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• SQLAuthority News – Android Efficiency Tips and Tricks – Personal Technology Tip

  - by pinaldave

  I use my phone for lots of things.  I use it mainly to replace my tablet – I can e-mail, take and edit photos, and do almost everything I can do on a laptop with this phone.  And I am sure that there are many of you out there just like me.  I personally have a Galaxy S3, which uses the Android operating system, and I have decided to feature it as the third installment of my Technology Tips and Tricks series. 1) Shortcut to your favorite contacts on home screen Access your most-called contacts easily from your home screen by holding your finger on any empty spot on the home screen.  A menu will pop up that allows you to choose Shortcuts, and Contact.  You can scroll through your contact list and then just tap on the name of the person you want to be able to dial with a single click. 2) Keep track of your data usage Yes, we all should keep a close eye on our data usage, because it is very easy to go over our limits and then end up with a giant bill at the end of the month.  Never get surprised when you open that mobile phone envelope again.  Go to Settings, then Data Usage, and you can find a quick rundown of your usage, how much data each app uses, and you can even set alarms to let you know when you are nearing the limits.   Better yet, you can set the phone to stop using data when it reaches a certain limit. 3) Bring back Good Grammar We often hear proclamations about the downfall of written language, and how texting abbreviations, misspellings, and lack of punctuation are the root of all evil.  Well, we can show all those doomsdayers that all is not lost by bringing punctuation back to texting.  Usually we leave it off when we text because it takes too long to get to the screen with all the punctuation options.  But now you can hold down the period (or “full stop”) button and a list of all the commonly-used punctuation marks will pop right up. 4) Apps, Apps, Apps and Apps And finally, I cannot end an article about smart phones without including a list of my favorite apps.  Here are a list of my Top 10 Applications on my Android (not counting social media apps). Advanced Task Killer – Keeps my phone snappy by closing un-necessary apps WhatsApp - my favorite alternate to Text SMS Flipboard - my ‘timepass’ moments Skype – keeps me close to friends and family GoogleMaps - I am never lost because of this one thing Amazon Kindle – Books my best friends DropBox - My data always safe Pluralsight Player – Learning never stops for me Samsung Kies Air – Connecting Phone to Computer Chrome – Replacing default browser I have not included any social media applications in the above list, but you can be sure that I am linked to Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com)   Filed under: Best Practices, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Android, Personal Technology

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• ATG Live Webcast: Advanced E-Business Suite Architectures

  - by BillSawyer

  I am pleased to announce the ATG Live Webcast event for Dec. 8th, 2011: Advanced E-Business Suite Architectures Join Elke Phelps, Senior Principal Product Manager and Sriram Veeraraghavan, Senior Principal Software Engineer as they discuss advanced E-Business Suite architectures that can help you improve performance, scalability, business continuity, utilization, provisioning, and security. This one-hour webcasts provides an overview of advanced architectures with Q&A. This session will cover the latest advanced architectural options, including the use of Oracle database high-availability features and functions such as Real Application Clusters, ASM, Active Data Guard, clouds, virtualization, Oracle VM, high-availability and load-balancing architectures, WebLogic Server, and more. This session will also cover the latest updates to systems management tools like AutoConfig, and may also include sneak previews of upcoming functionality. This event is targeted to architects, system administrators, DBAs, developers, and implementers. The agenda for the Advanced E-Business Suite Architectures webcast includes the following topics: Advanced Oracle E-Business Suite Architectures Optional External Integrations Oracle E-Business Suite 12.2 Improving Performance and Scalability Providing Business Continuity Improving Utilization and Provisioning Improving Security Date:            Thursday, December 8, 2011Time:           8:00 AM - 9:00 AM Pacific Standard TimePresenter:  Elke Phelps, Senior Principal Product Manager                      Sriram Veeraraghavan, Senior Principal Software EngineerWebcast Registration Link (Preregistration is optional but encouraged)To hear the audio feed:    Domestic Participant Dial-In Number:           877-697-8128    International Participant Dial-In Number:      706-634-9568    Additional International Dial-In Numbers Link:    Dial-In Passcode:                                              98514To see the presentation:    The Direct Access Web Conference details are:    Website URL: https://ouweb.webex.com    Meeting Number:  273291684If you miss the webcast, or you have missed any webcast, don't worry -- we'll post links to the recording as soon as it's available from Oracle University.  You can monitor this blog for pointers to the replay. And, you can find our archive of our past webcasts and training at http://blogs.oracle.com/stevenChan/entry/e_business_suite_technology_learningIf you have any questions or comments, feel free to email Bill Sawyer (Senior Manager, Applications Technology Curriculum) at BilldotSawyer-AT-Oracle-DOT-com.

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• A temporary disagreement

  - by Tony Davis

  Last month, Phil Factor caused a furore amongst some MVPs with an article that attempted to offer simple advice to developers regarding the use of table variables, versus local and global temporary tables, in their code. Phil makes clear that the table variables do come with some fairly major limitations.no distribution statistics, no parallel query plans for queries that modify table variables.but goes on to suggest that for reasonably small-scale strategic uses, and with a bit of due care and testing, table variables are a "good thing". Not everyone shares his opinion; in fact, I imagine he was rather aghast to learn that there were those felt his article was akin to pulling the pin out of a grenade and tossing it into the database; table variables should be avoided in almost all cases, according to their advice, in favour of temp tables. In other words, a fairly major feature of SQL Server should be more-or-less 'off limits' to developers. The problem with temp tables is that, because they are scoped either in the procedure or the connection, it is easy to allow them to hang around for too long, eating up precious memory and bulking up the shared tempdb database. Unless they are explicitly dropped, global temporary tables, and local temporary tables created within a connection rather than within a stored procedure, will persist until the connection is closed or, with connection pooling, until the connection is reused. It's also quite common with ASP.NET applications to have connection leaks, as Bill Vaughn explains in his chapter in the "SQL Server Deep Dives" book, meaning that the web page exits without closing the connection object, maybe due to an error condition. This will then hang around in the heap for what might be hours before picked up by the garbage collector. Table variables are much safer in this regard, since they are batch-scoped and so are cleaned up automatically once the batch is complete, which also means that they are intuitive to use for the developer because they conform to scoping rules that are closer to those in procedural code. On the surface then, an ideal way to deal with issues related to tempdb memory hogging. So why did Phil qualify his recommendation to use Table Variables? This is another of those cases where, like scalar UDFs and table-valued multi-statement UDFs, developers can sometimes get into trouble with a relatively benign-looking feature, due to way it's been implemented in SQL Server. Once again the biggest problem is how they are handled internally, by the SQL Server query optimizer, which can make very poor choices for JOIN orders and so on, in the absence of statistics, especially when joining to tables with highly-skewed data. The resulting execution plans can be horrible, as will be the resulting performance. If the JOIN is to a large table, that will hurt. Ideally, Microsoft would simply fix this issue so that developers can't get burned in this way; they've been around since SQL Server 2000, so Microsoft has had a bit of time to get it right. As I commented in regard to UDFs, when developers discover issues like with such standard features, the database becomes an alien planet to them, where death lurks around each corner, and they continue to avoid these "killer" features years after the problems have been eventually resolved. In the meantime, what is the right approach? Is it to say "hammers can kill, don't ever use hammers", or is it to try to explain, as Phil's article and follow-up blog post have tried to do, what the feature was intended for, why care must be applied in its use, and so enable developers to make properly-informed decisions, without requiring them to delve deep into the inner workings of SQL Server? Cheers, Tony.

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• Software Architecture verses Software Design

  Recently, I was asked what the differences between software architecture and software design are. At a very superficial level both architecture and design seem to mean relatively the same thing. However, if we examine both of these terms further we will find that they are in fact very different due to the level of details they encompass. Software Architecture can be defined as the essence of an application because it deals with high level concepts that do not include any details as to how they will be implemented. To me this gives stakeholders a view of a system or application as if someone was viewing the earth from outer space. At this distance only very basic elements of the earth can be detected like land, weather and water. As the viewer comes closer to earth the details in this view start to become more defined. Details about the earth’s surface will start to actually take form as well as mane made structures will be detected. The process of transitioning a view from outer space to inside our earth’s atmosphere is similar to how an architectural concept is transformed to an architectural design. From this vantage point stakeholders can start to see buildings and other structures as if they were looking out of a small plane window. This distance is still high enough to see a large area of the earth’s surface while still being able to see some details about the surface. This viewing point is very similar to the actual design process of an application in that it takes the very high level architectural concept or concepts and applies concrete design details to form a software design that encompasses the actual implementation details in the form of responsibilities and functions. Examples of these details include: interfaces, components, data, and connections. In review, software architecture deals with high level concepts without regard to any implementation details. Software design on the other hand takes high level concepts and applies concrete details so that software can be implemented. As part of the transition between software architecture to the creation of software design an evaluation on the architecture is recommended. There are several benefits to including this step as part of the transition process. It allows for projects to ensure that they are on the correct path as to meeting the stakeholder’s requirement goals, identifies possible cost savings and can be used to find missing or nonspecific requirements that cause ambiguity in a design. In the book “Evaluating Software Architectures: Methods and Case Studies”, they define key benefits to adding an architectural review process to ensure that an architecture is ready to move on to the design phase. Benefits to evaluating software architecture: Gathers all stakeholders to communicate about the project Goals are clearly defined in regards to the creation or validation of specific requirements Goals are prioritized so that when conflicts occur decisions will be made based on goal priority Defines a clear expectation of the architecture so that all stakeholders have a keen understanding of the project Ensures high quality documentation of the architecture Enables discoveries of architectural reuse  Increases the quality of architecture practices. I can remember a few projects that I worked on that could have really used an architectural review prior to being passed on to developers. This project was to create some new advertising space on the company’s website in order to sell space based on the location and some other criteria. I was one of the developer selected to lead this project and I was given a high level design concept and a long list of ever changing requirements due to the fact that sales department had no clear direction as to what exactly the project was going to do or how they were going to bill the clients once they actually agreed to purchase the Ad space. In my personal opinion IT should have pushed back to have the requirements further articulated instead of forcing programmers to code blindly attempting to build such an ambiguous project.  Unfortunately, we had to suffer with this project for about 4 months when it should have only taken 1.5 to complete due to the constantly changing and unclear requirements. References  Clements, P., Kazman, R., & Klein, M. (2002). Evaluating Software Architectures. Westford, Massachusetts: Courier Westford. 

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• ATG Live Webcast June 28: Scrambling Sensitive Data in EBS 12 Cloned Environments

  - by BillSawyer

  Securing the Oracle E-Business Suite includes protecting the underlying E-Business data in production and non-production databases.  While steps can be taken to provide a secure configuration to limit EBS access, a better approach to protecting non-production data is simply to scramble (mask) the data in the non-production copy.   The Oracle E-Business Suite Template for Data Masking Pack can be used in situations where confidential or regulated data needs to be shared with other non-production users who need access to some of the original data, but not necessarily every table.  Examples of non-production users include internal application developers or external business partners such as offshore testing companies, suppliers or customers. The Oracle E-Business Suite Template for Data Masking Pack is applied to a non-production environment with the Enterprise Manager Grid Control Data Masking Pack.  When applied, the Oracle E-Business Suite Template for Data Masking Pack will create an irreversibly scrambled version of your production database for development and testing. This ATG Live Webcast is your chance to come learn about the Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1.3 Template for Data Masking Pack from the experts. Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1.3 Template for Data Masking The agenda for the Oracle E-Business Suite Template for Data Masking Pack webcast includes the following topics: What does data masking do in E-Business Suite environments? De-identify the data Mask sensitive data Maintain data validity How can EBS customers use data masking? References Join Eric Bing, Senior Director and Elke Phelps, Senior Principal Product Manager, as they discusses the Oracle E-Business Suite Template for Data Masking Pack.Date:                  Thursday, June 28, 2012Time:                 8:00AM Pacific Standard TimePresenters:     Eric Bing, Senior Director                           Elke Phelps, Senior Principal Product ManagerWebcast Registration Link (Preregistration is optional but encouraged) To hear the audio feed:    Domestic Participant Dial-In Number:           877-697-8128    International Participant Dial-In Number:      706-634-9568    Additional International Dial-In Numbers Link:    Dial-In Passcode:                                              100865To see the presentation:    The Direct Access Web Conference details are:    Website URL: https://ouweb.webex.com    Meeting Number:  599097152If you miss the webcast, or you have missed any webcast, don't worry -- we'll post links to the recording as soon as it's available from Oracle University.  You can monitor this blog for pointers to the replay. And, you can find our archive of our past webcasts and training here.If you have any questions or comments, feel free to email Bill Sawyer (Senior Manager, Applications Technology Curriculum) at BilldotSawyer-AT-Oracle-DOT-com.

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• F1 Pit Pragmatics

  - by mikef

  "I hate computers. No, really, I hate them. I love the communications they facilitate, I love the conveniences they provide to my life. but I actually hate the computers themselves." - Scott Merrill, 'I hate computers: confessions of a Sysadmin' If Scott's goal was to polarize opinion and trigger raging arguments over the 'real reasons why computers suck', then he certainly succeeded. Impassioned vitriol sits side-by-side with rational debate. Yet Scott's fundamental point is absolutely on the money - Computers are a means to an end. The IT industry is finally starting to put weight behind the notion that good User Experience is an absolutely crucial goal, a cause championed by the likes of Microsoft's Bill Buxton, and which Apple's increasingly ubiquitous touch screen interface exemplifies. However, that doesn't change the fact that, occasionally, you just have to man up and deal with complex systems. In fact, sometimes you just need to sacrifice everything else in the name of performance. You'll find a perfect example of this Faustian bargain in Trevor Clarke's fascinating look into the (diabolical) IT infrastructure of modern F1 racing - high performance, high availability. high everything. To paraphrase, each car has up to 100 sensors, transmitting around 30Gb of data over the course of a race (70% in real-time). This data is then processed by no less than 3 servers (per car) so that the engineers in the pit have access to telemetry, strategy information, timing feeds, a connection back to the operations room in the team's home base - the list goes on. All of this while the servers are exposed "to carbon dust, oil, vibration, rain, heat, [and] variable power". Now, this is admittedly an extreme context where there's no real choice but to use complex systems where ease-of-use is, at best, a secondary concern. The flip-side is seen in small-scale personal computing such as that seen in Apple's iDevices, which are incredibly intuitive but limited in their scope. In terms of what kinds of systems they prefer to use, I suspect that most SysAdmins find themselves somewhere along this axis of Power vs. Usability, and which end of this axis you resonate with also hints at where you think the IT industry should focus its energy. Do you see yourself in the F1 pit, making split-second decisions, wrestling with information flows and reticent hardware to bend them to your will? If so, I imagine you feel that computers are subtle tools which need to be tuned and honed, using the advanced knowledge possessed only by responsible SysAdmins (If you have an iPhone, I suspect it's jail-broken). If the machines throw enigmatic errors, it's the price of flexibility and raw power. Alternatively, would you prefer to have your role more accessible, with users empowered by knowledge, spreading the load of managing IT environments? In that case, then you want hardware and software to have User Experience as their primary focus, and are of the "means to an end" school of thought (you're probably also fed up with users not listening to you when you try and help). At its heart, the dichotomy is between raw power (which might be difficult to use) and ease-of-use (which might have some limitations, but you can be up and running immediately). Of course, the ultimate goal is a fusion of flexibility, power and usability all in one system. It's achievable in specific software environments, and Red Gate considers it a target worth aiming for, but in other cases it's a goal right up there with cold fusion. I think it'll be a long time before we see it become ubiquitous. In the meantime, are you Power-Hungry or a Champion of Usability? Cheers, Michael Francis Simple Talk SysAdmin Editor

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• JD Edwards Apps in a Box - Update

  - by Hartmut Wiese

  Summary and clarification JD Edwards Apps in a box is a Partner offering to the customer. We as Oracle have a huge interest in getting a successful offering to the market and we help the Partner building their offering. We provide components like JD Edwards EnterpriseOne and the Hardware. The Business Partner adds the installation services and position this as a solution to the market for a single price. As you know JD Edwards EnterpriseOne can run on multiple hardware platforms. Linux/X-86 version As you all know we do have JD Edwards VM Templates available from Oracle for the X-86 architecture. Each Partner should or is already able to install JD Edwards EnterpriseOne using these images from our software delivery cloud. We built a master bill of material for a X3-2 Hardware configuration now. It has been uploaded on the Community Workspace now. This is a SUGGESTION and limited to 50 Users MAX. However I strongly recommend you to do a sizing as usual and verify the configuration for each opportunity individually. T4-1/X3-2 version Oracle is not providing similar images for the T4-1 SPARC / SOLARIS architecture. There is an Optimized Solution Team inside Oracle who has created an Optimized Solution for JD Edwards some time ago. They created a whitepaper which is still available to download. This whitepaper was used as a starting point however we decided to build a new version of it using the latest Software and Hardware available. This has now been finalized and we are happy to provide this to our partners. This image is more a service we provide for each partner which they can reuse and extend based on their individual offerings. It is not an official supported Oracle Product and cannot be used to deploy to customers immediately. You cannot resell “JDE in a box”. You can use these images to save time while building your own Go-to-Market offering. You might want to add functionality like Mobility. It is also not complete as also the Deployment Server needs to be configured individually at the customer site. We will create some documentation about: what this images contains (and what not)? what final installation activities needs to be provided by each VAD/Partner in this process?  I will send an email to the community once we are ready to share it. You find these assets than in the Community Workspace. The Business Model with Oracle Hardware For those who have not done any Hardware business with Oracle yet: Usually a HW reseller orders the hardware through a Value Add Distributors (VAD) and not from Oracle directly. Each Partner needs to have Hardware Resell rights to do so. The VAD is assembling the boxes according to the needs of each customer. It is easily possible for them to prepare the boxes with the images we/you provide. However the final configuration is something a reseller/implementer needs to do at the customer site. This process is not the same in the EMEA region. Sometimes a VAD are taking the order but they do not see the Hardware at all. In those cases a VAD cannot provide any help with the pre-loading of any images and the reseller/implementer needs to do that. In some countries we do not have VADs at all.

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• Industry perspectives on managing content

  - by aahluwalia

  Earlier this week I was noodling over a topic for my first blog post. My intention for this blog is to bring a practitioner's perspective on ECM to the community; to share and collaborate on best practices and approaches that address today's business problems. Reviewing my past 14 years of experience with web technologies, I wondered what topic would serve as a good "conversation starter". During this time, I received a call from a friend who was seeking insights on how content management applies to specific industries. She approached me because she vaguely remembered that I had worked in the Health Insurance industry in the recent past. She wanted me to tell her about the specific business needs of this industry. She was in for quite a surprise as she found out that I had spent the better part of a decade managing content within the Health Insurance industry and I discovered a great topic for my first blog post! I offer some insights from Health Insurance and invite my fellow practitioners to share their insights from other industries. What does content management mean to these industries? What can solution providers be aware of when offering solutions to these industries? The United States health care system relies heavily on private health insurance, which is the primary source of coverage for approximately 58% Americans. In the late 19th century, "accident insurance" began to be available, which operated much like modern disability insurance. In the late 20th century, traditional disability insurance evolved into modern health insurance programs. The first thing a solution provider must be aware of about the Health Insurance industry is that it tends to be transaction intensive. They are the ones who manage and administer our health plans and process our claims when we visit our health care providers. It helps to keep in mind that they are in the business of delivering health insurance and not technology. You may find the mindset conservative in comparison to the IT industry, however, the Health Insurance industry has benefited and will continue to benefit from the efficiency that technology brings to traditionally paper-driven processes. We are all aware of the impact that Healthcare reform bill has had a significant impact on the Health Insurance industry. They are under a great deal of pressure to explore ways to reduce their administrative costs and increase operational efficiency. Overall, administrative costs of health insurance include the insurer's cost to administer the health plan, the costs borne by employers, health-care providers, governments and individual consumers. Inefficiencies plague health insurance, owing largely to the absence of standardized processes across the industry. To achieve this, industry leaders have come together to establish standards and invest in initiatives to help their healthcare provider partners transition to the next generation of healthcare technology. The move to online services and paperless explanation of benefits are some manifestations of technological advancements in health insurance. Several companies have adopted Toyota's LEAN methodology or Six Sigma principles to improve quality, reduce waste and excessive costs, thereby increasing the value of their plan offerings. A growing number of health insurance companies have transformed their business systems in the past decade alone and adopted some form of content management to reduce the costs involved in administering health plans. The key strategy has been to convert paper documents and forms into electronic formats, automate the content development process and securely distribute content to various audiences via diverse marketing channels, including web and mobile. Enterprise content management solutions can enable document capture of claim forms, manage digital assets, integrate with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Human Capital Management (HCM) solutions, build Business Process Management (BPM) processes, define retention and disposition instructions to comply with state and federal regulations and allow eBusiness and Marketing departments to develop and deliver web content to multiple websites, mobile devices and portals. Content can be shared securely within and outside the organization using Information Rights Management.  At the end of the day, solution providers who can translate strategic goals into solutions that maximize process automation, increase ease of use and minimize IT overhead are likely to be successful in today's health insurance environment.

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• Launching Ops Center 12c

  - by user12601629

  Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c is most ambitious version of the Ops Center tooling that we've ever released. I think that make it appropriate that we launched it in grand style! When it became clear we were going to be complete with the 12c final release about this time of year, the marketing team proposed that we roll the launch of 12c into Oracle OpenWorld Tokyo.  I thought that sounded like a fine idea!  You see, I have always loved Japan.  I even studied a bit of Japanese language back in school. OpenWorld Tokyo was an outstanding even this year.  It was held in Roppongi, one of the most stylish districts in Tokyo. And, to make things even better, the Sakura (cherry blossoms) were blooming.  If you've never been in Japan for cherry blossom season, it's a must see!  Here are a couple of pics for you. Here is a picture from Roppongi, near the conference.  Here's a picture near the Imperial Palace.  A couple of friends from the local sales team took me here before my flight out. So, now back to the product launch! We choose to launch the product in John Fowler's "Engineered Systems" keynote address.  It made perfect sense because of the close ties of Ops Center to the Systems portfolio of products.  It was a packed house for the keynote.  Here's a picture I took just before we started -- there were also hundreds more people in "overflow" rooms in other parts of the venue. Here's a picture of me on stage during the launch. While there are countless new features in Ops Center 12c that customers will love, I had to limit myself to discussing just three. Mission Critical Clouds Solaris 11 Engineered Systems So, what does Mission Critical Cloud mean?  It means we've expanded EM's cloud capabilities in a couple of key areas. First, we've expanded the "self service provisioning" capabilities we have to include SPARC -- not just x86.  Now you can build clouds of Solaris Zones with ease!  Second, we've much more deeply integrated high-end storage and network management into the cloud layers.  These may our IaaS story is now much more powerful! For Solaris 11, we didn't simply port our monitoring agent to S11.  That would have been easy, but also boring! We support S11 deeply.  Full access to the power of the IPS packaging system, the new virtualized networking stack, new Zones features, the Auto Install framework.  If you're ready to try Solaris 11 then Ops Center is ready for you. Last is on the area of Engineered Systems.  These combinations of hardware and software are fast and powerful. However, we're also on a mission to make them ever easier to manage.  We've made major strides with Ops Center 12c. Manage these systems as racks, not individual components.  The new capabilities for the new engineered systems like Exalogic and SPARC SuperCluster and striking. You can read more here: Oracle Unveils Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c So, I'll wrap this up with one final bit of fun. One of my friends from the Oracle marketing department found a super cool place to get dinner.  It's a restaurant called Gonpachi. It turns out this is the place that inspired the scene in the Quentin Taratino movie Kill Bill where Uma Thurman fights 88 Ninjas.  Here is a picture I snapped while we were there. It was surely a good time. Check it out next time you're in Tokyo.

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• Get to Know a Candidate (8 of 25): Rocky Anderson&ndash;Justice Party

  - by Brian Lanham

  DISCLAIMER: This is not a post about “Romney” or “Obama”. This is not a post for whom I am voting. Information sourced for Wikipedia. Ross Carl “Rocky” Anderson served two terms as the 33rd mayor of Salt Lake City, Utah, between 2000 and 2008.  He is the Executive Director of High Road for Human Rights.  Prior to serving as Mayor, he practiced law for 21 years in Salt Lake City, during which time he was listed in Best Lawyers in America, was rated A-V (highest rating) by Martindale-Hubbell, served as Chair of the Utah State Bar Litigation Section[4] and was Editor-in-Chief of, and a contributor to, Voir Dire legal journal. As mayor, Anderson rose to nationwide prominence as a champion of several national and international causes, including climate protection, immigration reform, restorative criminal justice, LGBT rights, and an end to the "war on drugs". Before and after the invasion by the U.S. of Iraq in 2003, Anderson was a leading opponent of the invasion and occupation of Iraq and related human rights abuses. Anderson was the only mayor of a major U.S. city who advocated for the impeachment of President George W. Bush, which he did in many venues throughout the United States. Anderson's work and advocacy led to local, national, and international recognition in numerous spheres, including being named by Business Week as one of the top twenty activists in the world on climate change,serving on the Newsweek Global Environmental Leadership Advisory Board, and being recognized by the Human Rights Campaign as one of the top ten straight advocates in the United States for LGBT equality. He has also received numerous awards for his work, including the EPA Climate Protection Award, the Sierra Club Distinguished Service Award, the Respect the Earth Planet Defender Award, the National Association of Hispanic Publications Presidential Award, The Drug Policy Alliance Richard J. Dennis Drugpeace Award, the Progressive Democrats of America Spine Award, the League of United Latin American Citizens Profile in Courage Award, the Bill of Rights Defense Committee Patriot Award, the Code Pink (Salt Lake City) Pink Star honor, the Morehouse University Gandhi, King, Ikeda Award, and the World Leadership Award for environmental programs. Formerly a member of the Democratic Party, Anderson expressed his disappointment with that Party in 2011, stating, “The Constitution has been eviscerated while Democrats have stood by with nary a whimper. It is a gutless, unprincipled party, bought and paid for by the same interests that buy and pay for the Republican Party." Anderson announced his intention to run for President in 2012 as a candidate for the newly-formed Justice Party. Although founded by Rocky Anderson of Utah, the Justice Party was first recognized by Mississippi and describes itself as advocating economic justice through measures such as green jobs and a right to organize, environment justice through enforcing employee safeguards in trade agreements, and social and civic justice through universal health care. In its first press release, the Utah Justice Party set forth its goals for justice in the economic, environmental, social and civic realms, along with a call to rid the corrupting influence of big money from government, to reverse the erosion of rights guaranteed by the Constitution, and to stop draining American resources to support illegal wars of aggression. Its press release says its grassroots supporters believe that now is the time for all to "shed their skeptical view that their voices don't matter", that "our 2-party system is a 'duopoly' controlled by the same corporate and military interests", and that the people must act to ensure "that our nation will achieve a brighter, sustainable future.” Anderson has ballot access in CO, CT, FL, ID, LA, MI, MN, MS, NJ, NM, OR, RI, TN, UT, VT, WA (152 electoral votes) and has write-in access in AL, AK, DE, GA, IL, IO, KS, MD, MO, NE, NH, NY, PA, TX Learn more about Rocky Anderson and Justice Party on Wikipedia.

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• Clever memory usage through the years

  - by Ben Emmett

  A friend and I were recently talking about the really clever tricks people have used to get the most out of memory. I thought I’d share my favorites, and would love to hear yours too! Interleaving on drum memory Back in the ye olde days before I’d been born (we’re talking the 50s / 60s here), working memory commonly took the form of rotating magnetic drums. These would spin at a constant speed, and a fixed head would read from memory when the correct part of the drum passed it by, a bit like a primitive platter disk. Because each revolution took a few milliseconds, programmers took to manually arranging information non-sequentially on the drum, timing when an instruction or memory address would need to be accessed, then spacing information accordingly around the edge of the drum, thus reducing the access delay. Similar techniques were still used on hard disks and floppy disks into the 90s, but have become irrelevant with modern disk technologies. The Hashlife algorithm Conway’s Game of Life has attracted numerous implementations over the years, but Bill Gosper’s Hashlife algorithm is particularly impressive. Taking advantage of the repetitive nature of many cellular automata, it uses a quadtree structure to store the hashes of pieces of the overall grid. Over time there are fewer and fewer new structures which need to be evaluated, so it starts to run faster with larger grids, drastically outperforming other algorithms both in terms of speed and the size of grid which can be simulated. The actual amount of memory used is huge, but it’s used in a clever way, so makes the list . Elite’s procedural generation Ok, so this isn’t exactly a memory optimization – more a storage optimization – but it gets an honorable mention anyway. When writing Elite, David Braben and Ian Bell wanted to build a rich world which gamers could explore, but their 22K memory was something of a limitation (for comparison that’s about the size of my avatar picture at the top of this page). They procedurally generated all the characteristics of the 2048 planets in their virtual universe, including the names, which were stitched together using a lookup table of parts of names. In fact the original plans were for 2^52 planets, but it was decided that that was probably too many. Oh, and they did that all in assembly language. Other games of the time used similar techniques too – The Sentinel’s landscape generation algorithm being another example. Modern Garbage Collectors Garbage collection in managed languages like Java and .NET ensures that most of the time, developers stop needing to care about how they use and clean up memory as the garbage collector handles it automatically. Achieving this without killing performance is a near-miraculous feet of software engineering. Much like when learning chemistry, you find that every time you think you understand how the garbage collector works, it turns out to be a mere simplification; that there are yet more complexities and heuristics to help it run efficiently. Of course introducing memory problems is still possible (and there are tools like our memory profiler to help if that happens to you) but they’re much, much rarer. A cautionary note In the examples above, there were good and well understood reasons for the optimizations, but cunningly optimized code has usually had to trade away readability and maintainability to achieve its gains. Trying to optimize memory usage without being pretty confident that there’s actually a problem is doing it wrong. So what have I missed? Tell me about the ingenious (or stupid) tricks you’ve seen people use. Ben

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• Seamless STP with Oracle SOA Suite

  - by user12339860

  STP stands for “Straight Through Processing”. Wikipedia describes STP as a solution that enables “the entire trade process for capital markets and payment transactions to be conducted electronically without the need for re-keying or manual intervention, subject to legal and regulatory restrictions” .I will deal with the later part of the definition i.e “payment transactions without manual intervention” in this article. The STP that I am writing about involves the interaction between a Bank and its’ corporate customers,to that extent this business case is also called “Corporate Payments”.Simply put a  Corporate Payment-STP solution needs to connect the payment transaction right from the Corporate ERP into the Bank’s Payment Hub. A SOA based STP solution can do a lot more than just process transaction. But before I get to the solution let me describe the perspectives of the two primary parties in this interaction. The Corporate customer and the Bank. Corporate's Interaction with Bank:  Typically it is the treasury department of an enterprise which interacts with the Bank on a daily basis. Here is how a day of interaction would look like from the treasury department of a corp. Corporate Cash Retrieve Beginning of day totals Monitor Cash Accounts Send or receive cash between accounts Supply chain payments Payment Settlements Calculate settlement positions Retrieve End of Day totals Assess Transaction Financial Impact Short Term Investment Desk Retrieve Current Account information Conduct Investment activities Bank’s Interaction with the Corporate :  From the Bank’s perspective, the interaction starts from the point of on boarding a corporate customer to billing the corporate for the value added services it provides. Once the corporate is on-boarded the daily interaction involves Handle the various formats of data arriving from customers Process Beginning of Day & End of Day reporting request from customers Meet compliance requirements Process Payments Transmit Payment Status Challenges with this Interaction :  Both the Bank & the Corporate face many challenges from these interactions. Some of the challenges include Keeping a consistent view of transaction data for various LOBs of the corporate & the Bank Corporate customers use different ERPs, hence the data formats are bound to be different Can the Bank’s IT systems convert the data formats that can be easily mapped to the corporate ERP How does the Bank manage the communication profiles of these customers?  Corporate customers are demanding near real time visibility on their corporate accounts Corporate customers can make better cash management decisions if they can analyse the impact. Can the Bank create opportunities to sell its products to the investment desks at corporate houses & manage their orders? How will the Bank bill the corporate customer for the value added services it provides. What does a SOA based Seamless STP solution bring to the table? Highlights of Oracle SOA based STP solution For the Corporate Customer: No Manual or Paper based banking transactions Secure Delivery of Payment data to the Bank from multiple ERPs without customization Single Portal for monitoring & administering payment transactions Rule based validation of payments Customer has data necessary for more effective handling of payment and cash management decisions  Business measurements track progress toward payment cost goals  For the Bank: Reduces time & complexity of transactions Simplifies the process of introducing new products to corporate customers Single Payment hub for all corporate ERP payments across multiple instruments New Revenue sources by delivering value added services to customers Leverages existing payment infrastructure Remove Inconsistent data formats and interchange between bank and corporate systems  Compliance and many other benefits

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• PASS Summit 2013 Review

  - by Ajarn Mark Caldwell

  As a long-standing member of PASS who lives in the greater Seattle area and has attended about nine of these Summits, let me start out by saying how GREAT it was to go to Charlotte, North Carolina this year.  Many of the new folks that I met at the Summit this year, upon hearing that I was from Seattle, commented that I must have been disappointed to have to travel to the Summit this year after 5 years in a row in Seattle.  Well, nothing could be further from the truth.  I cheered loudly when I first heard that the 2013 Summit would be outside Seattle.  I have many fond memories of trips to Orlando, Florida and Grapevine, Texas for past Summits (missed out on Denver, unfortunately).  And there is a funny dynamic that takes place when the conference is local.  If you do as I have done the last several years and saved my company money by not getting a hotel, but rather just commuting from home, then both family and coworkers tend to act like you’re just on a normal schedule.  For example, I have a young family, and my wife and kids really wanted to still see me come home “after work”, but there are a whole lot of after-hours activities, social events, and great food to be enjoyed at the Summit each year.  Even more so if you really capitalize on the opportunities to meet face-to-face with people you either met at previous summits or have spoken to or heard of, from Twitter, blogs, and forums.  Then there is also the lovely commuting in Seattle traffic from neighboring cities rather than the convenience of just walking across the street from your hotel.  So I’m just saying, there are really nice aspects of having the conference 2500 miles away. Beyond that, the training was fantastic as usual.  The SQL Server community has many outstanding presenters and experts with deep knowledge of the tools who are extremely willing to share all of that with anyone who wants to listen.  The opening video with PASS President Bill Graziano in a NASCAR race turned dream sequence was very well done, and the keynotes, as usual, were great.  This year I was particularly impressed with how well attended were the Professional Development sessions.  Not too many years ago, those were very sparsely attended, but this year, the two that I attended were standing-room only, and these were not tiny rooms.  I would say this is a testament to both the maturity of the attendees realizing how important these topics are to career success, as well as to the ever-increasing skills of the presenters and the program committee for selecting speakers and topics that resonated with people.  If, as is usually the case, you were not able to get to every session that you wanted to because there were just too darn many good ones, I encourage you to get the recordings. Overall, it was a great time as these events always are.  It was wonderful to see old friends and make new ones, and the people of Charlotte did an awesome job hosting the event and letting their hospitality shine (extra kudos to SQLSentry for all they did with the shuttle, maps, and other event sponsorships).  We’re back in Seattle next year (it is a release year, after all) but I would say that with the success of this year’s event, I strongly encourage the Board and PASS HQ to firmly reestablish the location rotation schedule.  I’ll even go so far as to suggest standardizing on an alternating Seattle – Charlotte schedule, or something like that. If you missed the Summit this year, start saving now, and register early, so you can join us!

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• I.T. Chargeback : Core to Cloud Computing

  - by Anand Akela

  Contributed by Mark McGill Consolidation and Virtualization have been widely adopted over the years to help deliver benefits such as increased server utilization, greater agility and lower cost to the I.T. organization. These are key enablers of cloud, but in themselves they do not provide a complete cloud solution. Building a true enterprise private cloud involves moving from an admin driven world, where the I.T. department is ultimately responsible for the provisioning of servers, databases, middleware and applications, to a world where the consumers of I.T. resources can provision their infrastructure, platforms and even complete application stacks on demand. Switching from an admin-driven provisioning model to a user-driven model creates some challenges. How do you ensure that users provisioning resources will not provision more than they need? How do you encourage users to return resources when they have finished with them so that others can use them? While chargeback has existed as a concept for many years (especially in mainframe environments), it is the move to this self-service model that has created a need for a new breed of chargeback applications for cloud. Enabling self-service without some form of chargeback is like opening a shop where all of the goods are free. A successful chargeback solution will be able to allocate the costs of shared I.T. infrastructure based on the relative consumption by the users. Doing this creates transparency between the I.T. department and the consumers of I.T. When users are able to understand how their consumption translates to cost they are much more likely to be prudent when it comes to their use of I.T. resources. This also gives them control of their I.T. costs, as moderate usage will translate to a lower charge at the end of the month. Implementing Chargeback successfully create a win-win situation for I.T. and the consumers. Chargeback can help to ensure that I.T. resources are used for activities that deliver business value. It also improves the overall utilization of I.T. infrastructure as I.T. resources that are not needed are not left running idle. Enterprise Manager 12c provides an integrated metering and chargeback solution for Enterprise Manager Targets. This solution is built on top of the rich configuration and utilization information already available in Enterprise Manager. It provides metering not just for virtual machines, but also for physical hosts, databases and middleware. Enterprise Manager 12c provides metering based on the utilization and configuration of the following types of Enterprise Manager Target: Oracle VM Host Oracle Database Oracle WebLogic Server Using Enterprise Manager Chargeback, administrators are able to create a set of Charge Plans that are used to attach prices to the various metered resources. These plans can contain fixed costs (eg. $10/month/database), configuration based costs (eg. $10/month if OS is Windows) and utilization based costs (eg. $0.05/GB of Memory/hour) The self-service user provisioning these resources is then able to view a report that details their usage and helps them understand how this usage translates into cost. Armed with this information, the user is able to determine if the resources are delivering adequate business value based on what is being charged. Figure 1: Chargeback in Self-Service Portal Enterprise Manager 12c provides a variety of additional interfaces into this data. The administrator can access summary and trending reports. Summary reports allow the administrator to drill-down through the cost center hierarchy to identify, for example, the top resource consumers across the organization. Figure 2: Charge Summary Report Trending reports can be used for I.T. planning and budgeting as they show utilization and charge trends over a period of time. Figure 3: CPU Trend Report We also provide chargeback reports through BI Publisher. This provides a way for users who do not have an Enterprise Manager login (such as Line of Business managers) to view charge and usage information. For situations where a bill needs to be produced, chargeback can be integrated with billing applications such as Oracle Billing and Revenue Management (BRM). Further information on Enterprise Manager 12c’s integrated metering and chargeback: White Paper Screenwatch Cloud Management on OTN

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• What do you need to know to be a world-class master software developer? [closed]

  - by glitch

  I wanted to bring up this question to you folks and see what you think, hopefully advise me on the matter: let's say you had 30 years of learning and practicing software development in front of you, how would you dedicate your time so that you'd get the biggest bang for your buck. What would you both learn and work on to be a world-class software developer that would make a large impact on the industry and leave behind a legacy? I think that most great developers end up being both broad generalists and specialists in one-two areas of interest. I'm thinking Bill Joy, John Carmack, Linus Torvalds, K&R and so on. I'm thinking that perhaps one approach would be to break things down by categories and establish a base minimum of "software development" greatness. I'm thinking: Operating Systems: completely internalize the core concepts of OS, perhaps gain a lot of familiarity with an OSS one such as Linux. Anything from memory management to device drivers has to be complete second nature. Programming Languages: this is one of those topics that imho has to be fully grokked even if it might take many years. I don't think there's quite anything like going through the process of developing your own compiler, understanding language design trade-offs and so on. Programming Language Pragmatics is one of my favorite books actually, I think you want to have that internalized back to back, and that's just the start. You could go significantly deeper, but I think it's time well spent, because it's such a crucial building block. As a subset of that, you want to really understand the different programming paradigms out there. Imperative, declarative, logic, functional and so on. Anything from assembly to LISP should be at the very least comfortable to write in. Contexts: I believe one should have experience working in different contexts to truly be able to appreciate the trade-offs that are being made every day. Embedded, web development, mobile development, UX development, distributed, cloud computing and so on. Hardware: I'm somewhat conflicted about this one. I think you want some understanding of computer architecture at a low level, but I feel like the concepts that will truly matter will be slightly higher level, such as CPU caching / memory hierarchy, ILP, and so on. Networking: we live in a completely network-dependent era. Having a good understanding of the OSI model, knowing how the Web works, how HTTP works and so on is pretty much a pre-requisite these days. Distributed systems: once again, everything's distributed these days, it's getting progressively harder to ignore this reality. Slightly related, perhaps add solid understanding of how browsers work to that, since the world seems to be moving so much to interfacing with everything through a browser. Tools: Have a really broad toolset that you're familiar with, one that continuously expands throughout the years. Communication: I think being a great writer, effective communicator and a phenomenal team player is pretty much a prerequisite for a lot of a software developer's greatness. It can't be overstated. Software engineering: understanding the process of building software, team dynamics, the requirements of the business-side, all the pitfalls. You want to deeply understand where what you're writing fits from the market perspective. The better you understand all of this, the more of your work will actually see the daylight. This is really just a starting list, I'm confident that there's a ton of other material that you need to master. As I mentioned, you most likely end up specializing in a bunch of these areas as you go along, but I was trying to come up with a baseline. Any thoughts, suggestions and words of wisdom from the grizzled veterans out there who would like to share their thoughts and experiences with this? I'd really love to know what you think!

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• ?Oracle Database 12c????Information Lifecycle Management ILM?Storage Enhancements

  - by Liu Maclean(???)

  Oracle Database 12c????Information Lifecycle Management ILM ?????????Storage Enhancements ???????? Lifecycle Management ILM ????????? Automatic Data Placement ??????, ??ADP? ?????? 12c???????Datafile??? Online Move Datafile, ????????????????datafile???????,??????????????? ????(12.1.0.1)Automatic Data Optimization?heat map????????: ????????? (CDB)?????Automatic Data Optimization?heat map Row-level policies for ADO are not supported for Temporal Validity. Partition-level ADO and compression are supported if partitioned on the end-time columns. Row-level policies for ADO are not supported for in-database archiving. Partition-level ADO and compression are supported if partitioned on the ORA_ARCHIVE_STATE column. Custom policies (user-defined functions) for ADO are not supported if the policies default at the tablespace level. ADO does not perform checks for storage space in a target tablespace when using storage tiering. ADO is not supported on tables with object types or materialized views. ADO concurrency (the number of simultaneous policy jobs for ADO) depends on the concurrency of the Oracle scheduler. If a policy job for ADO fails more than two times, then the job is marked disabled and the job must be manually enabled later. Policies for ADO are only run in the Oracle Scheduler maintenance windows. Outside of the maintenance windows all policies are stopped. The only exceptions are those jobs for rebuilding indexes in ADO offline mode. ADO has restrictions related to moving tables and table partitions. ??????row,segment???????????ADO??,?????create table?alter table?????? ????ADO??,??????????????,???????????????? storage tier , ?????????storage tier?????????, ??????????????ADO??????????? segment?row??group? ?CREATE TABLE?ALERT TABLE???ILM???,??????????????????ADO policy? ??ILM policy???????????????? ??????? ????ADO policy, ?????alter table  ???????,?????????????? CREATE TABLE sales_ado (PROD_ID NUMBER NOT NULL, CUST_ID NUMBER NOT NULL, TIME_ID DATE NOT NULL, CHANNEL_ID NUMBER NOT NULL, PROMO_ID NUMBER NOT NULL, QUANTITY_SOLD NUMBER(10,2) NOT NULL, AMOUNT_SOLD NUMBER(10,2) NOT NULL ) ILM ADD POLICY COMPRESS FOR ARCHIVE HIGH SEGMENT AFTER 6 MONTHS OF NO ACCESS; SQL> SELECT SUBSTR(policy_name,1,24) AS POLICY_NAME, policy_type, enabled 2 FROM USER_ILMPOLICIES; POLICY_NAME POLICY_TYPE ENABLED -------------------- -------------------------- -------------- P41 DATA MOVEMENT YES ALTER TABLE sales MODIFY PARTITION sales_1995 ILM ADD POLICY COMPRESS FOR ARCHIVE HIGH SEGMENT AFTER 6 MONTHS OF NO ACCESS; SELECT SUBSTR(policy_name,1,24) AS POLICY_NAME, policy_type, enabled FROM USER_ILMPOLICIES; POLICY_NAME POLICY_TYPE ENABLE ------------------------ ------------- ------ P1 DATA MOVEMENT YES P2 DATA MOVEMENT YES /* You can disable an ADO policy with the following */ ALTER TABLE sales_ado ILM DISABLE POLICY P1; /* You can delete an ADO policy with the following */ ALTER TABLE sales_ado ILM DELETE POLICY P1; /* You can disable all ADO policies with the following */ ALTER TABLE sales_ado ILM DISABLE_ALL; /* You can delete all ADO policies with the following */ ALTER TABLE sales_ado ILM DELETE_ALL; /* You can disable an ADO policy in a partition with the following */ ALTER TABLE sales MODIFY PARTITION sales_1995 ILM DISABLE POLICY P2; /* You can delete an ADO policy in a partition with the following */ ALTER TABLE sales MODIFY PARTITION sales_1995 ILM DELETE POLICY P2; ILM ???????: ?????ILM ADP????,???????: ?????? ???? activity tracking, ????2????????,???????????????????: SEGMENT-LEVEL???????????????????? ROW-LEVEL????????,??????? ????????: 1??????? SEGMENT-LEVEL activity tracking ALTER TABLE interval_sales ILM  ENABLE ACTIVITY TRACKING SEGMENT ACCESS ???????INTERVAL_SALES??segment level  activity tracking,?????????????????? 2? ??????????? ALTER TABLE emp ILM ENABLE ACTIVITY TRACKING (CREATE TIME , WRITE TIME); 3????????? ALTER TABLE emp ILM ENABLE ACTIVITY TRACKING  (READ TIME); ?12.1.0.1.0?????? ??HEAT_MAP??????????, ?????system??session?????heap_map????????????? ?????????HEAT MAP??,? ALTER SYSTEM SET HEAT_MAP = ON; ?HEAT MAP??????,??????????????????????????  ??SYSTEM?SYSAUX????????????? ???????HEAT MAP??: ALTER SYSTEM SET HEAT_MAP = OFF; ????? HEAT_MAP????, ?HEAT_MAP??? ?????????????????????? ?HEAT_MAP?????????Automatic Data Optimization (ADO)??? ??ADO??,Heat Map ?????????? ????V$HEAT_MAP_SEGMENT ??????? HEAT MAP?? SQL> select * from V$heat_map_segment; no rows selected SQL> alter session set heat_map=on; Session altered. SQL> select * from scott.emp; EMPNO ENAME JOB MGR HIREDATE SAL COMM DEPTNO ---------- ---------- --------- ---------- --------- ---------- ---------- ---------- 7369 SMITH CLERK 7902 17-DEC-80 800 20 7499 ALLEN SALESMAN 7698 20-FEB-81 1600 300 30 7521 WARD SALESMAN 7698 22-FEB-81 1250 500 30 7566 JONES MANAGER 7839 02-APR-81 2975 20 7654 MARTIN SALESMAN 7698 28-SEP-81 1250 1400 30 7698 BLAKE MANAGER 7839 01-MAY-81 2850 30 7782 CLARK MANAGER 7839 09-JUN-81 2450 10 7788 SCOTT ANALYST 7566 19-APR-87 3000 20 7839 KING PRESIDENT 17-NOV-81 5000 10 7844 TURNER SALESMAN 7698 08-SEP-81 1500 0 30 7876 ADAMS CLERK 7788 23-MAY-87 1100 20 7900 JAMES CLERK 7698 03-DEC-81 950 30 7902 FORD ANALYST 7566 03-DEC-81 3000 20 7934 MILLER CLERK 7782 23-JAN-82 1300 10 14 rows selected. SQL> select * from v$heat_map_segment; OBJECT_NAME SUBOBJECT_NAME OBJ# DATAOBJ# TRACK_TIM SEG SEG FUL LOO CON_ID -------------------- -------------------- ---------- ---------- --------- --- --- --- --- ---------- EMP 92997 92997 23-JUL-13 NO NO YES NO 0 ??v$heat_map_segment???,?v$heat_map_segment??????????????X$HEATMAPSEGMENT V$HEAT_MAP_SEGMENT displays real-time segment access information. Column Datatype Description OBJECT_NAME VARCHAR2(128) Name of the object SUBOBJECT_NAME VARCHAR2(128) Name of the subobject OBJ# NUMBER Object number DATAOBJ# NUMBER Data object number TRACK_TIME DATE Timestamp of current activity tracking SEGMENT_WRITE VARCHAR2(3) Indicates whether the segment has write access: (YES or NO) SEGMENT_READ VARCHAR2(3) Indicates whether the segment has read access: (YES or NO) FULL_SCAN VARCHAR2(3) Indicates whether the segment has full table scan: (YES or NO) LOOKUP_SCAN VARCHAR2(3) Indicates whether the segment has lookup scan: (YES or NO) CON_ID NUMBER The ID of the container to which the data pertains. Possible values include:   0: This value is used for rows containing data that pertain to the entire CDB. This value is also used for rows in non-CDBs. 1: This value is used for rows containing data that pertain to only the root n: Where n is the applicable container ID for the rows containing data The Heat Map feature is not supported in CDBs in Oracle Database 12c, so the value in this column can be ignored. ??HEAP MAP??????????????????,????DBA_HEAT_MAP_SEGMENT???????? ???????HEAT_MAP_STAT$?????? ??Automatic Data Optimization??????: ????1: SQL> alter system set heat_map=on; ?????? ????????????? scott?? http://www.askmaclean.com/archives/scott-schema-script.html SQL> grant all on dbms_lock to scott; ????? SQL> grant dba to scott; ????? @ilm_setup_basic C:\APP\XIANGBLI\ORADATA\MACLEAN\ilm.dbf @tktgilm_demo_env_setup SQL> connect scott/tiger ; ???? SQL> select count(*) from scott.employee; COUNT(*) ---------- 3072 ??? 1 ?? SQL> set serveroutput on SQL> exec print_compression_stats('SCOTT','EMPLOYEE'); Compression Stats ------------------ Uncmpressed : 3072 Adv/basic compressed : 0 Others : 0 PL/SQL ???????? ???????3072?????? ????????? ????policy ???????????? alter table employee ilm add policy row store compress advanced row after 3 days of no modification / SQL> set serveroutput on SQL> execute list_ilm_policies; -------------------------------------------------- Policies defined for SCOTT -------------------------------------------------- Object Name------ : EMPLOYEE Subobject Name--- : Object Type------ : TABLE Inherited from--- : POLICY NOT INHERITED Policy Name------ : P1 Action Type------ : COMPRESSION Scope------------ : ROW Compression level : ADVANCED Tier Tablespace-- : Condition type--- : LAST MODIFICATION TIME Condition days--- : 3 Enabled---------- : YES -------------------------------------------------- PL/SQL ???????? SQL> select sysdate from dual; SYSDATE -------------- 29-7? -13 SQL> execute set_back_chktime(get_policy_name('EMPLOYEE',null,'COMPRESSION','ROW','ADVANCED',3,null,null),'EMPLOYEE',null,6); Object check time reset ... -------------------------------------- Object Name : EMPLOYEE Object Number : 93123 D.Object Numbr : 93123 Policy Number : 1 Object chktime : 23-7? -13 08.13.42.000000 ?? Distnt chktime : 0 -------------------------------------- PL/SQL ???????? ?policy?chktime???6??, ????set_back_chktime???????????????“????”?,?????????,???????? ?????? alter system flush buffer_cache; alter system flush buffer_cache; alter system flush shared_pool; alter system flush shared_pool; SQL> execute set_window('MONDAY_WINDOW','OPEN'); Set Maint. Window OPEN ----------------------------- Window Name : MONDAY_WINDOW Enabled? : TRUE Active? : TRUE ----------------------------- PL/SQL ???????? SQL> exec dbms_lock.sleep(60) ; PL/SQL ???????? SQL> exec print_compression_stats('SCOTT', 'EMPLOYEE'); Compression Stats ------------------ Uncmpressed : 338 Adv/basic compressed : 2734 Others : 0 PL/SQL ???????? ??????????????? Adv/basic compressed : 2734 ??????? SQL> col object_name for a20 SQL> select object_id,object_name from dba_objects where object_name='EMPLOYEE'; OBJECT_ID OBJECT_NAME ---------- -------------------- 93123 EMPLOYEE SQL> execute list_ilm_policy_executions ; -------------------------------------------------- Policies execution details for SCOTT -------------------------------------------------- Policy Name------ : P22 Job Name--------- : ILMJOB48 Start time------- : 29-7? -13 08.37.45.061000 ?? End time--------- : 29-7? -13 08.37.48.629000 ?? ----------------- Object Name------ : EMPLOYEE Sub_obj Name----- : Obj Type--------- : TABLE ----------------- Exec-state------- : SELECTED FOR EXECUTION Job state-------- : COMPLETED SUCCESSFULLY Exec comments---- : Results comments- : --- -------------------------------------------------- PL/SQL ???????? ILMJOB48?????policy?JOB,?12.1.0.1??J00x???? ?MMON_SLAVE???M00x???15????????? select sample_time,program,module,action from v$active_session_history where action ='KDILM background EXEcution' order by sample_time; 29-7? -13 08.16.38.369000000 ?? ORACLE.EXE (M000) MMON_SLAVE KDILM background EXEcution 29-7? -13 08.17.38.388000000 ?? ORACLE.EXE (M000) MMON_SLAVE KDILM background EXEcution 29-7? -13 08.17.39.390000000 ?? ORACLE.EXE (M000) MMON_SLAVE KDILM background EXEcution 29-7? -13 08.23.38.681000000 ?? ORACLE.EXE (M002) MMON_SLAVE KDILM background EXEcution 29-7? -13 08.32.38.968000000 ?? ORACLE.EXE (M000) MMON_SLAVE KDILM background EXEcution 29-7? -13 08.33.39.993000000 ?? ORACLE.EXE (M003) MMON_SLAVE KDILM background EXEcution 29-7? -13 08.33.40.993000000 ?? ORACLE.EXE (M003) MMON_SLAVE KDILM background EXEcution 29-7? -13 08.36.40.066000000 ?? ORACLE.EXE (M000) MMON_SLAVE KDILM background EXEcution 29-7? -13 08.37.42.258000000 ?? ORACLE.EXE (M000) MMON_SLAVE KDILM background EXEcution 29-7? -13 08.37.43.258000000 ?? ORACLE.EXE (M000) MMON_SLAVE KDILM background EXEcution 29-7? -13 08.37.44.258000000 ?? ORACLE.EXE (M000) MMON_SLAVE KDILM background EXEcution 29-7? -13 08.38.42.386000000 ?? ORACLE.EXE (M001) MMON_SLAVE KDILM background EXEcution select distinct action from v$active_session_history where action like 'KDILM%' KDILM background CLeaNup KDILM background EXEcution SQL> execute set_window('MONDAY_WINDOW','CLOSE'); Set Maint. Window CLOSE ----------------------------- Window Name : MONDAY_WINDOW Enabled? : TRUE Active? : FALSE ----------------------------- PL/SQL ???????? SQL> drop table employee purge ; ????? ???? ????? spool ilm_usecase_1_cleanup.lst @ilm_demo_cleanup ; spool off

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• Unclear pricing of Windows Azure

  - by Dirk

  How do you people think about the Windows Azure pricing model and the way it is presented to the user? I just found out that Azure keeps charging hours for STOPPED instances. I just received a bill from more than 100 euro for 3 STOPPED instances (not) running "HelloAzure". I the past I also played around with Amazon Web Services. Amazon doesn't charge for stopped instances. I was wondering: "Should I have known this before, or is Microsoft doing a bad job in clear communication in the pricing model?" Quote from http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/pricing/ : Compute time, measured in service hours: Windows Azure compute hours are charged only for when your application is deployed. When developing and testing your application, developers will want to remove the compute instances that are not being used to minimize compute hour billing. Partial compute hours are billed as full hours. I read this, so I stopped all instances after a few hours playing around. Now it seems I should have deleted them, not just "stopped". Strictly speaking, all depends on the definition of the word "deployed". If you upload an application, but it is not running, can it still be regarded as being "deployed"? May be, but when you read this for the first time, with AWS experience in mind, I don't think it's 100% clear what this means. Technically speaking, an uploaded application only uses (read: should only use / needs only) a few MB harddrive space. It doesn't require any CPU time. If Azure wants to reserve CPU's for not running instances.. well, that's Azure's choice, not mine. I don't want to spread a hate campaign at all, but I do want to know how people think about this subject. Should Microsoft be more clear about their pricing model or do you think it's clear enough? Second question: did anyone got refunded for a similar case? Thanks in advance! UPDATE 27-01-2011 I sent an email to customer support a few days ago, but I guess that didn't reach anu human being because I didn't hear anything from it. So, I made a telephone call today with a Dutch customer support representative (I live in Holland). She totally understood the problem and she's trying to get a refund for me. However, she mentioned that "usually these refund requests are denied", but she's going to try. She also mentioned that I'm not the first one with this (or similar) problem. UPDATE 28-01-2011 I just received a phonecall from Microsoft support. The lady told me some good news: the money will refunded. However, the invoice has not been made yet, and my creditcard will first be chardged, after which it will be refunded, but hey, that's no problem for me! I'm glad the way it's solved! Thanks everybody!

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• possible UDP attack on BIND?

  - by Waleed Hamra

  hello everyone, i was surprised last month when my EC2 instance (ubuntu precise server), that is supposed to be under the free tier still, accumulated lots of traffic... today, while checking my current billing statement, i noticed i already have tons of traffic, while still in the middle of the month, and i'm fearing what my bill by the end of the month is going to be... i installed bandwidthd, and after few minutes, i noticed lots of UDP traffic to "108.162.233.15". this is apparently a cloudflare IP, and i don't have anything using cloudflare (as far as i know). so i ran "iftop" to see what ports are being used, and i saw the UDP traffic coming from port 80 to my port 53... why would a webserver query dns? so i stopped bind on my server, and ran it in foreground debugging mode, and saw the following query, being repeated continuously: 17-Nov-2012 12:30:58.216 client 108.162.233.15#80: UDP request 17-Nov-2012 12:30:58.216 client 108.162.233.15#80: request is not signed 17-Nov-2012 12:30:58.216 client 108.162.233.15#80: recursion available 17-Nov-2012 12:30:58.216 client 108.162.233.15#80: query 17-Nov-2012 12:30:58.216 client 108.162.233.15#80: query (cache) 'isc.org/ANY/IN' approved 17-Nov-2012 12:30:58.216 client 108.162.233.15#80: send 17-Nov-2012 12:30:58.216 client 108.162.233.15#80: sendto 17-Nov-2012 12:30:58.216 client 108.162.233.15#80: senddone 17-Nov-2012 12:30:58.217 client 108.162.233.15#80: next 17-Nov-2012 12:30:58.217 client 108.162.233.15#80: endrequest 17-Nov-2012 12:30:58.217 client @0x7fbee05126e0: udprecv 17-Nov-2012 12:30:58.343 client 108.162.233.15#80: UDP request 17-Nov-2012 12:30:58.343 client 108.162.233.15#80: request is not signed 17-Nov-2012 12:30:58.343 client 108.162.233.15#80: recursion available 17-Nov-2012 12:30:58.343 client 108.162.233.15#80: query 17-Nov-2012 12:30:58.343 client 108.162.233.15#80: query (cache) 'isc.org/ANY/IN' approved 17-Nov-2012 12:30:58.343 client 108.162.233.15#80: send 17-Nov-2012 12:30:58.344 client 108.162.233.15#80: sendto 17-Nov-2012 12:30:58.344 client 108.162.233.15#80: senddone 17-Nov-2012 12:30:58.344 client 108.162.233.15#80: next 17-Nov-2012 12:30:58.344 client 108.162.233.15#80: endrequest my question is... is this normal? should i be worried? or is this completely irrelevant to my data charges, and i should wait to see more data from bandwidthd? thank you in advance.

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• How to get same cookie to control two different folders on same site.

  - by Incandescent

  I am using the below cookie javascript to run a background color changer on my site. I want to also use it for the background color of my forum which is in a separate folder (http://lightbulbchoice.com/forum). I currently have it working on both the site and forum but you have to set each separately, i.e., each is setting it's own cookie. How do I get the forum to locate the main site cookie and not set it's own? // Cookie Functions - Second Helping (21-Jan-96) // Written by: Bill Dortch, hIdaho Design // The following functions were released to the public domain by him. function getCookieVal (offset) { var endstr = document.cookie.indexOf (";", offset); if (endstr == -1) endstr = document.cookie.length; return unescape(document.cookie.substring(offset, endstr)); } function GetCookie (name) { var arg = name + "="; var alen = arg.length; var clen = document.cookie.length; var i = 0; while (i < clen) { var j = i + alen; if (document.cookie.substring(i, j) == arg) return getCookieVal (j); i = document.cookie.indexOf(" ", i) + 1; if (i == 0) break; } return null; } function SetCookie (name, value) { var argv = SetCookie.arguments; var argc = SetCookie.arguments.length; var expires = (argc > 2) ? argv[2] : null; var path = (argc > 3) ? argv[3] : null; var domain = (argc > 4) ? argv[4] : null; var secure = (argc > 5) ? argv[5] : false; document.cookie = name + "=" + escape (value) + ((expires == null) ? "" : ("; expires=" + expires.toGMTString())) + ((path == null) ? "" : ("; path=" + path)) + ((domain == null) ? "" : ("; domain=" + domain)) + ((secure == true) ? "; secure" : ""); } // --> </script>

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• Local admin password recovery: Windows Vista

  - by Jim Dennis

  I am faced with an unsettling situation. A friend of my father's has rather suddenly become a widower. Naturally they've taken care of the bank accounts and all the normal mundane things that people have been doing for a century or so. However, she was the computer user of the household. He was aware that they had some online banking stuff and bill paying stuff ... and that she spent lots of time on FaceBook and stuff like that. However, he doesn't know what her local passwords were (actually only vaguely aware that her couple of desktop and couple of laptop system even had passwords). He's never heard of "admin" passwords so that's no good either. In the past I've used KNOPPIX and the old LinuxCare "bootable business card" to recover NT passwords. I've never done this with MS Windows Vista. So, I'm looking for the best advice on how to do this. Naturally I do have physical access to the systems (the two laptops are charging across the room from me; and her old desktop systems are, naturally, still back at his place). Getting it right is much more important than fast or easy (I don't want to mess up those filesystems and possibly lose some photos or other stuff that he or his kids or grandkids will want). (BTW: if anyone things this is some social engineering hack to play upon the sympathies of the community to get the information I'm asking for ... think about it for a minute. I know about IRC and the "warez" boards. I know I can find this stuff out there if I dig enough. I'm just asking here because it'll hopefully be faster and, secondarily to raise awareness. As more of us put more of our lives online ... as we get older and as places like FaceBook continue to widen the appeal of computing to a broader segment of older people ... we are, as computer nerds, going to see a lot more of this. Survivors will needs us to be careful, sensitive and ethically responsible as they try to recover those bits of legacy during their bereavement. I can now tell you, first hand, it sucks!)

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• Asterisk server firewall script allows 2-way audio from incoming calls, but not on outgoing?

  - by cappie

  I'm running an Asterisk PBX on a virtual machine directly connected to the Internet and I really want to prevent script kiddies, l33t h4x0rz and actual hackers access to my server. The basic way I protect my calling-bill now is by using 32 character passwords, but I would much rather have a way to protect The firewall script I'm currently using is stated below, however, without the established connection firewall rule (mentioned rule #1), I cannot receive incoming audio from the target during outgoing calls: #!/bin/bash # first, clean up! iptables -F iptables -X iptables -t nat -F iptables -t nat -X iptables -t mangle -F iptables -t mangle -X iptables -P INPUT ACCEPT iptables -P FORWARD DROP # we're not a router iptables -P OUTPUT ACCEPT # don't allow invalid connections iptables -A INPUT -m state --state INVALID -j DROP # always allow connections that are already set up (MENTIONED RULE #1) iptables -A INPUT -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT # always accept ICMP iptables -A INPUT -p icmp -j ACCEPT # always accept traffic on these ports #iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT # always allow DNS traffic iptables -A INPUT -p udp --sport 53 -j ACCEPT iptables -A OUTPUT -p udp --dport 53 -j ACCEPT # allow return traffic to the PBX iptables -A INPUT -p udp -m udp --dport 50000:65536 -j ACCEPT iptables -A INPUT -p udp -m udp --dport 10000:20000 -j ACCEPT iptables -A INPUT -p udp --destination-port 5060:5061 -j ACCEPT iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --destination-port 5060:5061 -j ACCEPT iptables -A INPUT -m multiport -p udp --dports 10000:20000 iptables -A INPUT -m multiport -p tcp --dports 10000:20000 # IP addresses of the office iptables -A INPUT -s 95.XXX.XXX.XXX/32 -j ACCEPT # accept everything from the trunk IP's iptables -A INPUT -s 195.XXX.XXX.XXX/32 -j ACCEPT iptables -A INPUT -s 195.XXX.XXX.XXX/32 -j ACCEPT # accept everything on localhost iptables -A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT # accept all outgoing traffic iptables -A OUTPUT -j ACCEPT # DROP everything else #iptables -A INPUT -j DROP I would like to know what firewall rule I'm missing for this all to work.. There is so little documentation on which ports (incoming and outgoing) asterisk actually needs.. (return ports included). Are there any firewall/iptables specialists here that see major problems with this firewall script? It's so frustrating not being able to find a simple firewall solution that enabled me to have a PBX running somewhere on the Internet which is firewalled in such a way that it can ONLY allows connections from and to the office, the DNS servers and the trunk(s) (and only support SSH (port 22) and ICMP traffic for the outside world). Hopefully, using this question, we can solve this problem once and for all.

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• Developer Training – A Conclusive Summary- Part 5

  - by pinaldave

  Developer Training - Importance and Significance - Part 1 Developer Training – Employee Morals and Ethics – Part 2 Developer Training – Difficult Questions and Alternative Perspective - Part 3 Developer Training – Various Options for Developer Training – Part 4 Developer Training – A Conclusive Summary- Part 5 We have now reached the end of our series about developer training.  I hope you have come away thinking that training is the best way to advance in your company and that you are looking for training opportunities right now.  If you’re still not convinced here are a few things to keep in mind:  Training benefits the employer and the employee. A well trained employee is a happy employee, and a happy employee is more efficient and productive. Training an employee might be expensive, but it is less expensive than hiring a new person. Whether you are looking at him from the employee’s or the company’s point of view, there are always advantages to training. A Broader View This series is definitely written for Developer Training but it is not limited to developers only. There are IT Pro, System Admins, DBAs as well many other technology professionals; this article series is for all professionals in the world. The concepts and take away will remain common across all the platform and regardless of technology affiliation. Pass the Knowledge If I have to pick one advise which is extremely important related to training, I will pick – pass the knowledge. Once you have decided in favor of training, there is more to it than simply showing up and staying awake.  It is always a good idea to take notes – at the very least it will help you stay awake, but they will often serve as a good way to remember your training when you go back to work.  You can also use them to pass your new knowledge on to fellow employees, which can be very fun and rewarding. Right Place, Right Time and Right Training There are so many ways to get developer training.  In-person and on the job training is easy to come by and is the most usual type of training, but don’t overlook my favorite type of training: On Demand.  Being able to learn at your own pace, own place and on your own time will make training a realistic goal for almost every employee. I can think of nothing more important in life than furthering your education.  Especially when you work in a field that is constantly changing – like technology.  Whether you like it or not, training is incredibly important.  That is why I feel it is so important to receive training.  And because there are so many different training formats – live, online, through books, through people – I am certain that we all can find a way to be trained that best suits our goals and personalities. The Teacher Within If you think of anyone who is a master of the technology field or an incredibly successful developer (the obvious examples that spring to mind are Steve Jobs or Bill Gates), you will also find a teacher.  Both these individuals spent their lives developing better technology, but also educating other developers and the public about how to use these technologies and how it can change your life for the better.  I think that we all should strive to be like these wonderful teachers.  We might not be able to change the world, but we can certainly change a few lives around us. Even if we never turn into trainers ourselves , being trained as a student can be a good exercise.  We learn a lot and become better employees – and it would not be a stretch to say that this makes us better individuals, as well. Final Say I think learning and growing in your chosen field is not only a good idea, career-wise, but can be fun, too!  I for one never feel more alive than when I am learning about something I am really passionate about.  I think my job title – technology evangelist – explains how enthusiastic I am about this subject.  But please don’t think that I am thinking of this as someone who wants to train and educate others (although this is also one of my passions).  I am also a passionate student.  I enjoy learning new things and am always on the lookout for new ways to learn and new people to learn from. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Developer Training, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• SQL Developer Blitz at ODTUG Kscope12

  - by thatjeffsmith

  Oracle Development Tools User Group (ODTUG) puts on an outstanding event, and I enjoy that the content comes FIRST. Yes, the after-event parties and entertainment are first class, but I look forward most to sitting in on some excellent sessions. For Kscope12 one would expect Oracle to have a large presence, and you would be absolutely correct! The APEX team will be there in full force, and we’ll have sessions on JDeveloper, ADF, and .NET. But what I want to talk about today is our awesome line-up of coverage for Oracle SQL Developer (Surprise!) DB and Developer’s Toolbox Symposium Kris Rice or @krisrice, Product Development Manager for SQL Developer, will speak at 10AM Sunday about SQL Developer Data Modeler. Our free data modeling solution allows one to reverse engineer a data dictionary to a model, modify it, and create a script of the changes. Collaboration is an important part of any development team; with built-in subversion support, the modeler makes collaboration easy, not just possible. After the morning break, I’ll be talking about SQL Developer’s PL/SQL support. From creating your code, to debugging, tuning, testing, and documenting PL/SQL – SQL Developer fits the bill. Since I have a full hour, I should have time to do a little riff on using source control to version and manage your revisions too! At 3:15 Jagan Athreya will talk about the new integration between SQL Developer and Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c. Enabling developers to define changes in SQLDeveloper and allowing DBAs to promote these changes to Test and Production via Enterprise Manager will reduce errors, accelerate productivity, and help eliminate unplanned downtime. Get your SQL Developer groove on at ODTUG Kscope12! Presentations SQL Developer Tips and Tricks Monday June 25, Session 5, 4:15 pm – 5:15 pm I’ll take you through my favorite keyboard shortcuts, top 10 preferences every user should tweak, and spotlight features that the average user probably hasn’t discovered yet. My goal for this session is for everyone to take 1-2 tips they can implement immediately to save mucho time. I enjoy interacting with the audience so no two versions of this presentation are the same. Oracle SQL Developer and Data Modeler New Features When: Tuesday June 26, Session 6, 8:30 am – 9:30 am Ashley Chen, my PM-partner-in-crime, will be covering all the new features from our two latest updates. So if you’re new to SQL Developer, or you’ve been using an older version, stop by and see what new toys you have to play with. I also have a bet with Ashley that she will have more attendees than me, so be sure to show up so I can collect. Debugging PL/SQL With SQL Developer When: Wednesday June 27, Session 16, 3:00 pm – 4:00 pm Me again – sorry. This time I have an entire hour to JUST talk about PL/SQL and debugging! Should you use a watch with a break condition, or a breakpoint with a passcount? How does external debugging with a Perl script work? Can I just debug an anonymous PL/SQL block. So if debugging to you is just a DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE() call, stop by and see how our IDE can help you take things to the next level! Or is that level++? Hands-on-Training SQL Developer Soup to Nuts When: Tuesday, 8:00 AM – 9:30 AM If you learn by doing, this is the session for you. Bring your own laptop or use one of the lab machines. We’ll give you a VirtualBox OEL image running 11gR2 EE Database with all the fixin’s (that’s Southern speak for Partitioning, Advanced Compression, Tuning & Diagnostic Packs, etc), TimesTen, APEX and much more. All you have to do is login and run through our lab exercises. You can start with a model and work your way up to debugging and testing your own appliction, or you can pick and choose your lessons to suit your needs. We’ll have people on hand to help you out and answer your questions. Booth Hours We’ll be in the vendor area and have our very own ‘demo pod’ for SQL Developer. Between Kris, Ashley, and I we should be able to answer your questions or show you how to ‘do that thing’ in the tool. Or just stop by and say hello! We’ll be around the following hours’ish: Sunday, June 24, 2012 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM Monday, June 25, 2012 9:00 AM – 4:30 PM Tuesday, June 26, 2012 9:30 AM – 3:30 PM Wednesday, June 27, 2012 10:15 AM – 2:00 PM No Excuses – If You Have Questions, This is Your Chance to Get Your Answers! We’re doing just about everything outside of a scavenger hunt to bring information and value to our users. Let us know what you like, what you don’t like, and we’ll do our best to do more of the former and less of the latter!

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• Authorize.Net, Silent Posts, and URL Rewriting Don't Mix

  The too long, didn't read synopsis: If you use Authorize.Net and its silent post feature and it stops working, make sure that if your website uses URL rewriting to strip or add a www to the domain name that the URL you specify for the silent post matches the URL rewriting rule because Authorize.Net's silent post feature won't resubmit the post request to URL specified via the redirect response. I have a client that uses Authorize.Net to manage and bill customers. Like many payment gateways, Authorize.Net supports recurring payments. For example, a website may charge members a monthly fee to access their services. With Authorize.Net you can provide the billing amount and schedule and at each interval Authorize.Net will automatically charge the customer's credit card and deposit the funds to your account. You may want to do something whenever Authorize.Net performs a recurring payment. For instance, if the recurring payment charge was a success you would extend the customer's service; if the transaction was denied then you would cancel their service (or whatever). To accomodate this, Authorize.Net offers a silent post feature. Properly configured, Authorize.Net will send an HTTP request that contains details of the recurring payment transaction to a URL that you specify. This URL could be an ASP.NET page on your server that then parses the data from Authorize.Net and updates the specified customer's account accordingly. (Of course, you can always view the history of recurring payments through the reporting interface on Authorize.Net's website; the silent post feature gives you a way to programmatically respond to a recurring payment.) Recently, this client of mine that uses Authorize.Net informed me that several paying customers were telling him that their access to the site had been cut off even though their credit cards had been recently billed. Looking through our logs, I noticed that we had not shown any recurring payment log activity for over a month. I figured one of two things must be going on: either Authorize.Net wasn't sending us the silent post requests anymore or the page that was processing them wasn't doing so correctly. I started by verifying that our Authorize.Net account was properly setup to use the silent post feature and that it was pointing to the correct URL. Authorize.Net's site indicated the silent post was configured and that recurring payment transaction details were being sent to http://example.com/AuthorizeNetProcessingPage.aspx. Next, I wanted to determine what information was getting sent to that URL.The application was setup tolog the parsed results of the Authorize.Net request, such as what customer the recurring payment applied to; however,we were not logging the actual HTTP request coming from Authorize.Net. I contacted Authorize.Net's support to inquire if they logged the HTTP request send via the silent post feature and was told that they did not. I decided to add a bit of code to log the incoming HTTP request, which you can do by using the Request object's SaveAs method. This allowed me to saveevery incoming HTTP request to the silent post page to a text file on the server. Upon the next recurring payment, I was able to see the HTTP request being received by the page: GET /AuthorizeNetProcessingPage.aspx HTTP/1.1Connection: CloseAccept: */*Host: www.example.com That was it. Two things alarmed me: first, the request was obviously a GET and not a POST; second, there was no POST body (obviously), which is where Authorize.Net passes along thedetails of the recurring payment transaction.What stuck out was the Host header, which differed slightly from the silent post URL configured in Authorize.Net. Specifically, the Host header in the above logged request pointed to www.example.com, whereas the Authorize.Net configuration used example.com (no www). About a month ago - the same time these recurring payment transaction detailswere no longer being processed by our ASP.NET page - we had implemented IIS 7's URL rewriting feature to permanently redirect all traffic to example.com to www.example.com. Could that be the problem? I contacted Authorize.Net's support again and asked them if their silent post algorithmwould follow the301HTTP response and repost the recurring payment transaction details. They said, Yes, the silent post would follow redirects. Their reports didn't jive with my observations, so I went ahead and updated our Authorize.Net configuration to point to http://www.example.com/AuthorizeNetProcessingPage.aspx instead of http://example.com/AuthorizeNetProcessingPage.aspx. And, I'm happy to report, recurring payments and correctly being processed again! If you use Authorize.Net and the silent post feature, and you notice that your processing page is not longer working, make sure you are not using any URL rewriting rules that may conflict with the silent post URL configuration. Hope this saves someone the time it took me to get to the bottom of this. Happy Programming!Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• I Didn&rsquo;t Get You Anything&hellip;

  - by Bob Rhubart

  Nearly every day this blog features a  list posts and articles written by members of the OTN architect community. But with Christmas just days away, I thought a break in that routine was in order. After all, if the holidays aren’t excuse enough for an off-topic post, then the terrorists have won. Rather than buy gifts for everyone -- which, given the readership of this blog and my budget could amount to a cash outlay of upwards of $15.00 – I thought I’d share a bit of holiday humor. I wrote the following essay back in the mid-90s, for a “print” publication that used “paper” as a content delivery system.  That was then. I’m older now, my kids are older, but my feelings toward the holidays haven’t changed… It’s New, It’s Improved, It’s Christmas! The holidays are a time of rituals. Some of these, like the shopping, the music, the decorations, and the food, are comforting in their predictability. Other rituals, like the shopping, the  music, the decorations, and the food, can leave you curled into the fetal position in some dark corner, whimpering. How you react to these various rituals depends a lot on your general disposition and credit card balance. I, for one, love Christmas. But there is one Christmas ritual that really tangles my tinsel: the seasonal editorializing about how our modern celebration of the holidays pales in comparison to that of Christmas past. It's not that the old notions of how to celebrate the holidays aren't all cozy and romantic--you can't watch marathon broadcasts of "It's A Wonderful White Christmas Carol On Thirty-Fourth Street Story" without a nostalgic teardrop or two falling onto your plate of Christmas nachos. It's just that the loudest cheerleaders for "old-fashioned" holiday celebrations overlook the fact that way-back-when those people didn't have the option of doing it any other way. Dashing through the snow in a one-horse open sleigh? No thanks. When Christmas morning rolls around, I'm going to be mighty grateful that the family is going to hop into a nice warm Toyota for the ride over to grandma's place. I figure a horse-drawn sleigh is big fun for maybe fifteen minutes. After that you’re going to want Old Dobbin to haul ass back to someplace warm where the egg nog is spiked and the family can gather in the flickering glow of a giant TV and contemplate the true meaning of football. Chestnuts roasting on an open fire? Sorry, no fireplace. We've got a furnace for heat, and stuffing nuts in there voids the warranty. Any of the roasting we do these days is in the microwave, and I'm pretty sure that if you put chestnuts in the microwave they would become little yuletide hand grenades. Although, if you've got a snoot full of Yule grog, watching chestnuts explode in your microwave might be a real holiday hoot. Some people may see microwave ovens as a symptom of creeping non-traditional holiday-ism. But I'll bet you that if there were microwave ovens around in Charles Dickens' day, the Cratchits wouldn't have had to entertain an uncharacteristically giddy Scrooge for six or seven hours while the goose cooked. Holiday entertaining is, in fact, the one area that even the most severe critic of modern practices would have to admit has not changed since Tim was Tiny. A good holiday celebration, then as now, involves lots of food, free-flowing drink, and a gathering of friends and family, some of whom you are about as happy to see as a subpoena. Just as the Cratchit's Christmas was spent with a man who, for all they knew, had suffered some kind of head trauma, so the modern holiday gathering includes relatives or acquaintances who, because they watch too many talk shows, and/or have poor personal hygiene, and/or fail to maintain scheduled medication, you would normally avoid like a plate of frosted botulism. But in the season of good will towards men, you smile warmly at the mystery uncle wandering around half-crocked with a clump of mistletoe dangling from the bill of his N.R.A. cap. Dickens' story wouldn't have become the holiday classic it has if, having spotted on their doorstep an insanely grinning, raw poultry-bearing, fresh-off-a-rough-night Scrooge, the Cratchits had pulled their shades and pretended not to be home. Which is probably what I would have done. Instead, knowing full well his reputation as a career grouch, they welcomed him into their home, and we have a touching story that teaches a valuable lesson about how the Christmas spirit can get the boss to pump up the payroll. Despite what the critics might say, our modern Christmas isn't all that different from those of long ago. Sure, the technology has changed, but that just means a bigger, brighter, louder Christmas, with lasers and holograms and stuff. It's our modern celebration of a season that even the least spiritual among us recognizes as a time of hope that the nutcases of the world will wake up and realize that peace on earth is a win/win proposition for everybody. If Christmas has changed, it's for the better. We should continue making Christmas bigger and louder and shinier until everybody gets it.  *** Happy Holidays, everyone!   del.icio.us Tags: holiday,humor Technorati Tags: holiday,humor

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