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• SQL SERVER – BI Quiz Hint – Performance Tuning Cubes – Hints

  - by pinaldave

  I earlier wrote about SQL BI Quiz over here and here. The details of the quiz is here: Working with huge data is very common when it is about Data Warehousing. It is necessary to create Cubes on the data to make it meaningful and consumable. There are cases when retrieving the data from cube takes lots of the time. Let us assume that your cube is returning you data very quickly. Suddenly on one day it is returning the data very slowly. What are the three things will you to diagnose this. After diagnose what you will do to resolve performance issue. Participate in my question over here I required BI Expert Jason Thomas to help with few hints to blog readers. He is one of the leading SSAS expert and writes a complicated subject in simple words. If queries were executing properly before but now take a long time to return the data, it means that there has been a change in the environment in which it is running. Some possible changes are listed below:-  1) Data factors:- Compare the data size then and now. Increase in data can result in different execution times. Poorly written queries as well as poor design will not start showing issues till the data grows. How to find it out? (Ans : SQL Server profiler and Perfmon Counters can be used for identifying the issues and performance  tuning the MDX queries)  2) Internal Factors:- Is some slow MDX query / multiple mdx queries running at the same time, which was not running when you had tested it before? Is there any locking happening due to proactive caching or processing operations? Are the measure group caches being cleared by processing operations? (Ans : Again, profiler and perfmon counters will help in finding it out. Load testing can be done using AS Performance Workbench (http://asperfwb.codeplex.com/) by running multiple queries at once)  3) External factors:- Is some other application competing for the same resources?  HINT : Read “Identifying and Resolving MDX Query Performance Bottlenecks in SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services” (http://sqlcat.com/whitepapers/archive/2007/12/16/identifying-and-resolving-mdx-query-performance-bottlenecks-in-sql-server-2005-analysis-services.aspx) Well, these are great tips. Now win big prizes by participate in my question over here. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Is there a better term than "smoothness" or "granularity" to describe this language feature?

  - by Chris

  One of the best things about programming is the abundance of different languages. There are general purpose languages like C++ and Java, as well as little languages like XSLT and AWK. When comparing languages, people often use things like speed, power, expressiveness, and portability as the important distinguishing features. There is one characteristic of languages I consider to be important that, so far, I haven't heard [or been able to come up with] a good term for: how well a language scales from writing tiny programs to writing huge programs. Some languages make it easy and painless to write programs that only require a few lines of code, e.g. task automation. But those languages often don't have enough power to solve large problems, e.g. GUI programming. Conversely, languages that are powerful enough for big problems often require far too much overhead for small problems. This characteristic is important because problems that look small at first frequently grow in scope in unexpected ways. If a programmer chooses a language appropriate only for small tasks, scope changes can require rewriting code from scratch in a new language. And if the programmer chooses a language with lots of overhead and friction to solve a problem that stays small, it will be harder for other people to use and understand than necessary. Rewriting code that works fine is the single most wasteful thing a programmer can do with their time, but using a bazooka to kill a mosquito instead of a flyswatter isn't good either. Here are some of the ways this characteristic presents itself. Can be used interactively - there is some environment where programmers can enter commands one by one Requires no more than one file - neither project files nor makefiles are required for running in batch mode Can easily split code across multiple files - files can refeence each other, or there is some support for modules Has good support for data structures - supports structures like arrays, lists, and especially classes Supports a wide variety of features - features like networking, serialization, XML, and database connectivity are supported by standard libraries Here's my take on how C#, Python, and shell scripting measure up. Python scores highest. Feature C# Python shell scripting --------------- --------- --------- --------------- Interactive poor strong strong One file poor strong strong Multiple files strong strong moderate Data structures strong strong poor Features strong strong strong Is there a term that captures this idea? If not, what term should I use? Here are some candidates. Scalability - already used to decribe language performance, so it's not a good idea to overload it in the context of language syntax Granularity - expresses the idea of being good just for big tasks versus being good for big and small tasks, but doesn't express anything about data structures Smoothness - expresses the idea of low friction, but doesn't express anything about strength of data structures or features Note: Some of these properties are more correctly described as belonging to a compiler or IDE than the language itself. Please consider these tools collectively as the language environment. My question is about how easy or difficult languages are to use, which depends on the environment as well as the language.

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• New Feature in ODI 11.1.1.6: Enterprise Data Quality Integration

  - by Julien Testut

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Oracle Data Integrator 11.1.1.6.0 introduces a new Open Tool called EnterpriseDataQuality which allows ODI users to invoke an Oracle Enterprise Data Quality Job from a Package. This post will give you an overview of this new feature. Oracle Enterprise Data Quality (OEDQ) provides organizations with an integrated suite of data quality tools that offer an end-to-end solution to measure, improve, and manage the quality of data from any domain, including customer and product data. The addition of the EnterpriseDataQuality Open Tool extends the inline Data Quality capabilities of Oracle Data Integrator with Oracle Enterprise Data Quality powerful data profiling, cleansing, matching, and monitoring capabilities. The EnterpriseDataQuality Open Tool can invoke any OEDQ Job stored in a Project. This Open Tool connects to an OEDQ server using a JMX (Java Management Extensions) interface. Once installed, this Open Tool will be found under Plugins in the Package Toolbox area: This EnterpriseDataQuality Open Tool takes a couple of parameters as inputs such as the Enterprise Data Quality Job and Project names, the OEDQ hostname and JMX port etc. With the EnterpriseDataQuality Open Tool, ODI customers can now incorporate their Oracle Enterprise Data Quality processes within their Data Integration workflows. You will find instructions about how to use the Enterprise Data Quality Open Tool in the Oracle Data Integrator documentation at: Using the EnterpriseDataQuality Open Tool.You can find an overview of all the new features introduced in ODI 11.1.1.6 in the following document: ODI 11.1.1.6 New Features Overview.

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• Web Experience Management: Segmentation & Targeting - Chalk Talk with John

  - by Michael Snow

  Today's post comes from our WebCenter friend, John Brunswick.  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"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;} Having trouble getting your arms around the differences between Web Content Management (WCM) and Web Experience Management (WEM)?  Told through story, the video below outlines the differences in an easy to understand manner. By following the journey of Mr. and Mrs. Smith on their adventure to find the best amusement park in two neighboring towns, we can clearly see what an impact context and relevancy play in our decision making within online channels.  Just as when we search to connect with the best products and services for our needs, the Smiths have their grandchildren coming to visit next week and finding the best park is essential to guarantee a great family vacation.  One town effectively Segments and Targets visitors to enhance their experience, reducing the effort needed to learn about their park. Have a look below to join the Smiths in their search.    Learn MORE about how you might measure up: Deliver Engaging Digital Experiences Drive Digital Marketing SuccessAccess Free Assessment Tool

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• How To Deal With Terrible Design Decisions

  - by splatto

  I'm a consultant at one company. There is another consultant who is a year older than me and has been here 3 months longer than I have, and a full time developer. The full-time developer is great. My concern is that I see the consultant making absolutely terrible design decisions. For example, M:M relationships are being stored in the database as a comma-delimited string rather than using a conjunction table to hold the relationships. For example, consider two tables, Car and Property: Car records: Camry Volvo Mercedes Property records: Spare Tire Satellite Radio Ipod Support Standard Rather than making a table CarProperties to represent this, he has made a "Property" attribute on the Car table whose data looks like "1,3,7,13,19,25," I hate how this decision and others are affecting the quality of my code. We have butted heads over this design three times in the past two months since I've been here. He asked me why my suggestion was better, and I responded that our database would be eliminating redundant data by converting to a higher normal form. I explained that this design flaw in particular is discussed and discouraged in entry level college programs, and he responded with a shot at me saying that these comma-separated-value database properties are taught when you do your masters (which neither of us have). Needless to say, he became very upset and demanded I apologize for criticizing his work, which I did in the interest of not wanting to be the consultant to create office drama. Our project manager is focused on delivering a product ASAP and is a very strong personality - Suggesting to him at this point that we spend some time to do this right will set him off. There is a strong likelihood that both of our contracts will be extended to work on a second project coming up. How will I be able to exert dominant influence over the design of the system and the data model to ensure that such terrible mistakes are not repeated in the next project? A glimpse at the dynamics: I can be a strong personality if I don't measure myself. The other consultant is not a strong personality, is a poor communicator, is quite stubborn and thinks he is better than everyone else. The project manager is an extremely strong personality who is focused on releasing tomorrow's product yesterday. The full-time developer is very laid back and easy going, a very effective communicator, but is someone who will accept bad design if it means not rocking the boat. Code reviews or anything else that takes "time" will be out of the question - there is no way our PM will be sold on such a thing by anybody.

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• SQLAuthority News – Download Whitepaper – SQL Server Analysis Services to Hive

  - by pinaldave

  The SQL Server Analysis Service is a very interesting subject and I always have enjoyed learning about it. You can read my earlier article over here. Big Data is my new interest and I have been exploring it recently. During this weekend this blog post caught my attention and I enjoyed reading it. Big Data is the next big thing. The growth is predicted to be 60% per year till 2016. There is no single solution to the growing need of the big data available in the market right now as well there is no one solution in the business intelligence eco-system available as well. However, the need of the solution is ever increasing. I am personally Klout user. You can see my Klout profile over. I do understand what Klout is trying to achieve – a single place to measure the influence of the person. However, it works a bit mysteriously. There are plenty of social media available currently in the internet world. The biggest problem all the social media faces is that everybody opens an account but hardly people logs back in. To overcome this issue and have returned visitors Klout has come up with the system where visitors can give 5/10 K+ to other users in a particular area. Looking at all the activities Klout is doing it is indeed big consumer of the Big Data as well it is early adopter of the big data and Hadoop based system.  Klout has to 1 trillion rows of data to be analyzed as well have nearly thousand terabyte warehouse. Hive the language used for Big Data supports Ad-Hoc Queries using HiveQL there are always better solutions. The alternate solution would be using SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) along with HiveQL. As there is no direct method to achieve there are few common workarounds already in place. A new ODBC driver from Klout has broken through the limitation and SQL Server Relation Engine can be used as an intermediate stage before SSAS. In this white paper the same solutions have been discussed in the depth. The white paper discusses following important concepts. The Klout Big Data solution Big Data Analytics based on Analysis Services Hadoop/Hive and Analysis Services integration Limitations of direct connectivity Pass-through queries to linked servers Best practices and lessons learned This white paper discussed all the important concepts which have enabled Klout to go go to the next level with all the offerings as well helped efficiency by offering a few out of the box solutions. I personally enjoy reading this white paper and I encourage all of you to do so. SQL Server Analysis Services to Hive Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL White Papers, T SQL, Technology

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• Windows Phone 7 Development Updates &ndash; March 8th 2011

  - by Nikita Polyakov

  Here are the latest update from the Windows Phone 7 Developer Worlds that went live this month. Here are some of the latest numbers: Windows Phone Marketplace currently offers more than 9,000 quality apps and games and enjoys a base of over 32,000 registered developers, delivering an average of 100 new apps every day. There have been over 1 million downloads of the developers tools for Windows Phone 7. Trial version help you sell more Trials result in higher sales by the numbers: Users like trials  - paid apps with trial functionality are downloaded 70 times more than paid apps that don’t Nearly 1 out of 10 trial apps downloaded convert to a purchase and generate 10 times more revenue on average than paid apps that don’t include trial functionality. Trial downloads convert to paid downloads quickly. More than half of trial downloads that convert to a sale do so within the 1st 24 hours of trial download, and mostly within 2 hours of trial download. Microsoft Ad Control is gaining traction By the numbers - ad supported Windows Phone 7 apps are: Roughly ¼ of all registered U.S. WP7 developers have downloaded the free Ad SDK for Silverlight and XNA Of ad funded apps, over 95 percent use the free Microsoft Advertising Ad Control Monthly impressions from our Ad Exchange has continued to grow by double digits – impressions increased by 376 percent since January Ad Control, the first wave of “How Do I” videos are now available on MSDN: Create an Ad in a Windows Phone 7 XNA Game App Register Ad-Enabled Windows Phone 7 Apps Measure Ad Performance of Windows Phone 7 Apps Boarder International App submission for Free Apps through Yalla Apps As of today you can start submitting your free applications in developer markets that are currently not covered by Microsoft. To submit your Free application if you DO NOT belong to one of the Marketplace supported countries, go to: Yalla Apps Marketplace Policy Updates: Free App Marketplace Submission upped to 100 and other news Microsoft has been revisiting a few of our Marketplace policies based on feedback from developers to reduce friction and cost, word for word: 1. We have raised the limit on the number of certifications that can be performed for FREE apps at no cost to the registered developer from five to 100. This was a common request from developers which we are glad to implement after building alternate methods to ensure that users can find and download high quality apps. 2. We have converted policy 5.6 - related to the inclusion of contact information for support - from a mandatory to an optional policy. This is still a strongly recommended best practice, but we recognized and responded to developer feedback that this policy was creating excessive drag on the certification process for developers without commensurate user benefit for all apps. 3. We also understand the desire for clarification with regard to our policy on applications distributed under open source licenses.  The Marketplace Application Provider Agreement (APA) already permits applications under the BSD, MIT, Apache Software License 2.0 and Microsoft Public License.  We plan to update the APA shortly to clarify that we also permit applications under the Eclipse Public License, the Mozilla Public License and other, similar licenses and we continue to explore the possibility of accommodating additional OSS licenses. Enjoy and happy coding! Official Blog Post for reference.

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• Default values - are they good or evil?

  - by Andrew

  The question about default values in general - default return function values, default parameter values, default logic for when something is missing, default logic for handling exceptions, default logic for handling the edge conditions etc. For a long time I considered default values to be a "pure evil" thing, something that "cloaks the catastrophe" and results in a very hard do find bugs. But recently I started to think about default values as some sort of a technical debt ... which is not a straight bad thing but something that could provide some "short term financing" get us to survive the project (how many of us could afford to buy a house without taking out the mortgage?). When I say a "short term" - I don't mean - "do something quickly first and do refactor it out later before it hits the production". No - I am talking about relying on a hardcoded default values in a production software. Granted - it could cause some issues, but what if it only going to cause a single trouble in a whole year. Again - I am talking about the "average" mainstream software here (not a software for a nuclear power station) - the average web site or a UI application for the accounting software, meaning that people lives are not at stake, nor millions of dollars. Again, from my experience, business users would rather live with the software which "works somehow", rather then wait for a perfect one. And the use of default values helps a lot if you develop a software in a RAD style. But again - the longest debug sessions I have spent were because of the bugs introduced by a default value which either stopped being "a default" along the way or because a small subsystem has recently been upgraded and as a result of this upgrade it does not handle the default correctly (e.g. empty list vs null, or null string vs empty string). So my question is - are the default values good or evil. And if they are a technical debt - how do measure up how much you can borrow so you can afford the repayments? Would really appreciate any input. Cheers. EDIT: If I am using the default values as a way to cut the corners during the development - and if the corners cutting results in a bugs and issues - what is the methodology to recover from these issues?

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• How Big Data and Social Won the Election

  - by Mike Stiles

  The story of big data’s influence on the outcome of the US Presidential election is worth a good look, because a) it’s a harbinger of things to come, and b) it’s an example of similar successes available to any enterprise seriously resourcing integrated big data, modeling, and data-driven execution on all assets, including social. Obama campaign manager Jim Messina fielded a data and analytics brain trust 5 times larger than 2008. At that time, there were numerous databases from various sources, few of them talking to each other. This time, the mission was to be metrics-centered and measure everything measurable, and in context with all the other data. Big data showed them exactly what they needed to know and told them what to do about it. It showed them women 40-49 on the west coast would donate big money if they got to eat with George Clooney. Women on the east coast would pony up to hang out with Sarah Jessica Parker. Extensive daily modeling showed them what kinds of email appeals, from who, and to whom, would prove most successful in raising cash, recruiting volunteers, and getting out the vote. Swing state voters were profiled and approached with more customized targeting that at any time in history. Ads were purchased on specific shows watched by the targets, increasing efficiency 14% over traditional media buys. For all the criticism of the candidate’s focus on appearing on comedy and entertainment shows, and local radio morning shows, that’s where the data sent them to reach the voters most likely to turn out for them. And then there was social. Again, more than in any other election, Facebook was used for virtual, highly efficient door-to-door canvasing. Facebook fans got pictures of friends in swing states and were asked to encourage them to act. Using that approach, 1 in 5 peer-to-peer appeals led to the desired action. Assumptions, gut, intuition, campaign experience, all took a backseat to strategy shifts solidly backed up by data. Zeroing in on demographics likely to back the President and tracking their mood daily literally changed the voter landscape. The Romney team watched Obama voters appear seemingly out of thin air. One Obama campaign aide said, “We ran the election 66,000 times every night.” Which brings us to your organization. If you’re starting to feel like the battle-cry of “but this is the way we’ve always done it” is starting to put you in an extremely vulnerable position, you’re right. Social has become a key communication tool of the 21st century. Failing to use it, or failing to invest in a deep understanding of who your customers and prospects are so the content you post there will achieve desired actions and results, will leave you waking up one morning wondering, “What happened?”@mikestilesPhoto stock.xchng

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• Code Coverage for Maven Integrated in NetBeans IDE 7.2

  - by Geertjan

  In NetBeans IDE 7.2, JaCoCo is supported natively, i.e., out of the box, as a code coverage engine for Maven projects, since Cobertura does not work with JDK 7 language constructs. (Although, note that Cobertura is supported as well in NetBeans IDE 7.2.) It isn't part of NetBeans IDE 7.2 Beta, so don't even try there; you need some development build from after that. I downloaded the latest development build today. To enable JaCoCo features in NetBeans IDE, you need do no different to what you'd do when enabling JaCoCo in Maven itself, which is rather wonderful. In both cases, all you need to do is add this to the "plugins" section of your POM: <plugin> <groupId>org.jacoco</groupId> <artifactId>jacoco-maven-plugin</artifactId> <version>0.5.7.201204190339</version> <executions> <execution> <goals> <goal>prepare-agent</goal> </goals> </execution> <execution> <id>report</id> <phase>prepare-package</phase> <goals> <goal>report</goal> </goals> </execution> </executions> </plugin> Now you're done and ready to examine the code coverage of your tests, whether they are JUnit or TestNG. At this point, i.e., for no other reason than that you added the above snippet into your POM, you will have a new Code Coverage menu when you right-click on the project node: If you click Show Report above, the Code Coverage Report window opens. Here, once you've run your tests, you can actually see how many classes have been covered by your tests, which is pretty useful since 100% tests passing doesn't mean much when you've only tested one class, as you can see very graphically below: Then, when you click the bars in the Code Coverage Report window, the class under test is shown, with the methods for which tests exist highlighted in green and those that haven't been covered in red: (Note: Of course, striving for 100% code coverage is a bit nonsensical. For example, writing tests for your getters and setters may not be the most useful way to spend one's time. But being able to measure, and visualize, code coverage is certainly useful regardless of the percentage you're striving to achieve.) Best of all about all this is that everything you see above is available out of the box in NetBeans IDE 7.2. Take a look at what else NetBeans IDE 7.2 brings for the first time to the world of Maven: http://wiki.netbeans.org/NewAndNoteworthyNB72#Maven

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• Oracle GoldenGate: Knowledge Document Series Post #2

  - by Doug Reid

  0 false 18 pt 18 pt 0 0 false false false /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; 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;} 0 false 18 pt 18 pt 0 0 false false false /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; 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;} For our second post in this series the team would like to highlight the knowledge document “How-To: Oracle GoldenGate – Heartbeat Process to Monitor Lag and Performance”. This knowledge document outlines a procedure to reliably measure lag between source and target systems through the use of 'heartbeat' tables. The basic idea is to have a table on the source system that gets updated at a predetermined interval. In your capture processes you would capture the update from the heartbeat table. Using tokens you would add some additional information to the heartbeat record to be able to tell which extract process was capturing the update. This additional information would be used downstream to calculate the real lag time between the source and target systems for a given extract and by checking the last update time on the heartbeat at the target you could also determine if data has stopped flowing between the source and target.  Click here to view the document

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• Pay in the future should make you think in the present

  - by BuckWoody

  Distributed Computing - and more importantly “-as-a-Service” models of computing have a different cost model. This is something that sounds obvious on the surface but it’s often forgotten during the design and coding phase of a project. In on-premises computing, we’re used to purchasing a server and all of the hardware infrastructure and software licenses needed not only for one project, but several. This is an up-front or “sunk” cost that we consume by running code the organization needs to perform its function. Using a direct connection over wires you’ve already paid for, we don’t often have to think about bandwidth, hits on the data store or the amount of compute we use - we just know more is better. In a pay-as-you-go model, however, each of these architecture decisions has a potential cost impact. The amount of data you store, the number of times you access it, and the amount you send back all come with a charge. The offset is that you don’t buy anything at all up-front, so that sunk cost is freed up. And financial professionals know that money now is worth more than money later. Saving that up-front cost allows you to invest it in other things. It’s not just that you’re using things that now cost money - it’s that the design itself in distributed computing has a cost impact. That can be a really good thing, such as when you dynamically add capacity for paying customers. If you can tie back the cost of a series of clicks to what a user will pay to do so, you can set a profit margin that is easy to track. Here’s a case in point: Assume you are using a large instance in Windows Azure to compute some data that you retrieve from a SQL Azure database. If you don’t monitor the path of the application, you may not know what you are really using. Since you’re paying by the size of the instance, it’s best to maximize it all the time. Recently I evaluated just this situation, and found that downsizing the instance and adding another one where needed, adding a caching function to the application, moving part of the data into Windows Azure tables not only increased the speed of the application, but reduced the cost and more closely tied the cost to the profit. The key is this: from the very outset - the design - make sure you include metrics to measure for the cost/performance (sometimes these are the same) for your application. Windows Azure opens up awesome new ways of doing things, so make sure you study distributed systems architecture before you try and force in the application design you have on premises into your new application structure.

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• Reporting on common code smells : A POC

  - by Dave Ballantyne

  Over the past few blog entries, I’ve been looking at parsing TSQL scripts in a variety of ways for a variety of tasks.  In my last entry ‘How to prevent ‘Select *’ : The elegant way’, I looked at parsing SQL to report upon uses of SELECT *.  The obvious question leading on from this is, “Great, what about other code smells ?”  Well, using the language service parser to do that was turning out to be a bit of a hard job,  sure I was getting tokens but no real context.  I wasn't even being told when an end of statement had been reached. One of the other parsing options available from Microsoft is exposed in the assembly ‘Microsoft.SqlServer.TransactSql.ScriptDom’,  this is ,I believe, installed with the client development tools with SQLServer.  It is much more feature rich than the original parser I had used and breaks a TSQL script into intuitive classes for analysis. So, what sort of smells can I now find using it ?  Well, for an opening gambit quite a nice little list. Use of NOLOCK Set of READ UNCOMMITTED Use of SELECT * Insert without column references Explicit datatype conversion on Sargs Cross server selects Non use of two-part naming convention Table and Query hint usage Changes in set options Use of single line comments Use of ordinal column positions in ORDER BY clause Now, lets not argue the point that “It depends” as smells on some of these, but as an academic exercise it is quite interesting.  The code is available from this link :https://www.dropbox.com/s/rfk32sou4fzl2cw/TSQLDomTest.zip  All the usual disclaimers apply to this code, I cannot be held responsible for anything ranging from mild annoyance through to universe destruction due to the use of this code or examples. The zip file contains a powershell script and my test cases.  The assembly used requires .Net 4 to run, which means that you will need powershell 3 ( though im running through PowerGUI and all works ok ) .  The code searches for all .sql files in the folder hierarchy for the workingpath,  you can override this if you want by simply changing the $Folder variable, and processes each in turn for the smells.  Feedback is not great at the moment, all it does is output to an xml file (Smells.xml) the offset position and a description of the smell found. Right now, I am interested in your feedback.  What do you think ?  Is this (or should it be) more than an academic exercise ?  Can tooling such as this be used as some form of code quality measure ?  Does it Work ? Do you have a case listed above which is not being reported ? Do you have a case that you would love to be reported ? Let me know , please mailto: [email protected]. Thanks

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• Why would more CPU cores on virtual machine slow compile times?

  - by Sid

  [edit#2] If anyone from VMWare can hit me up with a copy of VMWare Fusion, I'd be more than happy to do the same as a VirtualBox vs VMWare comparison. Somehow I suspect the VMWare hypervisor will be better tuned for hyperthreading (see my answer too) I'm seeing something curious. As I increase the number of cores on my Windows 7 x64 virtual machine, the overall compile time increases instead of decreasing. Compiling is usually very well suited for parallel processing as in the middle part (post dependency mapping) you can simply call a compiler instance on each of your .c/.cpp/.cs/whatever file to build partial objects for the linker to take over. So I would have imagined that compiling would actually scale very well with # of cores. But what I'm seeing is: 8 cores: 1.89 sec 4 cores: 1.33 sec 2 cores: 1.24 sec 1 core: 1.15 sec Is this simply a design artifact due to a particular vendor's hypervisor implementation (type2:virtualbox in my case) or something more pervasive across more VMs to make hypervisor implementations more simpler? With so many factors, I seem to be able to make arguments both for and against this behavior - so if someone knows more about this than me, I'd be curious to read your answer. Thanks Sid [edit:addressing comments] @MartinBeckett: Cold compiles were discarded. @MonsterTruck: Couldn't find an opensource project to compile directly. Would be great but can't screwup my dev env right now. @Mr Lister, @philosodad: Have 8 hw threads, using VirtualBox, so should be 1:1 mapping without emulation @Thorbjorn: I have 6.5GB for the VM and a smallish VS2012 project - it's quite unlikely that I'm swapping in/out trashing the page file. @All: If someone can point to an open source VS2010/VS2012 project, that might be a better community reference than my (proprietary) VS2012 project. Orchard and DNN seem to need environment tweaking to compile in VS2012. I really would like to see if someone with VMWare Fusion also sees this (for VMWare vs VirtualBox compartmentalization) Test details: Hardware: Macbook Pro Retina CPU : Core i7 @ 2.3Ghz (quad core, hyper threaded = 8 cores in windows task manager) Memory : 16 GB Disk : 256GB SSD Host OS: Mac OS X 10.8 VM type: VirtualBox 4.1.18 (type 2 hypervisor) Guest OS: Windows 7 x64 SP1 Compiler: VS2012 compiling a solution with 3 C# Azure projects Compile times measure by VS2012 plugin called 'VSCommands' All tests run 5 times, first 2 runs discarded, last 3 averaged

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• Data Model Dissonance

  - by Tony Davis

  So often at the start of the development of database applications, there is a premature rush to the keyboard. Unless, before we get there, we’ve mapped out and agreed the three data models, the Conceptual, the Logical and the Physical, then the inevitable refactoring will dog development work. It pays to get the data models sorted out up-front, however ‘agile’ you profess to be. The hardest model to get right, the most misunderstood, and the one most neglected by the various modeling tools, is the conceptual data model, and yet it is critical to all that follows. The conceptual model distils what the business understands about itself, and the way it operates. It represents the business rules that govern the required data, its constraints and its properties. The conceptual model uses the terminology of the business and defines the most important entities and their inter-relationships. Don’t assume that the organization’s understanding of these business rules is consistent or accurate. Too often, one department has a subtly different understanding of what an entity means and what it stores, from another. If our conceptual data model fails to resolve such inconsistencies, it will reduce data quality. If we don’t collect and measure the raw data in a consistent way across the whole business, how can we hope to perform meaningful aggregation? The conceptual data model has more to do with business than technology, and as such, developers often regard it as a worthy but rather arcane ceremony like saluting the flag or only eating fish on Friday. However, the consequences of getting it wrong have a direct and painful impact on many aspects of the project. If you adopt a silo-based (a.k.a. Domain driven) approach to development), you are still likely to suffer by starting with an incomplete knowledge of the domain. Even when you have surmounted these problems so that the data entities accurately reflect the business domain that the application represents, there are likely to be dire consequences from abandoning the goal of a shared, enterprise-wide understanding of the business. In reading this, you may recall experiences of the consequence of getting the conceptual data model wrong. I believe that Phil Factor, for example, witnessed the abandonment of a multi-million dollar banking project due to an inadequate conceptual analysis of how the bank defined a ‘customer’. We’d love to hear of any examples you know of development projects poleaxed by errors in the conceptual data model. Cheers, Tony

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• Profiling Startup Of VS2012 &ndash; Ants Profiler

  - by Alois Kraus

  I just downloaded ANTS Profiler 7.4 to check how fast it is and how deep I can analyze the startup of Visual Studio 2012. The Pro version which is useful does cost 445€ which is ok. To measure a complex system I decided to simply profile VS2012 (Update 1) on my older Intel 6600 2,4GHz with 3 GB RAM and a 32 bit Windows 7. Ants Profiler is really easy to use. So lets try it out. The Ants Profiler does want to start the profiled application by its own which seems to be rather common. I did choose Method Level timing of all managed methods. In the configuration menu I did want to get all call stacks to get full details. Once this is configured you are ready to go.   After that you can select the Method Grid to view Wall Clock Time in ms. I hate percentages which are on by default because I do want to look where absolute time is spent and not something else.   From the Method Grid I can drill down to see where time is spent in a nice and I can look at the decompiled methods where the time is spent. This does really look nice. But did you see the size of the scroll bar in the method grid? Although I wanted all call stacks I do get only about 4 pages of methods to drill down. From the scroll bar count I would guess that the profiler does show me about 150 methods for the complete VS startup. This is nonsense. I will never find a bottleneck in VS when I am presented only a fraction of the methods that were actually executed. I have also tried in the configuration window to also profile the extremely trivial functions but there was no noticeable difference. It seems that the Ants Profiler does filter away way too many details to be useful for bigger systems. If you want to optimize a CPU bound operation inside NUnit then Ants Profiler is with its line level timings a very nice tool to work with. But for bigger stuff it is certainly not usable. I also do not like that I must start the profiled application from the profiler UI. This makes it hard to profile processes which are started by some other process. Next: JetBrains dotTrace

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• rotating an object on an arc

  - by gardian06

  I am trying to get a turret to rotate on an arc, and have hit a wall. I have 8 possible starting orientations for the turrets, and want them to rotate on a 90 degree arc. I currently take the starting rotation of the turret, and then from that derive the positive, and negative boundary of the arc. because of engine restrictions (Unity) I have to do all of my tests against a value which is between [0,360], and due to numerical precision issues I can not test against specific values. I would like to write a general test without having to go in, and jury rig cases //my current test is: // member variables public float negBound; public float posBound; // found in Start() function (called immediately after construction) // eulerAngles.y is the the degree measure of the starting y rotation negBound = transform.eulerAngles.y-45; posBound = transform.eulerAngles.y+45; // insure that values are within bounds if(negBound<0){ negBound+=360; }else if(posBound>360){ posBound-=360; } // called from Update() when target not in firing line void Rotate(){ // controlls what direction if(transform.eulerAngles.y>posBound){ dir = -1; } else if(transform.eulerAngles.y < negBound){ dir = 1; } // rotate object } follows is a table of values for my different cases (please excuse my force formatting) read as base is the starting rotation of the turret, neg is the negative boundry, pos is the positive boundry, range is the acceptable range of values, and works is if it performs as expected with the current code. |base-|-neg-|-pos--|----------range-----------|-works-| |---0---|-315-|--45--|-315-0,0-45----------|----------| |--45--|---0---|--90--|-0-45,54-90----------|----x----| |-135-|---90--|-180-|-90-135,135-180---|----x----| |-180-|--135-|-225-|-135-180,180-225-|----x----| |-225-|--180-|-270-|-180-225,225-270-|----x----| |-270-|--225-|-315-|-225-270,270-315-|----------| |-315-|--270-|---0---|--270-315,315-0---|----------| I will need to do all tests from derived, or stored values, but can not figure out how to get all of my cases to work simultaneously. //I attempted to concatenate the 2 tests: if((transform.eulerAngles.y>posBound)&&(transform.eulerAngles.y < negBound)){ dir *= -1; } this caused only the first case to be successful // I attempted to store a opposite value, and do a void Rotate(){ // controlls what direction if((transform.eulerAngles.y > posBound)&&(transform.eulerAngles.y<oposite)){ dir = -1; } else if((transform.eulerAngles.y < negBound)&&(transform.eulerAngles.y>oposite)){ dir = 1; } // rotate object } this causes the opposite situation as indicated on the table. What am I missing here?

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• Accounting for waves when doing planar reflections

  - by CloseReflector

  I've been studying Nvidia's examples from the SDK, in particular the Island11 project and I've found something curious about a piece of HLSL code which corrects the reflections up and down depending on the state of the wave's height. Naturally, after examining the brief paragraph of code: // calculating correction that shifts reflection up/down according to water wave Y position float4 projected_waveheight = mul(float4(input.positionWS.x,input.positionWS.y,input.positionWS.z,1),g_ModelViewProjectionMatrix); float waveheight_correction=-0.5*projected_waveheight.y/projected_waveheight.w; projected_waveheight = mul(float4(input.positionWS.x,-0.8,input.positionWS.z,1),g_ModelViewProjectionMatrix); waveheight_correction+=0.5*projected_waveheight.y/projected_waveheight.w; reflection_disturbance.y=max(-0.15,waveheight_correction+reflection_disturbance.y); My first guess was that it compensates for the planar reflection when it is subjected to vertical perturbation (the waves), shifting the reflected geometry to a point where is nothing and the water is just rendered as if there is nothing there or just the sky: Now, that's the sky reflecting where we should see the terrain's green/grey/yellowish reflection lerped with the water's baseline. My problem is now that I cannot really pinpoint what is the logic behind it. Projecting the actual world space position of a point of the wave/water geometry and then multiplying by -.5f, only to take another projection of the same point, this time with its y coordinate changed to -0.8 (why -0.8?). Clues in the code seem to indicate it was derived with trial and error because there is redundancy. For example, the author takes the negative half of the projected y coordinate (after the w divide): float waveheight_correction=-0.5*projected_waveheight.y/projected_waveheight.w; And then does the same for the second point (only positive, to get a difference of some sort, I presume) and combines them: waveheight_correction+=0.5*projected_waveheight.y/projected_waveheight.w; By removing the divide by 2, I see no difference in quality improvement (if someone cares to correct me, please do). The crux of it seems to be the difference in the projected y, why is that? This redundancy and the seemingly arbitrary selection of -.8f and -0.15f lead me to conclude that this might be a combination of heuristics/guess work. Is there a logical underpinning to this or is it just a desperate hack? Here is an exaggeration of the initial problem which the code fragment fixes, observe on the lowest tessellation level. Hopefully, it might spark an idea I'm missing. The -.8f might be a reference height from which to deduce how much to disturb the texture coordinate sampling the planarly reflected geometry render and -.15f might be the lower bound, a security measure.

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• C Programming arrays, I dont understand how I would go about making this program, If anyone can just guide me through the basic outline please :) [on hold]

  - by Rashmi Kohli

  Problem The temperature of a car engine has been measured, from real-world experiments, as shown in the table and graph below: Time (min) Temperature (oC) 0 20 1 36 2 61 3 68 4 77 5 110 Use linear regression to find the engine’s temperature at 1.5 minutes, 4.3 minutes, and any other time specified by the user. Background In engineering, many times we measure several data points in an experiment, but then we need to predict a value that we have not measured which lies between two measured values, such as the problem statement above. If the relation between the measured parameters seems to be roughly linear, then we can use linear regression to find the relationship between those parameters. In the graph of the problem statement above, the relation seems to be roughly linear. Hence, we can apply linear regression to the above problem. Assuming y {y0, y1, …yn-1} has a linear relation with x {x0, x1, … xn-1}, we can say that: y = mx+b where m and b can be found with linear regression as follows: For the problem in this lab, using linear regression gives us the following line (in blue) compared to the measured curve (in red). As you can see, there is usually a difference between the measured values and the estimated (predicted) values. What linear regression does is to minimize those differences and still give us a straight line (blue). Other methods, such as non-linear regression, are also possible to achieve higher accuracy and better curve fitting. Requirements Your program should first print the table of the temperatures similar to the way it’s printed in the problem statement. It should then calculate the temperature at minute 1.5 and 4.3 and show the answers to the user. Next, it should prompt the user to enter a time in minutes (or -1 to quit), and after reading the user’s specified time it should give the value of the engine’s temperature at that time. It should then go back to the prompt. Hints •Use a one dimensional array to store the temperature values given in the problem statement. •Use functions to separate tasks such as calculating m, calculating b, calculating the temperature at a given time, printing the prompt, etc. You can then give your algorithm as well as you pseudo code per function, as opposed to one large algorithm diagram or one large sequence of pseudo code.

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• Performance analytics via DBMS "plugins", or other solution

  - by Polynomial

  I'm working on a systems monitoring product that currently focuses on performance at the system level. We're expanding out to monitoring database systems. Right now we can fetch simple performance information from a selection of DBMS, like connection count, disk IO rates, lock wait times, etc. However, we'd really like a way to measure the execution time of every query going into a DBMS, without requiring the client to implement monitoring in their application code. Some potential solutions might be: Some sort of proxy that sits between client and server. SSL might be an issue here, plus it requires us to reverse engineer and implement the network protocol for each DBMS. Plugin for each DBMS system that automatically records performance information when a query comes in. Other problems include "anonymising" the SQL, i.e. taking something like SELECT * FROM products WHERE price > 20 AND name LIKE "%disk%" and producing SELECT * FROM products WHERE price > ? AND name LIKE "%?%", though this shouldn't be too difficult with some clever parsing and regex. We're mainly focusing on: MySQL MSSQL Oracle Redis mongodb memcached Are there any plugin-style mechanisms we can utilise for any of these? Or is there a simpler solution?

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• Accessing network shares on Windows7 via SonicWall VPN client

  - by Jack Lloyd

  I'm running Windows7 x64 (fully patched) and the SonicWall 4.2.6.0305 client (64-bit, claims to support Windows7). I can login to the VPN and access network resources (eg SSH to a machine that lives behind the VPN). However I cannot seem to be able to access shared filesystems. Windows is refusing to do discovery on the VPN network. I suspect part of the problem is Windows persistently considers the VPN connection to be a 'public network'. Normally, you can open the network and sharing center and modify this setting, however it does not give me a choice for the VPN. So I did the expedient thing and turned on file sharing for public networks. I also disabled the Windows firewall for good measure. Still no luck. I can access the server directly by putting \\192.168.1.240 in the taskbar, which brings up the list of shares on the server. However, trying to open any of the shares simply tells me "Windows cannot access \\192.168.1.240\share You do not have permission to access ..."; it never asks for a domain password. I also tried Windows7 native VPN functionality - it couldn't successfully connect to the VPN at all. I suspect this is because SonicWall is using some obnoxious special/undocumented authentication system; I had similar problems trying to connect on Linux with the normal IPsec tools there. What magical invocation or control panel option am I missing that will let this work? Are there any reasonable debugging strategies? I'm feeling quite frustrated at Windows tendency to not give me much useful information that might let me understand what it is trying to do and what is going wrong.

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• SSI includes not working on Debian with Apache

  - by Mike

  I'm trying to get SSI to work on Debian running Apache, however the .shtml files are not being parsed. From a PHP file with phpinfo() I can see that the following show up in the loaded modules section: mod_mime_xattr mod_mime mod_mime_magic In /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/mime.conf I have (among other things): AddType text/html .shtml AddOutputFilter INCLUDES .shtml In /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/domain.com.conf (for the virtual host in question) I have: <Directory /home/username/public_html> Options +Includes allow from all AllowOverride All </Directory> and for good measure, I added the following as well: <Directory /> Options +Includes </directory> In the user's .htaccess file, I tried adding: Options +Includes AddType text/html shtml AddHandler server-parsed shtml Nothing seems to work. How can I even debug this? Edit: Here is the output of ls /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/ in case this helps actions.conf dav_svn.load proxy_balancer.load actions.load deflate.conf proxy.conf alias.conf deflate.load proxy_connect.load alias.load dir.conf proxy_http.load auth_basic.load dir.load proxy.load auth_digest.load env.load python.load authn_file.load fcgid.conf reqtimeout.conf authz_default.load fcgid.load reqtimeout.load authz_groupfile.load mime.conf rewrite.load authz_host.load mime.load ruby.load authz_user.load mime_magic.conf setenvif.conf autoindex.conf mime_magic.load setenvif.load autoindex.load mime-xattr.load ssl.conf cgi.load negotiation.conf ssl.load dav_fs.conf negotiation.load status.conf dav_fs.load php5.conf status.load dav.load php5.load suexec.load dav_svn.conf proxy_balancer.conf

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• Will this increase my Virtual private Server failing rate ?

  - by Spencer Lim

  Will this increase my Virtual private Server failing rate if i :- install Microsoft Window Server 2008 Enterprise install SQL server enterprise 2008 install IIS 7.5 install ASP.Net Mvc 2 install Microsoft Exchange << should live inside MWS2008 ? or standalone without OS? install Team foundation server << should live inside MWS2008 ? or standalone without OS? on one mini VPS with specification of DELL Poweredge R710 shared plan DDR3 ECC RAMs 16GB and -- 1GB for this VPS using DELL PERC 6i raid controller (this thing alone about 1.5k-2k) and the SAS HDD (15K RPM) (146GB) -- 33GB to this VPS each hdd is freaking fast over 300MB read / write possible with proper tuning the motherboard is a DELL and it has twin redundant PSU (870watt 85%eff) its running on Intel Xeon 5502 (Quad Core) x2 so about 8 physical proc (fairly share) is there any ruler to measure for this about one VPS can only install what what what service ? because of my resource is limited =.@ may i know if it is install in this way,maybe it seem like defeat the way of "VPS"... what will happen ? or any guideline on this issue (fully configuring the window server 2008 R2) ? Thx for reply

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• Juniper router dropping pings to external interface

  - by Alexander Garden

  My organization has a Juniper SSG20-WLAN that routes our traffic to the outside world. We've been having intermittent problems with our internet connection so I wrote up a Python script to ping the internal interface of the router, the external interface, a couple of our internal servers, the ISP router our router talks to, their upstream provider, and Google and Yahoo for good measure. It does that about every minute. What I have found is that when our internet goes out, our Juniper router ceases responding to pings on the external interface. Everything past that is, of course, unreachable. The internal interface and our internal servers continue to echo back without interruption. None of the counters indicate dropped packets of any type. They all look normal. The logs complain about VIP servers being unavailable but otherwise nothing indicative of network issues. My questions are these: Does this exonerate our ISP? Or, contrawise, might a problem with the connection be causing the external interface to go down? Is there somewhere else in the SSG20, beside the system log and counters, that might help me track down info on the problem? UPDATE: Turned out that one of the switches between my monitoring box and the router was a router itself, and occasionally diverting from the gateway to itself. Kudos to those who made suggestions along those lines. Not really sure which answer to mark as accepted, as it was really stuff in the comments that turned out to be right. Thanks for the suggestions.

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• RDP problem with Vista and Windows 7 destination

  - by MadBison

  I use a server a home to host a bunch of concurrently running Hyper-V VM's with different OS's and software for testing. I have Vista on the laptop, all latest SP's and patches. The server is Server 2008 R2, fully patched. The guests are a mix of XP, Vista, Server 2008 and Windows 7. If I connect to the Win XP or Server 2008 guest using RDP, it is always good. Very quick, no speed issues. If I connect to the Vista or Win 7 guests, the response time is so slow it is unusable. Usually 6 or 8 seconds, and at times it is to long to measure! This happens from both the laptop running Vista, and the server running Server 2008 R2. Does anyone know what the issue is with RDP on Vista and Windows 7 destinations? I did read this: http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/microsoft/remote-desktop-slow-problem-solved.asp and that is not the problem I have applied that change to all PC's.

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