Search Results

Search found 1281 results on 52 pages for 'joes 2 pros'.

Page 50/52 | < Previous Page | 46 47 48 49 50 51 52  | Next Page >

  • how to store xml structure in a persistence layer?

    - by fayer
    i wonder how i could store a xml structure in a persistence layer. cause the relational data looks like: <entity id="1000070"> <name>apple</name> <entities> <entity id="7002870"> <name>mac</name> <entities> <entity id="7002907"> <name>leopard</name> <entities> <entity id="7024080"> <name>safari</name> </entity> <entity id="7024701"> <name>finder</name> </entity> </entities> </entity> </entities> </entity> <entity id="7024080"> <name>iphone</name> <entities> <entity id="7024080"> <name>3g</name> </entity> <entity id="7024701"> <name>3gs</name> </entity> </entities> </entity> <entity id="7024080"> <name>ipad</name> </entity> </entities> </entity> as you can see, it has no static structure but a dynamical one. mac got 2 descendant levels while iphone got 1 and ipad got 0. i wonder how i could store this data the best way? what are my options. cause it seems impossible to store it in a mysql database due to this dynamical structure. is the only way to store it as a xml file then? is the speed of getting information (xpath/xquery/simplexml) from a xml file worse or greater than from mysql? what are the pros and cons? do i have other options? is storing information in xml files, suited for a lot of users accessing it at the same time? would be great with feedbacks!! thanks!

    Read the article

  • C++ vs Matlab vs Python as a main language for Computer Vision Research

    - by Hough
    Hi all, Firstly, sorry for a somewhat long question but I think that many people are in the same situation as me and hopefully they can also gain some benefit from this. I'll be starting my PhD very soon which involves the fields of computer vision, pattern recognition and machine learning. Currently, I'm using opencv (2.1) C++ interface and I especially like its powerful Mat class and the overloaded operations available for matrix and image operations and seamless transformations. I've also tried (and implemented many small vision projects) using opencv python interface (new bindings; opencv 2.1) and I really enjoy python's ability to integrate opencv, numpy, scipy and matplotlib. But recently, I went back to opencv C++ interface because I felt that the official python new bindings were not stable enough and no overloaded operations are available for matrices and images, not to mention the lack of machine learning modules and slow speeds in certain operations. I've also used Matlab extensively in the past and although I've used mex files and other means to speed up the program, I just felt that Matlab's performance was inadequate for real-time vision tasks, be it for fast prototyping or not. When the project becomes larger and larger, many tasks have to be re-written in C and compiled into Mex files increasingly and Matlab becomes nothing more than a glue language. Here comes the sub-questions: For carrying out research in these fields (machine learning, vision, pattern recognition), what is your main or ideal programming language for rapid prototyping of ideas and testing algorithms contained in papers? For computer vision research work, can you list down the pros and cons of using the following languages? C++ (with opencv + gsl + svmlib + other libraries) vs Matlab (with all its toolboxes) vs python (with the imcomplete opencv bindings + numpy + scipy + matplotlib). Are there computer vision PhD/postgrad students here who are using only C++ (with all its availabe libraries including opencv) without even needing to resort to Matlab or python? In other words, given the current existing computer vision or machine learning libraries, is C++ alone sufficient for fast prototyping of ideas? If you're currently using Java or C# for your research, can you list down the reasons why they should be used and how they compare to other languages in terms of available libraries? What is the de facto vision/machine learning programming language and its associated libraries used in your research group? Thanks in advance. Edit: As suggested, I've opened the question to both academic and non-academic computer vision/machine learning/pattern recognition researchers and groups.

    Read the article

  • Is it normal for a programmer with 2 years experience to take a long time to code simple programs?

    - by ajax81
    Hi all, I'm a relatively new programmer (18 months on the scene), and I'm finally getting to the point where I'm comfortable accepting projects and developing solutions under minimal supervision. Unfortunately, this also means that I've become acutely aware of my performance shortfalls, the most prevalent of which is the amount of time it takes me to develop, test, and submit algorithms for review. A great example of what I'm talking about occurred this week when I was tasked with developing a simple XML web service (asp.net 3.5) callable via client-side JavaScript, that accepts a single parameter and returns a dataset output to a modal window (please note this is the first time I've had to develop a web service and have had ZERO experience creating/consuming them...let alone calling them from JS client side). Keeping a long story short -- I worked on it for 4 days straight, all day each day, for a grand total of 36 hours, not including the time I spent dwelling on the problem in the shower, the morning commute, and laying awake in bed at night. I learned a great deal about web services and xml/json/javascript...but was called in for a management review to discuss the length of time it took me to develop the solution. In the meeting, I was praised for the quality of my work and was in fact told that my effort was commendable. However, they (senior leads and pm's) weren't impressed with the amount of time it took me to develop the solution and expressed that they would have liked to see the solution in roughly 1/3 of the time it took me. I guess what concerns me the most is that I've identified this pattern as common for myself. Between online videos, book research, and trial/error coding...if its something I haven't seen before, I can spend up to two weeks on a problem that seems to only take the pros in the videos moments to code up. And of course, knowing that management isn't happy with this pattern has shaken me up a bit. To sum up, I have some very specific questions I'd like to ask, and would greatly appreciate your objective professional feedback. Is my experience as a junior programmer common among new developers? Or is it possible that I'm just not cut out for the work? If you suspect that my experience is not common and that there may be an aptitude issue, do you have any suggestions/solutions that I could propose to management to help bring me up to speed? Do seasoned, professional programmers ever encounter knowledge barriers that considerably delay deliverables? When you started out in the industry, did you know how to "do it all"? If not, how long did it take you to be perceived as "proficient"? Was it a natural progression of trial and error, or was there a particular zen moment when you knew you had achieved super saiyen power level? Anyways, thanks for taking the time to read my question(s). I don't know if this is the right place to ask for professional career guidance, but I greatly appreciate your willingness to help me out. Cheers, Daniel

    Read the article

  • SaaS Architecture Question from Newbie

    - by user226767
    I have developed a number of departmental client-server applications, and am now ready to begin working on moving one of these applications to a SaaS model. I have done some basic web development, but I'm a newbie when it comes to SaaS architectures. One of the first questions that comes to mind as I try to design the architecture is the question of single vs. multi tenancy. The pros and cons of each vary significantly depending on the type of application and scale required, so I'd like to describe my application and scale needs below, and hope others can comment on how I should get started with the architecture. The client-server application currently consists of a Firebird database and a Windows application. The database contains about 20 tables containing a few thousand records in 4 primary tables, and a few hundred records in various lookup and related tables. Although the number of records is small, the size can get large, as the database can contain large BLOBS. Each customer sets up their own database and has a handful of users within the organization connected to it. When I update the db schema, a new windows application is released, and it checks the db schema and then applies the updates as needed. For the SaaS application, I am designing for 100's (not 1000's or millions) of new customers per year. My first thought was to go with a multi tenancy model to make updates easy (shut down apply the updates to one database, and then start up). On the other hand, a single tenancy model would provide a means to roll updates out to a group of customers at a time, and spread the risk of data corruption - i.e. if something goes wrong with a database, it will impact one customer instead of all customers. With this idea, I was thinking of having a single web front-end which would connect to a single customer database upon login. Thus, when a new customer creates an account, a new database would be created (each customer would have their own db with multiple users as needed for the customer). In this model, a db update would require either a process to go through each db to apply schema changes, or a trigger upon logging in to initiate a schema update similar to the client-server model currently in use. Can anyone point me to information for similar applications which have been ported from client-server to SaaS? Or provide any pointers to consider? Basically I'm looking for architecture examples of taking a departmental application and making it available as a self service website for multiple customers. Thanks for any suggestions, resources, etc.

    Read the article

  • Is it ok to use <strong> in place of <b> blindly ?

    - by metal-gear-solid
    Note: I know <b> is presentational and <span style="font-weight:bold> is better way and <strong> and <em> for emphasis but my question is not regarding this. Should we convert every <b> to <strong> blindly ? many people do this they think <b> is not good as per web standards so they convert every <b> to <strong> upon site redesign, content re-population, new site design and people suggest this to others also. Dreamweaver has also given option to convert all <b> and <i> to <strong> and <em> on code paste in design view and when we use B and I Which people use blindly. And Dreamweaver(if above option is checked) and many online WYSIWYG editor give output in <strong> and <em> while button shows B and I. In my opinion it's creating misconception about <strong> and <b> When we get content from client we don't know where client want to give emphasize and where he just want to use text bold for presentation purpose.What we should do in this condition? no one has time client and we both to give time to think for each bold text, it should be in <b> or in <strong>, <i> or in <em> What are pros and cons to convert every <b> and <i> into <strong> and <em> blindly if we are saying our site is accessible? Update: remember <b> and <i> are not deprecated there are in HTML 5 specification

    Read the article

  • How to communicate between Client and Server in a Client-Server Application?

    - by Sanoj
    I would like to implement an Client-Server Application, where the business-logic, security validations and a database are at the server and the user interface are at the client. I would like to implement clients in different languages i.e. one in WPF/.NET, one Swing/Java , one in Android/Java and maybe one HTML/JavaScript client. The server will be on Internet, so I would like to be able to have encrypted communication. The client will send some lists of items to be added to the database, or update items, and do some transactions. The server will check if the items are already updated by another client, or update the item, add new items or delete items. How do I solve the communication between clients and the server in such a system? I have been thinking about: http/https webserver, and sending messages in JSON or XML and use Web Sockets for bi-directional communication. Use http in a RESTful way, except when WebSockets are needed. But I guess there are better solutions for native desktop applications than http? CORBA - I have just heard about it, and it's old and complex. Not much talk about it these days. XMPP/Jabber - I have just heard about it and I don't know if it fits me at all. EJabberd seams to be a popular implementation. AMQP - I have just heard about it and I don't know if it fits me at all. RabbitMQ seams to be a popular implementation. Windows Communication Foundation, Java RMI, Java Message Service - but are they language independent? I guess some of these alternatives are on different levels, maybe I can have i.e xmpp or amqp in web sockets over https? What technologys are used for this problem in companies today? and what is recommended to use? I have no experience of them other than webservers and http. Please give me some guidance in this jungle. What are the pros and cons of these technologies in my situation?

    Read the article

  • IQueryable and lazy loading

    - by Nelson
    I'm having a hard time determining the best way to handle this... With Entity Framework (and L2S), LINQ queries return IQueryable. I have read various opinions on whether the DAL/BLL should return IQueryable, IEnumerable or IList. Assuming we go with IList, then the query is run immediately and that control is not passed on to the next layer. This makes it easier to unit test, etc. You lose the ability to refine the query at higher levels, but you could simply create another method that allows you to refine the query and still return IList. And there are many more pros/cons. So far so good. Now comes Entity Framework and lazy loading. I am using POCO objects with proxies in .NET 4/VS 2010. In the presentation layer I do: foreach (Order order in bll.GetOrders()) { foreach (OrderLine orderLine in order.OrderLines) { // Do something } } In this case, GetOrders() returns IList so it executes immediately before returning to the PL. But in the next foreach, you have lazy loading which executes multiple SQL queries as it gets all the OrderLines. So basically, the PL is running SQL queries "on demand" in the wrong layer. Is there any sensible way to avoid this? I could turn lazy loading off, but then what's the point of having this "feature" that everyone was complaining EF1 didn't have? And I'll admit it is very useful in many scenarios. So I see several options: Somehow remove all associations in the entities and add methods to return them. This goes against the default EF behavior/code generation and makes it harder to do some composite (multiple entity) LINQ queries. It seems like a step backwards. I vote no. If we have lazy loading anyway which makes it hard to unit test, then go all the way and return IQueryable. You'll have more control farther up the layers. I still don't think this is a good option because IQueryable ties you to L2S, L2E, or your own full implementation of IQueryable. Lazy loading may run queries "on demand", but doesn't tie you to any specific interface. I vote no. Turn off lazy loading. You'll have to handle your associations manually. This could be with eager loading's .Include(). I vote yes in some specific cases. Keep IList and lazy loading. I vote yes in many cases, only due to the troubles with the others. Any other options or suggestions? I haven't found an option that really convinces me.

    Read the article

  • What is your most productive shortcut with Vim?

    - by Olivier Pons
    I've heard a lot about Vim, both pros and cons. It really seems you should be (as a developer) faster with Vim than with any other editor. I'm using Vim to do some basic stuff and I'm at best 10 times less productive with Vim. The only two things you should care about when you talk about speed (you may not care enough about them, but you should) are: Using alternatively left and right hands is the fastest way to use the keyboard. Never touching the mouse is the second way to be as fast as possible. It takes ages for you to move your hand, grab the mouse, move it, and bring it back to the keyboard (and you often have to look at the keyboard to be sure you returned your hand properly to the right place) Here are two examples demonstrating why I'm far less productive with Vim. Copy/Cut & paste. I do it all the time. With all the classical editors you press Shift with the left hand, and you move the cursor with your right hand to select text. Then Ctrl+C copies, you move the cursor and Ctrl+V pastes. With Vim it's horrible: yy to copy one line (you almost never want the whole line!) [number xx]yy to copy xx lines into the buffer. But you never know exactly if you've selected what you wanted. I often have to do [number xx]dd then u to undo! Another example? Search & replace. In PSPad: Ctrl+f then type what you want you search for, then press Enter. In Vim: /, then type what you want to search for, then if there are some special characters put \ before each special character, then press Enter. And everything with Vim is like that: it seems I don't know how to handle it the right way. NB : I've already read the Vim cheat sheet :) My question is: What is the way you use Vim that makes you more productive than with a classical editor?

    Read the article

  • Anyone have experience calling Rake from MSBuild for code gen and other benefits? How did it go? Wha

    - by Charlie Flowers
    While programming in C# using Visual Studio 2008, I often wish for "automatic" code generation. If possible, I'd like to achieve it by making my MSBuild solution file call out to Rake, which would call Ruby code for the code generation, having the resulting generated files automatically appear in my solution. Here's one business example (of many possible examples I could name) where this kind of automatic code generation would be helpful. In a recent project I had an interface with some properties that contained dollar amounts. I wanted a second interface and a third interface that had the same properties as the first interface, except they were "qualified" with a business unit name. Something like this: public interface IQuarterlyResults { double TotalRevenue { get; set; } double NetProfit { get; set; } } public interface IConsumerQuarterlyResults { double ConsumerTotalRevenue { get; set; } double ConsumerNetProfit { get; set; } } public interface ICorporateQuarterResults { double CorporateTotalRevenue { get; set; } double CorporateNetProfit { get; set; } } In this example, there is a "Consumer Business Unit" and a "Corporate Business Unit". Every property on IQuarterlyResults becomes a property called "Corporate" + [property name] on ICorporateQuarterlyResults, and likewise for IConsumerQuarterlyResults. Why make interfaces for these, rather than merely having an instance of IQuarterlyResults for Consumer and another instance for Corporate? Because, when working with the calculator object I was building, the user had to deal with 100's of properties, and it is much less confusing if he can deal with "fully qualified" property names such as "ConsumerNetProfit". But let's not get bogged down in this example. It is only an example and not the main question. The main question is this: I love using Ruby and ERB for code generation, and I love using Rake to manage dependencies between tasks. To solve the problem above, what I'd like to do is have MSBuild call out to Rake, and have Rake / Ruby read the list of properties on the "core" interface and then generate the code to make all the dependent interfaces and their properties. This would get triggered every time I do a build, because I'd put it into the MSBuild file for the VS.NET solution. Has anyone tried anything like this? How did it work out for you? What insights can you share about pros, cons, tips for success, etc.? Thanks!

    Read the article

  • General ORM design question

    - by Calvin
    Suppose you have 2 classes, Person and Rabbit. A person can do a number of things to a rabbit, s/he can either feed it, buy it and become its owner, or give it away. A rabbit can have none or at most 1 owner at a time. And if it is not fed for a while, it may die. Class Person { Void Feed(Rabbit r); Void Buy(Rabbit r); Void Giveaway(Person p, Rabbit r); Rabbit[] rabbits; } Class Rabbit { Bool IsAlive(); Person pwner; } There are a couple of observations from the domain model: Person and Rabbit can have references to each other Any actions on 1 object can also change the state of the other object Even if no explicit actions are invoked, there can still be a change of state in the objects (e.g. Rabbit can be starved to death, and that causes it to be removed from the Person.rabbits array) As DDD is concerned, I think the correct approach is to synchronize all calls that may change the states in the domain model. For instance, if a Person buys a Rabbit, s/he would need to acquire a lock in Person to make a change to the rabbits array AND also another lock in Rabbit to change its owner before releasing the first one. This would prevent a race condition where 2 Persons claim to be the owner of the little Rabbit. The other approach is to let the database to handle all these synchronizations. Who makes the first call wins, but then the DB needs to have some kind of business logics to figure out if it is a valid transaction (e.g. if a Rabbit already has an owner, it cannot change its owner unless the Person gives it away). There are both pros/cons in either approach, and I’d expect the “best” solution would be somewhere in-between. How would you do it in real life? What’s your take and experience? Also, is it a valid concern that there can be another race condition the domain model has committed its change but before it is fully committed in the database? And for the 3rd observation (i.e. state change due to time factor). How will you do it?

    Read the article

  • Best practices regarding equals: to overload or not to overload?

    - by polygenelubricants
    Consider the following snippet: import java.util.*; public class EqualsOverload { public static void main(String[] args) { class Thing { final int x; Thing(int x) { this.x = x; } public int hashCode() { return x; } public boolean equals(Thing other) { return this.x == other.x; } } List<Thing> myThings = Arrays.asList(new Thing(42)); System.out.println(myThings.contains(new Thing(42))); // prints "false" } } Note that contains returns false!!! We seems to have lost our things!! The bug, of course, is the fact that we've accidentally overloaded, instead of overridden, Object.equals(Object). If we had written class Thing as follows instead, then contains returns true as expected. class Thing { final int x; Thing(int x) { this.x = x; } public int hashCode() { return x; } @Override public boolean equals(Object o) { return (o instanceof Thing) && (this.x == ((Thing) o).x); } } Effective Java 2nd Edition, Item 36: Consistently use the Override annotation, uses essentially the same argument to recommend that @Override should be used consistently. This advice is good, of course, for if we had tried to declare @Override equals(Thing other) in the first snippet, our friendly little compiler would immediately point out our silly little mistake, since it's an overload, not an override. What the book doesn't specifically cover, however, is whether overloading equals is a good idea to begin with. Essentially, there are 3 situations: Overload only, no override -- ALMOST CERTAINLY WRONG! This is essentially the first snippet above Override only (no overload) -- one way to fix This is essentially the second snippet above Overload and override combo -- another way to fix The 3rd situation is illustrated by the following snippet: class Thing { final int x; Thing(int x) { this.x = x; } public int hashCode() { return x; } public boolean equals(Thing other) { return this.x == other.x; } @Override public boolean equals(Object o) { return (o instanceof Thing) && (this.equals((Thing) o)); } } Here, even though we now have 2 equals method, there is still one equality logic, and it's located in the overload. The @Override simply delegates to the overload. So the questions are: What are the pros and cons of "override only" vs "overload & override combo"? Is there a justification for overloading equals, or is this almost certainly a bad practice?

    Read the article

  • drupal (CMS) or codeigniter (MVC) for creating a new web application?

    - by ajsie
    im going to create a new web application that is very customized. it will contain images, that are fully searchable - in a very, very customized way. when you click on the pictures you can add comments and so on. it requires users to be registered, but the registration/login process will be highly customized too. at the moment im using CodeIgniter for this. But i've read a lot of posts about CMS like Drupal and it sounds like i could let it handle basic stuff, maybe design and other front end work. i have no experience with CMS, in fact, i just started to use a MVC framework like CI and was impressed of how much easier it gets to start developing. so i wonder, if i'm going to create this kind of application, could i use drupal and then add the usual stuff, as i was going to do with CodeIgniter, like controllers, views, models, config files, my own libraries and so on? how does it work on a system like Drupal. how do you code PHP with it as with any MVC framework. it sounds like it has a lot of modules, i just wonder, if i can use it as a MVC framework but have the benefit of having all these basic stuff and design ready to use? cause then it sounds like the best "library" to provide for a web application from scratch. or is it difficult to create a customized app with it? i guess it has modules like images and users, but then how could i customize these so that every image has tags on it and country information, or have every user subscribing to changes to an image, that email will be sent to users and so on? cause i guess its easy to install a module. the question is, how do i customize it. maybe i don't need all that table columns. maybe i want to add/remove business logic. what are the pros and cons with using Drupal for this? is it even the right way to go? can you make a Stackoverflow with Drupal? Facebook? Twitter? Youtube? assuming that you know php of course. share your thoughts cause im totally new on creating a web application! thanks

    Read the article

  • Circular database relationships. Good, Bad, Exceptions?

    - by jim
    I have been putting off developing this part of my app for sometime purely because I want to do this in a circular way but get the feeling its a bad idea from what I remember my lecturers telling me back in school. I have a design for an order system, ignoring the everything that doesn't pertain to this example I'm left with: CreditCard Customer Order I want it so that, Customers can have credit cards (0-n) Customers have orders (1-n) Orders have one customer(1-1) Orders have one credit card(1-1) Credit cards can have one customer(1-1) (unique ids so we can ignore uniqueness of cc number, husband/wife may share cc instances ect) Basically the last part is where the issue shows up, sometimes credit cards are declined and they wish to use a different one, this needs to update which their 'current' card is but this can only change the current card used for that order, not the other orders the customer may have on disk. Effectively this creates a circular design between the three tables. Possible solutions: Either Create the circular design, give references: cc ref to order, customer ref to cc customer ref to order or customer ref to cc customer ref to order create new table that references all three table ids and put unique on the order so that only one cc may be current to that order at any time Essentially both model the same design but translate differently, I am liking the latter option best at this point in time because it seems less circular and more central. (If that even makes sense) My questions are, What if any are the pros and cons of each? What is the pitfalls of circular relationships/dependancies? Is this a valid exception to the rule? Is there any reason I should pick the former over the latter? Thanks and let me know if there is anything you need clarified/explained. --Update/Edit-- I have noticed an error in the requirements I stated. Basically dropped the ball when trying to simplify things for SO. There is another table there for Payments which adds another layer. The catch, Orders can have multiple payments, with the possibility of using different credit cards. (if you really want to know even other forms of payment). Stating this here because I think the underlying issue is still the same and this only really adds another layer of complexity.

    Read the article

  • PHP Shared Sessions across Domain

    - by bigstylee
    Hi, I have seen a few answers to this on SOO but most of these are concerned with the use of subdomains, of which none have worked for me. The common one being that the use of session.cookie_domain, which from my understanding will only work with subdomains. I am interested in a solution that deals with deals with entirely different domains (and includes the possibility of subdomains). Unfortunately project deadlines being what they are, time is not on my side, so I turn to SOO's expertise and experience. The current project brief is to be able to log into one site which currently only stores the user_id in the session and then be able to retrieve this value while on a different domain within the same server enviroment. Session data is being stored/retrieved from a database where the session id is the primary key. I am hoping to find a "light wieght" and "easy" to implement solution. The system is utlising an in-house Model View Controller design pattern, so all requests (including different domains) are run through a single bootstrap script. Using the domain name as a variable, this determines what context to display to the user. One option that did look like to have potential is the use of a hidden image and using the alt tag to set the user id. My first impressions suggest this immediately seems "too easy" (if possible) and riddled with security flaws. Disscuss? Another option which I considered is using the IP and User Agent for authentication but again I feel this not going to be a reliable option due to shared networks and changing IP addresses. My third option (and preferred) which I considered and as yet not seen discussed is using htaccess to fool the user into thinking that they are on a different domain when infact apache is redirecting; something like www.foo.com/index.php?domain=bar.com&controller=news/categoires/1 but displays to the user as www.bar.com/news/categories/1 foo.com represents the "main site domain" which all requests are run through and bar.com is what the user thinks they are accessing. The controller request dictates the page and view being requested. Is this possible? Are there other options? Pros/Cons? Thanks in advanced!!!

    Read the article

  • IIS7 web farm - local or shared content?

    - by rbeier
    We're setting up an IIS7 web farm with two servers. Should each server have its own local copy of the content, or should they pull content directly from a UNC share? What are the pros and cons of each approach? We currently have a single live server WEB1, with content stored locally on a separate partition. A job periodically syncs WEB1 to a standby server WEB2, using robocopy for content and msdeploy for config. If WEB1 goes down, Nagios notifies us, and we manually run a script to move the IP addresses to WEB2's network interface. Both servers are actually VMs running on separate VMWare ESX 4 hosts. The servers are domain-joined. We have around 50-60 live sites on WEB1 - mostly ASP.NET, with a few that are just static HTML. Most are low-traffic "microsites". A few have moderate traffic, but none are massive. We'd like to change this so both WEB1 and WEB2 are actively serving content. This is mainly for reliability - if WEB1 goes down, we don't want to have to manually intervene to fail things over. Spreading the load is also nice, but the load is not high enough right now for us to need this. We're planning to configure our firewall to balance traffic across the two servers. It will detect when a server goes down and will send all the traffic to the remaining live server. We're planning to use sticky sessions for now... eventually we may move to SQL Server session state and stateless load balancing. But we need a way for the servers to share content. We were originally planning to move all the content to a UNC share. Our storage provider says they can set up a highly available SMB share for us. So if we go the UNC route, the storage shouldn't be a single point of failure. But we're wondering about the downsides to this approach: We'll need to change the physical paths for each site and virtual directory. There are also some projects that have absolute paths in their web.config files - we'll have to update those as well. We'll need to create a domain user for the web servers to access the share, and grant that user appropriate permissions. I haven't looked into this yet - I'm not sure if the application pool identity needs to be changed to this user, or if there's another way to tell IIS to use this account when connecting to the share. Sites will no longer be able to access their content if there's ever an Active Directory problem. In general, it just seems a lot more complicated, with more moving parts that could break. Our storage provider would create a volume for us on their redundant SAN. If I understand correctly, this SAN volume would be mounted on a VM running in their redundant VMWare environment; this VM would then expose the SMB share to our web servers. On the other hand, a benefit of the shared content approach is that we'd only need to deploy code to one place, and there would never be a temporary inconsistency between multiple copies of the content. This thread is pretty interesting, though some of these people are working at a much larger scale. I've just been discussing content so far, but we also need to think about configuration. I don't know if we can just use DFS replication for the applicationHost.config and other files, or if it's best to use the shared configuration feature with the config on a UNC share. What do you think? Thanks for your help, Richard

    Read the article

  • SQL SERVER – Interview Questions and Answers – Frequently Asked Questions – Introduction – Day 1 of 31

    - by pinaldave
    List of all the Interview Questions and Answers Series blogs Posts covering interview questions and answers always make for interesting reading.  Some people like the subject for their helpful hints and thought provoking subject, and others dislike these posts because they feel it is nothing more than cheating.  I’d like to discuss the pros and cons of a Question and Answer format here. Interview Questions and Answers are Helpful Just like blog posts, books, and articles, interview Question and Answer discussions are learning material.  The popular Dummy’s books or Idiots Guides are not only for “dummies,” but can help everyone relearn the fundamentals.  Question and Answer discussions can serve the same purpose.  You could call this SQL Server Fundamentals or SQL Server 101. I have administrated hundreds of interviews during my career and I have noticed that sometimes an interviewee with several years of experience lacks an understanding of the fundamentals.  These individuals have been in the industry for so long, usually working on a very specific project, that the ABCs of the business have slipped their mind. Or, when a college graduate is looking to get into the industry, he is not expected to have experience since he is just graduated. However, the new grad is expected to have an understanding of fundamentals and theory.  Sometimes after the stress of final exams and graduation, it can be difficult to remember the correct answers to interview questions, though. An interview Question and Answer discussion can be very helpful to both these individuals.  It is simply a way to go back over the building blocks of a topic.  Many times a simple review like this will help “jog” your memory, and all those previously-memorized facts will come flooding back to you.  It is not a way to re-learn a topic, but a way to remind yourself of what you already know. A Question and Answer discussion can also be a way to go over old topics in a more interesting manner.  Especially if you have been working in the industry, or taking lots of classes on the topic, everything you read can sound like a repeat of what you already know.  Going over a topic in a new format can make the material seem fresh and interesting.  And an interested mind will be more engaged and remember more in the end. Interview Questions and Answers are Harmful A common argument against a Question and Answer discussion is that it will give someone a “cheat sheet.” A new guy with relatively little experience can read the interview questions and answers, and then memorize them. When an interviewer asks him the same questions, he will repeat the answers and get the job. Honestly, is he good hire because he memorized the interview questions? Wouldn’t it be better for the interviewer to hire someone with actual experience?  The answer is not as easy as it seems – there are many different factors to be considered. If the interviewer is asking fundamentals-related questions only, he gets the answers he wants to hear, and then hires this first candidate – there is a good chance that he is hiring based on personality rather than experience.  If the interviewer is smart he will ask deeper questions, have more than one person on the interview team, and interview a variety of candidates.  If one interviewee happens to memorize some answers, it usually doesn’t mean he will automatically get the job at the expense of more qualified candidates. Another argument against interview Question and Answers is that it will give candidates a false sense of confidence, and that they will appear more qualified than they are. Well, if that is true, it will not last after the first interview when the candidate is asked difficult questions and he cannot find the answers in the list of interview Questions and Answers.  Besides, confidence is one of the best things to walk into an interview with! In today’s competitive job market, there are often hundreds of candidates applying for the same position.  With so many applicants to choose from, interviewers must make decisions about who to call back and who to hire based on their gut feeling.  One drawback to reading an interview Question and Answer article is that you might sound very boring in your interview – saying the same thing as every single candidate, and parroting answers that sound like someone else wrote them for you – because they did.  However, it is definitely better to go to an interview prepared, just make sure that you give a lot of thought to your answers to make them sound like your own voice.  Remember that you will be hired based on your skills as well as your personality, so don’t think that having all the right answers will make get you hired.  A good interviewee will be prepared, confident, and know how to stand out. My Opinion A list of interview Questions and Answers is really helpful as a refresher or for beginners. To really ace an interview, one needs to have real-world, hands-on experience with SQL Server as well. Interview questions just serve as a starter or easy read for experienced professionals. When I have to learn new technology, I often search online for interview questions and get an idea about the breadth and depth of the technology. Next Action I am going to write about interview Questions and Answers for next 30 days. I have previously written a series of interview questions and answers; now I have re-written them keeping the latest version of SQL Server and current industry progress in mind. If you have faced interesting interview questions or situations, please write to me and I will publish them as a guest post. If you want me to add few more details, leave a comment and I will make sure that I do my best to accommodate. Tomorrow we will start the interview Questions and Answers series, with a few interesting stories, best practices and guest posts. We will have a prize give-away and other awards when the series ends. List of all the Interview Questions and Answers Series blogs Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Interview Questions and Answers, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

    Read the article

  • WWDC and Tech Ed: A Tale of Two DevCons

    - by andrewbrust
    Next week marks the first full week of June.  Summer will feel in full swing and it will be a pretty big season for technology.  In seeming acknowledgement of that very fact, both Apple and Microsoft will be holding large developers conferences starting Monday.  Apple will hold its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in lovely San Francisco and Microsoft will hold its Tech Ed conference in muggy, oil-laden yet soulful New Orleans.  A brief survey of each show reveals much about the differences in each company’s offerings, strategy, and approach to customers and partners. In the interest of full disclosure, I must explain that I will be speaking at Microsoft’s Tech Ed show, and have done so, on and off, since 2003.  I have never been to an Apple conference and, as readers of this blog may know, I acquired my first ever Apple product 2 months ago when I bought an iPad on the day of that product’s launch.  I think I have keen insights into Microsoft’s conference.  My ability to comment on Apple’s event ranges somewhere between backseat driver and naive observer.  Just so you know. Although both shows cater to their respective company’s developers, there are a number of differences in the events’ purposes and content approaches.  First off, let’s consider each show as a news and PR vehicle.  WWDC will feature Steve Jobs’ keynote address and most likely will be where Apple officially reveals details of its 4th-generation iPhone. Jobs will likely also provide deep background information on the corresponding iPhone OS release.  These presumed announcements will make the show a magnet for the tech press and tech blogger elite.  Apple’s customers will be interested too, especially since the iPhone OS release will likely be made available to owners of existing iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad devices. Tech Ed, on the other hand, may not be especially newsworthy at all.  The keynote address will be given by Bob Muglia, who is President of the company’s Server and Tools Division, and he’ll likely be reviewing things more than previewing them. That’s because the company has, in the last 6-8 months, already released new versions of a majority of its products, including Windows, Office, SharePoint, SQL Server, Exchange, its Azure cloud platform, its .NET software development layer, its Silverlight Rich Internet Application (RIA) technology and its Visual Studio developer suite.  Redmond’s product pipeline has functioned more like a firehose of late, and the company has a ton of work to do to get developers up to speed on everything that’s new. I know I keep saying “developers,” but in Tech Ed’s case, that’s not really accurate.  In North America, Tech Ed caters to both developers and IT pros (i.e. technologists who work with physical IT infrastructure, as well as security and administration of the server software that runs on it).  This pairing has, since its inception, struck some as anomalous and others, including many exhibitors, as very smart. Certainly, it means Tech Ed ends up being a confab for virtually all professionals in Microsoft’s ecosystem.  And this year, Microsoft’s Business Intelligence (BI) conference will be co-located with Tech Ed, further enhancing that fusion effect. Clearly then, Microsoft’s show will focus on education, as its name assures us.  Apple’s will serve as both a press event and an opportunity to get its own App Store developer channel synced up with its newest technology advances.  For example, we already know that iPhone OS 4.0 will provide for a limited multitasking capability; that will only work well if people know how to code to it in a capable way.  Apple also told us its iAd advertising platform will be part of the new OS, and Steve Jobs insists that’s to provide a revenue opportunity for developers.  This too, then, needs to be explicated and soaked up buy the faithful. A look at each show’s breakout session lineup provides some interesting takeaways.  WWDC will have very few Mac-specific sessions on offer, and virtually no sessions that at are IT- or “Enterprise-“ related.  It’s all about the phone, music players and tablets.  However, WWDC will have plenty of low-level, hardcore tech coverage of such things as Advanced Memory Analysis and Creating Secure Applications, as well as lots of rich media-related content like Core Animation and Game Design and Development.  Beyond Apple’s proprietary platform, WWDC will also feature an array of sessions on HTML 5 and other Web standards.  In all, WWDC offers over 100 technical sessions and hands-on labs. What about Tech Ed’s editorial content?  Like the target audience, it really runs the gamut.  The show has 21 tracks (versus WWDC’s 5) and more than 745 “learning opportunities” which include breakout sessions, demo stations, hands-on labs and BIrds of a Feather discussion sessions.  Topics range from Architecture talks like Patterns of Parallel Programming to cloud computing talks like Building High Capacity Compute Applications with Windows Azure to IT-focused topics like Virtualization of Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Farm Architecture.  I also count 19 sessions on Windows Phone 7.  Unfortunately, with regard to Web standards and HTML 5, only a few sessions are offered, all of them specific to Internet Explorer. All-in-all, Apple’s show looks more exciting and “sexier” than Tech Ed. Microsoft’s show seems a lot more enterprise-focused than WWDC. This is, of course, well in sync with each company’s approach and products.  Microsoft’s content is much wider ranging and bests WWDC in sheer volume of sessions and labs.  I suppose some might argue that less is more; others that Apple’s consumer-focused offerings simply don’t provide for the same depth of coverage to a business audience.  Microsoft has a serious focus on the cloud and  a paucity of coverage on client-side Web standards; Apple has virtually no cloud offering at all.  Again, this reflects each tech titan’s go-to-market strategy. My own take is that employees of each company should attend the other’s event.  The amount of mutual exclusivity in content may make sense in terms of corporate philosophy, but the reality is that each company could stand to diversify into the other’s territory, at least somewhat. My own talk at Tech Ed will focus on competitive analysis around Microsoft’s BI products.  Apple does not today figure into that analysis. Maybe one day it will.

    Read the article

  • Too Many Kittens To Juggle At Once

    - by Bil Simser
    Ahh, the Internet. That crazy, mixed up place where one tweet turns into a conversation between dozens of people and spawns a blogpost. This is the direct result of such an event this morning. It started innocently enough, with this: Then followed up by a blog post by Joel here. In the post, Joel introduces us to the term Business Solutions Architect with mad skillz like InfoPath, Access Services, Excel Services, building Workflows, and SSRS report creation, all while meeting the business needs of users in a SharePoint environment. I somewhat disagreed with Joel that this really wasn’t a new role (at least IMHO) and that a good Architect or BA should really be doing this job. As Joel pointed out when you’re building a SharePoint team this kind of role is often overlooked. Engineers might be able to build workflows but is the right workflow for the right problem? Michael Pisarek wrote about a SharePoint Business Architect a few months ago and it’s a pretty solid assessment. Again, I argue you really shouldn’t be looking for roles that don’t exist and I don’t suggest anyone create roles to hire people to fill them. That’s basically creating a solution looking for problems. Michael’s article does have some great points if you’re lost in the quagmire of SharePoint duties though (and I especially like John Ross’ quote “The coolest shit is worthless if it doesn’t meet business needs”). SharePoinTony summed it up nicely with “SharePoint Solutions knowledge is both lacking and underrated in most environments. Roles help”. Having someone on the team who can dance between a business user and a coder can be difficult. Remember the idea of telling something to someone and them passing it on to the next person. By the time the story comes round the circle it’s a shadow of it’s former self with little resemblance to the original tale. This is very much business requirements as they’re told by the user to a business analyst, written down on paper, read by an architect, tuned into a solution plan, and implemented by a developer. Transformations between what was said, what was heard, what was written down, and what was developed can be distant cousins. Not everyone has the skill of communication and even less have negotiation skills to suit the SharePoint platform. Negotiation is important because not everything can be (or should be) done in SharePoint. Sometimes it’s just not appropriate to build it on the SharePoint platform but someone needs to know enough about the platform and what limitations it might have, then communicate that (and/or negotiate) with a customer or user so it’s not about “You can’t have this” to “Let’s try it this way”. Visualize the possible instead of denying the impossible. So what is the right SharePoint team? My cromag brain came with a fairly simpleton answer (and I’m sure people will just say this is a cop-out). The perfect SharePoint team is just enough people to do the job that know the technology and business problem they’re solving. Bridge the gap between business need and technology platform and you have an architect. Communicate the needs of the business effectively so the entire team understands it and you have a business analyst. Can you get this with full time workers? Maybe but don’t expect miracles out of the gate. Also don’t take a consultant’s word as gospel. Some consultants just don’t have the diversity of the SharePoint platform to be worth their value so be careful. You really need someone who knows enough about SharePoint to be able to validate a consultants knowledge level. This is basically try for any consultant, not just a SharePoint one. Specialization is good and needed. A good, well-balanced SharePoint team is one of people that can solve problems with work with the technology, not against it. Having a top developer is great, but don’t rely on them to solve world hunger if they can’t communicate very well with users. An expert business analyst might be great at gathering requirements so the entire team can understand them, but if it means building 100% custom solutions because they don’t fit inside the SharePoint boundaries isn’t of much value. Just repeat. There is no silver bullet. There is no silver bullet. There is no silver bullet. A few people pointed out Nick Inglis’ article Excluding The Information Professional In SharePoint. It’s a good read too and hits home that maybe some developers and IT pros need some extra help in the information space. If you’re in an organization that needs labels on people, come up with something everyone understands and go with it. If that’s Business Solutions Architect, SharePoint Advisor, or Guy Who Knows A Lot About Portals, make it work for you. We all wish that one person could master all that is SharePoint but we also know that doesn’t scale very well and you quickly get into the hit-by-a-bus syndrome (with the organization coming to a full crawl when the guy or girl goes on vacation, gets sick, or pops out a baby). There are too many gaps in SharePoint knowledge to have any one person know it all and too many kittens to juggle all at once. We like to consider ourselves experts in our field, but trying to tackle too many roles at once and we end up being mediocre jack of all trades, master of none. Don't fall into this pit. It's a deep, dark hole you don't want to try to claw your way out of. Trust me. Been there. Done that. Got the t-shirt. In the end I don’t disagree with Joel. SharePoint is a beast and not something that should be taken on by newbies. If you just read “Teach Yourself SharePoint in 24 Hours” and want to go build your corporate intranet or the next killer business solution with all your new found knowledge plan to pony up consultant dollars a few months later when everything goes to Hell in a handbasket and falls over. I’m not saying don’t build solutions in SharePoint. I’m just saying that building effective ones takes skill like any craft and not something you can just cobble together with a little bit of cursory knowledge. Thanks to *everyone* who participated in this tweet rush. It was fun and educational.

    Read the article

  • How do I determine if my controller is in IDE or AHCI mode in Linux?

    - by philcolbourn
    I have an old MacBook Pro 4,1 (early 2008) - but I suspect an answer would apply to many MacBook Pros. It has an Intel IDE/SATA controller (ICH8M/ICH8M-E). I have installed a patched MBR that is supposed to put my controller into AHCI mode. It does this by setting some controller port value that I don't understand. This seems to work as I get this from lspci: 00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801HM/HEM (ICH8M/ICH8M-E) IDE Controller (rev 03) 00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801HM/HEM (ICH8M/ICH8M-E) SATA Controller [AHCI mode] (rev 03) Now most, perhaps all, sites that provide a solution (enabling AHCI) suggest that after a sleep/wake cycle that a controller will revert to IDE mode due to how Apple support Windows. They recommend disabling sleep. From author of patchedcode.bin I think Enabling AHCI for Windows on MacBooks NB: I do not have bootcamp installed and I do not have Windows installed. Is there a way to prove that my controller is in IDE or AHCI mode? Background Data Using patchedcode.bin MBR I get this in syslog: Jun 12 22:33:22 max kernel: [ 1.860955] ahci 0000:00:1f.2: version 3.0 Jun 12 22:33:22 max kernel: [ 1.861052] ahci 0000:00:1f.2: irq 45 for MSI/MSI-X Jun 12 22:33:22 max kernel: [ 1.861117] ahci 0000:00:1f.2: AHCI 0001.0100 32 slots 3 ports 1.5 Gbps 0x1 impl SATA mode Jun 12 22:33:22 max kernel: [ 1.861120] ahci 0000:00:1f.2: flags: 64bit ncq sntf pm led clo pio slum part ccc ems Jun 12 22:33:22 max kernel: [ 1.861130] ahci 0000:00:1f.2: setting latency timer to 64 Jun 12 22:33:22 max kernel: [ 1.880880] ACPI: Video Device [GFX0] (multi-head: yes rom: no post: no) Jun 12 22:33:22 max kernel: [ 1.880983] scsi2 : ahci Jun 12 22:33:22 max kernel: [ 1.884552] scsi3 : ahci Jun 12 22:33:22 max kernel: [ 1.886932] scsi4 : ahci Jun 12 22:33:22 max kernel: [ 1.886998] ata3: SATA max UDMA/133 abar m2048@0xdb504000 port 0xdb504100 irq 45 Jun 12 22:33:22 max kernel: [ 1.887000] ata4: DUMMY Jun 12 22:33:22 max kernel: [ 1.887002] ata5: DUMMY Jun 12 22:33:22 max kernel: [ 2.204103] ata3: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300) Jun 12 22:33:22 max kernel: [ 2.204656] ata3.00: ATA-8: FUJITSU MHY2200BH, 0081000D, max UDMA/100 Jun 12 22:33:22 max kernel: [ 2.204662] ata3.00: 390721968 sectors, multi 16: LBA48 NCQ (depth 31/32), AA Jun 12 22:33:22 max kernel: [ 2.205324] ata3.00: configured for UDMA/100 Jun 12 22:33:22 max kernel: [ 2.205554] scsi 2:0:0:0: Direct-Access ATA FUJITSU MHY2200B 0081 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5 Using my original MBR I get this from syslog: Jun 13 18:07:13 max kernel: [ 0.622861] ata_piix 0000:00:1f.1: version 2.13 Jun 13 18:07:13 max kernel: [ 0.622869] ata_piix 0000:00:1f.1: power state changed by ACPI to D0 Jun 13 18:07:13 max kernel: [ 0.622924] ata_piix 0000:00:1f.1: setting latency timer to 64 Jun 13 18:07:13 max kernel: [ 0.623339] scsi0 : ata_piix Jun 13 18:07:13 max kernel: [ 0.623730] scsi1 : ata_piix Jun 13 18:07:13 max kernel: [ 0.623765] ata1: PATA max UDMA/100 cmd 0x8108 ctl 0x811c bmdma 0x80e0 irq 21 Jun 13 18:07:13 max kernel: [ 0.623767] ata2: PATA max UDMA/100 cmd 0x8100 ctl 0x8118 bmdma 0x80e8 irq 21 Jun 13 18:07:13 max kernel: [ 0.623810] ata_piix 0000:00:1f.2: MAP [ Jun 13 18:07:13 max kernel: [ 0.623811] P0 -- -- -- ] Jun 13 18:07:13 max kernel: [ 0.623866] ata_piix 0000:00:1f.2: setting latency timer to 64 Jun 13 18:07:13 max kernel: [ 0.624241] scsi2 : ata_piix Jun 13 18:07:13 max kernel: [ 0.624558] scsi3 : ata_piix Jun 13 18:07:13 max kernel: [ 0.624862] ata3: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0x80f8 ctl 0x8114 bmdma 0x8020 irq 18 Jun 13 18:07:13 max kernel: [ 0.624865] ata4: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0x80f0 ctl 0x8110 bmdma 0x8028 irq 18 Jun 13 18:07:13 max kernel: [ 1.208879] ata3.00: ATA-8: FUJITSU MHY2200BH, 0081000D, max UDMA/100 Jun 13 18:07:13 max kernel: [ 1.208882] ata3.00: 390721968 sectors, multi 16: LBA48 NCQ (depth 0/32) Jun 13 18:07:13 max kernel: [ 1.208961] ata1.01: ATAPI: MATSHITA DVD+/-RW UJ-867S, 1.00, max UDMA/33 Jun 13 18:07:13 max kernel: [ 1.216186] ata3.00: configured for UDMA/100 Jun 13 18:07:13 max kernel: [ 1.224396] ata1.01: configured for UDMA/33

    Read the article

  • Exploring the Excel Services REST API

    - by jamiet
    Over the last few years Analysis Services guru Chris Webb and I have been on something of a crusade to enable better access to data that is locked up in countless Excel workbooks that litter the hard drives of enterprise PCs. The most prominent manifestation of that crusade up to now has been a forum thread that Chris began on Microsoft Answers entitled Excel Web App API? Chris began that thread with: I was wondering whether there was an API for the Excel Web App? Specifically, I was wondering if it was possible (or if it will be possible in the future) to expose data in a spreadsheet in the Excel Web App as an OData feed, in the way that it is possible with Excel Services? Up to recently the last 10 words of that paragraph "in the way that it is possible with Excel Services" had completely washed over me however a comment on my recent blog post Thoughts on ExcelMashup.com (and a rant) by Josh Booker in which Josh said: Excel Services is a service application built for sharepoint 2010 which exposes a REST API for excel documents. We're looking forward to pros like you giving it a try now that Office365 makes sharepoint more easily accessible.  Can't wait for your future blog about using REST API to load data from Excel on Offce 365 in SSIS. made me think that perhaps the Excel Services REST API is something I should be looking into and indeed that is what I have been doing over the past few days. And you know what? I'm rather impressed with some of what Excel Services' REST API has to offer. Unfortunately Excel Services' REST API also has one debilitating aspect that renders this blog post much less useful than it otherwise would be; namely that it is not publicly available from the Excel Web App on SkyDrive. Therefore all I can do in this blog post is show you screenshots of what the REST API provides in Sharepoint rather than linking you directly to those REST resources; that's a great shame because one of the benefits of a REST API is that it is easily and ubiquitously demonstrable from a web browser. Instead I am hosting a workbook on Sharepoint in Office 365 because that does include Excel Services' REST API but, again, all I can do is show you screenshots. N.B. If anyone out there knows how to make Office-365-hosted spreadsheets publicly-accessible (i.e. without requiring a username/password) please do let me know (because knowing which forum on which to ask the question is an exercise in futility). In order to demonstrate Excel Services' REST API I needed some decent data and for that I used the World Tourism Organization Statistics Database and Yearbook - United Nations World Tourism Organization dataset hosted on Azure Datamarket (its free, by the way); this dataset "provides comprehensive information on international tourism worldwide and offers a selection of the latest available statistics on international tourist arrivals, tourism receipts and expenditure" and you can explore the data for yourself here. If you want to play along at home by viewing the data as it exists in Excel then it can be viewed here. Let's dive in.   The root of Excel Services' REST API is the model resource which resides at: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model Note that this is true for every workbook hosted in a Sharepoint document library - each Excel workbook is a RESTful resource. (Update: Mark Stacey on Twitter tells me that "It's turned off by default in onpremise Sharepoint (1 tickbox to turn on though)". Thanks Mark!) The data is provided as an ATOM feed but I have Firefox's feed reading ability turned on so you don't see the underlying XML goo. As you can see there are four top level resources, Ranges, Charts, Tables and PivotTables; exploring one of those resources is where things get interesting. Let's take a look at the Tables Resource: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Tables Our workbook contains only one table, called ‘Table1’ (to reiterate, you can explore this table yourself here). Viewing that table via the REST API is pretty easy, we simply append the name of the table onto our previous URI: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Tables('Table1') As you can see, that quite simply gives us a representation of the data in that table. What you cannot see from this screenshot is that this is pure HTML that is being served up; that is all well and good but actually we can do more interesting things. If we specify that the data should be returned not as HTML but as: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Tables('Table1')?$format=image then that data comes back as a pure image and can be used in any web page where you would ordinarily use images. This is the thing that I really like about Excel Services’ REST API – we can embed an image in any web page but instead of being a copy of the data, that image is actually live – if the underlying data in the workbook were to change then hitting refresh will show a new image. Pretty cool, no? The same is true of any Charts or Pivot Tables in your workbook - those can be embedded as images too and if the underlying data changes, boom, the image in your web page changes too. There is a lot of data in the workbook so the image returned by that previous URI is too large to show here so instead let’s take a look at a different resource, this time a range: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Ranges('Data!A1|C15') That URI returns cells A1 to C15 from a worksheet called “Data”: And if we ask for that as an image again: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Ranges('Data!A1|C15')?$format=image Were this image resource not behind a username/password then this would be a live image of the data in the workbook as opposed to one that I had to copy and upload elsewhere. Nonetheless I hope this little wrinkle doesn't detract from the inate value of what I am trying to articulate here; that an existing image in a web page can be changed on-the-fly simply by inserting some data into an Excel workbook. I for one think that that is very cool indeed! I think that's enough in the way of demo for now as this shows what is possible using Excel Services' REST API. Of course, not all features work quite how I would like and here is a bulleted list of some of my more negative feedback: The URIs are pig-ugly. Are "_vti_bin" & "ExcelRest.aspx" really necessary as part of the URI? Would this not be better: http://server/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/Model/Tables(‘Table1’) That URI provides the necessary addressability and is a lot easier to remember. Discoverability of these resources is not easy, we essentially have to handcrank a URI ourselves. Take the example of embedding a chart into a blog post - would it not be better if I could browse first through the document library to an Excel workbook and THEN through the workbook to the chart/range/table that I am interested in? Call it a wizard if you like. That would be really cool and would, I am sure, promote this feature and cut down on the copy-and-paste disease that the REST API is meant to alleviate. The resources that I demonstrated can be returned as feeds as well as images or HTML simply by changing the format parameter to ?$format=atom however for some inexplicable reason they don't return OData and no-one on the Excel Services team can tell me why (believe me, I have asked). $format is an OData parameter however other useful parameters such as $top and $filter are not supported. It would be nice if they were. Although I haven't demonstrated it here Excel Services' REST API does provide a makeshift way of altering the data by changing the value of specific cells however what it does not allow you to do is add new data into the workbook. Google Docs allows this and was one of the motivating factors for Chris Webb's forum post that I linked to above. None of this works for Excel workbooks hosted on SkyDrive This blog post is as long as it needs to be for a short introduction so I'll stop now. If you want to know more than I recommend checking out a few links: Excel Services REST API documentation on MSDNSo what does REST on Excel Services look like??? by Shahar PrishExcel Services in SharePoint 2010 REST API Syntax by Christian Stich. Any thoughts? Let's hear them in the comments section below! @Jamiet 

    Read the article

  • Week in Geek: IPv6 Capable Smartphones Compromise User Privacy Edition

    - by Asian Angel
    This week we learned how to “clone a disk, resize static windows, and create system function shortcuts”, use 45 different services, sites, and apps to help read favorite sites, add MP3 support to Audacity (for saving in MP3 format), install a Wii game loader for easy backups and fast load times, create a Blue Screen of Death in any color, and more. Photo by legofenris. Weekly News Links Photo by The H Security. IPv6: Smartphones compromise users’ privacy Since version 4 of the iOS operating system, Apple’s iPhones, iPads and iPods have been capable of handling IPv6, and most Android devices have been capable since version 2.1. However, the operating systems transfer an ID that discloses information about their users. Dumb phones can be attacked too Much of the discussion of security threats to mobile phones revolves around smartphones, but researchers have found that less advanced “feature phones,” still used by the majority of people around the world, also are vulnerable to attack. SCADA exploit – the dragon awakes The recent publication of an exploit for KingView, a software package for visualising industrial process control systems, appears to be having an effect. Threatpost reports that both the Chinese vendor Wellintech and Chinese CERT (CN-CERT) have now reacted. Sophos: Spam to get more malicious Spam is becoming more malicious in nature as trickery tactics change in line with current user interests, according to a new report released Tuesday by Sophos. Global spam traffic rebounds as Rustock wakes Spam is on the rise after the Rustock botnet awoke from its Christmas slumber, according to Symantec. Cracking WPA keys in the cloud At the forthcoming Black Hat conference, blogger Thomas Roth plans to demonstrate how weak WPA PSKs can be cracked quickly and easily using Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. Microsoft Security Advisory: Vulnerability in Internet Explorer could allow remote code execution Provides a link to more details about the vulnerability and shows a work-around/fix for the problem. Adobe plans to make it easier to delete Flash cookies in web browsers The new API, NPAPI:ClearSiteData, will allow Flash cookies – also known as Local Shared Objects (LSO) – to be deleted directly in the browser’s settings. Firefox beta getting new database standard The ninth beta version of Firefox is set to get support for a standard called IndexedDB that provides a database interface useful for offline data storage and other tasks needing information on a browser’s computer. MetroPCS accused of blocking certain Net content MetroPCS is violating the FCC’s recently approved Net neutrality rules by blocking certain Internet content, say several public interest groups. Server and Tools chief Muglia to leave Microsoft in summer 2011 Microsoft veteran and Server & Tools Business (STB) President Bob Muglia is leaving Microsoft, according to an email that CEO Steve Ballmer sent to employees on January 10. Report: DOJ nearing decision on Google-ITA The U.S. Department of Justice is gearing up for a possible formal antitrust investigation into whether or not Google should be allowed to purchase travel software company ITA Software, according to a report. South Korea says Google Street View broke law Police in South Korea reportedly say Google broke the country’s law when its Street View service captured personal data from unsecure Wi-Fi networks. The backlash over Google’s HTML5 video bet Choosing strategies based on what you believe to be long-term benefits is generally a good idea when running a business, but if you manage to alienate the world in the process, the long term may become irrelevant. Google answers critics on HTML5 Web video move Google responded to critics of its decision to drop support for a popular HTML5 video codec by declaring that a royalty-supported standard for Web video will hold the Web hostage. Random TinyHacker Links A Special GiveAway: a Great Book & Great Security Software The team from 7 Tutorials has a special giveaway running during the month of January. Signed copies of their latest book, full 1-year licenses of BitDefender Internet Security 2011 and free 3-month trials for everyone willing to participate. One Click Rooting For Android Phones Here’s a nice tool that helps you root your Android phone effortlessly. New Angry Birds Free version 1.0 Available in the App Store. Google Code University Learn programming at Google Code University. Capture and Share Your Favorite Part Of a YouTube Video SnipSnip.it lets you share only the part of the video that you like. Super User Questions More great questions and answers from this past week’s popular topics at Super User. What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for? Does OS X support linux-like features? What is the easiest way to make a backup of an entire hard disk? Will shifting from Wireless to Wired network result in better performance? Is it legal to install Windows 7 Home Premium Retail inside VMware virtual machine? How-To Geek Weekly Article Recap Enjoy reading through our hottest articles from this past week. The 50 Best Ways to Disable Built-in Windows Features You Don’t Want The Best of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in 2011 How to Upgrade Windows 7 Easily (And Understand Whether You Should) The Worst of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in 2011 The How-To Geek Guide to Audio Editing: Basic Noise Removal One Year Ago on How-To Geek More great articles from one year ago filled with helpful geeky goodness for you to enjoy. Share Text & Images the Easy Way with JustPaste.it Start Portable Firefox in Safe Mode Firefox 3.6 Release Candidate Available, Here’s How to Fix Your Incompatible Extensions Protect Your Computer from “Little Hands” with KidSafe Lock Prying Eyes Out of Your Minimized Windows Custom Crocheted Cylon-Cthulhu Hybrid What happens when you let your Cylon Centurion figure and your crocheted Cthulhu spend too many lonely nights together? A Cylon-Cthulhu hybrid, of course! You can get your own from the Cthulhu Chick store over on Etsy. Note: This is not an ad…Ruth is a friend of ours, and this Cylon-Cthulhu hybrid makes the perfect guard for the new MVP trophy in our office. The Geek Note Whether it is a geeky indoor project or just getting outside, we hope that you and your families have a terrific fun-filled weekend! Remember to keep sending those great tips in to us at [email protected]. Photo by qwrrty. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How to Upgrade Windows 7 Easily (And Understand Whether You Should) The How-To Geek Guide to Audio Editing: Basic Noise Removal Install a Wii Game Loader for Easy Backups and Fast Load Times The Best of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in 2011 The Worst of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in 2011 HTG Projects: How to Create Your Own Custom Papercraft Toy Firefox 4.0 Beta 9 Available for Download – Get Your Copy Now The Frustrations of a Computer Literate Watching a Newbie Use a Computer [Humorous Video] Season0nPass Jailbreaks Current Gen Apple TVs IBM’s Jeopardy Playing Computer Watson Shows The Pros How It’s Done [Video] Tranquil Juice Drop Abstract Wallpaper Pulse Is a Sleek Newsreader for iOS and Android Devices

    Read the article

  • SQL Server Split() Function

    - by HighAltitudeCoder
    Title goes here   Ever wanted a dbo.Split() function, but not had the time to debug it completely?  Let me guess - you are probably working on a stored procedure with 50 or more parameters; two or three of them are parameters of differing types, while the other 47 or so all of the same type (id1, id2, id3, id4, id5...).  Worse, you've found several other similar stored procedures with the ONLY DIFFERENCE being the number of like parameters taped to the end of the parameter list. If this is the situation you find yourself in now, you may be wondering, "why am I working with three different copies of what is basically the same stored procedure, and why am I having to maintain changes in three different places?  Can't I have one stored procedure that accomplishes the job of all three? My answer to you: YES!  Here is the Split() function I've created.    /******************************************************************************                                       Split.sql   ******************************************************************************/ /******************************************************************************   Split a delimited string into sub-components and return them as a table.   Parameter 1: Input string which is to be split into parts. Parameter 2: Delimiter which determines the split points in input string. Works with space or spaces as delimiter. Split() is apostrophe-safe.   SYNTAX: SELECT * FROM Split('Dvorak,Debussy,Chopin,Holst', ',') SELECT * FROM Split('Denver|Seattle|San Diego|New York', '|') SELECT * FROM Split('Denver is the super-awesomest city of them all.', ' ')   ******************************************************************************/ USE AdventureWorks GO   IF EXISTS       (SELECT *       FROM sysobjects       WHERE xtype = 'TF'       AND name = 'Split'       ) BEGIN       DROP FUNCTION Split END GO   CREATE FUNCTION Split (       @InputString                  VARCHAR(8000),       @Delimiter                    VARCHAR(50) )   RETURNS @Items TABLE (       Item                          VARCHAR(8000) )   AS BEGIN       IF @Delimiter = ' '       BEGIN             SET @Delimiter = ','             SET @InputString = REPLACE(@InputString, ' ', @Delimiter)       END         IF (@Delimiter IS NULL OR @Delimiter = '')             SET @Delimiter = ','   --INSERT INTO @Items VALUES (@Delimiter) -- Diagnostic --INSERT INTO @Items VALUES (@InputString) -- Diagnostic         DECLARE @Item                 VARCHAR(8000)       DECLARE @ItemList       VARCHAR(8000)       DECLARE @DelimIndex     INT         SET @ItemList = @InputString       SET @DelimIndex = CHARINDEX(@Delimiter, @ItemList, 0)       WHILE (@DelimIndex != 0)       BEGIN             SET @Item = SUBSTRING(@ItemList, 0, @DelimIndex)             INSERT INTO @Items VALUES (@Item)               -- Set @ItemList = @ItemList minus one less item             SET @ItemList = SUBSTRING(@ItemList, @DelimIndex+1, LEN(@ItemList)-@DelimIndex)             SET @DelimIndex = CHARINDEX(@Delimiter, @ItemList, 0)       END -- End WHILE         IF @Item IS NOT NULL -- At least one delimiter was encountered in @InputString       BEGIN             SET @Item = @ItemList             INSERT INTO @Items VALUES (@Item)       END         -- No delimiters were encountered in @InputString, so just return @InputString       ELSE INSERT INTO @Items VALUES (@InputString)         RETURN   END -- End Function GO   ---- Set Permissions --GRANT SELECT ON Split TO UserRole1 --GRANT SELECT ON Split TO UserRole2 --GO   The syntax is basically as follows: SELECT <fields> FROM Table 1 JOIN Table 2 ON ... JOIN Table 3 ON ... WHERE LOGICAL CONDITION A AND LOGICAL CONDITION B AND LOGICAL CONDITION C AND TABLE2.Id IN (SELECT * FROM Split(@IdList, ',')) @IdList is a parameter passed into the stored procedure, and the comma (',') is the delimiter you have chosen to split the parameter list on. You can also use it like this: SELECT <fields> FROM Table 1 JOIN Table 2 ON ... JOIN Table 3 ON ... WHERE LOGICAL CONDITION A AND LOGICAL CONDITION B AND LOGICAL CONDITION C HAVING COUNT(SELECT * FROM Split(@IdList, ',') Similarly, it can be used in other aggregate functions at run-time: SELECT MIN(SELECT * FROM Split(@IdList, ','), <fields> FROM Table 1 JOIN Table 2 ON ... JOIN Table 3 ON ... WHERE LOGICAL CONDITION A AND LOGICAL CONDITION B AND LOGICAL CONDITION C GROUP BY <fields> Now that I've (hopefully effectively) explained the benefits to using this function and implementing it in one or more of your database objects, let me warn you of a caveat that you are likely to encounter.  You may have a team member who waits until the right moment to ask you a pointed question: "Doesn't this function just do the same thing as using the IN function?  Why didn't you just use that instead?  In other words, why bother with this function?" What's happening is, one or more team members has failed to understand the reason for implementing this kind of function in the first place.  (Note: this is THE MOST IMPORTANT ASPECT OF THIS POST). Allow me to outline a few pros to implementing this function, so you may effectively parry this question.  Touche. 1) Code consolidation.  You don't have to maintain what is basically the same code and logic, but with varying numbers of the same parameter in several SQL objects.  I'm not going to go into the cons related to using this function, because the afore mentioned team member is probably more than adept at pointing these out.  Remember, the real positive contribution is ou are decreasing the liklihood that your team fails to update all (x) duplicate copies of what are basically the same stored procedure, and so on...  This is the classic downside to duplicate code.  It is a virus, and you should kill it. You might be better off rejecting your team member's question, and responding with your own: "Would you rather maintain the same logic in multiple different stored procedures, and hope that the team doesn't forget to always update all of them at the same time?".  In his head, he might be thinking "yes, I would like to maintain several different copies of the same stored procedure", although you probably will not get such a direct response.  2) Added flexibility - you can use the Split function elsewhere, and for splitting your data in different ways.  Plus, you can use any kind of delimiter you wish.  How can you know today the ways in which you might want to examine your data tomorrow?  Segue to my next point. 3) Because the function takes a delimiter parameter, you can split the data in any number of ways.  This greatly increases the utility of such a function and enables your team to work with the data in a variety of different ways in the future.  You can split on a single char, symbol, word, or group of words.  You can split on spaces.  (The list goes on... test it out). Finally, you can dynamically define the behavior of a stored procedure (or other SQL object) at run time, through the use of this function.  Rather than have several objects that accomplish almost the same thing, why not have only one instead?

    Read the article

  • Exploring the Excel Services REST API

    - by jamiet
    Over the last few years Analysis Services guru Chris Webb and I have been on something of a crusade to enable better access to data that is locked up in countless Excel workbooks that litter the hard drives of enterprise PCs. The most prominent manifestation of that crusade up to now has been a forum thread that Chris began on Microsoft Answers entitled Excel Web App API? Chris began that thread with: I was wondering whether there was an API for the Excel Web App? Specifically, I was wondering if it was possible (or if it will be possible in the future) to expose data in a spreadsheet in the Excel Web App as an OData feed, in the way that it is possible with Excel Services? Up to recently the last 10 words of that paragraph "in the way that it is possible with Excel Services" had completely washed over me however a comment on my recent blog post Thoughts on ExcelMashup.com (and a rant) by Josh Booker in which Josh said: Excel Services is a service application built for sharepoint 2010 which exposes a REST API for excel documents. We're looking forward to pros like you giving it a try now that Office365 makes sharepoint more easily accessible.  Can't wait for your future blog about using REST API to load data from Excel on Offce 365 in SSIS. made me think that perhaps the Excel Services REST API is something I should be looking into and indeed that is what I have been doing over the past few days. And you know what? I'm rather impressed with some of what Excel Services' REST API has to offer. Unfortunately Excel Services' REST API also has one debilitating aspect that renders this blog post much less useful than it otherwise would be; namely that it is not publicly available from the Excel Web App on SkyDrive. Therefore all I can do in this blog post is show you screenshots of what the REST API provides in Sharepoint rather than linking you directly to those REST resources; that's a great shame because one of the benefits of a REST API is that it is easily and ubiquitously demonstrable from a web browser. Instead I am hosting a workbook on Sharepoint in Office 365 because that does include Excel Services' REST API but, again, all I can do is show you screenshots. N.B. If anyone out there knows how to make Office-365-hosted spreadsheets publicly-accessible (i.e. without requiring a username/password) please do let me know (because knowing which forum on which to ask the question is an exercise in futility). In order to demonstrate Excel Services' REST API I needed some decent data and for that I used the World Tourism Organization Statistics Database and Yearbook - United Nations World Tourism Organization dataset hosted on Azure Datamarket (its free, by the way); this dataset "provides comprehensive information on international tourism worldwide and offers a selection of the latest available statistics on international tourist arrivals, tourism receipts and expenditure" and you can explore the data for yourself here. If you want to play along at home by viewing the data as it exists in Excel then it can be viewed here. Let's dive in.   The root of Excel Services' REST API is the model resource which resides at: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model Note that this is true for every workbook hosted in a Sharepoint document library - each Excel workbook is a RESTful resource. (Update: Mark Stacey on Twitter tells me that "It's turned off by default in onpremise Sharepoint (1 tickbox to turn on though)". Thanks Mark!) The data is provided as an ATOM feed but I have Firefox's feed reading ability turned on so you don't see the underlying XML goo. As you can see there are four top level resources, Ranges, Charts, Tables and PivotTables; exploring one of those resources is where things get interesting. Let's take a look at the Tables Resource: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Tables Our workbook contains only one table, called ‘Table1’ (to reiterate, you can explore this table yourself here). Viewing that table via the REST API is pretty easy, we simply append the name of the table onto our previous URI: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Tables('Table1') As you can see, that quite simply gives us a representation of the data in that table. What you cannot see from this screenshot is that this is pure HTML that is being served up; that is all well and good but actually we can do more interesting things. If we specify that the data should be returned not as HTML but as: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Tables('Table1')?$format=image then that data comes back as a pure image and can be used in any web page where you would ordinarily use images. This is the thing that I really like about Excel Services’ REST API – we can embed an image in any web page but instead of being a copy of the data, that image is actually live – if the underlying data in the workbook were to change then hitting refresh will show a new image. Pretty cool, no? The same is true of any Charts or Pivot Tables in your workbook - those can be embedded as images too and if the underlying data changes, boom, the image in your web page changes too. There is a lot of data in the workbook so the image returned by that previous URI is too large to show here so instead let’s take a look at a different resource, this time a range: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Ranges('Data!A1|C15') That URI returns cells A1 to C15 from a worksheet called “Data”: And if we ask for that as an image again: http://server/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/model/Ranges('Data!A1|C15')?$format=image Were this image resource not behind a username/password then this would be a live image of the data in the workbook as opposed to one that I had to copy and upload elsewhere. Nonetheless I hope this little wrinkle doesn't detract from the inate value of what I am trying to articulate here; that an existing image in a web page can be changed on-the-fly simply by inserting some data into an Excel workbook. I for one think that that is very cool indeed! I think that's enough in the way of demo for now as this shows what is possible using Excel Services' REST API. Of course, not all features work quite how I would like and here is a bulleted list of some of my more negative feedback: The URIs are pig-ugly. Are "_vti_bin" & "ExcelRest.aspx" really necessary as part of the URI? Would this not be better: http://server/Documents/TourismExpenditureInMillionsOfUSD.xlsx/Model/Tables(‘Table1’) That URI provides the necessary addressability and is a lot easier to remember. Discoverability of these resources is not easy, we essentially have to handcrank a URI ourselves. Take the example of embedding a chart into a blog post - would it not be better if I could browse first through the document library to an Excel workbook and THEN through the workbook to the chart/range/table that I am interested in? Call it a wizard if you like. That would be really cool and would, I am sure, promote this feature and cut down on the copy-and-paste disease that the REST API is meant to alleviate. The resources that I demonstrated can be returned as feeds as well as images or HTML simply by changing the format parameter to ?$format=atom however for some inexplicable reason they don't return OData and no-one on the Excel Services team can tell me why (believe me, I have asked). $format is an OData parameter however other useful parameters such as $top and $filter are not supported. It would be nice if they were. Although I haven't demonstrated it here Excel Services' REST API does provide a makeshift way of altering the data by changing the value of specific cells however what it does not allow you to do is add new data into the workbook. Google Docs allows this and was one of the motivating factors for Chris Webb's forum post that I linked to above. None of this works for Excel workbooks hosted on SkyDrive This blog post is as long as it needs to be for a short introduction so I'll stop now. If you want to know more than I recommend checking out a few links: Excel Services REST API documentation on MSDNSo what does REST on Excel Services look like??? by Shahar PrishExcel Services in SharePoint 2010 REST API Syntax by Christian Stich. Any thoughts? Let's hear them in the comments section below! @Jamiet 

    Read the article

  • Is the Cloud ready for an Enterprise Java web application? Seeking a JEE hosting advice.

    - by Jakub Holý
    Greetings to all the smart people around here! I'd like to ask whether it is feasible or a good idea at all to deploy a Java enterprise web application to a Cloud such as Amazon EC2. More exactly, I'm looking for infrastructure options for an application that shall handle few hundred users with long but neither CPU nor memory intensive sessions. I'm considering dedicated servers, virtual private servers (VPSs) and EC2. I've noticed that there is a project called JBoss Cloud so people are working on enabling such a deployment, on the other hand it doesn't seem to be mature yet and I'm not sure that the cloud is ready for this kind of applications, which differs from the typical cloud-based applications like Twitter. Would you recommend to deploy it to the cloud? What are the pros and cons? The application is a Java EE 5 web application whose main function is to enable users to compose their own customized Product by combining the available Parts. It uses stateless and stateful session beans and JPA for persistence of entities to a RDBMS and fetches information about Parts from the company's inventory system via a web service. Aside of external users it's used also by few internal ones, who are authenticated against the company's LDAP. The application should handle around 300-400 concurrent users building their product and should be reasonably scalable and available though these qualities are only of a medium importance at this stage. I've proposed an architecture consisting of a firewall (FW) and load balancer supporting sticky sessions and https (in the Cloud this would be replaced with EC2's Elastic Load Balancing service and FW on the app. servers, in a physical architecture the load-balancer would be a HW), then two physical clustered application servers combined with web servers (so that if one fails, a user doesn't loose his/her long built product) and finally a database server. The DB server would need a slave backup instance that can replace the master instance if it fails. This should provide reasonable availability and fault tolerance and provide good scalability as long as a single RDBMS can keep with the load, which should be OK for quite a while because most of the operations are done in the memory using a stateful bean and only occasionally stored or retrieved from the DB and the amount of data is low too. A problematic part could be the dependency on the remote inventory system webservice but with good caching of its outputs in the application it should be OK too. Unfortunately I've only vague idea of the system resources (memory size, number and speed of CPUs/cores) that such an "average Java EE application" for few hundred users needs. My rough and mostly unfounded estimate based on actual Amazon offerings is that 1.7GB and a single, 2-core "modern CPU" with speed around 2.5GHz (the High-CPU Medium Instance) should be sufficient for any of the two application servers (since we can handle higher load by provisioning more of them). Alternatively I would consider using the Large instance (64b, 7.5GB RAM, 2 cores at 1GHz) So my question is whether such a deployment to the cloud is technically and financially feasible or whether dedicated/VPS servers would be a better option and whether there are some real-world experiences with something similar. Thank you very much! /Jakub Holy PS: I've found the JBoss EAP in a Cloud Case Study that shows that it is possible to deploy a real-world Java EE application to the EC2 cloud but unfortunately there're no details regarding topology, instance types, or anything :-(

    Read the article

  • April Oracle Database Events

    - by Mandy Ho
    Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";} April 17-18, 2012 – Moscow, Russia Oracle Develop Conference The Oracle database developer conference, Oracle Develop, will visit Moscow, Russia and Hyderabad, India this spring. Oracle Develop includes a database development track, which contains .NET sessions and hands-on lab led by an Oracle .NET product manager. Register today before the event fills up. http://www.oracle.com/javaone/ru-en/index.html Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";} April 24, 26 – San Diego, CA & San Jose, CA ISC2 Leadership Regional Event Series Oracle at (ISC)2 Security Leadership Series: Herding Clouds -- Managing Cloud Security Concerns and Expectations Join us for his interactive day-long session where industry leaders, including Oracle solution experts, will talk about how to: dispel the top Cloud security myths minimize "rogue Cloud" implementations identify potential compliance pitfalls and how to avoid them develop contract language for your cloud providers manage users across your fractured datacenter leverage existing technologies to protect data as it moves from the enterprise to the cloud http://www.oracle.com/webapps/events/ns/EventsDetail.jsp?p_eventId=146972&src=7239493&src=7239493&Act=228 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";} April 22-26, 2012 – Las Vegas, NV IOUG Collaborate 12 From April 22-26, 2012, Oracle takes Las Vegas. Thousands of Oracle professionals will descend upon the Mandalay Bay Convention Center for a weeks worth of education sessions, networking opportunities and more, at the only user-driven and user-run Oracle conference - COLLABORATE 12.  Your COLLABORATE 12 - IOUG Forum registration comes complete with a bonus- a full day Deep Dive education program on Sunday! Choose from numerous hot topics, including Real World Performance, High Availability and more, presented by legendary and seasoned Oracle pros, including Tom Kyte and Craig Shallahamer. http://www.oracle.com/webapps/events/ns/EventsDetail.jsp?p_eventId=143637&src=7360364&src=7360364&Act=5 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";} Independent Oracle User Group (IOUG) Regional Events: April 16, 2012 – Columbus, Ohio Ohio Oracle Users Group Higher Performance PL/PQL and Oracle Database 11g PL/SQL New Features – Featuring Steven Feuerstein http://www.ooug.org/ Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";} April 26, 2012- Irving, TX Dallas Oracle Users Group Oracle Database Forum: 5-7PM Oracle Corporation, 6031 Connection Drive Irving, TX http://memberservices.membee.com/538/irmevents.aspx?id=64 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";} Apr 30, 2012- Los Angeles, CA Real World Performance Tour A full day of real world database performance with: Tom Kyte, author of the ever popular AskTom Blog, Andrew Holdsworth, head of Oracle's Real World Performance Team, and Graham Wood, renowned Oracle Database performance architect. Through discussion, debate and demos, they’ll show you how to master performance engineering topics like: Best practices for designing hardware architectures and how to spot and fix bad design. How to develop applications that deliver the fastest possible performance without sacrificing accuracy.  New for 2012! Updates on Enterprise Manager, Exadata, and what these technologies mean to your current systems. http://www.ioug.org/Events/ADayofRealWorldPerformance/tabid/194/Default.aspx

    Read the article

< Previous Page | 46 47 48 49 50 51 52  | Next Page >