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• Tuning Red Gate: #4 of Some

  - by Grant Fritchey

  First time connecting to these servers directly (keys to the kingdom, bwa-ha-ha-ha. oh, excuse me), so I'm going to take a look at the server properties, just to see if there are any issues there. Max memory is set, cool, first possible silly mistake clear. In fact, these look to be nicely set up. Oh, I'd like to see the ANSI Standards set by default, but it's not a big deal. The default location for database data is the F:\ drive, where I saw all the activity last time. Cool, the people maintaining the servers in our company listen, parallelism threshold is set to 35 and optimize for ad hoc is enabled. No shocks, no surprises. The basic setup is appropriate. On to the problem database. Nothing wrong in the properties. The database is in SIMPLE recovery, but I think it's a reporting system, so no worries there. Again, I'd prefer to see the ANSI settings for connections, but that's the worst thing I can see. Time to look at the queries, tables, indexes and statistics because all the information I've collected over the last several days suggests that we're not looking at a systemic problem (except possibly not enough memory), but at the traditional tuning issues. I just want to note that, I started looking at the system, not the queries. So should you when tuning your environment. I know, from the data collected through SQL Monitor, what my top poor performing queries are, and the most frequently called, etc. I'm starting with the most frequently called. I'm going to get the execution plan for this thing out of the cache (although, with the cache dumping constantly, I might not get it). And it's not there. Called 1.3 million times over the last 3 days, but it's not in cache. Wow. OK. I'll see what's in cache for this database: SELECT  deqs.creation_time,         deqs.execution_count,         deqs.max_logical_reads,         deqs.max_elapsed_time,         deqs.total_logical_reads,         deqs.total_elapsed_time,         deqp.query_plan,         SUBSTRING(dest.text, (deqs.statement_start_offset / 2) + 1,                   (deqs.statement_end_offset - deqs.statement_start_offset) / 2                   + 1) AS QueryStatement FROM    sys.dm_exec_query_stats AS deqs         CROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_sql_text(deqs.sql_handle) AS dest         CROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_query_plan(deqs.plan_handle) AS deqp WHERE   dest.dbid = DB_ID('Warehouse') AND deqs.statement_end_offset > 0 AND deqs.statement_start_offset > 0 ORDER BY deqs.max_logical_reads DESC ; And looking at the most expensive operation, we have our first bad boy: Multiple table scans against very large sets of data and a sort operation. a sort operation? It's an insert. Oh, I see, the table is a heap, so it's doing an insert, then sorting the data and then inserting into the primary key. First question, why isn't this a clustered index? Let's look at some more of the queries. The next one is deceiving. Here's the query plan: You're thinking to yourself, what's the big deal? Well, what if I told you that this thing had 8036318 reads? I know, you're looking at skinny little pipes. Know why? Table variable. Estimated number of rows = 1. Actual number of rows. well, I'm betting several more than one considering it's read 8 MILLION pages off the disk in a single execution. We have a serious and real tuning candidate. Oh, and I missed this, it's loading the table variable from a user defined function. Let me check, let me check. YES! A multi-statement table valued user defined function. And another tuning opportunity. This one's a beauty, seriously. Did I also mention that they're doing a hash against all the columns in the physical table. I'm sure that won't lead to scans of a 500,000 row table, no, not at all. OK. I lied. Of course it is. At least it's on the top part of the Loop which means the scan is only executed once. I just did a cursory check on the next several poor performers. all calling the UDF. I think I found a big tuning opportunity. At this point, I'm typing up internal emails for the company. Someone just had their baby called ugly. In addition to a series of suggested changes that we need to implement, I'm also apologizing for being such an unkind monster as to question whether that third eye & those flippers belong on such an otherwise lovely child.

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• ASSIMP in my program is much slower to import than ASSIMP view program

  - by Marco

  The problem is really simple: if I try to load with the function aiImportFileExWithProperties a big model in my software (around 200.000 vertices), it takes more than one minute. If I try to load the very same model with ASSIMP view, it takes 2 seconds. For this comparison, both my software and Assimp view are using the dll version of the library at 64 bit, compiled by myself (Assimp64.dll). This is the relevant piece of code in my software // default pp steps unsigned int ppsteps = aiProcess_CalcTangentSpace | // calculate tangents and bitangents if possible aiProcess_JoinIdenticalVertices | // join identical vertices/ optimize indexing aiProcess_ValidateDataStructure | // perform a full validation of the loader's output aiProcess_ImproveCacheLocality | // improve the cache locality of the output vertices aiProcess_RemoveRedundantMaterials | // remove redundant materials aiProcess_FindDegenerates | // remove degenerated polygons from the import aiProcess_FindInvalidData | // detect invalid model data, such as invalid normal vectors aiProcess_GenUVCoords | // convert spherical, cylindrical, box and planar mapping to proper UVs aiProcess_TransformUVCoords | // preprocess UV transformations (scaling, translation ...) aiProcess_FindInstances | // search for instanced meshes and remove them by references to one master aiProcess_LimitBoneWeights | // limit bone weights to 4 per vertex aiProcess_OptimizeMeshes | // join small meshes, if possible; aiProcess_SplitByBoneCount | // split meshes with too many bones. Necessary for our (limited) hardware skinning shader 0; cout << "Loading " << pFile << "... "; aiPropertyStore* props = aiCreatePropertyStore(); aiSetImportPropertyInteger(props,AI_CONFIG_IMPORT_TER_MAKE_UVS,1); aiSetImportPropertyFloat(props,AI_CONFIG_PP_GSN_MAX_SMOOTHING_ANGLE,80.f); aiSetImportPropertyInteger(props,AI_CONFIG_PP_SBP_REMOVE, aiPrimitiveType_LINE | aiPrimitiveType_POINT); aiSetImportPropertyInteger(props,AI_CONFIG_GLOB_MEASURE_TIME,1); //aiSetImportPropertyInteger(props,AI_CONFIG_PP_PTV_KEEP_HIERARCHY,1); // Call ASSIMPs C-API to load the file scene = (aiScene*)aiImportFileExWithProperties(pFile.c_str(), ppsteps | /* default pp steps */ aiProcess_GenSmoothNormals | // generate smooth normal vectors if not existing aiProcess_SplitLargeMeshes | // split large, unrenderable meshes into submeshes aiProcess_Triangulate | // triangulate polygons with more than 3 edges //aiProcess_ConvertToLeftHanded | // convert everything to D3D left handed space aiProcess_SortByPType | // make 'clean' meshes which consist of a single typ of primitives 0, NULL, props); aiReleasePropertyStore(props); if(!scene){ cout << aiGetErrorString() << endl; return 0; } this is the relevant piece of code in assimp view code // default pp steps unsigned int ppsteps = aiProcess_CalcTangentSpace | // calculate tangents and bitangents if possible aiProcess_JoinIdenticalVertices | // join identical vertices/ optimize indexing aiProcess_ValidateDataStructure | // perform a full validation of the loader's output aiProcess_ImproveCacheLocality | // improve the cache locality of the output vertices aiProcess_RemoveRedundantMaterials | // remove redundant materials aiProcess_FindDegenerates | // remove degenerated polygons from the import aiProcess_FindInvalidData | // detect invalid model data, such as invalid normal vectors aiProcess_GenUVCoords | // convert spherical, cylindrical, box and planar mapping to proper UVs aiProcess_TransformUVCoords | // preprocess UV transformations (scaling, translation ...) aiProcess_FindInstances | // search for instanced meshes and remove them by references to one master aiProcess_LimitBoneWeights | // limit bone weights to 4 per vertex aiProcess_OptimizeMeshes | // join small meshes, if possible; aiProcess_SplitByBoneCount | // split meshes with too many bones. Necessary for our (limited) hardware skinning shader 0; aiPropertyStore* props = aiCreatePropertyStore(); aiSetImportPropertyInteger(props,AI_CONFIG_IMPORT_TER_MAKE_UVS,1); aiSetImportPropertyFloat(props,AI_CONFIG_PP_GSN_MAX_SMOOTHING_ANGLE,g_smoothAngle); aiSetImportPropertyInteger(props,AI_CONFIG_PP_SBP_REMOVE,nopointslines ? aiPrimitiveType_LINE | aiPrimitiveType_POINT : 0 ); aiSetImportPropertyInteger(props,AI_CONFIG_GLOB_MEASURE_TIME,1); //aiSetImportPropertyInteger(props,AI_CONFIG_PP_PTV_KEEP_HIERARCHY,1); // Call ASSIMPs C-API to load the file g_pcAsset->pcScene = (aiScene*)aiImportFileExWithProperties(g_szFileName, ppsteps | /* configurable pp steps */ aiProcess_GenSmoothNormals | // generate smooth normal vectors if not existing aiProcess_SplitLargeMeshes | // split large, unrenderable meshes into submeshes aiProcess_Triangulate | // triangulate polygons with more than 3 edges aiProcess_ConvertToLeftHanded | // convert everything to D3D left handed space aiProcess_SortByPType | // make 'clean' meshes which consist of a single typ of primitives 0, NULL, props); aiReleasePropertyStore(props); As you can see the code is nearly identical because I copied from assimp view. What could be the reason for such a difference in performance? The two software are using the same dll Assimp64.dll (compiled in my computer with vc++ 2010 express) and the same function aiImportFileExWithProperties to load the model, so I assume that the actual code employed is the same. How is it possible that the function aiImportFileExWithProperties is 100 times slower when called by my sotware than when called by assimp view? What am I missing? I am not good with dll, dynamic and static libraries so I might be missing something obvious. ------------------------------ UPDATE I found out the reason why the code is going slower. Basically I was running my software with "Start debugging" in VC++ 2010 Express. If I run the code outside VC++ 2010 I get same performance of assimp view. However now I have a new question. Why does the dll perform slower in VC++ debugging? I compiled it in release mode without debugging information. Is there any way to have the dll go fast in debugmode i.e. not debugging the dll? Because I am interested in debugging only my own code, not the dll that I assume is already working fine. I do not want to wait 2 minutes every time I want to load my software to debug. Does this request make sense?

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• NoSQL Java API for MySQL Cluster: Questions & Answers

  - by Mat Keep

  The MySQL Cluster engineering team recently ran a live webinar, available now on-demand demonstrating the ClusterJ and ClusterJPA NoSQL APIs for MySQL Cluster, and how these can be used in building real-time, high scale Java-based services that require continuous availability. Attendees asked a number of great questions during the webinar, and I thought it would be useful to share those here, so others are also able to learn more about the Java NoSQL APIs. First, a little bit about why we developed these APIs and why they are interesting to Java developers. ClusterJ and Cluster JPA ClusterJ is a Java interface to MySQL Cluster that provides either a static or dynamic domain object model, similar to the data model used by JDO, JPA, and Hibernate. A simple API gives users extremely high performance for common operations: insert, delete, update, and query. ClusterJPA works with ClusterJ to extend functionality, including - Persistent classes - Relationships - Joins in queries - Lazy loading - Table and index creation from object model By eliminating data transformations via SQL, users get lower data access latency and higher throughput. In addition, Java developers have a more natural programming method to directly manage their data, with a complete, feature-rich solution for Object/Relational Mapping. As a result, the development of Java applications is simplified with faster development cycles resulting in accelerated time to market for new services. MySQL Cluster offers multiple NoSQL APIs alongside Java: - Memcached for a persistent, high performance, write-scalable Key/Value store, - HTTP/REST via an Apache module - C++ via the NDB API for the lowest absolute latency. Developers can use SQL as well as NoSQL APIs for access to the same data set via multiple query patterns – from simple Primary Key lookups or inserts to complex cross-shard JOINs using Adaptive Query Localization Marrying NoSQL and SQL access to an ACID-compliant database offers developers a number of benefits. MySQL Cluster’s distributed, shared-nothing architecture with auto-sharding and real time performance makes it a great fit for workloads requiring high volume OLTP. Users also get the added flexibility of being able to run real-time analytics across the same OLTP data set for real-time business insight. OK – hopefully you now have a better idea of why ClusterJ and JPA are available. Now, for the Q&A. Q & A Q. Why would I use Connector/J vs. ClusterJ? A. Partly it's a question of whether you prefer to work with SQL (Connector/J) or objects (ClusterJ). Performance of ClusterJ will be better as there is no need to pass through the MySQL Server. A ClusterJ operation can only act on a single table (e.g. no joins) - ClusterJPA extends that capability Q. Can I mix different APIs (ie ClusterJ, Connector/J) in our application for different query types? A. Yes. You can mix and match all of the API types, SQL, JDBC, ODBC, ClusterJ, Memcached, REST, C++. They all access the exact same data in the data nodes. Update through one API and new data is instantly visible to all of the others. Q. How many TCP connections would a SessionFactory instance create for a cluster of 8 data nodes? A. SessionFactory has a connection to the mgmd (management node) but otherwise is just a vehicle to create Sessions. Without using connection pooling, a SessionFactory will have one connection open with each data node. Using optional connection pooling allows multiple connections from the SessionFactory to increase throughput. Q. Can you give details of how Cluster J optimizes sharding to enhance performance of distributed query processing? A. Each data node in a cluster runs a Transaction Coordinator (TC), which begins and ends the transaction, but also serves as a resource to operate on the result rows. While an API node (such as a ClusterJ process) can send queries to any TC/data node, there are performance gains if the TC is where most of the result data is stored. ClusterJ computes the shard (partition) key to choose the data node where the row resides as the TC. Q. What happens if we perform two primary key lookups within the same transaction? Are they sent to the data node in one transaction? A. ClusterJ will send identical PK lookups to the same data node. Q. How is distributed query processing handled by MySQL Cluster ? A. If the data is split between data nodes then all of the information will be transparently combined and passed back to the application. The session will connect to a data node - typically by hashing the primary key - which then interacts with its neighboring nodes to collect the data needed to fulfil the query. Q. Can I use Foreign Keys with MySQL Cluster A. Support for Foreign Keys is included in the MySQL Cluster 7.3 Early Access release Summary The NoSQL Java APIs are packaged with MySQL Cluster, available for download here so feel free to take them for a spin today! Key Resources MySQL Cluster on-line demo  MySQL ClusterJ and JPA On-demand webinar  MySQL ClusterJ and JPA documentation MySQL ClusterJ and JPA whitepaper and tutorial

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• BIP and Mapviewer Mash Up I

  - by Tim Dexter

  I was out in Yellowstone last week soaking up various wildlife and a bit too much rain ... good to be back until the 95F heat yesterday. Taking a little break from the Excel templates; the dev folks are planing an Excel patch in the next week or so that will add a mass of new functionality. At the risk of completely mis leading you I'm going to hang back a while. What I have written so far holds true and will continue to do so. This week, I have been mostly eating 'mapviewer' ... answers on a post card please, TV show and character. I had a request to show how BIP can call mapviewer and render a dynamic map in an output. So I hit the books and colleagues for some answers. Mapviewer is Oracle's geographic information system, hereby known as GIS. I use it a lot in our BIEE demos where the interaction with the maps is very impressive. Need a map of California and its congressional districts? I have contacts; Jerry and David with their little black box of maps. Once in my possession I can build highly interactive, clickable maps that allow the user to drill into more information using a very friendly interface driving BIEE content and navigation. But what about maps in BIP output? Bryan Wise, who has written some articles on this blog did some work a while back with the PL/SQL API interface. The extract for the report called a function that in turn called the mapviewer server, passing a set of mapping requirements, it then returned a URL to a cached copy of that map. Easy to then have BIP render that image. Thats still very doable. You need to install a couple of packages and then load the mapviewer java APIs into the database. Then you can write your function to the APIs. A little involved? Maybe, but the database is doing all the heavy lifting for you. I thought I would investigate another method for getting the maps back into BIP. There is a URL interface you can call, this involves building an XML message to be passed to the mapviewer server. It's pretty straightforward to use on the mapviewer side. On the BIP side things are little more tricksy. After some unexpected messing about I finally got the ubiquitous Hello World map to render using the URL method. Not the most exciting map in the world, lots of ocean and a rather long URL to get it to render. http://127.0.0.1:9704/mapviewer/omserver?xml_request=%3Cmap_request%20title=%22Hello%20World%22%20datasource=%22cagis%22%20format=%22GIF_STREAM%22/%3E Notice all of the encoding in the URL string to handle the spaces, quotes, etc. All necessary to get BIP to make the call to the mapviewer server correctly without truncating the URL if it hits a real space rather than a %20. With that in mind constructing the URL was pretty simple. I'm not going to get into the content of the URL too much, for that you need to bone up on the mapviewer XML API. Check out the home page here and the documentation here. To make the template portable I used the standard CURRENT_SERVER_URL parameter from the BIP server and declared that in my template. <?param@begin:CURRENT_SERVER_URL;'myserver'?> Ignore the 'myserver', that was just a dummy value for testing at runtime it will resolve to: 'http://yourserver:port/xmlpserver' Not quite what we need as mapviewer has its own server path, in my case I needed 'mapviewer/omserver?xml_request=' as the fixed path to the mapviewer request URL. A little concatenation and substringing later I came up with <?param@begin:mURL;concat(substring($CURRENT_SERVER_URL,1,22),'mapviewer/omserver?xml_request=')?> Thats the basic URL that I can then build on. To get the Hello World map I need to add the following: <map_request title="Hello World" datasource="cagis" format="GIF_STREAM"/> Those angle brackets were the source of my headache, BIPs XSLT engine was attempting to process them rather than just pass them. Hok Min to the rescue ... again. I owe him lunch when I get out to HQ again! To solve the problem, I needed to escape all the characters and white space and then use native XSL to assign the string to a parameter. <xsl:param xdofo:ctx="begin"name="pXML">%3Cmap_request%20title=%22Hello%20World%22 %20datasource=%22cagis%22%20format=%22GIF_STREAM%22/%3E</xsl:param> I did not need to assign it to a parameter but I felt that if I were going to do anything more serious than Hello World like plotting points of interest on the map. I would need to dynamically build the URL, so using a set of parameters or variables that I then concatenated would be easier. Now I had the initial server string and the request all I then did was combine the two using a concat: concat($mURL,$pXML) Embedding that into an image tag: <fo:external-graphic src="url({concat($mURL,$pXML)})"/> and I was done. Notice the curly braces to get the concat evaluated prior to the image call. As you will see next time, building the XML message to go onto the URL can get quite complex but I have used it with some data. Ultimately, it would be easier to build an extension to BIP to handle the data to be plotted, it would then build the XML message, call mapviewer and return a URL to the map image for BIP to render. More on that next time ...

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• About Me

  - by Jeffrey West

  I’m new to blogging.  This is the second blog post that I have written, and before I go too much further I wanted the readers of my blog to know a bit more about me… Kid’s Stuff By trade, I am a programmer (or coder, developer, engineer, architect, etc).  I started programming when I was 12 years old.  When I was 7, we got our first ‘family’ computer – an Apple IIc.  It was great to play games on, and of course what else was a 7-year-old going to do with it.  I did have one problem with it, though.  When I put in my 5.25” floppy to play a game, sometimes, instead loading my game I would get a mysterious ‘]’ on the screen with a flashing cursor.  This, of course, was not my game.  Much like the standard ‘Microsoft fix’ is to reboot, back then you would take the floppy out, shake it, and restart the computer and pray for a different result. One day, I learned at school that I could topple my nemesis – the ‘]’ and flashing cursor – by typing ‘load’ and pressing enter.  Most of the time, this would load my game and then I would get to play.  Problem solved.  However, I began to wonder – what else can I make it do? When I was in 5th grade my dad got a bright idea to buy me a Tandy 1000HX.  He didn’t know what I was going to do with it, and neither did I.  Least of all, my mom wasn’t happy about buying a 5th grader a $1,000 computer.  Nonetheless, Over time, I learned how to write simple basic programs out of the back of my Math book: 10 x=5 20 y=6 30 PRINT x+y That was fun for all of about 5 minutes.  I needed more – more challenges, more things that I could make the computer do.  In order to quench this thirst my parents sent me to National Computer Camps in Connecticut.  It was one of the best experiences of my childhood, and I spent 3 weeks each summer after that learning BASIC, Pascal, Turbo C and some C++.  There weren’t many kids at the time who knew anything about computers, and lets just say my knowledge of and interest in computers didn’t score me many ‘cool’ points.  My experiences at NCC set me on the path that I find myself on now, and I am very thankful for the experience.  Real Life I have held various positions in the past at different levels within the IT layer cake.  I started out as a Software Developer for a startup in the Dallas, TX area building software for semiconductor testing statistical process control and sampling.  I was the second Java developer that was hired, and the ninth employee overall, so I got a great deal of experience developing software.  Since there weren’t that many people in the organization, I also got a lot of field experience which meant that if I screwed up the code, I got yelled at (figuratively) by both my boss AND the customer.  Fun Times!  What made it better was that I got to help run pilot programs in Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and Malta.  Getting yelled at in Taiwan is slightly less annoying that getting yelled at in Dallas… I spent the next 5 years at Accenture doing systems integration in the ‘SOA’ group.  I joined as a Consultant and left as a Senior Manager.  I started out writing code in WebLogic Integration and left after I wrapped up project where I led a team of 25 to develop the next generation of a digital media platform to deliver HD content in a digital format.  At Accenture, I had the pleasure of working with some truly amazing people – mentoring some and learning from many others – and on some incredible real-world IT projects.  Given my background with the BEA stack of products I was often called in to troubleshoot and tune WebLogic, ALBPM and ALSB installations and have logged many hours digging through thread dumps, running performance tests with SoapUI and decompiling Java classes we didn’t have the source for so I could see what was going on in the code. I am now a Senior Principal Product Manager at Oracle in the Application Grid practice.  The term ‘Application Grid’ refers to a collection of software and hardware products within Oracle that enables customers to build horizontally scalable systems.  This collection of products includes WebLogic, GlassFish, Coherence, Tuxedo and the JRockit/HotSpot JVMs (HotSprocket, maybe?).  Now, with the introduction of Exalogic it has grown to include hardware as well. Wrapping it up… I love technology and have a diverse background ranging from software development to HW and network architecture & tuning.  I have held certifications for being an Oracle Certified DBA, MSCE and Cisco Certified Network Professional (CCNP), among others and I have put those to great use over my career.  I am excited about programming & technology and I enjoy helping people learn and be successful.  If you are having challenges with WebLogic, BPM or Service Bus feel free to reach out to me and I’ll be happy to help as I have time. Thanks for stopping by!   --Jeff

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• SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #053 – Final Post in Series

  - by Pinal Dave

  It has been a fantastic journey to write memory lane series for an entire year. This series gave me the opportunity to go back and see what I have contributed to this blog throughout the last 7 years. This was indeed fantastic series as this provided me the opportunity to witness how technology has grown throughout the year and how I have progressed in my career while writing this blog post. This series was indeed fantastic experience readers as many joined during the last few years and were not sure what they have missed in recent years. Let us continue with the final episode of the Memory Lane Series. Here is the list of selected articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2007 Get Current User – Get Logged In User Here is the straight script which list logged in SQL Server users. Disable All Triggers on a Database – Disable All Triggers on All Servers Question : How to disable all the triggers for a database? Additionally, how to disable all the triggers for all servers? For answer execute the script in the blog post. Importance of Master Database for SQL Server Startup I have received following questions many times. I will list all the questions here and answer them together. What is the purpose of Master database? Should our backup Master database? Which database is must have database for SQL Server for startup? Which are the default system database created when SQL Server 2005 is installed for the first time? What happens if Master database is corrupted? Answers to all of the questions are very much related. 2008 DECLARE Multiple Variables in One Statement SQL Server is a great product and it has many features which are very unique to SQL Server. Regarding feature of SQL Server where multiple variable can be declared in one statement, it is absolutely possible to do. 2009 How to Enable Index – How to Disable Index – Incorrect syntax near ‘ENABLE’ Many times I have seen that the index is disabled when there is a large update operation on the table. Bulk insert of very large file updates in any table using SSIS is usually preceded by disabling the index and followed by enabling the index. I have seen many developers running the following query to disable the index. 2010 List of all the Views from Database Many emails I received suggesting that they have hundreds of the view and now have no clue what is going on and how many of them have indexes and how many does not have an index. Some even asked me if there is any way they can get a list of the views with the property of Index along with it. Here is the quick script which does exactly the same. You can also include many other columns from the same view. Minimum Maximum Memory – Server Memory Options I was recently reading about SQL Server Memory Options over here. While reading this one line really caught my attention is minimum value allowed for maximum memory options. The default setting for min server memory is 0, and the default setting for max server memory is 2147483647. The minimum amount of memory you can specify for max server memory is 16 megabytes (MB). 2011 Fundamentals of Columnstore Index There are two kinds of storage in a database. Row Store and Column Store. Row store does exactly as the name suggests – stores rows of data on a page – and column store stores all the data in a column on the same page. These columns are much easier to search – instead of a query searching all the data in an entire row whether the data are relevant or not, column store queries need only to search a much lesser number of the columns. How to Ignore Columnstore Index Usage in Query In summary the question in simple words “How can we ignore using the column store index in selective queries?” Very interesting question – you can use I can understand there may be the cases when the column store index is not ideal and needs to be ignored the same. You can use the query hint IGNORE_NONCLUSTERED_COLUMNSTORE_INDEX to ignore the column store index. The SQL Server Engine will use any other index which is best after ignoring the column store index. 2012 Storing Variable Values in Temporary Array or Temporary List SQL Server does not support arrays or a dynamic length storage mechanism like list. Absolutely there are some clever workarounds and few extra-ordinary solutions but everybody can;t come up with such solution. Additionally, sometime the requirements are very simple that doing extraordinary coding is not required. Here is the simple case. Move Database Files MDF and LDF to Another Location It is not common to keep the Database on the same location where OS is installed. Usually Database files are in SAN, Separate Disk Array or on SSDs. This is done usually for performance reason and manageability perspective. Now the challenges comes up when database which was installed at not preferred default location and needs to move to a different location. Here is the quick tutorial how you can do it. UNION ALL and ORDER BY – How to Order Table Separately While Using UNION ALL If your requirement is such that you want your top and bottom query of the UNION resultset independently sorted but in the same result set you can add an additional static column and order by that column. Let us re-create the same scenario. Copy Data from One Table to Another Table – SQL in Sixty Seconds #031 – Video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVWIA-ACMNo Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Problems with opening CHM Help files from Network or Internet

  - by Rick Strahl

  As a publisher of a Help Creation tool called Html Help Help Builder, I’ve seen a lot of problems with help files that won't properly display actual topic content and displays an error message for topics instead. Here’s the scenario: You go ahead and happily build your fancy, schmanzy Help File for your application and deploy it to your customer. Or alternately you've created a help file and you let your customers download them off the Internet directly or in a zip file. The customer downloads the file, opens the zip file and copies the help file contained in the zip file to disk. She then opens the help file and finds the following unfortunate result:     The help file  comes up with all topics in the tree on the left, but a Navigation to the WebPage was cancelled or Operation Aborted error in the Help Viewer's content window whenever you try to open a topic. The CHM file obviously opened since the topic list is there, but the Help Viewer refuses to display the content. Looks like a broken help file, right? But it's not - it's merely a Windows security 'feature' that tries to be overly helpful in protecting you. The reason this happens is because files downloaded off the Internet - including ZIP files and CHM files contained in those zip files - are marked as as coming from the Internet and so can potentially be malicious, so do not get browsing rights on the local machine – they can’t access local Web content, which is exactly what help topics are. If you look at the URL of a help topic you see something like this:   mk:@MSITStore:C:\wwapps\wwIPStuff\wwipstuff.chm::/indexpage.htm which points at a special Microsoft Url Moniker that in turn points the CHM file and a relative path within that HTML help file. Try pasting a URL like this into Internet Explorer and you'll see the help topic pop up in your browser (along with a warning most likely). Although the URL looks weird this still equates to a call to the local computer zone, the same as if you had navigated to a local file in IE which by default is not allowed.  Unfortunately, unlike Internet Explorer where you have the option of clicking a security toolbar, the CHM viewer simply refuses to load the page and you get an error page as shown above. How to Fix This - Unblock the Help File There's a workaround that lets you explicitly 'unblock' a CHM help file. To do this: Open Windows Explorer Find your CHM file Right click and select Properties Click the Unblock button on the General tab Here's what the dialog looks like:   Clicking the Unblock button basically, tells Windows that you approve this Help File and allows topics to be viewed.   Is this insecure? Not unless you're running a really old Version of Windows (XP pre-SP1). In recent versions of Windows Internet Explorer pops up various security dialogs or fires script errors when potentially malicious operations are accessed (like loading Active Controls), so it's relatively safe to run local content in the CHM viewer. Since most help files don't contain script or only load script that runs pure JavaScript access web resources this works fine without issues. How to avoid this Problem As an application developer there's a simple solution around this problem: Always install your Help Files with an Installer. The above security warning pop up because Windows can't validate the source of the CHM file. However, if the help file is installed as part of an installation the installation and all files associated with that installation including the help file are trusted. A fully installed Help File of an application works just fine because it is trusted by Windows. Summary It's annoying as all hell that this sort of obtrusive marking is necessary, but it's admittedly a necessary evil because of Microsoft's use of the insecure Internet Explorer engine that drives the CHM Html Engine's topic viewer. Because help files are viewing local content and script is allowed to execute in CHM files there's potential for malicious code hiding in CHM files and the above precautions are supposed to avoid any issues. © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012 Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Why do my 512x512 bitmaps look jaggy on Android OpenGL?

  - by Milo Mordaunt

  This is sort of driving me nuts, I've googled and googled and tried everything I can think of, but my sprites still look super blurry and super jaggy. Example: Here: https://docs.google.com/open?id=0Bx9Gbwnv9Hd2TmpiZkFycUNmRTA If you click through to the actual full size image you should see what I mean, it's like it's taking and average of every 5*5 pixels or something, the background looks really blurry and blocky, but the ball is the worst. The clouds look all right for some reason, probably because they're mostly transparent. I know the pngs aren't top notch themselves but hey, I'm no artist! I would imagine it's a problem with either: a. How the pngs are made example sprite (512x512): https://docs.google.com/open?id=0Bx9Gbwnv9Hd2a2RRQlJiQTFJUEE b. How my Matrices work This is the relevant parts of the renderer: public void onDrawFrame(GL10 unused) { if(world != null) { dt = System.currentTimeMillis() - endTime; world.update( (float) dt); // Redraw background color GLES20.glClear(GLES20.GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT); Matrix.setIdentityM(mvMatrix, 0); Matrix.translateM(mvMatrix, 0, 0f, 0f, 0f); world.draw(mvMatrix, mProjMatrix); endTime = System.currentTimeMillis(); } else { Log.d(TAG, "There is no world...."); } } public void onSurfaceChanged(GL10 unused, int width, int height) { GLES20.glViewport(0, 0, width, height); Matrix.orthoM(mProjMatrix, 0, 0, width /2, 0, height /2, -1.f, 1.f); } And this is what each Quad does when draw is called: public void draw(float[] mvMatrix, float[] pMatrix) { Matrix.setIdentityM(mMatrix, 0); Matrix.setIdentityM(mvMatrix, 0); Matrix.translateM(mMatrix, 0, xPos, yPos, 0.f); Matrix.multiplyMM(mvMatrix, 0, mvMatrix, 0, mMatrix, 0); Matrix.scaleM(mvMatrix, 0, scale, scale, 0f); Matrix.rotateM(mvMatrix, 0, angle, 0f, 0f, -1f); GLES20.glUseProgram(mProgram); posAttr = GLES20.glGetAttribLocation(mProgram, "vPosition"); texAttr = GLES20.glGetAttribLocation(mProgram, "aTexCo"); uSampler = GLES20.glGetUniformLocation(mProgram, "uSampler"); int alphaHandle = GLES20.glGetUniformLocation(mProgram, "alpha"); GLES20.glVertexAttribPointer(posAttr, COORDS_PER_VERTEX, GLES20.GL_FLOAT, false, 0, vertexBuffer); GLES20.glVertexAttribPointer(texAttr, 2, GLES20.GL_FLOAT, false, 0, texCoBuffer); GLES20.glEnableVertexAttribArray(posAttr); GLES20.glEnableVertexAttribArray(texAttr); GLES20.glActiveTexture(GLES20.GL_TEXTURE0); GLES20.glBindTexture(GLES20.GL_TEXTURE_2D, texture); GLES20.glUniform1i(uSampler, 0); GLES20.glUniform1f(alphaHandle, alpha); mMVMatrixHandle = GLES20.glGetUniformLocation(mProgram, "uMVMatrix"); mPMatrixHandle = GLES20.glGetUniformLocation(mProgram, "uPMatrix"); GLES20.glUniformMatrix4fv(mMVMatrixHandle, 1, false, mvMatrix, 0); GLES20.glUniformMatrix4fv(mPMatrixHandle, 1, false, pMatrix, 0); GLES20.glDrawElements(GLES20.GL_TRIANGLE_STRIP, 4, GLES20.GL_UNSIGNED_SHORT, indicesBuffer); GLES20.glDisableVertexAttribArray(posAttr); GLES20.glDisableVertexAttribArray(texAttr); GLES20.glBindTexture(GLES20.GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0); } c. How my texture loading/blending/shaders setup works Here is the renderer setup: public void onSurfaceCreated(GL10 unused, EGLConfig config) { // Set the background frame color GLES20.glClearColor(0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f); GLES20.glDisable(GLES20.GL_DEPTH_TEST); GLES20.glDepthMask(false); GLES20.glBlendFunc(GLES20.GL_ONE, GLES20.GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA); GLES20.glEnable(GLES20.GL_BLEND); GLES20.glEnable(GLES20.GL_DITHER); } Here is the vertex shader: attribute vec4 vPosition; attribute vec2 aTexCo; varying vec2 vTexCo; uniform mat4 uMVMatrix; uniform mat4 uPMatrix; void main() { gl_Position = uPMatrix * uMVMatrix * vPosition; vTexCo = aTexCo; } And here's the fragment shader: precision mediump float; uniform sampler2D uSampler; uniform vec4 vColor; varying vec2 vTexCo; varying float alpha; void main() { vec4 color = texture2D(uSampler, vec2(vTexCo)); gl_FragColor = color; if(gl_FragColor.a == 0.0) { "discard; } } This is how textures are loaded: private int loadTexture(int rescource) { int[] texture = new int[1]; BitmapFactory.Options opts = new BitmapFactory.Options(); opts.inScaled = false; Bitmap temp = BitmapFactory.decodeResource(context.getResources(), rescource, opts); GLES20.glGenTextures(1, texture, 0); GLES20.glActiveTexture(GLES20.GL_TEXTURE0); GLES20.glBindTexture(GLES20.GL_TEXTURE_2D, texture[0]); GLES20.glTexParameterf(GLES20.GL_TEXTURE_2D, GLES20.GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, GLES20.GL_LINEAR); GLES20.glTexParameterf(GLES20.GL_TEXTURE_2D, GLES20.GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GLES20.GL_LINEAR); GLUtils.texImage2D(GLES20.GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, temp, 0); GLES20.glGenerateMipmap(GLES20.GL_TEXTURE_2D); GLES20.glBindTexture(GLES20.GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0); temp.recycle(); return texture[0]; } I'm sure I'm doing about 20,000 things wrong, so I'm really sorry if the problem is blindingly obvious... The test device is a Galaxy Note, running a JellyBean custom ROM, if that matters at all. So the screen resolution is 1280x800, which means... The background is 1024x1024, so yeah it might be a little blurry, but shouldn't be made of lego. Thank you so much, any answer at all would be appreciated.

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• Interview with Geoff Bones, developer on SQL Storage Compress

  - by red(at)work

  How did you come to be working at Red Gate? I've been working at Red Gate for nine months; before that I had been at a multinational engineering company. A number of my colleagues had left to work at Red Gate and spoke very highly of it, but I was happy in my role and thought, 'It can't be that great there, surely? They'll be back!' Then one day I visited to catch up them over lunch in the Red Gate canteen. I was so impressed with what I found there, that, three days later, I'd applied for a role as a developer. And how did you get into software development? My first job out of university was working as a systems programmer on IBM mainframes. This was quite a while ago: there was a lot of assembler and loading programs from tape drives and that kind of stuff. I learned a lot about how computers work, and this stood me in good stead when I moved over the development in the 90s. What's the best thing about working as a developer at Red Gate? Where should I start? One of the great things as a developer at Red Gate is the useful feedback and close contact we have with the people who use our products, either directly at trade shows and other events or through information coming through the product managers. The company's whole ethos is built around assisting the user, and this is in big contrast to my previous development roles. We aim to produce tools that people really want to use, that they enjoy using, and, as a developer, this is a great thing to aim for and a great feeling when we get it right. At Red Gate we also try to cut out the things that distract and stop us doing our jobs. As a developer, this means that I can focus on the code and the product I'm working on, knowing that others are doing a first-class job of making sure that the builds are running smoothly and that I'm getting great feedback from the testers. We keep our process light and effective, as we want to produce great software more than we want to produce great audit trails. Tell us a bit about the products you are currently working on. You mean HyperBac? First let me explain a bit about what HyperBac is. At heart it's a compression and encryption technology, but with a few added features that open up a wealth of really exciting possibilities. Right now we have the HyperBac technology in just three products: SQL HyperBac, SQL Virtual Restore and SQL Storage Compress, but we're only starting to develop what it can do. My personal favourite is SQL Virtual Restore; for example, I love the way you can use it to run independent test databases that are all backed by a single compressed backup. I don't think the market yet realises the kind of things you do once you are using these products. On the other hand, the benefits of SQL Storage Compress are straightforward: run your databases but use only 20% of the disk space. Databases are getting larger and larger, and, as they do, so does your ROI. What's a typical day for you? My days are pretty varied. We have our daily team stand-up meeting and then sometimes I will work alone on a current issue, or I'll be pair programming with one of my colleagues. From time to time we give half a day up to future planning with the team, when we look at the long and short term aims for the product and working out the development priorities. I also get to go to conferences and events, which is unusual for a development role and gives me the chance to meet and talk to our customers directly. Have you noticed anything different about developing tools for DBAs rather than other IT kinds of user? It seems to me that DBAs are quite independent minded; they know exactly what the problem they are facing is, and often have a solution in mind before they begin to look for what's on the market. This means that they're likely to cherry-pick tools from a range of vendors, picking the ones that are the best fit for them and that disrupt their environments the least. When I've met with DBAs, I've often been very impressed at their ability to summarise their set up, the issues, the obstacles they face when implementing a tool and their plans for their environment. It's easier to develop products for this audience as they give such a detailed overview of their needs, and I feel I understand their problems.

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• libgdx rotation (animation, arrays) issues and help needed

  - by johnny-b

  well i am a noob at java and libgdx. i got the homing bullet working with the help of someone. now i am smashing my head as to how i can make it rotate so it faces the ball (which is the main character) when it goes around it or when it is coming towards it. the bullet is facing <--- and the code below is what i have done so far. also i used sprites for the bullet and also animation method. Also how do i make it an array/arraylist which is best so i can have multiple bullets at random or placed places. i tried many things nothing workd :( thank you for the help. // below is the bullet or enemy if you want to call it. public class Bullet extends Sprite { public static final float BULLET_HOMING = 6000; public static final float BULLET_SPEED = 300; private Vector2 velocity; private float lifetime; public Bullet(float x, float y) { velocity = new Vector2(0, 0); setPosition(x, y); } public void update(float delta) { float targetX = GameWorld.getBall().getX(); float targetY = GameWorld.getBall().getY(); float dx = targetX - getX(); float dy = targetY - getY(); float distToTarget = (float) Math.sqrt(dx * dx + dy * dy); dx /= distToTarget; dy /= distToTarget; dx *= BULLET_HOMING; dy *= BULLET_HOMING; velocity.x += dx * delta; velocity.y += dy * delta; float vMag = (float) Math.sqrt(velocity.x * velocity.x + velocity.y * velocity.y); velocity.x /= vMag; velocity.y /= vMag; velocity.x *= BULLET_SPEED; velocity.y *= BULLET_SPEED; Vector2 v = velocity.cpy().scl(delta); setPosition(getX() + v.x, getY() + v.y); setOriginCenter(); setRotation(velocity.angle()); lifetime += delta; setRegion(AssetLoader.bulletAnimation.getKeyFrame(lifetime)); } } // this is where i load the images. public class AssetLoader { public static Animation bulletAnimation; public static Sprite bullet1, bullet2; public static void load() { texture = new Texture(Gdx.files.internal("SpriteN1.png")); texture.setFilter(TextureFilter.Nearest, TextureFilter.Nearest); bullet1 = new Sprite(texture, 380, 350, 45, 20); bullet1.flip(false, true); bullet2 = new Sprite(texture, 425, 350, 45, 20); bullet2.flip(false, true); Sprite[] bullets = { bullet1, bullet2 }; bulletAnimation = new Animation(0.06f, aims); bulletAnimation.setPlayMode(Animation.PlayMode.LOOP); } public static void dispose() { // We must dispose of the texture when we are finished. texture.dispose(); } // this is for the rendering of the images etc public class GameRenderer { private Bullet bullet; private Ball ball; public GameRenderer(GameWorld world) { myWorld = world; cam = new OrthographicCamera(); cam.setToOrtho(true, 480, 320); batcher = new SpriteBatch(); // Attach batcher to camera batcher.setProjectionMatrix(cam.combined); shapeRenderer = new ShapeRenderer(); shapeRenderer.setProjectionMatrix(cam.combined); // Call helper methods to initialize instance variables initGameObjects(); initAssets(); } private void initGameObjects() { ball = GameWorld.getBall(); bullet = myWorld.getBullet(); scroller = myWorld.getScroller(); } private void initAssets() { ballAnimation = AssetLoader.ballAnimation; bulletAnimation = AssetLoader.bulletAnimation; } public void render(float runTime) { Gdx.gl.glClearColor(0, 0, 0, 1); Gdx.gl.glClear(GL30.GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT); batcher.begin(); // Disable transparency // This is good for performance when drawing images that do not require // transparency. batcher.disableBlending(); // The ball needs transparency, so we enable that again. batcher.enableBlending(); batcher.draw(AssetLoader.ballAnimation.getKeyFrame(runTime), ball.getX(), ball.getY(), ball.getWidth(), ball.getHeight()); batcher.draw(AssetLoader.bulletAnimation.getKeyFrame(runTime), bullet.getX(), bullet.getY()); // End SpriteBatch batcher.end(); } } // this is to load the image etc on the screen i guess public class GameWorld { public static Ball ball; private Bullet bullet; private ScrollHandler scroller; public GameWorld() { ball = new Ball(480, 273, 32, 32); bullet = new Bullet(10, 10); scroller = new ScrollHandler(0); } public void update(float delta) { ball.update(delta); bullet.update(delta); scroller.update(delta); } public static Ball getBall() { return ball; } public ScrollHandler getScroller() { return scroller; } public Bullet getBullet() { return bullet; } } so there is the whole thing. the images are loaded via the AssetLoader then to the GameRenderer and GameWorld via the Bullet class. i am guessing that is how it is. sorry newbie so still learning. thank you in advace for the help or any advice.

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• Row Count Plus Transformation

  As the name suggests we have taken the current Row Count Transform that is provided by Microsoft in the Integration Services toolbox and we have recreated the functionality and extended upon it. There are two things about the current version that we thought could do with cleaning up Lack of a custom UI You have to type the variable name yourself In the Row Count Plus Transformation we solve these issues for you. Another thing we thought was missing is the ability to calculate the time taken between components in the pipeline. An example usage would be that you want to know how many rows flowed between Component A and Component B and how long it took. Again we have solved this issue. Credit must go to Erik Veerman of Solid Quality Learning for the idea behind noting the duration. We were looking at one of his packages and saw that he was doing something very similar but he was using a Script Component as a transformation. Our philosophy is that if you have to write or Copy and Paste the same piece of code more than once then you should be thinking about a custom component and here it is. The Row Count Plus Transformation populates variables with the values returned from; Counting the rows that have flowed through the path Returning the time in seconds between when it first saw a row come down this path and when it saw the final row. It is possible to leave both these boxes blank and the component will still work.   All input columns are passed through the transformation unaltered, you are not permitted to change or add to the inputs or outputs of this component. Optionally you can set the component to fire an event, which happens during the PostExecute phase of the execution. This can be useful to improve visibility of this information, such that it is captured in package logging, or can be used to drive workflow in the case of an error event. Properties Property Data Type Description OutputRowCountVariable String The name of the variable into which the amount of row read will be passed (Optional). OutputDurationVariable String The name of the variable into which the duration in seconds will be passed. (Optional). EventType RowCountPlusTransform.EventType The type of event to fire during post execute, included in which are the row count and duration values. RowCountPlusTransform.EventType Enumeration Name Value Description None 0 Do not fire any event. Information 1 Fire an Information event. Warning 2 Fire a Warning event. Error 3 Fire an Error event. Installation The component is provided as an MSI file which you can download and run to install it. This simply places the files on disk in the correct locations and also installs the assemblies in the Global Assembly Cache as per Microsoft’s recommendations. You may need to restart the SQL Server Integration Services service, as this caches information about what components are installed, as well as restarting any open instances of Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) / Visual Studio that you may be using to build your SSIS packages. For 2005/2008 Only - Finally you will have to add the transformation to the Visual Studio toolbox manually. Right-click the toolbox, and select Choose Items.... Select the SSIS Data Flow Items tab, and then check the Row Count Plus Transformation in the Choose Toolbox Items window. This process has been described in detail in the related FAQ entry for How do I install a task or transform component? We recommend you follow best practice and apply the current Microsoft SQL Server Service pack to your SQL Server servers and workstations, and this component requires a minimum of SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 1. Downloads The Row Number Transformation is available for SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008 (includes R2) and SQL Server 2012. Please choose the version to match your SQL Server version, or you can install multiple versions and use them side by side if you have more than one version of SQL Server installed. Row Count Plus Transformation for SQL Server 2005 Row Count Plus Transformation for SQL Server 2008 Row Count Plus Transformation for SQL Server 2012 Version History SQL Server 2012 Version 3.0.0.6 - SQL Server 2012 release. Includes upgrade support for both 2005 and 2008 packages to 2012. (5 Jun 2012) SQL Server 2008 Version 2.0.0.5 - SQL Server 2008 release. (15 Oct 2008) SQL Server 2005 Version 1.1.0.43 - Bug fix for duration. For long running processes the duration second count may have been incorrect. (8 Sep 2006) Version 1.1.0.42 - SP1 Compatibility Testing. Added the ability to raise an event with the count and duration data for easier logging or workflow. (18 Jun 2006) Version 1.0.0.1 - SQL Server 2005 RTM. Made available as general public release. (20 Mar 2006) Screenshot Troubleshooting Make sure you have downloaded the version that matches your version of SQL Server. We offer separate downloads for SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2012. If you get an error when you try and use the component along the lines of The component could not be added to the Data Flow task. Please verify that this component is properly installed.  ... The data flow object "Konesans ..." is not installed correctly on this computer, this usually indicates that the internal cache of SSIS components needs to be updated. This is held by the SSIS service, so you need restart the the SQL Server Integration Services service. You can do this from the Services applet in Control Panel or Administrative Tools in Windows. You can also restart the computer if you prefer. You may also need to restart any current instances of Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) / Visual Studio that you may be using to build your SSIS packages. Once installation is complete you need to manually add the task to the toolbox before you will see it and to be able add it to packages - How do I install a task or transform component?

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• Customizing UPK outputs (Part 2 - Player)

  - by [email protected]

  There are a few things that can be done to give the Player output a personalized look to match your corporate branding. In my previous post, I talked about changing the logo. In addition to the logo, you can change the graphic in the heading, button colors, border colors and many other items. Prior to making any customizations, I strongly recommend making a copy of the existing Player style. This will give you a backup in case things go wrong. I'd also recommend that you create your own brand. This way, when you install the newest updates from us, your brand will remain intact. Creating your own brand is pretty easy. Make sure you have modify permissions on the publishing styles directory, if you are using a multi-user installation. Under the Publishing/Styles folder, create a new folder with your company name. Copy all the publishing styles from the UPK folder to your newly created folder. Now, when you go through the Publishing wizard, you will have two categories to choose from: the UPK category or your custom category. Now, for updating the Player output. First, the graphic that appears on the right hand side of the Player. If you're using a multi-user installation, check out the player style from your custom brand. Open the player style. Open the img folder. The file named "banner_image.png" represents the graphic that appears on the right hand side of the player. It is currently sized at 425 x 54. Try to keep your graphic about the same size. Rename your graphic file to be "banner_image.png", and drag it into the img folder. Save the package. Check in the package if you are in a multi-user installation. You've just updated the banner heading! Next, let's work on updating some of the other colors in the player. All the customizable areas are located in the skin.css file which is in the root of the Player style. Many of our customers update the colors to match their own theme. You don't have to be a programmer to make these changes, honest. :) To change the colors in the player: Make a copy of the original skin.css file. (This is to make sure you have a working version to revert to, in case something goes wrong.) Open the skin.css file from the Player package. You can edit it using Notepad. Make the desired changes. Save the file. Save the package. Publish to view your new changes. When you open the skin.css, you will see groupings like this: .headerDivbar { height: 21px; background-color: #CDE2FD; } Change the value of the background-color to the color of your choice. Note that you cannot use "red" as a color, but rather you should enter the hexadecimal color code. If you don't know the color code, search the web for "hexadecimal colors" and you'll find many sites to provide the information. Here are a few of the variables that you can update. Heading: .headerDivbar -this changes the color of the banner that appears under the graphic Button colors: .navCellOn - changes the color of the mode buttons when your mouse is hovering on them. .navCellOff - changes the color of the mode buttons when the mouse is not over them Lines: .thorizontal - this is the color of the horizontal lines surrounding the outline .tvertical - this is the color of the vertical lines on the left and right margin in the outline. .tsep - this is the color of the line that separates the outline from the content area Search frame: .tocSearchColor - this is the color of the search area .tocFrameText - this is the background color of the TOC tree. Hint: If you want to try out the changes prior to updating the style, you can update the skin.css in some content you've already published for the player (it's located in the css folder of the player package). This way, you can immediately see the changes without going through publishing. Once you're happy with the changes, update the skin.css in player style. Want to customize more? Refer to the "Customizing the Player" section of the Content Development manual for more details on all the options in the skin.css that can be changed, and pictures of what each variable controls. I'd love to see how you've customized the player for your corporate needs. Also, if there are other areas of the player you'd like to modify but have not been able to, let us know. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments. --Maria Cozzolino, Manager of Requirements & UI Design for UPK

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• Database-as-a-Service on Exadata Cloud

  - by Gagan Chawla

  Note – Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c DBaaS is platform agnostic and is designed to work on Exadata/non-Exadata, physical/virtual, Oracle/non Oracle platforms and it’s not a mandatory requirement to use Exadata as the base platform. Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) is an important trend these days and the top business drivers motivating customers towards private database cloud model include constant pressure to reduce IT Costs and Complexity, and also to be able to improve Agility and Quality of Service. The first step many enterprises take in their journey towards cloud computing is to move to a consolidated and standardized environment and Exadata being already a proven best-in-class popular consolidation platform, we are seeing now more and more customers starting to evolve from Exadata based platform into an agile self service driven private database cloud using Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c. Together Exadata Database Machine and Enterprise Manager 12c provides industry’s most comprehensive and integrated solution to transform from a typical silo’ed environment into enterprise class database cloud with self service, rapid elasticity and pay-per-use capabilities.   In today’s post, I’ll list down the important steps to enable DBaaS on Exadata using Enterprise Manager 12c. These steps are chalked down based on a recent DBaaS implementation from a real customer engagement - Project Planning - First step involves defining the scope of implementation, mapping functional requirements and objectives to use cases, defining high availability, network, security requirements, and delivering the project plan. In a Cloud project you plan around technology, business and processes all together so ensure you engage your actual end users and stakeholders early on in the project right from the scoping and planning stage. Setup your EM 12c Cloud Control Site – Once the project plan approval and sign off from stakeholders is achieved, refer to EM 12c Install guide and these are some important tips to follow during the site setup phase - Review the new EM 12c Sizing paper before you get started with install Cloud, Chargeback and Trending, Exadata plug ins should be selected to deploy during install Refer to EM 12c Administrator’s guide for High Availability, Security, Network/Firewall best practices and options Your management and managed infrastructure should not be combined i.e. EM 12c repository should not be hosted on same Exadata where target Database Cloud is to be setup Setup Roles and Users – Cloud Administrator (EM_CLOUD_ADMINISTRATOR), Self Service Administrator (EM_SSA_ADMINISTRATOR), Self Service User (EM_SSA_USER) are the important roles required for cloud lifecycle management. Roles and users are managed by Super Administrator via Setup menu –> Security option. For Self Service/SSA users custom role(s) based on EM_SSA_USER should be created and EM_USER, PUBLIC roles should be revoked during SSA user account creation. Configure Software Library – Cloud Administrator logs in and in this step configures software library via Enterprise menu –> provisioning and patching option and the storage location is OMS shared filesystem. Software Library is the centralized repository that stores all software entities and is often termed as ‘local store’. Setup Self Update – Self Update is one of the most innovative and cool new features in EM 12c framework. Self update can be accessed via Setup -> Extensibility option by Super Administrator and is the unified delivery mechanism to get all new and updated entities (Agent software, plug ins, connectors, gold images, provisioning bundles etc) in EM 12c. Deploy Agents on all Compute nodes, and discover Exadata targets – Refer to Exadata discovery cookbook for detailed walkthrough to ensure successful discovery of Exadata targets. Configure Privilege Delegation Settings – This step involves deployment of privilege setting template on all the nodes by Super Administrator via Setup menu -> Security option with the option to define whether to use sudo or powerbroker for all provisioning and patching operations. Provision Grid Infrastructure with RAC Database on Compute Nodes – Software is provisioned in this step via a provisioning profile using EM 12c database provisioning. In case of Exadata, Grid Infrastructure and RAC Database software is already deployed on compute nodes via OneCommand from Oracle, so SSA Administrator just needs to discover Oracle Homes and Listener as EM targets. Databases will be created as and when users request for databases from cloud. Customize Create Database Deployment Procedure – the actual database creation steps are "templatized" in this step by Self Service Administrator and the newly saved deployment procedure will be used during service template creation in next step. This is an important step and make sure you have locked all the required variables marked as locked as ‘Y’ in this table. Setup Self Service Portal – This step involves setting up of zones, user quotas, service templates, chargeback plan. The SSA portal is setup by Self Service Administrator via Setup menu -> Cloud -> Database option and following guided workflow. Refer to DBaaS cookbook for details. You also have an option to customize SSA login page via steps documented in EM 12c Cloud Administrator’s guide Final Checks – Define and document process guidelines for SSA users and administrators. Get your SSA users trained on Self Service Portal features and overall DBaaS model and SSA administrators should be familiar with Self Service Portal setup pieces, EM 12c database lifecycle management capabilities and overall EM 12c monitoring framework. GO LIVE – Announce rollout of Database-as-a-Service to your SSA users. Users can login to the Self Service Portal and request/monitor/view their databases in Exadata based database cloud. Congratulations! You just delivered a successful database cloud implementation project! In future posts, we will cover these additional useful topics around database cloud – DBaaS Implementation tips and tricks – right from setup to self service to managing the cloud lifecycle ‘How to’ enable real production databases copies in DBaaS with rapid provisioning in database cloud Case study of a customer who recently achieved success with their transformational journey from traditional silo’ed environment on to Exadata based database cloud using Enterprise Manager 12c. More Information – Podcast on Database as a Service using Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Installation and Administration guide, Cloud Administration guide DBaaS Cookbook Exadata Discovery Cookbook Screenwatch: Private Database Cloud: Set Up the Cloud Self-Service Portal Screenwatch: Private Database Cloud: Use the Cloud Self-Service Portal Stay Connected: Twitter |  Face book |  You Tube |  Linked in |  Newsletter

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• InnoDB Compression Improvements in MySQL 5.6

  - by Inaam Rana

  MySQL 5.6 comes with significant improvements for the compression support inside InnoDB. The enhancements that we'll talk about in this piece are also a good example of community contributions. The work on these was conceived, implemented and contributed by the engineers at Facebook. Before we plunge into the details let us familiarize ourselves with some of the key concepts surrounding InnoDB compression. In InnoDB compressed pages are fixed size. Supported sizes are 1, 2, 4, 8 and 16K. The compressed page size is specified at table creation time. InnoDB uses zlib for compression. InnoDB buffer pool will attempt to cache compressed pages like normal pages. However, whenever a page is actively used by a transaction, we'll always have the uncompressed version of the page as well i.e.: we can have a page in the buffer pool in compressed only form or in a state where we have both the compressed page and uncompressed version but we'll never have a page in uncompressed only form. On-disk we'll always only have the compressed page. When both compressed and uncompressed images are present in the buffer pool they are always kept in sync i.e.: changes are applied to both atomically. Recompression happens when changes are made to the compressed data. In order to minimize recompressions InnoDB maintains a modification log within a compressed page. This is the extra space available in the page after compression and it is used to log modifications to the compressed data thus avoiding recompressions. DELETE (and ROLLBACK of DELETE) and purge can be performed without recompressing the page. This is because the delete-mark bit and the system fields DB_TRX_ID and DB_ROLL_PTR are stored in uncompressed format on the compressed page. A record can be purged by shuffling entries in the compressed page directory. This can also be useful for updates of indexed columns, because UPDATE of a key is mapped to INSERT+DELETE+purge. A compression failure happens when we attempt to recompress a page and it does not fit in the fixed size. In such case, we first try to reorganize the page and attempt to recompress and if that fails as well then we split the page into two and recompress both pages. Now lets talk about the three major improvements that we made in MySQL 5.6.Logging of Compressed Page Images:InnoDB used to log entire compressed data on the page to the redo logs when recompression happens. This was an extra safety measure to guard against the rare case where an attempt is made to do recovery using a different zlib version from the one that was used before the crash. Because recovery is a page level operation in InnoDB we have to be sure that all recompress attempts must succeed without causing a btree page split. However, writing entire compressed data images to the redo log files not only makes the operation heavy duty but can also adversely affect flushing activity. This happens because redo space is used in a circular fashion and when we generate much more than normal redo we fill up the space much more quickly and in order to reuse the redo space we have to flush the corresponding dirty pages from the buffer pool.Starting with MySQL 5.6 a new global configuration parameter innodb_log_compressed_pages. The default value is true which is same as the current behavior. If you are sure that you are not going to attempt to recover from a crash using a different version of zlib then you should set this parameter to false. This is a dynamic parameter.Compression Level:You can now set the compression level that zlib should choose to compress the data. The global parameter is innodb_compression_level - the default value is 6 (the zlib default) and allowed values are 1 to 9. Again the parameter is dynamic i.e.: you can change it on the fly.Dynamic Padding to Reduce Compression Failures:Compression failures are expensive in terms of CPU. We go through the hoops of recompress, failure, reorganize, recompress, failure and finally page split. At the same time, how often we encounter compression failure depends largely on the compressibility of the data. In MySQL 5.6, courtesy of Facebook engineers, we have an adaptive algorithm based on per-index statistics that we gather about compression operations. The idea is that if a certain index/table is experiencing too many compression failures then we should try to pack the 16K uncompressed version of the page less densely i.e.: we let some space in the 16K page go unused in an attempt that the recompression won't end up in a failure. In other words, we dynamically keep adding 'pad' to the 16K page till we get compression failures within an agreeable range. It works the other way as well, that is we'll keep removing the pad if failure rate is fairly low. To tune the padding effort two configuration variables are exposed. innodb_compression_failure_threshold_pct: default 5, range 0 - 100,dynamic, implies the percentage of compress ops to fail before we start using to padding. Value 0 has a special meaning of disabling the padding. innodb_compression_pad_pct_max: default 50, range 0 - 75, dynamic, the  maximum percentage of uncompressed data page that can be reserved as pad.

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• Design Pattern for Complex Data Modeling

  - by Aaron Hayman

  I'm developing a program that has a SQL database as a backing store. As a very broad description, the program itself allows a user to generate records in any number of user-defined tables and make connections between them. As for specs: Any record generated must be able to be connected to any other record in any other user table (excluding itself...the record, not the table). These "connections" are directional, and the list of connections a record has is user ordered. Moreover, a record must "know" of connections made from it to others as well as connections made to it from others. The connections are kind of the point of this program, so there is a strong possibility that the number of connections made is very high, especially if the user is using the software as intended. A record's field can also include aggregate information from it's connections (like obtaining average, sum, etc) that must be updated on change from another record it's connected to. To conserve memory, only relevant information must be loaded at any one time (can't load the entire database in memory at load and go from there). I cannot assume the backing store is local. Right now it is, but eventually this program will include syncing to a remote db. Neither the user tables, connections or records are known at design time as they are user generated. I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to design the backing store and the object model to best fit these specs. In my first design attempt on this, I had one object managing all a table's records and connections. I attempted this first because it kept the memory footprint smaller (records and connections were simple dicts), but maintaining aggregate and link information between tables became....onerous (ie...a huge spaghettified mess). Tracing dependencies using this method almost became impossible. Instead, I've settled on a distributed graph model where each record and connection is 'aware' of what's around it by managing it own data and connections to other records. Doing this increases my memory footprint but also let me create a faulting system so connections/records aren't loaded into memory until they're needed. It's also much easier to code: trace dependencies, eliminate cycling recursive updates, etc. My biggest problem is storing/loading the connections. I'm not happy with any of my current solutions/ideas so I wanted to ask and see if anybody else has any ideas of how this should be structured. Connections are fairly simple. They contain: fromRecordID, fromTableID, fromRecordOrder, toRecordID, toTableID, toRecordOrder. Here's what I've come up with so far: Store all the connections in one big table. If I do this, either I load all connections at once (one big db call) or make a call every time a user table is loaded. The big issue here: the size of the connections table has the potential to be huge, and I'm afraid it would slow things down. Store in separate tables all the outgoing connections for each user table. This is probably the worst idea I've had. Now my connections are 'spread out' over multiple tables (one for each user table), which means I have to make a separate DB called to each table (or make a huge join) just to find all the incoming connections for a particular user table. I've avoided making "one big ass table", but I'm not sure the cost is worth it. Store in separate tables all outgoing AND incoming connections for each user table (using a flag to distinguish between incoming vs outgoing). This is the idea I'm leaning towards, but it will essentially double the total DB storage for all the connections (as each connection will be stored in two tables). It also means I have to make sure connection information is kept in sync in both places. This is obviously not ideal but it does mean that when I load a user table, I only need to load one 'connection' table and have all the information I need. This also presents a separate problem, that of connection object creation. Since each user table has a list of all connections, there are two opportunities for a connection object to be made. However, connections objects (designed to facilitate communication between records) should only be created once. This means I'll have to devise a common caching/factory object to make sure only one connection object is made per connection. Does anybody have any ideas of a better way to do this? Once I've committed to a particular design pattern I'm pretty much stuck with it, so I want to make sure I've come up with the best one possible.

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• My Red Gate Experience

  - by Colin Rothwell

  I’m Colin, and I’ve been an intern working with Mike in publishing on Simple-Talk and SQLServerCentral for the past ten weeks. I’ve mostly been working “behind the scenes”, making improvements to the spam filtering, along with various other small tweaks. When I arrived at Red Gate, one of the first things Mike asked me was what I wanted to get out of the internship. It wasn’t a question I’d given a great deal of thought to, but my immediate response was the same as almost anybody: to support my growing family. Well, ok, not quite that, but money was certainly a motivator, along with simply making sure that I didn’t get bored over the summer. Three months is a long time to fill, and many of my friends end up getting bored, or worse, knitting obsessively. With the arrogance which seems fairly common among Cambridge people, I wasn’t expecting to really learn much here! In my mind, the part of the year where I am at Uni is the part where I learn things, whilst Red Gate would be an opportunity to apply what I’d learnt. Thankfully, the opposite is true: I’ve learnt a lot during my time here, and there has been a definite positive impact on the way I write code. The first thing I’ve really learnt is that test-driven development is, in general, a sensible way of working. Before coming, I didn’t really get it: how could you test something you hadn’t yet written? It didn’t make sense! My problem was seeing a test as having to test all the behaviour of a given function. Writing tests which test the bare minimum possible and building them up is a really good way of crystallising the direction the code needs to grow in, and ensures you never attempt to write too much code at time. One really good experience of this was early on in my internship when Mike and I were working on the query used to list active authors: I’d written something which I thought would do the trick, but by starting again using TDD we grew something which revealed that there were several subtle mistakes in the query I’d written. I’ve also been awakened to the value of pair programming. Whilst I could sort of see the point before coming, I also thought that it was impossible that two people would ever get more done at the same computer than if they were working separately. I still think that this is true for projects with pieces that developers can easily work on independently, and with developers who both know the codebase, but I’ve found that pair programming can be really good for learning a code base, and for building up small projects to the point where you can start working on separate components, as well as solving particularly difficult problems. Later on in my internship, for my down tools week project, I was working on adding Python support to Glimpse. Another intern and I we pair programmed the entire project, using ping pong pair programming as much as possible. One bonus that this brought which I wasn’t expecting was that I found myself less prone to distraction: with someone else peering over my shoulder, I didn’t have the ever-present temptation to open gmail, or facebook, or yammer, or twitter, or hacker news, or reddit, and so on, and so forth. I’m quite proud of this project: I think it’s some of the best code I’ve written. I’ve also been really won over to the value of descriptive variables names. In my pre-Red Gate life, as a lone-ranger style cowboy programmer, I’d developed a tendency towards laziness in variable names, sometimes abbreviating or, worse, using acronyms. I’ve swiftly realised that this is a bad idea when working with a team: saving a few key strokes is inevitably not worth it when it comes to reading code again in the future. Longer names also mean you can do away with a majority of comments. I appreciate that if you’ve come up with an O(n*log n) algorithm for something which seemed O(n^2), you probably want to explain how it works, but explaining what a variable name means is a big no no: it’s so very easy to change the behaviour of the code, whilst forgetting about the comments. Whilst at Red Gate, I took the opportunity to attend a code retreat, which really helped me to solidify all the things I’d learnt. To be completely free of any existing code base really lets you focus on best practises and think about how you write code. If you get a chance to go on a similar event, I’d highly recommend it! Cycling to Red Gate, I’ve also become much better at fitting inner tubes: if you’re struggling to get the tube out, or re-fit the tire, letting a bit of air out usually helps. I’ve also become quite a bit better at foosball and will miss having a foosball table! I’d like to finish off by saying thank you to everyone at Red Gate for having me. I’ve really enjoyed working with, and learning from, the team that brings you this web site. If you meet any of them, buy them a drink!

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• BPM 11g - Dynamic Task Assignment with Multi-level Organization Units

  - by Mark Foster

  I've seen several requirements to have a more granular level of task assignment in BPM 11g based on some value in the data passed to the process. Parametric Roles is normally the first port of call to try to satisfy this requirement, but in this blog we will show how a lot of use-cases can be satisfied by the easier to implement and flexible Organization Unit. The Use-Case Task assignment is to an approval group containing several users. At runtime, a location value in the input data determines which of the particular users the task is ultimately assigned to. In this case we use the Demo Community referenced in the SOA Admin Guide, and specifically the "LoanAnalyticGroup" which contains three users; "szweig", "mmitch" & "fkafka". In our scenario we would like to assign a task to "szweig" if the input data specifies that the location is "JapanCentral", to "fkafka" if the location is "JapanNorth" and to "mmitch" if "JapanSouth", and to all of them if the location is "Japan" i.e....   The Process Simple one human task process.... In the output data association of the "Start" activity we need to set the value of the "Organization Unit" predefined variable based on the input data (note that the  predefined variables can only be set on output data associations)....  ...and in the output data association of the human activity we will reset the "Organization Unit" to empty, always good practice to ensure that the Organization Unit will not be used for any subsequent human activities for which we do not require it.... Set Up the Organization Unit  Log in to the BPM Workspace with an administrator user (weblogic/welcome1 in our case) and choose the "Administration" option. Within "Roles" assign the "ProcessOwner" swim-lane for our process to "LoanAnalyticGroup".... Within "Organization Units" we can model our organization.... "Root Organization Unit" as "Japan" and "Child Organization Unit" as "Central", "South" & "North" as shown. As described previously, add user "szweig" to "Central", "mmitch" to "South" and "fkafka" to "North"....   Test the Process Invalid Data  First let us test with invalid data in the input to see what the consequences are, here we use "X" as input.... ...and looking at the instance we can see it has errored.... Organization Unit Root Level Assignment  Now let us see what happens if we have "Japan" in the input data.... ...looking in the "flow trace" we can see that the task has been assigned....  ... but who has the task been assigned to ? Let us look in the BPM Workspace for user "szweig"....  ...and for "mmitch"....  ... and for "fkafka"....  ...so we can see that with an Organization Unit at "Root" level we have successfully assigned the task to all users. Organization Unit Child Level Assignment  Now let us test with "Japan/North" in the input data.... ...and looking in "fkafka" workspace we see the task has been assigned, remember, he was associated with "JapanNorth"....   ... but what about the workspace of "szweig"....  ...no tasks assigned, neither has "mmitch", just as we expected. Summary  We have seen in this blog how to easily implement multi-level dynamic task routing using Organization Units, a common use-case and a simpler solution than Parametric Roles. 

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• Detecting Duplicates Using Oracle Business Rules

  - by joeywong-Oracle

  Recently I was involved with a Business Process Management Proof of Concept (BPM PoC) where we wanted to show how customers could use Oracle Business Rules (OBR) to easily define some rules to detect certain conditions, such as duplicate account numbers, duplicate names, high transaction amounts, etc, in a set of transactions. Traditionally you would have to loop through the transactions and compare each transaction with each other to find matching conditions. This is not particularly nice as it relies on more traditional approaches (coding) and is not the most efficient way. OBR is a great place to house these types’ of rules as it allows users/developers to externalise the rules, in a simpler manner, externalising the rules from the message flows and allows users to change them when required. So I went ahead looking for some examples. After quite a bit of time spent Googling, I did not find much out in the blogosphere. In fact the best example was actually from...... wait for it...... Oracle Documentation! (http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E28271_01/user.1111/e10228/rules_start.htm#ASRUG228) However, if you followed the link there was not much explanation provided with the example. So the aim of this article is to provide a little more explanation to the example so that it can be better understood. Note: I won’t be covering the BPM parts in great detail. Use case: Payment instruction file is required to be processed. Before instruction file can be processed it needs to be approved by a business user. Before the approval process, it would be useful to run the payment instruction file through OBR to look for transactions of interest. The output of the OBR can then be used to flag the transactions for the approvers to investigate. Example BPM Process So let’s start defining the Business Rules Dictionary. For the input into our rules, we will be passing in an array of payments which contain some basic information for our demo purposes. Input to Business Rules And for our output we want to have an array of rule output messages. Note that the element I am using for the output is only for one rule message element and not an array. We will configure the Business Rules component later to return an array instead. Output from Business Rules Business Rule – Create Dictionary Fill in all the details and click OK. Open the Business Rules component and select Decision Functions from the side. Modify the Decision Function Configuration Select the decision function and click on the edit button (the pencil), don’t worry that JDeveloper indicates that there is an error with the decision function. Then click the Ouputs tab and make sure the checkbox under the List column is checked, this is to tell the Business Rules component that it should return an array of rule message elements. Updating the Decision Service Next we will define the actual rules. Click on Ruleset1 on the side and then the Create Rule in the IF/THEN Rule section. Creating new rule in ruleset Ok, this is where some detailed explanation is required. Remember that the input to this Business Rules dictionary is a list of payments, each of those payments were of the complex type PaymentType. Each of those payments in the Oracle Business Rules engine is treated as a fact in its working memory. Implemented rule So in the IF/THEN rule, the first task is to grab two PaymentType facts from the working memory and assign them to temporary variable names (payment1 and payment2 in our example). Matching facts Once we have them in the temporary variables, we can then start comparing them to each other. For our demonstration we want to find payments where the account numbers were the same but the account name was different. Suspicious payment instruction And to stop the rule from comparing the same facts to each other, over and over again, we have to include the last test. Stop rule from comparing endlessly And that’s it! No for loops, no need to keep track of what you have or have not compared, OBR handles all that for you because everything is done in its working memory. And once all the tests have been satisfied we need to assert a new fact for the output. Assert the output fact Save your Business Rules. Next step is to complete the data association in the BPM process. Pay extra care to use Copy List instead of the default Copy when doing data association at an array level. Input and output data association Deploy and test. Test data Rule matched Parting words: Ideally you would then use the output of the Business Rules component to then display/flag the transactions which triggered the rule so that the approver can investigate. Link: SOA Project Archive [Download]

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• XNA: Huge Tile Map, long load times

  - by Zach

  Recently I built a tile map generator for a game project. What I am very proud of is that I finally got it to the point where I can have a GIANT 2D map build perfectly on my PC. About 120000pixels by 40000 pixels. I can go larger actually, but I have only 1 draw back. #1 ram, the map currently draws about 320MB of ram and I know the Xbox allows 512MB I think? #2 It takes 20 mins for the map to build then display on the Xbox, on my PC it take less then a few seconds. I need to bring that 20 minutes of generating from 20 mins to how ever little bit I can, and how can a lower the amount of RAM usage while still being able to generate my map. Right now everything is stored in Jagged Arrays, each piece generating in a size of 1280x720 (the mother piece). Up to the amount that I need, every block is exactly 40x40 pixels however the blocks get removed from a List or regenerated in a List depending how close the mother piece is to the player. Saving A LOT of CPU, so at all times its no more then looping through 5184 some blocks. Well at least I'm sure of this. But how can I lower my RAM usage without hurting the size of the map, and how can I lower these INSANE loading times? EDIT: Let me explain my self better. Also I'd like to let everyone know now that I'm inexperienced with many of these things. So here is an example of the arrays I'm using. Here is the overall in a shorter term: int[][] array = new int[30][]; array[0] = new int[] { 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2 }; array[1] = new int[] { 1, 3, 3, 3, 3, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2 }; that goes on for around 30 arrays downward. Now for every time it hits a 1, it goes and generates a tile map 1280x720 and it does that exactly the way it does it above. This is how I loop through those arrays: for (int i = 0; i < array.Length; i += 1) { for (int h = 0; h < array[i].Length; h += 1) { } { Now how the tiles are drawn and removed is something like this: public void Draw(SpriteBatch spriteBatch, Vector2 cam) { if (cam.X >= this.Position.X - 1280) { if (cam.X <= this.Position.X + 2560) { if (cam.Y >= this.Position.Y - 720) { if (cam.Y <= this.Position.Y + 1440) { if (visible) { if (once == 0) { once = 1; visible = false; regen(); } } for (int i = Tiles.Count - 1; i >= 0; i--) { Tiles[i].Draw(spriteBatch, cam); } for (int i = unWalkTiles.Count - 1; i >= 0; i--) { unWalkTiles[i].Draw(spriteBatch, cam); } } else { once = 0; for (int i = Tiles.Count - 1; i >= 0; i--) { Tiles.RemoveAt(i); } for (int i = unWalkTiles.Count - 1; i >= 0; i--) { unWalkTiles.RemoveAt(i); } } } else { once = 0; for (int i = Tiles.Count - 1; i >= 0; i--) { Tiles.RemoveAt(i); } for (int i = unWalkTiles.Count - 1; i >= 0; i--) { unWalkTiles.RemoveAt(i); } } } else { once = 0; for (int i = Tiles.Count - 1; i >= 0; i--) { Tiles.RemoveAt(i); } for (int i = unWalkTiles.Count - 1; i >= 0; i--) { unWalkTiles.RemoveAt(i); } } } else { once = 0; for (int i = Tiles.Count - 1; i >= 0; i--) { Tiles.RemoveAt(i); } for (int i = unWalkTiles.Count - 1; i >= 0; i--) { unWalkTiles.RemoveAt(i); } } } } If you guys still need more information just ask in the comments.

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• .NET Security Part 4

  - by Simon Cooper

  Finally, in this series, I am going to cover some of the security issues that can trip you up when using sandboxed appdomains. DISCLAIMER: I am not a security expert, and this is by no means an exhaustive list. If you actually are writing security-critical code, then get a proper security audit of your code by a professional. The examples below are just illustrations of the sort of things that can go wrong. 1. AppDomainSetup.ApplicationBase The most obvious one is the issue covered in the MSDN documentation on creating a sandbox, in step 3 – the sandboxed appdomain has the same ApplicationBase as the controlling appdomain. So let’s explore what happens when they are the same, and an exception is thrown. In the sandboxed assembly, Sandboxed.dll (IPlugin is an interface in a partially-trusted assembly, with a single MethodToDoThings on it): public class UntrustedPlugin : MarshalByRefObject, IPlugin { // implements IPlugin.MethodToDoThings() public void MethodToDoThings() { throw new EvilException(); } } [Serializable] internal class EvilException : Exception { public override string ToString() { // show we have read access to C:\Windows // read the first 5 directories Console.WriteLine("Pwned! Mwuahahah!"); foreach (var d in Directory.EnumerateDirectories(@"C:\Windows").Take(5)) { Console.WriteLine(d.FullName); } return base.ToString(); } } And in the controlling assembly: // what can possibly go wrong? AppDomainSetup appDomainSetup = new AppDomainSetup { ApplicationBase = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.SetupInformation.ApplicationBase } // only grant permissions to execute // and to read the application base, nothing else PermissionSet restrictedPerms = new PermissionSet(PermissionState.None); restrictedPerms.AddPermission( new SecurityPermission(SecurityPermissionFlag.Execution)); restrictedPerms.AddPermission( new FileIOPermission(FileIOPermissionAccess.Read, appDomainSetup.ApplicationBase); restrictedPerms.AddPermission( new FileIOPermission(FileIOPermissionAccess.pathDiscovery, appDomainSetup.ApplicationBase); // create the sandbox AppDomain sandbox = AppDomain.CreateDomain("Sandbox", null, appDomainSetup, restrictedPerms); // execute UntrustedPlugin in the sandbox // don't crash the application if the sandbox throws an exception IPlugin o = (IPlugin)sandbox.CreateInstanceFromAndUnwrap("Sandboxed.dll", "UntrustedPlugin"); try { o.MethodToDoThings() } catch (Exception e) { Console.WriteLine(e.ToString()); } And the result? Oops. We’ve allowed a class that should be sandboxed to execute code with fully-trusted permissions! How did this happen? Well, the key is the exact meaning of the ApplicationBase property: The application base directory is where the assembly manager begins probing for assemblies. When EvilException is thrown, it propagates from the sandboxed appdomain into the controlling assembly’s appdomain (as it’s marked as Serializable). When the exception is deserialized, the CLR finds and loads the sandboxed dll into the fully-trusted appdomain. Since the controlling appdomain’s ApplicationBase directory contains the sandboxed assembly, the CLR finds and loads the assembly into a full-trust appdomain, and the evil code is executed. So the problem isn’t exactly that the sandboxed appdomain’s ApplicationBase is the same as the controlling appdomain’s, it’s that the sandboxed dll was in such a place that the controlling appdomain could find it as part of the standard assembly resolution mechanism. The sandbox then forced the assembly to load in the controlling appdomain by throwing a serializable exception that propagated outside the sandbox. The easiest fix for this is to keep the sandbox ApplicationBase well away from the ApplicationBase of the controlling appdomain, and don’t allow the sandbox permissions to access the controlling appdomain’s ApplicationBase directory. If you do this, then the sandboxed assembly can’t be accidentally loaded into the fully-trusted appdomain, and the code can’t be executed. If the plugin does try to induce the controlling appdomain to load an assembly it shouldn’t, a SerializationException will be thrown when it tries to load the assembly to deserialize the exception, and no damage will be done. 2. Loading the sandboxed dll into the application appdomain As an extension of the previous point, you shouldn’t directly reference types or methods in the sandboxed dll from your application code. That loads the assembly into the fully-trusted appdomain, and from there code in the assembly could be executed. Instead, pull out methods you want the sandboxed dll to have into an interface or class in a partially-trusted assembly you control, and execute methods via that instead (similar to the example above with the IPlugin interface). If you need to have a look at the assembly before executing it in the sandbox, either examine the assembly using reflection from within the sandbox, or load the assembly into the Reflection-only context in the application’s appdomain. The code in assemblies in the reflection-only context can’t be executed, it can only be reflected upon, thus protecting your appdomain from malicious code. 3. Incorrectly asserting permissions You should only assert permissions when you are absolutely sure they’re safe. For example, this method allows a caller read-access to any file they call this method with, including your documents, any network shares, the C:\Windows directory, etc: [SecuritySafeCritical] public static string GetFileText(string filePath) { new FileIOPermission(FileIOPermissionAccess.Read, filePath).Assert(); return File.ReadAllText(filePath); } Be careful when asserting permissions, and ensure you’re not providing a loophole sandboxed dlls can use to gain access to things they shouldn’t be able to. Conclusion Hopefully, that’s given you an idea of some of the ways it’s possible to get past the .NET security system. As I said before, this post is not exhaustive, and you certainly shouldn’t base any security-critical applications on the contents of this blog post. What this series should help with is understanding the possibilities of the security system, and what all the security attributes and classes mean and what they are used for, if you were to use the security system in the future.

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• ROracle support for TimesTen In-Memory Database

  - by Sam Drake

  Today's guest post comes from Jason Feldhaus, a Consulting Member of Technical Staff in the TimesTen Database organization at Oracle.  He shares with us a sample session using ROracle with the TimesTen In-Memory database.  Beginning in version 1.1-4, ROracle includes support for the Oracle Times Ten In-Memory Database, version 11.2.2. TimesTen is a relational database providing very fast and high throughput through its memory-centric architecture.  TimesTen is designed for low latency, high-volume data, and event and transaction management. A TimesTen database resides entirely in memory, so no disk I/O is required for transactions and query operations. TimesTen is used in applications requiring very fast and predictable response time, such as real-time financial services trading applications and large web applications. TimesTen can be used as the database of record or as a relational cache database to Oracle Database. ROracle provides an interface between R and the database, providing the rich functionality of the R statistical programming environment using the SQL query language. ROracle uses the OCI libraries to handle database connections, providing much better performance than standard ODBC.The latest ROracle enhancements include: Support for Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database Support for Date-Time using R's POSIXct/POSIXlt data types RAW, BLOB and BFILE data type support Option to specify number of rows per fetch operation Option to prefetch LOB data Break support using Ctrl-C Statement caching support Times Ten 11.2.2 contains enhanced support for analytics workloads and complex queries: Analytic functions: AVG, SUM, COUNT, MAX, MIN, DENSE_RANK, RANK, ROW_NUMBER, FIRST_VALUE and LAST_VALUE Analytic clauses: OVER PARTITION BY and OVER ORDER BY Multidimensional grouping operators: Grouping clauses: GROUP BY CUBE, GROUP BY ROLLUP, GROUP BY GROUPING SETS Grouping functions: GROUP, GROUPING_ID, GROUP_ID WITH clause, which allows repeated references to a named subquery block Aggregate expressions over DISTINCT expressions General expressions that return a character string in the source or a pattern within the LIKE predicate Ability to order nulls first or last in a sort result (NULLS FIRST or NULLS LAST in the ORDER BY clause) Note: Some functionality is only available with Oracle Exalytics, refer to the TimesTen product licensing document for details. Connecting to TimesTen is easy with ROracle. Simply install and load the ROracle package and load the driver. > install.packages("ROracle") > library(ROracle) Loading required package: DBI > drv <- dbDriver("Oracle") Once the ROracle package is installed, create a database connection object and connect to a TimesTen direct driver DSN as the OS user. > conn <- dbConnect(drv, username ="", password="", dbname = "localhost/SampleDb_1122:timesten_direct") You have the option to report the server type - Oracle or TimesTen? > print (paste ("Server type =", dbGetInfo (conn)$serverType)) [1] "Server type = TimesTen IMDB" To create tables in the database using R data frame objects, use the function dbWriteTable. In the following example we write the built-in iris data frame to TimesTen. The iris data set is a small example data set containing 150 rows and 5 columns. We include it here not to highlight performance, but so users can easily run this example in their R session. > dbWriteTable (conn, "IRIS", iris, overwrite=TRUE, ora.number=FALSE) [1] TRUE Verify that the newly created IRIS table is available in the database. To list the available tables and table columns in the database, use dbListTables and dbListFields, respectively. > dbListTables (conn) [1] "IRIS" > dbListFields (conn, "IRIS") [1] "SEPAL.LENGTH" "SEPAL.WIDTH" "PETAL.LENGTH" "PETAL.WIDTH" "SPECIES" To retrieve a summary of the data from the database we need to save the results to a local object. The following call saves the results of the query as a local R object, iris.summary. The ROracle function dbGetQuery is used to execute an arbitrary SQL statement against the database. When connected to TimesTen, the SQL statement is processed completely within main memory for the fastest response time. > iris.summary <- dbGetQuery(conn, 'SELECT SPECIES, AVG ("SEPAL.LENGTH") AS AVG_SLENGTH, AVG ("SEPAL.WIDTH") AS AVG_SWIDTH, AVG ("PETAL.LENGTH") AS AVG_PLENGTH, AVG ("PETAL.WIDTH") AS AVG_PWIDTH FROM IRIS GROUP BY ROLLUP (SPECIES)') > iris.summary SPECIES AVG_SLENGTH AVG_SWIDTH AVG_PLENGTH AVG_PWIDTH 1 setosa 5.006000 3.428000 1.462 0.246000 2 versicolor 5.936000 2.770000 4.260 1.326000 3 virginica 6.588000 2.974000 5.552 2.026000 4 <NA> 5.843333 3.057333 3.758 1.199333 Finally, disconnect from the TimesTen Database. > dbCommit (conn) [1] TRUE > dbDisconnect (conn) [1] TRUE We encourage you download Oracle software for evaluation from the Oracle Technology Network. See these links for our software: Times Ten In-Memory Database,  ROracle.  As always, we welcome comments and questions on the TimesTen and  Oracle R technical forums.

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• How to draw textures on a model

  - by marc wellman

  The following code is a complete XNA 3.1 program almost unaltered to that code skeleton Visual Studio is creating when creating a new project. The only things I have changed are imported a .x model to the content folder of the VS solution. (the model is a simple square with a texture spanning over it - made in Google Sketchup and exported with several .x exporters) in the Load() method I am loading the .x model into the game. The Draw() method uses a BasicEffect to render the model. Except these three things I haven't added any code. Why does the model does not show the texture ? What can I do to make the texture visible ? This is the texture file (a standard SketchUp texture from the palette): And this is what my program looks like - as you can see: No texture! Find below the complete source code of the program AND the complete .x file: namespace WindowsGame1 { /// <summary> /// This is the main type for your game /// </summary> public class Game1 : Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game { GraphicsDeviceManager graphics; SpriteBatch spriteBatch; public Game1() { graphics = new GraphicsDeviceManager(this); Content.RootDirectory = "Content"; } /// <summary> /// Allows the game to perform any initialization it needs to before starting to run. /// This is where it can query for any required services and load any non-graphic /// related content. Calling base.Initialize will enumerate through any components /// and initialize them as well. /// </summary> protected override void Initialize() { // TODO: Add your initialization logic here base.Initialize(); } Model newModel; /// <summary> /// LoadContent will be called once per game and is the place to load /// all of your content. /// </summary> protected override void LoadContent() { // Create a new SpriteBatch, which can be used to draw textures. spriteBatch = new SpriteBatch(GraphicsDevice); // TODO: usse this.Content to load your game content here newModel = Content.Load<Model>(@"aau3d"); foreach (ModelMesh mesh in newModel.Meshes) { foreach (ModelMeshPart meshPart in mesh.MeshParts) { meshPart.Effect = new BasicEffect(this.GraphicsDevice, null); } } } /// <summary> /// UnloadContent will be called once per game and is the place to unload /// all content. /// </summary> protected override void UnloadContent() { // TODO: Unload any non ContentManager content here } /// <summary> /// Allows the game to run logic such as updating the world, /// checking for collisions, gathering input, and playing audio. /// </summary> /// <param name="gameTime">Provides a snapshot of timing values.</param> protected override void Update(GameTime gameTime) { // Allows the game to exit if (GamePad.GetState(PlayerIndex.One).Buttons.Back == ButtonState.Pressed) this.Exit(); // TODO: Add your update logic here base.Update(gameTime); } /// <summary> /// This is called when the game should draw itself. /// </summary> /// <param name="gameTime">Provides a snapshot of timing values.</param> protected override void Draw(GameTime gameTime) { if (newModel != null) { GraphicsDevice.Clear(Color.CornflowerBlue); Matrix[] transforms = new Matrix[newModel.Bones.Count]; newModel.CopyAbsoluteBoneTransformsTo(transforms); foreach (ModelMesh mesh in newModel.Meshes) { foreach (BasicEffect effect in mesh.Effects) { effect.EnableDefaultLighting(); effect.TextureEnabled = true; effect.World = transforms[mesh.ParentBone.Index] * Matrix.CreateRotationY(0) * Matrix.CreateTranslation(new Vector3(0, 0, 0)); effect.View = Matrix.CreateLookAt(new Vector3(200, 1000, 200), Vector3.Zero, Vector3.Up); effect.Projection = Matrix.CreatePerspectiveFieldOfView(MathHelper.ToRadians(45.0f), 0.75f, 1.0f, 10000.0f); } mesh.Draw(); } } base.Draw(gameTime); } } } This is the model I am using (.x): xof 0303txt 0032 // SketchUp 6 -> DirectX (c)2008 edecadoudal, supports: faces, normals and textures Material Default_Material{ 1.0;1.0;1.0;1.0;; 3.2; 0.000000;0.000000;0.000000;; 0.000000;0.000000;0.000000;; } Material _Groundcover_RiverRock_4inch_{ 0.568627450980392;0.494117647058824;0.427450980392157;1.0;; 3.2; 0.000000;0.000000;0.000000;; 0.000000;0.000000;0.000000;; TextureFilename { "aau3d.xGroundcover_RiverRock_4inch.jpg"; } } Mesh mesh_0{ 4; -81.6535;0.0000;74.8031;, -0.0000;0.0000;0.0000;, -81.6535;0.0000;0.0000;, -0.0000;0.0000;74.8031;; 2; 3;0,1,2, 3;1,0,3;; MeshMaterialList { 2; 2; 1, 1; { Default_Material } { _Groundcover_RiverRock_4inch_ } } MeshTextureCoords { 4; -2.1168,-3.4022; 1.0000,-0.0000; 1.0000,-3.4022; -2.1168,-0.0000;; } MeshNormals { 4; 0.0000;1.0000;-0.0000; 0.0000;1.0000;-0.0000; 0.0000;1.0000;-0.0000; 0.0000;1.0000;-0.0000;; 2; 3;0,1,2; 3;1,0,3;; } }

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• Yippy &ndash; the F# MVVM Pattern

  - by MarkPearl

  I did a recent post on implementing WPF with F#. Today I would like to expand on this posting to give a simple implementation of the MVVM pattern in F#. A good read about this topic can also be found on Dean Chalk’s blog although my example of the pattern is possibly simpler. With the MVVM pattern one typically has 3 segments, the view, viewmodel and model. With the beauty of WPF binding one is able to link the state based viewmodel to the view. In my implementation I have kept the same principles. I have a view (MainView.xaml), and and a ViewModel (MainViewModel.fs).     What I would really like to illustrate in this posting is the binding between the View and the ViewModel so I am going to jump to that… In Program.fs I have the following code… module Program open System open System.Windows open System.Windows.Controls open System.Windows.Markup open myViewModels // Create the View and bind it to the View Model let myView = Application.LoadComponent(new System.Uri("/FSharpWPF;component/MainView.xaml", System.UriKind.Relative)) :?> Window myView.DataContext <- new MainViewModel() :> obj // Application Entry point [<STAThread>] [<EntryPoint>] let main(_) = (new Application()).Run(myView) You can see that I have simply created the view (myView) and then created an instance of my viewmodel (MainViewModel) and then bound it to the data context with the code… myView.DataContext <- new MainViewModel() :> obj If I have a look at my viewmodel (MainViewModel) it looks like this… module myViewModels open System open System.Windows open System.Windows.Input open System.ComponentModel open ViewModelBase type MainViewModel() = // private variables let mutable _title = "Bound Data to Textbox" // public properties member x.Title with get() = _title and set(v) = _title <- v // public commands member x.MyCommand = new FuncCommand ( (fun d -> true), (fun e -> x.ShowMessage) ) // public methods member public x.ShowMessage = let msg = MessageBox.Show(x.Title) () I have exposed a few things, namely a property called Title that is mutable, a command and a method called ShowMessage that simply pops up a message box when called. If I then look at my view which I have created in xaml (MainView.xaml) it looks as follows… <Window xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" Title="F# WPF MVVM" Height="350" Width="525"> <Grid> <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition Height="Auto"/> <RowDefinition Height="Auto"/> <RowDefinition Height="*"/> </Grid.RowDefinitions> <TextBox Text="{Binding Path=Title, Mode=TwoWay}" Grid.Row="0"/> <Button Command="{Binding MyCommand}" Grid.Row="1"> <TextBlock Text="Click Me"/> </Button> </Grid> </Window>   It is also very simple. It has a button that’s command is bound to the MyCommand and a textbox that has its text bound to the Title property. One other module that I have created is my ViewModelBase. Right now it is used to store my commanding function but I would look to expand on it at a later stage to implement other commonly used functions… module ViewModelBase open System open System.Windows open System.Windows.Input open System.ComponentModel type FuncCommand (canExec:(obj -> bool),doExec:(obj -> unit)) = let cecEvent = new DelegateEvent<EventHandler>() interface ICommand with [<CLIEvent>] member x.CanExecuteChanged = cecEvent.Publish member x.CanExecute arg = canExec(arg) member x.Execute arg = doExec(arg) Put this all together and you have a basic project that implements the MVVM pattern in F#. For me this is quite exciting as it turned out to be a lot simpler to do than I originally thought possible. Also because I have my view in XAML I can use the XAML designer to design forms in F# which I believe is a much cleaner way to go rather than implementing it all in code. Finally if I look at my viewmodel code, it is actually quite clean and compact…

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• Five development tools I can't live without

  - by bconlon

  When applying to join Geeks with Blogs I had to specify the development tools I use every day. That got me thinking, it's taken a long time to whittle my tools of choice down to the selection I use, so it might be worth sharing. Before I begin, I appreciate we all have our preferred development tools, but these are the ones that work for me. Microsoft Visual Studio Microsoft Visual Studio has been my development tool of choice for more years than I care to remember. I first used this when it was Visual C++ 1.5 (hats off to those who started on 1.0) and by 2.2 it had everything I needed from a C++ IDE. Versions 4 and 5 followed and if I had to guess I would expect more Windows applications are written in VC++ 6 and VB6 than any other language. Then came the not so great versions Visual Studio .Net 2002 (7.0) and 2003 (7.1). If I'm honest I was still using v6. 2005 was better and 2008 was simply brilliant. Everything worked, the compiler was super fast and I was happy again...then came 2010...oh dear. 2010 is a big step backwards for me. It's not encouraging for my upcoming WPF exploits that 2010 is fronted in WPF technology, with the forever growing Find/Replace dialog, the issues with C++ intellisense, and the buggy debugger. That said it is still my tool of choice but I hope they sort the issue in SP1. I've tried other IDEs like Visual Age and Eclipse, but for me Visual Studio is the best. A really great tool. Liquid XML Studio XML development is a tricky business. The W3C standards are often difficult to get to the bottom of so it's great to have a graphical tool to help. I first used Liquid Technologies 5 or 6 years back when I needed to process XML data in C++. Their excellent XML Data Binding tool has an easy to use Wizard UI (as compared to Castor or JAXB command line tools) and allows you to generate code from an XML Schema. So instead of having to deal with untyped nodes like with a DOM parser, instead you get an Object Model providing a custom API in C++, C#, VB etc. More recently they developed a graphical XML IDE with XML Editor, XSLT, XQuery debugger and other XML tools. So now I can develop an XML Schema graphically, click a button to generate a Sample XML document, and click another button to run the Wizard to generate code including a Sample Application that will then load my Sample XML document into the generated object model. This is a very cool toolset. Note: XML Data Binding is nothing to do with WPF Data Binding, but I hope to cover both in more detail another time. .Net Reflector Note: I've just noticed that starting form the end of February 2011 this will no longer be a free tool !! .Net Reflector turns .Net byte code back into C# source code. But how can it work this magic? Well the clue is in the name, it uses reflection to inspect a compiled .Net assembly. The assembly is compiled to byte code, it doesn't get compiled to native machine code until its needed using a just-in-time (JIT) compiler. The byte code still has all of the information needed to see classes, variables. methods and properties, so reflector gathers this information and puts it in a handy tree. I have used .Net Reflector for years in order to understand what the .Net Framework is doing as it sometimes has undocumented, quirky features. This really has been invaluable in certain instances and I cannot praise enough kudos on the original developer Lutz Roeder. Smart Assembly In order to stop nosy geeks looking at our code using a tool like .Net Reflector, we need to obfuscate (mess up) the byte code. Smart Assembly is a tool that does this. Again I have used this for a long time. It is very quick and easy to use. Another excellent tool. Coincidentally, .Net Reflector and Smart Assembly are now both owned by Red Gate. Again kudos goes to the original developer Jean-Sebastien Lange. TortoiseSVN SVN (Apache Subversion) is a Source Control System developed as an open source project. TortoiseSVN is a graphical UI wrapper over SVN that hooks into Windows Explorer to enable files to be Updated, Committed, Merged etc. from the right click menu. This is an essential tool for keeping my hard work safe! Many years ago I used Microsoft Source Safe and I disliked CVS type systems. But TortoiseSVN is simply the best source control tool I have ever used. --- So there you have it, my top 5 development tools that I use (nearly) every day and have helped to make my working life a little easier. I'm sure there are other great tools that I wish I used but have never heard of, but if you have not used any of the above, I would suggest you check them out as they are all very, very cool products. #

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• OpenGL (glx) not working with ubuntu 12.10

  - by user26766

  It all started when I installed nvidia's own (download from website) driver. Uninstalling it and reverting back to nvidia-current didn't solve the problem, so I have been playing with this for a while. It seems glx support is missing, and my intel graphics is not responding. gnome loads only in fallback mode. Here are some outputs: glxinfo name of display: :0.0 Error: couldn't find RGB GLX visual or fbconfig glxgears Error: couldn't get an RGB, Double-buffered visual optirun glxgears works fine lspci | grep VGA 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 2nd Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 09) 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GF108 [GeForce GT 540M] (rev ff) Here's the content of log file when just after running glxinfo: less /var/log/Xorg.0.log | grep gl [ 112.156] (II) LoadModule: "glx" [ 112.157] (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/libglx.so [ 112.157] (II) Module glx: vendor="X.Org Foundation" [ 112.157] (II) UnloadModule: "glx" [ 112.157] (II) Unloading glx [ 112.157] (EE) Failed to load module "glx" (module requirement mismatch, 0) Some more info... lsmod Module Size Used by bbswitch 13612 0 pci_stub 12623 1 vboxpci 23195 0 vboxnetadp 25671 0 vboxnetflt 23480 0 vboxdrv 320372 3 vboxpci,vboxnetadp,vboxnetflt parport_pc 32689 0 ppdev 17074 0 bnep 18141 2 rfcomm 46620 12 binfmt_misc 17501 1 snd_hda_codec_hdmi 32049 1 snd_hda_codec_realtek 78147 1 joydev 17458 0 uvcvideo 76750 0 videobuf2_core 32852 1 uvcvideo videodev 120310 2 uvcvideo,videobuf2_core videobuf2_vmalloc 12861 1 uvcvideo videobuf2_memops 13405 1 videobuf2_vmalloc snd_hda_intel 33492 3 coretemp 13401 0 kvm_intel 132760 0 arc4 12530 2 snd_hda_codec 134213 3 snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hda_codec_realtek,snd_hda_intel kvm 414111 1 kvm_intel iwlwifi 386837 0 i915 520799 2 snd_hwdep 17699 1 snd_hda_codec snd_pcm 96668 3 snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec psmouse 100389 0 drm_kms_helper 49113 1 i915 ghash_clmulni_intel 13221 0 snd_seq_midi 13325 0 snd_rawmidi 30513 1 snd_seq_midi btusb 22475 0 drm 288436 3 i915,drm_kms_helper serio_raw 13216 0 snd_seq_midi_event 14900 1 snd_seq_midi snd_seq 61555 2 snd_seq_midi,snd_seq_midi_event mac80211 535936 1 iwlwifi bluetooth 209249 22 bnep,rfcomm,btusb snd_timer 29426 2 snd_pcm,snd_seq snd_seq_device 14498 3 snd_seq_midi,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq snd 78921 16 snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hda_codec_realtek,snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec,snd_hwdep,snd_pcm,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq,snd_timer,snd_seq_device cfg80211 206797 2 iwlwifi,mac80211 aesni_intel 51038 1 cryptd 20404 2 ghash_clmulni_intel,aesni_intel aes_x86_64 17256 1 aesni_intel dell_wmi 12682 0 sparse_keymap 13891 1 dell_wmi dcdbas 14439 0 i2c_algo_bit 13414 1 i915 microcode 22804 0 lpc_ich 17062 0 soundcore 15048 1 snd snd_page_alloc 18485 2 snd_hda_intel,snd_pcm video 19391 1 i915 mac_hid 13206 0 wmi 19071 1 dell_wmi mei 40691 0 lp 17760 0 parport 46346 3 parport_pc,ppdev,lp ahci 25721 3 libahci 31192 1 ahci atl1c 41102 0 how can I fix this? any ideas? Here is another thing I've tried: sudo apt-get purge nvidia* sudo reboot sudo apt-get install bumblebee bumblebee-nvidia didn't make any difference. The most relevant post I found on the web was this: http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-1722306.html Here it's explained that the problem is with the priority of shared libraries that are loaded for glxinfo. Here's what I get when I look up the libraries: linux-vdso.so.1 => (0x00007fff6bf8b000) libGL.so.1 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/mesa/libGL.so.1 (0x00007f22d6ccd000) libX11.so.6 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libX11.so.6 (0x00007f22d6993000) libc.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 (0x00007f22d65d3000) libglapi.so.0 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libglapi.so.0 (0x00007f22d63ad000) libXext.so.6 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXext.so.6 (0x00007f22d619b000) libXdamage.so.1 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXdamage.so.1 (0x00007f22d5f97000) libXfixes.so.3 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXfixes.so.3 (0x00007f22d5d91000) libX11-xcb.so.1 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libX11-xcb.so.1 (0x00007f22d5b8f000) libxcb-glx.so.0 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libxcb-glx.so.0 (0x00007f22d5977000) libxcb.so.1 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libxcb.so.1 (0x00007f22d5759000) libXxf86vm.so.1 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXxf86vm.so.1 (0x00007f22d5553000) libdrm.so.2 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libdrm.so.2 (0x00007f22d5346000) libpthread.so.0 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpthread.so.0 (0x00007f22d5129000) libdl.so.2 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libdl.so.2 (0x00007f22d4f25000) /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007f22d6f54000) libXau.so.6 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXau.so.6 (0x00007f22d4d20000) libXdmcp.so.6 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXdmcp.so.6 (0x00007f22d4b1a000) librt.so.1 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/librt.so.1 (0x00007f22d4911000) It seems "mesa" instead of nvidia-current is being used. However I didn't find any obvious link to /lib/nvidia-current in /etc/ld.so.conf (where the directories containing the shared libraries are listed). I don't know if there's anything missing or if this is normal. thanks, UPDATE: The problem was solved by updating to Ubuntu 13.04. It seems bumblebee was to blame, but I'm not sure what was going wrong...

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