Search Results

Search found 671 results on 27 pages for 'optimizing'.

Page 25/27 | < Previous Page | 21 22 23 24 25 26 27  | Next Page >

• March 21st Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, AJAX, Visual Studio, Silverlight

  - by ScottGu

  Here is the latest in my link-listing series. If you haven’t already, check out this month’s "Find a Hoster” page on the www.asp.net website to learn about great (and very inexpensive) ASP.NET hosting offers.  [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] ASP.NET URL Routing in ASP.NET 4: Scott Mitchell has a nice article that talks about the new URL routing features coming to Web Forms applications with ASP.NET 4.  Also check out my previous blog post on this topic. Control of Web Control ClientID Values in ASP.NET 4: Scott Mitchell has a nice article that describes how it is now easy to control the client “id” value emitted by server controls with ASP.NET 4. Web Deployment Made Awesome: Very nice MIX10 talk by Scott Hanselman on the new web deployment features coming with VS 2010, MSDeploy, and .NET 4.  Makes deploying web applications much, much easier. ASP.NET 4’s Browser Capabilities Support: Nice blog post by Stephen Walther that talks about the new browser definition capabilities support coming with ASP.NET 4. Integrating Twitter into an ASP.NET Website: Nice article by Scott Mitchell that demonstrates how to call and integrate Twitter from within your ASP.NET applications. Improving CSS with .LESS: Nice article by Scott Mitchell that describes how to optimize CSS using .LESS – a free, open source library. ASP.NET MVC Upgrading ASP.NET MVC 1 applications to ASP.NET MVC 2: Eilon Lipton from the ASP.NET team has a nice post that describes how to easily upgrade your ASP.NET MVC 1 applications to ASP.NET MVC 2.  He has an automated tool that makes this easy. Note that automated MVC upgrade support is also built-into VS 2010.  Use the tool in this blog post for updating existing MVC projects using VS 2008. Advanced ASP.NET MVC 2: Nice video talk by Brad Wilson of the ASP.NET MVC team.  In it he describes some of the more advanced features in ASP.NET MVC 2 and how to maximize your productivity with them. Dynamic Select Lists with ASP.NET MVC and jQuery: Michael Ceranski has a nice blog post that describes how to dynamically populate dropdownlists on the client using AJAX. AJAX Microsoft AJAX Minifier: We recently shipped an updated minifier utility that allows you to shrink/minify both JavaScript and CSS files – which can improve the performance of your web applications.  You can run this either manually as a command-line tool or now automatically integrate it using a Visual Studio build task.  You can download it for free here. Visual Studio VS 2010 Tip: Quickly Closing Documents: Nice blog post that describes some techniques for optimizing how windows are closed with the new VS 2010 IDE. Collpase to Definitions with Outlining: Nice tip from Zain on how to collapse your code editor to outline mode using Ctrl + M, Ctrl + O.  Also check out his post on copy/paste with outlining here. $299 VS 2010 Upgrade Offer for VS 2005/2008 Standard Users: Soma blogs about a nice VS 2010 upgrade offer you can take advantage of if you have VS 2005 or VS 2008 Standard editions.  For $299 you can upgrade to VS 2010 Professional edition. Dependency Graphics: Jason Zander (who runs the VS team) has a nice blog post that covers the new dependency graph support within VS 2010.  This makes it easier to visualize the dependencies within your application.  Also check out this video here. Layer Validation: Jason Zander has a nice blog post that talks about the new layer validation features in VS 2010.  This enables you to enforce cleaner layering within your projects and solutions.  VS 2010 Profiler Blog: The VS 2010 Profiler Team has their own blog and on it you can find a bunch of nice posts from the last few months that talk about a lot of the new features coming with VS 2010’s Profiler support.  Some really nice features coming. Silverlight Silverlight 4 Training Course: Nice free set of training courses from Microsoft that can help bring you up to speed on all of the new Silverlight 4 features and how to build applications with them.  Updated and current with the recently released Silverlight 4 RC build and tools. Getting Started with Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Development: Nice blog post by Tim Heuer that summarizes how to get started building Windows Phone 7 applications using Silverlight.  Also check out my blog post from last week on how to build a Windows Phone 7 Twitter application using Silverlight. A Guide to What Has Changed with the Silverlight 4 RC: Nice summary post by Tim Heuer that describes all of the things that have changed between the Silverlight 4 Beta and the Silverlight 4 RC. Path Based Layout - Part 1 and Part 2: Christian Schormann has a nice blog post about a really cool new feature in Expression Blend 4 and Silverlight 4 called Path Layout. Also check out Andy Beaulieu’s blog post on this. Hope this helps, Scott

  Read the article

• SQL SERVER – Example of Performance Tuning for Advanced Users with DB Optimizer

  - by Pinal Dave

  Performance tuning is such a subject that everyone wants to master it. In beginning everybody is at a novice level and spend lots of time learning how to master the art of performance tuning. However, as we progress further the tuning of the system keeps on getting very difficult. I have understood in my early career there should be no need of ego in the technology field. There are always better solutions and better ideas out there and we should not resist them. Instead of resisting the change and new wave I personally adopt it. Here is a similar example, as I personally progress to the master level of performance tuning, I face that it is getting harder to come up with optimal solutions. In such scenarios I rely on various tools to teach me how I can do things better. Once I learn about tools, I am often able to come up with better solutions when I face the similar situation next time. A few days ago I had received a query where the user wanted to tune it further to get the maximum out of the performance. I have re-written the similar query with the help of AdventureWorks sample database. SELECT * FROM HumanResources.Employee e INNER JOIN HumanResources.EmployeeDepartmentHistory edh ON e.BusinessEntityID = edh.BusinessEntityID INNER JOIN HumanResources.Shift s ON edh.ShiftID = s.ShiftID; User had similar query to above query was used in very critical report and wanted to get best out of the query. When I looked at the query – here were my initial thoughts Use only column in the select statements as much as you want in the application Let us look at the query pattern and data workload and find out the optimal index for it Before I give further solutions I was told by the user that they need all the columns from all the tables and creating index was not allowed in their system. He can only re-write queries or use hints to further tune this query. Now I was in the constraint box – I believe * was not a great idea but if they wanted all the columns, I believe we can’t do much besides using *. Additionally, if I cannot create a further index, I must come up with some creative way to write this query. I personally do not like to use hints in my application but there are cases when hints work out magically and gives optimal solutions. Finally, I decided to use Embarcadero’s DB Optimizer. It is a fantastic tool and very helpful when it is about performance tuning. I have previously explained how it works over here. First open DBOptimizer and open Tuning Job from File >> New >> Tuning Job. Once you open DBOptimizer Tuning Job follow the various steps indicates in the following diagram. Essentially we will take our original script and will paste that into Step 1: New SQL Text and right after that we will enable Step 2 for Generating Various cases, Step 3 for Detailed Analysis and Step 4 for Executing each generated case. Finally we will click on Analysis in Step 5 which will generate the report detailed analysis in the result pan. The detailed pan looks like. It generates various cases of T-SQL based on the original query. It applies various hints and available hints to the query and generate various execution plans of the query and displays them in the resultant. You can clearly notice that original query had a cost of 0.0841 and logical reads about 607 pages. Whereas various options which are just following it has different execution cost as well logical read. There are few cases where we have higher logical read and there are few cases where as we have very low logical read. If we pay attention the very next row to original query have Merge_Join_Query in description and have lowest execution cost value of 0.044 and have lowest Logical Reads of 29. This row contains the query which is the most optimal re-write of the original query. Let us double click over it. Here is the query: SELECT * FROM HumanResources.Employee e INNER JOIN HumanResources.EmployeeDepartmentHistory edh ON e.BusinessEntityID = edh.BusinessEntityID INNER JOIN HumanResources.Shift s ON edh.ShiftID = s.ShiftID OPTION (MERGE JOIN) If you notice above query have additional hint of Merge Join. With the help of this Merge Join query hint this query is now performing much better than before. The entire process takes less than 60 seconds. Please note that it the join hint Merge Join was optimal for this query but it is not necessary that the same hint will be helpful in all the queries. Additionally, if the workload or data pattern changes the query hint of merge join may be no more optimal join. In that case, we will have to redo the entire exercise once again. This is the reason I do not like to use hints in my queries and I discourage all of my users to use the same. However, if you look at this example, this is a great case where hints are optimizing the performance of the query. It is humanly not possible to test out various query hints and index options with the query to figure out which is the most optimal solution. Sometimes, we need to depend on the efficiency tools like DB Optimizer to guide us the way and select the best option from the suggestion provided. Let me know what you think of this article as well your experience with DB Optimizer. Please leave a comment. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Joins, SQL Optimization, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

  Read the article

• Social Business Forum Milano: Day 2

  - by me

  @YourService. The business world has flipped and small business can capitalize  by Frank Eliason (twitter: @FrankEliason ) Technology and social media tools have made it easier than ever for companies to communicate with consumers. They can listen and join in on conversations, solve problems, get instant feedback about their products and services, and more. So why, then, are most companies not doing this? Instead, it seems as if customer service is at an all time low, and that the few companies who are choosing to focus on their customers are experiencing a great competitive advantage. At Your Service explains the importance of refocusing your business on your customers and your employees, and just how to do it. Explains how to create a culture of empowered employees who understand the value of a great customer experience Advises on the need to communicate that experience to their customers and potential customers Frank Eliason, recognized by BusinessWeek as the 'most famous customer service manager in the US, possibly in the world,' has built a reputation for helping large businesses improve the way they connect with customers and enhance their relationships Quotes from the Audience: Bertrand Duperrin ?@bduperrin social service is not about shutting up the loudest cutsomers ! #sbf12 @frankeliason Paolo Pelloni ?@paolopelloniGautam Ghosh ?@GautamGhosh RT @cecildijoux: #sbf12 @frankeliason you need to change things and fix the approach it's not about social media it's about driving change  Peter H. Reiser ?@peterreiser #sbf12 Company Experience = Product Experience + Customer Interactions + Employee Experience @yourservice Engage or lose! Socialize, mobilize, conversify: engage your employees to improve business performance Christian Finn (twitter: @cfinn) First Christian was presenting the flying monkey   Then he outlined the four principals to fix the Intranet: 1. Socalize the Intranet 2. Get Thee to a Single Repository 3. Mobilize the Intranet 4. Conversationalize Your Processes Quotes from the Audience: Oscar Berg ?@oscarberg Engaged employees think their work bring out the best of their ideas @cfinn #sbf12 http://pic.twitter.com/68eddp48 John Stepper ?@johnstepper I like @cfinn's "conversify your processes" A nice related concept to "narrating your work", part of working out loud. http://johnstepper.com/2012/05/26/working-out-loud-your-personal-content-strategy/ Oscar Berg ?@oscarberg Organizations are talent markets - socializing your intranet makes this market function better @cfinn #sbf12 For profit, productivity, and personal benefit: creating a collaborative culture at Deutsche Bank John Stepper (twitter:@johnstepper) Driving adoption of collaboration + social media platforms at Deutsche Bank. John shared some great best practices on how to deploy an enterprise wide  community model  in a large company. He started with the most important question What is the commercial value of adding social ? Then he talked about the success of Community of Practices deployment and outlined some key use cases including the relevant measures to proof the ROI of the investment. Examples:  Community of practice -> measure: systematic collection of value stories  Self-service website  -> measure: based on representative models Optimizing asset inventory - > measure: Actual counts  This use case was particular interesting.  It is a crowd sourced spending/saving of infrastructure model.  User can cancel IT services they don't need (as example Software xx).  5% of the saving goes to social responsibility projects. The John outlined some  best practices on how to address the WIIFM (What's In It For Me) question of the individual users:  - change from hierarchy to graph -  working out loud = observable work + narrating  your work  - add social skills to career objectives - example: building a purposeful social network course/training as part of the job development curriculum And last but not least John gave some important tips on how to get senior management buy-in by establishing management sponsored division level collaboration boards which defines clear uses cases and measures. This divisional use cases are then implemented using a common social platform.  Thanks John - I learned a lot from your presentation!   Quotes from the Audience: Ana Silva ?@AnaDataGirl #sbf12 what's in it for individuals at Deutsche Bank? Shapping their reputations in a big org says @johnstepper #e20Ana Silva ?@AnaDataGirl Any reason why not? MT @magatorlibero #sbf12 is Deutsche B. experience on applying social inside company applicable to Italian people? Oscar Berg ?@oscarberg Your career is not a ladder, it is a network that opens up opportunities - @johnstepper #sbf12 Oscar Berg ?@oscarberg @johnstepper: Institutionalizing collaboration is next - collaboration woven into the fabric of daily work #sbf12 Ana Silva ?@AnaDataGirl #sbf12 @johnstepper talking about how Deutsche Bank is using #socbiz to build purposeful CoP & save money

  Read the article

• The Complementary Roles of PLM and PIM

  - by Ulf Köster

  Oracle Product Value Chain Solutions (aka Enterprise PLM Solutions) are a comprehensive set of product management solutions that work together to provide Oracle customers with a broad array of capabilities to manage all aspects of product life: innovation, design, launch, and supply chain / commercialization processes beyond the capabilities and boundaries of traditional engineering-focused Product Lifecycle Management applications. They support companies with an integrated managed view across the product value chain: From Lab to Launch, From Farm to Fork, From Concept to Product to Customer, From Product Innovation to Product Design and Product Commercialization. Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) represents a broad suite of software solutions to improve product-oriented business processes and data. PLM success stories prove that PLM helps companies improve time to market, increase product-related revenue, reduce product costs, reduce internal costs and improve product quality. As a maturing suite of enterprise solutions, PLM is still evolving to realize the promise it can provide across all facets of a business and all phases of the product lifecycle. The vision for PLM includes everything from gathering early requirements for a product through multiple stages of the product lifecycle from product design, through commercialization and eventual product retirement or replacement. In discrete or process industries, PLM is typically more focused on Product Definition as items with respect to the technical view of a material or part, including specifications, bills of material and manufacturing data. With Agile PLM, this is specifically related to capabilities addressing Product Collaboration, Governance and Compliance, Product Quality Management, Product Cost Management and Engineering Collaboration. PLM today is mainly addressing key requirements in the early product lifecycle, in engineering changes or in the “innovation cycle”, and primarily adds value related to product design, development, launch and engineering change process. In short, PLM is the master for Product Definition, wherever manufacturing takes place. Product Information Management (PIM) is a product suite that has evolved in parallel to PLM. Product Information Management (PIM) can extend the value of PLM implementations by providing complementary tools and capabilities. More relevant in the area of Product Commercialization, the vision for PIM is to manage product information throughout an enterprise and supply chain to improve product-related knowledge management, information sharing and synchronization from multiple data sources. PIM success stories have shown the ability to provide multiple benefits, with particular emphasis on reducing information complexity and information management costs. Product Information in PIM is typically treated as the commercial view of a material or part, including sales and marketing information and categorization. PIM collects information from multiple manufacturing sites and multiple suppliers into its repository, but also provides integration tools to push the information back out to the other systems, serving as an active central repository with the aim to provide a holistic view on any product sold by a company (hence the name “Product Hub”). In short, PIM is the master of commercial Product Information. So PIM is quickly becoming mandatory because of its value in optimizing multichannel selling processes and relationships with customers, as you can see from the following table: Viewpoint PLM Current State PIM Key Benefits PIM adds to PLM Product Lifecycle Primarily R&D Front end Innovation Cycle Change process Primarily commercial / transactional state of lifecycle Provides a seamless information flow from design and manufacturing through the ultimate selling and servicing of products Data Primarily focused on “item” vs. “product” data Product structures Specifications Technical information Repository for all product information. Reaches out to entire enterprise and its various silos of product information and descriptions Provides a “trusted source” of accurate product information to the internal organization and trading partners Data Lifecycle Repository for all design iterations Historical information Released, current information, with version management and time stamping Provides a single location to track and audit historical product information Communication PLM release finished product to ERP PLM is the master for Product Definition Captures information from disparate sources, including in-house data stores Recognizes the reality of today’s data “mess” across information silos Provides the ability to package product information to its audience in the desired, relevant format to meet their exacting business requirements Departmental R&D Manufacturing Quality Compliance Procurement Strategic Marketing Focus on Marketing and Sales Gathering information from other Departments, multiple sites, multiple suppliers A singular enterprise solution that leverages existing information silos and data stores Supply Chain Multi-site internal collaboration Supplier collaboration Customer collaboration Works with customers, exchanges / data pools, and trading partners to provide relevant product information packaged the way the customer desires Provides ability to provide trading partners and internal customers with information in a manner they desire, continuously Tools Data Management Collaboration Innovation Management Cleansing Synchronization Hub functions Consistent, clean and complete commercial product information The goals of both PLM and PIM, put simply, are to help companies make more profit from their products. PLM and PIM solutions can be easily added as they share some of the same goals, while coming from two different perspectives: the definition of the product and the commercialization of the product. Both can serve as a form of product “system of record”, but take different approaches to delivering value. Oracle Product Value Chain solutions offer rich new strategies for executives to collectively leverage Agile PLM, Product Data Hub, together with Enterprise Data Quality for Products, and other industry leading Oracle applications to achieve further incremental value, like Oracle Innovation Management. This is unique on the market today.

  Read the article

• BI&EPM in Focus June 2014

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

  Applications Webcast Centre – A Library of Discussion and Research for Best Practice: Achieving Reliable Planning, Budgeting and Forecasting Talent Analytics and Big Data – Is HR ready for the challenge Enterprise Data – The cost of non-quality Customers Josephine Niemiec from ADP talks about Oracle Hyperion Workforce Planning at Collaborate 2014 (link) Video Chris Nelms from Ameren talks about Oracle BI Spend and Procurement Analytics at Collaborate 2014 (link) Video Leggett & Platt Leverages Oracle Hyperion EPM and Demantra (link) Video Pella Corporation Accelerates Close Cycle by Cutting Time for Financial Consolidation from Three Days to Less Than One Day (link) Secretaría General de Administración de Justicia en España Enhances Citizen Services with Near-Real-Time Business Intelligence Gleaned from 500 Databases  (link) Bellco Credit Union Speeds Budget Development by 30%—Gains Insight into Specific Branch and Financial Product Profitability  (link)  Video QDQ media Speeds up Financial Reporting by 24x, Gains Business Agility, and Integrates Seamlessly into Corporate Accounting System  (link) Westfield Group Maximizes Shopping Mall Revenue, Shortens Year-End Financial Consolidation by 75%  (link)  IL&FS Transportation Networks Shortens Financial Consolidation and Reporting Cycle by Eight Days, Gains In-Depth Insight into Business Performance   (link) Angel Trains Optimizes Rail Operations for Purchasing, Sourcing, and Project Management to Meet Challenges of Evolving Rail Industry  (link) Enterprise Performance Management June 11, at Oracle Utrecht, NL: Morning session: Explore Planning and Budgeting in the Cloud (link) June 12, London: PureApps Presents: Best Practice Financial Consolidation and Reporting Workshop (link) July 3, Koln: Oracle Hyperion Business Analytics Roundtable (link) Blog: What's Your Tax Strategy? Automate the Operational Transfer Pricing Process (link) YouTube Video: Automate Tax Reporting with Oracle Hyperion Tax Provision (link) YouTube Video: Introducing Oracle Hyperion Planning’s Tablet Optimized Interface (link) OracleEPMWebcasts @ YouTube (link) Partner webcasts: Wednesday, 4 June, 5.00 GMT - Case Study:  Lessons Learned from Edgewater Ranzal's Internal Implementation of Oracle Planning & Budgeting Cloud Service (PBCS) - Learn more and register here! Thursday, 5 June, 4.00 GMT - Achieving Accountable Care Using Oracle Technology - Learn more and register here! Tuesday, 17 June, 4.00 GMT - Optimizing Performance for Oracle EPM Systems - Learn more and register here! Oracle University Blog: The Coolest Features Available with Oracle Hyperion 11.1.2.3 – Training from OU to help you to best use them (link) Support: Proactive Support: EPM Hyperion Planning 11.1.2.3.500 Using RMI Service [Blog] Proactive Support: Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service Videos (link) Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service (PBCS) 11.1.2.3.410 Patch Bundle [Doc ID 1670981.1] Hyperion Analytic Provider Services 11.1.2.2.106 Patch Set Update [Doc ID 1667350.1] Hyperion Essbase 11.1.2.2.106 Patch Set Update [Doc ID 1667346.1] Hyperion Essbase Administration Services 11.1.2.2.106 Patch Set Update [Doc ID 1667348.1] Hyperion Essbase Studio 11.1.2.2.106 Patch Set Update [Doc ID 1667329.1] Hyperion Smart View 11.1.2.5.210 Patch Set Update [Doc ID 1669427.1] Using HPCM, HSF or DRM Communities (link) Business Intelligence June 12, Birmingham, UK: Oracle Big Data at Work - Use Cases and Architecture (link) June 17, London: Oracle at Cloud & Big Data World Forums (link) June 17, Partner Webcast: Transform your Planning Capabilities with Peloton's CloudAccelerator for Oracle PBCS (link) June 19, London: Oracle at the Whitehall Media Big Data Analytics Conference and Exhibition (link) June 19, London: Partner Event - Agile BI Conference by Peak Indicators [link] June 25, Munich: Oracle Special Day auf der TDWI 2014 Konferenz (link) July 15, London: Oracle Endeca Information Discovery Workshop (link) July 16, London: BI Applications Workshop – Financial Analytics & Procurement Analytics (link) July 17, London: BI Applications Workshop – HR Analytics (link) Milan, Italy: L’Osservatorio Big Data Analytics & Business Intelligence with Politecnico di Milano (link) OBIA 11.1.1.8.1 - Now Available [Blog] What’s New in OBIA 11.1.1.8.1 [Blog] BI Blog: A closer look at Oracle BI Applications 11.1.1.8.1 release (link) Press Release: BI Applications Deliver Greater Insight into Talent and Procurement (link) Support Blog: OBIA 11.1.1.8.1 Upgrade Guide & Documentation (link) YouTube Video: Glenn Hoormann of Ludus talks to us about Oracle Business Intelligence and ERP at Collaborate 2014 (Link) YouTube Video: Performance Architects talks about key BI and Mobile trends, including Endeca at Collaborate 2014 (link) Big Data Blog: 3 Keys for Using Big Data Effectively for Enhanced Customer Experience (link) Big Data Lite Demo VM 3.0 Now Available on OTN BI Blog: Data Relationship Governance - Workflow in a Bottle (link) MDM Blog: Register for Product Data Management Weekly Cloudcasts (link) MDM Blog: Improve your Customer Experience with High Quality Information (link) MDM Blog: Big Data Challenges & Considerations (link) Oracle University: Oracle BI Applications 11g: Implementation using ODI (link) Proactive Support: Monthly Index [Blog] My Oracle Support: Partner Accreditation for Business Analytics Support [Blog] OBIEE 11g Test-to-Production (T2P) / Clone Procedures Guide [Blog] Normal 0 false false false EN-GB 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-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

  Read the article

• WordPress SEO Plugins to make your Blog Search Engine Friendly

  - by Vaibhav

  WordPress is the most common blogging system in use today and its use as a CMS is also wide spread. With hundreds of millions of sites using wordpress, getting correct SEO for your WordPress based Blog or Site is very important. We get regular queries from people who want Search Engine Optimisation for their site or blog which is made using wordpress. Here is a list of 16 of the best WordPress Plug-ins That can help you achieve better rankings: All in one SEO Pack This is most popular plugin among all SEO plugins for WordPress. It is easy to use and is compatible with most of the WordPress plugins. It works as a complete package of SEO plugin – automatically generating META tags and optimizing search engines for your titles and avoiding duplicate content. You can also include META tags manually (Met title, Meta description and Met keywords) for all pages and post in your website. HeadSpace2 HeasSpace2 is available in different languages , you can manage a wide range of SEO Tasks related with meta data, you can tag your posts, Custom descriptions and titles. So your page can rank the created relevancy on Search engines and you can load different settings for different pages. Platinum SEO plugin Automatic 301 redirects permalink changes, META tags generation, avoids duplicate content, and does SEO optimization of post and page titles and a lots of other features. TGFI.net SEO WordPress Plugin It’s a modified version of all-in-one SEO Pack. It has some unique feature over All-in-one SEO plugin, It generate titles, meta descriptions and meta keywords automatically when overrides are not present. Google XML Sitemaps Sitemaps Generated by this tool are supported by  Google,  Yahoo,  Bing, and Ask. We all know Sitemaps make indexing of web pages easier for web crawlers. Crawlers can retrieve complete structure of site and more information by sitemaps. They notify all major search engines about new posts every time you create a new post. Sitemap Generator You can generate highly customizable sitemap for your WordPress page. You can choose what to show and what not to show, you can list the items in your choice of orde. It supports pages and permalinks and multi-level categories. SEO Slugs They can generate more search engine friendly URLs for your site. Slugs are filename assigned to your post , this plugin removes all  common words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’, ‘what’, ‘you’ from slug which are assigned automatically to your post. SEO Post Links This is a similar plugin to SEO Slug, it removes unnecessary keywords from slug to make it short and SEO friendly and you can fix the number of characters in your post. Automatic SEO links With this tool you can create auto linking in your post. You can use this tool for inter linking or external linking too. Just select your words, anchor text target URL nature of links ( Do fallow / No follow ). This plugin will replace the matches found in post, WP Backlinks A helpful plugin for link exchange , whenever any webmaster submits a link for link exchange, the plugin will spider webmasters site for reciprocal link, and if everything is found good , your link will be exchanged. SEO Title Tag You can optimize your Title  tags of  Word press blog through this plugin . You can also override the title tag with custom titles , mass editing and title tags for 404 pages which are the main feature of this plugin. 404 SEO plugin With this Plugin you can customize 404 page of your site; you can give customized error message and links to relevant pages of your site. Redirection A powerful plugins to manage 301 redirection and logs related with redirection, with this plugin you can track 404 errors and track the log of all redirected URLs , this plugin can redirect  post automatically when URL changes for that post. AddToAny This plugin helps your readers to share, save, email and bookmark your posts and pages. It supports more than a hundred social bookmarking , networking and sharing sites. SEO Friendly Images You can make SEO friendly images available on your site with the help of this tool. It updates images with proper titles and ALT tags. Robots Meta A plugin which prevents Search engines to index comments on your post, login and admin pages. It also allows to add tags for individual pages.

  Read the article

• SQL Authority News – Play by Play with Pinal Dave – A Birthday Gift

  - by Pinal Dave

  Today is my birthday. Personal Note When I was young, I was always looking forward to my birthday as on this day, I used to get gifts from everybody. Now when I am getting old on each of my birthday, I have almost same feeling but the direction is different. Now on each of my birthday, I feel like giving gifts to everybody. I have received lots of support, love and respect from everybody; and now I must return it back.Well, on this birthday, I have very unique gifts for everybody – my latest course on SQL Server. How I Tune Performance I often get questions where I am asked how do I work on a normal day. I am often asked that how do I work when I have performance tuning project is assigned to me. Lots of people have expressed their desire that they want me to explain and demonstrate my own method of solving performance problem when I am facing real world problem. It is a pretty difficult task as in the real world, nothing goes as planned and usually planned demonstrations have no place there. The real world, demands real solutions and in a timely fashion. If a consultant goes to industry and does not demonstrate his/her capabilities in very first few minutes, it does not matter how much fame he/she is, the door is shown to them eventually. It is true and in my early career, I have faced it quite commonly. I have learned the trick to be honest from the start and request absolutely transparent communication from the organization where I am to consult. Play by Play Play by Play is a very unique setup. It is not planned and it is a step by step course. It is like a reality show – a very real encounter to the problem and real problem solving approach. I had a great time doing this course. Geoffrey Grosenbach (VP of Pluralsight) sits down with me to see what a SQL Server Admin does in the real world. This Play-by-Play focuses on SQL Server performance tuning and I go over optimizing queries and fine-tuning the server. The table of content of this course is very simple. Introduction In the introduction I explained my basic strategies when I am approached by a customer for performance tuning. Basic Information Gathering In this module I explain how I do gather various information for performance tuning project. It is very crucial to demonstrate to customers for consultant his capability of solving problem. I attempt to resolve a small problem which gives a big positive impact on performance, consultant have to gather proper information from the start. I demonstrate in this module, how one can collect all the important performance tuning metrics. Removing Performance Bottleneck In this module, I build upon the previous module’s statistics collected. I analysis various performance tuning measures and immediately start implementing various tweaks on the performance, which will start improving the performance of my server. This is a very effective method and it gives immediate return of efforts. Index Optimization Indexes are considered as a silver bullet for performance tuning. However, it is not true always there are plenty of examples where indexes even performs worst after implemented. The key is to understand a few of the basic properties of the index and implement the right things at the right time. In this module, I describe in detail how to do index optimizations and what are right and wrong with Index. If you are a DBA or developer, and if your application is running slow – this is must attend module for you. I have some really interesting stories to tell as well. Optimize Query with Rewrite Every problem has more than one solution, in this module we will see another very famous, but hard to master skills for performance tuning – Query Rewrite. There are few do’s and don’ts for any query rewrites. I take a very simple example and demonstrate how query rewrite can improve the performance of the query at many folds. I also share some real world funny stories in this module. This course is hosted at Pluralsight. You will need a valid login for Pluralsight to watch  Play by Play: Pinal Dave course. You can also sign up for FREE Trial of Pluralsight to watch this course. As today is my birthday – I will give 10 people (randomly) who will express their desire to learn this course, a free code. Please leave your comment and I will send you free code to watch this course for free. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Training, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Video

  Read the article

• The JRockit Performance Counters

  - by Marcus Hirt

  Every now and then I get a question regarding what the attributes in the PerfCounters dynamic MBean represent. Now, all the MBeans under the oracle.jrockit.management (bea.jrockit.management pre R28) domain are part of what we call JMXMAPI (the JRockit JMX based Management API), which is unsupported. Therefore there is no official documentation for the API. I did however write a bit about JMXMAPI in my recent JRockit book, Oracle JRockit: The Definitive Guide. The information in the table below is from that book: Counter Description java.cls.loadedClasses The number of classes loaded since the start of the JVM. java.cls.unloadedClasses The number of classes unloaded since the start of the JVM. java.property.java.class.path The class path of the JVM. java.property.java.endorsed.dirs The endorsed dirs. See the Endorsed Standards Override Mechanism. java.property.java.ext.dirs The ext dirs, which are searched for jars that should be automatically put on the classpath. See the Java documentation for java.ext.dirs. java.property.java.home The root of the JDK or JRE installation. java.property.java.library.path The library path used to find user libraries. java.property.java.vm.version The JRockit version. java.rt.vmArgs The list of VM arguments. java.threads.daemon The number of running daemon threads. java.threads.live The total number of running threads. java.threads.livePeak The peak number of threads that has been running since JRockit was started. java.threads.nonDaemon The number of non-daemon threads running. java.threads.started The total number of threads started since the start of JRockit. jrockit.gc.latest.heapSize The current heap size in bytes. jrockit.gc.latest.nurserySize The current nursery size in bytes. jrockit.gc.latest.oc.compaction.time How long, in ticks, the last compaction lasted. Reset to 0 if compaction is skipped. jrockit.gc.latest.oc.heapUsedAfter Used heap at the end of the last OC, in bytes. jrockit.gc.latest.oc.heapUsedBefore Used heap at the start of the last OC, in bytes. jrockit.gc.latest.oc.number The number of OCs that have occurred so far. jrockit.gc.latest.oc.sumOfPauses The paused time for the last OC, in ticks. jrockit.gc.latest.oc.time The time the last OC took, in ticks. jrockit.gc.latest.yc.sumOfPauses The paused time for the last YC, in ticks. jrockit.gc.latest.yc.time The time the last YC took, in ticks. jrockit.gc.max.oc.individualPause The longest OC pause so far, in ticks. jrockit.gc.max.yc.individualPause The longest YC pause so far, in ticks. jrockit.gc.total.oc.compaction.externalAborted Number of aborted external compactions so far. jrockit.gc.total.oc.compaction.internalAborted Number of aborted internal compactions so far. jrockit.gc.total.oc.compaction.internalSkipped Number of skipped internal compactions so far. jrockit.gc.total.oc.compaction.time The total time spent doing compaction so far, in ticks. jrockit.gc.total.oc.ompaction.externalSkipped Number of skipped external compactions so far. jrockit.gc.total.oc.pauseTime The sum of all OC pause times so far, in ticks. jrockit.gc.total.oc.time The total time spent doing OC so far, in ticks. jrockit.gc.total.pageFaults The number of page faults that have occurred during GC so far. jrockit.gc.total.yc.pauseTime The sum of all YC pause times, in ticks. jrockit.gc.total.yc.promotedObjects The number of objects that all YCs have promoted. jrockit.gc.total.yc.promotedSize The total number of bytes that all YCs have promoted, in bytes. jrockit.gc.total.yc.time The total time spent doing YC, in ticks. oracle.ci.jit.count The number of methods JIT compiled. oracle.ci.jit.timeTotal The total time spent JIT compiling, in ticks. oracle.ci.opt.count The number of methods optimized. oracle.ci.opt.timeTotal The total time spent optimizing, in ticks. oracle.rt.counterFrequency Used to convert ticks values to seconds. Note that many of these counters are excellent choices for attributes to plot in the Management Console. Also note that many values are in ticks – to convert them to seconds, divide by the value in the oracle.rt.counterFrequency counter.

  Read the article

• Recent Innovations to ILOM

  - by B.Koch

  by Josh Rosen If you are wondering how Oracle can make some of the most advanced, reliable, and fault tolerant servers on the market, look no further than Oracle Integrated Lights Out Manager or ILOM.  We build ILOM into every server we create, from Oracle x86 Systems such as X3-2 to the SPARC T-Series family. Oracle ILOM is an embedded service processor, but it's really more than that.  It's a computer within a computer.  It's smart, it's tightly integrated into all aspects of the server's operation, and it's a big reason why Oracle servers are used for some of the most mission-critical workloads out there. To understand the value of ILOM, there is no better place to start than its fault management capability.  We have taken the sophisticated fault management architecture from Solaris, developed and refined over a decade, and built it into each and every ILOM. ILOM detects a potential issue at its earliest stage, watching low-level sensors.   If the root cause of a problem is not clear from a single error reading, ILOM will look for other clues and combine multiple pieces of information to correctly identify a failing component. ILOM provides peace of mind. We tailor our fault management for each new server platform that we produce.  You can rest assured that it's always actively keeping the server healthy.  And if there is a problem, you can be confident it will let you know by sending you a notification by e-mail or trap. We also heard IT managers tell us they needed a Ph.D. in computer engineering to manage today's servers. It doesn't have to be that way.  Thanks to the latest innovations to Oracle ILOM, we present hardware inventory and status in way that makes sense – to anyone.  Green means everything is healthy and red means something is wrong.  When a component needs to be replaced a clear message indicates where the problem is and points you at a knowledge article about that problem.  It's that simple. Simpler management and simple interfaces mean reduced complexity and lower costs to manage.  And we know that's really important. ILOM does all this while also providing advanced service processor features you depend on for managing enterprise class systems.  You can remotely control the server power, interact with a virtual video console for the server, and mount media on the server remotely.  There is no need to spend money on a KVM switch to get this functionality. And when people hear how advanced ILOM is, they can't believe ILOM is free.  All features are enabled and included with each Oracle server that you buy.  There are no advanced licenses you need to purchase or features to unlock. Configuring ILOM has also never been easier.  It is now possible to configure almost all aspects of the server directly from ILOM.  This includes changing BIOS settings, persistently modifying boot order, and optimizing power settings -- all directly from ILOM. But Oracle's innovation does not stop with ILOM.  Oracle has engineered Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center to integrate directly with ILOM, providing centralized management across all of our servers. Ops Center will discover each of your Oracle servers over the network by searching for ILOMs.  When it finds one, it knows how to communicate with ILOM to monitoring and configure that server from application to disk. Since every server that Oracle produces, from x86 Systems to SPARC T-Series up and down the line, comes with Oracle ILOM, you can manage all Oracle servers in the same way.  And while all of our servers may have different components on the inside, each with their specialized functions, the way you integrate them and the way you monitor and manage them is exactly the same. Oracle ILOM is state-of-art.  If you are looking for a server that make systems management simple and is easy to integrate and maintain, check out the latest advances to Oracle ILOM. Josh Rosen is a Principal Product Manager at Oracle and previously spent more than a decade as a developer and architect of system management software. Josh has worked on system management for many of Oracle's hardware products ranging from the earliest blade systems to the latest Oracle x86 servers.

  Read the article

• Pella Increases Online Appointment Scheduling and Rapidly Personalizes and Updates Marketing Initiatives

  - by Michael Snow

  Originally posted on Oracle Customers page.Oracle Customer: Pella CorporationLocation:  Pella, IowaIndustry: Industrial Manufacturing Employees:  7,100 Pella Corporation is an innovative leader in creating a better view for homes and businesses by designing, testing, manufacturing, and installing quality windows and doors for new construction, remodeling, and replacement applications. A family-owned company, Pella has an 88-year history of innovation and, today, is the second-largest manufacturer in the country of windows and doors, including patio, entry, and storm doors. The company has 10 manufacturing facilities in United States and window and door showrooms across the United States and Canada. In-home consultations are an important part of Pella’s sales process. Several years ago, the company launched an online appointment scheduling tool to improve customer convenience. While the functionality worked well, the company wanted to increase online conversion rates and decrease the number of incomplete, online appointment schedules. It also wanted to give its business analysts and other line-of-business personnel the ability to update the scheduling tool and interface quickly, without needing IT team intervention and recoding, to better capitalize on opportunities and personalize the interface for specific markets. Pella also looked to reduce IT complexity by selecting a system that integrated easily with its Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 enterprise applications.Pella, which has a large Oracle footprint, selected Oracle WebCenter Sites as the foundation for its new, real-time appointment scheduling application. It used the solution to re-engineer the scheduling process and the information required to set up an appointment. Just a few months after launch, it is seeing improvement in the number of appointments booked online and experiencing fewer abandoned appointments during the scheduling process. As important, Pella can now quickly and easily make changes to images, video, and content displayed on the scheduling tool interface, delivering greater business agility. Previously, such changes required a developer and weeks of coding and testing. Today, a member of Pella’s business analyst team can complete the changes in hours. This capability enables Pella to personalize the Web experience for customers. For example, it can display different products or images for clients in different regions.The solution is also highly scalable. Pella is using Oracle WebCenter Sites for appointment scheduling now and plans to migrate Pella.com, its configurator tool, and dealer microsites onto the platform. Further, Pella plans to leverage the solution to optimize mobile devices. “Moving ahead, we expect to extensively leverage Oracle WebCenter Sites to gain greater flexibility in updating the Web experience, thanks to the ability to make updates quickly without developer resources. Segmentation and targeting capabilities will allow us to create a more personalized experience across both traditional and mobile platforms,” said Teri Lancaster, IT manager, customer experience applications, Pella Corporation. A word from Pella Corporation "Oracle WebCenter Sites?from the start?delivered important benefits. We’ve redesigned the online scheduling process and are seeing more potential customers completing consultation bookings online. More important, the solution opens a world of other possibilities as we plan to migrate Pella.com and our dealer microsites to the platform, and leverage it to optimize the Web experience for our mobile devices.” – Teri Lancaster, IT Manager, Customer Experience Applications, Pella Corporation Oracle Product and Services Oracle WebCenter Sites Why Oracle Pella has a long-standing relationship with Oracle. “We look to Oracle first for a solution. Our Oracle account team came to us with several solutions, and Oracle WebCenter Sites delivered the scalability, ease-of-use, flexibility, and scalability that we required for the appointment scheduling initiative and other Web projects on the horizon, including migrating Pella.com and optimizing our site for mobile platforms,”said Teri Lancaster, IT manager, customer experience applications, Pella Corporation. Implementation Process The Pella implementation team, working with Oracle partner Element Solutions, LLC, integrated the appointment setting application with Pella.com as well as the company’s Oracle E-Business Suite customer relationship management applications. Using Oracle WebCenter Site’s development tools and subversion capabilities to develop the application, the Element Solutions and Pella teams could work remotely and collaboratively, accelerating deployment. Pella went live with the new scheduling tool in just six months. Partner Oracle PartnerElement Solutions, LLC Element Solutions was instrumental at every major stage of the project, including design creation and approval, development, training, and rollout. “Element Solutions was a vital partner for our Oracle WebCenter Sites initiative. The team provided guidance, and more important, critical knowledge transfer at every stage?which equipped us to get the most out of this powerful and versatile solution. We were definitely collaboration partners,” Lancaster said. Resources Pella Corporation Upgrades Enterprise Applications to Continue to Improve Manufacturing Efficiency Thousands of Customers Successfully and Smoothly Upgrade to Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1 for New Functionality, Lower Operating Costs and Improved Shared Operations Managing the Virtual World

  Read the article

• Code Metrics: Number of IL Instructions

  - by DigiMortal

  In my previous posting about code metrics I introduced how to measure LoC (Lines of Code) in .NET applications. Now let’s take a step further and let’s take a look how to measure compiled code. This way we can somehow have a picture about what compiler produces. In this posting I will introduce you code metric called number of IL instructions. NB! Number of IL instructions is not something you can use to measure productivity of your team. If you want to get better idea about the context of this metric and LoC then please read my first posting about LoC. What are IL instructions? When code written in some .NET Framework language is compiled then compiler produces assemblies that contain byte code. These assemblies are executed later by Common Language Runtime (CLR) that is code execution engine of .NET Framework. The byte code is called Intermediate Language (IL) – this is more common language than C# and VB.NET by example. You can use ILDasm tool to convert assemblies to IL assembler so you can read them. As IL instructions are building blocks of all .NET Framework binary code these instructions are smaller and highly general – we don’t want very rich low level language because it executes slower than more general language. For every method or property call in some .NET Framework language corresponds set of IL instructions. There is no 1:1 relationship between line in high level language and line in IL assembler. There are more IL instructions than lines in C# code by example. How much instructions there are? I have no common answer because it really depends on your code. Here you can see some metrics from my current community project that is developed on SharePoint Server 2007. As average I have about 7 IL instructions per line of code. This is not metric you should use, it is just illustrative example so you can see the differences between numbers of lines and IL instructions. Why should I measure the number of IL instructions? Just take a look at chart above. Compiler does something that you cannot see – it compiles your code to IL. This is not intuitive process because you usually cannot say what is exactly the end result. You know it at greater plain but you don’t know it exactly. Therefore we can expect some surprises and that’s why we should measure the number of IL instructions. By example, you may find better solution for some method in your source code. It looks nice, it works nice and everything seems to be okay. But on server under load your fix may be way slower than previous code. Although you minimized the number of lines of code it ended up with increasing the number of IL instructions. How to measure the number of IL instructions? My choice is NDepend because Visual Studio is not able to measure this metric. Steps to make are easy. Open your NDepend project or create new and add all your application assemblies to project (you can also add Visual Studio solution to project). Run project analysis and wait until it is done. You can see over-all stats form global summary window. This is the same window I used to read the LoC and the number of IL instructions metrics for my chart. Meanwhile I made some changes to my code (enabled advanced caching for events and event registrations module) and then I ran code analysis again to get results for this section of this posting. NDepend is also able to tell you exactly what parts of code have problematically much IL instructions. The code quality section of CQL Query Explorer shows you how much problems there are with members in analyzed code. If you click on the line Methods too big (NbILInstructions) you can see all the problematic members of classes in CQL Explorer shown in image on right. In my case if have 10 methods that are too big and two of them have horrible number of IL instructions – just take a look at first two methods in this TOP10. Also note the query box. NDepend has easy and SQL-like query language to query code analysis results. You can modify these queries if you like and also you can define your own ones if default set is not enough for you. What is good result? As you can see from query window then the number of IL instructions per member should have maximally 200 IL instructions. Of course, like always, the less instructions you have, the better performing code you have. I don’t mean here little differences but big ones. By example, take a look at my first method in warnings list. The number of IL instructions it has is huge. And believe me – this method looks awful. Conclusion The number of IL instructions is useful metric when optimizing your code. For analyzing code at general level to find out too long methods you can use the number of LoC metric because it is more intuitive for you and you can therefore handle the situation more easily. Also you can use NDepend as code metrics tool because it has a lot of metrics to offer.

  Read the article

• C#/.NET Little Wonders: Static Char Methods

  - by James Michael Hare

  Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. Often times in our code we deal with the bigger classes and types in the BCL, and occasionally forgot that there are some nice methods on the primitive types as well.  Today we will discuss some of the handy static methods that exist on the char (the C# alias of System.Char) type. The Background I was examining a piece of code this week where I saw the following: 1: // need to get the 5th (offset 4) character in upper case 2: var type = symbol.Substring(4, 1).ToUpper(); 3:  4: // test to see if the type is P 5: if (type == "P") 6: { 7: // ... do something with P type... 8: } Is there really any error in this code?  No, but it still struck me wrong because it is allocating two very short-lived throw-away strings, just to store and manipulate a single char: The call to Substring() generates a new string of length 1 The call to ToUpper() generates a new upper-case version of the string from Step 1. In my mind this is similar to using ToUpper() to do a case-insensitive compare: it isn’t wrong, it’s just much heavier than it needs to be (for more info on case-insensitive compares, see #2 in 5 More Little Wonders). One of my favorite books is the C++ Coding Standards: 101 Rules, Guidelines, and Best Practices by Sutter and Alexandrescu.  True, it’s about C++ standards, but there’s also some great general programming advice in there, including two rules I love:         8. Don’t Optimize Prematurely         9. Don’t Pessimize Prematurely We all know what #8 means: don’t optimize when there is no immediate need, especially at the expense of readability and maintainability.  I firmly believe this and in the axiom: it’s easier to make correct code fast than to make fast code correct.  Optimizing code to the point that it becomes difficult to maintain often gains little and often gives you little bang for the buck. But what about #9?  Well, for that they state: “All other things being equal, notably code complexity and readability, certain efficient design patterns and coding idioms should just flow naturally from your fingertips and are no harder to write then the pessimized alternatives. This is not premature optimization; it is avoiding gratuitous pessimization.” Or, if I may paraphrase: “where it doesn’t increase the code complexity and readability, prefer the more efficient option”. The example code above was one of those times I feel where we are violating a tacit C# coding idiom: avoid creating unnecessary temporary strings.  The code creates temporary strings to hold one char, which is just unnecessary.  I think the original coder thought he had to do this because ToUpper() is an instance method on string but not on char.  What he didn’t know, however, is that ToUpper() does exist on char, it’s just a static method instead (though you could write an extension method to make it look instance-ish). This leads me (in a long-winded way) to my Little Wonders for the day… Static Methods of System.Char So let’s look at some of these handy, and often overlooked, static methods on the char type: IsDigit(), IsLetter(), IsLetterOrDigit(), IsPunctuation(), IsWhiteSpace() Methods to tell you whether a char (or position in a string) belongs to a category of characters. IsLower(), IsUpper() Methods that check if a char (or position in a string) is lower or upper case ToLower(), ToUpper() Methods that convert a single char to the lower or upper equivalent. For example, if you wanted to see if a string contained any lower case characters, you could do the following: 1: if (symbol.Any(c => char.IsLower(c))) 2: { 3: // ... 4: } Which, incidentally, we could use a method group to shorten the expression to: 1: if (symbol.Any(char.IsLower)) 2: { 3: // ... 4: } Or, if you wanted to verify that all of the characters in a string are digits: 1: if (symbol.All(char.IsDigit)) 2: { 3: // ... 4: } Also, for the IsXxx() methods, there are overloads that take either a char, or a string and an index, this means that these two calls are logically identical: 1: // check given a character 2: if (char.IsUpper(symbol[0])) { ... } 3:  4: // check given a string and index 5: if (char.IsUpper(symbol, 0)) { ... } Obviously, if you just have a char, then you’d just use the first form.  But if you have a string you can use either form equally well. As a side note, care should be taken when examining all the available static methods on the System.Char type, as some seem to be redundant but actually have very different purposes.  For example, there are IsDigit() and IsNumeric() methods, which sound the same on the surface, but give you different results. IsDigit() returns true if it is a base-10 digit character (‘0’, ‘1’, … ‘9’) where IsNumeric() returns true if it’s any numeric character including the characters for ½, ¼, etc. Summary To come full circle back to our opening example, I would have preferred the code be written like this: 1: // grab 5th char and take upper case version of it 2: var type = char.ToUpper(symbol[4]); 3:  4: if (type == 'P') 5: { 6: // ... do something with P type... 7: } Not only is it just as readable (if not more so), but it performs over 3x faster on my machine:    1,000,000 iterations of char method took: 30 ms, 0.000050 ms/item.    1,000,000 iterations of string method took: 101 ms, 0.000101 ms/item. It’s not only immediately faster because we don’t allocate temporary strings, but as an added bonus there less garbage to collect later as well.  To me this qualifies as a case where we are using a common C# performance idiom (don’t create unnecessary temporary strings) to make our code better. Technorati Tags: C#,CSharp,.NET,Little Wonders,char,string

  Read the article

• Siemens AG, Sector Healthcare, Increases Transparency and Improves Customer Loyalty with Web Portal Solution

  - by Kellsey Ruppel

  Siemens AG, Sector Healthcare, Increases Transparency and Improves Customer Loyalty with Web Portal Solution CUSTOMER AND PARTNER INFORMATION Customer Name – Siemens AG, Sector Healthcare Customer Revenue – 73,515 Billion Euro (2011, Siemens AG total) Customer Quote – “The realization of our complex requirements within a very short amount of time was enabled through the competent implementation partner Sapient, who fully used the  very broad scope of standard functionality provided in the Oracle WebCenter Portal, and the management of customer services, who continuously supported the project setup. ” – Joerg Modlmayr, Project Manager, Healthcare Customer Service Portal, Siemens AG The Siemens Healthcare Sector is one of the world's largest suppliers to the healthcare industry and a trendsetter in medical imaging, laboratory diagnostics, medical information technology and hearing aids. Siemens offers its customers products and solutions for the entire range of patient care from a single source – from prevention and early detection to diagnosis, and on to treatment and aftercare. By optimizing clinical workflows for the most common diseases, Siemens also makes healthcare faster, better and more cost-effective. To ensure greater transparency, increased efficiency, higher user acceptance, and additional services, Siemens AG, Sector Healthcare, replaced several existing legacy portal solutions that could not meet the company’s future needs with Oracle WebCenter Portal. Various existing portal solutions that cannot meet future demands will be successively replaced by the new central service portal, which will also allow for the efficient and intuitive implementation of new service concepts.  With Oracle, doctors and hospitals using Siemens medical solutions now have access to a central information portal that provides important information and services at just the push of a button.  Customer Name – Siemens AG, Sector Healthcare Customer URL – www.siemens.com Customer Headquarters – Erlangen, Germany Industry – Industrial Manufacturing Employees – 360,000  Challenges – Replace disparate medical service portals to meet future demands and eliminate an  unnecessarily high level of administrative work caused by heterogeneous installations Ensure portals meet current user demands to improve user-acceptance rates and increase number of total users Enable changes and expansion through standard functionality to eliminate the need for reliance on IT and reduce administrative efforts and associated high costs Ensure efficient and intuitive implementation of new service concepts for all devices and systems Ensure hospitals and clinics to transparently monitor and measure services rendered for the various medical devices and systems  Increase electronic interaction and expand services to achieve a higher level of customer loyalty Solution –  Deployed Oracle WebCenter Portal to ensure greater transparency, and as a result, a higher level of customer loyalty  Provided a centralized platform for doctors and hospitals using Siemens’ medical technology solutions that provides important information and services at the push of a button Reduced significantly the administrative workload by centralizing the solution in the new customer service portal Secured positive feedback from customers involved in the pilot program developed by design experts from Oracle partner Sapient. The interfaces were created with customer needs in mind. The first survey taken shortly after implementation came back with 2.4 points on a scale of 0-3 in the category “customer service portal intuitiveness level” Met all requirements including alignment with the Siemens Style Guide without extensive programming Implemented additional services via the portal such as benchmarking options to ensure the optimal use of the Customer Device Park Provided option for documentation of all services rendered in conjunction with the medical technology systems to ensure that the value of the services are transparent for the decision makers in the hospitals  Saved and stored all machine data from approximately 100,000 remote systems in the central service and information platform Provided the option to register errors online and follow the call status in real-time on the portal Made  available at the push of a button all information on the medical technology devices used in hospitals or clinics—from security checks and maintenance activities to current device statuses Provided PDF format Service Performance Reports that summarize information from periods of time ranging from previous weeks up to one year, meeting medical product law requirements  Why Oracle – Siemens AG favored Oracle for many reasons, however, the company ultimately decided to go with Oracle due to the enormous range of functionality the solutions offered for the healthcare sector.“We are not programmers; we are service providers in the medical technology segment and focus on the contents of the portal. All the functionality necessary for internet-based customer interaction is already standard in Oracle WebCenter Portal, which is a huge plus for us. Having Oracle as our technology partner ensures that the product will continually evolve, providing a strong technology platform for our customer service portal well into the future,” said Joerg Modlmayr project manager, Healthcare Customer Service Portal, Siemens AG. Partner Involvement – Siemens AG selected Oracle Partner Sapient because the company offered a service portfolio that perfectly met Siemens’ requirements and had a wealth of experience implementing Oracle WebCenter Portal. Additionally, Sapient had designers with a very high level of expertise in usability—an aspect that Siemens considered to be of vast importance for the project.  “The Sapient team completely met all our expectations. Our tightly timed project was completed on schedule, and the positive feedback from our users proves that we set the right measures in terms of usability—all thanks to the folks at Sapient,” Modlmayr said.  Partner Name – Sapient GmbH Deutschland Partner URL – www.sapient.com

  Read the article

• Maximize Performance and Availability with Oracle Data Integration

  - by Tanu Sood

  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";} Alert: Oracle is hosting the 12c Launch Webcast for Oracle Data Integration and Oracle Golden Gate on Tuesday, November 12 (tomorrow) to discuss the new capabilities in detail and share customer perspectives. Hear directly from customer experts and executives from SolarWorld Industries America, British Telecom and Rittman Mead and get your questions answered live by product experts. Register for this complimentary webcast today and join in the discussion tomorrow. Author: Irem Radzik, Senior Principal Product Director, Oracle Organizations that want to use IT as a strategic point of differentiation prefer Oracle’s complete application offering to drive better business performance and optimize their IT investments. These enterprise applications are in the center of business operations and they contain critical data that needs to be accessed continuously, as well as analyzed and acted upon in a timely manner. These systems also need to operate with high-performance and availability, which means analytical functions should not degrade applications performance, and even system maintenance and upgrades should not interrupt availability. Oracle’s data integration products, Oracle Data Integrator, Oracle GoldenGate, and Oracle Enterprise Data Quality, provide the core foundation for bringing data from various business-critical systems to gain a broader, unified view. As a more advance offering to 3rd party products, Oracle’s data integration products facilitate real-time reporting for Oracle Applications without impacting application performance, and provide ability to upgrade and maintain the system without taking downtime. Oracle GoldenGate is certified for Oracle Applications, including E-Business Suite, Siebel CRM, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards, for moving transactional data in real-time to a dedicated operational reporting environment. This solution allows the app users to offload the resource-heavy queries to the reporting instance(s), reducing CPU utilization, improving OLTP performance, and extending the lifetime of existing IT assets. In addition, having a dedicated reporting instance with up-to-the-second transactional data allows optimizing the reporting environment and even decreasing costs as GoldenGate can move only the required data from expensive mainframe environments to cost-efficient open system platforms.  With real-time data replication capabilities GoldenGate is also certified to enable application upgrades and database/hardware/OS migration without impacting business operations. GoldenGate is certified for Siebel CRM, Communications Billing and Revenue Management and JD Edwards for supporting zero downtime upgrades to the latest app version. GoldenGate synchronizes a parallel, upgraded system with the old version in real time, thus enables continuous operations during the process. Oracle GoldenGate is also certified for minimal downtime database migrations for Oracle E-Business Suite and other key applications. GoldenGate’s solution also minimizes the risk by offering a failback option after the switchover to the new environment. Furthermore, Oracle GoldenGate’s bidirectional active-active data replication is certified for Oracle ATG Web Commerce to enable geographically load balancing and high availability for ATG customers. For enabling better business insight, Oracle Data Integration products power Oracle BI Applications with high performance bulk and real-time data integration. Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) is embedded in Oracle BI Applications version 11.1.1.7.1 and helps to integrate data end-to-end across the full BI Applications architecture, supporting capabilities such as data-lineage, which helps business users identify report-to-source capabilities. ODI is integrated with Oracle GoldenGate and provides Oracle BI Applications customers the option to use real-time transactional data in analytics, and do so non-intrusively. By using Oracle GoldenGate with the latest release of Oracle BI Applications, organizations not only leverage fresh data in analytics, but also eliminate the need for an ETL batch window and minimize the impact on OLTP systems. You can learn more about Oracle Data Integration products latest 12c version in our upcoming launch webcast and access the app-specific free resources in the new Data Integration for Oracle Applications Resource Center.

  Read the article

• Profiling Startup Of VS2012 &ndash; YourKit Profiler

  - by Alois Kraus

  The YourKit (v7.0.5) profiler is interesting in terms of price (79€ single place license, 409€ + 1 year support and upgrades) and feature set. You do get a performance and memory profiler in one package for which you normally need also to pay extra from the other vendors. As an interesting side note the profiler UI is written in Java because they do also sell Java profilers with the same feature set. To get all methods of a VS startup you need first to configure it to include System* in the profiled methods and you need to configure * to measure wall clock time. By default it does record only CPU times which allows you to optimize CPU hungry operations. But you will never see a Thread.Sleep(10000) in the profiler blocking the UI in this mode. It can profile as all others processes started from within the profiler but it can also profile the next or all started processes. As usual it can profile in sampling and tracing mode. But since it is a memory profiler as well it does by default also record all object allocations > 1MB. With allocation recording enabled VS2012 did crash but without allocation recording there were no problems. The CPU tab contains the time line of the application and when you click in the graph you the call stacks of all threads at this time. This is really a nice feature. When you select a time region you the CPU Usage estimation for this time window. I have seen many applications consuming 100% CPU only because they did create garbage like crazy. For this is the Garbage Collection tab interesting in conjunction with a time range. This view is like the CPU table only that the CPU graph (green) is missing. All relevant information except for GCs/s is already visible in the CPU tab. Very handy to pinpoint excessive GC or CPU bound issues. The Threads tab does show the thread names and their lifetime. This is useful to see thread interactions or which thread is hottest in terms of CPU consumption. On the CPU tab the call tree does exist in a merged and thread specific view. When you click on a method you get below a list of all called methods. There you can sort for methods with a high own time which are worth optimizing. In the Method List you can select which scope you want to see. Back Traces are the methods which did call you. Callees ist the list of methods called directly or indirectly by your method as a flat list. This is not a call stack but still very useful to see which methods were slow so you can see the “root” cause quite quickly without the need to click trough long call stacks. The last view Merged Calles is a call stacked view of the previous view. This does help a lot to understand did call each method at run time. You would get the same view with a debugger for one call invocation but here you get the full statistics (invocation count) as well. Since YourKit is also a memory profiler you can directly see which objects you have on your managed heap and which objects do hold most of your precious memory. You can in in the Object Explorer view also examine the contents of your objects (strings or whatsoever) to get a better understanding which objects where potentially allocating this stuff.   YourKit is a very easy to use combined memory and performance profiler in one product. The unbeatable single license price makes it very attractive to straightly buy it. Although it is a Java UI it is very responsive and the memory consumption is considerably lower compared to dotTrace and ANTS profiler. What I do really like is to start the YourKit ui and then start the processes I want to profile as usual. There is no need to alter your own application code to be able to inject a profiler into your new started processes. For performance and memory profiling you can simply select the process you want to investigate from the list of started processes. That's the way I like to use profilers. Just get out of the way and let the application run without any special preparations.   Next: Telerik JustTrace

  Read the article

• Objects won't render when Texture Compression + Mipmapping is Enabled

  - by felipedrl

  I'm optimizing my game and I've just implemented compressed (DXTn) texture loading in OpenGL. I've worked my way removing bugs but I can't figure out this one: objects w/ DXTn + mipmapped textures are not being rendered. It's not like they are appearing with a flat color, they just don't appear at all. DXTn textured objs render and mipmapped non-compressed textures render just fine. The texture in question is 256x256 I generate the mips all the way down 4x4, i.e 1 block. I've checked on gDebugger and it display all the levels (7) just fine. I'm using GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_NEAREST for min filter and GL_LINEAR for mag one. The texture is being compressed and mipmaps being created offline with Paint.NET tool using super sampling method. (I also tried bilinear just in case) Source follow: [SNIPPET 1: Loading DDS into sys memory + Initializing Object] // Read header DDSHeader header; file.read(reinterpret_cast<char*>(&header), sizeof(DDSHeader)); uint pos = static_cast<uint>(file.tellg()); file.seekg(0, std::ios_base::end); uint dataSizeInBytes = static_cast<uint>(file.tellg()) - pos; file.seekg(pos, std::ios_base::beg); // Read file data mData = new unsigned char[dataSizeInBytes]; file.read(reinterpret_cast<char*>(mData), dataSizeInBytes); file.close(); mMipmapCount = header.mipmapcount; mHeight = header.height; mWidth = header.width; mCompressionType = header.pf.fourCC; // Only support files divisible by 4 (for compression blocks algorithms) massert(mWidth % 4 == 0 && mHeight % 4 == 0); massert(mCompressionType == NO_COMPRESSION || mCompressionType == COMPRESSION_DXT1 || mCompressionType == COMPRESSION_DXT3 || mCompressionType == COMPRESSION_DXT5); // Allow textures up to 65536x65536 massert(header.mipmapcount <= MAX_MIPMAP_LEVELS); mTextureFilter = TextureFilter::LINEAR; if (mMipmapCount > 0) { mMipmapFilter = MipmapFilter::NEAREST; } else { mMipmapFilter = MipmapFilter::NO_MIPMAP; } mBitsPerPixel = header.pf.bitcount; if (mCompressionType == NO_COMPRESSION) { if (header.pf.flags & DDPF_ALPHAPIXELS) { // The only format supported w/ alpha is A8R8G8B8 massert(header.pf.amask == 0xFF000000 && header.pf.rmask == 0xFF0000 && header.pf.gmask == 0xFF00 && header.pf.bmask == 0xFF); mInternalFormat = GL_RGBA8; mFormat = GL_BGRA; mDataType = GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE; } else { massert(header.pf.rmask == 0xFF0000 && header.pf.gmask == 0xFF00 && header.pf.bmask == 0xFF); mInternalFormat = GL_RGB8; mFormat = GL_BGR; mDataType = GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE; } } else { uint blockSizeInBytes = 16; switch (mCompressionType) { case COMPRESSION_DXT1: blockSizeInBytes = 8; if (header.pf.flags & DDPF_ALPHAPIXELS) { mInternalFormat = GL_COMPRESSED_RGBA_S3TC_DXT1_EXT; } else { mInternalFormat = GL_COMPRESSED_RGB_S3TC_DXT1_EXT; } break; case COMPRESSION_DXT3: mInternalFormat = GL_COMPRESSED_RGBA_S3TC_DXT3_EXT; break; case COMPRESSION_DXT5: mInternalFormat = GL_COMPRESSED_RGBA_S3TC_DXT5_EXT; break; default: // Not Supported (DXT2, DXT4 or any compression format) massert(false); } } [SNIPPET 2: Uploading into video memory] massert(mData != NULL); glGenTextures(1, &mHandle); massert(mHandle!=0); glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, mHandle); commitFiltering(); uint offset = 0; Renderer* renderer = Renderer::getInstance(); switch (mInternalFormat) { case GL_RGB: case GL_RGBA: case GL_RGB8: case GL_RGBA8: for (uint i = 0; i < mMipmapCount + 1; ++i) { uint width = std::max(1U, mWidth >> i); uint height = std::max(1U, mHeight >> i); glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, i, mInternalFormat, width, height, mHasBorder, mFormat, mDataType, &mData[offset]); offset += width * height * (mBitsPerPixel / 8); } break; case GL_COMPRESSED_RGB_S3TC_DXT1_EXT: case GL_COMPRESSED_RGBA_S3TC_DXT1_EXT: case GL_COMPRESSED_RGBA_S3TC_DXT3_EXT: case GL_COMPRESSED_RGBA_S3TC_DXT5_EXT: { uint blockSize = 16; if (mInternalFormat == GL_COMPRESSED_RGB_S3TC_DXT1_EXT || mInternalFormat == GL_COMPRESSED_RGBA_S3TC_DXT1_EXT) { blockSize = 8; } uint width = mWidth; uint height = mHeight; for (uint i = 0; i < mMipmapCount + 1; ++i) { uint nBlocks = ((width + 3) / 4) * ((height + 3) / 4); // Only POT textures allowed for mipmapping massert(width % 4 == 0 && height % 4 == 0); glCompressedTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, i, mInternalFormat, width, height, mHasBorder, nBlocks * blockSize, &mData[offset]); offset += nBlocks * blockSize; if (width <= 4 && height <= 4) { break; } width = std::max(4U, width / 2); height = std::max(4U, height / 2); } break; } default: // Not Supported massert(false); } Also I don't understand the "+3" in the block size computation but looking for a solution for my problema I've encountered people defining it as that. I guess it won't make a differente for POT textures but I put just in case. Thanks.

  Read the article

• Developing Schema Compare for Oracle (Part 6): 9i Query Performance

  - by Simon Cooper

  All throughout the EAP and beta versions of Schema Compare for Oracle, our main request was support for Oracle 9i. After releasing version 1.0 with support for 10g and 11g, our next step was then to get version 1.1 of SCfO out with support for 9i. However, there were some significant problems that we had to overcome first. This post will concentrate on query execution time. When we first tested SCfO on a 9i server, after accounting for various changes to the data dictionary, we found that database registration was taking a long time. And I mean a looooooong time. The same database that on 10g or 11g would take a couple of minutes to register would be taking upwards of 30 mins on 9i. Obviously, this is not ideal, so a poke around the query execution plans was required. As an example, let's take the table population query - the one that reads ALL_TABLES and joins it with a few other dictionary views to get us back our list of tables. On 10g, this query takes 5.6 seconds. On 9i, it takes 89.47 seconds. The difference in execution plan is even more dramatic - here's the (edited) execution plan on 10g: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------| Id | Operation | Name | Bytes | Cost |-------------------------------------------------------------------------------| 0 | SELECT STATEMENT | | 108K| 939 || 1 | SORT ORDER BY | | 108K| 939 || 2 | NESTED LOOPS OUTER | | 108K| 938 ||* 3 | HASH JOIN RIGHT OUTER | | 103K| 762 || 4 | VIEW | ALL_EXTERNAL_LOCATIONS | 2058 | 3 ||* 20 | HASH JOIN RIGHT OUTER | | 73472 | 759 || 21 | VIEW | ALL_EXTERNAL_TABLES | 2097 | 3 ||* 34 | HASH JOIN RIGHT OUTER | | 39920 | 755 || 35 | VIEW | ALL_MVIEWS | 51 | 7 || 58 | NESTED LOOPS OUTER | | 39104 | 748 || 59 | VIEW | ALL_TABLES | 6704 | 668 || 89 | VIEW PUSHED PREDICATE | ALL_TAB_COMMENTS | 2025 | 5 || 106 | VIEW | ALL_PART_TABLES | 277 | 11 |------------------------------------------------------------------------------- And the same query on 9i: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------| Id | Operation | Name | Bytes | Cost |-------------------------------------------------------------------------------| 0 | SELECT STATEMENT | | 16P| 55G|| 1 | SORT ORDER BY | | 16P| 55G|| 2 | NESTED LOOPS OUTER | | 16P| 862M|| 3 | NESTED LOOPS OUTER | | 5251G| 992K|| 4 | NESTED LOOPS OUTER | | 4243M| 2578 || 5 | NESTED LOOPS OUTER | | 2669K| 1440 ||* 6 | HASH JOIN OUTER | | 398K| 302 || 7 | VIEW | ALL_TABLES | 342K| 276 || 29 | VIEW | ALL_MVIEWS | 51 | 20 ||* 50 | VIEW PUSHED PREDICATE | ALL_TAB_COMMENTS | 2043 | ||* 66 | VIEW PUSHED PREDICATE | ALL_EXTERNAL_TABLES | 1777K| ||* 80 | VIEW PUSHED PREDICATE | ALL_EXTERNAL_LOCATIONS | 1744K| ||* 96 | VIEW | ALL_PART_TABLES | 852K| |------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Have a look at the cost column. 10g's overall query cost is 939, and 9i is 55,000,000,000 (or more precisely, 55,496,472,769). It's also having to process far more data. What on earth could be causing this huge difference in query cost? After trawling through the '10g New Features' documentation, we found item 1.9.2.21. Before 10g, Oracle advised that you do not collect statistics on data dictionary objects. From 10g, it advised that you do collect statistics on the data dictionary; for our queries, Oracle therefore knows what sort of data is in the dictionary tables, and so can generate an efficient execution plan. On 9i, no statistics are present on the system tables, so Oracle has to use the Rule Based Optimizer, which turns most LEFT JOINs into nested loops. If we force 9i to use hash joins, like 10g, we get a much better plan: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------| Id | Operation | Name | Bytes | Cost |-------------------------------------------------------------------------------| 0 | SELECT STATEMENT | | 7587K| 3704 || 1 | SORT ORDER BY | | 7587K| 3704 ||* 2 | HASH JOIN OUTER | | 7587K| 822 ||* 3 | HASH JOIN OUTER | | 5262K| 616 ||* 4 | HASH JOIN OUTER | | 2980K| 465 ||* 5 | HASH JOIN OUTER | | 710K| 432 ||* 6 | HASH JOIN OUTER | | 398K| 302 || 7 | VIEW | ALL_TABLES | 342K| 276 || 29 | VIEW | ALL_MVIEWS | 51 | 20 || 50 | VIEW | ALL_PART_TABLES | 852K| 104 || 78 | VIEW | ALL_TAB_COMMENTS | 2043 | 14 || 93 | VIEW | ALL_EXTERNAL_LOCATIONS | 1744K| 31 || 106 | VIEW | ALL_EXTERNAL_TABLES | 1777K| 28 |------------------------------------------------------------------------------- That's much more like it. This drops the execution time down to 24 seconds. Not as good as 10g, but still an improvement. There are still several problems with this, however. 10g introduced a new join method - a right outer hash join (used in the first execution plan). The 9i query optimizer doesn't have this option available, so forcing a hash join means it has to hash the ALL_TABLES table, and furthermore re-hash it for every hash join in the execution plan; this could be thousands and thousands of rows. And although forcing hash joins somewhat alleviates this problem on our test systems, there's no guarantee that this will improve the execution time on customers' systems; it may even increase the time it takes (say, if all their tables are partitioned, or they've got a lot of materialized views). Ideally, we would want a solution that provides a speedup whatever the input. To try and get some ideas, we asked some oracle performance specialists to see if they had any ideas or tips. Their recommendation was to add a hidden hook into the product that allowed users to specify their own query hints, or even rewrite the queries entirely. However, we would prefer not to take that approach; as well as a lot of new infrastructure & a rewrite of the population code, it would have meant that any users of 9i would have to spend some time optimizing it to get it working on their system before they could use the product. Another approach was needed. All our population queries have a very specific pattern - a base table provides most of the information we need (ALL_TABLES for tables, or ALL_TAB_COLS for columns) and we do a left join to extra subsidiary tables that fill in gaps (for instance, ALL_PART_TABLES for partition information). All the left joins use the same set of columns to join on (typically the object owner & name), so we could re-use the hash information for each join, rather than re-hashing the same columns for every join. To allow us to do this, along with various other performance improvements that could be done for the specific query pattern we were using, we read all the tables individually and do a hash join on the client. Fortunately, this 'pure' algorithmic problem is the kind that can be very well optimized for expected real-world situations; as well as storing row data we're not using in the hash key on disk, we use very specific memory-efficient data structures to store all the information we need. This allows us to achieve a database population time that is as fast as on 10g, and even (in some situations) slightly faster, and a memory overhead of roughly 150 bytes per row of data in the result set (for schemas with 10,000 tables in that means an extra 1.4MB memory being used during population). Next: fun with the 9i dictionary views.

  Read the article

• Increasing efficiency of N-Body gravity simulation

  - by Postman

  I'm making a space exploration type game, it will have many planets and other objects that will all have realistic gravity. I currently have a system in place that works, but if the number of planets goes above 70, the FPS decreases an practically exponential rates. I'm making it in C# and XNA. My guess is that I should be able to do gravity calculations between 100 objects without this kind of strain, so clearly my method is not as efficient as it should be. I have two files, Gravity.cs and EntityEngine.cs. Gravity manages JUST the gravity calculations, EntityEngine creates an instance of Gravity and runs it, along with other entity related methods. EntityEngine.cs public void Update() { foreach (KeyValuePair<string, Entity> e in Entities) { e.Value.Update(); } gravity.Update(); } (Only relevant piece of code from EntityEngine, self explanatory. When an instance of Gravity is made in entityEngine, it passes itself (this) into it, so that gravity can have access to entityEngine.Entities (a dictionary of all planet objects)) Gravity.cs namespace ExplorationEngine { public class Gravity { private EntityEngine entityEngine; private Vector2 Force; private Vector2 VecForce; private float distance; private float mult; public Gravity(EntityEngine e) { entityEngine = e; } public void Update() { //First loop foreach (KeyValuePair<string, Entity> e in entityEngine.Entities) { //Reset the force vector Force = new Vector2(); //Second loop foreach (KeyValuePair<string, Entity> e2 in entityEngine.Entities) { //Make sure the second value is not the current value from the first loop if (e2.Value != e.Value ) { //Find the distance between the two objects. Because Fg = G * ((M1 * M2) / r^2), using Vector2.Distance() and then squaring it //is pointless and inefficient because distance uses a sqrt, squaring the result simple cancels that sqrt. distance = Vector2.DistanceSquared(e2.Value.Position, e.Value.Position); //This makes sure that two planets do not attract eachother if they are touching, completely unnecessary when I add collision, //For now it just makes it so that the planets are not glitchy, performance is not significantly improved by removing this IF if (Math.Sqrt(distance) > (e.Value.Texture.Width / 2 + e2.Value.Texture.Width / 2)) { //Calculate the magnitude of Fg (I'm using my own gravitational constant (G) for the sake of time (I know it's 1 at the moment, but I've been changing it) mult = 1.0f * ((e.Value.Mass * e2.Value.Mass) / distance); //Calculate the direction of the force, simply subtracting the positions and normalizing works, this fixes diagonal vectors //from having a larger value, and basically makes VecForce a direction. VecForce = e2.Value.Position - e.Value.Position; VecForce.Normalize(); //Add the vector for each planet in the second loop to a force var. Force = Vector2.Add(Force, VecForce * mult); //I have tried Force += VecForce * mult, and have not noticed much of an increase in speed. } } } //Add that force to the first loop's planet's position (later on I'll instead add to acceleration, to account for inertia) e.Value.Position += Force; } } } } I have used various tips (about gravity optimizing, not threading) from THIS question (that I made yesterday). I've made this gravity method (Gravity.Update) as efficient as I know how to make it. This O(N^2) algorithm still seems to be eating up all of my CPU power though. Here is a LINK (google drive, go to File download, keep .Exe with the content folder, you will need XNA Framework 4.0 Redist. if you don't already have it) to the current version of my game. Left click makes a planet, right click removes the last planet. Mouse moves the camera, scroll wheel zooms in and out. Watch the FPS and Planet Count to see what I mean about performance issues past 70 planets. (ALL 70 planets must be moving, I've had 100 stationary planets and only 5 or so moving ones while still having 300 fps, the issue arises when 70+ are moving around) After 70 planets are made, performance tanks exponentially. With < 70 planets, I get 330 fps (I have it capped at 300). At 90 planets, the FPS is about 2, more than that and it sticks around at 0 FPS. Strangely enough, when all planets are stationary, the FPS climbs back up to around 300, but as soon as something moves, it goes right back down to what it was, I have no systems in place to make this happen, it just does. I considered multithreading, but that previous question I asked taught me a thing or two, and I see now that that's not a viable option. I've also thought maybe I could do the calculations on my GPU instead, though I don't think it should be necessary. I also do not know how to do this, it is not a simple concept and I want to avoid it unless someone knows a really noob friendly simple way to do it that will work for an n-body gravity calculation. (I have an NVidia gtx 660) Lastly I've considered using a quadtree type system. (Barnes Hut simulation) I've been told (in the previous question) that this is a good method that is commonly used, and it seems logical and straightforward, however the implementation is way over my head and I haven't found a good tutorial for C# yet that explains it in a way I can understand, or uses code I can eventually figure out. So my question is this: How can I make my gravity method more efficient, allowing me to use more than 100 objects (I can render 1000 planets with constant 300+ FPS without gravity calculations), and if I can't do much to improve performance (including some kind of quadtree system), could I use my GPU to do the calculations?

  Read the article

• jQuery show "loading" during slow operation

  - by The Disintegrator

  I'm trying to show a small loading image during a slow operation with jQuery and can't get it right. It's a BIG table with thousands of rows. When I check the "mostrarArticulosDeReferencia" checkbox it removes the "hidden" class from these rows. This operation takes a couple of seconds and I want to give some feedback. "loading" is a div with a small animated gif Here's the full code jQuery(document).ready(function() { jQuery("#mostrarArticulosDeReferencia").click(function(event){ if( jQuery("#mostrarArticulosDeReferencia").attr("checked") ) { jQuery("#loading").show(); //not showing jQuery("#listadoArticulos tr.r").removeClass("hidden"); //slow operation jQuery("#loading").hide(); } else { jQuery("#loading").show(); //not showing jQuery("#listadoArticulos tr.r").addClass("hidden"); //slow operation jQuery("#loading").hide(); } }); jQuery("#loading").hide(); }); It looks like jquery is "optimizing" those 3 lines jQuery("#loading").show(); //not showing jQuery("#listadoArticulos tr.r").removeClass("hidden"); jQuery("#loading").hide(); And never shows the loading div. Any Ideas? Bonus: There is a faster way of doing this show/hide thing? Found out that toggle is WAY slower. UPDATE: I tried this jQuery("#mostrarArticulosDeReferencia").click(function(event){ if( jQuery("#mostrarArticulosDeReferencia").attr("checked") ) { jQuery("#loading").show(); //not showing jQuery("#listadoArticulos tr.r").removeClass("hidden"); //slow operation setTimeout("jQuery('#loading').hide()", 1000); } else { jQuery("#loading").show(); //not showing jQuery("#listadoArticulos tr.r").addClass("hidden"); //slow operation setTimeout("jQuery('#loading').hide()", 1000); } }); That's what I get click on checkbox nothing happens during 2/3 secs (processing) page gets updated loading div shows up during a split second UPDATE 2: I've got a working solution. But WHY I have to use setTimeout to make it work is beyond me... jQuery("#mostrarArticulosDeReferencia").click(function(event){ if( jQuery("#mostrarArticulosDeReferencia").attr("checked") ) { jQuery("#loading").show(); setTimeout("jQuery('#listadoArticulos tr.r').removeClass('hidden');", 1); setTimeout("jQuery('#loading').hide()", 1); } else { jQuery("#loading").show(); setTimeout("jQuery('#listadoArticulos tr.r').addClass('hidden');", 1); setTimeout("jQuery('#loading').hide()", 1); } });

  Read the article

• XML: Process large data

  - by Atmocreations

  Hello What XML-parser do you recommend for the following purpose: The XML-file (formatted, containing whitespaces) is around 800 MB. It mostly contains three types of tag (let's call them n, w and r). They have an attribute called id which i'd have to search for, as fast as possible. Removing attributes I don't need could save around 30%, maybe a bit more. First part for optimizing the second part: Is there any good tool (command line linux and windows if possible) to easily remove unused attributes in certain tags? I know that XSLT could be used. Or are there any easy alternatives? Also, I could split it into three files, one for each tag to gain speed for later parsing... Speed is not too important for this preparation of the data, of course it would be nice when it took rather minutes than hours. Second part: Once I have the data prepared, be it shortened or not, I should be able to search for the ID-attribute I was mentioning, this being time-critical. Estimations using wc -l tell me that there are around 3M N-tags and around 418K W-tags. The latter ones can contain up to approximately 20 subtags each. W-Tags also contain some, but they would be stripped away. "All I have to do" is navigating between tags containing certain id-attributes. Some tags have references to other id's, therefore giving me a tree, maybe even a graph. The original data is big (as mentioned), but the resultset shouldn't be too big as I only have to pick out certain elements. Now the question: What XML parsing library should I use for this kind of processing? I would use Java 6 in a first instance, with having in mind to be porting it to BlackBerry. Might it be useful to just create a flat file indexing the id's and pointing to an offset in the file? Is it even necessary to do the optimizations mentioned in the upper part? Or are there parser known to be quite as fast with the original data? Little note: To test, I took the id being on the very last line on the file and searching for the id using grep. This took around a minute on a Core 2 Duo. What happens if the file grows even bigger, let's say 5 GB? I appreciate any notice or recommendation. Thank you all very much in advance and regards

  Read the article

• [Android] For-Loop Performance Oddity

  - by Jack Holt

  I just noticed something concerning for-loop performance that seems to fly in the face of the recommendations given by the Google Android team. Look at the following code: package com.jackcholt; import android.app.Activity; import android.os.Bundle; import android.util.Log; public class Main extends Activity { @Override public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); setContentView(R.layout.main); loopTest(); finish(); } private void loopTest() { final long loopCount = 1228800; final int[] image = new int[8 * 320 * 480]; long start = System.currentTimeMillis(); for (int i = 0; i < (8 * 320 * 480); i++) { image[i] = i; } for (int i = 0; i < (8 * 320 * 480); i++) { image[i] = i; } Log.i("loopTest", "Elapsed time (recompute loop limit): " + (System.currentTimeMillis() - start)); start = System.currentTimeMillis(); for (int i = 0; i < 1228800; i++) { image[i] = i; } for (int i = 0; i < 1228800; i++) { image[i] = i; } Log.i("loopTest", "Elapsed time (literal loop limit): " + (System.currentTimeMillis() - start)); start = System.currentTimeMillis(); for (int i = 0; i < loopCount; i++) { image[i] = i; } for (int i = 0; i < loopCount; i++) { image[i] = i; } Log.i("loopTest", "Elapsed time (precompute loop limit): " + (System.currentTimeMillis() - start)); } } When I run this code I get the following output in logcat: I/loopTest( 726): Elapsed time (recompute loop limit): 759 I/loopTest( 726): Elapsed time (literal loop limit): 755 I/loopTest( 726): Elapsed time (precompute loop limit): 1317 As you can see the code that seems to recompute the loop limit value on every iteration of the loop compares very well to the code that uses a literal value for the loop limit. However, the code that uses a variable which contains the precomputed value for the loop limit is significantly slower than either of the others. I'm not surprised that accessing a variable should be slower that using a literal but why does code that looks like it should be using two multiply instructions on every iteration of the loop so comparable in performance to a literal? Could it be that because literals are the only thing being multiplied, the Java compiler is optimizing out the multiplication and using a precomputed literal?

  Read the article

• SQLiteException and SQLite error near "(": syntax error with Subsonic ActiveRecord

  - by nvuono

  I ran into an interesting error with the following LiNQ query using LiNQPad and when using Subsonic 3.0.x w/ActiveRecord within my project and wanted to share the error and resolution for anyone else who runs into it. The linq statement below is meant to group entries in the tblSystemsValues collection into their appropriate system and then extract the system with the highest ID. from ksf in KeySafetyFunction where ksf.Unit == 2 && ksf.Condition_ID == 1 join sys in tblSystems on ksf.ID equals sys.KeySafetyFunction join xval in (from t in tblSystemsValues group t by t.tblSystems_ID into groupedT select new { sysId = groupedT.Key, MaxID = groupedT.Max(g=>g.ID), MaxText = groupedT.First(gt2 => gt2.ID == groupedT.Max(g=>g.ID)).TextValue, MaxChecked = groupedT.First(gt2 => gt2.ID == groupedT.Max(g=>g.ID)).Checked }) on sys.ID equals xval.sysId select new {KSFDesc=ksf.Description, sys.Description, xval.MaxText, xval.MaxChecked} On its own, the subquery for grouping into groupedT works perfectly and the query to match up KeySafetyFunctions with their System in tblSystems also works perfectly on its own. However, when trying to run the completed query in linqpad or within my project I kept running into a SQLiteException SQLite Error Near "(" First I tried splitting the queries up within my project because I knew that I could just run a foreach loop over the results if necessary. However, I continued to receive the same exception! I eventually separated the query into three separate parts before I realized that it was the lazy execution of the queries that was killing me. It then became clear that adding the .ToList() specifier after the myProtectedSystem query below was the key to avoiding the lazy execution after combining and optimizing the query and being able to get my results despite the problems I encountered with the SQLite driver. // determine the max Text/Checked values for each system in tblSystemsValue var myProtectedValue = from t in tblSystemsValue.All() group t by t.tblSystems_ID into groupedT select new { sysId = groupedT.Key, MaxID = groupedT.Max(g => g.ID), MaxText = groupedT.First(gt2 => gt2.ID ==groupedT.Max(g => g.ID)).TextValue, MaxChecked = groupedT.First(gt2 => gt2.ID ==groupedT.Max(g => g.ID)).Checked}; // get the system description information and filter by Unit/Condition ID var myProtectedSystem = (from ksf in KeySafetyFunction.All() where ksf.Unit == 2 && ksf.Condition_ID == 1 join sys in tblSystem.All() on ksf.ID equals sys.KeySafetyFunction select new {KSFDesc = ksf.Description, sys.Description, sys.ID}).ToList(); // finally join everything together AFTER forcing execution with .ToList() var joined = from protectedSys in myProtectedSystem join protectedVal in myProtectedValue on protectedSys.ID equals protectedVal.sysId select new {protectedSys.KSFDesc, protectedSys.Description, protectedVal.MaxChecked, protectedVal.MaxText}; // print the gratifying debug results foreach(var protectedItem in joined) { System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine(protectedItem.Description + ", " + protectedItem.KSFDesc + ", " + protectedItem.MaxText + ", " + protectedItem.MaxChecked); }

  Read the article

• use jquery to toggle disabled state with a radio button

  - by hbowman

  I want to toggle two radio buttons and select fields based on which radio button is selected. I have the jQuery working, but want to know if there is a way to make it more efficient. Seems like quite a few lines for the simple goal I am trying to achieve. Here are the requirements: when the page loads, #aircraftType should be checked and #aircraftModelSelect should be grayed out (right now, the "checked" is being ignored by Firefox). If the user clicks either #aircraftType or #aircraftModel, the opposite select field should become disabled (if #aircraftModel is checked, #aircraftTypeSelect should be disabled, and vise versa). Any help on optimizing this code is appreciated. Code is up on jsfiddle too: http://jsfiddle.net/JuRKn/ $("#aircraftType").attr("checked"); $("#aircraftModel").removeAttr("checked"); $("#aircraftModelSelect").attr("disabled","disabled").addClass("disabled"); $("#aircraftType").click(function(){ $("#aircraftModelSelect").attr("disabled","disabled").addClass("disabled"); $("#aircraftTypeSelect").removeAttr("disabled").removeClass("disabled"); }); $("#aircraftModel").click(function(){ $("#aircraftTypeSelect").attr("disabled","disabled").addClass("disabled"); $("#aircraftModelSelect").removeAttr("disabled").removeClass("disabled"); }); HTML <div class="aircraftType"> <input type="radio" id="aircraftType" name="aircraft" checked /> <label for="aircraftType">Aircraft Type</label> <select size="6" multiple="multiple" id="aircraftTypeSelect" name="aircraftType"> <option value="">Light Jet</option> <option value="">Mid-Size Jet</option> <option value="">Super-Mid Jet</option> <option value="">Heavy Jet</option> <option value="">Turbo-Prop</option> </select> </div> <div class="aircraftModel"> <input type="radio" id="aircraftModel" name="aircraft" /> <label for="aircraftModel">Aircraft Model</label> <select size="6" multiple="multiple" id="aircraftModelSelect" name="aircraftModel"> <option value="">Astra SP</option> <option value="">Beechjet 400</option> <option value="">Beechjet 400A</option> <option value="">Challenger 300</option> <option value="">Challenger 600</option> <option value="">Challenger 603</option> <option value="">Challenger 604</option> <option value="">Challenger 605</option> <option value="">Citation Bravo</option> </select> </div>

  Read the article

• Exception when indexing text documents with Lucene, using SnowballAnalyzer for cleaning up

  - by Julia

  Hello!!! I am indexing the documents with Lucene and am trying to apply the SnowballAnalyzer for punctuation and stopword removal from text .. I keep getting the following error :( IllegalAccessError: tried to access method org.apache.lucene.analysis.Tokenizer.(Ljava/io/Reader;)V from class org.apache.lucene.analysis.snowball.SnowballAnalyzer Here is the code, I would very much appreciate help!!!! I am new with this.. public class Indexer { private Indexer(){}; private String[] stopWords = {....}; private String indexName; private IndexWriter iWriter; private static String FILES_TO_INDEX = "/Users/ssi/forindexing"; public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception { Indexer m = new Indexer(); m.index("./newindex"); } public void index(String indexName) throws Exception { this.indexName = indexName; final File docDir = new File(FILES_TO_INDEX); if(!docDir.exists() || !docDir.canRead()){ System.err.println("Something wrong... " + docDir.getPath()); System.exit(1); } Date start = new Date(); PerFieldAnalyzerWrapper analyzers = new PerFieldAnalyzerWrapper(new SimpleAnalyzer()); analyzers.addAnalyzer("text", new SnowballAnalyzer("English", stopWords)); Directory directory = FSDirectory.open(new File(this.indexName)); IndexWriter.MaxFieldLength maxLength = IndexWriter.MaxFieldLength.UNLIMITED; iWriter = new IndexWriter(directory, analyzers, true, maxLength); System.out.println("Indexing to dir..........." + indexName); if(docDir.isDirectory()){ File[] files = docDir.listFiles(); if(files != null){ for (int i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { try { indexDocument(files[i]); }catch (FileNotFoundException fnfe){ fnfe.printStackTrace(); } } } } System.out.println("Optimizing...... "); iWriter.optimize(); iWriter.close(); Date end = new Date(); System.out.println("Time to index was" + (end.getTime()-start.getTime()) + "miliseconds"); } private void indexDocument(File someDoc) throws IOException { Document doc = new Document(); Field name = new Field("name", someDoc.getName(), Field.Store.YES, Field.Index.ANALYZED); Field text = new Field("text", new FileReader(someDoc), Field.TermVector.WITH_POSITIONS_OFFSETS); doc.add(name); doc.add(text); iWriter.addDocument(doc); } }

  Read the article

• Can my loop be optimized any more? (C++)

  - by Sagekilla

  Below is one of my inner loops that's run several thousand times, with input sizes of 20 - 1000 or more. Is there anything I can do to help squeeze any more performance out of this? I'm not looking to move this code to something like using tree codes (Barnes-Hut), but towards optimizing the actual calculations happening inside, since the same calculations occur in the Barnes-Hut algorithm. Any help is appreciated! typedef double real; struct Particle { Vector pos, vel, acc, jerk; Vector oldPos, oldVel, oldAcc, oldJerk; real mass; }; class Vector { private: real vec[3]; public: // Operators defined here }; real Gravity::interact(Particle *p, size_t numParticles) { PROFILE_FUNC(); real tau_q = 1e300; for (size_t i = 0; i < numParticles; i++) { p[i].jerk = 0; p[i].acc = 0; } for (size_t i = 0; i < numParticles; i++) { for (size_t j = i+1; j < numParticles; j++) { Vector r = p[j].pos - p[i].pos; Vector v = p[j].vel - p[i].vel; real r2 = lengthsq(r); real v2 = lengthsq(v); // Calculate inverse of |r|^3 real r3i = Constants::G * pow(r2, -1.5); // da = r / |r|^3 // dj = (v / |r|^3 - 3 * (r . v) * r / |r|^5 Vector da = r * r3i; Vector dj = (v - r * (3 * dot(r, v) / r2)) * r3i; // Calculate new acceleration and jerk p[i].acc += da * p[j].mass; p[i].jerk += dj * p[j].mass; p[j].acc -= da * p[i].mass; p[j].jerk -= dj * p[i].mass; // Collision estimation // Metric 1) tau = |r|^2 / |a(j) - a(i)| // Metric 2) tau = |r|^4 / |v|^4 real mij = p[i].mass + p[j].mass; real tau_est_q1 = r2 / (lengthsq(da) * mij * mij); real tau_est_q2 = (r2*r2) / (v2*v2); if (tau_est_q1 < tau_q) tau_q = tau_est_q1; if (tau_est_q2 < tau_q) tau_q = tau_est_q2; } } return sqrt(sqrt(tau_q)); }

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 21 22 23 24 25 26 27  | Next Page >