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• Do You Develop Your PL/SQL Directly in the Database?

  - by thatjeffsmith

  I know this sounds like a REALLY weird question for many of you. Let me make one thing clear right away though, I am NOT talking about creating and replacing PLSQL objects directly into a production environment. Do we really need to talk about developers in production again? No, what I am talking about is a developer doing their work from start to finish in a development database. These are generally available to a development team for building the next and greatest version of your databases and database applications. And of course you are using a third party source control system, right? Last week I was in Tampa, FL presenting at the monthly Suncoast Oracle User’s Group meeting. Had a wonderful time, great questions and back-and-forth. My favorite heckler was there, @oraclenered, AKA Chet Justice.  I was in the middle of talking about how it’s better to do your PLSQL work in the Procedure Editor when Chet pipes up - Don’t do it that way, that’s wrong Just press play to edit the PLSQL directly in the database Or something along those lines. I didn’t get what the heck he was talking about. I had been showing how the Procedure Editor gives you much better feedback and support when working with PLSQL. After a few back-and-forths I got to what Chet’s main objection was, and again I’m going to paraphrase: You should develop offline in your SQL worksheet. Don’t do anything in the database until it’s done. I didn’t understand. Were developers expected to be able to internalize and mentally model the PL/SQL engine, see where their errors were, etc in these offline scripts? No, please give Chet more credit than that. What is the ideal Oracle Development Environment? If I were back in the ‘real world’ of database development, I would do all of my development outside of the ‘dev’ instance. My development process looks a little something like this: Do I have a program that already does something like this – copy and paste Has some smart person already written something like this – copy and paste Start typing in the white-screen-of-panic and bungle along until I get something that half-works Tweek, debug, test until I have fooled my subconscious into thinking that it’s ‘good’ As you might understand, I don’t want my co-workers to see the evolution of my code. It would seriously freak them out and I probably wouldn’t have a job anymore (don’t remind me that I already worked myself out of development.) So here’s what I like to do: Run a Local Instance of Oracle on my Machine and Develop My Code Privately I take a copy of development – that’s what source control is for afterall – and run it where no one else can see it. I now get to be my own DBA. If I need a trace – no problem. If I want to run an ASH report, no worries. If I need to create a directory or run some DataPump jobs, that’s all on me. Now when I get my code ‘up to snuff,’ then I will check it into source control and compile it into the official development instance. So my teammates suddenly go from seeing no program, to a mostly complete program. Is this right? If not, it doesn’t seem wrong to me. And after talking to Chet in the car on the way to the local cigar bar, it seems that he’s of the same opinion. So what’s so wrong with coding directly into a development instance? I think ‘wrong’ is a bit strong here. But there are a few pitfalls that you might want to look out for. A few come to mind – and I’m sure Chet could add many more as my memory fails me at the moment. But here goes: Development instance isn’t properly backed up – would hate to lose that work Development is wiped once a week and copied over from Prod – don’t laugh Someone clobbers your code You accidentally on purpose clobber someone else’s code The more developers you have in a single fish pond, the greater chance something ‘bad’ will happen This Isn’t One of Those Posts Where I Tell You What You Should Be Doing I realize many shops won’t be open to allowing developers to stage their own local copies of Oracle. But I would at least be aware that many of your developers are probably doing this anyway – with or without your tacit approval. SQL Developer can do local file tracking, but you should be using Source Control too! I will say that I think it’s imperative that you control your source code outside the database, even if your development team is comprised of a single developer. Store your source code in a file, and control that file in something like Subversion. You would be shocked at the number of teams that do not use a source control system. I know I continue to be shocked no matter how many times I meet another team running by the seat-of-their-pants. I’d love to hear how your development process works. And of course I want to know how SQL Developer and the rest of our tools can better support your processes. And one last thing, if you want a fun and interactive presentation experience, be sure to have Chet in the room

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• SQL SERVER – The Story of a Lesser Known Startup Parameter in SQL Server – Guest Post by Balmukund Lakhani

  - by Pinal Dave

  This is a fantastic blog post from my dear friend Balmukund ( blog | twitter | facebook ). He had presented a fantastic session in our last UG and there were lots of requests from attendees that he blogs about it. Well, here is the blog post about the same very popular UG session. Let us read the entire blog post in the voice of the Balmukund himself. During my last session in SQL Bangalore User Group (Facebook) meeting, I was lucky enough to deliver a session on SQL Server Startup issue. The name of the session was “SQL Engine Starting Trouble – How to start?” From the feedback, I realized that one of the “not well known” startup parameter is “-m”. Okay, you might say “I know that this is used to start the SQL in single user mode”. But what you might not know is that you can pass a string with -m which has special meaning and use. I have used this parameter in my blog here but looks like not many of you have seen that. It happens most of the time when we want to start SQL Server in single user mode, someone else makes connection before you can. The only choice you have is to repeat same process again till you succeed. Some smart DBAs may disable the remote network protocols (TCP/IP and Named Pipes) of SQL Instance and allow only local connections to SQL. Once the activity is complete, our dear smart DBA has to remember to re-enable network protocols. Sometimes, it may be a local service or application getting connection to SQL before we can. There is a better way to deal with it. Yes, you have guessed it correctly: -m parameter which a string. Since I work with SQL Product Support team, I may know little more undocumented commands and parameters, but this is not an undocumented stuff. It’s already documented in books online. So in this blog, I am going to show a demo of its usage. As documentation shows, “Do not use this option as a security feature.” So please read this blog as knowledge enhancer and troubleshooting issues not security feature. In my laptop, I have a default instance of SQL Server 2012 and here is what we would in the configuration manager. Now, I would go ahead and stop SQL Service by selecting SQL Server (MSSQLServer) > Right Click > Stop. There are multiple ways to start SQL with startup parameter. 1) Use Net Start Command from command prompt Net Start MSSQLServer /mSQLCMD The above command is the simplest way to add startup parameter to SQL. This parameter would be cleared once we stop and start SQL. 2) Add Startup Parameter via configuration manager. Step is already listed here. We need to add -mSQLCMD If we compare 1 and 2, it’s clear that unless we modify startup parameter and remove -m, it would be in effect. 3) Start SQL Service via command line SQLServr.exe –mSQLCMD –s<InstanceName> Wait, what does SQLCMD mean with /m? It’s the instruction to SQL that start SQL Server in Single User Mode and allow only the application which is SQLCMD. Any other application would fail with Login Failed for User Error message. It would be important to note that string is case sensitive. This value should be picked up from application_name column from sys.dm_exec_sessions. I have made a connection using SQLCMD and as we can see it comes as upper case “SQLCMD”. If we want only management studio query windows to connect then we need to give -m” Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio – Query” as startup parameter. In below example, I have given it as SQLCMd (lower case d at the end) and we would notice that we would not be able to connect to SQL Instance. Above proves that parameter works as expected and it’s case sensitive. Error Log would show below information. How to get error log location? I have already blogged about it. Hope you have learned something new. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Server Management Studio, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Liskov Substitution Principle and the Oft Forgot Third Wheel

  - by Stacy Vicknair

  Liskov Substitution Principle (LSP) is a principle of object oriented programming that many might be familiar with from the SOLID principles mnemonic from Uncle Bob Martin. The principle highlights the relationship between a type and its subtypes, and, according to Wikipedia, is defined by Barbara Liskov and Jeanette Wing as the following principle:   Let be a property provable about objects of type . Then should be provable for objects of type where is a subtype of .   Rectangles gonna rectangulate The iconic example of this principle is illustrated with the relationship between a rectangle and a square. Let’s say we have a class named Rectangle that had a property to set width and a property to set its height. 1: Public Class Rectangle 2: Overridable Property Width As Integer 3: Overridable Property Height As Integer 4: End Class   We all at some point here that inheritance mocks an “IS A” relationship, and by gosh we all know square IS A rectangle. So let’s make a square class that inherits from rectangle. However, squares do maintain the same length on every side, so let’s override and add that behavior. 1: Public Class Square 2: Inherits Rectangle 3:  4: Private _sideLength As Integer 5:  6: Public Overrides Property Width As Integer 7: Get 8: Return _sideLength 9: End Get 10: Set(value As Integer) 11: _sideLength = value 12: End Set 13: End Property 14:  15: Public Overrides Property Height As Integer 16: Get 17: Return _sideLength 18: End Get 19: Set(value As Integer) 20: _sideLength = value 21: End Set 22: End Property 23: End Class   Now, say we had the following test: 1: Public Sub SetHeight_DoesNotAffectWidth(rectangle As Rectangle) 2: 'arrange 3: Dim expectedWidth = 4 4: rectangle.Width = 4 5:  6: 'act 7: rectangle.Height = 7 8:  9: 'assert 10: Assert.AreEqual(expectedWidth, rectangle.Width) 11: End Sub   If we pass in a rectangle, this test passes just fine. What if we pass in a square?   This is where we see the violation of Liskov’s Principle! A square might "IS A” to a rectangle, but we have differing expectations on how a rectangle should function than how a square should! Great expectations Here’s where we pat ourselves on the back and take a victory lap around the office and tell everyone about how we understand LSP like a boss. And all is good… until we start trying to apply it to our work. If I can’t even change functionality on a simple setter without breaking the expectations on a parent class, what can I do with subtyping? Did Liskov just tell me to never touch subtyping again? The short answer: NO, SHE DIDN’T. When I first learned LSP, and from those I’ve talked with as well, I overlooked a very important but not appropriately stressed quality of the principle: our expectations. Our inclination is to want a logical catch-all, where we can easily apply this principle and wipe our hands, drop the mic and exit stage left. That’s not the case because in every different programming scenario, our expectations of the parent class or type will be different. We have to set reasonable expectations on the behaviors that we expect out of the parent, then make sure that those expectations are met by the child. Any expectations not explicitly expected of the parent aren’t expected of the child either, and don’t register as a violation of LSP that prevents implementation. You can see the flexibility mentioned in the Wikipedia article itself: A typical example that violates LSP is a Square class that derives from a Rectangle class, assuming getter and setter methods exist for both width and height. The Square class always assumes that the width is equal with the height. If a Square object is used in a context where a Rectangle is expected, unexpected behavior may occur because the dimensions of a Square cannot (or rather should not) be modified independently. This problem cannot be easily fixed: if we can modify the setter methods in the Square class so that they preserve the Square invariant (i.e., keep the dimensions equal), then these methods will weaken (violate) the postconditions for the Rectangle setters, which state that dimensions can be modified independently. Violations of LSP, like this one, may or may not be a problem in practice, depending on the postconditions or invariants that are actually expected by the code that uses classes violating LSP. Mutability is a key issue here. If Square and Rectangle had only getter methods (i.e., they were immutable objects), then no violation of LSP could occur. What this means is that the above situation with a rectangle and a square can be acceptable if we do not have the expectation for width to leave height unaffected, or vice-versa, in our application. Conclusion – the oft forgot third wheel Liskov Substitution Principle is meant to act as a guidance and warn us against unexpected behaviors. Objects can be stateful and as a result we can end up with unexpected situations if we don’t code carefully. Specifically when subclassing, make sure that the subclass meets the expectations held to its parent. Don’t let LSP think you cannot deviate from the behaviors of the parent, but understand that LSP is meant to highlight the importance of not only the parent and the child class, but also of the expectations WE set for the parent class and the necessity of meeting those expectations in order to help prevent sticky situations.   Code examples, in both VB and C# Technorati Tags: LSV,Liskov Substitution Principle,Uncle Bob,Robert Martin,Barbara Liskov,Liskov

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• Stir Trek: Iron Man Edition Recap and Photos

  - by Brian Jackett

  If you’ve noticed my blogging activity has reduced in frequency and technical content lately it’s primarily due to all of the conferences I’ve been attending, speaking at, or planning in the past few months.  This past Friday myself and six other dedicated individuals put on Stir Trek: Iron Man Edition as the culmination of a few months of hard work.  For those unfamiliar, Stir Trek is a web developer conference that was founded last year as an event to showcase content from Microsoft’s MIX conference and end the day with a private showing of the then just-released Star Trek movie.  This year’s conference expanded from 2 to 4 content tracks and upped the number of tickets from 350 to 600.  Even more amazing was the fact that we had 592 people show up day of the event for the lowest drop-off percentage of any conference I’ve been to before.   Nerd Dinner and Swag Bags     The night before Stir Trek: Iron Man Edition we hosted a nerd dinner at the Polaris Shopping mall food court with about 30 in attendance.  Nerd dinners are a great time to meet others passionate about technology and socialize before the whirlwind of the conference hits.  After the nerd dinner 20+ volunteers headed to the conference location and helped us stuff swag bags.  This in and of itself was a monumental task of putting together 600 swag bags with numerous leaflets, sponsor items, and t-shirts.  A big thanks goes out to all who assisted us that night so that we could finish in just under 2 hours instead of taking all night.  My sleep schedule also thanks you. Morning of Stir Trek     After getting a decent amount of sleep I arrived at Marcus Crosswoods theater at 6am to begin setting up for the day.  Myself and Jody Morgan were in charge of registration so we got tables set up, laid out swag bags, and organized our volunteer crew to assist with checking-in attendees.  Despite having 600+ people registration went fairly smoothly and got the day off to a great start.  I especially appreciated the 3+ cups of coffee from Crimson Cup, a local coffee shop.  For any of you that know me you’ll know that I rarely drink coffee except a few times a year when I really need the energy, so that says a lot about how good their coffee is.   Conference Starts     Once registration was completed the day kicked off with Molly Holzschlag keynoting.  Unfortunately Molly suffered from an ear infection and wasn’t able to fly so she had a virtual keynote and a session later in the day.  I was working behind the scenes on various tasks so I was only able to drop in very briefly on the keynote and rest of the morning sessions.  Throughout the day I tried to grab at least 1 or 2 pics of each presenter.  See my album below for the full set of pics.      For lunch we ordered around 150 pizzas from Mellow Mushroom, a local pizza place (notice the theme of supporting local businesses.)  Early on we were concerned about Mellow Mushroom being able to supply that many pizzas and get them delivered (still hot) to the theater, but they did an excellent job day of the event.  I wish I had gotten some pictures of the old school VW van they delivered the pizza in, but I was just a bit busy running around trying to get theaters ready for lunch.  We had attendees from last year who specifically requested that we have Mellow Mushroom supply lunch this year and I’m glad everything worked out being able to use them again.     During the afternoon I was able to attend a few sessions and hear some great content from various speakers.  It was also nice to just sit down and get off my feet for a bit.  After the last sessions the day concluded with a raffle.  There were a few logistical and technical issues that hampered our ability to smoothly conduct the raffle.  To those of you that agree the raffle wasn’t the smoothest experience I would like to say that the Stir Trek planning committee has already begun meeting to discuss ways of improving the conference for next year.  We are also accepting feedback (both positive and negative) at the following link: click here.  If you don’t wish to use the Joind In site you can also email me directly and I’ll be sure to pass along the feedback.   Iron Man 2 Movie     Last but not least, what Stir Trek event would be complete without the feature movie.  This year’s movie was Iron Man 2.  The theater had some really cool props and promotions (see pic below) for the movie.  I really enjoyed Iron Man 2, but I would recommend brushing up on the Iron Man comics and Marvel’s plans for future movies to understand some of the plot elements that come up.  Also make sure you stay through to the end of the movie credits to see a sneak peak of something special, that’s all I’ll say. Conclusion     Again a big thanks goes out to all of the speakers, sponsors, attendees, movie theater staff, volunteers, and everyone else involved in making this event great.  Also big thanks to my fellow Stir Trek planning committee members: Jeff Blankenburg, Matt Casto, Carey Payette, Jody Morgan, Rick Kierner, and Sarah Dutkiewitcz.  I am grateful for everything I learned while helping plan this event and look forward to being involved again next year.  For those interested we are currently targeting Thor as our movie theme for 2011 and then The Avengers for 2012.  These are tentative based on release dates that could shift as we get closer, but for now look solid.   Photos Pics on Facebook (includes tagging)     Stir Trek: Iron Man Edition photos on Facebook Pics on Live site (higher res)      View Full Album         -Frog Out

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• SQLAuthority News – #SQLPASS 2012 Seattle Update – Memorylane 2009, 2010, 2011

  - by pinaldave

  Today is the first day of the SQLPASS 2012 and I will be soon posting SQL Server 2012 experience over here. Today when I landed in Seattle, I got the nostalgia feeling. I used to stay in the USA. I stayed here for more than 7 years – I studied here and I worked in USA. I had lots of friends in Seattle when I used to stay in the USA. I always wanted to visit Seattle because it is THE place. I remember once I purchased a ticket to travel to Seattle through Priceline (well it was the cheapest option and I was a student) but could not fly because of an interesting issue. I used to be Teaching Assistant of an advanced course and the professor asked me to build a pop-quiz for the course. I unfortunately had to cancel the trip. Before I returned to India – I pretty much covered every city existed in my list to must visit, except one – Seattle. It was so interesting that I never made it to Seattle even though I wanted to visit, when I was in USA. After that one time I never got a chance to travel to Seattle. After a few years I also returned to India for good. Once on Television I saw “Sleepless in Seattle” movie playing and I immediately changed the channel as it reminded me that I never made it to Seattle before. However, destiny has its own way to handle decisions. After I returned to India – I visited Seattle total of 5 times and this is my 6th visit to Seattle in less than 3 years. I was here for 3 previous SQLPASS events – 2009, 2010, and 2011 as well two Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Summit in 2009 and 2010. During these five trips I tried to catch up with all of my all friends but I realize that time has its own way of doing things. Many moved out of Seattle and many were too busy revive the old friendship but there were few who always make a point to meet me when I travel to the city. During the course of my visits I have made few fantastic new friends – Rick Morelan (Joes 2 Pros) and Greg Lynch. Every time I meet them I feel that I know them for years. I think city of Seattle has played very important part in our relationship that I got these fantastic friends. SQLPASS is the event where I find all of my SQL Friends and I look for this event for an entire year. This year’s my goal is to meet as many as new friends I can meet. If you are going to be at SQLPASS – FIND ME. I want to have a photo with you. I want to remember each name as I believe this is very important part of our life – making new friends and sustaining new friendship. Here are few of the pointers where you can find me. All Keynotes – Blogger’s Table Exhibition Booth Joes 2 Pros Booth #117 – Do not forget to stop by at the booth – I might have goodies for you – limited editions. Book Signing Events – Check details in tomorrow’s blog or stop by Booth #117 Evening Parties 6th Nov – Welcome Reception Evening Parties 7th Nov - Exhibitor Reception – Do not miss Booth #117 Evening Parties 8th Nov - Community Appreciation Party Additionally at few other locations – Embarcadero Booth In Coffee shops in Convention Center If you are SQLPASS – make sure that I find an opportunity to meet you at the event. Reserve a little time and lets have a coffee together. I will be continuously tweeting about my where about on twitter so let us stay connected on twitter. Here is my experience of my earlier experience of attending SQLPASS. SQLAuthority News – Book Signing Event – SQLPASS 2011 Event Log SQLAuthority News – Meeting SQL Friends – SQLPASS 2011 Event Log SQLAuthority News – Story of Seattle – SQLPASS 2011 Event Log SQLAuthority News – SQLPASS Nov 8-11, 2010-Seattle – An Alternative Look at Experience SQLAuthority News – Notes of Excellent Experience at SQL PASS 2009 Summit, Seattle Let us meet! Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com)   Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL PASS, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology

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• Record Screen Activity with CamStudio

  - by Asian Angel

  Sometimes a visual demonstration works much better than a list of instructions. If you need to make a demo video for family and/or friends then you might want to have a look at CamStudio. Using CamStudio To get properly set up you will need to install two different files (the main program followed by the codec). Once that is done you are ready to get started. When you start the program you will see a surprisingly small window. Notice the highlighted Record to text…it serves as a visual indicator for the video type selected for recording. Before you start creating a video it would be a good idea to look through some of the settings. The first one to look at is the region or area that you want to record. Next you will want to look through the video options since these will affect the quality and final size of your video files. The default setting for quality is 70…adjust that to the level that best suits your needs. Note: For our example we maxed out the various video settings for best quality. On our system Microsoft Video 1 was listed as the default compressor but as you can see there were other options available. You can configure the settings for the compressor you want to use if desired. Keep in mind that each compressor will have unique settings of their own, so if you change it, be certain to go back and check. We decided to use the CamStudio Lossless Codec for our example (it gave the best results while trying the software). Going back to the main window you can toggle back and forth between .avi and .swf output using the last button. Once you are satisfied with the settings click on the red record button to start. If you need to pause while recording or stop recording click on the system tray icon and select the appropriate command. When you are finished recording, you will be presented with the save file window. Browse for the desired save location and name your new file. Once you have saved the file the movie player window will automatically open so that you view your new video. Our sample video shown here is at 50% of original size so may look slightly “gritty”. The detail was much better at 100%. If you decide to record and save as .swf the process will be identical to recording in .avi format until the movie player window opens. At that time the conversion process from .avi to .swf will begin. When complete you will have a new flash video and html file that goes with it. Depending on which browser you have set as default, you may run into a small problem when the preview for your new .swf file tries to open. There is a small bug in the generated html file. You can use this work-around or… Just open the .swf file directly in your favorite browser. Conclusion CamStudio may not produce the highest quality videos, but it’s free and does a very nice job nonetheless. If you are working on a tight budget or only need to make an occasional video then CamStudio is a very sensible choice. Links Download CamStudio Stable Version & CamStudio Codec *Download links are approximately half-way down the page. Download CamStudio Stable Version & CamStudio Codec at SourceForge *Beta version also available here. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Get the Classic Style Network Activity Indicator Back in Windows 7How To Copy a DVD with VLC 1.0ALLCapture 3.0 [Review]Listen and Record Over 12,000 Online Radio Stations with RadioSureGeek Reviews: Play And Record Internet Radio With Screamer Radio TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 TimeToMeet is a Simple Online Meeting Planning Tool Easily Create More Bookmark Toolbars in Firefox Filevo is a Cool File Hosting & Sharing Site Get a free copy of WinUtilities Pro 2010 World Cup Schedule Boot Snooze – Reboot and then Standby or Hibernate

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• SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #006

  - by pinaldave

  Here is the list of selected articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2006 This was my very first year of blogging so I was every day learning something new. As I have said many times, that blogging was never an intention. I had really not understood what exactly I am working on or beginning when I was beginning blogging in 2006. I had never knew that my life was going to change forever, once I started blogging. When I look back all of this year, I am happy that we are here together. 2007 IT Outsourcing to India – Top 10 Reasons Companies Outsource Outsourcing is about trust, collaboration and success. Helping other countries in need has been always the course of mankind, outsourcing is nothing different then that. With information technology and process improvements increasing the complexity, costs and skills required to accomplish routine tasks as well as challenging complex tasks, companies are outsourcing such tasks to providers who have the expertise to perform them at lower costs , with greater value and quality outcome. UDF – Remove Duplicate Chars From String This was a very interesting function I wrote in my early career. I am still using this function when I have to remove duplicate chars from strings. I have yet to come across a scenario where it does not work so I keep on using it till today. Please leave a comment if there is any better solution to this problem. FIX : Error : 3702 Cannot drop database because it is currently in use This is a very generic error when DROP Database is command is executed and the database is not dropped. The common mistake user is kept the connection open with this database and trying to drop the database. The database cannot be dropped if there is any other connection open along with it. It is always a good idea to take database in single user mode before dropping it. Here is the quick tutorial regarding how to bring the database in single user mode: Using T-SQL | Using SSMS. 2008 Install SQL Server 2008 – How to Upgrade to SQL Server 2008 – Installation Tutorial This was indeed one of the most popular articles in SQL Server 2008. Lots of people wanted to learn how to install SQL SErver 2008 but they were facing various issues while installation. I build this tutorial which becomes reference points for many. Default Collation of SQL Server 2008 What is the collation of SQL Server 2008 default installations? I often see this question confusing many experienced developers as well. Well the answer is in following image. Ahmedabad SQL Server User Group Meeting – November 2008 User group meetings are fun, now a days I am going to User Group meetings every week but there was a case when I have been just a beginner on this subject. The bug of the community was caught on me years ago when I started to present in Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar SQ LServer User Groups. 2009 Validate an XML document in TSQL using XSD My friend Jacob Sebastian wrote an excellent article on the subject XML and XSD. Because of the ‘eXtensible’ nature of XML (eXtensible Markup Language), often there is a requirement to restrict and validate the content of an XML document to a pre-defined structure and values. XSD (XML Schema Definition Language) is the W3C recommended language for describing and validating XML documents. SQL Server implements XSD as XML Schema Collections. Star Join Query Optimization At present, when queries are sent to very large databases, millions of rows are returned. Also the users have to go through extended query response times when joining multiple tables are involved with such queries. ‘Star Join Query Optimization’ is a new feature of SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition. This mechanism uses bitmap filtering for improving the performance of some types of queries by the effective retrieval of rows from fact tables. 2010 These puzzles are very interesting and intriguing – there was lots of interest on this subject. If you have free time this weekend. You may want to try them out. SQL SERVER – Challenge – Puzzle – Usage of FAST Hint (Solution)  SQL SERVER – Puzzle – Challenge – Error While Converting Money to Decimal (Solution)  SQL SERVER – Challenge – Puzzle – Why does RIGHT JOIN Exists (Open)  Additionally, I had great fun presenting SQL Server Performance Tuning seminar at fantastic locations in Hyderabad. Installing AdventeWorks Database This has been the most popular request I have received on my blog. Here is the quick video about how one can install AdventureWorks. 2011 Effect of SET NOCOUNT on @@ROWCOUNT There was an interesting incident once while I was presenting a session. I wrote a code and suddenly 10 hands went up in the air.  This was a bit surprise to me as I do not know why they all got alerted. I assumed that there should be something wrong with either project, screen or my display. However the real reason was very interesting – I suggest you read the complete blog post to understand this interesting scenario. Error: Deleting Offline Database and Creating the Same Name This is very interesting because once a user deletes the offline database the MDF and LDF file still exists and if the user attempts to create a new database with the same name it will give error. I found this very interesting and the blog explains the concept very quickly. Have you ever faced a similar situation? Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

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

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• How do I prove or disprove "god" objects are wrong?

  - by honestduane

  Problem Summary: Long story short, I inherited a code base and an development team I am not allowed to replace and the use of God Objects is a big issue. Going forward, I want to have us re-factor things but I am getting push-back from the teams who want to do everything with God Objects "because its easier" and this means I would not be allowed to re-factor. I pushed back citing my years of dev experience, that I'm the new boss who was hired to know these things, etc, and so did the third party offshore companies account sales rep, and this is now at the executive level and my meeting is tomorrow and I want to go in with a lot of technical ammo to advocate best practices because I feel it will be cheaper in the long run (And I personally feel that is what the third party is worried about) for the company. My issue is from a technical level, I know its good long term but I'm having trouble with the ultra short term and 6 months term, and while its something I "know" I cant prove it with references and cited resources outside of one person (Robert C. Martin, aka Uncle Bob), as that is what I am being asked to do as I have been told having data from one person and only one person (Robert C Martin) is not good enough of an argument. Question: What are some resources I can cite directly (Title, year published, page number, quote) by well known experts in the field that explicitly say this use of "God" Objects/Classes/Systems is bad (or good, since we are looking for the most technically valid solution)? Research I have already done: I have a number of books here and I have searched their indexes for the use of the words "god object" and "god class". I found that oddly its almost never used and the copy of the GoF book I have for example, never uses it (At least according to the index in front of me) but I have found it in 2 books per the below, but I want more I can use. I checked the Wikipedia page for "God Object" and its currently a stub with little reference links so although I personally agree with that it says, It doesn't have much I can use in an environment where personal experience is not considered valid. The book cited is also considered too old to be valid by the people I am debating these technical points with as the argument they are making is that "it was once thought to be bad but nobody could prove it, and now modern software says "god" objects are good to use". I personally believe that this statement is incorrect, but I want to prove the truth, whatever it is. In Robert C Martin's "Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C#" (ISBN: 0-13-185725-8, hardcover) where on page 266 it states "Everybody knows that god classes are a bad idea. We don't want to concentrate all the intelligence of a system into a single object or a single function. One of the goals of OOD is the partitioning and distribution of behavior into many classes and many function." -- And then goes on to say sometimes its better to use God Classes anyway sometimes (Citing micro-controllers as an example). In Robert C Martin's "Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship" page 136 (And only this page) talks about the "God class" and calls it out as a prime example of a violation of the "classes should be small" rule he uses to promote the Single Responsibility Principle" starting on on page 138. The problem I have is all my references and citations come from the same person (Robert C. Martin), and am from the same single person/source. I am being told that because he is just one guy, my desire to not use "God Classes" is invalid and not accepted as a standard best practice in the software industry. Is this true? Am I doing things wrong from a technical perspective by trying to keep to the teaching of Uncle Bob? God Objects and Object Oriented Programming and Design: The more I think of this the more I think this is more something you learn when you study OOP and its never explicitly called out; Its implicit to good design is my thinking (Feel free to correct me, please, as I want to learn), The problem is I "know" this, but but not everybody does, so in this case its not considered a valid argument because I am effectively calling it out as universal truth when in fact most people are statistically ignorant of it since statistically most people are not programmers. Conclusion: I am at a loss on what to search for to get the best additional results to cite, since they are making a technical claim and I want to know the truth and be able to prove it with citations like a real engineer/scientist, even if I am biased against god objects due to my personal experience with code that used them. Any assistance or citations would be deeply appreciated.

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

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

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

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• Amanda Todd&ndash;What Parents Can Learn From Her Story

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  Amanda Todd was a bullied teenager who committed suicide this week. Her story has become headline news due in part to her You Tube video she posted telling her story:   The story is heartbreaking for so many reasons, but I wanted to talk about what we as parents can learn from this. Being the dad to two girls, one that’s 10, I’m very aware of the dangers that the internet holds. When I saw her story, one thing jumped out at me – unmonitored internet access at an early age. My daughter (then 9) came home from a friends place once and asked if she could be in a YouTube video with her friend. Apparently this friend was allowed to do whatever she wanted on the internet, including posting goofy videos. This set off warning bells and we ensured our daughter realized the dangers and that she was not to ever post videos of herself. In looking at Amanda’s story, the access to unmonitored internet time along with just being a young girl and being flattered by an online predator were the key events that ultimately led to her suicide. Yes, the reaction of her classmates and “friends” was horrible as well, I’m not diluting that. But our youth don’t fully understand yet that what they do on the internet today will follow them potentially forever. And the people they meet online aren’t necessarily who they claim to be. So what can we as parents learn from Amanda’s story? Parents Shouldn’t Feel Bad About Being Internet Police Our job as parents is in part to protect our kids and keep them safe, even if they don’t like our measures. This includes monitoring, supervising, and restricting their internet activities. In our house we have a family computer in the living room that the kids can watch videos and surf the web. It’s in plain view of everyone, so you can’t hide what you’re looking at. If our daughter goes to a friend’s place, we ask about what they did and what they played. If the computer comes up, we ask about what they did on it. Luckily our daughter is very up front and honest in telling us things, so we have very open discussions. Parents Need to Be Honest About the Dangers of the Internet I’m sure every generation says that “kids grow up so fast these days”, but in our case the internet really does push our kids to be exposed to things they otherwise wouldn’t experience. One wrong word in a Google search, a click of a link in a spam email, or just general curiosity can expose a child to things they aren’t ready for or should never be exposed to (and I’m not just talking about adult material – have you seen some of the graphic pictures from war zones posted on news sites recently?). Our stance as parents has been to be open about discussing the dangers with our kids before they encounter any content – be proactive instead of reactionary. Part of this is alerting them to the monsters that lurk on the internet as well. As kids explore the world wide web, they’re eventually going to encounter some chat room or some Facebook friend invite or other personal connection with someone. More than ever kids need to be educated on the dangers of engaging with people online and sharing personal information. You can think of it as an evolved discussion that our parents had with us about using the phone: “Don’t say ‘I’m home alone’, don’t say when mom or dad get home, don’t tell them any information, etc.” Parents Need to Talk Self Worth at Home Katie makes the point better than I ever could (one bad word towards the end): Our children need to understand their value beyond what the latest issue of TigerBeat says, or the media who continues flaunting physical attributes over intelligence and character, or a society that puts focus on status and wealth. They also have to realize that just because someone pays you a compliment, that doesn’t mean you should ignore personal boundaries and limits. What does this have to do with the internet? Well, in days past if you wanted to be social you had to go out somewhere. Now you can video chat with any number of people from the comfort of wherever your laptop happens to be – and not just text but full HD video with sound! While innocent children head online in the hopes of meeting cool people, predators with bad intentions are heading online too. As much as we try to monitor their online activity and be honest about the dangers of the internet, the human side of our kids isn’t something we can control. But we can try to influence them to see themselves as not needing to search out the acceptance of complete strangers online. Way easier said than done, but ensuring self-worth is something discussed, encouraged, and celebrated is a step in the right direction. Parental Wake Up Call This post is not a critique of Amanda’s parents. The reality is that cyber bullying/abuse is happening every day, and there are millions of parents that have no clue its happening to their children. Amanda’s story is a wake up call that our children’s online activities may be putting them in danger. My heart goes out to the parents of this girl. As a father of daughters, I can’t imagine what I would do if I found my daughter having to hide in a ditch to avoid a mob or call 911 to report my daughter had attempted suicide by drinking bleach or deal with a child turning to drugs/alcohol/cutting to cope. It would be horrendous if we as parents didn’t re-evaluate our family internet policies in light of this event. And in the end, Amanda’s video was meant to bring attention to her plight and encourage others going through the same thing. We may not be kids, but we can still honour her memory by helping safeguard our children.

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• Employee Engagement Q&A with John Brunswick

  - by Kellsey Ruppel

  As we are focusing this week on Employee Engagement, I recently sat down with industry expert and thought leader John Brunswick on the topic. Here is the Q&A dialogue we shared.  Q: How do you effectively engage employees to drive business value?A: Motivation, both extrinsic and intrinsic, combined with the relevancy of various channels to support it.  Beyond chaining business strategies like compensation models within an organization, engagement ultimately is most successful when driven by employee's motivations.  Business value derived from engagement through technical capabilities can be objectively measured through metrics like the rate and accuracy of problem solving for a given business function or frequency of innovation created.  Providing employees performing "knowledge work" with capabilities that allow them to perform work with a higher degree of accuracy in the same or ideally less time, adds value for that individual and in turn, drives their level of engagement to drive business value. Q: Organizations with high levels of employee engagement outperform the total stock market index by 22%. Can you comment on why you think this might be? A: Alignment through shared purpose.  Zappos is an excellent example of a culture that arguably has higher than average levels of employee engagement and it permeates every aspect of their organization – embodied externally through their customer experience.  I recently made my first purchase with them and it was obvious through their web experience, visual design, communication style, customer service and attention to detail down to green packaging, that they have an amazingly strong shared purpose.  The Zappos.com ‘About page’ outlines their "Family Core Values", the first three being "Deliver WOW Through Service, Embrace and Drive Change & Create Fun and A Little Weirdness" – all reflected externally in my interaction with them.  Strong shared purpose enables higher product and service experience, equating to a dedicated customer base, repeat purchases and expanded marketshare. Q: Have you seen any trends in the market regarding employee engagement? A: Some companies now see offering a form of social engagement similar to Facebook and LinkedIn as standard communication infrastructure like email or instant messaging.  Originally offered as standalone tools, the value is now seen when these capabilities are offered in an integrated fashion in the context of business entities.  An emerging area of focus is around employee activities related to their organization on external social platforms, implicitly creating external communities with employees acting on behalf of the brand and interacting with each other (e.g. Twitter).  Companies have reached a formal understand that this now established communication medium requires strategies allowing employees to engage.  I have personally met colleagues from Oracle, like Oracle User Experience Director Ultan O'Broin (@ultan), via Twitter before meeting first through internal channels. Q: Employee engagement is important, but what about engaging customers and partners? A: The last few years we have witnessed an interesting evolution from the novelty of self-service to expectations of "intelligent" self-service.  From a consumer standpoint, engagement can end up being a key differentiator, especially in mature markets.  Customers that perform some level of interaction with a brand develop greater affinity for the brand and have a greater probability of acting as an advocate.  As organizations move toward a model of deeper engagement, they must ensure that their business is positioned to support deeper relationships, offering potentially greater transparency. From a partner standpoint greater engagement can lead to new types of business opportunities, much in the way that Amazon.com offers a unified shopping experience that can potentially span various vendors.  This same model can be extended to blending services and product delivery models, based on a closeness not easily possible before increased capability of engagement mechanisms. Q: What types of solutions are available to successfully deliver employee engagement? A: Solutions enabling higher levels of engagement do so on the basis of relevancy.  This relevancy is generally supported by aspects of content management, social collaboration, business intelligence, portal and process management technologies.  These technologies can help deliver an experience tailored to a given role or process within an organization that applies equally to work that is structured or unstructured, appearing in the form of functionality as simple as an online employee directory search, knowledge communities supported by social collaboration, as well as more feature rich business intelligence dashboards and portals. Looking to learn more about how to effectively engage your employees? Check out this webcast, or read more from John Brunswick. 

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• Interview with Geoff Bones, developer on SQL Storage Compress

  - by red(at)work

  How did you come to be working at Red Gate? I've been working at Red Gate for nine months; before that I had been at a multinational engineering company. A number of my colleagues had left to work at Red Gate and spoke very highly of it, but I was happy in my role and thought, 'It can't be that great there, surely? They'll be back!' Then one day I visited to catch up them over lunch in the Red Gate canteen. I was so impressed with what I found there, that, three days later, I'd applied for a role as a developer. And how did you get into software development? My first job out of university was working as a systems programmer on IBM mainframes. This was quite a while ago: there was a lot of assembler and loading programs from tape drives and that kind of stuff. I learned a lot about how computers work, and this stood me in good stead when I moved over the development in the 90s. What's the best thing about working as a developer at Red Gate? Where should I start? One of the great things as a developer at Red Gate is the useful feedback and close contact we have with the people who use our products, either directly at trade shows and other events or through information coming through the product managers. The company's whole ethos is built around assisting the user, and this is in big contrast to my previous development roles. We aim to produce tools that people really want to use, that they enjoy using, and, as a developer, this is a great thing to aim for and a great feeling when we get it right. At Red Gate we also try to cut out the things that distract and stop us doing our jobs. As a developer, this means that I can focus on the code and the product I'm working on, knowing that others are doing a first-class job of making sure that the builds are running smoothly and that I'm getting great feedback from the testers. We keep our process light and effective, as we want to produce great software more than we want to produce great audit trails. Tell us a bit about the products you are currently working on. You mean HyperBac? First let me explain a bit about what HyperBac is. At heart it's a compression and encryption technology, but with a few added features that open up a wealth of really exciting possibilities. Right now we have the HyperBac technology in just three products: SQL HyperBac, SQL Virtual Restore and SQL Storage Compress, but we're only starting to develop what it can do. My personal favourite is SQL Virtual Restore; for example, I love the way you can use it to run independent test databases that are all backed by a single compressed backup. I don't think the market yet realises the kind of things you do once you are using these products. On the other hand, the benefits of SQL Storage Compress are straightforward: run your databases but use only 20% of the disk space. Databases are getting larger and larger, and, as they do, so does your ROI. What's a typical day for you? My days are pretty varied. We have our daily team stand-up meeting and then sometimes I will work alone on a current issue, or I'll be pair programming with one of my colleagues. From time to time we give half a day up to future planning with the team, when we look at the long and short term aims for the product and working out the development priorities. I also get to go to conferences and events, which is unusual for a development role and gives me the chance to meet and talk to our customers directly. Have you noticed anything different about developing tools for DBAs rather than other IT kinds of user? It seems to me that DBAs are quite independent minded; they know exactly what the problem they are facing is, and often have a solution in mind before they begin to look for what's on the market. This means that they're likely to cherry-pick tools from a range of vendors, picking the ones that are the best fit for them and that disrupt their environments the least. When I've met with DBAs, I've often been very impressed at their ability to summarise their set up, the issues, the obstacles they face when implementing a tool and their plans for their environment. It's easier to develop products for this audience as they give such a detailed overview of their needs, and I feel I understand their problems.

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• Deep in the Heart of Texas

  - by Applications User Experience

  Author: Erika Webb, Manager, Fusion Applications UX User Assistance When I was first working in the usability field, the only way I could consider conducting a usability study was to bring a potential user to a lab environment where I could show them whatever I was interested in learning more about and ask them questions. While I hate to reveal just how long I have been working in this field, let's just say that pads of paper and a stopwatch were key tools for any test I conducted. Over the years, I have worked in simple labs with basic video taping equipment and not much else, and I have worked in corporate environments with sophisticated usability labs and state-of-the-art equipment. Years ago, we conducted all usability studies at the location of the user. If we wanted to see if there were any differences between users in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, we went to those places to run the test. A lab environment is very useful for many test situations. However, there has always been a debate in the usability field about whether bringing someone into a lab environment, however friendly we make it, somehow intrinsically changes the behavior of the user as compared to having them work in their own environment, at their own desk, and on their own computer. We developed systems to create a portable usability lab, so that we could go to the users that we needed to test.  Do lab environments change user behavior patterns? Then 9/11 hit. You may not remember, but no planes flew for weeks afterwards. Companies all over the world couldn't fly-in employees for meetings. Suddenly, traveling to the location of the users had an additional difficulty. The company I was working for at the time had usability specialists stuck in New York for days before they could finally rent a car and drive home to Colorado. This changed the world pretty suddenly, and technology jumped on the change. Companies offering Internet meeting tools were strugglinguntil no one could travel. The Internet boomed with collaboration tools that enabled people to work together wherever they happened to be. This change in technology has made a huge difference in my world. We use collaborative tools to bring our product concepts and ideas to the user across the Internet. As a global company, we benefit from having users from all over the world inform our designs. We now run usability studies with users all over the world in a single day, a feat we couldn't have accomplished 10 years ago by plane! Other technology companies have started to do more of this type of usability testing, since the tools have improved so dramatically. Plus, in our busy world, it's not always easy to find users who can take the time away from their jobs to come to our labs. reaching users where it is convenient for them greatly improves the odds that people do participate. I manage a team of usability specialists who live in India and California, whlie I live in Colorado. We have wonderful labs that we bring users into to show them our products. But very often, we run our studies remotely. We used to take the lab to the users now we use the labs, but we let the users stay where they are. We gain users who might not have been able to leave work to come to our labs, and they get to use the system they are familiar with. And we gain users nearly anywhere that we can set up an Internet connection, as long as the users have a phone, a broadband connection, and a compatible Web browser (with no pop-up blockers). After we recruit participants in a traditional manner, we send them an invitation to participate through the use of a telephone conference call and Web conferencing tool. At Oracle, we use Oracle Web Conference part of Oracle Collaboration Suite, which enables us to give the user control of the mouse, while we present a prototype or wireframe pictures. We can record the sessions over the Web and phone conference. We send the users instructions, plus tips to ensure that we won't have problems sharing screens. In some cases, when time is tight, we even run a five-minute "test session" with users a day in advance to be sure that we can connect. Prior to the test, we send users a participant script that contains information about the study, including any questionnaires. This is exactly the same script we give to participants who come to the labs. We ask users to print this before the beginning of the session. We generally run these studies by having a usability engineer in our usability labs, so that we can record the session as though the user were in the lab with us. Roughly 80% of our application software usability testing at Oracle is performed using remote methods. The probability of getting a   remote test participant decreases the higher up the person is in the target organization. We have a methodology checklist available to help our usability engineers work through the remote processes.

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• PASS: Board Q&amp;A at the Summit

  - by Bill Graziano

  The last two years we’ve put the Board in front of the members and taken questions.  We’re going to do that again this year.  It will be in Room 307/308 from 12:15 to 1:30 on Friday. Yes, this time overlaps with the Birds of a Feather Lunch and the start of afternoon sessions – but only partially.  You can attend the Q&A and still get to parts of both of those.  There just isn’t a great time to do this.  Every time overlaps with something. We can’t do it after the last session on Friday.  We can’t fit it between the last session and the evening events on Wednesday or Thursday.  We had some discussion around breakfast time but I didn’t think that was realistic.  This is the least bad time we could come up with. Last year we had 60-70 people attend.  These are the items that were specific things that I could work on: The first question was whether to increase transparency around individual votes of Board members.  We approved this at the Board meeting the following day.  The only caveat was that if the Board is given confidential information as a basis for their vote then we may not be able to disclose individual votes.  Putting a Director in a position where they can’t publicly defend the reason for their vote is a difficult situation.  Thanks Kendal! Can we have a Board member discretionary fund?  As background, I took a couple of people to lunch so we could have a quiet place to talk.  I bought lunch but wasn’t able to expense it back to PASS.  We just don’t have a budget item for things like this.  I think we should.  I would guess the entire Board would like it also.  It was in an earlier version of the budget but came out as part of a cost-cutting move to balance the budget.  I’d like to see it added back in but we’ll have to see. I know there were a comments about the elections.  At this point we had created the Election Review Committee.  I’ve already written at length about this process. Where does IT work go?  PASS started to publish our internal management reports starting in December 2010.  You can find them on our Governance page.  These aren’t filtered at all and include a variety of information about IT projects.  The most recent update had roughly a page of updates related to IT.  Lots of the work was related to Summit and the Orator tool that we use to manage speaker submissions. There were numerous requests that Tina Turner not be repeated.  Done.  I don’t think we’ll do anything quite like that again.  We had a request for a payment plan for Summit.  We looked into this briefly but didn’t take any action.  We didn’t think the effort was worth the small number of people that would use it.  If you disagree, submit this on our Summit Feedback site and get some votes. There were lots of suggestions around the first-timers events – especially from first timers.  You can find all our current activities related to first-timers at the First Timers page on the Summit web site.  Plus links to 34 (!) blog posts on suggestions for first-timers.  And a big THANK YOU to Confio and Red Gate for sponsoring this. I hope you get the chance to attend.  These events are very helpful to me as a Board member.  I like being able to look around the room as comments are being made and see the audience reaction.  It helps me gauge the interest in an idea. I’d also like to direct you to the Summit Feedback site.  You can submit and vote on ideas to make the Summit a better experience.  As of right now we have the suggestions from last year still up.  We may reset these prior to the Summit though.

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• Java EE and GlassFish Server Roadmap Update

  - by John Clingan

  2013 has been a stellar year for both the Java EE and GlassFish Server communities. On June 12, Oracle and its partners announced the release of Java EE 7, which delivers on three major themes – HTML5, developer productivity, and meeting enterprise demands. The online event attracted over 10,000 views in the first two days! During the online event, Oracle also announced the availability of GlassFish Server Open Source Edition 4, the world's first Java EE 7 compatible application server. The primary role of GlassFish Server Open Source Edition has been, and continues to be, driving adoption of the latest release of the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition. Oracle also announced the Java EE 7 SDK, which bundles GlassFish Server Open Source Edition 4, as a Java EE 7 learning aid. Last, Oracle publicly announced the Java EE 7 reference implementation based on GlassFish Server Open Source Edition 4. Java EE is a popular platform, as evidenced by the 20+ Java EE 6 compatible implementations available to choose from. After the launch of Java EE 7 and GlassFish Server Open Source Edition 4, we began planning the Java EE 8 roadmap, which was covered during the JavaOne Strategy Keynote. To summarize, there is a lot of interest in improving on HTML5 support, Cloud, and investigating NoSQL support. We received a lot of great feedback from the community and customers on what they would like to see in Java EE 8. As we approached JavaOne 2013, we started planning the GlassFish Server roadmap. What we announced at JavaOne was that GlassFish Server Open Source Edition 4.1 is scheduled for 2014. Here is an update to that roadmap. GlassFish Server Open Source Edition 4.1 is scheduled for 2014 We are planning updates as needed to GlassFish Server Open Source Edition, which is commercially unsupported As we head towards Java EE 8: The trunk will eventually transition to GlassFish Server Open Source Edition 5 as a Java EE 8 implementation The Java EE 8 Reference Implementation will be derived from GlassFish Server Open Source Edition 5. This replicates what has been done in past Java EE and GlassFish Server releases. Oracle will no longer release future major releases of Oracle GlassFish Server with commercial support – specifically Oracle GlassFish Server 4.x with commercial Java EE 7 support will not be released. Commercial Java EE 7 support will be provided from WebLogic Server. Oracle GlassFish Server will not be releasing a 4.x commercial version Expanding on that last bullet, new and existing Oracle GlassFish Server 2.1.x and 3.1.x commercial customers will continue to be supported according to the Oracle Lifetime Support Policy. Oracle recommends that existing commercial Oracle GlassFish Server customers begin planning to move to Oracle WebLogic Server, which is a natural technical and license migration path forward: Applications developed to Java EE standards can be deployed to both GlassFish Server and Oracle WebLogic Server GlassFish Server and Oracle WebLogic Server have implementation-specific deployment descriptor interoperability (here and here). GlassFish Server 3.x and Oracle WebLogic Server share quite a bit of code, so there are quite a bit of configuration and (extended) feature similarities. Shared code includes JPA, JAX-RS, WebSockets (pre JSR 356 in both cases), CDI, Bean Validation, JAX-WS, JAXB, and WS-AT. Both Oracle GlassFish Server 3.x and Oracle WebLogic Server 12c support Oracle Access Manager, Oracle Coherence, Oracle Directory Server, Oracle Virtual Directory, Oracle Database, Oracle Enterprise Manager and are entitled to support for the underlying Oracle JDK. To summarize, Oracle is committed to the future of Java EE.  Java EE 7 has been released and planning for Java EE 8 has begun. GlassFish Server Open Source Edition continues to be the strategic foundation for Java EE reference implementation going forward. And for developers, updates will be delivered as needed to continue to deliver a great developer experience for GlassFish Server Open Source Edition. We are planning for GlassFish Server Open Source Edition 5 as the foundation for the Java EE 8 reference implementation, as well as bundling GlassFish Server Open Source Edition 5 in a Java EE 8 SDK, which is the most popular distribution of GlassFish. This will allow GlassFish releases to be more focused on the Java EE platform and community-driven requirements. We continue to encourage community contributions, bug reports, participation on the GlassFish forum, etc. Going forward, Oracle WebLogic Server will be the single strategic commercially supported application server from Oracle. Disclaimer: The preceding is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract.It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.

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• Day 1 - Finding Like Minds

  - by dapostolov

  So, is being a Game Developer any different from being an IT Developer? I picture a poorly lit environment where I get to purchase my own desk lamp; I'm thinking one of those huge lava lamps that pump out so much heat you could fry an egg on it. To my right: a "great wall" of empty coke cans dwarf me. Eating my last slice of pizza I look across my desk to see a fellow developer with a smug look on his face;  he's just coded his latest module for the game and it looks like he's in nirvana. My duty, of course, is to remind him to keep focused on the job at hand. So, picking up my trusty elastic and aerodynamically crafted paper bullet I begin a 10 minute war of welts and laughter which is promptly abrupted by our Project Manager demanding more details from our morning Scrum meeting. After providing about 5 minutes of geek speak and several words of comfort to make his eyes glaze over...it hits me, the idea for the module...beckoning my developer friend over, we quickly shoo the Project Manager away and begin our brainstorming frenzy ... now, where'd I put that full can of coke? OK. OK. This isn't probably the most ideal game developer environment, but it definitely sounds fun to me...and from what I gather is nothing like most game development companies. But I'm not doing this blog series to "go pro"; like I stated in my first post I want to make a 2D game from an idea my best friend and I drummed up long, long ago. I'm in this for the passion AND I want to see how easy it is for us .Net Developers to create a game. So where do I start? Where can I find like minded individuals? What technologies are there? What do I need to make a video game? The questions are endless....AND...since I already have an idea ... lets start with ... Technology (yes, I'm a geek, live with it...) Technology OK. Predominantly, games are still made in C++ or even C. I'm not sure how much assembly code is floating around lately, however, that is not my concern. I do know C / C++ from my past, enough to even get me by, but I'm mainly interested in a recent, not-so-new, technology called XNA. What is XNA? XNA allows us .Net Developers to make 2D / 3D games for windows, Xbox*, and Windows Mobile 7*. * = for a nominal fee *cough* The following link is your one stop shop to XNA game development: http://creators.xna.com/en-US/education/gettingstarted The above site hosts information such as: - getting started - a sample/instructional shooter game in 2D / 3D with code (if I'm taking too long for you in this blog series) - downloads - starter kits... http://creators.xna.com/en-US/education/starterkits/ And of course...forums. You can also subscribe and pay for their premium membership which gets you some pretty awesome tutorials, resources, downloads, and premium community support. Some general Wiki information about XNA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNA_%28Microsoft%29 Community Support OK. Let's move on to industry and community support. Apart from XNA, there are some really cool sites out there, I just haven't found all of them yet. However, I found a really cool Game Development website called Gamastura. You can click on the following link to get you there: http://www.gamasutra.com/ The site is 100% dedicated to "The Art & Business of Making Games". Armed with blogs, twitter, jobs/resumes and most importantly industry news; one could subscribe to the feed and got lost in the wealth of information it provides. On a side note: I remember Gamasutra being around when my best friend and I wanted to make a video game...meaning, they've been around for a while now. I think the most beneficial aspect of this site is to understand the industry you want to get into. Otherwise, it's just a cool site to keep up to date with the industry in general. Another Community Support option is LinkedIn. Amongst the land of extremely bloated achievements and responsibilities lay 3 groups (that I have found) that deal with game development.: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=59205 - Game Developers http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=824817 - DirectX Game Developer Network http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=756587 - DirectX Developers The Game Developers group in LinkedIn is by far the most active of the three and could possibly provide a wealth of support. What I've done thus far: - I lightly researched the XNA technology - I looked around for some community sites to assist me - I downloaded the XNA Game Studio 3.1 on my PC and installed it on my IDE - I even tried both tutorials! http://creators.xna.com/en-US/education/gettingstarted/bgintro/chapter1   Best Regards D.

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• Walmart and Fusion Apps

  - by ultan o'broin

  Photograph: Misha Vaughan I attended Fusion Apps (yes, I know I am supposed to say "Oracle Fusion Applications", but stuffy old style guides are a turn-off in interwebs conversations) User Experience Advocate (FXA) training in Long Beach, California last week; a suitable location as ODTUG KSCOPE 11 was kicking off and key players were in the area. As a member of Oracle's Apps-UX team I know the Fusion Apps messaging, natch, and done some other Fusion Apps go-to-market content work too. For the messaging details themselves, see Lonneke Dikmans (@lonnekedikmans) great blog, by the way. However, I wanted some 'formal' training combined with the opportunity to meet and learn from people already out there delivering those messages. The idea in me reaching out to Misha Vaughan, Apps-UX FXA maven, to get me onto this training was that in addition to my UX knowledge, I could leverage my location in EMEA and hit up customer events more quickly and easily. Those local user groups do like to hear the voice of locals too you know (so I need to work on that mid-Atlantic accent). I'm looking forward to such opportunities. The training was all smashing stuff, just the right level of detail, delivered professionally and with great style and humor. I was especially honored to be paired off for my er, coaching with Debra Lilley (@debralilley), who shared with everyone all kinds of tips and insights from her experiences of delivering the message and demo. For me, that was the real power of the FXA event--the communal, conversational aspect--the meeting up with people who had done all this for real, the sharing in their experiences, while learning along with other newbies. Sorry, but that all-important social aspect doesn't work so well with remote meetings. Katie Candland (Apps-UX) gave us a great tour of the Fusion Apps demo and included some useful presentational tips too (any excuse to buy that iPad). It's clear to me that the Fusion Apps messaging and demos really come alive with real-world examples that local application users will recognize, and I picked up some "yes, that's my job made easier" scene-stealers from Debra and Karen Brownfield too, to add to the great ones already provided. This power of examples shouldn't surprise anyone, they've long been a mainstay of applications user assistance, popular with users. We'll offer customers different types of example topics in the Fusion Apps online help too (stay tuned), and we know from research how important those 3S's (stories, scenarios, and simulations) are to users when they consume and apply information. Well, we've got the simulation, now it's time for more stories and scenarios. If you get a chance to participate in an FXA event (whether you are an Oracle employee or otherwise), I'd encourage it. It's committing your time and energy for sure, but I got real bang for the buck from it for my everyday job too. Listening to the room's feedback on the application demo really brought our internal design work to life, and I picked up on some things that I need to follow up on (like how you alphabetically sort stuff in other languages). User experience is after all, about users. What will I be doing next, and what would I like to see happen? Obviously, I need to develop my story-telling links with the people I met in Long Beach and do some practicing with the materials, and then get out there and deliver them at a suitable location. The demo is what it is right now, and that's a super-rich demo that I know everyone will want to see and ask questions about. Then, as mentioned by attendees at the FXA event, follow up on those translated and localized messages for EMEA (and APAC), that deal with different statutory or reporting requirements of the target markets. Given my background I would say that, wouldn't I? However, language is part of the UX, and international revenue is greater than US-only revenue for Oracle, so yes dear, we all need to get over the fact that enterprise apps users don't all speak, or want to speak, American-English. Most importantly perhaps, the continued development of a strong messaging community between Oracle and partners and customers where we can swap and share those FXA messaging stories and scenarios about Fusion Apps in a conversational way. The more the better, a combination of online and face-to-face meetings. I must also mention the great dinner after the event at Parker's Lighthouse, and the fun myself and Andrew Gilmour (Apps-UX) had at our end of the table talking about just about everything except Fusion Apps with Ronald Van Luttikhuizen and Ben Prusinski (who now understands the difference between Cork and Dublin people. I hope). Thanks to all the Apps-UXers who helped bring the FXA training to town, and to Debra and all the others that I am too jetlagged to mention right who were instrumental in making it happen for me. Here's to the next one. And the Walmart angle? That was me doing my Robert Scoble (ScO'bilizer?)-style guerilla smart phone research in Walmart in Long Beach, before the FXA event. It's all about stories for me. You can read more about it on the appslab blog (see the comments).

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• Announcing Solaris Technical Track at NLUUG Spring Conference on Operating Systems

  - by user9135656

  The Netherlands Unix Users Group (NLUUG) is hosting a full-day technical Solaris track during its spring 2012 conference. The official announcement page, including registration information can be found at the conference page.This year, the NLUUG spring conference focuses on the base of every computing platform; the Operating System. Hot topics like Cloud Computing and Virtualization; the massive adoption of mobile devices that have their special needs in the OS they run but that at the same time put the challenge of massive scalability onto the internet; the upspring of multi-core and multi-threaded chips..., all these developments cause the Operating System to still be a very interesting area where all kinds of innovations have taken and are taking place.The conference will focus specifically on: Linux, BSD Unix, AIX, Windows and Solaris. The keynote speech will be delivered by John 'maddog' Hall, infamous promotor and supporter of UNIX-based Operating Systems. He will talk the audience through several decades of Operating Systems developments, and share many stories untold so far. To make the conference even more interesting, a variety of talks is offered in 5 parallel tracks, covering new developments in and  also collaboration  between Linux, the BSD's, AIX, Solaris and Windows. The full-day Solaris technical track covers all innovations that have been delivered in Oracle Solaris 11. Deeply technically-skilled presenters will talk on a variety of topics. Each topic will first be introduced at a basic level, enabling visitors to attend to the presentations individually. Attending to the full day will give the audience a comprehensive overview as well as more in-depth understanding of the most important new features in Solaris 11.NLUUG Spring Conference details:* Date and time:        When : April 11 2012        Start: 09:15 (doors open: 8:30)        End  : 17:00, (drinks and snacks served afterwards)* Venue:        Nieuwegein Business Center        Blokhoeve 1             3438 LC Nieuwegein              The Nederlands          Tel     : +31 (0)30 - 602 69 00        Fax     : +31 (0)30 - 602 69 01        Email   : [email protected]        Route   : description - (PDF, Dutch only)* Conference abstracts and speaker info can be found here.* Agenda for the Solaris track: Note: talks will be in English unless marked with 'NL'.1.      Insights to Solaris 11         Joerg Moellenkamp - Solaris Technical Specialist         Oracle Germany2.      Lifecycle management with Oracle Solaris 11         Detlef Drewanz - Solaris Technical Specialist         Oracle Germany3.      Solaris 11 Networking - Crossbow Project        Andrew Gabriel - Solaris Technical Specialist        Oracle UK4.      ZFS: Data Integrity and Security         Darren Moffat - Senior Principal Engineer, Solaris Engineering         Oracle UK5.      Solaris 11 Zones and Immutable Zones (NL)         Casper Dik - Senior Staff Engineer, Software Platforms         Oracle NL6.      Experiencing Solaris 11 (NL)         Patrick Ale - UNIX Technical Specialist         UPC Broadband, NLTalks are 45 minutes each.There will be a "Solaris Meeting point" during the conference where people can meet-up, chat with the speakers and with fellow Solaris enthousiasts, and where live demos or other hands-on experiences can be shared.The official announcement page, including registration information can be found at the conference page on the NLUUG website. This site also has a complete list of all abstracts for all talks.Please register on the NLUUG website.

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• Easy Made Easier

  - by dragonfly

      How easy is it to deploy a 2 node, fully redundant Oracle RAC cluster? Not very. Unless you use an Oracle Database Appliance. The focus of this member of Oracle's Engineered Systems family is to simplify the configuration, management and maintenance throughout the life of the system, while offering pay-as-you-grow scaling. Getting a 2-node RAC cluster up and running in under 2 hours has been made possible by the Oracle Database Appliance. Don't take my word for it, just check out these blog posts from partners and end users. The Oracle Database Appliance Experience - Zip Zoom Zoom http://www.fuadarshad.com/2012/02/oracle-database-appliance-experience.html Off-the-shelf Oracle database servers http://normanweaver.wordpress.com/2011/10/10/off-the-shelf-oracle-database-servers/ Oracle Database Appliance – Deployment Steps http://marcel.vandewaters.nl/oracle/database-appliance/oracle-database-appliance-deployment-steps     See how easy it is to deploy an Oracle Database Appliance for high availability with RAC? Now for the meat of this post, which is the first in a series of posts describing tips for making the deployment of an ODA even easier. The key to the easy deployment of an Oracle Database Appliance is the Appliance Manager software, which does the actual software deployment and configuration, based on best practices. But in order for it to do that, it needs some basic information first, including system name, IP addresses, etc. That's where the Appliance Manager GUI comes in to play, taking a wizard approach to specifying the information needed.     Using the Appliance Manager GUI is pretty straight forward, stepping through several screens of information to enter data in typical wizard style. Like most configuration tasks, it helps to gather the required information before hand. But before you rush out to a committee meeting on what to use for host names, and rely on whatever IP addresses might be hanging around, make sure you are familiar with some of the auto-fill defaults for the Appliance Manager. I'll step through the key screens below to highlight the results of the auto-fill capability of the Appliance Manager GUI.     Depending on which of the 2 Configuration Types (Config Type screen) you choose, you will get a slightly different set of screens. The Typical configuration assumes certain default configuration choices and has the fewest screens, where as the Custom configuration gives you the most flexibility in what you configure from the start. In the examples below, I have used the Custom config type.     One of the first items you are asked for is the System Name (System Info screen). This is used to identify the system, but also as the base for the default hostnames on following screens. In this screen shot, the System Name is "oda".     When you get to the next screen (Generic Network screen), you enter your domain name, DNS IP address(es), and NTP IP address(es). Next up is the Public Network screen, seen below, where you will see the host name fields are automatically filled in with default host names based on the System Name, in this case "oda". The System Name is also the basis for default host names for the extra ethernet ports available for configuration as part of a Custom configuration, as seen in the 2nd screen shot below (Other Network). There is no requirement to use these host names, as you can easily edit any of the host names. This does make filling in the configuration details easier and less prone to "fat fingers" if you are OK with these host names. Here is a full list of the automatically filled in host names. 1 2 1-vip 2-vip -scan 1-ilom 2-ilom 1-net1 2-net1 1-net2 2-net2 1-net3 2-net3     Another auto-fill feature of the Appliance Manager GUI follows a common practice of deploying IP Addresses for a RAC cluster in sequential order. In the screen shot below, I entered the first IP address (Node1-IP), then hit Tab to move to the next field. As a result, the next 5 IP address fields were automatically filled in with the next 5 IP addresses sequentially from the first one I entered. As with the host names, these are not required, and can be changed to whatever your IP address values are. One note of caution though, if the first IP Address field (Node1-IP) is filled out and you click in that field and back out, the following 5 IP addresses will be set to the sequential default. If you don't use the sequential IP addresses, pay attention to where you click that mouse. :-)     In the screen shot below, by entering the netmask value in the Netmask field, in this case 255.255.255.0, the gateway value was auto-filled into the Gateway field, based on the IP addresses and netmask previously entered. As always, you can change this value.     My last 2 screen shots illustrate that the same sequential IP address autofill and netmask to gateway autofill works when entering the IP configuration details for the Integrated Lights Out Manager (ILOM) for both nodes. The time these auto-fill capabilities save in entering data is nice, but from my perspective not as important as the opportunity to avoid data entry errors. In my next post in this series, I will touch on the benefit of using the network validation capability of the Appliance Manager GUI prior to deploying an Oracle Database Appliance.

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• Oracle OpenWorld Preview: Let's Get Social and Interactive

  - by Christie Flanagan

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} On this blog, we often write about getting social and interactive.  Usually, we’re talking about how to create a social business or how to make the customer experience more social and interactive.  Today’s topic is about getting social and interactive as well. But this time we’re talking about getting social and interactive the old fashioned way, face-to-face at Oracle OpenWorld with fellow Oracle WebCenter customers, partners and experts and the broader Oracle community.  Here are some great ways to get social at OpenWorld outside of the exhibition halls and meeting rooms: Oracle OpenWorld Welcome Reception - Sponsored by FujitsuSunday, September 30, 7:00 p.m.–8:30 p.m.Yerba Buena Gardens & Howard Street Tent You’ll definitely want to attend the Opening Ceremonies for Oracle OpenWorld 2012 on Sunday, September 30. Centered in Yerba Buena Gardens (YBG) and shimmying out to other venues, the Opening Ceremonies are not to be missed. Join other attendees for great food and drink, energizing music, networking opportunities, and more. While you’re at YBG (home of ORACLE TEAM USA’s America’s Cup Pavilion), be sure to meet the sailors who will be defending the 34th America’s Cup in 2013. Get a good look at the 161-year old Trophy itself—the oldest trophy still being contested in international sport. And at the AC72 boat display, view a model of the largest wingsail ever built. Oracle WebCenter Customer Appreciation ReceptionTuesday, October 2, 6:30 p.m.—9:30 p.m.The Palace Hotel, Rallston BallroomThose Oracle WebCenter customers who’ve RSVP’d to attend the Oracle WebCenter Customer Appreciation Reception shouldn’t miss this private cocktail reception at one of San Francisco’s finest hotels. Sponsored by Oracle WebCenter partners Fishbowl Solutions, Fujitsu, Keste, Mythics, Redstone Content Solutions, TEAM Informatics, and TekStream, this evening will provide plenty of time to interact with other WebCenter customers, partners and employees over hors d'oeuvres and cocktails. Oracle Appreciation Event – Sponsored by CSC, Fujitsu and IntelWednesday, October 3, 7:30 p.m.—1:00 a.m.Treasure Island, San Francisco On Wednesday night October 3, Treasure Island will be engineered to rock as the Oracle Appreciation Event gets revved up and attendees get rolling. As always at the Oracle Appreciation Event, there will be unlimited refreshments, fun and games, the most awesome views of San Francisco from just about anywhere, and top notch entertainment.  Past performers read like a veritable who’s who of the rock and roll elite. Join us—it's our way of saying thanks to you for supporting Oracle and our flagship conference. Complimentary shuttle service to and from Treasure Island will be provided, so all you have to worry about is having a rocking night of your own. Oracle OpenWorld Music FestivalSeptember 30-October 4, Check schedule for venues and times.Oracle presents the first annual Oracle OpenWorld Musical Festival, featuring some of today’s breakthrough musicians from around the country and the world including Macy Gray, Joss Stone, Jimmy Cliff and The Hives. It’s five nights of back-to-back performances in the heart of San Francisco. Registered Oracle conference attendees get free admission, so remember your badge when you head to a show. With limited space at some venues, these concerts are first-come, first-served. So mark your calendars and get ready for the music to begin. See you there!I hope this give you an idea of the many opportunities to socialize and interact with the Oracle community at OpenWorld, and if you’re a music lover like me, you’re in for a special treat as we debut our first annual Oracle OpenWorld Music Festival.  Check out the links below for more information on these events and the many featured performers: Reflections from the Young Prisms A Brief Soul Session with Joss Stone Mixing It Up with Blues Mix Red Meat’s Music is Rare and Well Done The English Beat’s Dave Wakeling Gets Philosophical Top Ten Reasons to Attend the Oracle Appreciation Event There’s Magic in the Air, There’ll Be Music Everywhere Looking forward to seeing you at OpenWorld!

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• "Yes, but that's niche."

  - by Geertjan

  JavaOne 2012 has come to an end though it feels like it hasn't even started yet! What happened, time is a weird thing. Too many things to report on. James Gosling's appearance at the JavaOne community keynote was seen, by everyone (which is quite a lot) of people I talked to, as the highlight of the conference. It was interesting that the software for the Duke's Choice Award winning Liquid Robotics that James Gosling is now part of and came to talk about is a Swing application that uses the WorldWind libraries. It was also interesting that James Gosling pointed out to the conference: "There are things you can't do using HTML." That brings me to the wonderful counter argument to the above, which I spend my time running into a lot: "Yes, but that's niche." It's a killer argument, i.e., it kills all discussions completely in one fell swoop. Kind of when you're talking about someone and then this sentence drops into the conversation: "Yes, but she's got cancer now." Here's one implementation of "Yes, but that's niche": Person A: All applications are moving to the web, tablet, and mobile phone. That's especially true now with HTML5, which is going to wipe away everything everywhere and all applications are going to be browser based. Person B: What about air traffic control applications? Will they run on mobile phones too? And do you see defence applications running in a browser? Don't you agree that there are multiple scenarios imaginable where the Java desktop is the optimal platform for running applications? Person A: Yes, but that's niche. Here's another implementation, though it contradicts the above [despite often being used by the same people], since JavaFX is a Java desktop technology: Person A: Swing is dead. Everyone is going to be using purely JavaFX and nothing else. Person B: Does JavaFX have a docking framework and a module system? Does it have a plugin system?  These are some of the absolutely basic requirements of Java desktop software once you get to high end systems, e.g., banks, defence force, oil/gas services. Those kinds of applications need a web browser and so they love the JavaFX WebView component and they also love the animated JavaFX charting components. But they need so much more than that, i.e., an application framework. Aren't there requirements that JavaFX isn't meeting since it is a UI toolkit, just like Swing is a UI toolkit, and what they have in common is their lack, i.e., natively, of any kind of application framework? Don't people need more than a single window and a monolithic application structure? Person A: Yes, but that's niche. In other words, anything that doesn't fit within the currently dominant philosophy is "niche", for no other reason than that it doesn't fit within the currently dominant philosophy... regardless of the actual needs of real developers. Saying "Yes, but that's niche", kills the discussion completely, because it relegates one side of the conversation to the arcane and irrelevant corners of the universe. You're kind of like Cobol now, as soon as "Yes, but that's niche" is said. What's worst about "Yes, but that's niche" is that it doesn't enter into any discussion about user requirements, i.e., there's so few that need this particular solution that we don't even need to talk about them anymore. Note, of course, that I'm not referring specifically or generically to anyone or anything in particular. Just picking up from conversations I've picked up on as I was scurrying around the Hilton's corridors while looking for the location of my next presentation over the past few days. It does, however, mean that there were people thinking "Yes, but that's niche" while listening to James Gosling pointing out that HTML is not the be-all and end-all of absolutely everything. And so this all leaves me wondering: How many applications must be part of a niche for the niche to no longer be a niche? And what if there are multiple small niches that have the same requirements? Don't all those small niches together form a larger whole, one that should be taken seriously, i.e., a whole that is not a niche?

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• How to tell whether your programmers are under-performing?

  - by A Team Lead

  I am a team lead with 5+ developers. I have a developer (let's call him A) who is a good programmer, who writes good clean, easy to understand code. However he is somewhat difficult to manage, and sometimes I wonder whether he is really under-performing or not. Our company requires the developers to indicate the work progress in the bug tracker we use, not so much as to monitor the programmers but to let the stackholders know the progress. The thing is, A only updates a task progress when it is done ( maybe 3 weeks after it is first worked on) and this leaves everyone wondering what is going on in the middle of the development week. He wouldn't change his habit despite repeated probing. ( It's OK, developers hate paperwork, I do, too) Recent 2-3 months he on leave quite often due to various events-- either he is sick, or have to attend a lot of personal events etc. ( It's OK, bad things happen in a string. It's just a coincidence) We define sprints, or roadmaps for each month. And in the beginning of the sprint, we will discuss the amount of work each of the developers have to do in a sprint and the developers get to set the amount of time they need for each task. He usually won't be able to complete all of them. (It's OK, the developers are regularly missing deadlines not due to their fault). If only one or two of the above events happen, I won't feel that A is under-performing, but they all happen together. So I have the feeling that A is under-performing and maybe-- God forbid--- slacking off. This is just a feeling based on my years of experience as programmer. But I could be wrong. It is notoriously hard to measure the work of a programmer, given that not all two tasks are alike, and there lacks a standard objective to measure the commitment of a programmer to your company. It is downright impossible to tell whether the programmer is doing his job or slacking off. All you can do, is to trust them-- yeah, trusting and giving them autonomy is the best way for programmers to work, I know that, so don't start a lecture on why you need to trust your programmers, thank you every much-- but if they abuse your trust, can you know? My question is, how can you tell whether your programmers are under-performing? Surely there are experience team leads who know better than me on this? Outcome: I've a straight talk with him regarding my perception on his performance. He was indignant when I suggested that I had the feeling that he wasn't performing at his best level. He felt that this was a completely unfair feeling. I then replied that this was my feeling and I didn't know whether my feeling was right or not. He would have none of this and ended the discussion immediately. Before he left he said that he "would try to give more to the company" in a very cold tone. I was taken aback by his reaction. I am sure that I offended him in some ways. Not too sure whether that was the right thing to do for me to be so frank with him, though. Extra notes: I hate micromanaging. So all that we have for our software process is Sprint ( where tasks get prioritized and assigned, and at the end of the month, a review of the amount of work done). Developers would require to update the tasks as they go along everyday. There is no standup meeting, or anything of the sort. Mainly because we have the freedom to work from home and everyone cherishes this freedom. Although I am the one who sets the deadline, but the developers will provide the estimate for each tasks and I will decide-- based on the estimate-- the tasks that go into a particular sprint. If they can't finish the tasks at the end of the sprint, I will push them to the next. So theoretically one can just do only 1 or 2 tasks during the whole sprint and then push the remaining 99 tasks to the next sprint and still he will be fine as long as justifies this-- in the form of daily work progress updates

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• Siemens AG, Sector Healthcare, Increases Transparency and Improves Customer Loyalty with Web Portal Solution

  - by Kellsey Ruppel

  Siemens AG, Sector Healthcare, Increases Transparency and Improves Customer Loyalty with Web Portal Solution CUSTOMER AND PARTNER INFORMATION Customer Name – Siemens AG, Sector Healthcare Customer Revenue – 73,515 Billion Euro (2011, Siemens AG total) Customer Quote – “The realization of our complex requirements within a very short amount of time was enabled through the competent implementation partner Sapient, who fully used the  very broad scope of standard functionality provided in the Oracle WebCenter Portal, and the management of customer services, who continuously supported the project setup. ” – Joerg Modlmayr, Project Manager, Healthcare Customer Service Portal, Siemens AG The Siemens Healthcare Sector is one of the world's largest suppliers to the healthcare industry and a trendsetter in medical imaging, laboratory diagnostics, medical information technology and hearing aids. Siemens offers its customers products and solutions for the entire range of patient care from a single source – from prevention and early detection to diagnosis, and on to treatment and aftercare. By optimizing clinical workflows for the most common diseases, Siemens also makes healthcare faster, better and more cost-effective. To ensure greater transparency, increased efficiency, higher user acceptance, and additional services, Siemens AG, Sector Healthcare, replaced several existing legacy portal solutions that could not meet the company’s future needs with Oracle WebCenter Portal. Various existing portal solutions that cannot meet future demands will be successively replaced by the new central service portal, which will also allow for the efficient and intuitive implementation of new service concepts.  With Oracle, doctors and hospitals using Siemens medical solutions now have access to a central information portal that provides important information and services at just the push of a button.  Customer Name – Siemens AG, Sector Healthcare Customer URL – www.siemens.com Customer Headquarters – Erlangen, Germany Industry – Industrial Manufacturing Employees – 360,000  Challenges – Replace disparate medical service portals to meet future demands and eliminate an  unnecessarily high level of administrative work caused by heterogeneous installations Ensure portals meet current user demands to improve user-acceptance rates and increase number of total users Enable changes and expansion through standard functionality to eliminate the need for reliance on IT and reduce administrative efforts and associated high costs Ensure efficient and intuitive implementation of new service concepts for all devices and systems Ensure hospitals and clinics to transparently monitor and measure services rendered for the various medical devices and systems  Increase electronic interaction and expand services to achieve a higher level of customer loyalty Solution –  Deployed Oracle WebCenter Portal to ensure greater transparency, and as a result, a higher level of customer loyalty  Provided a centralized platform for doctors and hospitals using Siemens’ medical technology solutions that provides important information and services at the push of a button Reduced significantly the administrative workload by centralizing the solution in the new customer service portal Secured positive feedback from customers involved in the pilot program developed by design experts from Oracle partner Sapient. The interfaces were created with customer needs in mind. The first survey taken shortly after implementation came back with 2.4 points on a scale of 0-3 in the category “customer service portal intuitiveness level” Met all requirements including alignment with the Siemens Style Guide without extensive programming Implemented additional services via the portal such as benchmarking options to ensure the optimal use of the Customer Device Park Provided option for documentation of all services rendered in conjunction with the medical technology systems to ensure that the value of the services are transparent for the decision makers in the hospitals  Saved and stored all machine data from approximately 100,000 remote systems in the central service and information platform Provided the option to register errors online and follow the call status in real-time on the portal Made  available at the push of a button all information on the medical technology devices used in hospitals or clinics—from security checks and maintenance activities to current device statuses Provided PDF format Service Performance Reports that summarize information from periods of time ranging from previous weeks up to one year, meeting medical product law requirements  Why Oracle – Siemens AG favored Oracle for many reasons, however, the company ultimately decided to go with Oracle due to the enormous range of functionality the solutions offered for the healthcare sector.“We are not programmers; we are service providers in the medical technology segment and focus on the contents of the portal. All the functionality necessary for internet-based customer interaction is already standard in Oracle WebCenter Portal, which is a huge plus for us. Having Oracle as our technology partner ensures that the product will continually evolve, providing a strong technology platform for our customer service portal well into the future,” said Joerg Modlmayr project manager, Healthcare Customer Service Portal, Siemens AG. Partner Involvement – Siemens AG selected Oracle Partner Sapient because the company offered a service portfolio that perfectly met Siemens’ requirements and had a wealth of experience implementing Oracle WebCenter Portal. Additionally, Sapient had designers with a very high level of expertise in usability—an aspect that Siemens considered to be of vast importance for the project.  “The Sapient team completely met all our expectations. Our tightly timed project was completed on schedule, and the positive feedback from our users proves that we set the right measures in terms of usability—all thanks to the folks at Sapient,” Modlmayr said.  Partner Name – Sapient GmbH Deutschland Partner URL – www.sapient.com

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• Educause Top-Ten IT Issues - the most change in a decade or more

  - by user739873

  The Education IT Issue Panel has released the 2012 top-ten issues facing higher education IT leadership, and instead of the customary reshuffling of the same deck, the issues reflect much of the tumult and dynamism facing higher education generally.  I find it interesting (and encouraging) that at the top of this year's list is "Updating IT Professionals' Skills and Roles to Accommodate Emerging Technologies and Changing IT Management and Service Delivery Models."  This reflects, in my view, the realization that higher education IT must change in order to fully realize the potential for transforming the institution, and therefore it's people must learn new skills, understand and accept new ways of solving problems, and not be tied down by past practices or institutional inertia. What follows in the remaining 9 top issues all speak, in some form or fashion, to the need for dramatic change, but not just in the areas of "funding IT" (code for cost containment or reduction), but rather the need to increase effectiveness and efficiency of the institution through the use of technology—leveraging the wave of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) to the institution's advantage, rather than viewing it as a threat and a problem to be contained. Although it's #10 of 10, IT Governance (and establishment and implementation of the governance model throughout the institution) is key to effectively acting upon many of the preceding issues in this year's list.  In the majority of cases, technology exists to meet the needs and requirements to effectively address many of the challenges outlined in top-ten issues list. Which brings me to my next point. Although I try not to sound too much like an Oracle commercial in these (all too infrequent) blog posts, I can't help but point out how much confluence there is between several of the top issues this year and what my colleagues and I have been evangelizing for some time. Starting from the bottom of the list up: 1) I'm gratified that research and the IT challenges it presents has made the cut.  Big Data (or Large Data as it's phased in the report) is rapidly going to overwhelm much of what exists today even at our most prepared and well-equipped research universities.  Combine large data with the significantly more stringent requirements around data preservation, archiving, sharing, curation, etc. coming from granting agencies like NSF, and you have the brewing storm that could result in a lot of "one-off" solutions to a problem that could very well be addressed collectively and "at scale."   2) Transformative effects of IT – while I see more and more examples of this, there is still much more that can be achieved. My experience tells me that culture (as the report indicates or at least poses the question) gets in the way more than technology not being up to task.  We spend too much time on "context" and not "core," and get lost in the weeds on the journey to truly transforming the institution with technology. 3) Analytics as a key element in improving various institutional outcomes.  In our work around Student Success, we see predictive "academic" analytics as essential to getting in front of the Student Success issue, regardless of how an institution or collections of institutions defines success.  Analytics must be part of the fabric of the key academic enterprise applications, not a bolt-on.  We will spend a significant amount of time on this topic during our semi-annual Education Industry Strategy Council meeting in Washington, D.C. later this month. 4) Cloud strategy for the broad range of applications in the academic enterprise.  Some of the recent work by Casey Green at the Campus Computing Survey would seem to indicate that there is movement in this area but mostly in what has been termed "below the campus" application areas such as collaboration tools, recruiting, and alumni relations.  It's time to get serious about sourcing elements of mature applications like student information systems, HR, Finance, etc. leveraging a model other than traditional on-campus custom. I've only selected a few areas of the list to highlight, but the unifying theme here (and this is where I run the risk of sounding like an Oracle commercial) is that these lofty goals cry out for partners that can bring economies of scale to bear on the problems married with a deep understanding of the nuances unique to higher education.  In a recent piece in Educause Review on Student Information Systems, the author points out that "best of breed is back". Unfortunately I am compelled to point out that best of breed is a large part of the reason we have made as little progress as we have as an industry in advancing some of the causes outlined above.  Don't confuse "integrated" and "full stack" for vendor lock-in.  The best-of-breed market forces that Ron points to ensure that solutions have to be "integratable" or they don't survive in the marketplace. However, by leveraging the efficiencies afforded by adopting solutions that are pre-integrated (and possibly metered out as a service) allows us to shed unnecessary costs – as difficult as these decisions are to make and to drive throughout the organization. Cole

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