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• 5 ways to stop code thrashing&hellip;

  - by MarkPearl

  A few days ago I was programming on a personal project and hit a roadblock. I was applying the MVVM pattern and for some reason my view model was not updating the view when the state changed??? I had applied this pattern many times before and had never had this problem. It just didn’t make sense. So what did I do… I did what anyone would have done in my situation and looked to pass the blame to someone or something else. I tried to blame one of the inherited base classes, but it looked fine, then to Visual Studio, but it seemed to be fine and eventually to any random segment of code I came across. My elementary problem had now mushroomed into one that had lost any logical basis and I was in thrashing mode! So what to do when you begin to thrash? 1) Do a general code cleanup – Now there is a difference between cleaning code and changing code . When you thrash you change code and you want to avoid this. What you really want to do is things like rename variables to have better meaning and go over your comments. 2) Do a proof of concept – if cleaning code doesn’t help. The  you want to isolate the problem and identify the key concepts. When you isolate code you ideally want it to be in a totally separate project with as little complexity as possible. Make the building blocks and try and replicate the functionality that you are getting in your current application. 3) Phone a friend – I have found speaking to someone else about the problem generally helps me solve any thrashing issues I am having. Usually they don’t even have to say anything to solve the problem, just you talking them through the problem helps you get clarity of mind. 4) Let the dust settle – Sometimes time is the best solution. I have had a few problems that no matter who I discussed them with and no matter how much code cleaning I had done I just couldn’t seem to fix it. My brain just seemed to be going in circles. A good nights rest has always helped and often just the break away from the problem has helped me find a solution. 5) Stack overflow it – So similar to phone a friend. I am really surprised to see what a melting pot stack overflow has been and what a help it has been in solving technology specific problems. Just be considerate to those using the site and explain clearly exactly what problem you are having and the technologies you are using or else you will probably not get any useful help…

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• Am I deluding myself? Business analyst transition to programmer

  - by Ryan

  Current job: Working as the lead business analyst for a Big 4 firm, leading a team of developers and testers working on a large scale re-platforming project (4 onshore dev, 4 offshore devs, several onshore/offshore testers). Also work in a similar capacity on other smaller scale projects. Extent of my role: Gathering/writing out requirements, creating functional specifications, designing the UI (basically mapping out all front-end aspects of the system), working closely with devs to communicate/clarify requirements and come up with solutions when we hit roadblocks, writing test cases (and doing much of the testing), working with senior management and key stakeholders, managing beta testers, creating user guides and leading training sessions, providing key technical support. I also write quite a few macros in Excel using VBA (several of my macros are now used across the entire firm, so there are maybe around 1000 people using them) and use SQL on a daily basis, both on the SQL compact files the program relies on, our SQL Server data and any Access databases I create. The developers feel that I am quite good in this role because I understand a lot about programming, inherent system limitations, structure of the databases, etc so it's easier for me to communicate ideas and come up with suggestions when we face problems. What really interests me is developing software. I do a fair amount of programming in VBA and have been wanting to learn C# for awhile (the dev team uses C# - I review code occasionally for my own sake but have not had any practical experience using it). I'm interested in not just the business process but also the technical side of things, so the traditional BA role doesn't really whet my appetite for the kind of stuff I want to do. Right now I have a few small projects that managers have given me and I'm finding new ways to do them (like building custom Access applications), so there's a bit here and there to keep me interested. My question is this: what I would like to do is create custom Excel or Access applications for small businesses as a freelance business (working as a one-man shop; maybe having an occasional contractor depending on a project's complexity). This would obviously start out as a part-time venture while I have a day job, but eventually become a full-time job. Am I deluding myself to thinking I can go from BA/part-time VBA programmer to making a full-time go of a freelance business (where I would be starting out just writing custom Excel/Access apps in VBA)? Or is this type of thing not usually attempted until someone gains years of full-time programming experience? And is there even a market for these types of applications amongst small businesses (and maybe medium-sized) businesses?

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• SOA Summit - Oracle Session Replay

  - by Bruce Tierney

  If you think you missed the most recent Integration Developer News (IDN) "SOA Summit" 2013...good news, you didn't.  At least not the replay of the Oracle session titled: Three Solutionsfor Simplifying Cloud/On-Premises Integration As you will see in the reply below, this session introduces Three common reasons for integration complexity: Disparate Toolkits Lack of API Management Rigid, Brittle Infrastructure and then the Three solutions to these challenges: Unify Cloud On-premises Integration Enable Multi-channel Development with API Management Plan for the Unexpected - Future Readiness The last solution on future readiness describes how you can transition from being reactive to new trends, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), by modifying your integration strategy to enable business agility and how to recognize trends through Fast Data event processing ahead of your competition. Oracle SOA Suite customer SFpark's (San Francisco Metropolitan Transit Authority) implementation with API Management is covered as shown in the screenshot to the right This case study covers the core areas of API Management for partners to build their own applications by leveraging parking availability and real-time pricing as well as mobile enablement of data integrated by SOA Suite underneath.  Download the free SFpark app from the Apple and Android app stores to check it out. When looking into the future, the discussion starts with a historical look to better prepare for what comes next.   As shown in the image below, one of the next frontiers after mobile and cloud integration is a deeper level of direct "enterprise to customer" interaction.  Much of this relates to the Internet of Things.  Examples of IoT from the perspective of SOA and integration is also covered in the session. For example, early adopter Turkcell and their tracking of mobile phone users as they move from point A to B to C is shown in the image the right.   As you look into more "smart services" such as Location-Based Services, how "future ready" is your application infrastructure?  . . . Check out the replay by clicking the video image below to learn about these three challenges and solution including how to "future ready" your application infrastructure:

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• Use Expressions with LINQ to Entities

  - by EltonStoneman

  [Source: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman] Recently I've been putting together a generic approach for paging the response from a WCF service. Paging changes the service signature, so it's not as simple as adding a behavior to an existing service in config, but the complexity of the paging is isolated in a generic base class. We're using the Entity Framework talking to SQL Server, so when we ask for a page using LINQ's .Take() method we get a nice efficient SQL query for just the rows we want, with minimal impact on SQL Server and network traffic. We use the maximum ID of the record returned as a high-water mark (rather than using .Skip() to go to the next record), so the approach caters for records being deleted between page requests. In the paged response we include a HasMorePages indicator, computed by comparing the max ID in the page of results to the max ID for the whole resultset - if the latter is bigger, then there are more pages. In some quick performance testing, the paged version of the service performed much more slowly than the unpaged version, which was unexpected. We narrowed it down to the code which gets the max ID for the full resultset - instead of building an efficient MAX() SQL query, EF was returning the whole resultset and then computing the max ID in the service layer. It's easy to reproduce - take this AdventureWorks query:             var context = new AdventureWorksEntities();             var query = from od in context.SalesOrderDetail                         where od.ModifiedDate >= modified                          && od.SalesOrderDetailID.CompareTo(id) > 0                         orderby od.SalesOrderDetailID                         select od;   We can find the maximum SalesOrderDetailID like this:             var maxIdEfficiently = query.Max(od => od.SalesOrderDetailID);   which produces our efficient MAX() SQL query. If we're doing this generically and we already have the ID function in a Func:             Func<SalesOrderDetail, int> idFunc = od => od.SalesOrderDetailID;             var maxIdInefficiently = query.Max(idFunc);   This fetches all the results from the query and then runs the Max() function in code. If you look at the difference in Reflector, the first call passes an Expression to the Max(), while the second call passes a Func. So it's an easy fix - wrap the Func in an Expression:             Expression<Func<SalesOrderDetail, int>> idExpression = od => od.SalesOrderDetailID;             var maxIdEfficientlyAgain = query.Max(idExpression);   - and we're back to running an efficient MAX() statement. Evidently the EF provider can dissect an Expression and build its equivalent in SQL, but it can't do that with Funcs.

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• Addressing threats introduced by the BYOD trend

  - by kyap

  With the growth of the mobile technology segment, enterprises are facing a new type of threats introduced by the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) trend, where employees use their own devices (laptops, tablets or smartphones) not necessarily secured to access corporate network and information.In the past - actually even right now, enterprises used to provide laptops to their employees for their daily work, with specific operating systems including anti-virus and desktop management tools, in order to make sure that the pools of laptop allocated are spyware or trojan-horse free to access the internal network and sensitive information. But the BYOD reality is breaking this paradigm and open new security breaches for enterprises as most of the username/password based systems, especially the internal web applications, can be accessed by less or none protected device.To address this reality we can adopt 3 approaches:1. Coué's approach: Close your eyes and assume that your employees are mature enough to know what he/she should or should not do.2. Consensus approach: Provide a list of restricted and 'certified' devices to the internal network. 3. Military approach: Access internal systems with certified laptop ONLYIf you choose option 1: Thanks for visiting my blog and I hope you find the others entries more useful :)If you choose option 2: The proliferation of new hardware and software updates every quarter makes this approach very costly and difficult to maintain.If you choose option 3: You need to find a way to allow the access into your sensitive application from the corporate authorized machines only, managed by the IT administrators... but how? The challenge with option 3 is to find out how end-users can restrict access to certain sensitive applications only from authorized machines, or from another angle end-users can not access the sensitive applications if they are not using the authorized machine... So what if we find a way to store the applications credential secretly from the end-users, and then automatically submit them when the end-users access the application? With this model, end-users do not know the username/password to access the applications so even if the end-users use their own devices they will not able to login. Also, there's no need to reconfigure existing applications to adapt to the new authenticate scheme given that we are still leverage the same username/password authenticate model at the application level. To adopt this model, you can leverage Oracle Enterprise Single Sign On. In short, Oracle ESSO is a desktop based solution, capable to store credentials of Web and Native based applications. At the application startup and if it is configured as an esso-enabled application - check out my previous post on how to make Skype essso-enabled, Oracle ESSO takes over automatically the sign-in sequence with the store credential on behalf of the end-users. Combined with Oracle ESSO Provisioning Gateway, the credentials can be 'pushed' in advance from an actual provisioning server, like Oracle Identity Manager or Tivoli Identity Manager, so the end-users can login into sensitive application without even knowing the actual username and password, so they can not login with other machines rather than those secured by Oracle ESSO.Below is a graphical illustration of this approach:With this model, not only you can protect the access to sensitive applications only from authorized machine, you can also implement much stronger Password Policies in terms of Password Complexity as well as Password Reset Frequency but end-users will not need to remember the passwords anymore.If you are interested, do not hesitate to check out the Oracle Enterprise Single Sign-on products from OTN !

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• Oracle OpenWorld - Events of Interest

  - by Larry Wake

  I mentioned the "Focus On Oracle Solaris" document the other day, which lists many of the Solaris-related events at Oracle OpenWorld this year; today I thought I'd highlight a few sessions you might find interesting. Monday, October 1st: 4:45 PM - Get Proactive: Best Practices for Maintaining and Upgrading Oracle Solaris (Moscone South 252) This session covers best practices for upgrading and patching and how to take advantage of unique technologies in Oracle Solaris 10 and 11. Learn how to get maximum value from My Oracle Support for both reactive and proactive requirements. Understand the benefits of secure remote access and how Oracle Support experts use collaborative shared sessions combined with Oracle Solaris technologies such as DTrace. Tuesday, October 2nd: 10:15 AM -  How to Increase Performance and Agility with an Open Data Center Fabric (Moscone South 200) If you haven't had a chance to hear about Xsigo Systems, this is a golden opportunity while you're at OpenWorld. Now part of Oracle, Xsigo's network virtualization technology is designed to increase both application performance and management efficiency, through a combination of software-defined network technology and the industry’s fastest fabric, allowing data center to converge Ethernet and Fibre Channel connectivity to a single fabric, to reduce complexity by 70 percent and CapEx by 50 percent while providing more I/O bandwidth to your applications. Wednesday, October 3rd: 10:15 AM - General Session: Oracle Solaris 11 Strategy, Engineering Insights, and Roadmap (Moscone South 103) Markus Flierl, head of Oracle Solaris Core Engineering, will outline the strategy and roadmap for Oracle Solaris,  how Oracle Solaris 11 is being deployed in cloud computing and the unique optimizations in Oracle Solaris 11 for the Oracle stack. The session also offers a sneak peek at the latest technology under development in Oracle Solaris, and what customers can expect to see in the coming updates. Plus, there are several Hands-On Labs: Monday, October 1st: 10:45 AM - 11:45 AM - Reduce Risk with Oracle Solaris Access Control to Restrain Users and Isolate Applications (Marriott Marquis - Salon 14/15) 4:45 PM - 5:45 PM - Managing Your Data with Built-In Oracle Solaris ZFS Data Services in Release 11  (Marriott Marquis - Salon 14/15) Tuesday, October 2nd: 1:15 PM - 2:15 PM - Virtualizing Your Oracle Solaris 11 Environment  (Marriott Marquis - Salon 10/11) Wednesday, October 3rd: 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM - Large-Scale Installation and Deployment of Oracle Solaris 11 (Marriott Marquis - Salon 14/15) There's plenty more--see the "Focus On Oracle Solaris" guide. See you next week in San Francisco!

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• How to explain bad software to non-technical people?

  - by mtutty

  In discussing software development with non-technical people (customers, business owners, project sponsors, etc.), I often resort to analogies and metaphors. It's relatively easy and effective to use a "house" or other metaphor for describing the size and complexity of new development. However, we often inherit someone else's code or data, and this approach doesn't seem to hold up as well when trying to explain why we're gutting something that already seems to work. Of course we can point to cycle time and cost to be saved in the future but this generally means nothing to business folks. I know doctors can say "just take this pill," but I'm not sure that software devs have the same authority. Ideas? EDIT: Let me add a bit to the discussion. The specific project I'm talking about has customers that don't realize (or care) about specific aspects of the system we're retiring (i.e., they think it was just fine): The system would save a NEW RECORD every time someone updated a field The system contained tables for reference data. These tables had new records added every day, even though they were duplicates of previous records. And there was no way to tie the reference data used for a particular case at the time it was closed. This is like 99% of the data in the old system. The field NAMES also have spaces, apostrophes and other inappropriate characters in them, making everything harder to work with. In addition to the incredible amount of duplicate data, they have around 1000 XLS files with data they want added to the system. Previously, they would do a spreadsheet for each case in the database, IN ADDITION TO what they typed into the database. Getting rid of this old, unneeded information and piping in the XLS data comprises about 80% of the total project effort, and was not something we could accurately predict. I'm trying to find a concrete way to describe how bad this thing was, mostly so that the customer will understand why the migration process has been so time-consuming. The actual coding was done pretty quickly and the new system works fine, but without the old data they won't be happy. Sorry to get into the weeds, but most of the answers I've seen so far are pretty basic scope/schedule/cost things. I've been doing this for 15 years, so this really is more of a reflective, philosophical question - but without some of the details it can be difficult to really appreciate the awful beauty of this problem.

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• Modelling highly specific business requirements

  - by AndyBursh

  How can one go about modelling highly specific business requirements, which have no precedent in the system? Take for example the following requirement: When a purchase order contains N lines, is over X value in total and is being recorded against project Y, an email needs to be sent to persons A and B with the details This requirement supplements other requirements surrounding purchase orders, but comes in at a much later date in response to some ongoing problem elsewhere in the business. Persons A and B are not part of any role or group in the system, and don't hold any specific responsibility; they are simply the two people the business has appointed to receive these emails in this very specific case. Projects are also data driven, so project Y has no special properties to distinguish it from any other project. The only way to identify it is to compare its identifier to a magic number. How can one go about modelling this kind of case without introducing too much additional complexity? That I can think of right now, there are a couple of options. Perform the checks and actions inline with the existing code. Here we find the correct spot in the code, check the conditions in the requirement and send the emails to hardcoded addresses. Of course this is fraught with issues. At the very least it stops working if one of these people leaves or changes their email address. At worst you have to ensure that any tests and test data are aware that additional actions are taken for a specific set of criteria. Introduce some form of events system. Here we introduce an eventing system, so that we might react to some event, and fulfil the requirement outside of the usual path of execution. This sounds like a cleaner solution than option 1, but the work involved is ultimately probably slightly overkill for this one small requirement. That said, having it in place does allow the system to handle these kinds of specific requirements consistently and easily in the future. Are there any other (good/better) ways of handling highly specific requirements? I mean other than telling the other parts of the business no!

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• Achieving decoupling in Model classes

  - by Guven

  I am trying to test-drive (or at least write unit tests) my Model classes but I noticed that my classes end up being too coupled. Since I can't break this coupling, writing unit tests is becoming harder and harder. To be more specific: Model Classes: These are the classes that hold the data in my application. They resemble pretty much the POJO (plain old Java objects), but they also have some methods. The application is not too big so I have around 15 model classes. Coupling: Just to give an example, think of a simple case of Order Header - Order Item. The header knows the item and the item knows the header (needs some information from the header for performing certain operations). Then, let's say there is the relationship between Order Item - Item Report. The item report needs the item as well. At this point, imagine writing tests for Item Report; you need have a Order Header to carry out the tests. This is a simple case with 3 classes; things get more complicated with more classes. I can come up with decoupled classes when I design algorithms, persistence layers, UI interactions, etc... but with model classes, I can't think of a way to separate them. They currently sit as one big chunk of classes that depend on each other. Here are some workarounds that I can think of: Data Generators: I have a package that generates sample data for my model classes. For example, the OrderHeaderGenerator class creates OrderHeaders with some basic data in it. I use the OrderHeaderGenerator from my ItemReport unit-tests so that I get an instance to OrderHeader class. The problem is these generators get complicated pretty fast and then I also need to test these generators; defeating the purpose a little bit. Interfaces instead of dependencies: I can come up with interfaces to get rid of the hard dependencies. For example, the OrderItem class would depend on the IOrderHeader interface. So, in my unit tests, I can easily mock the behaviour of an OrderHeader with a FakeOrderHeader class that implements the IOrderHeader interface. The problem with this approach is the complexity that the Model classes would end up having. Would you have other ideas on how to break this coupling in the model classes? Or, how to make it easier to unit-test the model classes?

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• OTN Virtual Technology Summit - July 9 - Middleware Track

  - by OTN ArchBeat

  The Architecture of Analytics: Big Time Big Data and Business Intelligence This four-session track, part of the free OTN Virtual Technology Summit on July 9, will present a solution architect's perspective on how business intelligence products in Oracle's Fusion Middleware family and beyond fit into an effective big data architecture, offering insight and expertise from Oracle ACE Directors and product team experts specializing in business Intelligence to help you meet your big data business intelligence challenges. Register now! Sessions Oracle Big Data Appliance Case Study: Using Big Data to Analyze Cancer-Genome Relationships Tom Plunkett, Lead Author of the Oracle Big Data Handbook What does it take to build an award winning Big Data solution? This presentation takes a deep technical dive into the use of the Oracle Big Data Appliance in a project for the National Cancer Institute's Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research. The Frederick National Laboratory and the Oracle team won several awards for analyzing relationships between genomes and cancer subtypes with big data, including the 2012 Government Big Data Solutions Award, the 2013 Excellence.Gov Finalist for Innovation, and the 2013 ComputerWorld Honors Laureate for Innovation. [30 mins] Getting Value from Big Data Variety Richard Tomlinson, Director, Product Management, Oracle Big data variety implies big data complexity. Performing analytics on diverse data typically involves mashing up structured, semi-structured and unstructured content. So how can we do this effectively to get real value? How do we relate diverse content so we can start to analyze it? This session looks at how we approach this tricky problem using Endeca Information Discovery. [30 mins] How To Leverage Your Investment In Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Within a Big Data Architecture Oracle ACE Director Kevin McGinley More and more organizations are realizing the value Big Data technologies contribute to the return on investment in Analytics. But as an increasing variety of data types reside in different data stores, organizations are finding that a unified Analytics layer can help bridge the divide in modern data architectures. This session will examine how you can enable Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) to play a role in a unified Analytics layer and the benefits and use cases for doing so. [30 mins] Oracle Data Integrator 12c As Your Big Data Data Integration Hub Oracle ACE Director Mark Rittman Oracle Data Integrator 12c (ODI12c), as well as being able to integrate and transform data from application and database data sources, also has the ability to load, transform and orchestrate data loads to and from Big Data sources. In this session, we'll look at ODI12c's ability to load data from Hadoop, Hive, NoSQL and file sources, transform that data using Hive and MapReduce processing across the Hadoop cluster, and then bulk-load that data into an Oracle Data Warehouse using Oracle Big Data Connectors. We will also look at how ODI12c enables ETL-offloading to a Hadoop cluster, with some tips and techniques on real-time capture into a Hadoop data reservoir and techniques and limitations when performing ETL on big data sources. [90 mins] Register now!

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• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for 10-24-2012

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Play Oracle Vanquisher Here's a little respite from whatever it is you normally spend your time on. Oracle Vanquisher is an online diversion that makes a game of data center optimization. According to the description: "Armed with a cool Oracle vacuum pack suit and a strategic IT roadmap, you will thwart threats and optimize your data center to increase your company’s stock price and boost your company's position." Mainly you avoid electric shock and killer birds. The current high score belongs to someone identified as "TEN." My score? Never mind. Book: DevOps for Developers | The Java Source The subject of DevOps has come up in a couple of recent OTN ArchBeat Podcasts, so it's somewhat serendipitous that Tori Weildt's recent blog post offers an overview of Java Champion Michael Hutterman's new book, DevOps for Developers, now available from Apress. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) : Context is everything… | The ORACLE-BASE Blog BOYD is a factor in the evolution of IT, but in what context? "The real IT work in companies is still being done on PCs," says Oracle ACE Director Tim Hall. "Yes, you can use a cloud service on your phone, but look around the office and you will see those cloud services are actually being used by people on PCs." Oracle in the Cloud: Oracle EBusiness Suite sizing | Tom Laszewski Cloud expert Tom Laszewski shares several technical resources that will be helpful for sizing of Oracle EBusiness Suite. Setting Up, Configuring, and Using an Oracle WebLogic Server Cluster Author and expert Yuli Vasiliev shows you how take advantage of multiple Oracle WebLogic Server instances grouped into a cluster to maximize scalability and availability. Webcast: Reduce Costs with Oracle's Database Storage Management Watch this! Join Oracle experts Kevin Jernigan and Margaret Hamburger for an interactive webcast in which you'll learn how Oracle's Database Storage Management can reduce storage costs and management complexity while improving query performance to meet service-level agreements and compliance requirements. Event Date: Tuesday, November 6, 2012 Event Time: 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET Thought for the Day "Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves." — Alan Kay Source: softwarequotes.com

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• All hail the Excel Queen

  - by Tim Dexter

  An excellent question this past week from dear ol Blighty; actually from Brian at Nextgen Clearing Ltd in the big smoke (London). Brian was developing an excel template and wanted to be able to reference the data fields multiple times inside the Excel template. Damn good question and I of course has some wacky solutions, from macros and cell referencing in Excel to pre-processing the data with an XSL stylesheet to copy the data multiple times so it could be referenced multiple times. All completely outlandish, enter our Queen of Excel, Shirley from the development team. Shirley is singlehandedly responsible for the Excel templates, I put her through six months of hell a few years back, with a host of Excel template requirements. She was more than up to the challenge and has developed some great features. One of those, is the ability to use the hidden XDO_METADATA sheet to map the data to custom named fields so they can be used multiple times in the template. So simple and very neat! Excel template and regular Excel users will know that you can only use the naming function once ie the names have to be unique across the workbook so you can not reuse a cell/group name. To get around this you can just come up with as many cell names as you want and map them in the XDO_METADATA sheet to the data columns/fields in your XML data set:. For example: XDO_?DEPTNO_SUMMARY?  <?DEPTNO?> XDO_?DNAME_SUMMARY?  <?DNAME?> XDO_GROUP_?G_D_DETAIL? <xsl:for-each-group select=".//G_D" group-by="./DEPTNO"> XDO_?DEPTNO_DETAIL? <?DEPTNO?> As you can see DEPTNO has been referenced twice and mapped to different named values in the left hand column. These values can then be used to name individual cells in the Excel template. You'll also notice a mix of Publisher <? ...?> and native XSL commands. So the world is your oyster on the mapping and the complexity you might need for calculations or string manipulation. Shirley has kindly built out a sample Excel template, data and result here so you can see how it all hangs together. the XDO_METADATA sheet is hidden, just right click on the sheet names and use the Unhide command to show it.

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• SMTP POP3 & PST. Acronyms from Hades.

  - by mikef

  A busy SysAdmin will occasionally have reason to curse SMTP. It is, certainly, one of the strangest events in the history of IT that such a deeply flawed system, designed originally purely for campus use, should have reached its current dominant position. The explanation was that it was the first open-standard email system, so SMTP/POP3 became the internet standard. We are, in consequence, dogged with a system with security weaknesses so extreme that messages are sent in plain text and you have no real assurance as to who the message came from anyway (SMTP-AUTH hasn't really caught on). Even without the security issues, the use of SMTP in an office environment provides a management nightmare to all commercial users responsible for complying with all regulations that control the conduct of business: such as tracking, retaining, and recording company documents. SMTP mail developed from various Unix-based systems designed for campus use that took the mail analogy so literally that mail messages were actually delivered to the users, using a 'store and forward' mechanism. This meant that, from the start, the end user had to store, manage and delete messages. This is a problem that has passed through all the releases of MS Outlook: It has to be able to manage mail locally in the dreaded PST file. As a stand-alone system, Outlook is flawed by its neglect of any means of automatic backup. Previous Outlook PST files actually blew up without warning when they reached the 2 Gig limit and became corrupted and inaccessible, leading to a thriving industry of 3rd party tools to clear up the mess. Microsoft Exchange is, of course, a server-based system. Emails are less likely to be lost in such a system if it is properly run. However, there is nothing to stop users from using local PSTs as well. There is the additional temptation to load emails into mobile devices, or USB keys for off-line working. The result is that the System Administrator is faced by a complex hybrid system where backups have to be taken from Servers, and PCs scattered around the network, where duplication of emails causes storage issues, and document retention policies become impossible to manage. If one adds to that the complexity of mobile phone email readers and mail synchronization, the problem is daunting. It is hardly surprising that the mood darkens when SysAdmins meet and discuss PST Hell. If you were promoted to the task of tormenting the souls of the damned in Hades, what aspects of the management of Outlook would you find most useful for your task? I'd love to hear from you. Cheers, Michael

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• Taking a Projects Development to the Next Level

  - by user1745022

  I have been looking for some advice for a while on how to handle a project I am working on, but to no avail. I am pretty much on my fourth iteration of improving an "application" I am working on; the first two times were in Excel, the third Time in Access, and now in Visual Studio. The field is manufacturing. The basic idea is I am taking read-only data from a massive Sybase server, filtering it and creating much smaller tables in Access daily (using delete and append Queries) and then doing a bunch of stuff. More specifically, I use a series of queries to either combine data from multiple tables or group data in specific ways (aggregate functions), and then I place this data into a table (so I can sort and manipulate data using DAO.recordset and run multiple custom algorithms). This process is then repeated multiple times throughout the database until a set of relevant tables are created. Many times I will create a field in a query with a value such as 1.1 so that when I append it to a table I can store information in the field from the algorithms. So as the process continues the number of fields for the tables change. The overall application consists of 4 "back-end" databases linked together on a shared drive, with various output (either front-end access applications or Excel). So my question is is this how many data driven applications that solve problems essentially work? Each backend database is updated with fresh data daily and updating each takes around 10 seconds (for three) and 2 minutes(for 1). Project Objectives. I want/am moving to SQL Server soon. Front End will be a Web Application (I know basic web-development and like the administration flexibility) and visual-studio will be IDE with c#/.NET. Should these algorithms be run "inside the database," or using a series of C# functions on each server request. I know you're not supposed to store data in a database unless it is an actual data point, and in Access I have many columns that just hold calculations from algorithms in vba. The truth is, I have seen multiple professional Access applications, and have never seen one that has the complexity or does even close to what mine does (for better or worse). But I know some professional software applications are 1000 times better then mine. So Please Please Please give me a suggestion of some sort. I have been completely on my own and need some guidance on how to approach this project the right way.

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• "Expecting A Different Result?" (2 of 3 in 'No Customer Left Behind' Series)

  - by Kathryn Perry

  A guest post by David Vap, Group Vice President, Oracle Applications Product Development Many companies already have some type of customer experience initiative in process or one that could be framed as such. The challenge is that the initiatives too often are started in a department silo, don't have the right level of executive sponsorship, or have been initiated without the necessary insight and strategic business alignment. You can't keep doing the same things, give it a customer experience name, and expect a different result. You can't continue to just compete on price or features - that is not sustainable in commoditized markets. And ultimately, investing in technology alone doesn't solve customer experience problems; it just adds to the complexity of them. You need a customer experience strategy and approach on how to execute a customer-centric worldview within your business. To develop this, you must take an outside in journey on how your customers are interacting with your business to establish a benchmark of your customers' experiences. Then you must get cross-functional alignment on what you are trying to achieve, near, mid, and long term. Your execution of that strategy should be based on a customer experience approach: Understand your customer: You need to capture the insights across interactions, channels (including social), and personas to better understand whom to serve, how to serve them, and when to serve them. Not all experiences or customers are equal, so leverage this insight to understand the strategic business objectives you need to address. Then determine which experiences can be improved immediately and which over time to get the result you need. Empower your ecosystem: You need to align your front-line employees with your strategy and give them the power, insight, and tools that allow them to cultivate a culture around strengthening the relationships with your customers. You also need to provide the transparency, access, and collaboration that enable your customers and partners to self serve and self solve and to share with ease. Adapt your business: You need to enable the discipline of agility within your organization and infrastructure so that you can innovate, tailor, and personalize experiences. This needs to be done both reactively from insight and proactively in real time so you can stay ahead of shifting market trends and evolving consumer behaviors. No longer will the old approaches provide the same returns. To compete, differentiate, and win in a world where the customer has the power, you must execute a strategy that is sure to deliver a better brand experience for your customers. Note: This is Part 2 in a three-part series. Part 1 is here. Stop back for Part 3 on November 28.

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• Ad-hoc reporting similar to Microstrategy/Pentaho - is OLAP really the only choice (is OLAP even sufficient)?

  - by TheBeefMightBeTough

  So I'm getting ready to develop an API in Java that will provide all dimensions, metrics, hierarchies, etc to a user such that they can pick and choose what they want (say, e.g., dimensions of Location (a store) and Weekly, and the metric Product Sales $), provide their choices to the api, and have it spit out an object that contains the answer to their question (the object would probably be a set of cells). I don't even believe there will be much drill up/down. The data warehouse the APIwill interface with is in a standard form (FACT tables, dimensions, star schema format). My question is, is an OLAP framework such as Mondrian the only way to achieve something akin to ad-hoc reporting? I can envisage a really large Cube (or VirtualCube) that contains most of the dimensions and metrics the user could ever want, which would give the illusion of ad-hoc reporting. The problem is that there is a ton of setup to do (so much XML) to get the framework to work with the data. Further it requires specific knowledge, such as MDX, and even moreso learning the framework peculiars (Mondrian API). Finally, I am not positive it will scale much better than simply making queries against a SQL database. OLAP to me feels like very old technology. Is performance really an issue anymore? The alternative I can think of would be dynamic SQL. If the existing tables in the data warehouse conform to a naming scheme (FACT_, DIM_, etc), or if a very simple config file/ database table containing config information existed that stored which tables are fact tables, which are dimensions, and what metrics are available, then couldn't the api read from that and assembly the appropriate sql query? Would this necessarily be harder than learning MDX, Mondrian (or another OLAP framework), and creating all the cubes? In general, I feel that OLAP is at the same time too powerful (supports drill up/down, complex functions) and outdated and am reluctant to base my architecture on it. However, I am unsure if the alternative(s), such as rolling my own ad-hoc reporting framework using dynamic SQL would remove any complexity while still fulfilling requirements, both functional and non-functional (e.g., scalability; some FACT tables have many millions of rows). I also wonder about other techniques (e.g., hive). Has anyone here tried to do ad-hoc reporting? Any advice? I expect this project to take a pretty long time (3 months min, but probably longer), so I just do not want to commit to an architecture without being absolutely sure of its pros and cons. Thanks so much.

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• Integrating with a payment provider; Proper and robust OOP approach

  - by ExternalUse

  History We are currently using a so called redirect model for our online payments (where you send the payer to a payment gateway, where he inputs his payment details - the gateway will then return him to a success/failure callback page). That's easy and straight-forward, but unfortunately quite inconvenient and at times confusing for our customers (leaving the site, changing their credit card details with an additional login on another site etc). Intention & Problem description We are now intending to switch to an integrated approach using an exchange of XML requests and responses. My problem is on how to cater with all (or rather most) of the things that may happen during processing - bearing in mind that normally simplicity is robust whereas complexity is fragile. Examples User abort: The user inputs Credit Card details and hits submit. An XML message to the provider's gateway is sent and waiting for response. The user hits "stop" in his browser or closes the window. ignore_user_abort() in PHP may be an option - but is that reliable? might it be better to redirect the user to a "please wait"-page, that in turn opens an AJAX or other request to the actual processor that does not rely on the connection? Database goes away sounds over-complicated, but with e.g. a webserver in the States and a DB in the UK, it has happened and will happen again: User clicks together his order, payment request has been sent to the provider but the response cannot be stored in the database. What approach could I use, using PHP to sort of start an SQL like "Transaction" that only at the very end gets committed or rolled back, depending on the individual steps? Should then neither commit or roll back have happened, I could sort of "lock" the user to prevent him from paying again or to improperly account for payments - but how? And what else do I need to consider technically? None of the integration examples of e.g. Worldpay, Realex or SagePay offer any insight, and neither Google or my search terms were good enough to find somebody else's thoughts on this. Thank you very much for any insight on how you would approach this!

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• Reasons NOT to use JSF [closed]

  - by Vain Fellowman

  I am new to StackExchange, but I figured you would be able to help me. We're crating a new Java Enterprise application, replacing an legacy JSP solution. Due to many many changes, the UI and parts of the business logic will completely be rethought and reimplemented. Our first thought was JSF, as it is the standard in Java EE. At first I had a good impression. But now I am trying to implement a functional prototype, and have some really serious concerns about using it. First of all, it creates the worst, most cluttered invalid pseudo-HTML/CSS/JS mix I've ever seen. It violates every single rule I learned in web-development. Furthermore it throws together, what never should be so tightly coupled: Layout, Design, Logic and Communication with the server. I don't see how I would be able to extend this output comfortably, whether styling with CSS, adding UI candy (like configurable hot-keys, drag-and-drop widgets) or whatever. Secondly, it is way too complicated. Its complexity is outstanding. If you ask me, it's a poor abstraction of basic web technologies, crippled and useless in the end. What benefits do I have? None, if you think about. Hundreds of components? I see ten-thousands of HTML/CSS snippets, ten-thousands of JavaScript snippets and thousands of jQuery plug-ins in addition. It solves really many problems - we wouldn't have if we wouldn't use JSF. Or the front-controller pattern at all. And Lastly, I think we will have to start over in, say 2 years. I don't see how I can implement all of our first GUI mock-up (Besides; we have no JSF Expert in our team). Maybe we could hack it together somehow. And then there will be more. I'm sure we could hack our hack. But at some point, we'll be stuck. Due to everything above the service tier is in control of JSF. And we will have to start over. My suggestion would be to implement a REST api, using JAX-RS. Then create a HTML5/Javascript client with client side MVC. (or some flavor of MVC..) By the way; we will need the REST api anyway, as we are developing a partial Android front-end, too. I doubt, that JSF is the best solution nowadays. As the Internet is evolving, I really don't see why we should use this 'rake'. Now, what are pros/cons? How can I emphasize my point to not use JSF? What are strong points to use JSF over my suggestion?

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• LDAP authentication issue with Kerio Connect

  - by djk

  We have Kerio Connect (mail server) running on a Windows Server 2003 server on a domain. In the webmail client, users are able to change their domain password. This functionality used to work fine until a user tried to change their password a few days ago, when every password they'd try would result in the webmail client claiming their password was "invalid". I spoke to Kerio about this and they claim that this error is returned by the domain controller, which supports my initial investigations. The error that the DC is logging when an attempt is made to change the password is this: "80090308: LdapErr: DSID-0C090334, comment: AcceptSecurityContext error, data 52e, vece" The "data 52e" part indicates that this is an "invalid credentials" error. I don't see how this can be as I've tried (in the Kerio Connect configuration) various accounts that have privileges to modify accounts, including my own as I am a domain admin. I have ran 'dcdiag' (all tests) on the DC and it came back passing every single one of them. I've searched high and low for an answer to this and came up empty. Does anyone have any idea why this may have suddenly started happening? Thanks! Edit: I should mention that the passwords we are changing to do comply with the complexity policy.

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• How can I forward an application with X11 in grayscale

  - by ??????? ???????????

  I am trying to run a graphical application at home and display it on a it on a laptop which is located about six routing hops away. The problem is that the connection is so slow (or rather there is so much GOOEY being transfered) that the mouse is unresponsive and it takes a "long time" to redraw the window even at a resolution of 800x600 pixels. The connection speeds are 10MBit up at home and about 1MBit down on the laptop, which I think should be sufficient for looking at some GUI in (almost) real time. Since this traffic is sent over over a secure shell, I have enabled Compression with highest CompressionLevel along with Ciphers set to blowfish-cbc. This has substantially improved the responsiveness of the application, making it nearly usable. However, my goal is to improve the performance even further by sacrificing colors and even frame rate. The application to be displayed a Qemu SDL window with a graphically-oriented OS in it. This is not strictly relevant, but perhaps there are options to tweak the SDL output which I am not aware of. A possible workaround would be to run the application in a "hidden" X server and enabling TigerVNC on that X server. This would automatically give me the benefits of an optimized VNC viewport, but the goal is to do without (reduce complexity). The question I'm asking is what are my options for reducing the data-rate generated on the server in order to make the graphical application more usable on the client. As mentioned, colors are not important and I could probably work with 5-16 fps. Both machines are running Gentoo with the software in question being: workstation X.Org X Server 1.10.4 OpenSSH_5.8p1-hpn13v10, OpenSSL 1.0.0e QEMU emulator version 0.15.1 (qemu-kvm-0.15.1) laptop X.Org X Server 1.12.2 OpenSSH_5.8p1-hpn13v10lpk, OpenSSL 1.0.0j

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• Outgrew MongoDB … now what?

  - by samsmith

  We dump debug and transaction logs into mongodb. We really like mongodb because: Blazing insert perf document oriented Ability to let the engine drop inserts when needed for performance But there is this big problem with mongodb: The index must fit in physical RAM. In practice, this limits us to 80-150gb of raw data (we currently run on a system with 16gb RAM). Sooooo, for us to have 500gb or a tb of data, we would need 50gb or 80gb of RAM. Yes, I know this is possible. We can add servers and use mongo sharding. We can buy a special server box that can take 100 or 200 gb of RAM, but this is the tail wagging the dog! We could spend boucoup $$$ on hardware to run FOSS, when SQL Server Express can handle WAY more data on WAY less hardware than Mongo (SQL Server does not meet our architectural desires, or we would use it!) We are not going to spend huge $ on hardware here, because it is necessary only because of the Mongo architecture, not because of the inherent processing/storage needs. (And sharding? Please! Cost aside, who needs the ongoing complexity of three, five, or more servers to manage a relatively small load?) Bottom line: MongoDB is FOSS, but we gotta spend $$$$$$$ on hardware to run it? We sould rather buy commercial SW! I am sure we are not the first to hit this issue, so we ask the community: Where do we go next? (We already run Mongo v2) Thanks!!

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• Performance variation

  - by Ree

  During my time spent working with multiple machines, I have noticed that performance of the same machine doing the same tasks in the same order differs and sometimes the difference is big enough to be noticeable. This applies to all the machines I've owned and/or maintained (old and modern). Some examples (many of them you may have noticed yourself) that sometimes are completed in different time frames: POST OS installation Hardware tests and operations (usually executed within a customized OS such as one of the many DOS variants), HDD tests and "low level" formats Software installation or other tasks (such as benchmarks) within a general purpose OS (Windows, Linux, etc) I can imagine this is caused by the fact that a machine is built with many components having to communicate as a whole and since the mechanical and electronic parts aren't perfect the overhead occurs. In the last example, I assume the OS complexity and concurrently running multiple processes has some additional effect as well. However, I'm wondering if this hardware imperfection and overhead is indeed that high to be humanly noticeable? Maybe there are other factors that are influencial as much or even more? So, in short - why? To emphasize: the difference is noticeable on the same machine performing the same tasks and this applies to ANY machine in my experience. I'm not comparing machine to machine performance.

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• Writing a script for ash?

  - by rumtscho

  My VPN is behaving funny sometimes, and I have to restart it often. I wanted to write a script which does that for me. It doesn't have to be anything fancy, just a shortcut for the commands I have to type into the terminal. More specifically: it will look at the running processes. If it finds a running vpnc process, it will kill it. Then it will start vpnc. I've written bash scripts of similar complexity, but now I don't have a bash, only an ash. Until now, the only difference I noticed is that there are much less commands available, but then, I don't use it very often. So I have some questions. Is writing ash scripts different than writing bash scripts? Is there something specific to consider when doing it? When the script is ready, how can I deploy it? For bash, I just put the executable file under /usr/lib and run it by typing the file name into the command line, will this work with ash? Are there any special pitfalls to watch out for in the script I want to write? I think that the killing process part may get hairy, if I write something that kills the wrong process, but even then running the script shouldn't break anything permanently, right?

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• Managing Apache to Compensate for WebDAV's Security Masking

  - by Tohuw

  When a user creates a file via WebDAV, the default behavior is that the file is owned by the user and group running the Apache process, with a umask of 022. Unfortunately, this makes it impossible for unprivileged users to write to the files by other means without being a member of the group Apache runs under (which strikes me as a particularly bad idea). My current solution is to set umask 000 in Apache's envvars and remove all world permissions from the webdav parent directory for the user. So, if the WebDAV share is /home/foo/www, then /home/foo/www is owned by www-data:foo with permissions of 770. This keeps other unprivileged users out, more or less, but it's hokey at best and a security disaster awaiting at worst. From my research and poking around at mod_dav and Apache, I cannot find a reasonable solution short of a cron job flipping all the permissions back (I'd rather not have the load and increased complexity on the server). SuExec won't work, either, because WebDAV operations are not going to execute as a different user. Any thoughts on this? Thank you.

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• Requiring SSH-key Login From Specific IP Ranges

  - by Sean M

  I need to be able to access my server (Ubuntu 8.04 LTS) from remote sites, but I'd like to worry a bit less about password complexity. Thus, I'd like to require that SSH keys be used for login instead of name/password. However, I still have a lot to learn about security, and having already badly broken a test box when I was trying to set this up, I'm acutely aware of the chance of screwing myself while trying to accomplish this. So I have a second goal: I'd like to require that certain IP ranges (e.g. 10.0.0.0/8) may log in with name/password, but everyone else must use an SSH key to log in. How can I satisfy both of these goals? There already exists a very similar question here, but I can't quite figure out how to get to what I want from that information. Current tactic: reading through the PAM documentation (pam_access looks promising) and looking at /etc/ssh/sshd_config. Edit: Alternatively, is there a way to specify that certain users must authenticate with SSH keys, and others may authenticate with name/password? Solution that's currently working: # Globally deny logon via password, only allow SSH-key login. PasswordAuthentication no # But allow connections from the LAN to use passwords. Match Address 192.168.*.* PasswordAuthentication yes The Match Address block can also usefully be a Match User block, answering my secondary question. For now I'm just chalking the failure to parse CIDR addresses up to a quirk of my install, and resolving to try again when I go to Ubuntu 10.04 not too long from now. PAM turns out not to be necessary.

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