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• Q&A L. J. E-nal, kérdések és válaszok, "az Oracle a rendszerek cége"

  - by Fekete Zoltán

  A Reuters következo interjújában olvashatjuk az alábbi sorokat: "...Oracle is a systems company. We're not a hardware company. We're not a software company. We are a systems company. We want to deliver compete working systems. Now, of course we are a software company..." Azaz az Oracle a teljes muködo rendszek cége. "...A lot of this stuff is preintegrated, which should make it much more reliable much, more lower cost..."

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• Developer Profile: Marcelo Quinta

  - by Tori Wieldt

  As the Java developer community lead for Oracle, the best part of my job is going to conferences and meeting Java developers. I’ve had the pleasure to meet men and women who are smart, fun and passionate about Java—they make the Java community happen. The current issue of Java Magazine provides profiles of other young Java developers around the world. Subscribe to read them! Marcelo Quinta Age: 24Occupation: Professor, Federal University of GoiasLocation: Goias, Brazil Twitter: @mrquinta Marcelo (white polo shirt, center) and class OTN: When did you realize that you were good at programming? When I was in graduate school, I developed a Java system that displayed worked out the logics of getting the maximum coverage using the fewest resources (for example, the minimum number of soldiers [and positions] needed for a battlefield. It may seems not difficult, but it's a hard problem to solve, mathematically. Here I was, a freshman, who came up with an app  "solving" it. Some Master's students use my software today. It was then I began to believe in what I could do.OTN: What most inspires you about programming?I'm really inspired by the challenges and tension that comes from solving a complicated problems. Lately, I've been doing a new system focused on education and digital inclusion and was very gratifying to see it working and the results. I felt useful for the community. OTN: What are some things you would like to accomplish using Java?Java is a very strong platform and that gives us power to develop applications for different devices and purposes, from home automation with little microcontrollers to systems in big servers. I would like to build more systems that integrate the people life or different business contexts, from PCs to cell phones and tablets, ubiquitously. I think IT has reached a level where the current challenge is to make systems that leverage existing technologies that are present in daily life. Java gives us a very interesting set of options to put it into practice, especially in systems that require more strength.OTN: What technical insights into Java technology have been most important to you?I have really enjoyed the way that Java has evolved with Oracle, with new features added, many of them which were suggested by the community. Java 7 came with substantial improvements in the language syntax and it seems that Java 8 takes it even further. I also made some applications in JavaFX and liked the new version. The Java GUI is on a higher level than is offered out there. I saw some JavaFX prototypes running in modern tablets and I got excited. OTN: What would you like to be doing 10 years from now?I want my work to make a difference for individuals or an institution. It would be interesting to be improving one of the systems that I am making today. Recently I've been mixing my hobbies and work, playing with Arduino and home automation. The JHome project, winner of the Duke's Choice Award in 2011, is very interesting to me.OTN: Do you listen to music when you write code? If so, what kind?Absolutely! I usually listen to electronic music (Prodigy, Fatboy Slim and Paul Oakenfold), rock (Metallica, Strokes, The Black Keys) and a bit of local alternative music. I live in Goiânia, "The Brazilian Seattle" and I profit from it very well. OTN: What do you do when you're not programming?I like to play guitar and to fish. Last year I sold my economy car and bought a old jeep. Some people called me crazy, but since then I've been having a great time and having adventures on the backroads of Brazil. Once I broke my glasses in a funny game involving my car's suspension and the airbags. OTN: Does your girlfriend think you are crazy?Crazy is someone who doesn't have courage to do strange things! My girlfriend likes my style. =D Subscribe to the free Java Magazine to read profiles of other young Java developers. Visit the Java channel on YouTube to see a video of Marcelo in action.

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• Have Your Cake and Eat it Too: Industry Best Practices + Flexibility

  - by Oracle Accelerate for Midsize Companies

  By Richard Garraputa, VP of Sales & Marketing, brij Richard joined brij in 1996 after graduating from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro with degrees in Information Systems and Accounting. He directs brij’s overall strategies of both the business development and marketing departments. Companies looking for new ERP systems spend so much time comparing features and functions of software products but too often short change the value of their own processes.  Company managers I meet often claim that they are implementing a new ERP system so they can perform better and faster.  When asked how, the answer is often “by implementing best practices”.  But the term ‘best practices’ is frequently used to mean ‘doing things the way everyone else does them’ rather than a starting point or benchmark to build upon by adding your own value. Of course, implementing standardized processes across an enterprise is an important step in improving operational efficiencies.  But not all companies are alike.  Do you ever tell your customers “We are just like our competition and have no competitive differentiation”?  Probably not.  So why should the implementation of your business processes be just like your competitor’s?  Even within the same industry, companies differentiate themselves by leveraging their unique expertise and approach to business.  These unique aspects—the competitive differentiators that companies use to thrive in a crowded marketplace—can and should be supported by the implementation of business systems like ERP. Modern ERP systems like Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne have a broad and deep functional footprint designed to integrate a company’s core operations.  But how can a company take advantage of this footprint without blowing up their implementation budget?  Some ERP vendors claim to solve this challenge by stating that their systems come pre-configured with ‘best practices’.  Too often what they are really saying is that you will have to abandon your key operational differentiators to fit a vendor’s template for your business—or extend your implementation and postpone the realization of any benefits. Thankfully for midsize companies, there is an alternative to the undesirable options of extended implementation projects or abandoning their competitive differentiators.  Oracle Accelerate Solutions speed the time it takes to implement JD Edwards EnterpriseOne solution based on your unique business characteristics, getting your new ERP system up and running faster without forcing your business to fit a cookie-cutter solution. We’ve been a JD Edwards implementation partner since 1986 and we now leverage Oracle Business Accelerators—cloud based rapid implementation tools built and maintained by Oracle. Oracle Business Accelerators deliver the benefits of embedded industry best practices without forcing every customer in to one set of processes like many template or “clone and go” approaches do. You retain the ability to reconfigure your applications—without customization—as your business changes. Wielded by Oracle partners with industry-specific domain expertise, Oracle Accelerate Solution implementations powered by Oracle Business Accelerators help automate the application configuration to fit your business better, faster. For example, on a recent project at a manufacturing company, the project manager told me that Oracle Business Accelerators helped get them to Conference Room Pilot 20% faster than with a traditional approach. Time savings equal cost savings. And if ‘better and faster’ is your goal for your business performance, shouldn’t it be the goal for your ERP implementation as well? Established in 1986, brij has been dedicated solely to helping its customers implement Oracle’s JD Edwards solutions and to maximize the value of those customers’ IT investments. They are a Gold level member in Oracle PartnerNetwork and an Oracle Accelerate Solution provider.

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• When to use Aspect Oriented Architecture (AOA/AOD)

  When is it appropriate to use aspect oriented architecture? I think the only honest answer to this question is that it depends on the context for which the question is being asked. There really are no hard and fast rules regarding the selection of an architectural model(s) for a project because each model provides good and bad benefits. Every system is built with a unique requirements and constraints. This context will dictate when to use one type of architecture over another or in conjunction with others. To me aspect oriented architecture models should be a sub-phase in the architectural modeling and design process especially when creating enterprise level models. Personally, I like to use this approach to create a base architectural model that is defined by non-functional requirements and system quality attributes.   This general model can then be used as a starting point for additional models because it is targets all of the business key quality attributes required by the system.Aspect oriented architecture is a method for modeling non-functional requirements and quality attributes of a system known as aspects. These models do not deal directly with specific functionality. They do categorize functionality of the system. This approach allows a system to be created with a strong emphasis on separating system concerns into individual components. These cross cutting components enables a systems to create with compartmentalization in regards to non-functional requirements or quality attributes.  This allows for the reduction in code because an each component maintains an aspect of a system that can be called by other aspects. This approach also allows for a much cleaner and smaller code base during the implementation and support of a system. Additionally, enabling developers to develop systems based on aspect-oriented design projects will be completed faster and will be more reliable because existing components can be shared across a system; thus, the time needed to create and test the functionality is reduced.   Example of an effective use of Aspect Oriented ArchitectureIn my experiences, aspect oriented architecture can be very effective with large or more complex systems. Typically, these types of systems have a large number of concerns so the act of defining them is very beneficial for reducing the system’s complexity because components can be developed to address each concern while exposing functionality to the other system components. The benefits to using the aspect oriented approach as the starting point for a system is that it promotes communication between IT and the business due to the fact that the aspect oriented models are quality attributes focused so not much technical understanding is needed to understand the model.An example of this can be in developing a new intranet website. Common Intranet Concerns: Error Handling Security Logging Notifications Database connectivity Example of a not as effective use of Aspect Oriented ArchitectureAgain in my experiences, aspect oriented architecture is not as effective with small or less complex systems in comparison.  There is no need to model concerns for a system that has a limited amount of them because the added overhead would not be justified for the actual benefits of creating the aspect oriented architecture model.  Furthermore, these types of projects typically have a reduced time schedule and a limited budget.  The creation of the Aspect oriented models would increase the overhead of a project and thus increase the time needed to implement the system. An example of this is seen by creating a small application to poll a network share for new files and then FTP them to a new location.  The two primary concerns for this project is to monitor a network drive and FTP files to a new location.  There is no need to create an aspect model for this system because there will never be a need to share functionality amongst either of these concerns.  To add to my point, this system is so small that it could be created with just a few classes so the added layer of componentizing the concerns would be complete overkill for this situation. References:Brichau, Johan; D'Hondt, Theo. (2006) Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD) - An Introduction. Retreived from: http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~jbrichau/courses/introductionToAOSD.pdf

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• WebCenter Customer Spotlight: Ancestry.com

  - by me

  Author: Peter Reiser - Social Business Evangelist, Oracle WebCenter  Solution SummaryAncestry.com Inc is the largest for-profit genealogy company in the world and it operates a network of genealogical and historical record websites focused on the U.S. and nine foreign countries, develops and markets genealogical software, and offers a wide array of genealogical related services. As of June 2012, the company provided access to more than 10 billion records, 38 million family trees, and 2 million paying subscribers. Their main business challenges were to improve time to market and agility to respond quickly to fast changing Internet waves while integrating with their existing content (4 PetaByte) and legacy systems. Ancestry.com implemented Oracle WebCenter Sites as their Web Experience Management System for their landing pages and marketing micro sites, added dynamic sections to their existing websites and integrated the existing content and legacy systems through web services. The Ancestry.com landing pages and marketing sites are now managed by the business team without any involvement of engineering resources. Managed content can quickly be added to existing pages without having to refactor the whole page and existing content (4 PetaBytes)  is now served trough Oracle WebCenter Sites without having to migrate from existing systems. Company OverviewAncestry.com Inc is a publicly traded Internet company (NASDAQ: ACOM) based in Provo, Utah, USA. The largest for-profit genealogy company in the world, it operates a network of genealogical and historical record websites focused on the U.S. and nine foreign countries, develops and markets genealogical software, and offers a wide array of genealogical related services. As of June 2012, the company provided access to more than 10 billion records, 38 million family trees, and 2 million paying subscribers. Business ChallengesAncestry main business challenge was to respond quickly to fast changing Internet waves.  Product marketing could not change Web site content without going through development. They needed dedicated developers just to support their marketing efforts. Technical Requirements Support current systems and environments - ASP.NET, MVC.NET, Java, JSP, PHP Scalable and manageable for a world wide network Marketing Requirements Easy to enter content – Without having a degree in HTML Scheduling of content – When is content visible to users Product Requirements Easy to manage content – See when content is out-of-date Rotation of content – Producing new content as old content expires Solution DeployedAncestry implemented  Oracle WebCenter Sites as their Web Experience Management System to manage their landing pages and marketing micro sites. This sites are fully managed by their business team without involvement of any engineering resources. The integration with their existing Web sites is done through Spot Management which allows the ability to add dynamic content to certain sections of a web page. The dynamic content is managed by  Oracle WebCenter Sites. The integration with the existing content (4 PetaBytes!) is done trough  a custom content provider interface which allows to mix existing content with content from  Oracle WebCenter Sites. Business ResultsAncestry.com has achieved following impressive business results: Landing pages and marketing sites are now managed by the business team without any involvement of engineering resources Managed content can quickly be added to existing pages without having to refactor the whole page Provide access to existing content (4 PetaBytes)  without having to migrate from existing systems Additional Information Ancestry Webcast Oracle WebCenter Sites

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• MySQL Server 5.6 defaults changes

  - by user12626240

  We're improving the MySQL Server defaults, as announced by Tomas Ulin at MySQL Connect. Here's what we're changing:  Setting  Old  New  Notes back_log  50  50 + ( max_connections / 5 ) capped at 900 binlog_checksum  off  CRC32  New variable in 5.6 binlog_row_event_max_size  1k  8k flush_time  1800  Windows changes from 1800 to 0  Was already 0 on other platforms host_cache_size  128  128 + 1 for each of the first 500 max_connections + 1 for every 20 max_connections over 500, capped at 2000  New variable in 5.6 innodb_autoextend_increment  8  64  Now affects *.ibd files. 64 is 64 megabytes innodb_buffer_pool_instances  0  8. On 32 bit Windows only, if innodb_buffer_pool_size is greater than 1300M, default is innodb_buffer_pool_size / 128M innodb_concurrency_tickets  500  5000 innodb_file_per_table  off  on innodb_log_file_size  5M  48M  InnoDB will always change size to match my.cnf value. Also see innodb_log_compressed_pages and binlog_row_image innodb_old_blocks_time 0  1000 1 second innodb_open_files  300  300; if innodb_file_per_table is ON, higher of table_open_cache or 300 innodb_purge_batch_size  20  300 innodb_purge_threads  0  1 innodb_stats_on_metadata  on  off join_buffer_size 128k  256k max_allowed_packet  1M  4M max_connect_errors  10  100 open_files_limit  0  5000  See note 1 query_cache_size  0  1M query_cache_type  on/1  off/0 sort_buffer_size  2M  256k sql_mode  none  NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION  See later post about default my.cnf for STRICT_TRANS_TABLES sync_master_info  0  10000  Recommend: master_info_repository=table sync_relay_log  0  10000 sync_relay_log_info  0  10000  Recommend: relay_log_info_repository=table. Also see Replication Relay and Status Logs table_definition_cache  400  400 + table_open_cache / 2, capped at 2000 table_open_cache  400  2000   Also see table_open_cache_instances thread_cache_size  0  8 + max_connections/100, capped at 100 Note 1: In 5.5 there was already a rule to make open_files_limit 10 + max_connections + table_cache_size * 2 if that was higher than the user-specified value. Now uses the higher of that and (5000 or what you specify). We are also adding a new default my.cnf file and guided instructions on the key settings to adjust. More on this in a later post. We're also providing a page with suggestions for settings to improve backwards compatibility. The old example files like my-huge.cnf are obsolete. Some of the improvements are present from 5.6.6 and the rest are coming. These are ideas, and until they are in an official GA release, they are subject to change. As part of this work I reviewed every old server setting plus many hundreds of emails of feedback and testing results from inside and outside Oracle's MySQL Support team and the many excellent blog entries and comments from others over the years, including from many MySQL Gurus out there, like Baron, Sheeri, Ronald, Schlomi, Giuseppe and Mark Callaghan. With these changes we're trying to make it easier to set up the server by adjusting only a few settings that will cause others to be set. This happens only at server startup and only applies to variables where you haven't set a value. You'll see a similar approach used for the Performance Schema. The Gurus don't need this but for many newcomers the defaults will be very useful. Possibly the most unusual change is the way we vary the setting for innodb_buffer_pool_instances for 32-bit Windows. This is because we've found that DLLs with specified load addresses often fragment the limited four gigabyte 32-bit address space and make it impossible to allocate more than about 1300 megabytes of contiguous address space for the InnoDB buffer pool. The smaller requests for many pools are more likely to succeed. If you change the value of innodb_log_file_size in my.cnf you will see a message like this in the error log file at the next restart, instead of the old error message: [Warning] InnoDB: Resizing redo log from 2*64 to 5*128 pages, LSN=5735153 One of the biggest challenges for the defaults is the millions of installations on a huge range of systems, from point of sale terminals and routers though shared hosting or end user systems and on to major servers with lots of CPU cores, hundreds of gigabytes of RAM and terabytes of fast disk space. Our past defaults were for the smaller systems and these change that to larger shared hosting or shared end user systems, still with a bias towards the smaller end. There is a bias in favour of OLTP workloads, so reporting systems may need more changes. Where there is a conflict between the best settings for benchmarks and normal use, we've favoured production, not benchmarks. We're very interested in your feedback, comments and suggestions.

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• Low latency programming

  - by Sambatyon

  I've been reading a lot about low latency financial systems (especially since the famous case of corporate espionage) and the idea of low latency systems has been in my mind ever since. There are a million applications that can use what these guys are doing, so I would like to learn more about the topic. The thing is I cannot find anything valuable about the topic. Can anybody recommend books, sites, examples on low latency systems?

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• 0xDEADBEEF equivalent for 64-bit development?

  - by Peter Mortensen

  For C++ development for 32-bit systems (be it Linux, Mac OS or Windows, PowerPC or x86) I have initialised pointers that would otherwise be undefined (e.g. they can not immediately get a proper value) like so: int *pInt = reinterpret_cast<int *>(0xDEADBEEF); (To save typing and being DRY the right-hand side would normally be in a constant, e.g. BAD_PTR.) If pInt is dereferenced before it gets a proper value then it will crash immediately on most systems (instead of crashing much later when some memory is overwritten or going into a very long loop). Of course the behavior is dependent on the underlying hardware (getting a 4 byte integer from the odd address 0xDEADBEEF from a user process may be perfectly valid), but the crashing has been 100% reliable for all the systems I have developed for so far (Mac OS 68xxx, Mac OS PowerPC, Linux Redhat Pentium, Windows GUI Pentium, Windows console Pentium). For instance on PowerPC it is illegal (bus fault) to fetch a 4 byte integer from an odd address. What is a good value for this on 64-bit systems?

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• Namespaces and deserialization issue

  - by CaffGeek

  UPDATE: You can run the code at the end of this to recreate and see the error I am having and hopefully solve it! UPDATE2: It's not the removal of the xmlns="" that's the issue... as you can remove it from the initial xml string. The problem is with the [XmlType(TypeName = "Systems")] somehow causing it to be added... UPDATE3: Turns out the problem is in here, I need to set the TypeName based on what is in the existing, XmlTypeAttribute if it already exists on the class.... xmlAttributes.XmlType = new XmlTypeAttribute { Namespace = "" }; I get the following XML as a string from a webservice <Systems xmlns=""> <System id="1"> <sys_name>ALL</sys_name> </System> <System id="2"> <sys_name>asdfasdf</sys_name> </System> <System id="3"> <sys_name>fasdfasf</sys_name> </System> <System id="4"> <sys_name>asdfasdfasdf</sys_name> </System> </Systems> I then execute this, to convert it to an object result = XElement.Parse(xmlResult.OuterXml).Deserialize<AwayRequestSystems>(); Strangely though, in the Deserialize method, while the RemoveAllNamespaces works and returns the xml without the namespace I get the error <Systems xmlns=''> was not expected. in the catch when return (T) serializer.Deserialize(reader); executes! Why is it doing this? The xmlns is GONE!!! EXECUTABLE CODE! (Just put it in a test project) using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Diagnostics; using System.Linq; using System.Xml; using System.Xml.Linq; using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting; using System.Xml.Serialization; namespace DeserializationTest { [TestClass] public class UnitTest1 { public TestContext TestContext { get; set; } [TestMethod] public void RemoveXmlnsFromSystems() { var xml = XElement.Parse(@"<Systems xmlns=""""> <System id=""1""> <sys_name>ALL</sys_name> </System> <System id=""2""> <sys_name>ePO</sys_name> </System> <System id=""3""> <sys_name>iEFT</sys_name> </System> <System id=""4""> <sys_name>Away Requests</sys_name> </System> <System id=""5""> <sys_name>RP3</sys_name> </System> </Systems>"); var systems = xml.Deserialize<AwayRequestSystems>(); Assert.IsInstanceOfType(systems, typeof(AwayRequestSystems)); var xmlnsFree = xml.RemoveAllNamespaces(); var str = xmlnsFree.ToString(); Debug.WriteLine(str); Assert.AreNotEqual("Error", xmlnsFree.Name.ToString(), "Serialization Error"); Assert.IsFalse(str.Contains("xmlns"), "Xmlns still exists"); } } [XmlType(TypeName = "Systems")] public class AwayRequestSystems : List<AwayRequestSystem> { } [XmlType(TypeName = "System")] public class AwayRequestSystem { [XmlAttribute("id")] public int ID { get; set; } [XmlElement("sys_name")] public string Name { get; set; } } public static class XmlSerializerFactory { private static Dictionary<Type, XmlSerializer> _serializers = new Dictionary<Type, XmlSerializer>(); public static void ResetCache() { _serializers = new Dictionary<Type, XmlSerializer>(); } public static XmlSerializer GetSerializerFor(Type typeOfT) { if (!_serializers.ContainsKey(typeOfT)) { var xmlAttributes = new XmlAttributes(); var xmlAttributeOverrides = new XmlAttributeOverrides(); Debug.WriteLine(string.Format("XmlSerializerFactory.GetSerializerFor(typeof({0}));", typeOfT)); xmlAttributes.XmlType = new XmlTypeAttribute { Namespace = "" }; xmlAttributes.Xmlns = false; var types = new List<Type> { typeOfT, typeOfT.BaseType }; foreach (var property in typeOfT.GetProperties()) { types.Add(property.PropertyType); } types.RemoveAll(t => t.ToString().StartsWith("System.")); foreach (var type in types) { if (xmlAttributeOverrides[type] == null) xmlAttributeOverrides.Add(type, xmlAttributes); } var newSerializer = new XmlSerializer(typeOfT, xmlAttributeOverrides); //var newSerializer = new XmlSerializer(typeOfT, xmlAttributeOverrides, types.ToArray(), new XmlRootAttribute(), string.Empty); //var newSerializer = new XmlSerializer(typeOfT, string.Empty); _serializers.Add(typeOfT, newSerializer); } return _serializers[typeOfT]; } } public static class XElementExtensions { public static XElement RemoveAllNamespaces(this XElement source) { if (source.HasAttributes) source.Attributes().Where(a => a.Name.LocalName.Equals("xmlns")).Remove(); return source.HasElements ? new XElement(source.Name.LocalName, source.Attributes()/*.Where(a => !a.Name.LocalName.Equals("xmlns"))*/, source.Elements().Select(el => RemoveAllNamespaces(el)) ) : new XElement(source.Name.LocalName) { Value = source.Value }; } } public static class SerializationExtensions { public static XElement Serialize(this object source) { try { var serializer = XmlSerializerFactory.GetSerializerFor(source.GetType()); var xdoc = new XDocument(); using (var writer = xdoc.CreateWriter()) { serializer.Serialize(writer, source, new XmlSerializerNamespaces(new[] { new XmlQualifiedName("", "") })); } var result = (xdoc.Document != null) ? xdoc.Document.Root : new XElement("Error", "Document Missing"); return result.RemoveAllNamespaces(); } catch (Exception x) { return new XElement("Error", x.ToString()); } } public static T Deserialize<T>(this XElement source) where T : class { //try //{ var serializer = XmlSerializerFactory.GetSerializerFor(typeof(T)); var cleanxml = source.RemoveAllNamespaces(); var reader = cleanxml.CreateReader(); return (T)serializer.Deserialize(reader); //} //catch (Exception x) //{ // return null; //} } } }

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• Oracle Solaris 11 ZFS Lab for Openworld 2012

  - by user12626122

  Preface This is the content from the Oracle Openworld 2012 ZFS lab. It was well attended - the feedback was that it was a little short - thats probably because in writing it I bacame very time-concious after the ASM/ACFS on Solaris extravaganza I ran last year which was almost too long for mortal man to finish in the 1 hour session. Enjoy. Table of Contents Exercise Z.1: ZFS Pools Exercise Z.2: ZFS File Systems Exercise Z.3: ZFS Compression Exercise Z.4: ZFS Deduplication Exercise Z.5: ZFS Encryption Exercise Z.6: Solaris 11 Shadow Migration Introduction This set of exercises is designed to briefly demonstrate new features in Solaris 11 ZFS file system: Deduplication, Encryption and Shadow Migration. Also included is the creation of zpools and zfs file systems - the basic building blocks of the technology, and also Compression which is the compliment of Deduplication. The exercises are just introductions - you are referred to the ZFS Adminstration Manual for further information. From Solaris 11 onward the online manual pages consist of zpool(1M) and zfs(1M) with further feature-specific information in zfs_allow(1M), zfs_encrypt(1M) and zfs_share(1M). The lab is easily carried out in a VirtualBox running Solaris 11 with 6 virtual 3 Gb disks to play with. Exercise Z.1: ZFS Pools Task: You have several disks to use for your new file system. Create a new zpool and a file system within it. Lab: You will check the status of existing zpools, create your own pool and expand it. Your Solaris 11 installation already has a root ZFS pool. It contains the root file system. Check this: root@solaris:~# zpool list NAME SIZE ALLOC FREE CAP DEDUP HEALTH ALTROOT rpool 15.9G 6.62G 9.25G 41% 1.00x ONLINE - root@solaris:~# zpool status pool: rpool state: ONLINE scan: none requested config: NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM rpool ONLINE 0 0 0 c3t0d0s0 ONLINE 0 0 0 errors: No known data errors Note the disk device the root pool is on - c3t0d0s0 Now you will create your own ZFS pool. First you will check what disks are available: root@solaris:~# echo | format Searching for disks...done AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS: 0. c3t0d0 <ATA-VBOX HARDDISK-1.0 cyl 2085 alt 2 hd 255 sec 63> /pci@0,0/pci8086,2829@d/disk@0,0 1. c3t2d0 <ATA-VBOX HARDDISK-1.0 cyl 1534 alt 2 hd 128 sec 32> /pci@0,0/pci8086,2829@d/disk@2,0 2. c3t3d0 <ATA-VBOX HARDDISK-1.0 cyl 1534 alt 2 hd 128 sec 32> /pci@0,0/pci8086,2829@d/disk@3,0 3. c3t4d0 <ATA-VBOX HARDDISK-1.0 cyl 1534 alt 2 hd 128 sec 32> /pci@0,0/pci8086,2829@d/disk@4,0 4. c3t5d0 <ATA-VBOX HARDDISK-1.0 cyl 1534 alt 2 hd 128 sec 32> /pci@0,0/pci8086,2829@d/disk@5,0 5. c3t6d0 <ATA-VBOX HARDDISK-1.0 cyl 1534 alt 2 hd 128 sec 32> /pci@0,0/pci8086,2829@d/disk@6,0 6. c3t7d0 <ATA-VBOX HARDDISK-1.0 cyl 1534 alt 2 hd 128 sec 32> /pci@0,0/pci8086,2829@d/disk@7,0 Specify disk (enter its number): Specify disk (enter its number): The root disk is numbered 0. The others are free for use. Try creating a simple pool and observe the error message: root@solaris:~# zpool create mypool c3t2d0 c3t3d0 'mypool' successfully created, but with no redundancy; failure of one device will cause loss of the pool So destroy that pool and create a mirrored pool instead: root@solaris:~# zpool destroy mypool root@solaris:~# zpool create mypool mirror c3t2d0 c3t3d0 root@solaris:~# zpool status mypool pool: mypool state: ONLINE scan: none requested config: NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM mypool ONLINE 0 0 0 mirror-0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c3t2d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c3t3d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 errors: No known data errors Back to topExercise Z.2: ZFS File Systems Task: You have to create file systems for later exercises. You can see that when a pool is created, a file system of the same name is created: root@solaris:~# zfs list NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT mypool 86.5K 2.94G 31K /mypool Create your filesystems and mountpoints as follows: root@solaris:~# zfs create -o mountpoint=/data1 mypool/mydata1 The -o option sets the mount point and automatically creates the necessary directory. root@solaris:~# zfs list mypool/mydata1 NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT mypool/mydata1 31K 2.94G 31K /data1 Back to top Exercise Z.3: ZFS Compression Task:Try out different forms of compression available in ZFS Lab:Create 2nd filesystem with compression, fill both file systems with the same data, observe results You can see from the zfs(1) manual page that there are several types of compression available to you, set with the property=value syntax: compression=on | off | lzjb | gzip | gzip-N | zle Controls the compression algorithm used for this dataset. The lzjb compression algorithm is optimized for performance while providing decent data compression. Setting compression to on uses the lzjb compression algorithm. The gzip compression algorithm uses the same compression as the gzip(1) command. You can specify the gzip level by using the value gzip-N where N is an integer from 1 (fastest) to 9 (best compression ratio). Currently, gzip is equivalent to gzip-6 (which is also the default for gzip(1)). Create a second filesystem with compression turned on. Note how you set and get your values separately: root@solaris:~# zfs create -o mountpoint=/data2 mypool/mydata2 root@solaris:~# zfs set compression=gzip-9 mypool/mydata2 root@solaris:~# zfs get compression mypool/mydata1 NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE mypool/mydata1 compression off default root@solaris:~# zfs get compression mypool/mydata2 NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE mypool/mydata2 compression gzip-9 local Now you can copy the contents of /usr/lib into both your normal and compressing filesystem and observe the results. Don't forget the dot or period (".") in the find(1) command below: root@solaris:~# cd /usr/lib root@solaris:/usr/lib# find . -print | cpio -pdv /data1 root@solaris:/usr/lib# find . -print | cpio -pdv /data2 The copy into the compressing file system takes longer - as it has to perform the compression but the results show the effect: root@solaris:/usr/lib# zfs list NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT mypool 1.35G 1.59G 31K /mypool mypool/mydata1 1.01G 1.59G 1.01G /data1 mypool/mydata2 341M 1.59G 341M /data2 Note that the available space in the pool is shared amongst the file systems. This behavior can be modified using quotas and reservations which are not covered in this lab but are covered extensively in the ZFS Administrators Guide. Back to top Exercise Z.4: ZFS Deduplication The deduplication property is used to remove redundant data from a ZFS file system. With the property enabled duplicate data blocks are removed synchronously. The result is that only unique data is stored and common componenents are shared. Task:See how to implement deduplication and its effects Lab: You will create a ZFS file system with deduplication turned on and see if it reduces the amount of physical storage needed when we again fill it with a copy of /usr/lib. root@solaris:/usr/lib# zfs destroy mypool/mydata2 root@solaris:/usr/lib# zfs set dedup=on mypool/mydata1 root@solaris:/usr/lib# rm -rf /data1/* root@solaris:/usr/lib# mkdir /data1/2nd-copy root@solaris:/usr/lib# zfs list NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT mypool 1.02M 2.94G 31K /mypool mypool/mydata1 43K 2.94G 43K /data1 root@solaris:/usr/lib# find . -print | cpio -pd /data1 2142768 blocks root@solaris:/usr/lib# zfs list NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT mypool 1.02G 1.99G 31K /mypool mypool/mydata1 1.01G 1.99G 1.01G /data1 root@solaris:/usr/lib# find . -print | cpio -pd /data1/2nd-copy 2142768 blocks root@solaris:/usr/lib#zfs list NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT mypool 1.99G 1.96G 31K /mypool mypool/mydata1 1.98G 1.96G 1.98G /data1 You could go on creating copies for quite a while...but you get the idea. Note that deduplication and compression can be combined: the compression acts on metadata. Deduplication works across file systems in a pool and there is a zpool-wide property dedupratio: root@solaris:/usr/lib# zpool get dedupratio mypool NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE mypool dedupratio 4.30x - Deduplication can also be checked using "zpool list": root@solaris:/usr/lib# zpool list NAME SIZE ALLOC FREE CAP DEDUP HEALTH ALTROOT mypool 2.98G 1001M 2.01G 32% 4.30x ONLINE - rpool 15.9G 6.66G 9.21G 41% 1.00x ONLINE - Before moving on to the next topic, destroy that dataset and free up some space: root@solaris:~# zfs destroy mypool/mydata1 Back to top Exercise Z.5: ZFS Encryption Task: Encrypt sensitive data. Lab: Explore basic ZFS encryption. This lab only covers the basics of ZFS Encryption. In particular it does not cover various aspects of key management. Please see the ZFS Adminastrion Manual and the zfs_encrypt(1M) manual page for more detail on this functionality. Back to top root@solaris:~# zfs create -o encryption=on mypool/data2 Enter passphrase for 'mypool/data2': ******** Enter again: ******** root@solaris:~# Creation of a descendent dataset shows that encryption is inherited from the parent: root@solaris:~# zfs create mypool/data2/data3 root@solaris:~# zfs get -r encryption,keysource,keystatus,checksum mypool/data2 NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE mypool/data2 encryption on local mypool/data2 keysource passphrase,prompt local mypool/data2 keystatus available - mypool/data2 checksum sha256-mac local mypool/data2/data3 encryption on inherited from mypool/data2 mypool/data2/data3 keysource passphrase,prompt inherited from mypool/data2 mypool/data2/data3 keystatus available - mypool/data2/data3 checksum sha256-mac inherited from mypool/data2 You will find the online manual page zfs_encrypt(1M) contains examples. In particular, if time permits during this lab session you may wish to explore the changing of a key using "zfs key -c mypool/data2". Exercise Z.6: Shadow Migration Shadow Migration allows you to migrate data from an old file system to a new file system while simultaneously allowing access and modification to the new file system during the process. You can use Shadow Migration to migrate a local or remote UFS or ZFS file system to a local file system. Task: You wish to migrate data from one file system (UFS, ZFS, VxFS) to ZFS while mainaining access to it. Lab: Create the infrastructure for shadow migration and transfer one file system into another. First create the file system you want to migrate root@solaris:~# zpool create oldstuff c3t4d0 root@solaris:~# zfs create oldstuff/forgotten Then populate it with some files: root@solaris:~# cd /var/adm root@solaris:/var/adm# find . -print | cpio -pdv /oldstuff/forgotten You need the shadow-migration package installed: root@solaris:~# pkg install shadow-migration Packages to install: 1 Create boot environment: No Create backup boot environment: No Services to change: 1 DOWNLOAD PKGS FILES XFER (MB) Completed 1/1 14/14 0.2/0.2 PHASE ACTIONS Install Phase 39/39 PHASE ITEMS Package State Update Phase 1/1 Image State Update Phase 2/2 You then enable the shadowd service: root@solaris:~# svcadm enable shadowd root@solaris:~# svcs shadowd STATE STIME FMRI online 7:16:09 svc:/system/filesystem/shadowd:default Set the filesystem to be migrated to read-only root@solaris:~# zfs set readonly=on oldstuff/forgotten Create a new zfs file system with the shadow property set to the file system to be migrated: root@solaris:~# zfs create -o shadow=file:///oldstuff/forgotten mypool/remembered Use the shadowstat(1M) command to see the progress of the migration: root@solaris:~# shadowstat EST BYTES BYTES ELAPSED DATASET XFRD LEFT ERRORS TIME mypool/remembered 92.5M - - 00:00:59 mypool/remembered 99.1M 302M - 00:01:09 mypool/remembered 109M 260M - 00:01:19 mypool/remembered 133M 304M - 00:01:29 mypool/remembered 149M 339M - 00:01:39 mypool/remembered 156M 86.4M - 00:01:49 mypool/remembered 156M 8E 29 (completed) Note that if you had created /mypool/remembered as encrypted, this would be the preferred method of encrypting existing data. Similarly for compressing or deduplicating existing data. The procedure for migrating a file system over NFS is similar - see the ZFS Administration manual. That concludes this lab session.

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• Common Live Upgrade problems

  - by user12611829

  As I have worked with customers deploying Live Upgrade in their environments, several problems seem to surface over and over. With this blog article, I will try to collect these troubles, as well as suggest some workarounds. If this sounds like the beginnings of a Wiki, you would be right. At present, there is not enough material for one, so we will use this blog for the time being. I do expect new material to be posted on occasion, so if you wish to bookmark it for future reference, a permanent link can be found here. Live Upgrade copies over ZFS root clone This was introduced in Solaris 10 10/09 (u8) and the root of the problem is a duplicate entry in the source boot environments ICF configuration file. Prior to u8, a ZFS root file system was not included in /etc/vfstab, since the mount is implicit at boot time. Starting with u8, the root file system is included in /etc/vfstab, and when the boot environment is scanned to create the ICF file, a duplicate entry is recorded. Here's what the error looks like. # lucreate -n s10u9-baseline Checking GRUB menu... System has findroot enabled GRUB Analyzing system configuration. Comparing source boot environment file systems with the file system(s) you specified for the new boot environment. Determining which file systems should be in the new boot environment. Updating boot environment description database on all BEs. Updating system configuration files. Creating configuration for boot environment . Source boot environment is . Creating boot environment . Creating file systems on boot environment . Creating file system for in zone on . The error indicator ----- /usr/lib/lu/lumkfs: test: unknown operator zfs Populating file systems on boot environment . Checking selection integrity. Integrity check OK. Populating contents of mount point . This should not happen ------ Copying. Ctrl-C and cleanup If you weren't paying close attention, you might not even know this is an error. The symptoms are lucreate times that are way too long due to the extraneous copy, or the one that alerted me to the problem, the root file system is filling up - again thanks to a redundant copy. This problem has already been identified and corrected, and a patch (121431-58 or later for x86, 121430-57 for SPARC) is available. Unfortunately, this patch has not yet made it into the Solaris 10 Recommended Patch Cluster. Applying the prerequisite patches from the latest cluster is a recommendation from the Live Upgrade Survival Guide blog, so an additional step will be required until the patch is included. Let's see how this works. # patchadd -p | grep 121431 Patch: 121429-13 Obsoletes: Requires: 120236-01 121431-16 Incompatibles: Packages: SUNWluzone Patch: 121431-54 Obsoletes: 121436-05 121438-02 Requires: Incompatibles: Packages: SUNWlucfg SUNWluu SUNWlur # unzip 121431-58 # patchadd 121431-58 Validating patches... Loading patches installed on the system... Done! Loading patches requested to install. Done! Checking patches that you specified for installation. Done! Approved patches will be installed in this order: 121431-58 Checking installed patches... Executing prepatch script... Installing patch packages... Patch 121431-58 has been successfully installed. See /var/sadm/patch/121431-58/log for details Executing postpatch script... Patch packages installed: SUNWlucfg SUNWlur SUNWluu # lucreate -n s10u9-baseline Checking GRUB menu... System has findroot enabled GRUB Analyzing system configuration. INFORMATION: Unable to determine size or capacity of slice . Comparing source boot environment file systems with the file system(s) you specified for the new boot environment. Determining which file systems should be in the new boot environment. INFORMATION: Unable to determine size or capacity of slice . Updating boot environment description database on all BEs. Updating system configuration files. Creating configuration for boot environment . Source boot environment is . Creating boot environment . Cloning file systems from boot environment to create boot environment . Creating snapshot for on . Creating clone for on . Setting canmount=noauto for in zone on . Saving existing file in top level dataset for BE as //boot/grub/menu.lst.prev. Saving existing file in top level dataset for BE as //boot/grub/menu.lst.prev. Saving existing file in top level dataset for BE as //boot/grub/menu.lst.prev. File propagation successful Copied GRUB menu from PBE to ABE No entry for BE in GRUB menu Population of boot environment successful. Creation of boot environment successful. This time it took just a few seconds. A cursory examination of the offending ICF file (/etc/lu/ICF.3 in this case) shows that the duplicate root file system entry is now gone. # cat /etc/lu/ICF.3 s10u8-baseline:-:/dev/zvol/dsk/panroot/swap:swap:8388608 s10u8-baseline:/:panroot/ROOT/s10u8-baseline:zfs:0 s10u8-baseline:/vbox:pandora/vbox:zfs:0 s10u8-baseline:/setup:pandora/setup:zfs:0 s10u8-baseline:/export:pandora/export:zfs:0 s10u8-baseline:/pandora:pandora:zfs:0 s10u8-baseline:/panroot:panroot:zfs:0 s10u8-baseline:/workshop:pandora/workshop:zfs:0 s10u8-baseline:/export/iso:pandora/iso:zfs:0 s10u8-baseline:/export/home:pandora/home:zfs:0 s10u8-baseline:/vbox/HardDisks:pandora/vbox/HardDisks:zfs:0 s10u8-baseline:/vbox/HardDisks/WinXP:pandora/vbox/HardDisks/WinXP:zfs:0 Solaris 10 9/10 introduces new autoregistration file This one is actually mentioned in the Oracle Solaris 9/10 release notes. I know, I hate it when that happens too. Here's what the "error" looks like. # luupgrade -u -s /mnt -n s10u9-baseline System has findroot enabled GRUB No entry for BE in GRUB menu Copying failsafe kernel from media. 61364 blocks miniroot filesystem is Mounting miniroot at ERROR: The auto registration file does not exist or incomplete. The auto registration file is mandatory for this upgrade. Use -k argument along with luupgrade command. autoreg_file is path to auto registration information file. See sysidcfg(4) for a list of valid keywords for use in this file. The format of the file is as follows. oracle_user=xxxx oracle_pw=xxxx http_proxy_host=xxxx http_proxy_port=xxxx http_proxy_user=xxxx http_proxy_pw=xxxx For more details refer "Oracle Solaris 10 9/10 Installation Guide: Planning for Installation and Upgrade". As with the previous problem, this is also easy to work around. Assuming that you don't want to use the auto-registration feature at upgrade time, create a file that contains just autoreg=disable and pass the filename on to luupgrade. Here is an example. # echo "autoreg=disable" /var/tmp/no-autoreg # luupgrade -u -s /mnt -k /var/tmp/no-autoreg -n s10u9-baseline System has findroot enabled GRUB No entry for BE in GRUB menu Copying failsafe kernel from media. 61364 blocks miniroot filesystem is Mounting miniroot at ####################################################################### NOTE: To improve products and services, Oracle Solaris communicates configuration data to Oracle after rebooting. You can register your version of Oracle Solaris to capture this data for your use, or the data is sent anonymously. For information about what configuration data is communicated and how to control this facility, see the Release Notes or www.oracle.com/goto/solarisautoreg. INFORMATION: After activated and booted into new BE , Auto Registration happens automatically with the following Information autoreg=disable ####################################################################### Validating the contents of the media . The media is a standard Solaris media. The media contains an operating system upgrade image. The media contains version . Constructing upgrade profile to use. Locating the operating system upgrade program. Checking for existence of previously scheduled Live Upgrade requests. Creating upgrade profile for BE . Checking for GRUB menu on ABE . Saving GRUB menu on ABE . Checking for x86 boot partition on ABE. Determining packages to install or upgrade for BE . Performing the operating system upgrade of the BE . CAUTION: Interrupting this process may leave the boot environment unstable or unbootable. The Live Upgrade operation now proceeds as expected. Once the system upgrade is complete, we can manually register the system. If you want to do a hands off registration during the upgrade, see the Oracle Solaris Auto Registration section of the Oracle Solaris Release Notes for instructions on how to do that. Technocrati Tags: Oracle Solaris Patching Live Upgrade var sc_project=1193495; var sc_invisible=1; var sc_security="a46f6831";

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• E-Business Suite Certified with DB 11.2.0.2 on HP-UX Itanium and IBM AIX on Power

  - by Steven Chan

  As a follow-on to our previous certification announcement, Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2.0.2) s now certified with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 (12.0.x and 12.1.x) and 11i (11.5.10.2 + ATG PF.H RUP 6 and higher) on the following additional platforms:Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12HP-UX Itanium (11.31) IBM AIX on Power Systems (64-bit) (5.3, 6.1) Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11iIBM AIX on Power Systems (64-bit) (5.3, 6.1)

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• Software Architecture and Software Architecture Evaluation

  How many of us have worked at places where the concept of software architecture was ridiculed for wasting time and money? Even more ridiculous to them was the concept of evaluating software architecture. I think the next time that I am in this situation again, and I hope that I never am I will have to push for this methodology in the software development life cycle. I have spent way too many hours/days/months/years working poorly architected systems or systems that were just built ADHOC. This in software development must stop. I can understand why systems get like this due to overzealous sales staff, demanding management that wants everything yesterday, and project managers asking if things are done yet before the project has even started. But seriously, some time must be spent designing the applications that we write along with evaluating the architecture so that it will integrate will within the existing systems of an origination. If placed in this situation again, I will strive to gain buying from key players within the business, for example: Senior Software Engineers\Developers, Software Architects, Project Managers, Software Quality Assurance, Technical Services, Operations, and Finance in order for this idea to succeed with upper management. In order to convince these key players I will have to show them the benefits of architecture and even more benefits of evaluating software architecture on a system wide level. Benefits of Software Architecture Evaluation Places Stakeholders in the Same Room to Communicate Ensures Delivery of Detailed Quality Goals Prioritizes Conflicting Goals Requires Clear Explication Improves the Quality of Documentation Discovers Opportunities for Cross-Project Reuse Improves Architecture Practices Once I had key player buy in then and only then would I approach upper management about my plan regarding implementing the concept of software architecture and using evaluation to ensure that the software being designed is the proper architecture for the project. In addition to the benefits listed above I would also show upper management how much time is being wasted by not doing these evaluations. For example, if project X cost us Y amount, then why do we have several implementations in various forms of X and how much money and time could we have saved if we just reused the existing code base to give each system the same functionality that was already created? After this, I would mention what would happen if we had 50 instances of this situation? Then I would show them how the software architecture evaluation process would have prevented this and that the optimization could have leveraged its existing code base to increase the speed and quality of its development. References:Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute (2011). Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method from http://www.sei.cmu.edu/architecture/tools/evaluate/atam.cfm

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• Reinventing the Wheel – Automating Data Consistency Checks with Powershell

  - by Jonathan Kehayias

  When I started in my current position at the beginning of the year, one of the first things that I did was to schedule a sit down with the various teams of Analysts that exist in our organization to find out more about their systems.  One thing I am always interested in is the manual processes that people do routinely that might be able to be automated.   A couple of the analyst mentioned that they routinely run queries in their systems to identify issues so that they can proactively...(read more)

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• SQL SERVER – Guest Post – Architecting Data Warehouse – Niraj Bhatt

  - by pinaldave

  Niraj Bhatt works as an Enterprise Architect for a Fortune 500 company and has an innate passion for building / studying software systems. He is a top rated speaker at various technical forums including Tech·Ed, MCT Summit, Developer Summit, and Virtual Tech Days, among others. Having run a successful startup for four years Niraj enjoys working on – IT innovations that can impact an enterprise bottom line, streamlining IT budgets through IT consolidation, architecture and integration of systems, performance tuning, and review of enterprise applications. He has received Microsoft MVP award for ASP.NET, Connected Systems and most recently on Windows Azure. When he is away from his laptop, you will find him taking deep dives in automobiles, pottery, rafting, photography, cooking and financial statements though not necessarily in that order. He is also a manager/speaker at BDOTNET, Asia’s largest .NET user group. Here is the guest post by Niraj Bhatt. As data in your applications grows it’s the database that usually becomes a bottleneck. It’s hard to scale a relational DB and the preferred approach for large scale applications is to create separate databases for writes and reads. These databases are referred as transactional database and reporting database. Though there are tools / techniques which can allow you to create snapshot of your transactional database for reporting purpose, sometimes they don’t quite fit the reporting requirements of an enterprise. These requirements typically are data analytics, effective schema (for an Information worker to self-service herself), historical data, better performance (flat data, no joins) etc. This is where a need for data warehouse or an OLAP system arises. A Key point to remember is a data warehouse is mostly a relational database. It’s built on top of same concepts like Tables, Rows, Columns, Primary keys, Foreign Keys, etc. Before we talk about how data warehouses are typically structured let’s understand key components that can create a data flow between OLTP systems and OLAP systems. There are 3 major areas to it: a) OLTP system should be capable of tracking its changes as all these changes should go back to data warehouse for historical recording. For e.g. if an OLTP transaction moves a customer from silver to gold category, OLTP system needs to ensure that this change is tracked and send to data warehouse for reporting purpose. A report in context could be how many customers divided by geographies moved from sliver to gold category. In data warehouse terminology this process is called Change Data Capture. There are quite a few systems that leverage database triggers to move these changes to corresponding tracking tables. There are also out of box features provided by some databases e.g. SQL Server 2008 offers Change Data Capture and Change Tracking for addressing such requirements. b) After we make the OLTP system capable of tracking its changes we need to provision a batch process that can run periodically and takes these changes from OLTP system and dump them into data warehouse. There are many tools out there that can help you fill this gap – SQL Server Integration Services happens to be one of them. c) So we have an OLTP system that knows how to track its changes, we have jobs that run periodically to move these changes to warehouse. The question though remains is how warehouse will record these changes? This structural change in data warehouse arena is often covered under something called Slowly Changing Dimension (SCD). While we will talk about dimensions in a while, SCD can be applied to pure relational tables too. SCD enables a database structure to capture historical data. This would create multiple records for a given entity in relational database and data warehouses prefer having their own primary key, often known as surrogate key. As I mentioned a data warehouse is just a relational database but industry often attributes a specific schema style to data warehouses. These styles are Star Schema or Snowflake Schema. The motivation behind these styles is to create a flat database structure (as opposed to normalized one), which is easy to understand / use, easy to query and easy to slice / dice. Star schema is a database structure made up of dimensions and facts. Facts are generally the numbers (sales, quantity, etc.) that you want to slice and dice. Fact tables have these numbers and have references (foreign keys) to set of tables that provide context around those facts. E.g. if you have recorded 10,000 USD as sales that number would go in a sales fact table and could have foreign keys attached to it that refers to the sales agent responsible for sale and to time table which contains the dates between which that sale was made. These agent and time tables are called dimensions which provide context to the numbers stored in fact tables. This schema structure of fact being at center surrounded by dimensions is called Star schema. A similar structure with difference of dimension tables being normalized is called a Snowflake schema. This relational structure of facts and dimensions serves as an input for another analysis structure called Cube. Though physically Cube is a special structure supported by commercial databases like SQL Server Analysis Services, logically it’s a multidimensional structure where dimensions define the sides of cube and facts define the content. Facts are often called as Measures inside a cube. Dimensions often tend to form a hierarchy. E.g. Product may be broken into categories and categories in turn to individual items. Category and Items are often referred as Levels and their constituents as Members with their overall structure called as Hierarchy. Measures are rolled up as per dimensional hierarchy. These rolled up measures are called Aggregates. Now this may seem like an overwhelming vocabulary to deal with but don’t worry it will sink in as you start working with Cubes and others. Let’s see few other terms that we would run into while talking about data warehouses. ODS or an Operational Data Store is a frequently misused term. There would be few users in your organization that want to report on most current data and can’t afford to miss a single transaction for their report. Then there is another set of users that typically don’t care how current the data is. Mostly senior level executives who are interesting in trending, mining, forecasting, strategizing, etc. don’t care for that one specific transaction. This is where an ODS can come in handy. ODS can use the same star schema and the OLAP cubes we saw earlier. The only difference is that the data inside an ODS would be short lived, i.e. for few months and ODS would sync with OLTP system every few minutes. Data warehouse can periodically sync with ODS either daily or weekly depending on business drivers. Data marts are another frequently talked about topic in data warehousing. They are subject-specific data warehouse. Data warehouses that try to span over an enterprise are normally too big to scope, build, manage, track, etc. Hence they are often scaled down to something called Data mart that supports a specific segment of business like sales, marketing, or support. Data marts too, are often designed using star schema model discussed earlier. Industry is divided when it comes to use of data marts. Some experts prefer having data marts along with a central data warehouse. Data warehouse here acts as information staging and distribution hub with spokes being data marts connected via data feeds serving summarized data. Others eliminate the need for a centralized data warehouse citing that most users want to report on detailed data. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Best Practices, Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, Database, Pinal Dave, PostADay, Readers Contribution, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Reinventing the Wheel – Automating Data Consistency Checks with Powershell

  - by Jonathan Kehayias

  When I started in my current position at the beginning of the year, one of the first things that I did was to schedule a sit down with the various teams of Analysts that exist in our organization to find out more about their systems.  One thing I am always interested in is the manual processes that people do routinely that might be able to be automated.   A couple of the analyst mentioned that they routinely run queries in their systems to identify issues so that they can proactively...(read more)

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• New Netra SPARC T3 Servers

  - by Ferhat Hatay

  Today at the Mobile World Congress 2011, Oracle announced two new carrier-grade NEBS Level 3- certified servers: Oracle’s Netra SPARC T3-1 rackmount server and Oracle’s Netra SPARC T3-1BA ATCA blade server bringing the performance, scalability and power efficiency of the newest SPARC T3 processor to the communications market.    The Netra SPARC T3-1 server enclosure has a compact 20inch-deep carrier-grade rack-optimized design The new Netra SPARC T3 servers further expand Oracle’s complete portfolio for the communications industry, which includes carrier-grade servers, storage and application software to run operations support systems and service delivery platforms with easy migration capabilities and unmatched investment protection via the binary compatibility guarantee of the Oracle Solaris operating system. With advanced reliability, networking and security features built-in to Oracle Solaris – the most widely deployed carrier-grade OS – the systems announced today are uniquely suited for mission-critical core network infrastructure and service delivery. The world’s first carrier-grade system using the 16-core, 128-thread SPARC T3 processor, the Netra SPARC T3-1 server supports 2x the I/O bandwidth, 2x the memory and is 35 percent faster than the previous generation. With integrated on-chip 10 Gigabit Ethernet, on-chip cryptographic acceleration, and built-in, no-cost Oracle VM Server for SPARC and Oracle Solaris Containers for virtualization, the Netra SPARC T3-1 server is an ideal platform for consolidation, offering 128 virtual systems in a single server. As the next generation Netra SPARC ATCA blade, Netra SPARC T3-1BA ATCA blade server brings the PICMG 3.0 compatibility, NEBS Level 3 Certification, ETSI compliance and the Netra business practices to the customer solution. The Netra SPARC T3-1BA ATCA blade server can be mixed in the Sun Netra CT900 blade chassis with other ATCA UltraSPARC and x86 blades.     The Netra SPARC T3-1BA ATCA blade server   The Netra SPARC T3-1BA ATCA blade server delivers industry-leading scalability, density and cost efficiency with up to 36 SPARC T3 processors (3456 processing threads) in a single rack – a 50 percent increase over the previous generation. The Netra SPARC T3-1BA blade server also offers high-bandwidth and high-capacity I/O, with greater memory capacity to tackle the increasing business demands of the communications industry. For service providers faced with the rapid growth of broadband networks and the dramatic surge in global smartphone adoption, the new Netra SPARC T3 systems deliver continuous availability with massive scalability, tested and certified to run in the harshest conditions. More information Oracle’s Sun Netra Servers Scaling Throughput and Managing TCO with Oracle’s Netra SPARC T3-1 Servers Enabling End-to-End 10 Gigabit Ethernet in Oracle's Sun Netra ATCA Product Family Data Sheet: Netra SPARC T3-1BA ATCA Blade Server Data Sheet: Netra SPARC T3-1 Server Oracle Solaris: The Carrier Grade Operating System

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• Taking AIIM at Social

  - by Christie Flanagan

  Today we are pleased to have a guest post from Christian Finn (@cfinn).  Christian is Senior Director of Product Management for Oracle WebCenter and heads up the WebCenter evangelist team.Last week I had the privilege of speaking at AIIM’s new conference in San Francisco.  AIIM, for those of you not familiar with it, is a global community of information professionals and got its start with ECM and imaging long ago. With 65,000+ members, AIIM has now set about broadening its scope to focus more on the intersection between systems of record (think traditional ECM) and systems of engagement (think social solutions).  So AIIM’s conference is a natural place to be for WebCenter types like me, who have a foot in both of those worlds.AIIM used to have their name on a very large tradeshow, but have changed direction now to run a small, intimate conference.  The lineup of keynotes was terrific, including David Pogue of The New York Times, Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, and Ted Schadler, author of Empowered among many thought-provoking and engaging speakers. (Note: Ted will soon be featured in our Social Business webcast series. Stay tuned.)John Mancini and his team at AIIM did a fabulous job running the event and the engagement from the 450 attendees was sustained over the two and a half days.  Our proudest moment was having three finalists up for AIIM awards including: San Joaquin County, CA, for a justice case management system using WebCenter Content and Oracle BPM; Medtronic and Fishbowl Solutions for their innovative iPad solutions on WebCenter Content, and the government of Louisville, Kentucky/Jefferson County for their accounts payable solution using WebCenter Content’s Image & Process Management.  The highlight of the awards night was San Joaquin winning the small organization award against some tough competition.In addition to the conversations sparked at the show, AIIM promoted the whitepapers their industry task forces have produced on the impact and opportunities created by systems of engagement and systems of record. The task forces were led by: Geoffrey Moore, the renowned high tech marketing guru and author of Crossing The Chasm; and Andrew McAfee, who coined the term and wrote the book, Enterprise 2.0. (Note: Andy will also be featured soon on the Social Business webcast series.)  These free papers make short, excellent reading and you can download them on the AIIM website: Moore highlights the changes to Enterprise IT that the social revolution will engender, and McAfee covers where and how organizations are finding value in using social techniques to foster innovation, to scale Q&A across the organization, and to connect sales and marketing for greater efficiency and effectiveness. Moore’s whitepaper is here and McAfee’s whitepapers are available here. For the benefit of those who did not get a chance to attend the AIIM conference, I’ll be posting the topics of my AIIM presentation, “Three Principles for Fixing Your Broken Organization,” here on the WebCenter blog over the rest of this week and next in a series of posts.  

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• Bunny Inc. – Episode 1. Mr. CIO meets Mr. Executive Manager

  - by kellsey.ruppel(at)oracle.com

  To make accurate and timely business decisions, executive managers are constantly in need of valuable information that is often hidden in old-style traditional systems. What can Mr. CIO come up with to help make Mr. Executive Manager's job easier at Bunny Inc.? Take a look and discover how you too can make informed business decisions by combining back-office systems with social media. Bunny Inc. -- Episode 1. Mr. CIO meets Mr. Executive ManagerTechnorati Tags: UXP, collaboration, enterprise 2.0, modern user experience, oracle, portals, webcenter, e20bunnies

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• Engagement: Don’t Forget Your Employees!

  - by Kellsey Ruppel

  By Mark Brown, Sr. Director, Oracle WebCenter  This week we want to focus on Employee Engagement, and how it is critical to your business. Today we hear and read a great deal about “Customer Engagement” – and rightly so, it is those customers, whether they be traditional paying customers, citizens, students, club members, or whomever it is that are “paying the bills”.  A more engaged customer is more likely to make it easier to pay those bills by buying more, giving good reviews, or spreading the word of how wonderful their experience was. But what about those who are providing those services, those who design and make those goods; why is it that all too often they are left out of conversations concerning engagement? In fact, it is critical that we consider our employees as customers since they are using internal systems that run your organization the same way customers use external systems. Studies have shown that an organization in which the employees feel “engaged” or better able to make decisions, do their jobs, and are connected to their peers have better return to their stakeholders. (shareholders).  On the surface this seems obvious, happy employees are more productive employees. But it leads to the question – how many of our existing policies, systems and processes are actually reducing that level of engagement? Let’s look at a couple examples. If posting new information that may be of great value to everyone in the larger organization is hard to do because we use an antiquated system, then we’re making it hard to share and increasing the potential for duplicate work. If it is not trivially obvious how to create and publish this post, then chances are very high that I’ll put it on the bottom of my queue. And finally, when critical information is spread across various systems, intranet sites, workgroups and peoples inboxes, then it is very hard to learn and grow from that information.  These may sound trivial, but how often do we push things off not because it is intellectually challenging, we may have the answer at our fingertips, but because it is hard to make that information readily available.  If an engaged employee is a productive employee, then what can we do to increase their level of engagement? We can start by looking for opportunities to provide self-documenting self-service solutions. Our newer employees grew up using simplified web interfaces everyday and they loathe calling a help-desk unless it is the last resort. Sadly, many of our enterprise applications have not kept pace and we all still have processes that are based on sending an email -- like discount approvals, vacation requests, or even offer-letter approvals.   My suggestion is to pick one highly visible, high-impact process where employees are either reticent to execute on the process or openly complain about how cumbersome it is and look at the mechanism for that process. If there are better ways, streamlined steps, better UIs that could be done, then you have a candidate to reconfigure that process and make it more engaging. Looking to better engage your employees? Start here!

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• Webcast: The ART of Migrating and Modernizing IBM Mainframe Applications

  - by todd.little

  Tuxedo provides an excellent platform to migrate mainframe applications to distributed systems. As the only distributed transaction processing monitor that offers quality of service comparable or better than mainframe systems, Tuxedo allows customers to migrate their existing mainframe based applications to a platform with a much lower total cost of ownership. Please join us on Thursday April 29 at 10:00am Pacific Time for this exciting webcast covering the new Oracle Tuxedo Application Runtime for CICS and Batch 11g. Find out how easy it is to migrate your CICS and mainframe batch applications to Tuxedo.

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• EPM 11.1.2 - R&A DATABASE CONNECTIONS DISAPPEAR FROM THE "DATABASE CONNECTION MANAGER

  - by Powder

  When accessing the database connection panel through Reporting and Analysis all previously entered database connection do not appear. This is due to a bug in the Windows SMB2 protocol. To work around this bug you have to disable the protocol. On Windows 2008 the protocol is automatically enabled. This needs to be done on both the servers and the clients. Note that “server” is the server which hosts RAF repository service and RM1 folder, “client” – server which hosts replicated Repository service that accesses repository files via network i.e. \\<server_host>\RM1  In order to disable SMB 2.0 on the server side, follow these steps:  1. Run "regedit" on Windows Server 2008 based computer.  2. Expand and locate the sub tree as follows.  HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters  3. Add a new REG_DWORD key with the name of "Smb2" (without quotation mark)  Value name: Smb2  Value type: REG_DWORD  0 = disabled  1 = enabled 4. Set the value to 0 to disable SMB 2.0, or set it to 1 to re-enable SMB 2.0.  5. Reboot the server.  To disable SMB 2.0 for Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 systems that are the “client” systems run the following commands:  sc config lanmanworkstation depend= bowser/mrxsmb10/nsi  sc config mrxsmb20 start= disabled  Note there's an extra " " (space) after the "=" sign.  To enable back SMB 2.0 for Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 systems that  are the “client” systems run the following commands: sc config lanmanworkstation depend= bowser/mrxsmb10/mrxsmb20/nsi  sc config mrxsmb20 start= auto  Again, note there's an extra " " (space) after the "=" sign. 

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• Is RTD Stateless or Stateful?

  - by [email protected]

  Yes.   A stateless service is one where each request is an independent transaction that can be processed by any of the servers in a cluster.  A stateful service is one where state is kept in a server's memory from transaction to transaction, thus necessitating the proper routing of requests to the right server. The main advantage of stateless systems is simplicity of design. The main advantage of stateful systems is performance. I'm often asked whether RTD is a stateless or stateful service, so I wanted to clarify this issue in depth so that RTD's architecture will be properly understood. The short answer is: "RTD can be configured as a stateless or stateful service." The performance difference between stateless and stateful systems can be very significant, and while in a call center implementation it may be reasonable to use a pure stateless configuration, a web implementation that produces thousands of requests per second is practically impossible with a stateless configuration. RTD's performance is orders of magnitude better than most competing systems. RTD was architected from the ground up to achieve this performance. Features like automatic and dynamic compression of prediction models, automatic translation of metadata to machine code, lack of interpreted languages, and separation of model building from decisioning contribute to achieving this performance level. Because  of this focus on performance we decided to have RTD's default configuration work in a stateful manner. By being stateful RTD requests are typically handled in a few milliseconds when repeated requests come to the same session. Now, those readers that have participated in implementations of RTD know that RTD's architecture is also focused on reducing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) with features like automatic model building, automatic time windows, automatic maintenance of database tables, automatic evaluation of data mining models, automatic management of models partitioned by channel, geography, etcetera, and hot swapping of configurations. How do you reconcile the need for a low TCO and the need for performance? How do you get the performance of a stateful system with the simplicity of a stateless system? The answer is that you make the system behave like a stateless system to the exterior, but you let it automatically take advantage of situations where being stateful is better. For example, one of the advantages of stateless systems is that you can route a message to any server in a cluster, without worrying about sending it to the same server that was handling the session in previous messages. With an RTD stateful configuration you can still route the message to any server in the cluster, so from the point of view of the configuration of other systems, it is the same as a stateless service. The difference though comes in performance, because if the message arrives to the right server, RTD can serve it without any external access to the session's state, thus tremendously reducing processing time. In typical implementations it is not rare to have high percentages of messages routed directly to the right server, while those that are not, are easily handled by forwarding the messages to the right server. This architecture usually provides the best of both worlds with performance and simplicity of configuration.   Configuring RTD as a pure stateless service A pure stateless configuration requires session data to be persisted at the end of handling each and every message and reloading that data at the beginning of handling any new message. This is of course, the root of the inefficiency of these configurations. This is also the reason why many "stateless" implementations actually do keep state to take advantage of a request coming back to the same server. Nevertheless, if the implementation requires a pure stateless decision service, this is easy to configure in RTD. The way to do it is: Mark every Integration Point to Close the session at the end of processing the message In the Session entity persist the session data on closing the session In the session entity check if a persisted version exists and load it An excellent solution for persisting the session data is Oracle Coherence, which provides a high performance, distributed cache that minimizes the performance impact of persisting and reloading the session. Alternatively, the session can be persisted to a local database. An interesting feature of the RTD stateless configuration is that it can cope with serializing concurrent requests for the same session. For example, if a web page produces two requests to the decision service, these requests could come concurrently to the decision services and be handled by different servers. Most stateless implementation would have the two requests step onto each other when saving the state, or fail one of the messages. When properly configured, RTD will make one message wait for the other before processing.   A Word on Context Using the context of a customer interaction typically significantly increases lift. For example, offer success in a call center could double if the context of the call is taken into account. For this reason, it is important to utilize the contextual information in decision making. To make the contextual information available throughout a session it needs to be persisted. When there is a well defined owner for the information then there is no problem because in case of a session restart, the information can be easily retrieved. If there is no official owner of the information, then RTD can be configured to persist this information.   Once again, RTD provides flexibility to ensure high performance when it is adequate to allow for some loss of state in the rare cases of server failure. For example, in a heavy use web site that serves 1000 pages per second the navigation history may be stored in the in memory session. In such sites it is typical that there is no OLTP that stores all the navigation events, therefore if an RTD server were to fail, it would be possible for the navigation to that point to be lost (note that a new session would be immediately established in one of the other servers). In most cases the loss of this navigation information would be acceptable as it would happen rarely. If it is desired to save this information, RTD would persist it every time the visitor navigates to a new page. Note that this practice is preferred whether RTD is configured in a stateless or stateful manner.  

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• GNU/Linux: Don't Call Them PC Viruses

  <b>The ERACC Web Log:</b> "The fact that malware are written primarily for PC systems is a given and is well reported in the news. The fact that malware are written primarily for Microsoft Windows based PC systems is often not reported."

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• Oracle Leader in Transportation Management

  - by John Murphy

  Oracle Named a Leader in the Transportation Management Systems Market by Leading Analyst Firm Redwood Shores, Calif. – October 15, 2012 News Facts Gartner, Inc. has placed Oracle Transportation Management in the Leaders Quadrant of its 2012 report, “Magic Quadrant for Transportation Management Systems (TMS).” (1) Gartner Magic Quadrants position vendors within a particular market segment based on their completeness of vision and ability to execute on that vision. According to the report, “Multiple subcomponents make up a comprehensive TMS across planning (for example, load consolidation, routing, mode selection and carrier selection) and execution (for example, tendering loads to carriers, shipment track and trace, and freight audit and payment).” Built on modern, flexible, Internet based architecture, Oracle Transportation Management is a global transportation and logistics operations system that allows companies to minimize cost, optimize service levels, support sustainability initiatives, and create flexible business process automation within their transportation and logistics networks. With a share of 26% of worldwide software revenue for 2011, Oracle is also number one in TMS vendor share according to Gartner’s report, “Market Trends: A Golden Opportunity in the Transportation Management System Market, 2012 – 2016.” (2) Supporting Quote “Shippers and logistics service providers face increasingly complex challenges as they try to reduce costs, secure capacity and improve overall freight efficiency,” said Derek Gittoes, vice president, logistics product strategy, Oracle. “We believe our high standing in both Gartner reports is a reflection of Oracle’s commitment to addressing these challenges by delivering the industry’s broadest and deepest transportation management platform. With a flexible and modern platform, we are able to support customers with both basic transportation needs, as well as those with highly complex logistics requirements.” Supporting Resources Magic Quadrant for Transportation Management Systems Market Trends: A Golden Opportunity in the Transportation Management System Market, 2012 – 2016 Oracle Transportation Management (1) Gartner, Inc., “Magic Quadrant for Transportation Management Systems,” by C. Dwight Klappich, August 23, 2012 (2) Gartner, Inc., “Market Trends: A Golden Opportunity in the Transportation Management System Market, 2012 – 2016,” by Chad Eschinger and C. Dwight Klappich, September 24, 2012. About Oracle Applications Over 65,000 customers worldwide rely on Oracle's complete, open and integrated enterprise applications to achieve superior results. Oracle provides a secure path for customers to benefit from the latest technology advances that improve the customer software experience and drive better business performance. Oracle Applications Unlimited is Oracle's commitment to customer choice through continuous investment and innovation in current applications offerings. Oracle's next-generation Fusion Applications build upon that commitment, and are designed to work with and evolve Oracle's Applications Unlimited offerings. Oracle's lifetime support policy helps ensure customers will continue to have a choice in upgrade paths, based on their enterprise needs. For more information on the latest Oracle Applications releases go towww.oracle.com/applications About Oracle Oracle engineers hardware and software to work together in the cloud and in your data center. For more information about Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL), visit www.oracle.com. Trademarks Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. ###   Karen [email protected] Simon JonesBlanc & [email protected]

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