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• SQL SERVER – Thinking about Deprecated, Discontinued Features and Breaking Changes while Upgrading to SQL Server 2012 – Guest Post by Nakul Vachhrajani

  - by pinaldave

  Nakul Vachhrajani is a Technical Specialist and systems development professional with iGATE having a total IT experience of more than 7 years. Nakul is an active blogger with BeyondRelational.com (150+ blogs), and can also be found on forums at SQLServerCentral and BeyondRelational.com. Nakul has also been a guest columnist for SQLAuthority.com and SQLServerCentral.com. Nakul presented a webcast on the “Underappreciated Features of Microsoft SQL Server” at the Microsoft Virtual Tech Days Exclusive Webcast series (May 02-06, 2011) on May 06, 2011. He is also the author of a research paper on Database upgrade methodologies, which was published in a CSI journal, published nationwide. In addition to his passion about SQL Server, Nakul also contributes to the academia out of personal interest. He visits various colleges and universities as an external faculty to judge project activities being carried out by the students. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are his own personal opinions and do not represent his employer’s view in anyway. Blog | LinkedIn | Twitter | Google+ Let us hear the thoughts of Nakul in first person - Those who have been following my blogs would be aware that I am recently running a series on the database engine features that have been deprecated in Microsoft SQL Server 2012. Based on the response that I have received, I was quite surprised to know that most of the audience found these to be breaking changes, when in fact, they were not! It was then that I decided to write a little piece on how to plan your database upgrade such that it works with the next version of Microsoft SQL Server. Please note that the recommendations made in this article are high-level markers and are intended to help you think over the specific steps that you would need to take to upgrade your database. Refer the documentation – Understand the terms Change is the only constant in this world. Therefore, whenever customer requirements, newer architectures and designs require software vendors to make a change to the keywords, functions, etc; they ensure that they provide their end users sufficient time to migrate over to the new standards before dropping off the old ones. Microsoft does that too with it’s Microsoft SQL Server product. Whenever a new SQL Server release is announced, it comes with a list of the following features: Breaking changes These are changes that would break your currently running applications, scripts or functionalities that are based on earlier version of Microsoft SQL Server These are mostly features whose behavior has been changed keeping in mind the newer architectures and designs Lesson: These are the changes that you need to be most worried about! Discontinued features These features are no longer available in the associated version of Microsoft SQL Server These features used to be “deprecated” in the prior release Lesson: Without these changes, your database would not be compliant/may not work with the version of Microsoft SQL Server under consideration Deprecated features These features are those that are still available in the current version of Microsoft SQL Server, but are scheduled for removal in a future version. These may be removed in either the next version or any other future version of Microsoft SQL Server The features listed for deprecation will compose the list of discontinued features in the next version of SQL Server Lesson: Plan to make necessary changes required to remove/replace usage of the deprecated features with the latest recommended replacements Once a feature appears on the list, it moves from bottom to the top, i.e. it is first marked as “Deprecated” and then “Discontinued”. We know of “Breaking change” comes later on in the product life cycle. What this means is that if you want to know what features would not work with SQL Server 2012 (and you are currently using SQL Server 2008 R2), you need to refer the list of breaking changes and discontinued features in SQL Server 2012. Use the tools! There are a lot of tools and technologies around us, but it is rarely that I find teams using these tools religiously and to the best of their potential. Below are the top two tools, from Microsoft, that I use every time I plan a database upgrade. The SQL Server Upgrade Advisor Ever since SQL Server 2005 was announced, Microsoft provides a small, very light-weight tool called the “SQL Server upgrade advisor”. The upgrade advisor analyzes installed components from earlier versions of SQL Server, and then generates a report that identifies issues to fix either before or after you upgrade. The analysis examines objects that can be accessed, such as scripts, stored procedures, triggers, and trace files. Upgrade Advisor cannot analyze desktop applications or encrypted stored procedures. Refer the links towards the end of the post to know how to get the Upgrade Advisor. The SQL Server Profiler Another great tool that you can use is the one most SQL Server developers & administrators use often – the SQL Server profiler. SQL Server Profiler provides functionality to monitor the “Deprecation” event, which contains: Deprecation announcement – equivalent to features to be deprecated in a future release of SQL Server Deprecation final support – equivalent to features to be deprecated in the next release of SQL Server You can learn more using the links towards the end of the post. A basic checklist There are a lot of finer points that need to be taken care of when upgrading your database. But, it would be worth-while to identify a few basic steps in order to make your database compliant with the next version of SQL Server: Monitor the current application workload (on a test bed) via the Profiler in order to identify usage of features marked as Deprecated If none appear, you are all set! (This almost never happens) Note down all the offending queries and feature usages Run analysis sessions using the SQL Server upgrade advisor on your database Based on the inputs from the analysis report and Profiler trace sessions, Incorporate solutions for the breaking changes first Next, incorporate solutions for the discontinued features Revisit and document the upgrade strategy for your deployment scenarios Revisit the fall-back, i.e. rollback strategies in case the upgrades fail Because some programming changes are dependent upon the SQL server version, this may need to be done in consultation with the development teams Before any other enhancements are incorporated by the development team, send out the database changes into QA QA strategy should involve a comparison between an environment running the old version of SQL Server against the new one Because minimal application changes have gone in (essential changes for SQL Server version compliance only), this would be possible As an ongoing activity, keep incorporating changes recommended as per the deprecated features list As a DBA, update your coding standards to ensure that the developers are using ANSI compliant code – this code will require a change only if the ANSI standard changes Remember this: Change management is a continuous process. Keep revisiting the product release notes and incorporate recommended changes to stay prepared for the next release of SQL Server. May the power of SQL Server be with you! Links Referenced in this post Breaking changes in SQL Server 2012: Link Discontinued features in SQL Server 2012: Link Get the upgrade advisor from the Microsoft Download Center at: Link Upgrade Advisor page on MSDN: Link Profiler: Review T-SQL code to identify objects no longer supported by Microsoft: Link Upgrading to SQL Server 2012 by Vinod Kumar: Link Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Upgrade

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• Converting #MDX to #DAX and PowerPivot Workshop online #ppws

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  I just published the article Converting MDX to DAX – First Steps on the renewed SQLBI web site about converting MDX to DAX. The reason is that with BISM Tabular in Analysis Services 2012 you will be able to write queries in both DAX and MDX. If you already know MDX, you might wonder how to “translate” your MDX knowledge in DAX. I think that this is another way you can improve your knowledge about DAX: it has different concepts behind and this comparison should be helpful in this purpose. This is...(read more)

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• Integration Patterns with Azure Service Bus Relay, Part 1: Exposing the on-premise service

  - by Elton Stoneman

  We're in the process of delivering an enabling project to expose on-premise WCF services securely to Internet consumers. The Azure Service Bus Relay is doing the clever stuff, we register our on-premise service with Azure, consumers call into our .servicebus.windows.net namespace, and their requests are relayed and serviced on-premise. In theory it's all wonderfully simple; by using the relay we get lots of protocol options, free HTTPS and load balancing, and by integrating to ACS we get plenty of security options. Part of our delivery is a suite of sample consumers for the service - .NET, jQuery, PHP - and this set of posts will cover setting up the service and the consumers. Part 1: Exposing the on-premise service In theory, this is ultra-straightforward. In practice, and on a dev laptop it is - but in a corporate network with firewalls and proxies, it isn't, so we'll walkthrough some of the pitfalls. Note that I'm using the "old" Azure portal which will soon be out of date, but the new shiny portal should have the same steps available and be easier to use. We start with a simple WCF service which takes a string as input, reverses the string and returns it. The Part 1 version of the code is on GitHub here: on GitHub here: IPASBR Part 1. Configuring Azure Service Bus Start by logging into the Azure portal and registering a Service Bus namespace which will be our endpoint in the cloud. Give it a globally unique name, set it up somewhere near you (if you’re in Europe, remember Europe (North) is Ireland, and Europe (West) is the Netherlands), and  enable ACS integration by ticking "Access Control" as a service: Authenticating and authorizing to ACS When we try to register our on-premise service as a listener for the Service Bus endpoint, we need to supply credentials, which means only trusted service providers can act as listeners. We can use the default "owner" credentials, but that has admin permissions so a dedicated service account is better (Neil Mackenzie has a good post On Not Using owner with the Azure AppFabric Service Bus with lots of permission details). Click on "Access Control Service" for the namespace, navigate to Service Identities and add a new one. Give the new account a sensible name and description: Let ACS generate a symmetric key for you (this will be the shared secret we use in the on-premise service to authenticate as a listener), but be sure to set the expiration date to something usable. The portal defaults to expiring new identities after 1 year - but when your year is up *your identity will expire without warning* and everything will stop working. In production, you'll need governance to manage identity expiration and a process to make sure you renew identities and roll new keys regularly. The new service identity needs to be authorized to listen on the service bus endpoint. This is done through claim mapping in ACS - we'll set up a rule that says if the nameidentifier in the input claims has the value serviceProvider, in the output we'll have an action claim with the value Listen. In the ACS portal you'll see that there is already a Relying Party Application set up for ServiceBus, which has a Default rule group. Edit the rule group and click Add to add this new rule: The values to use are: Issuer: Access Control Service Input claim type: http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/nameidentifier Input claim value: serviceProvider Output claim type: net.windows.servicebus.action Output claim value: Listen When your service namespace and identity are set up, open the Part 1 solution and put your own namespace, service identity name and secret key into the file AzureConnectionDetails.xml in Solution Items, e.g: <azure namespace="sixeyed-ipasbr">    <!-- ACS credentials for the listening service (Part1):-->   <service identityName="serviceProvider"            symmetricKey="nuR2tHhlrTCqf4YwjT2RA2BZ/+xa23euaRJNLh1a/V4="/>  </azure> Build the solution, and the T4 template will generate the Web.config for the service project with your Azure details in the transportClientEndpointBehavior:           <behavior name="SharedSecret">             <transportClientEndpointBehavior credentialType="SharedSecret">               <clientCredentials>                 <sharedSecret issuerName="serviceProvider"                               issuerSecret="nuR2tHhlrTCqf4YwjT2RA2BZ/+xa23euaRJNLh1a/V4="/>               </clientCredentials>             </transportClientEndpointBehavior>           </behavior> , and your service namespace in the Azure endpoint:         <!-- Azure Service Bus endpoints -->          <endpoint address="sb://sixeyed-ipasbr.servicebus.windows.net/net"                   binding="netTcpRelayBinding"                   contract="Sixeyed.Ipasbr.Services.IFormatService"                   behaviorConfiguration="SharedSecret">         </endpoint> The sample project is hosted in IIS, but it won't register with Azure until the service is activated. Typically you'd install AppFabric 1.1 for Widnows Server and set the service to auto-start in IIS, but for dev just navigate to the local REST URL, which will activate the service and register it with Azure. Testing the service locally As well as an Azure endpoint, the service has a WebHttpBinding for local REST access:         <!-- local REST endpoint for internal use -->         <endpoint address="rest"                   binding="webHttpBinding"                   behaviorConfiguration="RESTBehavior"                   contract="Sixeyed.Ipasbr.Services.IFormatService" /> Build the service, then navigate to: http://localhost/Sixeyed.Ipasbr.Services/FormatService.svc/rest/reverse?string=abc123 - and you should see the reversed string response: If your network allows it, you'll get the expected response as before, but in the background your service will also be listening in the cloud. Good stuff! Who needs network security? Onto the next post for consuming the service with the netTcpRelayBinding.  Setting up network access to Azure But, if you get an error, it's because your network is secured and it's doing something to stop the relay working. The Service Bus relay bindings try to use direct TCP connections to Azure, so if ports 9350-9354 are available *outbound*, then the relay will run through them. If not, the binding steps down to standard HTTP, and issues a CONNECT across port 443 or 80 to set up a tunnel for the relay. If your network security guys are doing their job, the first option will be blocked by the firewall, and the second option will be blocked by the proxy, so you'll get this error: System.ServiceModel.CommunicationException: Unable to reach sixeyed-ipasbr.servicebus.windows.net via TCP (9351, 9352) or HTTP (80, 443) - and that will probably be the start of lots of discussions. Network guys don't really like giving servers special permissions for the web proxy, and they really don't like opening ports, so they'll need to be convinced about this. The resolution in our case was to put up a dedicated box in a DMZ, tinker with the firewall and the proxy until we got a relay connection working, then run some traffic which the the network guys monitored to do a security assessment afterwards. Along the way we hit a few more issues, diagnosed mainly with Fiddler and Wireshark: System.Net.ProtocolViolationException: Chunked encoding upload is not supported on the HTTP/1.0 protocol - this means the TCP ports are not available, so Azure tries to relay messaging traffic across HTTP. The service can access the endpoint, but the proxy is downgrading traffic to HTTP 1.0, which does not support tunneling, so Azure can’t make its connection. We were using the Squid proxy, version 2.6. The Squid project is incrementally adding HTTP 1.1 support, but there's no definitive list of what's supported in what version (here are some hints). System.ServiceModel.Security.SecurityNegotiationException: The X.509 certificate CN=servicebus.windows.net chain building failed. The certificate that was used has a trust chain that cannot be verified. Replace the certificate or change the certificateValidationMode. The evocation function was unable to check revocation because the revocation server was offline. - by this point we'd given up on the HTTP proxy and opened the TCP ports. We got this error when the relay binding does it's authentication hop to ACS. The messaging traffic is TCP, but the control traffic still goes over HTTP, and as part of the ACS authentication the process checks with a revocation server to see if Microsoft’s ACS cert is still valid, so the proxy still needs some clearance. The service account (the IIS app pool identity) needs access to: www.public-trust.com mscrl.microsoft.com We still got this error periodically with different accounts running the app pool. We fixed that by ensuring the machine-wide proxy settings are set up, so every account uses the correct proxy: netsh winhttp set proxy proxy-server="http://proxy.x.y.z" - and you might need to run this to clear out your credential cache: certutil -urlcache * delete If your network guys end up grudgingly opening ports, they can restrict connections to the IP address range for your chosen Azure datacentre, which might make them happier - see Windows Azure Datacenter IP Ranges. After all that you've hopefully got an on-premise service listening in the cloud, which you can consume from pretty much any technology.

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• Slides from the Scottish Area User Group Meeting 25th February

  - by MartinBell

  I really enjoyed last weeks user group meeting, the interaction from everyone helped make it an excellent evening. Iain has provided these links for the two products he mentioned in the talk: The product information for Lightspeed is here and the videos for using the features are here , it can be download from here For Performance Analysis the data sheet is here and information regarding installing it can be found here with the download here . Iain’s slides are here ....(read more)

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• 7 of the Best Free Linux Medical Imaging Software

  <b>LinuxLinks:</b> "Now, let's explore the 7 imaging software at hand. For each title we have compiled its own portal page, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, a screenshot of the software in action, together with links to relevant resources and reviews."

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• SSIS: Deploying OLAP cubes using C# script tasks and AMO

  - by DrJohn

  As part of the continuing series on Building dynamic OLAP data marts on-the-fly, this blog entry will focus on how to automate the deployment of OLAP cubes using SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) and Analysis Services Management Objects (AMO). OLAP cube deployment is usually done using the Analysis Services Deployment Wizard. However, this option was dismissed for a variety of reasons. Firstly, invoking external processes from SSIS is fraught with problems as (a) it is not always possible to ensure SSIS waits for the external program to terminate; (b) we cannot log the outcome properly and (c) it is not always possible to control the server's configuration to ensure the executable works correctly. Another reason for rejecting the Deployment Wizard is that it requires the 'answers' to be written into four XML files. These XML files record the three things we need to change: the name of the server, the name of the OLAP database and the connection string to the data mart. Although it would be reasonably straight forward to change the content of the XML files programmatically, this adds another set of complication and level of obscurity to the overall process. When I first investigated the possibility of using C# to deploy a cube, I was surprised to find that there are no other blog entries about the topic. I can only assume everyone else is happy with the Deployment Wizard! SSIS "forgets" assembly references If you build your script task from scratch, you will have to remember how to overcome one of the major annoyances of working with SSIS script tasks: the forgetful nature of SSIS when it comes to assembly references. Basically, you can go through the process of adding an assembly reference using the Add Reference dialog, but when you close the script window, SSIS "forgets" the assembly reference so the script will not compile. After repeating the operation several times, you will find that SSIS only remembers the assembly reference when you specifically press the Save All icon in the script window. This problem is not unique to the AMO assembly and has certainly been a "feature" since SQL Server 2005, so I am not amazed it is still present in SQL Server 2008 R2! Sample Package So let's take a look at the sample SSIS package I have provided which can be downloaded from here: DeployOlapCubeExample.zip  Below is a screenshot after a successful run. Connection Managers The package has three connection managers: AsDatabaseDefinitionFile is a file connection manager pointing to the .asdatabase file you wish to deploy. Note that this can be found in the bin directory of you OLAP database project once you have clicked the "Build" button in Visual Studio TargetOlapServerCS is an Analysis Services connection manager which identifies both the deployment server and the target database name. SourceDataMart is an OLEDB connection manager pointing to the data mart which is to act as the source of data for your cube. This will be used to replace the connection string found in your .asdatabase file Once you have configured the connection managers, the sample should run and deploy your OLAP database in a few seconds. Of course, in a production environment, these connection managers would be associated with package configurations or set at runtime. When you run the sample, you should see that the script logs its activity to the output screen (see screenshot above). If you configure logging for the package, then these messages will also appear in your SSIS logging. Sample Code Walkthrough Next let's walk through the code. The first step is to parse the connection string provided by the TargetOlapServerCS connection manager and obtain the name of both the target OLAP server and also the name of the OLAP database. Note that the target database does not have to exist to be referenced in an AS connection manager, so I am using this as a convenient way to define both properties. We now connect to the server and check for the existence of the OLAP database. If it exists, we drop the database so we can re-deploy. svr.Connect(olapServerName); if (svr.Connected) { // Drop the OLAP database if it already exists Database db = svr.Databases.FindByName(olapDatabaseName); if (db != null) { db.Drop(); } // rest of script } Next we start building the XMLA command that will actually perform the deployment. Basically this is a small chuck of XML which we need to wrap around the large .asdatabase file generated by the Visual Studio build process. // Start generating the main part of the XMLA command XmlDocument xmlaCommand = new XmlDocument(); xmlaCommand.LoadXml(string.Format("<Batch Transaction='false' xmlns='http://schemas.microsoft.com/analysisservices/2003/engine'><Alter AllowCreate='true' ObjectExpansion='ExpandFull'><Object><DatabaseID>{0}</DatabaseID></Object><ObjectDefinition/></Alter></Batch>", olapDatabaseName));  Next we need to merge two XML files which we can do by simply using setting the InnerXml property of the ObjectDefinition node as follows: // load OLAP Database definition from .asdatabase file identified by connection manager XmlDocument olapCubeDef = new XmlDocument(); olapCubeDef.Load(Dts.Connections["AsDatabaseDefinitionFile"].ConnectionString); // merge the two XML files by obtain a reference to the ObjectDefinition node oaRootNode.InnerXml = olapCubeDef.InnerXml;   One hurdle I had to overcome was removing detritus from the .asdabase file left by the Visual Studio build. Through an iterative process, I found I needed to remove several nodes as they caused the deployment to fail. The XMLA error message read "Cannot set read-only node: CreatedTimestamp" or similar. In comparing the XMLA generated with by the Deployment Wizard with that generated by my code, these read-only nodes were missing, so clearly I just needed to strip them out. This was easily achieved using XPath to find the relevant XML nodes, of which I show one example below: foreach (XmlNode node in rootNode.SelectNodes("//ns1:CreatedTimestamp", nsManager)) { node.ParentNode.RemoveChild(node); } Now we need to change the database name in both the ID and Name nodes using code such as: XmlNode databaseID = xmlaCommand.SelectSingleNode("//ns1:Database/ns1:ID", nsManager); if (databaseID != null) databaseID.InnerText = olapDatabaseName; Finally we need to change the connection string to point at the relevant data mart. Again this is easily achieved using XPath to search for the relevant nodes and then replace the content of the node with the new name or connection string. XmlNode connectionStringNode = xmlaCommand.SelectSingleNode("//ns1:DataSources/ns1:DataSource/ns1:ConnectionString", nsManager); if (connectionStringNode != null) { connectionStringNode.InnerText = Dts.Connections["SourceDataMart"].ConnectionString; } Finally we need to perform the deployment using the Execute XMLA command and check the returned XmlaResultCollection for errors before setting the Dts.TaskResult. XmlaResultCollection oResults = svr.Execute(xmlaCommand.InnerXml);  // check for errors during deployment foreach (Microsoft.AnalysisServices.XmlaResult oResult in oResults) { foreach (Microsoft.AnalysisServices.XmlaMessage oMessage in oResult.Messages) { if ((oMessage.GetType().Name == "XmlaError")) { FireError(oMessage.Description); HadError = true; } } } If you are not familiar with XML programming, all this may all seem a bit daunting, but perceiver as the sample code is pretty short. If you would like the script to process the OLAP database, simply uncomment the lines in the vicinity of Process method. Of course, you can extend the script to perform your own custom processing and to even synchronize the database to a front-end server. Personally, I like to keep the deployment and processing separate as the code can become overly complex for support staff.If you want to know more, come see my session at the forthcoming SQLBits conference.

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• Excel tables creation upon MySQL data import (new feature in MySQL for Excel 1.2.x)

  - by Javier Treviño

  In this blog post we are going to talk about one of the features included since MySQL for Excel 1.2.0, you can install the latest GA or maintenance version using the MySQL Installer or optionally you can download directly any GA or non-GA version from the MySQL Developer Zone. Remember how easy is to dump data from a MySQL table, view or stored procedure to an Excel worksheet? (If you don't you can check out this other post: How To - Guide to Importing Data from a MySQL Database to Excel using MySQL for Excel). In version 1.2.0 we introduced some advanced options for the Import MySQL Data operation regarding Excel tables. The Advanced Options dialog shown above is accessible from any Import Data dialog. When the Create an Excel table for the imported MySQL table data option is checked (which is by default), MySQL for Excel will create an Excel table (also known in Excel jargon as a ListObject) from the Excel range containing the imported MySQL data. This "little feature" enables the right-away usage of the Excel table in data analysis, like including it for summarization on a PivotTable, including a summarization row at the end of the table's data, sorting or filtering the table's data by clicking the drop-down button next to each column's header, among other actions. The Excel tables that are created automatically from imported MySQL data will have a name like [UserPrefix].<SchemaName>.<DbObjectName> for tables and views, and <Prefix>.<SchemaName>.<ProcedureName>.<ResultSetName> for stored procedures.  Notice the first piece of the name is an optional [UserPrefix], the prefix is only used if the Prefix Excel tables with the following text option is checked, notice that the suggested prefix is "MySQL" but it can be changed to whatever text is suitable for you. Excel tables must have a table style so they are easily identified. There are a lot of predefined Excel table styles, by default the MySqlDefault style is applied, which is the style you have seen applied to imported data for Edit Sessions, and which adds simple and elegant formatting to the table. If you wish to change it to any of the predefined Excel table style you can do it through the drop-down list on the Use style [[styles drop-down]] for the new Excel table option. Excel tables are the basic construction blocks for building data analysis or self-service Business Intelligence using other more advanced Excel tools like Power Pivot, Power View or Power Map. This feature empowers imported MySQL data to use it in more advanced ways.  We hope you give this and the other new features in the 1.2.x version family a try! Remember that your feedback is very important for us, so drop us a message and follow us: MySQL on Windows (this) Blog: https://blogs.oracle.com/MySqlOnWindows/ MySQL for Excel forum: http://forums.mysql.com/list.php?172 Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/mysql YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/MySQLChannel Cheers!

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• More Fun With Math

  - by PointsToShare

  More Fun with Math   The runaway student – three different ways of solving one problem Here is a problem I read in a Russian site: A student is running away. He is moving at 1 mph. Pursuing him are a lion, a tiger and his math teacher. The lion is 40 miles behind and moving at 6 mph. The tiger is 28 miles behind and moving at 4 mph. His math teacher is 30 miles behind and moving at 5 mph. Who will catch him first? Analysis Obviously we have a set of three problems. They are all basically the same, but the details are different. The problems are of the same class. Here is a little excursion into computer science. One of the things we strive to do is to create solutions for classes of problems rather than individual problems. In your daily routine, you call it re-usability. Not all classes of problems have such solutions. If a class has a general (re-usable) solution, it is called computable. Otherwise it is unsolvable. Within unsolvable classes, we may still solve individual (some but not all) problems, albeit with different approaches to each. Luckily the vast majority of our daily problems are computable, and the 3 problems of our runaway student belong to a computable class. So, let’s solve for the catch-up time by the math teacher, after all she is the most frightening. She might even make the poor runaway solve this very problem – perish the thought! Method 1 – numerical analysis. At 30 miles and 5 mph, it’ll take her 6 hours to come to where the student was to begin with. But by then the student has advanced by 6 miles. 6 miles require 6/5 hours, but by then the student advanced by another 6/5 of a mile as well. And so on and so forth. So what are we to do? One way is to write code and iterate it until we have solved it. But this is an infinite process so we’ll end up with an infinite loop. So what to do? We’ll use the principles of numerical analysis. Any calculator – your computer included – has a limited number of digits. A double floating point number is good for about 14 digits. Nothing can be computed at a greater accuracy than that. This means that we will not iterate ad infinidum, but rather to the point where 2 consecutive iterations yield the same result. When we do financial computations, we don’t even have to go that far. We stop at the 10th of a penny.  It behooves us here to stop at a 10th of a second (100 milliseconds) and this will how we will avoid an infinite loop. Interestingly this alludes to the Zeno paradoxes of motion – in particular “Achilles and the Tortoise”. Zeno says exactly the same. To catch the tortoise, Achilles must always first come to where the tortoise was, but the tortoise keeps moving – hence Achilles will never catch the tortoise and our math teacher (or lion, or tiger) will never catch the student, or the policeman the thief. Here is my resolution to the paradox. The distance and time in each step are smaller and smaller, so the student will be caught. The only thing that is infinite is the iterative solution. The race is a convergent geometric process so the steps are diminishing, but each step in the solution takes the same amount of effort and time so with an infinite number of steps, we’ll spend an eternity solving it.  This BTW is an original thought that I have never seen before. But I digress. Let’s simply write the code to solve the problem. To make sure that it runs everywhere, I’ll do it in JavaScript. function LongCatchUpTime(D, PV, FV) // D is Distance; PV is Pursuers Velocity; FV is Fugitive’ Velocity {     var t = 0;     var T = 0;     var d = parseFloat(D);     var pv = parseFloat (PV);     var fv = parseFloat (FV);     t = d / pv;     while (t > 0.000001) //a 10th of a second is 1/36,000 of an hour, I used 1/100,000     {         T = T + t;         d = t * fv;         t = d / pv;     }     return T;     } By and large, the higher the Pursuer’s velocity relative to the fugitive, the faster the calculation. Solving this with the 10th of a second limit yields: 7.499999232000001 Method 2 – Geometric Series. Each step in the iteration above is smaller than the next. As you saw, we stopped iterating when the last step was small enough, small enough not to really matter.  When we have a sequence of numbers in which the ratio of each number to its predecessor is fixed we call the sequence geometric. When we are looking at the sum of sequence, we call the sequence of sums series.  Now let’s look at our student and teacher. The teacher runs 5 times faster than the student, so with each iteration the distance between them shrinks to a fifth of what it was before. This is a fixed ratio so we deal with a geometric series.  We normally designate this ratio as q and when q is less than 1 (0 < q < 1) the sum of  + … +  is  – 1) / (q – 1). When q is less than 1, it is easier to use ) / (1 - q). Now, the steps are 6 hours then 6/5 hours then 6/5*5 and so on, so q = 1/5. And the whole series is multiplied by 6. Also because q is less than 1 , 1/  diminishes to 0. So the sum is just  / (1 - q). or 1/ (1 – 1/5) = 1 / (4/5) = 5/4. This times 6 yields 7.5 hours. We can now continue with some algebra and take it back to a simpler formula. This is arduous and I am not going to do it here. Instead let’s do some simpler algebra. Method 3 – Simple Algebra. If the time to capture the fugitive is T and the fugitive travels at 1 mph, then by the time the pursuer catches him he travelled additional T miles. Time is distance divided by speed, so…. (D + T)/V = T  thus D + T = VT  and D = VT – T = (V – 1)T  and T = D/(V – 1) This “strangely” coincides with the solution we just got from the geometric sequence. This is simpler ad faster. Here is the corresponding code. function ShortCatchUpTime(D, PV, FV) {     var d = parseFloat(D);     var pv = parseFloat (PV);     var fv = parseFloat (FV);     return d / (pv - fv); } The code above, for both the iterative solution and the algebraic solution are actually for a larger class of problems.  In our original problem the student’s velocity (speed) is 1 mph. In the code it may be anything as long as it is less than the pursuer’s velocity. As long as PV > FV, the pursuer will catch up. Here is the really general formula: T = D / (PV – FV) Finally, let’s run the program for each of the pursuers.  It could not be worse. I know he’d rather be eaten alive than suffering through yet another math lesson. See the code run? Select  “Catch Up Time” in www.mgsltns.com/games.htm The host is running on Unix, so the link is case sensitive. That’s All Folks

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• Emit Knowledge - social network for knowledge sharing

  - by hajan

  Emit Knowledge, as the words refer - it's a social network for emitting / sharing knowledge from users by users. Those who can benefit the most out of this network is perhaps all of YOU who have something to share with others and contribute to the knowledge world. I've been closely communicating with the core team of this very, very interesting, brand new social network (with specific purpose!) about the concept, idea and the vision they have for their product and I can say with a lot of confidence that this network has real potential to become something from which we will all benefit. I won't speak much about that and would prefer to give you link and try it yourself - http://www.emitknowledge.com Mainly, through the past few months I've been testing this network and it is getting improved all the time. The user experience is great, you can easily find out what you need and it follows some known patterns that are common for all social networks. They have some real good ideas and plans that are already under development for the next updates of their product. You can do micro blogging or you can do regular normal blogging… it’s up to you, and the way it works, it is seamless. Here is a short Question and Answers (QA) interview I made with the lead of the team, Marijan Nikolovski: 1. Can you please explain us briefly, what is Emit Knowledge? Emit Knowledge is a brand new knowledge based social network, delivering quality content from users to users. We believe that people’s knowledge, experience and professional thoughts compose quality content, worth sharing among millions around the world. Therefore, we created the platform that matches people’s need to share and gain knowledge in the most suitable and comfortable way. Easy to work with, Emit Knowledge lets you to smoothly craft and emit knowledge around the globe. 2. How 'old' is Emit Knowledge? In hamster’s years we are almost five years old start-up :). Just kidding. We’ve released our public beta about three months ago. Our official release date is 27 of June 2012. 3. How did you come up with this idea? Everything started from a simple idea to solve a complex problem. We’ve seen that the social web has become polluted with data and is on the right track to lose its base principles – socialization and common cause. That was our start point. We’ve gathered the team, drew some sketches and started to mind map the idea. After several idea refactoring’s Emit Knowledge was born. 4. Is there any competition out there in the market? Currently we don't have any competitors that share the same cause. What makes our platform different is the ideology that our product promotes and the functionalities that our platform offers for easy socialization based on interests and knowledge sharing. 5. What are the main technologies used to build Emit Knowledge? Emit Knowledge was built on a heterogeneous pallet of technologies. Currently, we have four of separation: UI – Built on ASP.NET MVC3 and Knockout.js; Messaging infrastructure – Build on top of RabbitMQ; Background services – Our in-house solution for job distribution, orchestration and processing; Data storage – Build on top of MongoDB; What are the main reasons you've chosen ASP.NET MVC? Since all of our team members are .NET engineers, the decision was very natural. ASP.NET MVC is the only Microsoft web stack that sticks to the HTTP behavioral standards. It is easy to work with, have a tiny learning curve and everyone who is familiar with the HTTP will understand its architecture and convention without any difficulties. 6. What are the main reasons for choosing ASP.NET MVC? Since all of our team members are .NET engineers, the decision was very natural. ASP.NET MVC is the only Microsoft web stack that sticks to the HTTP behavioral standards. It is easy to work with, have a tiny learning curve and everyone who is familiar with the HTTP will understand its architecture and convention without any difficulties. 7. Did you use some of the latest Microsoft technologies? If yes, which ones? Yes, we like to rock the cutting edge tech house. Currently we are using Microsoft’s latest technologies like ASP.NET MVC, Web API (work in progress) and the best for the last; we are utilizing Windows Azure IaaS to the bone. 8. Can you please tell us shortly, what would be the benefit of regular bloggers in other blogging platforms to join Emit Knowledge? Well, unless you are some of the smoking ace gurus whose blogs are followed by a large number of users, our platform offers knowledge based segregated community equipped with tools that will enable both current and future users to expand their relations and to self-promote in the community based on their activity and knowledge sharing. 10. I see you are working very intensively and there is already integration with some third-party services to make the process of sharing and emitting knowledge easier, which services did you integrate until now and what do you plan do to next? We have “reemit” functionality for internal sharing and we also support external services like: Twitter; LinkedIn; Facebook; For the regular bloggers we have an extra cream, Windows Live Writer support for easy blog posts emitting. 11. What should we expect next? Currently, we are working on a new fancy community feature. This means that we are going to support user groups to be formed. So for all existing communities and user groups out there, wait us a little bit, we are coming for rescue :). One of the top next features they are developing is the Community Feature. It means, if you have your own User Group, Community Group or any other Group on which you and your users are mostly blogging or sharing (emitting) knowledge in various ways, Emit Knowledge as a platform will help you have everything you need to promote your group, make new followers and host all the necessary stuff that you have had need of. I would invite you to try the network and start sharing knowledge in a way that will help you gather new followers and spread your knowledge faster, easier and in a more efficient way! Let’s Emit Knowledge!

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• How To Watch Indian Union Budget 2011-2012 Live On Your PC

  - by Gopinath

  The Union Budget of India 2011-2012 will be tabled on Lok Sabha on 26th Feb, 2011. The finance minister, Mr. Pranab Muhkerjee will present the budget in the house and it will be broadcasted live on the TV channels(DD, NDTV, IBN Live and others) as well as on the web. For those who are willing to watch the budget session live on computers here is the required information. National Informatics Centre – Budget 2011 Live Web Cast Indian Government official stream of Union Budget 2011-2011 is available  at  http://budgetlive.nic.in/. This live stream will provide the budget information as is, without any masala, hype or so called analysis by experts sitting in private TV channel studios (and talking rubbish!) To view the primary live stream you need to install Windows Media Player plugin on your browser. As it’s a government website, better you use Internet Explorer browser to watch it. It may not work on Firefox or Chrome. Also the live stream is provided in other formats like Real Media and Flash. Here are the various streaming formats for you to choose Flash Player – High Bandwidth Stream Windows Media Player – Low Bandwidth Stream (IE browser is preferred) Windows Media Player – High Bandwidth Stream  (IE browser is preferred) Real Media Player – Low Bandwidth Stream Real Media Player – High Bandwidth Stream Indian Media Channels Covering Live Of Union Budget 2011 – 2012 Most of the news media channels live stream are available for free on the web, here are the few new channels you can watch live to follow Union Budget 2011 – 2012. NDTV 24 x 7 News Live Stream (English) NDTV India Live Streaming (Hindi) CNBC TV 18 Live Streaming (English) CNN IBN Live Streaming (English) IBN 7 Live Streaming (Hindi) Caution: In the name of analysis, most of the media channels mislead the viewers and provide base less information at times. Take utmost care in absorbing the information you see in any of the Indian news channel. This article titled,How To Watch Indian Union Budget 2011-2012 Live On Your PC, was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

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• Microsoft Business Intelligence Seminar 2011

  - by DavidWimbush

  I was lucky enough to attend the maiden presentation of this at Microsoft Reading yesterday. It was pretty gripping stuff not only because of what was said but also because of what could only be hinted at. Here's what I took away from the day. (Disclaimer: I'm not a BI guru, just a reasonably experienced BI developer, so I may have misunderstood or misinterpreted a few things. Particularly when so much of the talk was about the vision and subtle hints of what is coming. Please comment if you think I've got anything wrong. I'm also not going to even try to cover Master Data Services as I struggled to imagine how you would actually use it.) I was a bit worried when I learned that the whole day was going to be presented by one guy but Rafal Lukawiecki is a very engaging speaker. He's going to be presenting this about 20 times around the world over the coming months. If you get a chance to hear him speak, I say go for it. No doubt some of the hints will become clearer as Denali gets closer to RTM. Firstly, things are definitely happening in the SQL Server Reporting and BI world. Traditionally IT would build a data warehouse, then cubes on top of that, and then publish them in a structured and controlled way. But, just as with many IT projects in general, by the time it's finished the business has moved on and the system no longer meets their requirements. This not sustainable and something more agile is needed but there has to be some control. Apparently we're going to be hearing the catchphrase 'Balancing agility with control' a lot. More users want more access to more data. Can they define what they want? Of course not, but they'll recognise it when they see it. It's estimated that only 28% of potential BI users have meaningful access to the data they need, so there is a real pent-up demand. The answer looks like: give them some self-service tools so they can experiment and see what works, and then IT can help to support the results. It's estimated that 32% of Excel users are comfortable with its analysis tools such as pivot tables. It's the power user's preferred tool. Why fight it? That's why PowerPivot is an Excel add-in and that's why they released a Data Mining add-in for it as well. It does appear that the strategy is going to be to use Reporting Services (in SharePoint mode), PowerPivot, and possibly something new (smiles and hints but no details) to create reports and explore data. Everything will be published and managed in SharePoint which gives users the ability to mash-up, share and socialise what they've found out. SharePoint also gives IT tools to understand what people are looking at and where to concentrate effort. If PowerPivot report X becomes widely used, it's time to check that it shows what they think it does and perhaps get it a bit more under central control. There was more SharePoint detail that went slightly over my head regarding where Excel Services and Excel Web Application fit in, the differences between them, and the suggestion that it is likely they will one day become one (but not in the immediate future). That basic pattern is set to be expanded upon by further exploiting Vertipaq (the columnar indexing engine that enables PowerPivot to store and process a lot of data fast and in a small memory footprint) to provide scalability 'from the desktop to the data centre', and some yet to be detailed advances in 'frictionless deployment' (part of which is about making the difference between local and the cloud pretty much irrelevant). Excel looks like becoming Microsoft's primary BI client. It already has: the ability to consume cubes strong visualisation tools slicers (which are part of Excel not PowerPivot) a data mining add-in PowerPivot A major hurdle for self-service BI is presenting the data in a consumable format. You can't just give users PowerPivot and a server with a copy of the OLTP database(s). Building cubes is labour intensive and doesn't always give the user what they need. This is where the BI Semantic Model (BISM) comes in. I gather it's a layer of metadata you define that can combine multiple data sources (and types of data source) into a clear 'interface' that users can work with. It comes with a new query language called DAX. SSAS cubes are unlikely to go away overnight because, with their pre-calculated results, they are still the most efficient way to work with really big data sets. A few other random titbits that came up: Reporting Services is going to get some good new stuff in Denali. Keep an eye on www.projectbotticelli.com for the slides. You can also view last year's seminar sessions which covered a lot of the same ground as far as the overall strategy is concerned. They plan to add more material as Denali's features are publicly exposed. Check out the PASS keynote address for a showing of Yahoo's SQL BI servers. Apparently they wheeled the rack out on stage still plugged in and running! Check out the Excel 2010 Data Mining Add-Ins. 32 bit only at present but 64 bit is on the way. There are lots of data sets, many of them free, at the Windows Azure Marketplace Data Market (where you can also get ESRI shape files). If you haven't already seen it, have a look at the Silverlight Pivot Viewer (http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/06/29/silverlight-pivotviewer-now-available.aspx). The Bing Maps Data Connector is worth a look if you're into spatial stuff (http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/maps/archive/2010/07/13/data-connector-sql-server-2008-spatial-amp-bing-maps.aspx).  

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• SQLAuthority News – Office 2010 Readiness Check – Are you ready for Office 2010?

  - by pinaldave

  PowerPivot for Excel is a data analysis tool that delivers unmatched computational power directly within the application users already know and love—Microsoft Excel. Office 2010 is the next version of Office 2010. We all know Office 2010 is on the verge of getting released and the reviews available online say that it’s a phenomenal product. My [...]

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• Excel Solver vs Solver Foundation

  - by JoshReuben

  I recently read a book http://www.amazon.com/Scientific-Engineering-Cookbook-Cookbooks-OReilly/dp/0596008791/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1296593374&sr=8-1 - the Excel Scientific and Engineering Cookbook.     The 2 main tools that this book leveraged were the Data Analysis Pack and Excel Solver. I had previously been aquanted with Microsoft Solver Foundation - this is a full fledged API for solving optimization problems, and went beyond being a mere Excel plugin - it exposed a C# programmatic interface for in process and a web service interface for out of process integration. were they the same? apparently not!   2 different solver frameworks for Excel: http://www.solver.com/index.html http://www.solverfoundation.com/ I contacted both vendors to get their perspectives.   Heres what the Excel Solver guys had to say:   "The Solver Foundation requires you to learn and use a very specific modeling language (OML). The Excel solver allows you to formulate your optimization problems without learning any new language simply by entering the formulas into cells on the Excel spreadsheet, something that nearly everyone is already familiar with doing.   The Excel Solver also allows you to seamlessly upgrade to products that combine Monte Carlo Simulation capabilities (our Risk Solver Premium and Risk Solver Platform products) which allow you to include uncertainty into your models when appropriate.   Our advanced Excel Solver Products also have a number of built in reporting tools for advanced analysis of the your model and it's results"           And Heres what the Microsoft Solver Foundation guys had to say:   "  With the release of Solver Foundation 3.0, Solver Foundation has the same kinds of solvers (plus a few more) than what is found in Excel Solver. I think there are two main differences:   1.      Problems are described differently. In Excel Solver the goals and constraints are specified inside the spreadsheet, in formulas. In Solver Foundation they are described either in .Net code that uses the Solver Foundation Services API, or using the OML modeling language in Excel. 2.      Solver Foundation’s primary strength is on solving large linear, mixed integer, and constraint models. That is, models that contain arbitrary nonlinear functions (such as trig functions, IF(), powers, etc) are handled a bit better by the Excel Solver at this point. "

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• Super Bowl Ads' Best and Worst Online Performances

  Web analysis firm Gomez ranks the big Super Bowl advertisers' post-game performance. The winner may be a sweet surprise, but GoDaddy and Hyundai can't be too happy.

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• ANTS Memory Profiler 7.0

  - by James Michael Hare

  I had always been a fan of ANTS products (Reflector is absolutely invaluable, and their performance profiler is great as well – very easy to use!), so I was curious to see what the ANTS Memory Profiler could show me. Background While a performance profiler will track how much time is typically spent in each unit of code, a memory profiler gives you much more detail on how and where your memory is being consumed and released in a program. As an example, I’d been working on a data access layer at work to call a market data web service.  This web service would take a list of symbols to quote and would return back the quote data.  To help consolidate the thousands of web requests per second we get and reduce load on the web services, we implemented a 5-second cache of quote data.  Not quite long enough to where customers will typically notice a quote go “stale”, but just long enough to be able to collapse multiple quote requests for the same symbol in a short period of time. A 5-second cache may not sound like much, but it actually pays off by saving us roughly 42% of our web service calls, while still providing relatively up-to-date information.  The question is whether or not the extra memory involved in maintaining the cache was worth it, so I decided to fire up the ANTS Memory Profiler and take a look at memory usage. First Impressions The main thing I’ve always loved about the ANTS tools is their ease of use.  Pretty much everything is right there in front of you in a way that makes it easy for you to find what you need with little digging required.  I’ve worked with other, older profilers before (that shall remain nameless other than to hint it was created by a very large chip maker) where it was a mind boggling experience to figure out how to do simple tasks. Not so with AMP.  The opening dialog is very straightforward.  You can choose from here whether to debug an executable, a web application (either in IIS or from VS’s web development server), windows services, etc. So I chose a .NET Executable and navigated to the build location of my test harness.  Then began profiling. At this point while the application is running, you can see a chart of the memory as it ebbs and wanes with allocations and collections.  At any given point in time, you can take snapshots (to compare states) zoom in, or choose to stop at any time.  Snapshots Taking a snapshot also gives you a breakdown of the managed memory heaps for each generation so you get an idea how many objects are staying around for extended periods of time (as an object lives and survives collections, it gets promoted into higher generations where collection becomes less frequent). Generating a snapshot brings up an analysis view with very handy graphs that show your generation sizes.  Almost all my memory is in Generation 1 in the managed memory component of the first graph, which is good news to me, because Gen 2 collections are much rarer.  I once3 made the mistake once of caching data for 30 minutes and found it didn’t get collected very quick after I released my reference because it had been promoted to Gen 2 – doh! Analysis It looks like (from the second pie chart) that the majority of the allocations were in the string class.  This also is expected for me because the majority of the memory allocated is in the web service responses, so it doesn’t seem the entities I’m adapting to (to prevent being too tightly coupled to the web service proxy classes, which can change easily out from under me) aren’t taking a significant portion of memory. I also appreciate that they have clear summary text in key places such as “No issues with large object heap fragmentation were detected”.  For novice users, this type of summary information can be critical to getting them to use a tool and develop a good working knowledge of it. There is also a handy link at the bottom for “What to look for on the summary” which loads a web page of help on key points to look for. Clicking over to the session overview, it’s easy to compare the samples at each snapshot to see how your memory is growing, shrinking, or staying relatively the same.  Looking at my snapshots, I’m pretty happy with the fact that memory allocation and heap size seems to be fairly stable and in control: Once again, you can check on the large object heap, generation one heap, and generation two heap across each snapshot to spot trends. Back on the analysis tab, we can go to the [Class List] button to get an idea what classes are making up the majority of our memory usage.  As was little surprise to me, System.String was the clear majority of my allocations, though I found it surprising that the System.Reflection.RuntimeMehtodInfo came in second.  I was curious about this, so I selected it and went into the [Instance Categorizer].  This view let me see where these instances to RuntimeMehtodInfo were coming from. So I scrolled back through the graph, and discovered that these were being held by the System.ServiceModel.ChannelFactoryRefCache and I was satisfied this was just an artifact of my WCF proxy. I also like that down at the bottom of the Instance Categorizer it gives you a series of filters and offers to guide you on which filter to use based on the problem you are trying to find.  For example, if I suspected a memory leak, I might try to filter for survivors in growing classes.  This means that for instances of a class that are growing in memory (more are being created than cleaned up), which ones are survivors (not collected) from garbage collection.  This might allow me to drill down and find places where I’m holding onto references by mistake and not freeing them! Finally, if you want to really see all your instances and who is holding onto them (preventing collection), you can go to the “Instance Retention Graph” which creates a graph showing what references are being held in memory and who is holding onto them. Visual Studio Integration Of course, VS has its own profiler built in – and for a free bundled profiler it is quite capable – but AMP gives a much cleaner and easier-to-use experience, and when you install it you also get the option of letting it integrate directly into VS. So once you go back into VS after installation, you’ll notice an ANTS menu which lets you launch the ANTS profiler directly from Visual Studio.   Clicking on one of these options fires up the project in the profiler immediately, allowing you to get right in.  It doesn’t integrate with the Visual Studio windows themselves (like the VS profiler does), but still the plethora of information it provides and the clear and concise manner in which it presents it makes it well worth it. Summary If you like the ANTS series of tools, you shouldn’t be disappointed with the ANTS Memory Profiler.  It was so easy to use that I was able to jump in with very little product knowledge and get the information I was looking it for. I’ve used other profilers before that came with 3-inch thick tomes that you had to read in order to get anywhere with the tool, and this one is not like that at all.  It’s built for your everyday developer to get in and find their problems quickly, and I like that! Tweet Technorati Tags: Influencers,ANTS,Memory,Profiler

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• People, Process & Engagement: WebCenter Partner Keste

  - by Michael Snow

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Within the WebCenter group here at Oracle, discussions about people, process and engagement cross over many vertical industries and products. Amidst our growing partner ecosystem, the community provides us insight into great customer use cases every day. Such is the case with our partner, Keste, who provides us a guest post on our blog today with an overview of their innovative solution for a customer in the transportation industry. Keste is an Oracle software solutions and development company headquartered in Dallas, Texas. As a Platinum member of the Oracle® PartnerNetwork, Keste designs, develops and deploys custom solutions that automate complex business processes. Seamless Customer Self-Service Experience in the Trucking Industry with Oracle WebCenter Portal  Keste, Oracle Platinum Partner Customer Overview Omnitracs, Inc., a Qualcomm company provides mobility solutions for trucking fleets to companies in the transportation industry. Omnitracs’ mobility services include basic communications such as text as well as advanced monitoring services such as GPS tracking, temperature tracking of perishable goods, load tracking and weighting distribution, and many others. Customer Business Needs Already the leading provider of mobility solutions for large trucking fleets, they chose to target smaller trucking fleets as new customers. However their existing high-touch customer support method would not be a cost effective or scalable method to manage and service these smaller customers. Omnitracs needed to provide several self-service features to make customer support more scalable while keeping customer satisfaction levels high and the costs manageable. The solution also had to be very intuitive and easy to use. The systems that Omnitracs sells to these trucking customers require professional installation and smaller customers need to track and schedule the installation. Information captured in Oracle eBusiness Suite needed to be readily available for new customers to track these purchases and delivery details. Omnitracs wanted a high impact User Interface to significantly improve customer experience with the ability to integrate with EBS, provisioning systems as well as CRM systems that were already implemented. Omnitracs also wanted to build an architecture platform that could potentially be extended to other Portals. Omnitracs’ stated goal was to deliver an “eBay-like” or “Amazon-like” experience for all of their customers so that they could reach a much broader market beyond their large company customer base. Solution Overview In order to manage the increased complexity, the growing support needs of global customers and improve overall product time-to-market in a cost-effective manner, IT began to deliver a self-service model. This self service model not only transformed numerous business processes but is also allowing the business to keep up with the growing demands of the (internal and external) customers. This solution was a customer service Portal that provided self service capabilities for large and small customers alike for Activation of mobility products, managing add-on applications for the devices (much like the Apple App Store), transferring services when trucks are sold to other companies as well as deactivation all without the involvement of a call service agent or sending multiple emails to different Omnitracs contacts. This is a conceptual view of the Customer Portal showing the details of the components that make up the solution. 12.00 The portal application for transactions was entirely built using ADF 11g R2. Omnitracs’ business had a pressing requirement to have a portal available 24/7 for its customers. Since there were interactions with EBS in the back-end, the downtimes on the EBS would negate this availability. Omnitracs devised a decoupling strategy at the database side for the EBS data. The decoupling of the database was done using Oracle Data Guard and completely insulated the solution from any eBusiness Suite down time. The customer has no knowledge whether eBS is running or not. Here are two sample screenshots of the portal application built in Oracle ADF. Customer Benefits The Customer Portal not only provided the scalability to grow the business but also provided the seamless integration with other disparate applications. Some of the key benefits are: Improved Customer Experience: With a modern look and feel and a Portal that has the aspects of an App Store, the customer experience was significantly improved. Page response times went from several seconds to sub-second for all of the pages. Enabled new product launches: After successfully dominating the large fleet market, Omnitracs now has a scalable solution to sell and manage smaller fleet customers giving them a huge advantage over their nearest competitors. Dozens of new customers have been acquired via this portal through an onboarding process that now takes minutes Seamless Integrations Improves Customer Support: ADF 11gR2 allowed Omnitracs to bring a diverse list of applications into one integrated solution. This provided a seamless experience for customers to route them from Marketing focused application to a customer-oriented portal. Internally, it also allowed Sales Representatives to have an integrated flow for taking a prospect through the various steps to onboard them as a customer. Key integrations included: Unity Core Salesforce.com Merchant e-Solution for credit card Custom Omnitracs Applications like CUPS and AUTO Security utilizing OID and OVD Back end integration with EBS (Data Guard) and iQ Database Business Impact Significant business impacts were realized through the launch of customer portal. It not only allows the business to push through in underserved segments, but also reduces the time it needs to spend on customer support—allowing the business to focus more on sales and identifying the market for new products. Some of the Immediate Benefits are The entire onboarding process is now completely automated and now completes in minutes. This represents an 85% productivity improvement over their previous processes. And it was 160 times faster! With the success of this self-service solution, the business is now targeting about 3X customer growth in the next five years. This represents a tripling of their overall customer base and significant downstream revenue for the ongoing services. 90%+ improvement of customer onboarding and management process by utilizing, single sign on integration using OID/OAM solution, performance improvements and new self-service functionality Unified login for all Customers, Partners and Internal Users enables login to a common portal and seamless access to all other integrated applications targeted at the respective audience Significantly improved customer experience with a better look and feel with a more user experience focused Portal screens. Helped sales of the new product by having an easy way of ordering and activating the product. Data Guard helped increase availability of the Portal to 99%+ and make it independent of EBS downtime. This gave customers the feel of high availability of the portal application. Some of the anticipated longer term Benefits are: Platform that can be leveraged to launch any new product introduction and enable all product teams to reach new customers and new markets Easy integration with content management to allow business owners more control of the product catalog Overall reduced TCO with standardization of the Oracle platform Managed IT support cost savings through optimization of technology skills needed to support and modify this solution ------------------------------------------------------------ 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 -"/ /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";}

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• Calgary .NET User Group Visual Studio 2010 Presentation (April 28, 2010)

  - by David Paquette

  If you’re in Calgary, come join us on April 28th, 2010.  Habib Heydarian (Principal Program Manager Lead, Microsoft) will be presenting the new debugging features in Visual Studio 2010 including IntelliTrace, multi-tier performance analysis, importing/exporting breakpoints and many other features. Register at www.dotnetcalgary.com.

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• SQL SERVER – BI Quiz Hint – Performance Tuning Cubes – Hints

  - by pinaldave

  I earlier wrote about SQL BI Quiz over here and here. The details of the quiz is here: Working with huge data is very common when it is about Data Warehousing. It is necessary to create Cubes on the data to make it meaningful and consumable. There are cases when retrieving the data from cube takes lots of the time. Let us assume that your cube is returning you data very quickly. Suddenly on one day it is returning the data very slowly. What are the three things will you to diagnose this. After diagnose what you will do to resolve performance issue. Participate in my question over here I required BI Expert Jason Thomas to help with few hints to blog readers. He is one of the leading SSAS expert and writes a complicated subject in simple words. If queries were executing properly before but now take a long time to return the data, it means that there has been a change in the environment in which it is running. Some possible changes are listed below:-  1) Data factors:- Compare the data size then and now. Increase in data can result in different execution times. Poorly written queries as well as poor design will not start showing issues till the data grows. How to find it out? (Ans : SQL Server profiler and Perfmon Counters can be used for identifying the issues and performance  tuning the MDX queries)  2) Internal Factors:- Is some slow MDX query / multiple mdx queries running at the same time, which was not running when you had tested it before? Is there any locking happening due to proactive caching or processing operations? Are the measure group caches being cleared by processing operations? (Ans : Again, profiler and perfmon counters will help in finding it out. Load testing can be done using AS Performance Workbench (http://asperfwb.codeplex.com/) by running multiple queries at once)  3) External factors:- Is some other application competing for the same resources?  HINT : Read “Identifying and Resolving MDX Query Performance Bottlenecks in SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services” (http://sqlcat.com/whitepapers/archive/2007/12/16/identifying-and-resolving-mdx-query-performance-bottlenecks-in-sql-server-2005-analysis-services.aspx) Well, these are great tips. Now win big prizes by participate in my question over here. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Report: Systems Engineer Is Best IT Job

  San Francisco-based research and analysis group, Focus, has named systems engineer as the "best job in America."...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Social Analytics and the Customer

  - by David Dorf

  Many successful retailers put the customer at the center of everything they do, so its important that the customer is modeled correctly across all their systems.  The path to omni-channel starts and ends with the customer so at ARTS, our next big project is focused on ensuring a consistent representation of customers across our transactional data model, datawarehouse model, and XML schemas.  Further, we've started a new whitepaper that describes how Big Data and Social Media Analytics should be leveraged by retailers to add and additional level of customer insight. Let's start by taking a closer look at the meaning of social analytics.  Here's my definition: Social Analytics, in the retail context, describes the analysis of data obtained from social media sources in an effort to better comprehend and interact with the community of consumers.  This discipline seeks to understand what’s being said by the community about brands and products (“monitoring”), as well as understand the behaviors of those in the community (“profiling”).  The results are used to enforce the brand image, improve product decisions, and better focus marketing, all of which lead to increased sales. To help illustrate the facets of social analytics, I drew the diagram below which was originally published by Retail Touchpoints. There are lots of tools on the market that allow retailers to monitor social media for brand and product mentions.  These include analysis of sentiment, reach, share of voice, engagement, etc.  When your brand is mentioned, good or bad, its an opportunity to engage with the customer and possibly lead to a sale.  Because products are not always unique, its much more difficult to monitor product mentions, but detecting product trends early can help a retailer make better merchandising decisions, especially in fashion. Once a retailer understands what's being said, the next step is learn more about who's saying it.  That involves profiling customers beyond simple demographics to understand their motivations.  Much can be learned from patterns, and even more when customers voluntarily share their data.  Knowing that a customer is passionate about, for example, mountain biking allows the retailer to make relevant offers on helmets, ask for opinions on hydration, and help spread marketing messages. Social analytics has many facets that benefit retailers, some of which are easy but many of which are hard.  Its important for the CMO and CIO to work closely together to plan for these capabilities and monitor the maturity of tools on the market.  This is an area that will separate winners from losers.

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• Weird referral traffic [closed]

  - by Noam

  Possible Duplicate: Strange incoming links appearing on site statistics I'm getting weird traffic from Japan, from a site called ime.nu Why weird? because I'm not able to identify the link and also when going to their homepage link it just shows an Apache Test Page, while I'm seeing it is a pretty big site in analysis sites (Alexa Ranked 121 in JP) Can someone help me understand the mystery?

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• New BIDSHelper Release - 1.4.3.0

  - by Darren Gosbell

  Today we released an update for BIDSHelper which you can download from here This release addresses the following issues: For some people the BIDS Helper extensions to the Project Properties page for the SSIS Deploy plugin was not available. Copy and Paste in errors in SSIS packages Updates to Parent-Child Dim Naturalizer The following features are new in this release: Analysis Services Many-to-Many Matrix Compression Roles Report General Preferences   If you are interested to find out what else BIDSHelper can do, full documentation of all the features is available on the project website here: http://bidshelper.codeplex.com

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• SPSS launcher for Unity

  - by user67157

  I have "SPSS 20 for Linux" statistical analysis program installed under /opt/IBM directory. I can run it via terminal entering the command line with /opt/IBM, and it runs without any problems. When the program window opens, I go to the launcher and right-click on its icon to lock it there, but after closing it, the icon becomes useless. When I click on it, nothing happens. I tried to ceate a launcher for it, but there is no use again.

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• Data Flow Diagrams - Difference between Lines and Arrows

  - by Howdy_McGee

  I'm currently working with Visio to create Data Flow Diagrams for a System Analysis and Design class but I'm unsure what the difference between ------ and ------> is. I can connect 2 shapes together with a line (process, entity, data store) but does the single line connecting the two mean data flow? Do I need to explicitly use the data flow arrow to show which way data is flowing? (There doesn't seem to be tags for this topic, maybe im in the wrong place?)

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• Tired of Downloading Your Entire Schema? How About a Partial Download?

  - by user702295

  Proceed to document 1448266.1, Demantra Non Invasive Partial Schema Export Utility Extracting Partial Schema Dumps for Analysis.  In this document you will find instructions and 2 SQL scripts.  Give it a try.  If you have a problem, feel free to post to this BLOG or the community located at: https://communities.oracle.com/portal/server.pt/community/demantra_solutions/231 Regards!   Jeff

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