Search Results

Search found 10774 results on 431 pages for 'email obfuscation'.

Page 406/431 | < Previous Page | 402 403 404 405 406 407 408 409 410 411 412 413 | Next Page >

How to Collect Debug Info for Oracle SQL Developer

- by thatjeffsmith

In a perfect world, there would be no software bugs. Developers would always test their code. QA would find any scenarios and bugs the developers hadn’t already thought of. Regression tests would be complete and flawless. But alas, we can only afford to pay mere humans here, so we will have bugs from time to time. Or sometimes you are trying to do something the software wasn’t designed for, or perhaps your machine has exhausted it’s resources trying to build the un-buildable. When you run into problems, you will need help. Developers need your help so they can help you. Surprisingly enough, feedback like this isn’t very helpful: Your program isn’t working. How can I make it work? When you are ready to work with us on the SQL Developer OTN forum, you will most likely be asked to run SQL Developer and capture the output from the command console. In case you need help with this, ere’s a step-by-step process you can follow in Windows 7 (should work in XP too.) Open a windows command window Start – Run – CMD Once it’s open, click on the window icon and select ‘Defaults.’ Change the default buffer size to be something bigger, much bigger. Set the CMD window default buffer size HIGHER Note: you only need to do this once. Navigate to your SQL Developer Installation Folder Instead of running the ‘sqldeveloper.exe’ file in the root directory, we are going to go several sub-directories down. Find the ‘bin’ sub-directory and run the ‘sqldeveloper.exe’ there. When you do this, a CMD window will open, and then you’ll see the SQL Developer application load. The SQL Developer bin directory - run the tool from here and get a logging window Use SQL Developer as normal, until it ‘breaks’ or ‘hangs’ Now, you are ready to grab the nitty-gritty information that MIGHT tell the developer what is going wrong or happening in your scenario. Click back into the CMD window Send a Ctrl+Break or a Ctrl+Pause. If you on a newer laptop that doesn’t have this key, be sure to check the ‘Fn’ subset of keys. If you need to map the BREAK or PAUSE buttons, this article might help. You can also try the on-screen keyboard in windows – just type ‘OSK’ in your START – RUN prompt. Copy the logging information from the command window – all of it We need this information, help us get it! Open a case with Oracle Support or Start a Thread on the Forums Or email me. If you’re on my blog reading this, it’s the least I can do to help Now, before you hit ‘Send’ or ‘Post’ or ‘Submit’ – be sure to add a brief description of what you were doing in the application when you ran into the problem. Even if you were doing ‘nothing,’ let us know how many connections you had open, what windows were active, etc. The more you can tell us, the higher your odds go up to getting a quick fix or at least an answer as to what is happening. Also include the following information: The version of SQL Developer you are running The version of the JDK you are using The OS you are using The version of Oracle you are connected to Now, don’t be surprised if you get asked to upgrade to a supported configuration, say ‘version 3.1 and the 1.6 JDK.’ Supporting older versions of software is fun, and while we enjoy a challenge, it may be easier for you to upgrade your way out of the problem at hand.

Read the article
Enterprise Manager Database Control Configuration - Recovering From Errors Due to CA Expiry on Oracle Database 10.2.0.4 or 10.2.0.5 from 31-Dec-2010 onwards

- by jayatheertha.rao(at)oracle.com

Description What is the Issue? In Enterprise Manager Database Control with Oracle Database 10.2.0.4 and 10.2.0.5, the root certificate used to secure communications via the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol will expire on 31-Dec-2010 00:00:00. The certificate expiration will cause errors if you attempt to configure Database Control on or after 31-Dec-2010. Existing Database Control configurations are not affected by this issue. Likelihood of Occurrence What Versions Are Affected? The issue impacts configuration of Database Control with Oracle Database 10.2.0.4 and 10.2.0.5 only. It does not impact database creation or upgrade. The issue does not impact existing Database Control configurations. What Happens During Database Control Configuration Failure? Database Configuration Assistant (DBCA) and Database Upgrade Assistant (DBUA) Errors Database Configuration Assistant (DBCA) and Database Upgrade Assistant (DBUA) will report the following error in the console: Could not complete the Enterprise Manager configuration.Enterprise manager configuration failed due to the following error -Error starting Database Control Enterprise Manager Configuration Assistant (EMCA) Errors Enterprise Manager Configuration Assistant (EMCA) will write errors similar to those below to the emca.log file: CONFIG: Securing Database Control completed successfully .Jan 2, 2011 7:22:47 PM oracle.sysman.emcp.ParamsManager getParamCONFIG: No value was set for the parameter ORACLE_HOSTNAME.Jan 2, 2011 7:22:47 PM oracle.sysman.emcp.util.DBControlUtil startOMSINFO: Starting Database Control (this may take a while) ...Jan 2, 2011 7:22:47 PM oracle.sysman.emcp.util.PlatformInterface addEnvVarToListCONFIG: Value for env var 'ORACLE_HOSTNAME' is '', discarding the sameCONFIG: Returning env array from cacheJan 2, 2011 7:22:47 PM oracle.sysman.emcp.util.PlatformInterface executeCommandCONFIG: Starting execution: /myhost/bin/emctl start dbconsoleJan 2, 2011 7:27:26 PM oracle.sysman.emcp.util.PlatformInterface executeCommandCONFIG: Exit value of 1Jan 2, 2011 7:27:26 PM oracle.sysman.emcp.util.PlatformInterface executeCommandCONFIG: Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Database Control Release 10.2.0.4.0Copyright (c) 1996, 2007 Oracle Corporation. All rights reserved.https://myhost:5501/em/console/aboutApplicationStarting Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Database Control............................................................................................. failed.------------------------------------------------------------------Logs are generated in directory /myhost/sysman/logJan 2, 2011 7:27:26 PM oracle.sysman.emcp.util.PlatformInterface executeCommandWARNING: Error executing /myhost/bin/emctl start dbconsoleJan 2, 2011 7:27:26 PM oracle.sysman.emcp.EMConfig performSEVERE: Error starting Database ControlRefer to the log file at /myhost/dbua/d4/upgrade/emConfig.log for more details.Jan 2, 2011 7:27:26 PM oracle.sysman.emcp.EMConfig performCONFIG: Stack Trace:oracle.sysman.emcp.exception.EMConfigException: Error starting Database Controlat oracle.sysman.emcp.EMDBPostConfig.performUpgrade(EMDBPostConfig.java:763)at oracle.sysman.emcp.EMDBPostConfig.invoke(EMDBPostConfig.java:232)at oracle.sysman.emcp.EMDBPostConfig.invoke(EMDBPostConfig.java:193)at oracle.sysman.emcp.EMConfig.perform(EMConfig.java:184)at oracle.sysman.assistants.util.em.EMConfiguration.run(EMConfiguration.java:436)at oracle.sysman.assistants.util.em.EMConfigStep.executeImpl(EMConfigStep.java:140)at oracle.sysman.assistants.util.step.BasicStep.execute(BasicStep.java:210)at oracle.sysman.assistants.util.step.BasicStep.callStep(BasicStep.java:251)at oracle.sysman.assistants.dbma.backend.EMConfigStep.executeStepImpl(EMConfigStep.java:104)at oracle.sysman.assistants.dbma.backend.SummarizableStep.executeImpl(SummarizableStep.java:175)at oracle.sysman.assistants.util.step.BasicStep.execute(BasicStep.java:210)at oracle.sysman.assistants.util.step.Step.execute(Step.java:140)at oracle.sysman.assistants.util.step.StepContext$ModeRunner.run(StepContext.java:2488)at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:534) The EMCA console will display output similar to the following: aime@myhost09 db_1]$ bin/emca -config dbcontrol db -repos recreate -clusterSTARTED EMCA at Jan 11, 2011 4:11:01 PMEM Configuration Assistant, Version 10.2.0.1.0 ProductionCopyright (c) 2003, 2005, Oracle. All rights reserved.Enter the following information:Database unique name: catestDatabase Control is already configured for the database catestYou have chosen to configure Database Control for managing the database catestThis will remove the existing configuration and the default settings and perform a fresh configurationDo you wish to continue? [yes(Y)/no(N)]: YListener port number: 1521Cluster name: myclusterPassword for SYS user:Password for DBSNMP user:Password for SYSMAN user:Email address for notifications (optional):Outgoing Mail (SMTP) server for notifications (optional):........Jan 11, 2011 4:18:05 PM oracle.sysman.emcp.util.DBControlUtil secureDBConsoleINFO: Securing Database Control (this may take a while) ...Jan 11, 2011 4:19:31 PM oracle.sysman.emcp.util.DBControlUtil startOMSINFO: Starting Database Control (this may take a while) ...Jan 11, 2011 4:28:38 PM oracle.sysman.emcp.EMConfig performSEVERE: Error starting Database ControlRefer to the log file at /myhost/oracle/product/10.2.0/db_1/cfgtoollogs/emca/catest/emca_2011-01-11_04-11-01-PM.log for more details.Could not complete the configuration. Refer to the log file at /myhost/oracle/product/10.2.0/db_1/cfgtoollogs/emca/catest/emca_2011-01-11_04-11-01-PM.log for more details. At the end of the database installation on non-Windows platforms, both Database Control and the Management Agent will be up and running, even though the status of both components will be shown as not running, because EMCTL will be unable to connect to the dbconsole process. In addition, Database Control will fail to connect to the Agent. Note for Windows Platform Only:On Windows, the dbconsole process will be stopped after the failed configuration attempt. Note that the tool used to perform Database Control configuration (DBUA, DBCA or EMCA) will also wait for 15 minutes for Database Control to start, then time out. The output of the "emctl status dbconsole" command incorrectly returns the status of Database Control, as shown below: $ ./emctl status dbconsoleOracle Enterprise Manager 10g Database Control Release 10.2.0.1.0Copyright (c) 1996, 2005 Oracle Corporation. All rights reserved.https://myhost:1158/em/console/aboutApplicationOracle Enterprise Manager 10g is not running. The output of the "emctl status agent" command incorrectly returns the status of the Agent, as shownbelow: $ ./emctl status agentOracle Enterprise Manager 10g Database Control Release 10.2.0.1.0Copyright (c) 1996, 2005 Oracle Corporation. All rights reserved.---------------------------------------------------------------Agent is Not Running For Solution, refer to Note: 1222603.1 Note: 1217493.1

Read the article
It’s nice to be important, but it’s more important to be nice

- by BuckWoody

I’ve been a little “preachy” lately, telling you that you should let people finish their sentences, and always check a problem out before you tell a user that their issue is “impossible”. Well, I’ll round that out with one more tip today. Keep in mind that all of these things are actions I’ve been guilty of, hopefully in the past. I’m kind of a “work in progress”. And yes, I know these tips are coming from someone who picks on people in presentations, but that is of course done in fun, and (hopefully) with the audience’s knowledge. (No, this isn’t aimed at any one person or event in particular – I just see it happen a lot) I’ve seen, unfortunately over and over, someone in authority react badly to someone who is incorrect, or at least perceived to be incorrect. This might manifest itself in a comment, post, question or whatever, but the point is that I’ve seen really intelligent people literally attack someone they view as getting something wrong. Don’t misunderstand me; if someone posts that you should always drop a production database in the middle of the day I think you should certainly speak up and mention that this might be a bad idea! No, I’m talking about generalizations or even incorrect statements done in good faith. Let me explain with an example. Suppose someone makes the statement: “If you don’t have enough space on your system, you can just use a DBCC command to shrink the database”. Let’s take two responses to this statement. Response One: “That’s insane. Everyone knows that shrinking a database is a stupid idea, you’re just going to fragment your indexes all over the place.” Response Two: “That’s an interesting take – in my experience and from what I’ve read here (someurl.com) I think this might not be a universal best practice.” Of course, both responses let the person making the statement and those reading it know that you don’t agree, and that it’s probably wrong. But the person you responded to and the general audience hearing you (or reading your response) might form two different opinions of you. The first response says to me “this person really needs to be right, and takes arguments personally. They aren’t thinking of the other person at all, or the folks reading or hearing the exchange. They turned an incorrect technical statement into a personal attack. They haven’t left the other party any room to ‘save face’, and they have potentially turned what could be a positive learning experience for everyone into a negative. Also, they sound more than just a little arrogant.” The second response says to me “this person has left room for everyone to save face, has presented evidence to the contrary and is thinking about moving the ball forward and getting it right rather than attacking someone for getting it wrong.” It’s the idea of questioning a statement rather than attacking a person. Perhaps you have a different take. Maybe you think the “direct” approach is best – and maybe that’s worked for you. Something to consider is what you’ve really accomplished while using that first method. Sure, the info you provide is correct, and perhaps someone out there won’t shrink a database because of your response – but perhaps you’ve turned a lot more people off, and now they won’t listen to your other valuable information. You’ll be an expert, but another one of the nameless, arrogant jerks in technology. And I don’t think anyone likes to be thought of that way. OK, I’ll get down off of the high-horse now. And I’ll keep the title of this entry (said to me by my grandmother when I was a little kid) in mind when I dismount. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

Read the article
Updating the managed debugging API for .NET v4

- by Brian Donahue

In any successful investigation, the right tools play a big part in collecting evidence about the state of the "crime scene" as it was before the detectives arrived. Unfortunately for the Crash Scene Investigator, we don't have the budget to fly out to the customer's site, chalk the outline, and eat their doughnuts. We have to rely on the end-user to collect the evidence for us, which means giving them the fingerprint dust and the evidence baggies and leaving them to it. With that in mind, the Red Gate support team have been writing tools that can collect vital clues with a minimum of fuss. Years ago we would have asked for a memory dump, where we used to get the customer to run CDB.exe and produce dumps that we could analyze in-house, but those dumps were pretty unwieldy (500MB files) and the debugger often didn't dump exactly where we wanted, or made five or more dumps. What we wanted was just the minimum state information from the program at the time of failure, so we produced a managed debugger that captured every first and second-chance exception and logged the stack and a minimal amount of variables from the memory of the application, which could all be exported as XML. This caused less inconvenience to the end-user because it is much easier to send a 65KB XML file in an email than a 500MB file containing all of the application's memory. We don't need to have the entire victim shipped out to us when we just want to know what was under the fingernails. The thing that made creating a managed debugging tool possible was the MDbg Engine example written by Microsoft as part of the Debugging Tools for Windows distribution. Since the ICorDebug interface is a bit difficult to understand, they had kindly created some wrappers that provided an event-driven debugging model that was perfect for our needs, but .NET 4 applications under debugging started complaining that "The debugger's protocol is incompatible with the debuggee". The introduction of .NET Framework v4 had changed the managed debugging API significantly, however, without an update for the MDbg Engine code! After a few hours of research, I had finally worked out that most of the version 4 ICorDebug interface still works much the same way in "legacy" v2 mode and there was a relatively easy fix for the problem in that you can still get a reference to legacy ICorDebug by changing the way the interface is created. In .NET v2, the interface was acquired using the CreateDebuggingInterfaceFromVersion method in mscoree.dll. In v4, you must first create IClrMetaHost, enumerate the runtimes, get an ICLRRuntimeInfo interface to the .NET 4 runtime from that, and use the GetInterface method in mscoree.dll to return a "legacy" ICorDebug interface. The rest of the MDbg Engine will continue working the old way. Here is how I had changed the MDbg Engine code to support .NET v4: private void InitFromVersion(string debuggerVersion){if( debuggerVersion.StartsWith("v1") ){throw new ArgumentException( "Can't debug a version 1 CLR process (\"" + debuggerVersion + "\"). Run application in a version 2 CLR, or use a version 1 debugger instead." );} ICorDebug rawDebuggingAPI=null;if (debuggerVersion.StartsWith("v4")){Guid CLSID_MetaHost = new Guid("9280188D-0E8E-4867-B30C-7FA83884E8DE"); Guid IID_MetaHost = new Guid("D332DB9E-B9B3-4125-8207-A14884F53216"); ICLRMetaHost metahost = (ICLRMetaHost)NativeMethods.ClrCreateInterface(CLSID_MetaHost, IID_MetaHost); IEnumUnknown runtimes = metahost.EnumerateInstalledRuntimes(); ICLRRuntimeInfo runtime = GetRuntime(runtimes, debuggerVersion); //Defined in metahost.hGuid CLSID_CLRDebuggingLegacy = new Guid(0xDF8395B5, 0xA4BA, 0x450b, 0xA7, 0x7C, 0xA9, 0xA4, 0x77, 0x62, 0xC5, 0x20);Guid IID_ICorDebug = new Guid("3D6F5F61-7538-11D3-8D5B-00104B35E7EF"); Object res;runtime.GetInterface(ref CLSID_CLRDebuggingLegacy, ref IID_ICorDebug, out res); rawDebuggingAPI = (ICorDebug)res; }elserawDebuggingAPI = NativeMethods.CreateDebuggingInterfaceFromVersion((int)CorDebuggerVersion.Whidbey,debuggerVersion);if (rawDebuggingAPI != null)InitFromICorDebug(rawDebuggingAPI);elsethrow new ArgumentException("Support for debugging version " + debuggerVersion + " is not yet implemented");} The changes above will ensure that the debugger can support .NET Framework v2 and v4 applications with the same codebase, but we do compile two different applications: one targeting v2 and the other v4. As a footnote I need to add that some missing native methods and wrappers, along with the EnumerateRuntimes method code, came from the Mindbg project on Codeplex. Another change is that when using the MDbgEngine.CreateProcess to launch a process in the debugger, do not supply a null as the final argument. This does not work any more because GetCORVersion always returns "v2.0.50727" as the function has been deprecated in .NET v4. What's worse is that on a system with only .NET 4, the user will be prompted to download and install .NET v2! Not nice! This works much better: proc = m_Debugger.CreateProcess(ProcessName, ProcessArgs, DebugModeFlag.Default,String.Format("v{0}.{1}.{2}",System.Environment.Version.Major,System.Environment.Version.Minor,System.Environment.Version.Build)); Microsoft "unofficially" plan on updating the MDbg samples soon, but if you have an MDbg-based application, you can get it working right now by changing one method a bit and adding a few new interfaces (ICLRMetaHost, IEnumUnknown, and ICLRRuntimeInfo). The new, non-legacy implementation of MDbg Engine will add new, interesting features like dump-file support and by association I assume garbage-collection/managed object stats, so it will be well worth looking into if you want to extend the functionality of a managed debugger going forward.

Read the article
Use Advanced Font Ligatures in Office 2010

- by Matthew Guay

Fonts can help your documents stand out and be easier to read, and Office 2010 helps you take your fonts even further with support for OpenType ligatures, stylistic sets, and more. Here’s a quick look at these new font features in Office 2010. Introduction Starting with Windows 7, Microsoft has made an effort to support more advanced font features across their products. Windows 7 includes support for advanced OpenType font features and laid the groundwork for advanced font support in programs with the new DirectWrite subsystem. It also includes the new font Gabriola, which includes an incredible number of beautiful stylistic sets and ligatures. Now, with the upcoming release of Office 2010, Microsoft is bringing advanced typographical features to the Office programs we love. This includes support for OpenType ligatures, stylistic sets, number forms, contextual alternative characters, and more. These new features are available in Word, Outlook, and Publisher 2010, and work the same on Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7. Please note that Windows does include several OpenType fonts that include these advanced features. Calibri, Cambria, Constantia, and Corbel all include multiple number forms, while Consolas, Palatino Linotype, and Gabriola (Windows 7 only) include all the OpenType features. And, of course, these new features will work great with any other OpenType fonts you have that contain advanced ligatures, stylistic sets, and number forms. Using advanced typography in Word To use the new font features, open a new document, select an OpenType font, and enter some text. Here we have Word 2010 in Windows 7 with some random text in the Gabriola font. Click the arrow on the bottom of the Font section of the ribbon to open the font properties. Alternately, select the text and click Font. Now, click on the Advanced tab to see the OpenType features. You can change the ligatures setting… Choose Proportional or Tabular number spacing… And even select Lining or Old-style number forms. Here’s a comparison of Lining and Old-style number forms in Word 2010 with the Calibri font. Finally, you can choose various Stylistic sets for your font. The dialog always shows 20 styles, whether or not your font includes that many. Most include only 1 or 2; Gabriola includes 6. Here’s lorem ipsum text, using the Gabriola font with Stylistic set 6. Impressive, huh? The font ligatures change based on context, so they will automatically change as you are typing. Watch the transition as we typed the word Microsoft in Word with Gabriola stylistic set 6. Here’s another example, showing the fi and tt ligatures in Calibri. These effects work great in Word 2010 in XP, too. And, since Outlook uses Word as it’s editing engine, you can use the same options in Outlook 2010. Note that these font effects may not show up the same if the recipient’s email client doesn’t support advanced OpenType typography. It will, of course, display perfectly if the recipient is using Outlook 2010. Using advanced typography in Publisher 2010 Publisher 2010 includes the same advanced font features. This is especially nice for those using Publisher for professional layout and design. Simply insert a text box, enter some text, select it, and click the arrow on the bottom of the font box as in Word to open the font properties. This font options dialog is actually more advanced than Word’s font options. You can preview your font changes on sample text right in the properties box. You can also choose to add or remove a swash from your characters. Conclusion Advanced typographical effects are a welcome addition to Word and Publisher 2010, and they are very impressive when coupled with modern fonts such as Gabriola. From designing elegant headers to using old-style numbers, these features are very useful and fun. Do you have a favorite OpenType font that includes advanced typographical features? Let us know in the comments! More Reading Advances in typography in Windows 7 – Engineering 7 Blog New features in Microsoft Word 2010 Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Change the Default Font in Excel 2007Ask the Readers: Do You Use a Laptop, Desktop, or Both?Keep Websites From Using Tiny Fonts in SafariAdd or Remove Apps from the Microsoft Office 2007 or 2010 SuiteFriday Fun: Desktop Tower Defense Pro TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional SpeedyFox Claims to Speed up your Firefox Beware Hover Kitties Test Drive Mobile Phones Online With TryPhone Ben & Jerry’s Free Cone Day, 3/23/10 New Stinger from McAfee Helps Remove ‘FakeAlert’ Threats Google Apps Marketplace: Tools & Services For Google Apps Users

Read the article
It’s nice to be important, but it’s more important to be nice

- by BuckWoody

I’ve been a little “preachy” lately, telling you that you should let people finish their sentences, and always check a problem out before you tell a user that their issue is “impossible”. Well, I’ll round that out with one more tip today. Keep in mind that all of these things are actions I’ve been guilty of, hopefully in the past. I’m kind of a “work in progress”. And yes, I know these tips are coming from someone who picks on people in presentations, but that is of course done in fun, and (hopefully) with the audience’s knowledge. (No, this isn’t aimed at any one person or event in particular – I just see it happen a lot) I’ve seen, unfortunately over and over, someone in authority react badly to someone who is incorrect, or at least perceived to be incorrect. This might manifest itself in a comment, post, question or whatever, but the point is that I’ve seen really intelligent people literally attack someone they view as getting something wrong. Don’t misunderstand me; if someone posts that you should always drop a production database in the middle of the day I think you should certainly speak up and mention that this might be a bad idea! No, I’m talking about generalizations or even incorrect statements done in good faith. Let me explain with an example. Suppose someone makes the statement: “If you don’t have enough space on your system, you can just use a DBCC command to shrink the database”. Let’s take two responses to this statement. Response One: “That’s insane. Everyone knows that shrinking a database is a stupid idea, you’re just going to fragment your indexes all over the place.” Response Two: “That’s an interesting take – in my experience and from what I’ve read here (someurl.com) I think this might not be a universal best practice.” Of course, both responses let the person making the statement and those reading it know that you don’t agree, and that it’s probably wrong. But the person you responded to and the general audience hearing you (or reading your response) might form two different opinions of you. The first response says to me “this person really needs to be right, and takes arguments personally. They aren’t thinking of the other person at all, or the folks reading or hearing the exchange. They turned an incorrect technical statement into a personal attack. They haven’t left the other party any room to ‘save face’, and they have potentially turned what could be a positive learning experience for everyone into a negative. Also, they sound more than just a little arrogant.” The second response says to me “this person has left room for everyone to save face, has presented evidence to the contrary and is thinking about moving the ball forward and getting it right rather than attacking someone for getting it wrong.” It’s the idea of questioning a statement rather than attacking a person. Perhaps you have a different take. Maybe you think the “direct” approach is best – and maybe that’s worked for you. Something to consider is what you’ve really accomplished while using that first method. Sure, the info you provide is correct, and perhaps someone out there won’t shrink a database because of your response – but perhaps you’ve turned a lot more people off, and now they won’t listen to your other valuable information. You’ll be an expert, but another one of the nameless, arrogant jerks in technology. And I don’t think anyone likes to be thought of that way. OK, I’ll get down off of the high-horse now. And I’ll keep the title of this entry (said to me by my grandmother when I was a little kid) in mind when I dismount. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

Read the article
Troubleshooting Application Timeouts in SQL Server

- by Tara Kizer

I recently received the following email from a blog reader: "We are having an OLTP database instance, using SQL Server 2005 with little to moderate traffic (10-20 requests/min). There are also bulk imports that occur at regular intervals in this DB and the import duration ranges between 10secs to 1 min, depending on the data size. Intermittently (2-3 times in a week), we face an issue, where queries get timed out (default of 30 secs set in application). On analyzing, we found two stored procedures, having queries with multiple table joins inside them of taking a long time (5-10 mins) in getting executed, when ideally the execution duration ranges between 5-10 secs. Execution plan of the same displayed Clustered Index Scan happening instead of Clustered Index Seek. All required Indexes are found to be present and Index fragmentation is also minimal as we Rebuild Indexes regularly alongwith Updating Statistics. With no other alternate options occuring to us, we restarted SQL server and thereafter the performance was back on track. But sometimes it was still giving timeout errors for some hits and so we also restarted IIS and that stopped the problem as of now." Rather than respond directly to the blog reader, I thought it would be more interesting to share my thoughts on this issue in a blog. There are a few things that I can think of that could cause abnormal timeouts: Blocking Bad plan in cache Outdated statistics Hardware bottleneck To determine if blocking is the issue, we can easily run sp_who/sp_who2 or a query directly on sysprocesses (select * from master..sysprocesses where blocking <> 0). If blocking is present and consistent, then you'll need to determine whether or not to kill the parent blocking process. Killing a process will cause the transaction to rollback, so you need to proceed with caution. Killing the parent blocking process is only a temporary solution, so you'll need to do more thorough analysis to figure out why the blocking was present. You should look into missing indexes and perhaps consider changing the database's isolation level to READ_COMMITTED_SNAPSHOT. The blog reader mentions that the execution plan shows a clustered index scan when a clustered index seek is normal for the stored procedure. A clustered index scan might have been chosen either because that is what is in cache already or because of out of date statistics. The blog reader mentions that bulk imports occur at regular intervals, so outdated statistics is definitely something that could cause this issue. The blog reader may need to update statistics after imports are done if the imports are changing a lot of data (greater than 10%). If the statistics are good, then the query optimizer might have chosen to scan rather than seek in a previous execution because the scan was determined to be less costly due to the value of an input parameter. If this parameter value is rare, then its execution plan in cache is what we call a bad plan. You want the best plan in cache for the most frequent parameter values. If a bad plan is a recurring problem on your system, then you should consider rewriting the stored procedure. You might want to break up the code into multiple stored procedures so that each can have a different execution plan in cache. To remove a bad plan from cache, you can recompile the stored procedure. An alternative method is to run DBCC FREEPROCACHE which drops the procedure cache. It is better to recompile stored procedures rather than dropping the procedure cache as dropping the procedure cache affects all plans in cache rather than just the ones that were bad, so there will be a temporary performance penalty until the plans are loaded into cache again. To determine if there is a hardware bottleneck occurring such as slow I/O or high CPU utilization, you will need to run Performance Monitor on the database server. Hopefully you already have a baseline of the server so you know what is normal and what is not. Be on the lookout for I/O requests taking longer than 12 milliseconds and CPU utilization over 90%. The servers that I support typically are under 30% CPU utilization, but your baseline could be higher and be within a normal range. If restarting the SQL Server service fixes the problem, then the problem was most likely due to blocking or a bad plan in the procedure cache. Rather than restarting the SQL Server service, which causes downtime, the blog reader should instead analyze the above mentioned things. Proceed with caution when restarting the SQL Server service as all transactions that have not completed will be rolled back at startup. This crash recovery process could take longer than normal if there was a long-running transaction running when the service was stopped. Until the crash recovery process is completed on the database, it is unavailable to your applications. If restarting IIS fixes the problem, then the problem might not have been inside SQL Server. Prior to taking this step, you should do analysis of the above mentioned things. If you can think of other reasons why the blog reader is facing this issue a few times a week, I'd love to hear your thoughts via a blog comment.

Read the article
Top 4 Lame Tech Blogging Posts

- by jkauffman

From a consumption point of view, tech blogging is a great resource for one-off articles on niche subjects. If you spend any time reading tech blogs, you may find yourself running into several common, useless types of posts tech bloggers slip into. Some of these lame posts may just be natural due to common nerd psychology, and some others are probably due to lame, lemming-like laziness. I’m sure I’ll do my fair share of fitting the mold, but I quickly get bored when I happen upon posts that hit these patterns without any real purpose or personal touches. 1. The Content Regurgitation Posts This is a common pattern fueled by the starving pan-handlers in the web traffic economy. These are posts that are terse opinions or addendums to an existing post. I commonly see these involve huge block quotes from the linked article which almost always produces over 50% of the post itself. I’ve accidentally gone to these posts when I’m knowingly only interested in the source material. Web links can degrade as well, so if the source link is broken, then, well, I’m pretty steamed. I see this occur with simple opinions on technologies, Stack Overflow solutions, or various tech news like posts from Microsoft. It’s not uncommon to go to the linked article and see the author announce that he “added a blog post” as a response or summary of the topic. This is just rude, but those who do it are probably aware of this. It’s a matter of winning that sweet, juicy web traffic. I doubt this leeching is fooling anybody these days. I would like to rally human dignity and urge people to avoid these types of posts, and just leave a comment on the source material. 2. The “Sorry I Haven’t Posted In A While” Posts This one is far too common. You’ll most likely see this quote somewhere in the body of the offending post: I have been really busy. If the poster is especially guilt-ridden, you’ll see a few volleys of excuses. Here are some common reasons I’ve seen, which I’ll list from least to most painfully awkward. Out of town Vague allusions to personal health problems (these typically includes phrases like “sick”, “treatment'”, and “all better now!”) “Personal issues” (which I usually read as "divorce”) Graphic or specific personal health problems (maximum awkwardness potential is achieved if you see links to charity fund websites) I can’t help but to try over-analyzing why this occurs. Personally, I see this an an amalgamation of three plain factors: Life happens Us nerds are duty-driven, and driven to guilt at personal inefficiencies Tech blogs can become personal journals I don’t think we can do much about the first two, but on the third I think we could certainly contain our urges. I’m a pretty boring guy and, whether or I like it or not, I have an unspoken duty to protect the world from hearing about my unremarkable existence. Nobody cares what kind of sandwich I’m eating. Similarly, if I disappear for a while, it’s unlikely that anybody who happens upon my blog would care why. Rest assured, if I stop posting for a while due to a vasectomy, you will be the first to know. 3. The “At A Conference”, or “Conference Review” Posts I don’t know if I’m like everyone else on this one, but I have never been successfully interested in these posts. It even sounds like a good idea: if I can’t make it to a particular conference (like the KCDC this year), wouldn’t I be interested in a concentrated summary of events? Apparently, no! Within this realm, I’ve never read a post by a blogger that held my interest. What really baffles is is that, for whatever reason, I am genuinely engaged and interested when talking to someone in person regarding the same topic. I have noticed the same phenomenon when hearing about others’ vacations. If someone sends me an email about their vacation, I gloss over it and forget about it quickly. In contrast, if I’m speaking to that individual in person about their vacation, I’m actually interested. I’m unsure why the written medium eradicates the intrigue. I was raised by a roaming pack of friendly wild video games, so that may be a factor. 4. The “Top X Number of Y’s That Z” Posts I’ve seen this one crop up a lot more in the past few of years. Here are some fabricated examples: 5 Easy Ways to Improve Your Code Top 7 Good Habits Programmers Learn From Experience The 8 Things to Consider When Giving Estimates Top 4 Lame Tech Blogging Posts These are attention-grabbing headlines, and I’d assume they rack up hits. In fact, I enjoy a good number of these. But, I’ve been drawn to articles like this just to find an endless list of identically formatted posts on the blog’s archive sidebar. Often times these posts have overlapping topics, too. These types of posts give the impression that the author has given thought to prioritize and organize the points as a result of a comprehensive consideration of a particular topic. Did the author really weigh all the possibilities when identifying the “Top 4 Lame Tech Blogging Patterns”? Unfortunately, probably not. What a tool. To reiterate, I still enjoy the format, but I feel it is abused. Nowadays, I’m pretty skeptical when approaching posts in this format. If these trends continue, my brain will filter these blog posts out just as effectively as it ignores the encroaching “do xxx with this one trick” advertisements. Conclusion To active blog readers, I hope my guide has served you precious time in being able to identify lame blog posts at a glance. Save time and energy by skipping over the chaff of the internet! And if you author a blog, perhaps my insight will help you to avoid the occasional urge to produce these needless filler posts.

Read the article
Workaround for datadude deployment bug - NullReferenceException

- by jamiet

I have come across a bug in Visual Studio 2010 Database Projects (aka datadude aka DPro aka Visual Studio Database Development Tools aka Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals aka Juneau aka SQL Server Data Tools) that other people may encounter so, for the purposes of googling, I'm writing this blog post about it. Through my own googling I discovered that a Connect bug had already been raised about it (VS2010 Database project deploy - “SqlDeployTask” task failed unexpectedly, NullReferenceException), and coincidentally enough it was raised by my former colleague Tom Hunter (whom I have mentioned here before as the superhuman Tom Hunter) although it has not (at this time) received a reply from Microsoft. Tom provided a repro, namely that this syntactically valid function definition: CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[Function1]()RETURNS TABLEASRETURN ( WITH cte AS ( SELECT 1 AS [c1] FROM [$(Database3)].[dbo].[Table1] ) SELECT 1 AS [c1] FROM cte) would produce this nasty unhelpful error upon deployment: C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v10.0\TeamData\Microsoft.Data.Schema.TSqlTasks.targets(120,5): Error MSB4018: The "SqlDeployTask" task failed unexpectedly.System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object. at Microsoft.Data.Schema.Sql.SchemaModel.SqlModelComparerBase.VariableSubstitution(SqlScriptProperty propertyValue, IDictionary`2 variables, Boolean& isChanged) at Microsoft.Data.Schema.Sql.SchemaModel.SqlModelComparerBase.ArePropertiesEqual(IModelElement source, IModelElement target, ModelPropertyClass propertyClass, ModelComparerConfiguration configuration) at Microsoft.Data.Schema.SchemaModel.ModelComparer.CompareProperties(IModelElement sourceElement, IModelElement targetElement, ModelComparerConfiguration configuration, ModelComparisonChangeDefinition changes) at Microsoft.Data.Schema.SchemaModel.ModelComparer.CompareElementsWithoutCompareName(IModelElement sourceElement, IModelElement targetElement, ModelComparerConfiguration configuration, Boolean parentExplicitlyIncluded, Boolean compareElementOnly, ModelComparisonResult result, ModelComparisonChangeDefinition changes) at Microsoft.Data.Schema.SchemaModel.ModelComparer.CompareElementsWithSameType(IModelElement sourceElement, IModelElement targetElement, ModelComparerConfiguration configuration, ModelComparisonResult result, Boolean ignoreComparingName, Boolean parentExplicitlyIncluded, Boolean compareElementOnly, Boolean compareFromRootElement, ModelComparisonChangeDefinition& changes) at Microsoft.Data.Schema.SchemaModel.ModelComparer.CompareChildren(IModelElement sourceElement, IModelElement targetElement, ModelComparerConfiguration configuration, Boolean parentExplicitlyIncluded, Boolean compareParentElementOnly, ModelComparisonResult result, ModelComparisonChangeDefinition changes, Boolean isComposing) at Microsoft.Data.Schema.SchemaModel.ModelComparer.CompareElementsWithoutCompareName(IModelElement sourceElement, IModelElement targetElement, ModelComparerConfiguration configuration, Boolean parentExplicitlyIncluded, Boolean compareElementOnly, ModelComparisonResult result, ModelComparisonChangeDefinition changes) at Microsoft.Data.Schema.SchemaModel.ModelComparer.CompareElementsWithSameType(IModelElement sourceElement, IModelElement targetElement, ModelComparerConfiguration configuration, ModelComparisonResult result, Boolean ignoreComparingName, Boolean parentExplicitlyIncluded, Boolean compareElementOnly, Boolean compareFromRootElement, ModelComparisonChangeDefinition& changes) at Microsoft.Data.Schema.SchemaModel.ModelComparer.CompareChildren(IModelElement sourceElement, IModelElement targetElement, ModelComparerConfiguration configuration, Boolean parentExplicitlyIncluded, Boolean compareParentElementOnly, ModelComparisonResult result, ModelComparisonChangeDefinition changes, Boolean isComposing) at Microsoft.Data.Schema.SchemaModel.ModelComparer.CompareElementsWithoutCompareName(IModelElement sourceElement, IModelElement targetElement, ModelComparerConfiguration configuration, Boolean parentExplicitlyIncluded, Boolean compareElementOnly, ModelComparisonResult result, ModelComparisonChangeDefinition changes) at Microsoft.Data.Schema.SchemaModel.ModelComparer.CompareElementsWithSameType(IModelElement sourceElement, IModelElement targetElement, ModelComparerConfiguration configuration, ModelComparisonResult result, Boolean ignoreComparingName, Boolean parentExplicitlyIncluded, Boolean compareElementOnly, Boolean compareFromRootElement, ModelComparisonChangeDefinition& changes) at Microsoft.Data.Schema.SchemaModel.ModelComparer.CompareAllElementsForOneType(ModelElementClass type, ModelComparerConfiguration configuration, ModelComparisonResult result, Boolean compareOrphanedElements) at Microsoft.Data.Schema.SchemaModel.ModelComparer.CompareStore(ModelStore source, ModelStore target, ModelComparerConfiguration configuration) at Microsoft.Data.Schema.Build.SchemaDeployment.CompareModels() at Microsoft.Data.Schema.Build.SchemaDeployment.PrepareBuildPlan() at Microsoft.Data.Schema.Build.SchemaDeployment.Execute(Boolean executeDeployment) at Microsoft.Data.Schema.Build.SchemaDeployment.Execute() at Microsoft.Data.Schema.Tasks.DBDeployTask.Execute() at Microsoft.Build.BackEnd.TaskExecutionHost.Microsoft.Build.BackEnd.ITaskExecutionHost.Execute() at Microsoft.Build.BackEnd.TaskBuilder.ExecuteInstantiatedTask(ITaskExecutionHost taskExecutionHost, TaskLoggingContext taskLoggingContext, TaskHost taskHost, ItemBucket bucket, TaskExecutionMode howToExecuteTask, Boolean& taskResult) Done executing task "SqlDeployTask" -- FAILED. Done building target "DspDeploy" in project "Lloyds.UKTax.DB.UKtax.dbproj" -- FAILED. Done executing task "CallTarget" -- FAILED.Done building target "DBDeploy" in project It turns out there are a certain set of circumstances that need to be met for this error to occur: The object being deployed is an inline function (may also exist for multistatement and scalar functions - I haven't tested that) That object includes SQLCMD variable references The object has already been deployed successfully Just to reiterate that last bullet point, the error does not occur when you deploy the function for the first time, only on the subsequent deployment. Luckily I have a direct line into a guy on the development team so I fired off an email on Friday evening and today (Monday) I received a reply back telling me that there is a simple fix, one simply has to remove the parentheses that wrap the SQL statement. So, in the case of Tom's repro, the function definition simpy has to be changed to: CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[Function1]()RETURNS TABLEASRETURN --( WITH cte AS ( SELECT 1 AS [c1] FROM [$(Database3)].[dbo].[Table1] ) SELECT 1 AS [c1] FROM cte--) I have commented out the offending parentheses rather than removing them just to emphasize the point. Thereafter the function will deploy fine. I tested this out on my own project this morning and can confirm that this fix does indeed work. I have been told that the bug CAN be reproduced in the Release Candidate (RC) 0 build of SQL Server Data Tools in SQL Server 2010 so am hoping that a fix makes it in for the Release-To-Manufacturing (RTM) build. Hope this helps @jamiet

Read the article
Nerdstock 2012: A photo review of Microsoft TechEd North America 2012

- by The Un-T Guy

Not only could I not fathom that I would ever be attending a tech event of the magnitude of TechEd, neither could any of my co-workers. As the least technical person in the history of Information Technology ever, I felt as though I were walking into the belly of the beast, fearing I’d not be allowed out until I could write SSIS packages, program in Visual Basic, or at least arm wrestle a DBA. Most of my fears were unrealized. But I made it. I was here. I even got to wear the Mark of the Geek neck package with schedule, eyeglass cleaners, name badge (company name obfuscated so they don’t fire me), and a pen. The name badge was seemingly the key element, as every vendor in the place wanted to scan it to capture name, email address, and numbers to show their bosses back home. It also let me eat the food and drink the coffee so that’s a fair trade. A recurring theme throughout the presentations and vendor demos was “the Cloud” and BYOD (bring your own device). The below was a common site throughout the week, as attendees from all over the world brought their own devices and were able to (seemingly) seamlessly connect to the Worldwide Innerwebs. Apparently proof that Microsoft and the event organizers were practicing what they were preaching. “Cavernous” is one way to describe the downstairs facility itself. “Freaking cavernous” might be more accurate. Work sessions were held in classrooms on the second and third floors but the real action was happening downstairs. Microsoft bookstore, blogger hub (shoutout to Geekswithblogs.net), The Wall (sans Pink Floyd, sadly), couches, recharging stations… …a game zone with pool and air hockey tables, pinball machines, foosball… …vintage video games… …and a even giant chess board. Looked like this guy was opening with the Kaspersky parry. The blend of technology and fantasy even went so far as to bring childhood favorites to life. Assuming, of course, your childhood was pre-video games (like mine) and you were stuck with electric football and Rock ‘em Sock ‘em robots: And, lest the “combatants” become unruly or – God forbid – afternoon snacks were late, Orange County’s finest was on the scene to keep the peace. On a high-tech mode of transport, of course. She wasn’t the only one to think this was a swell way to transition from one concourse to the next. Given the level of support provided by the entire Orange County Convention Center staff, I knew they had to have some secret. Here’s one entrance to the vendor zone/”Technical Learning Center.” Couldn’t help but think of them as the remora attached to the Whale Shark that is Microsoft… …or perhaps planets orbiting the sun. Microsoft is just that huge and it seemed like every vendor in the industry looks forward to partnering with the tech behemoth. Aside from the free stuff from the vendors, probably the most popular place in the house was the dining area. Amazing spreads every day, multiple times a day. While no attendance numbers were available at press time, literally thousands of attendees were fed, and fed well, every day. And lest you think my post from earlier in the week exaggerated about the backpacks… …or that I’m exaggerating about the lunch crowds. This represents only about between 25-30% of the lunch crowd – it was all my camera could capture at once. No one went away hungry. The only thing missing was a a vat of Red Bull but apparently organizers went old school, with probably 100 urns of the original energy drink – coffee – all around the venue. Of course, following lunch and afternoon sessions, some preferred the even older school method of re-energizing. There were rumors that Microsoft was serving graham crackers and milk in this area. But they were only rumors. Cannot overstate the wonderful service provided by the Orange County Convention Center staff. Coffee, soft drinks, juice, and water were available always. Buffet meals were delicious with a wide range of healthy options available, in addition to hundreds (at least) special meal requests supported every day. Ever tried to keep up with an estimated 9,000 hungry and thirsty IT-ers? These folks did. Kudos to all of the staff and many thanks! And while I occasionally poke fun at the Whale Shark, if nothing else this experience convinced me of one thing: Microsoft knows how to put on a professional event. Hundreds of informative, professionally delivered sessions, covering a wide range of topics set at varying levels of expertise (some that even I was able to follow), social activities, vendor partnerships…they brought everything you could ask for to inform, educate, and inspire an entire IT industry. So as I depart the belly of the beast, I can both take pride in the fact that I survived the week and marvel at the brilliance surrounding me. The IT industry – or at least the segment associated with Microsoft – is in good, professional hands. And what won’t fit in their hands can be toted in the Microsoft provided backpacks. Win-win. Until New Orleans…

Read the article
WP7 “Phantom Data” Source Possibly Revealed?

- by Bil Simser

Recently there’s been rumours floating around regarding “phantom” Windows Phone 7 data being magically sent and received on the latest WP7 phones. The news has mostly been floating around twitter so I didn’t pay it much attention. The BBC Technology News picked it up so I thought I would look more into it myself seeing that we have WP7 phones and maybe there was some truth to all this (and more importantly what was the cause). Full disclosure. I don’t have a lot of data points around this. This is from looking at a few phone logs, changing the configuration and looking back again after the change. I haven’t done a clean baseline test nor have I done testing with hundreds of phones. I leave the experience up to the reader to decide. So I went spelunking into the phone logs to see what was up. Most providers will show you data usage, at least on a daily basis. I lucked out with the provider and plan in that they provide hourly breakdowns. Here’s a snapshot from my usage throughout one night. Timestamp Data Usage 12:38:30 AM 2098 Kilobytes 1:30:30 AM 2 Kilobytes 2:38:30 AM 7118 Kilobytes 3:38:30 AM 6622 Kilobytes 4:38:30 AM 76 Kilobytes 5:38:30 AM 29 Kilobytes 6:38:30 AM 19 Kilobytes 7:38:30 AM 20 Kilobytes So a few observations from this data: Data seems to be collected on a regular basis. Looking at some other people phone logs, the times vary but it’s always hourly. There’s not a tremendous amount of data here (about 16 megabytes) but it seems like a lot for 7 hours The phone was connected to my home Wifi during this period Nothing was running and the phone was in a locked state Like I said, not a lot of data but it adds up. 16MB for 7 hours = about 50MB in a 24 hour period. That’s just plain old data being collected (somewhere, somehow) and not actual usage (Marketplace, Email, Browsing, etc.). Besides, when connected to a WiFi network you shouldn’t be charged data usage from your phone company (in theory, YMMV). After reviewing the logs I made a theory that the only thing that could possibly be sending data is the Feedback feature. With no other apps running under lock, what else could it be? In Windows 7 under your Settings the last option is Feedback. This sends feedback to Microsoft to “help improve Windows Phone”. On this page you have three options: Send feedback and use my cellular data connection Send feedback and (presumably) use my WiFi connection Don’t send feedback Knowing what I know about Microsoft, they do use the feedback data. For example some of the placement and inclusion of features in Office 2007 was based on that Feedback data that Office sends (assuming you had opted in). However in the Privacy Statement (it’s long but a good read at least once in your life), the Phone manual, and every other source I could look at there is no information about how much data it’s planning to send, just that it’s sending some data and that “some data charges with your carrier may apply”. Looking back at the logs, I have to wonder. 6MB at 3:30 and *then* 7MB the next hour. That’s a lot of information. And it adds up. 50MB in a 24 hour period X 30 days puts most people over a normal 1GB plan. And frankly why am I paying for a data plan only to have 80% of it chewed up by Microsoft, with no real benefit to me. If they included porn in the 50mb daily transfer I’d be okay with this, but I don’t see any new movies on my phone. So I turned it off. Set Feedback to disabled and wait. I waited. And waited. And generally didn’t use the phone if I could. The next day I went back to look at the data usage logs from the time period after turning the feedback mechanism off. Here are the results. Timestamp Data Usage 1:19:48 PM 0 Kilobytes 2:19:48 PM 0 Kilobytes 3:19:48 PM 0 Kilobytes 4:19:48 PM 678 Kilobytes (took a phone call) 5:19:48 PM 82 Kilobytes 6:19:48 PM 88 Kilobytes 7:20:30 PM 86 Kilobytes (guess they changed their reporting time) 8:20:30 PM 86 Kilobytes 9:20:30 PM 66 Kilobytes 10:20:30 PM 67 Kilobytes 11:20:30 PM 49 Kilobytes 12:20:30 AM 32 Kilobytes 1:20:30 AM 38 Kilobytes 2:20:31 AM 18 Kilobytes 3:20:31 AM 27 Kilobytes 4:20:31 AM 86 Kilobytes 5:20:31 AM 53 Kilobytes 6:20:31 AM 22 Kilobytes 7:22:15 AM 30 Kilobytes (another reporting time change) 8:22:15 AM 29 Kilobytes 9:22:15 AM 74 Kilobytes 10:22:15 AM 154 Kilobytes (phone call) 11:22:15 AM 12 Kilobytes 12:13:27 PM 49 Kilobytes 1:13:27 PM 197 Kilobytes (phone call) Quite a *drastic* change from what Feedback was turned on. I mean for a 24 hour period (sans 3 phone calls) I consumed about 1MB. Still quite a bit of transfer going on but at least it amounts to 30MB per month, not 30MB per day! Like I said this observation is neither scientific or conclusive. You decide what to do but frankly until Microsoft makes this data transfer exempt from your data plan (like that will happen) I would just turn Feedback off. YMMV.

Read the article
CQRS – Questions and Concerns

- by Dylan Smith

I’ve been doing a lot of learning on CQRS and Event Sourcing over the last little while and I have a number of questions that I haven’t been able to answer. 1. What is the benefit of CQRS when compared to a typical DDD architecture that uses Event Sourcing and properly captures intent and behavior via verb-based commands? (other than Scalability) 2. When using CQRS what do you do with complex query-based logic? I’m going to elaborate on #1 in this blog post and I’ll do a follow-up post on #2. I watched through Greg Young’s video on the business benefits of CQRS + Event Sourcing and first let me say that I thought it was an excellent presentation that really drives home a lot of the benefits to this approach to architecture (I watched it twice in a row I enjoyed it so much!). But it didn’t answer some of my questions fully (I wish I had been there to ask these of Greg in person!). So let me pick apart some of the points he makes and how they relate to my first question above. I’m completely sold on the idea of event sourcing and have a clear understanding of the benefits that it brings to the table, so I’m not going to question that. But you can use event sourcing without going to a CQRS architecture, so my main question is around the benefits of CQRS + Event Sourcing vs Event Sourcing + Typical DDD architecture Architecture with Event Sourcing + Commands on Left, CQRS on Right Greg talks about how the stereotypical architecture doesn’t support DDD, but is that only because his diagram shows DTO’s coming up from the client. If we use the same diagram but allow the client to send commands doesn’t that remove a lot of the arguments that Greg makes against the stereotypical architecture? We can now introduce verbs into the system. We can capture intent now (storing it still requires event sourcing, but you can implement event sourcing without doing CQRS) We can create a rich domain model (as opposed to an anemic domain model) Scalability is obviously a benefit that CQRS brings to the table, but like Greg says, very few of the systems we create truly need significant scalability Greg talks about the ability to scale your development efforts. He says CQRS allows you to split the system into 3 parts (Client, Domain/Commands, Reads) and assign 3 teams of developers to work on them in parallel; letting you scale your development efforts by 3x with nearly linear gains. But in the stereotypical architecture don’t you already have 2 separate modules that you can split your dev efforts between: The client that sends commands/queries and receives DTO’s, and the Domain which accepts commands/queries, and generates events/DTO’s. If this is true it’s not really a 3x scaling you achieve with CQRS but merely a 1.5x scaling which while great doesn’t sound nearly as dramatic (“I can do it with 10 devs in 12 months – let me hire 5 more and we can have it done in 8 months”). Making the Query side “stupid simple” such that you can assign junior developers (or even outsource it) sounds like a valid benefit, but I have some concerns over what you do with complex query-based logic/behavior. I’m going to go into more detail on this in a follow-up blog post shortly. He also seemed to focus on how “stupid-simple” it is doing queries against the de-normalized data store, but I imagine there is still significant complexity in the event handlers that interpret the events and apply them to the de-normalized tables. It sounds like Greg suggests that because we’re doing CQRS that allows us to apply Event Sourcing when we otherwise wouldn’t be able to (~33:30 in the video). I don’t believe this is true. I don’t see why you wouldn’t be able to apply Event Sourcing without separating out the Commands and Queries. The queries would just operate against the domain model instead of the database. But you’d still get the benefits of Event Sourcing. Without CQRS the queries would only be able to operate against the current state rather than the event history, but even in CQRS the domain behaviors can only operate against the current state and I don’t see that being a big limiting factor. If some query needs to operate against something that is not captured by the current state you would just have to update the domain model to capture that information (no different than if that statement were made about a Command under CQRS). Some of the benefits I do see being applicable are that your domain model might end up being simpler/smaller since it only needs to represent the state needed to process commands and not worry about the reads (like the Deactivate Inventory Item and associated comment example that Greg provides). And also commands that can be handled in a Transaction Script style manner by the command handler simply generating events and not touching the domain model. It also makes it easier for your senior developers to focus on the command behavior and ignore the queries, which is usually going to be a better use of their time. And of course scalability. If anybody out there has any thoughts on this and can help educate me further, please either leave a comment or feel free to get in touch with me via email:

Read the article
SQL SERVER – PAGELATCH_DT, PAGELATCH_EX, PAGELATCH_KP, PAGELATCH_SH, PAGELATCH_UP – Wait Type – Day 12 of 28

- by pinaldave

This is another common wait type. However, I still frequently see people getting confused with PAGEIOLATCH_X and PAGELATCH_X wait types. Actually, there is a big difference between the two. PAGEIOLATCH is related to IO issues, while PAGELATCH is not related to IO issues but is oftentimes linked to a buffer issue. Before we delve deeper in this interesting topic, first let us understand what Latch is. Latches are internal SQL Server locks which can be described as very lightweight and short-term synchronization objects. Latches are not primarily to protect pages being read from disk into memory. It’s a synchronization object for any in-memory access to any portion of a log or data file.[Updated based on comment of Paul Randal] The difference between locks and latches is that locks seal all the involved resources throughout the duration of the transactions (and other processes will have no access to the object), whereas latches locks the resources during the time when the data is changed. This way, a latch is able to maintain the integrity of the data between storage engine and data cache. A latch is a short-living lock that is put on resources on buffer cache and in the physical disk when data is moved in either directions. As soon as the data is moved, the latch is released. Now, let us understand the wait stat type related to latches. From Book On-Line: PAGELATCH_DT Occurs when a task is waiting on a latch for a buffer that is not in an I/O request. The latch request is in Destroy mode. PAGELATCH_EX Occurs when a task is waiting on a latch for a buffer that is not in an I/O request. The latch request is in Exclusive mode. PAGELATCH_KP Occurs when a task is waiting on a latch for a buffer that is not in an I/O request. The latch request is in Keep mode. PAGELATCH_SH Occurs when a task is waiting on a latch for a buffer that is not in an I/O request. The latch request is in Shared mode. PAGELATCH_UP Occurs when a task is waiting on a latch for a buffer that is not in an I/O request. The latch request is in Update mode. PAGELATCH_X Explanation: When there is a contention of access of the in-memory pages, this wait type shows up. It is quite possible that some of the pages in the memory are of very high demand. For the SQL Server to access them and put a latch on the pages, it will have to wait. This wait type is usually created at the same time. Additionally, it is commonly visible when the TempDB has higher contention as well. If there are indexes that are heavily used, contention can be created as well, leading to this wait type. Reducing PAGELATCH_X wait: The following counters are useful to understand the status of the PAGELATCH: Average Latch Wait Time (ms): The wait time for latch requests that have to wait. Latch Waits/sec: This is the number of latch requests that could not be granted immediately. Total Latch Wait Time (ms): This is the total latch wait time for latch requests in the last second. If there is TempDB contention, I suggest that you read the blog post of Robert Davis right away. He has written an excellent blog post regarding how to find out TempDB contention. The same blog post explains the terms in the allocation of GAM, SGAM and PFS. If there was a TempDB contention, Paul Randal explains the optimal settings for the TempDB in his misconceptions series. Trace Flag 1118 can be useful but use it very carefully. I totally understand that this blog post is not as clear as my other blog posts. I suggest if this wait stats is on one of your higher wait type. Do leave a comment or send me an email and I will get back to you with my solution for your situation. May the looking at all other wait stats and types together become effective as this wait type can help suggest proper bottleneck in your system. Read all the post in the Wait Types and Queue series. Note: The information presented here is from my experience and there is no way that I claim it to be accurate. I suggest reading Book OnLine for further clarification. All the discussions of Wait Stats in this blog are generic and vary from system to system. It is recommended that you test this on a development server before implementing it to a production server. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Wait Stats, SQL Wait Types, T SQL, Technology

Read the article
SQLAuthority News – Learning Trip – Traveling to Learn SQL Server

- by pinaldave

I am currently traveling to Delhi to learn SQL Server in person from my friend. You can read more details about why am I learning SQL Server. I have signed up for the course End to End SQL Server Business Intelligence at Koenig Solutions. Yesterday I blogged about my registration experience and today I am going to write about my experience once I arrived at Delhi. From Ahmedabad to Delhi I stay with my wife and daughter in Bangalore (IT Hub of India), my hometown is Ahmedabad. My parents stay in city nearby Ahmedabad. I decided to spend few days with my folks before I sign up for 3 days of solid learning. I had selected an early morning flight to Delhi. I landed at 8:30 AM in Delhi. As soon as I checked email in my mobile I was really glad that I had received details of my pick up vehicle from Koenig. I walked out of the airport and I noticed that a driver was waiting with a placard with my name and photo associated with it. He was in Koenig uniform so there was no chance to make mistakes. In minutes of landing in Delhi I was in my transport heading to the Koenig Training Center. After the quick introduction driver handed me a bag (to be precise Eco friendly bag). The bag contained following items: My registration form All necessary documents in print which I had received earlier A Printed Book of the course next day INR 1000 (What?) I was glad to receive the bag but I was very confused with the Rs 1000. I decided to figure this out once I reach to the training center. Arriving at Koenig Inn Deluxe Koenig registration fees include all the stay and meals. I had opted for Koenig Inn Deluxe as my stay as it was recommended by my friend as well it was the right economical choice for me. When I reached to my accommodation, they were well aware of my arrival and was immediately led to my spacious room. The room is well equipped with all the amenities (hot water, air condition, coffee table, munching snacks, and free internet) and the staff is very friendly. I immediately got ready as I had to go to Koenig Training Center to meet Center Head for a quick introduction. Koenig Inn Delux Koenig Training Center The training center is within five minutes of distance from the accommodation. I was lead to center head right away and had a very meaningful conversation with Ms Hema regarding my learning goals. She gave me a quick tour of the training center. I was amazed with the numbers of lab rooms they have in the center. The labs are spacious and give the most needed hand’s on experience to the users. I was led to the lab where I was suppose to learn my class the very next day as well I was provided my trainer’s profile. Mystery of Rs 1000 Well, after all this I have still not forgotten why I was provided Rs 1000 when arrived at the airport. When I asked about that I was told that because many students comes from foreign places and they may not have Indian Currency when they land at airport. This was for their immediate consumption till they arrive at the training center. Later on they can get their currency converted to local currency at Koenig Travel Desk. My curiosity was satisfied but I had not expected this answer. I am amazed at the attention to the details. Koenig Travel Desk When I heard about Koenig Travel Desk, I remembered that I have few friends in Delhi and Gurgaon. I had completed all of the formalities so I had reset of the day on my hand. I requested the travel desk if they can arrange a day cab for me so I can visit my friends in Guragon. Within 10 minutes I was on my way to Gurgaon. Telerik India Office Visit What did I do in Guragaon? I met my friends Abhishek Kant, Dhananjay Kumar and Amit Chowdhary. I visited Telerik India office and we had an excellent conversation on various aspects of technology and community. The Telerik India office is very spacious and Abhishek Kant (Telerik India Country Manager) gave us a quick tour of the office. We had an excellent lunch and dinner. One thing is for sure – the day was well spent. Pinal Dave, Dhananjay Kumar and Abhishek Kant Later evening I returned to my accommodation and decided to read up a few of the topics which I was going to learn next day. In tomorrow’s blog post I will discuss about my learning experience. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Training, T SQL, Technology

Read the article
Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 - Business Intelligence Samples

- by smisner

On April 14, 2010, Microsoft Press (blog | twitter) released my latest book, co-authored with Ross Mistry (twitter), as a free ebook download - Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2. As the title implies, this ebook is an introduction to the latest SQL Server release. Although you'll find a comprehensive review of the product's features in this book, you will not find the step-by-step details that are typical in my other books. For those readers who are interested in a more interactive learning experience, I have created two samples file for download: IntroSQLServer2008R2Samples project Sales Analysis workbook Here's a recap of the business intelligence chapters and the samples I used to generate the screen shots by chapter: Chapter 6: Scalable Data Warehousing covers a new edition of SQL Server, Parallel Data Warehouse. Understandably, Microsoft did not ship me the software and hardware to set up my own Parallel Data Warehouse environment for testing purposes and consequently you won't see any screenshots in this chapter. I received a lot of information and a lot of help from the product team during the development of this chapter to ensure its technical accuracy. Chapter 7: Master Data Services is a new component in SQL Server. After you install Master Data Services (MDS), which is a separate installation from SQL Server although it's found on the same media, you can install sample models to explore (which is what I did to create screenshots for the book). To do this, you deploying packages found at \Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\Master Data Services\Samples\Packages. You will first need to use the Configuration Manager (in the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2\Master Data Services program group) to create a database and a Web application for MDS. Then when you launch the application, you'll see a Getting Started page which has a Deploy Sample Data link that you can use to deploy any of the sample packages. Chapter 8: Complex Event Processing is an introduction to another new component, StreamInsight. This topic was way too large to cover in-depth in a single chapter, so I focused on information such as architecture, development models, and an overview of the key sections of code you'll need to develop for your own applications. StreamInsight is an engine that operates on data in-flight and as such has no user interface that I could include in the book as screenshots. The November CTP version of SQL Server 2008 R2 included code samples as part of the installation, but these are not the official samples that will eventually be available in Codeplex. At the time of this writing, the samples are not yet published. Chapter 9: Reporting Services Enhancements provides an overview of all the changes to Reporting Services in SQL Server 2008 R2, and there are many! In previous posts, I shared more details than you'll find in the book about new functions (Lookup, MultiLookup, and LookupSet), properties for page numbering, and the new global variable RenderFormat. I will confess that I didn't use actual data in the book for my discussion on the Lookup functions, but I did create real reports for the blog posts and will upload those separately. For the other screenshots and examples in the book, I have created the IntroSQLServer2008R2Samples project for you to download. To preview these reports in Business Intelligence Development Studio, you must have the AdventureWorksDW2008R2 database installed, and you must download and install SQL Server 2008 R2. For the map report, you must execute the PopulationData.sql script that I included in the samples file to add a table to the AdventureWorksDW2008R2 database. The IntroSQLServer2008R2Samples project includes the following files: 01_AggregateOfAggregates.rdl to illustrate the use of embedded aggregate functions 02_RenderFormatAndPaging.rdl to illustrate the use of page break properties (Disabled, ResetPageNumber), the PageName property, and the RenderFormat global variable 03_DataSynchronization.rdl to illustrate the use of the DomainScope property 04_TextboxOrientation.rdl to illustrate the use of the WritingMode property 05_DataBar.rdl 06_Sparklines.rdl 07_Indicators.rdl 08_Map.rdl to illustrate a simple analytical map that uses color to show population counts by state PopulationData.sql to provide the data necessary for the map report Chapter 10: Self-Service Analysis with PowerPivot introduces two new components to the Microsoft BI stack, PowerPivot for Excel and PowerPivot for SharePoint, which you can learn more about at the PowerPivot site. To produce the screenshots for this chapter, I created the Sales Analysis workbook which you can download (although you must have Excel 2010 and the PowerPivot for Excel add-in installed to explore it fully). It's a rather simple workbook because space in the book did not permit a complete exploration of all the wonderful things you can do with PowerPivot. I used a tutorial that was available with the CTP version as a basis for the report so it might look familiar if you've already started learning about PowerPivot. In future posts, I'll continue exploring the new features in greater detail. If there's any special requests, please let me know! Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

Read the article
Juniper Strategy, LLC is hiring SharePoint Developers…

- by Mark Rackley

Isn’t everybody these days? It seems as though there are definitely more jobs than qualified devs these days, but yes, we are looking for a few good devs to help round out our burgeoning SharePoint team. Juniper Strategy is located in the DC area, however we will consider remote devs for the right fit. This is your chance to get in on the ground floor of a bright company that truly “gets it” when it comes to SharePoint, Project Management, and Information Assurance. We need like-minded people who “get it”, enjoy it, and who are looking for more than just a job. We have government and commercial opportunities as well as our own internal product that has a bright future of its own. Our immediate needs are for SharePoint .NET developers, but feel free to submit your resume for us to keep on file as it looks as though we’ll need several people in the coming months. Please email us your resume and salary requirements to [email protected] Below are our official job postings. Thanks for stopping by, we look forward to hearing from you. Senior SharePoint .NET Developer Senior developer will focus on design and coding of custom, end-to-end business process solutions within the SharePoint framework. Senior developer with the ability to serve as a senior developer/mentor and manage day-to-day development tasks. Work with business consultants and clients to gather requirements to prepare business functional specifications. Analyze and recommend technical/development alternative paths based on business functional specifications. For selected development path, prepare technical specification and build the solution. Assist project manager with defining development task schedule and level-of-effort. Lead technical solution deployment. Job Requirements Minimum of 7 years experience in agile development, with at least 3 years of SharePoint-related development experience (SPS, SharePoint 2007/2010, WSS2-4). Thorough understanding of and demonstrated experience in development under the SharePoint Object Model, with focus on the WSS 3.0 foundation (MOSS 2007 Standard/Enterprise, Project Server 2007). Experience with using multiple data sources/repositories for database CRUD activities, including relational databases, SAP, Oracle e-Business. Experience with designing and deploying performance-based solutions in SharePoint for business processes that involve a very large number of records. Experience designing dynamic dashboards and mashups with data from multiple sources (internal to SharePoint as well as from external sources). Experience designing custom forms to facilitate user data entry, both with and without leveraging Forms Services. Experience building custom web part solutions. Experience with designing custom solutions for processing underlying business logic requirements including, but not limited to, SQL stored procedures, C#/ASP.Net workflows/event handlers (including timer jobs) to support multi-tiered decision trees and associated computations. Ability to create complex solution packages for deployment (e.g., feature-stapled site definitions). Must have impeccable communication skills, both written and verbal. Seeking a "tinkerer"; proactive with a thirst for knowledge (and a sense of humor). A US Citizen is required, and need to be able to pass NAC/E-Verify. An active Secret clearance is preferred. Applicants must pass a skills assessment test. MCP/MCTS or comparable certification preferred. Salary & Travel Negotiable SharePoint Project Lead Define project task schedule, work breakdown structure and level-of-effort. Serve as principal liaison to the customer to manage deliverables and expectations. Day-to-day project and team management, including preparation and maintenance of project plans, budgets, and status reports. Prepare technical briefings and presentation decks, provide briefs to C-level stakeholders. Work with business consultants and clients to gather requirements to prepare business functional specifications. Analyze and recommend technical/development alternative paths based on business functional specifications. The SharePoint Project Lead will be working with SharePoint architects and system owners to perform requirements/gap analysis and develop the underlying functional specifications. Once we have functional specifications as close to "final" as possible, the Project Lead will be responsible for preparation of the associated technical specification/development blueprint, along with assistance in preparing IV&V/test plan materials with support from other team members. This person will also be responsible for day-to-day management of "developers", but is also expected to engage in development directly as needed. Job Requirements Minimum 8 years of technology project management across the software development life-cycle, with a minimum of 3 years of project management relating specifically to SharePoint (SPS 2003, SharePoint2007/2010) and/or Project Server. Thorough understanding of and demonstrated experience in development under the SharePoint Object Model, with focus on the WSS 3.0 foundation (MOSS 2007 Standard/Enterprise, Project Server 2007). Ability to interact and collaborate effectively with team members and stakeholders of different skill sets, personalities and needs. General "development" skill set required is a fundamental understanding of MOSS 2007 Enterprise, SP1/SP2, from the top-level of skinning to the core of the SharePoint object model. Impeccable communication skills, both written and verbal, and a sense of humor are required. The projects will require being at a client site at least 50% of the time in Washington DC (NW DC) and Maryland (near Suitland). A US Citizen is required, and need to be able to pass NAC/E-Verify. An active Secret clearance is preferred. PMP certification, PgMP preferred. Salary & Travel Negotiable

Read the article
WordPress SEO Plugins to make your Blog Search Engine Friendly

- by Vaibhav

WordPress is the most common blogging system in use today and its use as a CMS is also wide spread. With hundreds of millions of sites using wordpress, getting correct SEO for your WordPress based Blog or Site is very important. We get regular queries from people who want Search Engine Optimisation for their site or blog which is made using wordpress. Here is a list of 16 of the best WordPress Plug-ins That can help you achieve better rankings: All in one SEO Pack This is most popular plugin among all SEO plugins for WordPress. It is easy to use and is compatible with most of the WordPress plugins. It works as a complete package of SEO plugin – automatically generating META tags and optimizing search engines for your titles and avoiding duplicate content. You can also include META tags manually (Met title, Meta description and Met keywords) for all pages and post in your website. HeadSpace2 HeasSpace2 is available in different languages , you can manage a wide range of SEO Tasks related with meta data, you can tag your posts, Custom descriptions and titles. So your page can rank the created relevancy on Search engines and you can load different settings for different pages. Platinum SEO plugin Automatic 301 redirects permalink changes, META tags generation, avoids duplicate content, and does SEO optimization of post and page titles and a lots of other features. TGFI.net SEO WordPress Plugin It’s a modified version of all-in-one SEO Pack. It has some unique feature over All-in-one SEO plugin, It generate titles, meta descriptions and meta keywords automatically when overrides are not present. Google XML Sitemaps Sitemaps Generated by this tool are supported by Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask. We all know Sitemaps make indexing of web pages easier for web crawlers. Crawlers can retrieve complete structure of site and more information by sitemaps. They notify all major search engines about new posts every time you create a new post. Sitemap Generator You can generate highly customizable sitemap for your WordPress page. You can choose what to show and what not to show, you can list the items in your choice of orde. It supports pages and permalinks and multi-level categories. SEO Slugs They can generate more search engine friendly URLs for your site. Slugs are filename assigned to your post , this plugin removes all common words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’, ‘what’, ‘you’ from slug which are assigned automatically to your post. SEO Post Links This is a similar plugin to SEO Slug, it removes unnecessary keywords from slug to make it short and SEO friendly and you can fix the number of characters in your post. Automatic SEO links With this tool you can create auto linking in your post. You can use this tool for inter linking or external linking too. Just select your words, anchor text target URL nature of links ( Do fallow / No follow ). This plugin will replace the matches found in post, WP Backlinks A helpful plugin for link exchange , whenever any webmaster submits a link for link exchange, the plugin will spider webmasters site for reciprocal link, and if everything is found good , your link will be exchanged. SEO Title Tag You can optimize your Title tags of Word press blog through this plugin . You can also override the title tag with custom titles , mass editing and title tags for 404 pages which are the main feature of this plugin. 404 SEO plugin With this Plugin you can customize 404 page of your site; you can give customized error message and links to relevant pages of your site. Redirection A powerful plugins to manage 301 redirection and logs related with redirection, with this plugin you can track 404 errors and track the log of all redirected URLs , this plugin can redirect post automatically when URL changes for that post. AddToAny This plugin helps your readers to share, save, email and bookmark your posts and pages. It supports more than a hundred social bookmarking , networking and sharing sites. SEO Friendly Images You can make SEO friendly images available on your site with the help of this tool. It updates images with proper titles and ALT tags. Robots Meta A plugin which prevents Search engines to index comments on your post, login and admin pages. It also allows to add tags for individual pages.

Read the article
Independence Day for Software Components – Loosening Coupling by Reducing Connascence

- by Brian Schroer

Today is Independence Day in the USA, which got me thinking about loosely-coupled “independent” software components. I was reminded of a video I bookmarked quite a while ago of Jim Weirich’s “Grand Unified Theory of Software Design” talk at MountainWest RubyConf 2009. I finally watched that video this morning. I highly recommend it. In the video, Jim talks about software connascence. The dictionary definition of connascence (con-NAY-sense) is: 1. The common birth of two or more at the same time 2. That which is born or produced with another. 3. The act of growing together. The brief Wikipedia page about Connascent Software Components says that: Two software components are connascent if a change in one would require the other to be modified in order to maintain the overall correctness of the system. Connascence is a way to characterize and reason about certain types of complexity in software systems. The term was introduced to the software world in Meilir Page-Jones’ 1996 book “What Every Programmer Should Know About Object-Oriented Design”. The middle third of that book is the author’s proposed graphical notation for describing OO designs. UML became the standard about a year later, so a revised version of the book was published in 1999 as “Fundamentals of Object-Oriented Design in UML”. Weirich says that the third part of the book, in which Page-Jones introduces the concept of connascence “is worth the price of the entire book”. (The price of the entire book, by the way, is not much – I just bought a used copy on Amazon for $1.36, so that was a pretty low-risk investment. I’m looking forward to getting the book and learning about connascence from the original source.) Meanwhile, here’s my summary of Weirich’s summary of Page-Jones writings about connascence: The stronger the form of connascence, the more difficult and costly it is to change the elements in the relationship. Some of the connascence types, ordered from weak to strong are: Connascence of Name Connascence of name is when multiple components must agree on the name of an entity. If you change the name of a method or property, then you need to change all references to that method or property. Duh. Connascence of name is unavoidable, assuming your objects are actually used. My main takeaway about connascence of name is that it emphasizes the importance of giving things good names so you don’t need to go changing them later. Connascence of Type Connascence of type is when multiple components must agree on the type of an entity. I assume this is more of a problem for languages without compilers (especially when used in apps without tests). I know it’s an issue with evil JavaScript type coercion. Connascence of Meaning Connascence of meaning is when multiple components must agree on the meaning of particular values, e.g that “1” means normal customer and “2” means preferred customer. The solution to this is to use constants or enums instead of “magic” strings or numbers, which reduces the coupling by changing the connascence form from “meaning” to “name”. Connascence of Position Connascence of positions is when multiple components must agree on the order of values. This refers to methods with multiple parameters, e.g.: eMailer.Send("[email protected]", "[email protected]", "Your order is complete", "Order completion notification"); The more parameters there are, the stronger the connascence of position is between the component and its callers. In the example above, it’s not immediately clear when reading the code which email addresses are sender and receiver, and which of the final two strings are subject vs. body. Connascence of position could be improved to connascence of type by replacing the parameter list with a struct or class. This “introduce parameter object” refactoring might be overkill for a method with 2 parameters, but would definitely be an improvement for a method with 10 parameters. This points out two “rules” of connascence: The Rule of Degree: The acceptability of connascence is related to the degree of its occurrence. The Rule of Locality: Stronger forms of connascence are more acceptable if the elements involved are closely related. For example, positional arguments in private methods are less problematic than in public methods. Connascence of Algorithm Connascence of algorithm is when multiple components must agree on a particular algorithm. Be DRY – Don’t Repeat Yourself. If you have “cloned” code in multiple locations, refactor it into a common function. Those are the “static” forms of connascence. There are also “dynamic” forms, including… Connascence of Execution Connascence of execution is when the order of execution of multiple components is important. Consumers of your class shouldn’t have to know that they have to call an .Initialize method before it’s safe to call a .DoSomething method. Connascence of Timing Connascence of timing is when the timing of the execution of multiple components is important. I’ll have to read up on this one when I get the book, but assume it’s largely about threading. Connascence of Identity Connascence of identity is when multiple components must reference the entity. The example Weirich gives is when you have two instances of the “Bob” Employee class and you call the .RaiseSalary method on one and then the .Pay method on the other does the payment use the updated salary? Again, this is my summary of a summary, so please be forgiving if I misunderstood anything. Once I get/read the book, I’ll make corrections if necessary and share any other useful information I might learn. See Also: Gregory Brown: Ruby Best Practices Issue #24: Connascence as a Software Design Metric (That link is failing at the time I write this, so I had to go to the Google cache of the page.)

Read the article
How to Automate your Database Documentation

- by Jonathan Hickford

In my previous post, “Automating Deployments with SQL Compare command line” I looked at how teams can automate the deployment and post deployment validation of SQL Server databases using the command line versions of Red Gate tools. In this post I’m looking at another use for the command line tools, namely using them to generate up-to-date documentation with every database change. There are many reasons why up-to-date documentation is valuable. For example when somebody new has to work on or administer a database for the first time, or when a new database comes into service. Having database documentation reduces the risks of making incorrect decisions when making changes. Documentation is very useful to business intelligence analysts when writing reports, for example in SSRS. There are a couple of great examples talking about why up to date documentation is valuable on this site: Database Documentation – Lands of Trolls: Why and How? and Database Documentation Using SQL Doc. The short answer is that it can save you time and reduce risk when you need that most! SQL Doc is a fast simple tool that automatically generates database documentation. It can create documents in HTML, Word or pdf files. The documentation contains information about object definitions and dependencies, along with any other information you want to associate with each object. The SQL Doc GUI, which is included in Red Gate’s SQL Developer Bundle and SQL Toolbelt, allows you to add additional notes to objects, and customise which objects are shown in the docs. These settings can be saved as a .sqldoc project file. The SQL Doc command line can use this project file to automatically update the documentation every time the database is changed, ensuring that documentation that is always up to date. The simplest way to keep documentation up to date is probably to use a scheduled task to run a script every day. However if you have a source controlled database, or are using a Continuous Integration (CI) server or a build server, it may make more sense to use that instead. If you’re using SQL Source Control or SSDT Database Projects to help version control your database, you can automatically update the documentation after each change is made to the source control repository that contains your database. To get this automation in place, you can use the functionality of a Continuous Integration (CI) server, which can trigger commands to run when a source control repository has changed. A CI server will also capture and save the documentation that is created as an artifact, so you can always find the exact documentation for a specific version of the database. This forms an always up to date data dictionary. If you don’t already have a CI server in place there are several you can use, such as the free open source Jenkins or the free starter editions of TeamCity. I won’t cover setting these up in this article, but there is information about using CI servers for automating database tasks on the Red Gate Database Delivery webpage. You may be interested in Red Gate’s SQL CI utility (part of the SQL Automation Pack) which is an easy way to update a database with the latest changes from source control. The PowerShell example below shows how to create the documentation from a database. That database might be your integration database or a shared development database that is always up to date with the latest changes. $serverName = "server\instance" $databaseName = "databaseName" # If you want to document multiple databases use a comma separated list $userName = "username" $password = "password" # Path to SQLDoc.exe $SQLDocPath = "C:\Program Files (x86)\Red Gate\SQL Doc 3\SQLDoc.exe" $arguments = @( "/server:$($serverName)", "/database:$($databaseName)", "/username:$($userName)", "/password:$($password)", "/filetype:html", "/outputfolder:.", # "/project:$args[0]", # If you already have a .sqldoc project file you can pass it as an argument to this script. Values in the project will be overridden with any options set on the command line "/name:$databaseName Report", "/copyrightauthor:$([Environment]::UserName)" ) write-host $arguments & $SQLDocPath $arguments There are several options you can set on the command line to vary how your documentation is created. For example, you can document multiple databases or exclude certain types of objects. In the example above, we set the name of the report to match the database name, and use the current Windows user as the documentation author. For more examples of how you can customise the report from the command line please see the SQL Doc command line documentation If you already have a .sqldoc project file, or wish to further customise the report by including or excluding specific objects, you can use this project on the command line. Any settings you specify on the command line will override the defaults in the project. For details of what you can customise in the project please see the SQL Doc project documentation. In the example above, the line to use a project is commented out, but you can uncomment this line and then pass a path to a .sqldoc project file as an argument to this script. Conclusion Keeping documentation about your databases up to date is very easy to set up using SQL Doc and PowerShell. By using a CI server to run this process you can trigger the documentation to be run on every change to a source controlled database, and keep historic documentation available. If you are considering more advanced database automation, e.g. database unit testing, change script generation, deploying to large numbers of targets and backup/verification, please email me at [email protected] for further script samples or if you have any questions.

Read the article
SQL Developer Data Modeler v3.3 Early Adopter: Collaborative Design via Excel?

- by thatjeffsmith

As you may have heard last week, we have a new version of Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler now available as an Early Adopter release. Version 3.3 has quite a few new features and I’ll be previewing them here. Today’s topic is our new Excel integration. It builds off of last week’s lesson: Search, so you may want to go read that first. They say it takes a village to raise a child. I say it takes a team to build a data model. You have your techie folks, your business folks, your in-betweeners, and your database geeks. Who gets to define how customers are represented and stored in your database? That data lives forever, so you better get it right from the beginning, or you’ll be living in a hacker’s paradise for years to come. Lots of good rantings, ravings, and advice on this topic in general on Karen Lopez’s (@datachick) blog. But let’s say you are the primary modeler on a project. You dutifully interview the business folks for their requirements. You sit down and start to model and think you’re pretty close. Now you need someone to confirm your assumptions and provide some feedback. Do you send your model over? Take a screenshot and blow it up on a whiteboard? Export to HTML and let them take a magic marker to their monitors? Or maybe you bite the bullet and install your modeling software on their desktops and take the hours or days required to train them up on how to use the the tool. Wouldn’t it be nice if they could just mark up their corrections in Excel and let you suck the updates back in? This is what we have started to build in Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler. Let’s say you have a new table called ‘UT_STARTUPS.’ It looks a little something like this: A table in Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler What I would like to do is have my team or co-worker review how I have defined those columns. Perhaps TIMESTAMP is overkill or maybe the column names themselves aren’t up to snuff. What I am going to do is now search for all the columns in my table, then export that to Excel. So do a search for UT_STARTUPS. Search, filter, then Report With the filter set to ‘Columns,’ if I do a report I’ll be only getting the columns that are resolving to my search term. So as long as my table name is unique in the model, I should get what I’m looking for. Here’s what I see when I click on the Report button: XLS or XLSX, either format is just fine I want to decide how the Column data is exported to Excel though, so I’m going to create a report template that I can use going forward. So click the ‘Manage’ button and setup a new template. I’m going to call mine ‘CollaborativeDevelopment.’ The templates allow me to define what properties are included in the reports. Once this is set, I’ll have the XLS file generated, and get to work Now let the Excel junkies do their stuff Note that not ALL of the report properties are update-able (yes, I made up a new word there) via Excel. We’ll have the full list of properties documented going forward, but in my Excel sheet, note that I can’t change the table name or the data types for the columns. I’m going to update some column names and supply ‘nice’ comments so the database users know what’s what. Here’s my input for the designer/architect/database dude: Be kind, please rew…use comments. Save the file, email it back to your modeler. Update the model from Excel That’s right, it’s a right mouse click from your model in the tree If everything goes right, you’ll see a nice confirmation message: It’s alive! Another to-do item on tap – making this dialog more informative. We’ll be showing exactly what in your model was updated from Excel. Let’s take another look at the model now Voila! Why are we doing this again? The goal is to reduce the number of round-trips from the modeler and the business process owner. One is used to working with Excel – why not allow them to mark up their changes in the tool they already know? This is an early adopter release and I anticipate this feature getting a good bit of tuning up before we release. Why don’t you download 3.3, give it a whirl, and let us know what you think?

Read the article
Messaging Systems – Handshaking, Reconciliation and Tracking for Data Transparency

- by Ahsan Alam

As many corporations build business partnerships with other organizations, the need to share information becomes necessary. Large amount of data sharing using snail mail, email and/or fax are quickly becoming a thing of the past. More and more organizations are relying heavily on Ftp and/or Web Service to exchange data. Corporations apply wide range of technologies and techniques based on available resources and data transfer needs. Sometimes, it involves simple home-grown applications. Other times, large investments are made on products like BizTalk, TIBCO etc. Complexity of information management also varies significantly from one organizations to another. Some may deal with handful of simple steps to process and manage shared data; whereas others may rely on fairly complex processes with heavy interaction with internal and external systems in order to serve the business needs. It is not surprising that many of these systems end up becoming black boxes over a period of time. Consequently, people and business start to rely more and more on developers and support personnel just to extract simple information adding to the loss of productivity. One of the most important factor in any business is transparency to data irrespective of technology preferences and the complexity of business processes. Not knowing the state of data could become very costly to the business. Being involved in messaging systems for some time now, I have heard the same type of questions over and over again. Did we transmit messages successfully? Did we get responses back? What is the expected turn-around-time? Did the system experience any errors? When one company transmits data to one or more company, it may invoke a set of processes that could complete in matter of seconds, or it could days. As data travels from one organizations to another, the uncertainty grows, and the longer it takes to track uncertain state of the data the costlier it gets for the business, So, in every business scenario, it's extremely important to be aware of the state of the data. Architects of messaging systems can take several steps to aid with data transparency. Some forms of data handshaking and reconciliation mechanism as well as extensive data tracking can be incorporated into the system to provide clear visibility to the data. What do I mean by handshaking and reconciliation? Some might consider these to be a single concept; however, I like to consider them in two unique categories. Handshaking serves as message receipts or acknowledgment. When one transmits messages to another, the receiver must acknowledge each message by sending immediate responses for each transaction. Whenever we use Web Services, handshaking is often achieved utilizing request/reply pattern. Similarly, if Ftp is used, a receiver can acknowledge by dropping messages for the sender as soon as the files are picked up. These forms of handshaking or acknowledgment informs the message sender and receiver that a successful transaction has occurred. I have mentioned earlier that it could take anywhere from a few seconds to a number of days before shared data is completely processed. In addition, whenever a batched transaction is used, processing time for each data element inside the batch could also vary significantly. So, in order to successfully manage data processing, reconciliation becomes extremely important; otherwise it may result into data loss or in some cases hefty penalty. Reconciliation can be done in many ways. Partner organizations can share and compare ad hoc reports to achieve reconciliation. On the other hand, partners can agree on some type of systematic reconciliation messages. Systems within responsible parties can trigger messages to partners as soon as the data process completes. Next step in the data transparency is extensive data tracking. Some products such as BizTalk and TIBCO provide built-in functionality for data tracking; however, built-in functionality may not always be adequate. Sometimes additional tracking system (or databases) needs to be built in order monitor all types of data flow including, message transactions, handshaking, reconciliation, system errors and many more. If these types of data are captured, then these can be presented to business users in any forms or fashion. When business users are empowered with such information, then the reliance on developers and support teams decreases dramatically. In today's collaborative world of information sharing, data transparency is key to the success of every business. The state of business data will constantly change. However, when people have easier access to various states of data, it allows them to make better and quicker decisions. Therefore, I feel that data handshaking, reconciliation and tracking is very important aspect of messaging systems.

Read the article
Chart Control in ASP.Net 4 – Second Part

- by sreejukg

Couple of weeks before, I have written an introduction about the chart control available in .Net framework. In that article, I explained the basic usage of the chart control with a simple example. You can read that article from the url http://weblogs.asp.net/sreejukg/archive/2010/12/31/getting-started-with-chart-control-in-asp-net-4-0.aspx. In this article I am going to demonstrate how one can generate various types of charts that can be generated easily using the ASP.Net chart control. Let us recollect the data sample we were working in the previous sample. The following is the data I used in the previous article. id SaleAmount SalesPerson SaleType SaleDate CompletionStatus (%) 1 1000 Jack Development 2010-01-01 100 2 300 Mills Consultancy 2010-04-14 90 3 4000 Mills Development 2010-05-15 80 4 2500 Mike eMarketting 2010-06-15 40 5 1080 Jack Development 2010-07-15 30 6 6500 Mills Consultancy 2010-08-24 65 In this article I am going to demonstrate various graphical reports generated from this data with the help of chart control. The following are the reports I am going to generate 1. Representation of share of Sales by each Sales person. 2. Representation of share of sales data according to sale type 3. Representation of sales progress over time period I am going to demonstrate how to bind the chart control programmatically. In order to facilitate this, I created an aspx page named “SalesAnalysis.Aspx” to my project. In the page I added the following controls 1. Dropdownlist control – with id ddlAnalysisType, user will use this to choose the type of chart they want to see. 2. A Button control – with id btnSubmit , by clicking this button, the chart based on the dropdownlist selection will be shown to the user 3. A label Control – with id lblMessage, to display the message to the user, initially this will ask the user to select an option and click on the button. 4. Chart control – with id chrtAnalysis, by default, I set visible = false so that during the page load the chart will be hidden to the users. The following is the initial output of the page. Generating chart for salesperson share Now from Visual Studio, I have double clicked on the button; it created the event handler btnSubmit_Click. In the button Submit event handler, I am using a switch case to execute the corresponding SQL statement and bind it to the chart control. The below is the code for generating the sales person share chart using a pie chart. The above code produces the following output The steps for creating the above chart can be summarized as follows. You specify a chart area, then a series and bind the chart to some x and y values. That is it. If you want to control the chart size and position, you can set the properties for the ChartArea.Position element. For e.g. in the previous code, after instantiating the chart area, setting the below code will give you a bigger pie chart. c.Position.Width = 100; c.Position.Height = 100; The width and height values are in percentage. In this case the chart will be generated by utilizing all the width and height of the chart object. See the output updated with the width and height set to 100% each. Generate Chart for sales type share Now for generating the chart according to the sales type, you just need to change the SQL query and x and y values of the chart. The Sql query used is “SELECT SUM(saleAmount) amount, SaleType from SalesData group by SaleType” and the X-Value is amount and Y-Values is SaleType. s.XValueMember = "SaleType"; s.YValueMembers = "amount"; After modifying the above code with these, the following output is generated. Generate Chart for sales progress over time period For generating the progress of sale chart against sales amount / period, line chart is the ideal tool. In order to facilitate the line chart, you can use Chart Type as System.Web.UI.DataVisualization.Charting.SeriesChartType.Line. Also we need to retrieve the amount and sales date from the data source. I have used the following query to facilitate this. “SELECT SaleAmount, SaleDate FROM SalesData” The output for the line chart is as follows Now you have seen how easily you can build various types of charts. Chart control is an excellent one that helps you to bring business intelligence to your applications. What I demonstrated in only a small part of what you can do with the chart control. Refer http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd456632.aspx for further reading. If you want to get the project files in zip format, post your email below. Hope you enjoyed reading this article.

Read the article
Dynamic Data Connections

- by Tim Dexter

I have had a long running email thread running between Dan and David over at Valspar and myself. They have built some impressive connectivity between their in house apps and BIP using web services. The crux of their problem has been that they have multiple databases that need the same report executed against them. Not such an unusual request as I have spoken to two customers in the last month with the same situation. Of course, you could create a report against each data connection and just run or call the appropriate report. Not too bad if you have two or three data connections but more than that and it becomes a maintenance nightmare having to update queries or layouts. Ideally you want to have just a single report definition on the BIP server and to dynamically set the connection to be used at runtime based on the user or system that the user is in. A quick bit of digging and help from Shinji on the development team and I had an answer. Rather embarassingly, the solution has been around since the Oct 2010 rollup patch last year. Still, I grabbed the latest Jan 2011 patch - check out Note 797057.1 for the latest available patches. Once installed, I used the best web service testing tool I have yet to come across - SoapUI. Just point it at the WSDL and you can check out the available services and their parameters and then test them too. The XML packet has a new dynamic data source entry. You can set you own custom JDBC connection or just specify an existing data source name thats defined on the server. <pub:runReport> <pub:reportRequest> <pub:attributeFormat>xml</pub:attributeFormat> <pub:attributeTemplate>0</pub:attributeTemplate> <pub:byPassCache>true</pub:byPassCache> <pub:dynamicDataSource> <pub:JDBCDataSource> <pub:JDBCDriverClass></pub:JDBCDriverClass> <pub:JDBCDriverType></pub:JDBCDriverType> <pub:JDBCPassword></pub:JDBCPassword> <pub:JDBCURL></pub:JDBCURL> <pub:JDBCUserName></pub:JDBCUserName> <pub:dataSourceName>Conn1</pub:dataSourceName> </pub:JDBCDataSource> </pub:dynamicDataSource> <pub:reportAbsolutePath>/Test/Employee Report/Employee Report.xdo</pub:reportAbsolutePath> </pub:reportRequest> <pub:userID>Administrator</pub:userID> <pub:password>Administrator</pub:password> </pub:runReport> So I have Conn1 and Conn2 defined that are connections to different databases. I can just flip the name, make the WS call and get the appropriate dataset in my report. Just as an example, here's my web service call java code. Just a case of bringing in the BIP java libs to my java project. publicReportServiceService = new PublicReportServiceService(); PublicReportService publicReportService = publicReportServiceService.getPublicReportService_v11(); String userID = "Administrator"; String password = "Administrator"; ReportRequest rr = new ReportRequest(); rr.setAttributeFormat("xml"); rr.setAttributeTemplate("1"); rr.setByPassCache(true); rr.setReportAbsolutePath("/Test/Employee Report/Employee Report.xdo"); rr.setReportOutputPath("c:\\temp\\output.xml"); BIPDataSource bipds = new BIPDataSource(); JDBCDataSource jds = new JDBCDataSource(); jds.setDataSourceName("Conn1"); bipds.setJDBCDataSource(jds); rr.setDynamicDataSource(bipds); try { publicReportService.runReport(rr, userID, password); } catch (InvalidParametersException e) { e.printStackTrace(); } catch (AccessDeniedException e) { e.printStackTrace(); } catch (OperationFailedException e) { e.printStackTrace(); } } Note, Im no java whiz kid or whizzy old bloke, at least not unless Ive had a coffee. JDeveloper has a nice feature where you point it at the WSDL and it creates everything to support your calling code for you. Couple of things to remember: 1. When you call the service, remember to set the bypass the cache option. Forget it and much scratching of your head and taking my name in vain will ensue. 2. My demo actually hit the same database but used two users, one accessed the base tables another views with the same name. For far too long I thought the connection swapping was not working. I was getting the same results for both users until I realized I was specifying the schema name for the table/view in my query e.g. select * from EMP.EMPLOYEES. So remember to have a generic query that will depend entirely on the connection. Its a neat feature if you want to be able to switch connections and only define a single report and call it remotely. Now if you want the connection to be set dynamically based on the user and the report run via the user interface, thats going to be more tricky ... need to think about that one!

Read the article
Weekend With #iPad

- by andrewbrust

Saturday morning, I got up, got dressed and took a 7-minute walk up to the Apple Store in New York’s Meatpacking District to pick up my reserved iPad. This precinct, which borders Greenwich Village (where I live and grew up) was, when I was a kid, a very industrial and smelly neighborhood during the day and a rough neighborhood at night. So imagine my sense of irony as I walked up Hudson Street towards 14th Street, to go wait in line with a bunch of hipsters to buy an iPad on launch day. Numerous blue T-shirt-clad Apple store workers were on hand to check people in to the line specifically identified for people who had reserved an iPad. Others workers passed out water and all of them, I kid you not, applauded people as they got their chance to go into the store and buy their devices. They also cheered people and yelled “congratulations” as they left. The event had all the charm of a mass wedding officiated by Reverend Sung Myung Moon. Once inside, a nice dude named Trey, with lots of tattoos on his calves, helped me and I acquired my device in short order. Another guy helped me activate the device, which was comical, because that has to be done through iTunes, which I hadn’t logged into in a while. Turns out my user id was my email address from the company I sold 5 1/2 years ago. Who knew? Regardless, I go the device working, packed up and left the store, shuddering as I was cheered and congratulated. By this time (about 10:30am) the line for reserved units and even walk-ins, was gone. The iPhone launch this was not. As much as I detested the Apple Store experience, I must say the device is really nice. the screen is bright, the colors are bold, and the experience is ultra-smooth. I quickly tested Safari, YouTube, Google Maps, and then installed a few apps, including the New York Times Editors’ Choice and a couple of Twitter clients. Some initial raves: Google Maps and Street View on the iPad is just amazing. The screen is full-size like a PC or Mac, but it’s right in front of you and responding to taps and flicks and pinches and it’s really engulfing. Video and photos are really nice on this device, despite the fact that 16:9 and anamorphic aspect ration content is letter boxed. It still looks amazing. And apps that are designed especially for the iPad, including The Weather Channel and Gilt and Kayak just look stunning. The richness, the friendly layout, the finger-friendly UIs, and the satisfaction of not having a keyboard between you and the information you’re managing, while you sit on a couch or an easy chair, is just really a beautiful thing. The mere experience of seeing these apps’ splash screens causes a shiver and Goosebumps. Truly. The iPad is not a desktop machine, and it’s not pocket device. That doesn’t mean it’s useless though. It’s the perfect “couchtop” computer. Now some downsides: the WiFi radio seems a bit flakey. More than a few times, I have had to toggle the WiFi off and back on to get it to connect properly. Worse yet, the iPad is totally bamboozled by the fact that I have four WiFi access points in my house, each with the same SSID. My laptops are smart enough to roam from one to the other, but the iPad seems to maintain an affinity for the downstairs access point, even if I’m turning it on two flights up. Telling the iPad to “forget” my WiFi network and then re-associate with it doesn’t help. More downers: as you might expect, there are far more applications developed for the iPhone than the iPad. And although iPhone apps run on the iPad, that provides about the same experience as watching standard def on a big HD flat panel, complete with the lousy choice of thick black borders or zooming the picture in to fill the screen. And speaking of iPhone Apps, I can’t get the Sonos one to work. Ideally, they’d have a dedicated iPad app and it would work on the first try. And the iPad is just as bad as any netbook when it comes to being a magnet for fingerprints. The lack of multi-tasking is quite painful too – truly, I don’t mind if only one app can be active at once, but the lack of ability to switch between apps, and the requirement to return to the home screen and re-launch a previous app to switch back, is already old and I’ve had the thing less than 48 hours. These are just initial impressions. I’ll have a fuller analysis soon, after I’ve had some more break-in time with my new toy. I’ll be thinking not just about the iPad and iPhone but also about Android, the 2.1 update for which was pushed to my Droid today, and Windows Phone 7, whose “hub” concept I now understand the value of. This has been a great year for alternative computing devices, and I see no net downside for Apple, Google or Microsoft. Exciting times.

Read the article
Personal search – the future of search

- by jamiet

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

Read the article

Search Results

Search found 10774 results on 431 pages for 'email obfuscation'.

Page 406/431 | < Previous Page | 402 403 404 405 406 407 408 409 410 411 412 413 | Next Page >

- by thatjeffsmith

- by jayatheertha.rao(at)oracle.com

- by BuckWoody

- by Brian Donahue

- by Matthew Guay

- by BuckWoody

- by Tara Kizer

- by jkauffman

- by jamiet

- by The Un-T Guy

- by Bil Simser

- by Dylan Smith

- by pinaldave

- by pinaldave

- by smisner

- by Mark Rackley

- by Vaibhav

- by Brian Schroer

- by Jonathan Hickford

- by thatjeffsmith

- by Ahsan Alam

- by sreejukg

- by Tim Dexter

- by andrewbrust

- by jamiet

< Previous Page | 402 403 404 405 406 407 408 409 410 411 412 413 | Next Page >