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• Revisioning the CeBIT 2011

  - by hechtsuppe

  Hey guys, I am living in the CeBIT's hometown, the beautiful city Hanover. So I am visiting this exhibition since 2002 and I've seen a lot of changes during all this time. But this time, it was the most boring fair I've ever seen. Lets start with the first halls: "The same procedure as every year"- directly behind the entrance are the exhibitioners from far east (China, Taiwan...). In the past, they've shown a lot of nice toys. But this time, they got very serious, the only great gimmick was the motorcycle suitcase for the iPad, I watched the presentation until I reminded myself that I am not owning an iPad and these cases weren't suitable for my BMW motorcycle. So I started looking for the business stuff (I was there for business). I walked deeper in the exhibition area: During the way to the business halls, I came across a hall where I heard a big bass- the gamer's hall I think so I made a quick getaway from there. I saw a lot of teenagers with gaming bags on thier shoulders and I was really confused. I thought 'Damn it is tuesday 11:00 am, the trade fair is opened for public on saturday, why they are here and not at school?'. So the german schools seem to be too easy for students. At the time I was a pupil I visited the CeBIT on saturday! At the business halls: I visited IBM's booth but there were only guys looking like penguins and I weared a white chemise. So nobody was interested in talking to me. At the coffeebar I met a very nice guy from Bangladesh I think he was round about 25, but he told me that he was the first time in germany and he thought that germans are still nazis. I laughed at him and went to DELL. I was really really really interested in client solutions from DELL because I want to get away from our current client manufacturer. At the DELL booth I became recognized and a really nice guy told me where to use which client products. But there were too many people for trying the notebooks so the DELL guy asked for my business card. But I am still waiting for information, dear 'DELL dude'. I went to the Microsoft booth for informing myself about new IT trends. There were nothig new, only a few presentations about the 'new' Windows Live, Windows Phone 7 and 'the allmighty cloud'. But there was a very small presentation corner with the title 'geeks corner'. A guy inside the 'geeks corner' started Visual Studio 2010, I was really agog for the presentation. But then he started talking about Windows Phone 7 and how to program. He began with drag'n drop a textbox and a button on the form. He wrote really basic code and explained the functionality of a textbox- then I stood up and left the room. At the end: Before leaving the fairground, I've visited a few small booths and the big anti-virus program companies. But there was nothing new, I was really disappointed  this year. I've seen only ten exhibition babes and the rest of the week I stood ~3 hours in traffic jams. But I really love the flair in the whole town during this exhibition. The people in the city railways, which are really confused and the people in the pubs. Cheers Vince

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• The enterprise vendor con - connecting SSD's using SATA 2 (3Gbits) thus limiting there performance

  - by tonyrogerson

  When comparing SSD against Hard drive performance it really makes me cross when folk think comparing an array of SSD running on 3GBits/sec to hard drives running on 6GBits/second is somehow valid. In a paper from DELL (http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pvaul/en/PowerEdge-PowerVaultH800-CacheCade-final.pdf) on increasing database performance using the DELL PERC H800 with Solid State Drives they compare four SSD drives connected at 3Gbits/sec against ten 10Krpm drives connected at 6Gbits [Tony slaps forehead while shouting DOH!]. It is true in the case of hard drives it probably doesn’t make much difference 3Gbit or 6Gbit because SAS and SATA are both end to end protocols rather than shared bus architecture like SCSI, so the hard drive doesn’t share bandwidth and probably can’t get near the 600MiBytes/second throughput that 6Gbit gives unless you are doing contiguous reads, in my own tests on a single 15Krpm SAS disk using IOMeter (8 worker threads, queue depth of 16 with a stripe size of 64KiB, an 8KiB transfer size on a drive formatted with an allocation size of 8KiB for a 100% sequential read test) I only get 347MiBytes per second sustained throughput at an average latency of 2.87ms per IO equating to 44.5K IOps, ok, if that was 3GBits it would be less – around 280MiBytes per second, oh, but wait a minute [...fingers tap desk] You’ll struggle to find in the commodity space an SSD that doesn’t have the SATA 3 (6GBits) interface, SSD’s are fast not only low latency and high IOps but they also offer a very large sustained transfer rate, consider the OCZ Agility 3 it so happens that in my masters dissertation I did the same test but on a difference box, I got 374MiBytes per second at an average latency of 2.67ms per IO equating to 47.9K IOps – cost of an 240GB Agility 3 is £174.24 (http://www.scan.co.uk/products/240gb-ocz-agility-3-ssd-25-sata-6gb-s-sandforce-2281-read-525mb-s-write-500mb-s-85k-iops), but that same drive set in a box connected with SATA 2 (3Gbits) would only yield around 280MiBytes per second thus losing almost 100MiBytes per second throughput and a ton of IOps too. So why the hell are “enterprise” vendors still only connecting SSD’s at 3GBits? Well, my conspiracy states that they have no interest in you moving to SSD because they’ll lose so much money, the argument that they use SATA 2 doesn’t wash, SATA 3 has been out for some time now and all the commodity stuff you buy uses it now. Consider the cost, not in terms of price per GB but price per IOps, SSD absolutely thrash Hard Drives on that, it was true that the opposite was also true that Hard Drives thrashed SSD’s on price per GB, but is that true now, I’m not so sure – a 300GByte 2.5” 15Krpm SAS drive costs £329.76 ex VAT (http://www.scan.co.uk/products/300gb-seagate-st9300653ss-savvio-15k3-25-hdd-sas-6gb-s-15000rpm-64mb-cache-27ms) which equates to £1.09 per GB compared to a 480GB OCZ Agility 3 costing £422.10 ex VAT (http://www.scan.co.uk/products/480gb-ocz-agility-3-ssd-25-sata-6gb-s-sandforce-2281-read-525mb-s-write-410mb-s-30k-iops) which equates to £0.88 per GB. Ok, I compared an “enterprise” hard drive with a “commodity” SSD, ok, so things get a little more complicated here, most “enterprise” SSD’s are SLC and most commodity are MLC, SLC gives more performance and wear, I’ll talk about that another day. For now though, don’t get sucked in by vendor marketing, SATA 2 (3Gbit) just doesn’t cut it, SSD need 6Gbit to breath and even that SSD’s are pushing. Alas, SSD’s are connected using SATA so all the controllers I’ve seen thus far from HP and DELL only do SATA 2 – deliberate? Well, I’ll let you decide on that one.

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• What Counts For a DBA – Decisions

  - by Louis Davidson

  It’s Friday afternoon, and the lead DBA, a very talented guy, is getting ready to head out for two well-earned weeks of vacation, with his family, when this error message pops up in his inbox: Msg 211, Level 23, State 51, Line 1. Possible schema corruption. Run DBCC CHECKCATALOG. His heart sinks. It’s ten…no eight…minutes till it’s time to walk out the door. He glances around at his coworkers, competent to handle many problems, but probably not up to the challenge of fixing possible database corruption. What does he do? After a few agonizing moments of indecision, he clicks shut his laptop. He’ll just wait and see. It was unlikely to come to anything; after all, it did say “possible” schema corruption, not definite. In that moment, his fate was sealed. The start of the solution to the problem (run DBCC CHECKCATALOG) had been right there in the error message. Had he done this, or at least took two of those eight minutes to delegate the task to a coworker, then he wouldn’t have ended up spending two-thirds of an idyllic vacation (for the rest of the family, at least) dealing with a problem that got consistently worse as the weekend progressed until the entire system was down. When I told this story to a friend of mine, an opera fan, he smiled and said it described the basic plotline of almost every opera or ‘Greek Tragedy’ ever written. The particular joy in opera, he told me, isn’t the warbly voiced leading ladies, or the plump middle-aged romantic leads, or even the music. No, what packs the opera houses in Italy is the drama of characters who, by the very nature of their life-experiences and emotional baggage, make all sorts of bad choices when faced with ordinary decisions, and so move inexorably to their fate. The audience is gripped by the spectacle of exotic characters doomed by their inability to see the obvious. I confess, my personal experience with opera is limited to Bugs Bunny in “What’s Opera, Doc?” (Elmer Fudd is a great example of a bad decision maker, if ever one existed), but I was struck by my friend’s analogy. If all the DBA cubicles were a stage, I think we would hear many similarly tragic tales, played out to music: “Error handling? We write our code to never experience errors, so nah…“ “Backups failed today, but it’s okay, we’ll back up tomorrow (we’ll back up tomorrow)“ And similarly, they would leave their audience gasping, not necessarily at the beauty of the music, or poetry of the lyrics, but at the inevitable, grisly fate of the protagonists. If you choose not to use proper error handling, or if you choose to skip a backup because, hey, you haven’t had a server crash in 10 years, then inevitably, in that moment you expected to be enjoying a vacation, or a football game, with your family and friends, you will instead be sitting in front of a computer screen, paying for your poor choices. Tragedies are very much part of IT. Most of a DBA’s day to day work has limited potential to wreak havoc; paperwork, timesheets, random anonymous threats to developers, routine maintenance and whatnot. However, just occasionally, you, as a DBA, will face one of those decisions that really matter, and which has the possibility to greatly affect your future and the future of your user’s data. Make those decisions count, and you’ll avoid the tragic fate of many an operatic hero or villain.

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• Xsigo and Oracle's Storage

  - by Philippe Deverchère

  Xsigo, a virtual network infrastructure provider, has recently been acquired by Oracle. Following this acquisition, one might ask ourselves why it is important to Oracle and how Oracle's storage is going to benefit on the long term from this virtualized infrastructure layer. Well, the first thing to understand is that Virtual Networking addresses both network and storage connectivity. Oracle Virtual Networking, as the Xsigo technology is now called, connects any server to any network and storage, so this is not just about connecting servers to the Internet or Intranet. It is also for a large part connecting servers to NAS and SAN storage. Connecting servers to storage has become increasingly complex in the past few years because of the strong emergence of virtualization at the Operating System level. 50% of enterprise workloads are now virtualized, up from 18% in 2009, resulting in a strong consolidation of various applications in a high density server footprint. At the same time, server I/O capability increased 8x in the last 8 years. All this has pushed IT administrators to multiply the number of I/O connections in the back-end of their physical servers, resulting in a messy and very hard to manage networking infrastructure. Here is a typical view of a rack back-end when no virtual networking is used. We consider that today: - 75% of users have ten or more Ethernet ports per server - 85% of users have two or more SAN ports per server - 58% have had to add connectivity to a server specifically for VMs - 65% consider cable reduction a priority The average is 12 or more ports per server, resulting in an extremely complex infrastructure to manage. What Oracle wants to achieve with its Oracle Virtual Networking offering is pretty simple. The objective is to eliminate the complexity through a dramatic reduction of cabling between servers and storage/networks. It is also to provide a software based management system so that any server can be connected to any network or any storage, on demand, and without physical intervention on the infrastructure. At the end of the day, the picture on the left shows what one wants to get for the back-end of customer's racks: just a couple of connections on each physical server to provide a simple, agile and fast network infrastructure for both storage and networking access. This is exactly what the Oracle Virtual Networking solution does. It transforms a complex, error-prone, difficult to manage and expensive networking infrastructure into a simple, high performance and agile solution for the data center. Practically speaking, and for the sake of simplicity, imagine that each server just hosts a minimal number of physical InfiniBand HCAs (Host Channel Adapter) with two links (for redundancy) onto the Oracle Fabric Interconnect director. Using the Oracle Fabric Manager software, you'll then be able to create virtual NICs and HBAs (called vNIC and vHBA) that will be seen by the servers as standard NICs and HBAs and associate them to networks and storage systems which are physically connected to the back-end of the director through standard Fibre Channel and Ethernet GbE/10GbE ports. In addition to this incredibly simple "at-a-click" connectivity capability, the Oracle Virtual Networking solution offers powerful features such as network isolation, Quality of Service, advanced performance monitoring and non-disruptive reconfiguration, migration and scalability of networking infrastructure. So let's go back now to our initial question: why is Oracle Virtual Networking especially important to Oracle's storage solutions? After all, one could connect any storage in the back-end of the Oracle Fabric Interconnect directors, right? The answer is pretty simple: since Oracle owns both the virtualized networking infrastructure and the storage (ZFS-SA, Pillar Axiom and tape), it is possible to imagine several ways in the future to add value when it comes to connect storage to a virtualized storage network: enhanced storage capabilities, converged management between storage and network, improved diagnostic capabilities and optimized integration resulting in higher performance and unique features/functions. Of course, all this is not going to be done overnight, and future will tell us is which evolutions come first. But there is little doubt that the integration of Xsigo within Oracle is going to create opportunities for Oracle's storage!

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• Getting Started with NASM

  - by MarkPearl

  Today I got to play with NASM. This is an assembler and disassembler that can be used to write 16-bit, 32-bit & 64-bit programs. Let me say upfront that the last time I looked at assembly code at any depth was when I was studying Computer Science in Pietermaritzburg – ten years ago – and we never ever got to touch any real assembly code so a lot of what I am looking at today is very new to me. The first thing I did was download NASM compiler. This turned out to be a bit more complicated than I thought. Originally I went to http://www.nasm.us/ and downloaded the nasm-2.09.04.zip file which I thought had all I needed. No luck! It seemed to just have the uncompiled code, and from what I could tell I would need to recompile and build it – possibly in c++? Well, I wasn’t going to waste my time with that, so a bit more searching and I found the Win32 (http://www.nasm.us/pub/nasm/releasebuilds/2.09.04/win32/) folder Nasm.exe which I downloaded. Choosing an IDE So, I have NASM compiler but to compile anything you need to pass a string of special characters in the command prompt. That’s fine if I was going to just do one program once every couple of years, but since I am aiming to do quite a bit more exploration of NASM I began searching for an IDE. There were a few options, even apparently Visual Studio with a bit of tweeking could do the job, but from past experience I wanted to avoid the VS route as it can sometimes get confusing. I eventually settled on TextPad which I had used a few years ago for a similar project and it had been simple enough yet powerful enough to do the job. A bit of searching and I found a syntax file for NASM and everything seemed hunky dory. Configuring TextPad to run the NASM Compiler Next was to get TextPad to run the NASM compiler. TextPad has this external tools option that allows one to configure special commands. To simplify the process I first created a bat file in the NASM directory that allowed me to simply compile asm files. The bat file was called as.bat and had just one line of code… nasm -f bin %1.asm -o %1.com -l %1.lst Once I had created as.bat I just needed to go into TextPad and create a tool. I have made a quick video of that just showing you where the various settings are which is viewable below. The 64Bit Problem So I now have an ‘IDE’ linked to my NASM compiler so everything should be fine right? No! Whenever I tried to compile an asm program it compiles fine, but when I try and run it I get an error – “This version of the file is not compatible with the version Windows you’re running. Check your computer’s system information to see whether you need an x86 (32-bit) or x64 (64-bit) version of the program, and then contact the software publisher." Well.. it turns out there are a few complications with having a 64 bit OS! So after searching google and coming to any real solution that I could find other than perhaps attempting to build the code for nasm, I eventually resorted to running a VM with Windows XP on it and putting NASM there… My first hello world program So I attempt my first hello world program as per an example I found… the code was quite simple and is shown below… bits16 org 0x100 jmp main message: db 'Hello World',0ah,0dh,'$' main: mov dx,message mov ah,09 int 21h int 20h Running the build tool from TextPad and everything compiles fine and I now have a console app with helllo world shown. Conclusion It’s very early days with NASM. I have been spoilt with Visual Studio and high order languages so I assume it will be a painful ride getting into the basics of assembly programming but I am hoping that at the end of it, I will at least have a bit more exposure to a language closer to the metal.

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• Exalytics and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) Partner Workshop

  - by mseika

  Workshop Description Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g is the #1 application infrastructure foundation. It enables enterprises to create and run agile and intelligent business applications and maximize IT efficiency by exploiting modern hardware and software architectures. Oracle Exalytics Business Intelligence Machine is the world’s first engineered system specifically designed to deliver high performance analysis, modeling and planning. Built using industry-standard hardware, market-leading business intelligence software and in-memory database technology, Oracle Exalytics is an optimized system that delivers unmatched speed, visualizations and scalability for Business Intelligence and Enterprise Performance Management applications. This FREE hands-on, partner workshop highlights both the hardware and software components that are engineered to work together to deliver Oracle Exalytics - an optimized version of the industry-leading Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database with analytic extensions, a highly scalable Oracle server designed specifically for in-memory business intelligence, and Oracle’s proven Business Intelligence Foundation with enhanced visualization capabilities and performance optimizations. This workshop will provide hands-on experience with Oracle's latest engineered system. Topics covered will include TimesTen In-Memory Database and the new Summary Advisor for Exalytics, the technical details (including mobile features) of the latest release of visualization enhancements for OBI-EE, and technical updates on Essbase. After taking this course, you will be well prepared to architect, build, demo, and implement an end-to-end Exalytics solution. You will also be able to extend your current analytical and enterprise performance management application implementations with numerous Oracle technologies specifically enhanced to take advantage of the compute capacity and in-memory capabilities of Oracle Exalytics.If you are a BI or Data Warehouse Architect, developer or consultant, you don’t want to miss this 3-day workshop. Register Now! Presentations Exalytics Architectural Overview Upgrade and Lifecycle Management Times Ten for Exalytics Summary Advisor Utility Essbase and EPM System on Exalytics Dashboard and Analysis Interactions OBIEE 11.1.1.6 Features and Advanced Topics Lab OutlineThe labs showcase Oracle Exalytics core components and functionality and provide expertise of Oracle Business Intelligence 11.1.1.6 new features and updates from prior releases. The hands-on activities are based on an Oracle VirtualBox image with software and training samples pre-installed. Lab Environment Setup Creating and Working with Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database Running Summary Advisor Utility Working with Exalytics Visualization Features – Dashboard and Analysis Interactions Audience Oracle Partners BI and EPM Application Developers and Implementers System Integrators and Solution Consultants Data Warehouse Developers Enterprise Architects Prerequisites Experience and understanding of OBIEE 11g is required Previous attendance of Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite Workshop or BIEE 11gIntroduction Workshop is highly recommended Good understanding of data warehousing and data modeling for reporting and analysis purpose Strong experience with database technologies preferred Equipment RequirementsThis workshop requires attendees to provide their own laptops for this class.Attendee laptops must meet the following minimum hardware/software requirements: Hardware Minimum 8GB RAM 60 GB free space (includes staging) USB 2.0 port (at least one available) It is strongly recommended that you bring a mouse. You will be working in a development environment and using the mouse heavily. Software One of the following operating systems: 64-bit Windows host/laptop OS 64-bit host/laptop OS with a Windows VM (XP, Server, or Win 7, BIC2g, etc.) Internet Explorer 7.x/8.x or Firefox 3.5.x WINRAR or 7ziputility to unzip workshop files: Download-able from http://www.win-rar.com/download.html Download-able from http://www.7zip.com/ Oracle VirtualBox 4.0.2 or higher Downloadable from http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads CPU virtualization mode needs to be enabled. We will provide guidance on the day of the workshop. Attendees will be given a VirtualBox image containing a pre-installed Oracle Exalytics environment. Schedule This workshop is 3 days. - Times vary by country!9:00am: Sign-in and technical setup 9:30am: Workshop starts 5:00pm: Workshop ends Oracle Exalytics and Business Intelligence (OBIEE) Workshop December 11-13, 2012: Oracle BVP, Birmingham, UK Register Here. Questions? Send email to: [email protected] Oracle Platform Technologies Enablement Services

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• Guest blog: A Closer Look at Oracle Price Analytics by Will Hutchinson

  - by Takin Babaei

  Overview:  Price Analytics helps companies understand how much of each sale goes into discounts, special terms, and allowances. This visibility lets sales management see the panoply of discounts and start seeing whether each discount drives desired behavior. In Price Analytics monitors parts of the quote-to-order process, tracking quotes, including the whole price waterfall and seeing which result in orders. The “price waterfall” shows all discounts between list price and “pocket price”. Pocket price is the final price the vendor puts in its pocket after all discounts are taken. The value proposition: Based on benchmarks from leading consultancies and companies I have talked to, where they have studied the effects of discounting and started enforcing what many of them call “discount discipline”, they find they can increase the pocket price by 0.8-3%. Yes, in today’s zero or negative inflation environment, one can, through better monitoring of discounts, collect what amounts to a price rise of a few percent. We are not talking about selling more product, merely about collecting a higher pocket price without decreasing quantities sold. Higher prices fall straight to the bottom line. The best reference I have ever found for understanding this phenomenon comes from an article from the September-October 1992 issue of Harvard Business Review called “Managing Price, Gaining Profit” by Michael Marn and Robert Rosiello of McKinsey & Co. They describe the outsized impact price management has on bottom line performance compared to selling more product or cutting variable or fixed costs. Price Analytics manages what Marn and Rosiello call “transaction pricing”, namely the prices of a given transaction, as opposed to what is on the price list or pricing according to the value received. They make the point that if the vendor does not manage the price waterfall, customers will, to the vendor’s detriment. It also discusses its findings that in companies it studied, there was no correlation between discount levels and any indication of customer value. I urge you to read this article. What Price Analytics does: Price analytics looks at quotes the company issues and tracks them until either the quote is accepted or rejected or it expires. There are prebuilt adapters for EBS and Siebel as well as a universal adapter. The target audience includes pricing analysts, product managers, sales managers, and VP’s of sales, marketing, finance, and sales operations. It tracks how effective discounts have been, the win rate on quotes, how well pricing policies have been followed, customer and product profitability, and customer performance against commitments. It has the concept of price waterfall, the deal lifecycle, and price segmentation built into the product. These help product and sales managers understand their pricing and its effectiveness on driving revenue and profit. They also help understand how terms are adhered to during negotiations. They also help people understand what segments exist and how well they are adhered to. To help your company increase its profits and revenues, I urge you to look at this product. If you have questions, please contact me. Will HutchinsonMaster Principal Sales Consultant – Analytics, Oracle Corp. Will Hutchinson has worked in the business intelligence and data warehousing for over 25 years. He started building data warehouses in 1986 at Metaphor, advancing to running Metaphor UK’s sales consulting area. He also worked in A.T. Kearney’s business intelligence practice for over four years, running projects and providing training to new consultants in the IT practice. He also worked at Informatica and then Siebel, before coming to Oracle with the Siebel acquisition. He became Master Principal Sales Consultant in 2009. He has worked on developing ROI and TCO models for business intelligence for over ten years. Mr. Hutchinson has a BS degree in Chemical Engineering from Princeton University and an MBA in Finance from the University of Chicago.

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• Growing Talent

  The subtitle of Daniel Coyles intriguing book The Talent Code is Greatness Isnt Born. Its Grown. Heres How. The Talent Code proceeds to layout a theory of how expertise can be cultivated through specific practices that encourage the growth of myelin in the brain. Myelin is a material that is produced and wraps around heavily used circuits in the brain, making them more efficient. Coyle uses an analogy that geeks will appreciate. When a circuit in the brain is used a lot (i.e. a specific action is repeated), the myelin insulates that circuit, increasing its bandwidth from telephone over copper to high speed broadband. This leads to the funny phenomenon of effortless expertise. Although highly skilled, the best players make it look easy. Coyle provides some biological backing for the long held theory that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to achieve mastery over a given subject. 10,000 hours or 10 years, as in, Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years and others. However, it is not just that more hours equals more mastery. The other factors that Coyle identifies includes deep practice, practice which crucially involves drills that are challenging without being impossible. Another way to put it is that every day you spend doing only tasks you find monotonous and automatic, you are literally stagnating your brains development! Perhaps Coyles subtitle, needs one more phrase, Greatness Isnt Born. Its Grown. Heres How. And oh yeah, its not easy. Challenging yourself, continuing to persist in the face of repeated failures, practicing every day is not easy. As consultants, we sell our expertise, so it makes sense that we plan projects so that people can play to their strengths. At the same time, an important part of our culture is constant improvement, challenging yourself to be better. And the balancing contest ensues. I just finished working on a proof of concept (POC) we did for a project we are bidding on. Completely time boxed, so our team naturally split responsibilities amongst ourselves according to who was better at what. I must have been pretty bad at the other components, as I found myself working on the user interface, not my usual strength. The POC had a website frontend, and one thing I do know is HTML. After starting out in pure ASP.NET WebForms, I got frustrated as time was ticking, I knew what I wanted in HTML, but I couldnt coax the right output out of the ASP.NET controls. I needed two or three elements on the screen that were identical in layout, with different content. With a backup plan in  of writing the HTML into the response by hand, I decided to challenge myself a bit and see what I could do in an hour or two using the Microsoft submitted jQuery micro-templating JavaScript library. This risk paid off. I was able to quickly get the user interface up and running, responsive to the JSON data we were working with. I felt energized by the double win of getting the POC ready and learning something new. Opportunities  specifically like this POC dont come around often, but the takeaway is that while it wont be easy, there are ways to generate your own opportunities to grow towards greatness.Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama Top 10 for October 21-27, 2012

  - by Bob Rhubart

  The Top 10 most popular items shared on the OTN ArchBeat Facebook Page for the week of October 21-27, 2012. OTN Architect Day: Los Angeles This is your brain on IT architecture. Stuff your cranium with architecture by attending Oracle Technology Network Architect Day in Los Angeles, October 25, 2012, at the Sofitel Los Angeles, 8555 Beverly Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90048. Technical sessions, panel Q&A, and peer roundtables—plus a free lunch. [NOTE: The event was last week, of course. Big thanks to the session presenters and especially to those Angelinos who came out for the event.] WebLogic Server 11gR1 Interactive Quick Reference"The WebLogic Server 11gR1 Administration interactive quick reference," explains Juergen Kress, "is a multimedia tool for various terms and concepts used in WebLogic Server architecture. This tool is available for administrators for online or offline use. This is built as a multimedia web page which provides descriptions of WebLogic Server Architectural components, and references to relevant documentation. This tool offers valuable reference information for any complex concept or product in an intuitive and useful manner." Podcast: Are You Future Proof? The latest OTN ArchBeat Podcast series features Oracle ACE Directors Ron Batra, Basheer Khan, and Ronald van Luttikhuizen, three practicing architects in an open discussion about how changes in enterprise IT are raising the bar for success for software architects and developers. Play Oracle Vanquisher Here's a little respite from whatever it is you normally spend your time on. Oracle Vanquisher is an online diversion that makes a game of data center optimization. According to the description: "Armed with a cool Oracle vacuum pack suit and a strategic IT roadmap, you will thwart threats and optimize your data center to increase your company’s stock price and boost your company’s position." Mainly you avoid electric shock and killer birds. The current high score belongs to someone identified as 'TEN." My score? Never mind. Advanced Oracle SOA Suite OOW 2012 PresentationsThe Oracle SOA Product Management team has compiled a complete list of all twelve of their Oracle SOA Suite presentations from Oracle OpenWorld 2012, with links to the slide decks. OAM and OIM 11g Academies Looking for technical how-to content covering Oracle Access Manager and Oracle Identity Manager? The people behind the Oracle Middleware Security blog have indexed relevant blog posts into what they call "Academies." "These indexes contain the articles we’ve written that we believe provide long lasting guidance on OAM and OIM. Posts covered in these series include articles on key aspects of OAM and OIM 11g, best practice architectural guidance, integrations, and customizations." Oracle’s Analytics, Engineered Systems, and Big Data Strategy | Mark Rittman Part 1 of 3 in Oracle ACE Director Mark Rittman's series on Oracle Exalytics, Oracle R Enterprise and Endeca. Oracle ACE Directors Nordic Tour 2012 : Venues and BI Presentations | Mark RittmanOracle ACE Director Mark Rittman shares information on the Oracle ACE Director Tour, as the community leaders make their way through the land of the midnight sun, with events in Copenhagen, Stockholm, Oslo and Helsinki. Following the Thread in OSB | Antony Reynolds Antony Reynolds recently led an Oracle Service Bus POC in which his team needed to get high throughput from an OSB pipeline. "Imagine our surprise when, on stressing the system, we saw it lock up, with large numbers of blocked threads." He shares the details of the problem and the solution in this extensive technical post. OW12: Oracle Business Process Management/Oracle ADF Integration Best Practices | Andrejus Baranovskis The Oracle OpenWorld presentations keep coming! Oracle ACE Director Andrejus Baranovskis shares the slides from "Oracle Business Process Management/Oracle ADF Integration Best Practices," co-presented with Danilo Schmiedel from Opitz Consulting. Thought for the Day "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." — Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879 – April 18, 1955) Source: Quotes For Software Engineers

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• History of Mobile Technology

  - by David Dorf

  Over the last ten years, mobile phones have gone through several incremental technology leaps that have added capabilities that impact the retail industry.  I've listed the six major ones below, along with their long-lasting impact. 1. Location In the US, the FCC required mobile phones to implement E911 (emergency calls) by 2006, requiring the caller to be located to within 300 meters.  Back in 2000, GPS was opened up for civilian use, and by 2004 Qualcomm had figured out how to use GPS in mobile phones.  So mobile operators moved from cell tower triangulation to GPS, principally for E911.  But then lots of other uses became apparent, especially navigation.  The earliest mobile apps from retailers made it easy to find nearby stores, and companies are looking at ways to use WiFi triangulation inside stores. 2. Computer Vision In 1997 Philippe Kahn shared a photo of his newborn using a mobile phone thus launching the popularity of instant visual communications.  Over the years the quality of the cameras got better, reaching the point where barcodes could be read around 2008.  That's when Occipital came on the scene with their Red Laser application, which was eventually acquired by eBay.  This opened up the ability for consumers to easily price compare inside stores.  Other interesting apps included Tesco's Wine Finder and Amazon's Price Checker, both allowing products to be identified by picture. 3. Augmented Reality Once the mobile phone had GPS, a video camera, and compass functionality it was suddenly possible to overlay digital information on the screen in real-time.  Yelp, which was using GPS to find nearby merchants, created a backdoor called Monocle on the iPhone that showed nearby merchants overlayed on the video camera view.  Today AR apps are mostly used by retailers for marketing, like Moosejaw's app that undresses models in their catalog. 4. Geo-Fencing So if we're able to track the location of a mobile phone, why not use that context to offer timely information?  My first experience with geo-fencing came courtesy of North Face, the outdoor enthusiast store. When a mobile phone enters a predetermined area, like near a store, a text message is sent to phone with an offer or useful information.  Of course retailers can geo-fence their competitors as well and find out which customers are aren't so loyal. 5. Digital Wallet Mobile payments leverage different technologies such as NFC, QRCodes, bluetooth, and SMS to facilitate communication between the consumers's phone and the retailer's point-of-sale. The key here is the potential to consolidate loyalty cards, coupons, and bank cards into the mobile phone and enable faster checkout.  Nobody does this better than Starbucks today, but McDonald's and Duncan Donuts aren't far behind.  Google, Isis, Paypal, Square, and MCX are all vying for leadership in this area.  If NFC does finally take off, it will be leveraged by retailers in more places than just the POS. 6. Voice Response Mobile Phones have had the ability to interpret simple voice commands for a while, but Google and Amazon were the first to use voice to allow searches for products.  Allowing searches by text, barcode, and voice makes it easy to comparison shop in the aisles.  Walmart even uses voice to build shopping lists, and if the Siri API is even opened we could see lots more innovation in this area.

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• How to Speed Up Any Android Phone By Disabling Animations

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Android phones — and tablets, too — display animations when moving between apps and screens. These animations look very slick, but they waste time — especially on fast phones, which could switch between apps instantly if not for the animations. Disabling these animations will speed up navigating between different apps and interface screens on your phone, saving you time. You can also speed up the animations if you’d rather see them. Access the Developer Options Menu First, we’ll need to access the Developer Options menu. It’s hidden by default so Android users won’t stumble across it unless they’re actually looking for it. To access the Developer Options menu, open the Settings screen, scroll down to the bottom of the list, and tap the About phone or About tablet option. Scroll down to the Build number field and tap it repeatedly. Eventually, you’ll see a message appear saying “You are now a developer!”. The Developer options submenu now appears on the Settings screen. You’ll find it near the bottom of the list, just above the About phone or About tablet option. Disable Interface Animations Open the Developer Options screen and slide the switch at the top of the screen to On. This allows you to change the hidden options on this screen. If you ever want to re-enable the animations and revert your changes, all you have to do is slide the Developer Options switch back to Off. Scroll down to the Drawing section. You’ll find the three options we want here — Window animation scale, Transition animation scale, and Animator duration scale. Tap each option and set it to Animation off to disable the associated animations. If you’d like to speed up the animations without disabling them entirely, select the Animation .5x option instead. If you’re feeling really crazy, you can even select longer animation durations. You can make the animations take as much as ten times longer with the Animation 10x setting. The Animator duration scale option applies to the transition animation that appears when you tap the app drawer button on your home screen.  Your change here won’t take effect immediately — you’ll have to restart Android’s launcher after changing the Animator duration scale setting. To restart Android’s launcher, open the Settings screen, tap Apps, swipe over to the All category, scroll down, and tap the Launcher app. Tap the Force stop button to forcibly close the launcher, then tap your device’s home button to re-launch the launcher. Your app drawer will now open immediately, too. Now whenever you open an app or transition to a new screen, it will pop up as quickly as possible — no waiting for animations and wasting processing power rendering them. How much of a speed improvement you’ll see here depends on your Android device and how fast it is. On our Nexus 4, this change makes many apps appear and become usable instantly if they’re running in the background. If you have a slower device, you may have to wait a moment for apps to be usable. That’s one of the big reasons why Android and other operating systems use animations. Animations help paper over delays that can occur while the operating system loads the app.     

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• Elo system behaves oddly in program I've created

  - by adc

  Alright, so I'm looking to build a small program (C# and XAML) that, essentially, does this: Generate array of players. Each player has a current rating and a true rating. I set current rating to 1200 as a starting point right now; I've also tried setting it to true rating and the average of the two. True rating is what their skill level actually is. Their true rating is calculated based on percentages from the current League of Legends rating system; generating an array of 970 thousand generates results very similar to the data from here: (removed due to URL limit - but trust me, the results are very similar). This array is of length specified by the user. If need be, sort the array from smallest to largest. Play X number of games, again specified by the user. This is done by taking the array of players (which is sorted by Current Rating after being created) and running through it in groups of 10. The first five are on team one, the second five are on team two. It then takes the True Rating of these players and calculates an expected chance to win using the Elo system. It generates a random double and compares it to the expected chance to win; if the number is lower, team one wins - otherwise team two wins. I then update the rating of the players via, again, the Elo system - giving the winning team a score of 1 and the losing team a score of 0. I use a K value of 36 (but have tried 12, 24, and even higher ones) and an F value of 400. After going through the entire loop of players (which I have conveniently forced to be a multiple of ten), it sorts the array - again via current rating. This, if my understanding of the Elo system is correct, runs properly. However, it doesn't seem to work. I have a running test telling me how many players of the full array are within 100 current rating of their true rating. I would expect some portion of the population to be outside this range (as probability is not always going to go in their favor), but a full 40-45% of the population is outside of this range. I also have it outputting the maximum difference between true and current rating - and I have never seen this drop below 500! It hovers between 550-600, occasionally going over or under. I'm at a loss as to what to change - I've fiddled with the K and F values, where I start all the players, etc. but nothing changes the fact that eventually a good 40% of the population is outside the range. And it isn't that I have it playing too few games - it's now run through over 60 thousand games and the problem never disappears or really fluctuates. The full C# code, including everything except the XAML file and the Player class (pastebin is being very slow and I can only post two links, so I can't link to the XAML file): http://pastebin.com/rFcZRL84 The Player class: http://pastebin.com/4cJTdTRu I guess my question is did I do anything wrong? Is there a problem with the way I implemented the system, or is it just that Riot uses a significantly modified Elo system? I don't think it's the latter, as that still wouldn't explain the massive true and current rating differences to me, however.

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• Blink-Data vs Instinct?

  - by Samantha.Y. Ma

  In his landmark bestseller Blink, well-known author and journalist Malcolm Gladwell explores how human beings everyday make seemingly instantaneous choices --in the blink of an eye--and how we “think without thinking.”  These situations actually aren’t as simple as they seem, he postulates; and throughout the book, Gladwell seeks answers to questions such as: 1.    What makes some people good at thinking on their feet and making quick spontaneous decisions?2.    Why do some people follow their instincts and win, while others consistently seem to stumble into error?3.    Why are some of the best decisions often those that are difficult to explain to others?In Blink, Gladwell introduces us to the psychologist who has learned to predict whether a marriage will last, based on a few minutes of observing a couple; the tennis coach who knows when a player will double-fault before the racket even makes contact with the ball; the antiquities experts who recognize a fake at a glance. Ultimately, Blink reveals that great decision makers aren't those who spend the most time deliberating or analyzing information, but those who focus on key factors among an overwhelming number of variables-- i.e., those who have perfected the art of "thin-slicing.” In Data vs. Instinct: Perfecting Global Sales Performance, a new report sponsored by Oracle, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) explores the roles data and instinct play in decision-making by sales managers and discusses how sales executives can increase sales performance through more effective  territory planning and incentive/compensation strategies.If you are a sales executive, ask yourself this:  “Do you rely on knowledge (data) when you plan out your sales strategy?  If you rely on data, how do you ensure that your data sources are reliable, up-to-date, and complete?  With the emergence of social media and the proliferation of both structured and unstructured data, how do you know that you are applying your information/data correctly and in-context?  Three key findings in the report are:•    Six out of ten executives say they rely more on data than instinct to drive decisions. •    Nearly one half (48 percent) of incentive compensation plans do not achieve the desired results. •    Senior sales executives rely more on current and historical data than on forecast data. Strikingly similar to what Gladwell concludes in Blink, the report’s authors succinctly sum up their findings: "The best outcome is a combination of timely information, insightful predictions, and support data."Applying this insight is crucial to creating a sound sales plan that drives alignment and results.  In the area of sales performance management, “territory programs and incentive compensation continue to present particularly complex challenges in an increasingly globalized market," say the report’s authors. "It behooves companies to get a better handle on translating that data into actionable and effective plans." To help solve this challenge, CRM Oracle Fusion integrates forecasting, quotas, compensation, and territories into a single system.   For example, Oracle Fusion CRM provides a natural integration between territories, which define the sales targets (e.g., collection of accounts) for the sales force, and quotas, which quantify the sales targets. In fact, territory hierarchy is a core analytic dimension to slice and dice sales results, using sales analytics and alerts to help you identify where problems are occurring. This makes territoriesStart tapping into both data and instinct effectively today with Oracle Fusion CRM.   Here is a short video to provide you with a snapshot of how it can help you optimize your sales performance.  

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• Sitting Pretty

  - by Phil Factor

  Guest Editorial for Simple-Talk IT Pro newsletter'DBAs and SysAdmins generally prefer an expression of calmness under adversity. It is a subtle trick, and requires practice in front of a mirror to get it just right. Too much adversity and they think you're not coping; too much calmness and they think you're under-employed' I dislike the term 'avatar', when used to describe a portrait photograph. An avatar, in the sense of a picture, is merely the depiction of one's role-play alter-ego, often a ridiculous bronze-age deity. However, professional image is important. The choice and creation of online photos has an effect on the way your message is received and it is important to get that right. It is fine to use that photo of you after ten lagers on holiday in an Ibiza nightclub, but what works on Facebook looks hilarious on LinkedIn. My splendid photograph that I use online was done by a professional photographer at great expense and I've never had the slightest twinge of regret when I remember how much I paid for it. It is me, but a more pensive and dignified edition, oozing trust and wisdom. One gasps at the magical skill that a professional photographer can conjure up, without digital manipulation, to make the best of a derisory noggin (ed: slang for a head). Even if he had offered to depict me as a semi-naked, muscle-bound, sword-wielding hero, I'd have demurred. No, any professional person needs a carefully cultivated image that looks right. I'd never thought of using that profile shot, though I couldn't help noticing the photographer flinch slightly when he first caught sight of my face. There is a problem with using an avatar. The use of a single image doesn't express the appropriate emotion. At the moment, it is weird to see someone with a laughing portrait writing something solemn. A neutral cast to the face, somewhat like a passport photo, is probably the best compromise. Actually, the same is true of a working life in IT. One of the first skills I learned was not to laugh at managers, but, instead, to develop a facial expression that promoted a sense of keenness, energy and respect. Every profession has its own preferred facial cast. A neighbour of mine has the natural gift of a face that displays barely repressed grief. Though he is characteristically cheerful, he earns a remarkable income as a pallbearer. DBAs and SysAdmins generally prefer an expression of calmness under adversity. It is a subtle trick, and requires practice in front of a mirror to get it just right. Too much adversity and they think you're not coping; too much calmness and they think you're under-employed. With an appropriate avatar, you could do away with a lot of the need for 'smilies' to give clues as to the meaning of what you've written on forums and blogs. If you had a set of avatars, showing the full gamut of human emotions expressible in writing: Rage, fear, reproach, joy, ebullience, apprehension, exasperation, dissembly, irony, pathos, euphoria, remorse and so on. It would be quite a drop-down list on forums, but given the vast prairies of space on the average hard drive, who cares? It would cut down on the number of spats in Forums just as long as one picks the right avatar. As an unreconstructed geek, I find it hard to admit to the value of image in the workplace, but it is true. Just as we use professionals to tidy up and order our CVs and job applications, we should employ experts to enhance our professional image. After all you don't perform surgery or dentistry on yourself do you?

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• LUKOIL Overseas Holding Optimizes Oil Field Development Projects with Integrated Project Management

  - by Melissa Centurio Lopes

  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-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} LUKOIL Overseas Group is a growing oil and gas company that is an integral part of the vertically integrated oil company OAO LUKOIL. It is engaged in the exploration, acquisition, integration, and efficient development of oil and gas fields outside the Russian Federation to promote transforming LUKOIL into a transnational energy company. In 2010, the company signed a 20-year development project for the giant, West Qurna 2 oil field in Iraq. Executing 10,000 to 15,000 project activities simultaneously on 14 major construction and drilling projects in Iraq for the West Qurna-2 project meant the company needed a clear picture, in real time, of dependencies between its capital construction, geologic exploration and sinking projects—required for its building infrastructure oil field development projects in Iraq. LUKOIL Overseas Holding deployed Oracle’s Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management to generate structured project management information and optimize planning, monitoring, and analysis of all engineering and commercial activities—such as tenders, and bulk procurement of materials and equipment—related to oil field development projects. A word from LUKOIL Overseas Holding Ltd. “Previously, we created project schedules on desktop computers and uploaded them to the project server to be merged into one big file for each project participant to access. This was not scalable, as we’ve grown and now run up to 15,000 activities in numerous projects and subprojects at any time. With Oracle’s Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management, we can now work concurrently on projects with many team members, enjoy absolute security, and issue new baselines for all projects and project participants once a week, with ease.” – Sergey Kotov, Head of IT and the Communication Office, LUKOIL Mid-East Ltd. Oracle Primavera Solutions: · Facilitated managing dependencies between projects by enabling the general scheduler to reschedule all projects and subprojects once a week, realigning 10,000 to 15,000 project activities that the company runs at any time · Replaced Microsoft Project and a paper-based system with a complete solution that provides structured project data · Enhanced data security by establishing project management security policies that enable only authorized project members to edit their project tasks, while enabling each project participant to view all project data that are relevant to that individual’s task · Enabled the company to monitor project progress in comparison to the projected plan, based on physical project assets to determine if each project is on track to conclude within its time and budget limitations To view the full list of solutions view here. “Oracle Gold Partner Parma Telecom was key to our successful Primavera deployment, implementing the software’s basic functionalities, such as project content, timeframes management, and cost management, in addition to performing its integration with our enterprise resource planning system and intranet portal within ten months and in accordance with budgets,” said Rafik Baynazarov, head of the master planning and control office, LUKOIL Mid-East Ltd. “ To read the full version of the customer success story, please view here.

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• Mastering snow and Java development at jDays in Gothenburg

  - by JavaCecilia

  Last weekend, I took the train from Stockholm to Gothenburg to attend and present at the new Java developer conference jDays. It was professionally arranged in the Swedish exhibition hall close to the amusement park Liseberg and we got a great deal out of the top-level presenters and hallway discussions. Understanding and Improving Your Java Process Our main purpose was to spread information on JVM and our monitoring tools for Java processes, so I held a crash course in the most important terms and concepts if you want to affect the performance of your Java process. From the beginning - the JVM specification to interpretation of heap usage graphs. For correct analysis, you also need to understand something about process memory - you need space for the Java heap (-Xms for initial size and -Xmx for max heap size), but the process memory also contain the thread stacks (to a size of -Xss), JVM internal data structures used for keeping track of Java objects on the heap, method compilation/optimization, native libraries, etc. If you get long pause times, make sure to monitor your application, see the allocation rate and frequency of pause times.My colleague Klara Ward then held a presentation on the Java Mission Control product, the profiling and diagnostics tools suite for HotSpot, coming soon. The room was packed and very appreciated, Klara demonstrated four different scenarios, e.g. how to diagnose and fix latencies due to lock contention for logging.My German colleague, OpenJDK ambassador Dalibor Topic travelled to Sweden to do the second keynote on "Make the Future Java". He let us in on the coming features and roadmaps of Java, now delivering major versions on a two-year schedule (Java 7 2011, Java 8 2013, etc). Also letting us in on where to download early versions of 8, to report problems early on. Software Development in teams Being a scout leader, I'm drilled in different team building and workshop techniques, creating strong groups - of course, I had to attend Henrik Berglund's session on building successful teams. He spoke about the importance of clear goals, autonomy and agreed processes. Thomas Sundberg ended the conference by doing live remote pair programming with Alex in Rumania and a concrete tips for people wanting to try it out (for local collaboration, remember to wash and change clothes). Memory Master Keynote The conference keynote was delivered by the Swedish memory master Mattias Ribbing, showing off by remembering the order of a deck of cards he'd seen once. He made it interactive by forcing the audience to learn a memory mastering technique of remembering ten ordered things by heart, asking us to shout out the order backwards and we made it! I desperately need this - bought the book, will get back on the subject. Continuous Delivery The most impressive presenter was Axel Fontaine on Continuous Delivery. Very well prepared slides with key images of his message and moved about the stage like a rock star. The topic is of course highly interesting, how to create an infrastructure enabling immediate feedback to developers and ability to release your product several times per day. Tomek Kaczanowski delivered a funny and useful presentation on good and bad tests, providing comic relief with poorly written tests and the useful rules of thumb how to rewrite them. To conclude, we had a great time and hope to see you at jDays next year :)

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• How much is a subscriber worth?

  - by Tom Lewin

  This year at Red Gate, we’ve started providing a way to back up SQL Azure databases and Azure storage. We decided to sell this as a service, instead of a product, which means customers only pay for what they use. Unfortunately for us, it makes figuring out revenue much trickier. With a product like SQL Compare, a customer pays for it, and it’s theirs for good. Sure, we offer support and upgrades, but, fundamentally, the sale is a simple, upfront transaction: we’ve made this product, you need this product, we swap product for money and everyone is happy. With software as a service, it isn’t that easy. The money and product don’t change hands up front. Instead, we provide a service in exchange for a recurring fee. We know someone buying SQL Compare will pay us $X, but we don’t know how long service customers will stay with us, or how much they will spend. How do we find this out? We use lifetime value analysis. What is lifetime value? Lifetime value, or LTV, is how much a customer is worth to the business. For Entrepreneurs has a brilliant write up that we followed to conduct our analysis. Basically, it all boils down to this equation: LTV = ARPU x ALC To make it a bit less of an alphabet-soup and a bit more understandable, we can write it out in full: The lifetime value of a customer equals the average revenue per customer per month, times the average time a customer spends with the service Simple, right? A customer is worth the average spend times the average stay. If customers pay on average $50/month, and stay on average for ten months, then a new customer will, on average, bring in $500 over the time they are a customer! Average spend is easy to work out; it’s revenue divided by customers. The problem comes when we realise that we don’t know exactly how long a customer will stay with us. How can we figure out the average lifetime of a customer, if we only have six months’ worth of data? The answer lies in the fact that: Average Lifetime of a Customer = 1 / Churn Rate The churn rate is the percentage of customers that cancel in a month. If half of your customers cancel each month, then your average customer lifetime is two months. The problem we faced was that we didn’t have enough data to make an estimate of one month’s cancellations reliable (because barely anybody cancels)! To deal with this data problem, we can take data from the last three months instead. This means we have more data to play with. We can still use the equation above, we just need to multiply the final result by three (as we worked out how many three month periods customers stay for, and we want our answer to be in months). Now these estimates are likely to be fairly unreliable; when there’s not a lot of data it pays to be cautious with inference. That said, the numbers we have look fairly consistent, and it’s super easy to revise our estimates when new data comes in. At the very least, these numbers give us a vague idea of whether a subscription business is viable. As far as Cloud Services goes, the business looks very viable indeed, and the low cancellation rates are much more than just data points in LTV equations; they show that the product is working out great for our customers, which is exactly what we’re looking for!

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• Olympics data available for all on Windows Azure SQL Database and Power View

  - by jamiet

  Are you looking around for some decent test data for your BI demos? Well, if so, Microsoft have provided some data about all medals won at the Olympics Games (1900 to 2008) at OlympicsData workbook - Excel, SSIS, Azure sample; it provides analysis over athletes, countries, medal type, sport, discipline and various other dimensions. The data has been provided in an Excel workbook along with instructions on how to load the data into a Windows Azure SQL Database using SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS). Frankly though, the rigmarole of standing up your own Windows Azure SQL Database ok, SQL Azure database, is both costly (SQL Azure isn’t free) and time consuming (the provided instructions aren’t exactly an idiot’s guide and getting SSIS to work properly with Excel isn’t a barrel of laughs either). To ease the pain for all you BI folks out there that simply want to party on the data I have loaded it all into the SQL Azure database that I use for hosting AdventureWorks on Azure. You can read more about AdventureWorks on Azure below however I’ll summarise here by saying it is a SQL Azure database provided for the use of the SQL Server community and which is supported by voluntary donations. To view the data the credentials you need are: Server mhknbn2kdz.database.windows.net  Database AdventureWorks2012 User sqlfamily Password sqlf@m1ly Type those into SSMS and away you go, the data is provided in four tables [olympics].[Sport], [olympics].[Discipline], [olympics].[Event] & [olympics].[Medalist]: I figured this would be a good candidate for a Power View report so I fired up Excel 2013 and built such a report to slice’n’dice through the data – here are some screenshots that should give you a flavour of what is available: A view of all the available data Where do all the gymastics medals go? Which countries do top ten all-time medal winners come from? You get the idea. There is masses of information here and if you have Excel 2013 handy Power View provides a quick and easy way of surfing through it. To save you the bother of setting up the Power View report yourself you can have the one that I took these screenshots from, it is available on my SkyDrive at OlympicsAnalysis.xlsx so just hit the link and download to play to your heart’s content. Party on, people! As I said above the data is hosted on a SQL Azure database that I use for hosting “AdventureWorks on Azure” which I first announced in March 2013 at AdventureWorks2012 now available for all on SQL Azure. I’ll repeat the pertinent parts of that blog post here: I am pleased to announce that as of today … [AdventureWorks2012] now resides on SQL Azure and is available for anyone, absolutely anyone, to connect to and use for their own means. This database is free for you to use but SQL Azure is of course not free so before I give you the credentials please lend me your ears eyes for a short while longer. AdventureWorks on Azure is being provided for the SQL Server community to use and so I am hoping that that same community will rally around to support this effort by making a voluntary donation to support the upkeep which, going on current pricing, is going to be $119.88 per year. If you would like to contribute to keep AdventureWorks on Azure up and running for that full year please donate via PayPal to [email protected] Any amount, no matter how small, will help. If those 50+ people that retweeted me beforehand all contributed $2 then that would just about be enough to keep this up for a year. If the community contributes more than we need then there are a number of additional things that could be done: Host additional databases (Northwind anyone??) Host in more datacentres (this first one is in Western Europe) Make a charitable donation That last one, a charitable donation, is something I would really like to do. The SQL Community have proved before that they can make a significant contribution to charitable orgnisations through purchasing the SQL Server MVP Deep Dives book and I harbour hopes that AdventureWorks on Azure can continue in that vein. So please, if you think AdventureWorks on Azure is something that is worth supporting please make a contribution. I’d like to emphasize that last point. If my hosting this Olympics data is useful to you please support this initiative by donating. Thanks in advance. @Jamiet

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• Why Apple’s New SDK Limitation is So Offensive

  - by TStewartDev

  I am not an Apple fanboy, nor have I ever been. However, I have owned a Mac, an iPod, and an iPhone in my lifetime, and for more than a decade, I have defended Apple against the untruths that the haters so enjoy spewing. I encouraged my wife to buy a MacBook when she needed a new laptop two years ago, and I often recommend them to my friends and relatives. I have proudly and happily used my first generation iPhone for nearly three years. Now, for the first time in well over ten years, I find myself ready to swear off Apple and encourage everyone I know to do the same. I was disappointed when Apple wouldn't allow native apps, but I still bought the iPhone. I've stomached their ambiguous app approval process even though it's apparent that Steve may just reject your app because he doesn't like you or feels threatened by you (I'm still lamenting the rejection of the Google Voice app). But, as a developer, I can no longer tolerate Apple's terms and the kind of totalitarian control they indicate Apple wants. In case you are not already familiar, Apple has dictated in their OS 4.0 SDK license agreement (the now infamous Section 3.3.1) that all apps developed for the iPhone must be coded in C, C++, or Objective C, and moreover, that using any cross-compiling platforms is a violation of the agreement. For those of you who aren't developers, let me try to illustrate why this angers those of us who are. Imagine you're a professional writer. You've had articles published in some journals and magazines, and you've got a couple popular books out there, too. You've got an idea for a new book, and so you take it to your publisher. Your publisher agrees that it's a good idea. "But," says the publisher, "we want to hold our books to a tighter standard so that our readers get the experience we want them to have. Therefore, from now on, all our writers may only use words from this list of the 10,000 most common English words. Furthermore, if you cite any other works or quote anyone, they must comply with that same list, or you'll have to rewrite the entire work as well in case our readers want to look up your citation." What do you do? If your work is a children's book, this probably isn't a big deal to you. If it's an autobiography, textbook, or even a novel, though, you're going to have a lot of trouble describing your content with only common words. It's going to take you longer to complete your book, too, since you'll be looking up less common words frequently to see if you can use them. You could always go to another publisher, but this one has the best ability to distribute your book. The next largest distributor can only do a quarter as much. You could abandon the project altogether, but then everyone loses. Isn't this a silly scenario? Who would put such a limitation on writers? Yet this is very much what Apple is doing. They are using their dominant position in the market to coerce developers to write their apps exclusively for the iPhone OS by making it too expensive to write for multiple platforms. It is at least a threefold attack, striking at Adobe who is set to release a compiler that lets Flash source be compiled to iPhone binaries; striking at Google whose Android platform stands the best chance at the moment of providing serious competition to the iPhone; and reinforcing their own strong position by keeping popular apps exclusively to iPhone. And while developers are already very upset about this, the sad fact is that most of us will cave and give in to Apple because consumers don't know any better. They will continue to buy Apple's toy forcing developers to play Apple's maniacal game in order to make any money, at least until Steve Jobs decides he doesn't like them or he intends to release a competing application (bye-bye OpenFeint). Apple has been kept in check on the desktop front by a very dominant Microsoft, but I'm afraid that their success with iPods, iTunes, and iPhones has created a monster that we may have to bear until it is slain by an anti-trust suit or dies with the retirement of Steve Jobs.

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• When things go awry

  - by Phil Factor

  The moment the Entrepreneur opened his mouth on prime-time national TV, spelled out the URL and waxed big on how exciting ‘his’ new website was, I knew I was in for a busy night. I’d designed and built it. All at once, half a million people tried to log into the website. Although all my stress-testing paid off, I have to admit that the network locked up tight long before there was any danger of a database or website problem. Soon afterwards, the Entrepreneur and the Big Boss were there in the autopsy meeting. We picked through all our systems in detail to see how they’d borne the unexpected strain. Mercifully, in view of the sour mood of the Big Boss, it turned out that the only thing we could have done better was buy a bigger pipe to and from the internet. We’d specified that ‘big pipe’ when designing the system. The Big Boss had then railed at the cost and so we’d subsequently compromised. I felt that my design decisions were vindicated. The Big Boss brooded for a while. Then he made the significant comment: “What really ****** me off is the fact that, for ten minutes, we couldn’t take people’s money.” At that point I stopped feeling smug. Had the internet connection been better, the system would have reached its limit and failed rather precipitously, and that wasn’t what he wanted. Then it occurred to me that what had gummed up the connection was all those images on the site, that had made it so impressive for the visitors. If there had been a way to automatically pare down the site to the bare essentials under stress… Hmm. I began to consider disaster-recovery in the broadest sense – maintaining a service in spite of unusual or unexpected events. What he said makes a lot of sense: sacrifice whatever isn’t essential to keep the core service running when we approach the capacity limits. Maybe in IT we should borrow (or revive) the business concept of the ‘Skeleton service’, maintaining only the priority parts under stress, using a process that is well-prepared and carefully rehearsed. How might this work? Whatever the event we have to prepare for, it is all about understanding the priorities; knowing what one can dispense with when the going gets tough. In the event of database disaster, it’s much faster to deploy a skeletal system with only the essential data than to restore the entire system, though there would have to be a reconciliation process to update the revived database retrospectively, once the emergency was over. It isn’t just the database that could be designed for resilience. One could prepare for unusually high traffic in a website by designing a system that degraded gradually to a ‘skeletal’ site, one that maintained the commercial essentials without fat images, JavaScript libraries and razzmatazz. This is all what the Big Boss scathingly called ‘a mere technicality’. It seems to me that what is needed first is a culture of application and database design which acknowledges that we live in a very imperfect world, and react accordingly when things go awry.

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• Silverlight Binding with multiple collections

  - by George Evjen

  We're designing some sport specific applications. In one of our views we have a gridview that is bound to an observable collection of Teams. This is pretty straight forward in terms of getting Teams bound to the GridView. <telerik:RadGridView Grid.Row="0" Grid.Column="0" x:Name="UsersGrid" ItemsSource="{Binding TeamResults}" SelectedItem="{Binding SelectedTeam, Mode=TwoWay}"> <telerik:RadGridView.Columns> <telerik:GridViewDataColumn Header="Name/Group" DataMemberBinding="{Binding TeamName}" MinWidth="150"></telerik:GridViewDataColumn> </telerik:RadGridView.Columns> </telerik:RadGridView> We use the observable collection of teams as our items source and then bind the property of TeamName to the first column. You can set the binding to mode=TwoWay, we use a dialog where we edit the selected item, so our binding here is not set to two way. The issue comes when we want to bind to a property that has another collection in it. To continue on our code from above, we have an observable collection of teams, within that collection we have a collection of KeyPeople. We get this collection using RIA Serivces with the code below. return _TeamsRepository.All().Include("KeyPerson"); Here we are getting all the teams and also including the KeyPerson entity. So when we are done with our Load we will end up with an observable collection of Teams with a navigation property / entity of KeyPerson. Within this KeyPerson entity is a list of people associated with that particular team. We want to display the head coach from this list of KeyPersons. This list currently has a list of ten or more people that are bound to this team, but we just want to display the Head Coach in the column next to team name. The issue becomes how do we bind to this included entity? I have found about three different ways to solve this issue. The way that seemed to fit us best is to utilize the features within RIA Services. We can create client side properties that will do the work for us. We will create in the client side library a partial class of Team. We will end up in our library a file that is Team.shared.cs. The code below is what we will put into our partial team class. public KeyPerson Coach        {            get            {                if (this.KeyPerson != null && this.KeyPerson.Any())                { return this.KeyPerson.Where(x => x.RelationshipType == “HeadCoach”).FirstOrDefault(); }                 return null;            }        } We will return just the person that is the Head Coach and then be able to bind that and any other additional properties that we need. <telerik:GridViewDataColumn Header="Coach" DataMemberBinding="{Binding Coach.Name}" MinWidth="150"></telerik:GridViewDataColumn> There are other ways that we could have solved this issue but we felt that creating a partial class through RIA Services best suited our needs.

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• No access to Samba shares

  - by koanhead

  I have three shared folders in my local home directory- that is to say, on my Ubuntu desktop's /home/me/. All were set up using "Sharing Options" in Nautilus' right-click menu. The standard "Music" and "Videos" folders are configured identically: the "Guest Access" box is checked, but the "Allow others to create and delete" is not. The third folder, called "shared", is configured to not allow Guest access but to allow others to modify files. I have not altered /etc/samba/smb.conf by hand, I have only used Sharing Options to create and modify these so-called "shares". My roommates have two Windows 7 computers and one Ubuntu Netbook Remix netbook. I have the aforementioned desktop machine and laptop running 10.04. None of these machines can access any of the shares. Attempts to access the Guest shares result in the message \\machine\directory is not accessible. The network name could not be found. This is the error message generated by a VM running Windows 2000. The other Windows machines generate a similar error. The Ubuntu laptop gives the error Unable to mount location: Failed to mount Windows share. Hurrah, once again, for informative error messages. That really helps a lot. When attempting to browse the folder called "shared" from the laptop, I'm confronted with a password dialog. This behavior is the same will all machines I've tried in the situation. On entering my username and password for the account to which the shares belong, the password dialog briefly disappears and is replaced with an identical dialog. No error message, useful or not, appears. When attempting to browse this folder with the VM, the outcome is the same except that the password dialog helpfully states "incorrect username or password". My assumption is that the username and password in question is that of the user which owns the shares. I have tried all other username and password combinations available in this context and the outcome is the same. I would like to be able to share files. Sharing them with Windows machines is a nice feature, or would be if it was available. Really I consider sharing files between two machines with the same version of the same operating system kind of a minimum condition for network usability. Samba last functioned reliably for me more than ten years ago. I have attempted to use it on and off since then with only intermittent success. Oh, and "Personal File Sharing" from the Preferences menu does not result in an entry in Places → Network → my-server. In fact, the old entry "MY-SERVER" goes away and is replaced by "koanhead's public files on my-server", which when I attempt to open it from the laptop gives a "DBus.Error.NoReply: Message did not receive a reply." I know I come here and gripe about Ubuntu a lot, but on the other hand I spend literally hours every day trying to fix things in Ubuntu. It's a good system which aspires to greatness, which is why things like this either Need to work; or Be adequately documented. Ideally both would be the case. Anyway, rant over. Hopefully someone will have some insight on this issue. Thanks all who bother to read this wall o'text for your time.

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• No access to Samba shares

  - by koanhead

  I have three shared folders in my local home directory- that is to say, on my Ubuntu desktop's /home/me/. All were set up using "Sharing Options" in Nautilus' right-click menu. The standard "Music" and "Videos" folders are configured identically: the "Guest Access" box is checked, but the "Allow others to create and delete" is not. The third folder, called "shared", is configured to not allow Guest access but to allow others to modify files. I have not altered /etc/samba/smb.conf by hand, I have only used Sharing Options to create and modify these so-called "shares". My roommates have two Windows 7 computers and one Ubuntu Netbook Remix netbook. I have the aforementioned desktop machine and laptop running 10.04. None of these machines can access any of the shares. Attempts to access the Guest shares result in the message \\machine\directory is not accessible. The network name could not be found. This is the error message generated by a VM running Windows 2000. The other Windows machines generate a similar error. The Ubuntu laptop gives the error Unable to mount location: Failed to mount Windows share. Hurrah, once again, for informative error messages. That really helps a lot. When attempting to browse the folder called "shared" from the laptop, I'm confronted with a password dialog. This behavior is the same will all machines I've tried in the situation. On entering my username and password for the account to which the shares belong, the password dialog briefly disappears and is replaced with an identical dialog. No error message, useful or not, appears. When attempting to browse this folder with the VM, the outcome is the same except that the password dialog helpfully states "incorrect username or password". My assumption is that the username and password in question is that of the user which owns the shares. I have tried all other username and password combinations available in this context and the outcome is the same. I would like to be able to share files. Sharing them with Windows machines is a nice feature, or would be if it was available. Really I consider sharing files between two machines with the same version of the same operating system kind of a minimum condition for network usability. Samba last functioned reliably for me more than ten years ago. I have attempted to use it on and off since then with only intermittent success. Oh, and "Personal File Sharing" from the Preferences menu does not result in an entry in Places → Network → my-server. In fact, the old entry "MY-SERVER" goes away and is replaced by "koanhead's public files on my-server", which when I attempt to open it from the laptop gives a "DBus.Error.NoReply: Message did not receive a reply." I know I come here and gripe about Ubuntu a lot, but on the other hand I spend literally hours every day trying to fix things in Ubuntu. It's a good system which aspires to greatness, which is why things like this either Need to work; or Be adequately documented. Ideally both would be the case. Anyway, rant over. Hopefully someone will have some insight on this issue. Thanks all who bother to read this wall o'text for your time.

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• .NET "must-have" development tools

  - by nzpcmad

  James Avery wrote a classic article a while back entitled Ten Must-Have Tools Every Developer Should Download Now which is a companion to Visual Studio Add-Ins Every Developer Should Download Now and Scott Hanselman has an excellent list on his blog but if you were on a desert island and were only allowed three .NET development tools which ones would you pick? Update: Assuming you already have an IDE like Visual Studio ... Update (5) : Up to 08/01 : The current state of play: Reflector 13 Resharper 9 NUnit + TestDriven.Net 7 Refactor Pro 4 Process Explorer (other Sysinternals) 3 SnippetCompiler 3 CodeRush 3 MSDN Library 2 LinqPad 2 Cruisecontrol.net 2 VMWare 2 RhinoMocks 2 Fiddler 2 PowerShell 2 PowerCommands for VS 2008 1 Sandcastle 1 SQL Profiler 1 Redgate ANTS profiler 11 NCover 1 VisualSVN 1 Rubber Ducky 1 WinMerge 1 NAnt 1 ViEmu 1 AnkhSVN 1 dotTrace Profiler 1 BeyondCompare 1 DPack VS Plugin 1 WCF Trace Viewer (SDK) 1 xUnit.net 1 SourceGear DiffMerge 1 Ghostdoc 1 Expression Studio 1 XAML Pad 1 KaXaml 1 Blender for 3D modeling 1 Snoop a WPF tool 1 DiffMerge 1 DPack 1 NDepend 1 Kodos 1 WatiN 1 HTTPWatch Basic Edition 1 Paint.Net 1 Mole For VS 1 What I find particularly interesting about this is that "NUnit + TestDriven.Net " is right up there in third place which shows the growing emphasis on testing as an integral part of the development process rather than as an adjunct which is simply bolted on. And I'm somewhat perplexed that Codesmith didn't receive a single vote?

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• Are eCommerce platforms worth it for large scale systems?

  - by codeflunky

  My company and I are building a new system for a relatively large client. We are going to be replacing their entire system, which includes some eCommerce aspects to it among many other things. It is not a typical public shopping site, and there are many things about the system (both back end and front end) that are quite different. Some of the people I work for are convinced that we should be using a third party product to implement the eCommerce pieces (shopping cart, catalog management). Their opinion is that it is a solved problem, and we shouldn't have to reinvent it. Given that direction, I have reviewed around ten different .NET based eCommerce platforms, and I struggle to imagine how we will be able to smoothly integrate any of them without a lot of friction. They are so all-encompassing that I feel like they are probably better suited for implementing simple shopping sites rather than larger systems that happen to have some eCommerce aspects to them. We have a really nice architecture planned for everything else (Entity Framework, ASP.NET MVC, etc.), and my gut is telling me that trying to introduce a third party platform will cause unnecessary fragmentation and difficulty. I would love to hear some opinions from people who have been there. Have you used a third party platform for eCommerce? Was it a typical shopping site or something different? Did you feel it was a help or a hinderance? Thanks.

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