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The Oracle Retail Week Awards - in review

- by user801960

The Oracle Retail Week Awards 2012 were another great success, building on the legacy of previous award ceremonies. Over 1,600 of the UK's top retailers gathered at the Grosvenor House Hotel and many of Europe's top retail leaders attended the prestigious Oracle Retail VIP Reception in the Grosvenor House Hotel's Red Bar. Over the years the Oracle Retail Week Awards have become a rallying point for the morale of the retail industry, and each nominated retailer served as a demonstration that the industry is fighting fit. It was an honour to speak to so many figureheads of UK - and global - retail. All of us at Oracle Retail would like to congratulate both the winners and the nominees for the awards. Retail is a cornerstone of the economy and it was inspiring to see so many outstanding demonstrations of innovation and dedication in the entries. Winners 2012 The Market Force Customer Service Initiative of the Year Winner: Dixons Retail: Knowhow Highly Commended: Hughes Electrical: Digital Switchover The Deloitte Employer of the Year Winner: Morrisons Growing Retailer of the Year Winner: Hallett Retail - The Concessions People Highly Commended: Blue Inc The TCC Marketing/Advertising Campaign of the Year Winner: Sainsbury's: Feed your Family for £50 The Brandbank Multichannel Retailer of the Year Winner: Debenhams Highly Commended: Halfords The Ashton Partnership Product Innovation of the Year Winner: Argos: Chad Valley Highly Commended: Halfords: Private label bikes The RR Donnelley Pure-play Online Retailer of the Year Winner: Wiggle The Hitachi Consulting Responsible Retailer of the Year Winner: B&Q: One Planet Home The CA Technologies Retail Technology Initiative of the Year Winner: Oasis: Argyll Street flagship launch with iPad PoS The Premier Tax Free Speciality Retailer of the Year Winner: Holland & Barrett Store Design of the Year Winner: Next Home and Garden, Shoreham, Sussex Highly Commended: Dixons Retail, Black concept store, Birmingham Bullring Store Manager of the Year Winner: Ian Allcock, Homebase, Aylesford Highly Commended: Darren Parfitt, Boots UK, Melton Mowbray Health Centre The Wates Retail Destination of the Year Winner: Westfield, Stratford The AlixPartners Emerging Retail Leader of the Year Winner: Catriona Marshall, HobbyCraft, Chief Executive The Wipro Retail International Retailer of the Year Winner: Apple The Clarity Search Retail Leader of the Year Winner: Ian Cheshire, Chief Executive, Kingfisher The Oracle Retailer of the Year Winner: Burberry Outstanding Contribution to Retail Winner: Lord Harris of Peckham Oracle Retail and "Your Experience Platform" Technology is the key to providing that differentiated retail experience. More specifically, it is what we at Oracle call ‘the experience platform’ - a set of integrated, cross-channel business technology solutions, selected and operated by a retail business and IT team, and deployed in accordance with that organisation’s individual strategy and processes. This business systems architecture simultaneously: Connects customer interactions across all channels and touchpoints, and every customer lifecycle phase to provide a differentiated customer experience that meets consumers’ needs and expectations. Delivers actionable insight that enables smarter decisions in planning, forecasting, merchandising, supply chain management, marketing, etc; Optimises operations to align every aspect of the retail business to gain efficiencies and economies, to align KPIs to eliminate strategic conflicts, and at the same time be working in support of customer priorities. Working in unison, these three goals not only help retailers to successfully navigate the challenges of today but also to focus on delivering that personalised customer experience based on differentiated products, pricing, services and interactions that will help you to gain market share and grow sales.

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Inequality joins, Asynchronous transformations and Lookups : SSIS

- by jamiet

It is pretty much accepted by SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) developers that synchronous transformations are generally quicker than asynchronous transformations (for a description of synchronous and asynchronous transformations go read Asynchronous and synchronous data flow components). Notice I said “generally” and not “always”; there are circumstances where using asynchronous transformations can be beneficial and in this blog post I’ll demonstrate such a scenario, one that is pretty common when building data warehouses. Imagine I have a [Customer] dimension table that manages information about all of my customers as a slowly-changing dimension. If that is a type 2 slowly changing dimension then you will likely have multiple rows per customer in that table. Furthermore you might also have datetime fields that indicate the effective time period of each member record. Here is such a table that contains data for four dimension members {Terry, Max, Henry, Horace}: Notice that we have multiple records per customer and that the [SCDStartDate] of a record is equivalent to the [SCDEndDate] of the record that preceded it (if there was one). (Note that I am on record as saying I am not a fan of this technique of storing an [SCDEndDate] but for the purposes of clarity I have included it here.) Anyway, the idea here is that we will have some incoming data containing [CustomerName] & [EffectiveDate] and we need to use those values to lookup [Customer].[CustomerId]. The logic will be: Lookup a [CustomerId] WHERE [CustomerName]=[CustomerName] AND [SCDStartDate] <= [EffectiveDate] AND [EffectiveDate] <= [SCDEndDate] The conventional approach to this would be to use a full cached lookup but that isn’t an option here because we are using inequality conditions. The obvious next step then is to use a non-cached lookup which enables us to change the SQL statement to use inequality operators: Let’s take a look at the dataflow: Notice these are all synchronous components. This approach works just fine however it does have the limitation that it has to issue a SQL statement against your lookup set for every row thus we can expect the execution time of our dataflow to increase linearly in line with the number of rows in our dataflow; that’s not good. OK, that’s the obvious method. Let’s now look at a different way of achieving this using an asynchronous Merge Join transform coupled with a Conditional Split. I’ve shown it post-execution so that I can include the row counts which help to illustrate what is going on here: Notice that there are more rows output from our Merge Join component than on the input. That is because we are joining on [CustomerName] and, as we know, we have multiple records per [CustomerName] in our lookup set. Notice also that there are two asynchronous components in here (the Sort and the Merge Join). I have embedded a video below that compares the execution times for each of these two methods. The video is just over 8minutes long. View on Vimeo For those that can’t be bothered watching the video I’ll tell you the results here. The dataflow that used the Lookup transform took 36 seconds whereas the dataflow that used the Merge Join took less than two seconds. An illustration in case it is needed: Pretty conclusive proof that in some scenarios it may be quicker to use an asynchronous component than a synchronous one. Your mileage may of course vary. The scenario outlined here is analogous to performance tuning procedural SQL that uses cursors. It is common to eliminate cursors by converting them to set-based operations and that is effectively what we have done here. Our non-cached lookup is performing a discrete operation for every single row of data, exactly like a cursor does. By eliminating this cursor-in-disguise we have dramatically sped up our dataflow. I hope all of that proves useful. You can download the package that I demonstrated in the video from my SkyDrive at http://cid-550f681dad532637.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Public/BlogShare/20100514/20100514%20Lookups%20and%20Merge%20Joins.zip Comments are welcome as always. @Jamiet Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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WebCenter Customer Spotlight: Texas Industries, Inc.

- by me

Author: Peter Reiser - Social Business Evangelist, Oracle WebCenter Solution SummaryTexas Industries, Inc. (TXI) is a leading supplier of cement, aggregate, and consumer product building materials for residential, commercial, and public works projects. TXI is based in Dallas and employs around 2,000 employees. The customer had the challenge of decentralized and manual processes for entering 180,000 vendor invoices annually. Invoice entry was a time- and resource-intensive process that entailed significant personnel requirements. TXI implemented a centralized solution leveraging Oracle WebCenter Imaging, a smart routing solution that enables users to capture invoices electronically with Oracle WebCenter Capture and Oracle WebCenter Forms Recognition to send the invoices through to Oracle Financials for approvals and processing. TXI significantly lowered resource needs for payable processing, increase productivity by 80% and reduce invoice processing cycle times by 84%—from 20 to 30 days to just 3 to 5 days, on average. Company OverviewTexas Industries, Inc. (TXI) is a leading supplier of cement, aggregate, and consumer product building materials for residential, commercial, and public works projects. With operating subsidiaries in six states, TXI is the largest producer of cement in Texas and a major producer in California. TXI is a major supplier of stone, sand, gravel, and expanded shale and clay products, and one of the largest producers of bagged cement and concrete products in the Southwest. Business ChallengesTXI had the challenge of decentralized and manual processes for entering 180,000 vendor invoices annually. Invoice entry was a time- and resource-intensive process that entailed significant personnel requirements. Their business objectives were: Increase the efficiency of core business processes, such as invoice processing, to support the organization’s desire to maintain its role as the Southwest’s leader in delivering high-quality, low-cost products to the construction industry Meet the audit and regulatory requirements for achieving Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliance Streamline entry of 180,000 invoices annually to accelerate processing, reduce errors, cut invoice storage and routing costs, and increase visibility into payables liabilities Solution DeployedTXI replaced a resource-intensive, paper-based, decentralized process for invoice entry with a centralized solution leveraging Oracle WebCenter Imaging 11g. They worked with the Oracle Partner Keste LLC to develop a smart routing solution that enables users to capture invoices electronically with Oracle WebCenter Capture and then uses Oracle WebCenter Forms Recognition and the Oracle WebCenter Imaging workflow to send the invoices through to Oracle Financials for approvals and processing. Business Results Significantly lowered resource needs for payable processing through centralization and improved efficiency Enabled the company to process invoices faster and pay bills earlier, allowing it to take advantage of additional vendor discounts Tracked to increase productivity by 80% and reduce invoice processing cycle times by 84%—from 20 to 30 days to just 3 to 5 days, on average Achieved a 25% reduction in paper invoice storage costs now that invoices are captured digitally, and enabled a 50% reduction in shipping costs, as the company no longer has to send paper invoices between headquarters and production facilities for approvals “Entering and manually processing more than 180,000 vendor invoices annually was time and labor intensive. With Oracle Imaging and Process Management, we have automated and centralized invoice entry and processing at our corporate office, improving productivity by 80% and reducing invoice processing cycle times by 84%—a very important efficiency gain.” Terry Marshall, Vice President of Information Services, Texas Industries, Inc. Additional Information TXI Customer Snapshot Oracle WebCenter Content Oracle WebCenter Capture Oracle WebCenter Forms Recognition

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signalR groups - connecting/disconnecting and sending - am I missing something?

- by Terry_Brown

very new to signalR, and have rolled up a very simple app that will take questions for moderation at conferences (felt like a straight forward use case) I have 2 hubs at the moment: - Question (for asking questions) - Speaker (these should receive questions and allow moderation, but that will come later) Solution lives at https://github.com/terrybrown/InterASK After watching a video (by David Fowler/Damian Edwards) (http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Web+Camps+TV/Damian-Edwards-and-David-Fowler-Demonstrate-SignalR) and another that I can't find the URL for atm, I thought I'd go with 'groups' as the concept to keep messages flowing to the right people. I implemented IConnected, IDisconnect as I'd seen in one of the videos, and upon debugging I can see Connect fire (and on reload I can see disconnect fire), but it seems nothing I do adds a person to a group. The signalR documentation suggests "Groups are not persisted on the server so applications are responsible for keeping track of what connections are in what groups so things like group count can be achieved" which I guess is telling me that I need to keep some method (static or otherwise?) of tracking who is in a group? Certainly I don't seem able to send to groups currently, though I have no problem distributing to anyone currently connected to the app and implementing the same JS method (2 machines on the same page). I suspect I'm just missing something - I read a few of the other questions on here, but none of them seem to mention IConnected/IDisconnect, which tells me these are either new (and nobody is using them) or that they're old (and nobody is using them). I know this could be considered a subjective question, though what I'm looking for is just a simple means of managing the groups so that I can do what I want to - send a question from one hub, and have people connected to a different hub receive it - groups felt the cleanest solution for this? Many thanks folks. Terry

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Problem Displaying XML in Grid View-newbie

- by Dean

I am trying to do something in VisualWebDev 2008 Express that I thought would be simple, but it is not working. I want to display data from an XML file so I added the XMLDataSource to my page, pointed it to the XML file, and then added the GridView and connected it to the datasource. I am getting the following error: GridView - GridView1There was an error rendering the control. The data source for GridView with id 'GridView1' did not have any properties or attributes from which to generate columns. Ensure that your data source has content. Could someone please tell me what I might be doing wrong, TIA Dean A smippet from my XML is as follows: 6019 - Renaissance MS - New School Renaissance MS 7155 Hall Road Fairburn, GA 30213 NS-6019200-LA-01 New School Close-out NS-6019200 0.000000000000000e+000 The construction of the new Renaissance MS will be at the intersection of Jones/Hall Road, in the districts 7th & 9F and Land Lots 117, 143 & 146 of Fulton County, GA. The work includes the construction of the 180,500 square foot building that will house 34 standard classrooms, 12 standard science labs, 20 special purpose classrooms, cafeteria and litchen, gymnasium, media center and administrative offices. The site will also have multi-purpose playfields with track, softball field, tennis courts and basketball/volleyball court. Terry O'Brien Parsons Stevens Wilkinson Stang Newdow Barton Malow -84.62242 33.61497

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Should I learn to code?

- by saltcod

Hi All, This is more of a philosophical question than a technical one, but I’d like some opinions on it, and I think that there are many others in my position that would benefit. My issue is that I don’t really have time to learn how to code. I know, I know… no one has time anymore, but please hear me out. Since learning to use Drupal about 2 years ago I’ve been involved with several projects wherein I’ve become the default quasi-developer, front-end designer, site manager, and system administrator. What I’ve found is that I can produce fairly nice, feature rich Drupal sites with the wealth of contrib. modules out there (Views, CCK, image handling, etc….). BUT! I can’t code. I know enough PHP to insert something into a block, or re-word a string, but that’s about it. I still don’t really even know how arrays work. My question Succinctly, my question is: Given the time that I have available for all of this stuff – in addition to a full-time job and regular life – am I better off trying to become more expert at the front-end stuff, or should I just learn PHP already? Pros 1. If a project doesn’t use Drupal, I’ll know enough PHP to be able to participate. 2. Learning PHP would help my Drupal development too 3. Learning PHP would make front-end theming easier 4. Learning PHP should give me that missing background in programming – and should allow me to learn other languages in the future Cons 1. At 28, I know I’m not too old to learn anything. But am I too old to become ‘good’? 2. Am I better off getting better and better at front-end UX work? 3. Am I better off farming out the PHP work? Suggestions from coders welcome! Thanks Terry

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JSON is not being recognised

- by richzilla

Hi All, Im having a bit of trouble getting my JSON to be recognised by my web page. I have validated JSON that im getting returned from server, so i know that is correct, however my javascript function is not doing anything with it. My succes function is as follows: success: function(data) { $('input[name=customer_name]').val(data.name); $('textarea[name=customer_address]').text(data.address); $('input[name=customer_email]').val(data.email); $('input[name=customer_tel]').val(data.tel); $('input[name=user_id]').val(item.id); } Yet the fields are not being repopulated with the data that is returned, if it helps, a sample of my JSON data: { "name": "Terry O'Toole", "address": "Terrys House\nTerry Street\nTerrysville\nTerrytown\nTT1 6TT", "email": "[email protected]", "tel": "05110000000" } Any help would be appreciated. [EDIT] Expanded ajax call: $.ajax({ url: "<?php echo site_url('user/users/ajax'); ?>", type: 'POST', data: {"userid": item.id}, success: function(data) { $('input[name=customer_name]').val(data.name); $('textarea[name=customer_address]').text(data.address); $('input[name=customer_email]').val(data.email); $('input[name=customer_tel]').val(data.tel); $('input[name=user_id]').val(item.id); } }) });

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getting Internet connection sharing working in a slightly more complicated configuration

- by tirichitirca t

I have the following configuration: Computer A - Mac OSX 10.8.4, wireless & wired adapters Computer B - Windows 7 (64 bit), wireless & wired adapters, has internet connection via the wired adapter (ethernet) d-link wired/wireless router. Problem to solve: Connect from computer A to the internet through the wired connection of computer B. I tried the following: I set up a local network between A and B using the d-link router. The configuration is this: D-link router - 192.168.0.1 A - wired connection to the d-link router, static 192.168.0.101 (I could have used the wireless but I preferred the wired connection) B - wireless connection to the d-link router DHCP 192.168.0.102 (but I made sure it always gets the same address) B - wired connection to the internet using some address that begins with 10.x.y.z. In this configuration A can see B. I enabled ICS on the wired adapter of B. I set up the Gateway of A to point to B and DNS servers to point to the DNS servers specified for the 10.x.y.z address. It doesn't work, A goes only as far as B. It can ping the 10.x.y.z address of B though. I then found this article: http://terrybritton.com/windows-internet-connection-sharing-ics-not-working-with-linux-bridging-is-the-solution-916/. Terry is suggesting that a bridge should be defined on B between the two connections. I tried that but basically computer B is screwed as soon as I create the bridge. It can't connect to the internet anymore. It is as if the network bridge seems to think the traffic to the internet should go from the wired connection to the wireless and not the other way around. The other thing that puzzles me is the router itself. In general the router needs an internet address. In a normal configuration it is the router that gets the ip address and the internet traffic goes through the router. In my case I am not interested in that. So, any suggestions to get this working? I wouldn't shy away from using a commercial software but I would think windows 7 should allow me to do it. Thanks

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How to use PredicateBuilder with nested OR conditionals in Linq

- by tblank

I've been very happily using PredicateBuilder but until now have only used it for queries with only either concatenated AND statements or OR statements. Now for the first time I need a pair of OR statements nested along with a some AND statements like this: select x from Table1 where a = 1 AND b = 2 AND (z = 1 OR y = 2) Using the documentation from Albahari, I've constructed my expression like this: Expression<Func<TdIncSearchVw, bool>> predicate = PredicateBuilder.True<TdIncSearchVw>(); // for AND Expression<Func<TdIncSearchVw, bool>> innerOrPredicate = PredicateBuilder.False<TdIncSearchVw>(); // for OR innerOrPredicate = innerOrPredicate.Or(i=> i.IncStatusInd.Equals(incStatus)); innerOrPredicate = innerOrPredicate.Or(i=> i.RqmtStatusInd.Equals(incStatus)); predicate = predicate.And(i => i.TmTec.Equals(tecTm)); predicate = predicate.And(i => i.TmsTec.Equals(series)); predicate = predicate.And(i => i.HistoryInd.Equals(historyInd)); predicate.And(innerOrPredicate); var query = repo.GetEnumerable(predicate); This results in SQL that completely ignores the 2 OR phrases. select x from TdIncSearchVw where ((this_."TM_TEC" = :p0 and this_."TMS_TEC" = :p1) and this_."HISTORY_IND" = :p2) If I try using just the OR phrases like: Expression<Func<TdIncSearchVw, bool>> innerOrPredicate = PredicateBuilder.False<TdIncSearchVw>(); // for OR innerOrPredicate = innerOrPredicate.Or(i=> i.IncStatusInd.Equals(incStatus)); innerOrPredicate = innerOrPredicate.Or(i=> i.RqmtStatusInd.Equals(incStatus)); var query = repo.GetEnumerable(innerOrPredicate); I get SQL as expected like: select X from TdIncSearchVw where (IncStatusInd = incStatus OR RqmtStatusInd = incStatus) If I try using just the AND phrases like: predicate = predicate.And(i => i.TmTec.Equals(tecTm)); predicate = predicate.And(i => i.TmsTec.Equals(series)); predicate = predicate.And(i => i.HistoryInd.Equals(historyInd)); var query = repo.GetEnumerable(predicate); I get SQL like: select x from TdIncSearchVw where ((this_."TM_TEC" = :p0 and this_."TMS_TEC" = :p1) and this_."HISTORY_IND" = :p2) which is exactly the same as the first query. It seems like I'm so close it must be something simple that I'm missing. Can anyone see what I'm doing wrong here? Thanks, Terry

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Internationalization of static pages with Rails

- by Gavin

I feel like I'm missing something really simple and I keep spinning my wheels on this problem. I currently have internationalization working throughout my app. The translations work and the routes work perfectly. At least, most of the site works with the exception of the routes to my two static pages, my "About" and "FAQ" pages. Every other link throughout the app points to the proper localized route. For example if I select "french" as my language, links point to the appropriate "(/:locale)/controller(.:format)." However, despite the changes I make throughout the app my links for the "About" and "FAQ" refuse to point to "../fr/static/about" and always point to "/static/about." To make matters stranger, when I run rake routes I see: "GET (/:locale)/static/:permalink(.:format) pages#show {:locale=/en|fr/}" and when I manually type in "../fr/static/about" the page translates perfectly. My Routes file: devise_for :users scope "(:locale)", :locale => /en|fr/ do get 'static/:permalink', :controller => 'pages', :action => 'show' resources :places, only: [:index, :show, :destroy] resources :homes, only: [:index, :show] match '/:locale' => 'places#index' get '/'=>'places#index',:as=>"root" end My ApplicationController: before_filter :set_locale def set_locale I18n.locale=params[:locale]||I18n.default_locale end def default_url_options(options={}) logger.debug "default_url_options is passed options: #{options.inspect}\n" { :locale => I18n.locale } end and My Pages Controller: class PagesController < ApplicationController before_filter :validate_page PAGES = ['about_us', 'faq'] def show render params[:permalink] end def validate_page redirect_to :status => 404 unless PAGES.include?(params[:permalink]) end end I'd be very grateful for any help ... it's just been one of those days. Edit: Thanks to Terry for jogging me to include views. <div class="container-fluid nav-collapse"> <ul class="nav"> <li class="dropdown"> <a href="#" class="dropdown-toggle" data-toggle="dropdown"><%= t(:'navbar.about') %><b class="caret"></b></a> <ul class="dropdown-menu"> <li><%=link_to t(:'navbar.about_us'), "/static/about_us"%></li> <li><%=link_to t(:'navbar.faq'), "/static/faq"%></li> <li><%=link_to t(:'navbar.blog'), '#' %></li> </ul> </li>

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