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• Supporting users if they're not on your site

  - by Roger Hart

  Have a look at this Read Write Web article, specifically the paragraph in bold and the comments. Have a wry chuckle, or maybe weep for the future of humanity - your call. Then pause, and worry about information architecture. The short story: Read Write Web bumps up the Google rankings for "Facebook login" at the same time as Facebook makes UI changes, and a few hundred users get confused and leave comments on Read Write Web complaining about not being able to log in to their Facebook accounts.* Blindly clicking the first Google result is not a navigation behaviour I'd anticipated for folks visiting big names sites like Facebook. But then, I use Launchy and don't know where any of my files are, depend on Firefox auto-complete, view Facebook through my IM client, and don't need a map to find my backside with both hands. Not all our users behave in the same way, which means not all of our architecture is within our control, and people can get to your content in all sorts of ways. Even if the Read Write Web episode is a prank of some kind (there are, after all, plenty of folks who enjoy orchestrated trolling) it's still a useful reminder. Your users may take paths through and to your content you cannot control, and they are unlikely to deconstruct their assumptions along the way. I guess the meaningful question is: can you still support those users? If they get to you from Google instead of your front door, does what they find still make sense? Does your information architecture still work if your guests come in through the bathroom window? Ok, so here they broke into the house next door - you can't be expected to deal with that. But the rest is well worth thinking about. Other off-site interaction It's rarely going to be as funny as the comments at Read Write Web, but your users are going to do, say, and read things they think of as being about you and your products, in places you don't control. That's good. If you pay attention to it, you get data. Your users get a better experience. There are easy wins, too. Blogs, forums, social media &c. People may look for and find help with your product on blogs and forums, on Twitter, and what have you. They may learn about your brand in the same way. That's fine, it's an interaction you can be part of. It's time-consuming, certainly, but you have the option. You won't get a blogger to incorporate your site navigation just in case your users end up there, but you can be there when they do. Again, Anne Gentle, Gordon McLean and others have covered this in more depth than I could. Direct contact Sales people, customer care, support, they all talk to people. Are they sending links to your content? if so, which bits? Do they know about all of it? Do they have the content they need to support them - messaging that funnels sales, FAQ that are realistically frequent, detailed examples of things people want to do, that kind of thing. Are they sending links because users can't find the good stuff? Are they sending précis of your content, or re-writes, or brand new stuff? If so, does that mean your content isn't up to scratch, or that you've got content missing? Direct sales/care/support interactions are enormously valuable, and can help you know what content your users find useful. You can't have a table of contents or a "See also" in a phonecall, but your content strategy can support more interactions than browsing. *Passing observation about Facebook. For plenty if folks, it is  the internet. Its services are simple versions of what a lot of people use the internet for, and they're aggregated into one stop. Flickr, Vimeo, Wordpress, Twitter, LinkedIn, and all sorts of games, have Facebook doppelgangers that are not only friendlier to entry-level users, they're right there, behind only one layer of authentication. As such, it could own a lot of interaction convention. Heavy users may well not be tech-savvy, and be quite change averse. That doesn't make this episode not dumb, but I'm happy to go easy on 'em.

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• Working with Reporting Services Filters–Part 1

  - by smisner

  There are two ways that you can filter data in Reporting Services. The first way, which usually provides a faster performance, is to use query parameters to apply a filter using the WHERE clause in a SQL statement. In that case, the structure of the filter depends upon the syntax recognized by the source database. Another way to filter data in Reporting Services is to apply a filter to a dataset, data region, or a group. Using this latter method, you can even apply multiple filters. However, the use of filter operators or the setup of multiple filters is not always obvious, so in this series of posts, I'll provide some more information about the configuration of filters. First, why not use query parameters exclusively for filtering? Here are a few reasons: You might want to apply a filter to part of the report, but not all of the report. Your dataset might retrieve data from a stored procedure, and doesn't allow you to pass a query parameter for filtering purposes. Your report might be set up as a snapshot on the report server and, in that case, cannot be dynamically filtered based on a query parameter. Next, let's look at how to set up a report filter in general. The process is the same whether you are applying the filter to a dataset, data region, or a group. When you go to the Filters page in the Properties dialog box for whichever of these items you selected (dataset, data region, group), you click the Add button to create a new filter. The interface looks like this: The Expression field is usually a field in the dataset, so to make it easier for you to make a selection,the drop-down list displays all of the current dataset fields. But notice the expression button to the right, which means that you can set up any type of expression-not just a dataset field. To the right of the expression button, you'll find a data type drop-down list. It's important to specify the correct data type for the field or expression you're using. Now for the operators. Here's a list of the options that you have: This Operator Performs This Action =, <>, >, >=, <, <=, Like Compares expression to value Top N, Bottom N Compares expression to Top (Bottom) set of N values (N = integer) Top %, Bottom % Compares expression to Top (Bottom) N percent of values (N = integer or float) Between Determines whether expression is between two values, inclusive In Determines whether expression is found in list of values Last, the Value is what you're comparing to the expression using the operator. The construction of a filter using some operators (=, <>, >, etc.) is fairly simple. If my dataset (for AdventureWorks data) has a Category field, and I have a parameter that prompts the user for a single category, I can set up a filter like this: Expression Data Type Operator Value [Category] Text = [@Category] But if I set the parameter to accept multiple values, I need to change the operator from = to In, just as I would have to do if I were using a query parameter. The parameter expression, [@Category], which translates to =Parameters!Category.Value, doesn’t need to change because it represents an array as soon as I change the parameter to allow multiple values. The “In” operator requires an array. With that in mind, let’s consider a variation on Value. Let’s say that I have a parameter that prompts the user for a particular year – and for simplicity’s sake, this parameter only allows a single value, and I have an expression that evaluates the previous year based on the user’s selection. Then I want to use these two values in two separate filters with an OR condition. That is, I want to filter either by the year selected OR by the year that was computed. If I create two filters, one for each year (as shown below), then the report will only display results if BOTH filter conditions are met – which would never be true. Expression Data Type Operator Value [CalendarYear] Integer = [@Year] [CalendarYear] Integer = =Parameters!Year.Value-1 To handle this scenario, we need to create a single filter that uses the “In” operator, and then set up the Value expression as an array. To create an array, we use the Split function after creating a string that concatenates the two values (highlighted in yellow) as shown below. Expression Data Type Operator Value =Cstr(Fields!CalendarYear.Value) Text In =Split( CStr(Parameters!Year.Value) + ”,” + CStr(Parameters!Year.Value-1) , “,”) Note that in this case, I had to apply a string conversion on the year integer so that I could concatenate the parameter selection with the calculated year. Pay attention to the second argument of the Split function—you must use a comma delimiter for the result to work correctly with the In operator. I also had to change the Expression value from [CalendarYear] (or =Fields!CalendarYear.Value) so that the expression would return a string that I could compare with the values in the string array. More fun with filter expressions in future posts!

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• Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and things I wish were more intuitive

  - by pjohnson

  I've started using Windows Workflow Foundation, and so far ran into a few things that aren't incredibly obvious. Microsoft did a good job of providing a ton of samples, which is handy because you need them to get anywhere with WF. The docs are thin, so I've been bouncing between samples and downloadable labs to figure out how to implement various activities in a workflow. Code separation or not? You can create a workflow and activity in Visual Studio with or without code separation, i.e. just a .cs "Component" style object with a Designer.cs file, or a .xoml XML markup file with code behind (beside?) it. Absence any obvious advantage to one or the other, I used code separation for workflows and any complex custom activities, and without code separation for custom activities that just inherit from the Activity class and thus don't have anything special in the designer. So far, so good. Workflow Activity Library project type - What's the point of this separate project type? So far I don't see much advantage to keeping your custom activities in a separate project. I prefer to have as few projects as needed (and no fewer). The Designer's Toolbox window seems to find your custom activities just fine no matter where they are, and the debugging experience doesn't seem to be any different. Designer Properties - This is about the designer, and not specific to WF, but nevertheless something that's hindered me a lot more in WF than in Windows Forms or elsewhere. The Properties window does a good job of showing you property values when you hover the mouse over the values. But they don't do the same to find out what a control's type is. So maybe if I named all my activities "x1" and "x2" instead of helpful self-documenting names like "listenForStatusUpdate", then I could easily see enough of the type to determine what it is, but any names longer than those and all I get of the type is "System.Workflow.Act" or "System.Workflow.Compone". Even hitting the dropdown doesn't expand any wider, like the debugger quick watch "smart tag" popups do when you scroll through members. The only way I've found around this in VS 2008 is to widen the Properties dialog, losing precious designer real estate, then shrink it back down when you're done to see what you were doing. Really? WF Designer - This is about the designer, and I believe is specific to WF. I should be able to edit the XML in a .xoml file, or drag and drop using the designer. With WPF (at least in VS 2010 Ultimate), these are side by side, and changes to one instantly update the other. With WF, I have to right-click on the .xoml file, choose Open With, and pick XML Editor to edit the text. It looks like this is one way where WF didn't get the same attention WPF got during .NET Fx 3.0 development. Service - In the WF world, this is simply a class that talks to the workflow about things outside the workflow, not to be confused with how the term "service" is used in every other context I've seen in the Windows and .NET world, i.e. an executable that waits for events or requests from a client and services them (Windows service, web service, WCF service, etc.). ListenActivity - Such a great concept, yet so unintuitive. It seems you need at least two branches (EventDrivenActivity instances), one for your positive condition and one for a timeout. The positive condition has a HandleExternalEventActivity, and the timeout has a DelayActivity followed by however you want to handle the delay, e.g. a ThrowActivity. The timeout is simple enough; wiring up the HandleExternalEventActivity is where things get fun. You need to create a service (see above), and an interface for that service (this seems more complex than should be necessary--why not have activities just wire to a service directly?). And you need to create a custom EventArgs class that inherits from ExternalDataEventArgs--you can't create an ExternalDataEventArgs event handler directly, even if you don't need to add any more information to the event args, despite ExternalDataEventArgs not being marked as an abstract class, nor a compiler error nor warning nor any other indication that you're doing something wrong, until you run it and find that it always times out and get to check every place mentioned here to see why. Your interface and service need an event that consumes your custom EventArgs class, and a method to fire that event. You need to call that method from somewhere. Then you get to hope that you did everything just right, or that you can step through code in the debugger before your Delay timeout expires. Yes, it's as much fun as it sounds. TransactionScopeActivity - I had the bright idea of putting one in as a placeholder, then filling in the database updates later. That caused this error: The workflow hosting environment does not have a persistence service as required by an operation on the workflow instance "[GUID]". ...which is about as helpful as "Object reference not set to an instance of an object" and even more fun to debug. Google led me to this Microsoft Forums hit, and from there I figured out it didn't like that the activity had no children. Again, a Validator on TransactionScopeActivity would have pointed this out to me at design time, rather than handing me a nearly useless error at runtime. Easily enough, I disabled the activity and that fixed it. I still see huge potential in my work where WF could make things easier and more flexible, but there are some seriously rough edges at the moment. Maybe I'm just spoiled by how much easier and more intuitive development elsewhere in the .NET Framework is.

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• Sea Monkey Sales & Marketing, and what does that have to do with ERP?

  - by user709270

  Tier One Defined By Lyle Ekdahl, Oracle JD Edwards Group Vice President and General Manager  I recently became aware of the latest Sea Monkey Sales & Marketing tactic. Wait now, what is Sea Monkey Sales & Marketing and what does that have to do with ERP? Well if you grew up in USA during the 50’s, 60’s and maybe a bit in the early 70’s there was a unifying media of culture known as the comic book. I was a big Iron Man fan. I always liked the troubled hero aspect of Tony Start and hey he was a technologist. This is going somewhere, just hold on. Of course comic books like most media contained advertisements. Ninety pound weakling transformed by Charles Atlas in just 15 minutes per day. Baby Ruth, Juicy Fruit Gum and all assortments of Hostess goodies were on display. The best ad was for the “Amazing Live Sea-Monkeys – The real live fun-pets you grow yourself!” These ads set the standard for exaggeration and half-truth; “…they love attention…so eager to please, they can even be trained…” The cartoon picture on the ad is of a family of royal looking sea creatures – daddy, mommy, son and little sis – sea monkey? There was a disclaimer at the bottom in fine print, “Caricatures shown not intended to depict Artemia.” Ok what ten years old knows what the heck artemia is? Well you grow up fast once you’ve been separated from your buck twenty five plus postage just to discover that it is brine shrimp. Really dumb brine shrimp that don’t take commands or do tricks. Unfortunately the technology industry is full of sea monkey sales and marketing. Yes believe it or not in some cases there is subterfuge and obfuscation used to secure contracts. Hey I get it; the picture on the box might not be the actual size. Make up what you want about your product, but here is what I don’t like, could you leave out the obvious falsity when it comes to my product, especially the negative stuff. So here is the latest one – “Oracle’s JD Edwards is NOT tier one”. Really? Definition please! Well a whole host of googleable and reputable sources confirm that a tier one vendor is large, well known, and enjoys national and international recognition. Let me see large, so thousands of customers? Oh and part of the world’s largest business software and hardware corporation? Check and check JD Edwards has that and that. Well known, enjoying national and international recognition? Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne is available in 21 languages and is directly localized in 33 countries that support some of the world’s largest multinationals and many midsized domestic market companies. Something on the order of half the JD Edwards customer base is outside North America. My passport is on its third insert after 2 years and not from vacations. So if you don’t mind I am going to mark national and international recognition in the got it column. So what else is there? Well let me offer a few criteria. Longevity – The JD Edwards products benefit from 35+ years of intellectual property development; through booms, busts, mergers and acquisitions, we are still here Vision & innovation – JD Edwards is the first full suite ERP to run on the iPad as just one example Proven track record of execution – Since becoming part of Oracle, JD Edwards has released to the market over 20 deliverables including major release, point releases, new apps modules, tool releases, integrations…. Solid, focused functionality with a flexible, interoperable, extensible underlying architecture – JD Edwards offers solid core ERP with specialty modules for verticals all delivered on a well defined independent tools layer that helps enable you to scale your business without an ERP reimplementation A continuation plan – Oracle’s JD Edwards offers our customers a 6 year roadmap as well as interoperability with Oracle’s next generation of applications Oh I almost forgot that the expert sources agree on one additional thing, tier one may be a preferred vendor that offers product and services to you with appealing value. You should check out the TCO studies of JD Edwards. I think you will see what the thousands of customers that rely on these products to run their businesses enjoy – that is the tier one solution with the lowest TCO. Oh and if you get an offer to buy an ERP for no license charge, remember the picture on the box might not be the actual size. 

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• 7 reasons you had to be at JavaOne Latin America 2012

  - by Bruno.Borges

  Yesterday was 12/12/12, and everybody went crazy on Twitter with cool memes like this one. And maybe you are now wondering why I mentioned 7 (seven) on the blog title. Because I want to play numbers? Yes! Today is 7 days after JavaOne Latin America 2012 is over (... and I had to figure out an excuse for taking so long to blog about it...). So unless you were at JavaOne Latin America this year, here are 7 things you missed: OTN Lounge mini-theatreThere was a mini-theatre holding several lightning talks. We had people from SouJava JUG, GoJava JUG, Globalcode, and several other Java gurus and companies running demos, talks, and even more. For example, @drspockbr talked about the ScrumToys project, that demonstrates the power of JSF. Hands On Lab for JAX-RS and WebSocketsOne of the cool things to do during JavaOne is to come to these Hands On labs and really do something using new technologies with the help of experts. This one in particular, was covered by me, Arun Gupta, and Reza Rahman. The HOL had more people than laptops (and we had 48 laptops!) interested on understanding and learning about the new stuff that is coming within Java EE 7. Things like JAX-RS, Server-sent Events and WebSockets. Hey, if you want to try this HOL by yourself, it is available on Github, so go for it! If you have questions, just let me know! Java Community KeynoteThis keynote presented a lot of cool things like startups using Java in their projects, the Duke Awards, SouJava winning the JCP Outstanding Award, the Java Band, and even more! It was really a space where the Java community could present what they are doing and what they want to do. There's a lot of interest on the Adopt-a-JSR program and the Adopt-OpenJDK. There's also an Adopt-a-JavaEE-JSR program! Take a look if you want to participate and Make the Future Java. Java EE (JMS, JAX-RS) sessions from Reza Rahman, the HeavyMetal guyReza is a well know professional and Java EE enthusiast from the communitty who just joined Oracle this year. His sessions were very well attended, perhaps because of a high interest on the new things coming to Java EE 7 like JMS 2.0 and JAX-RS 2.0. If you want to look at what he did at this JavaOne edition, read his blog post. By the way, if you like Java and heavymetal, you should follow him on Twitter as well! :-) Java EE (WebSockets, HTML5) sessions from Arun Gupta, the GlassFish guyIf you don't know Arun Gupta, no worries. You will have time to know about him while you read his Java EE 6 Pocket Guide. Arun has been evangelizing Java EE for a long time, and is now spreading his word about the new upcoming version Java EE 7. He gave one talk about HTML5 Productivity on the Java EE 7 platform, and another one on building web apps with WebSockets. Pretty neat! Arun blogged about JavaOne Latin America as well. Read it here. Java Embedded and JavaFXIf there are two things that are really trending in the Java World right now besides Java EE 7, certainly they are JavaFX and Java Embedded. There were 14 talks covering Java Embedded, from Java Cards to Raspberry.pi, from Java ME to Java on your TV with Ginga-J. The Internet of Things is becoming true, and Java is the only platform today that can connect it all in an standardized and concise way. JavaFX gained a lot of attention too. There were 8 sessions covering what the platform has to offer in terms of Rich User Experience. The JavaFX Scene Builder is an awesome tool to start playing designing an UI, and coding for JavaFX is like coding Swing with 8 hands, one holding your coffee cup. You can achieve a lot, with your two hands (unless, you really have 8 hands, then you can achieve 4 times more :-). If you want to read more about JavaFX, go to Stephen Chin's blog post. GlassFish and Friends Party, 1st edition at JavaOne Lating AmericaThis is probably the thing that I'm most proud. We brought to Brasil the tradition of holding a happy hour for all GlassFish, Java EE friends. This party started almost 7 years ago in San Francisco, and it was about time to bring it to Brazil! The party happened on Tuesday night, right after JavaOne General Keynote, at the Tribeca Pub. We had about 80 attendees and met a lot of Java EE developers there! People from JUGs, Oracle, Locaweb and Red Hat showed up too, including some execs from Oracle that didn't resist and could not miss a party like this one.Lots of caipirinhas, beer and food to everyone, some cool music... even The Fish walking around the party with Juggy!You can see more photos from the party on an album I shared with the recently created GlassFish Brasil community on Google+ here (but you may be more interested in joining the GlassFish english community). There's also more pictures that Arun took and shared on this link. So now you may want to consider coming to Brazil next year! Java EE 7 is on its way, and Brazil is happily and patiently waiting for it, with a lot of enthusiasm. By the way, GlassFish and Java EE 6 just celebrated a Happy Birthday!

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• The illusion of Competence

  - by tony_lombardo

  Working as a contractor opened my eyes to the developer food chain.  Even though I had similar experiences earlier in my career, the challenges seemed much more vivid this time through.  I thought I’d share a couple of experiences with you, and the lessons that can be taken from them. Lesson 1: Beware of the “funnel” guy.  The funnel guy is the one who wants you to funnel all thoughts, ideas and code changes through him.  He may say it’s because he wants to avoid conflicts in source control, but the real reason is likely that he wants to hide your contributions.  Here’s an example.  When I finally got access to the code on one of my projects, I was told by the developer that I had to funnel all of my changes through him.  There were 4 of us coding on the project, but only 2 of us working on the UI.  The other 2 were working on a separate application, but part of the overall project.  So I figured, I’ll check it into SVN, he reviews and accepts then merges in.  Not even close.  I didn’t even have checkin rights to SVN, I had to email my changes to the developer so he could check those changes in.  Lesson 2: If you point out flaws in code to someone supposedly ‘higher’ than you in the developer chain, they’re going to get defensive.  My first task on this project was to review the code, familiarize myself with it.  So of course, that’s what I did.  And in familiarizing myself with it, I saw so many bad practices and code smells that I immediately started coming up with solutions to fix it.  Of course, when I reviewed these changes with the developer (guy who originally wrote the code), he smiled and nodded and said, we can’t make those changes now, it’s too destabilizing.  I recommended we create a new branch and start working on refactoring, but branching was a new concept for this guy and he was worried we would somehow break SVN. How about some concrete examples? I started out by recommending we remove NUnit dependency and tests from the application project, and create a separate Unit testing project.  This was met with a little bit of resistance because - “How do I access the private methods?”  As it turned out there weren’t really any private methods that weren’t exposed by public methods, so I quickly calmed this fear. Win 1 Loss 0 Next, I recommended that all of the File IO access be wrapped in Using clauses, or at least properly wrapped in try catch finally.  This recommendation was accepted.. but never implemented. Win 2  Loss 1 Next recommendation was to refactor the command pattern implementation.  The command pattern was implemented, but it wasn’t really necessary for the application.  More over, the fact that we had 100 different command classes, each with it’s own specific command parameters class, made maintenance a huge hassle.  The same code repeated over and over and over.  This recommendation was declined, the code was too fragile and this change would destabilize it.  I couldn’t disagree, though it was the commands themselves in many cases that were fragile. Win 2 Loss 2 Next recommendation was to aid performance (and responsiveness) of the application by using asynchronous service calls.  This on was accepted. Win 2 Loss 3 If you’re paying any attention, you’re wondering why the async service calls was scored as a loss.. Let me explain.  The service call was made using the async pattern.  Followed by a thread.sleep  <facepalm>. Now it’s easy to be harsh on this kind of code, especially if you’re an experienced developer.  But I understood how most of this happened.  One junior guy, working as hard as he can to build his first real world application, with little or no guidance from anyone else.  He had his pattern book and theory of programming to help him, but no real world experience.  He didn’t know how difficult it would be to trace the crashes to the coding issues above, but he will one day.  The part that amazed me was the management position that “this guy should be a team lead, because he’s worked so hard”.  I’m all for rewarding hard work, but when you reward someone by promoting them past the point of their competence, you’re setting yourself and them up for failure.  And that’s lesson 3.  Just because you’ve got a hard worker, doesn’t mean he should be leading a development project.  If you’re a junior guy busting your ass, keep at it.  I encourage you to try new things, but most importantly to learn from your mistakes.  And correct your mistakes.  And if someone else looks at your code and shows you a laundry list of things that should be done differently, don’t take it personally – they’re really trying to help you.  And if you’re a senior guy, working with a junior guy, it’s your duty to point out the flaws in the code.  Even if it does make you the bad guy.  And while I’ve used “guy” above, I mean both men and women.  And in some cases mutant dinosaurs. 

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• ASP.NET Web Forms Extensibility: Control Adapters

  - by Ricardo Peres

  All ASP.NET controls from version 2.0 can be associated with a control adapter. A control adapter is a class that inherits from ControlAdapter and it has the chance to interact with the control(s) it is targeting so as to change some of its properties or alter its output. I talked about control adapters before and they really a cool feature. The ControlAdapter class exposes virtual methods for some well known lifecycle events, OnInit, OnLoad, OnPreRender and OnUnload that closely match their Control counterparts, but are fired before them. Because the control adapter has a reference to its target Control, it can cast it to its concrete class and do something with it before its lifecycle events are actually fired. The adapter is also notified before the control is rendered (BeginRender), after their children are renderes (RenderChildren) and after itself is rendered (Render): this way the adapter can modify the control’s output. Control adapters may be specified for any class inheriting from Control, including abstract classes, web server controls and even pages. You can, for example, specify a control adapter for the WebControl and UserControl classes, but, curiously, not for Control itself. When specifying a control adapter for a page, it must inherit from PageAdapter instead of ControlAdapter. The adapter for a control, if specified, can be found on the protected Adapter property, and for a page, on the PageAdapter property. The first use of control adapters that came to my attention was for changing the output of standard ASP.NET web controls so that they were more based on CSS and less on HTML tables: it was the CSS Friendly Control Adapters project, now available at http://code.google.com/p/aspnetcontroladapters/. They are interesting because you specify them in one location and they apply anywhere a control of the target type is created. Mind you, it applies to controls declared on markup as well as controls created by code with the new operator. So, how do you use control adapters? The most usual way is through a browser definition file. In it, you specify a set of control adapters and their target controls, for a given browser. This browser definition file is a XML file with extension .Browser, and can either be global (%WINDIR%\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\vXXXX\Config\Browsers) or local to the web application, in which case, it must be placed inside the App_Browsers folder at the root of the web site. It looks like this: 1: <browsers> 2: <browser refID="Default"> 3: <controlAdapters> 4: <adapter controlType="System.Web.UI.WebControls.TextBox" adapterType="MyNamespace.TextBoxAdapter, MyAssembly" /> 5: </controlAdapters> 6: </browser> 7: </browsers> A browser definition file targets a specific browser, so you can have different definitions for Chrome, IE, Firefox, Opera, as well as for specific version of each of those (like IE8, Firefox3). Alternatively, if you set the target to Default, it will apply to all. The reason to pick a specific browser and version might be, for example, in order to circumvent some limitation present in that specific version, so that on markup you don’t need to be concerned with that. Another option is through the the current Browser object of the request: 1: this.Context.Request.Browser.Adapters.Add(typeof(TextBox).FullName, typeof(TextBoxAdapter).FullName); This must go very early on the page lifecycle, for example, on the OnPreInit event, or even on Application_Start. You have to specify the full class name for both the target control and the adapter. Of course, you have to do this for every request, because it won’t be persisted. As an example, you may know that the classic TextBox control renders an HTML input tag if its TextMode is set to SingleLine and a textarea if set to MultiLine. Because the textarea has no notion of maximum length, unlike the input, something must be done in order to enforce this. Here’s a simple suggestion: 1: public class TextBoxControlAdapter : ControlAdapter 2: { 3: protected TextBox Target 4: { 5: get 6: { 7: return (this.Control as TextBox); 8: } 9: } 10:  11: protected override void OnLoad(EventArgs e) 12: { 13: if ((this.Target.MaxLength > 0) && (this.Target.TextMode == TextBoxMode.MultiLine)) 14: { 15: if (this.Target.Page.ClientScript.IsClientScriptBlockRegistered("TextBox_KeyUp") == false) 16: { 17: if (this.Target.Page.ClientScript.IsClientScriptBlockRegistered(this.Target.Page.GetType(), "TextBox_KeyUp") == false) 18: { 19: String script = String.Concat("function TextBox_KeyUp(sender) { if (sender.value.length > ", this.Target.MaxLength, ") { sender.value = sender.value.substr(0, ", this.Target.MaxLength, "); } }\n"); 20:  21: this.Target.Page.ClientScript.RegisterClientScriptBlock(this.Target.Page.GetType(), "TextBox_KeyUp", script, true); 22: } 23:  24: this.Target.Attributes["onkeyup"] = "TextBox_KeyUp(this)"; 25: } 26: } 27: 28: base.OnLoad(e); 29: } 30: } What it does is, for every TextBox control, if it is set for multi line and has a defined maximum length, it injects some JavaScript that will filter out any content that exceeds this maximum length. This will occur for any TextBox that you may have on your site, or any class that inherits from it. You can use any of the previous options to register this adapter. Stay tuned for more ASP.NET Web Forms extensibility tips!

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• The clock hands of the buffer cache

  - by Tony Davis

  Over a leisurely beer at our local pub, the Waggon and Horses, Phil Factor was holding forth on the esoteric, but strangely poetic, language of SQL Server internals, riddled as it is with 'sleeping threads', 'stolen pages', and 'memory sweeps'. Generally, I remain immune to any twinge of interest in the bowels of SQL Server, reasoning that there are certain things that I don't and shouldn't need to know about SQL Server in order to use it successfully. Suddenly, however, my attention was grabbed by his mention of the 'clock hands of the buffer cache'. Back at the office, I succumbed to a moment of weakness and opened up Google. He wasn't lying. SQL Server maintains various memory buffers, or caches. For example, the plan cache stores recently-used execution plans. The data cache in the buffer pool stores frequently-used pages, ensuring that they may be read from memory rather than via expensive physical disk reads. These memory stores are classic LRU (Least Recently Updated) buffers, meaning that, for example, the least frequently used pages in the data cache become candidates for eviction (after first writing the page to disk if it has changed since being read into the cache). SQL Server clearly needs some mechanism to track which pages are candidates for being cleared out of a given cache, when it is getting too large, and it is this mechanism that is somewhat more labyrinthine than I previously imagined. Each page that is loaded into the cache has a counter, a miniature "wristwatch", which records how recently it was last used. This wristwatch gets reset to "present time", each time a page gets updated and then as the page 'ages' it clicks down towards zero, at which point the page can be removed from the cache. But what is SQL Server is suffering memory pressure and urgently needs to free up more space than is represented by zero-counter pages (or plans etc.)? This is where our 'clock hands' come in. Each cache has associated with it a "memory clock". Like most conventional clocks, it has two hands; one "external" clock hand, and one "internal". Slava Oks is very particular in stressing that these names have "nothing to do with the equivalent types of memory pressure". He's right, but the names do, in that peculiar Microsoft tradition, seem designed to confuse. The hands do relate to memory pressure; the cache "eviction policy" is determined by both global and local memory pressures on SQL Server. The "external" clock hand responds to global memory pressure, in other words pressure on SQL Server to reduce the size of its memory caches as a whole. Global memory pressure – which just to confuse things further seems sometimes to be referred to as physical memory pressure – can be either external (from the OS) or internal (from the process itself, e.g. due to limited virtual address space). The internal clock hand responds to local memory pressure, in other words the need to reduce the size of a single, specific cache. So, for example, if a particular cache, such as the plan cache, reaches a defined "pressure limit" the internal clock hand will start to turn and a memory sweep will be performed on that cache in order to remove plans from the memory store. During each sweep of the hands, the usage counter on the cache entry is reduced in value, effectively moving its "last used" time to further in the past (in effect, setting back the wrist watch on the page a couple of hours) and increasing the likelihood that it can be aged out of the cache. There is even a special Dynamic Management View, sys.dm_os_memory_cache_clock_hands, which allows you to interrogate the passage of the clock hands. Frequently turning hands equates to excessive memory pressure, which will lead to performance problems. Two hours later, I emerged from this rather frightening journey into the heart of SQL Server memory management, fascinated but still unsure if I'd learned anything that I'd put to any practical use. However, I certainly began to agree that there is something almost Tolkeinian in the language of the deep recesses of SQL Server. Cheers, Tony.

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

  - by Pinal Dave

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

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• How do I consistently re-size my game window and elements?

  - by Milo

  In my 2D game, I have a flow layout. Inside the flow layout are tables. I have a slider that lets the user make the tables larger or smaller. This makes the background larger or smaller too. Everything should scale proportionally which means the background should stay at the same position when I make things larger, and it almost does. When the scrollbar is at 0, it does exactly this. As the scrollbar gets further down problems arise. I'll toggle the slider maybe 3 times and on the fourth time, the background jumps a little lower on the Y axis. In order to be efficient, I only start rendering the background near the parent of the flow layout. Here it is: void LobbyTableManager::renderBG( GraphicsContext* g, agui::Rectangle& absRect, agui::Rectangle& childRect ) { int cx, cy, cw, ch; g->getClippingRect(cx,cy,cw,ch); g->setClippingRect(absRect.getX(),absRect.getY(),absRect.getWidth(),absRect.getHeight()); float scale = 0.35f; int w = m_bgSprite->getWidth() * getTableScale() * scale; int h = m_bgSprite->getHeight() * getTableScale() * scale; int numX = ceil(absRect.getWidth() / (float)w) + 2; int numY = ceil(absRect.getHeight() / (float)h) + 2; float offsetX = m_activeTables[0]->getLocation().getX() - w; float offsetY = m_activeTables[0]->getLocation().getY() - h; int startY = childRect.getY(); if(moo) { std::cout << "S=" << startY << ","; } int numAttempts = 0; while(startY + h < absRect.getY() && numAttempts < 1000) { startY += h; if(moo) { std::cout << startY << ","; } numAttempts++; } if(moo) { std::cout << "\n"; moo = false; } g->holdDrawing(); for(int i = 0; i < numX; ++i) { for(int j = 0; j < numY; ++j) { g->drawScaledSprite(m_bgSprite,0,0,m_bgSprite->getWidth(),m_bgSprite->getHeight(), absRect.getX() + (i * w) + (offsetX),absRect.getY() + (j * h) + startY,w,h,0); } } g->unholdDrawing(); g->setClippingRect(cx,cy,cw,ch); } The numeric problem seems to be in the value of startY. I outputted startY figuring out its value: As you can see here, this is me only zooming in, pay attention to the final number before the next s=. You'll notice that, what should happen is, the numbers should be linear, ex: -40, -38, -36, -34, -32, -30, etc. As you'll notice, the start numbers linearly correlate ex: 62k, 64k, 66k, 68k, 70k etc.. but the end result is wrong every third or 4th time. Here is most of the resize code: void LobbyTableManager::setTableScale( float scale ) { scale += 0.3f; scale *= 2.0f; agui::Gui* gotGui = getGui(); float scrollRel = m_vScroll->getRelativeValue(); setScale(scale); rescaleTables(); resizeFlow(); if(gotGui) { gotGui->toggleWidgetLocationChanged(false); } updateScrollBars(); float newVal = scrollRel * m_vScroll->getMaxValue(); if((int)(newVal + 0.5f) > (int)newVal) { newVal++; } m_vScroll->setValue(newVal); static int x = 0; x++; moo = true; //std::cout << m_vScroll->getValue() << std::endl; if(gotGui) { gotGui->toggleWidgetLocationChanged(true); } if(gotGui) { gotGui->_widgetLocationChanged(); } } void LobbyTableManager::valueChanged( agui::VScrollBar* source,int val ) { if(getGui()) { getGui()->toggleWidgetLocationChanged(false); } m_flow->setLocation(0,-val); if(getGui()) { getGui()->toggleWidgetLocationChanged(true); getGui()->_widgetLocationChanged(); } }

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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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• SQLAuthority Guest Post – Lessons from Life and Work by Srini Chandra (Author of 3 Lives, in search of bliss)

  - by pinaldave

  Work and life are confusing terms together. How can one consider work outside of life. Work should be part of life or are we considering ourselves dead when we are at work. I have often seen developers and DBA complaining and confused about their job, work and life. Complaining is easy and everyone can do. I have heard quite often expression – “I do not have any other option.” I requested Srini Chanda (renowned author of Amazon Best Seller 3 Lives, in search of bliss (Amazon | Flipkart) to write a guest post on this subject which developer can read and appreciate. Let us see Srini’s thoughts in his own words. Each of us who works in the technology industry carries an especially heavy burden nowadays. For, fate has placed in our hands an awesome power to shape our society and its consciousness. For that reason, we must pay more and more attention to issues of professionalism, social responsibility and ethics. Equally importantly, the responsibility lies in our hands to ensure that we view our work and career as an opportunity to enlighten and lift ourselves up. Story: A Prisoner, 20 years and a Wheel Many years ago, I heard this story from a professor when I was a student at Carnegie Mellon. A man was sentenced to 20 years in prison. During his time in prison, he was asked to turn a wheel every day. So, every day he turned the wheel. At times, when he was tired or puzzled and stopped turning the wheel, he would be flogged with a whip. The man did not know anything about the wheel other than that it was placed outside his jail somewhere. He wondered if the wheel crushed corn or if it ground wheat or something similar. He wondered if turning the wheel was useful to anyone. At the end of his jail term, he rushed out to see what the wheel was doing. To his disappointment, he found that the wheel was not connected to anything. All these years, he had been toiling for nothing. He gave a loud, frustrated shout and dropped dead. How many of us are turning wheels wondering what it is connected to? How many of us have unstated, uncaring attitudes towards our careers? How many of us view work as drudgery, as no more than a way to earn that next paycheck? How many of us have wondered about the spiritually uplifting aspect of work? Can a workforce that views work as merely a chore, be ethical? Can it produce truly life enhancing technology? Can it make positive contributions to the quality of life of a society? I think not. Thanks to Pinal and you, his readers, for giving me this opportunity to share my thoughts in a series of guest posts. I’d like to present a few ways over the next few weeks, in which we can tap into the liberating potential of work and make our lives better in the process. Now, please allow me to tell you another version of the story that the good professor shared with us in the classroom that day. Story: A Prisoner, 20 years, a Wheel and the LIFE A man was sentenced to 20 years in prison. During his time in prison, he was asked to turn a wheel every day. So, every day he turned the wheel. At first, his whole body and mind rebelled against his predicament. So, his limbs grew weary and his mind became numb and confused. And then, his self-awareness began to grow. He began to wonder how he came to be in the prison in the first place. He looked around and saw all his fellow prisoners also turning the wheel. His wife, his parents, his friends and his children – they were all in the prison too, and turning their own wheels! He began to wonder how this came about. As he wondered more and more, he began to focus less on his physical drudgery and boredom. And he began to clearly see his inner spirit which guided him in ways that allowed him to see the world with a universal view. His inner spirit guided him towards the source of eternal wisdom and happiness. He began to see the source of happiness in everything around him – his prison bound relationships, even his jailers and in his wheel. He became a source of light to those around him. His wheel jokes and humor infected them with joy and happiness. Finally, the day came for his release from jail. He walked calmly outside the jail and laughed aloud when he saw that the wheel was not connected to anything. He knelt down, kissed it and thanked it for the wisdom it taught him. Life is the prison. The wheel is your work. Both are sacred. Both have enormous powers to teach us wisdom and bring us happiness. Whether we allow them to do so, is a choice we have to make. Over the next few weeks, I hope to share with you a few lessons that I have learnt at the wheel in my two decades of my career (prison). Thank you for reading, and do let me know what you think. Reference: Srini Chandra (3 Lives, in search of bliss), Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Book Review, T SQL, Technology

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• Design review for application facing memory issues

  - by Mr Moose

  I apologise in advance for the length of this post, but I want to paint an accurate picture of the problems my app is facing and then pose some questions below; I am trying to address some self inflicted design pain that is now leading to my application crashing due to out of memory errors. An abridged description of the problem domain is as follows; The application takes in a “dataset” that consists of numerous text files containing related data An individual text file within the dataset usually contains approx 20 “headers” that contain metadata about the data it contains. It also contains a large tab delimited section containing data that is related to data in one of the other text files contained within the dataset. The number of columns per file is very variable from 2 to 256+ columns. The original application was written to allow users to load a dataset, map certain columns of each of the files which basically indicating key information on the files to show how they are related as well as identify a few expected column names. Once this is done, a validation process takes place to enforce various rules and ensure that all the relationships between the files are valid. Once that is done, the data is imported into a SQL Server database. The database design is an EAV (Entity-Attribute-Value) model used to cater for the variable columns per file. I know EAV has its detractors, but in this case, I feel it was a reasonable choice given the disparate data and variable number of columns submitted in each dataset. The memory problem Given the fact the combined size of all text files was at most about 5 megs, and in an effort to reduce the database transaction time, it was decided to read ALL the data from files into memory and then perform the following; perform all the validation whilst the data was in memory relate it using an object model Start DB transaction and write the key columns row by row, noting the Id of the written row (all tables in the database utilise identity columns), then the Id of the newly written row is applied to all related data Once all related data had been updated with the key information to which it relates, these records are written using SqlBulkCopy. Due to our EAV model, we essentially have; x columns by y rows to write, where x can by 256+ and rows are often into the tens of thousands. Once all the data is written without error (can take several minutes for large datasets), Commit the transaction. The problem now comes from the fact we are now receiving individual files containing over 30 megs of data. In a dataset, we can receive any number of files. We’ve started seen datasets of around 100 megs coming in and I expect it is only going to get bigger from here on in. With files of this size, data can’t even be read into memory without the app falling over, let alone be validated and imported. I anticipate having to modify large chunks of the code to allow validation to occur by parsing files line by line and am not exactly decided on how to handle the import and transactions. Potential improvements I’ve wondered about using GUIDs to relate the data rather than relying on identity fields. This would allow data to be related prior to writing to the database. This would certainly increase the storage required though. Especially in an EAV design. Would you think this is a reasonable thing to try, or do I simply persist with identity fields (natural keys can’t be trusted to be unique across all submitters). Use of staging tables to get data into the database and only performing the transaction to copy data from staging area to actual destination tables. Questions For systems like this that import large quantities of data, how to you go about keeping transactions small. I’ve kept them as small as possible in the current design, but they are still active for several minutes and write hundreds of thousands of records in one transaction. Is there a better solution? The tab delimited data section is read into a DataTable to be viewed in a grid. I don’t need the full functionality of a DataTable, so I suspect it is overkill. Is there anyway to turn off various features of DataTables to make them more lightweight? Are there any other obvious things you would do in this situation to minimise the memory footprint of the application described above? Thanks for your kind attention.

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• SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #053 – Final Post in Series

  - by Pinal Dave

  It has been a fantastic journey to write memory lane series for an entire year. This series gave me the opportunity to go back and see what I have contributed to this blog throughout the last 7 years. This was indeed fantastic series as this provided me the opportunity to witness how technology has grown throughout the year and how I have progressed in my career while writing this blog post. This series was indeed fantastic experience readers as many joined during the last few years and were not sure what they have missed in recent years. Let us continue with the final episode of the Memory Lane Series. 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. 2007 Get Current User – Get Logged In User Here is the straight script which list logged in SQL Server users. Disable All Triggers on a Database – Disable All Triggers on All Servers Question : How to disable all the triggers for a database? Additionally, how to disable all the triggers for all servers? For answer execute the script in the blog post. Importance of Master Database for SQL Server Startup I have received following questions many times. I will list all the questions here and answer them together. What is the purpose of Master database? Should our backup Master database? Which database is must have database for SQL Server for startup? Which are the default system database created when SQL Server 2005 is installed for the first time? What happens if Master database is corrupted? Answers to all of the questions are very much related. 2008 DECLARE Multiple Variables in One Statement SQL Server is a great product and it has many features which are very unique to SQL Server. Regarding feature of SQL Server where multiple variable can be declared in one statement, it is absolutely possible to do. 2009 How to Enable Index – How to Disable Index – Incorrect syntax near ‘ENABLE’ Many times I have seen that the index is disabled when there is a large update operation on the table. Bulk insert of very large file updates in any table using SSIS is usually preceded by disabling the index and followed by enabling the index. I have seen many developers running the following query to disable the index. 2010 List of all the Views from Database Many emails I received suggesting that they have hundreds of the view and now have no clue what is going on and how many of them have indexes and how many does not have an index. Some even asked me if there is any way they can get a list of the views with the property of Index along with it. Here is the quick script which does exactly the same. You can also include many other columns from the same view. Minimum Maximum Memory – Server Memory Options I was recently reading about SQL Server Memory Options over here. While reading this one line really caught my attention is minimum value allowed for maximum memory options. The default setting for min server memory is 0, and the default setting for max server memory is 2147483647. The minimum amount of memory you can specify for max server memory is 16 megabytes (MB). 2011 Fundamentals of Columnstore Index There are two kinds of storage in a database. Row Store and Column Store. Row store does exactly as the name suggests – stores rows of data on a page – and column store stores all the data in a column on the same page. These columns are much easier to search – instead of a query searching all the data in an entire row whether the data are relevant or not, column store queries need only to search a much lesser number of the columns. How to Ignore Columnstore Index Usage in Query In summary the question in simple words “How can we ignore using the column store index in selective queries?” Very interesting question – you can use I can understand there may be the cases when the column store index is not ideal and needs to be ignored the same. You can use the query hint IGNORE_NONCLUSTERED_COLUMNSTORE_INDEX to ignore the column store index. The SQL Server Engine will use any other index which is best after ignoring the column store index. 2012 Storing Variable Values in Temporary Array or Temporary List SQL Server does not support arrays or a dynamic length storage mechanism like list. Absolutely there are some clever workarounds and few extra-ordinary solutions but everybody can;t come up with such solution. Additionally, sometime the requirements are very simple that doing extraordinary coding is not required. Here is the simple case. Move Database Files MDF and LDF to Another Location It is not common to keep the Database on the same location where OS is installed. Usually Database files are in SAN, Separate Disk Array or on SSDs. This is done usually for performance reason and manageability perspective. Now the challenges comes up when database which was installed at not preferred default location and needs to move to a different location. Here is the quick tutorial how you can do it. UNION ALL and ORDER BY – How to Order Table Separately While Using UNION ALL If your requirement is such that you want your top and bottom query of the UNION resultset independently sorted but in the same result set you can add an additional static column and order by that column. Let us re-create the same scenario. Copy Data from One Table to Another Table – SQL in Sixty Seconds #031 – Video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVWIA-ACMNo 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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• Professional Development – Difference Between Bio, CV and Resume

  - by Pinal Dave

  Applying for work can be very stressful – you want to put your best foot forward, and it can be very hard to sell yourself to a potential employer while highlighting your best characteristics and answering questions.  On top of that, some jobs require different application materials – a biography (or bio), a curriculum vitae (or CV), or a resume.  These things seem so interchangeable, so what is the difference? Let’s start with the one most of us have heard of – the resume.  A resume is a summary of your job and education history.  If you have ever applied for a job, you will have used a resume.  The ability to write a good resume that highlights your best characteristics and emphasizes your qualifications for a specific job is a skill that will take you a long way in the world.  For such an essential skill, unfortunately it is one that many people struggle with. RESUME So let’s discuss what makes a great resume.  First, make sure that your name and contact information are at the top, in large print (slightly larger font than the rest of the text, size 14 or 16 if the rest is size 12, for example).  You need to make sure that if you catch the recruiter’s attention and they know how to get a hold of you. As for qualifications, be quick and to the point.  Make your job title and the company the headline, and include your skills, accomplishments, and qualifications as bullet points.  Use good action verbs, like “finished,” “arranged,” “solved,” and “completed.”  Include hard numbers – don’t just say you “changed the filing system,” say that you “revolutionized the storage of over 250 files in less than five days.”  Doesn’t that sentence sound much more powerful? Curriculum Vitae (CV) Now let’s talk about curriculum vitae, or “CVs”.  A CV is more like an expanded resume.  The same rules are still true: put your name front and center, keep your contact info up to date, and summarize your skills with bullet points.  However, CVs are often required in more technical fields – like science, engineering, and computer science.  This means that you need to really highlight your education and technical skills. Difference between Resume and CV Resumes are expected to be one or two pages long – CVs can be as many pages as necessary.  If you are one of those people lucky enough to feel limited by the size constraint of resumes, a CV is for you!  On a CV you can expand on your projects, highlight really exciting accomplishments, and include more educational experience – including GPA and test scores from the GRE or MCAT (as applicable).  You can also include awards, associations, teaching and research experience, and certifications.  A CV is a place to really expand on all your experience and how great you will be in this particular position. Biography (Bio) Chances are, you already know what a bio is, and you have even read a few of them.  Think about the one or two paragraphs that every author includes in the back flap of a book.  Think about the sentences under a blogger’s photo on every “About Me” page.  That is a bio.  It is a way to quickly highlight your life experiences.  It is essentially the way you would introduce yourself at a party. Where a bio is required for a job, chances are they won’t want to know about where you were born and how many pets you have, though.  This is a way to summarize your entire job history in quick-to-read format – and sometimes during a job hunt, being able to get to the point and grab the recruiter’s interest is the best way to get your foot in the door.  Think of a bio as your entire resume put into words. Most bios have a standard format.  In paragraph one, talk about your most recent position and accomplishments there, specifically how they relate to the job you are applying for.  If you have teaching or research experience, training experience, certifications, or management experience, talk about them in paragraph two.  Paragraph three and four are for highlighting publications, education, certifications, associations, etc.  To wrap up your bio, provide your contact info and availability (dates and times). Where to use What? For most positions, you will know exactly what kind of application to use, because the job announcement will state what materials are needed – resume, CV, bio, cover letter, skill set, etc.  If there is any confusion, choose whatever the industry standard is (CV for technical fields, resume for everything else) or choose which of your documents is the strongest. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: About Me, PostADay, Professional Development, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• The Arab HEUG is now a reality, and other random thoughts

  - by user9147039

  I just returned from Doha, Qatar where the first of its kind HEUG (Higher Education User Group) meeting for institutions in the Middle East and North Africa was held at Qatar University and jointly hosted by Damman University from Saudi Arabia. Over 80 delegates attended including representation from education institutions in Oman, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Qatar. There are many other regional HEUG organizations in place (in Australia/New Zealand, APAC, EMEA, as well as smaller regional HEUG’s in the Netherlands, South Africa, and in regions of the US), but it was truly an accomplishment to see this Middle East/North Africa group organize and launch their chapter with a meeting of this quality. To be known as the Arab HEUG going forward, I am excited about the prospects for sharing between the institutions and for the growth of Oracle solutions in the region. In particular the hosts for the event (Qatar University) did a masterful job with logistics and organization, and the quality of the event was a testament to their capabilities. Among the more interesting and enlightening presentations I attended were one from Dammam University on the lessons learned from their implementation of Campus Solutions and transition off of Banner, as well as the use by Qatar University E-business Suite for grants management (both pre-and post-award). The most notable fact coming from this latter presentation was the fit (89%) of e-Business Suite Grants to the university’s requirements. In a few weeks time we will be convening the 5th meeting of the Oracle Education & Research Industry Strategy Council in Redwood Shores (5th since my advent into my current role). The main topics of discussion will be around our Higher Education Applications Strategy for the future (including cloud approaches to ERP (HCM, Finance, and Student Information Systems), how some cases studies on the benefits of leveraging delivered functionality and extensibility in the software (versus customization). On the second day of the event we will turn our attention to Oracle in Research and also budgeting and planning in higher education. Both of these sessions will include significant participation from council members in the form of panel discussions. Our EVP’s for Systems (John Fowler) and for Global Cloud Services and North America application sales (Joanne Olson) will join us for the discussion. I recently read a couple of articles that were surprising to me. The first was from Inside Higher Ed on October 15 entitled, “As colleges prepare for major software upgrades, Kuali tries to woo them from corporate vendors.” It continues to disappointment that after all this time we are still debating whether it is better to build enterprise software through open or community source initiatives when fully functional, flexible, supported, and widely adopted options exist in the marketplace. Over a decade or more ago when these solutions were relatively immature and there was a great deal of turnover in the market I could appreciate the initiatives like Kuali. But let’s not kid ourselves – the real objective of this movement is to counter a perceived predatory commercial software industry. Again, when commercial solutions are deployed as written without significant customization, and standard business processes are adopted, the cost of these solutions (relative to the value delivered) is quite low, and certain much lower than the massive investment (and risk) in in-house developers to support a bespoke community source system. In this era of cost pressures in education and the need to refocus resources on teaching, learning, and research, I believe it’s bordering on irresponsible to continue to pursue open-source ERP. Many of the adopter’s total costs are staggering and have little to show for their efforts and expended resources. The second article was recently in the Chronicle of Higher Education and was entitled “’Big Data’ Is Bunk, Obama Campaign’s Tech Guru Tells University Leaders.” This one was so outrageous I almost don’t want to legitimize it by referencing it here. In the article the writer relays statements made by Harper Reed, President Obama’s former CTO for his 2012 re-election campaign, that big data solutions in education have no relevance and are akin to snake oil. He goes on to state that while he’s a fan of data-driven decision making in education, most of the necessary analysis can be accomplished in Excel spreadsheets. Yeah… right. This is exactly what ails education (higher education in particular). Dozens of shadow and siloed systems running on spreadsheets with limited-to-no enterprise wide initiatives to harness the data-rich environment that is a higher ed institution and transform the data into useable information. I’ll grant Mr. Reed that “Big Data” is overused and hackneyed, but imperatives like improving student success in higher education are classic big data problems that data-mining and predictive analytics can address. Further, higher ed need to be producing a massive amount more data scientists and analysts than are currently in the pipeline, to further this discipline and application of these tools to many many other problems across multiple industries.

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• SQL Table stored as a Heap - the dangers within

  - by MikeD

  Nearly all of the time I create a table, I include a primary key, and often that PK is implemented as a clustered index. Those two don't always have to go together, but in my world they almost always do. On a recent project, I was working on a data warehouse and a set of SSIS packages to import data from an OLTP database into my data warehouse. The data I was importing from the business database into the warehouse was mostly new rows, sometimes updates to existing rows, and sometimes deletes. I decided to use the MERGE statement to implement the insert, update or delete in the data warehouse, I found it quite performant to have a stored procedure that extracted all the new, updated, and deleted rows from the source database and dump it into a working table in my data warehouse, then run a stored proc in the warehouse that was the MERGE statement that took the rows from the working table and updated the real fact table. Use Warehouse CREATE TABLE Integration.MergePolicy (PolicyId int, PolicyTypeKey int, Premium money, Deductible money, EffectiveDate date, Operation varchar(5)) CREATE TABLE fact.Policy (PolicyKey int identity primary key, PolicyId int, PolicyTypeKey int, Premium money, Deductible money, EffectiveDate date) CREATE PROC Integration.MergePolicy as begin begin tran Merge fact.Policy as tgtUsing Integration.MergePolicy as SrcOn (tgt.PolicyId = Src.PolicyId) When not matched by Target then Insert (PolicyId, PolicyTypeKey, Premium, Deductible, EffectiveDate)values (src.PolicyId, src.PolicyTypeKey, src.Premium, src.Deductible, src.EffectiveDate) When matched and src.Operation = 'U' then Update set PolicyTypeKey = src.PolicyTypeKey,Premium = src.Premium,Deductible = src.Deductible,EffectiveDate = src.EffectiveDate When matched and src.Operation = 'D' then Delete ;delete from Integration.WorkPolicy commit end Notice that my worktable (Integration.MergePolicy) doesn't have any primary key or clustered index. I didn't think this would be a problem, since it was relatively small table and was empty after each time I ran the stored proc. For one of the work tables, during the initial loads of the warehouse, it was getting about 1.5 million rows inserted, processed, then deleted. Also, because of a bug in the extraction process, the same 1.5 million rows (plus a few hundred more each time) was getting inserted, processed, and deleted. This was being sone on a fairly hefty server that was otherwise unused, and no one was paying any attention to the time it was taking. This week I received a backup of this database and loaded it on my laptop to troubleshoot the problem, and of course it took a good ten minutes or more to run the process. However, what seemed strange to me was that after I fixed the problem and happened to run the merge sproc when the work table was completely empty, it still took almost ten minutes to complete. I immediately looked back at the MERGE statement to see if I had some sort of outer join that meant it would be scanning the target table (which had about 2 million rows in it), then turned on the execution plan output to see what was happening under the hood. Running the stored procedure again took a long time, and the plan output didn't show me much - 55% on the MERGE statement, and 45% on the DELETE statement, and table scans on the work table in both places. I was surprised at the relative cost of the DELETE statement, because there were really 0 rows to delete, but I was expecting to see the table scans. (I was beginning now to suspect that my problem was because the work table was being stored as a heap.) Then I turned on STATS_IO and ran the sproc again. The output was quite interesting.Table 'Worktable'. Scan count 0, logical reads 0, physical reads 0, read-ahead reads 0, lob logical reads 0, lob physical reads 0, lob read-ahead reads 0.Table 'Policy'. Scan count 0, logical reads 0, physical reads 0, read-ahead reads 0, lob logical reads 0, lob physical reads 0, lob read-ahead reads 0.Table 'MergePolicy'. Scan count 1, logical reads 433276, physical reads 60, read-ahead reads 0, lob logical reads 0, lob physical reads 0, lob read-ahead reads 0. I've reproduced the above from memory, the details aren't exact, but the essential bit was the very high number of logical reads on the table stored as a heap. Even just doing a SELECT Count(*) from Integration.MergePolicy incurred that sort of output, even though the result was always 0. I suppose I should research more on the allocation and deallocation of pages to tables stored as a heap, but I haven't, and my original assumption that a table stored as a heap with no rows would only need to read one page to answer any query was definitely proven wrong. It's likely that some sort of physical defragmentation of the table may have cleaned that up, but it seemed that the easiest answer was to put a clustered index on the table. After doing so, the execution plan showed a cluster index scan, and the IO stats showed only a single page read. (I aborted my first attempt at adding a clustered index on the table because it was taking too long - instead I ran TRUNCATE TABLE Integration.MergePolicy first and added the clustered index, both of which took very little time). I suspect I may not have noticed this if I had used TRUNCATE TABLE Integration.MergePolicy instead of DELETE FROM Integration.MergePolicy, since I'm guessing that the truncate operation does some rather quick releasing of pages allocated to the heap table. In the future, I will likely be much more careful to have a clustered index on every table I use, even the working tables. Mike  

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• Summit reflections

  - by Rob Farley

  So far, my three PASS Summit experiences have been notably different to each other. My first, I wasn’t on the board and I gave two regular sessions and a Lightning Talk in which I told jokes. My second, I was a board advisor, and I delivered a precon, a spotlight and a Lightning Talk in which I sang. My third (last week), I was a full board director, and I didn’t present at all. Let’s not talk about next year. I’m not sure there are many options left. This year, I noticed that a lot more people recognised me and said hello. I guess that’s potentially because of the singing last year, but could also be because board elections can bring a fair bit of attention, and because of the effort I’ve put in through things like 24HOP... Yeah, ok. It’d be the singing. My approach was very different though. I was watching things through different eyes. I looked for the things that seemed to be working and the things that didn’t. I had staff there again, and was curious to know how their things were working out. I knew a lot more about what was going on behind the scenes to make various things happen, and although very little about the Summit was actually my responsibility (based on not having that portfolio), my perspective had moved considerably. Before the Summit started, Board Members had been given notebooks – an idea Tom (who heads up PASS’ marketing) had come up with after being inspired by seeing Bill walk around with a notebook. The plan was to take notes about feedback we got from people. It was a good thing, and the notebook forms a nice pair with the SQLBits one I got a couple of years ago when I last spoke there. I think one of the biggest impacts of this was that during the first keynote, Bill told everyone present about the notebooks. This set a tone of “we’re listening”, and a number of people were definitely keen to tell us things that would cause us to pull out our notebooks. PASSTV was a new thing this year. Justin, the host, featured on the couch and talked a lot of people about a lot of things, including me (he talked to me about a lot of things, I don’t think he talked to a lot people about me). Reaching people through online methods is something which interests me a lot – it has huge potential, and I love the idea of being able to broadcast to people who are unable to attend in person. I’m keen to see how this medium can be developed over time. People who know me will know that I’m a keen advocate of certification – I've been SQL certified since version 6.5, and have even been involved in creating exams. However, I don’t believe in studying for exams. I think training is worthwhile for learning new skills, but the goal should be on learning those skills, not on passing an exam. Exams should be for proving that the skills are there, not a goal in themselves. The PASS Summit is an excellent place to take exams though, and with an attitude of professional development throughout the event, why not? So I did. I wasn’t expecting to take one, but I was persuaded and took the MCM Knowledge Exam. I hadn’t even looked at the syllabus, but tried it anyway. I was very tired, and even fell asleep at one point during it. I’ll find out my result at some point in the future – the Prometric site just says “Tested” at the moment. As I said, it wasn’t something I was expecting to do, but it was good to have something unexpected during the week. Of course it was good to catch up with old friends and make new ones. I feel like every time I’m in the US I see things develop a bit more, with more and more people knowing who I am, who my staff are, and recognising the LobsterPot brand. I missed being a presenter, but I definitely enjoyed seeing many friends on the list of presenters. I won’t try to list them, because there are so many these days that people might feel sad if I don’t mention them. For those that I managed to see, I was pleased to see that the majority of them have lifted their presentation skills since I last saw them, and I happily told them as much. One person who I will mention was Paul White, who travelled from New Zealand to his first PASS Summit. He gave two sessions (a regular session and a half-day), packed large rooms of people, and had everyone buzzing with enthusiasm. I spoke to him after the event, and he told me that his expectations were blown away. Paul isn’t normally a fan of crowds, and the thought of 4000 people would have been scary. But he told me he had no idea that people would welcome him so well, be so friendly and so down to earth. He’s seen the significance of the SQL Server community, and says he’ll be back. It’ll be good to see him there. Will you be there too?

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• Customer Engagement: Are Your Customers Engaged With Your Brands?

  - by Michael Snow

  Engaging Customers is Critical for Business Growth This week we'll be spending some time looking at Customer Engagement. We all have stories about how we try to engage our customers better than ever before.  We all know that successfully engaging customers is critical to an organization’s business success. We also know that engaging our customers is more challenging today than ever before. There is so much noise to compete with for getting anyone's attention. Over the last decade and a half we’ve watched as the online channel became a primary one for conducting our business and even managing our lives. And during this whole process or evolution, the customer journey has grown increasingly complex. Customers themselves have assumed increasing power and influence over the purchase process and for setting the tone and pace of the relationships they have with brands and you see the evidence of this in the really high expectations that customers have today. They expect brand experiences that are personalized and relevant -- In other words they want experiences that demonstrate that the brand understands their interests, preferences and past interactions with them. They also expect their experience with a brand and the community surrounding it to be social and interactive – it’s no longer acceptable to have a static, one-way dialogue with your customer base or to fail to connect your customers with fellow customers, or with your employees and partners. And on top of all this, customers expect us to deliver this rich and engaging, personalized and interactive experience, in a consistent way across a variety of channels including web, mobile and social channels or even offline venues such as in-store or via a call center. And as a result, we see that delivery on these expectations and successfully engaging your customers is a great challenge today. Customers expect a personal, engaging and consistent online customer experience. Today’s consumer expects to engage with your brand and the community surrounding it in an interactive and social way. Customers have come to expect a lot for the online customer experience.  ·        They expect it to be personal: o   Accessible:  - Regardless of my device  Via my existing online identities  o   Relevant:  Content that interests me  o   Customized:  To be able to tailor my online experience  ·        They expect it to be engaging: o   Social:  So I can share content with my social networks  o   Intuitive:  To easily find what I need   o   Interactive:  So I can interact with online communities And they expect it to be consistent across the online experience – so you better have your brand and information ducks in a row. These expectations are not only limited to your customers by any means. Your employees (and partners) are also expecting to be empowered with engagement tools across their internal and external communications and interactions with customers, partners and other employees. We had a great conversation with Ted Schadler from Forrester Research entitled: "Mobile is the New Face of Engagement" that is now available On-Demand. Take a look at all the webcasts available to watch from our Social Business Thought Leader Series. Social capabilities have become so pervasive and changed customers’ expectations for their online experiences. The days of one-direction communication with customers are at an end. Today’s customers expect to engage in a dialogue with your brand and the community surrounding it in an interactive and social way. You have at a very short window of opportunity to engage a customer before they go to another site in their pursuit of information, product, or services. In fact, customers who engage with brands via social media tend to spend more that customers who don’t, between 20% and 40% more.  And your customers are also increasingly influenced by their social networks too – 40% of consumers say they factor in Facebook recommendations when making purchasing decisions.  This means a few different things for today’s businesses. Incorporating forms of social interaction such as commenting or reviews as well as tightly integrating your online experience with your customers’ social networking experiences into the online customer experience are crucial for maintaining the eyeballs on your desired pages. --- Notes/Sources: 93% - Cone Finds that Americans Expect Companies to Have a Presence in Social Media - http://www.coneinc.com/content1182 40% of consumers factor in Facebook recommendations when making decisions about purchasing (Increasing Campaign Effectiveness with Social Media, Syncapse, March 2011) 20%-40% - Customers who engage with a company via social media spend this percentage more with that company than other customers (Source: Bain & Company Report – Putting Social Media to Work)

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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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• Books are Dead! Long Live the Books!

  - by smisner

  We live in interesting times with regard to the availability of technical material. We have lots of free written material online in the form of vendor documentation online, forums, blogs, and Twitter. And we have written material that we can buy in the form of books, magazines, and training materials. Online videos and training – some free and some not free – are also an option. All of these formats are useful for one need or another. As an author, I pay particular attention to the demand for books, and for now I see no reason to stop authoring books. I assure you that I don’t get rich from the effort, and fortunately that is not my motivation. As someone who likes to refer to books frequently, I am still a big believer in books and have evidence from book sales that there are others like me. If I can do my part to help others learn about the technologies I work with, I will continue to produce content in a variety of formats, including books. (You can view a list of all of my books on the Publications page of my site and my online training videos at Pluralsight.) As a consumer of technical information, I prefer books because a book typically can get into a topic much more deeply than a blog post, and can provide more context than vendor documentation. It comes with a table of contents and a (hopefully accurate) index that helps me zero in on a topic of interest, and of course I can use the Search feature in digital form. Some people suggest that technology books are outdated as soon as they get published. I guess it depends on where you are with technology. Not everyone is able to upgrade to the latest and greatest version at release. I do assume, however, that the SQL Server 7.0 titles in my library have little value for me now, but I’m certain that the minute I discard the book, I’m going to want it for some reason! Meanwhile, as electronic books overtake physical books in sales, my husband is grateful that I can continue to build my collection digitally rather than physically as the books have a way of taking over significant square footage in our house! Blog posts, on the other hand, are useful for describing the scenarios that come up in real-life implementations that wouldn’t fit neatly into a book. As many years that I have working with the Microsoft BI stack, I still run into new problems that require creative thinking. Likewise, people who work with BI and other technologies that I use share what they learn through their blogs. Internet search engines help us find information in blogs that simply isn’t available anywhere else. Another great thing about blogs, also, is the connection to community and the dialog that can ensue between people with common interests. With the trend towards electronic formats for books, I imagine that we’ll see books continue to adapt to incorporate different forms of media and better ways to keep the information current. At the moment, I wish I had a better way to help readers with my last two Reporting Services books. In the case of the Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Reporting Services Step by Step book, I have heard many cases of readers having problems with the sample database that shipped on CD – either the database was missing or it was corrupt. So I’ve provided a copy of the database on my site for download from http://datainspirations.com/uploads/rs2005sbsDW.zip. Then for the Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2008 Reporting Services Step by Step book, we decided to avoid the database problem by using the AdventureWorks2008 samples that Microsoft published on Codeplex (although code samples are still available on CD). We had this silly idea that the URL for the download would remain constant, but it seems that expectation was ill-founded. Currently, the sample database is found at http://msftdbprodsamples.codeplex.com/releases/view/37109 but I have no idea how long that will remain valid. My latest books (#9 and #10 which are milestones I never anticipated), Building Integrated Business Intelligence Solutions with SQL Server 2008 R2 and Office 2010 (McGraw Hill, 2011) and Business Intelligence in Microsoft SharePoint 2010 (Microsoft Press, 2011), will not ship with a CD, but will provide all code samples for download at a site maintained by the respective publishers. I expect that the URLs for the downloads for the book will remain valid, but there are lots of references to other sites that can change or disappear over time. Does that mean authors shouldn’t make reference to such sites? Personally, I think the benefits to be gained from including links are greater than the risks of the links becoming invalid at some point. Do you think the time for technology books has come to an end? Is the delivery of books in electronic format enough to keep them alive? If technological barriers were no object, what would make a book more valuable to you than other formats through which you can obtain information?

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• Windows for IoT, continued

  - by Valter Minute

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/WindowsEmbeddedCookbook/archive/2014/08/05/windows-for-iot-continued.aspxI received many interesting feedbacks on my previous blog post and I tried to find some time to do some additional tests. Bert Kleinschmidt pointed out that pins 2,3 and 10 of the Galileo are connected directly to the SOC, while pin 13, the one used for the sample sketch is controlled via an I2C I/O expander. I changed my code to use pin 2 instead of 13 (just changing the variable assignment at the beginning of the code) and latency was greatly reduced. Now each pulse lasts for 1.44ms, 44% more than the expected time, but ways better that the result we got using pin 13. I also used SetThreadPriority to increase the priority of the thread that was running the sketch to THREAD_PRIORITY_HIGHEST but that didn't change the results. When I was using the I2C-controlled pin I tried the same and the timings got ways worse (increasing more than 10 times) and so I did not commented on that part, wanting to investigate the issua a bit more in detail. It seems that increasing the priority of the application thread impacts negatively the I2C communication. I tried to use also the Linux-based implementation (using a different Galileo board since the one provided by MS seems to use a different firmware) and the results of running the sample blink sketch modified to use pin 2 and blink the led for 1ms are similar to those we got on the same board running Windows. Here the difference between expected time and measured time is worse, getting around 3.2ms instead of 1 (320% compared to 150% using Windows but far from the 100.1% we got with the 8-bit Arduino). Both systems were not under load during the test, maybe loading some applications that use part of the CPU time would make those timings even less reliable, but I think that those numbers are enough to draw some conclusions. It may not be worth running a full OS if what you need is Arduino compatibility. The Arduino UNO is probably the best Arduino you can find to perform this kind of development. The Galileo running the Linux-based stack or running Windows for IoT is targeted to be a platform for "Internet of Things" devices, whatever that means. At the moment I don't see the "I" part of IoT. We have low level interfaces (SPI, I2C, the GPIO pins) that can be used to connect sensors but the support for connectivity is limited and the amount of work required to deliver some data to the cloud (using a secure HTTP request or a message queuing system like APMQS or MQTT) is still big and the rich OS underneath seems to not provide any help doing that.Why should I use sockets and can't access all the high level connectivity features we have on "full" Windows?I know that it's possible to use some third party libraries, try to build them using the Windows For IoT SDK etc. but this means re-inventing the wheel every time and can also lead to some IP concerns if used for products meant to be closed-source. I hope that MS and Intel (and others) will focus less on the "coolness" of running (some) Arduino sketches and more on providing a better platform to people that really want to design devices that leverage internet connectivity and the cloud processing power to deliver better products and services. Providing a reliable set of connectivity services would be a great start. Providing support for .NET would be even better, leaving native code available for hardware access etc. I know that those components may require additional storage and memory etc. So making the OS componentizable (or, at least, provide a way to install additional components) would be a great way to let developers pick the parts of the system they need to develop their solution, knowing that they will integrate well together. I can understand that the Arduino and Raspberry Pi* success may have attracted the attention of marketing departments worldwide and almost any new development board those days is promoted as "XXX response to Arduino" or "YYYY alternative to Raspberry Pi", but this is misleading and prevents companies from focusing on how to deliver good products and how to integrate "IoT" features with their existing offer to provide, at the end, a better product or service to their customers. Marketing is important, but can't decide the key features of a product (the OS) that is going to be used to develop full products for end customers integrating it with hardware and application software. I really like the "hackable" nature of open-source devices and like to see that companies are getting more and more open in releasing information, providing "hackable" devices and supporting developers with documentation, good samples etc. On the other side being able to run a sketch designed for an 8 bit microcontroller on a full-featured application processor may sound cool and an easy upgrade path for people that just experimented with sensors etc. on Arduino but it's not, in my humble opinion, the main path to follow for people who want to deliver real products.   *Shameless self-promotion: if you are looking for a good book in Italian about the Raspberry Pi , try mine: http://www.amazon.it/Raspberry-Pi-alluso-Digital-LifeStyle-ebook/dp/B00GYY3OKO

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• WSS 3.0 to SharePoint 2010: Tips for delaying the Visual Upgrade

  - by Kelly Jones

  My most recent project has been to migrate a bunch of sites from WSS 3.0 (SharePoint 2007) to SharePoint Server 2010.  The users are currently working with WSS 3.0 and Office 2003, so the new ribbon based UI in 2010 will be completely new.  My client wants to avoid the new SharePoint 2010 look and feel until they’ve had time to train their users, so we’ve been testing the upgrades by keeping them with the 2007 user interface. Permission to perform the Visual Upgrade One of the first things we noticed was the default permissions for who was allowed to switch the UI from 2007 to 2010.  By default, site collection administrators and site owners can do this.  Since we wanted to more tightly control the timing of the new UI, I added a few lines to the PowerShell script that we are using to perform the migration.  This script creates the web application, sets the User Policy, and then does a Mount-SPDatabase to attach the old 2007 content database to the 2010 farm.  I added the following steps after the Mount-SPDatabase step: #Remove the visual upgrade option for site owners # it remains for Site Collection administrators foreach ($sc in $WebApp.Sites){ foreach ($web in $sc.AllWebs){ #Visual Upgrade permissions for the site/subsite (web) $web.UIversionConfigurationEnabled = $false; $web.Update(); } } These script steps loop through each Site Collection in a particular web application ($WebApp) and then it loops through each subsite ($web) in the Site Collection ($sc) and disables the Site Owner’s permission to perform the Visual Upgrade. This is equivalent to going to the Site Collection administrator settings page –> Visual Upgrade and selecting “Hide Visual Upgrade”. Since only IT people have Site Collection administrator privileges, this will allow IT to control the timing of the new 2010 UI rollout. Newly created subsites Our next issue was brought to our attention by SharePoint Joel’s blog post last week (http://www.sharepointjoel.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=524 ).  In it, he lists some updates about the 2010 upgrade, and his fourth point was one that I hadn’t seen yet: 4. If a 2007 upgraded site has not been visually upgraded, the sites created underneath it will look like 2010 sites – While this is something I’ve been aware of, I think many don’t realize how this impacts common look and feel for master pages, and how it impacts good navigation and UI. As well depending on your patch level you may see hanging behavior in the list picker. The site and list creation Silverlight control in Internet Explorer is looking for resources that don’t exist in the galleries in the 2007 site, and hence it continues to spin and spin and eventually time out. The work around is to upgrade to SP1, or use Chrome or Firefox which won’t attempt to render the Silverlight control. When the root site collection is a 2007 site and has it’s set of galleries and the children are 2010 sites there is some strange behavior linked to the way that the galleries work and pull from the parent. Our production SharePoint 2010 Farm has SP1 installed, as well as the December 2011 Cumulative Update, so I think the “hanging behavior” he mentions won’t affect us. However, since we want to control the roll out of the UI, we are concerned that new subsites will have the 2010 look and feel, no matter what the parent site has. Ok, time to dust off my developer skills. I first looked into using feature stapling, but I couldn’t get that to work (although I’m pretty sure I had everything wired up correctly).  Then I stumbled upon SharePoint 2010’s web events – a great way to handle this. Using Visual Studio 2010, I created a new SharePoint project and added a Web Event Receiver: In the Event Receiver class, I used the WebProvisioned method to check if the parent site is a 2007 site (UIVersion = 3), and if so, then set the newly created site to 2007:   /// <summary> /// A site was provisioned. /// </summary> public override void WebProvisioned(SPWebEventProperties properties) { base.WebProvisioned(properties);   try { SPWeb curweb = properties.Web;   if (curweb.ParentWeb != null) {   //check if the parent website has the 2007 look and feel if (curweb.ParentWeb.UIVersion == 3) { //since parent site has 2007 look and feel // we'll apply that look and feel to the current web curweb.UIVersion = 3; curweb.Update(); } } } catch (Exception) { //TODO: Add logging for errors } }   This event is part of a Feature that is scoped to the Site Level (Site Collection).  I added a couple of lines to my migration PowerShell script to activate the Feature for any site collections that we migrate. Plan Going Forward The plan going forward is to perform the visual upgrade after the users for a particular site collection have gone through 2010 training. If we need to do several site collections at once, we’ll use a PowerShell script to loop through each site collection to update the sites to 2010.  If it’s just one or two, we’ll be using the “Update All Sites” button on the Visual Upgrade page for Site Collection Administrators. The custom code for newly created sites won’t need to be changed, since it relies on the UI version of the parent site.  If the parent is 2010, then the new site will look 2010.

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• The Unintended Consequences of Sound Security Policy

  - by Tanu Sood

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Author: Kevin Moulton, CISSP, CISM Meet the Author: Kevin Moulton, Senior Sales Consulting Manager, Oracle Kevin Moulton, CISSP, CISM, has been in the security space for more than 25 years, and with Oracle for 7 years. He manages the East Enterprise Security Sales Consulting Team. He is also a Distinguished Toastmaster. Follow Kevin on Twitter at twitter.com/kevin_moulton, where he sometimes tweets about security, but might also tweet about running, beer, food, baseball, football, good books, or whatever else grabs his attention. Kevin will be a regular contributor to this blog so stay tuned for more posts from him. When I speak to a room of IT administrators, I like to begin by asking them if they have implemented a complex password policy. Generally, they all nod their heads enthusiastically. I ask them if that password policy requires long passwords. More nodding. I ask if that policy requires upper and lower case letters – faster nodding – numbers – even faster – special characters – enthusiastic nodding all around! I then ask them if their policy also includes a requirement for users to regularly change their passwords. Now we have smiles with the nodding! I ask them if the users have different IDs and passwords on the many systems that they have access to. Of course! I then ask them if, when they walk around the building, they see something like this: Thanks to Jake Ludington for the nice example. Can these administrators be faulted for their policies? Probably not but, in the end, end-users will find a way to get their job done efficiently. Post-It Notes to the rescue! I was visiting a business in New York City one day which was a perfect example of this problem. First I walked up to the security desk and told them where I was headed. They asked me if they should call upstairs to have someone escort me. Is that my call? Is that policy? I said that I knew where I was going, so they let me go. Having the conference room number handy, I wandered around the place in a search of my destination. As I walked around, unescorted, I noticed the post-it note problem in abundance. Had I been so inclined, I could have logged in on almost any machine and into any number of systems. When I reached my intended conference room, I mentioned my post-it note observation to the two gentlemen with whom I was meeting. One of them said, “You mean like this,” and he produced a post it note full of login IDs and passwords from his breast pocket! I gave him kudos for not hanging the list on his monitor. We then talked for the rest of the meeting about the difficulties faced by the employees due to the security policies. These policies, although well-intended, made life very difficult for the end-users. Most users had access to 8 to 12 systems, and the passwords for each expired at a different times. The post-it note solution was understandable. Who could remember even half of them? What could this customer have done differently? I am a fan of using a provisioning system, such as Oracle Identity Manager, to manage all of the target systems. With OIM, and email could be automatically sent to all users when it was time to change their password. The end-users would follow a link to change their password on a web page, and then OIM would propagate that password out to all of the systems that the user had access to, even if the login IDs were different. Another option would be an Enterprise Single-Sign On Solution. With Oracle eSSO, all of a user’s credentials would be stored in a central, encrypted credential store. The end-user would only have to login to their machine each morning and then, as they moved to each new system, Oracle eSSO would supply the credentials. Good-bye post-it notes! 3M may be disappointed, but your end users will thank you. I hear people say that this post-it note problem is not a big deal, because the only people who would see the passwords are fellow employees. Do you really know who is walking around your building? What are the password policies in your business? How do the end-users respond?

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