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• The Interaction between Three-Tier Client/Server Model and Three-Tier Application Architecture Model

  The three-tier client/server model is a network architectural approach currently used in modern networking. This approach divides a network in to three distinct components. Three-Tier Client/Server Model Components Client Component Server Component Database Component The Client Component of the network typically represents any device on the network. A basic example of this would be computer or another network/web enabled devices that are connected to a network. Network clients request resources on the network, and are usually equipped with a user interface for the presentation of the data returned from the Server Component. This process is done through the use of various software clients, and example of this can be seen through the use of a web browser client. The web browser request information from the Server Component located on the network and then renders the results for the user to process. The Server Components of the network return data based on specific client request back to the requesting client.  Server Components also inherit the attributes of a Client Component in that they are a device on the network and that they can also request information from other Server Components. However what differentiates a Client Component from a Server Component is that a Server Component response to requests from devices on the network. An example of a Server Component can be seen in a web server. A web server listens for new requests and then interprets the request, processes the web pages, and then returns the processed data back to the web browser client so that it may render the data for the user to interpret. The Database Component of the network returns unprocessed data from databases or other resources. This component also inherits attributes from the Server Component in that it is a device on a network, it can request information from other server components and database components, and it also listens for new requests so that it can return data when needed. The three-tier client/server model is very similar to the three-tier application architecture model, and in fact the layers can be mapped to one another. Three-Tier Application Architecture Model Presentation Layer/Logic Business Layer/Logic Data Layer/Logic The Presentation Layer including its underlying logic is very similar to the Client Component of the three-tiered model. The Presentation Layer focuses on interpreting the data returned by the Business Layer as well as presents the data back to the user.  Both the Presentation Layer and the Client Component focus primarily on the user and their experience. This allows for segments of the Business Layer to be distributable and interchangeable because the Presentation Layer is not directly integrated in with Business Layer. The Presentation Layer does not care where the data comes from as long as it is in the proper format. This allows for the Presentation Layer and Business Layer to be stored on one or more different servers so that it can provide a higher availability to clients requesting data. A good example of this is a web site that uses load balancing. When a web site decides to take on the task of load balancing they must obtain a network device that sits in front of a one or machines in order to distribute the request across multiple servers. When a user comes in through the load balanced device they are redirected to a specific server based on a few factors. Common Load Balancing Factors Current Server Availability Current Server Response Time Current Server Priority The Business Layer and corresponding logic are business rules applied to data prior to it being sent to the Presentation Layer. These rules are used to manipulate the data coming from the Data Access Layer, in addition to validating any data prior to being stored in the Data Access Layer. A good example of this would be when a user is trying to create multiple accounts under one email address. The Business Layer logic can prevent duplicate accounts by enforcing a unique email for every new account before the data is even stored in the Data Access Layer. The Server Component can be directly tied to this layer in that the server typically stores and process the Business Layer before it is returned to the end-user via the Presentation Layer. In addition the Server Component can also run automated process through the Business Layer on the data in the Data Access Layer so that additional business analysis can be derived from the data that has been already collected. The Data Layer and its logic are responsible for storing information so that it can be easily retrieved. Typical in most modern applications data is stored in a database management system however data can also be in the form of files stored on a file server. In addition a database can take on one of several forms. Common Database Formats XML File Pipe Delimited File Tab Delimited File Comma Delimited File (CSV) Plain Text File Microsoft Access Microsoft SQL Server MySql Oracle Sybase The Database component of the Networking model can be directly tied to the Data Layer because this is where the Data Layer obtains the data to return back the Business Layer. The Database Component basically allows for a place on the network to store data for future use. This enables applications to save data when they can and then quickly recall the saved data as needed so that the application does not have to worry about storing the data in memory. This prevents overhead that could be created when an application must retain all data in memory. As you can see the Three-Tier Client/Server Networking Model and the Three-Tiered Application Architecture Model rely very heavily on one another to function especially if different aspects of an application are distributed across an entire network. The use of various servers and database servers are wonderful when an application has a need to distribute work across the network. Network Components and Application Layers Interaction Database components will store all data needed for the Data Access Layer to manipulate and return to the Business Layer Server Component executes the Business Layer that manipulates data so that it can be returned to the Presentation Layer Client Component hosts the Presentation Layer that  interprets the data and present it to the user

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• Taking advantage of Windows Azure CDN and Dynamic Pages in ASP.NET - Caching content from hosted services

  - by Shawn Cicoria

  With the updates to Windows Azure CDN announced this week [1] I wanted to help illustrate the capability with a working sample that will serve up dynamic content from an ASP.NET site hosted in a WebRole. First, to get a good overview of the capability you can read the Overview of the Windows Azure CDN [2] content on MSDN. When you setup the ability to cache content from a hosted service, the requirement is to provide a path to your role’s DNS endpoint that ends in the path “/cdn”.  Additionally, you then map CDN to that service. What WAZ CDN does, is allow you to then map that through the CDN to your host.  The CDN will then make a request to your host on your client’s behalf. The requirement is still that your client, and any Url’s that are to be serviced through the CDN and this capability have to use the CDN DNS name and not your host – no different than what CDN does for Blog storage. The following 2 URL’s are samples of how the client needs to issue the requests. Windows Azure hosted service URL: http: //myHostedService.cloudapp.net/cdn/music.aspx   - for regular “dynamic” content Windows Azure CDN URL: http: //<identifier>.vo.msecnd.net/music.aspx   - for CDN “cachable” content. The first URL path’s the request direct to your host into the Azure datacenter.  The 2nd URL paths the request through the CDN infrastructure, where CDN will make the determination to request the content on behalf of the client to the Azure datacenter and your host on the /cdn path. The big advantage here is you can apply logic to your content creation.  What’s important is emitting the CDN friendly headers that allow CDN to request and re-request only when you designate based upon it’s rules of “staleness” as described in the overview page. With IIS7.5 there is an underlying issue when the Managed Module “OutputCache” is enabled that in order to emit a good header for your content, you’ll need to remove, and in my sample, helps provide CDN friendly headers.  You get IIS 7.5 when running under OS Family “2” in your service configuration. By default, and when the OutputCache managed module is loaded, if you use the HttpResponse.CachePolicy to set the Http Headers for “max-age” when the HttpCacheability is “Public”, you will NOT get the “max-age” emitted as part of the “Cache-control:” header.  Instead, the OutputCache module will remove “max-age” and just emit “public”.  It works ok when Cacheability is set to “private”. To work around the issue and ensure your code as follows emits the full max-age along with the public option, you need to remove as follows: <system.webServer>   <modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true">     <remove name="OutputCache"/>   </modules> </system.webServer>   Response.Cache.SetCacheability(HttpCacheability.Public); Response.Cache.SetMaxAge(TimeSpan.FromMinutes(rv));   In the attached solution, the way I approached it was to have a VirtualApplication under the root site that has it’s own web.config  - this VirtualApplication is the /cdn of the site and when deployed to Azure as a Web Role will surface as a distinct IIS Application – along with a separate AppDomain. The CDN Sample is a simple Web Forms site that the /default landing page contains 3 IFrames to host: 1. Content direct from the host @   http://xxxx.cloudapp.net/cdn 2. Content via the CDN @ http://azxxx.vo.msecnd.net  3. Simple list of recent requests – showing where the request came from.   When you run the sample the first time you hit the page, both the Host and the CDN will cause 2 initial requests to hit the host.  You won’t see the first requests in the list because of timing – but if you refresh, you’ll see that the list will show that you have 2 requests initially. 1. sourced direct from the Browser to the HOST 2. sourced via the CDN The picture above shows the call-outs of each of those requests – green rows showing requests coming direct to the HOST, yellow showing the CDN request.  The IP addresses of the green items are direct from the client, where the CDN is from the CDN data center. As you refresh the page (hit Ctrl+F5 to force a full refresh and avoid “304 – not changed”) you’ll see that the request to the HOST get’s processed direct; but the request to the CDN endpoint is serviced direct from the CDN and doesn’t incur any additional request back to the HOST. The following is the Headers from the CDN response (Status-Line) HTTP/1.1 200 OK Age 13 Cache-Control public, max-age=300 Connection keep-alive Content-Length 6212 Content-Type image/jpeg; charset=utf-8 Date Fri, 11 Mar 2011 20:47:14 GMT Expires Fri, 11 Mar 2011 20:52:01 GMT Last-Modified Fri, 11 Mar 2011 20:47:02 GMT Server Microsoft-IIS/7.5 X-AspNet-Version 4.0.30319 X-Powered-By ASP.NET   The following are the Headers from the HOST response (Status-Line) HTTP/1.1 200 OK Cache-Control public, max-age=300 Content-Length 6189 Content-Type image/jpeg; charset=utf-8 Date Fri, 11 Mar 2011 20:47:15 GMT Last-Modified Fri, 11 Mar 2011 20:47:02 GMT Server Microsoft-IIS/7.5 X-AspNet-Version 4.0.30319 X-Powered-By ASP.NET   You can see that with the CDN request, the countdown (age) starts for aging the content. The full sample is located here: CDNSampleSite.zip [1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2011/03/09/now-available-updated-windows-azure-sdk-and-windows-azure-management-portal.aspx [2] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff919703.aspx

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• 2010 Collaboration Summit Impressions

  - by Elena Zannoni

  It's a bit late, but there you have it anyway. April 14 to 16 I attended the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in SFO. I was running two tracks, one on tracing and one on tools. You can see the tracks and the slides here: http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/collaboration-summit/slides I was pretty busy both days, Thursday with a whole day tracing track, Friday with a half day toolchain track. The sessions were well attended, the rooms were full, with people spilling in the hallways. Some new things were presented, like Kernelshark, by Steve Rostedt, a GUI (yes, believe it or not, a GUI) written in GTK. It is very nice, showing a timeline for traced kernel events, and you can zoom in and filter at will. It works on the latest kernels, and it requires some new things/fixes in GTK. I don't recall exactly what version of GTK though. Dominique Toupin from Ericsson presented something about user requirements for tracing. Mostly though about who's who in the embedded world, and eclipse. Masami and Mathieu presented an update on their work. See their slides. The interesting thing to me was of course the new version of uprobes w/o underlying utrace presented by Jim Keniston. At the end of the session we had a discussion about the future of utrace. Roland wasn't there, butTom Tromey (also from RedHat) collected the feedback. Basically we are at a standstill now that utrace has been rejected yet again. There wasn't much advise that anybody could give, except jokingly, we decided that the only way in is to make it a part of perf events. There needs to be another refactoring, but most of all, this "killer app" that would be enabled because of utrace hasn't materialized yet. We think that having a good debugging story on Linux is enough of a killer app, for instance allowing multiple tracers, and not relying on SIGCHLD etc. I think this wasn't completely clear to the kernel community. Trying to achieve debugging via a gdb stub inside the kernel interfacing to utrace and that is controlled via the gdb remote protocol also lost its appeal (thankfully, since the gdb remote protocol is archaic). Somebody would have to be creative in how to submit utrace. It doesn't have to be called utrace (it was really a random choice, for lack of a letter that was not already used in front of the word "trace"). So basically, I think the ideas behind utrace are sound, and the necessity of a new interface is acknowledged. But I believe the integration/submission process with the kernel folks has to restart from scratch, clean slate. We'll see. There are many conferences and meetings coming up in the near future where things can be discussed further. On the second day, Friday, we had the tools talks. It was interesting to observe the more "kernel" oriented people's behavior towards the gcc etc community. The first talk was by Mark Mitchell, about Gcc and its new plugin architecture. After that, Paolo talked about the new C++1x standard, which will be finalized in 2011. Many features are already implemented in the libstdc++ library and gcc and usable today. We had a few minutes (really, the half day track was quite short) where Bradley Kuhn from the Software Freedom Law Center explained the GPLv3 exception for gcc (due to the new gcc plugin architecture and the availability of the intermediate results from the compilation, which is a new thing). I will not try to explain, but basically you cannot take the result of the preprocessing and then use that in your own proprietary compiler. After, we had a talk by Ian Taylor about the new Gold linker. One good thing in that area is that they are trying to make gold the new default linker (for instance Fedora will use gold as the distro linker). However gold is very different from binutils' old linker. It doesn't use a linker script, for instance. The kernel has been linked with gold many times as an exercise (the ground work was done by Kris Van Hees), but this needs to be constantly tested/monitored because the kernel linker script is very complex, and uses esoteric features (Wenji is now monitoring that each kernel RC can be built with gold). It was positive that people are now aware of gold and the need for it to be ported to more architectures. It seems that the porting is very easy, with little arch dependent code. Finally Tom Tromey presented about gdb and the archer project. Archer is a development branch of gdb mostly done by RedHat, where they are focusing on better c++ printing, c++ expression parsing, and plugins. The archer work is merged regularly in the gdb mainline. In general it was a good conference. I did miss most of the first day, because that's when I flew in. But I caught a couple of talks. Nothing earth shattering, except for Google giving each person registered a free Android phone. Yey.

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• Oracle Enterprise Data Quality: Ever Integration-ready

  - by Mala Narasimharajan

  It is closing in on a year now since Oracle’s acquisition of Datanomic, and the addition of Oracle Enterprise Data Quality (EDQ) to the Oracle software family. The big move has caused some big shifts in emphasis and some very encouraging excitement from the field.  To give an illustration, combined with a shameless promotion of how EDQ can help to give quick insights into your data, I did a quick Phrase Profile of the subject field of emails to the Global EDQ mailing list since it was set up last September. The results revealed a very clear theme:   Integration, Integration, Integration! As well as the important Siebel and Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) integrations, we have been asked about integration with a huge variety of Oracle applications, including EBS, Peoplesoft, CRM on Demand, Fusion, DRM, Endeca, RightNow, and more - and we have not stood still! While it would not have been possible to develop specific pre-integrations with all of the above within a year, we have developed a package of feature-rich out-of-the-box web services and batch processes that can be plugged into any application or middleware technology with ease. And with Siebel, they work out of the box. Oracle Enterprise Data Quality version 9.0.4 includes the Customer Data Services (CDS) pack – a ready set of standard processes with standard interfaces, to provide integrated: Address verification and cleansing  Individual matching Organization matching The services can are suitable for either Batch or Real-Time processing, and are enabled for international data, with simple configuration options driving the set of locale-specific dictionaries that are used. For example, large dictionaries are provided to support international name transcription and variant matching, including highly specialized handling for Arabic, Japanese, Chinese and Korean data. In total across all locales, CDS includes well over a million dictionary entries.   Excerpt from EDQ’s CDS Individual Name Standardization Dictionary CDS has been developed to replace the OEM of Informatica Identity Resolution (IIR) for attached Data Quality on the Oracle price list, but does this in a way that creates a ‘best of both worlds’ situation for customers, who can harness not only the out-of-the-box functionality of pre-packaged matching and standardization services, but also the flexibility of OEDQ if they want to customize the interfaces or the process logic, without having to learn more than one product. From a competitive point of view, we believe this stands us in good stead against our key competitors, including Informatica, who have separate ‘Identity Resolution’ and general DQ products, and IBM, who provide limited out-of-the-box capabilities (with a steep learning curve) in both their QualityStage data quality and Initiate matching products. Here is a brief guide to the main services provided in the pack: Address Verification and Standardization EDQ’s CDS Address Cleaning Process The Address Verification and Standardization service uses EDQ Address Verification (an OEM of Loqate software) to verify and clean addresses in either real-time or batch. The Address Verification processor is wrapped in an EDQ process – this adds significant capabilities over calling the underlying Address Verification API directly, specifically: Country-specific thresholds to determine when to accept the verification result (and therefore to change the input address) based on the confidence level of the API Optimization of address verification by pre-standardizing data where required Formatting of output addresses into the input address fields normally used by applications Adding descriptions of the address verification and geocoding return codes The process can then be used to provide real-time and batch address cleansing in any application; such as a simple web page calling address cleaning and geocoding as part of a check on individual data.     Duplicate Prevention Unlike Informatica Identity Resolution (IIR), EDQ uses stateless services for duplicate prevention to avoid issues caused by complex replication and synchronization of large volume customer data. When a record is added or updated in an application, the EDQ Cluster Key Generation service is called, and returns a number of key values. These are used to select other records (‘candidates’) that may match in the application data (which has been pre-seeded with keys using the same service). The ‘driving record’ (the new or updated record) is then presented along with all selected candidates to the EDQ Matching Service, which decides which of the candidates are a good match with the driving record, and scores them according to the strength of match. In this model, complex multi-locale EDQ techniques can be used to generate the keys and ensure that the right balance between performance and matching effectiveness is maintained, while ensuring that the application retains control of data integrity and transactional commits. The process is explained below: EDQ Duplicate Prevention Architecture Note that where the integration is with a hub, there may be an additional call to the Cluster Key Generation service if the master record has changed due to merges with other records (and therefore needs to have new key values generated before commit). Batch Matching In order to allow customers to use different match rules in batch to real-time, separate matching templates are provided for batch matching. For example, some customers want to minimize intervention in key user flows (such as adding new customers) in front end applications, but to conduct a more exhaustive match on a regular basis in the back office. The batch matching jobs are also used when migrating data between systems, and in this case normally a more precise (and automated) type of matching is required, in order to minimize the review work performed by Data Stewards.  In batch matching, data is captured into EDQ using its standard interfaces, and records are standardized, clustered and matched in an EDQ job before matches are written out. As with all EDQ jobs, batch matching may be called from Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) if required. When working with Siebel CRM (or master data in Siebel UCM), Siebel’s Data Quality Manager is used to instigate batch jobs, and a shared staging database is used to write records for matching and to consume match results. The CDS batch matching processes automatically adjust to Siebel’s ‘Full Match’ (match all records against each other) and ‘Incremental Match’ (match a subset of records against all of their selected candidates) modes. The Future The Customer Data Services Pack is an important part of the Oracle strategy for EDQ, offering a clear path to making Data Quality Assurance an integral part of enterprise applications, and providing a strong value proposition for adopting EDQ. We are planning various additions and improvements, including: An out-of-the-box Data Quality Dashboard Even more comprehensive international data handling Address search (suggesting multiple results) Integrated address matching The EDQ Customer Data Services Pack is part of the Enterprise Data Quality Media Pack, available for download at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/oedq/downloads/index.html.

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• Knockoutjs - stringify to handling observables and custom events

  - by Renso

  Goal: Once you viewmodel has been built and populated with data, at some point it goal of it all is to persist the data to the database (or some other media). Regardless of where you want to save it, your client-side viewmodel needs to be converted to a JSON string and sent back to the server. Environment considerations: jQuery 1.4.3+ Knockoutjs version 1.1.2   How to: So let’s set the stage, you are using Knockoutjs and you have a viewmodel with some Knockout dependencies. You want to make sure it is in the proper JSON format and via ajax post it to the server for persistence.   First order of business is to deal with the viewmodel (JSON) object. To most the JSON stringifier sounds familiar. The JSON stringifier converts JavaScript data structures into JSON text. JSON does not support cyclic data structures, so be careful to not give cyclical structures to the JSON stringifier. You may ask, is this the best way to do it? What about those observables and other Knockout properties that I don’t want to persist or want their actual value persisted and not their function, etc. Not sure if you were aware, but KO already has a method; ko.utils.stringifyJson() - it's mostly just a wrapper around JSON.stringify. (which is native in some browsers, and can be made available by referencing json2.js in others). What does it do that the regular stringify does not is that it automatically converts observable, dependentObservable, or observableArray to their underlying value to JSON. Hold on! There is a new feature in this version of Knockout, the ko.toJSON. It is part of the core library and it will clone the view model’s object graph, so you don’t mess it up after you have stringified  it and unwrap all its observables. It's smart enough to avoid reference cycles. Since you are using the MVVM pattern it would assume you are not trying to reference DOM nodes from your view. Wait a minute. I can already see this info on the http://knockoutjs.com/examples/contactsEditor.html website, why mention it all here? First of this is a much nicer blog, no orange ? At this time, you may want to have a look at the blog and see what I am talking about. See the save event, how they stringify the view model’s contacts only? That’s cool but what if your view model is a representation of your object you want to persist, meaning it has no property that represents the json object you want to persist, it is the view model itself. The example in http://knockoutjs.com/examples/contactsEditor.html assumes you have a list of contacts you may want to persist. In the example here, you want to persist the view model itself. The viewmodel here looks something like this:     var myViewmodel = {         accountName: ko.observable(""),         accountType: ko.observable("Active")     };     myViewmodel.isItActive = ko.dependentObservable(function () {         return myViewmodel.accountType() == "Active";     });     myViewmodel.clickToSaveMe = function() {         SaveTheAccount();     }; Here is the function in charge of saving the account: Function SaveTheAccount() {     $.ajax({         data: ko.toJSON(viewmodel),         url: $('#ajaxSaveAccountUrl').val(),         type: "POST",         dataType: "json",         async: false,         success: function (result) {             if (result && result.Success == true) {                 $('#accountMessage').html('<span class="fadeMyContainerSlowly">The account has been saved</span>').show();                 FadeContainerAwaySlowly();             }         },         error: function (xmlHttpRequest, textStatus, errorThrown) {             alert('An error occurred: ' + errorThrown);         }     }); //ajax }; Try run this and your browser will eventually freeze up or crash. Firebug will tell you that you have a repetitive call to the first function call in your model that keeps firing infinitely.  What is happening is that Knockout serializes the view model to a JSON string by traversing the object graph and firing off the functions, again-and-again. Not sure why it does that, but it does. So what is the work around: Nullify your function calls and then post it:         var lightweightModel = viewmodel.clickToSaveMe = null;         data: ko.toJSON(lightweightModel), So then I traced the JSON string on the server and found it having issues with primitive types. C#, by the way. So I changed ko.toJSON(model) to ko.toJS(model), and that solved my problem. Of course you could just create a property on the viewmodel for the account itself, so you only have to serialize the property and not the entire viewmodel. If that is an option then that would be the way to go. If your view model contains other properties in the view model that you also want to post then that would not be an option and then you’ll know what to watch out for. Hope this helps.

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• Initial Review - Mastering Unreal Technology I: Introduction to Level Design with Unreal Engine 3

  - by Matt Christian

  Recently I purchased 3 large volumes on using the Unreal 3 Engine to create levels and custom games.  This past weekend I cracked the spine of the first and started reading.  Here are my early impressions (I'm ~250 pages into it, with appendices it's about 900). Pros Interestingly, the book starts with an overview of the Unreal engines leading up to Unreal 3 (including Gears of War) and follows with some discussion on planning a mod and what goes into the game development process.  This is nice for an intro to the book and is much preferred rather than a simple chapter detailing what is on the included CD, how to install and setup UnrealEd, etc...  While the chapter on Unreal history and planning can be considered 'fluff', it's much less 'fluffy' than most books provide. I need to mention one thing here that is pretty crucial in the way I'm going to continue reviewing this book.  Most technical books like this are used as a shelf reference; as a thick volume you use for looking up techniques every now and again.  Even so, I prefer reading from cover to cover, including chapters I may already be knowledgable on (I'm sure this is typical for most people).  If there was a chapter on installing UnrealEd (the previously mentioned 'fluff'), I would probably force myself to read it, even though I've installed the game and engine multiple times on different systems. Chapter 3 is where we really get to the introduction piece of UnrealEd, creating your first basic level.  This large chapter details creating two small rooms, adding static meshes, adding lighting, creating and adding particle emitters, creating a door that animates with Unreal Matinee and Kismet, static meshes with physics, and other little additions to make your level look less beginner.  This really is a chapter that overviews the entire rest of the book, as each chapter following details the creation and intermediate usages of Static Meshes, Materials, Lighting, etc... One other very nice part to this book is the way the tutorials are setup.  Each tutorial builds off the previous and all are step-by-step.  If you haven't completed one yet, you can find all the starting files on the CD that comes with the book. Cons While the description of the overview chapter (Chapter 3) is fresh in your mind, let me start the cons by saying this chapter is setup extremely confusing for the noob.  At one point, you end up creating a door mesh and setting it up as a InteropMesh so that it is ready to be animated, only to switch to particles and spend a good portion of time working on a different piece of the level.  Yes, this is actually how I develop my levels (jumping back and forth), though it's very odd for a book to jump out of sequence. The next item might be a positive or a negative depending on your skill level with UnrealEd.  Most of the introduction to the editor layout is found in one of the Appendices instead of before Chapter 3.  For new readers, this might lead to confusion as Appendix A would typically be read between Chapter 2 and 3.  However, this is a positive for those with some experience in UnrealEd as they don't have to force themselves through a 'learn every editor button' chapter.  I'm listing this in the Cons section as the book is 'Introduction to...' and is probably going to be directed toward a lot of very beginner developers. Finally, there's a lack of general description to a lot of the underlying engine and what each piece in UnrealEd is or does.  Sometimes you'll be performing Tutorial after Tutorial with barely a paragraph in between describing ANY of what you've just done.  Tutorial 1.1 Step 6 says to press Button X, so you do.  But why?  This is in part a problem with the structure of the tutorials rather than the content of the book.  Since the tutorials are so focused on a step-by-step (or procedural) description of a process, you learn the process and not why you're doing that.  For example, you might learn how to size a material to a surface, but will only learn what buttons to press and not what each one does. This becomes extremely apparent in the chapter on Static Meshes as most of the chapter is spent in 3D Studio Max.  Since there are books on 3DSM and modelling, the book really only tells you the steps and says to go grab a book on modelling if you're really interested in 3DSM.  Again, I've learned the process to develop my own meshes in 3DSM, but I don't know the why behind the steps. Conclusion So far the book is very good though I would have a hard time recommending it to a complete beginner.  I would suggest anyone looking at this book (obviously including the other 2, more advanced volumes) to pick up a copy of UDK or Unreal 3 (available online or via download services such as Steam) and watch some online tutorials and play with it first.  You'll find plenty of online videos available that were created by the authors and may suit as a better introduction to the editor.

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• Sun Fire X4800 M2 Delivers World Record TPC-C for x86 Systems

  - by Brian

  Oracle's Sun Fire X4800 M2 server equipped with eight 2.4 GHz Intel Xeon Processor E7-8870 chips obtained a result of 5,055,888 tpmC on the TPC-C benchmark. This result is a world record for x86 servers. Oracle demonstrated this world record database performance running Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Enterprise Edition with Partitioning. The Sun Fire X4800 M2 server delivered a new x86 TPC-C world record of 5,055,888 tpmC with a price performance of $0.89/tpmC using Oracle Database 11g Release 2. This configuration is available 06/26/12. The Sun Fire X4800 M2 server delivers 3.0x times better performance than the next 8-processor result, an IBM System p 570 equipped with POWER6 processors. The Sun Fire X4800 M2 server has 3.1x times better price/performance than the 8-processor 4.7GHz POWER6 IBM System p 570. The Sun Fire X4800 M2 server has 1.6x times better performance than the 4-processor IBM x3850 X5 system equipped with Intel Xeon processors. This is the first TPC-C result on any system using eight Intel Xeon Processor E7-8800 Series chips. The Sun Fire X4800 M2 server is the first x86 system to get over 5 million tpmC. The Oracle solution utilized Oracle Linux operating system and Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition Release 2 with Partitioning to produce the x86 world record TPC-C benchmark performance. Performance Landscape Select TPC-C results (sorted by tpmC, bigger is better) System p/c/t tpmC Price/tpmC Avail Database MemorySize Sun Fire X4800 M2 8/80/160 5,055,888 0.89 USD 6/26/2012 Oracle 11g R2 4 TB IBM x3850 X5 4/40/80 3,014,684 0.59 USD 7/11/2011 DB2 ESE 9.7 3 TB IBM x3850 X5 4/32/64 2,308,099 0.60 USD 5/20/2011 DB2 ESE 9.7 1.5 TB IBM System p 570 8/16/32 1,616,162 3.54 USD 11/21/2007 DB2 9.0 2 TB p/c/t - processors, cores, threads Avail - availability date Oracle and IBM TPC-C Response times System tpmC Response Time (sec) New Order 90th% Response Time (sec) New Order Average Sun Fire X4800 M2 5,055,888 0.210 0.166 IBM x3850 X5 3,014,684 0.500 0.272 Ratios - Oracle Better 1.6x 1.4x 1.3x Oracle uses average new order response time for comparison between Oracle and IBM. Graphs of Oracle's and IBM's response times for New-Order can be found in the full disclosure reports on TPC's website TPC-C Official Result Page. Configuration Summary and Results Hardware Configuration: Server Sun Fire X4800 M2 server 8 x 2.4 GHz Intel Xeon Processor E7-8870 4 TB memory 8 x 300 GB 10K RPM SAS internal disks 8 x Dual port 8 Gbs FC HBA Data Storage 10 x Sun Fire X4270 M2 servers configured as COMSTAR heads, each with 1 x 3.06 GHz Intel Xeon X5675 processor 8 GB memory 10 x 2 TB 7.2K RPM 3.5" SAS disks 2 x Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array storage (1.92 TB each) 1 x Brocade 5300 switches Redo Storage 2 x Sun Fire X4270 M2 servers configured as COMSTAR heads, each with 1 x 3.06 GHz Intel Xeon X5675 processor 8 GB memory 11 x 2 TB 7.2K RPM 3.5" SAS disks Clients 8 x Sun Fire X4170 M2 servers, each with 2 x 3.06 GHz Intel Xeon X5675 processors 48 GB memory 2 x 300 GB 10K RPM SAS disks Software Configuration: Oracle Linux (Sun Fire 4800 M2) Oracle Solaris 11 Express (COMSTAR for Sun Fire X4270 M2) Oracle Solaris 10 9/10 (Sun Fire X4170 M2) Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Enterprise Edition with Partitioning Oracle iPlanet Web Server 7.0 U5 Tuxedo CFS-R Tier 1 Results: System: Sun Fire X4800 M2 tpmC: 5,055,888 Price/tpmC: 0.89 USD Available: 6/26/2012 Database: Oracle Database 11g Cluster: no New Order Average Response: 0.166 seconds Benchmark Description TPC-C is an OLTP system benchmark. It simulates a complete environment where a population of terminal operators executes transactions against a database. The benchmark is centered around the principal activities (transactions) of an order-entry environment. These transactions include entering and delivering orders, recording payments, checking the status of orders, and monitoring the level of stock at the warehouses. Key Points and Best Practices Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Enterprise Edition with Partitioning scales easily to this high level of performance. COMSTAR (Common Multiprotocol SCSI Target) is the software framework that enables an Oracle Solaris host to serve as a SCSI Target platform. COMSTAR uses a modular approach to break the huge task of handling all the different pieces in a SCSI target subsystem into independent functional modules which are glued together by the SCSI Target Mode Framework (STMF). The modules implementing functionality at SCSI level (disk, tape, medium changer etc.) are not required to know about the underlying transport. And the modules implementing the transport protocol (FC, iSCSI, etc.) are not aware of the SCSI-level functionality of the packets they are transporting. The framework hides the details of allocation providing execution context and cleanup of SCSI commands and associated resources and simplifies the task of writing the SCSI or transport modules. Oracle iPlanet Web Server middleware is used for the client tier of the benchmark. Each web server instance supports more than a quarter-million users while satisfying the response time requirement from the TPC-C benchmark. See Also Oracle Press Release -- Sun Fire X4800 M2 TPC-C Executive Summary tpc.org Complete Sun Fire X4800 M2 TPC-C Full Disclosure Report tpc.org Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) Home Page Ideas International Benchmark Page Sun Fire X4800 M2 Server oracle.com OTN Oracle Linux oracle.com OTN Oracle Solaris oracle.com OTN Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Enterprise Edition oracle.com OTN Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array oracle.com OTN Disclosure Statement TPC Benchmark C, tpmC, and TPC-C are trademarks of the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC). Sun Fire X4800 M2 (8/80/160) with Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Enterprise Edition with Partitioning, 5,055,888 tpmC, $0.89 USD/tpmC, available 6/26/2012. IBM x3850 X5 (4/40/80) with DB2 ESE 9.7, 3,014,684 tpmC, $0.59 USD/tpmC, available 7/11/2011. IBM x3850 X5 (4/32/64) with DB2 ESE 9.7, 2,308,099 tpmC, $0.60 USD/tpmC, available 5/20/2011. IBM System p 570 (8/16/32) with DB2 9.0, 1,616,162 tpmC, $3.54 USD/tpmC, available 11/21/2007. Source: http://www.tpc.org/tpcc, results as of 7/15/2011.

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• Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c: Contributing to emerging Cloud standards

  - by Anand Akela

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Contributed by Tony Di Cenzo, Director for Standards Strategy and Architecture, and Mark Carlson, Principal Cloud Architect, for Oracle's Systems Management and Storage Products Groups . As one would expect of an industry leader, Oracle's participation in industry standards bodies is extensive. We participate in dozens of organizations that produce open standards which apply to our products, and our commitment to the success of these organizations is manifest in several way - we support them financially through our memberships; our senior engineers are active participants, often serving in leadership positions on boards, technical working groups and committees; and when it makes good business sense we contribute our intellectual property. We believe supporting the development of open standards is fundamental to Oracle meeting customer demands for product choice, seamless interoperability, and lowering the cost of ownership. Nowhere is this truer than in the area of cloud standards, and for the most recent release of our flagship management product, Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c (EM Cloud Control 12c). There is a fundamental rule that standards follow architecture. This was true of distributed computing, it was true of service-oriented architecture (SOA), and it's true of cloud. If you are familiar with Enterprise Manager it is likely to be no surprise that EM Cloud Control 12c is a source of technology that can be considered for adoption within cloud management standards. The reason, quite simply, is that the Oracle integrated stack architecture aligns with the cloud architecture models being adopted by the industry, and EM Cloud Control 12c has been developed to manage this architecture. EM Cloud Control 12c has facilities for managing the various underlying capabilities of the integrated stack in IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS clouds, and enables essential characteristics such as on-demand self-service provisioning, centralized policy-based resource management, integrated chargeback, and capacity planning, and complete visibility of the physical and virtual environment from applications to disk. Our most recent contribution in support of cloud management standards to come out of the EM Cloud Control 12c work was the Oracle Cloud Elemental Resource Model API. Oracle contributed the Elemental Resource Model API to the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) in 2011 where it was assigned to DMTF's Cloud Management Working Group (CMWG). The CMWG is considering the Oracle specification and those of several other vendors in their effort to produce a best practices specification for managing IaaS clouds. DMTF's Cloud Infrastructure Management Interface specification, called CIMI for short, is currently out for public review and expected to be released by DMTF later this year. We are proud to be playing an important role in the development of what is expected to become a major cloud standard. You can find more information on DMTF CIMI at http://dmtf.org/standards/cloud. You can find the work-in-progress release of CIMI at http://dmtf.org/content/cimi-work-progress-specifications-now-available-public-comment . The Oracle Cloud API specification is available on the Oracle Technology Network. You can find more information about the Oracle Cloud Elemental Resource Model API on the Oracle Technical Network (OTN), including a webcast featuring the API engineering manager Jack Yu (see TechCast Live: Inside the Oracle Cloud Resource Model API). If you have not seen this video we recommend you take the time to view it. Simply hover your cursor over the webcast title and control+click to follow the embedded link. If you have a question about the Oracle Cloud API or want to learn more about Oracle's participation in cloud management standards efforts drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. The Enterprise Manager Standards Blogs are written by Tony Di Cenzo, Director for Standards Strategy and Architecture, and Mark Carlson, Principal Cloud Architect, for Oracle's Systems Management and Storage Products Groups. They can be reached at Tony.DiCenzo at Oracle.com and Mark.Carlson at Oracle.com respectively. Stay Connected: Twitter |  Face book |  You Tube |  Linked in |  Newsletter

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• SOA, Empowerment and Continuous Improvement

  - by Tanu Sood

  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:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Rick Beers is Senior Director of Product Management for Oracle Fusion Middleware. Prior to joining Oracle, Rick held a variety of executive operational positions at Corning, Inc. and Bausch & Lomb. With a professional background that includes senior management positions in manufacturing, supply chain and information technology, Rick brings a unique set of experiences to cover the impact that technology can have on business models, processes and organizations. Rick will be hosting the IT Leader Editorial on a regular basis. I met my twin at Open World. We share backgrounds, experiences and even names. I hosted an invitation-only AppAdvantage Leadership Forum with an overcapacity 85 participants: 55 customers, 15 from the Oracle AppAdvantage team and 15 Partners. It was a lively, open and positive discussion of pace layered architectures and Oracle’s AppAdvantage approach to a unified view of Applications and Middleware. Rick Hassman from Pella was one of the customer panelists and during the pre event prep, Rick and I shared backgrounds and found that we had both been plant managers and led ERP deployments prior to leading IT itself. During the panel conversation I explored this with him, discussing the unique perspectives that this provides to CIO’s. He then hit on a point that I wasn’t able to fully appreciate until a week later. First though, some background. The week after the Forum, one of the participants emailed me with the following thoughts: “I am 150% behind this concept……but we are struggling with the concept of web services and the potential use of the Oracle Service Bus technology let alone moving into using the full SOA/BPM/BAM software to extend our JD Edwards application to both integrate and support business processes”. After thinking a bit I responded this way: While I certainly appreciate the degree of change and effort involved, perhaps I could offer the following: One of the underlying principles behind Oracle AppAdvantage is that more often than not, the choice between changing a business process and invasively customizing ERP represents a Hobson's Choice: neither is acceptable. In this case the third option, moving the process out of ERP, is the only acceptable one. Providing this choice typically requires end to end, real time interoperability across applications and/or services. This real time interoperability, to be sustainable over time requires a service oriented architecture. There's just no way around this. SOA adaptation is admittedly tough at the beginning. New skills, new technology and new headaches. But, like any radically new technology, it has a learning curve that drives cost down rather dramatically over time. Tough choices to be sure, but not entirely different than we face with every major technology cycle. Good points of course, but I felt that something was missing. The points were convincing, perhaps even a bit insightful, but they didn’t get at the heart of what Oracle AppAdvantage is focused upon: how the optimization of technology, applications, processes and relationships can change the very way that organizations operate. And then I thought back to the panel discussion with Rick Hassman at Oracle OpenWorld. Rick stressed that Continuous Improvement is a fundamental business strategy at Pella. I remember Continuous Improvement well as I suspect does everyone who was in American manufacturing during the 80’s. Pioneered by W. Edwards Deming in Japan (and still known alternatively as Kaizen), Continuous Improvement sets in place the business culture that we must not become complacent with success and resistant to the ongoing need for change. Many believe that this single handedly drove the renaissance in American manufacturing through the last two decades, which had become complacent during the 70’s and early 80’s. But what exactly does this have to do with SOA? It was Rick’s next point. He drew the connection that moving those business processes that need to continually change over time out of ERP and into edge applications and services enables continuous improvement by empowering people to continually strive for better ways of doing things rather than be being bound by workflows that cannot change. A compelling connection: that SOA, and the overall Oracle AppAdvantage framework of which it is an integral part, can empower people towards continuous improvement in business processes and as a result drive business leadership and business excellence. What better a case for technology innovation?

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• Benefits of PerformancePoint Services Using SharePoint Server 2010

  - by Wayne

  What is PerformancePoint Services? Most of the time it happens that the metrics that make up your key performance indicators are not simple values from a data source. In SharePoint Server 2007 PerformancePoint Services, you could create two kinds of KPI metrics: Simple single value metrics from any supported data source or Complex multiple value metrics from a single Analysis Services data source using MDX. Now things are even easier with Performance Point Services in SharePoint 2010. Let us check what is it? PerformancePoint Services in SharePoint Server 2010 is a performance management service that you can use to monitor and analyze your business. By providing flexible, easy-to-use tools for building dashboards, scorecards, reports, and key performance indicators (KPIs), PerformancePoint Services can help everyone across an organization make informed business decisions that align with companywide objectives and strategy. Scorecards, dashboards, and KPIs help drive accountability. Integrated analytics help employees move quickly from monitoring information to analyzing it and, when appropriate, sharing it throughout the organization. Prior to the addition of PerformancePoint Services to SharePoint Server, Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 functioned as a standalone server. Now PerformancePoint functionality is available as an integrated part of the SharePoint Server Enterprise license, as is the case with Excel Services in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. The popular features of earlier versions of PerformancePoint Services are preserved along with numerous enhancements and additional functionality. New PerformancePoint Services features PerformancePoint Services now can utilize SharePoint Server scalability, collaboration, backup and recovery, and disaster recovery capabilities. Dashboards and dashboard items are stored and secured within SharePoint lists and libraries, providing you with a single security and repository framework. New features and enhancements of SharePoint 2010 PerformancePoint Services • With PerformancePoint Services, functioning as a service in SharePoint Server, dashboards and dashboard items are stored and secured within SharePoint lists and libraries, providing you with a single security and repository framework. The new architecture also takes advantage of SharePoint Server scalability, collaboration, backup and recovery, and disaster recovery capabilities. You also can include and link PerformancePoint Services Web Parts with other SharePoint Server Web Parts on the same page. The new architecture also streamlines security models that simplify access to report data. • The Decomposition Tree is a new visualization report type available in PerformancePoint Services. You can use it to quickly and visually break down higher-level data values from a multi-dimensional data set to understand the driving forces behind those values. The Decomposition Tree is available in scorecards and analytic reports and ultimately in dashboards. • You can access more detailed business information with improved scorecards. Scorecards have been enhanced to make it easy for you to drill down and quickly access more detailed information. PerformancePoint scorecards also offer more flexible layout options, dynamic hierarchies, and calculated KPI features. Using this enhanced functionality, you can now create custom metrics that use multiple data sources. You can also sort, filter, and view variances between actual and target values to help you identify concerns or risks. • Better Time Intelligence filtering capabilities that you can use to create and use dynamic time filters that are always up to date. Other improved filters improve the ability for dashboard users to quickly focus in on information that is most relevant. • Ability to include and link PerformancePoint Services Web Parts together with other PerformancePoint Services Web parts on the same page. • Easier to author and publish dashboard items by using Dashboard Designer. • SQL Server Analysis Services 2008 support. • Increased support for accessibility compliance in individual reports and scorecards. • The KPI Details report is a new report type that displays contextually relevant information about KPIs, metrics, rows, columns, and cells within a scorecard. The KPI Details report works as a Web part that links to a scorecard or individual KPI to show relevant metadata to the end user in SharePoint Server. This Web part can be added to PerformancePoint dashboards or any SharePoint Server page. • Create analytics reports to better understand underlying business forces behind the results. Analytic reports have been enhanced to support value filtering, new chart types, and server-based conditional formatting. To conclude, PerformancePoint Services, by becoming tightly integrated with SharePoint Server 2010, takes advantage of many enterprise-level SharePoint Server 2010 features. Unfortunately, SharePoint Foundation 2010 doesn’t include this feature. There are still many choices in SharePoint family of products that include SharePoint Server 2010, SharePoint Foundation, SharePoint Server 2007 and associated free SharePoint web parts and templates.

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• BPM Suite 11gR1 Released

  - by Manoj Das

  This morning (April 27th, 2010), Oracle BPM Suite 11gR1 became available for download from OTN and eDelivery. If you have been following our plans in this area, you know that this is the release unifying BEA ALBPM product, which became Oracle BPM10gR3, with the Oracle stack. Some of the highlights of this release are: BPMN 2.0 modeling and simulation Web based Process Composer for BPMN and Rules authoring Zero-code environment with full access to Oracle SOA Suite’s rich set of application and other adapters Process Spaces – Out-of-box integration with Web Center Suite Process Analytics – Native process cubes as well as integration with Oracle BAM You can learn more about this release from the documentation. Notes about downloading and installing Please note that Oracle BPM Suite 11gR1 is delivered and installed as part of SOA 11.1.1.3.0, which is a sparse release (only incremental patch). To install: Download and install SOA 11.1.1.2.0, which is a full release (you can find the bits at the above location) Download and install SOA 11.1.1.3.0 During configure step (using the Fusion Middleware configuration wizard), use the Oracle Business Process Management template supplied with the SOA Suite11g (11.1.1.3.0) If you plan to use Process Spaces, also install Web Center 11.1.1.3.0, which also is delivered as a sparse release and needs to be installed on top of Web Center 11.1.1.2.0 Some early feedback We have been receiving very encouraging feedback on this release. Some quotes from partners are included below: “I just attended a preview workshop on BPM Studio, Oracle's BPMN 2.0 tool, held by Clemens Utschig Utschig from Oracle HQ. The usability and ease to get started are impressive. In the business view analysts can intuitively start modeling, then developers refine in their own, more technical view. The BPM Studio sets itself apart from pure play BPMN 2.0 tools by being seamlessly integrated inside a holistic SOA / BPM toolset: BPMN models are placed in SCA-Composites in SOA Suite 11g. This allows to abstract away the complexities of SOA integration aspects from business process aspects. For UIs in BPMN tasks, you have the richness of ADF 11g based Frontends. With BPM Studio we architects have a new modeling and development IDE that gives us interesting design challenges to grasp and elaborate, since many things BPMN 2.0 are different from good ol' BPEL. For example, for simple transformations, you don't use BPEL "assign" any more, but add the transformation directly to the service call. There is much less XPath involved. And, there is no translation from model to BPEL code anymore, so the awkward process model to BPEL roundtrip, which never really worked as well as it looked on marketing slides, is obsolete: With BPMN 2.0 "the model is the code". Now, these are great times to start the journey into BPM! Some tips: Start Projects smoothly, with initial processes being not overly complex and not using the more esoteric areas of BPMN, to manage the learning path and to stay successful with each iteration. Verify non functional requirements by conducting performance and load tests early. As mentioned above, separate all technical integration logic into SOA Suite or Oracle Service Bus. And - share your experience!” Hajo Normann, SOA Architect - Oracle ACE Director - Co-Leader DOAG SIG SOA   "Reuse of components across the Oracle 11G Fusion Middleware stack, like for instance a Database Adapter, is essential. It improves stability and predictability of the solution. BPM just is one of the components plugging into the stack and reuses all other components." Mr. Leon Smiers, Oracle Solution Architect, Capgemini   “I had the opportunity to follow a hands-on workshop held by Clemens for Oracle partners and I was really impressed of the overall offering of BPM11g. BPM11g allows the execution of BPMN 2.0 processes, without having to transform/translate them first to BPEL in order to be executable. The fact that BPMN uses the same underlying service infrastructure of SOA Suite 11g has a lot of benefits for us already familiar with SOA Suite 11g. BPMN is just another SCA component within a SCA composite and can (re)use all the existing components like Rules, Human Workflow, Adapters and Mediator. I also like the fact that BPMN runs on the same service engine as BPEL. By that all known best practices for making a BPEL  process reliable are valid for BPMN processes as well. Last but not least, BPMN is integrated into the superior end-to-end tracing of SOA Suite 11g. With BPM11g, Oracle offers a very competitive product which will have a big effect on the IT market. Clemens and Jürgen: Thanks for the great workshop! I’m really looking forward to my first project using Oracle BPM11g!” Guido Schmutz, Technology Manager / Oracle ACE Director for Fusion Middleware and SOA, Company:  Trivadis Some earlier feedback were summarized in this post.

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• How big can my SharePoint 2010 installation be?

  - by Sahil Malik

  Ad:: SharePoint 2007 Training in .NET 3.5 technologies (more information). 3 years ago, I had published “How big can my SharePoint 2007 installation be?” Well, SharePoint 2010 has significant under the covers improvements. So, how big can your SharePoint 2010 installation be? There are three kinds of limits you should know about Hard limits that cannot be exceeded by design. Configurable that are, well configurable – but the default values are set for a pretty good reason, so if you need to tweak, plan and understand before you tweak. Soft limits, you can exceed them, but it is not recommended that you do. Before you read any of the limits, read these two important disclaimers - 1. The limit depends on what you’re doing. So, don’t take the below as gospel, the reality depends on your situation. 2. There are many additional considerations in planning your SharePoint solution scalability and performance, besides just the below. So with those in mind, here goes.   Hard Limits - Zones per web app 5 RBS NAS performance Time to first byte of any response from NAS must be less than 20 milliseconds List row size 8000 bytes driven by how SP stores list items internally Max file size 2GB (default is 50MB, configurable). RBS does not increase this limit. Search metadata properties 10,000 per item crawled (pretty damn high, you’ll never need to worry about it). Max # of concurrent in-memory enterprise content types 5000 per web server, per tenant Max # of external system connections 500 per web server PerformancePoint services using Excel services as a datasource No single query can fetch more than 1 million excel cells Office Web Apps Renders One doc per second, per CPU core, per Application server, limited to a maximum of 8 cores.   Configurable Limits - Row Size Limit 6, configurable via SPWebApplication.MaxListItemRowStorage property List view lookup 8 join operations per query Max number of list items that a single operation can process at one time in normal hours 5000 Configurable via SPWebApplication.MaxItemsPerThrottledOperation   Also you get a warning at 3000, which is configurable via SPWebApplication.MaxItemsPerThrottledOperationWarningLevel   In addition, throttle overrides can be requested, throttle overrides can be disabled, and time windows can be set when throttle is disabled. Max number of list items for administrators that a single operation can process at one time in normal hours 20000 Configurable via SPWebApplication.MaxItemsPerThrottledOperationOverride Enumerating subsites 2000 Word and Powerpoint co-authoring simultaneous editors 10 (Hard limit is 99). # of webparts on a page 25 Search Crawl DBs per search service app 10 Items per crawl db 25 million Search Keywords 200 per site collection. There is a max limit of 5000, which can then be modified by editing the web.config/client.config. Concurrent # of workflows on a content db 15. Workflows running in the timer service are not counted in this limit. Further workflows are queued. Can be configured via the Set-SPFarmConfig powershell commandlet. Number of events picked by the workflow timer job and delivered to workflows 100. You can increase this limit by running additional instances of the workflow timer service. Visio services file size 50MB Visio web drawing recalculation timeout 120 seconds Configurable via – Powershell commandlet Set-SPVisioPerformance Visio services minimum and maximum cache age for data connected diagrams 0 to 24 hours. Default is 60 minutes. Configurable via – Powershell commandlet Set-SPVisioPerformance   Soft Limits - Content Databases 300 per web app Application Pools 10 per web server Managed Paths 20 per web app Content Database Size 200GB per Content DB Size of 1 site collection 100GB # of sites in a site collection 250,000 Documents in a library 30 Million, with nesting. Depends heavily on type and usage and size of documents. Items 30 million. Depends heavily on usage of items. SPGroups one SPUser can be in 5000 Users in a site collection 2 million, depends on UI, nesting, containers and underlying user store AD Principals in a SPGroup 5000 SPGroups in a site collection 10000 Search Service Instances 20 Indexed Items in Search 100 million Crawl Log entries 100 million Search Alerts 1 million per search application Search Crawled Properties 1/2 million URL removals in search 100 removals per operation User Profiles 2 million per service application Social Tags 500 million per social database Comment on the article ....

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• ASP.NET Web API - Screencast series Part 4: Paging and Querying

  - by Jon Galloway

  We're continuing a six part series on ASP.NET Web API that accompanies the getting started screencast series. This is an introductory screencast series that walks through from File / New Project to some more advanced scenarios like Custom Validation and Authorization. The screencast videos are all short (3-5 minutes) and the sample code for the series is both available for download and browsable online. I did the screencasts, but the samples were written by the ASP.NET Web API team. In Part 1 we looked at what ASP.NET Web API is, why you'd care, did the File / New Project thing, and did some basic HTTP testing using browser F12 developer tools. In Part 2 we started to build up a sample that returns data from a repository in JSON format via GET methods. In Part 3, we modified data on the server using DELETE and POST methods. In Part 4, we'll extend on our simple querying methods form Part 2, adding in support for paging and querying. This part shows two approaches to querying data (paging really just being a specific querying case) - you can do it yourself using parameters passed in via querystring (as well as headers, other route parameters, cookies, etc.). You're welcome to do that if you'd like. What I think is more interesting here is that Web API actions that return IQueryable automatically support OData query syntax, making it really easy to support some common query use cases like paging and filtering. A few important things to note: This is just support for OData query syntax - you're not getting back data in OData format. The screencast demonstrates this by showing the GET methods are continuing to return the same JSON they did previously. So you don't have to "buy in" to the whole OData thing, you're just able to use the query syntax if you'd like. This isn't full OData query support - full OData query syntax includes a lot of operations and features - but it is a pretty good subset: filter, orderby, skip, and top. All you have to do to enable this OData query syntax is return an IQueryable rather than an IEnumerable. Often, that could be as simple as using the AsQueryable() extension method on your IEnumerable. Query composition support lets you layer queries intelligently. If, for instance, you had an action that showed products by category using a query in your repository, you could also support paging on top of that. The result is an expression tree that's evaluated on-demand and includes both the Web API query and the underlying query. So with all those bullet points and big words, you'd think this would be hard to hook up. Nope, all I did was change the return type from IEnumerable<Comment> to IQueryable<Comment> and convert the Get() method's IEnumerable result using the .AsQueryable() extension method. public IQueryable<Comment> GetComments() { return repository.Get().AsQueryable(); } You still need to build up the query to provide the $top and $skip on the client, but you'd need to do that regardless. Here's how that looks: $(function () { //--------------------------------------------------------- // Using Queryable to page //--------------------------------------------------------- $("#getCommentsQueryable").click(function () { viewModel.comments([]); var pageSize = $('#pageSize').val(); var pageIndex = $('#pageIndex').val(); var url = "/api/comments?$top=" + pageSize + '&$skip=' + (pageIndex * pageSize); $.getJSON(url, function (data) { // Update the Knockout model (and thus the UI) with the comments received back // from the Web API call. viewModel.comments(data); }); return false; }); }); And the neat thing is that - without any modification to our server-side code - we can modify the above jQuery call to request the comments be sorted by author: $(function () { //--------------------------------------------------------- // Using Queryable to page //--------------------------------------------------------- $("#getCommentsQueryable").click(function () { viewModel.comments([]); var pageSize = $('#pageSize').val(); var pageIndex = $('#pageIndex').val(); var url = "/api/comments?$top=" + pageSize + '&$skip=' + (pageIndex * pageSize) + '&$orderby=Author'; $.getJSON(url, function (data) { // Update the Knockout model (and thus the UI) with the comments received back // from the Web API call. viewModel.comments(data); }); return false; }); }); So if you want to make use of OData query syntax, you can. If you don't like it, you're free to hook up your filtering and paging however you think is best. Neat. In Part 5, we'll add on support for Data Annotation based validation using an Action Filter.

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• Html.RenderAction Failed when Validation Failed

  - by Shaun

  RenderAction method had been introduced when ASP.NET MVC 1.0 released in its MvcFuture assembly and then final announced along with the ASP.NET MVC 2.0. Similar as RenderPartial, the RenderAction can display some HTML markups which defined in a partial view in any parent views. But the RenderAction gives us the ability to populate the data from an action which may different from the action which populating the main view. For example, in Home/Index.aspx we can invoke the Html.RenderPartial(“MyPartialView”) but the data of MyPartialView must be populated by the Index action of the Home controller. If we need the MyPartialView to be shown in Product/Create.aspx we have to copy (or invoke) the relevant code from the Index action in Home controller to the Create action in the Product controller which is painful. But if we are using Html.RenderAction we can tell the ASP.NET MVC from which action/controller the data should be populated. in that way in the Home/Index.aspx and Product/Create.aspx views we just need to call Html.RenderAction(“CreateMyPartialView”, “MyPartialView”) so it will invoke the CreateMyPartialView action in MyPartialView controller regardless from which main view. But in my current project we found a bug when I implement a RenderAction method in the master page to show something that need to connect to the backend data center when the validation logic was failed on some pages. I created a sample application below.   Demo application I created an ASP.NET MVC 2 application and here I need to display the current date and time on the master page. I created an action in the Home controller named TimeSlot and stored the current date into ViewDate. This method was marked as HttpGet as it just retrieves some data instead of changing anything. 1: [HttpGet] 2: public ActionResult TimeSlot() 3: { 4: ViewData["timeslot"] = DateTime.Now; 5: return View("TimeSlot"); 6: } Next, I created a partial view under the Shared folder to display the date and time string. 1: <%@ Control Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewUserControl<dynamic>" %> 2:  3: <span>Now: <% 1: : ViewData["timeslot"].ToString() %></span> Then at the master page I used Html.RenderAction to display it in front of the logon link. 1: <div id="logindisplay"> 2: <% 1: Html.RenderAction("TimeSlot", "Home"); %> 3:  4: <% 1: Html.RenderPartial("LogOnUserControl"); %> 5: </div> It’s fairly simple and works well when I navigated to any pages. But when I moved to the logon page and click the LogOn button without input anything in username and password the validation failed and my website crashed with the beautiful yellow page. (I really like its color style and fonts…)   How ASP.NET MVC executes Html.RenderAction In this example all other pages were rendered successful which means the ASP.NET MVC found the TimeSolt action under the Home controller except this situation. The only different is that when I clicked the LogOn button the browser send an HttpPost request to the server. Is that the reason of this bug? I created another action in Home controller with the same action name but for HttpPost. 1: [HttpPost] 2: [ActionName("TimeSlot")] 3: public ActionResult TimeSlot(object dummy) 4: { 5: return TimeSlot(); 6: } Or, I can use the AcceptVerbsAttribute on the TimeSlot action to let it allow both HttpGet and HttpPost. 1: [AcceptVerbs("GET", "POST")] 2: public ActionResult TimeSlot() 3: { 4: ViewData["timeslot"] = DateTime.Now; 5: return View("TimeSlot"); 6: } And then repeat what I did before and this time it worked well. Why we need the action for HttpPost here as it’s just data retrieving? That is because of how ASP.NET MVC executes the RenderAction method. In the source code of ASP.NET MVC we can see when proforming the RenderAction ASP.NET MVC creates a RequestContext instance from the current RequestContext and created a ChildActionMvcHandler instance which inherits from MvcHandler class. Then the ASP.NET MVC processes the handler through the HttpContext.Server.Execute method. That means it performs the action as a stand-alone request asynchronously and flush the result into the  TextWriter which is being used to render the current page. Since when I clicked the LogOn the request was in HttpPost so when ASP.NET MVC processed the ChildActionMvcHandler it would find the action which allow the current request method, which is HttpPost. Then our TimeSlot method in HttpGet would not be matched.   Summary In this post I introduced a bug in my currently developing project regards the new Html.RenderAction method provided within ASP.NET MVC 2 when processing a HttpPost request. In ASP.NET MVC world the underlying Http information became more important than in ASP.NET WebForm world. We need to pay more attention on which kind of request it currently created and how ASP.NET MVC processes.   Hope this helps, Shaun   All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• Oracle’s Web Experience Management

  - by Christie Flanagan

  Today’s guest post on Oracle’s Web Experience Management comes from a member of our WebCenter Evangelist team, Noël Jaffré, a Principal Technologist based in France.Oracle’s Web Experience Management (WEM) solution enables organizations to optimize the online channel for driving marketing and customer experience management success. It empowers business users to manage the web presence and create rich and engaging online experiences for customers and prospects. Oracle's WEM platform provides a framework to simplify the integration of Oracle, third-party and custom-built applications. This framework essentially allows the creation and integration of applications using one single business interface called the WEM interface. It includes the following: Single sign-on access control for all integrated applications using the Central Authentication Service (CAS) component. A single centralized administration window for user, role, and native applications management including site management. Community server management, gadget server management as well as management for partner integrated technologies. A Representational State Transfer (REST) API for accessing WebCenter Sites data. REST services are supported on both Oracle WebCenter Sites and Oracle WebCenter Sites Satellite Server to leverage the satellite server cache. All REST requests are cached for web consuming applications as well for the high performance delivery of native applications on the mobile channel. Oracle WebCenter Sites’ Web Experience Management environment enables organizations to deliver a compelling online experience to customers by simplifying the deployment and management of sophisticated and engaging websites. The WebCenter Sites platform automates the entire process of managing web content including: Authoring:  Business users can easily contribute and manage web content in real-time, with intuitive interfaces and drag-and-drop content authoring and layout capabilities designed for the non-technical user. Contextual Content Targeting: Marketers are empowered to create and manage targeted campaigns with relevant recommendations and promotions based on the context of the session of the visitor such as his or her navigation history, user profile, language, location or other information shared during the visitor session. Content Publishing and Deployment: It offers advanced multi-site management capabilities for departmental or regional sites, as well as strong multi-lingual and multi-locale content management. The remote satellite server caching infrastructure provides high-performance, distributed caching, tuned to deliver high-volume, targeted and multi-lingual sites. Analytics and Optimization: Business users and marketers have the ability to measure the effectiveness of their online content and campaigns at a granular level. Editors and marketers can immediately determine whether a given article or promotion is relevant to a particular customer segment. User-generated Content: Marketers can enable blogs, comments, rating and reviews on the website.  All comments and reviews posted to the website can be moderated from the administrator interface either manually or automatically using filters, whitelists, blacklists or community based moderation. Personalized Gadget Dashboards:  Site managers can deploy gadgets, small applications using web content, individually or as part of dashboards containing multiple gadgets.  These gadget dashboards enable site visitors to create their own “MyPage” on a given site where they can select and customize the gadgets that the site administrator has made available.  Any gadget that conforms to the iGoogle/OpenSocial standard can be made available to site visitors, or they can be created within the WEM interface. Oracle's WEM platform also provides a unique environment for the delivery of a rich, multichannel online experience for site visitors through its advanced management modules for mobile. With Oracle’s WEM solution, it’s easy to control branding and deliver a consistent message while repurposing web content for publication to mobile devices, kiosks and much more. This distinctive approach provides: HTML5 Delivery: HTML5 delivery which includes native support for adaptive design that responds to the user’s computer screen resolution and orientation. The approach is less driven by the particular hardware and more driven by the user’s interactions with the device. In other words, this approach takes both the screen interactions (either cursor or touch) and screen sizes and orientation into consideration. A Unique Native Mobile Extension Environment for Contributors: From the WEM interface, a contributor can directly manage their mobile channel, using the tooling already in place for driving the traditional web presence. This includes the mobile presentation, as well as mobile insite editing, drag and drop page layout, and in-context recommendations and personalization. Optimized REST APIs for High Performance Content Delivery on Native Mobile Device Applications: WebCenter Sites’ REST API uses the underlying HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE) to interact with resources. Resources support two types of input and output formats -- XML and JSON. REST calls are customizable to optimize the interactions between the content repositories and the client applications. Caching is essential to decrease network loads and improve overall reliability and usability of the applications and user interactions. REST results are cached through the highly efficient Oracle WebCenter Sites caching architecture.

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• Fusion HCM SaaS – Integration

  - by Kiran Mundy

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Fusion HCM SaaS – Integration A typical implementation pattern we’re seeing with Fusion Apps early adopters is implementing a few Fusion HCM applications that bring the most benefit to their company with the least disruption to existing programs and interfaces. Very often this ends up being Fusion Goals & Performance, Talent, Compensation or Benefits, often with Taleo for recruiting. The implementation picture looks like what you see below: Here, you can see that all the “downstream integrations” from the On-Premise Core HR, are unaffected because the master for employee data is still your On-Premise Core HR system – all updates and new hires are made here (although they may be fed in from Taleo to start with). As a second phase when customers migrate Core HR to Fusion HCM, they have to come up with a strategy to manage integrations to all their downstream applications that require employee details. For customers coming from EBS HR, a short term strategy that allows for minimal impact, is to extract employee data from Fusion (Via HCM Extract), and load the shared EBS HR tables (which are part of an EBS Financials install anyways), and let your downstream integrations continue to function based on this data as shown below. If you are not coming from EBS HR and there are license implications, you may want to consider: Creating an On-Premise warehouse for extracting data from Fusion Apps. Leveraging Fusion Apps Web Services (available to SaaS customers starting R7) to directly retrieve/write data to Fusion Apps. Integration Tools File Based Loader This is the primary mechanism for loading HCM data (both initial load and incremental updates) into Fusion HCM. Employee & related data can be uploaded into Fusion HCM using File Based Loader. Note that ability to schedule File Based Loader to run on a pre-defined schedule will be available as a patch on top of Rel 5. Hr2Hr has been deprecated in favor of File Based Loader, but for existing customers using Hr2Hr, here are some sample scripts that show how to get more informative error messages. They can be run by creating data model sql queries in BI Publisher. The scripts currently have hard coded values for request id and loader batch id, which your developer will need to update to the correct values for you. The BI Publisher Training Session recorded on Apr 18th is available here (under "Recordings"). This will enable a somewhat technical resource to create a data model sql query. Links to Documentation & Traning Reference documentation for File Based Loader on docs.oracle.com FBL 1.1 MOS Doc Id 1533860.1 Sample demo data files for File Based Loader HCM SaaS Integrations ppt and recording. EBS api's Loading Information into EBS Full or Shared HCM This could be candidate information being loaded from Taleo into EBS or  Employee information being loaded from Fusion HCM into an EBS shared HR install (for downstream applications & EBS Financials). Oracle HRMS Product Family Publicly Callable Business Process APIs (A Reference Consolidation) [ID 216838.1] This is a guide to the EBS R12 Integration Repository accessible from an EBS instance. EBS HRMS Publicly Callable Business Process APIs in Release 11i & 12 [ID 121964.1] Fusion HCM Extract Fusion HCM Extract is the primary mechanism used to extract employee information from Fusion HCM. Refer to the "Configure Identity Sync" doc on MOS  for additional mechanisms. Additional documentation (you'll need an oracle.com account to access) HCM Extracts User Guides (Rel 4 & 5) HCM Extract Entity/Attributes (Rel 5) HCM Extract User Guide (Rel 5) If you don’t have an oracle.com account, download the zipped HCM Extract Rel 5 Docs (Click on File --> Download on next screen). View Training Recordings on Fusion HCM Extract Benefits Extract To setup the benefits extract, refer to the following guide. Page 2-15 of the User Documentation describes how to use the benefits extract. Benefit enrollments can also be uploaded into Fusion Benefits. Instructions are here along with a sample upload file. However, if the defined benefits extract does not meet your requirements, you can use BI Publisher (Link to BI Publisher presentation recording from Apr 18th) to create your own version of Benefits extract. You can start with the data model query underlying the benefits extract. Payroll Interface Fusion Payroll Interface enables you to capture personal payroll information, such as earnings and deductions, along with other data from Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management, and send that information to a third-party payroll provider. Documentation: Payroll interface guide Sample file DBI's used for the payroll interface.Usage Patterns always accessible @ http://www.finapps.com Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";}

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• concurrency::accelerator

  - by Daniel Moth

  Overview An accelerator represents a "target" on which C++ AMP code can execute and where data can reside. Typically (but not necessarily) an accelerator is a GPU device. Accelerators are represented in C++ AMP as objects of the accelerator class. For many scenarios, you do not need to obtain an accelerator object, since the runtime has a notion of a default accelerator, which is what it thinks is the best one in the system. Examples where you need to deal with accelerator objects are if you need to pick your own accelerator (based on your specific criteria), or if you need to use more than one accelerators from your app. Construction and operator usage You can query and obtain a std::vector of all the accelerators on your system, which the runtime discovers on startup. Beyond enumerating accelerators, you can also create one directly by passing to the constructor a system-wide unique path to a device if you know it (i.e. the “Device Instance Path” property for the device in Device Manager), e.g. accelerator acc(L"PCI\\VEN_1002&DEV_6898&SUBSYS_0B001002etc"); There are some predefined strings (for predefined accelerators) that you can pass to the accelerator constructor (and there are corresponding constants for those on the accelerator class itself, so you don’t have to hardcode them every time). Examples are the following: accelerator::default_accelerator represents the default accelerator that the C++ AMP runtime picks for you if you don’t pick one (the heuristics of how it picks one will be covered in a future post). Example: accelerator acc; accelerator::direct3d_ref represents the reference rasterizer emulator that simulates a direct3d device on the CPU (in a very slow manner). This emulator is available on systems with Visual Studio installed and is useful for debugging. More on debugging in general in future posts. Example: accelerator acc(accelerator::direct3d_ref); accelerator::direct3d_warp represents a target that I will cover in future blog posts. Example: accelerator acc(accelerator::direct3d_warp); accelerator::cpu_accelerator represents the CPU. In this first release the only use of this accelerator is for using the staging arrays technique that I'll cover separately. Example: accelerator acc(accelerator::cpu_accelerator); You can also create an accelerator by shallow copying another accelerator instance (via the corresponding constructor) or simply assigning it to another accelerator instance (via the operator overloading of =). Speaking of operator overloading, you can also compare (for equality and inequality) two accelerator objects between them to determine if they refer to the same underlying device. Querying accelerator characteristics Given an accelerator object, you can access its description, version, device path, size of dedicated memory in KB, whether it is some kind of emulator, whether it has a display attached, whether it supports double precision, and whether it was created with the debugging layer enabled for extensive error reporting. Below is example code that accesses some of the properties; in your real code you'd probably be checking one or more of them in order to pick an accelerator (or check that the default one is good enough for your specific workload): void inspect_accelerator(concurrency::accelerator acc) { std::wcout << "New accelerator: " << acc.description << std::endl; std::wcout << "is_debug = " << acc.is_debug << std::endl; std::wcout << "is_emulated = " << acc.is_emulated << std::endl; std::wcout << "dedicated_memory = " << acc.dedicated_memory << std::endl; std::wcout << "device_path = " << acc.device_path << std::endl; std::wcout << "has_display = " << acc.has_display << std::endl; std::wcout << "version = " << (acc.version >> 16) << '.' << (acc.version & 0xFFFF) << std::endl; } accelerator_view In my next blog post I'll cover a related class: accelerator_view. Suffice to say here that each accelerator may have from 1..n related accelerator_view objects. You can get the accelerator_view from an accelerator via the default_view property, or create new ones by invoking the create_view method that creates an accelerator_view object for you (by also accepting a queuing_mode enum value of deferred or immediate that we'll also explore in the next blog post). Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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• Towards an F# .NET Reflector add-in

  - by CliveT

  When I had the opportunity to spent some time during Red Gate's recent "down tools" week on a project of my choice, the obvious project was an F# add-in for Reflector . To be honest, this was a bit of a misnomer as the amount of time in the designated week for coding was really less than three days, so it was always unlikely that very much progress would be made in such a small amount of time (and that certainly proved to be the case), but I did learn some things from the experiment. Like lots of problems, one useful technique is to take examples, get them to work, and then generalise to get something that works across the board. Unfortunately, I didn't have enough time to do the last stage. The obvious first step is to take a few function definitions, starting with the obvious hello world, moving on to a non-recursive function and finishing with the ubiquitous recursive Fibonacci function. let rec printMessage message  =     printfn  message let foo x  =    (x + 1) let rec fib x  =     if (x >= 2) then (fib (x - 1) + fib (x - 2)) else 1 The major problem in decompiling these simple functions is that Reflector has an in-memory object model that is designed to support object-oriented languages. In particular it has a return statement that allows function bodies to finish early. I used some of the in-built functionality to take the IL and produce an in-memory object model for the language, but then needed to write a transformer to push the return statements to the top of the tree to make it easy to render the code into a functional language. This tree transform works in some scenarios, but not in others where we simply regenerate code that looks more like CPS style. The next thing to get working was library level bindings of values where these values are calculated at runtime. let x = [1 ; 2 ; 3 ; 4] let y = List.map  (fun x -> foo x) x The way that this is translated into a set of classes for the underlying platform means that the code needs to follow references around, from the property exposing the calculated value to the class in which the code for generating the value is embedded. One of the strongest selling points of functional languages is the algebraic datatypes, which allow definitions via standard mathematical-style inductive definitions across the union cases. type Foo =     | Something of int     | Nothing type 'a Foo2 =     | Something2 of 'a     | Nothing2 Such a definition is compiled into a number of classes for the cases of the union, which all inherit from a class representing the type itself. It wasn't too hard to get such a de-compilation happening in the cases I tried. What did I learn from this? Firstly, that there are various bits of functionality inside Reflector that it would be useful for us to allow add-in writers to access. In particular, there are various implementations of the Visitor pattern which implement algorithms such as calculating the number of references for particular variables, and which perform various substitutions which could be more generally useful to add-in writers. I hope to do something about this at some point in the future. Secondly, when you transform a functional language into something that runs on top of an object-based platform, you lose some fidelity in the representation. The F# compiler leaves attributes in place so that tools can tell which classes represent classes from the source program and which are there for purposes of the implementation, allowing the decompiler to regenerate these constructs again. However, decompilation technology is a long way from being able to take unannotated IL and transform it into a program in a different language. For a simple function definition, like Fibonacci, I could write a simple static function and have it come out in F# as the same function, but it would be practically impossible to take a mass of class definitions and have a decompiler translate it automatically into an F# algebraic data type. What have we got out of this? Some data on the feasibility of implementing an F# decompiler inside Reflector, though it's hard at the moment to say how long this would take to do. The work we did is included the 6.5 EAP for Reflector that you can get from the EAP forum. All things considered though, it was a useful way to gain more familiarity with the process of writing an add-in and understand difficulties other add-in authors might experience. If you'd like to check out a video of Down Tools Week, click here.

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• Allowing Access to HttpContext in WCF REST Services

  - by Rick Strahl

  If you’re building WCF REST Services you may find that WCF’s OperationContext, which provides some amount of access to Http headers on inbound and outbound messages, is pretty limited in that it doesn’t provide access to everything and sometimes in a not so convenient manner. For example accessing query string parameters explicitly is pretty painful: [OperationContract] [WebGet] public string HelloWorld() { var properties = OperationContext.Current.IncomingMessageProperties; var property = properties[HttpRequestMessageProperty.Name] as HttpRequestMessageProperty; string queryString = property.QueryString; var name = StringUtils.GetUrlEncodedKey(queryString,"Name"); return "Hello World " + name; } And that doesn’t account for the logic in GetUrlEncodedKey to retrieve the querystring value. It’s a heck of a lot easier to just do this: [OperationContract] [WebGet] public string HelloWorld() { var name = HttpContext.Current.Request.QueryString["Name"] ?? string.Empty; return "Hello World " + name; } Ok, so if you follow the REST guidelines for WCF REST you shouldn’t have to rely on reading query string parameters manually but instead rely on routing logic, but you know what: WCF REST is a PITA anyway and anything to make things a little easier is welcome. To enable the second scenario there are a couple of steps that you have to take on your service implementation and the configuration file. Add aspNetCompatibiltyEnabled in web.config Fist you need to configure the hosting environment to support ASP.NET when running WCF Service requests. This ensures that the ASP.NET pipeline is fired up and configured for every incoming request. <system.serviceModel>     <serviceHostingEnvironment aspNetCompatibilityEnabled="true" multipleSiteBindingsEnabled="true" /> </system.serviceModel> Markup your Service Implementation with AspNetCompatibilityRequirements Attribute Next you have to mark up the Service Implementation – not the contract if you’re using a separate interface!!! – with the AspNetCompatibilityRequirements attribute: [ServiceContract(Namespace = "RateTestService")] [AspNetCompatibilityRequirements(RequirementsMode = AspNetCompatibilityRequirementsMode.Allowed)] public class RestRateTestProxyService Typically you’ll want to use Allowed as the preferred option. The other options are NotAllowed and Required. Allowed will let the service run if the web.config attribute is not set. Required has to have it set. All these settings determine whether an ASP.NET host AppDomain is used for requests. Once Allowed or Required has been set on the implemented class you can make use of the ASP.NET HttpContext object. When I allow for ASP.NET compatibility in my WCF services I typically add a property that exposes the Context and Request objects a little more conveniently: public HttpContext Context { get { return HttpContext.Current; } } public HttpRequest Request { get { return HttpContext.Current.Request; } } While you can also access the Response object and write raw data to it and manipulate headers THAT is probably not such a good idea as both your code and WCF will end up writing into the output stream. However it might be useful in some situations where you need to take over output generation completely and return something completely custom. Remember though that WCF REST DOES actually support that as well with Stream responses that essentially allow you to return any kind of data to the client so using Response should really never be necessary. Should you or shouldn’t you? WCF purists will tell you never to muck with the platform specific features or the underlying protocol, and if you can avoid it you definitely should avoid it. Querystring management in particular can be handled largely with Url Routing, but there are exceptions of course. Try to use what WCF natively provides – if possible as it makes the code more portable. For example, if you do enable ASP.NET Compatibility you won’t be able to self host a WCF REST service. At the same time realize that especially in WCF REST there are number of big holes or access to some features are a royal pain and so it’s not unreasonable to access the HttpContext directly especially if it’s only for read-only access. Since everything in REST works of URLS and the HTTP protocol more control and easier access to HTTP features is a key requirement to building flexible services. It looks like vNext of the WCF REST stuff will feature many improvements along these lines with much deeper native HTTP support that is often so useful in REST applications along with much more extensibility that allows for customization of the inputs and outputs as data goes through the request pipeline. I’m looking forward to this stuff as WCF REST as it exists today still is a royal pain (in fact I’m struggling with a mysterious version conflict/crashing error on my machine that I have not been able to resolve – grrrr…).© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in ASP.NET  AJAX  WCF  

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• DBCC CHECKDB (BatmanDb, REPAIR_ALLOW_DATA_LOSS) &ndash; Are you Feeling Lucky?

  - by David Totzke

  I’m currently working for a client on a PowerBuilder to WPF migration.  It’s one of those “I could tell you, but I’d have to kill you” kind of clients and the quick-lime pits are currently occupied by the EMC tech…but I’ve said too much already. At approximately 3 or 4 pm that day users of the Batman[1] application here in Gotham[1] started to experience problems accessing the application.  Batman[2] is a document management system here that also integrates with the ERP system.  Very little goes on here that doesn’t involve Batman in some way.  The errors being received seemed to point to network issues (TCP protocol error, connection forcibly closed by the remote host etc…) but the real issue was much more insidious. Connecting to the database via SSMS and performing selects on certain tables underlying the application areas that were having problems started to reveal the issue.  You couldn’t do a SELECT * FROM MyTable without it bombing and giving the same error noted above.  A run of DBCC CHECKDB revealed 14 tables with corruption.  One of the tables with issues was the Document table.  Pretty central to a “document management” system.  Information was obtained from IT that a single drive in the SAN went bad in the night.  A new drive was in place and was working fine.  The partition that held the Batman database is configured for RAID Level 5 so a single drive failure shouldn’t have caused any trouble and yet, the database is corrupted.  They do hourly incremental backups here so the first thing done was to try a restore.  A restore of the most recent backup failed so they worked backwards until they hit a good point.  This successful restore was for a backup at 3AM – a full day behind.  This time also roughly corresponds with the time the SAN started to report the drive failure.  The plot thickens… I got my hands on the output from DBCC CHECKDB and noticed a pattern.  What’s sad is that nobody that should have noticed the pattern in the DBCC output did notice.  There was a rush to do things to try and recover the data before anybody really understood what was wrong with it in the first place.  Cooler heads must prevail in these circumstances and some investigation should be done and a plan of action laid out or you could end up making things worse[3].  DBCC CHECKDB also told us that: repair_allow_data_loss is the minimum repair level for the errors found by DBCC CHECKDB Yikes.  That means that the database is so messed up that you’re definitely going to lose some stuff when you repair it to get it back to a consistent state.  All the more reason to do a little more investigation into the problem.  Rescuing this database is preferable to having to export all of the data possible from this database into a new one.  This is a fifteen year old application with about seven hundred tables.  There are TRIGGERS everywhere not to mention the referential integrity constraints to deal with.  Only fourteen of the tables have an issue.  We have a good backup that is missing the last 24 hours of business which means we could have a “do-over” of yesterday but that’s not a very palatable option either. All of the affected tables had TEXT columns and all of the errors were about LOB data types and orphaned off-row data which basically means TEXT, IMAGE or NTEXT columns.  If we did a SELECT on an affected table and excluded those columns, we got all of the rows.  We exported that data into a separate database.  Things are looking up.  Working on a copy of the production database we then ran DBCC CHECKDB with REPAIR_ALLOW_DATA_LOSS and that “fixed” everything up.   The allow data loss option will delete the bad rows.  This isn’t too horrible as we have all of those rows minus the text fields from out earlier export.  Now I could LEFT JOIN to the exported data to find the missing rows and INSERT them minus the TEXT column data. We had the restored data from the good 3AM backup that we could now JOIN to and, with fingers crossed, recover the missing TEXT column information.  We got lucky in that all of the affected rows were old and in the end we didn’t lose anything.  :O  All of the row counts along the way worked out and it looks like we dodged a major bullet here. We’ve heard back from EMC and it turns out the SAN firmware that they were running here is apparently buggy.  This thing is only a couple of months old.  Grrr…. They dispatched a technician that night to come and update it .  That explains why RAID didn’t save us. All-in-all this could have been a lot worse.  Given the root cause here, they basically won the lottery in not losing anything. Here are a few links to some helpful posts on the SQL Server Engine blog.  I love the title of the first one: Which part of 'REPAIR_ALLOW_DATA_LOSS' isn't clear? CHECKDB (Part 8): Can repair fix everything? (in fact, read the whole series) Ta da! Emergency mode repair (we didn’t have to resort to this one thank goodness)   Dave Just because I can…   [1] Names have been changed to protect the guilty. [2] I'm Batman. [3] And if I'm the coolest head in the room, you've got even bigger problems...

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• Talend Enterprise Data Integration overperforms on Oracle SPARC T4

  - by Amir Javanshir

  The SPARC T microprocessor, released in 2005 by Sun Microsystems, and now continued at Oracle, has a good track record in parallel execution and multi-threaded performance. However it was less suited for pure single-threaded workloads. The new SPARC T4 processor is now filling that gap by offering a 5x better single-thread performance over previous generations. Following our long-term relationship with Talend, a fast growing ISV positioned by Gartner in the “Visionaries” quadrant of the “Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools”, we decided to test some of their integration components with the T4 chip, more precisely on a T4-1 system, in order to verify first hand if this new processor stands up to its promises. Several tests were performed, mainly focused on: Single-thread performance of the new SPARC T4 processor compared to an older SPARC T2+ processor Overall throughput of the SPARC T4-1 server using multiple threads The tests consisted in reading large amounts of data --ten's of gigabytes--, processing and writing them back to a file or an Oracle 11gR2 database table. They are CPU, memory and IO bound tests. Given the main focus of this project --CPU performance--, bottlenecks were removed as much as possible on the memory and IO sub-systems. When possible, the data to process was put into the ZFS filesystem cache, for instance. Also, two external storage devices were directly attached to the servers under test, each one divided in two ZFS pools for read and write operations. Multi-thread: Testing throughput on the Oracle T4-1 The tests were performed with different number of simultaneous threads (1, 2, 4, 8, 12, 16, 32, 48 and 64) and using different storage devices: Flash, Fibre Channel storage, two stripped internal disks and one single internal disk. All storage devices used ZFS as filesystem and volume management. Each thread read a dedicated 1GB-large file containing 12.5M lines with the following structure: customerID;FirstName;LastName;StreetAddress;City;State;Zip;Cust_Status;Since_DT;Status_DT 1;Ronald;Reagan;South Highway;Santa Fe;Montana;98756;A;04-06-2006;09-08-2008 2;Theodore;Roosevelt;Timberlane Drive;Columbus;Louisiana;75677;A;10-05-2009;27-05-2008 3;Andrew;Madison;S Rustle St;Santa Fe;Arkansas;75677;A;29-04-2005;09-02-2008 4;Dwight;Adams;South Roosevelt Drive;Baton Rouge;Vermont;75677;A;15-02-2004;26-01-2007 […] The following graphs present the results of our tests: Unsurprisingly up to 16 threads, all files fit in the ZFS cache a.k.a L2ARC : once the cache is hot there is no performance difference depending on the underlying storage. From 16 threads upwards however, it is clear that IO becomes a bottleneck, having a good IO subsystem is thus key. Single-disk performance collapses whereas the Sun F5100 and ST6180 arrays allow the T4-1 to scale quite seamlessly. From 32 to 64 threads, the performance is almost constant with just a slow decline. For the database load tests, only the best IO configuration --using external storage devices-- were used, hosting the Oracle table spaces and redo log files. Using the Sun Storage F5100 array allows the T4-1 server to scale up to 48 parallel JVM processes before saturating the CPU. The final result is a staggering 646K lines per second insertion in an Oracle table using 48 parallel threads. Single-thread: Testing the single thread performance Seven different tests were performed on both servers. Given the fact that only one thread, thus one file was read, no IO bottleneck was involved, all data being served from the ZFS cache. Read File ? Filter ? Write File: Read file, filter data, write the filtered data in a new file. The filter is set on the “Status” column: only lines with status set to “A” are selected. This limits each output file to about 500 MB. Read File ? Load Database Table: Read file, insert into a single Oracle table. Average: Read file, compute the average of a numeric column, write the result in a new file. Division & Square Root: Read file, perform a division and square root on a numeric column, write the result data in a new file. Oracle DB Dump: Dump the content of an Oracle table (12.5M rows) into a CSV file. Transform: Read file, transform, write the result data in a new file. The transformations applied are: set the address column to upper case and add an extra column at the end, which is the concatenation of two columns. Sort: Read file, sort a numeric and alpha numeric column, write the result data in a new file. The following table and graph present the final results of the tests: Throughput unit is thousand lines per second processed (K lines/second). Improvement is the % of improvement between the T5140 and T4-1. Test T4-1 (Time s.) T5140 (Time s.) Improvement T4-1 (Throughput) T5140 (Throughput) Read/Filter/Write 125 806 645% 100 16 Read/Load Database 195 1111 570% 64 11 Average 96 557 580% 130 22 Division & Square Root 161 1054 655% 78 12 Oracle DB Dump 164 945 576% 76 13 Transform 159 1124 707% 79 11 Sort 251 1336 532% 50 9 The improvement of single-thread performance is quite dramatic: depending on the tests, the T4 is between 5.4 to 7 times faster than the T2+. It seems clear that the SPARC T4 processor has gone a long way filling the gap in single-thread performance, without sacrifying the multi-threaded capability as it still shows a very impressive scaling on heavy-duty multi-threaded jobs. Finally, as always at Oracle ISV Engineering, we are happy to help our ISV partners test their own applications on our platforms, so don't hesitate to contact us and let's see what the SPARC T4-based systems can do for your application! "As describe in this benchmark, Talend Enterprise Data Integration has overperformed on T4. I was generally happy to see that the T4 gave scaling opportunities for many scenarios like complex aggregations. Row by row insertion in Oracle DB is faster with more than 650,000 rows per seconds without using any bulk Oracle capabilities !" Cedric Carbone, Talend CTO.

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

  - by user709270

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

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• What Counts For a DBA: Simplicity

  - by Louis Davidson

  Too many computer processes do an apparently simple task in a bizarrely complex way. They remind me of this strip by one of my favorite artists: Rube Goldberg. In order to keep the boss from knowing one was late, a process is devised whereby the cuckoo clock kisses a live cuckoo bird, who then pulls a string, which triggers a hat flinging, which in turn lands on a rod that removes a typewriter cover…and so on. We rely on creating automated processes to keep on top of tasks. DBAs have a lot of tasks to perform: backups, performance tuning, data movement, system monitoring, and of course, avoiding being noticed.  Every day, there are many steps to perform to maintain the database infrastructure, including: checking physical structures, re-indexing tables where needed, backing up the databases, checking those backups, running the ETL, and preparing the daily reports and yes, all of these processes have to complete before you can call it a day, and probably before many others have started that same day. Some of these tasks are just naturally complicated on their own. Other tasks become complicated because the database architecture is excessively rigid, and we often discover during “production testing” that certain processes need to be changed because the written requirements barely resembled the actual customer requirements.   Then, with no time to change that rigid structure, we are forced to heap layer upon layer of code onto the problematic processes. Instead of a slight table change and a new index, we end up with 4 new ETL processes, 20 temp tables, 30 extra queries, and 1000 lines of SQL code.  Report writers then need to build reports and make magical numbers appear from those toxic data structures that are overly complex and probably filled with inconsistent data. What starts out as a collection of fairly simple tasks turns into a Goldbergian nightmare of daily processes that are likely to cause your dinner to be interrupted by the smartphone doing the vibration dance that signifies trouble at the mill. So what to do? Well, if it is at all possible, simplify the problem by either going into the code and refactoring the complex code to simple, or taking all of the processes and simplifying them into small, independent, easily-tested steps.  The former approach usually requires an agreement on changing underlying structures that requires countless mind-numbing meetings; while the latter can generally be done to any complex process without the same frustration or anger, though it will still leave you with lots of steps to complete, the ability to test each step independently will definitely increase the quality of the overall process (and with each step reporting status back, finding an actual problem within the process will be definitely less unpleasant.) We all know the principle behind simplifying a sequence of processes because we learned it in math classes in our early years of attending school, starting with elementary school. In my 4 years (ok, 9 years) of undergraduate work, I remember pretty much one thing from my many math classes that I apply daily to my career as a data architect, data programmer, and as an occasional indentured DBA: “show your work”. This process of showing your work was my first lesson in simplification. Each step in the process was in fact, far simpler than the entire process.  When you were working an equation that took both sides of 4 sheets of paper, showing your work was important because the teacher could see every step, judge it, and mark it accordingly.  So often I would make an error in the first few lines of a problem which meant that the rest of the work was actually moving me closer to a very wrong answer, no matter how correct the math was in the subsequent steps. Yet, when I got my grade back, I would sometimes be pleasantly surprised. I passed, yet missed every problem on the test. But why? While I got the fact that 1+1=2 wrong in every problem, the teacher could see that I was using the right process. In a computer process, the process is very similar. We take complex processes, show our work by storing intermediate values, and test each step independently. When a process has 100 steps, each step becomes a simple step that is tested and verified, such that there will be 100 places where data is stored, validated, and can be checked off as complete. If you get step 1 of 100 wrong, you can fix it and be confident (that if you did your job of testing the other steps better than the one you had to repair,) that the rest of the process works. If you have 100 steps, and store the state of the process exactly once, the resulting testable chunk of code will be far more complex and finding the error will require checking all 100 steps as one, and usually it would be easier to find a specific needle in a stack of similarly shaped needles.  The goal is to strive for simplicity either in the solution, or at least by simplifying every process down to as many, independent, testable, simple tasks as possible.  For the tasks that really can’t be done completely independently, minimally take those tasks and break them down into simpler steps that can be tested independently.  Like working out division problems longhand, have each step of the larger problem verified and tested.

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• College Courses through distance learning

  - by Matt

  I realize this isn't really a programming question, but didn't really know where to post this in the stackexchange and because I am a computer science major i thought id ask here. This is pretty unique to the programmer community since my degree is about 95% programming. I have 1 semester left, but i work full time. I would like to finish up in December, but to make things easier i like to take online classes whenever I can. So, my question is does anyone know of any colleges that offer distance learning courses for computer science? I have been searching around and found a few potential classes, but not sure yet. I would like to gather some classes and see what i can get approval for. Class I need: Only need one C SC 437 Geometric Algorithms C SC 445 Algorithms C SC 473 Automata Only need one C SC 452 Operating Systems C SC 453 Compilers/Systems Software While i only need of each of the above courses i still need to take two more electives. These also have to be upper 400 level classes. So i can take multiple in each category. Some other classes I can take are: CSC 447 - Green Computing CSC 425 - Computer Networking CSC 460 - Database Design CSC 466 - Computer Security I hoping to take one or two of these courses over the summer. If not, then online over the regular semester would be ok too. Any help in helping find these classes would be awesome. Maybe you went to a college that offered distance learning. Some of these classes may be considered to be graduate courses too. Descriptions are listed below if you need. Thanks! Descriptions Computer Security This is an introductory course covering the fundamentals of computer security. In particular, the course will cover basic concepts of computer security such as threat models and security policies, and will show how these concepts apply to specific areas such as communication security, software security, operating systems security, network security, web security, and hardware-based security. Computer Networking Theory and practice of computer networks, emphasizing the principles underlying the design of network software and the role of the communications system in distributed computing. Topics include routing, flow and congestion control, end-to-end protocols, and multicast. Database Design Functions of a database system. Data modeling and logical database design. Query languages and query optimization. Efficient data storage and access. Database access through standalone and web applications. Green Computing This course covers fundamental principles of energy management faced by designers of hardware, operating systems, and data centers. We will explore basic energy management option in individual components such as CPUs, network interfaces, hard drives, memory. We will further present the energy management policies at the operating system level that consider performance vs. energy saving tradeoffs. Finally we will consider large scale data centers where energy management is done at multiple layers from individual components in the system to shutting down entries subset of machines. We will also discuss energy generation and delivery and well as cooling issues in large data centers. Compilers/Systems Software Basic concepts of compilation and related systems software. Topics include lexical analysis, parsing, semantic analysis, code generation; assemblers, loaders, linkers; debuggers. Operating Systems Concepts of modern operating systems; concurrent processes; process synchronization and communication; resource allocation; kernels; deadlock; memory management; file systems. Algorithms Introduction to the design and analysis of algorithms: basic analysis techniques (asymptotics, sums, recurrences); basic design techniques (divide and conquer, dynamic programming, greedy, amortization); acquiring an algorithm repertoire (sorting, median finding, strong components, spanning trees, shortest paths, maximum flow, string matching); and handling intractability (approximation algorithms, branch and bound). Automata Introduction to models of computation (finite automata, pushdown automata, Turing machines), representations of languages (regular expressions, context-free grammars), and the basic hierarchy of languages (regular, context-free, decidable, and undecidable languages). Geometric Algorithms The study of algorithms for geometric objects, using a computational geometry approach, with an emphasis on applications for graphics, VLSI, GIS, robotics, and sensor networks. Topics may include the representation and overlaying of maps, finding nearest neighbors, solving linear programming problems, and searching geometric databases.

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• Java EE at JavaOne - A Few Picks from a Very Rich Line-up

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  A rich and diverse set of sessions cast a spotlight on Java EE at this year’s JavaOne, ranging from the popular Web Framework Smackdown, to Java EE 6 and Spring, to sessions exploring Java EE 7, and one on the implications of HTML5. Some of the world’s best EE architects and developers will be sharing their insight and expertise. If only I could be at ten places at once!BOF4149 - Web Framework Smackdown 2012    Markus Eisele - Principal IT Architect, msg systems ag    Graeme Rocher - Senior Staff Engineer, VMware    James Ward - Developer Evangelist, Heroku    Ed Burns - Consulting Member of Technical Staff, Oracle    Santiago Pericasgeertsen - Software Engineer, Oracle* Monday, Oct 1, 8:30 PM - 9:15 PM - Parc 55 - Cyril Magnin II/III Much has changed since the first Web framework smackdown, at JavaOne 2005. Or has it? The 2012 edition of this popular panel discussion surveys the current landscape of Web UI frameworks for the Java platform. The 2005 edition featured JSF, Webwork, Struts, Tapestry, and Wicket. The 2012 edition features representatives of the current crop of frameworks, with a special emphasis on frameworks that leverage HTML5 and thin-server architecture. Java Champion Markus Eisele leads the lively discussion with panelists James Ward (Play), Graeme Rocher (Grails), Edward Burns (JSF) and Santiago Pericasgeertsen (Avatar).CON6430 - Java EE and Spring Framework Panel Discussion    Richard Hightower - Developer, InfoQ    Bert Ertman - Fellow, Luminis    Gordon Dickens - Technical Architect, IT101, Inc.    Chris Beams - Senior Technical Staff, VMware    Arun Gupta - Technology Evangelist, Oracle* Tuesday, Oct 2, 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM - Parc 55 - Cyril Magnin II/III In the age of Java EE 6 and Spring 3, enterprise Java developers have many architectural choices, including Java EE 6 and Spring, but which one is right for your project? Many of us have heard the debate and seen the flame wars—it’s a topic with passionate community members, and it’s a vibrant debate. If you are looking for some level-headed discussion, grounded in real experience, by developers who have tried both, then come join this discussion. InfoQ’s Java editors moderate the discussion, and they are joined by independent consultants and representatives from both Java EE and VMWare/SpringSource.BOF4213 - Meet the Java EE 7 Specification Leads   Linda Demichiel - Consulting Member of Technical Staff, Oracle   Bill Shannon - Architect, Oracle* Tuesday, Oct 2, 5:30 PM - 6:15 PM – Parc 55 - Cyril Magnin II/III This is your chance to meet face-to-face with the engineers who are developing the next version of the Java EE platform. In this session, the specification leads for the leading technologies that are part of the Java EE 7 platform discuss new and upcoming features and answer your questions. Come prepared with your questions, your feedback, and your suggestions for new features in Java EE 7 and beyond.CON10656 - JavaEE.Next(): Java EE 7, 8, and Beyond    Ian Robinson - IBM Distinguished Engineer, IBM    Mark Little - JBoss CTO, NA    Scott Ferguson - Developer, Caucho Technology    Cameron Purdy - VP Development, Oracle*Wednesday, Oct 3, 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM - Parc 55 - Cyril Magnin II/IIIIn this session, hear from a distinguished panel of industry and open source luminaries regarding where they believe the Java EE community is headed, starting with Java EE 7. The focus of Java EE 7 and 8 is mostly on the cloud, specifically aiming to bring platform as a service (PaaS) providers and application developers together so that portable applications can be deployed on any cloud infrastructure and reap all its benefits in terms of scalability, elasticity, multitenancy, and so on. Most importantly, Java EE will leverage the modularization work in the underlying Java SE platform. Java EE will, of course, also update itself for trends such as HTML5, caching, NoSQL, ployglot programming, map/reduce, JSON, REST, and improvements to existing core APIs.CON7001 - HTML5 WebSocket and Java    Danny Coward - Java, Oracle*Wednesday, Oct 3, 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM - Parc 55 - Cyril Magnin IThe family of HTML5 technologies has pushed the pendulum away from rich client technologies and toward ever-more-capable Web clients running on today’s browsers. In particular, WebSocket brings new opportunities for efficient peer-to-peer communication, providing the basis for a new generation of interactive and “live” Web applications. This session examines the efforts under way to support WebSocket in the Java programming model, from its base-level integration in the Java Servlet and Java EE containers to a new, easy-to-use API and toolset that are destined to become part of the standard Java platform.

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