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• Take Advantage of Oracle's Ongoing Assurance Effort!

  - by eric.maurice

  Hi, this is Eric Maurice again! A few years ago, I posted a blog entry, which discussed the psychology of patching. The point of this blog entry was that a natural tendency existed for systems and database administrators to be reluctant to apply patches, even security patches, because of the fear of "breaking" the system. Unfortunately, this belief in the principle "if it ain't broke, don't fix it!" creates significant risks for organizations. Running systems without applying the proper security patches can greatly compromise the security posture of the organization because the security controls available in the affected system may be compromised as a result of the existence of the unfixed vulnerabilities. As a result, Oracle continues to strongly recommend that customers apply all security fixes as soon as possible. Most recently, I have had a number of conversations with customers who questioned the need to upgrade their highly stable but otherwise unsupported Oracle systems. These customers wanted to know more about the kind of security risks they were exposed to, by running obsolete versions of Oracle software. As per Oracle Support Policies, Critical Patch Updates are produced for currently supported products. In other words, Critical Patch Updates are not created by Oracle for product versions that are no longer covered under the Premier Support or Extended Support phases of the Lifetime Support Policy. One statement used in each Critical Patch Update Advisory is particularly important: "We recommend that customers upgrade to a supported version of Oracle products in order to obtain patches. Unsupported products, releases and versions are not tested for the presence of vulnerabilities addressed by this Critical Patch Update. However, it is likely that earlier versions of affected releases are also affected by these vulnerabilities." The purpose of this warning is to inform Oracle customers that a number of the vulnerabilities fixed in each Critical Patch Update may affect older versions of a specific product line. In other words, each Critical Patch Update provides a number of fixes for currently supported versions of a given product line (this information is listed for each bug in the Risk Matrices of the Critical Patch Update Advisory), but the unsupported versions in the same product line, while they may be affected by the vulnerabilities, will not receive the fixes, and are therefore vulnerable to attacks. The risk assumed by organizations wishing to remain on unsupported versions is amplified by the behavior of malicious hackers, who typically will attempt to, and sometimes succeed in, reverse-engineering the content of vendors' security fixes. As a result, it is not uncommon for exploits to be published soon after Oracle discloses vulnerabilities with the release of a Critical Patch Update or Security Alert. Let's consider now the nature of the vulnerabilities that may exist in obsolete versions of Oracle software. A number of severe vulnerabilities have been fixed by Oracle over the years. While Oracle does not test unsupported products, releases and versions for the presence of vulnerabilities addressed by each Critical Patch Update, it should be assumed that a number of the vulnerabilities fixed with the Critical Patch Update program do exist in unsupported versions (regardless of the product considered). The most severe vulnerabilities fixed in past Critical Patch Updates may result in full compromise of the targeted systems, down to the OS level, by remote and unauthenticated users (these vulnerabilities receive a CVSS Base Score of 10.0) or almost as critically, may result in the compromise of the affected systems (without compromising the underlying OS) by a remote and unauthenticated users (these vulnerabilities receive a CVSS Base Score of 7.5). Such vulnerabilities may result in complete takeover of the targeted machine (for the CVSS 10.0), or may result in allowing the attacker the ability to create a denial of service against the affected system or even hijacking or stealing all the data hosted by the compromised system (for the CVSS 7.5). The bottom line is that organizations should assume the worst case: that the most critical vulnerabilities are present in their unsupported version; therefore, it is Oracle's recommendation that all organizations move to supported systems and apply security patches in a timely fashion. Organizations that currently run supported versions but may be late in their security patch release level can quickly catch up because most Critical Patch Updates are cumulative. With a few exceptions noted in Oracle's Critical Patch Update Advisory, the application of the most recent Critical Patch Update will bring these products to current security patch level and provide the organization with the best possible security posture for their patch level. Furthermore, organizations are encouraged to upgrade to most recent versions as this will greatly improve their security posture. At Oracle, our security fixing policies state that security fixes are produced for the main code line first, and as a result, our products benefit from the mistakes made in previous version(s). Our ongoing assurance effort ensures that we work diligently to fix the vulnerabilities we find, and aim at constantly improving the security posture our products provide by default. Patch sets include numerous in-depth fixes in addition to those delivered through the Critical Patch Update and, in certain instances, important security fixes require major architectural changes that can only be included in new product releases (and cannot be backported through the Critical Patch Update program). For More Information: • Mary Ann Davidson is giving a webcast interview on Oracle Software Security Assurance on February 24th. The registration link for attending this webcast is located at http://event.on24.com/r.htm?e=280304&s=1&k=6A7152F62313CA09F77EBCEEA9B6294F&partnerref=EricMblog • A blog entry discussing Oracle's practices for ensuring the quality of Critical patch Updates can be found at http://blogs.oracle.com/security/2009/07/ensuring_critical_patch_update_quality.html • The blog entry "To patch or not to patch" is located at http://blogs.oracle.com/security/2008/01/to_patch_or_not_to_patch.html • Oracle's Support Policies are located at http://www.oracle.com/us/support/policies/index.html • The Critical Patch Update & Security Alert page is located at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/security/alerts-086861.html

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• Interview with Ronald Bradford about MySQL Connect

  - by Keith Larson

  Ronald Bradford,  an Oracle ACE Director has been busy working with  database consulting, book writing (EffectiveMySQL) while traveling and speaking around the world in support of MySQL. I was able to take some of his time to get an interview on this thoughts about theMySQL Connect conference. Keith Larson: What where your thoughts when you heard that Oracle was going to provide the community the MySQL Conference ?Ronald Bradford: Oracle has already been providing various different local community events including OTN Tech Days and  MySQL community days. These are great for local regions both in the US and abroad.  In previous years there has been an increase of content at Oracle Open World, however that benefits the Oracle community far more then the MySQL community.  It is good to see that Oracle is realizing the benefit in providing a large scale dedicated event for the MySQL community that includes speakers from the MySQL development teams, invested companies in the ecosystem and other community evangelists.I fully expect a successful event and look forward to hopefully seeing MySQL Connect at the upcoming Brazil and Japan OOW conferences and perhaps an event on the East Coast.Keith Larson: Since you are part of the content committee, what did you think of the submissions that were received during call for papers?Ronald Bradford: There was a large number of quality submissions to the number of available presentation sessions. As with the previous years as a committee member for the annual MySQL conference, there is always a large variety of common cornerstone MySQL features as well as new products and upcoming companies sharing their MySQL experiences. All of the usual major players in the ecosystem will in presenting at MySQL Connect including Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Continuent, Percona, Tokutek, Sphinx and Amazon to name a few.  This is ensuring the event will have a large number of quality speakers and a difficult time in choosing what to attend. Keith Larson: What sessions do you look forwarding to attending? Ronald Bradford: As with most quality conferences you can only be in one place at one time, so with multiple tracks per session it is always difficult to decide. The continued work and success with MySQL Cluster, and with a number of sessions I am sure will be popular. The features that interest me the most are around the optimizer, where there are several sessions on new features, and on the importance of backups. There are three presentations in this area to choose from.Keith Larson: Are you going to cover any of the content in your books at your MySQL Connect sessions?Ronald Bradford: I will be giving two presentations at MySQL Connect. The first will include the techniques available for creating better indexes where I will be touching on some aspects of the first Effective MySQL book on Optimizing SQL Statements.  In my second presentation from experiences of managing 500+ AWS MySQL instances, I will be touching on areas including SQL tuning, backup and recovery and scale out with replication.   These are the key topics of the initial books in the Effective MySQL series that focus on performance, scalability and business continuity.  The books however cover a far greater amount of detail then can be presented in a 1 hour session. Keith Larson: What features of MySQL 5.6 do you look forward to the most ?Ronald Bradford: I am very impressed with the optimizer trace feature. The ability to see exposed information is invaluable not just for MySQL 5.6, but to also apply information discerned for optimizing SQL statements in earlier versions of MySQL.  Not everybody understands that it is easy to deploy a MySQL 5.6 slave into an existing topology running an older version if MySQL for evaluation of many new features.  You can use the new mysqlbinlog streaming feature for duplicating master binary logs on an older version with a MySQL 5.6 slave.  The improvements in instrumentation in the Performance Schema are exciting.   However, as with my upcoming Replication Techniques in Depth title, that will be available for sale at MySQL Connect, there are numerous replication features, some long overdue with provide significant management benefits. Crash Save Slaves, Global transaction Identifiers (GTID)  and checksums just to mention a few.Keith Larson: You have been to numerous conferences, what would you recommend for people at the conference? Ronald Bradford: Make the time to meet and introduce yourself to the speakers that cover the topics that most interest you. The MySQL ecosystem has a very strong community.  The relationships you build with presenters, developers and architects in MySQL can be invaluable, however they are created over time. Get to know these people, interact with them over time.  This is the opportunity to learn more then just the content from a 1 hour session. Keith Larson: Any additional tips to handling the long hours ? Ronald Bradford: Conferences can be hard, especially with all the post event drinking.  This is a two day event and I am sure will include additional events on Friday and Saturday night so come well prepared, and leave work behind. Take the time to learn something new.   You can always catchup on sleep later. Keith Larson: Thank you so much for taking some time to do this I look forward to seeing you at the MySQL Connect conference.  Please stay tuned here for more updates on MySQL. 

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• Setting useLegacyV2RuntimeActivationPolicy At Runtime

  - by Reed

  Version 4.0 of the .NET Framework included a new CLR which is almost entirely backwards compatible with the 2.0 version of the CLR.  However, by default, mixed-mode assemblies targeting .NET 3.5sp1 and earlier will fail to load in a .NET 4 application.  Fixing this requires setting useLegacyV2RuntimeActivationPolicy in your app.Config for the application.  While there are many good reasons for this decision, there are times when this is extremely frustrating, especially when writing a library.  As such, there are (rare) times when it would be beneficial to set this in code, at runtime, as well as verify that it’s running correctly prior to receiving a FileLoadException. Typically, loading a pre-.NET 4 mixed mode assembly is handled simply by changing your app.Config file, and including the relevant attribute in the startup element: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <configuration> <startup useLegacyV2RuntimeActivationPolicy="true"> <supportedRuntime version="v4.0"/> </startup> </configuration> .csharpcode { background-color: #ffffff; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; color: black; font-size: small } .csharpcode pre { background-color: #ffffff; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; color: black; font-size: small } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000 } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080 } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0 } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633 } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00 } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000 } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000 } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; margin: 0em; width: 100% } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060 } This causes your application to run correctly, and load the older, mixed-mode assembly without issues. For full details on what’s happening here and why, I recommend reading Mark Miller’s detailed explanation of this attribute and the reasoning behind it. Before I show any code, let me say: I strongly recommend using the official approach of using app.config to set this policy. That being said, there are (rare) times when, for one reason or another, changing the application configuration file is less than ideal. While this is the supported approach to handling this issue, the CLR Hosting API includes a means of setting this programmatically via the ICLRRuntimeInfo interface.  Normally, this is used if you’re hosting the CLR in a native application in order to set this, at runtime, prior to loading the assemblies.  However, the F# Samples include a nice trick showing how to load this API and bind this policy, at runtime.  This was required in order to host the Managed DirectX API, which is built against an older version of the CLR. This is fairly easy to port to C#.  Instead of a direct port, I also added a little addition – by trapping the COM exception received if unable to bind (which will occur if the 2.0 CLR is already bound), I also allow a runtime check of whether this property was setup properly: public static class RuntimePolicyHelper { public static bool LegacyV2RuntimeEnabledSuccessfully { get; private set; } static RuntimePolicyHelper() { ICLRRuntimeInfo clrRuntimeInfo = (ICLRRuntimeInfo)RuntimeEnvironment.GetRuntimeInterfaceAsObject( Guid.Empty, typeof(ICLRRuntimeInfo).GUID); try { clrRuntimeInfo.BindAsLegacyV2Runtime(); LegacyV2RuntimeEnabledSuccessfully = true; } catch (COMException) { // This occurs with an HRESULT meaning // "A different runtime was already bound to the legacy CLR version 2 activation policy." LegacyV2RuntimeEnabledSuccessfully = false; } } [ComImport] [InterfaceType(ComInterfaceType.InterfaceIsIUnknown)] [Guid("BD39D1D2-BA2F-486A-89B0-B4B0CB466891")] private interface ICLRRuntimeInfo { void xGetVersionString(); void xGetRuntimeDirectory(); void xIsLoaded(); void xIsLoadable(); void xLoadErrorString(); void xLoadLibrary(); void xGetProcAddress(); void xGetInterface(); void xSetDefaultStartupFlags(); void xGetDefaultStartupFlags(); [MethodImpl(MethodImplOptions.InternalCall, MethodCodeType = MethodCodeType.Runtime)] void BindAsLegacyV2Runtime(); } } Using this, it’s possible to not only set this at runtime, but also verify, prior to loading your mixed mode assembly, whether this will succeed. In my case, this was quite useful – I am working on a library purely for internal use which uses a numerical package that is supplied with both a completely managed as well as a native solver.  The native solver uses a CLR 2 mixed-mode assembly, but is dramatically faster than the pure managed approach.  By checking RuntimePolicyHelper.LegacyV2RuntimeEnabledSuccessfully at runtime, I can decide whether to enable the native solver, and only do so if I successfully bound this policy. There are some tricks required here – To enable this sort of fallback behavior, you must make these checks in a type that doesn’t cause the mixed mode assembly to be loaded.  In my case, this forced me to encapsulate the library I was using entirely in a separate class, perform the check, then pass through the required calls to that class.  Otherwise, the library will load before the hosting process gets enabled, which in turn will fail. This code will also, of course, try to enable the runtime policy before the first time you use this class – which typically means just before the first time you check the boolean value.  As a result, checking this early on in the application is more likely to allow it to work. Finally, if you’re using a library, this has to be called prior to the 2.0 CLR loading.  This will cause it to fail if you try to use it to enable this policy in a plugin for most third party applications that don’t have their app.config setup properly, as they will likely have already loaded the 2.0 runtime. As an example, take a simple audio player.  The code below shows how this can be used to properly, at runtime, only use the “native” API if this will succeed, and fallback (or raise a nicer exception) if this will fail: public class AudioPlayer { private IAudioEngine audioEngine; public AudioPlayer() { if (RuntimePolicyHelper.LegacyV2RuntimeEnabledSuccessfully) { // This will load a CLR 2 mixed mode assembly this.audioEngine = new AudioEngineNative(); } else { this.audioEngine = new AudioEngineManaged(); } } public void Play(string filename) { this.audioEngine.Play(filename); } } Now – the warning: This approach works, but I would be very hesitant to use it in public facing production code, especially for anything other than initializing your own application.  While this should work in a library, using it has a very nasty side effect: you change the runtime policy of the executing application in a way that is very hidden and non-obvious.

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• Windows Phone Developer Spotlight: Nikolai Joukov

  - by Lori Lalonde

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/lorilalonde/archive/2014/06/04/windows-phone-developer-spotlight-nikolai-joukov.aspxAs part of an ongoing series, I plan to include a spotlight post on people within the community that are stars in their field and area of expertise. For my first spotlight post, I interviewed Nikolai Joukov, who is a regular attendee at my local area .NET User Group (CTTDNUG), and has also participated in many of the Mobile and Cloud workshops we have hosted over the past few years. Nikolai stood out immediately, because of his passion for developing mobile apps, his interest in continuous learning, and his drive to publish quality apps that people will find useful and entertaining. Background: Nikolai immigrated to Canada in 1995, and has been working in IT since 1997. He moved on to become an independent contractor in 2005, and has worked at various large scale organizations over the course of his career, including BMO, Enbridge, Economical Insurance, Equitable Life, Manulife and Sun Life. Nikolai is an accomplished Windows Phone and Windows Store publisher, with 11 published Windows Phone apps, and 8 published Windows Store apps. He has almost 6000 downloads and favourable reviews. Q & A with Nikolai How many years have you been developing Windows Phone apps? 2 years When did you develop your very first Windows Phone app, and what was it about? Actually, the very first app I wrote was for the Microsoft “Smart Phone” back in 2004. This phone was given to me by Microsoft during the Developers Days Conference in Toronto. It was some kind of experimental model named Smart Phone, but you had to use VB 3 to develop the applications. Needless to say, this was not very successful at that time. My app was a Stock Trades Calculator. Very primitive, but it was working for me. The phone was heavy and the battery barely lasted 4 hours. Microsoft stopped supporting it few months later and the phone stopped working shortly after, but I still have it as a souvenir. For Windows Phone, my first app was “Trip Packing Assistant”. This is a simple trip packing check list that allows you to list items by category, set required quantity of items, and mark off the item in the list when it is packed. I designed it for me and my wife Galina, since we love to travel and this program helps manage our list for us. How did you get started in Windows Phone development? I have to say thanks to our .NET User Group for introducing me to Windows Phone development. I was intrigued and decided to give it a try. In October 2012 during a 2 day training event that ObjectSharp hosted in London, I met Bruce Johnson. On his advice, I registered for Developer Movement, and it is was a good push to actually complete the apps that I started. You have a great series of travel guide apps both for Windows Phone and Windows Store. Tell us about how you came up with the idea to develop those apps and what process you went through to put it all together. Like I said earlier, my wife and I love to travel. Before I created Trip Packing Assistant, every time we were planning to travel somewhere new, Galina would spend 3-4 weeks doing research. She would create a Word document with all of the information. We didn’t want to have to carry our laptop with us all the time, so we printed out the Word document she created, and would take it with us. After we returned from the trip, we would bring back tons of pictures and materials. Then our friends started to ask us about our materials before they planned their trips to the same places we had visited. So I decided to give it a try and started making apps for Windows Phone and for Windows 8. I hope these applications will help people who are planning to travel. So, all of the pictures used in the travel apps you created were actually taken by you during these amazing trips? Yes Do you have another Windows Store/Windows Phone project in development right now? If so, can you give us a hint at what it will be about? I want to stay with travel apps for now. But this time I will try to write an app for us (Galina and I). Usually we go on the trip, then I write the apps after we have all this beautiful pictures in our hands. We are planning a trip to Rome. This app will not have the pictures, but I want to add a map with points of interest and all information that can be useful for us. Then we will go on our trip and test it on location. As well I am planning to work on my existing apps to make them better. What learning resources would you recommend for other developers that want to get started in Window Store and Windows Phone development? I would start with dev.windowsphone.com to get all tools and samples, also links to training materials. I like MVA (Microsoft Virtual Academy). Their videos are really useful and it is free. Pluralsight is good too but it is not free and I do not have a subscription anymore. Our .NET User Group meetings give good insights too. I went to all meetings and full day training events. When you start to develop your app, you need to do research for specific questions that arise during development. The Developer Portal and Nokia Developer are good resources too. Wrap Up Thanks Nikolai for participating in my first Spotlight blog post! Shown below is Nikolai’s publisher page in the Windows Phone Store and his publisher page in the Windows Store. Simply click on it to be taken to there to check out his portfolio of apps. Be sure to download his apps and try them out! They are all free! Nikolai’s Windows Phone apps   Nikolai’s Windows Store Apps

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• SQLAuthority News – Great Time Spent at Great Indian Developers Summit 2014

  - by Pinal Dave

  The Great Indian Developer Conference (GIDS) is one of the most popular annual event held in Bangalore. This year GIDS is scheduled on April 22, 25. I will be presented total four sessions at this event and each session is very different from each other. Here are the details of four of my sessions, which I presented there. Pluralsight Shades This event was a great event and I had fantastic fun presenting a technology over here. I was indeed very excited that along with me, I had many of my friends presenting at the event as well. I want to thank all of you to attend my session and having standing room every single time. I have already sent resources in my newsletter. You can sign up for the newsletter over here. Indexing is an Art I was amazed with the crowd present in the sessions at GIDS. There was a great interest in the subject of SQL Server and Performance Tuning. Audience at GIDS I believe event like such provides a great platform to meet and share knowledge. Pinal at Pluralsight Booth Here are the abstract of the sessions which I had presented. They were recorded so at some point in time they will be available, but if you want the content of all the courses immediately, I suggest you check out my video courses on the same subject on Pluralsight. Indexes, the Unsung Hero Relevant Pluralsight Course Slow Running Queries are the most common problem that developers face while working with SQL Server. While it is easy to blame SQL Server for unsatisfactory performance, the issue often persists with the way queries have been written, and how Indexes has been set up. The session will focus on the ways of identifying problems that slow down SQL Server, and Indexing tricks to fix them. Developers will walk out with scripts and knowledge that can be applied to their servers, immediately post the session. Indexes are the most crucial objects of the database. They are the first stop for any DBA and Developer when it is about performance tuning. There is a good side as well evil side to indexes. To master the art of performance tuning one has to understand the fundamentals of indexes and the best practices associated with the same. We will cover various aspects of Indexing such as Duplicate Index, Redundant Index, Missing Index as well as best practices around Indexes. SQL Server Performance Troubleshooting: Ancient Problems and Modern Solutions Relevant Pluralsight Course Many believe Performance Tuning and Troubleshooting is an art which has been lost in time. However, truth is that art has evolved with time and there are more tools and techniques to overcome ancient troublesome scenarios. There are three major resources that when bottlenecked creates performance problems: CPU, IO, and Memory. In this session we will focus on High CPU scenarios detection and their resolutions. If time permits we will cover other performance related tips and tricks. At the end of this session, attendees will have a clear idea as well as action items regarding what to do when facing any of the above resource intensive scenarios. Developers will walk out with scripts and knowledge that can be applied to their servers, immediately post the session. To master the art of performance tuning one has to understand the fundamentals of performance, tuning and the best practices associated with the same. We will discuss about performance tuning in this session with the help of Demos. Pinal Dave at GIDS MySQL Performance Tuning – Unexplored Territory Relevant Pluralsight Course Performance is one of the most essential aspects of any application. Everyone wants their server to perform optimally and at the best efficiency. However, not many people talk about MySQL and Performance Tuning as it is an extremely unexplored territory. In this session, we will talk about how we can tune MySQL Performance. We will also try and cover other performance related tips and tricks. At the end of this session, attendees will not only have a clear idea, but also carry home action items regarding what to do when facing any of the above resource intensive scenarios. Developers will walk out with scripts and knowledge that can be applied to their servers, immediately post the session. To master the art of performance tuning one has to understand the fundamentals of performance, tuning and the best practices associated with the same. You will also witness some impressive performance tuning demos in this session. Hidden Secrets and Gems of SQL Server We Bet You Never Knew Relevant Pluralsight Course SQL Trio Session! It really amazes us every time when someone says SQL Server is an easy tool to handle and work with. Microsoft has done an amazing work in making working with complex relational database a breeze for developers and administrators alike. Though it looks like child’s play for some, the realities are far away from this notion. The basics and fundamentals though are simple and uniform across databases, the behavior and understanding the nuts and bolts of SQL Server is something we need to master over a period of time. With a collective experience of more than 30+ years amongst the speakers on databases, we will try to take a unique tour of various aspects of SQL Server and bring to you life lessons learnt from working with SQL Server. We will share some of the trade secrets of performance, configuration, new features, tuning, behaviors, T-SQL practices, common pitfalls, productivity tips on tools and more. This is a highly demo filled session for practical use if you are a SQL Server developer or an Administrator. The speakers will be able to stump you and give you answers on almost everything inside the Relational database called SQL Server. I personally attended the session of Vinod Kumar, Balmukund Lakhani, Abhishek Kumar and my favorite Govind Kanshi. Summary If you have missed this event here are two action items 1) Sign up for Resource Newsletter 2) Watch my video courses on Pluralsight Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: MySQL, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Author Visit, SQLAuthority News, T SQL Tagged: GIDS

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• Goals for 2010 Retrospective

  - by Brian Jackett

  As we approach the end of 2010 I’d like to take a  few minutes to reflect back on this past year and revisit the goals that I set for myself at the beginning of the year (click here to see those goals).  I feel it is important to track your goals not only to see if you accomplished them but also to see what new directions in life you pursued.  Once we enter into 2011 I’ll follow up with a new post on goals for the new year. Professional Blog – This year I intended to write at least 2 posts a month.  Looking back I far surpassed that goal by writing 47 posts (this one being my 48th).  As with many things in life, quantity does not mean quality.  A good example is a number of my posts announcing upcoming speaking engagements and providing links to presentation slides and scripts.  That aside, I like to at least keep content relatively fresh on this blog  which I was able to accomplish.  At the same time I’ve gotten much more comfortable in my blogging style and it has become much easier to write. Speaking – I didn’t define a clear goal for speaking engagements, but had a rough idea of wanting to speak at 2-3 events.  Once again I far exceeded that number by speaking at 10 separate events and delivering 12+ presentations.  I’m very thankful for all of the opportunities that I was given and all of the wonderful people I have met as a result. Volunteering – This year I intended to help out with the COSPUG (now Buckeye SPUG) steering committee and Stir Trek conference.  I fulfilled both goals and as well as taking on lead organizer duties for the first ever SharePoint Saturday Columbus.  Each of these events and groups turned out to be successful and I was glad to be a part of them all.  I look forward to continuing to volunteer with each next year in some capacity. Android Development – My goal for getting into Android development was a late addition, but one I didn’t necessarily fulfill.  I spent a couple nights downloading the tools, configuring my environment, and going through some “simple” tutorials.  I say “simple” because in my opinion the tutorials were not laid out very well, took a long time to get running properly, and confused me more than helped.  After about a week I was frustrated with the process and didn’t think it was a good use of my time.  On a side note, I’ve dabbled in Windows Phone 7 development over the past few months and have been very excited by how easy and intuitive it was to get started and develop some proof of concepts. Personal Getting in Shape – I had intended to play on recreational sports leagues and work out on a semi-regular basis.  For the most part I fulfilled this goal by playing on various softball and volleyball leagues as well as using the gym.  At the same time I had some major setbacks.  In the spring I badly sprained my ankle and got hit in the knee with a softball which kept me inactive for almost 2 months.  More recently I broke my knuckle (click here to read about it) which I am still recovering from. Volunteering – On the volunteering front I kept my commitments at my parish’s high school youth group.  As for other volunteering opportunities I got involved with a great organization called Columbus Gives Back (website).  I’ve volunteered with them a few times and really enjoy their goal to provide opportunities to people with busy schedules.  They  offer a variety of events typically after work hours and spread out around Columbus with no set commitments on time you need to put in.  If you have the time or motivation I highly recommend them. House/Condo – I had been thinking of buying a house or condo this past summer, but decided to extend my apartment lease for another year instead.  I have begun the search for a place in the past few weeks and am excited begin the process of owning a home. Conclusion     This year I was able to set and achieve many of my goals.  For next year I’ll try to put more specific numbers to all of my goals.  If any of you readers set goals for 2011 feel free to send me a link as I’d love to see what you are aiming to accomplish.  Have a great end of 2010 and best wishes for the start of 2011!       -Frog Out

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• CSM DX11 issues

  - by KaiserJohaan

  I got CSM to work in OpenGL, and now Im trying to do the same in directx. I'm using the same math library and all and I'm pretty much using the alghorithm straight off. I am using right-handed, column major matrices from GLM. The light is looking (-1, -1, -1). The problem I have is twofolds; For some reason, the ground floor is causing alot of (false) shadow artifacts, like the vast shadowed area you see. I confirmed this when I disabled the ground for the depth pass, but thats a hack more than anything else The shadows are inverted compared to the shadowmap. If you squint you can see the chairs shadows should be mirrored instead. This is the first cascade shadow map, in range of the alien and the chair: I can't figure out why this is. This is the depth pass: for (uint32_t cascadeIndex = 0; cascadeIndex < NUM_SHADOWMAP_CASCADES; cascadeIndex++) { mShadowmap.BindDepthView(context, cascadeIndex); CameraFrustrum cameraFrustrum = CalculateCameraFrustrum(degreesFOV, aspectRatio, nearDistArr[cascadeIndex], farDistArr[cascadeIndex], cameraViewMatrix); lightVPMatrices[cascadeIndex] = CreateDirLightVPMatrix(cameraFrustrum, lightDir); mVertexTransformPass.RenderMeshes(context, renderQueue, meshes, lightVPMatrices[cascadeIndex]); lightVPMatrices[cascadeIndex] = gBiasMatrix * lightVPMatrices[cascadeIndex]; farDistArr[cascadeIndex] = -farDistArr[cascadeIndex]; } CameraFrustrum CalculateCameraFrustrum(const float fovDegrees, const float aspectRatio, const float minDist, const float maxDist, const Mat4& cameraViewMatrix) { CameraFrustrum ret = { Vec4(1.0f, 1.0f, -1.0f, 1.0f), Vec4(1.0f, -1.0f, -1.0f, 1.0f), Vec4(-1.0f, -1.0f, -1.0f, 1.0f), Vec4(-1.0f, 1.0f, -1.0f, 1.0f), Vec4(1.0f, -1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f), Vec4(1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f), Vec4(-1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f), Vec4(-1.0f, -1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f), }; const Mat4 perspectiveMatrix = PerspectiveMatrixFov(fovDegrees, aspectRatio, minDist, maxDist); const Mat4 invMVP = glm::inverse(perspectiveMatrix * cameraViewMatrix); for (Vec4& corner : ret) { corner = invMVP * corner; corner /= corner.w; } return ret; } Mat4 CreateDirLightVPMatrix(const CameraFrustrum& cameraFrustrum, const Vec3& lightDir) { Mat4 lightViewMatrix = glm::lookAt(Vec3(0.0f), -glm::normalize(lightDir), Vec3(0.0f, -1.0f, 0.0f)); Vec4 transf = lightViewMatrix * cameraFrustrum[0]; float maxZ = transf.z, minZ = transf.z; float maxX = transf.x, minX = transf.x; float maxY = transf.y, minY = transf.y; for (uint32_t i = 1; i < 8; i++) { transf = lightViewMatrix * cameraFrustrum[i]; if (transf.z > maxZ) maxZ = transf.z; if (transf.z < minZ) minZ = transf.z; if (transf.x > maxX) maxX = transf.x; if (transf.x < minX) minX = transf.x; if (transf.y > maxY) maxY = transf.y; if (transf.y < minY) minY = transf.y; } Mat4 viewMatrix(lightViewMatrix); viewMatrix[3][0] = -(minX + maxX) * 0.5f; viewMatrix[3][1] = -(minY + maxY) * 0.5f; viewMatrix[3][2] = -(minZ + maxZ) * 0.5f; viewMatrix[0][3] = 0.0f; viewMatrix[1][3] = 0.0f; viewMatrix[2][3] = 0.0f; viewMatrix[3][3] = 1.0f; Vec3 halfExtents((maxX - minX) * 0.5, (maxY - minY) * 0.5, (maxZ - minZ) * 0.5); return OrthographicMatrix(-halfExtents.x, halfExtents.x, -halfExtents.y, halfExtents.y, halfExtents.z, -halfExtents.z) * viewMatrix; } And this is the pixel shader used for the lighting stage: #define DEPTH_BIAS 0.0005 #define NUM_CASCADES 4 cbuffer DirectionalLightConstants : register(CBUFFER_REGISTER_PIXEL) { float4x4 gSplitVPMatrices[NUM_CASCADES]; float4x4 gCameraViewMatrix; float4 gSplitDistances; float4 gLightColor; float4 gLightDirection; }; Texture2D gPositionTexture : register(TEXTURE_REGISTER_POSITION); Texture2D gDiffuseTexture : register(TEXTURE_REGISTER_DIFFUSE); Texture2D gNormalTexture : register(TEXTURE_REGISTER_NORMAL); Texture2DArray gShadowmap : register(TEXTURE_REGISTER_DEPTH); SamplerComparisonState gShadowmapSampler : register(SAMPLER_REGISTER_DEPTH); float4 ps_main(float4 position : SV_Position) : SV_Target0 { float4 worldPos = gPositionTexture[uint2(position.xy)]; float4 diffuse = gDiffuseTexture[uint2(position.xy)]; float4 normal = gNormalTexture[uint2(position.xy)]; float4 camPos = mul(gCameraViewMatrix, worldPos); uint index = 3; if (camPos.z > gSplitDistances.x) index = 0; else if (camPos.z > gSplitDistances.y) index = 1; else if (camPos.z > gSplitDistances.z) index = 2; float3 projCoords = (float3)mul(gSplitVPMatrices[index], worldPos); float viewDepth = projCoords.z - DEPTH_BIAS; projCoords.z = float(index); float visibilty = gShadowmap.SampleCmpLevelZero(gShadowmapSampler, projCoords, viewDepth); float angleNormal = clamp(dot(normal, gLightDirection), 0, 1); return visibilty * diffuse * angleNormal * gLightColor; } As you can see I am using depth bias and a bias matrix. Any hints on why this behaves so wierdly?

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• How to Save Hundreds or Thousands of Dollars on Cell Phone Service

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Cell phone contracts are bad. You get a seemingly cheap phone up front, but you more than pay for the cost of the phone over two years. Prepaid phone plans are surging in North America for a reason. Prepaid phone plans will be cheaper and more flexible than traditional contracts with big carriers for many people. However much you use your phone, there’s a good chance you can save money with a prepaid service. No More Contracts Here’s how cell phone service typically works in North America: You get a subsidized phone for “free”, $99, or $199. You sign up for a two-year contract and more than pay back the cost of that phone over the length of the contract. This is similar to leasing something or purchasing it on a credit card and paying it back over two years — you spend less up front, but you’re paying more in the long run. But this isn’t the only option. You could opt for a cheaper prepaid service that doesn’t lock you into a contract. If you don’t use your phone much, you could just pay for what you use and avoid the hefty cell phone bills. If you use your phone a lot, you could get a cheaper plan, too. Now, this certainly isn’t for everyone. If you want the latest iPhone or Galaxy smartphone every two years and require a 4G data connection, prepaid services may not be for you. On the other hand, if you don’t need the latest phone, you can save money here. You can also save a huge amount of money if you don’t use your phone much. Phone Options When you choose your prepaid or contract-free service, you’ll often be able to purchase a phone from them. You’ll generally be able to find dirt-cheap dumbphones and the cheapest, slowest Android phones for not very much money. If you are able to buy a top-of-the-line smartphone, you’ll have to pay the full, unsubsidized price. That’s $649 for either an iPhone 5S or Samsung Galaxy S4. Whatever phones the service provider offers, you could always buy a phone elsewhere — for example, you could buy an unsubsidized iPhone direct from Apple and then take it to your cell phone service of choice. Most services will allow you to get a SIM card and pop it into your existing phone rather than purchasing a phone. If you can get a hand-me-down smartphone, you can often save quite a bit of money. For example, you may have a family member upgrading from an iPhone 4S to an iPhone 5S. You could take their phone to a prepaid carrier and have a nicer phone on a cheap cell phone plan. If you brought an old smartphone to a big carrier like AT&T or Verizon, they wouldn’t give you a discount on your monthly plan. You’d have to pay the same amount of money every month as if you had gotten a subsidized phone. Google’s Nexus phones are also great options for people looking to buy smartphones and pay up-front. Google’s Nexus 4 offered a modern, almost top-of-the-line Android smartphone experience at $299 or $349 when it came out last year. Google will soon be releasing the Nexus 5 and it’s expected to be priced at $349. That’s certainly a lot more than a cheap phone, but it’s a fairly high-end smartphone at almost half the price of an iPhone 5S or Galaxy S4. Nexus phones can be purchased online from Google’s Play Store. Service Options When choosing a service, you need to consider what you actually use. If you’re someone who only uses your phone rarely, you can get plans that will allow you to pay as little as a few dollars per month. If you’re someone who’s usually in range of Wi-Fi, you may not need much data at all. If you want a plan with unlimited talk, texting, and data usage, you can get it for much cheaper than you’d pay on a major carrier like AT&T. The options here range from pay-as-you-go plans, like the ones offered by T-Mobile, which allow you to put a certain amount of money in and only drain that balance when you actually use minutes, texts, or data. If you only make a few calls and send a few texts per month, you’d only pay a few bucks. On the other end, Walmart’s Straight Talk service is a popular option that offers unlimited talk, texting, and data at $45 per month. Which service is right for you depends on a lot of things, including your usage and what each network’s coverage is like in your area. You’ll want to do some research of your own before choosing a service. Prepaid services also offer you even more flexibility after you choose one. If you’re not happy or a better deal comes along, you can switch — you’re not locked into your service for two years and you won’t pay an early termination fee. Image Credit: Intel Free Press on Flickr, Jon Fingas on Flickr, John Karakatsanis on Flickr, kendalkinggroup on Flickr     

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• Day 3 - XNA: Hacking around with images

  - by dapostolov

  Yay! Today I'm going to get into some code! My mind has been on this all day! I find it amusing how I practice, daily, to be "in the moment" or "present" and the excitement and anticipation of this project seems to snatch it away from me frequently. WELL!!! (Shakes Excitedly) Let's do this =)! Let's code! For these next few days it is my intention to better understand image rendering using XNA; after said prototypes are complete I should (fingers crossed) be able to dive into my game code using the design document I hammered out the other night. On a personal note, I think the toughest thing right now is finding the time to do this project. Each night, after my little ones go to bed I can only really afford a couple hours of work on this project. However, I hope to utilise this time as best as I can because this is the first time in a while I've found a project that I've been passionate about. A friend recently asked me if I intend to go 3D or extend the game design. Yes. For now I'm keeping it simple. Lastly, just as a note, as I was doing some further research into image rendering this morning I came across some other XNA content and lessons learned. I believe this content could have probably been posted in the first couple of posts, however, I will share the new content as I learn it at the end of each day. Maybe I'll take some time later to fix the posts but for now Installation and Deployment - Lessons Learned I had installed the XNA studio  (Day 1) and the site instructions were pretty easy to follow. However, I had a small difficulty with my development environment. You see, I run a virtual desktop development environment. Even though I was able to code and compile all the tutorials the game failed to run...because I lacked a 3D capable card; it was not detected on the virtual box... First Lesson: The XNA runtime needs to "see" the 3D card! No sweat, Il copied the files over to my parent box and executed the program. ERROR. Hmm... Second Lesson (which I should have probably known but I let the excitement get the better of me): you need the XNA runtime on the client PC to run the game, oh, and don't forget the .Net Runtime! Sprite, it ain't just a Soft Drink... With these prototypes I intend to understand and perform the following tasks. learn game development terminology how to place and position (rotate) a static image on the screen how to layer static images on the screen understand image scaling can we reuse images? understand how framerate is handled in XNA how to display text , basic shapes, and colors on the screen how to interact with an image (collision of user input?) how to animate an image and understand basic animation techniques how to detect colliding images or screen edges how to manipulate the image, lets say colors, stretching how to focus on a segment of an image...like only displaying a frame on a film reel what's the best way to manage images (compression, storage, location, prevent artwork theft, etc.) Well, let's start with this "prototype" task list for now...Today, let's get an image on the screen and maybe I can mark a few of the tasks as completed... C# Prototype1 New Visual Studio Project Select the XNA Game Studio 3.1 Project Type Select the Windows Game 3.1 Template Type Prototype1 in the Name textbox provided Press OK. At this point code has auto-magically been created. Feel free to press the F5 key to run your first XNA program. You should have a blue screen infront of you. Without getting into the nitty gritty right, the code that was generated basically creates some basic code to clear the window content with the lovely CornFlowerBlue color. Something to notice, when you move your mouse into the window...nothing. ooooo spoooky. Let's put an image on that screen! Step A - Get an Image into the solution Under "Content" in your Solution Explorer, right click and add a new folder and name it "Sprites". Copy a small image in there; I copied a "Royalty Free" wizard hat from a quick google search and named it wizards_hat.jpg (rightfully so!) Step B - Add the sprite and position fields Now, open/edit  Game1.cs Locate the following line:  SpriteBatch spriteBatch; Under this line type the following:         SpriteBatch spriteBatch; // the line you are looking for...         Texture2D sprite;         Vector2 position; Step C - Load the image asset Locate the "Load Content" Method and duplicate the following:             protected override void LoadContent()         {             spriteBatch = new SpriteBatch(GraphicsDevice);             // your image name goes here...             sprite = Content.Load<Texture2D>("Sprites\\wizards_hat");             position = new Vector2(200, 100);             base.LoadContent();         } Step D - Draw the image Locate the "Draw" Method and duplicate the following:        protected override void Draw(GameTime gameTime)         {             GraphicsDevice.Clear(Color.CornflowerBlue);             spriteBatch.Begin(SpriteBlendMode.AlphaBlend);             spriteBatch.Draw(sprite, position, Color.White);             spriteBatch.End();             base.Draw(gameTime);         }  Step E - Compile and Run Engage! (F5) - Debug! Your image should now display on a cornflowerblue window about 200 pixels from the left and 100 pixels from the top. Awesome! =) Pretty cool how we only coded a few lines to display an image, but believe me, there is plenty going on behind the scenes. However, for now, I'm going to call it a night here. Blogging all this progress certainly takes time... However, tomorrow night I'm going to detail what we just did, plus start checking off points on that list! I'm wondering right now if I should add pictures / code to this post...let me know if you want them =) Best Regards, D.

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• Connect to running web role on Azure using Remote Desktop Connection and VS2012

  - by Magnus Karlsson

  We want to be able to collect IntelliTrace information from our running app and also use remote desktop to connect to the IIS and look around(probably debugging). 1. Create certificate 1.1 Right-click the cloud project (marked in red) and select “Configure remote desktop”. 1.2 In the drop down list of certificates, choose <create> at the bottom. 1.3. Follow the instructions, you can set it up with default values. 1.4 When done. Choose the certificate and click “Copy to File…” as seen in the left of the picture above. 1.5. Save the file with any name you want. Now we will save it to local storage to be able to import it to our solution through the azure configuration manager in step 3. 2. Save certificate to local storage Now we need to attach it to our local certificate storage to be able to reach it from our confiuguration manager in visual studio. Microsoft provides the following steps for doing this: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/232137 In order to view the Certificates store on the local computer, perform the following steps: Click Start, and then click Run. Type "MMC.EXE" (without the quotation marks) and click OK. Click Console in the new MMC you created, and then click Add/Remove Snap-in. In the new window, click Add. Highlight the Certificates snap-in, and then click Add. Choose the Computer option and click Next. Select Local Computer on the next screen, and then click OK. Click Close , and then click OK. You have now added the Certificates snap-in, which will allow you to work with any certificates in your computer's certificate store. You may want to save this MMC for later use. Now that you have access to the Certificates snap-in, you can import the server certificate into you computer's certificate store by following these steps: Open the Certificates (Local Computer) snap-in and navigate to Personal, and then Certificates. Note: Certificates may not be listed. If it is not, that is because there are no certificates installed. Right-click Certificates (or Personal if that option does not exist.) Choose All Tasks, and then click Import. When the wizard starts, click Next. Browse to the PFX file you created containing your server certificate and private key. Click Next. Enter the password you gave the PFX file when you created it. Be sure the Mark the key as exportable option is selected if you want to be able to export the key pair again from this computer. As an added security measure, you may want to leave this option unchecked to ensure that no one can make a backup of your private key. Click Next, and then choose the Certificate Store you want to save the certificate to. You should select Personal because it is a Web server certificate. If you included the certificates in the certification hierarchy, it will also be added to this store. Click Next. You should see a summary of screen showing what the wizard is about to do. If this information is correct, click Finish. You will now see the server certificate for your Web server in the list of Personal Certificates. It will be denoted by the common name of the server (found in the subject section of the certificate). Now that you have the certificate backup imported into the certificate store, you can enable Internet Information Services 5.0 to use that certificate (and the corresponding private key). To do this, perform the following steps: Open the Internet Services Manager (under Administrative Tools) and navigate to the Web site you want to enable secure communications (SSL/TLS) on. Right-click on the site and click Properties. You should now see the properties screen for the Web site. Click the Directory Security tab. Under the Secure Communications section, click Server Certificate. This will start the Web Site Certificate Wizard. Click Next. Choose the Assign an existing certificate option and click Next. You will now see a screen showing that contents of your computer's personal certificate store. Highlight your Web server certificate (denoted by the common name), and then click Next. You will now see a summary screen showing you all the details about the certificate you are installing. Be sure that this information is correct or you may have problems using SSL or TLS in HTTP communications. Click Next, and then click OK to exit the wizard. You should now have an SSL/TLS-enabled Web server. Be sure to protect your PFX files from any unwanted personnel. Image of a typical MMC.EXE with the certificates up.   3. Import the certificate to you visual studio project. 3.1 Now right click your equivalent to the MvcWebRole1 (as seen in the first picture under the red oval) and choose properties. 3.2 Choose Certificates. Right click the ellipsis to the right of the “thumbprint” and you should be able to select your newly created certificate here. After selecting it- save the file.   4. Upload the certificate to your Azure subscription. 4.1 Go to the azure management portal, click the services menu icon to the left and choose the service. Click Upload in the bottom menu.     5. Connect to server. Since I tried to use account settings(have to use another name) we have to set up a new name for the connection. No biggie. 5.1 Go to azure management portal, select your service and in the bottom menu, choose “REMOTE”. This will display the configuration for remote connection. It will actually change your ServiceConfiguration.cscfg file. After you change It here it might be good to choose download and replace the one in your project. Set a name that is not your windows azure account name and not Administrator. 5.2 Goto visual studio, click Server Explorer. Choose as selected in the picture below and click “COnnect using remote desktop”.   5.2 You will now be able to log in with the name and password set up in step 5.1. and voila! Windows server 2012, IIS and other nice stuff!   To do this one I’ve been using http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/ff683671.aspx where you can collect some of this information and additional one.

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• Closing the gap between strategy and execution with Oracle Business Intelligence 11g

  - by manan.goel(at)oracle.com

  Wikipedia defines strategy as a plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal. An example of this is General Electric's acquisitions and divestiture strategy (plan) designed to propel GE to number 1 or 2 place (goal) in every business segment that it operated in. Execution on the other hand can be defined as the actions taken to getting things done. In GE's case execution will be steps followed for mergers/acquisitions or divestiture. Business press has written extensively about the importance of both strategy and execution in achieving desired business objectives. Perhaps the quote from Thomas Edison says it best - "vision without execution is hallucination". Conversely, it can be said that "execution without vision" is well may be "wishful thinking". Research overwhelmingly point towards the wide gap between strategy and execution. According to a published study, 49% of surveyed executives perceive a gap between their organizations' ability to develop and communicate sound strategies and their ability to implement those strategies. Further, of these respondents, 64% don't have full confidence that their companies will be able to close the gap. Having established the severity and importance of the problem let's talk about the reasons for the strategy-execution gap. The common reasons include: -        Lack of clearly defined goals -        Lack of consistent measure of success -        Lack of ownership -        Lack of alignment -        Lack of communication -        Lack of proper execution -        Lack of monitoring       There are multiple approaches to solving the problem including organizational development practices, technology enablement etc. In most cases a combination of approaches is required to achieve the desired result. For the purposes of this discussion, I'll focus on technology.  Imagine an integrated closed loop technology platform that automates the entire management cycle from defining strategy to assigning ownership to communicating goals to achieving alignment to collaboration to taking actions to monitoring progress and achieving mid course corrections. Besides, for best ROI and lowest TCO such a system should also have characteristics like:  Complete -        Full functionality -        Rich end user access Open -        Any data source -        Any business application -        Any technology stack  Integrated -        Common metadata -        Common security -        Common system management From a capabilities perspective the system should provide the following capabilities: Define -        Strategy -        Objectives -        Ownership -        KPI's Communicate -        Pervasive -        Collaborative -        Role based -        Secure Execute -        Integrated -        Intuitive -        Secure -        Ubiquitous Monitor -        Multiple styles and formats -        Exception based -        Push & Pull Having talked about the business problem and outlined the blueprint for a technology solution, let's talk about how Oracle Business Intelligence 11g can help. Oracle Business Intelligence is a comprehensive business intelligence solution for reporting, ad hoc query and analysis, OLAP, dashboards and scorecards. Oracle's best in class BI platform is based on an architecturally integrated technology foundation that provides a unified end user experience and features a Common Enterprise Information Model, with common security, query request generation and optimization, and system management. The BI platform is ·         Complete - meaning it delivers all modes and styles of BI including reporting, ad hoc query and analysis, OLAP, dashboards and scorecards with a rich end user experience that includes visualization, collaboration, alerts and notifications, search and mobile access. ·         Open - meaning the BI platform integrates with any data source, ETL tool, business application, application server, security infrastructure, portal technology as well as any ODBC compliant third party analytical tool. The suite accesses data from multiple heterogeneous sources--including popular relational and multidimensional data sources and major ERP and CRM applications from Oracle and SAP. ·         Integrated - meaning the BI platform is based on an architecturally integrated technology foundation built on an open, standards based service oriented architecture.  The platform features a common enterprise information model, common security model and a common configuration, deployment and systems management framework. To summarize, Oracle Business Intelligence is a comprehensive, integrated BI platform that lets you define strategy, identify objectives, assign ownership, define KPI's, collaborate, take action, monitor, report and do course corrections all form a single interface and a single system. The platform's integrated metadata model and task based design ensures that the entire workflow from defining strategy to execution to monitoring is completely integrated delivering end to end visibility, transparency and agility. Click here to learn more about Oracle BI 11g. 

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• Xml failing to deserialise

  - by Carnotaurus

  I call a method to get my pages [see GetPages(String xmlFullFilePath)]. The FromXElement method is supposed to deserialise the LitePropertyData elements to strongly type LitePropertyData objects. Instead it fails on the following line: return (T)xmlSerializer.Deserialize(memoryStream); and gives the following error: <LitePropertyData xmlns=''> was not expected. What am I doing wrong? I have included the methods that I call and the xml data: public static T FromXElement<T>(this XElement xElement) { using (var memoryStream = new MemoryStream(Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(xElement.ToString()))) { var xmlSerializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(T)); return (T)xmlSerializer.Deserialize(memoryStream); } } public static List<LitePageData> GetPages(String xmlFullFilePath) { XDocument document = XDocument.Load(xmlFullFilePath); List<LitePageData> results = (from record in document.Descendants("row") select new LitePageData { Guid = IsValid(record, "Guid") ? record.Element("Guid").Value : null, ParentID = IsValid(record, "ParentID") ? Convert.ToInt32(record.Element("ParentID").Value) : (Int32?)null, Created = Convert.ToDateTime(record.Element("Created").Value), Changed = Convert.ToDateTime(record.Element("Changed").Value), Name = record.Element("Name").Value, ID = Convert.ToInt32(record.Element("ID").Value), LitePageTypeID = IsValid(record, "ParentID") ? Convert.ToInt32(record.Element("ParentID").Value) : (Int32?)null, Html = record.Element("Html").Value, FriendlyName = record.Element("FriendlyName").Value, Properties = record.Element("Properties") != null ? record.Element("Properties").Element("LitePropertyData").FromXElement<List<LitePropertyData>>() : new List<LitePropertyData>() }).ToList(); return results; } Here is the xml: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <root> <rows> <row> <ID>1</ID> <ImageUrl></ImageUrl> <Html>Home page</Html> <Created>01-01-2012</Created> <Changed>01-01-2012</Changed> <Name>Home page</Name> <FriendlyName>home-page</FriendlyName> </row> <row xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"> <Guid>edeaf468-f490-4271-bf4d-be145bc6a1fd</Guid> <ID>8</ID> <Name>Unused</Name> <ParentID>1</ParentID> <Created>2006-03-25T10:57:17</Created> <Changed>2012-07-17T12:24:30.0984747+01:00</Changed> <ChangedBy /> <LitePageTypeID xsi:nil="true" /> <Html> What is the purpose of this option? This option checks the current document for accessibility issues. It uses Bobby to provide details of whether the current web page conforms to W3C's WCAG criteria for web content accessibility. Issues with Bobby and Cynthia Bobby and Cynthia are free services that supposedly allow a user to expose web page accessibility barriers. It is something of a guide but perhaps a blunt instrument. I tested a few of the webpages that I have designed. Sure enough, my pages fall short and for good reason. I am not about to claim that Bobby and Cynthia are useless. Although it is useful and commendable tool, it project appears to be overly ambitious. Nevertheless, let me explain my issues with Bobby and Cynthia: First, certain W3C standards for designing web documents are often too strict and unworkable. For instance, in some versions W3C standards for HTML, certain tags should not include a particular attribute, whereas in others they are requisite if the document is to be ???well-formed???. The standard that a designer chooses is determined usually by the requirements specification document. This specifies which browsers and versions of those browsers that the web page is expected to correctly display. Forcing a hypertext document to conform strictly to a specific W3C standard for HTML is often no simple task. In the worst case, it cannot conform without losing some aesthetics or accessibility functionality. Second, the case of HTML documents is not an isolated case. Standards for XML, XSL, JavaScript, VBScript, are analogous. Therefore, you might imagine the problems when you begin to combine these languages and formats in an HTML document. Third, there is always more than one way to skin a cat. For example, Bobby and Cynthia may flag those IMG tags that do not contain a TITLE attribute. There might be good reason that a web developer chooses not to include the title attribute. The title attribute has a limited numbers of characters and does not support carriage returns. This is a major defect in the design of this tag. In fact, before the TITLE attribute was supported, there was the ALT attribute. Most browsers support both, yet they both perform a similar function. However, both attributes share the same deficiencies. In practice, there are instances where neither attribute would be used. Instead, for example, the developer would write some JavaScript or VBScript to circumvent these deficiencies. The concern is that Bobby and Cynthia would not notice this because it does not ???understand??? what the JavaScript does. </Html> <FriendlyName>unused</FriendlyName> <IsDeleted>false</IsDeleted> <Properties> <LitePropertyData> <Description>Image for the page</Description> <DisplayEditUI>true</DisplayEditUI> <OwnerTab>1</OwnerTab> <DisplayName>Image Url</DisplayName> <FieldOrder>1</FieldOrder> <IsRequired>false</IsRequired> <Name>ImageUrl</Name> <IsModified>false</IsModified> <ParentPageID>3</ParentPageID> <Type>String</Type> <Value xsi:type="xsd:string">smarter.jpg</Value> </LitePropertyData> <LitePropertyData> <Description>WebItemApplicationEnum</Description> <DisplayEditUI>true</DisplayEditUI> <OwnerTab>1</OwnerTab> <DisplayName>WebItemApplicationEnum</DisplayName> <FieldOrder>1</FieldOrder> <IsRequired>false</IsRequired> <Name>WebItemApplicationEnum</Name> <IsModified>false</IsModified> <ParentPageID>3</ParentPageID> <Type>Number</Type> <Value xsi:type="xsd:string">1</Value> </LitePropertyData> </Properties> <Seo> <Author>Phil Carney</Author> <Classification /> <Copyright>Carnotaurus</Copyright> <Description> What is the purpose of this option? This option checks the current document for accessibility issues. It uses Bobby to provide details of whether the current web page conforms to W3C's WCAG criteria for web content accessibility. Issues with Bobby and Cynthia Bobby and Cynthia are free services that supposedly allow a user to expose web page accessibility barriers. It is something of a guide but perhaps a blunt instrument. I tested a few of the webpages that I have designed. Sure enough, my pages fall short and for good reason. I am not about to claim that Bobby and Cynthia are useless. Although it is useful and commendable tool, it project appears to be overly ambitious. Nevertheless, let me explain my issues with Bobby and Cynthia: First, certain W3C standards for designing web documents are often too strict and unworkable. For instance, in some versions W3C standards for HTML, certain tags should not include a particular attribute, whereas in others they are requisite if the document is to be ???well-formed???. The standard that a designer chooses is determined usually by the requirements specification document. This specifies which browsers and versions of those browsers that the web page is expected to correctly display. Forcing a hypertext document to conform strictly to a specific W3C standard for HTML is often no simple task. In the worst case, it cannot conform without losing some aesthetics or accessibility functionality. Second, the case of HTML documents is not an isolated case. Standards for XML, XSL, JavaScript, VBScript, are analogous. Therefore, you might imagine the problems when you begin to combine these languages and formats in an HTML document. Third, there is always more than one way to skin a cat. For example, Bobby and Cynthia may flag those IMG tags that do not contain a TITLE attribute. There might be good reason that a web developer chooses not to include the title attribute. The title attribute has a limited numbers of characters and does not support carriage returns. This is a major defect in the design of this tag. In fact, before the TITLE attribute was supported, there was the ALT attribute. Most browsers support both, yet they both perform a similar function. However, both attributes share the same deficiencies. In practice, there are instances where neither attribute would be used. Instead, for example, the developer would write some JavaScript or VBScript to circumvent these deficiencies. The concern is that Bobby and Cynthia would not notice this because it does not ???understand??? what the JavaScript does. </Description> <Keywords>unused</Keywords> <Title>unused</Title> </Seo> </row> </rows> </root> EDIT Here are my entities: public class LitePropertyData { public virtual string Description { get; set; } public virtual bool DisplayEditUI { get; set; } public int OwnerTab { get; set; } public virtual string DisplayName { get; set; } public int FieldOrder { get; set; } public bool IsRequired { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } public virtual bool IsModified { get; set; } public virtual int ParentPageID { get; set; } public LiteDataType Type { get; set; } public object Value { get; set; } } [Serializable] public class LitePageData { public String Guid { get; set; } public Int32 ID { get; set; } public String Name { get; set; } public Int32? ParentID { get; set; } public DateTime Created { get; set; } public String CreatedBy { get; set; } public DateTime Changed { get; set; } public String ChangedBy { get; set; } public Int32? LitePageTypeID { get; set; } public String Html { get; set; } public String FriendlyName { get; set; } public Boolean IsDeleted { get; set; } public List<LitePropertyData> Properties { get; set; } public LiteSeoPageData Seo { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Saves the specified XML full file path. /// </summary> /// <param name="xmlFullFilePath">The XML full file path.</param> public void Save(String xmlFullFilePath) { XDocument doc = XDocument.Load(xmlFullFilePath); XElement demoNode = this.ToXElement<LitePageData>(); demoNode.Name = "row"; doc.Descendants("rows").Single().Add(demoNode); doc.Save(xmlFullFilePath); } }

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• Why We Should Learn to Stop Worrying and Love Millennials

  - by HCM-Oracle

  By Christine Mellon Much is said and written about the new generations of employees entering our workforce, as though they are a strange specimen, a mysterious life form to be “figured out,” accommodated and engaged – at a safe distance, of course.  At its worst, this talk takes a critical and disapproving tone, with baby boomer employees adamantly refusing to validate this new breed of worker, let alone determine how to help them succeed and achieve their potential.   The irony of our baby-boomer resentments and suspicions is that they belie the fact that we created the very vision that younger employees are striving to achieve.  From our frustrations with empty careers that did not fulfill us, from our opposition to “the man,” from our sharp memories of our parents’ toiling for 30 years just for the right to retire, from the simple desire not to live our lives in a state of invisibility, came the seeds of hope for something better. One characteristic of Millennial workers that grew from these seeds is the desire to experience as much as possible.  They are the “Experiential Employee”, with a passion for growing in diverse ways and expanding personal and professional horizons.  Rather than rooting themselves in a single company for a career, or even in a single career path, these employees are committed to building a broad portfolio of experiences and capabilities that will enable them to make a difference and to leave a mark of significance in the world.  How much richer is the organization that nurtures and leverages this inclination?  Our curmudgeonly ways must be surrendered and our focus redirected toward building the next generation of talent ecosystems, if we are to optimize what future generations have to offer.   Accelerating Professional Development In spite of our Boomer grumblings about Millennials’ “unrealistic” expectations, the truth is that we have a well-matched set of circumstances.  We have executives-in-waiting who want to learn quickly and a concurrent, urgent need to ramp up their development time, based on anticipated high levels of retirement in the next 10+ years.  Since we need to rapidly skill up these heirs to the corporate kingdom, isn’t it a fortunate coincidence that they are hungry to learn, develop and move fluidly throughout our organizations??  So our challenge now is to efficiently operationalize the wisdom we have acquired about effective learning and development.   We have already evolved from classroom-based models to diverse instructional methods.  The next step is to find the best approaches to help younger employees learn quickly and apply new learnings in an impactful way.   Creating temporary or even permanent functional partnerships among Millennial employees is one way to maximize outcomes.  This might take the form of 2 or more employees owning aspects of what once fell under a single role.  While one might argue this would mean duplication of resources, it could be a short term cost while employees come up to speed.  And the potential benefits would be numerous:  leveraging and validating the inherent sense of community of new generations, creating cross-functional skills with broad applicability, yielding additional perspectives and approaches to traditional work outcomes, and accelerating the performance curve for incumbents through Cooperative Learning (Johnson, D. and Johnson R., 1989, 1999).  This well-researched teaching strategy, where students support each other in the absorption and application of new information, has been shown to deliver faster, more efficient learning, and greater retention. Alternately, perhaps short term contracts with exiting retirees, or former retirees, to help facilitate the development of following generations may have merit.  Again, a short term cost, certainly.  However, the gains realized in shortening the learning curve, and strengthening engagement are substantial and lasting. Ultimately, there needs to be creative thinking applied for each organization on how to accelerate the capabilities of our future leaders in unique ways that mesh with current culture. The manner in which performance is evaluated must finally shift as well.  Employees will need to be assessed on how well they have developed key skills and capabilities vs. end-to-end mastery of functional positions they have no interest in keeping for an entire career. As we become more comfortable in placing greater and greater weight on competencies vs. tasks, we will realize increased organizational agility via this new generation of workers, which will be further enhanced by their natural flexibility and appetite for change. Revisiting Succession  For many years, organizations have failed to deliver desired succession planning outcomes.  According to CEB’s 2013 research, only 28% of current leaders were pre-identified in a succession plan. These disappointing results, along with the entrance of the experiential, Millennial employee into the workforce, may just provide the needed impetus for HR to reinvent succession processes.   We have recognized that the best professional development efforts are not always linear, and the time has come to fully adopt this philosophy in regard to succession as well.  Paths to specific organizational roles will not look the same for newer generations who seek out unique learning opportunities, without consideration of a singular career destination.  Rather than charting particular jobs as precursors for key positions, the experiences and skills behind what makes an incumbent successful must become essential in succession mapping.  And the multitude of ways in which those experiences and skills may be acquired must be factored into the process, along with the individual employee’s level of learning agility. While this may seem daunting, it is necessary and long overdue.  We have talked about the criticality of competency-based succession, however, we have not lived up to our own rhetoric.  Many Boomers have experienced the same frustration in our careers; knowing we are capable of shining in a particular role, but being denied the opportunity due to how our career history lined up, on paper, with documented job requirements.  These requirements usually emphasized past jobs/titles and specific tasks, versus capabilities, drive and willingness (let alone determination) to learn new things.  How satisfying would it be for us to leave a legacy where such narrow thinking no longer applies and potential is amplified? Realizing Diversity Another bloom from the seeds we Boomers have tried to plant over the past decades is a completely evolved view of diversity.  Millennial employees assume a diverse workforce, and are startled by anything less.  Their social tolerance, nurtured by wide and diverse networks, is unprecedented.  College graduates expect a similar landscape in the “real world” to what they experienced throughout their lives.  They appreciate and seek out divergent points of view and experiences without needing any persuasion.  The face of our U.S. workforce will likely see dramatic change as Millennials apply their fresh take on hiring and building strong teams, with an inherent sense of inclusion.  This wonderful aspect of the Millennial wave should be celebrated and strongly encouraged, as it is the fulfillment of our own aspirations. Future Perfect The Experiential Employee is operating more as a free agent than a long term player, and their commitment will essentially last as long as meaningful organizational culture and personal/professional opportunities keep their interest.  As Boomers, we have laid the foundation for this new, spirited employment attitude, and we should take pride in knowing that.  Generations to come will challenge organizations to excel in how they identify, manage and nurture talent. Let’s support and revel in the future that we’ve helped invent, rather than lament what we think has been lost.  After all, the future is always connected to the past.  And as so eloquently phrased by Antoine Lavoisier, French nobleman, chemist and politico:  “Nothing is Lost, Nothing is Created, and Everything is Transformed.” Christine has over 25 years of diverse HR experience.  She has held HR consulting and corporate roles, including CHRO positions for Echostar in Denver, a 6,000+ employee global engineering firm, and Aepona, a startup software firm, successfully acquired by Intel. Christine is a resource to Oracle clients, to assist in Human Capital Management strategy development and implementation, compensation practices, talent development initiatives, employee engagement, global HR management, and integrated HR systems and processes that support the full employee lifecycle. 

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• The Arab HEUG is now a reality, and other random thoughts

  - by user9147039

  I just returned from Doha, Qatar where the first of its kind HEUG (Higher Education User Group) meeting for institutions in the Middle East and North Africa was held at Qatar University and jointly hosted by Damman University from Saudi Arabia. Over 80 delegates attended including representation from education institutions in Oman, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Qatar. There are many other regional HEUG organizations in place (in Australia/New Zealand, APAC, EMEA, as well as smaller regional HEUG’s in the Netherlands, South Africa, and in regions of the US), but it was truly an accomplishment to see this Middle East/North Africa group organize and launch their chapter with a meeting of this quality. To be known as the Arab HEUG going forward, I am excited about the prospects for sharing between the institutions and for the growth of Oracle solutions in the region. In particular the hosts for the event (Qatar University) did a masterful job with logistics and organization, and the quality of the event was a testament to their capabilities. Among the more interesting and enlightening presentations I attended were one from Dammam University on the lessons learned from their implementation of Campus Solutions and transition off of Banner, as well as the use by Qatar University E-business Suite for grants management (both pre-and post-award). The most notable fact coming from this latter presentation was the fit (89%) of e-Business Suite Grants to the university’s requirements. In a few weeks time we will be convening the 5th meeting of the Oracle Education & Research Industry Strategy Council in Redwood Shores (5th since my advent into my current role). The main topics of discussion will be around our Higher Education Applications Strategy for the future (including cloud approaches to ERP (HCM, Finance, and Student Information Systems), how some cases studies on the benefits of leveraging delivered functionality and extensibility in the software (versus customization). On the second day of the event we will turn our attention to Oracle in Research and also budgeting and planning in higher education. Both of these sessions will include significant participation from council members in the form of panel discussions. Our EVP’s for Systems (John Fowler) and for Global Cloud Services and North America application sales (Joanne Olson) will join us for the discussion. I recently read a couple of articles that were surprising to me. The first was from Inside Higher Ed on October 15 entitled, “As colleges prepare for major software upgrades, Kuali tries to woo them from corporate vendors.” It continues to disappointment that after all this time we are still debating whether it is better to build enterprise software through open or community source initiatives when fully functional, flexible, supported, and widely adopted options exist in the marketplace. Over a decade or more ago when these solutions were relatively immature and there was a great deal of turnover in the market I could appreciate the initiatives like Kuali. But let’s not kid ourselves – the real objective of this movement is to counter a perceived predatory commercial software industry. Again, when commercial solutions are deployed as written without significant customization, and standard business processes are adopted, the cost of these solutions (relative to the value delivered) is quite low, and certain much lower than the massive investment (and risk) in in-house developers to support a bespoke community source system. In this era of cost pressures in education and the need to refocus resources on teaching, learning, and research, I believe it’s bordering on irresponsible to continue to pursue open-source ERP. Many of the adopter’s total costs are staggering and have little to show for their efforts and expended resources. The second article was recently in the Chronicle of Higher Education and was entitled “’Big Data’ Is Bunk, Obama Campaign’s Tech Guru Tells University Leaders.” This one was so outrageous I almost don’t want to legitimize it by referencing it here. In the article the writer relays statements made by Harper Reed, President Obama’s former CTO for his 2012 re-election campaign, that big data solutions in education have no relevance and are akin to snake oil. He goes on to state that while he’s a fan of data-driven decision making in education, most of the necessary analysis can be accomplished in Excel spreadsheets. Yeah… right. This is exactly what ails education (higher education in particular). Dozens of shadow and siloed systems running on spreadsheets with limited-to-no enterprise wide initiatives to harness the data-rich environment that is a higher ed institution and transform the data into useable information. I’ll grant Mr. Reed that “Big Data” is overused and hackneyed, but imperatives like improving student success in higher education are classic big data problems that data-mining and predictive analytics can address. Further, higher ed need to be producing a massive amount more data scientists and analysts than are currently in the pipeline, to further this discipline and application of these tools to many many other problems across multiple industries.

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• SQLAuthority News – A Conversation with an Old Friend – Sri Sridharan

  - by pinaldave

  Sri Sridharan is my old friend and we often talk on GTalk. The subject varies from Life in India/USA, movies, musics, and of course SQL. We have our differences when we talk about food or movie but we always agree when we talk about SQL. Yesterday while chatting with him we talked about SQLPASS and the conversation lasted for a long time. Here is the conversation between us on GTalk. I have removed a few of the personal talks and formatted into paragraphs as GTalk often shows stuff out of formatting. Pinal: Sri, Congrats on running for the PASS BoD again. You were so close last year. What made you decide to run again this year? Sri: Thank you Pinal for your leadership in the PASS India Community and all the things you do out there. After coming so close last year, there was no doubt in my mind that I will run again. I was truly humbled by the support I got from the community. Growing up in India for over 25 years, you are brought up in a very competitive part of the world. Right from the pressure of staying in the top of the class from kindergarten to your graduation, the relentless push from your parents about studying and getting good grades (and nothing else matters), you land up essentially living in a pressure cooker. To survive that relentless pressure, you need to have a thick skin, ability to stand up for who you really are , what you want to accomplish and in the process stay true those values. I am striving for a greater cause, to make PASS an organization that can help people with their SQL Server careers, to make PASS relevant to its chapter members, to make PASS an organization that every SQL professional in the world wants to be connected with. Just because I did not get elected or appointed last year does not mean that these causes are not worth fighting. Giving up upon failing the first time is simply not in me. If I did that, what message would I send to those who voted for me? What message would I send to my kids? Pinal: As someone who has such strong roots in India, what can the Indian PASS Community expect from you? Sri: First of all, I think fostering a regional leadership is something PASS must encourage as part of its global growth plan. For PASS global being able to understand all the issues in a region of the world and make sound decisions will be a tough thing to do on a continuous basis. I expect people like you, chapter leaders, regional mentors, MVPs of the region start playing a bigger role in shaping the next generation of PASS. That is something I said in my campaign and I still stand by it. I would like to see growth in the number of chapters in India. The current count does not truly represent the full potential of that region. I was pretty thrilled to see the Bangalore SQLSaturday happen early this year. I would like to see more of SQLSaturday events, at least in the major metro cities. I know the issues in India are very different from the rest of the world. So the formula needs to be tweaked a little for it to work better in India. Once the SQLSaturday model is vetted out, maybe there could be enough justification to have SQLRally India. PASS needs to have a premier SQL event in that region. Going to USA or Europe for that matter is incredibly hard due to VISA issues etc. So this could be a case of where PASS comes closer to where the community is. Pinal: What portfolio would take on if you are elected to the PASS Board? Sri: There are some very strong folks on the PASS Board today. The President discusses the portfolios with the group and makes the final call on the portfolios. I am also a fan of having a team associated with the portfolios. In that case, one person is the primary for a portfolio but secondary on a couple of other portfolios. This way people on the board have a direct vested interest in a few portfolios. Personally, I know I would these portfolios good justice – Chapters, Global Growth and Events (SQLSat, SQLRally). I would try to see if we can get a director to focus on Volunteers.  To me that is very critical for growth in the international regions. Pinal: This is an interesting conversation with you Sri. I know you so long time but this is indeed inspiring to many. India is a big country and we appreciate your thoughts. Sri: Thank you very much for taking time to chat with me today. Cheers. There are pretty strong candidates for SQLPASS Board of Elections this year. I know all of them in person and honestly it is going to be extremely difficult to not to vote for anybody. I am indeed in a crunch right now how to pick one over another. Though the choice is difficult, I encourage you to vote for them. I am extremely confident that the new board of directors will all have the same goal – Better SQL Server Community. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Database, DBA, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL PASS, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology

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• How do I restrict concurrent statistics gathering to a small set of tables from a single schema?

  - by Maria Colgan

  I got an interesting question from one of my colleagues in the performance team last week about how to restrict a concurrent statistics gather to a small subset of tables from one schema, rather than the entire schema. I thought I would share the solution we came up with because it was rather elegant, and took advantage of concurrent statistics gathering, incremental statistics, and the not so well known “obj_filter_list” parameter in DBMS_STATS.GATHER_SCHEMA_STATS procedure. You should note that the solution outline below with “obj_filter_list” still applies, even when concurrent statistics gathering and/or incremental statistics gathering is disabled. The reason my colleague had asked the question in the first place was because he wanted to enable incremental statistics for 5 large partitioned tables in one schema. The first time you gather statistics after you enable incremental statistics on a table, you have to gather statistics for all of the existing partitions so that a synopsis may be created for them. If the partitioned table in question is large and contains a lot of partition, this could take a considerable amount of time. Since my colleague only had the Exadata environment at his disposal overnight, he wanted to re-gather statistics on 5 partition tables as quickly as possible to ensure that it all finished before morning. Prior to Oracle Database 11g Release 2, the only way to do this would have been to write a script with an individual DBMS_STATS.GATHER_TABLE_STATS command for each partition, in each of the 5 tables, as well as another one to gather global statistics on the table. Then, run each script in a separate session and manually manage how many of this session could run concurrently. Since each table has over one thousand partitions that would definitely be a daunting task and would most likely keep my colleague up all night! In Oracle Database 11g Release 2 we can take advantage of concurrent statistics gathering, which enables us to gather statistics on multiple tables in a schema (or database), and multiple (sub)partitions within a table concurrently. By using concurrent statistics gathering we no longer have to run individual statistics gathering commands for each partition. Oracle will automatically create a statistics gathering job for each partition, and one for the global statistics on each partitioned table. With the use of concurrent statistics, our script can now be simplified to just five DBMS_STATS.GATHER_TABLE_STATS commands, one for each table. This approach would work just fine but we really wanted to get this down to just one command. So how can we do that? You may be wondering why we didn’t just use the DBMS_STATS.GATHER_SCHEMA_STATS procedure with the OPTION parameter set to ‘GATHER STALE’. Unfortunately the statistics on the 5 partitioned tables were not stale and enabling incremental statistics does not mark the existing statistics stale. Plus how would we limit the schema statistics gather to just the 5 partitioned tables? So we went to ask one of the statistics developers if there was an alternative way. The developer told us the advantage of the “obj_filter_list” parameter in DBMS_STATS.GATHER_SCHEMA_STATS procedure. The “obj_filter_list” parameter allows you to specify a list of objects that you want to gather statistics on within a schema or database. The parameter takes a collection of type DBMS_STATS.OBJECTTAB. Each entry in the collection has 5 feilds; the schema name or the object owner, the object type (i.e., ‘TABLE’ or ‘INDEX’), object name, partition name, and subpartition name. You don't have to specify all five fields for each entry. Empty fields in an entry are treated as if it is a wildcard field (similar to ‘*’ character in LIKE predicates). Each entry corresponds to one set of filter conditions on the objects. If you have more than one entry, an object is qualified for statistics gathering as long as it satisfies the filter conditions in one entry. You first must create the collection of objects, and then gather statistics for the specified collection. It’s probably easier to explain this with an example. I’m using the SH sample schema but needed a couple of additional partitioned table tables to get recreate my colleagues scenario of 5 partitioned tables. So I created SALES2, SALES3, and COSTS2 as copies of the SALES and COSTS table respectively (setup.sql). I also deleted statistics on all of the tables in the SH schema beforehand to more easily demonstrate our approach. Step 0. Delete the statistics on the tables in the SH schema. Step 1. Enable concurrent statistics gathering. Remember, this has to be done at the global level. Step 2. Enable incremental statistics for the 5 partitioned tables. Step 3. Create the DBMS_STATS.OBJECTTAB and pass it to the DBMS_STATS.GATHER_SCHEMA_STATS command. Here, you will notice that we defined two variables of DBMS_STATS.OBJECTTAB type. The first, filter_lst, will be used to pass the list of tables we want to gather statistics on, and will be the value passed to the obj_filter_list parameter. The second, obj_lst, will be used to capture the list of tables that have had statistics gathered on them by this command, and will be the value passed to the objlist parameter. In Oracle Database 11g Release 2, you need to specify the objlist parameter in order to get the obj_filter_list parameter to work correctly due to bug 14539274. Will also needed to define the number of objects we would supply in the obj_filter_list. In our case we ere specifying 5 tables (filter_lst.extend(5)). Finally, we need to specify the owner name and object name for each of the objects in the list. Once the list definition is complete we can issue the DBMS_STATS.GATHER_SCHEMA_STATS command. Step 4. Confirm statistics were gathered on the 5 partitioned tables. Here are a couple of other things to keep in mind when specifying the entries for the  obj_filter_list parameter. If a field in the entry is empty, i.e., null, it means there is no condition on this field. In the above example , suppose you remove the statement Obj_filter_lst(1).ownname := ‘SH’; You will get the same result since when you have specified gather_schema_stats so there is no need to further specify ownname in the obj_filter_lst. All of the names in the entry are normalized, i.e., uppercased if they are not double quoted. So in the above example, it is OK to use Obj_filter_lst(1).objname := ‘sales’;. However if you have a table called ‘MyTab’ instead of ‘MYTAB’, then you need to specify Obj_filter_lst(1).objname := ‘”MyTab”’; As I said before, although we have illustrated the usage of the obj_filter_list parameter for partitioned tables, with concurrent and incremental statistics gathering turned on, the obj_filter_list parameter is generally applicable to any gather_database_stats, gather_dictionary_stats and gather_schema_stats command. You can get a copy of the script I used to generate this post here. +Maria Colgan

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• It was a figure of speech!

  - by Ratman21

  Yesterday I posted the following as attention getter / advertisement (as well as my feelings). In the groups, (I am in) on the social networking site, LinkedIn and boy did I get responses.    I am fighting mad about (a figure of speech, really) not having a job! Look just because I am over 55 and have gray hair. It does not mean, my brain is dead or I can no longer trouble shoot a router or circuit or LAN issue. Or that I can do “IT” work at all. And I could prove this if; some one would give me at job. Come on try me for 90 days at min. wage. I know you will end up keeping me (hope fully at normal pay) around. Is any one hearing me…come on take up the challenge!     This was the responses I got.   I hear you. We just need to retrain and get our skills up to speed is all. That is what I am doing. I have not given up. Just got to stay on top of the game. Experience is on our side if we have the credentials and we are reasonable about our salaries this should not be an issue.   Already on it, going back to school and have got three certifications (CompTIA A+, Security+ and Network+. I am now studying for my CISCO CCNA certification. As to my salary, I am willing to work at very reasonable rate.   You need to re-brand yourself like a product, market and sell yourself. You need to smarten up, look and feel a million dollars, re-energize yourself, regain your confidents. Either start your own business, or re-write your CV so it stands out from the rest, get the template off the internet. Contact every recruitment agent in your town, state, country and overseas, and on the web. Apply to every job you think you could do, you may not get it but you will make a contact for your network, which may lead to a job at the end of the tunnel. Get in touch with everyone you know from past jobs. Do charity work. I maintain the IT Network, stage electrical and the Telecom equipment in my church,   Again already on it. I have email the world is seems with my resume and cover letters. So far, I have rewritten or had it rewrote, my resume and cover letters; over seven times so far. Re-energize? I never lost my energy level or my self-confidents in my work (now if could get some HR personal to see the same). I also volunteer at my church, I created and maintain the church web sit.   I share your frustration. Sucks being over 50 and looking for work. Please don't sell yourself short at min wage because the employer will think that’s your worth. Keep trying!!   I never stop trying and min wage is only for 90 days. If some one takes up the challenge. Some post asked if I am keeping up technology.   Do you keep up with the latest technology and can speak the language fluidly?   Yep to that and as to speaking it also a yep! I am a geek you know. I heard from others over the 50 year mark and younger too.   I'm with you! I keep getting told that I don't have enough experience because I just recently completed a Masters level course in Microsoft SQL Server, which gave me a project-intensive equivalent of between 2 and 3 years of experience. On top of that training, I have 19 years as an applications programmer and database administrator. I can normalize rings around experienced DBAs and churn out effective code with the best of them. But my 19 years is worthless as far as most recruiters and HR people are concerned because it is not the specific experience for which they're looking. HR AND RECRUITERS TAKE NOTE: Experience, whatever the language, translates across platforms and technology! By the way, I'm also over 55 and still have "got it"!   I never lost it and I also can work rings round younger techs.   I'm 52 and female and seem to be having the same issues. I have over 10 years experience in tech support (with a BS in CIS) and can't get hired either.   Ow, I only have an AS in computer science along with my certifications.   Keep the faith, I have been unemployed since August of 2008. I agree with you...I am willing to return to the beginning of my retail career and work myself back through the ranks, if someone will look past the grey and realize the knowledge I would bring to the table.   I also would like some one to look past the gray.   Interesting approach, volunteering to work for minimum wage for 90 days. I'm in the same situation as you, being 55 & balding w/white hair, so I know where you're coming from. I've been out of work now for a year. I'm in Michigan, where the unemployment rate is estimated to be 15% (the worst in the nation) & even though I've got 30+ years of IT experience ranging from mainframe to PC desktop support, it's difficult to even get a face-to-face interview. I had one prospective employer tell me flat out that I "didn't have the energy required for this position". Mostly I never get any feedback. All I can say is good luck & try to remain optimistic.   He said WHAT! Yes remaining optimistic is key. Along with faith in God. Then there was this (for lack of better word) jerk.   Give it up already. You were too old to work in high tech 10 years ago. Scratch that, 20 years ago! Try selling hot dogs in front of Fry's Electronics. At least you would get a chance to eat lunch with your previous colleagues....   You know funny thing on this person is that I checked out his profile. He is older than I am.

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• Oracle Fusion Middleware gives you Choice and Portability for Public and Private Cloud

  - by Michelle Kimihira

  Author: Margaret Lee, Senior Director, Product Management, Oracle Fusion Middleware Cloud Computing allows customers to quickly develop and deploy applications in a shared environment.  The environment can span across hardward (IaaS), foundation layer software (PaaS), and end-user software (SaaS). Cloud Computing provides compelling benefits in terms of business agility and IT cost savings.  However, with complex, existing heterogeneous architectures, and concerns for security and manageability, enterprises are challenged to define their Cloud strategy.  For most enterprises, the solution is a hybrid of private and public cloud.  Fusion Middleware supports customers’ Cloud requirements through choice and portability. Fusion Middleware supports a variety of cloud development and deployment models:  Oracle [Public] Cloud; customer private cloud; hybrid of these two, and traditional dedicated, on-premise model Customers can develop applications in any of these models and deployed in another, providing the flexibility and portability they need Oracle Cloud is a public cloud offering.  Within Oracle Cloud, Fusion Middleware provides two key offerings include the Developer cloud service and Java cloud deployment service. Developer Cloud Service Simplify Development: Automated provisioned environment; pre-configured and integrated; web-based administration Deploy Automatically: Fully integrated with Oracle Cloud for Java deployment; workflow ensures build & test Collaborate & Manage: Fits any size team; integrated team source repository; continuous integration; task/defect tracking Integrated with all major IDEs: Oracle JDeveloper; NetBeans; Eclipse Java Cloud Service Java Cloud service provides flexible Java deployment environment for departmental applications and development, staging, QA, training, and demo environments.  It also supports customizations deployments for SaaS-based Fusion Applications customers.  Some key features of Java Cloud Service include: WebLogic Server on Exalogic, secure, highly available infrastructure Database Service & IDE Integration Open, Standard-based Deploy Web Apps, Web Services, REST Services Fully managed and supported by Oracle For more information, please visit Oracle Cloud, Oracle Cloud Java Service and Oracle Cloud Developer Service. If your enterprise prefers a private cloud, for reasons such as security, control, manageability, and complex integration that prevent your applications from being deployed on a public cloud, Fusion Middleware also provide you with the products and tools you need.  Sometimes called Private PaaS, private clouds have their predecessors in shared-services arrangements many large companies have been building in the past decade.  The difference, however, are in the scope of the services, and depth of their capabilities.  In terms of vertical stack depth, private clouds not only provide hardware and software infrastructure to run your applications, they also provide services such as integration and security, that your applications need.  Horizontally, private clouds provide monitoring, management, lifecycle, and charge back capabilities out-of-box that shared-services platforms did not have before. Oracle Fusion Middleware includes the complete stack of hardware and software for you to build private clouds: SOA suite and BPM suite to support systems integration and process flow between applications deployed on your private cloud and the rest of your organization Identity and Access Management suite to provide security, provisioning, and access services for applications deployed on your private cloud WebLogic Server to run your applications Enterprise Manager's Cloud Management pack to monitor, manage, upgrade applications running on your private cloud Exalogic or optimized Oracle-Sun hardware to build out your private cloud The most important key differentiator for Oracle's cloud solutions is portability, between private and public clouds.  This is unique to Oracle because portability requires the vendor to have product depth and breadth in both public cloud services and private cloud product offerings.  Most public cloud vendors cannot provide the infrastructure and tools customers need to build their own private clouds.  In reverse, traditional software tools vendors typically do not have the product and expertise breadth to build out and offer a public cloud.  Oracle can.  It is important for customers that the products and technologies  Oracle uses to build its public is the same set that it sells to customers for them to build private clouds.  Fundamentally, that enables skills reuse,  as well as application portability. For more information on Oracle PaaS offerings, please visit Oracle's product information page.    Resources Follow us on Twitter and Facebook Subscribe to our regular Fusion Middleware Newsletter

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• JavaOne 2012 Sunday Strategy Keynote

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  At the Sunday Strategy Keynote, held at the Masonic Auditorium, Hasan Rizvi, EVP, Middleware and Java Development, stated that the theme for this year's JavaOne is: “Make the future Java”-- meaning that Java continues in its role as the most popular, complete, productive, secure, and innovative development platform. But it also means, he qualified, the process by which we make the future Java -- an open, transparent, collaborative, and community-driven evolution. "Many of you have bet your businesses and your careers on Java, and we have bet our business on Java," he said.Rizvi detailed the three factors they consider critical to the success of Java--technology innovation, community participation, and Oracle's leadership/stewardship. He offered a scorecard in these three realms over the past year--with OS X and Linux ARM support on Java SE, open sourcing of JavaFX by the end of the year, the release of Java Embedded Suite 7.0 middleware platform, and multiple releases on the Java EE side. The JCP process continues, with new JSR activity, and JUGs show a 25% increase in participation since last year. Oracle, meanwhile, continues its commitment to both technology and community development/outreach--with four regional JavaOne conferences last year in various part of the world, as well as the release of Java Magazine, with over 120,000 current subscribers. Georges Saab, VP Development, Java SE, next reviewed features of Java SE 7--the first major revision to the platform under Oracle's stewardship, which has included near-monthly update releases offering hundreds of fixes, performance enhancements, and new features. Saab indicated that developers, ISVs, and hosting providers have all been rapid adopters of the platform. He also noted that Oracle's entire Fusion middleware stack is supported on SE 7. The supported platforms for SE 7 has also increased--from Windows, Linux, and Solaris, to OS X, Linux ARM, and the emerging ARM micro-server market. "In the last year, we've added as many new platforms for Java, as were added in the previous decade," said Saab.Saab also explored the upcoming JDK 8 release--including Project Lambda, Project Nashorn (a modern implementation of JavaScript running on the JVM), and others. He noted that Nashorn functionality had already been used internally in NetBeans 7.3, and announced that they were planning to contribute the implementation to OpenJDK. Nandini Ramani, VP Development, Java Client, ME and Card, discussed the latest news pertaining to JavaFX 2.0--releases on Windows, OS X, and Linux, release of the FX Scene Builder tool, the JavaFX WebView component in NetBeans 7.3, and an OpenJFX project in OpenJDK. Nandini announced, as of Sunday, the availability for download of JavaFX on Linux ARM (developer preview), as well as Scene Builder on Linux. She noted that for next year's JDK 8 release, JavaFX will offer 3D, as well as third-party component integration. Avinder Brar, Senior Software Engineer, Navis, and Dierk König, Canoo Fellow, next took the stage and demonstrated all that JavaFX offers, with a feature-rich, animation-rich, real-time cargo management application that employs Canoo's just open-sourced Dolphin technology.Saab also explored Java SE 9 and beyond--Jigsaw modularity, Penrose Project for interoperability with OSGi, improved multi-tenancy for Java in the cloud, and Project Sumatra. Phil Rogers, HSA Foundation President and AMD Corporate Fellow, explored heterogeneous computing platforms that combine the CPU and the parallel processor of the GPU into a single piece of silicon and shared memory—a hardware technology driven by such advanced functionalities as HD video, face recognition, and cloud workloads. Project Sumatra is an OpenJDK project targeted at bringing Java to such heterogeneous platforms--with hardware and software experts working together to modify the JVM for these advanced applications and platforms.Ramani next discussed the latest with Java in the embedded space--"the Internet of things" and M2M--declaring this to be "the next IT revolution," with Java as the ideal technology for the ecosystem. Last week, Oracle released Java ME Embedded 3.2 (for micro-contollers and low-power devices), and Java Embedded Suite 7.0 (a middleware stack based on Java SE 7). Axel Hansmann, VP Strategy and Marketing, Cinterion, explored his company's use of Java in M2M, and their new release of EHS5, the world's smallest 3G-capable M2M module, running Java ME Embedded. Hansmaan explained that Java offers them the ability to create a "simple to use, scalable, coherent, end-to-end layer" for such diverse edge devices.Marc Brule, Chief Financial Office, Royal Canadian Mint, also explored the fascinating use-case of JavaCard in his country's MintChip e-cash technology--deployable on smartphones, USB device, computer, tablet, or cloud. In parting, Ramani encouraged developers to download the latest releases of Java Embedded, and try them out.Cameron Purdy, VP, Fusion Middleware Development and Java EE, summarized the latest developments and announcements in the Enterprise space--greater developer productivity in Java EE6 (with more on the way in EE 7), portability between platforms, vendors, and even cloud-to-cloud portability. The earliest version of the Java EE 7 SDK is now available for download--in GlassFish 4--with WebSocket support, better JSON support, and more. The final release is scheduled for April of 2013. Nicole Otto, Senior Director, Consumer Digital Technology, Nike, explored her company's Java technology driven enterprise ecosystem for all things sports, including the NikeFuel accelerometer wrist band. Looking beyond Java EE 7, Purdy mentioned NoSQL database functionality for EE 8, the concurrency utilities (possibly in EE 7), some of the Avatar projects in EE 7, some in EE 8, multi-tenancy for the cloud, supporting SaaS applications, and more.Rizvi ended by introducing Dr. Robert Ballard, oceanographer and National Geographic Explorer in Residence--part of Oracle's philanthropic relationship with the National Geographic Society to fund K-12 education around ocean science and conservation. Ballard is best known for having discovered the wreckage of the Titanic. He offered a fascinating video and overview of the cutting edge technology used in such deep-sea explorations, noting that in his early days, high-bandwidth exploration meant that you’d go down in a submarine and "stick your face up against the window." Now, it's a remotely operated, technology telepresence--"I think of my Hercules vehicle as my equivalent of a Na'vi. When I go beneath the sea, I actually send my spirit." Using high bandwidth satellite links, such amazing explorations can now occur via smartphone, laptop, or whatever platform. Ballard’s team regularly offers live feeds and programming out to schools and the world, spanning 188 countries--with embedding educators as part of the expeditions. It's technology at its finest, inspiring the next-generation of scientists and explorers!

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• Quicktips 1: Windows 7 Libraries; New website

  - by Michael B. McLaughlin

  I’m working on several large posts right now. So in the interim, I’ve decided to do shorter posts that contain something I find very helpful. This is the first. I’ve been using Windows 7 since April 2010. It’s the first OS I’ve ever worked with that I actually enjoy. I’ve used many over the years (KERNAL; PC DOS; MS-DOS 3.x+; Windows 3.0, 3.11, 95, 98, 98 SE, Me, NT 3.51, NT 4, 2000, XP, Vista, 7; various GNU/Linux distros starting with Debian 1.2 – most recently Ubuntu 10.04; ProDOS, Mac OS 9.X, Mac OS X (through 10.4); SunOS, Solaris; AIX, z/OS; OpenVMS). Some were frustrating. Some tolerable. Some were “nice except for…”. OS X actually started out as seemingly “nice” until every single release contained a breaking change to some major API and they then decided to flip-off everyone who had bought a Mac as little as two years earlier with the release of Snow Leopard without PPC support. Windows 7 is the first one that’s just “nice” without any qualifiers. There are so many little features that add up to make it nice. Today’s Quicktip is one of them. Quicktip 1: Create a Library for your Code One thing I particularly like about Windows 7 is the Libraries feature in Explorer. Specifically the fact that you can create custom ones. I used to spend a lot of time opening new Explorer windows and navigating my various Visual Studio projects folders. Custom libraries allowed me to simplify that whole process. I now simply go to my “Code” library and there it all is. Adding a new library is easy. Open an Explorer window. If you aren’t in your Libraries when it opens, navigate to Libraries. Click the “New library” button. Give it a name. Then right click on the new library you created and go to “Properties”. Click the “Include a folder…” button. Choose the folder you want and press “Include folder”. Voilà! If you wish to add more, simply click “Include a folder…” again and repeat. It’s true that this is just a small time saver. But it’s one of those things that just adds a really nice touch. ------------------------ In a separate note, just before Christmas I finally finished and published my new website: http://www.bobtacoindustries.com/ . I waited to post here about it until I found time to incorporate a few things I hadn’t had the time to do when I pushed it out for its “soft open”. Most of them are now done and so my site is now formally open. I have no plans or intentions of moving my blog ( http://blog.bobtacoindustries.com/ points here). I quite like it here, both in terms of the interface and also in terms of the concept (and realization thereof) of pooling geek bloggers to create a pool of knowledge and helpful tips, tricks, techniques, and advice. I created it simply because I felt that it was time to have a website as I venture further into my return to the land of software development. The “For Devs” section should hopefully be useful to developers, particularly the links section. It’s my curated list of sites that I regularly visit to solve problems, to help answer questions on Twitter and the AppHub forums, and to learn new things. I’ll be adding links to it periodically and will be including topic areas as I become acquainted with them enough to form a proper list. WPF will likely be the first topic area added. If there are any links you think I should add to the existing topics, let me know! I warn in advance that I’m less inclined to add blogs; there are simply too many good blogs and I do not want to have hundreds per topic area. So blogs are limited primarily, though not exclusively, to acknowledged experts in the subject area who generally blog regularly about it and who usually are part of the team that develops the product or technology in question. I’m much more amenable to including individual blogs posts in the techniques subcategory in the appropriate topic area. Ultimately, it’s a collection of things I find interesting and helpful. So please no hard feelings if I don’t add a link you think is awesome. I may well think it’s awesome too, but conclude that it doesn’t fit with my goals for the dev links area.

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• Oracle SOA Suite - Highlighted Travel and Transportation Customer References

  - by Bruce Tierney

  0 0 1 1137 6483 - 54 15 7605 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Next in this series on industry-specific highlights of Oracle SOA Suite customers is the Travel and Transportation industry.  If you are in the travel or transportation industry, take a look at how these Oracle SOA Suite integration customers have addressed common business requirements to enable better customer service, lower costs, and deliver new business services. For example, All Nippon Airways (ANA) has significantly lowered management costs associated with their hybrid on-premise/cloud ticketing system deployments for domestic and international flights. Their lead-time for changes or new applications has been greatly reduced compared to their old mainframe-based systems, enabling ANA to rapidly develop new services in response to changing market needs. Another example is Schneider National, a leading provider of truckload logistics, and how they have integrated Oracle E-Business Suite, Siebel CRM, Oracle Transportation Management and customers applications using Oracle SOA Suite. Schneider National has 400 BPEL processes that generate over 60 million composite instances over five SOA clusters.  Take a deeper look into any of these case studies, videos, and Oracle Magazine articles that closely align with your industry:  Customers fly and airline succeeds with an IT transformation. Company:  All Nippon Airways  Customer Oracle or Profit Magazine Article   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on January 06, 2014 Any successful business must ensure ongoing customer satisfaction, respond to increased competition, and minimize costs. Running a successful airline in today’s economic climate requires all of those things, as well a... Openmatics Revolutionizes Fleet Management with Standards-Based Vehicle Telematics Platform New Company:  Openmatics s.r.o.  Customer Snapshot   |   Automotive   |   Published on May 20, 2014 Openmatics uses Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle Application Development Framework as a foundation for Openmatics, a vehicle telematics service for next-generation fleet management. It integrated its own app shop wi... Future Proof: To keep pace with mobile, social, and location-based services, smart technologists are using middleware to innovate Company:  SFpark  Customer Oracle or Profit Magazine Article   |   Professional Services   |   Published on August 01, 2012 Oracle Fusion Middleware is at the heart of a recently completed and very ambitious project to change how people handle the challenge of finding a parking space in San Francisco, California. “Parking is a universal is... Globalia Corporación Empresarial Accelerates Hotel Bookings, Boosts Sales by 40% with In-Memory Data Grid Solution Company:  Globalia Corporación Empresarial S.A.  Customer Snapshot   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on April 29, 2013 Globalia Corporación Empresarial S.A. deployed Oracle Coherence to reengineer the group’s core system for hotel bookings, now serving booking requests involving 80 hotels within an average response time of 100 millise... Choice Hotels Uses Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle BPM Suite to Modernize Global IT Architecture Company:  Choice Hotels  Press Release   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on August 07, 2012 Choice Hotels International, one of the largest and most successful hotel franchises in the world, has implemented Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle BPM Suite. Sascar Consolidates Fleet Management Infrastructure and Accelerates Customers’ Data Access Company:  Sascar  Customer Case Study   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on February 07, 2014 Description – Sascar used Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and Oracle WebLogic Suite 11g to consolidate fleet management and perform real-time vehicle tracking 4x faster. Directorate General of Civil Aviation Streamlines Key Aviation Applications Access, Improves Productivity and Reduces Maintenance Costs Company:  Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGAC)  Customer Snapshot   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on May 24, 2013 With Oracle Fusion Middleware, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGAC) provided its 12,500 employees a virtual office environment that integrates team workspaces, business applications, and e-mails within a n... Schneider National Implements Next-Generation IT Infrastructure to Continue Leadership in Transportation and Logistics Industry Company:  Schneider National, Inc.  Customer Snapshot   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on February 26, 2013 Schneider National, Inc. deployed Oracle applications, Oracle Fusion Middleware, and Oracle development tools as the foundation for its next-generation IT environment, which is driving new levels of efficiency, profit... DGAC Cuts Subscription Costs with Oracle Company:  DGAC  Video   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on October 31, 2012 Using Oracle WebCenter Portal, Oracle SOA Suite, and Oracle Exalogic, DGAC reduces the cost of subscriptions to newsletters and provide to its 12,500 employees a collaborative workspace portal. Asiana Airlines Builds PIP System with Oracle Solutions Company:  Asiana Airlines  Video   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on July 26, 2012 With Oracle Exalogic and the Oracle SOA Suite, Asiana Airlines builds a passenger service integrated platform providing various services such as integration between its interface and internal systems and a data wareho... Choice Hotels Reduces Time to Market with Oracle WebCenter Company:  Choice Hotels  Video   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on April 11, 2014 Using Oracle WebCenter and Oracle SOA standardization, Choice Hotels consolidated multiple platforms, reduced IT dependency and realized tremendous benefits in total cost of ownership and faster time to market support... An Interview with Schneider National's Judy Lemke Company:  Schneider National  Video   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on December 17, 2013 Judy Lemke talks with Mark Sunday about the challenges Schneider National faced and how they overcame them through a companywide transformational change. For more details on these case studies, you can use this pre-filtered search on “Travel and Transportation” / “Middleware” / “Service Oriented Architecture” or browse on your own at www.oracle.com/customers

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• Team Foundation Server (TFS) Team Build Custom Activity C# Code for Assembly Stamping

  - by Bob Hardister

  For the full context and guidance on how to develop and implement a custom activity in Team Build see the Microsoft Visual Studio Rangers Team Foundation Build Customization Guide V.1 at http://vsarbuildguide.codeplex.com/ There are many ways to stamp or set the version number of your assemblies. This approach is based on the build number.   namespace CustomActivities { using System; using System.Activities; using System.IO; using System.Text.RegularExpressions; using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Client; [BuildActivity(HostEnvironmentOption.Agent)] public sealed class VersionAssemblies : CodeActivity { /// <summary> /// AssemblyInfoFileMask /// </summary> [RequiredArgument] public InArgument<string> AssemblyInfoFileMask { get; set; } /// <summary> /// SourcesDirectory /// </summary> [RequiredArgument] public InArgument<string> SourcesDirectory { get; set; } /// <summary> /// BuildNumber /// </summary> [RequiredArgument] public InArgument<string> BuildNumber { get; set; } /// <summary> /// BuildDirectory /// </summary> [RequiredArgument] public InArgument<string> BuildDirectory { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Publishes field values to the build report /// </summary> public OutArgument<string> DiagnosticTextOut { get; set; } // If your activity returns a value, derive from CodeActivity<TResult> and return the value from the Execute method. protected override void Execute(CodeActivityContext context) { // Obtain the runtime value of the input arguments string sourcesDirectory = context.GetValue(this.SourcesDirectory); string assemblyInfoFileMask = context.GetValue(this.AssemblyInfoFileMask); string buildNumber = context.GetValue(this.BuildNumber); string buildDirectory = context.GetValue(this.BuildDirectory); // ** Determine the version number values ** // Note: the format used here is: major.secondary.maintenance.build // ----------------------------------------------------------------- // Obtain the build definition name int nameStart = buildDirectory.LastIndexOf(@"\") + 1; string buildDefinitionName = buildDirectory.Substring(nameStart); // Set the primary.secondary.maintenance values // NOTE: these are hard coded in this example, but could be sourced from a file or parsed from a build definition name that includes them string p = "1"; string s = "5"; string m = "2"; // Initialize the build number string b; string na = "0"; // used for Assembly and Product Version instead of build number (see versioning best practices: **TBD reference) // Set qualifying product version information string productInfo = "RC2"; // Obtain the build increment number from the build number // NOTE: this code assumes the default build definition name format int buildIncrementNumberDelimterIndex = buildNumber.LastIndexOf("."); b = buildNumber.Substring(buildIncrementNumberDelimterIndex + 1); // Convert version to integer values int pVer = Convert.ToInt16(p); int sVer = Convert.ToInt16(s); int mVer = Convert.ToInt16(m); int bNum = Convert.ToInt16(b); int naNum = Convert.ToInt16(na); // ** Get all AssemblyInfo files and stamp them ** // Note: the mapping of AssemblyInfo.cs attributes to assembly display properties are as follows: // - AssemblyVersion = Assembly Version - used for the assembly version (does not change unless p, s or m values are changed) // - AssemblyFileVersion = File Version - used for the file version (changes with every build) // - AssemblyInformationalVersion = Product Version - used for the product version (can include additional version information) // ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Version assemblyVersion = new Version(pVer, sVer, mVer, naNum); Version newAssemblyFileVersion = new Version(pVer, sVer, mVer, bNum); Version productVersion = new Version(pVer, sVer, mVer); // Setup diagnostic fields int numberOfReplacements = 0; string addedAssemblyInformationalAttribute = "No"; // Enumerate over the assemblyInfo version attributes foreach (string attribute in new[] { "AssemblyVersion", "AssemblyFileVersion", "AssemblyInformationalVersion" }) { // Define the regular expression to find in each and every Assemblyinfo.cs files (which is for example 'AssemblyVersion("1.0.0.0")' ) Regex regex = new Regex(attribute + @"\(""\d+\.\d+\.\d+\.\d+""\)"); foreach (string file in Directory.EnumerateFiles(sourcesDirectory, assemblyInfoFileMask, SearchOption.AllDirectories)) { string text = File.ReadAllText(file); // Read the text from the AssemblyInfo file // If the AsemblyInformationalVersion attribute is not in the file, add it as the last line of the file // Note: by default the AssemblyInfo.cs files will not contain the AssemblyInformationalVersion attribute if (!text.Contains("[assembly: AssemblyInformationalVersion(\"")) { string lastLine = Environment.NewLine + "[assembly: AssemblyInformationalVersion(\"1.0.0.0\")]"; text = text + lastLine; addedAssemblyInformationalAttribute = "Yes"; } // Search for the expression Match match = regex.Match(text); if (match.Success) { // Get file attributes FileAttributes fileAttributes = File.GetAttributes(file); // Set file to read only File.SetAttributes(file, fileAttributes & ~FileAttributes.ReadOnly); // Insert AssemblyInformationalVersion attribute into the file text if does not already exist string newText = string.Empty; if (attribute == "AssemblyVersion") { newText = regex.Replace(text, attribute + "(\"" + assemblyVersion + "\")"); numberOfReplacements++; } if (attribute == "AssemblyFileVersion") { newText = regex.Replace(text, attribute + "(\"" + newAssemblyFileVersion + "\")"); numberOfReplacements++; } if (attribute == "AssemblyInformationalVersion") { newText = regex.Replace(text, attribute + "(\"" + productVersion + " " + productInfo + "\")"); numberOfReplacements++; } // Publish diagnostics to build report (diagnostic verbosity only) context.SetValue(this.DiagnosticTextOut, " Added AssemblyInformational Attribute: " + addedAssemblyInformationalAttribute + " Number of replacements: " + numberOfReplacements + " Build number: " + buildNumber + " Build directory: " + buildDirectory + " Build definition name: " + buildDefinitionName + " Assembly version: " + assemblyVersion + " New file version: " + newAssemblyFileVersion + " Product version: " + productVersion + " AssemblyInfo.cs Text Last Stamped: " + newText); // Write the new text in the AssemblyInfo file File.WriteAllText(file, newText); // restore the file's original attributes File.SetAttributes(file, fileAttributes); } } } } } }

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• SPARC T4-4 Delivers World Record Performance on Oracle OLAP Perf Version 2 Benchmark

  - by Brian

  Oracle's SPARC T4-4 server delivered world record performance with subsecond response time on the Oracle OLAP Perf Version 2 benchmark using Oracle Database 11g Release 2 running on Oracle Solaris 11. The SPARC T4-4 server achieved throughput of 430,000 cube-queries/hour with an average response time of 0.85 seconds and the median response time of 0.43 seconds. This was achieved by using only 60% of the available CPU resources leaving plenty of headroom for future growth. The SPARC T4-4 server operated on an Oracle OLAP cube with a 4 billion row fact table of sales data containing 4 dimensions. This represents as many as 90 quintillion aggregate rows (90 followed by 18 zeros). Performance Landscape Oracle OLAP Perf Version 2 Benchmark 4 Billion Fact Table Rows System Queries/hour Users* Response Time (sec) Average Median SPARC T4-4 430,000 7,300 0.85 0.43 * Users - the supported number of users with a given think time of 60 seconds Configuration Summary and Results Hardware Configuration: SPARC T4-4 server with 4 x SPARC T4 processors, 3.0 GHz 1 TB memory Data Storage 1 x Sun Fire X4275 (using COMSTAR) 2 x Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array (each with 80 FMODs) Redo Storage 1 x Sun Fire X4275 (using COMSTAR with 8 HDD) Software Configuration: Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2.0.3) with Oracle OLAP option Benchmark Description The Oracle OLAP Perf Version 2 benchmark is a workload designed to demonstrate and stress the Oracle OLAP product's core features of fast query, fast update, and rich calculations on a multi-dimensional model to support enhanced Data Warehousing. The bulk of the benchmark entails running a number of concurrent users, each issuing typical multidimensional queries against an Oracle OLAP cube consisting of a number of years of sales data with fully pre-computed aggregations. The cube has four dimensions: time, product, customer, and channel. Each query user issues approximately 150 different queries. One query chain may ask for total sales in a particular region (e.g South America) for a particular time period (e.g. Q4 of 2010) followed by additional queries which drill down into sales for individual countries (e.g. Chile, Peru, etc.) with further queries drilling down into individual stores, etc. Another query chain may ask for yearly comparisons of total sales for some product category (e.g. major household appliances) and then issue further queries drilling down into particular products (e.g. refrigerators, stoves. etc.), particular regions, particular customers, etc. Results from version 2 of the benchmark are not comparable with version 1. The primary difference is the type of queries along with the query mix. Key Points and Best Practices Since typical BI users are often likely to issue similar queries, with different constants in the where clauses, setting the init.ora prameter "cursor_sharing" to "force" will provide for additional query throughput and a larger number of potential users. Except for this setting, together with making full use of available memory, out of the box performance for the OLAP Perf workload should provide results similar to what is reported here. For a given number of query users with zero think time, the main measured metrics are the average query response time, the median query response time, and the query throughput. A derived metric is the maximum number of users the system can support achieving the measured response time assuming some non-zero think time. The calculation of the maximum number of users follows from the well-known response-time law N = (rt + tt) * tp where rt is the average response time, tt is the think time and tp is the measured throughput. Setting tt to 60 seconds, rt to 0.85 seconds and tp to 119.44 queries/sec (430,000 queries/hour), the above formula shows that the T4-4 server will support 7,300 concurrent users with a think time of 60 seconds and an average response time of 0.85 seconds. For more information see chapter 3 from the book "Quantitative System Performance" cited below. -- See Also Quantitative System Performance Computer System Analysis Using Queueing Network Models Edward D. Lazowska, John Zahorjan, G. Scott Graham, Kenneth C. Sevcik external local Oracle Database 11g – Oracle OLAP oracle.com OTN SPARC T4-4 Server oracle.com OTN Oracle Solaris oracle.com OTN Oracle Database 11g Release 2 oracle.com OTN Disclosure Statement Copyright 2012, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Results as of 11/2/2012.

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• Part 1 - Load Testing In The Cloud

  - by Tarun Arora

  Azure is fascinating, but even more fascinating is the marriage of Azure and TFS! Introduction Recently a client I worked for had 2 major business critical applications being delivered, with very little time budgeted for Performance testing, we immediately hit a bottleneck when the performance testing phase started, the in house infrastructure team could not support the hardware requirements in the short notice. It was suggested that the performance testing be performed on one of the QA environments which was a fraction of the production environment. This didn’t seem right, the team decided to turn to the cloud. The team took advantage of the elasticity offered by Azure, starting with a single test agent which was provisioned and ready for use with in 30 minutes the team scaled up to 17 test agents to perform a very comprehensive performance testing cycle. Issues were identified and resolved but the highlight was that the cost of running the ‘test rig’ proved to be less than if hosted on premise by the infrastructure team. Thank you for taking the time out to read this blog post, in the series of posts, I’ll try and cover the start to end of everything you need to know to use Azure to build your Test Rig in the cloud. But Why Azure? I have my own Data Centre… If the environment is provisioned in your own datacentre, - No matter what level of service agreement you may have with your infrastructure team there will be down time when the environment is patched - How fast can you scale up or down the environments (keeping the enterprise processes in mind) Administration, Cost, Flexibility and Scalability are the areas you would want to think around when taking the decision between your own Data Centre and Azure! How is Microsoft's Public Cloud Offering different from Amazon’s Public Cloud Offering? Microsoft's offering of the Cloud is a hybrid of Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) which distinguishes Microsoft's offering from other providers such as Amazon (Amazon only offers IaaS). PaaS – Platform as a Service IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service Fills the needs of those who want to build and run custom applications as services. Similar to traditional hosting, where a business will use the hosted environment as a logical extension of the on-premises datacentre. A service provider offers a pre-configured, virtualized application server environment to which applications can be deployed by the development staff. Since the service providers manage the hardware (patching, upgrades and so forth), as well as application server uptime, the involvement of IT pros is minimized. On-demand scalability combined with hardware and application server management relieves developers from infrastructure concerns and allows them to focus on building applications. The servers (physical and virtual) are rented on an as-needed basis, and the IT professionals who manage the infrastructure have full control of the software configuration. This kind of flexibility increases the complexity of the IT environment, as customer IT professionals need to maintain the servers as though they are on-premises. The maintenance activities may include patching and upgrades of the OS and the application server, load balancing, failover clustering of database servers, backup and restoration, and any other activities that mitigate the risks of hardware and software failures.   The biggest advantage with PaaS is that you do not have to worry about maintaining the environment, you can focus all your time in solving the business problems with your solution rather than worrying about maintaining the environment. If you decide to use a VM Role on Azure, you are asking for IaaS, more on this later. A nice blog post here on the difference between Saas, PaaS and IaaS. Now that we are convinced why we should be turning to the cloud and why in specific Azure, let’s discuss about the Test Rig. The Load Test Rig – Topology Now the moment of truth, Of course a big part of getting value from cloud computing is identifying the most adequate workloads to take to the cloud, so I’ve decided to try to make a Load Testing rig where the Agents are running on Windows Azure.   I’ll talk you through the above Topology, - User: User kick starts the load test run from the developer workstation on premise. This passes the request to the Test Controller. - Test Controller: The Test Controller is on premise connected to the same domain as the developer workstation. As soon as the Test Controller receives the request it makes use of the Windows Azure Connect service to orchestrate the test responsibilities to all the Test Agents. The Windows Azure Connect endpoint software must be active on all Azure instances and on the Controller machine as well. This allows IP connectivity between them and, given that the firewall is properly configured, allows the Controller to send work loads to the agents. In parallel, the Controller will collect the performance data from the agents, using the traditional WMI mechanisms. - Test Agents: The Test Agents are on the Windows Azure Public Cloud, as soon as the test controller issues instructions to the test agents, the test agents start executing the load tests. The HTTP requests are issued against the web server on premise, the results are captured by the test agents. And finally the results are passed over to the controller. - Servers: The Web Server and DB Server are hosted on premise in the datacentre, this is usually the case with business critical applications, you probably want to manage them your self. Recap and What’s next? So, in the introduction in the series of blog posts on Load Testing in the cloud I highlighted why creating a test rig in the cloud is a good idea, what advantages does Windows Azure offer and the Test Rig topology that I will be using. I would also like to mention that i stumbled upon this [Video] on Azure in a nutshell, great watch if you are new to Windows Azure. In the next post I intend to start setting up the Load Test Environment and discuss pricing with respect to test agent machine types that will be used in the test rig. Hope you enjoyed this post, If you have any recommendations on things that I should consider or any questions or feedback, feel free to add to this blog post. Remember to subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TarunArora.  See you in Part II.   Share this post : CodeProject

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• SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #031

  - by Pinal Dave

  Here is the list of selected articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2007 Find Table without Clustered Index – Find Table with no Primary Key Clustered index is very important concept for any table. They impact the performance very heavily. Here is a quick script to find tables without a clustered index. Replace TEXT with VARCHAR(MAX) – Stop using TEXT, NTEXT, IMAGE Data Types Question: “Is VARCHAR (MAX) big enough to store the TEXT field?” Answer: “Yes, VARCHAR(MAX) is big enough to accommodate TEXT field. TEXT, NTEXT and IMAGE data types of SQL Server 2000 will be deprecated in a future version of SQL Server, SQL Server 2005 provides backward compatibility to data types but it is recommended to use new data types which are VARHCAR (MAX), NVARCHAR (MAX) and VARBINARY (MAX).” Limiting Result Sets by Using TABLESAMPLE – Examples Introduced in SQL Server 2005, TABLESAMPLE allows you to extract a sampling of rows from a table in the FROM clause. The rows retrieved are random and they are are not in any order. This sampling can be based on a percentage of number of rows. You can use TABLESAMPLE when only a sampling of rows is necessary for the application instead of a full result set. User Defined Functions (UDF) Limitations UDF have its own advantage and usage but in this article we will see the limitation of UDF. Things UDF can not do and why Stored Procedure are considered as more flexible then UDFs. Stored Procedure are more flexibility then User Defined Functions(UDF). However, this blog post is a good read to know what are the limitations of UDF. Change Database Compatible Level – Backward Compatibility For a long time SQL Server stayed on the compatibility level of 80 which is of SQL Server 2000. However, as soon as SQL Server 2005 introduced the issue of compatibility was quite a major issue. Since that time MS has been releasing the versions at every 2-3 years, changing compatibility is a ever popular topic. In this blog post, we learn how we can do the same using T-SQL. We can also do the same using SSMS and here is the blog post for the same: Change Database Compatible Level – Backward Compatibility – Part 2 – Management Studio. Constraint on VARCHAR(MAX) Field To Limit It Certain Length How can I limit the VARCHAR(MAX) field with maximum length of 12500 characters only. His Question was valid as our application was allowed 12500 characters. First of all – this requirement is bit strange but if someone wants to do the same, they can do it as described in this blog post. 2008 UNPIVOT Table Example Understanding UNPIVOT can be very complicated at times. In this blog post, I have attempted to explain the same concept in very simple words. Create Default Constraint Over Table Column A simple straight to script blog post – I still use this blog quite many times for my own reference. UDF – Get the Day of the Week Function It took me 4 iteration to find this very simple function which can immediately get the day of the week in a single line. 2009 Find Hostname and Current Logged In User Name There are two tricks listed in this blog post where users can find out the hostname and current logged user name immediately and very easily. Interesting Observation of Logon Trigger On All Servers When I was doing a project, I made an interesting observation of executing a logon trigger multiple times. It was absolutely unexpected for me! As I was logging only once, naturally, I was expecting the entry only once. However, it did it multiple times on different threads – indeed an eccentric phenomenon at first sight! Difference Between Candidate Keys and Primary Key One needs to be very careful in selecting the Primary Key as an incorrect selection can adversely impact the database architect and future normalization. For a Candidate Key to qualify as a Primary Key, it should be Non-NULL and unique in any domain. I have observed quite often that Primary Keys are seldom changed. I would like to have your feedback on not changing a Primary Key. Create Multiple Filegroup For Single Database Why should one create multiple file group for any database and what are the advantages of the same. In this blog post, I explain the same in detail. List All Objects Created on All Filegroups in Database In this blog post we discuss the essential question – “How can I find which object belongs to which filegroup. Is there any way to know this?” 2010 DATE and TIME in SQL Server 2008 When DATE is converted to DATETIME it adds the of midnight. When TIME is converted to DATETIME it adds the date of 1900 and it is something one wants to consider if you are going to run scripts from SQL Server 2008 to earlier version with CONVERT. Disabled Index and Update Statistics If you do not need a nonclustered index, I suggest you to drop it as keeping them disabled is an overhead on your system. This is because every time the statistics are updated for system all the statistics for disabled indexes are also updated. Precision of SMALLDATETIME – A 1 Minute Precision The precision of the datatype SMALLDATETIME is 1 minute. It discards the seconds by rounding up or rounding down any seconds greater than zero. 2011 Getting Columns Headers without Result Data – SET FMTONLY ON SET FMTONLY ON returns only metadata to the client. It can be used to test the format of the response without actually running the query. When this setting is ON the resultset only have headers of the results but no data. Copy Database from Instance to Another Instance – Copy Paste in SQL Server SQL Server has a feature which copy database from one database to another database and it can be automated as well using SSIS. Make sure you have SQL Server Agent Turned on as this feature will create a job. Puzzle – SELECT * vs SELECT COUNT(*) If you have ever wondered SELECT * gives error when executed alone but SELECT COUNT(*) does not. Why? in that case, you should read this blog post. Creating All New Database with Full Recovery Model This blog post is very based on very interesting story where the user wants to do something by default for every single new database created. Model database is a secret weapon which should be used very carefully and with proper evalution. If used carefully this can be a very much beneficiary when we need a newly created database behave in certain fashion. 2012 In year 2012 I had two interesting series ran on the blog. If there is no fun in learning, the learning becomes a burden. For the same reason, I had decided to build a three part quiz around SEQUENCE. The quiz was to identify the next value of the sequence. I encourage all of you to take part in this fun quiz. Guess the Next Value – Puzzle 1 Guess the Next Value – Puzzle 2 Guess the Next Value – Puzzle 3 Can anyone remember their final day of schooling?  This is probably a silly question because – of course you can!  Many people mark this as the most exciting, happiest day of their life.  It marks the end of testing, the end of following rules set by teachers, and the beginning of finally being able to earn money and work in your chosen field. Read five part series on developer training subject Developer Training - Importance and Significance - Part 1 Developer Training – Employee Morals and Ethics – Part 2 Developer Training – Difficult Questions and Alternative Perspective - Part 3 Developer Training – Various Options for Developer Training – Part 4 Developer Training – A Conclusive Summary- Part 5 Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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