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  • Delphi Memory Management

    - by nomad311
    I haven't been able to find the answers to a couple of my Delphi memory management questions. I could test different scenarios (which I did to find out what breaks the FreeAndNil method), but its takes too long and its hard! But seriously, I would also like to know how you all (Delphi developers) handle these memory management issues. My Questions (Feel free to pose your own I'm sure the answers to them will help me too): Does FreeAndNil work for COM objects? My thoughts are I don't need it, but if all I need to do is set it to nil than why not stay consistent in my finally block and use FreeAndNil for everything? Whats the proper way to clean up static arrays (myArr : Array[0..5] of TObject). I can't FreeAndNil it, so is it good enough to just set it to nil (do I need to do that after I've FreeAnNil'd each object?)? Thanks Guys!

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  • Which tool do you use for tracking daily/weekly progress on your long-term goals?

    - by NoCatharsis
    I read through this post and this post to get an idea of short-term task management applications out there. However, now I'm having a problem tracking my longer-term goals pertaining to things like career, education, and exercise. I just discovered Disciplanner which might meet my needs but haven't had time to set it up just yet. Not to mention, it took me about 2 weeks of playing with every online to-do list app I could find before I came to a decision on which to use. I'm very particular about my tasks and goal-setting, so I would prefer to get some advice from other superusers before diving into the web again to find another life-management website.

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  • Oracle @ AIIM Conference

    - by [email protected]
    Oracle will be at the AIIM Conference and Exposition next week in Philadelphia. On the opening morning, Robert Shimp, Group Vice President, Global Technology Business Unit, of Oracle Corporation, will moderate an executive keynote panel. Mr. Shimp will lead four Oracle customer executives through a lively discussion of how innovative organizations are driving the integration of content management with their core business processes on Tuesday April 20th at 8:45 AM. Our panelists are: CINDY BIXLER, CIO, Embry Riddle Aeronautical University TOM SHOWALTER, Managing Director, JP Morgan Chase IRFAN MOTIWALA, Vice President, Moody's Investors Service MIT MONICA CROCKER, CRM, PMP, Corporate Records Manager, Land O'Lakes For more information on our panelists, click here. Oracle will be in booth #2113 at the AIIM Expo. Come by and enter the daily raffle to win a Netbook! Oracle and Oracle partners will demonstrate solutions that increase productivity, reduce costs and ensure compliance for business processes such as accounts payable, human resource onboarding, marketing campaigns, sales management, large scale diagrams for facilities and manufacturing, case management, and others Oracle products including Oracle Universal Content Management, Oracle Imaging and Process Management, Oracle Universal Records Management, Oracle WebCenter, Oracle AutoVue, and Oracle Secure Enterprise Search will be demonstrated in the booth. Oracle will host a private event at The Field House Sports Bar - see your Oracle representative for more details Oracle customers can meet in private meeting rooms with their Oracle representatives Key Sessions Besides the opening morning keynote panel, Oracle will have a number of other sessions at the conference. Oracle Content Management will be featured in the session G08 - A Passage to Improving Healthcare: Enhancing EMR with Electronic Records Wednesday April 21st 2:25PM-3:10PM Kristina Parma of Oracle partner ImageSource will deliver this session, along with Pam Doyle of Fujitsu and Nancy Gladish of Swedish Medical Center. Kristina will also be in the Oracle booth to talk about this solution. On Tuesday April 20th at 4:05 PM Ajay Gandhi of Oracle will deliver a session entitled Harnessing SharePoint Content for Enterprise Processes in PeopleSoft, Siebel, E-Business Suite and JD Edwards Tuesday April 20th 1:15PM-1:45PM - Bringing Content Management to Your AP, HR, Sales and Marketing Processes - Application Showcase Theater (on the AIIM Expo Floor - Booth 1549 Wednesday April 21st 12:30PM-1:00PM - Embed and Edit Content Anywhere - Application Showcase Theater (on the AIIM Expo Floor - Booth 1549 For more information, see the AIIM Expo page on the Oracle website.

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  • PeopleSoft CRM 9.2 Release Value Proposition

    - by Race Bannon
    Oracle's PeopleSoft Customer Relationship Management (CRM) delivers solutions that have been tailored to fit your industry business processes, your customer strategies, and your success criteria. With PeopleSoft CRM 9.2, organizations will be able to deploy a solution that delivers built-in best practices specific to your industry with a highly configurable, tightly integrated platform, ensuring that solutions will be fast to implement. The result is less configuration, less customization, and less integration. PeopleSoft Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a world-class solution for organizations of every size and Oracle’s planned product roadmap for PeopleSoft applications is to deliver valuable, needed features for all of an organization’s constituents along three design principles — Simplicity, Productivity, and Lowered Total Cost of Ownership — as well as new application functionality as prioritized by our customers. The upcoming 9.2 release of PeopleSoft Customer Relationship Management focuses on these themes of Simplicity, Productivity, and Lower Total Cost of Ownership while also delivering robust new functionality to help your organization succeed. The recently published PeopleSoft CRM 9.2 Release Value Proposition provides overviews of the new features and enhancements planned for these applications for Release 9.2. This document offers customers a road map intended to help them assess the business benefits of upgrading to the 9.2 release while also helping them plan their IT projects and investments. (Link is to a My Oracle Support page, available to customers and partners.) Oracle continues to deliver enterprise-wide features that enhance our customer ownership experience and helps them run their businesses more efficiently and profitably. With the CRM 9.2 release, we continue to abide by this firm commitment we’ve made to our customers.

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  • Microsoft 2010 Product Tour

    - by Randy Walker
    I’m proud to announce that two Microsoft employees, Sarika Calla and Kevin Halverson, who works on the Visual Studio Product Team will be visiting various User Groups and Companies in Arkansas and Texas! Bios: Sarika Calla – Speaking about a Woman’s perspective at Microsoft, this natively born Indian holds a Masters in Computer Science from Georgia Tech and has been with Microsoft for the past 8 years.  Sarika is now a Team Lead on the IDE Team.  (pic is Redmond sacalla mthumb.jpg) Kevin Halverson – With 7 years as a Microsoft employee, Kevin has expertise in LINQ Expression Trees, Code Model, and COM/Office Interop and has a background as a former Unix Sys Admin. (his pic is the profile.jpg)   June 1 – Walmart .Net User Group June 1 – Northwest Arkansas SQL Server User Group (lunch meeting) June 1 – Tyson devLoop June 1 – Northwest Arkansas .Net User Group   June 2 – Datatronics June 2 – Little Rock .Net User Group June 3 – Dallas Customer Visit * June 3 – Forth Worth .Net User Group * Please contact Randy Walker if you would like Sarika & Kevin to visit your company

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  • What is wrong with my Dot Product?

    - by Clay Ellis Murray
    I am trying to make a pong game but I wanted to use dot products to do the collisions with the paddles, however whenever I make a dot product objects it never changes much from .9 this is my code to make vectors vector = { make:function(object){ return [object.x + object.width/2,object.y + object.height/2] }, normalize:function(v){ var length = Math.sqrt(v[0] * v[0] + v[1] * v[1]) v[0] = v[0]/length v[1] = v[1]/length return v }, dot:function(v1,v2){ return v1[0] * v2[0] + v1[1] * v2[1] } } and this is where I am calculating the dot in my code vector1 = vector.normalize(vector.make(ball)) vector2 = vector.normalize(vector.make(object)) dot = vector.dot(vector1,vector2) Here is a JsFiddle of my code currently the paddles don't move. Any help would be greatly appreciated

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  • Product Search SEO

    - by dana
    I am a wondering if there is a recommended "best practice" for a product search SEO. I know to create a dynamic sitemap file that lists links to all products in the site. However, I want to implement a a bookmark-able "advanced search". Should I let search engines index any of the results? Take the following parameters for a search on a make believe used car website: minprice (minimum price in dollars) maxprice (maximum price in dollars) make (honda, audi, volvo) model (accord, A4, S40) minyear (minimum model year) maxyear (maximum model year) minmileage (minimum mileage) maxmileage (maximum mileage) Given these parameters, there could be an infinite number of search combinations: Price Between $10,000 and $20,000 /search?minprice=10000&maxprice&20000 Audis with less than 50k miles /search?model=audi&maxmileage=50000 More than 100,000 miles and less than $5,000 /search?minmileage=100000&maxprice=5000 etc. Over time, there may be inbound links to a variety of these types of searches, yet they are all slices of the same data. Should I allow for all of these searches to be indexed?

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  • The Oracle Database Appliance: How to Sell a Unique Product Webcast

    - by Cinzia Mascanzoni
    Due to the great success of our webcast on "The Oracle Database Appliance - How to sell a unique product!" held on April 12th, we are going to conduct a recast live on April 19th at 10:00 CET, a learning opportunity for those who missed it. Join us to learn about: ODA Benefits: Fast, Easy, Cost Efficient, Highly Reliable Feedback from early Customer Wins: What can we Learn? Objection Handling: Overcoming the most common customer questions Going beyond the Database: The ODA ECO System for applications, backup & more  When combined with your high-value services (e.g., migration, consolidation), the end result is a database system that you can use to grow the business in your existing accounts, or capture new business. Click here to register to this webcast.

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  • When is the best time to do self learning in relation with software management?

    - by shankbond
    It all started from here. I have been following Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art (Best Practices (Microsoft)). The third chapter says that in Software Management: You cannot give too much time to software developers, if you give it to them, then it is likely that extra time given to them will be filled by some other tasks (in other words, the developers will eat that time :)) Parkinson's Law You can also not squeeze the time from their schedule because if you do that, it is likely that they will develop poor quality product, poor design and will hurt you in the long run, there will be a panic situation and total chaos in the project, lots of rework etc. My question is related to the first point. If you don't give enough time then will the typical software engineer learn his/her skills? The market is always coming with new technologies, you need to learn them. Even with the existing familiar technologies there are always best practices and dos and don'ts.

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  • What is wrong with my Dot Product? [Javascript]

    - by Clay Ellis Murray
    I am trying to make a pong game but I wanted to use dot products to do the collisions with the paddles, however whenever I make a dot product objects it never changes much from .9 this is my code to make vectors vector = { make:function(object){ return [object.x + object.width/2,object.y + object.height/2] }, normalize:function(v){ var length = Math.sqrt(v[0] * v[0] + v[1] * v[1]) v[0] = v[0]/length v[1] = v[1]/length return v }, dot:function(v1,v2){ return v1[0] * v2[0] + v1[1] * v2[1] } } and this is where I am calculating the dot in my code vector1 = vector.normalize(vector.make(ball)) vector2 = vector.normalize(vector.make(object)) dot = vector.dot(vector1,vector2) Here is a JsFiddle of my code currently the paddles don't move. Any help would be greatly appreciated

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  • ISACA Webcast follow up: Managing High Risk Access and Compliance with a Platform Approach to Privileged Account Management

    - by Darin Pendergraft
    Last week we presented how Oracle Privileged Account Manager (OPAM) could be used to manage high risk, privileged accounts.  If you missed the webcast, here is a link to the replay: ISACA replay archive (NOTE: you will need to use Internet Explorer to view the archive) For those of you that did join us on the call, you will know that I only had a little bit of time for Q&A, and was only able to answer a few of the questions that came in.  So I wanted to devote this blog to answering the outstanding questions.  Here they are. 1. Can OPAM track admin or DBA activity details during a password check-out session? Oracle Audit Vault is monitoring these activities which can be correlated to check-out events. 2. How would OPAM handle simultaneous requests? OPAM can be configured to allow for shared passwords.  By default sharing is turned off. 3. How long are the passwords valid?  Are the admins required to manually check them in? Password expiration can be configured and set in the password policy according to your corporate standards.  You can specify if you want forced check-in or not. 4. Can 2-factor authentication be used with OPAM? Yes - 2-factor integration with OPAM is provided by integration with Oracle Access Manager, and Oracle Adaptive Access Manager. 5. How do you control access to OPAM to ensure that OPAM admins don't override the functionality to access privileged accounts? OPAM provides separation of duties by using Admin Roles to manage access to targets and privileged accounts and to control which operations admins can perform. 6. How and where are the passwords stored in OPAM? OPAM uses Oracle Platform Security Services (OPSS) Credential Store Framework (CSF) to securely store passwords.  This is the same system used by Oracle Applications. 7. Does OPAM support hierarchical/level based privileges?  Is the log maintained for independent review/audit? Yes. OPAM uses the Fusion Middleware (FMW) Audit Framework to store all OPAM related events in a dedicated audit database.  8. Does OPAM support emergency access in the case where approvers are not available until later? Yes.  OPAM can be configured to release a password under a "break-glass" emergency scenario. 9. Does OPAM work with AIX? Yes supported UNIX version are listed in the "certified component section" of the UNIX connector guide at:http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E22999_01/doc.111/e17694/intro.htm#autoId0 10. Does OPAM integrate with Sun Identity Manager? Yes.  OPAM can be integrated with SIM using the REST  APIs.  OPAM has direct integration with Oracle Identity Manager 11gR2. 11. Is OPAM available today and what does it cost? Yes.  OPAM is available now.  Ask your Oracle Account Manager for pricing. 12. Can OPAM be used in SAP environments? Yes, supported SAP version are listed in the "certified component section" of the SAP  connector guide here: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E22999_01/doc.111/e25327/intro.htm#autoId0 13. How would this product integrate, if at all, with access to a particular field in the DB that need additional security such as SSN's? OPAM can work with DB Vault and DB Firewall to provide the fine grained access control for databases. 14. Is VM supported? As a deployment platform Oracle VM is supported. For further details about supported Virtualization Technologies see Oracle Fusion Middleware Supported System configurations here: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/ias/downloads/fusion-certification-100350.html 15. Where did this (OPAM) technology come from? OPAM was built by Oracle Engineering. 16. Are all Linux flavors supported?  How about BSD? BSD is not supported. For supported UNIX version see the "certified component section" of the UNIX connector guide http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E22999_01/doc.111/e17694/intro.htm#autoId0 17. What happens if users don't check passwords in at the end of a work task? In OPAM a time frame can be defined how long a password can be checked out. The security admin can force a check-in at any given time. 18. is MySQL supported? Yes, supported DB version are listed in the "certified component section" of the DB connector guide here: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E22999_01/doc.111/e28315/intro.htm#BABGJJHA 19. What happens when OPAM crashes and you need to use the password? OPAM can be configured for high availability, but if required, OPAM data can be backed up/recovered.  See the OPAM admin guide. 20. Is OPAM Standalone product or does it leverage other components from IDM? OPAM can be run stand-alone, but will also leverage other IDM components

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  • Multiple domains and product categories but one company?

    - by Brad
    Hi Guys, My company is expanding online, and we are wondering the best way to go about our eCommerce strategy. We sell a wide range of products of a single material, lets use ceramics as an example. The current competition in our niche online is medium level. We currently have one site selling all our range: ceramicstuff.com However I have just found that ceramickitchenware.com, ceramicbowls.com, etc are currently unregistered, despite quite decent traffic search volume around those keywords monthly. What do you guys think about registering these domains to increase traffic? Would I put a standalone sites on those domains, or do I point them to my main domain? Or do I use them a "micro" sites to offer information, and then link to buy at my main domain, etc? Summary: I'm looking to employ "spammy" type SEO tricks, multiple domains, etc but the key point is I will be generating REAL content, and offering a REAL QUALITY product. How to proceed? Thanks!

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  • TELERIK LAUNCHES NEW AUTOMATED TESTING TOOLS PRODUCT LINE

    TELERIK LAUNCHES NEW AUTOMATED TESTING TOOLS PRODUCT LINE Merger with ArtOfTest repositions Telerik as a major player in the automated testing market Waltham, MA, April 13, 2010 Telerik, a leading provider of development tools and solutions for the Microsoft? .NET platform, today announced the launch of WebUI Test Studio 2010, an innovative and easy-to-use automated web-testing solution. Encompassing essential web technologies such as ASP.NET AJAX, Silverlight, and MVC, Teleriks WebUI Test Studio...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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  • Best practice for bulk eCommerce product upload?

    - by Or W
    I'm thinking about opening a large online store for Jewelry, the one thing that really bothers me is managing the actual operation of taking pictures, uploading and describing all the products. I'm trying to figure out the best way to do it, in terms of performance or the least time consuming. Just a few things to keep in mind I'll have over 1,000 items in the online store I'll have 3-4 pictures for each item, I'm using a DSLR camera if it makes any difference. I'm going to probably use Magento, unless you have better experience with another eCommerce platform that will help me get this done quickly. I'll need to randomly(?) create a product code for each item.

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  • Project Management Tool for developers and sysadmins: shared or separate?

    - by David
    Should a team of system administrators who are on a software development project share a project management tool with the developers or use their own separate one? We use Trac and I see the benefit in sharing since inter-team tasks can be maintained by a single system where there may be cross-over or misfiled bugs (e.g. an apparent bug which turns out to be a server configuration issue or a development cycle which needs a server to be configured before it can start) However sharing could be difficult since many system administration tasks don't coincide with a single development milestone if at all. So should a system administration team use a separate PM Tool or share the same one with the developers? If they should share, then how?

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  • How to get innovation in product development?

    - by simonsabin
    I was at Redgate last week and say plastered all over the canteen wall flip chart sheets with ideas scrawled over them. I was going to take a photo but thought it might not be allowed. I asked what it was all about and they told me that ALL the development team are going to stop working on what they are doing and do whatever they want. Whatever they want? yes So thats the whole team working on something? No, it can be individual or in groups. Having worked in product teams before I and the others...(read more)

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  • Diplomatically point out the obvious problem in a product

    - by exiter2000
    As we all know, every software has bugs in it. It is matter of time to discover it. Suppose if you just found your product has potential big issue and it was not developed by you. How would you deal with it? I usually speak up with some data & analysis even if it is not my part of code. I am wondering if it is too offensive because I often faced on some resistance(depending on the issue), which would eventually be gone.

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  • How To Uninstall Your Windows Product Key Before You Sell Your PC

    - by Taylor Gibb
    Do you have an old PC you want to sell, but also want to use your Windows license on your new PC ? There is a hidden command in Windows that allows you to do just that. Read on to find out more. Note: Between Microsoft and your OEM there are a number of different laws that determine whether you are allowed to use your license on another PC, so follow this tutorial at your own risk. Additionally before you go through the tutorial you will want to check that your product key is still attached to your PC/Installation CD, if it is not , do a quick Google search on how to recover it. 6 Ways Windows 8 Is More Secure Than Windows 7 HTG Explains: Why It’s Good That Your Computer’s RAM Is Full 10 Awesome Improvements For Desktop Users in Windows 8

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  • How to quantify product work in Resume?

    - by mob1lejunkie
    One of things I do in my Resume is try to quantify the impact my work has had in the particular company I was with at the time. The reason is it shows the value my work had added to the business. Is this what you guys do as well or am I the only one? In my previous job this was easy as I worked on short/medium internal applications and it was fairly easy to measure end result. For example, external consulting company quoted $50,000 for an application Business Services department wanted I completed it in 3 days so I say I saved the company $48,000. I have been in my current job for 3 years but all of it has been on 1 single well established product. About 30% work is maintenance and 70% work is on new modules. I have worked on various modules like API (WCF), Security (2 factor authentication), etc. How should I quantify work on modules? Many thanks.

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  • Oracle Catalog – product overview for middleware

    - by JuergenKress
    Are you looking for quick overview of all the Oracle product and solutions? The answer is the Oracle Catalog which helps you to understand the whole stack from hardware, database, middleware all the way to applications. A great source and helpful for sales persons and customers. Make sure you add the file to your mobile device. SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit  www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Technorati Tags: Catalog,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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  • How can I make a case for "dependency management"?

    - by C. Ross
    I'm currently trying to make a case for adopting dependency management for builds (ala Maven, Ivy, NuGet) and creating an internal repository for shared modules, of which we have over a dozen enterprise wide. What are the primary selling points of this build technique? The ones I have so far: Eases the process of distributing and importing shared modules, especially version upgrades. Requires the dependencies of shared modules to be precisely documented. Removes shared modules from source control, speeding and simplifying checkouts/check ins (when you have applications with 20+ libraries this is a real factor). Allows more control or awareness of what third party libs are used in your organization. Are there any selling points that I'm missing? Are there any studies or articles giving improvement metrics?

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  • Schema.org for Product Reviews

    - by Lynda
    I have a product reviews on a site and I am adding schema.org markup to the reviews. Here is the code I am using: <div class="blockquote-wrap"> <blockquote itemprop="review" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Review"><span itemprop="reviewBody">Text of the review itself.</span> <cite><span itemprop="author">Author Name</span>, Location of Author</cite> </blockquote> </div> This is all the reviews are. When I test the page using Google's Structured Data Testing Tool I receive this error: Error: Incomplete microdata with schema.org. My question is what data is missing that is required? I don't see which data is required on the Schema.org page for reviews.

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  • Prevent product key from being used on multiple virtual machines

    - by Nahum Litvin
    I have a software product. it will probably run on VMs that have no network connection at all. I want the user to pay for each VM the user runs. I thought to ask the user for some kind of hardware ID and provide him with serial that is unique for his machine. But user can just copy the VM image and than have two machines running? So I thought of having a security dongle. But how can I prevent user from running two VM's on the same machine both connected to the same dongle? This should be only basic defense so that actual hacking will be required to breach the license and not only spinning one more VM.

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  • How Mature is Your Database Change Management Process?

    - by Ben Rees
    .dbd-banner p{ font-size:0.75em; padding:0 0 10px; margin:0 } .dbd-banner p span{ color:#675C6D; } .dbd-banner p:last-child{ padding:0; } @media ALL and (max-width:640px){ .dbd-banner{ background:#f0f0f0; padding:5px; color:#333; margin-top: 5px; } } -- Database Delivery Patterns & Practices Further Reading Organization and team processes How do you get your database schema changes live, on to your production system? As your team of developers and DBAs are working on the changes to the database to support your business-critical applications, how do these updates wend their way through from dev environments, possibly to QA, hopefully through pre-production and eventually to production in a controlled, reliable and repeatable way? In this article, I describe a model we use to try and understand the different stages that customers go through as their database change management processes mature, from the very basic and manual, through to advanced continuous delivery practices. I also provide a simple chart that will help you determine “How mature is our database change management process?” This process of managing changes to the database – which all of us who have worked in application/database development have had to deal with in one form or another – is sometimes known as Database Change Management (even if we’ve never used the term ourselves). And it’s a difficult process, often painfully so. Some developers take the approach of “I’ve no idea how my changes get live – I just write the stored procedures and add columns to the tables. It’s someone else’s problem to get this stuff live. I think we’ve got a DBA somewhere who deals with it – I don’t know, I’ve never met him/her”. I know I used to work that way. I worked that way because I assumed that making the updates to production was a trivial task – how hard can it be? Pause the application for half an hour in the middle of the night, copy over the changes to the app and the database, and switch it back on again? Voila! But somehow it never seemed that easy. And it certainly was never that easy for database changes. Why? Because you can’t just overwrite the old database with the new version. Databases have a state – more specifically 4Tb of critical data built up over the last 12 years of running your business, and if your quick hotfix happened to accidentally delete that 4Tb of data, then you’re “Looking for a new role” pretty quickly after the failed release. There are a lot of other reasons why a managed database change management process is important for organisations, besides job security, not least: Frequency of releases. Many business managers are feeling the pressure to get functionality out to their users sooner, quicker and more reliably. The new book (which I highly recommend) Lean Enterprise by Jez Humble, Barry O’Reilly and Joanne Molesky provides a great discussion on how many enterprises are having to move towards a leaner, more frequent release cycle to maintain their competitive advantage. It’s no longer acceptable to release once per year, leaving your customers waiting all year for changes they desperately need (and expect) Auditing and compliance. SOX, HIPAA and other compliance frameworks have demanded that companies implement proper processes for managing changes to their databases, whether managing schema changes, making sure that the data itself is being looked after correctly or other mechanisms that provide an audit trail of changes. We’ve found, at Red Gate that we have a very wide range of customers using every possible form of database change management imaginable. Everything from “Nothing – I just fix the schema on production from my laptop when things go wrong, and write it down in my notebook” to “A full Continuous Delivery process – any change made by a dev gets checked in and recorded, fully tested (including performance tests) before a (tested) release is made available to our Release Management system, ready for live deployment!”. And everything in between of course. Because of the vast number of customers using so many different approaches we found ourselves struggling to keep on top of what everyone was doing – struggling to identify patterns in customers’ behavior. This is useful for us, because we want to try and fit the products we have to different needs – different products are relevant to different customers and we waste everyone’s time (most notably, our customers’) if we’re suggesting products that aren’t appropriate for them. If someone visited a sports store, looking to embark on a new fitness program, and the store assistant suggested the latest $10,000 multi-gym, complete with multiple weights mechanisms, dumb-bells, pull-up bars and so on, then he’s likely to lose that customer. All he needed was a pair of running shoes! To solve this issue – in an attempt to simplify how we understand our customers and our offerings – we built a model. This is a an attempt at trying to classify our customers in to some sort of model or “Customer Maturity Framework” as we rather grandly term it, which somehow simplifies our understanding of what our customers are doing. The great statistician, George Box (amongst other things, the “Box” in the Box-Jenkins time series model) gave us the famous quote: “Essentially all models are wrong, but some are useful” We’ve taken this quote to heart – we know it’s a gross over-simplification of the real world of how users work with complex legacy and new database developments. Almost nobody precisely fits in to one of our categories. But we hope it’s useful and interesting. There are actually a number of similar models that exist for more general application delivery. We’ve found these from ThoughtWorks/Forrester, from InfoQ and others, and initially we tried just taking these models and replacing the word “application” for “database”. However, we hit a problem. From talking to our customers we know that users are far less further down the road of mature database change management than they are for application development. As a simple example, no application developer, who wants to keep his/her job would develop an application for an organisation without source controlling that code. Sure, he/she might not be using an advanced Gitflow branching methodology but they’ll certainly be making sure their code gets managed in a repo somewhere with all the benefits of history, auditing and so on. But this certainly isn’t the case (yet) for the database – a very large segment of the people we speak to have no source control set up for their databases whatsoever, even at the most basic level (for example, keeping change scripts in a source control system somewhere). By the way, if this is you, Red Gate has a great whitepaper here, on the barriers people face getting a source control process implemented at their organisations. This difference in maturity is the same as you move in to areas such as continuous integration (common amongst app developers, relatively rare for database developers) and automated release management (growing amongst app developers, very rare for the database). So, when we created the model we started from scratch and biased the levels of maturity towards what we actually see amongst our customers. But, what are these stages? And what level are you? The table below describes our definitions for four levels of maturity – Baseline, Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced. As I say, this is a model – you won’t fit any of these categories perfectly, but hopefully one will ring true more than others. We’ve also created a PDF with a flow chart to help you find which of these groups most closely matches your team:  Download the Database Delivery Maturity Framework PDF here   Level D1 – Baseline Work directly on live databases Sometimes work directly in production Generate manual scripts for releases. Sometimes use a product like SQL Compare or similar to do this Any tests that we might have are run manually Level D2 – Beginner Have some ad-hoc DB version control such as manually adding upgrade scripts to a version control system Attempt is made to keep production in sync with development environments There is some documentation and planning of manual deployments Some basic automated DB testing in process Level D3 – Intermediate The database is fully version-controlled with a product like Red Gate SQL Source Control or SSDT Database environments are managed Production environment schema is reproducible from the source control system There are some automated tests Have looked at using migration scripts for difficult database refactoring cases Level D4 – Advanced Using continuous integration for database changes Build, testing and deployment of DB changes carried out through a proper database release process Fully automated tests Production system is monitored for fast feedback to developers   Does this model reflect your team at all? Where are you on this journey? We’d be very interested in knowing how you get on. We’re doing a lot of work at the moment, at Red Gate, trying to help people progress through these stages. For example, if you’re currently not source controlling your database, then this is a natural next step. If you are already source controlling your database, what about the next stage – continuous integration and automated release management? To help understand these issues, there’s a summary of the Red Gate Database Delivery learning program on our site, alongside a Patterns and Practices library here on Simple-Talk and a Training Academy section on our documentation site to help you get up and running with the tools you need to progress. All feedback is welcome and it would be great to hear where you find yourself on this journey! This article is part of our database delivery patterns & practices series on Simple Talk. Find more articles for version control, automated testing, continuous integration & deployment.

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