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• Is there an efficient way in LINQ to use a contains match if and only if there is no exact match?

  - by Peter

  I have an application where I am taking a large number of 'product names' input by a user and retrieving some information about each product. The problem is, the user may input a partial name or even a wrong name, so I want to return the closest matches for further selection. Essentially if product name A exactly matches a record, return that, otherwise return any contains matches. Otherwise return null. I have done this with three separate statements, and I was wondering if there was a more efficient way to do this. I am using LINQ to EF, but I materialize the products to a list first for performance reasons. productNames is a List of product names (input by the user). products is a List of product 'records' var directMatches = (from s in productNames join p in products on s.ToLower() equals p.name.ToLower() into result from r in result.DefaultIfEmpty() select new {Key = s, Product = r}); var containsMatches = (from d in directMatches from p in products where d.Product == null && p.name.ToLower().Contains(d.Key) select new { d.Key, Product = p }); var matches = from d in directMatches join c in containsMatches on d.Key equals c.Key into result from r in result.DefaultIfEmpty() select new {d.Key, Product = d.Product ?? (r != null ? r.Product: null) };

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• How to direct link to an attribute set?

  - by monocat

  I have created attributes; “Shop by Type” and “Shop by Color”. They work great within the layered navigation and extended search. I’ve designed graphics and placed them in the home page and would like to link to the respective attribute’s assigned products. Been searching the webs, but so far have been unsuccessful. If there’s no direct possible way, the next method would be creating cms pages and linking to it directly. How can I display products that are assigned to a specific attribute? Specifically “Multiple Select” types. I know you guys prefer at least some attempts, but as mentioned, been playing with it with no luck. I would appreciate some kind of starting point. Happy Holidays! Edit: I was able to put together this code that lists all the products assigned to said category id. Tried to filter it down where it only displays products that have an assigned same attribute with no luck yet. Any ideas? <?php $cat_id = 123; // category id $category = Mage::getModel('catalog/category')->load($cat_id); $_products = $category->getProductCollection() ->addAttributeToSelect('shop_by_color'); if (($this->getProductCollection()) && $_products->getSize()): ?> By the way, $cat_id is a sub category of root. Is there an easier way to point to it instead of using direct id number?

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• Display and Use Advanced Find for Product Subscriptions by Account in Microsoft CRM 4.0

  - by Chris

  By default when viewing an account in edit mode you have access to Opportunities, Invoices, and Quotes which contain the products being shopped by the account and/or the sales department. I'm trying to determine where to store, display, and use the products that an account has a subscription too. I may not understand the implementation but it seems that there should be "Products" option directly off the root Account management window that will show the user all the products the account has purchased. We are trying to integrate this with our production tracking system where product sales can originate from other channels that will not flow through CRM first. This product subscription does not fit into the Opportunity, Quote, or Invoice model because they are confirmed recurring sales that were automatically purchased via tools like a Public Website, Portal, etc. By enabling this tracking in CRM we can use the advanced find feature to facilitate follow up sales and marketing efforts. Example: Find everyone who is subscribed to model A, so we can notify them of a new holiday campaign where they can get 10% off on all add-ons. It's my assumption that this is a common scenario, however I'd like to better understand how to approach this within the world of Microsoft CRM. Thank you in advance.

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• SQL Database Schema Design For Large 3 Billion Relationship Database.

  - by K-Bell

  Get your geek on. Can you solve this? I am designing a products database for SQL Server 2008 R2 Ed. (not Enterprise Ed.) that will be used to store custom product configurations for over 30,000 distinct products. The database will have up to 500 users at a time. Here is the design problem… Each Product has a collection of Parts (up to 50 parts per product). So if I have 30,000 Products and each of them can have up to 50 Parts, that’s 1.5 million distinct Product-to-Part relationships …or as an equation… 30,000 (Products) X 50 (Parts) = 1.5 million Product-to-Parts records. …and If… Each Part can have up to 2000 finish options (A finish is a paint color). NOTE: Only one finish will be selected by a user at run-time. The 2000 finish options I need to store are the allowed options for a specific part on a specific product. So if I have 1.5 million distinct product-to-part relationships/records and each of those parts can have up to 2,000 finishes that is 3 billion allowable product-to-part-to finish relationships/records …or as an equation… 1.5 million (Parts) x 2,000 (Finishes) = 3 Billion Product-to-Part-to-Finishes records. How can I design this database so that I can execute fast and efficient queries for a specific product and return its list of Parts and all the allowable Finishes for each part without 3 Billion Product-to-Part-to-Finish records? Read time is more important then write time. Please post your thoughts/suggestions if you have experience with large databases. Thanks!

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• Implementation help... Subclass NSManagedObject?

  - by Canada Dev

  I'm working on an app where I have some products that I download in a list. The downloaded products are displayed in a table and each will is showing a detail view with more information. These same products can be saved as a favorite, and for this I am using Core Data. I'd like to be able to re-use a bunch of views for displaying the products, which means the stores object and the downloaded object would have to be the same kind. Now, how would I go about best implementing the objects? Can I make a class such as this: FavoriteProduct : NSManageObject // implementation and then subclass Product : FavoriteProduct // implementation ? The CD class just doesn't give me everything. What would be the best way to merge these two object classes so I have as little work ahead of me in terms of implementing the different views for each object? Basically, I just want to be able to call the same methods, etc. on the Product objects as I would on the ones that are FavoriteProduct objects, and re-use views for both kinds. There's only a bit of difference between the two (one is of course stored as a favorite and has some extra values such as notes, tags, while the Product one doesn't). Thanks in advance

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• Twitter Bootstrap: how to put unknown number of span* within a row-fluid?

  - by StackOverflowNewbie

  Assume I have the following nesting: <div class="cointainer-fluid"> <div class="row-fluid"> <div class="span3"> <!-- left sidebar here --> </div> <div class="span9"> <!-- main content here --> </div> </div> </div> I'd like to put an unknown number of <div class="span3"></div> in the main content area. (Each of the span3 is suppose to contain a product photo, name, price, etc.) Of course, my aim is that be responsive. So, I might display 20 products, which I'd like to possibly display 5 products per "row" on a wide screen, then 4 products per "row" on a slightly less wide screen, then 3, then 2, then 1. For example (each X represents a product): Wide Screen row 1: X X X X X row 2: X X X X X row 3: X X X X X row 4: X X X X X Less Wide Screen row 1: X X X X row 2: X X X X row 3: X X X X row 4: X X X X row 5: X X X X Even Less Wide Screen row 1: X X X row 2: X X X row 3: X X X row 4: X X X row 5: X X X row 6: X X X row 7: X X It seems like I need to do nested rows. However, if I do that, then I'll only be able to fit a certain amount of products in each nested row. That'll cause problems as the screen width decreases, for example (each X represents a product): Wide Screen row 1: X X X X X row 2: X X X X X row 3: X X X X X Less Wide Screen row 1: X X X X X row 2: X X X X X row 3: X X X X X How do I do what I want to do in Twitter Bootstrap?

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• How to handle product ratings in a database

  - by Mel

  Hello, I would like to know what is the best approach to storing product ratings in a database. I have in mind the following two (simplified, and assuming a MySQL db) scenarios: Scenario 1: Create two columns in the product table to store number of votes and the sum of all votes. Use columns to get an average on the product display page: products(productedID, productName, voteCount, voteSum) Pros: I will only need to access one table, and thus execute one query to display product data and ratings. Cons: Write operations will be executed in a table whose original purpose is only to furnish product data. Scenario 2: Create an additional table to store ratings. products(productID, productName) ratings(productID, voteCount, voteSum) Pros: Isolate ratings into a separate table, leaving the products table to furnish data on available products. Cons: I will have to execute two separate queries on product page requests (one for data and another for ratings). In terms of performance, which of the following two approaches is best: Allow users to execute an occasional write query to a table that will handle hundreds of read requests? Execute two queries at every product page, but isolate the write query into a separate table. I'm a novice to database development, and often find myself struggling with simple questions such as these. Many thanks,

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• NHibernate: Using value tables for optimization AND dynamic join

  - by Kostya

  Hi all, My situation is next: there are to entities with many-to-many relation, f.e. Products and Categories. Also, categories has hierachial structure, like a tree. There is need to select all products that depends to some concrete category with all its childs (branch). So, I use following sql statement to do that: SELECT * FROM Products p WHERE p.ID IN ( SELECT DISTINCT pc.ProductID FROM ProductsCategories pc INNER JOIN Categories c ON c.ID = pc.CategoryID WHERE c.TLeft >= 1 AND c.TRight <= 33378 ) But with big set of data this query executes very long and I found some solution to optimize it, look at here: DECLARE @CatProducts TABLE ( ProductID int NOT NULL ) INSERT INTO @CatProducts SELECT DISTINCT pc.ProductID FROM ProductsCategories pc INNER JOIN Categories c ON c.ID = pc.CategoryID WHERE c.TLeft >= 1 AND c.TRight <= 33378 SELECT * FROM Products p INNER JOIN @CatProducts cp ON cp.ProductID = p.ID This query executes very fast but I don't know how to do that with NHIbernate. Note, that I need use only ICriteria because of dynamic filtering\ordering. If some one knows a solution for that, it will be fantastic. But I'll pleasure to any suggestions of course. Thank you ahead, Kostya

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• How to add sub category on my codeigniter php application ?

  - by sagarmatha

  Hello friends I have a view echo "<label for='parent'>Category</label><br/> "; echo form_dropdown('category_id', $categories). "<p>"; controller function create(){ if($this->input->post('name')){ $this->MProducts->addProduct(); $this->session->set_flashdata('message', 'Products Created'); redirect('admin/products/index', 'refresh'); }else{ $data['title'] = "Create Product"; $data['main'] = 'admin_product_create'; $data['categories']= $this->MCats->getTopCategories(); $this->load->vars($data); $this->load->view('dashboard'); } } and the model is function getTopcategories(){ $data = array(); $data[0] = 'root'; $this->db->where('parentid',0); $Q = $this->db->get('categories'); if($Q->num_rows() > 0){ foreach($Q->result_array() as $row){ $data[$row['id']] = $row['name']; } } $Q->free_result(); return $data; } Basically, what i want is we get sub categories when we click categories and 'selected' subcategory id goes to database when we create products, So that we can list products by sub categories. Please help me how do we do that ?

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• Social Business Forum Milano: Day 2

  - by me

  @YourService. The business world has flipped and small business can capitalize  by Frank Eliason (twitter: @FrankEliason ) Technology and social media tools have made it easier than ever for companies to communicate with consumers. They can listen and join in on conversations, solve problems, get instant feedback about their products and services, and more. So why, then, are most companies not doing this? Instead, it seems as if customer service is at an all time low, and that the few companies who are choosing to focus on their customers are experiencing a great competitive advantage. At Your Service explains the importance of refocusing your business on your customers and your employees, and just how to do it. Explains how to create a culture of empowered employees who understand the value of a great customer experience Advises on the need to communicate that experience to their customers and potential customers Frank Eliason, recognized by BusinessWeek as the 'most famous customer service manager in the US, possibly in the world,' has built a reputation for helping large businesses improve the way they connect with customers and enhance their relationships Quotes from the Audience: Bertrand Duperrin ?@bduperrin social service is not about shutting up the loudest cutsomers ! #sbf12 @frankeliason Paolo Pelloni ?@paolopelloniGautam Ghosh ?@GautamGhosh RT @cecildijoux: #sbf12 @frankeliason you need to change things and fix the approach it's not about social media it's about driving change  Peter H. Reiser ?@peterreiser #sbf12 Company Experience = Product Experience + Customer Interactions + Employee Experience @yourservice Engage or lose! Socialize, mobilize, conversify: engage your employees to improve business performance Christian Finn (twitter: @cfinn) First Christian was presenting the flying monkey   Then he outlined the four principals to fix the Intranet: 1. Socalize the Intranet 2. Get Thee to a Single Repository 3. Mobilize the Intranet 4. Conversationalize Your Processes Quotes from the Audience: Oscar Berg ?@oscarberg Engaged employees think their work bring out the best of their ideas @cfinn #sbf12 http://pic.twitter.com/68eddp48 John Stepper ?@johnstepper I like @cfinn's "conversify your processes" A nice related concept to "narrating your work", part of working out loud. http://johnstepper.com/2012/05/26/working-out-loud-your-personal-content-strategy/ Oscar Berg ?@oscarberg Organizations are talent markets - socializing your intranet makes this market function better @cfinn #sbf12 For profit, productivity, and personal benefit: creating a collaborative culture at Deutsche Bank John Stepper (twitter:@johnstepper) Driving adoption of collaboration + social media platforms at Deutsche Bank. John shared some great best practices on how to deploy an enterprise wide  community model  in a large company. He started with the most important question What is the commercial value of adding social ? Then he talked about the success of Community of Practices deployment and outlined some key use cases including the relevant measures to proof the ROI of the investment. Examples:  Community of practice -> measure: systematic collection of value stories  Self-service website  -> measure: based on representative models Optimizing asset inventory - > measure: Actual counts  This use case was particular interesting.  It is a crowd sourced spending/saving of infrastructure model.  User can cancel IT services they don't need (as example Software xx).  5% of the saving goes to social responsibility projects. The John outlined some  best practices on how to address the WIIFM (What's In It For Me) question of the individual users:  - change from hierarchy to graph -  working out loud = observable work + narrating  your work  - add social skills to career objectives - example: building a purposeful social network course/training as part of the job development curriculum And last but not least John gave some important tips on how to get senior management buy-in by establishing management sponsored division level collaboration boards which defines clear uses cases and measures. This divisional use cases are then implemented using a common social platform.  Thanks John - I learned a lot from your presentation!   Quotes from the Audience: Ana Silva ?@AnaDataGirl #sbf12 what's in it for individuals at Deutsche Bank? Shapping their reputations in a big org says @johnstepper #e20Ana Silva ?@AnaDataGirl Any reason why not? MT @magatorlibero #sbf12 is Deutsche B. experience on applying social inside company applicable to Italian people? Oscar Berg ?@oscarberg Your career is not a ladder, it is a network that opens up opportunities - @johnstepper #sbf12 Oscar Berg ?@oscarberg @johnstepper: Institutionalizing collaboration is next - collaboration woven into the fabric of daily work #sbf12 Ana Silva ?@AnaDataGirl #sbf12 @johnstepper talking about how Deutsche Bank is using #socbiz to build purposeful CoP & save money

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

  - by Bertrand Matthelié

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

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• JavaOne pictures and Community Commentary on JCP Awards

  - by heathervc

  We posted some pictures from JCP related events at JavaOne 2012 on the JCP Facebook page today.  The 2012 JCP Program Award winners and some of the nominees responded to the community recognition of their achievements during some of the JCP events last week.     “Our job on the EC is to balance the need of innovation – so we don’t standardize too early, or too late. We try to find that sweet spot that makes innovation and standardization work together, and not against each other.”- Ben Evans, CEO of jClarity and Executive Committee (EC) representative of the London Java Community, 2012 JCP Member/Participant of the Year Winner“SouJava has been evangelizing the Java platform, promoting the Java ecosystem in Brazil, and contributing to JSRs for several years. It’s very gratifying to have our work recognized, on behalf of many developers and Java User Groups around the world. This really is the work of a large group of people, represented by the few that can be here tonight.”- Michael Santos, representative of SouJava, 2012 JCP Member/Participant of the Year Winner "In the last years Credit Suisse has contributed to the development of Java EE specifications through participation in many customer advisory boards, through statements of requirements for extensions to the core Java related products in use, and active participation in JSRs. Winning the JCP Outstanding Spec Lead Award 2012 is very encouraging for our engagement and also demonstrates the level of expertise and commitment to drive the evolution of Java. Victor Grazi is happy and honored to receive this award." - Susanne Cech Previtali, Executive Committee (EC) representative of Credit Suisse, accepting award for 2012 JCP Outstanding Spec Lead Winner "Managing a JSR is difficult. There are so many decisions to be made and so many good and varied opinions, you never really know if you have decided correctly. The key to success is transparency and collaboration. I am truly humbled by receiving this award, there are so many other active JSRs.” Victor added that going forward in the JCP EC, they would like to simplify and open the process of participation – being addressed in the JCP.Next initiative of the JCP EC. "We would also like to encourage the engagement of universities, professors and students – as an important part of the Java community. While innovation is the lifeblood of our community and industry, without strong standards and compatibility requirements, we all end up in a maze of technology where everything is slightly different and doesn’t quite work with everything else." Victo Grazi, Executive Committee (EC) representative of Credit Suisse, 2012 JCP Outstanding Spec Lead Winner“I am very pleased, of course, to accept this award, but the credit really should go to all of those who have participated in the work of the JCP, while pushing for changes in the way it operates.  JCP.Next represents three JSRs. The first two are done, but the final step, JSR 358, is the complicated one, and it will bring in the lawyers. Just to give you an idea of what we’re dealing with, it affects licensing, intellectual property, patents, implementations not based on the Reference Implementation (RI), the role of the RI, compatibility policy, possible changes to the Technical Compatibility Kit (TCK), transparency, where do individuals fit in, open source, and more.”- Patrick Curran, JCP Chair, Spec Lead on JCP.Next JSRs (JSR 348, JSR 355 and JSR 358), 2012 JCP Most Significant JSR Winner“I’m especially glad to see the JCP community recognize JCP.Next for its importance. The governance work it represents is KEY to moving the Java platform forward and the success of the technology.”- John Rizzo, Executive Committee (EC) representative of Aplix Corporation, JSR Expert Group Member “I am deeply honored to be nominated. I had the privilege to receive two awards on behalf of Expert Groups and Spec Leads two years ago. But this time, I am nominated personally, which values my own contribution to the JCP, and of course, participation in JSRs and the EC work. I’m a fan of Agile Principles and Values Working. Being an Agile Coach and Consultant, I use it for some of the biggest EC Member companies and projects. It fuels my ability to help the JCP become more agile, lean and transparent as part of the JCP.Next effort.” - Werner Keil, Individual Executive Committee (EC) Member, a 2012 JCP Member/Participant of the Year Nominee, JSR Expert Group Member“The JCP ever has been some kind of institution for me,” Markus said. “If in technical doubt, I go there, look for the specifications of the implementation I work with at the moment and verify what I had observed. Since the beginning of my Java journey more than 12 years back now, I always had a strong relationship with the JCP. Shaping the future of a technology by joining the JCP – giving feedback and contributing to the road ahead through individual JSRs – that brings you to a whole new level.”Calling himself, “the new kid on the block,” he explained that for years he was afraid to join the JCP and contribute. But in reality, “Every single one of the big names I meet from the different Expert Groups is a nice person. People you can actually work with,” he says. “And nobody blames you for things you don't know. As long as you are committed and bring what is worth the most: passion, experiences and the desire to make a difference.” - Markus Eisele, a 2012 JCP Member of the Year Nominee, JSR Expert Group MemberCongratulations again to all of the nominees and winners of the JCP Program Awards.  Next year, we will add another award for the group of JUG members (not an entire JUG) that makes the best contribution to the Adopt-a-JSR program.  Let us know if you have other suggestions or improvements.

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• Drive Online Engagement with Intuitive Portals and Websites

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  As more and more business is being conducted via online channels, engaging users and making them more productive and efficient though these online channels is becoming critical. These users could be customers, partners or employees and while the respective channels through which they interact might be different, these users do increasingly interact with your business through the Web, or mobile devices or now through various social mediums.  Businesses need a user engagement strategy and solution that allows them to deliver targeted and personalized content and applications to users through the various online mediums and touch points.  The customer experience today is made up of an ongoing set of interactions with organizations across many channels, online and offline.  The Direct channel (including sales reps, email and mail) is an important point of contact, as is the Contact Center.  Contact Centers rely on the phone as a means of interacting with customers, and also more now than ever, the Web as well.  However, the online organization is often managed separately from the Contact Center organization within a business. In-store is an important channel for retailers, offering Point-of-Service for human interactions, and Kiosks which enable self-service. Kiosks are a Web-enabled touch point but in-store kiosks are often managed by the head of retail operations, rather than the online organization.  And of course, the online channel, including customer interactions with an organization via digital means -- on the website, mobile websites, and social networking sites, has risen to paramount importance in recent years in the customer experience. Historically all of these channels have been managed separately. The result of all of this fragmentation is that the customer touch points with an organization are siloed.  Their interactions online are not known and respected in their dealings in-store.  Their calls to the contact center are not taken as input into what the website offers them when they arrive. Think of how many times you’ve fallen victim to this. Your experience with the company call center is different than the experience in-store. Your experience with the company website on your desktop computer is different than your experience on your iPad. I think you get the point. But the customer isn’t the only one we need to look at here, as employees and the IT organization have challenges as well when it comes to online engagement. There are many common tools and technologies that organizations have been using to try and engage users, whether it’s customers, employees or partners. Some have adopted different blog and wiki technologies (some hosted, some open source, sometimes embedded in platforms), to things like tagging, file sharing and content management, or composite applications for self-service applications and activity streams. Basically, there are so many different tools & technologies that each address different aspects of user engagement. Now, one of the challenges with this, is that if we look at each individual tool, typically just implementing for example a file sharing and basic collaboration solution, may meet the needs of the business user for one aspect of user engagement, but it may not be the best solution to engage with customers and partners, or it may not fit with IT standards such as integrating with their single sign on tools or their corporate website. Often, the scenario is that businesses are having to acquire multiple pieces and parts as well as build custom applications to meet their needs. Leaving customers and partners with a more fragmented way of interacting with the company. Every organization has some sort of enterprise balancing act between the needs of the business user and the needs and restrictions enforced by enterprise IT groups. As we’ve been discussing, we all know that the expectations for online engagement have changed since the days of the static, one-size fits all website. With these changes have come some very difficult organizational challenges as well. Today, as a business user, you want to engage with your customers, and your customers expect you to know who they are. They expect you to recall the details they’ve provided to you on your website, to your CSRs and to your sales people. They expect you to remember their purchases, their preferences and their problems. And they expect you to know who they are, equally well, across channels, including your web presence. This creates a host of challenges for today’s business users. Delivering targeted, relevant content online is now essential for converting prospects into customers and for engendering long term loyalty. Business users need the ability to leverage customer data from different sources to fuel their segmentation and targeting strategies and to easily set-up, manage and optimize online campaigns. Also critical, they need the ability to accomplish these things on-the-fly, at the speed of the marketplace, while making iterative improvements.  These changing expectations put a host of demands on the IT organization as well. The web presence must be able to scale to support the delivery of personalized and targeted content to thousands of site visitors without sacrificing performance. And integration between systems becomes more important as well, as organizations strive to obtain one view of the customer culled from WCM data, CRM data and more. So then, how do you solve these challenges and meet the growing demands of your users?  You need a solution that: Unifies every customer interaction across all channels Personalizes the products and content that interest the customer and to the device Delivers targeted promotions to the right customer Engages and improve employee productivity Provides self-service access to applications Includes embedded in-context social   So how then do you achieve this level of online engagement, complete customer experience and engage your employees? The answer: Oracle WebCenter. If you want to learn how to get there, we encourage you to attend this webcast on Thursday Drive Online Engagement with Intuitive Portals and Websites, where we'll talk about how you are able to transform your portal experience and optimize online engagement -- making your portals more interactive and more engaging across multiple channels. Register today!

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• Using R to Analyze G1GC Log Files

  - by user12620111

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  Using R to Analyze G1GC Log Files   Using R to Analyze G1GC Log Files Introduction Working in Oracle Platform Integration gives an engineer opportunities to work on a wide array of technologies. My team’s goal is to make Oracle applications run best on the Solaris/SPARC platform. When looking for bottlenecks in a modern applications, one needs to be aware of not only how the CPUs and operating system are executing, but also network, storage, and in some cases, the Java Virtual Machine. I was recently presented with about 1.5 GB of Java Garbage First Garbage Collector log file data. If you’re not familiar with the subject, you might want to review Garbage First Garbage Collector Tuning by Monica Beckwith. The customer had been running Java HotSpot 1.6.0_31 to host a web application server. I was told that the Solaris/SPARC server was running a Java process launched using a commmand line that included the following flags: -d64 -Xms9g -Xmx9g -XX:+UseG1GC -XX:MaxGCPauseMillis=200 -XX:InitiatingHeapOccupancyPercent=80 -XX:PermSize=256m -XX:MaxPermSize=256m -XX:+PrintGC -XX:+PrintGCTimeStamps -XX:+PrintHeapAtGC -XX:+PrintGCDateStamps -XX:+PrintFlagsFinal -XX:+DisableExplicitGC -XX:+UnlockExperimentalVMOptions -XX:ParallelGCThreads=8 Several sources on the internet indicate that if I were to print out the 1.5 GB of log files, it would require enough paper to fill the bed of a pick up truck. Of course, it would be fruitless to try to scan the log files by hand. Tools will be required to summarize the contents of the log files. Others have encountered large Java garbage collection log files. There are existing tools to analyze the log files: IBM’s GC toolkit The chewiebug GCViewer gchisto HPjmeter Instead of using one of the other tools listed, I decide to parse the log files with standard Unix tools, and analyze the data with R. Data Cleansing The log files arrived in two different formats. I guess that the difference is that one set of log files was generated using a more verbose option, maybe -XX:+PrintHeapAtGC, and the other set of log files was generated without that option. Format 1 In some of the log files, the log files with the less verbose format, a single trace, i.e. the report of a singe garbage collection event, looks like this: {Heap before GC invocations=12280 (full 61): garbage-first heap total 9437184K, used 7499918K [0xfffffffd00000000, 0xffffffff40000000, 0xffffffff40000000) region size 4096K, 1 young (4096K), 0 survivors (0K) compacting perm gen total 262144K, used 144077K [0xffffffff40000000, 0xffffffff50000000, 0xffffffff50000000) the space 262144K, 54% used [0xffffffff40000000, 0xffffffff48cb3758, 0xffffffff48cb3800, 0xffffffff50000000) No shared spaces configured. 2014-05-14T07:24:00.988-0700: 60586.353: [GC pause (young) 7324M->7320M(9216M), 0.1567265 secs] Heap after GC invocations=12281 (full 61): garbage-first heap total 9437184K, used 7496533K [0xfffffffd00000000, 0xffffffff40000000, 0xffffffff40000000) region size 4096K, 0 young (0K), 0 survivors (0K) compacting perm gen total 262144K, used 144077K [0xffffffff40000000, 0xffffffff50000000, 0xffffffff50000000) the space 262144K, 54% used [0xffffffff40000000, 0xffffffff48cb3758, 0xffffffff48cb3800, 0xffffffff50000000) No shared spaces configured. } A simple grep can be used to extract a summary: $ grep "\[ GC pause (young" g1gc.log 2014-05-13T13:24:35.091-0700: 3.109: [GC pause (young) 20M->5029K(9216M), 0.0146328 secs] 2014-05-13T13:24:35.440-0700: 3.459: [GC pause (young) 9125K->6077K(9216M), 0.0086723 secs] 2014-05-13T13:24:37.581-0700: 5.599: [GC pause (young) 25M->8470K(9216M), 0.0203820 secs] 2014-05-13T13:24:42.686-0700: 10.704: [GC pause (young) 44M->15M(9216M), 0.0288848 secs] 2014-05-13T13:24:48.941-0700: 16.958: [GC pause (young) 51M->20M(9216M), 0.0491244 secs] 2014-05-13T13:24:56.049-0700: 24.066: [GC pause (young) 92M->26M(9216M), 0.0525368 secs] 2014-05-13T13:25:34.368-0700: 62.383: [GC pause (young) 602M->68M(9216M), 0.1721173 secs] But that format wasn't easily read into R, so I needed to be a bit more tricky. I used the following Unix command to create a summary file that was easy for R to read. $ echo "SecondsSinceLaunch BeforeSize AfterSize TotalSize RealTime" $ grep "\[GC pause (young" g1gc.log | grep -v mark | sed -e 's/[A-SU-z\(\),]/ /g' -e 's/->/ /' -e 's/: / /g' | more SecondsSinceLaunch BeforeSize AfterSize TotalSize RealTime 2014-05-13T13:24:35.091-0700 3.109 20 5029 9216 0.0146328 2014-05-13T13:24:35.440-0700 3.459 9125 6077 9216 0.0086723 2014-05-13T13:24:37.581-0700 5.599 25 8470 9216 0.0203820 2014-05-13T13:24:42.686-0700 10.704 44 15 9216 0.0288848 2014-05-13T13:24:48.941-0700 16.958 51 20 9216 0.0491244 2014-05-13T13:24:56.049-0700 24.066 92 26 9216 0.0525368 2014-05-13T13:25:34.368-0700 62.383 602 68 9216 0.1721173 Format 2 In some of the log files, the log files with the more verbose format, a single trace, i.e. the report of a singe garbage collection event, was more complicated than Format 1. Here is a text file with an example of a single G1GC trace in the second format. As you can see, it is quite complicated. It is nice that there is so much information available, but the level of detail can be overwhelming. I wrote this awk script (download) to summarize each trace on a single line. #!/usr/bin/env awk -f BEGIN { printf("SecondsSinceLaunch IncrementalCount FullCount UserTime SysTime RealTime BeforeSize AfterSize TotalSize\n") } ###################### # Save count data from lines that are at the start of each G1GC trace. # Each trace starts out like this: # {Heap before GC invocations=14 (full 0): # garbage-first heap total 9437184K, used 325496K [0xfffffffd00000000, 0xffffffff40000000, 0xffffffff40000000) ###################### /{Heap.*full/{ gsub ( "\\)" , "" ); nf=split($0,a,"="); split(a[2],b," "); getline; if ( match($0, "first") ) { G1GC=1; IncrementalCount=b[1]; FullCount=substr( b[3], 1, length(b[3])-1 ); } else { G1GC=0; } } ###################### # Pull out time stamps that are in lines with this format: # 2014-05-12T14:02:06.025-0700: 94.312: [GC pause (young), 0.08870154 secs] ###################### /GC pause/ { DateTime=$1; SecondsSinceLaunch=substr($2, 1, length($2)-1); } ###################### # Heap sizes are in lines that look like this: # [ 4842M->4838M(9216M)] ###################### /\[ .*]$/ { gsub ( "\\[" , "" ); gsub ( "\ \]" , "" ); gsub ( "->" , " " ); gsub ( "\\( " , " " ); gsub ( "\ \)" , " " ); split($0,a," "); if ( split(a[1],b,"M") > 1 ) {BeforeSize=b[1]*1024;} if ( split(a[1],b,"K") > 1 ) {BeforeSize=b[1];} if ( split(a[2],b,"M") > 1 ) {AfterSize=b[1]*1024;} if ( split(a[2],b,"K") > 1 ) {AfterSize=b[1];} if ( split(a[3],b,"M") > 1 ) {TotalSize=b[1]*1024;} if ( split(a[3],b,"K") > 1 ) {TotalSize=b[1];} } ###################### # Emit an output line when you find input that looks like this: # [Times: user=1.41 sys=0.08, real=0.24 secs] ###################### /\[Times/ { if (G1GC==1) { gsub ( "," , "" ); split($2,a,"="); UserTime=a[2]; split($3,a,"="); SysTime=a[2]; split($4,a,"="); RealTime=a[2]; print DateTime,SecondsSinceLaunch,IncrementalCount,FullCount,UserTime,SysTime,RealTime,BeforeSize,AfterSize,TotalSize; G1GC=0; } } The resulting summary is about 25X smaller that the original file, but still difficult for a human to digest. SecondsSinceLaunch IncrementalCount FullCount UserTime SysTime RealTime BeforeSize AfterSize TotalSize ... 2014-05-12T18:36:34.669-0700: 3985.744 561 0 0.57 0.06 0.16 1724416 1720320 9437184 2014-05-12T18:36:34.839-0700: 3985.914 562 0 0.51 0.06 0.19 1724416 1720320 9437184 2014-05-12T18:36:35.069-0700: 3986.144 563 0 0.60 0.04 0.27 1724416 1721344 9437184 2014-05-12T18:36:35.354-0700: 3986.429 564 0 0.33 0.04 0.09 1725440 1722368 9437184 2014-05-12T18:36:35.545-0700: 3986.620 565 0 0.58 0.04 0.17 1726464 1722368 9437184 2014-05-12T18:36:35.726-0700: 3986.801 566 0 0.43 0.05 0.12 1726464 1722368 9437184 2014-05-12T18:36:35.856-0700: 3986.930 567 0 0.30 0.04 0.07 1726464 1723392 9437184 2014-05-12T18:36:35.947-0700: 3987.023 568 0 0.61 0.04 0.26 1727488 1723392 9437184 2014-05-12T18:36:36.228-0700: 3987.302 569 0 0.46 0.04 0.16 1731584 1724416 9437184 Reading the Data into R Once the GC log data had been cleansed, either by processing the first format with the shell script, or by processing the second format with the awk script, it was easy to read the data into R. g1gc.df = read.csv("summary.txt", row.names = NULL, stringsAsFactors=FALSE,sep="") str(g1gc.df) ## 'data.frame': 8307 obs. of 10 variables: ## $ row.names : chr "2014-05-12T14:00:32.868-0700:" "2014-05-12T14:00:33.179-0700:" "2014-05-12T14:00:33.677-0700:" "2014-05-12T14:00:35.538-0700:" ... ## $ SecondsSinceLaunch: num 1.16 1.47 1.97 3.83 6.1 ... ## $ IncrementalCount : int 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 ... ## $ FullCount : int 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 ... ## $ UserTime : num 0.11 0.05 0.04 0.21 0.08 0.26 0.31 0.33 0.34 0.56 ... ## $ SysTime : num 0.04 0.01 0.01 0.05 0.01 0.06 0.07 0.06 0.07 0.09 ... ## $ RealTime : num 0.02 0.02 0.01 0.04 0.02 0.04 0.05 0.04 0.04 0.06 ... ## $ BeforeSize : int 8192 5496 5768 22528 24576 43008 34816 53248 55296 93184 ... ## $ AfterSize : int 1400 1672 2557 4907 7072 14336 16384 18432 19456 21504 ... ## $ TotalSize : int 9437184 9437184 9437184 9437184 9437184 9437184 9437184 9437184 9437184 9437184 ... head(g1gc.df) ## row.names SecondsSinceLaunch IncrementalCount ## 1 2014-05-12T14:00:32.868-0700: 1.161 0 ## 2 2014-05-12T14:00:33.179-0700: 1.472 1 ## 3 2014-05-12T14:00:33.677-0700: 1.969 2 ## 4 2014-05-12T14:00:35.538-0700: 3.830 3 ## 5 2014-05-12T14:00:37.811-0700: 6.103 4 ## 6 2014-05-12T14:00:41.428-0700: 9.720 5 ## FullCount UserTime SysTime RealTime BeforeSize AfterSize TotalSize ## 1 0 0.11 0.04 0.02 8192 1400 9437184 ## 2 0 0.05 0.01 0.02 5496 1672 9437184 ## 3 0 0.04 0.01 0.01 5768 2557 9437184 ## 4 0 0.21 0.05 0.04 22528 4907 9437184 ## 5 0 0.08 0.01 0.02 24576 7072 9437184 ## 6 0 0.26 0.06 0.04 43008 14336 9437184 Basic Statistics Once the data has been read into R, simple statistics are very easy to generate. All of the numbers from high school statistics are available via simple commands. For example, generate a summary of every column: summary(g1gc.df) ## row.names SecondsSinceLaunch IncrementalCount FullCount ## Length:8307 Min. : 1 Min. : 0 Min. : 0.0 ## Class :character 1st Qu.: 9977 1st Qu.:2048 1st Qu.: 0.0 ## Mode :character Median :12855 Median :4136 Median : 12.0 ## Mean :12527 Mean :4156 Mean : 31.6 ## 3rd Qu.:15758 3rd Qu.:6262 3rd Qu.: 61.0 ## Max. :55484 Max. :8391 Max. :113.0 ## UserTime SysTime RealTime BeforeSize ## Min. :0.040 Min. :0.0000 Min. : 0.0 Min. : 5476 ## 1st Qu.:0.470 1st Qu.:0.0300 1st Qu.: 0.1 1st Qu.:5137920 ## Median :0.620 Median :0.0300 Median : 0.1 Median :6574080 ## Mean :0.751 Mean :0.0355 Mean : 0.3 Mean :5841855 ## 3rd Qu.:0.920 3rd Qu.:0.0400 3rd Qu.: 0.2 3rd Qu.:7084032 ## Max. :3.370 Max. :1.5600 Max. :488.1 Max. :8696832 ## AfterSize TotalSize ## Min. : 1380 Min. :9437184 ## 1st Qu.:5002752 1st Qu.:9437184 ## Median :6559744 Median :9437184 ## Mean :5785454 Mean :9437184 ## 3rd Qu.:7054336 3rd Qu.:9437184 ## Max. :8482816 Max. :9437184 Q: What is the total amount of User CPU time spent in garbage collection? sum(g1gc.df$UserTime) ## [1] 6236 As you can see, less than two hours of CPU time was spent in garbage collection. Is that too much? To find the percentage of time spent in garbage collection, divide the number above by total_elapsed_time*CPU_count. In this case, there are a lot of CPU’s and it turns out the the overall amount of CPU time spent in garbage collection isn’t a problem when viewed in isolation. When calculating rates, i.e. events per unit time, you need to ask yourself if the rate is homogenous across the time period in the log file. Does the log file include spikes of high activity that should be separately analyzed? Averaging in data from nights and weekends with data from business hours may alias problems. If you have a reason to suspect that the garbage collection rates include peaks and valleys that need independent analysis, see the “Time Series” section, below. Q: How much garbage is collected on each pass? The amount of heap space that is recovered per GC pass is surprisingly low: At least one collection didn’t recover any data. (“Min.=0”) 25% of the passes recovered 3MB or less. (“1st Qu.=3072”) Half of the GC passes recovered 4MB or less. (“Median=4096”) The average amount recovered was 56MB. (“Mean=56390”) 75% of the passes recovered 36MB or less. (“3rd Qu.=36860”) At least one pass recovered 2GB. (“Max.=2121000”) g1gc.df$Delta = g1gc.df$BeforeSize - g1gc.df$AfterSize summary(g1gc.df$Delta) ## Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max. ## 0 3070 4100 56400 36900 2120000 Q: What is the maximum User CPU time for a single collection? The worst garbage collection (“Max.”) is many standard deviations away from the mean. The data appears to be right skewed. summary(g1gc.df$UserTime) ## Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max. ## 0.040 0.470 0.620 0.751 0.920 3.370 sd(g1gc.df$UserTime) ## [1] 0.3966 Basic Graphics Once the data is in R, it is trivial to plot the data with formats including dot plots, line charts, bar charts (simple, stacked, grouped), pie charts, boxplots, scatter plots histograms, and kernel density plots. Histogram of User CPU Time per Collection I don't think that this graph requires any explanation. hist(g1gc.df$UserTime, main="User CPU Time per Collection", xlab="Seconds", ylab="Frequency") Box plot to identify outliers When the initial data is viewed with a box plot, you can see the one crazy outlier in the real time per GC. Save this data point for future analysis and drop the outlier so that it’s not throwing off our statistics. Now the box plot shows many outliers, which will be examined later, using times series analysis. Notice that the scale of the x-axis changes drastically once the crazy outlier is removed. par(mfrow=c(2,1)) boxplot(g1gc.df$UserTime,g1gc.df$SysTime,g1gc.df$RealTime, main="Box Plot of Time per GC\n(dominated by a crazy outlier)", names=c("usr","sys","elapsed"), xlab="Seconds per GC", ylab="Time (Seconds)", horizontal = TRUE, outcol="red") crazy.outlier.df=g1gc.df[g1gc.df$RealTime > 400,] g1gc.df=g1gc.df[g1gc.df$RealTime < 400,] boxplot(g1gc.df$UserTime,g1gc.df$SysTime,g1gc.df$RealTime, main="Box Plot of Time per GC\n(crazy outlier excluded)", names=c("usr","sys","elapsed"), xlab="Seconds per GC", ylab="Time (Seconds)", horizontal = TRUE, outcol="red") box(which = "outer", lty = "solid") Here is the crazy outlier for future analysis: crazy.outlier.df ## row.names SecondsSinceLaunch IncrementalCount ## 8233 2014-05-12T23:15:43.903-0700: 20741 8316 ## FullCount UserTime SysTime RealTime BeforeSize AfterSize TotalSize ## 8233 112 0.55 0.42 488.1 8381440 8235008 9437184 ## Delta ## 8233 146432 R Time Series Data To analyze the garbage collection as a time series, I’ll use Z’s Ordered Observations (zoo). “zoo is the creator for an S3 class of indexed totally ordered observations which includes irregular time series.” require(zoo) ## Loading required package: zoo ## ## Attaching package: 'zoo' ## ## The following objects are masked from 'package:base': ## ## as.Date, as.Date.numeric head(g1gc.df[,1]) ## [1] "2014-05-12T14:00:32.868-0700:" "2014-05-12T14:00:33.179-0700:" ## [3] "2014-05-12T14:00:33.677-0700:" "2014-05-12T14:00:35.538-0700:" ## [5] "2014-05-12T14:00:37.811-0700:" "2014-05-12T14:00:41.428-0700:" options("digits.secs"=3) times=as.POSIXct( g1gc.df[,1], format="%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%OS%z:") g1gc.z = zoo(g1gc.df[,-c(1)], order.by=times) head(g1gc.z) ## SecondsSinceLaunch IncrementalCount FullCount ## 2014-05-12 17:00:32.868 1.161 0 0 ## 2014-05-12 17:00:33.178 1.472 1 0 ## 2014-05-12 17:00:33.677 1.969 2 0 ## 2014-05-12 17:00:35.538 3.830 3 0 ## 2014-05-12 17:00:37.811 6.103 4 0 ## 2014-05-12 17:00:41.427 9.720 5 0 ## UserTime SysTime RealTime BeforeSize AfterSize ## 2014-05-12 17:00:32.868 0.11 0.04 0.02 8192 1400 ## 2014-05-12 17:00:33.178 0.05 0.01 0.02 5496 1672 ## 2014-05-12 17:00:33.677 0.04 0.01 0.01 5768 2557 ## 2014-05-12 17:00:35.538 0.21 0.05 0.04 22528 4907 ## 2014-05-12 17:00:37.811 0.08 0.01 0.02 24576 7072 ## 2014-05-12 17:00:41.427 0.26 0.06 0.04 43008 14336 ## TotalSize Delta ## 2014-05-12 17:00:32.868 9437184 6792 ## 2014-05-12 17:00:33.178 9437184 3824 ## 2014-05-12 17:00:33.677 9437184 3211 ## 2014-05-12 17:00:35.538 9437184 17621 ## 2014-05-12 17:00:37.811 9437184 17504 ## 2014-05-12 17:00:41.427 9437184 28672 Example of Two Benchmark Runs in One Log File The data in the following graph is from a different log file, not the one of primary interest to this article. I’m including this image because it is an example of idle periods followed by busy periods. It would be uninteresting to average the rate of garbage collection over the entire log file period. More interesting would be the rate of garbage collect in the two busy periods. Are they the same or different? Your production data may be similar, for example, bursts when employees return from lunch and idle times on weekend evenings, etc. Once the data is in an R Time Series, you can analyze isolated time windows. Clipping the Time Series data Flashing back to our test case… Viewing the data as a time series is interesting. You can see that the work intensive time period is between 9:00 PM and 3:00 AM. Lets clip the data to the interesting period:     par(mfrow=c(2,1)) plot(g1gc.z$UserTime, type="h", main="User Time per GC\nTime: Complete Log File", xlab="Time of Day", ylab="CPU Seconds per GC", col="#1b9e77") clipped.g1gc.z=window(g1gc.z, start=as.POSIXct("2014-05-12 21:00:00"), end=as.POSIXct("2014-05-13 03:00:00")) plot(clipped.g1gc.z$UserTime, type="h", main="User Time per GC\nTime: Limited to Benchmark Execution", xlab="Time of Day", ylab="CPU Seconds per GC", col="#1b9e77") box(which = "outer", lty = "solid") Cumulative Incremental and Full GC count Here is the cumulative incremental and full GC count. When the line is very steep, it indicates that the GCs are repeating very quickly. Notice that the scale on the Y axis is different for full vs. incremental. plot(clipped.g1gc.z[,c(2:3)], main="Cumulative Incremental and Full GC count", xlab="Time of Day", col="#1b9e77") GC Analysis of Benchmark Execution using Time Series data In the following series of 3 graphs: The “After Size” show the amount of heap space in use after each garbage collection. Many Java objects are still referenced, i.e. alive, during each garbage collection. This may indicate that the application has a memory leak, or may indicate that the application has a very large memory footprint. Typically, an application's memory footprint plateau's in the early stage of execution. One would expect this graph to have a flat top. The steep decline in the heap space may indicate that the application crashed after 2:00. The second graph shows that the outliers in real execution time, discussed above, occur near 2:00. when the Java heap seems to be quite full. The third graph shows that Full GCs are infrequent during the first few hours of execution. The rate of Full GC's, (the slope of the cummulative Full GC line), changes near midnight.   plot(clipped.g1gc.z[,c("AfterSize","RealTime","FullCount")], xlab="Time of Day", col=c("#1b9e77","red","#1b9e77")) GC Analysis of heap recovered Each GC trace includes the amount of heap space in use before and after the individual GC event. During garbage coolection, unreferenced objects are identified, the space holding the unreferenced objects is freed, and thus, the difference in before and after usage indicates how much space has been freed. The following box plot and bar chart both demonstrate the same point - the amount of heap space freed per garbage colloection is surprisingly low. par(mfrow=c(2,1)) boxplot(as.vector(clipped.g1gc.z$Delta), main="Amount of Heap Recovered per GC Pass", xlab="Size in KB", horizontal = TRUE, col="red") hist(as.vector(clipped.g1gc.z$Delta), main="Amount of Heap Recovered per GC Pass", xlab="Size in KB", breaks=100, col="red") box(which = "outer", lty = "solid") This graph is the most interesting. The dark blue area shows how much heap is occupied by referenced Java objects. This represents memory that holds live data. The red fringe at the top shows how much data was recovered after each garbage collection. barplot(clipped.g1gc.z[,c("AfterSize","Delta")], col=c("#7570b3","#e7298a"), xlab="Time of Day", border=NA) legend("topleft", c("Live Objects","Heap Recovered on GC"), fill=c("#7570b3","#e7298a")) box(which = "outer", lty = "solid") When I discuss the data in the log files with the customer, I will ask for an explaination for the large amount of referenced data resident in the Java heap. There are two are posibilities: There is a memory leak and the amount of space required to hold referenced objects will continue to grow, limited only by the maximum heap size. After the maximum heap size is reached, the JVM will throw an “Out of Memory” exception every time that the application tries to allocate a new object. If this is the case, the aplication needs to be debugged to identify why old objects are referenced when they are no longer needed. The application has a legitimate requirement to keep a large amount of data in memory. The customer may want to further increase the maximum heap size. Another possible solution would be to partition the application across multiple cluster nodes, where each node has responsibility for managing a unique subset of the data. Conclusion In conclusion, R is a very powerful tool for the analysis of Java garbage collection log files. The primary difficulty is data cleansing so that information can be read into an R data frame. Once the data has been read into R, a rich set of tools may be used for thorough evaluation.

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• JavaOne Latin America 2012 is a wrap!

  - by arungupta

  Third JavaOne in Latin America (2010, 2011) is now a wrap! Like last year, the event started with a Geek Bike Ride. I could not attend the bike ride because of pre-planned activities but heard lots of good comments about it afterwards. This is a great way to engage with JavaOne attendees in an informal setting. I highly recommend you joining next time! JavaOne Blog provides a a great coverage for the opening keynotes. I talked about all the great set of functionality that is coming in the Java EE 7 Platform. Also shared the details on how Java EE 7 JSRs are willing to take help from the Adopt-a-JSR program. glassfish.org/adoptajsr bridges the gap between JUGs willing to participate and looking for areas on where to help. The different specification leads have identified areas on where they are looking for feedback. So if you are JUG is interested in picking a JSR, I recommend to take a look at glassfish.org/adoptajsr and jump on the bandwagon. The main attraction for the Tuesday evening was the GlassFish Party. The party was packed with Latin American JUG leaders, execs from Oracle, and local community members. Free flowing food and beer/caipirinhas acted as great lubricant for great conversations. Some of them were considering the migration from Spring -> Java EE 6 and replacing their primary app server with GlassFish. Locaweb, a local hosting provider sponsored a round of beer at the party as well. They are planning to come with Java EE hosting next year and GlassFish would be a logical choice for them ;) I heard lots of positive feedback about the party afterwards. Many thanks to Bruno Borges for organizing a great party! Check out some more fun pictures of the party! Next day, I gave a presentation on "The Java EE 7 Platform: Productivity and HTML 5" and the slides are now available: With so much new content coming in the plaform: Java Caching API (JSR 107) Concurrency Utilities for Java EE (JSR 236) Batch Applications for the Java Platform (JSR 352) Java API for JSON (JSR 353) Java API for WebSocket (JSR 356) And JAX-RS 2.0 (JSR 339) and JMS 2.0 (JSR 343) getting major updates, there is definitely lot of excitement that was evident amongst the attendees. The talk was delivered in the biggest hall and had about 200 attendees. Also spent a lot of time talking to folks at the OTN Lounge. The JUG leaders appreciation dinner in the evening had its usual share of fun. Day 3 started with a session on "Building HTML5 WebSocket Apps in Java". The slides are now available: The room was packed with about 150 attendees and there was good interaction in the room as well. A collaborative whiteboard built using WebSocket was very well received. The following tweets made it more worthwhile: A WebSocket speek, by @ArunGupta, was worth every hour lost in transit. #JavaOneBrasil2012, #JavaOneBr @arungupta awesome presentation about WebSockets :) The session was immediately followed by the hands-on lab "Developing JAX-RS Web Applications Utilizing Server-Sent Events and WebSocket". The lab covers JAX-RS 2.0, Jersey-specific features such as Server-Sent Events, and a WebSocket endpoint using JSR 356. The complete self-paced lab guide can be downloaded from here. The lab was planned for 2 hours but several folks finished the entire exercise in about 75 mins. The wonderfully written lab material and an added incentive of Java EE 6 Pocket Guide did the trick ;-) I also spoke at "The Java Community Process: How You Can Make a Positive Difference". It was really great to see several JUG leaders talking about Adopt-a-JSR program and other activities that attendees can do to participate in the JCP. I shared details about Adopt a Java EE 7 JSR as well. The community keynote in the evening was looking fun but I had to leave in between to go through the peak Sao Paulo traffic time :) Enjoy the complete set of pictures in the album:

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• Social Media Talk: Facebook, Really?? How Has It Become This Popular??

  - by david.talamelli

  If you have read some of my previous posts over the past few years either here or on my personal blog David's Journal on Tap you will know I am a Social Media enthusiast. I use various social media sites everday in both my work and personal life. I was surprised to read today on Mashable.com that Facebook now Commands 41% of Social Media Trafic. When I think of the Social Media sites I use most, the sites that jump into my mind first are LinkedIn, Blogging and Twitter. I do use Facebook in both work and in my personal life but on the list of sites I use it probably ranks closer to the bottom of the list rather than the top. I know Facebook is engrained in everything these days - but really I am not a huge Facebook fan - and I am finding that over the past 3-6 months my interest in Facebook is going down rather than up. From a work perspective - SM sites let me connect with candidates and communities and they help me talk about the things that I am doing here at Oracle. From a personal perspective SM sites let me keep in touch with friends and family both here and overseas in a really simple and easy way. Sites like LinkedIn give me a great way to proactively talk to both active and passive candidates. Twitter is fantastic to keep in touch with industry trends and keep up to date on the latest trending topics as well as follow conversations about whatever keyword you want to follow. Blogging lets me share my thoughts and ideas with others and while FB does have some great benefits I don't think the benefits outweigh the negatives of using FB. I use TweetDeck to keep track of my twitter feeds, the latest LinkedIn updates and Facebook updates. Tweetdeck is a great tool as it consolidates these 3 SM sites for me and I can quickly scan to see the latest news on any of them. From what I have seen from Facebook it looks like 70%-80% of people are using FB to grow their farm on farmville, start a mafia war on mafiawars or read their horoscope, check their love percentage, etc...... In between all these "updates" every now and again you do see a real update from someone who actually has something to say but there is so much "white noise" on FB from all the games and apps that is hard to see the real messages from all the 'games' information. I don't like having to scroll through what seems likes pages of farmville updates only to get one real piece of information. For me this is where FB's value really drops off. While I use SM everyday I try to use SM effectively. Sifting through so much noise is not effective and really I am not all that interested in Farmville, MafiaWars or any similar game/app. But what about Groups and Facebook Ads?? Groups are ok, but I am not sure I would call them SM game changers - yes there is a group for everything out there, but a group whether it is on FB or not is only as good as the community that supports and participates in it. Many of the Groups on FB (and elsewhere) are set up and never used or promoted by the moderator. I have heard that FB ads do have an impact, and I have not really looked at them - the question of cost jumps and return on investment comes to my mind though. FB does have some benefits, it is a great way to keep in touch with people and a great way to talk to others. I think it would have been interesting to see a different statistic measuring how effective that 41% of Social Media Traffic via FB really is or is it just a case of more people jumping online to play games. To me FB does not equal SM effectiveness, at the moment it is a tool that I sometimes need to use as opposed to want to use. This article was originally posted on David Talamelli's Blog - David's Journal on Tap

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• Text Expansion Awareness for UX Designers: Points to Consider

  - by ultan o'broin

  Awareness of translated text expansion dynamics is important for enterprise applications UX designers (I am assuming all source text for translation is in English, though apps development can takes place in other natural languages too). This consideration goes beyond the standard 'character multiplication' rule and must take into account the avoidance of other layout tricks that a designer might be tempted to try. Follow these guidelines. For general text expansion, remember the simple rule that the shorter the word is in the English, the longer it will need to be in English. See the examples provided by Richard Ishida of the W3C and you'll get the idea. So, forget the 30 percent or one inch minimum expansion rule of the old Forms days. Unfortunately remembering convoluted text expansion rules, based as a percentage of the US English character count can be tough going. Try these: Up to 10 characters: 100 to 200% 11 to 20 characters: 80 to 100% 21 to 30 characters: 60 to 80% 31 to 50 characters: 40 to 60% 51 to 70 characters: 31 to 40% Over 70 characters: 30% (Source: IBM) So it might be easier to remember a rule that if your English text is less than 20 characters then allow it to double in length (200 percent), and then after that assume an increase by half the length of the text (50%). (Bear in mind that ADF can apply truncation rules on some components in English too). (If your text is stored in a database, developers must make sure the table column widths can accommodate the expansion of your text when translated based on byte size for the translated character and not numbers of characters. Use Unicode. One character does not equal one byte in the multilingual enterprise apps world.) Rely on a graceful transformation of translated text. Let all pages to resize dynamically so the text wraps and flow naturally. ADF pages supports this already. Think websites. Don't hard-code alignments. Use Start and End properties on components and not Left or Right. Don't force alignments of components on the page by using texts of a certain length as spacers. Use proper label positioning and anchoring in ADF components or other technologies. Remember that an increase in text length means an increase in vertical space too when pages are resized. So don't hard-code vertical heights for any text areas. Don't be tempted to manually create text or printed reports this way either. They cannot be translated successfully, and are very difficult to maintain in English. Use XML, HTML, RTF and so on. Check out what Oracle BI Publisher offers. Don't force wrapping by using tricks such as /n or /t characters or HTML BR tags or forced page breaks. Once the text is translated the alignment will be destroyed. The position of the breaking character or tag would need to be moved anyway, or even removed. When creating tables, then use table components. Don't use manually created tables that reply on word length to maintain column and row alignment. For example, don't use codeblock elements in HTML; use the proper table elements instead. Once translated, the alignment of manually formatted tabular data is destroyed. Finally, if there is a space restriction, then don't use made-up acronyms, abbreviations or some form of daft text speak to save space. Besides being incomprehensible in English, they may need full translations of the shortened words, even if they can be figured out. Use approved or industry standard acronyms according to the UX style rules, not as a space-saving device. Restricted Real Estate on Mobile Devices On mobile devices real estate is limited. Using shortened text is fine once it is comprehensible. Users in the mobile space prefer brevity too, as they are on the go, performing three-minute tasks, with no time to read lengthy texts. Using fragments and lightning up on unnecessary articles and getting straight to the point with imperative forms of verbs makes sense both on real estate and user experience grounds.

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• How To Clear An Alert - Part 2

  - by werner.de.gruyter

  There were some interesting comments and remarks on the original posting, so I decided to do a follow-up and address some of the issues that got raised... Handling Metric Errors First of all, there is a significant difference between an 'error' and an 'alert'. An 'alert' is the violation of a condition (a threshold) specified for a given metric. That means that the Agent is collecting and gathering the data for the metric, but there is a situation that requires the attention of an administrator. An 'error' on the other hand however, is a failure to collect metric data: The Agent is throwing the error because it cannot determine the value for the metric Whereas the 'alert' guarantees continuity of the metric data, an 'error' signals a big unknown. And the unknown aspect of all this is what makes an error a lot more serious than a regular alert: If you don't know what the current state of affairs is, there could be some serious issues brewing that nobody is aware of... The life-cycle of a Metric Error Clearing a metric error is pretty much the same workflow as a metric 'alert': The Agent signals the error after it failed to execute the metric The error is uploaded to the OMS/repository, where it becomes visible in the Console The error will remain active until the Agent is able to execute the metric successfully. Even though the metric is still getting scheduled and executed on a regular basis, the error will remain outstanding as long as the Agent is not capable of executing the metric correctly Knowing this, the way to fix the metric error should be obvious: Take the 'problem' away, and as soon as the metric is executed again (based on the frequency of the metric), the error will go away. The same tricks used to clear alerts can be used here too: Wait for the next scheduled execution. For those metrics that are executed regularly (like every 15 minutes or so), it's just a matter of waiting those minutes to see the updates. The 'Reevaluate Alert' button can be used to force a re-execution of the metric. In case a metric is executed once a day, this will be a better way to make sure that the underlying problem has been solved. And if it has been, the metric error will be removed, and the regular data points will be uploaded to the repository. And just in case you have to 'force' the issue a little: If you disable and re-enable a metric, it will get re-scheduled. And that means a new metric execution, and an update of the (hopefully) fixed problem. Database server-generated alerts and problem checkers There are various ways the Agent can collect metric data: Via a script or a SQL statement, reading a log file, getting a value from an SNMP OID or listening for SNMP traps or via the DBMS_SERVER_ALERTS mechanism of an Oracle database. For those alert which are generated by the database (like tablespace metrics for 10g and above databases), the Agent just 'waits' for the database to report any new findings. If the Agent has lost the current state of the server-side metrics (due to an incomplete recovery after a disaster, or after an improper use of the 'emctl clearstate' command), the Agent might be still aware of an alert that the database no longer has (or vice versa). The same goes for 'problem checker' alerts: Those metrics that only report data if there is a problem (like the 'invalid objects' metric) will also have a problem if the Agent state has been tampered with (again, the incomplete recovery, and after improper use of 'emctl clearstate' are the two main causes for this). The best way to deal with these kinds of mismatches, is to simple disable and re-enable the metric again: The disabling will clear the state of the metric, and the re-enabling will force a re-execution of the metric, so the new and updated results can get uploaded to the repository. Starting 10gR5, the Agent performs additional checks and verifications after each restart of the Agent and/or each state change of the database (shutdown/startup or failover in case of DataGuard) to catch these kinds of mismatches.

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• ASP.NET and HTML5 Local Storage

  - by Stephen Walther

  My favorite feature of HTML5, hands-down, is HTML5 local storage (aka DOM storage). By taking advantage of HTML5 local storage, you can dramatically improve the performance of your data-driven ASP.NET applications by caching data in the browser persistently. Think of HTML5 local storage like browser cookies, but much better. Like cookies, local storage is persistent. When you add something to browser local storage, it remains there when the user returns to the website (possibly days or months later). Importantly, unlike the cookie storage limitation of 4KB, you can store up to 10 megabytes in HTML5 local storage. Because HTML5 local storage works with the latest versions of all modern browsers (IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari), you can start taking advantage of this HTML5 feature in your applications right now. Why use HTML5 Local Storage? I use HTML5 Local Storage in the JavaScript Reference application: http://Superexpert.com/JavaScriptReference The JavaScript Reference application is an HTML5 app that provides an interactive reference for all of the syntax elements of JavaScript (You can read more about the application and download the source code for the application here). When you open the application for the first time, all of the entries are transferred from the server to the browser (all 300+ entries). All of the entries are stored in local storage. When you open the application in the future, only changes are transferred from the server to the browser. The benefit of this approach is that the application performs extremely fast. When you click the details link to view details on a particular entry, the entry details appear instantly because all of the entries are stored on the client machine. When you perform key-up searches, by typing in the filter textbox, matching entries are displayed very quickly because the entries are being filtered on the local machine. This approach can have a dramatic effect on the performance of any interactive data-driven web application. Interacting with data on the client is almost always faster than interacting with the same data on the server. Retrieving Data from the Server In the JavaScript Reference application, I use Microsoft WCF Data Services to expose data to the browser. WCF Data Services generates a REST interface for your data automatically. Here are the steps: Create your database tables in Microsoft SQL Server. For example, I created a database named ReferenceDB and a database table named Entities. Use the Entity Framework to generate your data model. For example, I used the Entity Framework to generate a class named ReferenceDBEntities and a class named Entities. Expose your data through WCF Data Services. I added a WCF Data Service to my project and modified the data service class to look like this:   using System.Data.Services; using System.Data.Services.Common; using System.Web; using JavaScriptReference.Models; namespace JavaScriptReference.Services { [System.ServiceModel.ServiceBehavior(IncludeExceptionDetailInFaults = true)] public class EntryService : DataService<ReferenceDBEntities> { // This method is called only once to initialize service-wide policies. public static void InitializeService(DataServiceConfiguration config) { config.UseVerboseErrors = true; config.SetEntitySetAccessRule("*", EntitySetRights.All); config.DataServiceBehavior.MaxProtocolVersion = DataServiceProtocolVersion.V2; } // Define a change interceptor for the Products entity set. [ChangeInterceptor("Entries")] public void OnChangeEntries(Entry entry, UpdateOperations operations) { if (!HttpContext.Current.Request.IsAuthenticated) { throw new DataServiceException("Cannot update reference unless authenticated."); } } } }     The WCF data service is named EntryService. Notice that it derives from DataService<ReferenceEntitites>. Because it derives from DataService<ReferenceEntities>, the data service exposes the contents of the ReferenceEntitiesDB database. In the code above, I defined a ChangeInterceptor to prevent un-authenticated users from making changes to the database. Anyone can retrieve data through the service, but only authenticated users are allowed to make changes. After you expose data through a WCF Data Service, you can use jQuery to retrieve the data by performing an Ajax call. For example, I am using an Ajax call that looks something like this to retrieve the JavaScript entries from the EntryService.svc data service: $.ajax({ dataType: "json", url: “/Services/EntryService.svc/Entries”, success: function (result) { var data = callback(result["d"]); } });     Notice that you must unwrap the data using result[“d”]. After you unwrap the data, you have a JavaScript array of the entries. I’m transferring all 300+ entries from the server to the client when the application is opened for the first time. In other words, I transfer the entire database from the server to the client, once and only once, when the application is opened for the first time. The data is transferred using JSON. Here is a fragment: { "d" : [ { "__metadata": { "uri": "http://superexpert.com/javascriptreference/Services/EntryService.svc/Entries(1)", "type": "ReferenceDBModel.Entry" }, "Id": 1, "Name": "Global", "Browsers": "ff3_6,ie8,ie9,c8,sf5,es3,es5", "Syntax": "object", "ShortDescription": "Contains global variables and functions", "FullDescription": "<p>\nThe Global object is determined by the host environment. In web browsers, the Global object is the same as the windows object.\n</p>\n<p>\nYou can use the keyword <code>this</code> to refer to the Global object when in the global context (outside of any function).\n</p>\n<p>\nThe Global object holds all global variables and functions. For example, the following code demonstrates that the global <code>movieTitle</code> variable refers to the same thing as <code>window.movieTitle</code> and <code>this.movieTitle</code>.\n</p>\n<pre>\nvar movieTitle = \"Star Wars\";\nconsole.log(movieTitle === this.movieTitle); // true\nconsole.log(movieTitle === window.movieTitle); // true\n</pre>\n", "LastUpdated": "634298578273756641", "IsDeleted": false, "OwnerId": null }, { "__metadata": { "uri": "http://superexpert.com/javascriptreference/Services/EntryService.svc/Entries(2)", "type": "ReferenceDBModel.Entry" }, "Id": 2, "Name": "eval(string)", "Browsers": "ff3_6,ie8,ie9,c8,sf5,es3,es5", "Syntax": "function", "ShortDescription": "Evaluates and executes JavaScript code dynamically", "FullDescription": "<p>\nThe following code evaluates and executes the string \"3+5\" at runtime.\n</p>\n<pre>\nvar result = eval(\"3+5\");\nconsole.log(result); // returns 8\n</pre>\n<p>\nYou can rewrite the code above like this:\n</p>\n<pre>\nvar result;\neval(\"result = 3+5\");\nconsole.log(result);\n</pre>", "LastUpdated": "634298580913817644", "IsDeleted": false, "OwnerId": 1 } … ]} I worried about the amount of time that it would take to transfer the records. According to Google Chome, it takes about 5 seconds to retrieve all 300+ records on a broadband connection over the Internet. 5 seconds is a small price to pay to avoid performing any server fetches of the data in the future. And here are the estimated times using different types of connections using Fiddler: Notice that using a modem, it takes 33 seconds to download the database. 33 seconds is a significant chunk of time. So, I would not use the approach of transferring the entire database up front if you expect a significant portion of your website audience to connect to your website with a modem. Adding Data to HTML5 Local Storage After the JavaScript entries are retrieved from the server, the entries are stored in HTML5 local storage. Here’s the reference documentation for HTML5 storage for Internet Explorer: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc197062(VS.85).aspx You access local storage by accessing the windows.localStorage object in JavaScript. This object contains key/value pairs. For example, you can use the following JavaScript code to add a new item to local storage: <script type="text/javascript"> window.localStorage.setItem("message", "Hello World!"); </script>   You can use the Google Chrome Storage tab in the Developer Tools (hit CTRL-SHIFT I in Chrome) to view items added to local storage: After you add an item to local storage, you can read it at any time in the future by using the window.localStorage.getItem() method: <script type="text/javascript"> window.localStorage.setItem("message", "Hello World!"); </script>   You only can add strings to local storage and not JavaScript objects such as arrays. Therefore, before adding a JavaScript object to local storage, you need to convert it into a JSON string. In the JavaScript Reference application, I use a wrapper around local storage that looks something like this: function Storage() { this.get = function (name) { return JSON.parse(window.localStorage.getItem(name)); }; this.set = function (name, value) { window.localStorage.setItem(name, JSON.stringify(value)); }; this.clear = function () { window.localStorage.clear(); }; }   If you use the wrapper above, then you can add arbitrary JavaScript objects to local storage like this: var store = new Storage(); // Add array to storage var products = [ {name:"Fish", price:2.33}, {name:"Bacon", price:1.33} ]; store.set("products", products); // Retrieve items from storage var products = store.get("products");   Modern browsers support the JSON object natively. If you need the script above to work with older browsers then you should download the JSON2.js library from: https://github.com/douglascrockford/JSON-js The JSON2 library will use the native JSON object if a browser already supports JSON. Merging Server Changes with Browser Local Storage When you first open the JavaScript Reference application, the entire database of JavaScript entries is transferred from the server to the browser. Two items are added to local storage: entries and entriesLastUpdated. The first item contains the entire entries database (a big JSON string of entries). The second item, a timestamp, represents the version of the entries. Whenever you open the JavaScript Reference in the future, the entriesLastUpdated timestamp is passed to the server. Only records that have been deleted, updated, or added since entriesLastUpdated are transferred to the browser. The OData query to get the latest updates looks like this: http://superexpert.com/javascriptreference/Services/EntryService.svc/Entries?$filter=(LastUpdated%20gt%20634301199890494792L) If you remove URL encoding, the query looks like this: http://superexpert.com/javascriptreference/Services/EntryService.svc/Entries?$filter=(LastUpdated gt 634301199890494792L) This query returns only those entries where the value of LastUpdated > 634301199890494792 (the version timestamp). The changes – new JavaScript entries, deleted entries, and updated entries – are merged with the existing entries in local storage. The JavaScript code for performing the merge is contained in the EntriesHelper.js file. The merge() method looks like this:   merge: function (oldEntries, newEntries) { // concat (this performs the add) oldEntries = oldEntries || []; var mergedEntries = oldEntries.concat(newEntries); // sort this.sortByIdThenLastUpdated(mergedEntries); // prune duplicates (this performs the update) mergedEntries = this.pruneDuplicates(mergedEntries); // delete mergedEntries = this.removeIsDeleted(mergedEntries); // Sort this.sortByName(mergedEntries); return mergedEntries; },   The contents of local storage are then updated with the merged entries. I spent several hours writing the merge() method (much longer than I expected). I found two resources to be extremely useful. First, I wrote extensive unit tests for the merge() method. I wrote the unit tests using server-side JavaScript. I describe this approach to writing unit tests in this blog entry. The unit tests are included in the JavaScript Reference source code. Second, I found the following blog entry to be super useful (thanks Nick!): http://nicksnettravels.builttoroam.com/post/2010/08/03/OData-Synchronization-with-WCF-Data-Services.aspx One big challenge that I encountered involved timestamps. I originally tried to store an actual UTC time as the value of the entriesLastUpdated item. I quickly discovered that trying to work with dates in JSON turned out to be a big can of worms that I did not want to open. Next, I tried to use a SQL timestamp column. However, I learned that OData cannot handle the timestamp data type when doing a filter query. Therefore, I ended up using a bigint column in SQL and manually creating the value when a record is updated. I overrode the SaveChanges() method to look something like this: public override int SaveChanges(SaveOptions options) { var changes = this.ObjectStateManager.GetObjectStateEntries( EntityState.Modified | EntityState.Added | EntityState.Deleted); foreach (var change in changes) { var entity = change.Entity as IEntityTracking; if (entity != null) { entity.LastUpdated = DateTime.Now.Ticks; } } return base.SaveChanges(options); }   Notice that I assign Date.Now.Ticks to the entity.LastUpdated property whenever an entry is modified, added, or deleted. Summary After building the JavaScript Reference application, I am convinced that HTML5 local storage can have a dramatic impact on the performance of any data-driven web application. If you are building a web application that involves extensive interaction with data then I recommend that you take advantage of this new feature included in the HTML5 standard.

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• Java Spotlight Episode 57: Live From #Devoxx - Ben Evans and Martijn Verburg of the London JUG with Yara Senger of SouJava

  - by Roger Brinkley

  Tweet Live from Devoxx 11,  an interview with Ben Evans and Martijn Verburg from the London JUG along with  Yara Senger from the SouJava JUG on the JCP Executive Committee Elections, JSR 248, and Adopt-a-JSR program. Both the London JUG and SouJava JUG are JCP Standard Edition Executive Committee Members. Joining us this week on the Java All Star Developer Panel are Geertjan Wielenga, Principal Product Manger in Oracle Developer Tools; Stephen Chin, Java Champion and Java FX expert; and Antonio Goncalves, Paris JUG leader. Right-click or Control-click to download this MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the Java Spotlight Podcast Feed to get the latest podcast automatically. If you use iTunes you can open iTunes and subscribe with this link: Java Spotlight Podcast in iTunes. Show Notes News Netbeans 7.1 JDK 7 upgrade tools Netbeans First Patch Program OpenJFX approved as an OpenJDK project Devoxx France April 18-20, 2012 Events Nov 22-25, OTN Developer Days in the Nordics Nov 22-23, Goto Conference, Prague Dec 6-8, Java One Brazil, Sao Paulo Feature interview Ben Evans has lived in "Interesting Times" in technology - he was the lead performance testing engineer for the Google IPO, worked on the initial UK trials of 3G networks with BT, built award-winning websites for some of Hollywood's biggest hits of the 90s, rearchitected and reimagined technology helping some of the most vulnerable people in the UK and has worked on everything from some of the UKs very first ecommerce sites, through to multi-billion dollar currency trading systems. He helps to run the London Java Community, and represents the JUG on the Java SE/EE Executive Committee. His first book "The Well-Grounded Java Developer" (with Martijn Verburg) has just been published by Manning. Martijn Verburg (aka 'the Diabolical Developer') herds Cats in the Java/open source communities and is constantly humbled by the creative power to be found there. Currently he resides in London where he co-leads the London JUG (a JCP EC member), runs a couple of open source projects & drinks too much beer at his local pub. You can find him online moderating at the Javaranch or discussing (ranting?) subjects on the Prgorammers Stack Exchange site. Most recently he's become a regular speaker at conferences on Java, open source and software development and has recently wrapped up his first Manning title - "The Well-Grounded Java Developer" with his co-author Ben Evans. Yara Senger is the partner and director of teacher education and Globalcode, graduated from the University of Sao Paulo, Sao Carlos, has significant experience in Brazil and abroad in developing solutions to critical Java. She is the co-creator of Java programs Academy and Academy of Web Developer, accumulating over 1000 hours in the classroom teaching Java. She currently serves as the President of Sou Java. In this interview Ben, Martijn, and Yara talk about the JCP Executive Committee Elections, JSR 348, and the Adopt-a-JSR program. Mail Bag What's Cool Show Transcripts Transcript for this show is available here when available.

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• Tuxedo 11gR1 Client Server Affinity

  - by todd.little

  One of the major new features in Oracle Tuxedo 11gR1 is the ability to define an affinity between clients and servers. In previous releases of Tuxedo, the only way to ensure that multiple requests from a client went to the same server was to establish a conversation with tpconnect() and then use tpsend() and tprecv(). Although this works it has some drawbacks. First for single-threaded servers, the server is tied up for the entire duration of the conversation and cannot service other clients, an obvious scalability issue. I believe the more significant drawback is that the application programmer has to switch from the simple request/response model provided by tpcall() to the half duplex tpsend() and tprecv() calls used with conversations. Switching between the two typically requires a fair amount of redesign and recoding. The Client Server Affinity feature in Tuxedo 11gR1 allows by way of configuration an application to define affinities that can exist between clients and servers. This is done in the *SERVICES section of the UBBCONFIG file. Using new parameters for services defined in the *SERVICES section, customers can determine when an affinity session is created or deleted, the scope of the affinity, and whether requests can be routed outside the affinity scope. The AFFINITYSCOPE parameter can be MACHINE, GROUP, or SERVER, meaning that while the affinity session is in place, all requests from the client will be routed to the same MACHINE, GROUP, or SERVER. The creation and deletion of affinity is defined by the SESSIONROLE parameter and a service can be defined as either BEGIN, END, or NONE, where BEGIN starts an affinity session, END deletes the affinity session, and NONE does not impact the affinity session. Finally customers can define how strictly they want the affinity scope adhered to using the AFFINITYSTRICT parameter. If set to MANDATORY, all requests made during an affinity session will be routed to a server in the affinity scope. Thus if the affinity scope is SERVER, all subsequent tpcall() requests will be sent to the same server the affinity scope was established with. If the server doesn't offer that service, even though other servers do offer the service, the call will fail with TPNOENT. Setting AFFINITYSTRICT to PRECEDENT tells Tuxedo to try and route the request to a server in the affinity scope, but if that's not possible, then Tuxedo can try to route the request to servers out of scope. All of this begs the question, why? Why have this feature? There many uses for this capability, but the most common is when there is state that is maintained in a server, group of servers, or in a machine and subsequent requests from a client must be routed to where that state is maintained. This might be something as simple as a database cursor maintained by a server on behalf of a client. Alternatively it might be that the server has a connection to an external system and subsequent requests need to go back to the server that has that connection. A more sophisticated case is where a group of servers maintains some sort of cache in shared memory and subsequent requests need to be routed to where the cache is maintained. Although this last case might be able to be handled by data dependent routing, using client server affinity allows the cache to be partitioned dynamically instead of statically.

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• Running ODI 11gR1 Standalone Agent as a Windows Service

  - by fx.nicolas

  ODI 11gR1 introduces the capability to use OPMN to start and protect agent processes as services. Setting up the OPMN agent is covered in the following post and extensively in the ODI Installation Guide. Unfortunately, OPMN is not installed along with ODI, and ODI 10g users who are really at ease with the old Java Wrapper are a little bit puzzled by OPMN, and ask: "How can I simply set up the agent as a service?". Well... although the Tanuki Service Wrapper is no longer available for free, and the agentservice.bat script lost, you can switch to another service wrapper for the same result. For example, Yet Another Java Service Wrapper (YAJSW) is a good candidate. To configure a standalone agent with YAJSW: download YAJSW Uncompress the zip to a folder (called %YAJSW% in this example) Configure, start and test your standalone agent. Make sure that this agent is loaded with all the required libraries and drivers, as the service will not load dynamically the drivers added subsequently in the /drivers directory. Retrieve the PID of the agent process: Open Task Manager. Select View Select Columns Select the PID (Process Identifier) column, then click OK In the list of processes, find the java.exe process corresponding to your agent, and note its PID. Open a command line prompt in %YAJSW%/bat and run: genConfig.bat <your_pid> This command generates a wrapper configuration file for the agent. This file is called %YAJSW%/conf/wrapper.conf. Stop your agent. Edit the wrapper.conf file and modify the configuration of your service. For example, modify the display name and description of the service as shown in the example below. Important: Make sure to escape the commas in the ODI encoded passwords with a backslash! In the example below, the ODI_SUPERVISOR_ENCODED_PASS contained a comma character which had to be prefixed with a backslash. # Title to use when running as a console wrapper.console.title=\"AGENT\" #******************************************************************** # Wrapper Windows Service and Posix Daemon Properties #******************************************************************** # Name of the service wrapper.ntservice.name=AGENT_113 # Display name of the service wrapper.ntservice.displayname=ODI Agent # Description of the service wrapper.ntservice.description=Oracle Data Integrator Agent 11gR3 (11.1.1.3.0) ... # Escape the comma in the password with a backslash. wrapper.app.parameter.7 = -ODI_SUPERVISOR_ENCODED_PASS=fJya.vR5kvNcu9TtV\,jVZEt Execute your wrapped agent as console by calling in the command line prompt: runConsole.bat Check that your agent is running, and test it again.This command starts the agent with the configuration but does not install it yet as a service. To Install the agent as service call installService.bat From that point, you can view, start and stop the agent via the windows services. Et voilà ! Two final notes: - To modify the agent configuration, you must uninstall/reinstall the service. For this purpose, run the uninstallService.bat to uninstall it and play again the process above. - To be able to uninstall the agent service, you should keep a backup of the wrapper.conf file. This is particularly important when starting several services with the wrapper.

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• Talking JavaOne with Rock Star Simon Ritter

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  Oracle’s Java Technology Evangelist Simon Ritter is well known at JavaOne for his quirky and fun-loving sessions, which, this year include: CON4644 -- “JavaFX Extreme GUI Makeover” (with Angela Caicedo on how to improve UIs in JavaFX) CON5352 -- “Building JavaFX Interfaces for the Real World” (Kinect gesture tracking and mind reading) CON5348 -- “Do You Like Coffee with Your Dessert?” (Some cool demos of Java of the Raspberry Pi) CON6375 -- “Custom JavaFX Charts: (How to extend JavaFX Chart controls with some interesting things) I recently asked Ritter about the significance of the Raspberry Pi, the topic of one of his sessions that consists of a credit card-sized single-board computer developed in the UK with the intention of stimulating the teaching of basic computer science in schools. “I don't think there's one definitive thing that makes the RP significant,” observed Ritter, “but a combination of things that really makes it stand out. First, it's the cost: $35 for what is effectively a completely usable computer. OK, so you have to add a power supply, SD card for storage and maybe a screen, keyboard and mouse, but this is still way cheaper than a typical PC. The choice of an ARM processor is also significant, as it avoids problems like cooling (no heat sink or fan) and can use a USB power brick.  Combine these two things with the immense groundswell of community support and it provides a fantastic platform for teaching young and old alike about computing, which is the real goal of the project.”He informed me that he’ll be at the Raspberry Pi meetup on Saturday (not part of JavaOne). Check out the details here.JavaFX InterfacesWhen I asked about how JavaFX can interface with the real world, he said that there are many ways. “JavaFX provides you with a simple set of programming interfaces that can create complex, cool and compelling user interfaces,” explained Ritter. “Because it's just Java code you can combine JavaFX with any other Java library to provide data to display and control the interface. What I've done for my session is look at some of the possible ways of doing this using some of the amazing hardware that's available today at very low cost. The Kinect sensor has added a new dimension to gaming in terms of interaction; there's a Java API to access this so you can easily collect skeleton tracking data from it. Some clever people have also written libraries that can track gestures like swipes, circles, pushes, and so on. We use these to control parts of the UI. I've also experimented with a Neurosky EEG sensor that can in some ways ‘read your mind’ (well, at least measure some of the brain functions like attention and meditation).  I've written a Java library for this that I include as a way of controlling the UI. We're not quite at the stage of just thinking a command though!” Here Comes Java EmbeddedAnd what, from Ritter’s perspective, is the most exciting thing happening in the world of Java today? “I think it's seeing just how Java continues to become more and more pervasive,” he said. “One of the areas that is growing rapidly is embedded systems.  We've talked about the ‘Internet of things’ for many years; now it's finally becoming a reality. With the ability of more and more devices to include processing, storage and networking we need an easy way to write code for them that's reliable, has high performance, and is secure. Java fits all these requirements. With Java Embedded being a conference within a conference, I'm very excited about the possibilities of Java in this space.”Check out Ritter’s sessions or say hi if you run into him.

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• How to prepare for an interview presentation!

  - by Tim Koekkoek

  During an interview process you might be asked to prepare a presentation as one of the steps in the recruitment process. Below, we want to give you some tips to help you prepare for what might be considered a daunting aspect of a recruitment process. Main purpose of the presentation Always keep in mind the main purpose of what the presentation is meant to convey. Generally speaking, an interview presentation is for the company to check if you have the ability to represent and sell the organization (and yourself), to the internal and external stakeholders in the position you are applying for. A presentation is often also part of the recruitment process to check whether you can structure and explain your experience and thoughts in a convincing manner. If you are unsure about the purpose of the presentation, feel free to ask your recruiter for more information. Preparation As with every task you do, preparation is key, so is the case with an interview presentation. It is important to know who your audience is. You have to adapt your presentation to your audience, ensuring that you are presenting the facts which they would want to hear. Furthermore, make sure you practice your presentation beforehand; this will make you more confident in your presenting skills. Also, estimate the length of your presentation as presentations or pitches during the recruitment process are often capped to a certain time limit. Structure Every presentation should have a beginning, middle and an end. Make sure you give an overview of your presentation and tell the audience what they can expect. Your presentation should have a logical order and a clear message. Always build up to your key message with strong arguments and evidence. When speaking about the topic, make sure you convey your points with conviction. Also be sure you believe the message you bring forward, if you don’t believe it yourself, then the audience definitely won’t! Delivery When you think back on successful presentations you have seen, the presenter was most likely always standing up. So if asked to do a presentation, follow this example and make sure you stand up as well. Standing up when you are doing your presentation shows confidence and control. Another important aspect in the delivery of the presentation is to relax and speak slowly and with enough volume for the audience to hear you. Speaking slowly allows the audience the time to absorb the information you are providing to them. Visual Using PowerPoint, or an equivalent, makes it very easy to have a visually attractive presentation. Make sure however that you take into account that the visual aids you use are there to support you, not for you to read word for word what is on the slides! Questions When starting your presentation, it is a good idea to tell your audience that you will deal with any questions they might have at the end of the presentation. This way it doesn’t interrupt your train of thought and the flow of your presentation. Answering questions at the end may give you additional opportunities to further expand on your facts in the topic. Some people might play the “devil’s advocate” role and confront you with opposing opinions, if this is the case, take your time to reiterate your points and remain professional in your response. A good way to deal with this is to start interacting with other members of the audience and ask for their opinions, so it will become a group discussion. This will also shows strong leadership skills, as you are open to discuss and ask for other opinions. If you are interested in more tips and tricks for your interview process, have a look at Competency Based Interview Tips and How to prepare for a Telephone Interview. For more information about Oracle and our vacancies, please visit our Facebook community and our careers website.

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• Read XML Files using LINQ to XML and Extension Methods

  - by psheriff

  In previous blog posts I have discussed how to use XML files to store data in your applications. I showed you how to read those XML files from your project and get XML from a WCF service. One of the problems with reading XML files is when elements or attributes are missing. If you try to read that missing data, then a null value is returned. This can cause a problem if you are trying to load that data into an object and a null is read. This blog post will show you how to create extension methods to detect null values and return valid values to load into your object. The XML Data An XML data file called Product.xml is located in the \Xml folder of the Silverlight sample project for this blog post. This XML file contains several rows of product data that will be used in each of the samples for this post. Each row has 4 attributes; namely ProductId, ProductName, IntroductionDate and Price. <Products>  <Product ProductId="1"           ProductName="Haystack Code Generator for .NET"           IntroductionDate="07/01/2010"  Price="799" />  <Product ProductId="2"           ProductName="ASP.Net Jumpstart Samples"           IntroductionDate="05/24/2005"  Price="0" />  ...  ...</Products> The Product Class Just as you create an Entity class to map each column in a table to a property in a class, you should do the same for an XML file too. In this case you will create a Product class with properties for each of the attributes in each element of product data. The following code listing shows the Product class. public class Product : CommonBase{  public const string XmlFile = @"Xml/Product.xml";   private string _ProductName;  private int _ProductId;  private DateTime _IntroductionDate;  private decimal _Price;   public string ProductName  {    get { return _ProductName; }    set {      if (_ProductName != value) {        _ProductName = value;        RaisePropertyChanged("ProductName");      }    }  }   public int ProductId  {    get { return _ProductId; }    set {      if (_ProductId != value) {        _ProductId = value;        RaisePropertyChanged("ProductId");      }    }  }   public DateTime IntroductionDate  {    get { return _IntroductionDate; }    set {      if (_IntroductionDate != value) {        _IntroductionDate = value;        RaisePropertyChanged("IntroductionDate");      }    }  }   public decimal Price  {    get { return _Price; }    set {      if (_Price != value) {        _Price = value;        RaisePropertyChanged("Price");      }    }  }} NOTE: The CommonBase class that the Product class inherits from simply implements the INotifyPropertyChanged event in order to inform your XAML UI of any property changes. You can see this class in the sample you download for this blog post. Reading Data When using LINQ to XML you call the Load method of the XElement class to load the XML file. Once the XML file has been loaded, you write a LINQ query to iterate over the “Product” Descendants in the XML file. The “select” portion of the LINQ query creates a new Product object for each row in the XML file. You retrieve each attribute by passing each attribute name to the Attribute() method and retrieving the data from the “Value” property. The Value property will return a null if there is no data, or will return the string value of the attribute. The Convert class is used to convert the value retrieved into the appropriate data type required by the Product class. private void LoadProducts(){  XElement xElem = null;   try  {    xElem = XElement.Load(Product.XmlFile);     // The following will NOT work if you have missing attributes    var products =         from elem in xElem.Descendants("Product")        orderby elem.Attribute("ProductName").Value        select new Product        {          ProductId = Convert.ToInt32(            elem.Attribute("ProductId").Value),          ProductName = Convert.ToString(            elem.Attribute("ProductName").Value),          IntroductionDate = Convert.ToDateTime(            elem.Attribute("IntroductionDate").Value),          Price = Convert.ToDecimal(elem.Attribute("Price").Value)        };     lstData.DataContext = products;  }  catch (Exception ex)  {    MessageBox.Show(ex.Message);  }} This is where the problem comes in. If you have any missing attributes in any of the rows in the XML file, or if the data in the ProductId or IntroductionDate is not of the appropriate type, then this code will fail! The reason? There is no built-in check to ensure that the correct type of data is contained in the XML file. This is where extension methods can come in real handy. Using Extension Methods Instead of using the Convert class to perform type conversions as you just saw, create a set of extension methods attached to the XAttribute class. These extension methods will perform null-checking and ensure that a valid value is passed back instead of an exception being thrown if there is invalid data in your XML file. private void LoadProducts(){  var xElem = XElement.Load(Product.XmlFile);   var products =       from elem in xElem.Descendants("Product")      orderby elem.Attribute("ProductName").Value      select new Product      {        ProductId = elem.Attribute("ProductId").GetAsInteger(),        ProductName = elem.Attribute("ProductName").GetAsString(),        IntroductionDate =            elem.Attribute("IntroductionDate").GetAsDateTime(),        Price = elem.Attribute("Price").GetAsDecimal()      };   lstData.DataContext = products;} Writing Extension Methods To create an extension method you will create a class with any name you like. In the code listing below is a class named XmlExtensionMethods. This listing just shows a couple of the available methods such as GetAsString and GetAsInteger. These methods are just like any other method you would write except when you pass in the parameter you prefix the type with the keyword “this”. This lets the compiler know that it should add this method to the class specified in the parameter. public static class XmlExtensionMethods{  public static string GetAsString(this XAttribute attr)  {    string ret = string.Empty;     if (attr != null && !string.IsNullOrEmpty(attr.Value))    {      ret = attr.Value;    }     return ret;  }   public static int GetAsInteger(this XAttribute attr)  {    int ret = 0;    int value = 0;     if (attr != null && !string.IsNullOrEmpty(attr.Value))    {      if(int.TryParse(attr.Value, out value))        ret = value;    }     return ret;  }   ...  ...} Each of the methods in the XmlExtensionMethods class should inspect the XAttribute to ensure it is not null and that the value in the attribute is not null. If the value is null, then a default value will be returned such as an empty string or a 0 for a numeric value. Summary Extension methods are a great way to simplify your code and provide protection to ensure problems do not occur when reading data. You will probably want to create more extension methods to handle XElement objects as well for when you use element-based XML. Feel free to extend these extension methods to accept a parameter which would be the default value if a null value is detected, or any other parameters you wish. NOTE: You can download the complete sample code at my website. http://www.pdsa.com/downloads. Choose “Tips & Tricks”, then "Read XML Files using LINQ to XML and Extension Methods" from the drop-down. Good Luck with your Coding,Paul D. Sheriff  

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