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• What's New in Database Lifecycle Management in Enterprise Manager 12c Release 3

  - by HariSrinivasan

  Enterprise Manager 12c Release 3 includes improvements and enhancements across every area of the product. This blog provides an overview of the new and enhanced features in the Database Lifecycle Management area. I will deep dive into specific features more in depth in subsequent posts. "What's New?"  In this release, we focused on four things: 1. Lifecycle Management Support for new Database12c - Pluggable Databases 2. Management of long running processes, such as a security patch cycle (Change Activity Planner) 3. Management of large number of systems by · Leveraging new framework capabilities for lifecycle operations, such as the new advanced ‘emcli’ script option · Refining features such as configuration search and compliance 4. Minor improvements and quality fixes to existing features · Rollback support for Single instance databases · Improved "OFFLINE" Patching experience · Faster collection of ORACLE_HOME configurations Lifecycle Management Support for new Database 12c - Pluggable Databases Database 12c introduces Pluggable Databases (PDBs), the brand new addition to help you achieve your consolidation goals. Pluggable databases offer unprecedented consolidation at database level and native lifecycle verbs for creating, plugging and unplugging the databases on a container database (CDB). Enterprise Manager can supplement the capabilities of pluggable databases by offering workflows for migrating, provisioning and cloning them using the software library and the deployment procedures. For example, Enterprise Manager can migrate an existing database to a PDB or clone a PDB by storing a versioned copy in the software library. One can also manage the planned downtime related to patching by  migrating the PDBs to a new CDB. While pluggable databases offer these exciting features, it can also pose configuration management and compliance challenges if not managed properly. Enterprise Manager features like inventory management, topology associations and configuration search can mitigate the sprawl of PDBs and also lock them to predefined golden standards using configuration comparison and compliance rules. Learn More ... Management of Long Running datacenter processes - Change Activity Planner (CAP) Currently, customers resort to cumbersome methods to create, execute, track and monitor change activities within their data center. Some customers use traditional tools such as spreadsheets, project planners and in-house custom built solutions. Customers often have weekly sync up meetings across stake holders to collect status and updates. Some of the change activities, for example the quarterly patch set update (PSU) patch rollouts are not single tasks but processes with multiple tasks. Some of those tasks are performed within Enterprise Manager Cloud Control (for example Patch) and some are performed outside of Enterprise Manager Cloud Control. These tasks often run for a longer period of time and involve multiple people or teams. Enterprise Manger Cloud Control supports core data center operations such as configuration management, compliance management, and automation. Enterprise Manager Cloud Control release 12.1.0.3 leverages these capabilities and introduces the Change Activity Planner (CAP). CAP provides the ability to plan, execute, and track change activities in real time. It covers the typical datacenter activities that are spread over a long period of time, across multiple people and multiple targets (even target types). Here are some examples of Change Activity Process in a datacenter: · Patching large environments (PSU/CPU Patching cycles) · Upgrading large number of database environments · Rolling out Compliance Rules · Database Consolidation to Exadata environments CAP provides user flows for Compliance Officers/Managers (incl. lead administrators) and Operators (DBAs and admins). Managers can create change activity plans for various projects, allocate resources, targets, and groups affected. Upon activation of the plan, tasks are created and automatically assigned to individual administrators based on target ownership. Administrators (DBAs) can identify their tasks and understand the context, schedules, and priorities. They can complete tasks using Enterprise Manager Cloud Control automation features such as patch plans (or in some cases outside Enterprise Manager). Upon completion, compliance is evaluated for validations and updates the status of the tasks and the plans. Learn More about CAP ...  Improved Configuration & Compliance Management of a large number of systems Improved Configuration Comparison:  Get to the configuration comparison results faster for simple ad-hoc comparisons. When performing a 1 to 1 comparison, Enterprise Manager will perform the comparison immediately and take the user directly to the results without having to wait for a job to be submitted and executed. Flattened system comparisons reduce comparison setup time and reduce complexity. In addition to the previously existing topological comparison, users now have an option to compare using a “flattened” methodology. Flattening means to remove duplicate target instances within the systems and remove the hierarchy of member targets. The result are much easier to spot differences particularly for specific use cases like comparing patch levels between complex systems like RAC and Fusion Apps. Improved Configuration Search & Advanced EMCLI Script option for Mass Automation Enterprise manager 12c introduces a new framework level capability to be able to script and stitch together multiple tasks using EMCLI. This powerful capability can be leveraged for lifecycle operations, especially when executing a task over a large number of targets. Specific usages of this include, retrieving a qualified list of targets using Configuration Search and then using the resultset for automation. Another example would be executing a patching operation and then re-executing on targets where it may have failed. This is complemented by other enhancements, such as a better usability for designing reusable configuration searches. IN EM 12c Rel 3, a simplified UI makes building adhoc searches even easier. Searching for missing patches is a common use of configuration search. This required the use of the advanced options which are now clearly defined and easy to use. Perform “Configuration Search” using the EMCLI. Users can find and execute Configuration Searches from the EMCLI which can be extremely useful for building sophisticated automation scripts. For an example, Run the Search named “Oracle Databases on Exadata” which finds all Database targets running on top of Exadata. Further filter the results by refining by options like name, host, etc.. emcli get_targets -config_search="Databases on Exadata" –target_name="exa%“ Use this in powerful mass automation operations using the new emcli script option. For example, to solve the use case of – Finding all DBs running on Exadata and housing E-Biz and Patch them. Create a Python script with emcli functions and invoke it in the new EMCLI script option shell. Invoke the script in the new EMCLI with script option directly: $<path to emcli>/emcli @myPSU_Patch.py Richer compliance content:  Now over 50 Oracle Provided Compliance Standards including new standards for Pluggable Database, Fusion Applications, Oracle Identity Manager, Oracle VM and Internet Directory. 9 Oracle provided Real Time Monitoring Standards containing over 900 Compliance Rules across 500 Facets. These new Real time Compliance Standards covers both Exadata Compute nodes and Linux servers. The result is increased Oracle software coverage and faster time to compliance monitoring on Exadata. Enhancements to Patch Management: Overhauled "OFFLINE" Patching experience: Simplified Patch uploads UI to improve the offline experience of patching. There is now a single step process to get the patches into software library. Customers often maintain local repositories of patches, sometimes called software depots, where they host the patches downloaded from My Oracle Support. In the past, you had to move these patches to your desktop then upload them to the Enterprise Manager's Software library through the Enterprise Manager Cloud Control user interface. You can now use the following EMCLI command to upload multiple patches directly from a remote location within the data center: $emcli upload_patches -location <Path to Patch directory> -from_host <HOSTNAME> The upload process filters all of the new patches, automatically selects the relevant metadata files from the location, and uploads the patches to software library. Other Improvements:  Patch rollback for single instance databases, new option in the Patch Plan to rollback the patches added to the patch plans. Upon execution, the procedure would rollback the patch and the SQL applied to the single instance Databases. Improved and faster configuration collection of Oracle Home targets can enable more reliable automation at higher level functions like Provisioning, Patching or Database as a Service. Just to recap, here is a list of database lifecycle management features:  * Red highlights mark – New or Enhanced in the Release 3. • Discovery, inventory tracking and reporting • Database provisioning including o Migration to Pluggable databases o Plugging and unplugging of pluggable databases o Gold image based cloning o Scaling of RAC nodes •Schema and data change management •End-to-end patch management in online and offline modes, including o Patch advisories in online (connected with My Oracle Support) and offline mode o Patch pre-deployment analysis, deployment and rollback (currently only for single instance databases) o Reporting • Upgrade planning and execution of the upgrade process • Configuration management including • Compliance management with out-of-box content • Change Activity Planner for planning, designing and tracking long running processes For more information on Enterprise Manager’s database lifecycle management capabilities, visit http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/oem/lifecycle-mgmt/index.html

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• Data Aggregation of CSV files java

  - by royB

  I have k csv files (5 csv files for example), each file has m fields which produce a key and n values. I need to produce a single csv file with aggregated data. I'm looking for the most efficient solution for this problem, speed mainly. I don't think by the way that we will have memory issues. Also I would like to know if hashing is really a good solution because we will have to use 64 bit hashing solution to reduce the chance for a collision to less than 1% (we are having around 30000000 rows per aggregation). For example file 1: f1,f2,f3,v1,v2,v3,v4 a1,b1,c1,50,60,70,80 a3,b2,c4,60,60,80,90 file 2: f1,f2,f3,v1,v2,v3,v4 a1,b1,c1,30,50,90,40 a3,b2,c4,30,70,50,90 result: f1,f2,f3,v1,v2,v3,v4 a1,b1,c1,80,110,160,120 a3,b2,c4,90,130,130,180 algorithm that we thought until now: hashing (using concurentHashTable) merge sorting the files DB: using mysql or hadoop or redis. The solution needs to be able to handle Huge amount of data (each file more than two million rows) a better example: file 1 country,city,peopleNum england,london,1000000 england,coventry,500000 file 2: country,city,peopleNum england,london,500000 england,coventry,500000 england,manchester,500000 merged file: country,city,peopleNum england,london,1500000 england,coventry,1000000 england,manchester,500000 The key is: country,city. This is just an example, my real key is of size 6 and the data columns are of size 8 - total of 14 columns. We would like that the solution will be the fastest in regard of data processing.

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• DIY Homemade Hybrid Rocket Engine [Video]

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Remember the guy with the cool DIY astronaut ice cream build? He’s back with a mini hybrid rocket engine that runs off oxygen and acrylic. I built a small rocket engine for demonstration purposes. The engine is built from a 2″ diameter acrylic rod through which I drilled a 0.5″ hole. The oxygen at 80 psi or less is passed through the hole and then is forced through a convergent-divergent nozzle at the tail end. The nozzle’s throat is about 0.25″ and expands to 0.625″. I lit the engine by inserting a burning cotton swab (with wooden stick) while a small amount of oxygen was flowing. The acrylic catches fire very easily in a pure oxygen environment. The engine can be throttled and shut off completely, which is a major benefit to hybrid engine designs. Solid-fuel rockets cannot be throttled or shut off, which makes them difficult to control. [via Make] HTG Explains: What is the Windows Page File and Should You Disable It? How To Get a Better Wireless Signal and Reduce Wireless Network Interference How To Troubleshoot Internet Connection Problems

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• Should one generally develop a client library for REST services to help prevent API breakages?

  - by BestPractices

  We have a project where UI code will be developed by the same team but in a different language (Python/Django) from the services layer (REST/Java). The code for each layer exits in different code repositories and which can follow different release cycles. I'm trying to come up with a process that will prevent/reduce breaking changes in the services layer from the perspective of the UI layer. I've thought to write integration tests at the UI layer level that we'll run whenever we build the UI or the services layer (we're using Jenkins as our CI tool to build the code which is in two Git repos) and if there are failures then something in the services layer broke and the commit is not accepted. Would it also be a good idea (is it a best practice?) to have the developer of the services layer create and maintain a client library for the REST service that exists in the UI layer that they will update whenever there is a breaking change in their Service API? Conceivably, we would then have the advantage of a statically-typed API that the UI code builds against. If the client library API changes, then the UI code won't compile (so we'll know sooner that there was a breaking change). I'd also still run the integration tests upon building the UI or services layer to further validate that the integration between UI and the service(s) still works.

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• Managed Service Architectures Part I

  - by barryoreilly

  Instead of thinking about service oriented architecture, a concept that is continually defined, redefined, abused and mistreated, perhaps it is time to drop the acronym and consider what we actually need to get the job done.   ‘Pure’ SOA involves the modeling of an organisation’s processes, the so called ‘Top Down’ approach, followed by the implementation of these processes as services.     Another approach, more commonly seen in the wild, is the bottom up approach. This usually involves services that simply start popping up in the organization, and SOA in this case is often just an attempt to rein in these services. Such projects, although described as SOA projects for a variety of reasons, have clearly little relation to process driven architecture. Much has been written about these two approaches, with many deciding that a hybrid of both methods is needed to succeed with SOA.   These hybrid methods are a sensible compromise, but one gets the feeling that there is too much focus on ‘Succeeding with SOA’. Organisations who focus too much on bottom up development, or who waste too much time and money on top down approaches that don’t produce results, are often recommended to attempt an ‘agile’(Erl) or ‘middle-out’ (Microsoft) approach in order to succeed with SOA.  The problem with recommending this approach is that, in most cases, succeeding with SOA isn’t the aim of the project. If a project is started with the simple aim of ‘Succeeding with SOA’ then the reasons for the projects existence probably need to be questioned.   There are a number of things we can be sure of: ·         An organisation will have a number of disparate IT systems ·         Some of these systems will have redundant data and functionality ·         Integration will give considerable ROI ·         Integration will already be under way. ·         Services will already exist in the organisation ·         These services will be inconsistent in their implementation and in their governance   So there are three goals here: 1.       Alignment between the business and IT 2.     Integration of disparate systems 3.     Management of services.   2 and 3 are going to happen,  in fact they must happen if any degree of return is expected from the IT department. Ignoring 1 is considered a typical mistake in SOA implementations, as it ignores the business implications. However, the business implication of this approach is the money saved in more efficient IT processes. 2 and 3 are ongoing, and they will continue happening, even if a large project to produce a SOA metamodel is started. The result will then be an unstructured cackle of services, and a metamodel that is already going out of date. So we get stuck in and rebuild our services so that they match the metamodel, with the far reaching consequences that this will have on all our LOB systems are current. Lets imagine that this actually works ( how often do we rip and replace working software because it doesn't fit a certain pattern? Never -that's the point of integration), we will now be working with a metamodel that is out of date, and most likely incomplete if the organisation is large.      Accepting that an object can have more than one model over time, with perhaps more than one model being  at any given time will help us realise the limitations of the top down model. It is entirely normal , and perhaps necessary, for an organisation to be able to view an entity from different perspectives.   So, instead of trying to constantly force these goals in a straight line, why not let them happen in parallel, and manage the changes in each layer.     If  company A has chosen to model their business processes and create a business architecture, there will be a reason behind this. Often the aim is to make the business more flexible and able to cope with change, through alignment between the business and the IT department.   If company B’s IT department recognizes the problem of wild services springing up everywhere, and decides to do something about it, by designing a platform and processes for the introduction of services, is this not a valid approach?   With the hybrid approach, it is recommended that company A begin deploying services as quickly as possible. Based on models that are clearly incomplete, and which will therefore change rapidly and often in the near future. Natural business evolution will also mean that the models can be guaranteed to change in the not so near future. To ‘Succeed with SOA’ Company B needs to go back to the drawing board and start modeling processes and objects. So, in effect, we are telling business analysts to start developing code based on a model they are unsure of, and telling programmers to ignore the obvious and growing problems in their IT department and start drawing lines and boxes.     Could the problem be that there are two different problem domains? And the whole concept of SOA as it being described by clever salespeople today creates an example of oft dreaded ‘tight coupling’ between these two domains?   Could it be that we have taken two large problem areas, and bundled the solution together in order to create a magic bullet? And then convinced ourselves that the bullet actually exists?   Company A wants to have a closer relationship between the business and its IT department, in order to become a more flexible organization. Company B wants to decrease the maintenance costs of its IT infrastructure. If both companies focus on succeeding with SOA, then they aren’t focusing on their actual goals.   If Company A starts building services from incomplete models, without a gameplan, they will end up in the same situation as company B, with wild services. If company B focuses on modeling, they could easily end up with the same problems as company A.   Now we have two companies, who a short while ago had one problem each, that now have two problems each. This has happened because of a focus on ‘Succeeding with SOA’, rather than solving the problem at hand.   This is not to suggest that the two problem domains are unrelated, a strategy that encompasses both will obviously be good for the organization. But only if the organization realizes this and can develop such a strategy. This strategy cannot be bought in a box.       Anyone who has worked with SOA for a while will be used to analyzing the solutions to a problem and judging the solution’s level of coupling. If we have two applications that each perform separate functions, but need to communicate with each other, we create a integration layer between them, perhaps with a service, but we do all we can to reduce the dependency between the two systems. Using the same approach, we can separate the modeling (business architecture) and the service hosting (technical architecture).     The business architecture describes the processes and business objects in the business domain.   The technical architecture describes the hosting and management and implementation of services.   The glue that binds these together, the integration layer in our analogy, is the service contract, where the operations map the processes to their technical implementation, and the messages map business concepts to software objects in the implementation.   If we reduce the coupling between these layers, we should be able to allow developers to develop services, and business analysts to develop models, without the changes rippling through from one side to the other.   This would allow company A to carry on modeling, and company B to develop a service platform, each achieving their intended goal, without necessarily creating the problems seen in pure top down or bottom up approaches. Company B could then at a later date map their service infrastructure to a unified model, and company A could carry on modeling, insulating deployed services from changes in the ongoing modeling.   How do we do this?  The concept of service virtualization has been around for a while, and is instantly realizable in Microsoft’s Managed Services Engine. Here we can create a layer of virtual services, which represent the business analyst’s view, presenting uniform contracts to the outside world. These services can then transform and route messages to the actual service implementations. I like to think of the virtual services with their beautifully modeled interfaces as ‘SOA services’, and the implementations as simple integration ‘adapter’ services providing an interface to a technical implementation. The Managed Services Engine also provides policy based control over services, regardless of where they are deployed, simplifying handling of security, logging, exception handling etc.   This solves a big problem. The pressure to deliver services quickly is always there in projects. It is very important to quickly show value when implementing service architectures. There is also pressure to deliver quality, and you can’t easily do both at the same time. This approach allows quick delivery with quality increasing over time, allowing modeling and service development to occur in parallel and independent of each other. The link between business modeling and service implementation is not one that is obvious to many organizations, and requires a certain maturity to realize and drive forward. It is also completely possible that a company can benefit from one without the other, even if this approach is frowned upon today, there are many companies doing so and seeing ROI.   Of course there are disadvantages to this. The biggest one being the transformations necessary between the virtual interfaces and the service implementations. Bad choices in developing the services in the service implementation could mean that it is impossible to map the modeled processes to the implementation with redevelopment of the service. In many cases the architect will not have a choice here anyway, as proprietary systems are often delivered with predeveloped services. The alternative is to wait until the model is finished and then build the service according the model. However, if that approach worked we wouldn’t be having this discussion! And even when it does work, natural business evolution will mean that the two concepts (model and implementation) will immediately start to drift away from each other, so coupling them tightly together so that they are forever bound to the model that only applies at the time of the modeling work will not really achieve a great deal. Architecture is all about trade offs, and here a choice has to be made. The choice is between something will initially be of low quality but will work, or something that may well be impossible to achieve in most situations.         In conclusion, top-down is a natural approach for business analysts, and bottom-up  is a natural approach for developers. Instead of trying to force something on both that neither want, and which has not shown itself to be successful,  why not let them get on with their jobs, and let an enterprise architect coordinate the processes?

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• Los Angeles Department of Building & Safety Lowers Customer Service Costs with Oracle WebCenter

  - by Kellsey Ruppel

  Register Now for this Webcast. Los Angeles Department of Building & Safety Lowers Customer Service Costs with Oracle WebCenter Los Angeles Department of Building & Safety (LADBS) is one of the largest construction permitting departments in the country, serving over 350,000 walk-in and 530,000 phone customers, and issuing over 110,000 permits worth $3 Billion every year. LADBS needed a way to migrate walk-in and phone transactions to customer self-service, so they turned to Oracle WebCenter and teamed with Oracle Partner 3Di to deliver a customer self-service portal to lower their cost of customer service operation, while increasing customer satisfaction. Attend this Webcast to learn how Oracle WebCenter has allowed Los Angeles Department of Building & Safety to: Deliver a state of the art customer self-service portal Reduce traffic on high cost, low satisfaction customer service channels Integrate business workflows and legacy applications Register Now for this Webcast. REGISTER NOW Register now for this exclusive event. Wednesday, November 14, 2012 10 a.m. PT / 1 p.m. ET Presented by: Giovani DacumosDirector of Systems, Los Angeles Department of Building & Safety Jing ReyesApplications Development Group Manager, Los Angeles Department of Building & Safety Rajiv Desai CEO, 3Di Sheetal ParanjpyeProject Manager, 3Di Presented by: Copyright © 2012, Oracle. All rights reserved. Contact Us | Legal Notices and Terms of Use | Privacy Statement

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• EM12c Release 4: Database as a Service Enhancements

  - by Adeesh Fulay

  Oracle Enterprise Manager 12.1.0.4 (or simply put EM12c R4) is the latest update to the product. As previous versions, this release provides tons of enhancements and bug fixes, attributing to improved stability and quality. One of the areas that is most exciting and has seen tremendous growth in the last few years is that of Database as a Service. EM12c R4 provides a significant update to Database as a Service. The key themes are: Comprehensive Database Service Catalog (includes single instance, RAC, and Data Guard) Additional Storage Options for Snap Clone (includes support for Database feature CloneDB) Improved Rapid Start Kits Extensible Metering and Chargeback Miscellaneous Enhancements 1. Comprehensive Database Service Catalog Before we get deep into implementation of a service catalog, lets first understand what it is and what benefits it provides. Per ITIL, a service catalog is an exhaustive list of IT services that an organization provides or offers to its employees or customers. Service catalogs have been widely popular in the space of cloud computing, primarily as the medium to provide standardized and pre-approved service definitions. There is already some good collateral out there that talks about Oracle database service catalogs. The two whitepapers i recommend reading are: Service Catalogs: Defining Standardized Database Service High Availability Best Practices for Database Consolidation: The Foundation for Database as a Service [Oracle MAA] EM12c comes with an out-of-the-box service catalog and self service portal since release 1. For the customers, it provides the following benefits: Present a collection of standardized database service definitions, Define standardized pools of hardware and software for provisioning, Role based access to cater to different class of users, Automated procedures to provision the predefined database definitions, Setup chargeback plans based on service tiers and database configuration sizes, etc Starting Release 4, the scope of services offered via the service catalog has been expanded to include databases with varying levels of availability - Single Instance (SI) or Real Application Clusters (RAC) databases with multiple data guard based standby databases. Some salient points of the data guard integration: Standby pools can now be defined across different datacenters or within the same datacenter as the primary (this helps in modelling the concept of near and far DR sites) The standby databases can be single instance, RAC, or RAC One Node databases Multiple standby databases can be provisioned, where the maximum limit is determined by the version of database software The standby databases can be in either mount or read only (requires active data guard option) mode All database versions 10g to 12c supported (as certified with EM 12c) All 3 protection modes can be used - Maximum availability, performance, security Log apply can be set to sync or async along with the required apply lag The different service levels or service tiers are popularly represented using metals - Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze, and so on. The Oracle MAA whitepaper (referenced above) calls out the various service tiers as defined by Oracle's best practices, but customers can choose any logical combinations from the table below:  Primary  Standby [1 or more]  EM 12cR4  SI  -  SI  SI  RAC -  RAC SI  RAC RAC  RON -  RON RON where RON = RAC One Node is supported via custom post-scripts in the service template A sample service catalog would look like the image below. Here we have defined 4 service levels, which have been deployed across 2 data centers, and have 3 standardized sizes. Again, it is important to note that this is just an example to get the creative juices flowing. I imagine each customer would come up with their own catalog based on the application requirements, their RTO/RPO goals, and the product licenses they own. In the screenwatch titled 'Build Service Catalog using EM12c DBaaS', I walk through the complete steps required to setup this sample service catalog in EM12c. 2. Additional Storage Options for Snap Clone In my previous blog posts, i have described the snap clone feature in detail. Essentially, it provides a storage agnostic, self service, rapid, and space efficient approach to solving your data cloning problems. The net benefit is that you get incredible amounts of storage savings (on average 90%) all while cloning databases in a matter of minutes. Space and Time, two things enterprises would love to save on. This feature has been designed with the goal of providing data cloning capabilities while protecting your existing investments in server, storage, and software. With this in mind, we have pursued with the dual solution approach of Hardware and Software. In the hardware approach, we connect directly to your storage appliances and perform all low level actions required to rapidly clone your databases. While in the software approach, we use an intermediate software layer to talk to any storage vendor or any storage configuration to perform the same low level actions. Thus delivering the benefits of database thin cloning, without requiring you to drastically changing the infrastructure or IT's operating style. In release 4, we expand the scope of options supported by snap clone with the addition of database CloneDB. While CloneDB is not a new feature, it was first introduced in 11.2.0.2 patchset, it has over the years become more stable and mature. CloneDB leverages a combination of Direct NFS (or dNFS) feature of the database, RMAN image copies, sparse files, and copy-on-write technology to create thin clones of databases from existing backups in a matter of minutes. It essentially has all the traits that we want to present to our customers via the snap clone feature. For more information on cloneDB, i highly recommend reading the following sources: Blog by Tim Hall: Direct NFS (DNFS) CloneDB in Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Oracle OpenWorld Presentation by Cern: Efficient Database Cloning using Direct NFS and CloneDB The advantages of the new CloneDB integration with EM12c Snap Clone are: Space and time savings Ease of setup - no additional software is required other than the Oracle database binary Works on all platforms Reduce the dependence on storage administrators Cloning process fully orchestrated by EM12c, and delivered to developers/DBAs/QA Testers via the self service portal Uses dNFS to delivers better performance, availability, and scalability over kernel NFS Complete lifecycle of the clones managed by EM12c - performance, configuration, etc 3. Improved Rapid Start Kits DBaaS deployments tend to be complex and its setup requires a series of steps. These steps are typically performed across different users and different UIs. The Rapid Start Kit provides a single command solution to setup Database as a Service (DBaaS) and Pluggable Database as a Service (PDBaaS). One command creates all the Cloud artifacts like Roles, Administrators, Credentials, Database Profiles, PaaS Infrastructure Zone, Database Pools and Service Templates. Once the Rapid Start Kit has been successfully executed, requests can be made to provision databases and PDBs from the self service portal. Rapid start kit can create complex topologies involving multiple zones, pools and service templates. It also supports standby databases and use of RMAN image backups. The Rapid Start Kit in reality is a simple emcli script which takes a bunch of xml files as input and executes the complete automation in a matter of seconds. On a full rack Exadata, it took only 40 seconds to setup PDBaaS end-to-end. This kit works for both Oracle's engineered systems like Exadata, SuperCluster, etc and also on commodity hardware. One can draw parallel to the Exadata One Command script, which again takes a bunch of inputs from the administrators and then runs a simple script that configures everything from network to provisioning the DB software. Steps to use the kit: The kit can be found under the SSA plug-in directory on the OMS: EM_BASE/oracle/MW/plugins/oracle.sysman.ssa.oms.plugin_12.1.0.8.0/dbaas/setup It can be run from this default location or from any server which has emcli client installed For most scenarios, you would use the script dbaas/setup/database_cloud_setup.py For Exadata, special integration is provided to reduce the number of inputs even further. The script to use for this scenario would be dbaas/setup/exadata_cloud_setup.py The database_cloud_setup.py script takes two inputs: Cloud boundary xml: This file defines the cloud topology in terms of the zones and pools along with host names, oracle home locations or container database names that would be used as infrastructure for provisioning database services. This file is optional in case of Exadata, as the boundary is well know via the Exadata system target available in EM. Input xml: This file captures inputs for users, roles, profiles, service templates, etc. Essentially, all inputs required to define the DB services and other settings of the self service portal. Once all the xml files have been prepared, invoke the script as follows for PDBaaS: emcli @database_cloud_setup.py -pdbaas -cloud_boundary=/tmp/my_boundary.xml -cloud_input=/tmp/pdb_inputs.xml          The script will prompt for passwords a few times for key users like sysman, cloud admin, SSA admin, etc. Once complete, you can simply log into EM as the self service user and request for databases from the portal. More information available in the Rapid Start Kit chapter in Cloud Administration Guide.  4. Extensible Metering and Chargeback  Last but not the least, Metering and Chargeback in release 4 has been made extensible in all possible regards. The new extensibility features allow customer, partners, system integrators, etc to : Extend chargeback to any target type managed in EM Promote any metric in EM as a chargeback entity Extend list of charge items via metric or configuration extensions Model abstract entities like no. of backup requests, job executions, support requests, etc  A slew of emcli verbs have also been added that allows administrators to create, edit, delete, import/export charge plans, and assign cost centers all via the command line. More information available in the Chargeback API chapter in Cloud Administration Guide. 5. Miscellaneous Enhancements There are other miscellaneous, yet important, enhancements that are worth a mention. These mostly have been asked by customers like you. These are: Custom naming of DB Services Self service users can provide custom names for DB SID, DB service, schemas, and tablespaces Every custom name is validated for uniqueness in EM 'Create like' of Service Templates Now creating variants of a service template is only a click away. This would be vital when you publish service templates to represent different database sizes or service levels. Profile viewer View the details of a profile like datafile, control files, snapshot ids, export/import files, etc prior to its selection in the service template Cleanup automation - for failed and successful requests Single emcli command to cleanup all remnant artifacts of a failed request Cleanup can be performed on a per request bases or by the entire pool As an extension, you can also delete successful requests Improved delete user workflow Allows administrators to reassign cloud resources to another user or delete all of them Support for multiple tablespaces for schema as a service In addition to multiple schemas, user can also specify multiple tablespaces per request I hope this was a good introduction to the new Database as a Service enhancements in EM12c R4. I encourage you to explore many of these new and existing features and give us feedback. Good luck! References: Cloud Management Page on OTN Cloud Administration Guide [Documentation] -- Adeesh Fulay (@adeeshf)

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• Learn How Ancestry.com Helps Families Uncover Their History with Oracle WebCenter

  - by Christie Flanagan

  Delivering Exceptional Online Customer ExperiencesAncestry.com is the world’s largest online family history resource, providing an engaging and interactive customer experience to more than 1.7 million members. With smart search technology, a wealth of learning resources, and a worldwide community of family history enthusiasts, Ancestry.com helps people discover their roots and tell their unique family stories. Key to Ancestry.com’s success has been the delivery of an online customer experience that converts site visitors into paying subscribers and keeps them coming back. To help achieve this goal, Ancestry.com turned to Oracle’s Web experience management solution, Oracle WebCenter Sites. Join us as executives from Ancestry.com and Oracle discuss how Oracle’s Web experience management solution is helping them deliver engaging online experiences. Learn how: Ancestry.com selected Oracle WebCenter Sites to meet their demanding Web experience management requirements The company was able to get up and running quickly despite a complex technology stack and challenging integration requirements with legacy systems Ancestry.com empowered business users to manage the online experience and significantly reduce time to market for their online campaigns and initiatives Register now for the Webcast. REGISTER NOW Thursday,June 28, 201210 a.m. PT / 1 p.m. ET Presented by: Blane Nelson Chief Architect–Applications,Ancestry.com Christie FlanaganDirector of Product Marketing, Oracle WebCenter Sites,Oracle

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• Hill International Wins Oracle Eco-Enterprise Innovation Award

  - by Evelyn Neumayr

  In my last blog entry, I discussed Oracle’s Eco-Enterprise Innovation Award, part of the Oracle Excellence awards. Nominations for this year’s awards are due July 17. These awards are presented to organizations that use Oracle products to reduce their environmental footprint while improving their operational efficiency. One of last year’s winners was Hill International. Engineering News-Record magazine recently ranked Hill as the eighth-largest construction management firm in the United States. Hill International was able to streamline its forecasting and improve its visibility into its construction projects’ productivity and profitability using Oracle Primavera. They also implemented Oracle Hyperion Financial Management to standardize its financial reporting and forecasting processes and support its decision-making. With Oracle, Hill gained visibility into the true productivity of each project and cut its financial reporting cycle time from two weeks to one. The company also used the data generated to support new construction project proposals and determine the profitability of potential projects. Hill International realized significant cost savings and reduced its environmental impact on its US$400 million Comcast Center construction project in Philadelphia by centralizing its data storage, reducing paper usage, and maximizing project efficiency. It also leveraged the increased visibility offered by the Oracle solutions to make more environmentally-sound business decisions regarding on-site demolition, re-use of previous structures, green design of new facilities, procurement, and materials usage. See more about Hill International and the other Eco-Enterprise Innovation award winners here.  

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• Best Persistence choice for J2EE-App with frequently changing Data Model

  - by Ben-G

  Whenever I develop a J2EE-Application, I at some point decide to switch from my dummy Persistence (Simply Using Lists and other Data Structures) to some Sort of Database Persistence. Mostly when I hope the Data Model is more or less complete. From this point on, changes to the data model become exhausting, but unluckily they occur rather often. I've used different Object-Relational-Mappers (iBatis, Hibernate) for my projects. They definitely reduce the pain coming with Data Model changes, but they anyway let me adjust code/configuration at 3 or 4 places for every single change. To me, that's cumbersome and error prone. I made a better experience with DB4O, which simply persists Java Objects as they are, but I believe it's performance does not scale for huge applications. Is there anyway to maintain performance while letting out all the ugly configuration work? I'm seeking a performant framework which really hides persistence from my code. Wish for thinking? Or am I missing out THE technology? Hope you can help.

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• Learn How to Integrate Social Media into Your Customer Service - December 12 Webcast

  - by Tuula Fai

  Are you interested in learning more about social media customer service strategies? Then register for CRM Magazine's Roundtable Webcast, Four Social Media Support Strategies, being held Wednesday, December 12 from 11 AM - 12 PM PT (2 - 3 PM ET). The webcast features Oracle's Charlie Knapp, Director of CRM/CX Applications, Product Marketing who will speak on best practices for social enabling your contact center and customer support. Here is a brief overview of the webinar: Today's customers reveal an incredible amount of valuable information through social media on a daily basis. How well is your organization able to listen and repond? Join Parature, Verint Systems, KANA, and Oracle in this free webinar and learn how to: Enable collaboration across the enterprise to provide service and support in social media. Enhance loyalty, drive voice of the customer listening, and reduce costs. Intelligently identify, route, and engage directly with your customers through social media. Integrate social media into contact center workflows to solve customer issues, protect your brand, and improve satisfaction. Register now to join us for this free web event.  

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• Oracle Cloud Solutions @ Cloud Expo East (June 10-12)

  - by Gene Eun

  Oracle is proud to be the Platinum Sponsor at next week's Cloud Expo East (June 10-12) at the Javits Center in New York City.  This is the fourth consecutive year Oracle has sponsored Cloud Expo. As in years past, Oracle has a full schedule of sessions shown below. We'd love to have you be our guest at Cloud Expo East and have you attend one of our sessions and hear more about our thought leadership and leading solutions in the Cloud and Big Data. We'll also have booth #207, so please stop by and see a demo of many of our cloud offerings. Date  Time  Session Title  Track  Room Tuesday, June 10 4:40 pm - 5:15 pm Top 5 Best Practices for your Application Platform As a Service Cloud Business and the API Economy | Deploying the Cloud TBD Wednesday, June 11 9:10 am - 10:10 am Cloud Odyssey:  A Hero’s Quest All Tracks (Keynote) Keynote Hall Wednesday, June 11 10:15 am - 10:45 am Big Data Management System: Smart SWL Processing Across Hadoop and Your Data Warehouse All Tracks (General Session) Keynote Hall Wednesday, June 11 2:50 pm - 3:25 pm Plug into the Cloud: Your Blueprint to Database as a Service Mobile | Hot Topics TBD Wednesday, June 11 2:50 pm - 3:25 pm From Supply-led to Demand-led: Lead Your IT to Better Serve Your Users Cloud Business and the API Economy | Deploying the Cloud TBD Thursday, June 12 2:50 pm - 3:25 pm Reduce Complexity and Accelerate Innovation with IaaS and PaaS Cloud Business and the API Economy | Deploying the Cloud TBD At Cloud Expo East, you'll get to learn about and experience the latest in Cloud and Big Data. If you don't have a pass to Cloud Expo, no problem. Oracle is giving away FREE VIP Gold Passes! We would love to have you attend Cloud Expo on us. Just go to Oracle's Cloud Expo 2014 event registration page and follow the instructions for a complimentary pass. Stay tuned to this blog and follow us on Twitter (@OracleCloudZone) during and after Cloud Expo for more insight and observations about this year's conference.

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• Need Help With Conflicting Customer Support Goals?

  - by Tom Floodeen

  It seems that every OPS review Customer Support Executives are being asked to improve the customer KPIs while also improving gross margin. This is a tough road for even experienced leaders. You need to reduce your agents research time while increasing their answer accuracy. You want to spend less time training them while growing the number of products and systems being used. You have to deal with increasing service volumes but at the same time you need to focus on creating appropriate service insight. After all, to be a great support center you not only have to be good at answering questions, you also need to be good at preventing them.   Five Key Benefits of knowledge Management in Customer Service will help you start down the path meeting these, and other, objectives. With Oracle Knowledge Products, fully integrated with Oracle’s CRM solutions, you can accomplish both increased  service demand while driving your costs down. And you can handle both while positively impacting the satisfaction and loyalty of your customers.  Take advantage of Oracle to not only provide you with a great integrated tool suite, but also with the vision to drive you down the path of success.

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• 5 Mac Applications For Web And Graphic Design

  - by Jyoti

  In this article free applications useful and effective for the development and creation of websites with your Mac computer. Without further ado, here are 5 Excellent Mac Application for Web and Graphic Design. Fotoflexer : Fotoflexer claims to be “The world’s most advanced online image editor”. It offers completely free access to numerous features such as photo effects, graphics, shapes, morphing, and the creation of collages. You can also integrate and share your art with social sites like MySpace, Flickr, Facebook, and more. This can be an important app if the site you are creating is going to use applications. Simple CSS : With Simple CSS you can create Cascading Style Sheets from scratch or edit them right from the comfort of your desktop. Update styles on multiple pages all at once and reduce the data transfer usage on your page for faster loads. Blender : Blender is an open source software that allows you to create 3D animation with interactive playback leaves you with the option to optimize the style of your site with a few graphics. You can create animations with shades of colors, glossy features, soft shadows and advanced rendering features. JAlbum : Jalbum is a very useful app that allows you to create stylish photo galleries to publish on the web. All you have to do is simply drag selected folders into a pane where any images contained within the folder will automatically be arranged into a photo gallery. You can add several different themes and templates to enhance the appearance of your gallery, later then gain the HTML code and publish the complete gallery onto the web. Colorate : With Colorate you can create harmonized color palettes along with color schemes. Generate these palettes for images, photographs and more.

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• Why Are Minimized Programs Often Slow to Open Again?

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  It seems particularly counterintuitive: you minimize an application because you plan on returning to it later and wish to skip shutting the application down and restarting it later, but sometimes maximizing it takes even longer than launching it fresh. What gives? Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. The Question SuperUser reader Bart wants to know why he’s not saving any time with application minimization: I’m working in Photoshop CS6 and multiple browsers a lot. I’m not using them all at once, so sometimes some applications are minimized to taskbar for hours or days. The problem is, when I try to maximize them from the taskbar – it sometimes takes longer than starting them! Especially Photoshop feels really weird for many seconds after finally showing up, it’s slow, unresponsive and even sometimes totally freezes for minute or two. It’s not a hardware problem as it’s been like that since always on all on my PCs. Would I also notice it after upgrading my HDD to SDD and adding RAM (my main PC holds 4 GB currently)? Could guys with powerful pcs / macs tell me – does it also happen to you? I guess OSes somehow “focus” on active software and move all the resources away from the ones that run, but are not used. Is it possible to somehow set RAM / CPU / HDD priorities or something, for let’s say, Photoshop, so it won’t slow down after long period of inactivity? So what is the deal? Why does he find himself waiting to maximize a minimized app? The Answer SuperUser contributor Allquixotic explains why: Summary The immediate problem is that the programs that you have minimized are being paged out to the “page file” on your hard disk. This symptom can be improved by installing a Solid State Disk (SSD), adding more RAM to your system, reducing the number of programs you have open, or upgrading to a newer system architecture (for instance, Ivy Bridge or Haswell). Out of these options, adding more RAM is generally the most effective solution. Explanation The default behavior of Windows is to give active applications priority over inactive applications for having a spot in RAM. When there’s significant memory pressure (meaning the system doesn’t have a lot of free RAM if it were to let every program have all the RAM it wants), it starts putting minimized programs into the page file, which means it writes out their contents from RAM to disk, and then makes that area of RAM free. That free RAM helps programs you’re actively using — say, your web browser — run faster, because if they need to claim a new segment of RAM (like when you open a new tab), they can do so. This “free” RAM is also used as page cache, which means that when active programs attempt to read data on your hard disk, that data might be cached in RAM, which prevents your hard disk from being accessed to get that data. By using the majority of your RAM for page cache, and swapping out unused programs to disk, Windows is trying to improve responsiveness of the program(s) you are actively using, by making RAM available to them, and caching the files they access in RAM instead of the hard disk. The downside of this behavior is that minimized programs can take a while to have their contents copied from the page file, on disk, back into RAM. The time increases the larger the program’s footprint in memory. This is why you experience that delay when maximizing Photoshop. RAM is many times faster than a hard disk (depending on the specific hardware, it can be up to several orders of magnitude). An SSD is considerably faster than a hard disk, but it is still slower than RAM by orders of magnitude. Having your page file on an SSD will help, but it will also wear out the SSD more quickly than usual if your page file is heavily utilized due to RAM pressure. Remedies Here is an explanation of the available remedies, and their general effectiveness: Installing more RAM: This is the recommended path. If your system does not support more RAM than you already have installed, you will need to upgrade more of your system: possibly your motherboard, CPU, chassis, power supply, etc. depending on how old it is. If it’s a laptop, chances are you’ll have to buy an entire new laptop that supports more installed RAM. When you install more RAM, you reduce memory pressure, which reduces use of the page file, which is a good thing all around. You also make available more RAM for page cache, which will make all programs that access the hard disk run faster. As of Q4 2013, my personal recommendation is that you have at least 8 GB of RAM for a desktop or laptop whose purpose is anything more complex than web browsing and email. That means photo editing, video editing/viewing, playing computer games, audio editing or recording, programming / development, etc. all should have at least 8 GB of RAM, if not more. Run fewer programs at a time: This will only work if the programs you are running do not use a lot of memory on their own. Unfortunately, Adobe Creative Suite products such as Photoshop CS6 are known for using an enormous amount of memory. This also limits your multitasking ability. It’s a temporary, free remedy, but it can be an inconvenience to close down your web browser or Word every time you start Photoshop, for instance. This also wouldn’t stop Photoshop from being swapped when minimizing it, so it really isn’t a very effective solution. It only helps in some specific situations. Install an SSD: If your page file is on an SSD, the SSD’s improved speed compared to a hard disk will result in generally improved performance when the page file has to be read from or written to. Be aware that SSDs are not designed to withstand a very frequent and constant random stream of writes; they can only be written over a limited number of times before they start to break down. Heavy use of a page file is not a particularly good workload for an SSD. You should install an SSD in combination with a large amount of RAM if you want maximum performance while preserving the longevity of the SSD. Use a newer system architecture: Depending on the age of your system, you may be using an out of date system architecture. The “system architecture” is generally defined as the “generation” (think generations like children, parents, grandparents, etc.) of the motherboard and CPU. Newer generations generally support faster I/O (input/output), better memory bandwidth, lower latency, and less contention over shared resources, instead providing dedicated links between components. For example, starting with the “Nehalem” generation (around 2009), the Front-Side Bus (FSB) was eliminated, which removed a common bottleneck, because almost all system components had to share the same FSB for transmitting data. This was replaced with a “point to point” architecture, meaning that each component gets its own dedicated “lane” to the CPU, which continues to be improved every few years with new generations. You will generally see a more significant improvement in overall system performance depending on the “gap” between your computer’s architecture and the latest one available. For example, a Pentium 4 architecture from 2004 is going to see a much more significant improvement upgrading to “Haswell” (the latest as of Q4 2013) than a “Sandy Bridge” architecture from ~2010. Links Related questions: How to reduce disk thrashing (paging)? Windows Swap (Page File): Enable or Disable? Also, just in case you’re considering it, you really shouldn’t disable the page file, as this will only make matters worse; see here. And, in case you needed extra convincing to leave the Windows Page File alone, see here and here. Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.     

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• Spotlight: How Scandinavia's Largest Nuclear Power Plant Increased Productivity and Reduced Costs wi

  - by [email protected]

  Ringhals nuclear power plant, which is part of the Vattenfall Group, is located about 60 km south-west of the beautiful coastal city of Gothenburg in Sweden. A deep concern to reduce environmental impact coupled with an effort to increase plant safety and operational efficiency have led to a recent surge in investments and initiatives around plant modification and plant optimization at Ringhals. A multitude of challenges were faced by the users in various groups that were involved in these projects. First, it was very difficult for users to easily access complex and layered asset and engineering information, which was critical to increased productivity and completing projects on time. Moreover, the 20 or so different solutions that were being used to view various document formats, not only resulted in collaboration complexity but also escalated IT administration costs and woes. Finally, there was a considerable non-engineering community comprising non-CAD specialists that needed easy access to plant data in an effort to minimize engineering disruption. Oracle's AutoVue significantly simplified the ability to efficiently view and use digital asset information by providing a standardized visualization solution for the enterprise. The key benefits achieved by Ringhals include: Increased productivity of plant optimization and plant modification by 3% Saved around $ 500 K annually Cut IT maintenance costs by 50% by using a single solution Reduced engineering disruption by allowing non-CAD users easy access to digital plant data The complete case-study can be found here

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• Creating a newspaper that effects the game's economy?

  - by zardon

  I am writing a game in Objective C/cocos2d where a newspaper is a central part of what controls or rather effects the game's world economy as well as what a city might do (such as increase X, reduce Y) The newspaper is a bit like a "Chance card" in Monopoly, it has an effect on something. My question is, what is the best way to do write a newspaper that has both a random and specific effect within the game. Would the best strategy be to write out all the things a newspaper can affect, a PLIST of headlines (with placeholders). I think Tiny Tower uses a PLIST of events and it randomly picks an event, but I'm not sure how it actually parses it because certain events do different things. But then how do I parse all the scenarios that a newspaper can deliver? A big switch statement seems very long and complicated to do. I am wondering if there is a simpler way to handle this kind of thing. Related to this is that there might be no news that day and I'm not sure what the newspaper should display, should it just display the last headline? So, in summary. 1) A newspaper generates a headline, it affects different things, such as the world economy, prices, how city reacts 2) I need the newspaper to generate headlines (although there may be days when there are no headlines at all), but I am not sure how to parse it without using a big-ass switch statement. Thanks in advance.

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• How to use batch rendering with an entity component system?

  - by Kiril

  I have an entity component system and a 2D rendering engine. Because I have a lot of repeating sprites (the entities are non-animated, the background is tile based) I would really like to use batch rendering to reduce calls to the drawing routine. What would be the best way to integrate this with an engtity system? I thought about creating and populating the sprite batche every frame update, but that will probably be very slow. A better way would be to add a reference to an entity's quad to the sprite batch at initialization, but that would mean that the entity factory has to be aware of the Rendering System or that the sprite batch has to be a component of some Cache entity. One case violates encapsulation pretty heavily, while the other forces a non-game object entity in the entity system, which I am not sure I like a lot. As for engine, I am using Love2D (Love2D website) and FEZ ( FEZ website) as entity system(so everything is in Lua). I am more interested in a generic pattern of how to properly implement that rather than a language/library specific solution. Thanks in advance!

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• Announcing Oracle Environmental Accounting and Reporting

  - by Theresa Hickman

  Oracle just launched a new product called Oracle Environmental Accounting and Reporting designed to help company’s track and report their greenhouse emissions at the operational level.  Companies around the world are facing increasing pressure to improve their energy efficiency and reduce waste in their operations. Also, new worldwide greenhouse gas legislation is putting added pressure on companies to report the impact of their emissions and energy usage on the environment. Today, companies undergo extensive and expensive data audits to maintain a ledger of up-to-date emissions factors that compare figures on an annual basis. Existing “ad hoc” approaches utilizing manual or niche solutions have a high operational cost and weak data security and audit-ability. The ideal solution is to embed environmental usage within the mainstream business operations, such as recording energy usage at the time of invoice entry, and then report on those results. This is precisely what Oracle Environmental Accounting and Reporting is designed to do. You can now capture environmental data either electronically or manually; convert that to greenhouse gas emissions; comply with mandatory and voluntary greenhouse gas reporting schemes; and identify opportunities for CO2 emissions and cost reductions.   Oracle recently acquired the intellectual property for this solution which works with both Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Release 9.0. For more information, visit Oracle Environmental Accounting and Reporting.

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• KeyRef &ndash; A Keyboard Shortcut Reference Site

  - by Liam McLennan

  The mouse is like computer training wheels. It makes using a computer easier – but it slows you down. Like many of my peers I am making a effort to learn keyboard shortcuts to reduce my dependence on the mouse. So I have started accumulating browser bookmarks to websites listing keyboard shortcuts for vim and resharper etc. Based on the assumption that I am not the only person who finds this untenable I am considering building the ultimate keyboard shortcut reference site. This is an opportunity for me to improve my rails skills and hopefully contribute something useful to the anti-mouse community. Mockups Shortcuts will be grouped by application, so the first thing a user needs to do is find their application. They do this by typing the application name into a textbox and then selecting from a reducing list of applications. This interface will work like the stackoverflow tags page. Selecting an application will take the user to a page that lists the shortcuts for that application. This page will have a permalink for bookmarking. Shortcuts can be searched by keyword or by using the shortcut.

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• What are the possible options for AI path-finding etc when the world is "partitionned"?

  - by Sebastien Diot

  If you anticipate a large persistent game world, and you don't want to end up with some game server crashing due to overload, then you have to design from the ground up a game world that is partitioned in chunks. This is in particular true if you want to run your game servers in the cloud, where each individual VM is relatively week, and memory and CPU are at a premium. I think the biggest challenge here is that the player receives all the parts around the location of the avatar, but mobs/monsters are normally located in the server itself, and can only directly access the data about the part of the world that the server own. So how can we make the AI behave realistically in that context? It can send queries to the other servers that own the neighboring parts, but that sounds rather network intensive and latency prone. It would probably be more performant for each mob AI to be spread over the neighboring parts, and proactively send the relevant info to the part that contains the actual mob atm. That would also reduce the stress in a mob crossing a border between two parts, and therefore "switching server". Have you heard of any AI design that solves those issues? Some kind of distributed AI brain? Maybe some kind of "agent" community working together through message passing?

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• How do you stay productive when dealing with extremely badly written code?

  - by gaearon

  I don't have much experience in working in software industry, being self-taught and having participated in open source before deciding to take a job. Now that I work for money, I also have to deal with some unpleasant stuff, which is normal of course. Recently I was assigned to add logging to a large SharePoint project which is written by some programmer who obviously was learning to code on the job. After 2 years of collaboration, the client switched to our company, but the damage was done, and now somehow I need to maintain this code. Not that the code was too hard to read. Despite problems - each project has one class with several copy-pasted methods, enormous if nestings, Systems Hungarian, undisposed connections — it's still readable. However, I found myself absolutely unproductive despite working on something as simple as adding logging. Basically, I just need to go through the code step by step and add some trace calls. However, the idiocy of the code is so annoying that I get tired within 10 minutes of starting. In the beginning, I used to add using constructs, reduce nesting by reversing if's, rename the variables to readable names—but the project is large, and eventually I gave up. I know this is not the task I should be doing, but at least reducing the mess gave me some kind of psychological reward so I could keep going. Now the trick stopped working, and I still have 60% of my work to do. I started having headaches after work, and I no longer get the feeling of satisfaction I used to get - which would usually allow me to code for 10 hours straight and still feel fresh. This is not just one big rant, for I really do have an actual question: Is there a way to stay productive and not to fight the windmills? Is there some kind of psychological trick to stay focused on the task, instead of thinking “How stupid is that?” each time I see another clever trick by the previous programmer? The problem with adding logging is that I actually have to understand what the code does, and doing so hurts my brain in an unpleasant fashion.

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• EPM Planning 11.1.2 - MassGridStatistics

  - by Keith Rosenthal

  A utility is available for Oracle Hyperion Planning that determines web form load times.  This utility, MassGridStatistics, opens all web forms within the Planning application.  After the forms are opened, an html page will appear showing the form options, suppression, number of row column and page members, and load times.  Any form having a load time longer than one second could potentially have scalability issues in a multi-user environment and should be considered for re-design.  Adding suppression (especially block suppression) and reducing the number of rows and columns are potential fixes that will reduce load times. The MassGridStatistics utility is located in a .7z file called MassGridStatistics.7z.  Extract the file using 7-Zip.  A readme file is provided listing the installation instructions and the steps to run the utility. MassGridStatistics is included with the 11.1.2.1.101 patch set and will also be in all future releases starting with 11.1.2.2.  For earlier Planning releases, an SR will be necessary to have Support provide the utility.

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• Client side latency when using prediction

  - by Tips48

  I've implemented Client-Side prediction into my game, where when input is received by the client, it first sends it to the server and then acts upon it just as the server will, to reduce the appearance of lag. The problem is, the server is authoritative, so when the server sends back the position of the Entity to the client, it undo's the effect of the interpolation and creates a rubber-banding effect. For example: Client sends input to server - Client reacts on input - Server receives and reacts on input - Server sends back response - Client reaction is undone due to latency between server and client To solve this, I've decided to store the game state and input every tick in the client, and then when I receive a packet from the server, get the game state from when the packet was sent and simulate the game up to the current point. My questions: Won't this cause lag? If I'm receiving 20/30 EntityPositionPackets a second, that means I have to run 20-30 simulations of the game state. How do I sync the client and server tick? Currently, I'm sending the milli-second the packet was sent by the server, but I think it's adding too much complexity instead of just sending the tick. The problem with converting it to sending the tick is that I have no guarantee that the client and server are ticking at the same rate, for example if the client is an old-end PC.

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• Animating DOM elements vs refreshing a single Canvas

  - by mgibsonbr

  A few years ago, when the HTML Canvas element was still kinda fresh, I wrote a small game in a rather "unusual" way: each game element had its own canvas, and frequently animated elements even had multiple canvases, one for each animation sprite. This way, the translation would be done by manipulating the DOM position of the canvases, while the sprite animation would consist of altering the visibility of the already drawn canvases. (z-indexes, of course, were the tricky part) It worked like a charm: even in IE6 with excanvas it showed a decent performance, and everything was rather consistent between browsers, including some smartphones. Now I'm thinking in writing a larger game engine in the same fashion, so I'm wondering whether it would be a good idea to do so in the current context (with all the advances in browsers and so on). I know I'm trading memory for time, so this needs to be customizable (even at runtime) for each machine the game will be running. But I believe using separate canvases would also help to avoid the game "freezing" on CPU spikes, since the translation would still happen even if the redraws lag for a while. Besides, the browsers' rendering engines are already optimized in may ways, so I'm guessing this scheme would also reduce the load on the CPU (in contrast to doing everything in JavaScript - specially the less optimized ones). It looks good in my head, but I'd like to hear the opinion of more experienced people before proceeding further. Is there any known drawback of doing this? I'm particulartly unexperienced in dealing with the GPU, so I wonder whether this "trick" would nullify any benefit of using a single, big canvas. Or maybe on modern devices it's overkill (though I'm skeptic about the claims that canvas+js - especially WebGL - will ever be a good alternative to native code). Any thoughts?

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