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• Bios Memory settings and Virtualization + Ubuntu (Unofficial Answers Welcome) [closed]

  - by TardisGuy

  Attempting to optimize my (Main Windowless) Ubuntu system for my uses I will detail questions below, I understand this might be the wrong place to ask these questions. If so, my apologies and I thank you so much for your patience. Thanks to all the volenteers that have helped me learn ubuntu over the years (Since 5.10) This is a "short" list of questions I have been trying to figure out for some time. If you feel you can answer one but not another, that's already more than I could ask for. I have wrote this up in a format for easy navigation to important points Hopefully to less annoy your eyes. You're welcome :) or i'm sorry i annoy you. :( If you would be so kind, Please format answers as follows: question 1: _ _ _ _ _ or question 1-a: _ _ _ _ _ If you want to simply link me to relevant information, rather than type up something really detailed; that would be more than awesome! Memory Specific Questions Goal: Maximizing memory bandwith to better perform in Virtualization, and Large file compression. (Possible conflict?) Ganged vs Unganged "which is better?"** is relative, i know. But what about ganged vs unganged - With or without Bank/channel interleaving? a: Speculation - If i understand correctly, "channel interleaving has something to do with using both channels to read or write in a kind of "striping" pattern, as opposed to a standard half duplex operation.(probably wrong) but wouldn't ganged channels make this irrelevant? Memory Interleaving(bank). Does it have a down side? Does it require a ratio of clocks? (If I run 4x4gig ddr3) a. If im reading correctly(trying to learn), this is designed to spread operations between latency cycles to work around the higher latency of "normal" operation. b. However it seems to me that it has to be: divisible by fractions of a master clock? So if i run memory at 1333mhz, then the mean between 2 (physical) banks would operate every (roughly) 600Mhz? Warning! Possibly utter nonsense: (1333/2 interleaving to act like 1 memory module per 2 sticks of a total of 4 sticks, meaning 2x channels@4) c. which makes me wonder if there would be left over clock cycles the system would have to... "truncate/balance" or something? But I'm certain theres a feature somewhere i don't understand. Virtualization Questions AMD-V - Option of IOMMU Turned it on, why do i have extra option of "64MB"? If IOMMU is on, but "64MB" is "disabled", Is it on? (have scoured google, I still dont know) a. I think i understand that its supposed to (kind of) "set aside" a part of ram to act as a faster interactive zone for "stuff" (usb, Graphics, and... what?) b. I am using Nvidia graphics on AMD (Used kernel option "iommu=pt iommu=1, pt "passthrough"? No idea what they do, found it on google to solve boot up issue) c. Will this option help me use low latency sound hardware, like my midi keyboard? Can you recommend any additional tweaks? a. sysctl settings? b. swap settings? Grats, youve reached the end. Thanks for Reading.

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• Move over DFS and Robocopy, here is SyncToy!

  - by andywe

  Ever since Windows 2000, I have always had the need to replicate data to multiple endpoints with the same content. Until DFS was introduced, the method of thinking was to either manually copy the data location by location, or to batch script it with xcopy and schedule a task. Even though this worked (and still does today), it was cumbersome, and intensive on the network, especially when dealing with larger amounts of data. Then along came robocopy, as an internal tool written by an enterprising programmer at Microsoft. We used it quite a bit, especially when we could not use DFS in the early days. It was received so well, it made it into the public realm. At least now we could have the ability to determine what files had changed and only replicate those. Well, over time there has been evolution of this ideal. DFS is obviously the Windows enterprise class service to do this, along with BrancheCache..however you don’t always need or want the power of DFS, especially when it comes to small datacenter installations, or remote offices. I have specific data sets that are on closed or restricted networks, that either have a security need for this, or are in remote countries where bandwidth is a premium. FOr this, I use the latest evolution for one off replication names Synctoy. Synctoy is from Microsoft, seemingly released in 2009, that wraps a nice GUI around setting up a paired set of folders (remember the mobile briefcase from Windows 98?), and allowing you the choice of synchronization methods. 1 way, or 2 way. Simply create a paired set of folders on the source and destination, choose your options for content, exclude any file types you don’t want to replicate, and click run. Scheduling is even easier. MS has included a wrapper for doing just this so all you enter in your task schedule in the SynToyCMD.exe, a –R as an argument, and the time schedule. No more complicated command lines or scripts.   I find this especially useful when I use MS backup to back up a system volume, but only want subsets of backup information of a data share and ONLY when that dataset has changed. Not relying on full backups and incremental. An example of this is my application installation master share. I back this up with SyncToy because I do not need multiple backup copies..one copy elsewhere suffices to back it up. At home, very useful for your pictures, videos, music, ect..the backup is online and ready to access, not waiting for you to restore a backup file, and no need to institute a domain simply to have DFS.'   Do note there is a risk..if you accidently delete a file and do not catch this before the next sync, then depending on your SyncToy settings, you can indeed lose that file as the destination updates..so due diligence applies. I make it a rule to sync manly one way…I use my master share for making changes, and allow the schedule to follow suit. Any real important file I lock down as read only through file permissions so it cannot be deleted unless I intervene.   Check out the tool and have some fun! http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?DisplayLang=en&id=15155

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• Approach for packing 2D shapes while minimizing total enclosing area

  - by Dennis

  Not sure on my tags for this question, but in short .... I need to solve a problem of packing industrial parts into crates while minimizing total containing area. These parts are motors, or pumps, or custom-made components, and they have quite unusual shapes. For some, it may be possible to assume that a part === rectangular cuboid, but some are not so simple, i.e. they assume a shape more of that of a hammer or letter T. With those, (assuming 2D shape), by alternating direction of top & bottom, one can pack more objects into the same space, than if all tops were in the same direction. Crude example below with letter "T"-shaped parts: ***** xxxxx ***** x ***** *** ooo * x vs * x vs * x vs * x o * x * xxxxx * x * x o xxxxx xxx Right now we are solving the problem by something like this: using CAD software, make actual models of how things fit in crate boxes make estimates of actual crate dimensions & write them into Excel file (1) is crazy amount of work and as the result we have just a limited amount of possible entries in (2), the Excel file. The good things is that programming this is relatively easy. Given a combination of products to go into crates, we do a lookup, and if entry exists in the Excel (or Database), we bring it out. If it doesn't, we say "sorry, no data!". I don't necessarily want to go full force on making up some crazy algorithm that given geometrical part description can align, rotate, and figure out best part packing into a crate, given its shape, but maybe I do.. Question Well, here is my question: assuming that I can represent my parts as 2D (to be determined how), and that some parts look like letter T, and some parts look like rectangles, which algorithm can I use to give me a good estimate on the dimensions of the encompassing area, while ensuring that the parts are packed in a minimal possible area, to minimize crating/shipping costs? Are there approximation algorithms? Seeing how this can get complex, is there an existing library I could use? My thought / Approach My naive approach would be to define a way to describe position of parts, and place the first part, compute total enclosing area & dimensions. Then place 2nd part in 0 degree orientation, repeat, place it at 180 degree orientation, repeat (for my case I don't think 90 degree rotations will be meaningful due to long lengths of parts). Proceed using brute force "tacking on" other parts to the enclosing area until all parts are processed. I may have to shift some parts a tad (see 3rd pictorial example above with letters T). This adds a layer of 2D complexity rather than 1D. I am not sure how to approach this. One idea I have is genetic algorithms, but I think those will take up too much processing power and time. I will need to look out for shape collisions, as well as adding extra padding space, since we are talking about real parts with irregularities rather than perfect imaginary blocks. I'm afraid this can get geometrically messy fairly fast, and I'd rather keep things simple, if I can. But what if the best (practical) solution is to pack things into different crate boxes rather than just one? This can get a bit more tricky. There is human element involved as well, i.e. like parts can go into same box and are thus a constraint to be considered. Some parts that are not the same are sometimes grouped together for shipping and can be considered as a common grouped item. Sometimes customers want things shipped their way, which adds human element to constraints. so there will have to be some customization.

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• The long road to bug-free software

  - by Tony Davis

  The past decade has seen a burgeoning interest in functional programming languages such as Haskell or, in the Microsoft world, F#. Though still on the periphery of mainstream programming, functional programming concepts are gradually seeping into the imperative C# language (for example, Lambda expressions have their root in functional programming). One of the more interesting concepts from functional programming languages is the use of formal methods, the lofty ideal behind which is bug-free software. The idea is that we write a specification that describes exactly how our function (say) should behave. We then prove that our function conforms to it, and in doing so have proved beyond any doubt that it is free from bugs. All programmers already use one form of specification, specifically their programming language's type system. If a value has a specific type then, in a type-safe language, the compiler guarantees that value cannot be an instance of a different type. Many extensions to existing type systems, such as generics in Java and .NET, extend the range of programs that can be type-checked. Unfortunately, type systems can only prevent some bugs. To take a classic problem of retrieving an index value from an array, since the type system doesn't specify the length of the array, the compiler has no way of knowing that a request for the "value of index 4" from an array of only two elements is "unsafe". We restore safety via exception handling, but the ideal type system will prevent us from doing anything that is unsafe in the first place and this is where we start to borrow ideas from a language such as Haskell, with its concept of "dependent types". If the type of an array includes its length, we can ensure that any index accesses into the array are valid. The problem is that we now need to carry around the length of arrays and the values of indices throughout our code so that it can be type-checked. In general, writing the specification to prove a positive property, even for a problem very amenable to specification, such as a simple sorting algorithm, turns out to be very hard and the specification will be different for every program. Extend this to writing a specification for, say, Microsoft Word and we can see that the specification would end up being no simpler, and therefore no less buggy, than the implementation. Fortunately, it is easier to write a specification that proves that a program doesn't have certain, specific and undesirable properties, such as infinite loops or accesses to the wrong bit of memory. If we can write the specifications to prove that a program is immune to such problems, we could reuse them in many places. The problem is the lack of specification "provers" that can do this without a lot of manual intervention (i.e. hints from the programmer). All this might feel a very long way off, but computing power and our understanding of the theory of "provers" advances quickly, and Microsoft is doing some of it already. Via their Terminator research project they have started to prove that their device drivers will always terminate, and in so doing have suddenly eliminated a vast range of possible bugs. This is a huge step forward from saying, "we've tested it lots and it seems fine". What do you think? What might be good targets for specification and verification? SQL could be one: the cost of a bug in SQL Server is quite high given how many important systems rely on it, so there's a good incentive to eliminate bugs, even at high initial cost. [Many thanks to Mike Williamson for guidance and useful conversations during the writing of this piece] Cheers, Tony.

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• SharePoint Content and Site Editing Tips

  - by Bil Simser

  A few content management and site editing tips for power users on this bacon flavoured unicorn morning. The theme here is keep it clean!Write "friendly" email addressesRemember it's human beings reading your content. So seeing something like "If you have questions please send an email to [email protected]" breaks up the readiblity. Instead just do the simple steps of writing the content in plain English and going back, highlighting the name and insert a link (note: you might have to prefix the link with mailto:[email protected]). It makes for a friendlier looking page and hides the ugliness that are sometimes in email addresses.Use friendly column and list namesThis is a big pet peeve of mine. When you first create a column or list with spaces the internal name is changed. The display name might be "My Amazing List of Animals with Large Testicles" but the internal (and link) name becomes "My_x00x20_Amazing_x00x20_List_x00x20_of_x00x20_Animals_x00x20_with_x00x20_Large_x00x20_Testicles". What's worse is if you create a publishing page named "This Website is Fueled By a Dolphin's Spleen". Not only is it incorrect grammar, but the apostrophe wreaks havoc on both the internal name for the list (with lots of crazy hex codes) as well as the hyperlink (where everything is uuencoded). Instead create the list with a distinct and compact name then go back and change it to whatever you want. The end result is a better formed name that you can both script and access in code easier.Keep your Views CleanWhen you add a column to a list or create a new list the default is to add it to the default view. Do everyone a favour and don't check this box! The default view of a list should be something similar to the Title field and nothing else. Keep it clean. If you want to set a defalt view that's different, go back and create one with all the fields and filtering and sorting columns you want and set it as default. It's a good idea to keep the original AllItems.aspx (note the lack of space in the filename!) easy and unfiltered. It's also a good idea to keep your column count down in views. Don't let every column be added by default and don't add every column just because you can. Create separate views for distinct responsibilities and try to keep the number of columns down to a single screen to prevent horizontal scrolling.Simple NavigationThe Quick Launch is a great tool for navigating around your site but don't use the default of adding all lists to it. Uncheck that box and keep navigation simple. Create custom groupings that make sense so if you don't have a site with "Documents and Lists" but "Reports and Notices" makes more sense then do it. Also hide internal lists from the Quick Launch. For example, if most users don't need to see all the lookup tables you might have on a site don't show them. You can use audience filtering on the Quick Launch if you want to hide admin items from non-admin users so consider that as an option.Enjoy!

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• PHP-FPM stops responding and dies [migrated]

  - by user12361

  I'm running Drupal 6 with Nginx 1.5.1 and PHP-FPM (PHP 5.3.26) on a 1GB single core VPS with 3GB of swap space on SSD storage. I just switched from shared hosting to this unmanaged VPS because my site was getting too heavy, so I'm still learning the ropes. I have moderately high traffic, I don't really monitor it closely but Google Adsense usually record close to 30K page views/day. I usually have 50 to 80 authenticated users logged in and a few hundred more anonymous users hitting the Boost static HTML cache at any given moment. The problem I'm having is that PHP-FPM frequently stops responding, resulting in Nginx 502 or 504 errors. I swear I have read every page on the internet about this issue, which seems fairly common, and I've tried endless combinations of configurations, and I can't find a good solution. After restarting Nginx and PHP-FPM, the site runs really fast for a while, and then without warning it simply stops responding. I get a white screen while the browser waits on the server, and after about 30 seconds to a minute it throws an Nginx 502 or 504 error. Sometimes it runs well for 2 minutes, sometimes 5 minutes, sometimes 5 hours, but it always ends up hanging. When I find the server in this state, there is still plenty of free memory (500MB or more) and no major CPU usage, the control and worker PHP-FPM processes are still present, and the server is still pingable and usable via SSH. A reload of PHP-FPM via the init script revives it again. The hangups don't seem to correspond to the amount of traffic, because I observed this behavior consistently when I was testing this configuration on a development VPS with no traffic at all. I've been constantly tweaking the settings, but I can't definitively eliminate the problem. I set Nginx workers to just 1. In the PHP-FPM config I have tried all three of the process managers. "Dynamic" is definitely the least reliable, consistently hanging up after only a few minutes. "Static" also has been unreliable and unpredictable. The least buggy has been "ondemand", but even that is failing me, sometimes after as much as 12 to 24 hours. But I can't leave the server unattended because PHP-FPM dies and never comes back on its own. I tried adjusting the pm.max_children value from as low as 3 to as high as 50, doesn't make a lot of difference, but I currently have it at 10. Same thing for the spare servers values. I also have set pm.max_requests anywhere from 30 to unlimited, and it doesn't seem to make a difference. According to the logs, the PHP-FPM processes are not exiting with SIGSEGV or SIGBUS, but rather with SIGTERM. I get a lot of lines like: WARNING: [pool www] child 3739, script '/var/www/drupal6/index.php' (request: "GET /index.php") execution timed out (38.739494 sec), terminating and: WARNING: [pool www] child 3738 exited on signal 15 (SIGTERM) after 50.004380 seconds from start I actually found several articles that recommend doing a graceful reload of PHP-FPM via cron every few minutes or hours to circumvent this issue. So that's what I did, "/etc/init.d/php-fpm reload" every 5 minutes. So far, it's keeping the lights on. But it feels like a dreadful hack. Is PHP-FPM really that unreliable? Is there anything else I can do? Thanks a lot!

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• The best computer ever

  - by Jeff

  (This is a repost from my personal blog… wow… I need to write more technical stuff!) About three years and three months ago, I bought a 17" MacBook Pro, and it turned out to be the best computer I've ever owned. You might think that every computer with better specs is automatically better than the last, but that hasn't been my experience. My first one was a Sony, back in the Pentium III days, and it cost an astonishing $2,500. That was even more ridiculous in 1999 dollars. It had a dial-up modem, and a CD-ROM, built-in! It may have even played DVD's. A few years later I bought an HP, and it ended up being a pile of shit. The power connector inside came loose from the board, and on occasion would even short. In 2005, I bought a Dell, and it wasn't bad. It had a really high resolution screen (complete with dead pixels, a problem in those days), and it was the first laptop I felt I could do real work on. When 2006 rolled around, Apple started making computers with Intel CPU's, and I bought the very first one the week it came out. I used Boot Camp to run Windows. I still have it in its box somewhere, and I used it for three years. The current 17" was new in 2009. The goodness was largely rooted in having a big screen with lots of dots. This computer has been the source of hundreds of blog posts, tens of thousands of lines of code, video and photo editing, and of course, a whole lot of Web surfing. It connected to corpnet at Microsoft, WiFi in Hawaii and has presented many a deck. It has traveled with me tens of thousands of miles. Last year, I put a solid state drive in it, and it was like getting a new computer. I can boot up a Windows 7 VM in about 19 seconds. Having 8 gigs of RAM has always been fantastic. Everything about it has been fast and fun. When new, the battery (when not using VM's) could get as much as 10 hours. I can still do 7 without much trouble. After 460 charge cycles, the battery health is still between 85 and 90%. The only real negative has been the size and weight. It's only an inch thick, but naturally it's pretty big with a 17" screen. You don't get battery life like that without a huge battery, either, so it's heavy. It was never a deal breaker, but sometimes a long haul across a large airport, you know you're carrying it. Today, Apple announced a new, thinner and lighter 15" laptop, with twice the RAM and CPU cores, and four times the screen resolution. It basically handles my size and weight issues while retaining the resolution, and it still costs less than my 17" did. So I ordered one. Three years is an excellent run, but I kind of budgeted for a new workhorse this year anyway. So if you're interested in a 17" MacBook Pro with a Core 2 Duo 2.66 GHz CPU, 8 gigs of RAM and a 320 gig hard drive (sorry, I'm keeping the SSD), I have one to sell. They've apparently discontinued the 17", which is going to piss off the video community. It's in excellent condition, with a few minor scratches, but I take care of my stuff.

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• How much am I worth hourly as a software/web developer? [closed]

  - by luckysmack

  I may be starting a new job very soon as a developer for both web and desktop software. The primary languages I will be using is ASP.NET with C# with some php for existing projects(I've already had one interview which went very well). The job deals primarily in advertising. But this is my first real job in the market, I have no degrees, but have some college time(~1yr). So I am primarily self taught. They are fully aware of my skill set and lack of degrees or certificates. I applied as an entry level developer. It will be a permanent and full time/hourly position, and not a per contract job. So since it my cherry job, im not really sure what to ask for. even though im self taught im pretty confident in my skills and know what im doing fairly well. I pick up on new concepts very well and find new things fairly easy to learn. Here is a very brief summary of my skills: PHP: ~2years C#/.NET: 2 months Python: Basics only. ~1 month OOP Familiarity: Great (1 year) MVC Familiarity: Great (1 year) PHP Frameworks used: CakePHP(6 months), Yii(3 months), Lithium(3 months) CMS Familiar with: Drupal(1.5 years), Wordpress(only basics) I also have ~2yrs experience in maintaining my own VPS server and the hassles all that entails (linux/debian) Pretty much all the above will be used at this job. Although I will be using C# a vast majority of the time. I only recently started learning it but am moving along fairly rapidly and its all going smooth as butter. So what have I built? I have one proprietary site built in drupal which is used an an order log for products, inventory, and their shipments. It is also able to process payments through paypal merchant services. I have worked on a handful of other small apps used here and there I'm not able to show but which worked fairly well (all in php using frameworks though). The business does fairly well and is far from a a typical corporate type environment. It is much closer to a small development studio. And it is based out of northern California. I don't know how/what more info I can give on them. I also want this to be able to be referenced by other people possibly so I am looking for general tips and ideas to get an answer as well. I had trouble finding a reasonable range on other websites which seemed to be either way to low, or showed what a veteran developer makes. I know this is a fairly subjective question, but it is difficult to get a reasonable answer or guesstimate anywhere else. Even if only a little bit help, its much appreciated. So as for the direct question, based on all this info (did I miss anything?), how much should I ask for hourly? How much am I worth as a software developer?

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• HERMES Medical Solutions Helps Save Lives with MySQL

  - by Bertrand Matthelié

  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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Cambria","serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} HERMES Medical Solutions was established in 1976 in Stockholm, Sweden, and is a leading innovator in medical imaging hardware/software products for health care facilities worldwide. HERMES delivers a plethora of different medical imaging solutions to optimize hospital workflow. 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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Cambria","serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} HERMES advanced algorithms make it possible to detect the smallest changes under therapies important and necessary to optimize different therapeutic methods and doses. Challenges Fighting illness & disease requires state-of-the-art imaging modalities and software in order to diagnose accurately, stage disease appropriately and select the best treatment available. Selecting and implementing a new database platform that would deliver the needed performance, reliability, security and flexibility required by the high-end medical solutions offered by HERMES. Solution Decision to migrate from in-house database to an embedded SQL database powering the HERMES products, delivered either as software, integrated hardware and software solutions, or via the cloud in a software-as-a-service configuration. Evaluation of several databases and selection of MySQL based on its high performance, ease of use and integration, and low Total Cost of Ownership. On average, between 4 and 12 Terabytes of data are stored in MySQL databases underpinning the HERMES solutions. The data generated by each medical study is indeed stored during 10 years or more after the treatment was performed. MySQL-based HERMES systems also allow doctors worldwide to conduct new drug research projects leveraging the large amount of medical data collected. Hospitals and other HERMES customers worldwide highly value the “zero administration” capabilities and reliability of MySQL, enabling them to perform medical analysis without any downtime. Relying on MySQL as their embedded database, the HERMES team has been able to increase their focus on further developing their clinical applications. HERMES Medical Solutions could leverage the Oracle Financing payment plan to spread its investment over time and make the MySQL choice even more valuable. “MySQL has proven to be an excellent database choice for us. We offer high-end medical solutions, and MySQL delivers the reliability, security and performance such solutions require.” Jan Bertling, CEO.

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• Oracle Executive Strategy Brief: Enterprise-Grade Cloud Applications

  - by B Shashikumar

  Cloud Computing has clearly evolved into one of the dominant secular trends in the industry. Organizations are looking to the cloud to change how they buy and consume IT. And its no longer about just lower up-front costs. The cloud promises to deliver greater agility and free up resources to focus on innovation versus running and maintaining systems. But are organizations actually realizing these benefits? The full promise of cloud is not being realized by customers who entrust their business to multiple niche cloud providers. While almost 9 out of 10 companies  expect more IT agility with cloud, only 47% are actually getting it (Source: 2011 State of Cloud Survey by Symantec). These niche cloud customers have also seen the promises of lower costs, efficiency gains, improved security, and compliance go unfulfilled. Having one cloud provider for customer relationship management (CRM) and another for human capital management (HCM), and then trying to glue these proprietary systems together while integrating to a back-office financial system can add to complexity and long-term costs. Completing a business process or generating an integrated report is cumbersome, and leverages incomplete data. Why can’t niche cloud providers deliver on the full promise of cloud? It’s simple: you still need to complete business processes. You still need reporting that enables you to take action using data from multiple systems. You still have to comply with SOX and other industry regulations. These requirements don’t go away just because you deploy in the cloud. Delivering lower up-front costs by enabling customers to buy software as a service (SaaS) is the easy part. To get real value that lasts longer than your quarterly report, it’s important to realize the benefits of cloud without compromising on functionality and while having the right level of control and flexibility. This is the true promise of cloud. Oracle’s cloud strategy centers around delivering the benefits of cloud—without compromise. We uniquely empower our customers with complete solutions and choice. From the richest functionality to integrated reporting and great user experience. It’s all available in the cloud. And it works not just with other Oracle cloud applications, but with your existing Oracle and third-party systems as well. This helps protect your current investments and extend their value as you journey to the cloud. We’ve made the necessary investments not only in our applications but also in the underlying technology that makes it all run—from the platform down to the hardware and operating system. We make it all. And we’ve engineered it to work together and be highly optimized for our customers, in the cloud. With Oracle enterprise-grade cloud applications, you get the benefits of cloud plus more power, more choice, and more confidence. Read more about how you can realize the true advantage of Cloud with Oracle Enterprise-grade Cloud applications in the Oracle Executive Strategy Brief here.  You can also attend an Oracle Cloud Conference event at a city near you. Register here. 

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• What Counts For a DBA – Depth

  - by Louis Davidson

  SQL Server offers very simple interfaces to many of its features. Most people could open up SSMS, connect to a server, write a simple query and see the results. Even several of the core DBA tasks are deceptively straightforward. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to perform a basic database backup or run a trace (even using the newfangled Extended Events!). However, appearances can be deceptive, and often times it is really important that a DBA understands not just the basics of how to perform a task, but why we do a task, and how that task works. As an analogy, consider a child walking into a darkened room. Most would know that they need to turn on the light, and how to do it, so they flick the switch. But what happens if light fails to shine forth. Most would immediately tell you that you need to consider changing the light bulb. So you hop in the car and take them to the local home store and instruct them to buy a replacement. Confronted with a 40 foot display of light bulbs, how will they decide which of the hundreds of types of bulbs, of different types, fittings, shapes, colors, power and efficiency ratings, is the right choice? Obviously the main lesson the child is going to learn this day is how to use their cell phone as a flashlight so they don’t have to ask for help the next time. Likewise, when the metaphorical toddlers who use your database server have issues, they will instinctively know something is wrong, and may even have some idea what caused it, but will have no depth of knowledge to figure out the right solution. That is where the DBA comes in and attempts to save the day. However, when one looks beneath the shiny UI, SQL Server has its own “40 foot display of light bulbs”, in the form of the tremendous number of tools and the often-bewildering amount of information they can present to the DBA, to help us find issues. Unfortunately, resorting to guesswork, to trying different “bulbs” over and over, hoping to stumble on the answer. This is where the right depth of knowledge goes a long way. If we need to write a SELECT statement, then knowing the syntax and where to find the data is not enough. Knowledge of indexes and query plans is essential. Without it, we might hit on a query that “works”, but we are basically still a user, not a programmer, because we have no real control over our platform. Is that level of knowledge deep enough? Probably not, since knowledge of the underlying metadata and structures would be very useful in helping us make sense of any query plan. Understanding the structure of an index makes the “key lookup” operator not sound like what you do when someone tapes your car key to the ceiling. So is even this level of understanding deep enough? Do we need to understand the memory architecture used to process the query? It might be a comforting level of knowledge, and will doubtless come in handy at some point, but is not strictly necessary in most cases. Beyond that lies (more or less) full knowledge of SQL language and the intricacies of every step the SQL Server engine takes to process our query. My personal theory is that, as a professional, our knowledge of a given task should extend, at a minimum, one level deeper than is strictly necessary to perform the task. Anything deeper can be left to the ridiculously smart, or obsessive, or both. As an example. tasked with storing an integer value between 0 and 99999999, it’s essential that I know that choosing an Integer over Decimal(8,0) will likely offer performance benefits. It is then useful that I also understand the value of adding a CHECK constraint, to make sure the values are valid to the desired range; and comforting that I know a little about the underlying processors, registers and computer math. Anything further, I leave to the likes of Joe Chang, whose recent blog post on the topic offers depth by the bucketful!  

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• Customer Loyalty vs. Customer Engagement: Who Cares?

  - by Jeb Dasteel-Oracle

  Have you read the recent Forbes OracleVoice blog titled Customer Loyalty is Dead. Long Live Engagement!? If you haven’t, take a look. This article prompted lots of conversation in the social realm. Many who read the article voiced their reactions to the headline and now I’m jumping in to add my view. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE Customer loyalty is still key. It’s the effect and engagement is the cause. We at least know that to be true for our customers. We are in an age where customers are demanding to be heard. We need them to be actively involved – or engaged – as well. Greater levels of customer engagement, properly targeted, positively correlate with satisfaction. Our data has shown us this over and over. Satisfied customers are more loyal and more willing to vocalize their satisfaction through referencing, and are more likely to purchase again, all of which in turn drives incremental revenue – from the customer doing the referencing AND the customer on the receiving end of that reference. Turning this around completely, if we begin to see the level of a customer’s engagement start to wane, this is an indicator that their satisfaction, loyalty, and future revenue are likely at risk. At Oracle, we’ve put in place many programs to target, encourage, and then track engagement, allowing us to measure engagement as a determinant of loyalty. Some of these programs include our Key Accounts, solution design and architectural, Executive Sponsorship, as well as executive advisory boards. Specific programs allow us to engage specific contacts within specific customer organizations (based on role) and then systematically track their engagement activities over time, along side of tracking customer satisfaction, loyalty, referenceability, and incremental revenue contribution. Continuous measurement of engagement allows us to better understand customer views of what it means to partner with a provider and adjust program participation to better meet the needs of the partnership. We can also track across customer segments, and design new programs that are even more effective than the ones we have in place today. In case you missed any of my previous Forbes articles, I’ve included links below for easy access. Award-Winning Companies Put Customers First The Power of Peer Networks: 5 Reasons to Get (and Stay) Involved Technology At Work: Traveling In Style Customer Central: 8 Strategies for Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business Technology at Work: Five Companies Doing IT Right /* 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;}

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• Consolidation in a Database Cloud

  - by B R Clouse

  Consolidation of multiple databases onto a shared infrastructure is the next step after Standardization.  The potential consolidation density is a function of the extent to which the infrastructure is shared.  The three models provide increasing degrees of sharing: Server: each database is deployed in a dedicated VM. Hardware is shared, but most of the software infrastructure is not. Standardization is often applied incompletely since operating environments can be moved as-is onto the shared platform. The potential for VM sprawl is an additional downside. Database: multiple database instances are deployed on a shared software / hardware infrastructure. This model is very efficient and easily implemented with the features in the Oracle Database and supporting products. Many customers have moved to this model and achieved significant, measurable benefits. Schema: multiple schemas are deployed within a single database instance. The most efficient model, it places constraints on the environment. Usually this model will be implemented only by customers deploying their own applications.  (Note that a single deployment can combine Database and Schema consolidations.) Customer value: lower costs, better system utilization In this phase of the maturity model, under-utilized hardware can be used to host more workloads, or retired and those workloads migrated to consolidation platforms. Customers benefit from higher utilization of the hardware resources, resulting in reduced data center floor space, and lower power and cooling costs. And, the OpEx savings from Standardization are multiplied, since there are fewer physical components (both hardware and software) to manage. Customer value: higher productivity The OpEx benefits from Standardization are compounded since not only are there fewer types of things to manage, now there are fewer entities to manage. In this phase, customers discover that their IT staff has time to move away from "day-to-day" tasks and start investing in higher value activities. Database users benefit from consolidating onto shared infrastructures by relieving themselves of the requirement to maintain their own dedicated servers. Also, if the shared infrastructure offers capabilities such as High Availability / Disaster Recovery, which are often beyond the budget and skillset of a standalone database environment, then moving to the consolidation platform can provide access to those capabilities, resulting in less downtime. Capabilities / Characteristics In this phase, customers will typically deploy fixed-size clusters and consolidate on a cluster until that cluster is deemed "full," at which point a new cluster is built. Customers will define one or a few cluster architectures that are used wherever possible; occasionally there may be deployments which must be handled as exceptions. The "full" policy may be based on number of databases deployed on the cluster, or observed peak workload, etc. IT will own the provisioning of new databases on a cluster, making the decision of when and where to place new workloads. Resources may be managed dynamically, e.g., as a priority workload increases, it may be given more CPU and memory to handle the spike. Users will be charged at a fixed, relatively coarse level; or in some cases, no charging will be applied. Activities / Tasks Oracle offers several tools to plan a successful consolidation. Real Application Testing (RAT) has a feature to help plan and validate database consolidations. Enterprise Manager 12c's Cloud Management Pack for Database includes a planning module. Looking ahead, customers should start planning for the Services phase by defining the Service Catalog that will be made available for database services.

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• Video works with 'Try me' but not after install. What is the difference? U12.04LTS,

  - by HarveyP

  My hard drive got corrupted so I did a reinstall. Tested Youtube in FF during 'try me' and it worked - jerky, but it worked. Instal without all the updates (576 outstanding now) in order to get ff installed as per the demo - to no avail. In 'try me' mode ff NEVER crashed! After install ff crashed whilst I was typing in 'youtube' in the address field. When I finally got to youtube - no video. What is the difference between ff in try me and ff after install? Off to try some selected updates now to see if I can see it for myself. In previous installation I had several profiles and aliased ff with -safe-mode switch to simplify startup of most stable ff. Also found that ff startup in graphic mode worked better (but still without video) with all of the extensions disabled and all of the plugins set to "ask" and always denied ... I have SiS graphic card in SiS Motherboard for XP and ancient Hyundai ImageQuest QV770 monitor. I have Ubuntu 12.04.01 LTS 1 day after install with only the immediate upgrades requested to language pack (English UK). Using FR Alternative keyboard. Connected with domestic wifi network from Orange (FT) I really want to use Skype, but won't bother installing it (again) without video as I can do my sms on FB - whilst ff is not crashed ... Update ... Is something overflowing? I have just had to reboot in order to get ff to restart in any way shape or form - restart on crash form generates new crash form, etc. It was however a good half hour before it crashed so some improvement over conditions before disk corruption. I have now installed all of the critical updates (332 recommended updates still outstanding) which included some relating to ff. Still no video. Still crashing - especially when on Grepolis website. Since the re-install I have had a lovely 1024x768 screen, but after last ff crash and reboot I got a message about 'low graphics mode' and 'setting things myself'. I was not sufficiently tuned in at the time to take proper note - I have no doubt I shall see it again and shall report accordingly. I still have only laptop options for my screen and do not know how to rectify this. Spent a few days with ubuntu on a different, newer machine which has now suffered a graphics breakdown. Returned to this old one again, but with new flat screen Monitor. Found SIS drivers for my graphics BUT it is intended for Red Hat 7.2. I chose this over the version for 7.0 because I thought what the hell, I might not be able to do anything with either of them but this is the later one ... The file will not open with software manager - found a similar problem on Overclock but it has not helped me to install this driver. File name is sis_drv.o-410 and it is currently idling away in my Downloads folder ... I have tried the solution offered on another sis problem, but this shows that my xserver-xorg-video-sis driver is up to date. I am now at a loss as to how to proceed if I can't install the latest sis driver from sis ... Does nobody know how FF changes from "try-me" to "installed"? Any time I MUST have video I reboot from the disk again, but this is tedious! Also one of the things I mock most about MS is the constant rebooting ... UPDATE 10/6/2014 I have installed chromium-browser - worse, crashes even more often than ff.I have installed epiphany - better; Video works but not the associated soundtrack.FireFox is version 14.01 in 'try me' and version 29.0 from my install. Would it be useful to try to downgrade FireFox in order to get video?

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• Cloud – the forecast is improving

  - by Rob Farley

  There is a lot of discussion about “the cloud”, and how that affects people’s data stories. Today the discussion enters the realm of T-SQL Tuesday, hosted this month by Jorge Segarra. Over the years, companies have invested a lot in making sure that their data is good, and I mean every aspect of it – the quality of it, the security of it, the performance of it, and more. Experts such as those of us at LobsterPot Solutions have helped these companies with this, and continue to work with clients to make sure that data is a strong part of their business, not an oversight. Whether business intelligence systems are being utilised or not, every business needs to be able to rely on its data, and have the confidence in it. Data should be a foundation upon which a business is built. In the past, data had been stored in paper-based systems. Filing cabinets stored vital information. Today, people have server rooms with storage of various kinds, recognising that filing cabinets don’t necessarily scale particularly well. It’s easy to ‘lose’ data in a filing cabinet, when you have people who need to make sure that the sheets of paper are in the right spot, and that you know how things are stored. Databases help solve that problem, but still the idea of a large filing cabinet continues, it just doesn’t involve paper. If something happens to the physical ‘filing cabinet’, then the problems are larger still. Then the data itself is under threat. Many clients have generators in case the power goes out, redundant cables in case the connectivity dies, and spare servers in other buildings just in case they’re required. But still they’re maintaining filing cabinets. You see, people like filing cabinets. There’s something to be said for having your data ‘close’. Even if the data is not in readable form, living as bits on a disk somewhere, the idea that its home is ‘in the building’ is comforting to many people. They simply don’t want to move their data anywhere else. The cloud offers an alternative to this, and the human element is an obstacle. By leveraging the cloud, companies can have someone else look after their filing cabinet. A lot of people really don’t like the idea of this, partly because the administrators of the data, those people who could potentially log in with escalated rights and see more than they should be allowed to, who need to be trusted to respond if there’s a problem, are now a faceless entity in the cloud. But this doesn’t mean that the cloud is bad – this is simply a concern that some people may have. In new functionality that’s on its way, we see other hybrid mechanisms that mean that people can leverage parts of the cloud with less fear. Companies can use cloud storage to hold their backup data, for example, backups that have been encrypted and are therefore not able to be read by anyone (including administrators) who don’t have the right password. Companies can have a database instance that runs locally, but which has its data files in the cloud, complete with Transparent Data Encryption if needed. There can be a higher level of control, making the change easier to accept. Hybrid options allow people who have had fears (potentially very justifiable) to take a new look at the cloud, and to start embracing some of the benefits of the cloud (such as letting someone else take care of storage, high availability, and more) without losing the feeling of the data being close. @rob_farley

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• Data breakpoints to find points where data gets broken

  - by raccoon_tim

  When working with a large code base, finding reasons for bizarre bugs can often be like finding a needle in a hay stack. Finding out why an object gets corrupted without no apparent reason can be quite daunting, especially when it seems to happen randomly and totally out of context. Scenario Take the following scenario as an example. You have defined the a class that contains an array of characters that is 256 characters long. You now implement a method for filling this buffer with a string passed as an argument. At this point you mistakenly expect the buffer to be 256 characters long. At some point you notice that you require another character buffer and you add that after the previous one in the class definition. You now figure that you don’t need the 256 characters that the first member can hold and you shorten that to 128 to conserve space. At this point you should start thinking that you also have to modify the method defined above to safeguard against buffer overflow. It so happens, however, that in this not so perfect world this does not cross your mind. Buffer overflow is one of the most frequent sources for errors in a piece of software and often one of the most difficult ones to detect, especially when data is read from an outside source. Many mass copy functions provided by the C run-time provide versions that have boundary checking (defined with the _s suffix) but they can not guard against hard coded buffer lengths that at some point get changed. Finding the bug Getting back to the scenario, you’re now wondering why does the second string get modified with data that makes no sense at all. Luckily, Visual Studio provides you with a tool to help you with finding just these kinds of errors. It’s called data breakpoints. To add a data breakpoint, you first run your application in debug mode or attach to it in the usual way, and then go to Debug, select New Breakpoint and New Data Breakpoint. In the popup that opens, you can type in the memory address and the amount of bytes you wish to monitor. You can also use an expression here, but it’s often difficult to come up with an expression for data in an object allocated on the heap when not in the context of a certain stack frame. There are a couple of things to note about data breakpoints, however. First of all, Visual Studio supports a maximum of four data breakpoints at any given time. Another important thing to notice is that some C run-time functions modify memory in kernel space which does not trigger the data breakpoint. For instance, calling ReadFile on a buffer that is monitored by a data breakpoint will not trigger the breakpoint. The application will now break at the address you specified it to. Often you might immediately spot the issue but the very least this feature can do is point you in the right direction in search for the real reason why the memory gets inadvertently modified. Conclusions Data breakpoints are a great feature, especially when doing a lot of low level operations where multiple locations modify the same data. With the exception of some special cases, like kernel memory modification, you can use it whenever you need to check when memory at a certain location gets changed on purpose or inadvertently.

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• Does *every* project benefit from written specifications?

  - by nikie

  I know this is holy war territory, so please read the question to the end before answering. There are many cases where written specifications make a lot of sense. For example, if you're a contractor and you want to get paid, you need written specs. If you're working in a team with 20 persons, you need written specs. If you're writing a programming language compiler or interpreter (and it's not perl), you'll usually write a formal specification. I don't doubt that there are many more cases where written specifications are a really good idea. I just think that there are cases where there's so little benefit in written specs, that it doesn't outweigh the costs of writing and maintaining them. EDIT: The close votes say that "it is difficult to say what is asked here", so let me clarify: The usefulness of written, detailed specifications is often claimed like a dogma. (If you want examples, look at the comments.) But I don't see the use of them for the kind of development I'm doing. So what is asked here is: How would written specifications help me? Background information: I work for a small company that's developing vertical market software. If our product is easier to use and has better performance than the competition, it sells. If it's harder to use, even if it behaves 100% as the specification says, it doesn't sell. So there are no "external forces" for having written specs. The advantage would have to be somewhere in the development process. Now, I can see how frozen specifications would make a developer's life easier. But we'll never have frozen specs. If we see in the middle of development that feature X is not intuitive to use the way it's specified, then we can only choose between changing the specification or developing a product that won't sell. You'll probably ask by now: How do you know when you're done? Well, we're continually improving our product. The competition does the same. So (hopefully) we're never done. We keep improving the software, and when we reach a point when the benefits of the improvements we've added since the last release outweigh the costs of an update, we create a new release that is then tested, localized, documented and deployed. This also means that there's rarely any schedule pressure. Nobody has to do overtime to make a deadline. If the feature isn't done by the time we want to release the next version, it'll simply go into the next version. The next question might be: How do your developers know what they're supposed to implement? The answer is: They have a lot of domain knowledge. They know the customers business well enough, so a high-level description of the feature (or even just the problem that the customer needs solved) is enough to implement it. If it's not clear, the developer creates a few fake screens to get feedback from marketing/management or customers, but this is nowhere near the level of detail of actual specifications. This might be inefficient for larger teams, but for a small team with low turnover it works quite well. It has the additional benefit that the developer in question often comes up with a better solution than the person writing the specs might have. This question is already getting very long, but let me address one last point: Testing. Like I said in the beginning, if our software behaves 100% like the spec says, it still can be crap. In fact, if it's so unintuitive that you need a spec to know how to test it, it probably is crap. It makes sense to have fixed, written tests for some core functionality and for regression bugs, but again, this is nowhere near a full written spec of how the software should behave when. The main test is: hand the software to a user who doesn't know it yet and tell him to use the new feature X. If she can figure out how to use it and it works, it works.

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• Application Logging needs work

  Application Logging Application logging is the act of logging events that occur within an application much like how a court report documents what happens in court case. Application logs can be useful for several reasons, but the most common use for logs is to recreate steps to find the root cause of applications errors. Other uses can include the detection of Fraud, verification of user activity, or provide audits on user/data interactions. “Logs can contain different kinds of data. The selection of the data used is normally affected by the motivation leading to the logging. “ (OWASP, 2009) OWASP also stats that logging include applicable debugging information like the event date time, responsible process, and a description of the event. “There are many reasons why a logging system is a necessary part of delivering a distributed application. One of the most important is the ability to track exactly how many users are using the application during different time periods.” (Hatton, 2000) Hatton also states that application logging helps system designers determine whether parts of an application aren't being used as designed. He implies that low usage can be used to identify if users like or do not like aspects of a system based on user usage of the application. This enables application designers to extract why users don't like aspects of an application so that changes can be made to increase its usefulness and effectiveness. “Logging memory usage can also assist you in tuning up the internals of your application. If you're experiencing a randomly occurring problem, being able to match activities performed with the memory status at the time may enable you to discover the cause of the problem. It also gives you a good indication of the health of the distributed server machine at the time any activity is performed. “ (Hatton, 2000) Commonly Logged Application Events (Defined by OWASP) Access of Data Creation of Data Modification of Data in any form Administrative Functions  Configuration Changes Debugging Information(Application Events)  Authorization Attempts  Data Deletion Network Communication  Authentication Events  Errors/Exceptions Application Error Logging The functionality associated with application error logging is actually the combination of proper error handling and applications logging.  If we look back at Figure 4 and Figure 5, these code examples allow developers to handle various types of errors that occur within the life cycle of an application’s execution. Application logging can be applied within the Catch section of the TryCatch statement allowing for the errors to be logged when they occur. By placing the logging within the Catch section specific error details can be accessed that help identify the source of the error, the path to the error, what caused the error and definition of the error that occurred. This can then be logged and reviewed at a later date in order recreate the error that was received based data found in the application log. By allowing applications to log errors developers IT staff can use them to recreate errors that are encountered by end-users or other dependent systems.

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• Oracle Excellence Award

  - by Hartmut Wiese

  CALL FOR NOMINATIONS 2014 Oracle Excellence Award: Sustainability Innovation Is your organization using an Oracle product to help with a sustainability initiative while reducing costs? Saving energy? Saving gas? Saving paper? For example, you may use Oracle’s Agile Product Lifecycle Management to design more eco-friendly products, Oracle Transportation Management to reduce fleet emissions, Oracle Exadata Database Machine to decrease power and cooling needs while increasing database performance, Oracle Business Intelligence to measure environmental impacts, or one of many other Oracle products. Your organization may be eligible for the 2014 Oracle Excellence Award: Sustainability Innovation. Submit a nomination form located here by Friday June 20 if your company is using any Oracle product to take an environmental lead as well as to reduce costs and improve business efficiencies by using green business practices. These awards will be presented during Oracle OpenWorld 2014 (September 28-October 2) in San Francisco.  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 About the Award • Winners will be selected from the customer and/or partner nominations. Either a customer, their partner, or Oracle representative can submit the nomination form on behalf of the customer.• There is a nomination form here to discuss your use of Oracle products and how they have helped your sustainability efforts and reduced costs. • Winners will be selected based on the extent of the environmental impact they have had as well as the business efficiencies they have achieved through their combined use of Oracle products. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Nomination Eligibility • Your company uses at least one component of Oracle products, whether it's the Oracle database, business applications, Fusion Middleware, or Sun servers/storage. • This solution should be in production or in active development. • Nomination deadline: Friday June 20, 2014. Benefits to Award Winners • Award presented to winners during Oracle OpenWorld by Jeff Henley, Oracle Chairman of the Board • Free Oracle OpenWorld registration pass for each winning customer • 2014 Oracle Excellence Award: Sustainability Innovation award logo for inclusion on your own website &/or press release • Possible placement in Oracle Profit Magazine &/or Oracle Magazine • ‘Enable the Eco-Enterprise’ podcast opportunity See last year's winners here Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 ______________________________________________________________________________________ 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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Questions? Send an email to: [email protected] Follow Oracle’s Sustainability Solutions on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and the Sustainability Matters blog Web page with award details:  http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/green/call-for-nominations-185050.html  

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• Faster Memory Allocation Using vmtasks

  - by Steve Sistare

  You may have noticed a new system process called "vmtasks" on Solaris 11 systems: % pgrep vmtasks 8 % prstat -p 8 PID USERNAME SIZE RSS STATE PRI NICE TIME CPU PROCESS/NLWP 8 root 0K 0K sleep 99 -20 9:10:59 0.0% vmtasks/32 What is vmtasks, and why should you care? In a nutshell, vmtasks accelerates creation, locking, and destruction of pages in shared memory segments. This is particularly helpful for locked memory, as creating a page of physical memory is much more expensive than creating a page of virtual memory. For example, an ISM segment (shmflag & SHM_SHARE_MMU) is locked in memory on the first shmat() call, and a DISM segment (shmflg & SHM_PAGEABLE) is locked using mlock() or memcntl(). Segment operations such as creation and locking are typically single threaded, performed by the thread making the system call. In many applications, the size of a shared memory segment is a large fraction of total physical memory, and the single-threaded initialization is a scalability bottleneck which increases application startup time. To break the bottleneck, we apply parallel processing, harnessing the power of the additional CPUs that are always present on modern platforms. For sufficiently large segments, as many of 16 threads of vmtasks are employed to assist an application thread during creation, locking, and destruction operations. The segment is implicitly divided at page boundaries, and each thread is given a chunk of pages to process. The per-page processing time can vary, so for dynamic load balancing, the number of chunks is greater than the number of threads, and threads grab chunks dynamically as they finish their work. Because the threads modify a single application address space in compressed time interval, contention on locks protecting VM data structures locks was a problem, and we had to re-scale a number of VM locks to get good parallel efficiency. The vmtasks process has 1 thread per CPU and may accelerate multiple segment operations simultaneously, but each operation gets at most 16 helper threads to avoid monopolizing CPU resources. We may reconsider this limit in the future. Acceleration using vmtasks is enabled out of the box, with no tuning required, and works for all Solaris platform architectures (SPARC sun4u, SPARC sun4v, x86). The following tables show the time to create + lock + destroy a large segment, normalized as milliseconds per gigabyte, before and after the introduction of vmtasks: ISM system ncpu before after speedup ------ ---- ------ ----- ------- x4600 32 1386 245 6X X7560 64 1016 153 7X M9000 512 1196 206 6X T5240 128 2506 234 11X T4-2 128 1197 107 11x DISM system ncpu before after speedup ------ ---- ------ ----- ------- x4600 32 1582 265 6X X7560 64 1116 158 7X M9000 512 1165 152 8X T5240 128 2796 198 14X (I am missing the data for T4 DISM, for no good reason; it works fine). The following table separates the creation and destruction times: ISM, T4-2 before after ------ ----- create 702 64 destroy 495 43 To put this in perspective, consider creating a 512 GB ISM segment on T4-2. Creating the segment would take 6 minutes with the old code, and only 33 seconds with the new. If this is your Oracle SGA, you save over 5 minutes when starting the database, and you also save when shutting it down prior to a restart. Those minutes go directly to your bottom line for service availability.

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• MySQL, An Ideal Choice for The Cloud

  - by Bertrand Matthelié

  As the world's most popular web database, MySQL has quickly become the leading database for the cloud, with most providers offering MySQL-based services. 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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Access our Resource Kit to discover: Why MySQL has become the leading database in the cloud, and how it addresses the critical attributes of cloud-based deployments How ISVs rely on MySQL to power their SaaS offerings Best practices to deploy the world’s most popular open source database in public and private clouds Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE You will also find out how you can leverage MySQL together with Hadoop and other technologies to unlock the value of Big Data, either on-premise or in the cloud. Access white papers, webinars, case studies and other resources in /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} our Resource Kit now!

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• MySQL Enterprise Backup 3.8.2 has been released!

  - by Hema Sridharan

  MySQL Enterprise Backup v3.8.2, a maintenance release of online MySQL backup tool, is now available for download from My Oracle Support  (MOS) website as our latest GA release.  It will also be available via the Oracle Software Delivery Cloud in approximately 1-2 weeks. A brief summary of the changes in MySQL Enterprise Backup version 3.8.2 is given below.   A. Functionality Added or Changed:  MySQL Enterprise Backup has a new --on-disk-full command line option. mysqlbackup could hang when the disk became full, rather than detecting the low space condition. mysqlbackup now monitors disk space when running backup commands, and users can now specify the action to take at a disk-full condition with the --on-disk-full option. For more details, refer this page MySQL Enterprise Backup has a new progress report feature, which periodically outputs short progress indicators on its  operations to user-selected destinations (for example, stdout, stderr, a file, or other choices). For more details on progress report options, refer here   B. Bugs Fixed: When --innodb-file-per-table=ON, if a table was renamed and backup-to-image was in progress, apply-log would fail when being run on the backup. (Bug #16903973)   MySQL Server failed to start after a backup was restored if  there had been online DDL transactions on partitioned tables during the time of backup. (Bug #16924499)   apply-log failed if ALTER TABLE ... REORGANIZE PARTITION was applied to partitioned InnoDB tables during backup. (Bug #16721824, Bug #16903951)  apply-incremental-backup might fail with an assertion error if  the InnoDB tables being backed up were created in Barracuda format and with their KEY_BLOCK_SIZE  values  different from the innodb_page_size . This fix ensures that different KEY_BLOCK_SIZE  values are handled properly during incremental backup and apply-incremental-backup operations.  If a table was renamed following a full backup, a subsequent incremental backup could copy the .frm file with the new name, but not the associated .ibd file with the new name. After a  restore, the InnoDB data dictionary could be in an  inconsistent state. This issue primarily occurred if the table  was not changed between the full backup and the subsequent  incremental backup. Bug #16262690)  After a full backup, if a table was renamed and modified,  apply-incremental-backup would crash when run on the backup directory. (Bug #16262609) The value of the binary log position in backup_variables.txt  could be different from the output displayed during the   backup-and-apply-log operation. (This issue did not occur if  the backup and apply-log steps were done separately.) (Bug  #16195529) When using the --only-innodb-with-frm option, MySQL Enterprise Backup tried to create temporary files at unintended locations in the file system, which might cause a failure when, for example, the user had no write privilege for those locations.   This fix makes sure the paths for the temporary files are  correct. (Bug #14787324)  A backup process might hang when it ran into an LSN mismatch between a data file  and the redo log. This fix makes sure the process does not hang and it displays an error message showing the  name of the problematic data file (Bug #14791645) Please post your questions / comments about Backup in forums. Thanks, MEB Team

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• Career-Defining Moments

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/robz/archive/2013/06/25/career-defining-moments.aspx Fear holds us back from many things. A little fear is healthy, but don’t let it overwhelm you into missing opportunities. In every career there is a moment when you can either step forward and define yourself, or sit down and regret it later. Why do we hold back: is it fear, constraints, family concerns, or that we simply can't do it? I think in many cases it comes to the unknown, and we are good at fearing the unknown. Some people hold back because they are fearful of what they don’t know. Some hold back because they are fearful of learning new things. Some hold back simply because to take on a new challenge it means they have to give something else up. The phrase sometimes used is “It’s the devil you know versus the one you don’t.” That fear sometimes allows us to miss great opportunities. In many people’s case it is the opportunity to go into business for yourself, to start something that never existed. Most hold back hear for a fear of failing. We’ve all heard the phrase “What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?”, which is intended to get people to think about the opportunities they might create. A better term I heard recently on the Ruby Rogues podcast was “What would be worth doing even if you knew you were going to fail?” I think that wording suits the intent better. If you knew (or thought) going in that you were going to fail and you didn’t care, it would open you up to the possibility of paying more attention to the journey and not the outcome. In my case it is a fear of acceptance. I am fearful that I may not learn what I need to learn or may not do a good enough job to be accepted. At the same time that fear drives me and makes me want to leap forward. Some folks would define this as “The Flinch”. I’m learning Ruby and Puppet right now. I have limited experience with both, limited to the degree it scares me some that I don’t know much about either. Okay, it scares me quite a bit! Some people’s defining moment might be going to work for Microsoft. All of you who know me know that I am in love with automation, from low-tech to high-tech automation. So for me, my “mecca” is a little different in that regard. Awhile back I sat down and defined where I wanted my career to go and it had to do more with DevOps, defined as applying developer practices to system administration operations (I could not find this definition when I searched). It’s an area that interests me and why I really want to expand chocolatey into something more awesome. I want to see Windows be as automatable and awesome as other operating systems that are out there. Back to the career-defining moment. Sometimes these moments only come once in a lifetime. The key is to recognize when you are in one of these moments and step back to evaluate it before choosing to dive in head first. So I am about to embark on what I define as one of these “moments.”  On July 1st I will be joining Puppet Labs and working to help make the Windows automation experience rock solid! I’m both scared and excited about the opportunity!

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• Multidimensional multiple-choice knapsack problem: find a feasible solution

  - by Onheiron

  My assignment is to use local search heuristics to solve the Multidimensional multiple-choice knapsack problem, but to do so I first need to find a feasible solution to start with. Here is an example problem with what I tried so far. Problem R1 R2 R3 RESOUCES : 8 8 8 GROUPS: G1: 11.0 3 2 2 12.0 1 1 3 G2: 20.0 1 1 3 5.0 2 3 2 G3: 10.0 2 2 3 30.0 1 1 3 Sorting strategies To find a starting feasible solution for my local search I decided to ignore maximization of gains and just try to fit the resources requirements. I decided to sort the choices (strategies) in each group by comparing their "distance" from the multidimensional space origin, thus calculating SQRT(R1^2 + R2^2 + ... + RN^2). I felt like this was a keen solution as it somehow privileged those choices with resouce usages closer to each other (e.g. R1:2 R2:2 R3:2 < R1:1 R2:2 R3:3) even if the total sum is the same. Doing so and selecting the best choice from each group proved sufficent to find a feasible solution for many[30] different benchmark problems, but of course I knew it was just luck. So I came up with the problem presented above which sorts like this: R1 R2 R3 RESOUCES : 8 8 8 GROUPS: G1: 12.0 1 1 3 < select this 11.0 3 2 2 G2: 20.0 1 1 3 < select this 5.0 2 3 2 G3: 30.0 1 1 3 < select this 10.0 2 2 3 And it is not feasible because the resources consmption is R1:3, R2:3, R3:9. The easy solution is to pick one of the second best choices in group 1 or 2, so I'll need some kind of iteration (local search[?]) to find the starting feasible solution for my local search solution. Here are the options I came up with Option 1: iterate choices I tried to find a way to iterate all the choices with a specific order, something like G1 G2 G3 1 1 1 2 1 1 1 2 1 1 1 2 2 2 1 ... believeng that feasible solutions won't be that far away from the unfeasible one I start with and thus the number of iterations will keep quite low. Does this make any sense? If yes, how can I iterate the choices (grouped combinations) of each group keeping "as near as possibile" to the previous iteration? Option 2: Change the comparation term I tried to think how to find a better variable to sort the choices on. I thought at a measure of how "precious" a resource is based on supply and demand, so that an higer demand of a more precious resource will push you down the list, but this didn't help at all. Also I thought there probably isn't gonna be such a comparsion variable which assures me a feasible solution at first strike. I there such a variable? If not, is there a better sorting criteria anyways? Option 3: implement any known sub-optimal fast solving algorithm Unfortunately I could not find any of such algorithms online. Any suggestion?

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• installer can't find partition, but fdisk can find them

  - by pxd

  I'm installing ubuntu 12.04, my system had install 2 system -- winxp and ubuntu 10.10. Now, I want to update ubuntu to 12.04. I use usb disk to install 12.04. But, the installer can't not find my partition in my harddisk. But, the fdisk can find them. Can you help me? How to do? ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo lshw -short H/W path Device Class Description system HP 2230s (NN868PA#AB2) /0 bus 3037 /0/9 memory 64KiB BIOS /0/0 processor Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T6570 @ 2.10GHz /0/0/1 memory 2MiB L2 cache /0/0/3 memory 32KiB L1 cache /0/0/0.1 processor Logical CPU /0/0/0.2 processor Logical CPU /0/2 memory 32KiB L1 cache /0/4 memory 2GiB System Memory /0/4/0 memory SODIMM [empty] /0/4/1 memory 2GiB SODIMM DDR2 Synchronous 800 MHz (1.2 ns) /0/100 bridge Mobile 4 Series Chipset Memory Controller Hub /0/100/2 display Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller /0/100/2.1 display Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller /0/100/1a bus 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 /0/100/1a.1 bus 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5 /0/100/1a.2 bus 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #6 /0/100/1a.7 bus 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2 /0/100/1b multimedia 82801I (ICH9 Family) HD Audio Controller /0/100/1c bridge 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 1 /0/100/1c.1 bridge 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 2 /0/100/1c.1/0 wlan1 network PRO/Wireless 5100 AGN [Shiloh] Network Connection /0/100/1c.2 bridge 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 3 /0/100/1c.4 bridge 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 5 /0/100/1c.5 bridge 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 6 /0/100/1c.5/0 eth1 network 88E8072 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller /0/100/1d bus 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 /0/100/1d.1 bus 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 /0/100/1d.2 bus 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 /0/100/1d.7 bus 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1 /0/100/1e bridge 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge /0/100/1f bridge ICH9M LPC Interface Controller /0/100/1f.2 scsi0 storage 82801IBM/IEM (ICH9M/ICH9M-E) 4 port SATA Controller [AHCI mode] /0/100/1f.2/0 /dev/sda disk 500GB WDC WD5000BEVT-0 /0/100/1f.2/0/1 /dev/sda1 volume 48GiB Windows NTFS volume /0/100/1f.2/0/2 /dev/sda2 volume 416GiB Extended partition /0/100/1f.2/0/2/5 /dev/sda5 volume 97GiB HPFS/NTFS partition /0/100/1f.2/0/2/6 /dev/sda6 volume 198GiB HPFS/NTFS partition /0/100/1f.2/0/2/7 /dev/sda7 volume 27GiB Linux filesystem partition /0/100/1f.2/0/2/8 /dev/sda8 volume 93GiB Linux filesystem partition /0/100/1f.2/1 /dev/cdrom disk CDDVDW TS-L633M /0/1 scsi6 storage /0/1/0.0.0 /dev/sdb disk 15GB STORAGE DEVICE /0/1/0.0.0/0 /dev/sdb disk 15GB /0/1/0.0.0/0/1 /dev/sdb1 volume 14GiB Windows FAT volume /1 power HZ04037 ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo fdisk -l Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders, total 976773168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x31263125 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 63 102277727 51138832+ 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda2 102277728 976784129 437253201 f W95 Ext'd (LBA) /dev/sda5 102277791 307078127 102400168+ 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda6 307078191 724141151 208531480+ 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda7 724142080 781459455 28658688 83 Linux /dev/sda8 781461504 976771071 97654784 83 Linux Disk /dev/sdb: 15.9 GB, 15931539456 bytes 64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 15193 cylinders, total 31116288 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x0009eb92 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id Systemfile:///home/ubuntu/Pictures/Screenshot%20from%202012-07-07%2010:25:40.png /dev/sdb1 * 32 31115263 15557616 c W95 FAT32 (LBA) ubuntu 12.04 installer can't find the partition in my hard disk, only find device - /dev/sda.(sorry, I'm new user, so can't send image.)

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