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• Moving from Silverlight 4 Beta to RC - Part 1

  The other day I had finished up my Task-It Webinar, written a few blog posts, and knew the time had come to move from my Silverlight 4 Beta environment up to the latest RC (release candidate) bits that were released last Monday. What disappointed me when I went to the Silverlight 4 Information Page is that it told me what to install, but not what to uninstall first. Uninstalling I'm not entirely sure if I had to uninstall anything, or if installing the new stuff would just work, but in poking around the web I found posts stating that you must uninstall the following items first. Unfortunately I'm going by memory here and have not been able to find my way back to the magic page I found in the myriad of posts that I went through: Microsoft VisualStudio Beta 2 Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Extended (apparently this must be done *before* the next one) Microsoft .NET Framework Client Profile Microsoft Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 WCF RIA Services Preview for Visual Studio 2010 While I was at it, I removed a bunch of other stuff, like Blend 3, Blend 4, the SDK's associated with them, and a bunch other stuff that was old. Of course, I didn't really want/need to keep any Silverlight 3 stuff around as I am developing Task-It in Silverlight 4. If I need a Silverlight 3 environment at some point I'll set it up in a virtual environment. NOTE: One thing that I did not uninstall is the Microsoft Silverlight 4 Toolkit November 2009. The reason is that they have not released the March version yet, so if you uninstall this, youll end up having to reinstall it. Installing OK, now that I had all of that old stuff off my machine, now it was time to get the new stuff. For this part I liked Tim Heuer's post, A Guide to What has Changed in Silverlight 4 RC better than the Silverlight 4 Information Page. VisualStudio 2010 RC - I installed Ultimate, but you may not need that version. No harm, it's free for now anyway. I downloaded the .exe and the 3 .rar files, then ran the .exe. I then extracted the contents of the ISO (using WinZip) to a new directory, and now had Setup.exe, a bunch of .cab files and some other assorted stuff. I simply ran Setup.exe and chose custom install (only because I wanted to uncheck Visual C++...I don't really have a need for that) Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 - As mentioned in Tim's blog post, this installs this installs Silverlight developer runtime, SDK, tools, and this installs Silverlight developer runtime, SDK, tools, and WCF RIA Services. WCF RIA Services Toolkit March 2010 - I'm not sure if/when I'll need any of this stuff, but no harm in installing it anyway. Expression Blend 4 beta - Only if you plan to use Blend, which I do. Windows Phone Developer Tools - Only if you are interested in playing with Windows Phone 7 development. Wrap Up Hopefully I got those steps right. If anyone finds anything I've missed, please just add a comment to this post and I'll update it accordingly.Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• History of Mobile Technology

  - by David Dorf

  Over the last ten years, mobile phones have gone through several incremental technology leaps that have added capabilities that impact the retail industry.  I've listed the six major ones below, along with their long-lasting impact. 1. Location In the US, the FCC required mobile phones to implement E911 (emergency calls) by 2006, requiring the caller to be located to within 300 meters.  Back in 2000, GPS was opened up for civilian use, and by 2004 Qualcomm had figured out how to use GPS in mobile phones.  So mobile operators moved from cell tower triangulation to GPS, principally for E911.  But then lots of other uses became apparent, especially navigation.  The earliest mobile apps from retailers made it easy to find nearby stores, and companies are looking at ways to use WiFi triangulation inside stores. 2. Computer Vision In 1997 Philippe Kahn shared a photo of his newborn using a mobile phone thus launching the popularity of instant visual communications.  Over the years the quality of the cameras got better, reaching the point where barcodes could be read around 2008.  That's when Occipital came on the scene with their Red Laser application, which was eventually acquired by eBay.  This opened up the ability for consumers to easily price compare inside stores.  Other interesting apps included Tesco's Wine Finder and Amazon's Price Checker, both allowing products to be identified by picture. 3. Augmented Reality Once the mobile phone had GPS, a video camera, and compass functionality it was suddenly possible to overlay digital information on the screen in real-time.  Yelp, which was using GPS to find nearby merchants, created a backdoor called Monocle on the iPhone that showed nearby merchants overlayed on the video camera view.  Today AR apps are mostly used by retailers for marketing, like Moosejaw's app that undresses models in their catalog. 4. Geo-Fencing So if we're able to track the location of a mobile phone, why not use that context to offer timely information?  My first experience with geo-fencing came courtesy of North Face, the outdoor enthusiast store. When a mobile phone enters a predetermined area, like near a store, a text message is sent to phone with an offer or useful information.  Of course retailers can geo-fence their competitors as well and find out which customers are aren't so loyal. 5. Digital Wallet Mobile payments leverage different technologies such as NFC, QRCodes, bluetooth, and SMS to facilitate communication between the consumers's phone and the retailer's point-of-sale. The key here is the potential to consolidate loyalty cards, coupons, and bank cards into the mobile phone and enable faster checkout.  Nobody does this better than Starbucks today, but McDonald's and Duncan Donuts aren't far behind.  Google, Isis, Paypal, Square, and MCX are all vying for leadership in this area.  If NFC does finally take off, it will be leveraged by retailers in more places than just the POS. 6. Voice Response Mobile Phones have had the ability to interpret simple voice commands for a while, but Google and Amazon were the first to use voice to allow searches for products.  Allowing searches by text, barcode, and voice makes it easy to comparison shop in the aisles.  Walmart even uses voice to build shopping lists, and if the Siri API is even opened we could see lots more innovation in this area.

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• Backup SQL Database Federation

  - by Herve Roggero

  One of the amazing features of Windows Azure SQL Database is the ability to create federations in order to scale your cloud databases. However until now, there were very few options available to backup federated databases. In this post I will show you how Enzo Cloud Backup can help you backup, and restore your federated database easily. You can restore federated databases in SQL Database, or even on SQL Server (as regular databases). Generally speaking, you will need to perform the following steps to backup and restore the federations of a SQL Database: Backup the federation root Backup the federation members Restore the federation root Restore the federation members These actions can be automated using: the built-in scheduler of Enzo Cloud Backup, the command-line utilities, or the .NET Cloud Backup API provided, giving you complete control on how you want to perform your backup and restore operations. Backing up federations Let’s look at the tool to backup federations. You can explore your existing federations by using the Enzo Cloud Backup application as shown below. As you can see, the federation root and the various federations available are shown in separate tabs for convenience. You would first need to backup the federation root (unless you intend to restore the federation member on a local SQL Server database and you don’t need what’s in the federation root). The steps are similar than those to backup a federation member, so let’s proceed to backing up a federation member. You can click on a specific federation member to view the database details by clicking at the tab that contains your federation member. You can see the size currently consumed and a summary of its content at the bottom of the screen. If you right-click on a specific range, you can choose to backup the federation member. This brings up a window with the details of the federation member already filled out for you, including the value of the member that is used to select the federation member. Notice that the list of Federations includes “Federation Root”, which is what you need to select to backup the federation root (you can also do that directly from the root database tab).  Once you provide at least one backup destination, you can begin the backup operation.  From this window, you can also schedule this operation as a job and perform this operation entirely in the cloud. You can also “filter” the connection, so that only the specific member value is backed up (this will backup all the global tables, and only the records for which the distribution value is the one specified). You can repeat this operation for every federation member in your federation. Restoring Federations Once backed up, you can restore your federations easily. Select the backup device using the tool, then select Restore. The following window will appear. From here you can create a new root database. You can also view the backup properties, showing you exactly which federations will be created. Under the Federations tab, you can select how the federations will be created. I chose to recreate the federations and let the tool perform all the SPLIT operations necessary to recreate the same number of federation members. Other options include to create the first federation member only, or not to create the federation members at all. Once the root database has been restored and the federation members have been created, you can restore the federation members you previously backed up. The screen below shows you how to restore a backup of a federation member into a specific federation member (the details of the federation member are provided to make it easier to identify). Conclusion This post gave you an overview on how to backup and restore federation roots and federation members. The backup operations can be setup once, then scheduled daily.

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• Social Search: Looking for Love

  - by Mike Stiles

  For marketers and enterprise executives who have placed a higher priority on and allocated bigger budgets to search over social, it might be time to notice yet another shift that’s well underway. Social is search. Search marketing was always more of an internal slam-dunk than other digital initiatives. Even a C-suite that understood little about the new technology world knew it’s a good thing when people are able to find you. Google was the new Yellow Pages. Only with Google, you could get your listing first without naming yourself “AAAA Plumbing.” There were wizards out there who could give your business prominence in front of people who were specifically looking for what you offered. Other search giants like Bing also came along to offer such ideal matchmaking possibilities. But what if the consumer isn’t using a search engine to find what they’re looking for? And what if the search engines started altering their algorithms so that search placement manipulation was more difficult? Both of those things have started to happen. Experian Hitwise’s numbers show that visits to the major search engines in the UK dropped 100 million through August. Search engines are far from dead, or even challenged. But more and more, the public is discovering the sites and brands they need through advice they get via social, not search. You’ll find the worlds of social and search increasingly co-mingling as well. Search behemoths Google and Bing are including Facebook and Google+ into their engines. Meanwhile, Facebook and Twitter have done some integration of global web search into their platforms. So what makes social such a worthwhile search entity for brands? First and foremost, the consumer has demonstrated a behavior of acting on recommendations from social connections. A cry in the wilderness like, “Anybody know any good catering companies?” will usually yield a link (and an endorsement) from a friend such as “Yeah, check out Just-Cheese-Balls Catering.” There’s no such human-driven force/influence behind the big search engines. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and others call it “Friend Mining.” It is, in essence, searching for answers from friends’ experiences as opposed to faceless code. And Facebook has all of those friends’ experiences already stored as data. eMarketer says search in an $18 billion business, and investors are really into it. So no shock Facebook’s ready to leverage their social graph into relevant search. What do you do about all this as a brand? For one thing, it’s going to lead to some interesting paid marketing opportunities around the corner, including Sponsored Stories bought against certain queries, inserting deals into search results, capitalizing on social search results on mobile, etc. Apart from that, it might be time to stop mentally separating social and search in your strategic planning and budgeting. Courting your fans on social will cumulatively add up to more valuable, personally endorsed recommendations for your company when a consumer conducts a search on social. Fail to foster those relationships, fail to engage, fail to provide knock-em-dead customer service, fail to wow them with your actual products and services…and you’ll wind up with the visibility you deserve in social search results.

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• Advanced Record-Level Business Intelligence with Inner Queries

  - by gt0084e1

  While business intelligence is generally applied at an aggregate level to large data sets, it's often useful to provide a more streamlined insight into an individual records or to be able to sort and rank them. For instance, a salesperson looking at a specific customer could benefit from basic stats on that account. A marketer trying to define an ideal customer could pull the top entries and look for insights or patterns. Inner queries let you do sophisticated analysis without the overhead of traditional BI or OLAP technologies like Analysis Services. Example - Order History Constancy Let's assume that management has realized that the best thing for our business is to have customers ordering every month. We'll need to identify and rank customers based on how consistently they buy and when their last purchase was so sales & marketing can respond accordingly. Our current application may not be able to provide this and adding an OLAP server like SSAS may be overkill for our needs. Luckily, SQL Server provides the ability to do relatively sophisticated analytics via inner queries. Here's the kind of output we'd like to see. Creating the Queries Before you create a view, you need to create the SQL query that does the calculations. Here we are calculating the total number of orders as well as the number of months since the last order. These fields might be very useful to sort by but may not be available in the app. This approach provides a very streamlined and high performance method of delivering actionable information without radically changing the application. It's also works very well with self-service reporting tools like Izenda. SELECT CustomerID,CompanyName, ( SELECT COUNT(OrderID) FROM Orders WHERE Orders.CustomerID = Customers.CustomerID ) As Orders, DATEDIFF(mm, ( SELECT Max(OrderDate) FROM Orders WHERE Orders.CustomerID = Customers.CustomerID) ,getdate() ) AS MonthsSinceLastOrder FROM Customers Creating Views To turn this or any query into a view, just put CREATE VIEW AS before it. If you want to change it use the statement ALTER VIEW AS. Creating Computed Columns If you'd prefer not to create a view, inner queries can also be applied by using computed columns. Place you SQL in the (Formula) field of the Computed Column Specification or check out this article here. Advanced Scoring and Ranking One of the best uses for this approach is to score leads based on multiple fields. For instance, you may be in a business where customers that don't order every month require more persistent follow up. You could devise a simple formula that shows the continuity of an account. If they ordered every month since their first order, they would be at 100 indicating that they have been ordering 100% of the time. Here's the query that would calculate that. It uses a few SQL tricks to make this happen. We are extracting the count of unique months and then dividing by the months since initial order. This query will give you the following information which can be used to help sales and marketing now where to focus. You could sort by this percentage to know where to start calling or to find patterns describing your best customers. Number of orders First Order Date Last Order Date Percentage of months order was placed since last order. SELECT CustomerID, (SELECT COUNT(OrderID) FROM Orders WHERE Orders.CustomerID = Customers.CustomerID) As Orders, (SELECT Max(OrderDate) FROM Orders WHERE Orders.CustomerID = Customers.CustomerID) AS LastOrder, (SELECT Min(OrderDate) FROM Orders WHERE Orders.CustomerID = Customers.CustomerID) AS FirstOrder, DATEDIFF(mm,(SELECT Min(OrderDate) FROM Orders WHERE Orders.CustomerID = Customers.CustomerID),getdate()) AS MonthsSinceFirstOrder, 100*(SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT 100*DATEPART(yy,OrderDate) + DATEPART(mm,OrderDate)) FROM Orders WHERE Orders.CustomerID = Customers.CustomerID) / DATEDIFF(mm,(SELECT Min(OrderDate) FROM Orders WHERE Orders.CustomerID = Customers.CustomerID),getdate()) As OrderPercent FROM Customers

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• NHibernate and Stored Procedures in C#

  - by Jess Nickson

  I was recently trying and failing to set up NHibernate (v1.2) in an ASP.NET project. The aim was to execute a stored procedure and return the results, but it took several iterations for me to end up with a working solution. In this post I am simply trying to put the required code in one place, in the hope that the snippets may be useful in guiding someone else through the same process. As it is kind’ve the first time I have had to play with NHibernate, there is a good chance that this solution is sub-optimal and, as such, I am open to suggestions on how it could be improved! There are four code snippets that I required: The stored procedure that I wanted to execute The C# class representation of the results of the procedure The XML mapping file that allows NHibernate to map from C# to the procedure and back again The C# code used to run the stored procedure The Stored Procedure The procedure was designed to take a UserId and, from this, go and grab some profile data for that user. Simple, right? We just need to do a join first, because the user’s site ID (the one we have access to) is not the same as the user’s forum ID. CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[GetForumProfileDetails] ( @userId INT ) AS BEGIN SELECT Users.UserID, forumUsers.Twitter, forumUsers.Facebook, forumUsers.GooglePlus, forumUsers.LinkedIn, forumUsers.PublicEmailAddress FROM Users INNER JOIN Forum_Users forumUsers ON forumUsers.UserSiteID = Users.UserID WHERE Users.UserID = @userId END I’d like to make a shout out to Format SQL for its help with, well, formatting the above SQL!   The C# Class This is just the class representation of the results we expect to get from the stored procedure. NHibernate requires a virtual property for each column of data, and these properties must be called the same as the column headers. You will also need to ensure that there is a public or protected parameterless constructor. public class ForumProfile : IForumProfile { public virtual int UserID { get; set; } public virtual string Twitter { get; set; } public virtual string Facebook { get; set; } public virtual string GooglePlus { get; set; } public virtual string LinkedIn { get; set; } public virtual string PublicEmailAddress { get; set; } public ForumProfile() { } }   The NHibernate Mapping File This is the XML I wrote in order to make NHibernate a) aware of the stored procedure, and b) aware of the expected results of the procedure. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <hibernate-mapping xmlns="urn:nhibernate-mapping-2.2" namespace="[namespace]" assembly="[assembly]"> <sql-query name="GetForumProfileDetails"> <return-scalar column="UserID" type="Int32"/> <return-scalar column="Twitter" type="String"/> <return-scalar column="Facebook" type="String"/> <return-scalar column="GooglePlus" type="String"/> <return-scalar column="LinkedIn" type="String"/> <return-scalar column="PublicEmailAddress" type="String"/> exec GetForumProfileDetails :UserID </sql-query> </hibernate-mapping>   Calling the Stored Procedure Finally, to bring it all together, the C# code that I used in order to execute the stored procedure! public IForumProfile GetForumUserProfile(IUser user) { return NHibernateHelper .GetCurrentSession() .GetNamedQuery("GetForumProfileDetails") .SetInt32("UserID", user.UserID) .SetResultTransformer( Transformers.AliasToBean(typeof (ForumProfile))) .UniqueResult<ForumProfile>(); } There are a number of ‘Set’ methods (i.e. SetInt32) that allow you specify values for any parameters in the procedure. The AliasToBean method is then required to map the returned scalars (as specified in the XML) to the correct C# class.

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• Business School graduate joins Oracle

  - by jessica.ebbelaar(at)oracle.com

  My name is Mathias, I work as an Applications Inside Sales Rep for the French market, and I’d like to give you a brief snapshot of my experience at Oracle. First things first, how did you hear about Oracle? Where have you seen the sharp and recognizable red logo? Was it in Charles de Gaulle Airport when your eyes crossed the 20-metre banner with a picture of a strange big machine in the middle? Was it through reading the Forbes 10 top IT companies worldwide ranking? Or is it because IT is your thing and you cannot but know one of the “big four”? Meeting with a Grenoble Alumnus My story is a little different. My plan was to work in sales, in the IT industry. I had heard about Oracle, but my opinion at the time was that this kind of multinational company was way out of reach for a young graduate, even with high enthusiasm and great excitement to be (finally) on the job market. So, I was really surprised when I had an interesting conversation with a top alumnus of my business school. We were at the Grenoble Ecole de Management graduation ceremony (our graduation!), and before the party got really started, I got to chat with her. She told me of the great experience she was getting by living and working in Dublin. She had already figured it all out: “you work with another 100 young people from 10 different nationalities across Europe, you can be based in Dublin, but then once you work really hard you can move to Malaga Spain or other BUs around the world, you can work with different lines of business and learn about new “techy” and business oriented products, move to the field in your home country or elsewhere, etc.” What, what, what? Moving around Europe, trained by the best sales coaches in the world, acquiring strong IT knowledge and getting on board with one of fastest-growing and most watched companies in the world? Well, I was in. The next day (OK, 3 days after, the time to recover), I sent her my CV, and 3 months later I started as a Business Development Consultant at Oracle in Dublin, representing the latest cloud based CRM across the French market. That was 15 months ago. Since then, I moved line of business twice, I’m always learning new things and working with different and senior stakeholders; I have attended hundreds of hours of sales and product training (priceless when you come from a business background); I passed the Dublin Institute of Technology Sales Certification through different trainings given onsite within Oracle; I’ve led projects based around social media and I’ve gotten involved within various sales deals going on my market. Despite all of these great things, two will remain in my spirit: the multiculturalism that I experience every day in the office, and the American style of management - more direct and open than what you can find in “regular French companies”. Sales Progression Board In May 2012, I passed what we call a ‘Sales Progression Board’ to be promoted to an Inside Sales position. I am now in charge of generating revenue through the sale of Oracle applications on my specific territory. Always keeping in my mind my personal ambition: going to the field one day. Interested to join Oracle in the same role as Mathias? Visit http://campus.oracle.com.

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• Programmatically Making the Selected OutlineView Cell Editable

  - by Geertjan

  When you're using the OutlineView and you use the Tab key to move through its cells, the cells are shown to be selected, as below: However, until you press the Space key in the selected cell, or until you click the mouse within it, you cannot edit it. That's extremely annoying when you're creating a data-entry application. Your user would like to begin editing a cell as soon as they have tabbed into it. Needing to press Space first, or click the mouse in the cell first, is a cumbersome additional step that completely destroys your work flow. Below, you can see that an editable cell looks very different to one that is merely selected: I.e., now I can type and the text changes. How to set up the OutlineView so that the Tab key makes the selected cell editable? Here's the constructor of the TopComponent you see above: public ViewerTopComponent() {     initComponents();     setName(Bundle.CTL_ViewerTopComponent());     setToolTipText(Bundle.HINT_ViewerTopComponent());     setLayout(new BorderLayout());     OutlineView ov = new OutlineView();     final Outline outline = ov.getOutline();     outline.setRootVisible(false);     //When column selection changes, e.g., via Tab key,     //programmatically start editing the cell:     ListSelectionListener listSelectionListener = new ListSelectionListener() {         @Override         public void valueChanged(ListSelectionEvent e) {             int row = outline.getSelectedRow();             int column = outline.getSelectedColumn();             //Ignore the node column:             if (row > -1 && row > -1) {                 outline.editCellAt(row, column);             }         }     };     outline.getColumnModel().getSelectionModel().addListSelectionListener(listSelectionListener);     ov.setPropertyColumns(             "city", "City", "state", "State");     add(ov, BorderLayout.CENTER);     em.setRootContext(             new AbstractNode(Children.create(new CustomerChildFactory(), true)));     associateLookup(ExplorerUtils.createLookup(em, getActionMap())); }

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• Why do I need two Instances in Windows Azure?

  - by BuckWoody

  Windows Azure as a Platform as a Service (PaaS) means that there are various components you can use in it to solve a problem: Compute “Roles” - Computers running an OS and optionally IIS - you can have more than one "Instance" of a given Role Storage - Blobs, Tables and Queues for Storage Other Services - Things like the Service Bus, Azure Connection Services, SQL Azure and Caching It’s important to understand that some of these services are Stateless and others maintain State. Stateless means (at least in this case) that a system might disappear from one physical location and appear elsewhere. You can think of this as a cashier at the front of a store. If you’re in line, a cashier might take his break, and another person might replace him. As long as the order proceeds, you as the customer aren’t really affected except for the few seconds it takes to change them out. The cashier function in this example is stateless. The Compute Role Instances in Windows Azure are Stateless. To upgrade hardware, because of a fault or many other reasons, a Compute Role's Instance might stop on one physical server, and another will pick it up. This is done through the controlling fabric that Windows Azure uses to manage the systems. It’s important to note that storage in Azure does maintain State. Your data will not simply disappear - it is maintained - in fact, it’s maintained three times in a single datacenter and all those copies are replicated to another for safety. Going back to our example, storage is similar to the cash register itself. Even though a cashier leaves, the record of your payment is maintained. So if a Compute Role Instance can disappear and re-appear, the things running on that first Instance would stop working. If you wrote your code in a Stateless way, then another Role Instance simply re-starts that transaction and keeps working, just like the other cashier in the example. But if you only have one Instance of a Role, then when the Role Instance is re-started, or when you need to upgrade your own code, you can face downtime, since there’s only one. That means you should deploy at least two of each Role Instance not only for scale to handle load, but so that the first “cashier” has someone to replace them when they disappear. It’s not just a good idea - to gain the Service Level Agreement (SLA) for our uptime in Azure it’s a requirement. We point this out right in the Management Portal when you deploy the application: (Click to enlarge) When you deploy a Role Instance you can also set the “Upgrade Domain”. Placing Roles on separate Upgrade Domains means that you have a continuous service whenever you upgrade (more on upgrades in another post) - the process looks like this for two Roles. This example covers the scenario for upgrade, so you have four roles total - One Web and one Worker running the "older" code, and one of each running the new code. In all those Roles you want at least two instances, and this example shows that you're covered for High Availability and upgrade paths: The take-away is this - always plan for forward-facing Roles to have at least two copies. For Worker Roles that do background processing, there are ways to architect around this number, but it does affect the SLA if you have only one.

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• Planning in the Cloud - For Real

  - by jmorourke

  One of the hottest topics at Oracle OpenWorld 2012 this week is “the cloud”.  Over the past few years, Oracle has made major investments in cloud-based applications, including some acquisitions, and now has over 100 applications available through Oracle Cloud services.  At OpenWorld this week, Oracle announced seven new offerings delivered via the Oracle Cloud services platform, one of which is the Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service.  Based on Oracle Hyperion Planning, this service is the first of Oracle’s EPM applications to be to be offered in the Cloud.    This solution is targeted to organizations that are struggling with spreadsheets or legacy planning and budgeting applications, want to deploy a world class solution for financial planning and budgeting, but are constrained by IT resources and capital budgets. With the Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service, organizations can fast track their way to world-class financial planning, budgeting and forecasting – at cloud speed, with no IT infrastructure investments and with minimal IT resources. Oracle Hyperion Planning is a market-leading budgeting, planning and forecasting application that is used by over 3,300 organizations worldwide.  Prior to this announcement, Oracle Hyperion Planning was only offered on a license and maintenance basis.  It could be deployed on-premise, or hosted through Oracle On-Demand or third party hosting partners.  With this announcement, Oracle’s market-leading Hyperion Planning application will be available as a Cloud Service and through subscription-based pricing. This lowers the cost of entry and deployment for new customers and provides a scalable environment to support future growth. With this announcement, Oracle is the first major vendor to offer one of its core EPM applications as a cloud-based service.  Other major vendors have recently announced cloud-based EPM solutions, but these are only BI dashboards delivered via a cloud platform.   With this announcement Oracle is providing a market-leading, world-class financial budgeting, planning and forecasting as a cloud service, with the following advantages: ·                     Subscription-based pricing ·                     Available standalone or as an extension to Oracle Fusion Financials Cloud Service ·                     Implementation services available from Oracle and the Oracle Partner Network ·                     High scalability and performance ·                     Integrated financial reporting and MS Office interface ·                     Seamless integration with Oracle and non-Oracle transactional applications ·                     Provides customers with more options for their planning and budgeting deployment vs. strictly on-premise or cloud-only solution providers. The OpenWorld announcement of Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service is a preview announcement, with controlled availability expected in calendar year 2012.  For more information, check out the links below: Press Release Web site If you have any questions or need additional information, please feel free to contact me at [email protected].

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• Calculating for leap year [migrated]

  - by Bradley Bauer

  I've written this program using Java in Eclipse. I was able to utilize a formula I found that I explained in the commented out section. Using the for loop I can iterate through each month of the year, which I feel good about in that code, it seems clean and smooth to me. Maybe I could give the variables full names to make everything more readable but I'm just using the formula in its basic essence :) Well my problem is it doesn't calculate correctly for years like 2008... Leap Years. I know that if (year % 400 == 0 || (year % 4 == 0 && year % 100 != 0)) then we have a leap year. Maybe if the year is a leap year I need to subtract a certain amount of days from a certain month. Any solutions, or some direction would be great thanks :) package exercises; public class E28 { /* * Display the first days of each month * Enter the year * Enter first day of the year * * h = (q + (26 * (m + 1)) / 10 + k + k/4 + j/4 + 5j) % 7 * * h is the day of the week (0: Saturday, 1: Sunday ......) * q is the day of the month * m is the month (3: March 4: April.... January and Feburary are 13 and 14) * j is the century (year / 100) * k is the year of the century (year %100) * */ public static void main(String[] args) { java.util.Scanner input = new java.util.Scanner(System.in); System.out.print("Enter the year: "); int year = input.nextInt(); int j = year / 100; // Find century for formula int k = year % 100; // Find year of century for formula // Loop iterates 12 times. Guess why. for (int i = 1, m = i; i <= 12; i++) { // Make m = i. So loop processes formula once for each month if (m == 1 || m == 2) m += 12; // Formula requires that Jan and Feb are represented as 13 and 14 else m = i; // if not jan or feb, then set m to i int h = (1 + (26 * (m + 1)) / 10 + k + k/4 + j/4 + 5 * j) % 7; // Formula created by a really smart man somewhere // I let the control variable i steer the direction of the formual's m value String day; if (h == 0) day = "Saturday"; else if (h == 1) day = "Sunday"; else if (h == 2) day = "Monday"; else if (h == 3) day = "Tuesday"; else if (h == 4) day = "Wednesday"; else if (h == 5) day = "Thursday"; else day = "Friday"; switch (m) { case 13: System.out.println("January 1, " + year + " is " + day); break; case 14: System.out.println("Feburary 1, " + year + " is " + day); break; case 3: System.out.println("March 1, " + year + " is " + day); break; case 4: System.out.println("April 1, " + year + " is " + day); break; case 5: System.out.println("May 1, " + year + " is " + day); break; case 6: System.out.println("June 1, " + year + " is " + day); break; case 7: System.out.println("July 1, " + year + " is " + day); break; case 8: System.out.println("August 1, " + year + " is " + day); break; case 9: System.out.println("September 1, " + year + " is " + day); break; case 10: System.out.println("October 1, " + year + " is " + day); break; case 11: System.out.println("November 1, " + year + " is " + day); break; case 12: System.out.println("December 1, " + year + " is " + day); break; } } } }

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• Drawing texture does not work anymore with a small amount of triangles

  - by Paul

  When i draw lines, the vertices are well connected. But when i draw the texture inside the triangles, it only works with i<4 in the for loop, otherwise with i<5 for example, there is a EXC_BAD_ACCESS message, at @synthesize textureImage = _textureImage. I don't understand why. (The generatePolygons method seems to work fine as i tried to draw lines with many vertices as in the second image below. And textureImage remains the same for i<4 or i<5 : it's a 512px square image). Here are the images : What i want to achieve is to put the red points and connect them to the y-axis (the green points) and color the area (the green triangles) : If i only draw lines, it works fine : Then with a texture color, it works for i<4 in the loop (the red points in my first image, plus the fifth one to connect the last y) : But then, if i set i<5, the debug tool says EXC_BAD_ACCESS at the synthesize of _textureImage. Here is my code : I set a texture color in HelloWordLayer.mm with : CCSprite *textureImage = [self spriteWithColor:color3 textureSize:512]; _terrain.textureImage = textureImage; Then in the class Terrain, i create the vertices and put the texture in the draw method : @implementation Terrain @synthesize textureImage = _textureImage; //EXC_BAD_ACCESS for i<5 - (void)generatePath2{ CGSize winSize = [CCDirector sharedDirector].winSize; float x = 40; float y = 0; for(int i = 0; i < kMaxKeyPoints+1; ++i) { _hillKeyPoints[i] = CGPointMake(x, y); x = 150 + (random() % (int) 30); y += 30; } } -(void)generatePolygons{ _nPolyVertices = 0; float x1 = 0; float y1 = 0; int keyPoints = 0; for (int i=0; i<4; i++){ /* HERE : 4 = OK / 5 = crash */ //V0: at (0,0) _polyVertices[_nPolyVertices] = CGPointMake(x1, y1); _polyTexCoords[_nPolyVertices++] = CGPointMake(x1, y1); //V1: to the first "point" _polyVertices[_nPolyVertices] = CGPointMake(_hillKeyPoints[keyPoints].x, _hillKeyPoints[keyPoints].y); _polyTexCoords[_nPolyVertices++] = CGPointMake(_hillKeyPoints[keyPoints].x, _hillKeyPoints[keyPoints].y); keyPoints++; //from point at index 0 to 1 //V2, same y as point n°2: _polyVertices[_nPolyVertices] = CGPointMake(0, _hillKeyPoints[keyPoints].y); _polyTexCoords[_nPolyVertices++] = CGPointMake(0, _hillKeyPoints[keyPoints].y); //V1 again _polyVertices[_nPolyVertices] = _polyVertices[_nPolyVertices-2]; _polyTexCoords[_nPolyVertices++] = _polyVertices[_nPolyVertices-2]; //V2 again _polyVertices[_nPolyVertices] = _polyVertices[_nPolyVertices-2]; _polyTexCoords[_nPolyVertices++] = _polyVertices[_nPolyVertices-2]; //V3 = same x,y as point at index 1 _polyVertices[_nPolyVertices] = CGPointMake(_hillKeyPoints[keyPoints].x, _hillKeyPoints[keyPoints].y); _polyTexCoords[_nPolyVertices] = CGPointMake(_hillKeyPoints[keyPoints].x, _hillKeyPoints[keyPoints].y); y1 = _polyVertices[_nPolyVertices].y; _nPolyVertices++; } } - (id)init { if ((self = [super init])) { [self generatePath2]; [self generatePolygons]; } return self; } - (void) draw { //glDisable(GL_TEXTURE_2D); glDisableClientState(GL_COLOR_ARRAY); glDisableClientState(GL_TEXTURE_COORD_ARRAY); glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, _textureImage.texture.name); glColor4f(1, 1, 1, 1); glVertexPointer(2, GL_FLOAT, 0, _polyVertices); glTexCoordPointer(2, GL_FLOAT, 0, _polyTexCoords); glDrawArrays(GL_TRIANGLE_STRIP, 0, (GLsizei)_nPolyVertices); glColor4f(1, 1, 1, 1); for(int i = 1; i < 40; ++i) { ccDrawLine(_polyVertices[i-1], _polyVertices[i]); } // restore default GL states glEnable(GL_TEXTURE_2D); glEnableClientState(GL_COLOR_ARRAY); glEnableClientState(GL_TEXTURE_COORD_ARRAY); } Do you see anything wrong in this code? Thanks for your help

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• Sitting Pretty

  - by Phil Factor

  Guest Editorial for Simple-Talk IT Pro newsletter'DBAs and SysAdmins generally prefer an expression of calmness under adversity. It is a subtle trick, and requires practice in front of a mirror to get it just right. Too much adversity and they think you're not coping; too much calmness and they think you're under-employed' I dislike the term 'avatar', when used to describe a portrait photograph. An avatar, in the sense of a picture, is merely the depiction of one's role-play alter-ego, often a ridiculous bronze-age deity. However, professional image is important. The choice and creation of online photos has an effect on the way your message is received and it is important to get that right. It is fine to use that photo of you after ten lagers on holiday in an Ibiza nightclub, but what works on Facebook looks hilarious on LinkedIn. My splendid photograph that I use online was done by a professional photographer at great expense and I've never had the slightest twinge of regret when I remember how much I paid for it. It is me, but a more pensive and dignified edition, oozing trust and wisdom. One gasps at the magical skill that a professional photographer can conjure up, without digital manipulation, to make the best of a derisory noggin (ed: slang for a head). Even if he had offered to depict me as a semi-naked, muscle-bound, sword-wielding hero, I'd have demurred. No, any professional person needs a carefully cultivated image that looks right. I'd never thought of using that profile shot, though I couldn't help noticing the photographer flinch slightly when he first caught sight of my face. There is a problem with using an avatar. The use of a single image doesn't express the appropriate emotion. At the moment, it is weird to see someone with a laughing portrait writing something solemn. A neutral cast to the face, somewhat like a passport photo, is probably the best compromise. Actually, the same is true of a working life in IT. One of the first skills I learned was not to laugh at managers, but, instead, to develop a facial expression that promoted a sense of keenness, energy and respect. Every profession has its own preferred facial cast. A neighbour of mine has the natural gift of a face that displays barely repressed grief. Though he is characteristically cheerful, he earns a remarkable income as a pallbearer. DBAs and SysAdmins generally prefer an expression of calmness under adversity. It is a subtle trick, and requires practice in front of a mirror to get it just right. Too much adversity and they think you're not coping; too much calmness and they think you're under-employed. With an appropriate avatar, you could do away with a lot of the need for 'smilies' to give clues as to the meaning of what you've written on forums and blogs. If you had a set of avatars, showing the full gamut of human emotions expressible in writing: Rage, fear, reproach, joy, ebullience, apprehension, exasperation, dissembly, irony, pathos, euphoria, remorse and so on. It would be quite a drop-down list on forums, but given the vast prairies of space on the average hard drive, who cares? It would cut down on the number of spats in Forums just as long as one picks the right avatar. As an unreconstructed geek, I find it hard to admit to the value of image in the workplace, but it is true. Just as we use professionals to tidy up and order our CVs and job applications, we should employ experts to enhance our professional image. After all you don't perform surgery or dentistry on yourself do you?

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• Get to Know a Candidate (3 of 25): Virgil Goode&ndash;Constitution Party

  - by Brian Lanham

  DISCLAIMER: This is not a post about “Romney” or “Obama”. This is not a post for whom I am voting. Information sourced for Wikipedia. Meet Virgil Goode of the Constitution Party Goode was served as a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives from 1997 to 2009. He represented the 5th congressional district of Virginia. Goode was born in Richmond, Virginia, the son of Alice Clara (née Besecker) and Virgil Hamlin Goode. He has spent most of his life in Rocky Mount. Goode graduated with a B.A. from the University of Richmond (Phi Beta Kappa) and with a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law. He also is a member of Lambda Chi Alpha Fraternity and served in the Army National Guard from 1969 to 1975. Goode grew up as a Democrat. He entered politics soon after graduating from law school. At the age of 27, he won a special election to the state Senate from a Southside district as an independent after the death of the Democratic incumbent. One of his major campaign focuses at the time was advocacy for the Equal Rights Amendment. Soon after being elected, he joined the Democrats. Goode wore his party ties very loosely. He became famous for his support of the tobacco industry, expressing his fear that "his elderly mother would be denied 'the one last pleasure' of smoking a cigarette on her hospital deathbed." He was an ardent defender of gun rights while being an enthusiastic supporter of L. Douglas Wilder, who later became the first elected black governor in the history of the United States. At the Democratic Party's state political convention in 1985, Goode nominated Wilder for lieutenant governor. However, while governor, Wilder cracked down on the sale of guns in the state. After the 1995 elections resulted in a 20–20 split between Democrats and Republicans in the State Senate, Goode seriously considered voting with the Republicans on organizing the chamber. Had he done so, the State Senate would have been under Republican control for the first time since Reconstruction (the Republicans ultimately won control outright in 1999). Goode's actions at the time "forced his party to share power with Republican lawmakers in the state legislature," which further upset the Democratic Party. Goode is on the ballot in CA, FL, ID, IO, LA, MI, MN, MS, MI, NJ, NM, NY, NV, ND, OH, SC, SD, TN, UT, VA, WA, WI, WY.  He is a write-in candidate in CA, CT, DC, GA, IL, IN, ME, MD, MA, MO, NC, TX, VT, WV Constitution Party This party was founded as the “U.S. Taxpayers’ Party” and considers itself conservative. The party's platform is predicated on the principles of the nation's founding documents. The party puts a large focus on immigration, calling for stricter penalties towards illegal immigrants and a moratorium on legal immigration until all federal subsidies to immigrants are discontinued.The party absorbed the American Independent Party, originally founded for George Wallace's 1968 presidential campaign. The American Independent Party of California has been an affiliate of the Constitution Party since its founding; however, current party leadership is disputed and the issue is in court to resolve this conflict. The Constitution Party has some substantial support from the Christian Right and in 2010 achieved major party status in Colorado. Learn more about Virgil Goode and Constitution Party on Wikipedia.

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• How can I gather client's data on Google App Engine without using Datastore/Backend Instances too much?

  - by ruslan

  One of the projects I'm working on is online survey engine. It's my first big commercial project on Google App Engine. I need your advice on how to collect stats and efficiently record them in DataStore without bankrupting me. Initial requirements are: After user finishes survey client sends list of pairs [ID (int) + PercentHit (double)]. This list shows how close answers of this user match predefined answers of reference answerers (which identified by IDs). I call them "target IDs". Creator of the survey wants to see aggregated % for given IDs for last hour, particular timeframe or from the beginning of the survey. Some surveys may have thousands of target/reference answerers. So I created entity public class HitsStatsDO implements Serializable { @Id transient private Long id; transient private Long version = (long) 0; transient private Long startDate; @Parent transient private Key parent; // fake parent which contains target id @Transient int targetId; private double avgPercent; private long hitCount; } But writing HitsStatsDO for each target from each user would give a lot of data. For instance I had a survey with 3000 targets which was answered by ~4 million people within one week with 300K people taking survey in first day. Even if we assume they were answering it evenly for 24 hours it would give us ~1040 writes/second. Obviously it hits concurrent writes limit of Datastore. I decided I'll collect data for one hour and save that, that's why there are avgPercent and hitCount in HitsStatsDO. GAE instances are stateless so I had to use dynamic backend instance. There I have something like this: // Contains stats for one hour private class Shard { ReadWriteLock lock = new ReentrantReadWriteLock(); Map<Integer, HitsStatsDO> map = new HashMap<Integer, HitsStatsDO>(); // Key is target ID public void saveToDatastore(); public void updateStats(Long startDate, Map<Integer, Double> hits); } and map with shard for current hour and previous hour (which doesn't stay here for long) private HashMap<Long, Shard> shards = new HashMap<Long, Shard>(); // Key is HitsStatsDO.startDate So once per hour I dump Shard for previous hour to Datastore. Plus I have class LifetimeStats which keeps Map<Integer, HitsStatsDO> in memcached where map-key is target ID. Also in my backend shutdown hook method I dump stats for unfinished hour to Datastore. There is only one major issue here - I have only ONE backend instance :) It raises following questions on which I'd like to hear your opinion: Can I do this without using backend instance ? What if one instance is not enough ? How can I split data between multiple dynamic backend instances? It hard because I don't know how many I have because Google creates new one as load increases. I know I can launch exact number of resident backend instances. But how many ? 2, 5, 10 ? What if I have no load at all for a week. Constantly running 10 backend instances is too expensive. What do I do with data from clients while backend instance is dead/restarting?

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• Taking HRMS to the Cloud to Simplify Human Resources Management

  - by HCM-Oracle

  By Anke Mogannam With human capital management (HCM) a top-of-mind issue for executives in every industry, human resources (HR) organizations are poised to have their day in the sun—proving not just their administrative worth but their strategic value as well.  To make good on that promise, however, HR must modernize. Indeed, if HR is to act as an agent of change—providing the swift reallocation of employees  and the rapid absorption of employee data required for enterprises to shift course on a dime—it must first deal with the disruptive change at its own front door. And increasingly, that means choosing the right technology and human resources management system (HRMS) for managing the entire employee lifecycle. Unfortunately, for most organizations, this task has proved easier said than done. This is because while much has been written about advances in HRMS technology, until recently, most of those advances took the form of disparate on-premises solutions designed to serve very specific purposes. Although this may have resulted in key competencies in certain areas, it also meant that processes for core HR functions like payroll and benefits were being carried out in separate systems from those used for talent management, workforce optimization, training, and so on. With no integration—and no single system of record—processes were disconnected, ease of use was impeded, user experience was diminished, and vital data was left untapped.  Today, however, that scenario has begun to change, and end-to-end cloud-based HCM solutions have moved from wished-for innovations to real-life solutions. Why, then, have HR organizations been so slow in adopting them? The answer—it would seem—is, “It’s complicated.” So complicated, in fact, that 45 percent of the respondents to PwC’s “Annual HR Technology Survey” (for 2013) reported having no formal HR software roadmap, and 40 percent stated that they “did not know” whether their organizations would be increasing their use of cloud or software as a service (SaaS) for HR.  Clearly, HR organizations need help sorting through the morass of HR software options confronting them. But just as clearly, there’s an enormous opportunity awaiting those that do. The trick will come in charting a course that allows HR to leverage existing technology while investing in the cloud-based solutions that will deliver the end-to-end processes, easy-to-understand analytics, and superior adaptability required to simplify—and add value to—every aspect of employee management. The Opportunity therefore is to cut costs, drive Innovation, and increase engagement by moving to cloud-based HCM.  Then you will benefit from one Interface, leverage many access points, and  gain at-a-glance insight across your entire workforce. With many legacy on-premises HR systems not being efficient anymore and cloud-based, integrated systems that span the range of HR functions finally reaching maturity, the time is ripe for moving core HR to the cloud. Indeed, for the first time ever there are more HRMS replacement initiatives than HRMS upgrade initiatives under way, and the majority of them involve moving to the cloud per Cedar Crestone’s 2013-2014 HRMS survey. To learn how you can launch your own cloud HCM initiative and begin using HR to power the enterprise, visit Oracle HRMS in the Cloud and Oracle’s new customer 2 cloud program. Anke Mogannam brings more than 16 years of marketing and human capital management experience in the technology industries to her role at Oracle where she is part of the Human Capital Management applications marketing team. In that role, Anke drives content marketing, messaging, go-to-market activities, integrated marketing campaigns, and field enablement. Prior to joining Oracle, Anke held several roles in communications, marketing, HCM product strategy and product management at PeopleSoft, SAP, Workday and Saba. Follow her on Twitter @amogannam

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• Type of computer for a developer on the road

  - by nabucosound

  Hi developers: I am planning to be traveling through eurasia and asia (russia, china, korea, japan, south east asia...) for a while and, although there are plenty of marvelous things to see and to do, I must keep on working :(. I am a python developer, dedicated mainly to web projects. I use django, sqlite3, browsers, and ocassionaly (only if I have no choice) I install postgres, mysql, apache or any other servers commonly used in the internets. I do my coding on vim, use ssh to connect, lftp to transfer files, IRC, grep/ack... So I spend most of my time in the terminal shells. But I also use IM or Skype to communicate with my clients and peers, as well as some other software (that after all is not mandatory for my day-to-day work). I currently work with a Macbook Pro (3 years old now) and so far I am very happy with the performance. But I don't want to carry it if I am going to be "on transit" for long time, it is simply huge and heavy for what I am planning to load in my rather small backpack (while traveling, less is more, you know). So here I am reading all kind of opinions about netbooks, because at first sight this is the kind of computer I thought I had to choose. I am going to use Linux for it, Microsoft is not my cup of tea and Mac is not available for them, unless I were to buy a Macbook air, something that I won't do because if I am robbed or rain/dust/truck loaders break it I would burst in tears. I am concerned about wifi performance and connectivity, I am going to use one of those linux distros/tools to hack/test on "open" networks (if you know what I mean) in case I am not in a place with real free wifi access and I find myself in an emergency. CPU speed should be acceptable, but since I don't plan to run Photoshop or expensive IDEs, I guess most of the time I won't be overloading the machine. Apart from this, maybe (surely) I am missing other features to consider. With that said (sorry about the length) here it comes my question, raised from a deep ignorance regarding the wars betweeb betbooks vs notebooks (I assume tablet PCs are not for programming yet): If I buy a netbook will I have to throw it away after 1 month on the road and buy a notebook? Or will I be OK? Thanks! Hector Update I have received great feedback so far! I would like to insist on the fact that I will be traveling through many different countries and scenarios. I am sure that while in Japan I will be more than fine with anything related to technology, connectivity, etc. But consider that I will be, for example, on a train through Russia (transsiberian) and will cross Mongolia as well. I will stay in friends' places sometimes, but most of the time I will have to work from hostel rooms, trains, buses, beaches (hey this last one doesn't sound too bad hehe!). I think some of your answers guys seem to focus on the geek part but loose the point of this "on the road" fact. I am very aware and agree that netbooks suck compared to notebooks, but what I am trying to do here is to find a balance and discover your experiences with netbooks to see first hand if a netbook will be a fail in the mid-long term of the trip for my purposes. So I have resumed the main concepts expressed here on this small list, in no particular order: keyboard/touchpad feel: I use vim so no need of moving mouse pointers that much, unless I am browsing the web, but intensive use of keyboard screen real state: again, terminal work for most of the time battery life: I think something very important weight/size: also very important looks not worth stealing it, don't give a shit if it is lost/stolen/broken: this may depend on kind of person, your economy, etc. Also to prevent losing work, I will upload EVERYTHING to the cloud whenever I'll have a chance. wifi: don't want to discover my wifi is one of those that cannot deal with half the routers on this planet or has poor connectivity. Thanks again for your answers and comments!

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• Controlling soft errors and false alarms in SSIS

  - by Jim Giercyk

  If you are like me, you dread the 3AM wake-up call.  I would say that the majority of the pages I get are false alarms.  The alerts that require action often require me to open an SSIS package, see where the trouble is and try to identify the offending data.  That can be very time-consuming and can take quite a chunk out of my beauty sleep.  For those reasons, I have developed a simple error handling scenario for SSIS which allows me to rest a little easier.  Let me first say, this is a high level discussion; getting into the nuts and bolts of creating each shape is outside the scope of this document, but if you have an average understanding of SSIS, you should have no problem following along. In the Data Flow above you can see that there is a caution triangle.  For the purpose of this discussion I am creating a truncation error to demonstrate the process, so this is to be expected.  The first thing we need to do is to redirect the error output.  Double-clicking on the Query shape presents us with the properties window for the input.  Simply set the columns that you want to redirect to Redirect Row in the dropdown box and hit Apply. Without going into a dissertation on error handling, I will just note that you can decide which errors you want to redirect on Error and on Truncation.  Therefore, to override this process for a column or condition, simply do not redirect that column or condition. The next thing we want to do is to add some information about the error; specifically, the name of the package which encountered the error and which step in the package wrote the record to the error table.  REMEMBER: If you redirect the error output, your package will not fail, so you will not know where the error record was created without some additional information.    I added 3 columns to my error record; Severity, Package Name and Step Name.  Severity is just a free-form column that you can use to note whether an error is fatal, whether the package is part of a test job and should be ignored, etc.  Package Name and Step Name are system variables. In my package I have created a truncation situation, where the firstname column is 50 characters in the input, but only 4 characters in the output.  Some records will pass without truncation, others will be sent to the error output.  However, the package will not fail. We can see that of the 14 input rows, 8 were redirected to the error table. This information can be used by another step or another scheduled process or triggered to determine whether an error should be sent.  It can also be used as a historical record of the errors that are encountered over time.  There are other system variables that might make more sense in your infrastructure, so try different things.  Date and time seem like something you would want in your output for example.  In summary, we have redirected the error output from an input, added derived columns with information about the errors, and inserted the information and the offending data into an error table.  The error table information can be used by another step or process to determine, based on the error information, what level alert must be sent.  This will eliminate false alarms, and give you a head start when a genuine error occurs.

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• Consumer Oriented Search In Oracle Endeca Information Discovery – Part 1

  - by Bob Zurek

  Information Discovery, a core capability of Oracle Endeca Information Discovery, enables business users to rapidly search, discover and navigate through a wide variety of big data including structured, unstructured and semi-structured data. One of the key capabilities, among many, that differentiate our solution from others in the Information Discovery market is our deep support for search across this growing amount of varied big data. Our method and approach is very different than classic simple keyword search that is found in may information discovery solutions. In this first part of a series on the topic of search, I will walk you through many of the key capabilities that go beyond the simple search box that you might experience in products where search was clearly an afterthought or attempt to catch up to our core capabilities in this area. Lets explore. The core data management solution of Oracle Endeca Information Discovery is the Endeca Server, a hybrid search-analytical database that his highly scalable and column-oriented in nature. We will talk in more technical detail about the capabilities of the Endeca Server in future blog posts as this post is intended to give you a feel for the deep search capabilities that are an integral part of the Endeca Server. The Endeca Server provides best-of-breed search features aw well as a new class of features that are the first to be designed around the requirement to bridge structured, semi-structured and unstructured big data. Some of the key features of search include type a heads, automatic alphanumeric spell corrections, positional search, Booleans, wildcarding, natural language, and category search and query classification dialogs. This is just a subset of the advanced search capabilities found in Oracle Endeca Information Discovery. Search is an important feature that makes it possible for business users to explore on the diverse data sets the Endeca Server can hold at any one time. The search capabilities in the Endeca server differ from other Information Discovery products with simple “search boxes” in the following ways: The Endeca Server Supports Exploratory Search.  Enterprise data frequently requires the user to explore content through an ad hoc dialog, with guidance that helps them succeed. This has implications for how to design search features. Traditional search doesn’t assume a dialog, and so it uses relevance ranking to get its best guess to the top of the results list. It calculates many relevance factors for each query, like word frequency, distance, and meaning, and then reduces those many factors to a single score based on a proprietary “black box” formula. But how can a business users, searching, act on the information that the document is say only 38.1% relevant? In contrast, exploratory search gives users the opportunity to clarify what is relevant to them through refinements and summaries. This approach has received consumer endorsement through popular ecommerce sites where guided navigation across a broad range of products has helped consumers better discover choices that meet their, sometimes undetermined requirements. This same model exists in Oracle Endeca Information Discovery. In fact, the Endeca Server powers many of the most popular e-commerce sites in the world. The Endeca Server Supports Cascading Relevance. Traditional approaches of search reduce many relevance weights to a single score. This means that if a result with a good title match gets a similar score to one with an exact phrase match, they’ll appear next to each other in a list. But a user can’t deduce from their score why each got it’s ranking, even though that information could be valuable. Oracle Endeca Information Discovery takes a different approach. The Endeca Server stratifies results by a primary relevance strategy, and then breaks ties within a strata by ordering them with a secondary strategy, and so on. Application managers get the explicit means to compose these strategies based on their knowledge of their own domain. This approach gives both business users and managers a deterministic way to set and understand relevance. Now that you have an understanding of two of the core search capabilities in Oracle Endeca Information Discovery, our next blog post on this topic will discuss more advanced features including set search, second-order relevance as well as an understanding of faceted search mechanisms that include queries and filters.  

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• Columnstore Case Study #1: MSIT SONAR Aggregations

  - by aspiringgeek

  Preamble This is the first in a series of posts documenting big wins encountered using columnstore indexes in SQL Server 2012 & 2014.  Many of these can be found in this deck along with details such as internals, best practices, caveats, etc.  The purpose of sharing the case studies in this context is to provide an easy-to-consume quick-reference alternative. Why Columnstore? If we’re looking for a subset of columns from one or a few rows, given the right indexes, SQL Server can do a superlative job of providing an answer. If we’re asking a question which by design needs to hit lots of rows—DW, reporting, aggregations, grouping, scans, etc., SQL Server has never had a good mechanism—until columnstore. Columnstore indexes were introduced in SQL Server 2012. However, they're still largely unknown. Some adoption blockers existed; yet columnstore was nonetheless a game changer for many apps.  In SQL Server 2014, potential blockers have been largely removed & they're going to profoundly change the way we interact with our data.  The purpose of this series is to share the performance benefits of columnstore & documenting columnstore is a compelling reason to upgrade to SQL Server 2014. App: MSIT SONAR Aggregations At MSIT, performance & configuration data is captured by SCOM. We archive much of the data in a partitioned data warehouse table in SQL Server 2012 for reporting via an application called SONAR.  By definition, this is a primary use case for columnstore—report queries requiring aggregation over large numbers of rows.  New data is refreshed each night by an automated table partitioning mechanism—a best practices scenario for columnstore. The Win Compared to performance using classic indexing which resulted in the expected query plan selection including partition elimination vs. SQL Server 2012 nonclustered columnstore, query performance increased significantly.  Logical reads were reduced by over a factor of 50; both CPU & duration improved by factors of 20 or more.  Other than creating the columnstore index, no special modifications or tweaks to the app or databases schema were necessary to achieve the performance improvements.  Existing nonclustered indexes were rendered superfluous & were deleted, thus mitigating maintenance challenges such as defragging as well as conserving disk capacity. Details The table provides the raw data & summarizes the performance deltas. Logical Reads (8K pages) CPU (ms) Durn (ms) Columnstore 160,323 20,360 9,786 Conventional Table & Indexes 9,053,423 549,608 193,903 ? x56 x27 x20 The charts provide additional perspective of this data.  "Conventional vs. Columnstore Metrics" document the raw data.  Note on this linear display the magnitude of the conventional index performance vs. columnstore.  The “Metrics (?)” chart expresses these values as a ratio. Summary For DW, reports, & other BI workloads, columnstore often provides significant performance enhancements relative to conventional indexing.  I have documented here, the first in a series of reports on columnstore implementations, results from an initial implementation at MSIT in which logical reads were reduced by over a factor of 50; both CPU & duration improved by factors of 20 or more.  Subsequent features in this series document performance enhancements that are even more significant. 

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• The Future of Air Travel: Intelligence and Automation

  - by BobEvans

  Remember those white-knuckle flights through stormy weather where unexpected plunges in altitude result in near-permanent relocations of major internal organs? Perhaps there’s a better way, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article: “Pilots of a Honeywell International Inc. test plane stayed on their initial flight path, relying on the company's latest onboard radar technology to steer through the worst of the weather. The specially outfitted Boeing 757 barely shuddered as it gingerly skirted some of the most ferocious storm cells over Fort Walton Beach and then climbed above the rest in zero visibility.” Or how about the multifaceted check-in process, which might not wreak havoc on liver location but nevertheless makes you wonder if you’ve been trapped in some sort of covert psychological-stress test? Another WSJ article, called “The Self-Service Airport,” says there’s reason for hope there as well: “Airlines are laying the groundwork for the next big step in the airport experience: a trip from the curb to the plane without interacting with a single airline employee. At the airport of the near future, ‘your first interaction could be with a flight attendant,’ said Ben Minicucci, chief operating officer of Alaska Airlines, a unit of Alaska Air Group Inc.” And in the topsy-turvy world of air travel, it’s not just the passengers who’ve been experiencing bumpy rides: the airlines themselves are grappling with a range of challenges—some beyond their control, some not—that make profitability increasingly elusive in spite of heavy demand for their services. A recent piece in The Economist illustrates one of the mega-challenges confronting the airline industry via a striking set of contrasting and very large numbers: while the airlines pay $7 billion per year to third-party computerized reservation services, the airlines themselves earn a collective profit of only $3 billion per year. In that context, the anecdotes above point unmistakably to the future that airlines must pursue if they hope to be able to manage some of the factors outside of their control (e.g., weather) as well as all of those within their control (operating expenses, end-to-end visibility, safety, load optimization, etc.): more intelligence, more automation, more interconnectedness, and more real-time awareness of every facet of their operations. Those moves will benefit both passengers and the air carriers, says the WSJ piece on The Self-Service Airport: “Airlines say the advanced technology will quicken the airport experience for seasoned travelers—shaving a minute or two from the checked-baggage process alone—while freeing airline employees to focus on fliers with questions. ‘It's more about throughput with the resources you have than getting rid of humans,’ said Andrew O'Connor, director of airport solutions at Geneva-based airline IT provider SITA.” Oracle’s attempting to help airlines gain control over these challenges by blending together a range of its technologies into a solution called the Oracle Airline Data Model, which suggests the following steps: • To retain and grow their customer base, airlines need to focus on the customer experience. • To personalize and differentiate the customer experience, airlines need to effectively manage their passenger data. • The Oracle Airline Data Model can help airlines jump-start their customer-experience initiatives by consolidating passenger data into a customer data hub that drives realtime business intelligence and strategic customer insight. • Oracle’s Airline Data Model brings together multiple types of data that can jumpstart your data-warehousing project with rich out-of-the-box functionality. • Oracle’s Intelligent Warehouse for Airlines brings together the powerful capabilities of Oracle Exadata and the Oracle Airline Data Model to give you real-time strategic insights into passenger demand, revenues, sales channels and your flight network. The airline industry aside, the bullet points above offer a broad strategic outline for just about any industry because the customer experience is becoming pre-eminent in each and there is simply no way to deliver world-class customer experiences unless a company can capture, manage, and analyze all of the relevant data in real-time. I’ll leave you with two thoughts from the WSJ article about the new in-flight radar system from Honeywell: first, studies show that a single episode of serious turbulence can wrack up $150,000 in additional costs for an airline—so, it certainly behooves the carriers to gain the intelligence to avoid turbulence as much as possible. And second, it’s back to that top-priority customer-experience thing and the value that ever-increasing levels of intelligence can deliver. As the article says: “In the cabin, reporters watched screens showing the most intense parts of the nearly 10-mile wide storm, which churned some 7,000 feet below, in vibrant red and other colors. The screens also were filled with tiny symbols depicting likely locations of lightning and hail, which can damage planes and wreak havoc on the nerves of white-knuckle flyers.”  (Bob Evans is senior vice-president, communications, for Oracle.)  

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• Identity in .NET 4.5&ndash;Part 2: Claims Transformation in ASP.NET (Beta 1)

  - by Your DisplayName here!

  In my last post I described how every identity in .NET 4.5 is now claims-based. If you are coming from WIF you might think, great – how do I transform those claims? Sidebar: What is claims transformation? One of the most essential features of WIF (and .NET 4.5) is the ability to transform credentials (or tokens) to claims. During that process the “low level” token details are turned into claims. An example would be a Windows token – it contains things like the name of the user and to which groups he belongs to. That information will be surfaced as claims of type Name and GroupSid. Forms users will be represented as a Name claim (all the other claims that WIF provided for FormsIdentity are gone in 4.5). The issue here is, that your applications typically don’t care about those low level details, but rather about “what’s the purchase limit of alice”. The process of turning the low level claims into application specific ones is called claims transformation. In pre-claims times this would have been done by a combination of Forms Authentication extensibility, role manager and maybe ASP.NET profile. With claims transformation all your identity gathering code is in one place (and the outcome can be cached in a single place as opposed to multiple ones). The structural class to do claims transformation is called ClaimsAuthenticationManager. This class has two purposes – first looking at the incoming (low level) principal and making sure all required information about the user is present. This is your first chance to reject a request. And second – modeling identity information in a way it is relevant for the application (see also here). This class gets called (when present) during the pipeline when using WS-Federation. But not when using the standard .NET principals. I am not sure why – maybe because it is beta 1. Anyhow, a number of people asked me about it, and the following is a little HTTP module that brings that feature back in 4.5. public class ClaimsTransformationHttpModule : IHttpModule {     public void Dispose()     { }     public void Init(HttpApplication context)     {         context.PostAuthenticateRequest += Context_PostAuthenticateRequest;     }     void Context_PostAuthenticateRequest(object sender, EventArgs e)     {         var context = ((HttpApplication)sender).Context;         // no need to call transformation if session already exists         if (FederatedAuthentication.SessionAuthenticationModule != null &&             FederatedAuthentication.SessionAuthenticationModule.ContainsSessionTokenCookie(context.Request.Cookies))         {             return;         }         var transformer = FederatedAuthentication.FederationConfiguration.IdentityConfiguration.ClaimsAuthenticationManager;         if (transformer != null)         {             var transformedPrincipal = transformer.Authenticate(context.Request.RawUrl, context.User as ClaimsPrincipal);             context.User = transformedPrincipal;             Thread.CurrentPrincipal = transformedPrincipal;         }     } } HTH

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• Simple Merging Of PDF Documents with iTextSharp 5.4.5.0

  - by Mladen Prajdic

  As we were working on our first SQL Saturday in Slovenia, we came to a point when we had to print out the so-called SpeedPASS's for attendees. This SpeedPASS file is a PDF and contains thier raffle, lunch and admission tickets. The problem is we have to download one PDF per attendee and print that out. And printing more than 10 docs at once is a pain. So I decided to make a little console app that would merge multiple PDF files into a single file that would be much easier to print. I used an open source PDF manipulation library called iTextSharp version 5.4.5.0 This is a console program I used. It’s brilliantly named MergeSpeedPASS. It only has two methods and is really short. Don't let the name fool you It can be used to merge any PDF files. The first parameter is the name of the target PDF file that will be created. The second parameter is the directory containing PDF files to be merged into a single file. using iTextSharp.text; using iTextSharp.text.pdf; using System; using System.IO; namespace MergeSpeedPASS { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { if (args.Length == 0 || args[0] == "-h" || args[0] == "/h") { Console.WriteLine("Welcome to MergeSpeedPASS. Created by Mladen Prajdic. Uses iTextSharp 5.4.5.0."); Console.WriteLine("Tool to create a single SpeedPASS PDF from all downloaded generated PDFs."); Console.WriteLine(""); Console.WriteLine("Example: MergeSpeedPASS.exe targetFileName sourceDir"); Console.WriteLine(" targetFileName = name of the new merged PDF file. Must include .pdf extension."); Console.WriteLine(" sourceDir = path to the dir containing downloaded attendee SpeedPASS PDFs"); Console.WriteLine(""); Console.WriteLine(@"Example: MergeSpeedPASS.exe MergedSpeedPASS.pdf d:\Downloads\SQLSaturdaySpeedPASSFiles"); } else if (args.Length == 2) CreateMergedPDF(args[0], args[1]); Console.WriteLine(""); Console.WriteLine("Press any key to exit..."); Console.Read(); } static void CreateMergedPDF(string targetPDF, string sourceDir) { using (FileStream stream = new FileStream(targetPDF, FileMode.Create)) { Document pdfDoc = new Document(PageSize.A4); PdfCopy pdf = new PdfCopy(pdfDoc, stream); pdfDoc.Open(); var files = Directory.GetFiles(sourceDir); Console.WriteLine("Merging files count: " + files.Length); int i = 1; foreach (string file in files) { Console.WriteLine(i + ". Adding: " + file); pdf.AddDocument(new PdfReader(file)); i++; } if (pdfDoc != null) pdfDoc.Close(); Console.WriteLine("SpeedPASS PDF merge complete."); } } } } Hope it helps you and have fun.

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• Help Me Help You Fix That

  - by BuckWoody

  If you've been redirected here because you posted on a forum, or asked a question in an e-mail, the person wanted you to know how to get help quickly from a group of folks who are willing to do so - but whose time is valuable. You need to put a little effort into the question first to get others to assist. This is how to do that. It will only take you a moment to read... 1. State the problem succinctly in the title When an e-mail thread starts, or a forum post is the "head" of the conversation, you'll attract more helpers by using a descriptive headline than a vague one. This: "Driver for Epson Line Printer Not Installing on Operating System XYZ" Not this: "Can't print - PLEASE HELP" 2. Explain the Error Completely Make sure you include all pertinent information in the request. More information is better, there's almost no way to add too much data to the discussion. What you were doing, what happened, what you saw, the error message, visuals, screen shots, whatever you can include. This: "I'm getting error '5203 - Driver not compatible with Operating System since about 25 years ago' in a message box on the screen when I tried to run the SETUP.COM file from my older computer. It was a 1995 Compaq Proliant and worked correctly there.." Not this: "I get an error message in a box. It won't install." 3. Explain what you have done to research the problem If the first thing you do is ask a question without doing any research, you're lazy, and no one wants to help you. Using one of the many fine search engines you can most always find the answer to your problem. Sometimes you can't. Do yourself a favor - open a notepad app, and paste the URL's as you look them up. If you get your answer, don't save the note. If you don't get an answer, send the list along with the problem. It will show that you've tried, and also keep people from sending you links that you've already checked. This: "I read the fine manual, and it doesn't mention Operating System XYZ for some reason. Also, I checked the following links, but the instructions there didn't fix the problem: " Not this: <NULL> 4. Say "Please" and "Thank You" Remember, you're asking for help. No one owes you their valuable time. Ask politely, don't pester, endure the people who are rude to you, and when your question is answered, respond back to the thread or e-mail with a thank you to close it out. It helps others that have your same problem know that this is the correct answer. This: "I could really use some help here - if you have any pointers or things to try, I'd appreciate it." Not this: "I really need this done right now - why are there no responses?" This: "Thanks for those responses - that last one did the trick. Turns out I needed a new printer anyway, didn't realize they were so inexpensive now." Not this: <NULL> There are a lot of motivated people that will help you. Help them do that.

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• Mobile Deals: the Consumer Wants You in Their Pocket

  - by Mike Stiles

  Mobile deals offer something we talk about a lot in social marketing, relevant content. If a consumer is already predisposed to liking your product and gets a timely deal for it that’s easy and convenient to use, not only do you score on the marketing side, it clearly generates some of that precious ROI that’s being demanded of social. First, a quick gut-check on the public’s adoption of mobile. Nielsen figures have 55.5% of US mobile owners using smartphones. If young people are indeed the future, you can count on the move to mobile exploding exponentially. Teens are the fastest growing segment of smartphone users, and 58% of them have one. But the largest demographic of smartphone users is 25-34 at 74%. That tells you a focus on mobile will yield great results now, and even better results straight ahead. So we can tell both from statistics and from all the faces around you that are buried in their smartphones this is where consumers are. But are they looking at you? Do you have a valid reason why they should? Everybody likes a good deal. BIA/Kelsey says US consumers will spend $3.6 billion this year for daily deals (the Groupons and LivingSocials of the world), up 87% from 2011. The report goes on to say over 26% of small businesses are either "very likely" or "extremely likely" to offer up a deal in the next 6 months. Retail Gazette reports 58% of consumers shop with coupons, a 40% increase in 4 years. When you consider that a deal can be the impetus for a real-world transaction, a first-time visit to a store, an online purchase, entry into a loyalty program, a social referral, a new fan or follower, etc., that 26% figure shows us there’s a lot of opportunity being left on the table by brands. The existing and emerging technologies behind mobile devices make the benefits of offering deals listed above possible. Take how mobile payment systems are being tied into deal delivery and loyalty programs. If it’s really easy to use a coupon or deal, it’ll get used. If it’s complicated, it’ll be passed over as “not worth it.” When you can pay with your mobile via technologies that connects store and user, you get the deal, you get the loyalty credit, you pay, and your receipt is uploaded, all in one easy swipe. Nothing to keep track of, nothing to lose or forget about. And the store “knows” you, so future offers will be based on your tastes. Consider the endgame. A customer who’s a fan of your belt buckle store’s Facebook Page is in one of your physical retail locations. They pull up your app, because they’ve gotten used to a loyalty deal being offered when they go to your store. Voila. A 10% discount active for the next 30 minutes. Maybe the app also surfaces social references to your brand made by friends so they can check out a buckle someone’s raving about. If they aren’t a fan of your Page or don’t have your app, perhaps they’ve opted into location-based deal services so you can still get them that 10% deal while they’re in the store. Or maybe they’ve walked in with a pre-purchased Groupon or Living Social voucher. They pay with one swipe, and you’ve learned about their buying preferences, credited their loyalty account and can encourage them to share a pic of their new buckle on social. Happy customer. Happy belt buckle company. All because the brand was willing to use the tech that’s available to meet consumers where they are, incentivize them, and show them how much they’re valued through rewards.

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