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• Silverlight 5 Hosting :: Features in Silverlight 5 and Release Date

  - by mbridge

  Silverlight 5 is finally announced in the Silverlight FireStarter Event on the 2nd December, 2010. This new version of Silverlight which was earlier labeled as 'Future of Microsoft Silverlight' has now come much closer to go live as the first Silverlight 5 Beta version is expected to be shipped during the early months of 2011. However for the full fledged and the final release of Silverlight 5, we have to wait many more months as the same is likely to be made available within the Q3 2011. As would have been usually expected, this latest edition would feature many new capabilities thereby extending the developer productivity to a whole new dimension of premium media experience and feature-rich business applications. It comes along with many new feature updates as well as the inclusion of new technologies to improve the standard of the Silverlight applications which are now fine-tuned to produce next generation business and media solutions that is capable to meet the requirements of the advanced web-based app development. The Silverlight 5 is all set to replace the previous fourth version which now includes more than forty new features while also dropping various deprecated elements that was prevalent earlier. It has brought around some major performance enhancements and also included better support for various other tools and technologies. Following are some of the changes that are registered to be available under the Silverlight 5 Beta edition which is scheduled to be launched during the Q1 2011. Silverlight 5 : Premium Media Experiences The media features of Silverlight 5 has seen some major enhancements with a lot of optimizations being made to deliver richer solutions. It's capability has now been extended to make things easier, faster and capable of performing the desired tasks in the most efficient manner. The Silverlight media solutions has already been a part of many companies in the recent days where various on-demand Silverlight services were featured but with the arrival of the next generation premium media solution of Silverlight 5, it is expected to register new heights of success and global user acclamation for using it with many esteemed web-based projects and media solutions. - The most happening element in the new Silverlight 5 will be its support for utilizing the GPU based hardware acceleration which is intended to lower down the CPU load to a significant extent and thereby allowing faster rendering of media contents without consuming much resources. This feature is believed to be particularly helpful for low configured machines to run full HD media content without any lagging caused due to processor load. It will hence be one great feature to revolutionize the new generation high quality media contents to be available within the web in a more efficient manner with its hardware decoded video playback capabilities. - With the inclusion of hardware video decoding to minimize the processor load, the Silverlight 5 also comes with another optimization enhancement to also reduce the power consumption level by making new methods to deal with the power-saver settings. With this optimization in effect, the computer would be automatically allowed to switch to sleep mode while no video playback is in progress and also to prevent any screensavers to popup and cause annoyances during any video playback. There would also be other power saver options which will be made available to best suit the users requirements and purpose. - The Silverlight trickplay feature is another great way to tweak any silverlight powered media content as is used for many video tutorial sites or for dealing with any sort of presentations. This feature enables the user to modify the playback speed to either slowdown or speedup during the playback durations based on the requirements without compromising on the quality of output. Normally such manipulations always makes the content's audio to go off-pitch, but the same will not be the case with TrickPlay and the audio would seamlessly progress with the video without skipping any of its part. - In addition to all of the above, the new Silverlight 5 will be featuring wireless control of all the media contents by making use of remote controllers. With the use of such remote devices, it will be easier to handle the various media playback controls thereby providing more freedom while experiencing the premium media services. Silverlight 5 : Business Application Development The application development standard has been extended with more possibilities by bringing forth new and useful technologies and also reviving the existing methods to work better than what it was used to. From the UI improvements to advanced technical aspects, the Silverlight 5 scores high on all grounds to produce great next generation business delivered applications by putting in more creativity and resourceful touch to all the apps being produced with it. - The WPF feature of Silverlight is made more effective by introducing new standards of Databinding which is intended to improve the productivity standards of the Silverlight application developer. It brings in a lot of convenience in debugging the databinding components or expressions and hence making things work in a flawless manner. Some additional features related to databinding includes that of Ancestor RelativeSource, Implicit DataTemplates and Model View ViewModel (MVVM) support with DataContextChanged event and many other new features relating it. - It now comes with a refined text and printing service which facilitates better clarity of the text rendering and also many positive changes which are being applied to the layout pattern. New supports has been added to include OpenType font, multi-column text, linked-text containers and character leading support to name a few among the available features.This also includes some important printing aspects like that of Postscript Vector Printing API which allows to program our printing tasks in a user defined way and Pivot functionality for visualization concerns of informations. - The Graphics support is the key improvements being incorporated which now enables to utilize three dimensional graphics pattern using GPU acceleration. It can manage to provide some really cool visualizations being curved to provide media contents within the business apps with also the support for full HD contents at 1080p quality. - Silverlight 5 includes the support for 64-bit operating systems and relevant browsers and is also optimized to provide better performance. It can support the background thread for the networking which can reduce the latency of the network to a considerable extent. The Out-of-Browser functionality adds the support for utilizing various libraries and also the Win32 API. It also comes with testing support with VS 2010 which is mostly an automated procedure and has also enabled increased security aspects of all the Silverlight 5 developed applications by using the improved version of group policy support.

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• Form, function and complexity in rule processing

  - by Charles Young

  Tim Bass posted on ‘Orwellian Event Processing’. I was involved in a heated exchange in the comments, and he has more recently published a post entitled ‘Disadvantages of Rule-Based Systems (Part 1)’. Whatever the rights and wrongs of our exchange, it clearly failed to generate any agreement or understanding of our different positions. I don't particularly want to promote further argument of that kind, but I do want to take the opportunity of offering a different perspective on rule-processing and an explanation of my comments. For me, the ‘red rag’ lay in Tim’s claim that “...rules alone are highly inefficient for most classes of (not simple) problems” and a later paragraph that appears to equate the simplicity of form (‘IF-THEN-ELSE’) with simplicity of function.   It is not the first time Tim has expressed these views and not the first time I have responded to his assertions.   Indeed, Tim has a long history of commenting on the subject of complex event processing (CEP) and, less often, rule processing in ‘robust’ terms, often asserting that very many other people’s opinions on this subject are mistaken.   In turn, I am of the opinion that, certainly in terms of rule processing, which is an area in which I have a specific interest and knowledge, he is often mistaken. There is no simple answer to the fundamental question ‘what is a rule?’ We use the word in a very fluid fashion in English. Likewise, the term ‘rule processing’, as used widely in IT, is equally difficult to define simplistically. The best way to envisage the term is as a ‘centre of gravity’ within a wider domain. That domain contains many other ‘centres of gravity’, including CEP, statistical analytics, neural networks, natural language processing and so much more. Whole communities tend to gravitate towards and build themselves around some of these centres. The term 'rule processing' is associated with many different technology types, various software products, different architectural patterns, the functional capability of many applications and services, etc. There is considerable variation amongst these different technologies, techniques and products. Very broadly, a common theme is their ability to manage certain types of processing and problem solving through declarative, or semi-declarative, statements of propositional logic bound to action-based consequences. It is generally important to be able to decouple these statements from other parts of an overall system or architecture so that they can be managed and deployed independently.  As a centre of gravity, ‘rule processing’ is no island. It exists in the context of a domain of discourse that is, itself, highly interconnected and continuous.   Rule processing does not, for example, exist in splendid isolation to natural language processing.   On the contrary, an on-going theme of rule processing is to find better ways to express rules in natural language and map these to executable forms.   Rule processing does not exist in splendid isolation to CEP.   On the contrary, an event processing agent can reasonably be considered as a rule engine (a theme in ‘Power of Events’ by David Luckham).   Rule processing does not live in splendid isolation to statistical approaches such as Bayesian analytics. On the contrary, rule processing and statistical analytics are highly synergistic.   Rule processing does not even live in splendid isolation to neural networks. For example, significant research has centred on finding ways to translate trained nets into explicit rule sets in order to support forms of validation and facilitate insight into the knowledge stored in those nets. What about simplicity of form?   Many rule processing technologies do indeed use a very simple form (‘If...Then’, ‘When...Do’, etc.)   However, it is a fundamental mistake to equate simplicity of form with simplicity of function.   It is absolutely mistaken to suggest that simplicity of form is a barrier to the efficient handling of complexity.   There are countless real-world examples which serve to disprove that notion.   Indeed, simplicity of form is often the key to handling complexity. Does rule processing offer a ‘one size fits all’. No, of course not.   No serious commentator suggests it does.   Does the design and management of large knowledge bases, expressed as rules, become difficult?   Yes, it can do, but that is true of any large knowledge base, regardless of the form in which knowledge is expressed.   The measure of complexity is not a function of rule set size or rule form.  It tends to be correlated more strongly with the size of the ‘problem space’ (‘search space’) which is something quite different.   Analysis of the problem space and the algorithms we use to search through that space are, of course, the very things we use to derive objective measures of the complexity of a given problem. This is basic computer science and common practice. Sailing a Dreadnaught through the sea of information technology and lobbing shells at some of the islands we encounter along the way does no one any good.   Building bridges and causeways between islands so that the inhabitants can collaborate in open discourse offers hope of real progress.

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• SQL SERVER – Advanced Data Quality Services with Melissa Data – Azure Data Market

  - by pinaldave

  There has been much fanfare over the new SQL Server 2012, and especially around its new companion product Data Quality Services (DQS). Among the many new features is the addition of this integrated knowledge-driven product that enables data stewards everywhere to profile, match, and cleanse data. In addition to the homegrown rules that data stewards can design and implement, there are also connectors to third party providers that are hosted in the Azure Datamarket marketplace.  In this review, I leverage SQL Server 2012 Data Quality Services, and proceed to subscribe to a third party data cleansing product through the Datamarket to showcase this unique capability. Crucial Questions For the purposes of the review, I used a database I had in an Excel spreadsheet with name and address information. Upon a cursory inspection, there are miscellaneous problems with these records; some addresses are missing ZIP codes, others missing a city, and some records are slightly misspelled or have unparsed suites. With DQS, I can easily add a knowledge base to help standardize my values, such as for state abbreviations. But how do I know that my address is correct? And if my address is not correct, what should it be corrected to? The answer lies in a third party knowledge base by the acknowledged USPS certified address accuracy experts at Melissa Data. Reference Data Services Within DQS there is a handy feature to actually add reference data from many different third-party Reference Data Services (RDS) vendors. DQS simplifies the processes of cleansing, standardizing, and enriching data through custom rules and through service providers from the Azure Datamarket. A quick jump over to the Datamarket site shows me that there are a handful of providers that offer data directly through Data Quality Services. Upon subscribing to these services, one can attach a DQS domain or composite domain (fields in a record) to a reference data service provider, and begin using it to cleanse, standardize, and enrich that data. Besides what I am looking for (address correction and enrichment), it is possible to subscribe to a host of other services including geocoding, IP address reference, phone checking and enrichment, as well as name parsing, standardization, and genderization.  These capabilities extend the data quality that DQS has natively by quite a bit. For my current address correction review, I needed to first sign up to a reference data provider on the Azure Data Market site. For this example, I used Melissa Data’s Address Check Service. They offer free one-month trials, so if you wish to follow along, or need to add address quality to your own data, I encourage you to sign up with them. Once I subscribed to the desired Reference Data Provider, I navigated my browser to the Account Keys within My Account to view the generated account key, which I then inserted into the DQS Client – Configuration under the Administration area. Step by Step to Guide That was all it took to hook in the subscribed provider -Melissa Data- directly to my DQS Client. The next step was for me to attach and map in my Reference Data from the newly acquired reference data provider, to a domain in my knowledge base. On the DQS Client home screen, I selected “New Knowledge Base” under Knowledge Base Management on the left-hand side of the home screen. Under New Knowledge Base, I typed a Name and description of my new knowledge base, then proceeded to the Domain Management screen. Here I established a series of domains (fields) and then linked them all together as a composite domain (record set). Using the Create Domain button, I created the following domains according to the fields in my incoming data: Name Address Suite City State Zip I added a Suite column in my domain because Melissa Data has the ability to return missing Suites based on last name or company. And that’s a great benefit of using these third party providers, as they have data that the data steward would not normally have access to. The bottom line is, with these third party data providers, I can actually improve my data. Next, I created a composite domain (fulladdress) and added the (field) domains into the composite domain. This essentially groups our address fields together in a record to facilitate the full address cleansing they perform. I then selected my newly created composite domain and under the Reference Data tab, added my third party reference data provider –Melissa Data’s Address Check- and mapped in each domain that I had to the provider’s Schema. Now that my composite domain has been married to the Reference Data service, I can take the newly published knowledge base and create a project to cleanse and enrich my data. My next task was to create a new Data Quality project, mapping in my data source and matching it to the appropriate domain column, and then kick off the verification process. It took just a few minutes with some progress indicators indicating that it was working. When the process concluded, there was a helpful set of tabs that place the response records into categories: suggested; new; invalid; corrected (automatically); and correct. Accepting the suggestions provided by  Melissa Data allowed me to clean up all the records and flag the invalid ones. It is very apparent that DQS makes address data quality simplistic for any IT professional. Final Note As I have shown, DQS makes data quality very easy. Within minutes I was able to set up a data cleansing and enrichment routine within my data quality project, and ensure that my address data was clean, verified, and standardized against real reference data. As reviewed here, it’s easy to see how both SQL Server 2012 and DQS work to take what used to require a highly skilled developer, and empower an average business or database person to consume external services and clean data. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Utility, T SQL, Technology Tagged: DQS

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• Logical Domain Modeling Made Simple

  - by Knut Vatsendvik

  How can logical domain modeling be made simple and collaborative? Many non-technical end-users, managers and business domain experts find it difficult to understand the visual models offered by many UML tools. This creates trouble in capturing and verifying the information that goes into a logical domain model. The tools are also too advanced and complex for a non-technical user to learn and use. We have therefore, in our current project, ended up with using Confluence as tool for designing the logical domain model with the help of a few very useful plugins. Big thanks to Ole Nymoen and Per Spilling for their expertise in this field that made this posting possible. Confluence Plugins Here is a list of Confluence plugins used in this solution. Install these before trying out the macros used below. Plugin Description Copy Space Allows a space administrator to copy a space, including the pages within the space Metadata Supports adding metadata to Wiki pages Label Manages labeling of pages Linking Contains macros for linking to templates, the dashboard and other Table Enhances the table capability in Confluence Creating a Confluence Space First we need to create a new confluence space for the domain model. Click the link Create a Space located below the list of spaces on the Dashboard. Please contact your Confluence administrator is you do not have permissions to do this.   For illustrative purpose all attributes and entities in this posting are based on my imaginary project manager domain model. When a logical domain model is good enough for being implemented, do a copy of the Confluence Space (see Copy Space plugin). In this way you create a stable version of the logical domain model while further design can continue with the new copied space. Typical will the implementation phase result in a database design and/or a XSD schema design. Add Space Templates Go to the Home page of your Confluence Space. Navigate to the Browse drop-down menu and click on Advanced. Then click the Templates option in the left navigation panel. Click Add New Space Template to add the following three templates. Name: attribute {metadata-list} || Name | | || Type | | || Format | | || Description | | {metadata-list} {add-label:attribute} Name: primary-type {metadata-list} || Name | || || Type | || || Format | || || Description | || {metadata-list} {add-label:primary-type} Name: complex-type {metadata-list} || Name | || || Description |  || {metadata-list} h3. Attributes || Name || Type || Format || Description || | [name] | {metadata-from:name|Type} | {metadata-from:name|Format} | {metadata-from:name|Description} | {add-label:complex-type,entity} The metadata-list macro (see Metadata plugin) will save a list of metadata values to the page. The add-label macro (see Label plugin) will automatically label the page. Primary Types Page Our first page to add will act as container for our primary types. Switch to Wiki markup when adding the following content to the page. | (+) {add-page:template=primary-type|parent=@self}Add new primary type{add-page} | {metadata-report:Name,Type,Format,Description|sort=Name|root=@self|pages=@descendents} Once the page is created, click the Add new primary type (create-page macro) to start creating a new pages. Here is an example of input to the LocalDate page. Embrace the LocalDate with square brackets [] to make the page linkable. Again switch to Wiki markup before editing. {metadata-list} || Name | [LocalDate] || || Type | Date || || Format | YYYY-MM-DD || || Description | Date in local time zone. YYYY = year, MM = month and DD = day || {metadata-list} {add-label:primary-type} The metadata-report macro will show a tabular report of all child pages.   Attributes Page The next page will act as container for all of our attributes. | (+) {add-page:template=attribute|parent=@self|title=attribute}Add new attribute{add-page} | {metadata-report:Name,Type,Format,Description|sort=Name|pages=@descendants} Here is an example of input to the startDate page. {metadata-list} || Name | [startDate] || || Type | [LocalDate] || || Format | {metadata-from:LocalDate|Format} || || Description | The projects start date || {metadata-list} {add-label:attribute} Using the metadata-from macro we fetch the text from the previously created LocalDate page. Complex Types Page The last page in this example shows how attributes can be combined together to form more complex types.   h3. Intro Overview of complex types in the domain model. | (+) {add-page:template=complex-type|parent=@self}Add a new complex type{add-page}\\ | {metadata-report:Name,Description|sort=Name|root=@self|pages=@descendents} Here is an example of input to the ProjectType page. {metadata-list} || Name | [ProjectType] || || Description | Represents a project || {metadata-list} h3. Attributes || Name || Type || Format || Description || | [projectId] | {metadata-from:projectId|Type} | {metadata-from:projectId|Format} | {metadata-from:projectId|Description} | | [name] | {metadata-from:name|Type} | {metadata-from:name|Format} | {metadata-from:name|Description} | | [description] | {metadata-from:description|Type} | {metadata-from:description|Format} | {metadata-from:description|Description} | | [startDate] | {metadata-from:startDate|Type} | {metadata-from:startDate|Format} | {metadata-from:startDate|Description} | {add-label:complex-type,entity} Gives us this Conclusion Using a web-based corporate Wiki like Confluence to create a logical domain model increases the collaboration between people with different roles in the enterprise. It’s my believe that this helps the domain model to be more accurate, and better documented. In our real project we have more pages than illustrated here to complete the documentation. We do also still use UML tools to create different types of diagrams that Confluence do not support. As a last tip, an ImageMap plugin can make those diagrams clickable when used in pages. Enjoy!

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• What’s Your Tax Strategy? Automate the Tax Transfer Pricing Process!

  - by tobyehatch

  Does your business operate in multiple countries? Well, whether you like it or not, many local and international tax authorities inspect your tax strategy.  Legal, effective tax planning is perceived as a “moral” issue. CEOs are being asked to testify on their process of tax transfer pricing between multinational legal entities.  Marc Seewald, Senior Director of Product Management for EPM Applications specializing in all tax subjects and Product Manager for Oracle Hyperion Tax Provisioning, and Bart Stoehr, Senior Director of Product Strategy for Oracle Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management joined me for a discussion/podcast on this interesting subject.  So what exactly is “tax transfer pricing”? Marc defined it this way. “Tax transfer pricing is a profit allocation methodology required to be used by multinational corporations. Specifically, the ultimate goal of the transfer pricing is to ensure that the global multinational pays their fair share of income tax in each of their local markets. Specifically, it prevents companies from unfairly moving profit from ‘high tax’ countries to ‘low tax’ countries.” According to Marc, in today’s global economy, profitability can be significantly impacted by goods and services exchanged between the related divisions within a single multinational company.  To ensure that these cost allocations are done fairly, there are rules that govern the process. These rules ensure that intercompany allocations fairly represent the actual nature of the businesses activity- as if two divisions were unrelated - and provide a clear audit trail of how the costs have been allocated to prove that allocations fall within reasonable ranges.  What are the repercussions of improper tax transfer pricing? How important is it? Tax transfer pricing allocations can materially impact the amount of overall corporate income taxes paid by a company worldwide, in some cases by hundreds of millions of dollars!  Since so much tax revenue is at stake, revenue agencies like the IRS, and international regulatory bodies like the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) are pushing to reform and clarify reporting for tax transfer pricing. Most recently the OECD announced an “Action Plan for Base Erosion and Profit Shifting”. As Marc explained, the times are changing and companies need to be responsive to this issue. “It feels like every other week there is another company being accused of avoiding taxes,” said Marc. Most recently, Caterpillar was accused of avoiding billions of dollars in taxes. In the last couple of years, Apple, GE, Ikea, and Starbucks, have all been accused of tax avoidance. It’s imperative that companies like these have a clear and auditable tax transfer process that enables them to justify tax transfer pricing allocations and avoid steep penalties and bad publicity. Transparency and efficiency are what is needed when it comes to the tax transfer pricing process. Bart explained that tax transfer pricing is driving a deeper inspection of profit recognition specifically focused on the tax element of profit.  However, allocations needed to support tax profitability are nearly identical in process to allocations taking place in other parts of the finance organization. For example, the methods and processes necessary to arrive at tax profitability by legal entity are no different than those used to arrive at fully loaded profitability for a product line. In fact, there is a great opportunity for alignment across these two different functions.So it seems that tax transfer pricing should be reflected in profitability in general. Bart agreed and told us more about some of the critical sub-processes of an overall tax transfer pricing process within the Oracle solution for tax transfer pricing.  “First, there is a ton of data preparation, enrichment and pre-allocation data analysis that is managed in the Oracle Hyperion solution. This serves as the “data staging” to the next, critical sub-processes.  From here, we leverage the Oracle EPM platform’s ability to re-use dimensions and legal entity driver data and financial data with Oracle Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management (HPCM).  Within HPCM, we manage the driver data, define the legal entity to legal entity allocation rules (like cost plus), and have the option to test out multiple, simultaneous tax transfer pricing what-if scenarios.  Once processed, a tax expert can evaluate the effectiveness of any one scenario result versus another via a variance analysis configured with HPCM’s pre-packaged reporting capability known as Oracle Hyperion SmartView for Office.”   Further, Bart explained that the ability to visibly demonstrate how a cost or revenue has been allocated is really helpful and auditable.  “HPCM’s Traceability Maps are that visual representation of all allocation flows that have been executed and is the tax transfer analyst’s best friend in maintaining clear documentation for tax transfer pricing audits. Simply click and drill as you inspect the chain of allocation definitions and results. Once final, the post-allocated tax data can be compared to the GL to create invoices and journal entries for posting to your GL system of choice.  Of course, there is a framework for overall governance of the journal entries, allocation percentages, and reporting to include necessary approvals.” Lastly, Marc explained that the key value in using the Oracle Hyperion solution for tax transfer pricing is that it keeps everything in alignment in one single place. Specifically, Oracle Hyperion effectively becomes the single book of record for the GAAP, management, and the tax set of books. There are many benefits to having one source of the truth. These include EFFICIENCY, CONTROLS and TRANSPARENCY.So, what’s your tax strategy? Why not automate the tax transfer pricing process!To listen to the entire podcast, click here.To learn more about Oracle Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management (HPCM), click here.

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• Building a Distributed Commerce Infrastructure in the Cloud using Azure and Commerce Server

  - by Lewis Benge

  One of the biggest questions I routinely get asked is how scalable Commerce Server is. Of course the text book answer is the product has been around for 10 years, powers some of the largest e-Commerce websites in the world, so it scales horizontally extremely well. One argument however though is what if you can't predict the growth of demand required of your Commerce Platform, or need the ability to scale up during busy seasons such as Christmas for a retail environment but are hesitant on maintaining the infrastructure on a year-round basis? The obvious answer is to utilise the many elasticated cloud infrastructure providers that are establishing themselves in the ever-growing market, the problem however is Commerce Server is still product which has a legacy tightly coupled dependency on Windows and IIS components. Commerce Server 2009 codename "R2" however introduced to the concept of an n-tier deployment of Microsoft Commerce Server, meaning you are no longer tied to core objects API but instead have serializable Commerce Entity objects, and business logic allowing for Commerce Server to now be built into a WCF-based SOA architecture. Presentation layers no-longer now need to remain on the same physical machine as the application server, meaning you can now build the user experience into multiple-technologies and host them in multiple places – leveraging the transport benefits that a WCF service may bring, such as message queuing, security, and multiple end-points. All of this logic will still need to remain in your internal infrastructure, for two reasons. Firstly cloud based computing infrastructure does not support PCI security requirements, and secondly even though many of the legacy Commerce Server dependencies have been abstracted away within this version of the application, it is still not a fully supported to be deployed exclusively into the cloud. If you do wish to benefit from the scalability of the cloud however, you can still achieve a great Commerce Server and Azure setup by utilising both the Azure App Fabric in terms of the service bus, and authentication services and Windows Azure to host any online presence you may require. The architecture would be something similar to this: This setup would allow you to construct your Commerce Services as part of your on-site infrastructure. These services would contain all of the channels custom business logic, and provide the overall interface back into the underlying Commerce Server components. It would be recommended that services are constructed around the specific business domain of the application, which based on your business model would usually consist of separate services around Catalogue, Orders, Search, Profiles, and Marketing. The App Fabric service bus is then used to abstract and aggregate further the services, making them available to the cloud and subsequently secured by App Fabrics authentication services. These services are now available for consumption by any client, using any supported technology – not just .NET. Thus meaning you are now able to construct apps for IPhone, integrate with Java based POS Devices, and any many other potential uses. This aggregation is useful, and forms the basis of the further strategy around diversifying and enhancing the e-Commerce experience, but also provides the foundation for the scalability we want to gain from utilising a cloud-based application platform. The Windows Azure application platform is Microsoft solution to benefiting from the true economies of scale in terms of the elasticity of the cloud. Just before the launch of the Azure Platform – Domino's pizza actually managed to run their whole SuperBowl operation from the scalability of Windows Azure, and simply switching back to their traditional operation the next day with no residual infrastructure costs. The platform also natively can subscribe to services and messages exposed within the AppFabric service bus, making it an ideal solution to build and deploy a presentation layer which will need to support of scalable infrastructure – such as a high demand public facing e-Commerce portal, or a promotion element of a brand. Windows Azure has excellent support for ASP.NET, including its own caching providers meaning expensive operations such as catalogue queries can persist in memory on the application server, reducing the demand on internal infrastructure and prioritising it for more business critical operations such as receiving orders and processing payments. Windows Azure also supports other languages too, meaning utilising this approach you can technically build a Commerce Server presentation layer in Java, PHP, or Ruby – or equally in ASP.NET or Silverlight without having to change any of the underlying business or Commerce Server implementation. This SOA-style architecture is one of the primary differentiators for Commerce Server as a product in the e-Commerce market, and now with the introduction of a WCF capability in Commerce Server 2009/2009 R2 the opportunities for extensibility of the both the user experience, and integration into third parties, are drastically increased, all with no effect to the underlying channel logic. So if you are looking at deployment options for your e-Commerce application to help support demand in a cost effective way. I would highly recommend you consider looking at Windows Azure, and if you have any questions in-particular about this style of deployment, please feel free to get in touch!

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• Some New .NET Toys (Repost)

  - by Kevin Grossnicklaus

  Last week I was fortunate enough to spend time in Redmond on Microsoft’s campus for the 2011 Microsoft MVP Summit. It was great to hang out with a number of old friends and get the opportunity to talk tech with the various product teams up at Microsoft. The weather wasn’t exactly sunny but Microsoft always does a great job with the Summit and everyone had a blast (heck, I even got to run the bases at SafeCo field) While much of what we saw is covered under NDA, there a ton of great things in the pipeline from Microsoft and many things that are already available (or just became so) that I wasn’t necessarily aware of. The purpose of this post is to share some of the info I learned on resources and tools available to .NET developers today. Please let me know if you have any questions (or if you know of something else cool which might benefit others). Enjoy! Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Microsoft has issued the RTM release of Visual Studio 2010 SP1. You can download the full SP1 on MSDN as of today (March 10th to the general public) and take advantage of such things as: Silverlight 4 is included in the box (as opposed to a separate install) Silverlight 4 Profiling WCF RIA Services SP1 Intellitrace for 64-bit and SharePoint ASP.NET now easily supports IIS Express and SQL CE Want a description of all that’s new beyond the above biased list (which arguably only contains items I think are important)? Check out this KB article. Portable Library Tools CTP Without much fanfare Microsoft has released a CTP of a new add-in to Visual Studio 2010 which simplifies code sharing between projects targeting different runtimes (i.e. Silverlight, WPF, Win7 Phone, XBox). With this Add-In installed you can add a new project of type “Portable Library” and specify which platforms you wish to target. Once that is done, any code added to this library will be limited to use only features which are common to all selected frameworks. Other projects can now reference this portable library and be provided assemblies custom built to their environment. This greatly simplifies the current process of sharing linked files between platforms like WPF and Silverlight. You can find out more about this CTP and how it works on this great blog post. Visual Studio Async CTP Microsoft has also released a CTP of a set of language and framework enhancements to provide a much more powerful asynchronous programming model. Due to the focus on async programming in all types of platforms (and it being the ONLY option in Silverlight and Win7 phone) a move towards a simpler and more understandable model is always a good thing. This CTP (called Visual Studio Async CTP) can be downloaded here. You can read more about this CTP on this blog post. MSDN Code Samples Gallery Microsoft has also launched new code samples gallery on their MSDN site: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/. This site allows you to easily search for small samples of code related to a particular technology or platform. If a sample of code you are looking for is not found, you can request one via the site and other developers can see your request and provide a sample to the site to suit your needs. You can also peruse requested samples and, if you find a scenario where you can provide value, upload your own sample for the benefit of others. Samples are packaged into the VS .vsix format and include any necessary references/dependencies. By using .vsix as the deployment mechanism, as samples are installed from the site they are kept in your Visual Studio 2010 Samples Gallery and kept for your future reference. If you get a chance, check out the site and see how it is done. Although a somewhat simple concept, I was very impressed with their implementation and the way they went about trying to suit a need. I’ll definitely be looking there in the future as need something or want to share something. MSDN Search Capabilities Another item I learned recently and was not aware of (that might seem trivial to some) is the power of the MSDN site’s search capabilities. Between the Code Samples Gallery described above and the search enhancements on MSDN, Microsoft is definitely investing in their platform to help provide developers of all skill levels the tools and resources they need to be successful. What do I mean by the MSDN search capability and why should you care? If you go to the MSDN home page (http://msdn.microsoft.com) and use the “Search MSDN with Big” box at the very top of the page you will see some very interesting results. First, the search actually doesn’t just search the MSDN library it searches: MSDN Library All Microsoft Blogs CodePlex StackOverflow Downloads MSDN Magazine Support Knowledgebase (I’m not sure it even ends there but the above are all I know of) Beyond just searching all the above locations, the results are formatted very nicely to give some contextual information based on where the result came from. For example, if a keyword search returned results from CodePlex, each row in the search results screen would include a large amount of information specific to CodePlex such as: Looking at the above results immediately tells you everything from the page views to the CodePlex ratings. All in all, knowing that this much information is indexed and available from a single search location will lead me to utilize this as one of my initial searches for development information.

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• Running Jetty under Windows Azure Using RoleEntryPoint in a Worker Role

  - by Shawn Cicoria

  This post is built upon the work of Mario Kosmiskas and David C. Chou’s prior postings – from here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mariok/archive/2011/01/05/deploying-java-applications-in-azure.aspx  http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dachou/archive/2010/03/21/run-java-with-jetty-in-windows-azure.aspx As Mario points out in his post, when you need to have more control over the process that starts, it generally is better left to a RoleEntryPoint capability that as of now, requires the use of a CLR based assembly that is deployed as part of the package to Azure. There were things I liked especially about Mario’s post – specifically, the ability to pull down the JRE and Jetty runtimes at role startup and instantiate the process using the extracted bits.  The way Mario initialized the java process (and Jetty) was to take advantage of a role startup task configured as part of the service definition.  This is a great quick way to kick off processes or tasks prior to your role entry point.  However, if you need access to service configuration values or role events, that’s where RoleEntryPoint comes in.  For this PoC sample I moved the logic for retrieving the bits for the jre and jetty to the worker roles OnStart – in addition to moving the process kickoff to the OnStart method.  The Run method at this point is there to loop and just report the status of the java process. Beyond just making things more parameterized, both Mario’s and David’s articles still form the essence of the approach. The solution that accompanies this post provides all the necessary .NET based Visual Studio project.  In addition, you’ll need: 1. Jetty 7 runtime http://www.eclipse.org/jetty/downloads.php 2. JRE http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html Once you have these the first step is to create archives (zips) of the distributions.  For this PoC, the structure of the archive requires that the root of the archive looks as follows: JRE6.zip jetty---.zip Upload the contents to a storage container (block blob), and for this example I used /archives as the location.  The service configuration has several settings that allow, which is the advantage of using RoleEntryPoint, the ability to provide these things via native configuration support from Azure in a worker role. Storage Explorer You can use development storage for testing this out – the zipped version of the solution is configured for development storage.  When you’re ready to deploy, you update the two settings – 1 for diagnostics and the other for the storage container where the /archives are going to be stored. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="HostedJetty" osFamily="2" osVersion="*"> <Role name="JettyWorker"> <Instances count="1" /> <ConfigurationSettings> <!--<Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Diagnostics.ConnectionString" value="DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=<accountName>;AccountKey=<accountKey>" />--> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Diagnostics.ConnectionString" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" /> <Setting name="JettyArchive" value="jetty-distribution-7.3.0.v20110203b.zip" /> <Setting name="StartRole" value="true" /> <Setting name="BlobContainer" value="archives" /> <Setting name="JreArchive" value="jre6.zip" /> <!--<Setting name="StorageCredentials" value="DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=<accountName>;AccountKey=<accountKey>"/>--> <Setting name="StorageCredentials" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" />   For interacting with Storage you can use several tools – one tool that I like is from the Windows Azure CAT team located here: http://appfabriccat.com/2011/02/exploring-windows-azure-storage-apis-by-building-a-storage-explorer-application/  and shown in the prior picture At runtime, during role initialization and startup, Azure will call into your RoleEntryPoint.  At that time the code will do a dynamic pull of the 2 archives and extract – using the Sharp Zip Lib <link> as Mario had demonstrated in his sample.  The only different here is the use of CLR code vs. PowerShell (which is really CLR, but that’s another discussion). At this point, once the 2 zips are extracted, the Role’s file system looks as follows: Worker Role approot From there, the OnStart method (which also does the download and unzip using a simple StorageHelper class) kicks off the Java path and now you have Java! Task Manager Jetty Sample Page A couple of things I’m working on to enhance this is to extract the jre and jetty bits not to the appRoot but to a resource location defined as part of the service definition. ServiceDefinition.csdef <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceDefinition name="HostedJetty" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceDefinition"> <WorkerRole name="JettyWorker"> <Imports> <Import moduleName="Diagnostics" /> <Import moduleName="RemoteAccess" /> <Import moduleName="RemoteForwarder" /> </Imports> <Endpoints> <InputEndpoint name="JettyPort" protocol="tcp" port="80" localPort="8080" /> </Endpoints> <LocalResources> <LocalStorage name="Archives" cleanOnRoleRecycle="false" sizeInMB="100" /> </LocalResources>   As the concept matures a bit, being able to update dynamically the content or jar files as part of a running java solution is something that is possible through continued enhancement of this simple model. The Visual Studio 2010 Solution is located here: HostingJavaSln_NDA.zip

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• SQL Authority News – Play by Play with Pinal Dave – A Birthday Gift

  - by Pinal Dave

  Today is my birthday. Personal Note When I was young, I was always looking forward to my birthday as on this day, I used to get gifts from everybody. Now when I am getting old on each of my birthday, I have almost same feeling but the direction is different. Now on each of my birthday, I feel like giving gifts to everybody. I have received lots of support, love and respect from everybody; and now I must return it back.Well, on this birthday, I have very unique gifts for everybody – my latest course on SQL Server. How I Tune Performance I often get questions where I am asked how do I work on a normal day. I am often asked that how do I work when I have performance tuning project is assigned to me. Lots of people have expressed their desire that they want me to explain and demonstrate my own method of solving performance problem when I am facing real world problem. It is a pretty difficult task as in the real world, nothing goes as planned and usually planned demonstrations have no place there. The real world, demands real solutions and in a timely fashion. If a consultant goes to industry and does not demonstrate his/her capabilities in very first few minutes, it does not matter how much fame he/she is, the door is shown to them eventually. It is true and in my early career, I have faced it quite commonly. I have learned the trick to be honest from the start and request absolutely transparent communication from the organization where I am to consult. Play by Play Play by Play is a very unique setup. It is not planned and it is a step by step course. It is like a reality show – a very real encounter to the problem and real problem solving approach. I had a great time doing this course. Geoffrey Grosenbach (VP of Pluralsight) sits down with me to see what a SQL Server Admin does in the real world. This Play-by-Play focuses on SQL Server performance tuning and I go over optimizing queries and fine-tuning the server. The table of content of this course is very simple. Introduction In the introduction I explained my basic strategies when I am approached by a customer for performance tuning. Basic Information Gathering In this module I explain how I do gather various information for performance tuning project. It is very crucial to demonstrate to customers for consultant his capability of solving problem. I attempt to resolve a small problem which gives a big positive impact on performance, consultant have to gather proper information from the start. I demonstrate in this module, how one can collect all the important performance tuning metrics. Removing Performance Bottleneck In this module, I build upon the previous module’s statistics collected. I analysis various performance tuning measures and immediately start implementing various tweaks on the performance, which will start improving the performance of my server. This is a very effective method and it gives immediate return of efforts. Index Optimization Indexes are considered as a silver bullet for performance tuning. However, it is not true always there are plenty of examples where indexes even performs worst after implemented. The key is to understand a few of the basic properties of the index and implement the right things at the right time. In this module, I describe in detail how to do index optimizations and what are right and wrong with Index. If you are a DBA or developer, and if your application is running slow – this is must attend module for you. I have some really interesting stories to tell as well. Optimize Query with Rewrite Every problem has more than one solution, in this module we will see another very famous, but hard to master skills for performance tuning – Query Rewrite. There are few do’s and don’ts for any query rewrites. I take a very simple example and demonstrate how query rewrite can improve the performance of the query at many folds. I also share some real world funny stories in this module. This course is hosted at Pluralsight. You will need a valid login for Pluralsight to watch  Play by Play: Pinal Dave course. You can also sign up for FREE Trial of Pluralsight to watch this course. As today is my birthday – I will give 10 people (randomly) who will express their desire to learn this course, a free code. Please leave your comment and I will send you free code to watch this course for free. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Training, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Video

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• ORA-4030 Troubleshooting

  - by [email protected]

  QUICKLINK: Note 399497.1 FAQ ORA-4030 Note 1088087.1 : ORA-4030 Diagnostic Tools [Video]   Have you observed an ORA-0430 error reported in your alert log? ORA-4030 errors are raised when memory or resources are requested from the Operating System and the Operating System is unable to provide the memory or resources.   The arguments included with the ORA-4030 are often important to narrowing down the problem. For more specifics on the ORA-4030 error and scenarios that lead to this problem, see Note 399497.1 FAQ ORA-4030.   Looking for the best way to diagnose? There are several available diagnostic tools (error tracing, 11g Diagnosibility, OCM, Process Memory Guides, RDA, OSW, diagnostic scripts) that collectively can prove powerful for identifying the cause of the ORA-4030.    Error Tracing   The ORA-4030 error usually occurs on the client workstation and for this reason, a trace file and alert log entry may not have been generated on the server side.  It may be necessary to add additional tracing events to get initial diagnostics on the problem. To setup tracing to trap the ORA-4030, on the server use the following in SQLPlus: alter system set events '4030 trace name heapdump level 536870917;name errorstack level 3';Once the error reoccurs with the event set, you can turn off  tracing using the following command in SQLPlus:alter system set events '4030 trace name context off; name context off';NOTE:   See more diagnostics information to collect in Note 399497.1  11g DiagnosibilityStarting with Oracle Database 11g Release 1, the Diagnosability infrastructure was introduced which places traces and core files into a location controlled by the DIAGNOSTIC_DEST initialization parameter when an incident, such as an ORA-4030 occurs.  For earlier versions, the trace file will be written to either USER_DUMP_DEST (if the error was caught in a user process) or BACKGROUND_DUMP_DEST (if the error was caught in a background process like PMON or SMON). The trace file may contain vital information about what led to the error condition.    Note 443529.1 11g Quick Steps to Package and Send Critical Error Diagnostic Informationto Support[Video]  Oracle Configuration Manager (OCM) Oracle Configuration Manager (OCM) works with My Oracle Support to enable proactive support capability that helps you organize, collect and manage your Oracle configurations. Oracle Configuration Manager Quick Start Guide Note 548815.1: My Oracle Support Configuration Management FAQ Note 250434.1: BULLETIN: Learn More About My Oracle Support Configuration Manager    General Process Memory Guides   An ORA-4030 indicates a limit has been reached with respect to the Oracle process private memory allocation.    Each Operating System will handle memory allocations with Oracle slightly differently. Solaris     Note 163763.1Linux       Note 341782.1IBM AIX   Notes 166491.1 and 123754.1HP           Note 166490.1Windows Note 225349.1, Note 373602.1, Note 231159.1, Note 269495.1, Note 762031.1Generic    Note 169706.1   RDAThe RDA report will show more detailed information about the database and Server Configuration. Note 414966.1 RDA Documentation Index Download RDA -- refer to Note 314422.1 Remote Diagnostic Agent (RDA) 4 - Getting Started OS Watcher (OSW)This tool is designed to gather Operating System side statistics to compare with the findings from the database.  This is a key tool in cases where memory usage is higher than expected on the server while not experiencing ORA-4030 errors currently. Reference more details on setup and usage in Note 301137.1 OS Watcher User Guide Diagnostic Scripts   Refer to Note 1088087.1 : ORA-4030 Diagnostic Tools [Video] Common Causes/Solutions The ORA-4030 can occur for a variety of reasons.  Some common causes are:   * OS Memory limit reached such as physical memory and/or swap/virtual paging.   For instance, IBM AIX can experience ORA-4030 issues related to swap scenarios.  See Note 740603.1 10.2.0.4 not using large pages on AIX for more on that problem. Also reference Note 188149.1 for pointers on 10g and stack size issues.* OS limits reached (kernel or user shell limits) that limit overall, user level or process level memory * OS limit on PGA memory size due to SGA attach address           Reference: Note 1028623.6 SOLARIS How to Relocate the SGA* Oracle internal limit on functionality like PL/SQL varrays or bulk collections. ORA-4030 errors will include arguments like "pl/sql vc2" "pmucalm coll" "pmuccst: adt/re".  See Coding Pointers for pointers on application design to get around these issues* Application design causing limits to be reached* Bug - space leaks, heap leaks   ***For reference to the content in this blog, refer to Note.1088267.1 Master Note for Diagnosing ORA-4030

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• Recent Innovations to ILOM

  - by B.Koch

  by Josh Rosen If you are wondering how Oracle can make some of the most advanced, reliable, and fault tolerant servers on the market, look no further than Oracle Integrated Lights Out Manager or ILOM.  We build ILOM into every server we create, from Oracle x86 Systems such as X3-2 to the SPARC T-Series family. Oracle ILOM is an embedded service processor, but it's really more than that.  It's a computer within a computer.  It's smart, it's tightly integrated into all aspects of the server's operation, and it's a big reason why Oracle servers are used for some of the most mission-critical workloads out there. To understand the value of ILOM, there is no better place to start than its fault management capability.  We have taken the sophisticated fault management architecture from Solaris, developed and refined over a decade, and built it into each and every ILOM. ILOM detects a potential issue at its earliest stage, watching low-level sensors.   If the root cause of a problem is not clear from a single error reading, ILOM will look for other clues and combine multiple pieces of information to correctly identify a failing component. ILOM provides peace of mind. We tailor our fault management for each new server platform that we produce.  You can rest assured that it's always actively keeping the server healthy.  And if there is a problem, you can be confident it will let you know by sending you a notification by e-mail or trap. We also heard IT managers tell us they needed a Ph.D. in computer engineering to manage today's servers. It doesn't have to be that way.  Thanks to the latest innovations to Oracle ILOM, we present hardware inventory and status in way that makes sense – to anyone.  Green means everything is healthy and red means something is wrong.  When a component needs to be replaced a clear message indicates where the problem is and points you at a knowledge article about that problem.  It's that simple. Simpler management and simple interfaces mean reduced complexity and lower costs to manage.  And we know that's really important. ILOM does all this while also providing advanced service processor features you depend on for managing enterprise class systems.  You can remotely control the server power, interact with a virtual video console for the server, and mount media on the server remotely.  There is no need to spend money on a KVM switch to get this functionality. And when people hear how advanced ILOM is, they can't believe ILOM is free.  All features are enabled and included with each Oracle server that you buy.  There are no advanced licenses you need to purchase or features to unlock. Configuring ILOM has also never been easier.  It is now possible to configure almost all aspects of the server directly from ILOM.  This includes changing BIOS settings, persistently modifying boot order, and optimizing power settings -- all directly from ILOM. But Oracle's innovation does not stop with ILOM.  Oracle has engineered Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center to integrate directly with ILOM, providing centralized management across all of our servers. Ops Center will discover each of your Oracle servers over the network by searching for ILOMs.  When it finds one, it knows how to communicate with ILOM to monitoring and configure that server from application to disk. Since every server that Oracle produces, from x86 Systems to SPARC T-Series up and down the line, comes with Oracle ILOM, you can manage all Oracle servers in the same way.  And while all of our servers may have different components on the inside, each with their specialized functions, the way you integrate them and the way you monitor and manage them is exactly the same. Oracle ILOM is state-of-art.  If you are looking for a server that make systems management simple and is easy to integrate and maintain, check out the latest advances to Oracle ILOM. Josh Rosen is a Principal Product Manager at Oracle and previously spent more than a decade as a developer and architect of system management software. Josh has worked on system management for many of Oracle's hardware products ranging from the earliest blade systems to the latest Oracle x86 servers.

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• Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Award Winners 2012: ADF & Fusion Development

  - by Dana Singleterry

  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-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; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Awards honor customers for their cutting-edge solutions using Oracle Fusion Middleware. Winners are selected based on the uniqueness of their business case, business benefits, level of impact relative to the size of the organization, complexity and magnitude of implementation, and the originality of architecture. The awards were presented during Oracle OpenWorld 2012 and following winners are for the category of ADF & Fusion Development. Micros – an OPN Platinum partner – has been working closely with Oracle product management teams in applying industry best practices in the development of their solutions. Their current application suite for the hospitality industry was built on Oracle Forms and the Oracle database running on MS Windows. The next generation of this suite is being developed and released in modules that are now based on Oracle FMW (including ADF) 11g technologies and Oracle Database 11g all running on Oracle Linux. The primary driver was that of modernization and hence the reason Oracle ADF was selected to provide a rich UI for business processes that could be served up through traditional methods or through mobile devices globally. SOA Suite & ADF allowed for loosely-coupled services that could evolve with the needs of the business. Micros's application innovations includes the use of business application portlets that have been published from ADF Faces Task Flows generated using WebCenter portlet libraries  & Oracle Metadata Services (MDS) with multi-layered customizations using Oracle WebCenter Composer. PCS (Marfin Egnatia Bank of Greece) – PCS Wealth Management is a WM Software Solution, which captures and automates the WM business processes allowing Service Providers to allocate enough time and effort into Customer Service and Investment Strategies, under Advisory or Execution-Only Services. The Product is built upon the latest Web Technologies and ensures Best Practices covering all functional expectations, meeting local regulatory requirements and discovering successful opportunities for the WM Customers' Portfolios. The new unified Wealth Management system offers an unparalleled User Interface taking full advantage of the user friendly ADF Faces Components to a great extent, all serving Private Banking purposes. The application offers a true Account Officer Cockpit with shallow navigation, one-click access to informed decisions and a perfect customer service. ADF Grids and Pivots, the Data Visualization Components, as well as the Calendar and Map Components are cleverly used to help the user eliminate the usage of Excel, Outlook and other systems. PCS's application is unique in the way it leverages the ADF Faces data visualization components to create a truly attractive and insightful dashboard for their application. PCS Wealth Management Demo Qualcomm – Qualcomm, a $17B per year company, designs and sells semiconductor products for wireless telecommunications, mobile and computing markets. In addition, Qualcomm companies provide various hardware and software products to facilitate the design, development and deployment of phones and the applications that run on them. Qualcomm’s challenge has been to not only develop and deploy new business system functions to keep pace with customer demand, but also to provide a customer collaboration capability that is sufficiently robust, easy to use, and flexible to meet emerging and future needs. Qualcomm has taken successful steps in building and deploying the customer engagement platform Ieveraging various Oracle technologies including Fusion Middleware (ADF, SOA, OBIEE) and their proven ERP foundation of EBS and 11g databases. The new platform delivers a more unified and “seamless” business solution with a consistent, modern “look and feel” all based on standard business processes which facilitate efficient collaboration with Qualcomm and its customers. The look and feel leverages ADF in innovative ways and includes hover over navigation, custom pagination components, and skinning. Qualcomm has exposed a services layer that provides significant functionality including order-to-ship, quote-to-order, customer on-boarding and contract validation. Qualcomm's creative designs leverage Oracle's SOA Suite to integrate with Oracle EBS and desperate applications to provide a rich user interface through the use use of Oracle ADF Faces Rich Client Components providing a self-service solution to their customers.

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• Pella Increases Online Appointment Scheduling and Rapidly Personalizes and Updates Marketing Initiatives

  - by Michael Snow

  Originally posted on Oracle Customers page.Oracle Customer: Pella CorporationLocation:  Pella, IowaIndustry: Industrial Manufacturing Employees:  7,100 Pella Corporation is an innovative leader in creating a better view for homes and businesses by designing, testing, manufacturing, and installing quality windows and doors for new construction, remodeling, and replacement applications. A family-owned company, Pella has an 88-year history of innovation and, today, is the second-largest manufacturer in the country of windows and doors, including patio, entry, and storm doors. The company has 10 manufacturing facilities in United States and window and door showrooms across the United States and Canada. In-home consultations are an important part of Pella’s sales process. Several years ago, the company launched an online appointment scheduling tool to improve customer convenience. While the functionality worked well, the company wanted to increase online conversion rates and decrease the number of incomplete, online appointment schedules. It also wanted to give its business analysts and other line-of-business personnel the ability to update the scheduling tool and interface quickly, without needing IT team intervention and recoding, to better capitalize on opportunities and personalize the interface for specific markets. Pella also looked to reduce IT complexity by selecting a system that integrated easily with its Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 enterprise applications.Pella, which has a large Oracle footprint, selected Oracle WebCenter Sites as the foundation for its new, real-time appointment scheduling application. It used the solution to re-engineer the scheduling process and the information required to set up an appointment. Just a few months after launch, it is seeing improvement in the number of appointments booked online and experiencing fewer abandoned appointments during the scheduling process. As important, Pella can now quickly and easily make changes to images, video, and content displayed on the scheduling tool interface, delivering greater business agility. Previously, such changes required a developer and weeks of coding and testing. Today, a member of Pella’s business analyst team can complete the changes in hours. This capability enables Pella to personalize the Web experience for customers. For example, it can display different products or images for clients in different regions.The solution is also highly scalable. Pella is using Oracle WebCenter Sites for appointment scheduling now and plans to migrate Pella.com, its configurator tool, and dealer microsites onto the platform. Further, Pella plans to leverage the solution to optimize mobile devices. “Moving ahead, we expect to extensively leverage Oracle WebCenter Sites to gain greater flexibility in updating the Web experience, thanks to the ability to make updates quickly without developer resources. Segmentation and targeting capabilities will allow us to create a more personalized experience across both traditional and mobile platforms,” said Teri Lancaster, IT manager, customer experience applications, Pella Corporation. A word from Pella Corporation "Oracle WebCenter Sites?from the start?delivered important benefits. We’ve redesigned the online scheduling process and are seeing more potential customers completing consultation bookings online. More important, the solution opens a world of other possibilities as we plan to migrate Pella.com and our dealer microsites to the platform, and leverage it to optimize the Web experience for our mobile devices.” – Teri Lancaster, IT Manager, Customer Experience Applications, Pella Corporation Oracle Product and Services Oracle WebCenter Sites Why Oracle Pella has a long-standing relationship with Oracle. “We look to Oracle first for a solution. Our Oracle account team came to us with several solutions, and Oracle WebCenter Sites delivered the scalability, ease-of-use, flexibility, and scalability that we required for the appointment scheduling initiative and other Web projects on the horizon, including migrating Pella.com and optimizing our site for mobile platforms,”said Teri Lancaster, IT manager, customer experience applications, Pella Corporation. Implementation Process The Pella implementation team, working with Oracle partner Element Solutions, LLC, integrated the appointment setting application with Pella.com as well as the company’s Oracle E-Business Suite customer relationship management applications. Using Oracle WebCenter Site’s development tools and subversion capabilities to develop the application, the Element Solutions and Pella teams could work remotely and collaboratively, accelerating deployment. Pella went live with the new scheduling tool in just six months. Partner Oracle PartnerElement Solutions, LLC Element Solutions was instrumental at every major stage of the project, including design creation and approval, development, training, and rollout. “Element Solutions was a vital partner for our Oracle WebCenter Sites initiative. The team provided guidance, and more important, critical knowledge transfer at every stage?which equipped us to get the most out of this powerful and versatile solution. We were definitely collaboration partners,” Lancaster said. Resources Pella Corporation Upgrades Enterprise Applications to Continue to Improve Manufacturing Efficiency Thousands of Customers Successfully and Smoothly Upgrade to Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1 for New Functionality, Lower Operating Costs and Improved Shared Operations Managing the Virtual World

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• Oracle Database 12c Spatial: Vector Performance Acceleration

  - by Okcan Yasin Saygili-Oracle

  Most business information has a location component, such as customer addresses, sales territories and physical assets. Businesses can take advantage of their geographic information by incorporating location analysis and intelligence into their information systems. This allows organizations to make better decisions, respond to customers more effectively, and reduce operational costs – increasing ROI and creating competitive advantage. Oracle Database, the industry’s most advanced database,  includes native location capabilities, fully integrated in the kernel, for fast, scalable, reliable and secure spatial and massive graph applications. It is a foundation for deploying enterprise-wide spatial information systems and locationenabled business applications. Developers can extend existing Oracle-based tools and applications, since they can easily incorporate location information directly in their applications, workflows, and services. Spatial Features The geospatial data features of Oracle Spatial and Graph option support complex geographic information systems (GIS) applications, enterprise applications and location services applications. Oracle Spatial and Graph option extends the spatial query and analysis features included in every edition of Oracle Database with the Oracle Locator feature, and provides a robust foundation for applications that require advanced spatial analysis and processing in the Oracle Database. It supports all major spatial data types and models, addressing challenging business-critical requirements from various industries, including transportation, utilities, energy, public sector, defense and commercial location intelligence. Network Data Model Graph Features The Network Data Model graph explicitly stores and maintains a persistent data model withnetwork connectivity and provides network analysis capability such as shortest path, nearest neighbors, within cost and reachability. It loads partitioned networks into memory on demand, overcomingthe limitations of in-memory analysis. Partitioning massive networks into manageable sub-networkssimplifies the network analysis. RDF Semantic Graph Features RDF Semantic Graph has native support for World Wide Web Consortium standards. It has open, scalable, and secure features for storing RDF/OWL ontologies anddata; native inference with OWL 2, SKOS and user-defined rules; and querying RDF/OWL data withSPARQL 1.1, Java APIs, and SPARQLgraph patterns in SQL. Video: Oracle Spatial and Graph Overview Oracle spatial is embeded on oracle database product. So ,we can use oracle installer (OUI).The Oracle Universal Installer (OUI) is used to install Oracle Database software. OUI is a graphical user interface utility that enables you to view the Oracle software that is installed on your machine, install new Oracle Database software, and delete Oracle software that you no longer need to use. Online Help is available to guide you through the installation process. One of the installation options is to create a database. If you select database creation, OUI automatically starts Oracle Database Configuration Assistant (DBCA) to guide you through the process of creating and configuring a database. If you do not create a database during installation, you must invoke DBCA after you have installed the software to create a database. You can also use DBCA to create additional databases. For installing Oracle Database 12c you may check the Installing Oracle Database Software and Creating a Database tutorial under the Oracle Database 12c 2-Day DBA Series.You can always check if spatial is available in your database using  "select comp_id, version, status, comp_name from dba_registry where comp_id='SDO';"   One of the most notable improvements with Oracle Spatial and Graph 12c can be seen in performance increases in vector data operations. Enabling the Spatial Vector Acceleration feature (available with the Spatial option) dramatically improves the performance of commonly used vector data operations, such as sdo_distance, sdo_aggr_union, and sdo_inside. With 12c, these operations also run more efficiently in parallel than in prior versions through the use of metadata caching. For organizations that have been facing processing limitations, these enhancements enable developers to make a small set of configuration changes and quickly realize significant performance improvements. Results include improved index performance, enhanced geometry engine performance, optimized secondary filter optimizations for Spatial operators, and improved CPU and memory utilization for many advanced vector functions. Vector performance acceleration is especially beneficial when using Oracle Exadata Database Machine and other large-scale systems. Oracle Spatial and Graph vector performance acceleration builds on general improvements available to all SDO_GEOMETRY operations in these areas: Caching of index metadata, Concurrent update mechanisms, and Optimized spatial predicate selectivity and cost functions. These optimizations enable more efficient use of: CPU, Memory, and Partitioning Resulting in substantial query performance improvements.UsageTo accelerate the performance of spatial operators, it is recommended that you set the SPATIAL_VECTOR_ACCELERATION database system parameter to the value TRUE. (This parameter is authorized for use only by licensed Oracle Spatial users, and its default value is FALSE.) You can set this parameter for the whole system or for a single session. To set the value for the whole system, do either of the following:Enter the following statement from a suitably privileged account:   ALTER SYSTEM SET SPATIAL_VECTOR_ACCELERATION = TRUE;Add the following to the database initialization file (xxxinit.ora):   SPATIAL_VECTOR_ACCELERATION = TRUE;To set the value for the current session, enter the following statement from a suitably privileged account:   ALTER SESSION SET SPATIAL_VECTOR_ACCELERATION = TRUE; Checkout the complete list of new features on Oracle.com @ http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/options/spatialandgraph/overview/index.html Spatial and Graph Data Sheet (PDF) Spatial and Graph White Paper (PDF)

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• Dual Boot Oracle Solaris 11/11 and Linux (Ubuntu 11.10/grub2)

  - by HartmutStreppel

  After having worked with Open Solaris on my laptop first, then with an upgrade to Oracle Solaris 11 Express, I finally did a fresh install of Oracle Solaris 11/11, when it became available. I am not a big fan of upgrades as I know that I am not the perfect administrator and my system gets spoiled with unclean configurations, outdated packages and wrong settings that cannot be reversed. So I prefer to start from scratch. Especially with Oracle Solaris 11 I wanted to have a system just like a customer would have it in production. The installation was smooth - more or less, if I had only read the documentation a bit better in advance. For a number of reasons I prefer a dual boot system. The most important one is, that especially with mobile devices you often run into network problems. And you have a hard time figuring out where the problem is: in your laptop hardware, in the OS you are running, or really within the network. If you have an alternate OS to boot, you can exclude the OS and your hardware. This makes you feel better. The second OS should be a Linux variant - and for some not so obvious reason I decided to go with the latest Ubuntu release (11.10). It replaced a very old Open Suse installation that had not been booted for a while. I knew that it was probably best to install Ubuntu first and then Oracle Solaris 11, as this would put the right boot information for Oracle Solaris  into the MBR and onto the root partition. But then, how to enable dual boot with the 2 OSes. Searching the web one mainly finds information about dual boot of: Linux and Linux Linux and Windows I do not want to explain which wrong configurations I worked through, but I prefer to explain the final setup, which is extremely simple, and I am wondering why this is not covered as the easiest solution for most dual boot setups. I use chainloader from and to both OS'es, with the only disadvantage that I have to confirm two grub menus each time I want to boot the "other" OS. Still there were some hurdles to jump over: Ubuntu did not like getting its boot blocks being placed on the partition instead of the disk; I must admit that I do not fully understand why. But using the --force option you could get that done Ubuntu needs an active partition; that was easy to achieve grub2 uses a different numbering scheme for the partitions. That is in the docs, if you read them. BTW: The usual disclaimer is valid. There is  no guarantee that what I describe works or works well. Please back up your data carefully before trying any of this. So, Oracle Solaris 11 is installed on the first partition and Ubuntu on the third. With Ubtuntu things initially were a bit more complicated, as I did not know how to boot it. And the live CD did not offer the capability to boot the on-disk image (at least I did not find it). So I booted the live CD, mounted the Ubuntu installation at /mnt and wrote the boot blocks into the partition. This is something that does not seem to be recommended, at least grub-install refrained from doing what I intended. After a bit more research I was bold enough to use the --force option and wrote the boot blocks to /dev/sda3 using grub-install --boot-directory=/mnt/boot --force --no-floppy /dev/sda3 So, I now had a system with the Solaris boot loader in the MBR, Solaris specific boot blocks on the Solaris root partition and Ubuntu specific boot blocks in the Ubuntu partition. I just had to chain them together and I was done. Oracle Solaris 11: I have added the following lines to /rpool/boot/grub/menu.lst (be aware of the /rpool!!!!) title Ubuntu 11.10root (hd0,2)makeactivechainloader +1boot The Ubuntu root file system sits on the third partition (/dev/sda3). Ubuntu: I have added the following lines to /etc/grub.d/40_custom: menuentry "Solaris 11/11" {      set root=(hd0,1)      chainloader +1} Two things need to be mentioned: a) grub2 starts numbering partitions with 1; so my /dev/sda1 is partition 1. b) Oracle Solaris boots without the partition being made active (btw: the command to make a partition active with grub2 is "parttool (hd0,1) boot+", which currently does not work for me). As debugging grub is a bit complicated, I used the grub CLI to perform some tests and also used a tool, that I found on sourceforge.net that was able to prepare a list of all boot loaders on all partitions. This told me that the basic setup was correct. Unfortunately I lost it in the live CD environment. I hope this is helpful for some of the readers.Hartmut

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• WebLogic 12.1.2 launch webcast on-demand & WebLogic Community feedback

  - by JuergenKress

  You missed the WebLogic & Coherence & JDeveloper 12.1.2 launch Webcast? Watch it on-demand: View On-Demand Version Read the Q&A from this Webcast Special thanks for Frank Munz and Simon Haslams our WebLogic Community experts on the phone!Thanks for the community for the great twitter feedback send us your tweets @wlscommunity #WebLogicCommunity WebLogic Community Join the #WebLogic Partner Community for the latest WebLogic 12.1.2 details and upcoming trainings http://www.WeblogicCommunity.com #OracleCAF Oracle WebLogic ?Unified update, patch, install process is a key component in reducing Ops cost in #WebLogic 12c #OracleCAF WebLogic Community Demo time #WebLogic cluster creation in seconds #OracleCAF by @mike_lehmann & Will Lyons #WebLogicCommunity pic.twitter.com/gyb8YqnKco Oracle WebLogic ?Dynamic server clusters to scale apps - coming up in #WebLogic 12c launch. #OracleCAF http://pub.vitrue.com/lBmE Oracle WebLogic ?Key feature of #WebLogic 12.1.2 release: @Oracle Database 12c integration. #OracleCAF #OracleDB OTNArchBeat ?Many tech posts on #weblogic available on #oracleace Rene van Wijk's blog. #OracleCAF http://pub.vitrue.com/O9Cn Frank Munz ?Correct me if I am wrong, but this could be the first WebLogic 12.1.2 training ever: http://www.ausoug.org.au/insync13/insync13-frank-munz.html … Cloud Foundation ?.#WebLogic 12.1.2 deep dive starts NOW during #OracleCAF launch. #Coherence up next in a few minutes. http://pub.vitrue.com/HPHM Maciej Gruszka ?Watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiCoO_QGBsU&feature=c4-overview&list=UUrEIV9YO17leE9aJWamKEPw … at #WebLogic channel with @dave_cabelus about Elastic JMS Oracle WebLogic ?Pick up the new book by @frankmunz on WLS 12c http://amzn.to/1ceppgZ #WebLogic #OracleCAF OTNArchBeat ?@OTNArchBeat 31 Jul @frankmunz 's #WebLogic YouTube channel >> watch and learn #OracleCAF http://pub.vitrue.com/B4IM WebLogic Community ?@frankmunz WebLogic expert build elastic clouds with #WebLogic http://www.munzandmore.com/blog #OracleCAF #WebLogicCommunity pic.twitter.com/UK5UKjXUVl OTNArchBeat @frankmunz 's blog, covering #weblog #cloud and more #OracleCAF http://pub.vitrue.com/N8ST OTNArchBeat ?oracladmin: @simon_haslam 's Oracle Fusion Middleware blog #OracleCAF #oracleace http://pub.vitrue.com/cwGx Yuri Grinshteyn ?Coherence uses WLS tooling, including deployment, and can be part of the WLS cluster. Well done there. #OracleCAF Maciej Gruszka ?#Coherence 12.1.2 auto updates data grid on changes inside DB thru #GoldenGate HotCache - another cool feature of #OracleCAF Oracle WebLogic ?From #OracleCAF launch: Tight integration tween WLS, #Coherence and #OracleDB. Dynamic clusters, OSS support & more http://pub.vitrue.com/3NL9 OTNArchBeat ?25 recent no-fluff technical articles on Oracle WebLogic #OracleCAF http://pub.vitrue.com/FEG5 Maciej Gruszka ?@dave_cabelus Elastic JMS is my favourite capability of #WebLogic 12.1.2 WebLogic Community ?Dynamic WebLogic Clustering COOL - what is Wour favorite 12.1.2 feature? #OracleCAF #WebLogicCommunity pic.twitter.com/T8lvDMJ1U0 WebLogic Community ?What is the coolest #WebLogic 12.1.2 feature? Let us know @wlscommunity http://weblogiccommunity.com/2013/07/30/launch-webcast-weblogic-coherence-jdeveloper-adf-12-1-2-00-july-31st-2013/ … #WebLogicCommunity Simon Haslam ?I'm speaking(!) on the panel session with @frankmunz & Matt Rosen on the CAF/WebLogic 12.1.2 launch: 6pm UK today https://event.on24.com/eventRegistration/EventLobbyServlet?target=registration.jsp&eventid=651242&partnerref=CAF_Launch_OCOM_07312013&sourcepage=register … Markus Eisele ?#WebLogic 12.1.2 - an Important New Release for Middleware Admins http://bit.ly/1cmtqhX by @simon_haslam OracleEnterpriseMgr ?The JVM diagnostics features of #EM12c are now shown in a demo by @hawkinsg1 at the #OracleCAF launch http://bit.ly/caflaunch Shaun Smith ?Curious about the new #Coherence 12.1.2 GoldenGate HotCache feature? I explain all on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0TIG3hgbg0&feature=share&list=PLxqhEJ4CA3JtQwuPS8Qmd88lGX-gsIbHV … #OracleCAF Maciej Gruszka ?Try for Yourself -- Download the products Oracle WebLogic 12.1.2: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/fusion-middleware/downloads/index.html … Oracle Coherence 12c: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/coherence/downloads/index.htm … WebLogic Community ?What is Your favorite feature in #WebLogic 12.1.2 ? cool stuff! #OracleCAF #WebLogicCommunity http://WeblogicCommunity.com pic.twitter.com/xjR05tiaQj We encourage you to learn more about all the products by reviewing the following resources: Try for Yourself -- Download the products Oracle WebLogic 12.1.2 Oracle Coherence 12c Enterprise Manager Developer Tools WebLogic Community blog Learn more Read the Oracle WebLogic Business Whitepaper Read the Oracle Coherence Business Whitepaper Read the Oracle WebLogic and Oracle Database Integration Whitepaper Get Training from Oracle University Check out the Oracle WebLogic YouTube Channel Check out the Oracle Coherence YouTube Channel WebLogic Partner Community Registration The Webcast is available on-demand Watch Webcast Now WebLogic Community For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Technorati Tags: Weblogic 12.1.2,WebLogic Community,Oracle,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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• Talend Enterprise Data Integration overperforms on Oracle SPARC T4

  - by Amir Javanshir

  The SPARC T microprocessor, released in 2005 by Sun Microsystems, and now continued at Oracle, has a good track record in parallel execution and multi-threaded performance. However it was less suited for pure single-threaded workloads. The new SPARC T4 processor is now filling that gap by offering a 5x better single-thread performance over previous generations. Following our long-term relationship with Talend, a fast growing ISV positioned by Gartner in the “Visionaries” quadrant of the “Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools”, we decided to test some of their integration components with the T4 chip, more precisely on a T4-1 system, in order to verify first hand if this new processor stands up to its promises. Several tests were performed, mainly focused on: Single-thread performance of the new SPARC T4 processor compared to an older SPARC T2+ processor Overall throughput of the SPARC T4-1 server using multiple threads The tests consisted in reading large amounts of data --ten's of gigabytes--, processing and writing them back to a file or an Oracle 11gR2 database table. They are CPU, memory and IO bound tests. Given the main focus of this project --CPU performance--, bottlenecks were removed as much as possible on the memory and IO sub-systems. When possible, the data to process was put into the ZFS filesystem cache, for instance. Also, two external storage devices were directly attached to the servers under test, each one divided in two ZFS pools for read and write operations. Multi-thread: Testing throughput on the Oracle T4-1 The tests were performed with different number of simultaneous threads (1, 2, 4, 8, 12, 16, 32, 48 and 64) and using different storage devices: Flash, Fibre Channel storage, two stripped internal disks and one single internal disk. All storage devices used ZFS as filesystem and volume management. Each thread read a dedicated 1GB-large file containing 12.5M lines with the following structure: customerID;FirstName;LastName;StreetAddress;City;State;Zip;Cust_Status;Since_DT;Status_DT 1;Ronald;Reagan;South Highway;Santa Fe;Montana;98756;A;04-06-2006;09-08-2008 2;Theodore;Roosevelt;Timberlane Drive;Columbus;Louisiana;75677;A;10-05-2009;27-05-2008 3;Andrew;Madison;S Rustle St;Santa Fe;Arkansas;75677;A;29-04-2005;09-02-2008 4;Dwight;Adams;South Roosevelt Drive;Baton Rouge;Vermont;75677;A;15-02-2004;26-01-2007 […] The following graphs present the results of our tests: Unsurprisingly up to 16 threads, all files fit in the ZFS cache a.k.a L2ARC : once the cache is hot there is no performance difference depending on the underlying storage. From 16 threads upwards however, it is clear that IO becomes a bottleneck, having a good IO subsystem is thus key. Single-disk performance collapses whereas the Sun F5100 and ST6180 arrays allow the T4-1 to scale quite seamlessly. From 32 to 64 threads, the performance is almost constant with just a slow decline. For the database load tests, only the best IO configuration --using external storage devices-- were used, hosting the Oracle table spaces and redo log files. Using the Sun Storage F5100 array allows the T4-1 server to scale up to 48 parallel JVM processes before saturating the CPU. The final result is a staggering 646K lines per second insertion in an Oracle table using 48 parallel threads. Single-thread: Testing the single thread performance Seven different tests were performed on both servers. Given the fact that only one thread, thus one file was read, no IO bottleneck was involved, all data being served from the ZFS cache. Read File ? Filter ? Write File: Read file, filter data, write the filtered data in a new file. The filter is set on the “Status” column: only lines with status set to “A” are selected. This limits each output file to about 500 MB. Read File ? Load Database Table: Read file, insert into a single Oracle table. Average: Read file, compute the average of a numeric column, write the result in a new file. Division & Square Root: Read file, perform a division and square root on a numeric column, write the result data in a new file. Oracle DB Dump: Dump the content of an Oracle table (12.5M rows) into a CSV file. Transform: Read file, transform, write the result data in a new file. The transformations applied are: set the address column to upper case and add an extra column at the end, which is the concatenation of two columns. Sort: Read file, sort a numeric and alpha numeric column, write the result data in a new file. The following table and graph present the final results of the tests: Throughput unit is thousand lines per second processed (K lines/second). Improvement is the % of improvement between the T5140 and T4-1. Test T4-1 (Time s.) T5140 (Time s.) Improvement T4-1 (Throughput) T5140 (Throughput) Read/Filter/Write 125 806 645% 100 16 Read/Load Database 195 1111 570% 64 11 Average 96 557 580% 130 22 Division & Square Root 161 1054 655% 78 12 Oracle DB Dump 164 945 576% 76 13 Transform 159 1124 707% 79 11 Sort 251 1336 532% 50 9 The improvement of single-thread performance is quite dramatic: depending on the tests, the T4 is between 5.4 to 7 times faster than the T2+. It seems clear that the SPARC T4 processor has gone a long way filling the gap in single-thread performance, without sacrifying the multi-threaded capability as it still shows a very impressive scaling on heavy-duty multi-threaded jobs. Finally, as always at Oracle ISV Engineering, we are happy to help our ISV partners test their own applications on our platforms, so don't hesitate to contact us and let's see what the SPARC T4-based systems can do for your application! "As describe in this benchmark, Talend Enterprise Data Integration has overperformed on T4. I was generally happy to see that the T4 gave scaling opportunities for many scenarios like complex aggregations. Row by row insertion in Oracle DB is faster with more than 650,000 rows per seconds without using any bulk Oracle capabilities !" Cedric Carbone, Talend CTO.

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• Use WLST to Delete All JMS Messages From a Destination

  - by james.bayer

  I got a question today about whether WebLogic Server has any tools to delete all messages from a JMS Queue.  It just so happens that the WLS Console has this capability already.  It’s available on the screen after the “Show Messages” button is clicked on a destination’s Monitoring tab as seen in the screen shot below. The console is great for something ad-hoc, but what if I want to automate this?  Well it just so happens that the console is just a weblogic application layered on top of the JMX Management interface.  If you look at the MBean Reference, you’ll find a JMSDestinationRuntimeMBean that includes the operation deleteMessages that takes a JMS Message Selector as an argument.  If you pass an empty string, that is essentially a wild card that matches all messages. Coding a stand-alone JMX client for this is kind of lame, so let’s do something more suitable to scripting.  In addition to the console, WebLogic Scripting Tool (WLST) based on Jython is another way to browse and invoke MBeans, so an equivalent interactive shell session to delete messages from a destination would looks like this: D:\Oracle\fmw11gr1ps3\user_projects\domains\hotspot_domain\bin>setDomainEnv.cmd D:\Oracle\fmw11gr1ps3\user_projects\domains\hotspot_domain>java weblogic.WLST   Initializing WebLogic Scripting Tool (WLST) ...   Welcome to WebLogic Server Administration Scripting Shell   Type help() for help on available commands   wls:/offline> connect('weblogic','welcome1','t3://localhost:7001') Connecting to t3://localhost:7001 with userid weblogic ... Successfully connected to Admin Server 'AdminServer' that belongs to domain 'hotspot_domain'.   Warning: An insecure protocol was used to connect to the server. To ensure on-the-wire security, the SSL port or Admin port should be used instead.   wls:/hotspot_domain/serverConfig> serverRuntime() Location changed to serverRuntime tree. This is a read-only tree with ServerRuntimeMBean as the root. For more help, use help(serverRuntime)   wls:/hotspot_domain/serverRuntime> cd('JMSRuntime/AdminServer.jms/JMSServers/JMSServer-0/Destinations/SystemModule-0!Queue-0') wls:/hotspot_domain/serverRuntime/JMSRuntime/AdminServer.jms/JMSServers/JMSServer-0/Destinations/SystemModule-0!Queue-0> ls() dr-- DurableSubscribers   -r-- BytesCurrentCount 0 -r-- BytesHighCount 174620 -r-- BytesPendingCount 0 -r-- BytesReceivedCount 253548 -r-- BytesThresholdTime 0 -r-- ConsumersCurrentCount 0 -r-- ConsumersHighCount 0 -r-- ConsumersTotalCount 0 -r-- ConsumptionPaused false -r-- ConsumptionPausedState Consumption-Enabled -r-- DestinationInfo javax.management.openmbean.CompositeDataSupport(compositeType=javax.management.openmbean.CompositeType(name=DestinationInfo,items=((itemName=ApplicationName,itemType=javax.management.openmbean.SimpleType(name=java.lang.String)),(itemName=ModuleName,itemType=javax.management.openmbean.SimpleType(name=java.lang.String)),(itemName openmbean.SimpleType(name=java.lang.Boolean)),(itemName=SerializedDestination,itemType=javax.management.openmbean.SimpleType(name=java.lang.String)),(itemName=ServerName,itemType=javax.management.openmbean.SimpleType(name=java.lang.String)),(itemName=Topic,itemType=javax.management.openmbean.SimpleType(name=java.lang.Boolean)),(itemName=VersionNumber,itemType=javax.management.op ule-0!Queue-0, Queue=true, SerializedDestination=rO0ABXNyACN3ZWJsb2dpYy5qbXMuY29tbW9uLkRlc3RpbmF0aW9uSW1wbFSmyJ1qZfv8DAAAeHB3kLZBABZTeXN0ZW1Nb2R1bGUtMCFRdWV1ZS0wAAtKTVNTZXJ2ZXItMAAOU3lzdGVtTW9kdWxlLTABAANBbGwCAlb6IS6T5qL/AAAACgEAC0FkbWluU2VydmVyAC2EGgJW+iEuk+ai/wAAAAsBAAtBZG1pblNlcnZlcgAthBoAAQAQX1dMU19BZG1pblNlcnZlcng=, ServerName=JMSServer-0, Topic=false, VersionNumber=1}) -r-- DestinationType Queue -r-- DurableSubscribers null -r-- InsertionPaused false -r-- InsertionPausedState Insertion-Enabled -r-- MessagesCurrentCount 0 -r-- MessagesDeletedCurrentCount 3 -r-- MessagesHighCount 2 -r-- MessagesMovedCurrentCount 0 -r-- MessagesPendingCount 0 -r-- MessagesReceivedCount 3 -r-- MessagesThresholdTime 0 -r-- Name SystemModule-0!Queue-0 -r-- Paused false -r-- ProductionPaused false -r-- ProductionPausedState Production-Enabled -r-- State advertised_in_cluster_jndi -r-- Type JMSDestinationRuntime   -r-x closeCursor Void : String(cursorHandle) -r-x deleteMessages Integer : String(selector) -r-x getCursorEndPosition Long : String(cursorHandle) -r-x getCursorSize Long : String(cursorHandle) -r-x getCursorStartPosition Long : String(cursorHandle) -r-x getItems javax.management.openmbean.CompositeData[] : String(cursorHandle),Long(start),Integer(count) -r-x getMessage javax.management.openmbean.CompositeData : String(cursorHandle),Long(messageHandle) -r-x getMessage javax.management.openmbean.CompositeData : String(cursorHandle),String(messageID) -r-x getMessage javax.management.openmbean.CompositeData : String(messageID) -r-x getMessages String : String(selector),Integer(timeout) -r-x getMessages String : String(selector),Integer(timeout),Integer(state) -r-x getNext javax.management.openmbean.CompositeData[] : String(cursorHandle),Integer(count) -r-x getPrevious javax.management.openmbean.CompositeData[] : String(cursorHandle),Integer(count) -r-x importMessages Void : javax.management.openmbean.CompositeData[],Boolean(replaceOnly) -r-x moveMessages Integer : String(java.lang.String),javax.management.openmbean.CompositeData,Integer(java.lang.Integer) -r-x moveMessages Integer : String(selector),javax.management.openmbean.CompositeData -r-x pause Void : -r-x pauseConsumption Void : -r-x pauseInsertion Void : -r-x pauseProduction Void : -r-x preDeregister Void : -r-x resume Void : -r-x resumeConsumption Void : -r-x resumeInsertion Void : -r-x resumeProduction Void : -r-x sort Long : String(cursorHandle),Long(start),String[](fields),Boolean[](ascending)   wls:/hotspot_domain/serverRuntime/JMSRuntime/AdminServer.jms/JMSServers/JMSServer-0/Destinations/SystemModule-0!Queue-0> cmo.deleteMessages('') 2 where the domain name is “hotspot_domain”, the JMS Server name is “JMSServer-0”, the Queue name is “Queue-0” and the System Module is named “SystemModule-0”.  To invoke the operation, I use the “cmo” object, which is the “Current Management Object” that represents the currently navigated to MBean.  The 2 indicates that two messages were deleted.  Combining this WLST code with a recent post by my colleague Steve that shows you how to use an encrypted file to store the authentication credentials, you could easily turn this into a secure automated script.  If you need help with that step, a long while back I blogged about some WLST basics.  Happy scripting.

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• Oracle Delivers Latest Release of Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c

  - by Scott McNeil

  Richer Service Catalog for Database and Middleware as a Service; Enhanced Database and Middleware Management Help Drive Enterprise-Scale Private Cloud Adoption News Summary IT organizations are adopting private clouds as a stepping-stone to business-driven, self-service IT. Successful implementations hinge on the ability to efficiently deploy and manage cloud services at enterprise scale. Having a complete cloud management solution integrated with an enterprise-class technology stack is a fundamental requirement for IT. Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Release 4 meets that requirement by helping businesses become more agile and responsive, while reducing cost, complexity, and risk. News Facts Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Release 4, available today, lets organizations rapidly adopt Oracle-based, enterprise-scale private clouds. New capabilities provide advanced technology stack management, secure database administration, and enterprise service governance, enabling Oracle customers and partners to maximize database and application performance and drive innovation using self-service IT platforms. The enhancements have been driven by customers and the growing Oracle Enterprise Manager Ecosystem, comprised of more than 750 Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Specialized partners. Oracle and its partners and customers have built over 140 plug-ins and connectors for Oracle Enterprise Manager. Watch the video highlights. Automation for Broader Cloud Services Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Release 4 allows for a rapid enterprise-wide adoption of database, middleware and infrastructure services in the private cloud, driven by an enhanced API-enabled service catalog. The release features “push button” style provisioning of complete environments such as SOA and Oracle Active Data Guard, and fast data cloning that enables rapid deployment and testing of enterprise applications. Out-of-the-box capabilities to detect data and configuration vulnerabilities provide enhanced cloud service governance along with greater operational control through a flexible and extensible showback mechanism. Enhanced Database Management A new performance warehouse enables predictive database diagnostics and trend analysis and helps identify database problems before they occur. New enterprise data-governance capabilities enhance security by helping systematically discover and protect sensitive data. Step-by-step orchestration of upgrades with the ability to rollback changes enables faster adoption of Oracle Database 12c. Expanded Fusion Middleware Management A new consolidated view of Oracle Fusion Middleware 12c deployments with a guided management capability lets administrators apply best management practices to diverse middleware environments and identify performance issues quickly. A Java VM Diagnostics as a Service feature allows governed access to diagnostics data for IT workers across multiple disciplines for accelerated DevOps resolutions of defects and performance optimization. New automated provisioning for SOA lets middleware administrators perform mass SOA provisioning with ease. Superior Enterprise-Grade Management Private roles and preferred credentials have been added to Oracle Enterprise Manager to provide additional fine-grained security for organizations with complex access control requirements. A new security console provides a single point of control for managing the security of Oracle Enterprise Manager environments. Support for the latest industry standard SNMP v3 protocol, including encryption, enables more secure heterogeneous management. “Smart monitoring” adapts to observed environmental changes and adds self-management capabilities to help Oracle Enterprise Manager run at peak performance, while demanding less IT supervision. Supporting Quotes “Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has a strong tradition of technology breakthroughs and leadership. As a member of Oracle’s Customer Advisory Board for Oracle Enterprise Manager, we have consistently provided feedback and guidance in the areas of enterprise-scale cloud, self-diagnosability, and secure administration for the product,” said Tim Frazier, CIO, NIF and Photon Sciences, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “We intend to take advantage of the Release 4 features that support enterprise-scale availability and fine-grained security capabilities for private cloud deployments.” “IDC's most recent CloudTrack survey shows that most enterprises plan to adopt hybrid cloud architectures over the next three years,” said Mary Johnston Turner, Research Vice President, Enterprise System Management Software, IDC. “These organizations plan to deploy a wide range of workloads into cloud environments including mission critical database and middleware services that require high levels of fault tolerance and disaster recovery. Such capabilities were traditionally custom configured for each application but cloud offers the possibility to incorporate such properties within the service definition, enabling organizations to adopt cloud without compromise. With the latest release of Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c, Oracle is providing customers with an out-of-the-box experience for delivering highly-resilient cloud services for databases and applications.” “Since its inception, Oracle has been leading the way in innovative, scalable and high performance solutions for the enterprise. With this release of Oracle Enterprise Manager, we are extending this leadership by providing enterprise-scale capabilities for planning, delivering, and managing private clouds. We call this ‘zero-to-cloud – accelerated.’ These enhancements help our customers to expedite their adoption of cloud computing and prepares them for the next generation of self-service IT,” said Prakash Ramamurthy, senior vice president of Systems and Cloud Management at Oracle. Supporting Resources Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Video: Cerner Delivers High Performance Private Cloud Video: BIAS Achieves Outstanding Results with Private Cloud Press Release Stay Connected: Twitter | Facebook | YouTube | Linkedin | Newsletter Download the Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Mobile app

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• Oracle Business Intelligence Advanced - Hands-on Workshop para Parceiros - 18 a 21 de Janeiro

  - by Claudia Costa

  Workshop Description This FREE hands-on workshop highlights strengths of OBIEE 11g by providing attendees a hands-on experience with BI 11g product. OBIEE 11g has adopted the standardized infrastructure of Fusion Middleware to provide robust server capability along with highly anticipated advanced visualization components like Maps, Flash based charts, Scorecards and KPIs. This workshop focuses on new features and infrastructure components for the BI practitioners who are familiar with either OBIEE 10g or previous BI releases. After taking this course, Oracle Business Intelligence 11g Advanced, you will gain insight into OBIEE11g technology, reporting solutions and new features. Workshop provides opportunities to practice with OBIEE11g environment as hands on activities. Participant will gain in-depth understanding of new architecture of OBIEE 11g, security mode, installation/configuration as well as reporting aspects like, new ROLAP/MOLAP style hierarchical browsing, new chart types, Action Framework and Advanced Visualization. If you are a Business Intelligence practitioners and familiar with BI10g - you cannot afford to miss this 3-day workshop. Register Now! PresentationsBusiness Intelligence EE (OBIEE) 11g: Advanced Workshop ·         OBIEE 11g Overview ·         OBIEE 11g Architecture and Infrastructure ·         OBIEE 11g Installation, Configuration and Monitoring ·         OBIEE11g Security Model and BI Components ·         OBIEE 11g Homepage Overview ·         New Visualizations: Master-Detail Events, Charts, Hierarchies ·         Reports Building with OBIEE 11g and Catalog Management ·         Spatial Integration, Action Framework, Scorecards ·         OBIEE 11g Dashboards ·         OBIEE Integration Options  Lab OutlineOracle Business Intelligence (OBIEE) 11g: Advanced Workshop The labs enable OBIEE Core functionality through hands-on activities are based on a Oracle VirtualBox image with software and training samples pre-installed. This Advanced course has few labs optional during the workshop to allow for students to practice them on their own. The primary purpose of the workshop is to provide expertise of 11g features and infrastructure changes from 10g. Labs will allow you to explore concepts to: ·         Have a clear understanding of the OBIEE 11g architecture ·         Have a clear understanding of the OBIEE differentiators ·         OBIEE11g Security Model ·         OBIEE11g Environment Management ·         Report Building with OBIEE11g ·         OBIEE11g Dashboard and Homepage Environment ·         New Visualization features ·         Management of Reports, Dashboards and BI Catalog Objects Audience ·         Business Intelligence Evangelist ·         Business Intelligence Application Developer or Consultant ·         Data Warehouse Developer ·         Enterprise Architects ·         Industry Solutions Architects Prerequisites ·         Experience and Understanding of OBIEE 10g is required. ·         Good understanding of data modeling for reporting purpose ·         Strong experience with database technologies preferred Equipment RequirementsThis workshop requires attendees to provide their own laptops. Attendee laptops must meet the following minimum hardware/software requirements: OBIEE 11g environments requires at least 3 GB of RAM (4GB Preferred), without which student will not be able to complete labs. This workshop has environment that includes VM Image and also a software components that students will install on their laptop for the labs. ·         Minimum 3GB RAM. 25GB free disk space ·         Internet Explorer 7 ·         VirtualBox (the latest version) ·         Downloadable from http://www.virtualbox.org ·         WINRAR or 7zip ·         Downloadable from http://www.win-rar.com/download.html ·         Downloadable from http://www.7zip.com/ Attendees will be given a VirtualBox image for Oraclee BI 11g Workshop containing the software along with required toolset, database and data sets for the labs. AgendaThis class duration is 3 Days9:00am: Sign-in and Technical Set up9:30am : Workshop Starts5:00pm : Workhop Ends LocalHotel Holiday Inn Express - Porto Salvo - Lisboa This class is Free. Register early to confirm a seat! Oracle BI Advanced 11g Hands-on Workshop - Schedule Register Now! January 11-13, 2011: Kista, Sweden January 18-20, 2011: Lisbon, Portugal March 1-3, 2011: Reading, Berkshire, UK March 15-17, 2011: Colombes, Paris, France March 29-31, 2011: Amsterdam, Netherlands Questions? For registration questions please send an email to [email protected]. Para outras informações, por favor contacte Claudia Costa, telf: 214235027 ou pelo email   

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• MySQL Connect Only 10 Days Away - Focus on InnoDB Sessions

  - by Bertrand Matthelié

  Time flies and MySQL Connect is only 10 days away! You can check out the full program here as well as in the September edition of the MySQL newsletter. Mat recently blogged about the MySQL Cluster sessions you’ll have the opportunity to attend, and below are those focused on InnoDB. Remember you can plan your schedule with Schedule Builder. Saturday, 1.00 pm, Room Golden Gate 3: 10 Things You Should Know About InnoDB—Calvin Sun, Oracle InnoDB is the default storage engine for Oracle’s MySQL as of MySQL Release 5.5. It provides the standard ACID-compliant transactions, row-level locking, multiversion concurrency control, and referential integrity. InnoDB also implements several innovative technologies to improve its performance and reliability. This presentation gives a brief history of InnoDB; its main features; and some recent enhancements for better performance, scalability, and availability. Saturday, 5.30 pm, Room Golden Gate 4: Demystified MySQL/InnoDB Performance Tuning—Dimitri Kravtchuk, Oracle This session covers performance tuning with MySQL and the InnoDB storage engine for MySQL and explains the main improvements made in MySQL Release 5.5 and Release 5.6. Which setting for which workload? Which value will be better for my system? How can I avoid potential bottlenecks from the beginning? Do I need a purge thread? Is it true that InnoDB doesn't need thread concurrency anymore? These and many other questions are asked by DBAs and developers. Things are changing quickly and constantly, and there is no “silver bullet.” But understanding the configuration setting’s impact is already a huge step in performance improvement. Bring your ideas and problems to share them with others—the discussion is open, just moderated by a speaker. Sunday, 10.15 am, Room Golden Gate 4: Better Availability with InnoDB Online Operations—Calvin Sun, Oracle Many top Web properties rely on Oracle’s MySQL as a critical piece of infrastructure for serving millions of users. Database availability has become increasingly important. One way to enhance availability is to give users full access to the database during data definition language (DDL) operations. The online DDL operations in recent MySQL releases offer users the flexibility to perform schema changes while having full access to the database—that is, with minimal delay of operations on a table and without rebuilding the entire table. These enhancements provide better responsiveness and availability in busy production environments. This session covers these improvements in the InnoDB storage engine for MySQL for online DDL operations such as add index, drop foreign key, and rename column. Sunday, 11.45 am, Room Golden Gate 7: Developing High-Throughput Services with NoSQL APIs to InnoDB and MySQL Cluster—Andrew Morgan and John Duncan, Oracle Ever-increasing performance demands of Web-based services have generated significant interest in providing NoSQL access methods to MySQL (MySQL Cluster and the InnoDB storage engine of MySQL), enabling users to maintain all the advantages of their existing relational databases while providing blazing-fast performance for simple queries. Get the best of both worlds: persistence; consistency; rich SQL queries; high availability; scalability; and simple, flexible APIs and schemas for agile development. This session describes the memcached connectors and examines some use cases for how MySQL and memcached fit together in application architectures. It does the same for the newest MySQL Cluster native connector, an easy-to-use, fully asynchronous connector for Node.js. Sunday, 1.15 pm, Room Golden Gate 4: InnoDB Performance Tuning—Inaam Rana, Oracle The InnoDB storage engine has always been highly efficient and includes many unique architectural elements to ensure high performance and scalability. In MySQL 5.5 and MySQL 5.6, InnoDB includes many new features that take better advantage of recent advances in operating systems and hardware platforms than previous releases did. This session describes unique InnoDB architectural elements for performance, new features, and how to tune InnoDB to achieve better performance. Sunday, 4.15 pm, Room Golden Gate 3: InnoDB Compression for OLTP—Nizameddin Ordulu, Facebook and Inaam Rana, Oracle Data compression is an important capability of the InnoDB storage engine for Oracle’s MySQL. Compressed tables reduce the size of the database on disk, resulting in fewer reads and writes and better throughput by reducing the I/O workload. Facebook pushes the limit of InnoDB compression and has made several enhancements to InnoDB, making this technology ready for online transaction processing (OLTP). In this session, you will learn the fundamentals of InnoDB compression. You will also learn the enhancements the Facebook team has made to improve InnoDB compression, such as reducing compression failures, not logging compressed page images, and allowing changes of compression level. Not registered yet? You can still save US$ 300 over the on-site fee – Register Now!

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• Welcome to Jackstown

  - by fatherjack

  I live in a small town, the population count isn't that great but let me introduce you to some of the population. We'll start with Martin the Doc, he fixes up anything that gets poorly, so much so that he could be classed as the doctor, the vet and even the garage mechanic. He's got a reputation that he can fix anything and that hasn't been proved wrong yet. He's great friends with Brian (who gets called "Brains") the teacher who seems to have a sound understanding of any topic you care to pass his way. If he isn't sure he tells you and then goes to find out and comes back with a full answer real quick. Its good to have that sort of research capability close at hand. Brains is also great at encouraging anyone who needs a bit of support to get them up to speed and working on their jobs. Steve sees Brains regularly, that's because he is the librarian, he keeps all sorts of reading material and nowadays there's even video to watch about any topic you like. Steve keeps scouring all sorts of places to get the content that's needed and he keeps it in good order so that what ever is needed can be found quickly. He also has to make sure that old stuff gets marked as probably out of date so that anyone reading it wont get mislead. Over the road from him is Greg, he's the town crier. We don't have a newspaper here so Greg keeps us all informed of what's going on "out of town" - what new stuff we might make use of and what wont work in a small place like this. If we are interested he goes ahead and gets people in to demonstrate their products  and tell us about the details. Greg is pretty good at getting us discounts too. Now Greg's brother Ian works for the mayors office in the "waste management department" nowadays its all about the recycling but he still has to make sure that the stuff that cant be used any more gets disposed of properly. It depends on the type of waste he's dealing with that decides how it need to be treated and he has to know a lot about the different methods and when to use which ones. There are two people that keep the peace in town, Brent is the detective, investigating wrong doings and applying justice where necessary and Bart is the diplomat who smooths things over when any people have a dispute or disagreement. Brent is meticulous in his investigations and fair in the way he handles any situation he finds. Discretion is his byword. There's a rumour that Bart used to work for the United Nations but what ever his history there is no denying his ability to get apparently irreconcilable parties working together to their combined benefit. Someone who works closely with Bart is Brad, he is the translator in town. He has several languages that he can converse in but he can also explain things from someone's point of view or  and make it understandable to someone else. To keep things on the straight and narrow from a legal perspective is Ben the solicitor, making sure we all abide by the rules.Two people who make for an interesting evening's conversation if you get them together are Aaron and Grant, Aaron is the local planning inspector and Grant is an inventor of some reputation. Anything being constructed around here needs Aarons agreement. He's quite flexible in his rules though; if you can justify what you want to do with solid logic but he wont stand for any development going on without his inclusion. That gets a demolition notice and there's no argument. Grant as I mentioned is the inventor in town, if something can be improved or created then Grant is your man. He mainly works on his own but isnt averse to getting specific advice and assistance from specialist from out of town if they can help him finish his creations.There aren't too many people left for you to meet in the town, there's Rob, he's an ex professional sportsman. He played Hockey, Football, Cricket, you name it. He was in his element as goal keeper / wicket keeper and that shows in his personal life. He just goes about his business and people often don't even know that he's helped them. Really low profile, doesn't get any glory but saves people from lots of problems, even disasters on occasion. There goes Neil, he's a bit of an odd person, some people say he's gifted with special clairvoyant powers, personally I think he's got his ear to the ground and knows where to find out the important news as soon as its made public. Anyone getting a visit from Neil is best off to follow his advice though, he's usually spot on and you wont be caught by surprise if you follow his recommendations – wherever it comes from.Poor old Andrew is the last person to introduce you to. Andrew doesn't show himself too often but when he does it seems that people find a reason to blame him for their problems, whether he had anything to do with their predicament or not. In all honesty, without fail, and to his great credit, he takes it in good grace and never retaliates or gets annoyed when he's out and about.  It pays off too as its very often the case that those who were blaming him recently suddenly find they need his help and they readily forget the issues pretty rapidly.And then there's me, what do I do in town? Well, I'm just a DBA with a lot of hats. (Jackstown Pop. 1)

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• NoSQL Java API for MySQL Cluster: Questions & Answers

  - by Mat Keep

  The MySQL Cluster engineering team recently ran a live webinar, available now on-demand demonstrating the ClusterJ and ClusterJPA NoSQL APIs for MySQL Cluster, and how these can be used in building real-time, high scale Java-based services that require continuous availability. Attendees asked a number of great questions during the webinar, and I thought it would be useful to share those here, so others are also able to learn more about the Java NoSQL APIs. First, a little bit about why we developed these APIs and why they are interesting to Java developers. ClusterJ and Cluster JPA ClusterJ is a Java interface to MySQL Cluster that provides either a static or dynamic domain object model, similar to the data model used by JDO, JPA, and Hibernate. A simple API gives users extremely high performance for common operations: insert, delete, update, and query. ClusterJPA works with ClusterJ to extend functionality, including - Persistent classes - Relationships - Joins in queries - Lazy loading - Table and index creation from object model By eliminating data transformations via SQL, users get lower data access latency and higher throughput. In addition, Java developers have a more natural programming method to directly manage their data, with a complete, feature-rich solution for Object/Relational Mapping. As a result, the development of Java applications is simplified with faster development cycles resulting in accelerated time to market for new services. MySQL Cluster offers multiple NoSQL APIs alongside Java: - Memcached for a persistent, high performance, write-scalable Key/Value store, - HTTP/REST via an Apache module - C++ via the NDB API for the lowest absolute latency. Developers can use SQL as well as NoSQL APIs for access to the same data set via multiple query patterns – from simple Primary Key lookups or inserts to complex cross-shard JOINs using Adaptive Query Localization Marrying NoSQL and SQL access to an ACID-compliant database offers developers a number of benefits. MySQL Cluster’s distributed, shared-nothing architecture with auto-sharding and real time performance makes it a great fit for workloads requiring high volume OLTP. Users also get the added flexibility of being able to run real-time analytics across the same OLTP data set for real-time business insight. OK – hopefully you now have a better idea of why ClusterJ and JPA are available. Now, for the Q&A. Q & A Q. Why would I use Connector/J vs. ClusterJ? A. Partly it's a question of whether you prefer to work with SQL (Connector/J) or objects (ClusterJ). Performance of ClusterJ will be better as there is no need to pass through the MySQL Server. A ClusterJ operation can only act on a single table (e.g. no joins) - ClusterJPA extends that capability Q. Can I mix different APIs (ie ClusterJ, Connector/J) in our application for different query types? A. Yes. You can mix and match all of the API types, SQL, JDBC, ODBC, ClusterJ, Memcached, REST, C++. They all access the exact same data in the data nodes. Update through one API and new data is instantly visible to all of the others. Q. How many TCP connections would a SessionFactory instance create for a cluster of 8 data nodes? A. SessionFactory has a connection to the mgmd (management node) but otherwise is just a vehicle to create Sessions. Without using connection pooling, a SessionFactory will have one connection open with each data node. Using optional connection pooling allows multiple connections from the SessionFactory to increase throughput. Q. Can you give details of how Cluster J optimizes sharding to enhance performance of distributed query processing? A. Each data node in a cluster runs a Transaction Coordinator (TC), which begins and ends the transaction, but also serves as a resource to operate on the result rows. While an API node (such as a ClusterJ process) can send queries to any TC/data node, there are performance gains if the TC is where most of the result data is stored. ClusterJ computes the shard (partition) key to choose the data node where the row resides as the TC. Q. What happens if we perform two primary key lookups within the same transaction? Are they sent to the data node in one transaction? A. ClusterJ will send identical PK lookups to the same data node. Q. How is distributed query processing handled by MySQL Cluster ? A. If the data is split between data nodes then all of the information will be transparently combined and passed back to the application. The session will connect to a data node - typically by hashing the primary key - which then interacts with its neighboring nodes to collect the data needed to fulfil the query. Q. Can I use Foreign Keys with MySQL Cluster A. Support for Foreign Keys is included in the MySQL Cluster 7.3 Early Access release Summary The NoSQL Java APIs are packaged with MySQL Cluster, available for download here so feel free to take them for a spin today! Key Resources MySQL Cluster on-line demo  MySQL ClusterJ and JPA On-demand webinar  MySQL ClusterJ and JPA documentation MySQL ClusterJ and JPA whitepaper and tutorial

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• Mixed Emotions: Humans React to Natural Language Computer

  - by Applications User Experience

  There was a big event in Silicon Valley on Tuesday, November 15. Watson, the natural language computer developed at IBM Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, and its inventor and principal research investigator, David Ferrucci, were guests at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California for another round of the television game Jeopardy. You may have read about or watched on YouTube how Watson beat Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, two top Jeopardy competitors, last February. This time, Watson swept the floor with two Silicon Valley high-achievers, one a venture capitalist with a background  in math, computer engineering, and physics, and the other a technology and finance writer well-versed in all aspects of culture and humanities. Watson is the product of the DeepQA research project, which attempts to create an artificially intelligent computing system through advances in natural language processing (NLP), among other technologies. NLP is a computing strategy that seeks to provide answers by processing large amounts of unstructured data contained in multiple large domains of human knowledge. There are several ways to perform NLP, but one way to start is by recognizing key words, then processing  contextual  cues associated with the keyword concepts so that you get many more “smart” (that is, human-like) deductions,  rather than a series of “dumb” matches.  Jeopardy questions often require more than key word matching to get the correct answer; typically several pieces of information put together, often from vastly different categories, to come up with a satisfactory word string solution that can be rephrased as a question.  Smarter than your average search engine, but is it as smart as a human? Watson was especially fast at descrambling mixed-up state capital names, and recalling and pairing movie titles where one started and the other ended in the same word (e.g., Billion Dollar Baby Boom, where both titles used the word Baby). David said they had basically removed the variable of how fast Watson hit the buzzer compared to human contestants, but frustration frequently appeared on the faces of the contestants beaten to the punch by Watson. David explained that top Jeopardy winners like Jennings achieved their success with a similar strategy, timing their buzz to the end of the reading of the clue,  and “running the board”, being first to respond on about 60% of the clues.  Similar results for Watson. It made sense that Watson would be good at the technical and scientific stuff, so I figured the venture capitalist was toast. But I thought for sure Watson would lose to the writer in categories such as pop culture, wines and foods, and other humanities. Surprisingly, it held its own. I was amazed it could recognize a word definition of a syllogism in the category of philosophy. So what was the audience reaction to all of this? We started out expecting our formidable human contestants to easily run some of their categories; however, they started off on the wrong foot with the state capitals which Watson could unscramble so efficiently. By the end of the first round, contestants and the audience were feeling a little bit, well, …. deflated. Watson was winning by about $13,000, and the humans had gone into negative dollars. The IBM host said he was going to “slow Watson down a bit,” and the humans came back with respectable scores in Double Jeopardy. This was partially thanks to a very sympathetic audience (and host, also a human) providing “group-think” on many questions, especially baseball ‘s most valuable players, which by the way, couldn’t have been hard because even I knew them.  Yes, that’s right, the humans cheated. Since Watson could speak but not hear us (it didn’t have speech recognition capability), it was probably unaware of this. In Final Jeopardy, the single question had to do with law. I was sure Watson would blow this one, but all contestants were able to answer correctly about a copyright law. In a career devoted to making computers more helpful to people, I think I may have seen how a computer can do too much. I’m not sure I’d want to work side-by-side with a Watson doing my job. Certainly listening and empathy are important traits we humans still have over Watson.  While there was great enthusiasm in the packed room of computer scientists and their friends for this standing-room-only show, I think it made several of us uneasy (especially the poor human contestants whose egos were soundly bashed in the first round). This computer system, by the way , only took 4 years to program. David Ferrucci mentioned several practical uses for Watson, including medical diagnoses and legal strategies. Are you “the expert” in your job? Imagine NLP computing on an Oracle database.   This may be the user interface of the future to enable users to better process big data. How do you think you’d like it? Postscript: There were three little boys sitting in front of me in the very first row. They looked, how shall I say it, … unimpressed!

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• SQL SERVER – What is Incremental Statistics? – Performance improvements in SQL Server 2014 – Part 1

  - by Pinal Dave

  This is the first part of the series Incremental Statistics. Here is the index of the complete series. What is Incremental Statistics? – Performance improvements in SQL Server 2014 – Part 1 Simple Example of Incremental Statistics – Performance improvements in SQL Server 2014 – Part 2 DMV to Identify Incremental Statistics – Performance improvements in SQL Server 2014 – Part 3 Statistics are considered one of the most important aspects of SQL Server Performance Tuning. You might have often heard the phrase, with related to performance tuning. “Update Statistics before you take any other steps to tune performance”. Honestly, I have said above statement many times and many times, I have personally updated statistics before I start to do any performance tuning exercise. You may agree or disagree to the point, but there is no denial that Statistics play an extremely vital role in the performance tuning. SQL Server 2014 has a new feature called Incremental Statistics. I have been playing with this feature for quite a while and I find that very interesting. After spending some time with this feature, I decided to write about this subject over here. New in SQL Server 2014 – Incremental Statistics Well, it seems like lots of people wants to start using SQL Server 2014′s new feature of Incremetnal Statistics. However, let us understand what actually this feature does and how it can help. I will try to simplify this feature first before I start working on the demo code. Code for all versions of SQL Server Here is the code which you can execute on all versions of SQL Server and it will update the statistics of your table. The keyword which you should pay attention is WITH FULLSCAN. It will scan the entire table and build brand new statistics for you which your SQL Server Performance Tuning engine can use for better estimation of your execution plan. UPDATE STATISTICS TableName(StatisticsName) WITH FULLSCAN Who should learn about this? Why? If you are using partitions in your database, you should consider about implementing this feature. Otherwise, this feature is pretty much not applicable to you. Well, if you are using single partition and your table data is in a single place, you still have to update your statistics the same way you have been doing. If you are using multiple partitions, this may be a very useful feature for you. In most cases, users have multiple partitions because they have lots of data in their table. Each partition will have data which belongs to itself. Now it is very common that each partition are populated separately in SQL Server. Real World Example For example, if your table contains data which is related to sales, you will have plenty of entries in your table. It will be a good idea to divide the partition into multiple filegroups for example, you can divide this table into 3 semesters or 4 quarters or even 12 months. Let us assume that we have divided our table into 12 different partitions. Now for the month of January, our first partition will be populated and for the month of February our second partition will be populated. Now assume, that you have plenty of the data in your first and second partition. Now the month of March has just started and your third partition has started to populate. Due to some reason, if you want to update your statistics, what will you do? In SQL Server 2012 and earlier version You will just use the code of WITH FULLSCAN and update the entire table. That means even though you have only data in third partition you will still update the entire table. This will be VERY resource intensive process as you will be updating the statistics of the partition 1 and 2 where data has not changed at all. In SQL Server 2014 You will just update the partition of Partition 3. There is a special syntax where you can now specify which partition you want to update now. The impact of this is that it is smartly merging the new data with old statistics and update the entire statistics without doing FULLSCAN of your entire table. This has a huge impact on performance. Remember that the new feature in SQL Server 2014 does not change anything besides the capability to update a single partition. However, there is one feature which is indeed attractive. Previously, when table data were changed 20% at that time, statistics update were triggered. However, now the same threshold is applicable to a single partition. That means if your partition faces 20% data, change it will also trigger partition level statistics update which, when merged to your final statistics will give you better performance. In summary If you are not using a partition, this feature is not applicable to you. If you are using a partition, this feature can be very helpful to you. Tomorrow: We will see working code of SQL Server 2014 Incremental Statistics. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: SQL Statistics, Statistics

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