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• The JavaOne 2012 Sunday Technical Keynote

  - by Janice J. Heiss

  At the JavaOne 2012 Sunday Technical Keynote, held at the Masonic Auditorium, Mark Reinhold, Chief Architect, Java Platform Group, stated that they were going to do things a bit differently--"rather than 20 minutes of SE, and 20 minutes of FX, and 20 minutes of EE, we're going to mix it up a little," he said. "For much of it, we're going to be showing a single application, to show off some of the great work that's been done in the last year, and how Java can scale well--from the cloud all the way down to some very small embedded devices, and how JavaFX scales right along with it."Richard Bair and Jasper Potts from the JavaFX team demonstrated a JavaOne schedule builder application with impressive navigation, animation, pop-overs, and transitions. They noted that the application runs seamlessly on either Windows or Macs, running Java 7. They then ran the same application on an Ubuntu Linux machine--"it just works," said Blair.The JavaFX duo next put the recently released JavaFX Scene Builder through its paces -- dragging and dropping various image assets to build the application's UI, then fine tuning a CSS file for the finished look and feel. Among many other new features, in the past six months, JavaFX has released support for H.264 and HTTP live streaming, "so you can get all the real media playing inside your JavaFX application," said Bair. And in their developer preview builds of JavaFX 8, they've now split the rendering thread from the UI thread, to better take advantage of multi-core architectures.Next, Brian Goetz, Java Language Architect, explored language and library features planned for Java SE 8, including Lambda expressions and better parallel libraries. These feature changes both simplify code and free-up libraries to more effectively use parallelism. "It's currently still a lot of work to convert an application from serial to parallel," noted Goetz.Reinhold had previously boasted of Java scaling down to "small embedded devices," so Blair and Potts next ran their schedule builder application on a small embedded PandaBoard system with an OMAP4 chip set. Connected to a touch screen, the embedded board ran the same JavaFX application previously seen on the desktop systems, but now running on Java SE Embedded. (The systems can be seen and tried at four of the nearby JavaOne hotels.) Bob Vandette, Java Embedded Architect, then displayed a $25 Rasberry Pi ARM-based system running Java SE Embedded, noting the even greater need for the platform independence of Java in such highly varied embedded processor spaces. Reinhold and Vandetta discussed Project Jigsaw, the planned modularization of the Java SE platform, and its deferral from the Java 8 release to Java 9. Reinhold demonstrated the promise of Jigsaw by running a modularized demo version of the earlier schedule builder application on the resource constrained Rasberry Pi system--although the demo gods were not smiling down, and the application ultimately crashed.Reinhold urged developers to become involved in the Java 8 development process--getting the weekly builds, trying out their current code, and trying out the new features:http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk8http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk8/spechttp://jdk8.java.netFrom there, Arun Gupta explored Java EE. The primary themes of Java EE 7, Gupta stated, will be greater productivity, and HTML 5 functionality (WebSocket, JSON, and HTML 5 forms). Part of the planned productivity increase of the release will come from a reduction in writing boilerplate code--through the widespread use of dependency injection in the platform, along with default data sources and default connection factories. Gupta noted the inclusion of JAX-RS in the web profile, the changes and improvements found in JMS 2.0, as well as enhancements to Java EE 7 in terms of JPA 2.1 and EJB 3.2. GlassFish 4 is the reference implementation of Java EE 7, and currently includes WebSocket, JSON, JAX-RS 2.0, JMS 2.0, and more. The final release is targeted for Q2, 2013. Looking forward to Java EE 8, Gupta explored how the platform will provide multi-tenancy for applications, modularity based on Jigsaw, and cloud architecture. Meanwhile, Project Avatar is the group's incubator project for designing an end-to-end framework for building HTML 5 applications. Santiago Pericas-Geertsen joined Gupta to demonstrate their "Angry Bids" auction/live-bid/chat application using many of the enhancements of Java EE 7, along with an Avatar HTML 5 infrastructure, and running on the GlassFish reference implementation.Finally, Gupta covered Project Easel, an advanced tooling capability in NetBeans for HTML5. John Ceccarelli, NetBeans Engineering Director, joined Gupta to demonstrate creating an HTML 5 project from within NetBeans--formatting the project for both desktop and smartphone implementations. Ceccarelli noted that NetBeans 7.3 beta will be released later this week, and will include support for creating such HTML 5 project types. Gupta directed conference attendees to: http://glassfish.org/javaone2012 for everything about Java EE and GlassFish at JavaOne 2012.

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• How to Achieve Real-Time Data Protection and Availabilty....For Real

  - by JoeMeeks

  There is a class of business and mission critical applications where downtime or data loss have substantial negative impact on revenue, customer service, reputation, cost, etc. Because the Oracle Database is used extensively to provide reliable performance and availability for this class of application, it also provides an integrated set of capabilities for real-time data protection and availability. Active Data Guard, depicted in the figure below, is the cornerstone for accomplishing these objectives because it provides the absolute best real-time data protection and availability for the Oracle Database. This is a bold statement, but it is supported by the facts. It isn’t so much that alternative solutions are bad, it’s just that their architectures prevent them from achieving the same levels of data protection, availability, simplicity, and asset utilization provided by Active Data Guard. Let’s explore further. Backups are the most popular method used to protect data and are an essential best practice for every database. Not surprisingly, Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) is one of the most commonly used features of the Oracle Database. But comparing Active Data Guard to backups is like comparing apples to motorcycles. Active Data Guard uses a hot (open read-only), synchronized copy of the production database to provide real-time data protection and HA. In contrast, a restore from backup takes time and often has many moving parts - people, processes, software and systems – that can create a level of uncertainty during an outage that critical applications can’t afford. This is why backups play a secondary role for your most critical databases by complementing real-time solutions that can provide both data protection and availability. Before Data Guard, enterprises used storage remote-mirroring for real-time data protection and availability. Remote-mirroring is a sophisticated storage technology promoted as a generic infrastructure solution that makes a simple promise – whatever is written to a primary volume will also be written to the mirrored volume at a remote site. Keeping this promise is also what causes data loss and downtime when the data written to primary volumes is corrupt – the same corruption is faithfully mirrored to the remote volume making both copies unusable. This happens because remote-mirroring is a generic process. It has no  intrinsic knowledge of Oracle data structures to enable advanced protection, nor can it perform independent Oracle validation BEFORE changes are applied to the remote copy. There is also nothing to prevent human error (e.g. a storage admin accidentally deleting critical files) from also impacting the remote mirrored copy. Remote-mirroring tricks users by creating a false impression that there are two separate copies of the Oracle Database. In truth; while remote-mirroring maintains two copies of the data on different volumes, both are part of a single closely coupled system. Not only will remote-mirroring propagate corruptions and administrative errors, but the changes applied to the mirrored volume are a result of the same Oracle code path that applied the change to the source volume. There is no isolation, either from a storage mirroring perspective or from an Oracle software perspective.  Bottom line, storage remote-mirroring lacks both the smarts and isolation level necessary to provide true data protection. Active Data Guard offers much more than storage remote-mirroring when your objective is protecting your enterprise from downtime and data loss. Like remote-mirroring, an Active Data Guard replica is an exact block for block copy of the primary. Unlike remote-mirroring, an Active Data Guard replica is NOT a tightly coupled copy of the source volumes - it is a completely independent Oracle Database. Active Data Guard’s inherent knowledge of Oracle data block and redo structures enables a separate Oracle Database using a different Oracle code path than the primary to use the full complement of Oracle data validation methods before changes are applied to the synchronized copy. These include: physical check sum, logical intra-block checking, lost write validation, and automatic block repair. The figure below illustrates the stark difference between the knowledge that remote-mirroring can discern from an Oracle data block and what Active Data Guard can discern. An Active Data Guard standby also provides a range of additional services enabled by the fact that it is a running Oracle Database - not just a mirrored copy of data files. An Active Data Guard standby database can be open read-only while it is synchronizing with the primary. This enables read-only workloads to be offloaded from the primary system and run on the active standby - boosting performance by utilizing all assets. An Active Data Guard standby can also be used to implement many types of system and database maintenance in rolling fashion. Maintenance and upgrades are first implemented on the standby while production runs unaffected at the primary. After the primary and standby are synchronized and all changes have been validated, the production workload is quickly switched to the standby. The only downtime is the time required for user connections to transfer from one system to the next. These capabilities further expand the expectations of availability offered by a data protection solution beyond what is possible to do using storage remote-mirroring. So don’t be fooled by appearances.  Storage remote-mirroring and Active Data Guard replication may look similar on the surface - but the devil is in the details. Only Active Data Guard has the smarts, the isolation, and the simplicity, to provide the best data protection and availability for the Oracle Database. Stay tuned for future blog posts that dive into the many differences between storage remote-mirroring and Active Data Guard along the dimensions of data protection, data availability, cost, asset utilization and return on investment. For additional information on Active Data Guard, see: Active Data Guard Technical White Paper Active Data Guard vs Storage Remote-Mirroring Active Data Guard Home Page on the Oracle Technology Network

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• Day 3 - XNA: Hacking around with images

  - by dapostolov

  Yay! Today I'm going to get into some code! My mind has been on this all day! I find it amusing how I practice, daily, to be "in the moment" or "present" and the excitement and anticipation of this project seems to snatch it away from me frequently. WELL!!! (Shakes Excitedly) Let's do this =)! Let's code! For these next few days it is my intention to better understand image rendering using XNA; after said prototypes are complete I should (fingers crossed) be able to dive into my game code using the design document I hammered out the other night. On a personal note, I think the toughest thing right now is finding the time to do this project. Each night, after my little ones go to bed I can only really afford a couple hours of work on this project. However, I hope to utilise this time as best as I can because this is the first time in a while I've found a project that I've been passionate about. A friend recently asked me if I intend to go 3D or extend the game design. Yes. For now I'm keeping it simple. Lastly, just as a note, as I was doing some further research into image rendering this morning I came across some other XNA content and lessons learned. I believe this content could have probably been posted in the first couple of posts, however, I will share the new content as I learn it at the end of each day. Maybe I'll take some time later to fix the posts but for now Installation and Deployment - Lessons Learned I had installed the XNA studio  (Day 1) and the site instructions were pretty easy to follow. However, I had a small difficulty with my development environment. You see, I run a virtual desktop development environment. Even though I was able to code and compile all the tutorials the game failed to run...because I lacked a 3D capable card; it was not detected on the virtual box... First Lesson: The XNA runtime needs to "see" the 3D card! No sweat, Il copied the files over to my parent box and executed the program. ERROR. Hmm... Second Lesson (which I should have probably known but I let the excitement get the better of me): you need the XNA runtime on the client PC to run the game, oh, and don't forget the .Net Runtime! Sprite, it ain't just a Soft Drink... With these prototypes I intend to understand and perform the following tasks. learn game development terminology how to place and position (rotate) a static image on the screen how to layer static images on the screen understand image scaling can we reuse images? understand how framerate is handled in XNA how to display text , basic shapes, and colors on the screen how to interact with an image (collision of user input?) how to animate an image and understand basic animation techniques how to detect colliding images or screen edges how to manipulate the image, lets say colors, stretching how to focus on a segment of an image...like only displaying a frame on a film reel what's the best way to manage images (compression, storage, location, prevent artwork theft, etc.) Well, let's start with this "prototype" task list for now...Today, let's get an image on the screen and maybe I can mark a few of the tasks as completed... C# Prototype1 New Visual Studio Project Select the XNA Game Studio 3.1 Project Type Select the Windows Game 3.1 Template Type Prototype1 in the Name textbox provided Press OK. At this point code has auto-magically been created. Feel free to press the F5 key to run your first XNA program. You should have a blue screen infront of you. Without getting into the nitty gritty right, the code that was generated basically creates some basic code to clear the window content with the lovely CornFlowerBlue color. Something to notice, when you move your mouse into the window...nothing. ooooo spoooky. Let's put an image on that screen! Step A - Get an Image into the solution Under "Content" in your Solution Explorer, right click and add a new folder and name it "Sprites". Copy a small image in there; I copied a "Royalty Free" wizard hat from a quick google search and named it wizards_hat.jpg (rightfully so!) Step B - Add the sprite and position fields Now, open/edit  Game1.cs Locate the following line:  SpriteBatch spriteBatch; Under this line type the following:         SpriteBatch spriteBatch; // the line you are looking for...         Texture2D sprite;         Vector2 position; Step C - Load the image asset Locate the "Load Content" Method and duplicate the following:             protected override void LoadContent()         {             spriteBatch = new SpriteBatch(GraphicsDevice);             // your image name goes here...             sprite = Content.Load<Texture2D>("Sprites\\wizards_hat");             position = new Vector2(200, 100);             base.LoadContent();         } Step D - Draw the image Locate the "Draw" Method and duplicate the following:        protected override void Draw(GameTime gameTime)         {             GraphicsDevice.Clear(Color.CornflowerBlue);             spriteBatch.Begin(SpriteBlendMode.AlphaBlend);             spriteBatch.Draw(sprite, position, Color.White);             spriteBatch.End();             base.Draw(gameTime);         }  Step E - Compile and Run Engage! (F5) - Debug! Your image should now display on a cornflowerblue window about 200 pixels from the left and 100 pixels from the top. Awesome! =) Pretty cool how we only coded a few lines to display an image, but believe me, there is plenty going on behind the scenes. However, for now, I'm going to call it a night here. Blogging all this progress certainly takes time... However, tomorrow night I'm going to detail what we just did, plus start checking off points on that list! I'm wondering right now if I should add pictures / code to this post...let me know if you want them =) Best Regards, D.

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• How to make creating viewmodels at runtime less painful

  - by Mr Happy

  I apologize for the long question, it reads a bit as a rant, but I promise it's not! I've summarized my question(s) below In the MVC world, things are straightforward. The Model has state, the View shows the Model, and the Controller does stuff to/with the Model (basically), a controller has no state. To do stuff the Controller has some dependencies on web services, repository, the lot. When you instantiate a controller you care about supplying those dependencies, nothing else. When you execute an action (method on Controller), you use those dependencies to retrieve or update the Model or calling some other domain service. If there's any context, say like some user wants to see the details of a particular item, you pass the Id of that item as parameter to the Action. Nowhere in the Controller is there any reference to any state. So far so good. Enter MVVM. I love WPF, I love data binding. I love frameworks that make data binding to ViewModels even easier (using Caliburn Micro a.t.m.). I feel things are less straightforward in this world though. Let's do the exercise again: the Model has state, the View shows the ViewModel, and the ViewModel does stuff to/with the Model (basically), a ViewModel does have state! (to clarify; maybe it delegates all the properties to one or more Models, but that means it must have a reference to the model one way or another, which is state in itself) To do stuff the ViewModel has some dependencies on web services, repository, the lot. When you instantiate a ViewModel you care about supplying those dependencies, but also the state. And this, ladies and gentlemen, annoys me to no end. Whenever you need to instantiate a ProductDetailsViewModel from the ProductSearchViewModel (from which you called the ProductSearchWebService which in turn returned IEnumerable<ProductDTO>, everybody still with me?), you can do one of these things: call new ProductDetailsViewModel(productDTO, _shoppingCartWebService /* dependcy */);, this is bad, imagine 3 more dependencies, this means the ProductSearchViewModel needs to take on those dependencies as well. Also changing the constructor is painful. call _myInjectedProductDetailsViewModelFactory.Create().Initialize(productDTO);, the factory is just a Func, they are easily generated by most IoC frameworks. I think this is bad because Init methods are a leaky abstraction. You also can't use the readonly keyword for fields that are set in the Init method. I'm sure there are a few more reasons. call _myInjectedProductDetailsViewModelAbstractFactory.Create(productDTO); So... this is the pattern (abstract factory) that is usually recommended for this type of problem. I though it was genius since it satisfies my craving for static typing, until I actually started using it. The amount of boilerplate code is I think too much (you know, apart from the ridiculous variable names I get use). For each ViewModel that needs runtime parameters you'll get two extra files (factory interface and implementation), and you need to type the non-runtime dependencies like 4 extra times. And each time the dependencies change, you get to change it in the factory as well. It feels like I don't even use a DI container anymore. (I think Castle Windsor has some kind of solution for this [with it's own drawbacks, correct me if I'm wrong]). do something with anonymous types or dictionary. I like my static typing. So, yeah. Mixing state and behavior in this way creates a problem which don't exist at all in MVC. And I feel like there currently isn't a really adequate solution for this problem. Now I'd like to observe some things: People actually use MVVM. So they either don't care about all of the above, or they have some brilliant other solution. I haven't found an in-depth example of MVVM with WPF. For example, the NDDD-sample project immensely helped me understand some DDD concepts. I'd really like it if someone could point me in the direction of something similar for MVVM/WPF. Maybe I'm doing MVVM all wrong and I should turn my design upside down. Maybe I shouldn't have this problem at all. Well I know other people have asked the same question so I think I'm not the only one. To summarize Am I correct to conclude that having the ViewModel being an integration point for both state and behavior is the reason for some difficulties with the MVVM pattern as a whole? Is using the abstract factory pattern the only/best way to instantiate a ViewModel in a statically typed way? Is there something like an in depth reference implementation available? Is having a lot of ViewModels with both state/behavior a design smell?

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• Defining Your Online Segmentation and Targeting Strategy

  - by Christie Flanagan

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} A lot of times, companies will put online segmentation and targeting on the back burner because they don’t know where to start. Often, I’ve heard web managers say that their segments aren’t well understood yet, so they can’t really deliver personalized online experiences that are meaningful. This lack of complete understanding means that they don't really bother to try. But, I don’t think you necessarily need to have an elaborate segmentation and targeting strategy already in place to start delivering a more relevant online customer experience. Sometimes it helps to think of how segmentation and targeting might solve some of the challenges your sites visitors are currently experiencing on your web presence, rather than doing nothing and waiting until a fully baked segmentation strategy lands in your inbox.  For example, perhaps you have a broad and varied service offering that makes it difficult for site visitors to easily find the solutions that are most relevant for them.  How can segmentation and targeting help solve this problem?  Or maybe it’s like the airline I described in Monday’s post where the special deals featured on the home page are only relevant to site visitors from a couple of cities.  Couldn’t segmentation and targeting help them to highlight offers on their home page that are relevant to a larger share of their site visitors? Your early segmentation and targeting efforts do not need to be complicated.  There are simple ways to start delivering a more relevant online customer experience, even if you’re dealing with anonymous site visitors.  These include targeting content to site visitors based on: Referral: Deliver targeted content to your site visitors that is based on where they came from or the search term they used to find your site Behavior:  Deliver content to your site visitors that is related or similar to content they’ve clicked on already Location:  Deliver content your site visitors that is most relevant for their geographic location (this would solve that pesky airline home page problem described above) So as you can see, there really are some very simple ways in which you can start improving your online customer experience using very basic segmentation and targeting methods.  One thing to keep in mind as you start to define you segmentation and targeting strategy is that there are many different types of attributes or combinations of attributes upon which you can base your segmentation and targeting strategy.  In addition to referral, behavior and location, other attributes that you should consider are: Profile Information:  What profile information do you know about this customer already?  Perhaps they provided some information on their interests and preferences when they first registered with your site. Time:  What time is it and how does that impact what my site visitors are looking for or trying to do? Demographics: What are my site visitors’ ages, incomes or ethnicities? Which attributes you select to include in your segmentation strategy will depend on your unique business needs and objectives.  Attributes such as behavior or referral may not be the most important targeting criteria depending on your situation. For example, if you’re a newspaper you might know that certain visitors are sports fans based on their profile information.  You can create a segment for sports fans and target sports related content to that segment of your readership online.  Or perhaps, a reader is browsing stories that are related to politics; you can use that visitor’s behavior to assign him or her to a segment for those interested in politics. From there you can recommend more stories to that visitor based on their interest in politics. For an airline, the visitor’s location may be a more important attribute. By detecting the visitor’s location, you can assign them to an appropriate segment and then target special flights and offers to them based on their likely departure airport. As you can see, there are many practical ways that you can start improving the experience your customers receive on your web presence using fairly basic segmentation and targeting techniques. If you want to learn more about segmentation and targeting using Oracle’s web experience management solution, check out this helpful video that demonstrates these powerful capabilities in Oracle WebCenter Sites. ***** On Demand Webcast Featuring Brian Solis of Altimeter Group Trends such as the mobile web, social media, gamification and real-time are changing customer behavior and expectations. In this new environment, many businesses will struggle. Some will fall by the wayside, while others learn to adapt and thrive. Watch this on demand webcast with Altimeter Group digital analyst and author, Brian Solis, and discover what your organization needs to know about how to compete in the new era of Digital Darwinism. View now.

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• What's new in Solaris 11.1?

  - by Karoly Vegh

  Solaris 11.1 is released. This is the first release update since Solaris 11 11/11, the versioning has been changed from MM/YY style to 11.1 highlighting that this is Solaris 11 Update 1.  Solaris 11 itself has been great. What's new in Solaris 11.1? Allow me to pick some new features from the What's New PDF that can be found in the official Oracle Solaris 11.1 Documentation. The updates are very numerous, I really can't include all.  I. New AI Automated Installer RBAC profiles have been introduced to enable delegation of installation tasks. II. The interactive installer now supports installing the OS to iSCSI targets. III. ASR (Auto Service Request) and OCM (Oracle Configuration Manager) have been enabled by default to proactively provide support information and create service requests to speed up support processes. This is optional and can be disabled but helps a lot in supportcases. For further information, see: http://oracle.com/goto/solarisautoreg IV. The new command svcbundle helps you to create SMF manifests without having to struggle with XML editing. (btw, do you know the interactive editprop subcommand in svccfg? The listprop/setprop subcommands are great for scripting and automating, but for an interactive property editing session try, for example, this: svccfg -s svc:/application/pkg/system-repository:default editprop )  V. pfedit: Ever wondered how to delegate editing permissions to certain files? It is well known "sudo /usr/bin/vi /etc/hosts" is not the right way, for sudo elevates the complete vi process to admin levels, and the user can "break" out of the session as root with simply starting a shell from that vi. Now, the new pfedit command provides a solution exactly to this challenge - an auditable, secure, per-user configurable editing possibility. See the pfedit man page for examples.   VI. rsyslog, the popular logging daemon (filters, SSL, formattable output, SQL collect...) has been included in Solaris 11.1 as an alternative to syslog.  VII: Zones: Solaris Zones - as a major Solaris differentiator - got lots of love in terms of new features: ZOSS - Zones on Shared Storage: Placing your zones to shared storage (FC, iSCSI) has never been this easy - via zonecfg.  parallell updates - with S11's bootenvironments updating zones was no problem and meant no downtime anyway, but still, now you can update them parallelly, a way faster update action if you are running a large number of zones. This is like parallell patching in Solaris 10, but with all the IPS/ZFS/S11 goodness.  per-zone fstype statistics: Running zones on a shared filesystems complicate the I/O debugging, since ZFS collects all the random writes and delivers them sequentially to boost performance. Now, over kstat you can find out which zone's I/O has an impact on the other ones, see the examples in the documentation: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E26502_01/html/E29024/gmheh.html#scrolltoc Zones got RDSv3 protocol support for InfiniBand, and IPoIB support with Crossbow's anet (automatic vnic creation) feature.  NUMA I/O support for Zones: customers can now determine the NUMA I/O topology of the system from within zones.  VIII: Security got a lot of attention too:  Automated security/audit reporting, with builtin reporting templates e.g. for PCI (payment card industry) audits.  PAM is now configureable on a per-user basis instead of system wide, allowing different authentication requirements for different users  SSH in Solaris 11.1 now supports running in FIPS 140-2 mode, that is, in a U.S. government security accredited fashion.  SHA512/224 and SHA512/256 cryptographic hash functions are implemented in a FIPS-compliant way - and on a T4 implemented in silicon! That is, goverment-approved cryptography at HW-speed.  Generally, Solaris is currently under evaluation to be both FIPS and Common Criteria certified.  IX. Networking, as one of the core strengths of Solaris 11, has been extended with:  Data Center Bridging (DCB) - not only setups where network and storage share the same fabric (FCoE, anyone?) can have Quality-of-Service requirements. DCB enables peers to distinguish traffic based on priorities. Your NICs have to support DCB, see the documentation, and additional information on Wikipedia. DataLink MultiPathing, DLMP, enables link aggregation to span across multiple switches, even between those of different vendors. But there are essential differences to the good old bandwidth-aggregating LACP, see the documentation: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E26502_01/html/E28993/gmdlu.html#scrolltoc VNIC live migration is now supported from one physical NIC to another on-the-fly  X. Data management:  FedFS, (Federated FileSystem) is new, it relies on Solaris 11's NFS referring mechanism to join separate shares of different NFS servers into a single filesystem namespace. The referring system has been there since S11 11/11, in Solaris 11.1 FedFS uses a LDAP - as the one global nameservice to bind them all.  The iSCSI initiator now uses the T4 CPU's HW-implemented CRC32 algorithm - thus improving iSCSI throughput while reducing CPU utilization on a T4 Storage locking improvements are now RAC aware, speeding up throughput with better locking-communication between nodes up to 20%!  XI: Kernel performance optimizations: The new Virtual Memory subsystem ("VM2") scales now to 100+ TB Memory ranges.  The memory predictor monitors large memory page usage, and adjust memory page sizes to applications' needs OSM, the Optimized Shared Memory allows Oracle DBs' SGA to be resized online XII: The Power Aware Dispatcher in now by default enabled, reducing power consumption of idle CPUs. Also, the LDoms' Power Management policies and the poweradm settings in Solaris 11 OS will cooperate. XIII: x86 boot: upgrade to the (Grand Unified Bootloader) GRUB2. Because grub2 differs in the configuration syntactically from grub1, one shall not edit the new grub configuration (grub.cfg) but use the new bootadm features to update it. GRUB2 adds UEFI support and also support for disks over 2TB. XIV: Improved viewing of per-CPU statistics of mpstat. This one might seem of less importance at first, but nowadays having better sorting/filtering possibilities on a periodically updated mpstat output of 256+ vCPUs can be a blessing. XV: Support for Solaris Cluster 4.1: The What's New document doesn't actually mention this one, since OSC 4.1 has not been released at the time 11.1 was. But since then it is available, and it requires Solaris 11.1. And it's only a "pkg update" away. ...aand I seriously need to stop here. There's a lot I missed, Edge Virtual Bridging, lofi tuning, ZFS sharing and crypto enhancements, USB3.0, pulseaudio, trusted extensions updates, etc - but if I mention all those then I effectively copy the What's New document. Which I recommend reading now anyway, it is a great extract of the 300+ new projects and RFE-followups in S11.1. And this blogpost is a summary of that extract.  For closing words, allow me to come back to Request For Enhancements, RFEs. Any customer can request features. Open up a Support Request, explain that this is an RFE, describe the feature you/your company desires to have in S11 implemented. The more SRs are collected for an RFE, the more chance it's got to get implemented. Feel free to provide feedback about the product, as well as about the Solaris 11.1 Documentation using the "Feedback" button there. Both the Solaris engineers and the documentation writers are eager to hear your input.Feel free to comment about this post too. Except that it's too long ;)  wbr,charlie

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• Anatomy of a .NET Assembly - CLR metadata 2

  - by Simon Cooper

  Before we look any further at the CLR metadata, we need a quick diversion to understand how the metadata is actually stored. Encoding table information As an example, we'll have a look at a row in the TypeDef table. According to the spec, each TypeDef consists of the following: Flags specifying various properties of the class, including visibility. The name of the type. The namespace of the type. What type this type extends. The field list of this type. The method list of this type. How is all this data actually represented? Offset & RID encoding Most assemblies don't need to use a 4 byte value to specify heap offsets and RIDs everywhere, however we can't hard-code every offset and RID to be 2 bytes long as there could conceivably be more than 65535 items in a heap or more than 65535 fields or types defined in an assembly. So heap offsets and RIDs are only represented in the full 4 bytes if it is required; in the header information at the top of the #~ stream are 3 bits indicating if the #Strings, #GUID, or #Blob heaps use 2 or 4 bytes (the #US stream is not accessed from metadata), and the rowcount of each table. If the rowcount for a particular table is greater than 65535 then all RIDs referencing that table throughout the metadata use 4 bytes, else only 2 bytes are used. Coded tokens Not every field in a table row references a single predefined table. For example, in the TypeDef extends field, a type can extend another TypeDef (a type in the same assembly), a TypeRef (a type in a different assembly), or a TypeSpec (an instantiation of a generic type). A token would have to be used to let us specify the table along with the RID. Tokens are always 4 bytes long; again, this is rather wasteful of space. Cutting the RID down to 2 bytes would make each token 3 bytes long, which isn't really an optimum size for computers to read from memory or disk. However, every use of a token in the metadata tables can only point to a limited subset of the metadata tables. For the extends field, we only need to be able to specify one of 3 tables, which we can do using 2 bits: 0x0: TypeDef 0x1: TypeRef 0x2: TypeSpec We could therefore compress the 4-byte token that would otherwise be needed into a coded token of type TypeDefOrRef. For each type of coded token, the least significant bits encode the table the token points to, and the rest of the bits encode the RID within that table. We can work out whether each type of coded token needs 2 or 4 bytes to represent it by working out whether the maximum RID of every table that the coded token type can point to will fit in the space available. The space available for the RID depends on the type of coded token; a TypeOrMethodDef coded token only needs 1 bit to specify the table, leaving 15 bits available for the RID before a 4-byte representation is needed, whereas a HasCustomAttribute coded token can point to one of 18 different tables, and so needs 5 bits to specify the table, only leaving 11 bits for the RID before 4 bytes are needed to represent that coded token type. For example, a 2-byte TypeDefOrRef coded token with the value 0x0321 has the following bit pattern: 0 3 2 1 0000 0011 0010 0001 The first two bits specify the table - TypeRef; the other bits specify the RID. Because we've used the first two bits, we've got to shift everything along two bits: 000000 1100 1000 This gives us a RID of 0xc8. If any one of the TypeDef, TypeRef or TypeSpec tables had more than 16383 rows (2^14 - 1), then 4 bytes would need to be used to represent all TypeDefOrRef coded tokens throughout the metadata tables. Lists The third representation we need to consider is 1-to-many references; each TypeDef refers to a list of FieldDef and MethodDef belonging to that type. If we were to specify every FieldDef and MethodDef individually then each TypeDef would be very large and a variable size, which isn't ideal. There is a way of specifying a list of references without explicitly specifying every item; if we order the MethodDef and FieldDef tables by the owning type, then the field list and method list in a TypeDef only have to be a single RID pointing at the first FieldDef or MethodDef belonging to that type; the end of the list can be inferred by the field list and method list RIDs of the next row in the TypeDef table. Going back to the TypeDef If we have a look back at the definition of a TypeDef, we end up with the following reprensentation for each row: Flags - always 4 bytes Name - a #Strings heap offset. Namespace - a #Strings heap offset. Extends - a TypeDefOrRef coded token. FieldList - a single RID to the FieldDef table. MethodList - a single RID to the MethodDef table. So, depending on the number of entries in the heaps and tables within the assembly, the rows in the TypeDef table can be as small as 14 bytes, or as large as 24 bytes. Now we've had a look at how information is encoded within the metadata tables, in the next post we can see how they are arranged on disk.

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• obiee 10g teradata Solaris deployment

  - by user554629

  I have 3-4 years worth of notes on proper Teradata deployment across multiple operating systems.   The topic that is too large to cover succinctly in a blog entry.   I'm trying something new:  document a specific situation, consolidate the facts, document diagnostic procedures and then clone the structure to cover other obiee deployments (11g and other operating systems). Until the icon below is removed, this blog entry may be revised frequently.  No construction between June 6th through June 25th. Getting started obiee 10g certification:  pg 24-25 Teradata V2R5.1.x - V2R6.2, Client 13.10, certified 10.1.3.4.1obiee 10g documentation: Deployment Guide, Server Administration, Install/Config Guideobiee overview: teradata connectivity downloads: ( requires registration )solaris odbc drivers: sparc 13.10:  Choose 13.10.00.04  ( ReadMe ) sparc 14.00: probably would work, but not certified by Oracle on 10g I assume you have obiee 10.1.3.4.1 installed; 10.1.3.4.2 would be a better choice. Teradata odbc install requires root for Solaris pkgadd Only 1 version of Teradata odbc can be installed.symbolic links to the current version are created in /usr/lib at install obiee implementation background database access has two types of implementation:  native and odbcnative drivers use DB vendor client interfaces for accessodbc drivers are provided by the DB vendor for DB accessTeradata is an odbc interface Database. odbc drivers require an ODBC Driver Managerobiee uses Merant Data Direct driver manager obiee servers communicate with one another using odbc.The internal odbc driver is implemented by the obiee team and requires Merant Driver Manager. Teradata supplies a Driver Manager, which is built by Merant, but should not be used in obiee. The nqsserver shared library deployment looks like this  OBIEE Server<->DataDirect Manager<->Teradata Driver<->Teradata Database nqsserver startup $ cd $BI/setup$ . ./sa-init64.sh$ run-sa.sh autorestart64 The following files are referenced from setup:  .variant.sh  user.sh  NQSConfig.INI  DBFeatures.INI  $ODBCINI ( odbc.ini )  sqlnet.ora How does nqsserver connect to Teradata? A teradata DSN is created in the RPD. ( TD71 )setup/odbc.ini contains: [ODBC Data Sources] TD71=tdata.so[TD71]Driver=/opt/tdodbc/odbc/drivers/tdata.soDescription=Teradata V7.1.0DBCName=###.##.##.### LastUser=Username=northwindPassword=northwindDatabase=DefaultDatabase=northwind setup/user.sh contains LIBPATH\=/opt/tdicu/lib_64\:/usr/odbc/lib\:/usr/odbc/drivers\:/usr/lpp/tdodbc/odbc/drivers\:$LIBPATHexport LIBPATH   setup/.variant.sh contains if [ "$ANA_SERVER_64" = "1" ]; then  ANA_BIN_DIR=${SAROOTDIR}/server/Bin64  ANA_WEB_DIR=${SAROOTDIR}/web/bin64  ANA_ODBC_DIR=${SAROOTDIR}/odbc/lib64         setup/sa-run.sh  contains . ${ANA_INSTALL_DIR}/setup/.variant.sh. ${ANA_INSTALL_DIR}/setup/user.sh logfile="${SAROOTDIR}/server/Log/nqsserver.out.log"${ANA_BIN_DIR}/nqsserver -quiet >> ${logfile} 2>&1 &   nqsserver is running: nqsserver produces $BI/server/nqsserver.logAt startup, the native database drivers connect and record DB versions.tdata.so is not loaded until a Teradata DB connection is attempted.    Teradata odbc client installation Accept all the defaults for pkgadd.   Install in /opt. $ mkdir odbc$ cd odbc$ gzip -dc ../tdodbc__solaris_sparc.13.10.00.04.tar.gz | tar -xf - $ sudo su# pkgadd -d . TeraGSS# pkgadd -d . tdicu1310# pkgadd -d . tdodbc1310   Directory Notes: /opt/teradata/client/13.10/odbc_64/lib/tdata.soThe 64-bit obiee library loaded by nqsserver. /opt/teradata/client/13.10/odbc_64/lib is not needed in LD_LIBRARY_PATH /opt/teradata/client/13.10/tdicu/lib64is needed in LD_LIBRARY_PATH /usr/odbc should not be referenced;  it is a link to 32-bit libraries LD_LIBRARY_PATH_64 should not be used.     Useful bash functions and aliases export SAROOTDIR=/export/home/dw_adm/OracleBIexport TERA_HOME=/opt/teradata/client/13.10 export ORACLE_HOME=/export/home/oracle/product/10.2.0/clientexport ODBCINI=$SAROOTDIR/setup/odbc.iniexport TD_ICU_DATA=$TERA_HOME/tdicu/lib64alias cds="alias | grep '^alias cd' | sed 's/^alias //' | sort"alias cdtd="cd $TERA_HOME; ls" alias cdtdodbc="cd $TERA_HOME/odbc_64; ls -l"alias cdtdicu="cd $TERA_HOME/tdicu/lib64; ls -l"alias cdbi="cd $SAROOTDIR; ls"alias cdbiodbc="cd $SAROOTDIR/odbc; ls -l"alias cdsetup="cd $SAROOTDIR/setup; ls -ltr"alias cdsvr="cd $SAROOTDIR/server; ls"alias cdrep="cd $SAROOTDIR/server/Repository; ls -ltr"alias cdsvrcfg="cd $SAROOTDIR/server/Config; ls -ltr"alias cdsvrlog="cd $SAROOTDIR/server/Log; ls -ltr"alias cdweb="cd $SAROOTDIR/web; ls"alias cdwebconfig="cd $SAROOTDIR/web/config; ls -ltr"alias cdoci="cd $ORACLE_HOME; ls"pkgfiles() { pkgchk -l $1 | awk  '/^Pathname/ {print $2}'; }pkgfind()  { pkginfo | egrep -i $1 ; } Examples: $ pkgfind td$ pkgfiles tdodbc1310 | grep 64$ cds$ cdtdodbc$ cdsetup$ cdsvrlog$ cdweblog

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• Collision Detection, player correction

  - by DoomStone

  I am having some problems with collision detection, I have 2 types of objects excluding the player. Tiles and what I call MapObjects. The tiles are all 16x16, where the MapObjects can be any size, but in my case they are all 16x16. When my player runs along the mapobjects or tiles, it get verry jaggy. The player is unable to move right, and will get warped forward when moving left. I have found the problem, and that is my collision detection will move the player left/right if colliding the object from the side, and up/down if collision from up/down. Now imagine that my player is sitting on 2 tiles, at (10,12) and (11,12), and the player is mostly standing on the (11,12) tile. The collision detection will first run on then (10,12) tile, it calculates the collision depth, and finds that is is a collision from the side, and therefore move the object to the right. After, it will do the collision detection with (11,12) and it will move the character up. So the player will not fall down, but are unable to move right. And when moving left, the same problem will make the player warp forward. This problem have been bugging me for a few days now, and I just can't find a solution! Here is my code that does the collision detection. public void ApplyObjectCollision(IPhysicsObject obj, List<IComponent> mapObjects, TileMap map) { PhysicsVariables physicsVars = GetPhysicsVariables(); Rectangle bounds = ((IComponent)obj).GetBound(); int leftTile = (int)Math.Floor((float)bounds.Left / map.GetTileSize()); int rightTile = (int)Math.Ceiling(((float)bounds.Right / map.GetTileSize())) - 1; int topTile = (int)Math.Floor((float)bounds.Top / map.GetTileSize()); int bottomTile = (int)Math.Ceiling(((float)bounds.Bottom / map.GetTileSize())) - 1; // Reset flag to search for ground collision. obj.IsOnGround = false; // For each potentially colliding tile, for (int y = topTile; y <= bottomTile; ++y) { for (int x = leftTile; x <= rightTile; ++x) { IComponent tile = map.Get(x, y); if (tile != null) { bounds = HandelCollision(obj, tile, bounds, physicsVars); } } } // Handel collision for all Moving objects foreach (IComponent mo in mapObjects) { if (mo == obj) continue; if (mo.GetBound().Intersects(((IComponent)obj).GetBound())) { bounds = HandelCollision(obj, mo, bounds, physicsVars); } } } private Rectangle HandelCollision(IPhysicsObject obj, IComponent objb, Rectangle bounds, PhysicsVaraibales physicsVars) { // If this tile is collidable, SpriteCollision collision = ((IComponent)objb).GetCollisionType(); if (collision != SpriteCollision.Passable) { // Determine collision depth (with direction) and magnitude. Rectangle tileBounds = ((IComponent)objb).GetBound(); Vector2 depth = bounds.GetIntersectionDepth(tileBounds); if (depth != Vector2.Zero) { float absDepthX = Math.Abs(depth.X); float absDepthY = Math.Abs(depth.Y); // Resolve the collision along the shallow axis. if (absDepthY <= absDepthX || collision == SpriteCollision.Platform) { // If we crossed the top of a tile, we are on the ground. if (obj.PreviousBound.Bottom <= tileBounds.Top) obj.IsOnGround = true; // Ignore platforms, unless we are on the ground. if (collision == SpriteCollision.Impassable || obj.IsOnGround) { // Resolve the collision along the Y axis. ((IComponent)obj).Position = new Vector2(((IComponent)obj).Position.X, ((IComponent)obj).Position.Y + depth.Y); // If we hit something about us, remove all velosity upwards if (depth.Y > 0 && obj.IsJumping) { obj.Velocity = new Vector2(obj.Velocity.X, 0); obj.JumpTime = physicsVars.MaxJumpTime; } // Perform further collisions with the new bounds. return ((IComponent)obj).GetBound(); } } else if (collision == SpriteCollision.Impassable) // Ignore platforms. { // Resolve the collision along the X axis. ((IComponent)obj).Position = new Vector2(((IComponent)obj).Position.X + depth.X, ((IComponent)obj).Position.Y); // Perform further collisions with the new bounds. return ((IComponent)obj).GetBound(); } } } return bounds; } Update: I have uploaded the source code, if you want to look that through. I think that my general approach might be wrong when i am working with small tiles, I have also be unable to find any good information on physics and collision detection in Platform games. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3181816/Sogaard.Games.SuperMario.rar

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• Detecting Duplicates Using Oracle Business Rules

  - by joeywong-Oracle

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

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• Walmart and Fusion Apps

  - by ultan o'broin

  Photograph: Misha Vaughan I attended Fusion Apps (yes, I know I am supposed to say "Oracle Fusion Applications", but stuffy old style guides are a turn-off in interwebs conversations) User Experience Advocate (FXA) training in Long Beach, California last week; a suitable location as ODTUG KSCOPE 11 was kicking off and key players were in the area. As a member of Oracle's Apps-UX team I know the Fusion Apps messaging, natch, and done some other Fusion Apps go-to-market content work too. For the messaging details themselves, see Lonneke Dikmans (@lonnekedikmans) great blog, by the way. However, I wanted some 'formal' training combined with the opportunity to meet and learn from people already out there delivering those messages. The idea in me reaching out to Misha Vaughan, Apps-UX FXA maven, to get me onto this training was that in addition to my UX knowledge, I could leverage my location in EMEA and hit up customer events more quickly and easily. Those local user groups do like to hear the voice of locals too you know (so I need to work on that mid-Atlantic accent). I'm looking forward to such opportunities. The training was all smashing stuff, just the right level of detail, delivered professionally and with great style and humor. I was especially honored to be paired off for my er, coaching with Debra Lilley (@debralilley), who shared with everyone all kinds of tips and insights from her experiences of delivering the message and demo. For me, that was the real power of the FXA event--the communal, conversational aspect--the meeting up with people who had done all this for real, the sharing in their experiences, while learning along with other newbies. Sorry, but that all-important social aspect doesn't work so well with remote meetings. Katie Candland (Apps-UX) gave us a great tour of the Fusion Apps demo and included some useful presentational tips too (any excuse to buy that iPad). It's clear to me that the Fusion Apps messaging and demos really come alive with real-world examples that local application users will recognize, and I picked up some "yes, that's my job made easier" scene-stealers from Debra and Karen Brownfield too, to add to the great ones already provided. This power of examples shouldn't surprise anyone, they've long been a mainstay of applications user assistance, popular with users. We'll offer customers different types of example topics in the Fusion Apps online help too (stay tuned), and we know from research how important those 3S's (stories, scenarios, and simulations) are to users when they consume and apply information. Well, we've got the simulation, now it's time for more stories and scenarios. If you get a chance to participate in an FXA event (whether you are an Oracle employee or otherwise), I'd encourage it. It's committing your time and energy for sure, but I got real bang for the buck from it for my everyday job too. Listening to the room's feedback on the application demo really brought our internal design work to life, and I picked up on some things that I need to follow up on (like how you alphabetically sort stuff in other languages). User experience is after all, about users. What will I be doing next, and what would I like to see happen? Obviously, I need to develop my story-telling links with the people I met in Long Beach and do some practicing with the materials, and then get out there and deliver them at a suitable location. The demo is what it is right now, and that's a super-rich demo that I know everyone will want to see and ask questions about. Then, as mentioned by attendees at the FXA event, follow up on those translated and localized messages for EMEA (and APAC), that deal with different statutory or reporting requirements of the target markets. Given my background I would say that, wouldn't I? However, language is part of the UX, and international revenue is greater than US-only revenue for Oracle, so yes dear, we all need to get over the fact that enterprise apps users don't all speak, or want to speak, American-English. Most importantly perhaps, the continued development of a strong messaging community between Oracle and partners and customers where we can swap and share those FXA messaging stories and scenarios about Fusion Apps in a conversational way. The more the better, a combination of online and face-to-face meetings. I must also mention the great dinner after the event at Parker's Lighthouse, and the fun myself and Andrew Gilmour (Apps-UX) had at our end of the table talking about just about everything except Fusion Apps with Ronald Van Luttikhuizen and Ben Prusinski (who now understands the difference between Cork and Dublin people. I hope). Thanks to all the Apps-UXers who helped bring the FXA training to town, and to Debra and all the others that I am too jetlagged to mention right who were instrumental in making it happen for me. Here's to the next one. And the Walmart angle? That was me doing my Robert Scoble (ScO'bilizer?)-style guerilla smart phone research in Walmart in Long Beach, before the FXA event. It's all about stories for me. You can read more about it on the appslab blog (see the comments).

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• How do I restrict concurrent statistics gathering to a small set of tables from a single schema?

  - by Maria Colgan

  I got an interesting question from one of my colleagues in the performance team last week about how to restrict a concurrent statistics gather to a small subset of tables from one schema, rather than the entire schema. I thought I would share the solution we came up with because it was rather elegant, and took advantage of concurrent statistics gathering, incremental statistics, and the not so well known “obj_filter_list” parameter in DBMS_STATS.GATHER_SCHEMA_STATS procedure. You should note that the solution outline below with “obj_filter_list” still applies, even when concurrent statistics gathering and/or incremental statistics gathering is disabled. The reason my colleague had asked the question in the first place was because he wanted to enable incremental statistics for 5 large partitioned tables in one schema. The first time you gather statistics after you enable incremental statistics on a table, you have to gather statistics for all of the existing partitions so that a synopsis may be created for them. If the partitioned table in question is large and contains a lot of partition, this could take a considerable amount of time. Since my colleague only had the Exadata environment at his disposal overnight, he wanted to re-gather statistics on 5 partition tables as quickly as possible to ensure that it all finished before morning. Prior to Oracle Database 11g Release 2, the only way to do this would have been to write a script with an individual DBMS_STATS.GATHER_TABLE_STATS command for each partition, in each of the 5 tables, as well as another one to gather global statistics on the table. Then, run each script in a separate session and manually manage how many of this session could run concurrently. Since each table has over one thousand partitions that would definitely be a daunting task and would most likely keep my colleague up all night! In Oracle Database 11g Release 2 we can take advantage of concurrent statistics gathering, which enables us to gather statistics on multiple tables in a schema (or database), and multiple (sub)partitions within a table concurrently. By using concurrent statistics gathering we no longer have to run individual statistics gathering commands for each partition. Oracle will automatically create a statistics gathering job for each partition, and one for the global statistics on each partitioned table. With the use of concurrent statistics, our script can now be simplified to just five DBMS_STATS.GATHER_TABLE_STATS commands, one for each table. This approach would work just fine but we really wanted to get this down to just one command. So how can we do that? You may be wondering why we didn’t just use the DBMS_STATS.GATHER_SCHEMA_STATS procedure with the OPTION parameter set to ‘GATHER STALE’. Unfortunately the statistics on the 5 partitioned tables were not stale and enabling incremental statistics does not mark the existing statistics stale. Plus how would we limit the schema statistics gather to just the 5 partitioned tables? So we went to ask one of the statistics developers if there was an alternative way. The developer told us the advantage of the “obj_filter_list” parameter in DBMS_STATS.GATHER_SCHEMA_STATS procedure. The “obj_filter_list” parameter allows you to specify a list of objects that you want to gather statistics on within a schema or database. The parameter takes a collection of type DBMS_STATS.OBJECTTAB. Each entry in the collection has 5 feilds; the schema name or the object owner, the object type (i.e., ‘TABLE’ or ‘INDEX’), object name, partition name, and subpartition name. You don't have to specify all five fields for each entry. Empty fields in an entry are treated as if it is a wildcard field (similar to ‘*’ character in LIKE predicates). Each entry corresponds to one set of filter conditions on the objects. If you have more than one entry, an object is qualified for statistics gathering as long as it satisfies the filter conditions in one entry. You first must create the collection of objects, and then gather statistics for the specified collection. It’s probably easier to explain this with an example. I’m using the SH sample schema but needed a couple of additional partitioned table tables to get recreate my colleagues scenario of 5 partitioned tables. So I created SALES2, SALES3, and COSTS2 as copies of the SALES and COSTS table respectively (setup.sql). I also deleted statistics on all of the tables in the SH schema beforehand to more easily demonstrate our approach. Step 0. Delete the statistics on the tables in the SH schema. Step 1. Enable concurrent statistics gathering. Remember, this has to be done at the global level. Step 2. Enable incremental statistics for the 5 partitioned tables. Step 3. Create the DBMS_STATS.OBJECTTAB and pass it to the DBMS_STATS.GATHER_SCHEMA_STATS command. Here, you will notice that we defined two variables of DBMS_STATS.OBJECTTAB type. The first, filter_lst, will be used to pass the list of tables we want to gather statistics on, and will be the value passed to the obj_filter_list parameter. The second, obj_lst, will be used to capture the list of tables that have had statistics gathered on them by this command, and will be the value passed to the objlist parameter. In Oracle Database 11g Release 2, you need to specify the objlist parameter in order to get the obj_filter_list parameter to work correctly due to bug 14539274. Will also needed to define the number of objects we would supply in the obj_filter_list. In our case we ere specifying 5 tables (filter_lst.extend(5)). Finally, we need to specify the owner name and object name for each of the objects in the list. Once the list definition is complete we can issue the DBMS_STATS.GATHER_SCHEMA_STATS command. Step 4. Confirm statistics were gathered on the 5 partitioned tables. Here are a couple of other things to keep in mind when specifying the entries for the  obj_filter_list parameter. If a field in the entry is empty, i.e., null, it means there is no condition on this field. In the above example , suppose you remove the statement Obj_filter_lst(1).ownname := ‘SH’; You will get the same result since when you have specified gather_schema_stats so there is no need to further specify ownname in the obj_filter_lst. All of the names in the entry are normalized, i.e., uppercased if they are not double quoted. So in the above example, it is OK to use Obj_filter_lst(1).objname := ‘sales’;. However if you have a table called ‘MyTab’ instead of ‘MYTAB’, then you need to specify Obj_filter_lst(1).objname := ‘”MyTab”’; As I said before, although we have illustrated the usage of the obj_filter_list parameter for partitioned tables, with concurrent and incremental statistics gathering turned on, the obj_filter_list parameter is generally applicable to any gather_database_stats, gather_dictionary_stats and gather_schema_stats command. You can get a copy of the script I used to generate this post here. +Maria Colgan

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• Working with packed dates in SSIS

  - by Jim Giercyk

  One of the challenges recently thrown my way was to read an EBCDIC flat file, decode packed dates, and insert the dates into a SQL table.  For those unfamiliar with packed data, it is a way to store data at the nibble level (half a byte), and was often used by mainframe programmers to conserve storage space.  In the case of my input file, the dates were 2 bytes long and  represented the number of days that have past since 01/01/1950.  My first thought was, in the words of Scooby, Hmmmmph?  But, I love a good challenge, so I dove in. Reading in the flat file was rather simple.  The only difference between reading an EBCDIC and an ASCII file is the Code Page option in the connection manager.  In my case, I needed to use Code Page 1140 for EBCDIC (I could have also used Code Page 37).       Once the code page is set correctly, SSIS can understand what it is reading and it will convert the output to the default code page, 1252.  However, packed data is either unreadable or produces non-alphabetic characters, as we can see in the preview window.   Column 1 is actually the packed date, columns 0 and 2 are the values in the rest of the file.  We are only interested in Column 1, which is a 2 byte field representing a packed date.  We know that 2 bytes of packed data can be stored in 1 byte of character data, so we are working with 4 packed digits in 2 character bytes.  If you are confused, stay tuned….this will make sense in a minute.   Right-click on your Flat File Source shape and select “Show Advanced Editor”. Here is where the magic begins. By changing the properties of the output columns, we can access the packed digits from each byte. By default, the Output Column data type is DT_STR. Since we want to look at the bytes individually and not the entire string, change the data type to DT_BYTES. Next, and most important, set UseBinaryFormat to TRUE. This will write the HEX VALUES of the output string instead of writing the character values.  Now we are getting somewhere! Next, you will need to use a Data Conversion shape in your Data Flow to transform the 2 position byte stream to a 4 position Unicode string containing the packed data.  You need the string to be 4 bytes long because it will contain the 4 packed digits.  Here is what that should look like in the Data Conversion shape: Direct the output of your data flow to a test table or file to see the results.  In my case, I created a test table.  The results looked like this:     Hold on a second!  That doesn't look like a date at all.  No, of course not.  It is a hex number which represents the days which have passed between 01/01/1950 and the date.  We have to convert the Hex value to a decimal value, and use the DATEADD function to get a date value.  Luckily, I have created a function to convert Hex to Decimal:   -- ============================================= -- Author:        Jim Giercyk -- Create date: March, 2012 -- Description:    Converts a Hex string to a decimal value -- ============================================= CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[ftn_HexToDec] (     @hexValue NVARCHAR(6) ) RETURNS DECIMAL AS BEGIN     -- Declare the return variable here DECLARE @decValue DECIMAL IF @hexValue LIKE '0x%' SET @hexValue = SUBSTRING(@hexValue,3,4) DECLARE @decTab TABLE ( decPos1 VARCHAR(2), decPos2 VARCHAR(2), decPos3 VARCHAR(2), decPos4 VARCHAR(2) ) DECLARE @pos1 VARCHAR(1) = SUBSTRING(@hexValue,1,1) DECLARE @pos2 VARCHAR(1) = SUBSTRING(@hexValue,2,1) DECLARE @pos3 VARCHAR(1) = SUBSTRING(@hexValue,3,1) DECLARE @pos4 VARCHAR(1) = SUBSTRING(@hexValue,4,1) INSERT @decTab VALUES (CASE               WHEN @pos1 = 'A' THEN '10'                 WHEN @pos1 = 'B' THEN '11'               WHEN @pos1 = 'C' THEN '12'               WHEN @pos1 = 'D' THEN '13'               WHEN @pos1 = 'E' THEN '14'               WHEN @pos1 = 'F' THEN '15'               ELSE @pos1              END, CASE               WHEN @pos2 = 'A' THEN '10'                 WHEN @pos2 = 'B' THEN '11'               WHEN @pos2 = 'C' THEN '12'               WHEN @pos2 = 'D' THEN '13'               WHEN @pos2 = 'E' THEN '14'               WHEN @pos2 = 'F' THEN '15'               ELSE @pos2              END, CASE               WHEN @pos3 = 'A' THEN '10'                 WHEN @pos3 = 'B' THEN '11'               WHEN @pos3 = 'C' THEN '12'               WHEN @pos3 = 'D' THEN '13'               WHEN @pos3 = 'E' THEN '14'               WHEN @pos3 = 'F' THEN '15'               ELSE @pos3              END, CASE               WHEN @pos4 = 'A' THEN '10'                 WHEN @pos4 = 'B' THEN '11'               WHEN @pos4 = 'C' THEN '12'               WHEN @pos4 = 'D' THEN '13'               WHEN @pos4 = 'E' THEN '14'               WHEN @pos4 = 'F' THEN '15'               ELSE @pos4              END) SET @decValue = (CONVERT(INT,(SELECT decPos4 FROM @decTab)))         +                 (CONVERT(INT,(SELECT decPos3 FROM @decTab))*16)      +                 (CONVERT(INT,(SELECT decPos2 FROM @decTab))*(16*16)) +                 (CONVERT(INT,(SELECT decPos1 FROM @decTab))*(16*16*16))     RETURN @decValue END GO     Making use of the function, I found the decimal conversion, added that number of days to 01/01/1950 and FINALLY arrived at my “unpacked relative date”.  Here is the query I used to retrieve the formatted date, and the result set which was returned: SELECT [packedDate] AS 'Hex Value',        dbo.ftn_HexToDec([packedDate]) AS 'Decimal Value',        CONVERT(DATE,DATEADD(day,dbo.ftn_HexToDec([packedDate]),'01/01/1950'),101) AS 'Relative String Date'   FROM [dbo].[Output Table]         This technique can be used any time you need to retrieve the hex value of a character string in SSIS.  The date example may be a bit difficult to understand at first, but with SSIS becoming the preferred tool for enterprise level integration for many companies, there is no doubt that developers will encounter these types of requirements with regularity in the future. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

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• RiverTrail - JavaScript GPPGU Data Parallelism

  - by JoshReuben

  Where is WebCL ? The Khronos WebCL working group is working on a JavaScript binding to the OpenCL standard so that HTML 5 compliant browsers can host GPGPU web apps – e.g. for image processing or physics for WebGL games - http://www.khronos.org/webcl/ . While Nokia & Samsung have some protype WebCL APIs, Intel has one-upped them with a higher level of abstraction: RiverTrail. Intro to RiverTrail Intel Labs JavaScript RiverTrail provides GPU accelerated SIMD data-parallelism in web applications via a familiar JavaScript programming paradigm. It extends JavaScript with simple deterministic data-parallel constructs that are translated at runtime into a low-level hardware abstraction layer. With its high-level JS API, programmers do not have to learn a new language or explicitly manage threads, orchestrate shared data synchronization or scheduling. It has been proposed as a draft specification to ECMA a (known as ECMA strawman). RiverTrail runs in all popular browsers (except I.E. of course). To get started, download a prebuilt version https://github.com/downloads/RiverTrail/RiverTrail/rivertrail-0.17.xpi , install Intel's OpenCL SDK http://www.intel.com/go/opencl and try out the interactive River Trail shell http://rivertrail.github.com/interactive For a video overview, see  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jueg6zB5XaM . ParallelArray the ParallelArray type is the central component of this API & is a JS object that contains ordered collections of scalars – i.e. multidimensional uniform arrays. A shape property describes the dimensionality and size– e.g. a 2D RGBA image will have shape [height, width, 4]. ParallelArrays are immutable & fluent – they are manipulated by invoking methods on them which produce new ParallelArray objects. ParallelArray supports several constructors over arrays, functions & even the canvas. // Create an empty Parallel Array var pa = new ParallelArray(); // pa0 = <>   // Create a ParallelArray out of a nested JS array. // Note that the inner arrays are also ParallelArrays var pa = new ParallelArray([ [0,1], [2,3], [4,5] ]); // pa1 = <<0,1>, <2,3>, <4.5>>   // Create a two-dimensional ParallelArray with shape [3, 2] using the comprehension constructor var pa = new ParallelArray([3, 2], function(iv){return iv[0] * iv[1];}); // pa7 = <<0,0>, <0,1>, <0,2>>   // Create a ParallelArray from canvas.  This creates a PA with shape [w, h, 4], var pa = new ParallelArray(canvas); // pa8 = CanvasPixelArray   ParallelArray exposes fluent API functions that take an elemental JS function for data manipulation: map, combine, scan, filter, and scatter that return a new ParallelArray. Other functions are scalar - reduce  returns a scalar value & get returns the value located at a given index. The onus is on the developer to ensure that the elemental function does not defeat data parallelization optimization (avoid global var manipulation, recursion). For reduce & scan, order is not guaranteed - the onus is on the dev to provide an elemental function that is commutative and associative so that scan will be deterministic – E.g. Sum is associative, but Avg is not. map Applies a provided elemental function to each element of the source array and stores the result in the corresponding position in the result array. The map method is shape preserving & index free - can not inspect neighboring values. // Adding one to each element. var source = new ParallelArray([1,2,3,4,5]); var plusOne = source.map(function inc(v) {     return v+1; }); //<2,3,4,5,6> combine Combine is similar to map, except an index is provided. This allows elemental functions to access elements from the source array relative to the one at the current index position. While the map method operates on the outermost dimension only, combine, can choose how deep to traverse - it provides a depth argument to specify the number of dimensions it iterates over. The elemental function of combine accesses the source array & the current index within it - element is computed by calling the get method of the source ParallelArray object with index i as argument. It requires more code but is more expressive. var source = new ParallelArray([1,2,3,4,5]); var plusOne = source.combine(function inc(i) { return this.get(i)+1; }); reduce reduces the elements from an array to a single scalar result – e.g. Sum. // Calculate the sum of the elements var source = new ParallelArray([1,2,3,4,5]); var sum = source.reduce(function plus(a,b) { return a+b; }); scan Like reduce, but stores the intermediate results – return a ParallelArray whose ith elements is the results of using the elemental function to reduce the elements between 0 and I in the original ParallelArray. // do a partial sum var source = new ParallelArray([1,2,3,4,5]); var psum = source.scan(function plus(a,b) { return a+b; }); //<1, 3, 6, 10, 15> scatter a reordering function - specify for a certain source index where it should be stored in the result array. An optional conflict function can prevent an exception if two source values are assigned the same position of the result: var source = new ParallelArray([1,2,3,4,5]); var reorder = source.scatter([4,0,3,1,2]); // <2, 4, 5, 3, 1> // if there is a conflict use the max. use 33 as a default value. var reorder = source.scatter([4,0,3,4,2], 33, function max(a, b) {return a>b?a:b; }); //<2, 33, 5, 3, 4> filter // filter out values that are not even var source = new ParallelArray([1,2,3,4,5]); var even = source.filter(function even(iv) { return (this.get(iv) % 2) == 0; }); // <2,4> Flatten used to collapse the outer dimensions of an array into a single dimension. pa = new ParallelArray([ [1,2], [3,4] ]); // <<1,2>,<3,4>> pa.flatten(); // <1,2,3,4> Partition used to restore the original shape of the array. var pa = new ParallelArray([1,2,3,4]); // <1,2,3,4> pa.partition(2); // <<1,2>,<3,4>> Get return value found at the indices or undefined if no such value exists. var pa = new ParallelArray([0,1,2,3,4], [10,11,12,13,14], [20,21,22,23,24]) pa.get([1,1]); // 11 pa.get([1]); // <10,11,12,13,14>

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, July 15, 2013

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, July 15, 2013Popular ReleasesMVC Forum: MVC Forum v1.0: Finally version 1.0 is here! We have been fixing a few bugs, and making sure the release is as stable as possible. We have also changed the way configuration of the application works, mostly how to add your own code or replace some of the standard code with your own. If you download and use our software, please give us some sort of feedback, good or bad!SharePoint 2013 TypeScript Definitions: Release 1.1: TypeScript 0.9 support SharePoint TypeScript Definitions are now compliant with the new version of TypeScript TypeScript generics are now used for defining collection classes (derivatives of SP.ClientCollection object) Improved coverage Added mQuery definitions (m$) Added SPClientAutoFill definitions SP.Utilities namespace is now fully covered SP.UI modal dialog definitions improved CSR definitions improved, added some missing methods and context properties, mostly related to list ...GoAgent GUI: GoAgent GUI ??? 1.0.0: ????GoAgent GUI????，???????????.Net Framework 4.0 ???????: Windows 8 x64 Windows 8 x86 Windows 7 x64 Windows 7 x86 ???????： Windows 8.1 Preview (x86/x64) ???????： Windows XP ????： ????????GoAgent????，????????，?????????????，???????????????????，??????????，????。PiGraph: PiGraph 2.0.8.13: C?p nh?t:Các l?i dã s?a: S?a l?i không nh?p du?c s? âm. L?i tabindex trong giao di?n Thêm hàm Các l?i chua kh?c ph?c: L?i ghi chú nh?p nháy màu. L?i khung ghi chú vu?t ra kh?i biên khi luu file. Luu ý:N?u không kh?i d?ng duoc chuong trình, b?n nên c?p nh?t driver card d? h?a phiên b?n m?i nh?t: AMD Graphics Drivers NVIDIA Driver Xem yêu c?u h? th?ngD3D9Client: D3D9Client R12 for Orbiter Beta: D3D9Client release for orbiter BetaVidCoder: 1.4.23: New in 1.4.23 Added French translation. Fixed non-x264 video encoders not sticking in video tab. New in 1.4 Updated HandBrake core to 0.9.9 Blu-ray subtitle (PGS) support Additional framerates: 30, 50, 59.94, 60 Additional sample rates: 8, 11.025, 12 and 16 kHz Additional higher bitrates for audio Same as Source Constant Framerate 24-bit FLAC encoding Added Windows Phone 8 and Apple TV 3 presets Introduced process isolation for encodes. Now if HandBrake crashes, VidCoder will ...Project Server 2013 Event Handler Admin Tool: PSI Event Admin Tool: Download & exract the File. Use LoggerAdmin to upload the event handlers in project server 2013. PSIEventLogger\LoggerAdmin\bin\DebugGherkin editor: Gherkin Editor Beta 2: Fix issue #7 and add some refactoring and code cleanupNew-NuGetPackage PowerShell Script: New-NuGetPackage.ps1 PowerShell Script v1.2: Show nuget gallery to push to when prompting user if they want to push their package.Site Templates By Steve: SharePoint 2010 CORE Site Theme By Steve WSP: Great Site Theme to start with from Steve. See project home page for install instructions. This is a nice centered, mega-menu, fixed width masterpage with styles. Remember to update the mega menu lists.SharePoint Solution Installer: SharePoint Solution Installer V1.2.8: setup2013.exe now supports CompatibilityLevel to target specific hive Use setup.exe for SP2007 & SP2010. Use setup2013.exe for SP2013.TBox - tool to make developer's life easier.: TBox 1.021: 1)Add console unit tests runner, to run unit tests in parallel from console. Also this new sub tool can save valid xml nunit report. It can help you in continuous integration. 2)Fix build scripts.LifeInSharepoint Modern UI Update: Version 2: Some minor improvements, including Audience Targeting support for quick launch links. Also removing all NextDocs references.Virtual Photonics: VTS MATLAB Package 1.0.13 Beta: This is the beta release of the MATLAB package with examples of using the VTS libraries within MATLAB. Changes for this release: Added two new examples to vts_solver_demo.m that: 1) generates and plots R(lambda) at a given rho, and chromophore concentrations assuming a power law for scattering, and 2) solves inverse problem for R(lambda) at given rho. This example solves for concentrations of HbO2, Hb and H20 given simulated measurements created using Nurbs scaled Monte Carlo and inverted u...Advanced Resource Tab for Blend: Advanced Resource Tab: This is the first alpha release of the advanced resource tab for Blend for Visual Studio 2012.Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.96: Fix for issue #19957: EXE should output the name of the file(s) being minified. Discussion #449181: throw a Sev-2 warning when trailing commas are detected on an Array literal. Perfectly legal to do so, but the behavior ends up working differently on different browsers, so throw a cross-browser warning. Add a few more known global names for improved ES6 compatibility update Nuget package to version 2.5 and automatically add the AjaxMin.targets to your project when you update the package...Outlook 2013 Add-In: Categories and Colors: This new version has a major change in the drawing of the list items: - Using owner drawn code to format the appointments using GDI (some flickering may occur, but it looks a little bit better IMHO, with separate sections). - Added category color support (if more than one category, only one color will be shown). Here, the colors Outlook uses are slightly different than the ones available in System.Drawing, so I did a first approach matching. ;-) - Added appointment status support (to show fr...Columbus Remote Desktop: 2.0 Sapphire: Added configuration settings Added update notifications Added ability to disable GPU acceleration Fixed connection bugsLINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter v2.1.07: Supports .NET 3.5, .NET 4.0, .NET 4.5, Silverlight 4.0, Windows Phone 7.1, Windows Phone 8, Client Profile, Windows 8, and Windows Azure. 100% Twitter API coverage. Also supports Twitter API v1.1! Also on NuGet.DotNetNuke® Community Edition CMS: 06.02.08: Major Highlights Fixed issue where the application throws an Unhandled Error and an HTTP Response Code of 200 when the connection to the database is lost. Security FixesNone Updated Modules/Providers ModulesNone ProvidersNoneNew Projects[.Net Intl] harroc_c;mallar_a;olouso_f: The goal of this project is to create a web crawler and a web front who allows you to search in your index. You will create a mini (or large!) search engine basButterfly Storage: Butterfly Storage is a data access technology based on object-oriented database model for Windows Store applications.KaveCompany: KaveCompleave that girl alone: a team project!MyClrProfiler: This project helps you learn about and develop your own CLR profiler.NETDeob: Deobfuscate obfuscated .NET files easilyProgram stomatologie: SummarySimple Graph Library: Simple portable class library for graphs data structures. .NET, Silverlight 4/5, Windows Phone, Windows RT, Xbox 360T6502 Emulator: T6502 is a 6502 emulator written in TypeScript using AngularJS. The goal is well-organized, readable code over performance.WP8 File Access Webserver: C# HTTP server and web application on Windows Phone 8. Implements file access, browsing and downloading.wpadk: wpadk????wp7?????? ?????????，?????、SDK、wpadk?????????????。??????????????????。??????????????????，????wpadk?????????????????????????????????????。xlmUnit: xlmUnit, Unit Testing

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• Easing the Journey to the Private Cloud with Oracle Consulting

  - by MichaelM-Oracle

  By Sanjai Marimadaiah, Senior Director, Strategy & Business Development – Cloud Solutions, Oracle Consulting Services Business leaders are now leading the charge on how their firms can profit from cloud solutions. Agility and innovation are becoming the primary drivers of the business case for the cloud, even more than the anticipated cost savings. Leaders need to find the right strategy and optimize the use of cloud-based applications across their enterprise-computing infrastructure. The Problem – Current State With prevalent IT practices, many organizations find that they run multiple IT solutions serving similar business needs. This has led to the proliferation of technology stacks, for example: Oracle 10g on Sun T4 running Solaris 9; Oracle 11g on Exadata running Linux; or Oracle 12c on commodity x86 servers. This variance has a huge impact on an organization’s agility and expenses, and requires IT professionals with varied skills as well as on-going training for different systems and tools. Fortunately there is a practical business strategy to overcome this unneeded redundancy. Thus begins a journey to the right cloud computing solution. The Solution – Cloud Services from Oracle Consulting Services (OCS) Oracle Consulting Services (OCS ) works closely with our clients as trusted advisors to proactively respond to business needs and IT concerns. OCS understands that making the transition to cloud solutions begins with a strategic conversation, based on its deep expertise for successfully completing private cloud service engagements with several companies. For a journey to the cloud, Oracle Consulting Services leads the client through four phases– standardization, consolidation, service delivery, and enterprise cloud – to achieve optimal returns. Phase 1 - Standardization Oracle Consulting Services (OCS) works with clients to evaluate their business requirements and propose a set of standard solutions stacks for various IT solutions. This is an opportune time to evaluate cloud ready solutions, such as Oracle 12c, Oracle Exadata, and the Oracle Database Appliance (ODA). The OCS consultants, together with the delivery team, then turn to upgrading and migrating existing solution stacks to standardized offerings. OCS has the expertise and tools to complete this stage in a fraction of the time required by other IT services companies. Clients quickly realize cost savings in tools, processes, and type/number of resources required. This standardization also improves agility of the IT organizations and their abilities to respond to the needs of various business units. Phase 2 - Consolidation During the consolidation phase, OCS consultants programmatically consolidate hundreds of databases into a smaller number of servers to improve utilization, reduce floor space, and optimize maintenance costs. Consolidation helps clients realize huge savings in CapEx investments and shrink OpEx costs. The use of engineered systems, such as Oracle Exadata, greatly reduces the client’s risk of moving to a new solution stack. OCS recommends clients to pursue Phase 1 (Standardization) and Phase 2 (Consolidation) simultaneously to reduce the overall time, effort, and expense of the cloud journey. Phase 3 - Service Delivery Once a client is on a path of standardization and consolidation, OCS consultants create Service Catalogues based on the SLAs requirements and the criticality of the solutions. The number and types of Service Catalogues (Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze, etc.) vary from client to client. OCS consultants also implement a variety of value-added cloud solutions, including monitoring, metering, and charge-back solutions. At this stage, clients are able to achieve a high level of understanding in their cloud journey. Their IT organizations are operating efficiently and are more agile in responding to the needs of business units. Phase 4 - Enterprise Cloud In the final phase of the cloud journey, the economics of the IT organizations change. Business units can request services on-demand; applications can be deployed and consumed on a pay-as-you-go model. OCS has the expertise and capabilities to establish processes, programs, and solutions required for IT organizations to transform how they interact with business units. The Promise of Cloud Solutions Depending the size and complexity of their business model, some clients are able to abbreviate some phases of their cloud journey. Cloud solutions are still evolving and there is rapid pace of innovation to transform how IT organizations operate. The lesson is clear. Cloud solutions hold a lot of promise for business agility. Business leaders can now leverage an additional set of capabilities and services. They can ramp up their pace of innovation. With cloud maturity, they can compete more effectively in their respective markets. But there are certainly challenges ahead. A skilled consulting services partner can play a pivotal role as a trusted advisor in the successful adoption of cloud solutions. Oracle Consulting Services has expertise and a portfolio of services to help clients succeed on their journey to the cloud.

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• DevConnections Spring 2010 Speaker Evals and Tips

  As a conference speaker, I always look forward to hearing from attendees whether they felt my sessions were valuable and worth their time.  Its always gratifying  get a high score, but of course its the (preferably constructive) criticism thats key to continued improvement.  Im by no means the best technical presenter around, and Im always looking for ways to improve. Ive recently spoken at a few events, including TechEd and an Ohio event called Stir Trek.  DevConnections was actually back in April, but theyre just getting their final evals out to speakers.  TechEd, of course, does online evals so immediately after your talks you can see what people think.  Ill try and post my TechEd evals in the next week or so. I gave 3 talks at DevConnections Spring 2010 / VS2010 Launch which I discussed in this previous blog post.  In this follow-up, Im just going to share some eval info and my thoughts on it, albeit a couple of months later. Pragmatic ASP.NET Tips, Tricks, and Tools Evals Turned In: 27 Overall Eval: 3.74 Average Score: 3.47 89% found the technical level Just Right.  7.4% thought it was too basic (3.6% did not respond).  Since nobody thought the content was Too complex, I could perhaps have added some more complex material, but having about 90% say its Just Right is pretty good. 92% said at least 50% of the material was new to them.  36% said 75% or more was new.  Thats also pretty good, I think. 77.8% can use the information immediately; 15% can use it within 2-6 months (7.2 % no response). Overall 78% rated the session Excellent, 18% Good, 4% Fair. All comments (9): Steve did a great job Excellent session! It was good. Im now super excited to attend Steves other sessions later today.  Very useful. One of the best speakers here.  Bring him back to future conferences please. Continue to have this session with new and old stuff.  I always find something I did not know about. Excellent!  This was the best session Ive seen all week. Did not increase font on all pages could not see. For Steve to have had more sessions. Note to self make the fonts bigger across the board.  Otherwise, this is all good for my ego. :)  This is always a very popular session and one I really enjoy giving.  Tips and Tricks talks are pretty easy because you dont have to go in depth with any particular thing, and theyre almost always with existing technology so youre not dealing with betas, lack of documentation, and other issues.  Its an easy session to do well, in my experience, and one which I think attendees definitely appreciate.   Whats New in ASP.NET MVC 2 Evals Turned In: 23 Overall Eval: 3.77 Average Score: 3.47 (wow, I cant believe I scored better on this talk than the tips and tricks talk, which Ive given many times and was more excited about) 96% found the technical level Just Right.  90% found 50% or more of the material to be new.  43% can use the info immediately, and another 43% can use it within 2-6 months I guess that speaks to adoption rates of MVC 2 among my attendees Overall 74% said the session was Excellent, 22% Good.  4% No Response. All Comments (6): Great job, thank you. Great speaker! Really good, a little lost in the code at some points, but great information. Speaker needs to repeat questions from audience for everyone to hear. Exceeded my expectations. Great speaker, very informative. I really do try to religiously repeat questions from the audience for everyone to hear, but obviously I didnt do it 100% of the time.  Note to self remember to repeat questions.  That and making fonts big are really basic speaker best practices, which just goes to prove that fundamentals are always something that can be perfected.   SOLIDify Your ASP.NET MVC 2 Application Evals Turned In: 8 (!) Overall Eval: 3.63 Average Score: 3.47 As I recall this was one of the last talks of the day / show, which might account for the low number of evals turned in.  I dont recall speaking to an empty room for this talk, although it certainly wasnt as crowded as the tips and tricks talk. 100% found the technical level Just Right.  100% found at least half the material new.  62.5% can use it at once and 37.5% within 2-6 months.  62.5% rated the session Excellent overall; 37.5% Good.  Im thinking there were 5 evals with all 4s checked and 3 with all 3s checked (4 = Excellent, 3 = Good) All Comments (3): This covered many topics Ive read about recently, and it helped reinforce them. It was a nice overview of the solid principle, but I thought there might be specifics for MVC2.  I am glad there is not. Move a little slower. Ok, so another fundamental dont go too fast.  Looks like I got one fundamental tip from the comments of each talk. My Take-Aways Remember the fundamentals.  Its worth going through a checklist prior to presenting to make sure these things are fresh in your mind.  Increase all font sizes.  Repeat all questions from audience members without microphones (this is also a great way to stall for time, btw).  Resist the urge to move too quickly especially if youre nervous or short of time.  Writing this up in a blog post also further reinforces these fundamentals for me, which is one of the main reasons why I do it I retain things better when I write them, and even moreso when I write them for public consumption since I have to really think about what Im saying.  And maybe a few of you find this interesting or helpful, which is a bonus. Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Developing Schema Compare for Oracle (Part 1)

  - by Simon Cooper

  SQL Compare is one of Red Gate's most successful SQL Server tools; it allows developers and DBAs to compare and synchronize the contents of their databases. Although similar tools exist for Oracle, they are quite noticeably lacking in the usability and stability that SQL Compare is known for in the SQL Server world. We could see a real need for a usable schema comparison tools for Oracle, and so the Schema Compare for Oracle project was born. Over the next few weeks, as we come up to release of v1, I'll be doing a series of posts on the development of Schema Compare for Oracle. For the first post, I thought I would start with the main pitfalls that we stumbled across when developing the product, especially from a SQL Server background. 1. Schemas and Databases The most obvious difference is that the concept of a 'database' is quite different between Oracle and SQL Server. On SQL Server, one server instance has multiple databases, each with separate schemas. There is typically little communication between separate databases, and most databases are no more than about 1000-2000 objects. This means SQL Compare can register an entire database in a reasonable amount of time, and cross-database dependencies probably won't be an issue. It is a quite different scene under Oracle, however. The terms 'database' and 'instance' are used interchangeably, (although technically 'database' refers to the datafiles on disk, and 'instance' the running Oracle process that reads & writes to the database), and a database is a single conceptual entity. This immediately presents problems, as it is infeasible to register an entire database as we do in SQL Compare; in my Oracle install, using the standard recommended options, there are 63975 system objects. If we tried to register all those, not only would it take hours, but the client would probably run out of memory before we finished. As a result, we had to allow people to specify what schemas they wanted to register. This decision had quite a few knock-on effects for the design, which I will cover in a future post. 2. Connecting to Oracle The next obvious difference is in actually connecting to Oracle – in SQL Server, you can specify a server and database, and off you go. On Oracle things are slightly more complicated. SIDs, Service Names, and TNS A database (the files on disk) must have a unique identifier for the databases on the system, called the SID. It also has a global database name, which consists of a name (which doesn't have to match the SID) and a domain. Alternatively, you can identify a database using a service name, which normally has a 1-to-1 relationship with instances, but may not if, for example, using RAC (Real Application Clusters) for redundancy and failover. You specify the computer and instance you want to connect to using TNS (Transparent Network Substrate). The user-visible parts are a config file (tnsnames.ora) on the client machine that specifies how to connect to an instance. For example, the entry for one of my test instances is: SC_11GDB1 = (DESCRIPTION = (ADDRESS_LIST = (ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = simonctest)(PORT = 1521)) ) (CONNECT_DATA = (SID = 11gR1db1) ) ) This gives the hostname, port, and SID of the instance I want to connect to, and associates it with a name (SC_11GDB1). The tnsnames syntax also allows you to specify failover, multiple descriptions and address lists, and client load balancing. You can then specify this TNS identifier as the data source in a connection string. Although using ODP.NET (the .NET dlls provided by Oracle) was fine for internal prototype builds, once we released the EAP we discovered that this simply wasn't an acceptable solution for installs on other people's machines. Due to .NET assembly strong naming, users had to have installed on their machines the exact same version of the ODP.NET dlls as we had on our build server. We couldn't ship the ODP.NET dlls with our installer as the Oracle license agreement prohibited this, and we didn't want to force users to install another Oracle client just so they can run our program. To be able to list the TNS entries in the connection dialog, we also had to locate and parse the tnsnames.ora file, which was complicated by users with several Oracle client installs and intricate TNS entries. After much swearing at our computers, we eventually decided to use a third party Oracle connection library from Devart that we could ship with our program; this could use whatever client version was installed, parse the TNS entries for us, and also had the nice feature of being able to connect to an Oracle server without having any client installed at all. Unfortunately, their current license agreement prevents us from shipping an Oracle SDK, but that's a bridge we'll cross when we get to it. 3. Running synchronization scripts The most important difference is that in Oracle, DDL is non-transactional; you cannot rollback DDL statements like you can on SQL Server. Although we considered various solutions to this, including using the flashback archive or recycle bin, or generating an undo script, no reliable method of completely undoing a half-executed sync script has yet been found; so in this case we simply have to trust that the DBA or developer will check and verify the script before running it. However, before we got to that stage, we had to get the scripts to run in the first place... To run a synchronization script from SQL Compare we essentially pass the script over to the SqlCommand.ExecuteNonQuery method. However, when we tried to do the same for an OracleConnection we got a very strange error – 'ORA-00911: invalid character', even when running the most basic CREATE TABLE command. After much hair-pulling and Googling, we discovered that Oracle has got some very strange behaviour with semicolons at the end of statements. To understand what's going on, we need to take a quick foray into SQL and PL/SQL. PL/SQL is not T-SQL In SQL Server, T-SQL is the language used to interface with the database. It has DDL, DML, control flow, and many other nice features (like Turing-completeness) that you can mix and match in the same script. In Oracle, DDL SQL and PL/SQL are two completely separate languages, with different syntax, different datatypes and different execution engines within the instance. Oracle SQL is much more like 'pure' ANSI SQL, with no state, no control flow, and only the basic DML commands. PL/SQL is the Turing-complete language, but can only do DML and DCL (i.e. BEGIN TRANSATION commands). Any DDL or SQL commands that aren't recognised by the PL/SQL engine have to be passed back to the SQL engine via an EXECUTE IMMEDIATE command. In PL/SQL, a semicolons is a valid token used to delimit the end of a statement. In SQL, a semicolon is not a valid token (even though the Oracle documentation gives them at the end of the syntax diagrams) . When you execute the command CREATE TABLE table1 (COL1 NUMBER); in SQL*Plus the semicolon on the end is a command to SQL*Plus to execute the preceding statement on the server; it strips off the semicolon before passing it on. SQL Developer does a similar thing. When executing a PL/SQL block, however, the syntax is like so: BEGIN INSERT INTO table1 VALUES (1); INSERT INTO table1 VALUES (2); END; / In this case, the semicolon is accepted by the PL/SQL engine as a statement delimiter, and instead the / is the command to SQL*Plus to execute the current block. This explains the ORA-00911 error we got when trying to run the CREATE TABLE command – the server is complaining about the semicolon on the end. This also means that there is no SQL syntax to execute more than one DDL command in the same OracleCommand. Therefore, we would have to do a round-trip to the server for every command we want to execute. Obviously, this would cause lots of network traffic and be very slow on slow or congested networks. Our first attempt at a solution was to wrap every SQL statement (without semicolon) inside an EXECUTE IMMEDIATE command in a PL/SQL block and pass that to the server to execute. One downside of this solution is that we get no feedback as to how the script execution is going; we're currently evaluating better solutions to this thorny issue. Next up: Dependencies; how we solved the problem of being unable to register the entire database, and the knock-on effects to the whole product.

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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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• Easy Made Easier

  - by dragonfly

      How easy is it to deploy a 2 node, fully redundant Oracle RAC cluster? Not very. Unless you use an Oracle Database Appliance. The focus of this member of Oracle's Engineered Systems family is to simplify the configuration, management and maintenance throughout the life of the system, while offering pay-as-you-grow scaling. Getting a 2-node RAC cluster up and running in under 2 hours has been made possible by the Oracle Database Appliance. Don't take my word for it, just check out these blog posts from partners and end users. The Oracle Database Appliance Experience - Zip Zoom Zoom http://www.fuadarshad.com/2012/02/oracle-database-appliance-experience.html Off-the-shelf Oracle database servers http://normanweaver.wordpress.com/2011/10/10/off-the-shelf-oracle-database-servers/ Oracle Database Appliance – Deployment Steps http://marcel.vandewaters.nl/oracle/database-appliance/oracle-database-appliance-deployment-steps     See how easy it is to deploy an Oracle Database Appliance for high availability with RAC? Now for the meat of this post, which is the first in a series of posts describing tips for making the deployment of an ODA even easier. The key to the easy deployment of an Oracle Database Appliance is the Appliance Manager software, which does the actual software deployment and configuration, based on best practices. But in order for it to do that, it needs some basic information first, including system name, IP addresses, etc. That's where the Appliance Manager GUI comes in to play, taking a wizard approach to specifying the information needed.     Using the Appliance Manager GUI is pretty straight forward, stepping through several screens of information to enter data in typical wizard style. Like most configuration tasks, it helps to gather the required information before hand. But before you rush out to a committee meeting on what to use for host names, and rely on whatever IP addresses might be hanging around, make sure you are familiar with some of the auto-fill defaults for the Appliance Manager. I'll step through the key screens below to highlight the results of the auto-fill capability of the Appliance Manager GUI.     Depending on which of the 2 Configuration Types (Config Type screen) you choose, you will get a slightly different set of screens. The Typical configuration assumes certain default configuration choices and has the fewest screens, where as the Custom configuration gives you the most flexibility in what you configure from the start. In the examples below, I have used the Custom config type.     One of the first items you are asked for is the System Name (System Info screen). This is used to identify the system, but also as the base for the default hostnames on following screens. In this screen shot, the System Name is "oda".     When you get to the next screen (Generic Network screen), you enter your domain name, DNS IP address(es), and NTP IP address(es). Next up is the Public Network screen, seen below, where you will see the host name fields are automatically filled in with default host names based on the System Name, in this case "oda". The System Name is also the basis for default host names for the extra ethernet ports available for configuration as part of a Custom configuration, as seen in the 2nd screen shot below (Other Network). There is no requirement to use these host names, as you can easily edit any of the host names. This does make filling in the configuration details easier and less prone to "fat fingers" if you are OK with these host names. Here is a full list of the automatically filled in host names. 1 2 1-vip 2-vip -scan 1-ilom 2-ilom 1-net1 2-net1 1-net2 2-net2 1-net3 2-net3     Another auto-fill feature of the Appliance Manager GUI follows a common practice of deploying IP Addresses for a RAC cluster in sequential order. In the screen shot below, I entered the first IP address (Node1-IP), then hit Tab to move to the next field. As a result, the next 5 IP address fields were automatically filled in with the next 5 IP addresses sequentially from the first one I entered. As with the host names, these are not required, and can be changed to whatever your IP address values are. One note of caution though, if the first IP Address field (Node1-IP) is filled out and you click in that field and back out, the following 5 IP addresses will be set to the sequential default. If you don't use the sequential IP addresses, pay attention to where you click that mouse. :-)     In the screen shot below, by entering the netmask value in the Netmask field, in this case 255.255.255.0, the gateway value was auto-filled into the Gateway field, based on the IP addresses and netmask previously entered. As always, you can change this value.     My last 2 screen shots illustrate that the same sequential IP address autofill and netmask to gateway autofill works when entering the IP configuration details for the Integrated Lights Out Manager (ILOM) for both nodes. The time these auto-fill capabilities save in entering data is nice, but from my perspective not as important as the opportunity to avoid data entry errors. In my next post in this series, I will touch on the benefit of using the network validation capability of the Appliance Manager GUI prior to deploying an Oracle Database Appliance.

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• Computer Networks UNISA - Chap 14 &ndash; Insuring Integrity &amp; Availability

  - by MarkPearl

  After reading this section you should be able to Identify the characteristics of a network that keep data safe from loss or damage Protect an enterprise-wide network from viruses Explain network and system level fault tolerance techniques Discuss issues related to network backup and recovery strategies Describe the components of a useful disaster recovery plan and the options for disaster contingencies What are integrity and availability? Integrity – the soundness of a networks programs, data, services, devices, and connections Availability – How consistently and reliably a file or system can be accessed by authorized personnel A number of phenomena can compromise both integrity and availability including… security breaches natural disasters malicious intruders power flaws human error users etc Although you cannot predict every type of vulnerability, you can take measures to guard against the most damaging events. The following are some guidelines… Allow only network administrators to create or modify NOS and application system users. Monitor the network for unauthorized access or changes Record authorized system changes in a change management system’ Install redundant components Perform regular health checks on the network Check system performance, error logs, and the system log book regularly Keep backups Implement and enforce security and disaster recovery policies These are just some of the basics… Malware Malware refers to any program or piece of code designed to intrude upon or harm a system or its resources. Types of Malware… Boot sector viruses Macro viruses File infector viruses Worms Trojan Horse Network Viruses Bots Malware characteristics Some common characteristics of Malware include… Encryption Stealth Polymorphism Time dependence Malware Protection There are various tools available to protect you from malware called anti-malware software. These monitor your system for indications that a program is performing potential malware operations. A number of techniques are used to detect malware including… Signature Scanning Integrity Checking Monitoring unexpected file changes or virus like behaviours It is important to decide where anti-malware tools will be installed and find a balance between performance and protection. There are several general purpose malware policies that can be implemented to protect your network including… Every compute in an organization should be equipped with malware detection and cleaning software that regularly runs Users should not be allowed to alter or disable the anti-malware software Users should know what to do in case the anti-malware program detects a malware virus Users should be prohibited from installing any unauthorized software on their systems System wide alerts should be issued to network users notifying them if a serious malware virus has been detected. Fault Tolerance Besides guarding against malware, another key factor in maintaining the availability and integrity of data is fault tolerance. Fault tolerance is the ability for a system to continue performing despite an unexpected hardware or software malfunction. Fault tolerance can be realized in varying degrees, the optimal level of fault tolerance for a system depends on how critical its services and files are to productivity. Generally the more fault tolerant the system, the more expensive it is. The following describe some of the areas that need to be considered for fault tolerance. Environment (Temperature and humidity) Power Topology and Connectivity Servers Storage Power Typical power flaws include Surges – a brief increase in voltage due to lightening strikes, solar flares or some idiot at City Power Noise – Fluctuation in voltage levels caused by other devices on the network or electromagnetic interference Brownout – A sag in voltage for just a moment Blackout – A complete power loss The are various alternate power sources to consider including UPS’s and Generators. UPS’s are found in two categories… Standby UPS – provides continuous power when mains goes down (brief period of switching over) Online UPS – is online all the time and the device receives power from the UPS all the time (the UPS is charged continuously) Servers There are various techniques for fault tolerance with servers. Server mirroring is an option where one device or component duplicates the activities of another. It is generally an expensive process. Clustering is a fault tolerance technique that links multiple servers together to appear as a single server. They share processing and storage responsibilities and if one unit in the cluster goes down, another unit can be brought in to replace it. Storage There are various techniques available including the following… RAID Arrays NAS (Storage (Network Attached Storage) SANs (Storage Area Networks) Data Backup A backup is a copy of data or program files created for archiving or safekeeping. Many different options for backups exist with various media including… These vary in cost and speed. Optical Media Tape Backup External Disk Drives Network Backups Backup Strategy After selecting the appropriate tool for performing your servers backup, devise a backup strategy to guide you through performing reliable backups that provide maximum data protection. Questions that should be answered include… What data must be backed up At what time of day or night will the backups occur How will you verify the accuracy of the backups Where and for how long will backup media be stored Who will take responsibility for ensuring that backups occurred How long will you save backups Where will backup and recovery documentation be stored Different backup methods provide varying levels of certainty and corresponding labour cost. There are also different ways to determine which files should be backed up including… Full backup – all data on all servers is copied to storage media Incremental backup – Only data that has changed since the last full or incremental backup is copied to a storage medium Differential backup – Only data that has changed since the last backup is coped to a storage medium Disaster Recovery Disaster recovery is the process of restoring your critical functionality and data after an enterprise wide outage has occurred. A disaster recovery plan is for extreme scenarios (i.e. fire, line fault, etc). A cold site is a place were the computers, devices, and connectivity necessary to rebuild a network exist but they are not appropriately configured. A warm site is a place where the computers, devices, and connectivity necessary to rebuild a network exists with some appropriately configured devices. A hot site is a place where the computers, devices, and connectivity necessary to rebuild a network exists and all are appropriately configured.

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• Some New .NET Downloads and Resources

  - by Kevin Grossnicklaus

  Last week I was fortunate enough to spend time in Redmond on Microsoft’s campus for the 2011 Microsoft MVP Summit.  It was great to hang out with a number of old friends and get the opportunity to talk tech with the various product teams up at Microsoft.  The weather wasn’t exactly sunny but Microsoft always does a great job with the Summit and everyone had a blast (heck, I even got to run the bases at SafeCo field) While much of what we saw is covered under NDA, there a ton of great things in the pipeline from Microsoft and many things that are already available (or just became so) that I wasn’t necessarily aware of.  The purpose of this post is to share some of the info I learned on resources and tools available to .NET developers today.  Please let me know if you have any questions (or if you know of something else cool which might benefit others). Enjoy! Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Microsoft has issued the RTM release of Visual Studio 2010 SP1.  You can download the full SP1 on MSDN as of today (March 10th to the general public) and take advantage of such things as: Silverlight 4 is included in the box (as opposed to a separate install) Silverlight 4 Profiling WCF RIA Services SP1 Intellitrace for 64-bit and SharePoint ASP.NET now easily supports IIS Express and SQL CE Want a description of all that’s new beyond the above biased list (which arguably only contains items I think are important)?  Check out this KB article. Portable Library Tools CTP Without much fanfare Microsoft has released a CTP of a new add-in to Visual Studio 2010 which simplifies code sharing between projects targeting different runtimes (i.e. Silverlight, WPF, Win7 Phone, XBox).   With this Add-In installed you can add a new project of type “Portable Library” and specify which platforms you wish to target.  Once that is done, any code added to this library will be limited to use only features which are common to all selected frameworks.  Other projects can now reference this portable library and be provided assemblies custom built to their environment.  This greatly simplifies the current process of sharing linked files between platforms like WPF and Silverlight.  You can find out more about this CTP and how it works on this great blog post. Visual Studio Async CTP Microsoft has also released a CTP of a set of language and framework enhancements to provide a much more powerful asynchronous programming model.   Due to the focus on async programming in all types of platforms (and it being the ONLY option in Silverlight and Win7 phone) a move towards a simpler and more understandable model is always a good thing. This CTP (called Visual Studio Async CTP) can be downloaded here.  You can read more about this CTP on this blog post. MSDN Code Samples Gallery Microsoft has also launched new code samples gallery on their MSDN site: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/.   This site allows you to easily search for small samples of code related to a particular technology or platform.  If a sample of code you are looking for is not found, you can request one via the site and other developers can see your request and provide a sample to the site to suit your needs.  You can also peruse requested samples and, if you find a scenario where you can provide value, upload your own sample for the benefit of others.  Samples are packaged into the VS .vsix format and include any necessary references/dependencies.  By using .vsix as the deployment mechanism, as samples are installed from the site they are kept in your Visual Studio 2010 Samples Gallery and kept for your future reference. If you get a chance, check out the site and see how it is done.  Although a somewhat simple concept, I was very impressed with their implementation and the way they went about trying to suit a need.  I’ll definitely be looking there in the future as need something or want to share something. MSDN Search Capabilities Another item I learned recently and was not aware of (that might seem trivial to some) is the power of the MSDN site’s search capabilities.  Between the Code Samples Gallery described above and the search enhancements on MSDN, Microsoft is definitely investing in their platform to help provide developers of all skill levels the tools and resources they need to be successful. What do I mean by the MSDN search capability and why should you care? If you go to the MSDN home page (http://msdn.microsoft.com) and use the “Search MSDN with Big” box at the very top of the page you will see some very interesting results.  First, the search actually doesn’t just search the MSDN library it searches: MSDN Library All Microsoft Blogs CodePlex StackOverflow Downloads MSDN Magazine Support Knowledgebase (I’m not sure it even ends there but the above are all I know of) Beyond just searching all the above locations, the results are formatted very nicely to give some contextual information based on where the result came from.  For example, if a keyword search returned results from CodePlex, each row in the search results screen would include a large amount of information specific to CodePlex such as: Looking at the above results immediately tells you everything from the page views to the CodePlex ratings.  All in all, knowing that this much information is indexed and available from a single search location will lead me to utilize this as one of my initial searches for development information.

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• ROracle support for TimesTen In-Memory Database

  - by Sam Drake

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

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• .NET Security Part 4

  - by Simon Cooper

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

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• REST to Objects in C#

  RESTful interfaces for web services are all the rage for many Web 2.0 sites.  If you want to consume these in a very simple fashion, LINQ to XML can do the job pretty easily in C#.  If you go searching for help on this, youll find a lot of incomplete solutions and fairly large toolkits and frameworks (guess how I know this) this quick article is meant to be a no fluff just stuff approach to making this work. POCO Objects Lets assume you have a Model that you want to suck data into from a RESTful web service.  Ideally this is a Plain Old CLR Object, meaning it isnt infected with any persistence or serialization goop.  It might look something like this: public class Entry { public int Id; public int UserId; public DateTime Date; public float Hours; public string Notes; public bool Billable;   public override string ToString() { return String.Format("[{0}] User: {1} Date: {2} Hours: {3} Notes: {4} Billable {5}", Id, UserId, Date, Hours, Notes, Billable); } } Not that this isnt a completely trivial object.  Lets look at the API for the service.  RESTful HTTP Service In this case, its TickSpots API, with the following sample output: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <entries type="array"> <entry> <id type="integer">24</id> <task_id type="integer">14</task_id> <user_id type="integer">3</user_id> <date type="date">2008-03-08</date> <hours type="float">1.00</hours> <notes>Had trouble with tribbles.</notes> <billable>true</billable> # Billable is an attribute inherited from the task <billed>true</billed> # Billed is an attribute to track whether the entry has been invoiced <created_at type="datetime">Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:46:16 -0400</created_at> <updated_at type="datetime">Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:46:16 -0400</updated_at> # The following attributes are derived and provided for informational purposes: <user_email>[email protected]</user_email> <task_name>Remove converter assembly</task_name> <sum_hours type="float">2.00</sum_hours> <budget type="float">10.00</budget> <project_name>Realign dilithium crystals</project_name> <client_name>Starfleet Command</client_name> </entry> </entries> Im assuming in this case that I dont necessarily care about all of the data fields the service is returning I just need some of them for my applications purposes.  Thus, you can see there are more elements in the <entry> XML than I have in my Entry class. Get The XML with C# The next step is to get the XML.  The following snippet does the heavy lifting once you pass it the appropriate URL: protected XElement GetResponse(string uri) { var request = WebRequest.Create(uri) as HttpWebRequest; request.UserAgent = ".NET Sample"; request.KeepAlive = false;   request.Timeout = 15 * 1000;   var response = request.GetResponse() as HttpWebResponse;   if (request.HaveResponse == true && response != null) { var reader = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream()); return XElement.Parse(reader.ReadToEnd()); } throw new Exception("Error fetching data."); } This is adapted from the Yahoo Developer article on Web Service REST calls.  Once you have the XML, the last step is to get the data back as your POCO. Use LINQ-To-XML to Deserialize POCOs from XML This is done via the following code: public IEnumerable<Entry> List(DateTime startDate, DateTime endDate) { string additionalParameters = String.Format("start_date={0}&end_date={1}", startDate.ToShortDateString(), endDate.ToShortDateString()); string uri = BuildUrl("entries", additionalParameters);   XElement elements = GetResponse(uri);   var entries = from e in elements.Elements() where e.Name.LocalName == "entry" select new Entry { Id = int.Parse(e.Element("id").Value), UserId = int.Parse(e.Element("user_id").Value), Date = DateTime.Parse(e.Element("date").Value), Hours = float.Parse(e.Element("hours").Value), Notes = e.Element("notes").Value, Billable = bool.Parse(e.Element("billable").Value) }; return entries; }   For completeness, heres the BuildUrl method for my TickSpot API wrapper: // Change these to your settings protected const string projectDomain = "DOMAIN.tickspot.com"; private const string authParams = "[email protected]&password=MyTickSpotPassword";   protected string BuildUrl(string apiMethod, string additionalParams) { if (projectDomain.Contains("DOMAIN")) { throw new ApplicationException("You must update your domain in ProjectRepository.cs."); } if (authParams.Contains("MyTickSpotPassword")) { throw new ApplicationException("You must update your email and password in ProjectRepository.cs."); } return string.Format("https://{0}/api/{1}?{2}&{3}", projectDomain, apiMethod, authParams, additionalParams); } Thats it!  Now go forth and consume XML and map it to classes you actually want to work with.  Have fun! Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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