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  • A brief introduction to BRM and architecture

    - by Yani Miguel
    Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management (Oracle BRM) is the telcos industry´s leading solution intended for communications service providers. This post encourages to know BRM starting with the basics. History Portal was a billing and revenue managament solution to communications industry created by Portal Software. In 2006 Oracle acquired Portal Software and the solution was renamed BRM. Today Oracle BRM is the first end-to-end packaged enterprise software suite for the communications industry, however BRM is just one more product in the catalog of OSS solutions that Oracle offers. BRM can bill and manage all communications services including wireline, wireless, broadband, cable, voice over IP, IPTV, music, and video. BRM Architecture BRM´s architecture consists of 4 layers or tiers. Through these layers are the data, bussines logic and interfaces to connect graphical client tools.Application tier This layer provides GUI client tools enabling communication to other layers through open APIs. Some BRM client applications are: Customer Center Pricing Center Universal Event Loader Web Server BRM Billing Application Collections Center Permissioning Center Furthermore, this layer is where are provided real-time external events. Bussines Process Tier Although all layers are equally important, I think it deserves more atention because in this tier BRM functionality is implemented. All functions that give life to BRM are in this layer coded in C language called Opcodes (System Processes in the image). Any changes or additional functionality should be made here, so when we try to customize the product, we will most of the time programming in this layer (Business Policies in the image).Bussines Process Tier Features: Implements Portal system functionalityValidates data from the application tierModifies Portal behavior through business policies. Business policies can by customized.Triggers external systems using event notification. Object Tier This layer is responsible for transfer the BRM requests into database language and translate BRM requests into external system requests. Without it, the business logic (data from Bussines Process Tier) could not be understood by the relational database. Data tier Data tier is responsable for the storage of BRM database and other external systems databases. External systems include credit card, tax, and directory servers. Finally, It's important to note that BRM is designed to easily integrate with the following solutions:AIA 2.4 Siebel CRM E-Business Suite - G/L onlyCommunications Services Gatekeeper Oracle BI Publisher. Personally, I think that BRM could improve migrating client-server architecture to a fully web platform that works with Oracle Middleware like any product of the Fusion Middleware family. Hopefully there are already initiatives in this area.

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  • At most how many customized P3 attributes could be added into Agile?

    - by Jie Chen
    I have one customer/Oracle Partner Consultant asking me such question: how many customized attributes can be allowed to add to Agile's subclass Page Three? I never did research against this because Agile User Guide never says this and theoretically Agile supports unlimited amount of customized attributes, unless the browser itself cannot handle them in allocated memory. However my customers says when to add almost 1000 attributes, the browser (Web Client) will not show any Page Three attributes, including all the out-of-box attributes. Let's see why. Analysis It is horrible to add 1000 attributes manually. Let's do it by a batch SQL like below to add them to Item's subclass Page Three tab. Do not execute below SQL because it will not take effect due to your different node id. CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE createP3Text(v_name IN VARCHAR2) IS v_nid NUMBER; v_pid NUMBER; BEGIN select SEQNODETABLE.nextval into v_nid from dual; Insert Into nodeTable ( id,parentID,description,objType,inherit,helpID,version,name ) values ( v_nid,2473003, v_name ,1,0,0,0, v_name); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,0,2,1,0,1,925, null); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,1,0,0,0,0,1,'0'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,1,0,0,0,0,2,'0'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,1,2,2,0,1,3,'50'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,0,2,1,0,1,5, null); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,0,2,2,0,1,6,'50'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,0,2,2,0,0,7,'0'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,0,4,1,451,1,8,'0'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,0,4,1,451,1,9,'1'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,1,2,1,0,1,10,v_name); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,1,0,0,0,0,11,'0'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,1,4,1,11743,1,14,'2'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,0,2,1,0,1,30, null); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,0,2,1,0,1,38, null); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,1,4,1,451,0,59,'1'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,1,4,1,451,0,60,'1'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,1,4,1,724,0,61, null); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,1,2,1,0,0,232,'0'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,1,4,1,451,0,233,'1'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,0,4,1,12239,1,415,'13307'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,1,2,1,0,0,605,'0'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,0,4,1,451,1,610,'0'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,1,4,1,451,0,716,'1'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,0,4,1,451,1,795,'0'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,0,4,1,2000008821,1,864,'2'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,0,4,1,451,1,923,'0'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,0,4,1,451,0,719,'0'); Insert Into tableInfo ( tabID,tableID,classID,att,ordering ) values ( 2473005,1501,2473002,v_nid,9999); commit; END createP3Text; / BEGIN FOR i in 1..1000 LOOP createP3Text('MyText' || i); END LOOP; END; / DROP PROCEDURE createP3Text; COMMIT; Now restart Agile Server and check the Server's log, we noticed below: ***** Node Created : 85625 ***** Property Created : 184579 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ + Agile PLM Server Starting Up... + +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ However the previously log before batch SQL is ***** Node Created : 84625 ***** Property Created : 157579 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ + Agile PLM Server Starting Up... + +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Obviously we successfully imported 1000 (85625-84625) attributes. Now go to JavaClient and confirm if we have them or not. Theoretically we are able to open such item object and see all these 1000 attributes and their values, but we get below error. We have no error tips in server log. But never mind we have the Java Console for JavaClient. If to open the same item in JavaClient we get a clear error and detailed trace in Java Console. ORA-01795: maximum number of expressions in a list is 1000 java.sql.SQLException: ORA-01795: maximum number of expressions in a list is 1000 at oracle.jdbc.driver.DatabaseError.throwSqlException(DatabaseError.java:125) ... ... at weblogic.jdbc.wrapper.PreparedStatement.executeQuery(PreparedStatement.java:128) at com.agile.pc.cmserver.base.AgileFlexUtil.setFlexValuesForOneRowTable(AgileFlexUtil.java:1104) at com.agile.pc.cmserver.base.BaseFlexTableDAO.loadExtraFlexAttValues(BaseFlexTableDAO.java:111) at com.agile.pc.cmserver.base.BasePageThreeDAO.loadTable(BasePageThreeDAO.java:108) If you are interested in the background of the problem, you may de-compile the class com.agile.pc.cmserver.base.AgileFlexUtil.setFlexValuesForOneRowTable and find the root cause that Agile happens to hit Oracle Database's limitation that more than 1000 values in the "IN" clause. Check here http://ora-01795.ora-code.com If you need Oracle Agile's final solution, please contact Oracle Agile Support. Performance Below two screenshot are jvm heap usage from before-SQL and after-SQL. We can see there is no big memory gap between two cases. So definitely there is no performance impact to Agile Application Server unless you have more than 1000 attributes for EACH of your dozens of  subclasses. And for client, 1000 attributes should not impact the browser's performance because in HTML we only use dt and dd for each attribute's pair: label and value. It is quite lightweight.

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  • Should I choose Doctrine 2 or Propel 1.5/1.6, and why?

    - by Billy ONeal
    I'd like to hear from those who have used Doctrine 2 (or later) and Propel 1.5 (or later). Most comparisons between these two object relational mappers are based on old versions -- Doctrine 1 versus Propel 1.3/1.4, and both ORMs went through significant redesigns in their recent revisions. For example, most of the criticism of Propel seems to center around the "ModelName Peer" classes, which are deprecated in 1.5 in any case. Here's what I've accumulated so far (And I've tried to make this list as balanced as possible...): Propel Pros Extremely IDE friendly, because actual code is generated, instead of relying on PHP magic methods. This means IDE features like code completion are actually helpful. Fast (In terms of database usage -- no runtime introspection is done on the database) Clean migration between schema versions (at least in the 1.6 beta) Can generate PHP 5.3 models (i.e. namespaces) Easy to chain a lot of things into a single database query with things like useXxx methods. (See the "code completion" video above) Cons Requires an extra build step, namely building the model classes. Generated code needs rebuilt whenever Propel version is changed, a setting is changed, or the schema changes. This might be unintuitive to some and custom methods applied to the model are lost. (I think?) Some useful features (i.e. version behavior, schema migrations) are in beta status. Doctrine Pros More popular Doctrine Query Language can express potentially more complicated relationships between data than easily possible with Propel's ActiveRecord strategy. Easier to add reusable behaviors when compared with Propel. DocBlock based commenting for building the schema is embedded in the actual PHP instead of a separate XML file. Uses PHP 5.3 Namespaces everywhere Cons Requires learning an entirely new programming language (Doctrine Query Language) Implemented in terms of "magic methods" in several places, making IDE autocomplete worthless. Requires database introspection and thus is slightly slower than Propel by default; caching can remove this but the caching adds considerable complexity. Fewer behaviors are included in the core codebase. Several features Propel provides out of the box (such as Nested Set) are available only through extensions. Freakin' HUGE :) This I have gleaned though only through reading the documentation available for both tools -- I've not actually built anything yet. I'd like to hear from those who have used both tools though, to share their experience on pros/cons of each library, and what their recommendation is at this point :)

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  • Automated build platform for .NET portfolio - best choice?

    - by jkohlhepp
    I am involved with maintaining a fairly large portfolio of .NET applications. Also in the portfolio are legacy applications built on top of other platforms - native C++, ECLIPS Forms, etc. I have a complex build framework on top of NAnt right now that manages the builds for all of these applications. The build framework uses NAnt to do a number of different things: Pull code out of Subversion, as well as create tags in Subversion Build the code, using MSBuild for .NET or other compilers for other platforms Peek inside AssemblyInfo files to increment version numbers Do deletes of certain files that shouldn't be included in builds / releases Releases code to deployment folders Zips code up for backup purposes Deploy Windows services; start and stop them Etc. Most of those things can be done with just NAnt by itself, but we did build a couple of extension tasks for NAnt to do some things that were specific to our environment. Also, most of those processes above are genericized and reused across a lot of our different application build scripts, so that we don't repeat logic. So it is not simple NAnt code, and not simple build scripts. There are dozens of NAnt files that come together to execute a build. Lately I've been dissatisfied with NAnt for a couple reasons: (1) it's syntax is just awful - programming languages on top of XML are really horrific to maintain, (2) the project seems to have died on the vine; there haven't been a ton of updates lately and it seems like no one is really at the helm. Trying to get it working with .NET 4 has cause some pain points due to this lack of activity. So, with all of that background out of the way, here's my question. Given some of the things that I want to accomplish based on that list above, and given that I am primarily in a .NET shop, but I also need to build non-.NET projects, is there an alternative to NAnt that I should consider switching to? Things on my radar include Powershell (with or without psake), MSBuild by itself, and rake. These all have pros and cons. For example, is MSBuild powerful enough? I remember using it years ago and it didn't seem to have as much power as NAnt. Do I really want to have my team learn Ruby just to do builds using rake? Is psake really mature enough of a project to pin my portfolio to? Is Powershell "too close to the metal" and I'll end up having to write my own build library akin to psake to use it on its own? Are there other tools that I should consider? If you were involved with maintaining a .NET portfolio of significant complexity, what build tool would you be looking at? What does your team currently use?

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  • Visual Studio 2010 RC &ndash; Silverlight 4 and WCF RIA Services Development - Updates from MIX Anno

    - by Harish Ranganathan
    MIX is happening and there is a lot of excitement around the various releases such as the Windows Phone 7 Developer Preview, IE9 Platform Preview and few other announcements that have been made.  Clearly, the Windows Phone 7 Developer Preview has generated the maximum interest and opened a plethora of opportunities for .NET Developers.  It also takes the mobile development to a new generation and doesn’t force developers to learn different programming language. Along with this, few other releases have been out.  The most anticipated Silverlight 4 RC is out and its corresponding templates are also out there for you to download.  Once VS 2010 RC was released, it was much of a disappointment that it doesn’t support SL4 development as well as the SL4 Business Application Development (a.k.a. WCF RIA Services).   There were few workarounds though nothing concrete.  Earlier I had written about how the WCF RIA Services Preview does work with ASP.NET Development using VS 2010 RC. However, with the release of SL4 RC and the corresponding tooling updates, one can develop for both SL4 as well as SL4 + WCF RIA Services using VS 2010 RC.  This is kind of important and keeps the continuum going until VS 2010 RTMs.  So, the purpose of this post is to quickly give the updates and links to install the relevant tools. Silverlight 4 RC Runtime Windows Runtime or the Mac Runtime Silverlight 4 RC Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2010 RC Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 (this would install the Runtime as well automatically) Expression Blend 4 Beta Expression Blend 4 Beta If you install the SL4 RC Developer Tools, it also installs the WCF RIA Services Preview automatically.  You just need to install the WCF RIA Services Toolkit that can be downloaded from Install the WCF RIA Services Toolkit Of course you can also just install the WCF RIA Services for VS 2010 RC separately (without SL4 Tools) from here Kindly note, all the above mentioned links are with respect to Visual Studio 2010 RC edition.  If you are developing with VS 2008, then you can just target SL3 (as I write this, there seems to be no official support for developing SL4 with VS 2008) and the related tools can be downloaded from http://www.silverlight.net/getstarted/ Basically you need to download SL 3 Runtime, SDK, Expression Blend 3 and the Silverlight Toolkit.  All the links for the download are available in the above mentioned page. Also, a version of WCF RIA Services that is supported in VS 2008 is available for download at WCF RIA Services Beta for VS 2008 I know there are far too many things to keep in mind.  So, I put a flowchart that could help with depicting it pictorial.  Note that this is just my own imagination and doesn’t cover all scenarios.  for example, if you are neither developing for Webform, Silverlight, you end up nowhere whereas in actual scenario you may want to develop Desktop, Services, Console, Game and what not.  So, keep in mind this is just Web. Cheers !!!

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  • Play Thousands of Online Radio Stations with Shoutcast in VLC

    - by DigitalGeekery
    Are you looking for more variety from your radio stations? Today we’ll take a look at how to easily stream thousands of radio stations to your desktop with VLC media player. Getting Started Select Media from the menu, go to Services Discovery, and click Shoutcast radio listings.   Next, select View from the menu and click Playlist.   Or, click on the Show Playlist button In the Playlist window, click on Shoutcast radio listings in the left pane. You should then see a very long list of Titles displayed on the right. Scroll though the list to find a music genre or topic that interests you. Double-click to expand the list of station options. Select one of the channel listings from the list and double click to begin playing.   Looking for a specific station? Type a search term into the search filter box to see if it is available.   That’s it. Sit back and enjoy listening to your favorite Internet radio programming. If you are a music or talk radio fan, you aren’t likely to run out of listening options in VLC. Want to find some more uses for VLC? Check out our articles on how to copy a DVD, convert video files to MP3, and how to set a video as your desktop wallpaper. Download VLC Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Listen to Over 100,000 Radio Stations in Windows Media CenterListen to Local FM Radio in Windows 7 Media CenterListen and Record Over 12,000 Online Radio Stations with RadioSureGeek Reviews: Play And Record Internet Radio With Screamer RadioWeekend Fun: Watch Television on Your PC with AnyTV TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 Zoofs, find the most popular tweeted YouTube videos Video preview of new Windows Live Essentials 21 Cursor Packs for XP, Vista & 7 Map the Stars with Stellarium Use ILovePDF To Split and Merge PDF Files TimeToMeet is a Simple Online Meeting Planning Tool

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  • SQLAuthority News – Updates on Contests, Books and SQL Server

    - by pinaldave
    There are lots of things happening on this blog and I feel sometime it is difficult to keep up. One of the suggestion I keep on receiving if there is a single page where one can visit and know the updates. I did consider of the same at some point but in era of RSS Feed it is difficult to have proper audience to that page. Here are few updates on various contest and books give away in recent time. Combo set of 5 Joes 2 Pros Book – 1 for YOU and 1 for Friend – I have received so many entries for this contest. Many have sent me email asking if this contest can be extended by couple of days. For the same the deadline for this contest is now Nov 10th 7 AM. You can send your entries by that time. The prize is 2 combo set of Joes 2 Pros is of USD 444. If you have not take part in the contest please take part now. Guess What is in the box? – There were many entry for this contest. We played this contest on blog as well, facebook. The answer of this contest was announced in 2 days in blog post announcing my new book. The winner was Manas Dash from Bangalore. He answered “The box will contain SQL book authored by Vinod and Pinal”. This was the closest answer we received. Win 5 SQL Programming Book Contest will have winner announced by Nov 15th and winners will be sent email. Win 5 SQL Wait Stats Book Contest is closed and winners have been sent their award. My third book SQL Server Interview Questions and Answers have run out of stock in India in 36 hours of its launch. We are working very hard to make it available again. Thank you again for excellent support! Without your participation all the give away have no significance. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: About Me, Pinal Dave, PostADay, Readers Contribution, Readers Question, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Puzzle, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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  • JavaScript in different browsers

    - by PointsToShare
    Adventures with JavaScript rendered in IE 8, Chrome 15, and Firefox 8.0 I have written a little monogram about the advantages of Math and wrote a few JavaScript applications to demonstrate them. I was a bit careless and used elements on the page in my JavaScript without using any of the GetElementsByXXXX methods to identify them.  Say I had a text box named tbSeqNum into which I entered a number to be used in a computation. In my code I simply referred to its value by using it directly. Like here: Function Blah() {                 return tbSeqNum.value; } This ran fine in IE8. In IE, the elements are available as global variables. This is not the case in either Firefox or Chrome. In there one has to create the variable and only then use it. Assuming I also used tbSeqNum as the element’s ID, this works: Function Blah() {                 return GetElementById(“tbSeqNum”).value; } Naturally this corrected function also works in IE, so be warned. Also, coming from windows programming (I am long in the tooth and programmed long before the internet), I have a habit of putting an “Exit” button on my pages and setting their onclick to: onclick=”window.close()”. Again, this works fine in IE. In Firefox and chrome, it does not! There you can only close a window that you opened in the code. A window that was opened by navigation to a URL will not close.  Before I deployed mu code to my website, I painfully removed all my Exit buttons. But my greatest surprise came when I tested my pages in the various browsers. In my code I do a comparison on the performance of two algorithms used to solve the same problem. One is brute force, the other uses a mathematical formula. The compare functions runs each many times and displays the time it took for each and also the ratio. Chrome runs JavaScript between 5 and 10 times faster than Firefox and between 50 and 100 times faster that IE. Wow!!! This difference is especially remarkable when the code uses iteration. I suspect that the JS engines in Chrome and Firefox simply cache the result of a function and if it is called again with the same parameters, it returns the cached result. To see it in action play run the “How Many Squares” page in www.mgsltns.com/games.htm The host is running on Unix, so the link is case sensitive. Last Note: IE9 runs JS a bit faster, but still lags behind almost as badly. That’s All Folks!

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  • SortedDictionary and SortedList

    - by Simon Cooper
    Apart from Dictionary<TKey, TValue>, there's two other dictionaries in the BCL - SortedDictionary<TKey, TValue> and SortedList<TKey, TValue>. On the face of it, these two classes do the same thing - provide an IDictionary<TKey, TValue> interface where the iterator returns the items sorted by the key. So what's the difference between them, and when should you use one rather than the other? (as in my previous post, I'll assume you have some basic algorithm & datastructure knowledge) SortedDictionary We'll first cover SortedDictionary. This is implemented as a special sort of binary tree called a red-black tree. Essentially, it's a binary tree that uses various constraints on how the nodes of the tree can be arranged to ensure the tree is always roughly balanced (for more gory algorithmical details, see the wikipedia link above). What I'm concerned about in this post is how the .NET SortedDictionary is actually implemented. In .NET 4, behind the scenes, the actual implementation of the tree is delegated to a SortedSet<KeyValuePair<TKey, TValue>>. One example tree might look like this: Each node in the above tree is stored as a separate SortedSet<T>.Node object (remember, in a SortedDictionary, T is instantiated to KeyValuePair<TKey, TValue>): class Node { public bool IsRed; public T Item; public SortedSet<T>.Node Left; public SortedSet<T>.Node Right; } The SortedSet only stores a reference to the root node; all the data in the tree is accessed by traversing the Left and Right node references until you reach the node you're looking for. Each individual node can be physically stored anywhere in memory; what's important is the relationship between the nodes. This is also why there is no constructor to SortedDictionary or SortedSet that takes an integer representing the capacity; there are no internal arrays that need to be created and resized. This may seen trivial, but it's an important distinction between SortedDictionary and SortedList that I'll cover later on. And that's pretty much it; it's a standard red-black tree. Plenty of webpages and datastructure books cover the algorithms behind the tree itself far better than I could. What's interesting is the comparions between SortedDictionary and SortedList, which I'll cover at the end. As a side point, SortedDictionary has existed in the BCL ever since .NET 2. That means that, all through .NET 2, 3, and 3.5, there has been a bona-fide sorted set class in the BCL (called TreeSet). However, it was internal, so it couldn't be used outside System.dll. Only in .NET 4 was this class exposed as SortedSet. SortedList Whereas SortedDictionary didn't use any backing arrays, SortedList does. It is implemented just as the name suggests; two arrays, one containing the keys, and one the values (I've just used random letters for the values): The items in the keys array are always guarenteed to be stored in sorted order, and the value corresponding to each key is stored in the same index as the key in the values array. In this example, the value for key item 5 is 'z', and for key item 8 is 'm'. Whenever an item is inserted or removed from the SortedList, a binary search is run on the keys array to find the correct index, then all the items in the arrays are shifted to accomodate the new or removed item. For example, if the key 3 was removed, a binary search would be run to find the array index the item was at, then everything above that index would be moved down by one: and then if the key/value pair {7, 'f'} was added, a binary search would be run on the keys to find the index to insert the new item, and everything above that index would be moved up to accomodate the new item: If another item was then added, both arrays would be resized (to a length of 10) before the new item was added to the arrays. As you can see, any insertions or removals in the middle of the list require a proportion of the array contents to be moved; an O(n) operation. However, if the insertion or removal is at the end of the array (ie the largest key), then it's only O(log n); the cost of the binary search to determine it does actually need to be added to the end (excluding the occasional O(n) cost of resizing the arrays to fit more items). As a side effect of using backing arrays, SortedList offers IList Keys and Values views that simply use the backing keys or values arrays, as well as various methods utilising the array index of stored items, which SortedDictionary does not (and cannot) offer. The Comparison So, when should you use one and not the other? Well, here's the important differences: Memory usage SortedDictionary and SortedList have got very different memory profiles. SortedDictionary... has a memory overhead of one object instance, a bool, and two references per item. On 64-bit systems, this adds up to ~40 bytes, not including the stored item and the reference to it from the Node object. stores the items in separate objects that can be spread all over the heap. This helps to keep memory fragmentation low, as the individual node objects can be allocated wherever there's a spare 60 bytes. In contrast, SortedList... has no additional overhead per item (only the reference to it in the array entries), however the backing arrays can be significantly larger than you need; every time the arrays are resized they double in size. That means that if you add 513 items to a SortedList, the backing arrays will each have a length of 1024. To conteract this, the TrimExcess method resizes the arrays back down to the actual size needed, or you can simply assign list.Capacity = list.Count. stores its items in a continuous block in memory. If the list stores thousands of items, this can cause significant problems with Large Object Heap memory fragmentation as the array resizes, which SortedDictionary doesn't have. Performance Operations on a SortedDictionary always have O(log n) performance, regardless of where in the collection you're adding or removing items. In contrast, SortedList has O(n) performance when you're altering the middle of the collection. If you're adding or removing from the end (ie the largest item), then performance is O(log n), same as SortedDictionary (in practice, it will likely be slightly faster, due to the array items all being in the same area in memory, also called locality of reference). So, when should you use one and not the other? As always with these sort of things, there are no hard-and-fast rules. But generally, if you: need to access items using their index within the collection are populating the dictionary all at once from sorted data aren't adding or removing keys once it's populated then use a SortedList. But if you: don't know how many items are going to be in the dictionary are populating the dictionary from random, unsorted data are adding & removing items randomly then use a SortedDictionary. The default (again, there's no definite rules on these sort of things!) should be to use SortedDictionary, unless there's a good reason to use SortedList, due to the bad performance of SortedList when altering the middle of the collection.

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  • 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.)

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  • The Red Gate Guide to SQL Server Team based Development Free e-book

    - by Mladen Prajdic
    After about 6 months of work, the new book I've coauthored with Grant Fritchey (Blog|Twitter), Phil Factor (Blog|Twitter) and Alex Kuznetsov (Blog|Twitter) is out. They're all smart folks I talk to online and this book is packed with good ideas backed by years of experience. The book contains a good deal of information about things you need to think of when doing any kind of multi person database development. Although it's meant for SQL Server, the principles can be applied to any database platform out there. In the book you will find information on: writing readable code, documenting code, source control and change management, deploying code between environments, unit testing, reusing code, searching and refactoring your code base. I've written chapter 5 about Database testing and chapter 11 about SQL Refactoring. In the database testing chapter (chapter 5) I cover why you should test your database, why it is a good idea to have a database access interface composed of stored procedures, views and user defined functions, what and how to test. I talk about how there are many testing methods like black and white box testing, unit and integration testing, error and stress testing and why and how you should do all those. Sometimes you have to convince management to go for testing in the development lifecycle so I give some pointers and tips how to do that. Testing databases is a bit different from testing object oriented code in a way that to have independent unit tests you need to rollback your code after each test. The chapter shows you ways to do this and also how to avoid it. At the end I show how to test various database objects and how to test access to them. In the SQL Refactoring chapter (chapter 11) I cover why refactor and where to even begin refactoring. I also who you a way to achieve a set based mindset to solve SQL problems which is crucial to good SQL set based programming and a few commonly seen problems to refactor. These problems include: using functions on columns in the where clause, SELECT * problems, long stored procedure with many input parameters, one subquery per condition in the select statement, cursors are good for anything problem, using too large data types everywhere and using your data in code for business logic anti-pattern. You can read more about it and download it here: The Red Gate Guide to SQL Server Team-based Development Hope you like it and send me feedback if you wish too.

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  • JavaOne Rock Star – Adam Bien

    - by Janice J. Heiss
    Among the most celebrated developers in recent years, especially in the domain of Java EE and JavaFX, is consultant Adam Bien, who, in addition to being a JavaOne Rock Star for Java EE sessions given in 2009 and 2011, is a Java Champion, the winner of Oracle Magazine’s 2011 Top Java Developer of the Year Award, and recently won a 2012 JAX Innovation Award as a top Java Ambassador. Bien will be presenting the following sessions: TUT3907 - Java EE 6/7: The Lean Parts CON3906 - Stress-Testing Java EE 6 Applications Without Stress CON3908 - Building Serious JavaFX 2 Applications CON3896 - Interactive Onstage Java EE Overengineering I spoke with Bien to get his take on Java today. He expressed excitement that the smallest companies and startups are showing increasing interest in Java EE. “This is a very good sign,” said Bien. “Only a few years ago J2EE was mostly used by larger companies -- now it becomes interesting even for one-person shows. Enterprise Java events are also extremely popular. On the Java SE side, I'm really excited about Project Nashorn.” Nashorn is an upcoming JavaScript engine, developed fully in Java by Oracle, and based on the Da Vinci Machine (JSR 292) which is expected to be available for Java 8.    Bien expressed concern about a common misconception regarding Java's mediocre productivity. “The problem is not Java,” explained Bien, “but rather systems built with ancient patterns and approaches. Sometimes it really is ‘Cargo Cult Programming.’ Java SE/EE can be incredibly productive and lean without the unnecessary and hard-to-maintain bloat. The real problems are ‘Ivory Towers’ and not Java’s lack of productivity.” Bien remarked that if there is one thing he wanted Java developers to understand it is that, "Premature optimization is the root of all evil. Or at least of some evil. Modern JVMs and application servers are hard to optimize upfront. It is far easier to write simple code and measure the results continuously. Identify the hotspots first, then optimize.”   He advised Java EE developers to, “Rethink everything you know about Enterprise Java. Before you implement anything, ask the question: ‘Why?’ If there is no clear answer -- just don't do it. Most well known best practices are outdated. Focus your efforts on the domain problem and not the technology.” Looking ahead, Bien remarked, “I would like to see open source application servers running directly on a hypervisor. Packaging the whole runtime in a single file would significantly simplify the deployment and operations.” Check out a recent Java Magazine interview with Bien about his Java EE 6 stress monitoring tool here.

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  • Back-sliding into Unmanaged Code

    - by Laila
    It is difficult to write about Microsoft's ambivalence to .NET without mentioning clichés about dog food.  In case you've been away a long time, you'll remember that Microsoft surprised everyone with the speed and energy with which it introduced and evangelised the .NET Framework for managed code. There was good reason for this. Once it became obvious to all that it had sleepwalked into third place as a provider of development languages, behind Borland and Sun, it reacted quickly to attract the best talent in the industry to produce a windows version of the Java runtime, with Bounds-checking, Automatic Garbage collection, structures exception handling and common data types. To develop applications for this managed runtime, it produced several excellent languages, and more are being provided. The only thing Microsoft ever got wrong was to give it a stupid name. The logical step for Microsoft would be to base the entire operating system on the .NET framework, and to re-engineer its own applications. In 2002, Bill Gates, then Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect said about their plans for .NET, "This is a long-term approach. These things don't happen overnight." Now, eight years later, we're still waiting for signs of the 'long-term approach'. Microsoft's vision of an entirely managed operating system has subsided since the Vista fiasco, but stays alive yet dormant as Midori, still being developed by Microsoft Research. This is an Internet-centric fork of the singularity operating system, a research project started in 2003 to build a highly-dependable operating system in which the kernel, device drivers, and applications are all written in managed code. Midori is predicated on the prevalence of connected systems, with provisions for distributed concurrency where application components exist 'in the cloud', and supports a programming model that can tolerate cancellation, intermittent connectivity and latency. It features an entirely new security model that sandboxes applications for increased security. So have Microsoft converted its existing applications to the .NET framework? It seems not. What Windows applications can run on Mono? Very few, it seems. We all thought that .NET spelt the end of DLL Hell and the need for COM interop, but it looks as if Bill Gates' idea of 'not overnight' might stretch to a decade or more. The Operating System has shown only minimal signs of migrating to .NET. Even where the use of .NET has come to dominate, when used for server applications with IIS, IIS itself is still entirely developed in unmanaged code. This is an irritation to Microsoft's greatest supporters who committed themselves fully to the NET framework, only to find parts of the Ambivalent Microsoft Empire quietly backsliding into unmanaged code and the awful C++. It is a strategic mistake that the invigorated Apple didn't make with the Mac OS X Architecture. Cheers, Laila

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  • Am I experienced enough to learn and develop immediately using Ruby on Rails?

    - by acheong87
    General Question I understand that discussions revolving around questions of this form run the risk of becoming too specific to help others. So, perhaps a better, general question would be: What kind of experience, if any, translates easily to Ruby on Rails; and if none, then what's the learning curve like, in comparison to other popular languages? Background I have the opportunity to build a website using whatever technologies I wish to use. It's a fairly simple website, for listing products, taking payments, managing customer data, providing a back-end portal for employees to manage data, possibly hooking in flight information (the products are travel related), possibly integrating a blog and all the social-networking goodies. Specific Problem I have to let the client know by tonight whether I'm interested in taking up this project, before he talks to other potential developers, but I'm on the fence. I already work a full-time C++ development job, so the money doesn't do it for me. It's the opportunity to (be paid to) learn some new technologies and to have a real, running product in the end. I've heard and read great things about Ruby, and am really intrigued. I zipped through some introductory Ruby tutorials, no sweat. However I found the Rails tutorials a little overwhelming, especially not being able to try it out anywhere. And researching Rails hosts like Heroku and EngineYard makes me think that maybe I don't know what I'm getting myself into. The ship's leaving port! I wish I had more time to learn, better yet play with the language, but I have to decide soon! Should I venture or pass? Additional Details My experiences are in C/C++/Tcl/Perl/PHP/jQuery, and basic knowledge of Java/C#. I didn't study C.S. formally so I wasn't exposed to design principles, programming paradigms, etc., which is my greatest concern. Will my lack of understanding in this realm make RoR frustrating to learn? Will it be so incompatible with a C++ "way" of thinking that I'll wish I never started? Am I putting my client at risk by attempting this? If it helps, I'm quick to learn new things (self-taught so far) and care a great deal about correctness, using things for their intended purposes, and so on. I've read numerous recommendations of Agile Development with Rails and would love to read it (though perhaps, while developing in parallel, for shortness of time). Worse comes to worst, I'd give up and do the standard LAMP gig, of course, not charging the client for wasted time. But I'm hoping to avoid the project altogether if it's gonna come down to that! Thanks in advance for any tips, insights, votes of confidence, votes of discouragement (for the better), and such.

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  • Should I be put off a junior role that uses an online development test?

    - by Ninefingers
    I've applied for a junior development role, or rather been found by a recruiter looking for a developer. In order to get to a telephone interview stage I've been asked to sit one of those online coding assessments. This wasn't quite what I expected. I consider myself a fairly good developer for my age and experience, but I've no illusions about being Don Knuth or anything. The test was a series of incredibly obtuse questions asking about the results of various obscure evaluations. About 30 minutes in I was thinking to myself I hadn't intended to enter an obfuscated code contest/code golf exercise. After my last telephone interview I was asked to build something. I did. That seemed fair. Go away and work this out is more my in office experience of programming than "please evaluate this combination of lambdas, filters, maps, lists, tuples etc". So I'm a little put off, to be honest. I never claimed to know the language inside out or all the little corner cases. My questions, then: Should I be put off? Why? Why not? Are these kinds of tests what I should be expecting for junior roles? Should I learn stuff exam style? That seems to be the objective of these tests, for which you are timed and not supposed to use references or books? Normally, in the course of development I have a fairly good idea of basic types, rules, flow control and whatever. Occasionally I'll come up on something I need to use a regex for and have to go and remind myself of the exact piece of syntax I need if trying what I think should work doesn't. Or I'll come up against a module I've not used before and go and look it up. For example, if I wanted to write a server using sockets in C right now, I'd probably check the last piece of code I wrote doing that (and or the various books I have) and work from there. Chances are I probably couldn't do it exactly from scratch and from memory, although I can tell you you'd need a socket(), bind(), listen() and accept() call and you might also want select() depending on whether you intend to pthread_create or not. So I know what the calls are, but not their specific parameter list. What are your experiences if you are a recruiting manager? Are you after programmers who can quote you the API or do you not mind if your programmers have a few books on their desk and google function calls every so often?

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  • Using Sitecore RenderingContext Parameters as MVC controller action arguments

    - by Kyle Burns
    I have been working with the Technical Preview of Sitecore 6.6 on a project and have been for the most part happy with the way that Sitecore (which truly is an MVC implementation unto itself) has been expanded to support ASP.NET MVC. That said, getting up to speed with the combined platform has not been entirely without stumbles and today I want to share one area where Sitecore could have really made things shine from the "it just works" perspective. A couple days ago I was asked by a colleague about the usage of the "Parameters" field that is defined on Sitecore's Controller Rendering data template. Based on the standard way that Sitecore handles a field named Parameters, I was able to deduce that the field expected key/value pairs separated by the "&" character, but beyond that I wasn't sure and didn't see anything from a documentation perspective to guide me, so it was time to dig and find out where the data in the field was made available. My first thought was that it would be really nice if Sitecore handled the parameters in this field consistently with the way that ASP.NET MVC handles the various parameter collections on the HttpRequest object and automatically maps them to parameters of the action method executing. Being the hopeful sort, I configured a name/value pair on one of my renderings, added a parameter with matching name to the controller action and fired up the bugger to see... that the parameter was not populated. Having established that the field's value was not going to be presented to me the way that I had hoped it would, the next assumption that I would work on was that Sitecore would handle this field similar to how they handle other similar data and would plug it into some ambient object that I could reference from within the controller method. After a considerable amount of guessing, testing, and cracking code open with Redgate's Reflector (a must-have companion to Sitecore documentation), I found that the most direct way to access the parameter was through the ambient RenderingContext object using code similar to: string myArgument = string.Empty; var rc = Sitecore.Mvc.Presentation.RenderingContext.CurrentOrNull; if (rc != null) {     var parms = rc.Rendering.Parameters;     myArgument = parms["myArgument"]; } At this point, we know how this field is used out of the box from Sitecore and can provide information from Sitecore's Content Editor that will be available when the controller action is executing, but it feels a little dirty. In order to properly test the action method I would have to do a lot of setup work and possible use an isolation framework such as Pex and Moles to get at a value that my action method is dependent upon. Notice I said that my method is dependent upon the value but in order to meet that dependency I've accepted another dependency upon Sitecore's RenderingContext.  I'm a big believer in, when possible, ensuring that any piece of code explicitly advertises dependencies using the method signature, so I found myself still wanting this to work the same as if the parameters were in the request route, querystring, or form by being able to add a myArgument parameter to the action method and have this parameter populated by the framework. Lucky for us, the ASP.NET MVC framework is extremely flexible and provides some easy to grok and use extensibility points. ASP.NET MVC is able to provide information from the request as input parameters to controller actions because it uses objects which implement an interface called IValueProvider and have been registered to service the application. The most basic statement of responsibility for an IValueProvider implementation is "I know about some data which is indexed by key. If you hand me the key for a piece of data that I know about I give you that data". When preparing to invoke a controller action, the framework queries registered IValueProvider implementations with the name of each method argument to see if the ValueProvider can supply a value for the parameter. (the rest of this post will assume you're working along and make a lot more sense if you do) Let's pull Sitecore out of the equation for a second to simplify things and create an extremely simple IValueProvider implementation. For this example, I first create a new ASP.NET MVC3 project in Visual Studio, selecting "Internet Application" and otherwise taking defaults (I'm assuming that anyone reading this far in the post either already knows how to do this or will need to take a quick run through one of the many available basic MVC tutorials such as the MVC Music Store). Once the new project is created, go to the Index action of HomeController.  This action sets a Message property on the ViewBag to "Welcome to ASP.NET MVC!" and invokes the View, which has been coded to display the Message. For our example, we will remove the hard coded message from this controller (although we'll leave it just as hard coded somewhere else - this is sample code). For the first step in our exercise, add a string parameter to the Index action method called welcomeMessage and use the value of this argument to set the ViewBag.Message property. The updated Index action should look like: public ActionResult Index(string welcomeMessage) {     ViewBag.Message = welcomeMessage;     return View(); } This represents the entirety of the change that you will make to either the controller or view.  If you run the application now, the home page will display and no message will be presented to the user because no value was supplied to the Action method. Let's now write a ValueProvider to ensure this parameter gets populated. We'll start by creating a new class called StaticValueProvider. When the class is created, we'll update the using statements to ensure that they include the following: using System.Collections.Specialized; using System.Globalization; using System.Web.Mvc; With the appropriate using statements in place, we'll update the StaticValueProvider class to implement the IValueProvider interface. The System.Web.Mvc library already contains a pretty flexible dictionary-like implementation called NameValueCollectionValueProvider, so we'll just wrap that and let it do most of the real work for us. The completed class looks like: public class StaticValueProvider : IValueProvider {     private NameValueCollectionValueProvider _wrappedProvider;     public StaticValueProvider(ControllerContext controllerContext)     {         var parameters = new NameValueCollection();         parameters.Add("welcomeMessage", "Hello from the value provider!");         _wrappedProvider = new NameValueCollectionValueProvider(parameters, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);     }     public bool ContainsPrefix(string prefix)     {         return _wrappedProvider.ContainsPrefix(prefix);     }     public ValueProviderResult GetValue(string key)     {         return _wrappedProvider.GetValue(key);     } } Notice that the only entry in the collection matches the name of the argument to our HomeController's Index action.  This is the important "secret sauce" that will make things work. We've got our new value provider now, but that's not quite enough to be finished. Mvc obtains IValueProvider instances using factories that are registered when the application starts up. These factories extend the abstract ValueProviderFactory class by initializing and returning the appropriate implementation of IValueProvider from the GetValueProvider method. While I wouldn't do so in production code, for the sake of this example, I'm going to add the following class definition within the StaticValueProvider.cs source file: public class StaticValueProviderFactory : ValueProviderFactory {     public override IValueProvider GetValueProvider(ControllerContext controllerContext)     {         return new StaticValueProvider(controllerContext);     } } Now that we have a factory, we can register it by adding the following line to the end of the Application_Start method in Global.asax.cs: ValueProviderFactories.Factories.Add(new StaticValueProviderFactory()); If you've done everything right to this point, you should be able to run the application and be presented with the home page reading "Hello from the value provider!". Now that you have the basics of the IValueProvider down, you have everything you need to enhance your Sitecore MVC implementation by adding an IValueProvider that exposes values from the ambient RenderingContext's Parameters property. I'll provide the code for the IValueProvider implementation (which should look VERY familiar) and you can use the work we've already done as a reference to create and register the factory: public class RenderingContextValueProvider : IValueProvider {     private NameValueCollectionValueProvider _wrappedProvider = null;     public RenderingContextValueProvider(ControllerContext controllerContext)     {         var collection = new NameValueCollection();         var rc = RenderingContext.CurrentOrNull;         if (rc != null && rc.Rendering != null)         {             foreach(var parameter in rc.Rendering.Parameters)             {                 collection.Add(parameter.Key, parameter.Value);             }         }         _wrappedProvider = new NameValueCollectionValueProvider(collection, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);         }     public bool ContainsPrefix(string prefix)     {         return _wrappedProvider.ContainsPrefix(prefix);     }     public ValueProviderResult GetValue(string key)     {         return _wrappedProvider.GetValue(key);     } } In this post I've discussed the MVC IValueProvider used to map data to controller action method arguments and how this can be integrated into your Sitecore 6.6 MVC solution.

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  • My raycaster is putting out strange results, how do I fix it?

    - by JamesK89
    I'm working on a raycaster in ActionScript 3.0 for the fun of it, and as a learning experience. I've got it up and running and its displaying me output as expected however I'm getting this strange bug where rays go through corners of blocks and the edges of blocks appear through walls. Maybe somebody with more experience can point out what I'm doing wrong or maybe a fresh pair of eyes can spot a tiny bug I haven't noticed. Thank you so much for your help! Screenshots: http://i55.tinypic.com/25koebm.jpg http://i51.tinypic.com/zx5jq9.jpg Relevant code: function drawScene() { rays.graphics.clear(); rays.graphics.lineStyle(1, rgba(0x00,0x66,0x00)); var halfFov = (player.fov/2); var numRays:int = ( stage.stageWidth / COLUMN_SIZE ); var prjDist = ( stage.stageWidth / 2 ) / Math.tan(toRad( halfFov )); var angStep = ( player.fov / numRays ); for( var i:int = 0; i < numRays; i++ ) { var rAng = ( ( player.angle - halfFov ) + ( angStep * i ) ) % 360; if( rAng < 0 ) rAng += 360; var ray:Object = castRay(player.position, rAng); drawRaySlice(i*COLUMN_SIZE, prjDist, player.angle, ray); } } function drawRaySlice(sx:int, prjDist, angle, ray:Object) { if( ray.distance >= MAX_DIST ) return; var height:int = int(( TILE_SIZE / (ray.distance * Math.cos(toRad(angle-ray.angle))) ) * prjDist); if( !height ) return; var yTop = int(( stage.stageHeight / 2 ) - ( height / 2 )); if( yTop < 0 ) yTop = 0; var yBot = int(( stage.stageHeight / 2 ) + ( height / 2 )); if( yBot > stage.stageHeight ) yBot = stage.stageHeight; rays.graphics.moveTo( (ray.origin.x / TILE_SIZE) * MINI_SIZE, (ray.origin.y / TILE_SIZE) * MINI_SIZE ); rays.graphics.lineTo( (ray.hit.x / TILE_SIZE) * MINI_SIZE, (ray.hit.y / TILE_SIZE) * MINI_SIZE ); for( var x:int = 0; x < COLUMN_SIZE; x++ ) { for( var y:int = yTop; y < yBot; y++ ) { buffer.setPixel(sx+x, y, clrTable[ray.tile-1] >> ( ray.horz ? 1 : 0 )); } } } function castRay(origin:Point, angle):Object { // Return values var rTexel = 0; var rHorz = false; var rTile = 0; var rDist = MAX_DIST + 1; var rMap:Point = new Point(); var rHit:Point = new Point(); // Ray angle and slope var ra = toRad(angle) % ANGLE_360; if( ra < ANGLE_0 ) ra += ANGLE_360; var rs = Math.tan(ra); var rUp = ( ra > ANGLE_0 && ra < ANGLE_180 ); var rRight = ( ra < ANGLE_90 || ra > ANGLE_270 ); // Ray position var rx = 0; var ry = 0; // Ray step values var xa = 0; var ya = 0; // Ray position, in map coordinates var mx:int = 0; var my:int = 0; var mt:int = 0; // Distance var dx = 0; var dy = 0; var ds = MAX_DIST + 1; // Horizontal intersection if( ra != ANGLE_180 && ra != ANGLE_0 && ra != ANGLE_360 ) { ya = ( rUp ? TILE_SIZE : -TILE_SIZE ); xa = ya / rs; ry = int( origin.y / TILE_SIZE ) * ( TILE_SIZE ) + ( rUp ? TILE_SIZE : -1 ); rx = origin.x + ( ry - origin.y ) / rs; mx = 0; my = 0; while( mx >= 0 && my >= 0 && mx < world.size.x && my < world.size.y ) { mx = int( rx / TILE_SIZE ); my = int( ry / TILE_SIZE ); mt = getMapTile(mx,my); if( mt > 0 && mt < 9 ) { dx = rx - origin.x; dy = ry - origin.y; ds = ( dx * dx ) + ( dy * dy ); if( rDist >= MAX_DIST || ds < rDist ) { rDist = ds; rTile = mt; rMap.x = mx; rMap.y = my; rHit.x = rx; rHit.y = ry; rHorz = true; rTexel = int(rx % TILE_SIZE) } break; } rx += xa; ry += ya; } } // Vertical intersection if( ra != ANGLE_90 && ra != ANGLE_270 ) { xa = ( rRight ? TILE_SIZE : -TILE_SIZE ); ya = xa * rs; rx = int( origin.x / TILE_SIZE ) * ( TILE_SIZE ) + ( rRight ? TILE_SIZE : -1 ); ry = origin.y + ( rx - origin.x ) * rs; mx = 0; my = 0; while( mx >= 0 && my >= 0 && mx < world.size.x && my < world.size.y ) { mx = int( rx / TILE_SIZE ); my = int( ry / TILE_SIZE ); mt = getMapTile(mx,my); if( mt > 0 && mt < 9 ) { dx = rx - origin.x; dy = ry - origin.y; ds = ( dx * dx ) + ( dy * dy ); if( rDist >= MAX_DIST || ds < rDist ) { rDist = ds; rTile = mt; rMap.x = mx; rMap.y = my; rHit.x = rx; rHit.y = ry; rHorz = false; rTexel = int(ry % TILE_SIZE); } break; } rx += xa; ry += ya; } } return { angle: angle, distance: Math.sqrt(rDist), hit: rHit, map: rMap, tile: rTile, horz: rHorz, origin: origin, texel: rTexel }; }

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  • Source of (programmer) inefficiency

    - by Daniel
    I am interested to gain a better insight about the possible reasons of personal inefficiency as programmers (and only in programming) due to – simply - our own errors (because we are humans – well, almost all of us). I am not interested in how much we are productive or in how many adjustements the customer asks for when the work is done, but where and how each of us spend that part of its time in tasks that are unproductive and there is no one to blame except ourselves. Excluding ego - feeding and / or self – gratification, what I am trying to get (for all of us) is: what are the common issues eating our time; insight on reasons for that issues; identify simple way for us, personally (not delegating actions to other or our organizations), to correct our own problems. Please, do not think in academic terms but aim at the opportunity to compare our daily experiences and understand what are and how we try to fix our personal deficiencies. If you are interested to respond to this post, please: integrate the list if you see something important (or obvious) missing; highlight or name honestly your first issue tellng the way you try to address and solve your issue acting on yourself and yourself only in a sort of "continuous quality improving" My criteria for accepting the answer is: choose the best solution (feasibility and utility) to fix one (or more) of the problems of the list. Of course, selecting an error is not a vote on our skills: maybe we are hyper professional programmers and we lose ten minutes only every year or we are terribly inefficient, losing a couple of days a week: reasons for inefficiency could be really the same - but in a different scale. A possible list: Plain error in the names (variables, functions). Inability to see the obvious in your code. Misreading. Lack of concentration. Trying to use a technology you have not mastered. Errors with data types. Time required to understand your previous code or your documentation. Trying to do something more than requested because you enjoy it Using solutions more complicated than required because you enjoy it. Plain logical errors. Errors due to your fault in communications. Distraction My first personal issue: "Trying to use a technology you do not master." I have to use daily several technologies and I often need to spend significant time correcting code because my assumptions were plainly wrong. Reasons for this: production needs put high pressure and make difficult to find the time to learn. I try to address this reading technical books - as many as I can - even if this actually consumes a lot of time.

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  • Guide to MySQL & NoSQL, Webinar Q&A

    - by Mat Keep
    0 0 1 959 5469 Homework 45 12 6416 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA 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-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-ansi-language:EN-US;} Yesterday we ran a webinar discussing the demands of next generation web services and how blending the best of relational and NoSQL technologies enables developers and architects to deliver the agility, performance and availability needed to be successful. Attendees posted a number of great questions to the MySQL developers, serving to provide additional insights into areas like auto-sharding and cross-shard JOINs, replication, performance, client libraries, etc. So I thought it would be useful to post those below, for the benefit of those unable to attend the webinar. Before getting to the Q&A, there are a couple of other resources that maybe useful to those looking at NoSQL capabilities within MySQL: - On-Demand webinar (coming soon!) - Slides used during the webinar - Guide to MySQL and NoSQL whitepaper  - MySQL Cluster demo, including NoSQL interfaces, auto-sharing, high availability, etc.  So here is the Q&A from the event  Q. Where does MySQL Cluster fit in to the CAP theorem? A. MySQL Cluster is flexible. A single Cluster will prefer consistency over availability in the presence of network partitions. A pair of Clusters can be configured to prefer availability over consistency. A full explanation can be found on the MySQL Cluster & CAP Theorem blog post.  Q. Can you configure the number of replicas? (the slide used a replication factor of 1) Yes. A cluster is configured by an .ini file. The option NoOfReplicas sets the number of originals and replicas: 1 = no data redundancy, 2 = one copy etc. Usually there's no benefit in setting it >2. Q. Interestingly most (if not all) of the NoSQL databases recommend having 3 copies of data (the replication factor).    Yes, with configurable quorum based Reads and writes. MySQL Cluster does not need a quorum of replicas online to provide service. Systems that require a quorum need > 2 replicas to be able to tolerate a single failure. Additionally, many NoSQL systems take liberal inspiration from the original GFS paper which described a 3 replica configuration. MySQL Cluster avoids the need for a quorum by using a lightweight arbitrator. You can configure more than 2 replicas, but this is a tradeoff between incrementally improved availability, and linearly increased cost. Q. Can you have cross node group JOINS? Wouldn't that run into the risk of flooding the network? MySQL Cluster 7.2 supports cross nodegroup joins. A full cross-join can require a large amount of data transfer, which may bottleneck on network bandwidth. However, for more selective joins, typically seen with OLTP and light analytic applications, cross node-group joins give a great performance boost and network bandwidth saving over having the MySQL Server perform the join. Q. Are the details of the benchmark available anywhere? According to my calculations it results in approx. 350k ops/sec per processor which is the largest number I've seen lately The details are linked from Mikael Ronstrom's blog The benchmark uses a benchmarking tool we call flexAsynch which runs parallel asynchronous transactions. It involved 100 byte reads, of 25 columns each. Regarding the per-processor ops/s, MySQL Cluster is particularly efficient in terms of throughput/node. It uses lock-free minimal copy message passing internally, and maximizes ID cache reuse. Note also that these are in-memory tables, there is no need to read anything from disk. Q. Is access control (like table) planned to be supported for NoSQL access mode? Currently we have not seen much need for full SQL-like access control (which has always been overkill for web apps and telco apps). So we have no plans, though especially with memcached it is certainly possible to turn-on connection-level access control. But specifically table level controls are not planned. Q. How is the performance of memcached APi with MySQL against memcached+MySQL or any other Object Cache like Ecache with MySQL DB? With the memcache API we generally see a memcached response in less than 1 ms. and a small cluster with one memcached server can handle tens of thousands of operations per second. Q. Can .NET can access MemcachedAPI? Yes, just use a .Net memcache client such as the enyim or BeIT memcache libraries. Q. Is the row level locking applicable when you update a column through memcached API? An update that comes through memcached uses a row lock and then releases it immediately. Memcached operations like "INCREMENT" are actually pushed down to the data nodes. In most cases the locks are not even held long enough for a network round trip. Q. Has anyone published an example using something like PHP? I am assuming that you just use the PHP memcached extension to hook into the memcached API. Is that correct? Not that I'm aware of but absolutely you can use it with php or any of the other drivers Q. For beginner we need more examples. Take a look here for a fully worked example Q. Can I access MySQL using Cobol (Open Cobol) or C and if so where can I find the coding libraries etc? A. There is a cobol implementation that works well with MySQL, but I do not think it is Open Cobol. Also there is a MySQL C client library that is a standard part of every mysql distribution Q. Is there a place to go to find help when testing and/implementing the NoSQL access? If using Cluster then you can use the [email protected] alias or post on the MySQL Cluster forum Q. Are there any white papers on this?  Yes - there is more detail in the MySQL Guide to NoSQL whitepaper If you have further questions, please don’t hesitate to use the comments below!

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  • IBM Server Config questions

    - by Joel Coel
    I have a few questions on a potential server setup. First, the situation: Last year we bought an IBM x3500 server with 2 Xeon E5410's, 9GB RAM, 6 HDDs. The original intent for this server was to replace the old exchange e-mail server. It was brought in, set up, and then shortly after we switched to gmail. Shortly after that my predecessor left for greener pastures, and finally I was hired. So this nice server is now sitting (mostly) idle. This year I have budget again for one server, and of course I want to put this other server to work. I'm thinking about the best use for the two server, and I think I finally have a plan for what I want to do with them. The idea is to use the two newer servers as a pair of VM hosts. I will set up each server with the same 8 VMs, but divide up the load so that only 4 are active per physical host. That means I've normally got 2GB RAM + 2 cores per host. I've done some load testing to pick out what servers to convert to virtual, and chose them so that each host will be capable of handling the entire set of 8 by itself in a pinch with 1 core and 1GB RAM, but would be very taxed to do so. This should take our data center from 13 total servers down to 7. The "servers" I'm replacing are mostly re-purposed desktops, so I'm more than happy to be able to do this. Now it's time to go shopping for the new server. I'd like my two hosts to match as closely as possible, and so I'm looking at IBM again. It also helps that we have some educational matching grant money from IBM that I need to use to help pay for this system (we're a small private college). So finally, (if you're not bored already), we come to my questions: Am I missing anything big or obvious in this plan? I'm a little worried about network performance since the VM hosts will only have 4 nics total where 8 used to be, but I don't think it will be a problem. Is there anything else like this I might be overlooking? Am I making it even too complicated? IBM no longer has a good analog to last year's server. If I want to match the performance (8 cores, 9GB RAM, 1333mhz front side bus, 6 spindles), I have to spend quite a bit more than we paid last year: $2K+, or nearly a 33% cost increase. This only brings a marginal increase in performance. The alternative to stay in budget is to take a hit on the fsb down to 800mhz or cut the number of cores in half, neither of which is attractive. The main cost culprit is the processor. IBM no longer offers the E5410. It's listed as a part, but not available in any of the server configs I've looked at. I'm considering getting the cheapest 800mhz fsb dual core xeon I can configure and then buying the E5410's separately. That's still an extra $350 I wasn't counting on, but that's better than $2K. I want to know what others think of this - will it work or will I end up with the wrong motherboard or some other issue? Am I missing a simple way to configure the server I really want? I don't really intend to do this, but one option to save some money back is to omit the redundant power supply. Since my redundancy plan for these system is to switch over to a completely different host, the extra power isn't fully necessary. That said, it's still very helpful to avoid even short downtimes while I switch over VMs. Has anyone done this?

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  • Voxel Engine in Multiplayer?

    - by Oliver Schöning
    This is a question more out of Interest for now, because I am not even near to the point that I could create this project at the moment. I really like the progress on the Atomontage Engine. A Voxel engine that is WIP at the moment. I would like to create a Voxel SERVER eventually. First in JavaScript (That's what I am learning right now) later perhaps in C++ for speed. Remember, I am perfectly aware that this is very hard! This is a brainstorm for the next 10 years as for now. What I would like to achieve one day is a Multiplayer Game in the Browser where the voxels positions are updated by XYZ input from the server. The Browser Does only 3 things: sending player input to the server, updating Voxel positions send from the server and rendering the world. I imagine using something like the Three.js libary on the client side. So that would be my programming dream right there... Now to something simpler for the near future. Right now I am learning javascript. And I am making games with Construct2. (A really cool JavaScript "game maker") The plan is to create a 2D Voxel enviorment (Block Voxels) on the Socket.IO Server* and send the position of the Voxels and Players to the Client side which then positions the Voxel Blocks to the Server Output coordinates. I think that is a bit more manageable then the other bigger idea. And also there should be no worries about speed with this type of project in JavaScript (I hope). Extra Info: *I am using nodejs (Without really knowing what it does besides making Socket.IO work) So now some questions: Is the "dream project" doable in JavaScript? Or is C++ just the best option because it does not take as long to be interpreted at run time like JavaScript? What are the limitations? I can think of some: Need of a Powerful server depending on how much information the server has to process. Internet Speed; Sending the data of the Voxel positions to every player could add up being very high! The browser FPS might go down quickly if rendering to many objects. One way of fixing reducing the packages Could be to let the browser calculate some of the Voxel positions from Several Values. But that would slow down the Client side too. What about the more achievable project? I am almost 100% convinced that this is possible in JavaScript, and that there are several ways of doing this. This is just XY position Updating for now.. Hope this did make some sense. Please comment if you got something to say :D

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  • How to Use Your Android Phone as a Modem; No Rooting Required

    - by Jason Fitzpatrick
    If your cellular provider’s mobile hotspot/tethering plans are too pricey, skip them and tether your phone to your computer without inflating your monthly bill. Read on to see how you can score free mobile internet. We recently received a letter from a How-To Geek reader, requesting help linking their Android phone to their laptop to avoid the highway robbery their cellular provider was insisting upon: Dear How-To Geek, I recently found out that my cellphone company charges $30 a month to use your smartphone as a data modem. That’s an outrageous price when I already pay an extra $15 a month charge just because they insist that because I have a smartphone I need a data plan because I’ll be using so much more data than other users. They expect me to pay what amounts to a $45 a month premium just to do some occasional surfing and email checking from the comfort of my laptop instead of the much smaller smartphone screen! Surely there is a work around? I’m running Windows 7 on my laptop and I have an Android phone running Android OS 2.2. Help! Sincerely, No Double Dipping! Well Double Dipping, this is a sentiment we can strongly related to as many of us on staff are in a similar situation. It’s absurd that so many companies charge you to use the data connection on the phone you’re already paying for. There is no difference in bandwidth usage if you stream Pandora to your phone or to your laptop, for example. Fortunately we have a solution for you. It’s not free-as-in-beer but it only costs $16 which, over the first year of use alone, will save you $344. Let’s get started! Latest Features How-To Geek ETC What Can Super Mario Teach Us About Graphics Technology? Windows 7 Service Pack 1 is Released: But Should You Install It? How To Make Hundreds of Complex Photo Edits in Seconds With Photoshop Actions How to Enable User-Specific Wireless Networks in Windows 7 How to Use Google Chrome as Your Default PDF Reader (the Easy Way) How To Remove People and Objects From Photographs In Photoshop Make Efficient Use of Tab Bar Space by Customizing Tab Width in Firefox See the Geeky Work Done Behind the Scenes to Add Sounds to Movies [Video] Use a Crayon to Enhance Engraved Lettering on Electronics Adult Swim Brings Their Programming Lineup to iOS Devices Feel the Chill of the South Atlantic with the Antarctica Theme for Windows 7 Seas0nPass Now Offers Untethered Apple TV Jailbreaking

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  • Building a Flash Platformer

    - by Jonathan O
    I am basically making a game where the whole game is run in the onEnterFrame method. This is causing a delay in my code that makes debugging and testing difficult. Should programming an entire platformer in this method be efficient enough for me to run hundreds of lines of code? Also, do variables in flash get updated immediately? Are there just lots of threads listening at the same time? Here is the code... stage.addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, onEnter); function onEnter(e:Event):void { //Jumping if (Yoshi.y > groundBaseLevel) { dy = 0; canJump = true; onGround = true; //This line is not updated in time } if (Key.isDown(Key.UP) && canJump) { dy = -10; canJump = false; onGround = false; //This line is not updated in time } if(!onGround) { dy += gravity; Yoshi.y += dy; } //limit screen boundaries //character movement if (! Yoshi.hitTestObject(Platform)) //no collision detected { if (Key.isDown(Key.RIGHT)) { speed += 4; speed *= friction; Yoshi.x = Yoshi.x + movementIncrement + speed; Yoshi.scaleX = 1; Yoshi.gotoAndStop('Walking'); } else if (Key.isDown(Key.LEFT)) { speed -= 4; speed *= friction; Yoshi.x = Yoshi.x - movementIncrement + speed; Yoshi.scaleX = -1; Yoshi.gotoAndStop('Walking'); } else { speed *= friction; Yoshi.x = Yoshi.x + speed; Yoshi.gotoAndStop('Still'); } } else //bounce back collision detected { if(Yoshi.hitTestPoint(Platform.x - Platform.width/2, Platform.y - Platform.height/2, false)) { trace('collision left'); Yoshi.x -=20; } if(Yoshi.hitTestPoint(Platform.x, Platform.y - Platform.height/2, false)) { trace('collision top'); onGround=true; //This update is not happening in time speed = 0; } } }

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  • View the Real Links Behind Shortened URLs in Chrome

    - by Asian Angel
    When you encounter shortened URLs there is always that worry in the back of your mind about where they really lead to. Now you can get a “sneak peak” at the real links behind those URLs with the View Thru extension for Google Chrome. The URL Shortening services officially supported at this time are: bit.ly, cli.gs, ff.im, goo.gl, is.gd, nyti.ms, ow.ly, post.ly, su.pr, & tinyurl.com. Before When you encounter a shortened URL you are pretty much on your own in deciding whether to trust that link or not. It would really be nice if you could just hover your mouse over those links and know where they will lead ahead of time. After Once you have the extension installed you are ready to access that link viewing goodness. Please note that you will need to reload any pages that were open prior to installing the extension. For our first example we chose a shortened URL from “bit.ly”. As you can see the entire link behind the shortened URL is displayed very nicely…no hidden surprises there! Note: There are no options to worry with for the extension. Another perfect result for the “goo.gl URL” shown below. View Thru will certainly remove a lot of the stress related to clicking on shortened URLs. Bonus Find Just out of curiosity we looked for a shortened URL not listed as being officially supported at this time. We found one with the “http://nyti.ms/” domain and View Thru showed the link perfectly…so be sure to give it a try on other services too. Conclusion If you worry about where a shortened URL will really lead you then the View Thru extension can help alleviate that stress. Links Download the View Thru extension (Google Chrome Extensions) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips See Where Shortened URLs “Link To” in Your Favorite BrowserVerify the Destinations of Shortened URLs the Easy WayCreate Shortened goo.gl URLs in Google Chrome the Easy WayCreate Shortened goo.gl URLs in Your Favorite BrowserAccess Google Chrome’s Special Pages the Easy Way TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 QuicklyCode Provides Cheatsheets & Other Programming Stuff Download Free MP3s from Amazon Awe inspiring, inter-galactic theme (Win 7) Case Study – How to Optimize Popular Wordpress Sites Restore Hidden Updates in Windows 7 & Vista Iceland an Insurance Job?

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  • Hype and LINQ

    - by Tony Davis
    "Tired of querying in antiquated SQL?" I blinked in astonishment when I saw this headline on the LinqPad site. Warming to its theme, the site suggests that what we need is to "kiss goodbye to SSMS", and instead use LINQ, a modern query language! Elsewhere, there is an article entitled "Why LINQ beats SQL". The designers of LINQ, along with many DBAs, would, I'm sure, cringe with embarrassment at the suggestion that LINQ and SQL are, in any sense, competitive ways of doing the same thing. In fact what LINQ really is, at last, is an efficient, declarative language for C# and VB programmers to access or manipulate data in objects, local data stores, ORMs, web services, data repositories, and, yes, even relational databases. The fact is that LINQ is essentially declarative programming in a .NET language, and so in many ways encourages developers into a "SQL-like" mindset, even though they are not directly writing SQL. In place of imperative logic and loops, it uses various expressions, operators and declarative logic to build up an "expression tree" describing only what data is required, not the operations to be performed to get it. This expression tree is then parsed by the language compiler, and the result, when used against a relational database, is a SQL string that, while perhaps not always perfect, is often correctly parameterized and certainly no less "optimal" than what is achieved when a developer applies blunt, imperative logic to the SQL language. From a developer standpoint, it is a mistake to consider LINQ simply as a substitute means of querying SQL Server. The strength of LINQ is that that can be used to access any data source, for which a LINQ provider exists. Microsoft supplies built-in providers to access not just SQL Server, but also XML documents, .NET objects, ADO.NET datasets, and Entity Framework elements. LINQ-to-Objects is particularly interesting in that it allows a declarative means to access and manipulate arrays, collections and so on. Furthermore, as Michael Sorens points out in his excellent article on LINQ, there a whole host of third-party LINQ providers, that offers a simple way to get at data in Excel, Google, Flickr and much more, without having to learn a new interface or language. Of course, the need to be generic enough to deal with a range of data sources, from something as mundane as a text file to as esoteric as a relational database, means that LINQ is a compromise and so has inherent limitations. However, it is a powerful and beautifully compact language and one that, at least in its "query syntax" guise, is accessible to developers and DBAs alike. Perhaps there is still hope that LINQ can fulfill Phil Factor's lobster-induced fantasy of a language that will allow us to "treat all data objects, whether Word files, Excel files, XML, relational databases, text files, HTML files, registry files, LDAPs, Outlook and so on, in the same logical way, as linked databases, and extract the metadata, create the entities and relationships in the same way, and use the same SQL syntax to interrogate, create, read, write and update them." Cheers, Tony.

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