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MySQL for Excel 1.1.3 has been released

- by Javier Treviño

The MySQL Windows Experience Team is proud to announce the release of MySQL for Excel version 1.1.3, the latest addition to the MySQL Installer for Windows. MySQL for Excel is an application plug-in enabling data analysts to very easily access and manipulate MySQL data within Microsoft Excel. It enables you to directly work with a MySQL database from within Microsoft Excel so you can easily do tasks such as: Importing MySQL Data into Excel Exporting Excel data directly into MySQL to a new or existing table Editing MySQL data directly within Excel MySQL for Excel is installed using the MySQL Installer for Windows. The MySQL installer comes in 2 versions Full (150 MB) which includes a complete set of MySQL products with their binaries included in the download Web (1.5 MB - a network install) which will just pull MySQL for Excel over the web and install it when run. You can download MySQL Installer from our official Downloads page at http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/installer/. MySQL for Excel 1.1.3 introduces the following features: Upon saving a Workbook containing Worksheets in Edit Mode, the user is asked if he wants to exit the Edit Mode on all Worksheets before their parent Workbook is saved so the Worksheets are saved unprotected, otherwise the Worksheets will remain protected and the users will be able to unprotect them later retrieving the passkeys from the application log after closing MySQL for Excel. Added background coloring to the column names header row of an Import Data operation to have the same look as the one in an Edit Data operation (i.e. gray-ish background). Connection passwords can be stored securely just like MySQL Workbench does and these secured passwords are shared with Workbench in the same way connections are. Changed the way the MySQL for Excel ribbon toggle button works, instead of just showing or hiding the add-in it actually opens and closes it. Added a connection test before any operation against the database (schema creation, data import, append, export or edition) so the operation dialog is not shown and a friendlier error message is shown. Also this release contains the following bug fixes: Added a check on every connection test for an expired password, if the password has been expired a dialog is now shown to the user to reset the password. Bug #17354118 - DON'T HANDLE EXPIRED PASSWORDS Added code to escape text values to be imported to an Excel worksheet that start with an equals sign so Excel does not treat those values as formulas that will fail evaluation. This is an option turned on by default that can be turned off by users if they wish to import values to be treated as Excel formulas. Bug #17354102 - ERROR IMPORTING TEXT VALUES TO EXCEL STARTING WITH AN EQUALS SIGN Added code to properly check the reason for a failing connection, if it's a failing password the user gets a dialog to retry the connection with a different password until the connection succeeds, a connection error not related to the password is thrown or the user cancels. If the failing connection is not related to a bad password an error message is shown to the users indicating the reason of the failure. Bug #16239007 - CONNECTIONS TO MYSQL SERVICES NOT RUNNING DISPLAY A WRONG PASSWORD ERROR MESSAGE Added global options dialog that can be accessed from the Schema Selection and DB Object Selection panels where the timeouts for the connection to the DB Server and for the query commands can be changed from their default values (15 seconds for the connection timeout and 30 seconds for the query timeout). MySQL Bug #68732, Bug #17191646 - QUERY TIMEOUT CANNOT BE ADJUSTED IN MYSQL FOR EXCEL Changed the Varchar(65,535) data type shown in the Export Data data type combo box to Text since the maximum row size is 65,535 bytes and any autodetected column data type with a length greater than 4,000 should be set to Text actually for the table to be created successfully. MySQL Bug #69779, Bug #17191633 - EXPORT FAILS FOR EXCEL FILES CONTAINING > 4000 CHARACTERS OF TEXT PER CELL Removed code that was replacing all spaces typed by the user in an overriden data type for a new column in an Export Data operation, also improved the data type detection code to flag as invalid data types with parenthesis but without any text inside or where the contents inside the parenthesis are not valid for the specific data type. Bug #17260260 - EXPORT DATA SET TYPE NOT WORKING WITH MEMBER VALUES CONTAINING SPACES Added support for the year data type with a length of 2 or 4 and a validation that valid values are integers between 1901-2155 (for 4-digit years) or between 0-99 (for 2-digit years). Bug #17259915 - EXPORT DATA YEAR DATA TYPE NOT RECOGNIZED IF DECLARED WITH A DISPLAY WIDTH) Fixed code for Export Data operations where users overrode the data type for columns typing Text in the data type combobox, which is a valid data type but was not recognized as such. Bug #17259490 - EXPORT DATA TEXT DATA TYPE NOT RECOGNIZED AS A VALID DATA TYPE Changed the location of the registry where the MySQL for Excel add-in is installed to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE instead of HKEY_CURRENT_USER so the add-in is accessible by all users and not only to the user that installed it. For this to work with Excel 2007 a hotfix may be required (see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/976477). MySQL Bug #68746, Bug #16675992 - EXCEL-ADD-IN IS ONLY INSTALLED FOR USER ACCOUNT THAT THE INSTALLATION RUNS UNDER Added support for Excel 2013 Single Document Interface, now that Excel 2013 creates 1 window per workbook also the Excel Add-In maintains an independent custom task pane in each window. MySQL Bug #68792, Bug #17272087 - MYSQL FOR EXCEL SIDEBAR DOES NOT APPEAR IN EXCEL 2013 (WITH WORKAROUND) Included the latest MySQL Utility with a code fix for the COM exception thrown when attempting to open Workbench in the Manage Connections window. Bug #17258966 - MYSQL WORKBENCH NOT OPENED BY CLICKING MANAGE CONNECTIONS HOTLABEL Fixed code for Append Data operations that was not applying a calculated automatic mapping correctly when the source and target tables had different number of columns, some columns with the same name but some of those lying on column indexes beyond the limit of the other source/target table. MySQL Bug #69220, Bug #17278349 - APPEND DOESN'T AUTOMATICALLY DETECT EXCEL COL HEADER WITH SAME NAME AS SQL FIELD Fixed some code for Edit Data operations that was escaping special characters twice (during edition in Excel and then upon sending the query to the MySQL server). MySQL Bug #68669, Bug #17271693 - A BACKSLASH IS INSERTED BEFORE AN APOSTROPHE EDITING TABLE WITH MYSQL FOR EXCEL Upgraded MySQL Utility with latest version that encapsulates dialog base classes and introduces more classes to handle Workbench connections, and removed these from the Excel project. Bug #16500331 - CAN'T DELETE CONNECTIONS CREATED WITHIN ADDIN You can access the MySQL for Excel documentation at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/mysql-for-excel.html You can find our team’s blog at http://blogs.oracle.com/MySQLOnWindows. You can also post questions on our MySQL for Excel forum found at http://forums.mysql.com/. Enjoy and thanks for the support!

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People, Process & Engagement: WebCenter Partner Keste

- by Michael Snow

v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Within the WebCenter group here at Oracle, discussions about people, process and engagement cross over many vertical industries and products. Amidst our growing partner ecosystem, the community provides us insight into great customer use cases every day. Such is the case with our partner, Keste, who provides us a guest post on our blog today with an overview of their innovative solution for a customer in the transportation industry. Keste is an Oracle software solutions and development company headquartered in Dallas, Texas. As a Platinum member of the Oracle® PartnerNetwork, Keste designs, develops and deploys custom solutions that automate complex business processes. Seamless Customer Self-Service Experience in the Trucking Industry with Oracle WebCenter Portal Keste, Oracle Platinum Partner Customer Overview Omnitracs, Inc., a Qualcomm company provides mobility solutions for trucking fleets to companies in the transportation industry. Omnitracs’ mobility services include basic communications such as text as well as advanced monitoring services such as GPS tracking, temperature tracking of perishable goods, load tracking and weighting distribution, and many others. Customer Business Needs Already the leading provider of mobility solutions for large trucking fleets, they chose to target smaller trucking fleets as new customers. However their existing high-touch customer support method would not be a cost effective or scalable method to manage and service these smaller customers. Omnitracs needed to provide several self-service features to make customer support more scalable while keeping customer satisfaction levels high and the costs manageable. The solution also had to be very intuitive and easy to use. The systems that Omnitracs sells to these trucking customers require professional installation and smaller customers need to track and schedule the installation. Information captured in Oracle eBusiness Suite needed to be readily available for new customers to track these purchases and delivery details. Omnitracs wanted a high impact User Interface to significantly improve customer experience with the ability to integrate with EBS, provisioning systems as well as CRM systems that were already implemented. Omnitracs also wanted to build an architecture platform that could potentially be extended to other Portals. Omnitracs’ stated goal was to deliver an “eBay-like” or “Amazon-like” experience for all of their customers so that they could reach a much broader market beyond their large company customer base. Solution Overview In order to manage the increased complexity, the growing support needs of global customers and improve overall product time-to-market in a cost-effective manner, IT began to deliver a self-service model. This self service model not only transformed numerous business processes but is also allowing the business to keep up with the growing demands of the (internal and external) customers. This solution was a customer service Portal that provided self service capabilities for large and small customers alike for Activation of mobility products, managing add-on applications for the devices (much like the Apple App Store), transferring services when trucks are sold to other companies as well as deactivation all without the involvement of a call service agent or sending multiple emails to different Omnitracs contacts. This is a conceptual view of the Customer Portal showing the details of the components that make up the solution. 12.00 The portal application for transactions was entirely built using ADF 11g R2. Omnitracs’ business had a pressing requirement to have a portal available 24/7 for its customers. Since there were interactions with EBS in the back-end, the downtimes on the EBS would negate this availability. Omnitracs devised a decoupling strategy at the database side for the EBS data. The decoupling of the database was done using Oracle Data Guard and completely insulated the solution from any eBusiness Suite down time. The customer has no knowledge whether eBS is running or not. Here are two sample screenshots of the portal application built in Oracle ADF. Customer Benefits The Customer Portal not only provided the scalability to grow the business but also provided the seamless integration with other disparate applications. Some of the key benefits are: Improved Customer Experience: With a modern look and feel and a Portal that has the aspects of an App Store, the customer experience was significantly improved. Page response times went from several seconds to sub-second for all of the pages. Enabled new product launches: After successfully dominating the large fleet market, Omnitracs now has a scalable solution to sell and manage smaller fleet customers giving them a huge advantage over their nearest competitors. Dozens of new customers have been acquired via this portal through an onboarding process that now takes minutes Seamless Integrations Improves Customer Support: ADF 11gR2 allowed Omnitracs to bring a diverse list of applications into one integrated solution. This provided a seamless experience for customers to route them from Marketing focused application to a customer-oriented portal. Internally, it also allowed Sales Representatives to have an integrated flow for taking a prospect through the various steps to onboard them as a customer. Key integrations included: Unity Core Salesforce.com Merchant e-Solution for credit card Custom Omnitracs Applications like CUPS and AUTO Security utilizing OID and OVD Back end integration with EBS (Data Guard) and iQ Database Business Impact Significant business impacts were realized through the launch of customer portal. It not only allows the business to push through in underserved segments, but also reduces the time it needs to spend on customer support—allowing the business to focus more on sales and identifying the market for new products. Some of the Immediate Benefits are The entire onboarding process is now completely automated and now completes in minutes. This represents an 85% productivity improvement over their previous processes. And it was 160 times faster! With the success of this self-service solution, the business is now targeting about 3X customer growth in the next five years. This represents a tripling of their overall customer base and significant downstream revenue for the ongoing services. 90%+ improvement of customer onboarding and management process by utilizing, single sign on integration using OID/OAM solution, performance improvements and new self-service functionality Unified login for all Customers, Partners and Internal Users enables login to a common portal and seamless access to all other integrated applications targeted at the respective audience Significantly improved customer experience with a better look and feel with a more user experience focused Portal screens. Helped sales of the new product by having an easy way of ordering and activating the product. Data Guard helped increase availability of the Portal to 99%+ and make it independent of EBS downtime. This gave customers the feel of high availability of the portal application. Some of the anticipated longer term Benefits are: Platform that can be leveraged to launch any new product introduction and enable all product teams to reach new customers and new markets Easy integration with content management to allow business owners more control of the product catalog Overall reduced TCO with standardization of the Oracle platform Managed IT support cost savings through optimization of technology skills needed to support and modify this solution ------------------------------------------------------------ 12.00 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:"Times New Roman","serif";}

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Contracting as a Software Developer in the UK

- by Frez

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Whilst it is possible to contract using other financial vehicles such as umbrella companies, this article will only consider limited companies as that is what I have experience of using. Contracting or consultancy requires a different mind-set from being a permanent member of staff, and not all developers are capable of this shift in attitude. Whilst you can look forward to an increase in the money you take home, there are real risks and expenses you would not normally be exposed to as a permie. So let us have a look at the pros and cons: Pros: More money There is no doubt that whilst you are working on contracts you will earn significantly more than you would as a permanent employee. Furthermore, working through a limited company is more tax efficient. Less politics You really have no need to involve yourself in office politics. When the end of the day comes you can go home and not think or worry about the power struggles within the company you are contracted to. Your career progression is not tied to the company. Expenses from gross income All your expenses of trading as a business will come out of your company’s gross income, i.e. before tax. This covers travelling expenses provided you have not been at the same client/location for more than two years, internet subscriptions, professional subscriptions, software, hardware, accountancy services and so on. Cons: Work is more transient Contracts typically range from a couple of weeks to a year, although will most likely start at 3 months. However, most contracts are extended either because the project you have been brought in to help with takes longer to deliver than expected, the client decides they can use you on other aspects of the project, or the client decides they would like to use you on other projects. The temporary nature of the work means that you will have down-time between contracts while you secure new opportunities during which time your company will have no income. You may need to attend several interviews before securing a new contract. Accountancy expenses Your company is a separate entity and there are accountancy requirements which, unless you like paperwork, means your company will need to appoint an accountant to prepare your company’s accounts. It may also be worth purchasing some accountancy software, so talk to your accountant about this as they may prefer you to use a particular software package so they can integrate it with their systems. VAT You will need to register your company for VAT. This is tax neutral for you as the VAT you charge your clients you will pass onto the government less any VAT you are reclaiming from expenses, but it is additional paperwork to undertake each quarter. It is worth checking out the Fixed Rate VAT Scheme that is available, particularly after the initial expenses of setting up your company are over. No training Clients take you on based on your skills, not to train you when they will lose that investment at the end of the contract, so understand that it is unlikely you will receive any training funded by a client. However, learning new skills during a contract is possible and you may choose to accept a contract on a lower rate if this is guaranteed as it will help secure future contracts. No financial extras You will have no free pension, life, accident, sickness or medical insurance unless you choose to purchase them yourself. A financial advisor can give you all the necessary advice in this area, and it is worth taking seriously. A year after I started as a consultant I contracted a serious illness, this kept me off work for over two months, my client was very understanding and it could have been much worse, so it is worth considering what your options might be in the case of illness, death and retirement. Agencies Whilst it is possible to work directly for end clients there are pros and cons of working through an agency. The main advantage is cash flow, you invoice the agency and they typically pay you within a week, whereas working directly for a client could have you waiting up to three months to be paid. The downside of working for agencies, especially in the current difficult times, is that they may go out of business and you then have difficulty getting the money you are owed. Tax investigation It is possible that the Inland Revenue may decide to investigate your company for compliance with tax law. Insurance is available to cover you for this. My personal recommendation would be to join the PCG as this insurance is included as a benefit of membership, Professional Indemnity Some agencies require that you are covered by professional indemnity insurance; this is a cost you would not incur as a permie. Travel Unless you live in an area that has an abundance of opportunities, such as central London, it is likely that you will be travelling further, longer and with more expense than if you were permanently employed at a local company. This not only affects you monetarily, but also your quality of life and the ability to keep fit and healthy. Obtaining finance If you want to secure a mortgage on a property it can be more difficult or expensive, especially if you do not have three years of audited accounts to show a mortgage lender. Caveat This post is my personal opinion and should not be used as a definitive guide or recommendation to contracting and whether it is suitable for you as an individual, i.e. I accept no responsibility if you decide to take up contracting based on this post and you fare badly for whatever reason.

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Oracle Database 12 c New Partition Maintenance Features by Gwen Lazenby

- by hamsun

One of my favourite new features in Oracle Database 12c is the ability to perform partition maintenance operations on multiple partitions. This means we can now add, drop, truncate and merge multiple partitions in one operation, and can split a single partition into more than two partitions also in just one command. This would certainly have made my life slightly easier had it been available when I administered a data warehouse at Oracle 9i. To demonstrate this new functionality and syntax, I am going to create two tables, ORDERS and ORDERS_ITEMS which have a parent-child relationship. ORDERS is to be partitioned using range partitioning on the ORDER_DATE column, and ORDER_ITEMS is going to partitioned using reference partitioning and its foreign key relationship with the ORDERS table. This form of partitioning was a new feature in 11g and means that any partition maintenance operations performed on the ORDERS table will also take place on the ORDER_ITEMS table as well. First create the ORDERS table - SQL CREATE TABLE orders ( order_id NUMBER(12), order_date TIMESTAMP, order_mode VARCHAR2(8), customer_id NUMBER(6), order_status NUMBER(2), order_total NUMBER(8,2), sales_rep_id NUMBER(6), promotion_id NUMBER(6), CONSTRAINT orders_pk PRIMARY KEY(order_id) ) PARTITION BY RANGE(order_date) (PARTITION Q1_2007 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('01-APR-2007','DD-MON-YYYY')), PARTITION Q2_2007 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('01-JUL-2007','DD-MON-YYYY')), PARTITION Q3_2007 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('01-OCT-2007','DD-MON-YYYY')), PARTITION Q4_2007 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('01-JAN-2008','DD-MON-YYYY')) ); Table created. Now the ORDER_ITEMS table SQL CREATE TABLE order_items ( order_id NUMBER(12) NOT NULL, line_item_id NUMBER(3) NOT NULL, product_id NUMBER(6) NOT NULL, unit_price NUMBER(8,2), quantity NUMBER(8), CONSTRAINT order_items_fk FOREIGN KEY(order_id) REFERENCES orders(order_id) on delete cascade) PARTITION BY REFERENCE(order_items_fk) tablespace example; Table created. Now look at DBA_TAB_PARTITIONS to get details of what partitions we have in the two tables – SQL select table_name,partition_name, partition_position position, high_value from dba_tab_partitions where table_owner='SH' and table_name like 'ORDER_%' order by partition_position, table_name; TABLE_NAME PARTITION_NAME POSITION HIGH_VALUE -------------- --------------- -------- ------------------------- ORDERS Q1_2007 1 TIMESTAMP' 2007-04-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q1_2007 1 ORDERS Q2_2007 2 TIMESTAMP' 2007-07-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q2_2007 2 ORDERS Q3_2007 3 TIMESTAMP' 2007-10-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q3_2007 3 ORDERS Q4_2007 4 TIMESTAMP' 2008-01-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q4_2007 4 Just as an aside it is also now possible in 12c to use interval partitioning on reference partitioned tables. In 11g it was not possible to combine these two new partitioning features. For our first example of the new 12cfunctionality, let us add all the partitions necessary for 2008 to the tables using one command. Notice that the partition specification part of the add command is identical in format to the partition specification part of the create command as shown above - SQL alter table orders add PARTITION Q1_2008 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('01-APR-2008','DD-MON-YYYY')), PARTITION Q2_2008 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('01-JUL-2008','DD-MON-YYYY')), PARTITION Q3_2008 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('01-OCT-2008','DD-MON-YYYY')), PARTITION Q4_2008 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('01-JAN-2009','DD-MON-YYYY')); Table altered. Now look at DBA_TAB_PARTITIONS and we can see that the 4 new partitions have been added to both tables – SQL select table_name,partition_name, partition_position position, high_value from dba_tab_partitions where table_owner='SH' and table_name like 'ORDER_%' order by partition_position, table_name; TABLE_NAME PARTITION_NAME POSITION HIGH_VALUE -------------- --------------- -------- ------------------------- ORDERS Q1_2007 1 TIMESTAMP' 2007-04-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q1_2007 1 ORDERS Q2_2007 2 TIMESTAMP' 2007-07-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q2_2007 2 ORDERS Q3_2007 3 TIMESTAMP' 2007-10-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q3_2007 3 ORDERS Q4_2007 4 TIMESTAMP' 2008-01-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q4_2007 4 ORDERS Q1_2008 5 TIMESTAMP' 2008-04-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q1_2008 5 ORDERS Q2_2008 6 TIMESTAMP' 2008-07-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEM Q2_2008 6 ORDERS Q3_2008 7 TIMESTAMP' 2008-10-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q3_2008 7 ORDERS Q4_2008 8 TIMESTAMP' 2009-01-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q4_2008 8 Next, we can drop or truncate multiple partitions by giving a comma separated list in the alter table command. Note the use of the plural ‘partitions’ in the command as opposed to the singular ‘partition’ prior to 12c– SQL alter table orders drop partitions Q3_2008,Q2_2008,Q1_2008; Table altered. Now look at DBA_TAB_PARTITIONS and we can see that the 3 partitions have been dropped in both the two tables – TABLE_NAME PARTITION_NAME POSITION HIGH_VALUE -------------- --------------- -------- ------------------------- ORDERS Q1_2007 1 TIMESTAMP' 2007-04-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q1_2007 1 ORDERS Q2_2007 2 TIMESTAMP' 2007-07-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q2_2007 2 ORDERS Q3_2007 3 TIMESTAMP' 2007-10-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q3_2007 3 ORDERS Q4_2007 4 TIMESTAMP' 2008-01-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q4_2007 4 ORDERS Q4_2008 5 TIMESTAMP' 2009-01-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q4_2008 5 Now let us merge all the 2007 partitions together to form one single partition – SQL alter table orders merge partitions Q1_2005, Q2_2005, Q3_2005, Q4_2005 into partition Y_2007; Table altered. TABLE_NAME PARTITION_NAME POSITION HIGH_VALUE -------------- --------------- -------- ------------------------- ORDERS Y_2007 1 TIMESTAMP' 2008-01-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Y_2007 1 ORDERS Q4_2008 2 TIMESTAMP' 2009-01-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q4_2008 2 Splitting partitions is a slightly more involved. In the case of range partitioning one of the new partitions must have no high value defined, and in list partitioning one of the new partitions must have no list of values defined. I call these partitions the ‘everything else’ partitions, and will contain any rows contained in the original partition that are not contained in the any of the other new partitions. For example, let us split the Y_2007 partition back into 4 quarterly partitions – SQL alter table orders split partition Y_2007 into (PARTITION Q1_2007 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('01-APR-2007','DD-MON-YYYY')), PARTITION Q2_2007 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('01-JUL-2007','DD-MON-YYYY')), PARTITION Q3_2007 VALUES LESS THAN (TO_DATE('01-OCT-2007','DD-MON-YYYY')), PARTITION Q4_2007); Now look at DBA_TAB_PARTITIONS to get details of the new partitions – TABLE_NAME PARTITION_NAME POSITION HIGH_VALUE -------------- --------------- -------- ------------------------- ORDERS Q1_2007 1 TIMESTAMP' 2007-04-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q1_2007 1 ORDERS Q2_2007 2 TIMESTAMP' 2007-07-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q2_2007 2 ORDERS Q3_2007 3 TIMESTAMP' 2007-10-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q3_2007 3 ORDERS Q4_2007 4 TIMESTAMP' 2008-01-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q4_2007 4 ORDERS Q4_2008 5 TIMESTAMP' 2009-01-01 00:00:00' ORDER_ITEMS Q4_2008 5 Partition Q4_2007 has a high value equal to the high value of the original Y_2007 partition, and so has inherited its upper boundary from the partition that was split. As for a list partitioning example let look at the following another table, SALES_PAR_LIST, which has 2 partitions, Americas and Europe and a partitioning key of country_name. SQL select table_name,partition_name, high_value from dba_tab_partitions where table_owner='SH' and table_name = 'SALES_PAR_LIST'; TABLE_NAME PARTITION_NAME HIGH_VALUE -------------- --------------- ----------------------------- SALES_PAR_LIST AMERICAS 'Argentina', 'Canada', 'Peru', 'USA', 'Honduras', 'Brazil', 'Nicaragua' SALES_PAR_LIST EUROPE 'France', 'Spain', 'Ireland', 'Germany', 'Belgium', 'Portugal', 'Denmark' Now split the Americas partition into 3 partitions – SQL alter table sales_par_list split partition americas into (partition south_america values ('Argentina','Peru','Brazil'), partition north_america values('Canada','USA'), partition central_america); Table altered. Note that no list of values was given for the ‘Central America’ partition. However it should have inherited any values in the original ‘Americas’ partition that were not assigned to either the ‘North America’ or ‘South America’ partitions. We can confirm this by looking at the DBA_TAB_PARTITIONS view. SQL select table_name,partition_name, high_value from dba_tab_partitions where table_owner='SH' and table_name = 'SALES_PAR_LIST'; TABLE_NAME PARTITION_NAME HIGH_VALUE --------------- --------------- -------------------------------- SALES_PAR_LIST SOUTH_AMERICA 'Argentina', 'Peru', 'Brazil' SALES_PAR_LIST NORTH_AMERICA 'Canada', 'USA' SALES_PAR_LIST CENTRAL_AMERICA 'Honduras', 'Nicaragua' SALES_PAR_LIST EUROPE 'France', 'Spain', 'Ireland', 'Germany', 'Belgium', 'Portugal', 'Denmark' In conclusion, I hope that DBA’s whose work involves maintaining partitions will find the operations a bit more straight forward to carry out once they have upgraded to Oracle Database 12c. Gwen Lazenby is a Principal Training Consultant at Oracle. She is part of Oracle University's Core Technology delivery team based in the UK, teaching Database Administration and Linux courses. Her specialist topics include using Oracle Partitioning and Parallelism in Data Warehouse environments, as well as Oracle Spatial and RMAN.

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Guide to MySQL & NoSQL, Webinar Q&A

- by Mat Keep

0 0 1 959 5469 Homework 45 12 6416 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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; 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; mso-ansi-language:EN-US;} Yesterday we ran a webinar discussing the demands of next generation web services and how blending the best of relational and NoSQL technologies enables developers and architects to deliver the agility, performance and availability needed to be successful. Attendees posted a number of great questions to the MySQL developers, serving to provide additional insights into areas like auto-sharding and cross-shard JOINs, replication, performance, client libraries, etc. So I thought it would be useful to post those below, for the benefit of those unable to attend the webinar. Before getting to the Q&A, there are a couple of other resources that maybe useful to those looking at NoSQL capabilities within MySQL: - On-Demand webinar (coming soon!) - Slides used during the webinar - Guide to MySQL and NoSQL whitepaper - MySQL Cluster demo, including NoSQL interfaces, auto-sharing, high availability, etc. So here is the Q&A from the event Q. Where does MySQL Cluster fit in to the CAP theorem? A. MySQL Cluster is flexible. A single Cluster will prefer consistency over availability in the presence of network partitions. A pair of Clusters can be configured to prefer availability over consistency. A full explanation can be found on the MySQL Cluster & CAP Theorem blog post. Q. Can you configure the number of replicas? (the slide used a replication factor of 1) Yes. A cluster is configured by an .ini file. The option NoOfReplicas sets the number of originals and replicas: 1 = no data redundancy, 2 = one copy etc. Usually there's no benefit in setting it >2. Q. Interestingly most (if not all) of the NoSQL databases recommend having 3 copies of data (the replication factor). Yes, with configurable quorum based Reads and writes. MySQL Cluster does not need a quorum of replicas online to provide service. Systems that require a quorum need > 2 replicas to be able to tolerate a single failure. Additionally, many NoSQL systems take liberal inspiration from the original GFS paper which described a 3 replica configuration. MySQL Cluster avoids the need for a quorum by using a lightweight arbitrator. You can configure more than 2 replicas, but this is a tradeoff between incrementally improved availability, and linearly increased cost. Q. Can you have cross node group JOINS? Wouldn't that run into the risk of flooding the network? MySQL Cluster 7.2 supports cross nodegroup joins. A full cross-join can require a large amount of data transfer, which may bottleneck on network bandwidth. However, for more selective joins, typically seen with OLTP and light analytic applications, cross node-group joins give a great performance boost and network bandwidth saving over having the MySQL Server perform the join. Q. Are the details of the benchmark available anywhere? According to my calculations it results in approx. 350k ops/sec per processor which is the largest number I've seen lately The details are linked from Mikael Ronstrom's blog The benchmark uses a benchmarking tool we call flexAsynch which runs parallel asynchronous transactions. It involved 100 byte reads, of 25 columns each. Regarding the per-processor ops/s, MySQL Cluster is particularly efficient in terms of throughput/node. It uses lock-free minimal copy message passing internally, and maximizes ID cache reuse. Note also that these are in-memory tables, there is no need to read anything from disk. Q. Is access control (like table) planned to be supported for NoSQL access mode? Currently we have not seen much need for full SQL-like access control (which has always been overkill for web apps and telco apps). So we have no plans, though especially with memcached it is certainly possible to turn-on connection-level access control. But specifically table level controls are not planned. Q. How is the performance of memcached APi with MySQL against memcached+MySQL or any other Object Cache like Ecache with MySQL DB? With the memcache API we generally see a memcached response in less than 1 ms. and a small cluster with one memcached server can handle tens of thousands of operations per second. Q. Can .NET can access MemcachedAPI? Yes, just use a .Net memcache client such as the enyim or BeIT memcache libraries. Q. Is the row level locking applicable when you update a column through memcached API? An update that comes through memcached uses a row lock and then releases it immediately. Memcached operations like "INCREMENT" are actually pushed down to the data nodes. In most cases the locks are not even held long enough for a network round trip. Q. Has anyone published an example using something like PHP? I am assuming that you just use the PHP memcached extension to hook into the memcached API. Is that correct? Not that I'm aware of but absolutely you can use it with php or any of the other drivers Q. For beginner we need more examples. Take a look here for a fully worked example Q. Can I access MySQL using Cobol (Open Cobol) or C and if so where can I find the coding libraries etc? A. There is a cobol implementation that works well with MySQL, but I do not think it is Open Cobol. Also there is a MySQL C client library that is a standard part of every mysql distribution Q. Is there a place to go to find help when testing and/implementing the NoSQL access? If using Cluster then you can use the [email protected] alias or post on the MySQL Cluster forum Q. Are there any white papers on this? Yes - there is more detail in the MySQL Guide to NoSQL whitepaper If you have further questions, please don’t hesitate to use the comments below!

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C#/.NET Little Wonders: Use Cast() and TypeOf() to Change Sequence Type

- by James Michael Hare

Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. We’ve seen how the Select() extension method lets you project a sequence from one type to a new type which is handy for getting just parts of items, or building new items. But what happens when the items in the sequence are already the type you want, but the sequence itself is typed to an interface or super-type instead of the sub-type you need? For example, you may have a sequence of Rectangle stored in an IEnumerable<Shape> and want to consider it an IEnumerable<Rectangle> sequence instead. Today we’ll look at two handy extension methods, Cast<TResult>() and OfType<TResult>() which help you with this task. Cast<TResult>() – Attempt to cast all items to type TResult So, the first thing we can do would be to attempt to create a sequence of TResult from every item in the source sequence. Typically we’d do this if we had an IEnumerable<T> where we knew that every item was actually a TResult where TResult inherits/implements T. For example, assume the typical Shape example classes: 1: // abstract base class 2: public abstract class Shape { } 3: 4: // a basic rectangle 5: public class Rectangle : Shape 6: { 7: public int Widtgh { get; set; } 8: public int Height { get; set; } 9: } And let’s assume we have a sequence of Shape where every Shape is a Rectangle… 1: var shapes = new List<Shape> 2: { 3: new Rectangle { Width = 3, Height = 5 }, 4: new Rectangle { Width = 10, Height = 13 }, 5: // ... 6: }; To get the sequence of Shape as a sequence of Rectangle, of course, we could use a Select() clause, such as: 1: // select each Shape, cast it to Rectangle 2: var rectangles = shapes 3: .Select(s => (Rectangle)s) 4: .ToList(); But that’s a bit verbose, and fortunately there is already a facility built in and ready to use in the form of the Cast<TResult>() extension method: 1: // cast each item to Rectangle and store in a List<Rectangle> 2: var rectangles = shapes 3: .Cast<Rectangle>() 4: .ToList(); However, we should note that if anything in the list cannot be cast to a Rectangle, you will get an InvalidCastException thrown at runtime. Thus, if our Shape sequence had a Circle in it, the call to Cast<Rectangle>() would have failed. As such, you should only do this when you are reasonably sure of what the sequence actually contains (or are willing to handle an exception if you’re wrong). Another handy use of Cast<TResult>() is using it to convert an IEnumerable to an IEnumerable<T>. If you look at the signature, you’ll see that the Cast<TResult>() extension method actually extends the older, object-based IEnumerable interface instead of the newer, generic IEnumerable<T>. This is your gateway method for being able to use LINQ on older, non-generic sequences. For example, consider the following: 1: // the older, non-generic collections are sequence of object 2: var shapes = new ArrayList 3: { 4: new Rectangle { Width = 3, Height = 13 }, 5: new Rectangle { Width = 10, Height = 20 }, 6: // ... 7: }; Since this is an older, object based collection, we cannot use the LINQ extension methods on it directly. For example, if I wanted to query the Shape sequence for only those Rectangles whose Width is > 5, I can’t do this: 1: // compiler error, Where() operates on IEnumerable<T>, not IEnumerable 2: var bigRectangles = shapes.Where(r => r.Width > 5); However, I can use Cast<Rectangle>() to treat my ArrayList as an IEnumerable<Rectangle> and then do the query! 1: // ah, that’s better! 2: var bigRectangles = shapes.Cast<Rectangle>().Where(r => r.Width > 5); Or, if you prefer, in LINQ query expression syntax: 1: var bigRectangles = from s in shapes.Cast<Rectangle>() 2: where s.Width > 5 3: select s; One quick warning: Cast<TResult>() only attempts to cast, it won’t perform a cast conversion. That is, consider this: 1: var intList = new List<int> { 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89 }; 2: 3: // casting ints to longs, this should work, right? 4: var asLong = intList.Cast<long>().ToList(); Will the code above work? No, you’ll get a InvalidCastException. Remember that Cast<TResult>() is an extension of IEnumerable, thus it is a sequence of object, which means that it will box every int as an object as it enumerates over it, and there is no cast conversion from object to long, and thus the cast fails. In other words, a cast from int to long will succeed because there is a conversion from int to long. But a cast from int to object to long will not, because you can only unbox an item by casting it to its exact type. For more information on why cast-converting boxed values doesn’t work, see this post on The Dangers of Casting Boxed Values (here). OfType<TResult>() – Filter sequence to only items of type TResult So, we’ve seen how we can use Cast<TResult>() to change the type of our sequence, when we expect all the items of the sequence to be of a specific type. But what do we do when a sequence contains many different types, and we are only concerned with a subset of a given type? For example, what if a sequence of Shape contains Rectangle and Circle instances, and we just want to select all of the Rectangle instances? Well, let’s say we had this sequence of Shape: 1: var shapes = new List<Shape> 2: { 3: new Rectangle { Width = 3, Height = 5 }, 4: new Rectangle { Width = 10, Height = 13 }, 5: new Circle { Radius = 10 }, 6: new Square { Side = 13 }, 7: // ... 8: }; Well, we could get the rectangles using Select(), like: 1: var onlyRectangles = shapes.Where(s => s is Rectangle).ToList(); But fortunately, an easier way has already been written for us in the form of the OfType<T>() extension method: 1: // returns only a sequence of the shapes that are Rectangles 2: var onlyRectangles = shapes.OfType<Rectangle>().ToList(); Now we have a sequence of only the Rectangles in the original sequence, we can also use this to chain other queries that depend on Rectangles, such as: 1: // select only Rectangles, then filter to only those more than 2: // 5 units wide... 3: var onlyBigRectangles = shapes.OfType<Rectangle>() 4: .Where(r => r.Width > 5) 5: .ToList(); The OfType<Rectangle>() will filter the sequence to only the items that are of type Rectangle (or a subclass of it), and that results in an IEnumerable<Rectangle>, we can then apply the other LINQ extension methods to query that list further. Just as Cast<TResult>() is an extension method on IEnumerable (and not IEnumerable<T>), the same is true for OfType<T>(). This means that you can use OfType<TResult>() on object-based collections as well. For example, given an ArrayList containing Shapes, as below: 1: // object-based collections are a sequence of object 2: var shapes = new ArrayList 3: { 4: new Rectangle { Width = 3, Height = 5 }, 5: new Rectangle { Width = 10, Height = 13 }, 6: new Circle { Radius = 10 }, 7: new Square { Side = 13 }, 8: // ... 9: }; We can use OfType<Rectangle> to filter the sequence to only Rectangle items (and subclasses), and then chain other LINQ expressions, since we will then be of type IEnumerable<Rectangle>: 1: // OfType() converts the sequence of object to a new sequence 2: // containing only Rectangle or sub-types of Rectangle. 3: var onlyBigRectangles = shapes.OfType<Rectangle>() 4: .Where(r => r.Width > 5) 5: .ToList(); Summary So now we’ve seen two different ways to get a sequence of a superclass or interface down to a more specific sequence of a subclass or implementation. The Cast<TResult>() method casts every item in the source sequence to type TResult, and the OfType<TResult>() method selects only those items in the source sequence that are of type TResult. You can use these to downcast sequences, or adapt older types and sequences that only implement IEnumerable (such as DataTable, ArrayList, etc.). Technorati Tags: C#,CSharp,.NET,LINQ,Little Wonders,TypeOf,Cast,IEnumerable<T>

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T4 Performance Counters explained

- by user13346607

Now that T4 is out for a few month some people might have wondered what details of the new pipeline you can monitor. A "cpustat -h" lists a lot of events that can be monitored, and only very few are self-explanatory. I will try to give some insight on all of them, some of these "PIC events" require an in-depth knowledge of T4 pipeline. Over time I will try to explain these, for the time being these events should simply be ignored. (Side note: some counters changed from tape-out 1.1 (*only* used in the T4 beta program) to tape-out 1.2 (used in the systems shipping today) The table only lists the tape-out 1.2 counters) 0 0 1 1058 6033 Oracle Microelectronics 50 14 7077 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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; 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;} pic name (cpustat) Prose Comment Sel-pipe-drain-cycles, Sel-0-[wait|ready], Sel-[1,2] Sel-0-wait counts cycles a strand waits to be selected. Some reasons can be counted in detail; these are: Sel-0-ready: Cycles a strand was ready but not selected, that can signal pipeline oversubscription Sel-1: Cycles only one instruction or µop was selected Sel-2: Cycles two instructions or µops were selected Sel-pipe-drain-cycles: cf. PRM footnote 8 to table 10.2 Pick-any, Pick-[0|1|2|3] Cycles one, two, three, no or at least one instruction or µop is picked Instr_FGU_crypto Number of FGU or crypto instructions executed on that vcpu Instr_ld dto. for load Instr_st dto. for store SPR_ring_ops dto. for SPR ring ops Instr_other dto. for all other instructions not listed above, PRM footnote 7 to table 10.2 lists the instructions Instr_all total number of instructions executed on that vcpu Sw_count_intr Nr of S/W count instructions on that vcpu (sethi %hi(fc000),%g0 (whatever that is)) Atomics nr of atomic ops, which are LDSTUB/a, CASA/XA, and SWAP/A SW_prefetch Nr of PREFETCH or PREFETCHA instructions Block_ld_st Block loads or store on that vcpu IC_miss_nospec, IC_miss_[L2_or_L3|local|remote]\ _hit_nospec Various I$ misses, distinguished by where they hit. All of these count per thread, but only primary events: T4 counts only the first occurence of an I$ miss on a core for a certain instruction. If one strand misses in I$ this miss is counted, but if a second strand on the same core misses while the first miss is being resolved, that second miss is not counted This flavour of I$ misses counts only misses that are caused by instruction that really commit (note the "_nospec") BTC_miss Branch target cache miss ITLB_miss ITLB misses (synchronously counted) ITLB_miss_asynch dto. but asynchronously [I|D]TLB_fill_\ [8KB|64KB|4MB|256MB|2GB|trap] H/W tablewalk events that fill ITLB or DTLB with translation for the corresponding page size. The “_trap” event occurs if the HWTW was not able to fill the corresponding TLB IC_mtag_miss, IC_mtag_miss_\ [ptag_hit|ptag_miss|\ ptag_hit_way_mismatch] I$ micro tag misses, with some options for drill down Fetch-0, Fetch-0-all fetch-0 counts nr of cycles nothing was fetched for this particular strand, fetch-0-all counts cycles nothing was fetched for all strands on a core Instr_buffer_full Cycles the instruction buffer for a strand was full, thereby preventing any fetch BTC_targ_incorrect Counts all occurences of wrongly predicted branch targets from the BTC [PQ|ROB|LB|ROB_LB|SB|\ ROB_SB|LB_SB|RB_LB_SB|\ DTLB_miss]\ _tag_wait ST_q_tag_wait is listed under sl=20. These counters monitor pipeline behaviour therefore they are not strand specific: PQ_...: cycles Rename stage waits for a Pick Queue tag (might signal memory bound workload for single thread mode, cf. Mail from Richard Smith) ROB_...: cycles Select stage waits for a ROB (ReOrderBuffer) tag LB_...: cycles Select stage waits for a Load Buffer tag SB_...: cycles Select stage waits for Store Buffer tag combinations of the above are allowed, although some of these events can overlap, the counter will only be incremented once per cycle if any of these occur DTLB_...: cycles load or store instructions wait at Pick stage for a DTLB miss tag [ID]TLB_HWTW_\ [L2_hit|L3_hit|L3_miss|all] Counters for HWTW accesses caused by either DTLB or ITLB misses. Canbe further detailed by where they hit IC_miss_L2_L3_hit, IC_miss_local_remote_remL3_hit, IC_miss I$ prefetches that were dropped because they either miss in L2$ or L3$ This variant counts misses regardless if the causing instruction commits or not DC_miss_nospec, DC_miss_[L2_L3|local|remote_L3]\ _hit_nospec D$ misses either in general or detailed by where they hit cf. the explanation for the IC_miss in two flavours for an explanation of _nospec and the reasoning for two DC_miss counters DTLB_miss_asynch counts all DTLB misses asynchronously, there is no way to count them synchronously DC_pref_drop_DC_hit, SW_pref_drop_[DC_hit|buffer_full] L1-D$ h/w prefetches that were dropped because of a D$ hit, counted per core. The others count software prefetches per strand [Full|Partial]_RAW_hit_st_[buf|q] Count events where a load wants to get data that has not yet been stored, i. e. it is still inside the pipeline. The data might be either still in the store buffer or in the store queue. If the load's data matches in the SB and in the store queue the data in buffer takes precedence of course since it is younger [IC|DC]_evict_invalid, [IC|DC|L1]_snoop_invalid, [IC|DC|L1]_invalid_all Counter for invalidated cache evictions per core St_q_tag_wait Number of cycles pipeline waits for a store queue tag, of course counted per core Data_pref_[drop_L2|drop_L3|\ hit_L2|hit_L3|\ hit_local|hit_remote] Data prefetches that can be further detailed by either why they were dropped or where they did hit St_hit_[L2|L3], St_L2_[local|remote]_C2C, St_local, St_remote Store events distinguished by where they hit or where they cause a L2 cache-to-cache transfer, i.e. either a transfer from another L2$ on the same die or from a different die DC_miss, DC_miss_\ [L2_L3|local|remote]_hit D$ misses either in general or detailed by where they hit cf. the explanation for the IC_miss in two flavours for an explanation of _nospec and the reasoning for two DC_miss counters L2_[clean|dirty]_evict Per core clean or dirty L2$ evictions L2_fill_buf_full, L2_wb_buf_full, L2_miss_buf_full Per core L2$ buffer events, all count number of cycles that this state was present L2_pipe_stall Per core cycles pipeline stalled because of L2$ Branches Count branches (Tcc, DONE, RETRY, and SIT are not counted as branches) Br_taken Counts taken branches (Tcc, DONE, RETRY, and SIT are not counted as branches) Br_mispred, Br_dir_mispred, Br_trg_mispred, Br_trg_mispred_\ [far_tbl|indir_tbl|ret_stk] Counter for various branch misprediction events. Cycles_user counts cycles, attribute setting hpriv, nouser, sys controls addess space to count in Commit-[0|1|2], Commit-0-all, Commit-1-or-2 Number of times either no, one, or two µops commit for a strand. Commit-0-all counts number of times no µop commits for the whole core, cf. footnote 11 to table 10.2 in PRM for a more detailed explanation on how this counters interacts with the privilege levels

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Rapid Evolution of Society & Technology

- by Michael Snow

We caught up with Brian Solis on the phone the other day and Christie Flanagan had a chance to chat with him and learn a bit more about him and some of the concepts he'll be addressing in our Social Business Thought Leaders Webcast on Thursday 12/13/12. «--- Interview with Brian Solis 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- mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Be sure and register for this week's webcast ---» ------------------- Guest post by Brian Solis. Reposted (Borrowed) from his posting of May 24, 2012 Dear [insert business name], what’s your promise? - Brian Solis You say you want to get closer to customers, but your actions are different than your words. You say you want to “surprise and delight” customers, but your product development teams are too busy building against a roadmap without consideration of the 5th P of marketing…people. Your employees are your number one asset, however the infrastructure of the organization has turned once optimistic and ambitious intrapreneurs into complacent cogs or worse, your greatest detractors. You question the adoption of disruptive technology by your internal champions yet you’ve not tried to find the value for yourself. You’re a change agent and you truly wish to bring about change, but you’ve not invested time or resources to answer “why” in your endeavors to become a connected or social business. If we are to truly change, we must find purpose. We must uncover the essence of our business and the value it delivers to traditional and connected consumers. We must rethink the spirit of today’s embrace and clearly articulate how transformation is going to improve customer and employee experiences and relationships now and over time. Without doing so, any attempts at evolution will be thwarted by reality. In an era of Digital Darwinism, no business is too big to fail or too small to succeed. These are undisciplined times which require alternative approaches to recognize and pursue new opportunities. But everything begins with acknowledging the 360 view of the world that you see today is actually a filtered view of managed and efficient convenience. Today, many organizations that were once inspired by innovation and engagement have fallen into a process of marketing, operationalizing, managing, and optimizing. That might have worked for the better part of the last century, but for the next 10 years and beyond, new vision, leadership and supporting business models will be written to move businesses from rigid frameworks to adaptive and agile entities. I believe that today’s executives will undergo a great test; a test of character, vision, intention, and universal leadership. It starts with a simple, but essential question…what is your promise? Notice, I didn’t ask about your brand promise. Nor did I ask for you to cite your mission and vision statements. This is much more than value propositions or manufactured marketing language designed to hook audiences and stakeholders. I asked for your promise to me as your consumer, stakeholder, and partner. This isn’t about B2B or B2C, but instead, people to people, person to person. It is this promise that will breathe new life into an organization that on the outside, could be misdiagnosed as catatonic by those who are disrupting your markets. A promise, for example, is meant to inspire. It creates alignment. It serves as the foundation for your vision, mission, and all business strategies and it must come from the top to mean anything. For without it, we cannot genuinely voice what it is we stand for or stand behind. Think for a moment about the definition of community. It’s easy to confuse a workplace or a market where everyone simply shares common characteristics. However, a community in this day and age is much more than belonging to something, it’s about doing something together that makes belonging matter The next few years will force a divide where companies are separated by intention as measured by actions and words. But, becoming a social business is not enough. Becoming more authentic and transparent doesn’t serve as a mantra for a renaissance. A promise is the ink that inscribes the spirit of the relationship between you and me. A promise serves as the words that influence change from within and change beyond the halls of our business. It is the foundation for a renewed embrace, one that must then find its way to every aspect of the organization. It’s the difference between a social business and an adaptive business. While an adaptive business can also be social, it is the culture of the organization that strives to not just use technology to extend current philosophies or processes into new domains, but instead give rise to a new culture where striving for relevance is among its goals. The tools and networks simply become enablers of a greater mission You are reading this because you believe in something more than what you’re doing today. While you fight for change within your organization, remember to aim for a higher purpose. Organizations that strive for innovation, imagination, and relevance will outperform those that do not. Part of your job is to lead a missionary push that unites the groundswell with a top down cascade. Change will only happen because you and other internal champions see what others can’t and will do what other won’t. It takes resolve. It takes the ability to translate new opportunities into business value. And, it takes courage. “This is a very noisy world, so we have to be very clear what we want them to know about us”-Steve Jobs ----------------------------------------------------------------- So -- where do you begin to evaluate the kind of experience you are delivering for your customers, partners, and employees? Take a look at this White Paper: Creating a Successful and Meaningful Customer Experience on the Web and then have a cup of coffee while you listen to the sage advice of Guy Kawasaki in a short video below. An interview with Guy Kawasaki on Maximizing Social Media Channels

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Configuring Oracle HTTP Server 12c for WebLogic Server Domain

- by Emin Askerov

Oracle HTTP Server (OHS) 12c 12.1.2 which was released in July 2013 as a part of Oracle Web Tier 12c is the web server component of Oracle Fusion Middleware. In essence this is Apache HTTP Server 2.2.22 (with critical bug fixes from higher versions) which includes modules developed specifically by Oracle. It provides a listener functionality for Oracle WebLogic Server and the framework for hosting static pages, dynamic pages, and applications over the Web. OHS can be easily managed by Weblogic Management Framework, a set of tools which provides administrative capabilities (start, stop, lifecycle operations, etc.) for Oracle Fusion Middleware products. In other words all tools which are familiar to us (Node Manager, WLST, Administration Console, Fusion Middleware Control etc.) presented as a part of Weblogic Management Framework and using for managing Java and System Components both for Weblogic Server and Standalone Domain types. You can familiarize yourself with these terms using related documentation: 1. Introduction to Oracle HTTP Server: http://docs.oracle.com/middleware/1212/webtier/index.html 2. Weblogic Management Framework: http://docs.oracle.com/middleware/1212/core/ASCON/terminology.htm#ASCON11260 In the given post I would like to cover rather simple use case how to configure OHS as web proxy in Weblogic Cluster environment. For example, we have existing Weblogic Domain where some managed servers have been joined to cluster and host business applications. We need to configure web proxy component which will act as entry point, load balancer for our cluster for user requests. Of course, we could install old good Apache HTTP Server and configure mod_wl plugin. However this solution not optimal from manageability perspective: we need to install Apache, install additional plugin then configure it by editing configuration file which is not really convenient for FMW Administrators and often increase time of performing of simple administrative task. Alternatively, we could use OHS as System Component within Weblogic Domain and use full power of Weblogic Management Framework in order to configure, manage and monitor it! I like this idea! What about you? I hope after reading this post you will agree with me. First of all it is necessary to download OHS binaries. You can use this link for downloading: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/webtier/downloads/index2-303202.html As we will use Fusion Middleware Control for managing OHS instances it is necessary to extend your domain with Enterprise Manager and Oracle ADF and JRF templates. This is not topic for focusing in this post, but you could get more information from documentation or one of my previous posts: http://docs.oracle.com/middleware/1212/wls/WLDTR/fmw_templates.htm#sthref64 https://blogs.oracle.com/imc/entry/the_specifics_of_adf_12c Note: you should have properly configured Node Manager utility for managing OHS instances Let’s consider configuration process step by step: 1. Shut down all Weblogic instances of existing domain including Admin Server; 2. Install Oracle HTTP Server. You should use your Fusion Middleware Home Path (e.g. /u01/Oracle/FMW12) for Installation Location and select Colocated HTTP Server option as Installation Type. I will not focus on this topic in this post. All information related to OHS installation you could find here: http://docs.oracle.com/middleware/1212/webtier/WTINS/install_gui.htm#i1082009 3. Next we need to extend our existing domain with OHS component. In order to do this you should do the following: a. Run Fusion Middleware Configuration Wizard (ORACLE_HOME/oracle_common/common/bin/config.sh); b. On the step 1 select Update an existing domain option and point your Fusion Middleware Home Path; c. On the step 2 check Oracle HTTP Server, Oracle Enterprise Manager Plugin for WEBTIER templates; d. Go through other steps without any changes and finish configuration process. 4. Start Admin Server and all managed servers related to your cluster 5. Log in to Enterprise Manager FMW Control using http://<hostname>:<port>/em URL 6. Now we will create OHS instance within our Weblogic Domain Infrastructure. Navigate to Weblogic Domain -> Administration -> Create/Delete OHS menu item; 7. Enter to edit mode, clicking Changes -> Lock&Edit menu item; 8. Create new OHS instance clicking Create button; 9. Define Instance Name (e.g. DevOSH) and Machine parameters; 10. Now we need to define listen port. By default OHS will use 7777 port number for income HTTP requests. We could change it to any free port number we would like to use. In order to do it, right click on our created OHS instance (left hand panel) and navigate to Administration -> Port Configuration; 11. Click on record with port number 7777 and then click Edit button; 12. Change port number value (in our case this will be 8080) and then click OK button; 13. Now we need to edit mod_wl_ohs configuration in order to enable OHS to act as proxy for WebLogic Server Instances/Cluster; 14. In order to do it right click on our created OHS instance (left panel) and navigate to Administration -> mod_wl_ohs Configuration; a. In Weblogic Cluster you should enter cluster address (define <host:port> for all managed servers which participated in cluster), e.g: 192.168.56.2:7004,192.168.56.2:7005 b. Define Weblogic Port parameter at which the Oracle WebLogic Server host is listening for connection requests from the module (or from other servers); c. Check Dynamic Server List option. This will dynamically update cluster list for every request; d. In the Location table define list of endpoint locations which you would like to process. In order to do this click Add Row button and define Location, Weblogic Cluster, Path Trim and Path Prefix parameters (if required); e. Click Apply button in order to save changes. 15. Activate changes clicking Changes ? Activate Changes menu item; 16. Finally we will start configured OHS instance. Right click on OHS instance tree item under Web Tier folder, select Control -> Start Up menu item; 17. Ensure that OHS instance up and running and then test your environment. Run deployed application to your Weblogic Cluster accessing via OHS web proxy; Normal 0 false false false RU X-NONE 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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;}

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Day 3 - XNA: Hacking around with images

- by dapostolov

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

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Visiting the Fire Station in Coromandel

Hm, I just tried to remember how we actually came up with this cool idea... but it's already too blurred and it doesn't really matter after all. Anyway, if I remember correctly (IIRC), it happened during one of the Linux meetups at Mugg & Bean, Bagatelle where Ajay and I brought our children along and we had a brief conversation about how cool it would be to check out one of the fire stations here in Mauritius. We both thought that it would be a great experience and adventure for the little ones. An idea takes shape And there we go, down the usual routine these... having an idea, checking out the options and discussing who's doing what. Except this time, it was all up to Ajay, and he did a fantastic job. End of August, he told me that he got in touch with one of his friends which actually works as a fire fighter at the station in Coromandel and that there could be an option to come and visit them (soon). A couple of days later - Confirmed! Be there, and in time... What time? Anyway, doesn't really matter... Everything was settled and arranged. I asked the kids on Friday afternoon if they might be interested to see the fire engines and what a fire fighter is doing. Of course, they were all in! Getting up early on Sunday morning isn't really a regular exercise for all of us but everything went smooth and after a short breakfast it was time to leave. Where are we going? Are we there yet? Now, we are in Bambous. Why do you go this way? The kids were so much into it. Absolutely amazing to see their excitement. Are we there yet? Well, we went through the sugar cane fields towards Chebel and then down into the industrial zone at Coromandel. Honestly, I had a clue where the fire station is located but having Google Maps in reach that shouldn't be a problem in case that we might get lost. But my worries were washed away when our children guided us... "There! Over there are the fire engines! We have to turn left, dad." - No comment, the kids were right! As we were there a little bit too early, we parked the car and the kids started to explore the area and outskirts of the fire station. Some minutes later, as if we had placed an order a unit of two cars had to go out for an alarm and the kids could witness them leaving as closely as possible. Sirens on and wow!!! Ladder truck L32 - MAN truck with Rosenbauer built-up and equipment by Metz Taking the tour Ajay arrived shortly after that and guided us finally inside the station to meet with his pal. The three guys were absolutely well-prepared and showed us around in the hall, explaining that there two units out at the moment. But the ladder truck (with max. 32m expandable height) was still around we all got a great insight into the technique and equipment on the vehicle. It was amazing to see all three kids listening to Mambo as give some figures about the truck and how the fire fighters are actually it. The children and 'our' fire fighters of the day had great fun with the various fire engines Absolutely fantastic that the children were allowed to experience this - we had so much fun! Ajay's son brought two of his toy fire engines along, shared them with ours, and they all played very well together. As a parent it was really amazing to see them at such an ease. Enough theory Shortly afterwards the ladder truck was moved outside, got stabilised and ready to go for 'real-life' exercising. With the additional equipment of safety helmets, security belts and so on, we all got a first-hand impression about how it could be as a fire-fighter. Actually, I was totally amazed by the curiousity and excitement of my BWE. She was really into it and asked lots of interesting questions - in general but also technical. And while our fighters were busy with Ajay and family, I gave her some more details and explanations about the truck, the expandable ladder, the safety cage at the top and other equipment available. Safety first! No exceptions and always be prepared for the worst case... Also, the equipped has been checked prior to excuse - This is your life saver... Hooked up and ready to go... ...of course not too high. This is just a demonstration - and 32 meters above ground isn't for everyone. Well, after that it was me that had the asking looks on me, and I finally revealed to the local fire fighters that I was in the auxiliary fire brigade, more precisely in the hazard department, for more than 10 years. So not a professional fire fighter but at least a passionate and educated one as them. Inside the station Our fire fighters really took their time to explain their daily job to kids, provided them access to operation seat on the ladder truck and how the truck cabin is actually equipped with the different radios and so on. It was really a great time. Later on we had a brief tour through the building itself, and again all of our questions were answered. We had great fun and started to joke about bits and pieces. For me it was also very interesting to see the comparison between the fire station here in Mauritius and the ones I have been to back in Germany. Amazing to see them completely captivated in the play - the children had lots of fun! Also, that there are currently ten fire stations all over the island, plus two additional but private ones at the airport and at the harbour. The newest one is actually down in Black River on the west coast because the time from Quatre Bornes takes too long to have any chance of an effective alarm at all. IMHO, a very good decision as time is the most important factor in getting fire incidents under control. After all it was great experience for all of us, especially for the children to see and understand that their toy trucks are only copies of the real thing and that the job of a (professional) fire fighter is very important in our society. Don't forget that those guys run into the danger zone while you're trying to get away from it as much as possible. Another unit just came back from a grass fire - and shortly after they went out again. No time to rest, too much to do! Mauritian Fire Fighters now and (maybe) in the future... Thank you! It was an honour to be around! Thank you to Ajay for organising and arranging this Sunday morning event, and of course of Big Thank You to the three guys that took some time off to have us at the Fire Station in Coromandel and guide us through their daily job! And remember to call 115 in case of emergencies!

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The Future of Project Management is Social

- by Natalia Rachelson

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} A guest post by Kazim Isfahani, Director, Product Marketing, Oracle Rapid Ascent. Breakneck Speed. Lightning Fast. Perhaps even overwhelming. No matter which set of adjectives we use to describe it, social media’s rise into the enterprise mainstream has been unprecedented. Indeed, the big 4 social media powerhouses (Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and Twitter), have nearly 2 Billion users between them. You may be asking (as you should really) “That’s all well and good for the consumer, but for me at my company, what’s your point? Beyond the fact that I can check and post updates, that is.” Good question, kind sir. Impact of Social and Collaboration on Project Management I’ll dovetail this discussion to the project management realm, since that’s what I’m writing about. Speed is a big challenge for project-driven organizations. Anything that can help speed up project delivery - be it a new product introduction effort or a geographical expansion project - fast is a good thing. So where does this whole social thing fit particularly since there are already a host of tools to help with traditional project execution? The fact is companies have seen improvements in their productivity by deploying departmental collaboration and other social-oriented solutions. McKinsey’s survey on social tools shows we have reached critical scale: 72% of respondents report that their companies use at least one and over 40% say they are using social networks and blogs. We don’t hear as much about the impact of social media technologies at the project and project manager level, but that does not mean there is none. Consider the new hire. The type of individual entering the workforce and executing on projects is a generation of worker expecting visually appealing, easy to use and easy to understand technology meshing hand-in-hand with business processes. Consider the project manager. The social era has enhanced the role that the project manager must play. Today’s project manager must be a supreme communicator, an influencer, a sympathizer, a negotiator, and still manage to keep all stakeholders in the loop on project progress. Social tools play a significant role in this effort. Now consider the impact to the project team. The way that a project team functions has changed, with newer, social oriented technologies making the process of information dissemination and team communications much more fluid. It’s clear that a shift is occurring where “social” is intersecting with project management. The Rise of Social Project Management We refer to the melding of project management and social networking as Social Project Management. Social Project Management is based upon the philosophy that the project team is one part of an integrated whole, and that valuable and unique abilities exist within the larger organization. For this reason, Social Project Management systems should be integrated into the collaborative platform(s) of an organization, allowing communication to proceed outside the project boundaries. What makes social project management "social" is an implicit awareness where distributed teams build connected links in ways that were previously restricted to teams that were co-located. Just as critical, Social Project Management embraces the vision of seamless online collaboration within a project team, but also provides for, (and enhances) the use of rigorous project management techniques. Social Project Management acknowledges that projects (particularly large projects) are a social activity - people doing work with people, for other people, with commitments to yet other people. The more people (larger projects), the more interpersonal the interactions, and the more social affects the project. The Epitome of Social - Fusion Project Portfolio Management If I take this one level further to discuss Fusion Project Portfolio Management, the notion of Social Project Management is on full display. With Fusion Project Portfolio Management, project team members have a single place for interaction on projects and access to any other resources working within the Fusion ERP applications. This allows team members the opportunity to be informed with greater participation and provide better information. The application’s the visual appeal, and highly graphical nature makes it easy to navigate information. The project activity stream adds to the intuitive user experience. The goal of productivity is pervasive throughout Fusion Project Portfolio Management. Field research conducted with Oracle customers and partners showed that users needed a way to stay in the context of their core transactions and yet easily access social networking tools. This is manifested in the application so when a user executes a business process, they not only have the transactional application at their fingertips, but also have things like e-mail, SMS, text, instant messaging, chat – all providing a number of different ways to interact with people and/or groups of people, both internal and external to the project and enterprise. But in the end, connecting people is relatively easy. The larger issue is finding a way to serve up relevant, system-generated, actionable information, in real time, which will allow for more streamlined execution on key business processes. Fusion Project Portfolio Management’s design concept enables users to create project communities, establish discussion threads, manage event calendars as well as deliver project based work spaces to organize communications within the context of a project – all within a secure business environment. We’d love to hear from you and get your thoughts and ideas about how Social Project Management is impacting your organization. To learn more about Oracle Fusion Project Portfolio Management, please visit this link

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Oracle Identity Manager Role Management With API

- by mustafakaya

As an administrator, you use roles to create and manage the records of a collection of users to whom you want to permit access to common functionality, such as access rights, roles, or permissions. Roles can be independent of an organization, span multiple organizations, or contain users from a single organization. Using roles, you can: View the menu items that the users can access through Oracle Identity Manager Administration Web interface. Assign users to roles. Assign a role to a parent role Designate status to the users so that they can specify defined responses for process tasks. Modify permissions on data objects. Designate role administrators to perform actions on roles, such as enabling members of another role to assign users to the current role, revoke members from current role and so on. Designate provisioning policies for a role. These policies determine if a resource object is to be provisioned to or requested for a member of the role. Assign or remove membership rules to or from the role. These rules determine which users can be assigned/removed as direct membership to/from the role. In this post, i will share some examples for role management with Oracle Identity Management API. You can do role operations you can use Thor.API.Operations.tcGroupOperationsIntf interface. tcGroupOperationsIntf service = getClient().getService(tcGroupOperationsIntf.class); Assign an user to role : public void assignRoleByUsrKey(String roleName, String usrKey) throws Exception { Map<String, String> filter = new HashMap<String, String>(); filter.put("Groups.Role Name", roleName); tcResultSet role = service.findGroups(filter); String groupKey = role.getStringValue("Groups.Key"); service.addMemberUser(Long.parseLong(groupKey), Long.parseLong(usrKey)); } Revoke an user from role: public void revokeRoleByUsrKey(String roleName, String usrKey) throws Exception { Map<String, String> filter = new HashMap<String, String>(); filter.put("Groups.Role Name", roleName); tcResultSet role = service.findGroups(filter); String groupKey = role.getStringValue("Groups.Key"); service.removeMemberUser(Long.parseLong(groupKey), Long.parseLong(usrKey)); } Get all members of a role : public List<User> getRoleMembers(String roleName) throws Exception { List<User> userList = new ArrayList<User>(); Map<String, String> filter = new HashMap<String, String>(); filter.put("Groups.Role Name", roleName); tcResultSet role = service.findGroups(filter); String groupKey = role.getStringValue("Groups.Key"); tcResultSet members = service.getAllMemberUsers(Long.parseLong(groupKey)); for (int i = 0; i < members.getRowCount(); i++) { members.goToRow(i); long userKey = members.getLongValue("Users.Key"); User member = oimUserManager.findUserByUserKey(String.valueOf(userKey)); userList.add(member); } return userList; } About me: Mustafa Kaya is a Senior Consultant in Oracle Fusion Middleware Team, living in Istanbul. Before coming to Oracle, he worked in teams developing web applications and backend services at a telco company. He is a Java technology enthusiast, software engineer and addicted to learn new technologies,develop new ideas. Follow Mustafa on Twitter,Connect on LinkedIn, and visit his site for Oracle Fusion Middleware related tips.

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Retrieving a list of eBay categories using the .NET SDK and GetCategoriesCall

- by Bill Osuch

eBay offers a .Net SDK for its Trading API - this post will show you the basics of making an API call and retrieving a list of current categories. You'll need the category ID(s) for any apps that post or search eBay. To start, download the latest SDK from https://www.x.com/developers/ebay/documentation-tools/sdks/dotnet and create a new console app project. Add a reference to the eBay.Service DLL, and a few using statements: using eBay.Service.Call; using eBay.Service.Core.Sdk; using eBay.Service.Core.Soap; I'm assuming at this point you've already joined the eBay Developer Network and gotten your app IDs and user tokens. If not: Join the developer program Generate tokens Next, add an app.config file that looks like this: <?xml version="1.0"?> <configuration> <appSettings> <add key="Environment.ApiServerUrl" value="https://api.ebay.com/wsapi"/> <add key="UserAccount.ApiToken" value="YourBigLongToken"/> </appSettings> </configuration> And then add the code to get the xml list of categories: ApiContext apiContext = GetApiContext(); GetCategoriesCall apiCall = new GetCategoriesCall(apiContext); apiCall.CategorySiteID = "0"; //Leave this commented out to retrieve all category levels (all the way down): //apiCall.LevelLimit = 4; //Uncomment this to begin at a specific parent category: //StringCollection parentCategories = new StringCollection(); //parentCategories.Add("63"); //apiCall.CategoryParent = parentCategories; apiCall.DetailLevelList.Add(DetailLevelCodeType.ReturnAll); CategoryTypeCollection cats = apiCall.GetCategories(); using (StreamWriter outfile = new StreamWriter(@"C:\Temp\EbayCategories.xml")) { outfile.Write(apiCall.SoapResponse); } GetApiContext() (provided in the sample apps in the SDK) is required for any call: static ApiContext GetApiContext() { //apiContext is a singleton, //to avoid duplicate configuration reading if (apiContext != null) { return apiContext; } else { apiContext = new ApiContext(); //set Api Server Url apiContext.SoapApiServerUrl = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["Environment.ApiServerUrl"]; //set Api Token to access eBay Api Server ApiCredential apiCredential = new ApiCredential(); apiCredential.eBayToken = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["UserAccount.ApiToken"]; apiContext.ApiCredential = apiCredential; //set eBay Site target to US apiContext.Site = SiteCodeType.US; return apiContext; } } Running this will give you a large (4 or 5 megs) XML file that looks something like this: <soapenv:Envelope xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:soapenv="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"> <soapenv:Body> <GetCategoriesResponse > <Timestamp>2012-06-06T16:03:46.158Z</Timestamp> <Ack>Success</Ack> <CorrelationID>d02dd9e3-295a-4268-9ea5-554eeb2e0e18</CorrelationID> <Version>775</Version> <Build>E775_CORE_BUNDLED_14891042_R1</Build> - <CategoryArray> <Category> <BestOfferEnabled>true</BestOfferEnabled> <AutoPayEnabled>true</AutoPayEnabled> <CategoryID>20081</CategoryID> <CategoryLevel>1</CategoryLevel> <CategoryName>Antiques</CategoryName> <CategoryParentID>20081</CategoryParentID> </Category> <Category> <BestOfferEnabled>true</BestOfferEnabled> <AutoPayEnabled>true</AutoPayEnabled> <CategoryID>37903</CategoryID> <CategoryLevel>2</CategoryLevel> <CategoryName>Antiquities</CategoryName> <CategoryParentID>20081</CategoryParentID> </Category> (etc.) You could work with this, but I wanted a nicely nested view, like this: <CategoryArray> <Category Name='Antiques' ID='20081' Level='1'> <Category Name='Antiquities' ID='37903' Level='2'/> </CategoryArray> ...so I transformed the xml: private void TransformXML(CategoryTypeCollection cats) { XmlElement topLevelElement = null; XmlElement childLevelElement = null; XmlNode parentNode = null; string categoryString = ""; XmlDocument returnDoc = new XmlDocument(); XmlElement root = returnDoc.CreateElement("CategoryArray"); returnDoc.AppendChild(root); XmlNode rootNode = returnDoc.SelectSingleNode("/CategoryArray"); //Loop through CategoryTypeCollection foreach (CategoryType category in cats) { if (category.CategoryLevel == 1) { //Top-level category, so we know we can just add it topLevelElement = returnDoc.CreateElement("Category"); topLevelElement.SetAttribute("Name", category.CategoryName); topLevelElement.SetAttribute("ID", category.CategoryID); rootNode.AppendChild(topLevelElement); } else { // Level number will determine how many Category nodes we are deep categoryString = ""; for (int x = 1; x < category.CategoryLevel; x++) { categoryString += "/Category"; } parentNode = returnDoc.SelectSingleNode("/CategoryArray" + categoryString + "[@ID='" + category.CategoryParentID[0] + "']"); childLevelElement = returnDoc.CreateElement("Category"); childLevelElement.SetAttribute("Name", category.CategoryName); childLevelElement.SetAttribute("ID", category.CategoryID); parentNode.AppendChild(childLevelElement); } } returnDoc.Save(@"C:\Temp\EbayCategories-Modified.xml"); } Yes, there are probably much cleaner ways of dealing with it, but I'm not an xml expert… Keep in mind, eBay categories do not change on a regular basis, so you should be able to cache this data (either in a file or database) for some time. The xml returns a CategoryVersion node that you can use to determine if the category list has changed. Technorati Tags: Csharp, eBay

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Benchmarking MySQL Replication with Multi-Threaded Slaves

- by Mat Keep

0 0 1 1145 6530 Homework 54 15 7660 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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; 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; mso-ansi-language:EN-US;} The objective of this benchmark is to measure the performance improvement achieved when enabling the Multi-Threaded Slave enhancement delivered as a part MySQL 5.6. As the results demonstrate, Multi-Threaded Slaves delivers 5x higher replication performance based on a configuration with 10 databases/schemas. For real-world deployments, higher replication performance directly translates to: · Improved consistency of reads from slaves (i.e. reduced risk of reading "stale" data) · Reduced risk of data loss should the master fail before replicating all events in its binary log (binlog) The multi-threaded slave splits processing between worker threads based on schema, allowing updates to be applied in parallel, rather than sequentially. This delivers benefits to those workloads that isolate application data using databases - e.g. multi-tenant systems deployed in cloud environments. Multi-Threaded Slaves are just one of many enhancements to replication previewed as part of the MySQL 5.6 Development Release, which include: · Global Transaction Identifiers coupled with MySQL utilities for automatic failover / switchover and slave promotion · Crash Safe Slaves and Binlog · Optimized Row Based Replication · Replication Event Checksums · Time Delayed Replication These and many more are discussed in the “MySQL 5.6 Replication: Enabling the Next Generation of Web & Cloud Services” Developer Zone article Back to the benchmark - details are as follows. Environment The test environment consisted of two Linux servers: · one running the replication master · one running the replication slave. Only the slave was involved in the actual measurements, and was based on the following configuration: - Hardware: Oracle Sun Fire X4170 M2 Server - CPU: 2 sockets, 6 cores with hyper-threading, 2930 MHz. - OS: 64-bit Oracle Enterprise Linux 6.1 - Memory: 48 GB Test Procedure Initial Setup: Two MySQL servers were started on two different hosts, configured as replication master and slave. 10 sysbench schemas were created, each with a single table: CREATE TABLE `sbtest` ( `id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT, `k` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0', `c` char(120) NOT NULL DEFAULT '', `pad` char(60) NOT NULL DEFAULT '', PRIMARY KEY (`id`), KEY `k` (`k`) ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 10,000 rows were inserted in each of the 10 tables, for a total of 100,000 rows. When the inserts had replicated to the slave, the slave threads were stopped. The slave data directory was copied to a backup location and the slave threads position in the master binlog noted. 10 sysbench clients, each configured with 10 threads, were spawned at the same time to generate a random schema load against each of the 10 schemas on the master. Each sysbench client executed 10,000 "update key" statements: UPDATE sbtest set k=k+1 WHERE id = <random row> In total, this generated 100,000 update statements to later replicate during the test itself. Test Methodology: The number of slave workers to test with was configured using: SET GLOBAL slave_parallel_workers=<workers> Then the slave IO thread was started and the test waited for all the update queries to be copied over to the relay log on the slave. The benchmark clock was started and then the slave SQL thread was started. The test waited for the slave SQL thread to finish executing the 100k update queries, doing "select master_pos_wait()". When master_pos_wait() returned, the benchmark clock was stopped and the duration calculated. The calculated duration from the benchmark clock should be close to the time it took for the SQL thread to execute the 100,000 update queries. The 100k queries divided by this duration gave the benchmark metric, reported as Queries Per Second (QPS). Test Reset: The test-reset cycle was implemented as follows: · the slave was stopped · the slave data directory replaced with the previous backup · the slave restarted with the slave threads replication pointer repositioned to the point before the update queries in the binlog. The test could then be repeated with identical set of queries but a different number of slave worker threads, enabling a fair comparison. The Test-Reset cycle was repeated 3 times for 0-24 number of workers and the QPS metric calculated and averaged for each worker count. MySQL Configuration The relevant configuration settings used for MySQL are as follows: binlog-format=STATEMENT relay-log-info-repository=TABLE master-info-repository=TABLE As described in the test procedure, the slave_parallel_workers setting was modified as part of the test logic. The consequence of changing this setting is: 0 worker threads: - current (i.e. single threaded) sequential mode - 1 x IO thread and 1 x SQL thread - SQL thread both reads and executes the events 1 worker thread: - sequential mode - 1 x IO thread, 1 x Coordinator SQL thread and 1 x Worker thread - coordinator reads the event and hands it to the worker who executes 2+ worker threads: - parallel execution - 1 x IO thread, 1 x Coordinator SQL thread and 2+ Worker threads - coordinator reads events and hands them to the workers who execute them Results Figure 1 below shows that Multi-Threaded Slaves deliver ~5x higher replication performance when configured with 10 worker threads, with the load evenly distributed across our 10 x schemas. This result is compared to the current replication implementation which is based on a single SQL thread only (i.e. zero worker threads). Figure 1: 5x Higher Performance with Multi-Threaded Slaves The following figure shows more detailed results, with QPS sampled and reported as the worker threads are incremented. The raw numbers behind this graph are reported in the Appendix section of this post. Figure 2: Detailed Results As the results above show, the configuration does not scale noticably from 5 to 9 worker threads. When configured with 10 worker threads however, scalability increases significantly. The conclusion therefore is that it is desirable to configure the same number of worker threads as schemas. Other conclusions from the results: · Running with 1 worker compared to zero workers just introduces overhead without the benefit of parallel execution. · As expected, having more workers than schemas adds no visible benefit. Aside from what is shown in the results above, testing also demonstrated that the following settings had a very positive effect on slave performance: relay-log-info-repository=TABLE master-info-repository=TABLE For 5+ workers, it was up to 2.3 times as fast to run with TABLE compared to FILE. Conclusion As the results demonstrate, Multi-Threaded Slaves deliver significant performance increases to MySQL replication when handling multiple schemas. This, and the other replication enhancements introduced in MySQL 5.6 are fully available for you to download and evaluate now from the MySQL Developer site (select Development Release tab). You can learn more about MySQL 5.6 from the documentation Please don’t hesitate to comment on this or other replication blogs with feedback and questions. Appendix – Detailed Results

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Unlocking Productivity

- by Michael Snow

Unlocking Productivity in Life Sciences with Consolidated Content Management by Joe Golemba, Vice President, Product Management, Oracle WebCenter As life sciences organizations look to become more operationally efficient, the ability to effectively leverage information is a competitive advantage. Whether data mining at the drug discovery phase or prepping the sales team before a product launch, content management can play a key role in developing, organizing, and disseminating vital information. The goal of content management is relatively straightforward: put the information that people need where they can find it. A number of issues can complicate this; information sits in many different systems, each of those systems has its own security, and the information in those systems exists in many different formats. Identifying and extracting pertinent information from mountains of farflung data is no simple job, but the alternative—wasted effort or even regulatory compliance issues—is worse. An integrated information architecture can enable health sciences organizations to make better decisions, accelerate clinical operations, and be more competitive. Unstructured data matters Often when we think of drug development data, we think of structured data that fits neatly into one or more research databases. But structured data is often directly supported by unstructured data such as experimental protocols, reaction conditions, lot numbers, run times, analyses, and research notes. As life sciences companies seek integrated views of data, they are typically finding diverse islands of data that seemingly have no relationship to other data in the organization. Information like sales reports or call center reports can be locked into siloed systems, and unavailable to the discovery process. Additionally, in the increasingly networked clinical environment, Web pages, instant messages, videos, scientific imaging, sales and marketing data, collaborative workspaces, and predictive modeling data are likely to be present within an organization, and each source potentially possesses information that can help to better inform specific efforts. Historically, content management solutions that had 21CFR Part 11 capabilities—electronic records and signatures—were focused mainly on content-enabling manufacturing-related processes. Today, life sciences companies have many standalone repositories, requiring different skills, service level agreements, and vendor support costs to manage them. With the amount of content doubling every three to six months, companies have recognized the need to manage unstructured content from the beginning, in order to increase employee productivity and operational efficiency. Using scalable and secure enterprise content management (ECM) solutions, organizations can better manage their unstructured content. These solutions can also be integrated with enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems or research systems, making content available immediately, in the context of the application and within the flow of the employee’s typical business activity. Administrative safeguards—such as content de-duplication—can also be applied within ECM systems, so documents are never recreated, eliminating redundant efforts, ensuring one source of truth, and maintaining content standards in the organization. Putting it in context Consolidating structured and unstructured information in a single system can greatly simplify access to relevant information when it is needed through contextual search. Using contextual filters, results can include therapeutic area, position in the value chain, semantic commonalities, technology-specific factors, specific researchers involved, or potential business impact. The use of taxonomies is essential to organizing information and enabling contextual searches. Taxonomy solutions are composed of a hierarchical tree that defines the relationship between different life science terms. When overlaid with additional indexing related to research and/or business processes, it becomes possible to effectively narrow down the amount of data that is returned during searches, as well as prioritize results based on specific criteria and/or prior search history. Thus, search results are more accurate and relevant to an employee’s day-to-day work. For example, a search for the word "tissue" by a lab researcher would return significantly different results than a search for the same word performed by someone in procurement. Of course, diverse data repositories, combined with the immense amounts of data present in an organization, necessitate that the data elements be regularly indexed and cached beforehand to enable reasonable search response times. In its simplest form, indexing of a single, consolidated data warehouse can be expected to be a relatively straightforward effort. However, organizations require the ability to index multiple data repositories, enabling a single search to reference multiple data sources and provide an integrated results listing. Security and compliance Beyond yielding efficiencies and supporting new insight, an enterprise search environment can support important security considerations as well as compliance initiatives. For example, the systems enable organizations to retain the relevance and the security of the indexed systems, so users can only see the results to which they are granted access. This is especially important as life sciences companies are working in an increasingly networked environment and need to provide secure, role-based access to information across multiple partners. Although not officially required by the 21 CFR Part 11 regulation, the U.S. Food and Drug Administraiton has begun to extend the type of content considered when performing relevant audits and discoveries. Having an ECM infrastructure that provides centralized management of all content enterprise-wide—with the ability to consistently apply records and retention policies along with the appropriate controls, validations, audit trails, and electronic signatures—is becoming increasingly critical for life sciences companies. Making the move Creating an enterprise-wide ECM environment requires moving large amounts of content into a single enterprise repository, a daunting and risk-laden initiative. The first key is to focus on data taxonomy, allowing content to be mapped across systems. The second is to take advantage new tools which can dramatically speed and reduce the cost of the data migration process through automation. Additional content need not be frozen while it is migrated, enabling productivity throughout the process. The ability to effectively leverage information into success has been gaining importance in the life sciences industry for years. The rapid adoption of enterprise content management, both in operational processes as well as in scientific management, are clear indicators that the companies are looking to use all available data to be better informed, improve decision making, minimize risk, and increase time to market, to maintain profitability and be more competitive. As more and more varieties and sources of information are brought under the strategic management umbrella, the ability to divine knowledge from the vast pool of information is increasingly difficult. Simple search engines and basic content management are increasingly unable to effectively extract the right information from the mountains of data available. By bringing these tools into context and integrating them with business processes and applications, we can effectively focus on the right decisions that make our organizations more profitable. More Information Oracle will be exhibiting at DIA 2012 in Philadelphia on June 25-27. Stop by our booth Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} (#2825) to learn more about the advantages of a centralized ECM strategy and see the Oracle WebCenter Content solution, our 21 CFR Part 11 compliant content management platform.

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Oracle SOA Suite - Highlighted Travel and Transportation Customer References

- by Bruce Tierney

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

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Reviewing Retail Predictions for 2011

- by David Dorf

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} I've been busy thinking about what 2012 and beyond will look like for retail, and I have some interesting predictions to share. But before I go there, let’s first review this year’s predictions before making new ones for 2012. 1. Alternate Payments We've seen several alternate payment schemes emerge over the last two years, and 2011 may be the year one of them takes hold. Any competition that can drive down fees will be good for everyone. I'm betting that Apple will add NFC chips to their next version of the iPhone, then enable payments in stores using iTunes accounts on the backend. Paypal will continue to make inroads, and Isis will announce a pilot. The iPhone 4S did not contain an NFC chip, so we’ll have to continuing waiting for the iPhone 5. PayPal announced its moving into in-store payments, and Google launched its wallet in selected cities. Overall I think the payment scene is heating up and that trend will continue. 2. Engineered Systems The industry is moving toward purpose-built appliances that are optimized across the entire stack. Oracle calls these "engineered systems" and the first two examples are Exadata and Exalogic, but there are other examples from other vendors. These are particularly important to the retail industry because of the volume of data that must be processed. There should be continued adoption in 2011. Oracle reports that Exadata is its fasting growing product, and at the recent OpenWorld it announced the SuperCluster and Exalytics products, both continuing the engineered systems trend. SAP’s HANA continues to receive attention, and IBM also seems to be moving in this direction. 3. Social Analytics There are lots of tools that provide insight into how a brand is perceived across popular internet sites, but as far as I know, these tools are not industry specific. The next step needs to mine the data and determine how it should influence retail operations. The data needs to help retailers determine how they create promotions, which products to stock, and how to keep consumers engaged. Social data alone does not provide the answers, but its one more data point that will help retailers make better decisions. Look for some vendor consolidation to help make this happen. In March, Salesforce.com acquired leading social monitoring vendor Radian6 and followed up with acquisitions of Heroku and Model Metrics. The notion of Social CRM seems to be going more mainstream now. 4. 2-D Barcodes Look for more QRCodes on shelf-tags, in newspaper circulars, and on billboards. It's a great portal from the physical world into the digital one that buys us time until augmented reality matures further. Nobody wants to type "www", backslash, and ".com" on their phones. QRCodes are everywhere. ‘Nuff said. 5. In the words of Microsoft, "To the Cloud!" My favorite "cloud application" is Evernote. If you take notes on your work laptop, you will inevitably need those notes on your home PC. And if you manage to solve that problem, you'll need to access them from your mobile phone. Evernote stores your notes in the cloud and provides easy ways to access them. Being able to access a service from anywhere and not having to worry about backups, upgrades, etc. is great. Retailers will start to rely on cloud services, both public and private, in the coming year. There were no shortage of announcements in this area: Amazon’s cloud-based Kindle Fire, Apple’s iCloud, Oracle’s Public Cloud, etc. I saw an interesting presentation showing how BevMo moved their systems to the cloud. Seems like retailers are starting to consider the cloud for specific uses. 6. F-CommerceTop of Form Move over "E" and "M" so we can introduce "F-Commerce," which should go mainstream in 2011. Already several retailers have created small stores on Facebook, and it won't be long before Facebook becomes a full-fledged channel in the omni-channel world of retail. The battle between Facebook and Google will heat up over retail, where both stand to make lots of money. JCPenney and ASOS both put their entire catalogs on Facebook, and lots of other retailers have connected Facebook to their e-commerce site. I still think selling from the newsfeed is the best approach, and several retailers are trying that approach as well. I just don’t see Google+ as a threat to Facebook, so I think that battle is over. I called 2011 The Year of F-Commerce, and that was probably accurate. Its good to look back at predictions, but we also have to think about what was missed. I didn't see Amazon entering the tablet business with such a splash, although in hindsight it was obvious. Nor did I think HP would fall so far so fast. Look for my 2012 predictions coming soon.

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Single Key Multiple Values Data Structure for one to many mapping

- by nijhawan.saurabh

Dictionaries are good, they are great to store Key / Value pairs but what if you want to store multiple values for a single key? Dictionaries would not allow duplicate keys. I came across a nice way to represent such a Data Structure using one of the Extension Method (ToLookup) present in System.Linq Namespace which converts an IEnumerable<T> to an ILookup<TKey, TElement>. Now, there are two parameters this method expects (The other overload expects 3 parameters): IEnumerable<TSource> - This list would contain the actual data. Func<TSource, TKey> keySelector - The Delegate which which computes the keys The method returns the following: ILookup<TKey, TElement> This DS would store Keys and multiple values along those keys. Let's see a small example: 12 using System; 13 using System.Collections.Generic; 14 using System.Linq; 15 16 /// <summary> 17 /// </summary> 18 internal class Program 19 { 20 #region Methods 21 22 /// <summary> 23 /// </summary> 24 /// <param name="args"> 25 /// The args. 26 /// </param> 27 private static void Main(string[] args) 28 { 29 // Create an array of strings. 30 var list = new List<string> { "IceCream1", "Chocolate Moose", "IceCream2" }; 31 32 // Generate a lookup Data Structure 33 ILookup<int, string> lookupDs = list.ToLookup(item => item.Length); 34 35 // Enumerate groupings. 36 foreach (var group in lookupDs) 37 { 38 foreach (string element in group) 39 { 40 Console.WriteLine(element); 41 } 42 } 43 } Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE 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-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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Master-slave vs. peer-to-peer archictecture: benefits and problems

- by Ashok_Ora

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE Almost two decades ago, I was a member of a database development team that introduced adaptive locking. Locking, the most popular concurrency control technique in database systems, is pessimistic. Locking ensures that two or more conflicting operations on the same data item don’t “trample” on each other’s toes, resulting in data corruption. In a nutshell, here’s the issue we were trying to address. In everyday life, traffic lights serve the same purpose. They ensure that traffic flows smoothly and when everyone follows the rules, there are no accidents at intersections. As I mentioned earlier, the problem with typical locking protocols is that they are pessimistic. Regardless of whether there is another conflicting operation in the system or not, you have to hold a lock! Acquiring and releasing locks can be quite expensive, depending on how many objects the transaction touches. Every transaction has to pay this penalty. To use the earlier traffic light analogy, if you have ever waited at a red light in the middle of nowhere with no one on the road, wondering why you need to wait when there’s clearly no danger of a collision, you know what I mean. The adaptive locking scheme that we invented was able to minimize the number of locks that a transaction held, by detecting whether there were one or more transactions that needed conflicting eyou could get by without holding any lock at all. In many “well-behaved” workloads, there are few conflicts, so this optimization is a huge win. If, on the other hand, there are many concurrent, conflicting requests, the algorithm gracefully degrades to the “normal” behavior with minimal cost. We were able to reduce the number of lock requests per TPC-B transaction from 178 requests down to 2! Wow! This is a dramatic improvement in concurrency as well as transaction latency. The lesson from this exercise was that if you can identify the common scenario and optimize for that case so that only the uncommon scenarios are more expensive, you can make dramatic improvements in performance without sacrificing correctness. So how does this relate to the architecture and design of some of the modern NoSQL systems? NoSQL systems can be broadly classified as master-slave sharded, or peer-to-peer sharded systems. NoSQL systems with a peer-to-peer architecture have an interesting way of handling changes. Whenever an item is changed, the client (or an intermediary) propagates the changes synchronously or asynchronously to multiple copies (for availability) of the data. Since the change can be propagated asynchronously, during some interval in time, it will be the case that some copies have received the update, and others haven’t. What happens if someone tries to read the item during this interval? The client in a peer-to-peer system will fetch the same item from multiple copies and compare them to each other. If they’re all the same, then every copy that was queried has the same (and up-to-date) value of the data item, so all’s good. If not, then the system provides a mechanism to reconcile the discrepancy and to update stale copies. So what’s the problem with this? There are two major issues: First, IT’S HORRIBLY PESSIMISTIC because, in the common case, it is unlikely that the same data item will be updated and read from different locations at around the same time! For every read operation, you have to read from multiple copies. That’s a pretty expensive, especially if the data are stored in multiple geographically separate locations and network latencies are high. Second, if the copies are not all the same, the application has to reconcile the differences and propagate the correct value to the out-dated copies. This means that the application program has to handle discrepancies in the different versions of the data item and resolve the issue (which can further add to cost and operation latency). Resolving discrepancies is only one part of the problem. What if the same data item was updated independently on two different nodes (copies)? In that case, due to the asynchronous nature of change propagation, you might land up with different versions of the data item in different copies. In this case, the application program also has to resolve conflicts and then propagate the correct value to the copies that are out-dated or have incorrect versions. This can get really complicated. My hunch is that there are many peer-to-peer-based applications that don’t handle this correctly, and worse, don’t even know it. Imagine have 100s of millions of records in your database – how can you tell whether a particular data item is incorrect or out of date? And what price are you willing to pay for ensuring that the data can be trusted? Multiple network messages per read request? Discrepancy and conflict resolution logic in the application, and potentially, additional messages? All this overhead, when all you were trying to do was to read a data item. Wouldn’t it be simpler to avoid this problem in the first place? Master-slave architectures like the Oracle NoSQL Database handles this very elegantly. A change to a data item is always sent to the master copy. Consequently, the master copy always has the most current and authoritative version of the data item. The master is also responsible for propagating the change to the other copies (for availability and read scalability). Client drivers are aware of master copies and replicas, and client drivers are also aware of the “currency” of a replica. In other words, each NoSQL Database client knows how stale a replica is. This vastly simplifies the job of the application developer. If the application needs the most current version of the data item, the client driver will automatically route the request to the master copy. If the application is willing to tolerate some staleness of data (e.g. a version that is no more than 1 second out of date), the client can easily determine which replica (or set of replicas) can satisfy the request, and route the request to the most efficient copy. This results in a dramatic simplification in application logic and also minimizes network requests (the driver will only send the request to exactl the right replica, not many). So, back to my original point. A well designed and well architected system minimizes or eliminates unnecessary overhead and avoids pessimistic algorithms wherever possible in order to deliver a highly efficient and high performance system. If you’ve every programmed an Oracle NoSQL Database application, you’ll know the difference! /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}

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Code Behaviour via Unit Tests

- by Dewald Galjaard

Normal 0 false false false EN-ZA X-NONE 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-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Some four months ago my car started acting up. Symptoms included a sputtering as my car’s computer switched between gears intermittently. Imagine building up speed, then when you reach 80km/h the car magically and mysteriously decide to switch back to third or even second gear. Clearly it was confused! I managed to track down a technician, an expert in his field to help me out. As he fitted his handheld computer to some hidden port under the dash, he started to explain “These cars are quite intelligent, you know. When they sense something is wrong they run in a restrictive program which probably account for how you managed to drive here in the first place...” I was surprised and thought this was certainly going to be an interesting test drive. The car ran smoothly down the first couple of stretches as the technician ran through routine checks. Then he said “Ok, all looking good. We need to start testing aspects of the gearbox. Inside the gearbox there are a couple of sensors. One of them is a speed sensor which talks to the computer, which in turn will decide which gear to switch to. The restrictive program avoid these sensors altogether and allow the computer to obtain its input from other [non-affected] sources”. Then, as soon as he forced the speed sensor to come back online the symptoms and ill behaviour re-emerged... What an incredible analogy for getting into a discussion on unit testing software? Besides I should probably put my ill fortune to some good use, right? This example provide a lot of insight into how and why we should conduct unit tests when writing code. More importantly, it captures what is easily and unfortunately often the most overlooked goal of writing unit tests by those new to the art and those who oppose it alike - The goal of writing unit tests is to test the behaviour of our code under predefined conditions. Although it is very possible to test the intrinsic workings of each and every component in your code, writing several tests for each method in practise will soon prove to be an exhausting and ultimately fruitless exercise given the certain and ever changing nature of business requirements. Consequently it is true and quite possible whilst conducting proper unit tests, to call any single method several times as you examine and contemplate different scenarios. Let’s write some code to demonstrate what I mean. In my example I make use of the Moq framework and NUnit to create my tests. Truly you can use whatever you’re comfortable with. First we’ll create an ISpeedSensor interface. This is to represent the speed sensor located in the gearbox. Then we’ll create a Gearbox class which we’ll pass to a constructor when we instantiate an object of type Computer. All three are described below. ISpeedSensor.cs namespace AutomaticVehicle { public interface ISpeedSensor { int ReportCurrentSpeed(); } } Gearbox.cs namespace AutomaticVehicle { public class Gearbox { private ISpeedSensor _speedSensor; public Gearbox( ISpeedSensor gearboxSpeedSensor ) { _speedSensor = gearboxSpeedSensor; } /// <summary> /// This method obtain it's reading from the speed sensor. /// </summary> /// <returns></returns> public int ReportCurrentSpeed() { return _speedSensor.ReportCurrentSpeed(); } } } Computer.cs namespace AutomaticVehicle { public class Computer { private Gearbox _gearbox; public Computer( Gearbox gearbox ) { } public int GetCurrentSpeed() { return _gearbox.ReportCurrentSpeed( ); } } } Since this post is about Unit testing, that is exactly what we’ll create next. Create a second project in your solution. I called mine AutomaticVehicleTests and I immediately referenced the respective nunit, moq and AutomaticVehicle dll’s. We’re going to write a test to examine what happens inside the Computer class. ComputerTests.cs namespace AutomaticVehicleTests { [TestFixture] public class ComputerTests { [Test] public void Computer_Gearbox_SpeedSensor_DoesThrow() { // Mock ISpeedSensor in gearbox Mock< ISpeedSensor > speedSensor = new Mock< ISpeedSensor >( ); speedSensor.Setup( n => n.ReportCurrentSpeed() ).Throws<Exception>(); Gearbox gearbox = new Gearbox( speedSensor.Object ); // Create Computer instance to test it's behaviour towards an exception in gearbox Computer carComputer = new Computer( gearbox ); // For simplicity let’s assume for now the car only travels at 60 km/h. Assert.AreEqual( 60, carComputer.GetCurrentSpeed( ) ); } } } What is happening in this test? We have created a mocked object using the ISpeedsensor interface which we've passed to our Gearbox object. Notice that I created the mocked object using an interface, not the implementation. I’ll talk more about this in future posts but in short I do this to accentuate the fact that I'm not not really concerned with how SpeedSensor work internally at this particular point in time. Next I’ve gone ahead and created a scenario where I’ve declared the speed sensor in Gearbox to be faulty by forcing it to throw an exception should we ask Gearbox to report on its current speed. Sneaky, sneaky. This test is a simulation of how things may behave in the real world. Inevitability things break, whether it’s caused by mechanical failure, some logical error on your part or a fellow developer which didn’t consult the documentation (or the lack thereof ) - whether you’re calling a speed sensor, making a call to a database, calling a web service or just trying to write a file to disk. It’s a scenario I’ve created and this test is about how the code within the Computer instance will behave towards any such error as I’ve depicted. Now, if you’ve followed closely in my final assert method you would have noticed I did something quite unexpected. I might be getting ahead of myself now but I’m testing to see if the value returned is equal to what I expect it to be under perfect conditions – I’m not testing to see if an error has been thrown! Why is that? Well, in short this is TDD. Test Driven Development is about first writing your test to define the result we want, then to go back and change the implementation within your class to obtain the desired output (I need to make sure I can drive back to the repair shop. Remember? ) So let’s go ahead and run our test as is. It’s fails miserably... Good! Let’s go back to our Computer class and make a small change to the GetCurrentSpeed method. Computer.cs public int GetCurrentSpeed() { try { return _gearbox.ReportCurrentSpeed( ); } catch { RunRestrictiveProgram( ); } } This is a simple solution, I know, but it does provide a way to allow for different behaviour. You’re more than welcome to provide an implementation for RunRestrictiveProgram should you feel the need to. It's not within the scope of this post or related to the point I'm trying to make. What is important is to notice how the focus has shifted in our approach from how things can break - to how things behave when broken. Happy coding!

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Gathering statistics for an Oracle WebCenter Content Database

- by Nicolas Montoya

Have you ever heard: "My Oracle WebCenter Content instance is running slow. I checked the memory and CPU usage of the application server and it has plenty of resources. What could be going wrong?An Oracle WebCenter Content instance runs on an application server and relies on a database server on the back end. If your application server tier is running fine, chances are that your database server tier may host the root of the problem. While many things could cause performance problems, on active Enterprise Content Management systems, keeping database statistics updated is extremely important.The Oracle Database have a set of built-in optimizer utilities that can help make database queries more efficient. It is strongly recommended to update or re-create the statistics about the physical characteristics of a table and the associated indexes in order to maximize the efficiency of optimizers. These physical characteristics include: Number of records Number of pages Average record length The frequency with which you need to update statistics depends on how quickly the data is changing. Typically, statistics should be updated when the number of new items since the last update is greater than ten percent of the number of items when the statistics were last updated. If a large amount of documents are being added or removed from the system, the a post step should be added to gather statistics upon completion of this massive data change. In some cases, you may need to collect statistics in the middle of the data processing to expedite its execution. These proceses include but are not limited to: data migration, bootstrapping of a new system, records management disposition processing (typically at the end of the calendar year), etc. A DOCUMENTS table with a ten million rows will often generate a very different plan than a table with just a thousand.A quick check of the statistics for the WebCenter Content (WCC) Database could be performed via the below query:SELECT OWNER, TABLE_NAME, NUM_ROWS, BLOCKS, AVG_ROW_LEN,TO_CHAR(LAST_ANALYZED, 'MM/DD/YYYY HH24:MI:SS')FROM DBA_TABLESWHERE TABLE_NAME='DOCUMENTS';OWNER TABLE_NAME NUM_ROWS------------------------------ ------------------------------ ---------- BLOCKS AVG_ROW_LEN TO_CHAR(LAST_ANALYZ---------- ----------- -------------------ATEAM_OCS DOCUMENTS 4172 46 61 04/06/2012 11:17:51This output will return not only the date when the WCC table DOCUMENTS was last analyzed, but also it will return the <DATABASE SCHEMA OWNER> for this table in the form of <PREFIX>_OCS.This database username could later on be used to check on other objects owned by the WCC <DATABASE SCHEMA OWNER> as shown below:SELECT OWNER, TABLE_NAME, NUM_ROWS, BLOCKS, AVG_ROW_LEN,TO_CHAR(LAST_ANALYZED, 'MM/DD/YYYY HH24:MI:SS')FROM DBA_TABLESWHERE OWNER='ATEAM_OCS'ORDER BY NUM_ROWS ASC;...OWNER TABLE_NAME NUM_ROWS------------------------------ ------------------------------ ---------- BLOCKS AVG_ROW_LEN TO_CHAR(LAST_ANALYZ---------- ----------- -------------------ATEAM_OCS REVISIONS 2051 46 141 04/09/2012 22:00:22ATEAM_OCS DOCUMENTS 4172 46 61 04/06/2012 11:17:51ATEAM_OCS ARCHIVEHISTORY 4908 244 218 04/06/2012 11:17:49OWNER TABLE_NAME NUM_ROWS------------------------------ ------------------------------ ---------- BLOCKS AVG_ROW_LEN TO_CHAR(LAST_ANALYZ---------- ----------- -------------------ATEAM_OCS DOCUMENTHISTORY 5865 110 72 04/06/2012 11:17:50ATEAM_OCS SCHEDULEDJOBSHISTORY 10131 244 131 04/06/2012 11:17:54ATEAM_OCS SCTACCESSLOG 10204 496 268 04/06/2012 11:17:54...The Oracle Database allows to collect statistics of many different kinds as an aid to improving performance. The DBMS_STATS package is concerned with optimizer statistics only. The database sets automatic statistics collection of this kind on by default, DBMS_STATS package is intended for only specialized cases.The following subprograms gather certain classes of optimizer statistics:GATHER_DATABASE_STATS Procedures GATHER_DICTIONARY_STATS Procedure GATHER_FIXED_OBJECTS_STATS Procedure GATHER_INDEX_STATS Procedure GATHER_SCHEMA_STATS Procedures GATHER_SYSTEM_STATS Procedure GATHER_TABLE_STATS ProcedureThe DBMS_STATS.GATHER_SCHEMA_STATS PL/SQL Procedure gathers statistics for all objects in a schema.DBMS_STATS.GATHER_SCHEMA_STATS ( ownname VARCHAR2, estimate_percent NUMBER DEFAULT to_estimate_percent_type (get_param('ESTIMATE_PERCENT')), block_sample BOOLEAN DEFAULT FALSE, method_opt VARCHAR2 DEFAULT get_param('METHOD_OPT'), degree NUMBER DEFAULT to_degree_type(get_param('DEGREE')), granularity VARCHAR2 DEFAULT GET_PARAM('GRANULARITY'), cascade BOOLEAN DEFAULT to_cascade_type(get_param('CASCADE')), stattab VARCHAR2 DEFAULT NULL, statid VARCHAR2 DEFAULT NULL, options VARCHAR2 DEFAULT 'GATHER', objlist OUT ObjectTab, statown VARCHAR2 DEFAULT NULL, no_invalidate BOOLEAN DEFAULT to_no_invalidate_type ( get_param('NO_INVALIDATE')), force BOOLEAN DEFAULT FALSE);There are several values for the OPTIONS parameter that we need to know about: GATHER reanalyzes the whole schema GATHER EMPTY only analyzes tables that have no existing statistics GATHER STALE only reanalyzes tables with more than 10 percent modifications (inserts, updates, deletes) GATHER AUTO will reanalyze objects that currently have no statistics and objects with stale statistics. Using GATHER AUTO is like combining GATHER STALE and GATHER EMPTY. Example:exec dbms_stats.gather_schema_stats( - ownname => '<PREFIX>_OCS', - options => 'GATHER AUTO' -);

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Building Enterprise Smartphone App – Part 4: Application Development Considerations

- by Tim Murphy

This is the final part in a series of posts based on a talk I gave recently at the Chicago Information Technology Architects Group. Feel free to leave feedback. Application Development Considerations Now we get to the actual building of your solutions. What are the skills and resources that will be needed in order to develop a smartphone application in the enterprise? Language Knowledge One of the first things you need to consider when you are deciding which platform language do you either have the most in house skill base or can you easily acquire. If you already have developers who know Java or C# you may want to use either Android or Windows Phone. You should also take into consideration the market availability of developers. If your key developer leaves how easy is it to find a knowledgeable replacement? A second consideration when it comes to programming languages is the qualities exposed by the languages of a particular platform. How well does that development language and its associated frameworks support things like security and access to the features of the smartphone hardware? This will play into your overall cost of ownership if you have to create this infrastructure on your own. Manage Limited Resources Everything is limited on a smartphone: battery, memory, processing power, network bandwidth. When developing your applications you will have to keep your footprint as small as possible in every way. This means not running unnecessary processes in the background that will drain the battery or pulling more data over the airwaves than you have to. You also want to keep your on device in as compact a format as possible. Mobile Design Patterns There are a number of design patterns that have either come to life because of smartphone development or have been adapted for this use. The main pattern in the Windows Phone environment is the MVVM (Model-View-View-Model). This is great for overall application structure and separation of concerns. The fun part is trying to keep that separation as pure as possible. Many of the other patterns may or may not have strict definitions, but some that you need to be concerned with are push notification, asynchronous communication and offline data storage. Real estate is limited on smartphones and even tablets. You are also limited in the type of controls that can be represented in the UI. This means rethinking how you modularize your application. Typing is also much harder to do so you want to reduce this as much as possible. This leads to UI patterns. While not what we would traditionally think of as design patterns the guidance each platform has for UI design is critical to the success of your application. If user find the application difficult navigate they will not use it. Development Process Because of the differences in development tools required, test devices and certification and deployment processes your teams will need to learn new way of working together. This will include the need to integrate service contracts of back-end systems with mobile applications. You will also want to make sure that you present consistency across different access points to corporate data. Your web site may have more functionality than your smartphone application, but it should have a consistent core set of functionality. This all requires greater communication between sub-teams of your developers. Testing Process Testing of smartphone apps has a lot more to do with what happens when you lose connectivity or if the user navigates away from your application. There are a lot more opportunities for the user or the device to perform disruptive acts. This should be your main testing concentration aside from the main business requirements. You will need to do things like setting the phone to airplane mode and seeing what the application does in order to weed out any gaps in your handling communication interruptions. Need For Outside Experts Since this is a development area that is new to most companies the need for experts is a lot greater. Whether these are consultants, vendor representatives or just development community forums you will need to establish expert contacts. Nothing is more dangerous for your project timelines than a lack of knowledge. Make sure you know who to call to avoid lengthy delays in your project because of knowledge gaps. Security Security has to be a major concern for enterprise applications. You aren't dealing with just someone's game standings. You are dealing with a companies intellectual property and competitive advantage. As such you need to start by limiting access to the application itself. Once the user is in the app you need to ensure that the data is secure at all times. This includes both local storage and across the wire. This means if a platform doesn’t natively support encryption for these functions you will need to find alternatives to secure your data. You also need to keep secret (encryption) keys obfuscated or locked away outside of the application. People can disassemble the code otherwise and break your encryption. Offline Capabilities As we discussed earlier one your biggest concerns is not having connectivity. Because of this a good portion of your code may be dedicated to handling loss of connection and reconnection situations. What do you do if you lose the network? Back up all your transactions and store of any supporting data so that operations can continue off line. In order to support this you will need to determine the available flat file or local data base capabilities of the platform. Any failed transactions will need to support a retry mechanism whether it is automatic or user initiated. This also includes your services since they will need to be able to roll back partially completed transactions. What ever you do, don’t ignore this area when you are designing your system. Deployment Each platform has different deployment capabilities. Some are more suited to enterprise situations than others. Apple's approach is probably the most mature at the moment. Prior to the current generation of smartphone platforms it would have been Windows CE. Windows Phone 7 has the limitation that the app has to be distributed through the same network as public facing applications. You mark them as private which means that they are only accessible by a direct URL. Unfortunately this does not make them undiscoverable (although it is very difficult). This will change with Windows Phone 8 where companies will be able to certify their own applications and distribute them. Given this Windows Phone applications need to be more diligent with application access in order to keep them restricted to the company's employees. My understanding of the Android deployment schemes is that it is much less standardized then either iOS or Windows Phone. Someone would have to confirm or deny that for me though since I have not yet put the time into researching this platform further. Given my limited exposure to the iOS and Android platforms I have not been able to confirm this, but there are varying degrees of user involvement to install and keep applications updated. At one extreme the user just goes to a website to do the install and in other case they may need to download files and perform steps to install them. Future Bluetooth Today we use Bluetooth for keyboards, mice and headsets. In the future it could be used to interrogate car computers or manufacturing systems or possibly retail machines by service techs. This would open smartphones to greater use as a almost a Star Trek Tricorder. You would get you all your data as well as being able to use it as a universal remote for just about any device or machine. Better corporation controlled deployment At least in the Windows Phone world the upcoming release of Windows Phone 8 will include a private certification and deployment option that is currently not available with Windows Phone 7 (Mango). We currently have to run the apps through the Marketplace certification process and use a targeted distribution method. Platform independent approaches HTML5 and JavaScript with Web Service has become a popular topic lately for not only creating flexible web site, but also creating cross platform mobile applications. I’m not yet convinced that this lowest common denominator approach is viable in most cases, but it does have it’s place and seems to be growing. Be sure to keep an eye on it. Summary From my perspective enterprise smartphone applications can offer a great competitive advantage to many companies. They are not cheap to build and should be approached cautiously. Understand the factors I have outlined in this series, do you due diligence and see if there is a portion of your business that can benefit from the mobile experience. del.icio.us Tags: Architecture,Smartphones,Windows Phone,iOS,Android

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Online ALTER TABLE in MySQL 5.6

- by Marko Mäkelä

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

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OpenGL loading functions error [on hold]

- by Ghilliedrone

I'm new to OpenGL, and I bought a book on it for beginners. I finished writing the sample code for making a context/window. I get an error on this line at the part PFNWGLCREATECONTEXTATTRIBSARBPROC, saying "Error: expected a ')'": typedef HGLRC(APIENTRYP PFNWGLCREATECONTEXTATTRIBSARBPROC)(HDC, HGLRC, const int*); Replacing it or adding a ")" makes it error, but the error disappears when I use the OpenGL headers included in the books CD, which are OpenGL 3.0. I would like a way to make this work with the newest gl.h/wglext.h and without libraries. Here's the rest of the class if it's needed: #include <ctime> #include <windows.h> #include <iostream> #include <gl\GL.h> #include <gl\wglext.h> #include "Example.h" #include "GLWindow.h" typedef HGLRC(APIENTRYP PFNWGLCREATECONTEXTATTRIBSARBPROC)(HDC, HGLRC, const int*); PFNWGLCREATECONTEXTATTRIBSARBPROC wglCreateContextAttribsARB = NULL; bool GLWindow::create(int width, int height, int bpp, bool fullscreen) { DWORD dwExStyle; //Window Extended Style DWORD dwStyle; //Window Style m_isFullscreen = fullscreen;//Store the fullscreen flag m_windowRect.left = 0L; m_windowRect.right = (long)width; m_windowRect.top = 0L; m_windowRect.bottom = (long)height;//Set bottom to height // fill out the window class structure m_windowClass.cbSize = sizeof(WNDCLASSEX); m_windowClass.style = CS_HREDRAW | CS_VREDRAW; m_windowClass.lpfnWndProc = GLWindow::StaticWndProc; //We set our static method as the event handler m_windowClass.cbClsExtra = 0; m_windowClass.cbWndExtra = 0; m_windowClass.hInstance = m_hinstance; m_windowClass.hIcon = LoadIcon(NULL, IDI_APPLICATION); // default icon m_windowClass.hCursor = LoadCursor(NULL, IDC_ARROW); // default arrow m_windowClass.hbrBackground = NULL; // don't need background m_windowClass.lpszMenuName = NULL; // no menu m_windowClass.lpszClassName = (LPCWSTR)"GLClass"; m_windowClass.hIconSm = LoadIcon(NULL, IDI_WINLOGO); // windows logo small icon if (!RegisterClassEx(&m_windowClass)) { MessageBox(NULL, (LPCWSTR)"Failed to register window class", NULL, MB_OK); return false; } if (m_isFullscreen)//If we are fullscreen, we need to change the display { DEVMODE dmScreenSettings; //Device mode memset(&dmScreenSettings, 0, sizeof(dmScreenSettings)); dmScreenSettings.dmSize = sizeof(dmScreenSettings); dmScreenSettings.dmPelsWidth = width; //Screen width dmScreenSettings.dmPelsHeight = height; //Screen height dmScreenSettings.dmBitsPerPel = bpp; //Bits per pixel dmScreenSettings.dmFields = DM_BITSPERPEL | DM_PELSWIDTH | DM_PELSHEIGHT; if (ChangeDisplaySettings(&dmScreenSettings, CDS_FULLSCREEN) != DISP_CHANGE_SUCCESSFUL) { MessageBox(NULL, (LPCWSTR)"Display mode failed", NULL, MB_OK); m_isFullscreen = false; } } if (m_isFullscreen) //Is it fullscreen? { dwExStyle = WS_EX_APPWINDOW; //Window Extended Style dwStyle = WS_POPUP; //Windows Style ShowCursor(false); //Hide mouse pointer } else { dwExStyle = WS_EX_APPWINDOW | WS_EX_WINDOWEDGE; //Window Exteneded Style dwStyle = WS_OVERLAPPEDWINDOW; //Windows Style } AdjustWindowRectEx(&m_windowRect, dwStyle, false, dwExStyle); //Adjust window to true requested size //Class registered, so now create window m_hwnd = CreateWindowEx(NULL, //Extended Style (LPCWSTR)"GLClass", //Class name (LPCWSTR)"Chapter 2", //App name dwStyle | WS_CLIPCHILDREN | WS_CLIPSIBLINGS, 0, 0, //x, y coordinates m_windowRect.right - m_windowRect.left, m_windowRect.bottom - m_windowRect.top, //Width and height NULL, //Handle to parent NULL, //Handle to menu m_hinstance, //Application instance this); //Pass a pointer to the GLWindow here //Check if window creation failed, hwnd would equal NULL if (!m_hwnd) { return 0; } m_hdc = GetDC(m_hwnd); ShowWindow(m_hwnd, SW_SHOW); UpdateWindow(m_hwnd); m_lastTime = GetTickCount() / 1000.0f; return true; } LRESULT CALLBACK GLWindow::StaticWndProc(HWND hWnd, UINT uMsg, WPARAM wParam, LPARAM lParam) { GLWindow* window = nullptr; //If this is the create message if (uMsg == WM_CREATE) { //Get the pointer we stored during create window = (GLWindow*)((LPCREATESTRUCT)lParam)->lpCreateParams; //Associate the window pointer with the hwnd for the other events to access SetWindowLongPtr(hWnd, GWL_USERDATA, (LONG_PTR)window); } else { //If this is not a creation event, then we should have stored a pointer to the window window = (GLWindow*)GetWindowLongPtr(hWnd, GWL_USERDATA); if (!window) { //Do the default event handling return DefWindowProc(hWnd, uMsg, wParam, lParam); } } //Call our window's member WndProc(allows us to access member variables) return window->WndProc(hWnd, uMsg, wParam, lParam); } LRESULT GLWindow::WndProc(HWND hWnd, UINT uMsg, WPARAM wParam, LPARAM lParam) { switch (uMsg) { case WM_CREATE: { m_hdc = GetDC(hWnd); setupPixelFormat(); //Set the version that we want, in this case 3.0 int attribs[] = { WGL_CONTEXT_MAJOR_VERSION_ARB, 3, WGL_CONTEXT_MINOR_VERSION_ARB, 0, 0}; //Create temporary context so we can get a pointer to the function HGLRC tmpContext = wglCreateContext(m_hdc); //Make the context current wglMakeCurrent(m_hdc, tmpContext); //Get the function pointer wglCreateContextAttribsARB = (PFNWGLCREATECONTEXTATTRIBSARBPROC)wglGetProcAddress("wglCreateContextAttribsARB"); //If this is NULL then OpenGl 3.0 is not supported if (!wglCreateContextAttribsARB) { MessageBox(NULL, (LPCWSTR)"OpenGL 3.0 is not supported", (LPCWSTR)"An error occured", MB_ICONERROR | MB_OK); DestroyWindow(hWnd); return 0; } //Create an OpenGL 3.0 context using the new function m_hglrc = wglCreateContextAttribsARB(m_hdc, 0, attribs); //Delete the temporary context wglDeleteContext(tmpContext); //Make the GL3 context current wglMakeCurrent(m_hdc, m_hglrc); m_isRunning = true; } break; case WM_DESTROY: //Window destroy case WM_CLOSE: //Windows is closing wglMakeCurrent(m_hdc, NULL); wglDeleteContext(m_hglrc); m_isRunning = false; //Stop the main loop PostQuitMessage(0); break; case WM_SIZE: { int height = HIWORD(lParam); //Get height and width int width = LOWORD(lParam); getAttachedExample()->onResize(width, height); //Call the example's resize method } break; case WM_KEYDOWN: if (wParam == VK_ESCAPE) //If the escape key was pressed { DestroyWindow(m_hwnd); } break; default: break; } return DefWindowProc(hWnd, uMsg, wParam, lParam); } void GLWindow::processEvents() { MSG msg; //While there are messages in the queue, store them in msg while (PeekMessage(&msg, NULL, 0, 0, PM_REMOVE)) { //Process the messages TranslateMessage(&msg); DispatchMessage(&msg); } } Here is the header: #pragma once #include <ctime> #include <windows.h> class Example;//Declare our example class class GLWindow { public: GLWindow(HINSTANCE hInstance); //default constructor bool create(int width, int height, int bpp, bool fullscreen); void destroy(); void processEvents(); void attachExample(Example* example); bool isRunning(); //Is the window running? void swapBuffers() { SwapBuffers(m_hdc); } static LRESULT CALLBACK StaticWndProc(HWND wnd, UINT msg, WPARAM wParam, LPARAM lParam); LRESULT CALLBACK WndProc(HWND wnd, UINT msg, WPARAM wParam, LPARAM lParam); float getElapsedSeconds(); private: Example* m_example; //A link to the example program bool m_isRunning; //Is the window still running? bool m_isFullscreen; HWND m_hwnd; //Window handle HGLRC m_hglrc; //Rendering context HDC m_hdc; //Device context RECT m_windowRect; //Window bounds HINSTANCE m_hinstance; //Application instance WNDCLASSEX m_windowClass; void setupPixelFormat(void); Example* getAttachedExample() { return m_example; } float m_lastTime; };

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