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• Partition Wise Joins

  - by jean-pierre.dijcks

  Some say they are the holy grail of parallel computing and PWJ is the basis for a shared nothing system and the only join method that is available on a shared nothing system (yes this is oversimplified!). The magic in Oracle is of course that is one of many ways to join data. And yes, this is the old flexibility vs. simplicity discussion all over, so I won't go there... the point is that what you must do in a shared nothing system, you can do in Oracle with the same speed and methods. The Theory A partition wise join is a join between (for simplicity) two tables that are partitioned on the same column with the same partitioning scheme. In shared nothing this is effectively hard partitioning locating data on a specific node / storage combo. In Oracle is is logical partitioning. If you now join the two tables on that partitioned column you can break up the join in smaller joins exactly along the partitions in the data. Since they are partitioned (grouped) into the same buckets, all values required to do the join live in the equivalent bucket on either sides. No need to talk to anyone else, no need to redistribute data to anyone else... in short, the optimal join method for parallel processing of two large data sets. PWJ's in Oracle Since we do not hard partition the data across nodes in Oracle we use the Partitioning option to the database to create the buckets, then set the Degree of Parallelism (or run Auto DOP - see here) and get our PWJs. The main questions always asked are: How many partitions should I create? What should my DOP be? In a shared nothing system the answer is of course, as many partitions as there are nodes which will be your DOP. In Oracle we do want you to look at the workload and concurrency, and once you know that to understand the following rules of thumb. Within Oracle we have more ways of joining of data, so it is important to understand some of the PWJ ideas and what it means if you have an uneven distribution across processes. Assume we have a simple scenario where we partition the data on a hash key resulting in 4 hash partitions (H1 -H4). We have 2 parallel processes that have been tasked with reading these partitions (P1 - P2). The work is evenly divided assuming the partitions are the same size and we can scan this in time t1 as shown below. Now assume that we have changed the system and have a 5th partition but still have our 2 workers P1 and P2. The time it takes is actually 50% more assuming the 5th partition has the same size as the original H1 - H4 partitions. In other words to scan these 5 partitions, the time t2 it takes is not 1/5th more expensive, it is a lot more expensive and some other join plans may now start to look exciting to the optimizer. Just to post the disclaimer, it is not as simple as I state it here, but you get the idea on how much more expensive this plan may now look... Based on this little example there are a few rules of thumb to follow to get the partition wise joins. First, choose a DOP that is a factor of two (2). So always choose something like 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 and so on... Second, choose a number of partitions that is larger or equal to 2* DOP. Third, make sure the number of partitions is divisible through 2 without orphans. This is also known as an even number... Fourth, choose a stable partition count strategy, which is typically hash, which can be a sub partitioning strategy rather than the main strategy (range - hash is a popular one). Fifth, make sure you do this on the join key between the two large tables you want to join (and this should be the obvious one...). Translating this into an example: DOP = 8 (determined based on concurrency or by using Auto DOP with a cap due to concurrency) says that the number of partitions >= 16. Number of hash (sub) partitions = 32, which gives each process four partitions to work on. This number is somewhat arbitrary and depends on your data and system. In this case my main reasoning is that if you get more room on the box you can easily move the DOP for the query to 16 without repartitioning... and of course it makes for no leftovers on the table... And yes, we recommend up-to-date statistics. And before you start complaining, do read this post on a cool way to do stats in 11.

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• SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #005

  - by pinaldave

  Here is the list of curetted 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. 2006 SQL SERVER – Cursor to Kill All Process in Database I indeed wrote this cursor and when I often look back, I wonder how naive I was to write this. The reason for writing this cursor was to free up my database from any existing connection so I can do database operation. This worked fine but there can be a potentially big issue if there was any important transaction was killed by this process. There is another way to to achieve the same thing where we can use ALTER syntax to take database in single user mode. Read more about that over here and here. 2007 Rules of Third Normal Form and Normalization Advantage – 3NF The rules of 3NF are mentioned here Make a separate table for each set of related attributes, and give each table a primary key. If an attribute depends on only part of a multi-valued key, remove it to a separate table If attributes do not contribute to a description of the key, remove them to a separate table. Correct Syntax for Stored Procedure SP Sometime a simple question is the most important question. I often see in industry incorrectly written Stored Procedure. Few writes code after the most outer BEGIN…END and few writes code after the GO Statement. In this brief blog post, I have attempted to explain the same. 2008 Switch Between Result Pan and Query Pan – SQL Shortcut Many times when I am writing query I have to scroll the result displayed in the result set. Most of the developer uses the mouse to switch between and Query Pane and Result Pane. There are few developers who are crazy about Keyboard shortcuts. F6 is the keyword which can be used to switch between query pane and tabs of the result pane. Interesting Observation – Use of Index and Execution Plan Query Optimization is a complex game and it has its own rules. From the example in the article we have discovered that Query Optimizer does not use clustered index to retrieve data, sometime non clustered index provides optimal performance for retrieving Primary Key. When all the rows and columns are selected Primary Key should be used to select data as it provides optimal performance. 2009 Interesting Observation – TOP 100 PERCENT and ORDER BY If you pull up any application or system where there are more than 100 SQL Server Views are created – I am very confident that at one or two places you will notice the scenario wherein View the ORDER BY clause is used with TOP 100 PERCENT. SQL Server 2008 VIEW with ORDER BY clause does not throw an error; moreover, it does not acknowledge the presence of it as well. In this article we have taken three perfect examples and demonstrated which clause we should use when. Comma Separated Values (CSV) from Table Column A Very common question – How to create comma separated values from a table in the database? The answer is also very common if we use XML. Check out this article for quick learning on the same subject. Azure Start Guide – Step by Step Installation Guide Though Azure portal has changed a quite bit since I wrote this article, the concept used in this article are not old. They are still valid and many of the functions are still working as mentioned in the article. I believe this one article will put you on the track to use Azure! Size of Index Table for Each Index – Solution Earlier I have posted a small question on this blog and requested help from readers to participate here and provide a solution. The puzzle was to write a query that will return the size for each index that is on any particular table. We need a query that will return an additional column in the above listed query and it should contain the size of the index. This article presents two of the best solutions from the puzzle. 2010 Well, this week in 2010 was the week of puzzles as I posted three interesting puzzles. Till today I am noticing pretty good interesting in the puzzles. They are tricky but for sure brings a great value if you are a database developer for a long time. I suggest you go over this puzzles and their answers. Did you really know all of the answers? I am confident that reading following three blog post will for sure help you enhance the experience with T-SQL. SQL SERVER – Challenge – Puzzle – Usage of FAST Hint SQL SERVER – Puzzle – Challenge – Error While Converting Money to Decimal SQL SERVER – Challenge – Puzzle – Why does RIGHT JOIN Exists 2011 DVM sys.dm_os_sys_info Column Name Changed in SQL Server 2012 Have you ever faced a situation where something does not work? When you try to fix it - you enjoy fixing it and started to appreciate the breaking changes. Well, this was exactly I felt yesterday. Before I begin my story, I want to candidly state that I do not encourage anybody to use * in the SELECT statement. Now the disclaimer is over – I suggest you read the original story – you will love it! Get Directory Structure using Extended Stored Procedure xp_dirtree Here is the question to you – why would you do something in SQL Server where you can do the same task in command prompt much easily. Well, the answer is sometime there are real use cases when we have to do such thing. This is a similar example where I have demonstrated how in SQL Server 2012 we can use extended stored procedure to retrieve directory structure. 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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• Simultaneously calling multiple methods on a WCF service from silverlight

  - by ola karlsson

  A while back I had to debug some performance issues in an existing Silverlight app, as the problem / solution was a bit obscure and finding info about it was quite tricky, I thought I’d share, maybe it can help the next person with this problem. The App On start, the app would do a number of calls to different methods on a WCF service, this to populate the UI with the necessary data. Recently one of those services had been changed and was now taking quite a bit longer than it used to. This was resulting in quite a long loading time for the whole UI, which was set up so it wouldn’t let the user interact with anything, until all the service calls had finished. First I broke out the longer running service call from the others, then removed the constraint that it had to be loaded for the UI in general to become responsive. I also added a loading indicator just on that area of the UI, thinking that the main UI would load while this particular section could keep loading independently. The Problem However this is where things started to get a bit strange. I found that even after these changes, the main UI wouldn’t activate until the long running call returned. So now, I did what I should have done to start with, I got Fiddler out and had a look at what was really happening. What I found was that, once the call to the long running service method was placed, all subsequent call were waiting for that one to return before executing. Not having really worked with WCF previously or knowing much about it in general, I was stumped… I knew of the issues where Silverlight is restricted by the browsers networking features in regards to number of simultaneous connections etc. However that just didn’t seem to be the issue here, you can clearly see in Fiddler that there’s numerous calls, but they’re just not returning. I thought of the problem maybe being in the WCF service, but the calls were really not that complicated and surely the service should be able to handle a lot more than what I was throwing at it! So I did what every developer does in this type of scenario, I hit the search engines. I did a whole bunch of searching on things like “multiple simultaneous WCF calls from Silverlight” and “Calling long running WCF services from Silverlight” etc. etc. This however, pretty much got me nowhere, I found a whole heap of resources on how to do WCF calls from Silverlight but most of them were very basic and of no use what so ever. The fog is clearing It wasn’t until I came across the term “ WCF blocking calls” and started incorporating that in my searches I started to get somewhere. Those searches quite quickly brought me to the following thread in the Silverlight forum “Long-running WCF call blocking subsequent calls” which discussed the exact problem I was facing and the best part, one of the guys there had the solution! The short answer is in the forum post and the guys answering, has also done a more extensive blog post about it called “Silverlight, WCF, and ASP.Net Configuration Gotchas” which covers it very well.  So come on what’s the solution?! I heard you ask, unless you’ve already gone to the links and looked it up ;) The Solution Well, it turns out that the issue is founded in a mix of Silverlight, Asp.Net and WCF, basically if you’re doing multiple calls to a single WCF web-service and you have Asp.Net session state enabled, the calls will be executed sequentially by the service, hence any long running calls will block subsequent ones. So why is Asp.Net session state effecting us, we’re working in Silverlight, right? We'll as mentioned earlier, by default Silverlight uses the browsers networking stack when doing service calls, hence to the WCF service, the call looks like it might as well be coming from a normal Asp.Net. To get around this, we look to a feature introduced in Silverlight 3, namely the Client HTTP Stack. The Client HTTP Stack to the rescue By using the following syntax (for example in our App.xaml.cs, Application_Startup method) WebRequest.RegisterPrefix("http://", WebRequestCreator.ClientHttp); we can set our Silverlight application to use the Client HTTP Stack, which incidentally solves our problem! By using Silverlights own networking stack, rather than that of the browser, we get around the Asp.Net - WCF session state issue. The above code specifies that all calls to addresses starting with “http://” should go through the client stack, this can actually be set more granular and you can specify it to be used only for certain domains etc. Summary The actual solution is well covered in the forum and blog posts I link to above. This post is more about sharing my experience, hopefully helping to spread the word about this and maybe make it a bit easier for the next poor guy with this issue to find the solution. Until next time, Ola

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• Visualising data a different way with Pivot collections

  - by Rob Farley

  Roger’s been doing a great job extending PivotViewer recently, and you can find the list of LobsterPot pivots at http://pivot.lobsterpot.com.au Many months back, the TED Talk that Gary Flake did about Pivot caught my imagination, and I did some research into it. At the time, most of what we did with Pivot was geared towards what we could do for clients, including making Pivot collections based on students at a school, and using it to browse PDF invoices by their various properties. We had actual commercial work based on Pivot collections back then, and it was all kinds of fun. Later, we made some collections for events that were happening, and even got featured in the TechEd Australia keynote. But I’m getting ahead of myself... let me explain the concept. A Pivot collection is an XML file (with .cxml extension) which lists Items, each linking to an image that’s stored in a Deep Zoom format (this means that it contains tiles like Bing Maps, so that the browser can request only the ones of interest according to the zoom level). This collection can be shown in a Silverlight application that uses the PivotViewer control, or in the Pivot Browser that’s available from getpivot.com. Filtering and sorting the items according to their facets (attributes, such as size, age, category, etc), the PivotViewer rearranges the way that these are shown in a very dynamic way. To quote Gary Flake, this lets us “see patterns which are otherwise hidden”. This browsing mechanism is very suited to a number of different methods, because it’s just that – browsing. It’s not searching, it’s more akin to window-shopping than doing an internet search. When we decided to put something together for the conferences such as TechEd Australia 2010 and the PASS Summit 2010, we did some screen-scraping to provide a different view of data that was already available online. Nick Hodge and Michael Kordahi from Microsoft liked the idea a lot, and after a bit of tweaking, we produced one that Michael used in the TechEd Australia keynote to show the variety of talks on offer. It’s interesting to see a pattern in this data: The Office track has the most sessions, but if the Interactive Sessions and Instructor-Led Labs are removed, it drops down to only the sixth most popular track, with Cloud Computing taking over. This is something which just isn’t obvious when you look an ordinary search tool. You get a much better feel for the data when moving around it like this. The more observant amongst you will have noticed some difference in the collection that Michael is demonstrating in the picture above with the screenshots I’ve shown. That’s because it’s been extended some more. At the SQLBits conference in the UK this year, I had some interesting discussions with the guys from Xpert360, particularly Phil Carter, who I’d met in 2009 at an earlier SQLBits conference. They had got around to producing a Pivot collection based on the SQLBits data, which we had been planning to do but ran out of time. We discussed some of ways that Pivot could be used, including the ways that my old friend Howard Dierking had extended it for the MSDN Magazine. I’m not suggesting I influenced Xpert360 at all, but they certainly inspired us with some of their posts on the matter So with LobsterPot guys David Gardiner and Roger Noble both having dabbled in Pivot collections (and Dave doing some for clients), I set Roger to work on extending it some more. He’s used various events and so on to be able to make an environment that allows us to do quick deployment of new collections, as well as showing the data in a grid view which behaves as if it were simply a third view of the data (the other two being the array of images and the ‘histogram’ view). I see PivotViewer as being a significant step in data visualisation – so much so that I feature it when I deliver talks on Spatial Data Visualisation methods. Any time when there is information that can be conveyed through an image, you have to ask yourself how best to show that image, and whether that image is the focal point. For Spatial data, the image is most often a map, and the map becomes the central mode for navigation. I show Pivot with postcode areas, since I can browse the postcodes based on their data, and many of the images are recognisable (to locals of South Australia). Naturally, the images could link through to the map itself, and so on, but generally people think of Spatial data in terms of navigating a map, which doesn’t always gel with the information you’re trying to extract. Roger’s even looking into ways to hook PivotViewer into the Bing Maps API, in a similar way to the Deep Earth project, displaying different levels of map detail according to how ‘zoomed in’ the images are. Some of the work that Dave did with one of the schools was generating the Deep Zoom tiles “on the fly”, based on images stored in a database, and Roger has produced a collection which uses images from flickr, that lets you move from one search term to another. Pulling the images down from flickr.com isn’t particularly ideal from a performance aspect, and flickr doesn’t store images in a small-enough format to really lend itself to this use, but you might agree that it’s an interesting concept which compares nicely to using Maps. I’m looking forward to future versions of the PivotViewer control, and hope they provide many more events that can be used, and even more hooks into it. Naturally, LobsterPot could help provide your business with a PivotViewer experience, but you can probably do a lot of it yourself too. There’s a thorough guide at getpivot.com, which is how we got into it. For some examples of what we’ve done, have a look at http://pivot.lobsterpot.com.au. I’d like to see PivotViewer really catch on a data visualisation tool.

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• SOA, Empowerment and Continuous Improvement

  - by Tanu Sood

  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:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Rick Beers is Senior Director of Product Management for Oracle Fusion Middleware. Prior to joining Oracle, Rick held a variety of executive operational positions at Corning, Inc. and Bausch & Lomb. With a professional background that includes senior management positions in manufacturing, supply chain and information technology, Rick brings a unique set of experiences to cover the impact that technology can have on business models, processes and organizations. Rick will be hosting the IT Leader Editorial on a regular basis. I met my twin at Open World. We share backgrounds, experiences and even names. I hosted an invitation-only AppAdvantage Leadership Forum with an overcapacity 85 participants: 55 customers, 15 from the Oracle AppAdvantage team and 15 Partners. It was a lively, open and positive discussion of pace layered architectures and Oracle’s AppAdvantage approach to a unified view of Applications and Middleware. Rick Hassman from Pella was one of the customer panelists and during the pre event prep, Rick and I shared backgrounds and found that we had both been plant managers and led ERP deployments prior to leading IT itself. During the panel conversation I explored this with him, discussing the unique perspectives that this provides to CIO’s. He then hit on a point that I wasn’t able to fully appreciate until a week later. First though, some background. The week after the Forum, one of the participants emailed me with the following thoughts: “I am 150% behind this concept……but we are struggling with the concept of web services and the potential use of the Oracle Service Bus technology let alone moving into using the full SOA/BPM/BAM software to extend our JD Edwards application to both integrate and support business processes”. After thinking a bit I responded this way: While I certainly appreciate the degree of change and effort involved, perhaps I could offer the following: One of the underlying principles behind Oracle AppAdvantage is that more often than not, the choice between changing a business process and invasively customizing ERP represents a Hobson's Choice: neither is acceptable. In this case the third option, moving the process out of ERP, is the only acceptable one. Providing this choice typically requires end to end, real time interoperability across applications and/or services. This real time interoperability, to be sustainable over time requires a service oriented architecture. There's just no way around this. SOA adaptation is admittedly tough at the beginning. New skills, new technology and new headaches. But, like any radically new technology, it has a learning curve that drives cost down rather dramatically over time. Tough choices to be sure, but not entirely different than we face with every major technology cycle. Good points of course, but I felt that something was missing. The points were convincing, perhaps even a bit insightful, but they didn’t get at the heart of what Oracle AppAdvantage is focused upon: how the optimization of technology, applications, processes and relationships can change the very way that organizations operate. And then I thought back to the panel discussion with Rick Hassman at Oracle OpenWorld. Rick stressed that Continuous Improvement is a fundamental business strategy at Pella. I remember Continuous Improvement well as I suspect does everyone who was in American manufacturing during the 80’s. Pioneered by W. Edwards Deming in Japan (and still known alternatively as Kaizen), Continuous Improvement sets in place the business culture that we must not become complacent with success and resistant to the ongoing need for change. Many believe that this single handedly drove the renaissance in American manufacturing through the last two decades, which had become complacent during the 70’s and early 80’s. But what exactly does this have to do with SOA? It was Rick’s next point. He drew the connection that moving those business processes that need to continually change over time out of ERP and into edge applications and services enables continuous improvement by empowering people to continually strive for better ways of doing things rather than be being bound by workflows that cannot change. A compelling connection: that SOA, and the overall Oracle AppAdvantage framework of which it is an integral part, can empower people towards continuous improvement in business processes and as a result drive business leadership and business excellence. What better a case for technology innovation?

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• An Alphabet of Eponymous Aphorisms, Programming Paradigms, Software Sayings, Annoying Alliteration

  - by Brian Schroer

  Malcolm Anderson blogged about “Einstein’s Razor” yesterday, which reminded me of my favorite software development “law”, the name of which I can never remember. It took much Wikipedia-ing to find it (Hofstadter’s Law – see below), but along the way I compiled the following list: Amara’s Law: We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run. Brook’s Law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. Clarke’s Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Law of Demeter: Each unit should only talk to its friends; don't talk to strangers. Einstein’s Razor: “Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler” is the popular paraphrase, but what he actually said was “It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience”, an overly complicated quote which is an obvious violation of Einstein’s Razor. (You can tell by looking at a picture of Einstein that the dude was hardly an expert on razors or other grooming apparati.) Finagle's Law of Dynamic Negatives: Anything that can go wrong, will—at the worst possible moment. - O'Toole's Corollary: The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum. Greenspun's Tenth Rule: Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. (Morris’s Corollary: “…including Common Lisp”) Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law. Issawi’s Omelet Analogy: One cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs - but it is amazing how many eggs one can break without making a decent omelet. Jackson’s Rules of Optimization: Rule 1: Don't do it. Rule 2 (for experts only): Don't do it yet. Kaner’s Caveat: A program which perfectly meets a lousy specification is a lousy program. Liskov Substitution Principle (paraphrased): Functions that use pointers or references to base classes must be able to use objects of derived classes without knowing it Mason’s Maxim: Since human beings themselves are not fully debugged yet, there will be bugs in your code no matter what you do. Nils-Peter Nelson’s Nil I/O Rule: The fastest I/O is no I/O.    Occam's Razor: The simplest explanation is usually the correct one. Parkinson’s Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Quentin Tarantino’s Pie Principle: “…you want to go home have a drink and go and eat pie and talk about it.” (OK, he was talking about movies, not software, but I couldn’t find a “Q” quote about software. And wouldn’t it be cool to write a program so great that the users want to eat pie and talk about it?) Raymond’s Rule: Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.  Sowa's Law of Standards: Whenever a major organization develops a new system as an official standard for X, the primary result is the widespread adoption of some simpler system as a de facto standard for X. Turing’s Tenet: We shall do a much better programming job, provided we approach the task with a full appreciation of its tremendous difficulty, provided that we respect the intrinsic limitations of the human mind and approach the task as very humble programmers.  Udi Dahan’s Race Condition Rule: If you think you have a race condition, you don’t understand the domain well enough. These rules didn’t exist in the age of paper, there is no reason for them to exist in the age of computers. When you have race conditions, go back to the business and find out actual rules. Van Vleck’s Kvetching: We know about as much about software quality problems as they knew about the Black Plague in the 1600s. We've seen the victims' agonies and helped burn the corpses. We don't know what causes it; we don't really know if there is only one disease. We just suffer -- and keep pouring our sewage into our water supply. Wheeler’s Law: All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection... Except for the problem of too many layers of indirection. Wheeler also said “Compatibility means deliberately repeating other people's mistakes.”. The Wrong Road Rule of Mr. X (anonymous): No matter how far down the wrong road you've gone, turn back. Yourdon’s Rule of Two Feet: If you think your management doesn't know what it's doing or that your organisation turns out low-quality software crap that embarrasses you, then leave. Zawinski's Law of Software Envelopment: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Zawinski is also responsible for “Some people, when confronted with a problem, think 'I know, I'll use regular expressions.' Now they have two problems.” He once commented about X Windows widget toolkits: “Using these toolkits is like trying to make a bookshelf out of mashed potatoes.”

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• HTML5 and CSS3 Editing in Windows Live Writer

  - by Rick Strahl

  Windows Live Writer is a wonderful tool for editing blog posts and getting them posted to your blog. What makes it nice is that it has a small set of useful features, plus a simple plug-in model that has spawned many useful add-ins. Small tool with a reasonably decent plug-in model to extend equals a great solution to a simple problem. If you're running Windows, have a blog and aren’t using Live Writer you’re probably doing it wrong…One of Live Writer’s nice features is that it can download your blog’s CSS for preview and edit displays. It lets you edit your content inside of the context of that CSS using the WYSIWYG editor, so your content actually looks very close to what you’ll see on your blog while you’re editing your post. Unfortunately Live Writer renders the HTML content in the Web Browser Control’s  default IE 7 rendering mode. Yeah you read that right: IE 7 is the default for the Web Browser control and most applications that use it, are stuck in this modus unless the application explicitly overrides this default. The Web Browser control does not use the version of Internet Explorer installed on the system (IE 10 on my Win8 machine) but uses IE 7 mode for ‘compatibility’ for old applications.If you are importing your blog’s CSS that may suck if you’re using rich HTML 5 and CSS 3 formatting. Hack the Registry to get Live Writer to render using IE 9 or 10In order to get Live Writer (or any other application that uses the Web Browser Control for that matter) to render you can apply a registry hack that overrides the Web Browser Control engine usage for a specific application. I wrote about this in detail in a previous blog post a couple of years back.Here’s how you can set up Windows Live Writer to render your CSS 3 by making a change in your registry:The above is for setup on a 64 bit machine, where I configure Live Writer which is a 32 bit application for using IE 10 rendering. The keys set are as follows:32bit Configuration on 64 bit machine:HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\FeatureControl\FEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATIONKey: WindowsLiveWriter.exeValue: 9000 or 10000  (IE 9 or 10 respectively) (DWORD value)On a 32 bit only machine: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\FeatureControl\FEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATIONKey: WindowsLiveWriter.exeValue: 9000 or 10000  (IE 9 or 10 respectively) (DWORD value)Use decimal values of 9000, 10000 or 11000 to specify specific versions of Internet Explorer. This is a minor tweak, but it’s nice to actually see my blog posts now with the proper CSS formatting intact. Notice the rounded borders and shadow on the code blocks as well as the overflow-x and scrollbars that show up. In this particular case I can see what the code blocks actually look like in a specific resolution – much better than in the old plain view which just chopped things off at the end of the window frame. There are a few other elements that now show properly in the editor as well including block quotes and note boxes that I occasionally use. It’s minor stuff, but it makes the editing experience better yet and closer to the final things so there are less republish operations than I previously had. Sweet!Note that this approach of putting an IE version override into the registry works with most applications that use the Web Browser control. If you are using the Web Browser control in your own applications, it’s a good idea to switch the browser to a more recent version so you can take advantage of HTML 5 and CSS 3 in your browser displayed content by automatically setting this flag in the registry or as part of the application’s startup routine if not dedicated setup tool is used. At the very least you might set it to 9000 (IE 9) which supports most of the basic CSS3 features and is a decent baseline that works for most Windows 7 and 8 machines. If running pre-IE9, the browser will fall back to IE7 rendering and look bad but at least more recent browsers will see an improved experience.I’m surprised that there aren’t more vendors and third party apps using this feature. You can see in my first screen shot that there are only very few entries in the registry key group on my machine – any other apps use the Web Browser control are using IE7. Go figure. Certainly Windows Live Writer should be writing this key into the registry automatically as part of installation to support this functionality out of the box, but alas since it does not, this registry hack lets you get your way anyway…Resources.reg Files to register Live Write Browser Emulation (set for IE9)Specifying Internet Explorer Version for ApplicationsSnagIt LiveWriter Plug-inDownload Windows Live WriterDownload Windows Live Writer with Chocolatey© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2013Posted in Live Writer  Windows   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Creating Visual Studio projects that only contain static files

  - by Eilon

  Have you ever wanted to create a Visual Studio project that only contained static files and didn’t contain any code? While working on ASP.NET MVC we had a need for exactly this type of project. Most of the projects in the ASP.NET MVC solution contain code, such as managed code (C#), unit test libraries (C#), and Script# code for generating our JavaScript code. However, one of the projects, MvcFuturesFiles, contains no code at all. It only contains static files that get copied to the build output folder: As you may well know, adding static files to an existing Visual Studio project is easy. Just add the file to the project and in the property grid set its Build Action to “Content” and the Copy to Output Directory to “Copy if newer.” This works great if you have just a few static files that go along with other code that gets compiled into an executable (EXE, DLL, etc.). But this solution does not work well if the projects only contains static files and has no compiled code. If you create a new project in Visual Studio and add static files to it you’ll still get an EXE or DLL copied to the output folder, despite not having any actual code. We wanted to avoid having a teeny little DLL generated in the output folder. In ASP.NET MVC 2 we came up with a simple solution to this problem. We started out with a regular C# Class Library project but then edited the project file to alter how it gets built. The critical part to get this to work is to define the MSBuild targets for Build, Clean, and Rebuild to perform custom tasks instead of running the compiler. The Build, Clean, and Rebuild targets are the three main targets that Visual Studio requires in every project so that the normal UI functions properly. If they are not defined then running certain commands in Visual Studio’s Build menu will cause errors. Once you create the class library projects there are a few easy steps to change it into a static file project: The first step in editing the csproj file is to remove the reference to the Microsoft.CSharp.targets file because the project doesn’t contain any C# code: <Import Project="$(MSBuildToolsPath)\Microsoft.CSharp.targets" /> .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } The second step is to define the new Build, Clean, and Rebuild targets to delete and then copy the content files: <Target Name="Build"> <Copy SourceFiles="@(Content)" DestinationFiles="@(Content->'$(OutputPath)%(RelativeDir)%(Filename)%(Extension)')" /> </Target> <Target Name="Clean"> <Exec Command="rd /s /q $(OutputPath)" Condition="Exists($(OutputPath))" /> </Target> <Target Name="Rebuild" DependsOnTargets="Clean;Build"> </Target> .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; } The third and last step is to add all the files to the project as normal Content files (as you would do in any project type). To see how we did this in the ASP.NET MVC 2 project you can download the source code and inspect the MvcFutureFules.csproj project file. If you’re working on a project that contains many static files I hope this solution helps you out!

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• Weekend reading: Microsoft/Oracle and SkyDrive based code-editor

  - by jamiet

  A couple of news item caught my eye this weekend that I think are worthy of comment. Microsoft/Oracle partnership to be announced tomorrow (24/06/2013) According to many news site Microsoft and Oracle are about to announce a partnership (Oracle set for major Microsoft, Salesforce, Netsuite partnerships) and they all seem to be assuming that it will be something to do with “the cloud”. I wouldn’t disagree with that assessment, Microsoft are heavily pushing Azure and Oracle seem (to me anyway) to be rather lagging behind in the cloud game. More specifically folks seem to be assuming that Oracle’s forthcoming 12c database release will be offered on Azure. I did a bit of reading about Oracle 12c and one of its key pillars appears to be that it supports multi-tenant topologies and multi-tenancy is a common usage scenario for databases in the cloud. I’m left wondering then, if Microsoft are willing to push a rival’s multi-tenant solution what is happening to its own cloud-based multi-tenant offering – SQL Azure Federations. We haven’t heard anything about federations for what now seems to be a long time and moreover the main Program Manager behind the technology, Cihan Biyikoglu, recently left Microsoft to join Twitter. Furthermore, a Principle Architect for SQL Server, Conor Cunningham, recently presented the opening keynote at SQLBits 11 where he talked about multi-tenant solutions on SQL Azure and not once did he mention federations. All in all I don’t have a warm fuzzy feeling about the future of SQL Azure Federations so I hope that that question gets asked at some point following the Microsoft/Oracle announcement. Text Editor on SkyDrive with coding-specific features Liveside.net got a bit of a scoop this weekend with the news (Exclusive: SkyDrive.com to get web-based text file editing features) that Microsoft’s consumer-facing file storage service is going to get a new feature – a web-based code editor. Here’s Liveside’s screenshot: I’ve long had a passing interest in online code editors, indeed back in December 2009 I wondered out loud on this blog site: I started to wonder when the development tools that we use would also become cloud-based. After all, if we’re using cloud-based services does it not make sense to have cloud-based tools that work with them? I think it does. Project Houston Since then the world has moved on. Cloud 9 IDE (https://c9.io/) have blazed a trail in the fledgling world of online code editors and I have been wondering when Microsoft were going to start playing catch-up. I had no doubt that an online code editor was in Microsoft’s future; its an obvious future direction, why would I want to have to download and install a bloated text editor (which, arguably, is exactly what Visual Studio amounts to) and have to continually update it when I can simply open a web browser and have ready access to all of my code from wherever I am. There are signs that Microsoft is already making moves in this direction, after all the URL for their new offering Team Foundation Service doesn’t mention TFS at all – my own personalised URL for Team Foundation Service is http://jamiet.visualstudio.com – using “Visual Studio” as the domain name for a service that isn’t strictly speaking part of Visual Studio leads me to think that there’s a much bigger play here and that one day http://visualstudio.com will house an online code editor. With that in mind then I find Liveside’s revelation rather intriguing, why would a code editing tool show up in Skydrive? Perhaps SkyDrive is going to get integrated more tightly into TFS, I’m very interested to see where this goes. The larger question playing on my mind though is whether an online code editor from Microsoft will support SQL Server developers. I have opined before (see The SQL developer gap) about the shoddy treatment that SQL Server developers have to experience from Microsoft and I haven’t seen any change in Microsoft’s attitude in the three and a half years since I wrote that post. I’m constantly bewildered by the lack of investment in SQL Server developer productivity compared to the riches that are lavished upon our appdev brethren. When you consider that SQL Server is Microsoft’s third biggest revenue stream it is, frankly, rather insulting. SSDT was a step in the right direction but the hushed noises I hear coming out of Microsoft of late in regard to SSDT don’t bode fantastically well for its future. So, will an online code editor from Microsoft support T-SQL development? I have to assume not given the paucity of investment on us lowly SQL Server developers over the last few years, but I live in hope! Your thoughts in the comments section please. I would be very interested in reading them. @Jamiet

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• SQLAuthority News – Technical Review of Learning at Koenig Solutions

  - by pinaldave

  Yesterday I finished my 3 days fast track in person learning of course End to End SQL Server Business Intelligence at Koenig Solutions. You can read my previous article over here regarding why am I learning SQL Server. Yesterday I blogged about my experience of arriving to Training Center and my induction with the center. The Training Days I had enrolled for three days training so my routine each of the three days was very much same. However, the content every day was different as I was learning something new every day. Let me describe a few of the interesting details of my daily routine. A Single Student Batch The best part of my training was that in my training batch, I am single student. Koenig is known to smaller batches and often they have single student batches as well. I was very much delighted to know that I will have dedicated access and attention from my trainer in my batch as I will be single student in my batch. In most of the labs I have observed there are no more than 4 students at any time. Prakash and Pinal 7:30 AM Breakfast Talk We all students gather at 7:30 in breakfast area. The best time of the day. I was the only Indian student in the group. The other students were from USA, Canada, Nigeria, Bhutan, Tanzania, and a few others from other countries. I immediately become the source of information and reference manual. Though the distance between Delhi and Bangalore is 2000+ KM I was considered as a local guy. 8:30 AMHeading to Training Center Every day without fail at 8:30 the van started from our accommodation to the training center. As mentioned in an earlier blog post the distance is about 5 minutes and we were able to reach at the location before 8:45. This gave us some time settle in before our class starts at 9:00 AM. 9:00 AM Order Lunch Food Well it may sound funny that we just had breakfast 30 minutes but the first thing everybody has to do is to order lunch as soon as the class starts. There is an online training portal to order food for the day. Everybody has to place their order early during the day so the food arrives on time during lunch time. Everybody can order whatever they want to order using an online ordering system. The options are plenty and everybody can order what they like. 9:05 AM Learning Starts After deciding the lunch we started the learning. I was very fortunate to have a very experienced trainer - Prakash Chheatry. Though I have never met him before I have heard a lot about Prakash. He is known as the top most SQL Server Trainer in India. His student list contains some of the very well known SQL Server Experts of the world and few of SQL Server “best seller” book authors. Learning continues till 1:00 PM with one tea-coffee break in between. 1:00 PM Lunch The lunch time is again the fun time. We all students get together in the afternoon and tell the stories of the world. Indeed the best part of the day beside learning new stuff. 4:55 PM Ready to Return We stop at 4:55 as at precisely 5:00 PM the van stops by the institute which takes us back to our accommodation. Trust me seriously long long day always but the amount of the learning is the win of the day. 7:30 PM Dinner Time After coming back to the accommodation I study till 7:30 and then rush for dinner. Dinner is world cuisine and deserts are really delicious. After dinner every day I have written a blog and retired early as the next day is always going to be busier than the present day. What did I learn As I mentioned earlier I know SQL Server fairly well. I had expressed the same in my conversation as well. This is the reason I was assigned a fairly senior trainer and we learned everything quite quickly. As I know quite a few things we went pretty fast in many topics. There were a few things, I wanted to learn in detail as well practice on the labs. We slowed down where we wanted and rush through the concepts where I was very comfortable. Here is the list of the things which we covered in action pack three days. Introduction to Business Intelligence (Intro) SQL Server Analysis Service (Theory and Lab) SQL Server Integration Service  (Theory and Lab) SQL Server Reporting Service  (Theory and Lab) SQL Server PowerPivot (Lab) UDM (Theory) SharePoint Concepts (Theory) Power View (Demo) Business Intelligence and Security (Discussion) Well, I was delighted that I was able to refresh lots of concepts during these three days. Thanks to my trainer and my friend who helped me to have a good learning experience. I believe all the learning  will help me in my growth and future career. With this I end my this experience. I am planning to have another online learning experience later this month. I will blog about my experience as I begin it. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Training, T SQL, Technology

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• HTG Explains: Are You Using IPv6 Yet? Should You Even Care?

  - by Chris Hoffman

  IPv6 is extremely important for the long-term health of the Internet. But is your Internet service provider providing IPv6 connectivity yet? Does your home network support it? Should you even care if you’re using IPv6 yet? Switching from IPv4 to IPv6 will give the Internet a much larger pool of IP addresses. It should also allow every device to have its own public IP address, rather than be hidden behind a NAT router. IPv6 is Important Long-Term IPv6 is very important for the long-term health of the Internet. There are only about 3.7 billion public IPv4 addresses. This may sound like a lot, but it isn’t even one IP address for each person on the planet. Considering people have more and more Internet-connected devices — everything from light bulbs to thermostats are starting to become network-connected — the lack of IP addresses is already proving to be a serious problem. This may not affect those of us in well-off developed countries just yet, but developing countries are already running out of IPv4 addresses. So, if you work at an Internet service provider, manage Internet-connected servers, or develop software or hardware — yes, you should care about IPv6! You should be deploying it and ensuring your software and hardware works properly with it. It’s important to prepare for the future before the current IPv4 situation becomes completely unworkable. But, if you’re just typical user or even a typical geek with a home Internet connection and a home network, should you really care about your home network just yet? Probably not. What You Need to Use IPv6 To use IPv6, you’ll need three things: An IPv6-Compatible Operating System: Your operating system’s software must be capable of using IPv6. All modern desktop operating systems should be compatible — Windows Vista and newer versions of Windows, as well as modern versions of Mac OS X and Linux. Windows XP doesn’t have IPv6 support installed by default, but you shouldn’t be using Windows XP anymore, anyway. A Router With IPv6 Support: Many — maybe even most — consumer routers in the wild don’t support IPv6. Check your router’s specifications details to see if it supports IPv6 if you’re curious. If you’re going to buy a new router, you’ll probably want to get one with IPv6 support to future-proof yourself. If you don’t have an IPv6-enabled router yet, you don’t need to buy a new one just to get it. An ISP With IPv6 Enabled:  Your Internet service provider must also have IPv6 set up on their end. Even if you have modern software and hardware on your end, your ISP has to provide an IPv6 connection for you to use it. IPv6 is rolling out steadily, but slowly — there’s a good chance your ISP hasn’t enabled it for you yet. How to Tell If You’re Using IPv6 The easiest way to tell if you have IPv6 connectivity is to visit a website like testmyipv6.com. This website allows you to connect to it in different ways — click the links near the top to see if you can connect to the website via different types of connections. If you can’t connect via IPv6, it’s either because your operating system is too old (unlikely), your router doesn’t support IPv6 (very possible), or because your ISP hasn’t enabled it for you yet (very likely). Now What? If you can connect to the test website above via IPv6, congratulations! Everything is working as it should. Your ISP is doing a good job of rolling out IPv6 rather than dragging its feet. There’s a good chance you won’t have IPv6 working properly, however. So what should you do about this — should you head to Amazon and buy a new IPv6-enabled router or switch to an ISP that offers IPv6? Should you use a “tunnel broker,” as the test site recommends, to tunnel into IPv6 via your IPv4 connection? Well, probably not. Typical users shouldn’t have to worry about this yet. Connecting to the Internet via IPv6 shouldn’t be perceptibly faster, for example. It’s important for operating system vendors, hardware companies, and Internet service providers to prepare for the future and get IPv6 working, but you don’t need to worry about this on your home network. IPv6 is all about future-proofing. You shouldn’t be racing to implement this at home yet or worrying about it too much — but, when you need to buy a new router, try to buy one that supports IPv6. Image Credit: Adobe of Chaos on Flickr, hisperati on Flickr, Vox Efx on Flickr     

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• doubleTwist is an iTunes Alternative that Supports Several Devices

  - by Mysticgeek

  There are a lot of iTunes users out there, but unfortunately you can’t use it with all of your portable devices. Today we take a look at doubleTwist, which allows you to sync your media with a multitude of portable devices and easily share it as well. Note: You can run doubleTwist on Windows or Mac, and here we take a look at the Windows version. Install & Setup doubleTwist Download and install doubleTwist using the defaults in the wizard… Installation takes several moments and you’ll see the progress while it finishes up. After installation is complete, sign up for an account if you don’t already have one. If you do have an account you can login right away. Enter in your username, email address, and password then click Sign Up.   You’ll get an confirmation email and need to activate the account before you can sign in. Once you’re all signed up, launch doubleTwist and you’ll be ready to start using it. doubleTwist Music The default music store is Amazon MP3 store which might appeal to those of you who are tired of the iTunes music store. A lot of times the music is cheaper and available at higher bit rates. You can start searching for music in the Amazon Music Store and previewing songs. To purchase anything though you will need to sign into your Amazon account.   Under Playlists it allows you to import your playlists from iTunes and Windows Media Player, which is a handy feature if you don’t want to set them up again. Of course you can play your songs through the music player on your desktop. Devices One of the coolest things about doubleTwist is that it supports a lot of different portable media devices including iPod, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Android, PSP, Smartphones, and much more. Unfortunately for Zune users…there isn’t any support for the Zune of Zune HD yet. Here we have a Creative Zen attached and can sync songs, pictures, and podcasts. An HTC-S620 Smartphone running Windows Mobile… Even a simple USB drive will be recognized and you can transfer your media to it as well.   Podcasts Finding your favorite audio and video podcasts is easy with the search feature. You can easily manage and subscribe to podcasts in the subscriptions section.   You can watch the video podcasts directly in doubleTwist. Sharing Media Also you can share digital media with your friends or add it to Flickr and YouTube. You can send any pictures, videos, or music in your library to other people by dragging it over. You can email users individually… Or access contacts from your Gmail and Yahoo accounts. There is a limit to how much you can send of video podcasts… only the first 10 minutes. The person you send it to will get a link in their email that points to your My Feed page on the doubleTwist site.   There they can access the media you sent…in this example it’s a video podcast but you can share any media. Other Features Under My Profile you can change your avatar and personal information.   In Preferences you can choose where media is stored, its startup actions, podcast subscriptions, and manage device syncing. Conclusion It’s still in beta stage so expect some bugs, but overall doubleTwist is a solid media player that is easy to use with a clean interface. It’s simple and doesn’t try to do too much so is fairly easy on system resources. The main annoyance is it tries to catalog all of your media out of the box. Which may be alright for some users with smaller media collections, but very irritating to advanced users with large collections. Also there is currently no support for the Zune, but according to their forums, it’s on the way. At the time of this writing it’s in public beta and can be downloaded for XP, Vista, Windows 7 (32 & 64 bit), and Mac OSX. If you’re looking for an iTunes alternative that works with several different portable devices, you might want to give DoubleTwist a try. Download DoubleTwist Public Beta See If Your Media Device is Supported by doubleTwist Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips MusicBee is a Fast and Powerful Music ManagerAvoid the Apple QuickTime Bloat with QT LiteBeginner Geek: Set Default Programs in Windows 7 and VistaBeginner Geeks: OpenOffice is a Free Cross Platform Alternative to MS OfficeManage Devices the Easy Way with Device Stage in Windows 7 TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Play Music in Chrome by Simply Dragging a File 15 Great Illustrations by Chow Hon Lam Easily Sync Files & Folders with Friends & Family Amazon Free Kindle for PC Download Stretch popurls.com with a Stylish Script (Firefox) OldTvShows.org – Find episodes of Hitchcock, Soaps, Game Shows and more

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• PASS Summit 2010 Recap

  - by AjarnMark

  Last week I attended my eighth PASS Summit in nine years, and every year it is a fantastic event!  I was fortunate my first year to have a contact (Bill Graziano (blog | Twitter) from SQLTeam) that I was expecting to meet, and who got me started on a good track of making new contacts.  Each year I have made a few more, and renewed friendships from years past.  Many of the attendees agree that the pure networking opportunities are one of the best benefits of attending the Summit.  And there’s a lot of great technical stuff, too, some of the things that stick out for me this year include… Pre-Con Monday: PowerShell with Allen White (blog | Twitter).  This was the first time that I attended a pre-con.  For those not familiar with the concept, the regular sessions for the conference are 75-90 minutes long.  For an extra fee, you can attend a full-day session on a single topic during a pre- or post-conference training day.  I had been meaning for several months to dive in and learn PowerShell, but just never seemed to find (or make) the time for it, so when I saw this was one of the all-day sessions, and I was planning to be there on Monday anyway, I decided to go for it.  And it was well worth it!  I definitely came out of there with a good foundation to build my own PowerShell scripts, plus several sample scripts that he showed which already cover the first four or five things I was planning to do with PowerShell anyway.  This looks like the right tool for me to build an automated version of our software deployment process, which right now contains many repeated steps.  Thanks Allen! Service Broker with Denny Cherry (blog | Twitter).  I remembered reading Denny’s blog post on Using Service Broker instead of Replication, and ever since then I have been thinking about using this to populate a new reporting-focused Data Repository that we will be building in the near future.  When I saw he was doing this session, I thought it would be great to get more information and be able to ask the author questions.  When I brought this idea back to my boss, he really liked it, as we had previously been discussing doing nightly data loads, with an option to manually trigger a mid-day load if up-to-the-minute data was needed for something.  If we go the Service Broker route, we can keep the Repository current in near real-time.  Hooray! DBA Mythbusters with Paul Randal (blog | Twitter).  Even though I read every one of the posts in Paul’s blog series of the same name, I had to go see the legend in person.  It was great, and I still learned something new! How to Conduct Effective Meetings with Joe Webb (blog | Twitter).  I always like to sit in on a session that Joe does.  I met Joe several years ago when both he and Bill Graziano were on the PASS Board of Directors together, and we have kept in touch.  Joe is very well-spoken and has great experience with both SQL Server and business.  And we could certainly use some pointers at my work (probably yours, too) on making our meetings more effective and to run on-time.  Of course, now that I’m the Chapter Leader for the Professional Development virtual chapter, I also had to sit in on this ProfDev session and recruit Joe to do a presentation or two for the chapter next year. Query Optimization with David DeWitt.  Anyone who has seen Dr. David DeWitt present the 3rd keynote at a PASS Summit over the last three years knows what a great time it is to sit and listen to him make some really complicated and advanced topic easy to understand (although it still makes your head hurt).  It still amazes me that the simple two-table join query from pubs that he used in his example can possibly have 22 million possible physical query plans.  Ouch! Exhibit Hall:  This year I spent more serious time in the exhibit hall than any year past.  I have talked my boss into making a significant (for us) investment in monitoring tools next year, and this was a great opportunity to talk with all the big-hitters.  Readers of mine may recall that I fell in love with the SQL Sentry Power Suite several months ago and wrote a blog entry about it just from the trial version.  Well as things turned out, short-term budget priorities shifted, and we weren’t able to make the purchase then.  I have it in the budget for next year, but since I was going to the Summit, my boss wanted me to look at the other options to see if this was really the one that we wanted.  I spent a couple of hours talking with representatives from Red-Gate, Idera, Confio, and Quest about their offerings, and giving them each the same 3 scenarios that I wanted to be able to accomplish based on the questions and issues that arise in our company.  It was interesting to discover the different approaches or “world view” that each vendor takes to the subject of performance monitoring and troubleshooting.  I may write a separate article that goes into this in more depth, but the product that best aligned with our point of view, and met the current needs we have is still the SQL Sentry Power Suite.  I’m not saying that the others are bad or wrong or anything like that, just that the way they tackled the issue did not align as well with our particular needs as does SQL Sentry’s product.  And that was something I learned too, when you go shopping for these products, you really need to know what you want to get from them.  It’s best if you have a few example scenarios from work that you can use to test out how well each tool fits your particular needs. Overall, another GREAT event.  I can’t wait to get the DVDs so I can sit in on a bunch of other sessions that I couldn’t get to because I was in one of the ones above.  And I can hardly wait until next year!

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• Personal search – the future of search

  - by jamiet

  [Four months ago I wrote a meandering blog post on another blogging site entitled Personal search – the future of search. The points I made therein are becoming more relevant to what I'm reading about and hoping to get involved in in the future so I'm re-posting here to a wider audience to hopefully get some more feedback and guage reaction to it. This has been prompted by the book Pull by David Siegel that is forming my current holiday reading (recommended to me by a commenter on my previous post Interesting things – Twitter annotations and your phone as a web server) and in particular by Siegel's notion of us all in the future having a personal online data vault.] My one-time colleague Paul Dawson recently wrote an article called The Future of Search and in it he proposed some interesting ideas. Some choice quotes: The growth of Chinese search giant Baidu is an indicator that fully localised and tailored content and offerings have great traction with local audiences This trend is already driving an increase in the use of specialist searches … Look at how Farecast is now integrated into Bing for example, or how Flightstats is now integrated into Google. Search does not necessarily have to begin with a keyword, but could start instead with a click or a touch. Take a look at Retrievr. Start drawing a picture in the box and see what happens. This is certainly search without the need for typing in keywords search technology has advanced greatly in recent years. The recent launch of Microsoft Live Labs’ Pivot has given us a taste of what we can expect to see in the future This really got me thinking about where search might go in the future and as my mind wandered I realised that as the amount of data that we collect about ourselves increases so too will the need and the desire to search it. The amount of electronic data that exists about each and every person is increasing and in the near future I fully expect that we are going to be able to store personal data such as: A history of our location (in fact Google Latitude already offers this facility) Recordings of all our phone conversations Health information history (weight, blood pressure etc…) Energy usage Spending history What films we watch, what radio stations we listen to Voting history Of course, most of this stuff is already stored somewhere but crucially we don’t have easy access to it. My utilities supplier knows how much electricity I’m using but if I want to know for myself I have to go and dig through my statements (assuming I have kept them). Similarly my doctor probably has ready access to all of my health records, my bank knows exactly what I have spent my money on, my cable supplier knows what I watch on TV and my mobile phone supplier probably knows exactly where I am and where I’ve been for the past few years. Strange then that none of this electronic information is available to me in a way that I can really make use of it; after all, its MY information. Its MY data. I created it. That is set to change. As technologies mature and customers become more technically cognizant they will demand more access to the data that companies hold about them. The companies themselves will realise the benefit that they derive from giving users what they want and will embrace ways of providing it. As a result the amount of data that we store about ourselves is going to increase exponentially and the desire to search and derive value from that data is going to grow with it; we are about to enter the era of the “personal datastore” and we will want, and need, to search through it in order to make sense of it all. Its interesting then that today when we think of search we think of search engines and yet in these personal datastores we’re referring to data that search engines can’t touch because WE own it and we (hopefully) choose to keep it private. Someone, I know not who, is going to lead in this space by making it easy for us to search our data and retrieve information that we have either forgotten or maybe didn’t even know in the first place. We will learn new things about ourselves and about our habits; we will share these findings with whomever we choose; we will compare what we discover with others; we will collaborate for mutual benefit and, most of all, we will educate ourselves as to how to live our lives better. Search will be the means to that end, it will enable us to make sense of the wealth of information that we will collect day in day out. The future of search is personal, why would we be interested in anything else? @Jamiet Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• How to get sound on macbook pro 4,1

  - by Thomas

  I have just installed Xubuntu 12.04.2. My soundcard is detected: thomas@thomas-pc:~$ sudo aplay -l **** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices **** Home directory /home/thomas not ours. card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 0: ALC889A Analog [ALC889A Analog] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 1: ALC889A Digital [ALC889A Digital] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 Everything is put to max in alsamixer and nothing is muted (all the sliders are on OO. My speakers do not work, but when I plug in a headphone I hear it very soft. When I connect my stereo and put the sound VERY loud (3-blocks-of-complaining-neighbours loud) I hear it on a normal level but crackling. I added options snd-hda-intel model=mbp5 amixer set IEC958 off to at the end of /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf. When it's still not working I tried everything here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SoundTroubleshooting 1 >>> list-sinks 1 sink(s) available. * index: 0 name: <alsa_output.pci-0000_00_1b.0.analog-stereo> driver: <module-alsa-card.c> flags: HARDWARE HW_MUTE_CTRL HW_VOLUME_CTRL DECIBEL_VOLUME LATENCY DYNAMIC_LATENCY state: SUSPENDED suspend cause: IDLE priority: 9959 volume: 0: 100% 1: 100% 0: 0.00 dB 1: 0.00 dB balance 0.00 base volume: 100% 0.00 dB volume steps: 65537 muted: no current latency: 0.00 ms max request: 0 KiB max rewind: 0 KiB monitor source: 0 sample spec: s16le 2ch 44100Hz channel map: front-left,front-right Stereo used by: 0 linked by: 0 configured latency: 0.00 ms; range is 0.50 .. 371.52 ms card: 0 <alsa_card.pci-0000_00_1b.0> module: 4 properties: alsa.resolution_bits = "16" device.api = "alsa" device.class = "sound" alsa.class = "generic" alsa.subclass = "generic-mix" alsa.name = "ALC889A Analog" alsa.id = "ALC889A Analog" alsa.subdevice = "0" alsa.subdevice_name = "subdevice #0" alsa.device = "0" alsa.card = "0" alsa.card_name = "HDA Intel" alsa.long_card_name = "HDA Intel at 0x9b500000 irq 46" alsa.driver_name = "snd_hda_intel" device.bus_path = "pci-0000:00:1b.0" sysfs.path = "/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1b.0/sound/card0" device.bus = "pci" device.vendor.id = "8086" device.vendor.name = "Intel Corporation" device.product.name = "82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller" device.form_factor = "internal" device.string = "front:0" device.buffering.buffer_size = "65536" device.buffering.fragment_size = "32768" device.access_mode = "mmap+timer" device.profile.name = "analog-stereo" device.profile.description = "Analog Stereo" device.description = "Built-in Audio Analog Stereo" alsa.mixer_name = "Realtek ALC889A" alsa.components = "HDA:10ec0885,106b3a00,00100103" module-udev-detect.discovered = "1" device.icon_name = "audio-card-pci" ports: analog-output-speaker: Speakers (priority 10000, available: unknown) properties: analog-output-headphones: Headphones (priority 9000, available: no) properties: active port: <analog-output-speaker> 2 and 3: Doesn't seem an permission issue, the sound is very far away (See opening paragraph). 4 thomas@thomas-pc:~$ sudo aplay -l **** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices **** Home directory /home/thomas not ours. card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 0: ALC889A Analog [ALC889A Analog] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 1: ALC889A Digital [ALC889A Digital] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 5 thomas@thomas-pc:~$ find /lib/modules/`uname -r` | grep snd /lib/modules/3.2.0-48-generic/kernel/sound/core/snd-hwdep.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-48-generic/kernel/sound/core/snd-pcm.ko [.. huge lists continues ..] /lib/modules/3.2.0-48-generic/kernel/sound/pcmcia/pdaudiocf/snd-pdaudiocf.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-48-generic/kernel/sound/pcmcia/vx/snd-vxpocket.ko thomas@thomas-pc:~$ 6 thomas@thomas-pc:~$ lspci -v | grep -A7 -i "audio" 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 03) Subsystem: Apple Inc. Device 00a4 Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 46 Memory at 9b500000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K] Capabilities: <access denied> Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel Kernel modules: snd-hda-intel 7 I guess it's supported. Linux mint and Xubuntu 13.04 had no trouble with sounds. Everything worked out of the box Thanks in advance Edit: alsa-info.sh output: WARNING: /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf line 45: ignoring bad line starting with 'amixer' ALSA Information Script v 0.4.62 -------------------------------- This script visits the following commands/files to collect diagnostic information about your ALSA installation and sound related hardware. dmesg lspci lsmod aplay amixer alsactl /proc/asound/ /sys/class/sound/ ~/.asoundrc (etc.) See './alsa-info.sh --help' for command line options. WARNING: /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf line 45: ignoring bad line starting with 'amixer' Automatically upload ALSA information to www.alsa-project.org? [y/N] : y Uploading information to www.alsa-project.org ... Done! Your ALSA information is located at http://www.alsa-project.org/db/?f=6cffc584284d4c0b266eb53249824ef83d6c4e3e Please inform the person helping you. thomas@thomas-pc:~$

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• C++ Little Wonders: The C++11 auto keyword redux

  - by James Michael Hare

  I’ve decided to create a sub-series of my Little Wonders posts to focus on C++.  Just like their C# counterparts, these posts will focus on those features of the C++ language that can help improve code by making it easier to write and maintain.  The index of the C# Little Wonders can be found here. This has been a busy week with a rollout of some new website features here at my work, so I don’t have a big post for this week.  But I wanted to write something up, and since lately I’ve been renewing my C++ skills in a separate project, it seemed like a good opportunity to start a C++ Little Wonders series.  Most of my development work still tends to focus on C#, but it was great to get back into the saddle and renew my C++ knowledge.  Today I’m going to focus on a new feature in C++11 (formerly known as C++0x, which is a major move forward in the C++ language standard).  While this small keyword can seem so trivial, I feel it is a big step forward in improving readability in C++ programs. The auto keyword If you’ve worked on C++ for a long time, you probably have some passing familiarity with the old auto keyword as one of those rarely used C++ keywords that was almost never used because it was the default. That is, in the code below (before C++11): 1: int foo() 2: { 3: // automatic variables (allocated and deallocated on stack) 4: int x; 5: auto int y; 6:  7: // static variables (retain their value across calls) 8: static int z; 9:  10: return 0; 11: } The variable x is assumed to be auto because that is the default, thus it is unnecessary to specify it explicitly as in the declaration of y below that.  Basically, an auto variable is one that is allocated and de-allocated on the stack automatically.  Contrast this to static variables, that are allocated statically and exist across the lifetime of the program. Because auto was so rarely (if ever) used since it is the norm, they decided to remove it for this purpose and give it new meaning in C++11.  The new meaning of auto: implicit typing Now, if your compiler supports C++ 11 (or at least a good subset of C++11 or 0x) you can take advantage of type inference in C++.  For those of you from the C# world, this means that the auto keyword in C++ now behaves a lot like the var keyword in C#! For example, many of us have had to declare those massive type declarations for an iterator before.  Let’s say we have a std::map of std::string to int which will map names to ages: 1: std::map<std::string, int> myMap; And then let’s say we want to find the age of a given person: 1: // Egad that's a long type... 2: std::map<std::string, int>::const_iterator pos = myMap.find(targetName); Notice that big ugly type definition to declare variable pos?  Sure, we could shorten this by creating a typedef of our specific map type if we wanted, but now with the auto keyword there’s no need: 1: // much shorter! 2: auto pos = myMap.find(targetName); The auto now tells the compiler to determine what type pos should be based on what it’s being assigned to.  This is not dynamic typing, it still determines the type as if it were explicitly declared and once declared that type cannot be changed.  That is, this is invalid: 1: // x is type int 2: auto x = 42; 3:  4: // can't assign string to int 5: x = "Hello"; Once the compiler determines x is type int it is exactly as if we typed int x = 42; instead, so don’t' confuse it with dynamic typing, it’s still very type-safe. An interesting feature of the auto keyword is that you can modify the inferred type: 1: // declare method that returns int* 2: int* GetPointer(); 3:  4: // p1 is int*, auto inferred type is int 5: auto *p1 = GetPointer(); 6:  7: // ps is int*, auto inferred type is int* 8: auto p2 = GetPointer(); Notice in both of these cases, p1 and p2 are determined to be int* but in each case the inferred type was different.  because we declared p1 as auto *p1 and GetPointer() returns int*, it inferred the type int was needed to complete the declaration.  In the second case, however, we declared p2 as auto p2 which means the inferred type was int*.  Ultimately, this make p1 and p2 the same type, but which type is inferred makes a difference, if you are chaining multiple inferred declarations together.  In these cases, the inferred type of each must match the first: 1: // Type inferred is int 2: // p1 is int* 3: // p2 is int 4: // p3 is int& 5: auto *p1 = GetPointer(), p2 = 42, &p3 = p2; Note that this works because the inferred type was int, if the inferred type was int* instead: 1: // syntax error, p1 was inferred to be int* so p2 and p3 don't make sense 2: auto p1 = GetPointer(), p2 = 42, &p3 = p2; You could also use const or static to modify the inferred type: 1: // inferred type is an int, theAnswer is a const int 2: const auto theAnswer = 42; 3:  4: // inferred type is double, Pi is a static double 5: static auto Pi = 3.1415927; Thus in the examples above it inferred the types int and double respectively, which were then modified to const and static. Summary The auto keyword has gotten new life in C++11 to allow you to infer the type of a variable from it’s initialization.  This simple little keyword can be used to cut down large declarations for complex types into a much more readable form, where appropriate.   Technorati Tags: C++, C++11, Little Wonders, auto

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• Spolskism or Twitterism: A Doctor writes...

  - by Phil Factor

  "I never realized I had a problem. I just 'twittered' because it was a social thing to do. All my mates were doing it. It made me feel good to have 'followers'; it bolstered my self-esteem. Of course, you don't think of the long-term effects on your work and on the way you think. There's no denying that it impairs your judgment…" Yes, this story is typical. Hundreds of people are waking up to the long term effects of twittering, and seeking help. Dave, who wishes to remain anonymous, told our reporter… "I started using Twitter at work. Just a few minutes now and then, throughout the day. A lot of my colleagues were doing it and I thought 'Well, that's cool; it must be part of what I should be doing at work'. Soon, I was avidly reading every twitter that came my way, and counting the minutes between my own twitters. I tried to kid myself that it was all about professional development and getting other people to help you with work-related problems, but in truth I had become addicted to the buzz of the social network. The worse thing was that it made me seem busy even when I was really just frittering my time away. Inevitably, I started to get behind with my real work." Experts have identified the syndrome and given it a name: 'Twitterism', sometimes referred to as 'Spolskism', after the person who first drew attention to the pernicious damage to well-being that the practice caused, and who had the courage to take the pledge of rejecting it. According to one expert… "The occasional Twitter does little harm to the participant, and can be an adaptive way of dealing with stress. Unfortunately, it rarely stops there. The addictive qualities of the practice have put a strain on the caring professions who are faced with a flood of people making that first bold step to seeking help". Dave is one of those now seeking help for his addiction… "I had lost touch with reality. Even though I twittered my work colleagues constantly, I found I actually spoke to them less and less. Even when out socializing, I would frequently disengage from the conversation, in order to twitter. I stopped blogging. I stopped responding to emails; the only way to reach me was through the world of Twitter. Unfortunately, my denial about the harm that twittering was doing to me, my friends, and my work-colleagues was so strong that I truly couldn't see that I had a problem." Like other addictions, the help and support of others who are 'taking the cure' is important. There is a common bond between those who have 'been through hell and back' and are once more able to experience the joys of actually conversing and socializing, rather than the false comfort of solitary 'twittering'. Complete abstinence is essential to the cure. Most of those who risk even an occasional twitter face a headlong slide back into 'binge' twittering. Tom, another twitterer who has managed to kick the habit explains… "My twittering addiction now seems more like a bad dream. You get to work, and switch on the PC. You say to yourself, just open up the browser, just for a minute, just to see what people are saying on Twitter. The next thing you know, half the day has gone by. The worst thing is that when you're addicted, you get good at covering up the habit; I spent so much time looking at the screen and typing on the keyboard, people just assumed I was working hard.I know that I must never forget what it was like then, and what it's like now that I've kicked the habit. I now have more time for productive work and a real social life." Like many addictions, Spolskism has its most detrimental effects on family, friends and workmates, rather than the addict. So often nowadays, we hear the sad stories of Twitter-Widows; tales of long lonely evenings spent whilst their partners are engrossed in their twittering into their 'mobiles' or indulging in their solitary spolskistic habits in privacy, under cover of 'having to do work at home'. Workmates suffer too, when the addicts even take their laptops or mobiles into meetings in order to 'twitter' with their fellow obsessives, even stooping to complain to their followers how boring the meeting is. No; The best advice is to leave twittering to the birds. You know it makes sense.

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• Exitus Acta Probat: The Post-Processing Module

  - by Phil Factor

  Sometimes, one has to make certain ethical compromises to ensure the success of a corporate IT project. Exitus Acta Probat (literally 'the result validates the deeds' meaning that the ends justify the means)It was a while back, whilst working as a Technical Architect for a well-known international company, that I was given the task of designing the architecture of a rather specialized accounting system. We'd tried an off-the-shelf (OTS) Windows-based solution which crashed with dispiriting regularity, and didn't quite do what the business required. After a great deal of research and planning, we commissioned a Unux-based system that used X-terminals for the desktops of  the participating staff. X terminals are now obsolete, but were then hot stuff; stripped-down Unix workstations that provided client GUIs for networked applications long before the days of AJAX, Flash, Air and DHTML. I've never known a project go so smoothly: I'd been initially rather nervous about going the Unix route, believing then that  Unix programmers were excitable creatures who were prone to  indulge in role-play enactments of elves and wizards at the weekend, but the programmers I met from the company that did the work seemed to be rather donnish, earnest, people who quickly grasped our requirements and were faultlessly professional in their work.After thinking lofty thoughts for a while, there was considerable pummeling of keyboards by our suppliers, and a beautiful robust application was delivered to us ahead of dates.Soon, the department who had commissioned the work received shiny new X Terminals to replace their rather depressing lavatory-beige PCs. I modestly hung around as the application was commissioned and deployed to the department in order to receive the plaudits. They didn't come. Something was very wrong with the project. I couldn't put my finger on the problem, and the users weren't doing any more than desperately and futilely searching the application to find a fault with it.Many times in my life, I've come up against a predicament like this: The roll-out of an application goes wrong and you are hearing nothing that helps you to discern the cause but nit-*** noise. There is a limit to the emotional heat you can pack into a complaint about text being in the wrong font, or an input form being slightly cramped, but they tried their best. The answer is, of course, one that every IT executive should have tattooed prominently where they can read it in emergencies: In Vino Veritas (literally, 'in wine the truth', alcohol loosens the tongue. A roman proverb) It was time to slap the wallet and get the department down the pub with the tab in my name. It was an eye-watering investment, but hedged with an over-confident IT director who relished my discomfort. To cut a long story short, The real reason gushed out with the third round. We had deprived them of their PCs, which had been good for very little from the pure business perspective, but had provided them with many hours of happiness playing computer-based minesweeper and solitaire. There is no more agreeable way of passing away the interminable hours of wage-slavery than minesweeper or solitaire, and the employees had applauded the munificence of their employer who had provided them with the means to play it. I had, unthinkingly, deprived them of it.I held an emergency meeting with our suppliers the following day. I came over big with the notion that it was in their interests to provide a solution. They played it cool, probably knowing that it was my head on the block, not theirs. In the end, they came up with a compromise. they would temporarily descend from their lofty, cerebral stamping grounds  in order to write a server-based Minesweeper and Solitaire game for X Terminals, and install it in a concealed place within the system. We'd have to pay for it, though. I groaned. How could we do that? "Could we call it a 'post-processing module?" suggested their account executive.And so it came to pass. The application was a resounding success. Every now and then, the staff were able to indulge in some 'post-processing', with what turned out to be a very fine implementation of both minesweeper and solitaire. There were several refinements: A single click in a 'boss' button turned the games into what looked just like a financial spreadsheet.  They even threw in a multi-user version of Battleships. The extra payment for the post-processing module went through the change-control process without anyone untoward noticing, and peace once more descended. Only one thing niggles. Those games were good. Do they still survive, somewhere in a Linux library? If so, I'd like to claim a small part in their production.

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• Do You Develop Your PL/SQL Directly in the Database?

  - by thatjeffsmith

  I know this sounds like a REALLY weird question for many of you. Let me make one thing clear right away though, I am NOT talking about creating and replacing PLSQL objects directly into a production environment. Do we really need to talk about developers in production again? No, what I am talking about is a developer doing their work from start to finish in a development database. These are generally available to a development team for building the next and greatest version of your databases and database applications. And of course you are using a third party source control system, right? Last week I was in Tampa, FL presenting at the monthly Suncoast Oracle User’s Group meeting. Had a wonderful time, great questions and back-and-forth. My favorite heckler was there, @oraclenered, AKA Chet Justice.  I was in the middle of talking about how it’s better to do your PLSQL work in the Procedure Editor when Chet pipes up - Don’t do it that way, that’s wrong Just press play to edit the PLSQL directly in the database Or something along those lines. I didn’t get what the heck he was talking about. I had been showing how the Procedure Editor gives you much better feedback and support when working with PLSQL. After a few back-and-forths I got to what Chet’s main objection was, and again I’m going to paraphrase: You should develop offline in your SQL worksheet. Don’t do anything in the database until it’s done. I didn’t understand. Were developers expected to be able to internalize and mentally model the PL/SQL engine, see where their errors were, etc in these offline scripts? No, please give Chet more credit than that. What is the ideal Oracle Development Environment? If I were back in the ‘real world’ of database development, I would do all of my development outside of the ‘dev’ instance. My development process looks a little something like this: Do I have a program that already does something like this – copy and paste Has some smart person already written something like this – copy and paste Start typing in the white-screen-of-panic and bungle along until I get something that half-works Tweek, debug, test until I have fooled my subconscious into thinking that it’s ‘good’ As you might understand, I don’t want my co-workers to see the evolution of my code. It would seriously freak them out and I probably wouldn’t have a job anymore (don’t remind me that I already worked myself out of development.) So here’s what I like to do: Run a Local Instance of Oracle on my Machine and Develop My Code Privately I take a copy of development – that’s what source control is for afterall – and run it where no one else can see it. I now get to be my own DBA. If I need a trace – no problem. If I want to run an ASH report, no worries. If I need to create a directory or run some DataPump jobs, that’s all on me. Now when I get my code ‘up to snuff,’ then I will check it into source control and compile it into the official development instance. So my teammates suddenly go from seeing no program, to a mostly complete program. Is this right? If not, it doesn’t seem wrong to me. And after talking to Chet in the car on the way to the local cigar bar, it seems that he’s of the same opinion. So what’s so wrong with coding directly into a development instance? I think ‘wrong’ is a bit strong here. But there are a few pitfalls that you might want to look out for. A few come to mind – and I’m sure Chet could add many more as my memory fails me at the moment. But here goes: Development instance isn’t properly backed up – would hate to lose that work Development is wiped once a week and copied over from Prod – don’t laugh Someone clobbers your code You accidentally on purpose clobber someone else’s code The more developers you have in a single fish pond, the greater chance something ‘bad’ will happen This Isn’t One of Those Posts Where I Tell You What You Should Be Doing I realize many shops won’t be open to allowing developers to stage their own local copies of Oracle. But I would at least be aware that many of your developers are probably doing this anyway – with or without your tacit approval. SQL Developer can do local file tracking, but you should be using Source Control too! I will say that I think it’s imperative that you control your source code outside the database, even if your development team is comprised of a single developer. Store your source code in a file, and control that file in something like Subversion. You would be shocked at the number of teams that do not use a source control system. I know I continue to be shocked no matter how many times I meet another team running by the seat-of-their-pants. I’d love to hear how your development process works. And of course I want to know how SQL Developer and the rest of our tools can better support your processes. And one last thing, if you want a fun and interactive presentation experience, be sure to have Chet in the room

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• Getting Started with Prism (aka Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight)

  - by dotneteer

  Overview Prism is a framework from the Microsoft Patterns and Practice team that allow you to create WPF and Silverlight in a modular way. It is especially valuable for larger projects in which a large number of developers can develop in parallel. Prism achieves its goal by supplying several services: · Dependency Injection (DI) and Inversion of control (IoC): By using DI, Prism takes away the responsibility of instantiating and managing the life time of dependency objects from individual components to a container. Prism relies on containers to discover, manage and compose large number of objects. By varying the configuration, the container can also inject mock objects for unit testing. Out of the box, Prism supports Unity and MEF as container although it is possible to use other containers by subclassing the Bootstrapper class. · Modularity and Region: Prism supplies the framework to split application into modules from the application shell. Each module is a library project that contains both UI and code and is responsible to initialize itself when loaded by the shell. Each window can be further divided into regions. A region is a user control with associated model. · Model, view and view-model (MVVM) pattern: Prism promotes the user MVVM. The use of DI container makes it much easier to inject model into view. WPF already has excellent data binding and commanding mechanism. To be productive with Prism, it is important to understand WPF data binding and commanding well. · Event-aggregation: Prism promotes loosely coupled components. Prism discourages for components from different modules to communicate each other, thus leading to dependency. Instead, Prism supplies an event-aggregation mechanism that allows components to publish and subscribe events without knowing each other. Architecture In the following, I will go into a little more detail on the services provided by Prism. Bootstrapper In a typical WPF application, application start-up is controls by App.xaml and its code behind. The main window of the application is typically specified in the App.xaml file. In a Prism application, we start a bootstrapper in the App class and delegate the duty of main window to the bootstrapper. The bootstrapper will start a dependency-injection container so all future object instantiations are managed by the container. Out of box, Prism provides the UnityBootstrapper and MefUnityBootstrapper abstract classes. All application needs to either provide a concrete implementation of one of these bootstrappers, or alternatively, subclass the Bootstrapper class with another DI container. A concrete bootstrapper class must implement the CreateShell method. Its responsibility is to resolve and create the Shell object through the DI container to serve as the main window for the application. The other important method to override is ConfigureModuleCatalog. The bootstrapper can register modules for the application. In a more advance scenario, an application does not have to know all its modules at compile time. Modules can be discovered at run time. Readers to refer to one of the Open Modularity Quick Starts for more information. Modules Once modules are registered with or discovered by Prism, they are instantiated by the DI container and their Initialize method is called. The DI container can inject into a module a region registry that implements IRegionViewRegistry interface. The module, in its Initialize method, can then call RegisterViewWithRegion method of the registry to register its regions. Regions Regions, once registered, are managed by the RegionManager. The shell can then load regions either through the RegionManager.RegionName attached property or dynamically through code. When a view is created by the region manager, the DI container can inject view model and other services into the view. The view then has a reference to the view model through which it can interact with backend services. Service locator Although it is possible to inject services into dependent classes through a DI container, an alternative way is to use the ServiceLocator to retrieve a service on demard. Prism supplies a service locator implementation and it is possible to get an instance of the service by calling: ServiceLocator.Current.GetInstance<IServiceType>() Event aggregator Prism supplies an IEventAggregator interface and implementation that can be injected into any class that needs to communicate with each other in a loosely-coupled fashion. The event aggregator uses a publisher/subscriber model. A class can publishes an event by calling eventAggregator.GetEvent<EventType>().Publish(parameter) to raise an event. Other classes can subscribe the event by calling eventAggregator.GetEvent<EventType>().Subscribe(EventHandler, other options). Getting started The easiest way to get started with Prism is to go through the Prism Hands-On labs and look at the Hello World QuickStart. The Hello World QuickStart shows how bootstrapper, modules and region works. Next, I would recommend you to look at the Stock Trader Reference Implementation. It is a more in depth example that resemble we want to set up an application. Several other QuickStarts cover individual Prism services. Some scenarios, such as dynamic module discovery, are more advanced. Apart from the official prism document, you can get an overview by reading Glen Block’s MSDN Magazine article. I have found the best free training material is from the Boise Code Camp. To be effective with Prism, it is important to understands key concepts of WPF well first, such as the DependencyProperty system, data binding, resource, theme and ICommand. It is also important to know your DI container of choice well. I will try to explorer these subjects in depth in the future. Testimony Recently, I worked on a desktop WPF application using Prism. I had a wonderful experience with Prism. The Prism is flexible enough even in the presence of third party controls such as Telerik WPF controls. We have never encountered any significant obstacle.

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• JavaOne pictures and Community Commentary on JCP Awards

  - by heathervc

  We posted some pictures from JCP related events at JavaOne 2012 on the JCP Facebook page today.  The 2012 JCP Program Award winners and some of the nominees responded to the community recognition of their achievements during some of the JCP events last week.     “Our job on the EC is to balance the need of innovation – so we don’t standardize too early, or too late. We try to find that sweet spot that makes innovation and standardization work together, and not against each other.”- Ben Evans, CEO of jClarity and Executive Committee (EC) representative of the London Java Community, 2012 JCP Member/Participant of the Year Winner“SouJava has been evangelizing the Java platform, promoting the Java ecosystem in Brazil, and contributing to JSRs for several years. It’s very gratifying to have our work recognized, on behalf of many developers and Java User Groups around the world. This really is the work of a large group of people, represented by the few that can be here tonight.”- Michael Santos, representative of SouJava, 2012 JCP Member/Participant of the Year Winner "In the last years Credit Suisse has contributed to the development of Java EE specifications through participation in many customer advisory boards, through statements of requirements for extensions to the core Java related products in use, and active participation in JSRs. Winning the JCP Outstanding Spec Lead Award 2012 is very encouraging for our engagement and also demonstrates the level of expertise and commitment to drive the evolution of Java. Victor Grazi is happy and honored to receive this award." - Susanne Cech Previtali, Executive Committee (EC) representative of Credit Suisse, accepting award for 2012 JCP Outstanding Spec Lead Winner "Managing a JSR is difficult. There are so many decisions to be made and so many good and varied opinions, you never really know if you have decided correctly. The key to success is transparency and collaboration. I am truly humbled by receiving this award, there are so many other active JSRs.” Victor added that going forward in the JCP EC, they would like to simplify and open the process of participation – being addressed in the JCP.Next initiative of the JCP EC. "We would also like to encourage the engagement of universities, professors and students – as an important part of the Java community. While innovation is the lifeblood of our community and industry, without strong standards and compatibility requirements, we all end up in a maze of technology where everything is slightly different and doesn’t quite work with everything else." Victo Grazi, Executive Committee (EC) representative of Credit Suisse, 2012 JCP Outstanding Spec Lead Winner“I am very pleased, of course, to accept this award, but the credit really should go to all of those who have participated in the work of the JCP, while pushing for changes in the way it operates.  JCP.Next represents three JSRs. The first two are done, but the final step, JSR 358, is the complicated one, and it will bring in the lawyers. Just to give you an idea of what we’re dealing with, it affects licensing, intellectual property, patents, implementations not based on the Reference Implementation (RI), the role of the RI, compatibility policy, possible changes to the Technical Compatibility Kit (TCK), transparency, where do individuals fit in, open source, and more.”- Patrick Curran, JCP Chair, Spec Lead on JCP.Next JSRs (JSR 348, JSR 355 and JSR 358), 2012 JCP Most Significant JSR Winner“I’m especially glad to see the JCP community recognize JCP.Next for its importance. The governance work it represents is KEY to moving the Java platform forward and the success of the technology.”- John Rizzo, Executive Committee (EC) representative of Aplix Corporation, JSR Expert Group Member “I am deeply honored to be nominated. I had the privilege to receive two awards on behalf of Expert Groups and Spec Leads two years ago. But this time, I am nominated personally, which values my own contribution to the JCP, and of course, participation in JSRs and the EC work. I’m a fan of Agile Principles and Values Working. Being an Agile Coach and Consultant, I use it for some of the biggest EC Member companies and projects. It fuels my ability to help the JCP become more agile, lean and transparent as part of the JCP.Next effort.” - Werner Keil, Individual Executive Committee (EC) Member, a 2012 JCP Member/Participant of the Year Nominee, JSR Expert Group Member“The JCP ever has been some kind of institution for me,” Markus said. “If in technical doubt, I go there, look for the specifications of the implementation I work with at the moment and verify what I had observed. Since the beginning of my Java journey more than 12 years back now, I always had a strong relationship with the JCP. Shaping the future of a technology by joining the JCP – giving feedback and contributing to the road ahead through individual JSRs – that brings you to a whole new level.”Calling himself, “the new kid on the block,” he explained that for years he was afraid to join the JCP and contribute. But in reality, “Every single one of the big names I meet from the different Expert Groups is a nice person. People you can actually work with,” he says. “And nobody blames you for things you don't know. As long as you are committed and bring what is worth the most: passion, experiences and the desire to make a difference.” - Markus Eisele, a 2012 JCP Member of the Year Nominee, JSR Expert Group MemberCongratulations again to all of the nominees and winners of the JCP Program Awards.  Next year, we will add another award for the group of JUG members (not an entire JUG) that makes the best contribution to the Adopt-a-JSR program.  Let us know if you have other suggestions or improvements.

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• Oracle’s Web Experience Management

  - by Christie Flanagan

  Today’s guest post on Oracle’s Web Experience Management comes from a member of our WebCenter Evangelist team, Noël Jaffré, a Principal Technologist based in France.Oracle’s Web Experience Management (WEM) solution enables organizations to optimize the online channel for driving marketing and customer experience management success. It empowers business users to manage the web presence and create rich and engaging online experiences for customers and prospects. Oracle's WEM platform provides a framework to simplify the integration of Oracle, third-party and custom-built applications. This framework essentially allows the creation and integration of applications using one single business interface called the WEM interface. It includes the following: Single sign-on access control for all integrated applications using the Central Authentication Service (CAS) component. A single centralized administration window for user, role, and native applications management including site management. Community server management, gadget server management as well as management for partner integrated technologies. A Representational State Transfer (REST) API for accessing WebCenter Sites data. REST services are supported on both Oracle WebCenter Sites and Oracle WebCenter Sites Satellite Server to leverage the satellite server cache. All REST requests are cached for web consuming applications as well for the high performance delivery of native applications on the mobile channel. Oracle WebCenter Sites’ Web Experience Management environment enables organizations to deliver a compelling online experience to customers by simplifying the deployment and management of sophisticated and engaging websites. The WebCenter Sites platform automates the entire process of managing web content including: Authoring:  Business users can easily contribute and manage web content in real-time, with intuitive interfaces and drag-and-drop content authoring and layout capabilities designed for the non-technical user. Contextual Content Targeting: Marketers are empowered to create and manage targeted campaigns with relevant recommendations and promotions based on the context of the session of the visitor such as his or her navigation history, user profile, language, location or other information shared during the visitor session. Content Publishing and Deployment: It offers advanced multi-site management capabilities for departmental or regional sites, as well as strong multi-lingual and multi-locale content management. The remote satellite server caching infrastructure provides high-performance, distributed caching, tuned to deliver high-volume, targeted and multi-lingual sites. Analytics and Optimization: Business users and marketers have the ability to measure the effectiveness of their online content and campaigns at a granular level. Editors and marketers can immediately determine whether a given article or promotion is relevant to a particular customer segment. User-generated Content: Marketers can enable blogs, comments, rating and reviews on the website.  All comments and reviews posted to the website can be moderated from the administrator interface either manually or automatically using filters, whitelists, blacklists or community based moderation. Personalized Gadget Dashboards:  Site managers can deploy gadgets, small applications using web content, individually or as part of dashboards containing multiple gadgets.  These gadget dashboards enable site visitors to create their own “MyPage” on a given site where they can select and customize the gadgets that the site administrator has made available.  Any gadget that conforms to the iGoogle/OpenSocial standard can be made available to site visitors, or they can be created within the WEM interface. Oracle's WEM platform also provides a unique environment for the delivery of a rich, multichannel online experience for site visitors through its advanced management modules for mobile. With Oracle’s WEM solution, it’s easy to control branding and deliver a consistent message while repurposing web content for publication to mobile devices, kiosks and much more. This distinctive approach provides: HTML5 Delivery: HTML5 delivery which includes native support for adaptive design that responds to the user’s computer screen resolution and orientation. The approach is less driven by the particular hardware and more driven by the user’s interactions with the device. In other words, this approach takes both the screen interactions (either cursor or touch) and screen sizes and orientation into consideration. A Unique Native Mobile Extension Environment for Contributors: From the WEM interface, a contributor can directly manage their mobile channel, using the tooling already in place for driving the traditional web presence. This includes the mobile presentation, as well as mobile insite editing, drag and drop page layout, and in-context recommendations and personalization. Optimized REST APIs for High Performance Content Delivery on Native Mobile Device Applications: WebCenter Sites’ REST API uses the underlying HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE) to interact with resources. Resources support two types of input and output formats -- XML and JSON. REST calls are customizable to optimize the interactions between the content repositories and the client applications. Caching is essential to decrease network loads and improve overall reliability and usability of the applications and user interactions. REST results are cached through the highly efficient Oracle WebCenter Sites caching architecture.

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• The Krewe App Post-Mortem

  - by Chris Gardner

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/freestylecoding/archive/2014/05/23/the-krewe-app-post-mortem.aspxNow that teched has come and gone, I thought I would use this opportunity to do a little post-mortem on The Krewe app. It is one thing to test the app at home. It is a completely different animal to see how it responds in the environment TechEd creates. At a future time, I will list all the things that I would like to change with the app. At this point, I will find some good way to get community feedback. I want to break all this down screen by screen. We'll start with the screen I got right. The first of these is the events calendar. This is the one screen that, to you guys, just worked. However, there was an issue here. When I wrote v1 for last year, I was lazy and placed everything in CST. This caused problems with the achievements, which I will explain later. Furthermore, the event locations were not check-in locations. This created another problem with the achievements. Next, we get to the Twitter page. For what this page does, it works great. For those that don't know, I have an Azure Worker Role that polls Twitter pretty close to the rate limit. I cache these results in my database, and serve them upon request. This gives me great control over the content. I just have to remember to flush past tweets after a period, to save database growth. The next screen is the check-in screen. This screen has been the bane of my existence since I first created the thing. Last year, I used a background task to check people out of locations after they traveled. This year, I removed the background task in favor of a foursquare model. You are checked out after 3 hours or when you check-in to some other location. This seemed to work well, until those pesky achievements came into the mix. Again, more on this later. Next, I want to address the Connect and Connections screens together. I wanted to use some of the capabilities of the phone, and NFC seemed a natural choice. From this, I came up with the gamification aspects of the app. Since we are, fundamentally, a networking organization, I wanted to encourage people to actually network. Users could make and share a profile, similar to a virtual business card. I just had to figure out how to get people to use the feature. Why not just give someone a business card? Thus, the achievements were born. This was such a good idea. It would have been a great idea, if I have come up with it about two months earlier... When I came up with these ideas, I had about 2 weeks to implement them. Version 1 of the app was, basically, a pure consumption app. We provided data and centralized it. With version 2, the app became a much more interactive experience. The API was not ready for this change in such a short period of time. Most of this became apparent when I started implementing the achievements. The achievements based on count and specific person when fairly easy. The problem came with tying them to locations and events. This took some true SQL kung fu. This also showed me the rookie mistake of putting CST, not UTC, in the database. Once I got all of that cleaned up, I had to find a way to get the achievement system to talk to the phone. I knew I needed to be able to dynamically add achievements. I wouldn't know the precise location of some things until I got to Houston. I wanted the server to approve the achievements. This, unfortunately, required a decent data connection. Some achievements required GPS levels of location accuracy in areas of network triangulation. All of this became a huge nightmare. My flagship feature was based on some silly assumptions. Still, I managed to get 31 people to get the first achievement (Make 1 Connection.) Quite a few of those managed to get to the higher levels. Soon, I will post a list of the feature and changes that need to happen to the API. This includes things like proper objects for communication, geo-fencing, and caching. However, that is for another day.

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• Personal search – the future of search

  - by jamiet

  [Four months ago I wrote a meandering blog post on another blogging site entitled Personal search – the future of search. The points I made therein are becoming more relevant to what I'm reading about and hoping to get involved in in the future so I'm re-posting here to a wider audience to hopefully get some more feedback and guage reaction to it. This has been prompted by the book Pull by David Siegel that is forming my current holiday reading (recommended to me by a commenter on my previous post Interesting things – Twitter annotations and your phone as a web server) and in particular by Siegel's notion of us all in the future having a personal online data vault.] My one-time colleague Paul Dawson recently wrote an article called The Future of Search and in it he proposed some interesting ideas. Some choice quotes: The growth of Chinese search giant Baidu is an indicator that fully localised and tailored content and offerings have great traction with local audiences This trend is already driving an increase in the use of specialist searches … Look at how Farecast is now integrated into Bing for example, or how Flightstats is now integrated into Google. Search does not necessarily have to begin with a keyword, but could start instead with a click or a touch. Take a look at Retrievr. Start drawing a picture in the box and see what happens. This is certainly search without the need for typing in keywords search technology has advanced greatly in recent years. The recent launch of Microsoft Live Labs’ Pivot has given us a taste of what we can expect to see in the future This really got me thinking about where search might go in the future and as my mind wandered I realised that as the amount of data that we collect about ourselves increases so too will the need and the desire to search it. The amount of electronic data that exists about each and every person is increasing and in the near future I fully expect that we are going to be able to store personal data such as: A history of our location (in fact Google Latitude already offers this facility) Recordings of all our phone conversations Health information history (weight, blood pressure etc…) Energy usage Spending history What films we watch, what radio stations we listen to Voting history Of course, most of this stuff is already stored somewhere but crucially we don’t have easy access to it. My utilities supplier knows how much electricity I’m using but if I want to know for myself I have to go and dig through my statements (assuming I have kept them). Similarly my doctor probably has ready access to all of my health records, my bank knows exactly what I have spent my money on, my cable supplier knows what I watch on TV and my mobile phone supplier probably knows exactly where I am and where I’ve been for the past few years. Strange then that none of this electronic information is available to me in a way that I can really make use of it; after all, its MY information. Its MY data. I created it. That is set to change. As technologies mature and customers become more technically cognizant they will demand more access to the data that companies hold about them. The companies themselves will realise the benefit that they derive from giving users what they want and will embrace ways of providing it. As a result the amount of data that we store about ourselves is going to increase exponentially and the desire to search and derive value from that data is going to grow with it; we are about to enter the era of the “personal datastore” and we will want, and need, to search through it in order to make sense of it all. Its interesting then that today when we think of search we think of search engines and yet in these personal datastores we’re referring to data that search engines can’t touch because WE own it and we (hopefully) choose to keep it private. Someone, I know not who, is going to lead in this space by making it easy for us to search our data and retrieve information that we have either forgotten or maybe didn’t even know in the first place. We will learn new things about ourselves and about our habits; we will share these findings with whomever we choose; we will compare what we discover with others; we will collaborate for mutual benefit and, most of all, we will educate ourselves as to how to live our lives better. Search will be the means to that end, it will enable us to make sense of the wealth of information that we will collect day in day out. The future of search is personal, why would we be interested in anything else? @Jamiet Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Fusion HCM SaaS – Integration

  - by Kiran Mundy

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Fusion HCM SaaS – Integration A typical implementation pattern we’re seeing with Fusion Apps early adopters is implementing a few Fusion HCM applications that bring the most benefit to their company with the least disruption to existing programs and interfaces. Very often this ends up being Fusion Goals & Performance, Talent, Compensation or Benefits, often with Taleo for recruiting. The implementation picture looks like what you see below: Here, you can see that all the “downstream integrations” from the On-Premise Core HR, are unaffected because the master for employee data is still your On-Premise Core HR system – all updates and new hires are made here (although they may be fed in from Taleo to start with). As a second phase when customers migrate Core HR to Fusion HCM, they have to come up with a strategy to manage integrations to all their downstream applications that require employee details. For customers coming from EBS HR, a short term strategy that allows for minimal impact, is to extract employee data from Fusion (Via HCM Extract), and load the shared EBS HR tables (which are part of an EBS Financials install anyways), and let your downstream integrations continue to function based on this data as shown below. If you are not coming from EBS HR and there are license implications, you may want to consider: Creating an On-Premise warehouse for extracting data from Fusion Apps. Leveraging Fusion Apps Web Services (available to SaaS customers starting R7) to directly retrieve/write data to Fusion Apps. Integration Tools File Based Loader This is the primary mechanism for loading HCM data (both initial load and incremental updates) into Fusion HCM. Employee & related data can be uploaded into Fusion HCM using File Based Loader. Note that ability to schedule File Based Loader to run on a pre-defined schedule will be available as a patch on top of Rel 5. Hr2Hr has been deprecated in favor of File Based Loader, but for existing customers using Hr2Hr, here are some sample scripts that show how to get more informative error messages. They can be run by creating data model sql queries in BI Publisher. The scripts currently have hard coded values for request id and loader batch id, which your developer will need to update to the correct values for you. The BI Publisher Training Session recorded on Apr 18th is available here (under "Recordings"). This will enable a somewhat technical resource to create a data model sql query. Links to Documentation & Traning Reference documentation for File Based Loader on docs.oracle.com FBL 1.1 MOS Doc Id 1533860.1 Sample demo data files for File Based Loader HCM SaaS Integrations ppt and recording. EBS api's Loading Information into EBS Full or Shared HCM This could be candidate information being loaded from Taleo into EBS or  Employee information being loaded from Fusion HCM into an EBS shared HR install (for downstream applications & EBS Financials). Oracle HRMS Product Family Publicly Callable Business Process APIs (A Reference Consolidation) [ID 216838.1] This is a guide to the EBS R12 Integration Repository accessible from an EBS instance. EBS HRMS Publicly Callable Business Process APIs in Release 11i & 12 [ID 121964.1] Fusion HCM Extract Fusion HCM Extract is the primary mechanism used to extract employee information from Fusion HCM. Refer to the "Configure Identity Sync" doc on MOS  for additional mechanisms. Additional documentation (you'll need an oracle.com account to access) HCM Extracts User Guides (Rel 4 & 5) HCM Extract Entity/Attributes (Rel 5) HCM Extract User Guide (Rel 5) If you don’t have an oracle.com account, download the zipped HCM Extract Rel 5 Docs (Click on File --> Download on next screen). View Training Recordings on Fusion HCM Extract Benefits Extract To setup the benefits extract, refer to the following guide. Page 2-15 of the User Documentation describes how to use the benefits extract. Benefit enrollments can also be uploaded into Fusion Benefits. Instructions are here along with a sample upload file. However, if the defined benefits extract does not meet your requirements, you can use BI Publisher (Link to BI Publisher presentation recording from Apr 18th) to create your own version of Benefits extract. You can start with the data model query underlying the benefits extract. Payroll Interface Fusion Payroll Interface enables you to capture personal payroll information, such as earnings and deductions, along with other data from Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management, and send that information to a third-party payroll provider. Documentation: Payroll interface guide Sample file DBI's used for the payroll interface.Usage Patterns always accessible @ http://www.finapps.com Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";}

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