transformation - Page 32

XSLT 1.0 grouping to reformat element defined by date into element defined by task

- by Daniel

Hi folks, I have a tricky XSLT transformation and I'd like your advise My xml is formatted as below: <Person> <name>John</name> <date>June12</date> <workTime taskID=1>34</workTime> <workTime taskID=2>12</workTime> </Person> <Person> <name>John</name> <date>June12</date> <workTime taskID=1>21</workTime> <workTime taskID=2>11</workTime> </Person> The output xml should be: <Person> <name>John</name> <taskID>1</taskID> <workTime> <date>June12</date> <time>34</time> </worTime> <workTime> <date>June13</date> <time>21</time> </worTime> </Person> <Person> <name>John</name> <taskID>2</taskID> <workTime> <date>June12</date> <time>12</time> </worTime> <workTime> <date>June13</date> <time>11</time> </worTime> </Person> Essentially, as an input, a "Person" object gathers all the task/workTime for a specific date. As an output, I want the "Person" object to gather the date/workTime for a specific task. I need to use XLST 1.0. I've been trying to use grouping with key but get very puzzled. Appreciate your help. Daniel

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xslt help - my transform is not rendering correctly

- by Hcabnettek

Hi All, I'm trying to apply an xlst transformation using the following file. This is very basic, but I wanted to build off of this when I get it working correctly. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:msxsl="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xslt" exclude-result-prefixes="msxsl"> <xsl:template match="/"> <div> <h2>Station Inventory</h2> <hr/> <xsl:apply-templates/> </div> </xsl:template> Here is some xml I'm using for the source. <StationInventoryList xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="http://www.dummy-tmdd-address"> <StationInventory> <station-id>9940</station-id> <station-name>Zone 9940-SEB</station-name> <station-travel-direction>SEB</station-travel-direction> <detector-list> <detector> <detector-id>2910</detector-id> <detector-name>1999 West Smith Exit SEB</detector-name> </detector> <detector> <detector-id>9205</detector-id> <detector-name>CR-155 Exit SEB</detector-name> </detector> <detector> <detector-id>9710</detector-id> <detector-name>Pt of View SEB</detector-name> </detector> </detector-list> </StationInventory> </StationInventoryList> Any ideas what I'm doing wrong? The simple intent here is to make a list of station, then make a list of detectors at a station. This is a small piece of the XML. It would have multiple StationInventory elements. I'm using the data as the source for an asp:xml control and the xslt file as the transformsource. var service = new InternalService(); var result = service.StationInventory(); invXml.DocumentContent = result; invXml.TransformSource = "StationInventory.xslt"; invXml.DataBind(); Any tips are of course appreciated. Have a terrific weekend. Cheers, ~ck

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cannot retrieve effect.fx file

- by numerical25

I am having issues loading my effect.fx from directx. When I step into my application, my ID3D10Effect *m_pDefaultEffect; pointer remains empty. the address remains at 0x000000 below is my code #pragma once #include "stdafx.h" #include "resource.h" #include "d3d10.h" #include "d3dx10.h" #include "dinput.h" #define MAX_LOADSTRING 100 class RenderEngine { protected: RECT m_screenRect; //direct3d Members ID3D10Device *m_pDevice; // The IDirect3DDevice10 // interface ID3D10Texture2D *m_pBackBuffer; // Pointer to the back buffer ID3D10RenderTargetView *m_pRenderTargetView; // Pointer to render target view IDXGISwapChain *m_pSwapChain; // Pointer to the swap chain RECT m_rcScreenRect; // The dimensions of the screen ID3D10Texture2D *m_pDepthStencilBuffer; ID3D10DepthStencilState *m_pDepthStencilState; ID3D10DepthStencilView *m_pDepthStencilView; //transformation matrixs D3DXMATRIX g_mtxWorld; D3DXMATRIX g_mtxView; D3DXMATRIX g_mtxProj; //Effect members ID3D10Effect *m_pDefaultEffect; ID3D10EffectTechnique *m_pDefaultTechnique; ID3DX10Font *m_pFont; // The font used for rendering text // Sprites used to hold font characters ID3DX10Sprite *m_pFontSprite; ATOM RegisterEngineClass(); void DoFrame(float); bool LoadEffects(); public: static HINSTANCE m_hInst; HWND m_hWnd; int m_nCmdShow; TCHAR m_szTitle[MAX_LOADSTRING]; // The title bar text TCHAR m_szWindowClass[MAX_LOADSTRING]; // the main window class name void DrawTextString(int x, int y, D3DXCOLOR color, const TCHAR *strOutput); //static functions static LRESULT CALLBACK WndProc(HWND hWnd, UINT message, WPARAM wParam, LPARAM lParam); static INT_PTR CALLBACK About(HWND hDlg, UINT message, WPARAM wParam, LPARAM lParam); bool InitWindow(); bool InitDirectX(); bool InitInstance(); int Run(); void ShutDown(); RenderEngine() { m_screenRect.right = 800; m_screenRect.bottom = 600; } }; below is the implementation bool RenderEngine::LoadEffects() { HRESULT hr; ID3D10Blob *pErrors = 0; // Create the default rendering effect hr = D3DX10CreateEffectFromFile(L"effect.fx", NULL, NULL, "fx_4_0", D3D10_SHADER_DEBUG, 0, m_pDevice, NULL, NULL, &m_pDefaultEffect, &pErrors, NULL); if(pErrors)// at this point, m_pDefaultEffect is still empty but pErrors returns data which means there is {//errors return false; //ends here } //m_pDefaultTechnique = m_pDefaultEffect->GetTechniqueByName("DefaultTechnique"); return true; } My directx Device does work. My effect.fx file is in the same folder as my solution files (.cpp and header files)

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XSLT, JSTL e JSF

- by Paulo S.

I have a xml file which I want to transform in a jsf code page. To do that I've created a xsl file. xml: <?xml version='1.0' encoding='ISO-8859-1'?> <questionario xmlns:xsi='http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance' xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation='Schema2.xsd'> <componente nome='input'> <id>input1</id> </componente> <componente nome='input'> <id>input2</id> </componente> </questionario> code: <%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jstl/core_rt" prefix="c" %> <%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/xml" prefix="x" %> <c:set var="xml" value="${questionarioXSLBean.xml}"/> <c:set var="xsl"> <xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="2.0" xmlns:f="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core" xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html" exclude-result-prefixes="f h"> <xsl:template match="/"> <xsl:for-each select="questionario/componente"> <xsl:if test="attribute::nome = 'input'"> <xsl:variable name="id"> <xsl:value-of select="id" /> </xsl:variable> <h:inputText id="{$id}"/> </xsl:if> </xsl:for-each> </xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet> </c:set> <x:transform xml="${xml}" xslt="${xsl}" /> The problem is that nothing is shown in my screen because the generated code for <h:inputText id="input1"/> is <h:inputText id="input_1" xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html"/> how can I replace the xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html" or suppress it. Thanks! Update: Let me clarify what I want to do. I want to generate a jsf page dynamically depending on the attributes of a xml file, for instance, 2 input texts, 3 check boxes, etc. To make the transformation to jsf I thought in two approaches, one using jstl and another using xslt. The problem with the former is that I couldn't integrate jstl with jsf code (to set jsf components attributes using jstl variables) and with the last approach, I'm facing the problem described above.I wouldn't like to create components in java (UIComponents). Any suggestions?

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Usage of Document() function in XSLT 1.0

- by infant programmer

I am triggering the transformation using a .NET code, unless I add "EnableDocumentFunction" property to the XSL-Setting, the program throws error saying .. "Usage of Document() function is prohibited", Actually the program is not editable and a kind of read-only .. is it possible to edit the XSL code itself so that I can use document() function?? The sample XSL and XMLs are Here: Sample XML : <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:msxsl="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xslt" exclude-result-prefixes="msxsl" > <xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes"/> <xsl:template match="@* | node()"> <xsl:copy> <xsl:apply-templates select="@* | node()"/> </xsl:copy> </xsl:template> <xsl:variable name="State_Code_Trn"> <State In="California" Out="CA"/> <State In="CA" Out="CA"/> <State In="Texas" Out="TX"/> <State In="TX" Out="TX"/> </xsl:variable> <xsl:template name="testing" match="test_node"> <xsl:variable name="test_val"> <xsl:value-of select="."/> </xsl:variable> <xsl:element name="{name()}"> <xsl:choose> <xsl:when test="document('')/*/xsl:variable[@name='State_Code_Trn'] /State[@In=$test_val]"> <xsl:value-of select="document('')/*/xsl:variable[@name='State_Code_Trn'] /State[@In=$test_val]/@Out"/> </xsl:when> <xsl:otherwise> <xsl:text>Other</xsl:text> </xsl:otherwise> </xsl:choose> </xsl:element> </xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet> And the sample XML : <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <root> <test_node>California</test_node> <test_node>CA</test_node> <test_node> CA</test_node> <test_node>Texas</test_node> <test_node>TX</test_node> <test_node>CAA</test_node> <test_node></test_node> </root>

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How to set background in OpenGL captured image from OpenCV

- by user325487

Hey All, i'm relatively new to Artoolkitplus and openGL i'm having a tough time getting the image i capture through openCV to be set as the background image in OpenGL ... I also cannot convert the image i take through the camera using opencv to be scaled to 320x280 from 640x480 .. i also have to save my image and load if for things to work... here's my code //////////// int findMarker() { IplImage* image = cvQueryFrame( capture ); if( !capture ) { fprintf( stderr, "ERROR: capture is NULL \n" ); getchar(); return -1; } if( !image ) { fprintf( stderr, "ERROR: frame is null...\n" ); getchar(); } //cvShowImage( "Capture", frame ); //image = cvCloneImage( frame ); try{ if(!cvSaveImage("immagineTmp.jpg",image)) printf("Could not save\n"); } catch(void*) {} image = cvLoadImage("immagineTmp.jpg", 1); cvShowImage( "Image", image ); glLoadIdentity(); ////////////// glDisable(GL_DEPTH_TEST); glOrtho(0,640,0,480,-1,1); glGenTextures(1, &bgid); glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, bgid); // Create Linear Filtered Texture glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, bgid); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D,GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER,GL_LINEAR); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D,GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER,GL_LINEAR); glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, 3, image-width, image-height, 0, GL_RGB, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, image-imageData); glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, bgid); glBegin(GL_QUADS); glTexCoord2f(0.0f, 0.0f); glVertex3f(-1.2f, -1.0f, -2.0f); glTexCoord2f(1.0f, 0.0f); glVertex3f( 1.2f, -1.0f, -2.0f); glTexCoord2f(1.0f, 1.0f); glVertex3f( 1.2f, 1.0f, -2.0f); glTexCoord2f(0.0f, 1.0f); glVertex3f(-1.2f, 1.0f, -2.0f); glEnd(); glEnable(GL_DEPTH_TEST); glLoadIdentity(); //////////// // do the OpenGL camera setup glMatrixMode(GL_PROJECTION); glLoadMatrixf(tracker-getProjectionMatrix()); int markerId = tracker-calc((unsigned char *)(image-imageData)); float conf = tracker-getConfidence(); // use the result of calc() to setup the OpenGL transformation glMatrixMode(GL_MODELVIEW); glLoadMatrixf(tracker-getModelViewMatrix()); if(markerId!=-1) { printf("\n\nFound marker %d (confidence %d%%)\n\nPose-Matrix:\n ", markerId, (int(conf*100.0f))); for(int i=0; i<16; i++) printf("%.2f %s", tracker-getModelViewMatrix()[i], (i%4==3)?"\n " : ""); } cvReleaseImage(&image); return 0; }

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XML serialization options in .NET

- by Borek

I'm building a service that returns an XML (no SOAP, no ATOM, just plain old XML). Say that I have my domain objects already filled with data and just need to transform them to the XML format. What options do I have on .NET? Requirements: The transformation is not 1:1. Say that I have an Address property of type Address with nested properties like Line1, City, Postcode etc. This may need to result in an XML like <xaddr city="...">Line1, Postcode</xaddr>, i.e. quite different. Some XML elements/attributes are conditional, for example, if a Customer is under 18, the XML needs to contain some additional information. I only need to serialize the objects to XML, the other direction (XML to objects) is not important Some technologies, i.e. Data Contracts use .NET attributes. Other means of configuration (external XML config, buddy classes etc.) would be a plus. Here are the options as I see them as the moment. Corrections / additions will be very welcome. String concatenation - forget it, it was a joke :) Linq 2 XML - complete control but quite a lot of hand written code, would need good suite of unit tests View engines in ASP.NET MVC (or even Web Forms theoretically), the logic being in controllers. It's a question how to structure it, I can have simple rules engine in my controller(s) and one view template per each possible output, or have the decision logic directly in the template. Both have upsides and downsides. XML Serialization - I'm not sure about the flexibility here Data Contracts from WCF - not sure about the flexibility either, plus would they work in a simple ASP.NET MVC app (non-WCF service)? Are they a super-set of the standard XML serialization now? If it exists, some XML-to-object mapper. The more I think about it the more I think I'm looking for something like this but I couldn't find anything appropriate. Any comments / other options?

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How to populate the span tags between specific tags.

- by Rachel

I want to populate span tags for all text nodes between the self closing tags s1 and s2 having the same id.If the transformation of the input to the output form requires the list of ids of the s1 , s2 tag pairs say 1, 2 etc i can assume that it is in place in any form if required.The input can have any structure and not exactly the same as seen in the sample input. It can have any number of s1, s2 tag pairs but each pair will have a unique id. Hope i am clear. How can this be achieved using XSL? Input: <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>This is my title</title> </head> <body> <h1 align="center">This <s1 id="1" />is my <s2 id="1" />heading</h1> <p> Sample content <s1 id="2" />Some text here. Some content here. </p> <p> Here you <s2 id="2" />go. </p> </body> </html> Desired output: <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>This is my title</title> </head> <body> <h1 align="center">This <span id="1">is my </span>heading</h1> <p> Sample content <span id="2">Some text here. Some content here.</span> </p> <p> <span id="2">Here you </span>go. </p> </body> </html>

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Sorting a list of numbers with modified cost

- by David

First, this was one of the four problems we had to solve in a project last year and I couldn’t find a suitable algorithm so we handle in a brute force solution. Problem: The numbers are in a list that is not sorted and supports only one type of operation. The operation is defined as follows: Given a position i and a position j the operation moves the number at position i to position j without altering the relative order of the other numbers. If i j, the positions of the numbers between positions j and i - 1 increment by 1, otherwise if i < j the positions of the numbers between positions i+1 and j decreases by 1. This operation requires i steps to find a number to move and j steps to locate the position to which you want to move it. Then the number of steps required to move a number of position i to position j is i+j. We need to design an algorithm that given a list of numbers, determine the optimal (in terms of cost) sequence of moves to rearrange the sequence. Attempts: Part of our investigation was around NP-Completeness, we make it a decision problem and try to find a suitable transformation to any of the problems listed in Garey and Johnson’s book: Computers and Intractability with no results. There is also no direct reference (from our point of view) to this kind of variation in Donald E. Knuth’s book: The art of Computer Programing Vol. 3 Sorting and Searching. We also analyzed algorithms to sort linked lists but none of them gives a good idea to find de optimal sequence of movements. Note that the idea is not to find an algorithm that orders the sequence, but one to tell me the optimal sequence of movements in terms of cost that organizes the sequence, you can make a copy and sort it to analyze the final position of the elements if you want, in fact we may assume that the list contains the numbers from 1 to n, so we know where we want to put each number, we are just concerned with minimizing the total cost of the steps. We tested several greedy approaches but all of them failed, divide and conquer sorting algorithms can’t be used because they swap with no cost portions of the list and our dynamic programing approaches had to consider many cases. The brute force recursive algorithm takes all the possible combinations of movements from i to j and then again all the possible moments of the rest of the element’s, at the end it returns the sequence with less total cost that sorted the list, as you can imagine the cost of this algorithm is brutal and makes it impracticable for more than 8 elements. Our observations: n movements is not necessarily cheaper than n+1 movements (unlike swaps in arrays that are O(1)). There are basically two ways of moving one element from position i to j: one is to move it directly and the other is to move other elements around i in a way that it reaches the position j. At most you make n-1 movements (the untouched element reaches its position alone). If it is the optimal sequence of movements then you didn’t move the same element twice.

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Ajax Control Toolkit Now Supports jQuery

- by Stephen.Walther

I’m excited to announce the September 2013 release of the Ajax Control Toolkit, which now supports building new Ajax Control Toolkit controls with jQuery. You can download the latest release of the Ajax Control Toolkit from http://AjaxControlToolkit.CodePlex.com or you can install the Ajax Control Toolkit directly within Visual Studio by executing the following NuGet command: The New jQuery Extender Base Class This release of the Ajax Control Toolkit introduces a new jQueryExtender base class. This new base class enables you to create Ajax Control Toolkit controls with jQuery instead of the Microsoft Ajax Library. Currently, only one control in the Ajax Control Toolkit has been rewritten to use the new jQueryExtender base class (only one control has been jQueryized). The ToggleButton control is the first of the Ajax Control Toolkit controls to undergo this dramatic transformation. All of the other controls in the Ajax Control Toolkit are written using the Microsoft Ajax Library. We hope to gradually rewrite these controls as jQuery controls over time. You can view the new jQuery ToggleButton live at the Ajax Control Toolkit sample site: http://www.asp.net/ajaxLibrary/AjaxControlToolkitSampleSite/ToggleButton/ToggleButton.aspx Why are we rewriting Ajax Control Toolkits with jQuery? There are very few developers actively working with the Microsoft Ajax Library while there are thousands of developers actively working with jQuery. Because we want talented developers in the community to continue to contribute to the Ajax Control Toolkit, and because almost all JavaScript developers are familiar with jQuery, it makes sense to support jQuery with the Ajax Control Toolkit. Also, we believe that the Ajax Control Toolkit is a great framework for Web Forms developers who want to build new ASP.NET controls that use JavaScript. The Ajax Control Toolkit has great features such as automatic bundling, minification, caching, and compression. We want to make it easy for ASP.NET developers to build new controls that take advantage of these features. Instantiating Controls with data-* Attributes We took advantage of the new JQueryExtender base class to change the way that Ajax Control Toolkit controls are instantiated. In the past, adding an Ajax Control Toolkit to a page resulted in inline JavaScript being injected into the page. For example, adding the ToggleButton control to a page injected the following HTML and script: <input id="ctl00_SampleContent_CheckBox1" name="ctl00$SampleContent$CheckBox1" type="checkbox" checked="checked" /> <script type="text/javascript"> //<![CDATA[ Sys.Application.add_init(function() { $create(Sys.Extended.UI.ToggleButtonBehavior, {"CheckedImageAlternateText":"Check", "CheckedImageUrl":"ToggleButton_Checked.gif", "ImageHeight":19, "ImageWidth":19, "UncheckedImageAlternateText":"UnCheck", "UncheckedImageUrl":"ToggleButton_Unchecked.gif", "id":"ctl00_SampleContent_ToggleButtonExtender1"}, null, null, $get("ctl00_SampleContent_CheckBox1")); }); //]]> </script> Notice the call to the JavaScript $create() method at the bottom of the page. When using the Microsoft Ajax Library, this call to the $create() method is necessary to create the Ajax Control Toolkit control. This inline script looks pretty ugly to a modern JavaScript developer. Inline script! Horrible! The jQuery version of the ToggleButton injects the following HTML and script into the page: <input id="ctl00_SampleContent_CheckBox1" name="ctl00$SampleContent$CheckBox1" type="checkbox" checked="checked" data-act-togglebuttonextender="imageWidth:19, imageHeight:19, uncheckedImageUrl:'ToggleButton_Unchecked.gif', checkedImageUrl:'ToggleButton_Checked.gif', uncheckedImageAlternateText:'I don't understand why you don't like ASP.NET', checkedImageAlternateText:'It's really nice to hear from you that you like ASP.NET'" /> Notice that there is no script! There is no call to the $create() method. In fact, there is no inline JavaScript at all. The jQuery version of the ToggleButton uses an HTML5 data-* attribute instead of an inline script. The ToggleButton control is instantiated with a data-act-togglebuttonextender attribute. Using data-* attributes results in much cleaner markup (You don’t need to feel embarrassed when selecting View Source in your browser). Ajax Control Toolkit versus jQuery So in a jQuery world why is the Ajax Control Toolkit needed at all? Why not just use jQuery plugins instead of the Ajax Control Toolkit? For example, there are lots of jQuery ToggleButton plugins floating around the Internet. Why not just use one of these jQuery plugins instead of using the Ajax Control Toolkit ToggleButton control? There are three main reasons why the Ajax Control Toolkit continues to be valuable in a jQuery world: Ajax Control Toolkit controls run on both the server and client jQuery plugins are client only. A jQuery plugin does not include any server-side code. If you need to perform any work on the server – think of the AjaxFileUpload control – then you can’t use a pure jQuery solution. Ajax Control Toolkit controls provide a better Visual Studio experience You don’t get any design time experience when you use jQuery plugins within Visual Studio. Ajax Control Toolkit controls, on the other hand, are designed to work with Visual Studio. For example, you can use the Visual Studio Properties window to set Ajax Control Toolkit control properties. Ajax Control Toolkit controls shield you from working with JavaScript I like writing code in JavaScript. However, not all developers like JavaScript and some developers want to completely avoid writing any JavaScript code at all. The Ajax Control Toolkit enables you to take advantage of JavaScript (and the latest features of HTML5) in your ASP.NET Web Forms websites without writing a single line of JavaScript. Better ToolkitScriptManager Documentation With this release, we have added more detailed documentation for using the ToolkitScriptManager. In particular, we added documentation that describes how to take advantage of the new bundling, minification, compression, and caching features of the Ajax Control Toolkit. The ToolkitScriptManager documentation is part of the Ajax Control Toolkit sample site and it can be read here: http://www.asp.net/ajaxLibrary/AjaxControlToolkitSampleSite/ToolkitScriptManager/ToolkitScriptManager.aspx Other Fixes This release of the Ajax Control Toolkit includes several important bug fixes. For example, the Ajax Control Toolkit Twitter control was completely rewritten with this release. Twitter is in the process of retiring the first version of their API. You can read about their plans here: https://dev.twitter.com/blog/planning-for-api-v1-retirement We completely rewrote the Ajax Control Toolkit Twitter control to use the new Twitter API. To take advantage of the new Twitter API, you must get a key and access token from Twitter and add the key and token to your web.config file. Detailed instructions for using the new version of the Ajax Control Toolkit Twitter control can be found here: http://www.asp.net/ajaxLibrary/AjaxControlToolkitSampleSite/Twitter/Twitter.aspx Summary We’ve made some really great changes to the Ajax Control Toolkit over the last two releases to modernize the toolkit. In the previous release, we updated the Ajax Control Toolkit to use a better bundling, minification, compression, and caching system. With this release, we updated the Ajax Control Toolkit to support jQuery. We also continue to update the Ajax Control Toolkit with important bug fixes. I hope you like these changes and I look forward to hearing your feedback.

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17 new features in Visual Studio 2010

- by vik20000in

Visual studio 2010 has been released to RTM a few days back. This release of Visual studio 2010 comes with a big number of improvements on many fronts. In this post I will try and point out some of the major improvements in Visual Studio 2010. 1) Visual studio IDE Improvement. Visual studio IDE has been rewritten in WPF. The look and feel of the studio has been improved for improved readability. Start page has been redesigned and template so that anyone can change the start page as they wish. 2) Multiple Monitor - Support for Multiple Monitor was already there in Visual studio. But in this edition it has been improved as much that we can now place the document, design and code window outside the IDE in another monitor. 3) ZOOM in Code Editor – Making the editors in WPF has made significant improvement for them. The best one that I like is the ZOOM feature. We can now zoom in the code editor with the help of the ctrl + Mouse scroll. The zoom feature does not work on the Design surface or windows with icon like solution view and toolbox. 4) Box Selection - Another Important improvement in the Visual studio 2010 is the box selection. We can select a rectangular by holding down the Alt Key and selecting with mouse. Now in the rectangular selection we can insert text, Paste same code in different line etc. This is helpful if you want to convert a number of variables from public to private etc… 5) New Improved Search – One of the best productivity improvements in Visual studio 2010 is its new search as you type support. This has been done in the Navigate To window which can be brought up by pressing (Ctrl + ,). The navigate To windows also take help of the Camel casing and will be able to search with the help of camel casing when character is entered in upper case. For example we can search AOH for AddOrederHeader. 6) Call Hierarchy – This feature is only available to the Visual C# and Visual C++ editor. The call hierarchy windows displays the calls made to and from (yes both to and from) a selected method property or a constructor. The call hierarchy also shows the implementation of interface and the overrides of virtual or abstract methods. This window is very helpful in understanding the code flow, and evaluating the effect of making changes. The best part is it is available at design time and not at runtime only like a debugger. 7) Highlighting references – One of the very cool stuff in Visual Studio 2010 is the fact if you select a variable then all the use of that variable will be highlighted alongside. This should work for all the result of symbols returned by Find all reference. This also works for Name of class, objects variable, properties and methods. We can also use the Ctrl + Shift + Down Arrow or Up Arror to move through them. 8) Generate from usage - The Generate from usage feature lets you use classes and members before you define them. You can generate a stub for any undefined class, constructor, method, property, field, or enum that you want to use but have not yet defined. You can generate new types and members without leaving your current location in code, This minimizes interruption to your workflow.9) IntelliSense Suggestion Mode - IntelliSense now provides two alternatives for IntelliSense statement completion, completion mode and suggestion mode. Use suggestion mode for situations where classes and members are used before they are defined. In suggestion mode, when you type in the editor and then commit the entry, the text you typed is inserted into the code. When you commit an entry in completion mode, the editor shows the entry that is highlighted on the members list. When an IntelliSense window is open, you can press CTRL+ALT+SPACEBAR to toggle between completion mode and suggestion mode. 10) Application Lifecycle Management – A client application for management of application lifecycle like version control, work item tracking, build automation, team portal etc is available for free (this is not available for express edition.). 11) Start Page – The start page has been redesigned with WPF for new functionality and look. Tabbed areas are provided for content from different source including MSDN. Once you open some project the start page closes automatically. The list of recent project also lets you remove project from the list. And above all the start page is customizable enough to be changed as per individual requirement. 12) Extension Manager – Visual Studio 2010 has provided good ways to be extended. We can also use MEF to extend most of the features of Visual Studio. The new extension manager now can go the visual studio gallery and install the extension without even opening any explorer. 13) Code snippets – Visual studio 2010 for HTML, Jscript and Asp.net also. 14) Improved Intelligence for JavaScript has been improved vastly (around 2-5 times). Intelligence now also shows the XML documentation comment on the go. 15) Web Deployment – Web Deployment has been vastly improved. We can package and publish the web application in one click. Three major supported deployment scenarios are Web packages, one click deployment and Web configuration Transformation. 16) SharePoint - Visual Studio 2010 also brings vastly improved development experience for SharePoint. We can create, edit, debug, package, deploy and activate SharePoint project from within Visual Studio. Deployment of Site is as easy as hitting F5. 17) Azure – Visual Studio 2010 also comes with handy improvement for developing on windows Azure environment. Vikram

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T4 Template error - Assembly Directive cannot locate referenced assembly in Visual Studio 2010 proje

- by CodeSniper

I ran into the following error recently in Visual Studio 2010 while trying to port Phil Haack’s excellent T4CSS template which was originally built for Visual Studio 2008. The Problem Error Compiling transformation: Metadata file 'dotless.Core' could not be found In “T4 speak”, this simply means that you have an Assembly directive in your T4 template but the T4 engine was not able to locate or load the referenced assembly. In the case of the T4CSS Template, this was a showstopper for making it work in Visual Studio 2010. On a side note: The T4CSS template is a sweet little wrapper to allow you to use DotLessCss to generate static .css files from .less files rather than using their default HttpHandler or command-line tool. If you haven't tried DotLessCSS yet, go check it out now! In short, it is a tool that allows you to templatize and program your CSS files so that you can use variables, expressions, and mixins within your CSS which enables rapid changes and a lot of developer-flexibility as you evolve your CSS and UI. Back to our regularly scheduled program… Anyhow, this post isn't about DotLessCss, its about the T4 Templates and the errors I ran into when converting them from Visual Studio 2008 to Visual Studio 2010. In VS2010, there were quite a few changes to the T4 Template Engine; most were excellent changes, but this one bit me with T4CSS: “Project assemblies are no longer used to resolve template assembly directives.” In VS2008, if you wanted to reference a custom assembly in your T4 Template (.tt file) you would simply right click on your project, choose Add Reference and select that assembly. Afterwards you were allowed to use the following syntax in your T4 template to tell it to look at the local references: <#@ assembly name="dotless.Core.dll" #> This told the engine to look in the “usual place” for the assembly, which is your project references. However, this is exactly what they changed in VS2010. They now basically sandbox the T4 Engine to keep your T4 assemblies separate from your project assemblies. This can come in handy if you want to support different versions of an assembly referenced both by your T4 templates and your project. Who broke the build? Oh, Microsoft Did! In our case, this change causes a problem since the templates are no longer compatible when upgrading to VS 2010 – thus its a breaking change. So, how do we make this work in VS 2010? Luckily, Microsoft now offers several options for referencing assemblies from T4 Templates: GAC your assemblies and use Namespace Reference or Fully Qualified Type Name Use a hard-coded Fully Qualified UNC path Copy assembly to Visual Studio "Public Assemblies Folder" and use Namespace Reference or Fully Qualified Type Name. Use or Define a Windows Environment Variable to build a Fully Qualified UNC path. Use a Visual Studio Macro to build a Fully Qualified UNC path. Option #1 & 2 were already supported in Visual Studio 2008, so if you want to keep your templates compatible with both Visual Studio versions, then you would have to adopt one of these approaches. Yakkety Yak, use the GAC! Option #1 requires an additional pre-build step to GAC the referenced assembly, which could be a pain. But, if you go that route, then after you GAC, all you need is a simple type name or namespace reference such as: <#@ assembly name="dotless.Core" #> Hard Coding aint that hard! The other option of using hard-coded paths in Option #2 is pretty impractical in most situations since each developer would have to use the same local project folder paths, or modify this setting each time for their local machines as well as for production deployment. However, if you want to go that route, simply use the following assembly directive style: <#@ assembly name="C:\Code\Lib\dotless.Core.dll" #> Lets go Public! Option #3, the Visual Studio Public Assemblies Folder, is the recommended place to put commonly used tools and libraries that are only needed for Visual Studio. Think of it like a VS-only GAC. This is likely the best place for something like dotLessCSS and is my preferred solution. However, you will need to either use an installer or a pre-build action to copy the assembly to the right folder location. Normally this is located at: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\PublicAssemblies Once you have copied your assembly there, you use the type name or namespace syntax again: <#@ assembly name="dotless.Core" #> Save the Environment! Option #4, using a Windows Environment Variable, is interesting for enterprise use where you may have standard locations for files, but less useful for demo-code, frameworks, and products where you don't have control over the local system. The syntax for including a environment variable in your assembly directive looks like the following, just as you would expect: <#@ assembly name="%mypath%\dotless.Core.dll" #> “mypath” is a Windows environment variable you setup that points to some fully qualified UNC path on your system. In the right situation this can be a great solution such as one where you use a msi installer for deployment, or where you have a pre-existing environment variable you can re-use. OMG Macros! Finally, Option #5 is a very nice option if you want to keep your T4 template’s assembly reference local and relative to the project or solution without muddying-up your dev environment or GAC with extra deployments. An example looks like this: <#@ assembly name="$(SolutionDir)lib\dotless.Core.dll" #> In this example, I’m using the “SolutionDir” VS macro so I can reference an assembly in a “/lib” folder at the root of the solution. This is just one of the many macros you can use. If you are familiar with creating Pre/Post-build Event scripts, you can use its dialog to look at all of the different VS macros available. This option gives the best solution for local assemblies without the hassle of extra installers or other setup before the build. However, its still not compatible with Visual Studio 2008, so if you have a T4 Template you want to use with both, then you may have to create multiple .tt files, one for each IDE version, or require the developer to set a value in the .tt file manually. I’m not sure if T4 Templates support any form of compiler switches like “#if (VS2010)” statements, but it would definitely be nice in this case to switch between this option and one of the ones more compatible with VS 2008. Conclusion As you can see, we went from 3 options with Visual Studio 2008, to 5 options (plus one problem) with Visual Studio 2010. As a whole, I think the changes are great, but the short-term growing pains during the migration may be annoying until we get used to our new found power. Hopefully this all made sense and was helpful to you. If nothing else, I’ll just use it as a reference the next time I need to port a T4 template to Visual Studio 2010. Happy T4 templating, and “May the fourth be with you!”

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Who IS Brian Solis?

- by Michael Snow

Q: Brian, Welcome to the WebCenter Blog. Can you tell our readers your current role and what career path brought you here? A: I’m proudly serving as a principal analyst at Altimeter Group, a research based advisory firm in Silicon Valley. My career path, well, let’s just say it’s a long and winding road. As a kid, I was fascinated with technology. I learned programming at an early age and found myself naturally drawn to all things tech. I started my career as a database programmer at a technology marketing agency in Southern California. When I saw the chance to work with tech companies and help them better market their capabilities to businesses and consumers, I switched focus from programming to marketing and advertising. As technologist, my approach to marketing was different. I didn’t believe in hype, fluff or buzz words. I believed in translating features into benefits and specifications and capabilities into solutions for real world problems and opportunities. In the mid 90’s I experimented with direct to consumer/customer engagement in dedicated technology forums and boards. I quickly realized that the entire approach to do so would need to change. Therefore, I learned and developed new methods for a more social and informed way of engaging people in ways that helped them, marketed the company, and also tied to tangible benefits for the company. This work would lead me to start an agency in 1999 dedicated to interactive marketing. As I continued to experiment with interactive platforms, I developed interesting methods for converting one-to-many forms of media into one-to-one-to-many programs. I ran that company until joining Altimeter Group. Along the way, in the early 2000s, I realized that everything was changing and that there were others like me finding success in what would become a more social form of media. I dedicated a significant amount of my time to sharing everything that I learned in the form of articles, blogs, and eventually books. My mission became to share my experience with anyone who’d listen. It would later become much bigger than marketing, this would lead to a decade of work, that still continues, in business transformation. Then and now, I find myself always assuming the role of a student. Q: As an industry analyst & technology change evangelist, what are you primarily focused on these days? A: As a digital analyst, I study how disruptive technology impacts business. As an aspiring social scientist, I study how technology affects human behavior. I explore both horizons professionally and personally to better understand the future of popular culture and also the opportunities that exist for organizations to improve relationships and experiences with customers and the people that are important to them. Q: People cite that the line between work and life is getting more and more blurred. Do you see your personal life influencing your professional work? A: The line between work and life isn’t blurred it’s been overtly crossed and erased. We live in an always on society. The digital lifestyle keeps us connected to one another it keeps us connected all the time. Whether your sending or checking email, trying to catch up, or simply trying to get ahead, people are spending the equivalent of an extra day at work in the time they spend out of work…working. That’s absurd. It’s a matter of survival. It’s also a matter of unintended, subconscious self-causation. We brought this on ourselves and continue to do so. Think about your day. You’re in meetings for the better part of each day. You probably spend evenings and weekends catching up on email and actually doing the work you couldn’t get to during the day. And, your co-workers and executives are doing the same thing. So if you try to slow down, you find yourself at a disadvantage as you’re willfully pulling yourself out of an unfortunate culture of whenever wherever business dynamics. If you’re unresponsive or unreachable, someone within your organization or on your team is accessible. Over time, this could contribute to unfavorable impressions. I choose to steer my life balance in ways that complement one another. But, I don’t pretend to have this figured out by any means. In fact, I find myself swimming upstream like those around me. It’s essentially a competition for relevance and at some point I’ll learn how to earn attention and relevance while redrawing the line between work and life. Q: How can people keep up with what you’re working on? A: The easy answer is that people can keep up with me at briansolis.com. But, I also try to reach people where their attention is focused. Whether it’s Facebook (facebook.com/briansolis), Twitter (@briansolis), Google+ (+briansolis), Youtube (briansolis.tv) or through books and conferences, people can usually find me in a place of their choosing. Q: Recently, you’ve been working with us here at Oracle on something exciting coming up later this week. What’s on the horizon? A: I spent some time with the Oracle team reviewing the idea of Digital Darwinism and how technology and society are evolving faster than many organizations can adapt. Digital Darwinism: How Brands Can Survive the Rapid Evolution of Society and Technology Thursday, December 13, 2012, 10 a.m. PT / 1 p.m. ET Q: You’ve been very actively pursued for media interviews and conference and company speaking engagements – anything you’d like to share to give us a sneak peak of what to expect on Thursday’s webcast? A: We’re inviting guests to join us online as we dive into the future of business and how the convergence of technology and connected consumerism would ultimately impact how business is done. It’ll be an exciting and revealing conversation that explores just how much everything is changing. We’ll also review the importance of adapting to emergent trends and how to compete for the future. It’s important to recognize that change is not happening to us, it’s happening because of us. We are part of the revolution and therefore we need to help organizations adapt from the inside out. Watch the Entire Oracle Social Business Thought Leaders Webcast Series On-Demand and Stay Tuned for More to Come in 2013!

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How to pass XML to DB using XMLTYPE

- by James Taylor

Probably not a common use case but I have seen it pop up from time to time. The question how do I pass XML from a queue or web service and insert it into a DB table using XMLTYPE.In this example I create a basic table with the field PAYLOAD of type XMLTYPE. I then take the full XML payload of the web service and insert it into that database for auditing purposes.I use SOA Suite 11.1.1.2 using composite and mediator to link the web service with the DB adapter.1. Insert Database Objects Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} --Create XML_EXAMPLE_TBL Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} CREATE TABLE XML_EXAMPLE_TBL (PAYLOAD XMLTYPE); Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} --Create procedure LOAD_TEST_XML Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} CREATE or REPLACE PROCEDURE load_test_xml (xmlFile in CLOB) IS BEGIN INSERT INTO xml_example_tbl (payload) VALUES (XMLTYPE(xmlFile)); --Handle the exceptions EXCEPTION WHEN OTHERS THEN raise_application_error(-20101, 'Exception occurred in loadPurchaseOrder procedure :'||SQLERRM || ' **** ' || xmlFile ); END load_test_xml; / 2. Creating New SOA Project TestXMLTYPE in JDeveloperIn JDeveloper either create a new Application or open an existing Application you want to put this work.Under File -> New -> SOA Tier -> SOA Project Provide a name for the Project, e.g. TestXMLType Choose Empty Composite When selected Empty Composite click Finish.3. Create Database Connection to Stored ProcedureA Blank composite will be displayed. From the Component Palette drag a Database Adapter to the External References panel. and configure the Database Adapter Wizard to connect to the DB procedure created above.Provide a service name InsertXML Select a Database connection where you installed the table and procedure above. If it doesn't exist create a new one. Select Call a Stored Procedure or Function then click NextChoose the schema you installed your Procedure in step 1 and query for the LOAD_TEST_XML procedure.Click Next for the remaining screens until you get to the end, then click Finish to complete the database adapter wizard.4. Create the Web Service InterfaceDownload this sample schema that will be used as the input for the web service. It does not matter what schema you use this solution will work with any. Feel free to use your own if required. singleString.xsd Drag from the component palette the Web Service to the Exposed Services panel on the component.Provide a name InvokeXMLLoad for the service, and click the cog icon.Click the magnify glass for the URL to browse to the location where you downloaded the xml schema above. Import the schema file by selecting the import schema iconBrowse to the location to where you downloaded the singleString.xsd above.Click OK for the Import Schema File, then select the singleString node of the imported schema.Accept all the defaults until you get back to the Web Service wizard screen. The click OK. This step has created a WSDL based on the schema we downloaded earlier.Your composite should now look something like this now.5. Create the Mediator Routing Rules Drag a Mediator component into the middle of the Composite called ComponentsGive the name of Route, and accept the defaultsLink the services up to the Mediator by connecting the reference points so your Composite looks like this.6. Perform Translations between Web Service and the Database Adapter.From the Composite double click the Route Mediator to show the Map Plan. Select the transformation icon to create the XSLT translation file.Choose Create New Mapper File and accept the defaults.From the Component Palette drag the get-content-as-string component into the middle of the translation file.Your translation file should look something like thisNow we need to map the root element of the source 'singleString' to the XMLTYPE of the database adapter, applying the function get-content-as-string.To do this drag the element singleString to the left side of the function get-content-as-string and drag the right side of the get-content-as-string to the XMLFILE element of the database adapter so the mapping looks like this. You have now completed the SOA Component you can now save your work, deploy and test.When you deploy I have assumed that you have the correct database configurations in the WebLogic Console based on the connection you setup connecting to the Stored Procedure. 7. Testing the ApplicationOpen Enterprise Manager and navigate to the TestXMLTYPE Composite and click the Test button. Load some dummy variables in the Input Arguments and click the 'Test Web Service' buttonOnce completed you can run a SQL statement to check the install. In this instance I have just used JDeveloper and opened a SQL WorksheetSQL Statement Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} select * from xml_example_tbl; Result, you should see the full payload in the result.

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SQL SERVER – 5 Tips for Improving Your Data with expressor Studio

- by pinaldave

It’s no secret that bad data leads to bad decisions and poor results. However, how do you prevent dirty data from taking up residency in your data store? Some might argue that it’s the responsibility of the person sending you the data. While that may be true, in practice that will rarely hold up. It doesn’t matter how many times you ask, you will get the data however they decide to provide it. So now you have bad data. What constitutes bad data? There are quite a few valid answers, for example: Invalid date values Inappropriate characters Wrong data Values that exceed a pre-set threshold While it is certainly possible to write your own scripts and custom SQL to identify and deal with these data anomalies, that effort often takes too long and becomes difficult to maintain. Instead, leveraging an ETL tool like expressor Studio makes the data cleansing process much easier and faster. Below are some tips for leveraging expressor to get your data into tip-top shape. Tip 1: Build reusable data objects with embedded cleansing rules One of the new features in expressor Studio 3.2 is the ability to define constraints at the metadata level. Using expressor’s concept of Semantic Types, you can define reusable data objects that have embedded logic such as constraints for dealing with dirty data. Once defined, they can be saved as a shared atomic type and then re-applied to other data attributes in other schemas. As you can see in the figure above, I’ve defined a constraint on zip code. I can then save the constraint rules I defined for zip code as a shared atomic type called zip_type for example. The next time I get a different data source with a schema that also contains a zip code field, I can simply apply the shared atomic type (shown below) and the previously defined constraints will be automatically applied. Tip 2: Unlock the power of regular expressions in Semantic Types Another powerful feature introduced in expressor Studio 3.2 is the option to use regular expressions as a constraint. A regular expression is used to identify patterns within data. The patterns could be something as simple as a date format or something much more complex such as a street address. For example, I could define that a valid IP address should be made up of 4 numbers, each 0 to 255, and separated by a period. So 192.168.23.123 might be a valid IP address whereas 888.777.0.123 would not be. How can I account for this using regular expressions? A very simple regular expression that would look for any 4 sets of 3 digits separated by a period would be: ^[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}$ Alternatively, the following would be the exact check for truly valid IP addresses as we had defined above: ^(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|1[0-9]{2}|[1-9]?[0-9])\.(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|1[0-9]{2}|[1-9]?[0-9])\.(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|1[0-9]{2}|[1-9]?[0-9])\.(25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|1[0-9]{2}|[1-9]?[0-9])$ . In expressor, we would enter this regular expression as a constraint like this: Here we select the corrective action to be ‘Escalate’, meaning that the expressor Dataflow operator will decide what to do. Some of the options include rejecting the offending record, skipping it, or aborting the dataflow. Tip 3: Email pattern expressions that might come in handy In the example schema that I am using, there’s a field for email. Email addresses are often entered incorrectly because people are trying to avoid spam. While there are a lot of different ways to define what constitutes a valid email address, a quick search online yields a couple of really useful regular expressions for validating email addresses: This one is short and sweet: \b[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}\b (Source: http://www.regular-expressions.info/) This one is more specific about which characters are allowed: ^([a-zA-Z0-9_\-\.]+)@((\[[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.)|(([a-zA-Z0-9\-]+\.)+))([a-zA-Z]{2,4}|[0-9]{1,3})(\]?)$ (Source: http://regexlib.com/REDetails.aspx?regexp_id=26 ) Tip 4: Reject “dirty data” for analysis or further processing Yet another feature introduced in expressor Studio 3.2 is the ability to reject records based on constraint violations. To capture reject records on input, simply specify Reject Record in the Error Handling setting for the Read File operator. Then attach a Write File operator to the reject port of the Read File operator as such: Next, in the Write File operator, you can configure the expressor operator in a similar way to the Read File. The key difference would be that the schema needs to be derived from the upstream operator as shown below: Once configured, expressor will output rejected records to the file you specified. In addition to the rejected records, expressor also captures some diagnostic information that will be helpful towards identifying why the record was rejected. This makes diagnosing errors much easier! Tip 5: Use a Filter or Transform after the initial cleansing to finish the job Sometimes you may want to predicate the data cleansing on a more complex set of conditions. For example, I may only be interested in processing data containing males over the age of 25 in certain zip codes. Using an expressor Filter operator, you can define the conditional logic which isolates the records of importance away from the others. Alternatively, the expressor Transform operator can be used to alter the input value via a user defined algorithm or transformation. It also supports the use of conditional logic and data can be rejected based on constraint violations. However, the best tip I can leave you with is to not constrain your solution design approach – expressor operators can be combined in many different ways to achieve the desired results. For example, in the expressor Dataflow below, I can post-process the reject data from the Filter which did not meet my pre-defined criteria and, if successful, Funnel it back into the flow so that it gets written to the target table. I continue to be impressed that expressor offers all this functionality as part of their FREE expressor Studio desktop ETL tool, which you can download from here. Their Studio ETL tool is absolutely free and they are very open about saying that if you want to deploy their software on a dedicated Windows Server, you need to purchase their server software, whose pricing is posted on their website. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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Chock-full of Identity Customers at Oracle OpenWorld

- by Tanu Sood

Oracle Openworld (OOW) 2012 kicks off this coming Sunday. Oracle OpenWorld is known to bring in Oracle customers, organizations big and small, from all over the world. And, Identity Management is no exception. If you are looking to catch up with Oracle Identity Management customers, hear first-hand about their implementation experiences and discuss industry trends, business drivers, solutions and more at OOW, here are some sessions we recommend you attend: Monday, October 1, 2012 CON9405: Trends in Identity Management 10:45 a.m. – 11:45 a.m., Moscone West 3003 Subject matter experts from Kaiser Permanente and SuperValu share the stage with Amit Jasuja, Snior Vice President, Oracle Identity Management and Security to discuss how the latest advances in Identity Management are helping customers address emerging requirements for securely enabling cloud, social and mobile environments. CON9492: Simplifying your Identity Management Implementation 3:15 p.m. – 4:15 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Implementation experts from British Telecom, Kaiser Permanente and UPMC participate in a panel to discuss best practices, key strategies and lessons learned based on their own experiences. Attendees will hear first-hand what they can do to streamline and simplify their identity management implementation framework for a quick return-on-investment and maximum efficiency. CON9444: Modernized and Complete Access Management 4:45 p.m. – 5:45 p.m., Moscone West 3008 We have come a long way from the days of web single sign-on addressing the core business requirements. Today, as technology and business evolves, organizations are seeking new capabilities like federation, token services, fine grained authorizations, web fraud prevention and strong authentication. This session will explore the emerging requirements for access management, what a complete solution is like, complemented with real-world customer case studies from ETS, Kaiser Permanente and TURKCELL and product demonstrations. Tuesday, October 2, 2012 CON9437: Mobile Access Management 10:15 a.m. – 11:15 a.m., Moscone West 3022 With more than 5 billion mobile devices on the planet and an increasing number of users using their own devices to access corporate data and applications, securely extending identity management to mobile devices has become a hot topic. This session will feature Identity Management evangelists from companies like Intuit, NetApp and Toyota to discuss how to extend your existing identity management infrastructure and policies to securely and seamlessly enable mobile user access. CON9491: Enhancing the End-User Experience with Oracle Identity Governance applications 11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m., Moscone West 3008 As organizations seek to encourage more and more user self service, business users are now primary end users for identity management installations. Join experts from Visa and Oracle as they explore how Oracle Identity Governance solutions deliver complete identity administration and governance solutions with support for emerging requirements like cloud identities and mobile devices. CON9447: Enabling Access for Hundreds of Millions of Users 1:15 p.m. – 2:15 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Dealing with scale problems? Looking to address identity management requirements with million or so users in mind? Then take note of Cisco’s implementation. Join this session to hear first-hand how Cisco tackled identity management and scaled their implementation to bolster security and enforce compliance. CON9465: Next Generation Directory – Oracle Unified Directory 5:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Get the 360 degrees perspective from a solution provider, implementation services partner and the customer in this session to learn how the latest Oracle Unified Directory solutions can help you build a directory infrastructure that is optimized to support cloud, mobile and social networking and yet deliver on scale and performance. Wednesday, October 3, 2012 CON9494: Sun2Oracle: Identity Management Platform Transformation 11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Sun customers are actively defining strategies for how they will modernize their identity deployments. Learn how customers like Avea and SuperValu are leveraging their Sun investment, evaluating areas of expansion/improvement and building momentum. CON9631: Entitlement-centric Access to SOA and Cloud Services 11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m., Marriott Marquis, Salon 7 How do you enforce that a junior trader can submit 10 trades/day, with a total value of $5M, if market volatility is low? How can hide sensitive patient information from clerical workers but make it visible to specialists as long as consent has been given or there is an emergency? How do you externalize such entitlements to allow dynamic changes without having to touch the application code? In this session, Uberether and HerbaLife take the stage with Oracle to demonstrate how you can enforce such entitlements on a service not just within your intranet but also right at the perimeter. CON3957 - Delivering Secure Wi-Fi on the Tube as an Olympics Legacy from London 2012 11:45 a.m. – 12:45 p.m., Moscone West 3003 In this session, Virgin Media, the U.K.’s first combined provider of broadband, TV, mobile, and home phone services, shares how it is providing free secure Wi-Fi services to the London Underground, using Oracle Virtual Directory and Oracle Entitlements Server, leveraging back-end legacy systems that were never designed to be externalized. As an Olympics 2012 legacy, the Oracle architecture will form a platform to be consumed by other Virgin Media services such as video on demand. CON9493: Identity Management and the Cloud 1:15 p.m. – 2:15 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Security is the number one barrier to cloud service adoption. Not so for industry leading companies like SaskTel, ConAgra foods and UPMC. This session will explore how these organizations are using Oracle Identity with cloud services and how some are offering identity management as a cloud service. CON9624: Real-Time External Authorization for Middleware, Applications, and Databases 3:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m., Moscone West 3008 As organizations seek to grant access to broader and more diverse user populations, the importance of centrally defined and applied authorization policies become critical; both to identify who has access to what and to improve the end user experience. This session will explore how customers are using attribute and role-based access to achieve these goals. CON9625: Taking control of WebCenter Security 5:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Many organizations are extending WebCenter in a business to business scenario requiring secure identification and authorization of business partners and their users. Leveraging LADWP’s use case, this session will focus on how customers are leveraging, securing and providing access control to Oracle WebCenter portal and mobile solutions. Thursday, October 4, 2012 CON9662: Securing Oracle Applications with the Oracle Enterprise Identity Management Platform 2:15 p.m. – 3:15 p.m., Moscone West 3008 Oracle Enterprise identity Management solutions are designed to secure access and simplify compliance to Oracle Applications. Whether you are an EBS customer looking to upgrade from Oracle Single Sign-on or a Fusion Application customer seeking to leverage the Identity instance as an enterprise security platform, this session with Qualcomm and Oracle will help you understand how to get the most out of your investment. And here’s the complete listing of all the Identity Management sessions at Oracle OpenWorld.

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15 Kasim 2012 Oracle Day

- by TUFEKCIOGLU,FATIH

15.Kasim'da Harbiye Istanbul Kongre Merkezi'nde düzenlenecek Oracle Day'e ait etkinlik bilgileri : Oracle Day etkinlik bilgileri için tiklayiniz En Son Teknolojiden Faydalanin: Inovasyona ve Rekabete Zaman Birakin 15 Kasim 2012 Bulut Bilisim, Mobilite, Sosyal Medya ve Büyük Veri, bildigimiz dünyayi yeniden tanimliyor. Bu teknolojileri kurumuna ilk getirenlerden biri olun; daha hizli yeni ürün ve hizmet gelistirme, müsteri deneyimini iyilestirme ve yeni inovatif is modellerini hayata geçirme firsati yakalayarak rekabetteki konumunuzu güçlendirin. Oracle ve is ortaklari bu noktada size, teknolojik yenilikleri kurumunuza uyarlamanizda yardim ederken, sizin de piyasadaki degisimlerden rakiplerinizden önce avantaj elde etmenizi saglar. Oracle'in, birlikte çalismak için tasarlanmis olan yazilim ve donanimlarda en yeni teknolojileri kullanarak, bilgi teknolojilerini nasil sadelestirdigini ögrenmek için Oracle Day'de bize katilin. Oracle Day'de: Oracle'in Bulut Bilisim, Büyük Veri, Sosyal Medya, is uygulamalari çözümleri hakkinda bilgi edinme, Basarili is dönüsümleri hakkinda örnek basari hikayelerini dinleme, Sizinle ayni zorluklari tecrübe eden sektör çalisanlariyla biraraya gelme, Oracle uzmanlari ve is ortaklari ile tanisma ve yeni ürün tanitimlarini izleme, Oracle OpenWorld'den en yeni ürün bilgilerini edinme firsatini kaçirmayin... Saygilarimizla, Oracle Türkiye Hemen Kaydolun! Platin Sponsor Istanbul Kongre Merkezi Taskisla Caddesi Harbiye 34367 Istanbul / Türkiye 15 Kasim 2012, Persembe 08:30 - 18:30 LCV: [email protected] oracle.com/oracleday Bizi takip edin: #oracleday Oracle Is Ortagi Müsteri Basari Hikayesi TROUG Sunum Ingilizce'dir Günün Ajandasi 08:45-09:30 Kayit 09:30-10:00 Hos Geldiniz Filiz Dogan, Genel Müdür, Oracle Türkiye 10:00-10:30 Navigating Complexity by Simplifying I.T. Andrew Mendelsohn, Kidemli Baskan Yardimcisi, Oracle Veritabani Sunucu Teknolojileri, Oracle 10:30-11:00 Dönüsümsel Bulut Yolculugu Ilker Kuruöz, CIO, Turkcell 11:00-11:20 Yeni Dönemde Veri Merkezlerinin Olmazsa Olmazlari Yalim Eristiren, Genel Müdür Yardimcisi, Intel 11:20-11:30 Slimfit Feyza Narli, Is Çözümleri Direktörü, Innova 11:30-12:00 Java ile Inovasyon Cuma Yigit, Teknik Mimar, Etiya Yusuf Tok, Java Grup Yöneticisi, OBSS Ersun Engel, Satis Müdürü, Oracle 12:00-12:10 Kahve Molasi 1. SALON 2. SALON 3. SALON 4. SALON 5. SALON 6. SALON 7. SALON 8. SALON 9. SALON 10. SALON Müsteri Deneyimi: Çalisaninizi Yetkinlestirin. Markanizi Güçlendirin. Is Süreçlerinde Degisim Daha Fazla Veri, Daha Hizli Sonuç: Isinizi Analitik Çözümlerle Güçlendirin Peki Ama Nasil? Bulut Uygulayicilari için Çözüm Haritasi Is Uygulamalarinizda Inovasyonun Gücünü Kullanin Yeni Nesil Veri Merkezi ile BT'nin Gücünü Ortaya Çikartin Oracle & Is Ortaklari Çözümleri - Basari Hikayeleri I Oracle & Is Ortaklari Çözümleri - Basari Hikayeleri II Oracle Finansal Hizmetler - Core Banking and Analytical Solutions Oracle User Group (TROUG) 12:10-12:40 Müsteri Deneyimi: Çalisaninizi Yetkinlestirin. Markanizi Güçlendirin. Tekfen Ceyhan Çelik Fabrikasi Maliyet Yönetimi ve Üretim Takibi Daha Fazla Veriyle, Daha Hizli Hareket: Yaraticiligi Aksiyonla Güçlendirme Architect Your Cloud: A Blueprint for Cloud Builders Technology Strategies that Drive Business Excellence: Get Social. Be Mobile. Run Cloud. Yeni Nesil Veri Merkezi ile BT'nin Gücünü Ortaya Çikartin Innovate with Oracle - Virtual Banking and Self Service Channels What's Next for Oracle Database? Oracle Innova Oracle Oracle Oracle Oracle Oracle Oracle 12:40-13:40 Ögle Yemegi 13:40-14:10 Uygulamalariniz Artik Bulutta 21. Yüzyilda Finans: Potansiyeli Kullanin - Sonuçlara Ulasin! "Düsünce Hizinda" Intel Islemcili Oracle Büyük Veri ve Is Analitigi Çözümleri Deniz Seviyesinden Bulutlara I CRM'inizi Sosyallestirin: Telaura Sosyal CRM Yeni Nesil Veri Merkezinde Trend: Sadelik Abone Bilgi Yönetim Sistemi (ABYS) Yüksek Oracle Veri Tabani Performansi - Oracle Veri Tabani Oracle Veri Depolama Sistemi ile Entegre Oldugunda Sigortacilikta Finansal Transformasyon ve Entegre Veri Ambari Çözümleri SQL/PLSQL Yeni Özellikler Oracle Oracle Intel Oracle Etiya Oracle Inspirit Oracle Oraturk TROUG 14:10-14:20 Kahve Molasi 14:20-14:50 Satis ve Pazarlamada Sosyal Mecralar Müsteri Basari Hikayeleri Paneli: Degisim Yolculugu ve Sonuçlari Tukas'in Analitik Yolculugu Deniz Seviyesinden Bulutlara II Loupe: IP Tabanli Servisler için Proaktif Izleme Veri Merkezinizdeki Riskleri Ortadan Kaldirin Oracle iAS to WebLogic Migrasyonu Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance - Turkcell Deneyimleri Analytical Transformation - Risk and Finance Together to Address the Regulatory Changes Today and Tomorrow Veri Madenciligi Veritabaninda Yapilir: Uygulamalariyla Oracle R Enterprise ve Oracle Data Mining Opsiyonu Oracle Akbank, Teknosa, Dogus Holding, Ceynak Gtech Oracle Netas Oracle OBSS Turkcell&Gantek Oracle TROUG 14:50-15:00 Kahve Molasi 15:00-15:30 Yetenek Yönetiminde Entegre Çözümler: Taleo ile Ise Alim Artik Daha Kolay Müsteri Basari Hikayeleri Paneli: Degisim Yolculugu ve Sonuçlari Büyük Veri & Exalytics - Exadata'nin Gelecek Rotasi - Bütünlesik (Engineered) Sistemler'de Ücretsiz Platin Hizmetleri Aksigorta Oracle ATS (Application Testing Suite) ile Uygulamalarini Nasil Test Ediyor? Üstün Performans ve Esneklik ile Servis Seviyenizi Arttirin Akilli Belediyecilik Uygulamalarinda Oracle BPM ile Süreç Yönetimi Teyp ile Uçtan Uca Yedekleme Çözümleri Connecting with Customers to Enhance Revenue Generation: Unleashing the Power of an Enterprise Revenue Management and Billing Solution Günümüzün Uygulama Mimarisi Sorunlari ve Çözüm Önerileri Oracle Akbank, Teknosa, Dogus Holding, Ceynak Oracle Oracle Aksigorta Oracle Sampas Remivac Oracle TROUG 15:30-15:40 Kahve Molasi 15:40-16:10 JD Edwards Yeni Sürüm ile Satis Agi Yönetimi Oracle Policy Automation ile Türkçe Merkezi Is Kurallari Yönetimi Oracle BI ile Kurumsal Karne Çözümleri Turkcell Süperbulut ile Yazilim Artik Hizmetinizde Bütünlesik (Engineered) Sistemler Artik SAP Müsterilerinde de Fark Yaratiyor Yeni Nesil Veri Merkezi Olusturma: Denenmis ve Ispatlanmis Yöntemler Türk Telekom SOA Projesi Basari Hikayesi Yapi Kredi Sigorta Uygulamalarinda Son Kullanici Deneyimini Nasil Izliyor? 2013 NFC Trendleri Karagöz ile Hacivat Veri Tabaninda TupperWare & Akademi Danismanlik Oracle Oracle Turkcell Oracle Oracle Türk Telekom Yapi Kredi Sigorta Smartsoft TROUG 16:10-16:20 Kahve Molasi 16:20-16:50 Tutarli, Tekil Veriye Yolculuk: Oracle Ana Veri Yönetimi Turkcell/Superonline'da Varlik Yönetimi Her Tür Verinin Endeca ile Rahat Analizi Bulut Bilisim'de Güvenlik Nasil Saglanir? Rekabette Kazanmak: GoldenGate ile Dogru Kararlari Rakiplerinizden Önce Verin. Veri Merkeziniz için Bulut Altyapi Stratejileri Oracle Orkestrasi: Çok Sesli Yönetime Kulak Verin Lojistik Zekasi / Horoz Lojistik Basari Hikayesi Bütünlesik Sistemler (Engineered Systems) ile Yüksek Performansli Java Uygulamalari International Growth - Helping the Banks Standardize Overseas Operations Oracle Big Data Oracle Turkcell Oracle Oracle Oracle Oracle Kora & Horoz Lojistik Oracle Oracle TROUG 16:50-18:30 Kokteyl Eger bir kamu kurumunun/kurulusunun çalisani veya görevlisi iseniz, bu etkinlige iliskin önemli etik kurallara iliskin bilgi için lütfen buraya tiklayiniz Copyright 2012, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Bize Ulasin | Yasal Uyarilar | Gizlilik Beyani

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Thank You for a Great Welcome for Oracle GoldenGate 11g Release 2

- by Irem Radzik

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Yesterday morning we had two launch webcasts for Oracle GoldenGate 11g Release 2. I had the pleasure to present, as well as moderate the Q&A panels in both of these webcasts. Both events had hundreds of live attendees, sending us over 150 questions. Even though we left 30 minutes for Q&A, it was not nearly enough time to address for all the insightful questions our audience sent. Our product management team and I really appreciate the interaction we had yesterday and we are starting to respond back with outstanding questions today. Oracle GoldenGate’s new release launch also had great welcome from the media. You can find the links for various articles on the new release below: ITBusinessEdge Oracle Embraces Cross-Platform Data Integration Information Week: Oracle Real-Time Advance Taps Compressed Data Integration Developer News, Oracle GoldenGate Adds Deeper Oracle Integration, Extends Real-Time Performance CIO, Oracle GoldenGate Buddies Up with Sibling Software DBTA, Real-Time Data Integration: Oracle GoldenGate 11g Release 2 Now Available CBR Oracle unveils GoldenGate 11g Release 2 real-time data integration application In this blog, I want to address some of the frequently asked questions that came up during the webcasts. You can find the top questions and their answers along with related resources below. We will continue to address frequently asked questions via future blogs. Q: Will the new Integrated Capture for Oracle Database replace the Classic Capture? If not, which one do I use when? A: No, Classic Capture will be around for long time. Core platform specific features, bug fixes, and patches will be available for both Capture processes.Oracle Database specific features will be only available in the Integrated Capture. The Integrated Capture for Oracle Database is an option for users that need to capture data from compressed tables or need support for XML data types, XA on RAC. Users who don’t leverage these features should continue to use our Classic Capture. For more information on Oracle GoldenGate 11g Release 2 I recommend to check out the White paper: Oracle GoldenGate 11gR2 New Features as well as other technical white papers we have on OTN. For those of you coming to OpenWorld, please attend the related session: Extracting Data in Oracle GoldenGate Integrated Capture Mode, Monday Oct 1st 1:45pm Moscone South – 102 to learn more about this new feature. Q: What is new in Conflict Detection and Resolution? And how does it work? A: There are now pre-built functions to identify the conditions under which an error occurs and how to handle the record when the condition occurs. Error conditions handled include inserts into a target table where the row already exists, updates or deletes to target table rows that exist, but the original source data (before columns) do not match the existing data in the target row, and updates or deletes where the row does not exist in the target database table.Foreach of these conditions a method to handle the error is specified. Please check out our recent blog on this topic and the White paper: Oracle GoldenGate 11gR2 New Features white paper. Also, for those attending OpenWorld please attend the session: Best Practices for Conflict Detection and Resolution in Oracle GoldenGate for Active/Active- Wednesday Oct 3rd 3:30pm Mascone 3000 Q: Does Oracle GoldenGate Veridata and the Management Pack require additional licenses, or is it incorporated with the GoldenGate license? A: Oracle GoldenGate Veridata and Oracle Management Pack for Oracle GoldenGate are additional products and require separate licenses. Please check out Oracle's price list here. Q: Does GoldenGate - Oracle Enterprise Manager Plug-in require additional license? A: Oracle Enterprise Manager Plug-in is included in the Oracle Management Pack for Oracle GoldenGate license, which is separate from Oracle GoldenGate license. There is no separate license for the Enterprise Manager Plug-in by itself. Oracle GoldenGate Monitor, Oracle GoldenGate Director, and Enterprise Manager Plug-in are included in the Management Pack for Oracle GoldenGate license. Please check out Management Pack for Oracle GoldenGate data sheet for more info on this product bundle. Q: Is Oracle GoldenGate replacing Oracle Streams product? A: Oracle GoldenGate is the strategic data replication product. Therefore, Oracle Streams will continue to be supported, but will not be actively enhanced. Rather, the best elements of Oracle Streams will be added to Oracle GoldenGate. Conflict management is one of them and with the latest release Oracle GoldenGate has a more advanced conflict management offering. Current customers depending on Oracle Streams will continue to be fully supported. Q: How is Oracle GoldenGate different than Oracle Data Integrator? A: Oracle Data Integrator is designed for fast bulk data movement and transformation between heterogeneous systems, while GoldenGate is designed for real-time movement of transactions between heterogeneous systems. These two products are completely complementary where GoldenGate provides low-impact real-time change data capture and delivery to a staging area on the target. And Oracle Data Integrator transforms this data and loads the DW tables. In fact, Oracle Data Integrator integrates with GoldenGate to use GoldenGate’s Capture process as one option for its CDC mechanism. We have several customers that deployed GoldenGate and ODI together to feed real-time data to their data warehousing solutions. Please also check out Oracle Data Integrator Changed Data Capture with Oracle GoldenGate Data Sheet (PDF). Thank you again very much for welcoming Oracle GoldenGate 11g Release 2 and stay in touch with us for more exciting news, updates, and events.

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Handling HumanTask attachments in Oracle BPM 11g PS4FP+ (I)

- by ccasares

Adding attachments to a HumanTask is a feature that exists in Oracle HWF (Human Workflow) since 10g. However, in 11g there have been many improvements on this feature and this entry will try to summarize them. Oracle BPM 11g 11.1.1.5.1 (aka PS4 Feature Pack or PS4FP) introduced two great features: Ability to link attachments at a Task scope or at a Process scope: "Task" attachments are only visible within the scope (lifetime) of a task. This means that, initially, any member of the assignment pattern of the Human Task will be able to handle (add, review or remove) attachments. However, once the task is completed, subsequent human tasks will not have access to them. This does not mean those attachments got lost. Once the human task is completed, attachments can be retrieved in order to, i.e., check them in to a Content Server or to inject them to a new and different human task. Aside note: a "re-initiated" human task will inherit comments and attachments, along with history and -optionally- payload. See here for more info. "Process" attachments are visible within the scope of the process. This means that subsequent human tasks in the same process instance will have access to them. Ability to use Oracle WebCenter Content (previously known as "Oracle UCM") as the backend for the attachments instead of using HWF database backend. This feature adds all content server document lifecycle capabilities to HWF attachments (versioning, RBAC, metadata management, etc). As of today, only Oracle WCC is supported. However, Oracle BPM Suite does include a license of Oracle WCC for the solely usage of document management within BPM scope. Here are some code samples that leverage the above features. Retrieving uploaded attachments -Non UCM- Non UCM attachments (default ones or those that have existed from 10g, and are stored "as-is" in HWK database backend) can be retrieved after the completion of the Human Task. Firstly, we need to know whether any attachment has been effectively uploaded to the human task. There are two ways to find it out: Through an XPath function: Checking the execData/attachment[] structure. For example: Once we are sure one ore more attachments were uploaded to the Human Task, we want to get them. In this example, by "get" I mean to get the attachment name and the payload of the file. Aside note: Oracle HWF lets you to upload two kind of [non-UCM] attachments: a desktop document and a Web URL. This example focuses just on the desktop document one. In order to "retrieve" an uploaded Web URL, you can get it directly from the execData/attachment[] structure. Attachment content (payload) is retrieved through the getTaskAttachmentContents() XPath function: This example shows how to retrieve as many attachments as those had been uploaded to the Human Task and write them to the server using the File Adapter service. The sample process excerpt is as follows: A dummy UserTask using "HumanTask1" Human Task followed by a Embedded Subprocess that will retrieve the attachments (we're assuming at least one attachment is uploaded): and once retrieved, we will write each of them back to a file in the server using a File Adapter service: In detail: We've defined an XSD structure that will hold the attachments (both name and payload): Then, we can create a BusinessObject based on such element (attachmentCollection) and create a variable (named attachmentBPM) of such BusinessObject type. We will also need to keep a copy of the HumanTask output's execData structure. Therefore we need to create a variable of type TaskExecutionData... ...and copy the HumanTask output execData to it: Now we get into the embedded subprocess that will retrieve the attachments' payload. First, and using an XSLT transformation, we feed the attachmentBPM variable with the name of each attachment and setting an empty value to the payload: Please note that we're using the XSLT for-each node to create as many target structures as necessary. Also note that we're setting an Empty text to the payload variable. The reason for this is to make sure the <payload></payload> tag gets created. This is needed when we map the payload to the XML variable later. Aside note: We are assuming that we're retrieving non-UCM attachments. However in real life you might want to check the type of attachment you're handling. The execData/attachment[]/storageType contains the values "UCM" for UCM type attachments, "TASK" for non-UCM ones or "URL" for Web URL ones. Those values are part of the "Ext.Com.Oracle.Xmlns.Bpel.Workflow.Task.StorageTypeEnum" enumeration. Once we have fed the attachmentsBPM structure and so it now contains the name of each of the attachments, it is time to iterate through it and get the payload. Therefore we will use a new embedded subprocess of type MultiInstance, that will iterate over the attachmentsBPM/attachment[] element: In every iteration we will use a Script activity to map the corresponding payload element with the result of the XPath function getTaskAttachmentContents(). Please, note how the target array element is indexed with the loopCounter predefined variable, so that we make sure we're feeding the right element during the array iteration: The XPath function used looks as follows: hwf:getTaskAttachmentContents(bpmn:getDataObject('UserTask1LocalExecData')/ns1:systemAttributes/ns1:taskId, bpmn:getDataObject('attachmentsBPM')/ns:attachment[bpmn:getActivityInstanceAttribute('SUBPROCESS3067107484296', 'loopCounter')]/ns:fileName) where the input parameters are: taskId of the just completed Human Task attachment name we're retrieving the payload from array index (loopCounter predefined variable) Aside note: The reason whereby we're iterating the execData/attachment[] structure through embedded subprocess and not, i.e., using XSLT and for-each nodes, is mostly because the getTaskAttachmentContents() XPath function is currently not available in XSLT mappings. So all this example might be considered as a workaround until this gets fixed/enhanced in future releases. Once this embedded subprocess ends, we will have all attachments (name + payload) in the attachmentsBPM variable, which is the main goal of this sample. But in order to test everything runs fine, we finish the sample writing each attachment to a file. To that end we include a final embedded subprocess to concurrently iterate through each attachmentsBPM/attachment[] element: On each iteration we will use a Service activity that invokes a File Adapter write service. In here we have two important parameters to set. First, the payload itself. The file adapter awaits binary data in base64 format (string). We have to map it using XPath (Simple mapping doesn't recognize a String as a base64-binary valid target): Second, we must set the target filename using the Service Properties dialog box: Again, note how we're making use of the loopCounter index variable to get the right element within the embedded subprocess iteration. Handling UCM attachments will be part of a different and upcoming blog entry. Once I finish will all posts on this matter, I will upload the whole sample project to java.net.

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Pre-rentrée Oracle Open World 2012 : à vos agendas

- by Eric Bezille

A maintenant moins d'un mois de l’événement majeur d'Oracle, qui se tient comme chaque année à San Francisco, fin septembre, début octobre, les spéculations vont bon train sur les annonces qui vont y être dévoilées... Et sans lever le voile, je vous engage à prendre connaissance des sujets des "Key Notes" qui seront tenues par Larry Ellison, Mark Hurd, Thomas Kurian (responsable des développements logiciels) et John Fowler (responsable des développements systèmes) afin de vous donner un avant goût. Stratégie et Roadmaps Oracle Bien entendu, au-delà des séances plénières qui vous donnerons une vision précise de la stratégie, et pour ceux qui seront sur place, je vous engage à ne pas manquer les séances d'approfondissement qui auront lieu dans la semaine, dont voici quelques morceaux choisis : "Accelerate your Business with the Oracle Hardware Advantage" avec John Fowler, le lundi 1er Octobre, 3:15pm-4:15pm "Why Oracle Softwares Runs Best on Oracle Hardware" , avec Bradley Carlile, le responsable des Benchmarks, le lundi 1er Octobre, 12:15pm-13:15pm "Engineered Systems - from Vision to Game-changing Results", avec Robert Shimp, le lundi 1er Octobre 1:45pm-2:45pm "Database and Application Consolidation on SPARC Supercluster", avec Hugo Rivero, responsable dans les équipes d'intégration matériels et logiciels, le lundi 1er Octobre, 4:45pm-5:45pm "Oracle’s SPARC Server Strategy Update", avec Masood Heydari, responsable des développements serveurs SPARC, le mardi 2 Octobre, 10:15am - 11:15am "Oracle Solaris 11 Strategy, Engineering Insights, and Roadmap", avec Markus Flier, responsable des développements Solaris, le mercredi 3 Octobre, 10:15am - 11:15am "Oracle Virtualization Strategy and Roadmap", avec Wim Coekaerts, responsable des développement Oracle VM et Oracle Linux, le lundi 1er Octobre, 12:15pm-1:15pm "Big Data: The Big Story", avec Jean-Pierre Dijcks, responsable du développement produits Big Data, le lundi 1er Octobre, 3:15pm-4:15pm "Scaling with the Cloud: Strategies for Storage in Cloud Deployments", avec Christine Rogers, Principal Product Manager, et Chris Wood, Senior Product Specialist, Stockage , le lundi 1er Octobre, 10:45am-11:45am Retours d'expériences et témoignages Si Oracle Open World est l'occasion de partager avec les équipes de développement d'Oracle en direct, c'est aussi l'occasion d'échanger avec des clients et experts qui ont mis en oeuvre nos technologies pour bénéficier de leurs retours d'expériences, comme par exemple : "Oracle Optimized Solution for Siebel CRM at ACCOR", avec les témoignages d'Eric Wyttynck, directeur IT Multichannel & CRM et Pascal Massenet, VP Loyalty & CRM systems, sur les bénéfices non seulement métiers, mais également projet et IT, le mercredi 3 Octobre, 1:15pm-2:15pm "Tips from AT&T: Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle Database, and SPARC Enterprise", avec le retour d'expérience des experts Oracle, le mardi 2 Octobre, 11:45am-12:45pm "Creating a Maximum Availability Architecture with SPARC SuperCluster", avec le témoignage de Carte Wright, Database Engineer à CKI, le mercredi 3 Octobre, 11:45am-12:45pm "Multitenancy: Everybody Talks It, Oracle Walks It with Pillar Axiom Storage", avec le témoignage de Stephen Schleiger, Manager Systems Engineering de Navis, le lundi 1er Octobre, 1:45pm-2:45pm "Oracle Exadata for Database Consolidation: Best Practices", avec le retour d'expérience des experts Oracle ayant participé à la mise en oeuvre d'un grand client du monde bancaire, le lundi 1er Octobre, 4:45pm-5:45pm "Oracle Exadata Customer Panel: Packaged Applications with Oracle Exadata", animé par Tim Shetler, VP Product Management, mardi 2 Octobre, 1:15pm-2:15pm "Big Data: Improving Nearline Data Throughput with the StorageTek SL8500 Modular Library System", avec le témoignage du CTO de CSC, Alan Powers, le jeudi 4 Octobre, 12:45pm-1:45pm "Building an IaaS Platform with SPARC, Oracle Solaris 11, and Oracle VM Server for SPARC", avec le témoignage de Syed Qadri, Lead DBA et Michael Arnold, System Architect d'US Cellular, le mardi 2 Octobre, 10:15am-11:15am "Transform Data Center TCO with Oracle Optimized Servers: A Customer Panel", avec les témoignages notamment d'AT&T et Liberty Global, le mardi 2 Octobre, 11:45am-12:45pm "Data Warehouse and Big Data Customers’ View of the Future", avec The Nielsen Company US, Turkcell, GE Retail Finance, Allianz Managed Operations and Services SE, le lundi 1er Octobre, 4:45pm-5:45pm "Extreme Storage Scale and Efficiency: Lessons from a 100,000-Person Organization", le témoignage de l'IT interne d'Oracle sur la transformation et la migration de l'ensemble de notre infrastructure de stockage, mardi 2 Octobre, 1:15pm-2:15pm Echanges avec les groupes d'utilisateurs et les équipes de développement Oracle Si vous avez prévu d'arriver suffisamment tôt, vous pourrez également échanger dès le dimanche avec les groupes d'utilisateurs, ou tous les soirs avec les équipes de développement Oracle sur des sujets comme : "To Exalogic or Not to Exalogic: An Architectural Journey", avec Todd Sheetz - Manager of DBA and Enterprise Architecture, Veolia Environmental Services, le dimanche 30 Septembre, 2:30pm-3:30pm "Oracle Exalytics and Oracle TimesTen for Exalytics Best Practices", avec Mark Rittman, de Rittman Mead Consulting Ltd, le dimanche 30 Septembre, 10:30am-11:30am "Introduction of Oracle Exadata at Telenet: Bringing BI to Warp Speed", avec Rudy Verlinden & Eric Bartholomeus - Managers IT infrastructure à Telenet, le dimanche 30 Septembre, 1:15pm-2:00pm "The Perfect Marriage: Sun ZFS Storage Appliance with Oracle Exadata", avec Melanie Polston, directeur, Data Management, de Novation et Charles Kim, Managing Director de Viscosity, le dimanche 30 Septembre, 9:00am-10am "Oracle’s Big Data Solutions: NoSQL, Connectors, R, and Appliance Technologies", avec Jean-Pierre Dijcks et les équipes de développement Oracle, le lundi 1er Octobre, 6:15pm-7:00pm Testez et évaluez les solutions Et pour finir, vous pouvez même tester les technologies au travers du Oracle DemoGrounds, (1133 Moscone South pour la partie Systèmes Oracle, OS, et Virtualisation) et des "Hands-on-Labs", comme : "Deploying an IaaS Environment with Oracle VM", le mardi 2 Octobre, 10:15am-11:15am "Virtualize and Deploy Oracle Applications in Minutes with Oracle VM: Hands-on Lab", le mardi 2 Octobre, 11:45am-12:45pm (il est fortement conseillé d'avoir suivi le "Hands-on-Labs" précédent avant d'effectuer ce Lab. "x86 Enterprise Cloud Infrastructure with Oracle VM 3.x and Sun ZFS Storage Appliance", le mercredi 3 Octobre, 5:00pm-6:00pm "StorageTek Tape Analytics: Managing Tape Has Never Been So Simple", le mercredi 3 Octobre, 1:15pm-2:15pm "Oracle’s Pillar Axiom 600 Storage System: Power and Ease", le lundi 1er Octobre, 12:15pm-1:15pm "Enterprise Cloud Infrastructure for SPARC with Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c", le lundi 1er Octobre, 1:45pm-2:45pm "Managing Storage in the Cloud", le mardi 2 Octobre, 5:00pm-6:00pm "Learn How to Write MapReduce on Oracle’s Big Data Platform", le lundi 1er Octobre, 12:15pm-1:15pm "Oracle Big Data Analytics and R", le mardi 2 Octobre, 1:15pm-2:15pm "Reduce Risk with Oracle Solaris Access Control to Restrain Users and Isolate Applications", le lundi 1er Octobre, 10:45am-11:45am "Managing Your Data with Built-In Oracle Solaris ZFS Data Services in Release 11", le lundi 1er Octobre, 4:45pm-5:45pm "Virtualizing Your Oracle Solaris 11 Environment", le mardi 2 Octobre, 1:15pm-2:15pm "Large-Scale Installation and Deployment of Oracle Solaris 11", le mercredi 3 Octobre, 3:30pm-4:30pm En conclusion, une semaine très riche en perspective, et qui vous permettra de balayer l'ensemble des sujets au coeur de vos préoccupations, de la stratégie à l'implémentation... Cette semaine doit se préparer, pour tailler votre agenda sur mesure, à travers les plus de 2000 sessions dont je ne vous ai fait qu'un extrait, et dont vous pouvez retrouver l'ensemble en ligne.

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Service Broker, not ETL

- by jamiet

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

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Can Microsoft Build Appliances?

- by andrewbrust

Billy Hollis, my Visual Studio Live! colleague and fellow Microsoft Regional Director said recently, and I am paraphrasing, that the computing world, especially on the consumer side, has shifted from one of building hardware and software that makes things possible to do, to building products and technologies that make things easy to do. Billy crystalized things perfectly, as he often does. In this new world of “easy to do,” Apple has done very well and Microsoft has struggled. In the old world, customers wanted a Swiss Army Knife, with the most gimmicks and gadgets possible. In the new world, people want elegantly cutlery. They may want cake cutters and utility knives too, but they don’t want one device that works for all three tasks. People don’t want tools, they want utensils. People don’t want machines. They want appliances. Microsoft Appliances: They Do Exist Microsoft has built a few appliance-like devices. I would say XBox 360 is an appliance, It’s versatile, mind you, but it’s the kind of thing you plug in, turn on and use, as opposed to set-up, tune, and open up to upgrade the internals. Windows Phone 7 is an appliance too. It’s a true smartphone, unlike Windows Mobile which was a handheld computer with a radio stack. Zune is an appliance too, and a nice one. It hasn’t attained much traction in the market, but that’s probably because the seminal consumer computing appliance -- the iPod – got there so much more quickly. In the embedded world, Mediaroom, Microsoft’s set-top product for the cable industry (used by AT&T U-Verse and others) is an appliance. So is Microsoft’s Sync technology, used in Ford automobiles. Even on the enterprise side, Microsoft has an appliance: SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse Edition (PDW) combines Microsoft software with select OEMs’ server, networking and storage hardware. You buy the appliance units from the OEMs, plug them in, connect them and go. I would even say that Bing is an appliance. Not in the hardware sense, mind you. But from the software perspective, it’s a single-purpose product that you visit or run, use and then move on. You don’t have to install it (except the iOS and Android native apps where it’s pretty straightforward), you don’t have to customize it, you don’t have to program it. Basically, you just use it. Microsoft Appliances that Should Exist But Microsoft builds a bunch of things that are not appliances. Media Center is not an appliance, and it most certainly should be. Instead, it’s an app that runs on Windows 7. It runs full-screen and you can use this configuration to conceal the fact that Windows is under it, but eventually something will cause you to abandon that masquerade (like Patch Tuesday). The next version of Windows Home Server won’t, in my opinion, be an appliance either. Now that the Drive Extender technology is gone, and users can’t just add and remove drives into and from a single storage pool, the product is much more like a IT server and less like an appliance-premised one. Much has been written about this decision by Microsoft. I’ll just sum it up in one word: pity. Microsoft doesn’t have anything remotely appliance-like in the tablet category, either. Until it does, it likely won’t have much market share in that space either. And of course, the bulk of Microsoft’s product catalog on the business side is geared to enterprise machines and not personal appliances. Appliance DNA: They Gotta Have It. The consumerization of IT is real, because businesspeople are consumers too. They appreciate the fit and finish of appliances at home, and they increasingly feel entitled to have it at work too. Secure and reliable push email in a smartphone is necessary, but it isn’t enough. People want great apps and a pleasurable user experience too. The full Microsoft Office product is needed at work, but a PC with a keyboard and mouse, or maybe a touch screen that uses a stylus (or requires really small fingers), to run Office isn’t enough either. People want a flawless touch experience available for the times they want to read and take quick notes. Until Microsoft realizes this fully and internalizes it, it will suffer defeats in the consumer market and even setbacks in the business market. Think about how slow the Office upgrade cycle is…now imagine if the next version of Office had a first-class alternate touch UI and consider the possible acceleration in adoption rates. Can Microsoft make the appliance switch? Can the appliance mentality become pervasive at the company? Can Microsoft hasten its release cycles dramatically and shed the “some assembly required” paradigm upon which many of its products are based? Let’s face it, the chances that Microsoft won’t make this transition are significant. But there are also encouraging signs, and they should not be ignored. The appliances we have already discussed, especially Xbox, Zune and Windows Phone 7, are the most obvious in this regard. The fact that SQL Server has an appliance SKU now is a more subtle but perhaps also more significant outcome, because that product sits so smack in the middle of Microsoft’s enterprise stack. Bing is encouraging too, especially given its integrated travel, maps and augmented reality capabilities. As Bing gains market share, Microsoft has tangible proof that it can transform and win, even when everyone outside the company, and many within it, would bet otherwise. That Great Big Appliance in the Sky Perhaps the most promising (and evolving) proof points toward the appliance mentality, though, are Microsoft’s cloud offerings -- Azure and BPOS/Office 365. While the cloud does not represent a physical appliance (quite the opposite in fact) its ability to make acquisition, deployment and use of technology simple for the user is absolutely an embodiment of the appliance mentality and spirit. Azure is primarily a platform as a service offering; it doesn’t just provide infrastructure. SQL Azure does likewise for databases. And Office 365 does likewise for SharePoint, Exchange and Lync. You don’t administer, tune and manage servers; instead, you create databases or site collections or mailboxes and start using them. Upgrades come automatically, and it seems like releases will come more frequently. Fault tolerance and content distribution is just there. No muss. No fuss. You use these services; you don’t have to set them up and think about them. That’s how appliances work. To me, these signs point out that Microsoft has the full capability of transforming itself. But there’s a lot of work ahead. Microsoft may say they’re “all in” on the cloud, but the majority of the company is still oriented around its old products and models. There needs to be a wholesale cultural transformation in Redmond. It can happen, but product management, program management, the field and executive ranks must unify in the effort. So must partners, and even customers. New leaders must rise up and Microsoft must be able to see itself as a winner. If Microsoft does this, it could lock-in decades of new success, and be a standard business school case study for doing so. If not, the company will have missed an opportunity, and may see its undoing.

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More Fun with C# Iterators and Generators

- by James Michael Hare

In my last post, I talked quite a bit about iterators and how they can be really powerful tools for filtering a list of items down to a subset of items. This had both pros and cons over returning a full collection, which, in summary, were: Pros: If traversal is only partial, does not have to visit rest of collection. If evaluation method is costly, only incurs that cost on elements visited. Adds little to no garbage collection pressure. Cons: Very slight performance impact if you know caller will always consume all items in collection. And as we saw in the last post, that con for the cost was very, very small and only really became evident on very tight loops consuming very large lists completely. One of the key items to note, though, is the garbage! In the traditional (return a new collection) method, if you have a 1,000,000 element collection, and wish to transform or filter it in some way, you have to allocate space for that copy of the collection. That is, say you have a collection of 1,000,000 items and you want to double every item in the collection. Well, that means you have to allocate a collection to hold those 1,000,000 items to return, which is a lot especially if you are just going to use it once and toss it. Iterators, though, don't have this problem. Each time you visit the node, it would return the doubled value of the node (in this example) and not allocate a second collection of 1,000,000 doubled items. Do you see the distinction? In both cases, we're consuming 1,000,000 items. But in one case we pass back each doubled item which is just an int (for example's sake) on the stack and in the other case, we allocate a list containing 1,000,000 items which then must be garbage collected. So iterators in C# are pretty cool, eh? Well, here's one more thing a C# iterator can do that a traditional "return a new collection" transformation can't! It can return **unbounded** collections! I know, I know, that smells a lot like an infinite loop, eh? Yes and no. Basically, you're relying on the caller to put the bounds on the list, and as long as the caller doesn't you keep going. Consider this example: public static class Fibonacci { // returns the infinite fibonacci sequence public static IEnumerable<int> Sequence() { int iteration = 0; int first = 1; int second = 1; int current = 0; while (true) { if (iteration++ < 2) { current = 1; } else { current = first + second; second = first; first = current; } yield return current; } } } Whoa, you say! Yes, that's an infinite loop! What the heck is going on there? Yes, that was intentional. Would it be better to have a fibonacci sequence that returns only a specific number of items? Perhaps, but that wouldn't give you the power to defer the execution to the caller. The beauty of this function is it is as infinite as the sequence itself! The fibonacci sequence is unbounded, and so is this method. It will continue to return fibonacci numbers for as long as you ask for them. Now that's not something you can do with a traditional method that would return a collection of ints representing each number. In that case you would eventually run out of memory as you got to higher and higher numbers. This method, though, never runs out of memory. Now, that said, you do have to know when you use it that it is an infinite collection and bound it appropriately. Fortunately, Linq provides a lot of these extension methods for you! Let's say you only want the first 10 fibonacci numbers: foreach(var fib in Fibonacci.Sequence().Take(10)) { Console.WriteLine(fib); } Or let's say you only want the fibonacci numbers that are less than 100: foreach(var fib in Fibonacci.Sequence().TakeWhile(f => f < 100)) { Console.WriteLine(fib); } So, you see, one of the nice things about iterators is their power to work with virtually any size (even infinite) collections without adding the garbage collection overhead of making new collections. You can also do fun things like this to make a more "fluent" interface for for loops: // A set of integer generator extension methods public static class IntExtensions { // Begins counting to inifity, use To() to range this. public static IEnumerable<int> Every(this int start) { // deliberately avoiding condition because keeps going // to infinity for as long as values are pulled. for (var i = start; ; ++i) { yield return i; } } // Begins counting to infinity by the given step value, use To() to public static IEnumerable<int> Every(this int start, int byEvery) { // deliberately avoiding condition because keeps going // to infinity for as long as values are pulled. for (var i = start; ; i += byEvery) { yield return i; } } // Begins counting to inifity, use To() to range this. public static IEnumerable<int> To(this int start, int end) { for (var i = start; i <= end; ++i) { yield return i; } } // Ranges the count by specifying the upper range of the count. public static IEnumerable<int> To(this IEnumerable<int> collection, int end) { return collection.TakeWhile(item => item <= end); } } Note that there are two versions of each method. One that starts with an int and one that starts with an IEnumerable<int>. This is to allow more power in chaining from either an existing collection or from an int. This lets you do things like: // count from 1 to 30 foreach(var i in 1.To(30)) { Console.WriteLine(i); } // count from 1 to 10 by 2s foreach(var i in 0.Every(2).To(10)) { Console.WriteLine(i); } // or, if you want an infinite sequence counting by 5s until something inside breaks you out... foreach(var i in 0.Every(5)) { if (someCondition) { break; } ... } Yes, those are kinda play functions and not particularly useful, but they show some of the power of generators and extension methods to form a fluid interface. So what do you think? What are some of your favorite generators and iterators?

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tile_static, tile_barrier, and tiled matrix multiplication with C++ AMP

- by Daniel Moth

We ended the previous post with a mechanical transformation of the C++ AMP matrix multiplication example to the tiled model and in the process introduced tiled_index and tiled_grid. This is part 2. tile_static memory You all know that in regular CPU code, static variables have the same value regardless of which thread accesses the static variable. This is in contrast with non-static local variables, where each thread has its own copy. Back to C++ AMP, the same rules apply and each thread has its own value for local variables in your lambda, whereas all threads see the same global memory, which is the data they have access to via the array and array_view. In addition, on an accelerator like the GPU, there is a programmable cache, a third kind of memory type if you'd like to think of it that way (some call it shared memory, others call it scratchpad memory). Variables stored in that memory share the same value for every thread in the same tile. So, when you use the tiled model, you can have variables where each thread in the same tile sees the same value for that variable, that threads from other tiles do not. The new storage class for local variables introduced for this purpose is called tile_static. You can only use tile_static in restrict(direct3d) functions, and only when explicitly using the tiled model. What this looks like in code should be no surprise, but here is a snippet to confirm your mental image, using a good old regular C array // each tile of threads has its own copy of locA, // shared among the threads of the tile tile_static float locA[16][16]; Note that tile_static variables are scoped and have the lifetime of the tile, and they cannot have constructors or destructors. tile_barrier In amp.h one of the types introduced is tile_barrier. You cannot construct this object yourself (although if you had one, you could use a copy constructor to create another one). So how do you get one of these? You get it, from a tiled_index object. Beyond the 4 properties returning index objects, tiled_index has another property, barrier, that returns a tile_barrier object. The tile_barrier class exposes a single member, the method wait. 15: // Given a tiled_index object named t_idx 16: t_idx.barrier.wait(); 17: // more code …in the code above, all threads in the tile will reach line 16 before a single one progresses to line 17. Note that all threads must be able to reach the barrier, i.e. if you had branchy code in such a way which meant that there is a chance that not all threads could reach line 16, then the code above would be illegal. Tiled Matrix Multiplication Example – part 2 So now that we added to our understanding the concepts of tile_static and tile_barrier, let me obfuscate rewrite the matrix multiplication code so that it takes advantage of tiling. Before you start reading this, I suggest you get a cup of your favorite non-alcoholic beverage to enjoy while you try to fully understand the code. 01: void MatrixMultiplyTiled(vector<float>& vC, const vector<float>& vA, const vector<float>& vB, int M, int N, int W) 02: { 03: static const int TS = 16; 04: array_view<const float,2> a(M, W, vA); 05: array_view<const float,2> b(W, N, vB); 06: array_view<writeonly<float>,2> c(M,N,vC); 07: parallel_for_each(c.grid.tile< TS, TS >(), 08: [=] (tiled_index< TS, TS> t_idx) restrict(direct3d) 09: { 10: int row = t_idx.local[0]; int col = t_idx.local[1]; 11: float sum = 0.0f; 12: for (int i = 0; i < W; i += TS) { 13: tile_static float locA[TS][TS], locB[TS][TS]; 14: locA[row][col] = a(t_idx.global[0], col + i); 15: locB[row][col] = b(row + i, t_idx.global[1]); 16: t_idx.barrier.wait(); 17: for (int k = 0; k < TS; k++) 18: sum += locA[row][k] * locB[k][col]; 19: t_idx.barrier.wait(); 20: } 21: c[t_idx.global] = sum; 22: }); 23: } Notice that all the code up to line 9 is the same as per the changes we made in part 1 of tiling introduction. If you squint, the body of the lambda itself preserves the original algorithm on lines 10, 11, and 17, 18, and 21. The difference being that those lines use new indexing and the tile_static arrays; the tile_static arrays are declared and initialized on the brand new lines 13-15. On those lines we copy from the global memory represented by the array_view objects (a and b), to the tile_static vanilla arrays (locA and locB) – we are copying enough to fit a tile. Because in the code that follows on line 18 we expect the data for this tile to be in the tile_static storage, we need to synchronize the threads within each tile with a barrier, which we do on line 16 (to avoid accessing uninitialized memory on line 18). We also need to synchronize the threads within a tile on line 19, again to avoid the race between lines 14, 15 (retrieving the next set of data for each tile and overwriting the previous set) and line 18 (not being done processing the previous set of data). Luckily, as part of the awesome C++ AMP debugger in Visual Studio there is an option that helps you find such races, but that is a story for another blog post another time. May I suggest reading the next section, and then coming back to re-read and walk through this code with pen and paper to really grok what is going on, if you haven't already? Cool. Why would I introduce this tiling complexity into my code? Funny you should ask that, I was just about to tell you. There is only one reason we tiled our extent, had to deal with finding a good tile size, ensure the number of threads we schedule are correctly divisible with the tile size, had to use a tiled_index instead of a normal index, and had to understand tile_barrier and to figure out where we need to use it, and double the size of our lambda in terms of lines of code: the reason is to be able to use tile_static memory. Why do we want to use tile_static memory? Because accessing tile_static memory is around 10 times faster than accessing the global memory on an accelerator like the GPU, e.g. in the code above, if you can get 150GB/second accessing data from the array_view a, you can get 1500GB/second accessing the tile_static array locA. And since by definition you are dealing with really large data sets, the savings really pay off. We have seen tiled implementations being twice as fast as their non-tiled counterparts. Now, some algorithms will not have performance benefits from tiling (and in fact may deteriorate), e.g. algorithms that require you to go only once to global memory will not benefit from tiling, since with tiling you already have to fetch the data once from global memory! Other algorithms may benefit, but you may decide that you are happy with your code being 150 times faster than the serial-version you had, and you do not need to invest to make it 250 times faster. Also algorithms with more than 3 dimensions, which C++ AMP supports in the non-tiled model, cannot be tiled. Also note that in future releases, we may invest in making the non-tiled model, which already uses tiling under the covers, go the extra step and use tile_static memory on your behalf, but it is obviously way to early to commit to anything like that, and we certainly don't do any of that today. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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The SSIS tuning tip that everyone misses

- by Rob Farley

I know that everyone misses this, because I’m yet to find someone who doesn’t have a bit of an epiphany when I describe this. When tuning Data Flows in SQL Server Integration Services, people see the Data Flow as moving from the Source to the Destination, passing through a number of transformations. What people don’t consider is the Source, getting the data out of a database. Remember, the source of data for your Data Flow is not your Source Component. It’s wherever the data is, within your database, probably on a disk somewhere. You need to tune your query to optimise it for SSIS, and this is what most people fail to do. I’m not suggesting that people don’t tune their queries – there’s plenty of information out there about making sure that your queries run as fast as possible. But for SSIS, it’s not about how fast your query runs. Let me say that again, but in bolder text: The speed of an SSIS Source is not about how fast your query runs. If your query is used in a Source component for SSIS, the thing that matters is how fast it starts returning data. In particular, those first 10,000 rows to populate that first buffer, ready to pass down the rest of the transformations on its way to the Destination. Let’s look at a very simple query as an example, using the AdventureWorks database: We’re picking the different Weight values out of the Product table, and it’s doing this by scanning the table and doing a Sort. It’s a Distinct Sort, which means that the duplicates are discarded. It'll be no surprise to see that the data produced is sorted. Obvious, I know, but I'm making a comparison to what I'll do later. Before I explain the problem here, let me jump back into the SSIS world... If you’ve investigated how to tune an SSIS flow, then you’ll know that some SSIS Data Flow Transformations are known to be Blocking, some are Partially Blocking, and some are simply Row transformations. Take the SSIS Sort transformation, for example. I’m using a larger data set for this, because my small list of Weights won’t demonstrate it well enough. Seven buffers of data came out of the source, but none of them could be pushed past the Sort operator, just in case the last buffer contained the data that would be sorted into the first buffer. This is a blocking operation. Back in the land of T-SQL, we consider our Distinct Sort operator. It’s also blocking. It won’t let data through until it’s seen all of it. If you weren’t okay with blocking operations in SSIS, why would you be happy with them in an execution plan? The source of your data is not your OLE DB Source. Remember this. The source of your data is the NCIX/CIX/Heap from which it’s being pulled. Picture it like this... the data flowing from the Clustered Index, through the Distinct Sort operator, into the SELECT operator, where a series of SSIS Buffers are populated, flowing (as they get full) down through the SSIS transformations. Alright, I know that I’m taking some liberties here, because the two queries aren’t the same, but consider the visual. The data is flowing from your disk and through your execution plan before it reaches SSIS, so you could easily find that a blocking operation in your plan is just as painful as a blocking operation in your SSIS Data Flow. Luckily, T-SQL gives us a brilliant query hint to help avoid this. OPTION (FAST 10000) This hint means that it will choose a query which will optimise for the first 10,000 rows – the default SSIS buffer size. And the effect can be quite significant. First let’s consider a simple example, then we’ll look at a larger one. Consider our weights. We don’t have 10,000, so I’m going to use OPTION (FAST 1) instead. You’ll notice that the query is more expensive, using a Flow Distinct operator instead of the Distinct Sort. This operator is consuming 84% of the query, instead of the 59% we saw from the Distinct Sort. But the first row could be returned quicker – a Flow Distinct operator is non-blocking. The data here isn’t sorted, of course. It’s in the same order that it came out of the index, just with duplicates removed. As soon as a Flow Distinct sees a value that it hasn’t come across before, it pushes it out to the operator on its left. It still has to maintain the list of what it’s seen so far, but by handling it one row at a time, it can push rows through quicker. Overall, it’s a lot more work than the Distinct Sort, but if the priority is the first few rows, then perhaps that’s exactly what we want. The Query Optimizer seems to do this by optimising the query as if there were only one row coming through: This 1 row estimation is caused by the Query Optimizer imagining the SELECT operation saying “Give me one row” first, and this message being passed all the way along. The request might not make it all the way back to the source, but in my simple example, it does. I hope this simple example has helped you understand the significance of the blocking operator. Now I’m going to show you an example on a much larger data set. This data was fetching about 780,000 rows, and these are the Estimated Plans. The data needed to be Sorted, to support further SSIS operations that needed that. First, without the hint. ...and now with OPTION (FAST 10000): A very different plan, I’m sure you’ll agree. In case you’re curious, those arrows in the top one are 780,000 rows in size. In the second, they’re estimated to be 10,000, although the Actual figures end up being 780,000. The top one definitely runs faster. It finished several times faster than the second one. With the amount of data being considered, these numbers were in minutes. Look at the second one – it’s doing Nested Loops, across 780,000 rows! That’s not generally recommended at all. That’s “Go and make yourself a coffee” time. In this case, it was about six or seven minutes. The faster one finished in about a minute. But in SSIS-land, things are different. The particular data flow that was consuming this data was significant. It was being pumped into a Script Component to process each row based on previous rows, creating about a dozen different flows. The data flow would take roughly ten minutes to run – ten minutes from when the data first appeared. The query that completes faster – chosen by the Query Optimizer with no hints, based on accurate statistics (rather than pretending the numbers are smaller) – would take a minute to start getting the data into SSIS, at which point the ten-minute flow would start, taking eleven minutes to complete. The query that took longer – chosen by the Query Optimizer pretending it only wanted the first 10,000 rows – would take only ten seconds to fill the first buffer. Despite the fact that it might have taken the database another six or seven minutes to get the data out, SSIS didn’t care. Every time it wanted the next buffer of data, it was already available, and the whole process finished in about ten minutes and ten seconds. When debugging SSIS, you run the package, and sit there waiting to see the Debug information start appearing. You look for the numbers on the data flow, and seeing operators going Yellow and Green. Without the hint, I’d sit there for a minute. With the hint, just ten seconds. You can imagine which one I preferred. By adding this hint, it felt like a magic wand had been waved across the query, to make it run several times faster. It wasn’t the case at all – but it felt like it to SSIS.

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