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• Oracle Social Network Developer Challenge Winners

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  Originally posted by Jake Kuramoto on The Apps Lab blog. Now that OpenWorld 2012 has wrapped, I have time to tell you all about what happened. Maybe you recall that Noel (@noelportugal) and I were running a modified hackathon during the show, the Oracle Social Network Developer Challenge. Without further ado, congratulations to Dimitri Gielis (@dgielis) and Martin Giffy D’Souza (@martindsouza) on their winning entry, an integration between Oracle APEX and Oracle Social Network that integrates feedback and bug submission with Oracle Social Network Conversations, allowing developers, end-users and project leaders to view and discuss the feedback on their APEX applications from within Oracle Social Network. Update: Bob Rhubart of OTN (@brhubart) interviewed Dimitri and Martin right after their big win. Money quote from Dimitri when asked what he’d buy with the $500 in Amazon gift cards, “Oracle Social Network.” Nice one. In their own words: In the developers perspective it’s important to get feedback soon, so after a first iteration and end-users start to test, they can give feedback of the application. Previously it stopped there, and it was up to the developer to communicate further with email, phone etc. With OSN every feedback and communication gets logged and other people can see the discussion immediately as well. For the end users perspective he can now communicate in a more efficient way to not only the developers, but also between themselves. Maybe many end-users (in different locations) would like to change some behaviour, by using OSN they can see the entry somebody put in with a screenshot and they can just start to chat about it. Some key technical end users can have lighten the tasks of the development team by looking at the feedback first and start to communicate with their peers. For the project manager he has now the ability to really see what communication has taken place in certain areas and can make decisions on that. Later, if things come up again, he can always go back in OSN and see what was said at that moment in time. Integrating OSN in the APEX applications enhances the user experience, makes the lives of the developers easier and gives a better overview to project managers. Incidentally, you may already know Dimitri and Martin, since both are Oracle Ace Directors. I ran into Martin at the Ace Director briefings Friday before the conference started, and at that point, he wasn’t sure he’d have time to enter the Challenge. After some coaxing, he and Dimitri agreed to give it a go and banged out their entry on Tuesday night, or more accurately, very early Wednesday morning, the day of the Challenge judging. I think they said it took them about four hours of hardcore coding to get it done, very much like a traditional hackathon, which is essentially a code sprint from idea to finished product. Here are some screenshots of the workflow they built. #gallery-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-1 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } I love this idea, i.e. closing the loop between web developers and users, a very common pain point, and so did our judges. Speaking of, special thanks to our panel of three judges: Reggie Bradford (@reggiebradford), serial entrepreneur, founder of Vitrue and SVP of Cloud Product Development at Oracle Robert Hipps (@roberthipps), VP of Development for Oracle Social Network and my former boss Roland Smart (@rsmartx), VP of Social Marketing and the brains behind the Oracle Social Developer Community Finally, thanks to everyone who made this possible, including: The three other teams from HarQen (@harqen), TEAM Informatics (@teaminformatics) and Fishbowl Solutions (@fishbowle20) featuring Friend of the ‘Lab John Sim (@jrsim_uix), who finished and presented entries. I’ll be posting the details of their work this week. The one guy who finished an entry, but couldn’t make the judging, Bex Huff (@bex). Bex rallied from a hospitalization due to an allergic reaction during the show; he’s fine, don’t worry. I’ll post details of his work next week, too. The 40-plus people who registered to compete in the Challenge. Noel for all his hard work, sample code, and flying monkey target, more on that to come. The Oracle Social Network development team for supporting this event. Everyone in legal and the beta program office for their help. And finally, the Oracle Technology Network (@oracletechnet) for hosting the event and providing countless hours of operational and moral support. Sorry if I’ve missed some people, since this was a huge team effort. This event was a big success, and we plan to do similar events in the future. Stay tuned to this channel for more. 

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• Find odd and even rows using $.inArray() function when using jQuery Templates

  - by hajan

  In the past period I made series of blogs on ‘jQuery Templates in ASP.NET’ topic. In one of these blogs dealing with jQuery Templates supported tags, I’ve got a question how to create alternating row background. When rendering the template, there is no direct access to the item index. One way is if there is an incremental index in the JSON string, we can use it to solve this. If there is not, then one of the ways to do this is by using the jQuery’s $.inArray() function. - $.inArray(value, array) – similar to JavaScript indexOf() Here is an complete example how to use this in context of jQuery Templates: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" > <head runat="server">     <style type="text/css">         #myList { cursor:pointer; }                  .speakerOdd { background-color:Gray; color:White;}         .speaker { background-color:#443344; color:White;}                  .speaker:hover { background-color:White; color:Black;}         .speakerOdd:hover { background-color:White; color:Black;}     </style>     <title>jQuery ASP.NET</title>     <script src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.4.4.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>     <script src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jquery.templates/beta1/jquery.tmpl.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>     <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">         var speakers = [             { Name: "Hajan1" },             { Name: "Hajan2" },             { Name: "Hajan3" },             { Name: "Hajan4" },             { Name: "Hajan5" }         ];         $(function () {             $("#myTemplate").tmpl(speakers).appendTo("#myList");         });         function oddOrEven() {             return ($.inArray(this.data, speakers) % 2) ? "speaker" : "speakerOdd";         }     </script>     <script id="myTemplate" type="text/x-jquery-tmpl">         <tr class="${oddOrEven()}">             <td> ${Name}</td>         </tr>     </script> </head> <body>     <table id="myList"></table> </body> </html> So, I have defined stylesheet classes speakerOdd and speaker as well as corresponding :hover styles. Then, you have speakers JSON string containing five items. And what is most important in our case is the oddOrEven function where $.inArray(value, data) is implemented. function oddOrEven() {     return ($.inArray(this.data, speakers) % 2) ? "speaker" : "speakerOdd"; } Remark: The $.inArray() method is similar to JavaScript's native .indexOf() method in that it returns -1 when it doesn't find a match. If the first element within the array matches value, $.inArray() returns 0. From http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.inArray/ So, now we can call oddOrEven function from inside our jQuery Template in the following way: <script id="myTemplate" type="text/x-jquery-tmpl">     <tr class="${oddOrEven()}">         <td> ${Name}</td>     </tr> </script> And the result is I hope you like it. Regards, Hajan

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• A new SQL, a new Analysis Services, a new Workshop! #ssas #sql2012

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  One week ago Microsoft SQL Server 2012 finally debuted with a virtual launch event and you can find many intro sessions there (20 minutes each). There is a lot of new content available if you want to learn more about SQL 2012 and in this blog post I’d like to provide a few link to sessions, documents, bits and courses that are available now or very soon. First of all, the release of Analysis Services 2012 has finally released PowerPivot 2012 (many of us called it PowerPivot v2 before this official name) and also the new Data Mining Add-in for Microsoft Office 2010, now available also for Excel 64bit! And, of course, don’t miss the Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Feature Pack, there are a lot of upgrades for both DBAs and developers. I just discovered there is a new LocalDB version of SQL Express that can run in user mode without any setup. Is this the end of SQL CE? But now, back to Analysis Services: if you want some tutorial on Tabular, the Microsoft Virtual Academy has a whole track dedicated to Analysis Services 2012 but you will probably be interested also in the one about Reporting Services 2012. If you think that virtual is good but it’s not enough, there are plenty of conferences in the coming months – these are just those where I and Alberto will deliver some SSAS Tabular presentations: SQLBits X, London, March 29-31, 2012: if you are in London or want a good reason to go, this is the most important SQL Server event in Europe this year, no doubts about it. And not only because of the high number of attendees, but also because there is an impressive number of speakers (excluding me, of course) coming from all over the world. This is an event second only to PASS Summit in Seattle so there are no good reasons to not attend it. Microsoft SQL Server & Business Intelligence Conference 2012, Milan, March 28-29, 2012: this is an Italian conference so the language might be a barrier, but many of us also speak English and the food is good! Just a few seats still available. TechEd North America, Orlando, June 11-14, 2012: you know, this is a big event and it contains everything – if you want to spend a whole day learning the SSAS Tabular model with me and Alberto, don’t miss our pre-conference day “Using BISM Tabular in Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2012” (be careful, it is on June 10, a nice study-Sunday!). TechEd Europe, Amsterdam, June 26-29, 2012: the European version of TechEd provides almost the same content and you don’t have to go overseas. We also run the same pre-conference day “Using BISM Tabular in Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2012” (in this case, it is on June 25, that’s a regular Monday). I and Alberto will also speak at some user group meeting around Europe during… well, we’re going to travel a lot in the next months. In fact, if you want to get a complete training on SSAS Tabular, you should spend two days with us in one of our SSAS Tabular Workshop! We prepared a 2-day seminar, a very intense one, that start from the simple tabular modeling and cover architecture, DAX, query, advanced modeling, security, deployment, optimization, monitoring, relationships with PowerPivot and Multidimensional… Really, there are a lot of stuffs here! We announced the first dates in Europe and also an online edition optimized for America’s time zone: Apr 16-17, 2012 – Amsterdam, Netherlands Apr 26-27, 2012 – Copenhagen, Denmark May 7-8, 2012 – Online for America’s time zone May 14-15, 2012 – Brussels, Belgium May 21-22, 2012 – Oslo, Norway May 24-25, 2012 – Stockholm, Sweden May 28-29, 2012 – London, United Kingdom May 31-Jun 1, 2012 – Milan, Italy (Italian language) Also Chris Webb will join us in this workshop and in every date you can find who is the speaker on the web site. The course is based on our upcoming book, almost 600 pages (!) about SSAS Tabular, an incredible effort that will be available very soon in a preview (rough cuts from O’Reilly) and will be on the shelf in May. I will provide a link to order it as soon as we have one! And if you think that this is not enough… you’re right! Do you know what is the only thing you can do to optimize your Tabular model? Optimize your DAX code. Learning DAX is easy, mastering DAX requires some knowledge… and our DAX Advanced Workshop will provide exactly the required content. Public classes will be available later this year, by now we just deliver it on demand.

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• The Unspoken - The Why of GC Ergonomics

  - by jonthecollector

  Do you use GC ergonomics, -XX:+UseAdaptiveSizePolicy, with the UseParallelGC collector? The jist of GC ergonomics for that collector is that it tries to grow or shrink the heap to meet a specified goal. The goals that you can choose are maximum pause time and/or throughput. Don't get too excited there. I'm speaking about UseParallelGC (the throughput collector) so there are definite limits to what pause goals can be achieved. When you say out loud "I don't care about pause times, give me the best throughput I can get" and then say to yourself "Well, maybe 10 seconds really is too long", then think about a pause time goal. By default there is no pause time goal and the throughput goal is high (98% of the time doing application work and 2% of the time doing GC work). You can get more details on this in my very first blog. GC ergonomics The UseG1GC has its own version of GC ergonomics, but I'll be talking only about the UseParallelGC version. If you use this option and wanted to know what it (GC ergonomics) was thinking, try -XX:AdaptiveSizePolicyOutputInterval=1 This will print out information every i-th GC (above i is 1) about what the GC ergonomics to trying to do. For example, UseAdaptiveSizePolicy actions to meet *** throughput goal *** GC overhead (%) Young generation: 16.10 (attempted to grow) Tenured generation: 4.67 (attempted to grow) Tenuring threshold: (attempted to decrease to balance GC costs) = 1 GC ergonomics tries to meet (in order) Pause time goal Throughput goal Minimum footprint The first line says that it's trying to meet the throughput goal. UseAdaptiveSizePolicy actions to meet *** throughput goal *** This run has the default pause time goal (i.e., no pause time goal) so it is trying to reach a 98% throughput. The lines Young generation: 16.10 (attempted to grow) Tenured generation: 4.67 (attempted to grow) say that we're currently spending about 16% of the time doing young GC's and about 5% of the time doing full GC's. These percentages are a decaying, weighted average (earlier contributions to the average are given less weight). The source code is available as part of the OpenJDK so you can take a look at it if you want the exact definition. GC ergonomics is trying to increase the throughput by growing the heap (so says the "attempted to grow"). The last line Tenuring threshold: (attempted to decrease to balance GC costs) = 1 says that the ergonomics is trying to balance the GC times between young GC's and full GC's by decreasing the tenuring threshold. During a young collection the younger objects are copied to the survivor spaces while the older objects are copied to the tenured generation. Younger and older are defined by the tenuring threshold. If the tenuring threshold hold is 4, an object that has survived fewer than 4 young collections (and has remained in the young generation by being copied to the part of the young generation called a survivor space) it is younger and copied again to a survivor space. If it has survived 4 or more young collections, it is older and gets copied to the tenured generation. A lower tenuring threshold moves objects more eagerly to the tenured generation and, conversely a higher tenuring threshold keeps copying objects between survivor spaces longer. The tenuring threshold varies dynamically with the UseParallelGC collector. That is different than our other collectors which have a static tenuring threshold. GC ergonomics tries to balance the amount of work done by the young GC's and the full GC's by varying the tenuring threshold. Want more work done in the young GC's? Keep objects longer in the survivor spaces by increasing the tenuring threshold. This is an example of the output when GC ergonomics is trying to achieve a pause time goal UseAdaptiveSizePolicy actions to meet *** pause time goal *** GC overhead (%) Young generation: 20.74 (no change) Tenured generation: 31.70 (attempted to shrink) The pause goal was set at 50 millisecs and the last GC was 0.415: [Full GC (Ergonomics) [PSYoungGen: 2048K-0K(26624K)] [ParOldGen: 26095K-9711K(28992K)] 28143K-9711K(55616K), [Metaspace: 1719K-1719K(2473K/6528K)], 0.0758940 secs] [Times: user=0.28 sys=0.00, real=0.08 secs] The full collection took about 76 millisecs so GC ergonomics wants to shrink the tenured generation to reduce that pause time. The previous young GC was 0.346: [GC (Allocation Failure) [PSYoungGen: 26624K-2048K(26624K)] 40547K-22223K(56768K), 0.0136501 secs] [Times: user=0.06 sys=0.00, real=0.02 secs] so the pause time there was about 14 millisecs so no changes are needed. If trying to meet a pause time goal, the generations are typically shrunk. With a pause time goal in play, watch the GC overhead numbers and you will usually see the cost of setting a pause time goal (i.e., throughput goes down). If the pause goal is too low, you won't achieve your pause time goal and you will spend all your time doing GC. GC ergonomics is meant to be simple because it is meant to be used by anyone. It was not meant to be mysterious and so this output was added. If you don't like what GC ergonomics is doing, you can turn it off with -XX:-UseAdaptiveSizePolicy, but be pre-warned that you have to manage the size of the generations explicitly. If UseAdaptiveSizePolicy is turned off, the heap does not grow. The size of the heap (and the generations) at the start of execution is always the size of the heap. I don't like that and tried to fix it once (with some help from an OpenJDK contributor) but it unfortunately never made it out the door. I still have hope though. Just a side note. With the default throughput goal of 98% the heap often grows to it's maximum value and stays there. Definitely reduce the throughput goal if footprint is important. Start with -XX:GCTimeRatio=4 for a more modest throughput goal (%20 of the time spent in GC). A higher value means a smaller amount of time in GC (as the throughput goal).

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• Oracle Social Network Developer Challenge: Bezzotech

  - by Kellsey Ruppel

  Originally posted by Jake Kuramoto on The Apps Lab blog. I’ve covered all the entries we had for the Oracle Social Network Developer Challenge, the winners, Dimitri and Martin, HarQen, TEAM Informatics and John Sim from Fishbowl Solutions, and today, I’m giving you bonus coverage. Friend of the ‘Lab, Bex Huff (@bex) from Bezzotech (@bezzotech), had an interesting OpenWorld. He rebounded from an allergic reaction to finish his entry, Honey Badger, only to have his other OpenWorld commitments make him unable to present his work. Still, he did a bunch of work, and I want to make sure everyone knows about the Honey Badger. If you’re wondering about the name, it’s a meme; “honey badger don’t care.” Bex tackled a common problem with social tools by adding game mechanics to create an incentive for people to keep their profiles updated. He used a Hot-or-Not style comparison app that poses expertise questions and awards a badge to the winner. Questions are based on whatever attributes the business wants to emphasize. The goal is to find the mavens in an organization, give them praise and recognition, ideally creating incentive for everyone to raise their games. In his own words: There is a real information quality problem in social networks. In last year’s keynote, Larry Elison demonstrated how to use the social network to track down resources that have the skill sets needed for specific projects. But how well would that work in real life? People usually update that information with the basic profile information, but they rarely update their profiles with latest news items, projects, customers, or skills. It’s a pain. Or, put another way, when was the last time you updated your LinkedIn profile? Enter the Honey Badger! This is a example of a comparator app that gamifies the way people keep their profiles updated, which ensures higher quality data in the social network. An administrator comes up with a series of important questions: Who is a better communicator? Who is a better Java programmer? Who is a better team player? And people would have a space in their profile to give a justification as to why they have these skills. The second part of the app is the comparator. It randomly shows two people, their names, and their justification for why they have these skills. You will click on one of them to “vote” for them, then on the next page you will see the results from the previous match, and get 2 new people to vote on. Anybody with a winning score wins a “Honey Badge” to be displayed on their profile page, which proudly states that their peers agree that this person has those skills. Once a badge is won, it will be jealously guarded. The longer your go without updating your profile, the more likely it is that you will lose your badge. This “loss aversion” is well known in psychology, and is a strong incentive for people to keep their profiles up to date. If a user sees their rank drop from 90% to 60%, they will find the time to update their justification! Unfortunately, during the hackathon we were not allowed to modify the schema to allow for additional fields such as “justification.” So this hack is limited to just the one basic question: who is the bigger Honey Badger? Here are some shots of the Honey Badger application: #gallery-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-1 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } Thanks to Bex and everyone for participating in our challenge. Despite very little time to promote this event, we had a great turnout and creative and useful entries. The amount of work required to put together these final entries was significant, especially during a conference, and the judges and all of us involved were impressed at how much work everyone was able to do. Congrats to everyone, pat yourselves on the back. Stay tuned if you’re interested in challenges like these. We’ll likely be running similar events in the not-so-distant future.

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• ORACLE RIGHTNOW DYNAMIC AGENT DESKTOP CLOUD SERVICE - Putting the Dynamite into Dynamic Agent Desktop

  - by Andreea Vaduva

  Untitled Document There’s a mountain of evidence to prove that a great contact centre experience results in happy, profitable and loyal customers. The very best Contact Centres are those with high first contact resolution, customer satisfaction and agent productivity. But how many companies really believe they are the best? And how many believe that they can be? We know that with the right tools, companies can aspire to greatness – and achieve it. Core to this is ensuring their agents have the best tools that give them the right information at the right time, so they can focus on the customer and provide a personalised, professional and efficient service. Today there are multiple channels through which customers can communicate with you; phone, web, chat, social to name a few but regardless of how they communicate, customers expect a seamless, quality experience. Most contact centre agents need to switch between lots of different systems to locate the right information. This hampers their productivity, frustrates both the agent and the customer and increases call handling times. With this in mind, Oracle RightNow has designed and refined a suite of add-ins to optimize the Agent Desktop. Each is designed to simplify and adapt the agent experience for any given situation and unify the customer experience across your media channels. Let’s take a brief look at some of the most useful tools available and see how they make a difference. Contextual Workspaces: The screen where agents do their job. Agents don’t want to be slowed down by busy screens, scrolling through endless tabs or links to find what they’re looking for. They want quick, accurate and easy. Contextual Workspaces are fully configurable and through workspace rules apply if, then, else logic to display only the information the agent needs for the issue at hand . Assigned at the Profile level, different levels of agent, from a novice to the most experienced, get a screen that is relevant to their role and responsibilities and ensures their job is done quickly and efficiently the first time round. Agent Scripting: Sometimes, agents need to deliver difficult or sensitive messages while maximising the opportunity to cross-sell and up-sell. After all, contact centres are now increasingly viewed as revenue generators. Containing sophisticated branching logic, scripting helps agents to capture the right level of information and guides the agent step by step, ensuring no mistakes, inconsistencies or missed opportunities. Guided Assistance: This is typically used to solve common troubleshooting issues, displaying a series of question and answer sets in a decision-tree structure. This means agents avoid having to bookmark favourites or rely on written notes. Agents find particular value in these guides - to quickly craft chat and email responses. What’s more, by publishing guides in answers on support pages customers, can resolve issues themselves, without needing to contact your agents. And b ecause it can also accelerate agent ramp-up time, it ensures that even novice agents can solve customer problems like an expert. Desktop Workflow: Take a step back and look at the full customer interaction of your agents. It probably spans multiple systems and multiple tasks. With Desktop Workflows you control the design workflows that span the full customer interaction from start to finish. As sequences of decisions and actions, workflows are unique in that they can create or modify different records and provide automation behind the scenes. This means your agents can save time and provide better quality of service by having the tools they need and the relevant information as required. And doing this boosts satisfaction among your customers, your agents and you – so win, win, win! I have highlighted above some of the tools which can be used to optimise the desktop; however, this is by no means an exhaustive list. In approaching your design, it’s important to understand why and how your customers contact you in the first place. Once you have this list of “whys” and “hows”, you can design effective policies and procedures to handle each category of problem, and then implement the right agent desktop user interface to support them. This will avoid duplication and wasted effort. Five Top Tips to take away: Start by working out “why” and “how” customers are contacting you. Implement a clean and relevant agent desktop to support your agents. If your workspaces are getting complicated consider using Desktop Workflow to streamline the interaction. Enhance your Knowledgebase with Guides. Agents can access them proactively and can be published on your web pages for customers to help themselves. Script any complex, critical or sensitive interactions to ensure consistency and accuracy. Desktop optimization is an ongoing process so continue to monitor and incorporate feedback from your agents and your customers to keep your Contact Centre successful.   Want to learn more? Having attending the 3-day Oracle RightNow Customer Service Administration class your next step is to attend the Oracle RightNow Customer Portal Design and 2-day Dynamic Agent Desktop Administration class. Here you’ll learn not only how to leverage the Agent Desktop tools but also how to optimise your self-service pages to enhance your customers’ web experience.   Useful resources: Review the Best Practice Guide Review the tune-up guide   About the Author: Angela Chandler joined Oracle University as a Senior Instructor through the RightNow Customer Experience Acquisition. Her other areas of expertise include Business Intelligence and Knowledge Management.  She currently delivers the following Oracle RightNow courses in the classroom and as a Live Virtual Class: RightNow Customer Service Administration (3 days) RightNow Customer Portal Design and Dynamic Agent Desktop Administration (2 days) RightNow Analytics (2 days) Rightnow Chat Cloud Service Administration (2 days)

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• HPCM 11.1.2.2.x - How to find data in an HPCM Standard Costing database

  - by Jane Story

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} When working with a Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management (HPCM) Standard Costing application, there can often be a requirement to check data or allocated results using reporting tools e.g Smartview. To do this, you are retrieving data directly from the Essbase databases related to your HPCM model. For information, running reports is covered in Chapter 9 of the HPCM User documentation. The aim of this blog is to provide a quick guide to finding this data for reporting in the HPCM generated Essbase database in v11.1.2.2.x of HPCM. In order to retrieve data from an HPCM generated Essbase database, it is important to understand each of the following dimensions in the Essbase database and where data is located within them: Measures dimension – identifies Measures AllocationType dimension – identifies Direct Allocation Data or Genealogy Allocation data Point Of View (POV) dimensions – there must be at least one, maximum of four. Business dimensions: Stage Business dimensions – these will be identified by the Stage prefix. Intra-Stage dimension – these will be identified by the _Intra suffix. Essbase outlines and reporting is explained in the documentation here:http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E17236_01/epm.1112/hpm_user/ch09s02.html For additional details on reporting measures, please review this section of the documentation:http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E17236_01/epm.1112/hpm_user/apas03.html Reporting requirements in HPCM quite often start with identifying non balanced items in the Stage Balancing report. The following documentation link provides help with identifying some of the items within the Stage Balancing report:http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E17236_01/epm.1112/hpm_user/generatestagebalancing.html The following are some types of data upon which you may want to report: Stage Data: Direct Input Assigned Input Data Assigned Output Data Idle Cost/Revenue Unassigned Cost/Revenue Over Driven Cost/Revenue Direct Allocation Data Genealogy Allocation Data Stage Data Stage Data consists of: Direct Input i.e. input data, the starting point of your allocation e.g. in Stage 1 Assigned Input Data i.e. the cost/revenue received from a prior stage (i.e. stage 2 and higher). Assigned Output Data i.e. for each stage, the data that will be assigned forward is assigned post stage data. Reporting on this data is explained in the documentation here:http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E17236_01/epm.1112/hpm_user/ch09s03.html Dimension Selection Measures Direct Input: CostInput RevenueInput Assigned Input (from previous stages): CostReceivedPriorStage RevenueReceivedPriorStage Assigned Output (to subsequent stages): CostAssignedPostStage RevenueAssignedPostStage AllocationType DirectAllocation POV One member from each POV dimension Stage Business Dimensions Any members for the stage business dimensions for the stage you wish to see the Stage data for. All other Dimensions NoMember Idle/Unassigned/OverDriven To view Idle, Unassigned or Overdriven Costs/Revenue, first select which stage for which you want to view this data. If multiple Stages have unassigned/idle, resolve the earliest first and re-run the calculation as differences in early stages will create unassigned/idle in later stages. Dimension Selection Measures Idle: IdleCost IdleRevenue Unassigned: UnAssignedCost UnAssignedRevenue Overdriven: OverDrivenCost OverDrivenRevenue AllocationType DirectAllocation POV One member from each POV dimension Dimensions in the Stage with Unassigned/ Idle/OverDriven Cost All the Stage Business dimensions in the Stage with Unassigned/Idle/Overdriven. Zoom in on each dimension to find the individual members to find which members have Unassigned/Idle/OverDriven data. All other Dimensions NoMember Direct Allocation Data Direct allocation data shows the data received by a destination intersection from a source intersection where a direct assignment(s) exists. Reporting on direct allocation data is explained in the documentation here:http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E17236_01/epm.1112/hpm_user/ch09s04.html You would select the following to report direct allocation data Dimension Selection Measures CostReceivedPriorStage AllocationType DirectAllocation POV One member from each POV dimension Stage Business Dimensions Any members for the SOURCE stage business dimensions and the DESTINATION stage business dimensions for the direct allocations for the stage you wish to report on. All other Dimensions NoMember Genealogy Allocation Data Genealogy allocation data shows the indirect data relationships between stages. Genealogy calculations run in the HPCM Reporting database only. Reporting on genealogy data is explained in the documentation here:http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E17236_01/epm.1112/hpm_user/ch09s05.html Dimension Selection Measures CostReceivedPriorStage AllocationType GenealogyAllocation (IndirectAllocation in 11.1.2.1 and prior versions) POV One member from each POV dimension Stage Business Dimensions Any stage business dimension members from the STARTING stage in Genealogy Any stage business dimension members from the INTERMEDIATE stage(s) in Genealogy Any stage business dimension members from the ENDING stage in Genealogy All other Dimensions NoMember Notes If you still don’t see data after checking the above, please check the following Check the calculation has been run. Here are couple of indicators that might help them with that. Note the size of essbase cube before and after calculations ensure that a calculation was run against the database you are examing. Export the essbase data to a text file to confirm that some data exists. Examine the date and time on task area to see when, if any, calculations were run and what choices were used (e.g. Genealogy choices) If data does not exist in places where they are expecting, it could be that No calculations/genealogy were run No calculations were successfully run The model/data at feeder location were either absent or incompatible, resulting in no allocation e.g no driver data. Smartview Invocation from HPCM From version 11.1.2.2.350 of HPCM (this version will be GA shortly), it is possible to directly invoke Smartview from HPCM. There is guided navigation before the Smartview invocation and it is then possible to see the selected value(s) in SmartView. Click to Download HPCM 11.1.2.2.x - How to find data in an HPCM Standard Costing database (Right click or option-click the link and choose "Save As..." to download this pdf file)

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• Welcome to Jackstown

  - by fatherjack

  I live in a small town, the population count isn't that great but let me introduce you to some of the population. We'll start with Martin the Doc, he fixes up anything that gets poorly, so much so that he could be classed as the doctor, the vet and even the garage mechanic. He's got a reputation that he can fix anything and that hasn't been proved wrong yet. He's great friends with Brian (who gets called "Brains") the teacher who seems to have a sound understanding of any topic you care to pass his way. If he isn't sure he tells you and then goes to find out and comes back with a full answer real quick. Its good to have that sort of research capability close at hand. Brains is also great at encouraging anyone who needs a bit of support to get them up to speed and working on their jobs. Steve sees Brains regularly, that's because he is the librarian, he keeps all sorts of reading material and nowadays there's even video to watch about any topic you like. Steve keeps scouring all sorts of places to get the content that's needed and he keeps it in good order so that what ever is needed can be found quickly. He also has to make sure that old stuff gets marked as probably out of date so that anyone reading it wont get mislead. Over the road from him is Greg, he's the town crier. We don't have a newspaper here so Greg keeps us all informed of what's going on "out of town" - what new stuff we might make use of and what wont work in a small place like this. If we are interested he goes ahead and gets people in to demonstrate their products  and tell us about the details. Greg is pretty good at getting us discounts too. Now Greg's brother Ian works for the mayors office in the "waste management department" nowadays its all about the recycling but he still has to make sure that the stuff that cant be used any more gets disposed of properly. It depends on the type of waste he's dealing with that decides how it need to be treated and he has to know a lot about the different methods and when to use which ones. There are two people that keep the peace in town, Brent is the detective, investigating wrong doings and applying justice where necessary and Bart is the diplomat who smooths things over when any people have a dispute or disagreement. Brent is meticulous in his investigations and fair in the way he handles any situation he finds. Discretion is his byword. There's a rumour that Bart used to work for the United Nations but what ever his history there is no denying his ability to get apparently irreconcilable parties working together to their combined benefit. Someone who works closely with Bart is Brad, he is the translator in town. He has several languages that he can converse in but he can also explain things from someone's point of view or  and make it understandable to someone else. To keep things on the straight and narrow from a legal perspective is Ben the solicitor, making sure we all abide by the rules.Two people who make for an interesting evening's conversation if you get them together are Aaron and Grant, Aaron is the local planning inspector and Grant is an inventor of some reputation. Anything being constructed around here needs Aarons agreement. He's quite flexible in his rules though; if you can justify what you want to do with solid logic but he wont stand for any development going on without his inclusion. That gets a demolition notice and there's no argument. Grant as I mentioned is the inventor in town, if something can be improved or created then Grant is your man. He mainly works on his own but isnt averse to getting specific advice and assistance from specialist from out of town if they can help him finish his creations.There aren't too many people left for you to meet in the town, there's Rob, he's an ex professional sportsman. He played Hockey, Football, Cricket, you name it. He was in his element as goal keeper / wicket keeper and that shows in his personal life. He just goes about his business and people often don't even know that he's helped them. Really low profile, doesn't get any glory but saves people from lots of problems, even disasters on occasion. There goes Neil, he's a bit of an odd person, some people say he's gifted with special clairvoyant powers, personally I think he's got his ear to the ground and knows where to find out the important news as soon as its made public. Anyone getting a visit from Neil is best off to follow his advice though, he's usually spot on and you wont be caught by surprise if you follow his recommendations – wherever it comes from.Poor old Andrew is the last person to introduce you to. Andrew doesn't show himself too often but when he does it seems that people find a reason to blame him for their problems, whether he had anything to do with their predicament or not. In all honesty, without fail, and to his great credit, he takes it in good grace and never retaliates or gets annoyed when he's out and about.  It pays off too as its very often the case that those who were blaming him recently suddenly find they need his help and they readily forget the issues pretty rapidly.And then there's me, what do I do in town? Well, I'm just a DBA with a lot of hats. (Jackstown Pop. 1)

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• Oracle on Oracle: Is that all?

  - by Darin Pendergraft

  On October 17th, I posted a short blog and a podcast interview with Chirag Andani, talking about how Oracle IT uses its own IDM products. Blog link here. In response, I received a comment from reader Jaime Cardoso ([email protected]) who posted: “- You could have talked about how by deploying Oracle's Open standards base technology you were able to integrate any new system in your infrastructure in days. - You could have talked about how by deploying federation you were enabling the business side to keep all their options open in terms of companies to buy and sell while maintaining perfect employee and customer's single view. - You could have talked about how you are now able to cut response times to your audit and security teams into 1/10th of your former times Instead you spent 6 minutes talking about single sign on and self provisioning? If I didn't knew your IDM offer so well I would now be wondering what its differences from Microsoft's offer was. Sorry for not giving a positive comment here but, please your IDM suite is very good and, you simply aren't promoting it well enough” So I decided to send Jaime a note asking him about his experience, and to get his perspective on what makes the Oracle products great. What I found out is that Jaime is a very experienced IDM Architect with several major projects under his belt. Darin Pendergraft: Can you tell me a bit about your experience? How long have you worked in IT, and what is your IDM experience? Jaime Cardoso: I started working in "serious" IT in 1998 when I became Netscape's technical specialist in Portugal. Netscape Portugal didn't exist so, I was working for their VAR here. Most of my work at the time was with Netscape's mail server and LDAP server. Since that time I've been bouncing between the system's side like Sun resellers, Solaris stuff and even worked with Sun's Engineering in the making of an Hierarchical Storage Product (Sun CIS if you know it) and the application's side, mostly in LDAP and IDM. Over the years I've been doing support, service delivery and pre-sales / architecture design of IDM solutions in most big customers in Portugal, to name a few projects: - The first European deployment of Sun Access Manager (SAPO – Portugal Telecom) - The identity repository of 5/5 of the Biggest Portuguese banks - The Portuguese government federation of services project DP: OK, in your blog response, you mentioned 3 topics: 1. Using Oracle's standards based architecture; (you) were able to integrate any new system in days: can you give an example? What systems, how long did it take, number of apps/users/accounts/roles etc. JC: It's relatively easy to design a user management strategy for a static environment, or if you simply assume that you're an <insert vendor here> shop and all your systems will bow to that vendor's will. We've all seen that path, the use of proprietary technologies in interoperability solutions but, then reality kicks in. As an ISP I recall that I made the technical decision to use Active Directory as a central authentication system for the entire IT infrastructure. Clients, systems, apps, everything was there. As a good part of the systems and apps were running on UNIX, then a connector became needed in order to have UNIX boxes to authenticate against AD. And, that strategy worked but, each new machine required the component to be installed, monitoring had to be made for that component and each new app had to be independently certified. A self care user portal was an ongoing project, AD access assumes the client is inside the domain, something the ISP's customers (and UNIX boxes) weren't nor had any intention of ever being. When the Windows 2008 rollout was done, Microsoft changed the Active Directory interface. The Windows administrators didn't have enough know-how about directories and the way systems outside the MS world behaved so, on the go live, things weren't properly tested and a general outage followed. Several hours and 1 roll back later, everything was back working. But, the ISP still had to change all of its applications to work with the new access methods and reset the effort spent on the self service user portal. To keep with the same strategy, they would also have to trust Microsoft not to change interfaces again. Simply by putting up an Oracle LDAP server in the middle and replicating the user info from the AD into LDAP, most of the problems went away. Even systems for which no AD connector existed had PAM in them so, integration was made at the OS level, fully supported by the OS supplier. Sun Identity Manager already had a self care portal, combined with a user workflow so, all the clearances had to be given before the account was created or updated. Adding a new system as a client for these authentication services was simply a new checkbox in the OS installer and, even True64 systems were, for the first time integrated also with a 5 minute work of a junior system admin. True, all the windows clients and MS apps still went to the AD for their authentication needs so, from the start everybody knew that they weren't 100% free of migration pains but, now they had a single point of problems to look at. If you're looking for numbers: - 500K directory entries (users) - 2-300 systems After the initial setup, I personally integrated about 20 systems / apps against LDAP in 1 day while being watched by the different IT teams. The internal IT staff did the rest. DP: 2. Using Federation allows the business to keep options open for buying and selling companies, and yet maintain a single view for both employee and customer. What do you mean by this? Can you give an example? JC: The market is dynamic. The company that's being bought today tomorrow will be sold again. Companies that spread on different markets may see the regulator forcing a sale of part of a company due to monopoly reasons and companies that are in multiple countries have to comply with different legislations. Our job, as IT architects, while addressing the customers and employees authentication services, is quite hard and, quite contrary. On one hand, we need to give access to all of our employees to the relevant systems, apps and resources and, we already have marketing talking with us trying to find out who's a customer of the bough company but not from ours to address. On the other hand, we have to do that and keep in mind we may have to break up all that effort and that different countries legislation may became a problem with a full integration plan. That's a job for user Federation. you don't want to be the one who's telling your President that he will sell that business unit without it's customer's database (making the deal worth a lot less) or that the buyer will take with him a copy of your entire customer's database. Federation enables you to start controlling permissions to users outside of your traditional authentication realm. So what if the people of that company you just bought are keeping their old logins? Do you want, because of that, to have a dedicated system for their expenses reports? And do you want to keep their sales (and pre-sales) people out of the loop in terms of your group's path? Control the information flow, establish a Federation trust circle and give access to your apps to users that haven't (yet?) been brought into your internal login systems. You can still see your users in a unified view, you obviously control if a user has access to any particular application, either that user is in your local database or stored in a directory on the other side of the world. DP: 3. Cut response times of audit and security teams to 1/10. Is this a real number? Can you give an example? JC: No, I don't have any backing for this number. One of the companies I did system Administration for has a SOX compliance policy in place (I remind you that I live in Portugal so, this definition of SOX may be somewhat different from what you're used to) and, every time the audit team says they'll do another audit, we have to negotiate with them the size of the sample and we spend about 15 man/days gathering all the required info they ask. I did some work with Sun's Identity auditor and, from what I've been seeing, Oracle's product is even better and, I've seen that most of the information they ask would have been provided in a few hours with the help of this tool. I do stand by what I said here but, to be honest, someone from Identity Auditor team would do a much better job than me explaining this time savings. Jaime is right: the Oracle IDM products have a lot of business value, and Oracle IT is using them for a lot more than I was able to cover in the short podcast that I posted. I want to thank Jaime for his comments and perspective. We want these blog posts to be informative and honest – so if you have feedback for the Oracle IDM team on any topic discussed here, please post your comments below.

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• What Counts For a DBA: Simplicity

  - by Louis Davidson

  Too many computer processes do an apparently simple task in a bizarrely complex way. They remind me of this strip by one of my favorite artists: Rube Goldberg. In order to keep the boss from knowing one was late, a process is devised whereby the cuckoo clock kisses a live cuckoo bird, who then pulls a string, which triggers a hat flinging, which in turn lands on a rod that removes a typewriter cover…and so on. We rely on creating automated processes to keep on top of tasks. DBAs have a lot of tasks to perform: backups, performance tuning, data movement, system monitoring, and of course, avoiding being noticed.  Every day, there are many steps to perform to maintain the database infrastructure, including: checking physical structures, re-indexing tables where needed, backing up the databases, checking those backups, running the ETL, and preparing the daily reports and yes, all of these processes have to complete before you can call it a day, and probably before many others have started that same day. Some of these tasks are just naturally complicated on their own. Other tasks become complicated because the database architecture is excessively rigid, and we often discover during “production testing” that certain processes need to be changed because the written requirements barely resembled the actual customer requirements.   Then, with no time to change that rigid structure, we are forced to heap layer upon layer of code onto the problematic processes. Instead of a slight table change and a new index, we end up with 4 new ETL processes, 20 temp tables, 30 extra queries, and 1000 lines of SQL code.  Report writers then need to build reports and make magical numbers appear from those toxic data structures that are overly complex and probably filled with inconsistent data. What starts out as a collection of fairly simple tasks turns into a Goldbergian nightmare of daily processes that are likely to cause your dinner to be interrupted by the smartphone doing the vibration dance that signifies trouble at the mill. So what to do? Well, if it is at all possible, simplify the problem by either going into the code and refactoring the complex code to simple, or taking all of the processes and simplifying them into small, independent, easily-tested steps.  The former approach usually requires an agreement on changing underlying structures that requires countless mind-numbing meetings; while the latter can generally be done to any complex process without the same frustration or anger, though it will still leave you with lots of steps to complete, the ability to test each step independently will definitely increase the quality of the overall process (and with each step reporting status back, finding an actual problem within the process will be definitely less unpleasant.) We all know the principle behind simplifying a sequence of processes because we learned it in math classes in our early years of attending school, starting with elementary school. In my 4 years (ok, 9 years) of undergraduate work, I remember pretty much one thing from my many math classes that I apply daily to my career as a data architect, data programmer, and as an occasional indentured DBA: “show your work”. This process of showing your work was my first lesson in simplification. Each step in the process was in fact, far simpler than the entire process.  When you were working an equation that took both sides of 4 sheets of paper, showing your work was important because the teacher could see every step, judge it, and mark it accordingly.  So often I would make an error in the first few lines of a problem which meant that the rest of the work was actually moving me closer to a very wrong answer, no matter how correct the math was in the subsequent steps. Yet, when I got my grade back, I would sometimes be pleasantly surprised. I passed, yet missed every problem on the test. But why? While I got the fact that 1+1=2 wrong in every problem, the teacher could see that I was using the right process. In a computer process, the process is very similar. We take complex processes, show our work by storing intermediate values, and test each step independently. When a process has 100 steps, each step becomes a simple step that is tested and verified, such that there will be 100 places where data is stored, validated, and can be checked off as complete. If you get step 1 of 100 wrong, you can fix it and be confident (that if you did your job of testing the other steps better than the one you had to repair,) that the rest of the process works. If you have 100 steps, and store the state of the process exactly once, the resulting testable chunk of code will be far more complex and finding the error will require checking all 100 steps as one, and usually it would be easier to find a specific needle in a stack of similarly shaped needles.  The goal is to strive for simplicity either in the solution, or at least by simplifying every process down to as many, independent, testable, simple tasks as possible.  For the tasks that really can’t be done completely independently, minimally take those tasks and break them down into simpler steps that can be tested independently.  Like working out division problems longhand, have each step of the larger problem verified and tested.

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• SQLAuthority News – #TechEDIn – TechEd India 2012 – Things to Do and Explore for SQL Enthusiast

  - by pinaldave

  TechEd India 2012 is just 48 hours away and I have been receiving lots of requests regarding how SQL enthusiasts can maximize their time they’ll be spending at TechEd India 2012. Trust me – TechEd is the biggest Tech Event in India and it is much larger in magnitude than we can imagine. There are plenty of tracks there and lots of things to do. Honestly, we need clone ourselves multiple times to completely cover the event. However, I am going to talk about SQL enthusiasts only right now. In this post, I’ll share a few things they can do in this big event. But before I start talking about specific things, there is one thing which is a must – Keynote. There are amazing Keynotes planned every single day at TechEd India 2012. One should not miss them at all. Social Media I am a big believer of the social media. I am everywhere - Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and GPlus. I suggest you follow the tag #TechEdIn as well as contribute at the healthy conversation going on right now. You may want to follow a few of the SQL Server enthusiasts who are also attending events like TechEd India. This way, you will know where they are and you can contribute along with them. For a good start, you can follow all the speakers who are presenting at the event. I have linked all the speakers’ names with their respective Twitter accounts. Networking Do not stop meeting new people. Introduce yourself. Catch the speakers after their sessions. Meet other SQL experts and discuss SQL as well as life aside SQL. The best way to start the communication is to talk about something new. Here are a few lines I usually use when I have to break the ice: SQL Server 2012 is just released and I have installed it. How many SQL Server sessions are you going to attend? I am going to attend _________ I am a big fan of SQL Server. Sessions Agenda Day 1 T-SQL Rediscovered with SQL Server 2012 - Jacob Sebastian Catapult your data with SQL Server 2012 integration services - Praveen Srivatsa Processing Big Data with SQL Server 2012 and Hadoop  - Stephan Forte SQL Server Misconceptions and Resolution – A Practical Perspective – Pinal Dave and Vinod Kumar Securing with ContainedDB in SQL Server 2012  - Pranab Majumdar Agenda Day 2 Hand-on-Lab – Exploring Power View with SQL Server 2012 – Ravi S. Maniam Hand-on-Lab - SQL Server 2012 – AlwaysOn Availability Groups  - Amit Ganguli Agenda Day 3 Peeling SQL Server like an Onion: Internals Debunked  - Vinod Kumar Speed Up! – Parallel Processes and Unparalleled Performance  - Pinal Dave Keeping Your Database Available – ‘AlwaysOn’  - Balmukund Lakhani Lesser Known Facts of SQL Server Backup and Restore  - Amit Banerjee Top five reasons why you want SQL Server 2012 BI - Praveen Srivatsa Product Booth and Event Partners There will be a dedicated SQL Server booth at the event. I suggest you stop by there and do communication with SQL Server Experts. Additionally there will be booths of various event partners. Stop by their booth and see if they have a product which can help your career. I know that Pluralsight has recently released my course on their online learning site and if that interests you, you can talk about the subject with them. Bring Your Camera Make a list of the people you want to meet. Follow them on Twitter or send them an email and know their location. Introduce yourself, meet them and have your conversation. Do not forget to take a photo with them and later on, share the photo on social media. It would be nice to send an email to everyone with attached high resolution images if you have their email address. After-hours parties After-hours parties are not always about eating and meeting friends but sometimes, they are very informative. Last time I ended up meeting an SQL expert, and we end up talking for long hours on various aspects of SQL Server. After 4 hours, we figured out that he stays in the same apartment complex as mine and since we have had an excellent friendship, he has then become our family friend. So, my advice is that you start to seek out who is meeting where in the evening and see if you can get invited to the parties. Make new friends but never lose mutual respect by doing something silly. Meet Me I will be at the event for three days straight. I will be around the SQL tracks. Please stop by and introduce yourself. I would like to meet you and talk to you. Meeting folks from the Community is very important as we all speak the same language at the end of the day – SQL Server. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology

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• Mixed Emotions: Humans React to Natural Language Computer

  - by Applications User Experience

  There was a big event in Silicon Valley on Tuesday, November 15. Watson, the natural language computer developed at IBM Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, and its inventor and principal research investigator, David Ferrucci, were guests at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California for another round of the television game Jeopardy. You may have read about or watched on YouTube how Watson beat Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, two top Jeopardy competitors, last February. This time, Watson swept the floor with two Silicon Valley high-achievers, one a venture capitalist with a background  in math, computer engineering, and physics, and the other a technology and finance writer well-versed in all aspects of culture and humanities. Watson is the product of the DeepQA research project, which attempts to create an artificially intelligent computing system through advances in natural language processing (NLP), among other technologies. NLP is a computing strategy that seeks to provide answers by processing large amounts of unstructured data contained in multiple large domains of human knowledge. There are several ways to perform NLP, but one way to start is by recognizing key words, then processing  contextual  cues associated with the keyword concepts so that you get many more “smart” (that is, human-like) deductions,  rather than a series of “dumb” matches.  Jeopardy questions often require more than key word matching to get the correct answer; typically several pieces of information put together, often from vastly different categories, to come up with a satisfactory word string solution that can be rephrased as a question.  Smarter than your average search engine, but is it as smart as a human? Watson was especially fast at descrambling mixed-up state capital names, and recalling and pairing movie titles where one started and the other ended in the same word (e.g., Billion Dollar Baby Boom, where both titles used the word Baby). David said they had basically removed the variable of how fast Watson hit the buzzer compared to human contestants, but frustration frequently appeared on the faces of the contestants beaten to the punch by Watson. David explained that top Jeopardy winners like Jennings achieved their success with a similar strategy, timing their buzz to the end of the reading of the clue,  and “running the board”, being first to respond on about 60% of the clues.  Similar results for Watson. It made sense that Watson would be good at the technical and scientific stuff, so I figured the venture capitalist was toast. But I thought for sure Watson would lose to the writer in categories such as pop culture, wines and foods, and other humanities. Surprisingly, it held its own. I was amazed it could recognize a word definition of a syllogism in the category of philosophy. So what was the audience reaction to all of this? We started out expecting our formidable human contestants to easily run some of their categories; however, they started off on the wrong foot with the state capitals which Watson could unscramble so efficiently. By the end of the first round, contestants and the audience were feeling a little bit, well, …. deflated. Watson was winning by about $13,000, and the humans had gone into negative dollars. The IBM host said he was going to “slow Watson down a bit,” and the humans came back with respectable scores in Double Jeopardy. This was partially thanks to a very sympathetic audience (and host, also a human) providing “group-think” on many questions, especially baseball ‘s most valuable players, which by the way, couldn’t have been hard because even I knew them.  Yes, that’s right, the humans cheated. Since Watson could speak but not hear us (it didn’t have speech recognition capability), it was probably unaware of this. In Final Jeopardy, the single question had to do with law. I was sure Watson would blow this one, but all contestants were able to answer correctly about a copyright law. In a career devoted to making computers more helpful to people, I think I may have seen how a computer can do too much. I’m not sure I’d want to work side-by-side with a Watson doing my job. Certainly listening and empathy are important traits we humans still have over Watson.  While there was great enthusiasm in the packed room of computer scientists and their friends for this standing-room-only show, I think it made several of us uneasy (especially the poor human contestants whose egos were soundly bashed in the first round). This computer system, by the way , only took 4 years to program. David Ferrucci mentioned several practical uses for Watson, including medical diagnoses and legal strategies. Are you “the expert” in your job? Imagine NLP computing on an Oracle database.   This may be the user interface of the future to enable users to better process big data. How do you think you’d like it? Postscript: There were three little boys sitting in front of me in the very first row. They looked, how shall I say it, … unimpressed!

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• A new SQL, a new Analysis Services, a new Workshop! #ssas #sql2012

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  One week ago Microsoft SQL Server 2012 finally debuted with a virtual launch event and you can find many intro sessions there (20 minutes each). There is a lot of new content available if you want to learn more about SQL 2012 and in this blog post I’d like to provide a few link to sessions, documents, bits and courses that are available now or very soon. First of all, the release of Analysis Services 2012 has finally released PowerPivot 2012 (many of us called it PowerPivot v2 before this official name) and also the new Data Mining Add-in for Microsoft Office 2010, now available also for Excel 64bit! And, of course, don’t miss the Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Feature Pack, there are a lot of upgrades for both DBAs and developers. I just discovered there is a new LocalDB version of SQL Express that can run in user mode without any setup. Is this the end of SQL CE? But now, back to Analysis Services: if you want some tutorial on Tabular, the Microsoft Virtual Academy has a whole track dedicated to Analysis Services 2012 but you will probably be interested also in the one about Reporting Services 2012. If you think that virtual is good but it’s not enough, there are plenty of conferences in the coming months – these are just those where I and Alberto will deliver some SSAS Tabular presentations: SQLBits X, London, March 29-31, 2012: if you are in London or want a good reason to go, this is the most important SQL Server event in Europe this year, no doubts about it. And not only because of the high number of attendees, but also because there is an impressive number of speakers (excluding me, of course) coming from all over the world. This is an event second only to PASS Summit in Seattle so there are no good reasons to not attend it. Microsoft SQL Server & Business Intelligence Conference 2012, Milan, March 28-29, 2012: this is an Italian conference so the language might be a barrier, but many of us also speak English and the food is good! Just a few seats still available. TechEd North America, Orlando, June 11-14, 2012: you know, this is a big event and it contains everything – if you want to spend a whole day learning the SSAS Tabular model with me and Alberto, don’t miss our pre-conference day “Using BISM Tabular in Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2012” (be careful, it is on June 10, a nice study-Sunday!). TechEd Europe, Amsterdam, June 26-29, 2012: the European version of TechEd provides almost the same content and you don’t have to go overseas. We also run the same pre-conference day “Using BISM Tabular in Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2012” (in this case, it is on June 25, that’s a regular Monday). I and Alberto will also speak at some user group meeting around Europe during… well, we’re going to travel a lot in the next months. In fact, if you want to get a complete training on SSAS Tabular, you should spend two days with us in one of our SSAS Tabular Workshop! We prepared a 2-day seminar, a very intense one, that start from the simple tabular modeling and cover architecture, DAX, query, advanced modeling, security, deployment, optimization, monitoring, relationships with PowerPivot and Multidimensional… Really, there are a lot of stuffs here! We announced the first dates in Europe and also an online edition optimized for America’s time zone: Apr 16-17, 2012 – Amsterdam, Netherlands Apr 26-27, 2012 – Copenhagen, Denmark May 7-8, 2012 – Online for America’s time zone May 14-15, 2012 – Brussels, Belgium May 21-22, 2012 – Oslo, Norway May 24-25, 2012 – Stockholm, Sweden May 28-29, 2012 – London, United Kingdom May 31-Jun 1, 2012 – Milan, Italy (Italian language) Also Chris Webb will join us in this workshop and in every date you can find who is the speaker on the web site. The course is based on our upcoming book, almost 600 pages (!) about SSAS Tabular, an incredible effort that will be available very soon in a preview (rough cuts from O’Reilly) and will be on the shelf in May. I will provide a link to order it as soon as we have one! And if you think that this is not enough… you’re right! Do you know what is the only thing you can do to optimize your Tabular model? Optimize your DAX code. Learning DAX is easy, mastering DAX requires some knowledge… and our DAX Advanced Workshop will provide exactly the required content. Public classes will be available later this year, by now we just deliver it on demand.

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• Day 4 - Game Sprites In Action

  - by dapostolov

  Yesterday I drew an image on the screen. Most exciting, but ... I spent more time blogging about it then actual coding. So this next little while I'm going to streamline my game and research and simply post key notes. Quick notes on the last session: The most important thing I wanted to point out were the following methods:           spriteBatch.Begin(SpriteBlendMode.AlphaBlend);           spriteBatch.Draw(sprite, position, Color.White);           spriteBatch.End(); The spriteBatch object is used to draw Textures and a 2D texture is called a Sprite A texture is generally an image, which is called an Asset in XNA The Draw Method in the Game1.cs is looped (until exit) and utilises the spriteBatch object to draw a Scene To begin drawing a Scene you call the Begin Method. To end a Scene you call the End Method. And to place an image on the Scene you call the Draw method. The most simple implementation of the draw method is:           spriteBatch.Draw(sprite, position, Color.White); 1) sprite - the 2D texture you loaded to draw 2) position - the 2d vector, a set of x & y coordinates 3) Color.White - the tint to apply to the texture, in this case, white light = nothing, nada, no tint. Game Sprites In Action! Today, I played around with Draw methods to get comfortable with their "quirks". The following is an example of the above draw method, but with more parameters available for us to use. Let's investigate!             spriteBatch.Draw(sprite, position2, null, Color.White, MathHelper.ToRadians(45.0f), new Vector2(sprite.Width / 2, sprite.Height / 2), 1.0F, SpriteEffects.None, 0.0F); The parameters (in order): 1) sprite  the texture to display 2) position2 the position on the screen / scene this can also be a rectangle 3) null the portion of the image to display within an image null = display full image this is generally used for animation strips / grids (more on this below) 4) Color.White Texture tinting White = no tint 5) MathHelper.ToRadians(45.0f) rotation of the object, in this case 45 degrees rotates from the set plotting point. 6) new Vector(0,0) the plotting point in this case the top left corner the image will rotate from the top left of the texture in the code above, the point is set to the middle of the image. 7) 1.0f Image scaling (1x) 8) SpriteEffects.None you can flip the image horizontally or vertically 9) 0.0f The z index of the image. 0 = closer, 1 behind? And playing around with different combinations I was able to come up with the following whacky display:   Checking off Yesterdays Intention List: learn game development terminology (in progress) - We learned sprite, scene, texture, and asset. how to place and position (rotate) a static image on the screen (completed) - The thing to note was, it's was in radians and I found a cool helper method to convert degrees into radians. Also, the image rotates from it's specified point. how to layer static images on the screen (completed) - I couldn't seem to get the zIndex working, but one things for sure, the order you draw the image in also determines how it is rendered on the screen. understand image scaling (in progress) - I'm not sure I have this fully covered, but for the most part plug a number in the scaling field and the image grows / shrinks accordingly. can we reuse images? (completed) - yes, I loaded one image and plotted the bugger all over the screen. understand how framerate is handled in XNA (in progress) - I hacked together some code to display the framerate each second. A framerate of 60 appears to be the standard. Interesting to note, the GameTime object does provide you with some cool timing capabilities, such as...is the game running slow? Need to investigate this down the road. how to display text , basic shapes, and colors on the screen (in progress) - i got text rendered on the screen, and i understand containing rectangles. However, I didn't display "shapes" & "colors" how to interact with an image (collision of user input?) (todo) how to animate an image and understand basic animation techniques (in progress) - I was able to create a stripe animation of numbers ranging from 1 - 4, each block was 40 x 40 pixles for a total stripe size of 160 x 40. Using the portion (source Rectangle) parameter, i limited this display to each section at varying intervals. It was interesting to note my first implementation animated at rocket speed. I then tried to create a smoother animation by limiting the redraw capacity, which seemed to work. I guess a little more research will have to be put into this for animating characters / scenes. how to detect colliding images or screen edges (todo) - but the rectangle object can detect collisions I believe. how to manipulate the image, lets say colors, stretching (in progress) - I haven't figured out how to modify a specific color to be another color, but the tinting parameter definately could be used. As for stretching, use the rectangle object as the positioning and the image will stretch to fit! how to focus on a segment of an image...like only displaying a frame on a film reel (completed) - as per basic animation techniques what's the best way to manage images (compression, storage, location, prevent artwork theft, etc.) (todo) Tomorrows Intention Tomorrow I am going to take a stab at rendering a game menu and from there I'm going to investigate how I can improve upon the code and techniques. Intention List: Render a menu, fancy or not Show the mouse cursor Hook up click event A basic animation of somesort Investigate image / menu techniques D.

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• SQL SERVER – What is Incremental Statistics? – Performance improvements in SQL Server 2014 – Part 1

  - by Pinal Dave

  This is the first part of the series Incremental Statistics. Here is the index of the complete series. What is Incremental Statistics? – Performance improvements in SQL Server 2014 – Part 1 Simple Example of Incremental Statistics – Performance improvements in SQL Server 2014 – Part 2 DMV to Identify Incremental Statistics – Performance improvements in SQL Server 2014 – Part 3 Statistics are considered one of the most important aspects of SQL Server Performance Tuning. You might have often heard the phrase, with related to performance tuning. “Update Statistics before you take any other steps to tune performance”. Honestly, I have said above statement many times and many times, I have personally updated statistics before I start to do any performance tuning exercise. You may agree or disagree to the point, but there is no denial that Statistics play an extremely vital role in the performance tuning. SQL Server 2014 has a new feature called Incremental Statistics. I have been playing with this feature for quite a while and I find that very interesting. After spending some time with this feature, I decided to write about this subject over here. New in SQL Server 2014 – Incremental Statistics Well, it seems like lots of people wants to start using SQL Server 2014′s new feature of Incremetnal Statistics. However, let us understand what actually this feature does and how it can help. I will try to simplify this feature first before I start working on the demo code. Code for all versions of SQL Server Here is the code which you can execute on all versions of SQL Server and it will update the statistics of your table. The keyword which you should pay attention is WITH FULLSCAN. It will scan the entire table and build brand new statistics for you which your SQL Server Performance Tuning engine can use for better estimation of your execution plan. UPDATE STATISTICS TableName(StatisticsName) WITH FULLSCAN Who should learn about this? Why? If you are using partitions in your database, you should consider about implementing this feature. Otherwise, this feature is pretty much not applicable to you. Well, if you are using single partition and your table data is in a single place, you still have to update your statistics the same way you have been doing. If you are using multiple partitions, this may be a very useful feature for you. In most cases, users have multiple partitions because they have lots of data in their table. Each partition will have data which belongs to itself. Now it is very common that each partition are populated separately in SQL Server. Real World Example For example, if your table contains data which is related to sales, you will have plenty of entries in your table. It will be a good idea to divide the partition into multiple filegroups for example, you can divide this table into 3 semesters or 4 quarters or even 12 months. Let us assume that we have divided our table into 12 different partitions. Now for the month of January, our first partition will be populated and for the month of February our second partition will be populated. Now assume, that you have plenty of the data in your first and second partition. Now the month of March has just started and your third partition has started to populate. Due to some reason, if you want to update your statistics, what will you do? In SQL Server 2012 and earlier version You will just use the code of WITH FULLSCAN and update the entire table. That means even though you have only data in third partition you will still update the entire table. This will be VERY resource intensive process as you will be updating the statistics of the partition 1 and 2 where data has not changed at all. In SQL Server 2014 You will just update the partition of Partition 3. There is a special syntax where you can now specify which partition you want to update now. The impact of this is that it is smartly merging the new data with old statistics and update the entire statistics without doing FULLSCAN of your entire table. This has a huge impact on performance. Remember that the new feature in SQL Server 2014 does not change anything besides the capability to update a single partition. However, there is one feature which is indeed attractive. Previously, when table data were changed 20% at that time, statistics update were triggered. However, now the same threshold is applicable to a single partition. That means if your partition faces 20% data, change it will also trigger partition level statistics update which, when merged to your final statistics will give you better performance. In summary If you are not using a partition, this feature is not applicable to you. If you are using a partition, this feature can be very helpful to you. Tomorrow: We will see working code of SQL Server 2014 Incremental Statistics. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: SQL Statistics, Statistics

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• ASP.NET Web Forms Extensibility: Handler Factories

  - by Ricardo Peres

  An handler factory is the class that implements IHttpHandlerFactory and is responsible for instantiating an handler (IHttpHandler) that will process the current request. This is true for all kinds of web requests, whether they are for ASPX pages, ASMX/SVC web services, ASHX/AXD handlers, or any other kind of file. Also used for restricting access for certain file types, such as Config, Csproj, etc. Handler factories are registered on the global Web.config file, normally located at %WINDIR%\Microsoft.NET\Framework<x64>\vXXXX\Config for a given path and request type (GET, POST, HEAD, etc). This goes on section <httpHandlers>. You would create a custom handler factory for a number of reasons, let me list just two: A centralized place for using dependency injection; Also a centralized place for invoking custom methods or performing some kind of validation on all pages. Let’s see an example using Unity for injecting dependencies into a page, suppose we have this on Global.asax.cs: 1: public class Global : HttpApplication 2: { 3: internal static readonly IUnityContainer Unity = new UnityContainer(); 4: 5: void Application_Start(Object sender, EventArgs e) 6: { 7: Unity.RegisterType<IFunctionality, ConcreteFunctionality>(); 8: } 9: } We instantiate Unity and register a concrete implementation for an interface, this could/should probably go in the Web.config file. Forget about its actual definition, it’s not important. Then, we create a custom handler factory: 1: public class UnityPageHandlerFactory : PageHandlerFactory 2: { 3: public override IHttpHandler GetHandler(HttpContext context, String requestType, String virtualPath, String path) 4: { 5: IHttpHandler handler = base.GetHandler(context, requestType, virtualPath, path); 6: 7: //one scenario: inject dependencies 8: Global.Unity.BuildUp(handler.GetType(), handler, String.Empty); 9:  10: return (handler); 11: } 12: } It inherits from PageHandlerFactory, which is .NET’s included factory for building regular ASPX pages. We override the GetHandler method and issue a call to the BuildUp method, which will inject required dependencies, if any exist. An example page with dependencies might be: 1: public class SomePage : Page 2: { 3: [Dependency] 4: public IFunctionality Functionality 5: { 6: get; 7: set; 8: } 9: } Notice the DependencyAttribute, it is used by Unity to identify properties that require dependency injection. When BuildUp is called, the Functionality property (or any other properties with the DependencyAttribute attribute) will receive the concrete implementation associated with it’s type, as registered on Unity. Another example, checking a page for authorization. Let’s define an interface first: 1: public interface IRestricted 2: { 3: Boolean Check(HttpContext ctx); 4: } An a page implementing that interface: 1: public class RestrictedPage : Page, IRestricted 2: { 3: public Boolean Check(HttpContext ctx) 4: { 5: //check the context and return a value 6: return ...; 7: } 8: } For this, we would use an handler factory such as this: 1: public class RestrictedPageHandlerFactory : PageHandlerFactory 2: { 3: private static readonly IHttpHandler forbidden = new UnauthorizedHandler(); 4:  5: public override IHttpHandler GetHandler(HttpContext context, String requestType, String virtualPath, String path) 6: { 7: IHttpHandler handler = base.GetHandler(context, requestType, virtualPath, path); 8: 9: if (handler is IRestricted) 10: { 11: if ((handler as IRestricted).Check(context) == false) 12: { 13: return (forbidden); 14: } 15: } 16:  17: return (handler); 18: } 19: } 20:  21: public class UnauthorizedHandler : IHttpHandler 22: { 23: #region IHttpHandler Members 24:  25: public Boolean IsReusable 26: { 27: get { return (true); } 28: } 29:  30: public void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context) 31: { 32: context.Response.StatusCode = (Int32) HttpStatusCode.Unauthorized; 33: context.Response.ContentType = "text/plain"; 34: context.Response.Write(context.Response.Status); 35: context.Response.Flush(); 36: context.Response.Close(); 37: context.ApplicationInstance.CompleteRequest(); 38: } 39:  40: #endregion 41: } The UnauthorizedHandler is an example of an IHttpHandler that merely returns an error code to the client, but does not cause redirection to the login page, it is included merely as an example. One thing we must keep in mind is, there can be only one handler factory registered for a given path/request type (verb) tuple. A typical registration would be: 1: <httpHandlers> 2: <remove path="*.aspx" verb="*"/> 3: <add path="*.aspx" verb="*" type="MyNamespace.MyHandlerFactory, MyAssembly"/> 4: </httpHandlers> First we remove the previous registration for ASPX files, and then we register our own. And that’s it. A very useful mechanism which I use lots of times.

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• Keep it Professional &ndash; Multiple Environments

  - by AjarnMark

  I have certainly been reading blogs a whole lot more than writing them the last several weeks, and it’s about time I got back to writing.  I have been collecting several topics and references for blog posts…some of which will probably just never get written as the timeliness of the topics fade over time.  Nonetheless, I’m back, and I think it is time to revive my Doing Business Right series, this time coming from the slant of managing a development team rather than the previous angle of being self-employed.  First up: separating Dev, Test, and Prod. A few months ago, Colin Stasiuk (@BenchmarkIT) wrote a great post about separating your Dev, Test/UAT, and Prod environments.  This post covers all the important points such as removing Developer access from both PROD and UAT, and the importance of proper deployment (a.k.a. promotion) procedures.  I won’t repeat it all here, go read the original!  But what I do want to address is what I believe to be the #1 excuse people use for not having separate environments:  Money.  I discussed this briefly in my comment on Colin’s post at the time, but let me repeat it here and expand on it a bit. Don’t let the size of your company or the size of its budget dictate whether you do things professionally or not.  I am convinced that most developers and development teams would agree that it is a best practice to have separate environments for development, testing, and production (a.k.a. Live).  So why don’t they?  Because they think that it means separate servers which means more money.  While having separate physical servers for the different environments would be ideal, it is not an absolute requirement in order to make this work.  Here are a few ideas: Use multiple instances of SQL Server and multiple Web Sites with Headers or Ports.  For no additional fees* you can install multiple instances of SQL Server on the same machine.  This gives you a nice separation, allowing you to even use the same database names as will appear in PROD, yet isolating the data and security access.  And in IIS, you can create multiple Web Sites on the same server just by using Host Headers or different port numbers to separate them.  This approach does still pose the risk of non-Prod environments impacting performance on Prod, but when your application is busy enough for that to be a concern, you can probably afford one of the other options. Use desktop PCs instead of servers.  Instead of investing in full server-grade hardware, you can mimic the separate environments on old desktop PCs and at least get functional equivalency, if not performance matching.  The last I checked, Microsoft did not require separate licensing for SQL Server if that installation was used exclusively for dev or test purposes*.  There may be some version or performance differences between this approach and what you have in Prod, but you have isolated test from impacting Prod resources this way. Virtualization.  This is of course one of the hot topics of the day, and I would be remiss if I did not suggest this.  It is quite easy these days to setup virtual machines so that, again, your environments are fairly isolated from one another, and you retain all the security and procedural benefits of having separate environments. So the point is, keep your high professional standards intact.  You don’t need to compromise on using proper procedure just because you work in a small company with a small budget.  Keep doing things the right way! By the way, where I work, our DEV environment is not on a server.  All development is done on the developer’s individual workstation where it can be isolated from other developers’ work for the duration of writing the code, but also where the developers have to reconcile (merge) differences in code under concurrent development.  This usually means that each change is executed multiple times (once per developer to update their environments with the latest changes from others) giving us an extra, informal. test deployment before even going to the Test/UAT server.  It also means that if the network goes down, the developers can continue to hum along because they are not dependent on networked resources.  In fact, they will likely be even more productive because they aren’t being interrupted by email…but that’s another post I need to write. * I am not a lawyer, nor a licensing specialist, but it appeared to be so the last time I checked.  When in doubt, consult an expert on the topic.

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• IBM Keynote: (hardware,software)–>{IBM.java.patterns}

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  On Sunday evening, September 30, 2012, Jason McGee, IBM Distinguished Engineer and Chief Architect Cloud Computing, along with John Duimovich IBM Distinguished Engineer and Java CTO, gave an information- and idea-rich keynote that left Java developers with much to ponder.Their focus was on the challenges to make Java more efficient and productive given the hardware and software environments of 2012. “One idea that is very interesting is the idea of multi-tenancy,” said McGee, “and how we can move up the spectrum. In traditional systems, we ran applications on dedicated middleware, operating systems and hardware. A lot of customers still run that way. Now people introduce hardware virtualization and share the hardware. That is good but there is a lot more we can do. We can share middleware and the application itself.” McGee challenged developers to better enable the Java language to function in these higher density models. He spoke about the need to describe patterns that help us grasp the full environment that an application needs, whether it’s a web or full enterprise application. Developers need to understand the resources that an application interacts with in a way that is simple and straightforward. The task is to then automate that deployment so that the complexity of infrastructure can be by-passed and developers can live in a simpler world where the cloud can automatically configure the needed environment. McGee argued that the key, something IBM has been working on, is to use a simpler pattern that allows a cloud-based architecture to embrace the entire infrastructure required for an application and make it highly available, scalable and able to recover from failure. The cloud-based architecture would automate the complexity of setting up and managing the infrastructure. IBM has been trying to realize this vision for customers so they can describe their Java application environment simply and allow the cloud to automate the deployment and management of applications. “The point,” explained McGee, “is to package the executable used to describe applications, to drop it into a shared system and let that system provide some intelligence about how to deploy and manage those applications.”John Duimovich on Improvements in JavaMcGee then brought onstage IBM’s Distinguished Engineer and CTO for Java, John Duimovich, who showed the audience ways to deploy Java applications more efficiently.Duimovich explained that, “When you run lots of copies of Java in the cloud or any hypervisor virtualized system, there are a lot of duplications of code and jar files. IBM has a facility called ‘shared classes’ where we put shared code, read only artefacts in a cache that is sharable across hypervisors.” By putting JIT code in ahead of time, he explained that the application server will use 20% less memory and operate 30% faster.  He described another example of how the JVM allows for the maximum amount of sharing that manages the tenants and file sockets and memory use through throttling and control. Duimovich touched on the “thin is in” model and IBM’s Liberty Profile and lightweight runtime for the cloud, which allows for greater efficiency in interacting with the cloud.Duimovich discussed the confusion Java developers experience when, for example, the hypervisor tells them that that they have 8 and then 4 and then 16 cores. “Because hypervisors are virtualized, they can change based on resource needs across the hypervisor layer. You may have 10 instances of an operation system and you may need to reallocate memory, " explained Duimovich.  He showed how to resize LPARs, reallocate CPUs and migrate applications as needed. He explained how application servers can resize thread pools and better use resources based on information from the hypervisors.Java Challenges in Hardware and SoftwareMcGee ended the keynote with a summary of upcoming hardware and software challenges for the Java platform. He noted that one reason developers love Java is it allows them to ignore differences in hardware. He stated that the most important things happening in hardware were in network and storage – in developments such as the speed of SSD, the exploitation of high-speed, low-latency networking, and recent developments such as storage-class memory, and non-volatile main memory. “So we are challenged to maintain the benefits of Java and the abstraction it provides from hardware while still exploiting the new innovations in hardware,” said McGee.McGee discussed transactional messaging applications where developers send messages transactionally persist a message to storage, something traditionally done by backing messages on spinning disks, something mostly outdated. “Now,” he pointed out, “we would use SSD and store it in Flash and get 70,000 messages a second. If we stored it using a PCI express-based flash memory device, it is still Flash but put on a PCI express bus on a card closer to the CPU. This way I get 300,000 messages a second and 25% improvement in latency.” McGee’s central point was that hardware has a huge impact on the performance and scalability of applications. New technologies are enabling developers to build classes of Java applications previously unheard of. “We need to be able to balance these things in Java – we need to maintain the abstraction but also be able to exploit the evolution of hardware technology,” said McGee. According to McGee, IBM's current focus is on systems wherein hardware and software are shipped together in what are called Expert Integrated Systems – systems that are pre-optimized, and pre-integrated together. McGee closed IBM’s engaging and thought-provoking keynote by pointing out that the use of Java in complex applications is increasingly being augmented by a host of other languages with strong communities around them – JavaScript, JRuby, Scala, Python and so forth. Java developers now must understand the strengths and weaknesses of such newcomers as applications increasingly involve a complex interconnection of languages.

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• Create Advanced Panoramas with Microsoft Image Composite Editor

  - by Matthew Guay

  Do you enjoy making panoramas with your pictures, but want more features than tools like Live Photo Gallery offer?  Here’s how you can create amazing panoramas for free with the Microsoft Image Composite Editor. Yesterday we took a look at creating panoramic photos in Windows Live Photo Gallery. Today we take a look at a free tool from Microsoft that will give you more advanced features to create your own masterpiece. Getting Started Download Microsoft Image Composite Editor from Microsoft Research (link below), and install as normal.  Note that there are separate version for 32 & 64-bit editions of Windows, so make sure to download the correct one for your computer. Once it’s installed, you can proceed to create awesome panoramas and extremely large image combinations with it.  Microsoft Image Composite Editor integrates with Live Photo Gallery, so you can create more advanced panoramic pictures directly.  Select the pictures you want to combine, click Extras in the menu bar, and select Create Image Composite. You can also create a photo stitch directly from Explorer.  Select the pictures you want to combine, right-click, and select Stitch Images… Or, simply launch the Image Composite Editor itself and drag your pictures into its editor.  Either way you start a image composition, the program will automatically analyze and combine your images.  This application is optimized for multiple cores, and we found it much faster than other panorama tools such as Live Photo Gallery. Within seconds, you’ll see your panorama in the top preview pane. From the bottom of the window, you can choose a different camera motion which will change how the program stitches the pictures together.  You can also quickly crop the picture to the size you want, or use Automatic Crop to have the program select the maximum area with a continuous picture.   Here’s how our panorama looked when we switched the Camera Motion to Planar Motion 2. But, the real tweaking comes in when you adjust the panorama’s projection and orientation.  Click the box button at the top to change these settings. The panorama is now overlaid with a grid, and you can drag the corners and edges of the panorama to change its shape. Or, from the Projection button at the top, you can choose different projection modes. Here we’ve chosen Cylinder (Vertical), which entirely removed the warp on the walls in the image.  You can pan around the image, and get the part you find most important in the center.  Click the Apply button on the top when you’re finished making changes, or click Revert if you want to switch to the default view settings. Once you’ve finished your masterpiece, you can export it easily to common photo formats from the Export panel on the bottom.  You can choose to scale the image or set it to a maximum width and height as well.  Click Export to disk to save the photo to your computer, or select Publish to Photosynth to post your panorama online. Alternately, from the File menu you can choose to save the panorama as .spj file.  This preserves all of your settings in the Image Composite Editor so you can edit it more in the future if you wish.   Conclusion Whether you’re trying to capture the inside of a building or a tall tree, the extra tools in Microsoft Image Composite Editor let you make nicer panoramas than you ever thought possible.  We found the final results surprisingly accurate to the real buildings and objects, especially after tweaking the projection modes.  This tool can be both fun and useful, so give it a try and let us know what you’ve found it useful for. Works with 32 & 64-bit versions of XP, Vista, and Windows 7 Link Download Microsoft Image Composite Editor Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Change or Set the Greasemonkey Script Editor in FirefoxNew Vista Syntax for Opening Control Panel Items from the Command-lineTune Your ClearType Font Settings in Windows VistaChange the Default Editor From Nano on Ubuntu LinuxMake MSE Create a Restore Point Before Cleaning Malware TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 Get a free copy of WinUtilities Pro 2010 World Cup Schedule Boot Snooze – Reboot and then Standby or Hibernate Customize Everything Related to Dates, Times, Currency and Measurement in Windows 7 Google Earth replacement Icon (Icons we like) Build Great Charts in Excel with Chart Advisor

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• Open World Day 3

  - by Antony Reynolds

  A Day in the Life of an Oracle OpenWorld Attendee Part IV My third day was exhibition day for me!  I took the opportunity to wander around the JavaOne and OpenWorld exhibitions to see what might be useful for me when selling WebLogic, Coherence & SOA Suite.  I found a number of interesting vendors and thought I would share what I found here.  These are not necessarily endorsements, but observations on companies that I thought had interesting looking products that fill a need I have seen at customers. Highly Available EBS Upgrades A few years ago I worked with a customer that was a port authority.  They wanted to tie E-Business Suite into their operations to provide faster processing of cargo and passengers.  However they only had a 2 hour downtime window to perform upgrades.  This was not a problem for core database and middleware technology, this could accommodate those upgrade timescales easily.  It was a problem for EBS however so I intrigued to find Rapid E-Suite Inc offering an 11i to 12i upgrade service that claims to require no outage.  This could be a real boon to EBS customers like my port friends that need to upgrade without disruption to their business. Mobile on WebLogic I have come across a number of customers who want a comprehensive mobile solution, connected and disconnected operation and so forth.  ADF only addresses part of these requirements currently so I was excited to discover mFrontiers Inc offering an apparently comprehensive solution that should integrate easily with Oracle SOA Suite to mobile enable a SOA infrastructure.  The ability to operate without a network is important for many applications, particularly in industries that require their engineers to enter buildings to perform maintenance or repairs, because network access is not always available – many of my colleagues don’t have mobile access from their homes because they live in the middle of nowhere – and disconnected support is crucial in these situations. Sharepoint Connector for WebCenter Content Obviously Sharepoint is an evil pernicious intrusion into a companies IT estate but it is widely deployed and many people like it but also would like to take advantage of Oracle products such as WebCenter Content.  So I was encouraged to see that Fishbowl Solutions have created a connector for Sharepoint that allows it to bring in content from WebCenter, it looks like a valuable way to maintain the Sharepoint interface end users are used to but extend the range of content by pulling stuff (technical term for content) from WebCenter.   Load Balancing The Enterprise Deployment Guides are Oracles bible on building highly available FMW environments, and each of them requires a front end load balancer.  I have been asked to help configure F5 Load Balancers on a number of occasions over my time at Oracle and each time I come back to it I find more useful features have been added to the BigIP line of load balancers that F5 sell, many of their documents are tailored to FMW.  I like F5, they provide (relatively) easy to use products that do what they say on the side of the box.  They may not have all the bells and whistles of some of their more expensive competitors but they do the job and do it well!  Besides which I like their logo! Other Stuff I saw lots of other interesting products and services, such as a lightweight monitoring tool for Coherence, Forms migration services, JCAPS migration services and lots of cool freebies to take home to the children! A Quiet Night Wednesday night was the partner appreciation event and I had decided to go back to the hotel and have an early night.  I decided to attend the last session of the day – a Maven/Hudson/WebLogic tutorial.  I got the wrong hotel for the session and snuck in 20 minutes late at the back and starting working on the hands on workshop.  One of my co-attendees raised his hand for help and as the presenter came over to help he suddenly stopped and yelled – “Is that Antony”!  It was my old friend Steve Button who used to be based in Redwood Shores but is now a WebLogic guru PM in Australia.  It was good to catch up with him.  As he yelled out a guy with really bad posture turned around to see who he was talking to, this turned out to be my friend Simon Haslan, Oracle ACE from the UK.  After the tutorial Simon and I retired to the coffee shop to catch up and share stories.  2 and half hours later we decided it was time to retire, so much for an early night but great to renew old friendships and find out what real customers are worrying about.

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• The standards that fail us and the intellectual bubble

  - by Jeff

  There has been a great deal of noise in the techie community about standards, and a sudden and unexplainable hate for Flash. This noise isn't coming from consumers... the countless soccer moms, teens and your weird uncle Bob, it's coming from the people who build (or at least claim to build) the stuff those consumers consume. If you could survey the position of consumers on the topic, they'd likely tell you that they just want stuff on the Web to work.The noise goes something like this: Web standards are the correct and right thing to use across the Intertubes, and anything not a part of those standards (Flash) is bad. Furthermore, the more recent noise is centered around the idea that HTML 5, along with Javascript, is the right thing to use. The arguments against Flash are, well, the truth is I haven't seen a good argument. I see anecdotal nonsense about high CPU usage and things I'd never think to check when I'm watching Piano Cat on YouTube, but these aren't arguments to me. Sure, I've seen it crash a browser a few times, but it's totally rare.But let's go back to standards. Yes, standards have played an important role in establishing the ubiquity of the Web. The protocols themselves, TCP/IP and HTTP, have been critical. HTML, which has served us well for a very long time, established an incredible foundation. Javascript did an OK job, and thanks to clever programmers writing great frameworks like JQuery, is becoming more and more useful. CSS is awful (there, I said it, I feel SO much better), and I'll never understand why it's so disconnected and different from anything else. It doesn't help that it's so widely misinterpreted by different browsers. Still, there's no question that standards are a good thing, and they've been good for the Web, consumers and publishers alike.HTML 4 has been with us for more than a decade. In Web years, that might as well be 80. HTML 5, contrary to popular belief, is not a standard, and likely won't be for many years to come. In fact, the Web hasn't really evolved at all in terms of its standards. The tools that generate the standard markup and script have, but at the end of the day, we're still living with standards that are more than ten years old. The "official" standards process has failed us.The Web evolved anyway, and did not wait for standards bodies to decide what to do next. It evolved in part because Macromedia, then Adobe, kept evolving Flash. In the earlier days, it mostly just did obnoxious splash pages, but then it started doing animation, and then rich apps as they added form input. Eventually it found its killer app: video. Now more than 95% of browsers have Flash installed. Consumers are better for it.But I'll do it one better... I'll go out on a limb and say that Flash is a standard. If it's that pervasive, I don't care what you tell me, it's a standard. Just because a company owns it doesn't mean that it's evil or not a standard. And hey, it pains me to say that as a developer, because I think the dev tools are the suck (more on that in a minute). But again, consumers don't care. They don't even pay for Flash. The bottom line is that if I put something Flash based on the Internet, it's likely that my audience will see it.And what about the speed of standards owned by a company? Look no further than Silverlight. Silverlight 2 (which I consider the "real" start to the story) came out about a year and a half ago. Now version 4 is out, and it has come a very long way in its capabilities. If you believe Riastats.com, more than half of browsers have it now. It didn't have to wait for standards bodies and nerds drafting documents, it's out today. At this rate, Silverlight will be on version 6 or 7 by the time HTML 5 is a ratified standard.Back to the noise, one of the things that has continually disappointed me about this profession is the number of people who get stuck in an intellectual bubble, color it with dogmatic principles, and completely ignore the actual marketplace where this stuff all has to live. We aren't machines; Binary thinking that forces us to choose between "open standards" and "proprietary lock-in" (the most loaded b.s. FUD term evar) isn't smart at all. The truth is that the <object> tag has allowed us to build incredible stuff on top of the old standards, and consumers have benefitted greatly. Consumer desire, capitalism, and yes, standards ratified by nerds who think about this stuff for years have all played a role in the broad adoption of the Interwebs.We could all do without the noise. At the end of the day, I'm going to build stuff for the Web that's good for my users, and I'm not going to base my decisions on a techie bubble religion. Imagine what the brilliant minds behind the noise could do for the Web if they joined me in that pursuit.

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• How to create a PeopleCode Application Package/Application Class using PeopleTools Tables

  - by Andreea Vaduva

  This article describes how - in PeopleCode (Release PeopleTools 8.50) - to enable a grid without enabling each static column, using a dynamic Application Class. The goal is to disable the following grid with three columns “Effort Date”, ”Effort Amount” and “Charge Back” , when the Check Box “Finished with task” is selected , without referencing each static column; this PeopleCode could be used dynamically with any grid. If the check box “Finished with task” is cleared, the content of the grid columns is editable (and the buttons “+” and “-“ are available): So, you create an Application Package “CLASS_EXTENSIONS” that contains an Application Class “EWK_ROWSET”. This Application Class is defined with Class extends “ Rowset” and you add two news properties “Enabled” and “Visible”: After creating this Application Class, you use it in two PeopleCode Events : Rowinit and FieldChange : This code is very ‘simple’, you write only one command : ” &ERS2.Enabled = False” → and the entire grid is “Enabled”… and you can use this code with any Grid! So, the complete PeopleCode to create the Application Package is (with explanation in [….]) : ******Package CLASS_EXTENSIONS : [Name of the Package: CLASS_EXTENSIONS] --Beginning of the declaration part------------------------------------------------------------------------------ class EWK_ROWSET extends Rowset; [Definition Class EWK_ROWSET as a subclass of Class Rowset] method EWK_ROWSET(&RS As Rowset); [Constructor is the Method with the same name of the Class] property boolean Visible get set; property boolean Enabled get set; [Definition of the property “Enabled” in read/write] private [Before the word “private”, all the declarations are publics] method SetDisplay(&DisplaySW As boolean, &PropName As string, &ChildSW As boolean); instance boolean &EnSW; instance boolean &VisSW; instance Rowset &NextChildRS; instance Row &NextRow; instance Record &NextRec; instance Field &NextFld; instance integer &RowCnt, &RecCnt, &FldCnt, &ChildRSCnt; instance integer &i, &j, &k; instance CLASS_EXTENSIONS:EWK_ROWSET &ERSChild; [For recursion] Constant &VisibleProperty = "VISIBLE"; Constant &EnabledProperty = "ENABLED"; end-class; --End of the declaration part------------------------------------------------------------------------------ method EWK_ROWSET [The Constructor] /+ &RS as Rowset +/ %Super = &RS; end-method; get Enabled /+ Returns Boolean +/; Return &EnSW; end-get; set Enabled /+ &NewValue as Boolean +/; &EnSW = &NewValue; %This.InsertEnabled=&EnSW; %This.DeleteEnabled=&EnSW; %This.SetDisplay(&EnSW, &EnabledProperty, False); [This method is called when you set this property] end-set; get Visible /+ Returns Boolean +/; Return &VisSW; end-get; set Visible /+ &NewValue as Boolean +/; &VisSW = &NewValue; %This.SetDisplay(&VisSW, &VisibleProperty, False); end-set; method SetDisplay [The most important PeopleCode Method] /+ &DisplaySW as Boolean, +/ /+ &PropName as String, +/ /+ &ChildSW as Boolean +/ [Not used in our example] &RowCnt = %This.ActiveRowCount; &NextRow = %This.GetRow(1); [To know the structure of a line ] &RecCnt = &NextRow.RecordCount; For &i = 1 To &RowCnt [Loop for each Line] &NextRow = %This.GetRow(&i); For &j = 1 To &RecCnt [Loop for each Record] &NextRec = &NextRow.GetRecord(&j); &FldCnt = &NextRec.FieldCount; For &k = 1 To &FldCnt [Loop for each Field/Record] &NextFld = &NextRec.GetField(&k); Evaluate Upper(&PropName) When = &VisibleProperty &NextFld.Visible = &DisplaySW; Break; When = &EnabledProperty; &NextFld.Enabled = &DisplaySW; [Enable each Field/Record] Break; When-Other Error "Invalid display property; Must be either VISIBLE or ENABLED" End-Evaluate; End-For; End-For; If &ChildSW = True Then [If recursion] &ChildRSCnt = &NextRow.ChildCount; For &j = 1 To &ChildRSCnt [Loop for each Rowset child] &NextChildRS = &NextRow.GetRowset(&j); &ERSChild = create CLASS_EXTENSIONS:EWK_ROWSET(&NextChildRS); &ERSChild.SetDisplay(&DisplaySW, &PropName, &ChildSW); [For each Rowset child, call Method SetDisplay with the same parameters used with the Rowset parent] End-For; End-If; End-For; end-method; ******End of the Package CLASS_EXTENSIONS:[Name of the Package: CLASS_EXTENSIONS] About the Author: Pascal Thaler joined Oracle University in 2005 where he is a Senior Instructor. His area of expertise is Oracle Peoplesoft Technology and he delivers the following courses: For Developers: PeopleTools Overview, PeopleTools I &II, Batch Application Engine, Language Oriented Object PeopleCode, Administration Security For Administrators : Server Administration & Installation, Database Upgrade & Data Management Tools For Interface Users: Integration Broker (Web Service)

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• 7 Reasons for Abandonment in eCommerce and the need for Contextual Support by JP Saunders

  - by Tuula Fai

  Shopper confidence, or more accurately the lack thereof, is the bane of the online retailer. There are a number of questions that influence whether a shopper completes a transaction, and all of those attributes revolve around knowledge. What products are available? What products are on offer? What would be the cost of the transaction? What are my options for delivery? In general, most online businesses do a good job of answering basic questions around the products as the shopper engages in the online journey, navigating the product catalog and working through the checkout process. The needs that are harder to address for the shopper are those that are less concerned with product specifics and more concerned with deciding whether the transaction met their needs and delivered value. A recent study by the Baymard Institute [1] finds that more than 60% of ecommerce site visitors will abandon their shopping cart. The study also identifies seven reasons for abandonment out of the commerce process [2]. Most of those reasons come down to poor usability within the commerce experience. Distractions. External distractions within the shopper’s external environment (TV, Children, Pets, etc.) or distractions on the eCommerce page can drive shopper abandonment. Ideally, the selection and check-out process should be straightforward. One common distraction is to drive the shopper away from the task at hand through pop-ups or re-directs. The shopper engaging with support information in the checkout process should not be directed away from the page to consume support. Though confidence may improve, the distraction also means abandonment may increase. Poor Usability. When the experience gets more complicated, buyer’s remorse can set in. While knowledge drives confidence, a lack of understanding erodes it. Therefore it is important that the commerce process is streamlined. In some cases, the number of clicks to complete a purchase is lengthy and unavoidable. In these situations, it is vital to ensure that the complexity of your experience can be explained with contextual support to avoid abandonment. If you can illustrate the solution to a complex action while the user is engaged in that action and address customer frustrations with your checkout process before they arise, you can decrease abandonment. Fraud. The perception of potential fraud can be enough to deter a buyer. Does your site look credible? Can shoppers trust your brand? Providing answers on the security of your experience and the levels of protection applied to profile information may play as big a role in ensuring the sale, as does the support you provide on the product offerings and purchasing process. Does it fit? If it is a clothing item or oversized furniture item, another common form of abandonment is for the shopper to question whether the item can be worn by the intended user. Providing information on the sizing applied to clothing, physical dimensions, and limitations on delivery/returns of oversized items will also assist the sale. A photo alone of the item will help, as it answers some of those questions, but won’t assuage all customer concerns about sizing and fit. Sometimes the customer doesn’t want to buy. Prospective buyers might be browsing through your catalog to kill time, or just might not have the money to purchase the item! You are unlikely to provide any information in contextual support to increase the likelihood to buy if the shopper already has no intentions of doing so. The customer will still likely abandon. Ensuring that any questions are proactively answered as they browse through your site can only increase their likelihood to return and buy at a future date. Can’t Buy. Errors or complexity at checkout can be another major cause of abandonment. Good contextual support is unlikely to help with severe errors caused by technical issues on your site, but it will have a big impact on customers struggling with complexity in the checkout process and needing a question answered prior to completing the sale. Embedded support within the checkout process to patiently explain how to complete a task will help increase conversion rates. Additional Costs. Tax, shipping and other costs or duties can dramatically increase the cost of the purchase and when unexpected, can increase abandonment, particularly if they can’t be adequately explained. Again, a lack of knowledge erodes confidence in the purchase, and cost concerns in particular, erode the perception of your brand’s trustworthiness. Again, providing information on what costs are additive and why they are being levied can decrease the likelihood that the customer will abandon out of the experience. Knowledge drives confidence and confidence drives conversion. If you’d like to understand best practices in providing contextual customer support in eCommerce to provide your shoppers with confidence, download the Oracle Cloud Service and Oracle Commerce - Contextual Support in Commerce White Paper. This white paper discusses the process of adding customer support, including a suggested process for finding where knowledge has the most influence on your shoppers and practical step-by-step illustrations on how contextual self-service can be added to your online commerce experience. Resources: [1] http://baymard.com/checkout-usability [2] http://baymard.com/blog/cart-abandonment

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• Five Things Learned at the BSR Conference in San Francisco on Nov 2nd-4th

  - by Evelyn Neumayr

  The BSR Conference 2011—“Redefining Leadership”—held from Nov 2nd to Nov 4th in San Francisco, with Oracle as one of the main sponsors, saw senior business executives, civil society representatives, and other experts from around the world gathering to share strategies and insights on the future of sustainability. The general conference sessions kicked off on November 2nd with a plenary address by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore. Other sessions were presented by CEOs of the caliber of Carl Bass (Autodesk), Brian Dunn (Best Buy), Carlos Brito (Anheuser-Busch InBev) and Ofra Strauss (Strauss Group). Here are five key highlights from the conference: 1.      The main leadership challenge is integrating sustainability into core business functions and overcoming short-termism. The “BSR GlobeScan State of Sustainable Business Poll 2011” - a survey of nearly 500 business leaders from 300 member companies - shows that 84% of respondents are optimistic that global businesses will embrace CSR/sustainability as part of their core strategies and operations in the next five years but consider integrating sustainability into their core business functions the key challenge. It is still difficult for many companies that are committed to the sustainability agenda to find investors that understand the long-term implications and as Al Gore said “Many companies are given the signal by the investors that it is the short term results that matter and that is a terribly debilitating force in the market.” 2.      Companies are required to address increasing compliance requirements and transparency in their supply chain, especially in relation with conflict minerals legislation and water management. The Dodd-Frank legislation, OECD guidelines, and the upcoming Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rules require companies to monitor upstream the sourcing of tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold, but given the complexity of this issue companies need to collaborate and partner with peer companies in their industry as well as in other industries to understand how to address conflict minerals in their supply chains. The Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs’ (IPE) China Water Pollution Map enables the public to access thousands of environmental quality, discharge, and infraction records released by various government agencies. Empowered with this information, the public has the opportunity to place greater pressure on polluting companies to comply with environmental standards and create solutions to improve their performance. 3.      A new standard for reporting on supply chain greenhouse gas emissions is available. The New “Scope 3” Supply Chain Greenhouse Gas Inventory Standard, released on October 4th 2011, is the only international greenhouse gas emissions standard that accounts for the full lifecycle of a company’s products. It provides a framework for companies to account for indirect emissions outside of energy use, such as transportation, manufacturing, and distribution, and it incorporates both upstream and downstream impacts of a product. With key investors now listing supplier vulnerability to rising energy prices and disruptions of service as a key concern, greenhouse gas (GHG) management isn’t just for leading companies but a necessity for any business. 4.      Environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) reporting is becoming increasingly important to investors and other stakeholders. While European investors have traditionally driven the ESG agenda, U.S. investors are increasingly including ESG data in their analyses. This trend will likely increase as stakeholders continue to demand that an ESG lens be applied to their investments. Investors are increasingly looking to partner on sustainability, as they see the benefits of ESG providing significant returns on investment. 5.      Software companies are offering an increasing variety of solutions to help drive changes and measure performance internally, in supply chains, and across peer companies. The significant challenge is how to integrate different software systems to facilitate decision-making based on a holistic understanding of trade-offs. Jon Chorley, Chief Sustainability Officer and Vice President, Supply Chain Management Product Strategy at Oracle was a panelist in the “Trends in Sustainability Software” session and commented that, “How we think about our business decisions really comes down to how we think about cost. And as long as we don’t assign a cost to things that have an environmental impact or social impact, then we make decisions based on incomplete information. If we could include that in the process that determines ‘Is this product profitable? we would then have a much better decision.” For more information on BSR visit www.brs.org. You can also view highlights of the plenary session at http://www.bsr.org/en/bsr-conference/session-summaries/2011. Oracle is proud to be a sponsor of this BSR conference. By Elena Avesani, Principal Product Strategy Manager, Oracle          

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• Is it Hard to Write a Blog?

  - by Joe Mayo

  Responding to a tweet I received, asking if I found it hard to write a blog and keep it interesting. This is one of the situations where a 140 character response doesn’t do a question justice. There’s a lot to think about between the subjects of writing, subject matter, and entertainment.  Here’s my take on each of these three topics: There’s all types of writing you can do with various degrees of difficulty. If you’re writing a book and you have a gazillion editors bleeding over your every utterance, then the task becomes harder because you’re second-guessing yourself, not knowing whose opinion will be violated. However, if you’re communicating in a public forum, not too many people care about the grammar as much as whether what you have to say is correct.  For a blog, I would say it’s somewhere in-between.  Right now, I’m using Windows Live Writer, which gives me a few advantages to just typing into the blog editor, such as spelling correction and the ability to save my work and resume later.  Overall, writing is one of those things that you just need to get used to.  It’s an essential skill for developers because you need to document your work, depending on what your definition of proper documentation is, and communicate with other developers via various communications mediums. Not begin good (or not thinking that you’re good) shouldn’t hold you back.  Like most things in life, practice will improve your skill.  So, push away that inner voice that keeps you from moving forward and just do it. A good grasp on the subject matter you’re writing about helps.  However, don’t let a lack of knowledge stop you from writing about something. I recall reading something a while back by a developer who didn’t know a technology but wrote about their experience in learning it. They ended up learning more by expressing their thoughts in writing. If you look around out many blogs today, there are many items written by developers learning what they’re writing about.  So, whether you are sure or unsure, you can still write – just be honest with yourself and your readers about what you’re writing. Also, don’t be afraid to have a different opinion or worry if someone will disagree.  I’ll freely admit that it took a while for me to become accustomed to being criticized. Take the good with the bad and use the bad to make yourself better. Guaranteed, someone will disagree with one or more parts of what I’ve written here or think they have a better approach. No problem, more power to them, and whatever constructive comments they have will be a benefit to me in the future; Otherwise, to h*ll with them. :)  Every time you get knocked down, get right back up, dust the dirt off your backside, and keep moving forward.  You’ll learn in time how to align a subject with your own presentation of the material. Entertainment could be hard or could be natural, depending on the personality of yourself and your target audience. It’s even more challenging because you can say something you think is funny and someone will be offended. In fact, there are a lot of things that you shouldn’t say in the name of a joke, but I won’t mention any of them here for want of not offending anyone. Of course, I probably offended someone by saying that and there is probably an organization somewhere in the world out to get me now. I’m probably not the best person to be giving you advice on entertaining an audience.  I mean, every time I try to tell a joke on Twitter 10 people unfriend me. Okay, maybe 15, but you get my point. One thing you might be interested in knowing is that it’s not too hard for one technical person to entertain other technical people, especially when the subject is of interest.  It’s the excitement in each sentence and passion in each paragraph that will keep another developer entertained and interested in what you have to say. Not everyone will like what you’ve written, but the important part is to find your own voice and it’s likely that there is one person in some corner of the world that likes what you have to say, even if it’s your mom and she doesn’t understand a single word you write. :)   If I could leave you with one final thought; Just do it and don’t let anyone or anything hold you back.   Joe

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