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• JDBC Triggers

  - by Tim Dexter

  Received a question from a customer last week, they were using the new rollup patch on top of 10.1.3.4.1. What are these boxes for? Don't you know? Surely? Well, they are for ... that new functionality, you know it's in the user docs, that thingmabobby doodah. OK, I dont know either, I can have a guess but let me check first. Serveral IM sessions, emails and a dig through the readme for the new patch and I had my answer. Its not in the official documentation, yet. Leslie is on the case. The two fields were designed to allow an Admin to set a users context attributes before a connection is made to a database and for un-setting the attributes after the connection is broken by the extraction engine. We got a sample from the Enterprise Manager team on how they will be using it with their VPD connections. FUNCTION bip_to_em_user (user_name_in IN VARCHAR2) RETURN BOOLEAN IS BEGIN SETEMUSERCONTEXT(user_name_in, MGMT_USER.OP_SET_IDENTIFIER); return TRUE; END bip_to_em_user; And used in the jdbc data source definition like this (pre-process function): sysman.mgmt_bip.bip_to_em_user(:xdo_user_name) You, of course can call any function that is going to return a boolean value, another example might be. FUNCTION set_per_process_username (username_in IN VARCHAR2) RETURN BOOLEAN IS BEGIN SETUSERCONTEXT(username_in); return TRUE; END set_per_process_username Just use your own function/package to set some user context. Very grateful for the mail from Leslie on the EM team's usage but I had to try it out. Rather than set up a VPD, I opted for a simpler test. Can I log the comings and goings of users and their queries using the same pre-process text box. Reaching back into the depths of my developer brain to remember some pl/sql, it was not that deep and I came up with: CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION BIPTEST (user_name_in IN VARCHAR2, smode IN VARCHAR2) RETURN BOOLEAN AS BEGIN INSERT INTO LOGTAB VALUES(user_name_in, sysdate,smode); RETURN true; END BIPTEST; To call it in the pre-fetch trigger. BIPTEST(:xdo_user_name) Not going to set the pl/sql world alight I know, but you get the idea. As a new connection is made to the database its logged in the LOGTAB table. The SMODE value just sets if its an entry or an exit. I used the pre- and post- boxes. NAME UPDATE_DATE S_FLAG oracle 14-MAY-10 09.51.34.000000000 AM Start oracle 14-MAY-10 10.23.57.000000000 AM Finish administrator 14-MAY-10 09.51.38.000000000 AM Start administrator 14-MAY-10 09.51.38.000000000 AM Finish oracle 14-MAY-10 09.51.42.000000000 AM Start oracle 14-MAY-10 09.51.42.000000000 AM Finish It works very well, I had some fun trying to find a nasty query for the extraction engine so that the timestamps from in to out actually had a difference. That engine is fast! The only derived value you can pass from BIP is :xdo_user_name. None of the other server values are available. Connection pools are not currently supported but planned for a future release. Now you know what those fields are for and look for some official documentation, rather than my ramblings, coming soon!

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• concurrency::accelerator_view

  - by Daniel Moth

  Overview We saw previously that accelerator represents a target for our C++ AMP computation or memory allocation and that there is a notion of a default accelerator. We ended that post by introducing how one can obtain accelerator_view objects from an accelerator object through the accelerator class's default_view property and the create_view method. The accelerator_view objects can be thought of as handles to an accelerator. You can also construct an accelerator_view given another accelerator_view (through the copy constructor or the assignment operator overload). Speaking of operator overloading, you can also compare (for equality and inequality) two accelerator_view objects between them to determine if they refer to the same underlying accelerator. We'll see later that when we use concurrency::array objects, the allocation of data takes place on an accelerator at array construction time, so there is a constructor overload that accepts an accelerator_view object. We'll also see later that a new concurrency::parallel_for_each function overload can take an accelerator_view object, so it knows on what target to execute the computation (represented by a lambda that the parallel_for_each also accepts). Beyond normal usage, accelerator_view is a quality of service concept that offers isolation to multiple "consumers" of an accelerator. If in your code you are accessing the accelerator from multiple threads (or, in general, from different parts of your app), then you'll want to create separate accelerator_view objects for each thread. flush, wait, and queuing_mode When you create an accelerator_view via the create_view method of the accelerator, you pass in an option of immediate or deferred, which are the two members of the queuing_mode enum. At any point you can access this value from the queuing_mode property of the accelerator_view. When the queuing_mode value is immediate (which is the default), any commands sent to the device such as kernel invocations and data transfers (e.g. parallel_for_each and copy, as we'll see in future posts), will get submitted as soon as the runtime sees fit (that is the definition of immediate). When the value of queuing_mode is deferred, the commands will be batched up. To send all buffered commands to the device for execution, there is a non-blocking flush method that you can call. If you wish to block until all the commands have been sent, there is a wait method you can call. Deferring is a more advanced scenario aimed at performance gains when you are submitting many device commands and you want to avoid the tiny overhead of flushing/submitting each command separately. Querying information Just like accelerator, accelerator_view exposes the is_debug and version properties. In fact, you can always access the accelerator object from the accelerator property on the accelerator_view class to access the accelerator interface we looked at previously. Interop with D3D (aka DX) In a later post I'll show an example of an app that uses C++ AMP to compute data that is used in pixel shaders. In those scenarios, you can benefit by integrating C++ AMP into your graphics pipeline and one of the building blocks for that is being able to use the same device context from both the compute kernel and the other shaders. You can do that by going from accelerator_view to device context (and vice versa), through part of our interop API in amp.h: *get_device, create_accelerator_view. More on those in a later post. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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• Implementing Database Settings Using Policy Based Management

  - by Ashish Kumar Mehta

  Introduction Database Administrators have always had a tough time to ensuring that all the SQL Servers administered by them are configured according to the policies and standards of organization. Using SQL Server’s  Policy Based Management feature DBAs can now manage one or more instances of SQL Server 2008 and check for policy compliance issues. In this article we will utilize Policy Based Management (aka Declarative Management Framework or DMF) feature of SQL Server to implement and verify database settings on all production databases. It is best practice to enforce the below settings on each Production database. However, it can be tedious to go through each database and then check whether the below database settings are implemented across databases. In this article I will explain it to you how to utilize the Policy Based Management Feature of SQL Server 2008 to create a policy to verify these settings on all databases and in cases of non-complaince how to bring them back into complaince. Database setting to enforce on each user database : Auto Close and Auto Shrink Properties of database set to False Auto Create Statistics and Auto Update Statistics set to True Compatibility Level of all the user database set as 100 Page Verify set as CHECKSUM Recovery Model of all user database set to Full Restrict Access set as MULTI_USER Configure a Policy to Verify Database Settings 1. Connect to SQL Server 2008 Instance using SQL Server Management Studio 2. In the Object Explorer, Click on Management > Policy Management and you will be able to see Policies, Conditions & Facets as child nodes 3. Right click Policies and then select New Policy…. from the drop down list as shown in the snippet below to open the  Create New Policy Popup window. 4. In the Create New Policy popup window you need to provide the name of the policy as “Implementing and Verify Database Settings for Production Databases” and then click the drop down list under Check Condition. As highlighted in the snippet below click on the New Condition… option to open up the Create New Condition window. 5. In the Create New Condition popup window you need to provide the name of the condition as “Verify and Change Database Settings”. In the Facet drop down list you need to choose the Facet as Database Options as shown in the snippet below. Under Expression you need to select Field value as @AutoClose and then choose Operator value as ‘ = ‘ and finally choose Value as False. Now that you have successfully added the first field you can now go ahead and add rest of the fields as shown in the snippet below. Once you have successfully added all the above shown fields of Database Options Facet, click OK to save the changes and to return to the parent Create New Policy – Implementing and Verify Database Settings for Production Database windows where you will see that the newly created condition “Verify and Change Database Settings” is selected by default. Continues…

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• In GLSL is it possible to offset vertices based on height map colour?

  - by Rob

  I am attempting to generate some terrain based upon a heightmap. I have generated a 32 x 32 grid and a corresponding height map - In my vertex shader I am trying to offset the position of the Y axis based upon the colour of the heightmap, white vertices being higher than black ones. //Vertex Shader Code #version 330 uniform mat4 modelMatrix; uniform mat4 viewMatrix; uniform mat4 projectionMatrix; uniform sampler2D heightmap; layout (location=0) in vec4 vertexPos; layout (location=1) in vec4 vertexColour; layout (location=3) in vec2 vertexTextureCoord; layout (location=4) in float offset; out vec4 fragCol; out vec4 fragPos; out vec2 fragTex; void main() { // Retreive the current pixel's colour vec4 hmColour = texture(heightmap,vertexTextureCoord); // Offset the y position by the value of current texel's colour value ? vec4 offset = vec4(vertexPos.x , vertexPos.y + hmColour.r, vertexPos.z , 1.0); // Final Position gl_Position = projectionMatrix * viewMatrix * modelMatrix * offset; // Data sent to Fragment Shader. fragCol = vertexColour; fragPos = vertexPos; fragTex = vertexTextureCoord; } However the code I have produced only creates a grid with none of the y vertices higher than any others. This is the C++ code that generates the grid and texture co-orientates which I believe to be correct as the texture is mapped to the grid, hence the white blob in the middle. The grid-lines are generated in the fragment shader, sorry for any confusion. I have tried multiplying the r value of hmColour by 1000 unfortunately that had no effect. The only other problem it could be is that the texture coordinate data is incorrect ? for (int z = 0; z < MAP_Z ; z++) { for(int x = 0; x < MAP_X ; x++) { //Generate Vertex Buffer vertexData[iVertex++] = float (x) * MAP_X; vertexData[iVertex++] = 0; vertexData[iVertex++] = -(float) (z) * MAP_Z; //Colour Buffer NOT NEEDED colourData[iColour++] = 255.0f; // R colourData[iColour++] = 1.0f; // G colourData[iColour++] = 0.0f; // B //Texture Buffer textureData[iTexture++] = (float ) x * (1.0f / MAP_X); textureData[iTexture++] = (float ) z * (1.0f / MAP_Z); } } The heightmap texture I am trying to use appears like so (without grid-lines). This is the corresponding fragment shader // Fragment Shader Code #version 330 uniform sampler2D hmTexture; layout (location=0) out vec4 fragColour; in vec2 fragTex; in vec4 pos; void main(void) { vec2 line = fragTex * 32; // Without Gridlines fragColour = texture(hmTexture,fragTex); // With grid lines // + mix(vec4(0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0), vec4(1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0), // smoothstep(0.05,fract(line.y), 0.99) * smoothstep(0.05,fract(line.x),0.99)); }

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• Agile Manifesto, Revisited

  - by GeekAgilistMercenary

  Again, conversations give me a zillion things to write about.  The recent conversation that has cropped up again is my various viewpoints of the Agile Manifesto.  Not all the processes that came after the manifesto was written, but just the core manifesto itself.  Just for context, here is the manifesto in all the glory. We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more. Several of the key signatories at the time went on to write some of the core books that really gave Agile Software Development traction.  If you check out the Agile Manifesto Site and do a search for any of those people, you will find a treasure trove of software development information. My 2 Cents First off, I agree with a few people out there.  Agile is not Scrum for instance.  Do NOT get these things confused when checking out Agile, or pushing forward with Scrum.  As David Starr points out in his blog entry, "About 35 minutes into this discussion, I realized I hadn?t heard a question or comment that wasn?t related to Scrum. I asked the room, ?How many people are on an agile team that is NOT using Scrum?? 5 hands. Seriously, out of about 150 people of so. 5 hands." So know, as this is one of my biggest pet peves these days, that Scrum is not Agile.  Another quote David writes, "I assure you, dear reader, 2 week time boxes does not an agile team make." This is the exact problem.  Take a look at the actual manifesto above.  First ideal, "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools".  There are a couple of meanings in this ideal, just as there are in the other written ideals.  But this one has a lot of contention with a set practice such as Scrum.  There are other formulas, namely XP (eXtreme) and Kanban are two that come to mind often.  But none of these are Agile, but instead a process based on the ideals of Agile. Some of you may be thinking, "that?s the same thing".  Well, no, it is not.  This type of differentiation is vitally important.  Agile is a set of ideals.  Processes are nice, but they can change, they may work for some and not others.  The Agile Manifesto covers the ideals behind what is intended, that intention being to learn and find new ways to build better software. Ideals, not processes.  Definition versus implementation.  Class versus object.  The ideals are of utmost importance, the processes are secondary, the first ideal is what really lays this out for me "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools".  Yes, we need tools but we need the individuals and their interactions more. For those coming into a development team, I hope you take this to mind.  It is of utmost importance that this differentiation is known and fought for.  The second the process becomes more important than the individuals and interactions, the team will effectively lose the advantages of Agile Ideals. This is just one of my first thoughts on the topic of Agile.  I will be writing more in the near future about each of the ideals.  I will make a point to outline more of my thoughts, my opinions, and experience with the ideals of Agile and the various processes that are out there.  Maybe, I may stumble upon something new with the help of my readers?  It would be a grand overture to the ideals I hold. For the original entry, check out my personal blog with other juicy tech tidbits, rants, raves, and the like. Agilist Mercenary

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• Android - passing data between Activities

  - by Bill Osuch

  (To follow along with this, you should understand the basics of starting new activities: Link ) The easiest way to pass data from one activity to another is to create your own custom bundle and pass it to your new class. First, create two new activities called Search and SearchResults (make sure you add the second one you create to the AndroidManifest.xml file!), and create xml layout files for each. Search's file should look like this: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <LinearLayout     xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"     android:layout_width="fill_parent"     android:layout_height="fill_parent"     android:orientation="vertical">     <TextView          android:layout_width="fill_parent"      android:layout_height="wrap_content"      android:text="Name:"/>     <EditText                android:id="@+id/edittext"         android:layout_width="fill_parent"         android:layout_height="wrap_content"/>     <TextView          android:layout_width="fill_parent"         android:layout_height="wrap_content"         android:text="ID Number:"/>     <EditText                android:id="@+id/edittext2"                android:layout_width="fill_parent"                android:layout_height="wrap_content"/>     <Button           android:id="@+id/btnSearch"          android:layout_width="fill_parent"         android:layout_height="wrap_content"         android:text="Search" /> </LinearLayout> and SearchResult's should look like this: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <LinearLayout     xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"     android:layout_width="fill_parent"     android:layout_height="fill_parent"     android:orientation="vertical">     <TextView          android:id="@+id/txtName"         android:layout_width="fill_parent"         android:layout_height="wrap_content"/>     <TextView          android:id="@+id/txtState"         android:layout_width="fill_parent"         android:layout_height="wrap_content"         android:text="No data"/> </LinearLayout> Next, we'll override the OnCreate method of Search: @Override public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {     super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);     setContentView(R.layout.search);     Button search = (Button) findViewById(R.id.btnSearch);     search.setOnClickListener(new View.OnClickListener() {         public void onClick(View view) {                           Intent intent = new Intent(Search.this, SearchResults.class);              Bundle b = new Bundle();                           EditText txt1 = (EditText) findViewById(R.id.edittext);             EditText txt2 = (EditText) findViewById(R.id.edittext2);                                      b.putString("name", txt1.getText().toString());             b.putInt("state", Integer.parseInt(txt2.getText().toString()));                              //Add the set of extended data to the intent and start it             intent.putExtras(b);             startActivity(intent);          }     }); } This is very similar to the previous example, except here we're creating our own bundle, adding some key/value pairs to it, and adding it to the intent. Now, to retrieve the data, we just need to grab the Bundle that was passed to the new Activity and extract our values from it: @Override public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {     super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);     setContentView(R.layout.search_results);     Bundle b = getIntent().getExtras();     int value = b.getInt("state", 0);     String name = b.getString("name");             TextView vw1 = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.txtName);     TextView vw2 = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.txtState);             vw1.setText("Name: " + name);     vw2.setText("State: " + String.valueOf(value)); }

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• Playing HTML5 Video with fall back for IE8/IE7 and earlier versions of other browsers using Silverlight

  - by Harish Ranganathan

  One of the popular HTML5 tags is the video tag.  The ability to play videos without depending on a plugin is something that excites web developers to a great extent and no wonder you end up seeing video demos in all HTML5 conferences. Now, coming to HTML5 Video, the tag itself is simply <video id=”ID” src=”FILENAME.mp4/ogv/webm” > in the simplest form.  This also means that the video needs to be H.256 encoded MP4 format or some of the other formats as mentioned above.  For a detailed specification on this, check this Wikipedia article HTML5 video is supported by all the modern browsers such as IE9 (currently in RC stage), Mozilla Firefox 4 and Chrome latest versions.  Here below is a simple example of a HTML5 video tag and the screen shot of how it looks like in IE9 RC <!DOCTYPE html> <head></head> <body> <h1>This is a sample of an HTML5 Video</h1> <video src="video.mp4" id="myvideo">Your browser doesn’t support this currently</video> </body> </html> You can add attributes to the video tag such as “autoplay” which will automatically start playing the video.  Also, you can specify “poster” to display an initial picture before the video starts playing etc., but I am not going into those for now. This would play well in the modern browsers as mentioned above.  However, if the end users are viewing this page from an earlier version of browsers such as IE8/IE7 or IE6, this video wouldn’t play.  Whatever text that is specified between the video tags, would just show up. Note: for demo purposes, I went to the IE9 developer toolbar and chose IE8 as Browser Mode to exhibit this legacy behaviour.  However, in the interest of serving the larger community of users who visit the site, we would like to have a fall back mechanism for playing videos on older version of browsers. Now, Silverlight is supported in IE6/7 & 8 and other browsers too.  If we can have the same video encoded for Silverlight, we can put the fall-back code, as follows:- <video src="videos/video.mp4" id="myvideo">     <object height="252" type="application/x-silverlight-2" width="448">         <param name="source" value="resources/player.xap">         <param name="initParams" value="deferredLoad=true, duration=0, m=http://localhost/DemoSite/videos/video.mp4, autostart=false, autohide=true, showembed=true, postid=0" />         <param name="background" value="#00FFFFFF" />     </object> </video>   Note, this sample uses a Silverlight XAP file with the same video and uses the object tag to embed it instead of the HTML5 video tag. So, when I now run this sample and switch to IE8 (using the IE9 Developer toolbar’s Browser Mode), I get and when clicking on the “Play” icon, Note, there are multiple ways to play videos in Silverlight and this is one of the ways.  For a complete list of Silverlight samples, visit http://www.silverlight.net/learn/  Also, we can use Flash to play video in the fall-back mechanism as well. Thus, we can create a fall-back mechanism for playing HTML5 videos for the older browsers and hence ensure that the end users get to experience the same. Cheers !!!

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• Oracle Announces Leading ISV Integration With Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  More Than 100 ISVs, including Big Machines, Marketo and Xactly, now Provide Integrated Offerings to Help Maximize Sales and Single Customer Viewpoint Demonstrating its continued commitment to business value via open standards and the cloud, Oracle today announced that more than 100 leading ISVs are integrating in the cloud with Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service, a service available through Oracle Cloud. For the first time Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service users can choose from a wide array of directly integrated third-party solutions, providing a new level of choice, seamless deployment and single view of customers with preferred implementations. Top partners, including ActivePrime, Avaya, BigMachines, Box, Brainshark, Callidus Software, CirrusPath, Clicktools, CRMIT, DBSync, EchoSign from Adobe, Eloqua, Fliptop, FPX, HarQen, HubSpot, iHance, InsideSales.com, InsideView, Interactive Intelligence, Lingotek, LinkPoint360, Marketo, Nuance, PerspecSys, Postcode Anywhere, Revegy, salesElement, StrikeIron, upsourceIT, White Springs, X+1 and Xactly, have announced their availability and integration today. By integrating with Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service, ISV solutions can easily be leveraged by customersBy choosing Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service as a sales platform, customers will continue to have complete choice of their own quoting, lead management and sales methodology solutions and it will all be pre-integrated with Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service. With demonstrable integration fusing standards-based technologies, such as SOAP web services, Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service customers choosing ISV integrations will also benefit from familiar ease-of-use and the Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud ervice user interface, including buttons, links and custom objects for a rich user experience. ISV integration with Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service also enables on-demand contextual data exchange capabilities, linking Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service business data with third-party application data for a complete CRM view. ISVs building robust, repeatable integrations with Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service can begin the process of achieving Oracle Validated Integration, an Oracle PartnerNetwork program that recognizes Oracle partner solutions with proven integration to Oracle Applications. ISVs can learn more about Oracle Validated Integration    here. For customers, Oracle Validated Integration means that a partner’s integration has been tested and validated as functionally and technically sound, that the partner solution is integrated with Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service in a reliable, standardized way, and that the integration operates and performs as documented. Oracle Cloud provides a broad portfolio of Platform Services, Application Services, and Social Services, all on a subscription basis. Oracle Cloud delivers instant value and productivity for end users, administrators, and developers through functionally rich, integrated, secure, enterprise cloud services. Supporting Quotes “BigMachines is a leader in Configure, Price, and Quote solutions in the Cloud. Our solution delivers accurate quotes directly from an opportunity, integrated with the leading Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud application from Oracle,” says John Pulling, Senior Vice President of Products at Big Machines. “Together, Big Machines and Oracle efficiently automate changes, enabling a faster, more efficient sales process for our joint customers.”   ”Modern marketing and sales must engage customers and prospects in real time across the web, email, social media, online and offline channels to understand where and how to allocate their budgets for maximum return,” said Srini Venkatesan, Senior VP, Products and Engineering at Marketo. “Alignment and integration with Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service allows Marketo’s solutions to deliver innovative capabilities for sales and marketing to adapt and grow their business on the core Oracle platform for CRM.”   “Sales incentives are the best way to drive better performance. Well managed incentives improve the bottom line, particularly when combined with effective sales systems,” said Christopher Cabrera, president and CEO of Xactly Corporation. “With Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service and Xactly working together, customers gain insight and efficiencies. The combination can create more effective compensation programs, while motivating sales to work to its full potential."   “The tremendous integration of leading ISVs with Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service is a testament to the undeniable business value and demand from customers,” said Anthony Lye, SVP of Oracle CRM. “Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service continues to define the industry, and we are proud to work with these leading ISVs to help users simultaneously maximize sales and revenue and extend their current deployments for a deeper and single customer viewpoint.” Supporting Resources Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud Service Learn More About Oracle Cloud

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• Low level programming - what's in it for me?

  - by back2dos

  For years I have considered digging into what I consider "low level" languages. For me this means C and assembly. However I had no time for this yet, nor has it EVER been neccessary. Now because I don't see any neccessity arising, I feel like I should either just schedule some point in time when I will study the subject or drop the plan forever. My Position For the past 4 years I have focused on "web technologies", which may change, and I am an application developer, which is unlikely to change. In application development, I think usability is the most important thing. You write applications to be "consumed" by users. The more usable those applications are, the more value you have produced. In order to achieve good usability, I believe the following things are viable Good design: Well-thought-out features accessible through a well-thought-out user interface. Correctness: The best design isn't worth anything, if not implemented correctly. Flexibility: An application A should constantly evolve, so that its users need not switch to a different application B, that has new features, that A could implement. Applications addressing the same problem should not differ in features but in philosophy. Performance: Performance contributes to a good user experience. An application is ideally always responsive and performs its tasks reasonably fast (based on their frequency). The value of performance optimization beyond the point where it is noticeable by the user is questionable. I think low level programming is not going to help me with that, except for performance. But writing a whole app in a low level language for the sake of performance is premature optimization to me. My Question What could low level programming teach me, what other languages wouldn't teach me? Am I missing something, or is it just a skill, that is of very little use for application development? Please understand, that I am not questioning the value of C and assembly. It's just that in my everyday life, I am quite happy that all the intricacies of that world are abstracted away and managed for me (mostly by layers written in C/C++ and assembly themselves). I just don't see any concepts, that could be new to me, only details I would have to stuff my head with. So what's in it for me? My Conclusion Thanks to everyone for their answers. I must say, nobody really surprised me, but at least now I am quite sure I will drop this area of interest until any need for it arises. To my understanding, writing assembly these days for processors as they are in use in today's CPUs is not only unneccesarily complicated, but risks to result in poorer runtime performance than a C counterpart. Optimizing by hand is nearly impossible due to OOE, while you do not get all kinds of optimizations a compiler can do automatically. Also, the code is either portable, because it uses a small subset of available commands, or it is optimized, but then it probably works on one architecture only. Writing C is not nearly as neccessary anymore, as it was in the past. If I were to write an application in C, I would just as much use tested and established libraries and frameworks, that would spare me implementing string copy routines, sorting algorithms and other kind of stuff serving as exercise at university. My own code would execute faster at the cost of type safety. I am neither keen on reeinventing the wheel in the course of normal app development, nor trying to debug by looking at core dumps :D I am currently experimenting with languages and interpreters, so if there is anything I would like to publish, I suppose I'd port a working concept to C, although C++ might just as well do the trick. Again, thanks to everyone for your answers and your insight.

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• Guessing Excel Data Types

  - by AjarnMark

  Note to Self HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Jet\4.0\Engines\Excel: TypeGuessRows = 0 means scan everything. Note to Others About 10 years ago I stumbled across this bit of information just when I needed it and it saved my project.  Then for some reason, a few years later when it would have been nice, but not critical, for some reason I could not find it again anywhere.  Well, now I have stumbled across it again, and to preserve my future self from nightmares and sudden baldness due to pulling my hair out, I have decided to blog it in the hopes that I can find it again this way. Here’s the story…  When you query data from an Excel spreadsheet, such as with old-fashioned DTS packages in SQL 2000 (my first reference) or simply with an OLEDB Data Adapter from ASP.NET (recent task) and if you are using the Microsoft Jet 4.0 driver (newer ones may deal with this differently) then you can get funny results where the query reports back that a cell value is null even when you know it contains data. What happens is that Excel doesn’t really have data types.  While you can format information in cells to appear like certain data types (e.g. Date, Time, Decimal, Text, etc.) that is not really defining the cell as being of a certain type like we think of when working with databases.  But, presumably, to make things more convenient for the user (programmer) when you issue a query against Excel, the query processor tries to guess what type of data is contained in each column and returns it in an appropriate manner.  This is all well and good IF your data is consistent in every row and matches what the processor guessed.  And, for efficiency’s sake, when the query processor is trying to figure out each column’s data type, it does so by analyzing only the first 8 rows of data (default setting). Now here’s the problem, suppose that your spreadsheet contains information about clothing, and one of the columns is Size.  Now suppose that in the first 8 rows, all of your sizes look like 32, 34, 18, 10, and so on, using numbers, but then, somewhere after the 8th row, you have some rows with sizes like S, M, L, XL.  What happens is that by examining only the first 8 rows, the query processor inferred that the column contained numerical data, and then when it hits the non-numerical data in later rows, it comes back blank.  Major bummer, and a real pain to track down if you don’t know that Excel is doing this, because you study the spreadsheet and say, “the data is RIGHT THERE!  WHY doesn’t the query see it?!?!”  And the hair-pulling begins. So, what’s a developer to do?  One option is to go to the registry setting noted above and change the DWORD value of TypeGuessRows from the default of 8 to 0 (zero).  Setting this value to zero will force Jet to scan every row in the spreadsheet before making its determination as to what type of data the column contains.  And that means that in the example above, it would have treated the column as a string rather than as numeric, and presto! your query now returns all of the values that you know are in there. Of course, there is a caveat… if you are querying large spreadsheets, making Jet scan every row can be quite a performance hit.  You could enter a different number (more than 8) that you believe is a better sampling of rows to make the guess, but you still have the possibility that every row scanned looks alike, but that later rows are different, and that you might get blanks when there really is data there.  That’s the type of gamble, I really don’t like to take with my data. Anyone with a better approach, or with experience with more recent drivers that have a better way of handling data types, please chime in!

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• Serial plans: Threshold / Parallel_degree_limit = 1

  - by jean-pierre.dijcks

  As a very short follow up on the previous post. So here is some more on getting a serial plan and why that happens Another reason - compared to the auto DOP is not on as we looked at in the earlier post - and often more prevalent to get a serial plan is if the plan simply does not take long enough to consider a parallel path. The resulting plan and note looks like this (note that this is a serial plan!): explain plan for select count(1) from sales; SELECT PLAN_TABLE_OUTPUT FROM TABLE(DBMS_XPLAN.DISPLAY()); PLAN_TABLE_OUTPUT -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Plan hash value: 672559287 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | Id  | Operation            | Name  | Rows  | Cost (%CPU)| Time     | Pstart| Pstop | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- PLAN_TABLE_OUTPUT -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |   0 | SELECT STATEMENT     |       |     1 |     5   (0)| 00:00:01 |       |     | |   1 |  SORT AGGREGATE      |       |     1 |            |          |       |     | |   2 |   PARTITION RANGE ALL|       |   960 |     5   (0)| 00:00:01 |     1 |  16 | |   3 |    TABLE ACCESS FULL | SALES |   960 |     5   (0)| 00:00:01 |     1 |  16 | Note -----    - automatic DOP: Computed Degree of Parallelism is 1 because of parallel threshold 14 rows selected. The parallel threshold is referring to parallel_min_time_threshold and since I did not change the default (10s) the plan is not being considered for a parallel degree computation and is therefore staying with the serial execution. Now we go into the land of crazy: Assume I do want this DOP=1 to happen, I could set the parameter in the init.ora, but to highlight it in this case I changed it on the session: alter session set parallel_degree_limit = 1; The result I get is: ERROR: ORA-02097: parameter cannot be modified because specified value is invalid ORA-00096: invalid value 1 for parameter parallel_degree_limit, must be from among CPU IO AUTO INTEGER>=2 Which of course makes perfect sense...

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• [EF + Oracle] Entities

  - by JTorrecilla

  Prologue Following with the Serie I started yesterday about Entity Framework with Oracle, Today I am going to start talking about Entities. What is an Entity? A Entity is an object of the EF model corresponding to a record in a DB table. For example, let’s see, in Image 1 we can see one Entity from our model, and in the second one we can see the mapping done with the DB. (Image 1) (Image 2) More in depth a Entity is a Class inherited from the abstract class “EntityObject”, contained by the “System.Data.Objects.DataClasses” namespace. At the same time, this class inherits from the following Class and interfaces: StructuralObject: It is an Abstract class that inherits from INotifyPropertyChanging and INotifyPropertyChanged interfaces, and it exposes the events that manage the Changes of the class, and the functions related to check the data types of the Properties from our Entity.  IEntityWithKey: Interface which exposes the Key of the entity. IEntityWithChangeTracker: Interface which lets indicate the state of the entity (Detached, Modified, Added…) IEntityWithRelationships: Interface which indicates the relations about the entity. Which is the Content of a Entity? A Entity is composed by: Properties, Navigation Properties and Methods. What is a Property? A Entity Property is an object that represents a column from the mapped table from DB. It has a data type equivalent in .Net Framework to the DB Type. When we create the EF model, VS, internally, create the code for each Entity selected in the Tables step, such all methods that we will see in next steps. For each property, VS creates a structure similar to: · Private variable with the mapped Data type. · Function with a name like On{Property_Name}Changing({dataType} value): It manages the event which happens when we try to change the value. · Function with a name like On{Property_Name}Change: It manages the event raised when the property has changed successfully. · Property with Get and Set methods: The Set Method manages the private variable and do the following steps: Raise Changing event. Report the Entity is Changing. Set the prívate variable. For it, Use the SetValidValue function of the StructuralObject. There is a function for each datatype, and the functions takes 2 params: the value, and if the prop allow nulls. Invoke that the entity has been successfully changed. Invoke the Changed event of the Prop. ReportPropertyChanging and ReportPropertyChanged events, let, respectively, indicate that there is pending changes in the Entity, and the changes have success correctly. While the ReportPropertyChanged is raised, the Track State of the Entity will be changed. What is a Navigation Property? Navigation Properties are a kind of property of the type: EntityCollection<TEntity>, where TEntity is an Entity type from the model related with the current one, it is said, is a set of record from a related table in the DB. The EntityCollection class inherits from: · RelatedEnd: There is an abstract class that give the functions needed to obtein the related objects. · ICollection<TEntity> · IEnumerable<TEntity> · IEnumerable · IListSource For the previous interfaces, I wish recommend the following post from Jose Miguel Torres. Navigation properties allow us, to get and query easily objects related with the Entity. Methods? There is only one method in the Entity object. “Create{Entity}”, that allow us to create an object of the Entity by sending the parameters needed to create it. Finally After this chapter, we know what is an Entity, how is related to the DB and the relation to other Entities. In following chapters, we will se CRUD operations(Create, Read, Update, Delete).

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• Recent improvements in Console Performance

  - by loren.konkus

  Recently, the WebLogic Server development and support organizations have worked with a number of customers to quantify and improve the performance of the Administration Console in large, distributed configurations where there is significant latency in the communications between the administration server and managed servers. These improvements fall into two categories: Constraining the amount of time that the Console stalls waiting for communication Reducing and streamlining the amount of data required for an update A few releases ago, we added support for a configurable domain-wide mbean "Invocation Timeout" value on the Console's configuration: general, advanced section for a domain. The default value for this setting is 0, which means wait indefinitely and was chosen for compatibility with the behavior of previous releases. This configuration setting applies to all mbean communications between the admin server and managed servers, and is the first line of defense against being blocked by a stalled or completely overloaded managed server. Each site should choose an appropriate timeout value for their environment and network latency. In the next release of WebLogic Server, we've added an additional console preference, "Management Operation Timeout", to the Console's shared preference page. This setting further constrains how long certain console pages will wait for slowly responding servers before returning partial results. While not all Console pages support this yet, key pages such as the Servers Configuration and Control table pages and the Deployments Control pages have been updated to support this. For example, if a user requests a Servers Table page and a Management Operation Timeout occurs, the table is displayed with both local configuration and remote runtime information from the responding managed servers and only local configuration information for servers that did not yet respond. This means that a troublesome managed server does not impede your ability to manage your domain using the Console. To support these changes, these Console pages have been re-written to use the Work Management feature of WebLogic Server to interact with each server or deployment concurrently, which further improves the responsiveness of these pages. The basic algorithm for these pages is: For each configuration mbean (ie, Servers) populate rows with configuration attributes from the fast, local mbean server Find a WorkManager For each server, Create a Work instance to obtain runtime mbean attributes for the server Schedule Work instance in the WorkManager Call WorkManager.waitForAll to wait WorkItems to finish, constrained by Management Operation Timeout For each WorkItem, if the runtime information obtained was not complete, add a message indicating which server has incomplete data Display collected data in table In addition to these changes to constrain how long the console waits for communication, a number of other changes have been made to reduce the amount and scope of managed server interactions for key pages. For example, in previous releases the Deployments Control table looked at the status of a deployment on every managed server, even those servers that the deployment was not currently targeted on. (This was done to handle an edge case where a deployment's target configuration was changed while it remained running on previously targeted servers.) We decided supporting that edge case did not warrant the performance impact for all, and instead only look at the status of a deployment on the servers it is targeted to. Comprehensive status continues to be available if a user clicks on the 'status' field for a deployment. Finally, changes have been made to the System Status portlet to reduce its impact on Console page display times. Obtaining health information for this display requires several mbean interactions with managed servers. In previous releases, this mbean interaction occurred with every display, and any delay or impediment in these interactions was reflected in the display time for every page. To reduce this impact, we've made several changes in this portlet: Using Work Management to obtain health concurrently Applying the operation timeout configuration to constrain how long we will wait Caching health information to reduce the cost during rapid navigation from page to page and only obtaining new health information if the previous information is over 30 seconds old. Eliminating heath collection if this portlet is minimized. Together, these Console changes have resulted in significant performance improvements for the customers with large configurations and high latency that we have worked with during their development, and some lesser performance improvements for those with small configurations and very fast networks. These changes will be included in the 11g Rel 1 patch set 2 (10.3.3.0) release of WebLogic Server.

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• Some OBI EE Tricks and Tips in the Admin Tool By Gerry Langton

  - by hamsun

  How to set the log level from a Session variable Initialization block As we know it is normal to set the log level non-zero for a particular user when we wish to debug problems. However sometimes it is inconvenient to go into each user’s properties in the Admin tool and update the log level. So I am showing a method which allows the log level to be set for all users via a session initialization block. This is particularly useful for anyone wanting an alternative way to set the log level. The screen shots shown are using the OBIEE 11g SampleApp demo but are applicable to any environment. Open the appropriate rpd in on-line mode and navigate to Manage Variables. Select Session Initialization Blocks, right click in the white space and create a New Initialization Block. I called the Initialization block Set_Loglevel . Now click on ‘Edit Data Source’ to enter the SQL. Chose the ‘Use OBI EE Server’ option for the SQL. This means that the SQL provided must use tables which have been defined in the Physical layer of the RPD, and whilst there is no need to provide a connection pool you must work in On-Line mode. The SQL can access any of the RPD tables and is purely used to return a value of 2. The ‘Test’ button confirms that the SQL is valid. Next, click on the ‘Edit Data Target’ button to add the LOGLEVEL variable to the initialization block. Check the ‘Enable any user to set the value’ option so that this will work for any user. Click OK and the following message will display as LOGLEVEL is a system session variable: Click ‘Yes’. Click ‘OK’ to save the Initialization block. Then check in the On-LIne changes. To test that LOGLEVEL has been set, log in to OBIEE using an administrative login (e.g. weblogic) and reload server metadata, either from the Analysis editor or from Administration > Reload Files and Metadata link. Run a query then navigate to Administration > Manage Sessions and click ‘View Log’ for the query just issued (which should be approximately the last in the list). A log file should exist and with LOGLEVEL set to 2 should include both logical and physical sql. If more diagnostic information is required then set LOGLEVEL to a higher value. If logging is required only for a particular analysis then an alternative method can be used directly from the Analysis editor. Edit the analysis for which debugging is required and click on the Advanced tab. Scroll down to the Advanced SQL clauses section and enter the following in the Prefix box: SET VARIABLE LOGLEVEL = 2; Click the ‘Apply SQL’ button. The SET VARIABLE statement will now prefix the Analysis’s logical SQL. So that any time this analysis is run it will produce a log. You can find information about training for Oracle BI EE products here or in the OU Learning Paths. Please send me an email at [email protected] if you have any further questions. About the Author: Gerry Langton started at Siebel Systems in 1999 working as a technical instructor teaching both Siebel application development and also Siebel Analytics (which subsequently became Oracle BI EE). From 2006 Gerry has worked as Senior Principal Instructor within Oracle University specialising in Oracle BI EE, Oracle BI Publisher and Oracle Data Warehouse development for BI.

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• Mass Metadata Updates with Folders

  - by Kyle Hatlestad

  With the release of WebCenter Content PS5, a new folder architecture called 'Framework Folders' was introduced.  This is meant to replace the folder architecture of 'Folders_g'.  While the concepts of a folder structure and access to those folders through Desktop Integration Suite remain the same, the underlying architecture of the component has been completely rewritten.  One of the main goals of the new folders is to scale better at large volumes and remove the limitations of 1000 content items or sub-folders within a folder.  Along with the new architecture, it has a new look and a few additional features have been added.  One of those features are Query Folders.  These are folders that are populated simply by a query rather then literally putting items within the folders.  This is something that the Library has provided, but it always took an administrator to define them through the Web Layout Editor.  Now users can quickly define query folders anywhere within the standard folder hierarchy.   Within this new Framework Folders is the very handy ability to do metadata updates.  It's similar to the Propagate feature in Folders_g, but there are some key differences that make this very flexible and much more powerful. It's used within regular folders and Query Folders.  So the content you're updating doesn't all have to be in the same folder...or a folder at all.   The user decides what metadata to propagate.  In Folders_g, the system administrator controls which fields will be propagated using a single administration page.  In Framework Folders, the user decides at that time which fields they want to update. You set the value you want on the propagation screen.  In Folders_g, it used the metadata defined on the parent folder to propagate.  With Framework Folders, you supply the new metadata value when you select the fields you want to update.  It does not have to be defined on the parent folder. Because of these differences, I think the new propagate method is much more useful.  Instead of always having to rely on Archiver or a custom spreadsheet, you can quickly do mass metadata updates right within folders.   Here are the basic steps to perform propagation. First create a folder for the propagation.  You can use a regular folder, but a Query Folder will work as well. Go into the folder to get the results.   In the Edit menu, select 'Propagate'. Select the check-box next to the field to update and enter the new value  Click the Propagate button. Once complete, a dialog will appear showing it is complete What's also nice is that the process happens asynchronously in the background which means you can browse to other pages and do other things while it is still working.  You aren't stuck on the page waiting for it to complete.  In addition, you can add a configuration flag to the server to turn on a status indicator icon.  Set 'FldEnableInProcessIndicator=1' and it will show a working icon as its doing the propagation. There is a caveat when using the propagation on a Query Folder.   While a propagation on a regular folder will update all of the items within that folder, a Query Folder propagation will only update the first 50 items.  So you may need to run it multiple times depending on the size...and have the query exclude the items as they get updated. One extra note...Framework Folders is offered as the default folder architecture in the PS5 release of WebCenter Content.  But if you are using WebCenter Content integrated with another product that makes use of folders (WebCenter Portal/Spaces, Fusion Applications, Primavera, etc), you'll need to continue using Folders_g until they are updated to use the new folders.

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• Project Euler 17: (Iron)Python

  - by Ben Griswold

  In my attempt to learn (Iron)Python out in the open, here’s my solution for Project Euler Problem 17.  As always, any feedback is welcome. # Euler 17 # http://projecteuler.net/index.php?section=problems&id=17 # If the numbers 1 to 5 are written out in words: # one, two, three, four, five, then there are # 3 + 3 + 5 + 4 + 4 = 19 letters used in total. # If all the numbers from 1 to 1000 (one thousand) # inclusive were written out in words, how many letters # would be used? # # NOTE: Do not count spaces or hyphens. For example, 342 # (three hundred and forty-two) contains 23 letters and # 115 (one hundred and fifteen) contains 20 letters. The # use of "and" when writing out numbers is in compliance # with British usage. import time start = time.time() def to_word(n): h = { 1 : "one", 2 : "two", 3 : "three", 4 : "four", 5 : "five", 6 : "six", 7 : "seven", 8 : "eight", 9 : "nine", 10 : "ten", 11 : "eleven", 12 : "twelve", 13 : "thirteen", 14 : "fourteen", 15 : "fifteen", 16 : "sixteen", 17 : "seventeen", 18 : "eighteen", 19 : "nineteen", 20 : "twenty", 30 : "thirty", 40 : "forty", 50 : "fifty", 60 : "sixty", 70 : "seventy", 80 : "eighty", 90 : "ninety", 100 : "hundred", 1000 : "thousand" } word = "" # Reverse the numbers so position (ones, tens, # hundreds,...) can be easily determined a = [int(x) for x in str(n)[::-1]] # Thousands position if (len(a) == 4 and a[3] != 0): # This can only be one thousand based # on the problem/method constraints word = h[a[3]] + " thousand " # Hundreds position if (len(a) >= 3 and a[2] != 0): word += h[a[2]] + " hundred" # Add "and" string if the tens or ones # position is occupied with a non-zero value. # Note: routine is broken up this way for [my] clarity. if (len(a) >= 2 and a[1] != 0): # catch 10 - 99 word += " and" elif len(a) >= 1 and a[0] != 0: # catch 1 - 9 word += " and" # Tens and ones position tens_position_value = 99 if (len(a) >= 2 and a[1] != 0): # Calculate the tens position value per the # first and second element in array # e.g. (8 * 10) + 1 = 81 tens_position_value = int(a[1]) * 10 + a[0] if tens_position_value <= 20: # If the tens position value is 20 or less # there's an entry in the hash. Use it and there's # no need to consider the ones position word += " " + h[tens_position_value] else: # Determine the tens position word by # dividing by 10 first. E.g. 8 * 10 = h[80] # We will pick up the ones position word later in # the next part of the routine word += " " + h[(a[1] * 10)] if (len(a) >= 1 and a[0] != 0 and tens_position_value > 20): # Deal with ones position where tens position is # greater than 20 or we have a single digit number word += " " + h[a[0]] # Trim the empty spaces off both ends of the string return word.replace(" ","") def to_word_length(n): return len(to_word(n)) print sum([to_word_length(i) for i in xrange(1,1001)]) print "Elapsed Time:", (time.time() - start) * 1000, "millisecs" a=raw_input('Press return to continue')

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• Have Your Cake and Eat it Too: Industry Best Practices + Flexibility

  - by Oracle Accelerate for Midsize Companies

  By Richard Garraputa, VP of Sales & Marketing, brij Richard joined brij in 1996 after graduating from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro with degrees in Information Systems and Accounting. He directs brij’s overall strategies of both the business development and marketing departments. Companies looking for new ERP systems spend so much time comparing features and functions of software products but too often short change the value of their own processes.  Company managers I meet often claim that they are implementing a new ERP system so they can perform better and faster.  When asked how, the answer is often “by implementing best practices”.  But the term ‘best practices’ is frequently used to mean ‘doing things the way everyone else does them’ rather than a starting point or benchmark to build upon by adding your own value. Of course, implementing standardized processes across an enterprise is an important step in improving operational efficiencies.  But not all companies are alike.  Do you ever tell your customers “We are just like our competition and have no competitive differentiation”?  Probably not.  So why should the implementation of your business processes be just like your competitor’s?  Even within the same industry, companies differentiate themselves by leveraging their unique expertise and approach to business.  These unique aspects—the competitive differentiators that companies use to thrive in a crowded marketplace—can and should be supported by the implementation of business systems like ERP. Modern ERP systems like Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne have a broad and deep functional footprint designed to integrate a company’s core operations.  But how can a company take advantage of this footprint without blowing up their implementation budget?  Some ERP vendors claim to solve this challenge by stating that their systems come pre-configured with ‘best practices’.  Too often what they are really saying is that you will have to abandon your key operational differentiators to fit a vendor’s template for your business—or extend your implementation and postpone the realization of any benefits. Thankfully for midsize companies, there is an alternative to the undesirable options of extended implementation projects or abandoning their competitive differentiators.  Oracle Accelerate Solutions speed the time it takes to implement JD Edwards EnterpriseOne solution based on your unique business characteristics, getting your new ERP system up and running faster without forcing your business to fit a cookie-cutter solution. We’ve been a JD Edwards implementation partner since 1986 and we now leverage Oracle Business Accelerators—cloud based rapid implementation tools built and maintained by Oracle. Oracle Business Accelerators deliver the benefits of embedded industry best practices without forcing every customer in to one set of processes like many template or “clone and go” approaches do. You retain the ability to reconfigure your applications—without customization—as your business changes. Wielded by Oracle partners with industry-specific domain expertise, Oracle Accelerate Solution implementations powered by Oracle Business Accelerators help automate the application configuration to fit your business better, faster. For example, on a recent project at a manufacturing company, the project manager told me that Oracle Business Accelerators helped get them to Conference Room Pilot 20% faster than with a traditional approach. Time savings equal cost savings. And if ‘better and faster’ is your goal for your business performance, shouldn’t it be the goal for your ERP implementation as well? Established in 1986, brij has been dedicated solely to helping its customers implement Oracle’s JD Edwards solutions and to maximize the value of those customers’ IT investments. They are a Gold level member in Oracle PartnerNetwork and an Oracle Accelerate Solution provider.

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• Big Data – Operational Databases Supporting Big Data – Columnar, Graph and Spatial Database – Day 14 of 21

  - by Pinal Dave

  In yesterday’s blog post we learned the importance of the Key-Value Pair Databases and Document Databases in the Big Data Story. In this article we will understand the role of Columnar, Graph and Spatial Database supporting Big Data Story. Now we will see a few of the examples of the operational databases. Relational Databases (The day before yesterday’s post) NoSQL Databases (The day before yesterday’s post) Key-Value Pair Databases (Yesterday’s post) Document Databases (Yesterday’s post) Columnar Databases (Tomorrow’s post) Graph Databases (Today’s post) Spatial Databases (Today’s post) Columnar Databases  Relational Database is a row store database or a row oriented database. Columnar databases are column oriented or column store databases. As we discussed earlier in Big Data we have different kinds of data and we need to store different kinds of data in the database. When we have columnar database it is very easy to do so as we can just add a new column to the columnar database. HBase is one of the most popular columnar databases. It uses Hadoop file system and MapReduce for its core data storage. However, remember this is not a good solution for every application. This is particularly good for the database where there is high volume incremental data is gathered and processed. Graph Databases For a highly interconnected data it is suitable to use Graph Database. This database has node relationship structure. Nodes and relationships contain a Key Value Pair where data is stored. The major advantage of this database is that it supports faster navigation among various relationships. For example, Facebook uses a graph database to list and demonstrate various relationships between users. Neo4J is one of the most popular open source graph database. One of the major dis-advantage of the Graph Database is that it is not possible to self-reference (self joins in the RDBMS terms) and there might be real world scenarios where this might be required and graph database does not support it. Spatial Databases  We all use Foursquare, Google+ as well Facebook Check-ins for location aware check-ins. All the location aware applications figure out the position of the phone with the help of Global Positioning System (GPS). Think about it, so many different users at different location in the world and checking-in all together. Additionally, the applications now feature reach and users are demanding more and more information from them, for example like movies, coffee shop or places see. They are all running with the help of Spatial Databases. Spatial data are standardize by the Open Geospatial Consortium known as OGC. Spatial data helps answering many interesting questions like “Distance between two locations, area of interesting places etc.” When we think of it, it is very clear that handing spatial data and returning meaningful result is one big task when there are millions of users moving dynamically from one place to another place & requesting various spatial information. PostGIS/OpenGIS suite is very popular spatial database. It runs as a layer implementation on the RDBMS PostgreSQL. This makes it totally unique as it offers best from both the worlds. Courtesy: mushroom network Tomorrow In tomorrow’s blog post we will discuss about very important components of the Big Data Ecosystem – Hive. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• Using the Script Component as a Conditional Split

  This is a quick walk through on how you can use the Script Component to perform Conditional Split like behaviour, splitting your data across multiple outputs. We will use C# code to decide what does flows to which output, rather than the expression syntax of the Conditional Split transformation. Start by setting up the source. For my example the source is a list of SQL objects from sys.objects, just a quick way to get some data: SELECT type, name FROM sys.objects type name S syssoftobjrefs F FK_Message_Page U Conference IT queue_messages_23007163 Shown above is a small sample of the data you could expect to see. Once you have setup your source, add the Script Component, selecting Transformation when prompted for the type, and connect it up to the source. Now open the component, but don’t dive into the script just yet. First we need to select some columns. Select the Input Columns page and then select the columns we want to uses as part of our filter logic. You don’t need to choose columns that you may want later, this is just the columns used in the script itself. Next we need to add our outputs. Select the Inputs and Outputs page.You get one by default, but we need to add some more, it wouldn’t be much of a split otherwise. For this example we’ll add just one more. Click the Add Output button, and you’ll see a new output is added. Now we need to set some properties, so make sure our new Output 1 is selected. In the properties grid change the SynchronousInputID property to be our input Input 0, and  change the ExclusionGroup property to 1. Now select Ouput 0 and change the ExclusionGroup property to 2. This value itself isn’t important, provided each output has a different value other than zero. By setting this property on both outputs it allows us to split the data down one or the other, making each exclusive. If we left it to 0, that output would get all the rows. It can be a useful feature allowing you to copy selected rows to one output whilst retraining the full set of data in the other. Now we can go back to the Script page and start writing some code. For the example we will do a very simple test, if the value of the type column is U, for user table, then it goes down the first output, otherwise it ends up in the other. This mimics the exclusive behaviour of the conditional split transformation. public override void Input0_ProcessInputRow(Input0Buffer Row) { // Filter all user tables to the first output, // the remaining objects down the other if (Row.type.Trim() == "U") { Row.DirectRowToOutput0(); } else { Row.DirectRowToOutput1(); } } The code itself is very simple, a basic if clause that determines which of the DirectRowToOutput methods we call, there is one for each output. Of course you could write a lot more code to implement some very complex logic, but the final direction is still just a method call. If we now close the script component, we can hook up the outputs and test the package. Your numbers will vary depending on the sample database but as you can see we have clearly split out input data into two outputs. As a final tip, when adding the outputs I would normally rename them, changing the Name in the Properties grid. This means the generated methods follow the pattern as do the path label shown on the design surface, making everything that much easier to recognise.

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• Best depth sorting method for a Top Down 2D game using a 3D physics engine

  - by Alic44

  I've spent many days googling this and still have issues with my game engine I'd like to ask about, which I haven't seen addressed before. I think the problem is that my game is an unusual combination of a completely 2D graphical approach using XNA's SpriteBatch, and a completely 3D engine (the amazing BEPU physics engine) with rotation mostly disabled. In essence, my question is similar to this one (the part about "faux 3D"), but the difference is that in my game, the player as well as every other creature is represented by 3D objects, and they can all jump, pick up other objects, and throw them around. What this means is that sorting by one value, such as a Z position (how far north/south a character is on the screen) won't work, because as soon as a smaller creature jumps on top of a larger creature, or a box, and walks backwards, the moment its z value is less than that other creature, it will appear to be behind the object it is actually standing on. I actually originally solved this problem by splitting every object in the game into physics boxes which MUST have a Y height equal to their Z depth. I then based the depth sorting value on the object's y position (how high it is off the ground) PLUS its z position (how far north or south it is on the screen). The problem with this approach is that it requires all moving objects in the game to be split graphically into chunks which match up with a physical box which has its y dimension equal to its z dimension. Which is stupid. So, I got inspired last night to rewrite with a fresh approach. My new method is a little more complex, but I think a little more sane: every object which needs to be sorted by depth in the game exposes the interface IDepthDrawable and is added to a list owned by the DepthDrawer object. IDepthDrawable contains: public interface IDepthDrawable { Rectangle Bounds { get; } //possibly change this to a class if struct copying of the xna Rectangle type becomes an issue DepthDrawShape DepthShape { get; } void Draw(SpriteBatch spriteBatch); } The Bounds Rectangle of each IDepthDrawable object represents the 2D Axis-Aligned Bounding Box it will take up when drawn to the screen. Anything that doesn't intersect the screen will be culled at this stage and the remaining on-screen IDepthDrawables will be Bounds tested for intersections with each other. This is where I get a little less sure of what I'm doing. Each group of collisions will be added to a list or other collection, and each list will sort itself based on its DepthShape property, which will have access to the object-to-be-drawn's physics information. For starting out, lets assume everything in the game is an axis aligned 3D Box shape. Boxes are pretty easy to sort. Something like: if (depthShape1.Back > depthShape2.Front) //if depthShape1 is in front of depthShape2. //depthShape1 goes on top. else if (depthShape1.Bottom > depthShape2.Top) //if depthShape1 is above depthShape2. //depthShape1 goes on top. //if neither of these are true, depthShape2 must be in front or above. So, by sorting draw order by several different factors from the physics engine, I believe I can get a really correct draw order. My question is, is this a good way of going about this, or is there some tried and true, tested way which is completely different and has somehow completely eluded me on the internets? And, if this does seem like a good way to remake my draw order sorting, what's the right sorting algorithm for reordering the Bounds Rectangle collision lists, and how do you deal with a Bounds Rectangle colliding with two different object which don't collide with eachother. I know these are solved problems, but I've only been programming for a year so any specific input here will be greatly appreciated. Thanks for reading this far, ye who made it -- sorry it was so long!

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• Guest blog: A Closer Look at Oracle Price Analytics by Will Hutchinson

  - by Takin Babaei

  Overview:  Price Analytics helps companies understand how much of each sale goes into discounts, special terms, and allowances. This visibility lets sales management see the panoply of discounts and start seeing whether each discount drives desired behavior. In Price Analytics monitors parts of the quote-to-order process, tracking quotes, including the whole price waterfall and seeing which result in orders. The “price waterfall” shows all discounts between list price and “pocket price”. Pocket price is the final price the vendor puts in its pocket after all discounts are taken. The value proposition: Based on benchmarks from leading consultancies and companies I have talked to, where they have studied the effects of discounting and started enforcing what many of them call “discount discipline”, they find they can increase the pocket price by 0.8-3%. Yes, in today’s zero or negative inflation environment, one can, through better monitoring of discounts, collect what amounts to a price rise of a few percent. We are not talking about selling more product, merely about collecting a higher pocket price without decreasing quantities sold. Higher prices fall straight to the bottom line. The best reference I have ever found for understanding this phenomenon comes from an article from the September-October 1992 issue of Harvard Business Review called “Managing Price, Gaining Profit” by Michael Marn and Robert Rosiello of McKinsey & Co. They describe the outsized impact price management has on bottom line performance compared to selling more product or cutting variable or fixed costs. Price Analytics manages what Marn and Rosiello call “transaction pricing”, namely the prices of a given transaction, as opposed to what is on the price list or pricing according to the value received. They make the point that if the vendor does not manage the price waterfall, customers will, to the vendor’s detriment. It also discusses its findings that in companies it studied, there was no correlation between discount levels and any indication of customer value. I urge you to read this article. What Price Analytics does: Price analytics looks at quotes the company issues and tracks them until either the quote is accepted or rejected or it expires. There are prebuilt adapters for EBS and Siebel as well as a universal adapter. The target audience includes pricing analysts, product managers, sales managers, and VP’s of sales, marketing, finance, and sales operations. It tracks how effective discounts have been, the win rate on quotes, how well pricing policies have been followed, customer and product profitability, and customer performance against commitments. It has the concept of price waterfall, the deal lifecycle, and price segmentation built into the product. These help product and sales managers understand their pricing and its effectiveness on driving revenue and profit. They also help understand how terms are adhered to during negotiations. They also help people understand what segments exist and how well they are adhered to. To help your company increase its profits and revenues, I urge you to look at this product. If you have questions, please contact me. Will HutchinsonMaster Principal Sales Consultant – Analytics, Oracle Corp. Will Hutchinson has worked in the business intelligence and data warehousing for over 25 years. He started building data warehouses in 1986 at Metaphor, advancing to running Metaphor UK’s sales consulting area. He also worked in A.T. Kearney’s business intelligence practice for over four years, running projects and providing training to new consultants in the IT practice. He also worked at Informatica and then Siebel, before coming to Oracle with the Siebel acquisition. He became Master Principal Sales Consultant in 2009. He has worked on developing ROI and TCO models for business intelligence for over ten years. Mr. Hutchinson has a BS degree in Chemical Engineering from Princeton University and an MBA in Finance from the University of Chicago.

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• Restrict number of characters to be typed for af:autoSuggestBehavior

  - by Arunkumar Ramamoorthy

  When using AutoSuggestBehavior for a UI Component, the auto suggest list is displayed as soon as the user starts typing in the field. In this article, we will find how to restrict the autosuggest list to be displayed till the user types in couple of characters. This would be more useful in the low latency networks and also the autosuggest list is bigger. We could display a static message to let the user know that they need to type in more characters to get a list for picking a value from. Final output we would expect is like the below image Lets see how we can implement this. Assuming we have an input text for the users to enter the country name and an autosuggest behavior is added to it. <af:inputText label="Country" id="it1"> <af:autoSuggestBehavior /> </af:inputText> Also, assuming we have a VO (we'll name it as CountryView for this example), with a view criteria to filter out the VO based on the bind variable passed. Now, we would generate View Impl class from the java node (including bind variables) and then expose the setter method of the bind variable to client interface. In the View layer, we would create a tree binding for the VO and the method binding for the setter method of the bind variable exposed above, in the pagedef file As we've already added an input text and an autosuggestbehavior for the test, we would not need to build the suggested items for the autosuggest list.Let us add a method in the backing bean to return us List of select items to be bound to the autosuggest list. padding: 5px; background-color: #fbfbfb; min-height: 40px; width: 544px; height: 168px; overflow: auto;"> public List onSuggest(String searchTerm) { ArrayList<SelectItem> selectItems = new ArrayList<SelectItem>(); if(searchTerm.length()>1) { //get access to the binding context and binding container at runtime BindingContext bctx = BindingContext.getCurrent(); BindingContainer bindings = bctx.getCurrentBindingsEntry(); //set the bind variable value that is used to filter the View Object //query of the suggest list. The View Object instance has a View //Criteria assigned OperationBinding setVariable = (OperationBinding) bindings.get("setBind_CountryName"); setVariable.getParamsMap().put("value", searchTerm); setVariable.execute(); //the data in the suggest list is queried by a tree binding. JUCtrlHierBinding hierBinding = (JUCtrlHierBinding) bindings.get("CountryView1"); //re-query the list based on the new bind variable values hierBinding.executeQuery(); //The rangeSet, the list of queries entries, is of type //JUCtrlValueBndingRef. List<JUCtrlValueBindingRef> displayDataList = hierBinding.getRangeSet(); for (JUCtrlValueBindingRef displayData : displayDataList){ Row rw = displayData.getRow(); //populate the SelectItem list selectItems.add(new SelectItem( (String)rw.getAttribute("Name"), (String)rw.getAttribute("Name"))); } } else{ SelectItem a = new SelectItem("","Type in two or more characters..","",true); selectItems.add(a); } return selectItems; } So, what we are doing in the above method is, to check the length of the search term and if it is more than 1 (i.e 2 or more characters), the return the actual suggest list. Otherwise, create a read only select item new SelectItem("","Type in two or more characters..","",true); and add it to the list of suggested items to be displayed. The last parameter for the SelectItem (boolean) is to make it as readOnly, so that users would not be able to select this static message from the displayed list. Finally, bind this method to the input text's autosuggestbehavior's suggestedItems property. <af:inputText label="Country" id="it1"> <af:autoSuggestBehavior suggestedItems="#{AutoSuggestBean.onSuggest}"/> </af:inputText>

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• SQL SERVER – Configuring Interactive Cleansing Suggestion Min Score for Suggestions in Data Quality Services (DQS) – Sensitivity of Suggestion

  - by pinaldave

  Earlier I talked about what kind of questions, I do not like when I get asked. Today we will go over the question which I like when I get asked the same. One of the reader practices various steps in my earlier blog post Step by Step Guide to Beginning Data Quality Services in SQL Server 2012 – Introduction to DQS. While reading the blog post he noticed that Data Quality Services is not providing very helpful suggestions. He wrote an email to me about it. Let us go over his email. “Pinal, I noticed in one of your images that DQS is not providing very helpful suggestions. First of all DQS should be able to make intelligent guesses and make the necessary correction by itself. If it cannot do the same, in that case, it should give us intelligent suggestions but in the image included here, I see the suggestions are not there as well. Why is it so? Would you please tell me how to increase the numbers of suggestion? I do understand this may not be preferable solution in many case but all the business cases go on it depends. There are cases when the high sensitivity required and there are cases when higher sensitivities are not required. I would like to seek your help here. –Sriram MD” This is indeed a great question. I see that Sriram understands that every system is different and every application has a different need. I will not have to tell him this most important concept. The question is about how to change the sensitivity of suggestions for correction in DQS. Well, this option is available under the configuration tab in the DQS client. Once you click on Configuration you will see the following screen. Click the Tab of General Settings. You will see the section of Interactive Cleansing. Under this second there is the first option of “Min score for suggestions”. As this is set to 0.7 every suggestion which matches 0.7 probabilities or higher probability are displayed under the suggestion tab. You can see in the following image that there is no suggestion as the min score for suggestions is set to 0.7 and there is no record which qualifies to that much confidence. Now let us change the value of Min Score for suggestion to 0.5. The lower value increased the confidence of DQS to give further suggestion to values which are over 0.5. However, in our case the suggestions which it provides are also accurate. This may not be true for your sample. Every sample is different so you should manually review it before approving them. I guess, this is a simple blog post to demonstrate how to change the confidence value for the suggestions which Data Quality Services provides. Use this feature with care and always tune it according to your datasets and record diversity. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com)       Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Data Quality Services, DQS

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• Authenticating your windows domain users in the cloud

  - by cibrax

  Moving to the cloud can represent a big challenge for many organizations when it comes to reusing existing infrastructure. For applications that drive existing business processes in the organization, reusing IT assets like active directory represent good part of that challenge. For example, a new web mobile application that sales representatives can use for interacting with an existing CRM system in the organization. In the case of Windows Azure, the Access Control Service (ACS) already provides some integration with ADFS through WS-Federation. That means any organization can create a new trust relationship between the STS running in the ACS and the STS running in ADFS. As the following image illustrates, the ADFS running in the organization should be somehow exposed out of network boundaries to talk to the ACS. This is usually accomplish through an ADFS proxy running in a DMZ. This is the official story for authenticating existing domain users with the ACS.  Getting an ADFS up and running in the organization, which talks to a proxy and also trust the ACS could represent a painful experience. It basically requires  advance knowledge of ADSF and exhaustive testing to get everything right.  However, if you want to get an infrastructure ready for authenticating your domain users in the cloud in a matter of minutes, you will probably want to take a look at the sample I wrote for talking to an existing Active Directory using a regular WCF service through the Service Bus Relay Binding. You can use the WCF ability for self hosting the authentication service within a any program running in the domain (a Windows service typically). The service will not require opening any port as it is opening an outbound connection to the cloud through the Relay Service. In addition, the service will be protected from being invoked by any unauthorized party with the ACS, which will act as a firewall between any client and the service. In that way, we can get a very safe solution up and running almost immediately. To make the solution even more convenient, I implemented an STS in the cloud that internally invokes the service running on premises for authenticating the users. Any existing web application in the cloud can just establish a trust relationship with this STS, and authenticate the users via WS-Federation passive profile with regular http calls, which makes this very attractive for web mobile for example. This is how the WCF service running on premises looks like, [ServiceBehavior(Namespace = "http://agilesight.com/active_directory/agent")] public class ProxyService : IAuthenticationService { IUserFinder userFinder; IUserAuthenticator userAuthenticator;   public ProxyService() : this(new UserFinder(), new UserAuthenticator()) { }   public ProxyService(IUserFinder userFinder, IUserAuthenticator userAuthenticator) { this.userFinder = userFinder; this.userAuthenticator = userAuthenticator; }   public AuthenticationResponse Authenticate(AuthenticationRequest request) { if (userAuthenticator.Authenticate(request.Username, request.Password)) { return new AuthenticationResponse { Result = true, Attributes = this.userFinder.GetAttributes(request.Username) }; }   return new AuthenticationResponse { Result = false }; } } Two external dependencies are used by this service for authenticating users (IUserAuthenticator) and for retrieving user attributes from the user’s directory (IUserFinder). The UserAuthenticator implementation is just a wrapper around the LogonUser Win Api. The UserFinder implementation relies on Directory Services in .NET for searching the user attributes in an existing directory service like Active Directory or the local user store. public UserAttribute[] GetAttributes(string username) { var attributes = new List<UserAttribute>();   var identity = UserPrincipal.FindByIdentity(new PrincipalContext(this.contextType, this.server, this.container), IdentityType.SamAccountName, username); if (identity != null) { var groups = identity.GetGroups(); foreach(var group in groups) { attributes.Add(new UserAttribute { Name = "Group", Value = group.Name }); } if(!string.IsNullOrEmpty(identity.DisplayName)) attributes.Add(new UserAttribute { Name = "DisplayName", Value = identity.DisplayName }); if(!string.IsNullOrEmpty(identity.EmailAddress)) attributes.Add(new UserAttribute { Name = "EmailAddress", Value = identity.EmailAddress }); }   return attributes.ToArray(); } As you can see, the code is simple and uses all the existing infrastructure in Azure to simplify a problem that looks very complex at first glance with ADFS. All the source code for this sample is available to download (or change) in this GitHub repository, https://github.com/AgileSight/ActiveDirectoryForCloud

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• Types of semantic bugs, logic errors [closed]

  - by C-Otto

  I am a PhD student and currently focus on automatically finding instances of new types of bugs in (Java) programs that cannot be found by existing tools like FindBugs. The existing tool currently is used to prove/disprove termination of (Java) programs. I have some ideas (see below), but I could need more input from you (experienced programmers, potential users of my tool). What kind of bugs do you wish to find? What types of bugs exist and might be suitable for my analysis? One strength of the approach I use is detailled information about the heap. So in contrast to FindBugs, I can work with knowledge of the form "variable x and variable y are disjoint on the heap" or "variable z is not cyclic". It is also possible to see if a method might have side effects (and if so, which variables may/may not be affected by it). Example 1: Vacuous call: Graph graphOne = createGraph(); Graph graphTwo = createGraph(); Node source = graphTwo.getRootNode(); for (Node n : graphOne.getNodes()) { if (areConnected(source, n)) { graphTwo.addNode(n); } } Imagine createGraph() creates a fresh graph, so that graphOne and graphTwo are disjoint on the heap. Then, because source is taken from graphTwo instead of graphOne, the call to areConnected always returns false. In this situation I could find out that the call areConnected is useless (because it does not have any side effect and the return value always is false) which helps finding the real bug (taking source from the wrong graph). For this the information that x and y are disjoint (because graphOne and graphTwo are disjoint) is crucial. This bug is related to calling x.equals(y) where x and y are objects of different classes. In this scenario, most implementations of equals() always return false, which most likely is not the intended result. FindBugs already finds this bug (hardcoded to equals(), semantics of implementation is not checked). Example 2: Useless code: someCode(); while (something()) { yetMoreSomething(); } moreCode(); In the case that the loop (so the code in something() and yetMoreSomething()) does not modify anything visible outside the loop, it does not make sense to run this code - the program has the same behaviour as someCode(); moreCode() (i.e., without the loop). To find this out, one needs detailled information about the side effects of the (possibly useless) code. If I can prove that the code does not have any side effect that can be observed afterwards (in the example: in moreCode() or later), then the code indeed is useless. Of course, here Input/Output of any form must be seen as a side effect, so that a System.out.println(...) is not considered useless. Example 3: Ignored return value: Instead of x = foo(); and making use of x, the method is called without storing the result: foo();. If the method does not have any side effect, its invocation is useless and can be dropped. Most likely, the bug here is that the returned value should have been used. Here, too, detailled information about side effects are needed. Can you think of similar types of bugs that might be detected (only) with detailled information about the heap, side effects, semantics of called methods, ...? Did you encounter bugs related to the ones shown below in "real life"? By the way, the tool is AProVE and Java related publications can be found on my homepage. Thanks a lot, Carsten

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