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• Is it true Java is faster to develop than C++?

  - by Mike

  I read somewhere that java is faster to develop than C++ as a pro of using java, in addition to portability and security. Is this true? I don't understand why it is faster.

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• SOAP vs REST (differences)

  - by Abdulaziz

  I have read articles about the differences between SOAP and REST as a web service communication protocol, but I think that the biggest advantage for REST over SOAP are : REST is more dynamic, no need for creating and updating UDDI. REST is not restricted to XML format. REST web services can send plain text, JSON, and also XML. But SOAP is more standardized (Ex; security). So, am I correct in these points? Thanks

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• Best Java obfuscator ?

  - by Xinus

  I am developing a security software and want to obfuscate my java code so it will become impossible to reverse engineer. What is the most reliable java obfuscator ?

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• 26 Days: Countdown to Oracle OpenWorld 2012

  - by Michael Snow

  Welcome to our countdown to Oracle OpenWorld! Oracle OpenWorld 2012 is just around the corner. In less than 26 days, San Francisco will be invaded by an expected 50,000 people from all over the world. Here on the Oracle WebCenter team, we’ve all been working to help make the experience a great one for all our WebCenter customers. For a sneak peak  – we’ll be spending this week giving you a teaser of what to look forward to if you are joining us in San Francisco from September 30th through October 4th. We have Oracle WebCenter sessions covering all topics imaginable. Take a look and use the tools we provide to build out your schedule in advance and reserve your seats in your favorite sessions.  That gives you plenty of time to plan for your week with us in San Francisco. If unfortunately, your boss denied your request to attend - there are still some ways that you can join in the experience virtually On-Demand. This year - we are expanding even more up North of Market Street and will be taking over Union Square as well. Check out this map of San Francisco to get a sense of how much of a footprint Oracle OpenWorld has grown to this year. With so much to see and so many sessions to learn from - its no wonder that people get excited. Add to that a good mix of fun and all of the possible WebCenter sessions you could attend - you won't want to sleep at all to take full advantage of such an opportunity. We'll also have our annual WebCenter Customer Appreciation reception - stay tuned this week for some more info on registration to make sure you'll be able to join us. If you've been following the America's Cup at all and believe in EXTREME PERFORMANCE you'll definitely want to take a look at this video from last year's OpenWorld Keynote. 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Important OpenWorld Links:  Attendee / Presenters Toolkit Oracle Schedule Builder WebCenter Sessions (listed in the catalog under Fusion Middleware as "Portals, Sites, Content, and Collaboration" ) Oracle Music Festival - AMAZING Line up!!  Oracle Customer Appreciation Night -LOOK HERE!! Oracle OpenWorld LIVE On-Demand Here are all the WebCenter sessions broken down by day for your viewing pleasure. Monday, October 1st CON8885 - Simplify CRM Engagement with Contextual Collaboration Are your sales teams disconnected and disengaged? Do you want a tool for easily connecting expertise across your organization and providing visibility into the complete sales process? Do you want a way to enhance and retain organization knowledge? Oracle Social Network is the answer. Attend this session to learn how to make CRM easy, effective, and efficient for use across virtual sales teams. Also learn how Oracle Social Network can drive sales force collaboration with natural conversations throughout the sales cycle, promote sales team productivity through purposeful social networking without the noise, and build cross-team knowledge by integrating conversations with CRM and other business applications. CON8268 - Oracle WebCenter Strategy: Engaging Your Customers. Empowering Your Business Oracle WebCenter is a user engagement platform for social business, connecting people and information. Attend this session to learn about the Oracle WebCenter strategy, and understand where Oracle is taking the platform to help companies engage customers, empower employees, and enable partners. Business success starts with ensuring that everyone is engaged with the right people and the right information and can access what they need through the channel of their choice—Web, mobile, or social. Are you giving customers, employees, and partners the best-possible experience? Come learn how you can! ¶ HOL10208 - Add Social Capabilities to Your Enterprise Applications Oracle Social Network enables you to add real-time collaboration capabilities into your enterprise applications, so that conversations can happen directly within your business systems. In this hands-on lab, you will try out the Oracle Social Network product to collaborate with other attendees, using real-time conversations with document sharing capabilities. Next you will embed social capabilities into a sample Web-based enterprise application, using embedded UI components. Experts will also write simple REST-based integrations, using the Oracle Social Network API to programmatically create social interactions. ¶ CON8893 - Improve Employee Productivity with Intuitive and Social Work Environments Social technologies have already transformed the ways customers, employees, partners, and suppliers communicate and stay informed. Forward-thinking organizations today need technologies and infrastructures to help them advance to the next level and integrate social activities with business applications to deliver a user experience that simplifies business processes and enterprise application engagement. Attend this session to hear from an innovative Oracle Social Network customer and learn how you can improve productivity with intuitive and social work environments and empower your employees with innovative social tools to enable contextual access to content and dynamic personalization of solutions. ¶ CON8270 - Oracle WebCenter Content Strategy and Vision Oracle WebCenter provides a strategic content infrastructure for managing documents, images, e-mails, and rich media files. With a single repository, organizations can address any content use case, such as accounts payable, HR onboarding, document management, compliance, records management, digital asset management, or Website management. In this session, learn about future plans for how Oracle WebCenter will address new use cases as well as new integrations with Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Applications, leveraging your investments by making your users more productive and error-free. ¶ CON8269 - Oracle WebCenter Sites Strategy and Vision Oracle’s Web experience management solution, Oracle WebCenter Sites, enables organizations to use the online channel to drive customer acquisition and brand loyalty. It helps marketers and business users easily create and manage contextually relevant, social, interactive online experiences across multiple channels on a global scale. In this session, learn about future plans for how Oracle WebCenter Sites will provide you with the tools, capabilities, and integrations you need in order to continue to address your customers’ evolving requirements for engaging online experiences and keep moving your business forward. ¶ CON8896 - Living with SharePoint SharePoint is a popular platform, but it’s not always the best fit for Oracle customers. In this session, you’ll discover the technical and nontechnical limitations and pitfalls of SharePoint and learn about Oracle alternatives for collaboration, portals, enterprise and Web content management, social computing, and application integration. The presentation shows you how to integrate with SharePoint when business or IT requirements dictate and covers cloud-based (Office 365) and on-premises versions of SharePoint. Presented by a former Microsoft director of SharePoint product management and backed by independent customer research, this session will prepare you to answer the question “Why don’t we just use SharePoint for that?’ the next time it comes up in your organization. ¶ CON7843 - Content-Enabling Enterprise Processes with Oracle WebCenter Organizations today continually strive to automate business processes, reduce costs, and improve efficiency. Many business processes are content-intensive and unstructured, requiring ad hoc collaboration, and distributed in nature, requiring many approvals and generating huge volumes of paper. In this session, learn how Oracle and SYSTIME have partnered to help a customer content-enable its enterprise with Oracle WebCenter Content and Oracle WebCenter Imaging 11g and integrate them with Oracle Applications. ¶ CON6114 - Tape Robotics’ Newest Superhero: Now Fueled by Oracle Software For small, midsize, and rapidly growing businesses that want the most energy-efficient, scalable storage infrastructure to meet their rapidly growing data demands, Oracle’s most recent addition to its award-winning tape portfolio leverages several pieces of Oracle software. With Oracle Linux, Oracle WebLogic, and Oracle Fusion Middleware tools, the library achieves a higher level of usability than previous products while offering customers a familiar interface for management, plus ease of use. This session examines the competitive advantages of the tape library and how Oracle software raises customer satisfaction. Learn how the combination of Oracle engineered systems, Oracle Secure Backup, and Oracle’s StorageTek tape libraries provide end-to-end coverage of your data. ¶ CON9437 - Mobile Access Management With more than five 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 focuses on how to extend your existing identity management infrastructure and policies to securely and seamlessly enable mobile user access. CON7815 - Customer Experience Online in Cloud: Oracle WebCenter Sites, Oracle ATG Apps, Oracle Exalogic Oracle WebCenter Sites and Oracle’s ATG product line together can provide a compelling marketing and e-commerce experience. When you couple them with the extreme performance of Oracle Exalogic, you’ll see unmatched scalability that provides you with a true cloud-based solution. In this session, you’ll learn how running Oracle WebCenter Sites and ATG applications on Oracle Exalogic delivers both a private and a public cloud experience. Find out what it takes to get these systems working together and delivering engaging Web experiences. Even if you aren’t considering Oracle Exalogic today, the rich Web experience of Oracle WebCenter, paired with the depth of the ATG product line, can provide your business full support, from merchandising through sale completion. ¶ CON8271 - Oracle WebCenter Portal Strategy and Vision To innovate and keep a competitive edge, organizations need to leverage the power of agile and responsive Web applications. Oracle WebCenter Portal enables you to do just that, by delivering intuitive user experiences for enterprise applications to drive innovation with composite applications and mashups. Attend this session to learn firsthand from customers how Oracle WebCenter Portal extends the value of existing enterprise applications, business processes, and content; delivers a superior business user experience; and maximizes limited IT resources. ¶ CON8880 - The Connected Customer Experience Begins with the Online Channel There’s a lot of talk these days about how to connect the customer journey across various touchpoints—from Websites and e-commerce to call centers and in-store—to provide experiences that are more relevant and engaging and ultimately gain competitive edge. Doing it all at once isn’t a realistic objective, so where do you start? Come to this session, and hear about three steps you can take that can help you begin your journey toward delivering the connected customer experience. You’ll hear how Oracle now has an integrated digital marketing platform for your corporate Website, your e-commerce site, your self-service portal, and your marketing and loyalty campaigns, and you’ll learn what you can do today to begin executing on your customer experience initiatives. ¶ GEN11451 - General Session: Building Mobile Applications with Oracle Cloud With the prevalence of smart mobile devices, companies are facing an increased demand to provide access to data and applications from new channels. However, developing applications for mobile devices poses some unique challenges. Come to this session to learn how Oracle addresses these challenges, offering a simpler way to develop and deploy cross-device mobile applications. See how Oracle Cloud enables you to access applications, data, and services from mobile channels in an easier way.  CON8272 - Oracle Social Network Strategy and Vision One key way of increasing employee productivity is by bringing people, processes, and information together—providing new social capabilities to enable business users to quickly correspond and collaborate on business activities. Oracle WebCenter provides a user engagement platform with social and collaborative technologies to empower business users to focus on their key business processes, applications, and content in the context of their role and process. Attend this session to hear how the latest social capabilities in Oracle Social Network are enabling organizations to transform themselves into social businesses.  --- Tuesday, October 2nd HOL10194 - Enterprise Content Management Simplified: Oracle WebCenter Content’s Next-Generation UI Regardless of the nature of your business, unstructured content underpins many of its daily functions. Whether you are working with traditional presentations, spreadsheets, or text documents—or even with digital assets such as images and multimedia files—your content needs to be accessible and manageable in convenient and intuitive ways to make working with the content easier. Additionally, you need the ability to easily share documents with coworkers to facilitate a collaborative working environment. Come to this session to see how Oracle WebCenter Content’s next-generation user interface helps modern knowledge workers easily manage personal and enterprise documents in a collaborative environment.¶ CON8877 - Develop a Mobile Strategy with Oracle WebCenter: Engage Customers, Employees, and Partners Mobile technology has gone from nice-to-have to a cornerstone of user engagement. Mobile access enables users to have information available at their fingertips, enabling them to take action the moment they make a decision, interact in the moment of convenience, and take advantage of new service offerings in their preferred channels. All your employees have your mobile applications in their pocket; now what are you going to do? It is a critical step for companies to think through what their employees, customers, and partners really need on their devices. Attend this session to see how Oracle WebCenter enables you to better engage your customers, employees, and partners by providing a unified experience across multiple channels. ¶ CON9447 - Enabling Access for Hundreds of Millions of Users How do you grow your business by identifying, authenticating, authorizing, and federating users on the Web, leveraging social identity and the open source OAuth protocol? How do you scale your access management solution to support hundreds of millions of users? With social identity support out of the box, Oracle’s access management solution is also benchmarked for 250-million-user deployment according to real-world customer scenarios. In this session, you will learn about the social identity capability and the 250-million-user benchmark testing of Oracle Access Manager and Oracle Adaptive Access Manager running on Oracle Exalogic and Oracle Exadata. ¶ HOL10207 - Build an Intranet Portal with Oracle WebCenter In this hands-on lab, you’ll work with Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle WebCenter Content to build out an enterprise portal that maximizes the productivity of teams and individual contributors. Using browser-based tools, you’ll manage site resources such as page styles, templates, and navigation. You’ll edit content stored in Oracle WebCenter Content directly from your portal. You’ll also experience the latest features that promote collaboration, social networking, and personal productivity. ¶ CON2906 - Get Proactive: Best Practices for Maintaining Oracle Fusion Middleware You chose Oracle Fusion Middleware products to help your organization deliver superior business results. Now learn how to take full advantage of your software with all the great tools, resources, and product updates you’re entitled to through Oracle Support. In this session, Oracle product experts provide proven best practices to help you work more efficiently, plan and prepare for upgrades and patching more effectively, and manage risk. Topics include configuration management tools, remote diagnostics, My Oracle Support Community, and My Oracle Support Lifecycle Advisors. New users and Oracle Fusion Middleware experts alike are guaranteed to leave with fresh ideas and practical, easy-to-implement next steps. ¶ CON8878 - Oracle WebCenter’s Cloud Strategy: From Social and Platform Services to Mashups Cloud computing represents a paradigm shift in how we build applications, automate processes, collaborate, and share and in how we secure our enterprise. Additionally, as you adopt cloud-based services in your organization, it’s likely that you will still have many critical on-premises applications running. With these mixed environments, multiple user interfaces, different security, and multiple datasources and content sources, how do you start evolving your strategy to account for these challenges? Oracle WebCenter offers a complete array of technologies enabling you to solve these challenges and prepare you for the cloud. Attend this session to learn how you can use Oracle WebCenter in the cloud as well as create on-premises and cloud application mash-ups. ¶ CON8901 - Optimize Enterprise Business Processes with Oracle WebCenter and Oracle BPM Do you have business processes that span multiple applications? Are you grappling with how to have visibility across these business processes; how to manage content that is associated with these processes; and, most importantly, how to model and optimize these business processes? Attend this session to hear how Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Business Process Management provide a unique set of integrated solutions to provide a composite application dashboard across these business processes and offer a solution for content-centric business processes. ¶ CON8883 - Deliver Engaging Interfaces to Oracle Applications with Oracle WebCenter Critical business processes live within enterprise applications, and application users need to manage and execute these processes as effectively as possible. Oracle provides a comprehensive user engagement platform to increase user productivity and optimize overall processes within Oracle Applications—Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle’s Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards product families—and third-party applications. Attend this session to learn how you can integrate these applications with Oracle WebCenter to deliver composite application dashboards to your end users—whether they are your customers, partners, or employees—for enhanced usability and Web 2.0–enabled enterprise portals.¶ Wednesday, October 3rd CON8895 - Future-Ready Intranets: How Aramark Re-engineered the Application Landscape There are essential techniques and technologies you can use to deliver employee portals that garner higher productivity, improve business efficiency, and increase user engagement. Attend this session to learn how you can leverage Oracle WebCenter Portal as a user engagement platform for bringing together business process management, enterprise content management, and business intelligence into a highly relevant and integrated experience. Hear how Aramark has leveraged Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle WebCenter Content to deliver a unified workspace providing simpler navigation and processing, consolidation of tools, easy access to information, integrated search, and single sign-on. ¶ CON8886 - Content Consolidation: Save Money, Increase Efficiency, and Eliminate Silos Organizations are looking for ways to save money and be more efficient. With content in many different places, it’s difficult to know where to look for a document and whether the document is the most current version. With Oracle WebCenter, content can be consolidated into one best-of-breed repository that is secure, scalable, and integrated with your business processes and applications. Users can find the content they need, where they need it, and ensure that it is the right content. This session covers content challenges that affect your business; content consolidation that can lead to savings in storage and administration costs and can lower risks; and how companies are realizing savings. ¶ CON8911 - Improve Online Experiences for Customers and Partners with Self-Service Portals Are you able to provide your customers and partners an easy-to-use online self-service experience? Are you processing high-volume transactions and struggling with call center bottlenecks or back-end systems that won’t integrate, causing order delays and customer frustration? Are you looking to target content such as product and service offerings to your end users? This session shares approaches to providing targeted delivery as well as strategies and best practices for transforming your business by providing an intuitive user experience for your customers and partners. ¶ CON6156 - Top 10 Ways to Integrate Oracle WebCenter Content This session covers 10 common ways to integrate Oracle WebCenter Content with other enterprise applications and middleware. It discusses out-of-the-box modules that provide expanded features in Oracle WebCenter Content—such as enterprise search, SOA, and BPEL—as well as developer tools you can use to create custom integrations. The presentation also gives guidance on which integration option may work best in your environment. ¶ HOL10207 - Build an Intranet Portal with Oracle WebCenter In this hands-on lab, you’ll work with Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle WebCenter Content to build out an enterprise portal that maximizes the productivity of teams and individual contributors. Using browser-based tools, you’ll manage site resources such as page styles, templates, and navigation. You’ll edit content stored in Oracle WebCenter Content directly from your portal. You’ll also experience the latest features that promote collaboration, social networking, and personal productivity. ¶ CON7817 - Migration to Oracle WebCenter Imaging 11g Customers today continually strive to automate business processes, reduce costs, and improve efficiency. The accounts payable process—which is often distributed in nature, requires many approvals, and generates huge volumes of paper invoices—is automated by many customers. In this session, learn how Oracle and SYSTIME have partnered to help a customer migrate its existing Oracle Imaging and Process Management Release 7.6 to the latest Oracle WebCenter Imaging 11g and integrate it with Oracle’s JD Edwards family of products. ¶ CON8910 - How to Engage Customers Across Web, Mobile, and Social Channels Whether on desktops at the office, on tablets at home, or on mobile phones when on the go, today’s customers are always connected. To engage today’s customers, you need to make the online customer experience connected and consistent across a host of devices and multiple channels, including Web, mobile, and social networks. Managing this multichannel environment can result in lots of headaches without the right tools. Attend this session to learn how Oracle WebCenter Sites solves the challenge of multichannel customer engagement. ¶ HOL10206 - Oracle WebCenter Sites 11g: Transforming the Content Contributor Experience Oracle WebCenter Sites 11g makes it easy for marketers and business users to contribute to and manage Websites with the new visual, contextual, and intuitive Web authoring interface. In this hands-on lab, you will create and manage content for a sports-themed Website, using many of the new and enhanced features of the 11g release. ¶ CON8900 - Building Next-Generation Portals: An Interactive Customer Panel Discussion Social and collaborative technologies have changed how people interact, learn, and collaborate, and providing a modern, social Web presence is imperative to remain competitive in today’s market. Can your business benefit from a more collaborative and interactive portal environment for employees, customers, and partners? Attend this session to hear from Oracle WebCenter Portal customers as they share their strategies and best practices for providing users with a modern experience that adapts to their needs and includes personalized access to content in context. The panel also addresses how customers have benefited from creating next-generation portals by migrating from older portal technologies to Oracle WebCenter Portal. ¶ CON9625 - Taking Control of Oracle WebCenter Security Organizations are increasingly looking to extend their Oracle WebCenter portal for social business, to serve external users and provide seamless access to the right information. In particular, many organizations are extending Oracle WebCenter in a business-to-business scenario requiring secure identification and authorization of business partners and their users. This session focuses on how customers are leveraging, securing, and providing access control to Oracle WebCenter portal and mobile solutions. You will learn best practices and hear real-world examples of how to provide flexible and granular access control for Oracle WebCenter deployments, using Oracle Platform Security Services and Oracle Access Management Suite product offerings. ¶ CON8891 - Extending Social into Enterprise Applications and Business Processes Oracle Social Network is an extensible social platform that enables contextual collaboration within enterprise applications and business processes, providing relevant data from across various enterprise systems in one place. Attend this session to see how an Oracle Social Network customer is integrating multiple applications—such as CRM, HCM, and business processes—into Oracle Social Network and Oracle WebCenter to enable individuals and teams to solve complex cross-organizational business problems more effectively by utilizing the social enterprise. ¶ Thursday, October 4th CON8899 - Becoming a Social Business: Stories from the Front Lines of Change What does it really mean to be a social business? How can you change our organization to embrace social approaches? What pitfalls do you need to avoid? In this lively panel discussion, customer and industry thought leaders in social business explore these topics and more as they share their stories of the good, the bad, and the ugly that can happen when embracing social methods and technologies to improve business success. Using moderated questions and open Q&A from the audience, the panel discusses vital topics such as the critical factors for success, the major issues to avoid, how to gain senior executive support for social efforts, how to handle undesired behavior, and how to measure business impact. It takes a thought-provoking look at becoming a social business from the inside. ¶ CON6851 - Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition to Create Vendor Portals Large manufacturers of grocery items routinely find themselves depending on the inventory management expertise of their wholesalers and distributors. Inventory costs can be managed more efficiently by the manufacturers if they have better insight into the inventory levels of items carried by their distributors. This creates a unique opportunity for distributors and wholesalers to leverage this knowledge into a revenue-generating subscription service. Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and Oracle WebCenter Portal play a key part in enabling creation of business-managed business intelligence portals for vendors. This session discusses one customer that implemented this by leveraging Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition. ¶ CON8879 - Provide a Personalized and Consistent Customer Experience in Your Websites and Portals Your customers engage with your company online in different ways throughout their journey—from prospecting by acquiring information on your corporate Website to transacting through self-service applications on your customer portal—and then the cycle begins again when they look for new products and services. Ensuring that the customer experience is consistent and personalized across online properties—from branding and content to interactions and transactions—can be a daunting task. Oracle WebCenter enables you to speak and interact with your customers with one voice across your Websites and portals by providing an integrated platform for delivery of self-service and engagement that unifies and personalizes the online experience. Learn more in this session. ¶ CON8898 - Land Mines, Potholes, and Dirt Roads: Navigating the Way to ECM Nirvana Ten years ago, people were predicting that by this time in history, we’d be some kind of utopian paperless society. As we all know, we’re not there yet, but are we getting closer? What is keeping companies from driving down the road to enterprise content management bliss? Most people understand that using ECM as a central platform enables organizations to expedite document-centric processes, but most business processes in organizations are still heavily paper-based. Many of these processes could be automated and improved with an ECM platform infrastructure. In this panel discussion, you’ll hear from Oracle WebCenter customers that have already solved some of these challenges as they share their strategies for success and roads to avoid along your journey. ¶ CON8908 - Oracle WebCenter Portal: Creating and Using Content Presenter Templates Oracle WebCenter Portal applications use task flows to display and integrate content stored in the Oracle WebCenter Content server. Among the most flexible task flows is Content Presenter, which renders various types of content on an Oracle WebCenter Portal page. Although Oracle WebCenter Portal comes with a set of predefined Content Presenter templates, developers can create their own templates for specific rendering needs. This session shows the lifecycle of developing Content Presenter task flows, including how to create, package, import, modify at runtime, and use such templates. In addition to simple examples with Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF) UI elements to render the content, it shows how to use other UI technologies, CSS files, and JavaScript libraries. ¶ CON8897 - Using Web Experience Management to Drive Online Marketing Success Every year, the online channel becomes more imperative for driving organizational top-line revenue, but for many companies, mastering how to best market their products and services in a fast-evolving online world with high customer expectations for personalized experiences can be a complex proposition. Come to this panel discussion, and hear directly from online marketers how they are succeeding today by using Web experience management to drive marketing success, using capabilities such as targeting and optimization, user-generated content, mobile site publishing, and site visitor personalization to deliver engaging online experiences. ¶ CON8892 - Oracle’s Journey to Social Business Social business is a revolution, one that is causing rapidly accelerating change in how companies and customers engage with one another and how employees work together. Oracle’s goal in becoming a social business is to create a socially connected organization in which working collaboratively across geographical locations, lines of business, and management chains is second nature, enabling innovative solutions to business challenges. We can achieve this by connecting the right people, finding the right content, communicating with the right people, collaborating at the right time, and building the right communities in the right context—all ready in the CLOUD. Attend this session to see how Oracle is transforming itself into a social business. ¶  ------------ If you've read all the way to the end here - we are REALLY looking forward to seeing you in San Francisco.

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• Oracle Announces New Oracle Exastack Program for ISV Partners

  - by pfolgado

  Oracle Exastack Program Enables ISV Partners to Leverage a Scalable, Integrated Infrastructure to Deliver Their Applications Tuned and Optimized for High-Performance News Facts Enabling Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and other members of Oracle Partner Network (OPN) to rapidly build and deliver faster, more reliable applications to end customers, Oracle today introduced Oracle Exastack Ready, available now, and Oracle Exastack Optimized, available in fall 2011 through OPN. The Oracle Exastack Program focuses on helping ISVs run their solutions on Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud -- integrated systems in which the software and hardware are engineered to work together. These products provide partners with a lower cost and high performance infrastructure for database and application workloads across on-premise and cloud based environments. Leveraging the new Oracle Exastack Program in which applications can qualify as Oracle Exastack Ready or Oracle Exastack Optimized, partners can use available OPN resources to optimize their applications to run faster and more reliably -- providing increased performance to their end users. By deploying their applications on Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, ISVs can reduce the cost, time and support complexities typically associated with building and maintaining a disparate application infrastructure -- enabling them to focus more on their core competencies, accelerating innovation and delivering superior value to customers. After qualifying their applications as Oracle Exastack Ready, partners can note to customers that their applications run on and support Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud component products including Oracle Solaris, Oracle Linux, Oracle Database and Oracle WebLogic Server. Customers can be confident when choosing a partner's Oracle Exastack Optimized application, knowing it has been tuned by the OPN member on Oracle Exadata Database Machine or Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud with a goal of delivering optimum speed, scalability and reliability. Partners participating in the Oracle Exastack Program can also leverage their Oracle Exastack Ready and Oracle Exastack Optimized applications to advance to Platinum or Diamond level in OPN. Oracle Exastack Programs Provide ISVs a Reliable, High-Performance Application Infrastructure With the Oracle Exastack Program ISVs have several options to qualify and tune their applications with Oracle Exastack, including: Oracle Exastack Ready: Oracle Exastack Ready provides qualifying partners with specific branding and promotional benefits based on their adoption of Oracle products. If a partner application supports the latest major release of one of these products, the partner may use the corresponding logo with their product marketing materials: Oracle Solaris Ready, Oracle Linux Ready, Oracle Database Ready, and Oracle WebLogic Ready. Oracle Exastack Ready is available to OPN members at the Gold level or above. Additionally, OPN members participating in the program can leverage their Oracle Exastack Ready applications toward advancement to the Platinum or Diamond levels in the OPN Specialized program and toward achieving Oracle Exastack Optimized status. Oracle Exastack Optimized: When available, for OPN members at the Gold level or above, Oracle Exastack Optimized will provide direct access to Oracle technical resources and dedicated Oracle Exastack lab environments so OPN members can test and tune their applications to deliver optimal performance and scalability on Oracle Exadata Database Machine or Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud. Oracle Exastack Optimized will provide OPN members with specific branding and promotional benefits including the use of the Oracle Exastack Optimized logo. OPN members participating in the program will also be able to leverage their Oracle Exastack Optimized applications toward advancement to Platinum or Diamond level in the OPN Specialized program. Oracle Exastack Labs and ISV Enablement: Dedicated Oracle Exastack lab environments and related technical enablement resources (including Guided Learning Paths and Boot Camps) will be available through OPN for OPN members to further their knowledge of Oracle Exastack offerings, and qualify their applications for Oracle Exastack Optimized or Oracle Exastack Ready. Oracle Exastack labs will be available to qualifying OPN members at the Gold level or above. Partners are eligible to participate in the Oracle Exastack Ready program immediately, which will help them meet the requirements to attain Oracle Exastack Optimized status in the future. Guidelines for Oracle Exastack Optimized, as well as Oracle Exastack Labs will be available in fall 2011. Supporting Quotes "In order to effectively differentiate their software applications in the marketplace, ISVs need to rapidly deliver new capabilities and performance improvements," said Judson Althoff, Oracle senior vice president of Worldwide Alliances and Channels and Embedded Sales. "With Oracle Exastack, ISVs have the ability to optimize and deploy their applications with a complete, integrated and cloud-ready infrastructure that will help them accelerate innovation, unlock new features and functionality, and deliver superior value to customers." "We view performance as absolutely critical and a key differentiator," said Tom Stock, SVP of Product Management, GoldenSource. "As a leading provider of enterprise data management solutions for securities and investment management firms, with Oracle Exadata Database Machine, we see an opportunity to notably improve data processing performance -- providing high quality 'golden copy' data in a reduced timeframe. Achieving Oracle Exastack Optimized status will be a stamp of approval that our solution will provide the performance and scalability that our customers demand." "As a leading provider of Revenue Intelligence solutions for telecommunications, media and entertainment service providers, our customers continually demand more readily accessible, enriched and pre-analyzed information to minimize their financial risks and maximize their margins," said Alon Aginsky, President and CEO of cVidya Networks. "Oracle Exastack enables our solutions to deliver the power, infrastructure, and innovation required to transform our customers' business operations and stay ahead of the game." Supporting Resources Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Oracle Exastack Oracle Exastack Datasheet Judson Althoff blog Connect with the Oracle Partner community at OPN on Facebook, OPN on LinkedIn, OPN on YouTube, or OPN on Twitter

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• Why Software Sucks...and What You Can Do About It – book review

  - by DigiMortal

      How do our users see the products we are writing for them and how happy they are with our work? Are they able to get their work done without fighting with cool features and crashes or are they just switching off resistance part of their brain to survive our software? Yeah, the overall picture of software usability landscape is not very nice. Okay, it is not even nice. But, fortunately, Why Software Sucks...and What You Can Do About It by David S. Platt explains everything. Why Software Sucks… is book for software users but I consider it as a-must reading also for developers and specially for their managers whose politics often kills all usability topics as soon as they may appear. For managers usability is soft topic that can be manipulated the way it is best in current state of project. Although developers are not UI designers and usability experts they are still very often forced to deal with these topics and this is how usability problems start (of course, also designers are able to produce designs that are stupid and too hard to use for users, but this blog here is about development). I found this book to be very interesting and funny reading. It is not humor book but it explains you all so you remember later very well what you just read. It took me about three evenings to go through this book and I am still enjoying what I found and how author explains our weird young working field to end users. I suggest this book to all developers – while you are demanding your management to hire or outsource usability expert you are at least causing less pain to end users. So, go and buy this book, just like I did. And… they thanks to mr. Platt :) There is one book more I suggest you to read if you are interested in usability - Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition by Steve Krug. Editorial review from Amazon Today’s software sucks. There’s no other good way to say it. It’s unsafe, allowing criminal programs to creep through the Internet wires into our very bedrooms. It’s unreliable, crashing when we need it most, wiping out hours or days of work with no way to get it back. And it’s hard to use, requiring large amounts of head-banging to figure out the simplest operations. It’s no secret that software sucks. You know that from personal experience, whether you use computers for work or personal tasks. In this book, programming insider David Platt explains why that’s the case and, more importantly, why it doesn’t have to be that way. And he explains it in plain, jargon-free English that’s a joy to read, using real-world examples with which you’re already familiar. In the end, he suggests what you, as a typical user, without a technical background, can do about this sad state of our software—how you, as an informed consumer, don’t have to take the abuse that bad software dishes out. As you might expect from the book’s title, Dave’s expose is laced with humor—sometimes outrageous, but always dead on. You’ll laugh out loud as you recall incidents with your own software that made you cry. You’ll slap your thigh with the same hand that so often pounded your computer desk and wished it was a bad programmer’s face. But Dave hasn’t written this book just for laughs. He’s written it to give long-overdue voice to your own discovery—that software does, indeed, suck, but it shouldn’t. Table of contents Acknowledgments xiii Introduction Chapter 1: Who’re You Calling a Dummy? Where We Came From Why It Still Sucks Today Control versus Ease of Use I Don’t Care How Your Program Works A Bad Feature and a Good One Stopping the Proceedings with Idiocy Testing on Live Animals Where We Are and What You Can Do Chapter 2: Tangled in the Web Where We Came From How It Works Why It Still Sucks Today Client-Centered Design versus Server-Centered Design Where’s My Eye Opener? It’s Obvious—Not! Splash, Flash, and Animation Testing on Live Animals What You Can Do about It Chapter 3: Keep Me Safe The Way It Was Why It Sucks Today What Programmers Need to Know, but Don’t A Human Operation Budgeting for Hassles Users Are Lazy Social Engineering Last Word on Security What You Can Do Chapter 4: Who the Heck Are You? Where We Came From Why It Still Sucks Today Incompatible Requirements OK, So Now What? Chapter 5: Who’re You Looking At? Yes, They Know You Why It Sucks More Than Ever Today Users Don’t Know Where the Risks Are What They Know First Milk You with Cookies? Privacy Policy Nonsense Covering Your Tracks The Google Conundrum Solution Chapter 6: Ten Thousand Geeks, Crazed on Jolt Cola See Them in Their Native Habitat All These Geeks Who Speaks, and When, and about What Selling It The Next Generation of Geeks—Passing It On Chapter 7: Who Are These Crazy Bastards Anyway? Homo Logicus Testosterone Poisoning Control and Contentment Making Models Geeks and Jocks Jargon Brains and Constraints Seven Habits of Geeks Chapter 8: Microsoft: Can’t Live With ’Em and Can’t Live Without ’Em They Run the World Me and Them Where We Came From Why It Sucks Today Damned if You Do, Damned if You Don’t We Love to Hate Them Plus ça Change Growing-Up Pains What You Can Do about It The Last Word Chapter 9: Doing Something About It 1. Buy 2. Tell 3. Ridicule 4. Trust 5. Organize Epilogue About the Author

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• Change Comes from Within

  - by John K. Hines

  I am in the midst of witnessing a variety of teams moving away from Scrum. Some of them are doing things like replacing Scrum terms with more commonly understood terminology. Mainly they have gone back to using industry standard terms and more traditional processes like the RAPID decision making process. For example: Scrum Master becomes Project Lead. Scrum Team becomes Project Team. Product Owner becomes Stakeholders. I'm actually quite sad to see this happening, but I understand that Scrum is a radical change for most organizations. Teams are slowly but surely moving away from Scrum to a process that non-software engineers can understand and follow. Some could never secure the education or personnel (like a Product Owner) to get the whole team engaged. And many people with decision-making authority do not see the value in Scrum besides task planning and tracking. You see, Scrum cannot be mandated. No one can force a team to be Agile, collaborate, continuously improve, and self-reflect. Agile adoptions must start from a position of mutual trust and willingness to change. And most software teams aren't like that. Here is my personal epiphany from over a year of attempting to promote Agile on a small development team: The desire to embrace Agile methodologies must come from each and every member of the team. If this desire does not exist - if the team is satisfied with its current process, if the team is not motivated to improve, or if the team is afraid of change - the actual demonstration of all the benefits prescribed by Agile and Scrum will take years. I've read some blog posts lately that criticise Scrum for demanding "Big Change Up Front." One's opinion of software methodologies boils down to one's perspective. If you see modern software development as successful, you will advocate for small, incremental changes to how it is done. If you see it as broken, you'll be much more motivated to take risks and try something different. So my question to you is this - is modern software development healthy or in need of dramatic improvement? I can tell you from personal experience that any project that requires exploration, planning, development, stabilisation, and deployment is hard. Trying to make that process better with only a slightly modified approach is a mistake. You will become completely dependent upon the skillset of your team (the only variable you can change). But the difficulty of planned work isn't one of skill. It isn't until you solve the fundamental challenges of communication, collaboration, quality, and efficiency that skill even comes into play. So I advocate for Big Change Up Front. And I advocate for it to happen often until those involved can say, from experience, that it is no longer needed. I hope every engineer has the opportunity to see the benefits of Agile and Scrum on a highly functional team. I'll close with more key learnings that can help with a Scrum adoption: Your leaders must understand Scrum. They must understand software development, its inherent difficulties, and how Scrum helps. If you attempt to adopt Scrum before the understanding is there, your leaders will apply traditional solutions to your problems - often creating more problems. Success should be measured by quality, not revenue. Namely, the value of software to an organization is the revenue it generates minus ongoing support costs. You should identify quality-based metrics that show the effect Agile techniques have on your software. Motivation is everything. I finally understand why so many Agile advocates say you that if you are not on a team using Agile, you should leave and find one. Scrum and especially Agile encompass many elegant solutions to a wide variety of problems. If you are working on a team that has not encountered these problems the the team may never see the value in the solutions.   Having said all that, I'm not giving up on Agile or Scrum. I am convinced it is a better approach for software development. But reality is saying that its adoption is not straightforward and highly subject to disruption. Unless, that is, everyone really, really wants it.

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• &ldquo;My life at Oracle&rdquo;

  - by cristian.condurache(at)oracle.com

  Hello everybody! My name is Eva and I currently work in Oracle Italy as Sales Programs Manager for the Technology Sales organization. Since 2009, I also proudly represent the Oracle Education Foundation within my country as the Ambassador for Italy. My career path in this amazing company began 5 years ago as a fresh graduate: after various years studying abroad, in Germany and Ireland mainly, I was looking for a valuable and concrete opportunity which could fulfill my energetic spirit. I wanted to develop myself inside a stimulating and “fast” business environment.. and here came Oracle and I really couldn’t ask for anything better!  THE PARTNER EXPERIENCE The first department I had the chance to work into was the Alliances and Channels organization, where I had the opportunity to join a brilliant team of great and visionary guys. I began having the responsibility to analyze and rationalize the portfolio of Oracle business partners and to identify potential cross-area solutions, which had to be highlighted both on the local market and internationally: this ended up with the implementation of the “Partner Community” model, a business environment of selected Oracle partners, specialized on the different technology focus areas. This new concept was then recognized as an EMEA Best Practice and replicated internationally. Having the opportunity to strengthen day after day strategic relationships with several business partners and study the market positioning of their technology solutions, I was given the role to develop the “Oracle Partner Network Innovation Award” in Italy: the EMEA competition encouraging and rewarding proven and successful technology innovations, creating high value for our common customers and generating new business potential. Several Italian partner solutions won different prizes and I decided that it was worth collecting all those valuable projects, winners and short-listed, inside two specific books in order also to provide them an international market visibility: OPN Innovation Award Booklet 2007 and OPN Innovation Award Booklet 2008 Inside the Alliances and Channels department I really had the opportunity to do    amazing things, like for example working side-by-side with one of the most exceptional teams in Oracle I have ever worked with: the EMEA Recruitment Team. Together, in fact, we conceived a brand new business initiative for our partners, called “Oracle Campus Joint Program”. This program was awarded as an EMEA Best Practice and acknowledged by both Italian public institutions and press media. Italy   is currently running its 5th edition.   Briefly, the “Oracle Campus Joint Program” aims at facing the growing issue of lack of  technology competences and skills on the market. By identifying a specific technology area and developing an intensive 4-6 week Oracle University training course and by collaborating with important academic institutes, international “gurus” and professionals, our business partners are able to benefit from a pool of brilliant top talented young consultants and offer them a significant career opportunity. BUSINESS BUT NOT ONLY: THE NO-PROFIT EXPERIENCE OF ORACLE Currently my mission in Oracle is to continue driving the implementation of strategic business development and sales programs for the entire Oracle Technology stack, involving both partners and the end-customers. But as a completely distinguished role from the day-today business, I’m also honored to represent in Italy the charity global organization founded by Oracle - the Oracle Education Foundation - and drive its corporate citizenship and marketing programs. Oracle Education Foundation is an independent charitable organization funded by Oracle and is dedicated to helping students develop 21st century skills through project learning and the use of technology. It provides “ThinkQuest” as a free program to primary and secondary (K12) schools. Just some significant numbers: today 548,000 students/teachers in 47 countries use ThinkQuest and the Oracle Education Foundation partners with 40+ no-profit or government organizations globally. ABOUT MYSELF AND MY INTERESTS About myself…I’m very enthusiastic and positive, trying always to transform difficult issues in challenging opportunities. My day usually begins very early in the morning with running, swimming or when I need to collect some “zen” energies with a yoga session or better with a long walk with my dog. I definitely love animals and generally speaking I’m very keen on environmental issues and try, as much as I can, to carry out a healthy and “planet respectful” lifestyle. My thirst for knowledge pushed me some time ago to begin a new personal challenge: I decided to enroll, dedicating a good part of my free time, for a second university degree: I chose “Neuroeconomics”, an innovative academic path which combines psychology, economics, and neuroscience and studies how people make decisions and the role of the brain when people evaluate these decisions, categorizing risks and rewards and generally interacting with each other. I’ve been very glad to talk about my experience in this article, as working for Oracle is something very stimulating. This company ensures you the opportunity to face new challenges, work with highly talented people and be professionally highlighted also globally. Motivation, good results and innovation is always pursued, recognized and fully supported. Thanks and wish you all an amazing career! If you have any question please contact [email protected]. For our job opportunities, please look at http://campus.oracle.com.   Technorati Tags: EMEA,Oracle Partners,Oracle Campus,Oracle Education,experience,EMEA Recruitment Team

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• Unique Business Value vs. Unique IT

  - by barry.perkins

  When the age of computing started, technology was new, exciting, full of potential and had a long way to grow. Vendor architectures were proprietary, and limited in function at first, growing in capability and complexity over time. There were few if any "standards", let alone "open standards" and the concepts of "open systems", and "open architectures" were far in the future. Companies employed intelligent, talented and creative people to implement the best possible solutions for their company. At first, those solutions were "unique" to each company. As time progressed, standards emerged, companies shared knowledge, business capability supplied by technology grew, and companies continued to expand their use of technology. Taking advantage of change required companies to struggle through periodic "revolutionary" change cycles, struggling through costly changes that were fraught with risk, resulted in solutions with an increasingly shorter half-life, and frequently required altering existing business processes and retraining employees and partner businesses. The pace of technological invention and implementation grew at an ever increasing rate, making the "revolutionary" approach based upon "proprietary" or "closed" architectures or technologies no longer viable. Concurrent with the advancement of technology, the rate of change in business increased, leading us to the incredibly fast paced, highly charged, and competitive global economy that we have today, where the most successful companies are companies that are good at implementing, leveraging and exploiting change. Fast forward to today, a world where dramatic changes in business and technology happen continually, a world where "evolutionary" change is crucial. Companies can no longer afford to build "unique IT", nor can they afford regular intervals of "revolutionary" change, with the associated costs and risks. Human ingenuity was once again up to the task, turning technology into a platform supporting business through evolutionary change, by employing "open": open standards; open systems; open architectures; and open solutions. Employing "open", enables companies to implement systems based upon technology, capability and standards that will evolve over time, providing a solid platform upon which a company can drive business needs, requirements, functions, and processes down into the technology, rather than exposing technology to the business, allowing companies to focus on providing "unique business value" rather than "unique IT". The big question! Does moving from "older" technology that no longer meets the needs of today's business, to new "open" technology require yet another "revolutionary change"? A "revolutionary" change with a short half-life, camouflaging reality with great marketing? The answer is "perhaps". With the endless options available to choose from, it is entirely possible to implement a solution that may work well today, but in 5 years time will become yet another albatross for the company to bear. Some solutions may look good today, solving a budget challenge by reducing cost, or solving a specific tactical challenge, but result in highly complex environments, that may be difficult to manage and maintain and limit the future potential of your business. Put differently, some solutions might push today's challenge into the future, resulting in a more complex and expensive solution. There is no such thing as a "1 size fits all" IT solution for business. If all companies implemented business solutions based upon technology that required, or forced the same business processes across all businesses in an industry, it would be extremely difficult to show competitive advantage through "unique business value". It would be equally difficult to "evolve" to meet or exceed business needs and keep up with today's rapid pace of change. How does one ensure that they do not jump from one trap directly into another? Or to put it positively, there are solutions available today that can address these challenges and issues. How does one ensure that the buying decision of today will serve the business well for years into the future? Intelligent & Informed decisions - "buying right" In a previous blog entry, we discussed the value of linking tactical to strategic The key is driving the focus to what is best for your business, handling today's tactical issues while also aligning with a roadmap/strategy that is tightly aligned with your strategic business objectives. When considering the plethora of possible options that provide various approaches to solving today's complex business problems, it is extremely important to ensure that vendors supplying those options, focus on what is best for your business, supplying sufficient information, providing adequate answers to questions, addressing challenges, issues, concerns and objections honestly and openly, and focus on supplying solutions that are tailored for, and deliver the most business value possible for your business. Here are a few questions to consider relative to the proposed options that should help ensure that today's solution doesn't become tomorrow's problem. Do the proposed solutions: Solve the problem(s) you are trying to address? Provide a solid foundation upon which to grow/enhance your business? Provide tactical gains that align with and enable your strategic business goals/objectives? Provide an infrastructure that can be leveraged with subsequent projects? Solve problems for the business overall, the lines of business, or just IT? Simplify your current environment Provide the basis for business: Efficiency Agility Clarity governance, risk, compliance real time business visibility and trend analysis Does your IT staff have the knowledge/experience to successfully manage the proposed systems once they are deployed in production? Done well, you will be presented with options tailored to your business, that enable you to drive the "unique business value" necessary to help your business stand out from others, creating a distinct competitive advantage, delivering what your customers need, when they need it, so you can attract new customers, new business, and grow top line revenue, all at a cost that provides a strong Return on Investment/Return on Assets. The net result is growth with managed cost providing significantly improved profit margin and shareholder value.

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• How to Automate your Database Documentation

  - by Jonathan Hickford

  In my previous post, “Automating Deployments with SQL Compare command line” I looked at how teams can automate the deployment and post deployment validation of SQL Server databases using the command line versions of Red Gate tools. In this post I’m looking at another use for the command line tools, namely using them to generate up-to-date documentation with every database change. There are many reasons why up-to-date documentation is valuable. For example when somebody new has to work on or administer a database for the first time, or when a new database comes into service. Having database documentation reduces the risks of making incorrect decisions when making changes. Documentation is very useful to business intelligence analysts when writing reports, for example in SSRS. There are a couple of great examples talking about why up to date documentation is valuable on this site:  Database Documentation – Lands of Trolls: Why and How? and Database Documentation Using SQL Doc. The short answer is that it can save you time and reduce risk when you need that most! SQL Doc is a fast simple tool that automatically generates database documentation. It can create documents in HTML, Word or pdf files. The documentation contains information about object definitions and dependencies, along with any other information you want to associate with each object. The SQL Doc GUI, which is included in Red Gate’s SQL Developer Bundle and SQL Toolbelt, allows you to add additional notes to objects, and customise which objects are shown in the docs.  These settings can be saved as a .sqldoc project file. The SQL Doc command line can use this project file to automatically update the documentation every time the database is changed, ensuring that documentation that is always up to date. The simplest way to keep documentation up to date is probably to use a scheduled task to run a script every day. However if you have a source controlled database, or are using a Continuous Integration (CI) server or a build server, it may make more sense to use that instead. If  you’re using SQL Source Control or SSDT Database Projects to help version control your database, you can automatically update the documentation after each change is made to the source control repository that contains your database. To get this automation in place,  you can use the functionality of a Continuous Integration (CI) server, which can trigger commands to run when a source control repository has changed. A CI server will also capture and save the documentation that is created as an artifact, so you can always find the exact documentation for a specific version of the database. This forms an always up to date data dictionary. If you don’t already have a CI server in place there are several you can use, such as the free open source Jenkins or the free starter editions of TeamCity. I won’t cover setting these up in this article, but there is information about using CI servers for automating database tasks on the Red Gate Database Delivery webpage. You may be interested in Red Gate’s SQL CI utility (part of the SQL Automation Pack) which is an easy way to update a database with the latest changes from source control. The PowerShell example below shows how to create the documentation from a database. That database might be your integration database or a shared development database that is always up to date with the latest changes. $serverName = "server\instance" $databaseName = "databaseName" # If you want to document multiple databases use a comma separated list $userName = "username" $password = "password" # Path to SQLDoc.exe $SQLDocPath = "C:\Program Files (x86)\Red Gate\SQL Doc 3\SQLDoc.exe" $arguments = @( "/server:$($serverName)", "/database:$($databaseName)", "/username:$($userName)", "/password:$($password)", "/filetype:html", "/outputfolder:.", # "/project:$args[0]", # If you already have a .sqldoc project file you can pass it as an argument to this script. Values in the project will be overridden with any options set on the command line "/name:$databaseName Report", "/copyrightauthor:$([Environment]::UserName)" ) write-host $arguments & $SQLDocPath $arguments There are several options you can set on the command line to vary how your documentation is created. For example, you can document multiple databases or exclude certain types of objects. In the example above, we set the name of the report to match the database name, and use the current Windows user as the documentation author. For more examples of how you can customise the report from the command line please see the SQL Doc command line documentation If you already have a .sqldoc project file, or wish to further customise the report by including or excluding specific objects, you can use this project on the command line. Any settings you specify on the command line will override the defaults in the project. For details of what you can customise in the project please see the SQL Doc project documentation. In the example above, the line to use a project is commented out, but you can uncomment this line and then pass a path to a .sqldoc project file as an argument to this script.  Conclusion Keeping documentation about your databases up to date is very easy to set up using SQL Doc and PowerShell. By using a CI server to run this process you can trigger the documentation to be run on every change to a source controlled database, and keep historic documentation available. If you are considering more advanced database automation, e.g. database unit testing, change script generation, deploying to large numbers of targets and backup/verification, please email me at [email protected] for further script samples or if you have any questions.

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• Spotlight on Claims: Serving Customers Under Extreme Conditions

  - by [email protected]

  Oracle Insurance's director of marketing for EMEA, John Sinclair, recently attended the CII Spotlight on Claims event in London. Bad weather and its implications for the insurance industry have become very topical as the frequency and diversity of natural disasters - including rains, wind and snow - has surged across Europe this winter. On England's wettest day on record, the county of Cumbria was flooded with 12 inches of rain within 24 hours. Freezing temperatures wreaked havoc on European travel, causing high speed TVG trains to break down and stranding hundreds of passengers under the English Chanel in a tunnel all night long without heat or electricity. A storm named Xynthia thrashed France and surrounding countries with hurricane force, flooding ports and killing 51 people. After the Spring Equinox, insurers may have thought the worst had past. Then came along Eyjafjallajökull, spewing out vast quantities of volcanic ash in what is turning out to be one of most costly natural disasters in history. Such extreme events challenge insurance companies' ability to service their customers just when customers need their help most. When you add economic downturn and competitive pressures to the mix, insurers are further stretched and required to continually learn and innovate to meet high customer expectations with reduced budgets. These and other issues were hot topics of discussion at the recent "Spotlight on Claims" seminar in London, focused on how weather is affecting claims and the insurance industry. The event was organized by the CII (Chartered Insurance Institute), a group with 90,000 members. CII has been at the forefront in setting professional standards for the insurance industry for over a century. Insurers came to the conference to hear how they could better serve their customers under extreme weather conditions, learn from the experience of their peers, and hear about technological breakthroughs in climate modeling, geographic intelligence and IT. Customer case studies at the conference highlighted the importance of effective and constant communication in handling the overflow of catastrophe related claims. First and foremost is the need to rapidly establish initial communication with claimants to build their confidence in a positive outcome. Ongoing communication then needs to be continued throughout the claims cycle to mange expectations and maintain ownership of the process from start to finish. Strong internal communication to support frontline staff was also deemed critical to successful crisis management, as was communication with the broader insurance ecosystem to tap into extended resources and business intelligence. Advances in technology - such web based systems to access policies and enter first notice of loss in the field - as well as customer-focused self-service portals and multichannel alerts, are instrumental in improving customer satisfaction and helping insurers to deal with the claims surge, which often can reach four or more times normal workloads. Dynamic models of the global climate system can now be used to better understand weather-related risks, and as these models mature it is hoped that they will soon become more accurate in predicting the timing of catastrophic events. Geographic intelligence is also being used within a claims environment to better assess loss reserves and detect fraud. Despite these advances in dealing with catastrophes and predicting their occurrence, there will never be a substitute for qualified front line staff to deal with customers. In light of pressures to streamline efficiency, there was debate as to whether outsourcing was the solution, or whether it was better to build on the people you have. In the final analysis, nearly everybody agreed that in the future insurance companies would have to work better and smarter to keep on top. An appeal was also made for greater collaboration amongst industry participants in dealing with the extreme conditions and systematic stress brought on by natural disasters. It was pointed out that the public oftentimes judged the industry as a whole rather than the individual carriers when it comes to freakish events, and that all would benefit at such times from the pooling of limited resources and professional skills rather than competing in silos for competitive advantage - especially the end customer. One case study that stood out was on how The Motorists Insurance Group was able to power through one of the most devastating catastrophes in recent years - Hurricane Ike. The keys to Motorists' success were superior people, processes and technology. They did a lot of upfront planning and invested in their people, creating a healthy team environment that delivered "max service" even when they were experiencing the same level of devastation as the rest of the population. Processes were rapidly adapted to meet the challenge of the catastrophe and continually adapted to Ike's specific conditions as they evolved. Technology was fundamental to the execution of their strategy, enabling them anywhere access, on the fly reassigning of resources and rapid training to augment the work force. You can learn more about the Motorists experience by watching this video. John Sinclair is marketing director for Oracle Insurance in EMEA. He has more than 20 years of experience in insurance and financial services.

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• The Virtues and Challenges of Implementing Basel III: What Every CFO and CRO Needs To Know

  - by Jenna Danko

  The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) is a group tasked with providing thought-leadership to the global banking industry.  Over the years, the BCBS has released volumes of guidance in an effort to promote stability within the financial sector.  By effectively communicating best-practices, the Basel Committee has influenced financial regulations worldwide.  Basel regulations are intended to help banks: More easily absorb shocks due to various forms of financial-economic stress Improve risk management and governance Enhance regulatory reporting and transparency In June 2011, the BCBS released Basel III: A global regulatory framework for more resilient banks and banking systems.  This new set of regulations included many enhancements to previous rules and will have both short and long term impacts on the banking industry.  Some of the key features of Basel III include: A stronger capital base More stringent capital standards and higher capital requirements Introduction of capital buffers  Additional risk coverage Enhanced quantification of counterparty credit risk Credit valuation adjustments  Wrong  way risk  Asset Value Correlation Multiplier for large financial institutions Liquidity management and monitoring Introduction of leverage ratio Even more rigorous data requirements To implement these features banks need to embark on a journey replete with challenges. These can be categorized into three key areas: Data, Models and Compliance. Data Challenges Data quality - All standard dimensions of Data Quality (DQ) have to be demonstrated.  Manual approaches are now considered too cumbersome and automation has become the norm. Data lineage - Data lineage has to be documented and demonstrated.  The PPT / Excel approach to documentation is being replaced by metadata tools.  Data lineage has become dynamic due to a variety of factors, making static documentation out-dated quickly.  Data dictionaries - A strong and clean business glossary is needed with proper identification of business owners for the data.  Data integrity - A strong, scalable architecture with work flow tools helps demonstrate data integrity.  Manual touch points have to be minimized.   Data relevance/coverage - Data must be relevant to all portfolios and storage devices must allow for sufficient data retention.  Coverage of both on and off balance sheet exposures is critical.   Model Challenges Model development - Requires highly trained resources with both quantitative and subject matter expertise. Model validation - All Basel models need to be validated. This requires additional resources with skills that may not be readily available in the marketplace.  Model documentation - All models need to be adequately documented.  Creation of document templates and model development processes/procedures is key. Risk and finance integration - This integration is necessary for Basel as the Allowance for Loan and Lease Losses (ALLL) is calculated by Finance, yet Expected Loss (EL) is calculated by Risk Management – and they need to somehow be equal.  This is tricky at best from an implementation perspective.  Compliance Challenges Rules interpretation - Some Basel III requirements leave room for interpretation.  A misinterpretation of regulations can lead to delays in Basel compliance and undesired reprimands from supervisory authorities. Gap identification and remediation - Internal identification and remediation of gaps ensures smoother Basel compliance and audit processes.  However business lines are challenged by the competing priorities which arise from regulatory compliance and business as usual work.  Qualification readiness - Providing internal and external auditors with robust evidence of a thorough examination of the readiness to proceed to parallel run and Basel qualification  In light of new regulations like Basel III and local variations such as the Dodd Frank Act (DFA) and Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review (CCAR) in the US, banks are now forced to ask themselves many difficult questions.  For example, executives must consider: How will Basel III play into their Risk Appetite? How will they create project plans for Basel III when they haven’t yet finished implementing Basel II? How will new regulations impact capital structure including profitability and capital distributions to shareholders? After all, new regulations often lead to diminished profitability as well as an assortment of implementation problems as we discussed earlier in this note.  However, by requiring banks to focus on premium growth, regulators increase the potential for long-term profitability and sustainability.  And a more stable banking system: Increases consumer confidence which in turn supports banking activity  Ensures that adequate funding is available for individuals and companies Puts regulators at ease, allowing bankers to focus on banking Stability is intended to bring long-term profitability to banks.  Therefore, it is important that every banking institution takes the steps necessary to properly manage, monitor and disclose its risks.  This can be done with the assistance and oversight of an independent regulatory authority.  A spectrum of banks exist today wherein some continue to debate and negotiate with regulators over the implementation of new requirements, while others are simply choosing to embrace them for the benefits I highlighted above. Do share with me how your institution is coping with and embracing these new regulations within your bank. Dr. Varun Agarwal is a Principal in the Banking Practice for Capgemini Financial Services.  He has over 19 years experience in areas that span from enterprise risk management, credit, market, and to country risk management; financial modeling and valuation; and international financial markets research and analyses.

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• Books are Dead! Long Live the Books!

  - by smisner

  We live in interesting times with regard to the availability of technical material. We have lots of free written material online in the form of vendor documentation online, forums, blogs, and Twitter. And we have written material that we can buy in the form of books, magazines, and training materials. Online videos and training – some free and some not free – are also an option. All of these formats are useful for one need or another. As an author, I pay particular attention to the demand for books, and for now I see no reason to stop authoring books. I assure you that I don’t get rich from the effort, and fortunately that is not my motivation. As someone who likes to refer to books frequently, I am still a big believer in books and have evidence from book sales that there are others like me. If I can do my part to help others learn about the technologies I work with, I will continue to produce content in a variety of formats, including books. (You can view a list of all of my books on the Publications page of my site and my online training videos at Pluralsight.) As a consumer of technical information, I prefer books because a book typically can get into a topic much more deeply than a blog post, and can provide more context than vendor documentation. It comes with a table of contents and a (hopefully accurate) index that helps me zero in on a topic of interest, and of course I can use the Search feature in digital form. Some people suggest that technology books are outdated as soon as they get published. I guess it depends on where you are with technology. Not everyone is able to upgrade to the latest and greatest version at release. I do assume, however, that the SQL Server 7.0 titles in my library have little value for me now, but I’m certain that the minute I discard the book, I’m going to want it for some reason! Meanwhile, as electronic books overtake physical books in sales, my husband is grateful that I can continue to build my collection digitally rather than physically as the books have a way of taking over significant square footage in our house! Blog posts, on the other hand, are useful for describing the scenarios that come up in real-life implementations that wouldn’t fit neatly into a book. As many years that I have working with the Microsoft BI stack, I still run into new problems that require creative thinking. Likewise, people who work with BI and other technologies that I use share what they learn through their blogs. Internet search engines help us find information in blogs that simply isn’t available anywhere else. Another great thing about blogs, also, is the connection to community and the dialog that can ensue between people with common interests. With the trend towards electronic formats for books, I imagine that we’ll see books continue to adapt to incorporate different forms of media and better ways to keep the information current. At the moment, I wish I had a better way to help readers with my last two Reporting Services books. In the case of the Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Reporting Services Step by Step book, I have heard many cases of readers having problems with the sample database that shipped on CD – either the database was missing or it was corrupt. So I’ve provided a copy of the database on my site for download from http://datainspirations.com/uploads/rs2005sbsDW.zip. Then for the Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2008 Reporting Services Step by Step book, we decided to avoid the database problem by using the AdventureWorks2008 samples that Microsoft published on Codeplex (although code samples are still available on CD). We had this silly idea that the URL for the download would remain constant, but it seems that expectation was ill-founded. Currently, the sample database is found at http://msftdbprodsamples.codeplex.com/releases/view/37109 but I have no idea how long that will remain valid. My latest books (#9 and #10 which are milestones I never anticipated), Building Integrated Business Intelligence Solutions with SQL Server 2008 R2 and Office 2010 (McGraw Hill, 2011) and Business Intelligence in Microsoft SharePoint 2010 (Microsoft Press, 2011), will not ship with a CD, but will provide all code samples for download at a site maintained by the respective publishers. I expect that the URLs for the downloads for the book will remain valid, but there are lots of references to other sites that can change or disappear over time. Does that mean authors shouldn’t make reference to such sites? Personally, I think the benefits to be gained from including links are greater than the risks of the links becoming invalid at some point. Do you think the time for technology books has come to an end? Is the delivery of books in electronic format enough to keep them alive? If technological barriers were no object, what would make a book more valuable to you than other formats through which you can obtain information?

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• Part 1 - Load Testing In The Cloud

  - by Tarun Arora

  Azure is fascinating, but even more fascinating is the marriage of Azure and TFS! Introduction Recently a client I worked for had 2 major business critical applications being delivered, with very little time budgeted for Performance testing, we immediately hit a bottleneck when the performance testing phase started, the in house infrastructure team could not support the hardware requirements in the short notice. It was suggested that the performance testing be performed on one of the QA environments which was a fraction of the production environment. This didn’t seem right, the team decided to turn to the cloud. The team took advantage of the elasticity offered by Azure, starting with a single test agent which was provisioned and ready for use with in 30 minutes the team scaled up to 17 test agents to perform a very comprehensive performance testing cycle. Issues were identified and resolved but the highlight was that the cost of running the ‘test rig’ proved to be less than if hosted on premise by the infrastructure team. Thank you for taking the time out to read this blog post, in the series of posts, I’ll try and cover the start to end of everything you need to know to use Azure to build your Test Rig in the cloud. But Why Azure? I have my own Data Centre… If the environment is provisioned in your own datacentre, - No matter what level of service agreement you may have with your infrastructure team there will be down time when the environment is patched - How fast can you scale up or down the environments (keeping the enterprise processes in mind) Administration, Cost, Flexibility and Scalability are the areas you would want to think around when taking the decision between your own Data Centre and Azure! How is Microsoft's Public Cloud Offering different from Amazon’s Public Cloud Offering? Microsoft's offering of the Cloud is a hybrid of Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) which distinguishes Microsoft's offering from other providers such as Amazon (Amazon only offers IaaS). PaaS – Platform as a Service IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service Fills the needs of those who want to build and run custom applications as services. Similar to traditional hosting, where a business will use the hosted environment as a logical extension of the on-premises datacentre. A service provider offers a pre-configured, virtualized application server environment to which applications can be deployed by the development staff. Since the service providers manage the hardware (patching, upgrades and so forth), as well as application server uptime, the involvement of IT pros is minimized. On-demand scalability combined with hardware and application server management relieves developers from infrastructure concerns and allows them to focus on building applications. The servers (physical and virtual) are rented on an as-needed basis, and the IT professionals who manage the infrastructure have full control of the software configuration. This kind of flexibility increases the complexity of the IT environment, as customer IT professionals need to maintain the servers as though they are on-premises. The maintenance activities may include patching and upgrades of the OS and the application server, load balancing, failover clustering of database servers, backup and restoration, and any other activities that mitigate the risks of hardware and software failures.   The biggest advantage with PaaS is that you do not have to worry about maintaining the environment, you can focus all your time in solving the business problems with your solution rather than worrying about maintaining the environment. If you decide to use a VM Role on Azure, you are asking for IaaS, more on this later. A nice blog post here on the difference between Saas, PaaS and IaaS. Now that we are convinced why we should be turning to the cloud and why in specific Azure, let’s discuss about the Test Rig. The Load Test Rig – Topology Now the moment of truth, Of course a big part of getting value from cloud computing is identifying the most adequate workloads to take to the cloud, so I’ve decided to try to make a Load Testing rig where the Agents are running on Windows Azure.   I’ll talk you through the above Topology, - User: User kick starts the load test run from the developer workstation on premise. This passes the request to the Test Controller. - Test Controller: The Test Controller is on premise connected to the same domain as the developer workstation. As soon as the Test Controller receives the request it makes use of the Windows Azure Connect service to orchestrate the test responsibilities to all the Test Agents. The Windows Azure Connect endpoint software must be active on all Azure instances and on the Controller machine as well. This allows IP connectivity between them and, given that the firewall is properly configured, allows the Controller to send work loads to the agents. In parallel, the Controller will collect the performance data from the agents, using the traditional WMI mechanisms. - Test Agents: The Test Agents are on the Windows Azure Public Cloud, as soon as the test controller issues instructions to the test agents, the test agents start executing the load tests. The HTTP requests are issued against the web server on premise, the results are captured by the test agents. And finally the results are passed over to the controller. - Servers: The Web Server and DB Server are hosted on premise in the datacentre, this is usually the case with business critical applications, you probably want to manage them your self. Recap and What’s next? So, in the introduction in the series of blog posts on Load Testing in the cloud I highlighted why creating a test rig in the cloud is a good idea, what advantages does Windows Azure offer and the Test Rig topology that I will be using. I would also like to mention that i stumbled upon this [Video] on Azure in a nutshell, great watch if you are new to Windows Azure. In the next post I intend to start setting up the Load Test Environment and discuss pricing with respect to test agent machine types that will be used in the test rig. Hope you enjoyed this post, If you have any recommendations on things that I should consider or any questions or feedback, feel free to add to this blog post. Remember to subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TarunArora.  See you in Part II.   Share this post : CodeProject

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• Training a 'replacement', how to enforce standards?

  - by Mohgeroth

  Not sure that this is the right stack exchange site to ask this of, but here goes... Scope I work for a small company that employs a few hundred people. The development team for the company is small and works out of visual foxpro. A specific department in the company hired me in as a 'lone gunman' to fix and enhance a pre-existing invoicing system. I've successfully taken an Access application that suffered from a lot of risks and limitations and converted it into a C# application driven off of a SQL server backend. I have recently obtained my undergraduate and am no expert by any means. To help make up for that I've felt that earning microsoft certifications will force me to understand more about .net and how it functions. So, after giving my notice with 9 months in advance, 3 months ago a replacement finally showed up. Their role is to learn what I have been designing to an attempt to support the applications designed in C#. The Replacement Fresh out of college with no real-world work experience, the first instinct for anything involving data was and still is listboxes... any time data is mentioned the list box is the control of choice for the replacement. This has gotten to the point, no matter how many times I discuss other controls, where I've seen 5 listboxes on a single form. Classroom experience was almost all C++ console development. So, an example of where I have concern is in a winforms application: Users need to key Reasons into a table to select from later. Given that I know that a strongly typed data set exists, I can just drag the data source from the toolbox and it would create all of this for me. I realize this is a simple example but using databinding is the key. For the past few months now we have been talking about the strongly typed dataset, how to use it and where it interacts with other controls. Data sets, how they work in relation to binding sources, adapters and data grid views. After handing this project off I expected questions about how to implement these since for me this is the way to do it. What happened next simply floors me: An instance of an adapter from the strongly typed dataset was created in the activate event of the form, a table was created and filled with data. Then, a loop was made to manually add rows to a listbox from this table. Finally, a variable was kept to do lookups to figure out what ID the record was for updates if required. How do they modify records you ask? That was my first question too. You won't believe how simple it is, all you do it double click and they type into a pop-up prompt the new value to change it to. As a data entry operator, all the modal popups would drive me absolutely insane. The final solution exceeds 100 lines of code that must be maintained. So my concern is that none of this is sinking in... the department is only allowed 20 hours a week of their time. Up until last week, we've only been given 4-5 hours a week if I'm lucky. The past week or so, I've been lucky to get 10. Question WHAT DO I DO?! I have 4 weeks left until I leave and they fully 'support' this application. I love this job and the opportunity it has given me but it's time for me to spread my wings and find something new. I am in no way, shape or form convinced that they are ready to take over. I do feel that the replacement has the technical ability to 'figure it out' but instead of learning they just write code to do all of this stuff manually. If the replacement wants to code differently in the end, as long as it works I'm fine with that as horrifiying at it looks. However to support what I have designed they MUST to understand how it works and how I have used controls and the framework to make 'magic' happen. This project has about 40 forms, a database with over 30 some odd tables, triggers and stored procedures. It relates labor to invoices to contracts to projections... it's not as simple as it was three years ago when I began this project and the department is now in a position where they cannot survive without it. How in the world can I accomplish any of the following?: Enforce standards or understanding in constent design when the department manager keeps telling them they can do it however they want to Find a way to engage the replacement in active learning of the framework and system design that support must be given for Gracefully inform sr. management that 5-9 hours a week is simply not enough time to learn about the department, pre-existing processes, applications that need to be supported AND determine where potential enhancements to the system go... Yes I know this is a wall of text, thanks for reading through me but I simply don't know what I should be doing. For me, this job is a monster of a reference and things would look extremely bad if I left and things fell apart. How do I handle this?

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• Hybrid IT or Cloud Initiative – a Perfect Enterprise Architecture Maturation Opportunity

  - by Ted McLaughlan

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} All too often in the growth and maturation of Enterprise Architecture initiatives, the effort stalls or is delayed due to lack of “applied traction”. By this, I mean the EA activities - whether targeted towards compliance, risk mitigation or value opportunity propositions – may not be attached to measurable, active, visible projects that could advance and prove the value of EA. EA doesn’t work by itself, in a vacuum, without collaborative engagement and a means of proving usefulness. A critical vehicle to this proof is successful orchestration and use of assets and investment resources to meet a high-profile business objective – i.e. a successful project. More and more organizations are now exploring and considering some degree of IT outsourcing, buying and using external services and solutions to deliver their IT and business requirements – vs. building and operating in-house, in their own data centers. The rapid growth and success of “Cloud” services makes some decisions easier and some IT projects more successful, while dramatically lowering IT risks and enabling rapid growth. This is particularly true for “Software as a Service” (SaaS) applications, which essentially are complete web applications hosted and delivered over the Internet. Whether SaaS solutions – or any kind of cloud solution - are actually, ultimately the most cost-effective approach truly depends on the organization’s business and IT investment strategy. This leads us to Enterprise Architecture, the connectivity between business strategy and investment objectives, and the capabilities purchased or created to meet them. If an EA framework already exists, the approach to selecting a cloud-based solution and integrating it with internal IT systems (i.e. a “Hybrid IT” solution) is well-served by leveraging EA methods. If an EA framework doesn’t exist, or is simply not mature enough to address complex, integrated IT objectives – a hybrid IT/cloud initiative is the perfect project to advance and prove the value of EA. Why is this? For starters, the success of any complex IT integration project - spanning multiple systems, contracts and organizations, public and private – depends on active collaboration and coordination among the project stakeholders. For a hybrid IT initiative, inclusive of one or more cloud services providers, the IT services, business workflow and data governance challenges alone can be extremely complex, requiring many diverse layers of organizational expertise and authority. Establishing subject matter expertise, authorities and strategic guidance across all the disciplines involved in a hybrid-IT or hybrid-cloud system requires top-level, comprehensive experience and collaborative leadership. Tools and practices reflecting industry expertise and EA alignment can also be very helpful – such as Oracle’s “Cloud Candidate Selection Tool”. Using tools like this, and facilitating this critical collaboration by leading, organizing and coordinating the input and expertise into a shared, referenceable, reusable set of authority models and practices – this is where EA shines, and where Enterprise Architects can be most valuable. The “enterprise”, in this case, becomes something greater than the core organization – it includes internal systems, public cloud services, 3rd-party IT platforms and datacenters, distributed users and devices; a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Through facilitated project collaboration, leading to identification or creation of solid governance models and processes, a durable and useful Enterprise Architecture framework will usually emerge by itself, if not actually identified and managed as such. The transition from planning collaboration to actual coordination, where the program plan, schedule and resources become synchronized and aligned to other investments in the organization portfolio, is where EA methods and artifacts appear and become most useful. The actual scope and use of these artifacts, in the context of this project, can then set the stage for the most desirable, helpful and pragmatic form of the now-maturing EA framework and community of practice. Considering or starting a hybrid-IT or hybrid-cloud initiative? Running into some complex relationship challenges? This is the perfect time to take advantage of your new, growing or possibly latent Enterprise Architecture practice.

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• Coherence Data Guarantees for Data Reads - Basic Terminology

  - by jpurdy

  When integrating Coherence into applications, each application has its own set of requirements with respect to data integrity guarantees. Developers often describe these requirements using expressions like "avoiding dirty reads" or "making sure that updates are transactional", but we often find that even in a small group of people, there may be a wide range of opinions as to what these terms mean. This may simply be due to a lack of familiarity, but given that Coherence sits at an intersection of several (mostly) unrelated fields, it may be a matter of conflicting vocabularies (e.g. "consistency" is similar but different in transaction processing versus multi-threaded programming). Since almost all data read consistency issues are related to the concept of concurrency, it is helpful to start with a definition of that, or rather what it means for two operations to be concurrent. Rather than implying that they occur "at the same time", concurrency is a slightly weaker statement -- it simply means that it can't be proven that one event precedes (or follows) the other. As an example, in a Coherence application, if two client members mutate two different cache entries sitting on two different cache servers at roughly the same time, it is likely that one update will precede the other by a significant amount of time (say 0.1ms). However, since there is no guarantee that all four members have their clocks perfectly synchronized, and there is no way to precisely measure the time it takes to send a given message between any two members (that have differing clocks), we consider these to be concurrent operations since we can not (easily) prove otherwise. So this leads to a question that we hear quite frequently: "Are the contents of the near cache always synchronized with the underlying distributed cache?". It's easy to see that if an update on a cache server results in a message being sent to each near cache, and then that near cache being updated that there is a window where the contents are different. However, this is irrelevant, since even if the application reads directly from the distributed cache, another thread update the cache before the read is returned to the application. Even if no other member modifies a cache entry prior to the local near cache entry being updated (and subsequently read), the purpose of reading a cache entry is to do something with the result, usually either displaying for consumption by a human, or by updating the entry based on the current state of the entry. In the former case, it's clear that if the data is updated faster than a human can perceive, then there is no problem (and in many cases this can be relaxed even further). For the latter case, the application must assume that the value might potentially be updated before it has a chance to update it. This almost aways the case with read-only caches, and the solution is the traditional optimistic transaction pattern, which requires the application to explicitly state what assumptions it made about the old value of the cache entry. If the application doesn't want to bother stating those assumptions, it is free to lock the cache entry prior to reading it, ensuring that no other threads will mutate the entry, a pessimistic approach. The optimistic approach relies on what is sometimes called a "fuzzy read". In other words, the application assumes that the read should be correct, but it also acknowledges that it might not be. (I use the qualifier "sometimes" because in some writings, "fuzzy read" indicates the situation where the application actually sees an original value and then later sees an updated value within the same transaction -- however, both definitions are roughly equivalent from an application design perspective). If the read is not correct it is called a "stale read". Going back to the definition of concurrency, it may seem difficult to precisely define a stale read, but the practical way of detecting a stale read is that is will cause the encompassing transaction to roll back if it tries to update that value. The pessimistic approach relies on a "coherent read", a guarantee that the value returned is not only the same as the primary copy of that value, but also that it will remain that way. In most cases this can be used interchangeably with "repeatable read" (though that term has additional implications when used in the context of a database system). In none of cases above is it possible for the application to perform a "dirty read". A dirty read occurs when the application reads a piece of data that was never committed. In practice the only way this can occur is with multi-phase updates such as transactions, where a value may be temporarily update but then withdrawn when a transaction is rolled back. If another thread sees that value prior to the rollback, it is a dirty read. If an application uses optimistic transactions, dirty reads will merely result in a lack of forward progress (this is actually one of the main risks of dirty reads -- they can be chained and potentially cause cascading rollbacks). The concepts of dirty reads, fuzzy reads, stale reads and coherent reads are able to describe the vast majority of requirements that we see in the field. However, the important thing is to define the terms used to define requirements. A quick web search for each of the terms in this article will show multiple meanings, so I've selected what are generally the most common variations, but it never hurts to state each definition explicitly if they are critical to the success of a project (many applications have sufficiently loose requirements that precise terminology can be avoided).

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• Kernel Panic every time I open a print queue

  - by Gray

  Every time I open any printer queue I get a kernel panic and have to reboot. It's quite frustrating. I've tried removing/adding printers, clearing all caches with Onyx, repairing permissions, all manner of things to no avail. Any tips would be greatly appreciated! ==== CRASH REPORT ==== Interval Since Last Panic Report: 25551 sec Panics Since Last Report: 1 Anonymous UUID: 322E8128-0027-4C2F-9264-6A9D9F1BD13E Thu Aug 27 10:04:23 2009 panic(cpu 0 caller 0x001AB0FE): Kernel trap at 0x00233080, type 14=page fault, registers: CR0: 0x8001003b, CR2: 0x00000008, CR3: 0x01157000, CR4: 0x00000660 EAX: 0x00000000, EBX: 0x03f05df0, ECX: 0x2ad007fd, EDX: 0x2ad02d2d CR2: 0x00000008, EBP: 0x2e6abb78, ESI: 0x03f136a0, EDI: 0x03f13640 EFL: 0x00010206, EIP: 0x00233080, CS: 0x00000008, DS: 0x01a70010 Error code: 0x00000000 Backtrace (CPU 0), Frame : Return Address (4 potential args on stack) 0x2e6ab998 : 0x12b4c6 (0x45f91c 0x2e6ab9cc 0x13355c 0x0) 0x2e6ab9e8 : 0x1ab0fe (0x469a98 0x233080 0xe 0x469248) 0x2e6abac8 : 0x1a1713 (0x2e6abae0 0x206 0x2e6abb78 0x233080) 0x2e6abad8 : 0x233080 (0xe 0x3e10048 0x4570010 0x96d0010) 0x2e6abb78 : 0x27866c (0x3f05df0 0x0 0x4ec4 0x3f136a0) 0x2e6abbc8 : 0x249d53 (0x3f13640 0x3e17464 0x55c160 0x3034ed5c) 0x2e6abdc8 : 0x24bb59 (0x3034ed00 0x28 0x9 0x0) 0x2e6abde8 : 0x270186 (0x2e6abe70 0x2e6abe44 0x8 0x0) 0x2e6abe68 : 0x22ca5f (0x3034ed00 0x3034ed00 0x2e6abea8 0xffffffff) 0x2e6abea8 : 0x21b36e (0x1e 0x3034ed00 0x246 0x0) 0x2e6abec8 : 0x217591 (0x3f65c04 0x1e 0x3034ed00 0x3ef2c2) 0x2e6abef8 : 0x217cea (0x530d64 0x4037808 0x3034ed40 0x2e6abf4c) 0x2e6abf68 : 0x217f1b (0x3f65c04 0x3034ed00 0x0 0x530de8) 0x2e6abfc8 : 0x1a14fc (0x530dc0 0x0 0x1a40b5 0x3dd95d0) Backtrace terminated-invalid frame pointer 0 BSD process name corresponding to current thread: kernel_task Mac OS version: 9L31a Kernel version: Darwin Kernel Version 9.8.0: Wed Jul 15 16:55:01 PDT 2009; root:xnu-1228.15.4~1/RELEASE_I386 System model name: MacBook4,1 (Mac-F22788A9) System uptime in nanoseconds: 30555146093771 unloaded kexts: com.apple.iokit.IOUSBMassStorageClass 2.0.8 - last unloaded 26709525128459 loaded kexts: com.vmware.kext.vmnet 2.0.5 com.vmware.kext.vmioplug 2.0.5 com.vmware.kext.vmci 2.0.5 com.vmware.kext.vmx86 2.0.5 com.apple.driver.iTunesPhoneDriver 1.0 - last loaded 981750246502 com.apple.iokit.IOUSBMassStorageClass 2.0.8 com.apple.filesystems.msdosfs 1.5.5 com.apple.iokit.IOBluetoothSerialManager 2.1.8f2 com.apple.filesystems.autofs 2.0.2 com.apple.driver.AppleHWSensor 1.9d0 com.apple.driver.AppleHDA 1.7.1a2 com.apple.driver.AppleUpstreamUserClient 2.7.5 com.apple.Dont_Steal_Mac_OS_X 6.0.3 com.apple.iokit.CHUDUtils 201 com.apple.iokit.CHUDProf 211 com.apple.driver.AppleIntelGMAX3100 5.4.8 com.apple.driver.AppleIntelGMAX3100FB 5.4.8 com.apple.driver.AppleHDAController 1.7.1a2 com.apple.iokit.IOFireWireIP 1.7.7 com.apple.driver.AppleIRController 113 com.apple.driver.AudioIPCDriver 1.0.6 com.apple.driver.ACPI_SMC_PlatformPlugin 3.4.0a17 com.apple.driver.AppleLPC 1.3.1 com.apple.driver.AppleBacklight 1.6.0 com.apple.driver.SMCMotionSensor 2.1.1d2 com.apple.driver.AppleUSBTrackpad 1.7.4f1 com.apple.driver.AppleUSBTCKeyEventDriver 1.7.4f1 com.apple.driver.AppleUSBTCKeyboard 1.7.4f1 com.apple.driver.CSRUSBBluetoothHCIController 2.1.8f2 com.apple.driver.AppleUSBMergeNub 3.4.6 com.apple.iokit.IOSCSIMultimediaCommandsDevice 2.1.1 com.apple.iokit.SCSITaskUserClient 2.1.1 com.apple.driver.XsanFilter 2.7.91 com.apple.iokit.IOATAPIProtocolTransport 1.5.3 com.apple.iokit.IOAHCIBlockStorage 1.2.2 com.apple.driver.AppleUSBHub 3.4.9 com.apple.iokit.IOUSBUserClient 3.4.9 com.apple.driver.AppleAHCIPort 1.7.0 com.apple.driver.AppleIntelPIIXATA 2.0.1 com.apple.driver.AppleFWOHCI 3.9.7 com.apple.driver.AppleUSBEHCI 3.4.6 com.apple.driver.AppleEFINVRAM 1.2.0 com.apple.iokit.AppleYukon2 3.1.13b2 com.apple.driver.AirPortBrcm43xx 366.91.21 com.apple.driver.AppleUSBUHCI 3.3.5 com.apple.driver.AppleSmartBatteryManager 158.10.5 com.apple.driver.AppleRTC 1.2.3 com.apple.driver.AppleHPET 1.4 com.apple.driver.AppleACPIPCI 1.2.5 com.apple.driver.AppleACPIButtons 1.2.5 com.apple.driver.AppleSMBIOS 1.4 com.apple.driver.AppleACPIEC 1.2.5 com.apple.driver.AppleAPIC 1.4 com.apple.security.seatbelt 107.12 com.apple.nke.applicationfirewall 1.6.77 com.apple.security.TMSafetyNet 3 com.apple.driver.AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement 76.2.0 com.apple.driver.DiskImages 199 com.apple.BootCache 30.4 com.apple.iokit.IOSerialFamily 9.4 com.apple.driver.DspFuncLib 1.7.1a2 com.apple.iokit.CHUDKernLib 201 com.apple.iokit.IOHDAFamily 1.7.1a2 com.apple.iokit.IOAudioFamily 1.6.9fc5 com.apple.kext.OSvKernDSPLib 1.1 com.apple.driver.IOPlatformPluginFamily 3.4.0a17 com.apple.iokit.IONDRVSupport 1.7.3 com.apple.iokit.IOGraphicsFamily 1.7.3 com.apple.driver.AppleSMC 2.3.1d1 com.apple.iokit.IOUSBHIDDriver 3.4.6 com.apple.driver.AppleUSBBluetoothHCIController 2.1.8f2 com.apple.iokit.IOBluetoothFamily 2.1.8f2 com.apple.driver.AppleUSBComposite 3.2.0 com.apple.iokit.IOSCSIBlockCommandsDevice 2.1.1 com.apple.iokit.IOBDStorageFamily 1.5 com.apple.iokit.IODVDStorageFamily 1.5 com.apple.iokit.IOCDStorageFamily 1.5 com.apple.iokit.IOSCSIArchitectureModelFamily 2.1.1 com.apple.iokit.IOAHCIFamily 1.5.0 com.apple.iokit.IOATAFamily 2.0.1 com.apple.iokit.IOFireWireFamily 3.4.9 com.apple.iokit.IO80211Family 216.1 com.apple.iokit.IONetworkingFamily 1.6.1 com.apple.iokit.IOUSBFamily 3.4.9 com.apple.driver.AppleEFIRuntime 1.2.0 com.apple.iokit.IOSMBusFamily 1.1 com.apple.iokit.IOStorageFamily 1.5.6 com.apple.iokit.IOHIDFamily 1.5.5 com.apple.driver.AppleACPIPlatform 1.2.5 com.apple.iokit.IOACPIFamily 1.2.0 com.apple.iokit.IOPCIFamily 2.6 Macbook Black Mac OS X (10.5.8)

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• Setting up Edimax EW-7206APg as Universal Repeater

  - by Ondra Žižka

  Hi, I've troubles setting up Edimax EW-7206APg as a Universal Repeater. I've read few manuals, but they are unclear on certain points. I've managed the repeater to get to a state when it's in a "connected" state. I've set the same WPA passphrase as the router has because I haven't seen any other place to set it at. These are my settings: System Uptime 0day:1h:33m:11s Hardware Version Rev. A Runtime Code Version 1.32 Wireless Configuration Mode Universal Repeater ESSID edimax Channel Number 6 Security WPA-shared key BSSID 00:c0:9f:40:bd:38 Associated Clients 0 Wireless Repeater Interface Configuration ESSID Dusan Security WPA BSSID 00:4f:62:23:8f:7e State Connected LAN Configuration IP Address 192.168.0.10 Subnet Mask 255.255.255.0 Default Gateway 192.168.0.1 MAC Address 00:c0:9f:40:bd:37 This is ipconfig /all: Prípona DNS podle pripojení . . . : riomail.cz Popis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . : Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2200BG Network Connection Fyzická Adresa. . . . . . . . . . : 00-0E-35-3D-77-68 Protokol DHCP povolen . . . . . . : Ano Automatická konfigurace povolena : Ano Adresa IP . . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.0.5 Maska podsíte . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0 Výchozí brána . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.0.1 Server DHCP . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.0.1 Servery DNS . . . . . . . . . . . : 94.74.192.252 94.74.192.244 I can ping the repeater, I can ping the root AP, but not a DNS server or any other IP beyond the root AP. Anyone has an idea what's wrong? Thanks, Ondra

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• BIND DNS Master with Zerigo Slaves - BIND won't update the slave servers

  - by Anthony

  I've tried to resolve this myself and have looked through Google and Stack but haven't found the answer I'm looking for. Currently on a VPS server I have BIND DNS installed as a MASTER DNS Server. I use Zerigo's DNS service as SLAVE servers for public use: The Master doesn't receive queries - It's job is to simply create and modify DNS entries locally of which the SLAVE use to serve. Here is an excerpt of the BIND log, I set it to INFO event logging: 14-Apr-2012 23:00:00.234 general: info: received control channel command 'reload' 14-Apr-2012 23:00:00.234 general: info: loading configuration from 'C:\DNS\BIND\etc\named.conf' 14-Apr-2012 23:00:00.234 general: info: using default UDP/IPv4 port range: [1024, 65535] 14-Apr-2012 23:00:00.234 general: info: using default UDP/IPv6 port range: [1024, 65535] 14-Apr-2012 23:00:00.250 general: info: reloading configuration succeeded 14-Apr-2012 23:00:00.250 general: info: reloading zones succeeded 14-Apr-2012 23:16:22.750 xfer-out: info: client 174.36.24.251#47135: transfer of 'ajmakeup.com/IN': AXFR started 14-Apr-2012 23:16:22.750 xfer-out: info: client 174.36.24.251#47135: transfer of 'ajmakeup.com/IN': AXFR ended 14-Apr-2012 23:16:23.015 xfer-out: info: client 68.71.141.22#36212: transfer of 'ajmakeup.com/IN': AXFR started 14-Apr-2012 23:16:23.031 xfer-out: info: client 68.71.141.22#36212: transfer of 'ajmakeup.com/IN': AXFR ended As you can see there is no problem with Zerigo's DNS servers requesting new DNS data, when I force a reload that is; I don't believe, as per the way they are set as SLAVE, that they poll for changes. However the problem is the other way; the MASTER is not updating the SLAVE servers when reload is run (on the MASTER); it is a batch on a 15 minute timer. Below is my NAMED.CONF: key "rndc-key" { algorithm hmac-md5; secret "REMOVED FOR SECURITY"; }; acl "trusted" { 174.36.24.251/32; 68.71.141.22/32; localhost; }; options { version "not currently available"; directory "C:\DNS\BIND\etc"; allow-query { trusted; }; }; controls { inet 127.0.0.1 port 953 allow { 127.0.0.1; } keys { "rndc-key"; }; }; logging{ channel simple_log { file "C:\DNS\BIND\logging\bind.log" versions 3 size 5m; severity info; print-time yes; print-severity yes; print-category yes; }; category default{ simple_log; }; }; zone "ajmakeup.com" in { type master; file "c:\dns\BIND\zones\db.ajmakeup.com.txt"; allow-transfer { 174.36.24.251; 68.71.141.22; }; allow-update { none; }; }; Does my problem have something to do with 'allow-query' under options? You will notice that 'allow-transfer' is set explicitly on each DNS zone. In case you need it here is my RNDC.CONF: key "rndc-key" { algorithm hmac-md5; secret "REMOVED FOR SECURITY"; }; options { default-key "rndc-key"; default-server 127.0.0.1; default-port 953; }; server localhost { key "rndc-key"; }; Note: I am using WebsitePanel as my hosting panel and is such why it creates the zone enteries the way it does. Although I know I can change this behaviour, I do not wish to do so nor do I believe is the root of the problem. Thanks for your help.

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• WebDav issue with Mac OS X 10.5.3 onwards

  - by svnr

  Hi, We upgraded to Mac OS X 10.5.3 and getting problem when uploading files (PUT) to a webdav server (the server is Apache running on a Windows environment). When we drag and drop on to a webdav folder using Finder we get a -36 error. When looking at the stack trace of the web server the problem is due to INVALID CRLF or some times getting the following error. Both the stack point to error when copying the stream. When googled found that it is because the Mac changed to Transfer-Encoding to 'Chunked' ClientAbortException: java.net.SocketException: Software caused connection abort: socket write error at org.apache.catalina.connector.OutputBuffer.realWriteBytes(OutputBuffer.java:366) at org.apache.tomcat.util.buf.ByteChunk.flushBuffer(ByteChunk.java:433) at org.apache.tomcat.util.buf.ByteChunk.append(ByteChunk.java:348) at org.apache.catalina.connector.OutputBuffer.writeBytes(OutputBuffer.java:392) at org.apache.catalina.connector.OutputBuffer.write(OutputBuffer.java:381) at org.apache.catalina.connector.CoyoteOutputStream.write(CoyoteOutputStream.java:88) at org.apache.commons.io.CopyUtils.copy(CopyUtils.java:200) at com.artesia.webdav.action.helper.ResponseWriterHelper.writeFileContentResponse(ResponseWriterHelper.java:206) at com.artesia.webdav.action.GetMethodAction.executeWebDavMethod(GetMethodAction.java:147) at com.artesia.webdav.action.BaseWebDavMethodAction.execute(BaseWebDavMethodAction.java:257) at com.artesia.webdav.action.BaseWebDavAction.execute(BaseWebDavAction.java:92) at org.apache.struts.action.RequestProcessor.processActionPerform(RequestProcessor.java:484) at org.apache.struts.action.RequestProcessor.process(RequestProcessor.java:274) at org.apache.struts.action.ActionServlet.process(ActionServlet.java:1482) at org.apache.struts.action.ActionServlet.doGet(ActionServlet.java:507) at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:697) at com.artesia.webdav.web.WebDavActionServlet.service(WebDavActionServlet.java:93) at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:810) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:252) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.doFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:173) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.invoke(ApplicationDispatcher.java:672) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.processRequest(ApplicationDispatcher.java:463) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.doForward(ApplicationDispatcher.java:398) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.forward(ApplicationDispatcher.java:301) at org.apache.struts.action.RequestProcessor.doForward(RequestProcessor.java:1069) at org.apache.struts.action.RequestProcessor.processForwardConfig(RequestProcessor.java:455) at org.apache.struts.action.RequestProcessor.process(RequestProcessor.java:279) at org.apache.struts.action.ActionServlet.process(ActionServlet.java:1482) at org.apache.struts.action.ActionServlet.doGet(ActionServlet.java:507) at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:697) at com.artesia.webdav.web.WebDavActionServlet.service(WebDavActionServlet.java:93) at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:810) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:252) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.doFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:173) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.invoke(ApplicationDispatcher.java:672) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.processRequest(ApplicationDispatcher.java:463) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.doForward(ApplicationDispatcher.java:398) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.forward(ApplicationDispatcher.java:301) at com.artesia.webdav.web.BaseWebDavServlet.forward(BaseWebDavServlet.java:91) at com.artesia.webdav.web.BaseWebDavServlet.service(BaseWebDavServlet.java:83) at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:810) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:252) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.doFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:173) at com.artesia.webdav.action.RequestFilter.doFilter(RequestFilter.java:46) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:202) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.doFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:173) at com.artesia.webdav.web.WebDavAuthenticationFilter.doFilter(WebDavAuthenticationFilter.java:463) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:202) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.doFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:173) at com.artesia.webdav.web.MacSessionHackFilter.doFilter(MacSessionHackFilter.java:111) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:202) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.doFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:173) at org.jboss.web.tomcat.filters.ReplyHeaderFilter.doFilter(ReplyHeaderFilter.java:96) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:202) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.doFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:173) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardWrapperValve.invoke(StandardWrapperValve.java:213) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContextValve.invoke(StandardContextValve.java:178) at org.jboss.web.tomcat.security.SecurityAssociationValve.invoke(SecurityAssociationValve.java:175) at org.jboss.web.tomcat.security.JaccContextValve.invoke(JaccContextValve.java:74) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHostValve.invoke(StandardHostValve.java:126) at org.apache.catalina.valves.ErrorReportValve.invoke(ErrorReportValve.java:105) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardEngineValve.invoke(StandardEngineValve.java:107) at org.apache.catalina.connector.CoyoteAdapter.service(CoyoteAdapter.java:148) at org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11Processor.process(Http11Processor.java:869) at org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11BaseProtocol$Http11ConnectionHandler.processConnection(Http11BaseProtocol.java:664) at org.apache.tomcat.util.net.PoolTcpEndpoint.processSocket(PoolTcpEndpoint.java:527) at org.apache.tomcat.util.net.MasterSlaveWorkerThread.run(MasterSlaveWorkerThread.java:112) at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:595) Caused by: java.net.SocketException: Software caused connection abort: socket write error at java.net.SocketOutputStream.socketWrite0(Native Method) at java.net.SocketOutputStream.socketWrite(SocketOutputStream.java:92) at java.net.SocketOutputStream.write(SocketOutputStream.java:136) at org.apache.coyote.http11.InternalOutputBuffer.realWriteBytes(InternalOutputBuffer.java:746) at org.apache.tomcat.util.buf.ByteChunk.flushBuffer(ByteChunk.java:433) at org.apache.tomcat.util.buf.ByteChunk.append(ByteChunk.java:348) at org.apache.coyote.http11.InternalOutputBuffer$OutputStreamOutputBuffer.doWrite(InternalOutputBuffer.java:769) at org.apache.coyote.http11.filters.IdentityOutputFilter.doWrite(IdentityOutputFilter.java:117) at org.apache.coyote.http11.InternalOutputBuffer.doWrite(InternalOutputBuffer.java:579) at org.apache.coyote.Response.doWrite(Response.java:559) at org.apache.catalina.connector.OutputBuffer.realWriteBytes(OutputBuffer.java:361)

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• Useful Command-line Commands on Windows

  - by Sung Meister

  The aim for this Wiki is to promote using a command to open up commonly used applications without having to go through many mouse clicks - thus saving time on monitoring and troubleshooting Windows machines. Answer entries need to specify Application name Commands Screenshot (Optional) Shortcut to commands && - Command Chaining %SYSTEMROOT%\System32\rcimlby.exe -LaunchRA - Remote Assistance (Windows XP) appwiz.cpl - Programs and Features (Formerly Known as "Add or Remove Programs") appwiz.cpl @,2 - Turn Windows Features On and Off (Add/Remove Windows Components pane) arp - Displays and modifies the IP-to-Physical address translation tables used by address resolution protocol (ARP) at - Schedule tasks either locally or remotely without using Scheduled Tasks bootsect.exe - Updates the master boot code for hard disk partitions to switch between BOOTMGR and NTLDR cacls - Change Access Control List (ACL) permissions on a directory, its subcontents, or files calc - Calculator chkdsk - Check/Fix the disk surface for physical errors or bad sectors cipher - Displays or alters the encryption of directories [files] on NTFS partitions cleanmgr.exe - Disk Cleanup clip - Redirects output of command line tools to the Windows clipboard cls - clear the command line screen cmd /k - Run command with command extensions enabled color - Sets the default console foreground and background colors in console command.com - Default Operating System Shell compmgmt.msc - Computer Management control.exe /name Microsoft.NetworkAndSharingCenter - Network and Sharing Center control keyboard - Keyboard Properties control mouse(or main.cpl) - Mouse Properties control sysdm.cpl,@0,3 - Advanced Tab of the System Properties dialog control userpasswords2 - Opens the classic User Accounts dialog desk.cpl - opens the display properties devmgmt.msc - Device Manager diskmgmt.msc - Disk Management diskpart - Disk management from the command line dsa.msc - Opens active directory users and computers dsquery - Finds any objects in the directory according to criteria dxdiag - DirectX Diagnostic Tool eventvwr - Windows Event Log (Event Viewer) explorer . - Open explorer with the current folder selected. explorer /e, . - Open explorer, with folder tree, with current folder selected. F7 - View command history find - Searches for a text string in a file or files findstr - Find a string in a file firewall.cpl - Opens the Windows Firewall settings fsmgmt.msc - Shared Folders fsutil - Perform tasks related to FAT and NTFS file systems ftp - Transfers files to and from a computer running an FTP server service getmac - Shows the mac address(es) of your network adapter(s) gpedit.msc - Group Policy Editor gpresult - Displays the Resultant Set of Policy (RSoP) information for a target user and computer httpcfg.exe - HTTP Configuration Utility iisreset - To restart IIS InetMgr.exe - Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager 7 InetMgr6.exe - Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager 6 intl.cpl - Regional and Language Options ipconfig - Internet protocol configuration lusrmgr.msc - Local Users and Groups Administrator msconfig - System Configuration notepad - Notepad? ;) mmsys.cpl - Sound/Recording/Playback properties mode - Configure system devices more - Displays one screen of output at a time mrt - Microsoft Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool mstsc.exe - Remote Desktop Connection nbstat - displays protocol statistics and current TCP/IP connections using NBT ncpa.cpl - Network Connections netsh - Display or modify the network configuration of a computer that is currently running netstat - Network Statistics net statistics - Check computer up time net stop - Stops a running service. net use - Connects a computer to or disconnects a computer from a shared resource, or displays information about computer connections odbcad32.exe - ODBC Data Source Administrator pathping - A traceroute that collects detailed packet loss stats perfmon - Opens Reliability and Performance Monitor ping - Determine whether a remote computer is accessible over the network powercfg.cpl - Power management control panel applet quser - Display information about user sessions on a terminal server qwinsta - See disconnected remote desktop sessions reg.exe - Console Registry Tool for Windows regedit - Registry Editor rasdial - Connects to a VPN or a dialup network robocopy - Backup/Restore/Copy large amounts of files reliably rsop.msc - Resultant Set of Policy (shows the combined effect of all group policies active on the current system/login) runas - Run specific tools and programs with different permissions than the user's current logon provides sc - Manage anything you want to do with services. schtasks - Enables an administrator to create, delete, query, change, run and end scheduled tasks on a local or remote system. secpol.msc - Local Security Settings services.msc - Services control panel set - Displays, sets, or removes cmd.exe environment variables. set DIRCMD - Preset dir parameter in cmd.exe start - Starts a separate window to run a specified program or command start. - opens the current directory in the Windows Explorer. shutdown.exe - Shutdown or Reboot a local/remote machine subst.exe - Associates a path with a drive letter, including local drives systeminfo -Displays a comprehensive information about the system taskkill - terminate tasks by process id (PID) or image name tasklist.exe - List Processes on local or a remote machine taskmgr.exe - Task Manager telephon.cpl - Telephone and Modem properties timedate.cpl - Date and Time title - Change the title of the CMD window you have open tracert - Trace route wmic - Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line winver.exe - Find Windows Version wscui.cpl - Windows Security Center wuauclt.exe - Windows Update AutoUpdate Client

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• disk-to-disk backup without costly backup redundancy?

  - by AaronLS

  A good backup strategy involves a combination of 1) disconnected backups/snapshots that will not be affected by bugs, viruses, and/or security breaches 2) geographically distributed backups to protect against local disasters 3) testing backups to ensure that they can be restored as needed Generally I take an onsite backup daily, and an offsite backup weekly, and do test restores periodically. In the rare circumstance that I need to restore files, I do some from the local backup. Should a catastrophic event destroy the servers and local backups, then the offsite weekly tape backup would be used to restore the files. I don't need multiple offsite backups with redundancy. I ALREADY HAVE REDUNDANCY THROUGH THE USE OF BOTH LOCAL AND REMOTE BACKUPS. I have recovery blocks and par files with the backups, so I already have protection against a small percentage of corrupt bits. I perform test restores to ensure the backups function properly. Should the remote backups experience a dataloss, I can replace them with one of the local backups. There are historical offsite backups as well, so if a dataloss was not noticed for a few weeks(such as a bug/security breach/virus), the data could be restored from an older backup. By doing this, the only scenario that poses a risk to complete data loss would be one where both the local, remote, and servers all experienced a data loss in the same time period. I'm willing to risk that happening since the odds of that trifecta negligibly small, and the data isn't THAT valuable to me. So I hope I have emphasized that I don't need redundancy in my offsite backups because I have covered all the bases. I know this exact technique is employed by numerous businesses. Of course there are some that take multiple offsite backups, because the data is so incredibly valuable that they don't even want to risk that trifecta disaster, but in the majority of cases the trifecta disaster is an accepted risk. I HAD TO COVER ALL THIS BECAUSE SOME PEOPLE DON'T READ!!! I think I have justified my backup strategy and the majority of businesses who use offsite tape backups do not have any additional redundancy beyond what is mentioned above(recovery blocks, par files, historical snapshots). Now I would like to eliminate the use of tapes for offsite backups, and instead use a backup service. Most however are extremely costly for $/gb/month storage. I don't mind paying for transfer bandwidth, but the cost of storage is way to high. All of them advertise that they maintain backups of the data, and I imagine they use RAID as well. Obviously if you were using them to host servers this would all be necessary, but for my scenario, I am simply replacing my offsite backups with such a service. So there is no need for RAID, and absolutely no value in another layer of backups of backups. My one and only question: "Are there online data-storage/backup services that do not use redundancy or offer backups(backups of my backups) as part of their packages, and thus are more reasonably priced?" NOT my question: "Is this a flawed strategy?" I don't care if you think this is a good strategy or not. I know it pretty standard. Very few people make an extra copy of their offsite backups. They already have local backups that they can use to replace the remote backups if something catastrophic happens at the remote site. Please limit your responses to the question posed. Sorry if I seem a little abrasive, but I had some trolls in my last post who didn't read my requirements nor my question, and were trying to go off answering a totally different question. I made it pretty clear, but didn't try to justify my strategy, because I didn't ask about whether my strategy was justifyable. So I apologize if this was lengthy, as it really didn't need to be, but since there are so many trolls here who try to sidetrack questions by responding without addressing the question at hand.

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• Tomcat running, catalina throwing exception

  - by Mark Steudel

  So I have to preface that I'm not familiar with tomcat/catalina, but trying to troubleshoot this anyway. Anyway I see in /var/log/tomcat5/catalina.out I'm seeing these errors: Using CATALINA_BASE: /usr/share/tomcat5 Using CATALINA_HOME: /usr/share/tomcat5 Using CATALINA_TMPDIR: /usr/share/tomcat5/temp Using JRE_HOME: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.apache.catalina.startup.Catalina at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:202) at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method) at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:190) at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:307) at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:248) at org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap.init(Bootstrap.java:223) at org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap.main(Bootstrap.java:410) I'm not really sure what this means. This installation was working a week ago ... did something get corrupted? How would I figure if it did ... what other information would be valuable here? Tomcat seems to be running and starting up fine ... UPDATE: this might be related: Jun 19, 2011 11:00:25 PM org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11BaseProtocol pause INFO: Pausing Coyote HTTP/1.1 on http-9080 Jun 19, 2011 11:00:26 PM org.apache.catalina.core.StandardService stop INFO: Stopping service Catalina log4j:ERROR LogMananger.repositorySelector was null likely due to error in class reloading, using NOPLoggerRepository. Some more stuff in the logs: 2011-06-12 23:04:45,223 INFO [main] [com.atlassian.confluence.lifecycle] contextInitialized Starting Confluence 3.1.1 (build #1724) 2011-06-12 23:04:45,663 INFO [main] [beans.factory.xml.XmlBeanDefinitionReader] loadBeanDefinitions Loading XML bean definitions from c lass path resource [bootstrapContext.xml] 2011-06-12 23:04:46,134 INFO [main] [beans.factory.xml.XmlBeanDefinitionReader] loadBeanDefinitions Loading XML bean definitions from c lass path resource [setupContext.xml] 2011-06-12 23:04:46,236 INFO [main] [beans.factory.xml.XmlBeanDefinitionReader] loadBeanDefinitions Loading XML bean definitions from c lass path resource [bootstrapCacheContext.xml] 2011-06-12 23:04:47,571 INFO [main] [atlassian.plugin.manager.DefaultPluginManager] init Initialising the plugin system 2011-06-12 23:04:48,338 INFO [main] [atlassian.plugin.manager.DefaultPluginManager] init Plugin system started in 0:00:00.748 Jun 12, 2011 11:05:05 PM org.apache.catalina.startup.Catalina stopServer SEVERE: Catalina.stop: java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.socketConnect(Native Method) at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.doConnect(PlainSocketImpl.java:333) at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.connectToAddress(PlainSocketImpl.java:195) at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.connect(PlainSocketImpl.java:182) at java.net.SocksSocketImpl.connect(SocksSocketImpl.java:366) at java.net.Socket.connect(Socket.java:525) at java.net.Socket.connect(Socket.java:475) at java.net.Socket.<init>(Socket.java:372) at java.net.Socket.<init>(Socket.java:186) at org.apache.catalina.startup.Catalina.stopServer(Catalina.java:395) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39) at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:597) at org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap.stopServer(Bootstrap.java:344) at org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap.main(Bootstrap.java:435) Jun 12, 2011 11:05:44 PM org.apache.catalina.core.AprLifecycleListener lifecycleEvent INFO: The Apache Tomcat Native library which allows optimal performance in production environments was not found on the java.library.pa th: /usr/java/jdk1.6.0_18/jre/lib/i386/client:/usr/java/jdk1.6.0_18/jre/lib/i386:/usr/java/jdk1.6.0_18/jre/../lib/i386:/usr/java/packag es/lib/i386:/lib:/usr/lib CLEAN LOG OUTPUT FROM STARTING TOMCAT: Using CATALINA_BASE: /usr/share/tomcat5 Using CATALINA_HOME: /usr/share/tomcat5 Using CATALINA_TMPDIR: /usr/share/tomcat5/temp Using JRE_HOME: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.apache.catalina.startup.Catalina at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:202) at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method) at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:190) at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:307) at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:248) at org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap.init(Bootstrap.java:223) at org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap.main(Bootstrap.java:410) So I did a /etc/rc.d/init.d/tomcat status and I get this: [wqadm1n@ip-72-167-51-178 proc]$ sudo /etc/rc.d/init.d/tomcat5 status /etc/rc.d/init.d/tomcat5 is stopped [wqadm1n@ip-72-167-51-178 proc]$ sudo /etc/rc.d/init.d/tomcat5 start Starting tomcat5: [ OK ] [wqadm1n@ip-72-167-51-178 proc]$ sudo /etc/rc.d/init.d/tomcat5 status lock file found but no process running for pid 30774

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• Setting up RADIUS + LDAP for WPA2 on Ubuntu

  - by Morten Siebuhr

  I'm setting up a wireless network for ~150 users. In short, I'm looking for a guide to set RADIUS server to authenticate WPA2 against a LDAP. On Ubuntu. I got a working LDAP, but as it is not in production use, it can very easily be adapted to whatever changes this project may require. I've been looking at FreeRADIUS, but any RADIUS server will do. We got a separate physical network just for WiFi, so not too many worries about security on that front. Our AP's are HP's low end enterprise stuff - they seem to support whatever you can think of. All Ubuntu Server, baby! And the bad news: I now somebody less knowledgeable than me will eventually take over administration, so the setup has to be as "trivial" as possible. So far, our setup is based only on software from the Ubuntu repositories, with exception of our LDAP administration web application and a few small special scripts. So no "fetch package X, untar, ./configure"-things if avoidable. UPDATE 2009-08-18: While I found several useful resources, there is one serious obstacle: Ignoring EAP-Type/tls because we do not have OpenSSL support. Ignoring EAP-Type/ttls because we do not have OpenSSL support. Ignoring EAP-Type/peap because we do not have OpenSSL support. Basically the Ubuntu version of FreeRADIUS does not support SSL (bug 183840), which makes all the secure EAP-types useless. Bummer. But some useful documentation for anybody interested: http://vuksan.com/linux/dot1x/802-1x-LDAP.html http://tldp.org/HOWTO/html_single/8021X-HOWTO/#confradius UPDATE 2009-08-19: I ended up compiling my own FreeRADIUS package yesterday evening - there's a really good recipe at http://www.linuxinsight.com/building-debian-freeradius-package-with-eap-tls-ttls-peap-support.html (See the comments to the post for updated instructions). I got a certificate from http://CACert.org (you should probably get a "real" cert if possible) Then I followed the instructions at http://vuksan.com/linux/dot1x/802-1x-LDAP.html. This links to http://tldp.org/HOWTO/html_single/8021X-HOWTO/, which is a very worthwhile read if you want to know how WiFi security works. UPDATE 2009-08-27: After following the above guide, I've managed to get FreeRADIUS to talk to LDAP: I've created a test user in LDAP, with the password mr2Yx36M - this gives an LDAP entry roughly of: uid: testuser sambaLMPassword: CF3D6F8A92967E0FE72C57EF50F76A05 sambaNTPassword: DA44187ECA97B7C14A22F29F52BEBD90 userPassword: {SSHA}Z0SwaKO5tuGxgxtceRDjiDGFy6bRL6ja When using radtest, I can connect fine: > radtest testuser "mr2Yx36N" sbhr.dk 0 radius-private-password Sending Access-Request of id 215 to 130.225.235.6 port 1812 User-Name = "msiebuhr" User-Password = "mr2Yx36N" NAS-IP-Address = 127.0.1.1 NAS-Port = 0 rad_recv: Access-Accept packet from host 130.225.235.6 port 1812, id=215, length=20 > But when I try through the AP, it doesn't fly - while it does confirm that it figures out the NT and LM passwords: ... rlm_ldap: sambaNTPassword -> NT-Password == 0x4441343431383745434139374237433134413232463239463532424542443930 rlm_ldap: sambaLMPassword -> LM-Password == 0x4346334436463841393239363745304645373243353745463530463736413035 [ldap] looking for reply items in directory... WARNING: No "known good" password was found in LDAP. Are you sure that the user is configured correctly? [ldap] user testuser authorized to use remote access rlm_ldap: ldap_release_conn: Release Id: 0 ++[ldap] returns ok ++[expiration] returns noop ++[logintime] returns noop [pap] Normalizing NT-Password from hex encoding [pap] Normalizing LM-Password from hex encoding ... It is clear that the NT and LM passwords differ from the above, yet the message [ldap] user testuser authorized to use remote access - and the user is later rejected...

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