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  • It's not just “Single Sign-on” by Steve Knott (aurionPro SENA)

    - by Greg Jensen
    It is true that Oracle Enterprise Single Sign-on (Oracle ESSO) started out as purely an application single sign-on tool but as we have seen in the previous articles in this series the product has matured into a suite of tools that can do more than just automated single sign-on and can also provide rapidly deployed, cost effective solution to many demanding password management problems. In the last article of this series I would like to discuss three cases where customers faced password scenarios that required more than just single sign-on and how some of the less well known tools in the Oracle ESSO suite “kitbag” helped solve these challenges. Case #1 One of the issues often faced by our customers is how to keep their applications compliant. I had a client who liked the idea of automated single sign-on for most of his applications but had a key requirement to actually increase the security for one specific SOX application. For the SOX application he wanted to secure access by using two-factor authentication with a smartcard. The problem was that the application did not support two-factor authentication. The solution was to use a feature from the Oracle ESSO suite called authentication manager. This feature enables you to have multiple authentication methods for the same user which in this case was a smartcard and the Windows password.  Within authentication manager each authenticator can be configured with a security grade so we gave the smartcard a high grade and the Windows password a normal grade. Security grading in Oracle ESSO can be configured on a per application basis so we set the SOX application to require the higher grade smartcard authenticator. The end result for the user was that they enjoyed automated single sign-on for most of the applications apart from the SOX application. When the SOX application was launched, the user was required by ESSO to present their smartcard before being given access to the application. Case #2 Another example solving compliance issues was in the case of a large energy company who had a number of core billing applications. New regulations required that users change their password regularly and use a complex password. The problem facing the customer was that the core billing applications did not have any native user password change functionality. The customer could not replace the core applications because of the cost and time required to re-develop them. With a reputation for innovation aurionPro SENA were approached to provide a solution to this problem using Oracle ESSO. Oracle ESSO has a password expiry feature that can be triggered periodically based on the timestamp of the users’ last password creation therefore our strategy here was to leverage this feature to provide the password change experience. The trigger can launch an application change password event however in this scenario there was no native change password feature that could be launched therefore a “dummy” change password screen was created that could imitate the missing change password function and connect to the application database on behalf of the user. Oracle ESSO was configured to trigger a change password event every 60 days. After this period if the user launched the application Oracle ESSO would detect the logon screen and invoke the password expiry feature. Oracle ESSO would trigger the “dummy screen,” detect it automatically as the application change password screen and insert a complex password on behalf of the user. After the password event had completed the user was logged on to the application with their new password. All this was provided at a fraction of the cost of re-developing the core applications. Case #3 Recent popular initiatives such as the BYOD and working from home schemes bring with them many challenges in administering “unmanaged machines” and sometimes “unmanageable users.” In a recent case, a client had a dispersed community of casual contractors who worked for the business using their own laptops to access applications. To improve security the around password management the security goal was to provision the passwords directly to these contractors. In a previous article we saw how Oracle ESSO has the capability to provision passwords through Provisioning Gateway but the challenge in this scenario was how to get the Oracle ESSO agent to the casual contractor on an unmanaged machine. The answer was to use another tool in the suite, Oracle ESSO Anywhere. This component can compile the normal Oracle ESSO functionality into a deployment package that can be made available from a website in a similar way to a streamed application. The ESSO Anywhere agent does not actually install into the registry or program files but runs in a folder within the user’s profile therefore no local administrator rights are required for installation. The ESSO Anywhere package can also be configured to stay persistent or disable itself at the end of the user’s session. In this case the user just needed to be told where the website package was located and download the package. Once the download was complete the agent started automatically and the user was provided with single sign-on to their applications without ever knowing the application passwords. Finally, as we have seen in these series Oracle ESSO not only has great utilities in its own tool box but also has direct integration with Oracle Privileged Account Manager, Oracle Identity Manager and Oracle Access Manager. Integrated together with these tools provides a complete and complementary platform to address even the most complex identity and access management requirements. So what next for Oracle ESSO? “Agentless ESSO available in the cloud” – but that will be a subject for a future Oracle ESSO series!                                                                                                                               

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  • Prioritizing Product Features

    - by Robert May
    A very common task in Agile Environments is prioritization.  Teams that are functioning well will prioritize new features, old features, the backlog, and any other source of stories for the team, and they’ll do it regularly. Not all teams are good at prioritizing according to the real return on investment that building stories will yield to the company.  This is unfortunate.  Too often, teams end up building features that are less valuable, and everyone seems to know it except perhaps the product owner!  Most features built into software are never even used.  Clearly, not much return for features that go unused. So how does a company avoid building features that add little value to the company?  This is a tough question to answer, but usually, this prioritization starts at the top with the executives of the company.  After all, they’re responsible for the overall vision of the company. Here’s what I recommend: Know your market. Know your customers and users. Know where you’re going and what you want to achieve. Implement the Vision Know Your Market We often see companies that don’t know their market.  Personally, I’m surprised by this.  These companies don’t know who their competitors are, don’t know what features make their product desirable in the market, and in many cases, get by with saying, “I’ve been doing this for XX years.  I know what the market wants!”  In many cases, they equate “marketing” with “advertising” and don’t understand the difference. This is almost never true.  Good companies will spend significant amounts of time and money finding out who they’re competing against and what makes their competitors successful in the marketplace.  Good companies understand that marketing involves more than just advertising.  Often, marketing is mostly research and analysis, not sales.  Until you understand your market, you cannot know what features will give you the best return on your investment dollar. Good companies have a marketing department and can answer the next important step which is to know your customers and your users. Know your Customers and Users First, note that I included both customers and users.  They’re often not the same thing.  Users use the product that you build.  Customers buy the product that you build.  It’s a subtle difference, but too often, I’ve seen companies that focus exclusively on one or the other and are not successful simply because they ignore an important part of the group. If your company is doing appropriate marketing, you know that these are two different aspects of your product and that both deserve attention to have a product that is successful in your target market.  Your marketing department should be spending a lot of time understanding these personas and then conveying that information to the company. I’m always surprised when development teams think that they can build a product that people want to use without understanding the users of that product.  Developers think differently than most people in the world.  They know what the computer is doing.  The computer isn’t magic to them.  So when they assume that they know how to build something, they bring with them quite a bit of baggage.  Never assume that you know your customer unless you’re regularly having interaction with them.  Also, don’t just leave this to Marketing or Product Management.  Take them time to get your developers out with the customers as well.  Developers are very smart people, and often, seeing how someone uses their software inspires them to make a much better product. Very often, because the users and customers aren’t know, teams will spend a significant amount of time building apps that are super flexible and configurable so that any possible combination of feature can be used.  This demonstrates a clear lack of understanding of the customer.  Most configuration questions can quickly be answered by talking to the customer.  In most cases, if your software requires significant setup and configuration before its usable, you probably don’t know your customers and users very well. Until you know your customers, you cannot know what features will be most valuable to your customers and you cannot build those features in a way that your customers can use. Know Where You’re Going and What You Want to Achieve Many companies suffer from not having a plan.  Executives will tell the team to make them a plan.  The team, not knowing their market and customers and users, will come up with a plan that doesn’t reflect reality and doesn’t consider ROI.  Management then wonders why the product is doing poorly in the market place. Instead of leaving this up to the teams, as executives, work with Marketing to understand what broad categories of features will sell the most product in the marketplace.  Then, once you’ve determined that, give this vision to the team and let them run with it.  Revise the vision as needed, but avoid changing streams frequently.  Sure, sometimes you need to, but often, executives will change priorities many times a month, leading to nothing more than confusion.  If the team has a vision, they’ll be able to execute that vision far better than they could otherwise. By knowing what products are most important, you can set budgetary goals and guidelines that will help you achieve the vision that was created. Implement the Vision Creating the vision is often where the general executives stop participating in the plan.  The team is responsible for implementing that vision.  Executives should attend showcases and and should remain aware of the progress that the team is making towards meeting the vision, however. Once a broad vision has been created, the team should break that vision down into minimal market features (MMF).  These MMFs should be sized using story points so that, using the team’s velocity, an estimated cost can be determined for each feature.  The product management team should then try to quantify the relative value of the MMFs based on customer feedback and interviews.  Once the value and cost of creating the feature is understood, a return on investment can be calculated.  The features should then be prioritized with the MMF’s that have the highest value and lowest cost rising to the top of features to implement.  Don’t let politics get in the way! Once the MMF’s have been prioritized, they should go through release planning to schedule them for implementation. Conclusion By having a good grasp on the strategy of the company, your Agile teams can be much more effective.  Each and every story the team is implementing will roll up into features that matter to the company and provide ROI to them.  The steps outlined in this post should be repeated on a regular basis.  I recommend reviewing them at least once per quarter to make sure that the vision hasn’t shifted and that the teams are still working on what matters most to the company. Technorati Tags: Agile,Product Owner,ROI

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  • PowerPivot and the Slowly Changing Dimensions

    - by AlbertoFerrari
    Slowly changing dimensions are very common in the data warehouses and, basically, they store many versions of the same entity whenever a change happens in the columns for which history needs to be maintained. For example, the AdventureWorks data warehouse has a type 2 SCD in the DimProduct table. It can be easily checked for the product code “FR-M94S-38” which shows three different versions of itself, with changing product cost and list price. This is exactly what we can expect to find in any data...(read more)

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  • PowerPivot and the Slowly Changing Dimensions

    - by AlbertoFerrari
    Slowly changing dimensions are very common in the data warehouses and, basically, they store many versions of the same entity whenever a change happens in the columns for which history needs to be maintained. For example, the AdventureWorks data warehouse has a type 2 SCD in the DimProduct table. It can be easily checked for the product code “FR-M94S-38” which shows three different versions of itself, with changing product cost and list price. This is exactly what we can expect to find in any data...(read more)

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  • MVPs and the Community

    - by andyleonard
    Introduction Earlier this month, David Woods decided to drop his MVP award . The move inspired some interesting comments and discussion among MVPs. David's points are: MVP Expertise Microsoft Technology Products Microsoft "Listens" Cost-Benefits for an MVP MVP Expertise After mentioning he's encountered MVPs who are not experts, David states: "The way you get in is by contributing to the community." Honestly, I don't know the specifics of how someone becomes a Microsoft MVP . And I'm ok with that....(read more)

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  • INETA Community Leadership Summit

    - by Scott Spradlin
    INETA Community Leadership Summit will be taking place on Sunday June 6th at 1PM at Tech·Ed North America in New Orleans. INETA is hosting a free Community Leadership Summit in New Orleans at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center on Sunday June 6th at 1:00 PM prior to the start of Tech·Ed 2010. The summit is open to Community Leaders from the area, as well as those attending Tech·Ed from across the country and around the world. It is an excellent opportunity for exchanging information and ideas. If you are a user group leader, or are involved in the leadership, planning, promotion, or day-to-day operations of a user group community, this event is for YOU! The summit is an open forum to share ideas, discuss common challenges, and gain from the experience of other leaders. INETA Community Leadership summits are part of an ongoing effort by INETA to create, improve and share resources designed to strengthen individual user groups and the community. This meeting will be the perfect opportunity to meet leaders from other groups, benefit from their success stories, and expand your network of contacts.   Quick FAQs Who can attend? Any leader or volunteer of any INETA User Group. Do I need to be attending Tech·Ed? No, you do NOT need to purchase a pass for Tech·Ed to attend the Leadership Summit. What does it cost to attend? There is NO cost to attend summit, but the knowledge that will be available about User Groups will be priceless. I want to help out, who do I contact? Send an email to [email protected] if you are interested. I want to attend, where do I register? We are putting together a registration link now, it will be published in a future newsletter and on the website. What will the format of the summit be? The summit will be like our Birds of a Feather Sessions but focused on User Group topics. Moderators will be armed with some broad topics to kick off the conversation, however the real value of these sessions is getting the chance to learn from each other. What topics will be covered? We are thinking of focusing on 4 areas: Running a User Group, Effective Content and Presenters, User Group Promotion and Developing Partnerships. However the agenda is yours! If there is a topic you want to see covered, or a topic that you would like to lead then email  [email protected]. Technorati Tags: conference

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  • Four Great Ways to Speed Up Your Website Speed

    As a webpage developer, you should already notice that page loading time is becoming more and more important than ever before. It is quite usual that visitors will not turn away from your webpage if it cost them more than half a minute to get access to your website. What's more, the faster your pages load, the more likely the search engines will be index deeper into your websites pages and give your website a better search engine ranking.

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  • DundeeWealth Selects Oracle CRM On Demand as Core Platform

    - by andrea.mulder
    "Oracle CRM On Demand enhances our existing Oracle platform, providing an integrated solution with incredible flexibility, mobility, agility and lowered total cost of ownership," said To Anh Tran, Senior Vice President of Business Transformation and Technology at DundeeWealth Inc. "Using Oracle as a partner in the expansion of DundeeWealth's CRM processes reinforces our client-centric approach to customer service and we believe it gives us a competitive advantage. As we begin our deployment, we are confident that Oracle is with us every step of the way." Click here to read more about more about DundeeWealth's plans.

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  • Fun with Aggregates

    - by Paul White
    There are interesting things to be learned from even the simplest queries.  For example, imagine you are given the task of writing a query to list AdventureWorks product names where the product has at least one entry in the transaction history table, but fewer than ten. One possible query to meet that specification is: SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p JOIN Production.TransactionHistory AS th ON p.ProductID = th.ProductID GROUP BY p.ProductID, p.Name HAVING COUNT_BIG(*) < 10; That query correctly returns 23 rows (execution plan and data sample shown below): The execution plan looks a bit different from the written form of the query: the base tables are accessed in reverse order, and the aggregation is performed before the join.  The general idea is to read all rows from the history table, compute the count of rows grouped by ProductID, merge join the results to the Product table on ProductID, and finally filter to only return rows where the count is less than ten. This ‘fully-optimized’ plan has an estimated cost of around 0.33 units.  The reason for the quote marks there is that this plan is not quite as optimal as it could be – surely it would make sense to push the Filter down past the join too?  To answer that, let’s look at some other ways to formulate this query.  This being SQL, there are any number of ways to write logically-equivalent query specifications, so we’ll just look at a couple of interesting ones.  The first query is an attempt to reverse-engineer T-SQL from the optimized query plan shown above.  It joins the result of pre-aggregating the history table to the Product table before filtering: SELECT p.Name FROM ( SELECT th.ProductID, cnt = COUNT_BIG(*) FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th GROUP BY th.ProductID ) AS q1 JOIN Production.Product AS p ON p.ProductID = q1.ProductID WHERE q1.cnt < 10; Perhaps a little surprisingly, we get a slightly different execution plan: The results are the same (23 rows) but this time the Filter is pushed below the join!  The optimizer chooses nested loops for the join, because the cardinality estimate for rows passing the Filter is a bit low (estimate 1 versus 23 actual), though you can force a merge join with a hint and the Filter still appears below the join.  In yet another variation, the < 10 predicate can be ‘manually pushed’ by specifying it in a HAVING clause in the “q1” sub-query instead of in the WHERE clause as written above. The reason this predicate can be pushed past the join in this query form, but not in the original formulation is simply an optimizer limitation – it does make efforts (primarily during the simplification phase) to encourage logically-equivalent query specifications to produce the same execution plan, but the implementation is not completely comprehensive. Moving on to a second example, the following query specification results from phrasing the requirement as “list the products where there exists fewer than ten correlated rows in the history table”: SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p WHERE EXISTS ( SELECT * FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID HAVING COUNT_BIG(*) < 10 ); Unfortunately, this query produces an incorrect result (86 rows): The problem is that it lists products with no history rows, though the reasons are interesting.  The COUNT_BIG(*) in the EXISTS clause is a scalar aggregate (meaning there is no GROUP BY clause) and scalar aggregates always produce a value, even when the input is an empty set.  In the case of the COUNT aggregate, the result of aggregating the empty set is zero (the other standard aggregates produce a NULL).  To make the point really clear, let’s look at product 709, which happens to be one for which no history rows exist: -- Scalar aggregate SELECT COUNT_BIG(*) FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = 709;   -- Vector aggregate SELECT COUNT_BIG(*) FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = 709 GROUP BY th.ProductID; The estimated execution plans for these two statements are almost identical: You might expect the Stream Aggregate to have a Group By for the second statement, but this is not the case.  The query includes an equality comparison to a constant value (709), so all qualified rows are guaranteed to have the same value for ProductID and the Group By is optimized away. In fact there are some minor differences between the two plans (the first is auto-parameterized and qualifies for trivial plan, whereas the second is not auto-parameterized and requires cost-based optimization), but there is nothing to indicate that one is a scalar aggregate and the other is a vector aggregate.  This is something I would like to see exposed in show plan so I suggested it on Connect.  Anyway, the results of running the two queries show the difference at runtime: The scalar aggregate (no GROUP BY) returns a result of zero, whereas the vector aggregate (with a GROUP BY clause) returns nothing at all.  Returning to our EXISTS query, we could ‘fix’ it by changing the HAVING clause to reject rows where the scalar aggregate returns zero: SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p WHERE EXISTS ( SELECT * FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID HAVING COUNT_BIG(*) BETWEEN 1 AND 9 ); The query now returns the correct 23 rows: Unfortunately, the execution plan is less efficient now – it has an estimated cost of 0.78 compared to 0.33 for the earlier plans.  Let’s try adding a redundant GROUP BY instead of changing the HAVING clause: SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p WHERE EXISTS ( SELECT * FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID GROUP BY th.ProductID HAVING COUNT_BIG(*) < 10 ); Not only do we now get correct results (23 rows), this is the execution plan: I like to compare that plan to quantum physics: if you don’t find it shocking, you haven’t understood it properly :)  The simple addition of a redundant GROUP BY has resulted in the EXISTS form of the query being transformed into exactly the same optimal plan we found earlier.  What’s more, in SQL Server 2008 and later, we can replace the odd-looking GROUP BY with an explicit GROUP BY on the empty set: SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p WHERE EXISTS ( SELECT * FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID GROUP BY () HAVING COUNT_BIG(*) < 10 ); I offer that as an alternative because some people find it more intuitive (and it perhaps has more geek value too).  Whichever way you prefer, it’s rather satisfying to note that the result of the sub-query does not exist for a particular correlated value where a vector aggregate is used (the scalar COUNT aggregate always returns a value, even if zero, so it always ‘EXISTS’ regardless which ProductID is logically being evaluated). The following query forms also produce the optimal plan and correct results, so long as a vector aggregate is used (you can probably find more equivalent query forms): WHERE Clause SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p WHERE ( SELECT COUNT_BIG(*) FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID GROUP BY () ) < 10; APPLY SELECT p.Name FROM Production.Product AS p CROSS APPLY ( SELECT NULL FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID GROUP BY () HAVING COUNT_BIG(*) < 10 ) AS ca (dummy); FROM Clause SELECT q1.Name FROM ( SELECT p.Name, cnt = ( SELECT COUNT_BIG(*) FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID GROUP BY () ) FROM Production.Product AS p ) AS q1 WHERE q1.cnt < 10; This last example uses SUM(1) instead of COUNT and does not require a vector aggregate…you should be able to work out why :) SELECT q.Name FROM ( SELECT p.Name, cnt = ( SELECT SUM(1) FROM Production.TransactionHistory AS th WHERE th.ProductID = p.ProductID ) FROM Production.Product AS p ) AS q WHERE q.cnt < 10; The semantics of SQL aggregates are rather odd in places.  It definitely pays to get to know the rules, and to be careful to check whether your queries are using scalar or vector aggregates.  As we have seen, query plans do not show in which ‘mode’ an aggregate is running and getting it wrong can cause poor performance, wrong results, or both. © 2012 Paul White Twitter: @SQL_Kiwi email: [email protected]

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  • Master Data Management and Cloud Computing

    - by david.butler(at)oracle.com
    Cloud Computing is all the rage these days. There are many reasons why this is so. But like its predecessor, Service Oriented Architecture, it can fall on hard times if the underlying data is left unmanaged. Master Data Management is the perfect Cloud companion. It can materially increase the chances for successful Cloud initiatives. In this blog, I'll review the nature of the Cloud and show how MDM fits in.   Here's the National Institute of Standards and Technology Cloud definition: •          Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.   Cloud architectures have three main layers: applications or Software as a Service (SaaS), Platforms as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). SaaS generally refers to applications that are delivered to end-users over the Internet. Oracle CRM On Demand is an example of a SaaS application. Today there are hundreds of SaaS providers covering a wide variety of applications including Salesforce.com, Workday, and Netsuite. Oracle MDM applications are located in this layer of Oracle's On Demand enterprise Cloud platform. We call it Master Data as a Service (MDaaS). PaaS generally refers to an application deployment platform delivered as a service. They are often built on a grid computing architecture and include database and middleware. Oracle Fusion Middleware is in this category and includes the SOA and Data Integration products used to connect SaaS applications including MDM. Finally, IaaS generally refers to computing hardware (servers, storage and network) delivered as a service.  This typically includes the associated software as well: operating systems, virtualization, clustering, etc.    Cloud Computing benefits are compelling for a large number of organizations. These include significant cost savings, increased flexibility, and fast deployments. Cost advantages include paying for just what you use. This is especially critical for organizations with variable or seasonal usage. Companies don't have to invest to support peak computing periods. Costs are also more predictable and controllable. Increased agility includes access to the latest technology and experts without making significant up front investments.   While Cloud Computing is certainly very alluring with a clear value proposition, it is not without its challenges. An IDC survey of 244 IT executives/CIOs and their line-of-business (LOB) colleagues identified a number of issues:   Security - 74% identified security as an issue involving data privacy and resource access control. Integration - 61% found that it is hard to integrate Cloud Apps with in-house applications. Operational Costs - 50% are worried that On Demand will actually cost more given the impact of poor data quality on the rest of the enterprise. Compliance - 49% felt that compliance with required regulatory, legal and general industry requirements (such as PCI, HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley) would be a major issue. When control is lost, the ability of a provider to directly manage how and where data is deployed, used and destroyed is negatively impacted.  There are others, but I singled out these four top issues because Master Data Management, properly incorporated into a Cloud Computing infrastructure, can significantly ameliorate all of these problems. Cloud Computing can literally rain raw data across the enterprise.   According to fellow blogger, Mike Ferguson, "the fracturing of data caused by the adoption of cloud computing raises the importance of MDM in keeping disparate data synchronized."   David Linthicum, CTO Blue Mountain Labs blogs that "the lack of MDM will become more of an issue as cloud computing rises. We're moving from complex federated on-premise systems, to complex federated on-premise and cloud-delivered systems."    Left unmanaged, non-standard, inconsistent, ungoverned data with questionable quality can pollute analytical systems, increase operational costs, and reduce the ROI in Cloud and On-Premise applications. As cloud computing becomes more relevant, and more data, applications, services, and processes are moved out to cloud computing platforms, the need for MDM becomes ever more important. Oracle's MDM suite is designed to deal with all four of the above Cloud issues listed in the IDC survey.   Security - MDM manages all master data attribute privacy and resource access control issues. Integration - MDM pre-integrates Cloud Apps with each other and with On Premise applications at the data level. Operational Costs - MDM significantly reduces operational costs by increasing data quality, thereby improving enterprise business processes efficiency. Compliance - MDM, with its built in Data Governance capabilities, insures that the data is governed according to organizational standards. This facilitates rapid and accurate reporting for compliance purposes. Oracle MDM creates governed high quality master data. A unified cleansed and standardized data view is produced. The Oracle Customer Hub creates a single view of the customer. The Oracle Product Hub creates high quality product data designed to support all go-to-market processes. Oracle Supplier Hub dramatically reduces the chances of 'supplier exceptions'. Oracle Site Hub masters locations. And Oracle Hyperion Data Relationship Management masters financial reference data and manages enterprise hierarchies across operational areas from ERP to EPM and CRM to SCM. Oracle Fusion Middleware connects Cloud and On Premise applications to MDM Hubs and brings high quality master data to your enterprise business processes.   An independent analyst once said "Poor data quality is like dirt on the windshield. You may be able to drive for a long time with slowly degrading vision, but at some point, you either have to stop and clear the windshield or risk everything."  Cloud Computing has the potential to significantly degrade data quality across the enterprise over time. Deploying a Master Data Management solution prior to or in conjunction with a move to the Cloud can insure that the data flowing into the enterprise from the Cloud is clean and governed. This will in turn insure that expected returns on the investment in Cloud Computing will be realized.       Oracle MDM has proven its metal in this area and has the customers to back that up. In fact, I will be hosting a webcast on Tuesday, April 10th at 10 am PT with one of our top Cloud customers, the Church Pension Group. They have moved all mainline applications to a hosted model and use Oracle MDM to insure the master data is managed and cleansed before it is propagated to other cloud and internal systems. I invite you join Martin Hossfeld, VP, IT Operations, and Danette Patterson, Enterprise Data Manager as they review business drivers for MDM and hosted applications, how they did it, the benefits achieved, and lessons learned. You can register for this free webcast here.  Hope to see you there.

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  • Alternatives to Google Website Optimizer

    - by yahelc
    What (affordable) alternatives are there to Google Website Optimizer for A/B and multivariate tests? The pro's with GWO are basically that its free and that it integrates with Google Analytics. The cons: The relative high time cost of setting up a test. Some alternatives I've seen so far: Optimizely.com VisualWebsiteOptimizer.com Genetify (wiki.github.com/gregdingle/genetify/) Free, open-source, but seems like there's no developer community committed to the project.

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  • Do keyword-based filenames and URLs really matter?

    - by Justin Scott
    We've developed a dynamic web application which uses URLs such as product.cfm?id=42 but our marketing team says we should use search friendly URLs and put our keywords into the URLs (so it would be product-name.cfm instead). Our developers tell us this will cost more money and take additional time. Is it worth the effort? How important is this to the search engines and will it impact our rankings?

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  • Launch Invitation: Introducing Oracle WebLogic Server 12c

    - by JuergenKress
    Introducing Oracle WebLogic Server 12c, the #1 Application Server Across Conventional and Cloud Environments Please join Hasan Rizvi on December 1, as he unveils the next generation of the industry’s #1 application server and cornerstone of Oracle’s cloud application foundation—Oracle WebLogic Server 12c. Hear, with your fellow IT managers, architects, and developers, how the new release of Oracle WebLogic Server is: Designed to help you seamlessly move into the public or private cloud with an open, standards-based platform Built to drive higher value for your current infrastructure and significantly reduce development time and cost Optimized to run your solutions for Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE); Oracle Fusion Middleware; and Oracle Fusion Applications Enhanced with transformational platforms and technologies such as Java EE 6, Oracle’s Active GridLink for RAC, Oracle Traffic Director, and Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder Don’t miss this online launch event. Register now. Executive Overview Thurs., December 1, 2011 10 a.m. PT / 1 p.m. ET Presented by: Hasan Rizvi Senior Vice President, Product Development, Oracle Today most businesses have the ambition to move to a cloud infrastructure. However, IT needs to maintain and invest in their current infrastructure for supporting today’s business. With Oracle WebLogic, the #1 app server in the marketplace, we provide you with the best of both worlds. The enhancements contained in WebLogic 12c provide you with significant benefits that drive higher value for your current infrastructure, while significantly reducing development time and cost. In addition, with WebLogic you are cloud-ready. You can move your existing applications as-is to a high performance engineered system, Exalogic, and instantly experience performance and scalability improvements that are orders of magnitude higher. A WebLogic-Exalogic combination may provide your private cloud infrastructure. Moreover, you can develop and test your applications on the recently announced Oracle’s Public Cloud offering: the Java Cloud Service and seamlessly move these to your on-premise infrastructure for production deployments. Developer Deep-Dive Thurs., December 1, 2011 11 a.m. PT / 2 p.m. ET See demos and interact with experts via live chat. Presented by: Will Lyons Director, Oracle WebLogic Server Product Management, Oracle Modern Java development looks very different from even a few years ago. Technology innovation, the ecosystem of tools and their integration with Java standards are changing how development is done. Cloud Computing is causing developers to re-evaluate their development platforms and deployment options. Business users are demanding faster time to market, but without sacrificing application performance and reliability. Find out in this session how Oracle WebLogic Server 12c enables rapid development of modern, lightweight Java EE 6 applications. Learn how you can leverage the latest development technologies, tools and standards when deploying to Oracle WebLogic Server across both conventional and Cloud environments. Don’t miss this online launch event. Register now. For regular information become a member of the WebLogic Partner Community please register at http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Technorati Tags: Hasan Rizvi,Oracle,WebLogic 12c,OPN,WebLogic Community,Jürgen Kress

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  • Oracle Systems and Solutions at OpenWorld Tokyo 2012

    - by ferhat
    Oracle OpenWorld Tokyo and JavaOne Tokyo will start next week April 4th. We will cover Oracle systems and Oracle Optimized Solutions in several keynote talks and general sessions. Full schedule can be found here. Come by the DemoGrounds to learn more about mission critical integration and optimization of complete Oracle stack. Our Oracle Optimized Solutions experts will be at hand to discuss 1-1 several of Oracle's systems solutions and technologies. Oracle Optimized Solutions are proven blueprints that eliminate integration guesswork by combing best in class hardware and software components to deliver complete system architectures that are fully tested, and include documented best practices that reduce integration risks and deliver better application performance. And because they are highly flexible by design, Oracle Optimized Solutions can be implemented as an end-to-end solution or easily adapted into existing environments. Oracle Optimized Solutions, Servers,  Storage, and Oracle Solaris  Sessions, Keynotes, and General Session Talks DAY TIME TITLE Notes Session Wednesday  April 4 9:00 - 11:15 Keynote: ENGINEERED FOR INNOVATION - Engineered Systems Mark Hurd,  President, Oracle Takao Endo, President & CEO, Oracle Corporation Japan John Fowler, EVP of Systems, Oracle Ed Screven, Chief Corporate Architect, Oracle English Session K1-01 11:50 - 12:35 Simplifying IT: Transforming the Data Center with Oracle's Engineered Systems Robert Shimp, Group VP, Product Marketing, Oracle English Session S1-01 15:20 - 16:05 Introducing Tiered Storage Solution for low cost Big Data Archiving S1-33 16:30 - 17:15 Simplifying IT - IT System Consolidation that also Accelerates Business Agility S1-42 Thursday  April 5 9:30 - 11:15 Keynote: Extreme Innovation Larry Ellison, Chief Executive Officer, Oracle English Session K2-01 11:50 - 13:20 General Session: Server and Storage Systems Strategy John Fowler, EVP of Systems, Oracle English Session G2-01 16:30 - 17:15 Top 5 Reasons why ZFS Storage appliance is "The cloud storage" by SAKURA Internet Inc L2-04 16:30 - 17:15 The UNIX based Exa* Performance IT Integration Platform - SPARC SuperCluster S2-42 17:40 - 18:25 Full stack solutions of hardware and software with SPARC SuperCluster and Oracle E-Business Suite  to minimize the business cost while maximizing the agility, performance, and availability S2-53 Friday April 6 9:30 - 11:15 Keynote: Oracle Fusion Applications & Cloud Robert Shimp, Group VP, Product Marketing Anthony Lye, Senior VP English Session K3-01 11:50 - 12:35 IT at Oracle: The Art of IT Transformation to Enable Business Growth English Session S3-02 13:00-13:45 ZFS Storagge Appliance: Architecture of high efficient and high performance S3-13 14:10 - 14:55 Why "Niko Niko doga" chose ZFS Storage Appliance to support their growing requirements and storage infrastructure By DWANGO Co, Ltd. S3-21 15:20 - 16:05 Osaka University: Lower TCO and higher flexibility for student study by Virtual Desktop By Osaka University S3-33 Oracle Developer Sessions with Oracle Systems and Oracle Solaris DAY TIME TITLE Notes LOCATION Friday April 6 13:00 - 13:45 Oracle Solaris 11 Developers D3-03 13:00 - 14:30 Oracle Solaris Tuning Contest Hands-On Lab D3-04 14:00 - 14:35 How to build high performance and high security Oracle Database environment with Oracle SPARC/Solaris English Session D3-13 15:00 - 15:45 IT Assets preservation and constructive migration with Oracle Solaris virtualization D3-24 16:00 - 17:30 The best packaging system for cloud environment - Creating an IPS package D3-34 Follow Oracle Infrared at Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn  to catch the latest news, developments, announcements, and inside views from  Oracle Optimized Solutions.

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  • Compute Scalars, Expressions and Execution Plan Performance

    - by Paul White
    The humble Compute Scalar is one of the least well-understood of the execution plan operators, and usually the last place people look for query performance problems. It often appears in execution plans with a very low (or even zero) cost, which goes some way to explaining why people ignore it. Some readers will already know that a Compute Scalar can contain a call to a user-defined function, and that any T-SQL function with a BEGIN…END block in its definition can have truly disastrous consequences...(read more)

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  • Attracting publishers to an in-house affiliate program

    - by Steve
    The cost to enter affiliate networks can be prohibitive for (cash-strapped) small business, particularly if they are simply testing the waters of an affiliate program. If such a company wanted to run an affiliate program in-house using off the shelf software, what methods would they use to attract publishers? Is it simply a case of SEO or SEM, attempting to attract publishers to the page on their website which outlines their affiliate program? Are there directories to submit one's affiliate program to?

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  • eMachines EZ1601 Review

    With a slim and stylish all-in-one design and an 18.5-inch widescreen monitor, Acer's brand-new desktop looks like it should cost more than $400. We put the elegant little nettop to the test and wind up just one DIMM short of falling in love.

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  • C#: LINQ vs foreach - Round 1.

    - by James Michael Hare
    So I was reading Peter Kellner's blog entry on Resharper 5.0 and its LINQ refactoring and thought that was very cool.  But that raised a point I had always been curious about in my head -- which is a better choice: manual foreach loops or LINQ?    The answer is not really clear-cut.  There are two sides to any code cost arguments: performance and maintainability.  The first of these is obvious and quantifiable.  Given any two pieces of code that perform the same function, you can run them side-by-side and see which piece of code performs better.   Unfortunately, this is not always a good measure.  Well written assembly language outperforms well written C++ code, but you lose a lot in maintainability which creates a big techncial debt load that is hard to offset as the application ages.  In contrast, higher level constructs make the code more brief and easier to understand, hence reducing technical cost.   Now, obviously in this case we're not talking two separate languages, we're comparing doing something manually in the language versus using a higher-order set of IEnumerable extensions that are in the System.Linq library.   Well, before we discuss any further, let's look at some sample code and the numbers.  First, let's take a look at the for loop and the LINQ expression.  This is just a simple find comparison:       // find implemented via LINQ     public static bool FindViaLinq(IEnumerable<int> list, int target)     {         return list.Any(item => item == target);     }         // find implemented via standard iteration     public static bool FindViaIteration(IEnumerable<int> list, int target)     {         foreach (var i in list)         {             if (i == target)             {                 return true;             }         }           return false;     }   Okay, looking at this from a maintainability point of view, the Linq expression is definitely more concise (8 lines down to 1) and is very readable in intention.  You don't have to actually analyze the behavior of the loop to determine what it's doing.   So let's take a look at performance metrics from 100,000 iterations of these methods on a List<int> of varying sizes filled with random data.  For this test, we fill a target array with 100,000 random integers and then run the exact same pseudo-random targets through both searches.                       List<T> On 100,000 Iterations     Method      Size     Total (ms)  Per Iteration (ms)  % Slower     Any         10       26          0.00046             30.00%     Iteration   10       20          0.00023             -     Any         100      116         0.00201             18.37%     Iteration   100      98          0.00118             -     Any         1000     1058        0.01853             16.78%     Iteration   1000     906         0.01155             -     Any         10,000   10,383      0.18189             17.41%     Iteration   10,000   8843        0.11362             -     Any         100,000  104,004     1.8297              18.27%     Iteration   100,000  87,941      1.13163             -   The LINQ expression is running about 17% slower for average size collections and worse for smaller collections.  Presumably, this is due to the overhead of the state machine used to track the iterators for the yield returns in the LINQ expressions, which seems about right in a tight loop such as this.   So what about other LINQ expressions?  After all, Any() is one of the more trivial ones.  I decided to try the TakeWhile() algorithm using a Count() to get the position stopped like the sample Pete was using in his blog that Resharper refactored for him into LINQ:       // Linq form     public static int GetTargetPosition1(IEnumerable<int> list, int target)     {         return list.TakeWhile(item => item != target).Count();     }       // traditionally iterative form     public static int GetTargetPosition2(IEnumerable<int> list, int target)     {         int count = 0;           foreach (var i in list)         {             if(i == target)             {                 break;             }               ++count;         }           return count;     }   Once again, the LINQ expression is much shorter, easier to read, and should be easier to maintain over time, reducing the cost of technical debt.  So I ran these through the same test data:                       List<T> On 100,000 Iterations     Method      Size     Total (ms)  Per Iteration (ms)  % Slower     TakeWhile   10       41          0.00041             128%     Iteration   10       18          0.00018             -     TakeWhile   100      171         0.00171             88%     Iteration   100      91          0.00091             -     TakeWhile   1000     1604        0.01604             94%     Iteration   1000     825         0.00825             -     TakeWhile   10,000   15765       0.15765             92%     Iteration   10,000   8204        0.08204             -     TakeWhile   100,000  156950      1.5695              92%     Iteration   100,000  81635       0.81635             -     Wow!  I expected some overhead due to the state machines iterators produce, but 90% slower?  That seems a little heavy to me.  So then I thought, well, what if TakeWhile() is not the right tool for the job?  The problem is TakeWhile returns each item for processing using yield return, whereas our for-loop really doesn't care about the item beyond using it as a stop condition to evaluate. So what if that back and forth with the iterator state machine is the problem?  Well, we can quickly create an (albeit ugly) lambda that uses the Any() along with a count in a closure (if a LINQ guru knows a better way PLEASE let me know!), after all , this is more consistent with what we're trying to do, we're trying to find the first occurence of an item and halt once we find it, we just happen to be counting on the way.  This mostly matches Any().       // a new method that uses linq but evaluates the count in a closure.     public static int TakeWhileViaLinq2(IEnumerable<int> list, int target)     {         int count = 0;         list.Any(item =>             {                 if(item == target)                 {                     return true;                 }                   ++count;                 return false;             });         return count;     }     Now how does this one compare?                         List<T> On 100,000 Iterations     Method         Size     Total (ms)  Per Iteration (ms)  % Slower     TakeWhile      10       41          0.00041             128%     Any w/Closure  10       23          0.00023             28%     Iteration      10       18          0.00018             -     TakeWhile      100      171         0.00171             88%     Any w/Closure  100      116         0.00116             27%     Iteration      100      91          0.00091             -     TakeWhile      1000     1604        0.01604             94%     Any w/Closure  1000     1101        0.01101             33%     Iteration      1000     825         0.00825             -     TakeWhile      10,000   15765       0.15765             92%     Any w/Closure  10,000   10802       0.10802             32%     Iteration      10,000   8204        0.08204             -     TakeWhile      100,000  156950      1.5695              92%     Any w/Closure  100,000  108378      1.08378             33%     Iteration      100,000  81635       0.81635             -     Much better!  It seems that the overhead of TakeAny() returning each item and updating the state in the state machine is drastically reduced by using Any() since Any() iterates forward until it finds the value we're looking for -- for the task we're attempting to do.   So the lesson there is, make sure when you use a LINQ expression you're choosing the best expression for the job, because if you're doing more work than you really need, you'll have a slower algorithm.  But this is true of any choice of algorithm or collection in general.     Even with the Any() with the count in the closure it is still about 30% slower, but let's consider that angle carefully.  For a list of 100,000 items, it was the difference between 1.01 ms and 0.82 ms roughly in a List<T>.  That's really not that bad at all in the grand scheme of things.  Even running at 90% slower with TakeWhile(), for the vast majority of my projects, an extra millisecond to save potential errors in the long term and improve maintainability is a small price to pay.  And if your typical list is 1000 items or less we're talking only microseconds worth of difference.   It's like they say: 90% of your performance bottlenecks are in 2% of your code, so over-optimizing almost never pays off.  So personally, I'll take the LINQ expression wherever I can because they will be easier to read and maintain (thus reducing technical debt) and I can rely on Microsoft's development to have coded and unit tested those algorithm fully for me instead of relying on a developer to code the loop logic correctly.   If something's 90% slower, yes, it's worth keeping in mind, but it's really not until you start get magnitudes-of-order slower (10x, 100x, 1000x) that alarm bells should really go off.  And if I ever do need that last millisecond of performance?  Well then I'll optimize JUST THAT problem spot.  To me it's worth it for the readability, speed-to-market, and maintainability.

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  • The Breakpoint Ep. 4 —The Tour De Timeline

    The Breakpoint Ep. 4 —The Tour De Timeline Ask and vote for questions at: goo.gl The DevTools' Timeline shows the heartbeat and health of your application's performance. In this episode we'll do a deep deep dive into how to uncover the cost of internal browser operations like parsing HTML, decoding images, invalidating layout geometry and painting to screen. Paul and Addy will show you how best to approach improving the performance of your CSS and JS. From: GoogleDevelopers Views: 0 0 ratings Time: 01:00:00 More in Science & Technology

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  • Webcast: The ART of Migrating and Modernizing IBM Mainframe Applications

    - by todd.little
    Tuxedo provides an excellent platform to migrate mainframe applications to distributed systems. As the only distributed transaction processing monitor that offers quality of service comparable or better than mainframe systems, Tuxedo allows customers to migrate their existing mainframe based applications to a platform with a much lower total cost of ownership. Please join us on Thursday April 29 at 10:00am Pacific Time for this exciting webcast covering the new Oracle Tuxedo Application Runtime for CICS and Batch 11g. Find out how easy it is to migrate your CICS and mainframe batch applications to Tuxedo.

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