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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, January 12, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, January 12, 2011Popular ReleasesGoogle URL Shortener API for .NET: Google URL Shortener API v1: According follow specification: http://code.google.com/apis/urlshortener/v1/reference.htmljGestures: a jQuery plugin for gesture events: 0.81: added event substitution for IE updated index.htmlStyleCop for ReSharper: StyleCop for ReSharper 5.1.14986.000: A considerable amount of work has gone into this release: Features: Huge focus on performance around the violation scanning subsystem: - caching added to reduce IO operations around reading and merging of settings files - caching added to reduce creation of expensive objects Users should notice condsiderable perf boost and a decrease in memory usage. Bug Fixes: - StyleCop's new ObjectBasedEnvironment object does not resolve the StyleCop installation path, thus it does not return the ...SQL Monitor - tracking sql server activities: SQL Monitor 3.1 beta 1: 1. support alert message template 2. dynamic toolbar commands depending on functionality 3. fixed some bugs 4. refactored part of the code, now more stable and more clean upFacebook C# SDK: 4.2.1: - Authentication bug fixes - Updated Json.Net to version 4.0.0 - BREAKING CHANGE: Removed cookieSupport config setting, now automatic. This download is also availible on NuGet: Facebook FacebookWeb FacebookWebMvcUmbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.6: The Umbraco 4.6 (codename JUNO) release contains many new features focusing on an improved installation experience, a number of robust developer features, and contains nearly 200 bug fixes since the 4.5.2 release. Improved installer experience Updated Starter Kits (Simple, Blog, Personal, Business) Beautiful, free, customizable skins included Skinning engine and Skin customization (see Skinning Documentation Kit) Default dashboards on install with hide option Updated Login timeout ...ArcGIS Editor for OpenStreetMap: ArcGIS Editor for OpenStreetMap 1.1 beta2: This is the beta2 release for the ArcGIS Editor for OpenStreetMap version 1.1. Changes from version 1.0: Multi-part geometries are now supported. Homogeneous relations (consisting of only lines or only polygons) are converted into the appropriate multi-part geometry. Mixed relations and super relations are maintained and tracked in a stand-alone relation table. The underlying editing logic has changed. As opposed to tracking the editing changes upon "Save edit" or "Stop edit" the changes a...Hawkeye - The .Net Runtime Object Editor: Hawkeye 1.2.5: In the case you are running an x86 Windows and you installed Release 1.2.4, you should consider upgrading to this release (1.2.5) as it appears Hawkeye is broken on x86 OS. I apologize for the inconvenience, but it appears Hawkeye 1.2.4 (and probably previous versions) doesn't run on x86 Windows (See issue http://hawkeye.codeplex.com/workitem/7791). This maintenance release fixes this broken behavior. This release comes in two flavors: Hawkeye.125.N2 is the standard .NET 2 build, was compile...Phalanger - The PHP Language Compiler for the .NET Framework: 2.0 (January 2011): Another release build for daily use; it contains many new features, enhanced compatibility with latest PHP opensource applications and several issue fixes. To improve the performance of your application using MySQL, please use Managed MySQL Extension for Phalanger. Changes made within this release include following: New features available only in Phalanger. Full support of Multi-Script-Assemblies was implemented; you can build your application into several DLLs now. Deploy them separately t...EnhSim: EnhSim 2.3.0: 2.3.0This release supports WoW patch 4.03a at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 - Changed how flame shoc...AutoLoL: AutoLoL v1.5.3: A message will be displayed when there's an update available Shows a list of recent mastery files in the Editor Tab (requested by quite a few people) Updater: Update information is now scrollable Added a buton to launch AutoLoL after updating is finished Updated the UI to match that of AutoLoL Fix: Detects and resolves 'Read Only' state on Version.xmlTweetSharp: TweetSharp v2.0.0.0 - Preview 7: Documentation for this release may be found at http://tweetsharp.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=UserGuide&referringTitle=Documentation. Note: This code is currently preview quality. Preview 7 ChangesFixes the regression issue in OAuth from Preview 6 Preview 6 ChangesMaintenance release with user reported fixes Preview 5 ChangesMaintenance release with user reported fixes Third Party Library VersionsHammock v1.0.6: http://hammock.codeplex.com Json.NET 3.5 Release 8: http://json.codeplex.comExtended WPF Toolkit: Extended WPF Toolkit - 1.3.0: What's in the 1.3.0 Release?BusyIndicator ButtonSpinner ChildWindow ColorPicker - Updated (Breaking Changes) DateTimeUpDown - New Control Magnifier - New Control MaskedTextBox - New Control MessageBox NumericUpDown RichTextBox RichTextBoxFormatBar - Updated .NET 3.5 binaries and SourcePlease note: The Extended WPF Toolkit 3.5 is dependent on .NET Framework 3.5 and the WPFToolkit. You must install .NET Framework 3.5 and the WPFToolkit in order to use any features in the To...sNPCedit: sNPCedit v0.9d: added elementclient coordinate catcher to catch coordinates select a target (ingame) i.e. your char, npc or monster than click the button and coordinates+direction will be transfered to the selected row in the table corrected labels from Rot to Direction (because it is a vector)Ionics Isapi Rewrite Filter: 2.1 latest stable: V2.1 is stable, and is in maintenance mode. This is v2.1.1.25. It is a bug-fix release. There are no new features. 28629 29172 28722 27626 28074 29164 27659 27900 many documentation updates and fixes proper x64 build environment. This release includes x64 binaries in zip form, but no x64 MSI file. You'll have to manually install x64 servers, following the instructions in the documentation.VivoSocial: VivoSocial 7.4.1: New release with bug fixes and updates for performance.UltimateJB: Ultimate JB 2.03 PL3 KAKAROTO + HERMES + Spoof 3.5: Voici une version attendu avec impatience pour beaucoup : - La version PL3 KAKAROTO intégre ses dernières modification et intégre maintenant le firmware 2.43 !!! Conclusion : - UltimateJB203PSXXXDEFAULTKAKAROTO=> Pas de spoof mais disponible pour les PS3 suivantes : 3.41_kiosk 3.41 3.40 3.30 3.21 3.15 3.10 3.01 2.76 2.70 2.60 2.53 2.43 - UltimateJB203PS341_HERMES => Pas de spoof mais version hermes 4b - UltimateJB203PS341HERMESSPOOF35X => hermes 4b + spoof des firmwares 3.50 et 3.55 au li....NET Extensions - Extension Methods Library for C# and VB.NET: Release 2011.03: Added lot's of new extensions and new projects for MVC and Entity Framework. object.FindTypeByRecursion Int32.InRange String.RemoveAllSpecialCharacters String.IsEmptyOrWhiteSpace String.IsNotEmptyOrWhiteSpace String.IfEmptyOrWhiteSpace String.ToUpperFirstLetter String.GetBytes String.ToTitleCase String.ToPlural DateTime.GetDaysInYear DateTime.GetPeriodOfDay IEnumberable.RemoveAll IEnumberable.Distinct ICollection.RemoveAll IList.Join IList.Match IList.Cast Array.IsNullOrEmpty Array.W...EFMVC - ASP.NET MVC 3 and EF Code First: EFMVC 0.5- ASP.NET MVC 3 and EF Code First: Demo web app ASP.NET MVC 3, Razor and EF Code FirstVidCoder: 0.8.0: Added x64 version. Made the audio output preview more detailed and accurate. If the chosen encoder or mixdown is incompatible with the source, the fallback that will be used is displayed. Added "Auto" to the audio mixdown choices. Reworked non-anamorphic size calculation to work better with non-standard pixel aspect ratios and cropping. Reworked Custom anamorphic to be more intuitive and allow display width to be set automatically (Thanks, Statick). Allowing higher bitrates for 6-ch...New ProjectsASP.NET MVC Scaffolding: Scaffolding package for ASP.NETAstor: OData Explorer: OData ExplorerBasic Users Community: A simple user community with threads and posts.Bukkit Server Manager: BSM makes server managing easy we have multiple type and database support including: MySql, SQLite types: VPS, Dedicated, Home PCCh4CP: Chamber 4 control programDotNetNuke Telerik Library: A set of Telerik wrappers for DotNetNuke module developers to utilize which aren't yet included as of 5.6.1. Eventually this will be offloaded to the core. Enjoy Life: our fypFolderSizeChecker: It suppose to check the size of big folders in specific partition and help user to find the most disk usage location. (It's simple project so please don't expect big and complex algorithms)HomeTeamOnline: This is project of HomeTeamOnlineICSWorld: This is project of ICSWorldIMAP Client for .NET 4.0 using LumiSoft: Develop an IMAP client using this sample project based on the LumiSoft .NET open source project. This project compiles in .NET 4.0 and demonstrates how to pull email using IMAP. The purpose of the project is for email auto processing.MUIExt (Multilingual User Interface Extender): MUIExt makes it easier for SharePoint 2010 users to create multilingual sites. You'll no longer have to live with the MUI limitations or have to manage variations. It's developed in csharp.Phoenix Service Bus: The goal of this pServiceBus is to provide an API and Service Components that would make implementing an ESB Infrastructure in your environment. It's developed in C#, and also have API written for Javascript Clients PhotoSnapper: Home project just to rename photos or .mov files in a folder starting from from a user defined number.redditfier: A windows application to notify redditors with new posts.SharePoint Field Updater: Automatically update sub fields according to a lookup field. For example: Updating field "Contact" will automatically put "Contact Email" and "Address" in the appropriate text fields.TXLCMS: emptyUmbraco Spark engine: Spark macro engine for UmbracoUrdu Translation: Urdu Translation Project WFTestDesign: BizUnit WF is based on BizUnit solution that allows user to define a test using WorkFlow UI, custom activities designed in this extension and general Workflow activities.It's enable also to use breakpoint in test. It's developed in C#.WPF Date Range Slider: A WPF Date Range Slider user control written with C# to allow your users to choose a range of dates using a double thumbed slider control.WPMind Framework for WP7: This project is used to provide some Windows Phone 7 controls for Windows Phone 7 Silverlight developer. Please join us if you are interested in this project.

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• Top 10 Tips & Tricks for Oracle SQL Developer

  - by thatjeffsmith

  Being a short week due to the holiday, and with everyone enjoying their Summer vacations (apologies Southern Hemispherians), I reckoned it was a great time to do one of those lazy recap-Top 10-Reader’s Digest type posts. I’ve been sharing 1-3 tips or ‘tricks’ a week since I started blogging about SQL Developer, and I have more than enough content to write a book. But since I’m lazy, I’m just going to compile a list of my favorite ‘must know’ tips instead. I always have to leave out a few tips when I do my presentations, so now I can refer back to this list to make sure I’m not forgetting anything. So without further ado… 1. Configure Your Preferences Yes, there are a LOT of options. But you don’t need to worry about all of them just yet. I do recommend you take a quick look at these ones in particular. Whether you’re new to the tool or have been using it for 5 years, don’t overlook these settings! 2. Disable Extensions You Aren’t Using If you’re not using Data Miner, or if you’re not working on a Migration – disable those extensions! SQL Developer will run leaner & meaner, plus the user interface will be a bit more simplified making the tool easier to navigate as well. 3. SQL Recall via Keyboard Access your history via the keyboard! Cycle through your recent SQL statements just using these magic key strokes! Ctrl+Up or Ctrl+Down. 4. Format Your Query Output Directly to CSV, XML, HTML, etc Have the query results pre-formatted in the format of your choice! Too lazy to run the Export wizard for your query result sets? Just add the SQL Developer output hints to your statement and have the output auto-magically formatted to the style of your choice! 5. Drag & Drop Multiple Tables to the Worksheet SQL Developer will auto-join the related objects. You can then toggle over to the Query Builder to toggle off the columns you don’t want to query. I guarantee this tip will save you time if you’re joining 3 or more tables! 6. Drag & Drop Multiple Tables to a Relational Model A pretty picture is worth a few dozen DDL scripts? SQL Developer does data modeling! If you ctrl-drag a table to a model, it will take that table and any related tables and reverse engineer them to a relational model! You can then print it out or export it to HTML, PDF, etc. 7. View Your PL/SQL Execution Output Automatically Function returns a refcursor? Procedure had 3 out parameters? When you run these programs via the Procedure Editor, we automatically capture the output and place them into one or more data grids for you to browse. 8. Disable Automatic Code Insight and Use It On-Demand Code Editor – Completion Insight – Enable Completion Auto-Popup (Keyword being Auto) Some folks really don’t like it when their IDEs or word-processors try to do ‘too much’ for them. Thankfully SQL Developer allows you to either increase the delay before it attempts to auto-complete your text OR to disable the automatic bit. Instead, you can invoke it on-demand. 9. Interactive Debugging – Change Your Variable Values as You Step Through Your PLSQL Watches aren’t just for watching. You can actually interact with your programs and ‘see what happens’ when X = 256 instead of 1. 10. Ditch the Tree View for the Schema Browser There’s nothing wrong with the Connection tree for browsing your database objects. But some folks just can’t seem to get comfortable with it. So, we built them a Schema Browser that uses a drop down control instead for changing up your schema and object types. Already Know This Stuff, Want More? Just check out my SQL Developer resource page, it’s one of the main links on the top of this page. Or if you can’t find something, just drop me a note in the form of a comment on this page and I’ll do my best to find it or write it for you.

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• TOTD #166: Using NoSQL database in your Java EE 6 Applications on GlassFish - MongoDB for now!

  - by arungupta

  The Java EE 6 platform includes Java Persistence API to work with RDBMS. The JPA specification defines a comprehensive API that includes, but not restricted to, how a database table can be mapped to a POJO and vice versa, provides mechanisms how a PersistenceContext can be injected in a @Stateless bean and then be used for performing different operations on the database table and write typesafe queries. There are several well known advantages of RDBMS but the NoSQL movement has gained traction over past couple of years. The NoSQL databases are not intended to be a replacement for the mainstream RDBMS. As Philosophy of NoSQL explains, NoSQL database was designed for casual use where all the features typically provided by an RDBMS are not required. The name "NoSQL" is more of a category of databases that is more known for what it is not rather than what it is. The basic principles of NoSQL database are: No need to have a pre-defined schema and that makes them a schema-less database. Addition of new properties to existing objects is easy and does not require ALTER TABLE. The unstructured data gives flexibility to change the format of data any time without downtime or reduced service levels. Also there are no joins happening on the server because there is no structure and thus no relation between them. Scalability and performance is more important than the entire set of functionality typically provided by an RDBMS. This set of databases provide eventual consistency and/or transactions restricted to single items but more focus on CRUD. Not be restricted to SQL to access the information stored in the backing database. Designed to scale-out (horizontal) instead of scale-up (vertical). This is important knowing that databases, and everything else as well, is moving into the cloud. RBDMS can scale-out using sharding but requires complex management and not for the faint of heart. Unlike RBDMS which require a separate caching tier, most of the NoSQL databases comes with integrated caching. Designed for less management and simpler data models lead to lower administration as well. There are primarily three types of NoSQL databases: Key-Value stores (e.g. Cassandra and Riak) Document databases (MongoDB or CouchDB) Graph databases (Neo4J) You may think NoSQL is panacea but as I mentioned above they are not meant to replace the mainstream databases and here is why: RDBMS have been around for many years, very stable, and functionally rich. This is something CIOs and CTOs can bet their money on without much worry. There is a reason 98% of Fortune 100 companies run Oracle :-) NoSQL is cutting edge, brings excitement to developers, but enterprises are cautious about them. Commercial databases like Oracle are well supported by the backing enterprises in terms of providing support resources on a global scale. There is a full ecosystem built around these commercial databases providing training, performance tuning, architecture guidance, and everything else. NoSQL is fairly new and typically backed by a single company not able to meet the scale of these big enterprises. NoSQL databases are good for CRUDing operations but business intelligence is extremely important for enterprises to stay competitive. RDBMS provide extensive tooling to generate this data but that was not the original intention of NoSQL databases and is lacking in that area. Generating any meaningful information other than CRUDing require extensive programming. Not suited for complex transactions such as banking systems or other highly transactional applications requiring 2-phase commit. SQL cannot be used with NoSQL databases and writing simple queries can be involving. Enough talking, lets take a look at some code. This blog has published multiple blogs on how to access a RDBMS using JPA in a Java EE 6 application. This Tip Of The Day (TOTD) will show you can use MongoDB (a document-oriented database) with a typical 3-tier Java EE 6 application. Lets get started! The complete source code of this project can be downloaded here. Download MongoDB for your platform from here (1.8.2 as of this writing) and start the server as: arun@ArunUbuntu:~/tools/mongodb-linux-x86_64-1.8.2/bin$./mongod./mongod --help for help and startup optionsSun Jun 26 20:41:11 [initandlisten] MongoDB starting : pid=11210port=27017 dbpath=/data/db/ 64-bit Sun Jun 26 20:41:11 [initandlisten] db version v1.8.2, pdfile version4.5Sun Jun 26 20:41:11 [initandlisten] git version:433bbaa14aaba6860da15bd4de8edf600f56501bSun Jun 26 20:41:11 [initandlisten] build sys info: Linuxbs-linux64.10gen.cc 2.6.21.7-2.ec2.v1.2.fc8xen #1 SMP Fri Nov 2017:48:28 EST 2009 x86_64 BOOST_LIB_VERSION=1_41Sun Jun 26 20:41:11 [initandlisten] waiting for connections on port 27017Sun Jun 26 20:41:11 [websvr] web admin interface listening on port 28017 The default directory for the database is /data/db and needs to be created as: sudo mkdir -p /data/db/sudo chown `id -u` /data/db You can specify a different directory using "--dbpath" option. Refer to Quickstart for your specific platform. Using NetBeans, create a Java EE 6 project and make sure to enable CDI and add JavaServer Faces framework. Download MongoDB Java Driver (2.6.3 of this writing) and add it to the project library by selecting "Properties", "LIbraries", "Add Library...", creating a new library by specifying the location of the JAR file, and adding the library to the created project. Edit the generated "index.xhtml" such that it looks like: <h1>Add a new movie</h1><h:form> Name: <h:inputText value="#{movie.name}" size="20"/><br/> Year: <h:inputText value="#{movie.year}" size="6"/><br/> Language: <h:inputText value="#{movie.language}" size="20"/><br/> <h:commandButton actionListener="#{movieSessionBean.createMovie}" action="show" title="Add" value="submit"/></h:form> This page has a simple HTML form with three text boxes and a submit button. The text boxes take name, year, and language of a movie and the submit button invokes the "createMovie" method of "movieSessionBean" and then render "show.xhtml". Create "show.xhtml" ("New" -> "Other..." -> "Other" -> "XHTML File") such that it looks like: <head> <title><h1>List of movies</h1></title> </head> <body> <h:form> <h:dataTable value="#{movieSessionBean.movies}" var="m" > <h:column><f:facet name="header">Name</f:facet>#{m.name}</h:column> <h:column><f:facet name="header">Year</f:facet>#{m.year}</h:column> <h:column><f:facet name="header">Language</f:facet>#{m.language}</h:column> </h:dataTable> </h:form> This page shows the name, year, and language of all movies stored in the database so far. The list of movies is returned by "movieSessionBean.movies" property. Now create the "Movie" class such that it looks like: import com.mongodb.BasicDBObject;import com.mongodb.BasicDBObject;import com.mongodb.DBObject;import javax.enterprise.inject.Model;import javax.validation.constraints.Size;/** * @author arun */@Modelpublic class Movie { @Size(min=1, max=20) private String name; @Size(min=1, max=20) private String language; private int year; // getters and setters for "name", "year", "language" public BasicDBObject toDBObject() { BasicDBObject doc = new BasicDBObject(); doc.put("name", name); doc.put("year", year); doc.put("language", language); return doc; } public static Movie fromDBObject(DBObject doc) { Movie m = new Movie(); m.name = (String)doc.get("name"); m.year = (int)doc.get("year"); m.language = (String)doc.get("language"); return m; } @Override public String toString() { return name + ", " + year + ", " + language; }} Other than the usual boilerplate code, the key methods here are "toDBObject" and "fromDBObject". These methods provide a conversion from "Movie" -> "DBObject" and vice versa. The "DBObject" is a MongoDB class that comes as part of the mongo-2.6.3.jar file and which we added to our project earlier.  The complete javadoc for 2.6.3 can be seen here. Notice, this class also uses Bean Validation constraints and will be honored by the JSF layer. Finally, create "MovieSessionBean" stateless EJB with all the business logic such that it looks like: package org.glassfish.samples;import com.mongodb.BasicDBObject;import com.mongodb.DB;import com.mongodb.DBCollection;import com.mongodb.DBCursor;import com.mongodb.DBObject;import com.mongodb.Mongo;import java.net.UnknownHostException;import java.util.ArrayList;import java.util.List;import javax.annotation.PostConstruct;import javax.ejb.Stateless;import javax.inject.Inject;import javax.inject.Named;/** * @author arun */@Stateless@Namedpublic class MovieSessionBean { @Inject Movie movie; DBCollection movieColl; @PostConstruct private void initDB() throws UnknownHostException { Mongo m = new Mongo(); DB db = m.getDB("movieDB"); movieColl = db.getCollection("movies"); if (movieColl == null) { movieColl = db.createCollection("movies", null); } } public void createMovie() { BasicDBObject doc = movie.toDBObject(); movieColl.insert(doc); } public List<Movie> getMovies() { List<Movie> movies = new ArrayList(); DBCursor cur = movieColl.find(); System.out.println("getMovies: Found " + cur.size() + " movie(s)"); for (DBObject dbo : cur.toArray()) { movies.add(Movie.fromDBObject(dbo)); } return movies; }} The database is initialized in @PostConstruct. Instead of a working with a database table, NoSQL databases work with a schema-less document. The "Movie" class is the document in our case and stored in the collection "movies". The collection allows us to perform query functions on all movies. The "getMovies" method invokes "find" method on the collection which is equivalent to the SQL query "select * from movies" and then returns a List<Movie>. Also notice that there is no "persistence.xml" in the project. Right-click and run the project to see the output as: Enter some values in the text box and click on enter to see the result as: If you reached here then you've successfully used MongoDB in your Java EE 6 application, congratulations! Some food for thought and further play ... SQL to MongoDB mapping shows mapping between traditional SQL -> Mongo query language. Tutorial shows fun things you can do with MongoDB. Try the interactive online shell  The cookbook provides common ways of using MongoDB In terms of this project, here are some tasks that can be tried: Encapsulate database management in a JPA persistence provider. Is it even worth it because the capabilities are going to be very different ? MongoDB uses "BSonObject" class for JSON representation, add @XmlRootElement on a POJO and how a compatible JSON representation can be generated. This will make the fromXXX and toXXX methods redundant.

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• TOTD #166: Using NoSQL database in your Java EE 6 Applications on GlassFish - MongoDB for now!

  - by arungupta

  The Java EE 6 platform includes Java Persistence API to work with RDBMS. The JPA specification defines a comprehensive API that includes, but not restricted to, how a database table can be mapped to a POJO and vice versa, provides mechanisms how a PersistenceContext can be injected in a @Stateless bean and then be used for performing different operations on the database table and write typesafe queries. There are several well known advantages of RDBMS but the NoSQL movement has gained traction over past couple of years. The NoSQL databases are not intended to be a replacement for the mainstream RDBMS. As Philosophy of NoSQL explains, NoSQL database was designed for casual use where all the features typically provided by an RDBMS are not required. The name "NoSQL" is more of a category of databases that is more known for what it is not rather than what it is. The basic principles of NoSQL database are: No need to have a pre-defined schema and that makes them a schema-less database. Addition of new properties to existing objects is easy and does not require ALTER TABLE. The unstructured data gives flexibility to change the format of data any time without downtime or reduced service levels. Also there are no joins happening on the server because there is no structure and thus no relation between them. Scalability and performance is more important than the entire set of functionality typically provided by an RDBMS. This set of databases provide eventual consistency and/or transactions restricted to single items but more focus on CRUD. Not be restricted to SQL to access the information stored in the backing database. Designed to scale-out (horizontal) instead of scale-up (vertical). This is important knowing that databases, and everything else as well, is moving into the cloud. RBDMS can scale-out using sharding but requires complex management and not for the faint of heart. Unlike RBDMS which require a separate caching tier, most of the NoSQL databases comes with integrated caching. Designed for less management and simpler data models lead to lower administration as well. There are primarily three types of NoSQL databases: Key-Value stores (e.g. Cassandra and Riak) Document databases (MongoDB or CouchDB) Graph databases (Neo4J) You may think NoSQL is panacea but as I mentioned above they are not meant to replace the mainstream databases and here is why: RDBMS have been around for many years, very stable, and functionally rich. This is something CIOs and CTOs can bet their money on without much worry. There is a reason 98% of Fortune 100 companies run Oracle :-) NoSQL is cutting edge, brings excitement to developers, but enterprises are cautious about them. Commercial databases like Oracle are well supported by the backing enterprises in terms of providing support resources on a global scale. There is a full ecosystem built around these commercial databases providing training, performance tuning, architecture guidance, and everything else. NoSQL is fairly new and typically backed by a single company not able to meet the scale of these big enterprises. NoSQL databases are good for CRUDing operations but business intelligence is extremely important for enterprises to stay competitive. RDBMS provide extensive tooling to generate this data but that was not the original intention of NoSQL databases and is lacking in that area. Generating any meaningful information other than CRUDing require extensive programming. Not suited for complex transactions such as banking systems or other highly transactional applications requiring 2-phase commit. SQL cannot be used with NoSQL databases and writing simple queries can be involving. Enough talking, lets take a look at some code. This blog has published multiple blogs on how to access a RDBMS using JPA in a Java EE 6 application. This Tip Of The Day (TOTD) will show you can use MongoDB (a document-oriented database) with a typical 3-tier Java EE 6 application. Lets get started! The complete source code of this project can be downloaded here. Download MongoDB for your platform from here (1.8.2 as of this writing) and start the server as: arun@ArunUbuntu:~/tools/mongodb-linux-x86_64-1.8.2/bin$./mongod./mongod --help for help and startup optionsSun Jun 26 20:41:11 [initandlisten] MongoDB starting : pid=11210port=27017 dbpath=/data/db/ 64-bit Sun Jun 26 20:41:11 [initandlisten] db version v1.8.2, pdfile version4.5Sun Jun 26 20:41:11 [initandlisten] git version:433bbaa14aaba6860da15bd4de8edf600f56501bSun Jun 26 20:41:11 [initandlisten] build sys info: Linuxbs-linux64.10gen.cc 2.6.21.7-2.ec2.v1.2.fc8xen #1 SMP Fri Nov 2017:48:28 EST 2009 x86_64 BOOST_LIB_VERSION=1_41Sun Jun 26 20:41:11 [initandlisten] waiting for connections on port 27017Sun Jun 26 20:41:11 [websvr] web admin interface listening on port 28017 The default directory for the database is /data/db and needs to be created as: sudo mkdir -p /data/db/sudo chown `id -u` /data/db You can specify a different directory using "--dbpath" option. Refer to Quickstart for your specific platform. Using NetBeans, create a Java EE 6 project and make sure to enable CDI and add JavaServer Faces framework. Download MongoDB Java Driver (2.6.3 of this writing) and add it to the project library by selecting "Properties", "LIbraries", "Add Library...", creating a new library by specifying the location of the JAR file, and adding the library to the created project. Edit the generated "index.xhtml" such that it looks like: <h1>Add a new movie</h1><h:form> Name: <h:inputText value="#{movie.name}" size="20"/><br/> Year: <h:inputText value="#{movie.year}" size="6"/><br/> Language: <h:inputText value="#{movie.language}" size="20"/><br/> <h:commandButton actionListener="#{movieSessionBean.createMovie}" action="show" title="Add" value="submit"/></h:form> This page has a simple HTML form with three text boxes and a submit button. The text boxes take name, year, and language of a movie and the submit button invokes the "createMovie" method of "movieSessionBean" and then render "show.xhtml". Create "show.xhtml" ("New" -> "Other..." -> "Other" -> "XHTML File") such that it looks like: <head> <title><h1>List of movies</h1></title> </head> <body> <h:form> <h:dataTable value="#{movieSessionBean.movies}" var="m" > <h:column><f:facet name="header">Name</f:facet>#{m.name}</h:column> <h:column><f:facet name="header">Year</f:facet>#{m.year}</h:column> <h:column><f:facet name="header">Language</f:facet>#{m.language}</h:column> </h:dataTable> </h:form> This page shows the name, year, and language of all movies stored in the database so far. The list of movies is returned by "movieSessionBean.movies" property. Now create the "Movie" class such that it looks like: import com.mongodb.BasicDBObject;import com.mongodb.BasicDBObject;import com.mongodb.DBObject;import javax.enterprise.inject.Model;import javax.validation.constraints.Size;/** * @author arun */@Modelpublic class Movie { @Size(min=1, max=20) private String name; @Size(min=1, max=20) private String language; private int year; // getters and setters for "name", "year", "language" public BasicDBObject toDBObject() { BasicDBObject doc = new BasicDBObject(); doc.put("name", name); doc.put("year", year); doc.put("language", language); return doc; } public static Movie fromDBObject(DBObject doc) { Movie m = new Movie(); m.name = (String)doc.get("name"); m.year = (int)doc.get("year"); m.language = (String)doc.get("language"); return m; } @Override public String toString() { return name + ", " + year + ", " + language; }} Other than the usual boilerplate code, the key methods here are "toDBObject" and "fromDBObject". These methods provide a conversion from "Movie" -> "DBObject" and vice versa. The "DBObject" is a MongoDB class that comes as part of the mongo-2.6.3.jar file and which we added to our project earlier.  The complete javadoc for 2.6.3 can be seen here. Notice, this class also uses Bean Validation constraints and will be honored by the JSF layer. Finally, create "MovieSessionBean" stateless EJB with all the business logic such that it looks like: package org.glassfish.samples;import com.mongodb.BasicDBObject;import com.mongodb.DB;import com.mongodb.DBCollection;import com.mongodb.DBCursor;import com.mongodb.DBObject;import com.mongodb.Mongo;import java.net.UnknownHostException;import java.util.ArrayList;import java.util.List;import javax.annotation.PostConstruct;import javax.ejb.Stateless;import javax.inject.Inject;import javax.inject.Named;/** * @author arun */@Stateless@Namedpublic class MovieSessionBean { @Inject Movie movie; DBCollection movieColl; @PostConstruct private void initDB() throws UnknownHostException { Mongo m = new Mongo(); DB db = m.getDB("movieDB"); movieColl = db.getCollection("movies"); if (movieColl == null) { movieColl = db.createCollection("movies", null); } } public void createMovie() { BasicDBObject doc = movie.toDBObject(); movieColl.insert(doc); } public List<Movie> getMovies() { List<Movie> movies = new ArrayList(); DBCursor cur = movieColl.find(); System.out.println("getMovies: Found " + cur.size() + " movie(s)"); for (DBObject dbo : cur.toArray()) { movies.add(Movie.fromDBObject(dbo)); } return movies; }} The database is initialized in @PostConstruct. Instead of a working with a database table, NoSQL databases work with a schema-less document. The "Movie" class is the document in our case and stored in the collection "movies". The collection allows us to perform query functions on all movies. The "getMovies" method invokes "find" method on the collection which is equivalent to the SQL query "select * from movies" and then returns a List<Movie>. Also notice that there is no "persistence.xml" in the project. Right-click and run the project to see the output as: Enter some values in the text box and click on enter to see the result as: If you reached here then you've successfully used MongoDB in your Java EE 6 application, congratulations! Some food for thought and further play ... SQL to MongoDB mapping shows mapping between traditional SQL -> Mongo query language. Tutorial shows fun things you can do with MongoDB. Try the interactive online shell  The cookbook provides common ways of using MongoDB In terms of this project, here are some tasks that can be tried: Encapsulate database management in a JPA persistence provider. Is it even worth it because the capabilities are going to be very different ? MongoDB uses "BSonObject" class for JSON representation, add @XmlRootElement on a POJO and how a compatible JSON representation can be generated. This will make the fromXXX and toXXX methods redundant.

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• How to find and fix performance problems in ORM powered applications

  - by FransBouma

  Once in a while we get requests about how to fix performance problems with our framework. As it comes down to following the same steps and looking into the same things every single time, I decided to write a blogpost about it instead, so more people can learn from this and solve performance problems in their O/R mapper powered applications. In some parts it's focused on LLBLGen Pro but it's also usable for other O/R mapping frameworks, as the vast majority of performance problems in O/R mapper powered applications are not specific for a certain O/R mapper framework. Too often, the developer looks at the wrong part of the application, trying to fix what isn't a problem in that part, and getting frustrated that 'things are so slow with <insert your favorite framework X here>'. I'm in the O/R mapper business for a long time now (almost 10 years, full time) and as it's a small world, we O/R mapper developers know almost all tricks to pull off by now: we all know what to do to make task ABC faster and what compromises (because there are almost always compromises) to deal with if we decide to make ABC faster that way. Some O/R mapper frameworks are faster in X, others in Y, but you can be sure the difference is mainly a result of a compromise some developers are willing to deal with and others aren't. That's why the O/R mapper frameworks on the market today are different in many ways, even though they all fetch and save entities from and to a database. I'm not suggesting there's no room for improvement in today's O/R mapper frameworks, there always is, but it's not a matter of 'the slowness of the application is caused by the O/R mapper' anymore. Perhaps query generation can be optimized a bit here, row materialization can be optimized a bit there, but it's mainly coming down to milliseconds. Still worth it if you're a framework developer, but it's not much compared to the time spend inside databases and in user code: if a complete fetch takes 40ms or 50ms (from call to entity object collection), it won't make a difference for your application as that 10ms difference won't be noticed. That's why it's very important to find the real locations of the problems so developers can fix them properly and don't get frustrated because their quest to get a fast, performing application failed. Performance tuning basics and rules Finding and fixing performance problems in any application is a strict procedure with four prescribed steps: isolate, analyze, interpret and fix, in that order. It's key that you don't skip a step nor make assumptions: these steps help you find the reason of a problem which seems to be there, and how to fix it or leave it as-is. Skipping a step, or when you assume things will be bad/slow without doing analysis will lead to the path of premature optimization and won't actually solve your problems, only create new ones. The most important rule of finding and fixing performance problems in software is that you have to understand what 'performance problem' actually means. Most developers will say "when a piece of software / code is slow, you have a performance problem". But is that actually the case? If I write a Linq query which will aggregate, group and sort 5 million rows from several tables to produce a resultset of 10 rows, it might take more than a couple of milliseconds before that resultset is ready to be consumed by other logic. If I solely look at the Linq query, the code consuming the resultset of the 10 rows and then look at the time it takes to complete the whole procedure, it will appear to me to be slow: all that time taken to produce and consume 10 rows? But if you look closer, if you analyze and interpret the situation, you'll see it does a tremendous amount of work, and in that light it might even be extremely fast. With every performance problem you encounter, always do realize that what you're trying to solve is perhaps not a technical problem at all, but a perception problem. The second most important rule you have to understand is based on the old saying "Penny wise, Pound Foolish": the part which takes e.g. 5% of the total time T for a given task isn't worth optimizing if you have another part which takes a much larger part of the total time T for that same given task. Optimizing parts which are relatively insignificant for the total time taken is not going to bring you better results overall, even if you totally optimize that part away. This is the core reason why analysis of the complete set of application parts which participate in a given task is key to being successful in solving performance problems: No analysis -> no problem -> no solution. One warning up front: hunting for performance will always include making compromises. Fast software can be made maintainable, but if you want to squeeze as much performance out of your software, you will inevitably be faced with the dilemma of compromising one or more from the group {readability, maintainability, features} for the extra performance you think you'll gain. It's then up to you to decide whether it's worth it. In almost all cases it's not. The reason for this is simple: the vast majority of performance problems can be solved by implementing the proper algorithms, the ones with proven Big O-characteristics so you know the performance you'll get plus you know the algorithm will work. The time taken by the algorithm implementing code is inevitable: you already implemented the best algorithm. You might find some optimizations on the technical level but in general these are minor. Let's look at the four steps to see how they guide us through the quest to find and fix performance problems. Isolate The first thing you need to do is to isolate the areas in your application which are assumed to be slow. For example, if your application is a web application and a given page is taking several seconds or even minutes to load, it's a good candidate to check out. It's important to start with the isolate step because it allows you to focus on a single code path per area with a clear begin and end and ignore the rest. The rest of the steps are taken per identified problematic area. Keep in mind that isolation focuses on tasks in an application, not code snippets. A task is something that's started in your application by either another task or the user, or another program, and has a beginning and an end. You can see a task as a piece of functionality offered by your application.  Analyze Once you've determined the problem areas, you have to perform analysis on the code paths of each area, to see where the performance problems occur and which areas are not the problem. This is a multi-layered effort: an application which uses an O/R mapper typically consists of multiple parts: there's likely some kind of interface (web, webservice, windows etc.), a part which controls the interface and business logic, the O/R mapper part and the RDBMS, all connected with either a network or inter-process connections provided by the OS or other means. Each of these parts, including the connectivity plumbing, eat up a part of the total time it takes to complete a task, e.g. load a webpage with all orders of a given customer X. To understand which parts participate in the task / area we're investigating and how much they contribute to the total time taken to complete the task, analysis of each participating task is essential. Start with the code you wrote which starts the task, analyze the code and track the path it follows through your application. What does the code do along the way, verify whether it's correct or not. Analyze whether you have implemented the right algorithms in your code for this particular area. Remember we're looking at one area at a time, which means we're ignoring all other code paths, just the code path of the current problematic area, from begin to end and back. Don't dig in and start optimizing at the code level just yet. We're just analyzing. If your analysis reveals big architectural stupidity, it's perhaps a good idea to rethink the architecture at this point. For the rest, we're analyzing which means we collect data about what could be wrong, for each participating part of the complete application. Reviewing the code you wrote is a good tool to get deeper understanding of what is going on for a given task but ultimately it lacks precision and overview what really happens: humans aren't good code interpreters, computers are. We therefore need to utilize tools to get deeper understanding about which parts contribute how much time to the total task, triggered by which other parts and for example how many times are they called. There are two different kind of tools which are necessary: .NET profilers and O/R mapper / RDBMS profilers. .NET profiling .NET profilers (e.g. dotTrace by JetBrains or Ants by Red Gate software) show exactly which pieces of code are called, how many times they're called, and the time it took to run that piece of code, at the method level and sometimes even at the line level. The .NET profilers are essential tools for understanding whether the time taken to complete a given task / area in your application is consumed by .NET code, where exactly in your code, the path to that code, how many times that code was called by other code and thus reveals where hotspots are located: the areas where a solution can be found. Importantly, they also reveal which areas can be left alone: remember our penny wise pound foolish saying: if a profiler reveals that a group of methods are fast, or don't contribute much to the total time taken for a given task, ignore them. Even if the code in them is perhaps complex and looks like a candidate for optimization: you can work all day on that, it won't matter.  As we're focusing on a single area of the application, it's best to start profiling right before you actually activate the task/area. Most .NET profilers support this by starting the application without starting the profiling procedure just yet. You navigate to the particular part which is slow, start profiling in the profiler, in your application you perform the actions which are considered slow, and afterwards you get a snapshot in the profiler. The snapshot contains the data collected by the profiler during the slow action, so most data is produced by code in the area to investigate. This is important, because it allows you to stay focused on a single area. O/R mapper and RDBMS profiling .NET profilers give you a good insight in the .NET side of things, but not in the RDBMS side of the application. As this article is about O/R mapper powered applications, we're also looking at databases, and the software making it possible to consume the database in your application: the O/R mapper. To understand which parts of the O/R mapper and database participate how much to the total time taken for task T, we need different tools. There are two kind of tools focusing on O/R mappers and database performance profiling: O/R mapper profilers and RDBMS profilers. For O/R mapper profilers, you can look at LLBLGen Prof by hibernating rhinos or the Linq to Sql/LLBLGen Pro profiler by Huagati. Hibernating rhinos also have profilers for other O/R mappers like NHibernate (NHProf) and Entity Framework (EFProf) and work the same as LLBLGen Prof. For RDBMS profilers, you have to look whether the RDBMS vendor has a profiler. For example for SQL Server, the profiler is shipped with SQL Server, for Oracle it's build into the RDBMS, however there are also 3rd party tools. Which tool you're using isn't really important, what's important is that you get insight in which queries are executed during the task / area we're currently focused on and how long they took. Here, the O/R mapper profilers have an advantage as they collect the time it took to execute the query from the application's perspective so they also collect the time it took to transport data across the network. This is important because a query which returns a massive resultset or a resultset with large blob/clob/ntext/image fields takes more time to get transported across the network than a small resultset and a database profiler doesn't take this into account most of the time. Another tool to use in this case, which is more low level and not all O/R mappers support it (though LLBLGen Pro and NHibernate as well do) is tracing: most O/R mappers offer some form of tracing or logging system which you can use to collect the SQL generated and executed and often also other activity behind the scenes. While tracing can produce a tremendous amount of data in some cases, it also gives insight in what's going on. Interpret After we've completed the analysis step it's time to look at the data we've collected. We've done code reviews to see whether we've done anything stupid and which parts actually take place and if the proper algorithms have been implemented. We've done .NET profiling to see which parts are choke points and how much time they contribute to the total time taken to complete the task we're investigating. We've performed O/R mapper profiling and RDBMS profiling to see which queries were executed during the task, how many queries were generated and executed and how long they took to complete, including network transportation. All this data reveals two things: which parts are big contributors to the total time taken and which parts are irrelevant. Both aspects are very important. The parts which are irrelevant (i.e. don't contribute significantly to the total time taken) can be ignored from now on, we won't look at them. The parts which contribute a lot to the total time taken are important to look at. We now have to first look at the .NET profiler results, to see whether the time taken is consumed in our own code, in .NET framework code, in the O/R mapper itself or somewhere else. For example if most of the time is consumed by DbCommand.ExecuteReader, the time it took to complete the task is depending on the time the data is fetched from the database. If there was just 1 query executed, according to tracing or O/R mapper profilers / RDBMS profilers, check whether that query is optimal, uses indexes or has to deal with a lot of data. Interpret means that you follow the path from begin to end through the data collected and determine where, along the path, the most time is contributed. It also means that you have to check whether this was expected or is totally unexpected. My previous example of the 10 row resultset of a query which groups millions of rows will likely reveal that a long time is spend inside the database and almost no time is spend in the .NET code, meaning the RDBMS part contributes the most to the total time taken, the rest is compared to that time, irrelevant. Considering the vastness of the source data set, it's expected this will take some time. However, does it need tweaking? Perhaps all possible tweaks are already in place. In the interpret step you then have to decide that further action in this area is necessary or not, based on what the analysis results show: if the analysis results were unexpected and in the area where the most time is contributed to the total time taken is room for improvement, action should be taken. If not, you can only accept the situation and move on. In all cases, document your decision together with the analysis you've done. If you decide that the perceived performance problem is actually expected due to the nature of the task performed, it's essential that in the future when someone else looks at the application and starts asking questions you can answer them properly and new analysis is only necessary if situations changed. Fix After interpreting the analysis results you've concluded that some areas need adjustment. This is the fix step: you're actively correcting the performance problem with proper action targeted at the real cause. In many cases related to O/R mapper powered applications it means you'll use different features of the O/R mapper to achieve the same goal, or apply optimizations at the RDBMS level. It could also mean you apply caching inside your application (compromise memory consumption over performance) to avoid unnecessary re-querying data and re-consuming the results. After applying a change, it's key you re-do the analysis and interpretation steps: compare the results and expectations with what you had before, to see whether your actions had any effect or whether it moved the problem to a different part of the application. Don't fall into the trap to do partly analysis: do the full analysis again: .NET profiling and O/R mapper / RDBMS profiling. It might very well be that the changes you've made make one part faster but another part significantly slower, in such a way that the overall problem hasn't changed at all. Performance tuning is dealing with compromises and making choices: to use one feature over the other, to accept a higher memory footprint, to go away from the strict-OO path and execute queries directly onto the RDBMS, these are choices and compromises which will cross your path if you want to fix performance problems with respect to O/R mappers or data-access and databases in general. In most cases it's not a big issue: alternatives are often good choices too and the compromises aren't that hard to deal with. What is important is that you document why you made a choice, a compromise: which analysis data, which interpretation led you to the choice made. This is key for good maintainability in the years to come. Most common performance problems with O/R mappers Below is an incomplete list of common performance problems related to data-access / O/R mappers / RDBMS code. It will help you with fixing the hotspots you found in the interpretation step. SELECT N+1: (Lazy-loading specific). Lazy loading triggered performance bottlenecks. Consider a list of Orders bound to a grid. You have a Field mapped onto a related field in Order, Customer.CompanyName. Showing this column in the grid will make the grid fetch (indirectly) for each row the Customer row. This means you'll get for the single list not 1 query (for the orders) but 1+(the number of orders shown) queries. To solve this: use eager loading using a prefetch path to fetch the customers with the orders. SELECT N+1 is easy to spot with an O/R mapper profiler or RDBMS profiler: if you see a lot of identical queries executed at once, you have this problem. Prefetch paths using many path nodes or sorting, or limiting. Eager loading problem. Prefetch paths can help with performance, but as 1 query is fetched per node, it can be the number of data fetched in a child node is bigger than you think. Also consider that data in every node is merged on the client within the parent. This is fast, but it also can take some time if you fetch massive amounts of entities. If you keep fetches small, you can use tuning parameters like the ParameterizedPrefetchPathThreshold setting to get more optimal queries. Deep inheritance hierarchies of type Target Per Entity/Type. If you use inheritance of type Target per Entity / Type (each type in the inheritance hierarchy is mapped onto its own table/view), fetches will join subtype- and supertype tables in many cases, which can lead to a lot of performance problems if the hierarchy has many types. With this problem, keep inheritance to a minimum if possible, or switch to a hierarchy of type Target Per Hierarchy, which means all entities in the inheritance hierarchy are mapped onto the same table/view. Of course this has its own set of drawbacks, but it's a compromise you might want to take. Fetching massive amounts of data by fetching large lists of entities. LLBLGen Pro supports paging (and limiting the # of rows returned), which is often key to process through large sets of data. Use paging on the RDBMS if possible (so a query is executed which returns only the rows in the page requested). When using paging in a web application, be sure that you switch server-side paging on on the datasourcecontrol used. In this case, paging on the grid alone is not enough: this can lead to fetching a lot of data which is then loaded into the grid and paged there. Keep note that analyzing queries for paging could lead to the false assumption that paging doesn't occur, e.g. when the query contains a field of type ntext/image/clob/blob and DISTINCT can't be applied while it should have (e.g. due to a join): the datareader will do DISTINCT filtering on the client. this is a little slower but it does perform paging functionality on the data-reader so it won't fetch all rows even if the query suggests it does. Fetch massive amounts of data because blob/clob/ntext/image fields aren't excluded. LLBLGen Pro supports field exclusion for queries. You can exclude fields (also in prefetch paths) per query to avoid fetching all fields of an entity, e.g. when you don't need them for the logic consuming the resultset. Excluding fields can greatly reduce the amount of time spend on data-transport across the network. Use this optimization if you see that there's a big difference between query execution time on the RDBMS and the time reported by the .NET profiler for the ExecuteReader method call. Doing client-side aggregates/scalar calculations by consuming a lot of data. If possible, try to formulate a scalar query or group by query using the projection system or GetScalar functionality of LLBLGen Pro to do data consumption on the RDBMS server. It's far more efficient to process data on the RDBMS server than to first load it all in memory, then traverse the data in-memory to calculate a value. Using .ToList() constructs inside linq queries. It might be you use .ToList() somewhere in a Linq query which makes the query be run partially in-memory. Example: var q = from c in metaData.Customers.ToList() where c.Country=="Norway" select c; This will actually fetch all customers in-memory and do an in-memory filtering, as the linq query is defined on an IEnumerable<T>, and not on the IQueryable<T>. Linq is nice, but it can often be a bit unclear where some parts of a Linq query might run. Fetching all entities to delete into memory first. To delete a set of entities it's rather inefficient to first fetch them all into memory and then delete them one by one. It's more efficient to execute a DELETE FROM ... WHERE query on the database directly to delete the entities in one go. LLBLGen Pro supports this feature, and so do some other O/R mappers. It's not always possible to do this operation in the context of an O/R mapper however: if an O/R mapper relies on a cache, these kind of operations are likely not supported because they make it impossible to track whether an entity is actually removed from the DB and thus can be removed from the cache. Fetching all entities to update with an expression into memory first. Similar to the previous point: it is more efficient to update a set of entities directly with a single UPDATE query using an expression instead of fetching the entities into memory first and then updating the entities in a loop, and afterwards saving them. It might however be a compromise you don't want to take as it is working around the idea of having an object graph in memory which is manipulated and instead makes the code fully aware there's a RDBMS somewhere. Conclusion Performance tuning is almost always about compromises and making choices. It's also about knowing where to look and how the systems in play behave and should behave. The four steps I provided should help you stay focused on the real problem and lead you towards the solution. Knowing how to optimally use the systems participating in your own code (.NET framework, O/R mapper, RDBMS, network/services) is key for success as well as knowing what's going on inside the application you built. I hope you'll find this guide useful in tracking down performance problems and dealing with them in a useful way.  

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• Problem with ATI Radeon HD 7670M on Ubuntu 12.10

  - by Aniket

  I updated from Ubuntu 12.04 to 12.10 a couple of days back. My machine is a Dell Inspiron 15R with a Radeon HD 7670M Graphic Driver. When I was using 12.04, I was able to install the propriety driver using the notification you usually get. But after the upgrade, the graphic driver is not getting installed. I am not getting the notification to install the driver And I also tried to follow the steps given - What is the correct way to install ATI Catalyst Video Drivers (fglrx)? I tried the legacy as well as the usual installation procedure Both ways I failed and my graphics went to the fallback, disabling Unity Note: My laptop is getting heated to 80 degrees and can shut down at any point. Please help.

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• How to remove the “AMD Testing use only” watermark from Ubuntu 12.10

  - by Lucio

  I've installed the latest catalyst driver (beta) following the step in this guide for Ubuntu Quantal Quetzal. My system is 64 bit and my graphic card is an ATI RadeonHD 6670, this g.c. is Officially Supported (Catalyst & Open Source), you can confirm that from this AMD Linux Community thread. I don't have any problem, except the AMD testing use only watermark. I see the following frame in any stage into the OS (logged, unlloged, etc.) except in the terminals. I found different versions of how to remove this image, but this change according to the system, so I want an answer from this popular (trusted) site. How to solve this issue in Ubuntu 12.10 32b? This procedure is different in a 64b system?

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, December 09, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, December 09, 2010Popular ReleasesAutoLoL: AutoLoL v1.4.3: AutoLoL now supports importing the build pages from Mobafire.com as well! Just insert the url to the build and voila. (For example: http://www.mobafire.com/league-of-legends/build/unforgivens-guide-how-to-build-a-successful-mordekaiser-24061) Stable release of AutoChat (It is still recommended to use with caution and to read the documentation) It is now possible to associate *.lolm files with AutoLoL to quickly open them The selected spells are now displayed in the masteries tab for qu...SubtitleTools: SubtitleTools 1.2: - Added auto insertion of RLE (RIGHT-TO-LEFT EMBEDDING) Unicode character for the RTL languages. - Fixed delete rows issue.PHP Manager for IIS: PHP Manager 1.1 for IIS 7: This is a final stable release of PHP Manager 1.1 for IIS 7. This is a minor incremental release that contains all the functionality available in 53121 plus additional features listed below: Improved detection logic for existing PHP installations. Now PHP Manager detects the location to php.ini file in accordance to the PHP specifications Configuring date.timezone. PHP Manager can automatically set the date.timezone directive which is required to be set starting from PHP 5.3 Ability to ...Algorithmia: Algorithmia 1.1: Algorithmia v1.1, released on December 8th, 2010.SuperSocket, an extensible socket application framework: SuperSocket 1.0 SP1: Fixed bugs: fixed a potential bug that the running state hadn't been updated after socket server stopped fixed a synchronization issue when clearing timeout session fixed a bug in ArraySegmentList fixed a bug on getting configuration valueCslaGenFork: CslaGenFork 4.0 CTP 2: The version is 4.0.1 CTP2 and was released 2010 December 7 and includes the following files: CslaGenFork 4.0.1-2010-12-07 Setup.msi Templates-2010-10-07.zip For getting started instructions, refer to How to section. Overview of the changes Since CTP1 there were 53 work items closed (28 features, 24 issues and 1 task). During this 60 days a lot of work has been done on several areas. First the stereotypes: EditableRoot is OK EditableChild is OK EditableRootCollection is OK Editable...Windows Workflow Foundation on Codeplex: WF AppFabric Caching Activity Pack 0.1: This release includes a set of AppFabric Caching Activities that allow you to use Windows Server AppFabric Caching with WF4. Video endpoint.tv - New WF4 Caching Activities for Windows Server AppFabric ActivitiesDataCacheAdd DataCacheGet DataCachePut DataCacheGet DataCacheRemove WaitForCacheBulkNotification WaitForCacheNotification WaitForFailureNotification WaitForItemNotification WaitForRegionNotification Unit TestsUnit tests are included in the source. Be sure to star...My Web Pages Starter Kit: 1.3.1 Production Release (Security HOTFIX): Due to a critical security issue, it's strongly advised to update the My Web Pages Starter Kit to this version. Possible attackers could misuse the image upload to transmit any type of file to the website. If you already have a running version of My Web Pages Starter Kit 1.3.0, you can just replace the ftb.imagegallery.aspx file in the root directory with the one attached to this release.EnhSim: EnhSim 2.2.0 ALPHA: 2.2.0 ALPHAThis release adds in the changes for 4.03a. at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 - Updated En...ASP.NET MVC Project Awesome (jQuery Ajax helpers): 1.4: A rich set of helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form, Popup and Pager new stuff: popup WhiteSpaceFilterAttribute tested on mozilla, safari, chrome, opera, ie 9b/8/7/6nopCommerce. ASP.NET open source shopping cart: nopCommerce 1.90: To see the full list of fixes and changes please visit the release notes page (http://www.nopCommerce.com/releasenotes.aspx).TweetSharp: TweetSharp v2.0.0.0 - Preview 4: Documentation for this release may be found at http://tweetsharp.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=UserGuide&referringTitle=Documentation. Note: This code is currently preview quality. Preview 4 ChangesReintroduced fluent interface support via satellite assembly Added entities support, entity segmentation, and ITweetable/ITweeter interfaces for client development Numerous fixes reported by preview users Preview 3 ChangesNumerous fixes and improvements to core engine Twitter API coverage: a...Aura: Aura Preview 1: Rewritten from scratch. This release supports getting color only from icon of foreground window.MBG Extensions Library: MBG.Extensions_v1.3: MBG.Extensions Collections.CollectionExtensions - AddIfNew - RemoveRange (Moved From ListExtensions to here, where it should have been) Collections.EnumerableExtensions - ToCommaSeparatedList has been replaced by: Join() and ToValueSeparatedList Join is for a single line of values. ToValueSeparatedList is generally for collection and will separate each entity in the collection by a new line character - ToQueue - ToStack Core.ByteExtensions - TripleDESDecrypt Core.DateTimeExtension...myCollections: Version 1.2: New in version 1.2: Big performance improvement. New Design (Added Outlook style View, New detail view, New Groub By...) Added Sort by Media Added Manage Movie Studio Zoom preference is now saved. Media name are now editable. Added Portuguese version You can now Hide details panel Add support for FLAC tags You can now imports books from BibTex Xml file BugFixingmytrip.mvc (CMS & e-Commerce): mytrip.mvc 1.0.49.0 beta: mytrip.mvc 1.0.49.0 beta web Web for install hosting System Requirements: NET 4.0, MSSQL 2008 or MySql (auto creation table to database) if .\SQLEXPRESS auto creation database (App_Data folder) mytrip.mvc 1.0.49.0 beta src System Requirements: Visual Studio 2010 or Web Deweloper 2010 MSSQL 2008 or MySql (auto creation table to database) if .\SQLEXPRESS auto creation database (App_Data folder) Connector/Net 6.3.4, MVC3 RC WARNING For run and debug mytrip.mvc 1.0.49.0 beta src download and ...Menu and Context Menu for Silverlight 4.0: Silverlight Menu and Context Menu v2.3 Beta: - Added keyboard navigation support with access keys - Shortcuts like Ctrl-Alt-A are now supported(where the browser permits it) - The PopupMenuSeparator is now completely based on the PopupMenuItem class - Moved item manipulation code to a partial class in PopupMenuItemsControl.cs - Moved menu management and keyboard navigation code to the new PopupMenuManager class - Simplified the layout by removing the RootGrid element(all content is now placed in OverlayCanvas and is accessed by the new ...MiniTwitter: 1.62: MiniTwitter 1.62 ???? ?? ??????????????????????????????????????? 140 ?????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????? ?? ??????????????????????????????????Phalanger - The PHP Language Compiler for the .NET Framework: 2.0 (December 2010): The release is targetted for stable daily use. With improved performance and enhanced compatibility with several latest PHP open source applications; it makes this release perfect replacement of your old PHP runtime. Changes made within this release include following and much more: Performance improvements based on real-world applications experience. We determined biggest bottlenecks and we found and removed overheads causing performance problems in many PHP applications. Reimplemented nat...Chronos WPF: Chronos v2.0 Beta 3: Release notes: Updated introduction document. Updated Visual Studio 2010 Extension (vsix) package. Added horizontal scrolling to the main window TaskBar. Added new styles for ListView, ListViewItem, GridViewColumnHeader, ... Added a new WindowViewModel class (allowing to fetch data). Added a new Navigate method (with several overloads) to the NavigationViewModel class (protected). Reimplemented Task usage for the WorkspaceViewModel.OnDelete method. Removed the reflection effect...New Projects:WinK: WinK Project1000 bornes: This project is the adaptation of the famous French card game 1000 bornes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mille_Bornes) There will be 3 types of clients: - Windows Application (WPF) - Internet Application (ASP.NET, Ajax) - Silverlight Application It's developed in C#.AutomaTones: BDSA Project 2010. Team Anders is developing an application that uses automatons to generate music.EIRENE: UnknownFinal: TDD driven analize of avalable tdd frameworks ect.HomeGrown Database Project tools: A set of tools that can be used to deploy Visual Studio SQL Databse and Server Projects. Developed using Visual Basic .Net 4.0mcssolution: no summaryMobile-enabled ASP.NET Web Forms / MVC application samples: Code samples for the whitepaper "Add mobile pages to your ASP.NET Web Forms / MVC application" linked from http://asp.net/mobileMSDI Projects: www.msdi.cnObject TreeView Visualizer: This is a Helper Library for easy Access to Visual a Object to an treeview. Nice feature to display data, if an error happen. One Place To Rule Them All: Desktop system to manage basics system functions in 3d environmant. Optra also provide community support and easy transfer data and setups between varius devices using xmpp protocol and OpenFire jabber server.Performance Data Suite: The Performance Data Suite will help you to monitor, analyze and optimize your server infrastructure. There will be predefined sets of data collections(e.g. MySQL, Apache, IIS) but it will also help you to create collections on your own.Secure Group Communication in AdHoc Networks: Secure Group Communication in AdHoc Networksimweb: simweb - is a research project which own by GCR and all its copyright belong to GCR. You can download the code for reference only but not able to be commercial without a fees.starLiGHT.Engine: starLiGHT.Engine is a set of libraries for indie game developers using XNA. It is in development for some years now as a closed source project. Now I will release some (most) parts as Open Source (dual licensing).UMC? ???? .NET ??? ?? ???? ???: ???(Junil, Um)? ???? .NET ???? ?? ?? ???? ??? ???.University of Ottawa tour for WP7: This is a Windows Phone 7 tour guide app for the University of Ottawa. vutpp for VS2010: C++ UnitTest Gui Addin????: ????

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• Troubleshooting High-CPU Utilization for SQL Server

  - by Susantha Bathige

  The objective of this FAQ is to outline the basic steps in troubleshooting high CPU utilization on  a server hosting a SQL Server instance. The first and the most common step if you suspect high CPU utilization (or are alerted for it) is to login to the physical server and check the Windows Task Manager. The Performance tab will show the high utilization as shown below: Next, we need to determine which process is responsible for the high CPU consumption. The Processes tab of the Task Manager will show this information: Note that to see all processes you should select Show processes from all user. In this case, SQL Server (sqlserver.exe) is consuming 99% of the CPU (a normal benchmark for max CPU utilization is about 50-60%). Next we examine the scheduler data. Scheduler is a component of SQLOS which evenly distributes load amongst CPUs. The query below returns the important columns for CPU troubleshooting. Note – if your server is under severe stress and you are unable to login to SSMS, you can use another machine’s SSMS to login to the server through DAC – Dedicated Administrator Connection (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms189595.aspx for details on using DAC) SELECT scheduler_id ,cpu_id ,status ,runnable_tasks_count ,active_workers_count ,load_factor ,yield_count FROM sys.dm_os_schedulers WHERE scheduler_id See below for the BOL definitions for the above columns. scheduler_id – ID of the scheduler. All schedulers that are used to run regular queries have ID numbers less than 1048576. Those schedulers that have IDs greater than or equal to 1048576 are used internally by SQL Server, such as the dedicated administrator connection scheduler. cpu_id – ID of the CPU with which this scheduler is associated. status – Indicates the status of the scheduler. runnable_tasks_count – Number of workers, with tasks assigned to them that are waiting to be scheduled on the runnable queue. active_workers_count – Number of workers that are active. An active worker is never preemptive, must have an associated task, and is either running, runnable, or suspended. current_tasks_count - Number of current tasks that are associated with this scheduler. load_factor – Internal value that indicates the perceived load on this scheduler. yield_count – Internal value that is used to indicate progress on this scheduler.                                                                 Now to interpret the above data. There are four schedulers and each assigned to a different CPU. All the CPUs are ready to accept user queries as they all are ONLINE. There are 294 active tasks in the output as per the current_tasks_count column. This count indicates how many activities currently associated with the schedulers. When a  task is complete, this number is decremented. The 294 is quite a high figure and indicates all four schedulers are extremely busy. When a task is enqueued, the load_factor  value is incremented. This value is used to determine whether a new task should be put on this scheduler or another scheduler. The new task will be allocated to less loaded scheduler by SQLOS. The very high value of this column indicates all the schedulers have a high load. There are 268 runnable tasks which mean all these tasks are assigned a worker and waiting to be scheduled on the runnable queue.   The next step is  to identify which queries are demanding a lot of CPU time. The below query is useful for this purpose (note, in its current form,  it only shows the top 10 records). SELECT TOP 10 st.text  ,st.dbid  ,st.objectid  ,qs.total_worker_time  ,qs.last_worker_time  ,qp.query_plan FROM sys.dm_exec_query_stats qs CROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_sql_text(qs.sql_handle) st CROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_query_plan(qs.plan_handle) qp ORDER BY qs.total_worker_time DESC This query as total_worker_time as the measure of CPU load and is in descending order of the  total_worker_time to show the most expensive queries and their plans at the top:      Note the BOL definitions for the important columns: total_worker_time - Total amount of CPU time, in microseconds, that was consumed by executions of this plan since it was compiled. last_worker_time - CPU time, in microseconds, that was consumed the last time the plan was executed.   I re-ran the same query again after few seconds and was returned the below output. After few seconds the SP dbo.TestProc1 is shown in fourth place and once again the last_worker_time is the highest. This means the procedure TestProc1 consumes a CPU time continuously each time it executes.      In this case, the primary cause for high CPU utilization was a stored procedure. You can view the execution plan by clicking on query_plan column to investigate why this is causing a high CPU load. I have used SQL Server 2008 (SP1) to test all the queries used in this article.

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• Alert visualization recipe: Get out your blender, drop in some sp_send_dbmail, Google Charts API, add your favorite colors and sprinkle with html. Blend till it’s smooth and looks pretty enough to taste.

  - by Maria Zakourdaev

    I really like database monitoring. My email inbox have a constant flow of different types of alerts coming from our production servers with all kinds of information, sometimes more useful and sometimes less useful. Usually database alerts look really simple, it’s usually a plain text email saying “Prod1 Database data file on Server X is 80% used. You’d better grow it manually before some query triggers the AutoGrowth process”. Imagine you could have received email like the one below.  In addition to the alert description it could have also included the the database file growth chart over the past 6 months. Wouldn’t it give you much more information whether the data growth is natural or extreme? That’s truly what data visualization is for. Believe it or not, I have sent the graph below from SQL Server stored procedure without buying any additional data monitoring/visualization tool.   Would you like to visualize your database alerts like I do? Then like myself, you’d love the Google Charts. All you need to know is a little HTML and have a mail profile configured on your SQL Server instance regardless of the SQL Server version. First of all, I hope you know that the sp_send_dbmail procedure has a great parameter @body_format = ‘HTML’, which allows us to send rich and colorful messages instead of boring black and white ones. All that we need is to dynamically create HTML code. This is how, for instance, you can create a table and populate it with some data: DECLARE @html varchar(max) SET @html = '<html>' + '<H3><font id="Text" style='color: Green;'>Top Databases: </H3>' + '<table border="1" bordercolor="#3300FF" style='background-color:#DDF8CC' width='70%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='3'>' + '<tr><font color="Green"><th>Database Name</th><th>Size</th><th>Physical Name</th></tr>' + CAST( (SELECT TOP 10                             td = name,'',                             td = size * 8/1024 ,'',                             td = physical_name              FROM sys.master_files               ORDER BY size DESC             FOR XML PATH ('tr'),TYPE ) AS VARCHAR(MAX)) + '</table>' EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_send_dbmail @recipients = '[email protected]', @subject ='Top databases', @body = @html, @body_format = 'HTML' This is the result:   If you want to add more visualization effects, you can use Google Charts Tools https://google-developers.appspot.com/chart/interactive/docs/index which is a free and rich library of data visualization charts, they’re also easy to populate and embed. There are two versions of the Google Charts Image based charts: https://google-developers.appspot.com/chart/image/docs/gallery/chart_gall This is an old version, it’s officially deprecated although it will be up for a next few years or so. I really enjoy using this one because it can be viewed within the email body. For mobile devices you need to change the “Load remote images” property in your email application configuration.           Charts based on JavaScript classes: https://google-developers.appspot.com/chart/interactive/docs/gallery This API is newer, with rich and highly interactive charts, and it’s much more easier to understand and configure. The only downside of it is that they cannot be viewed within the email body. Outlook, Gmail and many other email clients, as part of their security policy, do not run any JavaScript that’s placed within the email body. However, you can still enjoy this API by sending the report as an email attachment. Here is an example of the old version of Google Charts API, sending the same top databases report as in the previous example but instead of a simple table, this script is using a pie chart right from  the T-SQL code DECLARE @html  varchar(8000) DECLARE @Series  varchar(800),@Labels  varchar(8000),@Legend  varchar(8000);     SET @Series = ''; SET @Labels = ''; SET @Legend = ''; SELECT TOP 5 @Series = @Series + CAST(size * 8/1024 as varchar) + ',',                         @Labels = @Labels +CAST(size * 8/1024 as varchar) + 'MB'+'|',                         @Legend = @Legend + name + '|' FROM sys.master_files ORDER BY size DESC SELECT @Series = SUBSTRING(@Series,1,LEN(@Series)-1),         @Labels = SUBSTRING(@Labels,1,LEN(@Labels)-1),         @Legend = SUBSTRING(@Legend,1,LEN(@Legend)-1) SET @html =   '<H3><font color="Green"> '+@@ServerName+' top 5 databases : </H3>'+    '<br>'+    '<img src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?'+    'chf=bg,s,DDF8CC&'+    'cht=p&'+    'chs=400x200&'+    'chco=3072F3|7777CC|FF9900|FF0000|4A8C26&'+    'chd=t:'+@Series+'&'+    'chl='+@Labels+'&'+    'chma=0,0,0,0&'+    'chdl='+@Legend+'&'+    'chdlp=b"'+    'alt="'+@@ServerName+' top 5 databases" />'              EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_send_dbmail @recipients = '[email protected]',                             @subject = 'Top databases',                             @body = @html,                             @body_format = 'HTML' This is what you get. Isn’t it great? Chart parameters reference: chf     Gradient fill  bg - backgroud ; s- solid cht     chart type  ( p - pie) chs        chart size width/height chco    series colors chd        chart data string        1,2,3,2 chl        pir chart labels        a|b|c|d chma    chart margins chdl    chart legend            a|b|c|d chdlp    chart legend text        b - bottom of chart   Line graph implementation is also really easy and powerful DECLARE @html varchar(max) DECLARE @Series varchar(max) DECLARE @HourList varchar(max) SET @Series = ''; SET @HourList = ''; SELECT @HourList = @HourList + SUBSTRING(CONVERT(varchar(13),last_execution_time,121), 12,2)  + '|' ,              @Series = @Series + CAST( COUNT(1) as varchar) + ',' FROM sys.dm_exec_query_stats s     CROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_sql_text(plan_handle) t WHERE last_execution_time > = getdate()-1 GROUP BY CONVERT(varchar(13),last_execution_time,121) ORDER BY CONVERT(varchar(13),last_execution_time,121) SET @Series = SUBSTRING(@Series,1,LEN(@Series)-1) SET @html = '<img src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?'+ 'chco=CA3D05,87CEEB&'+ 'chd=t:'+@Series+'&'+ 'chds=1,350&'+ 'chdl= Proc executions from cache&'+ 'chf=bg,s,1F1D1D|c,lg,0,363433,1.0,2E2B2A,0.0&'+ 'chg=25.0,25.0,3,2&'+ 'chls=3|3&'+ 'chm=d,CA3D05,0,-1,12,0|d,FFFFFF,0,-1,8,0|d,87CEEB,1,-1,12,0|d,FFFFFF,1,-1,8,0&'+ 'chs=600x450&'+ 'cht=lc&'+ 'chts=FFFFFF,14&'+ 'chtt=Executions for from' +(SELECT CONVERT(varchar(16),min(last_execution_time),121)          FROM sys.dm_exec_query_stats          WHERE last_execution_time > = getdate()-1) +' till '+ +(SELECT CONVERT(varchar(16),max(last_execution_time),121)     FROM sys.dm_exec_query_stats) + '&'+ 'chxp=1,50.0|4,50.0&'+ 'chxs=0,FFFFFF,12,0|1,FFFFFF,12,0|2,FFFFFF,12,0|3,FFFFFF,12,0|4,FFFFFF,14,0&'+ 'chxt=y,y,x,x,x&'+ 'chxl=0:|1|350|1:|N|2:|'+@HourList+'3:|Hour&'+ 'chma=55,120,0,0" alt="" />' EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_send_dbmail @recipients = '[email protected]', @subject ='Daily number of executions', @body = @html, @body_format = 'HTML' Chart parameters reference: chco    series colors chd        series data chds    scale format chdl    chart legend chf        background fills chg        grid line chls    line style chm        line fill chs        chart size cht        chart type chts    chart style chtt    chart title chxp    axis label positions chxs    axis label styles chxt    axis tick mark styles chxl    axis labels chma    chart margins If you don’t mind to get your charts as an email attachment, you can enjoy the Java based Google Charts which are even easier to configure, and have much more advanced graphics. In the example below, the sp_send_email procedure uses the parameter @query which will be executed at the time that sp_send_dbemail is executed and the HTML result of this execution will be attached to the email. DECLARE @html varchar(max),@query varchar(max) DECLARE @SeriesDBusers  varchar(800);     SET @SeriesDBusers = ''; SELECT @SeriesDBusers = @SeriesDBusers +  ' ["'+DB_NAME(r.database_id) +'", ' +cast(count(1) as varchar)+'],' FROM sys.dm_exec_requests r GROUP BY DB_NAME(database_id) ORDER BY count(1) desc; SET @SeriesDBusers = SUBSTRING(@SeriesDBusers,1,LEN(@SeriesDBusers)-1) SET @query = ' PRINT '' <html>   <head>     <script type="text/javascript" src="https://www.google.com/jsapi"></script>     <script type="text/javascript">       google.load("visualization", "1", {packages:["corechart"]});        google.setOnLoadCallback(drawChart);       function drawChart() {                      var data = google.visualization.arrayToDataTable([                        ["Database Name", "Active users"],                        '+@SeriesDBusers+'                      ]);                        var options = {                        title: "Active users",                        pieSliceText: "value"                      };                        var chart = new google.visualization.PieChart(document.getElementById("chart_div"));                      chart.draw(data, options);       };     </script>   </head>   <body>     <table>     <tr><td>         <div id="chart_div" style='width: 800px; height: 300px;'></div>         </td></tr>     </table>   </body> </html> ''' EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_send_dbmail    @recipients = '[email protected]',    @subject ='Active users',    @body = @html,    @body_format = 'HTML',    @query = @Query,     @attach_query_result_as_file = 1,     @query_attachment_filename = 'Results.htm' After opening the email attachment in the browser you are getting this kind of report: In fact, the above is not only for database alerts. It can be used for applicative reports if you need high levels of customization that you cannot achieve using standard methods like SSRS. If you need more information on how to customize the charts, you can try the following: Image Based Charts wizard https://google-developers.appspot.com/chart/image/docs/chart_wizard  Live Image Charts Playground https://google-developers.appspot.com/chart/image/docs/chart_playground Image Based Charts Parameters List https://google-developers.appspot.com/chart/image/docs/chart_params Java Script Charts Playground https://code.google.com/apis/ajax/playground/?type=visualization Use the above examples as a starting point for your procedures and I’d be more than happy to hear of your implementations of the above techniques. Yours, Maria

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• Oracle Database Appliance Setup Poster Updated

  - by Ravi.Sharma

  The newly updated Setup Poster for Oracle Database Appliance is now available at http://wd0338.oracle.com/archive/cd_ns/E22693_01/index.htm This updated poster is a comprehensive source of information for anyone planning to deploy Oracle Database Appliance. It includes two main sections (which are conveniently printed on the two sides of a single 11x17 page) 1. Preparing to Deploy Oracle Database Appliance2. Oracle Database Appliance Setup The Preparing to Deploy Oracle Database Appliance section provides a concise list of items to plan for and review before beginning deployment. This includes registering Support Identifiers, allocating IP addresses, downloading software and patches, choosing configuration options, as well as important links to useful information. The Oracle Database Appliance Setup section provides a step by step procedure for deploying and configuring Oracle Database Appliance. This includes initial powering up of Oracle Database Appliance, configuring initial network, downloading software and completing the configuration using Oracle Database Appliance Configurator (GUI)  

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• Games to Vista Game explorer with Inno Setup

  - by Kraemer

  Ok, i'm trying to force my inno setup installer to add a shortcut of my game to Vista Games Explorer. Theoretically this should do the trick: [Files] Source: "GameuxInstallHelper.dll"; DestDir: "{app}"; Flags: ignoreversion overwritereadonly; [Registry] Root: HKLM; Subkey: SOFTWARE\dir\dir; Flags: uninsdeletekeyifempty Root: HKLM; Subkey: SOFTWARE\dir\dir; ValueName: Path; ValueType: String; ValueData: {app}; Flags: uninsdeletekey Root: HKLM; Subkey: SOFTWARE\dir\dir; ValueName: AppFile; ValueType: String; ValueData:{app}\executable.exe ; Flags: uninsdeletekey [CustomMessages] en.Local=en en.removemsg=Do you wish to remove game saves and settings? en.taskentry=Play [Code] const PlayTask = 0; AllUsers = 2; Current = 3; type TGUID = record Data1: Cardinal; Data2, Data3: Word; Data4: array [0..7] of char; end; var GUID: TGUID; function GetDC(HWND: DWord): DWord; external '[email protected] stdcall'; function GetDeviceCaps(DC: DWord; Index: Integer): Integer; external '[email protected] stdcall'; function ReleaseDC(HWND: DWord;DC: DWord): Integer; external '[email protected] stdcall'; function ShowWindow(hWnd: DWord; nCmdShow: Integer): boolean; external '[email protected] stdcall'; function SetWindowLong(hWnd: DWord; nIndex: Integer; dwNewLong: Longint):Longint; external '[email protected] stdcall'; function GenerateGUID(var GUID: TGUID): Cardinal; external 'GenerateGUID@files:GameuxInstallHelper.dll stdcall setuponly'; function AddToGameExplorer(Binary: String; Path: String; InstallType: Integer; var GUID: TGUID): Cardinal; external 'AddToGameExplorerW@files:GameuxInstallHelper.dll stdcall setuponly'; function CreateTask(InstallType: Integer; var GUID: TGUID; TaskType: Integer; TaskNumber: Integer; TaskName: String; Binary: String; Parameters: String): Cardinal; external 'CreateTaskW@files:GameuxInstallHelper.dll stdcall setuponly'; function RetrieveGUIDForApplication(Binary: String; var GUID: TGUID): Cardinal; external 'RetrieveGUIDForApplicationW@{app}\GameuxInstallHelper.dll stdcall uninstallonly'; function RemoveFromGameExplorer(var GUID: TGUID): Cardinal; external 'RemoveFromGameExplorer@{app}\GameuxInstallHelper.dll stdcall uninstallonly'; function RemoveTasks(var GUID: TGUID): Cardinal; external 'RemoveTasks@{app}\GameuxInstallHelper.dll stdcall uninstallonly'; function InitializeSetup(): Boolean; var appath: string; ResultCode: Integer; begin if RegKeyExists(HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, 'SOFTWARE\dir\dir') then begin RegQueryStringValue(HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, 'SOFTWARE\dir\dir', 'Path', appath) Exec((appath +'\unins000.exe'), '', '', SW_SHOW, ewWaitUntilTerminated, ResultCode) end else begin Result := TRUE end; end; procedure CurUninstallStepChanged(CurUninstallStep: TUninstallStep); begin if CurUninstallStep = usUninstall then begin if GetWindowsVersion shr 24 > 5 then begin RetrieveGUIDForApplication(ExpandConstant('{app}\AWL_Release.dll'), GUID); RemoveFromGameExplorer(GUID); RemoveTasks(GUID); UnloadDll(ExpandConstant('{app}\GameuxInstallHelper.dll')); end; end; if CurUninstallStep = usPostUninstall then begin if MsgBox(ExpandConstant('{cm:removemsg}'), mbConfirmation, MB_YESNO)=IDYES then begin DelTree(ExpandConstant('{app}'), True, True, True); end; end; end; procedure CurStepChanged(CurStep: TSetupStep); begin if GetWindowsVersion shr 24 > 5 then begin if CurStep = ssInstall then GenerateGUID(GUID); if CurStep = ssPostInstall then begin AddToGameExplorer(ExpandConstant('{app}\AWL_Release.dll'), ExpandConstant('{app}'), Current, GUID); CreateTask(3, GUID, PlayTask, 0, ExpandConstant('{cm:taskentry}'), ExpandConstant('{app}\executable.exe'), ''); CreateTask(3, GUID, 1, 0, 'Game Website', 'http://www.gamewebsite.com/', ''); end; end; end; The installer works just fine, but it doesn't place a shortcut of my game to Games explorer. Since i believe that the problem is on the binary file i guess for that part i should ask for some help. So, can anyone please give me a hand here?

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• Do You Develop Your PL/SQL Directly in the Database?

  - by thatjeffsmith

  I know this sounds like a REALLY weird question for many of you. Let me make one thing clear right away though, I am NOT talking about creating and replacing PLSQL objects directly into a production environment. Do we really need to talk about developers in production again? No, what I am talking about is a developer doing their work from start to finish in a development database. These are generally available to a development team for building the next and greatest version of your databases and database applications. And of course you are using a third party source control system, right? Last week I was in Tampa, FL presenting at the monthly Suncoast Oracle User’s Group meeting. Had a wonderful time, great questions and back-and-forth. My favorite heckler was there, @oraclenered, AKA Chet Justice.  I was in the middle of talking about how it’s better to do your PLSQL work in the Procedure Editor when Chet pipes up - Don’t do it that way, that’s wrong Just press play to edit the PLSQL directly in the database Or something along those lines. I didn’t get what the heck he was talking about. I had been showing how the Procedure Editor gives you much better feedback and support when working with PLSQL. After a few back-and-forths I got to what Chet’s main objection was, and again I’m going to paraphrase: You should develop offline in your SQL worksheet. Don’t do anything in the database until it’s done. I didn’t understand. Were developers expected to be able to internalize and mentally model the PL/SQL engine, see where their errors were, etc in these offline scripts? No, please give Chet more credit than that. What is the ideal Oracle Development Environment? If I were back in the ‘real world’ of database development, I would do all of my development outside of the ‘dev’ instance. My development process looks a little something like this: Do I have a program that already does something like this – copy and paste Has some smart person already written something like this – copy and paste Start typing in the white-screen-of-panic and bungle along until I get something that half-works Tweek, debug, test until I have fooled my subconscious into thinking that it’s ‘good’ As you might understand, I don’t want my co-workers to see the evolution of my code. It would seriously freak them out and I probably wouldn’t have a job anymore (don’t remind me that I already worked myself out of development.) So here’s what I like to do: Run a Local Instance of Oracle on my Machine and Develop My Code Privately I take a copy of development – that’s what source control is for afterall – and run it where no one else can see it. I now get to be my own DBA. If I need a trace – no problem. If I want to run an ASH report, no worries. If I need to create a directory or run some DataPump jobs, that’s all on me. Now when I get my code ‘up to snuff,’ then I will check it into source control and compile it into the official development instance. So my teammates suddenly go from seeing no program, to a mostly complete program. Is this right? If not, it doesn’t seem wrong to me. And after talking to Chet in the car on the way to the local cigar bar, it seems that he’s of the same opinion. So what’s so wrong with coding directly into a development instance? I think ‘wrong’ is a bit strong here. But there are a few pitfalls that you might want to look out for. A few come to mind – and I’m sure Chet could add many more as my memory fails me at the moment. But here goes: Development instance isn’t properly backed up – would hate to lose that work Development is wiped once a week and copied over from Prod – don’t laugh Someone clobbers your code You accidentally on purpose clobber someone else’s code The more developers you have in a single fish pond, the greater chance something ‘bad’ will happen This Isn’t One of Those Posts Where I Tell You What You Should Be Doing I realize many shops won’t be open to allowing developers to stage their own local copies of Oracle. But I would at least be aware that many of your developers are probably doing this anyway – with or without your tacit approval. SQL Developer can do local file tracking, but you should be using Source Control too! I will say that I think it’s imperative that you control your source code outside the database, even if your development team is comprised of a single developer. Store your source code in a file, and control that file in something like Subversion. You would be shocked at the number of teams that do not use a source control system. I know I continue to be shocked no matter how many times I meet another team running by the seat-of-their-pants. I’d love to hear how your development process works. And of course I want to know how SQL Developer and the rest of our tools can better support your processes. And one last thing, if you want a fun and interactive presentation experience, be sure to have Chet in the room

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• SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #049

  - by Pinal Dave

  Here is the list of selected articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2007 Two Connections Related Global Variables Explained – @@CONNECTIONS and @@MAX_CONNECTIONS @@CONNECTIONS Returns the number of attempted connections, either successful or unsuccessful since SQL Server was last started. @@MAX_CONNECTIONS Returns the maximum number of simultaneous user connections allowed on an instance of SQL Server. The number returned is not necessarily the number currently configured. Query Editor – Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio This post may be very simple for most of the users of SQL Server 2005. Earlier this year, I have received one question many times – Where is Query Analyzer in SQL Server 2005? I wrote small post about it and pointed many users to that post – SQL SERVER – 2005 Query Analyzer – Microsoft SQL SERVER Management Studio. Recently I have been receiving similar question. OUTPUT Clause Example and Explanation with INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE SQL Server 2005 has a new OUTPUT clause, which is quite useful. OUTPUT clause has access to insert and deleted tables (virtual tables) just like triggers. OUTPUT clause can be used to return values to client clause. OUTPUT clause can be used with INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE to identify the actual rows affected by these statements. OUTPUT clause can generate a table variable, a permanent table, or temporary table. Even though, @@Identity will still work with SQL Server 2005, however I find the OUTPUT clause very easy and powerful to use. Let us understand the OUTPUT clause using an example. Find Name of The SQL Server Instance Based on database server stored procedures has to run different logic. We came up with two different solutions. 1) When database schema is very much changed, we wrote completely new stored procedure and deprecated older version once it was not needed. 2) When logic depended on Server Name we used global variable @@SERVERNAME. It was very convenient while writing migrating script which depended on the server name for the same database. Explanation of TRY…CATCH and ERROR Handling With RAISEERROR Function One of the developers at my company thought that we can not use the RAISEERROR function in new feature of SQL Server 2005 TRY… CATCH. When asked for an explanation he suggested SQL SERVER – 2005 Explanation of TRY… CATCH and ERROR Handling article as excuse suggesting that I did not give example of RAISEERROR with TRY…CATCH. We all thought it was funny. Just to keep records straight, TRY… CATCH can sure use RAISEERROR function. Different Types of Cache Objects Serveral kinds of objects can be stored in the procedure cache: Compiled Plans: When the query optimizer finishes compiling a query plan, the principal output is compiled plan. Execution contexts: While executing a compiled plan, SQL Server has to keep track of information about the state of execution. Cursors: Cursors track the execution state of server-side cursors, including the cursor’s current location within a resultset. Algebrizer trees: The Algebrizer’s job is to produce an algebrizer tree, which represents the logic structure of a query. Open SSMS From Command Prompt – sqlwb.exe Example This article is written by request and suggestion of Sr. Web Developer at my organization. Due to the nature of this article most of the content is referred from Book On-Line. sqlwbcommand prompt utility which opens SQL Server Management Studio. Squib command does not run queries from the command prompt. sqlcmd utility runs queries from command prompt, read for more information. 2008 Puzzle – Solution – Computed Columns Datatype Explanation Just a day before I wrote article SQL SERVER – Puzzle – Computed Columns Datatype Explanation which was inspired by SQL Server MVP Jacob Sebastian. I suggest that before continuing this article read the original puzzle question SQL SERVER – Puzzle – Computed Columns Datatype Explanation.The question was if the computed column was of datatype TINYINT how to create a Computed Column of datatype INT? 2008 – Find If Index is Being Used in Database It is very often I get a query that how to find if any index is being used in the database or not. If any database has many indexes and not all indexes are used it can adversely affect performance. If the number of indices are higher it reduces the INSERT / UPDATE / DELETE operation but increase the SELECT operation. It is recommended to drop any unused indexes from table to improve the performance. 2009 Interesting Observation – Execution Plan and Results of Aggregate Concatenation Queries If you want to see what’s going on here, I think you need to shift your point of view from an implementation-centric view to an ANSI point of view. ANSI does not guarantee processing the order. Figure 2 is interesting, but it will be potentially misleading if you don’t understand the ANSI rule-set SQL Server operates under in most cases. Implementation thinking can certainly be useful at times when you really need that multi-million row query to finish before the backup fire off, but in this case, it’s counterproductive to understanding what is going on. SQL Server Management Studio and Client Statistics Client Statistics are very important. Many a times, people relate queries execution plan to query cost. This is not a good comparison. Both parameters are different, and they are not always related. It is possible that the query cost of any statement is less, but the amount of the data returned is considerably larger, which is causing any query to run slow. How do we know if any query is retrieving a large amount data or very little data? 2010 I encourage all of you to go through complete series and write your own on the subject. If you write an article and send it to me, I will publish it on this blog with due credit to you. If you write on your own blog, I will update this blog post pointing to your blog post. SQL SERVER – ORDER BY Does Not Work – Limitation of the View 1 SQL SERVER – Adding Column is Expensive by Joining Table Outside View – Limitation of the View 2 SQL SERVER – Index Created on View not Used Often – Limitation of the View 3 SQL SERVER – SELECT * and Adding Column Issue in View – Limitation of the View 4 SQL SERVER – COUNT(*) Not Allowed but COUNT_BIG(*) Allowed – Limitation of the View 5 SQL SERVER – UNION Not Allowed but OR Allowed in Index View – Limitation of the View 6 SQL SERVER – Cross Database Queries Not Allowed in Indexed View – Limitation of the View 7 SQL SERVER – Outer Join Not Allowed in Indexed Views – Limitation of the View 8 SQL SERVER – SELF JOIN Not Allowed in Indexed View – Limitation of the View 9 SQL SERVER – Keywords View Definition Must Not Contain for Indexed View – Limitation of the View 10 SQL SERVER – View Over the View Not Possible with Index View – Limitations of the View 11 SQL SERVER – Get Query Running in Session I was recently looking for syntax where I needed a query running in any particular session. I always remembered the syntax and ha d actually written it down before, but somehow it was not coming to mind quickly this time. I searched online and I ended up on my own article written last year SQL SERVER – Get Last Running Query Based on SPID. I felt that I am getting old because I forgot this really simple syntax. Find Total Number of Transaction on Interval In one of my recent Performance Tuning assignments I was asked how do someone know how many transactions are happening on a server during certain interval. I had a handy script for the same. Following script displays transactions happened on the server at the interval of one minute. You can change the WAITFOR DELAY to any other interval and it should work. 2011 Here are two DMV’s which are newly introduced in SQL Server 2012 and provides vital information about SQL Server. DMV – sys.dm_os_volume_stats – Information about operating system volume DMV – sys.dm_os_windows_info – Information about Operating System SQL Backup and FTP – A Quick and Handy Tool I have used this tool extensively since 2009 at numerous occasion and found it to be very impressive. What separates it from the crowd the most – it is it’s apparent simplicity and speed. When I install SQLBackupAndFTP and configure backups – all in 1 or 2 minutes, my clients are always impressed. Quick Note about JOIN – Common Questions and Simple Answers In this blog post we are going to talk about join and lots of things related to the JOIN. I recently started office hours to answer questions and issues of the community. I receive so many questions that are related to JOIN. I will share a few of the same over here. Most of them are basic, but note that the basics are of great importance. 2012 Importance of User Without Login Question: “In recent version of SQL Server we can create user without login. What is the use of it?” Great question indeed. Let me first attempt to answer this question but after reading my answer I need your help. I want you to help him as well with adding more value to it. Preserve Leading Zero While Coping to Excel from SSMS Earlier I wrote two articles about how to efficiently copy data from SSMS to Excel. Since I wrote that post there are plenty of interest generated on this subject. There are a few questions I keep on getting over this subject. One of the question is how to get the leading zero preserved while copying the data from SSMS to Excel. Well it is almost the same way as my earlier post SQL SERVER – Excel Losing Decimal Values When Value Pasted from SSMS ResultSet. The key here is in EXCEL and not in SQL Server. Solution – 2 T-SQL Puzzles – Display Star and Shortest Code to Display 1 Earlier on this blog we had asked two puzzles. The response from all of you is nothing but Amazing. I have received 350+ responses. Many are valid and many were indeed something I had not thought about it. I strongly suggest you read all the puzzles and their answers here - trust me if you start reading the comments you will not stop till you read every single comment. Seriously trust me on it. Personally I have learned a lot from it. Identify Most Resource Intensive Queries – SQL in Sixty Seconds #028 – Video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvlYy-TGaaA Importance of User Without Login – T-SQL Demo Script Earlier I wrote a blog post about SQL SERVER – Importance of User Without Login and my friend and SQL Expert Vinod Kumar has written excellent follow up blog post about Contained Databases inside SQL Server 2012. Now lots of people asked me if I can also explain the same concept again so here is the small demonstration for it. Let me show you how login without user can help. Before we continue on this subject I strongly recommend that you read my earlier blog post here. In following demo I am going to demonstrate following situation. Login using the System Admin account Create a user without login Checking Access Impersonate the user without login Checking Access Revert Impersonation Give Permission to user without login Impersonate the user without login Checking Access Revert Impersonation Clean up Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Monitoring Database disk space

  - by Michael Freidgeim

  An article Data files: To Autogrow Or Not To Autogrow? recommends NOT to rely on auto-grow, because it causing delays in unplanned times.We should mtonitor database files(both data and log), and if they close to max capacity, manually increase the size. However it doesn't give references, how to monitor the free space inside databases. I've tried to look how to do it. It can be done manually using   execute sp_spaceused for the database in question or  sp_SOS (can be downloaded from http://searchsqlserver.techtarget.com/tip/Find-size-of-SQL-Server-tables-and-other-objects-with-stored-procedure)Alternatively you can run SQL commands as suggested in Http://www.sqlteam.com/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=82359 by Michael Valentine Jonesselect [FREE_SPACE_MB] = convert(decimal(12,2),round((a.size-fileproperty(a.name,'SpaceUsed'))/128.000,2)) from dbo.sysfiles aMore useful article Monitor database file sizes with SQL Server Jobs describes how to setup monitoring Finally I found the excellent articleManaging Database Data Usage With Custom Space Alerts, that can be followed even support personnel without much DBA experience.

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• Announcing Oracle Audit Vault and Database Firewall

  - by Troy Kitch

  Today, Oracle announced the new Oracle Audit Vault and Database Firewall product, which unifies database activity monitoring and audit data analysis in one solution. This new product expands protection beyond Oracle and third party databases with support for auditing the operating system, directories and custom sources. Here are some of the key features of Oracle Audit Vault and Database Firewall: Single Administrator Console Default Reports Out-of-the-Box Compliance Reporting Report with Data from Multiple Source Types Audit Stored Procedure Calls - Not Visible on the Network Extensive Audit Details Blocking SQL Injection Attacks Powerful Alerting Filter Conditions To learn more about the new features in Oracle Audit Vault and Database Firewall, watch the on-demand webcast.

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• New Year's resolution 2012

  Same procedure as every year... Hundreds of thousands of people have their annual new year's resolution to begin the new year. And so am I. My resolution for 2012: Writing more blog articles (again). Actually, it's quite difficult to find to proper time and space to write up an article for any kind of blog, newspaper or magazine. Especially, when you are very busy with daily work and fulfilling customers demands with very tight schedules. But seriously, I'll try to keep it up with at least one or two articles per month during 2012. There are quite some good topics to write about in the queue. Cheers, JoKi

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• Organizations &amp; Architecture UNISA Studies &ndash; Chap 7

  - by MarkPearl

  Learning Outcomes Name different device categories Discuss the functions and structure of I/.O modules Describe the principles of Programmed I/O Describe the principles of Interrupt-driven I/O Describe the principles of DMA Discuss the evolution characteristic of I/O channels Describe different types of I/O interface Explain the principles of point-to-point and multipoint configurations Discuss the way in which a FireWire serial bus functions Discuss the principles of InfiniBand architecture External Devices An external device attaches to the computer by a link to an I/O module. The link is used to exchange control, status, and data between the I/O module and the external device. External devices can be classified into 3 categories… Human readable – e.g. video display Machine readable – e.g. magnetic disk Communications – e.g. wifi card I/O Modules An I/O module has two major functions… Interface to the processor and memory via the system bus or central switch Interface to one or more peripheral devices by tailored data links Module Functions The major functions or requirements for an I/O module fall into the following categories… Control and timing Processor communication Device communication Data buffering Error detection I/O function includes a control and timing requirement, to coordinate the flow of traffic between internal resources and external devices. Processor communication involves the following… Command decoding Data Status reporting Address recognition The I/O device must be able to perform device communication. This communication involves commands, status information, and data. An essential task of an I/O module is data buffering due to the relative slow speeds of most external devices. An I/O module is often responsible for error detection and for subsequently reporting errors to the processor. I/O Module Structure An I/O module functions to allow the processor to view a wide range of devices in a simple minded way. The I/O module may hide the details of timing, formats, and the electro mechanics of an external device so that the processor can function in terms of simple reads and write commands. An I/O channel/processor is an I/O module that takes on most of the detailed processing burden, presenting a high-level interface to the processor. There are 3 techniques are possible for I/O operations Programmed I/O Interrupt[t I/O DMA Access Programmed I/O When a processor is executing a program and encounters an instruction relating to I/O it executes that instruction by issuing a command to the appropriate I/O module. With programmed I/O, the I/O module will perform the requested action and then set the appropriate bits in the I/O status register. The I/O module takes no further actions to alert the processor. I/O Commands To execute an I/O related instruction, the processor issues an address, specifying the particular I/O module and external device, and an I/O command. There are four types of I/O commands that an I/O module may receive when it is addressed by a processor… Control – used to activate a peripheral and tell it what to do Test – Used to test various status conditions associated with an I/O module and its peripherals Read – Causes the I/O module to obtain an item of data from the peripheral and place it in an internal buffer Write – Causes the I/O module to take an item of data form the data bus and subsequently transmit that data item to the peripheral The main disadvantage of this technique is it is a time consuming process that keeps the processor busy needlessly I/O Instructions With programmed I/O there is a close correspondence between the I/O related instructions that the processor fetches from memory and the I/O commands that the processor issues to an I/O module to execute the instructions. Typically there will be many I/O devices connected through I/O modules to the system – each device is given a unique identifier or address – when the processor issues an I/O command, the command contains the address of the address of the desired device, thus each I/O module must interpret the address lines to determine if the command is for itself. When the processor, main memory and I/O share a common bus, two modes of addressing are possible… Memory mapped I/O Isolated I/O (for a detailed explanation read page 245 of book) The advantage of memory mapped I/O over isolated I/O is that it has a large repertoire of instructions that can be used, allowing more efficient programming. The disadvantage of memory mapped I/O over isolated I/O is that valuable memory address space is sued up. Interrupts driven I/O Interrupt driven I/O works as follows… The processor issues an I/O command to a module and then goes on to do some other useful work The I/O module will then interrupts the processor to request service when is is ready to exchange data with the processor The processor then executes the data transfer and then resumes its former processing Interrupt Processing The occurrence of an interrupt triggers a number of events, both in the processor hardware and in software. When an I/O device completes an I/O operations the following sequence of hardware events occurs… The device issues an interrupt signal to the processor The processor finishes execution of the current instruction before responding to the interrupt The processor tests for an interrupt – determines that there is one – and sends an acknowledgement signal to the device that issues the interrupt. The acknowledgement allows the device to remove its interrupt signal The processor now needs to prepare to transfer control to the interrupt routine. To begin, it needs to save information needed to resume the current program at the point of interrupt. The minimum information required is the status of the processor and the location of the next instruction to be executed. The processor now loads the program counter with the entry location of the interrupt-handling program that will respond to this interrupt. It also saves the values of the process registers because the Interrupt operation may modify these The interrupt handler processes the interrupt – this includes examination of status information relating to the I/O operation or other event that caused an interrupt When interrupt processing is complete, the saved register values are retrieved from the stack and restored to the registers Finally, the PSW and program counter values from the stack are restored. Design Issues Two design issues arise in implementing interrupt I/O Because there will be multiple I/O modules, how does the processor determine which device issued the interrupt? If multiple interrupts have occurred, how does the processor decide which one to process? Addressing device recognition, 4 general categories of techniques are in common use… Multiple interrupt lines Software poll Daisy chain Bus arbitration For a detailed explanation of these approaches read page 250 of the textbook. Interrupt driven I/O while more efficient than simple programmed I/O still requires the active intervention of the processor to transfer data between memory and an I/O module, and any data transfer must traverse a path through the processor. Thus is suffers from two inherent drawbacks… The I/O transfer rate is limited by the speed with which the processor can test and service a device The processor is tied up in managing an I/O transfer; a number of instructions must be executed for each I/O transfer Direct Memory Access When large volumes of data are to be moved, an efficient technique is direct memory access (DMA) DMA Function DMA involves an additional module on the system bus. The DMA module is capable of mimicking the processor and taking over control of the system from the processor. It needs to do this to transfer data to and from memory over the system bus. DMA must the bus only when the processor does not need it, or it must force the processor to suspend operation temporarily (most common – referred to as cycle stealing). When the processor wishes to read or write a block of data, it issues a command to the DMA module by sending to the DMA module the following information… Whether a read or write is requested using the read or write control line between the processor and the DMA module The address of the I/O device involved, communicated on the data lines The starting location in memory to read from or write to, communicated on the data lines and stored by the DMA module in its address register The number of words to be read or written, communicated via the data lines and stored in the data count register The processor then continues with other work, it delegates the I/O operation to the DMA module which transfers the entire block of data, one word at a time, directly to or from memory without going through the processor. When the transfer is complete, the DMA module sends an interrupt signal to the processor, this the processor is involved only at the beginning and end of the transfer. I/O Channels and Processors Characteristics of I/O Channels As one proceeds along the evolutionary path, more and more of the I/O function is performed without CPU involvement. The I/O channel represents an extension of the DMA concept. An I/O channel ahs the ability to execute I/O instructions, which gives it complete control over I/O operations. In a computer system with such devices, the CPU does not execute I/O instructions – such instructions are stored in main memory to be executed by a special purpose processor in the I/O channel itself. Two types of I/O channels are common A selector channel controls multiple high-speed devices. A multiplexor channel can handle I/O with multiple characters as fast as possible to multiple devices. The external interface: FireWire and InfiniBand Types of Interfaces One major characteristic of the interface is whether it is serial or parallel parallel interface – there are multiple lines connecting the I/O module and the peripheral, and multiple bits are transferred simultaneously serial interface – there is only one line used to transmit data, and bits must be transmitted one at a time With new generation serial interfaces, parallel interfaces are becoming less common. In either case, the I/O module must engage in a dialogue with the peripheral. In general terms the dialog may look as follows… The I/O module sends a control signal requesting permission to send data The peripheral acknowledges the request The I/O module transfers data The peripheral acknowledges receipt of data For a detailed explanation of FireWire and InfiniBand technology read page 264 – 270 of the textbook

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• How to mount an external Soundcard during startup?

  - by Moe

  I have an external sound card (Soundblaster XFi HD) connected to my Ubuntu 12.04 32-bit. that won't show up automatically after booting. After each boot process I need to plug the card out of the USB port and reconnect it, then it is found by the system and automatically used. I would like to either have it connected automatically during the boot process or at least have a little script or something which I can use after booting so that I don't have to manually plug the device off and on. Please note that I'm a total noob. If you don't mind please tell me the procedure step by step. Also, if I need to get some information via the terminal I'd need to be told the precise command to get it.

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• Spooling in SQL execution plans

  - by Rob Farley

  Sewing has never been my thing. I barely even know the terminology, and when discussing this with American friends, I even found out that half the words that Americans use are different to the words that English and Australian people use. That said – let’s talk about spools! In particular, the Spool operators that you find in some SQL execution plans. This post is for T-SQL Tuesday, hosted this month by me! I’ve chosen to write about spools because they seem to get a bad rap (even in my song I used the line “There’s spooling from a CTE, they’ve got recursion needlessly”). I figured it was worth covering some of what spools are about, and hopefully explain why they are remarkably necessary, and generally very useful. If you have a look at the Books Online page about Plan Operators, at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms191158.aspx, and do a search for the word ‘spool’, you’ll notice it says there are 46 matches. 46! Yeah, that’s what I thought too... Spooling is mentioned in several operators: Eager Spool, Lazy Spool, Index Spool (sometimes called a Nonclustered Index Spool), Row Count Spool, Spool, Table Spool, and Window Spool (oh, and Cache, which is a special kind of spool for a single row, but as it isn’t used in SQL 2012, I won’t describe it any further here). Spool, Table Spool, Index Spool, Window Spool and Row Count Spool are all physical operators, whereas Eager Spool and Lazy Spool are logical operators, describing the way that the other spools work. For example, you might see a Table Spool which is either Eager or Lazy. A Window Spool can actually act as both, as I’ll mention in a moment. In sewing, cotton is put onto a spool to make it more useful. You might buy it in bulk on a cone, but if you’re going to be using a sewing machine, then you quite probably want to have it on a spool or bobbin, which allows it to be used in a more effective way. This is the picture that I want you to think about in relation to your data. I’m sure you use spools every time you use your sewing machine. I know I do. I can’t think of a time when I’ve got out my sewing machine to do some sewing and haven’t used a spool. However, I often run SQL queries that don’t use spools. You see, the data that is consumed by my query is typically in a useful state without a spool. It’s like I can just sew with my cotton despite it not being on a spool! Many of my favourite features in T-SQL do like to use spools though. This looks like a very similar query to before, but includes an OVER clause to return a column telling me the number of rows in my data set. I’ll describe what’s going on in a few paragraphs’ time. So what does a Spool operator actually do? The spool operator consumes a set of data, and stores it in a temporary structure, in the tempdb database. This structure is typically either a Table (ie, a heap), or an Index (ie, a b-tree). If no data is actually needed from it, then it could also be a Row Count spool, which only stores the number of rows that the spool operator consumes. A Window Spool is another option if the data being consumed is tightly linked to windows of data, such as when the ROWS/RANGE clause of the OVER clause is being used. You could maybe think about the type of spool being like whether the cotton is going onto a small bobbin to fit in the base of the sewing machine, or whether it’s a larger spool for the top. A Table or Index Spool is either Eager or Lazy in nature. Eager and Lazy are Logical operators, which talk more about the behaviour, rather than the physical operation. If I’m sewing, I can either be all enthusiastic and get all my cotton onto the spool before I start, or I can do it as I need it. “Lazy” might not the be the best word to describe a person – in the SQL world it describes the idea of either fetching all the rows to build up the whole spool when the operator is called (Eager), or populating the spool only as it’s needed (Lazy). Window Spools are both physical and logical. They’re eager on a per-window basis, but lazy between windows. And when is it needed? The way I see it, spools are needed for two reasons. 1 – When data is going to be needed AGAIN. 2 – When data needs to be kept away from the original source. If you’re someone that writes long stored procedures, you are probably quite aware of the second scenario. I see plenty of stored procedures being written this way – where the query writer populates a temporary table, so that they can make updates to it without risking the original table. SQL does this too. Imagine I’m updating my contact list, and some of my changes move data to later in the book. If I’m not careful, I might update the same row a second time (or even enter an infinite loop, updating it over and over). A spool can make sure that I don’t, by using a copy of the data. This problem is known as the Halloween Effect (not because it’s spooky, but because it was discovered in late October one year). As I’m sure you can imagine, the kind of spool you’d need to protect against the Halloween Effect would be eager, because if you’re only handling one row at a time, then you’re not providing the protection... An eager spool will block the flow of data, waiting until it has fetched all the data before serving it up to the operator that called it. In the query below I’m forcing the Query Optimizer to use an index which would be upset if the Name column values got changed, and we see that before any data is fetched, a spool is created to load the data into. This doesn’t stop the index being maintained, but it does mean that the index is protected from the changes that are being done. There are plenty of times, though, when you need data repeatedly. Consider the query I put above. A simple join, but then counting the number of rows that came through. The way that this has executed (be it ideal or not), is to ask that a Table Spool be populated. That’s the Table Spool operator on the top row. That spool can produce the same set of rows repeatedly. This is the behaviour that we see in the bottom half of the plan. In the bottom half of the plan, we see that the a join is being done between the rows that are being sourced from the spool – one being aggregated and one not – producing the columns that we need for the query. Table v Index When considering whether to use a Table Spool or an Index Spool, the question that the Query Optimizer needs to answer is whether there is sufficient benefit to storing the data in a b-tree. The idea of having data in indexes is great, but of course there is a cost to maintaining them. Here we’re creating a temporary structure for data, and there is a cost associated with populating each row into its correct position according to a b-tree, as opposed to simply adding it to the end of the list of rows in a heap. Using a b-tree could even result in page-splits as the b-tree is populated, so there had better be a reason to use that kind of structure. That all depends on how the data is going to be used in other parts of the plan. If you’ve ever thought that you could use a temporary index for a particular query, well this is it – and the Query Optimizer can do that if it thinks it’s worthwhile. It’s worth noting that just because a Spool is populated using an Index Spool, it can still be fetched using a Table Spool. The details about whether or not a Spool used as a source shows as a Table Spool or an Index Spool is more about whether a Seek predicate is used, rather than on the underlying structure. Recursive CTE I’ve already shown you an example of spooling when the OVER clause is used. You might see them being used whenever you have data that is needed multiple times, and CTEs are quite common here. With the definition of a set of data described in a CTE, if the query writer is leveraging this by referring to the CTE multiple times, and there’s no simplification to be leveraged, a spool could theoretically be used to avoid reapplying the CTE’s logic. Annoyingly, this doesn’t happen. Consider this query, which really looks like it’s using the same data twice. I’m creating a set of data (which is completely deterministic, by the way), and then joining it back to itself. There seems to be no reason why it shouldn’t use a spool for the set described by the CTE, but it doesn’t. On the other hand, if we don’t pull as many columns back, we might see a very different plan. You see, CTEs, like all sub-queries, are simplified out to figure out the best way of executing the whole query. My example is somewhat contrived, and although there are plenty of cases when it’s nice to give the Query Optimizer hints about how to execute queries, it usually doesn’t do a bad job, even without spooling (and you can always use a temporary table). When recursion is used, though, spooling should be expected. Consider what we’re asking for in a recursive CTE. We’re telling the system to construct a set of data using an initial query, and then use set as a source for another query, piping this back into the same set and back around. It’s very much a spool. The analogy of cotton is long gone here, as the idea of having a continual loop of cotton feeding onto a spool and off again doesn’t quite fit, but that’s what we have here. Data is being fed onto the spool, and getting pulled out a second time when the spool is used as a source. (This query is running on AdventureWorks, which has a ManagerID column in HumanResources.Employee, not AdventureWorks2012) The Index Spool operator is sucking rows into it – lazily. It has to be lazy, because at the start, there’s only one row to be had. However, as rows get populated onto the spool, the Table Spool operator on the right can return rows when asked, ending up with more rows (potentially) getting back onto the spool, ready for the next round. (The Assert operator is merely checking to see if we’ve reached the MAXRECURSION point – it vanishes if you use OPTION (MAXRECURSION 0), which you can try yourself if you like). Spools are useful. Don’t lose sight of that. Every time you use temporary tables or table variables in a stored procedure, you’re essentially doing the same – don’t get upset at the Query Optimizer for doing so, even if you think the spool looks like an expensive part of the query. I hope you’re enjoying this T-SQL Tuesday. Why not head over to my post that is hosting it this month to read about some other plan operators? At some point I’ll write a summary post – once I have you should find a comment below pointing at it. @rob_farley

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• T-SQL Tuesday #21 - Crap!

  - by Most Valuable Yak (Rob Volk)

  Adam Machanic's (blog | twitter) ever popular T-SQL Tuesday series is being held on Wednesday this time, and the topic is… SHIT CRAP. No, not fecal material.  But crap code.  Crap SQL.  Crap ideas that you thought were good at the time, or were forced to do due (doo-doo?) to lack of time. The challenge for me is to look back on my SQL Server career and find something that WASN'T crap.  Well, there's a lot that wasn't, but for some reason I don't remember those that well.  So the additional challenge is to pick one particular turd that I really wish I hadn't squeezed out.  Let's see if this outline fits the bill: An ETL process on text files; That had to interface between SQL Server and an AS/400 system; That didn't use SSIS (should have) or BizTalk (ummm, no) but command-line scripting, using Unix utilities(!) via: xp_cmdshell; That had to email reports and financial data, some of it sensitive Yep, the stench smell is coming back to me now, as if it was yesterday… As to why SSIS and BizTalk were not options, basically I didn't know either of them well enough to get the job done (and I still don't).  I also had a strict deadline of 3 days, in addition to all the other responsibilities I had, so no time to learn them.  And seeing how screwed up the rest of the process was: Payment files from multiple vendors in multiple formats; Sent via FTP, PGP encrypted email, or some other wizardry; Manually opened/downloaded and saved to a particular set of folders (couldn't change this); Once processed, had to be placed BACK in the same folders with the original archived; x2 divisions that had to run separately; Plus an additional vendor file in another format on a completely different schedule; So that they could be MANUALLY uploaded into the AS/400 system (couldn't change this either, even if it was technically possible) I didn't feel so bad about the solution I came up with, which was naturally: Copy the payment files to the local SQL Server drives, using xp_cmdshell Run batch files (via xp_cmdshell) to parse the different formats using sed, a Unix utility (this was before Powershell) Use other Unix utilities (join, split, grep, wc) to process parsed files and generate metadata (size, date, checksum, line count) Run sqlcmd to execute a stored procedure that passed the parsed file names so it would bulk load the data to do a comparison bcp the compared data out to ANOTHER text file so that I could grep that data out of the original file Run another stored procedure to import the matched data into SQL Server so it could process the payments, including file metadata Process payment batches and log which division and vendor they belong to Email the payment details to the finance group (since it was too hard for them to run a web report with the same data…which they ran anyway to compare the emailed file against…which always matched, surprisingly) Email another report showing unmatched payments so they could manually void them…about 3 months afterward All in "Excel" format, using xp_sendmail (SQL 2000 system) Copy the unmatched data back to the original folder locations, making sure to match the file format exactly (if you've ever worked with ACH files, you'll understand why this sucked) If you're one of the 10 people who have read my blog before, you know that I love the DOS "for" command.  Like passionately.  Like fairy-tale love.  So my batch files were riddled with for loops, nested within other for loops, that called other batch files containing for loops.  I think there was one section that had 4 or 5 nested for commands.  It was wrong, disturbed, and completely un-maintainable by anyone, even myself.  Months, even a year, after I left the company I got calls from someone who had to make a minor change to it, and they called me to talk them out of spraying the office with an AK-47 after looking at this code.  (for you Star Trek TOS fans) The funniest part of this, well, one of the funniest, is that I made the deadline…sort of, I was only a day late…and the DAMN THING WORKED practically unchanged for 3 years.  Most of the problems came from the manual parts of the overall process, like forgetting to decrypt the files, or missing/late files, or saved to the wrong folders.  I'm definitely not trying to toot my own horn here, because this was truly one of the dumbest, crappiest solutions I ever came up with.  Fortunately as far as I know it's no longer in use and someone has written a proper replacement.  Today I would knuckle down and do it in SSIS or Powershell, even if it took me weeks to get it right. The real lesson from this crap code is to make things MAINTAINABLE and UNDERSTANDABLE.  sed scripting regular expressions doesn't fit that criteria in any way.  If you ever find yourself under pressure to do something fast at all costs, DON'T DO IT.  Stop and consider long-term maintainability, not just for yourself but for others on your team.  If you can't explain the basic approach in under 5 minutes, it ultimately won't succeed.  And while you may love to leave all that crap behind, it may follow you anyway, and you'll step in it again.   P.S. - if you're wondering about all the manual stuff that couldn't be changed, it was because the entire process had gone through Six Sigma, and was deemed the best possible way.  Phew!  Talk about stink!

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• Sensible Way to Pass Web Data in XML to a SQL Server Database

  - by Emtucifor

  After exploring several different ways to pass web data to a database for update purposes, I'm wondering if XML might be a good strategy. The database is currently SQL 2000. In a few months it will move to SQL 2005 and I will be able to change things if needed, but I need a SQL 2000 solution now. First of all, the database in question uses the EAV model. I know that this kind of database is generally highly frowned on, so for the purposes of this question, please just accept that this is not going to change. The current update method has the web server inserting values (that have all been converted first to their correct underlying types, then to sql_variant) to a temp table. A stored procedure is then run which expects the temp table to exist and it takes care of updating, inserting, or deleting things as needed. So far, only a single element has needed to be updated at a time. But now, there is a requirement to be able to edit multiple elements at once, and also to support hierarchical elements, each of which can have its own list of attributes. Here's some example XML I hand-typed to demonstrate what I'm thinking of. Note that in this database the Entity is Element and an ID of 0 signifies "create" aka an insert of a new item. <Elements> <Element ID="1234"> <Attr ID="221">Value</Attr> <Attr ID="225">287</Attr> <Attr ID="234"> <Element ID="99825"> <Attr ID="7">Value1</Attr> <Attr ID="8">Value2</Attr> <Attr ID="9" Action="delete" /> </Element> <Element ID="99826" Action="delete" /> <Element ID="0" Type="24"> <Attr ID="7">Value4</Attr> <Attr ID="8">Value5</Attr> <Attr ID="9">Value6</Attr> </Element> <Element ID="0" Type="24"> <Attr ID="7">Value7</Attr> <Attr ID="8">Value8</Attr> <Attr ID="9">Value9</Attr> </Element> </Attr> <Rel ID="3827" Action="delete" /> <Rel ID="2284" Role="parent"> <Element ID="3827" /> <Element ID="3829" /> <Attr ID="665">1</Attr> </Rel> <Rel ID="0" Type="23" Role="child"> <Element ID="3830" /> <Attr ID="67" </Rel> </Element> <Element ID="0" Type="87"> <Attr ID="221">Value</Attr> <Attr ID="225">569</Attr> <Attr ID="234"> <Element ID="0" Type="24"> <Attr ID="7">Value10</Attr> <Attr ID="8">Value11</Attr> <Attr ID="9">Value12</Attr> </Element> </Attr> </Element> <Element ID="1235" Action="delete" /> </Elements> Some Attributes are straight value types, such as AttrID 221. But AttrID 234 is a special "multi-value" type that can have a list of elements underneath it, and each one can have one or more values. Types only need to be presented when a new item is created, since the ElementID fully implies the type if it already exists. I'll probably support only passing in changed items (as detected by javascript). And there may be an Action="Delete" on Attr elements as well, since NULLs are treated as "unselected"--sometimes it's very important to know if a Yes/No question has intentionally been answered No or if no one's bothered to say Yes yet. There is also a different kind of data, a Relationship. At this time, those are updated through individual AJAX calls as things are edited in the UI, but I'd like to include those so that changes to relationships can be canceled (right now, once you change it, it's done). So those are really elements, too, but they are called Rel instead of Element. Relationships are implemented as ElementID1 and ElementID2, so the RelID 2284 in the XML above is in the database as: ElementID 2284 ElementID1 1234 ElementID2 3827 Having multiple children in one relationship isn't currently supported, but it would be nice later. Does this strategy and the example XML make sense? Is there a more sensible way? I'm just looking for some broad critique to help save me from going down a bad path. Any aspect that you'd like to comment on would be helpful. The web language happens to be Classic ASP, but that could change to ASP.Net at some point. A persistence engine like Linq or nHibernate is probably not acceptable right now--I just want to get this already working application enhanced without a huge amount of development time. I'll choose the answer that shows experience and has a balance of good warnings about what not to do, confirmations of what I'm planning to do, and recommendations about something else to do. I'll make it as objective as possible. P.S. I'd like to handle unicode characters as well as very long strings (10k +). UPDATE I have had this working for some time and I used the ADO Recordset Save-To-Stream trick to make creating the XML really easy. The result seems to be fairly fast, though if speed ever becomes a problem I may revisit this. In the meantime, my code works to handle any number of elements and attributes on the page at once, including updating, deleting, and creating new items all in one go. I settled on a scheme like so for all my elements: Existing data elements Example: input name e12345_a678 (element 12345, attribute 678), the input value is the value of the attribute. New elements Javascript copies a hidden template of the set of HTML elements needed for the type into the correct location on the page, increments a counter to get a new ID for this item, and prepends the number to the names of the form items. var newid = 0; function metadataAdd(reference, nameid, value) { var t = document.createElement('input'); t.setAttribute('name', nameid); t.setAttribute('id', nameid); t.setAttribute('type', 'hidden'); t.setAttribute('value', value); reference.appendChild(t); } function multiAdd(target, parentelementid, attrid, elementtypeid) { var proto = document.getElementById('a' + attrid + '_proto'); var instance = document.createElement('p'); target.parentNode.parentNode.insertBefore(instance, target.parentNode); var thisid = ++newid; instance.innerHTML = proto.innerHTML.replace(/{prefix}/g, 'n' + thisid + '_'); instance.id = 'n' + thisid; instance.className += ' new'; metadataAdd(instance, 'n' + thisid + '_p', parentelementid); metadataAdd(instance, 'n' + thisid + '_c', attrid); metadataAdd(instance, 'n' + thisid + '_t', elementtypeid); return false; } Example: Template input name _a678 becomes n1_a678 (a new element, the first one on the page, attribute 678). all attributes of this new element are tagged with the same prefix of n1. The next new item will be n2, and so on. Some hidden form inputs are created: n1_t, value is the elementtype of the element to be created n1_p, value is the parent id of the element (if it is a relationship) n1_c, value is the child id of the element (if it is a relationship) Deleting elements A hidden input is created in the form e12345_t with value set to 0. The existing controls displaying that attribute's values are disabled so they are not included in the form post. So "set type to 0" is treated as delete. With this scheme, every item on the page has a unique name and can be distinguished properly, and every action can be represented properly. When the form is posted, here's a sample of building one of the two recordsets used (classic ASP code): Set Data = Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Recordset") Data.Fields.Append "ElementID", adInteger, 4, adFldKeyColumn Data.Fields.Append "AttrID", adInteger, 4, adFldKeyColumn Data.Fields.Append "Value", adLongVarWChar, 2147483647, adFldIsNullable Or adFldMayBeNull Data.CursorLocation = adUseClient Data.CursorType = adOpenDynamic Data.Open This is the recordset for values, the other is for the elements themselves. I step through the posted form and for the element recordset use a Scripting.Dictionary populated with instances of a custom Class that has the properties I need, so that I can add the values piecemeal, since they don't always come in order. New elements are added as negative to distinguish them from regular elements (rather than requiring a separate column to indicate if it is new or addresses an existing element). I use regular expression to tear apart the form keys: "^(e|n)([0-9]{1,10})_(a|p|t|c)([0-9]{0,10})$" Then, adding an attribute looks like this. Data.AddNew ElementID.Value = DataID AttrID.Value = Integerize(Matches(0).SubMatches(3)) AttrValue.Value = Request.Form(Key) Data.Update ElementID, AttrID, and AttrValue are references to the fields of the recordset. This method is hugely faster than using Data.Fields("ElementID").Value each time. I loop through the Dictionary of element updates and ignore any that don't have all the proper information, adding the good ones to the recordset. Then I call my data-updating stored procedure like so: Set Cmd = Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Command") With Cmd Set .ActiveConnection = MyDBConn .CommandType = adCmdStoredProc .CommandText = "DataPost" .Prepared = False .Parameters.Append .CreateParameter("@ElementMetadata", adLongVarWChar, adParamInput, 2147483647, XMLFromRecordset(Element)) .Parameters.Append .CreateParameter("@ElementData", adLongVarWChar, adParamInput, 2147483647, XMLFromRecordset(Data)) End With Result.Open Cmd ' previously created recordset object with options set Here's the function that does the xml conversion: Private Function XMLFromRecordset(Recordset) Dim Stream Set Stream = Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Stream") Stream.Open Recordset.Save Stream, adPersistXML Stream.Position = 0 XMLFromRecordset = Stream.ReadText End Function Just in case the web page needs to know, the SP returns a recordset of any new elements, showing their page value and their created value (so I can see that n1 is now e12346 for example). Here are some key snippets from the stored procedure. Note this is SQL 2000 for now, though I'll be able to switch to 2005 soon: CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[DataPost] @ElementMetaData ntext, @ElementData ntext AS DECLARE @hdoc int --- snip --- EXEC sp_xml_preparedocument @hdoc OUTPUT, @ElementMetaData, '<xml xmlns:s="uuid:BDC6E3F0-6DA3-11d1-A2A3-00AA00C14882" xmlns:dt="uuid:C2F41010-65B3-11d1-A29F-00AA00C14882" xmlns:rs="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:rowset" xmlns:z="#RowsetSchema" />' INSERT #ElementMetadata (ElementID, ElementTypeID, ElementID1, ElementID2) SELECT * FROM OPENXML(@hdoc, '/xml/rs:data/rs:insert/z:row', 0) WITH ( ElementID int, ElementTypeID int, ElementID1 int, ElementID2 int ) ORDER BY ElementID -- orders negative items (new elements) first so they begin counting at 1 for later ID calculation EXEC sp_xml_removedocument @hdoc --- snip --- UPDATE E SET E.ElementTypeID = M.ElementTypeID FROM Element E INNER JOIN #ElementMetadata M ON E.ElementID = M.ElementID WHERE E.ElementID >= 1 AND M.ElementTypeID >= 1 The following query does the correlation of the negative new element ids to the newly inserted ones: UPDATE #ElementMetadata -- Correlate the new ElementIDs with the input rows SET NewElementID = Scope_Identity() - @@RowCount + DataID WHERE ElementID < 0 Other set-based queries do all the other work of validating that the attributes are allowed, are the correct data type, and inserting, updating, and deleting elements and attributes. I hope this brief run-down is useful to others some day! Converting ADO Recordsets to an XML stream was a huge winner for me as it saved all sorts of time and had a namespace and schema already defined that made the results come out correctly. Using a flatter XML format with 2 inputs was also much easier than sticking to some ideal about having everything in a single XML stream.

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• Sensible Way to Pass Web Data to Sql Server Database

  - by Emtucifor

  After exploring several different ways to pass web data to a database for update purposes, I'm wondering if XML might be a good strategy. The database is currently SQL 2000. In a few months it will move to SQL 2005 and I will be able to change things if needed, but I need a SQL 2000 solution now. First of all, the database in question uses the EAV model. I know that this kind of database is generally highly frowned on, so for the purposes of this question, please just accept that this is not going to change. The current update method has the web server inserting values (that have all been converted first to their correct underlying types, then to sql_variant) to a temp table. A stored procedure is then run which expects the temp table to exist and it takes care of updating, inserting, or deleting things as needed. So far, only a single element has needed to be updated at a time. But now, there is a requirement to be able to edit multiple elements at once, and also to support hierarchical elements, each of which can have its own list of attributes. Here's some example XML I hand-typed to demonstrate what I'm thinking of. Note that in this database the Entity is Element and an ID of 0 signifies "create" aka an insert of a new item. <Elements> <Element ID="1234"> <Attr ID="221">Value</Attr> <Attr ID="225">287</Attr> <Attr ID="234"> <Element ID="99825"> <Attr ID="7">Value1</Attr> <Attr ID="8">Value2</Attr> <Attr ID="9" Action="delete" /> </Element> <Element ID="99826" Action="delete" /> <Element ID="0" Type="24"> <Attr ID="7">Value4</Attr> <Attr ID="8">Value5</Attr> <Attr ID="9">Value6</Attr> </Element> <Element ID="0" Type="24"> <Attr ID="7">Value7</Attr> <Attr ID="8">Value8</Attr> <Attr ID="9">Value9</Attr> </Element> </Attr> <Rel ID="3827" Action="delete" /> <Rel ID="2284" Role="parent"> <Element ID="3827" /> <Element ID="3829" /> <Attr ID="665">1</Attr> </Rel> <Rel ID="0" Type="23" Role="child"> <Element ID="3830" /> <Attr ID="67" </Rel> </Element> <Element ID="0" Type="87"> <Attr ID="221">Value</Attr> <Attr ID="225">569</Attr> <Attr ID="234"> <Element ID="0" Type="24"> <Attr ID="7">Value10</Attr> <Attr ID="8">Value11</Attr> <Attr ID="9">Value12</Attr> </Element> </Attr> </Element> <Element ID="1235" Action="delete" /> </Elements> Some Attributes are straight value types, such as AttrID 221. But AttrID 234 is a special "multi-value" type that can have a list of elements underneath it, and each one can have one or more values. Types only need to be presented when a new item is created, since the ElementID fully implies the type if it already exists. I'll probably support only passing in changed items (as detected by javascript). And there may be an Action="Delete" on Attr elements as well, since NULLs are treated as "unselected"--sometimes it's very important to know if a Yes/No question has intentionally been answered No or if no one's bothered to say Yes yet. There is also a different kind of data, a Relationship. At this time, those are updated through individual AJAX calls as things are edited in the UI, but I'd like to include those so that changes to relationships can be canceled (right now, once you change it, it's done). So those are really elements, too, but they are called Rel instead of Element. Relationships are implemented as ElementID1 and ElementID2, so the RelID 2284 in the XML above is in the database as: ElementID 2284 ElementID1 1234 ElementID2 3827 Having multiple children in one relationship isn't currently supported, but it would be nice later. Does this strategy and the example XML make sense? Is there a more sensible way? I'm just looking for some broad critique to help save me from going down a bad path. Any aspect that you'd like to comment on would be helpful. The web language happens to be Classic ASP, but that could change to ASP.Net at some point. A persistence engine like Linq or nHibernate is probably not acceptable right now--I just want to get this already working application enhanced without a huge amount of development time. I'll choose the answer that shows experience and has a balance of good warnings about what not to do, confirmations of what I'm planning to do, and recommendations about something else to do. I'll make it as objective as possible. P.S. I'd like to handle unicode characters as well as very long strings (10k +). UPDATE I have had this working for some time and I used the ADO Recordset Save-To-Stream trick to make creating the XML really easy. The result seems to be fairly fast, though if speed ever becomes a problem I may revisit this. In the meantime, my code works to handle any number of elements and attributes on the page at once, including updating, deleting, and creating new items all in one go. I settled on a scheme like so for all my elements: Existing data elements Example: input name e12345_a678 (element 12345, attribute 678), the input value is the value of the attribute. New elements Javascript copies a hidden template of the set of HTML elements needed for the type into the correct location on the page, increments a counter to get a new ID for this item, and prepends the number to the names of the form items. var newid = 0; function metadataAdd(reference, nameid, value) { var t = document.createElement('input'); t.setAttribute('name', nameid); t.setAttribute('id', nameid); t.setAttribute('type', 'hidden'); t.setAttribute('value', value); reference.appendChild(t); } function multiAdd(target, parentelementid, attrid, elementtypeid) { var proto = document.getElementById('a' + attrid + '_proto'); var instance = document.createElement('p'); target.parentNode.parentNode.insertBefore(instance, target.parentNode); var thisid = ++newid; instance.innerHTML = proto.innerHTML.replace(/{prefix}/g, 'n' + thisid + '_'); instance.id = 'n' + thisid; instance.className += ' new'; metadataAdd(instance, 'n' + thisid + '_p', parentelementid); metadataAdd(instance, 'n' + thisid + '_c', attrid); metadataAdd(instance, 'n' + thisid + '_t', elementtypeid); return false; } Example: Template input name _a678 becomes n1_a678 (a new element, the first one on the page, attribute 678). all attributes of this new element are tagged with the same prefix of n1. The next new item will be n2, and so on. Some hidden form inputs are created: n1_t, value is the elementtype of the element to be created n1_p, value is the parent id of the element (if it is a relationship) n1_c, value is the child id of the element (if it is a relationship) Deleting elements A hidden input is created in the form e12345_t with value set to 0. The existing controls displaying that attribute's values are disabled so they are not included in the form post. So "set type to 0" is treated as delete. With this scheme, every item on the page has a unique name and can be distinguished properly, and every action can be represented properly. When the form is posted, here's a sample of building one of the two recordsets used (classic ASP code): Set Data = Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Recordset") Data.Fields.Append "ElementID", adInteger, 4, adFldKeyColumn Data.Fields.Append "AttrID", adInteger, 4, adFldKeyColumn Data.Fields.Append "Value", adLongVarWChar, 2147483647, adFldIsNullable Or adFldMayBeNull Data.CursorLocation = adUseClient Data.CursorType = adOpenDynamic Data.Open This is the recordset for values, the other is for the elements themselves. I step through the posted form and for the element recordset use a Scripting.Dictionary populated with instances of a custom Class that has the properties I need, so that I can add the values piecemeal, since they don't always come in order. New elements are added as negative to distinguish them from regular elements (rather than requiring a separate column to indicate if it is new or addresses an existing element). I use regular expression to tear apart the form keys: "^(e|n)([0-9]{1,10})_(a|p|t|c)([0-9]{0,10})$" Then, adding an attribute looks like this. Data.AddNew ElementID.Value = DataID AttrID.Value = Integerize(Matches(0).SubMatches(3)) AttrValue.Value = Request.Form(Key) Data.Update ElementID, AttrID, and AttrValue are references to the fields of the recordset. This method is hugely faster than using Data.Fields("ElementID").Value each time. I loop through the Dictionary of element updates and ignore any that don't have all the proper information, adding the good ones to the recordset. Then I call my data-updating stored procedure like so: Set Cmd = Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Command") With Cmd Set .ActiveConnection = MyDBConn .CommandType = adCmdStoredProc .CommandText = "DataPost" .Prepared = False .Parameters.Append .CreateParameter("@ElementMetadata", adLongVarWChar, adParamInput, 2147483647, XMLFromRecordset(Element)) .Parameters.Append .CreateParameter("@ElementData", adLongVarWChar, adParamInput, 2147483647, XMLFromRecordset(Data)) End With Result.Open Cmd ' previously created recordset object with options set Here's the function that does the xml conversion: Private Function XMLFromRecordset(Recordset) Dim Stream Set Stream = Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Stream") Stream.Open Recordset.Save Stream, adPersistXML Stream.Position = 0 XMLFromRecordset = Stream.ReadText End Function Just in case the web page needs to know, the SP returns a recordset of any new elements, showing their page value and their created value (so I can see that n1 is now e12346 for example). Here are some key snippets from the stored procedure. Note this is SQL 2000 for now, though I'll be able to switch to 2005 soon: CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[DataPost] @ElementMetaData ntext, @ElementData ntext AS DECLARE @hdoc int --- snip --- EXEC sp_xml_preparedocument @hdoc OUTPUT, @ElementMetaData, '<xml xmlns:s="uuid:BDC6E3F0-6DA3-11d1-A2A3-00AA00C14882" xmlns:dt="uuid:C2F41010-65B3-11d1-A29F-00AA00C14882" xmlns:rs="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:rowset" xmlns:z="#RowsetSchema" />' INSERT #ElementMetadata (ElementID, ElementTypeID, ElementID1, ElementID2) SELECT * FROM OPENXML(@hdoc, '/xml/rs:data/rs:insert/z:row', 0) WITH ( ElementID int, ElementTypeID int, ElementID1 int, ElementID2 int ) ORDER BY ElementID -- orders negative items (new elements) first so they begin counting at 1 for later ID calculation EXEC sp_xml_removedocument @hdoc --- snip --- UPDATE E SET E.ElementTypeID = M.ElementTypeID FROM Element E INNER JOIN #ElementMetadata M ON E.ElementID = M.ElementID WHERE E.ElementID >= 1 AND M.ElementTypeID >= 1 The following query does the correlation of the negative new element ids to the newly inserted ones: UPDATE #ElementMetadata -- Correlate the new ElementIDs with the input rows SET NewElementID = Scope_Identity() - @@RowCount + DataID WHERE ElementID < 0 Other set-based queries do all the other work of validating that the attributes are allowed, are the correct data type, and inserting, updating, and deleting elements and attributes. I hope this brief run-down is useful to others some day! Converting ADO Recordsets to an XML stream was a huge winner for me as it saved all sorts of time and had a namespace and schema already defined that made the results come out correctly. Using a flatter XML format with 2 inputs was also much easier than sticking to some ideal about having everything in a single XML stream.

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• Oracle dans une nouvelle bataille juridique sur l'utilisation du Java avec une société suisse d'édition de logiciels pour mobiles

  Oracle dans une nouvelle bataille juridique sur l'utilisation du Java Avec une société suisse d'édition de logiciels pour mobiles Depuis l'acquisition de Sun par Oracle, les droits de propriété intellectuelle d'Oracle sur Java sont au coeur d'un procès avec Google. Ces droits viennent de donner lieu à une autre procédure. La société suisse d'édition de logiciels pour mobiles Myriad a en effet annoncé hier avoir lancé des poursuites judiciaires contre Oracle. La firme a annoncé qu'elle avait déposé plainte auprès du tribunal du district du Delaware. Une plainte qui accuse Oracle d'avoir violé ses obligations dans le cadre de l'accord JSPA (Java Spécification Participation Ag...

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• Wireless card disappeards when restart ubuntu

  - by Kristian Jones

  I used 'additional drivers' to install 'Broadcom STA wireless driver' and it returns an error. WIthin jockey.log it says the following numerous times. 2011-02-14 21:24:06,945 DEBUG: BroadcomWLHandler enabled(): kmod disabled, bcm43xx: blacklisted, b43: blacklisted, b43legacy: blacklisted After it returns the error the network card will work temporarily until I restart the laptop. When I restart I got to go through the procedure again of trying to activate the driver, returns an error however it works temporarily. The network card is as follows on a Dell Inspiron 1545: Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11b/g LP-PHY [14e4:4315] Rev 01 I have been trying to solve this myself for many hours. Any help is appreciated/

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