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• How much is a subscriber worth?

  - by Tom Lewin

  This year at Red Gate, we’ve started providing a way to back up SQL Azure databases and Azure storage. We decided to sell this as a service, instead of a product, which means customers only pay for what they use. Unfortunately for us, it makes figuring out revenue much trickier. With a product like SQL Compare, a customer pays for it, and it’s theirs for good. Sure, we offer support and upgrades, but, fundamentally, the sale is a simple, upfront transaction: we’ve made this product, you need this product, we swap product for money and everyone is happy. With software as a service, it isn’t that easy. The money and product don’t change hands up front. Instead, we provide a service in exchange for a recurring fee. We know someone buying SQL Compare will pay us $X, but we don’t know how long service customers will stay with us, or how much they will spend. How do we find this out? We use lifetime value analysis. What is lifetime value? Lifetime value, or LTV, is how much a customer is worth to the business. For Entrepreneurs has a brilliant write up that we followed to conduct our analysis. Basically, it all boils down to this equation: LTV = ARPU x ALC To make it a bit less of an alphabet-soup and a bit more understandable, we can write it out in full: The lifetime value of a customer equals the average revenue per customer per month, times the average time a customer spends with the service Simple, right? A customer is worth the average spend times the average stay. If customers pay on average $50/month, and stay on average for ten months, then a new customer will, on average, bring in $500 over the time they are a customer! Average spend is easy to work out; it’s revenue divided by customers. The problem comes when we realise that we don’t know exactly how long a customer will stay with us. How can we figure out the average lifetime of a customer, if we only have six months’ worth of data? The answer lies in the fact that: Average Lifetime of a Customer = 1 / Churn Rate The churn rate is the percentage of customers that cancel in a month. If half of your customers cancel each month, then your average customer lifetime is two months. The problem we faced was that we didn’t have enough data to make an estimate of one month’s cancellations reliable (because barely anybody cancels)! To deal with this data problem, we can take data from the last three months instead. This means we have more data to play with. We can still use the equation above, we just need to multiply the final result by three (as we worked out how many three month periods customers stay for, and we want our answer to be in months). Now these estimates are likely to be fairly unreliable; when there’s not a lot of data it pays to be cautious with inference. That said, the numbers we have look fairly consistent, and it’s super easy to revise our estimates when new data comes in. At the very least, these numbers give us a vague idea of whether a subscription business is viable. As far as Cloud Services goes, the business looks very viable indeed, and the low cancellation rates are much more than just data points in LTV equations; they show that the product is working out great for our customers, which is exactly what we’re looking for!

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• How to Set Customer Table with Multiple Phone Numbers? - Relational Database Design

  - by user311509

  CREATE TABLE Phone ( phoneID - PK . . . ); CREATE TABLE PhoneDetail ( phoneDetailID - PK phoneID - FK points to Phone phoneTypeID ... phoneNumber ... . . . ); CREATE TABLE Customer ( customerID - PK firstName phoneID - Unique FK points to Phone . . . ); A customer can have multiple phone numbers e.g. Cell, Work, etc. phoneID in Customer table is unique and points to PhoneID in Phone table. If customer record is deleted, phoneID in Phone table should also be deleted. Do you have any concerns on my design? Is this designed properly? My problem is phoneID in Customer table is a child and if child record is deleted then i can not delete the parent (Phone) record automatically.

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• Any simple approaches for managing customer data change requests for global reference files?

  - by Kelly Duke

  For the first time, I am developing in an environment in which there is a central repository for a number of different industry standard reference data tables and many different customers who need to select records from these industry standard reference data tables to fill in foreign key information for their customer specific records. Because these industry standard reference files are utilized by all customers, I want to reserve Create/Update/Delete access to these records for global product administrators. However, I would like to implement a (semi-)automated interface by which specific customers could request record additions, deletions or modifications to any of the industry standard reference files that are shared among all customers. I know I need something like a "data change request" table specifying: user id, user request datetime, request type (insert, modify, delete), a user entered text explanation of the change request, the user request's current status (pending, declined, completed), admin resolution datetime, admin id, an admin entered text description of the resolution, etc. What I can't figure out is how to elegantly handle the fact that these data change requests could apply to dozens of different tables with differing table column definitions. I would like to give the customer users making these data change requests a convenient way to enter their proposed record additions/modifications directly into CRUD screens that look very much like the reference table CRUD screens they don't have write/delete permissions for (with an additional text explanation and perhaps request priority field). I would also like to give the global admins a tool that allows them to view all the outstanding data change requests for the users they oversee sorted by date requested or user/date requested. Upon selecting a data change request record off the list, the admin would be directed to another CRUD screen that would be populated with the fields the customer users requested for the new/modified industry standard reference table record along with customer's text explanation, the request status and the text resolution explanation field. At this point the admin could accept/edit/reject the requested change and if accepted the affected industry standard reference file would be automatically updated with the appropriate fields and the data change request record's status, text resolution explanation and resolution datetime would all also be appropriately updated. However, I want to keep the actual production reference tables as simple as possible and free from these extraneous and typically null customer change request fields. I'd also like the data change request file to aggregate all data change requests across all the reference tables yet somehow "point to" the specific reference table and primary key in question for modification & deletion requests or the specific reference table and associated customer user entered field values in question for record creation requests. Does anybody have any ideas of how to design something like this effectively? Is there a cleaner, simpler way I am missing? Thank you so much for reading.

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• Projections.count() and Projections.countDistinct() both result in the same query

  - by Kim L

  EDIT: I've edited this post completely, so that the new description of my problem includes all the details and not only what I previously considered relevant. Maybe this new description will help to solve the problem I'm facing. I have two entity classes, Customer and CustomerGroup. The relation between customer and customer groups is ManyToMany. The customer groups are annotated in the following way in the Customer class. @Entity public class Customer { ... @ManyToMany(mappedBy = "customers", fetch = FetchType.LAZY) public Set<CustomerGroup> getCustomerGroups() { ... } ... public String getUuid() { return uuid; } ... } The customer reference in the customer groups class is annotated in the following way @Entity public class CustomerGroup { ... @ManyToMany public Set<Customer> getCustomers() { ... } ... public String getUuid() { return uuid; } ... } Note that both the CustomerGroup and Customer classes also have an UUID field. The UUID is a unique string (uniqueness is not forced in the datamodel, as you can see, it is handled as any other normal string). What I'm trying to do, is to fetch all customers which do not belong to any customer group OR the customer group is a "valid group". The validity of a customer group is defined with a list of valid UUIDs. I've created the following criteria query Criteria criteria = getSession().createCriteria(Customer.class); criteria.setProjection(Projections.countDistinct("uuid")); criteria = criteria.createCriteria("customerGroups", "groups", Criteria.LEFT_JOIN); List<String> uuids = getValidUUIDs(); Criterion criterion = Restrictions.isNull("groups.uuid"); if (uuids != null && uuids.size() > 0) { criterion = Restrictions.or(criterion, Restrictions.in( "groups.uuid", uuids)); } criteria.add(criterion); When executing the query, it will result in the following SQL query select count(*) as y0_ from Customer this_ left outer join CustomerGroup_Customer customergr3_ on this_.id=customergr3_.customers_id left outer join CustomerGroup groups1_ on customergr3_.customerGroups_id=groups1_.id where groups1_.uuid is null or groups1_.uuid in ( ?, ? ) The query is exactly what I wanted, but with one exception. Since a Customer can belong to multiple CustomerGroups, left joining the CustomerGroup will result in duplicated Customer objects. Hence the count(*) will give a false value, as it only counts how many results there are. I need to get the amount of unique customers and this I expected to achieve by using the Projections.countDistinct("uuid"); -projection. For some reason, as you can see, the projection will still result in a count(*) query instead of the expected count(distinct uuid). Replacing the projection countDistinct with just count("uuid") will result in the exactly same query. Am I doing something wrong or is this a bug? === "Problem" solved. Reason: PEBKAC (Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair). I had a branch in my code and didn't realize that the branch was executed. That branch used rowCount() instead of countDistinct().

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• Drupal: what's the easiest way to let my customer to upload video thumbnails and associate them to v

  - by Patrick

  hi, my customer wants a gallery of videos and images (small thumbnails) and if you click on one of them you can see the picture / video in the overlaying lightbox). Now, I cannot install auto-generating video thumbnails because I don't have access to ffmpeg module on the server. I can only allow my customer to upload these thumbnails by himself. I'm using image and video CCK fields for each node to allow my customer images and videos. However I dunno how should I let him upload thumbnails for his videos. Should I create an additional Image CCK field for this ? Consequently, I should somehow associate the videos with the images in the design and my customer should pay attention to place them in the same order.. this is not very nice solution, but it is the only one that came to my mind so far. Furthermore, I'm using the lightbox I should somehow ignore the video thumbnails and display the videos instead... some tips ? Thanks

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• Three customer addresses in one table or in separate tables?

  - by DR

  In my application I have a Customer class and an Address class. The Customer class has three instances of the Address class: customerAddress, deliveryAddress, invoiceAddress. Whats the best way to reflect this structure in a database? The straightforward way would be a customer table and a separate address table. A more denormalized way would be just a customer table with columns for every address (Example for "street": customer_street, delivery_street, invoice_street) What are your experiences with that? Are there any advantages and disadvantages of these approaches?

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• Non perdere la possibilità di incontrare i membri dell’Oracle Real-Time Decisions Customer Advisory Board!

  - by Silvia Valgoi

  Quest’anno, in via del tutto eccezionale, vengono aperte le porte dell’appuntamento annuale che Oracle dedica ai clienti di alcune specifiche Applicazioni: si incontreranno a Roma il prossimo 20 giugno 2012  i clienti mondiali della soluzione Oracle Real-Time Decisions (RTD). E’ una occasione unica per sentire direttamente da chi ha implementato questa soluzione quali siano stati i reali ritorni sugli investimenti e per parlare direttamente con loro in un contesto internazionale. La testimonianza di  Dell - che presenterà l’utilizzo di RTD  integrato anche a Siebel - la partecipazione di  BT, Deutsch Telecom, United Airlines, Bouygues Telecom, Dell e RoomKe, fanno di questo appuntamento un momento importante per tutti coloro che vedono nel Real-Time Decisions un tassello importante per le loro strategie di Customer Experience Management. Sei interessato? http://www.oracle.com/goto/RealTimeDecisions

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• Oracle allo SMAU 2012 - La strategia CRM e l’approccio alla Customer Experience: perchè le aziende devono servire diversamente i propri clienti.

  - by Silvia Valgoi

  Lo scorso 18 Ottobre Oracle è stata presente all'edizione milanese di SMAU 2012 all'interno della Apps & Cloud Arena. Invitata da AISM (Associazione italiana marketing) Oracle  ha avuto l’opportunità di partecipare attivamente con un intervento all’interno dell’area tematica “Gestire efficacemente i propri clienti attraverso le applicazioni di Customer Relationship Management”. Le molte persone presenti hanno potuto ascoltare dove, secondo Oracle, si genera reale differenziazione del brand – al di là dei processi ormai consolidati di marketing , vendita e servizio al cliente – e dove si posiziona il nuovo valore per il business. Se non hai potuto partecipare guarda qui la presentazione di Oracle. Per maggiori informazioni: Silvia Valgoi

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• How do you balance the speed of Sprints with the customer's conservative adoption schedule?

  - by Cheeso

  I'd prefer to have sprints that last 3-4 weeks, but customers don't want to adopt new feature/function every 3-4 weeks. Existing customers are conservative and, once we meet their minimum bar for features and capabilities, they like to remain on a stable release for much longer than 4 weeks. Even a 3-month cycle would be pushing it for them. On the other hand, newer customers tend to have more feature requests, and are willing to follow sprints. But this willingness dissipates after we've met their bar. How do you balance the need for rapid sprints with the customer's conservative view of application change? I'm particularly interested in SaaS scenarios.

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• Our work name lately transformed to Revenue from Customer Support... Support? [on hold]

  - by Hollis Nieves

  I have been employeed from the same company (mobile phone business) for quite some time today like a Customer Support Represenative. I also have usually completed nicely until recently and loved the task. Into a Person Support/Revenue middleapproximately we've been converted by May and we've to purchase Television service to clients who call-in about their mobile phone service... They need us to become really manipulative with it. We havent had instruction on it. and our supervisors actually dont understand something about any of it possibly but need us to "Purchase! Purchase! Purchase!" ugggh. At I will become at my work any guidance? Revenue 've never be completed by me and I truly worry losing my work due to my performance. Revenue makes me uneasy... Any feedback could be appreciated

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• How can I use a compound condition in a join in Linq?

  - by Gary McGill

  Let's say I have a Customer table which has a PrimaryContactId field and a SecondaryContactId field. Both of these are foreign keys that reference the Contact table. For any given customer, either one or two contacts may be stored. In other words, PrimaryContactId can never be NULL, but SecondaryContactId can be NULL. If I drop my Customer and Contact tables onto the "Linq to SQL Classes" design surface, the class builder will spot the two FK relationships from the Customer table to the Contact table, and so the generated Customer class will have a Contact field and a Contact1 field (which I can rename to PrimaryContact and SecondaryContact to avoid confusion). Now suppose that I want to get details of all the contacts for a given set of customers. If there was always exactly one contact then I could write something like: from customer in customers join contact in contacts on customer.PrimaryContactId equals contact.id select ... ...which would be translated into something like: SELECT ... FROM Customer INNER JOIN Contact ON Customer.FirstSalesPersonId = Contact.id But, because I want to join on both the contact fields, I want the SQL to look something like: SELECT ... FROM Customer INNER JOIN Contact ON Customer.FirstSalesPersonId = Contact.id OR Customer.SecondSalesPersonId = Contact.id How can I write a Linq expression to do that?

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• Big Data – Is Big Data Relevant to me? – Big Data Questionnaires – Guest Post by Vinod Kumar

  - by Pinal Dave

  This guest post is by Vinod Kumar. Vinod Kumar has worked with SQL Server extensively since joining the industry over a decade ago. Working on various versions of SQL Server 7.0, Oracle 7.3 and other database technologies – he now works with the Microsoft Technology Center (MTC) as a Technology Architect. Let us read the blog post in Vinod’s own voice. I think the series from Pinal is a good one for anyone planning to start on Big Data journey from the basics. In my daily customer interactions this buzz of “Big Data” always comes up, I react generally saying – “Sir, do you really have a ‘Big Data’ problem or do you have a big Data problem?” Generally, there is a silence in the air when I ask this question. Data is everywhere in organizations – be it big data, small data, all data and for few it is bad data which is same as no data :). Wow, don’t discount me as someone who opposes “Big Data”, I am a big supporter as much as I am a critic of the abuse of this term by the people. In this post, I wanted to let my mind flow so that you can also think in the direction I want you to see these concepts. In any case, this is not an exhaustive dump of what is in my mind – but you will surely get the drift how I am going to question Big Data terms from customers!!! Is Big Data Relevant to me? Many of my customers talk to me like blank whiteboard with no idea – “why Big Data”. They want to jump into the bandwagon of technology and they want to decipher insights from their unexplored data a.k.a. unstructured data with structured data. So what are these industry scenario’s that come to mind? Here are some of them: Financials Fraud detection: Banks and Credit cards are monitoring your spending habits on real-time basis. Customer Segmentation: applies in every industry from Banking to Retail to Aviation to Utility and others where they deal with end customer who consume their products and services. Customer Sentiment Analysis: Responding to negative brand perception on social or amplify the positive perception. Sales and Marketing Campaign: Understand the impact and get closer to customer delight. Call Center Analysis: attempt to take unstructured voice recordings and analyze them for content and sentiment. Medical Reduce Re-admissions: How to build a proactive follow-up engagements with patients. Patient Monitoring: How to track Inpatient, Out-Patient, Emergency Visits, Intensive Care Units etc. Preventive Care: Disease identification and Risk stratification is a very crucial business function for medical. Claims fraud detection: There is no precise dollars that one can put here, but this is a big thing for the medical field. Retail Customer Sentiment Analysis, Customer Care Centers, Campaign Management. Supply Chain Analysis: Every sensors and RFID data can be tracked for warehouse space optimization. Location based marketing: Based on where a check-in happens retail stores can be optimize their marketing. Telecom Price optimization and Plans, Finding Customer churn, Customer loyalty programs Call Detail Record (CDR) Analysis, Network optimizations, User Location analysis Customer Behavior Analysis Insurance Fraud Detection & Analysis, Pricing based on customer Sentiment Analysis, Loyalty Management Agents Analysis, Customer Value Management This list can go on to other areas like Utility, Manufacturing, Travel, ITES etc. So as you can see, there are obviously interesting use cases for each of these industry verticals. These are just representative list. Where to start? A lot of times I try to quiz customers on a number of dimensions before starting a Big Data conversation. Are you getting the data you need the way you want it and in a timely manner? Can you get in and analyze the data you need? How quickly is IT to respond to your BI Requests? How easily can you get at the data that you need to run your business/department/project? How are you currently measuring your business? Can you get the data you need to react WITHIN THE QUARTER to impact behaviors to meet your numbers or is it always “rear-view mirror?” How are you measuring: The Brand Customer Sentiment Your Competition Your Pricing Your performance Supply Chain Efficiencies Predictive product / service positioning What are your key challenges of driving collaboration across your global business?  What the challenges in innovation? What challenges are you facing in getting more information out of your data? Note: Garbage-in is Garbage-out. Hold good for all reporting / analytics requirements Big Data POCs? A number of customers get into the realm of setting a small team to work on Big Data – well it is a great start from an understanding point of view, but I tend to ask a number of other questions to such customers. Some of these common questions are: To what degree is your advanced analytics (natural language processing, sentiment analysis, predictive analytics and classification) paired with your Big Data’s efforts? Do you have dedicated resources exploring the possibilities of advanced analytics in Big Data for your business line? Do you plan to employ machine learning technology while doing Advanced Analytics? How is Social Media being monitored in your organization? What is your ability to scale in terms of storage and processing power? Do you have a system in place to sort incoming data in near real time by potential value, data quality, and use frequency? Do you use event-driven architecture to manage incoming data? Do you have specialized data services that can accommodate different formats, security, and the management requirements of multiple data sources? Is your organization currently using or considering in-memory analytics? To what degree are you able to correlate data from your Big Data infrastructure with that from your enterprise data warehouse? Have you extended the role of Data Stewards to include ownership of big data components? Do you prioritize data quality based on the source system (that is Facebook/Twitter data has lower quality thresholds than radio frequency identification (RFID) for a tracking system)? Do your retention policies consider the different legal responsibilities for storing Big Data for a specific amount of time? Do Data Scientists work in close collaboration with Data Stewards to ensure data quality? How is access to attributes of Big Data being given out in the organization? Are roles related to Big Data (Advanced Analyst, Data Scientist) clearly defined? How involved is risk management in the Big Data governance process? Is there a set of documented policies regarding Big Data governance? Is there an enforcement mechanism or approach to ensure that policies are followed? Who is the key sponsor for your Big Data governance program? (The CIO is best) Do you have defined policies surrounding the use of social media data for potential employees and customers, as well as the use of customer Geo-location data? How accessible are complex analytic routines to your user base? What is the level of involvement with outside vendors and third parties in regard to the planning and execution of Big Data projects? What programming technologies are utilized by your data warehouse/BI staff when working with Big Data? These are some of the important questions I ask each customer who is actively evaluating Big Data trends for their organizations. These questions give you a sense of direction where to start, what to use, how to secure, how to analyze and more. Sign off Any Big data is analysis is incomplete without a compelling story. The best way to understand this is to watch Hans Rosling – Gapminder (2:17 to 6:06) videos about the third world myths. Don’t get overwhelmed with the Big Data buzz word, the destination to what your data speaks is important. In this blog post, we did not particularly look at any Big Data technologies. This is a set of questionnaire one needs to keep in mind as they embark their journey of Big Data. I did write some of the basics in my blog: Big Data – Big Hype yet Big Opportunity. Do let me know if these questions make sense?  Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• What's new in the RightNow November 2012 release?

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  What new in the RightNow November 2012? In order to find out, please watch this tutorial with imbedded demonstration or read the November 2012 Release notes.   News Facts The November 2012 release of     Oracle’s RightNow CX Cloud Service marks the completion of development efforts for 2012 and continues Oracle’s commitment to enhancing the Oracle RightNow offering following the acquisition. New release delivers key capabilities designed to help organizations improve customer experiences in order to increase customer acquisition and retention, while reducing total cost of ownership. Part of the Oracle Cloud, Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service now integrates Oracle RightNow Chat Cloud Service with Oracle Engagement Engine Cloud Service, helping organizations intelligently and proactively engage with customers through the right channel at the right time. Chat solutions have emerged as an important component of a cross-channel customer experience strategy. According to Forrester Research, Inc., chat adoption has risen dramatically between 2009 and 2011 from 19% to 37%, and it has the highest satisfaction level of all customer service channels at 62% satisfaction. (*) To help companies deliver enhanced customer experiences, Oracle has made significant investments in Oracle RightNow Chat Cloud Service throughout 2012. With the addition of rules-based engagement to existing capabilities such as co-browse, mobile chat, and cross-channel knowledge integration with the contact center, all delivered via the cloud, Oracle RightNow Chat Cloud Service is differentiated as the industry-leading chat solution. The Oracle Cloud offers a broad portfolio of software as-a-service applications, including Oracle Customer Service and Support Cloud Service, which is based on the Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service. New Capabilities Key Oracle RightNow Chat Cloud Service and other cross-channel capabilities include: Chat Business Rules, with over 70 built-in rule conditions, leverage the Oracle Engagement Engine to help enable organizations capture rich visitor data and invoke complex actions and triggers. Chat Business Rules allow granular control over when to engage a customer via the chat channel based on customer behavior, customer profile information and operational information. Click-to-Call provides the option for a customer to engage with a live agent over the phone during the Web browsing experience. Chat Availability Controls provide organizations with the ability to throttle volume through the chat channel based on real-time agent availability and wait time thresholds. This ability to manage the channel more efficiently allows organizations to provide a better experience to customers using the chat channel. Strategic and Operational Chat Channel Analytics provide better insight into channel and agent productivity and utilization and effectiveness with both out-of-the-box reports and ad hoc reports. New chat channel analytics provide comprehensive metrics with full data transparency. Background Service Updates improve high availability metrics for Oracle RightNow Chat Cloud Service during service update periods, setting the industry leading standard for sales and service delivery to customers via the chat channel. Additional Capabilities include: Improved Web developer tools for more efficient self-service user interface design Improved administration for enhanced user sessions management Increased cross-channel community collaboration Enhanced extensibility widgets and syndication management Streamlined content management and analytics capabilities Read the full announcement here

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• Is there value in unit testing auto implemented properties

  - by ahsteele

  It seems exceptionally heavy handed but going by the rule anything publicly available should be tested should auto-implemented properties be tested? Customer Class public class Customer { public string EmailAddr { get; set; } } Tested by [TestClass] public class CustomerTests : TestClassBase { [TestMethod] public void CanSetCustomerEmailAddress() { //Arrange Customer customer = new Customer(); //Act customer.EmailAddr = "[email protected]"; //Assert Assert.AreEqual("[email protected]", customer.EmailAddr); } }

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• Dynamic swappable Data Access Layer

  - by Andy

  I'm writing a data driven WPF client. The client will typically pull data from a WCF service, which queries a SQL db, but I'd like the option to pull the data directly from SQL or other arbitrary data sources. I've come up with this design and would like to hear your opinion on whether it is the best design. First, we have some data object we'd like to extract from SQL. // The Data Object with a single property public class Customer { private string m_Name = string.Empty; public string Name { get { return m_Name; } set { m_Name = value;} } } Then I plan on using an interface which all data access layers should implement. Suppose one could also use an abstract class. Thoughts? // The interface with a single method interface ICustomerFacade { List<Customer> GetAll(); } One can create a SQL implementation. // Sql Implementation public class SqlCustomrFacade : ICustomerFacade { public List<Customer> GetAll() { // Query SQL db and return something useful // ... return new List<Customer>(); } } We can also create a WCF implementation. The problem with WCF is is that it doesn't use the same data object. It creates its own local version, so we would have to copy the details over somehow. I suppose one could use reflection to copy the values of similar fields across. Thoughts? // Wcf Implementation public class WcfCustomrFacade : ICustomerFacade { public List<Customer> GetAll() { // Get date from the Wcf Service (not defined here) List<WcfService.Customer> wcfCustomers = wcfService.GetAllCustomers(); // The list we're going to return List<Customer> customers = new List<Customer>(); // This is horrible foreach(WcfService.Customer wcfCustomer in wcfCustomers) { Customer customer = new Customer(); customer.Name = wcfCustomer.Name; customers.Add(customer); } return customers; } } I also plan on using a factory to decide which facade to use. // Factory pattern public class FacadeFactory() { public static ICustomerFacade CreateCustomerFacade() { // Determine the facade to use if (ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["DAL"] == "Sql") return new SqlCustomrFacade(); else return new WcfCustomrFacade(); } } This is how the DAL would typically be used. // Test application public class MyApp { public static void Main() { ICustomerFacade cf = FacadeFactory.CreateCustomerFacade(); cf.GetAll(); } } I appreciate your thoughts and time.

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• WCF + json. WCF response invalid not expected string.

  - by Evgeny

  I have configured wcf service and method which return some structure. The problem that all symbols in response '\' begins with '/' Example: [ { "rel":"http:\/\/localhost:3354\/customer\/1\/order", "uri":"http:\/\/localhost:3354\/customer\/1\/order\/3" }, { "rel":"http:\/\/localhost:3354\/customer\/1\/order", "uri":"http:\/\/localhost:3354\/customer\/1\/order\/5" }, { "rel":"http:\/\/localhost:3354\/customer\/1\/order", "uri":"http:\/\/localhost:3354\/customer\/1\/order\/8" } ] And i return only http:\localhost:3354\customer\1\order ! Why that symbols added and how can i remove them?

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• Update single field

  - by 47

  I have a Customer class which has a representative field....this field is initially blank but when the user opens up the details page of the chosen customer, they'll be given the open of representing this customer by clicking on a link. The template layout I was thinking of is this: <strong>Representative: </strong> {% if customer.representative %} {{ customer.representative }} {% else %} <a href="{% url representCustomer customer.id %}">Represent this customer.</a> {% endif %} All that remains is the view to effect this...this is where I'm stuck.

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• Updating a sql server table with data from another table

  - by David G

  I have two basic SQL Server tables: Customer (ID [pk], AddressLine1, AddressLine2, AddressCity, AddressDistrict, AddressPostalCode) CustomerAddress(ID [pk], CustomerID [fk], Line1, Line2, City, District, PostalCode) CustomerAddress contains multiple addresses for the Customer record. For each Customer record I want to merge the most recent CustomerAddress record where most recent is determined by the highest CustomerAddress ID value. I've currently got the following: UPDATE Customer SET AddressLine1 = CustomerAddress.Line1, AddressPostalCode = CustomerAddress.PostalCode FROM Customer, CustomerAddress WHERE Customer.ID = CustomerAddress.CustomerID which works but how can I ensure that the most recent (highest ID) CustomerAddress record is selected to update the Customer table?

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• "Has Oracle written the script for CRM success?" - Anthony Lye on Customer Experience at BAFTA

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  Anthony Lye showcased Oracle Fusion CRM at a BAFTA gathering, and MyCustomer.com covered the story under the title of "Has Oracle written the script for CRM success?' According to MyCustomer.com, "Oracle's SVP of CRM Anthony Lye set the scene for the event, suggesting products are becoming commoditized, so that the only way to differentiate is through the relationship with the customer. But he warned that "customers are more and more in control of that relationship, so you have to provide great experiences for them." "The quickest win within your organization to create a single view is to connect your marketing organization with your selling organization, align goals, processes, people and technology," Anthony explained.   "And this is a transition that is already happening - "VPs of marketing have started turning up in the same meetings as VPs of sales, we have started to see that they want to work together" - but this convergence needs nurturing." "In Fusion there are capabilities to align the organisation - we enable marketing on the same platform to build campaigns connected to sales stages. It can affect leads and opportunities at the top end of the funnel. And the selling organisation can take advantage of marketing content - the materials that are exclusively within marketing can now be used by sales. Your sales teams have been campaigning forever, but it's usually by email, it isn't aligned with the corporate message and it's being sent to people it shouldn't. By aligning them we can increase output and the quality of that output." Anthony concluded: "Operating in a disconnected fashion having two distinct systems will cost you time and money. So we feel there's a material advantage in a solution like this." Enjoy the full story at http://www.mycustomer.com/topic/marketing/has-oracle-written-script-crm-success/139958

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• WebCenter Customer Advisory Board meetings kick off Oracle Open World 2012!

  - by Lance711

  Welcome to OpenWorld! OpenWorld 2012 got underway today with a series of meetings with the members of the WebCenter Customer Advisory Board. Led by the WebCenter Product Management team, these meetings are a great way for the product team and customers to directly interact and discuss real-life business challenges, product details and to discuss upcoming features and functionality. This year, board members participated in discussions around live demos around product enhancements that will be featured throughout the coming week. Highlights included a variety of new mobile and social solutions, a great new user interface for WebCenter Content plus new Portal and Sites functionality that makes the experience for the everyday user a lot more pleasant. The day kicked off with Roel Stalman, VP of Product Management, giving a detailed overview of what’s new in WebCenter. Given all the improvements to discuss, this session went over 2 hours! Roel showcased the brand new UI for Content, Portal and Sites. He also gave live demos of the new mobile apps for WebCenter Content, Portal and the Oracle Social Network.  The attendees then broke into sub-groups in order to deep-dive with Product Management for the Portal, Sites, and Content product areas on specific functionality and application integrations. If you are here in San Francisco this week for OpenWorld, I definitely recommend stopping by the WebCenter area in the Moscone West Exhibition Hall to see some of this new functionality for yourself. And be sure to check out the WebCenter sessions throughout the week as those give us a chance to discuss direction and strategy, answer your questions and get your feedback and ideas. For those of you could not make it to OpenWorld this year, we miss you! You can stay in touch with what is happening via this blog and by following #oow and #webcenter on Twitter. Additionally, we will be rolling out details on upcoming products and release info over the coming months via this blog and web seminars. Stay tuned!

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• Null Values And The T-SQL IN Operator

  - by Jesse

  I came across some unexpected behavior while troubleshooting a failing test the other day that took me long enough to figure out that I thought it was worth sharing here. I finally traced the failing test back to a SELECT statement in a stored procedure that was using the IN t-sql operator to exclude a certain set of values. Here’s a very simple example table to illustrate the issue: Customers CustomerId INT, NOT NULL, Primary Key CustomerName nvarchar(100) NOT NULL SalesRegionId INT NULL   The ‘SalesRegionId’ column contains a number representing the sales region that the customer belongs to. This column is nullable because new customers get created all the time but assigning them to sales regions is a process that is handled by a regional manager on a periodic basis. For the purposes of this example, the Customers table currently has the following rows: CustomerId CustomerName SalesRegionId 1 Customer A 1 2 Customer B NULL 3 Customer C 4 4 Customer D 2 5 Customer E 3   How could we write a query against this table for all customers that are NOT in sales regions 2 or 4? You might try something like this: 1: SELECT 2: CustomerId, 3: CustomerName, 4: SalesRegionId 5: FROM Customers 6: WHERE SalesRegionId NOT IN (2,4)   Will this work? In short, no; at least not in the way that you might expect. Here’s what this query will return given the example data we’re working with: CustomerId CustomerName SalesRegionId 1 Customer A 1 5 Customer E 5   I was expecting that this query would also return ‘Customer B’, since that customer has a NULL SalesRegionId. In my mind, having a customer with no sales region should be included in a set of customers that are not in sales regions 2 or 4.When I first started troubleshooting my issue I made note of the fact that this query should probably be re-written without the NOT IN clause, but I didn’t suspect that the NOT IN clause was actually the source of the issue. This particular query was only one minor piece in a much larger process that was being exercised via an automated integration test and I simply made a poor assumption that the NOT IN would work the way that I thought it should. So why doesn’t this work the way that I thought it should? From the MSDN documentation on the t-sql IN operator: If the value of test_expression is equal to any value returned by subquery or is equal to any expression from the comma-separated list, the result value is TRUE; otherwise, the result value is FALSE. Using NOT IN negates the subquery value or expression. The key phrase out of that quote is, “… is equal to any expression from the comma-separated list…”. The NULL SalesRegionId isn’t included in the NOT IN because of how NULL values are handled in equality comparisons. From the MSDN documentation on ANSI_NULLS: The SQL-92 standard requires that an equals (=) or not equal to (<>) comparison against a null value evaluates to FALSE. When SET ANSI_NULLS is ON, a SELECT statement using WHERE column_name = NULL returns zero rows even if there are null values in column_name. A SELECT statement using WHERE column_name <> NULL returns zero rows even if there are nonnull values in column_name. In fact, the MSDN documentation on the IN operator includes the following blurb about using NULL values in IN sub-queries or expressions that are used with the IN operator: Any null values returned by subquery or expression that are compared to test_expression using IN or NOT IN return UNKNOWN. Using null values in together with IN or NOT IN can produce unexpected results. If I were to include a ‘SET ANSI_NULLS OFF’ command right above my SELECT statement I would get ‘Customer B’ returned in the results, but that’s definitely not the right way to deal with this. We could re-write the query to explicitly include the NULL value in the WHERE clause: 1: SELECT 2: CustomerId, 3: CustomerName, 4: SalesRegionId 5: FROM Customers 6: WHERE (SalesRegionId NOT IN (2,4) OR SalesRegionId IS NULL)   This query works and properly includes ‘Customer B’ in the results, but I ultimately opted to re-write the query using a LEFT OUTER JOIN against a table variable containing all of the values that I wanted to exclude because, in my case, there could potentially be several hundred values to be excluded. If we were to apply the same refactoring to our simple sales region example we’d end up with: 1: DECLARE @regionsToIgnore TABLE (IgnoredRegionId INT) 2: INSERT @regionsToIgnore values (2),(4) 3:  4: SELECT 5: c.CustomerId, 6: c.CustomerName, 7: c.SalesRegionId 8: FROM Customers c 9: LEFT OUTER JOIN @regionsToIgnore r ON r.IgnoredRegionId = c.SalesRegionId 10: WHERE r.IgnoredRegionId IS NULL By performing a LEFT OUTER JOIN from Customers to the @regionsToIgnore table variable we can simply exclude any rows where the IgnoredRegionId is null, as those represent customers that DO NOT appear in the ignored regions list. This approach will likely perform better if the number of sales regions to ignore gets very large and it also will correctly include any customers that do not yet have a sales region.

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• NINTENDO, EDCON and ALLEGIS GROUP @ Oracle Open World 2012 Conference Session (CON9418): The Business Case for Oracle Exalogic: A Customer Perspective

  - by Sanjeev Sharma

   Are you looking to deliver breakthrough performance for packaged and custom  applications? For many front-office applications such as Oracle WebCenter Sites, Oracle Transportation Management, and Oracle’s ATG and Siebel product families,  improved  performance leads directly to greater revenue or cost savings from the business - a  compelling  proposition. For back-office applications, improved performance has tangible benefits  in terms of  footprint reductions. For all applications, Oracle Exalogic and Oracle Exadata provide an engineered solution that provides shorter time to value and lower operational costs.  Edcon is a leading clothing, footwear and textiles (CFT) retailing group in southern Africa trading through a range of retail formats. The Company has grown from opening it's first store in 1929, to ten retail brands trading in over 1000 stores in South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Swaziland and Lesotho. Edcon's retail business has, through recent acquisitions, added top stationery and houseware brands as well as general merchandise to its CFT portfolio. Edcon was looking to consolidate their existing middleware components (Weblogic and Oracle SOA) and retail applications (Retek, Siebel and E-Business Suite) on a common platform and turned to Oracle Exalogic. With Oracle Exalogic, Edcon is able to derive significant HW CAPEX savings, improve response-time of core business applications and mitigate operating risk. Hear senior business leaders from Nintendo, Edcon and Allegis Group discuss how the business value of  leveraging Oracle Exalogic at the following conference session at Oracle Open World 2012: Session:  CON9418 - The Business Case for Oracle Exalogic: A Customer PerspectiveDate: Monday, 1 Oct, 2012Time: 1:45 pm - 2:45 pm (PST)Venue: Moscone South (306)

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• Remote host: can tracert, can telnet, can*not* browse: what gives?

  - by MacThePenguin

  One of my customers of the company I work for has made a change to their Internet connection, and now we can't connect to them any more from our LAN. To help me troubleshoot this issue, the network guy on the customer's site has configured their firewall so that a HTTPS connection to their public IP address is open to any IP. I should put https://<customer's IP> in my browser and get a web page. Well, it works from any network I've tried (even from my smartphone), just not from my company's LAN. I thought it may be an issue with our firewall (though I checked its rules and it allows outbound TCP port 443 to anywhere), so I just connected a PC directly to the network connection of our provider, bypassing out firewall completely, and still it didn't work (everything else worked). So I asked for help to our Internet provider's customer service, and they asked me to do a tracert to our customer's IP. The tracert is successful, as the final hop shown in the output is the host I want to reach. So they said there's no problem. :( I also tried telnet <customer's IP> 443 and that works as well: I get a blank page with the cursor blinking (I've tried using another random port and that gives me an error message, as it should). Still, from any browser of any PC in my LAN I can't open that URL. I tried checking the network traffic with Wireshark: I see the packages going through and answers coming back, thought the packets I see passing are far less than they are if I successfully connect to another HTTPS website. See the attached screenshot: I had to blur the IPs, anyway the longer string is my PC's local IP address, the shorter one is the customer's public IP. I don't know what else to try. This is the only IP doing this... Any idea what could I try to find a solution to this issue? Thanks, let me know if you need further details. Edit: when I say "it doesn't work" I mean: the page doesn't open, the browser keeps loading for a long time and eventually shows an error saying that the page cannot be opened. I'm not in my office now so I can't paste the exact message, but it's the usual message you get when the browser reaches its timeout. When I say "it works", I mean the browser loads and shows a webpage (it's the logon page for the customers' firewall admin interface: so there's the firewall brand's logo and there are fields to enter a user id and a password). Update 13/09/2012: tried again to connect to the customer's network through our Internet connection without a firewall. This is what I did: Run a Kubuntu 12.04 live distro on a spare laptop; Updated all the packages I could and installed WireShark; Attached it to my LAN and verified that I couldn't open https://<customer's IP>. Verified that the Wireshark trace for this attempt was the same as the one I've already posted; Verified that I could connect to another customer's host using rdesktop (it worked); Tried to rdesktop to <customer's IP>, here's the output: kubuntu@kubuntu:/etc$ rdesktop <customer's IP> Autoselected keyboard map en-us ERROR: recv: Connection reset by peer Disconnected the laptop from the LAN; Disconnected the firewall from the Extranet connection, connected the laptop instead. Set its network configuration so that I could access the Internet; Verified that I could connect to other websites in http and https and in RDP to other customers' hosts - it all worked as expected; Verified that I could still traceroute to <customer's IP>: I could; Verified that I still couldn't open https://<customer's IP> (same exact result as before); Checked the WireShark trace for this attempt and noticed a different behaviour: I could see packets going out to the customer's IP, but no replies at all; Tried to run rdesktop again, with a slightly different result: kubuntu@kubuntu:/etc/network$ rdesktop <customer's IP> Autoselected keyboard map en-us ERROR: <customer's IP>: unable to connect Finally gave up, put everything back as it was before, turned off the laptop and lost the WireShark traces I had saved. :( I still remember them very well though. :) Can you get anything out of it? Thank you very much. Update 12/09/2012 n.2: I followed the suggestion by MadHatter in the comments. From inside the firewall, this is what I get: user@ubuntu-mantis:~$ openssl s_client -connect <customer's IP>:443 CONNECTED(00000003) If I now type GET / the output pauses for several seconds and then I get: write:errno=104 I'm going to try the same, but bypassing the firewall, as soon as I can. Thanks. Update 12/09/2012 n.3: So, I think ISA Server is altering the results of my tests... I tried installing Wireshark directly on the firewall and monitoring the packets on the Extranet network card. When the destination is the customer's IP, whatever service I try to connect to (HTTPS, RDP or SAProuter), I can only see outbound packets and no response packets whatsoever from their side. It looks like ISA Server is "faking" the remote server's replies, that's why I get a connection using telnet or the openSSL client. This is the wireshark trace from inside our LAN: But this is the trace on the Extranet network card: This makes a bit more sense... I'll send this info to the customer's tech and see if he can make anything out of it. Thanks to all that took the time to read my question and post suggestions. I'll update this post again.

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• T-SQL select where and group by date

  - by bconlon

  T-SQL has never been my favorite language, but I need to use it on a fairly regular basis and every time I seem to Google the same things. So if I add it here, it might help others with the same issues, but it will also save me time later as I will know where to look for the answers!! 1. How do I SELECT FROM WHERE to filter on a DateTime column? As it happens this is easy but I always forget. You just put the DATE value in single quotes and in standard format: SELECT StartDate FROM Customer WHERE StartDate >= '2011-01-01' ORDER BY StartDate 2. How do I then GROUP BY and get a count by StartDate? Bit trickier, but you can use the built in DATEADD and DATEDIFF to set the TIME part to midnight, allowing the GROUP BY to have a consistent value to work on: SELECT DATEADD (d, DATEDIFF(d, 0, StartDate),0) [Customer Creation Date], COUNT(*) [Number Of New Customers] FROM Customer WHERE StartDate >= '2011-01-01' GROUP BY DATEADD(d, DATEDIFF(d, 0, StartDate),0) ORDER BY [Customer Creation Date] Note: [Customer Creation Date] and [Number Of New Customers] column alias just provide more readable column headers. 3. Finally, how can you format the DATETIME to only show the DATE part (after all the TIME part is now always midnight)? The built in CONVERT function allows you to convert the DATETIME to a CHAR array using a specific format. The format is a bit arbitrary and needs looking up, but 101 is the U.S. standard mm/dd/yyyy, and 103 is the U.K. standard dd/mm/yyyy. SELECT CONVERT(CHAR(10), DATEADD(d, DATEDIFF(d, 0, StartDate),0), 103) [Customer Creation Date], COUNT(*) [Number Of New Customers] FROM Customer WHERE StartDate >= '2011-01-01' GROUP BY DATEADD(d, DATEDIFF(d, 0, StartDate),0) ORDER BY [Customer Creation Date]  #

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• Are null references really a bad thing?

  - by Tim Goodman

  I've heard it said that the inclusion of null references in programming languages is the "billion dollar mistake". But why? Sure, they can cause NullReferenceExceptions, but so what? Any element of the language can be a source of errors if used improperly. And what's the alternative? I suppose instead of saying this: Customer c = Customer.GetByLastName("Goodman"); // returns null if not found if (c != null) { Console.WriteLine(c.FirstName + " " + c.LastName + " is awesome!"); } else { Console.WriteLine("There was no customer named Goodman. How lame!"); } You could say this: if (Customer.ExistsWithLastName("Goodman")) { Customer c = Customer.GetByLastName("Goodman") // throws error if not found Console.WriteLine(c.FirstName + " " + c.LastName + " is awesome!"); } else { Console.WriteLine("There was no customer named Goodman. How lame!"); } But how is that better? Either way, if you forget to check that the customer exists, you get an exception. I suppose that a CustomerNotFoundException is a bit easier to debug than a NullReferenceException by virtue of being more descriptive. Is that all there is to it?

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