Search Results

Search found 66801 results on 2673 pages for 'near real time'.

facebook twitter digg google delicious technorati stumbleupon myspace wordpress linkedin gmail igoogle windows live tumblr viadeo yahoo buzz yahoo mail yahoo bookmarks favorites email print

Page 475/2673 | < Previous Page | 471 472 473 474 475 476 477 478 479 480 481 482  | Next Page >

  • Problem installing Ubuntu 10.04 64 bit side by side with Vista by using a bootable USB drive. What n

    - by Adam Siddhi
    What happened I decided to install Ubuntu 10.04 64 bit side by side with Vista Home Premium (I guess on another partition) with a USB stick. I found instructions on how to do this here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromUSBStick To create the bootable USB drive I had to download a program called Unetbootin. That process was simple enough. All I had to do was just choose the disk image option, select the ubuntu-10.04-desktop-amd64.iso image, make sure it recognizes my USB drive and then press OK. It takes only like a few minutes to create a working bootable USB drive. Then I have to restart my computer, enter the BIOS, select my USB drive as the first boot drive, save options and continue with booting up. After this Ubuntu actually loads up. I think this is known as the Live version of Ubuntu so you can try it out before fully installing it. Any ways, on the Ubuntu 10.04 desktop I saw an installer. I click it and begin the installation process. Just so you know, I tried installing it 2 times. I will explain what happened each time: The first time I tried installing Ubuntu 10.04 I got stuck at step 4 of 7. I remember selecting the last option in the window which was Specify Partitions Manually (Advanced) I made my partition for Ubuntu like 52 gigs. I clicked forward and a little pop up window appeared saying Please Wait. So the installation process stalled on this window so I closed out of it and quit the installation process. So at this point I was worried because I had already selected the partition size and assumed it started making it. Since it stalled I had to quit out though. Anyways, once again I reached step 4 of 7 a decided to select the first option which is Install them side by side choosing between them each startup. I figured this was the safe way to go. I did that and the pop up window saying Please Wait popped up again but lasted only like 10 seconds. Then I got to I guess step 6 where it asks you to enter your desired name and password. Did that and clicked forward. The Ubuntu 10.04 installation load screen appeared and the loading bar at the bottom started filling up. So I got to 83% and stalled during the Importing other profile information (I think it was called this. I had the option to do this during I think step 6) process. So at this point I decided to get stop the installation process. I was getting very nervous. I tried to restart the computer but all that happened was that Ubuntu restarted. I finally got the computer to restart. I was pretty sure I had screwed something up big time by this point. As my computer was restarting I entered BIOS again and switched back to it booting from my main hard drive containing Vista. Saved it and continued the boot process. My worst fears were confirmed as Vista would not boot up. I mean I saw the little Microsoft Windows choppy animated green loading bar at the bottom of the screen and then boom! It decided to restart. When it restarted I had the option to run a memory test check to see if there was anything that needed to be repaired. That took like 20 minutes and at the end I saw that I did indeed have to repair something. I had to go through 2 repair processes. After each I had to restart the computer. The 2nd time it went through the repair process it said that it could not fully repair the damage. I was scared and restarted but Vista did load up. I got to my desktop and saw a message saying something like Repairs have been made, Please restart for changes to take effect I noticed that some Notification icons were missing and I could not hear volume in a video. Things were a bit funky. So I did restart and here I am. Now what?! So since I got back into Vista and thankfully have a working Internet connection I am trying to find answers to my problem (that is why I am writing this post). I am scared that I have partioned my hard drive 2 times after researching Installing Ubuntu 10.04 and seeing this post http://techie-buzz.com/foss/ubuntu-10-04-lts-installation-guide.html The author shows screen shots of installing Ubuntu 10.04. He shows the image of step 4 of 7 with a caption at the bottom. I will recreate it below: Select a partitioning option. Unless you want to format all the hard drive and install Ubuntu afresh, select the last option and proceed. Questions If I have indeed partitioned my HD 2 times (which I am sure it is), how do I get to a point where I can see all my bad, unfinished Ubuntu partitions and get rid of them? How do I clean this big mess up? & How can I ensure that this mess will not happen next time I try installing Ubuntu 10.04? Thank you Adam

    Read the article

  • Minecraft flickers sometimes and colors get buggy on an Intel HD Graphics 3000

    - by Oskar
    I really like Ubuntu, but I always had to switch back to Windows just because I couldn't get my Intel HD Graphics 3000 to work. So, 11.10 came out and I'm trying to get things work in this update, so I can finally stay with Ubuntu and use it. Anyways, things seem to be more stable here, but they're still a bit fishy. I'm doing tests with Minecraft. Currently, there's only 1 minor bug. The game flickers from time to time and the colors get buggy or something I read that maybe I should update to kernel 3.1? Maybe 32-bit Ubuntu is better? It was impossible to play Minecraft in 11.04, but 11.10 is so much more stable.

    Read the article

  • Oracle Social Network Developer Challenge: Bezzotech

    - by Kellsey Ruppel
    Originally posted by Jake Kuramoto on The Apps Lab blog. I’ve covered all the entries we had for the Oracle Social Network Developer Challenge, the winners, Dimitri and Martin, HarQen, TEAM Informatics and John Sim from Fishbowl Solutions, and today, I’m giving you bonus coverage. Friend of the ‘Lab, Bex Huff (@bex) from Bezzotech (@bezzotech), had an interesting OpenWorld. He rebounded from an allergic reaction to finish his entry, Honey Badger, only to have his other OpenWorld commitments make him unable to present his work. Still, he did a bunch of work, and I want to make sure everyone knows about the Honey Badger. If you’re wondering about the name, it’s a meme; “honey badger don’t care.” Bex tackled a common problem with social tools by adding game mechanics to create an incentive for people to keep their profiles updated. He used a Hot-or-Not style comparison app that poses expertise questions and awards a badge to the winner. Questions are based on whatever attributes the business wants to emphasize. The goal is to find the mavens in an organization, give them praise and recognition, ideally creating incentive for everyone to raise their games. In his own words: There is a real information quality problem in social networks. In last year’s keynote, Larry Elison demonstrated how to use the social network to track down resources that have the skill sets needed for specific projects. But how well would that work in real life? People usually update that information with the basic profile information, but they rarely update their profiles with latest news items, projects, customers, or skills. It’s a pain. Or, put another way, when was the last time you updated your LinkedIn profile? Enter the Honey Badger! This is a example of a comparator app that gamifies the way people keep their profiles updated, which ensures higher quality data in the social network. An administrator comes up with a series of important questions: Who is a better communicator? Who is a better Java programmer? Who is a better team player? And people would have a space in their profile to give a justification as to why they have these skills. The second part of the app is the comparator. It randomly shows two people, their names, and their justification for why they have these skills. You will click on one of them to “vote” for them, then on the next page you will see the results from the previous match, and get 2 new people to vote on. Anybody with a winning score wins a “Honey Badge” to be displayed on their profile page, which proudly states that their peers agree that this person has those skills. Once a badge is won, it will be jealously guarded. The longer your go without updating your profile, the more likely it is that you will lose your badge. This “loss aversion” is well known in psychology, and is a strong incentive for people to keep their profiles up to date. If a user sees their rank drop from 90% to 60%, they will find the time to update their justification! Unfortunately, during the hackathon we were not allowed to modify the schema to allow for additional fields such as “justification.” So this hack is limited to just the one basic question: who is the bigger Honey Badger? Here are some shots of the Honey Badger application: #gallery-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-1 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } Thanks to Bex and everyone for participating in our challenge. Despite very little time to promote this event, we had a great turnout and creative and useful entries. The amount of work required to put together these final entries was significant, especially during a conference, and the judges and all of us involved were impressed at how much work everyone was able to do. Congrats to everyone, pat yourselves on the back. Stay tuned if you’re interested in challenges like these. We’ll likely be running similar events in the not-so-distant future.

    Read the article

  • Is Python worth learning? Is it a useful tool? [closed]

    - by Kenneth
    I recently had a discussion with a professor of mine on the topic of web development. I had recently decided I would learn python to increase my arsenal of web tools which I mentioned to him at that time. He almost immediately asked why I would waste my time on that. I'm not certain but I think he recently started in on researching and studying web development so he could pick up the web development classes that haven't been taught for a while after the previous professor who taught those classes left. I've heard a lot about python and thought maybe he was mistaken about its usefulness. Is python a useful tool to have? What applications can it be used for? Is it better than other similar alternatives? Does it have useful applications outside of web development as well?

    Read the article

  • Setting up SSO in ADF Security-enabled application

    - by Dmitry Nefedkin
    I'm continuing a series of post/videos regarding  the setting up ADF applications in the real world. This time I'm going to present how to set up Single Sign-On (SSO) and Single Logout (SLO) for ADF application using Oracle Access Manager 11g.  In this 40-min video we are going to explore the following topics: Review the demo environment; Install Oracle HTTP Server 11g (OHS) instance as a reverse proxy for Oracle Weblogic Server; Install OAM 11g Web Gate inside OHS; Modify and redeploy the ADF application for use with OAM; Configure OAM Identity Asserter in ADF domain; Configure single logout (SLO); Test SSO and SLO  

    Read the article

  • Getting Internet Explorer to Open Different Sets of Tabs Based on the Day of the Week

    - by Akemi Iwaya
    If you have to use Internet Explorer for work and need to open a different set of work-specific tabs every day, is there a quick and easy way to do it instead of opening each one individually? Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. The Question SuperUser reader bobSmith1432 is looking for a quick and easy way to open different daily sets of tabs in Internet Explorer for his work: When I open Internet Explorer on different days of the week, I want different tabs to be opened automatically. I have to run different reports for work each day of the week and it takes a lot of time to open the 5-10 tabs I use to run the reports. It would be a lot faster if, when I open Internet Explorer, the tabs I needed would automatically load and be ready. Is there a way to open 5-10 different tabs in Internet Explorer depending on the day of the week? Example: Monday – 6 Accounting Pages Tuesday – 7 Billing Pages Wednesday – 5 HR Pages Thursday – 10 Schedule Pages Friday – 8 Work Summary/Order Pages Is there an easier way for Bob to get all those tabs to load and be ready to go each day instead of opening them individually every time? The Answer SuperUser contributor Julian Knight has a simple, non-script solution for us: Rather than trying the brute force method, how about a work around? Open up each set of tabs either in different windows, or one set at a time, and save all tabs to bookmark folders. Put the folders on the bookmark toolbar for ease of access. Each day, right-click on the appropriate folder and click on ‘Open in tab group’ to open all the tabs. You could put all the day folders into a top-level folder to save space if you want, but at the expense of an extra click to get to them. If you really must go further, you need to write a program or script to drive Internet Explorer. The easiest way is probably writing a PowerShell script. Special Note: There are various scripts shared on the discussion page as well, so the solution shown above is just one possibility out of many. If you love the idea of using scripts for a function like this, then make sure to browse on over to the discussion page to see the various ones SuperUser members have shared! Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.

    Read the article

  • Still no keyboard after uninstalling Ubuntu

    - by Muhammad Rushdi Ibrahim
    I installed Ubuntu 11.04 for the first time yesterday. After rebooting for the first time, I couldn't log in because I couldn't type anything using the keyboard. After rebooting, the keyboard failed completely; I can only automatically boot into Windows since I can't choose Ubuntu. Then the problem got worse. I had to use On-Screen keyboard to log in into Windows. Still no keyboard. When I rebooted, my laptop couldn't reboot at all! I had to hard reboot. I decided to uninstall the Ubuntu, using the Add/Remove program in the Control Panel. I uninstalled it successfully. My laptop automatically boots into Windows without Ubuntu option. However, I still don't have the keyboard! Please help me. Acer Aspire 4935 Windows 7 Ultimate Thanks.

    Read the article

  • When to use shared libraries for a web framework?

    - by CamelBlues
    tl;dr: I've found myself hosting a bunch of sites running on the same web framework (symfony 1.4). Would it be helpful if I moved all of the shared library code into the same directory and shared it across the sites? more I see some advantages to this: Each site takes up less disk space Library updates (an unlikely scenario) can take place across all sites I also see some disadvantages, mostly in terms of a single point of failure and the inability to have sites using different versions of the framework. My real concern, though, is performance. I hypothesize that I will see a performance increase, since the PHP code will already be cached for all sites when they call the framework. Is this a correct hypothesis?

    Read the article

  • WidgetBlock Speeds Up Browsing by Removing Social Media Widgets

    - by Jason Fitzpatrick
    Chrome: If you’re tired of web pages cluttered with social media buttons, WidgetBlock bans the buttons and speeds up the load time of web pages in the process. Even on a snappy internet connection you’ve likely noticed, thanks to the deluge of social media buttons loading in the background, a noticeable lag on popular web sites. WidgetBlock blocks widgets from loading (just like popular ad blocking software blocks ads from loading). The above screenshot, taken from a popular media site, shows just how much screen real estate is taken up by social media widgets. Installing WidgetBlock banishes the social media widgets and speeds load time. Hit up the link below to grab a free copy. WidgetBlock [Chrome Web Store] HTG Explains: When Do You Need to Update Your Drivers? How to Make the Kindle Fire Silk Browser *Actually* Fast! Amazon’s New Kindle Fire Tablet: the How-To Geek Review

    Read the article

  • Is there a viable alternative to the agile development methodology? [closed]

    - by Eric Wilson
    The two predominant software-development methodologies are waterfall and agile. When discussing these two, there is often much focus on the particular practices that distinguish them (pair programming, TDD, etc. vs. functional spec, big up-front design, etc.) But the real differences are far deeper, in that these practices come from a philosophy. Waterfall says: Change is costly, so it should be minimized. Agile says: Change is inevitable, so make change cheap. My question is, regardless of what you think of TDD or functional specs, is the waterfall development methodology really viable? Does anyone really think that minimizing change in software is a viable option for those that desire to deliver valuable software? Or is the question really about what sort of practices work best in our situations to manage the inevitable change?

    Read the article

  • New SSIS features and enhancements in Denali – a webinar on 28th June in association with Pragmatic Works

    - by jamiet
    Tomorrow I shall be presenting a webinar entitled “New SSIS features and enhancements in Denali”. The webinar is being hosted by Pragmatic Works and you can sign up for it at Pragmatic Works webinars. The webinar will start at 1930BST and you can view the time for your timezone at this link: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=New+SSIS+features+and+enhancements+in+Denali&iso=20110628T1830 The webinar was arranged a few months ago and at that time we were hoping that the next Community Technology Preview (CTP) of SQL Server Denali would be available for public consumption; unfortunately it transpires that that is not yet the case and hence I will be presenting new features of CTP1 that was released at the start of this year. If you’re not yet familiar with the new features of SSIS that are coming in the next release of SQL Server then please do come and join the webinar. @Jamiet

    Read the article

  • Game development: “Play Now” via website vs. download & install

    - by Inside
    Heyo, I've spent some time looking over the various threads here on gamedev and also on the regular stackoverflow and while I saw a lot of posts and threads regarding various engines that could be used in game development, I haven't seen very much discussion regarding the various platforms that they can be used on. In particular, I'm talking about browser games vs. desktop games. I want to develop a simple 3D networked multiplayer game - roughly on the graphics level of Paper Mario and gameplay with roughly the same level of interaction as a hack & slash action/adventure game - and I'm having a hard time deciding what platform I want to target with it. I have some experience with using C++/Ogre3D and Python/Panda3D (and also some synchronized/networked programming), but I'm wondering if it's worth it to spend the extra time to learn another language and another engine/toolkit just so that the game can be played in a browser window (I'm looking at jMonkeyEngine right now). For simple & short games the newgrounds approach (go to the site, click "play now", instant gratification) seems to work well. What about for more complex games? Is there a point where the complexity of a game is enough for people to say "ok, I'm going to download and play that"? Is it worth it to go with engines that are less-mature, have less documentation, have fewer features, and smaller communities* just so that a (possibly?) larger audience can be reached? Does it make sense to even go with a web-environment for the kind of game that I want to make? Does anyone have any experiences with decisions like this? Thanks! (* With the exception of flash-based engines it seems like most of the other approaches have these downsides when compared to what is available for desktop-based environments. I'd go with flash, but I'm worried that flash's 3D capabilities aren't mature enough right now to do what I want easily. There's also Unity3D, but I'm not sure how I feel about that at all. It seems highly polished, but requires a plugin to be downloaded for the game to be played -- at that rate I might as well have players download my game.)

    Read the article

  • Designing for mobile (aka designing for everything)

    - by ihaynes
    Last Saturday I went to 'Developer Developer Developer 10' on the Microsoft campus at Reading (UK). This is one of a series of regular events put on by the developer community for the developer community. The guys who organise these events put in a huge amount of time and effort into them and they are well worth getting to if you can.I enjoy these events because there's always something currently relevant but also I can get an insight into things I don't normally come across or work with.Having said that, it's web related things that always grab my attention and this year one of my favourite speakers, George Adamson, gave a session on 'Designing for mobile (aka designing for everything)'. This is a subject close to my heart and I've tried to put the argument forward myself on http://www.ew-resource.co.uk/mobile/ but George makes a far better job of it that I can.His slideshow from the session is available on http://www.slideshare.net/george.adamson and although you won't get his unique presentation style in the static slideshow, this is well worth watching if you have the time.

    Read the article

  • Should I be looking for an alternative to Zen Cart as my business grows?

    - by MarkS
    I created a business website for a family business which is growing. It's my family, and I'm a software developer, but I don't want to rebuild the wheels or be a shopping cart programmer. For this business, I need the web store to "just work", but... it gets complicated... There are two parts of this business website. One of them is driven by Wordpress and I use the awesome Thesis theme. This is modern, flexible, and saves me a lot of time from doing custom coding and styling. I couldn't be more pleased with this arrangement. The other part of the site is a Zen Cart store. It's administration and it's flexibility is frustrating and archaic Web 1.0. For the past few years, I keep hearing that the developers are working on a 2.0 version of Zen Cart, but they haven't communicated anything significant in the past few years other than to say, "When it's ready, we'll let you know." What I'm looking for in a cart, I would need to install 6-10 additional mods, and would need to do a lot of custom coding. I'm now willing to pay for a top-notch e-commerce solution for a small business that we can grow up into a larger business over time. Requirements: Extremely flexible shipping that let's us set up rules per product/category, tables of rates, calculated rates, max package weighs, etc. (flexibility like that available with CEON Advance Shipping Module for Zen Cart Coupons and gift certificates Manual order entry for phone orders Multi-channel support (We also sell on Amazon, eBay, use Google Base and we want to maintain one set of inventory and have it kept current) Decent SEO features Reviews and star-ratings on products Easy social networking features for sharing, following, liking, etc) Easy integration with AdWords and analytics tracking Modern and very usable product and store administration (Like I was saying, I'm spoiled by Wordpress and Thesis) At the end of the day, I don't care if it's a hosted solution or if I have to host it myself. I just want something that is going to stay up-to-date, regularly be maintained and improved, and if I have to update it, things like the one-click update present in Wordpress is something it has to have. Professional Webmasters, if you had to run a store / website, but you had to spend your time focusing on your sales and marketing efforts rather than diffing php files and copying and tweaking them to change even the slightest details of your site, what would you choose?

    Read the article

  • Towards Database Continuous Delivery – What Next after Continuous Integration? A Checklist

    - by Ben Rees
    .dbd-banner p{ font-size:0.75em; padding:0 0 10px; margin:0 } .dbd-banner p span{ color:#675C6D; } .dbd-banner p:last-child{ padding:0; } @media ALL and (max-width:640px){ .dbd-banner{ background:#f0f0f0; padding:5px; color:#333; margin-top: 5px; } } -- Database delivery patterns & practices STAGE 4 AUTOMATED DEPLOYMENT If you’ve been fortunate enough to get to the stage where you’ve implemented some sort of continuous integration process for your database updates, then hopefully you’re seeing the benefits of that investment – constant feedback on changes your devs are making, advanced warning of data loss (prior to the production release on Saturday night!), a nice suite of automated tests to check business logic, so you know it’s going to work when it goes live, and so on. But what next? What can you do to improve your delivery process further, moving towards a full continuous delivery process for your database? In this article I describe some of the issues you might need to tackle on the next stage of this journey, and how to plan to overcome those obstacles before they appear. Our Database Delivery Learning Program consists of four stages, really three – source controlling a database, running continuous integration processes, then how to set up automated deployment (the middle stage is split in two – basic and advanced continuous integration, making four stages in total). If you’ve managed to work through the first three of these stages – source control, basic, then advanced CI, then you should have a solid change management process set up where, every time one of your team checks in a change to your database (whether schema or static reference data), this change gets fully tested automatically by your CI server. But this is only part of the story. Great, we know that our updates work, that the upgrade process works, that the upgrade isn’t going to wipe our 4Tb of production data with a single DROP TABLE. But – how do you get this (fully tested) release live? Continuous delivery means being always ready to release your software at any point in time. There’s a significant gap between your latest version being tested, and it being easily releasable. Just a quick note on terminology – there’s a nice piece here from Atlassian on the difference between continuous integration, continuous delivery and continuous deployment. This piece also gives a nice description of the benefits of continuous delivery. These benefits have been summed up by Jez Humble at Thoughtworks as: “Continuous delivery is a set of principles and practices to reduce the cost, time, and risk of delivering incremental changes to users” There’s another really useful piece here on Simple-Talk about the need for continuous delivery and how it applies to the database written by Phil Factor – specifically the extra needs and complexities of implementing a full CD solution for the database (compared to just implementing CD for, say, a web app). So, hopefully you’re convinced of moving on the the next stage! The next step after CI is to get some sort of automated deployment (or “release management”) process set up. But what should I do next? What do I need to plan and think about for getting my automated database deployment process set up? Can’t I just install one of the many release management tools available and hey presto, I’m ready! If only it were that simple. Below I list some of the areas that it’s worth spending a little time on, where a little planning and prep could go a long way. It’s also worth pointing out, that this should really be an evolving process. Depending on your starting point of course, it can be a long journey from your current setup to a full continuous delivery pipeline. If you’ve got a CI mechanism in place, you’re certainly a long way down that path. Nevertheless, we’d recommend evolving your process incrementally. Pages 157 and 129-141 of the book on Continuous Delivery (by Jez Humble and Dave Farley) have some great guidance on building up a pipeline incrementally: http://www.amazon.com/Continuous-Delivery-Deployment-Automation-Addison-Wesley/dp/0321601912 For now, in this post, we’ll look at the following areas for your checklist: You and Your Team Environments The Deployment Process Rollback and Recovery Development Practices You and Your Team It’s a cliché in the DevOps community that “It’s not all about processes and tools, really it’s all about a culture”. As stated in this DevOps report from Puppet Labs: “DevOps processes and tooling contribute to high performance, but these practices alone aren’t enough to achieve organizational success. The most common barriers to DevOps adoption are cultural: lack of manager or team buy-in, or the value of DevOps isn’t understood outside of a specific group”. Like most clichés, there’s truth in there – if you want to set up a database continuous delivery process, you need to get your boss, your department, your company (if relevant) onside. Why? Because it’s an investment with the benefits coming way down the line. But the benefits are huge – for HP, in the book A Practical Approach to Large-Scale Agile Development: How HP Transformed LaserJet FutureSmart Firmware, these are summarized as: -2008 to present: overall development costs reduced by 40% -Number of programs under development increased by 140% -Development costs per program down 78% -Firmware resources now driving innovation increased by a factor of 8 (from 5% working on new features to 40% But what does this mean? It means that, when moving to the next stage, to make that extra investment in automating your deployment process, it helps a lot if everyone is convinced that this is a good thing. That they understand the benefits of automated deployment and are willing to make the effort to transform to a new way of working. Incidentally, if you’re ever struggling to convince someone of the value I’d strongly recommend just buying them a copy of this book – a great read, and a very practical guide to how it can really work at a large org. I’ve spoken to many customers who have implemented database CI who describe their deployment process as “The point where automation breaks down. Up to that point, the CI process runs, untouched by human hand, but as soon as that’s finished we revert to manual.” This deployment process can involve, for example, a DBA manually comparing an environment (say, QA) to production, creating the upgrade scripts, reading through them, checking them against an Excel document emailed to him/her the night before, turning to page 29 in his/her notebook to double-check how replication is switched off and on for deployments, and so on and so on. Painful, error-prone and lengthy. But the point is, if this is something like your deployment process, telling your DBA “We’re changing everything you do and your toolset next week, to automate most of your role – that’s okay isn’t it?” isn’t likely to go down well. There’s some work here to bring him/her onside – to explain what you’re doing, why there will still be control of the deployment process and so on. Or of course, if you’re the DBA looking after this process, you have to do a similar job in reverse. You may have researched and worked out how you’d like to change your methodology to start automating your painful release process, but do the dev team know this? What if they have to start producing different artifacts for you? Will they be happy with this? Worth talking to them, to find out. As well as talking to your DBA/dev team, the other group to get involved before implementation is your manager. And possibly your manager’s manager too. As mentioned, unless there’s buy-in “from the top”, you’re going to hit problems when the implementation starts to get rocky (and what tool/process implementations don’t get rocky?!). You need to have support from someone senior in your organisation – someone you can turn to when you need help with a delayed implementation, lack of resources or lack of progress. Actions: Get your DBA involved (or whoever looks after live deployments) and discuss what you’re planning to do or, if you’re the DBA yourself, get the dev team up-to-speed with your plans, Get your boss involved too and make sure he/she is bought in to the investment. Environments Where are you going to deploy to? And really this question is – what environments do you want set up for your deployment pipeline? Assume everyone has “Production”, but do you have a QA environment? Dedicated development environments for each dev? Proper pre-production? I’ve seen every setup under the sun, and there is often a big difference between “What we want, to do continuous delivery properly” and “What we’re currently stuck with”. Some of these differences are: What we want What we’ve got Each developer with their own dedicated database environment A single shared “development” environment, used by everyone at once An Integration box used to test the integration of all check-ins via the CI process, along with a full suite of unit-tests running on that machine In fact if you have a CI process running, you’re likely to have some sort of integration server running (even if you don’t call it that!). Whether you have a full suite of unit tests running is a different question… Separate QA environment used explicitly for manual testing prior to release “We just test on the dev environments, or maybe pre-production” A proper pre-production (or “staging”) box that matches production as closely as possible Hopefully a pre-production box of some sort. But does it match production closely!? A production environment reproducible from source control A production box which has drifted significantly from anything in source control The big question is – how much time and effort are you going to invest in fixing these issues? In reality this just involves figuring out which new databases you’re going to create and where they’ll be hosted – VMs? Cloud-based? What about size/data issues – what data are you going to include on dev environments? Does it need to be masked to protect access to production data? And often the amount of work here really depends on whether you’re working on a new, greenfield project, or trying to update an existing, brownfield application. There’s a world if difference between starting from scratch with 4 or 5 clean environments (reproducible from source control of course!), and trying to re-purpose and tweak a set of existing databases, with all of their surrounding processes and quirks. But for a proper release management process, ideally you have: Dedicated development databases, An Integration server used for testing continuous integration and running unit tests. [NB: This is the point at which deployments are automatic, without human intervention. Each deployment after this point is a one-click (but human) action], QA – QA engineers use a one-click deployment process to automatically* deploy chosen releases to QA for testing, Pre-production. The environment you use to test the production release process, Production. * A note on the use of the word “automatic” – when carrying out automated deployments this does not mean that the deployment is happening without human intervention (i.e. that something is just deploying over and over again). It means that the process of carrying out the deployment is automatic in that it’s not a person manually running through a checklist or set of actions. The deployment still requires a single-click from a user. Actions: Get your environments set up and ready, Set access permissions appropriately, Make sure everyone understands what the environments will be used for (it’s not a “free-for-all” with all environments to be accessed, played with and changed by development). The Deployment Process As described earlier, most existing database deployment processes are pretty manual. The following is a description of a process we hear very often when we ask customers “How do your database changes get live? How does your manual process work?” Check pre-production matches production (use a schema compare tool, like SQL Compare). Sometimes done by taking a backup from production and restoring in to pre-prod, Again, use a schema compare tool to find the differences between the latest version of the database ready to go live (i.e. what the team have been developing). This generates a script, User (generally, the DBA), reviews the script. This often involves manually checking updates against a spreadsheet or similar, Run the script on pre-production, and check there are no errors (i.e. it upgrades pre-production to what you hoped), If all working, run the script on production.* * this assumes there’s no problem with production drifting away from pre-production in the interim time period (i.e. someone has hacked something in to the production box without going through the proper change management process). This difference could undermine the validity of your pre-production deployment test. Red Gate is currently working on a free tool to detect this problem – sign up here at www.sqllighthouse.com, if you’re interested in testing early versions. There are several variations on this process – some better, some much worse! How do you automate this? In particular, step 3 – surely you can’t automate a DBA checking through a script, that everything is in order!? The key point here is to plan what you want in your new deployment process. There are so many options. At one extreme, pure continuous deployment – whenever a dev checks something in to source control, the CI process runs (including extensive and thorough testing!), before the deployment process keys in and automatically deploys that change to the live box. Not for the faint hearted – and really not something we recommend. At the other extreme, you might be more comfortable with a semi-automated process – the pre-production/production matching process is automated (with an error thrown if these environments don’t match), followed by a manual intervention, allowing for script approval by the DBA. One he/she clicks “Okay, I’m happy for that to go live”, the latter stages automatically take the script through to live. And anything in between of course – and other variations. But we’d strongly recommended sitting down with a whiteboard and your team, and spending a couple of hours mapping out “What do we do now?”, “What do we actually want?”, “What will satisfy our needs for continuous delivery, but still maintaining some sort of continuous control over the process?” NB: Most of what we’re discussing here is about production deployments. It’s important to note that you will also need to map out a deployment process for earlier environments (for example QA). However, these are likely to be less onerous, and many customers opt for a much more automated process for these boxes. Actions: Sit down with your team and a whiteboard, and draw out the answers to the questions above for your production deployments – “What do we do now?”, “What do we actually want?”, “What will satisfy our needs for continuous delivery, but still maintaining some sort of continuous control over the process?” Repeat for earlier environments (QA and so on). Rollback and Recovery If only every deployment went according to plan! Unfortunately they don’t – and when things go wrong, you need a rollback or recovery plan for what you’re going to do in that situation. Once you move in to a more automated database deployment process, you’re far more likely to be deploying more frequently than before. No longer once every 6 months, maybe now once per week, or even daily. Hence the need for a quick rollback or recovery process becomes paramount, and should be planned for. NB: These are mainly scenarios for handling rollbacks after the transaction has been committed. If a failure is detected during the transaction, the whole transaction can just be rolled back, no problem. There are various options, which we’ll explore in subsequent articles, things like: Immediately restore from backup, Have a pre-tested rollback script (remembering that really this is a “roll-forward” script – there’s not really such a thing as a rollback script for a database!) Have fallback environments – for example, using a blue-green deployment pattern. Different options have pros and cons – some are easier to set up, some require more investment in infrastructure; and of course some work better than others (the key issue with using backups, is loss of the interim transaction data that has been added between the failed deployment and the restore). The best mechanism will be primarily dependent on how your application works and how much you need a cast-iron failsafe mechanism. Actions: Work out an appropriate rollback strategy based on how your application and business works, your appetite for investment and requirements for a completely failsafe process. Development Practices This is perhaps the more difficult area for people to tackle. The process by which you can deploy database updates is actually intrinsically linked with the patterns and practices used to develop that database and linked application. So you need to decide whether you want to implement some changes to the way your developers actually develop the database (particularly schema changes) to make the deployment process easier. A good example is the pattern “Branch by abstraction”. Explained nicely here, by Martin Fowler, this is a process that can be used to make significant database changes (e.g. splitting a table) in a step-wise manner so that you can always roll back, without data loss – by making incremental updates to the database backward compatible. Slides 103-108 of the following slidedeck, from Niek Bartholomeus explain the process: https://speakerdeck.com/niekbartho/orchestration-in-meatspace As these slides show, by making a significant schema change in multiple steps – where each step can be rolled back without any loss of new data – this affords the release team the opportunity to have zero-downtime deployments with considerably less stress (because if an increment goes wrong, they can roll back easily). There are plenty more great patterns that can be implemented – the book Refactoring Databases, by Scott Ambler and Pramod Sadalage is a great read, if this is a direction you want to go in: http://www.amazon.com/Refactoring-Databases-Evolutionary-paperback-Addison-Wesley/dp/0321774515 But the question is – how much of this investment are you willing to make? How often are you making significant schema changes that would require these best practices? Again, there’s a difference here between migrating old projects and starting afresh – with the latter it’s much easier to instigate best practice from the start. Actions: For your business, work out how far down the path you want to go, amending your database development patterns to “best practice”. It’s a trade-off between implementing quality processes, and the necessity to do so (depending on how often you make complex changes). Socialise these changes with your development group. No-one likes having “best practice” changes imposed on them, so good to introduce these ideas and the rationale behind them early.   Summary The next stages of implementing a continuous delivery pipeline for your database changes (once you have CI up and running) require a little pre-planning, if you want to get the most out of the work, and for the implementation to go smoothly. We’ve covered some of the checklist of areas to consider – mainly in the areas of “Getting the team ready for the changes that are coming” and “Planning our your pipeline, environments, patterns and practices for development”, though there will be more detail, depending on where you’re coming from – and where you want to get to. This article is part of our database delivery patterns & practices series on Simple Talk. Find more articles for version control, automated testing, continuous integration & deployment.

    Read the article

  • Polishing the MonologFX API

    - by HecklerMark
    Earlier this week, I released "into the wild" a new JavaFX 2.x dialog library, MonologFX, that incorporated some elements of DialogFX and new features I'd been working on over time. While I did try to get the API to a point of reasonable completion (nothing is ever truly "finished", of course!), there was one bit of functionality that I'd included without providing any real "polish": that of the button icons. Good friend and fellow JFXtras teammate José Pereda Llamas suggested I fix that oversight and provide an update (thanks much, José!), thus this post. If you'd like to take a peek at the new streamlined syntax, I've updated the earlier post; please click here if you'd like to review it. If you want to give MonologFX a try, just point your browser to GitHub to download the updated code and/or .jar. All the best,Mark

    Read the article

  • How to track events or e-commerce sales that occur later using Google Analytics?

    - by Anton
    Here's my problem: I have a static site with Google Analytics tracking code. To buy one of my services, users call me, and when their order is ready (many days later), I send them an e-mail link to a special page (download.php) where I have GA tracking code that is executed the first time they visit, so I track a "sale". The issue is, GA thinks that "sale" was a separate visit, and erroneously shows that only direct visits to my site result in sales. I don't understand how I can view stats (Pages / Visit, Avg. Time on Site, etc.) about users who eventually bought something. I've tried events and e-commerce tracking with no luck. Please help!

    Read the article

  • Massive Minecraft Creation Is a Functional Graphing Calculator

    - by Jason Fitzpatrick
    We’re no stranger to cool Minecraft creations, but this project takes Minecraft design to a whole new level. An industrious teen has built functional graphing calculator out of Minecraft blocks. It’s an absolutely enormous project that, if constructed in real life instead of in a virtual Minecraft space, would loom over a city. To fully appreciate how much ingenuity and effort went into the project, we’d suggest hitting up the comments over at Slashdot where commenters discuss the numerous obstacles and design tricks he would have needed to overcome and employ to pull the project off. [via Slashdot] What’s the Difference Between Sleep and Hibernate in Windows? Screenshot Tour: XBMC 11 Eden Rocks Improved iOS Support, AirPlay, and Even a Custom XBMC OS How To Be Your Own Personal Clone Army (With a Little Photoshop)

    Read the article

  • Introducing UPK 3.6 Simulation Help (You Say It and We Do It!)

    - by kathryn.lustenberger(at)oracle.com
    We would like to thank everyone that participated in the recent documentation survey that was conducted over the last several months. Your feedback is valuable and we appreciate the time you took to provide it. Many of you commented that you would like to have "UPKs for UPK" in the documentation. In response, we are pleased to announce the availability of Simulation Help. This unique help system is a blending of the text-based Developer help and a collection of approximately 200 simulations that show authors how to create, record, refine, localize, and publish content using the Developer. You can access Simulation Help at any time using the following link: http://download.oracle.com/technology/products/upk/index.html Save this link as a favorite or bookmark in your browser for easy access anytime. We have also provided a link to a short one-question survey so you can tell us what you think of the new Simulation Help. http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/BJT7LV6 Thanks again for your valuable feedback on the product documentation!

    Read the article

  • Introducing UPK 3.6 Simulation Help (You Say It and We Do It!)

    - by marc.santosusso
    We would like to thank everyone that participated in the recent documentation survey that was conducted over the last several months. Your feedback is valuable and we appreciate the time you took to provide it. Many of you commented that you would like to have "UPKs for UPK" in the documentation. In response, we are pleased to announce the availability of Simulation Help. This unique help system is a blending of the text-based Developer help and a collection of approximately 200 simulations that show authors how to create, record, refine, localize, and publish content using the Developer. You can access Simulation Help at any time using the following link: http://download.oracle.com/technology/products/upk/index.html Save this link as a favorite or bookmark in your browser for easy access anytime. We have also provided a link to a short one-question survey so you can tell us what you think of the new Simulation Help. http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/BJT7LV6 Thanks again for your valuable feedback on the product documentation!

    Read the article

  • Ask the Readers: Are You A Second Screen Multi-tasker?

    - by Jason Fitzpatrick
    Television watchers are no longer keeping their eyes continuously glued to the screen–increasingly smartphone, tablet, and laptop users have merged their mobile device and television time. Are you one of the second screen multi-taskers? Image courtesy of Umani, a TV-companion application for iPad. According to Nielsen user surveys, at least 80% of mobile device owners have used their device while watching television in the past month–27% said they use their mobile device alongside the television multiple times a day. What the survey results are light on, however, is an in depth look at what the users are doing with their second screen. This week we want to hear about whether or not you’re one of the second screen multi-taskers and what you use your mobile device for during your television/movie time. Sound off in the comments and then check back in on Friday for the What You Said roundup. How to Get Pro Features in Windows Home Versions with Third Party Tools HTG Explains: Is ReadyBoost Worth Using? HTG Explains: What The Windows Event Viewer Is and How You Can Use It

    Read the article

  • ACE a Session at Oracle OpenWorld

    - by Oracle OpenWorld Blog Team
    By Bob Rhubart Oracle ACE Sessions at Oracle OpenWorldAs you're finalizing your Oracle OpenWorld travel plans and taking advantage of Schedule Builder to plan your week in San Francisco, make sure you add some Oracle ACE sessions to your schedule."What's an Oracle ACE?" you ask. Members of the Oracle ACE Program are the most active members of the Oracle community, frequently sharing their substantial insights and real-world expertise with Oracle technologies through articles, blogs, social networks, and as presenters at Oracle OpenWorld and other events.With so many great sessions at this year's event, building your schedule can involve making a lot of tough choices. But you'll find that the sessions led by Oracle ACEs will be the icing on the cake of your Oracle OpenWorld content experience.To see a full list of Oracle ACE sessions at Oracle OpenWorld and other Oracle conferences that same week, check out this blog post that lists them all.

    Read the article

facebook twitter digg google delicious technorati stumbleupon myspace wordpress linkedin gmail igoogle windows live tumblr viadeo yahoo buzz yahoo mail yahoo bookmarks favorites email print

< Previous Page | 471 472 473 474 475 476 477 478 479 480 481 482  | Next Page >