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• Windows Azure Recipe: Enterprise LOBs

  - by Clint Edmonson

  Enterprises are more and more dependent on their specialized internal Line of Business (LOB) applications than ever before. Naturally, the more software they leverage on-premises, the more infrastructure they need manage. It’s frequently the case that our customers simply can’t scale up their hardware purchases and operational staff as fast as internal demand for software requires. The result is that getting new or enhanced applications in the hands of business users becomes slower and more expensive every day. Being able to quickly deliver applications in a rapidly changing business environment while maintaining high standards of corporate security is a challenge that can be met right now by moving enterprise LOBs out into the cloud and leveraging Azure’s Access Control services. In fact, we’re seeing many of our customers (both large and small) see huge benefits from moving their web based business applications such as corporate help desks, expense tracking, travel portals, timesheets, and more to Windows Azure. Drivers Cost Reduction Time to market Security Solution Here’s a sketch of how many Windows Azure Enterprise LOBs are being architected and deployed: Ingredients Web Role – this will host the core of the application. Each web role is a virtual machine hosting an application written in ASP.NET (or optionally php, or node.js). The number of web roles can be scaled up or down as needed to handle peak and non-peak traffic loads. Many Java based applications are also being deployed to Windows Azure with a little more effort. Database – every modern web application needs to store data. SQL Azure databases look and act exactly like their on-premise siblings but are fault tolerant and have data redundancy built in. Access Control – this service is necessary to establish federated identity between the cloud hosted application and an enterprise’s corporate network. It works in conjunction with a secure token service (STS) that is hosted on-premises to establish the corporate user’s identity and credentials. The source code for an on-premises STS is provided in the Windows Azure training kit and merely needs to be customized for the corporate environment and published on a publicly accessible corporate web site. Once set up, corporate users see a near seamless single sign-on experience. Reporting – businesses live and die by their reports and SQL Azure Reporting, based on SQL Server Reporting 2008 R2, can serve up reports with tables, charts, maps, gauges, and more. These reports can be accessed from the Windows Azure Portal, through a web browser, or directly from applications. Service Bus (optional) – if deep integration with other applications and systems is needed, the service bus is the answer. It enables secure service layer communication between applications hosted behind firewalls in on-premises or partner datacenters and applications hosted inside Windows Azure. The Service Bus provides the ability to securely expose just the information and services that are necessary to create a simpler, more secure architecture than opening up a full blown VPN. Data Sync (optional) – in cases where the data stored in the cloud needs to be shared internally, establishing a secure one-way or two-way data-sync connection between the on-premises and off-premises databases is a perfect option. It can be very granular, allowing us to specify exactly what tables and columns to synchronize, setup filters to sync only a subset of rows, set the conflict resolution policy for two-way sync, and specify how frequently data should be synchronized Training Labs These links point to online Windows Azure training labs where you can learn more about the individual ingredients described above. (Note: The entire Windows Azure Training Kit can also be downloaded for offline use.) Windows Azure (16 labs) Windows Azure is an internet-scale cloud computing and services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services which can be used individually or together. It gives developers the choice to build web applications; applications running on connected devices, PCs, or servers; or hybrid solutions offering the best of both worlds. New or enhanced applications can be built using existing skills with the Visual Studio development environment and the .NET Framework. With its standards-based and interoperable approach, the services platform supports multiple internet protocols, including HTTP, REST, SOAP, and plain XML SQL Azure (7 labs) Microsoft SQL Azure delivers on the Microsoft Data Platform vision of extending the SQL Server capabilities to the cloud as web-based services, enabling you to store structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Windows Azure Services (9 labs) As applications collaborate across organizational boundaries, ensuring secure transactions across disparate security domains is crucial but difficult to implement. Windows Azure Services provides hosted authentication and access control using powerful, secure, standards-based infrastructure. See my Windows Azure Resource Guide for more guidance on how to get started, including links web portals, training kits, samples, and blogs related to Windows Azure.

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• tile_static, tile_barrier, and tiled matrix multiplication with C++ AMP

  - by Daniel Moth

  We ended the previous post with a mechanical transformation of the C++ AMP matrix multiplication example to the tiled model and in the process introduced tiled_index and tiled_grid. This is part 2. tile_static memory You all know that in regular CPU code, static variables have the same value regardless of which thread accesses the static variable. This is in contrast with non-static local variables, where each thread has its own copy. Back to C++ AMP, the same rules apply and each thread has its own value for local variables in your lambda, whereas all threads see the same global memory, which is the data they have access to via the array and array_view. In addition, on an accelerator like the GPU, there is a programmable cache, a third kind of memory type if you'd like to think of it that way (some call it shared memory, others call it scratchpad memory). Variables stored in that memory share the same value for every thread in the same tile. So, when you use the tiled model, you can have variables where each thread in the same tile sees the same value for that variable, that threads from other tiles do not. The new storage class for local variables introduced for this purpose is called tile_static. You can only use tile_static in restrict(direct3d) functions, and only when explicitly using the tiled model. What this looks like in code should be no surprise, but here is a snippet to confirm your mental image, using a good old regular C array // each tile of threads has its own copy of locA, // shared among the threads of the tile tile_static float locA[16][16]; Note that tile_static variables are scoped and have the lifetime of the tile, and they cannot have constructors or destructors. tile_barrier In amp.h one of the types introduced is tile_barrier. You cannot construct this object yourself (although if you had one, you could use a copy constructor to create another one). So how do you get one of these? You get it, from a tiled_index object. Beyond the 4 properties returning index objects, tiled_index has another property, barrier, that returns a tile_barrier object. The tile_barrier class exposes a single member, the method wait. 15: // Given a tiled_index object named t_idx 16: t_idx.barrier.wait(); 17: // more code …in the code above, all threads in the tile will reach line 16 before a single one progresses to line 17. Note that all threads must be able to reach the barrier, i.e. if you had branchy code in such a way which meant that there is a chance that not all threads could reach line 16, then the code above would be illegal. Tiled Matrix Multiplication Example – part 2 So now that we added to our understanding the concepts of tile_static and tile_barrier, let me obfuscate rewrite the matrix multiplication code so that it takes advantage of tiling. Before you start reading this, I suggest you get a cup of your favorite non-alcoholic beverage to enjoy while you try to fully understand the code. 01: void MatrixMultiplyTiled(vector<float>& vC, const vector<float>& vA, const vector<float>& vB, int M, int N, int W) 02: { 03: static const int TS = 16; 04: array_view<const float,2> a(M, W, vA); 05: array_view<const float,2> b(W, N, vB); 06: array_view<writeonly<float>,2> c(M,N,vC); 07: parallel_for_each(c.grid.tile< TS, TS >(), 08: [=] (tiled_index< TS, TS> t_idx) restrict(direct3d) 09: { 10: int row = t_idx.local[0]; int col = t_idx.local[1]; 11: float sum = 0.0f; 12: for (int i = 0; i < W; i += TS) { 13: tile_static float locA[TS][TS], locB[TS][TS]; 14: locA[row][col] = a(t_idx.global[0], col + i); 15: locB[row][col] = b(row + i, t_idx.global[1]); 16: t_idx.barrier.wait(); 17: for (int k = 0; k < TS; k++) 18: sum += locA[row][k] * locB[k][col]; 19: t_idx.barrier.wait(); 20: } 21: c[t_idx.global] = sum; 22: }); 23: } Notice that all the code up to line 9 is the same as per the changes we made in part 1 of tiling introduction. If you squint, the body of the lambda itself preserves the original algorithm on lines 10, 11, and 17, 18, and 21. The difference being that those lines use new indexing and the tile_static arrays; the tile_static arrays are declared and initialized on the brand new lines 13-15. On those lines we copy from the global memory represented by the array_view objects (a and b), to the tile_static vanilla arrays (locA and locB) – we are copying enough to fit a tile. Because in the code that follows on line 18 we expect the data for this tile to be in the tile_static storage, we need to synchronize the threads within each tile with a barrier, which we do on line 16 (to avoid accessing uninitialized memory on line 18). We also need to synchronize the threads within a tile on line 19, again to avoid the race between lines 14, 15 (retrieving the next set of data for each tile and overwriting the previous set) and line 18 (not being done processing the previous set of data). Luckily, as part of the awesome C++ AMP debugger in Visual Studio there is an option that helps you find such races, but that is a story for another blog post another time. May I suggest reading the next section, and then coming back to re-read and walk through this code with pen and paper to really grok what is going on, if you haven't already? Cool. Why would I introduce this tiling complexity into my code? Funny you should ask that, I was just about to tell you. There is only one reason we tiled our extent, had to deal with finding a good tile size, ensure the number of threads we schedule are correctly divisible with the tile size, had to use a tiled_index instead of a normal index, and had to understand tile_barrier and to figure out where we need to use it, and double the size of our lambda in terms of lines of code: the reason is to be able to use tile_static memory. Why do we want to use tile_static memory? Because accessing tile_static memory is around 10 times faster than accessing the global memory on an accelerator like the GPU, e.g. in the code above, if you can get 150GB/second accessing data from the array_view a, you can get 1500GB/second accessing the tile_static array locA. And since by definition you are dealing with really large data sets, the savings really pay off. We have seen tiled implementations being twice as fast as their non-tiled counterparts. Now, some algorithms will not have performance benefits from tiling (and in fact may deteriorate), e.g. algorithms that require you to go only once to global memory will not benefit from tiling, since with tiling you already have to fetch the data once from global memory! Other algorithms may benefit, but you may decide that you are happy with your code being 150 times faster than the serial-version you had, and you do not need to invest to make it 250 times faster. Also algorithms with more than 3 dimensions, which C++ AMP supports in the non-tiled model, cannot be tiled. Also note that in future releases, we may invest in making the non-tiled model, which already uses tiling under the covers, go the extra step and use tile_static memory on your behalf, but it is obviously way to early to commit to anything like that, and we certainly don't do any of that today. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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• Get Application Title from Windows Phone

  - by psheriff

  In a Windows Phone application that I am currently developing I needed to be able to retrieve the Application Title of the phone application. You can set the Deployment Title in the Properties of your Windows Phone Application, however getting to this value programmatically can be a little tricky. This article assumes that you have Visual Studio 2010 and the Windows Phone tools installed along with it. The Windows Phone tools must be downloaded separately and installed with Visual Studio2010. You may also download the free Visual Studio2010 Express for Windows Phone developer environment. The WMAppManifest.xml File First off you need to understand that when you set the Deployment Title in the Properties windows of your Windows Phone application, this title actually gets stored into an XML file located under the \Properties folder of your application. This XML file is named WMAppManifest.xml. A portion of this file is shown in the following listing. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><Deployment  http://schemas.microsoft.com/windowsphone/2009/deployment"http://schemas.microsoft.com/windowsphone/2009/deployment"  AppPlatformVersion="7.0">  <App xmlns=""       ProductID="{71d20842-9acc-4f2f-b0e0-8ef79842ea53}"       Title="Mobile Time Track"       RuntimeType="Silverlight"       Version="1.0.0.0"       Genre="apps.normal"       Author="PDSA, Inc."       Description="Mobile Time Track"       Publisher="PDSA, Inc."> ... ...  </App></Deployment> Notice the “Title” attribute in the <App> element in the above XML document. This is the value that gets set when you modify the Deployment Title in your Properties Window of your Phone project. The only value you can set from the Properties Window is the Title. All of the other attributes you see here must be set by going into the XML file and modifying them directly. Note that this information duplicates some of the information that you can also set from the Assembly Information… button in the Properties Window. Why Microsoft did not just use that information, I don’t know. Reading Attributes from WMAppManifest I searched all over the namespaces and classes within the Windows Phone DLLs and could not find a way to read the attributes within the <App> element. Thus, I had to resort to good old fashioned XML processing. First off I created a WinPhoneCommon class and added two static methods as shown in the snippet below: public class WinPhoneCommon{  /// <summary>  /// Returns the Application Title   /// from the WMAppManifest.xml file  /// </summary>  /// <returns>The application title</returns>  public static string GetApplicationTitle()  {    return GetWinPhoneAttribute("Title");  }   /// <summary>  /// Returns the Application Description   /// from the WMAppManifest.xml file  /// </summary>  /// <returns>The application description</returns>  public static string GetApplicationDescription()  {    return GetWinPhoneAttribute("Description");  }   ... GetWinPhoneAttribute method here ...} In your Windows Phone application you can now simply call WinPhoneCommon.GetApplicationTitle() or WinPhone.GetApplicationDescription() to retrieve the Title or Description properties from the WMAppManifest.xml file respectively. You notice that each of these methods makes a call to the GetWinPhoneAttribute method. This method is shown in the following code snippet: /// <summary>/// Gets an attribute from the Windows Phone WMAppManifest.xml file/// To use this method, add a reference to the System.Xml.Linq DLL/// </summary>/// <param name="attributeName">The attribute to read</param>/// <returns>The Attribute's Value</returns>private static string GetWinPhoneAttribute(string attributeName){  string ret = string.Empty;   try  {    XElement xe = XElement.Load("WMAppManifest.xml");    var attr = (from manifest in xe.Descendants("App")                select manifest).SingleOrDefault();    if (attr != null)      ret = attr.Attribute(attributeName).Value;  }  catch  {    // Ignore errors in case this method is called    // from design time in VS.NET  }   return ret;} I love using the new LINQ to XML classes contained in the System.Xml.Linq.dll. When I did a Bing search the only samples I found for reading attribute information from WMAppManifest.xml used either an XmlReader or XmlReaderSettings objects. These are fine and work, but involve a little extra code. Instead of using these, I added a reference to the System.Xml.Linq.dll, then added two using statements to the top of the WinPhoneCommon class: using System.Linq;using System.Xml.Linq; Now, with just a few lines of LINQ to XML code you can read to the App element and extract the appropriate attribute that you pass into the GetWinPhoneAttribute method. Notice that I added a little bit of exception handling code in this method. I ignore the exception in case you call this method in the Loaded event of a user control. In design-time you cannot access the WMAppManifest file and thus an exception would be thrown. Summary In this article you learned how to retrieve the attributes from the WMAppManifest.xml file. I use this technique to grab information that I would otherwise have to hard-code in my application. Getting the Title or Description for your Windows Phone application is easy with just a little bit of LINQ to XML code. NOTE: You can download the complete sample code at my website. http://www.pdsa.com/downloads. Choose Tips & Tricks, then "Get Application Title from Windows Phone" from the drop-down. Good Luck with your Coding,Paul Sheriff ** SPECIAL OFFER FOR MY BLOG READERS **Visit http://www.pdsa.com/Event/Blog for a free video on Silverlight entitled Silverlight XAML for the Complete Novice - Part 1.  

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• Das T5-4 TPC-H Ergebnis naeher betrachtet

  - by Stefan Hinker

  Inzwischen haben vermutlich viele das neue TPC-H Ergebnis der SPARC T5-4 gesehen, das am 7. Juni bei der TPC eingereicht wurde.  Die wesentlichen Punkte dieses Benchmarks wurden wie gewohnt bereits von unserer Benchmark-Truppe auf  "BestPerf" zusammengefasst.  Es gibt aber noch einiges mehr, das eine naehere Betrachtung lohnt. Skalierbarkeit Das TPC raet von einem Vergleich von TPC-H Ergebnissen in unterschiedlichen Groessenklassen ab.  Aber auch innerhalb der 3000GB-Klasse ist es interessant: SPARC T4-4 mit 4 CPUs (32 Cores mit 3.0 GHz) liefert 205,792 QphH. SPARC T5-4 mit 4 CPUs (64 Cores mit 3.6 GHz) liefert 409,721 QphH. Das heisst, es fehlen lediglich 1863 QphH oder 0.45% zu 100% Skalierbarkeit, wenn man davon ausgeht, dass die doppelte Anzahl Kerne das doppelte Ergebnis liefern sollte.  Etwas anspruchsvoller, koennte man natuerlich auch einen Faktor von 2.4 erwarten, wenn man die hoehere Taktrate mit beruecksichtigt.  Das wuerde die Latte auf 493901 QphH legen.  Dann waere die SPARC T5-4 bei 83%.  Damit stellt sich die Frage: Was hat hier nicht skaliert?  Vermutlich der Plattenspeicher!  Auch hier lohnt sich eine naehere Betrachtung: Plattenspeicher Im Bericht auf BestPerf und auch im Full Disclosure Report der TPC stehen einige interessante Details zum Plattenspeicher und der Konfiguration.   In der Konfiguration der SPARC T4-4 wurden 12 2540-M2 Arrays verwendet, die jeweils ca. 1.5 GB/s Durchsatz liefert, insgesamt also eta 18 GB/s.  Dabei waren die Arrays offensichtlich mit jeweils 2 Kabeln pro Array direkt an die 24 8GBit FC-Ports des Servers angeschlossen.  Mit den 2x 8GBit Ports pro Array koennte man so ein theoretisches Maximum von 2GB/s erreichen.  Tatsaechlich wurden 1.5GB/s geliefert, was so ziemlich dem realistischen Maximum entsprechen duerfte. Fuer den Lauf mit der SPARC T5-4 wurden doppelt so viele Platten verwendet.  Dafuer wurden die 2540-M2 Arrays mit je einem zusaetzlichen Plattentray erweitert.  Mit dieser Konfiguration wurde dann (laut BestPerf) ein Maximaldurchsatz von 33 GB/s erreicht - nicht ganz das doppelte des SPARC T4-4 Laufs.  Um tatsaechlich den doppelten Durchsatz (36 GB/s) zu liefern, haette jedes der 12 Arrays 3 GB/s ueber seine 4 8GBit Ports liefern muessen.  Im FDR stehen nur 12 dual-port FC HBAs, was die Verwendung der Brocade FC Switches erklaert: Es wurden alle 4 8GBit ports jedes Arrays an die Switches angeschlossen, die die Datenstroeme dann in die 24 16GBit HBA ports des Servers buendelten.  Das theoretische Maximum jedes Storage-Arrays waere nun 4 GB/s.  Wenn man jedoch den Protokoll- und "Realitaets"-Overhead mit einrechnet, sind die tatsaechlich gelieferten 2.75 GB/s gar nicht schlecht.  Mit diesen Zahlen im Hinterkopf ist die Verdopplung des SPARC T4-4 Ergebnisses eine gute Leistung - und gleichzeitig eine gute Erklaerung, warum nicht bis zum 2.4-fachen skaliert wurde. Nebenbei bemerkt: Weder die SPARC T4-4 noch die SPARC T5-4 hatten in der gemessenen Konfiguration irgendwelche Flash-Devices. Mitbewerb Seit die T4 Systeme auf dem Markt sind, bemuehen sich unsere Mitbewerber redlich darum, ueberall den Eindruck zu hinterlassen, die Leistung des SPARC CPU-Kerns waere weiterhin mangelhaft.  Auch scheinen sie ueberzeugt zu sein, dass (ueber)grosse Caches und hohe Taktraten die einzigen Schluessel zu echter Server Performance seien.  Wenn ich mir nun jedoch die oeffentlichen TPC-H Ergebnisse ansehe, sehe ich dies: TPC-H @3000GB, Non-Clustered Systems System QphH SPARC T5-4 3.6 GHz SPARC T5 4/64 – 2048 GB 409,721.8 SPARC T4-4 3.0 GHz SPARC T4 4/32 – 1024 GB 205,792.0 IBM Power 780 4.1 GHz POWER7 8/32 – 1024 GB 192,001.1 HP ProLiant DL980 G7 2.27 GHz Intel Xeon X7560 8/64 – 512 GB 162,601.7 Kurz zusammengefasst: Mit 32 Kernen (mit 3 GHz und 4MB L3 Cache), liefert die SPARC T4-4 mehr QphH@3000GB ab als IBM mit ihrer 32 Kern Power7 (bei 4.1 GHz und 32MB L3 Cache) und auch mehr als HP mit einem 64 Kern Intel Xeon System (2.27 GHz und 24MB L3 Cache).  Ich frage mich, wo genau SPARC hier mangelhaft ist? Nun koennte man natuerlich argumentieren, dass beide Ergebnisse nicht gerade neu sind.  Nun, in Ermangelung neuerer Ergebnisse kann man ja mal ein wenig spekulieren: IBMs aktueller Performance Report listet die o.g. IBM Power 780 mit einem rPerf Wert von 425.5.  Ein passendes Nachfolgesystem mit Power7+ CPUs waere die Power 780+ mit 64 Kernen, verfuegbar mit 3.72 GHz.  Sie wird mit einem rPerf Wert von  690.1 angegeben, also 1.62x mehr.  Wenn man also annimmt, dass Plattenspeicher nicht der limitierende Faktor ist (IBM hat mit 177 SSDs getestet, sie duerfen das gerne auf 400 erhoehen) und IBMs eigene Leistungsabschaetzung zugrunde legt, darf man ein theoretisches Ergebnis von 311398 QphH@3000GB erwarten.  Das waere dann allerdings immer noch weit von dem Ergebnis der SPARC T5-4 entfernt, und gerade in der von IBM so geschaetzen "per core" Metric noch weniger vorteilhaft. In der x86-Welt sieht es nicht besser aus.  Leider gibt es von Intel keine so praktischen rPerf-Tabellen.  Daher muss ich hier fuer eine Schaetzung auf SPECint_rate2006 zurueckgreifen.  (Ich bin kein grosser Fan von solchen Kreuz- und Querschaetzungen.  Insb. SPECcpu ist nicht besonders geeignet, um Datenbank-Leistung abzuschaetzen, da fast kein IO im Spiel ist.)  Das o.g. HP System wird bei SPEC mit 1580 CINT2006_rate gelistet.  Das bis einschl. 2013-06-14 beste Resultat fuer den neuen Intel Xeon E7-4870 mit 8 CPUs ist 2180 CINT2006_rate.  Das ist immerhin 1.38x besser.  (Wenn man nur die Taktrate beruecksichtigen wuerde, waere man bei 1.32x.)  Hier weiter zu rechnen, ist muessig, aber fuer die ungeduldigen Leser hier eine kleine tabellarische Zusammenfassung: TPC-H @3000GB Performance Spekulationen System QphH* Verbesserung gegenueber der frueheren Generation SPARC T4-4 32 cores SPARC T4 205,792 2x SPARC T5-464 cores SPARC T5 409,721 IBM Power 780 32 cores Power7 192,001 1.62x IBM Power 780+ 64 cores Power7+  311,398* HP ProLiant DL980 G764 cores Intel Xeon X7560 162,601 1.38x HP ProLiant DL980 G780 cores Intel Xeon E7-4870    224,348* * Keine echten Resultate  - spekulative Werte auf der Grundlage von rPerf (Power7+) oder SPECint_rate2006 (HP) Natuerlich sind IBM oder HP herzlich eingeladen, diese Werte zu widerlegen.  Aber stand heute warte ich noch auf aktuelle Benchmark Veroffentlichungen in diesem Datensegment. Was koennen wir also zusammenfassen? Es gibt einige Hinweise, dass der Plattenspeicher der begrenzende Faktor war, der die SPARC T5-4 daran hinderte, auf jenseits von 2x zu skalieren Der Mythos, dass SPARC Kerne keine Leistung bringen, ist genau das - ein Mythos.  Wie sieht es umgekehrt eigentlich mit einem TPC-H Ergebnis fuer die Power7+ aus? Cache ist nicht der magische Performance-Schalter, fuer den ihn manche Leute offenbar halten. Ein System, eine CPU-Architektur und ein Betriebsystem jenseits einer gewissen Grenze zu skalieren ist schwer.  In der x86-Welt scheint es noch ein wenig schwerer zu sein. Was fehlt?  Nun, das Thema Preis/Leistung ueberlasse ich gerne den Verkaeufern ;-) Und zu guter Letzt: Nein, ich habe mich nicht ins Marketing versetzen lassen.  Aber manchmal kann ich mich einfach nicht zurueckhalten... Disclosure Statements The views expressed on this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Oracle. TPC-H, QphH, $/QphH are trademarks of Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC). For more information, see www.tpc.org, results as of 6/7/13. Prices are in USD. SPARC T5-4 409,721.8 QphH@3000GB, $3.94/QphH@3000GB, available 9/24/13, 4 processors, 64 cores, 512 threads; SPARC T4-4 205,792.0 QphH@3000GB, $4.10/QphH@3000GB, available 5/31/12, 4 processors, 32 cores, 256 threads; IBM Power 780 QphH@3000GB, 192,001.1 QphH@3000GB, $6.37/QphH@3000GB, available 11/30/11, 8 processors, 32 cores, 128 threads; HP ProLiant DL980 G7 162,601.7 QphH@3000GB, $2.68/QphH@3000GB available 10/13/10, 8 processors, 64 cores, 128 threads. SPEC and the benchmark names SPECfp and SPECint are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Results as of June 18, 2013 from www.spec.org. HP ProLiant DL980 G7 (2.27 GHz, Intel Xeon X7560): 1580 SPECint_rate2006; HP ProLiant DL980 G7 (2.4 GHz, Intel Xeon E7-4870): 2180 SPECint_rate2006,

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• ASP.NET WebAPI Security 3: Extensible Authentication Framework

  - by Your DisplayName here!

  In my last post, I described the identity architecture of ASP.NET Web API. The short version was, that Web API (beta 1) does not really have an authentication system on its own, but inherits the client security context from its host. This is fine in many situations (e.g. AJAX style callbacks with an already established logon session). But there are many cases where you don’t use the containing web application for authentication, but need to do it yourself. Examples of that would be token based authentication and clients that don’t run in the context of the web application (e.g. desktop clients / mobile). Since Web API provides a nice extensibility model, it is easy to implement whatever security framework you want on top of it. My design goals were: Easy to use. Extensible. Claims-based. ..and of course, this should always behave the same, regardless of the hosting environment. In the rest of the post I am outlining some of the bits and pieces, So you know what you are dealing with, in case you want to try the code. At the very heart… is a so called message handler. This is a Web API extensibility point that gets to see (and modify if needed) all incoming and outgoing requests. Handlers run after the conversion from host to Web API, which means that handler code deals with HttpRequestMessage and HttpResponseMessage. See Pedro’s post for more information on the processing pipeline. This handler requires a configuration object for initialization. Currently this is very simple, it contains: Settings for the various authentication and credential types Settings for claims transformation Ability to block identity inheritance from host The most important part here is the credential type support, but I will come back to that later. The logic of the message handler is simple: Look at the incoming request. If the request contains an authorization header, try to authenticate the client. If this is successful, create a claims principal and populate the usual places. If not, return a 401 status code and set the Www-Authenticate header. Look at outgoing response, if the status code is 401, set the Www-Authenticate header. Credential type support Under the covers I use the WIF security token handler infrastructure to validate credentials and to turn security tokens into claims. The idea is simple: an authorization header consists of two pieces: the schema and the actual “token”. My configuration object allows to associate a security token handler with a scheme. This way you only need to implement support for a specific credential type, and map that to the incoming scheme value. The current version supports HTTP Basic Authentication as well as SAML and SWT tokens. (I needed to do some surgery on the standard security token handlers, since WIF does not directly support string-ified tokens. The next version of .NET will fix that, and the code should become simpler then). You can e.g. use this code to hook up a username/password handler to the Basic scheme (the default scheme name for Basic Authentication). config.Handler.AddBasicAuthenticationHandler( (username, password) => username == password); You simply have to provide a password validation function which could of course point back to your existing password library or e.g. membership. The following code maps a token handler for Simple Web Tokens (SWT) to the Bearer scheme (the currently favoured scheme name for OAuth2). You simply have to specify the issuer name, realm and shared signature key: config.Handler.AddSimpleWebTokenHandler(     "Bearer",     http://identity.thinktecture.com/trust,     Constants.Realm,     "Dc9Mpi3jaaaUpBQpa/4R7XtUsa3D/ALSjTVvK8IUZbg="); For certain integration scenarios it is very useful if your Web API can consume SAML tokens. This is also easily accomplishable. The following code uses the standard WIF API to configure the usual SAMLisms like issuer, audience, service certificate and certificate validation. Both SAML 1.1 and 2.0 are supported. var registry = new ConfigurationBasedIssuerNameRegistry(); registry.AddTrustedIssuer( "d1 c5 b1 25 97 d0 36 94 65 1c e2 64 fe 48 06 01 35 f7 bd db", "ADFS"); var adfsConfig = new SecurityTokenHandlerConfiguration(); adfsConfig.AudienceRestriction.AllowedAudienceUris.Add( new Uri(Constants.Realm)); adfsConfig.IssuerNameRegistry = registry; adfsConfig.CertificateValidator = X509CertificateValidator.None; // token decryption (read from configuration section) adfsConfig.ServiceTokenResolver = FederatedAuthentication.ServiceConfiguration.CreateAggregateTokenResolver(); config.Handler.AddSaml11SecurityTokenHandler("SAML", adfsConfig); Claims Transformation After successful authentication, if configured, the standard WIF ClaimsAuthenticationManager is called to run claims transformation and validation logic. This stage is used to transform the “technical” claims from the security token into application claims. You can either have a separate transformation logic, or share on e.g. with the containing web application. That’s just a matter of configuration. Adding the authentication handler to a Web API application In the spirit of Web API this is done in code, e.g. global.asax for web hosting: protected void Application_Start() {     AreaRegistration.RegisterAllAreas();     ConfigureApis(GlobalConfiguration.Configuration);     RegisterGlobalFilters(GlobalFilters.Filters);     RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes);     BundleTable.Bundles.RegisterTemplateBundles(); } private void ConfigureApis(HttpConfiguration configuration) {     configuration.MessageHandlers.Add( new AuthenticationHandler(ConfigureAuthentication())); } private AuthenticationConfiguration ConfigureAuthentication() {     var config = new AuthenticationConfiguration     {         // sample claims transformation for consultants sample, comment out to see raw claims         ClaimsAuthenticationManager = new ApiClaimsTransformer(),         // value of the www-authenticate header, // if not set, the first scheme added to the handler collection is used         DefaultAuthenticationScheme = "Basic"     };     // add token handlers - see above     return config; } You can find the full source code and some samples here. In the next post I will describe some of the samples in the download, and then move on to authorization. HTH

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• Tracing Silex from PHP to the OS with DTrace

  - by cj

  In this blog post I show the full stack tracing of Brendan Gregg's php_syscolors.d script in the DTrace Toolkit. The Toolkit contains a dozen very useful PHP DTrace scripts and many more scripts for other languages and the OS. For this example, I'll trace the PHP micro framework Silex, which was the topic of the second of two talks by Dustin Whittle at a recent SF PHP Meetup. His slides are at Silex: From Micro to Full Stack. Installing DTrace and PHP The php_syscolors.d script uses some static PHP probes and some kernel probes. For Oracle Linux I discussed installing DTrace and PHP in DTrace PHP Using Oracle Linux 'playground' Pre-Built Packages. On other platforms with DTrace support, follow your standard procedures to enable DTrace and load the correct providers. The sdt and systrace providers are required in addition to fasttrap. On Oracle Linux, I loaded the DTrace modules like: # modprobe fasttrap # modprobe sdt # modprobe systrace # chmod 666 /dev/dtrace/helper Installing the DTrace Toolkit I download DTraceToolkit-0.99.tar.gz and extracted it: $ tar -zxf DTraceToolkit-0.99.tar.gz The PHP scripts are in the Php directory and examples in the Examples directory. Installing Silex I downloaded the "fat" Silex .tgz file from the download page and extracted it: $ tar -zxf silex_fat.tgz I changed the demonstration silex/web/index.php so I could use the PHP development web server: <?php // web/index.php $filename = __DIR__.preg_replace('#(\?.*)$#', '', $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']); if (php_sapi_name() === 'cli-server' && is_file($filename)) { return false; } require_once __DIR__.'/../vendor/autoload.php'; $app = new Silex\Application(); //$app['debug'] = true; $app->get('/hello', function() { return 'Hello!'; }); $app->run(); ?> Running DTrace The php_syscolors.d script uses the -Z option to dtrace, so it can be started before PHP, i.e. when there are zero of the requested probes available to be traced. I ran DTrace like: # cd DTraceToolkit-0.99/Php # ./php_syscolors.d Next, I started the PHP developer web server in a second terminal: $ cd silex $ php -S localhost:8080 -t web web/index.php At this point, the web server is idle, waiting for requests. DTrace is idle, waiting for the probes in php_syscolors.d to be fired, at which time the action associated with each probe will run. I then loaded the demonstration page in a browser: http://localhost:8080/hello When the request was fulfilled and the simple output of "Hello" was displayed, I ^C'd php and dtrace in their terminals to stop them. DTrace output over a thousand lines long had been generated. Here is one snippet from when run() was invoked: C PID/TID DELTA(us) FILE:LINE TYPE -- NAME ... 1 4765/4765 21 Application.php:487 func -> run 1 4765/4765 29 ClassLoader.php:182 func -> loadClass 1 4765/4765 17 ClassLoader.php:198 func -> findFile 1 4765/4765 31 ":- syscall -> access 1 4765/4765 26 ":- syscall <- access 1 4765/4765 16 ClassLoader.php:198 func <- findFile 1 4765/4765 25 ":- syscall -> newlstat 1 4765/4765 15 ":- syscall <- newlstat 1 4765/4765 13 ":- syscall -> newlstat 1 4765/4765 13 ":- syscall <- newlstat 1 4765/4765 22 ":- syscall -> newlstat 1 4765/4765 14 ":- syscall <- newlstat 1 4765/4765 15 ":- syscall -> newlstat 1 4765/4765 60 ":- syscall <- newlstat 1 4765/4765 13 ":- syscall -> newlstat 1 4765/4765 13 ":- syscall <- newlstat 1 4765/4765 20 ":- syscall -> open 1 4765/4765 16 ":- syscall <- open 1 4765/4765 26 ":- syscall -> newfstat 1 4765/4765 12 ":- syscall <- newfstat 1 4765/4765 17 ":- syscall -> newfstat 1 4765/4765 12 ":- syscall <- newfstat 1 4765/4765 12 ":- syscall -> newfstat 1 4765/4765 12 ":- syscall <- newfstat 1 4765/4765 20 ":- syscall -> mmap 1 4765/4765 14 ":- syscall <- mmap 1 4765/4765 3201 ":- syscall -> mmap 1 4765/4765 27 ":- syscall <- mmap 1 4765/4765 1233 ":- syscall -> munmap 1 4765/4765 53 ":- syscall <- munmap 1 4765/4765 15 ":- syscall -> close 1 4765/4765 13 ":- syscall <- close 1 4765/4765 34 Request.php:32 func -> main 1 4765/4765 22 Request.php:32 func <- main 1 4765/4765 31 ClassLoader.php:182 func <- loadClass 1 4765/4765 33 Request.php:249 func -> createFromGlobals 1 4765/4765 29 Request.php:198 func -> __construct 1 4765/4765 24 Request.php:218 func -> initialize 1 4765/4765 26 ClassLoader.php:182 func -> loadClass 1 4765/4765 89 ClassLoader.php:198 func -> findFile 1 4765/4765 43 ":- syscall -> access ... The output shows PHP functions being called and returning (and where they are located) and which system calls the PHP functions in turn invoked. The time each line took from the previous one is displayed in the third column. The first column is the CPU number. In this example, the process was always on CPU 1 so the output is naturally ordered without requiring post-processing, or the D script requiring to be modified to display a time stamp. On a terminal, the output of php_syscolors.d is color-coded according to whether each function is a PHP or system one, hence the file name. Summary With one tool, I was able to trace the interaction of a user application with the operating system. I was able to do this to an application running "live" in a web context. The DTrace Toolkit provides a very handy repository of DTrace information. Even though the PHP scripts were created in the time frame of the original PHP DTrace PECL extension, which only had PHP function entry and return probes, the scripts provide core examples for custom investigation and resolution scripts. You can easily adapt the ideas and and create scripts using the other PHP static probes, which are listed in the PHP Manual. Because DTrace is "always on", you can take advantage of it to resolve development questions or fix production situations.

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• Simple Scripting for your Exalogic Storage

  - by Trond Strømme

  As part of my job in Oracle ACS (Advanced Customer Services) I'm handling lots of different systems and customers. Among the recent systems I worked with have been Oracle's Exalogic engineered systems. One of the things I'd never had much exposure to as a system developer/architect/middleware guy/Java dude has been storage; outside of consuming it for my photography needs.. Well, I'm always ready for a new challenge... I'd downloaded the 7000 series storage simulator when it was released in the good old Sun days, found it fun and instructive to play around with, but as I never touched storage in any way (besides consuming it..) I forgot about it. A couple of years ago when I started working with Exalogic engineered systems it again came into light as an invaluable learning and testing tool for the embedded storage in an Exalogic;  Oracle's Sun ZFS Storage 7320 Appliance.  aaaanyway... I've been "booted" into a part-time role as the interim storage/system admin/middleware/Java guy for a client and found I needed to create the occasional report or summary or whatever.. of what's using the storage in the 7320 (as default configured for an Exalogic, 40T of disk in a mirrored configuration, yielding 18T of actual space.) Reading the nice documentation and some articles on the Oracle Technology Network I saw great possibilities with the embedded ECMAScript3/JavaScript engine in the 7000 series.  In my personal opinion anyone who's dealing with Exalogic administration, or exposed to any of the 7000 series of storage appliances and servers that Oracle offers should have a VirtualBox instance of it kicking around. For development and testing it's a fantastic tool. (It can save you from explaining (most) of the embarrassing FAILS you can do if you test something in a production system to your management...) So download, and install.  A small sidestep, if after firing up the 7000 series simulator in VirtualBox you've forgotten what it's IP address is, the following will sort you out if you log in directly via the running VirtualBox VM. So in my case I can ssh to 192.168.56.101 or point a browser to https://192.168.56.101:215 to log into the storage appliance. One simple way of executing a script on the 7320 is to ssh to the device and redirecting a file with the script in it to ssh. ssh [email protected] < myscript.js One question I got from my client and the people who will take over the systems was: "how can we see the quotas and allocations for all projects/shares in one easy go so we don't have to go navigating around in the BUI for all the hundreds of shares the 7320 is hosting just to check if anything is running dry?" Easy! JavaScript time, VirtualBox and emacs! //NOTE! this script is available 'as is' It has ben run on a couple of 7320's, (running 2010.08.17.3.0,1-1.25 & // 2011.04.24.1.0,1-1.8) a 7420 and the VB image, but I personally //offer no guarantee whatsoever that it won't make your server topple, catch fire or in any way go pear shaped.. //run at your own risk or learn from my code and or mistakes.. script run('cd /'); run('shares'); //get all projects: proj = list(); function spaceToGig(bytes){ return bytes/1073741824; //convert bytes to GB } function fullInPercent(quota, space_data){ tmp = (space_data/quota)*100; return tmp; } //print header, slightly good looking printf(" %s/%-15s %8s(GB) %7s(GB) %5s(GB) %7s(GB) %3s\n","Project", "Share","Quota","Ref", "Snap", "Total","%full"); printf("-------------------------------------------------------------------------------\n") //for each project, get all shares. check for quota and calculate percentage and human readable figures.. for (i=0;i<proj.length;i++){ run('select ' + proj[i]); //get all shares for a project var pshares = list(); //for each share get quota properties for (j=0;j<pshares.length;j++){ run('select ' + pshares[j]); quota = get('quota'); //properties associated with a share or inherited from a project spaceData = get('space_data'); spaceSnap = get('space_snapshots'); spaceTotal = get('space_total'); if(quota>0){ //has quota printf(" %s/%-15s \t%4.2fGB\t%.2fGB\t%.2fGB\t%.2fGB\t%5.2f%%\n",proj[i], pshares[j],spaceToGig(quota),spaceToGig(spaceData),spaceToGig(spaceSnap),spaceToGig(spaceTotal),fullInPercent(quota,spaceTotal)); }else{ //no quota printf(" %s/%-15s \t%8s\t%.2fGB\t%.2fGB\t%.2fGB\t%s\n",proj[i],pshares[j], "N/A", spaceToGig(spaceData),spaceToGig(spaceSnap),spaceToGig(spaceTotal),"N/A"); } run('cd ..'); } run('done'); } The resulting output should look something like this: Project/Share Quota(GB) Ref(GB) Snap(GB) Total(GB) %full ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ACSExalogicSystem/domains N/A 0.04GB 0.00GB 0.04GB N/A ACSExalogicSystem/logs N/A 0.01GB 0.00GB 0.01GB N/A ACSExalogicSystem/nodemgrs N/A 0.00GB 0.00GB 0.00GB N/A ACSExalogicSystem/stores N/A 0.04GB 0.00GB 0.04GB N/A ***_dev/FMW_***_1 133GB 4.24GB 0.01GB 4.25GB 3.19% ***_dev/FMW_***_2 N/A 4.25GB 0.01GB 4.26GB N/A ***_dev/applications 10GB 0.00GB 0.00GB 0.00GB 0.00% ***_dev/domains 50GB 10.75GB 3.55GB 14.30GB 28.61% ***_dev/logs 20GB 0.32GB 0.01GB 0.33GB 1.66% ***_dev/softwaredepot 20GB 4.15GB 0.00GB 4.15GB 20.73% ***_dev/stores 20GB 0.01GB 0.00GB 0.01GB 0.05% ###_dev/FMW_###_1 400GB 17.63GB 0.12GB 17.75GB 4.44% ###_dev/applications N/A 0.00GB 0.00GB 0.00GB N/A ###_dev/domains 120GB 14.21GB 5.53GB 19.74GB 16.45% ###_dev/logs 15GB 0.00GB 0.00GB 0.00GB 0.00% ###_dev/softwaredepot 250GB 73.55GB 0.02GB 73.57GB 29.43% …snip My apologies if the output is a bit mis-aligned here and there, I only bothered making it look good, not perfect :/ I also removed some of the project names (*,#)

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• SQL SERVER – Windows File/Folder and Share Permissions – Notes from the Field #029

  - by Pinal Dave

  [Note from Pinal]: This is a 29th episode of Notes from the Field series. Security is the task which we should give it to the experts. If there is a small overlook or misstep, there are good chances that security of the organization is compromised. This is very true, but there are always devils’s advocates who believe everyone should know the security. As a DBA and Administrator, I often see people not taking interest in the Windows Security hiding behind the reason of not expert of Windows Server. We all often miss the important mission statement for the success of any organization – Teamwork. In this blog post Brian tells the story in very interesting lucid language. Read On! In this episode of the Notes from the Field series database expert Brian Kelley explains a very crucial issue DBAs and Developer faces on their production server. Linchpin People are database coaches and wellness experts for a data driven world. Read the experience of Brian in his own words. When I talk security among database professionals, I find that most have at least a working knowledge of how to apply security within a database. When I talk with DBAs in particular, I find that most have at least a working knowledge of security at the server level if we’re speaking of SQL Server. One area I see continually that is weak is in the area of Windows file/folder (NTFS) and share permissions. The typical response is, “I’m a database developer and the Windows system administrator is responsible for that.” That may very well be true – the system administrator may have the primary responsibility and accountability for file/folder and share security for the server. However, if you’re involved in the typical activities surrounding databases and moving data around, you should know these permissions, too. Otherwise, you could be setting yourself up where someone is able to get to data he or she shouldn’t, or you could be opening the door where human error puts bad data in your production system. File/Folder Permission Basics: I wrote about file/folder permissions a few years ago to give the basic permissions that are most often seen. Here’s what you must know as a minimum at the file/folder level: Read - Allows you to read the contents of the file or folder. Having read permissions allows you to copy the file or folder. Write  – Again, as the name implies, it allows you to write to the file or folder. This doesn’t include the ability to delete, however, nothing stops a person with this access from writing an empty file. Delete - Allows the file/folder to be deleted. If you overwrite files, you may need this permission. Modify - Allows read, write, and delete. Full Control - Same as modify + the ability to assign permissions. File/Folder permissions aggregate, unless there is a DENY (where it trumps, just like within SQL Server), meaning if a person is in one group that gives Read and antoher group that gives Write, that person has both Read and Write permissions. As you might expect me to say, always apply the Principle of Least Privilege. This likely means that any additional permission you might add does not need Full Control. Share Permission Basics: At the share level, here are the permissions. Read - Allows you to read the contents on the share. Change - Allows you to read, write, and delete contents on the share. Full control - Change + the ability to modify permissions. Like with file/folder permissions, these permissions aggregate, and DENY trumps. So What Access Does a Person / Process Have? Figuring out what someone or some process has depends on how the location is being accessed: Access comes through the share (\\ServerName\Share) – a combination of permissions is considered. Access is through a drive letter (C:\, E:\, S:\, etc.) – only the file/folder permissions are considered. The only complicated one here is access through the share. Here’s what Windows does: Figures out what the aggregated permissions are at the file/folder level. Figures out what the aggregated permissions are at the share level. Takes the most restrictive of the two sets of permissions. You can test this by granting Full Control over a folder (this is likely already in place for the Users local group) and then setting up a share. Give only Read access through the share, and that includes to Administrators (if you’re creating a share, likely you have membership in the Administrators group). Try to read a file through the share. Now try to modify it. The most restrictive permission is the Share level permissions. It’s set to only allow Read. Therefore, if you come through the share, it’s the most restrictive. Does This Knowledge Really Help Me? In my experience, it does. I’ve seen cases where sensitive files were accessible by every authenticated user through a share. Auditors, as you might expect, have a real problem with that. I’ve also seen cases where files to be imported as part of the nightly processing were overwritten by files intended from development. And I’ve seen cases where a process can’t get to the files it needs for a process because someone changed the permissions. If you know file/folder and share permissions, you can spot and correct these types of security flaws. Given that there are a lot of database professionals that don’t understand these permissions, if you know it, you set yourself apart. And if you’re able to help on critical processes, you begin to set yourself up as a linchpin (link to .pdf) for your organization. If you want to get started with performance tuning and database security with the help of experts, read more over at Fix Your SQL Server. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: Notes from the Field, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Security, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• Instructions on how to configure a WebLogic Cluster and use it with Oracle Http Server

  - by Laurent Goldsztejn

  On October 17th I delivered a webcast on WebLogic Clustering that included a demo with Apache as the proxy server.  I realized that many steps are needed to set up the configuration I used during the demo.  The purpose of this article is to go through these steps to show how quickly and easily one can define a new cluster and then proxy requests via an Oracle Http Server (OHS). The domain configuration wizard offers the option to create a cluster.  The administration console or WLST, the Weblogic scripting tool can also be used to define a new cluster.  It can be created at any time but the servers that will participate in it cannot be in a running state. Cluster Creation using the configuration wizard Network and architecture requirements need to be considered while choosing between unicast and multicast. Multicast Vs. Unicast with WebLogic Clustering is of great help to make the best decision between the two messaging modes.  In addition, Configure Cluster offers details on each single field displayed above. After this initial configuration page, individual servers could be assigned to this newly created cluster although servers can be added later to the cluster.  What is not recommended is for the Admin server to participate in a cluster as the main purpose of the Admin server is to perform the bulk of the processing for the domain.  Servers need to stop before being assigned to a cluster.  There is also no minimum number of servers that have to participate in the cluster. At this point the configuration should be done and the cluster created successfully.  This can easily be verified from the console. Each clustered managed server can be launched to join the cluster.   At startup the following messages should be logged for each clustered managed server: <Notice> <WeblogicServer> <BEA-000365> <Server state changed to STARTING> <Notice> <Cluster> <BEA-000197> <Listening for announcements from cluster using messaging_mode cluster messaging> <Notice> <Cluster> <BEA-000133> <Waiting to synchronize with other running members of cluster_name>  It's time to try sending requests to the cluster and we will do this with the help of Oracle Http Server to play the role of a proxy server to demonstrate load balancing.  Proxy Server configuration  The first step is to download Weblogic Server Web Server Plugin that will enhance the web server by handling requests aimed at being sent to the Weblogic cluster.  For our test Oracle Http Server (OHS) will be used.  However plug-ins are also available for Apache Http server, Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS), Oracle iPlanet Webserver or even WebLogic Server with the HttpClusterServlet. Once OHS is installed on the system, the configuration file, mod_wl_ohs.conf, will need to be altered to include Weblogic proxy specifics. First of all, add the following directive to instruct Apache to load the Weblogic shared object module extracted from the plugins file just downloaded. LoadModule weblogic_module modules/mod_wl_ohs.so and then create an IfModule directive to encapsulate the following location block so that proxy will be enabled by path (each request including /wls will be directed directly to the WebLogic Cluster).  You could also proxy requests by MIME type using MatchExpression in the Location block. <IfModule weblogic_module> <Location /wls>    SetHandler weblogic-handler    PathTrim /wls    WebLogicCluster MS1_URL:port,MS2_URL:port    Debug ON    WLLogFile        c:/tmp/global_proxy.log     WLTempDir        "c:/myTemp"    DebugConfigInfo  On </Location> </IfModule> SetHandler specifies the handler for the plug-in module  PathTrim will instruct the plug-in to trim /w ls from the URL before forwarding the request to the cluster. The list of WebLogic Servers defined in WeblogicCluster could contain a mixed set of clustered and single servers.  However, the dynamic list returned for this parameter will only contain valid clustered servers and may contain more servers if not all clustered servers are listed in WeblogicCluster. Testing proxy and load balancing It's time to start OHS web server which should at this point be configured correctly to proxy requests to the clustered servers.  By default round-robin is the load balancing strategy set by WebLogic. Testing the load balancing can be easily done by disabling cookies on your browser given that a request containing a cookie attempts to connect to the primary server. If that attempt fails, the plug-in attempts to make a connection to the next available server in the list in a round-robin fashion.  With cookies enabled, you could use two different browsers to test the load balancing with a JSP page that contains the following: <%@ page contentType="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" language="java"  %>  <%  String path = request.getContextPath();   String getProtocol=request.getScheme();   String getDomain=request.getServerName();   String getPort=Integer.toString(request.getLocalPort());   String getPath = getProtocol+"://"+getDomain+":"+getPort+path+"/"; %> <html> <body> Receiving Server <%=getPath%> </body> </html>  Assuming that you name the JSP page Test.jsp and the webapp that contains it TestApp, your browsers should open the following URL: http://localhost/wls/TestApp/Test.jsp  Each browser should connect to a different clustered server and this simple JSP should confirm that.  The webapp that contains the JSP needs to be deployed to the cluster. You can also verify that the load is correctly balanced by looking at the proxy log file.  Each request generates a set of log entries that starts with : timestamp ================New Request: Each request is associated with a primary server and a secondary server if one is available.  For our test request, the following entries should appear in the log as well:Using Uri /wls/TestApp/Test.jsp After trimming path: '/TestApp/Test.jsp' The final request string is '/TestApp/Test.jsp' If an exception occurs, it should also be logged in the proxy log file with the prefix:timestamp *******Exception type   WeblogicBridgeConfig DebugConfigInfo enables runtime statistics and the production of configuration information.  For security purposes, this parameter should be turned off in production. http://webserver_host:port/path/xyz.jsp?__WebLogicBridgeConfig will display a proxy bridge page detailing the plugin configuration followed by runtime statistics which could help in diagnosing issues along with the analyzing of the proxy log file.  In our example the url would be: http://localhost/wls/TestApp/Test.jsp?__WebLogicBridgeConfig  Here is how the top section of the screen can look like: The bottom part of the page contains runtime statistics, here is a snippet of it (unrelated with the previous JSP example).   This entire plugin configuration should be very similar with other web servers, what varies is the name of the proxy server configuration file. So, as you can see, it only takes a few minutes to configure a Weblogic cluster and get servers to join it. 

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• SQL Sentry First Impressions

  - by AjarnMark

  After struggling to defend my SQL Servers from a political attack recently, I realized that I needed better tools to back me up, and SQL Sentry is the leading candidate. A couple of weeks ago, seemingly from out of nowhere, complaints from the business users started coming in that one of the core internal applications was running dramatically slower than normal, and fingers were being pointed at the SQL Server.  Unfortunately, we don’t have a production DBA whose entire job is to monitor and maintain our SQL Servers.  The responsibility falls to me to do the best I can, investing only a small portion of my time, because there are so many other responsibilities to take care of, and our industry is still deep in recession.  I inherited these SQL Servers and have made significant improvements in process and procedure, but I had not yet made the time to take real baseline measurements or keep a really close eye on the performance.  Like many DBAs, I wrote several of my own tools and used the “built-in tools” like Profiler, PerfMon, and sp_who2 (did I mention most of our instances are SQL Server 2000?).  These have all served me well for in-the-moment troubleshooting and maintenance, but they really fell down on the job when I was called upon to “prove” that SQL Server performance was acceptable and more importantly had not degraded recently (i.e. historical comparisons).  I really didn’t have anything from a historical comparison perspective, but I was able to show that current performance was acceptable, and deflect attention back onto other components (which in fact turned out to be the real culprit). That experience dramatically illustrated the need for better monitoring tools.  Coincidentally, I had been talking recently to my boss about the mini nightmare of monitoring several critical and interdependent overnight jobs that operate on separate instances of SQL Server.  Among other tools, I had been using Idera’s SQL Job Manager which is a free tool and did a nice job of showing me job schedules and histories in a nice calendar view.  This worked fairly well, and for the money (did I mention it was free?) it couldn’t be beat.  But it is based on the stored job history in MSDB, and there were other performance problems that we ran into when we started changing the settings for how much job history to retain, in order to be able to look back a month or more in the calendar view.  Another coincidence (if you believe in such things) was that when we had some of those performance challenges, I posted a couple of questions to the #sqlhelp hashtag on Twitter and Greg Gonzalez (@SQLSensei) suggested I check out SQL Sentry’s Event Manager.  At the time, I just thought he worked there, but later found out that he founded the company.  When I took a quick look at the features & benefits, the one that really jumped out at me is Chaining and Queueing which sounded like it would really help with our “interdependent jobs on different servers” issue. I know that is a lot of background story and coincidences, but hopefully you have stuck with me so far, and now we have arrived at the point where last week I downloaded and installed the 30-day trial of the SQL Sentry Power Suite, which is Event Manager plus Performance Advisor.  And I must say that I really like what I see so far.  Here are a few highlights: Great Support.  I had two issues getting the trial setup and monitoring a handful of our servers.  One of which was entirely my fault (missed a security setting in SQL 2008) and the other was mostly my fault (late change to some config settings that were apparently cached and did not get refreshed properly).  In both cases, the support staff at SQL Sentry were very responsive and rather quickly figured out what the cause and fix was for each of them.  This left me with a great impression of the company.  Kudos to them! Chaining and Queueing.  While I have not yet activated this feature, I am very excited about the possibilities.  We have jobs on three different instances of SQL Server that have to be run in a certain order, and each has to finish before the next can successfully begin, and I believe this feature will ensure just that.  It has been a real pain in the backside when one of those jobs runs just a little too long and does not finish before the job on another instance starts, thus triggering a chain reaction of either outright job failures, or worse, successful completion of completely invalid processing. Calendar View.  I really, really like the Event Manager calendar view where I can see all jobs and events across all instances and identify potential resource contention as well as windows of opportunity for maintenance activity.  Very well done, and based on Event Manager’s own database of accumulated historical information rather than querying the source instances every time. Performance Advisor Dashboard History View.  This view let’s me quickly select a date and time range and it displays graphs of key SQL Server and Windows metrics.  This is exactly the thing I needed to answer the “has performance changed recently” question at the beginning of this post. Reporting Services Subscription Jobs with Report Name.  This was a big and VERY pleasant surprise.  If you have ever looked at the list of SQL Server jobs that SQL Server Reporting Services creates when you make a Subscription, you will notice that they all have some sort of GUID as the name of the job.  This is really ugly, and really annoying because when you are just looking at the SQL Agent and Job Activity Monitor, if you see that Job X failed, you really do not have any indication in the name or the properties of the Job itself, as to what Report that was for.  But with SQL Sentry Event Manager you do.  The Jobs list in the Navigator pane in SQL Sentry, amazingly, displays the name of the Report that the Subscription Job is for.  And when you open it to see more details, it shows you the full Reporting Services path to that Report, so you can immediately track it down in the Report Manager in case you want to identify/notify the owner or edit the Subscription information.  I did not expect this at all, but I sure do like it.  HOORAY! That is just my first impressions from using the tools for a few days.  And I haven’t even gotten into how it showed me where I was completely mistaken about one aspect of my SQL Server disk configurations.  I’ll share that lesson in another blog entry.  But I have to say it again, the combination of Event Manager and Performance Advisor working together have really made me a fan.

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• H1 Visa interview tips–What you must know before attending the interview?

  - by Gopinath

  USA’s H1 visa allows highly qualified professionals from other countries to work in America. Many IT professionals in India aspire to go to USA on H1 and work for their clients. Recently I had a chance to study H1 visa process to help one of my friends and I would like to share what I learned. With the assumption that your H1 petition is approved and you got an interview scheduled at US Embassy for your visa stamping, here are tips you must know before attending the interview Dress Code – Formals Say no to casuals or any fancy dress when you attend the interview. It’s not a party or friends home you are visiting. Consider H1 Visa interview as your job interview and dress up in formals. There is no option B for your, you must be in formals. A plain formal shirt with a matching pant is suggested for men. Tie and Suit would not be required, but if you are a professional at management level you can consider wearing suit. Women can wear either formal Salwar or formal pant-shirt. Avoid heavy jewellery, wear what is must as per your tradition or culture. Body Language -  Smile on your face Your body language reflects what you are and what’s going on in your mind. Don’t be nervous or restless, be relaxed and wear a beautiful smile on your face. A smile is a curve that sets everything straight. When you are called for the interview, greet the interviewer with a beautiful smile. Say Good Morning/Afternoon/Evening depending on time you are visiting them. Whenever appropriate say Thank You. Generally American professionals are very friendly people and they reciprocate for your greetings. Make sure that you make them comfortable to start the interview. Carry original documents in a separate folder I don’t want to talk much about the documents that are required for your H1B interview as it’s big subject on it’s own and it requires a separate post. I assume that your consultant or employer helped you in gathering all the required documents like – petition, DS 160 forms, education & job related documents, resume, interview call letters, client letters, etc. For all the documents you are going to submit at the interview make sure that you have originals in a separate folder.  If required interviewer may ask you show the originals of any of the document you submitted for visa processing. Don’t mix the original documents with the documents you need to submit for interview. Have a separate folder for them. For those who are going to stamping along with their spouse and children, they need to carry few extra original documents like – marriage certificate, marriage photos(30 numbers)/album, birth certificates, passports, education and profession related certificates of the spouse and children. Know your role & responsibilities The interviewer will ask you questions on your roles and responsibilities at client location. Be clear what is your day to day tasks at client place and prepared to face detailed questions on the same. When asked explain clearly and also make sure what you say is inline with what is mentioned in your petition and client invitation letter. At times they may ask you questions specific to the project/technology you are going to work. So doing some homework in this area will help you easily answer the questions. Failing to answer basic questions on your role & responsibilities may result in rejection. You work for your Employer at Client location but NOT FOR CLIENT One of the important things to keep in mind that you work for your employer and you are being deputed to client location on a work visa.  Your employer is going to be solely responsible for your salary, work, promotion, pay hikes or what so ever during your stay at USA. Your client will not be responsible for anything. Lets say you are employed with Company X in India and they are applying for H1B to work at your client(ex: Microsoft) in USA, you must keep in my mind that Microsoft is not your employer. Microsoft will not pay your salaries or responsible for any employment related activities. Company X will be solely responsible for all your employer related activities. If you don’t get this correctly and say to Visa interviewer that your client is responsible, then you may get into troubles. Know your client It’s always good to know the clients with whom you are going to work in USA and their business. If your client is a well know organisation then you may not get many questions from interviewer else you need to be well prepared to provide details like – nature of business, location, size of the organisation, etc.  Get to know the basic details about your client and be confident while providing those details to the interviewer. Also make sure that you never talk about any confidential details of your client projects and business. Revealing confidential details of your client may land your job itself in soup. Make sure that your spouse is also in sync with you If you’ve applied a H4 visa for your spouse along with your H1, make sure that spouse is in sync with you. Your spouse also should know the basic details of your job, your employer, client and location where you will be travelling. Your spouse should also be prepared to answers questions related to marriage, their profession(if working), kids, education, etc. Interviewers will try to asses your spouse communication skills, whereabouts while staying in USA and would they prefer to work USA or not. On H4, which is a dependent visa, your spouse is not allowed to work in USA and at any point your spouse should not show the intentions to search for work in USA. Less luggage more comfort You would have definitely heard that there are lot of restrictions on what you can carry along with you to an US Embassy while attending the interview. To be frank it’s not good to say there are many restrictions, but there are a hell a lot of restrictions. There are unbelievable restrictions and it’s for the safety of everyone. You are not allowed to carry mobile phones, CD/DVDs, USBs, bank cards, cameras, cosmetics, food(except baby food), water, wallets, backpacks, sealed covers, etc. Trust me most of the things we carry with us regularly every day are not allowed inside. As there are 100s of restrictions, it would be easier if you understand what you can carry along with you and just carry them alone. Ask your employer/consultant to provide you a checklist of items that you can carry. Most what you would require are H1B related documents provided by the employer/consultant Photographs All original documents supporting your H1B Passports Some cash for your travel expenses (avoid coins) Any important phone number / details written in a paper(like your cab driver number, etc.) If you carry restricted stuff then you will be stopped at security checks, you have to find people who can safely keep all the restricted items. Due to heavy restrictions in and around the US Embassy you will not find any  place to keep your luggage. So just carry the bare minimum things required so that you feel more comfortable. Useful Links THE U.S. NON IMMIGRANT VISA APPLICATION PROCESS U.S VISA SECURITY REGULATIONS GENERAL FAQS Hope this information is helpful to you and best of luck for your interview. Creative commons Image credit: Flickr/ alexfrance, vinothchandar. hughelectronic, architratan, striatic

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• External File Upload Optimizations for Windows Azure

  - by rgillen

  [Cross posted from here: http://rob.gillenfamily.net/post/External-File-Upload-Optimizations-for-Windows-Azure.aspx] I’m wrapping up a bit of the work we’ve been doing on data movement optimizations for cloud computing and the latest set of data yielded some interesting points I thought I’d share. The work done here is not really rocket science but may, in some ways, be slightly counter-intuitive and therefore seemed worthy of posting. Summary: for those who don’t like to read detailed posts or don’t have time, the synopsis is that if you are uploading data to Azure, block your data (even down to 1MB) and upload in parallel. Set your block size based on your source file size, but if you must choose a fixed value, use 1MB. Following the above will result in significant performance gains… upwards of 10x-24x and a reduction in overall file transfer time of upwards of 90% (eg, uploading a 1GB file averaged 46.37 minutes prior to optimizations and averaged 1.86 minutes afterwards). Detail: For those of you who want more detail, or think that the claims at the end of the preceding paragraph are over-reaching, what follows is information and code supporting these claims. As the title would indicate, these tests were run from our research facility pointing to the Azure cloud (specifically US North Central as it is physically closest to us) and do not represent intra-cloud results… we have performed intra-cloud tests and the overall results are similar in notion but the data rates are significantly different as well as the tipping points for the various block sizes… this will be detailed separately). We started by building a very simple console application that would loop through a directory and upload each file to Azure storage. This application used the shipping storage client library from the 1.1 version of the azure tools. The only real variation from the client library is that we added code to collect and record the duration (in ms) and size (in bytes) for each file transferred. The code is available here. We then created a directory that had a collection of files for the following sizes: 2KB, 32KB, 64KB, 128KB, 512KB, 1MB, 5MB, 10MB, 25MB, 50MB, 100MB, 250MB, 500MB, 750MB, and 1GB (50 files for each size listed). These files contained randomly-generated binary data and do not benefit from compression (a separate discussion topic). Our file generation tool is available here. The baseline was established by running the application described above against the directory containing all of the data files. This application uploads the files in a random order so as to avoid transferring all of the files of a given size sequentially and thereby spreading the affects of periodic Internet delays across the collection of results.  We then ran some scripts to split the resulting data and generate some reports. The raw data collected for our non-optimized tests is available via the links in the Related Resources section at the bottom of this post. For each file size, we calculated the average upload time (and standard deviation) and the average transfer rate (and standard deviation). As you likely are aware, transferring data across the Internet is susceptible to many transient delays which can cause anomalies in the resulting data. It is for this reason that we randomized the order of source file processing as well as executed the tests 50x for each file size. We expect that these steps will yield a sufficiently balanced set of results. Once the baseline was collected and analyzed, we updated the test harness application with some methods to split the source file into user-defined block sizes and then to upload those blocks in parallel (using the PutBlock() method of Azure storage). The parallelization was handled by simply relying on the Parallel Extensions to .NET to provide a Parallel.For loop (see linked source for specific implementation details in Program.cs, line 173 and following… less than 100 lines total). Once all of the blocks were uploaded, we called PutBlockList() to assemble/commit the file in Azure storage. For each block transferred, the MD5 was calculated and sent ensuring that the bits that arrived matched was was intended. The timer for the blocked/parallelized transfer method wraps the entire process (source file splitting, block transfer, MD5 validation, file committal). A diagram of the process is as follows: We then tested the affects of blocking & parallelizing the transfers by running the updated application against the same source set and did a parameter sweep on the block size including 256KB, 512KB, 1MB, 2MB, and 4MB (our assumption was that anything lower than 256KB wasn’t worth the trouble and 4MB is the maximum size of a block supported by Azure). The raw data for the parallel tests is available via the links in the Related Resources section at the bottom of this post. This data was processed and then compared against the single-threaded / non-optimized transfer numbers and the results were encouraging. The Excel version of the results is available here. Two semi-obvious points need to be made prior to reviewing the data. The first is that if the block size is larger than the source file size you will end up with a “negative optimization” due to the overhead of attempting to block and parallelize. The second is that as the files get smaller, the clock-time cost of blocking and parallelizing (overhead) is more apparent and can tend towards negative optimizations. For this reason (and is supported in the raw data provided in the linked worksheet) the charts and dialog below ignore source file sizes less than 1MB. (click chart for full size image) The chart above illustrates some interesting points about the results: When the block size is smaller than the source file, performance increases but as the block size approaches and then passes the source file size, you see decreasing benefit to the point of negative gains (see the values for the 1MB file size) For some of the moderately-sized source files, small blocks (256KB) are best As the size of the source file gets larger (see values for 50MB and up), the smallest block size is not the most efficient (presumably due, at least in part, to the increased number of blocks, increased number of individual transfer requests, and reassembly/committal costs). Once you pass the 250MB source file size, the difference in rate for 1MB to 4MB blocks is more-or-less constant The 1MB block size gives the best average improvement (~16x) but the optimal approach would be to vary the block size based on the size of the source file.    (click chart for full size image) The above is another view of the same data as the prior chart just with the axis changed (x-axis represents file size and plotted data shows improvement by block size). It again highlights the fact that the 1MB block size is probably the best overall size but highlights the benefits of some of the other block sizes at different source file sizes. This last chart shows the change in total duration of the file uploads based on different block sizes for the source file sizes. Nothing really new here other than this view of the data highlights the negative affects of poorly choosing a block size for smaller files.   Summary What we have found so far is that blocking your file uploads and uploading them in parallel results in significant performance improvements. Further, utilizing extension methods and the Task Parallel Library (.NET 4.0) make short work of altering the shipping client library to provide this functionality while minimizing the amount of change to existing applications that might be using the client library for other interactions.   Related Resources Source code for upload test application Source code for random file generator ODatas feed of raw data from non-optimized transfer tests Experiment Metadata Experiment Datasets 2KB Uploads 32KB Uploads 64KB Uploads 128KB Uploads 256KB Uploads 512KB Uploads 1MB Uploads 5MB Uploads 10MB Uploads 25MB Uploads 50MB Uploads 100MB Uploads 250MB Uploads 500MB Uploads 750MB Uploads 1GB Uploads Raw Data OData feeds of raw data from blocked/parallelized transfer tests Experiment Metadata Experiment Datasets Raw Data 256KB Blocks 512KB Blocks 1MB Blocks 2MB Blocks 4MB Blocks Excel worksheet showing summarizations and comparisons

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• Making your ASP.NET/HTML Websites Indic aware &ndash; accepting Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Hindi and ot

  - by Harish Ranganathan

  Its been a month since I wrote my last post.  Much of work has been happening around planning for Tech Ed India, the upcoming Virtual TechDays this week as well as our Developer content at the Great Indian Developer Summit 2010.  Its going to be one exciting period starting this week and I am glad I would be able to meet a lot of folks who have written to me personally that they would like to catch up at Tech Ed India. For now, I had a chance to meet the Microsoft India Development Centre team that worked on the Microsoft Indic Language Input Tool (erstwhile Akshara). The team updated me that they have also released the scripts  so that the Indic input feature can be encapsulated into your own websites.  For example, if you are having a web page where you collect user information, you can pretty much make your site indic aware i.e. accept inputs in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Hindi etc.,  All you would need to include would be a bunch of scripts onto your web pages and you are ready to make it, like I said, “indic aware” I have built a sample web page that accepts First Name, Last Name, Address and an additional field.  When it comes to accepting indic, sometimes, you may want to avoid the indic input in certain fields and accept it in English.  You can specify the MicrosoftILITWebAttach="false" attribute to the Text Boxes and Text Areas (TextMode=”Multiline” in ASP.NET) so that the particular field automatically switches over to English input.  Similarly, the moment you specify that the TextMode=”Password” to make it as a password field, it automatically ignores all indic recognition and shows the masked dots for the words entered. Note that, this is, when we are going for the Opt-out mode, where we are specifying that by default all the input controls would need indic awareness and we would specify for those controls where it is not required.  The other mode is Opt-in mode where you would need to add a different property to the script definition i.e. attachMode=”optin” .  When we do this, we need to explicitly add the MicrosoftILITWebAttach="true" attribute for every control where we need indic input. I have created a sample web page which accepts First Name, Last Name, Address and an additional input field to demonstrate the “Opt-out”.   You can copy paste this into any of your web pages to check it <form id="form1" runat="server">     <!-- Microsoft Indic Language Input Tool embed code --> <input type="hidden" id="MicrosoftILITWebEmbedInfo" attachMode="optout" value="" /> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ilit.microsoft.com/bookmarklet/script/Tamil.js" defer="defer"></script>     <div>     <h2>         Welcome to the Registration Page     </h2>     <p>         First Name: <asp:TextBox runat="server" ID="txtFirstName" />         <br />         <br />         Last Name: <asp:TextBox runat="server" ID="txtLastName" />         <br />         <br />         Password:         <asp:TextBox runat="server" ID="txtPassword" TextMode="Password" />         <br />         <br />         Address: <asp:TextBox runat="server" ID="txtAddress" TextMode="MultiLine" Height="100" Width="200" />         <br />         <br />         English Text: <asp:TextBox ID="txtEnglishText" runat="server" MicrosoftILITWebAttach="false" />     </p>     <p>         <!-- Microsoft Indic Language Input Tool attribution image link --> <a style="text-decoration: none" href="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=184205&clcid=0x409"><img style="border: 0px" alt="Transliteration by Microsoft" src="http://ilit.microsoft.com/bookmarklet/images/attribution.png"></a>     </p>     </div>     </form> If you note the code snippet above, I have included the scripts in the top with the attachMode set to “optout” and for the last TextBox, I have mentioned the MicrosoftILITWebAttach="false” attribute to make it accept English input.   Additionally, you also need to add the “Microsoft Indic Language Input Tool attribution image” to your web page as a courtesy to the team that developed this feature.  It would basically add a image saying “Transliteration by Microsoft” similar to a Copy Right image.  You can see the screen shot below where I have typed it in Tamil.  In that you will notice that the password field behaves as expected and the last field accepts English Text.  You can also notice the icon that comes in the first textbox that indicates that, the field is going to accept indic text.   This sample is using Tamil, but you can pretty much do it for Hindi, Telugu, Kannada, Marathi, Bengali etc.,   The website for getting the Indic script and other instructions is http://specials.msn.co.in/ilit/WebEmbed.aspx?language=Tamil You can replace the querystring value “Tamil” to other languages as mentioned above to get the respective script. This also works for plain HTML based websites and doesn’t necessarily need you to use ASP.NET to achieve the functionality. Note that, this form is not completely localized.  This is transliterated.  You can add label controls for FirstName, LastName indication etc., and use the Visual Studio tools to localize and get those values from resource files.  In the resource files, you can enter the text in different languages to make this a truly localized page.  If you just want to download the Indic Tool Desktop version (that can be used for typing in Word, Excel, pretty much any input area), you can download it from http://specials.msn.co.in/ilit/  In the same page, there is also a web version where you can type and get text then and there if you dont want to install the desktop version. So, go ahead, download / use them in your websites and enjoy the power of Indic. Cheers !!!

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• Benchmarking MySQL Replication with Multi-Threaded Slaves

  - by Mat Keep

  0 0 1 1145 6530 Homework 54 15 7660 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-ansi-language:EN-US;} The objective of this benchmark is to measure the performance improvement achieved when enabling the Multi-Threaded Slave enhancement delivered as a part MySQL 5.6. As the results demonstrate, Multi-Threaded Slaves delivers 5x higher replication performance based on a configuration with 10 databases/schemas. For real-world deployments, higher replication performance directly translates to: · Improved consistency of reads from slaves (i.e. reduced risk of reading "stale" data) · Reduced risk of data loss should the master fail before replicating all events in its binary log (binlog) The multi-threaded slave splits processing between worker threads based on schema, allowing updates to be applied in parallel, rather than sequentially. This delivers benefits to those workloads that isolate application data using databases - e.g. multi-tenant systems deployed in cloud environments. Multi-Threaded Slaves are just one of many enhancements to replication previewed as part of the MySQL 5.6 Development Release, which include: · Global Transaction Identifiers coupled with MySQL utilities for automatic failover / switchover and slave promotion · Crash Safe Slaves and Binlog · Optimized Row Based Replication · Replication Event Checksums · Time Delayed Replication These and many more are discussed in the “MySQL 5.6 Replication: Enabling the Next Generation of Web & Cloud Services” Developer Zone article  Back to the benchmark - details are as follows. Environment The test environment consisted of two Linux servers: · one running the replication master · one running the replication slave. Only the slave was involved in the actual measurements, and was based on the following configuration: - Hardware: Oracle Sun Fire X4170 M2 Server - CPU: 2 sockets, 6 cores with hyper-threading, 2930 MHz. - OS: 64-bit Oracle Enterprise Linux 6.1 - Memory: 48 GB Test Procedure Initial Setup: Two MySQL servers were started on two different hosts, configured as replication master and slave. 10 sysbench schemas were created, each with a single table: CREATE TABLE `sbtest` (    `id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,    `k` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',    `c` char(120) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',    `pad` char(60) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',    PRIMARY KEY (`id`),    KEY `k` (`k`) ) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 10,000 rows were inserted in each of the 10 tables, for a total of 100,000 rows. When the inserts had replicated to the slave, the slave threads were stopped. The slave data directory was copied to a backup location and the slave threads position in the master binlog noted. 10 sysbench clients, each configured with 10 threads, were spawned at the same time to generate a random schema load against each of the 10 schemas on the master. Each sysbench client executed 10,000 "update key" statements: UPDATE sbtest set k=k+1 WHERE id = <random row> In total, this generated 100,000 update statements to later replicate during the test itself. Test Methodology: The number of slave workers to test with was configured using: SET GLOBAL slave_parallel_workers=<workers> Then the slave IO thread was started and the test waited for all the update queries to be copied over to the relay log on the slave. The benchmark clock was started and then the slave SQL thread was started. The test waited for the slave SQL thread to finish executing the 100k update queries, doing "select master_pos_wait()". When master_pos_wait() returned, the benchmark clock was stopped and the duration calculated. The calculated duration from the benchmark clock should be close to the time it took for the SQL thread to execute the 100,000 update queries. The 100k queries divided by this duration gave the benchmark metric, reported as Queries Per Second (QPS). Test Reset: The test-reset cycle was implemented as follows: · the slave was stopped · the slave data directory replaced with the previous backup · the slave restarted with the slave threads replication pointer repositioned to the point before the update queries in the binlog. The test could then be repeated with identical set of queries but a different number of slave worker threads, enabling a fair comparison. The Test-Reset cycle was repeated 3 times for 0-24 number of workers and the QPS metric calculated and averaged for each worker count. MySQL Configuration The relevant configuration settings used for MySQL are as follows: binlog-format=STATEMENT relay-log-info-repository=TABLE master-info-repository=TABLE As described in the test procedure, the slave_parallel_workers setting was modified as part of the test logic. The consequence of changing this setting is: 0 worker threads:    - current (i.e. single threaded) sequential mode    - 1 x IO thread and 1 x SQL thread    - SQL thread both reads and executes the events 1 worker thread:    - sequential mode    - 1 x IO thread, 1 x Coordinator SQL thread and 1 x Worker thread    - coordinator reads the event and hands it to the worker who executes 2+ worker threads:    - parallel execution    - 1 x IO thread, 1 x Coordinator SQL thread and 2+ Worker threads    - coordinator reads events and hands them to the workers who execute them Results Figure 1 below shows that Multi-Threaded Slaves deliver ~5x higher replication performance when configured with 10 worker threads, with the load evenly distributed across our 10 x schemas. This result is compared to the current replication implementation which is based on a single SQL thread only (i.e. zero worker threads). Figure 1: 5x Higher Performance with Multi-Threaded Slaves The following figure shows more detailed results, with QPS sampled and reported as the worker threads are incremented. The raw numbers behind this graph are reported in the Appendix section of this post. Figure 2: Detailed Results As the results above show, the configuration does not scale noticably from 5 to 9 worker threads. When configured with 10 worker threads however, scalability increases significantly. The conclusion therefore is that it is desirable to configure the same number of worker threads as schemas. Other conclusions from the results: · Running with 1 worker compared to zero workers just introduces overhead without the benefit of parallel execution. · As expected, having more workers than schemas adds no visible benefit. Aside from what is shown in the results above, testing also demonstrated that the following settings had a very positive effect on slave performance: relay-log-info-repository=TABLE master-info-repository=TABLE For 5+ workers, it was up to 2.3 times as fast to run with TABLE compared to FILE. Conclusion As the results demonstrate, Multi-Threaded Slaves deliver significant performance increases to MySQL replication when handling multiple schemas. This, and the other replication enhancements introduced in MySQL 5.6 are fully available for you to download and evaluate now from the MySQL Developer site (select Development Release tab). You can learn more about MySQL 5.6 from the documentation  Please don’t hesitate to comment on this or other replication blogs with feedback and questions. Appendix – Detailed Results

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• FAQ: Highlight GridView Row on Click and Retain Selected Row on Postback

  - by Vincent Maverick Durano

  A couple of months ago I’ve written a simple demo about “Highlighting GridView Row on MouseOver”. I’ve noticed many members in the forums (http://forums.asp.net) are asking how to highlight row in GridView and retain the selected row across postbacks. So I’ve decided to write this post to demonstrate how to implement it as reference to others who might need it. In this demo I going to use a combination of plain JavaScript and jQuery to do the client-side manipulation. I presumed that you already know how to bind the grid with data because I will not include the codes for populating the GridView here. For binding the gridview you can refer this post: Binding GridView with Data the ADO.Net way or this one: GridView Custom Paging with LINQ. To get started let’s implement the highlighting of GridView row on row click and retain the selected row on postback.  For simplicity I set up the page like this: <asp:Content ID="Content2" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContent" runat="server"> <h2>You have selected Row: (<asp:Label ID="Label1" runat="server" />)</h2> <asp:HiddenField ID="hfCurrentRowIndex" runat="server"></asp:HiddenField> <asp:HiddenField ID="hfParentContainer" runat="server"></asp:HiddenField> <asp:Button ID="Button1" runat="server" onclick="Button1_Click" Text="Trigger Postback" /> <asp:GridView ID="grdCustomer" runat="server" AutoGenerateColumns="false" onrowdatabound="grdCustomer_RowDataBound"> <Columns> <asp:BoundField DataField="Company" HeaderText="Company" /> <asp:BoundField DataField="Name" HeaderText="Name" /> <asp:BoundField DataField="Title" HeaderText="Title" /> <asp:BoundField DataField="Address" HeaderText="Address" /> </Columns> </asp:GridView> </asp:Content>   Note: Since the action is done at the client-side, when we do a postback like (clicking on a button) the page will be re-created and you will lose the highlighted row. This is normal because the the server doesn't know anything about the client/browser not unless if you do something to notify the server that something has changed. To persist the settings we will use some HiddenFields control to store the data so that when it postback we can reference the value from there. Now here’s the JavaScript functions below: <asp:content id="Content1" runat="server" contentplaceholderid="HeadContent"> <script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script type="text/javascript">       var prevRowIndex;       function ChangeRowColor(row, rowIndex) {           var parent = document.getElementById(row);           var currentRowIndex = parseInt(rowIndex) + 1;                 if (prevRowIndex == currentRowIndex) {               return;           }           else if (prevRowIndex != null) {               parent.rows[prevRowIndex].style.backgroundColor = "#FFFFFF";           }                 parent.rows[currentRowIndex].style.backgroundColor = "#FFFFD6";                 prevRowIndex = currentRowIndex;                 $('#<%= Label1.ClientID %>').text(currentRowIndex);                 $('#<%= hfParentContainer.ClientID %>').val(row);           $('#<%= hfCurrentRowIndex.ClientID %>').val(rowIndex);       }             $(function () {           RetainSelectedRow();       });             function RetainSelectedRow() {           var parent = $('#<%= hfParentContainer.ClientID %>').val();           var currentIndex = $('#<%= hfCurrentRowIndex.ClientID %>').val();           if (parent != null) {               ChangeRowColor(parent, currentIndex);           }       }          </script> </asp:content>   The ChangeRowColor() is the function that sets the background color of the selected row. It is also where we set the previous row and rowIndex values in HiddenFields.  The $(function(){}); is a short-hand for the jQuery document.ready event. This event will be fired once the page is posted back to the server that’s why we call the function RetainSelectedRow(). The RetainSelectedRow() function is where we referenced the current selected values stored from the HiddenFields and pass these values to the ChangeRowColor() function to retain the highlighted row. Finally, here’s the code behind part: protected void grdCustomer_RowDataBound(object sender, GridViewRowEventArgs e) { if (e.Row.RowType == DataControlRowType.DataRow) { e.Row.Attributes.Add("onclick", string.Format("ChangeRowColor('{0}','{1}');", e.Row.ClientID, e.Row.RowIndex)); } } The code above is responsible for attaching the javascript onclick event for each row and call the ChangeRowColor() function and passing the e.Row.ClientID and e.Row.RowIndex to the function. Here’s the sample output below:   That’s it! I hope someone find this post useful! Technorati Tags: jQuery,GridView,JavaScript,TipTricks

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• Oracle CRM On Demand Release 24 is Generally Available

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 We are pleased to announce that Oracle CRM On Demand Release 24 is Generally Available as of October 25, 2013 Get smarter, more productive and the best value with Oracle CRM On Demand Release 24. Oracle CRM On Demand continues to be the most complete Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) CRM solution available. Now, with Release 24, organizations of all types and sizes benefit from actionable insight anywhere, anytime, as well as key enhancements in mobility, embedded social, analytics, integration and extensibility, and ease of use.Next Generation Mobile and Desktop Solutions : Oracle CRM On Demand Release 24 offers a complete set of mobile and desktop solutions that improve productivity by enabling reps to access and update information anywhere, anytime. Capabilities include: Oracle CRM On Demand Disconnected Mobile Sales (DMS) – A disconnected native iPad solution, DMS has been further streamlined mobile sales process by adding Structured Product Messaging to record brand specific call objectives, enhancements in HTML5 eDetailing including message response tracking and improvements in administration and configuration such as more field management options for read only fields, role management and enhanced logging. Oracle CRM On Demand Connected Mobile Sales. This add-on mobile service provides a configurable mobile solution on iOS, BlackBerry and now Android devices. You can access data from CRM On Demand in real time with a rich, native user experience, that is comfortable and familiar to current iOS, BlackBerry and Android users. New features also include Single Sign On to enhance security for mobile users.  Oracle CRM On Demand Desktop: This application centralizes essential CRM information in the familiar Microsoft Outlook environment,increasing user adoption and decreasing training costs. Users can manage CRM data while disconnected, then synchronize bi-directionally when they are back on the network. New in Oracle CRM On Demand Desktop Version 3 is the ability to synchronize by Books of Business, and improved Online Lookup. Mobile Browser Support: The following mobile device browsers are now supported: Apple iPhone, Apple iPad, Windows 8 Tablets, and Google Android. Leverage the Social Enterprise Engaging customers via social channels is rapidly becoming a significant key to enhanced customer experience as it provides proactive customer service, targeted messaging and greater intimacy throughout the entire customer lifecycle. Listening to customers on the social channels can identify a customers’ sphere of influence and the real value they bring to their organization, or the impact they can have on the opportunity. Servicing the customer’s need is the first step towards loyalty to a brand, integrating with social channels allows us to maximize brand affinity and virally expand customer engagements thus increasing revenue. Oracle CRM On Demand is leveraging the Social Enterprise through its integration with Oracle’s Social Relationship Management (SRM) product suite by providing out-of-the-box integration with Social Engagement and Monitoring (SEM), Social Marketing (SM) and Oracle Social Network (OSN). With Oracle CRM On Demand Release 24, users are able to create a service request from a social post via SEM and have leads entered on a SM lead form automatically entered into Oracle CRM On Demand along with the campaign, streamlining the lead qualification process. Get Smarter with Actionable Insight The difference between making good decisions and great decisions depends heavily upon the quality, structure, and availability of information at hand. Oracle CRM On Demand Release 24 expands upon its industry-leading analytics capabilities to provide greater business insight than ever before. New capabilities include flexible permissions on analytics reports folders, allowing for read only access to reports, and additional field and object coverage. Get More Productive with Powerful Tools Oracle CRM On Demand Release 24 introduces a new set of powerful capabilities designed to maximize productivity. A significant new feature for customizing Oracle CRM On Demand is a JavaScript API. The JS API allows customers to add new buttons, suppress existing buttons and even change what happens when a user clicks an existing button. Other usability enhancements, such as personalized related information applets, extended case insensitive search provide users with better, more intuitive, experience. Additional privileges for viewing private activities and notes allow administrators to reassign records as needed, and Custom Object management. Workflow has been added to the Order Item object; and now tasks can be assigned to a relative user, such as an Account Owner, allowing more complex business processes to be automated and adhered to. Get the Best Value Oracle CRM On Demand delivers unprecedented value with the broadest set of capabilities from a single-provider solution, the industry’s lowest total cost of ownership, the most on-demand deployment options, the deepest CRM expertise and experience of any CRM provider, and the most secure CRM in the cloud. With Release 24, Oracle CRM On Demand now includes even more enterprise-grade security, integration, and extensibility features, along with enhanced industry editions to save you time and money. New features include: Business Process Administration: A new privilege has been added that allows administrators to override a Business Process Administration rule.This privilege permits users to edit a locked record, or unlock a record, in the event of a material change that needs to be reflected per corporatepolicy. Additionally, the Products Detailed object has been added to Business Process Administration, enabling record locking and logic to be applied. Expanded Integration: Oracle continues to improve Web Services each release, by adding more object coverage enabling customers and partners to easily integrate with CRM On Demand. Bottom Line Oracle CRM On Demand Release 24 enables organizations to get smarter, get more productive, and get the best value, period. For more information on Oracle CRM On Demand Release 24, please visit oracle.com/crmondemand

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• Oracle Partner Store (OPS) New Enhancements

  - by Kristin Rose

  Effective June 29th, Oracle Partner Store (OPS) will release the enhancements listed below to improve your overall ordering experience. v Online Transactional Oracle Master Agreement (Online TOMA) The Online TOMA enables end users to execute a transactional end user license agreement with Oracle. The new Online TOMA in OPS will replace the need for you to obtain a signed hard copy of the TOMA from the end user. You will now initiate the Online TOMA via OPS. Navigation: OPS Home > Order Tools > Online TOMA Query > Request Online TOMA> End User Contact, click “Select for TOMA” > Select Language > Submit (an automated email is sent immediately to the requestor and the end user) Ø The Online TOMA can also be initiated from the ‘My OPS’ tab. Under the Online TOMA Query section partners can track Online TOMA request details submitted to end users. The status of the Online TOMA request and the OMA Key generated (once Ts&Cs of the Online TOMA are accepted by an end user) are also displayed in this table. There is also the ability to resend pending Online TOMA requests by clicking ‘Resend’. Navigation: OPS Home > Order Tools > Online TOMA Query For more details on the Transactional OMA, please click here. v Convert Deals to Carts The partner deal registration system within OPS will now allow you to convert approved deals into carts with a simple click of a button. VADs can use Deal to Cart on all of their partners' registrations, regardless of whether they submitted on their partner's behalf, or the partner submitted themselves. Navigation: Login > Deal Registrations > Deal Registration List > Open the approved deal > Click Deal Reg ID number link to open > Click on 'Create Cart' link You can locate your newly created cart in the Saved Carts section of OPS. Links are also available from within an open deal or from the Deal Registration List. Click on the cart number to proceed. v Partner Opportunity Management: Deal Registration on OPS now allows you to see updated information on your opportunities from Oracle’s Fusion CRM opportunity management system.  Key fields such as close date, sales stage, products and status can be viewed by clicking the opportunity ID associated with the deal registration.  This new feature allows you to see regular updates to your opportunities after registrations are approved.  Through ongoing communication with Oracle Channel Managers and Sales Reps, you can ensure that Oracle has the latest information on your active registered deals. v Product Recommendations: When adding products to the Deal Registrations tab, OPS will now show additional products that you can try to include to maximize your sale and rebate. v Advanced Customer Support(ACS) Services Note: This will be available from July 9th. Initiate the purchase of the complete stack (HW/SW/Services) online with one single OPS order. More ACS services now supported online with exception of Start-Up Pack: · New SW installation services for Standard Configurations & stand alone System Software. · New Pre-production & Go-live services for Standard & Engineered Systems · New SW configuration & Platinum Pre-Production & Go-Live services for Engineered Systems · New Travel & Expenses Estimate included · New Partner & VAD volume discount supported v Software as a Service (SaaS) for Independent Software Vendors (ISVs): Oracle SaaS ISVs can now use OPS to submit their monthly usage reports to Oracle within 20 days after the end of every month. Navigation: OPS Home > Cart > Transaction Type: Partner SaaS for ISV’s > Add Eligible Products > Check out v Existing Approvals: In an effort to reduce the processing time of discount approvals, we have added a new section in the Request Approval page for you to communicate pre-existing approvals without having to attach the DAT. Just enter the Approval ID and submit your request. In case of existing software approvals, you will be required to submit the DAT with the Contact Information section filled out. v Additional data for Shipping Box Labels and Packing Slips OPS now has additional fields in the Shipping Notes section for you to add PO details. This will help you easily identify shipments as they arrive. Partners will have an End User PO field, whereas VADs will have VAR and End User PO fields. v Shipping Notes on OPS Hardware delivery Shipping Notes will now have multiple options to better suit your requirements. v Reminders for Royalty Reporting Partners: If you have not submitted your royalty report online, OPS will now send an automated alert to remind you. v Order Tracker Changes: · Order Tracker will now have a deal reg flag (Yes/No). You can now clearly distinguish between orders that have registered opportunities. · All lines of the order will be visible in the order details list. v Changes in Terminology · You will notice textual changes on some of our labels and messages relating to approval requests. “Discount Requests” has been replaced with “Approval Requests” to cater to some of our other offerings. · First Line Support (FLS) transaction type has been renamed to Support Provider Partner (SPP). OPS Support For more details on these enhancements, please request a training here. For assistance on the Oracle Partner Store, please contact the OPS support team in your region. NAMER: [email protected] LAD: [email protected] EMEA : [email protected] APAC: [email protected] Japan: [email protected] You can even call us on our Hotline! Find your local number here.     Thank you, Oracle Partner Store Support Team      

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• Application Development: Python or Java (or PHP)

  - by luckysmack

  I'm looking to get into application development, such as Facebook or Android apps and games. I am doing this for fun and to learn. Once my skills are to par I would like to have some side income from the apps, but I'm not banking on living off that (just so you know where I'm coming from and know what my end goals are). Currently I know and am familiar with PHP and frameworks such as cakephp and yii. However, I have been wanting to learn another language to broaden my horizons and to become a better developer. So I have narrowed it down to 2 languages. Python, and Java (I can already hear people cringing at the difference in the languages I have chosen, but I have some reasons). Python: closer to PHP that Java. Cross platformability. Also great as a general scripting language and has many file system level benefits that PHP does not. Cleaner syntax, readability, blah blah and the list goed on. Python will work great for cross platform apps and can be run on many OS's and is supported by Facebook for app development. But there is no support on Android (for full fledged apps). Java: a much stronger typed language, very robust community and corporate backing. Knowing Java is also good for personal marketability for enterprises, if you're into that. The main benefit here is that Java can write apps natively for Android and the apps can be ported for web versions to play on Facebook. So while I have seen many developers prefer Java over the two, Java has this significant advantage, where I can market my apps in both markets and in the future build more potential income. But like I said it is for fun. While money isn't the goal, it would still be nice. PHP: I'm putting this here because I know it already, and I'm sure a case could be made for it. It obviously works great for Facebook but like Python does not do so well on android. While it's mostly the realm of 'application development' that appeals to me, I do find Android apps fairly interesting and something that has a ton of potential to. But then again Facebook has a ton more users and the apps can also potentially be more immersive (desktop vs. mobile). So this is why I'm kinda stuck on what route to choose. Python for Facebook and web apps, with likely faster development to production times, or Java which can be developed for any of the platforms to make apps. Side note: I'm not really trying to get into 3D development, mostly 2D. And I also want to make an app with real-time play (websockets, etc). Someone mentioned node, js to me for that but Python seems to be more globally versatile for my goals. So, to anyone that does Facebook or Android development in either language: what do you suggest? Any input is valuable and I do appreciate it. And sorry for being long winded. EDIT: as mentioned in one of the answers, my primary goal is gaming. Although I do have some plans for non gaming apps such as general web based and desktop based ones. But gaming is my main goal with the possibility of income. EDIT: Another consideration could be Jython. Writing Python code which is converted into Java bytecode. This would allow the ability to do Android apps using Python. I could be wrong though, I'm still looking into it. Update 1-26-11: I recently acquired a new job which required I learn .NET using C#. Im sure some of you are cringing already but I really like the whole system and how it all works together between desktop and web development. But, as I am still interested in Python very much, and after some research I have decided I will learn Python as well as the IronPython implementation for .NET. But (again: I know...) since .NET is mostly a Windows thing and not as cross-compatible as I like, I will be learning Mono which is a cross platform implementation of .NET where I can use what I learn at work using C# and what I want to learn, Python/IronPython. So while learning and writing C#/.NET @ work I will be learning Python - Mono - Iron Python for what I want to do personally. And the benefit of them all being very closely related will help me out a lot, I think. What do you guys think? I almost feel like that should be another question, but there's not much of a question. Either way, you guys gave very helpful input.

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• MapRedux - PowerShell and Big Data

  - by Dittenhafer Solutions

  MapRedux – #PowerShell and #Big Data Have you been hearing about “big data”, “map reduce” and other large scale computing terms over the past couple of years and been curious to dig into more detail? Have you read some of the Apache Hadoop online documentation and unfortunately concluded that it wasn't feasible to setup a “test” hadoop environment on your machine? More recently, I have read about some of Microsoft’s work to enable Hadoop on the Azure cloud. Being a "Microsoft"-leaning technologist, I am more inclinded to be successful with experimentation when on the Windows platform. Of course, it is not that I am "religious" about one set of technologies other another, but rather more experienced. Anyway, within the past couple of weeks I have been thinking about PowerShell a bit more as the 2012 PowerShell Scripting Games approach and it occured to me that PowerShell's support for Windows Remote Management (WinRM), and some other inherent features of PowerShell might lend themselves particularly well to a simple implementation of the MapReduce framework. I fired up my PowerShell ISE and started writing just to see where it would take me. Quite simply, the ScriptBlock feature combined with the ability of Invoke-Command to create remote jobs on networked servers provides much of the plumbing of a distributed computing environment. There are some limiting factors of course. Microsoft provided some default settings which prevent PowerShell from taking over a network without administrative approval first. But even with just one adjustment, a given Windows-based machine can become a node in a MapReduce-style distributed computing environment. Ok, so enough introduction. Let's talk about the code. First, any machine that will participate as a remote "node" will need WinRM enabled for remote access, as shown below. This is not exactly practical for hundreds of intended nodes, but for one (or five) machines in a test environment it does just fine. C:> winrm quickconfig WinRM is not set up to receive requests on this machine. The following changes must be made: Set the WinRM service type to auto start. Start the WinRM service. Make these changes [y/n]? y Alternatively, you could take the approach described in the Remotely enable PSRemoting post from the TechNet forum and use PowerShell to create remote scheduled tasks that will call Enable-PSRemoting on each intended node. Invoke-MapRedux Moving on, now that you have one or more remote "nodes" enabled, you can consider the actual Map and Reduce algorithms. Consider the following snippet: $MyMrResults = Invoke-MapRedux -MapReduceItem $Mr -ComputerName $MyNodes -DataSet $dataset -Verbose Invoke-MapRedux takes an instance of a MapReduceItem which references the Map and Reduce scriptblocks, an array of computer names which are the remote nodes, and the initial data set to be processed. As simple as that, you can start working with concepts of big data and the MapReduce paradigm. Now, how did we get there? I have published the initial version of my PsMapRedux PowerShell Module on GitHub. The PsMapRedux module provides the Invoke-MapRedux function described above. Feel free to browse the underlying code and even contribute to the project! In a later post, I plan to show some of the inner workings of the module, but for now let's move on to how the Map and Reduce functions are defined. Map Both the Map and Reduce functions need to follow a prescribed prototype. The prototype for a Map function in the MapRedux module is as follows. A simple scriptblock that takes one PsObject parameter and returns a hashtable. It is important to note that the PsObject $dataset parameter is a MapRedux custom object that has a "Data" property which offers an array of data to be processed by the Map function. $aMap = { Param ( [PsObject] $dataset ) # Indicate the job is running on the remote node. Write-Host ($env:computername + "::Map"); # The hashtable to return $list = @{}; # ... Perform the mapping work and prepare the $list hashtable result with your custom PSObject... # ... The $dataset has a single 'Data' property which contains an array of data rows # which is a subset of the originally submitted data set. # Return the hashtable (Key, PSObject) Write-Output $list; } Reduce Likewise, with the Reduce function a simple prototype must be followed which takes a $key and a result $dataset from the MapRedux's partitioning function (which joins the Map results by key). Again, the $dataset is a MapRedux custom object that has a "Data" property as described in the Map section. $aReduce = { Param ( [object] $key, [PSObject] $dataset ) Write-Host ($env:computername + "::Reduce - Count: " + $dataset.Data.Count) # The hashtable to return $redux = @{}; # Return Write-Output $redux; } All Together Now When everything is put together in a short example script, you implement your Map and Reduce functions, query for some starting data, build the MapReduxItem via New-MapReduxItem and call Invoke-MapRedux to get the process started: # Import the MapRedux and SQL Server providers Import-Module "MapRedux" Import-Module “sqlps” -DisableNameChecking # Query the database for a dataset Set-Location SQLSERVER:\sql\dbserver1\default\databases\myDb $query = "SELECT MyKey, Date, Value1 FROM BigData ORDER BY MyKey"; Write-Host "Query: $query" $dataset = Invoke-SqlCmd -query $query # Build the Map function $MyMap = { Param ( [PsObject] $dataset ) Write-Host ($env:computername + "::Map"); $list = @{}; foreach($row in $dataset.Data) { # Write-Host ("Key: " + $row.MyKey.ToString()); if($list.ContainsKey($row.MyKey) -eq $true) { $s = $list.Item($row.MyKey); $s.Sum += $row.Value1; $s.Count++; } else { $s = New-Object PSObject; $s | Add-Member -Type NoteProperty -Name MyKey -Value $row.MyKey; $s | Add-Member -type NoteProperty -Name Sum -Value $row.Value1; $list.Add($row.MyKey, $s); } } Write-Output $list; } $MyReduce = { Param ( [object] $key, [PSObject] $dataset ) Write-Host ($env:computername + "::Reduce - Count: " + $dataset.Data.Count) $redux = @{}; $count = 0; foreach($s in $dataset.Data) { $sum += $s.Sum; $count += 1; } # Reduce $redux.Add($s.MyKey, $sum / $count); # Return Write-Output $redux; } # Create the item data $Mr = New-MapReduxItem "My Test MapReduce Job" $MyMap $MyReduce # Array of processing nodes... $MyNodes = ("node1", "node2", "node3", "node4", "localhost") # Run the Map Reduce routine... $MyMrResults = Invoke-MapRedux -MapReduceItem $Mr -ComputerName $MyNodes -DataSet $dataset -Verbose # Show the results Set-Location C:\ $MyMrResults | Out-GridView Conclusion I hope you have seen through this article that PowerShell has a significant infrastructure available for distributed computing. While it does take some code to expose a MapReduce-style framework, much of the work is already done and PowerShell could prove to be the the easiest platform to develop and run big data jobs in your corporate data center, potentially in the Azure cloud, or certainly as an academic excerise at home or school. Follow me on Twitter to stay up to date on the continuing progress of my Powershell MapRedux module, and thanks for reading! Daniel

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• FAQ&ndash;Highlight GridView Row on Click and Retain Selected Row on Postback

  - by Vincent Maverick Durano

  A couple of months ago I’ve written a simple demo about “Highlighting GridView Row on MouseOver”. I’ve noticed many members in the forums (http://forums.asp.net) are asking how to highlight row in GridView and retain the selected row across postbacks. So I’ve decided to write this post to demonstrate how to implement it as reference to others who might need it. In this demo I going to use a combination of plain JavaScript and jQuery to do the client-side manipulation. I presumed that you already know how to bind the grid with data because I will not include the codes for populating the GridView here. For binding the gridview you can refer this post: Binding GridView with Data the ADO.Net way or this one: GridView Custom Paging with LINQ. To get started let’s implement the highlighting of GridView row on row click and retain the selected row on postback.  For simplicity I set up the page like this: <asp:Content ID="Content2" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContent" runat="server"> <h2>You have selected Row: (<asp:Label ID="Label1" runat="server" />)</h2> <asp:HiddenField ID="hfCurrentRowIndex" runat="server"></asp:HiddenField> <asp:HiddenField ID="hfParentContainer" runat="server"></asp:HiddenField> <asp:Button ID="Button1" runat="server" onclick="Button1_Click" Text="Trigger Postback" /> <asp:GridView ID="grdCustomer" runat="server" AutoGenerateColumns="false" onrowdatabound="grdCustomer_RowDataBound"> <Columns> <asp:BoundField DataField="Company" HeaderText="Company" /> <asp:BoundField DataField="Name" HeaderText="Name" /> <asp:BoundField DataField="Title" HeaderText="Title" /> <asp:BoundField DataField="Address" HeaderText="Address" /> </Columns> </asp:GridView> </asp:Content>   Note: Since the action is done at the client-side, when we do a postback like (clicking on a button) the page will be re-created and you will lose the highlighted row. This is normal because the the server doesn't know anything about the client/browser not unless if you do something to notify the server that something has changed. To persist the settings we will use some HiddenFields control to store the data so that when it postback we can reference the value from there. Now here’s the JavaScript functions below: <asp:content id="Content1" runat="server" contentplaceholderid="HeadContent"> <script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script type="text/javascript">       var prevRowIndex;       function ChangeRowColor(row, rowIndex) {           var parent = document.getElementById(row);           var currentRowIndex = parseInt(rowIndex) + 1;                 if (prevRowIndex == currentRowIndex) {               return;           }           else if (prevRowIndex != null) {               parent.rows[prevRowIndex].style.backgroundColor = "#FFFFFF";           }                 parent.rows[currentRowIndex].style.backgroundColor = "#FFFFD6";                 prevRowIndex = currentRowIndex;                 $('#<%= Label1.ClientID %>').text(currentRowIndex);                 $('#<%= hfParentContainer.ClientID %>').val(row);           $('#<%= hfCurrentRowIndex.ClientID %>').val(rowIndex);       }             $(function () {           RetainSelectedRow();       });             function RetainSelectedRow() {           var parent = $('#<%= hfParentContainer.ClientID %>').val();           var currentIndex = $('#<%= hfCurrentRowIndex.ClientID %>').val();           if (parent != null) {               ChangeRowColor(parent, currentIndex);           }       }          </script> </asp:content>   The ChangeRowColor() is the function that sets the background color of the selected row. It is also where we set the previous row and rowIndex values in HiddenFields.  The $(function(){}); is a short-hand for the jQuery document.ready function. This function will be fired once the page is posted back to the server that’s why we call the function RetainSelectedRow(). The RetainSelectedRow() function is where we referenced the current selected values stored from the HiddenFields and pass these values to the ChangeRowColor) function to retain the highlighted row. Finally, here’s the code behind part: protected void grdCustomer_RowDataBound(object sender, GridViewRowEventArgs e) { if (e.Row.RowType == DataControlRowType.DataRow) { e.Row.Attributes.Add("onclick", string.Format("ChangeRowColor('{0}','{1}');", e.Row.ClientID, e.Row.RowIndex)); } } The code above is responsible for attaching the javascript onclick event for each row and call the ChangeRowColor() function and passing the e.Row.ClientID and e.Row.RowIndex to the function. Here’s the sample output below:   That’s it! I hope someone find this post useful! Technorati Tags: jQuery,GridView,JavaScript,TipTricks

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• DBA Best Practices - A Blog Series: Episode 1 - Backups

  - by Argenis

    This blog post is part of the DBA Best Practices series, on which various topics of concern for daily database operations are discussed. Your feedback and comments are very much welcome, so please drop by the comments section and be sure to leave your thoughts on the subject. Morning Coffee When I was a DBA, the first thing I did when I sat down at my desk at work was checking that all backups had completed successfully. It really was more of a ritual, since I had a dual system in place to check for backup completion: 1) the scheduled agent jobs to back up the databases were set to alert the NOC in failure, and 2) I had a script run from a central server every so often to check for any backup failures. Why the redundancy, you might ask. Well, for one I was once bitten by the fact that database mail doesn't work 100% of the time. Potential causes for failure include issues on the SMTP box that relays your server email, firewall problems, DNS issues, etc. And so to be sure that my backups completed fine, I needed to rely on a mechanism other than having the servers do the taking - I needed to interrogate the servers and ask each one if an issue had occurred. This is why I had a script run every so often. Some of you might have monitoring tools in place like Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) or similar 3rd party products that would track all these things for you. But at that moment, we had no resort but to write our own Powershell scripts to do it. Now it goes without saying that if you don't have backups in place, you might as well find another career. Your most sacred job as a DBA is to protect the data from a disaster, and only properly safeguarded backups can offer you peace of mind here. "But, we have a cluster...we don't need backups" Sadly I've heard this line more than I would have liked to. You need to understand that a cluster is comprised of shared storage, and that is precisely your single point of failure. A cluster will protect you from an issue at the Operating System level, and also under an outage of any SQL-related service or dependent devices. But it will most definitely NOT protect you against corruption, nor will it protect you against somebody deleting data from a table - accidentally or otherwise. Backup, fine. How often do I take a backup? The answer to this is something you will hear frequently when working with databases: it depends. What does it depend on? For one, you need to understand how much data your business is willing to lose. This is what's called Recovery Point Objective, or RPO. If you don't know how much data your business is willing to lose, you need to have an honest and realistic conversation about data loss expectations with your customers, internal or external. From my experience, their first answer to the question "how much data loss can you withstand?" will be "zero". In that case, you will need to explain how zero data loss is very difficult and very costly to achieve, even in today's computing environments. Do you want to go ahead and take full backups of all your databases every hour, or even every day? Probably not, because of the impact that taking a full backup can have on a system. That's what differential and transaction log backups are for. Have I answered the question of how often to take a backup? No, and I did that on purpose. You need to think about how much time you have to recover from any event that requires you to restore your databases. This is what's called Recovery Time Objective. Again, if you go ask your customer how long of an outage they can withstand, at first you will get a completely unrealistic number - and that will be your starting point for discussing a solution that is cost effective. The point that I'm trying to get across is that you need to have a plan. This plan needs to be practiced, and tested. Like a football playbook, you need to rehearse the moves you'll perform when the time comes. How often is up to you, and the objective is that you feel better about yourself and the steps you need to follow when emergency strikes. A backup is nothing more than an untested restore Backups are files. Files are prone to corruption. Put those two together and realize how you feel about those backups sitting on that network drive. When was the last time you restored any of those? Restoring your backups on another box - that, by the way, doesn't have to match the specs of your production server - will give you two things: 1) peace of mind, because now you know that your backups are good and 2) a place to offload your consistency checks with DBCC CHECKDB or any of the other DBCC commands like CHECKTABLE or CHECKCATALOG. This is a great strategy for VLDBs that cannot withstand the additional load created by the consistency checks. If you choose to offload your consistency checks to another server though, be sure to run DBCC CHECKDB WITH PHYSICALONLY on the production server, and if you're using SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 CU4 and above, be sure to enable traceflags 2562 and/or 2549, which will speed up the PHYSICALONLY checks further - you can read more about this enhancement here. Back to the "How Often" question for a second. If you have the disk, and the network latency, and the system resources to do so, why not backup the transaction log often? As in, every 5 minutes, or even less than that? There's not much downside to doing it, as you will have to clear the log with a backup sooner than later, lest you risk running out space on your tlog, or even your drive. The one drawback to this approach is that you will have more files to deal with at restore time, and processing each file will add a bit of extra time to the entire process. But it might be worth that time knowing that you minimized the amount of data lost. Again, test your plan to make sure that it matches your particular needs. Where to back up to? Network share? Locally? SAN volume? This is another topic where everybody has a favorite choice. So, I'll stick to mentioning what I like to do and what I consider to be the best practice in this regard. I like to backup to a SAN volume, i.e., a drive that actually lives in the SAN, and can be easily attached to another server in a pinch, saving you valuable time - you wouldn't need to restore files on the network (slow) or pull out drives out a dead server (been there, done that, it’s also slow!). The key is to have a copy of those backup files made quickly, and, if at all possible, to a remote target on a different datacenter - or even the cloud. There are plenty of solutions out there that can help you put such a solution together. That right there is the first step towards a practical Disaster Recovery plan. But there's much more to DR, and that's material for a different blog post in this series.

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• ODEE Green Field (Windows) Part 4 - Documaker

  - by AndyL-Oracle

  Welcome back! We're about nearing completion of our installation of Oracle Documaker Enterprise Edition ("ODEE") in a green field. In my previous post, I covered the installation of SOA Suite for WebLogic. Before that, I covered the installation of WebLogic, and Oracle 11g database - all of which constitute the prerequisites for installing ODEE. Naturally, if your environment already has a WebLogic server and Oracle database, then you can skip all those components and go straight for the heart of the installation of ODEE. The ODEE installation is comprised of two procedures, the first covers the installation, which is running the installer and answering some questions. This will lay down the files necessary to install into the tiers (e.g. database schemas, WebLogic domains, etcetera). The second procedure is to deploy the configuration files into the various components (e.g. deploy the database schemas, WebLogic domains, SOA composites, etcetera). I will segment my posts accordingly! Let's get started, shall we? Unpack the installation files into a temporary directory location. This should extract a zip file. Extract that zip file into the temporary directory location. Navigate to and execute the installer in Disk1/setup.exe. You may have to allow the program to run if User Account Control is enabled. Once the dialog below is displayed, click Next. Select your ODEE Home - inside this directory is where all the files will be deployed. For ease of support, I recommend using the default, however you can put this wherever you want. Click Next. Select the database type, database connection type – note that the database name should match the value used for the connection type (e.g. if using SID, then the name should be IDMAKER; if using ServiceName, the name should be “idmaker.us.oracle.com”). Verify whether or not you want to enable advanced compression. Note: if you are not licensed for Oracle 11g Advanced Compression option do not use this option! Terrible, terrible calamities will befall you if you do! Click Next. Enter the Documaker Admin user name (default "dmkr_admin" is recommended for support purposes) and set the password. Update the System name and ID (must be unique) if you want/need to - since this is a green field install you should be able to use the default System ID. The only time you'd change this is if you were, for some reason, installing a new ODEE system into an existing schema that already had a system. Click Next. Enter the Assembly Line user name (default "dmkr_asline" is recommended) and set the password. Update the Assembly Line name and ID (must be unique) if you want/need to - it's quite possible that at some point you will create another assembly line, in which case you have several methods of doing so. One is to re-run the installer, and in this case you would pick a different assembly line ID and name. Click Next. Note: you can set the DB folder if needed (typically you don’t – see ODEE Installation Guide for specifics. Select the appropriate Application Server type - in this case, our green field install is going to use WebLogic - set the username to weblogic (this is required) and specify your chosen password. This credential will be used to access the application server console/control panel. Keep in mind that there are specific criteria on password choices that are required by WebLogic, but are not enforced by the installer (e.g. must contain a number, must be of a certain length, etcetera). Choose a strong password. Set the connection information for the JMS server. Note that for the 12.3.x version, the installer creates a separate JVM (WebLogic managed server) that hosts the JMS server, whereas prior editions place the JMS server on the AdminServer.  You may also specify a separate URL to the JMS server in case you intend to move the JMS resources to a separate/different server (e.g. back to AdminServer). You'll need to provide a login principal and credentials - for simplicity I usually make this the same as the WebLogic domain user, however this is not a secure practice! Make your JMS principal different from the WebLogic principal and choose a strong password, then click Next. Specify the Hot Folder(s) (comma-delimited if more than one) - this is the directory/directories that is/are monitored by ODEE for jobs to process. Click Next. If you will be setting up an SMTP server for ODEE to send emails, you may configure the connection details here. The details required are simple: hostname, port, user/password, and the sender's address (e.g. emails will appear to be sent by the address shown here so if the recipient clicks "reply", this is where it will go). Click Next. If you will be using Oracle WebCenter:Content (formerly known as Oracle UCM) you can enable this option and set the endpoints/credentials here. If you aren't sure, select False - you can always go back and enable this later. I'm almost 76% certain there will be a post sometime in the future that details how to configure ODEE + WCC:C! Click Next. If you will be using Oracle UMS for sending MMS/text messages, you can enable and set the endpoints/credentials here. As with UCM, if you're not sure, don't enable it - you can always set it later. Click Next. On this screen you can change the endpoints for the Documaker Web Service (DWS), and the endpoints for approval processing in Documaker Interactive. The deployment process for ODEE will create 3 managed WebLogic servers for hosting various Documaker components (JMS, Interactive, DWS, Dashboard, Documaker Administrator, etcetera) and it will set the ports used for each of these services. In this screen you can change these values if you know how you want to deploy these managed servers - but for now we'll just accept the defaults. Click Next. Verify the installation details and click Install. You can save the installation into a response file if you need to (which might be useful if you want to rerun this installation in an unattended fashion). Allow the installation to progress... Click Next. You can save the response file if needed (e.g. in case you forgot to save it earlier!) Click Finish. That's it, you're done with the initial installation. Have a look around the ODEE_HOME that you just installed (remember we selected c:\oracle\odee_1?) and look at the files that are laid down. Don't change anything just yet! Stay tuned for the next segment where we complete and verify the installation. 

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• sorting dynamic table created by form inputs [migrated]

  - by mille

  i am having problems with sorting can someone help to sort this table not just by its form entry id but onclick with some other columns i tried a lot of plugins but cant get anything to work and i dont know what to do i am new at this i sorry for my english thanks. here is the js: var Animals ={ index: window.localStorage.getItem("Animals:index"), $table: document.getElementById("animals-table"), $form: document.getElementById("animals-form"), $button_save: document.getElementById("animals-save"), $button_discard: document.getElementById("animals-discard"), init: function() { if (!Animals.index) { window.localStorage.setItem("Animals:index", Animals.index = 1); } Animals.$form.reset(); Animals.$button_discard.addEventListener("click", function(event) { Animals.$form.reset(); Animals.$form.id_entry.value = 0; }, true); Animals.$form.addEventListener("submit", function(event) { var entry = { id: parseInt(this.id_entry.value), animal_id:this.animal_id.value, animal_name: this.animal_name.value, animal_type: this.animal_type.value, bday: this.bday.value, animal_sex: this.animal_sex.value, mother_name: this.mother_name.value, farm_name: this.farm_name.value, money: this.money.value, weight: this.weight.value, purchase_partner: this.purchase_partner.value }; if (entry.id === 0) { Animals.storeAdd(entry); Animals.tableAdd(entry); } else { // edit Animals.storeEdit(entry); Animals.tableEdit(entry); } this.reset(); this.id_entry.value = 0; event.preventDefault(); }, true); if (window.localStorage.length - 1) { var animals_list = [], i, key; for (i = 0; i < window.localStorage.length; i++) { key = window.localStorage.key(i); if (/Animals:\d+/.test(key)) { animals_list.push(JSON.parse(window.localStorage.getItem(key))); } } if (animals_list.length) { animals_list.sort(function(a, b) {return a.id < b.id ? -1 : (a.id > b.id ? 1 : 0);}) .forEach(Animals.tableAdd);} Animals.$table.addEventListener("click", function(event) { var op = event.target.getAttribute("data-op"); if (/edit|remove/.test(op)) { var entry = JSON.parse(window.localStorage.getItem("Animals:"+ event.target.getAttribute("data- id"))); if (op == "edit") { Animals.$form.id_entry.value = entry.id; Animals.$form.animal_id.value = entry.animal_id; Animals.$form.animal_name.value = entry.animal_name; Animals.$form.animal_type.value = entry.animal_type; Animals.$form.bday.value = entry.bday; Animals.$form.animal_sex.value = entry.animal_sex; Animals.$form.mother_name.value = entry.mother_name; Animals.$form.farm_name.value = entry.farm_name; Animals.$form.money.value = entry.money; Animals.$form.weight.value = entry.weight; Animals.$form.purchase_partner.value = entry.purchase_partner; } else if (op == "remove") { if (confirm('Are you sure you want to remove this animal from your list?' )) { Animals.storeRemove(entry); Animals.tableRemove(entry); } } event.preventDefault(); } }, true); }, storeAdd: function(entry) { entry.id = Animals.index; window.localStorage.setItem("Animals:index", ++Animals.index); window.localStorage.setItem("Animals:"+ entry.id, JSON.stringify(entry)); }, storeEdit: function(entry) { window.localStorage.setItem("Animals:"+ entry.id, JSON.stringify(entry)); }, storeRemove: function(entry) { window.localStorage.removeItem("Animals:"+ entry.id); }, tableAdd: function(entry) { var $tr = document.createElement("tr"), $td, key; for (key in entry) { if (entry.hasOwnProperty(key)) { $td = document.createElement("td"); $td.appendChild(document.createTextNode(entry[key])); $tr.appendChild($td); } } $td = document.createElement("td"); $td.innerHTML = '<a data-op="edit" data-id="'+ entry.id +'">Edit</a> | <a data-op="remove" data-id="'+ entry.id +'">Remove</a>'; $tr.appendChild($td); $tr.setAttribute("id", "entry-"+ entry.id); Animals.$table.appendChild($tr); }, tableEdit: function(entry) { var $tr = document.getElementById("entry-"+ entry.id), $td, key; $tr.innerHTML = ""; for (key in entry) { if (entry.hasOwnProperty(key)) { $td = document.createElement("td"); $td.appendChild(document.createTextNode(entry[key])); $tr.appendChild($td); } } $td = document.createElement("td"); $td.innerHTML = '<a data-op="edit" data-id="'+ entry.id +'">Edit</a> | <a data-op="remove" data-id="'+ entry.id +'">Remove</a>'; $tr.appendChild($td); }, tableRemove: function(entry) { Animals.$table.removeChild(document.getElementById("entry-"+ entry.id)); } }; Animals.init();

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• D2K to OA Framework Transition

  - by PRajkumar

  What is the difference between D2K form and OA Framework? It is a very innocent but important question for someone that desires to make transition from D2K to OA Framework. I hope you have already read and implemented OA Framework Getting Started. I will re-visit my own experience of implementing HelloWorld program in "OA Framework". When I implemented HelloWorld a year ago, I had no clue as to what I was doing & why I was doing those steps. I merely copied the steps from Oracle Tutorial without understanding them. Hence in this blog, I will try to explain in simple manner the meaning of OA Framework HelloWorld Program and compare the steps to D2K form [where possible]. To keep things simple, only basics will be discussed. Following key Steps were needed for HelloWorld Step 1 Create a new Workspace and a new Project as dictated by Oracle's tutorial. When defining project, you will specify a default package, which in this case was oracle.apps.ak.hello This means the following: - ak is the short name of the Application in Oracle           [means fnd_applications.short_name] hello is the name of your project Step 2 Next, you will create a OA Page within hello project Think OA Page as the fmx file itself in D2K. I am saying so because this page gets attached to the form function. This page will be created within hello project, hence the package name oracle.apps.ak.hello.webui Note the webui, it is a convention to have page in webui, means this page represents the Web User Interface You will assign the default AM [OAApplicationModule]. Think of AM "Connection Manager" and "Transaction State Manager" for your page          I can't co-relate this to anything in D2k, as there is no concept of Connection Pooling and that D2k is not stateless. Reason being that as soon as you kick off a D2K Form, it connects to a single session of Oracle and sticks to that single Oracle database session. So is not the case in OAF, hence AM is needed. Step 3 You create Region within the Page. ·         Region is what will store your fields. Text input fields will be of type messageTextInput. Think of Canvas in D2K. You can have nested regions. Stacked Canvas in D2K comes the closest to this component of OA Framework Step 4 Add a button to one of the nested regions The itemStyle should be submitButton, in case you want the page to be submitted when this button is clicked There is no WHEN-BUTTON-PRESSED trigger in OAF. In Framework, you will add a controller java code to handle events like Form Submit button clicks. JDeveloper generates the default code for you. Primarily two functions [should I call methods] will be created processRequest [for UI Rendering Handling] and processFormRequest          Think of processRequest as WHEN-NEW-FORM-INSTANCE, though processRequest is very restrictive. Note What is the difference between processRequest and processFormRequest? These two methods are available in the Default Controller class that gets created. processFormRequest This method is commonly used to react/respond to the event that has taken place, for example click of a button. Some examples are if(oapagecontext.getParameter("Cancel") != null) (Do your processing for Cancellation/ Rollback) if(oapagecontext.getParameter("Submit") != null) (Do your validations and commit here) if(oapagecontext.getParameter("Update") != null) (Do your validations and commit here) In the above three examples, you could be calling oapagecontext.forwardImmediately to re-direct the page navigation to some other page if needed. processRequest In this method, usually page rendering related code is written. Effectively, each GUI component is a bean that gets initialised during processRequest. Those who are familiar with D2K forms, something like pre-query may be written in this method. Step 5 In the controller to access the value in field "HelloName" the command is String userContent = pageContext.getParameter("HelloName"); In D2k, we used :block.field. In OAFramework, at submission of page, all the field values get passed into to OAPageContext object. Use getParameter to access the field value To set the value of the field, use OAMessageTextInputBean field HelloName = (OAMessageTextInputBean)webBean.findChildRecursive("HelloName"); fieldHelloName.setText(pageContext,"Setting the default value" ); Note when setting field value in controller: Note 1. Do not set the value in processFormRequest Note 2. If the field comes from View Object, then do not use setText in controller Note 3. For control fields [that are not based on View Objects], you can use setText to assign values in processRequest method Lets take some notes to expand beyond the HelloWorld Project Note 1 In D2K-forms we sort of created a Window, attached to Canvas, and then fields within that Canvas. However in OA Framework, think of Page being fmx/Window, think of Region being a Canvas, and fields being within Regions. This is not a formal/accurate understanding of analogy between D2k and Framework, but is close to being logical. Note 2 In D2k, your Forms fmb file was compiled to fmx. It was fmx file that was deployed on mid-tier. In case of OAF, your OA Page is nothing but a XML file. We call this MDS [meta data]. Whatever name you give to "Page" in OAF, an XML file of the same name gets created. This xml file must then be loaded into database by using XML Importer command. Note 3 Apart from MDS XML file, almost everything else is merely deployed to your mid-tier. Usually this is underneath $JAVA_TOP/oracle/apps/../.. All java files will go underneath java top/oracle/apps/../.. etc. Note 4 When building tutorial, ignore the steps for setting "Attribute Sets". These are not mandatory. Oracle might just have developed their tutorials without including these. Think of these like Visual Attributes of D2K forms Note 5 Controller is where you will write any java code in OA Framework. You can create a Controller per Page or have a different Controller for each of the Regions with the same Page. Note 6 In the method processFormRequest of the Controller, you can access the values of the page by using notation pageContext.getParameter("<fieldname here>"). This method processFormRequest is executed when the OAF Screen/Page is submitted by click of a button. Note 7 Inside the controller, all the Database Related interactions for example interaction with View Objects happen via Application Module. But why so? Because Application Module Manages the transaction state of the Application. OAApplicationModuleImpl oaapplicationmoduleimpl = OAApplicationModuleImpl)oapagecontext.getApplicationModule(oawebbean); OADBTransaction oadbtransaction = OADBTransaction)oaapplicationmoduleimpl.getDBTransaction(); Note 8 In D2K, we have control block or a block based on database view. Similarly, in OA Framework, if the field does not have view Object attached, then it is like a control field. Hence in HelloWorld example, field HelloName is a control field [in D2K terminology]. A view Object can either be based on a view/table, synonym or on a SQL statement. Note 9 I wish to access the fields in multi record block that is based on view Object. Can I do this in Controller? Sure you can. To traverse through those records, do the below ·         Get the reference to the View Object using (OAViewObject)oapagecontext.getApplicationModule(oawebbean).findViewObject("VO Name Here") ·         Loop through the records in View Objects using count returned from oaviewobject.getFetchedRowCount() ·         For each record, fetch the value of the fields within the loop as oracle.jbo.Row row = oaviewobject.getRowAtRangeIndex(loop index here); (String)row.getAttribute("Column name of VO here ");

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• Windows Azure – Write, Run or Use Software

  - by BuckWoody

  Windows Azure is a platform that has you covered, whether you need to write software, run software that is already written, or Install and use “canned” software whether you or someone else wrote it. Like any platform, it’s a set of tools you can use where it makes sense to solve a problem. The primary location for Windows Azure information is located at http://windowsazure.com. You can find everything there from the development kits for writing software to pricing, licensing and tutorials on all of that. I have a few links here for learning to use Windows Azure – although it’s best if you focus not on the tools, but what you want to solve. I’ve got it broken down here into various sections, so you can quickly locate things you want to know. I’ll include resources here from Microsoft and elsewhere – I use these same resources in the Architectural Design Sessions (ADS) I do with my clients worldwide. Write Software Also called “Platform as a Service” (PaaS), Windows Azure has lots of components you can use together or separately that allow you to write software in .NET or various Open Source languages to work completely online, or in partnership with code you have on-premises or both – even if you’re using other cloud providers. Keep in mind that all of the features you see here can be used together, or independently. For instance, you might only use a Web Site, or use Storage, but you can use both together. You can access all of these components through standard REST API calls, or using our Software Development Kit’s API’s, which are a lot easier. In any case, you simply use Visual Studio, Eclipse, Cloud9 IDE, or even a text editor to write your code from a Mac, PC or Linux.  Components you can use: Azure Web Sites: Windows Azure Web Sites allow you to quickly write an deploy websites, without setting a Virtual Machine, installing a web server or configuring complex settings. They work alone, with other Windows Azure Web Sites, or with other parts of Windows Azure. Web and Worker Roles: Windows Azure Web Roles give you a full stateless computing instance with Internet Information Services (IIS) installed and configured. Windows Azure Worker Roles give you a full stateless computing instance without Information Services (IIS) installed, often used in a "Services" mode. Scale-out is achieved either manually or programmatically under your control. Storage: Windows Azure Storage types include Blobs to store raw binary data, Tables to use key/value pair data (like NoSQL data structures), Queues that allow interaction between stateless roles, and a relational SQL Server database. Other Services: Windows Azure has many other services such as a security mechanism, a Cache (memcacheD compliant), a Service Bus, a Traffic Manager and more. Once again, these features can be used with a Windows Azure project, or alone based on your needs. Various Languages: Windows Azure supports the .NET stack of languages, as well as many Open-Source languages like Java, Python, PHP, Ruby, NodeJS, C++ and more.   Use Software Also called “Software as a Service” (SaaS) this often means consumer or business-level software like Hotmail or Office 365. In other words, you simply log on, use the software, and log off – there’s nothing to install, and little to even configure. For the Information Technology professional, however, It’s not quite the same. We want software that provides services, but in a platform. That means we want things like Hadoop or other software we don’t want to have to install and configure.  Components you can use: Kits: Various software “kits” or packages are supported with just a few clicks, such as Umbraco, Wordpress, and others. Windows Azure Media Services: Windows Azure Media Services is a suite of services that allows you to upload media for encoding, processing and even streaming – or even one or more of those functions. We can add DRM and even commercials to your media if you like. Windows Azure Media Services is used to stream large events all the way down to small training videos. High Performance Computing and “Big Data”: Windows Azure allows you to scale to huge workloads using a few clicks to deploy Hadoop Clusters or the High Performance Computing (HPC) nodes, accepting HPC Jobs, Pig and Hive Jobs, and even interfacing with Microsoft Excel. Windows Azure Marketplace: Windows Azure Marketplace offers data and programs you can quickly implement and use – some free, some for-fee.   Run Software Also known as “Infrastructure as a Service” (IaaS), this offering allows you to build or simply choose a Virtual Machine to run server-based software.  Components you can use: Persistent Virtual Machines: You can choose to install Windows Server, Windows Server with Active Directory, with SQL Server, or even SharePoint from a pre-configured gallery. You can configure your own server images with standard Hyper-V technology and load them yourselves – and even bring them back when you’re done. As a new offering, we also even allow you to select various distributions of Linux – a first for Microsoft. Windows Azure Connect: You can connect your on-premises networks to Windows Azure Instances. Storage: Windows Azure Storage can be used as a remote backup, a hybrid storage location and more using software or even hardware appliances.   Decision Matrix With all of these options, you can use Windows Azure to solve just about any computing problem. It’s often hard to know when to use something on-premises, in the cloud, and what kind of service to use. I’ve used a decision matrix in the last couple of years to take a particular problem and choose the proper technology to solve it. It’s all about options – there is no “silver bullet”, whether that’s Windows Azure or any other set of functions. I take the problem, decide which particular component I want to own and control – and choose the column that has that box darkened. For instance, if I have to control the wiring for a solution (a requirement in some military and government installations), that means the “Networking” component needs to be dark, and so I select the “On Premises” column for that particular solution. If I just need the solution provided and I want no control at all, I can look as “Software as a Service” solutions. Security, Pricing, and Other Info  Security: Security is one of the first questions you should ask in any distributed computing environment. We have certification info, coding guidelines and more, even a general “Request for Information” RFI Response already created for you.   Pricing: Are there licenses? How much does this cost? Is there a way to estimate the costs in this new environment? New Features: Many new features were added to Windows Azure - a good roundup of those changes can be found here. Support: Software Support on Virtual Machines, general support.    

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