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  • Top Questions and Answers for Pluging into Oracle Database as a Service

    - by David Swanger
    Yesterday we hosted a comprehensive online forum that shared a comprehensive path to help your organization design, deploy, and deliver a Database as a Service cloud. If you missed the online forum, you can watch it on demand by registering here. We received numerous questions.  Below are highlights of the most informative: DBaaS requires a lengthy and careful design efforts. What is the minimum requirements of setting up a scaled-down environment and test it out? You should have an OEM 12c environment for DBaaS administration and then a target database deployment platform that has the key characteristics of what your production environment will look like. This could be a single server or it could be a small pool of hosts if your production DBaaS will be larger and you want to test a more robust / real world configuration with Zones and Pools or DR capabilities for example. How does this benefit companies having their own data center? This allows companies to transform their internal IT to a service delivery model for the database. The benefits to the company are significant cost savings, improved business agility and reduced risk. The benefits to the consumers (internal) of services if much fast provisioning, and response to change in business requirements. From a deployment perspective, is DBaaS's job solely DBA's job? The best deployment model enables the DBA (or end-user) to control the entire process. All resources required to deploy the service are pre-provisioned, and there are no external dependencies (on network, storage, sysadmins teams). The service is created either via a self-service portal or by the DBA. The purpose of self service seems to be that the end user does not rely on the DBA. I just need to give him a template. He decides how much AMM he needs. Why shall I set it one by one. That doesn't seem to be the purpose of self service. Most customers we have worked with define a standardized service catalog, with a few (2 to 5) different classes of service. For each of these classes, there is a pre-defined deployment template, and the user has the ability to select from some pre-defined service sizes. The administrator only has to create this catalog once. Each user then simply selects from the options offered in the catalog.  Looking at DBaaS service definition, it seems to be no different from a service definition provided by a well defined DBA team. Why do you attribute it to DBaaS? There are a couple of perspectives. First, some organizations might already be operating with a high level of standardization and a higher level of maturity from an ITIL or Service Management perspective. Their journey to DBaaS could be shorter and their Service Definition will evolve less but they still might need to add capabilities such as Self Service and Metering/Chargeback. Other organizations are still operating in highly siloed environments with little automation and their formal Service Definition (if they have one) will be a lot less mature today. Therefore their future state DBaaS will look a lot different from their current state, as will their Service Definition. How database as a service impact or help with "Click to Compute" or deploying "Database in cloud infrastructure" DBaaS enables Click to Compute. Oracle DBaaS can be implemented using three architecture models: Oracle Multitenant 12c, native consolidation using Oracle Database and consolidation using virtualization in infrastructure cloud. As Deploy session showed, you get higher consolidating density and efficiency using Multitenant and higher isolation using infrastructure cloud. Depending upon your business needs, DBaaS can be implemented using any of these models. How exactly is the DBaaS different from the traditional db? Storage/OS/DB all together to 'transparently' provide service to applications? Will there be across-databases access by application/user. Some key differences are: 1) The services run on a shared platform. 2) The services can be rapidly provisioned (< 15 minutes). 3) The services are dynamic and can be relocated, grown, shrunk as needed to meet business needs without disruption and rapidly. 4) The user is able to provision the services directly from a standardized service catalog.. With 24x7x365 databases its difficult to find off peak hrs to do basic admin tasks such as gathering stats, running backups, batch jobs. How does pluggable database handle this and different needs/patching downtime of apps databases might be serving? You can gather stats in Oracle Multitenant the same way you had been in regular databases. Regarding patching/upgrading, Oracle Multitenant makes patch/upgrade very efficient in that you can pre-provision a new version/patched multitenant db in a different ORACLE_HOME and then unplug a PDB from its CDB and plug it into the newer/patched CDB in seconds.  Thanks for all the great questions!  If you'd like to learn more and missed the online forum, you can watch it on demand here.

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  • How to force a clock update using ntp?

    - by ysap
    I am running Ubuntu on an ARM based embedded system that lacks a battery backed RTC. The wake-up time is somewhere during 1970. Thus, I use the NTP service to update the time to the current time. I added the following line to /etc/rc.local file: sudo ntpdate -s time.nist.gov However, after startup, it still takes a couple of minutes until the time is updated, during which period I cannot work effectively with tar and make. How can I force a clock update at any given time? UPDATE 1: The following (thanks to Eric and Stephan) works fine from command line, but fails to update the clock when put in /etc/rc.local: $ date ; sudo service ntp stop ; sudo ntpdate -s time.nist.gov ; sudo service ntp start ; date Thu Jan 1 00:00:58 UTC 1970 * Stopping NTP server ntpd [ OK ] * Starting NTP server [ OK ] Thu Feb 14 18:52:21 UTC 2013 What am I doing wrong? UPDATE 2: I tried following the few suggestions that came in response to the 1st update, but nothing seems to actually do the job as required. Here's what I tried: Replace the server to us.pool.ntp.org Use explicit paths to the programs Remove the ntp service altogether and leave just sudo ntpdate ... in rc.local Remove the sudo from the above command in rc.local Using the above, the machine still starts at 1970. However, when doing this from command line once logged in (via ssh), the clock gets updated as soon as I invoke ntpdate. Last thing I did was to remove that from rc.local and place a call to ntpdate in my .bashrc file. This does update the clock as expected, and I get the true current time once the command prompt is available. However, this means that if the machine is turned on and no user is logged in, then the time never gets updates. I can, of course, reinstall the ntp service so at least the clock is updated within a few minutes from startup, but then we're back at square 1. So, is there a reason why placing the ntpdate command in rc.local does not perform the required task, while doing so in .bashrc works fine?

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  • 7-Eleven Improves the Digital Guest Experience With 10-Minute Application Provisioning

    - by MichaelM-Oracle
    By Vishal Mehra - Director, Cloud Computing, Oracle Consulting Making the Cloud Journey Matter There’s much more to cloud computing than cutting costs and closing data centers. In fact, cloud computing is fast becoming the engine for innovation and productivity in the digital age. Oracle Consulting Services contributes to our customers’ cloud journey by accelerating application provisioning and rapidly deploying enterprise solutions. By blending flexibility with standardization, our Middleware as a Service (MWaaS) offering is ensuring the success of many cloud initiatives. 10-Minute Application Provisioning Times at 7-Eleven As a case in point, 7-Eleven recently highlighted the scope, scale, and results of a cloud-powered environment. The world’s largest convenience store chain is rolling out a Digital Guest Experience (DGE) program across 8,500 stores in the U.S. and Canada. Everyday, 7-Eleven connects with tens of millions of customers through point-of-sale terminals, web sites, and mobile apps. Promoting customer loyalty, targeting promotions, downloading digital coupons, and accepting digital payments are all part of the roadmap for a comprehensive and rewarding customer experience. And what about the time required for deploying successive versions of this mission-critical solution? Ron Clanton, 7-Eleven's DGE Program Manager, Information Technology reported at Oracle Open World, " We are now able to provision new environments in less than 10 minutes. This includes the complete SOA Suite on Exalogic, and Enterprise Manager managing both the SOA Suite, Exalogic, and our Exadata databases ." OCS understands the complex nature of innovative solutions and has processes and expertise to help clients like 7-Eleven rapidly develop technology that enhances the customer experience with little more than the click of a button. OCS understood that the 7-Eleven roadmap required careful planning, agile development, and a cloud-capable environment to move fast and perform at enterprise scale. Business Agility Today’s business-savvy technology leaders face competing priorities as they confront the digital disruptions of the mobile revolution and next-generation enterprise applications. To support an innovation agenda, IT is required to balance competing priorities between development and operations groups. Standardization and consolidation of computing resources are the keys to success. With our operational and technical expertise promoting business agility, Oracle Consulting's deep Middleware as a Service experience can make a significant difference to our clients by empowering enterprise IT organizations with the computing environment they seek to keep up with the pace of change that digitally driven business units expect. Depending on the needs of the organization, this environment runs within a private, public, or hybrid cloud infrastructure. Through on-demand access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources, IT delivers the standard tools and methods for developing, integrating, deploying, and scaling next-generation applications. Gold profiles of predefined configurations eliminate the version mismatches among databases, application servers, and SOA suite components, delivered both by Oracle and other enterprise ISVs. These computing resources are well defined in business terms, enabling users to select what they need from a service catalog. Striking the Balance between Development and Operations As a result, development groups have the flexibility to choose among a menu of available services with descriptions of standard business functions, service level guarantees, and costs. Faced with the consumerization of enterprise IT, they can deliver the innovative customer experiences that seamlessly integrate with underlying enterprise applications and services. This cloud-powered development and testing environment accelerates release cycles to ensure agile development and rapid deployments. At the same time, the operations group is relying on certified stacks and frameworks, tuned to predefined environments and patterns. Operators can maintain a high level of security, and continue best practices for applications/systems monitoring and management. Moreover, faced with the challenges of delivering on service level agreements (SLAs) with the business units, operators can ensure performance, scalability, and reliability of the infrastructure. The elasticity of a cloud-computing environment – the ability to rapidly add virtual machines and storage in response to computing demands -- makes a difference for hardware utilization and efficiency. Contending with Continuous Change What does it take to succeed on the promise of the cloud? As the engine for innovation and productivity in the digital age, IT must face not only the technical transformations but also the organizational challenges of the cloud. Standardizing key technologies, resources, and services through cloud computing is only one part of the cloud journey. Managing relationships among multiple department and projects over time – developing the management, governance, and monitoring capabilities within IT – is an often unmentioned but all too important second part. In fact, IT must have the organizational agility to contend with continuous change. This is where a skilled consulting services partner can play a pivotal role as a trusted advisor in the successful adoption of cloud solutions. With a lifecycle services approach to delivering innovative business solutions, Oracle Consulting Services has expertise and a portfolio of services to help enterprise customers succeed on their cloud journeys as well as other converging mega trends .

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  • Ideas for time-keeping in a webbased RPG?

    - by ashy_32bit
    I'm assigned a task of doing the preliminary research stuff for a web-based MMO RPG. Now my buggiest problem here is "web based" vs "MMO RPG". I did some research about time keeping systems and I'm totally confused as how exactly something as real-time as an MMO-RPG can work on some pull-only (unidirectional) platform like HTTP. I know there is also a turn-based alternative to time keeping but can it work in an MMO setting ? EDIT: Take a battle for example, player A (human) wants to attack Player B (also human) in the open. How does it work when when player A issues the "attack" command on player B ? how do I inform player B that he is being attacked ? and then how exactly the battle goes on between the two in an HTTP based communication channel? To my knowledge this is impossible unless you resort to another technology (HTML is 1-way, that is you can just ask server and get response, server can't update you unless being asked to. this is very well-known and simply explained). So I though maybe I can somehow change the whole timekeeping model from real-time to a more non-real-time model (towards a turn based RPG for example) and somehow work around the whole problem of "interactivity". EDIT2: It is not that I don't wanna use any server side technologies. For sure it is not gonna work client-side-only even for the most trivial of the multi-player games, let alone an RPG. So sure there would be a (probably complex) server side component to it (the so called Game Engine I suppose). The problem is not the technology that implements the logic (game mechanics) bits but the communication technology and how it limits the game mechanics abilities (like how real-time or turn based it is gonna be). HTTP is a request-response protocol meaning you get served only if you ask for it (explicitly send a GET or POST request to the server). HTTP server can not inform you if anything of interest happens in the game world unless you refresh the page (as some suggested) or you use some bi-directional tech (totally different animals) like Flash, WebSock, HTML5 etc etc. So maybe the question is: Is it possible to implement a MMORPG using only HTML5/PHP and no periodic page refreshes? if so what would be rules to make it an MMO-RPG? Can't explain it any clearer. Sorry :D

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  • Wireframing: A Day In the Life of UX Workshop at Oracle

    - by ultan o'broin
    The Oracle Applications User Experience team's Day in the Life (DITL) of User Experience (UX) event was run in Oracle's Redwood Shores HQ for Oracle Usability Advisory Board (OUAB) members. I was charged with putting together a wireframing session, together with Director of Financial Applications User Experience, Scott Robinson (@scottrobinson). Example of stunning new wireframing visuals we used on the DITL events. We put on a lively show, explaining the basics of wireframing, the concepts, what it is and isn't, considerations on wireframing tool choice, and then imparting some tips and best practices. But the real energy came when the OUAB customers and partners in the room were challenge to do some wireframing of their own. Wireframing is about bringing your business and product use cases to life in real UX visual terms, by creating a low-fidelity drawing to iterate and agree on in advance of prototyping and coding what is to be finally built and rolled out for users. All the best people wireframe. Leonardo da Vinci used "cartoons" on some great works, tracing outlines first and using red ochre or charcoal dropped through holes in the tracing parchment onto the canvas to outline the subject. (Image distributed under Wikimedia commons license) Wireframing an application's user experience design enables you to: Obtain stakeholder buy-in. Enable faster iteration of different designs. Determine the task flow navigation paths (in Oracle Fusion Applications navigation is linked with user roles). Develop a content strategy (readability, search engine optimization (SEO) of content, and so on) Lay out the pages, widgets, groups of features, and so on. Apply usability heuristics early (no replacement for usability testing, but a great way to do some heavy-lifting up front). Decide upstream which functional user experience design patterns to apply (out of the box solutions that expedite productivity). Assess which Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) or equivalent technology components can be used (again, developer productivity is enhanced downstream). We ran a lively hands-on exercise where teams wireframed a choice of application scenarios using the time-honored tools of pen and paper. Scott worked the floor like a pro, pointing out great use of features, best practices, innovations, and making sure that the whole concept of wireframing, the gestalt, transferred. "We need more buttons!" The cry of the energized. Not quite. The winning wireframe session (online shopping scenario) from the Applications UX DITL event shown. Great fun, great energy, and great teamwork were evident in the room. Naturally, there were prizes for the best wireframe. Well, actually, prizes were handed out to the other attendees too! An exciting, slightly different aspect to delivery of this session made the wireframing event one of the highlights of the day. And definitely, something we will repeat again when we get the chance. Thanks to everyone who attended, contributed, and helped organize.

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  • Impressions and Reactions from Alliance 2012

    - by user739873
    Alliance 2012 has come to a conclusion.  What strikes me about every Alliance conference is the amazing amount of collaboration and cooperation I see across higher education in the sharing of best practices around the entire Oracle PeopleSoft software suite, not just the student information system (Oracle’s PeopleSoft Campus Solutions).  In addition to the vibrant U.S. organization, it's gratifying to see the growth in the international attendance again this year, with an EMEA HEUG organizing to complement the existing groups in the Netherlands, South Africa, and the U.K.  Their first meeting is planned for London in October, and I suspect they'll be surprised at the amount of interest and attendance. In my discussions with higher education IT and functional leadership at Alliance there were a number of instances where concern was expressed about Oracle's commitment to higher education as an industry, primarily because of a lack of perceived innovation in the applications that Oracle develops for this market. Here I think perception and reality are far apart, and I'd like to explain why I believe this to be true. First let me start with what I think drives this perception. Predominately it's in two areas. The first area is the user interface, both for students and faculty that interact with the system as "customers", and for those employees of the institution (faculty, staff, and sometimes students as well) that use the system in some kind of administrative role. Because the UI hasn't changed all that much from the PeopleSoft days, individuals perceive this as a dead product with little innovation and therefore Oracle isn't investing. The second area is around the integration of the higher education suite of applications (PeopleSoft Campus Solutions) and the rest of the Oracle software assets. Whether grown organically or acquired, there is an impressive array of middleware and other software products that could be leveraged much more significantly by the higher education applications than is currently the case today. This is also perceived as lack of investment. Let me address these two points.  First the UI.  More is being done here than ever before, and the PAG and other groups where this was discussed at Alliance 2012 were more numerous than I've seen in any past meeting. Whether it's Oracle development leveraging web services or some extremely early but very promising work leveraging the recent Endeca acquisition (see some cool examples here) there are a lot of resources aimed at this issue.  There are also some amazing prototypes being developed by our UX (user experience team) that will eventually make their way into the higher education applications realm - they had an impressive setup at Alliance.  Hopefully many of you that attended found this group. If not, the senior leader for that team Jeremy Ashley will be a significant contributor of content to our summer Industry Strategy Council meeting in Washington in June. In the area of integration with other elements of the Oracle stack, this is also an area of focus for the company and my team.  We're making this a priority especially in the areas of identity management and security, leveraging WebCenter more effectively for content, imaging, and mobility, and driving towards the ultimate objective of WebLogic Suite as our platform for SOA, links to learning management systems (SAIP), and content. There is also much work around business intelligence centering on OBI applications. But at the end of the day we get enormous value from the HEUG (higher education user group) and the various subgroups formed as a part of this community that help us align and prioritize our investments, whether it's around better integration with other Oracle products or integration with partner offerings.  It's one of the healthiest, mutually beneficial relationships between customers and an Education IT concern that exists on the globe. And I can't avoid mentioning that this kind of relationship between higher education and the corporate IT community that can truly address the problems of efficiency and effectiveness, institutional excellence (which starts with IT) and student success.  It's not (in my opinion) going to be solved through community source - cost and complexity only increase in that model and in the end higher education doesn't ultimately focus on core competencies: educating, developing, and researching.  While I agree with some of what Michael A. McRobbie wrote in his EDUCAUSE Review article (Information Technology: A View from Both Sides of the President’s Desk), I take strong issue with his assertion that the "the IT marketplace is just the opposite of long-term stability...."  Sure there has been healthy, creative destruction in the past 2-3 decades, but this has had the effect of, in the aggregate, benefiting education with greater efficiency, more innovation and increased stability as larger, more financially secure firms acquire and develop integrated solutions. Cole

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  • Why is multithreading often preferred for improving performance?

    - by user1849534
    I have a question, it's about why programmers seems to love concurrency and multi-threaded programs in general. I'm considering 2 main approaches here: an async approach basically based on signals, or just an async approach as called by many papers and languages like the new C# 5.0 for example, and a "companion thread" that manages the policy of your pipeline a concurrent approach or multi-threading approach I will just say that I'm thinking about the hardware here and the worst case scenario, and I have tested this 2 paradigms myself, the async paradigm is a winner at the point that I don't get why people 90% of the time talk about multi-threading when they want to speed up things or make a good use of their resources. I have tested multi-threaded programs and async program on an old machine with an Intel quad-core that doesn't offer a memory controller inside the CPU, the memory is managed entirely by the motherboard, well in this case performances are horrible with a multi-threaded application, even a relatively low number of threads like 3-4-5 can be a problem, the application is unresponsive and is just slow and unpleasant. A good async approach is, on the other hand, probably not faster but it's not worst either, my application just waits for the result and doesn't hangs, it's responsive and there is a much better scaling going on. I have also discovered that a context change in the threading world it's not that cheap in real world scenario, it's in fact quite expensive especially when you have more than 2 threads that need to cycle and swap among each other to be computed. On modern CPUs the situation it's not really that different, the memory controller it's integrated but my point is that an x86 CPUs is basically a serial machine and the memory controller works the same way as with the old machine with an external memory controller on the motherboard. The context switch is still a relevant cost in my application and the fact that the memory controller it's integrated or that the newer CPU have more than 2 core it's not bargain for me. For what i have experienced the concurrent approach is good in theory but not that good in practice, with the memory model imposed by the hardware, it's hard to make a good use of this paradigm, also it introduces a lot of issues ranging from the use of my data structures to the join of multiple threads. Also both paradigms do not offer any security abut when the task or the job will be done in a certain point in time, making them really similar from a functional point of view. According to the X86 memory model, why the majority of people suggest to use concurrency with C++ and not just an async approach ? Also why not considering the worst case scenario of a computer where the context switch is probably more expensive than the computation itself ?

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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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  • SQL SERVER – Backing Up and Recovering the Tail End of a Transaction Log – Notes from the Field #042

    - by Pinal Dave
    [Notes from Pinal]: The biggest challenge which people face is not taking backup, but the biggest challenge is to restore a backup successfully. I have seen so many different examples where users have failed to restore their database because they made some mistake while they take backup and were not aware of the same. Tail Log backup was such an issue in earlier version of SQL Server but in the latest version of SQL Server, Microsoft team has fixed the confusion with additional information on the backup and restore screen itself. Now they have additional information, there are a few more people confused as they have no clue about this. Previously they did not find this as a issue and now they are finding tail log as a new learning. Linchpin People are database coaches and wellness experts for a data driven world. In this 42nd episode of the Notes from the Fields series database expert Tim Radney (partner at Linchpin People) explains in a very simple words, Backing Up and Recovering the Tail End of a Transaction Log. Many times when restoring a database over an existing database SQL Server will warn you about needing to make a tail end of the log backup. This might be your reminder that you have to choose to overwrite the database or could be your reminder that you are about to write over and lose any transactions since the last transaction log backup. You might be asking yourself “What is the tail end of the transaction log”. The tail end of the transaction log is simply any committed transactions that have occurred since the last transaction log backup. This is a very crucial part of a recovery strategy if you are lucky enough to be able to capture this part of the log. Most organizations have chosen to accept some amount of data loss. You might be shaking your head at this statement however if your organization is taking transaction logs backup every 15 minutes, then your potential risk of data loss is up to 15 minutes. Depending on the extent of the issue causing you to have to perform a restore, you may or may not have access to the transaction log (LDF) to be able to back up those vital transactions. For example, if the storage array or disk that holds your transaction log file becomes corrupt or damaged then you wouldn’t be able to recover the tail end of the log. If you do have access to the physical log file then you can still back up the tail end of the log. In 2013 I presented a session at the PASS Summit called “The Ultimate Tail Log Backup and Restore” and have been invited back this year to present it again. During this session I demonstrate how you can back up the tail end of the log even after the data file becomes corrupt. In my demonstration I set my database offline and then delete the data file (MDF). The database can’t become more corrupt than that. I attempt to bring the database back online to change the state to RECOVERY PENDING and then backup the tail end of the log. I can do this by specifying WITH NO_TRUNCATE. Using NO_TRUNCATE is equivalent to specifying both COPY_ONLY and CONTINUE_AFTER_ERROR. It as its name says, does not try to truncate the log. This is a great demo however how could I achieve backing up the tail end of the log if the failure destroys my entire instance of SQL and all I had was the LDF file? During my demonstration I also demonstrate that I can attach the log file to a database on another instance and then back up the tail end of the log. If I am performing proper backups then my most recent full, differential and log files should be on a server other than the one that crashed. I am able to achieve this task by creating new database with the same name as the failed database. I then set the database offline, delete my data file and overwrite the log with my good log file. I attempt to bring the database back online and then backup the log with NO_TRUNCATE just like in the first example. I encourage each of you to view my blog post and watch the video demonstration on how to perform these tasks. I really hope that none of you ever have to perform this in production, however it is a really good idea to know how to do this just in case. It really isn’t a matter of “IF” you will have to perform a restore of a production system but more of a “WHEN”. Being able to recover the tail end of the log in these sever cases could be the difference of having to notify all your business customers of data loss or not. If you want me to take a look at your server and its settings, or if your server is facing any issue we can Fix Your SQL Server. Note: Tim has also written an excellent book on SQL Backup and Recovery, a must have for everyone. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: Notes from the Field, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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  • How to determine the source of a request in a distributed service system?

    - by Kabumbus
    Map/Reduce is a great concept for sorting large quantities of data at once. What to do if you have small parts of data and you need to reduce it all the time? Simple example - choosing a service for request. Imagine we have 10 services. Each provides services host with sets of request headers and post/get arguments. Each service declares it has 30 unique keys - 10 per set. service A: name id ... Now imagine we have a distributed services host. We have 200 machines with 10 services on each. Each service has 30 unique keys in there sets. but now to find to which service to map the incoming request we make our services post unique values that map to that sets. We can have up to or more than 10 000 such values sets on each machine per each service. service A machine 1 name = Sam id = 13245 ... service A machine 1 name = Ben id = 33232 ... ... service A machine 100 name = Ron id = 777888 ... So we get 200 * 10 * 30 * 30 * 10 000 == 18 000 000 000 and we get 500 requests per second on our gateway each containing 45 items 15 of which are just noise. And our task is to find a service for request (at least a machine it is running on). On all machines all over cluster for same services we have same rules. We can first select to which service came our request via rules filter 10 * 30. and we will have 200 * 30 * 10 000 == 60 000 000. So... 60 mil is definitely a problem... I hope to get on idea of mapping 30 * 10 000 onto some artificial neural network alike Perceptron that outputs 1 if 30 words (some hashes from words) from the request are correct or if less than Perceptron should return 0. And I’ll send each such Perceptron for each service from each machine to gateway. So I would have a map Perceptron <-> machine for each service. Can any one tall me if my Perceptron idea is at least “sane”? Or normal people do it some other way? Or if there are better ANNs for such purposes?

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  • What's My Problem? What's Your Problem?

    - by Jacek Ziabicki
    Software installers are not made for building demo environments. I can say this much after 12 years (on and off) of supporting my fellow sales consultants with environments for software demonstrations. When we release software, we include installation programs and procedures that are designed for use by our clients – to build a production environment and a limited number of testing, training and development environments. Different Objectives Your priorities when building an environment for client use vs. building a demo environment are very different. In a production environment, security, stability, and performance concerns are paramount. These environments are built on a specific server and rarely, if ever, moved to a different server or different network address. There is typically just one application running on a particular server (physical or virtual). Once built, the environment will be used for months or years at a time. Because of security considerations, the installation program wants to make these environments very specific to the organization using the software and the use case, encoding a fully qualified name of the server, or even the IP address on the network, in the configuration. So you either go through the installation procedure for each environment, or learn how to clone and reconfigure the software as a separate instance to build all your non-production environments. This may not matter much if the installation is as simple as clicking on the Setup program. But for enterprise applications, you have a number of configuration settings that you need to get just right – so whether you are installing from scratch or reconfiguring an existing installation, this requires both time and expertise in the particular piece of software. If you need a setup of several applications that are integrated to talk to one another, it is a whole new level of complexity. Now you need the expertise in all of the applications involved (plus the supporting technology products), and in addition to making each application work, you also have to configure the integration endpoints. Each application needs the URLs and credentials to call the integration layer, and the integration must be able to call each application. Then you have to make sure that each app has the right data so a business process initiated in one application can continue in the next. And, you will need to check that each application has the correct version and patch level for the integration to work. When building demo environments, your #1 concern is agility. If you can get away with a small number of long-running environments, you are lucky. More likely, you may get a request for a dedicated environment for a demonstration that is two weeks away: how quickly can you make this available so we still have the time to build the client-specific data? We are running a hands-on workshop next month, and we’ll need 15 instances of application X environment so each student can have a separate server for the exercises. We cannot connect to our data center from the client site, the client’s security policy won’t allow our VPN to go through – so we need a portable environment that we can bring with us. Our consultants need to be able to work at the hotel, airport, and the airplane, so we really want an environment that can run on a laptop. The client will need two playpen environments running in the cloud, accessible from their network, for a series of workshops that start two weeks from now. We have seen all of these scenarios and more. Here you would be much better served by a generic installation that would be easy to clone. Welcome to the Wonder Machine The reason I started this blog is to share a particular design of a demo environment, a special way to install software, that can address the above requirements, even for integrated setups. This design was created by a team at Oracle Utilities Global Business Unit, and we are using this setup for most of our demo environments. In a bout of modesty we called it the Wonder Machine. Over the next few posts – think of it as a novel in parts – I will tell you about the big idea, how it was implemented and what you can do with it. After we have laid down the groundwork, I would like to share some tips and tricks for users of our Wonder Machine implementation, as well as things I am learning about building portable, cloneable environments. The Wonder Machine is by no means a closed specification, it is under active development! I am hoping this blog will be of interest to two groups of readers – the users of the Wonder Machine we have built at Oracle Utilities, who want to get the most out of their demo environments and be able to reconfigure it to their needs – and to people who need to build environments for demonstration, testing, training, development and would like to make them cloneable and portable to maximize the reuse of their effort. Surely we are not the only ones facing this problem? If you can think of a better way to solve it, or if you can help us improve on our concept, I will appreciate your comments!

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  • Taking the Plunge - or Dipping Your Toe - into the Fluffy IAM Cloud by Paul Dhanjal (Simeio Solutions)

    - by Greg Jensen
    In our last three posts, we’ve examined the revolution that’s occurring today in identity and access management (IAM). We looked at the business drivers behind the growth of cloud-based IAM, the shortcomings of the old, last-century IAM models, and the new opportunities that federation, identity hubs and other new cloud capabilities can provide by changing the way you interact with everyone who does business with you. In this, our final post in the series, we’ll cover the key things you, the enterprise architect, should keep in mind when considering moving IAM to the cloud. Invariably, what starts the consideration process is a burning business need: a compliance requirement, security vulnerability or belt-tightening edict. Many on the business side view IAM as the “silver bullet” – and for good reason. You can almost always devise a solution using some aspect of IAM. The most critical question to ask first when using IAM to address the business need is, simply: is my solution complete? Typically, “business” is not focused on the big picture. Understandably, they’re focused instead on the need at hand: Can we be HIPAA compliant in 6 months? Can we tighten our new hire, employee transfer and termination processes? What can we do to prevent another password breach? Can we reduce our service center costs by the end of next quarter? The business may not be focused on the complete set of services offered by IAM but rather a single aspect or two. But it is the job – indeed the duty – of the enterprise architect to ensure that all aspects are being met. It’s like remodeling a house but failing to consider the impact on the foundation, the furnace or the zoning or setback requirements. While the homeowners may not be thinking of such things, the architect, of course, must. At Simeio Solutions, the way we ensure that all aspects are being taken into account – to expose any gaps or weaknesses – is to assess our client’s IAM capabilities against a five-step maturity model ranging from “ad hoc” to “optimized.” The model we use is similar to Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) developed by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University. It’s based upon some simple criteria, which can provide a visual representation of how well our clients fair when evaluated against four core categories: ·         Program Governance ·         Access Management (e.g., Single Sign-On) ·         Identity and Access Governance (e.g., Identity Intelligence) ·         Enterprise Security (e.g., DLP and SIEM) Often our clients believe they have a solution with all the bases covered, but the model exposes the gaps or weaknesses. The gaps are ideal opportunities for the cloud to enter into the conversation. The complete process is straightforward: 1.    Look at the big picture, not just the immediate need – what is our roadmap and how does this solution fit? 2.    Determine where you stand with respect to the four core areas – what are the gaps? 3.    Decide how to cover the gaps – what role can the cloud play? Returning to our home remodeling analogy, at some point, if gaps or weaknesses are discovered when evaluating the complete impact of the proposed remodel – if the existing foundation wouldn’t support the new addition, for example – the owners need to decide if it’s time to move to a new house instead of trying to remodel the old one. However, with IAM it’s not an either-or proposition – i.e., either move to the cloud or fix the existing infrastructure. It’s possible to use new cloud technologies just to cover the gaps. Many of our clients start their migration to the cloud this way, dipping in their toe instead of taking the plunge all at once. Because our cloud services offering is based on the Oracle Identity and Access Management Suite, we can offer a tremendous amount of flexibility in this regard. The Oracle platform is not a collection of point solutions, but rather a complete, integrated, best-of-breed suite. Yet it’s not an all-or-nothing proposition. You can choose just the features and capabilities you need using a pay-as-you-go model, incrementally turning on and off services as needed. Better still, all the other capabilities are there, at the ready, whenever you need them. Spooling up these cloud-only services takes just a fraction of the time it would take a typical organization to deploy internally. SLAs in the cloud may be higher than on premise, too. And by using a suite of software that’s complete and integrated, you can dramatically lower cost and complexity. If your in-house solution cannot be migrated to the cloud, you might consider using hardware appliances such as Simeio’s Cloud Interceptor to extend your enterprise out into the network. You might also consider using Expert Managed Services. Cost is usually the key factor – not just development costs but also operational sustainment costs. Talent or resourcing issues often come into play when thinking about sustaining a program. Expert Managed Services such as those we offer at Simeio can address those concerns head on. In a cloud offering, identity and access services lend to the new paradigms described in my previous posts. Most importantly, it allows us all to focus on what we're meant to do – provide value, lower costs and increase security to our respective organizations. It’s that magic “silver bullet” that business knew you had all along. If you’d like to talk more, you can find us at simeiosolutions.com.

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  • How employable am I as a programmer?

    - by dsimcha
    I'm currently a Ph.D. student in Biomedical Engineering with a concentration in computational biology and am starting to think about what I want to do after graduate school. I feel like I've accumulated a lot of programming skills while in grad school, but taken a very non-traditional path to learning all this stuff. I'm wondering whether I would have an easy time getting hired as a programmer and could fall back on that if I can't find a good job directly in my field, and if so whether I would qualify for a more prestigious position than "code monkey". Things I Have Going For Me Approximately 4 years of experience programming as part of my research. I believe I have a solid enough grasp of the fundamentals that I could pick up new languages and technologies pretty fast, and could demonstrate this in an interview. Good math and statistics skills. An extensive portfolio of open source work (and the knowledge that working on these projects implies): I wrote a statistics library in D, mostly from scratch. I wrote a parallelism library (parallel map, reduce, foreach, task parallelism, pipelining, etc.) that is currently in review for adoption by the D standard library. I wrote a 2D plotting library for D against the GTK Cairo backend. I currently use it for most of the figures I make for my research. I've contributed several major performance optimizations to the D garbage collector. (Most of these were low-hanging fruit, but it still shows my knowledge of low-level issues like memory management, pointers and bit twiddling.) I've contributed lots of miscellaneous bug fixes to the D standard library and could show the change logs to prove it. (This demonstrates my ability read other people's code.) Things I Have Going Against Me Most of my programming experience is in D and Python. I have very little to virtually no experience in the more established, "enterprise-y" languages like Java, C# and C++, though I have learned a decent amount about these languages from small, one-off projects and discussions about language design in the D community. In general I have absolutely no knowledge of "enterprise-y" technlogies. I've never used a framework before, possibly because most reusable code for scientific work and for D tends to call itself a "library" instead. I have virtually no formal computer science/software engineering training. Almost all of my knowledge comes from talking to programming geek friends, reading blogs, forums, StackOverflow, etc. I have zero professional experience with the official title of "developer", "software engineer", or something similar.

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  • What is 'Ubuntu Unity' (for the Desktop)?

    - by Martin
    Ok, so there's the buzz of Canonical (wanting to) switch for new Ubuntu version from the GNOME default desktop to their own Unity shell. (I hope that's accurate.) It seems I can not totally fathom what Unity actually is. For looking at its homepage it currently is firmly targeted at netbooks and the somehow different usage model on these. Is it a classical desktop? -- Taskbar? Shortcuts? Is the difference between Ubuntu(GNOME)+Unity more/less pronounced than the difference between Ubuntu and Kubuntu? Will "my parents" be able to get the interface if they've been using the classical gnome desktop so far? Edit: I would not like to split this up into more specific questions, as What is Unity? is exactly what the people I set up Ubuntu boxes for will ask me if they hear that the newer Ubuntu version is using that instead of the Desktop -- and it might well happen someone phrases it like that :-) I will certainly not give them the link to the HP as the explanation there does not lay out if it is a desktop or something more or something less: (It does not for me - therefore I'm asking here.) Unity is designed for netbooks and related touch-based devices. It includes [...] that makes it fast and easy to access [...] while removing screen elements that are rarely used in mobile and netbook computing. (emphasis mine) -- the explanation there doesn't even mention the desktop-PC! Unity has a vertical task management panel on the left-hand side and a menu panel at the top of the screen. [...] This sounds like a re-themed normal desktop. Clicking on an icon will give the target application focus if it is already running or launch it if it is not already running. If you click the ... Aha. Sounds like Windows 7. ... icon of an application that already has focus, Unity will activate an Expose-style view of all the open windows associated with that application. No clue what that's supposed to be. So it would really be nice if someone could explain for non desktop-design-terms experts what Unity is.

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  • Headaches using distributed version control for traditional teams?

    - by J Cooper
    Though I use and like DVCS for my personal projects, and can totally see how it makes managing contributions to your project from others easier (e.g. your typical Github scenario), it seems like for a "traditional" team there could be some problems over the centralized approach employed by solutions like TFS, Perforce, etc. (By "traditional" I mean a team of developers in an office working on one project that no one person "owns", with potentially everyone touching the same code.) A couple of these problems I've foreseen on my own, but please chime in with other considerations. In a traditional system, when you try to check your change in to the server, if someone else has previously checked in a conflicting change then you are forced to merge before you can check yours in. In the DVCS model, each developer checks in their changes locally and at some point pushes to some other repo. That repo then has a branch of that file that 2 people changed. It seems that now someone must be put in charge of dealing with that situation. A designated person on the team might not have sufficient knowledge of the entire codebase to be able to handle merging all conflicts. So now an extra step has been added where someone has to approach one of those developers, tell him to pull and do the merge and then push again (or you have to build an infrastructure that automates that task). Furthermore, since DVCS tends to make working locally so convenient, it is probable that developers could accumulate a few changes in their local repos before pushing, making such conflicts more common and more complicated. Obviously if everyone on the team only works on different areas of the code, this isn't an issue. But I'm curious about the case where everyone is working on the same code. It seems like the centralized model forces conflicts to be dealt with quickly and frequently, minimizing the need to do large, painful merges or have anyone "police" the main repo. So for those of you who do use a DVCS with your team in your office, how do you handle such cases? Do you find your daily (or more likely, weekly) workflow affected negatively? Are there any other considerations I should be aware of before recommending a DVCS at my workplace?

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  • Is it okay to have people with multiple roles in a Scrum team?

    - by Wayne M
    I'm evaluating some Agile-style methodologies for possible introduction to my team. With Scrum, is it allowable to have the same person perform multiple roles? We have a small team of four developers and a web designer; we don't really have a lead (I fulfill this role), QA testers or business analysts, and all of our development tasks come from the CIO. Automated testing is seen as a total waste of time, and everything focuses on speed and not quality. What will happen is the CIO will come up with a development task (whether a feature or a bug) and give it to a developer (not to the whole team, to an individual, often in private or out of the blue) who is then expected to get it completed. The CIO doesn't gather requirements beyond the initial idea (and this has bitten us before as we'll implement something only to find out that none of the end users can use the feature, because they weren't consulted or even informed about it before we developed it, and in a panic we'll be told to revert the change) but requires say in/approval of everything that we do. First things first, is a Scrum style something to consider to introduce some standards and practices? From reading, Scrum seems to rely on a bit more trust and communication and focuses more on project management than on development, which is something we are completely devoid of as we don't have any semblance of project management at present. Second, if it can work is it unreasonable for someone, let's say myself, to act as both ScrumMaster and a developer? Or for a developer to also be the Product Owner (although chances are this will be the CIO, who isn't a developer)? I realize the Scrum Master and the Product Owner should be different people but at the same time I don't think we have anyone who has the qualities of a Product Owner (chances are it would turn into a "I need all these stories, I don't care how but get it done" type of deal and/or any freeze would be unfrozen on a whim). It seems to me that I might need to pick and choose pieces of Scrum/XP/Lean to compensate for how things are done currently, as it's highly unlikely that the mentality can be changed; for instance Pair Programming would never fly (seen as a waste, you get half the tasks done if you need two people for everything), TDD would be a hard sell, but short cycles would be welcomed.

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  • Is your dream an international experience?

    - by Maria Sandu
    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-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Studying in Poland, having two summer jobs in England, doing one internship in India, working in Thailand for half a year and now working in Prague. Does it seem an adventure? Well it is and I will tell you how I came to have this international experience. Dzien Dobry! My name is Wojciech Jurojc, I am Polish and I am currently a Business Development Consultant within Oracle, based in Prague. I joined Oracle on the 1st of August 2011. I graduated in 2010 and obtained 2 Masters Degrees in Political Science and Economics. I would like to tell you more about my past and how I joined Oracle. In 2005 I began studying at the Faculty of Political Sciences Gdansk University. In 2008, I obtained a Bachelors Degree. During these three years I had the opportunity to go to England twice, where I worked as a Bartender, first in Blackpool and then in Manchester. This allowed me to improve my language skills and become more confident. In the meantime, I joined the International Student Organization-AIESEC, where I was organized conferences and conducted student projects. Also I met a mass of interesting people from around the world. After graduation in 2008, I was able to get an Internship within a big company in Poland. I worked there as an Intern in the Purchase Department. That was my first adventure within a corporate environment. I learnt a lot about purchasing processes and negotiations. In September 2008, I started studying two Masters Faculties: Political Science and Economics. It was very difficult, but it was not impossible. Over the next two years of studying I was able to go on a three month internship to India where I worked as a Marketing Assistant in an NGO. I was travelling around northern India and did presentations to the academic community about green energy and environmental projects. I had the opportunity to visit Nepal and walked in the Himalayas. That was a huge experience as well as a cultural shock. It taught me how to deal with many problems and to appreciate what I have. At the end of 2009 I was working as a Marketing Assistant for a Leasing company, where I learnt useful sales knowledge and improved my objection handling skills. In July 2010, I graduated with a double Masters and found a job in Thailand as Sales Representative in an IT company. I worked in Thailand until the end of January 2011. Besides that, I was working in an International company with interesting people and I had the opportunity to travel around Thailand and visit Cambodia. After this adventure I started looking for jobs in Europe where I could further develop my sales skills. I found Oracle and I don’t regret this decision which I made. I am currently working in Prague in an international Hardware team and I know that is not the end of my adventures. At this moment, I am working in a team of 12 members. Ten of them are based in Prague and 2 others are based in Russia. We come from different countries such as: Czech Republic, Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, Slovakia and Kazakhstan. I am working on the Polish market, cooperating with our Hardware customers and partners. What do I enjoy the most about my job? I enjoy every challenge that I face in my daily activities as there are always new experiences for me and new things that I learn. As part of Oracle, I gain international exposure and therefore more career opportunities to explore. I have planned my next step for the career path I dream of and I am currently working on it. I recommend you check our Career Page if you’re looking for an international career. If you want to find out more about our job opportunities, follow us on https://campus.oracle.com .

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  • Common SOA Problems by C2B2

    - by JuergenKress
    SOA stands for Service Oriented Architecture and has only really come together as a concrete approach in the last 15 years or so, although the concepts involved have been around for longer. Oracle SOA Suite is based around the Service Component Architecture (SCA) devised by the Open SOA collaboration of companies including Oracle and IBM. SCA, as used in SOA suite, is designed as a way to crystallise the concepts of SOA into a standard which ensures that SOA principles like the separation of application and business logic are maintained. Orchestration or Integration? A common thing to see with many people who are beginning to either build a new SOA based infrastructure, or move an old system to be service oriented, is confusion in the purpose of SOA technologies like BPEL and enterprise service buses. For a lot of problems, orchestration tools like BPEL or integration tools like an ESB will both do the job and achieve the right objectives; however it’s important to remember that, although a hammer can be used to drive a screw into wood, that doesn’t mean it’s the best way to do it. Service Integration is the act of connecting components together at a low level, which usually results in a single external endpoint for you to expose to your customers or other teams within your organisation – a simple product ordering system, for example, might integrate a stock checking service and a payment processing service. Process Orchestration, however, is generally a higher level approach whereby the (often externally exposed) service endpoints are brought together to track an end-to-end business process. This might include the earlier example of a product ordering service and couple it with a business rules service and human task to handle edge-cases. A good (but not exhaustive) rule-of-thumb is that integrations performed by an ESB will usually be real-time, whereas process orchestration in a SOA composite might comprise processes which take a certain amount of time to complete, or have to wait pending manual intervention. BPEL vs BPMN For some, with pre-existing SOA or business process projects, this decision is effectively already made. For those embarking on new projects it’s certainly an important consideration for those using Oracle SOA software since, due to the components included in SOA Suite and BPM Suite, the choice of which to buy is determined by what they offer. Oracle SOA suite has no BPMN engine, whereas BPM suite has both a BPMN and a BPEL engine. SOA suite has the ESB component “Mediator”, whereas BPM suite has none. Decisions must be made, therefore, on whether just one or both process modelling languages are to be used. The wrong decision could be costly further down the line. Design for performance: Read the complete article here. SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Wiki Technorati Tags: C2B2,SOA best practice,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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  • How do I take responsibility for my code when colleague makes unnecessary improvements without notice?

    - by Jesslyn
    One of my teammates is a jack of all trades in our IT shop and I respect his insight. However, sometimes he reviews my code (he's second in command to our team leader, so that's expected) without a heads up. So sometimes he reviews my changes before they complete the end goal and makes changes right away... and has even broken my work once. Other times, he has made unnecessary improvements to some of my code that is 3+ months old. This annoys me for a few reasons: I am not always given a chance to fix my mistakes He has not taken the time to ask me what I was trying to accomplish when he is confused, which could affect his testing or changes I don't always think his code is readable Deadlines are not an issue and his current workload doesn't require any work in my projects other than reviewing my code changes. Anyways, I have told him in the past to please keep me posted if he sees something in my work that he wants to change so that I could take ownership of my code (maybe I should have said "shortcomings") and he's not been responsive. I fear that I may come off as aggressive when I ask him to explain his changes to me. He's just a quiet person who keeps to himself, but his actions continue. I don't want to banish him from making code changes (not like I could), because we are a team--but I want to do my part to help our team. Added clarifications: We share 1 development branch. I do not wait until all my changes complete a single task because I risk losing some significant work--so I make sure my changes build and do not break anything. My concern is that my teammate doesn't explain the reason or purpose behind his changes. I don't think he should need my blessing, but if we disagree on an approach I thought it would be best to discuss the pros and cons and make a decision once we both understand what is going on. I have not discussed this with our team lead yet as I would prefer to resolve personal disagreements without getting management involved unless it is necessary. Since my concern seemed more of personal issue than a threat to our work, I chose to not bother the team lead. I am working on code review process ideas--to help promote the benefits of more organized code reviews without making it all about my pet peeves.

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  • At $20/month Windows Azure host my website with 99.97% uptime

    - by Gopinath
    Couple of years ago a reliable and decent performing Windows hosting was not affordable to many enthusiastic developers who want to try a startup idea or build a hobby site. I tried to start an ASP.NET website few years ago to provide services like – Mobile Tracing, Vehicle Tracing. But due to high cost of Windows hosting I developed those services using PHP (not an easy task for .NET developer) and hosted on them Linux servers.  But with recent evolution of Windows Azure, hosting ASP.NET websites on highly reliable servers is affordable. Today anyone can host a high responsive and available ASP.NET website for just $20/month using Windows Azure. My website coziie.com is running on Windows Azure and serves close to quarter millions visitors a month with 99.97% of uptime and most of the page load times are less than 3 seconds. All I spend to run this website is just around $20, if you translate it to India rupees its roughly Rs.1000. The web sever of coziie.com is powered by a single Extra Small Web role instance and the backend is powered by a SQL Azure instance. Azure is quite impressive to provide 99.97% of uptime. Response times during peak are around 3 seconds and on nomarl loads it is around 1.5 seconds. Here is the report of uptime provided by Royal Pingdom over last one year For just $20/month Windows Azure takes care of the following apart from hosting Patches up Windows OS to the latest version Upgrades ASP.NET to the latest version – coziie.com is running on ASP.NET MVC 3 and soon I’ll upgrade it to ASP.NET MVC 4 Hosts data on latest and best version Sql Server database SQL Azure maintains 3 copies of database and automatically recovers in case of server failures and disasters. I never worry about database backups/restore. Provides staging environment for deploying applications for testing purpose and move them to production – I upgrade  twice a month on average With Windows Azure I no longer focus on server maintenance or data backups. They are taken up by Microsoft team and I just focus on building my website. Wish there is a low cost Linux version of Windows Azure so that I can stop worrying about server maintenance of this blog!! If you are looking for a Windows hosting, look no further than Windows Azure. If you find $20/month is a bit expensive to start with you may explore Azure Website (sort of shared hosted environment) which is free to start with and as your traffic grows you can move to paid hosting.

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  • How do we provide valid time estimates during Sprint Planning without doing "too much" design?

    - by Michael Edenfield
    My team is getting up to speed with Scrum, but most of us are more familiar with non-agile or "pseudo-"agile methodologies. The part that is the biggest hurdle for us is running an efficient Sprint Planning meeting where we break our backlog items into tasks, and estimate hours. (I'm using the terminology from the VS2010 Scrum Template; apologies if I use the wrong word somewhere.) When we try to figure out how long a task is going to take, we often fall into the trap of designing the feature at the code level -- table layout, interfaces, etc -- in order to figure out how long that's going to take. I'm pretty sure this is not the appropriate place to be doing that kind of design. We should be scheduling tasks for these design meetings during the sprint. However, we are having trouble figuring out how else to come up with meaningful estimates for the tasks. Are there any practical habits/techniques/etc. for making a judgement call about how long a feature is going to take, without knowing how you plan to implement it? If our time estimates are going to change significantly once the design has been completed, how can we properly budget our Sprint backlog ahead of time? EDIT: Just to clarify, since some of the comments/answers are very valid but I think addressing the wrong question. We know that what we're doing is not right, and that we should be building time into the sprint for this design. Conceptually all of the developers understand that. We also also bringing in a team member with Scrum experience to keep us on track if we start going off into the weeds. The problem is that, without going through this design process, we are finding it difficult to provide concrete time estimates for anything. We are constantly saying things like "well if we design it this way it might take 8 hours but if we end up having to do this other way instead that will take about 32 but it might not be as bad once we start trying to write it...". I also assume that this process will get better once we have some historical velocity to work from, but many of the technologies and architectural patterns we are using are new to us. But if potentially-wildly-wrong estimates are just a natural part of adapting this process then we will just need to recondition ourselves to accept that :)

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  • Move Data into the Grid for Scalable, Predictable Response Times

    - by JuergenKress
    CloudTran is pleased to introduce the availability of the CloudTran Transaction and Persistence Manager for creating scalable, reliable data services on the Oracle Coherence In-Memory Data Grid (IMDG). Use of IMDG architectures has been key to handling today’s web-scale loads because it eliminates database latency by storing important and frequently access data in memory instead of on disk. The CloudTran product lets developers easily use an IMDG for full ACID-compliant transactions without having to be concerned about the location or spread of data. The system has its own implementation of fast, scalable distributed transactions that does NOT depend on XA protocols but still guarantees all ACID properties. Plus, CloudTran asynchronously replicates data going into the IMDG to back-end datastores and back-up data centers, again ensuring ACID properties. CloudTran can be accessed through Java Persistence API (JPA via TopLink Grid) and now, through a new Low-Level API, or LLAPI. This is ideal for use in SOA applications that need data reliability, high availability, performance, and scalability. Still in limited beta release, the LLAPI gives developers the ability to use standard put/remove logic available in Coherence and then wrap logic with simple Spring annotations or XML+AspectJ to start transactions. An important feature of LLAPI is the ability to join transactions. This is a common outcome for SOA applications that need to reduce network traffic by aggregating data into single cache entries and then doing SOA service processing in the node holding the data. This results in the need to orchestrate transaction processing across multiple service calls. CloudTran has the capability to handle these “multi-client” transactions at speed with no loss in ACID properties. Developing software around an IMDG like Oracle Coherence is an important choice for today’s web-scale applications and services. But this introduces new architectural considerations to maintain scalability in light of increased network loads and data movement. Without using CloudTran, developers are faced with an incredibly difficult task to ensure data reliability, availability, performance, and scalability when working with an IMDG. Working with highly distributed data that is entirely volatile while stored in memory presents numerous edge cases where failures can result in data loss. The CloudTran product takes care of all of this, leaving developers with the confidence and peace of mind that all data is processed correctly. For those interested in evaluating the CloudTran product and IMDGs, take a look at this link for more information: http://www.CloudTran.com/downloadAPI.php, or, send your questions to [email protected]. WebLogic Partner Community For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. BlogTwitterLinkedInMixForumWiki Technorati Tags: Coherence,cloudtran,cache,WebLogic Community,Oracle,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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  • Oracle Cloud Applications: The Right Ingredients Baked In

    - by yaldahhakim
    v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 false 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;} Oracle Cloud Applications: The Right Ingredients Baked In Eggs, flour, milk, and sugar. The magic happens when you mix these ingredients together. The same goes for the hottest technologies fast changing how IT impacts our organizations today: cloud, social, mobile, and big data. By themselves they’re pretty good; combining them with a great recipe is what unlocks real transformation power. Choosing the right cloud can be very similar to choosing the right cake. First consider comparing the core ingredients that go into baking a cake and the core design principles in building a cloud-based application. For instance, if flour is the base ingredient of a cake, then rich functionality that spans complete business processes is the base of an enterprise-grade cloud. Cloud computing is more than just consuming an "application as service", and having someone else manage it for you. Rather, the value of cloud is about making your business more agile in the marketplace, and shortening the time it takes to deliver and adopt new innovation. It’s also about improving not only the efficiency at which we communicate but the actual quality of the information shared as well. Data from different systems, like ingredients in a cake, must also be blended together effectively and evaluated through a consolidated lens. When this doesn’t happen, for instance when data in your sales cloud doesn't seamlessly connect with your order management and other “back office” applications, the speed and quality of information can decrease drastically. It’s like mixing ingredients in a strainer with a straw – you just can’t bring it all together without losing something. Mixing ingredients is similar to bringing clouds together, and co-existing cloud applications with traditional on premise applications. This is where a shared services  platform built on open standards and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is critical. It’s essentially a cloud recipe that calls for not only great ingredients, but also ingredients you can get locally or most likely already have in your kitchen (or IT shop.) Open standards is the best way to deliver a cost effective, durable application integration strategy – regardless of where your apps are deployed. It’s also the best way to build your own cloud applications, or extend the ones you consume from a third party. Just like using standard ingredients and tools you already have in your kitchen, a standards based cloud enables your IT resources to ensure a cloud works easily with other systems. Your IT staff can also make changes using tools they are already familiar with. Or even more ideal, enable business users to actually tailor their experience without having to call upon IT for help at all. This frees IT resources to focus more on developing new innovative services for the organization vs. run and maintain. Carrying the cake analogy forward, you need to add all the ingredients in before you bake it. The same is true with a modern cloud. To harness the full power of cloud, you can’t leave out some of the most important ingredients and just layer them on top later. This is what a lot of our niche competitors have done when it comes to social, mobile, big data and analytics, and other key technologies impacting the way we do business. The transformational power of these technology trends comes from having a strategy from the get-go that combines them into a winning recipe, and delivers them in a unified way. In looking at ways Oracle’s cloud is different from other clouds – not only is breadth of functionality rich across functional pillars like CRM, HCM, ERP, etc. but it embeds social, mobile, and rich intelligence capabilities where they make the most sense across business processes. This strategy enables the Oracle Cloud to uniquely deliver on all three of these dimensions to help our customers unlock the full power of these transformational technologies.

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  • Event Driven Behavior Tree: deterministic traversal order with parallel

    - by Heisenbug
    I've studied several articles and listen some talks about behavior trees (mostly the resources available on AIGameDev by Alex J. Champandard). I'm particularly interested on event driven behavior trees, but I have still some doubts on how to implement them correctly using a scheduler. Just a quick recap: Standard Behavior Tree Each execution tick the tree is traversed from the root in depth-first order The execution order is implicitly expressed by the tree structure. So in the case of behaviors parented to a parallel node, even if both children are executed during the same traversing, the first leaf is always evaluated first. Event Driven BT During the first traversal the nodes (tasks) are enqueued using a scheduler which is responsible for updating only running ones every update The first traversal implicitly produce a depth-first ordered queue in the scheduler Non leaf nodes stays suspended mostly of the time. When a leaf node terminate(either with success or fail status) the parent (observer) is waked up allowing the tree traversing to continue and new tasks will be enqueued in the scheduler Without parallel nodes in the tree there will be up to 1 task running in the scheduler Without parallel nodes, the tasks in the queue(excluding dynamic priority implementation) will be always ordered in a depth-first order (is this right?) Now, from what is my understanding of a possible implementation, there are 2 requirements I think must be respected(I'm not sure though): Now, some requirements I think needs to be guaranteed by a correct implementation are: The result of the traversing should be independent from which implementation strategy is used. The traversing result must be deterministic. I'm struggling trying to guarantee both in the case of parallel nodes. Here's an example: Parallel_1 -->Sequence_1 ---->leaf_A ---->leaf_B -->leaf_C Considering a FIFO policy of the scheduler, before leaf_A node terminates the tasks in the scheduler are: P1(suspended),S1(suspended),leaf_A(running),leaf_C(running) When leaf_A terminate leaf_B will be scheduled (at the end of the queue), so the queue will become: P1(suspended),S1(suspended),leaf_C(running),leaf_B(running) In this case leaf_B will be executed after leaf_C at every update, meanwhile with a non event-driven traversing from the root node, the leaf_B will always be evaluated before leaf_A. So I have a couple of question: do I have understand correctly how event driven BT work? How can I guarantee the depth first order is respected with such an implementation? is this a common issue or am I missing something?

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  • Small hiccup with VMware Player after upgrading to Ubuntu 12.04

    The upgrade process Finally, it was time to upgrade to a new LTS version of Ubuntu - 12.04 aka Precise Pangolin. I scheduled the weekend for this task and despite the nickname of Mauritius (Cyber Island) it took roughly 6 hours to download nearly 2.400 packages. No problem in general, as I have spare machines to work on, and it was weekend anyway. All went very smooth and only a few packages required manual attention due to local modifications in the configuration. With the new kernel 3.2.0-24 it was necessary to reboot the system and compared to the last upgrade, I got my graphical login as expected. Compilation of VMware Player 4.x fails A quick test on the installed applications, Firefox, Thunderbird, Chromium, Skype, CrossOver, etc. reveils that everything is fine in general. Firing up VMware Player displays the known kernel mod dialog that requires to compile the modules for the newly booted kernel. Usually, this isn't a big issue but this time I was confronted with the situation that vmnet didn't compile as expected ("Failed to compile module vmnet"). Luckily, this issue is already well-known, even though with "Failed to compile module vmmon" as general reason but nevertheless it was very easy and quick to find the solution to this problem. In VMware Communities there are several forum threads related to this topic and VMware provides the necessary patch file for Workstation 8.0.2 and Player 4.0.2. In case that you are still on Workstation 7.x or Player 3.x there is another patch file available. After download extract the file like so: tar -xzvf vmware802fixlinux320.tar.gz and run the patch script as super-user: sudo ./patch-modules_3.2.0.sh This will alter the existing installation and source files of VMware Player on your machine. As last step, which isn't described in many other resources, you have to restart the vmware service, or for the heart-fainted, just reboot your system: sudo service vmware restart This will load the newly created kernel modules into your userspace, and after that VMware Player will start as usual. Summary Upgrading any derivate of Ubuntu, in my case Xubuntu, is quick and easy done but it might hold some surprises from time to time. Nonetheless, it is absolutely worthy to go for it. Currently, this patch for VMware is the only obstacle I had to face so far and my system feels and looks better than before. Happy upgrade! Resources I used the following links based on Google search results: http://communities.vmware.com/message/1902218#1902218http://weltall.heliohost.org/wordpress/2012/01/26/vmware-workstation-8-0-2-player-4-0-2-fix-for-linux-kernel-3-2-and-3-3/ Update on VMware Player 4.0.3 Please continue to read on my follow-up article in case that you upgraded either VMware Workstation 8.0.3 or VMware Player 4.0.3.

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