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• Understanding ulimit -u

  - by tripleee

  I'd like to understand what's going on here. linvx$ ( ulimit -u 123; /bin/echo nst ) nst linvx$ ( ulimit -u 122; /bin/echo nst ) -bash: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable Terminated linvx$ ( ulimit -u 123; /bin/echo one; /bin/echo two; /bin/echo three ) one two three linvx$ ( ulimit -u 123; /bin/echo one & /bin/echo two & /bin/echo three ) -bash: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable Terminated one I speculate that the first 122 processes are consumed by Bash itself, and that the remaining ulimit governs how many concurrent processes I am allowed to have. The documentation is not very clear on this. Am I missing something? More importantly, for a real-world deployment, how can I know what sort of ulimit is realistic? It's a long-running daemon which spawns worker threads on demand, and reaps them when the load decreases. I've had it spin the server to its death a few times. The most important limit is probably memory, which I have now limited to 200M per process, but I'd like to figure out how I can enforce a limit on the number of children (the program does allow me to configure a maximum, but how do I know there are no bugs in that part of the code?)

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• Missing Memory on Windows Server 2008

  - by Chris Lively

  I have a windows 2008 x64 server with 8GB of RAM installed. Task Manager and Resource Monitor both insist that 7.5GB of the RAM is in use. However, the memory list under Processes (Memory Private Bytes) doesn't add up. I do have Show Processes from all users checked and hand adding the numbers I come up with about 3.5GB of RAM. I also looked at the latest copy of SysInternals Process Explorer. And neither the Private Bytes or Working Set adds up to more than about 3.5GB of RAM in use. What's going on? ===== Update: I bounced the server to see what would happen with the memory utilization. After boot and regular operations began it sat at 3GB of RAM usage. 18 hours later, it's back up to 6.8GB of usage with no indication as to where the additional 3.5GB or so of RAM is being used. Here are links to screen shots of the resource monitor and task manager: Resource Monitor Task Manager Update 2: Well, I believe I located the problem. When I detached one of the larger databases from my sql server the amount of ram shown as "in use" dropped drastically. The Memory Private Bytes count barely moved. So I'm guessing that SQL server has some way of allocating memory where it doesn't really show up in any of the monitors. I went further and created a new database file, then transferred all of the data from the one I detached. Even though it has the same data, and the same transactions going through it, the memory in use has stayed low. Maybe there was some corruption in the DB? I'll leave it to the DB gods and go searching for another "problem" ;)

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• Should I completely turn off swap for linux webserver?

  - by Poma

  Recently my friend told me that it is a good idea to turn off swap on linux webservers with enough memory. My server has 12 GB and currently uses 4GB (not counting cache and buffers) under peak load. His argument was that in a normal situation server will never use all of its RAM so the only way it can encounter OutOfMemory situation is due to some bug/ddos/etc. So in case swap is turned off system will run out of memory that will eventually crash the program hogging memory (most likely the web server process) and probably some other processes. In case swap is turned on it will eat both RAM and swap and eventually will result in the same crash, but before that it will offload crucial processes like sshd to swap and start to do a lot of swap operations resulting in major slowdown. This way when under ddos system may go into a completely unusable condition due to huge lags and I probably will not be unable to log in and kill webserver process or deny all incoming traffic (all but ssh). Is this right? Am I missing something (like the fact that swap partition is very useful in some way even if I have enough RAM)? Should I turn it off?

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• Can't deploy rails 4 app on Bluehost with Passenger 4 and nginx

  - by user2205763

  I am at Bluehost (dedicated server) trying to run a rails 4 app. I asked to have my server re-imaged, specifying that I do not want rails, ruby, or passenger install automatically as I wanted to install the latest versions myself using a version manager (Bluehost by default offers rails 2.3, ruby 1.8, and passenger 3, which won't work with my app). I installed ruby 1.9.3p327, rails 4.0.0, and passenger 4.0.5. I can verify this by typing, "ruby -v", "rails -v", and "passenger -v" (also "gem -v"). I made sure to install these not as root, so that I don't get a 403 forbidden error when trying to deploy the app. I installed passenger by typing "gem install passenger", and then installed the nginx passenger module (into "/nginx") with "passenger-install-nginx-module". I am trying to run my rails app on a subdomain, http://development.thegraduate.hk (I am using the subdomain to show my client progress on the website). In bluehost I created that subdomain, and had it point to "public_html/thegraduate". I then created a symlink from "rails_apps/thegraduate/public" to "public_html/thegraduate" and verified that the symlink exists. The problem is: when I go to http://development.thegraduate.hk, I get a directory listing. There is nothing resembling a rails app. I have not added a .htaccess file to /rails_apps/thegraduate/public, as that was never specified in the installation of passenger. It was meant to be 'install and go'. When I type "passenger-memory-status", I get 3 things: - Apache processes (7) - Nginx processes (0) - Passenger processes (0) So it appears that nginx and passenger are not running, and I can't figure out how to get it to run (I'm not looking to have it run as a standalone server). Here is my nginx.conf file (/nginx/conf/nginx.conf): #user nobody; worker_processes 1; #error_log logs/error.log; #error_log logs/error.log notice; #error_log logs/error.log info; #pid logs/nginx.pid; events { worker_connections 1024; } http { passenger_root /home/thegrad4/.rbenv/versions/1.9.3-p327/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/passenger-4.0.5; passenger_ruby /home/thegrad4/.rbenv/versions/1.9.3-p327/bin/ruby; include mime.types; default_type application/octet-stream; #log_format main '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" ' # '$status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" ' # '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"'; #access_log logs/access.log main; sendfile on; #tcp_nopush on; #keepalive_timeout 0; keepalive_timeout 65; #gzip on; server { listen 80; server_name development.thegraduate.hk; root ~/rails_apps/thegraduate/public; passenger_enabled on; #charset koi8-r; #access_log logs/host.access.log main; location / { root html; index index.html index.htm; } #error_page 404 /404.html; # redirect server error pages to the static page /50x.html # error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html; location = /50x.html { root html; } # proxy the PHP scripts to Apache listening on 127.0.0.1:80 # #location ~ \.php$ { # proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1; #} # pass the PHP scripts to FastCGI server listening on 127.0.0.1:9000 # #location ~ \.php$ { # root html; # fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000; # fastcgi_index index.php; # fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /scripts$fastcgi_script_name; # include fastcgi_params; #} # deny access to .htaccess files, if Apache's document root # concurs with nginx's one # #location ~ /\.ht { # deny all; #} } # another virtual host using mix of IP-, name-, and port-based configuration # #server { # listen 8000; # listen somename:8080; # server_name somename alias another.alias; # location / { # root html; # index index.html index.htm; # } #} # HTTPS server # #server { # listen 443; # server_name localhost; # ssl on; # ssl_certificate cert.pem; # ssl_certificate_key cert.key; # ssl_session_timeout 5m; # ssl_protocols SSLv2 SSLv3 TLSv1; # ssl_ciphers HIGH:!aNULL:!MD5; # ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on; # location / { # root html; # index index.html index.htm; # } #} } I don't get any errors, just the directory listing. I've tried to be as detailed as possible. Any help on this issue would be greatly appreciated as I've been stumped for the past 3 days. Scouring the web has not helped as my issue seems to be specific to me. Thanks so much. If there are any potential details I forgot to specify, just ask. ** ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ** Going to development.thegraduate.hk/public/ will correctly display the index.html page in /rails_apps/thegraduate/public. However, changing root in the routes.rb file to "root = 'home#index'" does nothing.

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• Trac FastCGI + Python on dreamhost leaves zombie python running

  - by Katsuke

  Hello there, Recently I installed trac in one of my dreamhost domains. I followed the instructions of http://trac.mlalonde.net/wiki/CreamyTrac and everything worked perfectly. At least i thought that was the case. After a few days, i started to notice that i was getting random 500 pages. I quickly checked the error log, and found a bunch of: [Fri Apr 16 14:35:34 2010] [error] [client *.*.*.*] Premature end of script headers: dispatch.fcgi [Fri Apr 16 14:35:54 2010] [error] [client *.*.*.*] Premature end of script headers: dispatch.fcgi, referer: http://www.trac.****.com/login [Fri Apr 16 16:05:58 2010] [error] [client *.*.*.*] Premature end of script headers: dispatch.fcgi, referer: http://www.trac.****.com/timeline The trac instance has very low traffic so it is possible that this might have been triggered faster if there was more use of it. So next step i went to look at top and am amazed by what i see: (this is NOT exactly what i saw, i just reproduced this from memory) 23730 rl_inst 20 0 44516 15m 4012 S 0.0 0.4 0:00.17 python2.4 23731 rl_inst 20 0 44616 15m 4012 S 0.0 0.4 0:03.17 python2.4 23732 rl_inst 20 0 44116 15m 4012 S 0.0 0.4 0:01.17 python2.4 23733 rl_inst 20 0 44826 15m 4012 S 0.0 0.4 0:04.17 python2.4 23734 rl_inst 20 0 44216 15m 4012 S 0.0 0.4 0:02.17 python2.4 23735 rl_inst 20 0 44416 15m 4012 S 0.0 0.4 0:01.17 python2.4 I opened the trac site again and that changed to this: 23730 rl_inst 20 0 44516 15m 4012 S 0.0 0.4 0:00.17 python2.4 23731 rl_inst 20 0 44616 15m 4012 S 0.0 0.4 0:03.17 python2.4 23732 rl_inst 20 0 44116 15m 4012 S 0.0 0.4 0:01.17 python2.4 23733 rl_inst 20 0 44826 15m 4012 S 0.0 0.4 0:04.17 python2.4 23734 rl_inst 20 0 44216 15m 4012 S 0.0 0.4 0:02.17 python2.4 23735 rl_inst 20 0 44416 15m 4012 S 0.0 0.4 0:01.17 python2.4 28378 rl_inst 20 0 2608 1208 1008 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 dispatch.fcgi 28382 rl_inst 20 0 44248 15m 4012 S 0.0 0.4 0:02.19 python2.4 So the dispatch.fcgi was being called correctly and was spawning correctly other python2.4 process. After the IDLE time passed this is the results: 23730 rl_inst 20 0 44516 15m 4012 S 0.0 0.4 0:00.17 python2.4 23731 rl_inst 20 0 44616 15m 4012 S 0.0 0.4 0:03.17 python2.4 23732 rl_inst 20 0 44116 15m 4012 S 0.0 0.4 0:01.17 python2.4 23733 rl_inst 20 0 44826 15m 4012 S 0.0 0.4 0:04.17 python2.4 23734 rl_inst 20 0 44216 15m 4012 S 0.0 0.4 0:02.17 python2.4 23735 rl_inst 20 0 44416 15m 4012 S 0.0 0.4 0:01.17 python2.4 28382 rl_inst 20 0 44248 15m 4012 S 0.0 0.4 0:02.19 python2.4 dispatch.fcgi was gone but the corresponding python2.4 was still there o_O. I had started with 5 sleeping processes of python and after idle time i ended up with 6. I repeated this and found that it kept spawning more and more python2.4, this was indeed what was causing my 500s indirectly. Let me explain my findings. Am on a shared hosting so my processes get killed if they are way too many. So everytime i opened trac 2 new processes spawned and one remained, to the point that dreamhost was killing a random process when i reached my limit. Sometimes killing the python2.4 that actually was rendering the current page. Hence header premature ending, python is gone the .fcgi doesnt know what to do and throws an 500. I found a dirty solution to this. I changed my dispatch.fcgi to contain a line that killed any currently running python2.4 process and then spawn a new one. Since then i dont get any rogues what so ever. But i dont think this is the best solution, calling killall in every fcgi just seems wrong. Anyone has run into this issue and found a cleaner solution? Is there anything that i have overlooked?

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• Oracle Fusion Applications: Changing the Game

  - by kellsey.ruppel(at)oracle.com

  Originally posted in the Oracle Profit Magazine, November 2010 Edition. When the order processing system red-flags a customer's credit status, the IT department doesn't get the customer's call. When a supplier misses a delivery date for a key automotive assembly, it's not the CIO who has to answer for the error. Knowledge workers (known in IT circles as "users") are on the front lines when an exception occurs in an established business process. They're also the ones who study sales trends to decide when to open a new store in an up-and-coming neighborhood, which products are most profitable, how employee skill sets are evolving, and which suppliers are most efficient. In short, knowledge workers are masters of business as unusual. Traditional enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and other familiar enterprise applications excel at automating, managing, and executing standard business processes. These programs shine when everything goes as planned. Life gets even trickier when a traditional application needs to be extended with a new service or an extra step is added to a business process when new products are brought to market, divisions are merged, or companies are acquired. Monolithic applications often need the IT department to step in and make the necessary adjustments--incurring additional costs and delays. Until now. When Oracle unveiled the much-anticipated family of Oracle Fusion Applications at Oracle OpenWorld in September 2010, knowledge workers in particular had a lot to cheer about. Business users will soon have ready access to analytical information and collaboration tools in the context of what they are working on, so they can make better decisions when problems or opportunities arise. Additionally, the Oracle Fusion Applications platform will make it easy for business users to tweak processes, create new capabilities, and find information, often without the need for IT department assistance and while still following company guidelines. And IT leaders will be happy to hear about new deployment options, guided implementation and setup tools, and cost-saving management capabilities. Just as important, the underlying technologies in Oracle Fusion Applications will allow organizations to choose among their existing investments and next-generation enterprise applications so they can introduce innovations at a pace that makes the most business and financial sense. "Oracle Fusion Applications are architected so you don't have to do rip and replace," says Jim Hayes, managing director of the consulting firm Accenture. "That's very important for creating a business case that will get through the steering committee and be approved by the board. It shows you can drive value and make a difference in the near term." For these and other reasons, analysts and early adopters are calling Oracle Fusion Applications a game changer for enterprise customers. The differences become apparent in three key areas: the way we innovate, work, and adopt technology. Game Changer #1: New Standard for InnovationChange is a constant challenge for most businesses, whether the catalysts are market dynamics, new competition, or the ever-expanding regulatory environment. And, in an ongoing effort to differentiate, business leaders are constantly looking for new ways to do business, serve constituents, and bring new products and services to market. In addition, companies face significant costs to keep their applications up-to-date. For example, when a company adds new suppliers to a procurement system, the IT shop typically has to invest time, effort, and even consulting fees for custom integrations that allow various ERP systems to communicate with each other. Oracle Fusion Applications were built on Web services and a modular SOA foundation to ease customizations and integration activities among all applications--whether from Oracle or another vendor. Interfaces and updates written in ubiquitous Java, rather than a proprietary coding language, allow organizations to tap into existing in-house technical skills rather than seek expensive outside specialists. And with SOA, organizations can extend a feature set or integrate with other SOA environments by combining Web services such as "look up customer" into a new business process managed by the BPEL orchestration engine. Flexibility like this has long-term implications. "Because users capture these changes at a higher metadata layer, not in the application's code, changes and additions are protected even as new versions of Oracle Fusion Applications are released," says Steve Miranda, senior vice president of applications development at Oracle. "This is a much more sustainable approach because you don't incur costly customizations that prevent upgrades and other innovations." And changes are easier to make: if one change is made in the metadata, that change is automatically reflected throughout the application interface, business intelligence, business process, and business logic. Game Changer #2: New Standard for WorkBoosting productivity comes down to doing the basics right: running business processes more efficiently and managing exceptions more effectively, so users can accomplish more in the course of a day or spend more quality time with the most profitable customers. The fastest way to improve process efficiency is to reduce the number of steps it takes to execute common tasks, such as ordering office equipment from an internal procurement system. Oracle Fusion Applications will deliver a complete role-based user experience with business intelligence and collaboration capabilities provided in the context of the work at hand. "We created every Oracle Fusion Applications screen by asking 'What does the user need to know?' 'What does he or she need to do?' and 'Who do they need to work with to get the job done?'" Miranda explains. So when the sales department heads need new laptops, the self-service procurement screen will not only display a list of approved vendors and configurations, but also a running list of reviews by coworkers who recently purchased the various models. Embedded intelligence may also display prevailing delivery lead times based on actual order histories, not the generic shipping dates vendors may quote. The pervasive business intelligence serves many other business activities across all areas of the enterprise. For example, a manager considering whether to promote a direct report can see the person's employee profile, with a salary history, appraisal summaries, and a rundown of skills and training. This approach to business intelligence also has implications for supply chain management. "One of the challenges at Ingersoll Rand is lack of visibility in our supply chain," says Mike Macrie, global director of enterprise applications for global industrial firm Ingersoll Rand. "Oracle Fusion Applications are going to provide the embedded intelligence to give us that visibility and give us the ability to analyze those orders at any point in our supply chain." Oracle Fusion Applications will also create a "role-based user experience" that displays a work list of events that need attention, based on user job function. Role awareness guides users with daily lists of action items and exceptions. So a credit manager may see seven invoices with discounts that are about to expire or 12 suppliers that have been put on hold because credit memos are awaiting approval. Individualization extends to the search capabilities of Oracle Fusion Applications. The platform uses Web-style search screens powered by an Oracle enterprise search engine, with a security framework that filters search results so individuals will only see the internal information they're authorized to access. A further aid to productivity is Oracle Fusion Applications' integration with Web 2.0 collaboration and social networking resources for business environments. Hover-over text will reveal relevant contact information whenever the name of a person appears in an Oracle Fusion Application. Users can connect via an online chat, phone call, or instant message without leaving the main application, reducing the time required for an accounts payable staffer to resolve a mismatch between an invoiced charge and the service record, for example. Addresses of suppliers, customers, or partners will also initiate hover-over text to show contact details and Web-based maps. Finally, Oracle Fusion Applications will promote a new way of working with purpose-driven communities that can bring new efficiencies to everything from cultivating sales leads to managing new projects. As soon as a lead or project materializes, the applications will automatically gather relevant participants into an online community that shares member contact information, schedules, discussion forums, and Wiki pages. "Oracle Fusion Applications will allow us to take it to the next level with embedded Web 2.0 tools and the embedded analytics," says Steve Printz, CIO and vice president, supply chain management, at window-and-door manufacturer Pella. "[This] allows those employees today who are processing transactions to really contribute to the success of the company and become decision-makers." Game Changer #3: New Standard for Technology AdoptionAs IT becomes a dominant component of how businesses run and compete, organizations need to lower the cost of implementing applications and introducing new application features. In the past, rolling out new code often required creating a test bed system, moving beta code to a separate system for user feedback, and--once all the revisions were made--moving version one of the software onto production systems, where business users could finally get the needed new features. Oracle Fusion Applications will use a dedicated setup manager application to streamline this process. First, the setup manager will help scope out the project, querying users about their requirements. "From those questions and answers we determine the steps and the order of those steps that will enable that task," Miranda says. Next, system utilities will assign tasks to owners, track completion status, and monitor the overall status of a programming effort. Oracle Fusion Applications can then recommend Web services that allow users to migrate setup choices and steps across all the various deployments of the application. Those setup capabilities automate the migration from test systems to production systems, as well as between different business units that may be using the same application. "The self-service ability of the setup manager helps business users change setups with very little intervention from the IT team," says Ravi Kumar, vice president at IT services company Infosys. "That to me is a big difference from how we've viewed enterprise applications before." For additional flexibility, organizations will be able to adopt Oracle Fusion Applications modules in either of two modes: a single-instance alternative uses one database for all Oracle Fusion Applications, while a "pillar mode" creates separate databases to underpin each application. This means IT departments running any one of Oracle's applications or even third-party applications can plug Oracle Fusion Applications modules into their environment and see additional business value created on top of their existing systems. And Oracle Fusion Applications offer a hybrid approach to deployment. The applications are all software-as-a-service-ready, so customers can choose on-premises, public or private cloud, or a combination of these to suit their business needs. It's that combination of flexibility and a roadmap for the future that may be the biggest game changer of all. "The Oracle Fusion Applications architecture allows us to migrate our company at a pace that's consistent with our business strategy, whereas before we might have had to do it with a massive upgrade," says Macrie of Ingersoll Rand. "We're looking forward to that architecture to really give us more flexibility in how we migrate over time." For More InformationUser Input Key to the Success of Oracle Fusion ApplicationsTransforming Coexistence into Strategic ValueUnder the HoodOracle Fusion ApplicationsOracle Service-Oriented Architecture  

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• Productivity Tips

  - by Brian T. Jackett

  A few months ago during my first end of year review at Microsoft I was doing an assessment of my year.  One of my personal goals to come out of this reflection was to improve my personal productivity.  While I hear many people say “I wish I had more hours in the day so that I could get more done” I feel like that is the wrong approach.  There is an inherent assumption that you are being productive with your time that you already have and thus more time would allow you to be as productive given more time.    Instead of wishing I could add more hours to the day I’ve begun adopting a number of processes or behavior changes in my personal life to make better use of my time with the goal of improving productivity.  The areas of focus are as follows: Focus Processes Tools Personal health Email Note: A number of these topics have spawned from reading Scott Hanselman’s blog posts on productivity, reading of David Allen’s book Getting Things Done, and discussions with friends and coworkers who had great insights into this topic.   Focus Pre-reading / viewing: Overcome your work addiction Millennials paralyzed by choice Its Not What You Read Its What You Ignore (Scott Hanselman video)    I highly recommend Scott Hanselman’s video above and this post before continuing with this article.  It is well worth the 40+ mins price of admission for the video and couple minutes for article.  One key takeaway for me was listing out my activities in an average week and realizing which ones held little or no value to me.  We all have a finite amount of time to work each day.  Do you know how much time and effort you spend on various aspects of your life (family, friends, religion, work, personal happiness, etc.)?  Do your actions and commitments reflect your priorities?    The biggest time consumers with little value for me were time spent on social media services (Twitter and Facebook), playing an MMO video game, and watching TV.  I still check up on Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft internal chat forums, and other services to keep contact with others but I’ve reduced that time significantly.  As for TV I’ve cut the cord and no longer subscribe to cable TV.  Instead I use Netflix, RedBox, and over the air channels but again with reduced time consumption.  With the time I’ve freed up I’m back to working out 2-3 times a week and reading 4 nights a week (both of which I had been neglecting previously).  I’ll mention a few tools for helping measure your time in the Tools section.   Processes    Do not multi-task.  I’ll say it again.  Do not multi-task.  There is no such thing as multi tasking.  The human brain is optimized to work on one thing at a time.  When you are “multi-tasking” you are really doing 2 or more things at less than 100%, usually by a wide margin.  I take pride in my work and when I’m doing something less than 100% the results typically degrade rapidly.    Now there are some ways of bending the rules of physics for this one.  There is the notion of getting a double amount of work done in the same timeframe.  Some examples would be listening to podcasts / watching a movie while working out, using a treadmill as your work desk, or reading while in the bathroom.    Personally I’ve found good results in combining one task that does not require focus (making dinner, playing certain video games, working out) and one task that does (watching a movie, listening to podcasts).  I believe this is related to me being a visual and kinesthetic (using my hands or actually doing it) learner.  I’m terrible with auditory learning.  My fiance and I joke that sometimes we talk and talk to each other but never really hear each other.   Goals / Tasks    Goals can give us direction in life and a sense of accomplishment when we complete them.  Goals can also overwhelm us and give us a sense of failure when we don’t complete them.  I propose that you shift your perspective and not dwell on all of the things that you haven’t gotten done, but focus instead on regularly setting measureable goals that are within reason of accomplishing.    At the end of each time frame have a retrospective to review your progress.  Do not feel guilty about what you did not accomplish.  Feel proud of what you did accomplish and readjust your goals for the next time frame to more attainable goals.  Here is a sample schedule I’ve seen proposed by some.  I have not consistently set goals for each timeframe, but I do typically set 3 small goals a day (this blog post is #2 for today). Each day set 3 small goals Each week set 3 medium goals Each month set 1 large goal Each year set 2 very large goals   Tools    Tools are an extension of our human body.  They help us extend beyond what we can physically and mentally do.  Below are some tools I use almost daily or have found useful as of late. Disclaimer: I am not getting endorsed to promote any of these products.  I just happen to like them and find them useful. Instapaper – Save internet links for reading later.  There are many tools like this but I’ve found this to be a great one.  There is even a “read it later” JavaScript button you can add to your browser so when you navigate to a site it will then add this to your list. Stacks for Instapaper – A Windows Phone 7 app for reading my Instapaper articles on the go.  It does require a subscription to Instapaper (nominal $3 every three months) but is easily worth the cost.  Alternatively you can set up your Kindle to sync with Instapaper easily but I haven’t done so. SlapDash Podcast – Apps for Windows Phone and  Windows 8 (possibly other platforms) to sync podcast viewing / listening across multiple devices.  Now that I have my Surface RT device (which I love) this is making my consumption easier to manage. Feed Reader – Simple Windows 8 app for quickly catching up on my RSS feeds.  I used to have hundreds of unread items all the time.  Now I’m down to 20-50 regularly and it is much easier and faster to consume on my Surface RT.  There is also a free version (which I use) and I can’t see much different between the free and paid versions currently. Rescue Time – Have you ever wondered how much time you’ve spent on websites vs. email vs. “doing work”?  This service tracks your computer actions and then lets you report on them.  This can help you quantitatively identify areas where your actions are not in line with your priorities. PowerShell – Windows automation tool.  It is now built into every client and server OS.  This tool has saved me days (and I mean the full 24 hrs worth) of time and effort in the past year alone.  If you haven’t started learning PowerShell and you administrating any Windows OS or server product you need to start today. Various blogging tools – I wrote a post a couple years ago called How I Blog about my blogging process and tools used.  Almost all of it still applies today.   Personal Health    Some of these may be common sense or debatable, but I’ve found them to help prioritize my daily activities. Get plenty of sleep on a regular basis.  Sacrificing sleep too many nights a week negatively impacts your cognition, attitude, and overall health. Exercise at least three days.  Exercise could be lifting weights, taking the stairs up multiple flights of stairs, walking for 20 mins, or a number of other "non-traditional” activities.  I find that regular exercise helps with sleep and improves my overall attitude. Eat a well balanced diet.  Too much sugar, caffeine, junk food, etc. are not good for your body.  This is not a matter of losing weight but taking care of your body and helping you perform at your peak potential.   Email    Email can be one of the biggest time consumers (i.e. waster) if you aren’t careful. Time box your email usage.  Set a meeting invite for yourself if necessary to limit how much time you spend checking email. Use rules to prioritize your email.  Email from external customers, my manager, or include me directly on the To line go into my inbox.  Everything else goes a level down and I have 30+ rules to further sort it, mostly distribution lists. Use keyboard shortcuts (when available).  I use Outlook for my primary email and am constantly hitting Alt + S to send, Ctrl + 1 for my inbox, Ctrl + 2 for my calendar, Space / Tab / Shift + Tab to mark items as read, and a number of other useful commands.  Learn them and you’ll see your speed getting through emails increase. Keep emails short.  No one Few people like reading through long emails.  The first line should state exactly why you are sending the email followed by a 3-4 lines to support it.  Anything longer might be better suited as a phone call or in person discussion.   Conclusion    In this post I walked through various tips and tricks I’ve found for improving personal productivity.  It is a mix of re-focusing on the things that matter, using tools to assist in your efforts, and cutting out actions that are not aligned with your priorities.  I originally had a whole section on keyboard shortcuts, but with my recent purchase of the Surface RT I’m finding that touch gestures have replaced numerous keyboard commands that I used to need.  I see a big future in touch enabled devices.  Hopefully some of these tips help you out.  If you have any tools, tips, or ideas you would like to share feel free to add in the comments section.         -Frog Out   Links Scott Hanselman Productivity posts http://www.hanselman.com/blog/CategoryView.aspx?category=Productivity Overcome your work addiction http://blogs.hbr.org/hbsfaculty/2012/05/overcome-your-work-addiction.html?awid=5512355740280659420-3271   Millennials paralyzed by choice http://priyaparker.com/blog/millennials-paralyzed-by-choice   Its Not What You Read Its What You Ignore (video) http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ItsNotWhatYouReadItsWhatYouIgnoreVideoOfScottHanselmansPersonalProductivityTips.aspx   Cutting the cord – Jeff Blankenburg http://www.jeffblankenburg.com/2011/04/06/cutting-the-cord/   Building a sitting standing desk – Eric Harlan http://www.ericharlan.com/Everything_Else/building-a-sitting-standing-desk-a229.html   Instapaper http://www.instapaper.com/u   Stacks for Instapaper http://www.stacksforinstapaper.com/   Slapdash Podcast Windows Phone -  http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/slapdash-podcasts/90e8b121-080b-e011-9264-00237de2db9e Windows 8 - http://apps.microsoft.com/webpdp/en-us/app/slapdash-podcasts/0c62e66a-f2e4-4403-af88-3430a821741e/m/ROW   Feed Reader http://apps.microsoft.com/webpdp/en-us/app/feed-reader/d03199c9-8e08-469a-bda1-7963099840cc/m/ROW   Rescue Time http://www.rescuetime.com/   PowerShell Script Center http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/scriptcenter/bb410849.aspx

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• Oracle OpenWorld Preview: Oracle WebCenter Sessions You Won’t Want to Miss

  - by Christie Flanagan

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-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;} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-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;} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-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;} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-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;} The beginning of Oracle OpenWorld is only a few short days away. This week on the WebCenter blog, we’ll focus in on the sessions you definitely don’t want to miss while you’re in San Francisco next week.  Monday, October 1 will be a day focused on strategy.  Here are the sessions you want to add to your calendar: CON8268 - Oracle WebCenter Strategy: Engaging Your Customers. Empowering Your Business Monday, Oct 1, 10:45 AM - 11:45 AM - Moscone West – 3001 Start things off with Oracle WebCenter’s Christian Finn, Senior Director of Evangelism and Roel Stalman, VP of Product Management to learn more about the Oracle WebCenter strategy, and to understand where Oracle is taking the platform to help companies engage, customers, empower employees, and enable partners. This session will also feature Richard Backx, Business IT Architect/Consultant, for the Dutch telecom, KPN. Richard has played a key role in the roll-out of WebCenter products for KPN’s multibrand portals with a specific focus on creating the best customer journey platform for all the company’s digital channels. Business success starts with ensuring that everyone is engaged with the right people and the right information and can access what they need through the channel of their choice—web, mobile, or social. Are you giving customers, employees, and partners the best-possible experience? Come learn how you can! Dig deeper into WebCenter’s strategy for its ECM, portal, web experience management and social collaboration in the following sessions: CON8270 - Oracle WebCenter Content Strategy and Vision Monday, Oct 1, 12:15 PM - 1:15 PM - Moscone West – 3001 Oracle WebCenter Content provides a strategic content infrastructure for managing documents, images, e-mails, and rich media files. With a single repository, organizations can address any content use case, such as accounts payable, HR onboarding, document management, compliance, records management, digital asset management, or Website management. In this session, learn about future plans for how Oracle WebCenter will address new use cases as well as new integrations with Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Applications, leveraging your investments by making your users more productive and error-free. CON8269 - Oracle WebCenter Sites Strategy and Vision Monday, Oct 1, 1:45 PM - 2:45 PM - Moscone West - 3009 Oracle’s Web experience management solution, Oracle WebCenter Sites, enables organizations to use the online channel to drive customer acquisition and brand loyalty. It helps marketers and business users easily create and manage contextually relevant, social, interactive online experiences across multiple channels on a global scale. In this session, learn about future plans for how Oracle WebCenter Sites will provide you with the tools, capabilities, and integrations you need in order to continue to address your customers’ evolving requirements for engaging online experiences and keep moving your business forward. CON8271 - Oracle WebCenter Portal Strategy and Vision Monday, Oct 1, 3:15 PM - 4:15 PM - Moscone West - 3001 To innovate and keep a competitive edge, organizations need to leverage the power of agile and responsive Web applications. Oracle WebCenter Portal enables you to do just that, by delivering intuitive user experiences for enterprise applications to drive innovation with composite applications and mashups. Attend this session to learn firsthand from Oracle WebCenter Portal customers like the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, extend the value of existing enterprise applications, business processes, and content; delivers a superior business user experience; and maximizes limited IT resources. CON8272 - Oracle Social Network Strategy and Vision Monday, Oct 1, 4:45 PM - 5:45 PM - Moscone West - 3001 One key way of increasing employee productivity is by bringing people, processes, and information together—providing new social capabilities to enable business users to quickly correspond and collaborate on business activities. Oracle WebCenter provides a user engagement platform with social and collaborative technologies to empower business users to focus on their key business processes, applications, and content in the context of their role and process. Attend this session to hear how the latest social capabilities in Oracle Social Network are enabling organizations to transform themselves into social businesses.Attention WebCenter Customers: Last Day to RSVP for WebCenter Customer Appreciation Reception Oracle WebCenter partners Fishbowl Solutions, Fujitsu, Keste, Mythics, Redstone Content Solutions, TEAM Informatics, and TekStream invite Oracle WebCenter customers to a private cocktail reception at one of San Francisco's finest hotels. Please join us and fellow Oracle WebCenter customers for hors d'oeuvres and cocktails at this exclusive reception. Don't miss this opportunity to meet and talk with executives from Oracle WebCenter product management and product marketing, and premier Oracle WebCenter partners. We look forward to seeing you! RSVP today.

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• Summary of Oracle E-Business Suite Technology Webcasts and Training

  - by BillSawyer

  Last Updated: November 16, 2011We're glad to hear that you've been finding our ATG Live Webcast series to be useful.  If you missed a webcast, you can download the presentation materials and listen to the recordings below. We're collecting other learning-related materials right now.  We'll update this summary with pointers to new training resources on an ongoing basis.  ATG Live Webcast Replays All of the ATG Live Webcasts are hosted by the Oracle University Knowledge Center.  In order to access the replays, you will need a free Oracle.com account. You can register for an Oracle.com account here.If you are a first-time OUKC user, you will have to accept the Terms of Use. Sign-in with your Oracle.com account, or if you don't already have one, use the link provided on the sign-in screen to create an account. After signing in, accept the Terms of Use. Upon completion of these steps, you will be directed to the replay. You only need to accept the Terms of Use once. Your acceptance will be noted on your account for all future OUKC replays and event registrations. 1. E-Business Suite R12 Oracle Application Framework (OAF) Rich User Interface Enhancements (Presentation) Prabodh Ambale (Senior Manager, ATG Development) and Gustavo Jiminez (Development Manager, ATG Development) offer a comprehensive review of the latest user interface enhancements and updates to OA Framework in EBS 12.  The webcast provides a detailed look at new features designed to enhance usability, including new capabilities for personalization and extensions, and features that support the use of dashboards and web services. (January 2011) 2. E-Business Suite R12 Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) Using the E-Business Suite Adapter (Presentation, Viewlet) Neeraj Chauhan (Product Manager, ATG Development) reviews the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) capabilities within E-Business Suite 12, focussing on using the E-Business Suite Adapter to integrate EBS with third-party applications via web services, and orchestrate services and distributed transactions across disparate applications. (February 2011) 3. Deploying Oracle VM Templates for Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle PeopleSoft Enterprise Applications Ivo Dujmovic (Director, ATG Development) reviews the latest capabilities for using Oracle VM to deploy virtualized EBS database and application tier instances using prebuilt EBS templates, wire those virtualized instances together using the EBS virtualization kit, and take advantage of live migration of user sessions between failing application tier nodes.  (February 2011) 4. How to Reduce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Using Oracle E-Business Suite Management Packs (Presentation) Angelo Rosado (Product Manager, ATG Development) provides an overview of how EBS sysadmins can make their lives easier with the Management Packs for Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.  This session highlights key features in Application Management Pack (AMP) and Application Change Management Pack) that can automate or streamline system configurations, monitor EBS performance and uptime, keep multiple EBS environments in sync with patches and configurations, and create patches for your own EBS customizations and apply them with Oracle's own patching tools.  (June 2011) 5. Upgrading E-Business Suite 11i Customizations to R12 (Presentation) Sara Woodhull (Principal Product Manager, ATG Development) provides an overview of how E-Business Suite developers can manage and upgrade existing EBS 11i customizations to R12.  Sara covers methods for comparing customizations between Release 11i and 12, managing common customization types, managing deprecated technologies, and more. (July 2011) 6. Tuning All Layers of E-Business Suite (Part 1 of 3) (Presentation) Lester Gutierrez, Senior Architect, and Deepak Bhatnagar, Senior Manager, from the E-Business Suite Application Performance team, lead Tuning All Layers of E-Business Suite (Part 1 of 3). This webcast provides an overview of how Oracle E-Business Suite system administrators, DBAs, developers, and implementers can improve E-Business Suite performance by following a performance tuning framework. Part 1 focuses on the performance triage approach, tuning applications modules, upgrade performance best practices, and tuning the database tier. This ATG Live Webcast is an expansion of the performance sessions at conferences that are perennial favourites with hardcore Apps DBAs. (August 2011)  7. Oracle E-Business Suite Directions: Deployment and System Administration (Presentation) Max Arderius, Manager Applications Technology Group, and Ivo Dujmovic, Director Applications Technology group, lead Oracle E-Business Suite Directions: Deployment and System Administration covering important changes in E-Business Suite R12.2. The changes discussed in this presentation include Oracle E-Business Suite architecture, installation, upgrade, WebLogic Server integration, online patching, and cloning. This webcast provides an overview of how Oracle E-Business Suite system administrators, DBAs, developers, and implementers can prepare themselves for these changes in R12.2 of Oracle E-Business Suite. (October 2011) Oracle University Courses For a general listing of all Oracle University courses related to E-Business Suite Technology, use the Oracle University E-Business Suite Technology course catalog link. Oracle University E-Business Suite Technology Course Catalog 1. R12 Oracle Applications System Administrator Fundamentals In this course students learn concepts and functions that are critical to the System Administrator role in implementing and managing the Oracle E-Business Suite. Topics covered include configuring security and user management, configuring flexfields, managing concurrent processing, and setting up other essential features such as profile options and printing. In addition, configuration and maintenance of an Oracle E-Business Suite through Oracle Applications Manager is discussed. Students also learn the fundamentals of Oracle Workflow including its setup. The System Administrator Fundamentals course provides the foundation needed to effectively control security and ensure smooth operations for an E-Business Suite installation. Demonstrations and hands-on practice reinforce the fundamental concepts of configuring an Oracle E-Business Suite, as well as handling day-to-day system administrator tasks. 2. R12.x Install/Patch/Maintain Oracle E-Business Suite This course will be applicable for customers who have implemented Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 or Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1. This course explains how to go about installing and maintaining an Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.x system. Both Standard and Express installation types are covered in detail. Maintenance topics include a detailed examination of the standard tools and utilities, and an in-depth look at patching an Oracle E-Business Suite system. After this course, students will be able to make informed decisions about how to install an Oracle E-Business Suite system that meets their specific requirements, and how to maintain the system afterwards. The extensive hands-on practices include performing an installation on a Linux system, navigating the file system to locate key files, running the standard maintenance tools and utilities, applying patches, and carrying out cloning operations. 3. R12.x Extend Oracle Applications: Building OA Framework Applications This class is a hands-on lab-intensive course that will keep the student busy and active for the duration of the course. While the course covers the fundamentals that support OA Framework-based applications, the course is really an exercise in J2EE programming. Over the duration of the course, the student will create an OA Framework-based application that selects, inserts, updates, and deletes data from a R12 Oracle Applications instance. 4. R12.x Extend Oracle Applications: Customizing OA Framework Applications This course has been significantly changed from the prior version to include additional deployments. The course doesn't teach the specifics of configuration of each product. That is left to the product-specific courses. What the course does cover is the general methods of building, personalizing, and extending OA Framework-based pages within the E-Business Suite. Additionally, the course covers the methods to deploy those types of customizations. The course doesn't include discussion of the Oracle Forms-based pages within the E-Business Suite. 5. R12.x Extend Oracle Applications: OA Framework Personalizations Personalization is the ability within an E-Business Suite instance to make changes to the look and behavior of OA Framework-based pages without programming. And, personalizations are likely to survive patches and upgrades, increasing their utility. This course will systematically walk you through the myriad of personalization options, starting with simple examples and increasing in complexity from there. 6. E-Business Suite: BI Publisher 5.6.3 for Developers Starting with the basic concepts, architecture, and underlying standards of Oracle XML Publisher, this course will lead a student through a progress of exercises building their expertise. By the end of the course, the student should be able to create Oracle XML Publisher RTF templates and data templates. They should also be able to deploy and maintain a BI Publisher report in an E-Business Suite instance. Students will also be introduced to Oracle BI Publisher Enterprise. 7. R12.x Implement Oracle Workflow This course provides an overview of the architecture and features of Oracle Workflow and the benefits of using Oracle Workflow in an e-business environment. You can learn how to design workflow processes to automate and streamline business processes, and how to define event subscriptions to perform processing triggered by business events. Students also learn how to respond to workflow notifications, how to administer and monitor workflow processes, and what setup steps are required for Oracle Workflow. Demonstrations and hands-on practice reinforce the fundamental concepts. 8. R12.x Oracle E-Business Suite Essentials for Implementers Oracle R12.1 E-Business Essentials for Implementers is a course that provides a functional foundation for any E-Business Suite Fundamentals course.

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• Uget tray icon not showing

  - by ArK

  Since I upgraded to Saucy, Uget is not showing in the system tray, although the Always show tray icon option in Uget settings is checked. P.S. this happens only with Uget, all the other Softwares have working tray icons (vlc,qbittorrent..) Here is the snapshot which shows the settings of Uget: sudo dpkg -l | grep -e "^rc" -e "^iU": rc account-plugin-generic-oauth 0.10bzr13.03.26-0ubuntu1.1 i386 GNOME Control Center account plugin for single signon - generic OAuth rc appmenu-gtk:i386 12.10.3daily13.04.03-0ubuntu1 i386 Export GTK menus over DBus rc appmenu-gtk3:i386 12.10.3daily13.04.03-0ubuntu1 i386 Export GTK menus over DBus rc arora 0.11.0-0ubuntu1 i386 simple cross platform web browser rc buc 0.5.2-20 i386 BUC rc clementine 1.1.1+dfsg-2ubuntu1 i386 modern music player and library organizer rc epiphany-browser 3.6.1-2ubuntu1 i386 Intuitive GNOME web browser rc epiphany-browser-data 3.6.1-2ubuntu3 all Data files for the GNOME web browser rc fancontrol 1:3.3.3-1ubuntu1 all utilities to read temperature/voltage/fan sensors rc flaremonitor 1.0-5 i386 It is an advanced browser integration helper module of FlareGet rc google-chrome-stable 28.0.1500.95-r213514 i386 The web browser from Google rc hal 0.5.14-8ubuntu1 i386 Hardware Abstraction Layer rc hotot-gtk 1:0.9.8.5+git20120630.884797d-1 all lightweight microblogging client - GTK+ wrapper rc jockey-common 0.9.7-0ubuntu13 all user interface and desktop integration for driver management rc libanalitza4abi1 4:4.10.4-0ubuntu0.1 i386 library to work with mathematical expressions rc libanalitza5 4:4.11.2-0ubuntu1 i386 library to work with mathematical expressions rc libanalitzagui4abi2 4:4.10.4-0ubuntu0.1 i386 library to work with mathematical expressions - GUI routines rc libanalitzaplot4 4:4.10.4-0ubuntu0.1 i386 library to work with mathematical expressions - plot routines rc libavcodec53:i386 6:0.8.6-1ubuntu2 i386 Libav codec library rc libavutil51:i386 6:0.8.6-1ubuntu2 i386 Libav utility library rc libbamf3-1:i386 0.4.0daily13.06.19~13.04-0ubuntu1 i386 Window matching library - shared library rc libboost-iostreams1.49.0 1.49.0-4 i386 Boost.Iostreams Library rc libboost-program-options1.49.0 1.49.0-4 i386 program options library for C++ rc libboost-python1.49.0 1.49.0-4 i386 Boost.Python Library rc libboost-thread1.49.0 1.49.0-4 i386 portable C++ multi-threading rc libbrlapi0.5:i386 4.4-8ubuntu4 i386 braille display access via BRLTTY - shared library rc libcamel-1.2-40 3.6.4-0ubuntu1.1 i386 Evolution MIME message handling library rc libcolumbus0-0 0.4.0daily13.04.16~13.04-0ubuntu1 i386 error tolerant matching engine - shared library rc libdns95 1:9.9.2.dfsg.P1-2ubuntu2.1 i386 DNS Shared Library used by BIND rc libdvbpsi7 0.2.2-1 i386 library for MPEG TS and DVB PSI tables decoding and generating rc libebackend-1.2-5 3.6.4-0ubuntu1.1 i386 Utility library for evolution data servers rc libechonest2.0:i386 2.0.2-0ubuntu1 i386 Qt library for communicating with The Echo Nest platform rc libechonest2.1:i386 2.1.0-2 i386 Qt library for communicating with The Echo Nest platform rc libedata-book-1.2-15 3.6.4-0ubuntu1.1 i386 Backend library for evolution address books rc libedata-cal-1.2-18 3.6.4-0ubuntu1.1 i386 Backend library for evolution calendars rc libftgl2 2.1.3~rc5-4ubuntu1 i386 library to render text in OpenGL using FreeType rc libgc1c3:i386 1:7.2d-0ubuntu5 i386 conservative garbage collector for C and C++ rc libgnome-desktop-3-4 3.6.3-0ubuntu1 i386 Utility library for loading .desktop files - runtime files rc libgtksourceview-3.0-0:i386 3.6.3-0ubuntu1 i386 shared libraries for the GTK+ syntax highlighting widget rc libgweather-3-1 3.6.2-0ubuntu1 i386 GWeather shared library rc libhal-storage1 0.5.14-8ubuntu1 i386 Hardware Abstraction Layer - shared library for storage devices rc libhal1 0.5.14-8ubuntu1 i386 Hardware Abstraction Layer - shared library rc libharfbuzz0:i386 0.9.13-1 i386 OpenType text shaping engine rc libhd16 16.0-2.2 i386 Hardware identification system library rc libibus-1.0-0:i386 1.4.2-0ubuntu2 i386 Intelligent Input Bus - shared library rc libical0 0.48-2 i386 iCalendar library implementation in C (runtime) rc libimobiledevice3 1.1.4-1ubuntu6.2 i386 Library for communicating with the iPhone and iPod Touch rc libisc92 1:9.9.2.dfsg.P1-2ubuntu2.1 i386 ISC Shared Library used by BIND rc libkdegamesprivate1 4:4.10.2-0ubuntu1 i386 private shared library for KDE games rc libkeybinder0 0.3.0-1ubuntu1 i386 registers global key bindings for applications rc libkgapi0:i386 0.4.4-0ubuntu1 i386 Google API library for KDE rc liblastfm1:i386 1.0.7-2 i386 Last.fm web services library rc libnetfilter-queue1 1.0.2-1 i386 Netfilter netlink-queue library rc libnl1:i386 1.1-7ubuntu1 i386 library for dealing with netlink sockets rc libossp-uuid16 1.6.2-1.3 i386 OSSP uuid ISO-C and C++ - shared library rc libpackagekit-glib2-14:i386 0.7.6-3ubuntu1 i386 Library for accessing PackageKit using GLib rc libpoppler28:i386 0.20.5-1ubuntu3 i386 PDF rendering library rc libprojectm2 2.1.0+dfsg-1build1 i386 Advanced Milkdrop-compatible music visualization library rc libqxt-core0:i386 0.6.1-7 i386 extensions to Qt core classes (LibQxt) rc libqxt-gui0:i386 0.6.1-7 i386 extensions to Qt GUI classes (LibQxt) rc libraw5:i386 0.14.7-0ubuntu1.13.04.2 i386 raw image decoder library rc librhythmbox-core6 2.98-0ubuntu5 i386 support library for the rhythmbox music player rc librhythmbox-core7 3.0.1-0~13.10~ppa1 i386 support library for the rhythmbox music player rc libsnmp15 5.4.3~dfsg-2.7ubuntu1 i386 SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) library rc libsqlite0 2.8.17-8fakesync1 i386 SQLite shared library rc libsyncdaemon-1.0-1 4.2.0-0ubuntu1 i386 Ubuntu One synchronization daemon library rc libtiff4:i386 3.9.7-2ubuntu1 i386 Tag Image File Format (TIFF) library (old version) rc libunity-core-6.0-5 7.0.0daily13.06.19~13.04-0ubuntu1 i386 Core library for the Unity interface. rc libva-wayland1:i386 1.2.1-0ubuntu0~raring i386 Video Acceleration (VA) API for Linux -- Wayland runtime rc libwayland0:i386 1.0.5-0ubuntu1 i386 wayland compositor infrastructure - shared libraries rc libwebp2:i386 0.1.3-3 i386 Lossy compression of digital photographic images. rc linux-image-3.8.0-19-generic 3.8.0-19.30 i386 Linux kernel image for version 3.8.0 on 32 bit x86 SMP rc linux-image-3.8.0-21-generic 3.8.0-21.32 i386 Linux kernel image for version 3.8.0 on 32 bit x86 SMP rc linux-image-3.8.0-22-generic 3.8.0-22.33 i386 Linux kernel image for version 3.8.0 on 32 bit x86 SMP rc linux-image-3.8.0-26-generic 3.8.0-26.38 i386 Linux kernel image for version 3.8.0 on 32 bit x86 SMP rc linux-image-3.8.0-27-generic 3.8.0-27.40 i386 Linux kernel image for version 3.8.0 on 32 bit x86 SMP rc linux-image-3.9.0-030900-generic 3.9.0-030900.201304291257 i386 Linux kernel image for version 3.9.0 on 32 bit x86 SMP rc linux-image-3.9.0-030900rc8-generic 3.9.0-030900rc8.201304211835 i386 Linux kernel image for version 3.9.0 on 32 bit x86 SMP rc linux-image-extra-3.8.0-19-generic 3.8.0-19.30 i386 Linux kernel image for version 3.8.0 on 32 bit x86 SMP rc linux-image-extra-3.8.0-21-generic 3.8.0-21.32 i386 Linux kernel image for version 3.8.0 on 32 bit x86 SMP rc linux-image-extra-3.8.0-22-generic 3.8.0-22.33 i386 Linux kernel image for version 3.8.0 on 32 bit x86 SMP rc linux-image-extra-3.8.0-26-generic 3.8.0-26.38 i386 Linux kernel image for version 3.8.0 on 32 bit x86 SMP rc linux-image-extra-3.8.0-27-generic 3.8.0-27.40 i386 Linux kernel image for version 3.8.0 on 32 bit x86 SMP rc preload 0.6.4-2 i386 adaptive readahead daemon rc steam-launcher 1.0.0.39 all Launcher for the Steam software distribution service rc super-boot-manager 0.7.15 all Simple gui to configure Grub2, Burg and Plymouth. rc totem 3.6.3-0ubuntu6 i386 Simple media player for the GNOME desktop based on GStreamer rc transmission-gtk 2.77-0ubuntu1 i386 lightweight BitTorrent client (GTK interface) rc unity-common 7.0.0daily13.06.19~13.04-0ubuntu1 all Common files for the Unity interface. rc vino 3.6.2-0ubuntu4 i386 VNC server for GNOME rc wicd-daemon 1.7.2.4-4.1 all wired and wireless network manager - daemon rc wicd-gtk 1.7.2.4-4.1 all wired and wireless network manager - GTK+ client rc xscreensaver 5.15-2ubuntu1 i386 Automatic screensaver for X rc xscreensaver-data 5.15-3ubuntu1 i386 data files to be shared among screensaver frontends sudo dpkg -l | grep uget: ii uget 1.10.3-1 i386 easy-to-use download manager written in GTK+ sudo dpkg -l | grep indicator: ii gir1.2-appindicator3-0.1 12.10.1+13.10.20130920-0ubuntu2 i386 Typelib files for libappindicator3-1. ii gir1.2-syncmenu-0.1 12.10.5+13.10.20131011-0ubuntu1 i386 indicator for synchronisation processes status - bindings ii indicator-applet-complete 12.10.2+13.10.20130924.2-0ubuntu1 i386 Clone of the GNOME panel indicator applet ii indicator-application 12.10.1daily13.01.25-0ubuntu1 i386 Application Indicators ii indicator-appmenu 13.01.0+13.10.20130930-0ubuntu1 i386 Indicator for application menus. ii indicator-bluetooth 0.0.6+13.10.20131016-0ubuntu1 i386 System bluetooth indicator. ii indicator-datetime 13.10.0+13.10.20131023.2-0ubuntu1 i386 Simple clock ii indicator-keyboard 0.0.0+13.10.20131010.1-0ubuntu1 i386 Keyboard indicator ii indicator-messages 13.10.1+13.10.20131011-0ubuntu1 i386 indicator that collects messages that need a response ii indicator-multiload 0.3-0ubuntu1 i386 Graphical system load indicator for CPU, ram, etc. ii indicator-power 12.10.6+13.10.20131008-0ubuntu1 i386 Indicator showing power state. ii indicator-printers 0.1.7daily13.03.01-0ubuntu1 i386 indicator showing active print jobs ii indicator-session 12.10.5+13.10.20131023.1-0ubuntu1 i386 indicator showing session management, status and user switching ii indicator-sound 12.10.2+13.10.20131011-0ubuntu1 i386 System sound indicator. ii indicator-sync 12.10.5+13.10.20131011-0ubuntu1 i386 indicator for synchronisation processes status ii libappindicator1 12.10.1+13.10.20130920-0ubuntu2 i386 Application Indicators ii libappindicator3-1 12.10.1+13.10.20130920-0ubuntu2 i386 Application Indicators ii libindicator3-7 12.10.2+13.10.20130913-0ubuntu2 i386 panel indicator applet - shared library ii libindicator7 12.10.2+13.10.20130913-0ubuntu2 i386 panel indicator applet - shared library ii libsync-menu1:i386 12.10.5+13.10.20131011-0ubuntu1 i386 indicator for synchronisation processes status - libraries ii python-appindicator 12.10.1+13.10.20130920-0ubuntu2 i386 Python bindings for libappindicator ii sni-qt:i386 0.2.6-0ubuntu1 i386 indicator support for Qt ii telepathy-indicator 0.3.1daily13.06.19-0ubuntu1 i386 Desktop service to integrate Telepathy with the messaging menu.

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• Performance Optimization &ndash; It Is Faster When You Can Measure It

  - by Alois Kraus

  Performance optimization in bigger systems is hard because the measured numbers can vary greatly depending on the measurement method of your choice. To measure execution timing of specific methods in your application you usually use Time Measurement Method Potential Pitfalls Stopwatch Most accurate method on recent processors. Internally it uses the RDTSC instruction. Since the counter is processor specific you can get greatly different values when your thread is scheduled to another core or the core goes into a power saving mode. But things do change luckily: Intel's Designer's vol3b, section 16.11.1 "16.11.1 Invariant TSC The time stamp counter in newer processors may support an enhancement, referred to as invariant TSC. Processor's support for invariant TSC is indicated by CPUID.80000007H:EDX[8]. The invariant TSC will run at a constant rate in all ACPI P-, C-. and T-states. This is the architectural behavior moving forward. On processors with invariant TSC support, the OS may use the TSC for wall clock timer services (instead of ACPI or HPET timers). TSC reads are much more efficient and do not incur the overhead associated with a ring transition or access to a platform resource." DateTime.Now Good but it has only a resolution of 16ms which can be not enough if you want more accuracy.   Reporting Method Potential Pitfalls Console.WriteLine Ok if not called too often. Debug.Print Are you really measuring performance with Debug Builds? Shame on you. Trace.WriteLine Better but you need to plug in some good output listener like a trace file. But be aware that the first time you call this method it will read your app.config and deserialize your system.diagnostics section which does also take time.   In general it is a good idea to use some tracing library which does measure the timing for you and you only need to decorate some methods with tracing so you can later verify if something has changed for the better or worse. In my previous article I did compare measuring performance with quantum mechanics. This analogy does work surprising well. When you measure a quantum system there is a lower limit how accurately you can measure something. The Heisenberg uncertainty relation does tell us that you cannot measure of a quantum system the impulse and location of a particle at the same time with infinite accuracy. For programmers the two variables are execution time and memory allocations. If you try to measure the timings of all methods in your application you will need to store them somewhere. The fastest storage space besides the CPU cache is the memory. But if your timing values do consume all available memory there is no memory left for the actual application to run. On the other hand if you try to record all memory allocations of your application you will also need to store the data somewhere. This will cost you memory and execution time. These constraints are always there and regardless how good the marketing of tool vendors for performance and memory profilers are: Any measurement will disturb the system in a non predictable way. Commercial tool vendors will tell you they do calculate this overhead and subtract it from the measured values to give you the most accurate values but in reality it is not entirely true. After falling into the trap to trust the profiler timings several times I have got into the habit to Measure with a profiler to get an idea where potential bottlenecks are. Measure again with tracing only the specific methods to check if this method is really worth optimizing. Optimize it Measure again. Be surprised that your optimization has made things worse. Think harder Implement something that really works. Measure again Finished! - Or look for the next bottleneck. Recently I have looked into issues with serialization performance. For serialization DataContractSerializer was used and I was not sure if XML is really the most optimal wire format. After looking around I have found protobuf-net which uses Googles Protocol Buffer format which is a compact binary serialization format. What is good for Google should be good for us. A small sample app to check out performance was a matter of minutes: using ProtoBuf; using System; using System.Diagnostics; using System.IO; using System.Reflection; using System.Runtime.Serialization; [DataContract, Serializable] class Data { [DataMember(Order=1)] public int IntValue { get; set; } [DataMember(Order = 2)] public string StringValue { get; set; } [DataMember(Order = 3)] public bool IsActivated { get; set; } [DataMember(Order = 4)] public BindingFlags Flags { get; set; } } class Program { static MemoryStream _Stream = new MemoryStream(); static MemoryStream Stream { get { _Stream.Position = 0; _Stream.SetLength(0); return _Stream; } } static void Main(string[] args) { DataContractSerializer ser = new DataContractSerializer(typeof(Data)); Data data = new Data { IntValue = 100, IsActivated = true, StringValue = "Hi this is a small string value to check if serialization does work as expected" }; var sw = Stopwatch.StartNew(); int Runs = 1000 * 1000; for (int i = 0; i < Runs; i++) { //ser.WriteObject(Stream, data); Serializer.Serialize<Data>(Stream, data); } sw.Stop(); Console.WriteLine("Did take {0:N0}ms for {1:N0} objects", sw.Elapsed.TotalMilliseconds, Runs); Console.ReadLine(); } } The results are indeed promising: Serializer Time in ms N objects protobuf-net   807 1000000 DataContract 4402 1000000 Nearly a factor 5 faster and a much more compact wire format. Lets use it! After switching over to protbuf-net the transfered wire data has dropped by a factor two (good) and the performance has worsened by nearly a factor two. How is that possible? We have measured it? Protobuf-net is much faster! As it turns out protobuf-net is faster but it has a cost: For the first time a type is de/serialized it does use some very smart code-gen which does not come for free. Lets try to measure this one by setting of our performance test app the Runs value not to one million but to 1. Serializer Time in ms N objects protobuf-net 85 1 DataContract 24 1 The code-gen overhead is significant and can take up to 200ms for more complex types. The break even point where the code-gen cost is amortized by its faster serialization performance is (assuming small objects) somewhere between 20.000-40.000 serialized objects. As it turned out my specific scenario involved about 100 types and 1000 serializations in total. That explains why the good old DataContractSerializer is not so easy to take out of business. The final approach I ended up was to reduce the number of types and to serialize primitive types via BinaryWriter directly which turned out to be a pretty good alternative. It sounded good until I measured again and found that my optimizations so far do not help much. After looking more deeper at the profiling data I did found that one of the 1000 calls did take 50% of the time. So how do I find out which call it was? Normal profilers do fail short at this discipline. A (totally undeserved) relatively unknown profiler is SpeedTrace which does unlike normal profilers create traces of your applications by instrumenting your IL code at runtime. This way you can look at the full call stack of the one slow serializer call to find out if this stack was something special. Unfortunately the call stack showed nothing special. But luckily I have my own tracing as well and I could see that the slow serializer call did happen during the serialization of a bool value. When you encounter after much analysis something unreasonable you cannot explain it then the chances are good that your thread was suspended by the garbage collector. If there is a problem with excessive GCs remains to be investigated but so far the serialization performance seems to be mostly ok.  When you do profile a complex system with many interconnected processes you can never be sure that the timings you just did measure are accurate at all. Some process might be hitting the disc slowing things down for all other processes for some seconds as well. There is a big difference between warm and cold startup. If you restart all processes you can basically forget the first run because of the OS disc cache, JIT and GCs make the measured timings very flexible. When you are in need of a random number generator you should measure cold startup times of a sufficiently complex system. After the first run you can try again getting different and much lower numbers. Now try again at least two times to get some feeling how stable the numbers are. Oh and try to do the same thing the next day. It might be that the bottleneck you found yesterday is gone today. Thanks to GC and other random stuff it can become pretty hard to find stuff worth optimizing if no big bottlenecks except bloatloads of code are left anymore. When I have found a spot worth optimizing I do make the code changes and do measure again to check if something has changed. If it has got slower and I am certain that my change should have made it faster I can blame the GC again. The thing is that if you optimize stuff and you allocate less objects the GC times will shift to some other location. If you are unlucky it will make your faster working code slower because you see now GCs at times where none were before. This is where the stuff does get really tricky. A safe escape hatch is to create a repro of the slow code in an isolated application so you can change things fast in a reliable manner. Then the normal profilers do also start working again. As Vance Morrison does point out it is much more complex to profile a system against the wall clock compared to optimize for CPU time. The reason is that for wall clock time analysis you need to understand how your system does work and which threads (if you have not one but perhaps 20) are causing a visible delay to the end user and which threads can wait a long time without affecting the user experience at all. Next time: Commercial profiler shootout.

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• Notes on Oracle BPM PS6 Adaptive Case Management

  - by gcolman

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} I have recently been looking at the  latest release of the BPM Case Management feature in the Oracle BPM PS6 release. I had put together some notes to help me gain a better understanding of the context of the PS6 BPM Case Management. Hopefully, this along with the other resources will enable you to gain a clear picture of the flexibility of this feature. Oracle BPM PS6 release includes Case Management capability. This initial release aims to provide: Case Management Framework Integration of Case Management with BPM & SOA suite It is best to regard the current PS6 case management feature as a case management framework. The framework provides the building blocks for creating a case management system that is fully integrated into Oracle BPM suite. As of the current PS6 release, no UI tooling exists to help manage cases or the case lifecycle. Mark Foster has written a good blog which outlines Case Management within PS6 in the following link. I wanted to provide more context on Case Management from my perspective in this blog. PS6 Case Management - High level View BPM PS6 includes “Case” as a first class component in a SOA Suite composite. The Case components (added to the SOA Composite) are created when a BPM process is assigned to a case in JDveloper. The SOA Case component is defined and configured within JDevloper, which allows us to specify the case data structures and metadata such as stakeholders, outcomes, milestones, document stores etc. "Activities" are associated with a case, and become available to be executed via the case apis. Activities are BPM processes, Human Activities or Java call outs. The PS6 release includes some additional database tables to store the case metadata and case instance data (data object, comments, etc…). These new tables are created within the SOA_INFRA schema and the documents associated with that case into a document repository that is configured with the case. One of the main features of Case Management is the control of the case logic through case events and case business rules. A PS6 Case has an associated business rule component, which can be configured to control the availability and execution of activities within the case. The business rules component is able to act upon events that the PS6 Case Management framework generates during the lifecycle of that case. Events are fired during the lifetime of the case (e.g. Case created, activity started, activity ended, note added, document uploaded.) Internal Case state The internal state of a case is represented by the diagram below. This shows the internal states and the transition paths for a Case from one state to the next Each transition in state will create an event that can be enacted upon via the Case rules engine. The internal case state lifecycle is defined as follows Defining a case A Case is created and defined as a component of a JDeveloper BPM project. When you create a Case as part of a BPM project, JDeveloper, creates the following components within the SCA composite: Case component Case component interfaces (WSDL etc) Case Rules component (Oracle Business Rules) Adds the Case Component and Case Rules Component to the BPM SOA composite Case Configuration The following section gives a high level overview of the items that can be configured for a BPM Case. Case Activities A Case is associated with a set of activities that are to be performed as part of that Case. Case activities can be: SOA Human Tasks BPM processes Custom Task (Java Class) Case activities are created from pre-existing BPM process or human tasks, which, once defined, can be configured additionally as Case activities in JDeveloper and made available within the lifecycle of a case. I've described the following configurable components of a case (very!) briefly as: Milestones Milestones are (optional) user defined logical milestones that can be achieved within a case. No activities are associates with a milestone, but milestone attainment can be programmatically set and events raised when milestones are reached Outcomes User defined status of a completed case. An event is fired when an outcome is attained. Case Data Defines the data that will be stored with a case XML schemas define the data that is stored with the case. Case Documents Defines the location of documents that are attached to a case (e.g. WebCenter Content) User Defined Events Optional user defined events that can be fired or captured to drive case processing rules Stakeholders Defines the actors who can participate in the case (roles, users, groups) Defines permissions for individual case permissions (read case, create document etc…) Business Rules Business rules are the main component controlling the flow of a Case Each case has an associated business ruleset Rules are fired on receiving Case events (or User defined events) Life cycle events Milestone events Activity events Data events Document events Comment events User event Managing the Case Managing the lifecycle of a case is achieved in two ways: Managing case logic with Business Rules Managing the case lifecycle via the Case APIs. A BPM Case can be viewed as a set of case data & documents along with the activities that can be performed within a case and also the case lifecycle state expressed as milestones and internal lifecycle state. The management of the case life is achieved though both the configuration of business rules and the “manual” interaction with a case instance through the Case APIs. Business Rules and Case Events A key component within the Case management framework is the event model. The BPM Case Management solution internally utilizes Oracle EDN (Event Delivery Network) to publish and subscribe to events generated by the Case framework. Events are generated by the Case framework on each of the processes and stages that a case instance will travel on its lifetime. The following case events are part of the BPM Case: Life cycle events Milestone events Activity events Data events Document events Comment events User event The Case business rules are configured to listen for these events, and business logic can be coded into the Case rules component to enact upon an event being received. Case API & Interaction Along with the business rules component, Cases can be managed via the Case API interfaces. These interfaces allow for the building of custom applications to integrate into case management framework. The API’s allow for updating case comments & documents, executing case activities, updating milestones etc. As there is no in built case management UI functions within the PS6 release, Cases need to be managed via a custom built UI, interacting with selected case instances, launching case activities, closing cases etc. (There is expected to be a UI component within subsequent releases) Logical Case Flow The diagram below is intended to depict a logical view of the case steps for a typical case. A UI or other service calls the Case interface to create a Case instance The case instance is created & database data inserted A lifecycle event is raised indicating a case activity (created) event The case business rules capture the event and decide on an action to take Additionally other parties can subscribe to Case events via EDN The business rules may handle the event, e.g. configured to execute a case activity on case creation event The BPM/Human Workflow/Custom activity is executed A case activity event is raised on the execute activity A case work UI or business service can inspect the case instance and call other actions to progress that case, such as: Execute activity Add Note Add document Add case data Update Milestone Raise user defined event Suspend case Resume case Close Case Summary Having had a little time to play around with the APIs and the case configuration, I really like the flexibility and power of combining Oracle Business Rules and the BPM Case Management event model. Creating something this flexible and powerful without BPM Case Management would take a lot of time and effort. This is hopefully going to save my customers a lot of time and effort! I may make amendments to this post as my understanding of Case Management increases! Take a look at the following links for official documentation etc. http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E28280_01/doc.1111/e15176/case_mgmt_bpmpd.htm https://blogs.oracle.com/bpm/entry/just_in_case 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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";}

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• Introduction to LinqPad Driver for StreamInsight 2.1

  - by Roman Schindlauer

  We are announcing the availability of the LinqPad driver for StreamInsight 2.1. The purpose of this blog post is to offer a quick introduction into the new features that we added to the StreamInsight LinqPad driver. We’ll show you how to connect to a remote server, how to inspect the entities present of that server, how to compose on top of them and how to manage their lifetime. Installing the driver Info on how to install the driver can be found in an earlier blog post here. Establishing connections As you click on the “Add Connection” link in the left pane you will notice that now it’s possible to build the data context automatically. The new driver appears as an option in the upper list, and if you pick it you will open a connection dialog that lets you connect to a remote StreamInsight server. The connection dialog lets you specify the address of the remote server. You will notice that it’s possible to pick up the binding information from the configuration file of the LinqPad application (which is normally in the same folder as LinqPad.exe and is called LinqPad.exe.config). In order for the context to be generated you need to pick an application from the server. The control is editable hence you can create a new application if you don’t want to make changes to an existing application. If you choose a new application name you will be prompted for confirmation before this gets created. Once you click OK the connection is created and you can start issuing queries against the remote server. If there’s any connectivity error the connection is marked with a red X and you can see the error message informing you what went wrong (i.e., the remote server could not be reached etc.). The context for remote servers Let’s take a look at what happens after we are connected successfully. Every LinqPad query runs inside a context – think of it as a class that wraps all the code that you’re writing. If you’re connecting to a live server the context will contain the following: The application object itself. All entities present in this application (sources, sinks, subjects and processes). The picture below shows a snapshot of the left pane of LinqPad after a successful connection. Every entity on the server has a different icon which will allow users to figure out its purpose. You will also notice that some entities have a string in parentheses following the name. It should be interpreted as such: the first name is the name of the property of the context class and the second name is the name of the entity as it exists on the server. Not all valid entity names are valid identifier names so in cases where we had to make a transformation you see both. Note also that as you hover over the entities you get IntelliSense with their types – more on that later. Remoting is not supported As you play with the entities exposed by the context you will notice that you can’t read and write directly to/from them. If for instance you’re trying to dump the content of an entity you will get an error message telling you that in the current version remoting is not supported. This is because the entity lives on the remote server and dumping its content means reading the events produced by this entity into the local process. ObservableSource.Dump(); Will yield the following error: Reading from a remote 'System.Reactive.Linq.IQbservable`1[System.Int32]' is not supported. Use the 'Microsoft.ComplexEventProcessing.Linq.RemoteProvider.Bind' method to read from the source using a remote observer. This basically tells you that you can call the Bind() method to direct the output of this source to a sink that has to be defined on the remote machine as well. You can’t bring the results to the LinqPad window unless you write code specifically for that. Compose queries You may ask – what's the purpose of all that? After all the same information is present in the EventFlowDebugger, why bother with showing it in LinqPad? First of all, What gets exposed in LinqPad is not what you see in the debugger. In LinqPad we have a property on the context class for every entity that lives on the server. Because LinqPad offers IntelliSense we in fact have much more information about the entity, and more importantly we can compose with that entity very easily. For example, let’s say that this code creates an entity: using (var server = Server.Connect(...)) {     var a = server.CreateApplication("WhiteFish");     var src = a         .DefineObservable<int>(() => Observable.Range(0, 3))         .Deploy("ObservableSource"); If later we want to compose with the source we have to fetch it and then we can bind something to     a.GetObservable<int>("ObservableSource)").Bind(... This means that we had to know a bunch of things about this: that it’s a source, that it’s an observable, it produces a result with payload Int32 and it’s named “ObservableSource”. Only the second and last bits of information are present in the debugger, by the way. As you type in the query window you see that all the entities are present, you get IntelliSense support for them and it’s much easier to make sense of what’s available. Let’s look at a scenario where composition is plausible. With the new programming model it’s possible to create “cold” sources that are parameterized. There was a way to accomplish that even in the previous version by passing parameters to the adapters, but this time it’s much more elegant because the expression declares what parameters are required. Say that we hover the mouse over the ThrottledSource source – we will see that its type is Func<int, int, IQbservable<int>> - this in effect means that we need to pass two int parameters before we can get a source that produces events, and the type for those events is int – in the particular case of my example I had the source produce a range of integers and the two parameters were the start and end of the range. So we see how a developer can create a source that is not running yet. Then someone else (e.g. an administrator) can pass whatever parameters appropriate and run the process. Proxy Types Here’s an interesting scenario – what if someone created a source on a server but they forgot to tell you what type they used. Worse yet, they might have used an anonymous type and even though they can refer to it by name you can’t figure out how to use that type. Let’s walk through an example that shows how you can compose against types you don’t need to have the definition of. This is how we can create a source that returns an anonymous type: Application.DefineObservable(() => Observable.Range(1, 10).Select(i => new { I = i })).Deploy("O1"); Now if we refresh the connection we can see the new source named O1 appear in the list. But what’s more important is that we now have a type to work with. So we can compose a query that refers to the anonymous type. var threshold = new StreamInsightDynamicDriver.TypeProxies.AnonymousType1_0<int>(5); var filter = from i in O1              where i > threshold              select i; filter.Deploy("O2"); You will notice that the anonymous type defined with this statement: new { I = i } can now be manipulated by a client that does not have access to it because the LinqPad driver has generated another type in its stead, named StreamInsightDynamicDriver.TypeProxies.AnonymousType1_0. This type has all the properties and fields of the type defined on the server, except in this case we can instantiate values and use it to compose more queries. It is worth noting that the same thing works for types that are not anonymous – the test is if the LinqPad driver can resolve the type or not. If it’s not possible then a new type will be generated that approximates the type that exists on the server. Control metadata In addition to composing processes on top of the existing entities we can do other useful things. We can delete them – nothing new here as we simply access the entities through the Entities collection of the application class. Here is where having their real name in parentheses comes handy. There’s another way to find out what’s behind a property – dump its expression. The first line in the output tells us what’s the name of the entity used to build this property in the context. Runtime information So let’s create a process to see what happens. We can bind a source to a sink and run the resulting process. If you right click on the connection you can refresh it and see the process present in the list of entities. Then you can drag the process to the query window and see that you can have access to process object in the Processes collection of the application. You can then manipulate the process (delete it, read its diagnostic view etc.). Regards, The StreamInsight Team

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• Introduction to LinqPad Driver for StreamInsight 2.1

  - by Roman Schindlauer

  We are announcing the availability of the LinqPad driver for StreamInsight 2.1. The purpose of this blog post is to offer a quick introduction into the new features that we added to the StreamInsight LinqPad driver. We’ll show you how to connect to a remote server, how to inspect the entities present of that server, how to compose on top of them and how to manage their lifetime. Installing the driver Info on how to install the driver can be found in an earlier blog post here. Establishing connections As you click on the “Add Connection” link in the left pane you will notice that now it’s possible to build the data context automatically. The new driver appears as an option in the upper list, and if you pick it you will open a connection dialog that lets you connect to a remote StreamInsight server. The connection dialog lets you specify the address of the remote server. You will notice that it’s possible to pick up the binding information from the configuration file of the LinqPad application (which is normally in the same folder as LinqPad.exe and is called LinqPad.exe.config). In order for the context to be generated you need to pick an application from the server. The control is editable hence you can create a new application if you don’t want to make changes to an existing application. If you choose a new application name you will be prompted for confirmation before this gets created. Once you click OK the connection is created and you can start issuing queries against the remote server. If there’s any connectivity error the connection is marked with a red X and you can see the error message informing you what went wrong (i.e., the remote server could not be reached etc.). The context for remote servers Let’s take a look at what happens after we are connected successfully. Every LinqPad query runs inside a context – think of it as a class that wraps all the code that you’re writing. If you’re connecting to a live server the context will contain the following: The application object itself. All entities present in this application (sources, sinks, subjects and processes). The picture below shows a snapshot of the left pane of LinqPad after a successful connection. Every entity on the server has a different icon which will allow users to figure out its purpose. You will also notice that some entities have a string in parentheses following the name. It should be interpreted as such: the first name is the name of the property of the context class and the second name is the name of the entity as it exists on the server. Not all valid entity names are valid identifier names so in cases where we had to make a transformation you see both. Note also that as you hover over the entities you get IntelliSense with their types – more on that later. Remoting is not supported As you play with the entities exposed by the context you will notice that you can’t read and write directly to/from them. If for instance you’re trying to dump the content of an entity you will get an error message telling you that in the current version remoting is not supported. This is because the entity lives on the remote server and dumping its content means reading the events produced by this entity into the local process. ObservableSource.Dump(); Will yield the following error: Reading from a remote 'System.Reactive.Linq.IQbservable`1[System.Int32]' is not supported. Use the 'Microsoft.ComplexEventProcessing.Linq.RemoteProvider.Bind' method to read from the source using a remote observer. This basically tells you that you can call the Bind() method to direct the output of this source to a sink that has to be defined on the remote machine as well. You can’t bring the results to the LinqPad window unless you write code specifically for that. Compose queries You may ask – what's the purpose of all that? After all the same information is present in the EventFlowDebugger, why bother with showing it in LinqPad? First of all, What gets exposed in LinqPad is not what you see in the debugger. In LinqPad we have a property on the context class for every entity that lives on the server. Because LinqPad offers IntelliSense we in fact have much more information about the entity, and more importantly we can compose with that entity very easily. For example, let’s say that this code creates an entity: using (var server = Server.Connect(...)) {     var a = server.CreateApplication("WhiteFish");     var src = a         .DefineObservable<int>(() => Observable.Range(0, 3))         .Deploy("ObservableSource"); If later we want to compose with the source we have to fetch it and then we can bind something to     a.GetObservable<int>("ObservableSource)").Bind(... This means that we had to know a bunch of things about this: that it’s a source, that it’s an observable, it produces a result with payload Int32 and it’s named “ObservableSource”. Only the second and last bits of information are present in the debugger, by the way. As you type in the query window you see that all the entities are present, you get IntelliSense support for them and it’s much easier to make sense of what’s available. Let’s look at a scenario where composition is plausible. With the new programming model it’s possible to create “cold” sources that are parameterized. There was a way to accomplish that even in the previous version by passing parameters to the adapters, but this time it’s much more elegant because the expression declares what parameters are required. Say that we hover the mouse over the ThrottledSource source – we will see that its type is Func<int, int, IQbservable<int>> - this in effect means that we need to pass two int parameters before we can get a source that produces events, and the type for those events is int – in the particular case of my example I had the source produce a range of integers and the two parameters were the start and end of the range. So we see how a developer can create a source that is not running yet. Then someone else (e.g. an administrator) can pass whatever parameters appropriate and run the process. Proxy Types Here’s an interesting scenario – what if someone created a source on a server but they forgot to tell you what type they used. Worse yet, they might have used an anonymous type and even though they can refer to it by name you can’t figure out how to use that type. Let’s walk through an example that shows how you can compose against types you don’t need to have the definition of. This is how we can create a source that returns an anonymous type: Application.DefineObservable(() => Observable.Range(1, 10).Select(i => new { I = i })).Deploy("O1"); Now if we refresh the connection we can see the new source named O1 appear in the list. But what’s more important is that we now have a type to work with. So we can compose a query that refers to the anonymous type. var threshold = new StreamInsightDynamicDriver.TypeProxies.AnonymousType1_0<int>(5); var filter = from i in O1              where i > threshold              select i; filter.Deploy("O2"); You will notice that the anonymous type defined with this statement: new { I = i } can now be manipulated by a client that does not have access to it because the LinqPad driver has generated another type in its stead, named StreamInsightDynamicDriver.TypeProxies.AnonymousType1_0. This type has all the properties and fields of the type defined on the server, except in this case we can instantiate values and use it to compose more queries. It is worth noting that the same thing works for types that are not anonymous – the test is if the LinqPad driver can resolve the type or not. If it’s not possible then a new type will be generated that approximates the type that exists on the server. Control metadata In addition to composing processes on top of the existing entities we can do other useful things. We can delete them – nothing new here as we simply access the entities through the Entities collection of the application class. Here is where having their real name in parentheses comes handy. There’s another way to find out what’s behind a property – dump its expression. The first line in the output tells us what’s the name of the entity used to build this property in the context. Runtime information So let’s create a process to see what happens. We can bind a source to a sink and run the resulting process. If you right click on the connection you can refresh it and see the process present in the list of entities. Then you can drag the process to the query window and see that you can have access to process object in the Processes collection of the application. You can then manipulate the process (delete it, read its diagnostic view etc.). Regards, The StreamInsight Team

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• OK - What now? How do we become a Social Business?

  - by Michael Snow

  We hope that those of you that attended yesterday's Webcast with Brian Solis enjoyed Brian's discussion with Christian Finn for our last Webcast of the season for the Oracle Social Business Thought Leaders Series.  For those of you that may have missed the webcast or were stuck at a company holiday party - you'll be glad to hear that the webcast will be available On-Demand starting later today (12/14/12). And any of you who'd like to listen to a quick but informative podcast with Brian - can listen to that here. Some of you may still be left with questions about how to get from point A to point B and even more confused than when you started thinking about this new world of Digital Darwinism. The post below, grabbed from an abundance of great thought leadership prose on Brian's blog may help you frame the path you need to start walking sooner versus later to stay off of the endangered species list.  As you explore your path forward, please keep Oracle in mind - we do offer a wide range of solutions to help your organization 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} optimize the engagement for your customers, employees and partners. The Path from a Social Brand to a Social Business Brian Solis Originally posted May 2, 2012 I’ve been a long-time supporter of MediaTemple’s (MT)Residence program along with Gary Vaynerchuk, Neil Patel, and many others whom I respect. I wanted to share my “7 questions to answer to become a social business” with you here.. Social Media is pervasive and is becoming the new normal in corporate marketing. Brands who get this right are starting to build their own media networks rich with customer connections numbering in the millions. Right now, Coca-Cola has over 34 million fans on Facebook, but they’re hardly alone. Disney follows just behind with 29 million fans, Starbucks boasts 25 million, and Oreo, Red Bull, and Converse play host to over 20 million fans. If we were to look at other networks such as Twitter and Youtube, we would see a recurring theme. People are connecting en masse with the businesses they support and new media represents the ability to cultivate consumer relationships in ways not possible with traditional earned or paid media. Sounds great right? This might sound abrupt, but the truth is that we’re hardly realizing the potential of what lies before us. Everything begins with understanding not just how other brands are marketing themselves in social media, but also seeing what they’re not doing and envisioning what’s possible. We’re already approaching the first of many crossroads that new media will present. Do we take the path of a social brand or that of a social business? What’s the difference? A social brand is just that, a business that is remodeling or retrofitting its existing marketing practices to new media. A social business is something altogether different as it embraces introspection and extrospection to reevaluate internal and external processes, systems, and opportunities to transform into a living, breathing entity that adapts to market conditions and opportunities. It’s a tough decision to make right now especially at a time when all we read about is how much success many businesses are finding without having to answer this very question. With all of the newfound success in social networks, the truth is that we’re only just beginning to learn what’s possible and that’s where you come in. When compared to the investment in time and resources across the board, social media represents only a small part of the mix. But with your help, that’s all about to change. The CMO Survey, an organization that disseminates the opinions of top marketers in order to predict the future of markets, recently published a report that gave credence to the fact that social media is taking off. One of the most profound takeaways from the report was this gem; “The “like button” [in Facebook] packs more customer-acquisition punch than other demand-generating activities.” With insights like this, it’s easy to see why the race to social is becoming heated. The report also highlighted exactly where social fits in the marketing mix today and as you can see, despite all of the hype, it’s not a dominant focus yet. As of August 2011, the percentage of overall marketing budgets dedicated to social media hovered at around 7%. However, in 2012 the investment in social media will climb to 10%. And, in five years, social media is expected to represent almost 18% of the total marketing budget. Think about that for a moment. In 2016, social media will only represent 18%? Queue the sound of a record scratching here. With businesses finding success in social networks, why are businesses failing to realize the true opportunity brought forth by the ability to listen to, connect with, and engage with customers? While there’s value in earning views, driving traffic, and building connections through the 3F’s (friends, fans and followers), success isn’t just defined simply by what really amounts to low-hanging fruit. The truth is that businesses cannot measure what it is they don’t know to value. As a result, innovation in new engagement initiatives is stifled because we’re applying dated or inflexible frameworks to new paradigms. Social media isn’t owned by marketing, but instead the entire organization. This changes everything and makes your role so much more important. It’s up to you to learn how to think outside of the proverbial social media box to see what others don’t, the ability to improve customers experiences through the evolution of a social brand into a social business. Doing so will translate customer insights from what they do and don’t share in social networks into better products, services, and processes. See, customers want something more from their favorite businesses than creative campaigns, viral content, and everyday dialogue in social networks. Customers want to be heard and they want to know that you’re listening. How businesses use social media must remind them that they’re more than just an audience, consumer, or a conduit to “trigger” a desired social effect. Herein lies both the challenge and opportunity of social media. It’s bigger than marketing. It’s also bigger than customer service. It’s about building relationships with customers that improve experiences and more importantly, teaches businesses how to re-imagine products and internal processes to better adapt to potential crises and seize new opportunities. When it comes down to it, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Foursquare, are all channels for listening, learning, and engaging. It’s what you do within each channel that builds a community around your brand. And, at the end of the day, the value of the community you build counts for everything. It’s important to understand that we cannot assume that these networks simply exist for people to lineup for our marketing messages or promotional campaigns. Nor can we assume that they’re reeling in anticipation for simple dialogue. They want value. They want recognition. They want access to exclusive information and offers. They need direction, answers and resolution. What we’re talking about here is the multidimensional makeup of consumers and how a one-sided approach to social media forces the needs for social media to expand beyond traditional marketing to socialize the various departments, lines of business, and functions to engage based on the nature of the situation or opportunity. In the same CMO study, it was revealed that marketers believe that social media has a long way to go toward integrating into the overall company strategy. On a scale of 1-7, with one being “not integrated at all” and seven being “very integrated,” 22% chose “one.” Critical functions such as service, HR, sales, R&D, product marketing and development, IR, CSR, etc. are either not engaged or are operating social media within a silo disconnected from other efforts or possibilities. The problem is that customers don’t view a company by silo, instead they see one company, one brand, and their experience in social media forms an impression that eventually contributes to their view of your brand. The first step here is to understand business priorities and objectives to assess how social media can be additive in achieving these goals. Additionally, surveying the landscape to determine other areas of interest as its specifically related to your business. • Are customers seeking help or direction? • Who are your most valuable customers and what are they sharing? • How can you use social media to acquire and retain customers? - What ideas are circulating and how can you harness user generated activity and content to innovate or adapt to better meet the needs of customers? - How can you broaden a single customer view to recognize the varying needs of customers and how your organization can organize around each circumstance? - What insights exist based on how consumers are interacting with one another? How can this intelligence inform marketing, service, products and other important business initiatives? - How can your business extend their current efforts to deliver better customer experiences and in turn more effectively unit internal collaboration and communication? Customer demands far exceed the capabilities of the marketing department. While creating a social brand is a necessary endeavor, building a social business is an investment in customer relevance now and over time. Beyond relevance, a social business fosters a culture of change that unites employees and customers and sets a foundation for meaningful and beneficial relationships. Innovation, communication, and creativity are the natural byproducts of engagement and transformation. As a social brand, we are competing for the moment. As a social business, we are competing the future in all that we do today.

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• How Mature is Your Database Change Management Process?

  - by Ben Rees

  .dbd-banner p{ font-size:0.75em; padding:0 0 10px; margin:0 } .dbd-banner p span{ color:#675C6D; } .dbd-banner p:last-child{ padding:0; } @media ALL and (max-width:640px){ .dbd-banner{ background:#f0f0f0; padding:5px; color:#333; margin-top: 5px; } } -- Database Delivery Patterns & Practices Further Reading Organization and team processes How do you get your database schema changes live, on to your production system? As your team of developers and DBAs are working on the changes to the database to support your business-critical applications, how do these updates wend their way through from dev environments, possibly to QA, hopefully through pre-production and eventually to production in a controlled, reliable and repeatable way? In this article, I describe a model we use to try and understand the different stages that customers go through as their database change management processes mature, from the very basic and manual, through to advanced continuous delivery practices. I also provide a simple chart that will help you determine “How mature is our database change management process?” This process of managing changes to the database – which all of us who have worked in application/database development have had to deal with in one form or another – is sometimes known as Database Change Management (even if we’ve never used the term ourselves). And it’s a difficult process, often painfully so. Some developers take the approach of “I’ve no idea how my changes get live – I just write the stored procedures and add columns to the tables. It’s someone else’s problem to get this stuff live. I think we’ve got a DBA somewhere who deals with it – I don’t know, I’ve never met him/her”. I know I used to work that way. I worked that way because I assumed that making the updates to production was a trivial task – how hard can it be? Pause the application for half an hour in the middle of the night, copy over the changes to the app and the database, and switch it back on again? Voila! But somehow it never seemed that easy. And it certainly was never that easy for database changes. Why? Because you can’t just overwrite the old database with the new version. Databases have a state – more specifically 4Tb of critical data built up over the last 12 years of running your business, and if your quick hotfix happened to accidentally delete that 4Tb of data, then you’re “Looking for a new role” pretty quickly after the failed release. There are a lot of other reasons why a managed database change management process is important for organisations, besides job security, not least: Frequency of releases. Many business managers are feeling the pressure to get functionality out to their users sooner, quicker and more reliably. The new book (which I highly recommend) Lean Enterprise by Jez Humble, Barry O’Reilly and Joanne Molesky provides a great discussion on how many enterprises are having to move towards a leaner, more frequent release cycle to maintain their competitive advantage. It’s no longer acceptable to release once per year, leaving your customers waiting all year for changes they desperately need (and expect) Auditing and compliance. SOX, HIPAA and other compliance frameworks have demanded that companies implement proper processes for managing changes to their databases, whether managing schema changes, making sure that the data itself is being looked after correctly or other mechanisms that provide an audit trail of changes. We’ve found, at Red Gate that we have a very wide range of customers using every possible form of database change management imaginable. Everything from “Nothing – I just fix the schema on production from my laptop when things go wrong, and write it down in my notebook” to “A full Continuous Delivery process – any change made by a dev gets checked in and recorded, fully tested (including performance tests) before a (tested) release is made available to our Release Management system, ready for live deployment!”. And everything in between of course. Because of the vast number of customers using so many different approaches we found ourselves struggling to keep on top of what everyone was doing – struggling to identify patterns in customers’ behavior. This is useful for us, because we want to try and fit the products we have to different needs – different products are relevant to different customers and we waste everyone’s time (most notably, our customers’) if we’re suggesting products that aren’t appropriate for them. If someone visited a sports store, looking to embark on a new fitness program, and the store assistant suggested the latest $10,000 multi-gym, complete with multiple weights mechanisms, dumb-bells, pull-up bars and so on, then he’s likely to lose that customer. All he needed was a pair of running shoes! To solve this issue – in an attempt to simplify how we understand our customers and our offerings – we built a model. This is a an attempt at trying to classify our customers in to some sort of model or “Customer Maturity Framework” as we rather grandly term it, which somehow simplifies our understanding of what our customers are doing. The great statistician, George Box (amongst other things, the “Box” in the Box-Jenkins time series model) gave us the famous quote: “Essentially all models are wrong, but some are useful” We’ve taken this quote to heart – we know it’s a gross over-simplification of the real world of how users work with complex legacy and new database developments. Almost nobody precisely fits in to one of our categories. But we hope it’s useful and interesting. There are actually a number of similar models that exist for more general application delivery. We’ve found these from ThoughtWorks/Forrester, from InfoQ and others, and initially we tried just taking these models and replacing the word “application” for “database”. However, we hit a problem. From talking to our customers we know that users are far less further down the road of mature database change management than they are for application development. As a simple example, no application developer, who wants to keep his/her job would develop an application for an organisation without source controlling that code. Sure, he/she might not be using an advanced Gitflow branching methodology but they’ll certainly be making sure their code gets managed in a repo somewhere with all the benefits of history, auditing and so on. But this certainly isn’t the case (yet) for the database – a very large segment of the people we speak to have no source control set up for their databases whatsoever, even at the most basic level (for example, keeping change scripts in a source control system somewhere). By the way, if this is you, Red Gate has a great whitepaper here, on the barriers people face getting a source control process implemented at their organisations. This difference in maturity is the same as you move in to areas such as continuous integration (common amongst app developers, relatively rare for database developers) and automated release management (growing amongst app developers, very rare for the database). So, when we created the model we started from scratch and biased the levels of maturity towards what we actually see amongst our customers. But, what are these stages? And what level are you? The table below describes our definitions for four levels of maturity – Baseline, Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced. As I say, this is a model – you won’t fit any of these categories perfectly, but hopefully one will ring true more than others. We’ve also created a PDF with a flow chart to help you find which of these groups most closely matches your team:  Download the Database Delivery Maturity Framework PDF here   Level D1 – Baseline Work directly on live databases Sometimes work directly in production Generate manual scripts for releases. Sometimes use a product like SQL Compare or similar to do this Any tests that we might have are run manually Level D2 – Beginner Have some ad-hoc DB version control such as manually adding upgrade scripts to a version control system Attempt is made to keep production in sync with development environments There is some documentation and planning of manual deployments Some basic automated DB testing in process Level D3 – Intermediate The database is fully version-controlled with a product like Red Gate SQL Source Control or SSDT Database environments are managed Production environment schema is reproducible from the source control system There are some automated tests Have looked at using migration scripts for difficult database refactoring cases Level D4 – Advanced Using continuous integration for database changes Build, testing and deployment of DB changes carried out through a proper database release process Fully automated tests Production system is monitored for fast feedback to developers   Does this model reflect your team at all? Where are you on this journey? We’d be very interested in knowing how you get on. We’re doing a lot of work at the moment, at Red Gate, trying to help people progress through these stages. For example, if you’re currently not source controlling your database, then this is a natural next step. If you are already source controlling your database, what about the next stage – continuous integration and automated release management? To help understand these issues, there’s a summary of the Red Gate Database Delivery learning program on our site, alongside a Patterns and Practices library here on Simple-Talk and a Training Academy section on our documentation site to help you get up and running with the tools you need to progress. All feedback is welcome and it would be great to hear where you find yourself on this journey! This article is part of our database delivery patterns & practices series on Simple Talk. Find more articles for version control, automated testing, continuous integration & deployment.

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• H12 timeout error on Heroku

  - by snowangel

  Can anyone shed some light on what's causing this timeout error on Heroku (at 2012-07-08T08:58:33+00:00)? The docs say that it's because of some long running process. I've set config.assets.initialize_on_precompile = false in config/application.rb. EmBP-2:bc Emma$ heroku restart Restarting processes... done EmBP-2:bc Emma$ heroku logs --tail 2012-07-08T08:47:21+00:00 heroku[nginx]: 82.69.50.215 - - [08/Jul/2012:08:47:21 +0000] "GET /assets/application.js HTTP/1.1" 200 311723 "https://codicology.co.uk/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_8) AppleWebKit/534.52.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1.2 Safari/534.52.7" codicology.co.uk 2012-07-08T08:47:21+00:00 heroku[nginx]: 127.0.0.1 - - [08/Jul/2012:08:47:21 +0000] "GET /assets/application.js HTTP/1.0" 200 1311615 "https://codicology.co.uk/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_8) AppleWebKit/534.52.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1.2 Safari/534.52.7" codicology.co.uk 2012-07-08T08:51:32+00:00 heroku[slugc]: Slug compilation started 2012-07-08T08:54:05+00:00 heroku[api]: Release v145 created by [email protected] 2012-07-08T08:54:05+00:00 heroku[api]: Deploy 8814b2f by [email protected] 2012-07-08T08:54:05+00:00 heroku[web.1]: State changed from up to starting 2012-07-08T08:54:06+00:00 heroku[slugc]: Slug compilation finished 2012-07-08T08:54:09+00:00 heroku[web.1]: Stopping all processes with SIGTERM 2012-07-08T08:54:09+00:00 heroku[worker.1]: Stopping all processes with SIGTERM 2012-07-08T08:54:09+00:00 heroku[web.1]: Starting process with command `bundle exec unicorn -p 22429 -c ./config/unicorn.rb` 2012-07-08T08:54:10+00:00 app[worker.1]: [Worker(host:2046e0bf-e109-40f2-abdb-10f69d224483 pid:1)] Exiting... 2012-07-08T08:54:11+00:00 app[web.1]: I, [2012-07-08T08:54:11.320616 #1] INFO -- : reaped #<Process::Status: pid 8 exit 0> worker=1 2012-07-08T08:54:11+00:00 app[web.1]: I, [2012-07-08T08:54:11.376765 #1] INFO -- : master complete 2012-07-08T08:54:11+00:00 app[web.1]: I, [2012-07-08T08:54:11.376272 #1] INFO -- : reaped #<Process::Status: pid 5 exit 0> worker=0 2012-07-08T08:54:12+00:00 app[web.1]: I, [2012-07-08T08:54:12.011695 #1] INFO -- : worker=0 spawning... 2012-07-08T08:54:12+00:00 app[web.1]: I, [2012-07-08T08:54:12.011386 #1] INFO -- : listening on addr=0.0.0.0:22429 fd=3 2012-07-08T08:54:12+00:00 app[web.1]: I, [2012-07-08T08:54:12.017917 #5] INFO -- : worker=0 spawned pid=5 2012-07-08T08:54:12+00:00 app[web.1]: I, [2012-07-08T08:54:12.019309 #1] INFO -- : master process ready 2012-07-08T08:54:12+00:00 app[web.1]: I, [2012-07-08T08:54:12.018250 #5] INFO -- : Refreshing Gem list 2012-07-08T08:54:12+00:00 app[web.1]: I, [2012-07-08T08:54:12.016768 #1] INFO -- : worker=1 spawning... 2012-07-08T08:54:12+00:00 app[web.1]: I, [2012-07-08T08:54:12.020863 #8] INFO -- : Refreshing Gem list 2012-07-08T08:54:12+00:00 app[web.1]: I, [2012-07-08T08:54:12.020617 #8] INFO -- : worker=1 spawned pid=8 2012-07-08T08:54:12+00:00 app[worker.1]: SQL (2.9ms) UPDATE "delayed_jobs" SET locked_by = null, locked_at = null WHERE (locked_by = 'host:2046e0bf-e109-40f2-abdb-10f69d224483 pid:1') 2012-07-08T08:54:12+00:00 heroku[web.1]: Process exited with status 0 2012-07-08T08:54:13+00:00 heroku[web.1]: State changed from starting to up 2012-07-08T08:54:14+00:00 heroku[worker.1]: Process exited with status 0 2012-07-08T08:54:14+00:00 heroku[worker.1]: State changed from up to down 2012-07-08T08:54:14+00:00 heroku[worker.1]: State changed from down to starting 2012-07-08T08:54:20+00:00 heroku[worker.1]: Starting process with command `bundle exec rake jobs:work` 2012-07-08T08:54:20+00:00 heroku[worker.1]: State changed from starting to up 2012-07-08T08:54:28+00:00 app[web.1]: DEPRECATION WARNING: You have Rails 2.3-style plugins in vendor/plugins! Support for these plugins will be removed in Rails 4.0. Move them out and bundle them in your Gemfile, or fold them in to your app as lib/myplugin/* and config/initializers/myplugin.rb. See the release notes for more on this: http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2012/1/4/rails-3-2-0-rc2-has-been-released. (called from <top (required)> at /app/config/environment.rb:6) 2012-07-08T08:54:28+00:00 app[web.1]: DEPRECATION WARNING: You have Rails 2.3-style plugins in vendor/plugins! Support for these plugins will be removed in Rails 4.0. Move them out and bundle them in your Gemfile, or fold them in to your app as lib/myplugin/* and config/initializers/myplugin.rb. See the release notes for more on this: http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2012/1/4/rails-3-2-0-rc2-has-been-released. (called from <top (required)> at /app/config/environment.rb:6) 2012-07-08T08:54:28+00:00 app[web.1]: DEPRECATION WARNING: You have Rails 2.3-style plugins in vendor/plugins! Support for these plugins will be removed in Rails 4.0. Move them out and bundle them in your Gemfile, or fold them in to your app as lib/myplugin/* and config/initializers/myplugin.rb. See the release notes for more on this: http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2012/1/4/rails-3-2-0-rc2-has-been-released. (called from <top (required)> at /app/config/environment.rb:6) 2012-07-08T08:54:28+00:00 app[web.1]: DEPRECATION WARNING: You have Rails 2.3-style plugins in vendor/plugins! Support for these plugins will be removed in Rails 4.0. Move them out and bundle them in your Gemfile, or fold them in to your app as lib/myplugin/* and config/initializers/myplugin.rb. See the release notes for more on this: http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2012/1/4/rails-3-2-0-rc2-has-been-released. (called from <top (required)> at /app/config/environment.rb:6) 2012-07-08T08:54:33+00:00 app[web.1]: Starting the New Relic Agent. 2012-07-08T08:54:33+00:00 app[web.1]: Starting the New Relic Agent. 2012-07-08T08:54:33+00:00 app[web.1]: Installed New Relic Browser Monitoring middleware 2012-07-08T08:54:33+00:00 app[web.1]: Installed New Relic Browser Monitoring middleware 2012-07-08T08:54:34+00:00 app[web.1]: 2012-07-08T08:54:34+00:00 app[web.1]: 2012-07-08T08:54:34+00:00 app[web.1]: [DEVISE] Devise.use_salt_as_remember_token is deprecated and has no effect. Please remove it. 2012-07-08T08:54:34+00:00 app[web.1]: 2012-07-08T08:54:34+00:00 app[web.1]: [DEVISE] Devise.use_salt_as_remember_token is deprecated and has no effect. Please remove it. 2012-07-08T08:54:34+00:00 app[web.1]: 2012-07-08T08:54:34+00:00 app[web.1]: /app/vendor/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/gems/actionpack-3.2.3/lib/action_dispatch/http/mime_type.rb:102: warning: already initialized constant XLSX 2012-07-08T08:54:34+00:00 app[web.1]: /app/vendor/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/gems/actionpack-3.2.3/lib/action_dispatch/http/mime_type.rb:102: warning: already initialized constant PDF 2012-07-08T08:54:34+00:00 app[web.1]: /app/vendor/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/gems/actionpack-3.2.3/lib/action_dispatch/http/mime_type.rb:102: warning: already initialized constant PDF 2012-07-08T08:54:34+00:00 app[web.1]: /app/vendor/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/gems/actionpack-3.2.3/lib/action_dispatch/http/mime_type.rb:102: warning: already initialized constant XLSX 2012-07-08T08:54:34+00:00 app[web.1]: /app/vendor/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/gems/actionpack-3.2.3/lib/action_dispatch/http/mime_type.rb:102: warning: already initialized constant PDF 2012-07-08T08:54:34+00:00 app[web.1]: /app/vendor/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/gems/actionpack-3.2.3/lib/action_dispatch/http/mime_type.rb:102: warning: already initialized constant PDF 2012-07-08T08:54:41+00:00 app[worker.1]: DEPRECATION WARNING: You have Rails 2.3-style plugins in vendor/plugins! Support for these plugins will be removed in Rails 4.0. Move them out and bundle them in your Gemfile, or fold them in to your app as lib/myplugin/* and config/initializers/myplugin.rb. See the release notes for more on this: http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2012/1/4/rails-3-2-0-rc2-has-been-released. (called from <top (required)> at /app/Rakefile:10) 2012-07-08T08:54:41+00:00 app[worker.1]: DEPRECATION WARNING: You have Rails 2.3-style plugins in vendor/plugins! Support for these plugins will be removed in Rails 4.0. Move them out and bundle them in your Gemfile, or fold them in to your app as lib/myplugin/* and config/initializers/myplugin.rb. See the release notes for more on this: http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2012/1/4/rails-3-2-0-rc2-has-been-released. (called from <top (required)> at /app/Rakefile:10) 2012-07-08T08:54:45+00:00 app[web.1]: [paperclip] Duplicate URL for csv with :s3_eu_url. This will clash with attachment defined in Importadvancecsv class 2012-07-08T08:54:45+00:00 app[web.1]: [paperclip] Duplicate URL for csv with :s3_eu_url. This will clash with attachment defined in Importpaymentcsv class 2012-07-08T08:54:45+00:00 app[web.1]: [paperclip] Duplicate URL for csv with :s3_eu_url. This will clash with attachment defined in Importpurchasecsv class 2012-07-08T08:54:45+00:00 app[web.1]: [paperclip] Duplicate URL for csv with :s3_eu_url. This will clash with attachment defined in Importadvancecsv class 2012-07-08T08:54:45+00:00 app[web.1]: [paperclip] Duplicate URL for csv with :s3_eu_url. This will clash with attachment defined in Importpaymentcsv class 2012-07-08T08:54:45+00:00 app[web.1]: [paperclip] Duplicate URL for csv with :s3_eu_url. This will clash with attachment defined in Importpurchasecsv class 2012-07-08T08:54:45+00:00 app[web.1]: [paperclip] Duplicate URL for csv with :s3_eu_url. This will clash with attachment defined in Importsalecsv class 2012-07-08T08:54:46+00:00 app[web.1]: [paperclip] Duplicate URL for csv with :s3_eu_url. This will clash with attachment defined in Profitarchive class 2012-07-08T08:54:46+00:00 app[web.1]: [paperclip] Duplicate URL for csv with :s3_eu_url. This will clash with attachment defined in Importsalecsv class 2012-07-08T08:54:46+00:00 app[web.1]: [paperclip] Duplicate URL for csv with :s3_eu_url. This will clash with attachment defined in Profitarchive class 2012-07-08T08:54:46+00:00 app[web.1]: [paperclip] Duplicate URL for xml with :s3_eu_url. This will clash with attachment defined in Onixarchive class 2012-07-08T08:54:47+00:00 app[web.1]: [paperclip] Duplicate URL for xml with :s3_eu_url. This will clash with attachment defined in Onixarchive class 2012-07-08T08:54:48+00:00 app[web.1]: I, [2012-07-08T08:54:48.467693 #8] INFO -- : worker=1 ready 2012-07-08T08:54:48+00:00 app[web.1]: I, [2012-07-08T08:54:48.823800 #5] INFO -- : worker=0 ready 2012-07-08T08:54:48+00:00 app[worker.1]: Starting the New Relic Agent. 2012-07-08T08:54:48+00:00 app[worker.1]: New Relic Agent not running. 2012-07-08T08:54:48+00:00 app[worker.1]: [Worker(host:1eabe514-7ec9-43b0-835b-ff3bd23bc266 pid:1)] New Relic Ruby Agent Monitoring DJ worker host:1eabe514-7ec9-43b0-835b-ff3bd23bc266 pid:1 2012-07-08T08:54:48+00:00 app[worker.1]: Installed New Relic Browser Monitoring middleware 2012-07-08T08:54:49+00:00 app[worker.1]: [Worker(host:1eabe514-7ec9-43b0-835b-ff3bd23bc266 pid:1)] Starting job worker 2012-07-08T08:57:54+00:00 heroku[web.1]: State changed from up to starting 2012-07-08T08:57:56+00:00 heroku[web.1]: Stopping all processes with SIGTERM 2012-07-08T08:57:57+00:00 app[web.1]: I, [2012-07-08T08:57:57.047386 #1] INFO -- : reaped #<Process::Status: pid 5 exit 0> worker=0 2012-07-08T08:57:57+00:00 app[web.1]: I, [2012-07-08T08:57:57.047753 #1] INFO -- : reaped #<Process::Status: pid 8 exit 0> worker=1 2012-07-08T08:57:57+00:00 app[web.1]: I, [2012-07-08T08:57:57.047999 #1] INFO -- : master complete 2012-07-08T08:57:57+00:00 heroku[worker.1]: Stopping all processes with SIGTERM 2012-07-08T08:57:58+00:00 heroku[web.1]: Process exited with status 0 2012-07-08T08:57:58+00:00 app[worker.1]: [Worker(host:1eabe514-7ec9-43b0-835b-ff3bd23bc266 pid:1)] Exiting... 2012-07-08T08:57:59+00:00 heroku[web.1]: Starting process with command `bundle exec unicorn -p 29766 -c ./config/unicorn.rb` 2012-07-08T08:58:01+00:00 app[worker.1]: SQL (27.9ms) UPDATE "delayed_jobs" SET locked_by = null, locked_at = null WHERE (locked_by = 'host:1eabe514-7ec9-43b0-835b-ff3bd23bc266 pid:1') 2012-07-08T08:58:02+00:00 app[web.1]: I, [2012-07-08T08:58:02.070527 #1] INFO -- : listening on addr=0.0.0.0:29766 fd=3 2012-07-08T08:58:02+00:00 app[web.1]: I, [2012-07-08T08:58:02.070782 #1] INFO -- : worker=0 spawning... 2012-07-08T08:58:02+00:00 app[web.1]: I, [2012-07-08T08:58:02.074498 #1] INFO -- : worker=1 spawning... 2012-07-08T08:58:02+00:00 app[web.1]: I, [2012-07-08T08:58:02.075702 #1] INFO -- : master process ready 2012-07-08T08:58:02+00:00 app[web.1]: I, [2012-07-08T08:58:02.076732 #5] INFO -- : worker=0 spawned pid=5 2012-07-08T08:58:02+00:00 app[web.1]: I, [2012-07-08T08:58:02.076957 #5] INFO -- : Refreshing Gem list 2012-07-08T08:58:02+00:00 app[web.1]: I, [2012-07-08T08:58:02.089022 #8] INFO -- : worker=1 spawned pid=8 2012-07-08T08:58:02+00:00 app[web.1]: I, [2012-07-08T08:58:02.089299 #8] INFO -- : Refreshing Gem list 2012-07-08T08:58:02+00:00 heroku[worker.1]: Process exited with status 0 2012-07-08T08:58:02+00:00 heroku[worker.1]: State changed from up to down 2012-07-08T08:58:02+00:00 heroku[worker.1]: State changed from down to starting 2012-07-08T08:58:02+00:00 heroku[web.1]: State changed from starting to up 2012-07-08T08:58:10+00:00 heroku[worker.1]: Starting process with command `bundle exec rake jobs:work` 2012-07-08T08:58:11+00:00 heroku[worker.1]: State changed from starting to up 2012-07-08T08:58:28+00:00 app[worker.1]: DEPRECATION WARNING: You have Rails 2.3-style plugins in vendor/plugins! Support for these plugins will be removed in Rails 4.0. Move them out and bundle them in your Gemfile, or fold them in to your app as lib/myplugin/* and config/initializers/myplugin.rb. See the release notes for more on this: http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2012/1/4/rails-3-2-0-rc2-has-been-released. (called from <top (required)> at /app/Rakefile:10) 2012-07-08T08:58:28+00:00 app[worker.1]: DEPRECATION WARNING: You have Rails 2.3-style plugins in vendor/plugins! Support for these plugins will be removed in Rails 4.0. Move them out and bundle them in your Gemfile, or fold them in to your app as lib/myplugin/* and config/initializers/myplugin.rb. See the release notes for more on this: http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2012/1/4/rails-3-2-0-rc2-has-been-released. (called from <top (required)> at /app/Rakefile:10) 2012-07-08T08:58:33+00:00 heroku[router]: Error H12 (Request timeout) -> GET codicology.co.uk/ dyno=web.1 queue= wait= service=30000ms status=503 bytes=0 2012-07-08T08:58:33+00:00 heroku[nginx]: 127.0.0.1 - - [08/Jul/2012:08:58:33 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 503 601 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_8) AppleWebKit/534.52.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1.2 Safari/534.52.7" codicology.co.uk 2012-07-08T08:58:33+00:00 heroku[nginx]: 82.69.50.215 - - [08/Jul/2012:08:58:33 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 503 601 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_8) AppleWebKit/534.52.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1.2 Safari/534.52.7" codicology.co.uk 2012-07-08T08:58:42+00:00 app[worker.1]: New Relic Agent not running. 2012-07-08T08:58:42+00:00 app[worker.1]: [Worker(host:b5fa9243-6f9b-4de4-8f64-adab767fe4b0 pid:1)] New Relic Ruby Agent Monitoring DJ worker host:b5fa9243-6f9b-4de4-8f64-adab767fe4b0 pid:1 2012-07-08T08:58:42+00:00 app[worker.1]: Starting the New Relic Agent. 2012-07-08T08:58:42+00:00 app[worker.1]: Installed New Relic Browser Monitoring middleware 2012-07-08T08:58:43+00:00 app[worker.1]: [Worker(host:b5fa9243-6f9b-4de4-8f64-adab767fe4b0 pid:1)] Starting job worker 2012-07-08T08:58:56+00:00 app[web.1]: DEPRECATION WARNING: You have Rails 2.3-style plugins in vendor/plugins! Support for these plugins will be removed in Rails 4.0. Move them out and bundle them in your Gemfile, or fold them in to your app as lib/myplugin/* and config/initializers/myplugin.rb. See the release notes for more on this: http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2012/1/4/rails-3-2-0-rc2-has-been-released. (called from <top (required)> at /app/config/environment.rb:6) 2012-07-08T08:58:56+00:00 app[web.1]: DEPRECATION WARNING: You have Rails 2.3-style plugins in vendor/plugins! Support for these plugins will be removed in Rails 4.0. Move them out and bundle them in your Gemfile, or fold them in to your app as lib/myplugin/* and config/initializers/myplugin.rb. See the release notes for more on this: http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2012/1/4/rails-3-2-0-rc2-has-been-released. (called from <top (required)> at /app/config/environment.rb:6) 2012-07-08T08:58:56+00:00 app[web.1]: DEPRECATION WARNING: You have Rails 2.3-style plugins in vendor/plugins! Support for these plugins will be removed in Rails 4.0. Move them out and bundle them in your Gemfile, or fold them in to your app as lib/myplugin/* and config/initializers/myplugin.rb. See the release notes for more on this: http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2012/1/4/rails-3-2-0-rc2-has-been-released. (called from <top (required)> at /app/config/environment.rb:6) 2012-07-08T08:58:56+00:00 app[web.1]: DEPRECATION WARNING: You have Rails 2.3-style plugins in vendor/plugins! Support for these plugins will be removed in Rails 4.0. Move them out and bundle them in your Gemfile, or fold them in to your app as lib/myplugin/* and config/initializers/myplugin.rb. See the release notes for more on this: http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2012/1/4/rails-3-2-0-rc2-has-been-released. (called from <top (required)> at /app/config/environment.rb:6) 2012-07-08T08:59:02+00:00 app[web.1]: Starting the New Relic Agent. 2012-07-08T08:59:02+00:00 app[web.1]: Installed New Relic Browser Monitoring middleware 2012-07-08T08:59:02+00:00 app[web.1]: Starting the New Relic Agent. 2012-07-08T08:59:02+00:00 app[web.1]: Installed New Relic Browser Monitoring middleware 2012-07-08T08:59:03+00:00 app[web.1]: 2012-07-08T08:59:03+00:00 app[web.1]: [DEVISE] Devise.use_salt_as_remember_token is deprecated and has no effect. Please remove it. 2012-07-08T08:59:03+00:00 app[web.1]: 2012-07-08T08:59:03+00:00 app[web.1]: 2012-07-08T08:59:03+00:00 app[web.1]: [DEVISE] Devise.use_salt_as_remember_token is deprecated and has no effect. Please remove it. 2012-07-08T08:59:03+00:00 app[web.1]: 2012-07-08T08:59:04+00:00 app[web.1]: /app/vendor/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/gems/actionpack-3.2.3/lib/action_dispatch/http/mime_type.rb:102: warning: already initialized constant XLSX 2012-07-08T08:59:04+00:00 app[web.1]: /app/vendor/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/gems/actionpack-3.2.3/lib/action_dispatch/http/mime_type.rb:102: warning: already initialized constant PDF 2012-07-08T08:59:04+00:00 app[web.1]: /app/vendor/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/gems/actionpack-3.2.3/lib/action_dispatch/http/mime_type.rb:102: warning: already initialized constant PDF 2012-07-08T08:59:04+00:00 app[web.1]: /app/vendor/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/gems/actionpack-3.2.3/lib/action_dispatch/http/mime_type.rb:102: warning: already initialized constant XLSX 2012-07-08T08:59:04+00:00 app[web.1]: /app/vendor/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/gems/actionpack-3.2.3/lib/action_dispatch/http/mime_type.rb:102: warning: already initialized constant PDF 2012-07-08T08:59:04+00:00 app[web.1]: /app/vendor/bundle/ruby/1.9.1/gems/actionpack-3.2.3/lib/action_dispatch/http/mime_type.rb:102: warning: already initialized constant PDF 2012-07-08T08:59:22+00:00 app[web.1]: [paperclip] Duplicate URL for csv with :s3_eu_url. This will clash with attachment defined in Importadvancecsv class 2012-07-08T08:59:22+00:00 app[web.1]: [paperclip] Duplicate URL for csv with :s3_eu_url. This will clash with attachment defined in Importpaymentcsv class 2012-07-08T08:59:22+00:00 app[web.1]: [paperclip] Duplicate URL for csv with :s3_eu_url. This will clash with attachment defined in Importpurchasecsv class 2012-07-08T08:59:22+00:00 app[web.1]: [paperclip] Duplicate URL for csv with :s3_eu_url. This will clash with attachment defined in Importsalecsv class 2012-07-08T08:59:22+00:00 app[web.1]: [paperclip] Duplicate URL for csv with :s3_eu_url. This will clash with attachment defined in Profitarchive class 2012-07-08T08:59:23+00:00 app[web.1]: [paperclip] Duplicate URL for csv with :s3_eu_url. This will clash with attachment defined in Importadvancecsv class 2012-07-08T08:59:23+00:00 app[web.1]: [paperclip] Duplicate URL for csv with :s3_eu_url. This will clash with attachment defined in Importpaymentcsv class 2012-07-08T08:59:23+00:00 app[web.1]: [paperclip] Duplicate URL for csv with :s3_eu_url. This will clash with attachment defined in Importpurchasecsv class 2012-07-08T08:59:23+00:00 app[web.1]: [paperclip] Duplicate URL for csv with :s3_eu_url. This will clash with attachment defined in Importsalecsv class 2012-07-08T08:59:23+00:00 app[web.1]: [paperclip] Duplicate URL for csv with :s3_eu_url. This will clash with attachment defined in Profitarchive class 2012-07-08T08:59:23+00:00 app[web.1]: [paperclip] Duplicate URL for xml with :s3_eu_url. This will clash with attachment defined in Onixarchive class 2012-07-08T08:59:24+00:00 app[web.1]: [paperclip] Duplicate URL for xml with :s3_eu_url. This will clash with attachment defined in Onixarchive class 2012-07-08T08:59:25+00:00 app[web.1]: I, [2012-07-08T08:59:25.555052 #5] INFO -- : worker=0 ready 2012-07-08T08:59:25+00:00 app[web.1]: 2012-07-08T08:59:25+00:00 app[web.1]: 2012-07-08T08:59:25+00:00 app[web.1]: Started GET "/" for 82.69.50.215 at 2012-07-08 08:59:25 +0000 2012-07-08T08:59:26+00:00 app[web.1]: Processing by PagesController#home as HTML 2012-07-08T08:59:26+00:00 app[web.1]: I, [2012-07-08T08:59:26.043501 #8] INFO -- : worker=1 ready 2012-07-08T08:59:26+00:00 app[web.1]: Rendered pages/home.html.haml within layouts/application (5.7ms) 2012-07-08T08:59:26+00:00 app[web.1]: (1.1ms) SELECT COUNT(*) FROM "delayed_jobs" 2012-07-08T08:59:26+00:00 app[web.1]: Rendered layouts/_header.html.erb (4.2ms) 2012-07-08T08:59:26+00:00 app[web.1]: Rendered layouts/_footer.html.haml (1.4ms) 2012-07-08T08:59:26+00:00 app[web.1]: Completed 200 OK in 326ms (Views: 258.4ms | ActiveRecord: 65.2ms)

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• BI and EPM Landscape

  - by frank.buytendijk

  Most of my blog entries are not about Oracle products, and most of the latest entries are about topics such as IT strategy and enterprise architecture. However, given my background at Gartner, and at Hyperion, I still keep a close eye on what's happening in BI and EPM. One important reason is that I believe there is significant competitive value for organizations getting BI and EPM right. Davenport and Harris wrote a great book called "Competing on Analytics", in which they explain this in a very engaging and convincing way. At Oracle we have defined the concept of "management excellence" that outlines what organizations have to do to keep or create a competitive edge. It's not only in the business processes, but also in the management processes. Recently, Gartner published its 2009 market shares report for BI, Analytics, and Performance Management. Gartner identifies the same three segments that Oracle does: (1) CPM Suites (Oracle refers not to Corporate Performance Management, but Enterprise Performance Management), (2) BI Platform, and (3) Analytic Applications & Performance Management. According to Gartner, Oracle's share is increasing with revenue growing by more than 5%. Oracle currently holds the #2 market share position in the overall BI Software space based on total BI software revenue. Source: Gartner Dataquest Market Share: Business Intelligence, Analytics and Performance Management Software, Worldwide, 2009; Dan Sommer and Bhavish Sood; Apr 2010 Gartner has ranked Oracle as #1 in the CPM Suites worldwide sub-segment based on total BI software revenue, and Oracle is gaining share with revenue growing by more than 6% in 2009. Source: Gartner Dataquest Market Share: Business Intelligence, Analytics and Performance Management Software, Worldwide, 2009; Dan Sommer and Bhavish Sood; Apr 2010 The Analytic Applications & Performance Management subsegment is more fragmented. It has for instance a very large "Other Vendors" category. The largest player traditionally is SAS. Analytic Applications are often meant for very specific analytic needs in very specific industry sectors. According to Gartner, from the large vendors, again Oracle is the one who is gaining the most share - with total BI software revenue growth close to 15% in 2009. Source: Gartner Dataquest Market Share: Business Intelligence, Analytics and Performance Management Software, Worldwide, 2009; Dan Sommer and Bhavish Sood; Apr 2010 I believe this shows Oracle's integration strategy is working. In fact, integration actually is the innovation. BI and EPM have been silo technology platforms and application suites way too long. Management and measuring performance should be very closely linked to strategy execution, which is the domain of other business application areas such as CRM, ERP, and Supply Chain. BI and EPM are not about "making better decisions" anymore, but are part of a tangible action framework. Furthermore, organizations are getting more serious about ecosystem thinking. They do not evaluate single tools anymore for different application areas, but buy into a complete ecosystem of hardware, software and services. The best ecosystem is the one that offers the most options, in environments where the uncertainty is high and investments are hard to reverse. The key to successfully managing such an environment is middleware, and BI and EPM become increasingly middleware intensive. In fact, given the horizontal nature of BI and EPM, sitting on top of all business functions and applications, you could call them "upperware". Many are active in the BI and EPM space. Big players can offer a lot, but there are always many areas that are covered by specialty vendors. Oracle openly embraces those technologies within the ecosystem as well. Complete, open and integrated still accurately describes the Oracle product strategy. frank

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• Running ODI 11gR1 Standalone Agent as a Windows Service

  - by fx.nicolas

  ODI 11gR1 introduces the capability to use OPMN to start and protect agent processes as services. Setting up the OPMN agent is covered in the following post and extensively in the ODI Installation Guide. Unfortunately, OPMN is not installed along with ODI, and ODI 10g users who are really at ease with the old Java Wrapper are a little bit puzzled by OPMN, and ask: "How can I simply set up the agent as a service?". Well... although the Tanuki Service Wrapper is no longer available for free, and the agentservice.bat script lost, you can switch to another service wrapper for the same result. For example, Yet Another Java Service Wrapper (YAJSW) is a good candidate. To configure a standalone agent with YAJSW: download YAJSW Uncompress the zip to a folder (called %YAJSW% in this example) Configure, start and test your standalone agent. Make sure that this agent is loaded with all the required libraries and drivers, as the service will not load dynamically the drivers added subsequently in the /drivers directory. Retrieve the PID of the agent process: Open Task Manager. Select View Select Columns Select the PID (Process Identifier) column, then click OK In the list of processes, find the java.exe process corresponding to your agent, and note its PID. Open a command line prompt in %YAJSW%/bat and run: genConfig.bat <your_pid> This command generates a wrapper configuration file for the agent. This file is called %YAJSW%/conf/wrapper.conf. Stop your agent. Edit the wrapper.conf file and modify the configuration of your service. For example, modify the display name and description of the service as shown in the example below. Important: Make sure to escape the commas in the ODI encoded passwords with a backslash! In the example below, the ODI_SUPERVISOR_ENCODED_PASS contained a comma character which had to be prefixed with a backslash. # Title to use when running as a console wrapper.console.title=\"AGENT\" #******************************************************************** # Wrapper Windows Service and Posix Daemon Properties #******************************************************************** # Name of the service wrapper.ntservice.name=AGENT_113 # Display name of the service wrapper.ntservice.displayname=ODI Agent # Description of the service wrapper.ntservice.description=Oracle Data Integrator Agent 11gR3 (11.1.1.3.0) ... # Escape the comma in the password with a backslash. wrapper.app.parameter.7 = -ODI_SUPERVISOR_ENCODED_PASS=fJya.vR5kvNcu9TtV\,jVZEt Execute your wrapped agent as console by calling in the command line prompt: runConsole.bat Check that your agent is running, and test it again.This command starts the agent with the configuration but does not install it yet as a service. To Install the agent as service call installService.bat From that point, you can view, start and stop the agent via the windows services. Et voilà ! Two final notes: - To modify the agent configuration, you must uninstall/reinstall the service. For this purpose, run the uninstallService.bat to uninstall it and play again the process above. - To be able to uninstall the agent service, you should keep a backup of the wrapper.conf file. This is particularly important when starting several services with the wrapper.

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• Challenges and Opportunities to Drive Change in the Healthcare System Explored at America’s Health Insurance Plans Exchange Conference and Institute 2013

  - by elaine blog

  The program theme at the June America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) Exchange Conference and AHIP’s Institute 2013 was Transforming Our Health Care System: Navigating and Succeeding in the New Marketplace.  Topics included care delivery transformation, innovation for a new healthcare eco system, Health Insurance Exchanges, the nexus of consumerism, retail and healthcare, driving value through improved operations and leveraging technology, data and innovation to transform care. Oracle participated as a sponsor of both conferences, signaling the significant investment and activity Oracle continues to make in helping health plans, providers and government agencies become more efficient and more relevant in the healthcare market place. AHIP is a national trade association representing the health insurance industry. AHIP’s members provide health and supplemental benefits to more than 200 million Americans through employer-sponsored coverage, the individual insurance market and public programs such as Medicare and Medicaid.   AHIP advocates for public policies that expand access to affordable health care. Health plans are focusing on the Health Insurance Exchanges and the opportunities they offer to provide better access and higher quality healthcare.  With the opportunities come operational challenges to implementation and innovative technology solutions to consider.   At the Exchange Conference, Oracle hosted a breakfast symposium on “Strategies for Success:  Driving Business Transformation in the Growing Health Insurance Exchange Market”. With Health Insurance Exchanges as catalysts for change, attendees learned about how to achieve integration within an Exchange and deploy new business strategies to support health reform initiatives. Discussion covered steps and processes to successfully establish and implement enrollment systems, quote to card activities, program pricing, claims billing, automated claims processing and new customer service tools. Piyush Pushkar, COO of Benefitalign, an Oracle partner that provides solutions to adopt innovative business models for retail, HIX, consumer-centric health plan and benefits administration, spoke on the state of the Exchanges in the U.S. and the activities health plans are engaged in to support individuals entering the healthcare system, including sales automation, member enrollment automation/portals and integration strategies with the Exchanges. The Oracle and Benefitalign partnership allows seamless integration between a health plan enrollment solution with the HIX individual market and allows for the health plan to customize and characterize the offerings available to the HIX that may or may not be available through other channels.  This approach can benefit the health plan through separation of interests, but also because some state-run HIXs require such separation. Janice W. Young, Program Director, Payer IT Strategies, IDC Health Insights, reviewed a survey of health plans on their investment priorities for this last year as well as this year.  She also identified the 2013-2015 strategies of go/get to market with front end and compliance investments; leveraging existing business processes and internal technologies; and establishing best practices.  Of key interest to the audience was a reform era payer solutions platform overview mapping technologies to support the business operations. David Bonham of the Oracle Health Insurance organization moderated the panel and spoke on Oracle’s presence in healthcare and products for payers to help them drive efficiencies and gain a competitive advantage in an ever changing market. Oracle serves healthcare stakeholders with applications such as billing, rating and underwriting, analytics, CRM, enrollment, and products for processing of health insurance claims including pricing and benefits administration, as well as payment of providers through alternative, non-fee for service reimbursement methods. Oracle in Healthcare….Did you know? More than 80 healthcare payers run Oracle applications. More than 300 leading healthcare providers run Oracle applications. 10 out of the top 12 fortune Global 500 healthcare organizations run Oracle applications. For more information on Oracle solutions for healthcare payers, please visit oracle.com/insurance or these individual solution pages: Oracle Health Insurance Components Oracle Insurance Insbridge Rating and Underwriting Oracle Insurance Revenue Management and Billing Oracle Documaker Oracle Healthcare Oracle CRM Related Resources Webcast On Demand: Strategies for Success: Driving Business Transformation in the Growing Health Insurance Exchange Market Strategy Brief: Executing on the Individual Mandate: Opportunities and Challenges for Healthcare Payers White Paper: White paper: Navigating Alternative Provider Reimbursement Models of the Future Strategy Brief: Enterprise Rating Agility Improves Payer Response to Healthcare Reform Podcast: Technology Implications of Healthcare Reform Don’t forget to keep up with us year-round: Facebook: www.facebook.com/oracleinsurance Twitter: www.twitter.com/oracleinsurance YouTube: www.youtube.com/oracleinsurance

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• Bancassurers Seek IT Solutions to Support Distribution Model

  - by [email protected]

  Oracle Insurance's director of marketing for EMEA, John Sinclair, attended the third annual Bancassurance Forum in Vienna last month. He reports that the outlook for bancassurance in EMEA remains positive, despite changing market conditions that have led a number of bancassurers to re-examine their business models. Vienna is at the crossroads between mature Western European markets, where bancassurance is now an established best practice, and more recently tapped Eastern European markets that offer the greatest growth potential. Attendance at the Bancassurance Forum was good, with 87 bancassurance attendees, most in very senior positions in the industry. The conference provided the chance for a lively discussion among bancassurers looking to keep abreast of the latest trends in one of Europe's most successful distribution models for insurance. Even under normal business conditions, there is a great demand for best practice sharing within the industry as there is no standard formula for success.  Each company has to chart its own course and choose the strategies for sales, products development and the structure of ownership that make sense for their business, and as soon as they get it right bancassurers need to adapt the mix to keep up with ever changing regulations, completion and economic conditions.  To optimize the overall relationship between banking and insurance for mutual benefit, a balance needs to be struck between potentially conflicting interests. The banking side of the house is looking for greater wallet share from its customers and the ability to increase profitability by bundling insurance products with higher margins - especially in light of the recent economic crisis, where margins for traditional banking products are low and completion high. The insurance side of the house seeks access to new customers through a complementary distribution channel that is efficient and cost effective. To make the relationship work, it is important that both sides of the same house forge strategic and long term relationships - irrespective of whether the underlying business model is supported by a distribution agreement, cross-ownership or other forms of capital structure. However, this third annual conference was not held under normal business conditions. The conference took place in challenging, yet interesting times. ING's forced spinoff of its insurance operations under pressure by the EU Commission and the troubling losses suffered by Allianz as a result of the Dresdner bank sale were fresh in everyone's mind. One year after markets crashed, there is now enough hindsight to better understand the implications for bancassurance and best practices that are emerging to deal with them. The loan-driven business that has been crucial to bancassurance up till now evaporated during the crisis, leaving bancassurers grappling with how to change their overall strategy from a loan-driven to a more diversified model.  Attendees came to the conference to learn what strategies were working - not only to cope with the market shift, but to take advantage of it as markets pick up. Over the course of 14 customer case studies and numerous analyst presentations, topical issues ranging from getting the business model right to the impact on capital structuring of Solvency II were debated openly. Many speakers alluded to the need to specifically design insurance products with the banking distribution channel in mind, which brings with it specific requirements such as a high degree of standardization to achieve efficiency and reduce training costs. Moreover, products must be engineered to suit end consumers who consider banks a one-stop shop. The importance of IT to the successful implementation of bancassurance strategies was a theme that surfaced regularly throughout the conference.  The cross-selling opportunity - that will ultimately determine the success or failure of any bancassurance model - can only be fully realized through a flexible IT architecture that enables banking and insurance processes to be integrated and presented to front-line staff through a common interface. However, the reality is that most bancassurers have legacy IT systems, which constrain the businesses' ability to implement new strategies to maintaining competitiveness in turbulent times. My colleague Glenn Lottering, who chaired the conference, believes that the primary opportunities for bancassurers to extract value from their IT infrastructure investments lie in distribution management, risk management with the advent of Solvency II, and achieving operational excellence. "Oracle is ideally suited to meet the needs of bancassurance," Glenn noted, "supplying market-leading software for both banking and insurance. Oracle provides adaptive systems that let customers easily integrate hybrid business processes from both worlds while leveraging existing IT infrastructure." Overall, the consensus at the conference was that the outlook for bancassurance in EMEA remains positive, despite changing market conditions that have led a number of bancassurers to re-examine their business models. John Sinclair is marketing director for Oracle Insurance in EMEA. He has more than 20 years of experience in insurance and financial services.    

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• Building vs. Buying a Master Data Management Solution

  - by david.butler(at)oracle.com

  Many organizations prefer to build their own MDM solutions. The argument is that they know their data quality issues and their data better than anyone. Plus a focused solution will cost less in the long run then a vendor supplied general purpose product. This is not unreasonable if you think of MDM as a point solution for a particular data quality problem. But this approach carries significant risk. We now know that organizations achieve significant competitive advantages when they deploy MDM as a strategic enterprise wide solution: with the most common best practice being to deploy a tactical MDM solution and grow it into a full information architecture. A build your own approach most certainly will not scale to a larger architecture unless it is done correctly with the larger solution in mind. It is possible to build a home grown point MDM solution in such a way that it will dovetail into broader MDM architectures. A very good place to start is to use the same basic technologies that Oracle uses to build its own MDM solutions. Start with the Oracle 11g database to create a flexible, extensible and open data model to hold the master data and all needed attributes. The Oracle database is the most flexible, highly available and scalable database system on the market. With its Real Application Clusters (RAC) it can even support the mixed OLTP and BI workloads that represent typical MDM data access profiles. Use Oracle Data Integration (ODI) for batch data movement between applications, MDM data stores, and the BI layer. Use Oracle Golden Gate for more real-time data movement. Use Oracle's SOA Suite for application integration with its: BPEL Process Manager to orchestrate MDM connections to business processes; Identity Management for managing users; WS Manager for managing web services; Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition for analytics; and JDeveloper for creating or extending the MDM management application. Oracle utilizes these technologies to build its MDM Hubs.  Customers who build their own MDM solution using these components will easily migrate to Oracle provided MDM solutions when the home grown solution runs out of gas. But, even with a full stack of open flexible MDM technologies, creating a robust MDM application can be a daunting task. For example, a basic MDM solution will need: a set of data access methods that support master data as a service as well as direct real time access as well as batch loads and extracts; a data migration service for initial loads and periodic updates; a metadata management capability for items such as business entity matrixed relationships and hierarchies; a source system management capability to fully cross-reference business objects and to satisfy seemingly conflicting data ownership requirements; a data quality function that can find and eliminate duplicate data while insuring correct data attribute survivorship; a set of data quality functions that can manage structured and unstructured data; a data quality interface to assist with preventing new errors from entering the system even when data entry is outside the MDM application itself; a continuing data cleansing function to keep the data up to date; an internal triggering mechanism to create and deploy change information to all connected systems; a comprehensive role based data security system to control and monitor data access, update rights, and maintain change history; a flexible business rules engine for managing master data processes such as privacy and data movement; a user interface to support casual users and data stewards; a business intelligence structure to support profiling, compliance, and business performance indicators; and an analytical foundation for directly analyzing master data. Oracle's pre-built MDM Hub solutions are full-featured 3-tier Internet applications designed to participate in the full Oracle technology stack or to run independently in other open IT SOA environments. Building MDM solutions from scratch can take years. Oracle's pre-built MDM solutions can bring quality data to the enterprise in a matter of months. But if you must build, at lease build with the world's best technology stack in a way that simplifies the eventual upgrade to Oracle MDM and to the full enterprise wide information architecture that it enables.

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• Oracle Data Integration 12c: Simplified, Future-Ready, High-Performance Solutions

  - by Thanos Terentes Printzios

  In today’s data-driven business environment, organizations need to cost-effectively manage the ever-growing streams of information originating both inside and outside the firewall and address emerging deployment styles like cloud, big data analytics, and real-time replication. Oracle Data Integration delivers pervasive and continuous access to timely and trusted data across heterogeneous systems. Oracle is enhancing its data integration offering announcing the general availability of 12c release for the key data integration products: Oracle Data Integrator 12c and Oracle GoldenGate 12c, delivering Simplified and High-Performance Solutions for Cloud, Big Data Analytics, and Real-Time Replication. The new release delivers extreme performance, increase IT productivity, and simplify deployment, while helping IT organizations to keep pace with new data-oriented technology trends including cloud computing, big data analytics, real-time business intelligence. With the 12c release Oracle becomes the new leader in the data integration and replication technologies as no other vendor offers such a complete set of data integration capabilities for pervasive, continuous access to trusted data across Oracle platforms as well as third-party systems and applications. Oracle Data Integration 12c release addresses data-driven organizations’ critical and evolving data integration requirements under 3 key themes: Future-Ready Solutions : Supporting Current and Emerging Initiatives Extreme Performance : Even higher performance than ever before Fast Time-to-Value : Higher IT Productivity and Simplified Solutions  With the new capabilities in Oracle Data Integrator 12c, customers can benefit from: Superior developer productivity, ease of use, and rapid time-to-market with the new flow-based mapping model, reusable mappings, and step-by-step debugger. Increased performance when executing data integration processes due to improved parallelism. Improved productivity and monitoring via tighter integration with Oracle GoldenGate 12c and Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c. Improved interoperability with Oracle Warehouse Builder which enables faster and easier migration to Oracle Data Integrator’s strategic data integration offering. Faster implementation of business analytics through Oracle Data Integrator pre-integrated with Oracle BI Applications’ latest release. Oracle Data Integrator also integrates simply and easily with Oracle Business Analytics tools, including OBI-EE and Oracle Hyperion. Support for loading and transforming big and fast data, enabled by integration with big data technologies: Hadoop, Hive, HDFS, and Oracle Big Data Appliance. Only Oracle GoldenGate provides the best-of-breed real-time replication of data in heterogeneous data environments. With the new capabilities in Oracle GoldenGate 12c, customers can benefit from: Simplified setup and management of Oracle GoldenGate 12c when using multiple database delivery processes via a new Coordinated Delivery feature for non-Oracle databases. Expanded heterogeneity through added support for the latest versions of major databases such as Sybase ASE v 15.7, MySQL NDB Clusters 7.2, and MySQL 5.6., as well as integration with Oracle Coherence. Enhanced high availability and data protection via integration with Oracle Data Guard and Fast-Start Failover integration. Enhanced security for credentials and encryption keys using Oracle Wallet. Real-time replication for databases hosted on public cloud environments supported by third-party clouds. Tight integration between Oracle Data Integrator 12c and Oracle GoldenGate 12c and other Oracle technologies, such as Oracle Database 12c and Oracle Applications, provides a number of benefits for organizations: Tight integration between Oracle Data Integrator 12c and Oracle GoldenGate 12c enables developers to leverage Oracle GoldenGate’s low overhead, real-time change data capture completely within the Oracle Data Integrator Studio without additional training. Integration with Oracle Database 12c provides a strong foundation for seamless private cloud deployments. Delivers real-time data for reporting, zero downtime migration, and improved performance and availability for Oracle Applications, such as Oracle E-Business Suite and ATG Web Commerce . Oracle’s data integration offering is optimized for Oracle Engineered Systems and is an integral part of Oracle’s fast data, real-time analytics strategy on Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine. Oracle Data Integrator 12c and Oracle GoldenGate 12c differentiate the new offering on data integration with these many new features. This is just a quick glimpse into Oracle Data Integrator 12c and Oracle GoldenGate 12c. Find out much more about the new release in the video webcast "Introducing 12c for Oracle Data Integration", where customer and partner speakers, including SolarWorld, BT, Rittman Mead will join us in launching the new release. Resource Kits Meet Oracle Data Integration 12c  Discover what's new with Oracle Goldengate 12c  Oracle EMEA DIS (Data Integration Solutions) Partner Community is available for all your questions, while additional partner focused webcasts will be made available through our blog here, so stay connected. For any questions please contact us at partner.imc-AT-beehiveonline.oracle-DOT-com Stay Connected Oracle Newsletters

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• Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database Performance on SPARC T4-2

  - by Brian

  The Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database is optimized to run on Oracle's SPARC T4 processor platforms running Oracle Solaris 11 providing unsurpassed scalability, performance, upgradability, protection of investment and return on investment. The following demonstrate the value of combining Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database with SPARC T4 servers and Oracle Solaris 11: On a Mobile Call Processing test, the 2-socket SPARC T4-2 server outperforms: Oracle's SPARC Enterprise M4000 server (4 x 2.66 GHz SPARC64 VII+) by 34%. Oracle's SPARC T3-4 (4 x 1.65 GHz SPARC T3) by 2.7x, or 5.4x per processor. Utilizing the TimesTen Performance Throughput Benchmark (TPTBM), the SPARC T4-2 server protects investments with: 2.1x the overall performance of a 4-socket SPARC Enterprise M4000 server in read-only mode and 1.5x the performance in update-only testing. This is 4.2x more performance per processor than the SPARC64 VII+ 2.66 GHz based system. 10x more performance per processor than the SPARC T2+ 1.4 GHz server. 1.6x better performance per processor than the SPARC T3 1.65 GHz based server. In replication testing, the two socket SPARC T4-2 server is over 3x faster than the performance of a four socket SPARC Enterprise T5440 server in both asynchronous replication environment and the highly available 2-Safe replication. This testing emphasizes parallel replication between systems. Performance Landscape Mobile Call Processing Test Performance System Processor Sockets/Cores/Threads Tps SPARC T4-2 SPARC T4, 2.85 GHz 2 16 128 218,400 M4000 SPARC64 VII+, 2.66 GHz 4 16 32 162,900 SPARC T3-4 SPARC T3, 1.65 GHz 4 64 512 80,400 TimesTen Performance Throughput Benchmark (TPTBM) Read-Only System Processor Sockets/Cores/Threads Tps SPARC T3-4 SPARC T3, 1.65 GHz 4 64 512 7.9M SPARC T4-2 SPARC T4, 2.85 GHz 2 16 128 6.5M M4000 SPARC64 VII+, 2.66 GHz 4 16 32 3.1M T5440 SPARC T2+, 1.4 GHz 4 32 256 3.1M TimesTen Performance Throughput Benchmark (TPTBM) Update-Only System Processor Sockets/Cores/Threads Tps SPARC T4-2 SPARC T4, 2.85 GHz 2 16 128 547,800 M4000 SPARC64 VII+, 2.66 GHz 4 16 32 363,800 SPARC T3-4 SPARC T3, 1.65 GHz 4 64 512 240,500 TimesTen Replication Tests System Processor Sockets/Cores/Threads Asynchronous 2-Safe SPARC T4-2 SPARC T4, 2.85 GHz 2 16 128 38,024 13,701 SPARC T5440 SPARC T2+, 1.4 GHz 4 32 256 11,621 4,615 Configuration Summary Hardware Configurations: SPARC T4-2 server 2 x SPARC T4 processors, 2.85 GHz 256 GB memory 1 x 8 Gbs FC Qlogic HBA 1 x 6 Gbs SAS HBA 4 x 300 GB internal disks Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array (40 x 24 GB flash modules) 1 x Sun Fire X4275 server configured as COMSTAR head SPARC T3-4 server 4 x SPARC T3 processors, 1.6 GHz 512 GB memory 1 x 8 Gbs FC Qlogic HBA 8 x 146 GB internal disks 1 x Sun Fire X4275 server configured as COMSTAR head SPARC Enterprise M4000 server 4 x SPARC64 VII+ processors, 2.66 GHz 128 GB memory 1 x 8 Gbs FC Qlogic HBA 1 x 6 Gbs SAS HBA 2 x 146 GB internal disks Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array (40 x 24 GB flash modules) 1 x Sun Fire X4275 server configured as COMSTAR head Software Configuration: Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 Oracle TimesTen 11.2.2.4 Benchmark Descriptions TimesTen Performance Throughput BenchMark (TPTBM) is shipped with TimesTen and measures the total throughput of the system. The workload can test read-only, update-only, delete and insert operations as required. Mobile Call Processing is a customer-based workload for processing calls made by mobile phone subscribers. The workload has a mixture of read-only, update, and insert-only transactions. The peak throughput performance is measured from multiple concurrent processes executing the transactions until a peak performance is reached via saturation of the available resources. Parallel Replication tests using both asynchronous and 2-Safe replication methods. For asynchronous replication, transactions are processed in batches to maximize the throughput capabilities of the replication server and network. In 2-Safe replication, also known as no data-loss or high availability, transactions are replicated between servers immediately emphasizing low latency. For both environments, performance is measured in the number of parallel replication servers and the maximum transactions-per-second for all concurrent processes. See Also SPARC T4-2 Server oracle.com OTN Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database oracle.com OTN Oracle Solaris oracle.com OTN Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Enterprise Edition oracle.com OTN Disclosure Statement Copyright 2012, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Results as of 1 October 2012.

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• What’s the Difference Between Succession Management and Talent Reviews?

  - by HCM-Oracle

  By Marcie Van Houten Is there a difference or are they pieces of one holistic strategic talent process? And can you have one without the other?  First, let me give a quick definition of each.  Succession planning (or management) is about creating succession slates or talent pools in support of a critical job or position or sets thereof. And then using those plans to help mitigate risk and plan talent needs for the organization.  Talent reviews (known by other names often) are sets of meetings where managers and executives come together to review, discuss and often heatedly debate the merits and potential of their employees, and then place and sometimes calibrate that talent on a performance to potential matrix.  These are some of the most strategic conversations happening in conference rooms across the globe. I speak with a lot of organizations about their practices in this area and the answers to these questions are as varied and nuanced as there are organizations thinking about them.  Some are passionate about their talent review processes and have a very evolved and thoughtful approach.  They really know their people, where their talent is, and the opportunities they plan to offer them.  And to them that is their succession process.  They may never create a slate of named candidates for a job or assign employees to formal talent pools.   On the flip side there are other organizations that create slates and slates and often multiple talent pools to support their strategic positions.  Through these, they are able to mitigate the risk associated with having a key player leave their organization.  And for them, that is their succession process.  Some will start from the lower levels of their organization and roll up their succession plans, while other organizations only cover their top 200 executives and key positions with plans.  And then there are organizations that leverage some of all of these.  Ultimately, the goals are to increase employee engagement, reduce talent-related risk, ensure the right talent is aligned to the strategic initiatives and to drive business value.  The approaches are as unique as the organizations they represent and the business opportunities they are looking to seize upon.   And that's ok.  It's great in fact. Because one thing that is common is the recognition that the need to know your people and align your top talent to the future needs of the organization is mission critical. Sure, there are a set of commonly recognized best practices and guiding principles for all of this.  There is no one right or perfect answer.  And that is what makes this all so much darn fun.  With Talent Review and Succession Management from Oracle HCM Cloud, we’ve blended the ability to support your strategic talent review conversations with both succession plans and talent pools allowing for one very seamless and interactive process. So whether you create a lot of succession plans, only focus on talent pools, have a robust talent review process, or all of the above, Oracle has you covered. I’m looking forward to spending time with our customers at the upcoming OHUG Global Conference 2014 happening June 9-13 in Las Vegas.  It’s an opportunity for me to talk to customers about their business and how they are doing strategic talent processes like talent reviews and succession.  I hope to see you there. Marcie Van Houten brings over 20 years of management consulting, information systems and human capital management experience to her role as director of product strategy at Oracle. Ms. Van Houten has spent the past several years at Oracle working closely with customers to help drive the direction of the company's talent and succession management applications. Additionally, she spent nine years at PeopleSoft as Director of Information Systems leading human capital management implementation projects. Marcie Van Houten lives in Walnut Creek, California, and holds a MBA from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.  You can follow her on Twitter: @MarcieVH

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