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• SaaS Customer Service Matters

  - by charles.knapp

  You probably know that Oracle CRM On Demand goes beyond contact and transaction tracking by providing valuable real-time insights. Do you know that Oracle CRM On Demand also delivers valuable service to our customers? Don't take my word for it. "Prior to Oracle CRM On Demand, we were too busy looking in the rear view mirror on our sales activities and needed a forward-looking tool to maximize sales and coaching opportunities," said Christian Doelle, Vice President Sales & Marketing, MonierLifetile. "After evaluating other organization's solutions, we found Oracle as the most proven with the real-time reporting and detailed reviews of sales opportunities that helped us to address our blind spots. Additionally, we have found throughout our implementation phase that Oracle's commitment to customer attention and service is incomparable." Learn more here about MonierLifetile's experience with Oracle CRM On Demand.

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• Webcast: Navigating the Future of Customer Service

  - by Charles Knapp

  Customer service is set to change dramatically over the next five years – and now is the time to ensure you have the tools to help you succeed. On  Wednesday, June 13, join Oracle and Forrester Research to discover what the future holds and learn how you can: Empower your agents Delight your customers Shape your customer service future Our speakers are Kate Leggett, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research, and John Perez, Customer Experience Strategist, Oracle RightNow. Kate is a leading expert on customer service strategies, as well as a published author on customer service trends and best practices. Her research focuses on helping organizations establish customer service strategies and deliver successful customer service projects. John has extensive experience of working on customer experience programs with organizations across a range of industries. He works with Oracle RightNow clients to build customer experience strategies that improve efficiency and productivity, increase sales, and drive customer loyalty.

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• The Numbers of Customer Experience

  - by Christie Flanagan

  This week, we’ll be continuing our conversations about Customer Experience (CX) on the Oracle WebCenter blog.  While we all know that customer experience is critically important for acquiring new customers and engendering long term brand loyalty, I thought we could kick this week off by taking a look at the numbers of customer experience.   I’m sure you’ll agree that nothing quite puts things into perspective like numbers and figures. A whopping 86% of consumers say that they are willing to pay more for a better customer experience.  But many companies are failing to step up to the challenge.  And when companies fail deliver on customer experience expectations, they leave money on the table. A huge percentage of customers, 89%, begin doing business with a competitor following a poor customer experience. Breaking up isn’t hard to do and today’s empowered customers have no qualms about taking their business elsewhere when their expectations for customer experience are not met. Over a quarter of consumers, 26%, posted a negative comment on a social networking site like Facebook or Twitter following a poor customer experience. Today, individual customer service failures have the ability to easily snowball.  An unsatisfied customer has the ability to easily share their rancor with their entire social network and chip away at your brand’s reputation. A large number of consumers, 79%,  who shared complaints about poor customer experience online had their complaints ignored.  Companies ignore customer complaints at their own peril.  And unsatisfied customers, when handled effectively, have the potential to become advocates for your brand.  Of the 21% of consumers who did get responses to complaints, more than half had positive reactions to the same company about which they were previously complaining. Half of consumers will give a brand only a week to respond to a question before they stop doing business with them.  The clock is ticking when customers have questions about your brand and a week is an eternity in the realm of customer experience.  The source for these stats is the 2011 Customer Experience Impact (CEI) Report, which explores the relationship between consumers and brands.  The report is based on a survey commissioned by RightNow (acquired by Oracle in 2012) and conducted by Harris Interactive. If you’re interested in seeing more facts and figures about customer experience, download the full report.

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• Purple Cows, Copernicus, and Shampoo – Lessons in Customer Experience

  - by Christina McKeon

  What makes a great customer experience? And, why should you or your organization care? These are the questions that set the stage for the Oracle Customer Experience Summit, which kicked off yesterday in San Francisco. Day 1: The first day was filled with demos and insights from customer experience experts and Oracle customers sharing what it takes to deliver great customer experiences. Author Seth Godin delivered an entertaining presentation that included an in-depth exploration of the always-connected, always-sharing experience revolution that we are witnessing and yes, talked about the purple cow. It turns out that customer experience is your way to be the purple cow. Before everyone headed out to see Pearl Jam and Kings of Leon at the Oracle customer appreciation event, the day wrapped up with a discussion around building a customer-centric culture. Where do you start? Whom does it involve? What are some pitfalls to avoid? Day 2: The second day addressed the details behind all the questions brought up at the end of Day 1. Before you start on a customer experience initiative, Paul Hagen noted that you must understand you will forge a path similar to Copernicus. You will be proposing ideas and approaches that challenge current thinking in your organization. Just as Copernicus' heliocentric theory started a scientific revolution, your customer-centric efforts will start an experience revolution. If you think customer experience is like a traditional marketing approach, think again. It’s not about controlling your customers and leading them where you want them to go. It might sound like heresy to some, but your customers are already in control, whether or not your company realizes and acknowledges it. And, to survive and thrive, you'll have to focus on customers by thinking outside-in and working towards a brand that is better and more authentic. We learned how Vail Resorts takes this customer-centric approach. Employees must experience the mountain themselves and understand the experience from the guest’s standpoint. This has created a culture where employees do things for guests that are not expected. We also learned a valuable lesson in designing and innovating customer-centered experiences from Kerry Bodine. First you make the thing, and then you make the thing right. In this case, the thing is customer experience. Getting customer experience right means iterative prototyping and testing of your ideas. This is where shampoo comes in—think lather, rinse, repeat. Be prepared to keep repeating until the customer experience is right. Many of these sessions will be posted to YouTube in the coming weeks so be sure to subscribe to our CX channel.

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• Integration Patterns with Azure Service Bus Relay, Part 3: Anonymous partial-trust consumer

  - by Elton Stoneman

  This is the third in the IPASBR series, see also: Integration Patterns with Azure Service Bus Relay, Part 1: Exposing the on-premise service Integration Patterns with Azure Service Bus Relay, Part 2: Anonymous full-trust .NET consumer As the patterns get further from the simple .NET full-trust consumer, all that changes is the communication protocol and the authentication mechanism. In Part 3 the scenario is that we still have a secure .NET environment consuming our service, so we can store shared keys securely, but the runtime environment is locked down so we can't use Microsoft.ServiceBus to get the nice WCF relay bindings. To support this we will expose a RESTful endpoint through the Azure Service Bus, and require the consumer to send a security token with each HTTP service request. Pattern applicability This is a good fit for scenarios where: the runtime environment is secure enough to keep shared secrets the consumer can execute custom code, including building HTTP requests with custom headers the consumer cannot use the Azure SDK assemblies the service may need to know who is consuming it the service does not need to know who the end-user is Note there isn't actually a .NET requirement here. By exposing the service in a REST endpoint, anything that can talk HTTP can be a consumer. We'll authenticate through ACS which also gives us REST endpoints, so the service is still accessed securely. Our real-world example would be a hosted cloud app, where we we have enough room in the app's customisation to keep the shared secret somewhere safe and to hook in some HTTP calls. We will be flowing an identity through to the on-premise service now, but it will be the service identity given to the consuming app - the end user's identity isn't flown through yet. In this post, we’ll consume the service from Part 1 in ASP.NET using the WebHttpRelayBinding. The code for Part 3 (+ Part 1) is on GitHub here: IPASBR Part 3. Authenticating and authorizing with ACS We'll follow the previous examples and add a new service identity for the namespace in ACS, so we can separate permissions for different consumers (see walkthrough in Part 1). I've named the identity partialTrustConsumer. We’ll be authenticating against ACS with an explicit HTTP call, so we need a password credential rather than a symmetric key – for a nice secure option, generate a symmetric key, copy to the clipboard, then change type to password and paste in the key: We then need to do the same as in Part 2 , add a rule to map the incoming identity claim to an outgoing authorization claim that allows the identity to send messages to Service Bus: Issuer: Access Control Service Input claim type: http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/nameidentifier Input claim value: partialTrustConsumer Output claim type: net.windows.servicebus.action Output claim value: Send As with Part 2, this sets up a service identity which can send messages into Service Bus, but cannot register itself as a listener, or manage the namespace. RESTfully exposing the on-premise service through Azure Service Bus Relay The part 3 sample code is ready to go, just put your Azure details into Solution Items\AzureConnectionDetails.xml and “Run Custom Tool” on the .tt files.  But to do it yourself is very simple. We already have a WebGet attribute in the service for locally making REST calls, so we are just going to add a new endpoint which uses the WebHttpRelayBinding to relay that service through Azure. It's as easy as adding this endpoint to Web.config for the service:         <endpoint address="https://sixeyed-ipasbr.servicebus.windows.net/rest"                   binding="webHttpRelayBinding"                    contract="Sixeyed.Ipasbr.Services.IFormatService"                   behaviorConfiguration="SharedSecret">         </endpoint> - and adding the webHttp attribute in your endpoint behavior:           <behavior name="SharedSecret">             <webHttp/>             <transportClientEndpointBehavior credentialType="SharedSecret">               <clientCredentials>                 <sharedSecret issuerName="serviceProvider"                               issuerSecret="gl0xaVmlebKKJUAnpripKhr8YnLf9Neaf6LR53N8uGs="/>               </clientCredentials>             </transportClientEndpointBehavior>           </behavior> Where's my WSDL? The metadata story for REST is a bit less automated. In our local webHttp endpoint we've enabled WCF's built-in help, so if you navigate to: http://localhost/Sixeyed.Ipasbr.Services/FormatService.svc/rest/help - you'll see the uri format for making a GET request to the service. The format is the same over Azure, so this is where you'll be connecting: https://[your-namespace].servicebus.windows.net/rest/reverse?string=abc123 Build the service with the new endpoint, open that in a browser and you'll get an XML version of an HTTP status code - a 401 with an error message stating that you haven’t provided an authorization header: <?xml version="1.0"?><Error><Code>401</Code><Detail>MissingToken: The request contains no authorization header..TrackingId:4cb53408-646b-4163-87b9-bc2b20cdfb75_5,TimeStamp:10/3/2012 8:34:07 PM</Detail></Error> By default, the setup of your Service Bus endpoint as a relying party in ACS expects a Simple Web Token to be presented with each service request, and in the browser we're not passing one, so we can't access the service. Note that this request doesn't get anywhere near your on-premise service, Service Bus only relays requests once they've got the necessary approval from ACS. Why didn't the consumer need to get ACS authorization in Part 2? It did, but it was all done behind the scenes in the NetTcpRelayBinding. By specifying our Shared Secret credentials in the consumer, the service call is preceded by a check on ACS to see that the identity provided is a) valid, and b) allowed access to our Service Bus endpoint. By making manual HTTP requests, we need to take care of that ACS check ourselves now. We do that with a simple WebClient call to the ACS endpoint of our service; passing the shared secret credentials, we will get back an SWT: var values = new System.Collections.Specialized.NameValueCollection(); values.Add("wrap_name", "partialTrustConsumer"); //service identity name values.Add("wrap_password", "suCei7AzdXY9toVH+S47C4TVyXO/UUFzu0zZiSCp64Y="); //service identity password values.Add("wrap_scope", "http://sixeyed-ipasbr.servicebus.windows.net/"); //this is the realm of the RP in ACS var acsClient = new WebClient(); var responseBytes = acsClient.UploadValues("https://sixeyed-ipasbr-sb.accesscontrol.windows.net/WRAPv0.9/", "POST", values); rawToken = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetString(responseBytes); With a little manipulation, we then attach the SWT to subsequent REST calls in the authorization header; the token contains the Send claim returned from ACS, so we will be authorized to send messages into Service Bus. Running the sample Navigate to http://localhost:2028/Sixeyed.Ipasbr.WebHttpClient/Default.cshtml, enter a string and hit Go! - your string will be reversed by your on-premise service, routed through Azure: Using shared secret client credentials in this way means ACS is the identity provider for your service, and the claim which allows Send access to Service Bus is consumed by Service Bus. None of the authentication details make it through to your service, so your service is not aware who the consumer is (MSDN calls this "anonymous authentication").

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• Oracle Service Cloud May 2014 Release – Focus on your driving by JP Saunders

  - by Tuula Fai

  The next time you’re twiddling dials on your car’s dashboard to get the air to blow in the right direction, and the right song to play on the stereo, while pulling on the wires to charge your phone and punching in passwords to re-sync your hands-free headset to take a call, consider this… Does having a better dashboard UI in your car improve your driving performance? The Tesla car has one of the most modern and intuitive dashboards in any commercial car today. It is actually based on the design of a smart phone, which can download apps and updates directly from the cloud.  The 17” touchscreen, Lynx-based dashboard totally integrates all channels and devices, allowing the driver to focus on the smooth driving and power of this luxury (toy) car.  What the folks at Tesla didn't do was avoid the complexity of our needs. Instead, they streamlined them. And, while we might not all be able to afford a Tesla, their approach demonstrates that a modern UI approach can ultimately make a positive difference in our lives and businesses.  This is why the productivity and effectiveness of a Modern Contact Center is many times greater than that of a traditional contact center. Agents in a Modern Contact Center get to focus on the task at hand, the customer engagement, rather than stumbling their way through Lego blocks of complexity.  The Oracle Service Cloud is a modern approach to customer service that empowers your agents to achieve greater focus on improving your operational and strategic success through streamlined business processes.  Here are some of the recent May 2014 release highlights to the Oracle Service Cloud: Performance Enhanced Desktop UI A modern agent desktop interface that optimizes clumsy tasks, logins, screens and workflows and is optimized for agent and system performance. Improvements include performance for drag-and-drop configurable views, saved searches, and improved caching for high-speed performance even during disconnected or slow internet access.  Customer Experience Routing A streamlined automatic way to connect the right customer need to the best agent skills, based on multidimensional variables such as product skills, language skills, workload, call volume to optimize the connection and resolution experience. On-The-Go Mobile Improvements to the Agent mobile app that extend connectivity to websites, and customer surveys that are mobile-ready and rendered for any device, and ensure the customer’s voice is captured while the insight is still top of mind.  Infused Social Engagement Enhancements to infused social capabilities allow agents to respond in social threads directly from within the agent desktop, with the information becoming part of the incident record for automatic actions (such as replay or escalate) triggered off the response. Front-End Siebel Contact Center The market leading online Web Customer Self-Service interface from the Oracle Service Cloud, is now out-of-the-box ready for Oracle Siebel customers. Deploy a new online web self-service interface in a matter of weeks to have customers self-serve and self-solve answers, with escalated incidents routed directly into the Oracle Siebel Contact Center. For more information on the latest enhancements for the Oracle Service Cloud, please see the Oracle Service Cloud May 2014 Capabilities and Benefits. Related blogs: Oracle Service Cloud Feb 2014

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• Siemens AG, Sector Healthcare, Increases Transparency and Improves Customer Loyalty with Web Portal Solution

  - by Kellsey Ruppel

  Siemens AG, Sector Healthcare, Increases Transparency and Improves Customer Loyalty with Web Portal Solution CUSTOMER AND PARTNER INFORMATION Customer Name – Siemens AG, Sector Healthcare Customer Revenue – 73,515 Billion Euro (2011, Siemens AG total) Customer Quote – “The realization of our complex requirements within a very short amount of time was enabled through the competent implementation partner Sapient, who fully used the  very broad scope of standard functionality provided in the Oracle WebCenter Portal, and the management of customer services, who continuously supported the project setup. ” – Joerg Modlmayr, Project Manager, Healthcare Customer Service Portal, Siemens AG The Siemens Healthcare Sector is one of the world's largest suppliers to the healthcare industry and a trendsetter in medical imaging, laboratory diagnostics, medical information technology and hearing aids. Siemens offers its customers products and solutions for the entire range of patient care from a single source – from prevention and early detection to diagnosis, and on to treatment and aftercare. By optimizing clinical workflows for the most common diseases, Siemens also makes healthcare faster, better and more cost-effective. To ensure greater transparency, increased efficiency, higher user acceptance, and additional services, Siemens AG, Sector Healthcare, replaced several existing legacy portal solutions that could not meet the company’s future needs with Oracle WebCenter Portal. Various existing portal solutions that cannot meet future demands will be successively replaced by the new central service portal, which will also allow for the efficient and intuitive implementation of new service concepts.  With Oracle, doctors and hospitals using Siemens medical solutions now have access to a central information portal that provides important information and services at just the push of a button.  Customer Name – Siemens AG, Sector Healthcare Customer URL – www.siemens.com Customer Headquarters – Erlangen, Germany Industry – Industrial Manufacturing Employees – 360,000  Challenges – Replace disparate medical service portals to meet future demands and eliminate an  unnecessarily high level of administrative work caused by heterogeneous installations Ensure portals meet current user demands to improve user-acceptance rates and increase number of total users Enable changes and expansion through standard functionality to eliminate the need for reliance on IT and reduce administrative efforts and associated high costs Ensure efficient and intuitive implementation of new service concepts for all devices and systems Ensure hospitals and clinics to transparently monitor and measure services rendered for the various medical devices and systems  Increase electronic interaction and expand services to achieve a higher level of customer loyalty Solution –  Deployed Oracle WebCenter Portal to ensure greater transparency, and as a result, a higher level of customer loyalty  Provided a centralized platform for doctors and hospitals using Siemens’ medical technology solutions that provides important information and services at the push of a button Reduced significantly the administrative workload by centralizing the solution in the new customer service portal Secured positive feedback from customers involved in the pilot program developed by design experts from Oracle partner Sapient. The interfaces were created with customer needs in mind. The first survey taken shortly after implementation came back with 2.4 points on a scale of 0-3 in the category “customer service portal intuitiveness level” Met all requirements including alignment with the Siemens Style Guide without extensive programming Implemented additional services via the portal such as benchmarking options to ensure the optimal use of the Customer Device Park Provided option for documentation of all services rendered in conjunction with the medical technology systems to ensure that the value of the services are transparent for the decision makers in the hospitals  Saved and stored all machine data from approximately 100,000 remote systems in the central service and information platform Provided the option to register errors online and follow the call status in real-time on the portal Made  available at the push of a button all information on the medical technology devices used in hospitals or clinics—from security checks and maintenance activities to current device statuses Provided PDF format Service Performance Reports that summarize information from periods of time ranging from previous weeks up to one year, meeting medical product law requirements  Why Oracle – Siemens AG favored Oracle for many reasons, however, the company ultimately decided to go with Oracle due to the enormous range of functionality the solutions offered for the healthcare sector.“We are not programmers; we are service providers in the medical technology segment and focus on the contents of the portal. All the functionality necessary for internet-based customer interaction is already standard in Oracle WebCenter Portal, which is a huge plus for us. Having Oracle as our technology partner ensures that the product will continually evolve, providing a strong technology platform for our customer service portal well into the future,” said Joerg Modlmayr project manager, Healthcare Customer Service Portal, Siemens AG. Partner Involvement – Siemens AG selected Oracle Partner Sapient because the company offered a service portfolio that perfectly met Siemens’ requirements and had a wealth of experience implementing Oracle WebCenter Portal. Additionally, Sapient had designers with a very high level of expertise in usability—an aspect that Siemens considered to be of vast importance for the project.  “The Sapient team completely met all our expectations. Our tightly timed project was completed on schedule, and the positive feedback from our users proves that we set the right measures in terms of usability—all thanks to the folks at Sapient,” Modlmayr said.  Partner Name – Sapient GmbH Deutschland Partner URL – www.sapient.com

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• Integration Patterns with Azure Service Bus Relay, Part 2: Anonymous full-trust .NET consumer

  - by Elton Stoneman

  This is the second in the IPASBR series, see also: Integration Patterns with Azure Service Bus Relay, Part 1: Exposing the on-premise service Part 2 is nice and easy. From Part 1 we exposed our service over the Azure Service Bus Relay using the netTcpRelayBinding and verified we could set up our network to listen for relayed messages. Assuming we want to consume that service in .NET from an environment which is fairly unrestricted for us, but quite restricted for attackers, we can use netTcpRelay and shared secret authentication. Pattern applicability This is a good fit for scenarios where: the consumer can run .NET in full trust the environment does not restrict use of external DLLs the runtime environment is secure enough to keep shared secrets the service does not need to know who is consuming it the service does not need to know who the end-user is So for example, the consumer is an ASP.NET website sitting in a cloud VM or Azure worker role, where we can keep the shared secret in web.config and we don't need to flow any identity through to the on-premise service. The service doesn't care who the consumer or end-user is - say it's a reference data service that provides a list of vehicle manufacturers. Provided you can authenticate with ACS and have access to Service Bus endpoint, you can use the service and it doesn't care who you are. In this post, we’ll consume the service from Part 1 in ASP.NET using netTcpRelay. The code for Part 2 (+ Part 1) is on GitHub here: IPASBR Part 2 Authenticating and authorizing with ACS In this scenario the consumer is a server in a controlled environment, so we can use a shared secret to authenticate with ACS, assuming that there is governance around the environment and the codebase which will prevent the identity being compromised. From the provider's side, we will create a dedicated service identity for this consumer, so we can lock down their permissions. The provider controls the identity, so the consumer's rights can be revoked. We'll add a new service identity for the namespace in ACS , just as we did for the serviceProvider identity in Part 1. I've named the identity fullTrustConsumer. We then need to add a rule to map the incoming identity claim to an outgoing authorization claim that allows the identity to send messages to Service Bus (see Part 1 for a walkthrough creating Service Idenitities): Issuer: Access Control Service Input claim type: http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/nameidentifier Input claim value: fullTrustConsumer Output claim type: net.windows.servicebus.action Output claim value: Send This sets up a service identity which can send messages into Service Bus, but cannot register itself as a listener, or manage the namespace. Adding a Service Reference The Part 2 sample client code is ready to go, but if you want to replicate the steps, you’re going to add a WSDL reference, add a reference to Microsoft.ServiceBus and sort out the ServiceModel config. In Part 1 we exposed metadata for our service, so we can browse to the WSDL locally at: http://localhost/Sixeyed.Ipasbr.Services/FormatService.svc?wsdl If you add a Service Reference to that in a new project you'll get a confused config section with a customBinding, and a set of unrecognized policy assertions in the namespace http://schemas.microsoft.com/netservices/2009/05/servicebus/connect. If you NuGet the ASB package (“windowsazure.servicebus”) first and add the service reference - you'll get the same messy config. Either way, the WSDL should have downloaded and you should have the proxy code generated. You can delete the customBinding entries and copy your config from the service's web.config (this is already done in the sample project in Sixeyed.Ipasbr.NetTcpClient), specifying details for the client:     <client>       <endpoint address="sb://sixeyed-ipasbr.servicebus.windows.net/net"                 behaviorConfiguration="SharedSecret"                 binding="netTcpRelayBinding"                 contract="FormatService.IFormatService" />     </client>     <behaviors>       <endpointBehaviors>         <behavior name="SharedSecret">           <transportClientEndpointBehavior credentialType="SharedSecret">             <clientCredentials>               <sharedSecret issuerName="fullTrustConsumer"                             issuerSecret="E3feJSMuyGGXksJi2g2bRY5/Bpd2ll5Eb+1FgQrXIqo="/>             </clientCredentials>           </transportClientEndpointBehavior>         </behavior>       </endpointBehaviors>     </behaviors>   The proxy is straight WCF territory, and the same client can run against Azure Service Bus through any relay binding, or directly to the local network service using any WCF binding - the contract is exactly the same. The code is simple, standard WCF stuff: using (var client = new FormatService.FormatServiceClient()) { outputString = client.ReverseString(inputString); } Running the sample First, update Solution Items\AzureConnectionDetails.xml with your service bus namespace, and your service identity credentials for the netTcpClient and the provider:   <!-- ACS credentials for the full trust consumer (Part2): -->   <netTcpClient identityName="fullTrustConsumer"                 symmetricKey="E3feJSMuyGGXksJi2g2bRY5/Bpd2ll5Eb+1FgQrXIqo="/> Then rebuild the solution and verify the unit tests work. If they’re green, your service is listening through Azure. Check out the client by navigating to http://localhost:53835/Sixeyed.Ipasbr.NetTcpClient. Enter a string and hit Go! - your string will be reversed by your on-premise service, routed through Azure: Using shared secret client credentials in this way means ACS is the identity provider for your service, and the claim which allows Send access to Service Bus is consumed by Service Bus. None of the authentication details make it through to your service, so your service is not aware who the consumer is (MSDN calls this "anonymous authentication").

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• Call for Customer Examples and Stories--PeopleTools 8.50

  - by PeopleTools Strategy Team

  PeopleTools 8.50 was a big release for us, and one that we think will provide a lot of value for customers. We've been having some interesting conversations with customers about this release at conferences, advisory board meetings, and technical group meetings. However, we would like to solicit some examples and success stories from you, our broad customer base. Do you have some examples of how you are using PeopleTools 8.50 and Enterprise Portal 9.1 that you would be willing to share? We would like to see some screen shots and perhaps a short blurb describing how you are using the Tools and Portal features, as well as any benefits accrued. Do you have a compelling success story? We are particularly interested in hearing about quantifiable improvements in user productivity, performance, cost savings, etc. You should be aware that these screen shots and stories will be public, and could appear in a conference presentation at some point. You will not be asked to serve as a formal reference, however. If you have some stories and examples you'd be willing share with us, please send them to this email address for the PeopleTools team: [email protected]

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• Service Broker, not ETL

  - by jamiet

  I have been very quiet on this blog of late and one reason for that is I have been very busy on a client project that I would like to talk about a little here. The client that I have been working for has a website that runs on a distributed architecture utilising a messaging infrastructure for communication between different endpoints. My brief was to build a system that could consume these messages and produce analytical information in near-real-time. More specifically I basically had to deliver a data warehouse however it was the real-time aspect of the project that really intrigued me. This real-time requirement meant that using an Extract transformation, Load (ETL) tool was out of the question and so I had no choice but to write T-SQL code (i.e. stored-procedures) to process the incoming messages and load the data into the data warehouse. This concerned me though – I had no way to control the rate at which data would arrive into the system yet we were going to have end-users querying the system at the same time that those messages were arriving; the potential for contention in such a scenario was pretty high and and was something I wanted to minimise as much as possible. Moreover I did not want the processing of data inside the data warehouse to have any impact on the customer-facing website. As you have probably guessed from the title of this blog post this is where Service Broker stepped in! For those that have not heard of it Service Broker is a queuing technology that has been built into SQL Server since SQL Server 2005. It provides a number of features however the one that was of interest to me was the fact that it facilitates asynchronous data processing which, in layman’s terms, means the ability to process some data without requiring the system that supplied the data having to wait for the response. That was a crucial feature because on this project the customer-facing website (in effect an OLTP system) would be calling one of our stored procedures with each message – we did not want to cause the OLTP system to wait on us every time we processed one of those messages. This asynchronous nature also helps to alleviate the contention problem because the asynchronous processing activity is handled just like any other task in the database engine and hence can wait on another task (such as an end-user query). Service Broker it was then! The stored procedure called by the OLTP system would simply put the message onto a queue and we would use a feature called activation to pick each message off the queue in turn and process it into the warehouse. At the time of writing the system is not yet up to full capacity but so far everything seems to be working OK (touch wood) and crucially our users are seeing data in near-real-time. By near-real-time I am talking about latencies of a few minutes at most and to someone like me who is used to building systems that have overnight latencies that is a huge step forward! So then, am I advocating that you all go out and dump your ETL tools? Of course not, no! What this project has taught me though is that in certain scenarios there may be better ways to implement a data warehouse system then the traditional “load data in overnight” approach that we are all used to. Moreover I have really enjoyed getting to grips with a new technology and even if you don’t want to use Service Broker you might want to consider asynchronous messaging architectures for your BI/data warehousing solutions in the future. This has been a very high level overview of my use of Service Broker and I have deliberately left out much of the minutiae of what has been a very challenging implementation. Nonetheless I hope I have caused you to reflect upon your own approaches to BI and question whether other approaches may be more tenable. All comments and questions gratefully received! Lastly, if you have never used Service Broker before and want to kick the tyres I have provided below a very simple “Service Broker Hello World” script that will create all of the objects required to facilitate Service Broker communications and then send the message “Hello World” from one place to anther! This doesn’t represent a “proper” implementation per se because it doesn’t close down down conversation objects (which you should always do in a real-world scenario) but its enough to demonstrate the capabilities! @Jamiet ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /*This is a basic Service Broker Hello World app. Have fun! -Jamie */ USE MASTER GO CREATE DATABASE SBTest GO --Turn Service Broker on! ALTER DATABASE SBTest SET ENABLE_BROKER GO USE SBTest GO -- 1) we need to create a message type. Note that our message type is -- very simple and allowed any type of content CREATE MESSAGE TYPE HelloMessage VALIDATION = NONE GO -- 2) Once the message type has been created, we need to create a contract -- that specifies who can send what types of messages CREATE CONTRACT HelloContract (HelloMessage SENT BY INITIATOR) GO --We can query the metadata of the objects we just created SELECT * FROM   sys.service_message_types WHERE name = 'HelloMessage'; SELECT * FROM   sys.service_contracts WHERE name = 'HelloContract'; SELECT * FROM   sys.service_contract_message_usages WHERE  service_contract_id IN (SELECT service_contract_id FROM sys.service_contracts WHERE name = 'HelloContract') AND        message_type_id IN (SELECT message_type_id FROM sys.service_message_types WHERE name = 'HelloMessage'); -- 3) The communication is between two endpoints. Thus, we need two queues to -- hold messages CREATE QUEUE SenderQueue CREATE QUEUE ReceiverQueue GO --more querying metatda SELECT * FROM sys.service_queues WHERE name IN ('SenderQueue','ReceiverQueue'); --we can also select from the queues as if they were tables SELECT * FROM SenderQueue   SELECT * FROM ReceiverQueue   -- 4) Create the required services and bind them to be above created queues CREATE SERVICE Sender   ON QUEUE SenderQueue CREATE SERVICE Receiver   ON QUEUE ReceiverQueue (HelloContract) GO --more querying metadata SELECT * FROM sys.services WHERE name IN ('Receiver','Sender'); -- 5) At this point, we can begin the conversation between the two services by -- sending messages DECLARE @conversationHandle UNIQUEIDENTIFIER DECLARE @message NVARCHAR(100) BEGIN   BEGIN TRANSACTION;   BEGIN DIALOG @conversationHandle         FROM SERVICE Sender         TO SERVICE 'Receiver'         ON CONTRACT HelloContract WITH ENCRYPTION=OFF   -- Send a message on the conversation   SET @message = N'Hello, World';   SEND  ON CONVERSATION @conversationHandle         MESSAGE TYPE HelloMessage (@message)   COMMIT TRANSACTION END GO --check contents of queues SELECT * FROM SenderQueue   SELECT * FROM ReceiverQueue   GO -- Receive a message from the queue RECEIVE CONVERT(NVARCHAR(MAX), message_body) AS MESSAGE FROM ReceiverQueue GO --If no messages were received and/or you can't see anything on the queues you may wish to check the following for clues: SELECT * FROM sys.transmission_queue -- Cleanup DROP SERVICE Sender DROP SERVICE Receiver DROP QUEUE SenderQueue DROP QUEUE ReceiverQueue DROP CONTRACT HelloContract DROP MESSAGE TYPE HelloMessage GO USE MASTER GO DROP DATABASE SBTest GO

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• Hosting WCF Service with netTcpBinding in Windows Service

  This article will explain How to create a WCF service with netTcpBinding, How to host the WCF service in Windows service ,How to start windows service and How to consume the service.

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• puppet service not stopping service

  - by Gregg Leventhal

  notice ("This should be echoed") service { "iptables": ensure => "stopped", } This does not stop iptables, I am not sure why. service iptables stop works fine. Puppet 2.6.17 on CentOS 6.3. UPDATE: /etc/puppet/manifests/nodes.pp node 'linux-dev' { include mycompany::install::apache::init include mycompany::config::services::init } /etc/puppet/modules/mycompany/manifests/config/services/init.pp class mycompany::config::services::init { if ($::id == "root") { service { 'iptables': #name => '/sbin/iptables', #enable => false, #hasstatus => true, ensure => stopped } notice ("IPTABLES is now being stopped...") file { '/tmp/puppet_still_works': ensure => 'present', owner => root } else { err("Error: this manifest must be run as the root user!") } }

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• Azure - Part 4 - Table Storage Service in Windows Azure

  - by Shaun

  In Windows Azure platform there are 3 storage we can use to save our data on the cloud. They are the Table, Blob and Queue. Before the Chinese New Year Microsoft announced that Azure SDK 1.1 had been released and it supports a new type of storage – Drive, which allows us to operate NTFS files on the cloud. I will cover it in the coming few posts but now I would like to talk a bit about the Table Storage.   Concept of Table Storage Service The most common development scenario is to retrieve, create, update and remove data from the data storage. In the normal way we communicate with database. When we attempt to move our application over to the cloud the most common requirement should be have a storage service. Windows Azure provides a in-build service that allow us to storage the structured data, which is called Windows Azure Table Storage Service. The data stored in the table service are like the collection of entities. And the entities are similar to rows or records in the tradtional database. An entity should had a partition key, a row key, a timestamp and set of properties. You can treat the partition key as a group name, the row key as a primary key and the timestamp as the identifer for solving the concurrency problem. Different with a table in a database, the table service does not enforce the schema for tables, which means you can have 2 entities in the same table with different property sets. The partition key is being used for the load balance of the Azure OS and the group entity transaction. As you know in the cloud you will never know which machine is hosting your application and your data. It could be moving based on the transaction weight and the number of the requests. If the Azure OS found that there are many requests connect to your Book entities with the partition key equals “Novel” it will move them to another idle machine to increase the performance. So when choosing the partition key for your entities you need to make sure they indecate the category or gourp information so that the Azure OS can perform the load balance as you wish.   Consuming the Table Although the table service looks like a database, you cannot access it through the way you are using now, neither ADO.NET nor ODBC. The table service exposed itself by ADO.NET Data Service protocol, which allows you can consume it through the RESTful style by Http requests. The Azure SDK provides a sets of classes for us to connect it. There are 2 classes we might need: TableServiceContext and TableServiceEntity. The TableServiceContext inherited from the DataServiceContext, which represents the runtime context of the ADO.NET data service. It provides 4 methods mainly used by us: CreateQuery: It will create a IQueryable instance from a given type of entity. AddObject: Add the specified entity into Table Service. UpdateObject: Update an existing entity in the Table Service. DeleteObject: Delete an entity from the Table Service. Beofre you operate the table service you need to provide the valid account information. It’s something like the connect string of the database but with your account name and the account key when you created the storage service on the Windows Azure Development Portal. After getting the CloudStorageAccount you can create the CloudTableClient instance which provides a set of methods for using the table service. A very useful method would be CreateTableIfNotExist. It will create the table container for you if it’s not exsited. And then you can operate the eneities to that table through the methods I mentioned above. Let me explain a bit more through an exmaple. We always like code rather than sentence.   Straightforward Accessing to the Table Here I would like to build a WCF service on the Windows Azure platform, and for now just one requirement: it would allow the client to create an account entity on the table service. The WCF service would have a method named Register and accept an instance of the account which the client wants to create. After perform some validation it will add the entity into the table service. So the first thing I should do is to create a Cloud Application on my VIstial Studio 2010 RC. (The Azure SDK 1.1 only supports VS2008 and VS2010 RC.) The solution should be like this below. Then I added a configuration items for the storage account through the Settings section under the cloud project. (Double click the Services file under Roles folder and navigate to the Setting section.) This setting will be used when to retrieve my storage account information. Since for now I just in the development phase I will select “UseDevelopmentStorage=true”. And then I navigated to the WebRole.cs file under my WCF project. If you have read my previous posts you would know that this file defines the process when the application start, and terminate on the cloud. What I need to do is to when the application start, set the configuration publisher to load my config file with the config name I specified. So the code would be like below. I removed the original service and contract created by the VS template and add my IAccountService contract and its implementation class - AccountService. And I add the service method Register with the parameters: email, password and it will return a boolean value to indicates the result which is very simple. At this moment if I press F5 the application will be established on my local development fabric and I can see my service runs well through the browser. Let’s implement the service method Rigister, add a new entity to the table service. As I said before the entities you want to store in the table service must have 3 properties: partition key, row key and timespan. You can create a class with these 3 properties. The Azure SDK provides us a base class for that named TableServiceEntity in Microsoft.WindowsAzure.StorageClient namespace. So what we need to do is more simply, create a class named Account and let it derived from the TableServiceEntity. And I need to add my own properties: Email, Password, DateCreated and DateDeleted. The DateDeleted is a nullable date time value to indecate whether this entity had been deleted and when. Do you notice that I missed something here? Yes it’s the partition key and row key I didn’t assigned. The TableServiceEntity base class defined 2 constructors one was a parameter-less constructor which will be used to fill values into the properties from the table service when retrieving data. The other was one with 2 parameters: partition key and row key. As I said below the partition key may affect the load balance and the row key must be unique so here I would like to use the email as the parition key and the email plus a Guid as the row key. OK now we finished the entity class we need to store onto the table service. The next step is to create a data access class for us to add it. Azure SDK gives us a base class for it named TableServiceContext as I mentioned below. So let’s create a class for operate the Account entities. The TableServiceContext need the storage account information for its constructor. It’s the combination of the storage service URI that we will create on Windows Azure platform, and the relevant account name and key. The TableServiceContext will use this information to find the related address and verify the account to operate the storage entities. Hence in my AccountDataContext class I need to override this constructor and pass the storage account into it. All entities will be saved in the table storage with one or many tables which we call them “table containers”. Before we operate an entity we need to make sure that the table container had been created on the storage. There’s a method we can use for that: CloudTableClient.CreateTableIfNotExist. So in the constructor I will perform it firstly to make sure all method will be invoked after the table had been created. Notice that I passed the storage account enpoint URI and the credentials to specify where my storage is located and who am I. Another advise is that, make your entity class name as the same as the table name when create the table. It will increase the performance when you operate it over the cloud especially querying. Since the Register WCF method will add a new account into the table service, here I will create a relevant method to add the account entity. Before implement, I should add a reference - System.Data.Services.Client to the project. This reference provides some common method within the ADO.NET Data Service which can be used in the Windows Azure Table Service. I will use its AddObject method to create my account entity. Since the table service are not fully implemented the ADO.NET Data Service, there are some methods in the System.Data.Services.Client that TableServiceContext doesn’t support, such as AddLinks, etc. Then I implemented the serivce method to add the account entity through the AccountDataContext. You can see in the service implmentation I load the storage account information through my configuration file and created the account table entity from the parameters. Then I created the AccountDataContext. If it’s my first time to invoke this method the constructor of the AccountDataContext will create a table container for me. Then I use Add method to add the account entity into the table. Next, let’s create a farely simple client application to test this service. I created a windows console application and added a service reference to my WCF service. The metadata information of the WCF service cannot be retrieved if it’s deployed on the Windows Azure even though the <serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="true"/> had been set. If we need to get its metadata we can deploy it on the local development service and then changed the endpoint to the address which is on the cloud. In the client side app.config file I specified the endpoint to the local development fabric address. And the just implement the client to let me input an email and a password then invoke the WCF service to add my acocunt. Let’s run my application and see the result. Of course it should return TRUE to me. And in the local SQL Express I can see the data had been saved in the table.   Summary In this post I explained more about the Windows Azure Table Storage Service. I also created a small application for demostration of how to connect and consume it through the ADO.NET Data Service Managed Library provided within the Azure SDK. I only show how to create an eneity in the storage service. In the next post I would like to explain about how to query the entities with conditions thruogh LINQ. I also would like to refactor my AccountDataContext class to make it dyamic for any kinds of entities.   Hope this helps, Shaun   All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• Windows service runs file locally but not on server

  - by Ben

  I created a simple Windows service in dot net which runs a file. When I run the service locally I see the file running in the task manager just fine. However, when I run the service on the server it won't run the file. I've checked the path to the file which is fine. I also checked the permissions on the folder and file, and they fine as well. Also there are no exceptions happening. Below is the code used to launch the process which runs the file. I posted this first on stack overflow, and some people were thinking this is a config issue, so I moved it here. Any ideas? try { // TODO: Add code here to start your service. eventLog1.WriteEntry("VirtualCameraService started"); // Create An instance of the Process class responsible for starting the newly process. System.Diagnostics.Process process1 = new System.Diagnostics.Process(); // Set the directory where the file resides process1.StartInfo.WorkingDirectory = "C:\\VirtualCameraServiceSetup\\"; // Set the filename name of the file to be opened process1.StartInfo.FileName = "VirtualCameraServiceProject.avc"; // Start the process process1.Start(); } catch (Exception ex) { eventLog1.WriteEntry("VirtualCameraService exception - " + ex.InnerException); }

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• EM12c Release 4: Database as a Service Enhancements

  - by Adeesh Fulay

  Oracle Enterprise Manager 12.1.0.4 (or simply put EM12c R4) is the latest update to the product. As previous versions, this release provides tons of enhancements and bug fixes, attributing to improved stability and quality. One of the areas that is most exciting and has seen tremendous growth in the last few years is that of Database as a Service. EM12c R4 provides a significant update to Database as a Service. The key themes are: Comprehensive Database Service Catalog (includes single instance, RAC, and Data Guard) Additional Storage Options for Snap Clone (includes support for Database feature CloneDB) Improved Rapid Start Kits Extensible Metering and Chargeback Miscellaneous Enhancements 1. Comprehensive Database Service Catalog Before we get deep into implementation of a service catalog, lets first understand what it is and what benefits it provides. Per ITIL, a service catalog is an exhaustive list of IT services that an organization provides or offers to its employees or customers. Service catalogs have been widely popular in the space of cloud computing, primarily as the medium to provide standardized and pre-approved service definitions. There is already some good collateral out there that talks about Oracle database service catalogs. The two whitepapers i recommend reading are: Service Catalogs: Defining Standardized Database Service High Availability Best Practices for Database Consolidation: The Foundation for Database as a Service [Oracle MAA] EM12c comes with an out-of-the-box service catalog and self service portal since release 1. For the customers, it provides the following benefits: Present a collection of standardized database service definitions, Define standardized pools of hardware and software for provisioning, Role based access to cater to different class of users, Automated procedures to provision the predefined database definitions, Setup chargeback plans based on service tiers and database configuration sizes, etc Starting Release 4, the scope of services offered via the service catalog has been expanded to include databases with varying levels of availability - Single Instance (SI) or Real Application Clusters (RAC) databases with multiple data guard based standby databases. Some salient points of the data guard integration: Standby pools can now be defined across different datacenters or within the same datacenter as the primary (this helps in modelling the concept of near and far DR sites) The standby databases can be single instance, RAC, or RAC One Node databases Multiple standby databases can be provisioned, where the maximum limit is determined by the version of database software The standby databases can be in either mount or read only (requires active data guard option) mode All database versions 10g to 12c supported (as certified with EM 12c) All 3 protection modes can be used - Maximum availability, performance, security Log apply can be set to sync or async along with the required apply lag The different service levels or service tiers are popularly represented using metals - Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze, and so on. The Oracle MAA whitepaper (referenced above) calls out the various service tiers as defined by Oracle's best practices, but customers can choose any logical combinations from the table below:  Primary  Standby [1 or more]  EM 12cR4  SI  -  SI  SI  RAC -  RAC SI  RAC RAC  RON -  RON RON where RON = RAC One Node is supported via custom post-scripts in the service template A sample service catalog would look like the image below. Here we have defined 4 service levels, which have been deployed across 2 data centers, and have 3 standardized sizes. Again, it is important to note that this is just an example to get the creative juices flowing. I imagine each customer would come up with their own catalog based on the application requirements, their RTO/RPO goals, and the product licenses they own. In the screenwatch titled 'Build Service Catalog using EM12c DBaaS', I walk through the complete steps required to setup this sample service catalog in EM12c. 2. Additional Storage Options for Snap Clone In my previous blog posts, i have described the snap clone feature in detail. Essentially, it provides a storage agnostic, self service, rapid, and space efficient approach to solving your data cloning problems. The net benefit is that you get incredible amounts of storage savings (on average 90%) all while cloning databases in a matter of minutes. Space and Time, two things enterprises would love to save on. This feature has been designed with the goal of providing data cloning capabilities while protecting your existing investments in server, storage, and software. With this in mind, we have pursued with the dual solution approach of Hardware and Software. In the hardware approach, we connect directly to your storage appliances and perform all low level actions required to rapidly clone your databases. While in the software approach, we use an intermediate software layer to talk to any storage vendor or any storage configuration to perform the same low level actions. Thus delivering the benefits of database thin cloning, without requiring you to drastically changing the infrastructure or IT's operating style. In release 4, we expand the scope of options supported by snap clone with the addition of database CloneDB. While CloneDB is not a new feature, it was first introduced in 11.2.0.2 patchset, it has over the years become more stable and mature. CloneDB leverages a combination of Direct NFS (or dNFS) feature of the database, RMAN image copies, sparse files, and copy-on-write technology to create thin clones of databases from existing backups in a matter of minutes. It essentially has all the traits that we want to present to our customers via the snap clone feature. For more information on cloneDB, i highly recommend reading the following sources: Blog by Tim Hall: Direct NFS (DNFS) CloneDB in Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Oracle OpenWorld Presentation by Cern: Efficient Database Cloning using Direct NFS and CloneDB The advantages of the new CloneDB integration with EM12c Snap Clone are: Space and time savings Ease of setup - no additional software is required other than the Oracle database binary Works on all platforms Reduce the dependence on storage administrators Cloning process fully orchestrated by EM12c, and delivered to developers/DBAs/QA Testers via the self service portal Uses dNFS to delivers better performance, availability, and scalability over kernel NFS Complete lifecycle of the clones managed by EM12c - performance, configuration, etc 3. Improved Rapid Start Kits DBaaS deployments tend to be complex and its setup requires a series of steps. These steps are typically performed across different users and different UIs. The Rapid Start Kit provides a single command solution to setup Database as a Service (DBaaS) and Pluggable Database as a Service (PDBaaS). One command creates all the Cloud artifacts like Roles, Administrators, Credentials, Database Profiles, PaaS Infrastructure Zone, Database Pools and Service Templates. Once the Rapid Start Kit has been successfully executed, requests can be made to provision databases and PDBs from the self service portal. Rapid start kit can create complex topologies involving multiple zones, pools and service templates. It also supports standby databases and use of RMAN image backups. The Rapid Start Kit in reality is a simple emcli script which takes a bunch of xml files as input and executes the complete automation in a matter of seconds. On a full rack Exadata, it took only 40 seconds to setup PDBaaS end-to-end. This kit works for both Oracle's engineered systems like Exadata, SuperCluster, etc and also on commodity hardware. One can draw parallel to the Exadata One Command script, which again takes a bunch of inputs from the administrators and then runs a simple script that configures everything from network to provisioning the DB software. Steps to use the kit: The kit can be found under the SSA plug-in directory on the OMS: EM_BASE/oracle/MW/plugins/oracle.sysman.ssa.oms.plugin_12.1.0.8.0/dbaas/setup It can be run from this default location or from any server which has emcli client installed For most scenarios, you would use the script dbaas/setup/database_cloud_setup.py For Exadata, special integration is provided to reduce the number of inputs even further. The script to use for this scenario would be dbaas/setup/exadata_cloud_setup.py The database_cloud_setup.py script takes two inputs: Cloud boundary xml: This file defines the cloud topology in terms of the zones and pools along with host names, oracle home locations or container database names that would be used as infrastructure for provisioning database services. This file is optional in case of Exadata, as the boundary is well know via the Exadata system target available in EM. Input xml: This file captures inputs for users, roles, profiles, service templates, etc. Essentially, all inputs required to define the DB services and other settings of the self service portal. Once all the xml files have been prepared, invoke the script as follows for PDBaaS: emcli @database_cloud_setup.py -pdbaas -cloud_boundary=/tmp/my_boundary.xml -cloud_input=/tmp/pdb_inputs.xml          The script will prompt for passwords a few times for key users like sysman, cloud admin, SSA admin, etc. Once complete, you can simply log into EM as the self service user and request for databases from the portal. More information available in the Rapid Start Kit chapter in Cloud Administration Guide.  4. Extensible Metering and Chargeback  Last but not the least, Metering and Chargeback in release 4 has been made extensible in all possible regards. The new extensibility features allow customer, partners, system integrators, etc to : Extend chargeback to any target type managed in EM Promote any metric in EM as a chargeback entity Extend list of charge items via metric or configuration extensions Model abstract entities like no. of backup requests, job executions, support requests, etc  A slew of emcli verbs have also been added that allows administrators to create, edit, delete, import/export charge plans, and assign cost centers all via the command line. More information available in the Chargeback API chapter in Cloud Administration Guide. 5. Miscellaneous Enhancements There are other miscellaneous, yet important, enhancements that are worth a mention. These mostly have been asked by customers like you. These are: Custom naming of DB Services Self service users can provide custom names for DB SID, DB service, schemas, and tablespaces Every custom name is validated for uniqueness in EM 'Create like' of Service Templates Now creating variants of a service template is only a click away. This would be vital when you publish service templates to represent different database sizes or service levels. Profile viewer View the details of a profile like datafile, control files, snapshot ids, export/import files, etc prior to its selection in the service template Cleanup automation - for failed and successful requests Single emcli command to cleanup all remnant artifacts of a failed request Cleanup can be performed on a per request bases or by the entire pool As an extension, you can also delete successful requests Improved delete user workflow Allows administrators to reassign cloud resources to another user or delete all of them Support for multiple tablespaces for schema as a service In addition to multiple schemas, user can also specify multiple tablespaces per request I hope this was a good introduction to the new Database as a Service enhancements in EM12c R4. I encourage you to explore many of these new and existing features and give us feedback. Good luck! References: Cloud Management Page on OTN Cloud Administration Guide [Documentation] -- Adeesh Fulay (@adeeshf)

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• Updating an ADF Web Service Data Control When Service Structure or Location Change

  - by Shay Shmeltzer

  The web service data control in Oracle ADF gives you a simplified approach to consuming services in ADF applications, and now with ADF Mobile the usage of this service seems to be growing. A frequent question we get is what happens if the service that I'm consuming changes - how do I update my data control? Well, first we should mention that if you do a good design of your application before you actually code - then things like Web service method signature shouldn't change. The signature is the contract between the publisher and the consumer, and contracts shouldn't be broken. But in reality things do change during development stages, so here is how you can update both method signatures and service location with the Web service data control: After watching this video you might be tempted to not copy the WSDLs to your project - which lets you use the right click update on a data control. However there is a reason why the copy is on by default, it reduces network traffic when you are actually running your application since ADF doesn't need to go to the server to find out the service structure. So for runtime performance, you probably should keep the WSDL local.  I encourage you to further look into both the connections.xml file where your service location is saved, and the datacontrols.dcx file where its definition is kept to get an even deeper understanding of how ADF works underneath the declarative layers.

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• Configuring service restart with 'restart service after' parameter

  - by Tim Brigham

  It appears that sc.exe isn't capable of setting the 'restart service after' parameter and powershell isn't capable of setting up service restarts at all. My intended configuration is failure1/restart failure2/restart failure3/nothing with a five minute counter between each restart. The five minute timer is extremely important. Is there anything else I can look at other than some registry hackery configure this?

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• Recommended service account setup for MS SQL Server 2005/2008

  - by boxerbucks

  We have a number of MS SQL servers in our environment running either SQL Server 2005 standard/enterprise or SQL server 2008 enterprise. Currently the SQL services are running as local service or network service and the MS recommended best practice is to run as a domain account which is what we are trying to move towards. Is the best practice with regards to domain accounts to have a separate domain account per service per server? So if we have 4 SQL services we want to run per server and we have 50 servers, we would create 50 * 4 = 200 accounts in AD? This seems excessive to me and I was wondering if anyone has any real experience with this type of setup and it's management.

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• Start/stop Windows Service A also Start/stop Windows service B

  - by Sean

  I created two Windows services A and B, and would like to add dependency between them so that I can: Start service A (service B starts automatically) Stop service A (service B stops automatically) However, the command sc config ServiceA depend= ServiceB only works for: Start service A (service B starts automatically) Stop service B (service A stops automatically) Is there any way to make service B stop automatically when I stop service A?

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• Android remote service doesn't call service methods

  - by tarantel

  Hello, I'm developing a GPS tracking software on android. I need IPC to control the service from different activities. So I decide to develop a remote service with AIDL. This wasn't a big problem but now it's always running into the methods of the interface and not into those of my service class. Maybe someone could help me? Here my ADIL file: package test.de.android.tracker interface ITrackingServiceRemote { void startTracking(in long trackId); void stopTracking(); void pauseTracking(); void resumeTracking(in long trackId); long trackingState(); } And the here a short version of my service class: public class TrackingService extends Service implements LocationListener{ private LocationManager mLocationManager; private TrackDb db; private long trackId; private boolean isTracking = false; @Override public void onCreate() { super.onCreate(); mNotificationManager = (NotificationManager) this .getSystemService(NOTIFICATION_SERVICE); mLocationManager = (LocationManager) getSystemService(LOCATION_SERVICE); db = new TrackDb(this.getApplicationContext()); } @Override public void onStart(Intent intent, int startId) { super.onStart(intent, startId); } @Override public void onDestroy(){ //TODO super.onDestroy(); } @Override public IBinder onBind(Intent intent){ return this.mBinder; } private IBinder mBinder = new ITrackingServiceRemote.Stub() { public void startTracking(long trackId) throws RemoteException { TrackingService.this.startTracking(trackId); } public void pauseTracking() throws RemoteException { TrackingService.this.pauseTracking(); } public void resumeTracking(long trackId) throws RemoteException { TrackingService.this.resumeTracking(trackId); } public void stopTracking() throws RemoteException { TrackingService.this.stopTracking(); } public long trackingState() throws RemoteException { long state = TrackingService.this.trackingState(); return state; } }; public synchronized void startTracking(long trackId) { // request updates every 250 meters or 0 sec this.trackId = trackId; mLocationManager.requestLocationUpdates(LocationManager.GPS_PROVIDER, 0, 250, this); isTracking = true; } public synchronized long trackingState() { if(isTracking){ return trackId; } else return -1; } public synchronized void stopTracking() { if(isTracking){ mLocationManager.removeUpdates(this); isTracking = false; } else Log.i(TAG, "Could not stop because service is not tracking at the moment"); } public synchronized void resumeTracking(long trackId) { if(!isTracking){ this.trackId = trackId; mLocationManager.requestLocationUpdates(LocationManager.GPS_PROVIDER, 0, 250, this); isTracking = true; } else Log.i(TAG, "Could not resume because service is tracking already track " + this.trackId); } public synchronized void pauseTracking() { if(isTracking){ mLocationManager.removeUpdates(this); isTracking = false; } else Log.i(TAG, "Could not pause because service is not tracking at the moment"); } public void onLocationChanged(Location location) { //TODO } For easier access from the client I wrote a ServiceManager class which sets up the ServiceConnection and you can call the service methods. Here my code for this: public class TrackingServiceManager{ private static final String TAG = "TrackingServiceManager"; private ITrackingServiceRemote mService = null; private Context mContext; private Boolean isBound = false; private ServiceConnection mServiceConnection; public TrackingServiceManager(Context ctx){ this.mContext = ctx; } public void start(long trackId) { if (isBound && mService != null) { try { mService.startTracking(trackId); } catch (RemoteException e) { Log.e(TAG, "Could not start tracking!",e); } } else Log.i(TAG, "No Service bound! 1"); } public void stop(){ if (isBound && mService != null) { try { mService.stopTracking(); } catch (RemoteException e) { Log.e(TAG, "Could not stop tracking!",e); } } else Log.i(TAG, "No Service bound!"); } public void pause(){ if (isBound && mService != null) { try { mService.pauseTracking(); } catch (RemoteException e) { Log.e(TAG, "Could not pause tracking!",e); } } else Log.i(TAG, "No Service bound!"); } public void resume(long trackId){ if (isBound && mService != null) { try { mService.resumeTracking(trackId); } catch (RemoteException e) { Log.e(TAG, "Could not resume tracking!",e); } } else Log.i(TAG, "No Service bound!"); } public float state(){ if (isBound && mService != null) { try { return mService.trackingState(); } catch (RemoteException e) { Log.e(TAG, "Could not resume tracking!",e); return -1; } } else Log.i(TAG, "No Service bound!"); return -1; } /** * Method for binding the Service with client */ public boolean connectService(){ mServiceConnection = new ServiceConnection() { @Override public void onServiceConnected(ComponentName name, IBinder service) { TrackingServiceManager.this.mService = ITrackingServiceRemote.Stub.asInterface(service); } } @Override public void onServiceDisconnected(ComponentName name) { if (mService != null) { mService = null; } } }; Intent mIntent = new Intent("test.de.android.tracker.action.intent.TrackingService"); this.isBound = this.mContext.bindService(mIntent, mServiceConnection, Context.BIND_AUTO_CREATE); return this.isBound; } public void disconnectService(){ this.mContext.unbindService(mServiceConnection); this.isBound = false; } } If i now try to call a method from an activity for example start(trackId) nothing happens. The binding is OK. When debugging it always runs into the startTracking() in the generated ITrackingServiceRemote.java file and not into my TrackingService class. Where is the problem? I can't find anything wrong. Thanks in advance! Tobias

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• SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 2 is available - but there's a catch!

  - by AaronBertrand

  Service Pack 2 is available: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=43340 The build number is 11.0.5058, and this includes fixes up to and including SQL Server 2012 SP1 CU #9. (The complete list of fixes is exhaustive, including all fixes from SP1 CU #1 -> #9, but the post-CU #9 fixes are listed here: http://support.microsoft.com/KB/2958429 However, if you may be affected by the regression bug I talked about earlier today , which could lead to data loss or corruption during online...(read more)

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• Create and Consume WCF service using Visual Studio 2010

  - by sreejukg

  In this article I am going to demonstrate how to create a WCF service, that can be hosted inside IIS and a windows application that consume the WCF service. To support service oriented architecture, Microsoft developed the programming model named Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). ASMX was the prior version from Microsoft, was completely based on XML and .Net framework continues to support ASMX web services in future versions also. While ASMX web services was the first step towards the service oriented architecture, Microsoft has made a big step forward by introducing WCF. An overview of planning for WCF can be found from this link http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff649584.aspx . The following are the important differences between WCF and ASMX from an asp.net developer point of view. 1. ASMX web services are easy to write, configure and consume 2. ASMX web services are only hosted in IIS 3. ASMX web services can only use http 4. WCF, can be hosted inside IIS, windows service, console application, WAS(Windows Process Activation Service) etc 5. WCF can be used with HTTP, TCP/IP, MSMQ and other protocols. The detailed difference between ASMX web service and WCF can be found here. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc304771.aspx Though WCF is a bigger step for future, Visual Studio makes it simpler to create, publish and consume the WCF service. In this demonstration, I am going to create a service named SayHello that accepts 2 parameters such as name and language code. The service will return a hello to user name that corresponds to the language. So the proposed service usage is as follows. Caller: SayHello(“Sreeju”, “en”) -> return value -> Hello Sreeju Caller: SayHello(“???”, “ar”) -> return value -> ????? ??? Caller: SayHello(“Sreeju”, “es”) - > return value -> Hola Sreeju Note: calling an automated translation service is not the intention of this article. If you are interested, you can find bing translator API and can use in your application. http://www.microsofttranslator.com/dev/ So Let us start First I am going to create a Service Application that offer the SayHello Service. Open Visual Studio 2010, Go to File -> New Project, from your preferred language from the templates section select WCF, select WCF service application as the project type, give the project a name(I named it as HelloService), click ok so that visual studio will create the project for you. In this demonstration, I have used C# as the programming language. Visual studio will create the necessary files for you to start with. By default it will create a service with name Service1.svc and there will be an interface named IService.cs. The screenshot for the project in solution explorer is as follows Since I want to demonstrate how to create new service, I deleted Service1.Svc and IService1.cs files from the project by right click the file and select delete. Now in the project there is no service available, I am going to create one. From the solution explorer, right click the project, select Add -> New Item Add new item dialog will appear to you. Select WCF service from the list, give the name as HelloService.svc, and click on the Add button. Now Visual studio will create 2 files with name IHelloService.cs and HelloService.svc. These files are basically the service definition (IHelloService.cs) and the service implementation (HelloService.svc). Let us examine the IHelloService interface. The code state that IHelloService is the service definition and it provides an operation/method (similar to web method in ASMX web services) named DoWork(). Any WCF service will have a definition file as an Interface that defines the service. Let us see what is inside HelloService.svc The code illustrated is implementing the interface IHelloService. The code is self-explanatory; the HelloService class needs to implement all the methods defined in the Service Definition. Let me do the service as I require. Open IHelloService.cs in visual studio, and delete the DoWork() method and add a definition for SayHello(), do not forget to add OperationContract attribute to the method. The modified IHelloService.cs will look as follows Now implement the SayHello method in the HelloService.svc.cs file. Here I wrote the code for SayHello method as follows. I am done with the service. Now you can build and run the service by clicking f5 (or selecting start debugging from the debug menu). Visual studio will host the service in give you a client to test it. The screenshot is as follows. In the left pane, it shows the services available in the server and in right side you can invoke the service. To test the service sayHello, double click on it from the above window. It will ask you to enter the parameters and click on the invoke button. See a sample output below. Now I have done with the service. The next step is to write a service client. Creating a consumer application involves 2 steps. One generating the class and configuration file corresponds to the service. Create a project that utilizes the generated class and configuration file. First I am going to generate the class and configuration file. There is a great tool available with Visual Studio named svcutil.exe, this tool will create the necessary class and configuration files for you. Read the documentation for the svcutil.exe here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa347733.aspx . Open Visual studio command prompt, you can find it under Start Menu -> All Programs -> Visual Studio 2010 -> Visual Studio Tools -> Visual Studio command prompt Make sure the service is in running state in visual studio. Note the url for the service(from the running window, you can right click and choose copy address). Now from the command prompt, enter the svcutil.exe command as follows. I have mentioned the url and the /d switch – for the directory to store the output files(In this case d:\temp). If you are using windows drive(in my case it is c: ) , make sure you open the command prompt with run as administrator option, otherwise you will get permission error(Only in windows 7 or windows vista). The tool has created 2 files, HelloService.cs and output.config. Now the next step is to create a new project and use the created files and consume the service. Let us do that now. I am going to add a console application to the current solution. Right click solution name in the solution explorer, right click, Add-> New Project Under Visual C#, select console application, give the project a name, I named it TestService Now navigate to d:\temp where I generated the files with the svcutil.exe. Rename output.config to app.config. Next step is to add both files (d:\temp\helloservice.cs and app.config) to the files. In the solution explorer, right click the project, Add -> Add existing item, browse to the d:\temp folder, select the 2 files as mentioned before, click on the add button. Now you need to add a reference to the System.ServiceModel to the project. From solution explorer, right click the references under testservice project, select Add reference. In the Add reference dialog, select the .Net tab, select System.ServiceModel, and click ok Now open program.cs by double clicking on it and add the code to consume the web service to the main method. The modified file looks as follows Right click the testservice project and set as startup project. Click f5 to run the project. See the sample output as follows Publishing WCF service under IIS is similar to publishing ASP.Net application. Publish the application to a folder using Visual studio publishing feature, create a virtual directory and create it as an application. Don’t forget to set the application pool to use ASP.Net version 4. One last thing you need to check is the app.config file you have added to the solution. See the element client under ServiceModel element. There is an endpoint element with address attribute that points to the published service URL. If you permanently host the service under IIS, you can simply change the address parameter to the corresponding one and your application will consume the service. You have seen how easily you can build/consume WCF service. If you need the solution in zipped format, please post your email below.

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• SQLAuthority News – Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 1 Released (SP1)

  - by pinaldave

  Last week, I was attending SQLPASS 2012 and I had great fun attending the event. During the event long awaited SQL Serer 2012 Service Pack 1 was released. I am pretty excited with SP1 as new service packs are cumulative updates and upgrade all editions and service levels of SQL Server 2012 to SP1. This service pack contains SQL Server 2012 Cumulative Update 1 (CU1) and Cumulative Update 2 (CU2). The latest SP1 has many new and enhanced features. Here are a few for example: Cross-Cluster Migration of AlwaysOn Availability Groups for OS Upgrade Selective XML Index DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS works with SELECT permission New function returns statistics properties – sys.dm_db_stats_properties SSMS Complete in Express SlipStream Full Installation Business Intelligence highlights with Office and SharePoint Server 2013 Management Object Support Added for Resource Governor DDL Please note that the size of the service pack is near 1 GB. Here is the link to SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 1. SQL Server Express is the free and feature rich edition of the SQL Server. It is used with lightweight website and desktop applications. Here is the link to SQL Server 2012 EXPRESS Service Pack 1. Here is the question for you – how long have you been using SQL Server 2012? Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Documentation, SQL Download, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Service Pack

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• Culture Shmulture?

  - by steve.diamond

  I've been thinking about "Customer Experience Management" lately. Here at Oracle, we arguably have the most complete suite of applications for managing the customer experience across and in the context of multiple channels -- from marketing to loyalty to contact center to self-service to analytics offerings, and more. And stay tuned, because in coming months let's just say we'll have even more to talk about on this front. But that said............ Last weekend my wife and I stayed at one of the premiere hotel chains on the planet. I won't name them, but we all know the short list. It could have been the St. Regis or the Ritz Carlton or Four Seasons or Hyatt Park or....This stay, at this particular hotel, was simply outstanding. Within a chain known for providing "above and beyond" levels of service, this particular hotel, under this particular manager, exceeded expectations on so many fronts. For example, at the Spa we mentioned to the two attendants that my wife is seven months pregnant and that we had previously had a lot of trouble conceiving. We then went to our room. Ten minutes later we heard a knock at the door and received a plate of chocolate covered strawberries with a heartfelt note and an inspiring quote, signed by the two spa attendees. The following day we arranged to have a bellhop drive us to the beach. Although they had a pre-arranged beach shuttle service with time limits, etc., he greeted us by saying, "I'm yours for the day until 4 p.m. Whatever you want to do is fine by me, as long as it's legal!" The morning that we left we arranged to have a taxi drive us to the airport--a nearly 40 mile drive. What showed up was a private coach complete with navy blue suited driver dude. And we were charged the taxi fare price. And there were many other awesome exchanges I won't mention here, although I did email the GM of this hotel two nights ago and expressed our effusive praise and gratitude. I'd submit that this hotel chain would have a definitive advantage using even more Oracle software to manage and optimize its customer interactions (yes, they are a customer). But WITHOUT the culture--that management team--and that instillation of aligned values across all employees of exemplifying 'the golden rule,' I wonder how much technology really matters in providing a distinctively positive and memorable customer experience. Lest you think I'm alone in these pontifications, have you read Paul Greenberg's blog lately? Have you seen one of his most recent posts? Now this SPECIFIC post is NOT about customer service per se. But it is about people. So yes, please think long and hard about the technology you seek to deploy. But never forget who will be interacting with your systems, and your customers.

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• Unable to add CRM 2011's Organization service as Service Reference to VS project

  - by Scorpion

  I have problem accessing Organization Service when I try to add it as a Service Reference in Visual Studio. However, I can Access the Service in browser. I have tried to add OrganizationData service and there is no issue with that. An Error occurred while attempting to find service at 'http://xxxxxxxx/xxxxx/XRMServices/2011/Organization.svc'. Error Details There was an error downloading 'http://xxxxxxxx/xxxxx/XRMServices/2011/Organization.svc/_vti_bin/ListData.svc/$metadata'. The request failed with HTTP status 400: Bad Request. Metadata contains a reference that cannot be resolved: 'http://xxxxxxxx/xxxxx/XRMServices/2011/Organization.svc'. Metadata contains a reference that cannot be resolved: 'http://xxxxxxxx/xxxxx/XRMServices/2011/Organization.svc'. If the service is defined in the current solution, try building the solution and adding the service reference again.

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