adaptive systems - Page 254

Commercial Drupal Modules & Themes

- by Ravish

A discussion at Drupal.org forums prompted me to give my input about commercial ecosystem around Open Source Content Management Systems. WordPress and Joomla have been growing rapidly since past few years. But, growth rate of Drupal seems to be almost flat. Despite being the most powerful CMS around, Drupal is still not being adopted by masses. Many people will argue that Drupal is not targeted towards masses, but developers. I agree, Drupal is more of a development platform than a consumer CMS. Drupal is ‘many things to many people’, and I can build almost any type of website with it. Drupal is being used for building blogs, corporate websites, Intranet portals, social networking and even a project management system. Looking at the wide array of Drupal implementations, it deserves to be the most widely adopted CMS. I believe there are few challenges that Drupal community needs to overcome. To understand these challenges, I surveyed some webmasters who use Joomla or WordPress but not Drupal. I asked them why they don’t want to use Drupal, following are the responses I got from them: Drupal is too complicated, takes time to learn. Drupal is great, but its admin panel is overwhelming. I couldn’t find any nice themes for Drupal. There is no WYSIWYG editor in Drupal. Most Drupal modules do not work out of the box. There aren’t enough modules like Ubercart which provides any out of the box functionality. I tried modules like CCK, Views and Panels. After wasting several hours struggling with them, I decided to give up on Drupal. I don’t use Drupal because of pushbutton and Garland theme. I had hard time trying to customize Garland and it messed up the whole layout. There are no premium modules and themes for Drupal. Joomla has tons of awesome themes and modules. I don’t want a million hacks like CCK, Views, Tokens, Pathauto, ImageCache and CTools just to run a simple website. Most of the complaints from users are related to the learning and development curve involved with Drupal, and the lack of ecosystem. While most of the problems will be gone in Drupal 7, ecosystem is something that needs to be built by the Drupal community. Drupal distributions are a great step forward. There are few awesome Drupal distributions available like Open Publish, Open Atrium and Drupal Commons. I predict, there will be a wave of many powerful Drupal distributions after Drupal 7 release. Many of them will be user-friendly and commercial supported. Following is my post at Drupal.org forums: Quote from: http://drupal.org/node/863776#comment-3313836 Brian Gardner (StudioPress) and Woo Themes launched premium WordPress themes in 2007, the developer community did not accept it at first. Moreover, they were not even GPL licensed. There was an outcry in WordPress community against them. Following that, most premium theme providers switched to GPL licensing. Despite controversies, users voted for premium theme and plugins by buying them. Inspired by their success, hundreds of other developers started to sell premium themes and plugins. It is now the acceptable and in fact most popular business model among WordPress community. Matt Mullenweg once told me, they would not support premium themes. If he supported, developers would no more give out free GPL themes & plugins. He pointed me towards Joomla, there were hardly any nice free themes & modules available. Now two years forward, premium products are not just accepted but embraced by the WordPress community – http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/commercial/ The quality and number of themes & modules has increased, even the free ones. This also helped to boost the adoption and ecosystem of WordPress. Today, state of Drupal is like WordPress was in 2007. There are hardly any out of the box solutions available for Drupal. Ubercart, Open Publish and Open Atrium are the only ones I can think of. Many of the popular Drupal modules are patches and hole-fillers. Thankfully, these hole-filler modules are going to be in Drupal 7 core. Drupal 7 and distributions will spawn a new array of solutions built upon Drupal. Soon, we will have more like Ubercarts and Open Atriums. If commercial solutions can help fuel this ecosystem and growth, Drupal community will accept them eventually. This debate will not stop your customers from buying your product. If your product is awesome, they will vote for you by buying your product.

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How to Use An Antivirus Boot Disc or USB Drive to Ensure Your Computer is Clean

- by Chris Hoffman

If your computer is infected with malware, running an antivirus within Windows may not be enough to remove it. If your computer has a rootkit, the malware may be able to hide itself from your antivirus software. This is where bootable antivirus solutions come in. They can clean malware from outside the infected Windows system, so the malware won’t be running and interfering with the clean-up process. The Problem With Cleaning Up Malware From Within Windows Standard antivirus software runs within Windows. If your computer is infected with malware, the antivirus software will have to do battle with the malware. Antivirus software will try to stop the malware and remove it, while the malware will attempt to defend itself and shut down the antivirus. For really nasty malware, your antivirus software may not be able to fully remove it from within Windows. Rootkits, a type of malware that hides itself, can be even trickier. A rootkit could load at boot time before other Windows components and prevent Windows from seeing it, hide its processes from the task manager, and even trick antivirus applications into believing that the rootkit isn’t running. The problem here is that the malware and antivirus are both running on the computer at the same time. The antivirus is attempting to fight the malware on its home turf — the malware can put up a fight. Why You Should Use an Antivirus Boot Disc Antivirus boot discs deal with this by approaching the malware from outside Windows. You boot your computer from a CD or USB drive containing the antivirus and it loads a specialized operating system from the disc. Even if your Windows installation is completely infected with malware, the special operating system won’t have any malware running within it. This means the antivirus program can work on the Windows installation from outside it. The malware won’t be running while the antivirus tries to remove it, so the antivirus can methodically locate and remove the harmful software without it interfering. Any rootkits won’t be able to set up the tricks they use at Windows boot time to hide themselves from the rest o the operating system. The antivirus will be able to see the rootkits and remove them. These tools are often referred to as “rescue disks.” They’re meant to be used when you need to rescue a hopelessly infected system. Bootable Antivirus Options As with any type of antivirus software, you have quite a few options. Many antivirus companies offer bootable antivirus systems based on their antivirus software. These tools are generally free, even when they’re offered by companies that specialized in paid antivirus solutions. Here are a few good options: avast! Rescue Disk – We like avast! for offering a capable free antivirus with good detection rates in independent tests. avast! now offers the ability to create an antivirus boot disc or USB drive. Just navigate to the Tools -> Rescue Disk option in the avast! desktop application to create bootable media. BitDefender Rescue CD – BitDefender always seems to receive good scores in independent tests, and the BitDefender Rescue CD offers the same antivirus engine in the form of a bootable disc. Kaspersky Rescue Disk – Kaspersky also receives good scores in independent tests and offers its own antivirus boot disc. These are just a handful of options. If you prefer another antivirus for some reason — Comodo, Norton, Avira, ESET, or almost any other antivirus product — you’ll probably find that it offers its own system rescue disk. How to Use an Antivirus Boot Disc Using an antivirus boot disc or USB drive is actually pretty simple. You’ll just need to find the antivirus boot disc you want to use and burn it to disc or install it on a USB drive. You can do this part on any computer, so you can create antivirus boot media on a clean computer and then take it to an infected computer. Insert the boot media into the infected computer and then reboot. The computer should boot from the removable media and load the secure antivirus environment. (If it doesn’t, you may need to change the boot order in your BIOS or UEFI firmware.) You can then follow the instructions on your screen to scan your Windows system for malware and remove it. No malware will be running in the background while you do this. Antivirus boot discs are useful because they allow you to detect and clean malware infections from outside an infected operating system. If the operating system is severely infected, it may not be possible to remove — or even detect — all the malware from within it. Image Credit: aussiegall on Flickr

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WebLogic Server Performance and Tuning: Part I - Tuning JVM

- by Gokhan Gungor

Each WebLogic Server instance runs in its own dedicated Java Virtual Machine (JVM) which is their runtime environment. Every Admin Server in any domain executes within a JVM. The same also applies for Managed Servers. WebLogic Server can be used for a wide variety of applications and services which uses the same runtime environment and resources. Oracle WebLogic ships with 2 different JVM, HotSpot and JRocket but you can choose which JVM you want to use. JVM is designed to optimize itself however it also provides some startup options to make small changes. There are default values for its memory and garbage collection. In real world, you will not want to stick with the default values provided by the JVM rather want to customize these values based on your applications which can produce large gains in performance by making small changes with the JVM parameters. We can tell the garbage collector how to delete garbage and we can also tell JVM how much space to allocate for each generation (of java Objects) or for heap. Remember during the garbage collection no other process is executed within the JVM or runtime, which is called STOP THE WORLD which can affect the overall throughput. Each JVM has its own memory segment called Heap Memory which is the storage for java Objects. These objects can be grouped based on their age like young generation (recently created objects) or old generation (surviving objects that have lived to some extent), etc. A java object is considered garbage when it can no longer be reached from anywhere in the running program. Each generation has its own memory segment within the heap. When this segment gets full, garbage collector deletes all the objects that are marked as garbage to create space. When the old generation space gets full, the JVM performs a major collection to remove the unused objects and reclaim their space. A major garbage collect takes a significant amount of time and can affect system performance. When we create a managed server either on the same machine or on remote machine it gets its initial startup parameters from $DOMAIN_HOME/bin/setDomainEnv.sh/cmd file. By default two parameters are set: Xms: The initial heapsize Xmx: The max heapsize Try to set equal initial and max heapsize. The startup time can be a little longer but for long running applications it will provide a better performance. When we set -Xms512m -Xmx1024m, the physical heap size will be 512m. This means that there are pages of memory (in the state of the 512m) that the JVM does not explicitly control. It will be controlled by OS which could be reserve for the other tasks. In this case, it is an advantage if the JVM claims the entire memory at once and try not to spend time to extend when more memory is needed. Also you can use -XX:MaxPermSize (Maximum size of the permanent generation) option for Sun JVM. You should adjust the size accordingly if your application dynamically load and unload a lot of classes in order to optimize the performance. You can set the JVM options/heap size from the following places: Through the Admin console, in the Server start tab In the startManagedWeblogic script for the managed servers $DOMAIN_HOME/bin/startManagedWebLogic.sh/cmd JAVA_OPTIONS="-Xms1024m -Xmx1024m" ${JAVA_OPTIONS} In the setDomainEnv script for the managed servers and admin server (domain wide) USER_MEM_ARGS="-Xms1024m -Xmx1024m" When there is free memory available in the heap but it is too fragmented and not contiguously located to store the object or when there is actually insufficient memory we can get java.lang.OutOfMemoryError. We should create Thread Dump and analyze if that is possible in case of such error. The second option we can use to produce higher throughput is to garbage collection. We can roughly divide GC algorithms into 2 categories: parallel and concurrent. Parallel GC stops the execution of all the application and performs the full GC, this generally provides better throughput but also high latency using all the CPU resources during GC. Concurrent GC on the other hand, produces low latency but also low throughput since it performs GC while application executes. The JRockit JVM provides some useful command-line parameters that to control of its GC scheme like -XgcPrio command-line parameter which takes the following options; XgcPrio:pausetime (To minimize latency, parallel GC) XgcPrio:throughput (To minimize throughput, concurrent GC ) XgcPrio:deterministic (To guarantee maximum pause time, for real time systems) Sun JVM has similar parameters (like -XX:UseParallelGC or -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC) to control its GC scheme. We can add -verbosegc -XX:+PrintGCDetails to monitor indications of a problem with garbage collection. Try configuring JVM’s of all managed servers to execute in -server mode to ensure that it is optimized for a server-side production environment.

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Three Steps to Becoming an Expert Oracle Linux System Administrator

- by Antoinette O'Sullivan

Oracle provides a complete system administration curriculum to take you from your initial experience of Unix to being an expert Oracle Linux system administrator. You can take these live instructor-led courses from your own desk through live-virtual events or by traveling to an education center through in-class events. Step 1: Unix and Linux Essentials This 3-day course is designed for users and administrators who are new to Oracle Linux. It will help you develop the basic UNIX skills needed to interact comfortably and confidently with the operating system. Below is a sample of the in-class events already on the schedule. Location Date Delivery Language Vivoorde, Belgium 28 October 2013 English Berlin, Germany 15 July 2013 German Utrecht, Netherlands 19 August 2013 Dutch Bucarest, Romania 12 August 2013 Romanian Ankara, Turkey 6 January 2013 Turkish Nairobi, Kenya 5 August 2013 English Kaduna, Nigeria 15 July 2013 English Woodmead, South Africa 15 July 2013 English Jakarta, Indonesia 23 September 2013 English Petaling Jaya, Malaysia 22 July 2013 English Makati City, Philippines 3 July 2013 English Bangkok, Thailand 20 November 2013 English Auckland, New Zealand 5 August 2013 English Melbourne, Australia 12 August 2013 English Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto, Canada 3 September 2013 English San Francisco and San Jose, CA, United States 15 July 2013 English Reston, VA, United States 7 August 2013 English Edison, NJ, and King of Prussia, PA, United States 3 September 2013 English Denver, CO, United States 25 September 2013 English Cambridge, MA, and Roseville MN, United States 6 November 2013 English Phoenix, AZ, and Sacramento, CA, United States 25 November 2013 English Step 2: Oracle Linux System Administration Through this 5-day course, become a knowledgeable Oracle Linux system administrator, learning how to install Oracle Linux and the benefits of Oracle's Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel and Ksplice. Below is a sample of in-class events already on the schedule. Location Date Delivery Language Vienna, Austria 1 July 2013 German Vivoorde, Belgium 18 November 2013 English Zagreb, Croatia 16 September 2013 Croatian London, England 3 September 2013 English Manchester, England 9 September 2013 English Paris, France 29 July 2013 French Budapest, Hungary 8 July 2013 Hungarian Utrecht, Netherland 2 September 2013 Dutch Warsaw, Poland 15 July 2013 Polish Bucharest, Romania 2 December 2013 Romanian Ankara, Turkey 7 October 2013 Turkish Istanbul, Turkey 9 September 2013 Turkish Nairobi, Kenya 12 August 2013 English Petaling Jaya, Malaysia 29 July 2013 English Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia 21 October 2013 English Makati City, Philippines 8 July 2013 English Singapore 24 July 2013 English Bangkok, Thailand 26 July 2013 English Canberra, Australia 19 August 2013 English Melbourne, Australia 16 September 2013 English Sydney, Australia 19 August 2013 English Mississauga, Canada 26 August 2013 English Ottawa, Canada 4 November 2013 English Phoenix, AZ, United States 7 October 2013 English Belmont, CA, United States 23 September 2013 English Irvine, CA, United States 18 November 2013 English Sacramento, CA, United States 19 August 2013 English San Francisco, CA, United States 15 July 2013 English Denver, CO, United States 19 August 2013 English Schaumburg, IL, United States 26 August 2013 English Indianapolis, IN, United States 14 October 2013 English Columbia, MD, United States 30 September 2013 English Roseville, MN, United States 19 August 2013 English St Louis, MO, United States 7 October 2013 English Edison, NJ, United States 28 October 2013 English Beaverton, OR, United States 12 August 2013 English Pittsburg, PA, United States 9 December 2013 English Reston, VA, United States 12 August 2013 English Brookfield, WI, United States 30 September 2013 English Sao Paolo, Brazil 15 July 2013 Brazilian Portugese Step 3: Oracle Linux Advanced System Administration This new 3-day course is ideal for administrators who want to learn about managing resources and file systems while developing troubleshooting and advanced storage administration skills. You will learn about Linux Containers, Cgroups, btrfs, DTrace and more. Below is a sample of in-class events already on the schedule. Location Date Delivery Language Melbourne, Australia 9 October 2013 English Roseville, MN, United States 3 September 2013 English To register for or learn more about these courses, go to http://oracle.com/education/linux. Watch this video to learn more about Oracle's operating system training.

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ODI and OBIEE 11g Integration

- by David Allan

Here we will see some of the connectivity options to OBIEE 11g using the JDBC driver. You’ll see based upon some connection properties how the physical or presentation layers can be utilized. In the integrators guide for OBIEE 11g you will find a brief statement indicating that there actually is a JDBC driver for OBIEE. In OBIEE 11g its now possible to connect directly to the physical layer, Venkat has an informative post here on this topic. In ODI 11g the Oracle BI technology is shipped with the product along with KMs for reverse engineering, and using OBIEE models for a data source. When you install OBIEE in 11g a light weight demonstration application is preinstalled in the server, when you open this in the BI Administration tool we see the regular 3 panel view within the administration tool. To interrogate this system via JDBC (just like ODI does using the KMs) need a couple of things; the JDBC driver from OBIEE 11g, a java client program and the credentials. In my java client program I want to connect to the OBIEE system, when I connect I can interrogate what the JDBC driver presents for the metadata. The metadata projected via the JDBC connection’s DatabaseMetadata changes depending on whether the property NQ_SESSION.SELECTPHYSICAL is set when the java client connects. Let’s use the sample app to illustrate. I have a java client program here that will print out the tables in the DatabaseMetadata, it will also output the catalog and schema. For example if I execute without any special JDBC properties as follows; java -classpath .;%BIHOMEDIR%\clients\bijdbc.jar meta_jdbc oracle.bi.jdbc.AnaJdbcDriver jdbc:oraclebi://localhost:9703/ weblogic mypass Then I get the following returned representing the presentation layer, the sample I used is XML, and has no schema; Catalog Schema Table Sample Sales Lite null Base Facts Sample Sales Lite null Calculated Facts … Sample Targets Lite null Base Facts … Now if I execute with the only difference being the JDBC property NQ_SESSION.SELECTPHYSICAL with the value Yes, then I see a different set of values representing the physical layer in OBIEE; java -classpath .;%BIHOMEDIR%\clients\bijdbc.jar meta_jdbc oracle.bi.jdbc.AnaJdbcDriver jdbc:oraclebi://localhost:9703/ weblogic mypass NQ_SESSION.SELECTPHYSICAL=Yes The following is returned; Catalog Schema Table Sample App Lite Data null D01 Time Day Grain Sample App Lite Data null F10 Revenue Facts (Order grain) … System DB (Update me) … If this was a database system such as Oracle, the catalog value would be the OBIEE database name and the schema would be the Oracle database schema. Other systems which have real catalog structure such as SQLServer would use its catalog value. Its this ‘Catalog’ and ‘Schema’ value that is important when integration OBIEE with ODI. For the demonstration application in OBIEE 11g, the following illustration shows how the information from OBIEE is related via the JDBC driver through to ODI. In the XML example above, within ODI’s physical schema definition on the right, we leave the schema blank since the XML data source has no schema. When I did this at first, I left the default value that ODI places in the Schema field since which was ‘<Undefined>’ (like image below) but this string is actually used in the RKM so ended up not finding any tables in this schema! Entering an empty string resolved this. Below we see a regular Oracle database example that has the database, schema, physical table structure, and how this is defined in ODI. Remember back to the physical versus presentation layer usage when we passed the special property, well to do this in ODI, the data server has a panel for properties where you can define key/value pairs. So if you want to select physical objects from the OBIEE server, then you must set this property. An additional changed in ODI 11g is the OBIEE connection pool support, this has been implemented via a ‘Connection Pool’ flex field for the Oracle BI data server. So here you set the connection pool name from the OBIEE system that you specifically want to use and this is used by the Oracle BI to Oracle (DBLINK) LKM, so if you are using this you must set this flex field. Hopefully a useful insight into some of the mechanics of how this hangs together.

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Lessons from a SAN Failure

- by Bill Graziano

At 1:10AM Sunday morning the main SAN at one of my clients suffered a “partial” failure. Partial means that the SAN was still online and functioning but the LUNs attached to our two main SQL Servers “failed”. Failed means that SQL Server wouldn’t start and the MDF and LDF files mostly showed a zero file size. But they were online and responding and most other LUNs were available. I’m not sure how SANs know to fail at 1AM on a Saturday night but they seem to. From a personal standpoint this worked out poorly: I was out with friends and after more than a few drinks. From a work standpoint this was about the best time to fail you could imagine. Everything was running well before Monday morning. But it was a long, long Sunday. I started tipsy, got tired and ended up hung over later in the day. Note to self: Try not to go out drinking right before the SAN fails. This caught us at an interesting time. We’re in the process of migrating to an entirely new set of servers so some things were partially moved. This made it difficult to follow our procedures as cleanly as we’d like. The benefit was that we had much better documentation of everything on the server. I would encourage everyone to really think through the process of implementing your DR plan and document as much as possible. Following a checklist is much easier than trying to remember at night under pressure in a hurry after a few drinks. I had a series of estimates on how long things would take. They were accurate for any single server failure. They weren’t accurate for a SAN failure that took two servers down. This wasn’t bad but we should have communicated better. Don’t forget how many things are outside the database. Logins, linked servers, DTS packages (yikes!), jobs, service broker, DTC (especially DTC), database triggers and any objects in the master database are all things you need backed up. We’d done a decent job on this and didn’t find significant problems here. That said this still took a lot of time. There were many annoyances as a result of this. Small settings like a login’s default database had a big impact on whether an application could run. This is probably the single biggest area of concern when looking to recreate a server. I’d encourage everyone to go through every single node of SSMS and look for user created objects or settings outside the database. Script out your logins with the proper SID and already encrypted passwords and keep it updated. This makes life so much easier. I used an approach based on KB246133 that worked well. I’ll get my scripts posted over the next few days. The disaster can cause your DR process to fail in unexpected ways. We have a job that scripts out all logins and role memberships and writes it to a file. This runs on the DR server and pulls from the production server. Upon opening the file I found that the contents were a “server not found” error. Fortunately we had other copies and didn’t need to try and restore the master database. This now runs on the production server and pushes the script to the DR site. Soon we’ll get it pushed to our version control software. One of the biggest challenges is keeping your DR resources up to date. Any server change (new linked server, new SQL Server Agent job, etc.) means that your DR plan (and scripts) is out of date. It helps to automate the generation of these resources if possible. Take time now to test your database restore process. We test ours quarterly. If you have a large database I’d also encourage you to invest in a compressed backup solution. Restoring backups was the single larger consumer of time during our recovery. And yes, there’s a database mirroring solution planned in our new architecture. I didn’t have much involvement in things outside SQL Server but this caused many, many things to change in our environment. Many applications today aren’t just executables or web sites. They are a combination of those plus network infrastructure, reports, network ports, IP addresses, DTS and SSIS packages, batch systems and many other things. These all needed a little bit of attention to make sure they were functioning properly. Profiler turned out to be a handy tool. I started a trace for failed logins and kept that running. That let me fix a number of problems before people were able to report them. I also ran traces to capture exceptions. This helped identify problems with linked servers. Overall the thing that gave me the most problem was linked servers. In order for a linked server to function properly you need to be pointed to the right server, have the proper login information, have the network routes available and have MSDTC configured properly. We have a lot of linked servers and this created many failure points. Some of the older linked servers used IP addresses and not DNS names. This meant we had to go in and touch all those linked servers when the servers moved.

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Management and Monitoring Tools for Windows Azure

- by BuckWoody

With such a large platform, Windows Azure has a lot of moving parts. We’ve done our best to keep the interface as simple as possible, while giving you the most control and visibility we can. However, as with most Microsoft products, there are multiple ways to do something – and I’ve always found that to be a good strength. Depending on the situation, I might want a graphical interface, a command-line interface, or just an API so I can incorporate the management into my own tools, or have third-party companies write other tools. While by no means exhaustive, I thought I might put together a quick list of a few tools you can use to manage and monitor Windows Azure components, from our IaaS, SaaS and PaaS offerings. Some of the products focus on one area more than another, but all are available today. I’ll try and maintain this list to keep it current, but make sure you check the date of this post’s update – if it’s more than six months old, it’s most likely out of date. Things move fast in the cloud. The Windows Azure Management Portal The primary tool for managing Windows Azure is our portal – most everything you need is there, from creating new services to querying a database. There are two versions as of this writing – a Silverlight client version, and a newer HTML5 version. The latter is being updated constantly to be in parity with the Silverlight client. There’s a balance in this portal between simplicity and power – we’re following the “less is more” approach, with increasing levels of detail as you work through the portal rather than overwhelming you with a single, long “more is more” page. You can find the Portal here: http://windowsazure.com (then click “Log In” and then “Portal”) Windows Azure Management API You can also use programming tools to either write your own interface, or simply provide management functions directly within your solution. You have two options – you can use the more universal REST API’s, which area bit more complex but work with any system that can write to them, or the more approachable .NET API calls in code. You can find the reference for the API’s here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/ee460799.aspx All Class Libraries, for each part of Windows Azure: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee393295.aspx PowerShell Command-lets PowerShell is one of the most powerful scripting languages I’ve used with Windows – and it’s baked into all of our products. When you need to work with multiple servers, scripting is really the only way to go, and the Windows Azure PowerShell Command-Lets allow you to work across most any part of the platform – and can even be used within the services themselves. You can do everything with them from creating a new IaaS, PaaS or SaaS service, to controlling them and even working with security and more. You can find more about the Command-Lets here: http://wappowershell.codeplex.com/documentation (older link, still works, will point you to the new ones as well) We have command-line utilities for other operating systems as well: https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/manage/downloads/ Video walkthrough of using the Command-Lets: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/BUILD/BUILD2011/SAC-859T System Center System Center is actually a suite of graphical tools you can use to manage, deploy, control, monitor and tune software from Microsoft and even other platforms. This will be the primary tool we’ll recommend for managing a hybrid or contiguous management process – and as time goes on you’ll see more and more features put into System Center for the entire Windows Azure suite of products. You can find the Management Pack and README for it here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=11324 SQL Server Management Studio / Data Tools / Visual Studio SQL Server has two built-in management and development, and since Version 2008 R2, you can use them to manage Windows Azure Databases. Visual Studio also lets you connect to and manage portions of Windows Azure as well as Windows Azure Databases. You can read more about Visual Studio here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/ee405484 You can read more about the SQL tools here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/ee621784.aspx Vendor-Provided Tools Microsoft does not suggest or endorse a specific third-party product. We do, however, use them, and see lots of other customers use them. You can browse to these sites to learn more, and chat with their folks directly on how they support Windows Azure. Cerebrata: Tools for managing from the command-line, graphical diagnostics, graphical storage management - http://www.cerebrata.com/ Quest Cloud Tools: Monitoring, Storage Management, and costing tools - http://communities.quest.com/community/cloud-tools Paraleap: Monitoring tool - http://www.paraleap.com/AzureWatch Cloudgraphs: Monitoring too - http://www.cloudgraphs.com/ Opstera: Monitoring for Windows Azure and a Scale-out pattern manager - http://www.opstera.com/products/Azureops/ Compuware: SaaS performance monitoring, load testing - http://www.compuware.com/application-performance-management/gomez-apm-products.html SOASTA: Penetration and Security Testing - http://www.soasta.com/cloudtest/enterprise/ LoadStorm: Load-testing tool - http://loadstorm.com/windows-azure Open-Source Tools This is probably the most specific set of tools, and the list I’ll have to maintain most often. Smaller projects have a way of coming and going, so I’ll try and make sure this list is current. Windows Azure MMC: (I actually use this one a lot) http://wapmmc.codeplex.com/ Windows Azure Diagnostics Monitor: http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/wazdmon Azure Application Monitor: http://azuremonitor.codeplex.com/ Azure Web Log: http://www.xentrik.net/software/azure_web_log.html Cloud Ninja:Multi-Tennant billing and performance monitor - http://cnmb.codeplex.com/ Cloud Samurai: Multi-Tennant Management- http://cloudsamurai.codeplex.com/ If you have additions to this list, please post them as a comment and I’ll research and then add them. Thanks!

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SQL SERVER – SSMS: Backup and Restore Events Report

- by Pinal Dave

A DBA wears multiple hats and in fact does more than what an eye can see. One of the core task of a DBA is to take backups. This looks so trivial that most developers shrug this off as the only activity a DBA might be doing. I have huge respect for DBA’s all around the world because even if they seem cool with all the scripting, automation, maintenance works round the clock to keep the business working almost 365 days 24×7, their worth is knowing that one day when the systems / HDD crashes and you have an important delivery to make. So these backup tasks / maintenance jobs that have been done come handy and are no more trivial as they might seem to be as considered by many. So the important question like: “When was the last backup taken?”, “How much time did the last backup take?”, “What type of backup was taken last?” etc are tricky questions and this report lands answers to the same in a jiffy. So the SSMS report, we are talking can be used to find backups and restore operation done for the selected database. Whenever we perform any backup or restore operation, the information is stored in the msdb database. This report can utilize that information and provide information about the size, time taken and also the file location for those operations. Here is how this report can be launched. Once we launch this report, we can see 4 major sections shown as listed below. Average Time Taken For Backup Operations Successful Backup Operations Backup Operation Errors Successful Restore Operations Let us look at each section next. Average Time Taken For Backup Operations Information shown in “Average Time Taken For Backup Operations” section is taken from a backupset table in the msdb database. Here is the query and the expanded version of that particular section USE msdb; SELECT (ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY t1.TYPE))%2 AS l1 , 1 AS l2 , 1 AS l3 , t1.TYPE AS [type] , (AVG(DATEDIFF(ss,backup_start_date, backup_finish_date)))/60.0 AS AverageBackupDuration FROM backupset t1 INNER JOIN sys.databases t3 ON ( t1.database_name = t3.name) WHERE t3.name = N'AdventureWorks2014' GROUP BY t1.TYPE ORDER BY t1.TYPE On my small database the time taken for differential backup was less than a minute, hence the value of zero is displayed. This is an important piece of backup operation which might help you in planning maintenance windows. Successful Backup Operations Here is the expanded version of this section. This information is derived from various backup tracking tables from msdb database. Here is the simplified version of the query which can be used separately as well. SELECT * FROM sys.databases t1 INNER JOIN backupset t3 ON (t3.database_name = t1.name) LEFT OUTER JOIN backupmediaset t5 ON ( t3.media_set_id = t5.media_set_id) LEFT OUTER JOIN backupmediafamily t6 ON ( t6.media_set_id = t5.media_set_id) WHERE (t1.name = N'AdventureWorks2014') ORDER BY backup_start_date DESC,t3.backup_set_id,t6.physical_device_name; The report does some calculations to show the data in a more readable format. For example, the backup size is shown in KB, MB or GB. I have expanded first row by clicking on (+) on “Device type” column. That has shown me the path of the physical backup file. Personally looking at this section, the Backup Size, Device Type and Backup Name are critical and are worth a note. As mentioned in the previous section, this section also has the Duration embedded inside it. Backup Operation Errors This section of the report gets data from default trace. You might wonder how. One of the event which is tracked by default trace is “ErrorLog”. This means that whatever message is written to errorlog gets written to default trace file as well. Interestingly, whenever there is a backup failure, an error message is written to ERRORLOG and hence default trace. This section takes advantage of that and shows the information. We can read below message under this section, which confirms above logic. No backup operations errors occurred for (AdventureWorks2014) database in the recent past or default trace is not enabled. Successful Restore Operations This section may not be very useful in production server (do you perform a restore of database?) but might be useful in the development and log shipping secondary environment, where we might be interested to see restore operations for a particular database. Here is the expanded version of the section. To fill this section of the report, I have restored the same backups which were taken to populate earlier sections. Here is the simplified version of the query used to populate this output. USE msdb; SELECT * FROM restorehistory t1 LEFT OUTER JOIN restorefile t2 ON ( t1.restore_history_id = t2.restore_history_id) LEFT OUTER JOIN backupset t3 ON ( t1.backup_set_id = t3.backup_set_id) WHERE t1.destination_database_name = N'AdventureWorks2014' ORDER BY restore_date DESC, t1.restore_history_id,t2.destination_phys_name Have you ever looked at the backup strategy of your key databases? Are they in sync and do we have scope for improvements? Then this is the report to analyze after a week or month of maintenance plans running in your database. Do chime in with what are the strategies you are using in your environments. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Backup and Restore, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Server Management Studio, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: SQL Reports

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To ORM or Not to ORM. That is the question…

- by Patrick Liekhus

UPDATE: Thanks for the feedback and comments. I have adjusted my table below with your recommendations. I had missed a point or two. I wanted to do a series on creating an entire project using the EDMX XAF code generation and the SpecFlow BDD Easy Test tools discussed in my earlier posts, but I thought it would be appropriate to start with a simple comparison and reasoning on why I choose to use these tools. Let’s start by defining the term ORM, or Object-Relational Mapping. According to Wikipedia it is defined as the following: Object-relational mapping (ORM, O/RM, and O/R mapping) in computer software is a programming technique for converting data between incompatible type systems in object-oriented programming languages. This creates, in effect, a "virtual object database" that can be used from within the programming language. Why should you care? Basically it allows you to map your business objects in code to their persistence layer behind them. And better yet, why would you want to do this? Let me outline it in the following points: Development speed. No more need to map repetitive tasks query results to object members. Once the map is created the code is rendered for you. Persistence portability. The ORM knows how to map SQL specific syntax for the persistence engine you choose. It does not matter if it is SQL Server, Oracle and another database of your choosing. Standard/Boilerplate code is simplified. The basic CRUD operations are consistent and case use database metadata for basic operations. So how does this help? Well, let’s compare some of the ORM tools that I have used and/or researched. I have been interested in ORM for some time now. My ORM of choice for a long time was NHibernate and I still believe it has a strong case in some business situations. However, you have to take business considerations into account and the law of diminishing returns. Because of these two factors, my recent activity and experience has been around DevExpress eXpress Persistence Objects (XPO). The primary reason for this is because they have the DevExpress eXpress Application Framework (XAF) that sits on top of XPO. With this added value, the data model can be created (either database first of code first) and the Web and Windows client can be created from these maps. While out of the box they provide some simple list and detail screens, you can verify easily extend and modify these to your liking. DevExpress has done a tremendous job of providing enough framework while also staying out of the way when you need to extend it. This sounds worse than it really is. What I mean by this is that if you choose to follow DevExpress coding style and recommendations, the hooks and extension points provided allow you to do some pretty heavy lifting while also not worrying about the basics. I have put together a list of the top features that I have used to compare the limited list of ORM’s that I have exposure with. Again, the biggest selling point in my opinion is that XPO is just a solid as any of the other ORM’s but with the added layer of XAF they become unstoppable. And then couple that with the EDMX modeling tools and code generation, it becomes a no brainer. Designer Features Entity Framework NHibernate Fluent w/ Nhibernate Telerik OpenAccess DevExpress XPO DevExpress XPO/XAF plus Liekhus Tools Uses XML to map relationships - Yes - - - Visual class designer interface Yes - - - - Yes Management integrated w/ Visual Studio Yes - - Yes - Yes Supports schema first approach Yes - - Yes - Yes Supports model first approach Yes - - Yes Yes Yes Supports code first approach Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Attribute driven coding style Yes - Yes - Yes Yes I have a very small team and limited resources with a lot of responsibilities. In order to keep up with our customers, we must rely on tools like these. We use the EDMX tool so that we can create a visual representation of the applications with our customers. Second, we rely on the code generation so that we can focus on the business problems at hand and not whether a field is mapped correctly. This keeps us from requiring as many junior level developers on our team. I have also worked on multiple teams where they believed in writing their own “framework”. In my experiences and opinion this is not the route to take unless you have a team dedicated to supporting just the framework. Each time that I have worked on custom frameworks, the framework eventually becomes old, out dated and full of “performance” enhancements specific to one or two requirements. With an ORM, there are a lot smarter people than me working on the bigger issue of persistence and performance. Again, my recommendation would be to use an available framework and get to working on your business domain problems. If your coding is not making money for you, why are you working on it? Do you really need to be writing query to object member code again and again? Thanks

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BizTalk host throttling – Singleton pattern and High database size

- by S.E.R.

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/SERivas/archive/2013/06/30/biztalk-host-throttling-ndash-singleton-pattern-and-high-database-size.aspxI have worked for some days around the singleton pattern (for those unfamiliar with it, read this post by Victor Fehlberg) and have come across a few very interesting posts, among which one dealt with performance issues (here, also by Victor Fehlberg). Simply put: if you have an orchestration which implements the singleton pattern, then performances will continuously decrease as the orchestration receives and consumes messages, and that behavior is more obvious when the orchestration never ends (ie : it keeps looping and never terminates or completes). As I experienced the same kind of problem (actually I was alerted by SCOM, which told me that the host was being throttled because of High database size), I thought it would be a good idea to dig a little bit a see what happens deep inside BizTalk and thus understand the reasons for this behavior. NOTE: in this article, I will focus on this High database size throttling condition. I will try and work on the other conditions in some not too distant future… Test conditions The singleton orchestration For the purpose of this study, I have created the following orchestration, which is a very basic implementation of a singleton that piles up incoming messages, then does something else when a certain timeout has been reached without receiving another message: Throttling settings I have two distinct hosts : one that hosts the receive port (basic FILE port) : Ports_ReceiveHostone that hosts the orchestration : ProcessingHost In order to emphasize the throttling mechanism, I have modified the throttling settings for each of these hosts are as follows (all other parameters are set to the default value): [Throttling thresholds] Message count in database: 500 (default value : 50000) Evolution of performance counters when submitting messages Since we are investigating the High database size throttling condition, here are the performance counter that we should take a look at (all of them are in the BizTalk:Message Agent performance object): Database sizeHigh database sizeMessage delivery throttling stateMessage publishing throttling stateMessage delivery delay (ms)Message publishing delay (ms)Message delivery throttling state durationMessage publishing throttling state duration (If you are not used to Perfmon, I strongly recommend that you start using it right now: it is a wonderful tool that allows you to open the hood and see what is going on inside BizTalk – and other systems) Database size It is quite obvious that we will start by watching the database size and high database size counters, just to see when the first reaches the configured threshold (500) and when the second rings the alarm. NOTE : During this test I submitted 600 messages, one message at a time every 10ms to see the evolution of the counters we have previously selected. It might not show very well on this screenshot, but here is what happened: From 15:46:50 to 15:47:50, the database size for the Ports_ReceiveHost host (blue line) kept growing until it reached a maximum of 504.At 15:47:50, the high database size alert fires At first I was surprised by this result: why is it the database size of the receiving host that keeps growing since it is the processing host that piles up messages? Actually, it makes total sense. This counter measures the size of the database queue that is being filled by the host, not consumed. Therefore, the high database size alert is raised on the host that fills the queue: Ports_ReceiveHost. More information is available on the Public MPWiki page. Now, looking at the Message publishing throttling state for the receiving host (green line), we can see that a throttling condition has been reached at 15:47:50: We can also see that the Message publishing delay(ms) (blue line) has begun growing slowly from this point. All of this explains why performances keep decreasing when a singleton keeps processing new messages: the database size grows and when it has exceeded the Message count in database threshold, the host is throttled and the publishing delay keeps increasing. Digging further So, what happens to the database queue then? Is it flushed some day or does it keep growing and growing indefinitely? The real question being: will the host be throttled forever because of this singleton? To answer this question, I set the Message count in database threshold to 20 (this value is very low in order not to wait for too long, otherwise I certainly would have fallen asleep in front of my screen) and I submitted 30 messages. The test was started at 18:26. At 18:56 (ie : exactly 30min later) the throttling was stopped and the database size was divided by 2. 30 min later again, the database size had dropped to almost zero: I guess I’ll have to find some documentation and do some more testing before I sort this out! My guess is that some maintenance job is at work here, though I cannot tell which one Digging even further If we take a look at the Message delivery throttling state counter for the processing host, we can see that this host was also throttled during the submission of the 600 documents: The value for the counter was 1, meaning that Message delivery incoming rate for the host instance exceeds the Message delivery outgoing rate * the specified Rate overdrive factor (percent) value. We will see this another day… :) A last word Let’s end this article with a warning: DO NOT CHANGE THE THROTTLING SETTINGS LIGHTLY! The temptation can be great to just bypass throttling by setting very high values for each parameter (or zero in some cases, which simply disables throttling). Nevertheless, always keep in mind that this mechanism is here for a very good reason: prevent your BizTalk infrastructure from exploding!! So whatever you do with those settings, do a lot of testing and benchmarking!

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CQRS – Questions and Concerns

- by Dylan Smith

I’ve been doing a lot of learning on CQRS and Event Sourcing over the last little while and I have a number of questions that I haven’t been able to answer. 1. What is the benefit of CQRS when compared to a typical DDD architecture that uses Event Sourcing and properly captures intent and behavior via verb-based commands? (other than Scalability) 2. When using CQRS what do you do with complex query-based logic? I’m going to elaborate on #1 in this blog post and I’ll do a follow-up post on #2. I watched through Greg Young’s video on the business benefits of CQRS + Event Sourcing and first let me say that I thought it was an excellent presentation that really drives home a lot of the benefits to this approach to architecture (I watched it twice in a row I enjoyed it so much!). But it didn’t answer some of my questions fully (I wish I had been there to ask these of Greg in person!). So let me pick apart some of the points he makes and how they relate to my first question above. I’m completely sold on the idea of event sourcing and have a clear understanding of the benefits that it brings to the table, so I’m not going to question that. But you can use event sourcing without going to a CQRS architecture, so my main question is around the benefits of CQRS + Event Sourcing vs Event Sourcing + Typical DDD architecture Architecture with Event Sourcing + Commands on Left, CQRS on Right Greg talks about how the stereotypical architecture doesn’t support DDD, but is that only because his diagram shows DTO’s coming up from the client. If we use the same diagram but allow the client to send commands doesn’t that remove a lot of the arguments that Greg makes against the stereotypical architecture? We can now introduce verbs into the system. We can capture intent now (storing it still requires event sourcing, but you can implement event sourcing without doing CQRS) We can create a rich domain model (as opposed to an anemic domain model) Scalability is obviously a benefit that CQRS brings to the table, but like Greg says, very few of the systems we create truly need significant scalability Greg talks about the ability to scale your development efforts. He says CQRS allows you to split the system into 3 parts (Client, Domain/Commands, Reads) and assign 3 teams of developers to work on them in parallel; letting you scale your development efforts by 3x with nearly linear gains. But in the stereotypical architecture don’t you already have 2 separate modules that you can split your dev efforts between: The client that sends commands/queries and receives DTO’s, and the Domain which accepts commands/queries, and generates events/DTO’s. If this is true it’s not really a 3x scaling you achieve with CQRS but merely a 1.5x scaling which while great doesn’t sound nearly as dramatic (“I can do it with 10 devs in 12 months – let me hire 5 more and we can have it done in 8 months”). Making the Query side “stupid simple” such that you can assign junior developers (or even outsource it) sounds like a valid benefit, but I have some concerns over what you do with complex query-based logic/behavior. I’m going to go into more detail on this in a follow-up blog post shortly. He also seemed to focus on how “stupid-simple” it is doing queries against the de-normalized data store, but I imagine there is still significant complexity in the event handlers that interpret the events and apply them to the de-normalized tables. It sounds like Greg suggests that because we’re doing CQRS that allows us to apply Event Sourcing when we otherwise wouldn’t be able to (~33:30 in the video). I don’t believe this is true. I don’t see why you wouldn’t be able to apply Event Sourcing without separating out the Commands and Queries. The queries would just operate against the domain model instead of the database. But you’d still get the benefits of Event Sourcing. Without CQRS the queries would only be able to operate against the current state rather than the event history, but even in CQRS the domain behaviors can only operate against the current state and I don’t see that being a big limiting factor. If some query needs to operate against something that is not captured by the current state you would just have to update the domain model to capture that information (no different than if that statement were made about a Command under CQRS). Some of the benefits I do see being applicable are that your domain model might end up being simpler/smaller since it only needs to represent the state needed to process commands and not worry about the reads (like the Deactivate Inventory Item and associated comment example that Greg provides). And also commands that can be handled in a Transaction Script style manner by the command handler simply generating events and not touching the domain model. It also makes it easier for your senior developers to focus on the command behavior and ignore the queries, which is usually going to be a better use of their time. And of course scalability. If anybody out there has any thoughts on this and can help educate me further, please either leave a comment or feel free to get in touch with me via email:

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Oracle Enterprise Data Quality: Ever Integration-ready

- by Mala Narasimharajan

It is closing in on a year now since Oracle’s acquisition of Datanomic, and the addition of Oracle Enterprise Data Quality (EDQ) to the Oracle software family. The big move has caused some big shifts in emphasis and some very encouraging excitement from the field. To give an illustration, combined with a shameless promotion of how EDQ can help to give quick insights into your data, I did a quick Phrase Profile of the subject field of emails to the Global EDQ mailing list since it was set up last September. The results revealed a very clear theme: Integration, Integration, Integration! As well as the important Siebel and Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) integrations, we have been asked about integration with a huge variety of Oracle applications, including EBS, Peoplesoft, CRM on Demand, Fusion, DRM, Endeca, RightNow, and more - and we have not stood still! While it would not have been possible to develop specific pre-integrations with all of the above within a year, we have developed a package of feature-rich out-of-the-box web services and batch processes that can be plugged into any application or middleware technology with ease. And with Siebel, they work out of the box. Oracle Enterprise Data Quality version 9.0.4 includes the Customer Data Services (CDS) pack – a ready set of standard processes with standard interfaces, to provide integrated: Address verification and cleansing Individual matching Organization matching The services can are suitable for either Batch or Real-Time processing, and are enabled for international data, with simple configuration options driving the set of locale-specific dictionaries that are used. For example, large dictionaries are provided to support international name transcription and variant matching, including highly specialized handling for Arabic, Japanese, Chinese and Korean data. In total across all locales, CDS includes well over a million dictionary entries. Excerpt from EDQ’s CDS Individual Name Standardization Dictionary CDS has been developed to replace the OEM of Informatica Identity Resolution (IIR) for attached Data Quality on the Oracle price list, but does this in a way that creates a ‘best of both worlds’ situation for customers, who can harness not only the out-of-the-box functionality of pre-packaged matching and standardization services, but also the flexibility of OEDQ if they want to customize the interfaces or the process logic, without having to learn more than one product. From a competitive point of view, we believe this stands us in good stead against our key competitors, including Informatica, who have separate ‘Identity Resolution’ and general DQ products, and IBM, who provide limited out-of-the-box capabilities (with a steep learning curve) in both their QualityStage data quality and Initiate matching products. Here is a brief guide to the main services provided in the pack: Address Verification and Standardization EDQ’s CDS Address Cleaning Process The Address Verification and Standardization service uses EDQ Address Verification (an OEM of Loqate software) to verify and clean addresses in either real-time or batch. The Address Verification processor is wrapped in an EDQ process – this adds significant capabilities over calling the underlying Address Verification API directly, specifically: Country-specific thresholds to determine when to accept the verification result (and therefore to change the input address) based on the confidence level of the API Optimization of address verification by pre-standardizing data where required Formatting of output addresses into the input address fields normally used by applications Adding descriptions of the address verification and geocoding return codes The process can then be used to provide real-time and batch address cleansing in any application; such as a simple web page calling address cleaning and geocoding as part of a check on individual data. Duplicate Prevention Unlike Informatica Identity Resolution (IIR), EDQ uses stateless services for duplicate prevention to avoid issues caused by complex replication and synchronization of large volume customer data. When a record is added or updated in an application, the EDQ Cluster Key Generation service is called, and returns a number of key values. These are used to select other records (‘candidates’) that may match in the application data (which has been pre-seeded with keys using the same service). The ‘driving record’ (the new or updated record) is then presented along with all selected candidates to the EDQ Matching Service, which decides which of the candidates are a good match with the driving record, and scores them according to the strength of match. In this model, complex multi-locale EDQ techniques can be used to generate the keys and ensure that the right balance between performance and matching effectiveness is maintained, while ensuring that the application retains control of data integrity and transactional commits. The process is explained below: EDQ Duplicate Prevention Architecture Note that where the integration is with a hub, there may be an additional call to the Cluster Key Generation service if the master record has changed due to merges with other records (and therefore needs to have new key values generated before commit). Batch Matching In order to allow customers to use different match rules in batch to real-time, separate matching templates are provided for batch matching. For example, some customers want to minimize intervention in key user flows (such as adding new customers) in front end applications, but to conduct a more exhaustive match on a regular basis in the back office. The batch matching jobs are also used when migrating data between systems, and in this case normally a more precise (and automated) type of matching is required, in order to minimize the review work performed by Data Stewards. In batch matching, data is captured into EDQ using its standard interfaces, and records are standardized, clustered and matched in an EDQ job before matches are written out. As with all EDQ jobs, batch matching may be called from Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) if required. When working with Siebel CRM (or master data in Siebel UCM), Siebel’s Data Quality Manager is used to instigate batch jobs, and a shared staging database is used to write records for matching and to consume match results. The CDS batch matching processes automatically adjust to Siebel’s ‘Full Match’ (match all records against each other) and ‘Incremental Match’ (match a subset of records against all of their selected candidates) modes. The Future The Customer Data Services Pack is an important part of the Oracle strategy for EDQ, offering a clear path to making Data Quality Assurance an integral part of enterprise applications, and providing a strong value proposition for adopting EDQ. We are planning various additions and improvements, including: An out-of-the-box Data Quality Dashboard Even more comprehensive international data handling Address search (suggesting multiple results) Integrated address matching The EDQ Customer Data Services Pack is part of the Enterprise Data Quality Media Pack, available for download at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/oedq/downloads/index.html.

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The Winds of Change are a Blowin’

- by Ajarn Mark Caldwell

For six years I have been an avid and outspoken fan and paying customer of SourceGear products…from Vault to Dragnet to Fortress and on to Vault Professional, but that is all changing now. Not the fan part, but the paying customer part. I’m still a huge fan. I think that SourceGear does a great job with their product and support has been fantastic when needed (which is not very often). I think that Eric Sink has done a fine job building a quality company and products, and I appreciate his contributions to the tech community through this blogging and books. I still think their products are high quality and do a fantastic job of what they do. But there’s the rub…what they do is no longer enough for me. As I have rebuilt our development team over the last couple of years, and we have begun to investigate Scrum and Kanban, I realize that I need more visibility into the progress of the team. I need better project management tools, and this is where Vault Professional lags behind several other tools. Granted, in the latest release (Vault 6.0) they added a nice time tracking feature, but I want more. (Note, I did contact SourceGear about my quest for more, but apparently, the rest of their customer base has not been clamoring for this and so they have not built it. Granted, I wasn’t clamoring for it either until just recently, but unfortunately for SourceGear, I want it now and don’t want to wait for them to build it into their system.) Ironically, it was SourceGear themselves who started to turn me on to the possibilities of other tools. They built a limited integration with Axosoft OnTime which I read about several times on their support site (I used to regularly read and occasionally comment on their Support Forum). I decided to check out OnTime and was very impressed with the tool for work item tracking and project management (not to mention their great Scrum Master in 10 Minutes video). I fell in love with the capabilities of OnTime. Unfortunately, the integration with Vault for source control management was, as I mentioned, limited. I could have forfeited the integration between work items and source code, but there is too much benefit to linking check-ins to work items for me to give that up. So then I did what was previously unthinkable for me, I considered switching not just the work tracking tool, but also the source code management tool. This was really stepping outside my comfort zone because source code is Gold, and not to be trifled with. When you find a good weapon to protect your gold, stick with it. I looked at Git and Tortoise SVN, but the integration methods for those was pretty rough compared to what I was used to. The recommended tool from Axosoft’s point of view appeared to be RocketSVN, but I really wasn’t sure I wanted to go the “flavor of Subversion” route. Then I started thinking about that other tool I liked back when I first chose to go with Vault, but couldn’t afford: Team Foundation Server. And what do you know…Microsoft has not only radically improved it over that version from back in 2006, but they also came to their senses about how it should be licensed, and it is much more affordable now. So I started looking into the latest capabilities in the 2012 version, and I fell in love all over again. I really went deep on checking out the tools. I watched numerous webcasts from Microsoft partners, went to a beta preview on Microsoft’s campus, and watched a lot of Channel 9 videos on the new ALM features (oooh…shiny). Frankly, I was very impressed with the capabilities of the newest version, and figured this was probably our direction. As an interesting twist of fate, one of my employees crossed paths with an ALM Consultant from Northwest Cadence, a local Microsoft Partner, and one of the companies that produced several of the webcasts that I had been watching. So I gave Bryon a call and started grilling him to see if he really knew anything or was just another guy who couldn’t find a job so he called himself a consultant. It turns out Bryon actually knows a lot, especially in an area that was becoming a frustration point for us: Branching strategies and automated builds (that’s probably a whole separate blog entry). As we talked, Bryon suggested we look into doing a DTDPS (Developer Tools Deployment Planning Services) session with his company. This is a service that can be paid for by Microsoft Enterprise Agreement planning services credits or SA training benefits, and, again, coincidentally, we had several that were just about to expire, so I put them to good use. The DTDPS sessions were great; and Bryon, Rick, and the rest of the folks at Northwest Cadence have been a pleasure to work with. We have just purchased a new server for our TFS rollout and are planning the steps and options right now. This is still a big project ahead of us to not only install and configure TFS, but also to load all of our source code (many different systems, not just one program) and transition to the new way of life with TFS, but I am convinced that it is the right move for my team at this point in time. We need the new capabilities that are in alignment with Scrum and Kanban methodologies in order to more efficiently manage all the different projects that we have going on at one time. I would still wholeheartedly endorse SourceGear’s products and Axosoft’s OnTime for those whose needs are met by those tools, but for me and my team, I think that TFS is the right fit, and I am looking forward to the change.

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SQLAuthority News – Why VoIP Service Providers Should Think About NuoDB’s Geo Distribution

- by Pinal Dave

You can always tell when someone’s showing off their cool, cutting edge comms technology. They tend to raise their voice a lot. Back in the day they’d announce their gadget leadership to the rest of the herd by shouting into their cellphone. Usually the message was no more urgent than “Hi, I’m on my cellphone!” Now the same types will loudly name-drop a different technology to the rest of the airport lounge. “I’m leveraging the wifi,” a fellow passenger bellowed, the other day, as we filtered through the departure gate. Nobody needed to know that, but the subtext was “look at me everybody”. You can tell the really advanced mobile user – they tend to whisper. Their handset has a microphone (how cool is that!) and they know how to use it. Sometimes these shouty public broadcasters aren’t even connected anyway because the database for their Voice over IP (VoIP) platform can’t cope. This will happen if they are using a traditional SQL model to try and cope with a phone network which has far flung offices and hundreds of mobile employees. That, like shouting into your phone, is just wrong on so many levels. What VoIP needs now is a single, logical database across multiple servers in different geographies. It needs to be updated in real-time and automatically scaled out during times of peak demand. A VoIP system should scale up to handle increased traffic, but just as importantly is must then go back down in the off peak hours. Try this with a MySQL database. It can’t scale easily enough, so it will keep your developers busy. They’ll have spent many hours trying to knit the different databases together. Traditional relational databases can possibly achieve this, at a price. Mind you, you could extend baked bean cans and string to every point on the network and that would be no less elegant. That’s not really following engineering principles though is it? Having said that, most telcos and VoIP systems use a separate, independent solution for each office location, which they link together – loosely. The more office locations, the more complex and expensive the solution becomes and so the more you spend on maintenance. Ideally, you’d have a fluid system that can automatically shift its shape as the need arises. That’s the point of software isn’t it – it adapts. Otherwise, we might as well return to the old days. A MySQL system isn’t exactly baked bean cans attached by string, but it’s closer in spirit to the old many teethed mechanical beast that was employed in the first type of automated switchboard. NuoBD’s NewSQL is designed to be a single database that works across multiple servers, which can scale easily, and scale on demand. That’s one system that gives high connectivity but no latency, complexity or maintenance issues. MySQL works in some circumstances, but a period of growth isn’t one of them. So as a company moves forward, the MySQL database can’t keep pace. Data storage and data replication errors creep in. Soon the diaspora of offices becomes a problem. Your telephone system isn’t just distributed, it is literally all over the place. Though voice calls are often a software function, some of the old habits of telephony remain. When you call an engineer out, some of them will listen to what you’re asking for and announce that it cannot be done. This is what happens if you ask, say, database engineers familiar with Oracle or Microsoft to fulfill your wish for a low maintenance system built on a single, fluid, scalable database. No can do, they’d say. In fact, I heard one shouting something similar into his VoIP handset at the airport. “I can’t get on the network, Mac. I’m on MySQL.” You can download NuoDB from here. “NuoDB provides the ability to replicate data globally in real-time, which is not available with any other product offering,” states Weeks. “That alone is remarkable and it works. I’ve seen it. I’ve used it. I’ve tested it. The ability to deploy NuoDB removes a tremendous burden from our support and engineering teams.” Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: NuoDB

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Oracle Day 2013 Istanbul – 14.Kasim.2013

- by TUFEKCIOGLU,FATIH

Oracle Day 2013 Istanbul – 14.Kasim.2013 Yeni Teknolojiler. Yeni Dünya. Sayfa duzgun goruntulenemiyorsa etkinlik takvimine asagidaki linkten ulasabilirsiniz : https://blogs.oracle.com/fatihtufekcioglu/resource/Oracle_Day_Istanbul_14.Kasim.2013_blogs.oracle.com.fatihtufekcioglu.html#! charset=iso-8859-1"> "> Hemen Kaydolun! Oracle Day 2013 Istanbul Istanbul Kongre Merkezi Taskisla Caddesi Harbiye 34367 Istanbul / Türkiye 14 Kasim 2013, Persembe 08:30 - 18:00 LCV: [email protected] Oracle Day 2013 Istanbul Yeni Teknolojiler. Yeni Dünya. 14 Kasim 2013 Sayin Davetlimiz, Teknoloji, dünyayi sürekli degistirmeye devam ediyor. Bulut bilisim, mobil çözümler, büyük veri ve nesnelerin interneti güçlerini birlestirerek, eski is modellerini altüst edip inovasyonu ön plana çikartiyorlar. Organizasyonlar ise bu yeni dünyaya ayak uydurmak için bir yandan sürekli degisimi saglamaya çalisirken, diger yandan da isletmelerini en iyi sekilde yönetmeye devam etmek zorundalar. Peki organizasyonlar bu dengeyi nasil koruyorlar? Oracle Day 2013 Istanbul'da birçok Oracle müsterisinden dinleyeceginiz basari hikayeleriyle bunun nasil mümkün oldugunu görebilirsiniz. Etkinlige katilarak: Teknolojinin, yeni is modellerini ve firsatlarini nasil atesledigini ögrenebilir, Inovasyonu ön plana çikartmak için bilgi teknolojilerini sadelestiren sirketlerin basari hikayelerini dinleyebilir, Sizinle ayni zorluklari tecrübe eden sektör profesyonelleriyle biraraya gelebilir, Oracle'dan en yeni ürün haberlerini ve duyurularini takip etme firsati bulabilirsiniz. Oracle ve is ortaklariyla bulusmak, müsteri basari hikayelerini dinlemek, sosyal ve mobil etkilesimler için firsatlar yakalamak, uygulamali demolar izlemek ve daha fazlasi için Oracle Day 2013 Istanbul'da bize katilmanizdan memnuniyet duyacagiz. Hemen Kaydolun. Saygilarimizla, Oracle Türkiye Oracle Is Ortagi Müsteri Basari Hikayesi TROUG Sunum Ingilizcedir Program 08:30-09:30 Kayit 09:30-10:00 Hos Geldiniz Filiz Dogan, Genel Müdür, Oracle Türkiye 10:00-10:30 Keynote Andrew Sutherland, SVP, EMEA Technology, Oracle 10:30-11:00 Yapi Kredi ve Oracle Cahit Erdogan, Bilisim Teknolojileri ve Operasyon Yönetimi Genel Müdür Yardimcisi, Yapi Kredi Bankasi 11:00-11:30 150. Yasinda Ziraat'te Teknolojinin Dünü, Bugünü, Yarini Yunus Uygur Kocaoglu, Ziraat Teknoloji Genel Müdürü & Bilgi Teknolojileri Yönetimi Genel Müdür Yardimcisi, Ziraat Bankasi 11:30-11:45 Oracle Day'de 5. Yil Sezgin Aslan, Is Gelistirme Grup Yöneticisi, Innova 11:45-13:00 Ögle Yemegi Salon 1 Salon 2 Salon 3 Salon 4 Salon 5 Salon 6 Salon 7 Salon 8 Bulut Bilisim Çözümleri Büyük Veri & Analitik Çözümler Mobil Dünyada Orta Katman Çözümleri Is Uygulamalari I Is Uygulamalari II Modern Veri Merkezi Oracle & Is Ortaklari Çözümleri & Basari Hikayeleri TROUG (Oracle User Group) 13:00-13:30 Bulutunuza Yön Verin! Big Data at Work: Transform Your Business with Analytics Your Blueprint For Driving Enterprise Mobile Strategy Empowering Modern Business in the Cloud - Is Optimizasyonu Hayal Degil! Degisime Dünden Hazir Olmak: "BAT E-Fatura Projesi” Panel: "Türkiye'de Nitelikli Bilisim Elemani Yetistirilmesi" Oracle Oracle Oracle Oracle Oracle Idea Teknoloji British American Tobacco Oracle TROUG 13:30-13:40 Kahve Molasi 13:40-14:10 12c ile Veritabani Buluta Tasindi, Peki ya Siz? Büyüklük Sizde Kalsin BT Öncüleri için Uygulama Sunucusu Platformu Vakif Emeklilik Muhasebe ve Lojistik Sistemler Dönüsüm Projesi JD Edwards EnterpriseOne: Kapsamli, Kullanici Dostu ve Yenilikçi Modern Veri Merkezleri için Etkin Oracle Sunuculari Ziraat Bankasi Exadata Basari Hikayesi Oracle Database 12c Önemli Özellikler (DB/DWH) Oracle Etiya Oracle Innova Oracle Oracle Ziraat Bankasi TROUG 14:10-14:20 Kahve Molasi 14:20-14:50 Oracle Bulutunuza Bir Mimarin Bakisi Odakliligin Gücü: Oracle BI Dashboard Kullanimiyla Performans Yönetimi Kurumsal Uygulamalarin Mobil Dünyaya Entegrasyonu Müsteri Karsisinda Tutarli, Etkin ve Tekil Durus: Mükemmel Müsteri Deneyimi Etkin Planlama ve Satin Alma ile Tedarik Zincirinden "Deger Zinciri"ne Dönüsüm Oracle Uygulamalari için Tasarlanmis Veri Depolama Sistemleri Bütünlesik Sistemler (Engineered Systems) için Platinum Hizmetler Sql/PLSQL Yeni Özellikler Oracle ING Oracle Oracle Oracle Oracle Oracle TROUG 14:50-15:00 Kahve Molasi 15:00-15:30 Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c: How Does It Support the Cloud? Veri Analizinde Yeni Yorum, Endeca ile Yeni Bakis Kurumsal Bilginin Yolculugu Basariya Giden Yol: Satis, Pazarlama ve Sosyal Medya Elele Kurumsal Performans Yönetimi (EPM) ile Is Potansiyelinizi Açiga Çikarin! Oracle Sunucu ve Veri Depolama Teknolojilerine Hizli Geçis - Avea Basari Hikayesi SAP Uygulamalari Oracle Engineered (Bütünlesik) Sistemler ile Daha Iyi Çalisiyor - Koçtas Basari Hikayesi Oracle EBS R12.2 Yeni Özellikler Oracle Gtech Oracle Innova Oracle Oracle Avea Oracle Koçtas TROUG 15:30-15:40 Kahve Molasi 15:40-16:10 Oracle Real Application Testing (RAT) ile Partitioning Islemleri, Oracle RAT'in Finansbank'taki Kullanim Alanlari Degisen Pazar Kosullarina Hizli Bütçe Revizyonu ile Adaptasyon Mobil Cihazlar için Erisim Yönetimi ve Güvenlik Yönetisim, Yasal Uyumluluk ve Süreç Optimizasyonu Lider Ise Alim Çözümü Taleo ile Bireysel Basaridan Kurumsal Basariya Oracle Bütünlesik Sistemleri ile Kendi Bulut Ortaminizi Yaratin Akçelik ERP Seçimi JDEdwards Exadata - Maximum Availability Architecture Best Practices Avea Finansbank IBTECH Gtech Oracle PwC Oracle Oracle Akçelik Kora Oracle 16:10-16:20 Kahve Molasi 16:20-16:50 Orta Katman da Bulutlu Hizli Veri mi Büyük Veri mi? Her Tür Süreç Ihtiyaci için Oracle BPM - Demo CRM Dünyasinin Tecrübeli Yildizi Siebel'in Bugünü ve Yarini Fusion ile IK Stratejilerinizi Bulutlara Tasimak Esnek ve Dinamik Veri Merkezi Altyapilari Kurulum Süresi En SADE ERP. Oracle Business Accelerator ile ERP'de Jet Hizi! Nefis: EDQ, OGG ve ODI Exadata Üzerinde Oracle Oracle Oracle KRBB Oracle Oracle AWR Oracle SADE Organik Labrys Danismanlik TROUG 16:50-18:00 Kokteyl & Oracle Infiniband Konseri PANELISTLER: Esref Adali: ITÜ Bilgisayar Mühendisligi Bölüm Baskani ve Bilisim Enstitüsü Bilgi Teknolojileri Programi Anabilim Dali Baskani Kemal Ciliz: TÜBISAD Yönetim Kurulu Baskani Zekeriya Besiroglu: Oracle Bilgisayar Programcilar Dernegi Yönetim Kurulu Baskani MODERATÖR: Cem Satana, Oracle Genel Müdür Yardimcisi ">Eger bir kamu kurumunun/kurulusunun çalisani veya görevlisi iseniz, bu etkinlige iliskin önemli etik kurallara iliskin bilgi için lütfen buraya tiklayiniz -- Copyright 2013, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Bize Ulasin | Yasal Uyarilar | Gizlilik Beyani Etkinlik takvimi : https://blogs.oracle.com/fatihtufekcioglu/resource/Oracle_Day_Istanbul_14.Kasim.2013_blogs.oracle.com.fatihtufekcioglu.html#!

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Configure Oracle SOA JMSAdatper to Work with WLS JMS Topics

- by fip

The WebLogic JMS Topic are typically running in a WLS cluster. So as your SOA composites that receive these Topic messages. In some situation, the two clusters are the same while in others they are sepearate. The composites in SOA cluster are subscribers to the JMS Topic in WebLogic cluster. As nature of JMS Topic is meant to distribute the same copy of messages to all its subscribers, two questions arise immediately when it comes to load balancing the JMS Topic messages against the SOA composites: How to assure all of the SOA cluster members receive different messages instead of the same (duplicate) messages, even though the SOA cluster members are all subscribers to the Topic? How to make sure the messages are evenly distributed (load balanced) to SOA cluster members? Here we will walk through how to configure the JMS Topic, the JmsAdapter connection factory, as well as the composite so that the JMS Topic messages will be evenly distributed to same composite running off different SOA cluster nodes without causing duplication. 2. The typical configuration In this typical configuration, we achieve the load balancing of JMS Topic messages to JmsAdapters by configuring a partitioned distributed topic along with sharable subscriptions. You can reference the documentation for explanation of PDT. And this blog posting does a very good job to visually explain how this combination of configurations would message load balancing among clients of JMS Topics. Our job is to apply this configuration in the context of SOA JMS Adapters. To do so would involve the following steps: Step A. Configure JMS Topic to be UDD and PDT, at the WebLogic cluster that house the JMS Topic Step B. Configure JCA Connection Factory with proper ServerProperties at the SOA cluster Step C. Reference the JCA Connection Factory and define a durable subscriber name, at composite's JmsAdapter (or the *.jca file) Here are more details of each step: Step A. Configure JMS Topic to be UDD and PDT, You do this at the WebLogic cluster that house the JMS Topic. You can follow the instructions at Administration Console Online Help to create a Uniform Distributed Topic. If you use WebLogic Console, then at the same administration screen you can specify "Distribution Type" to be "Uniform", and the Forwarding policy to "Partitioned", which would make the JMS Topic Uniform Distributed Destination and a Partitioned Distributed Topic, respectively Step B: Configure ServerProperties of JCA Connection Factory You do this step at the SOA cluster. This step is to make the JmsAdapter that connect to the JMS Topic through this JCA Connection Factory as a certain type of "client". When you configure the JCA Connection Factory for the JmsAdapter, you define the list of properties in FactoryProperties field, in a semi colon separated list: ClientID=myClient;ClientIDPolicy=UNRESTRICTED;SubscriptionSharingPolicy=SHARABLE;TopicMessageDistributionAll=false You can refer to Chapter 8.4.10 Accessing Distributed Destinations (Queues and Topics) on the WebLogic Server JMS of the Adapter User Guide for the meaning of these properties. Please note: Except for ClientID, other properties such as the ClientIDPolicy=UNRESTRICTED, SubscriptionSharingPolicy=SHARABLE and TopicMessageDistributionAll=false are all default settings for the JmsAdapter's connection factory. Therefore you do NOT have to explicitly specify them explicitly. All you need to do is the specify the ClientID. The ClientID is different from the subscriber ID that we are to discuss in the later steps. To make it simple, you just need to remember you need to specify the client ID and make it unique per connection factory. Here is the example setting: Step C. Reference the JCA Connection Factory and define a durable subscriber name, at composite's JmsAdapter (or the *.jca file) In the following example, the value 'MySubscriberID-1' was given as the value of property 'DurableSubscriber': <adapter-config name="subscribe" adapter="JMS Adapter" wsdlLocation="subscribe.wsdl" xmlns="http://platform.integration.oracle/blocks/adapter/fw/metadata"> <connection-factory location="eis/wls/MyTestUDDTopic" UIJmsProvider="WLSJMS" UIConnectionName="ateam-hq24b"/> <endpoint-activation portType="Consume_Message_ptt" operation="Consume_Message"> <activation-spec className="oracle.tip.adapter.jms.inbound.JmsConsumeActivationSpec"> <property name="DurableSubscriber" value="MySubscriberID-1"/> <property name="PayloadType" value="TextMessage"/> <property name="UseMessageListener" value="false"/> <property name="DestinationName" value="jms/MyTestUDDTopic"/> </activation-spec> </endpoint-activation> </adapter-config> You can set the durable subscriber name either at composite's JmsAdapter wizard,or by directly editing the JmsAdapter's *.jca file within the Composite project. 2.The "atypical" configurations: For some systems, there may be restrictions that do not allow the afore mentioned "typical" configurations be applied. For examples, some deployments may be required to configure the JMS Topic to be Replicated Distributed Topic rather than Partition Distributed Topic. We would like to discuss those scenarios here: Configuration A: The JMS Topic is NOT PDT In this case, you need to define the message selector 'NOT JMS_WL_DDForwarded' in the adapter's *.jca file, to filter out those "replicated" messages. Configuration B. The ClientIDPolicy=RESTRICTED In this case, you need separate factories for different composites. More accurately, you need separate factories for different *.jca file of JmsAdapter. References: Managing Durable Subscription WebLogic JMS Partitioned Distributed Topics and Shared Subscriptions JMS Troubleshooting: Configuring JMS Message Logging: Advanced Programming with Distributed Destinations Using the JMS Destination Availability Helper API

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PHP OCI8 and Oracle 11g DRCP Connection Pooling in Pictures

- by christopher.jones

Here is a screen shot from a PHP OCI8 connection pooling demo that I like to run. It graphically shows how little database host memory is needed when using DRCP connection pooling with Oracle Database 11g. Migrating to DRCP can be as simple as starting the pool and changing the connection string in your PHP application. The script that generated the data for this graph was a simple "Parts" query application being run under various simulated user loads. I was running the database on a small Oracle Linux server with just 2G of memory. I used PHP OCI8 1.4. Apache is in pre-fork mode, as needed for PHP. Each graph has time on the horizontal access in arbitrary 'tick' time units. Click the image to see it full sized. Pooled connections Beginning with the top left graph, At tick time 65 I used Apache's 'ab' tool to start 100 concurrent 'users' running the application. These users connected to the database using DRCP: $c = oci_pconnect('phpdemo', 'welcome', 'myhost/orcl:pooled'); A second hundred DRCP users were added to the system at tick 80 and a final hundred users added at tick 100. At about tick 110 I stopped the test and restarted Apache. This closed all the connections. The bottom left graph shows the number of statements being executed by the database per second, with some spikes for background database activity and some variability for this small test. Each extra batch of users adds another 'step' of load to the system. Looking at the top right Server Process graph shows the database server processes doing the query work for each web user. As user load is added, the DRCP server pool increases (in green). The pool is initially at its default size 4 and quickly ramps up to about (I'm guessing) 35. At tick time 100 the pool increases to my configured maximum of 40 processes. Those 40 processes are doing the query work for all 300 web users. When I stopped the test at tick 110, the pooled processes remained open waiting for more users to connect. If I had left the test quiet for the DRCP 'inactivity_timeout' period (300 seconds by default), the pool would have shrunk back to 4 processes. Looking at the bottom right, you can see the amount of memory being consumed by the database. During the initial quiet period about 500M of memory was in use. The absolute number is just an indication of my particular DB configuration. As the number of pooled processes increases, each process needs more memory. You can see the shape of the memory graph echoes the Server Process graph above it. Each of the 300 web users will also need a few kilobytes but this is almost too small to see on the graph. Non-pooled connections Compare the DRCP case with using 'dedicated server' processes. At tick 140 I started 100 web users who did not use pooled connections: $c = oci_pconnect('phpdemo', 'welcome', 'myhost/orcl'); This connection string change is the only difference between the two tests. At ticks 155 and 165 I started two more batches of 100 simulated users each. At about tick 195 I stopped the user load but left Apache running. Apache then gradually returned to its quiescent state, killing idle httpd processes and producing the downward slope at the right of the graphs as the persistent database connection in each Apache process was closed. The Executions per Second graph on the bottom left shows the same step increases as for the earlier DRCP case. The database is handling this load. But look at the number of Server processes on the top right graph. There is now a one-to-one correspondence between Apache/PHP processes and DB server processes. Each PHP processes has one DB server processes dedicated to it. Hence the term 'dedicated server'. The memory required on the database is proportional to all those database server processes started. Almost all my system's memory was consumed. I doubt it would have coped with any more user load. Summary Oracle Database 11g DRCP connection pooling significantly reduces database host memory requirements allow more system memory to be allocated for the SGA and allowing the system to scale to handled thousands of concurrent PHP users. Even for small systems, using DRCP allows more web users to be active. More information about PHP and DRCP can be found in the PHP Scalability and High Availability chapter of The Underground PHP and Oracle Manual.

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Replication Services in a BI environment

- by jorg

In this blog post I will explain the principles of SQL Server Replication Services without too much detail and I will take a look on the BI capabilities that Replication Services could offer in my opinion. SQL Server Replication Services provides tools to copy and distribute database objects from one database system to another and maintain consistency afterwards. These tools basically copy or synchronize data with little or no transformations, they do not offer capabilities to transform data or apply business rules, like ETL tools do. The only “transformations” Replication Services offers is to filter records or columns out of your data set. You can achieve this by selecting the desired columns of a table and/or by using WHERE statements like this: SELECT <published_columns> FROM [Table] WHERE [DateTime] >= getdate() - 60 There are three types of replication: Transactional Replication This type replicates data on a transactional level. The Log Reader Agent reads directly on the transaction log of the source database (Publisher) and clones the transactions to the Distribution Database (Distributor), this database acts as a queue for the destination database (Subscriber). Next, the Distribution Agent moves the cloned transactions that are stored in the Distribution Database to the Subscriber. The Distribution Agent can either run at scheduled intervals or continuously which offers near real-time replication of data! So for example when a user executes an UPDATE statement on one or multiple records in the publisher database, this transaction (not the data itself) is copied to the distribution database and is then also executed on the subscriber. When the Distribution Agent is set to run continuously this process runs all the time and transactions on the publisher are replicated in small batches (near real-time), when it runs on scheduled intervals it executes larger batches of transactions, but the idea is the same. Snapshot Replication This type of replication makes an initial copy of database objects that need to be replicated, this includes the schemas and the data itself. All types of replication must start with a snapshot of the database objects from the Publisher to initialize the Subscriber. Transactional replication need an initial snapshot of the replicated publisher tables/objects to run its cloned transactions on and maintain consistency. The Snapshot Agent copies the schemas of the tables that will be replicated to files that will be stored in the Snapshot Folder which is a normal folder on the file system. When all the schemas are ready, the data itself will be copied from the Publisher to the snapshot folder. The snapshot is generated as a set of bulk copy program (BCP) files. Next, the Distribution Agent moves the snapshot to the Subscriber, if necessary it applies schema changes first and copies the data itself afterwards. The application of schema changes to the Subscriber is a nice feature, when you change the schema of the Publisher with, for example, an ALTER TABLE statement, that change is propagated by default to the Subscriber(s). Merge Replication Merge replication is typically used in server-to-client environments, for example when subscribers need to receive data, make changes offline, and later synchronize changes with the Publisher and other Subscribers, like with mobile devices that need to synchronize one in a while. Because I don’t really see BI capabilities here, I will not explain this type of replication any further. Replication Services in a BI environment Transactional Replication can be very useful in BI environments. In my opinion you never want to see users to run custom (SSRS) reports or PowerPivot solutions directly on your production database, it can slow down the system and can cause deadlocks in the database which can cause errors. Transactional Replication can offer a read-only, near real-time database for reporting purposes with minimal overhead on the source system. Snapshot Replication can also be useful in BI environments, if you don’t need a near real-time copy of the database, you can choose to use this form of replication. Next to an alternative for Transactional Replication it can be used to stage data so it can be transformed and moved into the data warehousing environment afterwards. In many solutions I have seen developers create multiple SSIS packages that simply copies data from one or more source systems to a staging database that figures as source for the ETL process. The creation of these packages takes a lot of (boring) time, while Replication Services can do the same in minutes. It is possible to filter out columns and/or records and it can even apply schema changes automatically so I think it offers enough features here. I don’t know how the performance will be and if it really works as good for this purpose as I expect, but I want to try this out soon!

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Initial Review - Mastering Unreal Technology I: Introduction to Level Design with Unreal Engine 3

- by Matt Christian

Recently I purchased 3 large volumes on using the Unreal 3 Engine to create levels and custom games. This past weekend I cracked the spine of the first and started reading. Here are my early impressions (I'm ~250 pages into it, with appendices it's about 900). Pros Interestingly, the book starts with an overview of the Unreal engines leading up to Unreal 3 (including Gears of War) and follows with some discussion on planning a mod and what goes into the game development process. This is nice for an intro to the book and is much preferred rather than a simple chapter detailing what is on the included CD, how to install and setup UnrealEd, etc... While the chapter on Unreal history and planning can be considered 'fluff', it's much less 'fluffy' than most books provide. I need to mention one thing here that is pretty crucial in the way I'm going to continue reviewing this book. Most technical books like this are used as a shelf reference; as a thick volume you use for looking up techniques every now and again. Even so, I prefer reading from cover to cover, including chapters I may already be knowledgable on (I'm sure this is typical for most people). If there was a chapter on installing UnrealEd (the previously mentioned 'fluff'), I would probably force myself to read it, even though I've installed the game and engine multiple times on different systems. Chapter 3 is where we really get to the introduction piece of UnrealEd, creating your first basic level. This large chapter details creating two small rooms, adding static meshes, adding lighting, creating and adding particle emitters, creating a door that animates with Unreal Matinee and Kismet, static meshes with physics, and other little additions to make your level look less beginner. This really is a chapter that overviews the entire rest of the book, as each chapter following details the creation and intermediate usages of Static Meshes, Materials, Lighting, etc... One other very nice part to this book is the way the tutorials are setup. Each tutorial builds off the previous and all are step-by-step. If you haven't completed one yet, you can find all the starting files on the CD that comes with the book. Cons While the description of the overview chapter (Chapter 3) is fresh in your mind, let me start the cons by saying this chapter is setup extremely confusing for the noob. At one point, you end up creating a door mesh and setting it up as a InteropMesh so that it is ready to be animated, only to switch to particles and spend a good portion of time working on a different piece of the level. Yes, this is actually how I develop my levels (jumping back and forth), though it's very odd for a book to jump out of sequence. The next item might be a positive or a negative depending on your skill level with UnrealEd. Most of the introduction to the editor layout is found in one of the Appendices instead of before Chapter 3. For new readers, this might lead to confusion as Appendix A would typically be read between Chapter 2 and 3. However, this is a positive for those with some experience in UnrealEd as they don't have to force themselves through a 'learn every editor button' chapter. I'm listing this in the Cons section as the book is 'Introduction to...' and is probably going to be directed toward a lot of very beginner developers. Finally, there's a lack of general description to a lot of the underlying engine and what each piece in UnrealEd is or does. Sometimes you'll be performing Tutorial after Tutorial with barely a paragraph in between describing ANY of what you've just done. Tutorial 1.1 Step 6 says to press Button X, so you do. But why? This is in part a problem with the structure of the tutorials rather than the content of the book. Since the tutorials are so focused on a step-by-step (or procedural) description of a process, you learn the process and not why you're doing that. For example, you might learn how to size a material to a surface, but will only learn what buttons to press and not what each one does. This becomes extremely apparent in the chapter on Static Meshes as most of the chapter is spent in 3D Studio Max. Since there are books on 3DSM and modelling, the book really only tells you the steps and says to go grab a book on modelling if you're really interested in 3DSM. Again, I've learned the process to develop my own meshes in 3DSM, but I don't know the why behind the steps. Conclusion So far the book is very good though I would have a hard time recommending it to a complete beginner. I would suggest anyone looking at this book (obviously including the other 2, more advanced volumes) to pick up a copy of UDK or Unreal 3 (available online or via download services such as Steam) and watch some online tutorials and play with it first. You'll find plenty of online videos available that were created by the authors and may suit as a better introduction to the editor.

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A Rose by Any Other Name..

- by Geoff N. Hiten

It is always a good start when you can steal a title line from one of the best writers in the English language. Let’s hope I can make the rest of this post live up to the opening. One recurring problem with SQL server is moving databases to new servers. Client applications use a variety of ways to resolve SQL Server names, some of which are not changed easily <cough SharePoint /cough>. If you happen to be using default instances on both the source and target SQL Server, then the solution is pretty simple. You create (or bug the network admin until she creates) two DNS “A” records. One points the old name to the new IP address. The other creates a new alias for the old server, since the original system name is now redirected. Note this will redirect ALL traffic from the old server to the new server, including RDP and file share connection attempts. Figure 1 – Microsoft DNS MMC Snap-In Figure 2 – DNS New Host Dialog Box Both records are necessary so you can still access the old server via an alternate name. Server Role IP Address Name Alias Source 10.97.230.60 SQL01 SQL01_Old Target 10.97.230.80 SQL02 SQL01 Table 1 – Alias List If you or somebody set up connections via IP address, you deserve to have to go to each app and fix it by hand. That is the only way to fix that particular foul-up. If have to deal with Named Instances either as a source or a target, then it gets more complicated. The standard fix is to use the SQL Server Configuration Manager (or one of its earlier incarnations) to create a SQL client alias to redirect the connection. This can be a pain installing and configuring the app on multiple client servers. The good news is that SQL Server Configuration Manager AND all of its earlier versions simply write a few registry keys. Extracting the keys into a .reg file makes centralized automated deployment a snap. If the client is a 32-bit system, you have to extract the native key. If it is a 64-bit, you have to extract the native key and the WoW (32 bit on 64 bit host) key. First, pick a development system to create the actual registry key. If you do this repeatedly, you can simply edit an existing registry file. Create the entry using the SQL Configuration Manager. You must use a 64-bit system to create the WoW key. The following example redirects from a named instance “SQL01\SQLUtiluty” to a default instance on “SQL02”. Figure 3 – SQL Server Configuration Manager - Native Figure 3 shows the native key listing. Figure 4 – SQL Server Configuration Manager – WoW If you think you don’t need the WoW key because your app is 64 it, think again. SQL Server Management Server is a 32-bit app, as are most SQL test utilities. Always create both keys for 64-bit target systems. Now that the keys exist, we can extract them into a .reg file. Fire up REGEDIT and browse to the following location: HKLM\Software\Microsoft\MSSQLServer\Client\ConnectTo. You can also search the registry for the string value of one of the server names (old or new). Right click on the “ConnectTo” label and choose “Export”. Save with an appropriate name and location. The resulting file should look something like this: Figure 5 – SQL01_Alias.reg Repeat the process with the location: HKLM\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\MSSQLServer\Client\ConnectTo Note that if you have multiple alias entries, ALL of the entries will be exported. In that case, you can edit the file and remove the extra aliases. You can edit the files together into a single file. Just leave a blank line between new keys like this: Figure 6 – SQL01_Alias_All.reg Of course if you have an automatic way to deploy, it makes sense to have an automatic way to Un-deploy. To delete a registry key, simply edit the .reg file and replace the target with a “-“ sign like so. Figure 7 – SQL01_Alias_UNDO.reg Now we have the ability to move any database to any server without having to install or change any applications on any client server. The whole process should be transparent to the applications, which makes planning and coordinating database moves a far simpler task.

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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.

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Clean up after Visual Studio

- by psheriff

As programmer’s we know that if we create a temporary file during the running of our application we need to make sure it is removed when the application or process is complete. We do this, but why can’t Microsoft do it? Visual Studio leaves tons of temporary files all over your hard drive. This is why, over time, your computer loses hard disk space. This blog post will show you some of the most common places where these files are left and which ones you can safely delete..NET Left OversVisual Studio is a great development environment for creating applications quickly. However, it will leave a lot of miscellaneous files all over your hard drive. There are a few locations on your hard drive that you should be checking to see if there are left-over folders or files that you can delete. I have attempted to gather as much data as I can about the various versions of .NET and operating systems. Of course, your mileage may vary on the folders and files I list here. In fact, this problem is so prevalent that PDSA has created a Computer Cleaner specifically for the Visual Studio developer. Instructions for downloading our PDSA Developer Utilities (of which Computer Cleaner is one) are at the end of this blog entry.Each version of Visual Studio will create “temporary” files in different folders. The problem is that the files created are not always “temporary”. Most of the time these files do not get cleaned up like they should. Let’s look at some of the folders that you should periodically review and delete files within these folders.Temporary ASP.NET FilesAs you create and run ASP.NET applications from Visual Studio temporary files are placed into the <sysdrive>:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework[64]\<vernum>\Temporary ASP.NET Files folder. The folders and files under this folder can be removed with no harm to your development computer. Do not remove the "Temporary ASP.NET Files" folder itself, just the folders underneath this folder. If you use IIS for ASP.NET development, you may need to run the iisreset.exe utility from the command prompt prior to deleting any files/folder under this folder. IIS will sometimes keep files in use in this folder and iisreset will release the locks so the files/folders can be deleted.Website CacheThis folder is similar to the ASP.NET Temporary Files folder in that it contains files from ASP.NET applications run from Visual Studio. This folder is located in each users local settings folder. The location will be a little different on each operating system. For example on Windows Vista/Windows 7, the folder is located at <sysdrive>:\Users\<UserName>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WebsiteCache. If you are running Windows XP this folder is located at <sysdrive>:\ Documents and Settings\<UserName>\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\WebsiteCache. Check these locations periodically and delete all files and folders under this directory.Visual Studio BackupThis backup folder is used by Visual Studio to store temporary files while you develop in Visual Studio. This folder never gets cleaned out, so you should periodically delete all files and folders under this directory. On Windows XP, this folder is located at <sysdrive>:\Documents and Settings\<UserName>\My Documents\Visual Studio 200[5|8]\Backup Files. On Windows Vista/Windows 7 this folder is located at <sysdrive>:\Users\<UserName>\Documents\Visual Studio 200[5|8]\.Assembly CacheNo, this is not the global assembly cache (GAC). It appears that this cache is only created when doing WPF or Silverlight development with Visual Studio 2008 or Visual Studio 2010. This folder is located in <sysdrive>:\ Users\<UserName>\AppData\Local\assembly\dl3 on Windows Vista/Windows 7. On Windows XP this folder is located at <sysdrive>:\ Documents and Settings\<UserName>\Local Settings\Application Data\assembly. If you have not done any WPF or Silverlight development, you may not find this particular folder on your machine.Project AssembliesThis is yet another folder where Visual Studio stores temporary files. You will find a folder for each project you have opened and worked on. This folder is located at <sysdrive>:\Documents and Settings\<UserName>Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Visual Studio\[8|9].0\ProjectAssemblies on Windows XP. On Microsoft Vista/Windows 7 you will find this folder at <sysdrive>:\Users\<UserName>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Visual Studio\[8|9].0\ProjectAssemblies.Remember not all of these folders will appear on your particular machine. Which ones do show up will depend on what version of Visual Studio you are using, whether or not you are doing desktop or web development, and the operating system you are using.SummaryTaking the time to periodically clean up after Visual Studio will aid in keeping your computer running quickly and increase the space on your hard drive. Another place to make sure you are cleaning up is your TEMP folder. Check your OS settings for the location of your particular TEMP folder and be sure to delete any files in here that are not in use. I routinely clean up the files and folders described in this blog post and I find that I actually eliminate errors in Visual Studio and I increase my hard disk space.NEW! PDSA has just published a “pre-release” of our PDSA Developer Utilities at http://www.pdsa.com/DeveloperUtilities that contains a Computer Cleaner utility which will clean up the above-mentioned folders, as well as a lot of other miscellaneous folders that get Visual Studio build-up. You can download a free trial at http://www.pdsa.com/DeveloperUtilities. If you wish to purchase our utilities through the month of November, 2011 you can use the RSVP code: DUNOV11 to get them for only $39. This is $40 off the regular price.NOTE: You can download this article and many samples like the one shown in this blog entry at my website. http://www.pdsa.com/downloads. Select “Tips and Tricks”, then “Developer Machine Clean Up” from the drop down list.Good Luck with your Coding,Paul Sheriff** SPECIAL OFFER FOR MY BLOG READERS **We frequently offer a FREE gift for readers of my blog. Visit http://www.pdsa.com/Event/Blog for your FREE gift!

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.NET vs Windows 8

- by Simon Cooper

So, day 1 of DevWeek. Lots and lots of Windows 8 and WinRT, as you would expect. The keynote had some actual content in it, fleshed out some of the details of how your apps linked into the Metro infrastructure, and confirmed that there would indeed be an enterprise version of the app store available for Metro apps.) However, that's, not what I want to focus this post on. What I do want to focus on is this: Windows 8 does not make .NET developers obsolete. Phew! .NET in the New Ecosystem In all the hype around Windows 8 the past few months, a lot of developers have got the impression that .NET has been sidelined in Windows 8; C++ and COM is back in vogue, and HTML5 + JavaScript is the New Way of writing applications. You know .NET? It's yesterday's tech. Enter the 21st Century and write <div>! However, after speaking to people at the conference, and after a couple of talks by Dave Wheeler on the innards of WinRT and how .NET interacts with it, my views on the coming operating system have changed somewhat. To summarize what I've picked up, in no particular order (none of this is official, just my sense of what's been said by various people): Metro apps do not replace desktop apps. That is, Windows 8 fully supports .NET desktop applications written for every other previous version of Windows, and will continue to do so in the forseeable future. There are some apps that simply do not fit into Metro. They do not fit into the touch-based paradigm, and never will. Traditional desktop support is not going away anytime soon. The reason Silverlight has been hidden in all the Metro hype is that Metro is essentially based on Silverlight design principles. Silverlight developers will have a much easier time writing Metro apps than desktop developers, as they would already be used to all the principles of sandboxing and separation introduced with Silverlight. It's desktop developers who are going to have to adapt how they work. .NET + XAML is equal to HTML5 + JS in importance. Although the underlying WinRT system is built on C++ & COM, most application development will be done either using .NET or HTML5. Both systems have their own wrapper around the underlying WinRT infrastructure, hiding the implementation details. The CLR is unchanged; it's still the .NET 4 CLR, running IL in .NET assemblies. The thing that changes between desktop and Metro is the class libraries, which have more in common with the Silverlight libraries than the desktop libraries. In Metro, although all the types look and behave the same to callers, some of the core BCL types are now wrappers around their WinRT equivalents. These wrappers are then enhanced using standard .NET types and code to produce the Metro .NET class libraries. You can't simply port a desktop app into Metro. The underlying file IO, network, timing and database access is either completely different or simply missing. Similarly, although the UI is programmed using XAML, the behaviour of the Metro XAML is different to WPF or Silverlight XAML. Furthermore, the new design principles and touch-based interface for Metro applications demand a completely new UI. You will be able to re-use sections of your app encapsulating pure program logic, but everything else will need to be written from scratch. Microsoft has taken the opportunity to remove a whole raft of types and methods from the Metro framework that are obsolete (non-generic collections) or break the sandbox (synchronous APIs); if you use these, you will have to rewrite to use the alternatives, if they exist at all, to move your apps to Metro. If you want to write public WinRT components in .NET, there are some quite strict rules you have to adhere to. But the compilers know about these rules; you can write them in C# or VB, and the compilers will tell you when you do something that isn't allowed and deal with the translation to WinRT metadata rather than .NET assemblies. It is possible to write a class library that can be used in Metro and desktop applications. However, you need to be very careful not to use types that are available in one but not the other. One can imagine developers writing their own abstraction around file IO and UIs (MVVM anyone?) that can be implemented differently in Metro and desktop, but look the same within your shared library. So, if you're a .NET developer, you have a lot less to worry about. .NET is a viable platform on Metro, and traditional desktop apps are not going away. You don't have to learn HTML5 and JavaScript if you don't want to. Hurray!

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My History with Agile

- by Robert May

I’m going to write my history with Agile here. That way, in future posts, I can refer back to it, instead of typing it out in the post that contains information you may actually want to read. Note that I’m actually a pretty senior developer, and do lots of technical interviews. I’m an Agile fan because of the difference it makes in peoples lives and the improvement in quality it brings, and I’ll sacrifice my technological advance to help teams. Management History I started management pretty early in my career, starting with the first job that I ever had. I actually do NOT have a CS or similar degree. I have a Bachelor’s of Business Administration with an emphasis in Computer Information Systems. My first management gigs were around call center work and were very schedule oriented. I didn’t understand the true value of teams, and I’m ashamed to admit, I actually installed a fingerprint scanner as a time clock in this job. I shudder to think of the impact that I had on the team spirit. I didn’t even trust them enough to fill out their time cards correctly. How sad. I was managing nearly 100 people in this position, with the help of a great set of subordinates. I did try to come up with reward programs for the team, but again, didn’t understand the concept of team, so instead of letting the team determine how the rewards should work, I mandated from on high, which isn’t a good thing. I was told that I wasn’t the type that would be a good manager by people whom I respected a lot. They said it because I was a computer geek, since they don’t understand good management either, but in retrospect, they were right about me then. I was too green. After my first job, I went on to other jobs and with the exception of one job, I’ve managed people at them all. The rest of the management story is important for understanding agile, so I’ll save it for my next post. Technical History I’ve been in software development for many, many years. I technically started programming on a commodore 64 in basic. I didn’t know that I was programming, but I was sure having fun. That was followed by batch files, Gorilla hacking (I always had to win), WordPerfect Macro programming and other things that taught me the basics. My first “real” job was with a telephone company, and that’s where I made my first database application in DataEase, wrote my first VBA app and started using real programming tools, like turbo pascal, vb3-vb5, and semi-real tools like RPG and VisualRPG. I wrote my first web page in 1994, and built my first data driven web page in 1995 using perlDB. You really can do anything with Perl. At this time, I also started a Linux based internet service provider that is still in operation today. One of the people I worked with is now a Microsoft employee building and designing frameworks you probably know well. Smart guy. I also built my first ASP applications connecting to Sql Server 6.5, setup Exchange 5.5 for the company, and many other system administration stuff. I’m a programmer by choice, mostly because I don’t really like PC support. From there, I went on to a large state agency. I got to see and maintain true waterfall projects. 5 years of maintaining the 200 VB COM+ (MTS, actually) dlls that were used to calculate a single number is a long time. That was all Microsoft DNS technologies. SQL Server and VB6 were the tools of choice, although .net started to be a factor near the end of employment. I did some heavy XML work at this job and even wrote an XSD parser and validator in VB6 that was a shim until MSXML 3.0 came out. Prior to 3.0, XSD’s weren’t supported, and I didn’t want to write DTDs. Ironically, jobs after this were more generic. I pretty much settled in on the .net framework and revisions of it. Lots of WPF, some silverlight, lots of ASP.NET, some SQL Azure, lots of SQL Server, some Oracle, but I don’t think that I was as passionate about development and technologies. I was more into the management of development. I like people. Technorati Tags: Agile,history

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Management and Monitoring Tools for Windows Azure

- by BuckWoody

With such a large platform, Windows Azure has a lot of moving parts. We’ve done our best to keep the interface as simple as possible, while giving you the most control and visibility we can. However, as with most Microsoft products, there are multiple ways to do something – and I’ve always found that to be a good strength. Depending on the situation, I might want a graphical interface, a command-line interface, or just an API so I can incorporate the management into my own tools, or have third-party companies write other tools. While by no means exhaustive, I thought I might put together a quick list of a few tools you can use to manage and monitor Windows Azure components, from our IaaS, SaaS and PaaS offerings. Some of the products focus on one area more than another, but all are available today. I’ll try and maintain this list to keep it current, but make sure you check the date of this post’s update – if it’s more than six months old, it’s most likely out of date. Things move fast in the cloud. The Windows Azure Management Portal The primary tool for managing Windows Azure is our portal – most everything you need is there, from creating new services to querying a database. There are two versions as of this writing – a Silverlight client version, and a newer HTML5 version. The latter is being updated constantly to be in parity with the Silverlight client. There’s a balance in this portal between simplicity and power – we’re following the “less is more” approach, with increasing levels of detail as you work through the portal rather than overwhelming you with a single, long “more is more” page. You can find the Portal here: http://windowsazure.com (then click “Log In” and then “Portal”) Windows Azure Management API You can also use programming tools to either write your own interface, or simply provide management functions directly within your solution. You have two options – you can use the more universal REST API’s, which area bit more complex but work with any system that can write to them, or the more approachable .NET API calls in code. You can find the reference for the API’s here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/ee460799.aspx All Class Libraries, for each part of Windows Azure: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee393295.aspx PowerShell Command-lets PowerShell is one of the most powerful scripting languages I’ve used with Windows – and it’s baked into all of our products. When you need to work with multiple servers, scripting is really the only way to go, and the Windows Azure PowerShell Command-Lets allow you to work across most any part of the platform – and can even be used within the services themselves. You can do everything with them from creating a new IaaS, PaaS or SaaS service, to controlling them and even working with security and more. You can find more about the Command-Lets here: http://wappowershell.codeplex.com/documentation (older link, still works, will point you to the new ones as well) We have command-line utilities for other operating systems as well: https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/manage/downloads/ Video walkthrough of using the Command-Lets: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/BUILD/BUILD2011/SAC-859T System Center System Center is actually a suite of graphical tools you can use to manage, deploy, control, monitor and tune software from Microsoft and even other platforms. This will be the primary tool we’ll recommend for managing a hybrid or contiguous management process – and as time goes on you’ll see more and more features put into System Center for the entire Windows Azure suite of products. You can find the Management Pack and README for it here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=11324 SQL Server Management Studio / Data Tools / Visual Studio SQL Server has two built-in management and development, and since Version 2008 R2, you can use them to manage Windows Azure Databases. Visual Studio also lets you connect to and manage portions of Windows Azure as well as Windows Azure Databases. You can read more about Visual Studio here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/ee405484 You can read more about the SQL tools here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/ee621784.aspx Vendor-Provided Tools Microsoft does not suggest or endorse a specific third-party product. We do, however, use them, and see lots of other customers use them. You can browse to these sites to learn more, and chat with their folks directly on how they support Windows Azure. Cerebrata: Tools for managing from the command-line, graphical diagnostics, graphical storage management - http://www.cerebrata.com/ Quest Cloud Tools: Monitoring, Storage Management, and costing tools - http://communities.quest.com/community/cloud-tools Paraleap: Monitoring tool - http://www.paraleap.com/AzureWatch Cloudgraphs: Monitoring too - http://www.cloudgraphs.com/ Opstera: Monitoring for Windows Azure and a Scale-out pattern manager - http://www.opstera.com/products/Azureops/ Compuware: SaaS performance monitoring, load testing - http://www.compuware.com/application-performance-management/gomez-apm-products.html SOASTA: Penetration and Security Testing - http://www.soasta.com/cloudtest/enterprise/ LoadStorm: Load-testing tool - http://loadstorm.com/windows-azure Open-Source Tools This is probably the most specific set of tools, and the list I’ll have to maintain most often. Smaller projects have a way of coming and going, so I’ll try and make sure this list is current. Windows Azure MMC: (I actually use this one a lot) http://wapmmc.codeplex.com/ Windows Azure Diagnostics Monitor: http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/wazdmon Azure Application Monitor: http://azuremonitor.codeplex.com/ Azure Web Log: http://www.xentrik.net/software/azure_web_log.html Cloud Ninja:Multi-Tennant billing and performance monitor - http://cnmb.codeplex.com/ Cloud Samurai: Multi-Tennant Management- http://cloudsamurai.codeplex.com/ If you have additions to this list, please post them as a comment and I’ll research and then add them. Thanks!

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