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• Partner Webcast – More out of ODA with DB Options - 19 July 2012

  - by Thanos

  The Simple, Reliable, Affordable Path to High-Availability Databases Critical business data needs to be available 24/7 for users and customers, but it can be a struggle to find the time and resources to build a highly available database system that’s reliable and affordable. That’s why Oracle created the new Oracle Database Appliance—a complete package of software, server, storage, and networking. The Oracle Database Appliance integrates the world’s most popular database - Oracle Database 11g  - with system software, servers, storage and networking in a single box. Business gets the benefit of a reliable, secure and highly available database to support applications and maintain continuity – as well as groundbreaking ease of use. But that is not all, with the support for all Oracle Database Options, Oracle Database Appliance can be the ideal solution for many use cases. The benefits?   Unmatched performance, reliability & security for your data that’s there when you need it – which is all the time. Fast installation, simple deployment, easy management. Out of the box. Significant cost savings & reduced risk and complexity compared to integrating all the elements yourself. Ongoing lower total cost of ownership with multiple automated support, detection & correction functions that also save you time.   Discover the Oracle Database Appliance Value Proposition and learn how to position and combine it with database options to capture new business and easily roll out solutions safely and with maximum cost efficiency. Agenda: Oracle Database& Engineered Systems Innovation. What’s the Oracle Database Appliance ? Oracle Database Appliance Value Proposition. Oracle Database Appliance with Database Options Oracle Database Appliance Partners Business Delivery Format This FREE online LIVE eSeminar will be delivered over the Web. Registrations received less than 24hours prior to start time may not receive confirmation to attend. Duration: 1 hour Register Now! For any questions please contact us at partner.imc-AT-beehiveonline.oracle-DOT-com Visit regularly our ISV Migration Center blog Or Follow us @oracleimc to learn more on Oracle Technologies as well as upcoming partner webcasts and events.

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• Managing Social Relationships for the Enterprise – Part 1

  - by Michael Hylton

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Reggie Bradford, Senior Vice President, Oracle Today, Mark Hurd, President of Oracle, Thomas Kurian, Executive Vice President of Oracle and I discussed the strategic importance of how social media is impacting the enterprise and how it is changing the way customers, prospects employees and investors interact with brands worldwide. Oracle understands that the consumer is in control and as such, brands must evolve and change to meet growing needs. In addition, according to social media thought leader and Analyst from Altimeter Group, Jeremiah Owyang, companies now average 178 corporate-owned social media accounts. When Oracle added leading social marketing, listening analytics and development tools from Vitrue, Collective Intellect and Involver to its Oracle’s Cloud Services Suite we went beyond providing a single set of tools. We developed an entire framework to include a comprehensive social relationship management suite to help companies move beyond the social enterprise and achieve the social-enabled enterprise. The fundamental shift from transaction to engagement means that enterprises need not only a social strategy, but should also ensure that the information and data received from social initiatives flow back to marketing, sales, support and service. Doing so enables companies to deliver a proactive and compelling experience and provides analytics to turn engagement into opportunity – and ultimately that opportunity into revenue. On September 13, 2012, I am delighted to sit down with Jeremiah to further the discussion about how enterprises are addressing social media strategies and managing content. In addition, we will be taking your questions after the webinar via Twitter (@Oracle, @ReggieBradford, @cwfinn, @jowyang). Use #oracle and #socbiz to submit questions and follow the conversation. I look forward to speaking with you and answering your questions online. For more information about becoming a social-enabled enterprise, visit www.oracle.com/social. And don’t miss the insights of other social business thought leaders at www.oracle.com/goto/socialbusiness. Normal 0 false false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:Cambria; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin;}

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• java+netbeans+mysql+ubuntu 64 bits LTS VS C#+MS SQL for fast develop trading system

  - by crunchor

  I am going to build a trading system and use with the broker "Interactive Broker" API. The API supports C++ Socket, Java Socket, DDE, Active X APIs in Windows. The API supports Java Socket API, Posix C++ Socket API in Unix kind like Ubuntu. My trading system has some real time long calculations to do and a lot of maths for backtest. I am using a retail trading program Amibroker which is written in C++ and I run it in windows xp 32 bits, it will take me days to do one serious backtest with my G620 Sandy Bridge CPU and 3GB of ram. So for my trading system, I need to have 1. speed, 2. stability, 3. fast development I have done some research, C++ is fastest but I am not good at it and it takes much longer time to develop. Other than C++, Java in linux has the best speed. I also did some research for database and look like mysql has the best speed. Mysql and PostgreSQL both are very popular open source sql db, which one should I choose? I see MySQL has Workbench now which looks like similar to MS SQL management studio so look like a good start. Netbeans should be the most popular Java IDE now and seem like its GUI design can be as easy as Virtual Studio now. I am not sure if made by Netbeans would affect the speed and if its GUI design is really that good and easy to use. Ubuntu 64 bits LTS has good long term support, good community support, and stable. I will buy a new computer if I can create a good trading system for live trading and backtest. Very likely I will buy a I7 or I5 depends on if I7 can really have better speed for my case. Actually I mainly deal with C# in my jobs and I just knew java but not good at java. What would you guys recommend? Any better solution? This will be a big project and very likely life long project for me so I seriously do research including asking you guys before I start and focus on what I should, thanks!

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• E-Business Suite Sessions at Sangam 2013 in Hyderabad

  - by Sara Woodhull

  The Sangam 2013 conference, sponsored jointly by the All-India Oracle Users' Group (AIOUG) and India Oracle Applucations Users Group (IOAUG), will be in Hyderabad, India on November 8-9, 2013.  This year, the E-Business Suite Applications Technology Group (ATG) will offer two speaker sessions and a walk-in usability test of upcoming EBS user interface features.  It's only about two weeks away, so make your plans to attend if you are in India. Sessions Oracle E-Business Suite Technology: Latest Features and Roadmap Veshaal Singh, Senior Director, ATG Development Friday, Nov. 9, 11:00-12:00 This Oracle development session provides an overview of Oracle's product strategy for Oracle E-Business Suite technology, the capabilities and associated business benefits of recent releases, and a review of capabilities on the product roadmap. This is the cornerstone session for Oracle E-Business Suite technology. Come hear about the latest new usability enhancements of the user interface; systems administration and configuration management tools; security-related updates; and tools and options for extending, customizing, and integrating Oracle E-Business Suite with other applications. Integration Options for Oracle E-Business Suite Rekha Ayothi, Lead Product Manager, ATG Friday, Nov. 9, 2:00-3:00 In this Oracle development session, you will get an understanding of how, when and where you can leverage Oracle's integration technologies to connect end-to-end business processes across your enterprise, including your Oracle Applications portfolio. This session offers a technical look at Oracle E-Business Suite Integrated SOA Gateway, Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle Application Adapters for Data Integration for Oracle E-Business Suite, and other options for integrating Oracle E-Business Suite with other applications. Usability Testing There will be multiple opportunities to participate in usability testing at Sangam '13.  The User Experience team is running a one-on-one usability study that requires advance registration.  In addition, we will be hosting a special walk-in usability lab to get feedback for new Oracle E-Business Suite OA Framework features.  The walk-in lab is a shorter usability experience that does not require any pre-registration.  In both cases, Oracle wants your feedback!  Even if you only have a few minutes, come by the User Experience Lab, meet the team, and try the walk-in lab.

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• SQL SERVER – Iridium I/O – SQL Server Deduplication that Shrinks Databases and Improves Performance

  - by Pinal Dave

  Database performance is a common problem for SQL Server DBA’s.  It seems like we spend more time on performance than just about anything else.  In many cases, we use scripts or tools that point out performance bottlenecks but we don’t have any way to fix them.  For example, what do you do when you need to speed up a query that is already tuned as well as possible?  Or what do you do when you aren’t allowed to make changes for a database supporting a purchased application? Iridium I/O for SQL Server was originally built at Confio software (makers of Ignite) because DBA’s kept asking for a way to actually fix performance instead of just pointing out performance problems. The technology is certified by Microsoft and was so promising that it was spun out into a separate company that is now run by the Confio Founder/CEO and technology management team. Iridium uses deduplication technology to both shrink the databases as well as boost IO performance.  It is intriguing to see it work.  It will deduplicate a live database as it is running transactions.  You can watch the database get smaller while user queries are running. Iridium is a simple tool to use. After installing the software, you click an “Analyze” button which will spend a minute or two on each database and estimate both your storage and performance savings.  Next, you click an “Activate” button to turn on Iridium I/O for your selected databases.  You don’t need to reboot the operating system or restart the database during any part of the process. As part of my test, I also wanted to see if there would be an impact on my databases when Iridium was removed.  The ‘revert’ process (bringing the files back to their SQL Server native format) was executed by a simple click of a button, and completed while the databases were available for normal processing. I was impressed and enjoyed playing with the software and encourage all of you to try it out.  Here is the link to the website to download Iridium for free. . Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• What Problems Are Better Solved By SOAP Over REST?

  In the battle for web service supremacy SOAP and REST have been battling for years. In my personal opinion this debate should have never existed. Yes, both forms can be used to create an interactive web service, but each form of a service was developed independent of each other to solve two different yet similar problems. Based my research and experience I would have to say that REST should be the preferred web service methodology and SOAP should only be used in specific situations. Note, I did not say that I was against SOAP, and in fact I actually like to use SOAP when it is needed. Criteria for using SOAP: Does the service need a guaranteed level of reliability and security? Did the provider and consumer of the service agreed on a standardized data exchange format? Does the service need data context and state management? If you answer yes to any of these questions, then you may want to consider SOAP as the format for the web service. Another way to look at the relationship between REST and SOAP is to look at the medical field.  For most things a general doctor or you family health care provider can acceptably treat most conditions from the case of a common cold to a broken bone. A general doctor more aligns with REST in my opinion because for most service requirements REST fulfills a projects needs, but what happens if you need more of an advanced examination, you would go to a specialist. A specialist would already have experience dealing with specific issues that you are experiencing giving them specific context to how best treat you going forward. SOAP acts more like a specialist doctor giving that they understand the context of an issue and can treat it based on the state of other patients they have already treated. An example of where I would use SOAP over REST in real life would be a single sign-on application. I n these cases I need to check validate a username and password for authentication and authorization of a web page request. This service would need to maintain state while it authenticated a user and while it validated access to a web page on a subsequent request. This service must process every request for access and not allow caching to ensure that every request is processed and the appropriate users are allowed to view selected web pages. References: Rozlog, M. (2010). REST and SOAP: When Should I Use Each (or Both)? Retrieved 11 20, 2011, from Infoq.com: http://www.infoq.com/articles/rest-soap-when-to-use-each

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• Rapid Planning: Next Generation MRP

  - by john.bermudez

  MRP has been a mainstay of manufacturing systems for 40 years. MRP evolved from simple inventory planning systems to become the heart of the MRPII systems which eventually became ERP. While the applications surrounding it have become broader, more sophisticated and web-based, MRP continues to operate in the loneliness of the Saturday night batch window quietly exploding bills of materials and logging exceptions for hours. During this same 40 years, manufacturing business processes have seen countless changes and improvements including JIT, TQM, Six Sigma, Flow Manufacturing, Lean Manufacturing and Supply Chain Management. Although much logic has been added to MRP to deal with new manufacturing processes, it has not been able to keep up with the real-time pace of today's supply chain. As a result, planners have devised ingenious ways to trick MRP to handle new processes but often need to dump the output into spreadsheets of their own design in the hope of wrestling thousands of exceptions to ground. Oracle's new Rapid Planning application is just what companies still running MRP have been waiting for! The newest member of the Value Chain Planning product line, Rapid Planning is designed to empower planners with comprehensive supply planning that runs online in minutes, not hours. It enables a planner simulate the incremental impact of a new order or re-run an entire plan in a separate sandbox. Rapid Planning does a complete multi-level bill of material explosion like MRP but plans orders considering material and capacity constraints. Considering material and capacity constraints in planning can help you quickly reduce inventory and improve on-time shipments. Rapid Planning is an APS application that leverages years of Oracle development experience and customer feedback. Rather than rely exclusively on black-box heuristics, Rapid Planning is designed to give planners the computing power to use their industry experience and business knowledge to improve MRP. For example, Rapid Planning has a powerful worksheet user interface with built-in query capability that allows the planner to locate the orders she is interested in and use a mass update function to make quick work of large changes. The planner can save these queries and unique user interface to personalize their planning environment. Most importantly, Rapid Planning is designed to do supply planning in today's dynamic supply chain environment. It can be used to supplement MRP or replace MRP entirely. It generates plans that provide order-by-order details with aggregate key performance indicators that enable planners to quickly assess the overall business impact of a plan. To find out more about how Rapid Planning can help improve your MRP, please contact me at [email protected] or your Oracle Account Manager.

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• Role based access control in Oracle VM using Enterprise Manager 12c

  - by Ronen Kofman

  Enterprise Managers let’s you control any element in the environment and define which users can do what on each element. We will show here an example on how to set up RBAC (Role Base Access Control) for Oracle VM using Enterprise Manager, this will be a very simplified explanation  to help you get going. For more comprehensive explanations please refer to the Enterprise Manager User Guide. OK, first some basic Enterprise Manager terminology: Target – any element in the environment is a target – server, pool, zone, VM etc. Administrators – these are the Enterprise Manager users who can login to the platform. Roles – roles are privilege profiles which could be applied to Administrators. The first step will be to discover the virtual environment and bring it in to Enterprise Manager, this process is simple and can be done in two ways: Work on your Oracle VM manager, set it up until you feel comfortable and then register it in Enterprise Manager Use Enterprise Manager and build it all from there. In both cases we will be able to see the same picture from Oracle VM and from Enterprise Manager, any change made in one will be reflected in the other. Oracle VM Manager: Enterprise Manager: Once you have your virtual environment set up in Enterprise Manager it is time to start associating VMs with users (or Administrators as they are called in Enterprise Manager). Enterprise Manager allows us to connect to multiple different identity services and import users from them but the simplest way to add Administrators is just go to setup->security->Administrators and create new Administrator. The creation wizard will walk you through several stages and allow you to assign role(s) to your newly created Administrator, using roles can really shorten the process if done multiple times. When you get to “Target Privileges” stage, scroll down to the bottom to the “Target Privileges” section. In this section you can add targets (virtual machine in our case) and define the type of privileges you would like to assign to the Administrator which you are creating. In this example I chose one of the VMs and granted full privileges to the newly created Administrator. Administrator creation wizard "Target Privileges": Now when you login as the newly created administrator, you will only see the VM that was assign to you and will be able to have full control over it. That’s it, simple and straight forward, Enterprise Manager offers many more things which I skipped here but the point is that if you need role based access control Enterprise Manager can give it to you in a very easy way. Oh and one more thing, virtualization management in Enterprise Manager has no license cost, sweet.

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• Database Developer - October 2013 issue: Download Database 12c and related products

  - by Javier Puerta

  The October issue of the Database Application Developer  newsletter is now available. The focus of this issue is on downloads of Database 12c and related products. (Full newsletter here) Get Ready to Download, Deploy and Develop for Oracle Database 12c This month we're focused on downloads. We've rounded up the top developer releases (both early adopter and BETA releases) and the articles that will help you do more with Oracle 12c. See the technical content that will help you get started. If you're ready...Away we go! — Laura Ramsey, Database and Developer Community, Oracle Technology Network Team FEATURED DOWNLOADS Download: Oracle Database 12c According Tom Kyte, the Oracle 12c version has some of the biggest enhancements to the core database since version 6 - Check it out for yourself. Download: Oracle SQL Developer 4.0 Early Adopter 2 is Here Oracle SQL Developer is a free IDE that simplifies the development and management of Oracle Database. It is a complete end-to-end development platform for your PL/SQL applications that features a worksheet for running queries and scripts, a DBA console for managing the database, a reports interface, a complete data modeling solution and a migration platform for moving your 3rd party databases to Oracle.  If you are interested in checking out this new early adopter version,Oracle SQL Developer 4.0 EA is the place to go. Download: Oracle 12c Multitenant Self Provisioning Application -BETA- The -BETA- is here. The Multitenant self provisioning Application is an easy and productive way for DBAs and Developers to get familiar with powerful PDB features including create, clone, plug and unplug.   No better time to start playing with PDBs. Oracle 12c Multitenant Self Provisioning Application. Download: New! Updates to Oracle Data Integration Portfolio Oracle GoldenGate 12c and Oracle Data Integrator 12c is now available. From Real-Time data integration, transactional change data capture, data replication, transformations....to hi-volume, high-performance batch loads, event-driven, trickle-feed integration process..its now available. Go here all the details and links to downloads...and Congratulations Data Integration Team!. Download: Oracle VM Templates for Oracle 12c Features Support for Single Instance, Oracle Restart and Oracle RAC Support for all current Oracle Database 11.2 versions as well as Oracle 12c on Oracle Linux 5 Update 9 & Oracle Linux 6 Update 4. The Oracle 12c templates allow end-to-end automation for Flex Cluster, Flex ASM and PDBs. See how the Deploycluster tool was updated to support Single Instance and the new Oracle 12c features. Oracle VM Templates for Oracle Database. Download: Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler 4.0 EA 3 If you're looking for a datamodeling and database design tool that provides an environment for capturing, modeling, managing and exploiting metadata, it's time to check out Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler. Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler 4.0 EA V3 is here.

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• Database Developer - October 2013 issue: Download Database 12c and related products

  - by Javier Puerta

  The October issue of the Database Application Developer  newsletter is now available. The focus of this issue is on downloads of Database 12c and related products. (Full newsletter here) Get Ready to Download, Deploy and Develop for Oracle Database 12c This month we're focused on downloads. We've rounded up the top developer releases (both early adopter and BETA releases) and the articles that will help you do more with Oracle 12c. See the technical content that will help you get started. If you're ready...Away we go! — Laura Ramsey, Database and Developer Community, Oracle Technology Network Team FEATURED DOWNLOADS Download: Oracle Database 12c According Tom Kyte, the Oracle 12c version has some of the biggest enhancements to the core database since version 6 - Check it out for yourself. Download: Oracle SQL Developer 4.0 Early Adopter 2 is Here Oracle SQL Developer is a free IDE that simplifies the development and management of Oracle Database. It is a complete end-to-end development platform for your PL/SQL applications that features a worksheet for running queries and scripts, a DBA console for managing the database, a reports interface, a complete data modeling solution and a migration platform for moving your 3rd party databases to Oracle.  If you are interested in checking out this new early adopter version,Oracle SQL Developer 4.0 EA is the place to go. Download: Oracle 12c Multitenant Self Provisioning Application -BETA- The -BETA- is here. The Multitenant self provisioning Application is an easy and productive way for DBAs and Developers to get familiar with powerful PDB features including create, clone, plug and unplug.   No better time to start playing with PDBs. Oracle 12c Multitenant Self Provisioning Application. Download: New! Updates to Oracle Data Integration Portfolio Oracle GoldenGate 12c and Oracle Data Integrator 12c is now available. From Real-Time data integration, transactional change data capture, data replication, transformations....to hi-volume, high-performance batch loads, event-driven, trickle-feed integration process..its now available. Go here all the details and links to downloads...and Congratulations Data Integration Team!. Download: Oracle VM Templates for Oracle 12c Features Support for Single Instance, Oracle Restart and Oracle RAC Support for all current Oracle Database 11.2 versions as well as Oracle 12c on Oracle Linux 5 Update 9 & Oracle Linux 6 Update 4. The Oracle 12c templates allow end-to-end automation for Flex Cluster, Flex ASM and PDBs. See how the Deploycluster tool was updated to support Single Instance and the new Oracle 12c features. Oracle VM Templates for Oracle Database. Download: Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler 4.0 EA 3 If you're looking for a datamodeling and database design tool that provides an environment for capturing, modeling, managing and exploiting metadata, it's time to check out Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler. Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler 4.0 EA V3 is here.

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• Interviews: Going Beyond the Technical Quiz

  - by Tony Davis

  All developers will be familiar with the basic format of a technical interview. After a bout of CV-trawling to gauge basic experience, strengths and weaknesses, the interview turns technical. The whiteboard takes center stage and the challenge is set to design a function or query, or solve what on the face of it might seem a disarmingly simple programming puzzle. Most developers will have experienced those few panic-stricken moments, when one’s mind goes as blank as the whiteboard, before un-popping the marker pen, and hopefully one’s mental functions, to work through the problem. It is a way to probe the candidate’s knowledge of basic programming structures and techniques and to challenge their critical thinking. However, these challenges or puzzles, often devised by some of the smartest brains in the development team, have a tendency to become unnecessarily ‘tricksy’. They often seem somewhat academic in nature. While the candidate straight out of IT school might breeze through the construction of a Markov chain, a candidate with bags of practical experience but less in the way of formal training could become nonplussed. Also, a whiteboard and a marker pen make up only a very small part of the toolkit that a programmer will use in everyday work. I remember vividly my first job interview, for a position as technical editor. It went well, but after the usual CV grilling and technical questions, I was only halfway there. Later, they sat me alongside a team of editors, in front of a computer loaded with MS Word and copy of SQL Server Query Analyzer, and my task was to edit a real chapter for a real SQL Server book that they planned to publish, including validating and testing all the code. It was a tough challenge but I came away with a sound knowledge of the sort of work I’d do, and its context. It makes perfect sense, yet my impression is that many organizations don’t do this. Indeed, it is only relatively recently that Red Gate started to move over to this model for developer interviews. Now, instead of, or perhaps in addition to, the whiteboard challenges, the candidate can expect to sit with their prospective team, in front of Visual Studio, loaded with all the useful tools in the developer’s kit (ReSharper and so on) and asked to, for example, analyze and improve a real piece of software. The same principles should apply when interviewing for a database positon. In addition to the usual questions challenging the candidate’s knowledge of such things as b-trees, object permissions, database recovery models, and so on, sit the candidate down with the other database developers or DBAs. Arm them with a copy of Management Studio, and a few other tools, then challenge them to discover the flaws in a stored procedure, and improve its performance. Or present them with a corrupt database and ask them to get the database back online, and discover the cause of the corruption.

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• How can I convince cowboy programmers to use source control?

  - by P.Brian.Mackey

  UPDATE I work on a small team of devs, 4 guys. They have all used source control. Most of them can't stand source control and instead choose not to use it. I strongly believe source control is a necessary part of professional development. Several issues make it very difficult to convince them to use source control: The team is not used to using TFS. I've had 2 training sessions, but was only allotted 1 hour which is insufficient. Team members directly modify code on the server. This keeps code out of sync. Requiring comparison just to be sure you are working with the latest code. And complex merge problems arise Time estimates offered by developers exclude time required to fix any of these problems. So, if I say nono it will take 10x longer...I have to constantly explain these issues and risk myself because now management may perceive me as "slow". The physical files on the server differ in unknown ways over ~100 files. Merging requires knowledge of the project at hand and, therefore, developer cooperation which I am not able to obtain. Other projects are falling out of sync. Developers continue to have a distrust of source control and therefore compound the issue by not using source control. Developers argue that using source control is wasteful because merging is error prone and difficult. This is a difficult point to argue, because when source control is being so badly mis-used and source control continually bypassed, it is error prone indeed. Therefore, the evidence "speaks for itself" in their view. Developers argue that directly modifying server code, bypassing TFS saves time. This is also difficult to argue. Because the merge required to synchronize the code to start with is time consuming. Multiply this by the 10+ projects we manage. Permanent files are often stored in the same directory as the web project. So publishing (full publish) erases these files that are not in source control. This also drives distrust for source control. Because "publishing breaks the project". Fixing this (moving stored files out of the solution subfolders) takes a great deal of time and debugging as these locations are not set in web.config and often exist across multiple code points. So, the culture persists itself. Bad practice begets more bad practice. Bad solutions drive new hacks to "fix" much deeper, much more time consuming problems. Servers, hard drive space are extremely difficult to come by. Yet, user expectations are rising. What can be done in this situation?

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• Free eBook with SQL Server performance tips and nuggets

  - by Claire Brooking

  I’ve often found that the kind of tips that turn out to be helpful are the ones that encourage me to make a small step outside of a routine. No dramatic changes – just a quick suggestion that changes an approach. As a languages student at university, one of the best I spotted came from outside the lecture halls and ended up saving me time (and lots of huffing and puffing) – the use of a rainbow of sticky notes for well-used pages and letter categories in my dictionary. Simple, but armed with a heavy dictionary that could double up as a step stool, those markers were surprisingly handy. When the Simple-Talk editors told me about a book they were planning that would give a series of tips for developers on how to improve database performance, we all agreed it needed to contain a good range of pointers for big-hitter performance topics. But we wanted to include some of the smaller, time-saving nuggets too. We hope we’ve struck a good balance. The 45 Database Performance Tips eBook covers different tips to help you avoid code that saps performance, whether that’s the ‘gotchas’ to be aware of when using Object to Relational Mapping (ORM) tools, or what to be aware of for indexes, database design, and T-SQL. The eBook is also available to download with SQL Prompt from Red Gate. We often hear that it’s the productivity-boosting side of SQL Prompt that makes it useful for everyday coding. So when a member of the SQL Prompt team mentioned an idea to make the most of tab history, a new feature in SQL Prompt 6 for SQL Server Management Studio, we were intrigued. Now SQL Prompt can save tabs we have been working on in SSMS as a way to maintain an active template for queries we often recycle. When we need to reuse the same code again, we search for our saved tab (and we can also customize its name to speed up the search) to get started. We hope you find the eBook helpful, and as always on Simple-Talk, we’d love to hear from you too. If you have a performance tip for SQL Server you’d like to share, email Melanie on the Simple-Talk team ([email protected]) and we’ll publish a collection in a follow-up post.

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• Real-time Big Data Analytics is a reality for StubHub with Oracle Advanced Analytics

  - by Mark Hornick

  What can you use for a comprehensive platform for real-time analytics? How can you process big data volumes for near-real-time recommendations and dramatically reduce fraud? Learn in this video what Stubhub achieved with Oracle R Enterprise from the Oracle Advanced Analytics option to Oracle Database, and read more on their story here. Advanced analytics solutions that impact the bottom line of a business are challenging due to the range of skills and individuals involved in realizing such solutions. While we hear a lot about the role of the data scientist, that role is but one piece of the puzzle. Advanced analytics solutions also have an operationalization aspect that also requires close proximity to where the transactional activity occurs. The data scientist needs access to the right data with which to model the business problem. This involves IT for data collection, management, and administration, as well as ensuring zero downtime (a website needs to be up 24x7). This also involves working with the data scientist to keep predictive models refreshed with the latest scripts. Integrating advanced analytics solutions into enterprise apps involves not just generating predictions, but supporting the whole life-cycle from data collection, to model building, model assessment, and then outcome assessment and feedback to the model building process again. Application and web interface designers need to take into account how end users will see and use the advanced analytics results, e.g., supporting operations staff that need to handle the potentially fraudulent transactions. As just described, advanced analytics projects can be "complicated" from just a human perspective. The extent to which software can simplify the interactions among users and systems will increase the likelihood of project success. The ability to quickly operationalize advanced analytics projects and demonstrate measurable value, means the difference between a successful project and just a nice research report. By standardizing on Oracle Database and SQL invocation of R, along with in-database modeling as found in Oracle Advanced Analytics, expedient model deployment and zero downtime for refreshing models becomes a reality. Meanwhile, data scientists are also able to explore leading edge techniques available in open source. The Oracle solution propels the entire organization forward to realize the value of advanced analytics.

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• I still think Twitter is dead &hellip; but

  - by Randy Walker

  Twitter finally hit the mainstream about 8 months ago, but I’ve been saying for a couple of years now, without a real way for the company to earn money, what’s the future fate of Twitter?  On the personal side, where is the real value for the users?  For the most part, Twitter has replaced most people’s IM (instant messaging), at least in the technology circles I run in.  It still has value for users as a communication tool.  But I see it more as a fad.  My prediction is over the next 6 months we’ll start seeing a usage drop (if we haven’t already started to see it). On the business side, how does Twitter make money?  It doesn’t.  If you use the text messaging capabilities, you see a few ads.  But most smart phone and PC users, won’t ever see them.  I still think Twitter has the best chance to make money by forcing the “collectors” to pay money.  You know what I mean by “collector”, those people that collect tons of followers or friends.  If Twitter caps the number of followers and makes you pay to have more, would you?  The normal twitter user doesn’t have that many followers, and this is where my title comes in … BUT The financial value for Twitter is really seen through businesses connecting with their customers.  I’ve seen 3 effective ways this has been accomplished. 1. Giving your customers a coupon or announcing a sale My favorite is @amazonmp3, Being a huge music lover, I get notified when they put music on sale. Various restaurants like @ruthschris_ARK will let their favorite customers know about certain specials @BluefinMemphis I was traveling through Memphis once looking for a sushi restaurant when they had %50 off if we mentioned we saw them on Twitter.  It was their first attempt at trying to encourage customers in the door, and after talking with the management, it was a huge success 2. Giveaways @namecheap Several companies have started huge marketing campaigns, but my favorite is watching companies post trivia questions, and the first person to respond wins a prize. 3. Responding to Customer Complaints I once posted a complaint about American Express (a company that I have slowly come to really dislike) but they actually had someone contact me to try and resolve the issue.  I give them credit for paying attention, but still dislike them for their horrible credit practices.

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• The importance of Unit Testing in BI

  - by Davide Mauri

  One of the main steps in the process we internally use to develop a BI solution is the implementation of Unit Test of you BI Data. As you may already know, I’ve create a simple (for now) tool that leverages NUnit to allow us to quickly create Unit Testing without having to resort to use Visual Studio Database Professional: http://queryunit.codeplex.com/ Once you have a tool like this one, you can start also to make sure that your BI solution (DWH and CUBE) is not only structurally sound (I mean, the cube or the report gets processed correctly), but you can also check that the logical integrity of your business rules is enforced. For example let’s say that the customer tell you that they will never create an invoice for a specific product-line in 2010 since that product-line is dismissed and will never be sold again. Ok we know that this in theory is true, but a lot of this business rule effectiveness depends on the fact the people does not do a mistake while inserting new orders/invoices and the ERP used implements a check for this business logic. Unfortunately these last two hypotesis are not always true, so you may find yourself really having some invoices for a product line that doesn’t exists anymore. Maybe this kind of situation in future will be solved using Master Data Management but, meanwhile, how you can give and idea of the data quality to your customers? How can you check that logical integrity of the analytical data you produce is exactly what you expect? Well, Unit Testing of a DWH or a CUBE can be a solution. Once you have defined your test suite, by writing SQL and MDX queries that checks that your data is what you expect to be, if you use NUnit (and QueryUnit does), you can then use a tool like NUnit2Report to create a nice HTML report that can be shipped via email to give information of data quality: In addition to that, since NUnit produces an XML file as a result, you can also import it into a SQL Server Database and then monitor the quality of data over time. I’ll be speaking about this approach (and more in general about how to “engineer” a BI solution) at the next European SQL PASS Adaptive BI Best Practices http://www.sqlpass.org/summit/eu2010/Agenda/ProgramSessions/AdaptiveBIBestPratices.aspx I’ll enjoy discussing with you all about this, so see you there! And remember: “if ain't tested it's broken!” (Sorry I don’t remember how said that in first place :-)) Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Java Spotlight Episode 78: Jasper Potts on the JavaFX Scene Builder

  - by Roger Brinkley

  Tweet An interview with Jasper Potts about the new JavaFX Scene Builder. Joining us this week on the Java All Star Developer Panel are Dalibor Topic, Java Free and Open Source Software Ambassador and Arun Gupta, Java EE Guy. Right-click or Control-click to download this MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the Java Spotlight Podcast Feed to get the latest podcast automatically. If you use iTunes you can open iTunes and subscribe with this link:  Java Spotlight Podcast in iTunes. Show Notes News JavaFX Scene Builder Developer Preview available for testing. Java EE Unlock the Java EE 6 Platform using NetBeans 7.1 Tuning GlassFish for Production JSF 2.2 Update from Ed Burns John Rose at Microsoft's Lang.NEXT summit Recording of John's Java 8 presentation Jeroen Frijters' presentation on IKVM.NET Martin Odersky's keynote JVM Language Summit 2012 July 30 – August 1; Oracle Santa Clara (same as last year) CFP coming in a few days JVM Language Summit 2011 Presentations & Recordings Proposed development schedule for JDK 8 Say hello to Mathias Axelsson Events April 11, Cleveland JUG, Cleveland, OH April 12, GreenJUG, Greenville, SC April 17-18, JavaOne Russia, Moscow Russia April 18–20, Devoxx France, Paris, France April 17-20, GIDS, Bangalore April 21, Java Summit, Chennai April 26, Mix-IT, Lyon, France, May 3-4, JavaOne India, Hyderabad, India May 5, Bangalore, Pune, ?? - JUG outreach May 7, OTN Developer Day, Mumbai May 8, OTN Developer Day, Delhi Feature InterviewJasper Potts is the Developer Experience Architect for the Java Client Group at Oracle. Responsible for technical design for everything thats sis on the core platform including Controls, Tools, Samples and Blueprints. Formally a lead engineer on the JavaFX & Swing teams working on the new JavaFX UI Controls and Graphics frameworks. Also responsible for designing, developing and presenting demos during the keynotes at JavaOne and Devoxx. A JavaOne Rockstar presenter having presented many sessions on JavaFX and Swing at many conferences. Prior to Sun he founded Xerto a desktop applications company developing Imagery a Java professional photo management application. In this interview Jasper talks about the recently release JavaFX Scene Builder. Mail Bag What’s Cool Contribute to GlassFish in Five Different Ways Stephen Chin and James Weaver join Oracle Adam Bien - Building Java FX 2 Libraries From Source With Maven 3 Paul Sandoz - Java Boomerang Building Jigsaw on Mac OS X using VirtualBox Mandy Chung: Jigsaw for Mac OS X

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• New Options for MySQL High Availability

  - by Mat Keep

  Data is the currency of today’s web, mobile, social, enterprise and cloud applications. Ensuring data is always available is a top priority for any organization – minutes of downtime will result in significant loss of revenue and reputation. There is not a “one size fits all” approach to delivering High Availability (HA). Unique application attributes, business requirements, operational capabilities and legacy infrastructure can all influence HA technology selection. And then technology is only one element in delivering HA – “People and Processes” are just as critical as the technology itself. For this reason, MySQL Enterprise Edition is available supporting a range of HA solutions, fully certified and supported by Oracle. MySQL Enterprise HA is not some expensive add-on, but included within the core Enterprise Edition offering, along with the management tools, consulting and 24x7 support needed to deliver true HA. At the recent MySQL Connect conference, we announced new HA options for MySQL users running on both Linux and Solaris: - DRBD for MySQL - Oracle Solaris Clustering for MySQL DRBD (Distributed Replicated Block Device) is an open source Linux kernel module which leverages synchronous replication to deliver high availability database applications across local storage. DRBD synchronizes database changes by mirroring data from an active node to a standby node and supports automatic failover and recovery. Linux, DRBD, Corosync and Pacemaker, provide an integrated stack of mature and proven open source technologies. DRBD Stack: Providing Synchronous Replication for the MySQL Database with InnoDB Download the DRBD for MySQL whitepaper to learn more, including step-by-step instructions to install, configure and provision DRBD with MySQL Oracle Solaris Cluster provides high availability and load balancing to mission-critical applications and services in physical or virtualized environments. With Oracle Solaris Cluster, organizations have a scalable and flexible solution that is suited equally to small clusters in local datacenters or larger multi-site, multi-cluster deployments that are part of enterprise disaster recovery implementations. The Oracle Solaris Cluster MySQL agent integrates seamlessly with MySQL offering a selection of configuration options in the various Oracle Solaris Cluster topologies. Putting it All Together When you add MySQL Replication and MySQL Cluster into the HA mix, along with 3rd party solutions, users have extensive choice (and decisions to make) to deliver HA services built on MySQL To make the decision process simpler, we have also published a new MySQL HA Solutions Guide. Exploring beyond just the technology, the guide presents a methodology to select the best HA solution for your new web, cloud and mobile services, while also discussing the importance of people and process in ensuring service continuity. This is subject recently presented at Oracle Open World, and the slides are available here. Whatever your uptime requirements, you can be sure MySQL has an HA solution for your needs Please don't hesitate to let us know of your HA requirements in the comments section of this blog. You can also contact MySQL consulting to learn more about their HA Jumpstart offering which will help you scope out your scaling and HA requirements.

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• What do you do when you encounter an idiotic interview question?

  - by Senthil

  I was interviewing with a "too proud of my java skills"-looking person. He asked me "What is your knowledge on Java IO classes.. say.. hash maps?" He asked me to write a piece of java code on paper - instantiate a class and call one of the instance's methods. When I was done, he said my program wouldn't run. After 5 minutes of serious thinking, I gave up and asked why. He said I didn't write a main function so it wouldn't run. ON PAPER. [I am too furious to continue with the stupidity...] Believe me it wasn't trick questions or a psychic or anger management evaluation thing. I can tell from his face, he was proud of these questions. That "developer" was supposed to "judge" the candidates. I can think of several things: Hit him with a chair (which I so desperately wanted to) and walk out. Simply walk out. Ridicule him saying he didn't make sense. Politely let him know that he didn't make sense and go on to try and answer the questions. Don't tell him anything, but simply go on to try and answer the questions. So far, I have tried just 4 and 5. It hasn't helped. Unfortunately many candidates seem to do the same and remain polite but this lets these kind of "developers" just keep ascending up the corporate ladder, gradually getting the capacity to pi** off more and more people. How do you handle these interviewers without bursting your veins? What is the proper way to handle this, yet maintain your reputation if other potential employers were to ever get to know what happened here? Is there anything you can do or should you even try to fix this? P.S. Let me admit that my anger has been amplified many times by the facts: He was smiling like you wouldn't believe. I got so many (20 or so) calls from that company the day before, asking me to come to the interview, that I couldn't do any work that day. I wasted a paid day off.

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• SQL University: What and why of database testing

  - by Mladen Prajdic

  This is a post for a great idea called SQL University started by Jorge Segarra also famously known as SqlChicken on Twitter. It’s a collection of blog posts on different database related topics contributed by several smart people all over the world. So this week is mine and we’ll be talking about database testing and refactoring. In 3 posts we’ll cover: SQLU part 1 - What and why of database testing SQLU part 2 - What and why of database refactoring SQLU part 2 – Tools of the trade With that out of the way let us sharpen our pencils and get going. Why test a database The sad state of the industry today is that there is very little emphasis on testing in general. Test driven development is still a small niche of the programming world while refactoring is even smaller. The cause of this is the inability of developers to convince themselves and their managers that writing tests is beneficial. At the moment they are mostly viewed as waste of time. This is because the average person (let’s not fool ourselves, we’re all average) is unable to think about lower future costs in relation to little more current work. It’s orders of magnitude easier to know about the current costs in relation to current amount of work. That’s why programmers convince themselves testing is a waste of time. However we have to ask ourselves what tests are really about? Maybe finding bugs? No, not really. If we introduce bugs, we’re likely to write test around those bugs too. But yes we can find some bugs with tests. The main point of tests is to have reproducible repeatability in our systems. By having a code base largely covered by tests we can know with better certainty what a small code change can break in other parts of the system. By having repeatability we can make code changes with confidence, since we know we’ll see what breaks in other tests. And here comes the inability to estimate future costs. By spending just a few more hours writing those tests we’d know instantly what broke where. Imagine we fix a reported bug. We check-in the code, deploy it and the users are happy. Until we get a call 2 weeks later about a certain monthly process has stopped working. What we don’t know is that this process was developed by a long gone coworker and for some reason it relied on that same bug we’ve happily fixed. There’s no way we could’ve known that. We say OK and go in and fix the monthly process. But what we have no clue about is that there’s this ETL job that relied on data from that monthly process. Now that we’ve fixed the process it’s giving unexpected (yet correct since we fixed it) data to the ETL job. So we have to fix that too. But there’s this part of the app we coded that relies on data from that exact ETL job. And just like that we enter the “Loop of maintenance horror”. With the loop eventually comes blame. Here’s a nice tip for all developers and DBAs out there: If you make a mistake man up and admit to it. All of the above is valid for any kind of software development. Keeping this in mind the database is nothing other than just a part of the application. But a big part! One reason why testing a database is even more important than testing an application is that one database is usually accessed from multiple applications and processes. This makes it the central and vital part of the enterprise software infrastructure. Knowing all this can we really afford not to have tests? What to test in a database Now that we’ve decided we’ll dive into this testing thing we have to ask ourselves what needs to be tested? The short answer is: everything. The long answer is: read on! There are 2 main ways of doing tests: Black box and White box testing. Black box testing means we have no idea how the system internals are built and we only have access to it’s inputs and outputs. With it we test that the internal changes to the system haven’t caused the input/output behavior of the system to change. The most important thing to test here are the edge conditions. It’s where most programs break. Having good edge condition tests we can be more confident that the systems changes won’t break. White box testing has the full knowledge of the system internals. With it we test the internal system changes, different states of the application, etc… White and Black box tests should be complementary to each other as they are very much interconnected. Testing database routines includes testing stored procedures, views, user defined functions and anything you use to access the data with. Database routines are your input/output interface to the database system. They count as black box testing. We test then for 2 things: Data and schema. When testing schema we only care about the columns and the data types they’re returning. After all the schema is the contract to the out side systems. If it changes we usually have to change the applications accessing it. One helpful T-SQL command when doing schema tests is SET FMTONLY ON. It tells the SQL Server to return only empty results sets. This speeds up tests because it doesn’t return any data to the client. After we’ve validated the schema we have to test the returned data. There no other way to do this but to have expected data known before the tests executes and comparing that data to the database routine output. Testing Authentication and Authorization helps us validate who has access to the SQL Server box (Authentication) and who has access to certain database objects (Authorization). For desktop applications and windows authentication this works well. But the biggest problem here are web apps. They usually connect to the database as a single user. Please ensure that that user is not SA or an account with admin privileges. That is just bad. Load testing ensures us that our database can handle peak loads. One often overlooked tool for load testing is Microsoft’s OSTRESS tool. It’s part of RML utilities (x86, x64) for SQL Server and can help determine if our database server can handle loads like 100 simultaneous users each doing 10 requests per second. SQL Profiler can also help us here by looking at why certain queries are slow and what to do to fix them.   One particular problem to think about is how to begin testing existing databases. First thing we have to do is to get to know those databases. We can’t test something when we don’t know how it works. To do this we have to talk to the users of the applications accessing the database, run SQL Profiler to see what queries are being run, use existing documentation to decipher all the object relationships, etc… The way to approach this is to choose one part of the database (say a logical grouping of tables that go together) and filter our traces accordingly. Once we’ve done that we move on to the next grouping and so on until we’ve covered the whole database. Then we move on to the next one. Database Testing is a topic that we can spent many hours discussing but let this be a nice intro to the world of database testing. See you in the next post.

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• Which web framework to use under Backbonejs?

  - by egidra

  For a previous project, I was using Backbonejs alongside Django, but I found out that I didn't use many features from Django. So, I am looking for a lighter framework to use underneath a Backbonejs web app. I never used Django built in templates. When I did, it was to set up the initial index page, but that's all. I did use the user management system that Django provided. I used the models.py, but never views.py. I used urls.py to set up which template the user would hit upon visiting the site. I noticed that the two features that I used most from Django was South and Tastypie, and they aren't even included with Django. Particularly, django-tastypie made it easy for me to link up my frontend models to my backend models. It made it easy to JSONify my front end models and send them to Tastypie. Although, I found myself overriding a lot of tastypie's methods for GET, PUT, POST requests, so it became useless. South made it easy to migrate new changes to the database. Although, I had so much trouble with South. Is there a framework with an easier way of handling database modifications than using South? When using South with multiple people, we had the worse time keeping our databases synced. When someone added a new table and pushed their migration to git, the other two people would spend days trying to use South's automatic migration, but it never worked. I liked how Rails had a manual way of migrating databases. Even though I used Tastypie and South a lot, I found myself not actually liking them because I ended up overriding most Tastypie methods for each Resource, and I also had the worst trouble migrating new tables and columns with South. So, I would like a framework that makes that process easier. Part of my problem was that they are too "magical". Which framework should I use? Nodejs or a lighter Python framework? Which works best with my above criteria?

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• Free training at Northwest Cadence

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  Even though I have only been at Northwest Cadence for a short time I have already done so much. What I really wanted to do was let you guys know about a bunch of FREE training that NWC offers. These sessions are at a fantastic time for the UK as 9am PST (Seattle time) is around 5pm GMT. Its a fantastic way to finish off your Fridays and with the lack of love for developers in the UK set to continue I would love some of you guys to get some from the US instead. There are really two offerings. The first is something called Coffee talks that take you through an hours worth of detail in a specific category. Coffee Talks These coffee talks have some superb topics and you can get excellent interaction with the presenter as they are kind of informal. Date Day Time Topic Register Here 01/04/11 Tuesday 8:30AM – 9:30AM PST Real World Business and Technical Benefits of ALM with TFS 2010 150656 01/28/11 Friday 9:00AM - 10:00AM PST The Full Testing Experience Professional Quality Assurance with Visual Studio 2010 152810 02/11/11 Friday 9:00AM - 10:00AM PST Visual Source Safe to Team Foundation Server 152844 02/25/11 Friday 2:00PM - 3:00PM PST The Full Testing Experience Professional Quality Assurance with Visual Studio 2010 152816 03/11/11 Friday 9:00AM - 10:00AM PST Lab Manager The Ultimate “No More No Repro” Tool 152809 03/25/11 Friday 9:00AM - 10:00AM PST The Full Testing Experience Professional Quality Assurance with Visual Studio 2010 152838 04/08/11 Friday 9:00AM - 10:00AM PST Visual Source Safe to Team Foundation Server 152846 04/22/11 Friday 9:00AM - 10:00AM PST The Full Testing Experience Professional Quality Assurance with Visual Studio 2010 152839 05/06/11 Friday 2:00PM - 3:00PM PST Real World Business and Technical Benefits of ALM with TFS 2010 150657 05/20/11 Friday 9:00AM - 10:00AM PST The Full Testing Experience Professional Quality Assurance with Visual Studio 2010 152842 06/03/11 Friday 9:00AM - 10:00AM PST Visual Source Safe to Team Foundation Server 152847 06/17/11 Friday 9:00AM - 10:00AM PST The Full Testing Experience Professional Quality Assurance with Visual Studio 2010 152843   ALM Training Engagement Program Microsoft has released a new program to bring free Visual Studio 2010 Training Sessions to select customers on Microsoft Visual Studio products and how Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solutions can help drive greater business impact. For more details on this program, please see the process chart below.  To get started send an email to us; This training is paid for by Microsoft and you would need to commit to 4 sessions in order to get accepted into the program. So these have more hoops to jump through to get them, but the content is much more formal and centres around adoption.

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• TechEd 2010 Day Three: The Database Designer (Isn't)

  - by BuckWoody

  Yesterday at TechEd 2010 here in New Orleans I worked the front-booth, answering general SQL Server questions for the masses. I was actually a little surprised to find most of the questions I got were from folks that wanted to know more about Stream Insight and Master Data Services. In past conferences I've been asked a lot of "free consulting" questions, about problems folks have had from older products. I don't mind that a bit - in fact, I'm always happy to help in any way I can. But this time people are really interested in the new features in the product, and I like that they are thinking ahead, not just having to solve problems in production. My presentation was on "Database Design in an Hour". We had the usual fun, and SideShow Bob made an appearance - I kid you not. The guy in the back of the room looked just like Sideshow Bob, so I quickly held a "bes thair" contest, and he won. Duing the presentation, I explain the tools you can use to design databases. I also explain that the "Database Designer" tool in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) isn't truly a desinger - it uses non-standard notation, doesn't have a meta-data dictionary, and worst of all, it works at the physical level. In other words, whatever you do in SSMS will automatically change the field/table/relationship structures in the database. We fixed this in SSMS 2008 and higher by adding an option to block that, but the tool is not a good design function nonetheless. To be fair, no one I know of at Microsoft recommends that it is - but I was shocked to hear so many developers in the room defending it as a good tool. I think the main issue for someone who doesn't have to work with Relational Systems a great deal is that it can be difficult to figure out Foreign Keys. The syntax makes them look "backwards", so it's just easier to grab a field and place it on the table you want to point to. There are options. You can download a couple of free tools (CA has a community edition of ER-WIN, Quest has one, and Embarcadero also has one) and if you design more than one or two databases a year, it may be worth buying a true design tool. For years I used Visio, but we changed it so that it doesn't forward-engineer (create the DDL) any more, so it isn't a true design tool either. So investigate those free and not-so-free tools. You'll find they help you in your job - but stay away from the Database Designer in SSMS. Or I'll send Sideshow Bob over there to straighten you out. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• SQL University: What and why of database refactoring

  - by Mladen Prajdic

  This is a post for a great idea called SQL University started by Jorge Segarra also famously known as SqlChicken on Twitter. It’s a collection of blog posts on different database related topics contributed by several smart people all over the world. So this week is mine and we’ll be talking about database testing and refactoring. In 3 posts we’ll cover: SQLU part 1 - What and why of database testing SQLU part 2 - What and why of database refactoring SQLU part 3 - Tools of the trade This is a second part of the series and in it we’ll take a look at what database refactoring is and why do it. Why refactor a database To know why refactor we first have to know what refactoring actually is. Code refactoring is a process where we change module internals in a way that does not change that module’s input/output behavior. For successful refactoring there is one crucial thing we absolutely must have: Tests. Automated unit tests are the only guarantee we have that we haven’t broken the input/output behavior before refactoring. If you haven’t go back ad read my post on the matter. Then start writing them. Next thing you need is a code module. Those are views, UDFs and stored procedures. By having direct table access we can kiss fast and sweet refactoring good bye. One more point to have a database abstraction layer. And no, ORM’s don’t fall into that category. But also know that refactoring is NOT adding new functionality to your code. Many have fallen into this trap. Don’t be one of them and resist the lure of the dark side. And it’s a strong lure. We developers in general love to add new stuff to our code, but hate fixing our own mistakes or changing existing code for no apparent reason. To be a good refactorer one needs discipline and focus. Now we know that refactoring is all about changing inner workings of existing code. This can be due to performance optimizations, changing internal code workflows or some other reason. This is a typical black box scenario to the outside world. If we upgrade the car engine it still has to drive on the road (preferably faster) and not fly (no matter how cool that would be). Also be aware that white box tests will break when we refactor. What to refactor in a database Refactoring databases doesn’t happen that often but when it does it can include a lot of stuff. Let us look at a few common cases. Adding or removing database schema objects Adding, removing or changing table columns in any way, adding constraints, keys, etc… All of these can be counted as internal changes not visible to the data consumer. But each of these carries a potential input/output behavior change. Dropping a column can result in views not working anymore or stored procedure logic crashing. Adding a unique constraint shows duplicated data that shouldn’t exist. Foreign keys break a truncate table command executed from an application that runs once a month. All these scenarios are very real and can happen. With the proper database abstraction layer fully covered with black box tests we can make sure something like that does not happen (hopefully at all). Changing physical structures Physical structures include heaps, indexes and partitions. We can pretty much add or remove those without changing the data returned by the database. But the performance can be affected. So here we use our performance tests. We do have them, right? Just by adding a single index we can achieve orders of magnitude performance improvement. Won’t that make users happy? But what if that index causes our write operations to crawl to a stop. again we have to test this. There are a lot of things to think about and have tests for. Without tests we can’t do successful refactoring! Fixing bad code We all have some bad code in our systems. We usually refer to that code as code smell as they violate good coding practices. Examples of such code smells are SQL injection, use of SELECT *, scalar UDFs or cursors, etc… Each of those is huge code smell and can result in major code changes. Take SELECT * from example. If we remove a column from a table the client using that SELECT * statement won’t have a clue about that until it runs. Then it will gracefully crash and burn. Not to mention the widely unknown SELECT * view refresh problem that Tomas LaRock (@SQLRockstar on Twitter) and Colin Stasiuk (@BenchmarkIT on Twitter) talk about in detail. Go read about it, it’s informative. Refactoring this includes replacing the * with column names and most likely change to application using the database. Breaking apart huge stored procedures Have you ever seen seen a stored procedure that was 2000 lines long? I have. It’s not pretty. It hurts the eyes and sucks the will to live the next 10 minutes. They are a maintenance nightmare and turn into things no one dares to touch. I’m willing to bet that 100% of time they don’t have a single test on them. Large stored procedures (and functions) are a clear sign that they contain business logic. General opinion on good database coding practices says that business logic has no business in the database. That’s the applications part. Refactoring such behemoths requires writing lots of edge case tests for the stored procedure input/output behavior and then start to refactor it. First we split the logic inside into smaller parts like new stored procedures and UDFs. Those then get called from the master stored procedure. Once we’ve successfully modularized the database code it’s best to transfer that logic into the applications consuming it. This only leaves the stored procedure with common data manipulation logic. Of course this isn’t always possible so having a plethora of performance and behavior unit tests is absolutely necessary to confirm we’ve actually improved the codebase in some way.   Refactoring is not a popular chore amongst developers or managers. The former don’t like fixing old code, the latter can’t see the financial benefit. Remember how we talked about being lousy at estimating future costs in the previous post? But there comes a time when it must be done. Hopefully I’ve given you some ideas how to get started. In the last post of the series we’ll take a look at the tools to use and an example of testing and refactoring.

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• OpenWorld Day 1

  - by Antony Reynolds

  A Day in the Life of an OpenWorld Attendee Part I Lots of people are blogging insightfully about OpenWorld so I thought I would provide some non-insightful remarks to buck the trend! With 50,000 attendees I didn’t expect to bump into too many people I knew, boy was I wrong!  I walked into the registration area and immediately was hailed by a couple of customers I had worked with a few months ago.  Moving to the employee registration area in a different hall I bumped into a colleague from the UK who was also registering.  As soon as I got my badge I bumped into a friend from Ireland!  So maybe OpenWorld isn’t so big after all! First port of call was Larrys Keynote.  As always Larry was provocative and thought provoking.  His key points were announcing the Oracle cloud offering in IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, pointing out that Fusion Apps are cloud enabled and finally announcing the 12c Database, making a big play of its new multi-tenancy features.  His contention was that multi-tenancy will simplify cloud development and provide better security by providing DB level isolation for applications and customers. Next day, Monday, was my first full day at OpenWorld.  The first session I attended was on monitoring of OSB, very interesting presentation on the benefits achieved by an Illinois area telco – US Cellular.  Great discussion of why they bought the SOA Management Packs and the benefits they are already seeing from their investment in terms of improved provisioning and time to market, as well as better performance insight and assistance with capacity planning. Craig Blitz provided a nice walkthrough of where Coherence has been and where it is going. Last night I attended the BOF on Managed File Transfer where Dave Berry replayed Oracles thoughts on providing dedicated Managed File Transfer as part of the 12c SOA release.  Dave laid out the perceived requirements and solicited feedback from the audience on what if anything was missing.  He also demoed an early version of the functionality that would simplify setting up MFT in SOA Suite and make tracking activity much easier. So much for Day 1.  I also ran into scores of old friends and colleagues and had a pleasant dinner with my friend from Ireland where I caught up on the latest news from Oracle UK.  Not bad for Day 1!

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