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• Einladung zum Oracle Partner Day 2012

  - by A&C Redaktion

  EINLADUNG: ORACLE PARTNER DAY GERMANY - 29. Oktober 2012: COMMERZBANK ARENA, Frankfurt Sehr geehrter Oracle Partner, volle Kraft voraus! Unsere Neuausrichtung und Zusammenfassung der Ressourcen, die Sie sicherlich aufmerksam verfolgt haben, ist nun abgeschlossen. Wir sind sehr überzeugt davon, dass wir alle gemeinsam von diesen Veränderungen nachhaltig profitieren werden. Nur ein Stichwort dazu: „One Oracle Red Stack“. Oracle Alliances & Channels und seine Partner können ab sofort das komplette Oracle Produktportfolio bestehend aus Oracle Software Technology, Oracle Applications und Oracle Hardware anbieten – bei bestmöglichem Support aus unserer neuen Organisation. Mein Name ist Christian Werner. Ich bin seit einigen Wochen verantwortlich für alle Alliances & Channels Bereiche in Deutschland. Frau Silvia Kaske leitet jetzt den kompletten A&C Bereich in Europe North in der Funktion als Senior Director Europe North Alliances & Channel Sales. Willkommen an Bord! Was Sie als Oracle Partner davon erwarten können? Wir haben alle unsere Kräfte konzentriert. Aus drei eigenen Bereichen wird ein großes Ganzes. Für Sie bedeutet das: fokussiertes Wachstum, geballte Kompetenz und Supportinfrastruktur. Abgestimmte Prozesse und kürzere Zeiten für Approvals. Wir meinen: Die Zeit ist reif, um jetzt gemeinsam den Hebel auf „Volle Kraft voraus“ zu legen. Und die Bedingungen für Sie sind besser als jemals zuvor, wenn Sie Ihre Kundenbasis erweitern oder neue Marktbereiche erschließen wollen. Leinen los: Kommen Sie zum Oracle Partner Day, wenn Sie wissen wollen, was sich für Sie verbessern wird: am 29. Oktober 2012 in der Commerzbank Arena in Frankfurt. Treffen Sie Ihr neu aufgestelltes A&C-Team. Erleben Sie die Produktneuheiten von der Oracle Open World in San Francisco (30. September bis 4. Oktober 2012) aus erster Hand. Nutzen Sie das neue Speed Dating-Format mit ausgewählten Oracle Experten vor Ort – für konkrete Fragen zu Vertrieb und Produkten. Ganz besonders freue ich mich, dass dieses Jahr Jürgen Kunz, SVP Technology Northern Europe & Country Leader Germany, als Keynote Speaker dabei sein wird. Ich lade Sie ganz herzlich ein und freue mich, Sie in Frankfurt zu begrüßen! Die Teilnahme ist für Sie als Oracle Partner selbstverständlich kostenfrei. Hier finden Sie weitere Informationen zum Oracle Partner Day sowie die unkomplizierte Anmeldemöglichkeit. Ich freue mich auf Sie! Ihr Christian WernerSenior Director Alliances & Channels Germany Übrigens: Direkt nach dem Oracle Partner Day findet der Oracle Day für Endkunden statt. Sie als Partner können natürlich gemeinsam mit Ihren Kunden an dieser Veranstaltung teilnehmen. Bitte melden Sie sich schnell an, da die Plätze limitiert sind. Hier finden Sie weitere Infos zum Oracle Day.

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• MythTV lost recordings - "No recordings available" and no recording rules either

  - by nimasmi

  I have a c.6 year old mythtv database. I recently upgraded from Ubuntu 10.04 to 12.04. This brought a MythTV upgrade from 0.24 to 0.25, which went well. Today, all my recordings have disappeared. They still exist in the /var/lib/mythtv/recordings folder, and the 'M' key in the Watch Recordings page says that there are 201 recordings available somewhere, but they will not display. See screenshot: (implicit thanks to whomever upvoted this, giving me sufficient reputation to upload images) Changing the filter does not remedy the fact that there is nothing shown in the lists. My Upcoming Recordings screen says that there are no rules set, but my list of previously recorded shows is still there, and has an entry from as recently as 3am today. mythbackend --printsched gives the following: user@box:~$ mythbackend --printsched 2012-09-22 12:59:20.537008 C mythbackend version: fixes/0.25 [v0.25.2-15-g46cab93] www.mythtv.org 2012-09-22 12:59:20.537043 C Qt version: compile: 4.8.1, runtime: 4.8.1 2012-09-22 12:59:20.537048 N Enabled verbose msgs: general 2012-09-22 12:59:20.537076 N Setting Log Level to LOG_INFO 2012-09-22 12:59:20.537142 I Added logging to the console 2012-09-22 12:59:20.537152 I Added database logging to table logging 2012-09-22 12:59:20.537279 N Setting up SIGHUP handler 2012-09-22 12:59:20.537373 N Using runtime prefix = /usr 2012-09-22 12:59:20.537394 N Using configuration directory = /home/user/.mythtv 2012-09-22 12:59:20.537999 I Assumed character encoding: en_GB.UTF-8 2012-09-22 12:59:20.538599 N Empty LocalHostName. 2012-09-22 12:59:20.538610 I Using localhost value of box 2012-09-22 12:59:20.538792 I Testing network connectivity to '192.168.1.2' 2012-09-22 12:59:20.539420 I Starting process manager 2012-09-22 12:59:20.541412 I Starting IO manager (read) 2012-09-22 12:59:20.541715 I Starting IO manager (write) 2012-09-22 12:59:20.541836 I Starting process signal handler 2012-09-22 12:59:20.684497 N Setting QT default locale to EN_GB 2012-09-22 12:59:20.684694 I Current locale EN_GB 2012-09-22 12:59:20.684813 N Reading locale defaults from /usr/share/mythtv//locales/en_gb.xml 2012-09-22 12:59:20.697623 I New static DB connectionDataDirectCon 2012-09-22 12:59:20.704769 I MythCoreContext: Connecting to backend server: 192.168.1.2:6543 (try 1 of 1) Calculating Schedule from database. Inputs, Card IDs, and Conflict info may be invalid if you have multiple tuners. 2012-09-22 12:59:27.710538 E MythSocket(21dfcd0:14): readStringList: Error, timed out after 7000 ms. 2012-09-22 12:59:27.710592 C Protocol version check failure. The response to MYTH_PROTO_VERSION was empty. This happens when the backend is too busy to respond, or has deadlocked in due to bugs or hardware failure. Things I have tried so far: restart the backend restart the frontend run mythtv-setup and check database passwords and IP addresses change the frontend setting for backend IP from localhost to 192.168.1.2 (the backend/frontend's IP) run optimize_mythdb.pl Other suggestions appreciated.

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• I'm creating my own scalable, rapid prototyping web server. How should I design it?

  - by Mike Willliams

  I'm going to create my own web server that focuses on scalability, rapid prototyping and the use of JavaScript as the server's scripting language, much like node.js. It will use a Model-View-Controller design pattern so a web application can support more concurrent users just by adding hardware -- and not having to redesign the software. Basically, I'm aiming to produce a framework that allows for fast and easy development of cloud applications without the need to write lots of boiler plate code. I've got some questions about this... How hard will it be to put MySQL in the cloud? How could I go about implementing this and make the resulting product free? Will I have to write my own engine or modify an existing one, if I do what should I watch out for? To make this scalable I need to adjust from one server to hundreds of servers this creates the requirement for the servers to be load balancing, how should I do this? If I balance based on the work load per server I would need gateway to handle all the incoming requests. Is it the right idea to have all the servers check into the gateway and update there status. By having the servers run through a gateway if the gateway dies all the incoming requests are ignored. I'm thinking that having all the servers maintain a list of each other, or at least a few I could rebuild the list of servers and establish a new gateway. Is it worth it? Or should I have a backup gateway that could switch out? Should I let the user choose? How should I pick which server handles the database and which handles the page serving? Should I spread the database so that queries are preformed on multiple servers? Which would theoretically improve performance. The servers would need to mirror the database at least once so that if a server goes down the database isn't corrupted. So this brings up writing another question, should I broadcast SQL queries so that all the servers can take a bit of the work load? If I do it that way wouldn't a query clog up the network so that other queries couldn't be preformed? What are my alternatives? Finally, is there a free solution already out there that might need a little modification that suits my needs?

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• Elastic PaaS with WebLogic and OpenStack, part I

  - by Jernej Kaše

  In my previous blog I described the steps to get OpenStack on Solaris up and running. Now we'll explore how WebLogic and OpenStack can work together to deliver truly elastic Middleware Platform as a Service. Middleware / Platform as a Service goals First, let's define what PaaS should be : PaaS offerings facilitate the deployment of applications without the complexity of managing the underlying hardware and software and provisioning hosting capabilities. To break it down: - PaaS provides a complete platform for hosting solutions (Java EE, SOA, BPM, ...) - Infrastructure provisioning (virtual machine, OS, platform) and managing is hidden from the PaaS user [administrator or developer] - Additionally, PaaS could / should define target SLAs, and the platform should ensure the SLAs are meet automatically. PaaS use case To make it more tangible, we have an IT Administrator who has the requirement to deploy a Java EE enterprise application. The application is used by external users who need to submit reports by the end of each month. As a result, the number of concurrent users will fluctuate, with expected huge spikes around the end of each month. The SLA agreed by the management is that no more than 100 requests should be waiting to be processes at any given time. In addition, the IT admin has no more than 3 days to have the platform and the application operational. The Challenges Some of the challenges the IT Administrator is facing are: - how are we going to ensure the processing power? - how are we going to provision the (virtual) machines, Java EE platform and deploy the application? - how are we going to monitor the SLA? - how are we going to react to SLA, and increase capacity?  The Ideal Solution Ideally, the whole process should be automated, "set it and forget" and require no human interaction: - The vendor packages the solution as deployable image(s) - The images are deployed to the IaaS - From there, automated processes take care of SLA  Solution Architecture with WebLogic 12c, Dynamic Clusters, OpenStack & Solaris OracleSolaris provides OS and virtualisation through Solaris Zones OpenStack is a part of Solaris 11.2 and provides Cloud Management (console and API) WebLogic 12c with Dynamic Clusters provides the Platform Trafic Manager provides load balancing On top of out that, we are going to implement a small control script - Cloud Manager - which is going to monitor SLA through WebLogic Diagnostic Framework. In case there are more than 100 pending requests, the script will: - provision a new virtual machine based on image which is configured for the WebLogic domain - add the machine to WebLogic domain - Increase the number of servers in dynamic cluster - Start the newly provisioned server  Stay tuned for part II The hole solution with working demo will be presented in one of our Partner WebCasts in June, exact date TBA. Jernej Kaše is a Fusion Middleware Specialist working closely with Oracle Partners in the ECEMEA region to grow their business by leveraging Oracle technology.

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• The Spotlight is on You

  - by Claudia McDonald

  On the field or off the field, in ballet slippers or singing your heart out on stage, offering a stellar performance every time is key to holding the attention of your audience and having them come back hungry for more. Similarly, showing up to a new business meeting wearing pink tights and a tutu might be one way to holding the attention of your customer, but offering them an unmatched and ground-breaking software solution certainly will get their attention! Simply put, the Oracle Exastack program enables both ISV's and OEM's to rapidly build and deliver faster, more reliable applications. It comes as no surprise that the success of the Oracle Exastack program is centered on establishing Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud as the highest performance, lowest cost platforms available in the industry today.  But here is where the real standing-ovation-worthy facts come in. The Oracle Exadata Database Machine is the only database machine that provides extreme performance for both data warehousing and online transaction processing (OLTP) workloads, making it the ideal platform for consolidating onto private clouds. Whereas the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud is an engineered hardware and software system tested and tuned by Oracle to provide the best foundation for cloud computing, while allowing Java applications, Oracle Applications and other enterprise applications to run with extreme performance. – And the crowd goes wild, ladies and gentlemen! In just four months alone, our partners have already achieved over 150 Oracle Exastack Ready milestones for Oracle Solaris, Oracle Linux, Oracle Database and Oracle WebLogic Server.  As Judson has said, “With the Oracle Exastack program, Oracle is helping partners test, tune and optimize their applications to deliver optimal performance and reliability, accelerating innovation and delivering superior value to customers." And get this, not only are their applications running faster and more efficiently, they are actually being delivered at a lower cost to customers than ever before – extreme performance well deserving of 3 consecutive arabesques! If you haven’t already, check out what some of our partners are saying about the Oracle Exastack program in this video, and find out all that is available to you today. By participating in the Oracle Exastack program, partners now have the ability to achieve Oracle Exadata Optimized, Oracle Exalogic Optimized, Oracle Exadata Ready and Oracle Exalogic Ready status for their solutions. New Oracle Exastack labs, provide OPN members with access to Oracle technical resources, on-premise facilities and remote lab environments. With Oracle Exastack Optimized, partners experience faster and more reliable applications to run on the Oracle Exadata Database Machine, as well as the long awaited Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud. Savvy OPN members are leveraging the Oracle Exastack Optimized program toward their advancement to Platinum or Diamond level in OPN. Partners are achieving Oracle Exadata Ready and Oracle Exalogic Ready giving them a competitive advantage and signaling to customers that their applications readily support Oracle Exadata Database Machine or Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud to deliver extreme performance. Get your dancing shoes on, The OPN Communications Team

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• The Diabolical Developer: What You Need to Do to Become Awesome

  - by Tori Wieldt

  Wearing sunglasses and quite possibly hungover, Martijn Verburg's evil persona provided key tips on how to be a Diabolical Developer. His presentation at TheServerSide Java Symposium was heavy on the sarcasm and provided lots of laughter. Martijn insisted that developers take their power back and get rid of all the "modern fluff" that distract developers.He provided several key tips to become a Diabolical Developer:*Learn only from yourself. Don't read blogs or books, and don't attend conferences. If you must go on forums, only do it display your superiority, answer as obscurely as possible.*Work aloneBest coding happens when you alone in your room, lock yourself in for days. Make sure you have a gaming machine in with you.*Keep information to yourselfKnowledge is power. Think job security. Never provide documentation. *Make sure only you can read your code.Don't put comments in your code. Name your variables A,B,C....A1,B1, etc.If someone insists you format your in a standard way, change a small section and revert it back as soon as they walk away from your screen. *Stick to what you knowStay on Java 1.3. Don't bother learning abstractions. Write your application in a single file. Stuff as much code into one class as possible, a 30,000-line class is fine. Makes it easier for you to read and maintain.*Use Real ToolsNo "fancy-pancy" IDEs. Real developers only use vi.*Ignore FadsThe cloud is massively overhyped. Mobile is a big fad for young kids.The big, clunky desktop computer (with a real keyboard) will return.Learn new stuff only to pad your resume. Ajax is great for that. *Skip TestingTest-driven development is a complete waste of time. They sent men to the moon without unit tests.Just write your code properly in the first place and you don't need tests.*Compiled = Ship ItUser acceptance testing is an absolute waste of time. *Use a Single ThreadDon't use multithreading. All you need to do is throw more hardware at the problem.*Don't waste time on SEO.If you've written the contract correctly, you are paid for writing code, not attracting users.You don't want a lot of users, they only report problems. *Avoid meetingsFake being sick to avoid meetings. If you are forced into a meeting, play corporate bingo.Once you stand up and shout "bingo" you will kicked out of the meeting. Job done.Follow these tips and you'll be well on your way to being a Diabolical Developer!

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• How does I/O work for large graph databases?

  - by tjb1982

  I should preface this by saying that I'm mostly a front end web developer, trained as a musician, but over the past few years I've been getting more and more into computer science. So one idea I have as a fun toy project to learn about data structures and C programming was to design and implement my own very simple database that would manage an adjacency list of posts. I don't want SQL (maybe I'll do my own query language? I'm just having fun). It should support ACID. It should be capable of storing 1TB let's say. So with that, I was trying to think of how a database even stores data, without regard to data structures necessarily. I'm working on linux, and I've read that in that world "everything is a file," including hardware (like /dev/*), so I think that that obviously has to apply to a database, too, and it clearly does--whether it's MySQL or PostgreSQL or Neo4j, the database itself is a collection of files you can see in the filesystem. That said, there would come a point in scale where loading the entire database into primary memory just wouldn't work, so it doesn't make sense to design it with that mindset (I assume). However, reading from secondary memory would be much slower and regardless some portion of the database has to be in primary memory in order for you to be able to do anything with it. I read this post: Why use a database instead of just saving your data to disk? And I found it difficult to understand how other databases, like SQLite or Neo4j, read and write from secondary memory and are still very fast (faster, it would seem, than simply writing files to the filesystem as the above question suggests). It seems the key is indexing. But even indexes need to be stored in secondary memory. They are inherently smaller than the database itself, but indexes in a very large database might be prohibitively large, too. So my question is how is I/O generally done with large databases like the one I described above that would be at least 1TB storing a big adjacency list? If indexing is more or less the answer, how exactly does indexing work--what data structures should be involved?

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• The Oracle Graduate Experience...A Graduates Perspective by Angelie Tierney

  - by david.talamelli

  [Note: Angelie has just recently joined Oracle in Australia in our 2011 Graduate Program. Last week I shared my thoughts on our 2011 Graduate Program, this week Angelie took some time to share her thoughts of our Graduate Program. The notes below are Angelie's overview from her experience with us starting with our first contact last year - David Talamelli] How does the 1 year program work? It consists of 3 weeks of training, followed by 2 rotations in 2 different Lines of Business (LoB's). The first rotation goes for 4 months, while your 2nd rotation goes for 7, when you are placed into your final LoB for the program. The interview process: After sorting through the many advertised graduate jobs, submitting so many resumes and studying at the same time, it can all be pretty stressful. Then there is the interview process. David called me on a Sunday afternoon and I spoke to him for about 30 minutes in a mini sort of phone interview. I was worried that working at Oracle would require extensive technical experience, but David stressed that even the less technical, and more business-minded person could, and did, work at Oracle. I was then asked if I would like to attend a group interview in the next weeks, to which I said of course! The first interview was a day long, consisting of a brief introduction, a group interview where we worked on a business plan with a group of other potential graduates and were marked by 3 Oracle employees, on our ability to work together and presentation. After lunch, we then had a short individual interview each, and that was the end of the first round. I received a call a few weeks later, and was asked to come into a second interview, at which I also jumped at the opportunity. This was an interview based purely on your individual abilities and would help to determine which Line of Business you would go to, should you land a graduate position. So how did I cope throughout the interview stages? I believe the best tool to prepare for the interview, was to research Oracle and its culture and to see if I thought I could fit into that. I personally found out about Oracle, its partners as well as competitors and along the way, even found out about their part (or Larry Ellison's specifically) in the Iron Man 2 movie. Armed with some Oracle information and lots of enthusiasm, I approached the Oracle Graduate Interview process. Why did I apply for an Oracle graduate position? I studied a Bachelor of Business/Bachelor of Science in IT, and wanted to be able to use both my degrees, while have the ability to work internationally in the future. Coming straight from university, I wasn't sure exactly what I wanted to do in terms of my career. With the program, you are rotated across various lines of business, to not only expose you to different parts of the business, but to also help you to figure out what you want to achieve out of your career. As a result, I thought Oracle was the perfect fit. So what can an Oracle ANZ Graduate expect? First things first, you can expect to line up for your visitor pass. Really. Next you enter a room full of unknown faces, graduates just like you, and then you realise you're in this with 18 other people, going through the same thing as you. 3 weeks later you leave with many memories, colleagues you can call your friends, and a video of your presentation. Vanessa, the Graduate Manager, will also take lots of photos and keep you (well) fed. Well that's not all you leave with, you are also equipped with a wealth of knowledge and contacts within Oracle, both that will help you throughout your career there. What training is involved? We started our Oracle experience with 3 weeks of training, consisting of employee orientation, extensive product training, presentations on the various lines of business (LoB's), followed by sales and presentation training. While there was potential for an information overload, maybe even death by Powerpoint, we were able to have access to the presentations for future reference, which was very helpful. This period also allowed us to start networking, not only with the graduates, but with the managers who presented to us, as well as through the monthly chinwag, HR celebrations and even with the sharing of tea facilities. We also had a team bonding day when we recorded a "commercial" within groups, and learned how to play an Irish drum. Overall, the training period helped us to learn about Oracle, as well as ourselves, and to prepare us for our transition into our rotations. Where to now? I'm now into my 2nd week of my first graduate rotation. It has been exciting to finally get out into the work environment and utilise that knowledge we gained from training. My manager has been a great mentor, extremely knowledgeable, and it has been good being able to participate in meetings, conference calls and make a contribution towards the business. And while we aren't necessarily working directly with the other graduates, they are still reachable via email, Pidgin and lunch and they are important as a resource and support, after all, they are going through a similar experience to you. While it is only the beginning, there is a lot more to learn and a lot more to experience along the way, especially because, as we learned during training, at Oracle, the only constant is change.

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• Oracle Leader in Transportation Management

  - by John Murphy

  Oracle Named a Leader in the Transportation Management Systems Market by Leading Analyst Firm Redwood Shores, Calif. – October 15, 2012 News Facts Gartner, Inc. has placed Oracle Transportation Management in the Leaders Quadrant of its 2012 report, “Magic Quadrant for Transportation Management Systems (TMS).” (1) Gartner Magic Quadrants position vendors within a particular market segment based on their completeness of vision and ability to execute on that vision. According to the report, “Multiple subcomponents make up a comprehensive TMS across planning (for example, load consolidation, routing, mode selection and carrier selection) and execution (for example, tendering loads to carriers, shipment track and trace, and freight audit and payment).” Built on modern, flexible, Internet based architecture, Oracle Transportation Management is a global transportation and logistics operations system that allows companies to minimize cost, optimize service levels, support sustainability initiatives, and create flexible business process automation within their transportation and logistics networks. With a share of 26% of worldwide software revenue for 2011, Oracle is also number one in TMS vendor share according to Gartner’s report, “Market Trends: A Golden Opportunity in the Transportation Management System Market, 2012 – 2016.” (2) Supporting Quote “Shippers and logistics service providers face increasingly complex challenges as they try to reduce costs, secure capacity and improve overall freight efficiency,” said Derek Gittoes, vice president, logistics product strategy, Oracle. “We believe our high standing in both Gartner reports is a reflection of Oracle’s commitment to addressing these challenges by delivering the industry’s broadest and deepest transportation management platform. With a flexible and modern platform, we are able to support customers with both basic transportation needs, as well as those with highly complex logistics requirements.” Supporting Resources Magic Quadrant for Transportation Management Systems Market Trends: A Golden Opportunity in the Transportation Management System Market, 2012 – 2016 Oracle Transportation Management (1) Gartner, Inc., “Magic Quadrant for Transportation Management Systems,” by C. Dwight Klappich, August 23, 2012 (2) Gartner, Inc., “Market Trends: A Golden Opportunity in the Transportation Management System Market, 2012 – 2016,” by Chad Eschinger and C. Dwight Klappich, September 24, 2012. About Oracle Applications Over 65,000 customers worldwide rely on Oracle's complete, open and integrated enterprise applications to achieve superior results. Oracle provides a secure path for customers to benefit from the latest technology advances that improve the customer software experience and drive better business performance. Oracle Applications Unlimited is Oracle's commitment to customer choice through continuous investment and innovation in current applications offerings. Oracle's next-generation Fusion Applications build upon that commitment, and are designed to work with and evolve Oracle's Applications Unlimited offerings. Oracle's lifetime support policy helps ensure customers will continue to have a choice in upgrade paths, based on their enterprise needs. For more information on the latest Oracle Applications releases go towww.oracle.com/applications About Oracle Oracle engineers hardware and software to work together in the cloud and in your data center. For more information about Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL), visit www.oracle.com. Trademarks Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. ###   Karen [email protected] Simon JonesBlanc & [email protected]

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• Deep in the Heart of Texas

  - by Applications User Experience

  Author: Erika Webb, Manager, Fusion Applications UX User Assistance When I was first working in the usability field, the only way I could consider conducting a usability study was to bring a potential user to a lab environment where I could show them whatever I was interested in learning more about and ask them questions. While I hate to reveal just how long I have been working in this field, let's just say that pads of paper and a stopwatch were key tools for any test I conducted. Over the years, I have worked in simple labs with basic video taping equipment and not much else, and I have worked in corporate environments with sophisticated usability labs and state-of-the-art equipment. Years ago, we conducted all usability studies at the location of the user. If we wanted to see if there were any differences between users in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, we went to those places to run the test. A lab environment is very useful for many test situations. However, there has always been a debate in the usability field about whether bringing someone into a lab environment, however friendly we make it, somehow intrinsically changes the behavior of the user as compared to having them work in their own environment, at their own desk, and on their own computer. We developed systems to create a portable usability lab, so that we could go to the users that we needed to test.  Do lab environments change user behavior patterns? Then 9/11 hit. You may not remember, but no planes flew for weeks afterwards. Companies all over the world couldn't fly-in employees for meetings. Suddenly, traveling to the location of the users had an additional difficulty. The company I was working for at the time had usability specialists stuck in New York for days before they could finally rent a car and drive home to Colorado. This changed the world pretty suddenly, and technology jumped on the change. Companies offering Internet meeting tools were strugglinguntil no one could travel. The Internet boomed with collaboration tools that enabled people to work together wherever they happened to be. This change in technology has made a huge difference in my world. We use collaborative tools to bring our product concepts and ideas to the user across the Internet. As a global company, we benefit from having users from all over the world inform our designs. We now run usability studies with users all over the world in a single day, a feat we couldn't have accomplished 10 years ago by plane! Other technology companies have started to do more of this type of usability testing, since the tools have improved so dramatically. Plus, in our busy world, it's not always easy to find users who can take the time away from their jobs to come to our labs. reaching users where it is convenient for them greatly improves the odds that people do participate. I manage a team of usability specialists who live in India and California, whlie I live in Colorado. We have wonderful labs that we bring users into to show them our products. But very often, we run our studies remotely. We used to take the lab to the users now we use the labs, but we let the users stay where they are. We gain users who might not have been able to leave work to come to our labs, and they get to use the system they are familiar with. And we gain users nearly anywhere that we can set up an Internet connection, as long as the users have a phone, a broadband connection, and a compatible Web browser (with no pop-up blockers). After we recruit participants in a traditional manner, we send them an invitation to participate through the use of a telephone conference call and Web conferencing tool. At Oracle, we use Oracle Web Conference part of Oracle Collaboration Suite, which enables us to give the user control of the mouse, while we present a prototype or wireframe pictures. We can record the sessions over the Web and phone conference. We send the users instructions, plus tips to ensure that we won't have problems sharing screens. In some cases, when time is tight, we even run a five-minute "test session" with users a day in advance to be sure that we can connect. Prior to the test, we send users a participant script that contains information about the study, including any questionnaires. This is exactly the same script we give to participants who come to the labs. We ask users to print this before the beginning of the session. We generally run these studies by having a usability engineer in our usability labs, so that we can record the session as though the user were in the lab with us. Roughly 80% of our application software usability testing at Oracle is performed using remote methods. The probability of getting a   remote test participant decreases the higher up the person is in the target organization. We have a methodology checklist available to help our usability engineers work through the remote processes.

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• How to get my IR remote to work? Lirc can't see it

  - by user1234567

  I'm using Ubuntu 11.10 (amd64) and I'm trying to get my infrared remote control working. The IR device is a part of a DVB-T USB stick (Based on a RTL2832u chip). I'm using these drivers - it's the only way of getting this device to work under 11.10 that I found. It's a big impromevent from previous Ubuntu version, where I had to edit the driver's code. The device works quite great - and the IR part of it works, too. The driver's page says that the code it's in alpha stage, but I'm pretty sure that my issue has nothing to do with that. If, and only if driver's module is loaded with parameter rtl2832u_rc_mode=2 (which means "use NEC protocol for IR") the remote kind of works, I can see this by running cat /dev/.. ../input6 - when I press a button, random letters appear. The remote works just like a keyboard, but keys are totally messed up - when I press '5' the volume goes down, etc. I would like to use Lirc to fix that, but Lirc can't detect my device (i.e. irw shows nothing). I suspect, it's because something gets into control of the device and sets it up as a keyboard. Lirc seems to be working, it's KDE settings module works too, but it just doesn't detect the device. The Lirc page describes this issue, but since 2009 - the last year when that page was updated, Ubuntu moved from HAL (described there) to DeviceKit, rendering provided instruction useless. I had a similar issue with my previous remote, but the keys were not messed up so much - the remote was usable, so I gave up trying to get Lirc working. I tried the answer provided here, but it changed nothing. I also tried forcing lircd to use my device, but this didn't work too: for i in /sys/class/input/input* ; do echo -n "$(basename "$i"): "; cat "$i/name"; done shows input0: Power Button input1: Power Button input2: Logitech Logitech USB Keyboard input3: A4Tech PS/2+USB Mouse input6: IR-receiver inside an USB DVB receiver But when I run: lircd -n --device=name='IR*' as root (also tried with the full name) I always see: lircd-0.9.0[3983]: lircd(default) ready, using /var/run/lirc/lircd lircd-0.9.0[3983]: accepted new client on /var/run/lirc/lircd lircd-0.9.0[3983]: could not get file information for name=IR* lircd-0.9.0[3983]: default_init(): No such file or directory lircd-0.9.0[3983]: Failed to initialize hardware So, how to set up Lirc with devinput driver in such case?

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• Mixed Solaris 10 and 11 versions in logical domains on the same server

  - by jsavit

  One question that comes up frequently is whether you can mix Solaris 10 and Solaris 11 in different logical domains under Oracle VM Server for SPARC. The answer is yes depending only on the system software requirements for the underlying hardware platform. Different versions of Solaris 10 and 11 can exist side-by-side on the same server and can act as control, service, I/O or guest domains subject only to the minimum software levels documented in the System Requirements section of the Oracle VM Server for SPARC Release Notes. Here's an example just taken from a running system. First, here's the control domain, which is running Solaris 10. I've highlighted a guest running Solaris 11. # uname -a SunOS atl-sewr-24 5.10 Generic_147440-01 sun4v sparc SUNW,SPARC-Enterprise-T5220 # ldm -V Logical Domains Manager (v 2.1) Hypervisor control protocol v 1.7 Using Hypervisor MD v 1.3 System PROM: Hypervisor v. 1.10.0 @(#)Hypervisor 1.10.0 2011/04/27 16:19\015 # ldm list NAME STATE FLAGS CONS VCPU MEMORY UTIL UPTIME primary active -n-cv- SP 16 4G 1.6% 120d 17h atl-sewr-pool-148 active -n---- 5001 8 2G 0.1% 119d 21h atl-sewr-pool-152 active -n---- 5000 8 4G 0.2% 112d 19h atl-sewr-pool-154 active -n---- 5002 8 2G 0.1% 120d 15h atl-sewr-pool-155 active -n---- 5003 16 2G 0.0% 26d 14h 30m This system is running Oracle VM Server 2.1 with a Solaris 10 control domain. Hmm, I should update this machine to 2.2 when I get a few free moments. Upgrading is very straightforward. Here's a display logging into the highlighted guest: Last login: Mon May 21 10:18:16 2012 from dhcp-adc-twvpn- Oracle Corporation SunOS 5.11 11.0 November 2011 sewr@atl-sewr-pool-152:~$ uname -a SunOS atl-sewr-pool-152 5.11 11.0 sun4v sparc SUNW,SPARC-Enterprise-T5220 sewr@atl-sewr-pool-152:~$ cat /etc/release Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 SPARC Copyright (c) 1983, 2011, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Assembled 18 October 2011 sewr@atl-sewr-pool-152:~$ sudo virtinfo -ct Password: Domain role: LDoms guest Control domain: atl-sewr-24 sewr@atl-sewr-pool-152:~$ That's running the GA version of Solaris 11, so I probably should update that some time too. Note the use of the virtinfo -ct command that lets the guest get information about the hosting environment. Summary You can mix and match versions of Solaris in logical domains. All the different combinations work: Solaris 10 and/or Solaris 11 control and service domains with Solaris 10 and/or Solaris 11 guests. Mixing different guest OS levels on the same server is one of the traditional reasons for using virtual machines in the first place since virtual machines were invented some 40 years ago, used to run production and test systems in parallel while upgrading OS levels. This can easily be done with Oracle VM Server for SPARC (Logical Domains).

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• Playing a video logs me out

  - by Kartick Vaddadi

  When I try to play a video in vlc, totem or banshee, it immediately logs me out. Sometimes this happens when I try to full screen the video. This seems to happen only after upgrading to ubuntu 11, and happens for multiple kinds of files, like avi and m4v. The motherboard is Asus a8v-mx. Please help me fix my ubuntu installation. Thanks. Here are the relevant entries from syslog: 21:12:27 enlightenment kernel: [ 488.157457] powernow-k8: Hardware error - pending bit very stuck - no further pstate changes possible May 1 21:12:27 enlightenment kernel: [ 488.158634] powernow-k8: transition frequency failed May 1 21:12:27 enlightenment kernel: [ 488.264015] powernow-k8: failing targ, change pending bit set May 1 21:12:27 enlightenment kernel: [ 488.306466] agpgart-amd64 0000:00:00.0: AGP 3.0 bridge May 1 21:12:27 enlightenment kernel: [ 488.306489] agpgart-amd64 0000:00:00.0: putting AGP V3 device into 8x mode May 1 21:12:27 enlightenment kernel: [ 488.306562] pci 0000:01:00.0: putting AGP V3 device into 8x mode May 1 21:12:27 enlightenment kernel: [ 488.372044] powernow-k8: error - out of sync, fix 0x2 0xa, vid 0x4 0x4 May 1 21:12:27 enlightenment kernel: [ 488.372055] powernow-k8: ph2 null fid transition 0xa May 1 21:12:30 enlightenment rtkit-daemon[1304]: Successfully made thread 1987 of process 1987 (n/a) owned by '105' high priority at nice level -11. May 1 21:12:30 enlightenment rtkit-daemon[1304]: Supervising 1 threads of 1 processes of 1 users. May 1 21:12:30 enlightenment rtkit-daemon[1304]: Successfully made thread 1988 of process 1987 (n/a) owned by '105' RT at priority 5. May 1 21:12:30 enlightenment rtkit-daemon[1304]: Supervising 2 threads of 1 processes of 1 users. May 1 21:12:30 enlightenment rtkit-daemon[1304]: Successfully made thread 1989 of process 1987 (n/a) owned by '105' RT at priority 5. May 1 21:12:30 enlightenment rtkit-daemon[1304]: Supervising 3 threads of 1 processes of 1 users. May 1 21:12:32 enlightenment gdm-simple-greeter[1975]: Gtk-WARNING: /build/buildd/gtk+2.0-2.24.4/gtk/gtkwidget.c:5687: widget not within a GtkWindow May 1 21:12:32 enlightenment gdm-simple-greeter[1975]: WARNING: Unable to load CK history: no seat-id found May 1 21:12:34 enlightenment gdm-session-worker[1978]: GLib-GObject-CRITICAL: g_value_get_boolean: assertion `G_VALUE_HOLDS_BOOLEAN (value)' failed May 1 21:12:38 enlightenment gdm-session-worker[1978]: pam_sm_authenticate: Called May 1 21:12:38 enlightenment gdm-session-worker[1978]: pam_sm_authenticate: username = [rama] May 1 21:12:39 enlightenment rtkit-daemon[1304]: Successfully made thread 2108 of process 2108 (n/a) owned by '1000' high priority at nice level -11. May 1 21:12:39 enlightenment rtkit-daemon[1304]: Supervising 4 threads of 2 processes of 2 users. May 1 21:12:39 enlightenment pulseaudio[2108]: pid.c: Stale PID file, overwriting. May 1 21:12:39 enlightenment rtkit-daemon[1304]: Successfully made thread 2111 of process 2108 (n/a) owned by '1000' RT at priority 5. May 1 21:12:39 enlightenment rtkit-daemon[1304]: Supervising 5 threads of 2 processes of 2 users. May 1 21:12:39 enlightenment rtkit-daemon[1304]: Successfully made thread 2112 of process 2

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• Bay Area Coherence Special Interest Group Next Meeting July 21, 2011

  - by csoto

  Date: Thursday, July 21, 2011 Time: 4:30pm - 8:15pm ET (note that Parking at 475 Sansome Closes at 8:30pm) Where: Oracle Office, 475 Sansome Street, San Francisco, CA Google Map We will be providing snacks and beverages. Register! - Registration is required for building security. Presentation Line Up:? 5:10pm - Batch Processing Using Coherence in Oracle Group Policy Administration - Paul Cleary, Oracle Oracle Insurance Policy Administration (OIPA) is a flexible, rules-based policy administration solution that provides full record keeping for all policy lifecycle transactions. One component of OIPA is Cycle processing, which is the batch processing of pending insurance transactions. This presentation introduces OIPA and Cycle processing, describing the unique challenges of processing a high volume of transactions within strict time windows. It then reviews how OIPA uses Oracle Coherence and the Processing Pattern to meet these challenges, describing implementation specifics that highlight the simplicity and robustness of the Processing Pattern. 6:10pm - Secure, Optimize, and Load Balance Coherence with F5 - Chris Akker, F5 F5 Networks, Inc., the global leader in Application Delivery Networking, helps the world’s largest enterprises and service providers realize the full value of virtualization, cloud computing, and on-demand IT. Recently, F5 and Oracle partnered to deliver a novel solution that integrates Oracle Coherence 3.7 with F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM). This session will introduce F5 and how you can leverage BIG-IP LTM to secure, optimize, and load balance application traffic generated from Coherence*Extend clients across any number of servers in a cluster and to hardware-accelerate CPU-intensive SSL encryption. 7:10pm - Using Oracle Coherence to Enable Database Partitioning and DC Level Fault Tolerance - Alexei Ragozin, Independent Consultant and Brian Oliver, Oracle Partitioning is a very powerful technique for scaling database centric applications. One tricky part of partitioned architecture is routing of requests to the right database. The routing layer (routing table) should know the right database instance for each attribute which may be used for routing (e.g. account id, login, email, etc): it should be fast, it should fault tolerant and it should scale. All the above makes Oracle Coherence a natural choice for implementing such routing tables in partitioned architectures. This presentation will cover synchronization of the grid with multiple databases, conflict resolution, cross cluster replication and other aspects related to implementing robust partitioned architecture. Additional Info:?? - Download Past Presentations: The presentations from the previous meetings of the BACSIG are available for download here. Click on the presentation titles to download the PDF files. - Join the Coherence online community on our Oracle Coherence Users Group on LinkedIn. - Contact BACSIG with any comments, questions, presentation proposals and content suggestions.

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• The Arab HEUG is now a reality, and other random thoughts

  - by user9147039

  I just returned from Doha, Qatar where the first of its kind HEUG (Higher Education User Group) meeting for institutions in the Middle East and North Africa was held at Qatar University and jointly hosted by Damman University from Saudi Arabia. Over 80 delegates attended including representation from education institutions in Oman, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Qatar. There are many other regional HEUG organizations in place (in Australia/New Zealand, APAC, EMEA, as well as smaller regional HEUG’s in the Netherlands, South Africa, and in regions of the US), but it was truly an accomplishment to see this Middle East/North Africa group organize and launch their chapter with a meeting of this quality. To be known as the Arab HEUG going forward, I am excited about the prospects for sharing between the institutions and for the growth of Oracle solutions in the region. In particular the hosts for the event (Qatar University) did a masterful job with logistics and organization, and the quality of the event was a testament to their capabilities. Among the more interesting and enlightening presentations I attended were one from Dammam University on the lessons learned from their implementation of Campus Solutions and transition off of Banner, as well as the use by Qatar University E-business Suite for grants management (both pre-and post-award). The most notable fact coming from this latter presentation was the fit (89%) of e-Business Suite Grants to the university’s requirements. In a few weeks time we will be convening the 5th meeting of the Oracle Education & Research Industry Strategy Council in Redwood Shores (5th since my advent into my current role). The main topics of discussion will be around our Higher Education Applications Strategy for the future (including cloud approaches to ERP (HCM, Finance, and Student Information Systems), how some cases studies on the benefits of leveraging delivered functionality and extensibility in the software (versus customization). On the second day of the event we will turn our attention to Oracle in Research and also budgeting and planning in higher education. Both of these sessions will include significant participation from council members in the form of panel discussions. Our EVP’s for Systems (John Fowler) and for Global Cloud Services and North America application sales (Joanne Olson) will join us for the discussion. I recently read a couple of articles that were surprising to me. The first was from Inside Higher Ed on October 15 entitled, “As colleges prepare for major software upgrades, Kuali tries to woo them from corporate vendors.” It continues to disappointment that after all this time we are still debating whether it is better to build enterprise software through open or community source initiatives when fully functional, flexible, supported, and widely adopted options exist in the marketplace. Over a decade or more ago when these solutions were relatively immature and there was a great deal of turnover in the market I could appreciate the initiatives like Kuali. But let’s not kid ourselves – the real objective of this movement is to counter a perceived predatory commercial software industry. Again, when commercial solutions are deployed as written without significant customization, and standard business processes are adopted, the cost of these solutions (relative to the value delivered) is quite low, and certain much lower than the massive investment (and risk) in in-house developers to support a bespoke community source system. In this era of cost pressures in education and the need to refocus resources on teaching, learning, and research, I believe it’s bordering on irresponsible to continue to pursue open-source ERP. Many of the adopter’s total costs are staggering and have little to show for their efforts and expended resources. The second article was recently in the Chronicle of Higher Education and was entitled “’Big Data’ Is Bunk, Obama Campaign’s Tech Guru Tells University Leaders.” This one was so outrageous I almost don’t want to legitimize it by referencing it here. In the article the writer relays statements made by Harper Reed, President Obama’s former CTO for his 2012 re-election campaign, that big data solutions in education have no relevance and are akin to snake oil. He goes on to state that while he’s a fan of data-driven decision making in education, most of the necessary analysis can be accomplished in Excel spreadsheets. Yeah… right. This is exactly what ails education (higher education in particular). Dozens of shadow and siloed systems running on spreadsheets with limited-to-no enterprise wide initiatives to harness the data-rich environment that is a higher ed institution and transform the data into useable information. I’ll grant Mr. Reed that “Big Data” is overused and hackneyed, but imperatives like improving student success in higher education are classic big data problems that data-mining and predictive analytics can address. Further, higher ed need to be producing a massive amount more data scientists and analysts than are currently in the pipeline, to further this discipline and application of these tools to many many other problems across multiple industries.

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• Audio Stutters at gdm

  - by Allan

  Ok I have a problem every 2 times out of 3 I login (I cant be specific it fairly random) I get a Stuttering GDM warning (not the login sound just the Bell sound to wake you up) the only way to stop it is to login I have a Fujitsu Siemens Amilo 1718 with a 2gig of memory (only hardware mod) using 10.10 Maverick and I have disabled KMS as my system was freezing as per the release notes. The only time this has happened before on the same machine was when I gave Kubuntu a try when 10.04 came out then it happened at the login screen and at random times while listening to music in any program. By the way audio is fine as is almost everything else once I have logged in. I would like an answer to this as I am an advocate of Ubuntu and its kind of embarrassing when the first thing that happens is *bing*. as requested Daniel alsa-info Pulse verbose log Not sure how useful the pulse log will be as I cant replicate the bug with a terminal open but I wouldnt be asking the question if I knew the answer so..... Edit 24/12/2010 ......been living on cocktail sausages and pickled onions for five days now made a make shift splint with cocktail sticks..... oops so updated the alsa drivers but I still get the same message in the dmesg No response from codec, disabling MSI: last cmd=0x10a90000 googleing it brings up a forum post from some other distro with a green logo the only common denominator seems to be graphics ie ATI Radeon XPRESS 200M which is why I have had to turn of kms as the chip is so old that small mice try to eat the "kernel" ;) funnily enough following the bug link at the end of the post, I found a comment about "Ubuntu Black Magic" so mabey I am coming at this from the wrong angle...... Bad Joo Joo any one. I will try the second part of Daniels Fix and Update with the result. The final Edit: (Plays air guitar) In the end neither of these solved the problem as such However I have given Roland a tick for reminding me of the solution and I gave Daniel the Bounty for the effort in trying to solve the problem. The answer for future readers was the enable the correct HD Audio Model I found the answer back when using Karmic Koala 9.10 in this forum post Amilo Li1718 Skype - Can't get it working... the model is options snd-hda-intel model=3stack position_fix=1 enable=yes which can be added to the end of alsa-base.conf thanks all for helping and hope anyone with a similar problem will find the answer here.

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• How do software projects go over budget and under-deliver?

  - by Carlos

  I've come across this story quite a few times here in the UK: NHS Computer System Summary: We're spunking £12 Billion on some health software with barely anything working. I was sitting the office discussing this with my colleagues, and we had a little think about. From what I can see, all the NHS needs is a database + middle tier of drugs/hospitals/patients/prescriptions objects, and various GUIs for doctors and nurses to look at. You'd also need to think about security and scalability. And you'd need to sit around a hospital/pharmacy/GPs office for a bit to figure out what they need. But, all told, I'd say I could knock together something with that kind of structure in a couple of days, and maybe throw in a month or two to make it work in scale. * If I had a few million quid, I could probably hire some really excellent designers to make a maintainable codebase, and also buy appropriate hardware to run the system on. I hate to trivialize something that seems to have caused to much trouble, but to me it looks like just a big distributed CRUD + UI system. So how on earth did this project bloat to £12B without producing much useful software? As I don't think the software sounds so complicated, I can only imagine that something about how it was organised caused this mess. Is it outsourcing that's the problem? Is it not getting the software designers to understand the medical business that caused it? What are your experiences with projects gone over budget, under delivered? What are best practices for large projects? Have you ever worked on such a project? EDIT *This bit seemed to get a lot of attention. What I mean is I could probably do this for say, 30 users, spending a few tens of thousands of pounds. I'm not including stuff I don't know about the medical industry and government, but I think most people who've been around programming are familiar with that kind of database/front end kind of design. My point is the NHS project looks like a BIG version of this, with bells and whistles, notably security. But surely a budget millions of times larger than mine could provide this?

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• Engineered Systems: Oracle schlägt drei Fliegen mit einer Klappe

  - by A&C Redaktion

  Normal 0 21 false false false DE X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Die News aus dem Partnergeschäft von Oracle sorgen für Schlagzeilen im Magazin ChannelPartner. Über den neuen Fokus auf Engineered Systems und die SMB Appliances heißt es dort, so könne Oracle „drei Fliegen mit einer Klappe schlagen“: Erstens wird früheren Sun Hardware-Resellern der Einstieg ins Software-Geschäft erleichtert, zweitens bieten die Appliances neue Möglichkeiten für den Mittelstand und drittens bekräftigt die Strategie das zweistufige Channel-Modell. Dazu Silvia Kaske, Senior Director Channel Sales & Alliances Oracle Deutschland: "Wir stärken weltweit den Channel, weil das SMB-Geschäft zunehmend anzieht." Neben der durchaus positiven Wertung der Channel-Strategie bietet der Artikel einen anschaulichen Überblich darüber, was Engineered Systems eigentlich sind. Außerdem werden die Einsatzmöglichkeiten (Big Data, Mobile Computing, Cloud etc.) und Angebote von Oracle in diesem Bereich dargestellt und diskutiert. Das Highlight hierbei ist – wen wundert’s – die Oracle Database Appliance. Mit dem Portfolio wächst natürlich auch die Zahl der Spezialisierungen. Logisch, findet Silvia Kaske: "Endkunden erwarten keine Generalisten, sondern Spezialisten. Nur mit einem klaren Fokus wird der Partner erfolgreich sein". Hier geht’s zum vollständigen CP-Artikel unter dem Titel „Oracle lockt Channel mit SMB-Appliances“.

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• Business Strategy - Google Case Study

  Business strategy defined by SMBTN.com is a term used in business planning that implies a careful selection and application of resources to obtain a competitive advantage in anticipation of future events or trends. In more general terms business strategy is positioning a company so that it has the greatest competitive advantage over others in the markets and industries that they participate in. This process involves making corporate decisions regarding which markets to provide goods and services, pricing, acceptable quality levels, and how to interact with others in the marketplace. The primary objective of business strategy is to create and increase value for all of its shareholders and stakeholders through the creation of customer value. According to InformationWeek.com, Google has a distinctive technology advantage over its competitors like Microsoft, eBay, Amazon, Yahoo. Google utilizes custom high-performance systems which are cost efficient because they can scale to extreme workloads. This hardware allows for a huge cost advantage over its competitors. In addition, InformationWeek.com interviewed Stephen Arnold who stated that Google’s programmers are 50%-100% more productive compared to programmers working for their competitors.  He based this theory on Google’s competitors having to spend up to four times as much just to keep up. In addition to Google’s technological advantage, they also have developed a decentralized management schema where employees report directly to multiple managers and team project leaders. This allows for the responsibility of the technology department to be shared amongst multiple senior level engineers and removes the need for a singular department head to oversee the activities of the department.  This is a unique approach from the standard management style. Typically a department head like a CIO or CTO would oversee the department’s global initiatives and business functionality.  This would then be passed down and administered through middle management and implemented by programmers, business analyst, network administrators and Database administrators. It goes without saying that an IT professional’s responsibilities would be directed by Google’s technological advantage and management strategy.  Simply because they work within the department, and would have to design, develop, and support the high-performance systems and would have to report multiple managers and project leaders on a regular basis. Since Google was established and driven by new and immerging technology, all other departments would be directly impacted by the technology department.  In fact, they would have to cater to the technology department since it is a huge driving for in the success of Google. Reference: http://www.smbtn.com/smallbusinessdictionary/#b http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/linux/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=192300292&pgno=1&queryText=&isPrev=

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• Walmart and Fusion Apps

  - by ultan o'broin

  Photograph: Misha Vaughan I attended Fusion Apps (yes, I know I am supposed to say "Oracle Fusion Applications", but stuffy old style guides are a turn-off in interwebs conversations) User Experience Advocate (FXA) training in Long Beach, California last week; a suitable location as ODTUG KSCOPE 11 was kicking off and key players were in the area. As a member of Oracle's Apps-UX team I know the Fusion Apps messaging, natch, and done some other Fusion Apps go-to-market content work too. For the messaging details themselves, see Lonneke Dikmans (@lonnekedikmans) great blog, by the way. However, I wanted some 'formal' training combined with the opportunity to meet and learn from people already out there delivering those messages. The idea in me reaching out to Misha Vaughan, Apps-UX FXA maven, to get me onto this training was that in addition to my UX knowledge, I could leverage my location in EMEA and hit up customer events more quickly and easily. Those local user groups do like to hear the voice of locals too you know (so I need to work on that mid-Atlantic accent). I'm looking forward to such opportunities. The training was all smashing stuff, just the right level of detail, delivered professionally and with great style and humor. I was especially honored to be paired off for my er, coaching with Debra Lilley (@debralilley), who shared with everyone all kinds of tips and insights from her experiences of delivering the message and demo. For me, that was the real power of the FXA event--the communal, conversational aspect--the meeting up with people who had done all this for real, the sharing in their experiences, while learning along with other newbies. Sorry, but that all-important social aspect doesn't work so well with remote meetings. Katie Candland (Apps-UX) gave us a great tour of the Fusion Apps demo and included some useful presentational tips too (any excuse to buy that iPad). It's clear to me that the Fusion Apps messaging and demos really come alive with real-world examples that local application users will recognize, and I picked up some "yes, that's my job made easier" scene-stealers from Debra and Karen Brownfield too, to add to the great ones already provided. This power of examples shouldn't surprise anyone, they've long been a mainstay of applications user assistance, popular with users. We'll offer customers different types of example topics in the Fusion Apps online help too (stay tuned), and we know from research how important those 3S's (stories, scenarios, and simulations) are to users when they consume and apply information. Well, we've got the simulation, now it's time for more stories and scenarios. If you get a chance to participate in an FXA event (whether you are an Oracle employee or otherwise), I'd encourage it. It's committing your time and energy for sure, but I got real bang for the buck from it for my everyday job too. Listening to the room's feedback on the application demo really brought our internal design work to life, and I picked up on some things that I need to follow up on (like how you alphabetically sort stuff in other languages). User experience is after all, about users. What will I be doing next, and what would I like to see happen? Obviously, I need to develop my story-telling links with the people I met in Long Beach and do some practicing with the materials, and then get out there and deliver them at a suitable location. The demo is what it is right now, and that's a super-rich demo that I know everyone will want to see and ask questions about. Then, as mentioned by attendees at the FXA event, follow up on those translated and localized messages for EMEA (and APAC), that deal with different statutory or reporting requirements of the target markets. Given my background I would say that, wouldn't I? However, language is part of the UX, and international revenue is greater than US-only revenue for Oracle, so yes dear, we all need to get over the fact that enterprise apps users don't all speak, or want to speak, American-English. Most importantly perhaps, the continued development of a strong messaging community between Oracle and partners and customers where we can swap and share those FXA messaging stories and scenarios about Fusion Apps in a conversational way. The more the better, a combination of online and face-to-face meetings. I must also mention the great dinner after the event at Parker's Lighthouse, and the fun myself and Andrew Gilmour (Apps-UX) had at our end of the table talking about just about everything except Fusion Apps with Ronald Van Luttikhuizen and Ben Prusinski (who now understands the difference between Cork and Dublin people. I hope). Thanks to all the Apps-UXers who helped bring the FXA training to town, and to Debra and all the others that I am too jetlagged to mention right who were instrumental in making it happen for me. Here's to the next one. And the Walmart angle? That was me doing my Robert Scoble (ScO'bilizer?)-style guerilla smart phone research in Walmart in Long Beach, before the FXA event. It's all about stories for me. You can read more about it on the appslab blog (see the comments).

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• NFS server generating "invalid extent" on EXT4 system disk?

  - by Stephen Winnall

  I have a server running Xen 4.1 with Oneiric in the dom0 and each of the 4 domUs. The system disks of the domUs are LVM2 volumes built on top of an mdadm RAID1. All the domU system disks are EXT4 and are created using snapshots of the same original template. 3 of them run perfectly, but one (called s-ub-02) keeps on being remounted read-only. A subsequent e2fsck results in a single "invalid extent" diagnosis: e2fsck 1.41.14 (22-Dec-2010) /dev/domu/s-ub-02-root contains a file system with errors, check forced. Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes Inode 525418 has an invalid extent (logical block 8959, invalid physical block 0, len 0) Clear<y>? yes Pass 2: Checking directory structure Pass 3: Checking directory connectivity Pass 4: Checking reference counts Pass 5: Checking group summary information /dev/domu/s-ub-02-root: 77757/655360 files (0.3% non-contiguous), 360592/2621440 blocks The console shows typically the following errors for the system disk (xvda2): [101980.903416] EXT4-fs error (device xvda2): ext4_ext_find_extent:732: inode #525418: comm apt-get: bad header/extent: invalid extent entries - magic f30a, entries 12, max 340(340), depth 0(0) [101980.903473] EXT4-fs (xvda2): Remounting filesystem read-only I have created new versions of the system disk. The same thing always happens. This, and the fact that the disk is ultimately on a RAID1, leads me to preclude a hardware disk error. The only obvious distinguishing feature of this domU is the presence of nfs-kernel-server, so I suspect that. Its exports file looks like this: /exports/users 192.168.0.0/255.255.248.0(rw,sync,no_subtree_check) /exports/media/music 192.168.0.0/255.255.248.0(rw,sync,no_subtree_check) /exports/media/pictures 192.168.0.0/255.255.248.0(rw,sync,no_subtree_check) /exports/opt 192.168.0.0/255.255.248.0(rw,sync,no_subtree_check) /exports/users and /exports/opt are LVM2 volumes from the same volume group as the system disk. /exports/media is an EXT2 volume. (There is an issue where clients see /exports/media/pictures as being a read-only volume, which I mention for completeness.) With the exception of the read-only problem, the NFS server appears to work correctly under light load for several hours before the "invalid extent" problem occurs. There are no helpful entries in /var/log. All of a sudden, no more files are written, so you can see when the disk was remounted read-only, but there is no indication of what the cause might be. Can anyone help me with this problem? Steve

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• Columnstore Case Study #2: Columnstore faster than SSAS Cube at DevCon Security

  - by aspiringgeek

  Preamble This is the second in a series of posts documenting big wins encountered using columnstore indexes in SQL Server 2012 & 2014.  Many of these can be found in my big deck along with details such as internals, best practices, caveats, etc.  The purpose of sharing the case studies in this context is to provide an easy-to-consume quick-reference alternative. See also Columnstore Case Study #1: MSIT SONAR Aggregations Why Columnstore? As stated previously, If we’re looking for a subset of columns from one or a few rows, given the right indexes, SQL Server can do a superlative job of providing an answer. If we’re asking a question which by design needs to hit lots of rows—DW, reporting, aggregations, grouping, scans, etc., SQL Server has never had a good mechanism—until columnstore. Columnstore indexes were introduced in SQL Server 2012. However, they're still largely unknown. Some adoption blockers existed; yet columnstore was nonetheless a game changer for many apps.  In SQL Server 2014, potential blockers have been largely removed & they're going to profoundly change the way we interact with our data.  The purpose of this series is to share the performance benefits of columnstore & documenting columnstore is a compelling reason to upgrade to SQL Server 2014. The Customer DevCon Security provides home & business security services & has been in business for 135 years. I met DevCon personnel while speaking to the Utah County SQL User Group on 20 February 2012. (Thanks to TJ Belt (b|@tjaybelt) & Ben Miller (b|@DBADuck) for the invitation which serendipitously coincided with the height of ski season.) The App: DevCon Security Reporting: Optimized & Ad Hoc Queries DevCon users interrogate a SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services cube via SSRS. In addition, the SQL Server 2012 relational back end is the target of ad hoc queries; this DW back end is refreshed nightly during a brief maintenance window via conventional table partition switching. SSRS, SSAS, & MDX Conventional relational structures were unable to provide adequate performance for user interaction for the SSRS reports. An SSAS solution was implemented requiring personnel to ramp up technically, including learning enough MDX to satisfy requirements. Ad Hoc Queries Even though the fact table is relatively small—only 22 million rows & 33GB—the table was a typical DW table in terms of its width: 137 columns, any of which could be the target of ad hoc interrogation. As is common in DW reporting scenarios such as this, it is often nearly to optimize for such queries using conventional indexing. DevCon DBAs & developers attended PASS 2012 & were introduced to the marvels of columnstore in a session presented by Klaus Aschenbrenner (b|@Aschenbrenner) The Details Classic vs. columnstore before-&-after metrics are impressive. Scenario Conventional Structures Columnstore ? SSRS via SSAS 10 - 12 seconds 1 second >10x Ad Hoc 5-7 minutes (300 - 420 seconds) 1 - 2 seconds >100x Here are two charts characterizing this data graphically.  The first is a linear representation of Report Duration (in seconds) for Conventional Structures vs. Columnstore Indexes.  As is so often the case when we chart such significant deltas, the linear scale doesn’t expose some the dramatically improved values corresponding to the columnstore metrics.  Just to make it fair here’s the same data represented logarithmically; yet even here the values corresponding to 1 –2 seconds aren’t visible.  The Wins Performance: Even prior to columnstore implementation, at 10 - 12 seconds canned report performance against the SSAS cube was tolerable. Yet the 1 second performance afterward is clearly better. As significant as that is, imagine the user experience re: ad hoc interrogation. The difference between several minutes vs. one or two seconds is a game changer, literally changing the way users interact with their data—no mental context switching, no wondering when the results will appear, no preoccupation with the spinning mind-numbing hurry-up-&-wait indicators.  As we’ve commonly found elsewhere, columnstore indexes here provided performance improvements of one, two, or more orders of magnitude. Simplified Infrastructure: Because in this case a nonclustered columnstore index on a conventional DW table was faster than an Analysis Services cube, the entire SSAS infrastructure was rendered superfluous & was retired. PASS Rocks: Once again, the value of attending PASS is proven out. The trip to Charlotte combined with eager & enquiring minds let directly to this success story. Find out more about the next PASS Summit here, hosted this year in Seattle on November 4 - 7, 2014. DevCon BI Team Lead Nathan Allan provided this unsolicited feedback: “What we found was pretty awesome. It has been a game changer for us in terms of the flexibility we can offer people that would like to get to the data in different ways.” Summary For DW, reports, & other BI workloads, columnstore often provides significant performance enhancements relative to conventional indexing.  I have documented here, the second in a series of reports on columnstore implementations, results from DevCon Security, a live customer production app for which performance increased by factors of from 10x to 100x for all report queries, including canned queries as well as reducing time for results for ad hoc queries from 5 - 7 minutes to 1 - 2 seconds. As a result of columnstore performance, the customer retired their SSAS infrastructure. I invite you to consider leveraging columnstore in your own environment. Let me know if you have any questions.

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• DOAG 2012 and Educause 2012

  - by Chris Kawalek

  Oracle understands the value of desktop virtualization and how customers have really embraced it as a top tier method to deliver access to applications and data. Just as supporting operating systems other than Windows in the enterprise desktop space started to become necessary perhaps 5-7 years ago, supporting desktop virtualization with VDI, application virtualization, thin clients, and tablet access is becoming necessary today in 2012. Any application strategy needs to have a secure mobile component, and a solution that gives you a holistic strategy across both mobile and fixed-asset (i.e., desktop PCs) devices is crucial to success. This means it's probably useful to learn about desktop virtualization, even if it's not in your typical area of responsibility. A good way to do that is at one of the many trade shows where we exhibit. Here are two examples:  DOAG 2012 Conference + Exhibition The DOAG Conference is fast approaching, starting November 20th in Nuremberg, Germany. If you've been reading this blog for a while, you might remember that we attended last year as well. This conference is fantastic for us because we get to speak directly to users of Oracle products. In many cases, those DBAs, IT managers, and other infrastructure folks are looking for ways to deal with the burgeoning BYOD model, as well as ways of streamlining their standard desktop and access technologies. We have a couple of sessions where you can learn a great deal about how Oracle can help with these points. Session Schedule (look under "Infrastruktur & Hardware") The two sessions focused on desktop virtualization are: Oracle VDI Best Practice unter Linux (Oracle VDI Best Practice Under Linux) Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Implementierungen und Praxiserfahrungen (Virtual Desktop Infrastructures Implementations and Best Practices) We will also have experts on hand at the booth to answer your questions on using desktop virtualization. If you're at the show, please stop by and say hello to our team there! Educause 2012  Another good example is Educause. We've gone the last few years to show off a slough of education oriented applications and capabilities in the Oracle product portfolio. And every year, we display those applications through Oracle desktop virtualization. This means the demonstration can easily be setup ahead of time and replicated out to however many "demo pods" that we have available. There's no need for our product teams to setup individual laptops for demos -- we can display a standardized Windows desktop virtual machine with their apps all ready to go on a whole bunch of devices like your standard trade show laptop, our Sun Ray Clients, and iPad. Educause 2012 just wrapped, so we're sorry we missed you this year. But there is always next year! Until then, here are a few pictures from this year's show: You can also watch this video to see how Catholic Education Australia uses Oracle Secure Global Desktop to help cope with the ever changing ways that people access their applications.  -Chris 

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• A deadlock was detected while trying to lock variables in SSIS

  Error: 0xC001405C at SQL Log Status: A deadlock was detected while trying to lock variables "User::RowCount" for read/write access. A lock cannot be acquired after 16 attempts. The locks timed out. Have you ever considered variable locking when building your SSIS packages? I expect many people haven’t just because most of the time you never see an error like the one above. I’ll try and explain a few key concepts about variable locking and hopefully you never will see that error. First of all, what is all this variable locking all about? Put simply SSIS variables have to be locked before they can be accessed, and then of course unlocked once you have finished with them. This is baked into SSIS, presumably to reduce the risk of race conditions, but with that comes some additional overhead in that you need to be careful to avoid lock conflicts in some scenarios. The most obvious place you will come across any hint of locking (no pun intended) is the Script Task or Script Component with their ReadOnlyVariables and ReadWriteVariables properties. These two properties allow you to enter lists of variables to be used within the task, or to put it another way, these lists of variables to be locked, so that they are available within the task. During the task pre-execute phase the variables and locked, you then use them during the execute phase when you code is run, and then unlocked for you during the post-execute phase. So by entering the variable names in one of the two list, the locking is taken care of for you, and you just read and write to the Dts.Variables collection that is exposed in the task for the purpose. As you can see in the image above, the variable PackageInt is specified, which means when I write the code inside that task I don’t have to worry about locking at all, as shown below. public void Main() { // Set the variable value to something new Dts.Variables["PackageInt"].Value = 199; // Raise an event so we can play in the event handler bool fireAgain = true; Dts.Events.FireInformation(0, "Script Task Code", "This is the script task raising an event.", null, 0, ref fireAgain); Dts.TaskResult = (int)ScriptResults.Success; } As you can see as well as accessing the variable, hassle free, I also raise an event. Now consider a scenario where I have an event hander as well as shown below. Now what if my event handler uses tries to use the same variable as well? Well obviously for the point of this post, it fails with the error quoted previously. The reason why is clearly illustrated if you consider the following sequence of events. Package execution starts Script Task in Control Flow starts Script Task in Control Flow locks the PackageInt variable as specified in the ReadWriteVariables property Script Task in Control Flow executes script, and the On Information event is raised The On Information event handler starts Script Task in On Information event handler starts Script Task in On Information event handler attempts to lock the PackageInt variable (for either read or write it doesn’t matter), but will fail because the variable is already locked. The problem is caused by the event handler task trying to use a variable that is already locked by the task in Control Flow. Events are always raised synchronously, therefore the task in Control Flow that is raising the event will not regain control until the event handler has completed, so we really do have un-resolvable locking conflict, better known as a deadlock. In this scenario we can easily resolve the problem by managing the variable locking explicitly in code, so no need to specify anything for the ReadOnlyVariables and ReadWriteVariables properties. public void Main() { // Set the variable value to something new, with explicit lock control Variables lockedVariables = null; Dts.VariableDispenser.LockOneForWrite("PackageInt", ref lockedVariables); lockedVariables["PackageInt"].Value = 199; lockedVariables.Unlock(); // Raise an event so we can play in the event handler bool fireAgain = true; Dts.Events.FireInformation(0, "Script Task Code", "This is the script task raising an event.", null, 0, ref fireAgain); Dts.TaskResult = (int)ScriptResults.Success; } Now the package will execute successfully because the variable lock has already been released by the time the event is raised, so no conflict occurs. For those of you with a SQL Engine background this should all sound strangely familiar, and boils down to getting in and out as fast as you can to reduce the risk of lock contention, be that SQL pages or SSIS variables. Unfortunately we cannot always manage the locking ourselves. The Execute SQL Task is very often used in conjunction with variables, either to pass in parameter values or get results out. Either way the task will manage the locking for you, and will fail when it cannot lock the variables it requires. The scenario outlined above is clear cut deadlock scenario, both parties are waiting on each other, so it is un-resolvable. The mechanism used within SSIS isn’t actually that clever, and whilst the message says it is a deadlock, it really just means it tried a few times, and then gave up. The last part of the error message is actually the most accurate in terms of the failure, A lock cannot be acquired after 16 attempts. The locks timed out.  Now this may come across as a recommendation to always manage locking manually in the Script Task or Script Component yourself, but I think that would be an overreaction. It is more of a reminder to be aware that in high concurrency scenarios, especially when sharing variables across multiple objects, locking is important design consideration. Update – Make sure you don’t try and use explicit locking as well as leaving the variable names in the ReadOnlyVariables and ReadWriteVariables lock lists otherwise you’ll get the deadlock error, you cannot lock a variable twice!

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• Oracle's Integrated Systems Management and Support Experience

  - by Scott McNeil

  With its recent launch, Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g introduced a new approach to integrated systems management and support. What this means is taking both areas of IT management and vendor support and combining them into one integrated comprehensive and centralized platform. Traditional Ways Under the traditional method, IT operational teams would often focus on running their systems using management tools that weren’t connected to their vendor’s support systems. If you needed support with a product, administrators would often contact the vendor by phone or visit the vendor website for support and then log a service request in order to fix the issues. This method was also very time consuming, as administrators would have to collect their software configurations, operating systems and hardware settings, then manually enter them into an online form or recite them to a support analyst on the phone. For the vendor, they had to analyze all the configuration data to recreate the problem in order to solve it. This approach was very manual, uncoordinated and error-prone where duplication between the customer and vendor frequently occurred. A Better Support Experience By removing the boundaries between support, IT management tools and the customer’s IT infrastructure, Oracle paved the way for a better support experience. This was achieved through integration between Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g and My Oracle Support. Administrators can not only manage their IT infrastructure and applications through Oracle Enterprise Manager’s centralized console but can also receive proactive alerts and patch recommendations right within the console they use day-in-day-out. Having one single source of information saves time and potentially prevents unforeseen problems down the road. All for One, and One for All The first step for you is to allow Oracle Enterprise Manager to upload configuration data into Oracle’s secure configuration repository, where it can be analyzed for potential issues or conflicts for all customers. A fix to a problem encountered by one customer may actually be relevant to many more. The integration between My Oracle Support and Oracle Enterprise Manager allows all customers who may be impacted by the problem to receive a notification about the fix. Once the alert appears in Oracle Enterprise Manager’s console, the administrator can take his/her time to do further investigations using automated workflows provided in Oracle Enterprise Manager to analyze potential conflicts. Finally, administrators can schedule a time to test and automatically apply the fix to all the systems that need it. In the end, this helps customers maintain their service levels without compromise and avoid experiencing unplanned downtime that may result from potential issues or conflicts. This new paradigm of integrated systems management and support helps customers keep their systems secure, compliant, and up-to-date, while eliminating the traditional silos between IT management and vendor support. Oracle’s next generation platform also works hand-in-hand to provide higher quality of service to business users while at the same time making life for administrators less complicated. For more information on Oracle’s integrated systems management and support experience, be sure to visit our Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g Resource Center for the latest customer videos, webcast, and white papers.

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