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• PeopleSoft Upgrades, Fusion, & BI for Leading European PeopleSoft Applications Customers

  - by Mark Rosenberg

  With so many industry-leading services firms around the globe managing their businesses with PeopleSoft, it’s always an adventure setting up times and meetings for us to keep in touch with them, especially those outside of North America who often do not get to join us at Oracle OpenWorld. Fortunately, during the first two weeks of May, Nigel Woodland (Oracle’s Service Industries Director for the EMEA region) and I successfully blocked off our calendars to visit seven different customers spanning four countries in Western Europe. We met executives and leaders at four Staffing industry firms, two Professional Services firms that engage in consulting and auditing, and a Financial Services firm. As we shared the latest information regarding product capabilities and plans, we also gained valuable insight into the hot technology topics facing these businesses. What we heard was both informative and inspiring, and I suspect other Oracle PeopleSoft applications customers can benefit from one or more of the following observations from our trip. Great IT Plans Get Executed When You Respect the Users Each of our visits followed roughly the same pattern. After introductions, Nigel outlined Oracle’s product and technology strategy, including a discussion of how we at Oracle invest in each layer of the “technology stack” to provide customers with unprecedented business management capabilities and choice. Then, I provided the specifics of the PeopleSoft product line’s investment strategy, detailing the dramatic number of rich usability and functionality enhancements added to release 9.1 since its general availability in 2009 and the game-changing capabilities slated for 9.2. What was most exciting about each of these discussions was that shortly after my talking about what customers can do with release 9.1 right now to drive up user productivity and satisfaction, I saw the wheels turning in the minds of our audiences. Business analyst and end user-configurable tools and technologies, such as WorkCenters and the Related Action Framework, that provide the ability to tailor a “central command center” to the exact needs of each recruiter, biller, and every other role in the organization were exactly what each of our customers had been looking for. Every one of our audiences agreed that these tools which demonstrate a respect for the user would finally help IT pole vault over the wall of resistance that users had often raised in the past. With these new user-focused capabilities, IT is positioned to definitively partner with the business, instead of drag the business along, to unlock the value of their investment in PeopleSoft. This topic of respecting the user emerged during our very first visit, which was at Vital Services Group at their Head Office “The Mill” in Manchester, England. (If you are a student of architecture and are ever in Manchester, you should stop in to see this amazingly renovated old mill building.) I had just finished explaining our PeopleSoft 9.2 roadmap, and Mike Code, PeopleSoft Systems Manager for this innovative staffing company, said, “Mark, the new features you’ve shown us in 9.1/9.2 are very relevant to our business. As we forge ahead with the 9.1 upgrade, the ability to configure a targeted user interface with WorkCenters, Related Actions, Pivot Grids, and Alerts will enable us to satisfy the business that this upgrade is for them and will deliver tangible benefits. In fact, you’ve highlighted that we need to start talking to the business to keep up the momentum to start reviewing the 9.2 upgrade after we get to 9.1, because as much as 9.1 and PeopleTools 8.52 offers, what you’ve shown us for 9.2 is what we’ve envisioned was ultimately possible with our investment in PeopleSoft applications.” We also received valuable feedback about our investment for the Staffing industry when we visited with Hans Wanders, CIO of Randstad (the second largest Staffing company in the world) in the Netherlands. After our visit, Hans noted, “It was very interesting to see how the PeopleSoft applications have developed. I was truly impressed by many of the new developments.” Hans and Mike, sincere thanks for the validation that our team’s hard work and dedication to “respecting the users” is worth the effort! Co-existence of PeopleSoft and Fusion Applications Just Makes Sense As a “product person,” one of the most rewarding things about visiting customers is that they actually want to talk to me. Sometimes, they want to discuss a product area that we need to enhance; other times, they are interested in learning how to extract more value from their applications; and still others, they want to tell me how they are using the applications to drive real value for the business. During this trip, I was very pleased to hear that several of our customers not only thought the co-existence of Fusion applications alongside PeopleSoft applications made sense in theory, but also that they were aggressively looking at how to deploy one or more Fusion applications alongside their PeopleSoft HCM and FSCM applications. The most common deployment plan in the works by three of the organizations is to upgrade to PeopleSoft 9.1 or 9.2, and then adopt one of the new Fusion HCM applications, such as Fusion Performance Management or the full suite of  Fusion Talent Management. For example, during an applications upgrade planning discussion with the staffing company Hays plc., Mark Thomas, who is Hays’ UK IT Director, commented, “We are very excited about where we can go with the latest versions of the PeopleSoft applications in conjunction with Fusion Talent Management.” Needless to say, this news was very encouraging, because it reiterated that our applications investment strategy makes good business sense for our customers. Next Generation Business Intelligence Is the Key to the Future The third, and perhaps most exciting, lesson I learned during this journey is that our audiences already know that the latest generation of Business Intelligence technologies will be the “secret sauce” for organizations to transform business in radical ways. While a number of the organizations we visited on the trip have deployed or are deploying Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and the associated analytics applications to provide dashboards of easy-to-understand, user-configurable metrics that help optimize business performance according to current operating procedures, what’s most exciting to them is being able to use Business Intelligence to change the way an organization does business, grows revenue, and makes a profit. In particular, several executives we met asked whether we can help them minimize the need to have perfectly structured data and at the same time generate analytics that improve order fulfillment decision-making. To them, the path to future growth lies in having the ability to analyze unstructured data rapidly and intuitively and leveraging technology’s ability to detect patterns that a human cannot reasonably be expected to see. For illustrative purposes, here is a good example of a business problem where analyzing a combination of structured and unstructured data can produce better results. If you have a resource manager trying to decide which person would be the best fit for an assignment in terms of ensuring (a) client satisfaction, (b) the individual’s satisfaction with the work, (c) least travel distance, and (d) highest margin, you traditionally compare resource qualifications to assignment needs, calculate margins on past work with the client, and measure distances. To perform these comparisons, you are likely to need the organization to have profiles setup, people ranked against profiles, margin targets setup, margins measured, distances setup, distances measured, and more. As you can imagine, this requires organizations to plan and implement data setup, capture, and quality management initiatives to ensure that dependable information is available to support resourcing analysis and decisions. In the fast-paced, tight-budget world in which most organizations operate today, the effort and discipline required to maintain high-quality, structured data like those described in the above example are certainly not desirable and in some cases are not feasible. You can imagine how intrigued our audiences were when I informed them that we are ready to help them analyze volumes of unstructured data, detect trends, and produce recommendations. Our discussions delved into examples of how the firms could leverage Oracle’s Secure Enterprise Search and Endeca technologies to keyword search against, compare, and learn from unstructured resource and assignment data. We also considered examples of how they could employ Oracle Real-Time Decisions to generate statistically significant recommendations based on similar resourcing scenarios that have produced the desired satisfaction and profit margin results. --- Although I had almost no time for sight-seeing during this trip to Europe, I have to say that it may have been one of the most energizing and engaging trips of my career. Showing these dedicated customers how they can give every user a uniquely tailored set of tools and address business problems in ways that have to date been impossible made the journey across the Atlantic more than worth it. If any of these three topics intrigue you, I’d recommend you contact your Oracle applications representative to arrange for more detailed discussions with the appropriate members of our organization.

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• Prioritizing Product Features

  - by Robert May

  A very common task in Agile Environments is prioritization.  Teams that are functioning well will prioritize new features, old features, the backlog, and any other source of stories for the team, and they’ll do it regularly. Not all teams are good at prioritizing according to the real return on investment that building stories will yield to the company.  This is unfortunate.  Too often, teams end up building features that are less valuable, and everyone seems to know it except perhaps the product owner!  Most features built into software are never even used.  Clearly, not much return for features that go unused. So how does a company avoid building features that add little value to the company?  This is a tough question to answer, but usually, this prioritization starts at the top with the executives of the company.  After all, they’re responsible for the overall vision of the company. Here’s what I recommend: Know your market. Know your customers and users. Know where you’re going and what you want to achieve. Implement the Vision Know Your Market We often see companies that don’t know their market.  Personally, I’m surprised by this.  These companies don’t know who their competitors are, don’t know what features make their product desirable in the market, and in many cases, get by with saying, “I’ve been doing this for XX years.  I know what the market wants!”  In many cases, they equate “marketing” with “advertising” and don’t understand the difference. This is almost never true.  Good companies will spend significant amounts of time and money finding out who they’re competing against and what makes their competitors successful in the marketplace.  Good companies understand that marketing involves more than just advertising.  Often, marketing is mostly research and analysis, not sales.  Until you understand your market, you cannot know what features will give you the best return on your investment dollar. Good companies have a marketing department and can answer the next important step which is to know your customers and your users. Know your Customers and Users First, note that I included both customers and users.  They’re often not the same thing.  Users use the product that you build.  Customers buy the product that you build.  It’s a subtle difference, but too often, I’ve seen companies that focus exclusively on one or the other and are not successful simply because they ignore an important part of the group. If your company is doing appropriate marketing, you know that these are two different aspects of your product and that both deserve attention to have a product that is successful in your target market.  Your marketing department should be spending a lot of time understanding these personas and then conveying that information to the company. I’m always surprised when development teams think that they can build a product that people want to use without understanding the users of that product.  Developers think differently than most people in the world.  They know what the computer is doing.  The computer isn’t magic to them.  So when they assume that they know how to build something, they bring with them quite a bit of baggage.  Never assume that you know your customer unless you’re regularly having interaction with them.  Also, don’t just leave this to Marketing or Product Management.  Take them time to get your developers out with the customers as well.  Developers are very smart people, and often, seeing how someone uses their software inspires them to make a much better product. Very often, because the users and customers aren’t know, teams will spend a significant amount of time building apps that are super flexible and configurable so that any possible combination of feature can be used.  This demonstrates a clear lack of understanding of the customer.  Most configuration questions can quickly be answered by talking to the customer.  In most cases, if your software requires significant setup and configuration before its usable, you probably don’t know your customers and users very well. Until you know your customers, you cannot know what features will be most valuable to your customers and you cannot build those features in a way that your customers can use. Know Where You’re Going and What You Want to Achieve Many companies suffer from not having a plan.  Executives will tell the team to make them a plan.  The team, not knowing their market and customers and users, will come up with a plan that doesn’t reflect reality and doesn’t consider ROI.  Management then wonders why the product is doing poorly in the market place. Instead of leaving this up to the teams, as executives, work with Marketing to understand what broad categories of features will sell the most product in the marketplace.  Then, once you’ve determined that, give this vision to the team and let them run with it.  Revise the vision as needed, but avoid changing streams frequently.  Sure, sometimes you need to, but often, executives will change priorities many times a month, leading to nothing more than confusion.  If the team has a vision, they’ll be able to execute that vision far better than they could otherwise. By knowing what products are most important, you can set budgetary goals and guidelines that will help you achieve the vision that was created. Implement the Vision Creating the vision is often where the general executives stop participating in the plan.  The team is responsible for implementing that vision.  Executives should attend showcases and and should remain aware of the progress that the team is making towards meeting the vision, however. Once a broad vision has been created, the team should break that vision down into minimal market features (MMF).  These MMFs should be sized using story points so that, using the team’s velocity, an estimated cost can be determined for each feature.  The product management team should then try to quantify the relative value of the MMFs based on customer feedback and interviews.  Once the value and cost of creating the feature is understood, a return on investment can be calculated.  The features should then be prioritized with the MMF’s that have the highest value and lowest cost rising to the top of features to implement.  Don’t let politics get in the way! Once the MMF’s have been prioritized, they should go through release planning to schedule them for implementation. Conclusion By having a good grasp on the strategy of the company, your Agile teams can be much more effective.  Each and every story the team is implementing will roll up into features that matter to the company and provide ROI to them.  The steps outlined in this post should be repeated on a regular basis.  I recommend reviewing them at least once per quarter to make sure that the vision hasn’t shifted and that the teams are still working on what matters most to the company. Technorati Tags: Agile,Product Owner,ROI

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• MySQL Cluster 7.2: Over 8x Higher Performance than Cluster 7.1

  - by Mat Keep

  0 0 1 893 5092 Homework 42 11 5974 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-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:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-ansi-language:EN-US;} Summary The scalability enhancements delivered by extensions to multi-threaded data nodes enables MySQL Cluster 7.2 to deliver over 8x higher performance than the previous MySQL Cluster 7.1 release on a recent benchmark What’s New in MySQL Cluster 7.2 MySQL Cluster 7.2 was released as GA (Generally Available) in February 2012, delivering many enhancements to performance on complex queries, new NoSQL Key / Value API, cross-data center replication and ease-of-use. These enhancements are summarized in the Figure below, and detailed in the MySQL Cluster New Features whitepaper Figure 1: Next Generation Web Services, Cross Data Center Replication and Ease-of-Use Once of the key enhancements delivered in MySQL Cluster 7.2 is extensions made to the multi-threading processes of the data nodes. Multi-Threaded Data Node Extensions The MySQL Cluster 7.2 data node is now functionally divided into seven thread types: 1) Local Data Manager threads (ldm). Note – these are sometimes also called LQH threads. 2) Transaction Coordinator threads (tc) 3) Asynchronous Replication threads (rep) 4) Schema Management threads (main) 5) Network receiver threads (recv) 6) Network send threads (send) 7) IO threads Each of these thread types are discussed in more detail below. MySQL Cluster 7.2 increases the maximum number of LDM threads from 4 to 16. The LDM contains the actual data, which means that when using 16 threads the data is more heavily partitioned (this is automatic in MySQL Cluster). Each LDM thread maintains its own set of data partitions, index partitions and REDO log. The number of LDM partitions per data node is not dynamically configurable, but it is possible, however, to map more than one partition onto each LDM thread, providing flexibility in modifying the number of LDM threads. The TC domain stores the state of in-flight transactions. This means that every new transaction can easily be assigned to a new TC thread. Testing has shown that in most cases 1 TC thread per 2 LDM threads is sufficient, and in many cases even 1 TC thread per 4 LDM threads is also acceptable. Testing also demonstrated that in some instances where the workload needed to sustain very high update loads it is necessary to configure 3 to 4 TC threads per 4 LDM threads. In the previous MySQL Cluster 7.1 release, only one TC thread was available. This limit has been increased to 16 TC threads in MySQL Cluster 7.2. The TC domain also manages the Adaptive Query Localization functionality introduced in MySQL Cluster 7.2 that significantly enhanced complex query performance by pushing JOIN operations down to the data nodes. Asynchronous Replication was separated into its own thread with the release of MySQL Cluster 7.1, and has not been modified in the latest 7.2 release. To scale the number of TC threads, it was necessary to separate the Schema Management domain from the TC domain. The schema management thread has little load, so is implemented with a single thread. The Network receiver domain was bound to 1 thread in MySQL Cluster 7.1. With the increase of threads in MySQL Cluster 7.2 it is also necessary to increase the number of recv threads to 8. This enables each receive thread to service one or more sockets used to communicate with other nodes the Cluster. The Network send thread is a new thread type introduced in MySQL Cluster 7.2. Previously other threads handled the sending operations themselves, which can provide for lower latency. To achieve highest throughput however, it has been necessary to create dedicated send threads, of which 8 can be configured. It is still possible to configure MySQL Cluster 7.2 to a legacy mode that does not use any of the send threads – useful for those workloads that are most sensitive to latency. The IO Thread is the final thread type and there have been no changes to this domain in MySQL Cluster 7.2. Multiple IO threads were already available, which could be configured to either one thread per open file, or to a fixed number of IO threads that handle the IO traffic. Except when using compression on disk, the IO threads typically have a very light load. Benchmarking the Scalability Enhancements The scalability enhancements discussed above have made it possible to scale CPU usage of each data node to more than 5x of that possible in MySQL Cluster 7.1. In addition, a number of bottlenecks have been removed, making it possible to scale data node performance by even more than 5x. Figure 2: MySQL Cluster 7.2 Delivers 8.4x Higher Performance than 7.1 The flexAsynch benchmark was used to compare MySQL Cluster 7.2 performance to 7.1 across an 8-node Intel Xeon x5670-based cluster of dual socket commodity servers (6 cores each). As the results demonstrate, MySQL Cluster 7.2 delivers over 8x higher performance per data nodes than MySQL Cluster 7.1. More details of this and other benchmarks will be published in a new whitepaper – coming soon, so stay tuned! In a following blog post, I’ll provide recommendations on optimum thread configurations for different types of server processor. You can also learn more from the Best Practices Guide to Optimizing Performance of MySQL Cluster Conclusion MySQL Cluster has achieved a range of impressive benchmark results, and set in context with the previous 7.1 release, is able to deliver over 8x higher performance per node. As a result, the multi-threaded data node extensions not only serve to increase performance of MySQL Cluster, they also enable users to achieve significantly improved levels of utilization from current and future generations of massively multi-core, multi-thread processor designs.

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• Thread placement policies on NUMA systems - update

  - by Dave

  In a prior blog entry I noted that Solaris used a "maximum dispersal" placement policy to assign nascent threads to their initial processors. The general idea is that threads should be placed as far away from each other as possible in the resource topology in order to reduce resource contention between concurrently running threads. This policy assumes that resource contention -- pipelines, memory channel contention, destructive interference in the shared caches, etc -- will likely outweigh (a) any potential communication benefits we might achieve by packing our threads more densely onto a subset of the NUMA nodes, and (b) benefits of NUMA affinity between memory allocated by one thread and accessed by other threads. We want our threads spread widely over the system and not packed together. Conceptually, when placing a new thread, the kernel picks the least loaded node NUMA node (the node with lowest aggregate load average), and then the least loaded core on that node, etc. Furthermore, the kernel places threads onto resources -- sockets, cores, pipelines, etc -- without regard to the thread's process membership. That is, initial placement is process-agnostic. Keep reading, though. This description is incorrect. On Solaris 10 on a SPARC T5440 with 4 x T2+ NUMA nodes, if the system is otherwise unloaded and we launch a process that creates 20 compute-bound concurrent threads, then typically we'll see a perfect balance with 5 threads on each node. We see similar behavior on an 8-node x86 x4800 system, where each node has 8 cores and each core is 2-way hyperthreaded. So far so good; this behavior seems in agreement with the policy I described in the 1st paragraph. I recently tried the same experiment on a 4-node T4-4 running Solaris 11. Both the T5440 and T4-4 are 4-node systems that expose 256 logical thread contexts. To my surprise, all 20 threads were placed onto just one NUMA node while the other 3 nodes remained completely idle. I checked the usual suspects such as processor sets inadvertently left around by colleagues, processors left offline, and power management policies, but the system was configured normally. I then launched multiple concurrent instances of the process, and, interestingly, all the threads from the 1st process landed on one node, all the threads from the 2nd process landed on another node, and so on. This happened even if I interleaved thread creating between the processes, so I was relatively sure the effect didn't related to thread creation time, but rather that placement was a function of process membership. I this point I consulted the Solaris sources and talked with folks in the Solaris group. The new Solaris 11 behavior is intentional. The kernel is no longer using a simple maximum dispersal policy, and thread placement is process membership-aware. Now, even if other nodes are completely unloaded, the kernel will still try to pack new threads onto the home lgroup (socket) of the primordial thread until the load average of that node reaches 50%, after which it will pick the next least loaded node as the process's new favorite node for placement. On the T4-4 we have 64 logical thread contexts (strands) per socket (lgroup), so if we launch 48 concurrent threads we will find 32 placed on one node and 16 on some other node. If we launch 64 threads we'll find 32 and 32. That means we can end up with our threads clustered on a small subset of the nodes in a way that's quite different that what we've seen on Solaris 10. So we have a policy that allows process-aware packing but reverts to spreading threads onto other nodes if a node becomes too saturated. It turns out this policy was enabled in Solaris 10, but certain bugs suppressed the mixed packing/spreading behavior. There are configuration variables in /etc/system that allow us to dial the affinity between nascent threads and their primordial thread up and down: see lgrp_expand_proc_thresh, specifically. In the OpenSolaris source code the key routine is mpo_update_tunables(). This method reads the /etc/system variables and sets up some global variables that will subsequently be used by the dispatcher, which calls lgrp_choose() in lgrp.c to place nascent threads. Lgrp_expand_proc_thresh controls how loaded an lgroup must be before we'll consider homing a process's threads to another lgroup. Tune this value lower to have it spread your process's threads out more. To recap, the 'new' policy is as follows. Threads from the same process are packed onto a subset of the strands of a socket (50% for T-series). Once that socket reaches the 50% threshold the kernel then picks another preferred socket for that process. Threads from unrelated processes are spread across sockets. More precisely, different processes may have different preferred sockets (lgroups). Beware that I've simplified and elided details for the purposes of explication. The truth is in the code. Remarks: It's worth noting that initial thread placement is just that. If there's a gross imbalance between the load on different nodes then the kernel will migrate threads to achieve a better and more even distribution over the set of available nodes. Once a thread runs and gains some affinity for a node, however, it becomes "stickier" under the assumption that the thread has residual cache residency on that node, and that memory allocated by that thread resides on that node given the default "first-touch" page-level NUMA allocation policy. Exactly how the various policies interact and which have precedence under what circumstances could the topic of a future blog entry. The scheduler is work-conserving. The x4800 mentioned above is an interesting system. Each of the 8 sockets houses an Intel 7500-series processor. Each processor has 3 coherent QPI links and the system is arranged as a glueless 8-socket twisted ladder "mobius" topology. Nodes are either 1 or 2 hops distant over the QPI links. As an aside the mapping of logical CPUIDs to physical resources is rather interesting on Solaris/x4800. On SPARC/Solaris the CPUID layout is strictly geographic, with the highest order bits identifying the socket, the next lower bits identifying the core within that socket, following by the pipeline (if present) and finally the logical thread context ("strand") on the core. But on Solaris on the x4800 the CPUID layout is as follows. [6:6] identifies the hyperthread on a core; bits [5:3] identify the socket, or package in Intel terminology; bits [2:0] identify the core within a socket. Such low-level details should be of interest only if you're binding threads -- a bad idea, the kernel typically handles placement best -- or if you're writing NUMA-aware code that's aware of the ambient placement and makes decisions accordingly. Solaris introduced the so-called critical-threads mechanism, which is expressed by putting a thread into the FX scheduling class at priority 60. The critical-threads mechanism applies to placement on cores, not on sockets, however. That is, it's an intra-socket policy, not an inter-socket policy. Solaris 11 introduces the Power Aware Dispatcher (PAD) which packs threads instead of spreading them out in an attempt to be able to keep sockets or cores at lower power levels. Maximum dispersal may be good for performance but is anathema to power management. PAD is off by default, but power management polices constitute yet another confounding factor with respect to scheduling and dispatching. If your threads communicate heavily -- one thread reads cache lines last written by some other thread -- then the new dense packing policy may improve performance by reducing traffic on the coherent interconnect. On the other hand if your threads in your process communicate rarely, then it's possible the new packing policy might result on contention on shared computing resources. Unfortunately there's no simple litmus test that says whether packing or spreading is optimal in a given situation. The answer varies by system load, application, number of threads, and platform hardware characteristics. Currently we don't have the necessary tools and sensoria to decide at runtime, so we're reduced to an empirical approach where we run trials and try to decide on a placement policy. The situation is quite frustrating. Relatedly, it's often hard to determine just the right level of concurrency to optimize throughput. (Understanding constructive vs destructive interference in the shared caches would be a good start. We could augment the lines with a small tag field indicating which strand last installed or accessed a line. Given that, we could augment the CPU with performance counters for misses where a thread evicts a line it installed vs misses where a thread displaces a line installed by some other thread.)

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• SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #048

  - by Pinal Dave

  Here is the list of selected articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2007 Order of Result Set of SELECT Statement on Clustered Indexed Table When ORDER BY is Not Used Above theory is true in most of the cases. However SQL Server does not use that logic when returning the resultset. SQL Server always returns the resultset which it can return fastest.In most of the cases the resultset which can be returned fastest is the resultset which is returned using clustered index. Effect of TRANSACTION on Local Variable – After ROLLBACK and After COMMIT One of the Jr. Developer asked me this question (What will be the Effect of TRANSACTION on Local Variable – After ROLLBACK and After COMMIT?) while I was rushing to an important meeting. I was getting late so I asked him to talk with his Application Tech Lead. When I came back from meeting both of them were looking for me. They said they are confused. I quickly wrote down following example for them. 2008 SQL SERVER – Guidelines and Coding Standards Complete List Download Coding standards and guidelines are very important for any developer on the path of a successful career. A coding standard is a set of guidelines, rules and regulations on how to write code. Coding standards should be flexible enough or should take care of the situation where they should not prevent best practices for coding. They are basically the guidelines that one should follow for better understanding. Download Guidelines and Coding Standards complete List Download Get Answer in Float When Dividing of Two Integer Many times we have requirements of some calculations amongst different fields in Tables. One of the software developers here was trying to calculate some fields having integer values and divide it which gave incorrect results in integer where accurate results including decimals was expected. Puzzle – Computed Columns Datatype Explanation SQL Server automatically does a cast to the data type having the highest precedence. So the result of INT and INT will be INT, but INT and FLOAT will be FLOAT because FLOAT has a higher precedence. If you want a different data type, you need to do an EXPLICIT cast. Renaming SP is Not Good Idea – Renaming Stored Procedure Does Not Update sys.procedures I have written many articles about renaming a tables, columns and procedures SQL SERVER – How to Rename a Column Name or Table Name, here I found something interesting about renaming the stored procedures and felt like sharing it with you all. The interesting fact is that when we rename a stored procedure using SP_Rename command, the Stored Procedure is successfully renamed. But when we try to test the procedure using sp_helptext, the procedure will be having the old name instead of new names. 2009 Insert Values of Stored Procedure in Table – Use Table Valued Function It is clear from the result set that , where I have converted stored procedure logic into the table valued function, is much better in terms of logic as it saves a large number of operations. However, this option should be used carefully. The performance of the stored procedure is “usually” better than that of functions. Interesting Observation – Index on Index View Used in Similar Query Recently, I was working on an optimization project for one of the largest organizations. While working on one of the queries, we came across a very interesting observation. We found that there was a query on the base table and when the query was run, it used the index, which did not exist in the base table. On careful examination, we found that the query was using the index that was on another view. This was very interesting as I have personally never experienced a scenario like this. In simple words, “Query on the base table can use the index created on the indexed view of the same base table.” Interesting Observation – Execution Plan and Results of Aggregate Concatenation Queries Working with SQL Server has never seemed to be monotonous – no matter how long one has worked with it. Quite often, I come across some excellent comments that I feel like acknowledging them as blog posts. Recently, I wrote an article on SQL SERVER – Execution Plan and Results of Aggregate Concatenation Queries Depend Upon Expression Location, which is well received in the community. 2010 I encourage all of you to go through complete series and write your own on the subject. If you write an article and send it to me, I will publish it on this blog with due credit to you. If you write on your own blog, I will update this blog post pointing to your blog post. SQL SERVER – ORDER BY Does Not Work – Limitation of the View 1 SQL SERVER – Adding Column is Expensive by Joining Table Outside View – Limitation of the View 2 SQL SERVER – Index Created on View not Used Often – Limitation of the View 3 SQL SERVER – SELECT * and Adding Column Issue in View – Limitation of the View 4 SQL SERVER – COUNT(*) Not Allowed but COUNT_BIG(*) Allowed – Limitation of the View 5 SQL SERVER – UNION Not Allowed but OR Allowed in Index View – Limitation of the View 6 SQL SERVER – Cross Database Queries Not Allowed in Indexed View – Limitation of the View 7 SQL SERVER – Outer Join Not Allowed in Indexed Views – Limitation of the View 8 SQL SERVER – SELF JOIN Not Allowed in Indexed View – Limitation of the View 9 SQL SERVER – Keywords View Definition Must Not Contain for Indexed View – Limitation of the View 10 SQL SERVER – View Over the View Not Possible with Index View – Limitations of the View 11 2011 Startup Parameters Easy to Configure If you are a regular reader of this blog, you must be aware that I have written about SQL Server Denali recently. Here is the quickest way to reach into the screen where we can change the startup parameters. Go to SQL Server Configuration Manager >> SQL Server Services >> Right Click on the Server >> Properties >> Startup Parameters 2012 Validating Unique Columnname Across Whole Database I sometimes come across very strange requirements and often I do not receive a proper explanation of the same. Here is the one of those examples. For example “Our business requirement is when we add new column we want it unique across current database.” Read the solution to this strange request in this blog post. Excel Losing Decimal Values When Value Pasted from SSMS ResultSet It is very common when users are coping the resultset to Excel, the floating point or decimals are missed. The solution is very much simple and it requires a small adjustment in the Excel. By default Excel is very smart and when it detects the value which is getting pasted is numeric it changes the column format to accommodate that. Basic Calculation and PEMDAS Order of Operation Read this interesting blog post for fantastic conversation about the subject. Copy Column Headers from Resultset – SQL in Sixty Seconds #027 – Video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_-3tLqTRv0 Delete From Multiple Table – Update Multiple Table in Single Statement There are two questions which I get every single day multiple times. In my gmail, I have created standard canned reply for them. Let us see the questions here. I want to delete from multiple table in a single statement how will I do it? I want to update multiple table in a single statement how will I do it? Read the answer in the blog post. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• You Say You Want a (Customer Experience) Revolution

  - by Christie Flanagan

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} rev-o-lu-tion [rev-uh-loo-shuhn] noun 1. a sudden, radical or complete change 2. fundamental change in the way of thinking about or visualizing something; a change of paradigm 3. a changeover in use or preference especially in technology <the computer revolution> Lately, I've been hearing an awful lot about the customer experience revolution.  Tonight Oracle will be hosting The Experience Revolution, an evening of exploration and networking with customer experience executives in New York City where Oracle President Mark Hurd will introduce Oracle Customer Experience, a cross-stack suite of customer experience products that includes Oracle WebCenter and a number of other Oracle technologies. Then on Tuesday and Wednesday, the Forrester Customer Experience Forum East also kicks off in New York City where they'll examine how businesses can "reap the full business benefits of the customer experience revolution." So, are we in the midst of a customer experience revolution? As a consumer, I can answer that question with a definitive “yes.” When I bought my very first car, I had a lot of questions. How do I know if I’m paying a fair price? How do I know if this dealer is honest? Why do I have to sit through these good cop, bad cop shenanigans between sales and sales management at the dealership? Why do I feel like I’m doing these people a favor by giving them my business? In the end the whole experience left me feeling deeply unsatisfied. I didn’t feel that I held all that much power over the experience and the only real negotiating trick I had was to walk out, which I did, many times before actually making a purchase. Fast forward to a year ago and I found myself back in the market for a new car. The very first car that I bought had finally kicked the bucket after many years, many repair bills, and much wear and tear. Man, I had loved that car. It was time to move on, but I had a knot in my stomach when I reflected back on my last car purchase experience and dreaded the thought of going through that again. Could that have been the reason why I drove my old car for so long? But as I started the process of researching new cars, I started to feel really confident. I had a wealth of online information that helped me in my search. I went to Edmunds and plugged in some information on my preferences and left with a short list of vehicles. After an afternoon spent test driving the cars my short list, I had determined my favorite – it was a model I didn’t even know about until my research on Edmunds! But I didn’t want to go back to the dealership where I test drove it. They were clearly old school and wanted me to buy the way that they wanted to sell. No thanks! After that I went back online. I figured out exactly what people had paid for this car in my area. I found out what kind of discount others were able to negotiate from an online community forum dedicated to the make and model. I found out how the sales people were being incentivized by the manufacturer that month. I learned which dealers had the best ratings and reviews. This was actually getting exciting. I was feeling really empowered. My next step was to request online quotes from the some of the highest rated dealers but I already knew exactly how much I was going to pay. This was really a test for the dealers. My new mantra was “let he who delivers the best customer experience win.” An inside sales rep from one dealer responded to my quote request within a couple of hours. I told him I had already decided on the make and model and it was just a matter of figuring out who I would buy it from. I also told them that I was really busy and wouldn’t set foot in the dealership unless we had come to terms beforehand. Lastly, I let him know that I’d prefer to work out the details via email. He promised to get back to me shortly with a detailed quote. Over the next few days I received calls from other dealers. One asked me a host of questions that I had already answered in their lengthy online form. Another blamed their website performance issues for their delay in responding to my request. But by then it didn’t really matter because I’d already bought the car days before from the dealer who responded to me first and who was willing to adjust their sales process to accommodate my buying one. So, yes, I really do believe we are in the midst of a customer experience revolution. And every revolution leaves some victorious and other vanquished. Which side do you want to be on when it comes to the customer experience revolution?

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• Oracle's Global Single Schema

  - by david.butler(at)oracle.com

  Maximizing business process efficiencies in a heterogeneous environment is very difficult. The difficulty stems from the fact that the various applications across the Information Technology (IT) landscape employ different integration standards, different message passing strategies, and different workflow engines. Vendors such as Oracle and others are delivering tools to help IT organizations manage the complexities introduced by these differences. But the one remaining intractable problem impacting efficient operations is the fact that these applications have different definitions for the same business data. Business data is your business information codified for computer programs to use. A good data model will represent the way your organization does business. The computer applications your organization deploys to improve operational efficiency are built to operate on the business data organized into this schema.  If the schema does not represent how you do business, the applications on that schema cannot provide the features you need to achieve the desired efficiencies. Business processes span these applications. Data problems break these processes rendering them far less efficient than they need to be to achieve organization goals. Thus, the expected return on the investment in these applications is never realized. The success of all business processes depends on the availability of accurate master data.  Clearly, the solution to this problem is to consolidate all the master data an organization uses to run its business. Then clean it up, augment it, govern it, and connect it back to the applications that need it. Until now, this obvious solution has been difficult to achieve because no one had defined a data model sufficiently broad, deep and flexible enough to support transaction processing on all key business entities and serve as a master superset to all other operational data models deployed in heterogeneous IT environments. Today, the situation has changed. Oracle has created an operational data model (aka schema) that can support accurate and consistent master data across heterogeneous IT systems. This is foundational for providing a way to consolidate and integrate master data without having to replace investments in existing applications. This Global Single Schema (GSS) represents a revolutionary breakthrough that allows for true master data consolidation. Oracle has deep knowledge of applications dating back to the early 1990s.  It developed applications in the areas of Supply Chain Management (SCM), Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Human Capital Management (HCM), Financials and Manufacturing. In addition, Oracle applications were delivered for key industries such as Communications, Financial Services, Retail, Public Sector, High Tech Manufacturing (HTM) and more. Expertise in all these areas drove requirements for GSS. The following figure illustrates Oracle's unique position that enabled the creation of the Global Single Schema. GSS Requirements Gathering GSS defines all the key business entities and attributes including Customers, Contacts, Suppliers, Accounts, Products, Services, Materials, Employees, Installed Base, Sites, Assets, and Inventory to name just a few. In addition, Oracle delivers GSS pre-integrated with a wide variety of operational applications.  Business Process Automation EBusiness is about maximizing operational efficiency. At the highest level, these 'operations' span all that you do as an organization.  The following figure illustrates some of these high-level business processes. Enterprise Business Processes Supplies are procured. Assets are maintained. Materials are stored. Inventory is accumulated. Products and Services are engineered, produced and sold. Customers are serviced. And across this entire spectrum, Employees do the procuring, supporting, engineering, producing, selling and servicing. Not shown, but not to be overlooked, are the accounting and the financial processes associated with all this procuring, manufacturing, and selling activity. Supporting all these applications is the master data. When this data is fragmented and inconsistent, the business processes fail and inefficiencies multiply. But imagine having all the data under these operational business processes in one place. ·            The same accurate and timely customer data will be provided to all your operational applications from the call center to the point of sale. ·            The same accurate and timely supplier data will be provided to all your operational applications from supply chain planning to procurement. ·            The same accurate and timely product information will be available to all your operational applications from demand chain planning to marketing. You would have a single version of the truth about your assets, financial information, customers, suppliers, employees, products and services to support your business automation processes as they flow across your business applications. All company and partner personnel will access the same exact data entity across all your channels and across all your lines of business. Oracle's Global Single Schema enables this vision of a single version of the truth across the heterogeneous operational applications supporting the entire enterprise. Global Single Schema Oracle's Global Single Schema organizes hundreds of thousands of attributes into 165 major schema objects supporting over 180 business application modules. It is designed for international operations, and extensibility.  The schema is delivered with a full set of public Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and an Integration Repository with modern Service Oriented Architecture interfaces to make data available as a services (DaaS) to business processes and enable operations in heterogeneous IT environments. ·         Key tables can be extended with unlimited numbers of additional attributes and attribute groups for maximum flexibility.  o    This enables model extensions that reflect business entities unique to your organization's operations. ·         The schema is multi-organization enabled so data manipulation can be controlled along organizational boundaries. ·         It uses variable byte Unicode to support over 31 languages. ·         The schema encodes flexible date and flexible address formats for easy localizations. No matter how complex your business is, Oracle's Global Single Schema can hold your business objects and support your global operations. Oracle's Global Single Schema identifies and defines the business objects an enterprise needs within the context of its business operations. The interrelationships between the business objects are also contained within the GSS data model. Their presence expresses fundamental business rules for the interaction between business entities. The following figure illustrates some of these connections.   Interconnected Business Entities Interconnecte business processes require interconnected business data. No other MDM vendor has this capability. Everyone else has either one entity they can master or separate disconnected models for various business entities. Higher level integrations are made available, but that is a weak architectural alternative to data level integration in this critically important aspect of Master Data Management.    

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• Five Ways Enterprise 2.0 Can Transform Your Business - Q&A from the Webcast

  - by [email protected]

  A few weeks ago, Vince Casarez and I presented with KMWorld on the Five Ways Enterprise 2.0 Can Transform Your Business. It was an enjoyable, interactive webcast in which Vince and I discussed the ways Enterprise 2.0 can transform your business and more importantly, highlighted key customer examples of how to do so. If you missed the webcast, you can catch a replay here. We had a lot of audience participation in some of the polls we conducted and in the Q&A session. We weren't able to address all of the questions during the broadcast, so we attempted to answer them here: Q: Which area within your firm focuses on Web 2.0? Meaning, do you find new departments developing just to manage the web 2.0 (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) user experience or are you structuring current departments? A: There are three distinct efforts within Oracle. The first is around delivery of these Web 2.0 services for enterprise deployments. This is the focus of the WebCenter team. The second effort is injecting these Web 2.0 services into use cases that drive the different enterprise applications. This effort is focused on how to manage these external services and bring them into a cohesive flow for marketing programs, customer care, and purchasing. The third effort is how we consume these services internally to enhance Oracle's business delivery. It leverages the technologies and use cases of the first two but also pushes the envelope with regards to future directions of these other two areas. Q: In a business, Web 2.0 is mostly like action logs. How can we leverage the official process practice versus the logs of a recent action? Example: a system configuration modified last night on a call out versus the official practice that everybody would use in the morning.A: The key thing to remember is that most Web 2.0 actions / activity streams today are based on collaboration and communication type actions. At least with public social sites like Facebook and Twitter. What we're delivering as part of the WebCenter Suite are not just these types of activities but also enterprise application activities. These enterprise application activities come from different application modules: purchasing, HR, order entry, sales opportunity, etc. The actions within these systems are normally tied to a business object or process: purchase order/customer, employee or department, customer and supplier, customer and product, respectively. Therefore, the activities or "logs" as you name them are able to be "typed" so that as a viewer, you can filter or decide to see only certain types of information. In your example, you could have a view that only showed you recent "configuration" changes and this could be right next to a view that showed off the items to be watched every morning. Q: It's great to hear about customers using the software but is there any plan for future webinars to show what the products/installs look like? That would be very helpful.A: We don't have a webinar planned to show off the install process. However, we have a viewlet that's posted on Oracle Technology Network. You can see it here:http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/testcontent/wcs-install-098014.htmlAnd we've got excellent documentation that walks you through the steps here:http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E14571_01/install.1111/e12001/install.htmAnd there's a whole set of demos and examples of what WebCenter can do at this URL:http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/webcenter/release11-demos-097468.html Q: How do you anticipate managing metadata across the enterprise to make content findable?A: We need to first make sure we are all talking about the same thing when we use a word like "metadata". Here's why...  For a developer, metadata means information that describes key elements of the portal or application and what the portal or application can do. For content systems, metadata means key terms that provide a taxonomy or folksonomy about the information that is being indexed, ordered, and managed. For business intelligence systems, metadata means key terms that provide labels to groups of data that most non-mathematicians need to understand. And for SOA, metadata means labels for parts of the processes that business owners should understand that connect development terminology. There are also additional requirements for metadata to be available to the team building these new solutions as well as requirements to make this metadata available to the running system. These requirements are often separated by "design time" and "run time" respectively. So clearly, a general goal of managing metadata across the enterprise is very challenging. We've invested a huge amount of resources around Oracle Metadata Services (MDS) to be able to provide a more generic system for all of these elements. No other vendor has anything like this technology foundation in their products. This provides a huge benefit to our customers as they will now be able to find content, processes, people, and information from a common set of search interfaces with consistent enterprise wide results. Q: Can you give your definition of terms as to document and content, please?A: Content applies to a broad category of information from Word documents, presentations and reports through attachments to invoices and/or purchase orders. Content is essentially any type of digital asset including images, video, and voice. A document is just one type of content. Q: Do you have special integration tools to realize an interaction between UCM and WebCenter Spaces/Services?A: Yes, we've dedicated a whole team of engineers to exploit the key features of Oracle UCM within WebCenter.  While ensuring that WebCenter can connect to other non-Oracle systems, we've made sure that with the combined set of Oracle technology, no other solution can match the combined power and integration.  This is part of the Oracle Fusion Middleware strategy which is to provide best in class capabilities for Content and Portals.  When combined together, the synergy between the two products enables users to quickly add capabilities when they are needed.  For example, simple document sharing is part of the combined product offering, but if legal discovery or archiving is required, Oracle UCM product includes these capabilities that can be quickly added.  There's no need to move content around or add another system to support this, it's just a feature that gets turned on within Oracle UCM. Q: All customers have some interaction with their applications and have many older versions, how do you see some of these new Enterprise 2.0 capabilities adding value to existing enterprise application deployments?A: Just as Service Oriented Architectures allowed for connecting the processes of different applications systems to work together, there's a need for a similar approach with regards to these enterprise 2.0 capabilities. Oracle WebCenter is built on a core architecture that allows for SOA of these Enterprise 2.0 services so that one set of scalable services can be used and integrated directly into any type of application. In this way, users can get immediate value out of the Enterprise 2.0 capabilities without having to wait for the next major release or upgrade. These centrally managed WebCenter services expose a set of standard interfaces that make it extremely easy to add them into existing applications no matter what technology the application has been implemented. Q: We've heard about Oracle Next Generation applications called "Fusion Applications", can you tell me how all this works together?A: Oracle WebCenter powers the core collaboration and social computing services found within Fusion Applications. It is the core user experience technology for how all the application screens have been implemented. And the core concept of task flows allows for all the Fusion Applications modules to be adaptable and composable by business users and IT without needing to be a professional developer. Oracle WebCenter is at the heart of the new Fusion Applications. In addition, the same patterns and technologies are now being added to the existing applications including JD Edwards, Siebel, Peoplesoft, and eBusiness Suite. The core technology enables all these customers to have a much smoother upgrade path to Fusion Applications. They get immediate benefits of injecting new user interactions into their existing applications without having to completely move to Fusion Applications. And then when the time comes, their users will already be well versed in how the new capabilities work. Q: Does any of this work with non Oracle software? Other databases? Other application servers? etc.A: We have made sure that Oracle WebCenter delivers the broadest set of development choices so that no matter what technology you developers are using, WebCenter capabilities can be quickly and easily added to the site or application. In addition, we have certified Oracle WebCenter to run against non-Oracle databases like DB2 and SQLServer. We have stated plans for certification against MySQL as well. Later in CY 2011, Oracle will provide certification on non-Oracle application servers such as WebSphere and JBoss. Q: How do we balance User and IT requirements in regards to Enterprise 2.0 technologies?A: Wrong decisions are often made because employee knowledge is not tapped efficiently and opportunities to innovate are often missed because the right people do not work together. Collaboration amongst workers in the right business context is critical for success. While standalone Enterprise 2.0 technologies can improve collaboration for collaboration's sake, using social collaboration tools in the context of business applications and processes will improve business responsiveness and lead companies to a more competitive position. As these systems become more mission critical it is essential that they maintain the highest level of performance and availability while scaling to support larger communities. Q: What are the ways in which Enterprise 2.0 can improve business responsiveness?A: With a wide range of Enterprise 2.0 tools in the marketplace, CIOs need to deploy solutions that will meet the requirements from users as well as address the requirements from IT. Workers want a next-generation user experience that is personalized and aggregates their daily tools and tasks, while IT needs to ensure the solution is secure, scalable, flexible, reliable and easily integrated with existing systems. An open and integrated approach to deploying portals, content management, and collaboration can enhance your business by addressing both the needs of knowledge workers for better information and the IT mandate to conserve resources by simplifying, consolidating and centralizing infrastructure and administration.  

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• C# Performance Pitfall – Interop Scenarios Change the Rules

  - by Reed

  C# and .NET, overall, really do have fantastic performance in my opinion.  That being said, the performance characteristics dramatically differ from native programming, and take some relearning if you’re used to doing performance optimization in most other languages, especially C, C++, and similar.  However, there are times when revisiting tricks learned in native code play a critical role in performance optimization in C#. I recently ran across a nasty scenario that illustrated to me how dangerous following any fixed rules for optimization can be… The rules in C# when optimizing code are very different than C or C++.  Often, they’re exactly backwards.  For example, in C and C++, lifting a variable out of loops in order to avoid memory allocations often can have huge advantages.  If some function within a call graph is allocating memory dynamically, and that gets called in a loop, it can dramatically slow down a routine. This can be a tricky bottleneck to track down, even with a profiler.  Looking at the memory allocation graph is usually the key for spotting this routine, as it’s often “hidden” deep in call graph.  For example, while optimizing some of my scientific routines, I ran into a situation where I had a loop similar to: for (i=0; i<numberToProcess; ++i) { // Do some work ProcessElement(element[i]); } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } This loop was at a fairly high level in the call graph, and often could take many hours to complete, depending on the input data.  As such, any performance optimization we could achieve would be greatly appreciated by our users. After a fair bit of profiling, I noticed that a couple of function calls down the call graph (inside of ProcessElement), there was some code that effectively was doing: // Allocate some data required DataStructure* data = new DataStructure(num); // Call into a subroutine that passed around and manipulated this data highly CallSubroutine(data); // Read and use some values from here double values = data->Foo; // Cleanup delete data; // ... return bar; Normally, if “DataStructure” was a simple data type, I could just allocate it on the stack.  However, it’s constructor, internally, allocated it’s own memory using new, so this wouldn’t eliminate the problem.  In this case, however, I could change the call signatures to allow the pointer to the data structure to be passed into ProcessElement and through the call graph, allowing the inner routine to reuse the same “data” memory instead of allocating.  At the highest level, my code effectively changed to something like: DataStructure* data = new DataStructure(numberToProcess); for (i=0; i<numberToProcess; ++i) { // Do some work ProcessElement(element[i], data); } delete data; Granted, this dramatically reduced the maintainability of the code, so it wasn’t something I wanted to do unless there was a significant benefit.  In this case, after profiling the new version, I found that it increased the overall performance dramatically – my main test case went from 35 minutes runtime down to 21 minutes.  This was such a significant improvement, I felt it was worth the reduction in maintainability. In C and C++, it’s generally a good idea (for performance) to: Reduce the number of memory allocations as much as possible, Use fewer, larger memory allocations instead of many smaller ones, and Allocate as high up the call stack as possible, and reuse memory I’ve seen many people try to make similar optimizations in C# code.  For good or bad, this is typically not a good idea.  The garbage collector in .NET completely changes the rules here. In C#, reallocating memory in a loop is not always a bad idea.  In this scenario, for example, I may have been much better off leaving the original code alone.  The reason for this is the garbage collector.  The GC in .NET is incredibly effective, and leaving the allocation deep inside the call stack has some huge advantages.  First and foremost, it tends to make the code more maintainable – passing around object references tends to couple the methods together more than necessary, and overall increase the complexity of the code.  This is something that should be avoided unless there is a significant reason.  Second, (unlike C and C++) memory allocation of a single object in C# is normally cheap and fast.  Finally, and most critically, there is a large advantage to having short lived objects.  If you lift a variable out of the loop and reuse the memory, its much more likely that object will get promoted to Gen1 (or worse, Gen2).  This can cause expensive compaction operations to be required, and also lead to (at least temporary) memory fragmentation as well as more costly collections later. As such, I’ve found that it’s often (though not always) faster to leave memory allocations where you’d naturally place them – deep inside of the call graph, inside of the loops.  This causes the objects to stay very short lived, which in turn increases the efficiency of the garbage collector, and can dramatically improve the overall performance of the routine as a whole. In C#, I tend to: Keep variable declarations in the tightest scope possible Declare and allocate objects at usage While this tends to cause some of the same goals (reducing unnecessary allocations, etc), the goal here is a bit different – it’s about keeping the objects rooted for as little time as possible in order to (attempt) to keep them completely in Gen0, or worst case, Gen1.  It also has the huge advantage of keeping the code very maintainable – objects are used and “released” as soon as possible, which keeps the code very clean.  It does, however, often have the side effect of causing more allocations to occur, but keeping the objects rooted for a much shorter time. Now – nowhere here am I suggesting that these rules are hard, fast rules that are always true.  That being said, my time spent optimizing over the years encourages me to naturally write code that follows the above guidelines, then profile and adjust as necessary.  In my current project, however, I ran across one of those nasty little pitfalls that’s something to keep in mind – interop changes the rules. In this case, I was dealing with an API that, internally, used some COM objects.  In this case, these COM objects were leading to native allocations (most likely C++) occurring in a loop deep in my call graph.  Even though I was writing nice, clean managed code, the normal managed code rules for performance no longer apply.  After profiling to find the bottleneck in my code, I realized that my inner loop, a innocuous looking block of C# code, was effectively causing a set of native memory allocations in every iteration.  This required going back to a “native programming” mindset for optimization.  Lifting these variables and reusing them took a 1:10 routine down to 0:20 – again, a very worthwhile improvement. Overall, the lessons here are: Always profile if you suspect a performance problem – don’t assume any rule is correct, or any code is efficient just because it looks like it should be Remember to check memory allocations when profiling, not just CPU cycles Interop scenarios often cause managed code to act very differently than “normal” managed code. Native code can be hidden very cleverly inside of managed wrappers

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• Oracle Tutor: Top 10 to Implement Sustainable Policies and Procedures

  - by emily.chorba(at)oracle.com

  Overview Your organization (executives, managers, and employees) understands the value of having written business process documents (process maps, procedures, instructions, reference documents, and form abstracts). Policies and procedures should be documented because they help to reduce the range of individual decisions and encourage management by exception: the manager only needs to give special attention to unusual problems, not covered by a specific policy or procedure. As more and more procedures are written to cover recurring situations, managers will begin to make decisions which will be consistent from one functional area to the next.Companies should take a project management approach when implementing an environment for a sustainable documentation program and do the following:1. Identify an Executive Champion2. Put together a winning team3. Assign ownership4. Centralize publishing5. Establish the Document Maintenance Process Up Front6. Document critical activities only7. Document actual practice8. Minimize documentation9. Support continuous improvement10. Keep it simple 1. Identify an Executive ChampionAppoint a top down driver. Select one key individual to be a mentor for the procedure planning team. The individual should be a senior manager, such as your company president, CIO, CFO, the vice-president of quality, manufacturing, or engineering. Written policies and procedures can be important supportive aids when known to express the thinking for the chief executive officer and / or the president and to have his or her full support. 2. Put Together a Winning TeamChoose a strong Project Management Leader and staff the procedure planning team with management members from cross functional groups. Make sure team members have the responsibility - and the authority - to make things happen.The winning team should consist of the Documentation Project Manager, Document Owners (one for each functional area), a Document Controller, and Document Specialists (as needed). The Tutor Implementation Guide has complete job descriptions for these roles. 3. Assign Ownership It is virtually impossible to keep process documentation simple and meaningful if employees who are far removed from the activity itself create it. It is impossible to keep documentation up-to-date when responsibility for the document is not clearly understood.Key to the Tutor methodology, therefore, is the concept of ownership. Each document has a single owner, who is responsible for ensuring that the document is necessary and that it reflects actual practice. The owner must be a person who is knowledgeable about the activity and who has the authority to build consensus among the persons who participate in the activity as well as the authority to define or change the way an activity is performed. The owner must be an advocate of the performers and negotiate, not dictate practices.In the Tutor environment, a document's owner is the only person with the authority to approve an update to that document. 4. Centralize Publishing Although it is tempting (especially in a networked environment and with document management software solutions) to decentralize the control of all documents -- with each owner updating and distributing his own -- Tutor promotes centralized publishing by assigning the Document Administrator (gate keeper) to manage the updates and distribution of the procedures library. 5. Establish a Document Maintenance Process Up Front (and stick to it) Everyone in your organization should know they are invited to suggest changes to procedures and should understand exactly what steps to take to do so. Tutor provides a set of procedures to help your company set up a healthy document control system. There are many document management products available to automate some of the document change and maintenance steps. Depending on the size of your organization, a simple document management system can reduce the effort it takes to track and distribute document changes and updates. Whether your company decides to store the written policies and procedures on a file server or in a database, the essential tasks for maintaining documents are the same, though some tasks are automated. 6. Document Critical Activities Only The best way to keep your documentation simple is to reduce the number of process documents to a bare minimum and to include in those documents only as much detail as is absolutely necessary. The first step to reducing process documentation is to document only those activities that are deemed critical. Not all activities require documentation. In fact, some critical activities cannot and should not be standardized. Others may be sufficiently documented with an instruction or a checklist and may not require a procedure. A document should only be created when it enhances the performance of the employee performing the activity. If it does not help the employee, then there is no reason to maintain the document. Activities that represent little risk (such as project status), activities that cannot be defined in terms of specific tasks (such as product research), and activities that can be performed in a variety of ways (such as advertising) often do not require documentation. Sometimes, an activity will evolve to the point where documentation is necessary. For example, an activity performed by single employee may be straightforward and uncomplicated -- that is, until the activity is performed by multiple employees. Sometimes, it is the interaction between co-workers that necessitates documentation; sometimes, it is the complexity or the diversity of the activity.7. Document Actual Practices The only reason to maintain process documentation is to enhance the performance of the employee performing the activity. And documentation can only enhance performance if it reflects reality -- that is, current best practice. Documentation that reflects an unattainable ideal or outdated practices will end up on the shelf, unused and forgotten.Documenting actual practice means (1) auditing the activity to understand how the work is really performed, (2) identifying best practices with employees who are involved in the activity, (3) building consensus so that everyone agrees on a common method, and (4) recording that consensus.8. Minimize Documentation One way to keep it simple is to document at the highest level possible. That is, include in your documents only as much detail as is absolutely necessary.When writing a document, you should ask yourself, What is the purpose of this document? That is, what problem will it solve?By focusing on this question, you can target the critical information.• What questions are the end users likely to have?• What level of detail is required?• Is any of this information extraneous to the document's purpose? Short, concise documents are user friendly and they are easier to keep up to date. 9. Support Continuous Improvement Employees who perform an activity are often in the best position to identify improvements to the process. In other words, continuous improvement is a natural byproduct of the work itself -- but only if the improvements are communicated to all employees who are involved in the process, and only if there is consensus among those employees.Traditionally, process documentation has been used to dictate performance, to limit employees' actions. In the Tutor environment, process documents are used to communicate improvements identified by employees. How does this work? The Tutor methodology requires a process document to reflect actual practice, so the owner of a document must routinely audit its content -- does the document match what the employees are doing? If it doesn't, the owner has the responsibility to evaluate the process, to build consensus among the employees, to identify "best practices," and to communicate these improvements via a document update. Continuous improvement can also be an outgrowth of corrective action -- but only if the solutions to problems are communicated effectively. The goal should be to solve a problem once and only once, which means not only identifying the solution, but ensuring that the solution becomes part of the process. The Tutor system provides the method through which improvements and solutions are documented and communicated to all affected employees in a cost-effective, timely manner; it ensures that improvements are not lost or confined to a single employee. 10. Keep it Simple Process documents don't have to be complex and unfriendly. In fact, the simpler the format and organization, the more likely the documents will be used. And the simpler the method of maintenance, the more likely the documents will be kept up-to-date. Keep it simply by:• Minimizing skills and training required• Following the established Tutor document format and layout• Avoiding technology just for technology's sake No other rule has as major an impact on the success of your internal documentation as -- keep it simple. Learn More For more information about Tutor, visit Oracle.Com or the Tutor Blog. Post your questions at the Tutor Forum.   Emily Chorba Principle Product Manager Oracle Tutor & BPM 

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• Are Chromebooks the New Netbooks, and What Does That Mean?

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Netbooks — small, cheap, slow laptops — were once very popular. They fell out of favor — people bought them because they seemed cheap and portable, but the actual experience was lackluster. Most netbooks now sit unused. Windows netbooks have vanished from stores today, but there’s a new super-cheap laptop — the Chromebook. Chromebook sales numbers are impressive, but their usage statistics tell a different story. Are Chromebooks just the new netbook? The Problem With Netbooks Netbooks seemed appealing, especially in an age before tablets and lightweight ultrabooks. You could buy a netbook for $200 or so and have a portable device that let you get on the Internet. The name “netbook” spelled that out — it was a portable device for getting on the ‘net. They weren’t really that great. The original netbook was a lightweight Asus Eee PC that ran Linux alone and had a small amount of fast flash storage. Netbooks eventually ran heavier Windows XP operating systems — Windows Vista was out, but it was just too bloated to run on netbooks. Manufacturers added slow magnetic hard drives, bloatware, and even DVD drives! They couldn’t run most Windows software very well. The build quality was poor and their keyboards were tiny and cramped. People liked the idea of a lightweight device that let them get on the Internet and loved the cheap price, but the actual experience wasn’t great. Chromebook Sales Chromebook sales numbers seem surprisingly high. NPD reported that Chromebooks were 21% of all notebooks sold in the US in 2013. If you combine laptop and tablet sales into a single statistic, Chromebooks were 9.6% of all those devices sold. That’s 2/3 as many Chromebooks sold as iPads in the US! Of Amazon’s best-selling laptop computers, two of the top three are Chromebooks. These definitely look like successful products. Unlike netbooks, Chromebooks are taking off in a big way in the education market. Many schools are buying Chromebooks for their students instead of more expensive Windows laptops. They’re easier to manage and lock down than Windows laptops, but — more importantly for cash-strapped schools — they’re very cheap. Netbooks never had this sort of momentum in schools. Chromebook Usage Statistics Here’s where the rosy picture of Chromebooks starts to become more realistic. StatCounter’s browser usage statistics show how widely used different operating systems are. For example, Windows 7 has the highest share with 35.71% of web activity in April, 2014. The chart doesn’t even show Chrome OS at all, although there is an “Other” number near the bottom. Click the Download Data link to download a CSV file and we can view more detailed information. Chrome OS only accounted for 0.38% of web usage in April, 2014. Desktop Linux, which people often shrug at, accounted for 1.52% in the same month. To its credit, Chrome OS usage has increased. Chromebooks were widely mocked back in November, 2013 when the sales numbers came out. After all, they only accounted for 0.11% of web usage globally in November, 2013! But Chrome OS numbers have been improving: Nov, 2013: 0.11% Dec, 2013: 0.22% Jan, 2014: 0.31% Feb, 2014: 0.35% Mar, 2014: 0.36% Apr, 2014: 0.38% Chrome OS is climbing, but it’s definitely still in the “Other” category. It isn’t as high as we’d expect to see it with those types of sales numbers. Chromebooks vs. Netbooks Chromebooks are more limited devices than traditional PCs. You can do quite a few things, but you have to do it all using Chrome or Chrome apps. Most people won’t be enabling developer mode and installing a Linux desktop. You don’t have access to the powerful desktop software available for Windows and even Mac OS X. On the other hand, these Chromebooks are less compromised than netbooks in many ways. They come with a lightweight operating system designed for portable, mobile devices. They don’t come packed with any bloatware, like the bloatware you’ll find on competing Windows PCs and the original netbooks. They’re cheaper because the manufacturer doesn’t have to pay for a Windows license. There’s no need for antivirus software weighing the operating system down. They’re larger than the original netbooks, with many of them being 11.6-inches instead of the original 8-inch bodies many older netbooks came with. They have larger, more comfortable keyboards and fast solid-state storage. Really, Chromebooks are what netbooks wanted to be. People didn’t buy netbooks to use typical Windows software — they just wanted a lightweight PC. Of course, for many people, the real successor to netbooks is tablets. If all you want is a portable device to throw in a bag so you can get online, maybe a tablet is better. Where Does This Leave Chromebooks? So, are Chromebooks the new netbooks? It’s a bit early to answer that question. Chromebooks are definitely not out of the competition — their sales look good and their usage share is increasing. On the other hand, Chrome OS is still pretty far behind. They’re not catching fire like tablets did. Maybe netbooks were just before their time and Chromebooks were what they were always meant to be. Just as Microsoft’s Windows XP tablets failed, Windows XP netbooks also failed. Tablets took off with a more refined operating system on better hardware years later. “Netbooks” — or Chromebooks — are now taking off with a more purpose-built operating system on better hardware, too. It’s hard to count Chromebooks out because they provide a much better experience than netbooks ever did. If you’re one of the people who wants to use old Windows desktop apps on your portable laptop, you may think netbooks were better — but most people don’t want that. But maybe people either want a full desktop PC experience or a full mobile tablet experience. Is there a place for a laptop with a keyboard that can only view websites? We’ll have to wait and see. Image Credit: Kevin Jarret on Flickr, Clive Darra on Flickr, Sean Freese on Flickr

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• Answers to Your Common Oracle Database Lifecycle Management Questions

  - by Scott McNeil

  We recently ran a live webcast on Strategies for Managing Oracle Database's Lifecycle. There were tons of questions from our audience that we simply could not get to during the hour long presentation. Below are some of those questions along with their answers. Enjoy! Question: In the webcast the presenter talked about “gold” configuration standards, for those who want to use this technique, could you recommend a best practice to consider or follow? How do I get started? Answer:Gold configuration standardization is a quick and easy way to improve availability through consistency. Start by choosing a reference database and saving the configuration to the Oracle Enterprise Manager repository using the Save Configuration feature. Next create a comparison template using the Oracle provided template as a starting point and modify the ignored properties to eliminate expected differences in your environment. Finally create a comparison specification using the comparison template you created plus your saved gold configuration and schedule it to run on a regular basis. Don’t forget to fill in the email addresses of those you want to notify upon drift detection. Watch the database configuration management demo to learn more. Question: Can Oracle Lifecycle Management Pack for Database help with patching an Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC) environment? Answer: Yes, Oracle Enterprise Manager supports both parallel and rolling patch application of Oracle Real Application Clusters. The use of rolling patching is recommended as there is no downtime involved. For more details watch this demo. Question: What are some of the things administrators can do to control configuration drift? Why is it important? Answer:Configuration drift is one of the main causes of instability and downtime of applications. Oracle Enterprise Manager makes it easy to manage and control drift using scheduled configuration comparisons combined with comparison templates. Question: Does Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Release 2 offer an incremental update feature for "gold" images? For instance, if the source binary has a higher PSU level, what is the best approach to update the existing "gold" image in the software library? Do you have to create a new image or can you just update the original one? Answer:Provisioning Profiles (Gold images) can contain the installation files and database configuration templates. Although it is possible to make some changes to the profile after creation (mainly to configuration), it is normally recommended to simply create a new profile after applying a patch to your reference database. Question: The webcast talked about enforcing in-house standards, does Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c offer verification of your databases and systems to those standards? For example, the initial "gold" image has been massively deployed over time, and there may be some changes to it. How can you do regular checks from Enterprise Manager to ensure the in-house standards are being enforced? Answer:There are really two methods to validate conformity to standards. The first method is to use gold standards which you compare other databases to report unwanted differences. This method uses a new comparison template technology which allows users to ignore known differences (i.e. SID, Start time, etc) which results in a report only showing important or non-conformant differences. This method is quick to setup and configure and recommended for those who want to get started validating compliance quickly. The second method leverages the new compliance framework which allows the creation of specific and robust validations. These compliance rules are grouped into standards which can be assigned to databases quickly and easily. Compliance rules allow for targeted and more sophisticated validation beyond the basic equals operation available in the comparison method. The compliance framework can be used to implement just about any internal or industry standard. The compliance results will track current and historic compliance scores at the overall and individual database targets. When the issue is resolved, the score is automatically affected. Compliance framework is the recommended long term solution for validating compliance using Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c. Check out this demo on database compliance to learn more. Question: If you are using the integration between Oracle Enterprise Manager and My Oracle Support in an "offline" mode, how do you know if you have the latest My Oracle Support metadata? Answer:In Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Release 2, you now only need to download one zip file containing all of the metadata xmls files. There is no indication that the metadata has changed but you could run a checksum on the file and compare it to the previously downloaded version to see if it has changed. Question: What happens if a patch fails while administrators are applying it to a database or system? Answer:A large portion of Oracle Enterprise Manager's patch automation is the pre-requisite checks that happen to ensure the highest level of confidence the patch will successfully apply. It is recommended you test the patch in a non-production environment and save the patch plan as a template once successful so you can create new plans using the saved template. If you are using the recommended ‘out of place’ patching methodology, there is no urgency because the database is still running as the cloned Oracle home is being patched. Users can address the issue and restart the patch procedure at the point it left off. If you are using 'in place' method, you can address the issue and continue where the procedure left off. Question: Can Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c R2 compare configurations between more than one target at the same time? Answer:Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c can compare any number of target configurations at one time. This is the basis of many important use cases including Configuration Drift Management. These comparisons can also be scheduled on a regular basis and emails notification sent should any differences appear. To learn more about configuration search and compare watch this demo. Question: How is data comparison done since changes are taking place in a live production system? Answer:There are many things to keep in mind when using the data comparison feature (as part of the Change Management ability to compare table data). It was primarily intended to be used for maintaining consistency of important but relatively static data. For example, application seed data and application setup configuration. This data does not change often but is critical when testing an application to ensure results are consistent with production. It is not recommended to use data comparison on highly dynamic data like transactional tables or very large tables. Question: Which versions of Oracle Database can be monitored through Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c? Answer:Oracle Database versions: 9.2.0.8, 10.1.0.5, 10.2.0.4, 10.2.0.5, 11.1.0.7, 11.2.0.1, 11.2.0.2, 11.2.0.3. Watch the On-Demand Webcast Stay Connected: Twitter | Facebook | YouTube | Linkedin | NewsletterDownload the Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control12c Mobile app

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• PASS: Election Changes for 2011

  - by Bill Graziano

  Last year after the election, the PASS Board created an Election Review Committee.  This group was charged with reviewing our election procedures and making suggestions to improve the process.  You can read about the formation of the group and review some of the intermediate work on the site – especially in the forums. I was one of the members of the group along with Joe Webb (Chair), Lori Edwards, Brian Kelley, Wendy Pastrick, Andy Warren and Allen White.  This group worked from October to April on our election process.  Along the way we: Interviewed interested parties including former NomCom members, Board candidates and anyone else that came forward. Held a session at the Summit to allow interested parties to discuss the issues Had numerous conference calls and worked through the various topics I can’t thank these people enough for the work they did.  They invested a tremendous number of hours thinking, talking and writing about our elections.  I’m proud to say I was a member of this group and thoroughly enjoyed working with everyone (even if I did finally get tired of all the calls.) The ERC delivered their recommendations to the PASS Board prior to our May Board meeting.  We reviewed those and made a few modifications.  I took their recommendations and rewrote them as procedures while incorporating those changes.  Their original recommendations as well as our final document are posted at the ERC documents page.  Please take a second and read them BEFORE we start the elections.  If you have any questions please post them in the forums on the ERC site. (My final document includes a change log at the end that I decided to leave in.  If you want to know which areas to pay special attention to that’s a good start.) Many of those recommendations were already posted in the forums or in the blogs of individual ERC members.  Hopefully nothing in the ERC document is too surprising. In this post I’m going to walk through some of the key changes and talk about what I remember from both ERC and Board discussions.  I’ll pay a little extra attention to things the Board changed from the ERC.  I’d also encourage any of the Board or ERC members to blog their thoughts on this. The Nominating Committee will continue to exist.  Personally, I was curious to see what the non-Board ERC members would think about the NomCom.  There was broad agreement that a group to vet candidates had value to the organization. The NomCom will be composed of five members.  Two will be Board members and three will be from the membership at large.  The only requirement for the three community members is that you’ve volunteered in some way (and volunteering is defined very broadly).  We expect potential at-large NomCom members to participate in a forum on the PASS site to answer questions from the other PASS members. We’re going to hold an election to determine the three community members.  It will be closer to voting for Summit sessions than voting for Board members.  That means there won’t be multiple dedicated emails.  If you’re at all paying attention it will be easy to participate.  Personally I wanted it easy for those that cared to participate but not overwhelm those that didn’t care.  I think this strikes a good balance. There’s also a clause that in order to be considered a winner in this NomCom election, you must receive 10 votes.  This is something I suggested.  I have no idea how popular the NomCom election is going to be.  I just wanted a fallback that if no one participated and some random person got in with one or two votes.  Any open slots will be filled by the NomCom chair (usually the PASS Immediate Past President).  My assumption is that they would probably take the next highest vote getters unless they were throwing flames in the forums or clearly unqualified.  As a final check, the Board still approves the final NomCom. The NomCom is going to rank candidates instead of rating them.  This has interesting implications.  This was championed by another ERC member and I’m hoping they write something about it.  This will really force the NomCom to make decisions between candidates.  You can’t just rate everyone a 3 and be done with it.  It may also make candidates appear further apart than they actually are.  I’m looking forward talking with the NomCom after this election and getting their feedback on this. The PASS Board added an option to remove a candidate with a unanimous vote of the NomCom.  This was primarily put in place to handle people that lied on their application or had a criminal background or some other unusual situation and we figured it out. We list an explicit goal of three candidate per open slot. We also wanted an easy way to find the NomCom candidate rankings from the ballot.  Hopefully this will satisfy those that want a broad candidate pool and those that want the NomCom to identify the most qualified candidates. The primary spokesperson for the NomCom is the committee chair.  After the issues around the election last year we didn’t have a good communication plan in place.  We should have and that was a failure on the part of the Board.  If there is criticism of the election this year I hope that falls squarely on the Board.  The community members of the NomCom shouldn’t be fielding complaints over the election process.  That said, the NomCom is ranking candidates and we are forcing them to rank some lower than others.  I’m sure you’ll each find someone that you think should have been ranked differently.  I also want to highlight one other change to the process that we started last year and isn’t included in these documents.  I think the candidate forums on the PASS site were tremendously helpful last year in helping people to find out more about candidates.  That gives our members a way to ask hard questions of the candidates and publicly see their answers. This year we have two important groups to fill.  The first is the NomCom.  We need three people from our membership to step up and fill this role.  It won’t be easy.  You will have to make subjective rankings of your fellow community members.  Your actions will be important in deciding who the future leaders of PASS will be.  There’s a 50/50 chance that one of the people you interview will be the President of PASS someday.  This is not a responsibility to be taken lightly. The second is the slate of candidates.  If you’ve ever thought about running for the Board this is the year.  We’ve never had nine candidates on the ballot before.  Your chance of making it through the NomCom are higher than in any previous year.  Unfortunately the more of you that run, the more of you that will lose in the election.  And hopefully that competition will mean more community involvement and better Board members for PASS. Is this the end of changes to the election process?  It isn’t.  Every year that I’ve been on the Board the election process has changed.  Some years there have been small changes and some years there have been large changes.  After this election we’ll look at how the process worked and decide what steps to take – just like we do every year.

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• Expectations + Rewards = Innovation

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  “Innovation” is a heavy word. We regard those that embrace it as “Innovators”. We describe organizations as being “Innovative”. We hold those associated with the word in high regard, even though its dictionary definition is very simple: Introducing something new. What our culture has done is wrapped Innovation in white robes and a gold crown. Innovation is rarely just introducing something new. Innovations and innovators are typically associated with other terms: groundbreaking, genius, industry-changing, creative, leading. Being a true innovator and creating innovations are a big deal, and something companies try to strive for…or at least say they strive for. There’s huge value in being recognized as an innovator in an industry, since the idea is that innovation equates to increased profitability. IBM ran an ad a few years back that showed what their view of innovation is: “The point of innovation is to make actual money.” If the money aspect makes you feel uneasy, consider it another way: the point of innovation is to <insert payoff here>. Companies that innovate will be more successful. Non-profits that innovate can better serve their target clients. Governments that innovate can better provide services to their citizens. True innovation is not easy to come by though. As with anything in business, how well an organization will innovate is reliant on the employees it retains, the expectations placed on those employees, and the rewards available to them. In a previous blog post I talked about one formula: Right Employees + Happy Employees = Productive Employees I want to introduce a new one, that builds upon the previous one: Expectations + Rewards = Innovation  The level of innovation your organization will realize is directly associated with the expectations you place on your staff and the rewards you make available to them. Expectations We may feel uncomfortable with the idea of placing expectations on our staff, mainly because expectation has somewhat of a negative or cold connotation to it: “I expect you to act this way or else!” The problem is in the or-else part…we focus on the negative aspects of failing to meet expectations instead of looking at the positive side. “I expect you to act this way because it will produce <insert benefit here>”. Expectations should not be set to punish but instead be set to ensure quality. At a recent conference I spoke with some Microsoft employees who told me that you have five years from starting with the company to reach a “Senior” level. If you don’t, then you’re let go. The expectation Microsoft placed on their staff is that they should be working towards improving themselves, taking more responsibility, and thus ensure that there is a constant level of quality in the workforce. Rewards Let me be clear: a paycheck is not a reward. A paycheck is simply the employer’s responsibility in the employee/employer relationship. A paycheck will never be the key motivator to drive innovation. Offering employees something over and above their required compensation can spur them to greater performance and achievement. Working in the food service industry, this tactic was used again and again: whoever has the highest sales over lunch will receive a free lunch/gift certificate/entry into a draw/etc. There was something to strive for, to try beyond the baseline of what our serving jobs were. It was through this that innovative sales techniques would be tried and honed, with key servers being top sellers time and time again. At a code camp I spoke at, I was amazed to see that all the employees from one company receive $100 Visa gift cards as a thank you for taking time to speak. Again, offering something over and above that can give that extra push for employees. Rewards work. But what about the fairness angle? In the restaurant example I gave, there were servers that would never win the competition. They just weren’t good enough at selling and never seemed to get better. So should those that did work at performing better and produce more sales for the restaurant not get rewarded because those who weren’t working at performing better might get upset? Of course not! Organizations succeed because of their top performers and those that strive to join their ranks. The Expectation/Reward Graph While the Expectations + Rewards = Innovation formula may seem like a simple mathematics formula, there’s much more going under the hood. In fact there are three different outcomes that could occur based on what you put in as values for Expectations and Rewards. Consider the graph below and the descriptions that follow: Disgruntled – High Expectation, Low Reward I worked at a company where the mantra was “Company First, Because We Pay You”. Even today I still hear stories of how this sentiment continues to be perpetuated: They provide you a paycheck and a means to live, therefore you should always put them as your top priority. Of course, this is a huge imbalance in the expectation/reward equation. Why would anyone willingly meet high expectations of availability, workload, deadlines, etc. when there is no reward other than a paycheck to show for it? Remember: paychecks are not rewards! Instead, you see employees be disgruntled which not only affects the level of production but also the level of quality within an organization. It also means that you see higher turnover. Complacent – Low Expectation, Low Reward Complacency is a systemic problem that typically exists throughout all levels of an organization. With no real expectations or rewards, nobody needs to excel. In fact, those that do try to innovate, improve, or introduce new things into the organization might be shunned or pushed out by the rest of the staff who are just doing things the same way they’ve always done it. The bigger issue for the organization with low/low values is that at best they’ll never grow beyond their current size (and may shrink actually), and at worst will cease to exist. Entitled – Low Expectation, High Reward It’s one thing to say you have the best people and reward them as such, but its another thing to actually have the best people and reward them as such. Organizations with Entitled employees are the former: their organization provides them with all types of comforts, benefits, and perks. But there’s no requirement before the rewards are dolled out, and there’s no short-list of who receives the rewards. Everyone in the company is treated the same and is given equal share of the spoils. Entitlement is actually almost identical with Complacency with one notable difference: just try to introduce higher expectations into an entitled organization! Entitled employees have been spoiled for so long that they can’t fathom having rewards taken from them, or having to achieve specific levels of performance before attaining them. Those running the organization also buy in to the Entitled sentiment, feeling that they must persist the same level of comforts to appease their staff…even though the quality of the employee pool may be suspect. Innovative – High Expectation, High Reward Finally we have the Innovative organization which places high expectations but also provides high rewards. This organization gets it: if you truly want the best employees you need to apply equal doses of pressure and praise. Realize that I’m not suggesting crazy overtime or un-realistic working conditions. I do not agree with the “Glengary-Glenross” method of encouragement. But as anyone who follows sports can tell you, the teams that win are the ones where the coaches push their players to be their best; to achieve new levels of performance that they didn’t know they could receive. And the result for the players is more money, fame, and opportunity. It’s in this environment that organizations can focus on innovation – true innovation that builds the business and allows everyone involved to truly benefit. In Closing Organizations love to use the word “Innovation” and its derivatives, but very few actually do innovate. For many, the term has just become another marketing buzzword to lump in with all the other business terms that get overused. But for those organizations that truly get the value of innovation, they will be the ones surging forward while other companies simply fade into the background. And they will be the organizations that expect more from their employees, and give them their just rewards.

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• Real tortoises keep it slow and steady. How about the backups?

  - by Maria Zakourdaev

    … Four tortoises were playing in the backyard when they decided they needed hibiscus flower snacks. They pooled their money and sent the smallest tortoise out to fetch the snacks. Two days passed and there was no sign of the tortoise. "You know, she is taking a lot of time", said one of the tortoises. A little voice from just out side the fence said, "If you are going to talk that way about me I won't go." Is it too much to request from the quite expensive 3rd party backup tool to be a way faster than the SQL server native backup? Or at least save a respectable amount of storage by producing a really smaller backup files?  By saying “really smaller”, I mean at least getting a file in half size. After Googling the internet in an attempt to understand what other “sql people” are using for database backups, I see that most people are using one of three tools which are the main players in SQL backup area:  LiteSpeed by Quest SQL Backup by Red Gate SQL Safe by Idera The feedbacks about those tools are truly emotional and happy. However, while reading the forums and blogs I have wondered, is it possible that many are accustomed to using the above tools since SQL 2000 and 2005.  This can easily be understood due to the fact that a 300GB database backup for instance, using regular a SQL 2005 backup statement would have run for about 3 hours and have produced ~150GB file (depending on the content, of course).  Then you take a 3rd party tool which performs the same backup in 30 minutes resulting in a 30GB file leaving you speechless, you run to management persuading them to buy it due to the fact that it is definitely worth the price. In addition to the increased speed and disk space savings you would also get backup file encryption and virtual restore -  features that are still missing from the SQL server. But in case you, as well as me, don’t need these additional features and only want a tool that performs a full backup MUCH faster AND produces a far smaller backup file (like the gain you observed back in SQL 2005 days) you will be quite disappointed. SQL Server backup compression feature has totally changed the market picture. Medium size database. Take a look at the table below, check out how my SQL server 2008 R2 compares to other tools when backing up a 300GB database. It appears that when talking about the backup speed, SQL 2008 R2 compresses and performs backup in similar overall times as all three other tools. 3rd party tools maximum compression level takes twice longer. Backup file gain is not that impressive, except the highest compression levels but the price that you pay is very high cpu load and much longer time. Only SQL Safe by Idera was quite fast with it’s maximum compression level but most of the run time have used 95% cpu on the server. Note that I have used two types of destination storage, SATA 11 disks and FC 53 disks and, obviously, on faster storage have got my backup ready in half time. Looking at the above results, should we spend money, bother with another layer of complexity and software middle-man for the medium sized databases? I’m definitely not going to do so.  Very large database As a next phase of this benchmark, I have moved to a 6 terabyte database which was actually my main backup target. Note, how multiple files usage enables the SQL Server backup operation to use parallel I/O and remarkably increases it’s speed, especially when the backup device is heavily striped. SQL Server supports a maximum of 64 backup devices for a single backup operation but the most speed is gained when using one file per CPU, in the case above 8 files for a 2 Quad CPU server. The impact of additional files is minimal.  However, SQLsafe doesn’t show any speed improvement between 4 files and 8 files. Of course, with such huge databases every half percent of the compression transforms into the noticeable numbers. Saving almost 470GB of space may turn the backup tool into quite valuable purchase. Still, the backup speed and high CPU are the variables that should be taken into the consideration. As for us, the backup speed is more critical than the storage and we cannot allow a production server to sustain 95% cpu for such a long time. Bottomline, 3rd party backup tool developers, we are waiting for some breakthrough release. There are a few unanswered questions, like the restore speed comparison between different tools and the impact of multiple backup files on restore operation. Stay tuned for the next benchmarks.    Benchmark server: SQL Server 2008 R2 sp1 2 Quad CPU Database location: NetApp FC 15K Aggregate 53 discs Backup statements: No matter how good that UI is, we need to run the backup tasks from inside of SQL Server Agent to make sure they are covered by our monitoring systems. I have used extended stored procedures (command line execution also is an option, I haven’t noticed any impact on the backup performance). SQL backup LiteSpeed SQL Backup SQL safe backup database <DBNAME> to disk= '\\<networkpath>\par1.bak' , disk= '\\<networkpath>\par2.bak', disk= '\\<networkpath>\par3.bak' with format, compression EXECUTE master.dbo.xp_backup_database @database = N'<DBName>', @backupname= N'<DBName> full backup', @desc = N'Test', @compressionlevel=8, @filename= N'\\<networkpath>\par1.bak', @filename= N'\\<networkpath>\par2.bak', @filename= N'\\<networkpath>\par3.bak', @init = 1 EXECUTE master.dbo.sqlbackup '-SQL "BACKUP DATABASE <DBNAME> TO DISK= ''\\<networkpath>\par1.sqb'', DISK= ''\\<networkpath>\par2.sqb'', DISK= ''\\<networkpath>\par3.sqb'' WITH DISKRETRYINTERVAL = 30, DISKRETRYCOUNT = 10, COMPRESSION = 4, INIT"' EXECUTE master.dbo.xp_ss_backup @database = 'UCMSDB', @filename = '\\<networkpath>\par1.bak', @backuptype = 'Full', @compressionlevel = 4, @backupfile = '\\<networkpath>\par2.bak', @backupfile = '\\<networkpath>\par3.bak' If you still insist on using 3rd party tools for the backups in your production environment with maximum compression level, you will definitely need to consider limiting cpu usage which will increase the backup operation time even more: RedGate : use THREADPRIORITY option ( values 0 – 6 ) LiteSpeed : use  @throttle ( percentage, like 70%) SQL safe :  the only thing I have found was @Threads option.   Yours, Maria

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• CPU Utilization LAMP stack

  - by Max

  We've got an ec2 m2.4xlarge running Magento (centos 5.6, httpd 2.2, php 5.2.17 with eaccelerator 0.9.5.3, mysql 5.1.52). Right now we're getting a large traffic spike, and our top looks like this: top - 09:41:29 up 31 days, 1:12, 1 user, load average: 120.01, 129.03, 113.23 Tasks: 1190 total, 18 running, 1172 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 97.3%us, 1.8%sy, 0.0%ni, 0.5%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.4%st Mem: 71687720k total, 36898928k used, 34788792k free, 49692k buffers Swap: 880737784k total, 0k used, 880737784k free, 1586524k cached PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 2433 mysql 15 0 23.6g 4.5g 7112 S 564.7 6.6 33607:34 mysqld 24046 apache 16 0 411m 65m 28m S 26.4 0.1 0:09.05 httpd 24360 apache 15 0 410m 60m 25m S 26.4 0.1 0:03.65 httpd 24993 apache 16 0 410m 57m 21m S 26.1 0.1 0:01.41 httpd 24838 apache 16 0 428m 74m 20m S 24.8 0.1 0:02.37 httpd 24359 apache 16 0 411m 62m 26m R 22.3 0.1 0:08.12 httpd 23850 apache 15 0 411m 64m 27m S 16.8 0.1 0:14.54 httpd 25229 apache 16 0 404m 46m 17m R 10.2 0.1 0:00.71 httpd 14594 apache 15 0 404m 63m 34m S 8.4 0.1 1:10.26 httpd 24955 apache 16 0 404m 50m 21m R 8.4 0.1 0:01.66 httpd 24313 apache 16 0 399m 46m 22m R 8.1 0.1 0:02.30 httpd 25119 apache 16 0 411m 59m 23m S 6.8 0.1 0:01.45 httpd Questions: Would giving msyqld more memory help it cache queries and react faster? If so, how? Other than splitting mysql and php to separate servers (which we're about to do) is there anything else we could/should be doing? Thanks! UPDATE: Here's our my.cnf along with the output of mysqltuner. It looks like a cache problem. Thanks again! # cat /etc/my.cnf [client] port = **** socket = /var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock [mysqld] datadir=/mnt/persistent/mysql port=**** socket=/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock key_buffer = 512M max_allowed_packet = 64M table_cache = 1024 sort_buffer_size = 8M read_buffer_size = 4M read_rnd_buffer_size = 2M myisam_sort_buffer_size = 64M thread_cache_size = 128M tmp_table_size = 128M join_buffer_size = 1M query_cache_limit = 2M query_cache_size= 64M query_cache_type = 1 max_connections = 1000 thread_stack = 128K thread_concurrency = 48 log-bin=mysql-bin server-id = 1 wait_timeout = 300 innodb_data_home_dir = /mnt/persistent/mysql/ innodb_data_file_path = ibdata1:10M:autoextend innodb_buffer_pool_size = 20G innodb_additional_mem_pool_size = 20M innodb_log_file_size = 64M innodb_log_buffer_size = 8M innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 1 innodb_lock_wait_timeout = 50 innodb_thread_concurrency = 48 ft_min_word_len=3 [myisamchk] ft_min_word_len=3 key_buffer = 128M sort_buffer_size = 128M read_buffer = 2M write_buffer = 2M # ./mysqltuner.pl >> MySQLTuner 1.2.0 - Major Hayden <[email protected]> >> Bug reports, feature requests, and downloads at http://mysqltuner.com/ >> Run with '--help' for additional options and output filtering -------- General Statistics -------------------------------------------------- [--] Skipped version check for MySQLTuner script [OK] Currently running supported MySQL version 5.1.52-log [OK] Operating on 64-bit architecture -------- Storage Engine Statistics ------------------------------------------- [--] Status: +Archive -BDB +Federated +InnoDB -ISAM -NDBCluster [--] Data in MyISAM tables: 2G (Tables: 26) [--] Data in InnoDB tables: 749M (Tables: 250) [!!] Total fragmented tables: 262 -------- Security Recommendations ------------------------------------------- -------- Performance Metrics ------------------------------------------------- [--] Up for: 31d 2h 30m 38s (680M q [253.371 qps], 2M conn, TX: 4825B, RX: 236B) [--] Reads / Writes: 89% / 11% [--] Total buffers: 20.6G global + 15.1M per thread (1000 max threads) [OK] Maximum possible memory usage: 35.4G (51% of installed RAM) [OK] Slow queries: 0% (35K/680M) [OK] Highest usage of available connections: 53% (537/1000) [OK] Key buffer size / total MyISAM indexes: 512.0M/457.2M [OK] Key buffer hit rate: 100.0% (9B cached / 264K reads) [OK] Query cache efficiency: 42.3% (260M cached / 615M selects) [!!] Query cache prunes per day: 4384652 [OK] Sorts requiring temporary tables: 0% (1K temp sorts / 38M sorts) [!!] Joins performed without indexes: 100404 [OK] Temporary tables created on disk: 17% (7M on disk / 45M total) [OK] Thread cache hit rate: 99% (537 created / 2M connections) [!!] Table cache hit rate: 0% (1K open / 946K opened) [OK] Open file limit used: 9% (453/5K) [OK] Table locks acquired immediately: 99% (758M immediate / 758M locks) [OK] InnoDB data size / buffer pool: 749.3M/20.0G -------- Recommendations ----------------------------------------------------- General recommendations: Run OPTIMIZE TABLE to defragment tables for better performance Enable the slow query log to troubleshoot bad queries Adjust your join queries to always utilize indexes Increase table_cache gradually to avoid file descriptor limits Variables to adjust: query_cache_size (> 64M) join_buffer_size (> 1.0M, or always use indexes with joins) table_cache (> 1024)

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• Query optimization using composite indexes

  - by xmarch

  Many times, during the process of creating a new Coherence application, developers do not pay attention to the way cache queries are constructed; they only check that these queries comply with functional specs. Later, performance testing shows that these perform poorly and it is then when developers start working on improvements until the non-functional performance requirements are met. This post describes the optimization process of a real-life scenario, where using a composite attribute index has brought a radical improvement in query execution times.  The execution times went down from 4 seconds to 2 milliseconds! E-commerce solution based on Oracle ATG – Endeca In the context of a new e-commerce solution based on Oracle ATG – Endeca, Oracle Coherence has been used to calculate and store SKU prices. In this architecture, a Coherence cache stores the final SKU prices used for Endeca baseline indexing. Each SKU price is calculated from a base SKU price and a series of calculations based on information from corporate global discounts. Corporate global discounts information is stored in an auxiliary Coherence cache with over 800.000 entries. In particular, to obtain each price the process needs to execute six queries over the global discount cache. After the implementation was finished, we discovered that the most expensive steps in the price calculation discount process were the global discounts cache query. This query has 10 parameters and is executed 6 times for each SKU price calculation. The steps taken to optimise this query are described below; Starting point Initial query was: String filter = "levelId = :iLevelId AND  salesCompanyId = :iSalesCompanyId AND salesChannelId = :iSalesChannelId "+ "AND departmentId = :iDepartmentId AND familyId = :iFamilyId AND brand = :iBrand AND manufacturer = :iManufacturer "+ "AND areaId = :iAreaId AND endDate >=  :iEndDate AND startDate <= :iStartDate"; Map<String, Object> params = new HashMap<String, Object>(10); // Fill all parameters. params.put("iLevelId", xxxx); // Executing filter. Filter globalDiscountsFilter = QueryHelper.createFilter(filter, params); NamedCache globalDiscountsCache = CacheFactory.getCache(CacheConstants.GLOBAL_DISCOUNTS_CACHE_NAME); Set applicableDiscounts = globalDiscountsCache.entrySet(globalDiscountsFilter); With the small dataset used for development the cache queries performed very well. However, when carrying out performance testing with a real-world sample size of 800,000 entries, each query execution was taking more than 4 seconds. First round of optimizations The first optimisation step was the creation of separate Coherence index for each of the 10 attributes used by the filter. This avoided object deserialization while executing the query. Each index was created as follows: globalDiscountsCache.addIndex(new ReflectionExtractor("getXXX" ) , false, null); After adding these indexes the query execution time was reduced to between 450 ms and 1s. However, these execution times were still not good enough.  Second round of optimizations In this optimisation phase a Coherence query explain plan was used to identify how many entires each index reduced the results set by, along with the cost in ms of executing that part of the query. Though the explain plan showed that all the indexes for the query were being used, it also showed that the ordering of the query parameters was "sub-optimal".  Parameters associated to object attributes with high-cardinality should appear at the beginning of the filter, or more specifically, the attributes that filters out the highest of number records should be placed at the beginning. But examining corporate global discount data we realized that depending on the values of the parameters used in the query the “good” order for the attributes was different. In particular, if the attributes brand and family had specific values it was more optimal to have a different query changing the order of the attributes. Ultimately, we ended up with three different optimal variants of the query that were used in its relevant cases: String filter = "brand = :iBrand AND familyId = :iFamilyId AND departmentId = :iDepartmentId AND levelId = :iLevelId "+ "AND manufacturer = :iManufacturer AND endDate >= :iEndDate AND salesCompanyId = :iSalesCompanyId "+ "AND areaId = :iAreaId AND salesChannelId = :iSalesChannelId AND startDate <= :iStartDate"; String filter = "familyId = :iFamilyId AND departmentId = :iDepartmentId AND levelId = :iLevelId AND brand = :iBrand "+ "AND manufacturer = :iManufacturer AND endDate >=  :iEndDate AND salesCompanyId = :iSalesCompanyId "+ "AND areaId = :iAreaId  AND salesChannelId = :iSalesChannelId AND startDate <= :iStartDate"; String filter = "brand = :iBrand AND departmentId = :iDepartmentId AND familyId = :iFamilyId AND levelId = :iLevelId "+ "AND manufacturer = :iManufacturer AND endDate >= :iEndDate AND salesCompanyId = :iSalesCompanyId "+ "AND areaId = :iAreaId AND salesChannelId = :iSalesChannelId AND startDate <= :iStartDate"; Using the appropriate query depending on the value of brand and family parameters the query execution time dropped to between 100 ms and 150 ms. But these these execution times were still not good enough and the solution was cumbersome. Third and last round of optimizations The third and final optimization was to introduce a composite index. However, this did mean that it was not possible to use the Coherence Query Language (CohQL), as composite indexes are not currently supporte in CohQL. As the original query had 8 parameters using EqualsFilter, 1 using GreaterEqualsFilter and 1 using LessEqualsFilter, the composite index was built for the 8 attributes using EqualsFilter. The final query had an EqualsFilter for the multiple extractor, a GreaterEqualsFilter and a LessEqualsFilter for the 2 remaining attributes.  All individual indexes were dropped except the ones being used for LessEqualsFilter and GreaterEqualsFilter. We were now running in an scenario with an 8-attributes composite filter and 2 single attribute filters. The composite index created was as follows: ValueExtractor[] ve = { new ReflectionExtractor("getSalesChannelId" ), new ReflectionExtractor("getLevelId" ),    new ReflectionExtractor("getAreaId" ), new ReflectionExtractor("getDepartmentId" ),    new ReflectionExtractor("getFamilyId" ), new ReflectionExtractor("getManufacturer" ),    new ReflectionExtractor("getBrand" ), new ReflectionExtractor("getSalesCompanyId" )}; MultiExtractor me = new MultiExtractor(ve); NamedCache globalDiscountsCache = CacheFactory.getCache(CacheConstants.GLOBAL_DISCOUNTS_CACHE_NAME); globalDiscountsCache.addIndex(me, false, null); And the final query was: ValueExtractor[] ve = { new ReflectionExtractor("getSalesChannelId" ), new ReflectionExtractor("getLevelId" ),    new ReflectionExtractor("getAreaId" ), new ReflectionExtractor("getDepartmentId" ),    new ReflectionExtractor("getFamilyId" ), new ReflectionExtractor("getManufacturer" ),    new ReflectionExtractor("getBrand" ), new ReflectionExtractor("getSalesCompanyId" )}; MultiExtractor me = new MultiExtractor(ve); // Fill composite parameters.String SalesCompanyId = xxxx;...AndFilter composite = new AndFilter(new EqualsFilter(me,                   Arrays.asList(iSalesChannelId, iLevelId, iAreaId, iDepartmentId, iFamilyId, iManufacturer, iBrand, SalesCompanyId)),                                     new GreaterEqualsFilter(new ReflectionExtractor("getEndDate" ), iEndDate)); AndFilter finalFilter = new AndFilter(composite, new LessEqualsFilter(new ReflectionExtractor("getStartDate" ), iStartDate)); NamedCache globalDiscountsCache = CacheFactory.getCache(CacheConstants.GLOBAL_DISCOUNTS_CACHE_NAME); Set applicableDiscounts = globalDiscountsCache.entrySet(finalFilter);      Using this composite index the query improved dramatically and the execution time dropped to between 2 ms and  4 ms.  These execution times completely met the non-functional performance requirements . It should be noticed than when using the composite index the order of the attributes inside the ValueExtractor was not relevant.

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• MySQL reserves too much RAM

  - by Buddy

  I have a cheap VPS with 128Mb RAM and 256Mb burst. MySQL starts and reserves about 110Mb, but uses not more than 20Mb of them. My VPS Control Panel shows, that I use 127Mb (I also running nginx and sphinx), I know, that it shows reserved RAM, but when I reach over 128Mb, my VPS reboots automatically every 4 hours. So I want to force MySQL to reserve less RAM. How can i do that? I did some tweaks with my.conf but it helped not so much. top output: PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 1 root 15 0 2156 668 572 S 0.0 0.3 0:00.03 init 11311 root 15 0 11212 356 228 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.00 vzctl 11312 root 18 0 3712 1484 1248 S 0.0 0.6 0:00.01 bash 11347 root 18 0 2284 916 732 R 0.0 0.3 0:00.00 top 13978 root 17 -4 2248 552 344 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.00 udevd 14262 root 15 0 1812 564 472 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.03 syslogd 14293 sphinx 15 0 11816 1172 672 S 0.0 0.4 0:00.07 searchd 14305 root 25 0 7192 1036 636 S 0.0 0.4 0:00.00 sshd 14321 root 25 0 2832 836 668 S 0.0 0.3 0:00.00 xinetd 15389 root 18 0 3708 1300 1132 S 0.0 0.5 0:00.00 mysqld_safe 15441 mysql 15 0 113m 16m 4440 S 0.0 6.4 0:00.15 mysqld 15489 root 21 0 13056 1456 340 S 0.0 0.6 0:00.00 nginx 15490 nginx 18 0 13328 2388 992 S 0.0 0.9 0:00.06 nginx 15507 nginx 25 0 19520 5888 4244 S 0.0 2.2 0:00.00 php-cgi 15508 nginx 18 0 19636 4876 2748 S 0.0 1.9 0:00.12 php-cgi 15509 nginx 15 0 19668 4872 2716 S 0.0 1.9 0:00.11 php-cgi 15518 root 18 0 4492 1116 568 S 0.0 0.4 0:00.01 crond MySQL tuner: >> MySQLTuner 1.0.1 - Major Hayden <[email protected]> >> Bug reports, feature requests, and downloads at http://mysqltuner.com/ >> Run with '--help' for additional options and output filtering Please enter your MySQL administrative login: root Please enter your MySQL administrative password: -------- General Statistics -------------------------------------------------- [--] Skipped version check for MySQLTuner script [OK] Currently running supported MySQL version 5.0.77 [OK] Operating on 32-bit architecture with less than 2GB RAM -------- Storage Engine Statistics ------------------------------------------- [--] Status: -Archive -BDB -Federated +InnoDB -ISAM -NDBCluster [--] Data in InnoDB tables: 1M (Tables: 1) [OK] Total fragmented tables: 0 -------- Performance Metrics ------------------------------------------------- [--] Up for: 38m 43s (37 q [0.016 qps], 20 conn, TX: 4M, RX: 3K) [--] Reads / Writes: 100% / 0% [--] Total buffers: 28.1M global + 832.0K per thread (100 max threads) [OK] Maximum possible memory usage: 109.4M (42% of installed RAM) [OK] Slow queries: 0% (0/37) [OK] Highest usage of available connections: 1% (1/100) [OK] Key buffer size / total MyISAM indexes: 128.0K/64.0K [OK] Query cache efficiency: 42.1% (8 cached / 19 selects) [OK] Query cache prunes per day: 0 [!!] Temporary tables created on disk: 27% (3 on disk / 11 total) [!!] Thread cache is disabled [OK] Table cache hit rate: 57% (8 open / 14 opened) [OK] Open file limit used: 1% (12/1K) [OK] Table locks acquired immediately: 100% (22 immediate / 22 locks) [!!] Connections aborted: 10% [OK] InnoDB data size / buffer pool: 1.5M/8.0M -------- Recommendations ----------------------------------------------------- General recommendations: MySQL started within last 24 hours - recommendations may be inaccurate Enable the slow query log to troubleshoot bad queries When making adjustments, make tmp_table_size/max_heap_table_size equal Reduce your SELECT DISTINCT queries without LIMIT clauses Set thread_cache_size to 4 as a starting value Your applications are not closing MySQL connections properly Variables to adjust: tmp_table_size (> 32M) max_heap_table_size (> 16M) thread_cache_size (start at 4) I think if I do what MySQLtuner says, MySQL will use more RAM.

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• MySQL InnoDB disappeared, all InnoDB data cant be accessed

  - by dogmatic69

  Mysql (including InnoDB) was working fine, after a restart the other day when mysql starts it says in the logs: 140604 23:36:07 [Note] Plugin 'FEDERATED' is disabled. 140604 23:36:07 [Note] Plugin 'InnoDB' is disabled. In the app it says: SQLSTATE[42000]: Syntax error or access violation: 1286 Unknown storage engine 'InnoDB' Now, according to google this is a very simple fix, just remove the ib_logfile[0|1] files, which I have done and does not do anything. I started by making a full copy of the data dir for testing various 'fixes'. I have also uninstalled mysql and reinstalled it with no change, I just cant get it to run with innodb working anymore :/ # mysql --version mysql Ver 14.14 Distrib 5.5.37, for debian-linux-gnu (x86_64) using readline 6.3 I have also tried the innodb_force_recovery setting, 0 - 6, Any time I run a command on an InnoDB table it says innodb_force_recovery LOGS (from around the time it died) was working here Version: '5.5.37-0ubuntu0.14.04.1' socket: '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' port: 3306 (Ubuntu) 140530 1:24:22 [Note] /usr/sbin/mysqld: Normal shutdown 140530 1:24:22 [Note] Event Scheduler: Purging the queue. 0 events 140530 1:24:22 InnoDB: Starting shutdown... 140530 1:24:24 InnoDB: Shutdown completed; log sequence number 3345857316 140530 1:24:24 [Note] /usr/sbin/mysqld: Shutdown complete 140530 22:03:12 [Warning] Using unique option prefix myisam-recover instead of myisam-recover-options is deprecated and will be removed in a future release. Please use the full name instead. 140530 22:03:12 [Note] Plugin 'FEDERATED' is disabled. 140530 22:03:12 InnoDB: The InnoDB memory heap is disabled 140530 22:03:12 InnoDB: Mutexes and rw_locks use GCC atomic builtins 140530 22:03:12 InnoDB: Compressed tables use zlib 1.2.8 140530 22:03:12 InnoDB: Using Linux native AIO 140530 22:03:12 InnoDB: Initializing buffer pool, size = 128.0M 140530 22:03:12 InnoDB: Completed initialization of buffer pool 140530 22:03:12 InnoDB: highest supported file format is Barracuda. 140530 22:03:15 InnoDB: Waiting for the background threads to start 140530 22:03:16 InnoDB: 5.5.37 started; log sequence number 3345857316 140530 22:03:16 [Note] Server hostname (bind-address): '192.168.1.20'; port: 3306 140530 22:03:16 [Note] - '192.168.1.20' resolves to '192.168.1.20'; 140530 22:03:16 [Note] Server socket created on IP: '192.168.1.20'. 140530 22:03:16 [Note] Event Scheduler: Loaded 0 events 140530 22:03:16 [Note] /usr/sbin/mysqld: ready for connections. 140602 0:58:39 [Note] Event Scheduler: Purging the queue. 0 events 140602 0:58:39 InnoDB: Starting shutdown... 140602 0:58:41 InnoDB: Shutdown completed; log sequence number 3345954467 140602 0:58:41 [Note] /usr/sbin/mysqld: Shutdown complete does not work anymore 140602 21:45:19 [Warning] Using unique option prefix myisam-recover instead of myisam-recover-options is deprecated and will be removed in a future release. Please use the full name instead. 140602 21:45:19 [Note] Plugin 'FEDERATED' is disabled. 140602 21:45:19 [Note] Plugin 'InnoDB' is disabled. 140602 21:45:19 [Note] Server hostname (bind-address): '192.168.1.20'; port: 3306 140602 21:45:19 [Note] - '192.168.1.20' resolves to '192.168.1.20'; 140602 21:45:19 [Note] Server socket created on IP: '192.168.1.20'. 140602 21:45:19 [Note] Event Scheduler: Loaded 0 events 140602 21:45:19 [Note] /usr/sbin/mysqld: ready for connections.

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• mySQL Optimization Suggestions

  - by Brian Schroeter

  I'm trying to optimize our mySQL configuration for our large Magento website. The reason I believe that mySQL needs to be configured further is because New Relic has shown that our SELECT queries are taking a long time (20,000+ ms) in some categories. I ran MySQLTuner 1.3.0 and got the following results... (Disclaimer: I restarted mySQL earlier after tweaking some settings, and so the results here may not be 100% accurate): >> MySQLTuner 1.3.0 - Major Hayden <[email protected]> >> Bug reports, feature requests, and downloads at http://mysqltuner.com/ >> Run with '--help' for additional options and output filtering [OK] Currently running supported MySQL version 5.5.37-35.0 [OK] Operating on 64-bit architecture -------- Storage Engine Statistics ------------------------------------------- [--] Status: +ARCHIVE +BLACKHOLE +CSV -FEDERATED +InnoDB +MRG_MYISAM [--] Data in MyISAM tables: 7G (Tables: 332) [--] Data in InnoDB tables: 213G (Tables: 8714) [--] Data in PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA tables: 0B (Tables: 17) [--] Data in MEMORY tables: 0B (Tables: 353) [!!] Total fragmented tables: 5492 -------- Security Recommendations ------------------------------------------- [!!] User '@host5.server1.autopartsnetwork.com' has no password set. [!!] User '@localhost' has no password set. [!!] User 'root@%' has no password set. -------- Performance Metrics ------------------------------------------------- [--] Up for: 5h 3m 4s (5M q [317.443 qps], 42K conn, TX: 18B, RX: 2B) [--] Reads / Writes: 95% / 5% [--] Total buffers: 35.5G global + 184.5M per thread (1024 max threads) [!!] Maximum possible memory usage: 220.0G (174% of installed RAM) [OK] Slow queries: 0% (6K/5M) [OK] Highest usage of available connections: 5% (61/1024) [OK] Key buffer size / total MyISAM indexes: 512.0M/3.1G [OK] Key buffer hit rate: 100.0% (102M cached / 45K reads) [OK] Query cache efficiency: 66.9% (3M cached / 5M selects) [!!] Query cache prunes per day: 3486361 [OK] Sorts requiring temporary tables: 0% (0 temp sorts / 812K sorts) [!!] Joins performed without indexes: 1328 [OK] Temporary tables created on disk: 11% (126K on disk / 1M total) [OK] Thread cache hit rate: 99% (61 created / 42K connections) [!!] Table cache hit rate: 19% (9K open / 49K opened) [OK] Open file limit used: 2% (712/25K) [OK] Table locks acquired immediately: 100% (5M immediate / 5M locks) [!!] InnoDB buffer pool / data size: 32.0G/213.4G [OK] InnoDB log waits: 0 -------- Recommendations ----------------------------------------------------- General recommendations: Run OPTIMIZE TABLE to defragment tables for better performance MySQL started within last 24 hours - recommendations may be inaccurate Reduce your overall MySQL memory footprint for system stability Enable the slow query log to troubleshoot bad queries Increasing the query_cache size over 128M may reduce performance Adjust your join queries to always utilize indexes Increase table_cache gradually to avoid file descriptor limits Read this before increasing table_cache over 64: http://bit.ly/1mi7c4C Variables to adjust: *** MySQL's maximum memory usage is dangerously high *** *** Add RAM before increasing MySQL buffer variables *** query_cache_size (> 512M) [see warning above] join_buffer_size (> 128.0M, or always use indexes with joins) table_cache (> 12288) innodb_buffer_pool_size (>= 213G) My my.cnf configuration is as follows... [client] port = 3306 [mysqld_safe] nice = 0 [mysqld] tmpdir = /var/lib/mysql/tmp user = mysql port = 3306 skip-external-locking character-set-server = utf8 collation-server = utf8_general_ci event_scheduler = 0 key_buffer = 512M max_allowed_packet = 64M thread_stack = 512K thread_cache_size = 512 sort_buffer_size = 24M read_buffer_size = 8M read_rnd_buffer_size = 24M join_buffer_size = 128M # for some nightly processes client sessions set the join buffer to 8 GB auto-increment-increment = 1 auto-increment-offset = 1 myisam-recover = BACKUP max_connections = 1024 # max connect errors artificially high to support behaviors of NetScaler monitors max_connect_errors = 999999 concurrent_insert = 2 connect_timeout = 5 wait_timeout = 180 net_read_timeout = 120 net_write_timeout = 120 back_log = 128 # this table_open_cache might be too low because of MySQL bugs #16244691 and #65384) table_open_cache = 12288 tmp_table_size = 512M max_heap_table_size = 512M bulk_insert_buffer_size = 512M open-files-limit = 8192 open-files = 1024 query_cache_type = 1 # large query limit supports SOAP and REST API integrations query_cache_limit = 4M # larger than 512 MB query cache size is problematic; this is typically ~60% full query_cache_size = 512M # set to true on read slaves read_only = false slow_query_log_file = /var/log/mysql/slow.log slow_query_log = 0 long_query_time = 0.2 expire_logs_days = 10 max_binlog_size = 1024M binlog_cache_size = 32K sync_binlog = 0 # SSD RAID10 technically has a write capacity of 10000 IOPS innodb_io_capacity = 400 innodb_file_per_table innodb_table_locks = true innodb_lock_wait_timeout = 30 # These servers have 80 CPU threads; match 1:1 innodb_thread_concurrency = 48 innodb_commit_concurrency = 2 innodb_support_xa = true innodb_buffer_pool_size = 32G innodb_file_per_table innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 1 innodb_log_buffer_size = 2G skip-federated [mysqldump] quick quote-names single-transaction max_allowed_packet = 64M I have a monster of a server here to power our site because our catalog is very large (300,000 simple SKUs), and I'm just wondering if I'm missing anything that I can configure further. :-) Thanks!

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• need assistance with my.cnf - 1500% CPU usage

  - by Alan Long

  I'm running into a few issues with our new database server. It is a HP G8 with 2 INTEL XEON E5-2650 processors and 32GB of ram. This server is dedicated as a MySQL server (5.1.69) for our intranet portal. I have been having issues with this server staying alive - I notice high CPU usage during certain times of day (8% ~ 1500%+) and see very low memory usage (7 ~ 15%) based on using the 'top' command. When the CPU usage passes 1000%, that is when the app usually dies. I'm trying to see what I'm doing wrong with the config file, hopefully one of the experts can chime in and let me know what they think. See below for my.cnf file: [mysqld] default-storage-engine=InnoDB datadir=/var/lib/mysql socket=/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock #user=mysql large-pages # Disabling symbolic-links is recommended to prevent assorted security risks symbolic-links=0 max_connections=275 tmp_table_size=1G key_buffer_size=384M key_buffer=384M thread_cache_size=1024 long_query_time=5 low_priority_updates=1 max_heap_table_size=1G myisam_sort_buffer_size=8M concurrent_insert=2 table_cache=1024 sort_buffer_size=8M read_buffer_size=5M read_rnd_buffer_size=6M join_buffer_size=16M table_definition_cache=6k open_files_limit=8k slow_query_log #skip-name-resolve # Innodb Settings innodb_buffer_pool_size=18G innodb_thread_concurrency=0 innodb_log_file_size=1G innodb_log_buffer_size=16M innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=2 innodb_lock_wait_timeout=50 innodb_file_per_table #innodb_buffer_pool_instances=4 #eliminating double buffering innodb_flush_method = O_DIRECT flush_time=86400 innodb_additional_mem_pool_size=40M #innodb_io_capacity = 5000 #innodb_read_io_threads = 64 #innodb_write_io_threads = 64 # increase until threads_created doesnt grow anymore thread_cache=1024 query_cache_type=1 query_cache_limit=4M query_cache_size=256M # Try number of CPU's*2 for thread_concurrency thread_concurrency = 0 wait_timeout = 1800 connect_timeout = 10 interactive_timeout = 60 [mysqldump] max_allowed_packet=32M [mysqld_safe] log-error=/var/log/mysqld.log pid-file=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid log-slow-queries=/var/log/mysql/slow-queries.log long_query_time = 1 log-queries-not-using-indexes we connect to one database with 75 tables, the largest table has 1,150,000 entries and the second largest has 128,036 entries. I have also verified that our PHP queries are optimized as best as possible. Reference - MySQLtuner: >> MySQLTuner 1.2.0 - Major Hayden <[email protected]> >> Bug reports, feature requests, and downloads at http://mysqltuner.com/ >> Run with '--help' for additional options and output filtering -------- General Statistics -------------------------------------------------- [--] Skipped version check for MySQLTuner script [OK] Currently running supported MySQL version 5.1.69-log [OK] Operating on 64-bit architecture -------- Storage Engine Statistics ------------------------------------------- [--] Status: -Archive -BDB -Federated +InnoDB -ISAM -NDBCluster [--] Data in InnoDB tables: 420M (Tables: 75) [!!] Total fragmented tables: 75 -------- Security Recommendations ------------------------------------------- [!!] User '[email protected]' has no password set. -------- Performance Metrics ------------------------------------------------- [--] Up for: 1h 14m 50s (8M q [1K qps], 705 conn, TX: 6B, RX: 892M) [--] Reads / Writes: 68% / 32% [--] Total buffers: 19.7G global + 35.2M per thread (275 max threads) [!!] Maximum possible memory usage: 29.1G (93% of installed RAM) [OK] Slow queries: 0% (472/8M) [OK] Highest usage of available connections: 66% (183/275) [OK] Key buffer size / total MyISAM indexes: 384.0M/91.0K [OK] Key buffer hit rate: 100.0% (173 cached / 0 reads) [OK] Query cache efficiency: 96.2% (7M cached / 7M selects) [!!] Query cache prunes per day: 553614 [OK] Sorts requiring temporary tables: 0% (3 temp sorts / 1K sorts) [!!] Temporary tables created on disk: 49% (3K on disk / 7K total) [OK] Thread cache hit rate: 74% (183 created / 705 connections) [OK] Table cache hit rate: 97% (231 open / 238 opened) [OK] Open file limit used: 0% (17/8K) [OK] Table locks acquired immediately: 100% (432K immediate / 432K locks) [OK] InnoDB data size / buffer pool: 420.9M/18.0G -------- Recommendations ----------------------------------------------------- General recommendations: Run OPTIMIZE TABLE to defragment tables for better performance MySQL started within last 24 hours - recommendations may be inaccurate Reduce your overall MySQL memory footprint for system stability Increasing the query_cache size over 128M may reduce performance Temporary table size is already large - reduce result set size Reduce your SELECT DISTINCT queries without LIMIT clauses Variables to adjust: *** MySQL's maximum memory usage is dangerously high *** *** Add RAM before increasing MySQL buffer variables *** query_cache_size (> 256M) [see warning above] Thanks in advanced for your help!

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• MySQL crash. Unknown cause. Signal 11

  - by fortmac

  This is a database that I installed ~6 months ago and had been running fine. This is currently running in Ubuntu 12.04. Attempting to connect to MySQL causes this error: ERROR 2002 (HY000): Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (111) Then theres: $ sudo mysqld which returns: 130702 15:38:54 [Note] Plugin 'FEDERATED' is disabled. 130702 15:38:54 InnoDB: The InnoDB memory heap is disabled 130702 15:38:54 InnoDB: Mutexes and rw_locks use GCC atomic builtins 130702 15:38:54 InnoDB: Compressed tables use zlib 1.2.3.4 130702 15:38:54 InnoDB: Initializing buffer pool, size = 128.0M 130702 15:38:54 InnoDB: Completed initialization of buffer pool 130702 15:38:54 InnoDB: highest supported file format is Barracuda. InnoDB: The log sequence number in ibdata files does not match InnoDB: the log sequence number in the ib_logfiles! 130702 15:38:54 InnoDB: Database was not shut down normally! InnoDB: Starting crash recovery. InnoDB: Reading tablespace information from the .ibd files... InnoDB: Restoring possible half-written data pages from the doublewrite InnoDB: buffer... 130702 15:38:55 InnoDB: Waiting for the background threads to start 130702 15:38:56 InnoDB: 1.1.8 started; log sequence number 5201901917 130702 15:38:56 [Note] Server hostname (bind-address): '127.0.0.1'; port: 3306 130702 15:38:56 [Note] - '127.0.0.1' resolves to '127.0.0.1'; 130702 15:38:56 [Note] Server socket created on IP: '127.0.0.1'. 130702 15:38:56 [Note] Event Scheduler: Loaded 0 events 130702 15:38:56 [Note] mysqld: ready for connections. Version: '5.5.28-0ubuntu0.12.04.3' socket: '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' port: 3306 (Ubuntu) 19:39:02 UTC - mysqld got signal 11 ; This could be because you hit a bug. It is also possible that this binary or one of the libraries it was linked against is corrupt, improperly built, or misconfigured. This error can also be caused by malfunctioning hardware. We will try our best to scrape up some info that will hopefully help diagnose the problem, but since we have already crashed, something is definitely wrong and this may fail. key_buffer_size=16777216 read_buffer_size=131072 max_used_connections=1 max_threads=151 thread_count=1 connection_count=1 It is possible that mysqld could use up to key_buffer_size + (read_buffer_size + sort_buffer_size)*max_threads = 346681 K bytes of memory Hope that's ok; if not, decrease some variables in the equation. Thread pointer: 0x7f9509e51530 Attempting backtrace. You can use the following information to find out where mysqld died. If you see no messages after this, something went terribly wrong... stack_bottom = 7f94f1d3de60 thread_stack 0x30000 mysqld(my_print_stacktrace+0x29)[0x7f95083427b9] mysqld(handle_fatal_signal+0x483)[0x7f9508209b43] /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpthread.so.0(+0xfcb0)[0x7f9506f5bcb0] mysqld(+0x320e1c)[0x7f9508113e1c] mysqld(_ZN4JOIN15alloc_func_listEv+0x9c)[0x7f950812391c] mysqld(_ZN4JOIN7prepareEPPP4ItemP10TABLE_LISTjS1_jP8st_orderS7_S1_S7_P13st_select_lexP18st_select_lex_unit+0x918)[0x7f9508124658] mysqld(_Z12mysql_selectP3THDPPP4ItemP10TABLE_LISTjR4ListIS1_ES2_jP8st_orderSB_S2_SB_yP13select_resultP18st_select_lex_unitP13st_select_lex+0x130)[0x7f950812d060] mysqld(_Z13handle_selectP3THDP3LEXP13select_resultm+0x17c)[0x7f9508132fbc] mysqld(+0x2f6714)[0x7f95080e9714] mysqld(_Z21mysql_execute_commandP3THD+0x16d8)[0x7f95080f1178] mysqld(_Z11mysql_parseP3THDPcjP12Parser_state+0x10f)[0x7f95080f5e0f] mysqld(_Z16dispatch_command19enum_server_commandP3THDPcj+0x1380)[0x7f95080f7260] mysqld(_Z24do_handle_one_connectionP3THD+0x1bd)[0x7f950819b80d] mysqld(handle_one_connection+0x50)[0x7f950819b870] /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpthread.so.0(+0x7e9a)[0x7f9506f53e9a] /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6(clone+0x6d)[0x7f9506684cbd] Trying to get some variables. Some pointers may be invalid and cause the dump to abort. Query (7f94e0004b80): is an invalid pointer Connection ID (thread ID): 1 Status: NOT_KILLED The manual page at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/crashing.html contains information that should help you find out what is causing the crash. I'm at a loss. What other reports would be useful in diagnosing this? /var/log/mysql.err & /var/log/mysql.log are empty.

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• Optimizing MySQL for small VPS

  - by Chris M

  I'm trying to optimize my MySQL config for a verrry small VPS. The VPS is also running NGINX/PHP-FPM and Magento; all with a limit of 250MB of RAM. This is an output of MySQL Tuner... -------- General Statistics -------------------------------------------------- [--] Skipped version check for MySQLTuner script [OK] Currently running supported MySQL version 5.1.41-3ubuntu12.8 [OK] Operating on 64-bit architecture -------- Storage Engine Statistics ------------------------------------------- [--] Status: -Archive -BDB -Federated +InnoDB -ISAM -NDBCluster [--] Data in MyISAM tables: 1M (Tables: 14) [--] Data in InnoDB tables: 29M (Tables: 301) [--] Data in MEMORY tables: 1M (Tables: 17) [!!] Total fragmented tables: 301 -------- Security Recommendations ------------------------------------------- [OK] All database users have passwords assigned -------- Performance Metrics ------------------------------------------------- [--] Up for: 2d 11h 14m 58s (1M q [8.038 qps], 33K conn, TX: 2B, RX: 618M) [--] Reads / Writes: 83% / 17% [--] Total buffers: 122.0M global + 8.6M per thread (100 max threads) [!!] Maximum possible memory usage: 978.2M (404% of installed RAM) [OK] Slow queries: 0% (37/1M) [OK] Highest usage of available connections: 6% (6/100) [OK] Key buffer size / total MyISAM indexes: 32.0M/282.0K [OK] Key buffer hit rate: 99.7% (358K cached / 1K reads) [OK] Query cache efficiency: 83.4% (1M cached / 1M selects) [!!] Query cache prunes per day: 48301 [OK] Sorts requiring temporary tables: 0% (0 temp sorts / 144K sorts) [OK] Temporary tables created on disk: 13% (27K on disk / 203K total) [OK] Thread cache hit rate: 99% (6 created / 33K connections) [!!] Table cache hit rate: 0% (32 open / 51K opened) [OK] Open file limit used: 1% (20/1K) [OK] Table locks acquired immediately: 99% (1M immediate / 1M locks) [!!] InnoDB data size / buffer pool: 29.2M/8.0M -------- Recommendations ----------------------------------------------------- General recommendations: Run OPTIMIZE TABLE to defragment tables for better performance Reduce your overall MySQL memory footprint for system stability Enable the slow query log to troubleshoot bad queries Increase table_cache gradually to avoid file descriptor limits Variables to adjust: *** MySQL's maximum memory usage is dangerously high *** *** Add RAM before increasing MySQL buffer variables *** query_cache_size (> 64M) table_cache (> 32) innodb_buffer_pool_size (>= 29M) and this is the config. # # The MySQL database server configuration file. # # You can copy this to one of: # - "/etc/mysql/my.cnf" to set global options, # - "~/.my.cnf" to set user-specific options. # # One can use all long options that the program supports. # Run program with --help to get a list of available options and with # --print-defaults to see which it would actually understand and use. # # For explanations see # http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/server-system-variables.html # This will be passed to all mysql clients # It has been reported that passwords should be enclosed with ticks/quotes # escpecially if they contain "#" chars... # Remember to edit /etc/mysql/debian.cnf when changing the socket location. [client] port = 3306 socket = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock # Here is entries for some specific programs # The following values assume you have at least 32M ram # This was formally known as [safe_mysqld]. Both versions are currently parsed. [mysqld_safe] socket = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock nice = 0 [mysqld] # # * Basic Settings # # # * IMPORTANT # If you make changes to these settings and your system uses apparmor, you may # also need to also adjust /etc/apparmor.d/usr.sbin.mysqld. # user = mysql socket = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock port = 3306 basedir = /usr datadir = /var/lib/mysql tmpdir = /tmp skip-external-locking # # Instead of skip-networking the default is now to listen only on # localhost which is more compatible and is not less secure. bind-address = 127.0.0.1 # # * Fine Tuning # key_buffer = 32M max_allowed_packet = 16M thread_stack = 192K thread_cache_size = 8 sort_buffer_size = 4M read_buffer_size = 4M myisam_sort_buffer_size = 16M # This replaces the startup script and checks MyISAM tables if needed # the first time they are touched myisam-recover = BACKUP max_connections = 100 table_cache = 32 tmp_table_size = 128M #thread_concurrency = 10 # # * Query Cache Configuration # #query_cache_limit = 1M query_cache_type = 1 query_cache_size = 64M # # * Logging and Replication # # Both location gets rotated by the cronjob. # Be aware that this log type is a performance killer. # As of 5.1 you can enable the log at runtime! #general_log_file = /var/log/mysql/mysql.log #general_log = 1 log_error = /var/log/mysql/error.log # Here you can see queries with especially long duration #log_slow_queries = /var/log/mysql/mysql-slow.log #long_query_time = 2 #log-queries-not-using-indexes # # The following can be used as easy to replay backup logs or for replication. # note: if you are setting up a replication slave, see README.Debian about # other settings you may need to change. #server-id = 1 #log_bin = /var/log/mysql/mysql-bin.log expire_logs_days = 10 max_binlog_size = 100M #binlog_do_db = include_database_name #binlog_ignore_db = include_database_name # # * InnoDB # # InnoDB is enabled by default with a 10MB datafile in /var/lib/mysql/. # Read the manual for more InnoDB related options. There are many! # # * Security Features # # Read the manual, too, if you want chroot! # chroot = /var/lib/mysql/ # # For generating SSL certificates I recommend the OpenSSL GUI "tinyca". # # ssl-ca=/etc/mysql/cacert.pem # ssl-cert=/etc/mysql/server-cert.pem # ssl-key=/etc/mysql/server-key.pem [mysqldump] quick quote-names max_allowed_packet = 16M [mysql] #no-auto-rehash # faster start of mysql but no tab completition [isamchk] key_buffer = 16M # # * IMPORTANT: Additional settings that can override those from this file! # The files must end with '.cnf', otherwise they'll be ignored. # !includedir /etc/mysql/conf.d/ The site contains 1 wordpress site,so lots of MYISAM but mostly static content as its not changing all that often (A wordpress cache plugin deals with this). And the Magento Site which consists of a lot of InnoDB tables, some MyISAM and some INMEMORY. The "read" side seems to be running pretty well with a mass of optimizations I've used on Magento, the NGINX setup and PHP-FPM + XCACHE. I'd love to have a kick in the right direction with the MySQL config so I'm not blindly altering it based on the MySQLTuner without understanding what I'm changing. Thanks

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• Spotlight Infinite Indexing issue (external data drive)

  - by Manca Weeks

  This is an external drive, formerly a boot drive which is now in use only to access music files (sibelius, audio, midi, live, logic etc.) without transferring the data into a new boot system, partly because of the issue I am about to describe, but mostly because the majority of the data is mainly there for archival purposes. The user is a composer and prominent musician and needs to be able to rehash the data at will. I have tried several things - here is a list: - make complete filesystem clone with antonio diaz's ddrescue - run Disk Warrior on copy, repair whatever errors occurred - wipe out all ACLs on entire drive - set all permissions to the same value - wide open 777 - remove any system data (applications, system files, including hidden files to the best of my knowledge) by selecting only non-system/app data and using Carbon Copy Cloner to put only the data of interest onto a newly formatted drive - transfer data to newly formatted drive folder by folder, resetting the spotlight index in between adding each to observe for issues (interesting here is that no issues occurred except for in Documents folder - when I transferred only the Documents folder to a newly formatted drive on its own - no trouble. It appears almost as thought it may not be the content but the quantity or specific combination of data that results in problems) - use DataRescue to transfer the data to yet another newly formatted drive to expose any missed hidden files Between each of the above steps I stopped Spotlight (search for anything beginning with md in Activity Monitor - All Processes and quitting it), deleted the .Spotlight-V100 directory from the affected drive. Restart Splotlight indexing by adding drive to Spotlight privacy list and removing it. In each case the same issue occurs - Spotlight begins indexing normally (or so it seems), then the index estimated time increases, usually to 4 hours remaining. This is where it gets stuck and continues to predict 4 hours remaining but never finishes. Sometimes I can't eject the drive and have to quit the md.. processes from Activity Monitor to be able to eject the drive without Force Eject. Once I disconnect the drive after the 4 hours remaining situation - if I reattach it, Spotlight forever estimates remaining time and never gets going again. So there it is. It is apparently not a filesystem issue, not a permissions issue and not tied to any particular piece of hardware or protocol (used USB and FW drives). I have tried this on several machines (3 to be precise) and in 10.5.8 and 10.6.5. Simply disabling Spotlight on this volume is not an option because the owner has no clue where things are as the data on the volume dates back to music projects and compositions from 2003 and before. He needs to be able to query for results. Anyone got any ideas? ---update 2-6-11 Since I have not received any responses except the one below which appears to misunderstand my point, I am updating this post hoping to get more responses. I have used the terminal command sudo opensnoop -p PID where PID is the mdworker process ID to try and determine what Spotlight is doing and hopefully find the files it's having trouble with. Here's what happens: After indexing for a few hours, mdworker is gone. It no longer shows up in Activity Monitor under "All Processes" and the Terminal window with the opensnoop result stops moving. I then proceeded to execute the same command on mds to see what it was doing and here's what I get, repeatedly: 501 57 mds 21 / 501 57 mds 21 /Volumes/Sno Leppard 501 57 mds 21 /Volumes/Tiger 501 57 mds 21 /Volumes/Leppard 501 57 mds 21 /Volumes/Disk Warrior 501 57 mds 21 /Volumes/ONM Data These represent all the volumes currently mounted in the system. All except ONM Data, which is the one I am trying to index, are excluded from SPotlight indexing at the moment. The sequence above repeats over and over, with slight variation, sometimes skipping one of the volumes. Questions - what happened to mdworker? What is mds doing? I will let this run until tomorrow morning and throughout the day and monitor for any changes. Any input would be very much appreciated. Even if you're not sure what the ultimate answer is, please alert me to anything you think I may be missing. Hopefully at some point we will figure this out... Thanks, M __final edit__ I finally resolved the issue and here is how I did it. I used the terminal command "sudo opensnoop -p PID" where the PID is the process id of the processes I was monitoring. I was looking at all instances of mds and mdworker running in the system. After the third time through indexing the same data set (see info above), I contacted Apple and got to their highest level of support - they were flabbergasted as well. They advised me to install yet another default 10.6.6 system and try again. The same pattern repeated - mds and mdworker(s) would start indexing and eventually the spotlight icon would say 6 hours remaining and all mdworkers were gone, mds at 90% or so of CPU. But I did finally figure out that the first time mdworker stopped like that, the last file it touched was always in the same folder. I excluded that folder from spotlight search and the rest of the data set indexed within about 2 hours with no strange behavior or failures. I copied that folder to another machine and Spotlight barfed immediately. Exclude that folder and all is well again. I have no clue what is causing this behavior, still, but I did find a functional solution to the problem. Anyone with a similar problem - run opensnoop on all instances of mds and mdworker and wait patiently for wdworker to exit. Look at the last file it touched and exclude the enclosing folder from being indexed. I was able to repeat the issue and solution on 2 different installs and 2 different copies of the data set. Hope this helps. If we find an actual cause of the folder being such a problem (it is called MICHAEL BRECKER RECORD SOLOS and contains almost 1 GB of audio related files - performer, live, SD2 - things like that), I will edit again to let you all know. Thanks for ay attempts to help, M

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• Server Memory with Magento

  - by Mohamed Elgharabawy

  I have a cloud server with the following specifications: 2vCPUs 4G RAM 160GB Disk Space Network 400Mb/s System Image: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS I am only running Magento CE 1.7.0.2 on this server. Nothing else. Usually, the server has a loading time of 4-5 seconds. Recently, this has dropped to over 30 seconds and sometimes the server just goes away and I get HTTP error reports to my email stating that HTTP requests took more than 20000ms. Running top command and sorting them returns the following: top - 15:29:07 up 3:40, 1 user, load average: 28.59, 25.95, 22.91 Tasks: 112 total, 30 running, 82 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 90.2%us, 9.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.3%si, 0.2%st PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 31901 www-data 20 0 360m 71m 5840 R 7 1.8 1:39.51 apache2 32084 www-data 20 0 362m 72m 5548 R 7 1.8 1:31.56 apache2 32089 www-data 20 0 348m 59m 5660 R 7 1.5 1:41.74 apache2 32295 www-data 20 0 343m 54m 5532 R 7 1.4 2:00.78 apache2 32303 www-data 20 0 354m 65m 5260 R 7 1.6 1:38.76 apache2 32304 www-data 20 0 346m 56m 5544 R 7 1.4 1:41.26 apache2 32305 www-data 20 0 348m 59m 5640 R 7 1.5 1:50.11 apache2 32291 www-data 20 0 358m 69m 5256 R 6 1.7 1:44.26 apache2 32517 www-data 20 0 345m 56m 5532 R 6 1.4 1:45.56 apache2 30473 www-data 20 0 355m 66m 5680 R 6 1.7 2:00.05 apache2 32093 www-data 20 0 352m 63m 5848 R 6 1.6 1:53.23 apache2 32302 www-data 20 0 345m 56m 5512 R 6 1.4 1:55.87 apache2 32433 www-data 20 0 346m 57m 5500 S 6 1.4 1:31.58 apache2 32638 www-data 20 0 354m 65m 5508 R 6 1.6 1:36.59 apache2 32230 www-data 20 0 347m 57m 5524 R 6 1.4 1:33.96 apache2 32231 www-data 20 0 355m 66m 5512 R 6 1.7 1:37.47 apache2 32233 www-data 20 0 354m 64m 6032 R 6 1.6 1:59.74 apache2 32300 www-data 20 0 355m 66m 5672 R 6 1.7 1:43.76 apache2 32510 www-data 20 0 347m 58m 5512 R 6 1.5 1:42.54 apache2 32521 www-data 20 0 348m 59m 5508 R 6 1.5 1:47.99 apache2 32639 www-data 20 0 344m 55m 5512 R 6 1.4 1:34.25 apache2 32083 www-data 20 0 345m 56m 5696 R 5 1.4 1:59.42 apache2 32085 www-data 20 0 347m 58m 5692 R 5 1.5 1:42.29 apache2 32293 www-data 20 0 353m 64m 5676 R 5 1.6 1:52.73 apache2 32301 www-data 20 0 348m 59m 5564 R 5 1.5 1:49.63 apache2 32528 www-data 20 0 351m 62m 5520 R 5 1.6 1:36.11 apache2 31523 mysql 20 0 3460m 576m 8288 S 5 14.4 2:06.91 mysqld 32002 www-data 20 0 345m 55m 5512 R 5 1.4 2:01.88 apache2 32080 www-data 20 0 357m 68m 5512 S 5 1.7 1:31.30 apache2 32163 www-data 20 0 347m 58m 5512 S 5 1.5 1:58.68 apache2 32509 www-data 20 0 345m 56m 5504 R 5 1.4 1:49.54 apache2 32306 www-data 20 0 358m 68m 5504 S 4 1.7 1:53.29 apache2 32165 www-data 20 0 344m 55m 5524 S 4 1.4 1:40.71 apache2 32640 www-data 20 0 345m 56m 5528 R 4 1.4 1:36.49 apache2 31888 www-data 20 0 359m 70m 5664 R 4 1.8 1:57.07 apache2 32511 www-data 20 0 357m 67m 5512 S 3 1.7 1:47.00 apache2 32054 www-data 20 0 357m 68m 5660 S 2 1.7 1:53.10 apache2 1 root 20 0 24452 2276 1232 S 0 0.1 0:01.58 init Moreover, running free -m returns the following: total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 4003 3919 83 0 118 901 -/+ buffers/cache: 2899 1103 Swap: 0 0 0 To investigate this further, I have installed apache buddy, it recommeneded that I need to reduce the maxclient connections. Which I did. I also installed MysqlTuner and it suggests that I need to set my innodb_buffer_pool_size to = 3.0G. However, I cannot do that, since the whole memory is 4G. Here is the output from apache buddy: ### GENERAL REPORT ### Settings considered for this report: Your server's physical RAM: 4003MB Apache's MaxClients directive: 40 Apache MPM Model: prefork Largest Apache process (by memory): 73.77MB [ OK ] Your MaxClients setting is within an acceptable range. Max potential memory usage: 2950.8 MB Percentage of RAM allocated to Apache 73.72 % And this is the output of MySQLTuner: -------- Performance Metrics ------------------------------------------------- [--] Up for: 47m 22s (675K q [237.552 qps], 12K conn, TX: 1B, RX: 300M) [--] Reads / Writes: 45% / 55% [--] Total buffers: 2.1G global + 2.7M per thread (151 max threads) [OK] Maximum possible memory usage: 2.5G (64% of installed RAM) [OK] Slow queries: 0% (0/675K) [OK] Highest usage of available connections: 26% (40/151) [OK] Key buffer size / total MyISAM indexes: 36.0M/18.7M [OK] Key buffer hit rate: 100.0% (245K cached / 105 reads) [OK] Query cache efficiency: 92.5% (500K cached / 541K selects) [!!] Query cache prunes per day: 302886 [OK] Sorts requiring temporary tables: 0% (1 temp sorts / 15K sorts) [!!] Joins performed without indexes: 12135 [OK] Temporary tables created on disk: 25% (8K on disk / 32K total) [OK] Thread cache hit rate: 90% (1K created / 12K connections) [!!] Table cache hit rate: 17% (400 open / 2K opened) [OK] Open file limit used: 12% (123/1K) [OK] Table locks acquired immediately: 100% (196K immediate / 196K locks) [!!] InnoDB buffer pool / data size: 2.0G/3.5G [OK] InnoDB log waits: 0 -------- Recommendations ----------------------------------------------------- General recommendations: Run OPTIMIZE TABLE to defragment tables for better performance MySQL started within last 24 hours - recommendations may be inaccurate Enable the slow query log to troubleshoot bad queries Adjust your join queries to always utilize indexes Increase table_cache gradually to avoid file descriptor limits Read this before increasing table_cache over 64: http://bit.ly/1mi7c4C Variables to adjust: query_cache_size ( 64M) join_buffer_size ( 128.0K, or always use indexes with joins) table_cache ( 400) innodb_buffer_pool_size (= 3G) Last but not least, the server still has more than 60% of free disk space. Now, based on the above, I have few questions: Are these numbers normal? Do they make sense? Do I need to upgrade the server? If I don't need to upgrade and my configuration is not correct, how do I optimize it?

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