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  • Now's the Time to Register for Oracle OpenWorld Latin America 2012!

    - by Oracle OpenWorld Blog Team
    The recent Oracle OpenWorld conference held in San Francisco was a huge success. If you weren't able to attend, you'll be glad to know that key content and speakers from that conference will be featured in São Paulo on 4-6 December at Oracle OpenWorld Latin America 2012. Session tracks this year include: Applications, Business Intelligence, Database, Industries, Middleware, Oracle Services, and Servers and Storage Systems. At Oracle OpenWorld there's so much to see and do: keynotes, technical sessions, Oracle and partner demonstrations, hands-on labs, networking events, and more. Check the Website often as more details get added. And if you register between now and 15 November, you can save 35% off of the onsite price. We look forward to seeing you there!  (photo montage by Arun Gupta)

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  • Announcing an Upgrading How-To Technical Paper for WebLogic 11g

    - by Oracle Retail Documentation Team
    Oracle Retail has published a document on My Oracle Support (https://support.oracle.com) that provides you with guidance on how to upgrade from WebLogic11g 10.3.3 to WebLogic11g 10.3.4. The goal of this document is not to be a substitute for WebLogic documentation but to illustrate how Oracle Retail approached and performed its upgrade.   Doc ID: 1432575.1This document provides information about how to upgrade to WebLogic 10.3.4 and how to complete related component upgrades as well. Upgrading from WebLogic 10.3.3 to WebLogic 10.3.4 (rather than performing a separate WLS 10.3.4 installation) is recommended so that you do not have to port information and custom settings from your 10.3.3 installation. The paper addresses the following topics: High Level Steps for Applying WLS 10.3.4 Patch and 1.1.1.4.0 Patch Set JRockit Upgrade (optional for Linux and Sun OS only) WLS 10.3.4 Upgrade using Upgrade Installer SOA 11.1.1.4 Upgrade Forms 11.1.1.4 Upgrade Update DB Patch Assistant Post Patch Instructions Validation

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  • And the Winner Is ...

    - by Oracle OpenWorld Blog Team
    If you know excellent Oracle technologists, now's your chance to nominate them for an award. by Karen Shamban It’s possible to win an Oracle Excellence Award in one of 12 categories this year—nominations are open now through July 17, 2012. Winning customers and partners will be hosted at Oracle OpenWorld or JavaOne 2012, where they can meet with Oracle executives, network with peers, and be featured in an upcoming edition of an Oracle publication such as Oracle Magazine. This year’s Oracle Excellence Award categories are: •    CIO of the Year•    Database Administrator of the Year•    Eco-Enterprise Innovation•    Java Business Innovation•    Leadership•    Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation•    Proactive Support Champion–Global•    Specialized Partner of the Year–Europe, Middle East, and Africa•    Specialized Partner of the Year–Global•    Specialized Partner of the Year–North America•    Technologist of the Year Learn more about each award and nominate a deserving candidate now! Go to the Oracle Excellence Awards information page for details.

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  • Four Words That Go Together Well: Oracle. Technology. Network. Lounge.

    - by Oracle OpenWorld Blog Team
    Again this year the Oracle Technology Network (OTN) Lounge will be in the Howard Street Tent, on Howard Street (surprise!) between Moscone North and South. The OTN Lounge is a central meeting place for all Oracle OpenWorld and JavaOne attendees to network with Oracle experts, ACEs, and peers. And to discuss areas of common technology interest - or discuss anything at all. Check out this OTN blog post to get the details on exciting special activities, drawings, and contests happening at the lounge the week of the conference. Stop by - there could be a t-shirt in it for you. OTN Lounge Hours Sunday, September 30    7:00 p.m. - 8:30 p.m.Monday, October 1          8:00 a.m. - 7:00 p.m.Tuesday, October 2         8:00 a.m. - 7:00 p.m.Wednesday, October 3    8:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.Thursday, October 4        8:00 a.m. - 2:00 p.m.

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  • SQL Server Memory Manager Changes in Denali

    - by SQLOS Team
    The next version of SQL Server will contain significant changes to the memory manager component.  The memory manager component has been rewritten for Denali.  In the previous versions of SQL Server there were two distinct memory managers.  There was one memory manager which handled allocation sizes of 8k or less and another for greater than 8k.  For Denali there will be one memory manager for all allocation sizes.   The majority of the changes will be transparent to the end user.  However, some changes will be visible to the user.  These are listed below: ·         The ‘max server memory’ configuration option has new lower limits.  Specifically, 32-bit versions of SQL Server will have a lower limit of 64 MB.  The 64-bit versions will have a lower limit of 128 MB. ·         All memory allocations by SQL Server components will observe the ‘max server memory’ configuration option.  In previous SQL versions only the 8k allocations were limited the ‘max server memory’ configuration option.  Allocations larger than 8k weren’t constrained. ·         DMVs which refer to memory manager internals have been modified.  This includes adding or removing columns and changing column names. ·         The memory manager configuration messages in the error log have minor changes. ·         DBCC memorystatus output has been changed. ·         Address Windowing Extensions (AWE) has been deprecated.   In the next blog post I will discuss the changes to the memory manager DMVs in greater detail.  In future blog posts I will discuss the other changes in greater detail.  

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  • They Got What They Came For

    - by Oracle OpenWorld Blog Team
    At this week's Oracle OpenWorld Latin America, over 11,000 attendees got what they came for. Interesting and absorbing keynotes. Educational technical sessions. Innovative demos and exhibits. Inspiring hands-on labs. And many, many opportunities to network with and build their community of peers. If you weren't able to attend the conference, or if you did attend but want to review some of the sessions or share them with colleagues, session PDFs will be posted soon, so be sure to check back. 

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  • Have a Couple of Minutes? We’d Like Your Opinion.

    - by Oracle OpenWorld Blog Team
    by Kate Jones Last year’s Oracle University training offered prior to Oracle OpenWorld was a great success, so we’re doing it again this year—on Sunday, September 30. Our problem (and it’s a good one to have) is that we have more potential sessions than we have time in the day. So we’re looking for followers of Oracle OpenWorld to let us know what you think the most valuable and relevant topics are for these technical sessions. To see a preview of the sessions we’re considering and take the brief survey, click here. Don’t be shy—let us know what you think.

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  • Guide to reduce TFS database growth using the Test Attachment Cleaner

    - by terje
    Recently there has been several reports on TFS databases growing too fast and growing too big.  Notable this has been observed when one has started to use more features of the Testing system.  Also, the TFS 2010 handles test results differently from TFS 2008, and this leads to more data stored in the TFS databases. As a consequence of this there has been released some tools to remove unneeded data in the database, and also some fixes to correct for bugs which has been found and corrected during this process.  Further some preventive practices and maintenance rules should be adopted. A lot of people have blogged about this, among these are: Anu’s very important blog post here describes both the problem and solutions to handle it.  She describes both the Test Attachment Cleaner tool, and also some QFE/CU releases to fix some underlying bugs which prevented the tool from being fully effective. Brian Harry’s blog post here describes the problem too This forum thread describes the problem with some solution hints. Ravi Shanker’s blog post here describes best practices on solving this (TBP) Grant Holidays blogpost here describes strategies to use the Test Attachment Cleaner both to detect space problems and how to rectify them.   The problem can be divided into the following areas: Publishing of test results from builds Publishing of manual test results and their attachments in particular Publishing of deployment binaries for use during a test run Bugs in SQL server preventing total cleanup of data (All the published data above is published into the TFS database as attachments.) The test results will include all data being collected during the run.  Some of this data can grow rather large, like IntelliTrace logs and video recordings.   Also the pushing of binaries which happen for automated test runs, including tests run during a build using code coverage which will include all the files in the deployment folder, contributes a lot to the size of the attached data.   In order to handle this systematically, I have set up a 3-stage process: Find out if you have a database space issue Set up your TFS server to minimize potential database issues If you have the “problem”, clean up the database and otherwise keep it clean   Analyze the data Are your database( s) growing ?  Are unused test results growing out of proportion ? To find out about this you need to query your TFS database for some of the information, and use the Test Attachment Cleaner (TAC) to obtain some  more detailed information. If you don’t have too many databases you can use the SQL Server reports from within the Management Studio to analyze the database and table sizes. Or, you can use a set of queries . I find queries often faster to use because I can tweak them the way I want them.  But be aware that these queries are non-documented and non-supported and may change when the product team wants to change them. If you have multiple Project Collections, find out which might have problems: (Disclaimer: The queries below work on TFS 2010. They will not work on Dev-11, since the table structure have been changed.  I will try to update them for Dev-11 when it is released.) Open a SQL Management Studio session onto the SQL Server where you have your TFS Databases. Use the query below to find the Project Collection databases and their sizes, in descending size order.  use master select DB_NAME(database_id) AS DBName, (size/128) SizeInMB FROM sys.master_files where type=0 and substring(db_name(database_id),1,4)='Tfs_' and DB_NAME(database_id)<>'Tfs_Configuration' order by size desc Doing this on one of our SQL servers gives the following results: It is pretty easy to see on which collection to start the work   Find out which tables are possibly too large Keep a special watch out for the Tfs_Attachment table. Use the script at the bottom of Grant’s blog to find the table sizes in descending size order. In our case we got this result: From Grant’s blog we learnt that the tbl_Content is in the Version Control category, so the major only big issue we have here is the tbl_AttachmentContent.   Find out which team projects have possibly too large attachments In order to use the TAC to find and eventually delete attachment data we need to find out which team projects have these attachments. The team project is a required parameter to the TAC. Use the following query to find this, replace the collection database name with whatever applies in your case:   use Tfs_DefaultCollection select p.projectname, sum(a.compressedlength)/1024/1024 as sizeInMB from dbo.tbl_Attachment as a inner join tbl_testrun as tr on a.testrunid=tr.testrunid inner join tbl_project as p on p.projectid=tr.projectid group by p.projectname order by sum(a.compressedlength) desc In our case we got this result (had to remove some names), out of more than 100 team projects accumulated over quite some years: As can be seen here it is pretty obvious the “Byggtjeneste – Projects” are the main team project to take care of, with the ones on lines 2-4 as the next ones.  Check which attachment types takes up the most space It can be nice to know which attachment types takes up the space, so run the following query: use Tfs_DefaultCollection select a.attachmenttype, sum(a.compressedlength)/1024/1024 as sizeInMB from dbo.tbl_Attachment as a inner join tbl_testrun as tr on a.testrunid=tr.testrunid inner join tbl_project as p on p.projectid=tr.projectid group by a.attachmenttype order by sum(a.compressedlength) desc We then got this result: From this it is pretty obvious that the problem here is the binary files, as also mentioned in Anu’s blog. Check which file types, by their extension, takes up the most space Run the following query use Tfs_DefaultCollection select SUBSTRING(filename,len(filename)-CHARINDEX('.',REVERSE(filename))+2,999)as Extension, sum(compressedlength)/1024 as SizeInKB from tbl_Attachment group by SUBSTRING(filename,len(filename)-CHARINDEX('.',REVERSE(filename))+2,999) order by sum(compressedlength) desc This gives a result like this:   Now you should have collected enough information to tell you what to do – if you got to do something, and some of the information you need in order to set up your TAC settings file, both for a cleanup and for scheduled maintenance later.    Get your TFS server and environment properly set up Even if you have got the problem or if have yet not got the problem, you should ensure the TFS server is set up so that the risk of getting into this problem is minimized.  To ensure this you should install the following set of updates and components. The assumption is that your TFS Server is at SP1 level. Install the QFE for KB2608743 – which also contains detailed instructions on its use, download from here. The QFE changes the default settings to not upload deployed binaries, which are used in automated test runs. Binaries will still be uploaded if: Code coverage is enabled in the test settings. You change the UploadDeploymentItem to true in the testsettings file. Be aware that this might be reset back to false by another user which haven't installed this QFE. The hotfix should be installed to The build servers (the build agents) The machine hosting the Test Controller Local development computers (Visual Studio) Local test computers (MTM) It is not required to install it to the TFS Server, test agents or the build controller – it has no effect on these programs. If you use the SQL Server 2008 R2 you should also install the CU 10 (or later).  This CU fixes a potential problem of hanging “ghost” files.  This seems to happen only in certain trigger situations, but to ensure it doesn’t bite you, it is better to make sure this CU is installed. There is no such CU for SQL Server 2008 pre-R2 Work around:  If you suspect hanging ghost files, they can be – with some mental effort, deduced from the ghost counters using the following SQL query: use master SELECT DB_NAME(database_id) as 'database',OBJECT_NAME(object_id) as 'objectname', index_type_desc,ghost_record_count,version_ghost_record_count,record_count,avg_record_size_in_bytes FROM sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats (DB_ID(N'<DatabaseName>'), OBJECT_ID(N'<TableName>'), NULL, NULL , 'DETAILED') The problem is a stalled ghost cleanup process.  Restarting the SQL server after having stopped all components that depends on it, like the TFS Server and SPS services – that is all applications that connect to the SQL server. Then restart the SQL server, and finally start up all dependent processes again.  (I would guess a complete server reboot would do the trick too.) After this the ghost cleanup process will run properly again. The fix will come in the next CU cycle for SQL Server R2 SP1.  The R2 pre-SP1 and R2 SP1 have separate maintenance cycles, and are maintained individually. Each have its own set of CU’s. When it comes I will add the link here to that CU. The "hanging ghost file” issue came up after one have run the TAC, and deleted enourmes amount of data.  The SQL Server can get into this hanging state (without the QFE) in certain cases due to this. And of course, install and set up the Test Attachment Cleaner command line power tool.  This should be done following some guidelines from Ravi Shanker: “When you run TAC, ensure that you are deleting small chunks of data at regular intervals (say run TAC every night at 3AM to delete data that is between age 730 to 731 days) – this will ensure that small amounts of data are being deleted and SQL ghosted record cleanup can catch up with the number of deletes performed. “ This rule minimizes the risk of the ghosted hang problem to occur, and further makes it easier for the SQL server ghosting process to work smoothly. “Run DBCC SHRINKDB post the ghosted records are cleaned up to physically reclaim the space on the file system” This is the last step in a 3 step process of removing SQL server data. First they are logically deleted. Then they are cleaned out by the ghosting process, and finally removed using the shrinkdb command. Cleaning out the attachments The TAC is run from the command line using a set of parameters and controlled by a settingsfile.  The parameters point out a server uri including the team project collection and also point at a specific team project. So in order to run this for multiple team projects regularly one has to set up a script to run the TAC multiple times, once for each team project.  When you install the TAC there is a very useful readme file in the same directory. When the deployment binaries are published to the TFS server, ALL items are published up from the deployment folder. That often means much more files than you would assume are necessary. This is a brute force technique. It works, but you need to take care when cleaning up. Grant has shown how their settings file looks in his blog post, removing all attachments older than 180 days , as long as there are no active workitems connected to them. This setting can be useful to clean out all items, both in a clean-up once operation, and in a general There are two scenarios we need to consider: Cleaning up an existing overgrown database Maintaining a server to avoid an overgrown database using scheduled TAC   1. Cleaning up a database which has grown too big due to these attachments. This job is a “Once” job.  We do this once and then move on to make sure it won’t happen again, by taking the actions in 2) below.  In this scenario you should only consider the large files. Your goal should be to simply reduce the size, and don’t bother about  the smaller stuff. That can be left a scheduled TAC cleanup ( 2 below). Here you can use a very general settings file, and just remove the large attachments, or you can choose to remove any old items.  Grant’s settings file is an example of the last one.  A settings file to remove only large attachments could look like this: <!-- Scenario : Remove large files --> <DeletionCriteria> <TestRun /> <Attachment> <SizeInMB GreaterThan="10" /> </Attachment> </DeletionCriteria> Or like this: If you want only to remove dll’s and pdb’s about that size, add an Extensions-section.  Without that section, all extensions will be deleted. <!-- Scenario : Remove large files of type dll's and pdb's --> <DeletionCriteria> <TestRun /> <Attachment> <SizeInMB GreaterThan="10" /> <Extensions> <Include value="dll" /> <Include value="pdb" /> </Extensions> </Attachment> </DeletionCriteria> Before you start up your scheduled maintenance, you should clear out all older items. 2. Scheduled maintenance using the TAC If you run a schedule every night, and remove old items, and also remove them in small batches.  It is important to run this often, like every night, in order to keep the number of deleted items low. That way the SQL ghost process works better. One approach could be to delete all items older than some number of days, let’s say 180 days. This could be combined with restricting it to keep attachments with active or resolved bugs.  Doing this every night ensures that only small amounts of data is deleted. <!-- Scenario : Remove old items except if they have active or resolved bugs --> <DeletionCriteria> <TestRun> <AgeInDays OlderThan="180" /> </TestRun> <Attachment /> <LinkedBugs> <Exclude state="Active" /> <Exclude state="Resolved"/> </LinkedBugs> </DeletionCriteria> In my experience there are projects which are left with active or resolved workitems, akthough no further work is done.  It can be wise to have a cleanup process with no restrictions on linked bugs at all. Note that you then have to remove the whole LinkedBugs section. A approach which could work better here is to do a two step approach, use the schedule above to with no LinkedBugs as a sweeper cleaning task taking away all data older than you could care about.  Then have another scheduled TAC task to take out more specifically attachments that you are not likely to use. This task could be much more specific, and based on your analysis clean out what you know is troublesome data. <!-- Scenario : Remove specific files early --> <DeletionCriteria> <TestRun > <AgeInDays OlderThan="30" /> </TestRun> <Attachment> <SizeInMB GreaterThan="10" /> <Extensions> <Include value="iTrace"/> <Include value="dll"/> <Include value="pdb"/> <Include value="wmv"/> </Extensions> </Attachment> <LinkedBugs> <Exclude state="Active" /> <Exclude state="Resolved" /> </LinkedBugs> </DeletionCriteria> The readme document for the TAC says that it recognizes “internal” extensions, but it does recognize any extension. To run the tool do the following command: tcmpt attachmentcleanup /collection:your_tfs_collection_url /teamproject:your_team_project /settingsfile:path_to_settingsfile /outputfile:%temp%/teamproject.tcmpt.log /mode:delete   Shrinking the database You could run a shrink database command after the TAC has run in cases where there are a lot of data being deleted.  In this case you SHOULD do it, to free up all that space.  But, after the shrink operation you should do a rebuild indexes, since the shrink operation will leave the database in a very fragmented state, which will reduce performance. Note that you need to rebuild indexes, reorganizing is not enough. For smaller amounts of data you should NOT shrink the database, since the data will be reused by the SQL server when it need to add more records.  In fact, it is regarded as a bad practice to shrink the database regularly.  So on a daily maintenance schedule you should NOT shrink the database. To shrink the database you do a DBCC SHRINKDATABASE command, and then follow up with a DBCC INDEXDEFRAG afterwards.  I find the easiest way to do this is to create a SQL Maintenance plan including the Shrink Database Task and the Rebuild Index Task and just execute it when you need to do this.

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  • Tools of the Trade

    - by Ajarn Mark Caldwell
    I got pretty excited a couple of days ago when my new laptop arrived. “The new phone books are here!  The new phone books are here!  I’m a somebody!” - Steve Martin in The Jerk It is a Dell Precision M4500 with an Intel i7 Core 2.8 GHZ running 64-bit Windows 7 with a 15.6” widescreen, 8 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD.  For some of you high fliers, this may be nothing to write home about, but compared to the 32–bit Windows XP laptop with 2 GB of RAM and a regular hard disk that I’m coming from, it’s a really nice step forward.  I won’t even bore you with the details of the desktop PC I was first given when I started here 5 1/2 years ago.  Let’s just say that things have improved.  One really nice thing is that while we are definitely running a lean and mean department in terms of staffing, my boss believes in supporting that lean staff with good tools in order to stay lean instead of having to spend even more money on additional employees.  Of course, that only goes so far, and at some point you have to add more people in order to get more work done, which is why we are bringing on-board a new employee and a new contract developer next week.  But that’s a different story for a different time. But the main topic for this post is to highlight the variety of tools that I use in my job and that you might find useful, too.  This is easy to do right now because the process of building up my new laptop from scratch has forced me to assemble a list of software that had to be installed and configured.  Keep in mind as you look through this list that I play many roles in our company.  My official title is Software Engineering Manager, but in addition to managing the team, I am also an active ASP.NET and SQL developer, the Database Administrator, and 50% of the SAN Administrator team.  So, without further ado, here are the tools and some comments about why I use them: Tool Purpose Virtual Clone Drive Easily mount an ISO image as a DVD Drive.  This is particularly handy when you are downloading disk images from Microsoft for your tools. SQL Server 2008 R2 Developer Edition We are migrating all of our active systems to SQL 2008 R2.  Developer Edition has all the features of Enterprise Edition, but intended for development use. SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition (BIDS ONLY) The migration to SSRS 2008 R2 is just getting started, and in the meantime, maintenance work still has to be done on the reports on our SQL 2005 server.  For some reason, you can’t use BIDS from 2008 to write reports for a 2005 server.  There is some different format and when you open 2005 reports in 2008 BIDS, it forces you to upgrade, and they can no longer be uploaded to a 2005 server.  Hopefully Microsoft will fix this soon in some manner similar to Visual Studio now allows you to pick which version of the .NET Framework you are coding against. Visual Studio 2010 Premium All of our application development is in ASP.NET, and we might as well use the tool designed for it. I’ve used a version of Visual Studio going all the way back to VB 6.0 and Visual Interdev. Vault Professional Client Several years ago we replaced Visual Source Safe with SourceGear Vault (then Fortress, and now Vault Pro), and I love it.  It is very reliable with low overhead - perfect for a small to medium size development team.  And being a small ISV, their support is exceptional. Red-Gate Developer Bundle with the SQL Source Control update for Vault I first used, and fell in love with, SQL Prompt shortly before Red-Gate bought it, and then Red-Gate’s first release made me love it even more.  SQL Refactor (which has since been rolled into the latest version of SQL Prompt) has saved me many hours and migraine’s trying to understand somebody else’s code when their indenting was nonexistant, or worse, irrational.  SQL Compare has been awesome for troubleshooting potential schema issues between different instances of system databases.  SQL Data Compare helped us identify the cause behind a bug which appeared in PROD but could not be reproduced in a nearly (but not quite exactly) identical copy in UAT.  And the newest tool we are embracing: SQL Source Control.  I blogged about it here (and here, and here) last December.  This is really going to help us keep each developer’s copy of the database in sync with one another. Fiddler Helps you watch the whole traffic stream on web visits.  Haven’t used it a lot, but it did help me track down some odd 404 errors we were finding in our own application logs.  Has some other JavaScript troubleshooting capabilities, but some of its usefulness has been supplanted by the Developer Tools option in IE8. Funduc Search & Replace Find any string anywhere in a mound of source code really, really fast.  Does RegEx searches, if you understand that foreign language.  Has really helped with some refactoring work to pinpoint, for example, everywhere a particular stored procedure is referenced, whether in .NET code or other SQL procedures (which we have in script files).  Provides in-context preview of the search results.  Fantastic tool, and a bargain price. SciTE SciTE is a Scintilla based Text Editor and it is a fantastic, light-weight tool for quickly reviewing (or writing) program code, SQL scripts, and extract files.  It has language-specific syntax highlighting.  I used it to write several batch and CMD programs a year ago, and to examine data extract files for exchanging information with other systems.  Extremely handy are the options to View End of Line and View Whitespace.  Ever receive a file that is supposed to use CRLF as an end-of-line marker, but really only has CRs?  SciTE will quickly make that visible. Infragistics Controls We do a lot of ASP.NET development, and frequently use the WebGrid, WebTab, and date picker controls.  We will likely be implementing the Hierarchical Data Grid soon.  Infragistics has control suites for WebForms, WinForms, Silverlight, and coming soon MVC/JQuery. WinZip - WITH Command-Line add-in The classic compression program with a great command-line interface that allows me to build those CMD (and soon PowerShell) programs for automated compression jobs.  Our versioned Build packages are zip files. XML Notepad Haven’t used this a lot myself, but one of my team really likes it for examining large XML files. LINQPad Again, haven’t used this one a lot, but it was recommended to me for learning and practicing my LINQ skills which will come in handy as we implement Entity Framework. SQL Sentry Plan Explorer SQL Server Show Plan on steroids.  Great for helping you focus on the parts of a large query that are of most importance.  Also great for just compressing the graphical plan into more readable layout. Araxis Merge A great DIFF and Merge tool.  SourceGear provides a great tool called DiffMerge that we use all the time, but occasionally, I like the cross-edit capabilities of Araxis Merge.  For a while, we also produced DIFF reports in HTML that showed all the changes that occurred between two releases.  This was most important when we were putting out very small, but very important hot fixes on a very politically hot system.  The reports produced by Araxis Merge gave the Director of IS assurance that we were not accidentally introducing ripples throughout the system with our releases. Idera SQL Admin Toolset A great collection of tools including a password checker to help analyze your SQL Server for weak user passwords, a Backup Status tool to quickly scan a large list of servers and databases to identify any that are overdue for backups.  Particularly helpful for highlighting new databases that have been deployed without getting included in your backup processing.  I also like Space Analyzer to keep an eye on disk space consumed by database files. Idera SQL Job Manager This free tool provides a nice calendar view of SQL Server Job Schedules, but to a degree, you also get what you pay for.  We will be purchasing SQL Sentry Event Manager later this year as an even better job schedule reviewer/manager.  But in the meantime, this at least gives me a good view on potential resource conflicts across multiple instances of SQL Server. DBFViewer 2000 I inherited a couple of FoxPro databases that I have to keep an eye on occasionally and have not yet been able to migrate them to SQL Server. Balsamiq Mockups We are still in evaluation-mode on this tool, but I really like it as a quick UI mockup tool that does not require Visual Studio, so someone other than a programmer can do UI design.  The interface looks hand-drawn which definitely has some psychological benefits when communicating to users, too. FeedDemon I have to stay on top of my WAY TOO MANY blog subscriptions somehow.  I may read blogs on a couple of different computers, and FeedDemon’s integration with Google Reader allows me to keep them all in sync.  I don’t particularly like the Google Reader interface, or the fact that it always wanted to mark articles as read just because I scrolled past them.  FeedDemon solves this problem for me, and provides a multi-tabbed interface which is good because fairly frequently one blog will link to something else I want to read, and I can end up with a half-dozen open tabs all from one article. Synergy+ In my office, I run four monitors across two computers all with one mouse and keyboard.  Synergy is the magic software that makes this work. TweetDeck I’m not the most active Tweeter in the world, but when I want to check-in with the Twitterverse, this really helps.  I have found the #sqlhelp and #PoshHelp hash tags particularly useful, and I also have columns setup to make it easy to monitor #sqlpass, #PASSProfDev, and short term events like #sqlsat68.   Whew!  That’s a lot.  No wonder it took me a couple of days to get everything setup the way I wanted it.  Oh, that and actually getting some work accomplished at the same time.  Anyway, I know that is a huge dump of info, and most people never make it here to the end, so for those who did, let me say, CONGRATULATIONS, you made it! I hope you’ll find a new tool or two to make your work life a little easier.

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  • Advanced Continuous Delivery to Azure from TFS, Part 1: Good Enough Is Not Great

    - by jasont
    The folks over on the TFS / Visual Studio team have been working hard at releasing a steady stream of new features for their new hosted Team Foundation Service in the cloud. One of the most significant features released was simple continuous delivery of your solution into your Azure deployments. The original announcement from Brian Harry can be found here. Team Foundation Service is a great platform for .Net developers who are used to working with TFS on-premises. I’ve been using it since it became available at the //BUILD conference in 2011, and when I recently came to work at Stackify, it was one of the first changes I made. Managing work items is much easier than the tool we were using previously, although there are some limitations (more on that in another blog post). However, when continuous deployment was made available, it blew my mind. It was the killer feature I didn’t know I needed. Not to say that I wasn’t previously an advocate for continuous delivery; just that it was always a pain to set up and configure. Having it hosted - and a one-click setup – well, that’s just the best thing since sliced bread. It made perfect sense: my source code is in the cloud, and my deployment is in the cloud. Great! I can queue up a build from my iPad or phone and just let it go! I quickly tore through the quick setup and saw it all work… sort of. This will be the first in a three part series on how to take the building block of Team Foundation Service continuous delivery and build a CD model that will actually work for any team deploying something more advanced than a “Hello World” example. Part 1: Good Enough Is Not Great Part 2: A Model That Works: Branching and Multiple Deployment Environments Part 3: Other Considerations: SQL, Custom Tasks, Etc Good Enough Is Not Great There. I’ve said it. I certainly hope no one on the TFS team is offended, but it’s the truth. Let’s take a look under the hood and understand how it works, and then why it’s not enough to handle real world CD as-is. How it works. (note that I’ve skipped a couple of steps; I already have my accounts set up and something deployed to Azure) The first step is to establish some oAuth magic between your Azure management portal and your TFS Instance. You do this via the management portal. Once it’s done, you have a new build process template in your TFS instance. (Image lifted from the documentation) From here, you’ll get the usual prompts for security, allowing access, etc. But you’ll also get to pick which Solution in your source control to build. Here’s what the bulk of the build definition looks like. All I’ve had to do is add in the solution to build (notice that mine is from a specific branch – Release – more on that later) and I’ve changed the configuration. I trigger the build, and voila! I have an Azure deployment a few minutes later. The beauty of this is that it’s all in the cloud and I’m not waiting for my machine to compile and upload the package. (I also had to enable the build definition first – by default it is created in disabled state, probably a good thing since it will trigger on every.single.checkin by default.) I get to see a history of deployments from the Azure portal, and can link into TFS to see the associated changesets and work items. You’ll notice also that this build definition also automatically put my code in the Staging slot of my Azure deployment – more on this soon. For now, I can VIP swap and be in production. (P.S. I hate VIP swap and “production” and “staging” in Azure. More on that later too.) That’s it. That’s the default out-of-box experience. Easy, right? But it’s full of room for improvement, so let’s get into that….   The Problems Nothing is perfect (except my code – it’s always perfect), and neither is Continuous Deployment without a bit of work to help it fit your dev team’s process. So what are the issues? Issue 1: Staging vs QA vs Prod vs whatever other environments your team may have. This, for me, is the big hairy one. Remember how this automatically deployed to staging rather than prod for us? There are a couple of issues with this model: If I want to deliver to prod, it requires intervention on my part after deployment (via a VIP swap). If I truly want to promote between environments (i.e. Nightly Build –> Stable QA –> Production) I likely have configuration changes between each environment such as database connection strings and this process (and the VIP swap) doesn’t account for this. Yet. Issue 2: Branching and delivering on every check-in. As I mentioned above, I have set this up to target a specific branch – Release – of my code. For the purposes of this example, I have adopted the “basic” branching strategy as defined by the ALM Rangers. This basically establishes a “Main” trunk where you branch off Dev and Release branches. Granted, the Release branch is usually the only thing you will deploy to production, but you certainly don’t want to roll to production automatically when you merge to the Release branch and check-in (unless you like the thrill of it, and in that case, I like your style, cowboy….). Rather, you have nightly build and QA environments, or if you’ve adopted the feature-branch model you have environments for those. Those are the environments you want to continuously deploy to. But that takes us back to Issue 1: we currently have a 1:1 solution to Azure deployment target. Issue 3: SQL and other custom tasks. Let’s be honest and address the elephant in the room: I need to get some sleep because I see an elephant in the room. But seriously, I can’t think of an application I have touched in the last 10 years that doesn’t need to consider SQL changes when deploying code and upgrading an environment. Microsoft seems perfectly content to ignore this elephant for now: yes, they’ve added Data Tier Applications. But let’s be honest with ourselves again: no one really uses it, and it’s not suitable for anything more complex than a Hello World sample project database. Why? Because it doesn’t fit well into a great source control story. Developers make stored procedure and table changes all day long while coding complex applications, and if someone forgets to go update the DACPAC before the automated deployment, you have a broken build until it’s completed. Developers – not just DBAs – also like to work with SQL in SQL tools, not in Visual Studio. I’m really picking on SQL because that’s generally the biggest concern that I hear. But we need to account for any custom tasks as well in the build process.   The Solutions… ? We’ve taken a look at how this all works, and addressed the shortcomings. In my next post (which I promise will be very, very soon), I will detail how I’ve overcome these shortcomings and used this foundation to create a mature, flexible model for deploying my app – any version, any time, to any environment.

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  • Django admin site populated combo box based on imput

    - by user292652
    hi i have to following model class Match(models.Model): Team_one = models.ForeignKey('Team', related_name='Team_one') Team_two = models.ForeignKey('Team', related_name='Team_two') Stadium = models.CharField(max_length=255, blank=True) Start_time = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=False, auto_now=False, blank=True, null=True) Rafree = models.CharField(max_length=255, blank=True) Judge = models.CharField(max_length=255, blank=True) Winner = models.ForeignKey('Team', related_name='winner', blank=True) updated = models.DateTimeField('update date', auto_now=True ) created = models.DateTimeField('creation date', auto_now_add=True ) def save(self, force_insert=False, force_update=False): pass @models.permalink def get_absolute_url(self): return ('view_or_url_name') class MatchAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin): list_display = ('Team_one','Team_two', 'Winner') search_fields = ['Team_one','Team_tow'] admin.site.register(Match, MatchAdmin) i was wondering is their a way to populated the winner combo box once the team one and team two is selected in admin site ?

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  • What does a Software Developer actually do?

    - by chobo2
    Hi I am graduating from my Computer Science degree in a few weeks from now!! I started to look for my first job. For the last couple years I gotten really into web programming(Asp.net). My first choice would be to get a junior asp.net MVC developer but I don't any companies in my area use MVC yet or if they do they are not hiring. So my second choice would be a junior asp.net Webforms developer. My other choices after that would be forms applications, mobile applications using .Net and C#. As you can see I am looking for something with .Net. I spent the last couple years doing .Net projects for school, on my free time and love the Language and it would pain me right now to switch to something like php. So now I found a posting in my area for an Entry Software Developer. I like the fact that they are using .net and that it is entry job(I never worked in this industry and never had more then like a tutoring job so I want to for like intermediate jobs). Posting Are you looking for an exciting challenge within a dynamic, people-oriented culture where you can launch your technical career? Company Name Inc. is a technology consulting company, located in Canada, that designs, develops, and delivers real-time interactive applications accessed via the Internet as well as back-end tools to support these applications. Company Name provides a combination of out-of-the-box and customized solutions to an expanding list of partners and customers. POSITION SUMMARY As a member of our team, the successful candidate will be responsible for helping us increase the quality and stability of our software systems by working jointly and directly with both the Software Development teams and the QA Team. The primary mission of this role will be to substantially enhance our test automation suite. The incumbent will design and program automated tests (unit, integration, system, stress and load) in Visual Studio using C# and will develop sound processes that help us identify and resolve defects as early as possible. The successful incumbent will help us improve and enhance system functionality, reliability, performance and scalability. This role is specifically designed for an eager, bright, new graduate who is looking for a stepping stone into a software engineering role. We promote from within and invite new graduates to apply for this important position - which may lead to new opportunities. We also offer a generous professional development plan to help you on your way. You will be a key part of a team of experts that is responsible for improving the quality of our software by: • Designing, writing, and executing test plans and programmatic tests in Visual Studio using C# and NUnit for functional testing of our code, new features, regression, and performance test procedures. • Working with the engineers to design and build the stress and load testing framework which emulates tens and even hundreds of thousands of concurrent users via a distributed network interfacing with our Load Testing Lab. • Interfacing with both the Development Team and the QA Team to ensure risks are identified and managed. • Mentoring and leading the QA Team in programmatic test automation technologies and tools. MUST HAVE SKILLS / QUALIFICATIONS: • Diploma or higher Degree in Computer Science, or equivalent formal training. • Fundamental C# programming skills. • Knowledge of Internet technologies and Microsoft Windows platforms. • Knowledge of PC hardware. • Excellent communication skills (both oral and written). • Self-starter who takes initiative, requires minimal supervision, can handle multiple simultaneous tasks. • Detail-oriented, able to concentrate, and work quickly. • Proven diagnostic, analytical, and problem solving skills. NICE TO HAVE SKILLS: • Exposure to Visual Studio Team System or Visual Studio Test Edition. • Exposure in C# using NUnit. • Exposure to NUnit, HTTPUnit, and other automation tool suites. • Exposure to Performance/Stress/Load Testing. • Good understanding of relational databases (MS SQL Server). • Familiar with video and online multi-player games. As part of our team you will have the opportunity to work with a supportive team of experts, drive your own success, and ride the wave as we continually expand our team of experts. If you are interested in this opportunity, please send your resume to [email protected] with “Entry Level Software Developer” in the subject line. So that is the posting. To me it sounds like it is QA job. I don't have anything against QA jobs but alot of them seems to be your just clicking buttons and running scripts. Is this what a typical software developer does? Like I am so on the fence to apply for this job. On one side I am not sure how much programming I would be doing. Like I want to be at least half the time programming otherwise my skills will never improve since I will never be programming in teams and stuff. At the same time I have no experience in the industry so on the other side I am thinking just go for it and then maybe a year later try to get a full programming job(provided that I got the job). Yet if I am not programming in that job then that experience will not help me for the next job I find as I will be back a square one.

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  • Verizon Wireless Supports its Mission-Critical Employee Portal with MySQL

    - by Bertrand Matthelié
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Cambria","serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Verizon Wireless, the #1 mobile carrier in the United States, operates the nation’s largest 3G and 4G LTE network, with the most subscribers (109 millions) and the highest revenue ($70.2 Billion in 2011). Verizon Wireless built the first wide-area wireless broadband network and delivered the first wireless consumer 3G multimedia service in the US, and offers global voice and data services in more than 200 destinations around the world. To support 4.2 million daily wireless transactions and 493,000 calls and emails transactions produced by 94.2 million retail customers, Verizon Wireless employs over 78,000 employees with area headquarters across the United States. The Business Challenge Seeing the stupendous rise in social media, video streaming, live broadcasting…etc which redefined the scope of technology, Verizon Wireless, as a technology savvy company, wanted to provide a platform to its employees where they could network socially, view and host microsites, stream live videos, blog and provide the latest news. The IT team at Verizon Wireless had abundant experience with various technology platforms to support the huge number of applications in the company. However, open-source products weren’t yet widely used in the organization and the team had the ambition to adopt such technologies and see if the architecture could meet Verizon Wireless’ rigid requirements. After evaluating a few solutions, the IT team decided to use the LAMP stack for Vzweb, its mission-critical, 24x7 employee portal, with Drupal as the front end and MySQL on Linux as the backend, and for a few other internal websites also on MySQL. The MySQL Solution Verizon Wireless started to support its employee portal, Vzweb, its online streaming website, Vztube, and internal wiki pages, Vzwiki, with MySQL 5.1 in 2010. Vzweb is the main internal communication channel for Verizon Wireless, while Vztube hosts important company-wide webcasts regularly for executive-level announcements, so both channels have to be live and accessible all the time for its 78,000 employees across the United States. However during the initial deployment of the MySQL based Intranet, the application experienced performance issues. High connection spikes occurred causing slow user response time, and the IT team applied workarounds to continue the service. A number of key performance indexes (KPI) for the infrastructure were identified and the operational framework redesigned to support a more robust website and conform to the 99.985% uptime SLA (Service-Level Agreement). The MySQL DBA team made a series of upgrades in MySQL: Step 1: Moved from MyISAM to InnoDB storage engine in 2010 Step 2: Upgraded to the latest MySQL 5.1.54 release in 2010 Step 3: Upgraded from MySQL 5.1 to the latest GA release MySQL 5.5 in 2011, and leveraging MySQL Thread Pool as part of MySQL Enterprise Edition to scale better After making those changes, the team saw a much better response time during high concurrency use cases, and achieved an amazing performance improvement of 1400%! In January 2011, Verizon CEO, Ivan Seidenberg, announced the iPhone launch during the opening keynote at Consumer Electronic Show (CES) in Las Vegas, and that presentation was streamed live to its 78,000 employees. The event was broadcasted flawlessly with MySQL as the database. Later in 2011, Hurricane Irene attacked the East Coast of United States and caused major life and financial damages. During the hurricane, the team directed more traffic to its west coast data center to avoid potential infrastructure damage in the East Coast. Such transition was executed smoothly and even though the geographical distance became longer for the East Coast users, there was no impact in the performance of Vzweb and Vztube, and the SLA goal was achieved. “MySQL is the key component of Verizon Wireless’ mission-critical employee portal application,” said Shivinder Singh, senior DBA at Verizon Wireless. “We achieved 1400% performance improvement by moving from the MyISAM storage engine to InnoDB, upgrading to the latest GA release MySQL 5.5, and using the MySQL Thread Pool to support high concurrent user connections. MySQL has become part of our IT infrastructure, on which potentially more future applications will be built.” To learn more about MySQL Enterprise Edition, Get our Product Guide.

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  • Conditional Operator in SQL Where Clause

    - by Marc
    I'm wishing I could do something like the following in SQl Server 2005 (which I know isnt valid) for my where clause. Sometimes @teamID (passed into a stored procedure) will be the value of an existing teamID, otherwise it will always be zero and I want all rows from the Team table. I researched using Case and the operator needs to come before or after the entire statement which prevents me from having a different operator based on the value of @teamid. Any suggestions other than duplicating my select statements. declare @teamid int set @teamid = 0 Select Team.teamID From Team case @teamid when 0 then WHERE Team.teamID > 0 else WHERE Team.teamID = @teamid end

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  • Django admin site auto populate combo box based on input

    - by user292652
    hi i have to following model class Match(models.Model): Team_one = models.ForeignKey('Team', related_name='Team_one') Team_two = models.ForeignKey('Team', related_name='Team_two') Stadium = models.CharField(max_length=255, blank=True) Start_time = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=False, auto_now=False, blank=True, null=True) Rafree = models.CharField(max_length=255, blank=True) Judge = models.CharField(max_length=255, blank=True) Winner = models.ForeignKey('Team', related_name='winner', blank=True) updated = models.DateTimeField('update date', auto_now=True ) created = models.DateTimeField('creation date', auto_now_add=True ) def save(self, force_insert=False, force_update=False): pass @models.permalink def get_absolute_url(self): return ('view_or_url_name') class MatchAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin): list_display = ('Team_one','Team_two', 'Winner') search_fields = ['Team_one','Team_tow'] admin.site.register(Match, MatchAdmin) i was wondering is their a way to populated the winner combo box once the team one and team two is selected in admin site ?

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  • How to Answer a Stupid Interview Question the Right Way

    - by AjarnMark
    Have you ever been asked a stupid question during an interview; one that seemed to have no relation to the job responsibilities at all?  Tech people are often caught off-guard by these apparently irrelevant questions, but there is a way you can turn these to your favor.  Here is one idea. While chatting with a couple of folks between sessions at SQLSaturday 43 last weekend, one of them expressed frustration over a seemingly ridiculous and trivial question that she was asked during an interview, and she believes it cost her the job opportunity.  The question, as I remember it being described was, “What is the largest byte measurement?”.  The candidate made up a guess (“zetabyte”) during the interview, which is actually closer than she may have realized.  According to Wikipedia, there is a measurement known as zettabyte which is 10^21, and the largest one listed there is yottabyte at 10^24. My first reaction to this question was, “That’s just a hiring manager that doesn’t really know what they’re looking for in a candidate.  Furthermore, this tells me that this manager really does not understand how to build a team.”  In most companies, team interaction is more important than uber-knowledge.  I didn’t ask, but this could also be another geek on the team trying to establish their Alpha-Geek stature.  I suppose that there are a few, very few, companies that can build their businesses on hiring only the extreme alpha-geeks, but that certainly does not represent the majority of businesses in America. My friend who was there suggested that the appropriate response to this silly question would be, “And how does this apply to the work I will be doing?” Of course this is an understandable response when you’re frustrated because you know you can handle the technical aspects of the job, and it seems like the interviewer is just being silly.  But it is also a direct challenge, which may not be the best approach in interviewing.  I do have to admit, though, that there are those folks who just won’t respect you until you do challenge them, but again, I don’t think that is the majority. So after some thought, here is my suggestion: “Well, I know that there are petabytes and exabytes and things even larger than that, but I haven’t been keeping up on my list of Greek prefixes that have not yet been used, so I would have to look up the exact answer if you need it.  However, I have worked with databases as large as 30 Terabytes.  How big are the largest databases here at X Corporation?”  Perhaps with a follow-up of, “Typically, what I have seen in companies that have databases of your size, is that the three biggest challenges they face are: A, B, and C.  What would you say are the top 3 concerns that you would like the person you hire to be able to address?…Here is how I have dealt with those concerns in the past (or ‘Here is how I would tackle those issues for you…’).” Wait! What just happened?!  We took a seemingly irrelevant and frustrating question and turned it around into an opportunity to highlight our relevant skills and guide the conversation back in a direction more to our liking and benefit.  In more generic terms, here is what we did: Admit that you don’t know the specific answer off the top of your head, but can get it if it’s truly important to the company. Maybe for some reason it really is important to them. Mention something similar or related that you do know, reassuring them that you do have some knowledge in that subject area. Draw a parallel to your past work experience. Ask follow-up questions about the company’s specific needs and discuss how you can fulfill those. This type of thing requires practice and some forethought.  I didn’t come up with this answer until a day later, which is too late when you’re interviewing.  I still think it is silly for an interviewer to ask something like that, but at least this is one way to spin it to your advantage while you consider whether you really want to work for someone who would ask a thing like that.  Remember, interviewing is a two-way process.  You’re deciding whether you want to work there just as much as they are deciding whether they want you. There is always the possibility that this was a calculated maneuver on the part of the hiring manager just to see how quickly you think on your feet and how you handle stupid questions.  Maybe he knows something about the work environment and he’s trying to gauge whether you’ll actually fit in okay.  And if that’s the case, then the above response still works quite well.

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  • New Replication, Optimizer and High Availability features in MySQL 5.6.5!

    - by Rob Young
    As the Product Manager for the MySQL database it is always great to announce when the MySQL Engineering team delivers another great product release.  As a field DBA and developer it is even better when that release contains improvements and innovation that I know will help those currently using MySQL for apps that range from modest intranet sites to the most highly trafficked web sites on the web.  That said, it is my pleasure to take my hat off to MySQL Engineering for today's release of the MySQL 5.6.5 Development Milestone Release ("DMR"). The new highlighted features in MySQL 5.6.5 are discussed here: New Self-Healing Replication ClustersThe 5.6.5 DMR improves MySQL Replication by adding Global Transaction Ids and automated utilities for self-healing Replication clusters.  Prior to 5.6.5 this has been somewhat of a pain point for MySQL users with most developing custom solutions or looking to costly, complex third-party solutions for these capabilities.  With 5.6.5 these shackles are all but removed by a solution that is included with the GPL version of the database and supporting GPL tools.  You can learn all about the details of the great, problem solving Replication features in MySQL 5.6 in Mat Keep's Developer Zone article.  New Replication Administration and Failover UtilitiesAs mentioned above, the new Replication features, Global Transaction Ids specifically, are now supported by a set of automated GPL utilities that leverage the new GTIDs to provide administration and manual or auto failover to the most up to date slave (that is the default, but user configurable if needed) in the event of a master failure. The new utilities, along with links to Engineering related blogs, are discussed in detail in the DevZone Article noted above. Better Query Optimization and ThroughputThe MySQL Optimizer team continues to amaze with the latest round of improvements in 5.6.5. Along with much refactoring of the legacy code base, the Optimizer team has improved complex query optimization and throughput by adding these functional improvements: Subquery Optimizations - Subqueries are now included in the Optimizer path for runtime optimization.  Better throughput of nested queries enables application developers to simplify and consolidate multiple queries and result sets into a single unit or work. Optimizer now uses CURRENT_TIMESTAMP as default for DATETIME columns - For simplification, this eliminates the need for application developers to assign this value when a column of this type is blank by default. Optimizations for Range based queries - Optimizer now uses ready statistics vs Index based scans for queries with multiple range values. Optimizations for queries using filesort and ORDER BY.  Optimization criteria/decision on execution method is done now at optimization vs parsing stage. Print EXPLAIN in JSON format for hierarchical readability and Enterprise tool consumption. You can learn the details about these new features as well all of the Optimizer based improvements in MySQL 5.6 by following the Optimizer team blog. You can download and try the MySQL 5.6.5 DMR here. (look under "Development Releases")  Please let us know what you think!  The new HA utilities for Replication Administration and Failover are available as part of the MySQL Workbench Community Edition, which you can download here .Also New in MySQL LabsAs has become our tradition when announcing DMRs we also like to provide "Early Access" development features to the MySQL Community via the MySQL Labs.  Today is no exception as we are also releasing the following to Labs for you to download, try and let us know your thoughts on where we need to improve:InnoDB Online OperationsMySQL 5.6 now provides Online ADD Index, FK Drop and Online Column RENAME.  These operations are non-blocking and will continue to evolve in future DMRs.  You can learn the grainy details by following John Russell's blog.InnoDB data access via Memcached API ("NotOnlySQL") - Improved refresh of an earlier feature releaseSimilar to Cluster 7.2, MySQL 5.6 provides direct NotOnlySQL access to InnoDB data via the familiar Memcached API. This provides the ultimate in flexibility for developers who need fast, simple key/value access and complex query support commingled within their applications.Improved Transactional Performance, ScaleThe InnoDB Engineering team has once again under promised and over delivered in the area of improved performance and scale.  These improvements are also included in the aggregated Spring 2012 labs release:InnoDB CPU cache performance improvements for modern, multi-core/CPU systems show great promise with internal tests showing:    2x throughput improvement for read only activity 6x throughput improvement for SELECT range Read/Write benchmarks are in progress More details on the above are available here. You can download all of the above in an aggregated "InnoDB 2012 Spring Labs Release" binary from the MySQL Labs. You can also learn more about these improvements and about related fixes to mysys mutex and hash sort by checking out the InnoDB team blog.MySQL 5.6.5 is another installment in what we believe will be the best release of the MySQL database ever.  It also serves as a shining example of how the MySQL Engineering team at Oracle leads in MySQL innovation.You can get the overall Oracle message on the MySQL 5.6.5 DMR and Early Access labs features here. As always, thanks for your continued support of MySQL, the #1 open source database on the planet!

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  • Agile Development Requires Agile Support

    - by Matt Watson
    Agile developmentAgile development has become the standard methodology for application development. The days of long term planning with giant Gantt waterfall charts and detailed requirements is fading away. For years the product planning process frustrated product owners and businesses because no matter the plan, nothing ever went to plan. Agile development throws the detailed planning out the window and instead focuses on giving developers some basic requirements and pointing them in the right direction. Constant collaboration via quick iterations with the end users, product owners, and the development team helps ensure the project is done correctly.  The various agile development methodologies have helped greatly with creating products faster, but not without causing new problems. Complicated application deployments now occur weekly or monthly. Most of the products are web-based and deployed as a software service model. System performance and availability of these apps becomes mission critical. This is all much different from the old process of mailing new releases of client-server apps on CD once per quarter or year.The steady stream of new products and product enhancements puts a lot of pressure on IT operations to keep up with the software deployments and adding infrastructure capacity. The problem is most operations teams still move slowly thanks to change orders, documentation, procedures, testing and other processes. Operations can slow the process down and push back on the development team in some organizations. The DevOps movement is trying to solve some of these problems by integrating the development and operations teams more together. Rapid change introduces new problemsThe rapid product change ultimately creates some application problems along the way. Higher rates of change increase the likelihood of new application defects. Delivering applications as a software service also means that scalability of applications is critical. Development teams struggle to keep up with application defects and scalability concerns in their applications. Fixing application problems is a never ending job for agile development teams. Fixing problems before your customers do and fixing them quickly is critical. Most companies really struggle with this due to the divide between the development and operations groups. Fixing application problems typically requires querying databases, looking at log files, reviewing config files, reviewing error logs and other similar tasks. It becomes difficult to work on new features when your lead developers are working on defects from the last product version. Developers need more visibilityThe problem is most developers are not given access to see server and application information in the production environments. The operations team doesn’t trust giving all the developers the keys to the kingdom to log in to production and poke around the servers. The challenge is either give them no access, or potentially too much access. Those with access can still waste time figuring out the location of the application and how to connect to it over VPN. In addition, reproducing problems in test environments takes too much time and isn't always possible. System administrators spend a lot of time helping developers track down server information. Most companies give key developers access to all of the production resources so they can help resolve application defects. The problem is only those key people have access and they become a bottleneck. They end up spending 25-50% of their time on a daily basis trying to solve application issues because they are the only ones with access. These key employees’ time is best spent on strategic new projects, not addressing application defects. This job should fall to entry level developers, provided they have access to all the information they need to troubleshoot the problems.The solution to agile application support is giving all the developers limited access to the production environment and all the server information they need to see. Some companies create their own solutions internally to collect log files, centralize errors or other things to address the problem. Some developers even have access to server monitoring or other tools. But they key is giving them access to everything they need so they can see the full picture and giving access to the whole team. Giving access to everyone scales up the application support team and creates collaboration around providing improved application support.Stackify enables agile application supportStackify has created a solution that can give all developers a secure and read only view of the entire production server environment without console or remote desktop access.They provide a web application that provides real time visibility to the important information that developers need to see. An application centric view enables them to see all of their apps across multiple datacenters and environments. They don’t need to know where the application is deployed, just the name of the application to find it and dig in to see more. All your developers can see server health, application health, log files, config files, windows event viewer, deployment history, application notes, and much more. They can receive email and text alerts when problems arise and even safely query your production databases.Stackify enables companies that do agile development to scale up their application support team by getting more team members involved. The lead developers can spend more time on new projects. Application issues can be fixed quicker than ever. Operations can spend less time helping developers collect server information. Agile application support starts with Stackify. Visit Stackify.com to learn more.

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  • Help with query

    - by hdoe123
    Hi, I'm trying make a query that looks at a single table and looks to see if a student is a team called CMHT and in a medic team - if they are I don't want to see the result. I only want see if there only in CMHT or medic not both. Would the right direction be using sub query to filer it out? I've done a search on NOT IN but how could you get to see check if its in more then 2 teams are not? Student Team ref 1 CMHT 1 1 Medic 2 2 Medic 3 this would be in the result 3 CMHT 5 this would be in the result So far I've done the following code would I need use a sub query or do a self join and filter it that way? SELECT Table1.Student, Table1.Team, Table1.refnumber FROM Table1 WHERE (((Table1.Team) In ('Medics','CMHT'))

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  • What to do after a servicing fails on TFS 2010

    - by Martin Hinshelwood
    What do you do if you run a couple of hotfixes against your TFS 2010 server and you start to see seem odd behaviour? A customer of mine encountered that very problem, but they could not just, or at least not easily, go back a version.   You see, around the time of the TFS 2010 launch this company decided to upgrade their entire 250+ development team from TFS 2008 to TFS 2010. They encountered a few problems, owing mainly to the size of their TFS deployment, and the way they were using TFS. They were not doing anything wrong, but when you have the largest deployment of TFS outside of Microsoft you tend to run into problems that most people will never encounter. We are talking half a terabyte of source control in TFS with over 80 proxy servers. Its certainly the largest deployment I have ever heard of. When they did their upgrade way back in April, they found two major flaws in the product that meant that they had to back out of the upgrade and wait for a couple of hotfixes. KB983504 – Hotfix KB983578 – Patch KB2401992 -Hotfix In the time since they got the hotfixes they have run 6 successful trial migrations, but we are not talking minutes or hours here. When you have 400+ GB of data it takes time to copy it around. It takes time to do the upgrade and it takes time to do a backup. Well, last week it was crunch time with their developers off for Christmas they had a window of opportunity to complete the upgrade. Now these guys are good, but they wanted Northwest Cadence to be available “just in case”. They did not expect any problems as they already had 6 successful trial upgrades. The problems surfaced around 20 hours in after the first set of hotfixes had been applied. The new Team Project Collection, the only thing of importance, had disappeared from the Team Foundation Server Administration console. The collection would not reattach either. It would not even list the new collection as attachable! Figure: We know there is a database there, but it does not This was a dire situation as 20+ hours to repeat would leave the customer over time with 250+ developers sitting around doing nothing. We tried everything, and then we stumbled upon the command of last resort. TFSConfig Recover /ConfigurationDB:SQLServer\InstanceName;TFS_ConfigurationDBName /CollectionDB:SQLServer\instanceName;"Collection Name" -http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff407077.aspx WARNING: Never run this command! Now this command does something a little nasty. It assumes that there really should not be anything wrong and sets about fixing it. It ignores any servicing levels in the Team Project Collection database and forcibly applies the latest version of the schema. I am sure you can imagine the types of problems this may cause when the schema is updated leaving the data behind. That said, as far as we could see this collection looked good, and we were even able to find and attach the team project collection to the Configuration database. Figure: After attaching the TPC it enters a servicing mode After reattaching the team project collection we found the message “Re-Attaching”. Well, fair enough that sounds like something that may need to happen, and after checking that there was disk IO we left it to it. 14+ hours later, it was still not done so the customer raised a priority support call with MSFT and an engineer helped them out. Figure: Everything looks good, it is just offline. Tip: Did you know that these logs are not represented in the ~/Logs/* folder until they are opened once? The engineer dug around a bit and listened to our situation. He knew that we had run the dreaded “tfsconfig restore”, but was not phased. Figure: This message looks suspiciously like the wrong servicing version As it turns out, the servicing version was slightly out of sync with the schema. KB Schema Successful           KB983504 341 Yes   KB983578 344 sort of   KB2401992 360 nope   Figure: KB, Schema table with notation to its success The Schema version above represents the final end of run version for that hotfix or patch. The only way forward The problem was that the version was somewhere between 341 and 344. This is not a nice place to be in and the engineer give us the  only way forward as the removal of the servicing number from the database so that the re-attach process would apply the latest schema. if his sounds a little like the “tfsconfig recover” command then you are exactly right. Figure: Sneakily changing that 3 to a 1 should do the trick Figure: Changing the status and dropping the version should do it Now that we have done that we should be able to safely reattach and enable the Team Project Collection. Figure: The TPC is now all attached and running You may think that this is the end of the story, but it is not. After a while of mulling and seeking expert advice we came to the opinion that the database was, for want of a better term, “hosed”. There could well be orphaned data in there and the likelihood that we would have problems later down the line is pretty high. We contacted the customer back and made them aware that in all likelihood the repaired database was more like a “cut and shut” than anything else, and at the first sign of trouble later down the line was likely to split in two. So with 40+ hours invested in getting this new database ready the customer threw it away and started again. What would you do? Would you take the “cut and shut” to production and hope for the best?

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  • A new method of supporting FOSS?

    - by James
    I have been kicking an idea around for sometime and wondered if something of it's nature hadn't already been invented. The premise is a website that integrates code management, project/team management, and micro-transactions. Donations, in and of themselves, are a sporadic, and unreliable method of supporting developers. Furthermore most free software that accepts donations is started by programmers ,be it to learn, because of a hobby, or because they saw a niche that needed to be filled. There is no method in place of of saying "hay, the FOSS community needs this kind of software, will someone develop it, and accept donations!?" Programmers should be programming, not busy begging for money. Basically the idea is people can go to the site in question, and start a project or make a request. Anyone signed up with the site can start a request. Each member account is free to support or "upvote" a project request. Requests and the associated number of votes let programmers in the community know the needs of the community. When a project is started a request for developers can be put forth. Developers have a ranking based on commits to other projects. The project founder can send invites to known Developers, or accept invites from members based on developer ranking. Once the project has at least one team-member, an objectives sheet or "draft" can be put out, listing design, goals, and features. The founding member and each team-member may contribute to this sheet. Each "milestone", or "Feature" is represented by an article. An article is any unit of a draft that can be voted on by The Project Founder, Team-members, and contributors...which brings me to the next half of this idea. --Microtransactions-- People signed up with this hypothetical website can purchase credits which then can be transfered to projects they would like to support. Anyone who transfers credits to a project is known as a contributor to that project. At anytime a Founder, or the lead team-member may submit an article, or a design (multiple articles) for consideration. All team-members, as well as the Founder, can vote once for each article freely. Contributors may vote yes or no on a number of articles (independent of any given meeting where a particular design or article is considered) equal to the number of credits they have placed into a contributors fund for that particular project. A contributors fund is a proxy between a sites credit account, and a projects credit account. It is sort of like a promise to contribute, instead of an actual contribution. Contributers may place constraints on particular articles such that if those constraints (a yes or no vote) are satisfied then a manually specified amount of credits is automatically transfered to the project account. This allows a project to develop based on the needs of those who may (in the future) financially rely on the project. --- Code commits & milestones --- When a team-member makes a commit, they may specify if it's a minor commit, a bug fix, a compatibility patch (i.e. for a new platform), or a milestone (an article voted on previously). People signed up with the website, may download the updated project and test it to see if the programmer's assertion is true about the commit. A report may then be filed on a small form, giving a one or two paragraphs, and a positive or negative confirmation of the programmer's goal for that particular commit. After all milestones for a particular draft are complete, a new draft is submitted for voting. Also funds may withdrawn by each team-member based on the proportion of commits and milestones confirmed (fulfilled the stated purpose) for each programmer. --- voting --- Members, contributor, and non-contributor, may make priority requests for particular articles of a draft. The project founder may or may not opt to fill those requests based on the volume of upvotes. A fulfilled priority request means that any team-member that makes a community-confirmed commit for an article is, when all articles for the draft are fulfilled, granted a portion of project credits in proportion to the average priority of all the articles he committed. ---- Notes --- While this is horribly prone to design-by-committee the one saving grace is that the lead team-member may place constraints on a draft such that some, or ALL articles must be voted yes. Commits may not begin until a draft satisfying said constraints is approved. What does SO think, is this idea feasible? Does anyone see major problems with this? Is there any insights, or improvements that could be made?

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  • Overtime culture slowly creeping in - How do I handle this?

    - by bobsmith123
    Our company was one of the very few companies that did not enforce overtime. As such, all my team members promptly worked 40-48 hours a week and everything was good. We hired a few new developers and one of them has positioned himself to be a team lead. He has started working overtime, sending emails in the middle of the night which has come somewhat as a shock for the laid back team. Obviously, the higher ups seem to love him for being the "bad guy" enforcing overtime. Before this goes out of control, what steps do I take to stop this from continuing. I would rather not bring this up with the bosses for the fear of being seen as a whining team member. I am not sure if I should reply to his email outside work hours and encourage him to enforce this culture on our team. Thoughts?

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  • Java Properties and References -- I'm not getting what I expect.

    - by Blumer
    I'm a little embarrassed to ask this as I ought to know better, but here's what I've got. I have an object "Pitcher" with an int property of "runsAllowed". I have an object Batter that has a property of "responsiblePitcher". I have an object Team that has a property "pitcher". When the batter reaches base: Batter.responsiblePitcher = Team.pitcher; All that's well and good. However, if we have a pitching change while the runner is on base, I set a new pitcher in Team.pitcher: Team.pitcher = new Pitcher(); ... and of course this changes the value of Batter.pitcher. How should I be doing things differently such that the Batter.responsiblePitcher property continues to point to the pitcher who let him on base instead of pointing at whever is in the Team.pitcher property? Again, I feel like I ought to know this already ... Thanks.

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  • Planning a competition

    - by Jérôme
    I need to produce the schedule of a sport-event. There are 30 teams. Each team has to play 8 matches. This means that it is not possible for each team to compete again all other teams, but I need to avoid that two team compete more than once against each other. My idea was to generate all possible matches (for 30 teams: (30*29)/2 = 435 matches) and select from this list 120 matches (8 match for each team: 8 * 30 / 2 = 120 matches). This is where I'm having a hard time: how can I select these 120 matches? I tried some simple solutions (take first match of the list, then the last, and so on) but they don't seem to work with 30 teams. I also tried to generate all possible match combination and find which one is working but with 30 team, this is too much calculation time. Is there an existing algorithm that I could implement?

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  • MySQL select two tables at the same time...

    - by Jerry
    Hi all I have two tables and want to make a query. I tried to get team AA and team BB's image base on table A. I used: SELECT tableA.team1, tableA.team2, tableB.team, tableB.image, FROM tableA LEFT JOIN tableB ON tableA.team1=tableB.team The result only display imageA on the column. Are there any ways to select imageA and image B without using the second query? I appreciate any helps! Thanks a lot! My table structure are: table A team1 team2 ------------ AA BB table B team image ------------- AA imagaA BB imageB

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