Search Results

Search found 9592 results on 384 pages for 'manager'.

Page 364/384 | < Previous Page | 360 361 362 363 364 365 366 367 368 369 370 371  | Next Page >

• Beginner Geek: How to Use Bookmarklets on Any Device

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Web browser bookmarklets allow you to perform actions on the current page with just a click or tap. They’re a lightweight alternative to browser extensions. They even work on mobile browsers that don’t support traditional extensions. To use bookmarklets, all you need is a web browser that supports bookmarks — that’s it! Bookmarklets Explained Web pages you view in your browser use JavaScript code. That’s why web pages aren’t just static documents anymore — they’re dynamic. A bookmarklet is a normal bookmark with a piece of JavaScript code instead of a web address. When you click or tap the bookmarklet, it will execute the JavaScript code on the current page instead of loading a different page, as most bookmarks do. Bookmarklets can be used to do something to a web page with a single click. For example, you’ll find bookmarklets associated with web services like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pocket, and LastPass. When you click the bookmarklet, it will run code that lets you easily share the current page with that service. Bookmarklets don’t just have to be  associated with web services. A bookmarklet you click could modify the appearance of the page, stripping away most of the junk and giving you a clean “reading mode.” It could alter fonts, remove images, or insert other content. It can access anything the web page could access. For example, you could use a bookmarklet to reveal a password that just appears as ******* on the page. Unlike browser extensions, bookmarklets don’t run in the background and bog down your browser. They don’t do anything at all until you click them. Because they just use the standard bookmark system, they can also be used in mobile browsers where you couldn’t run extensions. For example, you could install the Pocket bookmarklet in Safari on an iPad and get an “Add to Pocket” option in Safari. Safari doesn’t offer browsing extensions and Apple’s iOS doesn’t offer a “Share” feature like Android and Windows 8 do, so this is the only way to get this direct integration. You could even use the LastPass bookmarklets in Safari on an iPad to integrate LastPass with the Safari web browser. Where to Find Bookmarklets If you’re looking for a bookmarklet for a particular service, you’ll generally find the bookmarklet on that service’s site. Websites like Twitter, Facebook, and Pocket host pages where they provide bookmarklets along with browser extensions. Bookmarklets aren’t like programs. They’re really just a piece of text that you can put in a bookmarklet, so you don’t have to download them a specific site. You can get them from practically anywhere — installing them just involves copying a bit of text off of a web page. For example, you can just search the web for “reveal password bookmarklet” if you wanted a bookmarklet that will reveal passwords. We’ve covered many of the must-have bookmarklets — and our readers have chimed in too — so take a look at our lists for more examples. How to Install a Bookmarklet Bookmarklets are simple to install. When you hover over a bookmarklet on a web page, you’ll see its address begins with “javascript:”. If you have your web browser’s bookmark or favorites toolbar visible, the easiest way to install a bookmarklet is with drag-and-drop. Press Ctrl+Shift+B to show your bookmarks toolbar if you’re using Chrome or Internet Explorer. In Firefox, right-click the toolbar and click Bookmarks Toolbar. Just drag and drop this link to your bookmark toolbar. The bookmarklet is now installed. You can also install bookmarklets manually. Select the bookmarklet’s code and copy it to your clipboard. If the bookmarklet is a link, right-click or long-press the link and copy its address to your clipboard. Open your browser’s bookmarks manager, add a bookmark, and paste the JavaScript code directly into the address box. Give your bookmarklet a name and save it. How to Use a Bookmarklet Bookmarklets are easiest to use if you have your browser’s bookmarks toolbar enabled. Just click the bookmarklet and your browser will run it on the current page. If you don’t have a bookmarks toolbar — such as on Safari on an iPad or another mobile browser — just open your browser’s bookmarks pane and tap or click the bookmark. In mobile Chrome, you’ll need to launch the bookmarklet from the location bar. Open the web page you want to run the bookmarklet on, tap your location bar, and start searching for the name of the bookmarklet. Tap the bookmarklet’s name to run it on the current page. Note that the bookmarklet only appears here because we have it saved as a bookmark in Chrome. You’ll need to add the bookmarklet to your browser’s bookmarks before you can use it in this way. The location bar approach may also be necessary in other browsers. The trick is loading the bookmark so that it will be associated with your current tab. You can’t just open your bookmarks in a separate browser tab and run the bookmarklet from there — it will run on that other browser tab. Bookmarklets are powerful and flexible. While they’re not as flashy as browser extensions, they’re much more lightweight and allow you to get extension-like features in more limited mobile browsers.

  Read the article

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

  - by Pinal Dave

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

  Read the article

• How to check if a Webcam is broken?

  - by user84812

  I just bought an Acer Aspire 3830TG, it comes with an integrated 1.3M HD Webcam. Before buying it i tried with a bootable Lubuntu usb stick, everything worked well except for the webcam, which i thought I had to tweak. The thing is that it seems the camera should work with no problems in ubuntu. The driver is detected, I try dmesg | grep uvcvideo and the output is [ 12.226174] uvcvideo: Found UVC 1.00 device 1.3M HD WebCam (058f:b002) [ 12.245553] usbcore: registered new interface driver uvcvideo I've also tried using different software (guvcview is black when camera output is MJPG and turns to funny colors when YU12 or YV12, cheese is always black, camorama is always with funny colors...). I should have checked that it was working properly with the default os (windows) but now it's too late for that. I even booted with a official Ubuntu Quantal distro from the usb pen, and the results are the same. so, my question is: is there any way to check that the camera is righmt or broken? So, if it's broken, at least i can go to the shop, show them that it's really broken and get an external webcam for free, or st like that. cheers. UPDATE 1 Thanks, jrp. I run sudo lsinput, and the output info about my video is the following: /dev/input/event6 bustype : BUS_USB vendor : 0x58f product : 0xb002 version : 2 name : "1.3M HD WebCam" phys : "usb-0000:00:1a.0-1.3/button" bits ev : EV_SYN EV_KEY /dev/input/event7 bustype : BUS_HOST vendor : 0x0 product : 0x6 version : 0 name : "Video Bus" phys : "LNXVIDEO/video/input0" bits ev : EV_SYN EV_KEY With this info, i'm not pretty sure about running the luvcview command. If I run luvcview -d /dev/video0 -L, the output is the following: SDL information: Video driver: x11 A window manager is available Device information: Device path: /dev/video0 { pixelformat = 'YUYV', description = 'YUV 4:2:2 (YUYV)' } { discrete: width = 640, height = 480 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 160, height = 120 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 176, height = 144 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 320, height = 240 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 352, height = 288 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 1280, height = 720 } Time interval between frame: 1/7, 1/5, { discrete: width = 1280, height = 800 } Time interval between frame: 1/7, 1/5, { discrete: width = 1280, height = 960 } Time interval between frame: 1/7, 1/5, { discrete: width = 1280, height = 1024 } Time interval between frame: 1/7, 1/5, { pixelformat = 'MJPG', description = 'MJPEG' } { discrete: width = 640, height = 480 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 160, height = 120 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 176, height = 144 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 320, height = 240 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 352, height = 288 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 1280, height = 720 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 1280, height = 800 } Time interval between frame: 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 1280, height = 960 } Time interval between frame: 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 1280, height = 1024 } Time interval between frame: 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { pixelformat = 'RGB3', description = 'RGB3' } { discrete: width = 640, height = 480 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 160, height = 120 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 176, height = 144 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 320, height = 240 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 352, height = 288 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 1280, height = 720 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 1280, height = 800 } Time interval between frame: 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 1280, height = 960 } Time interval between frame: 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 1280, height = 1024 } Time interval between frame: 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { pixelformat = 'BGR3', description = 'BGR3' } { discrete: width = 640, height = 480 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 160, height = 120 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 176, height = 144 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 320, height = 240 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 352, height = 288 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 1280, height = 720 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 1280, height = 800 } Time interval between frame: 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 1280, height = 960 } Time interval between frame: 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 1280, height = 1024 } Time interval between frame: 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { pixelformat = 'YU12', description = 'YU12' } { discrete: width = 640, height = 480 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 160, height = 120 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 176, height = 144 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 320, height = 240 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 352, height = 288 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 1280, height = 720 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 1280, height = 800 } Time interval between frame: 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 1280, height = 960 } Time interval between frame: 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 1280, height = 1024 } Time interval between frame: 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { pixelformat = 'YV12', description = 'YV12' } { discrete: width = 640, height = 480 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 160, height = 120 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 176, height = 144 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 320, height = 240 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 352, height = 288 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 1280, height = 720 } Time interval between frame: 1/30, 1/25, 1/20, 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 1280, height = 800 } Time interval between frame: 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 1280, height = 960 } Time interval between frame: 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, { discrete: width = 1280, height = 1024 } Time interval between frame: 1/15, 1/10, 1/5, if i run luvcview by itself, the image is funny (blue and red colors, mainly, with myself in negative state). tx

  Read the article

• A New Threat To Web Applications: Connection String Parameter Pollution (CSPP)

  - by eric.maurice

  Hi, this is Shaomin Wang. I am a security analyst in Oracle's Security Alerts Group. My primary responsibility is to evaluate the security vulnerabilities reported externally by security researchers on Oracle Fusion Middleware and to ensure timely resolution through the Critical Patch Update. Today, I am going to talk about a serious type of attack: Connection String Parameter Pollution (CSPP). Earlier this year, at the Black Hat DC 2010 Conference, two Spanish security researchers, Jose Palazon and Chema Alonso, unveiled a new class of security vulnerabilities, which target insecure dynamic connections between web applications and databases. The attack called Connection String Parameter Pollution (CSPP) exploits specifically the semicolon delimited database connection strings that are constructed dynamically based on the user inputs from web applications. CSPP, if carried out successfully, can be used to steal user identities and hijack web credentials. CSPP is a high risk attack because of the relative ease with which it can be carried out (low access complexity) and the potential results it can have (high impact). In today's blog, we are going to first look at what connection strings are and then review the different ways connection string injections can be leveraged by malicious hackers. We will then discuss how CSPP differs from traditional connection string injection, and the measures organizations can take to prevent this kind of attacks. In web applications, a connection string is a set of values that specifies information to connect to backend data repositories, in most cases, databases. The connection string is passed to a provider or driver to initiate a connection. Vendors or manufacturers write their own providers for different databases. Since there are many different providers and each provider has multiple ways to make a connection, there are many different ways to write a connection string. Here are some examples of connection strings from Oracle Data Provider for .Net/ODP.Net: Oracle Data Provider for .Net / ODP.Net; Manufacturer: Oracle; Type: .NET Framework Class Library: - Using TNS Data Source = orcl; User ID = myUsername; Password = myPassword; - Using integrated security Data Source = orcl; Integrated Security = SSPI; - Using the Easy Connect Naming Method Data Source = username/password@//myserver:1521/my.server.com - Specifying Pooling parameters Data Source=myOracleDB; User Id=myUsername; Password=myPassword; Min Pool Size=10; Connection Lifetime=120; Connection Timeout=60; Incr Pool Size=5; Decr Pool Size=2; There are many variations of the connection strings, but the majority of connection strings are key value pairs delimited by semicolons. Attacks on connection strings are not new (see for example, this SANS White Paper on Securing SQL Connection String). Connection strings are vulnerable to injection attacks when dynamic string concatenation is used to build connection strings based on user input. When the user input is not validated or filtered, and malicious text or characters are not properly escaped, an attacker can potentially access sensitive data or resources. For a number of years now, vendors, including Oracle, have created connection string builder class tools to help developers generate valid connection strings and potentially prevent this kind of vulnerability. Unfortunately, not all application developers use these utilities because they are not aware of the danger posed by this kind of attacks. So how are Connection String parameter Pollution (CSPP) attacks different from traditional Connection String Injection attacks? First, let's look at what parameter pollution attacks are. Parameter pollution is a technique, which typically involves appending repeating parameters to the request strings to attack the receiving end. Much of the public attention around parameter pollution was initiated as a result of a presentation on HTTP Parameter Pollution attacks by Stefano Di Paola and Luca Carettoni delivered at the 2009 Appsec OWASP Conference in Poland. In HTTP Parameter Pollution attacks, an attacker submits additional parameters in HTTP GET/POST to a web application, and if these parameters have the same name as an existing parameter, the web application may react in different ways depends on how the web application and web server deal with multiple parameters with the same name. When applied to connections strings, the rule for the majority of database providers is the "last one wins" algorithm. If a KEYWORD=VALUE pair occurs more than once in the connection string, the value associated with the LAST occurrence is used. This opens the door to some serious attacks. By way of example, in a web application, a user enters username and password; a subsequent connection string is generated to connect to the back end database. Data Source = myDataSource; Initial Catalog = db; Integrated Security = no; User ID = myUsername; Password = XXX; In the password field, if the attacker enters "xxx; Integrated Security = true", the connection string becomes, Data Source = myDataSource; Initial Catalog = db; Integrated Security = no; User ID = myUsername; Password = XXX; Intergrated Security = true; Under the "last one wins" principle, the web application will then try to connect to the database using the operating system account under which the application is running to bypass normal authentication. CSPP poses serious risks for unprepared organizations. It can be particularly dangerous if an Enterprise Systems Management web front-end is compromised, because attackers can then gain access to control panels to configure databases, systems accounts, etc. Fortunately, organizations can take steps to prevent this kind of attacks. CSPP falls into the Injection category of attacks like Cross Site Scripting or SQL Injection, which are made possible when inputs from users are not properly escaped or sanitized. Escaping is a technique used to ensure that characters (mostly from user inputs) are treated as data, not as characters, that is relevant to the interpreter's parser. Software developers need to become aware of the danger of these attacks and learn about the defenses mechanism they need to introduce in their code. As well, software vendors need to provide templates or classes to facilitate coding and eliminate developers' guesswork for protecting against such vulnerabilities. Oracle has introduced the OracleConnectionStringBuilder class in Oracle Data Provider for .NET. Using this class, developers can employ a configuration file to provide the connection string and/or dynamically set the values through key/value pairs. It makes creating connection strings less error-prone and easier to manager, and ultimately using the OracleConnectionStringBuilder class provides better security against injection into connection strings. For More Information: - The OracleConnectionStringBuilder is located at http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B28359_01/win.111/b28375/OracleConnectionStringBuilderClass.htm - Oracle has developed a publicly available course on preventing SQL Injections. The Server Technologies Curriculum course "Defending Against SQL Injection Attacks!" is located at http://st-curriculum.oracle.com/tutorial/SQLInjection/index.htm - The OWASP web site also provides a number of useful resources. It is located at http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Main_Page

  Read the article

• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, May 17, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, May 17, 2010New Projects.NET Essentials Course: .NET Essentials course @ Telerik Academy Training project for the studentsAU/NZ Office 2010 Launch Demos: The AU/NZ Office 2010 Launch Demos are a collection of code samples that were used as part of the Office/SharePoint 2010 launch parties in Australi...CybennyCMS: Very simple CMS system for building sites with ASP.NET with templates for lay-out, content pages with only html content and a xml file for the site...essionPIM: essionPIMGIStance: A library for finding "nearest neighbor" among an in-memory set of positions, in C# and F#. A radius must be specified for making a meaningful s...IP Informer: IP Informer is IP Informer.Kurumsal Ofis Paketi: Kurumsal Ofis Paketi (KOP), Microsoft Ofis 2010 ürünleri için geliştirilmiş eklenti yazılımıdır. KOP, Word ve Excel’de bulunan işlevlerinin genişle...Mockup to XAML: Convert Balsamiq Mockups to XAML. This project supports BMML mockup control conversion using plugins. A standard set of controls are included wit...Open XML Validator: This WPF app give you a brief resume about errors in your Open XML documents.Paint.NET Bulk Image Processor: PDNBulkUpdater is a plug-in for Paint.NET that allows you to efficiently perform operations such as resizing and converting multiple images at the ...PiPiBugNet: PiPiBugNet是一套全新的开源Bug管理系统Roleplay character generator: The roleplay character generator allows the creation of characters for different roleplaying gamesSharePoint User Search WebParts: This project contains SharePoint webparts which provide advanced search configuration and experience for SharePoint 2007. It will be upgrade in few...Spodi: Spodi is created on 22-04-2010TfsPolicyPack: This project will provide a few checkin policies for VS 2010.vccodesandobx: vccodesandobxvccodesandobxvccodesandobxWhiteNile: test project using codeplexNew ReleasesAnimeStore.Net: 1.0.3.0: Build 1.0.3.0 Changes Move some functionality to features (MEF) Filter / Search functionality. Anime hard-copy records storage (e.g Disk Storage ...AU/NZ Office 2010 Launch Demos: Twitter map web part: This is the main twitter map web part download, see the Twitter Map web part page for all the information.Blueset Studio Opensource Projects: 推来: 稳定版本BUtil: BUtil 5.0 Alpha2: The initial implementation of multitasking (except ghost)CassiniDev - Cassini 3.5/4.0 Developers Edition: CassiniDev 3.5.1 and 4.0.1 beta: Beta 2 is released here: url http://cassinidev.codeplex.com/releases/view/45456 New in CassiniDev v3.5.1.0/v4.0.1.0 Added .Net 4 / VS10 build. ...CBM-Command: 2010-05-16: Release Notes - 2010-05-16New Features New navigation options: Page Up, Page Down, Top of Directory, Bottom of Directory. See documentation (http:...CCNet Conditional Plugin: CCNet Conditional for CCNet 1.5: A (quick) build of the plugin for CCNet 1.5 to fix the 17365 bug reported by Beakster. This also adds a new condition "timeCondition"CybennyCMS: Cybenny CMS beta 1: The first beta. Includes a small demo site.Data Extracting SDK: Data Extracting SDK v.1.1 RTM: RTM version of Data Extracting SDK.Duckworth Lewis Professional Edition Calculator: DLcalc 2.0: This software can perform all D/L calculations 100% accurately. From version 2.0 onwards, tables for par scores can also be produced.EPiServer CMS Page Type Builder: Page Type Builder 1.2: Release notes can be found in this blog post.Floe IRC Client: Floe IRC Client 2010-05 R5: - Many new context menu options for @s - Ability to select multiple users in the nick list for some operations (kick, ban) - Bunch of minor bug fix...Graffiti CMS Events Plugin: Version 1.0.1: Minor update to previous version to fix bug where deleted posts were still showing in the calendar.Microsoft Research Boogie: 2010-05-16: Binary release of Boogie and Dafny. (Note, Chalice is not pre-built as part of this binary release. To obtain it, you need to build it yourself f...MSBuild Launch Pad (mPad): 1.0 Beta 2: Basic support for sln, csproj, vbproj, vcxproj, shfbproj, ccproj, oxygene and proj files are added. Basic settings (Show Prompt, and Auto Hide) are...Multi-Language Words Memorizer: Memorizer 1.1: Issues fix, XML db update with new words.NShader - HLSL - GLSL - CG - Shader Syntax Highlighter AddIn for Visual Studio: NShader 1.1: New release of NShader! New : - a Visual Studio 2010 port can be installed through the new extension manager : you just have to download NShaderV...PHPExcel: PHPExcel 1.7.3 Production: Want to contribute?Please refer the Contribute page. DonationsDonate via PayPal. If you want to, we can also add your name / company on our Donati...Rollback - A social backup tool.: Rollback Setup 0.5.1.2 Build 48360: Bug fixes for backing up files which are hidden/system. Changes to make builds on 64 bit Windows 7 using VS 2010 Express edition.Rollback - A social backup tool.: Rollback Setup 0.5.1.3: Updated version number.Shake - C# Make: Shake v0.1.20: New: Simple console logger Changes: Command line params helper writes out syntax and samples (like msbuild) Fixes: Assembly info, file task and r...SharePoint User Search WebParts: v0.1 Friendly MOSS 2007 Search WebPart: Very first version of this webpart. A more stabilized version will follow in few days.Team Deploy: Team Deploy 2010 Beta 1: This is the initial release for Team Deploy 2010 for TFS Team Build 2010. All features from Team Build 2.x are functional in this version. Comp...Team Foundation Server Administration Tool: 2.0: TFS Administration Tool 2.0 TFS Administration Tool 2.0 is built on top of the Team Foundation Server 2008 object model and in order to connect to...The Ping Master: v0.9.0.0: Installer for The Ping Master binariesUseful Office Macros: All Macro Downloads: Please find above the downloads related to this project. Each Excel Workbook below works independently of the others, so you only need to download...VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30516.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVisual Studio DSite: Advanced Digital Board Game (Visual C++ 2008): An advanced digital board game made in visual c 2008.YUI Compressor Custom Tool for Visual Studio: YUI Compressor Custom Tool Full Version: Version 1.0 The following changes have been made: Merged classes to automatically sense if the target file is Javascript or CSS. Cleaned up setu...Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)patterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesPHPExcelASP.NETMost Active Projectspatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryPHPExcelBlogEngine.NETRawrMicrosoft Biology FoundationCustomer Portal Accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRMWindows Azure Command-line Tools for PHP DevelopersDotNetZip LibraryCaliburn: An Application Framework for WPF and SilverlightSQL Server PowerShell Extensions

  Read the article

• nginx problem accessing virtual hosts

  - by Sc0rian

  I am setting up nginx as a reverse proxy. The server runs on directadmin and lamp stack. I have nginx running on port 81. I can access all my sites (including virtual ips) on the port 81. However when I forward the traffic from port 80 to 81, the virtual ips have a message saying "Apache is running normally". Server IPs are fine, and I can still access virtual IP's on 81. [root@~]# netstat -an | grep LISTEN | egrep ":80|:81" tcp 0 0 <virtual ip>:81 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN tcp 0 0 <virtual ip>:81 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN tcp 0 0 <serverip>:81 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN tcp 0 0 :::80 :::* LISTEN apache 24090 0.6 1.3 29252 13612 ? S 18:34 0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd -k start -DSSL apache 24092 0.9 2.1 39584 22056 ? S 18:34 0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd -k start -DSSL apache 24096 0.2 1.9 35892 20256 ? S 18:34 0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd -k start -DSSL apache 24120 0.3 1.7 35752 17840 ? S 18:34 0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd -k start -DSSL apache 24495 0.0 1.4 30892 14756 ? S 18:35 0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd -k start -DSSL apache 24496 1.0 2.1 39892 22164 ? S 18:35 0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd -k start -DSSL apache 24516 1.5 3.6 55496 38040 ? S 18:35 0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd -k start -DSSL apache 24519 0.1 1.2 28996 13224 ? S 18:35 0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd -k start -DSSL apache 24521 2.7 4.0 58244 41984 ? S 18:35 0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd -k start -DSSL apache 24522 0.0 1.2 29124 12672 ? S 18:35 0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd -k start -DSSL apache 24524 0.0 1.1 28740 12364 ? S 18:35 0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd -k start -DSSL apache 24535 1.1 1.7 36008 17876 ? S 18:35 0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd -k start -DSSL apache 24536 0.0 1.1 28592 12084 ? S 18:35 0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd -k start -DSSL apache 24537 0.0 1.1 28592 12112 ? S 18:35 0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd -k start -DSSL apache 24539 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z 18:35 0:00 [httpd] <defunct> apache 24540 0.0 1.1 28592 11540 ? S 18:35 0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd -k start -DSSL apache 24541 0.0 1.1 28592 11548 ? S 18:35 0:00 /usr/sbin/httpd -k start -DSSL root 24548 0.0 0.0 4132 752 pts/0 R+ 18:35 0:00 egrep apache|nginx root 28238 0.0 0.0 19576 284 ? Ss May29 0:00 nginx: master process /usr/local/nginx/sbin/nginx -c /usr/local/nginx/conf/nginx.conf apache 28239 0.0 0.0 19888 804 ? S May29 0:00 nginx: worker process apache 28240 0.0 0.0 19888 548 ? S May29 0:00 nginx: worker process apache 28241 0.0 0.0 19736 484 ? S May29 0:00 nginx: cache manager process here is my nginx conf: cat /usr/local/nginx/conf/nginx.conf user apache apache; worker_processes 2; # Set it according to what your CPU have. 4 Cores = 4 worker_rlimit_nofile 8192; pid /var/run/nginx.pid; events { worker_connections 1024; } http { include mime.types; default_type application/octet-stream; log_format main '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] ' '"$request" $status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" ' '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"'; server_tokens off; access_log /var/log/nginx_access.log main; error_log /var/log/nginx_error.log debug; server_names_hash_bucket_size 64; sendfile on; tcp_nopush on; tcp_nodelay off; keepalive_timeout 30; gzip on; gzip_comp_level 9; gzip_proxied any; proxy_buffering on; proxy_cache_path /usr/local/nginx/proxy_temp levels=1:2 keys_zone=one:15m inactive=7d max_size=1000m; proxy_buffer_size 16k; proxy_buffers 100 8k; proxy_connect_timeout 60; proxy_send_timeout 60; proxy_read_timeout 60; server { listen <server ip>:81 default rcvbuf=8192 sndbuf=16384 backlog=32000; # Real IP here server_name <server host name> _; # "_" is for handle all hosts that are not described by server_name charset off; access_log /var/log/nginx_host_general.access.log main; location / { proxy_set_header Host $host; proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; proxy_pass http://<server ip>; # Real IP here client_max_body_size 16m; client_body_buffer_size 128k; proxy_buffering on; proxy_connect_timeout 90; proxy_send_timeout 90; proxy_read_timeout 120; proxy_buffer_size 16k; proxy_buffers 32 32k; proxy_busy_buffers_size 64k; proxy_temp_file_write_size 64k; } location /nginx_status { stub_status on; access_log off; allow 127.0.0.1; deny all; } } include /usr/local/nginx/vhosts/*.conf; } here is my vhost conf: # cat /usr/local/nginx/vhosts/1.conf server { listen <virt ip>:81 default rcvbuf=8192 sndbuf=16384 backlog=32000; # Real IP here server_name <virt domain name>.com ; # "_" is for handle all hosts that are not described by server_name charset off; access_log /var/log/nginx_host_general.access.log main; location / { proxy_set_header Host $host; proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; proxy_pass http://<virt ip>; # Real IP here client_max_body_size 16m; client_body_buffer_size 128k; proxy_buffering on; proxy_connect_timeout 90; proxy_send_timeout 90; proxy_read_timeout 120; proxy_buffer_size 16k; proxy_buffers 32 32k; proxy_busy_buffers_size 64k; proxy_temp_file_write_size 64k; } }

  Read the article

• SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #032

  - by Pinal Dave

  Here is the list of selected articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2007 Complete Series of Database Coding Standards and Guidelines SQL SERVER Database Coding Standards and Guidelines – Introduction SQL SERVER – Database Coding Standards and Guidelines – Part 1 SQL SERVER – Database Coding Standards and Guidelines – Part 2 SQL SERVER Database Coding Standards and Guidelines Complete List Download Explanation and Example – SELF JOIN When all of the data you require is contained within a single table, but data needed to extract is related to each other in the table itself. Examples of this type of data relate to Employee information, where the table may have both an Employee’s ID number for each record and also a field that displays the ID number of an Employee’s supervisor or manager. To retrieve the data tables are required to relate/join to itself. Insert Multiple Records Using One Insert Statement – Use of UNION ALL This is very interesting question I have received from new developer. How can I insert multiple values in table using only one insert? Now this is interesting question. When there are multiple records are to be inserted in the table following is the common way using T-SQL. Function to Display Current Week Date and Day – Weekly Calendar Straight blog post with script to find current week date and day based on the parameters passed in the function.  2008 In my beginning years, I have almost same confusion as many of the developer had in their earlier years. Here are two of the interesting question which I have attempted to answer in my early year. Even if you are experienced developer may be you will still like to read following two questions: Order Of Column In Index Order of Conditions in WHERE Clauses Example of DISTINCT in Aggregate Functions Have you ever used DISTINCT with the Aggregation Function? Here is a simple example about how users can do it. Create a Comma Delimited List Using SELECT Clause From Table Column Straight to script example where I explained how to do something easy and quickly. Compound Assignment Operators SQL SERVER 2008 has introduced new concept of Compound Assignment Operators. Compound Assignment Operators are available in many other programming languages for quite some time. Compound Assignment Operators is operator where variables are operated upon and assigned on the same line. PIVOT and UNPIVOT Table Examples Here is a very interesting question – the answer to the question can be YES or NO both. “If we PIVOT any table and UNPIVOT that table do we get our original table?” Read the blog post to get the explanation of the question above. 2009 What is Interim Table – Simple Definition of Interim Table The interim table is a table that is generated by joining two tables and not the final result table. In other words, when two tables are joined they create an interim table as resultset but the resultset is not final yet. It may be possible that more tables are about to join on the interim table, and more operations are still to be applied on that table (e.g. Order By, Having etc). Besides, it may be possible that there is no interim table; sometimes final table is what is generated when the query is run. 2010 Stored Procedure and Transactions If Stored Procedure is transactional then, it should roll back complete transactions when it encounters any errors. Well, that does not happen in this case, which proves that Stored Procedure does not only provide just the transactional feature to a batch of T-SQL. Generate Database Script for SQL Azure When talking about SQL Azure the most common complaint I hear is that the script generated from stand-along SQL Server database is not compatible with SQL Azure. This was true for some time for sure but not any more. If you have SQL Server 2008 R2 installed you can follow the guideline below to generate a script which is compatible with SQL Azure. Convert IN to EXISTS – Performance Talk It is NOT necessary that every time when IN is replaced by EXISTS it gives better performance. However, in our case listed above it does for sure give better performance. You can read about this subject in the associated blog post. Subquery or Join – Various Options – SQL Server Engine Knows the Best Every single time whenever there is a performance tuning exercise, I hear the conversation from developer where some prefer subquery and some prefer join. In this two part blog post, I explain the same in the detail with examples. Part 1 | Part 2 Merge Operations – Insert, Update, Delete in Single Execution MERGE is a new feature that provides an efficient way to do multiple DML operations. In earlier versions of SQL Server, we had to write separate statements to INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE data based on certain conditions; however, at present, by using the MERGE statement, we can include the logic of such data changes in one statement that even checks when the data is matched and then just update it, and similarly, when the data is unmatched, it is inserted. 2011 Puzzle – Statistics are not updated but are Created Once Here is the quick scenario about my setup. Create Table Insert 1000 Records Check the Statistics Now insert 10 times more 10,000 indexes Check the Statistics – it will be NOT updated – WHY? Question to You – When to use Function and When to use Stored Procedure Personally, I believe that they are both different things - they cannot be compared. I can say, it will be like comparing apples and oranges. Each has its own unique use. However, they can be used interchangeably at many times and in real life (i.e., production environment). I have personally seen both of these being used interchangeably many times. This is the precise reason for asking this question. 2012 In year 2012 I had two interesting series ran on the blog. If there is no fun in learning, the learning becomes a burden. For the same reason, I had decided to build a three part quiz around SEQUENCE. The quiz was to identify the next value of the sequence. I encourage all of you to take part in this fun quiz. Guess the Next Value – Puzzle 1 Guess the Next Value – Puzzle 2 Guess the Next Value – Puzzle 3 Guess the Next Value – Puzzle 4 Simple Example to Configure Resource Governor – Introduction to Resource Governor Resource Governor is a feature which can manage SQL Server Workload and System Resource Consumption. We can limit the amount of CPU and memory consumption by limiting /governing /throttling on the SQL Server. If there are different workloads running on SQL Server and each of the workload needs different resources or when workloads are competing for resources with each other and affecting the performance of the whole server resource governor is a very important task. Tricks to Replace SELECT * with Column Names – SQL in Sixty Seconds #017 – Video  Retrieves unnecessary columns and increases network traffic When a new columns are added views needs to be refreshed manually Leads to usage of sub-optimal execution plan Uses clustered index in most of the cases instead of using optimal index It is difficult to debug SQL SERVER – Load Generator – Free Tool From CodePlex The best part of this SQL Server Load Generator is that users can run multiple simultaneous queries again SQL Server using different login account and different application name. The interface of the tool is extremely easy to use and very intuitive as well. A Puzzle – Swap Value of Column Without Case Statement Let us assume there is a single column in the table called Gender. The challenge is to write a single update statement which will flip or swap the value in the column. For example if the value in the gender column is ‘male’ swap it with ‘female’ and if the value is ‘female’ swap it with ‘male’. 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

  Read the article

• Massive Silverlight Giveaway! DevExpress , Syncfusion, Crypto Obfuscator and SL Spy!

  - by mbcrump

  Oh my, have we grown! Maybe I should change the name to Multiple Silverlight Giveaways. So far, my Silverlight giveaways have been such a success that I’m going to be able to give away more than one Silverlight product every month. Last month, we gave away 3 great products. 1) ComponentOne Silverlight Controls 2)  ComponentOne XAP Optimizer (with obfuscation) and 3) Silverlight Spy. This month, we will give away 4 great Silverlight products and have 4 different winners. This way the Silverlight community can grow with more than just one person winning all the prizes. This month we will be giving away: DevExpress Silverlight Controls – Over 50+ Silverlight Controls Syncfusion User Interface Edition - Create stunning line of business silverlight applications with a wide range of components including a high performance grid, docking manager, chart, gauge, scheduler and much more. Crypto Obfuscator – Works for all .NET including Silverlight/Windows Phone 7. Silverlight Spy – provides a license EVERY month for this giveaway. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Win a FREE developer’s license of one of the products listed above! 4 winners will be announced on April 1st, 2011! To be entered into the contest do the following things: Subscribe to my feed. – Use Google Reader, email or whatever is best for you.  Leave a comment below with a valid email account (I WILL NOT share this info with anyone.) Retweet the following : I just entered to win free #Silverlight controls from @mbcrump . Register here: http://mcrump.me/fTSmB8 ! Don’t change the URL because this will allow me to track the users that Tweet this page. Don’t forget to visit each of the vendors sites because they made this possible. MichaelCrump.Net provides Silverlight Giveaways every month. You can also see the latest giveaway by bookmarking http://giveaways.michaelcrump.net . ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- DevExpress Silverlight Controls Let’s take a quick look at some of the software that is provided in this giveaway. Before we get started with the Silverlight Controls, here is a couple of links to bookmark for the DevExpress Silverlight Controls: The Live Demos of the Silverlight Controls is located here. Great Video Tutorials of the Silverlight Controls are here. One thing that I liked about the DevExpress is how easy it was to find demos of each control. After you install the controls the following Program Group appears complete with “demos” that include full-source.   So, the first question that you may ask is, “What is included?” Here is the official list below. I wanted to show several of the controls that I think developers will use the most. The Book – Very rich animation between switching pages. Very easy to add your own images and custom text. The Menu – This is another control that just looked great. You can easily add images to the menu items with a few lines of XAML. The Window / Dialog Box – You can use this control to make a very beautiful “Wizard” to help your users navigate between pages. This is useful in setup or installation. Calculator – This would be useful for any type of Banking app. Also a first that I’ve seen from a 3rd party Control company. DatePicker – This controls feels a lot smoother than the one provided by Microsoft. It also provides the ability to “Clear” the selection. Overall the DevExpress Silverlight Controls feature a lot of quality controls that you should check out. You can go ahead and download a trial version of it right now by clicking here. If you win the contest you can simply enter your registration key and continue using the product without reinstalling. Syncfusion User Interface Edition Before we get started with the Syncfusion User Interface Edition, here is a couple of links to bookmark. The Live Demos can be found here. You can download a demo of it now at http://www.syncfusion.com/downloads/evalstart. After you install the Syncfusion, you can view the dashboard to run locally installed samples. You may also download the documentation to your local machine if needed. Since the name of the package is “User Interface Edition”, I decided to share several samples that struck me as “awesome”. Dashboard Gauges – I was very impressed with the various gauges they have included. The digital clock also looks very impressive. Diagram – The diagrams are also very easy to build. In the sample project below you can drag/drop the shapes onto the content pane. More complex lines like the Bezier lines are also easy to create using Syncfusion. Scheduling – Another strong component was the Scheduling with built-in support for Themes. Tools – If all of that wasn’t enough, it also comes with a nice pack of essential tools. Syncfusion has a nice variety of Silverlight Controls that you should check out. You can go ahead and download a trial version of it right now by clicking here. Crypto Obfuscator The following feature set is what is important to me in an Obfuscator since I am a Silverlight/WP7 Developer: And thankfully this is what you get in Crypto Obfuscator. You can download a trial version right now if you want to go ahead and play with it. Let’s spend a few moments taking a look at the application. After you have installed Crypto Obfuscator you will see the following screen: After you click on Assemblies you have the option to add your .XAP file in: I went ahead and loaded my .xap file from a Silverlight Application. At this point, you can simply save your project and hit “Obfuscate” and your done. You don’t have to mess with any of the other settings if you don’t want too. Of course, you can change the settings and add obfuscation rules, watermarks and signing if you wish.  After Obfuscation, it looks like this in .NET Reflector: I was trying to browse through methods and it actually crashed Reflector. This confirms the level of protection the obfuscator is providing. If this were a commercial application that my team built, I would have a huge smile on my face right now. Crypto Obfuscator is a great product and I hope you will spend the time learning more about it. Silverlight Spy Silverlight Spy is a runtime inspector tool that will tell you pretty much everything that is going on with the application. Basically, you give it a URL that contains a Silverlight application and you can explore the element tree, events, xaml and so much more. This has already been reviewed on MichaelCrump.net. _________________________________________________________________________________________ Thanks for reading and don’t forget to leave a comment below in order to win one of the four prizes available! Subscribe to my feed

  Read the article

• How to use Azure storage for uploading and displaying pictures.

  - by Magnus Karlsson

  Basic set up of Azure storage for local development and production. This is a somewhat completion of the following guide from http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/net/how-to-guides/blob-storage/ that also involves a practical example that I believe is commonly used, i.e. upload and present an image from a user.   First we set up for local storage and then we configure for them to work on a web role. Steps: 1. Configure connection string locally. 2. Configure model, controllers and razor views.   1. Setup connectionsstring 1.1 Right click your web role and choose “Properties”. 1.2 Click Settings. 1.3 Add setting. 1.4 Name your setting. This will be the name of the connectionstring. 1.5 Click the ellipsis to the right. (the ellipsis appear when you mark the area. 1.6 The following window appears- Select “Windows Azure storage emulator” and click ok.   Now we have a connection string to use. To be able to use it we need to make sure we have windows azure tools for storage. 2.1 Click Tools –> Library Package manager –> Manage Nuget packages for solution. 2.2 This is what it looks like after it has been added.   Now on to what the code should look like. 3.1 First we need a view which collects images to upload. Here Index.cshtml. 1: @model List<string> 2:  3: @{ 4: ViewBag.Title = "Index"; 5: } 6:  7: <h2>Index</h2> 8: <form action="@Url.Action("Upload")" method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data"> 9:  10: <label for="file">Filename:</label> 11: <input type="file" name="file" id="file1" /> 12: <br /> 13: <label for="file">Filename:</label> 14: <input type="file" name="file" id="file2" /> 15: <br /> 16: <label for="file">Filename:</label> 17: <input type="file" name="file" id="file3" /> 18: <br /> 19: <label for="file">Filename:</label> 20: <input type="file" name="file" id="file4" /> 21: <br /> 22: <input type="submit" value="Submit" /> 23: 24: </form> 25:  26: @foreach (var item in Model) { 27:  28: <img src="@item" alt="Alternate text"/> 29: } 3.2 We need a controller to receive the post. Notice the “containername” string I send to the blobhandler. I use this as a folder for the pictures for each user. If this is not a requirement you could just call it container or anything with small characters directly when creating the container. 1: public ActionResult Upload(IEnumerable<HttpPostedFileBase> file) 2: { 3: BlobHandler bh = new BlobHandler("containername"); 4: bh.Upload(file); 5: var blobUris=bh.GetBlobs(); 6: 7: return RedirectToAction("Index",blobUris); 8: } 3.3 The handler model. I’ll let the comments speak for themselves. 1: public class BlobHandler 2: { 3: // Retrieve storage account from connection string. 4: CloudStorageAccount storageAccount = CloudStorageAccount.Parse( 5: CloudConfigurationManager.GetSetting("StorageConnectionString")); 6: 7: private string imageDirecoryUrl; 8: 9: /// <summary> 10: /// Receives the users Id for where the pictures are and creates 11: /// a blob storage with that name if it does not exist. 12: /// </summary> 13: /// <param name="imageDirecoryUrl"></param> 14: public BlobHandler(string imageDirecoryUrl) 15: { 16: this.imageDirecoryUrl = imageDirecoryUrl; 17: // Create the blob client. 18: CloudBlobClient blobClient = storageAccount.CreateCloudBlobClient(); 19: 20: // Retrieve a reference to a container. 21: CloudBlobContainer container = blobClient.GetContainerReference(imageDirecoryUrl); 22: 23: // Create the container if it doesn't already exist. 24: container.CreateIfNotExists(); 25: 26: //Make available to everyone 27: container.SetPermissions( 28: new BlobContainerPermissions 29: { 30: PublicAccess = BlobContainerPublicAccessType.Blob 31: }); 32: } 33: 34: public void Upload(IEnumerable<HttpPostedFileBase> file) 35: { 36: // Create the blob client. 37: CloudBlobClient blobClient = storageAccount.CreateCloudBlobClient(); 38: 39: // Retrieve a reference to a container. 40: CloudBlobContainer container = blobClient.GetContainerReference(imageDirecoryUrl); 41: 42: if (file != null) 43: { 44: foreach (var f in file) 45: { 46: if (f != null) 47: { 48: CloudBlockBlob blockBlob = container.GetBlockBlobReference(f.FileName); 49: blockBlob.UploadFromStream(f.InputStream); 50: } 51: } 52: } 53: } 54: 55: public List<string> GetBlobs() 56: { 57: // Create the blob client. 58: CloudBlobClient blobClient = storageAccount.CreateCloudBlobClient(); 59: 60: // Retrieve reference to a previously created container. 61: CloudBlobContainer container = blobClient.GetContainerReference(imageDirecoryUrl); 62: 63: List<string> blobs = new List<string>(); 64: 65: // Loop over blobs within the container and output the URI to each of them 66: foreach (var blobItem in container.ListBlobs()) 67: blobs.Add(blobItem.Uri.ToString()); 68: 69: return blobs; 70: } 71: } 3.4 So, when the files have been uploaded we will get them to present them to out user in the index page. Pretty straight forward. In this example we only present the image by sending the Uri’s to the view. A better way would be to save them up in a view model containing URI, metadata, alternate text, and other relevant information but for this example this is all we need.   4. Now press F5 in your solution to try it out. You can see the storage emulator UI here:     4.1 If you get any exceptions or errors I suggest to first check if the service Is running correctly. I had problem with this and they seemed related to the installation and a reboot fixed my problems.     5. Set up for Cloud storage. To do this we need to add configuration for cloud just as we did for local in step one. 5.1 We need our keys to do this. Go to the windows Azure menagement portal, select storage icon to the right and click “Manage keys”. (Image from a different blog post though).   5.2 Do as in step 1.but replace step 1.6 with: 1.6 Choose “Manually entered credentials”. Enter your account name. 1.7 Paste your Account Key from step 5.1. and click ok.   5.3. Save, publish and run! Please feel free to ask any questions using the comments form at the bottom of this page. I will get back to you to help you solve any questions. Our consultancy agency also provides services in the Nordic regions if you would like any further support.

  Read the article

• I have 6 updates that won't install on Ubuntu 12.04?

  - by Taylor

  I'm an Ubuntu novice, so any help here is greatly appreciated! I'm running Ubuntu 12.04, and I have six updates that just won't install. I've tried Update Manger, sudo apt-get upgrade, and sudo apt-get update. Nothing has worked so far. Here are the details I get from Update Manager: installArchives() failed: Setting up linux-image-3.2.0-24-generic-pae (3.2.0-24.37) ... Running depmod. sh: 1: /usr/sbin/update-initramfs: not found Failed to create initrd image. dpkg: error processing linux-image-3.2.0-24-generic-pae (--configure): subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 2 Setting up linux-image-3.2.0-27-generic-pae (3.2.0-27.43) ... No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already Running depmod. sh: 1: /usr/sbin/update-initramfs: not found Failed to create initrd image. dpkg: error processing linux-image-3.2.0-27-generic-pae (--configure): subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 2 No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already Setting up linux-image-3.2.0-29-generic-pae (3.2.0-29.46) ... Running depmod. sh: 1: /usr/sbin/update-initramfs: not found Failed to create initrd image. dpkg: error processing linux-image-3.2.0-29-generic-pae (--configure): subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 2 No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already Setting up udev (175-0ubuntu9.1) ... udev stop/waiting udev start/running, process 3685 /var/lib/dpkg/info/udev.postinst: 87: /var/lib/dpkg/info/udev.postinst: update-initramfs: not found dpkg: error processing udev (--configure): subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 127 No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of xserver-xorg-core: xserver-xorg-core depends on udev (= 149); however: Package udev is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing xserver-xorg-core (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of fglrx: fglrx depends on xserver-xorg-core; however: Package xserver-xorg-core is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing fglrx (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of fglrx-amdcccle: fglrx-amdcccle depends on fglrx; however: Package fglrx is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing fglrx-amdcccle (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of linux-image-generic-pae: linux-image-generic-pae depends on linux-image-3.2.0-24-generic-pae; however: Package linux-image-3.2.0-24-generic-pae is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing linux-image-generic-pae (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of linux-generic-pae: linux-generic-pae depends on linux-image-generic-pae (= 3.2.0.24.26); however: Package linux-image-generic-pae is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing linux-generic-pae (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of xserver-xorg-video-intel: xserver-xorg-video-intel depends on xorg-video-abi-11; however: Package xorg-video-abi-11 is not installed. Package xserver-xorg-core which provides xorg-video-abi-11 is not configured yet. xserver-xorg-video-intel depends on xserver-xorg-core (= 2:1.10.99.901); however: Package xserver-xorg-core is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing xserver-xorg-video-intel (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of fglrx-dev:No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already fglrx-dev depends on fglrx; however: Package fglrx is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing fglrx-dev (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already Errors were encountered while processing: linux-image-3.2.0-24-generic-pae linux-image-3.2.0-27-generic-pae linux-image-3.2.0-29-generic-pae udev xserver-xorg-core fglrx fglrx-amdcccle linux-image-generic-pae linux-generic-pae xserver-xorg-video-intel fglrx-dev Error in function: Setting up linux-image-3.2.0-24-generic-pae (3.2.0-24.37) ... Running depmod. sh: 1: /usr/sbin/update-initramfs: not found Failed to create initrd image. dpkg: error processing linux-image-3.2.0-24-generic-pae (--configure): subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 2 Setting up linux-image-3.2.0-29-generic-pae (3.2.0-29.46) ... Running depmod. sh: 1: /usr/sbin/update-initramfs: not found Failed to create initrd image. dpkg: error processing linux-image-3.2.0-29-generic-pae (--configure): subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 2 Setting up linux-image-3.2.0-27-generic-pae (3.2.0-27.43) ... Running depmod. sh: 1: /usr/sbin/update-initramfs: not found Failed to create initrd image. dpkg: error processing linux-image-3.2.0-27-generic-pae (--configure): subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 2 Setting up udev (175-0ubuntu9.1) ... udev stop/waiting udev start/running, process 3782 /var/lib/dpkg/info/udev.postinst: 87: /var/lib/dpkg/info/udev.postinst: update-initramfs: not found dpkg: error processing udev (--configure): subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 127 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of linux-image-generic-pae: linux-image-generic-pae depends on linux-image-3.2.0-24-generic-pae; however: Package linux-image-3.2.0-24-generic-pae is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing linux-image-generic-pae (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of xserver-xorg-core: xserver-xorg-core depends on udev (= 149); however: Package udev is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing xserver-xorg-core (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of fglrx: fglrx depends on xserver-xorg-core; however: Package xserver-xorg-core is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing fglrx (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of linux-generic-pae: linux-generic-pae depends on linux-image-generic-pae (= 3.2.0.24.26); however: Package linux-image-generic-pae is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing linux-generic-pae (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of xserver-xorg-video-intel: xserver-xorg-video-intel depends on xorg-video-abi-11; however: Package xorg-video-abi-11 is not installed. Package xserver-xorg-core which provides xorg-video-abi-11 is not configured yet. xserver-xorg-video-intel depends on xserver-xorg-core (= 2:1.10.99.901); however: Package xserver-xorg-core is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing xserver-xorg-video-intel (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of fglrx-amdcccle: fglrx-amdcccle depends on fglrx; however: Package fglrx is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing fglrx-amdcccle (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of fglrx-dev: fglrx-dev depends on fglrx; however: Package fglrx is not configured yet. dpkg: error processing fglrx-dev (--configure): dependency problems - leaving unconfigured

  Read the article

• The Business of Winning Innovation: An Exclusive Blog Series

  - by Kerrie Foy

  "The Business of Winning Innovation” is a series of articles authored by Oracle Agile PLM experts on what it takes to make innovation a successful and lucrative competitive advantage. Our customers have proven Agile PLM applications to be enormously flexible and comprehensive, so we’ve launched this article series to showcase some of the most fascinating, value-packed use cases. In this article by Keith Colonna, we kick-off the series by taking a look at the science side of innovation within the Consumer Products industry and how PLM can help companies innovate faster, cheaper, smarter. This article will review how innovation has become the lifeline for growth within consumer products companies and how certain companies are “winning” by creating a competitive advantage for themselves by taking a more enterprise-wide,systematic approach to “innovation”.   Managing the Science of Innovation within the Consumer Products Industry By: Keith Colonna, Value Chain Solution Manager, Oracle The consumer products (CP) industry is very mature and competitive. Most companies within this industry have saturated North America (NA) with their products thus maximizing their NA growth potential. Future growth is expected to come from either expansion outside of North America and/or by way of new ideas and products. Innovation plays an integral role in both of these strategies, whether you’re innovating business processes or the products themselves, and may cause several challenges for the typical CP company, Becoming more innovative is both an art and a science. Most CP companies are very good at the art of coming up with new innovative ideas, but many struggle with perfecting the science aspect that involves the best practice processes that help companies quickly turn ideas into sellable products and services. Symptoms and Causes of Business Pain Struggles associated with the science of innovation show up in a variety of ways, like: · Establishing and storing innovative product ideas and data · Funneling these ideas to the chosen few · Time to market cycle time and on-time launch rates · Success rates, or how often the best idea gets chosen · Imperfect decision making (i.e. the ability to kill projects that are not projected to be winners) · Achieving financial goals · Return on R&D investment · Communicating internally and externally as more outsource partners are added globally · Knowing your new product pipeline and project status These challenges (and others) can be consolidated into three root causes: A lack of visibility Poor data with limited access The inability to truly collaborate enterprise-wide throughout your extended value chain Choose the Right Remedy Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions are uniquely designed to help companies solve these types challenges and their root causes. However, PLM solutions can vary widely in terms of configurability, functionality, time-to-value, etc. Business leaders should evaluate PLM solution in terms of their own business drivers and long-term vision to determine the right fit. Many of these solutions are point solutions that can help you cure only one or two business pains in the short term. Others have been designed to serve other industries with different needs. Then there are those solutions that demo well but are owned by companies that are either unable or unwilling to continuously improve their solution to stay abreast of the ever changing needs of the CP industry to grow through innovation. What the Right PLM Solution Should Do for You Based on more than twenty years working in the CP industry, I recommend investing in a single solution that can help you solve all of the issues associated with the science of innovation in a totally integrated fashion. By integration I mean the (1) integration of the all of the processes associated with the development, maintenance and delivery of your product data, and (2) the integration, or harmonization of this product data with other downstream sources, like ERP, product catalogues and the GS1 Global Data Synchronization Network (or GDSN, which is now a CP industry requirement for doing business with most retailers). The right PLM solution should help you: Increase Revenue. A best practice PLM solution should help a company grow its revenues by consolidating product development cycle-time and helping companies get new and improved products to market sooner. PLM should also eliminate many of the root causes for a product being returned, refused and/or reclaimed (which takes away from top-line growth) by creating an enterprise-wide, collaborative, workflow-driven environment. Reduce Costs. A strong PLM solution should help shave many unnecessary costs that companies typically take for granted. Rationalizing SKU’s, components (ingredients and packaging) and suppliers is a major opportunity at most companies that PLM should help address. A natural outcome of this rationalization is lower direct material spend and a reduction of inventory. Another cost cutting opportunity comes with PLM when it helps companies avoid certain costs associated with process inefficiencies that lead to scrap, rework, excess and obsolete inventory, poor end of life administration, higher cost of quality and regulatory and increased expediting. Mitigate Risk. Risks are the hardest to quantify but can be the most costly to a company. Food safety, recalls, line shutdowns, customer dissatisfaction and, worst of all, the potential tarnishing of your brands are a few of the debilitating risks that CP companies deal with on a daily basis. These risks are so uniquely severe that they require an enterprise PLM solution specifically designed for the CP industry that safeguards product information and processes while still allowing the art of innovation to flourish. Many CP companies have already created a winning advantage by leveraging a single, best practice PLM solution to establish an enterprise-wide, systematic approach to innovation. Oracle’s Answer for the Consumer Products Industry Oracle is dedicated to solving the growth and innovation challenges facing the CP industry. Oracle’s Agile Product Lifecycle Management for Process solution was originally developed with and for CP companies and is driven by a specialized development staff solely focused on maintaining and continuously improving the solution per the latest industry requirements. Agile PLM for Process helps CP companies handle all of the processes associated with managing the science of the innovation process, including: specification management, new product development/project and portfolio management, formulation optimization, supplier management, and quality and regulatory compliance to name a few. And as I mentioned earlier, integration is absolutely critical. Many Oracle CP customers, both with Oracle ERP systems and non-Oracle ERP systems, report benefits from Oracle’s Agile PLM for Process. In future articles we will explain in greater detail how both existing Oracle customers (like Gallo, Smuckers, Land-O-Lakes and Starbucks) and new Oracle customers (like ConAgra, Tyson, McDonalds and Heinz) have all realized the benefits of Agile PLM for Process and its integration to their ERP systems. More to Come Stay tuned for more articles in our blog series “The Business of Winning Innovation.” While we will also feature articles focused on other industries, look forward to more on how Agile PLM for Process addresses innovation challenges facing the CP industry. Additional topics include: Innovation Data Management (IDM), New Product Development (NPD), Product Quality Management (PQM), Menu Management,Private Label Management, and more! . Watch this video for more info about Agile PLM for Process

  Read the article

• Getting your bearings and defining the project objective

  - by johndoucette

  I wrote this two years ago and thought it was worth posting… Some may think this is a daunting task and some may even say “what a waste of time” and want to open MS Project and start typing out tasks because someone asked for an estimate and a task list. Hell, maybe you even use Excel and pump out a spreadsheet with some real scientific formula for guessing how long it will take to code a bunch of classes. However, this short exercise will provide the basis for the entire project, whether small or large and be a great friend when communicating to anyone on your team or even your client. I call this the Project Brief. If you find yourself going beyond a single page, then you must decompose the sections and summarize your findings so there is a complete and clear picture of the project you are working on in a relatively short statement. Here is a great quote from the PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge) relative to what a project is;   A project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service or result. With this in mind, the project brief should encompass the entirety (objective) of the endeavor in its explanation and what it will take (goals) to create the product, service or result (deliverables). Normally the process of identifying the project objective is done during the first stage of a project called the Project Kickoff, but you can perform this very important step anytime to help you get a bearing. There are many more parts to helping a project stay on course, but this is usually the foundation where it can be grounded on. Through a series of 3 exercises, you should be able to come up with the objective, goals and deliverables on your project. Follow these steps, and in no time (about &frac12; hour), you will have the foundation of your project plan. (See examples below) Exercise 1 – Objectives Begin with the end in mind. Think about your project in business terms with a couple things to help you understand the objective; Reference the business benefit in terms of cost, speed and / or quality, Provide a higher level of what the outcome will look like (future sense) It should be non-measurable, that’s what the goals are all about The output should be a single paragraph with three sentences and take 10 minutes to write. *Typically, agreement must be reached on the objectives of the project before you would proceed to the next steps of the project. Exercise 2 – Goals A project goal is a statement that answers questions about who, what, why, where and when. A good project goal statement; Answers the five “W” questions for the project Is measurable in each of its parts Is published and agreed on by all the owners This helps the Project Manager receive confirmation on defining the project target. Using the established project objective done in the first exercise, think about the things it will take to get the job done. Think about tangible activities which are the top level tasks in a typical Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). The overall goal statement plus all the deliverables (next exercise) can be seen as the project team’s contract with the project owners. Write 3 - 5 goals in about 10 minutes. You should not write the words “Who, what, why, where and when, but merely be able to answer the questions when you read a goal. Exercise 3 – Deliverables Every project creates some type of output and these outputs are called deliverables. There are two classes of deliverables; Internal – produced for project team members to meet their goals External – produced for project owners to meet their expectations The list you enter here provides a checklist for the team’s delivery and/or is a statement of all the expectations of the project owners. Here are some typical project deliverables; Product and product documentation End product/system Requirements/feature documents Installation guides Demo/prototype System design documents User guides/help files Plans Project plan Training plan Conversion/installation/delivery plan Test plans Documentation plan Communication plan Reports and general documentation Progress reports System acceptance tests Outstanding bug list Procedures Risk and issue logs Project history Deliverables should go with each of the goals. Have 3-5 deliverables for each goal. When you are done, you will have established a great foundation for the clarity of your project. This exercise can take some time, but with practice, you should be able to whip this one out in 10 minutes as well, especially if you are intimate with an ongoing project. Samples  Objective [Client] is implementing a series of MOSS sites to support external public (Internet), internal employee (Intranet) and an external secure (password protected Internet) applications. This project will focus on the public-facing web site and will provide [Client] with architectural recommendations based on the current design being done by their design partner [Partner] and the internal Content Team. In addition, it will provide [Client] with a development plan and confidence they need to deploy a world class public Internet website. Goals 1.  [Consultant] will provide technical guidance and set project team expectations for the implementation of the MOSS Internet site based on provided features/functions within three weeks. 2.  [Consultant] will understand phase 2 secure password-protected Internet site design and provide recommendations.   Deliverables 1.1  Public Internet (unsecure) Architectural Recommendation Plan 1.2  Physical Site construction Work Breakdown Structure and plan (Time, cost and resources needed) 2.1  Two Factor authentication recommendation document   Objective [Client] is currently using an application developed by [Consultant] many years ago called "XXX". This application, although functional, does not meet their new updated business requirements and contains a few defects which [Client] has developed work-around processes. [Client] would like to have a "new and improved" system to support their membership management needs by expanding membership and subscription capabilities, provide accounting integration with internal (GL) and external (VeriSign) systems, and implement hooks to the current CRM solution. This effort will take place through a series of phases, beginning with envisioning. Goals 1. Through discussions with users, [Consultant] will discover current issues/bugs which need to be resolved which must meet the current functionality requirements within three weeks. 2. [Consultant] will gather requirements from the users about what is "needed" vs. "what they have" for enhancements and provide a high level document supporting their needs. 3. [Consultant] will meet with the team members through a series of meetings and help define the overall project plan to deliver a new and improved solution. Deliverables 1.1 Prioritized list of Current application issues/bugs that need to be resolved 1.2 Provide a resolution plan on the issues/bugs identified in the current application 1.3 Risk Assessment Document 2.1 Deliver a Requirements Document showing high-level [Client] needs for the new XXX application. · New feature functionality not in the application today · Existing functionality that will remain in the new functionality 2.2 Reporting Requirements Document 3.1 A Project Plan showing the deliverables and cost for the next (second) phase of this project. 3.2 A Statement of Work for the next (second) phase of this project. 3.3 An Estimate of any work that would need to follow the second phase.

  Read the article

• Integrating Oracle Hyperion Smart View Data Queries with MS Word and Power Point

  - by Andreea Vaduva

  Untitled Document table { border: thin solid; } Most Smart View users probably appreciate that they can use just one add-in to access data from the different sources they might work with, like Oracle Essbase, Oracle Hyperion Planning, Oracle Hyperion Financial Management and others. But not all of them are aware of the options to integrate data analyses not only in Excel, but also in MS Word or Power Point. While in the past, copying and pasting single numbers or tables from a recent analysis in Excel made the pasted content a static snapshot, copying so called Data Points now creates dynamic, updateable references to the data source. It also provides additional nice features, which can make life easier and less stressful for Smart View users. So, how does this option work: after building an ad-hoc analysis with Smart View as usual in an Excel worksheet, any area including data cells/numbers from the database can be highlighted in order to copy data points - even single data cells only.   TIP It is not necessary to highlight and copy the row or column descriptions   Next from the Smart View ribbon select Copy Data Point. Then transfer to the Word or Power Point document into which the selected content should be copied. Note that in these Office programs you will find a menu item Smart View;from it select the Paste Data Point icon. The copied details from the Excel report will be pasted, but showing #NEED_REFRESH in the data cells instead of the original numbers. =After clicking the Refresh icon on the Smart View menu the data will be retrieved and displayed. (Maybe at that moment a login window pops up and you need to provide your credentials.) It works in the same way if you just copy one single number without any row or column descriptions, for example in order to incorporate it into a continuous text: Before refresh: After refresh: From now on for any subsequent updates of the data shown in your documents you only need to refresh data by clicking the Refresh button on the Smart View menu, without copying and pasting the context or content again. As you might realize, trying out this feature on your own, there won’t be any Point of View shown in the Office document. Also you have seen in the example, where only a single data cell was copied, that there aren’t any member names or row/column descriptions copied, which are usually required in an ad-hoc report in order to exactly define where data comes from or how data is queried from the source. Well, these definitions are not visible, but they are transferred to the Word or Power Point document as well. They are stored in the background for each individual data cell copied and can be made visible by double-clicking the data cell as shown in the following screen shot (but which is taken from another context).   So for each cell/number the complete connection information is stored along with the exact member/cell intersection from the database. And that’s not all: you have the chance now to exchange the members originally selected in the Point of View (POV) in the Excel report. Remember, at that time we had the following selection:   By selecting the Manage POV option from the Smart View meny in Word or Power Point…   … the following POV Manager – Queries window opens:   You can now change your selection for each dimension from the original POV by either double-clicking the dimension member in the lower right box under POV: or by selecting the Member Selector icon on the top right hand side of the window. After confirming your changes you need to refresh your document again. Be aware, that this will update all (!) numbers taken from one and the same original Excel sheet, even if they appear in different locations in your Office document, reflecting your recent changes in the POV. TIP Build your original report already in a way that dimensions you might want to change from within Word or Power Point are placed in the POV. And there is another really nice feature I wouldn’t like to miss mentioning: Using Dynamic Data Points in the way described above, you will never miss or need to search again for your original Excel sheet from which values were taken and copied as data points into an Office document. Because from even only one single data cell Smart View is able to recreate the entire original report content with just a few clicks: Select one of the numbers from within your Word or Power Point document by double-clicking.   Then select the Visualize in Excel option from the Smart View menu. Excel will open and Smart View will rebuild the entire original report, including POV settings, and retrieve all data from the most recent actual state of the database. (It might be necessary to provide your credentials before data is displayed.) However, in order to make this work, an active online connection to your databases on the server is necessary and at least read access to the retrieved data. But apart from this, your newly built Excel report is fully functional for ad-hoc analysis and can be used in the common way for drilling, pivoting and all the other known functions and features. So far about embedding Dynamic Data Points into Office documents and linking them back into Excel worksheets. You can apply this in the described way with ad-hoc analyses directly on Essbase databases or using Hyperion Planning and Hyperion Financial Management ad-hoc web forms. If you are also interested in other new features and smart enhancements in Essbase or Hyperion Planning stay tuned for coming articles or check our training courses and web presentations. You can find general information about offerings for the Essbase and Planning curriculum or other Oracle-Hyperion products here (please make sure to select your country/region at the top of this page) or in the OU Learning paths section , where Planning, Essbase and other Hyperion products can be found under the Fusion Middleware heading (again, please select the right country/region). Or drop me a note directly: [email protected] . About the Author: Bernhard Kinkel started working for Hyperion Solutions as a Presales Consultant and Consultant in 1998 and moved to Hyperion Education Services in 1999. He joined Oracle University in 2007 where he is a Principal Education Consultant. Based on these many years of working with Hyperion products he has detailed product knowledge across several versions. He delivers both classroom and live virtual courses. His areas of expertise are Oracle/Hyperion Essbase, Oracle Hyperion Planning and Hyperion Web Analysis.  

  Read the article

• Grow Your Business with Security

  - by Darin Pendergraft

  Author: Kevin Moulton Kevin Moulton has been in the security space for more than 25 years, and with Oracle for 7 years. He manages the East EnterpriseSecurity Sales Consulting Team. He is also a Distinguished Toastmaster. Follow Kevin on Twitter at twitter.com/kevin_moulton, where he sometimes tweets about security, but might also tweet about running, beer, food, baseball, football, good books, or whatever else grabs his attention. Kevin will be a regular contributor to this blog so stay tuned for more posts from him. It happened again! There I was, reading something interesting online, and realizing that a friend might find it interesting too. I clicked on the little email link, thinking that I could easily forward this to my friend, but no! Instead, a new screen popped up where I was asked to create an account. I was expected to create a User ID and password, not to mention providing some personally identifiable information, just for the privilege of helping that website spread their word. Of course, I didn’t want to have to remember a new account and password, I didn’t want to provide the requisite information, and I didn’t want to waste my time. I gave up, closed the web page, and moved on to something else. I was left with a bad taste in my mouth, and my friend might never find her way to this interesting website. If you were this content provider, would this be the outcome you were looking for? A few days later, I had a similar experience, but this one went a little differently. I was surfing the web, when I happened upon some little chotcke that I just had to have. I added it to my cart. When I went to buy the item, I was again brought to a page to create account. Groan! But wait! On this page, I also had the option to sign in with my OpenID account, my Facebook account, my Yahoo account, or my Google Account. I have all of those! No new account to create, no new password to remember, and no personally identifiable information to be given to someone else (I’ve already given it all to those other guys, after all). In this case, the vendor was easy to deal with, and I happily completed the transaction. That pleasant experience will bring me back again. This is where security can grow your business. It’s a differentiator. You’ve got to have a presence on the web, and that presence has to take into account all the smart phones everyone’s carrying, and the tablets that took over cyber Monday this year. If you are a company that a customer can deal with securely, and do so easily, then you are a company customers will come back to again and again. I recently had a need to open a new bank account. Every bank has a web presence now, but they are certainly not all the same. I wanted one that I could deal with easily using my laptop, but I also wanted 2-factor authentication in case I had to login from a shared machine, and I wanted an app for my iPad. I found a bank with all three, and that’s who I am doing business with. Let’s say, for example, that I’m in a regular Texas Hold-em game on Friday nights, so I move a couple of hundred bucks from checking to savings on Friday afternoons. I move a similar amount each week and I do it from the same machine. The bank trusts me, and they trust my machine. Most importantly, they trust my behavior. This is adaptive authentication. There should be no reason for my bank to make this transaction difficult for me. Now let's say that I login from a Starbucks in Uzbekistan, and I transfer $2,500. What should my bank do now? Should they stop the transaction? Should they call my home number? (My former bank did exactly this once when I was taking money out of an ATM on a business trip, when I had provided my cell phone number as my primary contact. When I asked them why they called my home number rather than my cell, they told me that their “policy” is to call the home number. If I'm on the road, what exactly is the use of trying to reach me at home to verify my transaction?) But, back to Uzbekistan… Should my bank assume that I am happily at home in New Jersey, and someone is trying to hack into my account? Perhaps they think they are protecting me, but I wouldn’t be very happy if I happened to be traveling on business in Central Asia. What if my bank were to automatically analyze my behavior and calculate a risk score? Clearly, this scenario would be outside of my typical behavior, so my risk score would necessitate something more than a simple login and password. Perhaps, in this case, a one-time password to my cell phone would prove that this is not just some hacker half way around the world. But, what if you're not a bank? Do you need this level of security? If you want to be a business that is easy to deal with while also protecting your customers, then of course you do. You want your customers to trust you, but you also want them to enjoy doing business with you. Make it easy for them to do business with you, and they’ll come back, and perhaps even Tweet about it, or Like you, and then their friends will follow. How can Oracle help? Oracle has the technology and expertise to help you to grown your business with security. Oracle Adaptive Access Manager will help you to prevent fraud while making it easier for your customers to do business with you by providing the risk analysis I discussed above, step-up authentication, and much more. Oracle Mobile and Social Access Service will help you to secure mobile access to applications by expanding on your existing back-end identity management infrastructure, and allowing your customers to transact business with you using the social media accounts they already know. You also have device fingerprinting and metrics to help you to grow your business securely. Security is not just a cost anymore. It’s a way to set your business apart. With Oracle’s help, you can be the business that everyone’s tweeting about. Image courtesy of Flickr user shareski

  Read the article

• Full-text Indexing Books Online

  - by Most Valuable Yak (Rob Volk)

  While preparing for a recent SQL Saturday presentation, I was struck by a crazy idea (shocking, I know): Could someone import the content of SQL Server Books Online into a database and apply full-text indexing to it?  The answer is yes, and it's really quite easy to do. The first step is finding the installed help files.  If you have SQL Server 2012, BOL is installed under the Microsoft Help Library.  You can find the install location by opening SQL Server Books Online and clicking the gear icon for the Help Library Manager.  When the new window pops up click the Settings link, you'll get the following: You'll see the path under Library Location. Once you navigate to that path you'll have to drill down a little further, to C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\HelpLibrary\content\Microsoft\store.  This is where the help file content is kept if you downloaded it for offline use. Depending on which products you've downloaded help for, you may see a few hundred files.  Fortunately they're named well and you can easily find the "SQL_Server_Denali_Books_Online_" files.  We are interested in the .MSHC files only, and can skip the Installation and Developer Reference files. Despite the .MHSC extension, these files are compressed with the standard Zip format, so your favorite archive utility (WinZip, 7Zip, WinRar, etc.) can open them.  When you do, you'll see a few thousand files in the archive.  We are only interested in the .htm files, but there's no harm in extracting all of them to a folder.  7zip provides a command-line utility and the following will extract to a D:\SQLHelp folder previously created: 7z e –oD:\SQLHelp "C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\HelpLibrary\content\Microsoft\store\SQL_Server_Denali_Books_Online_B780_SQL_110_en-us_1.2.mshc" *.htm Well that's great Rob, but how do I put all those files into a full-text index? I'll tell you in a second, but first we have to set up a few things on the database side.  I'll be using a database named Explore (you can certainly change that) and the following setup is a fragment of the script I used in my presentation: USE Explore; GO CREATE SCHEMA help AUTHORIZATION dbo; GO -- Create default fulltext catalog for later FT indexes CREATE FULLTEXT CATALOG FTC AS DEFAULT; GO CREATE TABLE help.files(file_id int not null IDENTITY(1,1) CONSTRAINT PK_help_files PRIMARY KEY, path varchar(256) not null CONSTRAINT UNQ_help_files_path UNIQUE, doc_type varchar(6) DEFAULT('.xml'), content varbinary(max) not null); CREATE FULLTEXT INDEX ON help.files(content TYPE COLUMN doc_type LANGUAGE 1033) KEY INDEX PK_help_files; This will give you a table, default full-text catalog, and full-text index on that table for the content you're going to insert.  I'll be using the command line again for this, it's the easiest method I know: for %a in (D:\SQLHelp\*.htm) do sqlcmd -S. -E -d Explore -Q"set nocount on;insert help.files(path,content) select '%a', cast(c as varbinary(max)) from openrowset(bulk '%a', SINGLE_CLOB) as c(c)" You'll need to copy and run that as one line in a command prompt.  I'll explain what this does while you run it and watch several thousand files get imported: The "for" command allows you to loop over a collection of items.  In this case we want all the .htm files in the D:\SQLHelp folder.  For each file it finds, it will assign the full path and file name to the %a variable.  In the "do" clause, we'll specify another command to be run for each iteration of the loop.  I make a call to "sqlcmd" in order to run a SQL statement.  I pass in the name of the server (-S.), where "." represents the local default instance. I specify -d Explore as the database, and -E for trusted connection.  I then use -Q to run a query that I enclose in double quotes. The query uses OPENROWSET(BULK…SINGLE_CLOB) to open the file as a data source, and to treat it as a single character large object.  In order for full-text indexing to work properly, I have to convert the text content to varbinary. I then INSERT these contents along with the full path of the file into the help.files table created earlier.  This process continues for each file in the folder, creating one new row in the table. And that's it! 5 SQL Statements and 2 command line statements to unzip and import SQL Server Books Online!  In case you're wondering why I didn't use FILESTREAM or FILETABLE, it's simply because I haven't learned them…yet. I may return to this blog after I figure that out and update it with the steps to do so.  I believe that will make it even easier. In the spirit of exploration, I'll leave you to work on some fulltext queries of this content.  I also recommend playing around with the sys.dm_fts_xxxx DMVs (I particularly like sys.dm_fts_index_keywords, it's pretty interesting).  There are additional example queries in the download material for my presentation linked above. Many thanks to Kevin Boles (t) for his advice on (re)checking the content of the help files.  Don't let that .htm extension fool you! The 2012 help files are actually XML, and you'd need to specify '.xml' in your document type column in order to extract the full-text keywords.  (You probably noticed this in the default definition for the doc_type column.)  You can query sys.fulltext_document_types to get a complete list of the types that can be full-text indexed. I also need to thank Hilary Cotter for giving me the original idea. I believe he used MSDN content in a full-text index for an article from waaaaaaaaaaay back, that I can't find now, and had forgotten about until just a few days ago.  He is also co-author of Pro Full-Text Search in SQL Server 2008, which I highly recommend.  He also has some FTS articles on Simple Talk: http://www.simple-talk.com/sql/learn-sql-server/sql-server-full-text-search-language-features/ http://www.simple-talk.com/sql/learn-sql-server/sql-server-full-text-search-language-features,-part-2/

  Read the article

• Evaluating Solutions to Manage Product Compliance? Don't Wait Much Longer

  - by Kerrie Foy

  Depending on severity, product compliance issues can cause all sorts of problems from run-away budgets to business closures. But effective policies and safeguards can create a strong foundation for innovation, productivity, market penetration and competitive advantage. If you’ve been putting off a systematic approach to product compliance, it is time to reconsider that decision, or indecision. Why now?  No matter what industry, companies face a litany of worldwide and regional regulations that require proof of product compliance and environmental friendliness for market access.  For example, Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) is a regulation that restricts the use of six dangerous materials used in the manufacture of electronic and electrical equipment.  ROHS was originally adopted by the European Union in 2003 for implementation in 2006, and it has evolved over time through various regional versions for North America, China, Japan, Korea, Norway and Turkey.  In addition, the RoHS directive allowed for material exemptions used in Medical Devices, but that exemption ends in 2014.   Additional regulations worth watching are the Battery Directive, Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE), and Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) directives.  Additional evolving regulations are coming from governing bodies like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Corporate sustainability initiatives are also gaining urgency and influencing product design. In a survey of 405 corporations in the Global 500 by Carbon Disclosure Project, co-written by PwC (CDP Global 500 Climate Change Report 2012 entitled Business Resilience in an Uncertain, Resource-Constrained World), 48% of the respondents indicated they saw potential to create new products and business services as a response to climate change. Just 21% reported a dedicated budget for the research. However, the report goes on to explain that those few companies are winning over new customers and driving additional profits by exploiting their abilities to adapt to environmental needs. The article cites Dell as an example – Dell has invested in research to develop new products designed to reduce its customers’ emissions by more than 10 million metric tons of CO2e per year. This reduction in emissions should save Dell’s customers over $1billion per year as a result! Over time we expect to see many additional companies prove that eco-design provides marketplace benefits through differentiation and direct customer value. How do you meet compliance requirements and also successfully invest in eco-friendly designs? No doubt companies struggle to answer this question. After all, the journey to get there may involve transforming business models, go-to-market strategies, supply networks, quality assurance policies and compliance processes per the rapidly evolving global and regional directives. There may be limited executive focus on the initiative, inability to quantify noncompliance, or not enough resources to justify investment. To make things even more difficult to address, compliance responsibility can be a passionate topic within an organization, making the prospect of change on an enterprise scale problematic and time-consuming. Without a single source of truth for product data and without proper processes in place, ensuring product compliance burgeons into a crushing task that is cost-prohibitive and overwhelming to an organization. With all the overhead, certain markets or demographics become simply inaccessible. Therefore, the risk to consumer goodwill and satisfaction, revenue, business continuity, and market potential is too great not to solve the compliance challenge. Companies are beginning to adapt and even thrive in today’s highly regulated and transparent environment by implementing systematic approaches to product compliance that are more than functional bandages but revenue-generating engines. Consider partnering with Oracle to help you address your compliance needs. Many of the world’s most innovative leaders and pioneers are leveraging Oracle’s Agile Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) portfolio of enterprise applications to manage the product value chain, centralize product data, automate processes, and launch more eco-friendly products to market faster.   Particularly, the Agile Product Governance & Compliance (PG&C) solution provides out-of-the-box functionality to integrate actionable regulatory information into the enterprise product record from the ideation to the disposal/recycling phase. Agile PG&C makes it possible to efficiently manage compliance per corporate green initiatives as well as regional and global directives. Options are critical, but so is ease-of-use. Anyone who’s grappled with compliance policy knows legal interpretation plays a major role in determining how an organization responds to regulation. Agile PG&C gives you the freedom to configure product compliance per your needs, while maintaining rigorous control over the product record in an easy-to-use interface that facilitates adoption efforts. It allows you to assign regulations as specifications for a part or BOM roll-up. Each specification has a threshold value that alerts you to a non-compliance issue if the threshold value is exceeded. Set however many regulations as specifications you need to make sure a product can be sold in your target countries. Another option is to implement like one of our leading consumer electronics customers and define your own “catch-all” specification to ensure compliance in all markets. You can give your suppliers secure access to enter their component data or integrate a third party’s data. With Agile PG&C you are able to design compliance earlier into your products to reduce cost and improve quality downstream when stakes are higher. Agile PG&C is a comprehensive solution that makes product compliance more reliable and efficient. Throughout product lifecycles, use the solution to support full material disclosures, efficiently manage declarations with your suppliers, feed compliance data into a corrective action if a product must be changed, and swiftly satisfy audits by showing all due diligence tracked in one solution. Given the compounding regulation and consumer focus on urgent environmental issues, now is the time to act. Implementing an enterprise, systematic approach to product compliance is a competitive investment. From the start, Agile Product Governance & Compliance enables companies to confidently design for compliance and sustainability, reduce the cost of compliance, minimize the risk of business interruption, deliver responsible products, and inspire new innovation.  Don’t wait any longer! To find out more about Agile Product Governance & Compliance download the data sheet, contact your sales representative, or call Oracle at 1-800-633-0738. Many thanks to Shane Goodwin, Senior Manager, Oracle Agile PLM Product Management, for contributions to this article. 

  Read the article

• Network communications mechanisms for SQL Server

  - by Akshay Deep Lamba

  Problem I am trying to understand how SQL Server communicates on the network, because I'm having to tell my networking team what ports to open up on the firewall for an edge web server to communicate back to the SQL Server on the inside. What do I need to know? Solution In order to understand what needs to be opened where, let's first talk briefly about the two main protocols that are in common use today: TCP - Transmission Control Protocol UDP - User Datagram Protocol Both are part of the TCP/IP suite of protocols. We'll start with TCP. TCP TCP is the main protocol by which clients communicate with SQL Server. Actually, it is more correct to say that clients and SQL Server use Tabular Data Stream (TDS), but TDS actually sits on top of TCP and when we're talking about Windows and firewalls and other networking devices, that's the protocol that rules and controls are built around. So we'll just speak in terms of TCP. TCP is a connection-oriented protocol. What that means is that the two systems negotiate the connection and both agree to it. Think of it like a phone call. While one person initiates the phone call, the other person has to agree to take it and both people can end the phone call at any time. TCP is the same way. Both systems have to agree to the communications, but either side can end it at any time. In addition, there is functionality built into TCP to ensure that all communications can be disassembled and reassembled as necessary so it can pass over various network devices and be put together again properly in the right order. It also has mechanisms to handle and retransmit lost communications. Because of this functionality, TCP is the protocol used by many different network applications. The way the applications all can share is through the use of ports. When a service, like SQL Server, comes up on a system, it must listen on a port. For a default SQL Server instance, the default port is 1433. Clients connect to the port via the TCP protocol, the connection is negotiated and agreed to, and then the two sides can transfer information as needed until either side decides to end the communication. In actuality, both sides will have a port to use for the communications, but since the client's port is typically determined semi-randomly, when we're talking about firewalls and the like, typically we're interested in the port the server or service is using. UDP UDP, unlike TCP, is not connection oriented. A "client" can send a UDP communications to anyone it wants. There's nothing in place to negotiate a communications connection, there's nothing in the protocol itself to coordinate order of communications or anything like that. If that's needed, it's got to be handled by the application or by a protocol built on top of UDP being used by the application. If you think of TCP as a phone call, think of UDP as a postcard. I can put a postcard in the mail to anyone I want, and so long as it is addressed properly and has a stamp on it, the postal service will pick it up. Now, what happens it afterwards is not guaranteed. There's no mechanism for retransmission of lost communications. It's great for short communications that doesn't necessarily need an acknowledgement. Because multiple network applications could be communicating via UDP, it uses ports, just like TCP. The SQL Browser or the SQL Server Listener Service uses UDP. Network Communications - Talking to SQL Server When an instance of SQL Server is set up, what TCP port it listens on depends. A default instance will be set up to listen on port 1433. A named instance will be set to a random port chosen during installation. In addition, a named instance will be configured to allow it to change that port dynamically. What this means is that when a named instance starts up, if it finds something already using the port it normally uses, it'll pick a new port. If you have a named instance, and you have connections coming across a firewall, you're going to want to use SQL Server Configuration Manager to set a static port. This will allow the networking and security folks to configure their devices for maximum protection. While you can change the network port for a default instance of SQL Server, most people don't. Network Communications - Finding a SQL Server When just the name is specified for a client to connect to SQL Server, for instance, MySQLServer, this is an attempt to connect to the default instance. In this case the client will automatically attempt to communicate to port 1433 on MySQLServer. If you've switched the port for the default instance, you'll need to tell the client the proper port, usually by specifying the following syntax in the connection string: <server>,<port>. For instance, if you moved SQL Server to listen on 14330, you'd use MySQLServer,14330 instead of just MySQLServer. However, because a named instance sets up its port dynamically by default, the client never knows at the outset what the port is it should talk to. That's what the SQL Browser or the SQL Server Listener Service (SQL Server 2000) is for. In this case, the client sends a communication via the UDP protocol to port 1434. It asks, "Where is the named instance?" So if I was running a named instance called SQL2008R2, it would be asking the SQL Browser, "Hey, how do I talk to MySQLServer\SQL2008R2?" The SQL Browser would then send back a communications from UDP port 1434 back to the client telling the client how to talk to the named instance. Of course, you can skip all of this of you set that named instance's port statically. Then you can use the <server>,<port> mechanism to connect and the client won't try to talk to the SQL Browser service. It'll simply try to make the connection. So, for instance, is the SQL2008R2 instance was listening on port 20080, specifying MySQLServer,20080 would attempt a connection to the named instance. Network Communications - Named Pipes Named pipes is an older network library communications mechanism and it's generally not used any longer. It shouldn't be used across a firewall. However, if for some reason you need to connect to SQL Server with it, this protocol also sits on top of TCP. Named Pipes is actually used by the operating system and it has its own mechanism within the protocol to determine where to route communications. As far as network communications is concerned, it listens on TCP port 445. This is true whether we're talking about a default or named instance of SQL Server. The Summary Table To put all this together, here is what you need to know: Type of Communication Protocol Used Default Port Finding a SQL Server or SQL Server Named Instance UDP 1434 Communicating with a default instance of SQL Server TCP 1433 Communicating with a named instance of SQL Server TCP * Determined dynamically at start up Communicating with SQL Server via Named Pipes TCP 445

  Read the article

• Merge replication stopping without errors in SQL 2008 R2

  - by Rob Farley

  A non-SQL MVP friend of mine, who also happens to be a client, asked me for some help again last week. I was planning on writing this up even before Rob Volk (@sql_r) listed his T-SQL Tuesday topic for this month. Earlier in the year, I (well, LobsterPot Solutions, although I’d been the person mostly involved) had helped out with a merge replication problem. The Merge Agent on the subscriber was just stopping every time, shortly after it started. With no errors anywhere – not in the Windows Event Log, the SQL Agent logs, not anywhere. We’d managed to get the system working again, but didn’t have a good reason about what had happened, and last week, the problem occurred again. I asked him about writing up the experience in a blog post, largely because of the red herrings that we encountered. It was an interesting experience for me, also because I didn’t end up touching my computer the whole time – just tapping on my phone via Twitter and Live Msgr. You see, the thing with replication is that a useful troubleshooting option is to reinitialise the thing. We’d done that last time, and it had started to work again – eventually. I say eventually, because the link being used between the sites is relatively slow, and it took a long while for the initialisation to finish. Meanwhile, we’d been doing some investigation into what the problem could be, and were suitably pleased when the problem disappeared. So I got a message saying that a replication problem had occurred again. Reinitialising wasn’t going to be an option this time either. In this scenario, the subscriber having the problem happened to be in a different domain to the publisher. The other subscribers (within the domain) were fine, just this one in a different domain had the problem. Part of the problem seemed to be a log file that wasn’t being backed up properly. They’d been trying to back up to a backup device that had a corruption, and the log file was growing. Turned out, this wasn’t related to the problem, but of course, any time you’re troubleshooting and you see something untoward, you wonder. Having got past that problem, my next thought was that perhaps there was a problem with the account being used. But the other subscribers were using the same account, without any problems. The client pointed out that that it was almost exactly six months since the last failure (later shown to be a complete red herring). It sounded like something might’ve expired. Checking through certificates and trusts showed no sign of anything, and besides, there wasn’t a problem running a command-prompt window using the account in question, from the subscriber box. ...except that when he ran the sqlcmd –E –S servername command I recommended, it failed with a Named Pipes error. I’ve seen problems with firewalls rejecting connections via Named Pipes but letting TCP/IP through, so I got him to look into SQL Configuration Manager to see what kind of connection was being preferred... Everything seemed fine. And strangely, he could connect via Management Studio. Turned out, he had a typo in the servername of the sqlcmd command. That particular red herring must’ve been reflected in his cheeks as he told me. During the time, I also pinged a friend of mine to find out who I should ask, and Ted Kruger (@onpnt) ‘s name came up. Ted (and thanks again, Ted – really) reconfirmed some of my thoughts around the idea of an account expiring, and also suggesting bumping up the logging to level 4 (2 is Verbose, 4 is undocumented ridiculousness). I’d just told the client to push the logging up to level 2, but the log file wasn’t appearing. Checking permissions showed that the user did have permission on the folder, but still no file was appearing. Then it was noticed that the user had been switched earlier as part of the troubleshooting, and switching it back to the real user caused the log file to appear. Still no errors. A lot more information being pushed out, but still no errors. Ted suggested making sure the FQDNs were okay from both ends, in case the servers were unable to talk to each other. DNS problems can lead to hassles which can stop replication from working. No luck there either – it was all working fine. Another server started to report a problem as well. These two boxes were both SQL 2008 R2 (SP1), while the others, still working, were SQL 2005. Around this time, the client tried an idea that I’d shown him a few years ago – using a Profiler trace to see what was being called on the servers. It turned out that the last call being made on the publisher was sp_MSenumschemachange. A quick interwebs search on that showed a problem that exists in SQL Server 2008 R2, when stored procedures have more than 4000 characters. Running that stored procedure (with the same parameters) manually on SQL 2005 listed three stored procedures, the first of which did indeed have more than 4000 characters. Still no error though, and the problem as listed at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2539378 describes an error that should occur in the Event log. However, this problem is the type of thing that is fixed by a reinitialisation (because it doesn’t need to send the procedure change across as a transaction). And a look in the change history of the long stored procs (you all keep them, right?), showed that the problem from six months earlier could well have been down to this too. Applying SP2 (with sufficient paranoia about backups and how to get back out again if necessary) fixed the problem. The stored proc changes went through immediately after the service pack was applied, and it’s been running happily since. The funny thing is that I didn’t solve the problem. He had put the Profiler trace on the server, and had done the search that found a forum post pointing at this particular problem. I’d asked Ted too, and although he’d given some useful information, nothing that he’d come up with had actually been the solution either. Sometimes, asking for help is the most useful thing you can do. Often though, you don’t end up getting the help from the person you asked – the sounding board is actually what you need. @rob_farley

  Read the article

• Agile Like Jazz

  - by Jeff Certain

  (I’ve been sitting on this for a week or so now, thinking that it needed to be tightened up a bit to make it less rambling. Since that’s clearly not going to happen, reader beware!) I had the privilege of spending around 90 minutes last night sitting and listening to Sonny Rollins play a concert at the Disney Center in LA. If you don’t know who Sonny Rollins is, I don’t know how to explain the experience; if you know who he is, I don’t need to. Suffice it to say that he has been recording professionally for over 50 years, and helped create an entire genre of music. A true master by any definition. One of the most intriguing aspects of a concert like this, however, is watching the master step aside and let the rest of the musicians play. Not just play their parts, but really play… letting them take over the spotlight, to strut their stuff, to soak up enthusiastic applause from the crowd. Maybe a lot of it has to do with the fact that Sonny Rollins has been doing this for more than a half-century. Maybe it has something to do with a kind of patience you learn when you’re on the far side of 80 – and the man can still blow a mean sax for 90 minutes without stopping! Maybe it has to do with the fact that he was out there for the love of the music and the love of the show, not because he had anything to prove to anyone and, I like to think, not for the money. Perhaps it had more to do with the fact that, when you’re at that level of mastery, the other musicians are going to be good. Really good. Whatever the reasons, there was a incredible freedom on that stage – the ability to improvise, for each musician to showcase their own specialization and skills, and them come back to the common theme, back to being on the same page, as it were. All this took place in the same venue that is home to the L.A. Phil. Somehow, I can’t ever see the same kind of free-wheeling improvisation happening in that context. And, since I’m a geek, I started thinking about agility. Rollins has put together a quintet that reflects his own particular style and past. No upright bass or piano for Rollins – drums, bongos, electric guitar and bass guitar along with his sax. It’s not about the mix of instruments. Other trios, quartets, and sextets use different mixes of instruments. New Orleans jazz tends towards trombones instead of sax; some prefer cornet or trumpet. But no matter what the choice of instruments, size matters. Team sizes are something I’ve been thinking about for a while. We’re on a quest to rethink how our teams are organized. They just feel too big, too unwieldy. In fact, they really don’t feel like teams at all. Most of the time, they feel more like collections or people who happen to report to the same manager. I attribute this to a couple factors. One is over-specialization; we have a tendency to have people work in silos. Although the teams are product-focused, within them our developers are both generalists and specialists. On the one hand, we expect them to be able to build an entire vertical slice of the application; on the other hand, each developer tends to be responsible for the vertical slice. As a result, developers often work on their own piece of the puzzle, in isolation. This sort of feels like working on a jigsaw in a group – each person taking a set of colors and piecing them together to reveal a portion of the overall picture. But what inevitably happens when you go to meld all those pieces together? Inevitably, you have some sections that are too big to move easily. These sections end up falling apart under their own weight as you try to move them. Not only that, but there are other challenges – figuring out where that section fits, and how to tie it into the rest of the puzzle. Often, this is when you find a few pieces need to be added – these pieces are “glue,” if you will. The other issue that arises is due to the overhead of maintaining communications in a team. My mother, who worked in IT for around 30 years, once told me that 20% per team member is a good rule of thumb for maintaining communication. While this is a rule of thumb, it seems to imply that any team over about 6 people is going to become less agile simple because of the communications burden. Teams of ten or twelve seem like they fall into the philharmonic organizational model. Complicated pieces of music requiring dozens of players to all be on the same page requires a much different model than the jazz quintet. There’s much less room for improvisation, originality or freedom. (There are probably orchestral musicians who will take exception to this characterization; I’m calling it like I see it from the cheap seats.) And, there’s one guy up front who is running the show, whose job is to keep all of those dozens of players on the same page, to facilitate communications. Somehow, the orchestral model doesn’t feel much like a self-organizing team, either. The first violin may be the best violinist in the orchestra, but they don’t get to perform free-wheeling solos. I’ve never heard of an orchestra getting together for a jam session. But I have heard of teams that organize their work based on the developers available, rather than organizing the developers based on the work required. I have heard of teams where desired functionality is deferred – or worse yet, schedules are missed – because one critical person doesn’t have any bandwidth available. I’ve heard of teams where people simply don’t have the big picture, because there is too much communication overhead for everyone to be aware of everything that is happening on a project. I once heard Paul Rayner say something to the effect of “you have a process that is perfectly designed to give you exactly the results you have.” Given a choice, I want a process that’s much more like jazz than orchestral music. I want a process that doesn’t burden me with lots of forms and checkboxes and stuff. Give me the simplest, most lightweight process that will work – and a smaller team of the best developers I can find. This seems like the kind of process that will get the kind of result I want to be part of.

  Read the article

• Deterministic/Consistent Unique Masking

  - by Dinesh Rajasekharan-Oracle

  One of the key requirements while masking data in large databases or multi database environment is to consistently mask some columns, i.e. for a given input the output should always be the same. At the same time the masked output should not be predictable. Deterministic masking also eliminates the need to spend enormous amount of time spent in identifying data relationships, i.e. parent and child relationships among columns defined in the application tables. In this blog post I will explain different ways of consistently masking the data across databases using Oracle Data Masking and Subsetting The readers of post should have minimal knowledge on Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c, Application Data Modeling, Data Masking concepts. For more information on these concepts, please refer to Oracle Data Masking and Subsetting document Oracle Data Masking and Subsetting 12c provides four methods using which users can consistently yet irreversibly mask their inputs. 1. Substitute 2. SQL Expression 3. Encrypt 4. User Defined Function SUBSTITUTE The substitute masking format replaces the original value with a value from a pre-created database table. As the method uses a hash based algorithm in the back end the mappings are consistent. For example consider DEPARTMENT_ID in EMPLOYEES table is replaced with FAKE_DEPARTMENT_ID from FAKE_TABLE. The substitute masking transformation that all occurrences of DEPARTMENT_ID say ‘101’ will be replaced with ‘502’ provided same substitution table and column is used , i.e. FAKE_TABLE.FAKE_DEPARTMENT_ID. The following screen shot shows the usage of the Substitute masking format with in a masking definition: Note that the uniqueness of the masked value depends on the number of columns being used in the substitution table i.e. if the original table contains 50000 unique values, then for the masked output to be unique and deterministic the substitution column should also contain 50000 unique values without which only consistency is maintained but not uniqueness. SQL EXPRESSION SQL Expression replaces an existing value with the output of a specified SQL Expression. For example while masking an EMPLOYEES table the EMAIL_ID of an employee has to be in the format EMPLOYEE’s [email protected] while FIRST_NAME and LAST_NAME are the actual column names of the EMPLOYEES table then the corresponding SQL Expression will look like %FIRST_NAME%||’.’||%LAST_NAME%||’@COMPANY.COM’. The advantage of this technique is that if you are masking FIRST_NAME and LAST_NAME of the EMPLOYEES table than the corresponding EMAIL ID will be replaced accordingly by the masking scripts. One of the interesting aspect’s of a SQL Expressions is that you can use sub SQL expressions, which means that you can write a nested SQL and use it as SQL Expression to address a complex masking business use cases. SQL Expression can also be used to consistently replace value with hashed value using Oracle’s PL/SQL function ORA_HASH. The following SQL Expression will help in the previous example for replacing the DEPARTMENT_IDs with a hashed number ORA_HASH (%DEPARTMENT_ID%, 1000) The following screen shot shows the usage of encrypt masking format with in the masking definition: ORA_HASH takes three arguments: 1. Expression which can be of any data type except LONG, LOB, User Defined Type [nested table type is allowed]. In the above example I used the Original value as expression. 2. Number of hash buckets which can be number between 0 and 4294967295. The default value is 4294967295. You can also co-relate the number of hash buckets to a range of numbers. In the above example above the bucket value is specified as 1000, so the end result will be a hashed number in between 0 and 1000. 3. Seed, can be any number which decides the consistency, i.e. for a given seed value the output will always be same. The default seed is 0. In the above SQL Expression a seed in not specified, so it to 0. If you have to use a non default seed then the function will look like. ORA_HASH (%DEPARTMENT_ID%, 1000, 1234 The uniqueness depends on the input and the number of hash buckets used. However as ORA_HASH uses a 32 bit algorithm, considering birthday paradox or pigeonhole principle there is a 0.5 probability of collision after 232-1 unique values. ENCRYPT Encrypt masking format uses a blend of 3DES encryption algorithm, hashing, and regular expression to produce a deterministic and unique masked output. The format of the masked output corresponds to the specified regular expression. As this technique uses a key [string] to encrypt the data, the same string can be used to decrypt the data. The key also acts as seed to maintain consistent outputs for a given input. The following screen shot shows the usage of encrypt masking format with in the masking definition: Regular Expressions may look complex for the first time users but you will soon realize that it’s a simple language. There are many resources in internet, oracle documentation, oracle learning library, my oracle support on writing a Regular Expressions, out of all the following My Oracle Support document helped me to get started with Regular Expressions: Oracle SQL Support for Regular Expressions[Video](Doc ID 1369668.1) USER DEFINED FUNCTION [UDF] User Defined Function or UDF provides flexibility for the users to code their own masking logic in PL/SQL, which can be called from masking Defintion. The standard format of an UDF in Oracle Data Masking and Subsetting is: Function udf_func (rowid varchar2, column_name varchar2, original_value varchar2) returns varchar2; Where • rowid is the row identifier of the column that needs to be masked • column_name is the name of the column that needs to be masked • original_value is the column value that needs to be masked You can achieve deterministic masking by using Oracle’s built in hash functions like, ORA_HASH, DBMS_CRYPTO.MD4, DBMS_CRYPTO.MD5, DBMS_UTILITY. GET_HASH_VALUE.Please refers to the Oracle Database Documentation for more information on the Oracle Hash functions. For example the following masking UDF generate deterministic unique hexadecimal values for a given string input: CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION RD_DUX (rid varchar2, column_name varchar2, orig_val VARCHAR2) RETURN VARCHAR2 DETERMINISTIC PARALLEL_ENABLE IS stext varchar2 (26); no_of_characters number(2); BEGIN no_of_characters:=6; stext:=substr(RAWTOHEX(DBMS_CRYPTO.HASH(UTL_RAW.CAST_TO_RAW(text),1)),0,no_of_characters); RETURN stext; END; The uniqueness depends on the input and length of the string and number of bits used by hash algorithm. In the above function MD4 hash is used [denoted by argument 1 in the DBMS_CRYPTO.HASH function which is a 128 bit algorithm which produces 2^128-1 unique hashed values , however this is limited by the length of the input string which is 6, so only 6^6 unique values will be generated. Also do not forget about the birthday paradox/pigeonhole principle mentioned earlier in this post. An another example is to consistently replace characters or numbers preserving the length and special characters as shown below: CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION RD_DUS(rid varchar2,column_name varchar2,orig_val VARCHAR2) RETURN VARCHAR2 DETERMINISTIC PARALLEL_ENABLE IS stext varchar2(26); BEGIN DBMS_RANDOM.SEED(orig_val); stext:=TRANSLATE(orig_val,'ABCDEFGHILKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ',DBMS_RANDOM.STRING('U',26)); stext:=TRANSLATE(stext,'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz',DBMS_RANDOM.STRING('L',26)); stext:=TRANSLATE(stext,'0123456789',to_char(DBMS_RANDOM.VALUE(1,9))); stext:=REPLACE(stext,'.','0'); RETURN stext; END; The following screen shot shows the usage of an UDF with in a masking definition: To summarize, Oracle Data Masking and Subsetting helps you to consistently mask data across databases using one or all of the methods described in this post. It saves the hassle of identifying the parent-child relationships defined in the application table. Happy Masking

  Read the article

• Developing Mobile Applications: Web, Native, or Hybrid?

  - by Michelle Kimihira

  Authors: Joe Huang, Senior Principal Product Manager, Oracle Mobile Application Development Framework  and Carlos Chang, Senior Principal Product Director The proliferation of mobile devices and platforms represents a game-changing technology shift on a number of levels. Companies must decide not only the best strategic use of mobile platforms, but also how to most efficiently implement them. Inevitably, this conversation devolves to the developers, who face the task of developing and supporting mobile applications—not a simple task in light of the number of devices and platforms. Essentially, developers can choose from the following three different application approaches, each with its own set of pros and cons. Native Applications: This refers to apps built for and installed on a specific platform, such as iOS or Android, using a platform-specific software development kit (SDK).  For example, apps for Apple’s iPhone and iPad are designed to run specifically on iOS and are written in Xcode/Objective-C. Android has its own variation of Java, Windows uses C#, and so on.  Native apps written for one platform cannot be deployed on another. Native apps offer fast performance and access to native-device services but require additional resources to develop and maintain each platform, which can be expensive and time consuming. Mobile Web Applications: Unlike native apps, mobile web apps are not installed on the device; rather, they are accessed via a Web browser.  These are server-side applications that render HTML, typically adjusting the design depending on the type of device making the request.  There are no program coding constraints for writing server-side apps—they can be written in Java, C, PHP, etc., it doesn’t matter.  Instead, the server detects what type of mobile browser is pinging the server and adjusts accordingly. For example, it can deliver fully JavaScript and CSS-enabled content to smartphone browsers, while downgrading gracefully to basic HTML for feature phone browsers. Mobile apps work across platforms, but are limited to what you can do through a browser and require Internet connectivity. For certain types of applications, these constraints may not be an issue. Oracle supports mobile web applications via ADF Faces (for tablets) and ADF Mobile browser (Trinidad) for smartphone and feature phones. Hybrid Applications: As the name implies, hybrid apps combine technologies from native and mobile Web apps to gain the benefits each. For example, these apps are installed on a device, like their pure native app counterparts, while the user interface (UI) is based on HTML5.  This UI runs locally within the native container, which usually leverages the device’s browser engine.  The advantage of using HTML5 is a consistent, cross-platform UI that works well on most devices.  Combining this with the native container, which is installed on-device, provides mobile users with access to local device services, such as camera, GPS, and local device storage.  Native apps may offer greater flexibility in integrating with device native services.  However, since hybrid applications already provide device integrations that typical enterprise applications need, this is typically less of an issue.  The new Oracle ADF Mobile release is an HTML5 and Java hybrid framework that targets mobile app development to iOS and Android from one code base. So, Which is the Best Approach? The short answer is – the best choice depends on the type of application you are developing.  For instance, animation-intensive apps such as games would favor native apps, while hybrid applications may be better suited for enterprise mobile apps because they provide multi-platform support. Just for starters, the following issues must be considered when choosing a development path. Application Complexity: How complex is the application? A quick app that accesses a database or Web service for some data to display?  You can keep it simple, and a mobile Web app may suffice. However, for a mobile/field worker type of applications that supports mission critical functionality, hybrid or native applications are typically needed. Richness of User Interactivity: What type of user experience is required for the application?  Mobile browser-based app that’s optimized for mobile UI may suffice for quick lookup or productivity type of applications.  However, hybrid/native application would typically be required to deliver highly interactive user experiences needed for field-worker type of applications.  For example, interactive BI charts/graphs, maps, voice/email integration, etc.  In the most extreme case like gaming applications, native applications may be necessary to deliver the highly animated and graphically intensive user experience. Performance: What type of performance is required by the application functionality?  For instance, for real-time look up of data over the network, mobile app performance depends on network latency and server infrastructure capabilities.  If consistent performance is required, data would typically need to be cached, which is supported on hybrid or native applications only. Connectivity and Availability: What sort of connectivity will your application require? Does the app require Web access all the time in order to always retrieve the latest data from the server? Or do the requirements dictate offline support? While native and hybrid apps can be built to operate offline, Web mobile apps require Web connectivity. Multi-platform Requirements: The terms “consumerization of IT” and BYOD (bring your own device) effectively mean that the line between the consumer and the enterprise devices have become blurred. Employees are bringing their personal mobile devices to work and are often expecting that they work in the corporate network and access back-office applications.  Even if companies restrict access to the big dogs: (iPad, iPhone, Android phones and tablets, possibly Windows Phone and tablets), trying to support each platform natively will require increasing resources and domain expertise with each new language/platform. And let’s not forget the maintenance costs, involved in upgrading new versions of each platform.   Where multi-platform support is needed, Web mobile or hybrid apps probably have the advantage. Going native, and trying to support multiple operating systems may be cost prohibitive with existing resources and developer skills. Device-Services Access:  If your app needs to access local device services, such as the camera, contacts app, accelerometer, etc., then your choices are limited to native or hybrid applications.   Fragmentation: Apple controls Apple iOS and the only concern is what version iOS is running on any given device.   Not so Android, which is open source. There are many, many versions and variants of Android running on different devices, which can be a nightmare for app developers trying to support different devices running different flavors of Android.  (Is it an Amazon Kindle Fire? a Samsung Galaxy?  A Barnes & Noble Nook?) This is a nightmare scenario for native apps—on the other hand, a mobile Web or hybrid app, when properly designed, can shield you from these complexities because they are based on common frameworks.  Resources: How many developers can you dedicate to building and supporting mobile application development?  What are their existing skills sets?  If you’re considering native application development due to the complexity of the application under development, factor the costs of becoming proficient on a each platform’s OS and programming language. Add another platform, and that’s another language, another SDK. On the other side of the equation, Web mobile or hybrid applications are simpler to make, and readily support more platforms, but there may be performance trade-offs. Conclusion This only scratches the surface. However, I hope to have suggested some food for thought in choosing your mobile development strategy.  Do your due diligence, search the Web, read up on mobile, talk to peers, attend events. The development team at Oracle is working hard on mobile technologies to help customers extend enterprise applications to mobile faster and effectively.  To learn more on what Oracle has to offer, check out the Oracle ADF Mobile (hybrid) and ADF Faces/ADF Mobile browser (Web Mobile) solutions from Oracle.   Additional Information Blog: ADF Blog Product Information on OTN: ADF Mobile Product Information on Oracle.com: Oracle Fusion Middleware Follow us on Twitter and Facebook Subscribe to our regular Fusion Middleware Newsletter

  Read the article

• Mobile BI Comes of Age

  - by rich.clayton(at)oracle.com

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} One of the hot topics in the Business Intelligence industry is mobility.  More specifically the question is how business can be transformed by the iPhone and the iPad.  In June 2003, Gartner predicted that Mobile BI would be obsolete and that the technology was headed for the 'trough of disillusionment'.  I agreed with them at that time.  Many vendors like MicroStrategy and Business Objects jumped into the fray attempting to show how PDA's like Palm Pilots could be integrated with BI.  Their investments resulted in interesting demos with no commercial traction.  Why, because wireless networks and mobile operating systems were primitive, immature and slow. In my opinion, Apple's iOS has changed everything in Mobile BI.  Yes Blackberry, Android and Symbian and all the rest have their place in the market but I believe that increasingly consumers (not IT departments) influence BI decision making processes.  Consumers are choosing the iPhone and the iPad. The number of iPads I see in business meetings now is staggering.  Some use it for email and note taking and others are starting to use corporate applications.  The possibilities for Mobile BI are countless and I would expect to see iPads enterprise-wide over the next few years.   These new devices will provide just-in-time access to critical business information.  Front-line managers interacting with customers, suppliers, patients or citizens will have information literally at their fingertips. I've experimented with several mobile BI tools.  They look cool but like their Executive Information System (EIS) predecessors of the 1990's these tools lack a backbone and a plausible integration strategy.  EIS was a viral technology in the early 1990's.  Executives from every industry and job function were showcasing their dashboards to fellow co-workers and colleagues at the country club.  Just like the iPad, every senior manager wanted one.  EIS wasn't a device however, it was a software application.   EIS quickly faded into the software sunset as it lacked integration with corporate information systems.  BI servers  replaced EIS because the technology focused on the heavy data lifting of integrating, normalizing, aggregating and managing large, complex data volumes.  The devices are here to stay. The cute stand-alone mobile BI tools, not so much. If all you're looking to do is put Excel files on your iPad, there are plenty of free tools on the market.  You'll look cool at your next management meeting but after a few weeks, the cool factor will fade away and you'll be wondering how you will ever maintain it.  If however you want secure, consistent, reliable information on your iPad, you need an integration strategy and a way to model the data.  BI Server technologies like the Oracle BI Foundation is a market leading approach to tackle that issue. I liken the BI mobility frenzy to buying classic cars.  Classic Cars have two buying groups - teenagers and middle-age folks looking to tinker.  Teenagers look at the pin-stripes and the paint job while middle-agers (like me)  kick the tires a bit and look under the hood to check out the quality and reliability of the engine.  Mobile BI tools sure look sexy but don't go very far without an engine and a transmission or an integration strategy. The strategic question in Mobile BI is can these startups build a motor and transmission faster than Oracle can re-paint the car?  Oracle has a great engine and a transmission that connects to all enterprise information assets.  We're working on the new paint job and are excited about the possibilities.  Just as vertical integration worked in the automotive business, it too works in the technology industry.

  Read the article

• What's new in Solaris 11.1?

  - by Karoly Vegh

  Solaris 11.1 is released. This is the first release update since Solaris 11 11/11, the versioning has been changed from MM/YY style to 11.1 highlighting that this is Solaris 11 Update 1.  Solaris 11 itself has been great. What's new in Solaris 11.1? Allow me to pick some new features from the What's New PDF that can be found in the official Oracle Solaris 11.1 Documentation. The updates are very numerous, I really can't include all.  I. New AI Automated Installer RBAC profiles have been introduced to enable delegation of installation tasks. II. The interactive installer now supports installing the OS to iSCSI targets. III. ASR (Auto Service Request) and OCM (Oracle Configuration Manager) have been enabled by default to proactively provide support information and create service requests to speed up support processes. This is optional and can be disabled but helps a lot in supportcases. For further information, see: http://oracle.com/goto/solarisautoreg IV. The new command svcbundle helps you to create SMF manifests without having to struggle with XML editing. (btw, do you know the interactive editprop subcommand in svccfg? The listprop/setprop subcommands are great for scripting and automating, but for an interactive property editing session try, for example, this: svccfg -s svc:/application/pkg/system-repository:default editprop )  V. pfedit: Ever wondered how to delegate editing permissions to certain files? It is well known "sudo /usr/bin/vi /etc/hosts" is not the right way, for sudo elevates the complete vi process to admin levels, and the user can "break" out of the session as root with simply starting a shell from that vi. Now, the new pfedit command provides a solution exactly to this challenge - an auditable, secure, per-user configurable editing possibility. See the pfedit man page for examples.   VI. rsyslog, the popular logging daemon (filters, SSL, formattable output, SQL collect...) has been included in Solaris 11.1 as an alternative to syslog.  VII: Zones: Solaris Zones - as a major Solaris differentiator - got lots of love in terms of new features: ZOSS - Zones on Shared Storage: Placing your zones to shared storage (FC, iSCSI) has never been this easy - via zonecfg.  parallell updates - with S11's bootenvironments updating zones was no problem and meant no downtime anyway, but still, now you can update them parallelly, a way faster update action if you are running a large number of zones. This is like parallell patching in Solaris 10, but with all the IPS/ZFS/S11 goodness.  per-zone fstype statistics: Running zones on a shared filesystems complicate the I/O debugging, since ZFS collects all the random writes and delivers them sequentially to boost performance. Now, over kstat you can find out which zone's I/O has an impact on the other ones, see the examples in the documentation: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E26502_01/html/E29024/gmheh.html#scrolltoc Zones got RDSv3 protocol support for InfiniBand, and IPoIB support with Crossbow's anet (automatic vnic creation) feature.  NUMA I/O support for Zones: customers can now determine the NUMA I/O topology of the system from within zones.  VIII: Security got a lot of attention too:  Automated security/audit reporting, with builtin reporting templates e.g. for PCI (payment card industry) audits.  PAM is now configureable on a per-user basis instead of system wide, allowing different authentication requirements for different users  SSH in Solaris 11.1 now supports running in FIPS 140-2 mode, that is, in a U.S. government security accredited fashion.  SHA512/224 and SHA512/256 cryptographic hash functions are implemented in a FIPS-compliant way - and on a T4 implemented in silicon! That is, goverment-approved cryptography at HW-speed.  Generally, Solaris is currently under evaluation to be both FIPS and Common Criteria certified.  IX. Networking, as one of the core strengths of Solaris 11, has been extended with:  Data Center Bridging (DCB) - not only setups where network and storage share the same fabric (FCoE, anyone?) can have Quality-of-Service requirements. DCB enables peers to distinguish traffic based on priorities. Your NICs have to support DCB, see the documentation, and additional information on Wikipedia. DataLink MultiPathing, DLMP, enables link aggregation to span across multiple switches, even between those of different vendors. But there are essential differences to the good old bandwidth-aggregating LACP, see the documentation: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E26502_01/html/E28993/gmdlu.html#scrolltoc VNIC live migration is now supported from one physical NIC to another on-the-fly  X. Data management:  FedFS, (Federated FileSystem) is new, it relies on Solaris 11's NFS referring mechanism to join separate shares of different NFS servers into a single filesystem namespace. The referring system has been there since S11 11/11, in Solaris 11.1 FedFS uses a LDAP - as the one global nameservice to bind them all.  The iSCSI initiator now uses the T4 CPU's HW-implemented CRC32 algorithm - thus improving iSCSI throughput while reducing CPU utilization on a T4 Storage locking improvements are now RAC aware, speeding up throughput with better locking-communication between nodes up to 20%!  XI: Kernel performance optimizations: The new Virtual Memory subsystem ("VM2") scales now to 100+ TB Memory ranges.  The memory predictor monitors large memory page usage, and adjust memory page sizes to applications' needs OSM, the Optimized Shared Memory allows Oracle DBs' SGA to be resized online XII: The Power Aware Dispatcher in now by default enabled, reducing power consumption of idle CPUs. Also, the LDoms' Power Management policies and the poweradm settings in Solaris 11 OS will cooperate. XIII: x86 boot: upgrade to the (Grand Unified Bootloader) GRUB2. Because grub2 differs in the configuration syntactically from grub1, one shall not edit the new grub configuration (grub.cfg) but use the new bootadm features to update it. GRUB2 adds UEFI support and also support for disks over 2TB. XIV: Improved viewing of per-CPU statistics of mpstat. This one might seem of less importance at first, but nowadays having better sorting/filtering possibilities on a periodically updated mpstat output of 256+ vCPUs can be a blessing. XV: Support for Solaris Cluster 4.1: The What's New document doesn't actually mention this one, since OSC 4.1 has not been released at the time 11.1 was. But since then it is available, and it requires Solaris 11.1. And it's only a "pkg update" away. ...aand I seriously need to stop here. There's a lot I missed, Edge Virtual Bridging, lofi tuning, ZFS sharing and crypto enhancements, USB3.0, pulseaudio, trusted extensions updates, etc - but if I mention all those then I effectively copy the What's New document. Which I recommend reading now anyway, it is a great extract of the 300+ new projects and RFE-followups in S11.1. And this blogpost is a summary of that extract.  For closing words, allow me to come back to Request For Enhancements, RFEs. Any customer can request features. Open up a Support Request, explain that this is an RFE, describe the feature you/your company desires to have in S11 implemented. The more SRs are collected for an RFE, the more chance it's got to get implemented. Feel free to provide feedback about the product, as well as about the Solaris 11.1 Documentation using the "Feedback" button there. Both the Solaris engineers and the documentation writers are eager to hear your input.Feel free to comment about this post too. Except that it's too long ;)  wbr,charlie

  Read the article

• Securing an ADF Application using OES11g: Part 1

  - by user12587121

  Future releases of the Oracle stack should allow ADF applications to be secured natively with Oracle Entitlements Server (OES). In a sequence of postings here I explore one way to achive this with the current technology, namely OES 11.1.1.5 and ADF 11.1.1.6. ADF Security Basics ADF Bascis The Application Development Framework (ADF) is Oracle’s preferred technology for developing GUI based Java applications.  It can be used to develop a UI for Swing applications or, more typically in the Oracle stack, for Web and J2EE applications.  ADF is based on and extends the Java Server Faces (JSF) technology.  To get an idea, Oracle provides an online demo to showcase ADF components. ADF can be used to develop just the UI part of an application, where, for example, the data access layer is implemented using some custom Java beans or EJBs.  However ADF also has it’s own data access layer, ADF Business Components (ADF BC) that will allow rapid integration of data from data bases and Webservice interfaces to the ADF UI component.   In this way ADF helps implement the MVC  approach to building applications with UI and data components. The canonical tutorial for ADF is to open JDeveloper, define a connection to a database, drag and drop a table from the database view to a UI page, build and deploy.  One has an application up and running very quickly with the ability to quickly integrate changes to, for example, the DB schema. ADF allows web pages to be created graphically and components like tables, forms, text fields, graphs and so on to be easily added to a page.  On top of JSF Oracle have added drag and drop tooling with JDeveloper and declarative binding of the UI to the data layer, be it database, WebService or Java beans.  An important addition is the bounded task flow which is a reusable set of pages and transitions.   ADF adds some steps to the page lifecycle defined in JSF and adds extra widgets including powerful visualizations. It is worth pointing out that the Oracle Web Center product (portal, content management and so on) is based on and extends ADF. ADF Security ADF comes with it’s own security mechanism that is exposed by JDeveloper at development time and in the WLS Console and Enterprise Manager (EM) at run time. The security elements that need to be addressed in an ADF application are: authentication, authorization of access to web pages, task-flows, components within the pages and data being returned from the model layer. One  typically relies on WLS to handle authentication and because of this users and groups will also be handled by WLS.  Typically in a Dev environment, users and groups are stored in the WLS embedded LDAP server. One has a choice when enabling ADF security (Application->Secure->Configure ADF Security) about whether to turn on ADF authorization checking or not: In the case where authorization is enabled for ADF one defines a set of roles in which we place users and then we grant access to these roles to the different ADF elements (pages or task flows or elements in a page). An important notion here is the difference between Enterprise Roles and Application Roles. The idea behind an enterprise role is that is defined in terms of users and LDAP groups from the WLS identity store.  “Enterprise” in the sense that these are things available for use to all applications that use that store.  The other kind of role is an Application Role and the idea is that  a given application will make use of Enterprise roles and users to build up a set of roles for it’s own use.  These application roles will be available only to that application.   The general idea here is that the enterprise roles are relatively static (for example an Employees group in the LDAP directory) while application roles are more dynamic, possibly depending on time, location, accessed resource and so on.  One of the things that OES adds that is that we can define these dynamic membership conditions in Role Mapping Policies. To make this concrete, here is how, at design time in Jdeveloper, one assigns these rights in Jdeveloper, which puts them into a file called jazn-data.xml: When the ADF app is deployed to a WLS this JAZN security data is pushed to the system-jazn-data.xml file of the WLS deployment for the policies and application roles and to the WLS backing LDAP for the users and enterprise roles.  Note the difference here: after deploying the application we will see the users and enterprise roles show up in the WLS LDAP server.  But the policies and application roles are defined in the system-jazn-data.xml file.  Consult the embedded WLS LDAP server to manage users and enterprise roles by going to the domain console and then Security Realms->myrealm->Users and Groups: For production environments (or in future to share this data with OES) one would then perform the operation of “reassociating” this security policy and application role data to a DB schema (or an LDAP).  This is done in the EM console by reassociating the Security Provider.  This blog posting has more explanations and references on this reassociation process. If ADF Authentication and Authorization are enabled then the Security Policies for a deployed application can be managed in EM.  Our goal is to be able to manage security policies for the applicaiton rather via OES and it's console. Security Requirements for an ADF Application With this package tour of ADF security we can see that to secure an ADF application with we would expect to be able to take care of at least the following items: Authentication, including a user and user-group store Authorization for page access Authorization for bounded Task Flow access.  A bounded task flow has only one point of entry and so if we protect that entry point by calling to OES then all the pages in the flow are protected.  Authorization for viewing data coming from the data access layer In the next posting we will describe a sample ADF application and required security policies. References ADF Dev Guide: Fusion Middleware Fusion Developer's Guide for Oracle Application Development Framework: Enabling ADF Security in a Fusion Web Application Oracle tutorial on securing a sample ADF application, appears to require ADF 11.1.2 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";} 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:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

  Read the article

• Top 10 Browser Productivity Tips

  - by Renso

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/renso/archive/2013/10/14/top-10-browser-productivity-tips.aspxYou don’t have to be a geek to be a productive browser user. The tips below have been selected by actions users take most of the time to navigate a web-site but use long-standing keyboard or mouse actions to get them done, when there are keyboard short-cuts you can use instead. Since you hands are already on the keyboard it is almost always faster to sue a keyboard shortcut to get something done that you usually used the mouse for. For example right-clicking on something to copy it and then doing to same for pasting something is very time consuming, keyboard shortcuts have been created that simplify the task. All it takes are a few memory brain cells to remember them. Here are the tips, in no particular order:   Tip 1 Hold down the spacebar on your keyboard to page to the end of your web page rather than using your mouse. This is really a slow way of doing it. If you want to page one page at a time, hit the spacebar once, and again to page again. But if you want to page all the way to the end of the web page simply hit Ctrl+End (that is hold down the Ctrl key and hit the End button on your keyboard). To get to the top of your web page, simply hit Ctrl + Home to go all the way to the top of your web page. Tip 2 Where are my downloads? Some folks run downloads again-and-again because they do not know where the last one went and they do not see the popup, or browser note on their web page in the footer, etc. Simply hit Ctrl+J. Works in most browsers. Tip 3 Selecting a US state from a drop down box. Don’t use the mouse, takes just way too long to scroll. When you tab to the drop down box or click on it with your mouse, simply hit the first character of the state and it will be selected. For Texas for example hit the letter “T” twice on your keyboard to get to it. The same concept can be applied to any drop down box that is alphabetical or numerically sorted. Tip 4 Fixing spelling errors. All modern-day browsers support this now. You see the red wavy lines underscoring a word, yes it is a spelling error. How do you fix it? Don’t overtype it or try and fix it manually, fist right-click on it and a list of suggestions comes up. If it does not show up, like my name “Renso” and you know how to spell your name as in this example, look further down the list of options (the little window popup that appears when you right click) and you should see an option to “Add to Dictionary”. Be warned, when you add it, it only adds it to the browser you’re using’s dictionary. If you use Google Chrome, Firefox and IE, each one will have their own list. Tip 5 So you have trouble seeing the text on the screen. Or you are looking at a photo, for example in Facebook. You want to zoom in to read better or zoom into a photo a bit more. Hit Ctrl++ (hold down Ctrl key and hit the plus key – actually it’s the equal key but it is easier to remember that it is plus for bigger). Hit the minus to zoom out. Now you can’t remember what the original size was since you were so excited to hit it 20 times, or was that 21… Simply hit Ctrl+0 (that is zero) and it will reset it to the default. Tip 6 So you closed a couple of tabs in your browser. Suddenly you remember something you wanted to double-check something on one of the tabs, you cannot remember the URL ad the tab is gone forever, or is it? Simply hit Ctrl+Shift+t and it will bring back your tabs one by one each time you click the T. This has also been a great way for me to quickly close some tabs because I don’t want my boss to see I’m shopping and then hitting Ctrl+Shift+t to quickly get it back and complete my check-put and purchase. Or, for parents, when you walk into your daughter’s room and you see she quickly clicks and closes a window/tab in here browser. Not to worry my little darling, daddy will Ctrl+Shift+t and see what boys on Facebook you were talking too… Tip 7 The web browser is frozen on your PC/Laptop/Whatever, in this example it may be your Internet Explorer browser. I don’t mention Firefox or Chrome here because it probably never happens in their world. You cannot close it, it won’t respond to anything you have done s far except for the next step you are about to take, which is throw your two-day old coffee on your keyboard. This happens especially on sites that want to force you to complete a purchase order. Hit Ctrl+Alt+Del on your keyboard on any version of windows, select TASK MANAGER. In the  First Tab, which is the Process Tab, look for the item in question. In this example you should see Internet Explorer. Right-click it and select “End Task”. It will force the thread out of memory and terminate that process. You can of course do this with any program running under your account. Tip 8 This is a personal favorite of mine. To select words in the paragraph without using the mouse. You don’t want to select one character at a time like when you use the Ctrl+arrows as it can be very slow if you want to select a lot of text. You also want to select whole words. Simply use the Ctrl+Shift_arrow (right or left depending which direction you want to go. Tip 9 I was a bit reluctant to add this one, but being in the professional services industry still come across many-a-folk that simply can’t copy-and-paste them-all text or images that reside on them screens, y’all. Ctrl+c to copy and Ctrl+v to paste it. Works a lot faster than using the mouse. You may be asking: “Well why in the devil did they not use Ctrl+p for paste…. because that is for printing. This is of course not limited to the browser world, it applies to almost any piece of software running on PC or Mac. Go try it on an image on your browser, right-click it and select copy. Open a word document and Ctrl+v to paste the image in there. Please consider copyright laws. Tip 10 Getting rid of annoying ads. Now this only works when you load a web page, meaning when you get back to the same page later you will have to do this again and you will need to learn a tool to do it, WELL WORTH IT. For example, I use GrooveShark to listen to music but I don’t like the ads they show. Install a tool like Firebug for Firefox or use the Ctrl+Shift+I on Chrome to bring up the developer toolbar. Shows at the bottom of the page. With Firefox, once you have installed Firebug as an add-on, a yellow bug should appear on the top right-hand-side of your browser, click on it to display the developer toolbar. You will need to learn how to use it, but once you know how to select an item/section on the window (usually just right-click the add you don’t want to see and select “Inspect Element”, the developer toolbar will appear (if not already there)) and then simply hit delete and it will remove the add from the screen. If you don’t know HTML you may need to play with it a bit, but once you understand how it works can open up a whole new world for you on how web pages actually work. If you can think of any others that have saved you a ton of time please let me know so I can add them to a top 99 list.

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 360 361 362 363 364 365 366 367 368 369 370 371  | Next Page >