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• Want to display a 3D model on the iPhone: how to get started?

  - by JeremyReimer

  I want to display and rotate a single 3D model, preferably textured, on the iPhone. Doesn't have to zoom in and out, or have a background, or anything. I have the following: an iPhone a MacBook the iPhone SDK Blender My knowledge base: I can make 3D models in various 3D programs (I'm most comfortable with 3D Studio Max, which I once took a course on, but I've used others) General knowledge of procedural programming from years ago (QuickBasic - I'm old!) Beginner's knowledge of object-oriented programming from going through simple Java and C# tutorials (Head Start C# book and my wife's intro to OOP course that used Java) I have managed to display a 3D textured model and spin it using a tutorial in C# I got off the net (I didn't just copy and paste, I understand basically how it works) and the XNA game development library, using Visual Studio on Windows. What I do not know: Much about Objective C Anything about OpenGL or OpenGL ES, which the iPhone apparently uses Anything about XCode My main problem is that I don't know where to start! All the iPhone books I found seem to be about creating GUI applications, not OpenGL apps. I found an OpenGL book but I don't know how much, if any, applies to iPhone development. And I find the Objective C syntax somewhat confusing, with the weird nested method naming, things like "id" that don't make sense, and the scary thought that I have to do manual memory management. Where is the best place to start? I couldn't find any tutorials for this sort of thing, but maybe my Google-Fu is weak. Or maybe I should start with learning Objective C? I know of books like Aaron Hillgrass', but I've also read that they are outdated and much of the sample code doesn't work on the iPhone SDK, plus it seems geared towards the Model-View-Controller paradigm which doesn't seem that suited for 3D apps. Basically I'm confused about what my first steps should be.

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• Jquery Sorting by Letter

  - by Batfan

  I am using jquery to sort through a group of paragraph tags (kudos to Aaron Harun). It pulls the value "letter" (a letter) from the url string and displays only paragraphs that start with that letter. It hides all others and also consolidates the list so that there are no duplicates showing. See the code: var letter = '<?php echo(strlen($_GET['letter']) == 1) ? $_GET['letter'] : ''; ?>' function finish(){ var found_first = []; jQuery('p').each(function(){ if(jQuery(this).text().substr(0,1).toUpperCase() == letter){ if(found_first[jQuery(this).text()] != true){ jQuery(this).addClass('current-series'); found_first[jQuery(this).text()] = true; }else{ jQuery(this).hide(); } } else{ jQuery(this).hide();} }) } Been working with this all day and I have 2 Questions on this: Is there a way to get it to ignore the word 'The', if it's first? For example, if a paragraph starts with 'The Amazing', I would like it to show up on the 'A' page, not the 'T' page, like it currently is. Is there a way to have a single page for (all) numbers? For example, the url to the page would be something similar to domain.com/index.php?letter=0 and this would show only the paragraph tags that start with a number, any number. I can currently do this with single numbers but, I would like 1 page for all numbers.

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• Oracle WebCenter at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference

  - by Brian Dirking

  We had a great week at the E20 Conference, presenting in four sessions – Andy MacMillan gave a session titled Today’s Successful Enterprises are Social Enterprises and was on a panel that Tony Byrne moderated; Christian Finn spoke on a panel on Unified Communications Unified Communications + Social Computing = Best of Both Worlds?, Mark Bennett spoke on a panel on The Evolution of Talent Management. The key areas of focus this year were sentiment analysis, adoption and community building, the benefits of failure, and social’s role in process applications. Sentiment analysis. This was focused not on external audiences but more on employee sentiment. Tim Young showed his internal "NikoNiko" project, where employees use smilies to report their current mood. The result was a dashboard that showed the company mood by department. Since the goal is to improve productivity, people can see which departments are running into issues and try and address them. A company might otherwise wait until the end of the quarter financials to find out that there was a problem and product didn’t ship. This is a way to identify issues immediately. Tim is great – he had the crowd laughing as soon as he hit the stage, with his proposed hastag for his session: by making it 138 characters long, people couldn’t say much behind his back. And as I tweeted during his session, I loved his comment that complexity diffuses energy - it sounds like something Sun Tzu would say. Another example of employee sentiment analysis was CubeVibe. Founder and CEO Aaron Aycock, in his 3 minute pitch or die session talked about how engaged employees perform better. It was too bad he got gonged, he was just picking up speed, but CubeVibe did win the vote – congratulations to them. Internal adoption, community building, and involvement. On this topic I spoke to Terri Griffith, and she said there is some good work going on at University of Indiana regarding this, and hinted that she might be blogging about it in the near future. This area holds lots of interest for me. Amongst our customers, - CPAC stands out as an organization that has successfully built a community. So, I wonder - what are the building blocks? A strong leader? A common or unifying purpose? A certain level of engagement? I imagine someone has created an equation that says “for a community to grow at 30% per month, there must be an engagement level x to the square root of y, where x equals current community size, and y equals the expected growth rate, and the result is how many engagements the average user must contribute to maintain that growth.” Does anyone have a framework like that? The net result of everyone’s experience is that there is nothing to do but start early and fail often. Kevin Jones made this the focus of his keynote. He talked about the types of failure and what they mean. And he showed his famous kids at work video: Kevin’s blog also has this post: Social Business Failure #8: Workflow Integration. This is something that we’ve been working on at Oracle. Since so much of business is based in enterprise applications such as ERP and CRM (and since Oracle offers e-Business Suite, Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards, as well as Fusion Applications), it makes sense that the social capabilities of Oracle WebCenter is built right into these applications. There are two types of social collaboration – ad-hoc, and exception handling. When you are in a business process and encounter an exception, you immediately look for 1) the document that tells you how to handle it, or 2) the person who can tell you how to handle it. With WebCenter built into these processes, people either search their content management system, or engage in expertise location and conversation. The great thing is, THEY DON’T HAVE TO LEAVE THE APPLICATION TO DO IT. Oracle has built the social capabilities right into the applications and business processes. I don’t think enough folks were able to see that at the event, but I expect that over the next six months folks will become very aware of it. WebCenter also provides the ability to have ad-hoc collaboration, search, and expertise location that folks need when they are innovating or collaborating. We demonstrated Oracle Social Network. It’s built on our Oracle WebCenter product to provide social collaboration inside and outside of your company. When we showed it to people, there were a number of areas that they commented on that were different from the other products being shown at the conference: Screenshots from within the product Many authors working on documents simultaneously Flagging people for follow up Direct ability to call out to people Ability to see presence not just if someone is online, but which conversation they are actively in Great stuff, the conference was full of smart people that that we enjoy spending time with. We’ll keep up in the meantime, but we look forward to seeing you in Boston.

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• Wildcards!

  - by Tim Dexter

  Yes, its been a while, Im sorry, mumble, mumble ... no excuses. Well other than its been, as my son would say 'hecka busy.' On a brighter note I see Kan has been posting some cool stuff in my absence, long may he continue! I received a question today asking about using a wildcard in a template, something like: <?if:INVOICE = 'MLP*'?> where * is the wildcard Well that particular try does not work but you can do it without building your own wildcard function. XSL, the underpinning language of the RTF templates, has some useful string functions - you can find them listed here. I used the starts-with function to achieve a simple wildcard scenario but the contains can be used in conjunction with some of the others to build something more sophisticated. Assume I have a a list of friends and the amounts of money they owe me ... Im very generous and my interest rates a pretty competitive :0) <ROWSET> <ROW> <NAME>Andy</NAME> <AMT>100</AMT> </ROW> <ROW> <NAME>Andrew</NAME> <AMT>60</AMT> </ROW> <ROW> <NAME>Aaron</NAME> <AMT>50</AMT> </ROW> <ROW> <NAME>Alice</NAME> <AMT>40</AMT> </ROW> <ROW> <NAME>Bob</NAME> <AMT>10</AMT> </ROW> <ROW> <NAME>Bill</NAME> <AMT>100</AMT> </ROW> Now, listing my friends is easy enough <for-each:ROW> <NAME> <AMT> <end for-each> but lets say I just want to see all my friends beginning with 'A'. To do that I can use an XPATH expression to filter the data and tack it on to the for-each expression. This is more efficient that using an 'if' statement just inside the for-each. <?for-each:ROW[starts-with(NAME,'A')]?> will find me all the A's. The square braces denote the start of the XPATH expression. starts-with is the function Im calling and Im passing the value I want to check i.e. NAME and the string Im looking for. Just substitute in the characters you are looking for. You can of course use the function in a if statement too. <?if:starts-with(NAME,'A')?><?attribute@incontext:color;'red'?><?end if?> Notice I removed the square braces, this will highlight text red if the name begins with an 'A' You can even use the function to do conditional calculations: <?sum (AMT[starts-with(../NAME,'A')])?> Sum only the amounts where the name begins with an 'A' Notice the square braces are back, its a function we want to apply to the AMT field. Also notice that we need to use ../NAME. The AMT and NAME elements are at the same level in the tree, so when we are at the AMT level we need the ../ to go up a level to then come back down to test the NAME value. I have built out the above functions in a sample template here. Huge prizes for the first person to come up with a 'true' wildcard solution i.e. if NAME like '*im*exter* demand cash now!

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• Can Kind People Finish First?

  - by Oracle Accelerate for Midsize Companies

  by Jim Lein, Oracle Midsize Programs In an earlier post, I expressed my undying love for KIND Snacks' products. This month's Oracle Profit magazine features an interview with KIND Healthy Snacks Founder and CEO Daniel Lubetzky entitled "Better Business". Lubetzky expresses his vision for making KIND a "not for profit only" company.  All great companies start with a good idea. In this case, that one great idea was to offer a healthy snack with ingredients you can "see and pronounce". That's one of things I really like about this company--that coupled with the fact that their snacks taste great. They compete in an over crowded playing field but I've found that it's rare to find an energy snack that both tastes good and is good for you.  A couple of interesting facts I learned from reading this article: Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} 9 out of 10 consumers who try a KIND bar will purchase a KIND product again and recommend it to others KIND has the highest Net Promoter Score among the top 10 brands in the nutritional bar category (I confess I've never heard about this rating before but now that I have it's pretty cool) KIND's coporate mantra, "Do the Kind Thing" both encourages people to do random acts of kindness and provides easy mechanisms for doing so. Not coincidentally, I think, KIND is indeed a story about how nice guys can finish first. KIND has doubled in size every year for the last ten  years and now employees over 300 people, with sales exceeding $120M annually. Growth Applies Pressures One thing I know for certain from interacting our with fast growing customers over the last fifteen years is that growth applies myriad pressures across the organization--resources, processes, technology systems, and leadership agility. And it's easy to forget that Oracle was once an entrepreneurial startup and experienced all those same pressures that other growing companies are experiencing today. When asked by Profit Editor in Chief Aaron Lazenby, " What sort of pressure does KIND"s growth and success place on operations?", Lubetzky responded, "We have a demand planning process right now that is manual to a significant extent, and it just takes so much management time. It takes us days and sometimes weeks to produce information that is critical to our business—and by the time we get the results, we need revised data. Our sales leadership could go out selling, but instead they’re talking to our team about forecasts." Hitching Your Wagon to Oracle Lubetzky and his team selected Oracle for what I believe is our company's greatest strength: hitch your wagon to Oracle and you can trust that we will be there for the long run with the solutions you need and financial staying power. In Lubetzky's words, "The KIND philosophy requires you to have a long-term view of things; taking shortcuts may be the fastest way to get things done, but in the long term that can come back and bite you. Oracle is the type of company—and has the kind of platform—that is here for the long term. It’s not going to go away tomorrow. And Oracle is going to invest all the necessary resources into staying ahead of the game and improving." o next time you're in the supermarket or an REI (my favorite store in the world) or any of the other 80,000 locations that carry KIND, give one a try. Maybe some day you'll want to become a KIND Brand Ambassador.   Looking for more news and information about Oracle Solutions for Midsize Companies? Read the latest Oracle for Midsize Companies Newsletter Sign-up to receive the latest communications from Oracle’s industry leaders and experts Jim Lein I evangelize Oracle's enterprise solutions for growing midsize companies. I recently celebrated 15 years with Oracle, having joined JD Edwards in 1999. I'm based in Evergreen, Colorado and love relating stories about creativity and innovation whether they be about software, live music, or the mountains. The views expressed here are my own, and not necessarily those of Oracle.

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• Online ALTER TABLE in MySQL 5.6

  - by Marko Mäkelä

  This is the low-level view of data dictionary language (DDL) operations in the InnoDB storage engine in MySQL 5.6. John Russell gave a more high-level view in his blog post April 2012 Labs Release – Online DDL Improvements. MySQL before the InnoDB Plugin Traditionally, the MySQL storage engine interface has taken a minimalistic approach to data definition language. The only natively supported operations were CREATE TABLE, DROP TABLE and RENAME TABLE. Consider the following example: CREATE TABLE t(a INT); INSERT INTO t VALUES (1),(2),(3); CREATE INDEX a ON t(a); DROP TABLE t; The CREATE INDEX statement would be executed roughly as follows: CREATE TABLE temp(a INT, INDEX(a)); INSERT INTO temp SELECT * FROM t; RENAME TABLE t TO temp2; RENAME TABLE temp TO t; DROP TABLE temp2; You could imagine that the database could crash when copying all rows from the original table to the new one. For example, it could run out of file space. Then, on restart, InnoDB would roll back the huge INSERT transaction. To fix things a little, a hack was added to ha_innobase::write_row for committing the transaction every 10,000 rows. Still, it was frustrating that even a simple DROP INDEX would make the table unavailable for modifications for a long time. Fast Index Creation in the InnoDB Plugin of MySQL 5.1 MySQL 5.1 introduced a new interface for CREATE INDEX and DROP INDEX. The old table-copying approach can still be forced by SET old_alter_table=0. This interface is used in MySQL 5.5 and in the InnoDB Plugin for MySQL 5.1. Apart from the ability to do a quick DROP INDEX, the main advantage is that InnoDB will execute a merge-sort algorithm before inserting the index records into each index that is being created. This should speed up the insert into the secondary index B-trees and potentially result in a better B-tree fill factor. The 5.1 ALTER TABLE interface was not perfect. For example, DROP FOREIGN KEY still invoked the table copy. Renaming columns could conflict with InnoDB foreign key constraints. Combining ADD KEY and DROP KEY in ALTER TABLE was problematic and not atomic inside the storage engine. The ALTER TABLE interface in MySQL 5.6 The ALTER TABLE storage engine interface was completely rewritten in MySQL 5.6. Instead of introducing a method call for every conceivable operation, MySQL 5.6 introduced a handful of methods, and data structures that keep track of the requested changes. In MySQL 5.6, online ALTER TABLE operation can be requested by specifying LOCK=NONE. Also LOCK=SHARED and LOCK=EXCLUSIVE are available. The old-style table copying can be requested by ALGORITHM=COPY. That one will require at least LOCK=SHARED. From the InnoDB point of view, anything that is possible with LOCK=EXCLUSIVE is also possible with LOCK=SHARED. Most ALGORITHM=INPLACE operations inside InnoDB can be executed online (LOCK=NONE). InnoDB will always require an exclusive table lock in two phases of the operation. The execution phases are tied to a number of methods: handler::check_if_supported_inplace_alter Checks if the storage engine can perform all requested operations, and if so, what kind of locking is needed. handler::prepare_inplace_alter_table InnoDB uses this method to set up the data dictionary cache for upcoming CREATE INDEX operation. We need stubs for the new indexes, so that we can keep track of changes to the table during online index creation. Also, crash recovery would drop any indexes that were incomplete at the time of the crash. handler::inplace_alter_table In InnoDB, this method is used for creating secondary indexes or for rebuilding the table. This is the ‘main’ phase that can be executed online (with concurrent writes to the table). handler::commit_inplace_alter_table This is where the operation is committed or rolled back. Here, InnoDB would drop any indexes, rename any columns, drop or add foreign keys, and finalize a table rebuild or index creation. It would also discard any logs that were set up for online index creation or table rebuild. The prepare and commit phases require an exclusive lock, blocking all access to the table. If MySQL times out while upgrading the table meta-data lock for the commit phase, it will roll back the ALTER TABLE operation. In MySQL 5.6, data definition language operations are still not fully atomic, because the data dictionary is split. Part of it is inside InnoDB data dictionary tables. Part of the information is only available in the *.frm file, which is not covered by any crash recovery log. But, there is a single commit phase inside the storage engine. Online Secondary Index Creation It may occur that an index needs to be created on a new column to speed up queries. But, it may be unacceptable to block modifications on the table while creating the index. It turns out that it is conceptually not so hard to support online index creation. All we need is some more execution phases: Set up a stub for the index, for logging changes. Scan the table for index records. Sort the index records. Bulk load the index records. Apply the logged changes. Replace the stub with the actual index. Threads that modify the table will log the operations to the logs of each index that is being created. Errors, such as log overflow or uniqueness violations, will only be flagged by the ALTER TABLE thread. The log is conceptually similar to the InnoDB change buffer. The bulk load of index records will bypass record locking. We still generate redo log for writing the index pages. It would suffice to log page allocations only, and to flush the index pages from the buffer pool to the file system upon completion. Native ALTER TABLE Starting with MySQL 5.6, InnoDB supports most ALTER TABLE operations natively. The notable exceptions are changes to the column type, ADD FOREIGN KEY except when foreign_key_checks=0, and changes to tables that contain FULLTEXT indexes. The keyword ALGORITHM=INPLACE is somewhat misleading, because certain operations cannot be performed in-place. For example, changing the ROW_FORMAT of a table requires a rebuild. Online operation (LOCK=NONE) is not allowed in the following cases: when adding an AUTO_INCREMENT column, when the table contains FULLTEXT indexes or a hidden FTS_DOC_ID column, or when there are FOREIGN KEY constraints referring to the table, with ON…CASCADE or ON…SET NULL option. The FOREIGN KEY limitations are needed, because MySQL does not acquire meta-data locks on the child or parent tables when executing SQL statements. Theoretically, InnoDB could support operations like ADD COLUMN and DROP COLUMN in-place, by lazily converting the table to a newer format. This would require that the data dictionary keep multiple versions of the table definition. For simplicity, we will copy the entire table, even for DROP COLUMN. The bulk copying of the table will bypass record locking and undo logging. For facilitating online operation, a temporary log will be associated with the clustered index of table. Threads that modify the table will also write the changes to the log. When altering the table, we skip all records that have been marked for deletion. In this way, we can simply discard any undo log records that were not yet purged from the original table. Off-page columns, or BLOBs, are an important consideration. We suspend the purge of delete-marked records if it would free any off-page columns from the old table. This is because the BLOBs can be needed when applying changes from the log. We have special logging for handling the ROLLBACK of an INSERT that inserted new off-page columns. This is because the columns will be freed at rollback.

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• NetBeans not liking libraries in lib-src

  - by DJTripleThreat

  I'm working on a project with a group that is using Eclipse, but I'm using Netbeans. Up until today this wasn't an issue. When updating from the repo they have added some source code as a library under a directory called /lib-src. When I try to compile the code I get an error that it can't find certain packages... these are the packages under /lib-src. Using NetBeans I can add the library as a folder so now the references to those packages are happy. However, I'm getting this new error when compiling: UNEXPECTED TOP-LEVEL ERROR: java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space at java.util.HashMap.addEntry(HashMap.java:753) at java.util.HashMap.put(HashMap.java:385) at com.android.dx.dex.file.ClassDataItem.addStaticField(ClassDataItem.java:134) at com.android.dx.dex.file.ClassDefItem.addStaticField(ClassDefItem.java:280) at com.android.dx.dex.cf.CfTranslator.processFields(CfTranslator.java:159) at com.android.dx.dex.cf.CfTranslator.translate0(CfTranslator.java:130) at com.android.dx.dex.cf.CfTranslator.translate(CfTranslator.java:85) at com.android.dx.command.dexer.Main.processClass(Main.java:297) at com.android.dx.command.dexer.Main.processFileBytes(Main.java:276) at com.android.dx.command.dexer.Main.access$100(Main.java:56) at com.android.dx.command.dexer.Main$1.processFileBytes(Main.java:228) at com.android.dx.cf.direct.ClassPathOpener.processOne(ClassPathOpener.java:134) at com.android.dx.cf.direct.ClassPathOpener.processDirectory(ClassPathOpener.java:190) at com.android.dx.cf.direct.ClassPathOpener.processOne(ClassPathOpener.java:122) at com.android.dx.cf.direct.ClassPathOpener.processDirectory(ClassPathOpener.java:190) at com.android.dx.cf.direct.ClassPathOpener.processOne(ClassPathOpener.java:122) at com.android.dx.cf.direct.ClassPathOpener.processDirectory(ClassPathOpener.java:190) at com.android.dx.cf.direct.ClassPathOpener.processOne(ClassPathOpener.java:122) at com.android.dx.cf.direct.ClassPathOpener.processDirectory(ClassPathOpener.java:190) at com.android.dx.cf.direct.ClassPathOpener.processOne(ClassPathOpener.java:122) at com.android.dx.cf.direct.ClassPathOpener.processDirectory(ClassPathOpener.java:190) at com.android.dx.cf.direct.ClassPathOpener.processOne(ClassPathOpener.java:122) at com.android.dx.cf.direct.ClassPathOpener.processDirectory(ClassPathOpener.java:190) at com.android.dx.cf.direct.ClassPathOpener.processOne(ClassPathOpener.java:122) at com.android.dx.cf.direct.ClassPathOpener.processDirectory(ClassPathOpener.java:190) at com.android.dx.cf.direct.ClassPathOpener.processOne(ClassPathOpener.java:122) at com.android.dx.cf.direct.ClassPathOpener.process(ClassPathOpener.java:108) at com.android.dx.command.dexer.Main.processOne(Main.java:245) at com.android.dx.command.dexer.Main.processAllFiles(Main.java:183) at com.android.dx.command.dexer.Main.run(Main.java:139) at com.android.dx.command.dexer.Main.main(Main.java:120) at com.android.dx.command.Main.main(Main.java:87) /home/aaron/NetBeansProjects/xbmc-remote/nbproject/build-impl.xml:411: exec returned: 3 BUILD FAILED (total time: 1 minute 25 seconds) I can include the build-impl.xml file if you need it, but I don't think that is main issue. Any ideas?

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• How to loop a json array and update links

  - by azz0r

  Hello, On page load, I do one call to get the current status of all the favourite links (display the right message aka: click to subscribe, click to unsubscribe. So far I have the following code: $(InitFavorite); function InitFavorite(){ var jList = $(".favourite_link"); var ids_to_check = {};//new Array(); $.each(jList, function () { var id = this.id; var object = id.split("_"); if (!ids_to_check[object[1]]) { ids_to_check[object[1]] = []; } ids_to_check[object[1]].push(object[0]); }); //console.log(ids_to_check); $.ajax({ type: 'POST', url: '/user/subscription/favourite-listing', data: ids_to_check, dataType: 'json', beforeSend: function(x) { if(x && x.overrideMimeType) { x.overrideMimeType("application/j-son;charset=UTF-8"); } }, error: function() { alert(1); }, success: function(returned_values) { $.each(returned_values, function() { console.log($(this)); }) } }); } My returned data is: {"env":"development","loggedIn":true,"translate":{},"aaron":"{\"Playlist\":{\"10\":\"Stop Recieving Updates For This Playlist\"},\"Clip\":{\"26\":\"Recieve Updates For This Clip\",\"27\":\"Recieve Updates For This Clip\",\"28\":\"Recieve Updates For This Clip\",\"29\":\"Stop Recieving Updates For This Clip\",\"30\":\"Recieve Updates For This Clip\"}}"} I would like it to loop through the data and for example update the class <a href="/user/subscription/toggle/id/26/object/Clip" class="favourite_link" id="26_Clip"> <img src="/design/images/icon/subscribe.png"> Add Clip To Favourites</a> However eaching through returned_values equals this in firebug: ["{", """, "P", "l", "a", "y", "l", "i", "s", "t", """, ":", "{", """, "1", "0", """, ":", """, "S", "t", "o", "p", " ", "R", "e", "c", "i", "e", "v", "i", "n", "g", " ", "U", "p", "d", "a", "t", "e", "s", " ", "F", "o", "r", " ", "T", "h", "i", "s", " ", "P", "l", "a", "y", "l", "i", "s", "t", """, "}", ",", """, "C", "l", "i", "p", """, ":", "{", """, "2", "6", """, ":", """, "R", "e", "c", "i", "e", "v", "e", " ", "U", "p", "d", "a", "t", "e", "s", " ", "F", "o", "r", " ", "T", "h", "i", "s", " ", "C", "l", "i", "p", """, ",", """, "2", "7", """, ":", """, "R", "e", "c", "i", "e", "v", "e", " ", "U", "p", "d", "a", "t", "e", "s", " ", "F", "o", "r", " ", "T", "h", "i", "s", " ", "C", "l", "i", "p", """, ",", """, "2", "8", """, ":", """, "R", "e", "c", "i", "e", "v", "e", " ", "U", "p", "d", "a", "t", "e", "s", " ", "F", "o", "r", " ", "T", "h", "i", "s", " ", "C", "l", "i", "p", """, ",", """, "2", "9", """, ":", """, "S", "t", "o", "p", " ", "R", "e", "c", "i", "e", "v", "i", "n", "g", " ", "U", "p", "d", "a", "t", "e", "s", " ", "F", "o", "r", " ", "T", "h", "i", "s", " ", "C", "l", "i", "p", """, ",", """, "3", "0", """, ":", """, "R", "e", "c", "i", "e", "v", "e", " ", "U", "p", "d", "a", "t", "e", "s", " ", "F", "o", "r", " ", "T", "h", "i", "s", " ", "C", "l", "i", "p", """, "}", "}"] How would I successfully loop that json array? Many thanks

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• jQuery: Giving each matched element an unique ID

  - by AnGafraidh

  I am writing an 'inline translator' application to be used with a cloud computing platform to extend non-supported languages. The majority of this uses jQuery to find the text value, replace it with the translation, then append the element with a span tag that has an unique ID, to be used elsewhere within the application. The problem arises however, when there are more than one element, say , that have the exact same value to be translated (matched elements). What happens in the function in question is that it puts all matched elements in the same span, taking the second, third, fourth, etc. out of their parent tags. My code is pretty much like this example: <script src='jquery-1.4.2.js'></script> <script> jQuery.noConflict(); var uniqueID='asdfjkl'; jQuery(window).ready(function() { var myQ1 = jQuery("input[id~=test1]"); myClone=myQ1.clone(); myClone.val('Replaced this button'); myQ1.replaceWith('<span id='+uniqueID+'></span>'); jQuery('#'+uniqueID).append(myClone); }); </script> <table> <tr><td> <input id='test1' type='button' value="I'm a button!"></input> &nbsp; <input id='test2' type='button' value="And so am I"></input> </tr></td> <tr><td> <input id='test1' type='button' value="I'm a button!"></input> </tr></td> </table> As a workaround, I've experimented with using a loop to create a class for each span, rising in increment until jQuery("input[id~=test1]").length, but I can't seem to get anything I do to work. Is there any way to give each matched element an unique ID? My fluency in jQuery is being put to the test! Thanks for any help in advance. Aaron

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• How to find an specific key/value (property list)

  - by Bob Rivers

  Hi, I'm learning cocoa/objective-c. Right now I'm dealing with key/value coding. After reading Aaron's book and other sources, I thought that I was able to left the simple examples and try a complex one... I'm trying read iTunes property list (iTunes Music Library.xml). I would like to retrieve the tracks held by an specific playlist. Probably everybody knows it, but bellow I put a piece of the xml: <plist version="1.0"> <dict> <key>Major Version</key><integer>1</integer> ... <key>Playlists</key> <array> <dict> <key>Name</key><string>Library</string> ... <key>Playlist Items</key> <array> <dict> <key>Track ID</key><integer>10281</integer> </dict> ... </array> </dict> <dict> ... </dict> </array> </dict> </plist> As you can see, the playlists are stored as dictionaries inside an array, and the key that identifies it is inside it, not as a <key> preceding it. The problem is that I'm not able to figure out how to search for a key that is inside another one. With the following code I can find the the array in which the playlists are stored, but how to find an specific <dict>? NSDictionary *rootDict = [[NSDictionary alloc] initWithContentsOfFile:file]; NSArray *playlists = [rootDict objectForKey:@"Playlists"]; Here at Stackoverflow I found this post, but I'm not sure if iterate over the array and test it is a good idea. I'm quite sure that I could use valueForKeyPath, but I'm unable to figure out how to do it. Any help is welcome. TIA, Bob

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• Tutorial: Getting Started with the NoSQL JavaScript / Node.js API for MySQL Cluster

  - by Mat Keep

  Tutorial authored by Craig Russell and JD Duncan  The MySQL Cluster team are working on a new NoSQL JavaScript connector for MySQL. The objectives are simplicity and high performance for JavaScript users: - allows end-to-end JavaScript development, from the browser to the server and now to the world's most popular open source database - native "NoSQL" access to the storage layer without going first through SQL transformations and parsing. Node.js is a complete web platform built around JavaScript designed to deliver millions of client connections on commodity hardware. With the MySQL NoSQL Connector for JavaScript, Node.js users can easily add data access and persistence to their web, cloud, social and mobile applications. While the initial implementation is designed to plug and play with Node.js, the actual implementation doesn't depend heavily on Node, potentially enabling wider platform support in the future. Implementation The architecture and user interface of this connector are very different from other MySQL connectors in a major way: it is an asynchronous interface that follows the event model built into Node.js. To make it as easy as possible, we decided to use a domain object model to store the data. This allows for users to query data from the database and have a fully-instantiated object to work with, instead of having to deal with rows and columns of the database. The domain object model can have any user behavior that is desired, with the NoSQL connector providing the data from the database. To make it as fast as possible, we use a direct connection from the user's address space to the database. This approach means that no SQL (pun intended) is needed to get to the data, and no SQL server is between the user and the data. The connector is being developed to be extensible to multiple underlying database technologies, including direct, native access to both the MySQL Cluster "ndb" and InnoDB storage engines. The connector integrates the MySQL Cluster native API library directly within the Node.js platform itself, enabling developers to seamlessly couple their high performance, distributed applications with a high performance, distributed, persistence layer delivering 99.999% availability. The following sections take you through how to connect to MySQL, query the data and how to get started. Connecting to the database A Session is the main user access path to the database. You can get a Session object directly from the connector using the openSession function: var nosql = require("mysql-js"); var dbProperties = {     "implementation" : "ndb",     "database" : "test" }; nosql.openSession(dbProperties, null, onSession); The openSession function calls back into the application upon creating a Session. The Session is then used to create, delete, update, and read objects. Reading data The Session can read data from the database in a number of ways. If you simply want the data from the database, you provide a table name and the key of the row that you want. For example, consider this schema: create table employee (   id int not null primary key,   name varchar(32),   salary float ) ENGINE=ndbcluster; Since the primary key is a number, you can provide the key as a number to the find function. function onSession = function(err, session) {   if (err) {     console.log(err);     ... error handling   }   session.find('employee', 0, onData); }; function onData = function(err, data) {   if (err) {     console.log(err);     ... error handling   }   console.log('Found: ', JSON.stringify(data));   ... use data in application }; If you want to have the data stored in your own domain model, you tell the connector which table your domain model uses, by specifying an annotation, and pass your domain model to the find function. var annotations = new nosql.Annotations(); function Employee = function(id, name, salary) {   this.id = id;   this.name = name;   this.salary = salary;   this.giveRaise = function(percent) {     this.salary *= percent;   } }; annotations.mapClass(Employee, {'table' : 'employee'}); function onSession = function(err, session) {   if (err) {     console.log(err);     ... error handling   }   session.find(Employee, 0, onData); }; Updating data You can update the emp instance in memory, but to make the raise persistent, you need to write it back to the database, using the update function. function onData = function(err, emp) {   if (err) {     console.log(err);     ... error handling   }   console.log('Found: ', JSON.stringify(emp));   emp.giveRaise(0.12); // gee, thanks!   session.update(emp); // oops, session is out of scope here }; Using JavaScript can be tricky because it does not have the concept of block scope for variables. You can create a closure to handle these variables, or use a feature of the connector to remember your variables. The connector api takes a fixed number of parameters and returns a fixed number of result parameters to the callback function. But the connector will keep track of variables for you and return them to the callback. So in the above example, change the onSession function to remember the session variable, and you can refer to it in the onData function: function onSession = function(err, session) {   if (err) {     console.log(err);     ... error handling   }   session.find(Employee, 0, onData, session); }; function onData = function(err, emp, session) {   if (err) {     console.log(err);     ... error handling   }   console.log('Found: ', JSON.stringify(emp));   emp.giveRaise(0.12); // gee, thanks!   session.update(emp, onUpdate); // session is now in scope }; function onUpdate = function(err, emp) {   if (err) {     console.log(err);     ... error handling   } Inserting data Inserting data requires a mapped JavaScript user function (constructor) and a session. Create a variable and persist it: function onSession = function(err, session) {   var data = new Employee(999, 'Mat Keep', 20000000);   session.persist(data, onInsert);   } }; Deleting data To remove data from the database, use the session remove function. You use an instance of the domain object to identify the row you want to remove. Only the key field is relevant. function onSession = function(err, session) {   var key = new Employee(999);   session.remove(Employee, onDelete);   } }; More extensive queries We are working on the implementation of more extensive queries along the lines of the criteria query api. Stay tuned. How to evaluate The MySQL Connector for JavaScript is available for download from labs.mysql.com. Select the build: MySQL-Cluster-NoSQL-Connector-for-Node-js You can also clone the project on GitHub Since it is still early in development, feedback is especially valuable (so don't hesitate to leave comments on this blog, or head to the MySQL Cluster forum). Try it out and see how easy (and fast) it is to integrate MySQL Cluster into your Node.js platforms. You can learn more about other previewed functionality of MySQL Cluster 7.3 here

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• Learning content for MCSDs: Web Applications and Windows Store Apps using HTML5

  Recently, I started again to learn for various Microsoft certifications. First candidate on my way to MSCD: Web Applications is the Exam 70-480: Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3. Motivation to go for a Microsoft exam I guess, this is quite personal but let me briefly describe my intentions to go that exam. First, I'm doing web development since the 1990's. Working with HTML, CSS and Javascript is happening almost daily in my workspace. And honestly, I do not only do 'pure' web development but already integrated several HTML/CSS/Javascript frontend UIs into an existing desktop application (written in Visual FoxPro) inclusive two-way communication and data exchange. Hm, might be an interesting topic for another blog article here... Second, this exam has a very interesting aspect which is listed at the bottom of the exam's details: Credit Toward Certification When you pass Exam 70-480: Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3, you complete the requirements for the following certification(s): Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3 Specialist Exam 70-480: Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3: counts as credit toward the following certification(s): MCSD: Web Applications MCSD: Windows Store Apps using HTML5 So, passing one single exam will earn you specialist certification straight-forward, and opens the path to higher levels of certifications. Preparations and learning path Well, due to a newsletter from Microsoft Learning (MSL) I caught interest in picking up the circumstances and learning materials for this particular exam. As of writing this article there is a promotional / voucher code available which enables you to register for this exam for free! Simply register yourself with or log into your existing account at Prometric, choose the exam for a testing facility near to you and enter the voucher code HTMLJMP (available through 31.03.2013 or while supplies last). Hurry up, there are restrictions... As stated above, I'm already very familiar with web development and the programming flavours involved into this. But of course, it is always good to freshen up your knowledge and reflect on yourself. Microsoft is putting a lot of effort to attract any kind of developers into the 'App Development'. Whether it is for the Windows 8 Store or the Windows Phone 8 Store, doesn't really matter. They simply need more apps. This demand for skilled developers also comes with a nice side-effect: Lots and lots of material to study. During the first couple of hours, I could easily gather high quality preparation material - again for free! Following is just a small list of starting points. If you have more resources, please drop me a message in the comment section, and I'll be glad to update this article accordingly. Developing HTML5 Apps Jump Start This is an accelerated jump start video course on development of HTML5 Apps for Windows 8. There are six modules that are split into two video sessions per module. Very informative and intense course material. This is packed stuff taken from an official preparation course for exam 70-480. Developing Windows Store Apps with HTML5 Jump Start Again, an accelerated preparation video course on Windows 8 Apps. There are six modules with two video sessions each which will catapult you to your exam. This is also related to preps for exam 70-481. Programming Windows 8 Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript Kraig Brockschmidt delves into the ups and downs of Windows 8 App development over 800+ pages. Great eBook to read, study, and to practice the samples - best of all, it's for free. codeSHOW() This is a Windows 8 HTML/JS project with the express goal of demonstrating simple development concepts for the Windows 8 platform. Code, code and more code... absolutely great stuff to study and practice. Microsoft Virtual Academy I already wrote about the MVA in a previous article. Well, if you haven't registered yourself yet, now is the time. The list is not complete for sure, but this might keep you busy for at least one or even two weeks to go through the material. Please don't hesitate to add more resources in the comment section. Right now, I'm already through all videos once, and digging my way through chapter 4 of Kraig's book. Additional material - Pluralsight Apart from those free online resources, I also following some courses from the excellent library of Pluralsight. They already have their own section for Windows 8 development, but of course, you get companion material about HTML5, CSS and Javascript in other sections, too. Introduction to Building Windows 8 Applications Building Windows 8 Applications with JavaScript and HTML Selling Windows 8 Apps HTML5 Fundamentals Using HTML5 and CSS3 HTML5 Advanced Topics CSS3 etc... Interesting to see that Michael Palermo provides his course material on multiple platforms. Fantastic! You might also pay a visit to his personal blog. Hm, it just came to my mind that Aaron Skonnard of Pluralsight publishes so-called '24 hours Learning Paths' based on courses available in the course library. Would be interested to see a combination for Windows 8 App development using HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript in the future. Recommended workspace environment Well, you might have guessed it but this requires Windows 8, Visual Studio 2012 Express or another flavour, and a valid Developers License. Due to an MSDN subscription I working on VS 2012 Premium with some additional tools by Telerik. Honestly, the fastest way to get you up and running for Windows 8 App development is the source code archive of codeSHOW(). It does not only give you all source code in general but contains a couple of SDKs like Bing Maps, Microsoft Advertising, Live ID, and Telerik Windows 8 controls... for free! Hint: Get the Windows Phone 8 SDK as well. Don't worry, while you are studying the material for Windows 8 you will be able to leverage from this knowledge to development for the phone platform, too. It takes roughly one to two hours to get your workspace and learning environment, at least this was my time frame due to slow internet connection and an aged spare machine. ;-) Oh, before I forget to mention it, as soon as you're done, go quickly to the Windows Store and search for ClassBrowserPlus. You might not need it ad hoc for your development using HTML5, CSS and Javascript but I think that it is a great developer's utility that enables you to view the properties, methods and events (along with help text) for all Windows 8 classes. It's always good to look behind the scenes and to explore how it is made. Idea: Start/join a learning group The way you learn new things or intensify your knowledge in a certain technology is completely up to your personal preference. Back in my days at the university, we used to meet once or twice a week in a small quiet room to exchange our progress, questions and problems we ran into. In general, I recommend to any software craftsman to lift your butt and get out to exchange with other developers. Personally, I like this approach, as it gives you new points of view and an insight into others' own experience with certain techniques and how they managed to solve tricky issues. Just keep it relaxed and not too formal after all, and you might a have a good time away from your dull office desk. Give your machine a break, too.

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• T-SQL Tuesday #31 - Logging Tricks with CONTEXT_INFO

  - by Most Valuable Yak (Rob Volk)

  This month's T-SQL Tuesday is being hosted by Aaron Nelson [b | t], fellow Atlantan (the city in Georgia, not the famous sunken city, or the resort in the Bahamas) and covers the topic of logging (the recording of information, not the harvesting of trees) and maintains the fine T-SQL Tuesday tradition begun by Adam Machanic [b | t] (the SQL Server guru, not the guy who fixes cars, check the spelling again, there will be a quiz later). This is a trick I learned from Fernando Guerrero [b | t] waaaaaay back during the PASS Summit 2004 in sunny, hurricane-infested Orlando, during his session on Secret SQL Server (not sure if that's the correct title, and I haven't used parentheses in this paragraph yet).  CONTEXT_INFO is a neat little feature that's existed since SQL Server 2000 and perhaps even earlier.  It lets you assign data to the current session/connection, and maintains that data until you disconnect or change it.  In addition to the CONTEXT_INFO() function, you can also query the context_info column in sys.dm_exec_sessions, or even sysprocesses if you're still running SQL Server 2000, if you need to see it for another session. While you're limited to 128 bytes, one big advantage that CONTEXT_INFO has is that it's independent of any transactions.  If you've ever logged to a table in a transaction and then lost messages when it rolled back, you can understand how aggravating it can be.  CONTEXT_INFO also survives across multiple SQL batches (GO separators) in the same connection, so for those of you who were going to suggest "just log to a table variable, they don't get rolled back":  HA-HA, I GOT YOU!  Since GO starts a new batch all variable declarations are lost. Here's a simple example I recently used at work.  I had to test database mirroring configurations for disaster recovery scenarios and measure the network throughput.  I also needed to log how long it took for the script to run and include the mirror settings for the database in question.  I decided to use AdventureWorks as my database model, and Adam Machanic's Big Adventure script to provide a fairly large workload that's repeatable and easily scalable.  My test would consist of several copies of AdventureWorks running the Big Adventure script while I mirrored the databases (or not). Since Adam's script contains several batches, I decided CONTEXT_INFO would have to be used.  As it turns out, I only needed to grab the start time at the beginning, I could get the rest of the data at the end of the process.   The code is pretty small: declare @time binary(128)=cast(getdate() as binary(8)) set context_info @time   ... rest of Big Adventure code ...   go use master; insert mirror_test(server,role,partner,db,state,safety,start,duration) select @@servername, mirroring_role_desc, mirroring_partner_instance, db_name(database_id), mirroring_state_desc, mirroring_safety_level_desc, cast(cast(context_info() as binary(8)) as datetime), datediff(s,cast(cast(context_info() as binary(8)) as datetime),getdate()) from sys.database_mirroring where db_name(database_id) like 'Adv%';   I declared @time as a binary(128) since CONTEXT_INFO is defined that way.  I couldn't convert GETDATE() to binary(128) as it would pad the first 120 bytes as 0x00.  To keep the CAST functions simple and avoid using SUBSTRING, I decided to CAST GETDATE() as binary(8) and let SQL Server do the implicit conversion.  It's not the safest way perhaps, but it works on my machine. :) As I mentioned earlier, you can query system views for sessions and get their CONTEXT_INFO.  With a little boilerplate code this can be used to monitor long-running procedures, in case you need to kill a process, or are just curious  how long certain parts take.  In this example, I added code to Adam's Big Adventure script to set CONTEXT_INFO messages at strategic places I want to monitor.  (His code is in UPPERCASE as it was in the original, mine is all lowercase): declare @msg binary(128) set @msg=cast('Altering bigProduct.ProductID' as binary(128)) set context_info @msg go ALTER TABLE bigProduct ALTER COLUMN ProductID INT NOT NULL GO set context_info 0x0 go declare @msg1 binary(128) set @msg1=cast('Adding pk_bigProduct Constraint' as binary(128)) set context_info @msg1 go ALTER TABLE bigProduct ADD CONSTRAINT pk_bigProduct PRIMARY KEY (ProductID) GO set context_info 0x0 go declare @msg2 binary(128) set @msg2=cast('Altering bigTransactionHistory.TransactionID' as binary(128)) set context_info @msg2 go ALTER TABLE bigTransactionHistory ALTER COLUMN TransactionID INT NOT NULL GO set context_info 0x0 go declare @msg3 binary(128) set @msg3=cast('Adding pk_bigTransactionHistory Constraint' as binary(128)) set context_info @msg3 go ALTER TABLE bigTransactionHistory ADD CONSTRAINT pk_bigTransactionHistory PRIMARY KEY NONCLUSTERED(TransactionID) GO set context_info 0x0 go declare @msg4 binary(128) set @msg4=cast('Creating IX_ProductId_TransactionDate Index' as binary(128)) set context_info @msg4 go CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX IX_ProductId_TransactionDate ON bigTransactionHistory(ProductId,TransactionDate) INCLUDE(Quantity,ActualCost) GO set context_info 0x0   This doesn't include the entire script, only those portions that altered a table or created an index.  One annoyance is that SET CONTEXT_INFO requires a literal or variable, you can't use an expression.  And since GO starts a new batch I need to declare a variable in each one.  And of course I have to use CAST because it won't implicitly convert varchar to binary.  And even though context_info is a nullable column, you can't SET CONTEXT_INFO NULL, so I have to use SET CONTEXT_INFO 0x0 to clear the message after the statement completes.  And if you're thinking of turning this into a UDF, you can't, although a stored procedure would work. So what does all this aggravation get you?  As the code runs, if I want to see which stage the session is at, I can run the following (assuming SPID 51 is the one I want): select CAST(context_info as varchar(128)) from sys.dm_exec_sessions where session_id=51   Since SQL Server 2005 introduced the new system and dynamic management views (DMVs) there's not as much need for tagging a session with these kinds of messages.  You can get the session start time and currently executing statement from them, and neatly presented if you use Adam's sp_whoisactive utility (and you absolutely should be using it).  Of course you can always use xp_cmdshell, a CLR function, or some other tricks to log information outside of a SQL transaction.  All the same, I've used this trick to monitor long-running reports at a previous job, and I still think CONTEXT_INFO is a great feature, especially if you're still using SQL Server 2000 or want to supplement your instrumentation.  If you'd like an exercise, consider adding the system time to the messages in the last example, and an automated job to query and parse it from the system tables.  That would let you track how long each statement ran without having to run Profiler. #TSQL2sDay

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• T-SQL Tuesday #31 - Logging Tricks with CONTEXT_INFO

  - by Most Valuable Yak (Rob Volk)

  This month's T-SQL Tuesday is being hosted by Aaron Nelson [b | t], fellow Atlantan (the city in Georgia, not the famous sunken city, or the resort in the Bahamas) and covers the topic of logging (the recording of information, not the harvesting of trees) and maintains the fine T-SQL Tuesday tradition begun by Adam Machanic [b | t] (the SQL Server guru, not the guy who fixes cars, check the spelling again, there will be a quiz later). This is a trick I learned from Fernando Guerrero [b | t] waaaaaay back during the PASS Summit 2004 in sunny, hurricane-infested Orlando, during his session on Secret SQL Server (not sure if that's the correct title, and I haven't used parentheses in this paragraph yet).  CONTEXT_INFO is a neat little feature that's existed since SQL Server 2000 and perhaps even earlier.  It lets you assign data to the current session/connection, and maintains that data until you disconnect or change it.  In addition to the CONTEXT_INFO() function, you can also query the context_info column in sys.dm_exec_sessions, or even sysprocesses if you're still running SQL Server 2000, if you need to see it for another session. While you're limited to 128 bytes, one big advantage that CONTEXT_INFO has is that it's independent of any transactions.  If you've ever logged to a table in a transaction and then lost messages when it rolled back, you can understand how aggravating it can be.  CONTEXT_INFO also survives across multiple SQL batches (GO separators) in the same connection, so for those of you who were going to suggest "just log to a table variable, they don't get rolled back":  HA-HA, I GOT YOU!  Since GO starts a new batch all variable declarations are lost. Here's a simple example I recently used at work.  I had to test database mirroring configurations for disaster recovery scenarios and measure the network throughput.  I also needed to log how long it took for the script to run and include the mirror settings for the database in question.  I decided to use AdventureWorks as my database model, and Adam Machanic's Big Adventure script to provide a fairly large workload that's repeatable and easily scalable.  My test would consist of several copies of AdventureWorks running the Big Adventure script while I mirrored the databases (or not). Since Adam's script contains several batches, I decided CONTEXT_INFO would have to be used.  As it turns out, I only needed to grab the start time at the beginning, I could get the rest of the data at the end of the process.   The code is pretty small: declare @time binary(128)=cast(getdate() as binary(8)) set context_info @time   ... rest of Big Adventure code ...   go use master; insert mirror_test(server,role,partner,db,state,safety,start,duration) select @@servername, mirroring_role_desc, mirroring_partner_instance, db_name(database_id), mirroring_state_desc, mirroring_safety_level_desc, cast(cast(context_info() as binary(8)) as datetime), datediff(s,cast(cast(context_info() as binary(8)) as datetime),getdate()) from sys.database_mirroring where db_name(database_id) like 'Adv%';   I declared @time as a binary(128) since CONTEXT_INFO is defined that way.  I couldn't convert GETDATE() to binary(128) as it would pad the first 120 bytes as 0x00.  To keep the CAST functions simple and avoid using SUBSTRING, I decided to CAST GETDATE() as binary(8) and let SQL Server do the implicit conversion.  It's not the safest way perhaps, but it works on my machine. :) As I mentioned earlier, you can query system views for sessions and get their CONTEXT_INFO.  With a little boilerplate code this can be used to monitor long-running procedures, in case you need to kill a process, or are just curious  how long certain parts take.  In this example, I added code to Adam's Big Adventure script to set CONTEXT_INFO messages at strategic places I want to monitor.  (His code is in UPPERCASE as it was in the original, mine is all lowercase): declare @msg binary(128) set @msg=cast('Altering bigProduct.ProductID' as binary(128)) set context_info @msg go ALTER TABLE bigProduct ALTER COLUMN ProductID INT NOT NULL GO set context_info 0x0 go declare @msg1 binary(128) set @msg1=cast('Adding pk_bigProduct Constraint' as binary(128)) set context_info @msg1 go ALTER TABLE bigProduct ADD CONSTRAINT pk_bigProduct PRIMARY KEY (ProductID) GO set context_info 0x0 go declare @msg2 binary(128) set @msg2=cast('Altering bigTransactionHistory.TransactionID' as binary(128)) set context_info @msg2 go ALTER TABLE bigTransactionHistory ALTER COLUMN TransactionID INT NOT NULL GO set context_info 0x0 go declare @msg3 binary(128) set @msg3=cast('Adding pk_bigTransactionHistory Constraint' as binary(128)) set context_info @msg3 go ALTER TABLE bigTransactionHistory ADD CONSTRAINT pk_bigTransactionHistory PRIMARY KEY NONCLUSTERED(TransactionID) GO set context_info 0x0 go declare @msg4 binary(128) set @msg4=cast('Creating IX_ProductId_TransactionDate Index' as binary(128)) set context_info @msg4 go CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX IX_ProductId_TransactionDate ON bigTransactionHistory(ProductId,TransactionDate) INCLUDE(Quantity,ActualCost) GO set context_info 0x0   This doesn't include the entire script, only those portions that altered a table or created an index.  One annoyance is that SET CONTEXT_INFO requires a literal or variable, you can't use an expression.  And since GO starts a new batch I need to declare a variable in each one.  And of course I have to use CAST because it won't implicitly convert varchar to binary.  And even though context_info is a nullable column, you can't SET CONTEXT_INFO NULL, so I have to use SET CONTEXT_INFO 0x0 to clear the message after the statement completes.  And if you're thinking of turning this into a UDF, you can't, although a stored procedure would work. So what does all this aggravation get you?  As the code runs, if I want to see which stage the session is at, I can run the following (assuming SPID 51 is the one I want): select CAST(context_info as varchar(128)) from sys.dm_exec_sessions where session_id=51   Since SQL Server 2005 introduced the new system and dynamic management views (DMVs) there's not as much need for tagging a session with these kinds of messages.  You can get the session start time and currently executing statement from them, and neatly presented if you use Adam's sp_whoisactive utility (and you absolutely should be using it).  Of course you can always use xp_cmdshell, a CLR function, or some other tricks to log information outside of a SQL transaction.  All the same, I've used this trick to monitor long-running reports at a previous job, and I still think CONTEXT_INFO is a great feature, especially if you're still using SQL Server 2000 or want to supplement your instrumentation.  If you'd like an exercise, consider adding the system time to the messages in the last example, and an automated job to query and parse it from the system tables.  That would let you track how long each statement ran without having to run Profiler. #TSQL2sDay

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• Agilist, Heal Thyself!

  - by Dylan Smith

  I’ve been meaning to blog about a great experience I had earlier in the year at Prairie Dev Con Calgary.  Myself and Steve Rogalsky did a session that we called “Agilist, Heal Thyself!”.  We used a format that was new to me, but that Steve had seen used at another conference.  What we did was start by asking the audience to give us a list of challenges they had had when adopting agile.  We wrote them all down, then had everybody vote on the most interesting ones.  Then we split into two groups, and each group was assigned one of the agile challenges.  We had 20 minutes to discuss the challenge, and suggest solutions or approaches to improve things.  At the end of the 20 minutes, each of the groups gave a brief summary of their discussion and learning's, then we mixed up the groups and repeated with another 2 challenges. The 2 groups I was part of had some really interesting discussions, and suggestions: Unfinished Stories at the end of Sprints The first agile challenge we tackled, was something that every single Scrum team I have worked with has struggled with.  What happens when you get to the end of a Sprint, and there are some stories that are only partially completed.  The team in question was getting very de-moralized as they felt that every Sprint was a failure as they never had a set of fully completed stories. How do you avoid this? and/or what do you do when it happens? There were 2 pieces of advice that were well received: 1. Try to bring stories to completion before starting new ones.  This is advice I give all my Scrum teams.  If you have a 3-week sprint, what happens all too often is you get to the end of week 2, and a lot of stories are almost done; but almost none are completely done.  This is a Bad Thing.  I encourage the teams I work with to only start a new story as a very last resort.  If you finish your task look at the stories in progress and see if there’s anything you can do to help before moving onto a new story.  In the daily standup, put a focus on seeing what stories got completed yesterday, if a few days go by with none getting completed, be sure this fact is visible to the team and do something about it.  Something I’ve been doing recently is introducing WIP (Work In Progress) limits while using Scrum.  My current team has 2-week sprints, and we usually have about a dozen or stories in a sprint.  We instituted a WIP limit of 4 stories.  If 4 stories have been started but not finished then nobody is allowed to start new stories.  This made it obvious very quickly that our QA tasks were our bottleneck (we have 4 devs, but only 1.5 testers).  The WIP limit forced the developers to start to pickup QA tasks before moving onto the next dev tasks, and we ended our sprints with many more stories completely finished than we did before introducing WIP limits. 2. Rather than using time-boxed sprints, why not just do away with them altogether and go to a continuous flow type approach like KanBan.  Limit WIP to keep things under control, but don’t have a fixed time box at the end of which all tasks are supposed to be done.  This eliminates the problem almost entirely.  At some points in the project (releases) you need to be able to burn down all the half finished stories to get a stable release build, but this probably occurs less often than every sprint, and there are alternative approaches to achieve it using branching strategies rather than forcing your team to try to get to Zero WIP every 2-weeks (e.g. when you are ready for a release, create a new branch for any new stories, but finish all existing stories in the current branch and release it). Trying to Introduce Agile into a team with previous Bad Agile Experiences One of the agile adoption challenges somebody described, was he was in a leadership role on a team he had recently joined – lets call him Dave.  This team was currently very waterfall in their ALM process, but they were about to start on a new green-field project.  Dave wanted to use this new project as an opportunity to do things the “right way”, using an Agile methodology like Scrum, adopting TDD, automated builds, proper branching strategies, etc.  The problem he was facing is everybody else on the team had previously gone through an “Agile Adoption” that was a horrible failure.  Dave blamed this failure on the consultant brought in previously to lead this agile transition, but regardless of the reason, the team had very negative feelings towards agile, and was very resistant to trying it out again.  Dave possibly had the authority to try to force the team to adopt Agile practices, but we all know that doesn’t work very well.  What was Dave to do? Ultimately, the best advice was to question *why* did Dave want to adopt all these various practices. Rather than trying to convince his team that these were the “right way” to run a dev project, and trying to do a Big Bang approach to introducing change.  He would be better served by identifying problems the team currently faces, have a discussion with the team to get everybody to agree that specific problems existed, then have an open discussion about ways to address those problems.  This way Dave could incrementally introduce agile practices, and he doesn’t even need to identify them as “agile” practices if he doesn’t want to.  For example, when we discussed with Dave, he said probably the teams biggest problem was long periods without feedback from users, then finding out too late that the software is not going to meet their needs.  Rather than Dave jumping right to introducing Scrum and all it entails, it would be easier to get buy-in from team if he framed it as a discussion of existing problems, and brainstorming possible solutions.  And possibly most importantly, don’t try to do massive changes all at once with a team that has not bought-into those changes.  Taking an incremental approach has a greater chance of success. I see something similar in my day job all the time too.  Clients who for one reason or another claim to not be fans of agile (or not ready for agile yet).  But then they go on to ask me to help them get shorter feedback cycles, quicker delivery cycles, iterative development processes, etc.  It’s kind of funny at times, sometimes you just need to phrase the suggestions in terms they are using and avoid the word “agile”. PS – I haven’t blogged all that much over the past couple of years, but in an attempt to motivate myself, a few of us have accepted a blogger challenge.  There’s 6 of us who have all put some money into a pool, and the agreement is that we each need to blog at least once every 2-weeks.  The first 2-week period that we miss we’re eliminated.  Last person standing gets the money.  So expect at least one blog post every couple of weeks for the near future (I hope!).  And check out the blogs of the other 5 people in this blogger challenge: Steve Rogalsky: http://winnipegagilist.blogspot.ca Aaron Kowall: http://www.geekswithblogs.net/caffeinatedgeek Tyler Doerkson: http://blog.tylerdoerksen.com David Alpert: http://www.spinthemoose.com Dave White: http://www.agileramblings.com (note: site not available yet.  should be shortly or he owes me some money!)

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• Un-failing over a Cisco PIX 515e

  - by ABrown

  We had a power outage at our data center last week and when our dual PIX 515E running IOS 7.0(8) (configured with a failover cable) came back, they were in a failed over state where the Secondary unit is active and the Primary unit is standby I have tried 'failover reset', 'failover active', and 'failover reload-standby' as well as executing reloads on both units in a variety of orders, and they don't come back Primary/Active Secondary/Standby. The only thing in my arsenal that I haven't tried is driving to the data center and performing a hard reboot, which I hate to do. I have read How Failover Works on the Cisco Secure Firewall and it seems like this should be wicked straight forward. output of show failover on Primary: Failover On Cable status: Normal Failover unit Primary Failover LAN Interface: N/A - Serial-based failover enabled Unit Poll frequency 15 seconds, holdtime 45 seconds Interface Poll frequency 15 seconds Interface Policy 1 Monitored Interfaces 2 of 250 maximum Version: Ours 7.0(8), Mate 7.0(8) Last Failover at: 02:52:05 UTC Mar 10 2010 This host: Primary - Standby Ready Active time: 0 (sec) Interface outside (x.x.x.165): Normal Interface inside (y.y.y.3): Normal Other host: Secondary - Active Active time: 897045 (sec) Interface outside (x.x.x.164): Normal Interface inside (y.y.y.4): Normal Stateful Failover Logical Update Statistics Link : Unconfigured. output of show failover on Secondary: Failover On Cable status: Normal Failover unit Secondary Failover LAN Interface: N/A - Serial-based failover enabled Unit Poll frequency 15 seconds, holdtime 45 seconds Interface Poll frequency 15 seconds Interface Policy 1 Monitored Interfaces 2 of 250 maximum Version: Ours 7.0(8), Mate 7.0(8) Last Failover at: 02:03:04 UTC Feb 28 2010 This host: Secondary - Active Active time: 896925 (sec) Interface outside (x.x.x.164): Normal Interface inside (y.y.y.4): Normal Other host: Primary - Standby Ready Active time: 0 (sec) Interface outside (x.x.x.165): Normal Interface inside (y.y.y.3): Normal Stateful Failover Logical Update Statistics Link : Unconfigured. I'm seeing the following in my syslog: Mar 10 03:05:00 fw1 %PIX-5-111008: User 'enable_15' executed the 'failover reset' command. Mar 10 03:05:09 fw1 %PIX-5-111008: User 'enable_15' executed the 'failover reload-standby' command. Mar 10 03:05:12 fw1 %PIX-6-720032: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: id=3,seq=200,grp=0,event=406,op=20,my=Active,peer=Failed. Mar 10 03:05:12 fw1 %PIX-6-720028: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: Peer state Failed. Mar 10 03:06:09 fw1 %PIX-6-720032: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: id=3,seq=200,grp=0,event=401,op=0,my=Active,peer=Failed. Mar 10 03:06:09 fw1 %PIX-6-720024: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: Control channel is down. Mar 10 03:06:09 fw1 %PIX-6-720032: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: id=3,seq=200,grp=0,event=401,op=1,my=Active,peer=Failed. Mar 10 03:06:10 fw1 %PIX-6-720024: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: Control channel is up. Mar 10 03:06:10 fw1 %PIX-6-720032: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: id=3,seq=200,grp=0,event=411,op=2,my=Active,peer=Failed. Mar 10 03:06:23 fw1 %PIX-6-720032: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: id=3,seq=200,grp=0,event=406,op=80,my=Active,peer=Standby Ready. Mar 10 03:06:23 fw1 %PIX-6-720028: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: Peer state Standby Ready. Mar 10 03:06:24 fw2 %PIX-6-720027: (VPN-Primary) HA status callback: My state Standby Ready. Mar 10 03:07:05 fw1 %PIX-5-111008: User 'enable_15' executed the 'failover reset' command. Mar 10 03:07:31 fw1 %PIX-5-111008: User 'enable_15' executed the 'failover active' command. Mar 10 03:08:04 fw1 %PIX-5-611103: User logged out: Uname: enable_1 Mar 10 03:08:04 fw1 %PIX-6-315011: SSH session from admin1_int on interface inside for user "pix" terminated normally Mar 10 03:08:39 fw1 %PIX-6-720032: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: id=3,seq=200,grp=0,event=406,op=20,my=Active,peer=Failed. Mar 10 03:08:39 fw1 %PIX-6-720028: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: Peer state Failed. Mar 10 03:09:10 fw1 %PIX-6-605005: Login permitted from admin1_int/36891 to inside:192.168.4.4/ssh for user "pix" Mar 10 03:09:23 fw1 %PIX-5-111008: User 'enable_15' executed the 'failover reset' command. Mar 10 03:09:38 fw1 %PIX-6-720032: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: id=3,seq=200,grp=0,event=401,op=0,my=Active,peer=Failed. Mar 10 03:09:39 fw1 %PIX-6-720024: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: Control channel is down. Mar 10 03:09:39 fw1 %PIX-6-720032: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: id=3,seq=200,grp=0,event=401,op=1,my=Active,peer=Failed. Mar 10 03:09:39 fw1 %PIX-6-720024: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: Control channel is up. Mar 10 03:09:39 fw1 %PIX-6-720032: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: id=3,seq=200,grp=0,event=411,op=2,my=Active,peer=Failed. Mar 10 03:09:52 fw1 %PIX-6-720032: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: id=3,seq=200,grp=0,event=406,op=80,my=Active,peer=Standby Ready. Mar 10 03:09:52 fw1 %PIX-6-720028: (VPN-Secondary) HA status callback: Peer state Standby Ready. Mar 10 03:09:53 fw2 %PIX-6-720027: (VPN-Primary) HA status callback: My state Standby Ready. I'm not exactly sure how to interpret that syslog data. Primary doesn't seem to even try to become Active. When I reload the individual units separately, my connections are retained, so it doesn't seem like I have a real hardware failure. Is there something I can query (IOS or SNMP) to check for hardware issues? Any thoughts? My IOS-fu is weak. Thanks for any help you might provide, Aaron

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• Hello Operator, My Switch Is Bored

  - by Paul White

  This is a post for T-SQL Tuesday #43 hosted by my good friend Rob Farley. The topic this month is Plan Operators. I haven’t taken part in T-SQL Tuesday before, but I do like to write about execution plans, so this seemed like a good time to start. This post is in two parts. The first part is primarily an excuse to use a pretty bad play on words in the title of this blog post (if you’re too young to know what a telephone operator or a switchboard is, I hate you). The second part of the post looks at an invisible query plan operator (so to speak). 1. My Switch Is Bored Allow me to present the rare and interesting execution plan operator, Switch: Books Online has this to say about Switch: Following that description, I had a go at producing a Fast Forward Cursor plan that used the TOP operator, but had no luck. That may be due to my lack of skill with cursors, I’m not too sure. The only application of Switch in SQL Server 2012 that I am familiar with requires a local partitioned view: CREATE TABLE dbo.T1 (c1 int NOT NULL CHECK (c1 BETWEEN 00 AND 24)); CREATE TABLE dbo.T2 (c1 int NOT NULL CHECK (c1 BETWEEN 25 AND 49)); CREATE TABLE dbo.T3 (c1 int NOT NULL CHECK (c1 BETWEEN 50 AND 74)); CREATE TABLE dbo.T4 (c1 int NOT NULL CHECK (c1 BETWEEN 75 AND 99)); GO CREATE VIEW V1 AS SELECT c1 FROM dbo.T1 UNION ALL SELECT c1 FROM dbo.T2 UNION ALL SELECT c1 FROM dbo.T3 UNION ALL SELECT c1 FROM dbo.T4; Not only that, but it needs an updatable local partitioned view. We’ll need some primary keys to meet that requirement: ALTER TABLE dbo.T1 ADD CONSTRAINT PK_T1 PRIMARY KEY (c1);   ALTER TABLE dbo.T2 ADD CONSTRAINT PK_T2 PRIMARY KEY (c1);   ALTER TABLE dbo.T3 ADD CONSTRAINT PK_T3 PRIMARY KEY (c1);   ALTER TABLE dbo.T4 ADD CONSTRAINT PK_T4 PRIMARY KEY (c1); We also need an INSERT statement that references the view. Even more specifically, to see a Switch operator, we need to perform a single-row insert (multi-row inserts use a different plan shape): INSERT dbo.V1 (c1) VALUES (1); And now…the execution plan: The Constant Scan manufactures a single row with no columns. The Compute Scalar works out which partition of the view the new value should go in. The Assert checks that the computed partition number is not null (if it is, an error is returned). The Nested Loops Join executes exactly once, with the partition id as an outer reference (correlated parameter). The Switch operator checks the value of the parameter and executes the corresponding input only. If the partition id is 0, the uppermost Clustered Index Insert is executed, adding a row to table T1. If the partition id is 1, the next lower Clustered Index Insert is executed, adding a row to table T2…and so on. In case you were wondering, here’s a query and execution plan for a multi-row insert to the view: INSERT dbo.V1 (c1) VALUES (1), (2); Yuck! An Eager Table Spool and four Filters! I prefer the Switch plan. My guess is that almost all the old strategies that used a Switch operator have been replaced over time, using things like a regular Concatenation Union All combined with Start-Up Filters on its inputs. Other new (relative to the Switch operator) features like table partitioning have specific execution plan support that doesn’t need the Switch operator either. This feels like a bit of a shame, but perhaps it is just nostalgia on my part, it’s hard to know. Please do let me know if you encounter a query that can still use the Switch operator in 2012 – it must be very bored if this is the only possible modern usage! 2. Invisible Plan Operators The second part of this post uses an example based on a question Dave Ballantyne asked using the SQL Sentry Plan Explorer plan upload facility. If you haven’t tried that yet, make sure you’re on the latest version of the (free) Plan Explorer software, and then click the Post to SQLPerformance.com button. That will create a site question with the query plan attached (which can be anonymized if the plan contains sensitive information). Aaron Bertrand and I keep a close eye on questions there, so if you have ever wanted to ask a query plan question of either of us, that’s a good way to do it. The problem The issue I want to talk about revolves around a query issued against a calendar table. The script below creates a simplified version and adds 100 years of per-day information to it: USE tempdb; GO CREATE TABLE dbo.Calendar ( dt date NOT NULL, isWeekday bit NOT NULL, theYear smallint NOT NULL,   CONSTRAINT PK__dbo_Calendar_dt PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (dt) ); GO -- Monday is the first day of the week for me SET DATEFIRST 1;   -- Add 100 years of data INSERT dbo.Calendar WITH (TABLOCKX) (dt, isWeekday, theYear) SELECT CA.dt, isWeekday = CASE WHEN DATEPART(WEEKDAY, CA.dt) IN (6, 7) THEN 0 ELSE 1 END, theYear = YEAR(CA.dt) FROM Sandpit.dbo.Numbers AS N CROSS APPLY ( VALUES (DATEADD(DAY, N.n - 1, CONVERT(date, '01 Jan 2000', 113))) ) AS CA (dt) WHERE N.n BETWEEN 1 AND 36525; The following query counts the number of weekend days in 2013: SELECT Days = COUNT_BIG(*) FROM dbo.Calendar AS C WHERE theYear = 2013 AND isWeekday = 0; It returns the correct result (104) using the following execution plan: The query optimizer has managed to estimate the number of rows returned from the table exactly, based purely on the default statistics created separately on the two columns referenced in the query’s WHERE clause. (Well, almost exactly, the unrounded estimate is 104.289 rows.) There is already an invisible operator in this query plan – a Filter operator used to apply the WHERE clause predicates. We can see it by re-running the query with the enormously useful (but undocumented) trace flag 9130 enabled: Now we can see the full picture. The whole table is scanned, returning all 36,525 rows, before the Filter narrows that down to just the 104 we want. Without the trace flag, the Filter is incorporated in the Clustered Index Scan as a residual predicate. It is a little bit more efficient than using a separate operator, but residual predicates are still something you will want to avoid where possible. The estimates are still spot on though: Anyway, looking to improve the performance of this query, Dave added the following filtered index to the Calendar table: CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX Weekends ON dbo.Calendar(theYear) WHERE isWeekday = 0; The original query now produces a much more efficient plan: Unfortunately, the estimated number of rows produced by the seek is now wrong (365 instead of 104): What’s going on? The estimate was spot on before we added the index! Explanation You might want to grab a coffee for this bit. Using another trace flag or two (8606 and 8612) we can see that the cardinality estimates were exactly right initially: The highlighted information shows the initial cardinality estimates for the base table (36,525 rows), the result of applying the two relational selects in our WHERE clause (104 rows), and after performing the COUNT_BIG(*) group by aggregate (1 row). All of these are correct, but that was before cost-based optimization got involved :) Cost-based optimization When cost-based optimization starts up, the logical tree above is copied into a structure (the ‘memo’) that has one group per logical operation (roughly speaking). The logical read of the base table (LogOp_Get) ends up in group 7; the two predicates (LogOp_Select) end up in group 8 (with the details of the selections in subgroups 0-6). These two groups still have the correct cardinalities as trace flag 8608 output (initial memo contents) shows: During cost-based optimization, a rule called SelToIdxStrategy runs on group 8. It’s job is to match logical selections to indexable expressions (SARGs). It successfully matches the selections (theYear = 2013, is Weekday = 0) to the filtered index, and writes a new alternative into the memo structure. The new alternative is entered into group 8 as option 1 (option 0 was the original LogOp_Select): The new alternative is to do nothing (PhyOp_NOP = no operation), but to instead follow the new logical instructions listed below the NOP. The LogOp_GetIdx (full read of an index) goes into group 21, and the LogOp_SelectIdx (selection on an index) is placed in group 22, operating on the result of group 21. The definition of the comparison ‘the Year = 2013’ (ScaOp_Comp downwards) was already present in the memo starting at group 2, so no new memo groups are created for that. New Cardinality Estimates The new memo groups require two new cardinality estimates to be derived. First, LogOp_Idx (full read of the index) gets a predicted cardinality of 10,436. This number comes from the filtered index statistics: DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS (Calendar, Weekends) WITH STAT_HEADER; The second new cardinality derivation is for the LogOp_SelectIdx applying the predicate (theYear = 2013). To get a number for this, the cardinality estimator uses statistics for the column ‘theYear’, producing an estimate of 365 rows (there are 365 days in 2013!): DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS (Calendar, theYear) WITH HISTOGRAM; This is where the mistake happens. Cardinality estimation should have used the filtered index statistics here, to get an estimate of 104 rows: DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS (Calendar, Weekends) WITH HISTOGRAM; Unfortunately, the logic has lost sight of the link between the read of the filtered index (LogOp_GetIdx) in group 22, and the selection on that index (LogOp_SelectIdx) that it is deriving a cardinality estimate for, in group 21. The correct cardinality estimate (104 rows) is still present in the memo, attached to group 8, but that group now has a PhyOp_NOP implementation. Skipping over the rest of cost-based optimization (in a belated attempt at brevity) we can see the optimizer’s final output using trace flag 8607: This output shows the (incorrect, but understandable) 365 row estimate for the index range operation, and the correct 104 estimate still attached to its PhyOp_NOP. This tree still has to go through a few post-optimizer rewrites and ‘copy out’ from the memo structure into a tree suitable for the execution engine. One step in this process removes PhyOp_NOP, discarding its 104-row cardinality estimate as it does so. To finish this section on a more positive note, consider what happens if we add an OVER clause to the query aggregate. This isn’t intended to be a ‘fix’ of any sort, I just want to show you that the 104 estimate can survive and be used if later cardinality estimation needs it: SELECT Days = COUNT_BIG(*) OVER () FROM dbo.Calendar AS C WHERE theYear = 2013 AND isWeekday = 0; The estimated execution plan is: Note the 365 estimate at the Index Seek, but the 104 lives again at the Segment! We can imagine the lost predicate ‘isWeekday = 0’ as sitting between the seek and the segment in an invisible Filter operator that drops the estimate from 365 to 104. Even though the NOP group is removed after optimization (so we don’t see it in the execution plan) bear in mind that all cost-based choices were made with the 104-row memo group present, so although things look a bit odd, it shouldn’t affect the optimizer’s plan selection. I should also mention that we can work around the estimation issue by including the index’s filtering columns in the index key: CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX Weekends ON dbo.Calendar(theYear, isWeekday) WHERE isWeekday = 0 WITH (DROP_EXISTING = ON); There are some downsides to doing this, including that changes to the isWeekday column may now require Halloween Protection, but that is unlikely to be a big problem for a static calendar table ;)  With the updated index in place, the original query produces an execution plan with the correct cardinality estimation showing at the Index Seek: That’s all for today, remember to let me know about any Switch plans you come across on a modern instance of SQL Server! Finally, here are some other posts of mine that cover other plan operators: Segment and Sequence Project Common Subexpression Spools Why Plan Operators Run Backwards Row Goals and the Top Operator Hash Match Flow Distinct Top N Sort Index Spools and Page Splits Singleton and Range Seeks Bitmaps Hash Join Performance Compute Scalar © 2013 Paul White – All Rights Reserved Twitter: @SQL_Kiwi

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• What would cause ANY .NET application to crash immediately... except a project I create and Debug in

  - by blak3r

  My software recently got deployed to a customer who said that the application was crashing immediately after it started. After some initial debugging, the customer provided me remote access to one of the computers which was unable to run the application. I found that the crash wasn't specific to my application. Any application which depended on the .NET framework crashed immediately. Conveniently, Visual Studio 2008 was installed so I created a quick hello world application on it and clicked Debug. The application worked fine. But, then when I tried to execute the generated binaries in the /bin/Debug/HelloWorld.exe directory outside of visual studio it crashed. List of things i've tried (UPDATED): I checked that "Everyone" has Read&Execute permissions for c:\Windows. To test that the problem was with the .NET Framework (and not my application), I attempted to download Paint .NET on to the computers. The setup frontend crashed in the same manner. Performed a repair of the .NET framework as outlined in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/908077 (Boy was this fun and time consuming). No luck. Installed .NET 3.5 SP1 (before it just had .NET 3.5) Note: my application targets 2.0 so I did this more as a long shot... but i learned in the process that .NET 3.5 SP1 also updates the underlying frameworks. Ran Aaron Stebner's .NET Setup Verification Tool. This tool indicated that .NET was successfully installed. (I forget if i checked all the versions but at least 2.0 worked). Tested some mini hello world applications which were targeted for .NET 2.0 and .NET 3.5 and both crashed in the same way. Tried launching .NET apps via windbg cmd line. Doing this did allow me invoke my simple hello world applications. So, simple .NET hello world works when invoked by windbg or by launching via debug in visual studio... but doesn't if i try to execute it standalone. I created a dump file using WinDbg. It wasn't all that revealing to me. FAULTING_IP: mscorwks!PEImage::GetEntryPointToken+21 79f4ff9d f6401010 test byte ptr [eax+10h],10h EXCEPTION_RECORD: 0012f710 -- (.exr 0x12f710) ExceptionAddress: 79f4ff9d (mscorwks!PEImage::GetEntryPointToken+0x00000021) ExceptionCode: c0000005 (Access violation) ExceptionFlags: 00000000 NumberParameters: 2 Parameter[0]: 00000000 Parameter[1]: 00000010 Attempt to read from address 00000010 FAULTING_THREAD: 00000b44 PROCESS_NAME: MyProcess.exe ERROR_CODE: (NTSTATUS) 0x80000003 - {EXCEPTION} Breakpoint A breakpoint has been reached. EXCEPTION_CODE: (HRESULT) 0x80000003 (2147483651) - One or more arguments are invalid DETOURED_IMAGE: 1 NTGLOBALFLAG: 0 APPLICATION_VERIFIER_FLAGS: 0 MANAGED_STACK: !dumpstack -EE OS Thread Id: 0xb44 (0) Current frame: ChildEBP RetAddr Caller,Callee EXCEPTION_OBJECT: !pe cb10b4 Exception object: 00cb10b4 Exception type: System.ExecutionEngineException Message: <none> InnerException: <none> StackTrace (generated): <none> StackTraceString: <none> HResult: 80131506 MANAGED_OBJECT_NAME: System.ExecutionEngineException CONTEXT: 0012f72c -- (.cxr 0x12f72c) eax=00000000 ebx=00000000 ecx=00000000 edx=0000000e esi=001a1490 edi=00000001 eip=79f4ff9d esp=0012f9f8 ebp=0012fa1c iopl=0 nv up ei pl zr na pe nc cs=001b ss=0023 ds=0023 es=0023 fs=003b gs=0000 efl=00010246 mscorwks!PEImage::GetEntryPointToken+0x21: 79f4ff9d f6401010 test byte ptr [eax+10h],10h ds:0023:00000010=?? Resetting default scope READ_ADDRESS: 00000010 FOLLOWUP_IP: mscorwks!PEImage::GetEntryPointToken+21 79f4ff9d f6401010 test byte ptr [eax+10h],10h BUGCHECK_STR: APPLICATION_FAULT_NULL_CLASS_PTR_DEREFERENCE_SHUTDOWN PRIMARY_PROBLEM_CLASS: NULL_CLASS_PTR_DEREFERENCE_SHUTDOWN DEFAULT_BUCKET_ID: NULL_CLASS_PTR_DEREFERENCE_SHUTDOWN LAST_CONTROL_TRANSFER: from 79ef02b5 to 79f4ff9d STACK_TEXT: 79f4ff9d mscorwks!PEImage::GetEntryPointToken+0x21 79ef02b5 mscorwks!PEFile::GetEntryPointToken+0xa0 79eefeaf mscorwks!SystemDomain::ExecuteMainMethod+0xd4 79fb9793 mscorwks!ExecuteEXE+0x59 79fb96df mscorwks!_CorExeMain+0x15c 7900b1b3 mscoree!_CorExeMain+0x2c 7c817077 kernel32!BaseProcessStart+0x23 SYMBOL_STACK_INDEX: 0 SYMBOL_NAME: mscorwks!PEImage::GetEntryPointToken+21 FOLLOWUP_NAME: MachineOwner MODULE_NAME: mscorwks IMAGE_NAME: mscorwks.dll DEBUG_FLR_IMAGE_TIMESTAMP: 471ef729 STACK_COMMAND: .cxr 0012F72C ; kb ; dds 12f9f8 ; kb FAILURE_BUCKET_ID: NULL_CLASS_PTR_DEREFERENCE_SHUTDOWN_80000003_mscorwks.dll!PEImage::GetEntryPointToken BUCKET_ID: APPLICATION_FAULT_NULL_CLASS_PTR_DEREFERENCE_SHUTDOWN_DETOURED_mscorwks!PEImage::GetEntryPointToken+21 WATSON_STAGEONE_URL: http://watson.microsoft.com/StageOne/MyProcess_exe/2_4_4_39/4a8a192c/unknown/0_0_0_0/bbbbbbb4/80000003/00000000.htm?Retriage=1 Followup: MachineOwner Edit 1:The event log details for this error say it's a .NET Runtime version 2.0.50727.3053 - Fatal Execution Engine Error (7A097706)(80131506). Edit 2 (10-7-09): This issue is still active. Edit 3 (3-29-10): This update is to let everyone know that I never did successfully solve the problem. The customer who's machine this was on lost interest in solving it and just reimaged the machine :(. Thanks for all the contributions though.

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• Help with Design for Vacation Tracking System (C#/.NET/Access/WebServices/SOA/Excel) [closed]

  - by Aaronaught

  I have been tasked with developing a system for tracking our company's paid time-off (vacation, sick days, etc.) At the moment we are using an Excel spreadsheet on a shared network drive, and it works pretty well, but we are concerned that we won't be able to "trust" employees forever and sometimes we run into locking issues when two people try to open the spreadsheet at once. So we are trying to build something a little more robust. I would like some input on this design in terms of maintainability, scalability, extensibility, etc. It's a pretty simple workflow we need to represent right now: I started with a basic MS Access schema like this: Employees (EmpID int, EmpName varchar(50), AllowedDays int) Vacations (VacationID int, EmpID int, BeginDate datetime, EndDate datetime) But we don't want to spend a lot of time building a schema and database like this and have to change it later, so I think I am going to go with something that will be easier to expand through configuration. Right now the vacation table has this schema: Vacations (VacationID int, PropName varchar(50), PropValue varchar(50)) And the table will be populated with data like this: VacationID | PropName | PropValue -----------+--------------+------------------ 1 | EmpID | 4 1 | EmpName | James Jones 1 | Reason | Vacation 1 | BeginDate | 2/24/2010 1 | EndDate | 2/30/2010 1 | Destination | Spectate Swamp 2 | ... | ... I think this is a pretty good, extensible design, we can easily add new properties to the vacation like the destination or maybe approval status, etc. I wasn't too sure how to go about managing the database of valid properties, I thought of putting them in a separate PropNames table but it gets complicated to manage all the different data types and people say that you shouldn't put CLR type names into a SQL database, so I decided to use XML instead, here is the schema: <VacationProperties> <PropertyNames>EmpID,EmpName,Reason,BeginDate,EndDate,Destination</PropertyNames> <PropertyTypes>System.Int32,System.String,System.String,System.DateTime,System.DateTime,System.String</PropertyTypes> <PropertiesRequired>true,true,false,true,true,false</PropertiesRequired> </VacationProperties> I might need more fields than that, I'm not completely sure. I'm parsing the XML like this (would like some feedback on the parsing code): string xml = File.ReadAllText("properties.xml"); Match m = Regex.Match(xml, "<(PropertyNames)>(.*?)</PropertyNames>"; string[] pn = m.Value.Split(','); // do the same for PropertyTypes, PropertiesRequired Then I use the following code to persist configuration changes to the database: string sql = "DROP TABLE VacationProperties"; sql = sql + " CREATE TABLE VacationProperties "; sql = sql + "(PropertyName varchar(100), PropertyType varchar(100) "; sql = sql + "IsRequired varchar(100))"; for (int i = 0; i < pn.Length; i++) { sql = sql + " INSERT VacationProperties VALUES (" + pn[i] + "," + pt[i] + "," + pv[i] + ")"; } // GlobalConnection is a singleton new SqlCommand(sql, GlobalConnection.Instance).ExecuteReader(); So far so good, but after a few days of this I then realized that a lot of this was just a more specific kind of a generic workflow which could be further abstracted, and instead of writing all of this boilerplate plumbing code I could just come up with a workflow and plug it into a workflow engine like Windows Workflow Foundation and have the users configure it: In order to support routing these configurations throw the workflow system, it seemed natural to implement generic XML Web Services for this instead of just using an XML file as above. I've used this code to implement the Web Services: public class VacationConfigurationService : WebService { [WebMethod] public void UpdateConfiguration(string xml) { // Above code goes here } } Which was pretty easy, although I'm still working on a way to validate that XML against some kind of schema as there's no error-checking yet. I also created a few different services for other operations like VacationSubmissionService, VacationReportService, VacationDataService, VacationAuthenticationService, etc. The whole Service Oriented Architecture looks like this: And because the workflow itself might change, I have been working on a way to integrate the WF workflow system with MS Visio, which everybody at the office already knows how to use so they could make changes pretty easily. We have a diagram that looks like the following (it's kind of hard to read but the main items are Activities, Authenticators, Validators, Transformers, Processors, and Data Connections, they're all analogous to the services in the SOA diagram above). The requirements for this system are: (Note - I don't control these, they were given to me by management) Main workflow must interface with Excel spreadsheet, probably through VBA macros (to ease the transition to the new system) Alerts should integrate with MS Outlook, Lotus Notes, and SMS (text messages). We also want to interface it with the company Voice Mail system but that is not a "hard" requirement. Performance requirements: Must handle 250,000 Transactions Per Second Should be able to handle up to 20,000 employees (right now we have 3) 99.99% uptime ("four nines") expected Must be secure against outside hacking, but users cannot be required to enter a username/password. Platforms: Must support Windows XP/Vista/7, Linux, iPhone, Blackberry, DOS 2.0, VAX, IRIX, PDP-11, Apple IIc. Time to complete: 6 to 8 weeks. My questions are: Is this a good design for the system so far? Am I using all of the recommended best practices for these technologies? How do I integrate the Visio diagram above with the Windows Workflow Foundation to call the ConfigurationService and persist workflow changes? Am I missing any important components? Will this be extensible enough to support any scenario via end-user configuration? Will the system scale to the above performance requirements? Will we need any expensive hardware to run it? Are there any "gotchas" I should know about with respect to cross-platform compatibility? For example would it be difficult to convert this to an iPhone app? How long would you expect this to take? (We've dedicated 1 week for testing so I'm thinking maybe 5 weeks?) Many thanks for your advices, Aaron

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• applet does not load

  - by jcp

  We have a legacy program that was ported from Java 1.3 to Java 1.5. This application involves applets which worked fine before. After porting however, the applet would not load. However there are no errors or exceptions. The app would just try to load it forever. We tried to run it with Java 1.6 and poof! No problems whatsoever. Isn't Java 6 backwards compatible? So how come it would run in that version and not in 1.5? ==== Java Console log for Java 1.5.0_19 basic: Registered modality listener basic: Registered modality listener basic: Registered modality listener liveconnect: Invoking JS method: document liveconnect: Invoking JS method: document liveconnect: Invoking JS method: document liveconnect: Invoking JS method: URL liveconnect: Invoking JS method: URL liveconnect: Invoking JS method: URL basic: Referencing classloader: sun.plugin.ClassLoaderInfo@bb7759, refcount=1 basic: Referencing classloader: sun.plugin.ClassLoaderInfo@bb7759, refcount=2 basic: Referencing classloader: sun.plugin.ClassLoaderInfo@bb7759, refcount=3 basic: Added progress listener: sun.plugin.util.GrayBoxPainter@b0bad7 basic: Loading applet ... basic: Initializing applet ... basic: Starting applet ... basic: Added progress listener: sun.plugin.util.GrayBoxPainter@ba9340 basic: Added progress listener: sun.plugin.util.GrayBoxPainter@1198891 basic: Loading applet ... basic: Initializing applet ... basic: Starting applet ... basic: Loading applet ... basic: Initializing applet ... basic: Starting applet ... basic: Referencing classloader: sun.plugin.ClassLoaderInfo@bb7759, refcount=4 basic: Releasing classloader: sun.plugin.ClassLoaderInfo@bb7759, refcount=3 basic: Referencing classloader: sun.plugin.ClassLoaderInfo@bb7759, refcount=4 basic: Releasing classloader: sun.plugin.ClassLoaderInfo@bb7759, refcount=3 basic: Referencing classloader: sun.plugin.ClassLoaderInfo@bb7759, refcount=4 basic: Releasing classloader: sun.plugin.ClassLoaderInfo@bb7759, refcount=3 network: Connecting <something>.jar with proxy=HTTP @ proxy/<ip address> basic: Loading <something>.jar from cache basic: No certificate info, this is unsigned JAR file. Left START init() Left END init() Right START init() Control start() Waiting for Left Panel to load... Right START start() network: Connecting socket://<ip address>:14444 with proxy=DIRECT Control start() Waiting for Left Panel to load... Control start() Waiting for Left Panel to load... Control start() Waiting for Left Panel to load... my HostName : <ip address> Thread-19 Check : Thread-19 Check : Monitor : run : start Thread-20 Monitor : Monitor: run() start Control start() Waiting for Left Panel to load... Control start() Waiting for Left Panel to load... Control start() Waiting for Left Panel to load... Control start() Waiting for Left Panel to load... Control start() Waiting for Left Panel to load... Control start() Waiting for Left Panel to load... the last message goes on forever... and now with the working version: ==== Java Console log for Java 1.6.0_15 basic: Added progress listener: sun.plugin.util.GrayBoxPainter$GrayBoxProgressListener@1b000e7 basic: Added progress listener: sun.plugin.util.GrayBoxPainter$GrayBoxProgressListener@12611a7 basic: Added progress listener: sun.plugin.util.GrayBoxPainter$GrayBoxProgressListener@1807ca8 network: CleanupThread used 6 us network: CleanupThread used 5 us network: CleanupThread used 6 us cache: Skip blacklist check as cached value is ok. network: Cache entry found [url: <something>.jar, version: null] network: Connecting <something>.jar with proxy=HTTP @ proxy/<ip address> network: ResponseCode for <something>.jar : 304 network: Encoding for <something>.jar : null network: Disconnect connection to <something>.jar Reading certificates from 11 <something>.jar | <something>.idx network: No certificate info for unsigned JAR file: <something>.jar basic: Applet loaded. basic: Applet loaded. basic: Applet resized and added to parent container basic: Applet resized and added to parent container basic: PERF: AppletExecutionRunnable - applet.init() BEGIN ; jvmLaunch dt 330275 us, pluginInit dt 27768955 us, TotalTime: 28099230 us Right START init() basic: PERF: AppletExecutionRunnable - applet.init() BEGIN ; jvmLaunch dt 330275 us, pluginInit dt 27770563 us, TotalTime: 28100838 us Left START init() basic: Applet loaded. basic: Applet resized and added to parent container basic: PERF: AppletExecutionRunnable - applet.init() BEGIN ; jvmLaunch dt 330275 us, pluginInit dt 27779332 us, TotalTime: 28109607 us Left END init() basic: Applet initialized basic: Removed progress listener: sun.plugin.util.GrayBoxPainter$GrayBoxProgressListener@12611a7 basic: Applet made visible And that's it. Still haven't figured out why it works with java6 and not java5. @valli: the object tag was used, not applet @thorbjorn: i tried that already... it just keeps saying loading applet... @aaron: how can i know what exception it is, if there really is one? and yes we have considered that its a java bug but i still havent found what that bug is. i have to submit a report tomorrow and i've scoured the net but came up with nothing as of yet... @all: thank you for your replies

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