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• Oracle OpenWorld Preview: Real World Perspectives from Oracle WebCenter Customers

  - by Christie Flanagan

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} If you frequent the Oracle WebCenter blog you’ve probably read a lot about the customer experience revolution over the last few months.  An important aspect of the customer experience revolution is the increasing role that peers play in influencing how others perceive a product, brand or solution, simply by sharing their own, real-world experiences.  Think about it, who do you trust more -- marketers and sales people pitching polished messages or peers with similar roles and similar challenges to the ones you face in your business every day? With this spirit in mind, this polished marketer personally invites you to hear directly from Oracle WebCenter customers about their real-life experiences during our customer panel sessions at Oracle OpenWorld next week.  If you’re currently using WebCenter, thinking about it, or just want to find out more about best practices in social business, next-generation portals, enterprise content management or web experience management, be sure to attend these sessions: CON8899 - Becoming a Social Business: Stories from the Front Lines of Change Wednesday, Oct 3, 11:45 AM - 12:45 PM - Moscone West - 3000Priscilla Hancock - Vice President/CIO, University of Louisville Kellie Christensen - Director of Information Technology, Banner EngineeringWhat does it really mean to be a social business? How can you change your organization to embrace social approaches? What pitfalls do you need to avoid? In this lively panel discussion, customer and industry thought leaders in social business explore these topics and more as they share their stories of the good, the bad, and the ugly that can happen when embracing social methods and technologies to improve business success. Using moderated questions and open Q&A from the audience, the panel discusses vital topics such as the critical factors for success, the major issues to avoid, how to gain senior executive support for social efforts, how to handle undesired behavior, and how to measure business impact. This session will take a thought-provoking look at becoming a social business from the inside. CON8900 - Building Next-Generation Portals: An Interactive Customer Panel DiscussionWednesday, Oct 3, 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM - Moscone West - 3000Roberts Wayne - Director, IT, Canadian Partnership Against CancerMike Beattie - VP Application Development, Aramark Uniform ServicesJohn Chen - Utilities Services Manager 6, Los Angeles Department of Water & PowerJörg Modlmayr - Head of Product Managment, Siemens AGSocial and collaborative technologies have changed how people interact, learn, and collaborate, and providing a modern, social Web presence is imperative to remain competitive in today’s market. Can your business benefit from a more collaborative and interactive portal environment for employees, customers, and partners? Attend this session to hear from Oracle WebCenter Portal customers as they share their strategies and best practices for providing users with a modern experience that adapts to their needs and includes personalized access to content in context. The panel also addresses how customers have benefited from creating next-generation portals by migrating from older portal technologies to Oracle WebCenter Portal. CON8898 - Land Mines, Potholes, and Dirt Roads: Navigating the Way to ECM NirvanaThursday, Oct 4, 12:45 PM - 1:45 PM - Moscone West - 3001Stephen Madsen - Senior Management Consultant, Alberta Agriculture and Rural DevelopmentHimanshu Parikh - Sr. Director, Enterprise Architecture & Middleware, Ross Stores, Inc.Ten years ago, people were predicting that by this time in history, we’d be some kind of utopian paperless society. As we all know, we're not there yet, but are we getting closer? What is keeping companies from driving down the road to enterprise content management bliss? Most people understand that using ECM as a central platform enables organizations to expedite document-centric processes, but most business processes in organizations are still heavily paper-based. Many of these processes could be automated and improved with an ECM platform infrastructure. In this panel discussion, you’ll hear from Oracle WebCenter customers that have already solved some of these challenges as they share their strategies for success and roads to avoid along your journey. CON8897 - Using Web Experience Management to Drive Online Marketing SuccessThursday, Oct 4, 2:15 PM - 3:15 PM - Moscone West - 3001Blane Nelson - Chief Architect, Ancestry.comMike Remedios - CIO, ArbonneCaitlin Scanlon - Product Manager, Monster WorldwideEvery year, the online channel becomes more imperative for driving organizational top-line revenue, but for many companies, mastering how to best market their products and services in a fast-evolving online world with high customer expectations for personalized experiences can be a complex proposition. Come to this panel discussion, and hear directly from customers on how they are succeeding today by using Web experience management to drive marketing success, using capabilities such as targeting and optimization, user-generated content, mobile site publishing, and site visitor personalization to deliver engaging online experiences. Your Handy Guide to WebCenter at Oracle OpenWorld Want a quick and easy guide to all the keynotes, demos, hands-on labs and WebCenter sessions you definitely don't want to miss at Oracle OpenWorld? Download this handy guide, Focus on WebCenter. More helpful links: * Oracle OpenWorld* Oracle Customer Experience Summit @ OpenWorld* Oracle OpenWorld on Facebook * Oracle OpenWorld on Twitter* Oracle OpenWorld on LinkedIn* Oracle OpenWorld Blog

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• How to Collect Debug Info for Oracle SQL Developer

  - by thatjeffsmith

  In a perfect world, there would be no software bugs. Developers would always test their code. QA would find any scenarios and bugs the developers hadn’t already thought of. Regression tests would be complete and flawless. But alas, we can only afford to pay mere humans here, so we will have bugs from time to time. Or sometimes you are trying to do something the software wasn’t designed for, or perhaps your machine has exhausted it’s resources trying to build the un-buildable. When you run into problems, you will need help. Developers need your help so they can help you. Surprisingly enough, feedback like this isn’t very helpful: Your program isn’t working. How can I make it work? When you are ready to work with us on the SQL Developer OTN forum, you will most likely be asked to run SQL Developer and capture the output from the command console. In case you need help with this, ere’s a step-by-step process you can follow in Windows 7 (should work in XP too.) Open a windows command window Start – Run – CMD Once it’s open, click on the window icon and select ‘Defaults.’ Change the default buffer size to be something bigger, much bigger. Set the CMD window default buffer size HIGHER Note: you only need to do this once. Navigate to your SQL Developer Installation Folder Instead of running the ‘sqldeveloper.exe’ file in the root directory, we are going to go several sub-directories down. Find the ‘bin’ sub-directory and run the ‘sqldeveloper.exe’ there. When you do this, a CMD window will open, and then you’ll see the SQL Developer application load. The SQL Developer bin directory - run the tool from here and get a logging window Use SQL Developer as normal, until it ‘breaks’ or ‘hangs’ Now, you are ready to grab the nitty-gritty information that MIGHT tell the developer what is going wrong or happening in your scenario. Click back into the CMD window Send a Ctrl+Break or a Ctrl+Pause. If you on a newer laptop that doesn’t have this key, be sure to check the ‘Fn’ subset of keys. If you need to map the BREAK or PAUSE buttons, this article might help. You can also try the on-screen keyboard in windows – just type ‘OSK’ in your START – RUN prompt. Copy the logging information from the command window – all of it We need this information, help us get it! Open a case with Oracle Support or Start a Thread on the Forums Or email me. If you’re on my blog reading this, it’s the least I can do to help Now, before you hit ‘Send’ or ‘Post’ or ‘Submit’ – be sure to add a brief description of what you were doing in the application when you ran into the problem. Even if you were doing ‘nothing,’ let us know how many connections you had open, what windows were active, etc. The more you can tell us, the higher your odds go up to getting a quick fix or at least an answer as to what is happening. Also include the following information: The version of SQL Developer you are running The version of the JDK you are using The OS you are using The version of Oracle you are connected to Now, don’t be surprised if you get asked to upgrade to a supported configuration, say ‘version 3.1 and the 1.6 JDK.’ Supporting older versions of software is fun, and while we enjoy a challenge, it may be easier for you to upgrade your way out of the problem at hand.

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• How To Replace Notepad in Windows 7

  - by Trevor Bekolay

  It used to be that Notepad was a necessary evil because it started up quickly and let us catch a quick glimpse of plain text files. Now, there are a bevy of capable Notepad replacements that are just as fast, but also have great feature sets. Before following the rest of this how-to, ensure that you’re logged into an account with Administrator access. Note: The following instructions involve modifying some Windows system folders. Don’t mess anything up while you’re in there! If you follow our instructions closely, you’ll be fine. Choose your replacement There are a ton of great Notepad replacements, including Notepad2, Metapad, and Notepad++. The best one for you will depend on what types of text files you open and what you do with them. We’re going to use Notepad++ in this how-to. The first step is to find the executable file that you’ll replace Notepad with. Usually this will be the only file with the .exe file extension in the folder where you installed your text editor. Copy the executable file to your desktop and try to open it, to make sure that it works when opened from a different folder. In the Notepad++ case, a special little .exe file is available for the explicit purpose of replacing Notepad.If we run it from the desktop, it opens up Notepad++ in all its glory. Back up Notepad You will probably never go back once you switch, but you never know. You can backup Notepad to a special location if you’d like, but we find it’s easiest to just keep a backed up copy of Notepad in the folders it was originally located. In Windows 7, Notepad resides in: C:\Windows C:\Windows\System32 C:\Windows\SysWOW64 in 64-bit versions only Navigate to each of those directories and copy Notepad. Paste it into the same folder. If prompted, choose to Copy, but keep both files. You can keep your backup as “notepad (2).exe”, but we prefer to rename it to “notepad.exe.bak”. Do this for all of the folders that have Notepad (2 total for 32-bit Windows 7, 3 total for 64-bit). Take control of Notepad and delete it Even if you’re on an administrator account, you can’t just delete Notepad – Microsoft has made some security gains in this respect. Fortunately for us, it’s still possible to take control of a file and delete it without resorting to nasty hacks like disabling UAC. Navigate to one of the directories that contain Notepad. Right-click on it and select Properties.   Switch to the Security tab, then click on the Advanced button. Note that the owner of the file is a user called “TrustedInstaller”. You can’t do much with files owned by TrustedInstaller, so let’s take control of it. Click the Edit… button. Select the desired owner (you could choose your own account, but we’re going to give any Administrator control) and click OK. You’ll get a message that you need to close and reopen the Properties windows to edit permissions. Before doing that, confirm that the owner has changed to what you selected. Click OK, then OK again to close the Properties window. Right-click on Notepad and click on Properties again. Switch to the Security tab. Click on Edit…. Select the appropriate group or user name in the list at the top, then add a checkmark in the checkbox beside Full control in the Allow column. Click OK, then Yes to the dialog box that pops up. Click OK again to close the Properties window. Now you can delete Notepad, by either selecting it and pressing Delete on the keyboard, or right-click on it and click Delete.   You’re now free from Notepad’s foul clutches! Repeat this procedure for the remaining folders (or folder, on 32-bit Windows 7). Drop in your replacement Copy your Notepad replacement’s executable, which should still be on your desktop. Browse to the two or three folders listed above and copy your .exe to those locations. If prompted for Administrator permission, click Continue. If your executable file was named something other than “notepad.exe”, rename it to “notepad.exe”. Don’t be alarmed if the thumbnail still shows the old Notepad icon. Double click on Notepad and your replacement should open. To make doubly sure that it works, press Win+R to bring up the Run dialog box and enter “notepad” into the text field. Press enter or click OK. Now you can allow Windows to open files with Notepad by default with little to no shame! All without restarting or having to disable UAC! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Search and Replace Specific Formatting (fonts, styles,etc) in Microsoft WordHow to Drag Files to the Taskbar to Open Them in Windows 7Customize the Windows 7 or Vista Send To MenuKill Processes from the Windows Command LineChange Your Windows 7 Library Icons the Easy Way TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Use My TextTools to Edit and Organize Text Discovery Channel LIFE Theme (Win7) Increase the size of Taskbar Previews (Win 7) Scan your PC for nasties with Panda ActiveScan CleanMem – Memory Cleaner AceStock – The Personal Stock Monitor

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• Create a Persistent Bootable Ubuntu USB Flash Drive

  - by Trevor Bekolay

  Don’t feel like reinstalling an antivirus program every time you boot up your Ubuntu flash drive? We’ll show you how to create a bootable Ubuntu flash drive that will remember your settings, installed programs, and more! Previously, we showed you how to create a bootable Ubuntu flash drive that would reset to its initial state every time you booted it up. This is great if you’re worried about messing something up, and want to start fresh every time you start tinkering with Ubuntu. However, if you’re using the Ubuntu flash drive to diagnose and solve problems with your PC, you might find that a lot of problems require guess-and-test cycles. It would be great if the settings you change in Ubuntu and the programs you install stay installed the next time you boot it up. Fortunately, Universal USB Installer, a great little program from Pen Drive Linux, can do just that! Note: You will need a USB drive at least 2 GB large. Make sure you back up any files on the flash drive because this process will format the drive, removing any files currently on it. Once Ubuntu has been installed on the flash drive, you can move those files back if there is enough space. Put Ubuntu on your flash drive Universal-USB-Installer.exe does not need to be installed, so just double click on it to run it wherever you downloaded it. Click Yes if you get a UAC prompt, and you will be greeted with this window. Click I Agree. In the drop-down box on the next screen, select Ubuntu 9.10 Desktop i386. Don’t worry if you normally use 64-bit operating systems – the 32-bit version of Ubuntu 9.10 will still work fine. Some useful tools do not have 64-bit versions, so unless you’re planning on switching to Ubuntu permanently, the 32-bit version will work best. If you don’t have a copy of the Ubuntu 9.10 CD downloaded, then click on the checkbox to Download the ISO. You’ll be prompted to launch a web browser; click Yes. The download should start immediately. When it’s finished, return the the Universal USB Installer and click on Browse to navigate to the ISO file you just downloaded. Click OK and the text field will be populated with the path to the ISO file. Select the drive letter that corresponds to the flash drive that you would like to use from the dropdown box. If you’ve backed up the files on this drive, we recommend checking the box to format the drive. Finally, you have to choose how much space you would like to set aside for the settings and programs that will be stored on the flash drive. Considering that Ubuntu itself only takes up around 700 MB, 1 GB should be plenty, but we’re choosing 2 GB in this example because we have lots of space on this USB drive. Click on the Create button and then make yourself a sandwich – it will take some time to install no matter how fast your PC is. Eventually it will finish. Click Close. Now you have a flash drive that will boot into a fully capable Ubuntu installation, and any changes you make will persist the next time you boot it up! Boot into Ubuntu If you’re not sure how to set your computer to boot using the USB drive, then check out the How to Boot Into Ubuntu section of our previous article on creating bootable USB drives, or refer to your motherboard’s manual. Once your computer is set to boot using the USB drive, you’ll be greeted with splash screen with some options. Press Enter to boot into Ubuntu. The first time you do this, it may take some time to boot up. Fortunately, we’ve found that the process speeds up on subsequent boots. You’ll be greeted with the Ubuntu desktop. Now, if you change settings like the desktop resolution, or install a program, those changes will be permanently stored on the USB drive! We installed avast! Antivirus, and on the next boot, found that it was still in the Accessories menu where we left it. Conclusion We think that a bootable Ubuntu USB flash drive is a great tool to have around in case your PC has problems booting otherwise. By having the changes you make persist, you can customize your Ubuntu installation to be the ultimate computer repair toolkit! Download Universal USB Installer from Pen Drive Linux Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Create a Bootable Ubuntu USB Flash Drive the Easy WayCreate a Bootable Ubuntu 9.10 USB Flash DriveReset Your Ubuntu Password Easily from the Live CDHow-To Geek on Lifehacker: Control Your Computer with Shortcuts & Speed Up Vista SetupHow To Setup a USB Flash Drive to Install Windows 7 TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Test Drive Windows 7 Online Download Wallpapers From National Geographic Site Spyware Blaster v4.3 Yes, it’s Patch Tuesday Generate Stunning Tag Clouds With Tagxedo Install, Remove and HIDE Fonts in Windows 7

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• SQL SERVER – Solution to Puzzle – Simulate LEAD() and LAG() without Using SQL Server 2012 Analytic Function

  - by pinaldave

  Earlier I wrote a series on SQL Server Analytic Functions of SQL Server 2012. During the series to keep the learning maximum and having fun, we had few puzzles. One of the puzzle was simulating LEAD() and LAG() without using SQL Server 2012 Analytic Function. Please read the puzzle here first before reading the solution : Write T-SQL Self Join Without Using LEAD and LAG. When I was originally wrote the puzzle I had done small blunder and the question was a bit confusing which I corrected later on but wrote a follow up blog post on over here where I describe the give-away. Quick Recap: Generate following results without using SQL Server 2012 analytic functions. I had received so many valid answers. Some answers were similar to other and some were very innovative. Some answers were very adaptive and some did not work when I changed where condition. After selecting all the valid answer, I put them in table and ran RANDOM function on the same and selected winners. Here are the valid answers. No Joins and No Analytic Functions Excellent Solution by Geri Reshef – Winner of SQL Server Interview Questions and Answers (India | USA) WITH T1 AS (SELECT Row_Number() OVER(ORDER BY SalesOrderDetailID) N, s.SalesOrderID, s.SalesOrderDetailID, s.OrderQty FROM Sales.SalesOrderDetail s WHERE SalesOrderID IN (43670, 43669, 43667, 43663)) SELECT SalesOrderID,SalesOrderDetailID,OrderQty, CASE WHEN N%2=1 THEN MAX(CASE WHEN N%2=0 THEN SalesOrderDetailID END) OVER (Partition BY (N+1)/2) ELSE MAX(CASE WHEN N%2=1 THEN SalesOrderDetailID END) OVER (Partition BY N/2) END LeadVal, CASE WHEN N%2=1 THEN MAX(CASE WHEN N%2=0 THEN SalesOrderDetailID END) OVER (Partition BY N/2) ELSE MAX(CASE WHEN N%2=1 THEN SalesOrderDetailID END) OVER (Partition BY (N+1)/2) END LagVal FROM T1 ORDER BY SalesOrderID, SalesOrderDetailID, OrderQty; GO No Analytic Function and Early Bird Excellent Solution by DHall – Winner of Pluralsight 30 days Subscription -- a query to emulate LEAD() and LAG() ;WITH s AS ( SELECT 1 AS ldOffset, -- equiv to 2nd param of LEAD 1 AS lgOffset, -- equiv to 2nd param of LAG NULL AS ldDefVal, -- equiv to 3rd param of LEAD NULL AS lgDefVal, -- equiv to 3rd param of LAG ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY SalesOrderDetailID) AS row, SalesOrderID, SalesOrderDetailID, OrderQty FROM Sales.SalesOrderDetail WHERE SalesOrderID IN (43670, 43669, 43667, 43663) ) SELECT s.SalesOrderID, s.SalesOrderDetailID, s.OrderQty, ISNULL( sLd.SalesOrderDetailID, s.ldDefVal) AS LeadValue, ISNULL( sLg.SalesOrderDetailID, s.lgDefVal) AS LagValue FROM s LEFT OUTER JOIN s AS sLd ON s.row = sLd.row - s.ldOffset LEFT OUTER JOIN s AS sLg ON s.row = sLg.row + s.lgOffset ORDER BY s.SalesOrderID, s.SalesOrderDetailID, s.OrderQty No Analytic Function and Partition By Excellent Solution by DHall – Winner of Pluralsight 30 days Subscription /* a query to emulate LEAD() and LAG() */ ;WITH s AS ( SELECT 1 AS LeadOffset, /* equiv to 2nd param of LEAD */ 1 AS LagOffset, /* equiv to 2nd param of LAG */ NULL AS LeadDefVal, /* equiv to 3rd param of LEAD */ NULL AS LagDefVal, /* equiv to 3rd param of LAG */ /* Try changing the values of the 4 integer values above to see their effect on the results */ /* The values given above of 0, 0, null and null behave the same as the default 2nd and 3rd parameters to LEAD() and LAG() */ ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY SalesOrderDetailID) AS row, SalesOrderID, SalesOrderDetailID, OrderQty FROM Sales.SalesOrderDetail WHERE SalesOrderID IN (43670, 43669, 43667, 43663) ) SELECT s.SalesOrderID, s.SalesOrderDetailID, s.OrderQty, ISNULL( sLead.SalesOrderDetailID, s.LeadDefVal) AS LeadValue, ISNULL( sLag.SalesOrderDetailID, s.LagDefVal) AS LagValue FROM s LEFT OUTER JOIN s AS sLead ON s.row = sLead.row - s.LeadOffset /* Try commenting out this next line when LeadOffset != 0 */ AND s.SalesOrderID = sLead.SalesOrderID /* The additional join criteria on SalesOrderID above is equivalent to PARTITION BY SalesOrderID in the OVER clause of the LEAD() function */ LEFT OUTER JOIN s AS sLag ON s.row = sLag.row + s.LagOffset /* Try commenting out this next line when LagOffset != 0 */ AND s.SalesOrderID = sLag.SalesOrderID /* The additional join criteria on SalesOrderID above is equivalent to PARTITION BY SalesOrderID in the OVER clause of the LAG() function */ ORDER BY s.SalesOrderID, s.SalesOrderDetailID, s.OrderQty No Analytic Function and CTE Usage Excellent Solution by Pravin Patel - Winner of SQL Server Interview Questions and Answers (India | USA) --CTE based solution ; WITH cteMain AS ( SELECT SalesOrderID, SalesOrderDetailID, OrderQty, ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY SalesOrderDetailID) AS sn FROM Sales.SalesOrderDetail WHERE SalesOrderID IN (43670, 43669, 43667, 43663) ) SELECT m.SalesOrderID, m.SalesOrderDetailID, m.OrderQty, sLead.SalesOrderDetailID AS leadvalue, sLeg.SalesOrderDetailID AS leagvalue FROM cteMain AS m LEFT OUTER JOIN cteMain AS sLead ON sLead.sn = m.sn+1 LEFT OUTER JOIN cteMain AS sLeg ON sLeg.sn = m.sn-1 ORDER BY m.SalesOrderID, m.SalesOrderDetailID, m.OrderQty No Analytic Function and Co-Related Subquery Usage Excellent Solution by Pravin Patel – Winner of SQL Server Interview Questions and Answers (India | USA) -- Co-Related subquery SELECT m.SalesOrderID, m.SalesOrderDetailID, m.OrderQty, ( SELECT MIN(SalesOrderDetailID) FROM Sales.SalesOrderDetail AS l WHERE l.SalesOrderID IN (43670, 43669, 43667, 43663) AND l.SalesOrderID >= m.SalesOrderID AND l.SalesOrderDetailID > m.SalesOrderDetailID ) AS lead, ( SELECT MAX(SalesOrderDetailID) FROM Sales.SalesOrderDetail AS l WHERE l.SalesOrderID IN (43670, 43669, 43667, 43663) AND l.SalesOrderID <= m.SalesOrderID AND l.SalesOrderDetailID < m.SalesOrderDetailID ) AS leag FROM Sales.SalesOrderDetail AS m WHERE m.SalesOrderID IN (43670, 43669, 43667, 43663) ORDER BY m.SalesOrderID, m.SalesOrderDetailID, m.OrderQty This was one of the most interesting Puzzle on this blog. Giveaway Winners will get following giveaways. Geri Reshef and Pravin Patel SQL Server Interview Questions and Answers (India | USA) DHall Pluralsight 30 days Subscription Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, Readers Contribution, Readers Question, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Function, SQL Puzzle, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Request Limit Length Limits for IIS&rsquo;s requestFiltering Module

  - by Rick Strahl

  Today I updated my CodePaste.net site to MVC 3 and pushed an update to the site. The update of MVC went pretty smooth as well as most of the update process to the live site. Short of missing a web.config change in the /views folder that caused blank pages on the server, the process was relatively painless. However, one issue that kicked my ass for about an hour – and not foe the first time – was a problem with my OpenId authentication using DotNetOpenAuth. I tested the site operation fairly extensively locally and everything worked no problem, but on the server the OpenId returns resulted in a 404 response from IIS for a nice friendly OpenId return URL like this: http://codepaste.net/Account/OpenIdLogon?dnoa.userSuppliedIdentifier=http%3A%2F%2Frstrahl.myopenid.com%2F&dnoa.return_to_sig_handle=%7B634239223364590000%7D%7BjbHzkg%3D%3D%7D&dnoa.return_to_sig=7%2BcGhp7UUkcV2B8W29ibIDnZuoGoqzyS%2F%2FbF%2FhhYscgWzjg%2BB%2Fj10ZpNdBkUCu86dkTL6f4OK2zY5qHhCnJ2Dw%3D%3D&openid.assoc_handle=%7BHMAC-SHA256%7D%7B4cca49b2%7D%7BMVGByQ%3D%3D%7D&openid.claimed_id=http%3A%2F%2Frstrahl.myopenid.com%2F&openid.identity=http%3A%2F%2Frstrahl.myopenid.com%2F&openid.mode=id_res&openid.ns=http%3A%2F%2Fspecs.openid.net%2Fauth%2F2.0&openid.ns.sreg=http%3A%2F%2Fopenid.net%2Fextensions%2Fsreg%2F1.1&openid.op_endpoint=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.myopenid.com%2Fserver&openid.response_nonce=2010-10-29T04%3A12%3A53Zn5F4r5&openid.return_to=http%3A%2F%2Fcodepaste.net%2FAccount%2FOpenIdLogon%3Fdnoa.userSuppliedIdentifier%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Frstrahl.myopenid.com%252F%26dnoa.return_to_sig_handle%3D%257B634239223364590000%257D%257BjbHzkg%253D%253D%257D%26dnoa.return_to_sig%3D7%252BcGhp7UUkcV2B8W29ibIDnZuoGoqzyS%252F%252FbF%252FhhYscgWzjg%252BB%252Fj10ZpNdBkUCu86dkTL6f4OK2zY5qHhCnJ2Dw%253D%253D&openid.sig=h1GCSBTDAn1on98sLA6cti%2Bj1M6RffNerdVEI80mnYE%3D&openid.signed=assoc_handle%2Cclaimed_id%2Cidentity%2Cmode%2Cns%2Cns.sreg%2Cop_endpoint%2Cresponse_nonce%2Creturn_to%2Csigned%2Csreg.email%2Csreg.fullname&openid.sreg.email=rstrahl%40host.com&openid.sreg.fullname=Rick+Strahl A 404 of course isn’t terribly helpful – normally a 404 is a resource not found error, but the resource is definitely there. So how the heck do you figure out what’s wrong? If you’re just interested in the solution, here’s the short version: IIS by default allows only for a 1024 byte query string, which is obviously exceeded by the above. The setting is controlled by the RequestFiltering module in IIS 6 and later which can be configured in ApplicationHost.config (in \%windir\system32\inetsvr\config). To set the value configure the requestLimits key like so: <configuration> <security> <requestFiltering> <requestLimits maxQueryString="2048"> </requestLimits> </requestFiltering> </security> </configuration> This fixed me right up and made the requests work. How do you find out about problems like this? Ah yes the troubles of an administrator? Read on and I’ll take you through a quick review of how I tracked this down. Finding the Problem The issue with the error returned is that IIS returns a 404 Resource not found error and doesn’t provide much information about it. If you’re lucky enough to be able to run your site from the localhost IIS is actually very helpful and gives you the right information immediately in a nicely detailed error page. The bottom of the page actually describes exactly what needs to be fixed. One problem with this easy way to find an error: You HAVE TO run localhost. On my server which has about 10 domains running localhost doesn’t point at the particular site I had problems with so I didn’t get the luxury of this nice error page. Using Failed Request Tracing to retrieve Error Info The first place I go with IIS errors is to turn on Failed Request Tracing in IIS to get more error information. If you have access to the server to make a configuration change you can enable Failed Request Tracing like this: Find the Failed Request Tracing Rules in the IIS Service Manager.   Select the option and then Edit Site Tracing to enable tracing. Then add a rule for * (all content) and specify status codes from 100-999 to capture all errors. if you know exactly what error you’re looking for it might help to specify it exactly to keep the number of errors down. Then run your request and let it fail. IIS will throw error log files into a folder like this C:\inetpub\logs\FailedReqLogFiles\W3SVC5 where the last 5 is the instance ID of the site. These files are XML but they include an XSL stylesheet that provides some decent formatting. In this case it pointed me straight at the offending module:   Ok, it’s the RequestFilteringModule. Request Filtering is built into IIS 6-7 and configured in ApplicationHost.config. This module defines a few basic rules about what paths and extensions are allowed in requests and among other things how long a query string is allowed to be. Most of these settings are pretty sensible but the query string value can easily become a problem especially if you’re dealing with OpenId since these return URLs are quite extensive. Debugging failed requests is never fun, but IIS 6 and forward at least provides us the tools that can help us point in the right direction. The error message the FRT report isn’t as nice as the IIS error message but it at least points at the offending module which gave me the clue I needed to look at request restrictions in ApplicationHost.config. This would still be a stretch if you’re not intimately familiar, but I think with some Google searches it would be easy to track this down with a few tries… Hope this was useful to some of you. Useful to me to put this out as a reminder – I’ve run into this issue before myself and totally forgot. Next time I got it, right?© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ASP.NET  Security  

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• SSAS Compare: an intern’s journey

  - by Red Gate Software BI Tools Team

  About a month ago, David mentioned an intern working in the BI Tools Team. That intern happens to be me! In five weeks’ time, I’ll start my second year of Computer Science at the University of Cambridge and be a full-time student again, but for the past eight weeks, I’ve been living a completely different life. As Jon mentioned before, the teams here at Red Gate are small and everyone (including the interns!) is responsible for the product as a whole. I’ve attended planning sessions, UX tests, daily meetings, and everything else a full-time member of the team would; I had as much say in where we would go next with the product as anyone; I was able to see that what I was doing was an important part of the product from the feedback we got in the UX tests. All these things almost made me forget that this is just an internship and not my full-time job. First steps at Red Gate Being based in Cambridge, Red Gate has many Cambridge university graduates working for them. They also hire some Cambridge undergraduates for internships each summer. With its popularity with university graduates and its great working environment, Red Gate has managed to build up a great reputation. When I thought of doing an internship here in Cambridge, Red Gate just seemed to be the obvious choice for my first real work experience. On my first day at Red Gate, David, the lead developer for SSAS Compare, helped me settle in and explained what I’d be doing. My task was to improve the user experience of displaying differences between MDX scripts by syntax highlighting, script formatting, and improving the difference identification in the first place. David suggested how I should approach the problem, but left all the details and design decisions to me. That was when I realised how much independence and responsibility I’d have. What I’ve done If you launch the latest version of SSAS Compare and drill down to an MDX script difference, you can see the changes that have been made. In earlier versions, you could only see the scripts in plain text on both sides — either in black or grey, depending on whether they were the same or not. However, you couldn’t see exactly where the scripts were different, which was especially annoying when the two scripts were large – as they often are. Furthermore, if parts of the two scripts were formatted differently, they seemed to be different but were actually the same, which caused even more confusion and made it difficult to see where the differences were. All these issues have been fixed now. The two scripts are automatically formatted by the tool so that if two things are syntactically equivalent, they look the same – including case differences in keywords! The actual difference is highlighted in grey, which makes them easy to spot. The difference identification has been improved as well, so two scripts aren’t identified as different if there’s just a difference in meaningless whitespace characters, or when you have “select” on one side and “SELECT” on the other. We also have syntax highlighting, which makes it easier to read the scripts. How I did it In order to do the formatting properly, we decided to parse the MDX scripts. After some investigation into parser builders, I decided to go with the GOLD Parser builder and the bsn-goldparser .NET engine. GOLD Parser builder provides a fairly nice GUI to write, build, and test grammar in. We also liked the idea of separating the grammar building from parsing a text. The bsn-goldparser is one of many .NET engines for GOLD, and although it doesn’t support the newest features of GOLD Parser, it has “the ability to map semantic action classes to terminals or reduction rules, so that a completely functional semantic AST can be created directly without intermediate token AST representation, and without the need for glue code.” That makes it much easier for us to change the implementation in our program when we change the grammar. As bsn-goldparser is open source, and I wanted some more features in it, I contributed two new features which have now been merged to the project. Unfortunately, there wasn’t an MDX grammar written for GOLD already, so I had to write it myself. I was referencing MSDN to get the formal grammar specification, but the specification was all over the place, so it wasn’t that easy to implement and find. We’re aware that we don’t yet fully support all valid MDX, so sometimes you’ll just see the MDX script difference displayed the old way. In that case, there is some grammar construct we don’t yet recognise. If you come across something SSAS Compare doesn’t recognise, we’d love to hear about it so we can add it to our grammar. When some MDX script gets parsed, a tree is produced. That tree can then be processed into a list of inlines which deal with the correct formatting and can be outputted to the screen. Doing all this has led me to many new technologies and projects I haven’t worked with before. This was my first experience with C# and Visual Studio, although I have done things in Java before. I have learnt how to unit test with NUnit, how to do dependency injection with Ninject, how to source-control code with SVN and Mercurial, how to build with TeamCity, how to use GOLD, and many other things. What’s coming next Sadly, my internship comes to an end this week, so there will be less development on MDX difference view for a while. But the team is going to work on marking the differences better and making it consistent with difference indication in the top part of comparison window, and will keep adding support for more MDX grammar so you can see the differences easily in every comparison you make. So long! And maybe I’ll see you next summer!

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• Updating the managed debugging API for .NET v4

  - by Brian Donahue

  In any successful investigation, the right tools play a big part in collecting evidence about the state of the "crime scene" as it was before the detectives arrived. Unfortunately for the Crash Scene Investigator, we don't have the budget to fly out to the customer's site, chalk the outline, and eat their doughnuts. We have to rely on the end-user to collect the evidence for us, which means giving them the fingerprint dust and the evidence baggies and leaving them to it. With that in mind, the Red Gate support team have been writing tools that can collect vital clues with a minimum of fuss. Years ago we would have asked for a memory dump, where we used to get the customer to run CDB.exe and produce dumps that we could analyze in-house, but those dumps were pretty unwieldy (500MB files) and the debugger often didn't dump exactly where we wanted, or made five or more dumps. What we wanted was just the minimum state information from the program at the time of failure, so we produced a managed debugger that captured every first and second-chance exception and logged the stack and a minimal amount of variables from the memory of the application, which could all be exported as XML. This caused less inconvenience to the end-user because it is much easier to send a 65KB XML file in an email than a 500MB file containing all of the application's memory. We don't need to have the entire victim shipped out to us when we just want to know what was under the fingernails. The thing that made creating a managed debugging tool possible was the MDbg Engine example written by Microsoft as part of the Debugging Tools for Windows distribution. Since the ICorDebug interface is a bit difficult to understand, they had kindly created some wrappers that provided an event-driven debugging model that was perfect for our needs, but .NET 4 applications under debugging started complaining that "The debugger's protocol is incompatible with the debuggee". The introduction of .NET Framework v4 had changed the managed debugging API significantly, however, without an update for the MDbg Engine code! After a few hours of research, I had finally worked out that most of the version 4 ICorDebug interface still works much the same way in "legacy" v2 mode and there was a relatively easy fix for the problem in that you can still get a reference to legacy ICorDebug by changing the way the interface is created. In .NET v2, the interface was acquired using the CreateDebuggingInterfaceFromVersion method in mscoree.dll. In v4, you must first create IClrMetaHost, enumerate the runtimes, get an ICLRRuntimeInfo interface to the .NET 4 runtime from that, and use the GetInterface method in mscoree.dll to return a "legacy" ICorDebug interface. The rest of the MDbg Engine will continue working the old way. Here is how I had changed the MDbg Engine code to support .NET v4: private void InitFromVersion(string debuggerVersion){if( debuggerVersion.StartsWith("v1") ){throw new ArgumentException( "Can't debug a version 1 CLR process (\"" + debuggerVersion + "\"). Run application in a version 2 CLR, or use a version 1 debugger instead." );} ICorDebug rawDebuggingAPI=null;if (debuggerVersion.StartsWith("v4")){Guid CLSID_MetaHost = new Guid("9280188D-0E8E-4867-B30C-7FA83884E8DE"); Guid IID_MetaHost = new Guid("D332DB9E-B9B3-4125-8207-A14884F53216"); ICLRMetaHost metahost = (ICLRMetaHost)NativeMethods.ClrCreateInterface(CLSID_MetaHost, IID_MetaHost); IEnumUnknown runtimes = metahost.EnumerateInstalledRuntimes(); ICLRRuntimeInfo runtime = GetRuntime(runtimes, debuggerVersion); //Defined in metahost.hGuid CLSID_CLRDebuggingLegacy = new Guid(0xDF8395B5, 0xA4BA, 0x450b, 0xA7, 0x7C, 0xA9, 0xA4, 0x77, 0x62, 0xC5, 0x20);Guid IID_ICorDebug = new Guid("3D6F5F61-7538-11D3-8D5B-00104B35E7EF"); Object res;runtime.GetInterface(ref CLSID_CLRDebuggingLegacy, ref IID_ICorDebug, out res); rawDebuggingAPI = (ICorDebug)res; }elserawDebuggingAPI = NativeMethods.CreateDebuggingInterfaceFromVersion((int)CorDebuggerVersion.Whidbey,debuggerVersion);if (rawDebuggingAPI != null)InitFromICorDebug(rawDebuggingAPI);elsethrow new ArgumentException("Support for debugging version " + debuggerVersion + " is not yet implemented");} The changes above will ensure that the debugger can support .NET Framework v2 and v4 applications with the same codebase, but we do compile two different applications: one targeting v2 and the other v4. As a footnote I need to add that some missing native methods and wrappers, along with the EnumerateRuntimes method code, came from the Mindbg project on Codeplex. Another change is that when using the MDbgEngine.CreateProcess to launch a process in the debugger, do not supply a null as the final argument. This does not work any more because GetCORVersion always returns "v2.0.50727" as the function has been deprecated in .NET v4. What's worse is that on a system with only .NET 4, the user will be prompted to download and install .NET v2! Not nice! This works much better: proc = m_Debugger.CreateProcess(ProcessName, ProcessArgs, DebugModeFlag.Default,String.Format("v{0}.{1}.{2}",System.Environment.Version.Major,System.Environment.Version.Minor,System.Environment.Version.Build)); Microsoft "unofficially" plan on updating the MDbg samples soon, but if you have an MDbg-based application, you can get it working right now by changing one method a bit and adding a few new interfaces (ICLRMetaHost, IEnumUnknown, and ICLRRuntimeInfo). The new, non-legacy implementation of MDbg Engine will add new, interesting features like dump-file support and by association I assume garbage-collection/managed object stats, so it will be well worth looking into if you want to extend the functionality of a managed debugger going forward.

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• SQL SERVER – Simple Example of Snapshot Isolation – Reduce the Blocking Transactions

  - by pinaldave

  To learn any technology and move to a more advanced level, it is very important to understand the fundamentals of the subject first. Today, we will be talking about something which has been quite introduced a long time ago but not properly explored when it comes to the isolation level. Snapshot Isolation was introduced in SQL Server in 2005. However, the reality is that there are still many software shops which are using the SQL Server 2000, and therefore cannot be able to maintain the Snapshot Isolation. Many software shops have upgraded to the later version of the SQL Server, but their respective developers have not spend enough time to upgrade themselves with the latest technology. “It works!” is a very common answer of many when they are asked about utilizing the new technology, instead of backward compatibility commands. In one of the recent consultation project, I had same experience when developers have “heard about it” but have no idea about snapshot isolation. They were thinking it is the same as Snapshot Replication – which is plain wrong. This is the same demo I am including here which I have created for them. In Snapshot Isolation, the updated row versions for each transaction are maintained in TempDB. Once a transaction has begun, it ignores all the newer rows inserted or updated in the table. Let us examine this example which shows the simple demonstration. This transaction works on optimistic concurrency model. Since reading a certain transaction does not block writing transaction, it also does not block the reading transaction, which reduced the blocking. First, enable database to work with Snapshot Isolation. Additionally, check the existing values in the table from HumanResources.Shift. ALTER DATABASE AdventureWorks SET ALLOW_SNAPSHOT_ISOLATION ON GO SELECT ModifiedDate FROM HumanResources.Shift GO Now, we will need two different sessions to prove this example. First Session: Set Transaction level isolation to snapshot and begin the transaction. Update the column “ModifiedDate” to today’s date. -- Session 1 SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL SNAPSHOT BEGIN TRAN UPDATE HumanResources.Shift SET ModifiedDate = GETDATE() GO Please note that we have not yet been committed to the transaction. Now, open the second session and run the following “SELECT” statement. Then, check the values of the table. Please pay attention on setting the Isolation level for the second one as “Snapshot” at the same time when we already start the transaction using BEGIN TRAN. -- Session 2 SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL SNAPSHOT BEGIN TRAN SELECT ModifiedDate FROM HumanResources.Shift GO You will notice that the values in the table are still original values. They have not been modified yet. Once again, go back to session 1 and begin the transaction. -- Session 1 COMMIT After that, go back to Session 2 and see the values of the table. -- Session 2 SELECT ModifiedDate FROM HumanResources.Shift GO You will notice that the values are yet not changed and they are still the same old values which were there right in the beginning of the session. Now, let us commit the transaction in the session 2. Once committed, run the same SELECT statement once more and see what the result is. -- Session 2 COMMIT SELECT ModifiedDate FROM HumanResources.Shift GO You will notice that it now reflects the new updated value. I hope that this example is clear enough as it would give you good idea how the Snapshot Isolation level works. There is much more to write about an extra level, READ_COMMITTED_SNAPSHOT, which we will be discussing in another post soon. If you wish to use this transaction’s Isolation level in your production database, I would appreciate your comments about their performance on your servers. I have included here the complete script used in this example for your quick reference. ALTER DATABASE AdventureWorks SET ALLOW_SNAPSHOT_ISOLATION ON GO SELECT ModifiedDate FROM HumanResources.Shift GO -- Session 1 SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL SNAPSHOT BEGIN TRAN UPDATE HumanResources.Shift SET ModifiedDate = GETDATE() GO -- Session 2 SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL SNAPSHOT BEGIN TRAN SELECT ModifiedDate FROM HumanResources.Shift GO -- Session 1 COMMIT -- Session 2 SELECT ModifiedDate FROM HumanResources.Shift GO -- Session 2 COMMIT SELECT ModifiedDate FROM HumanResources.Shift GO Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Transaction Isolation

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• How to customise search core results web part Part1

  - by ybbest

  In this post, I’d like to show you how to customise search core results web part. It is a quite simple, most of the times what you need to do is to change the xslt to perform the changes. Here are the steps: 1. You need to change the xslt to the following, so that you can see the raw xml. <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" > <xsl:output method="xml" version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes" /> <xsl:template match="/"> <xmp><xsl:copy-of select="*"/></xmp> </xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet> a. To do so , you need to go to edit page>>Edit search core results web part >>Display Properties and then untick use Location Visualization b. Open the xslt editor and copy the existing XSLT code to your preferred xslt editor so that you can customise it. c. Now you can paste in the XSLT code above. 2.Perform the search after you have completed step1 and you will see the search results returned in raw xml <All_Results> <Result> <id>1</id> <workid>678</workid> <rank>100000000</rank> <title>Ybbest</title> <author></author> <size>137531</size> <url>http://ybbest</url> <urlEncoded>http%3A%2F%2Fybbest</urlEncoded> <description>Ybbest test site</description> <write>3/17/2012</write> <sitename>http://ybbest</sitename> <collapsingstatus>0</collapsingstatus> <hithighlightedsummary> <c0>Ybbest</c0> test site <ddd /> Add a new image, change this welcome text or add new lists to this page by clicking the edit button above. You can click on Shared Documents to add files or on the <ddd /> </hithighlightedsummary> <hithighlightedproperties> <HHTitle> <c0>Ybbest</c0> </HHTitle> <HHUrl>http://<c0>ybbest</c0></HHUrl> </hithighlightedproperties> <contentclass>STS_Site</contentclass> <isdocument>False</isdocument> <picturethumbnailurl></picturethumbnailurl> <popularsocialtags /> <picturewidth>0</picturewidth> <pictureheight>0</pictureheight> <datepicturetaken></datepicturetaken> <serverredirectedurl></serverredirectedurl> <fileextension></fileextension> <ows_metadatafacetinfo></ows_metadatafacetinfo> <imageurl imageurldescription="SharePoint Site Collection">/_layouts/images/siteicon_16x16.png</imageurl> </Result> <TotalResults>69</TotalResults> <NumberOfResults>50</NumberOfResults> </All_Results> 3. Then you can read what has been returned in the raw xml and start modifying the xslt to customise your search results page. 4.You can also link an external xslt to the web part.It can be set in the Miscellaneous of Web Part section. You can also set it pragmatically using a feature receiver , you can download the source code to do so here. References: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6548104/change-xslt-of-the-searchresultwebpart-during-the-featureactivated http://www.dotnetmafia.com/blogs/dotnettipoftheday/archive/2010/04/05/a-quick-guide-to-coreresultswebpart-configuration-changes-in-sharepoint-2010.aspx http://www.tonytestasworld.com/post/2011/01/30/HowTo-display-SharePoint-Search-results-as-raw-XML.aspx

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• No, iCloud Isn’t Backing Them All Up: How to Manage Photos on Your iPhone or iPad

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Are the photos you take with your iPhone or iPad backed up in case you lose your device? If you’re just relying on iCloud to manage your important memories, your photos may not be backed up at all. Apple’s iCloud has a photo-syncing feature in the form of “Photo Stream,” but Photo Stream doesn’t actually perform any long-term backups of your photos. iCloud’s Photo Backup Limitations Assuming you’ve set up iCloud on your iPhone or iPad, your device is using a feature called “Photo Stream” to automatically upload the photos you take to your iCloud storage and sync them across your devices. Unfortunately, there are some big limitations here. 1000 Photos: Photo Stream only backs up the latest 1000 photos. Do you have 1500 photos in your Camera Roll folder on your phone? If so, only the latest 1000 photos are stored in your iCloud account online. If you don’t have those photos backed up elsewhere, you’ll lose them when you lose your phone. If you have 1000 photos and take one more, the oldest photo will be removed from your iCloud Photo Stream. 30 Days: Apple also states that photos in your Photo Stream will be automatically deleted after 30 days “to give your devices plenty of time to connect and download them.” Some people report photos aren’t deleted after 30 days, but it’s clear you shouldn’t rely on iCloud for more than 30 days of storage. iCloud Storage Limits: Apple only gives you 5 GB of iCloud storage space for free, and this is shared between backups, documents, and all other iCloud data. This 5 GB can fill up pretty quickly. If your iCloud storage is full and you haven’t purchased any more storage more from Apple, your photos aren’t being backed up. Videos Aren’t Included: Photo Stream doesn’t include videos, so any videos you take aren’t automatically backed up. It’s clear that iCloud’s Photo Stream isn’t designed as a long-term way to store your photos, just a convenient way to access recent photos on all your devices before you back them up for real. iCloud’s Photo Stream is Designed for Desktop Backups If you have a Mac, you can launch iPhoto and enable the Automatic Import option under Photo Stream in its preferences pane. Assuming your Mac is on and connected to the Internet, iPhoto will automatically download photos from your photo stream and make local backups of them on your hard drive. You’ll then have to back up your photos manually so you don’t lose them if your Mac’s hard drive ever fails. If you have a Windows PC, you can install the iCloud Control Panel, which will create a Photo Stream folder on your PC. Your photos will be automatically downloaded to this folder and stored in it. You’ll want to back up your photos so you don’t lose them if your PC’s hard drive ever fails. Photo Stream is clearly designed to be used along with a desktop application. Photo Stream temporarily backs up your photos to iCloud so iPhoto or iCloud Control Panel can download them to your Mac or PC and make a local backup before they’re deleted. You could also use iTunes to sync your photos from your device to your PC or Mac, but we don’t really recommend it — you should never have to use iTunes. How to Actually Back Up All Your Photos Online So Photo Stream is actually pretty inconvenient — or, at least, it’s just a way to temporarily sync photos between your devices without storing them long-term. But what if you actually want to automatically back up your photos online without them being deleted automatically? The solution here is a third-party app that does this for you, offering the automatic photo uploads with long-term storage. There are several good services with apps in the App Store: Dropbox: Dropbox’s Camera Upload feature allows you to automatically upload the photos — and videos — you take to your Dropbox account. They’ll be easily accessible anywhere there’s a Dropbox app and you can get much more free Dropbox storage than you can iCloud storage. Dropbox will never automatically delete your old photos. Google+: Google+ offers photo and video backups with its Auto Upload feature, too. Photos will be stored in your Google+ Photos — formerly Picasa Web Albums — and will be marked as private by default so no one else can view them. Full-size photos will count against your free 15 GB of Google account storage space, but you can also choose to upload an unlimited amount of photos at a smaller resolution. Flickr: The Flickr app is no longer a mess. Flickr offers an Auto Upload feature for uploading full-size photos you take and free Flickr accounts offer a massive 1 TB of storage for you to store your photos. The massive amount of free storage alone makes Flickr worth a look. Use any of these services and you’ll get an online, automatic photo backup solution you can rely on. You’ll get a good chunk of free space, your photos will never be automatically deleted, and you can easily access them from any device. You won’t have to worry about storing local copies of your photos and backing them up manually. Apple should fix this mess and offer a better solution for long-term photo backup, especially considering the limitations aren’t immediately obvious to users. Until they do, third-party apps are ready to step in and take their place. You can also automatically back up your photos to the web on Android with Google+’s Auto Upload or Dropbox’s Camera Upload. Image Credit: Simon Yeo on Flickr     

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• Aamir Khan’s Satyamev Jayate stirs a movement

  - by Gopinath

  Bollywood actor Aamir Khan is known for his dedication and hard work in inspiring millions of viewers though movies by discussing social problems and motivating people to solve them. His movie Rang De Basanthi seeded Indian anti-corruption movement, Tare Zameen Par touched the problems faced by few challenged kids and the latest movie 3 idiots exposed how education institutions in India are producing lakhs of Donkeys out of colleges every year. He extended his dedication of serving the society to small screen with the launch of reality TV show Satyamev Jayate. Before you start misjudging it as one of those non sense drama / entertaining reality shows, let me tell you that it is not a typical music, games, fight or dance reality show. Satyamev Jayate is all about the real people of India, their problems and how to tackle them.  This is not just a reality show, its movement to educate people about the social evils. Its been many years since I spent couple of hours  in front of TV as most of the programs are too cynical or does not add much value.  In my childhood I use to anxiously wait for Mahabarath or He-Man TV shows to start but after a two decades I waited anxiously for the start of Satyamev Jayate. The wait was worth and the 1 hours 30 minutes spent watching it meaningful. When was the last time you were so satisfied after watching a TV show and inspired to do something? I don’t remember. Today, the show focused on female foeticide and its impact. It showed women who were tortured and forced to abort female foetuses. On the show few brave women shared their experiences of giving birth to girl babies and rough times they are going through with their in-laws & husbands. The show not only focused on the problem but also on the root cause of the evil,  inspiring people working to tackle it and what every individual can do his part to solve it.  The best part of the show is,  its not a blame game. When there is a problem most of the people quickly get into identifying who is wrong and start blaming them instead of solve the actual problem.  Aamir did not blame anyone for female foeticide – neither the government who don’t impose strict rules, nor the doctors who abort girl babies to make money or the mother-in-laws & husbands who torcher girl baby mothers are blamed. He careful highlighted the problem, showed horrifying statistics and their impact on the future society and few inspiring people working to tackle the problem.  He touched heart and stirred a movement against the issue. First time ever I voted for a reality show through SMS and it’s for Satyamev Jayate. I’m proud to do so. Here are the few reactions of popular people, activists & media about the program @aamir_khan absolutely the best program I have seen on TV in recent past. Thanku for converting an idiot box into an inspirationsl medium — Kiran Bedi (@thekiranbedi) May 6, 2012 Satyamev Jayate proves tht TV 2 can b a tool of social change. — Shekhar Kapur (@shekharkapur) May 6, 2012 i absolutely loved #satyamevjayate. at least aamir is doing what all of us only talk about. — Harsha Bhogle (@bhogleharsha) May 6, 2012 Now Television will no longer be called an idiot box,the VISION of Television broadens up with#SatyamevJayate !!! — Madhur Bhandarkar (@mbhandarkar268) May 6, 2012 The Sunday 11am slot seems to have come back with a bang… #SatyamevJayate — atul kasbekar (@atulkasbekar) May 6, 2012   I was spellbound, says Prasoon Joshi – It’s a unique show. I was completely bowled over by it. It’s a never-done before concept Aamir Khan strikes the right chord with Satyamev Jayate – The format is quite crisp. Talking about the emotional connect, there are moments when your eyes well up with tears, but the various segments ensure there’s more content than emotional drama ‘Satyamev Jayate’ gutsy, sensible show: Viewers – From filmmakers to clinical psychologists to professors – everyone has given the thumbs up to Aamir Khan’s television show ‘Satyamev Jayate’, saying it is a gutsy, hard-hitting and sensible programme that strikes an emotional chord with the audiences. Aamir Khan’s TV debut ‘Satyamev Jayate’ takes Twitter by storm – The roads of the capital sported a deserted look around 11 am on Sunday morning, as everyone was hooked on to their TV sets. Did you watch the program? What is your opinion? I’m waiting for next 11 AM of next Sunday. Are you?

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• ASP.NET MVC HandleError Attribute

  - by Ben Griswold

  Last Wednesday, I took a whopping 15 minutes out of my day and added ELMAH (Error Logging Modules and Handlers) to my ASP.NET MVC application.  If you haven’t heard the news (I hadn’t until recently), ELMAH does a killer job of logging and reporting nearly all unhandled exceptions.  As for handled exceptions, I’ve been using NLog but since I was already playing with the ELMAH bits I thought I’d see if I couldn’t replace it. Atif Aziz provided a quick solution in his answer to a Stack Overflow question.  I’ll let you consult his answer to see how one can subclass the HandleErrorAttribute and override the OnException method in order to get the bits working.  I pretty much took rolled the recommended logic into my application and it worked like a charm.  Along the way, I did uncover a few HandleError fact to which I wasn’t already privy.  Most of my learning came from Steven Sanderson’s book, Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework.  I’ve flipped through a bunch of the book and spent time on specific sections.  It’s a really good read if you’re looking to pick up an ASP.NET MVC reference. Anyway, my notes are found a comments in the following code snippet.  I hope my notes clarify a few things for you too. public class LogAndHandleErrorAttribute : HandleErrorAttribute {     public override void OnException(ExceptionContext context)     {         // A word from our sponsors:         //      http://stackoverflow.com/questions/766610/how-to-get-elmah-to-work-with-asp-net-mvc-handleerror-attribute         //      and Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework by Steven Sanderson         //         // Invoke the base implementation first. This should mark context.ExceptionHandled = true         // which stops ASP.NET from producing a "yellow screen of death." This also sets the         // Http StatusCode to 500 (internal server error.)         //         // Assuming Custom Errors aren't off, the base implementation will trigger the application         // to ultimately render the "Error" view from one of the following locations:         //         //      1. ~/Views/Controller/Error.aspx         //      2. ~/Views/Controller/Error.ascx         //      3. ~/Views/Shared/Error.aspx         //      4. ~/Views/Shared/Error.ascx         //         // "Error" is the default view, however, a specific view may be provided as an Attribute property.         // A notable point is the Custom Errors defaultRedirect is not considered in the redirection plan.         base.OnException(context);           var e = context.Exception;                  // If the exception is unhandled, simply return and let Elmah handle the unhandled exception.         // Otherwise, try to use error signaling which involves the fully configured pipeline like logging,         // mailing, filtering and what have you). Failing that, see if the error should be filtered.         // If not, the error simply logged the exception.         if (!context.ExceptionHandled                || RaiseErrorSignal(e)                   || IsFiltered(context))                  return;           LogException(e); // FYI. Simple Elmah logging doesn't handle mail notifications.     }

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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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• Getting selected row in inputListOfValues returnPopupListener

  - by Frank Nimphius

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 false false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Model driven list-of-values in Oracle ADF are configured on the ADF Business component attribute which should be updated with the user value selection. The value lookup can be configured to be displayed as a select list, combo box, input list of values or combo box with list of values. Displaying the list in an af:inputListOfValues component shows the attribute value in an input text field and with an icon attached to it for the user to launch the list-of-values dialog. The list-of-values dialog allows users to use a search form to filter the lookup data list and to select an entry, which return value then is added as the value of the af:inputListOfValues component. Note: The model driven LOV can be configured in ADF Business Components to update multiple attributes with the user selection, though the most common use case is to update the value of a single attribute. A question on OTN was how to access the row of the selected return value on the ADF Faces front end. For this, you need to know that there is a Model property defined on the af:inputListOfValues that references the ListOfValuesModel implementation in the model. It is the value of this Model property that you need to get access to. The af:inputListOfValues has a ReturnPopupListener property that you can use to configure a managed bean method to receive notification when the user closes the LOV popup dialog by selecting the Ok button. This listener is not triggered when the cancel button is pressed. The managed bean signature can be created declaratively in Oracle JDeveloper 11g using the Edit option in the context menu next to the ReturnPopupListener field in the PropertyInspector. The empty method signature looks as shown below public void returnListener(ReturnPopupEvent returnPopupEvent) { } The ReturnPopupEvent object gives you access the RichInputListOfValues component instance, which represents the af:inputListOfValues component at runtime. From here you access the Model property of the component to then get a handle to the CollectionModel. The CollectionModel returns an instance of JUCtrlHierBinding in its getWrappedData method. Though there is no tree binding definition for the list of values dialog defined in the PageDef, it exists. Once you have access to this, you can read the row the user selected in the list of values dialog. See the following code: public void returnListener(ReturnPopupEvent returnPopupEvent) {   //access UI component instance from return event RichInputListOfValues lovField =        (RichInputListOfValues)returnPopupEvent.getSource();   //The LOVModel gives us access to the Collection Model and //ADF tree binding used to populate the lookup table ListOfValuesModel lovModel =  lovField.getModel(); CollectionModel collectionModel =          lovModel.getTableModel().getCollectionModel();     //The collection model wraps an instance of the ADF //FacesCtrlHierBinding, which is casted to JUCtrlHierBinding   JUCtrlHierBinding treeBinding =          (JUCtrlHierBinding) collectionModel.getWrappedData();     //the selected rows are defined in a RowKeySet.As the LOV table only   //supports single selections, there is only one entry in the rks RowKeySet rks = (RowKeySet) returnPopupEvent.getReturnValue();     //the ADF Faces table row key is a list. The list contains the //oracle.jbo.Key List tableRowKey = (List) rks.iterator().next();   //get the iterator binding for the LOV lookup table binding   DCIteratorBinding dciter = treeBinding.getDCIteratorBinding();   //get the selected row by its JBO key   Key key = (Key) tableRowKey.get(0); Row rw =  dciter.findRowByKeyString(key.toStringFormat(true)); //work with the row // ... }

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• Use Advanced Font Ligatures in Office 2010

  - by Matthew Guay

  Fonts can help your documents stand out and be easier to read, and Office 2010 helps you take your fonts even further with support for OpenType ligatures, stylistic sets, and more.  Here’s a quick look at these new font features in Office 2010. Introduction Starting with Windows 7, Microsoft has made an effort to support more advanced font features across their products.  Windows 7 includes support for advanced OpenType font features and laid the groundwork for advanced font support in programs with the new DirectWrite subsystem.  It also includes the new font Gabriola, which includes an incredible number of beautiful stylistic sets and ligatures. Now, with the upcoming release of Office 2010, Microsoft is bringing advanced typographical features to the Office programs we love.  This includes support for OpenType ligatures, stylistic sets, number forms, contextual alternative characters, and more.  These new features are available in Word, Outlook, and Publisher 2010, and work the same on Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7. Please note that Windows does include several OpenType fonts that include these advanced features.  Calibri, Cambria, Constantia, and Corbel all include multiple number forms, while Consolas, Palatino Linotype, and Gabriola (Windows 7 only) include all the OpenType features.  And, of course, these new features will work great with any other OpenType fonts you have that contain advanced ligatures, stylistic sets, and number forms. Using advanced typography in Word To use the new font features, open a new document, select an OpenType font, and enter some text.  Here we have Word 2010 in Windows 7 with some random text in the Gabriola font.  Click the arrow on the bottom of the Font section of the ribbon to open the font properties. Alternately, select the text and click Font. Now, click on the Advanced tab to see the OpenType features. You can change the ligatures setting… Choose Proportional or Tabular number spacing… And even select Lining or Old-style number forms. Here’s a comparison of Lining and Old-style number forms in Word 2010 with the Calibri font. Finally, you can choose various Stylistic sets for your font.  The dialog always shows 20 styles, whether or not your font includes that many.  Most include only 1 or 2; Gabriola includes 6. Here’s lorem ipsum text, using the Gabriola font with Stylistic set 6. Impressive, huh?  The font ligatures change based on context, so they will automatically change as you are typing.  Watch the transition as we typed the word Microsoft in Word with Gabriola stylistic set 6. Here’s another example, showing the fi and tt ligatures in Calibri. These effects work great in Word 2010 in XP, too. And, since Outlook uses Word as it’s editing engine, you can use the same options in Outlook 2010.  Note that these font effects may not show up the same if the recipient’s email client doesn’t support advanced OpenType typography.  It will, of course, display perfectly if the recipient is using Outlook 2010. Using advanced typography in Publisher 2010 Publisher 2010 includes the same advanced font features.  This is especially nice for those using Publisher for professional layout and design.  Simply insert a text box, enter some text, select it, and click the arrow on the bottom of the font box as in Word to open the font properties. This font options dialog is actually more advanced than Word’s font options.  You can preview your font changes on sample text right in the properties box.  You can also choose to add or remove a swash from your characters.   Conclusion Advanced typographical effects are a welcome addition to Word and Publisher 2010, and they are very impressive when coupled with modern fonts such as Gabriola.  From designing elegant headers to using old-style numbers, these features are very useful and fun. Do you have a favorite OpenType font that includes advanced typographical features?  Let us know in the comments! More Reading Advances in typography in Windows 7 – Engineering 7 Blog New features in Microsoft Word 2010 Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Change the Default Font in Excel 2007Ask the Readers: Do You Use a Laptop, Desktop, or Both?Keep Websites From Using Tiny Fonts in SafariAdd or Remove Apps from the Microsoft Office 2007 or 2010 SuiteFriday Fun: Desktop Tower Defense Pro TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional SpeedyFox Claims to Speed up your Firefox Beware Hover Kitties Test Drive Mobile Phones Online With TryPhone Ben & Jerry’s Free Cone Day, 3/23/10 New Stinger from McAfee Helps Remove ‘FakeAlert’ Threats Google Apps Marketplace: Tools & Services For Google Apps Users

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• SQL SERVER – Advanced Data Quality Services with Melissa Data – Azure Data Market

  - by pinaldave

  There has been much fanfare over the new SQL Server 2012, and especially around its new companion product Data Quality Services (DQS). Among the many new features is the addition of this integrated knowledge-driven product that enables data stewards everywhere to profile, match, and cleanse data. In addition to the homegrown rules that data stewards can design and implement, there are also connectors to third party providers that are hosted in the Azure Datamarket marketplace.  In this review, I leverage SQL Server 2012 Data Quality Services, and proceed to subscribe to a third party data cleansing product through the Datamarket to showcase this unique capability. Crucial Questions For the purposes of the review, I used a database I had in an Excel spreadsheet with name and address information. Upon a cursory inspection, there are miscellaneous problems with these records; some addresses are missing ZIP codes, others missing a city, and some records are slightly misspelled or have unparsed suites. With DQS, I can easily add a knowledge base to help standardize my values, such as for state abbreviations. But how do I know that my address is correct? And if my address is not correct, what should it be corrected to? The answer lies in a third party knowledge base by the acknowledged USPS certified address accuracy experts at Melissa Data. Reference Data Services Within DQS there is a handy feature to actually add reference data from many different third-party Reference Data Services (RDS) vendors. DQS simplifies the processes of cleansing, standardizing, and enriching data through custom rules and through service providers from the Azure Datamarket. A quick jump over to the Datamarket site shows me that there are a handful of providers that offer data directly through Data Quality Services. Upon subscribing to these services, one can attach a DQS domain or composite domain (fields in a record) to a reference data service provider, and begin using it to cleanse, standardize, and enrich that data. Besides what I am looking for (address correction and enrichment), it is possible to subscribe to a host of other services including geocoding, IP address reference, phone checking and enrichment, as well as name parsing, standardization, and genderization.  These capabilities extend the data quality that DQS has natively by quite a bit. For my current address correction review, I needed to first sign up to a reference data provider on the Azure Data Market site. For this example, I used Melissa Data’s Address Check Service. They offer free one-month trials, so if you wish to follow along, or need to add address quality to your own data, I encourage you to sign up with them. Once I subscribed to the desired Reference Data Provider, I navigated my browser to the Account Keys within My Account to view the generated account key, which I then inserted into the DQS Client – Configuration under the Administration area. Step by Step to Guide That was all it took to hook in the subscribed provider -Melissa Data- directly to my DQS Client. The next step was for me to attach and map in my Reference Data from the newly acquired reference data provider, to a domain in my knowledge base. On the DQS Client home screen, I selected “New Knowledge Base” under Knowledge Base Management on the left-hand side of the home screen. Under New Knowledge Base, I typed a Name and description of my new knowledge base, then proceeded to the Domain Management screen. Here I established a series of domains (fields) and then linked them all together as a composite domain (record set). Using the Create Domain button, I created the following domains according to the fields in my incoming data: Name Address Suite City State Zip I added a Suite column in my domain because Melissa Data has the ability to return missing Suites based on last name or company. And that’s a great benefit of using these third party providers, as they have data that the data steward would not normally have access to. The bottom line is, with these third party data providers, I can actually improve my data. Next, I created a composite domain (fulladdress) and added the (field) domains into the composite domain. This essentially groups our address fields together in a record to facilitate the full address cleansing they perform. I then selected my newly created composite domain and under the Reference Data tab, added my third party reference data provider –Melissa Data’s Address Check- and mapped in each domain that I had to the provider’s Schema. Now that my composite domain has been married to the Reference Data service, I can take the newly published knowledge base and create a project to cleanse and enrich my data. My next task was to create a new Data Quality project, mapping in my data source and matching it to the appropriate domain column, and then kick off the verification process. It took just a few minutes with some progress indicators indicating that it was working. When the process concluded, there was a helpful set of tabs that place the response records into categories: suggested; new; invalid; corrected (automatically); and correct. Accepting the suggestions provided by  Melissa Data allowed me to clean up all the records and flag the invalid ones. It is very apparent that DQS makes address data quality simplistic for any IT professional. Final Note As I have shown, DQS makes data quality very easy. Within minutes I was able to set up a data cleansing and enrichment routine within my data quality project, and ensure that my address data was clean, verified, and standardized against real reference data. As reviewed here, it’s easy to see how both SQL Server 2012 and DQS work to take what used to require a highly skilled developer, and empower an average business or database person to consume external services and clean data. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Utility, T SQL, Technology Tagged: DQS

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• SQL SERVER – SSMS: Memory Usage By Memory Optimized Objects Report

  - by Pinal Dave

  At conferences and at speaking engagements at the local UG, there is one question that keeps on coming which I wish were never asked. The question around, “Why is SQL Server using up all the memory and not releasing even when idle?” Well, the answer can be long and with the release of SQL Server 2014, this got even more complicated. This release of SQL Server 2014 has the option of introducing In-Memory OLTP which is completely new concept and our dependency on memory has increased multifold. In reality, nothing much changes but we have memory optimized objects (Tables and Stored Procedures) additional which are residing completely in memory and improving performance. As a DBA, it is humanly impossible to get a hang of all the innovations and the new features introduced in the next version. So today’s blog is around the report added to SSMS which gives a high level view of this new feature addition. This reports is available only from SQL Server 2014 onwards because the feature was introduced in SQL Server 2014. Earlier versions of SQL Server Management Studio would not show the report in the list. If we try to launch the report on the database which is not having In-Memory File group defined, then we would see the message in report. To demonstrate, I have created new fresh database called MemoryOptimizedDB with no special file group. Here is the query used to identify whether a database has memory-optimized file group or not. SELECT TOP(1) 1 FROM sys.filegroups FG WHERE FG.[type] = 'FX' Once we add filegroup using below command, we would see different version of report. USE [master] GO ALTER DATABASE [MemoryOptimizedDB] ADD FILEGROUP [IMO_FG] CONTAINS MEMORY_OPTIMIZED_DATA GO The report is still empty because we have not defined any Memory Optimized table in the database.  Total allocated size is shown as 0 MB. Now, let’s add the folder location into the filegroup and also created few in-memory tables. We have used the nomenclature of IMO to denote “InMemory Optimized” objects. USE [master] GO ALTER DATABASE [MemoryOptimizedDB] ADD FILE ( NAME = N'MemoryOptimizedDB_IMO', FILENAME = N'E:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL12.SQL2014\MSSQL\DATA\MemoryOptimizedDB_IMO') TO FILEGROUP [IMO_FG] GO You may have to change the path based on your SQL Server configuration. Below is the script to create the table. USE MemoryOptimizedDB GO --Drop table if it already exists. IF OBJECT_ID('dbo.SQLAuthority','U') IS NOT NULL DROP TABLE dbo.SQLAuthority GO CREATE TABLE dbo.SQLAuthority ( ID INT IDENTITY NOT NULL, Name CHAR(500)  COLLATE Latin1_General_100_BIN2 NOT NULL DEFAULT 'Pinal', CONSTRAINT PK_SQLAuthority_ID PRIMARY KEY NONCLUSTERED (ID), INDEX hash_index_sample_memoryoptimizedtable_c2 HASH (Name) WITH (BUCKET_COUNT = 131072) ) WITH (MEMORY_OPTIMIZED = ON, DURABILITY = SCHEMA_AND_DATA) GO As soon as above script is executed, table and index both are created. If we run the report again, we would see something like below. Notice that table memory is zero but index is using memory. This is due to the fact that hash index needs memory to manage the buckets created. So even if table is empty, index would consume memory. More about the internals of how In-Memory indexes and tables work will be reserved for future posts. Now, use below script to populate the table with 10000 rows INSERT INTO SQLAuthority VALUES (DEFAULT) GO 10000 Here is the same report after inserting 1000 rows into our InMemory table.    There are total three sections in the whole report. Total Memory consumed by In-Memory Objects Pie chart showing memory distribution based on type of consumer – table, index and system. Details of memory usage by each table. The information about all three is taken from one single DMV, sys.dm_db_xtp_table_memory_stats This DMV contains memory usage statistics for both user and system In-Memory tables. If we query the DMV and look at data, we can easily notice that the system tables have negative object IDs.  So, to look at user table memory usage, below is the over-simplified version of query. USE MemoryOptimizedDB GO SELECT OBJECT_NAME(OBJECT_ID), * FROM sys.dm_db_xtp_table_memory_stats WHERE OBJECT_ID > 0 GO This report would help DBA to identify which in-memory object taking lot of memory which can be used as a pointer for designing solution. I am sure in future we will discuss at lengths the whole concept of In-Memory tables in detail over this blog. To read more about In-Memory OLTP, have a look at In-Memory OLTP Series at Balmukund’s Blog. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Server Management Studio, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: SQL Memory, SQL Reports

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• Comments on Comments

  - by Joe Mayo

  I almost tweeted a reply to Capar Kleijne's question about comments on Twitter, but realized that my opinion exceeded 140 characters. The following is based upon my experience with extremes and approaches that I find useful in code comments. There are a couple extremes that I've seen and reasons why people go the distance in each approach. The most common extreme is no comments in the code at all.  A few bad reasons why this happens is because a developer is in a hurry, sloppy, or is interested in job preservation. The unfortunate result is that the code is difficult to understand and hard to maintain. The drawbacks to no comments in code are a primary reason why teachers drill the need for commenting code into our heads.  This viewpoint assumes the lack of comments are bad because the code is bad, but there is another reason for not commenting that is gaining more popularity. I've heard/and read that code should be self documenting. Following this thought pattern, if code is well written with meaningful names, there should not be a reason for comments.  An addendum to this argument is that comments are often neglected and get out-of-date, but the code is what is kept up-to-date. Presumably, if code contained very good naming, it would be easy to maintain.  This is a noble perspective and I like the practice of meaningful naming of identifiers. However, I think it's also an extreme approach that doesn't cover important cases.  i.e. If an identifier is named badly (subjective differences in opinion) or not changed appropriately during maintenance, then the badly named identifier is no more useful than a stale comment. These were the two no-comment extremes, so let's look at the too many comments extreme. On a regular basis, I'll see cases where the code is over-commented; not nearly as often as the no-comment scenarios, but still prevalent.  These are examples of where every single line in the code is commented.  These comments make the code harder to read because they get in the way of the algorithm.  In most cases, the comments parrot what each line of code does.  If a developer understands the language, then most statements are immediately intuitive.  i.e. what use is it to say that I'm assigning foo to bar when it's clear what the code is doing. I think that over-commenting code is a waste of time that slows down initial development and maintenance.  Understandably, the developer's intentions are admirable because they've had it beaten into their heads that they must comment. However, I think it's an extreme and prefer a more moderate approach. I don't think the extremes do justice to code because each can make maintenance harder.  No comments on bad code is obviously a problem, but the other two extremes are subtle and require qualification to address properly. The problem I see with the code-as-documentation approach is that it doesn't lift the developer out of the algorithm to identify dependencies, intentions, and hacks. Any developer can read code and follow an algorithm, but they still need to know where it fits into the big picture of the application. Because of indirections with language features like interfaces, delegates, and virtual members, code can become complex.  Occasionally, it's useful to point out a nuance or reason why a piece of code is there. i.e. If you've building an app that communicates via HTTP, you'll have certain headers to include for the endpoint, and it could be useful to point out why the code for setting those header values is there and how they affect the application. An argument against this could be that you should extract that code into a separate method with a meaningful name to describe the scenario.  My problem with such an approach would be that your code base becomes even more difficult to navigate and work with because you have all of this extra code just to make the code more meaningful. My opinion is that a simple and well-stated comment stating the reasons and intention for the code is more natural and convenient to the initial developer and maintainer.  I just don't agree with the approach of going out of the way to avoid making a comment.  I'm also concerned that some developers would take this approach as an excuse to not comment their bad code. Another area where I like comments is on documentation comments.  Java has it and so does C# and VB.  It's convenient because we can build automated tools that extract these comments.  These extracted comments are often much better than no documentation at all.  The "go read the code" answer always doesn't fulfill the need for a quick summary of an API. To summarize, I think that the extremes of no comments and too many comments are less than desirable approaches. I prefer documentation comments to explain each class and member (API level) and code comments as necessary to supplement well-written code. Joe

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• What’s New for Oracle Commerce? Executive QA with John Andrews, VP Product Management, Oracle Commerce

  - by Katrina Gosek

  Oracle Commerce was for the fifth time positioned as a leader by Gartner in the Magic Quadrant for E-Commerce. This inspired me to sit down with Oracle Commerce VP of Product Management, John Andrews to get his perspective on what continues to make Oracle a leader in the industry and what’s new for Oracle Commerce in 2013. Q: Why do you believe Oracle Commerce continues to be a leader in the industry? John: Oracle has a great acquisition strategy – it brings best-of-breed technologies into the product fold and then continues to grow and innovate them. This is particularly true with products unified into the Oracle Commerce brand. Oracle acquired ATG in late 2010 – and then Endeca in late 2011. This means that under the hood of Oracle Commerce you have market-leading technologies for cross-channel commerce and customer experience, both designed and developed in direct response to the unique challenges online businesses face. And we continue to innovate on capabilities core to what our customers need to be successful – contextual and personalized experience delivery, merchant-inspired tools, and architecture for performance and scalability. Q: It’s not a slow moving industry. What are you doing to keep the pace of innovation at Oracle Commerce? John: Oracle owes our customers the most innovative commerce capabilities. By unifying the core components of ATG and Endeca we are delivering on this promise. Oracle Commerce is continuing to innovate and redefine how commerce is done and in a way that drive business results and keeps customers coming back for experiences tailored just for them. Our January and May 2013 releases not only marked the seventh significant releases for the solution since the acquisitions of ATG and Endeca, we also continue to demonstrate rapid and significant progress on the unification of commerce and customer experience capabilities of the two commerce technologies. Q: Can you tell us what was notable about these latest releases under the Oracle Commerce umbrella? John: Specifically, our latest product innovations give businesses selling online the ability to get to market faster with more personalized commerce experiences in the following ways: Mobile: the latest Commerce Reference Application in this release offers a wider range of examples for online businesses to leverage for iOS development and specifically new iPad reference capabilities. This release marks the first release of the iOS Universal application that serves both the iPhone and iPad devices from a single download or binary. Business users can now drive page content management and layout of search results and category pages, as well as create additional storefront elements such as categories, facets / dimensions, and breadcrumbs through Experience Manager tools. Cross-Channel Commerce: key commerce platform capabilities have been added to support cross-channel commerce, including an expanded inventory model to maintain inventory for stores, pickup in stores and Web-based returns. Online businesses with in-store operations can now offer advanced shipping options on the web and make returns and exchange logic easily available on the web. Multi-Site Capabilities: significant enhancements to the Commerce Platform multi-site architecture that allows business users to quickly launch and manage multiple sites on the same cluster and share data, carts, and other components. First introduced in 2010, with this latest release business users can now partition or share customer profiles, control users’ site-based access, and manage personalization assets using site groups. Internationalization: continued language support and enhancements for business user tools as well and search and navigation. Guided Search now supports 35 total languages with 11 new languages (including Danish, Arabic, Norwegian, Serbian Cyrillic) added in this release. Commerce Platform tools now include localized support for 17 locales with 4 new languages (Danish, Portuguese (European), Finnish, and Thai). No development or customization is required in order for business users to use the applications in any of these supported languages. Business Tool Experience: valuable new Commerce Merchandising features include a new workflow for making emergency changes quickly and increased visibility into promotions rules and qualifications in preview mode. Oracle Commerce business tools continue to become more and more feature rich to provide intuitive, easy- to-use (yet powerful) capabilities to allow business users to manage content and the shopping experience. Commerce & Experience Unification: demonstrable unification of commerce and customer experience capabilities include – productized cartridges that provide supported integration between the Commerce Platform and Experience Management tools, cross-channel returns, Oracle Service Cloud integration, and integrated iPad application. The mission guiding our product development is to deliver differentiated, personalized user experiences across any device in a contextual manner – and to give the business the best tools to tune and optimize those user experiences to meet their business objectives. We also need to do this in a way that makes it operationally efficient for the business, keeping the overall total cost of ownership low – yet also allows the business to expand, whether it be to new business models, geographies or brands. To learn more about the latest Oracle Commerce releases and mission, visit the links below: • Hear more from John about the Oracle Commerce mission • Hear from Oracle Commerce customers • Documentation on the new releases • Listen to the Oracle ATG Commerce 10.2 Webcast • Listen to the Oracle Endeca Commerce 3.1.2 Webcast

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• Management and Monitoring Tools for Windows Azure

  - by BuckWoody

  With such a large platform, Windows Azure has a lot of moving parts. We’ve done our best to keep the interface as simple as possible, while giving you the most control and visibility we can. However, as with most Microsoft products, there are multiple ways to do something – and I’ve always found that to be a good strength. Depending on the situation, I might want a graphical interface, a command-line interface, or just an API so I can incorporate the management into my own tools, or have third-party companies write other tools. While by no means exhaustive, I thought I might put together a quick list of a few tools you can use to manage and monitor Windows Azure components, from our IaaS, SaaS and PaaS offerings. Some of the products focus on one area more than another, but all are available today. I’ll try and maintain this list to keep it current, but make sure you check the date of this post’s update – if it’s more than six months old, it’s most likely out of date. Things move fast in the cloud. The Windows Azure Management Portal The primary tool for managing Windows Azure is our portal – most everything you need is there, from creating new services to querying a database. There are two versions as of this writing – a Silverlight client version, and a newer HTML5 version. The latter is being updated constantly to be in parity with the Silverlight client. There’s a balance in this portal between simplicity and power – we’re following the “less is more” approach, with increasing levels of detail as you work through the portal rather than overwhelming you with a single, long “more is more” page. You can find the Portal here: http://windowsazure.com (then click “Log In” and then “Portal”) Windows Azure Management API You can also use programming tools to either write your own interface, or simply provide management functions directly within your solution. You have two options – you can use the more universal REST API’s, which area bit more complex but work with any system that can write to them, or the more approachable .NET API calls in code. You can find the reference for the API’s here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/ee460799.aspx  All Class Libraries, for each part of Windows Azure: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee393295.aspx  PowerShell Command-lets PowerShell is one of the most powerful scripting languages I’ve used with Windows – and it’s baked into all of our products. When you need to work with multiple servers, scripting is really the only way to go, and the Windows Azure PowerShell Command-Lets allow you to work across most any part of the platform – and can even be used within the services themselves. You can do everything with them from creating a new IaaS, PaaS or SaaS service, to controlling them and even working with security and more. You can find more about the Command-Lets here: http://wappowershell.codeplex.com/documentation (older link, still works, will point you to the new ones as well) We have command-line utilities for other operating systems as well: https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/manage/downloads/  Video walkthrough of using the Command-Lets: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/BUILD/BUILD2011/SAC-859T  System Center System Center is actually a suite of graphical tools you can use to manage, deploy, control, monitor and tune software from Microsoft and even other platforms. This will be the primary tool we’ll recommend for managing a hybrid or contiguous management process – and as time goes on you’ll see more and more features put into System Center for the entire Windows Azure suite of products. You can find the Management Pack and README for it here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=11324  SQL Server Management Studio / Data Tools / Visual Studio SQL Server has two built-in management and development, and since Version 2008 R2, you can use them to manage Windows Azure Databases. Visual Studio also lets you connect to and manage portions of Windows Azure as well as Windows Azure Databases. You can read more about Visual Studio here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/ee405484  You can read more about the SQL tools here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/ee621784.aspx  Vendor-Provided Tools Microsoft does not suggest or endorse a specific third-party product. We do, however, use them, and see lots of other customers use them. You can browse to these sites to learn more, and chat with their folks directly on how they support Windows Azure. Cerebrata: Tools for managing from the command-line, graphical diagnostics, graphical storage management - http://www.cerebrata.com/  Quest Cloud Tools: Monitoring, Storage Management, and costing tools - http://communities.quest.com/community/cloud-tools  Paraleap: Monitoring tool - http://www.paraleap.com/AzureWatch  Cloudgraphs: Monitoring too -  http://www.cloudgraphs.com/  Opstera: Monitoring for Windows Azure and a Scale-out pattern manager - http://www.opstera.com/products/Azureops/  Compuware: SaaS performance monitoring, load testing -  http://www.compuware.com/application-performance-management/gomez-apm-products.html  SOASTA: Penetration and Security Testing - http://www.soasta.com/cloudtest/enterprise/  LoadStorm: Load-testing tool - http://loadstorm.com/windows-azure  Open-Source Tools This is probably the most specific set of tools, and the list I’ll have to maintain most often. Smaller projects have a way of coming and going, so I’ll try and make sure this list is current. Windows Azure MMC: (I actually use this one a lot) http://wapmmc.codeplex.com/  Windows Azure Diagnostics Monitor: http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/wazdmon  Azure Application Monitor: http://azuremonitor.codeplex.com/  Azure Web Log: http://www.xentrik.net/software/azure_web_log.html  Cloud Ninja:Multi-Tennant billing and performance monitor -  http://cnmb.codeplex.com/  Cloud Samurai: Multi-Tennant Management- http://cloudsamurai.codeplex.com/    If you have additions to this list, please post them as a comment and I’ll research and then add them. Thanks!

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• Silverlight Cream for December 05, 2010 -- #1003

  - by Dave Campbell

  In this (Almost) All-Submittal Issue: John Papa(-2-), Jesse Liberty, Tim Heuer, Dan Wahlin, Markus Egger, Phil Middlemiss, Coding4Fun, Michael Washington, Gill Cleeren, MichaelD!, Colin Eberhardt, Kunal Chowdhury, and Rabeeh Abla. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Two-Way Binding on TreeView.SelectedItem" Phil Middlemiss WP7: "Taking Screen Shots of Windows Phone 7 Panorama Apps" Markus Egger Training: "Beginners Guide to Visual Studio LightSwitch (Part - 4)" Kunal Chowdhury Shoutouts: Don't let the fire go out... check out the Firestarter Labs Bart Czernicki discusses the need for 64-bit Silverlight: Why a 64-bit runtime for Silverlight 5 Matters Laurent Duveau is interviewed by the SilverlightShow folks to discuss his WP7 app: Laurent Duveau on Morse Code Flash Light WP7 Application From SilverlightCream.com: John Papa: Silverlight 5 Features John Papa has a post up highlighting his take on what's cool in the new featureset for Silverlight 5... including an external link to the keynote. Silverlight Firestarter Keynote and Sessions John Papa also has posted links to all the individual session videos... what a great resource! Yet Another Podcast #17 – Scott Guthrie Jesse Liberty went big with his latest Yet Another Podcast ... he is interviewing Scott Guthrie about the Firestarter, Silverlight, WP7. and more. Silverlight 5 Plans Revealed With this post from Tim Heuer, I find myself adding a Silverlight 5 tag... so bring on the fun! ... unless you've been overloaded like I have since last Thursday, you've probably seen this, but what the heck... Silverlight Firestarter Wrap Up and WCF RIA Services Talk Sample Code Phoenix's own Dan Wahlin had a great WCF RIA Services presentation at the Firestarter last week, and his material and lots of other good links are up on his blog, and I'd say that even if he didn't have a couple shoutouts to me in it :) Thanks Dan!! Taking Screen Shots of Windows Phone 7 Panorama Apps Markus Egger helps us all out with a post on how to get screenshots of your WP7 Panorama app... in case you haven't tried it ... it's not as easy as it sounds! Two-Way Binding on TreeView.SelectedItem Phil Middlemiss is back with a post taking some of the mystery out of the TreeView control bound to a data context and dealing with the SelectedItem property... oh yeah, and throw all that into MVVM! Great tutorial as usual, a cool behavior, and all the source. Native Extensions for Microsoft Silverlight Alan Cobb pointed me to a quick post up on the Coding4Fun site about the NESL (Native Extensions for SilverLight) from Microsoft that give access to some cool features of Windows 7 from Silverlight... I added an NESL tag in case other posts appear on this subject. Silverlight Simple Drag And Drop / Or Browse View Model / MVVM File Upload Control Michael Washington has another great tutorial up at CodeProject that expands on prior work he'd done with drag/drop file upload with this post on integrating an updated browse/upload into ViewModel/MVVM projects, all of which is Blendable. The validation story in Silverlight (Part 1) In good news for all of us, Gill Cleeren has started a tutorial series at SilverlightShow on Silverlight Validation. The first one is up discussing the basics... The Common Framework MichaelD! has a WPF/Silverlight framework up with Facebook Authentication, Xaml-driven IOC, T4 synchronous WCF proxies, and WP7 on the roadmap... source on CodePlex, check it out and give him some feedback. Exploring Reactive Extensions (Rx) through Twitter and Bing Maps Mashups If you've been waiting around to learn Rx, Colin Eberhardt has the post up for you (and me)... great tutorial up on Twitter and Bing Maps Mashups ... and all the code... for the twitter immediate app, and also the UKSnow one we showed last week... check out the demo page, and grab the source! Beginners Guide to Visual Studio LightSwitch (Part - 4) Kunal Chowdhury has the 4th part of his Lightswitch tutorial series up at SilverlightShow. In this one, he shows how to integrate multiple tables into a screen. It is here Take Your Silverlight Application Full Screen & intercept all windows keys !! Rabeeh Abla sent me this link to the blog describing a COM exposed library that intercepts all keys when Silverlight is full-screen. There are a few I hit when I'm going through blogs that Ctrl-W (FF) just won't take down and that annoys me... so this might be a solution if you have that problem... worth a look anyway! Stay in the 'Light! Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• SQLAuthority News – Meeting SQL Friends – SQLPASS 2011 Event Log

  - by pinaldave

  One of the biggest reason I go to SQLPASS is that my friends are going there too. There are so many friends with whom I often talk on Facebook and Twitter but I rarely get time to meet them as well talk with them. One thing I am usually sure that many fo them will be for sure attend SQLPASS. This is one event which every SQL Server Enthusiast should attend. Just like everybody I had pleasant time to meet many of my SQL friends. There were so many friends that I met and I did not click photo. There were so many friends who clicked photo in their camera and I do not have them. Here are 1% of the photos which I have. If you are not in the photo, it does not mean I have less respect to our friendship. Please post link to our photo together :) I was very fortunate that I was able to snap a quick photograph with Pinal Dave with Dr. David DeWitt. I stood outside of the hall waiting for Dr. to show up and when he was heading down from convention center I requested him if I can have one photo for my memory lane and very politely he agreed to have one. It indeed made my day! Pinal Dave with Dr. David DeWitt Every single time I met Steve, I make sure I have one photo for my memory. Steve is so kind every single time. If you know SQL and do not know Steve Jones, you do not know SQL (IMHO). Following is the photograph with Michael McLean. More details about this photo in future blog post! Pinal Dave, Michael McLean, and Rick Morelan Arnie always shares his wisdom with me. I still remember when I very first time visited USA, I was standing alone in corner and Arnie walked to me and introduced to every single person he know. Talking to Arnie is always pleasure and inspiring. Arnie Rowland and Pinal Dave I am now published author and have written two books so far. I am fortunate to have Rick Morelan as Co-author of both of my books. He is great guy and very easy to become friends with. I am very much impressed by him and his kindness during book co-authoring. Here is very first of our photograph together at SQLPASS. Rick Morelan and Pinal Dave Diego Nogare and I have been talking for long time on twitter and on various social media channels. I finally got chance to meet my friend from Brazil. It was excellent experience to meet a friend whom one wants to meet for long time and had never got chance earlier. Buck Woody – who does not know Buck. He is funny, kind and most important friends of every one. Buck is so kind that he does not hesitate to approach people even though he is famous and most known in community. Every time I meet him I learn something. He is always smiling and approachable. Pinal Dave and Buck Woddy Rushabh Mehta is current SQL PASS president and personal friend. He has always smiling face and tremendous love for SQL community. I often wonder where he gets all the time for all the time and efforts he puts in for community. I never miss a chance to meet and greet him. Even though he is renowned SQL Guru and extremely busy person – every single time I meet him he always asks me – “How is Nupur and Shaivi?” He even remembers my wife and daughters name. I am touched. Rushabh Mehta and Pinal Dave Nigel Sammy has extremely well sense of humor and passion from community. We have excellent synergy while we are together. The attached photo is taken while I was talking to him on Seattle Shoreline about SQL. Pinal Dave and Nigel Sammy Rick Morelan wanted my this trip to be memorable. I am vegetarian and I told him that I do not like Seafood. Well, to prove the point, he took me to fantastic Seafood restaurant in Seattle and treated me with mouth watering vegetarian dishes. I think when I go to Seattle next time, I am going to make him to take me again to the same place. Rick, Rushabh, Pinal and Paras Well, this is a short summary of few of the friends I met at Seattle. What is the life without friends, eh? Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL PASS, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Author Visit, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology

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• Dynamic Grouping and Columns

  - by Tim Dexter

  Some good collaboration between myself and Kan Nishida (Oracle BIP Consulting) over at bipconsulting on a question that came in yesterday to an internal mailing list. Is there a way to allow columns to be place into a template dynamically? This would be similar to the Answers Column selector. A customer has said Crystal can do this and I am trying to see how BI Pub can do the same. Example: Report has Regions as a dimension in a table, they want the user to select a parameter that will insert either Units or Dollars without having to create multiple templates. Now whether Crystal can actually do it or not is another question, can Publisher? Yes we can! Kan took the first stab. His approach, was to allow to swap out columns in a table in the report. Some quick steps: 1. Create a parameter from BIP server UI 2. Declare the parameter in RTF template You can check this post to see how you can declare the parameter from the server. http://bipconsulting.blogspot.com/2010/02/how-to-pass-user-input-values-to-report.html 3. Use the parameter value to condition if a particular column needs to be displayed or not. You can use <?if@column:.....?> syntax for Column level IF condition. The if@column is covered in user documentation. This would allow a developer to create a report with the parameter or multiple parameters to allow the user to pick a column to be included in the report. I took a slightly different tack, with the mention of the column selector in the Answers report I took that to mean that the user wanted to select more of a dimensional column and then have the report recalculate all its totals and subtotals based on that selected column. This is a little bit more involved and involves some smart XSL and XPATH expressions, but still very doable. The user can select a column as a parameter, that is passed to the template rather than the query. The parameter value that is actually passed is the element name that you want to regroup the data by. Inside the template we then reference that parameter value in our for-each-group loop. That's where we need the trixy XSL/XPATH code to get the regrouping to happen. At this juncture, I need to hat tip to Klaus, for his article on dynamic sorting that he wrote back in 2006. I basically took his sorting code and applied it to the for-each loop. You can follow both of Kan's first two steps above i.e. Create a parameter from BIP server UI - this just needs to be based on a 'list' type list of value with name/value pairs e.g. Department/DEPARTMENT_NAME, Job/JOB_TITLE, etc. The user picks the 'friendly' value and the server passes the element name to the template. Declare the parameter in RTF template - been here before lots of times right? <?param@begin:group1;'"DEPARTMENT_NAME"'?> I have used a default value so that I can test the funtionality inside the template builder (notice the single and double quotes.) Next step is to use the template builder to build a re-grouped report layout. It does not matter if its hard coded right now; we will add in the dynamic piece next. Once you have a functioning template that is re-grouping correctly. Open up the for-each-group field and modify it to use the parameter: <?for-each-group:ROW;./*[name(.) = $group1]?> 'group1' is my grouping parameter, declared above. We need the XPATH expression to find the column in the XML structure we want to group that matches the one passed by the parameter. Its essentially looking through the data tree for a match. We can show the actual grouping value in the report output with a similar XPATH expression <?./*[name(.) = $group1]?> In my example, I took things a little further so that I could have a dynamic label for the parameter value. For instance if I am using MANAGER as the parameter I want to show: Manager: Tim Dexter My XML elements are readable e.g. DEPARTMENT_NAME. Its a simple case of replacing the underscore with a space and then 'initcapping' the result: <?xdoxslt:init_cap(translate($group1,'_',' '))?> With this in place, the user can now select a grouping column in the BIP report viewer and the layout will re-group the data and any calculations based on that column. I built a group above report but you could equally build the group left version to truly mimic the Answers column selector. If you are interested you can get an example report, sample data and layout template here. Of course, you can combine Klaus' dynamic sorting, Kan's conditional column approach and this dynamic grouping to build a real kick ass report for users that will keep them happy for hours..

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• SharePoint Saturday Michigan 2010 Recap, Slides, and Photos

  - by Brian Jackett

  This past weekend I attended SharePoint Saturday Michigan (SPSMI) in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  For those unfamiliar, SharePoint Saturday is a community driven event where various speakers gather to present at a FREE conference on all topics related to SharePoint.  This made my third SharePoint Saturday attended and second I’ve spoken at.  I believe today it was announced that about 210 people total attended the event.  I was very happy with the turnout, especially the ratio of male to female attendees.  Typically with computer related conferences the ratio leans towards more males attending, but both Peter Serzo (one of conference organizers) and I both commented to each other that at the end of the day it appeared to be close to 40% women in the crowd.  So here’s my recap of the weekend. Arrival     Friday afternoon I drove up from Columbus, OH to Ann Arbor, MI and arrived around 4pm.  I was attempting to avoid the rush hour traffic and construction backups.  Turned out to be a good idea because other speakers coming up Friday got stuck on a highway which literally closed down in both directions due to a bad accident.  I was talking my friend Sean McDonough through the highway closing and this was the first time I had seen a solid black traffic line on Google Maps.  Most of us are familiar with Green, Yellow, and Red, but this line was black if that tells you how bad it got. Speaker “Dinner”     Fast forward a few hours and it was time for the speaker “dinner.”  I put “dinner” in quotes because with this night alone SPSMI set a new bar for nicest and most extravagant speaker appreciation events for SharePoint Saturday.  By tapping into some very influential contacts, the conference organizers were able to provide a truck limo (yep you heard right) with refreshments, access to an underground suite at the Palace of Auburn Hills, and courtside tickets to see the Detroit Pistons play that night.  Being a Michigan native I have to say that I was absolutely floored by this experience and very thankful to our conference organizers Peter, Sebastian, and Jesse along with Trillium Teamologies. Sessions     The actual conference started Saturday morning at 9am with the keynote by Rob Collie who is the Microsoft program manager for PowerPivot.  The day continued and I attended the following sessions: Mike Watson (@mikewat) – “SharePoint 2010 Fight Night: Devs vs. Admins” Karl Swedeberg (@kswedberg) – “A Walk on the Client Side with jQuery“ [my session] Brian Jackett (@briantjackett) - “Real World Deployment of SharePoint 2007 Solutions” Jeff Willinger (@jwillie) - “Social Computing and Collaboration Inside and Outside the 4 Walls” Paul Schaeflein (@paulschaeflein) – “PowerShell for the SharePoint Developer” My Presentation     I had a great time presenting my session on Deploying SharePoint 2007 Solutions, but it wasn’t without its fair share of technical issues.  As my session was right after lunch I came in to my room 10 mins early to set up my laptop, slides, and demos.  As a quick background note, a few months ago I got an upgraded laptop from my company Sogeti and have been dual booting it between XP (factory installed) and Windows Server 2008 R2 w/ Hyper-V.  As such I had prepared all of my demo virtual machines to run under Hyper-V.  About 3 minutes before my session was scheduled to start though it became apparent that I did not have the correct display drivers to connect Windows Server 2008 R2 to the projector…     As you can imagine this was a slight cause for concern as I was potentially going to be unable to give my presentation.  Luckily for me I usually prepare for such unforeseen issues and had my presentation and some spare VMs that would run on XP on my external hard drive.  Knowing this I rebooted my machine into XP and began my presentation without slides until about 5 mins into the session when everything was up and running on XP.  Despite this being the first time I gave this presentation I have to say it was one of my favorites I’ve given so far.  The audience was very engaged in the session and I received some great, positive feedback afterwards.  Thanks to all who attended my session, I appreciate it very much. Link to Presentation Files     For those of you who attended my session and would like my slides or demo PowerShell scripts they can be found on my SkyDrive at the link below.  Also, if you have a few minutes and wouldn’t mind rating my session I have this session posted on SpeakerRate.  As speakers we always appreciate any and all feedback attendees offer, so thank you if you are able to provide any. SkyDrive folder with session files Rate my SharePoint 2007 Solutions session   Picture Albums     For everyone else, here are my pictures from the weekend.  The first link is to my FaceBook album which will have tagging (recommend this one.)  The second is to my Live album if you care for higher resolution images. http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2154482&id=21905041&l=a3fb72ee8c View Full Album Conclusion     A big thank you goes out to all of the organizers, speakers, sponsors, and attendees of SPSMI.  As I’ve said so many times, without each and every one of you these events wouldn’t be possible.  I thoroughly enjoyed this trip back to my home state and presenting a new session.  For those interested in my upcoming schedule I will be giving two sessions on PowerShell at SharePoint Saturday Charlotte in April, helping plan Stir Trek: Iron Man Edition in May, and I’m submitting sessions to Day of .Net Ann Arbor in May as well.  Beyond that I haven’t planned out any travels.  Thanks for reading my recap.  Look forward to more technical posts now that I have a short break in conferences.         -Frog Out   links: Michigan image

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