data at the same time into the same set of tables, as explained earlier, database may experience contention. The default value of 20 is mostly optimal in such a case. Experiment with different values for the initial phase by +/-10 for CHUNK_SIZE parameter and observe the performance impact. A larger value may make sense during the main processing phase. Again experimentation is the key in finding the suitable value for your environment. Start with a large value such as 2000 for the chunk size, then increment or decrement the size by 500 at a time until an optimal value is found. eg., Set a value for CHUNK_SIZE parameter as shown below. CONNECT APPS/APPS_PASSWORD UPDATE PAY_ACTION_PARAMETERS SET PARAMETER_VALUE = DESIRED_VALUE WHERE PARAMETER_NAME = 'CHUNK_SIZE'; COMMIT; CHUNK_SIZE action parameter accepts a value that is as low as 1 or as high as 16000. CHUNK SHUFFLE parameter By default, chunks of assignment actions are processed sequentially by all threads - which may not be a good thing especially given that all child processes/threads performing similar actions against the same set of tables almost at the same time. By saying not a good thing, I mean to say that the default behavior leads to contention in the database (in data blocks, for example). It is possible to relieve some of that database contention by randomizing the processing order of chunks of assignment actions. This behavior is controlled by the CHUNK SHUFFLE action parameter. Chunk processing is not randomized unless explicitly configured. eg., Set chunk shuffling as shown below. CONNECT APPS/APPS_PASSWORD UPDATE PAY_ACTION_PARAMETERS SET PARAMETER_VALUE = 'Y' WHERE PARAMETER_NAME = 'CHUNK SHUFFLE'; COMMIT; Finally I recommend checking the following document out for additional details and additional pay action tunable parameters that may speed up the processing of Oracle Payroll.     My Oracle Support Doc ID: 226987.1 Oracle 11i & R12 Human Resources (HRMS) & Benefits (BEN) Tuning & System Health Checks Also experiment with different combinations of parameters and values until the right set of action parameters and values are found for your deployment.

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  • Collaborative Organizations build Organizational Culture

    “A Collaborative organization builds its culture based on the idea of the family or an athletic team.”(Hoefling, 2001) As I grew up, I participated in many different types of clubs, civic organizations, and sports teams.  Now looking back at the more successful undertakings, I can see three commonalities amongst them. They all shared a defined purpose or goal, defined functional roles, and a shared sense of responsibility to the group. Defined Purpose or Goal In order to unit people to work together, they must share a common goal or have a common purpose. An example of this would be the Lions Club International Foundation. There purpose is to help everyone to lead healthier and more productive lives, nurtures the potential of youth, promotes health, serves the elderly, empowers the disabled and helps victims of disasters. This organization holds localized meetings across the world and works in conjunction with other localized clubs within there organization along with other organizations to promote common goals. If there are no common goals for the group, then there is nothing that binds people to the group, and nothing will be done. Defined Functional Roles In order for an organization to work and function as a team, they must have defined roles and everyone must know how their roles are interdependent on each other. Lets shed light on this subject by looking at a football team’s offense.  Each player has an assigned role to play each time the ball is snapped. The offensive line blocks for the running back or quarterback, the quarterback passes the ball to the wide receiver or hands it off to the running back and the running back and wide receivers run with the ball towards the goal line. Each member of this team shares a common goal of scoring a touchdown, but if each team member does not fulfill their assigned roles the offences will collapse and the team will lose yards. This will provide a set back to the teams goal of scoring a touchdown because they potential are then farther away from the goal line.  In addition, if all the players do not know their roles and how they are part of a larger team then even larger yard losses can occur. Shared Sense of Personal Responsibility to the Group Shared responsibility comes with the shared common goals. Each person in the organization must do their part to promote the common shared goal or purpose based on their abilities. A prime example of this is a wrestling team competing in a match. Points are awarded to the team based on how many wins the team achieves in the meet and of that how many wins where won by decision or by pin. If a wrestler pins his opponent the teams will receive 2 points for the win, but if the wrestler wins by decision, then the team only gets one point for the win. So it is the responsibility of each person on the team to not get pinned if they are unable to win the match. If the team member gets pinned then the other team receives an additional point for the win. References: Hoefling, T. (2001). Working Virtually: Managing People for Successful Virtual Teams and Organizations. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing, LLC.

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  • The best computer ever

    - by Jeff
    (This is a repost from my personal blog… wow… I need to write more technical stuff!) About three years and three months ago, I bought a 17" MacBook Pro, and it turned out to be the best computer I've ever owned. You might think that every computer with better specs is automatically better than the last, but that hasn't been my experience. My first one was a Sony, back in the Pentium III days, and it cost an astonishing $2,500. That was even more ridiculous in 1999 dollars. It had a dial-up modem, and a CD-ROM, built-in! It may have even played DVD's. A few years later I bought an HP, and it ended up being a pile of shit. The power connector inside came loose from the board, and on occasion would even short. In 2005, I bought a Dell, and it wasn't bad. It had a really high resolution screen (complete with dead pixels, a problem in those days), and it was the first laptop I felt I could do real work on. When 2006 rolled around, Apple started making computers with Intel CPU's, and I bought the very first one the week it came out. I used Boot Camp to run Windows. I still have it in its box somewhere, and I used it for three years. The current 17" was new in 2009. The goodness was largely rooted in having a big screen with lots of dots. This computer has been the source of hundreds of blog posts, tens of thousands of lines of code, video and photo editing, and of course, a whole lot of Web surfing. It connected to corpnet at Microsoft, WiFi in Hawaii and has presented many a deck. It has traveled with me tens of thousands of miles. Last year, I put a solid state drive in it, and it was like getting a new computer. I can boot up a Windows 7 VM in about 19 seconds. Having 8 gigs of RAM has always been fantastic. Everything about it has been fast and fun. When new, the battery (when not using VM's) could get as much as 10 hours. I can still do 7 without much trouble. After 460 charge cycles, the battery health is still between 85 and 90%. The only real negative has been the size and weight. It's only an inch thick, but naturally it's pretty big with a 17" screen. You don't get battery life like that without a huge battery, either, so it's heavy. It was never a deal breaker, but sometimes a long haul across a large airport, you know you're carrying it. Today, Apple announced a new, thinner and lighter 15" laptop, with twice the RAM and CPU cores, and four times the screen resolution. It basically handles my size and weight issues while retaining the resolution, and it still costs less than my 17" did. So I ordered one. Three years is an excellent run, but I kind of budgeted for a new workhorse this year anyway. So if you're interested in a 17" MacBook Pro with a Core 2 Duo 2.66 GHz CPU, 8 gigs of RAM and a 320 gig hard drive (sorry, I'm keeping the SSD), I have one to sell. They've apparently discontinued the 17", which is going to piss off the video community. It's in excellent condition, with a few minor scratches, but I take care of my stuff.

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  • Moving StarterSTS to the (Azure) Cloud

    - by Your DisplayName here!
    Quite some people asked me about an Azure version of StarterSTS. While I kinda knew what I had to do to make the move, I couldn’t find the time. Until recently. This blog post briefly documents the necessary changes and design decisions for the next version of StarterSTS which will work both on-premise and on Azure. Provider Fortunately StarterSTS is already based on the idea of “providers”. Authentication, roles and claims generation is based on the standard ASP.NET provider infrastructure. This makes the migration to different data stores less painful. In my case I simply moved the ASP.NET provider database to SQL Azure and still use the standard SQL Server based membership, roles and profile provider. In addition StarterSTS has its own providers to abstract resource access for certificates, relying party registration, client certificate registration and delegation. So I only had to provide new implementations. Signing and SSL keys now go in the Azure certificate store and user mappings (client certificates and delegation settings) have been moved to Azure table storage. The one thing I didn’t anticipate when I originally wrote StarterSTS was the need to also encapsulate configuration. Currently configuration is “locked” to the standard .NET configuration system. The new version will have a pluggable SettingsProvider with versions for .NET configuration as well as Azure service configuration. If you want to externalize these settings into e.g. a database, it is now just a matter of supplying a corresponding provider. Moving between the on-premise and Azure version will be just a matter of using different providers. URL Handling Another thing that’s substantially different on Azure (and load balanced scenarios in general) is the handling of URLs. In farm scenarios, the standard APIs like ASP.NET’s Request.Url return the current (internal) machine name, but you typically need the address of the external facing load balancer. There’s a hotfix for WCF 3.5 (included in v4) that fixes this for WCF metadata. This was accomplished by using the HTTP Host header to generate URLs instead of the local machine name. I now use the same approach for generating WS-Federation metadata as well as information card files. New Features I introduced a cache provider. Since we now have slightly more expensive lookups (e.g. relying party data from table storage), it makes sense to cache certain data in the front end. The default implementation uses the ASP.NET web cache and can be easily extended to use products like memcached or AppFabric Caching. Starting with the relying party provider, I now also provide a read/write interface. This allows building management interfaces on top of this provider. I also include a (very) simple web page that allows working with the relying party provider data. I guess I will use the same approach for other providers in the future as well. I am also doing some work on the tracing and health monitoring area. Especially important for the Azure version. Stay tuned.

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  • HERMES Medical Solutions Helps Save Lives with MySQL

    - by Bertrand Matthelié
    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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Cambria","serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} HERMES Medical Solutions was established in 1976 in Stockholm, Sweden, and is a leading innovator in medical imaging hardware/software products for health care facilities worldwide. HERMES delivers a plethora of different medical imaging solutions to optimize hospital workflow. 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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Cambria","serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} HERMES advanced algorithms make it possible to detect the smallest changes under therapies important and necessary to optimize different therapeutic methods and doses. Challenges Fighting illness & disease requires state-of-the-art imaging modalities and software in order to diagnose accurately, stage disease appropriately and select the best treatment available. Selecting and implementing a new database platform that would deliver the needed performance, reliability, security and flexibility required by the high-end medical solutions offered by HERMES. Solution Decision to migrate from in-house database to an embedded SQL database powering the HERMES products, delivered either as software, integrated hardware and software solutions, or via the cloud in a software-as-a-service configuration. Evaluation of several databases and selection of MySQL based on its high performance, ease of use and integration, and low Total Cost of Ownership. On average, between 4 and 12 Terabytes of data are stored in MySQL databases underpinning the HERMES solutions. The data generated by each medical study is indeed stored during 10 years or more after the treatment was performed. MySQL-based HERMES systems also allow doctors worldwide to conduct new drug research projects leveraging the large amount of medical data collected. Hospitals and other HERMES customers worldwide highly value the “zero administration” capabilities and reliability of MySQL, enabling them to perform medical analysis without any downtime. Relying on MySQL as their embedded database, the HERMES team has been able to increase their focus on further developing their clinical applications. HERMES Medical Solutions could leverage the Oracle Financing payment plan to spread its investment over time and make the MySQL choice even more valuable. “MySQL has proven to be an excellent database choice for us. We offer high-end medical solutions, and MySQL delivers the reliability, security and performance such solutions require.” Jan Bertling, CEO.

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  • In the Firing Line: The impact of project and portfolio performance on the CEO

    - by Melissa Centurio Lopes
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} What are the primary measurements for rating CEO performance? For corporate boards, business analysts, investors, and the trade press the metrics they deploy are relatively binary in nature; what is being done to generate earnings, and what is being done to build and sustain high performance? As for the market, interest is primarily aroused when operational and financial performance falls outside planned commitments for the year. When organizations announce better than predicted results, they usually experience an immediate increase in share price. Likewise, poor results have an obviously negative impact on the share price and impact the role and tenure of the incumbent CEO. The danger for the CEO is that the risk of failure is ever present, ranging from manufacturing delays and supply chain issues to labor shortages and scope creep. This risk is enhanced by the involvement of secondary suppliers providing services critical to overall work schedules, and magnified further across a portfolio of programs and projects underway at any one time – and all set within a global context. All can impact planned return on investment and have an inevitable impact on the share price – the primary empirical measure of day-to-day performance. Read this complete complementary report, In the Firing Line and explore what is the direct link between the health of the portfolio and CEO performance. This report will provide an overview of the responsibility the CEO has for implementing and maintaining a culture of accountability, offer examples of some of the higher profile project failings in recent years, and detail the capabilities available to the CEO to mitigate the risks residing in their own portfolios. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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  • Get More Value From Your Oracle Premier Support Investment

    - by Get Proactive Customer Adoption Team
    Untitled Document The Return on Investment in Support Training I’m a typical software user. I’ve been using spreadsheets almost daily for the past 10 years or so. I know how to enter simple formulas, format cells, import files, and I can sort and filter. Sometimes I even use a pivot table. I never attended training. I learnt everything I know on the fly. Sometimes it was intuitive and easy, other times I had to spend minutes and even hours searching for a solution. Yet when I see what some other people can do with their spreadsheets, I know I’m utilizing maybe 15% of the functionality. Pity, one day I really have to sign up for training. Why haven’t I done it yet? Ah, you know, I’m a busy person, I have work to do. And if I need to use a feature that I am unfamiliar with, I’ll spend time on it only when I really need it. Now wait. When I recall how much time I spent trying to figure how things work compared to time I spent doing the productive work, I realize it was not insignificant. I’m unable to sum up all the time I spent ‘learning’ on the fly, but I’m sure it’s been days or even weeks. And after all this time, I’ve mastered 15% of its features. If only I had attended training years ago. That investment would have paid back 10 times! Working with My Oracle Support is no different. Our customers typically use simple search, create service requests, and download patches. They think they know how to use My Oracle Support. And they’re right. They know something but often they’re utilizing only a fragment of My Oracle Support’s potential. For the investment that has been made, using only a small subset of the capabilities offered in My Oracle Support leaves value on the table. There is much more available in My Oracle Support. Dozens of diagnostic tools and proactive health checks will keep verifying your Oracle environments against best practices that Oracle gathers every day thanks to our comprehensive knowledge management process. Automated patch recommendations will help prevent known issues, and upgrade planning and more is included in My Oracle Support. Why are you not utilizing all of these best practices, capabilities and tools? Is it because you don’t have time to invest 2-3 hours of your time to learn about the features? Simply because you think you can learn on the fly like I thought I could? Does learning on the fly how to properly use the Service Request escalation process when you already have critical issue sound like a good idea? My advice is: Invest your time now to learn how My Oracle Support can help you prevent issues on your systems. Learn how to find answers faster and resolve problems more efficiently. Understand how to properly complete a service request. Invest in Support training, offered at no additional cost to Oracle Premier Support customers. It will pay back quicker than you think. It will bring you more value than you think. Discover your advantage with Oracle Premier Support's Proactive Portfolio.

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  • Application Logging needs work

    Application Logging Application logging is the act of logging events that occur within an application much like how a court report documents what happens in court case. Application logs can be useful for several reasons, but the most common use for logs is to recreate steps to find the root cause of applications errors. Other uses can include the detection of Fraud, verification of user activity, or provide audits on user/data interactions. “Logs can contain different kinds of data. The selection of the data used is normally affected by the motivation leading to the logging. “ (OWASP, 2009) OWASP also stats that logging include applicable debugging information like the event date time, responsible process, and a description of the event. “There are many reasons why a logging system is a necessary part of delivering a distributed application. One of the most important is the ability to track exactly how many users are using the application during different time periods.” (Hatton, 2000) Hatton also states that application logging helps system designers determine whether parts of an application aren't being used as designed. He implies that low usage can be used to identify if users like or do not like aspects of a system based on user usage of the application. This enables application designers to extract why users don't like aspects of an application so that changes can be made to increase its usefulness and effectiveness. “Logging memory usage can also assist you in tuning up the internals of your application. If you're experiencing a randomly occurring problem, being able to match activities performed with the memory status at the time may enable you to discover the cause of the problem. It also gives you a good indication of the health of the distributed server machine at the time any activity is performed. “ (Hatton, 2000) Commonly Logged Application Events (Defined by OWASP) Access of Data Creation of Data Modification of Data in any form Administrative Functions  Configuration Changes Debugging Information(Application Events)  Authorization Attempts  Data Deletion Network Communication  Authentication Events  Errors/Exceptions Application Error Logging The functionality associated with application error logging is actually the combination of proper error handling and applications logging.  If we look back at Figure 4 and Figure 5, these code examples allow developers to handle various types of errors that occur within the life cycle of an application’s execution. Application logging can be applied within the Catch section of the TryCatch statement allowing for the errors to be logged when they occur. By placing the logging within the Catch section specific error details can be accessed that help identify the source of the error, the path to the error, what caused the error and definition of the error that occurred. This can then be logged and reviewed at a later date in order recreate the error that was received based data found in the application log. By allowing applications to log errors developers IT staff can use them to recreate errors that are encountered by end-users or other dependent systems.

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